Difference and repetition reading notes: Difference-in-itself
Difference is what allows one to make determinations ‘between’ things. In this view, things distinguish themselves from each other : chair is not-table, and table is not-chair. But there are other determinations, where a form may distinguish itself from a ground; but the ground does not distinguish itself from that form.
When this happens, in the end there is only one ‘monstrous’ determination which encompasses both the determinate and the indeterminate, the form and the ground, the thing and its cause.
This happens in thought, which gives birth to monstrous difference precisely at the point (the limit, the plateau) that form and ground merge and maintain a wavering relationship of differentiation/undifferentiation.
Why is it monstrous? Because thought is violence, it is like Artaud’s cruelty, the appearance of a line of differentiation that shatters the indeterminate ‘nothingness’ of the ground, not allowing it to return to abstraction or purity, but instead a swarming, buzzing, pulsating infrastructure.
And so, historically philosophies of difference have tried to save difference from this monstrous reputation by subordinating it to representation in the concept. By doing so they have hoped to make difference harmonious, relating only to distinct forms and not having to do with an interminable and indeterminable ground.
Finite representation
Aristotle is the first of Deleuze’s opponents. The system of genera and species, and of categories, that Aristotle proposes at first pretends to be a philosophy of difference.
In Aristotle, Being is comprised of ten highest Categories, each of which is divided by differences into lower species. These species are said to comprise of their genus and the difference which marks them out. Deleuze initially asks whether this species difference comprises the ‘greatest’ or most perfect difference, in that it has to do with the essence of the species which it marks out. Yet, Deleuze points out, it is nothing like difference-in-itself, since it has to begin with a predefined concept, the genus, which represents an identity for the various species which it marks out. Thus, this kind of difference is subordinate to identity.
The other difference in Aristotle is that between the highest concepts. This is because Being, the only thing possible above them, is not considered a genus in itself. If Being were a genus, then as genus it would have to be said of all the differences which separate it. In Aristotle, differences have Being, they are. The difference rational, when added to animal, is the species human. Thus, for Being to be a genus, this would be like saying “animal” of the difference “rational”.
Thus, the relationship between the categories and Being is different to that of a species to a genus. Instead, each category is said to contain its own Being, to maintain an internal relation to Being which differs to all the rest. The concept of Being is thus said to be common of the categories by a relationship of analogy, in that it is some common core concept which each relates to or possesses differently.
This introduces two problems for Deleuze. First, it means that Being is equivocal: it is said in different senses of each of the categories. Second, the relationship of analogy is still the same as that of identity, in that each of the categories relate to a single (admittedly confused) identity above them.
And so it becomes that univocity of species and genera (i.e. that human is said in the same sense of Socrates and Plato), comes to rest on the fact that differences have Being, and that that Being is equivocal.
Deleuze instead wants to search for a Being which is univocal, said in a single and same sense for all the things which it is predicated of. This will allow the notion of differences in themselves, not dependent on the existing identity of categories and genera, themselves dependent on an analogy with equivocal Being; but instead directly and immediately implicated in Being.
Univocal being
Univocal being: “A single voice raises the clamour of being”. The model of judgement, in Aristotle, where things are placed in categories and divided, is replaced with the model of the proposition. It is now a question of how Being is expressed, how it operates as the meaning under all the things which express it. This could indeed be similar to the analogy of Aristotle, in that all the categories, formally distinct, express Being. But Deleuze adds the condition that the underlying thing, Being itself, must be understood in the same sense of all these things.
Such a Being may have similar characteristics to equivocal Being. It displays distribution and hierarchy. But in the judgement of equivocal Being, distribution and hierarchy are to do with splitting up and parcelling out. Each species has its particular predicates, it slots neatly under an identical genus. In univocal Being, distribution and hierarchy are instead to do with how things array themselves in the open space which is Being, and how they exercise their own power which is proper to them. There will be more on this later, particularly when Deleuze gets to Nietzsche.
An important final note: where in equivocal Being differences are and this is precisely the reason Being is equivocal, in univocal Being differences are not, but in a very particular way that does not have to do with negation. This non-Being which is not nothingness gets explained later on in the track.
The history of univocity
There are three moments and three representants of Univocal Being in the history of philosophy: Duns Scotus — Spinoza — Nietzsche.
In Duns Scotus Univocal Being is neuter: all things have being in the equal sense, large and small, universal and singular, finite and infinite. There are still distinctions which appear as real differences: formal and modal distinctions. In the first, there are differences between the attributes of one thing, each of in which it is still expressed univocally (i.e. the soul is expressed by the will and the intellect, and is the same in each but each is different — similar to the attributes of substance in Spinoza). In the latter, a thing may express differences in degree or variation while still having the same essential quality (i.e. shades of red). Deleuze says that Duns Scotus has no sense of affirmation, no expression.
In Spinoza, univocal being becomes affirmative — it is God, substance, expressing itself in everything. The attributes of God are like formal distinctions and the modes like modal ones. The modes are understood as degrees of power of substance.
And yet in Spinoza difference is still subordinate to identity. Substance is said to exist apart from everything else, all things are merely expressions of substance. Univocal being has become static.
It is only in Nietzsche that we finally see the Copernican revolution whereby identity becomes secondary to a primary difference that affirms itself. My understanding of Nietzsche, and particularly Deleuze’s Nietzsche, is probably not refined enough to really understand this.
But the world of the will to power as erasing all identities might be uncovered in this quote from Nietzsche:
And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end…as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces…a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing and eternally flooding back with tremendous years of recurrence…out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness; this my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the two-fold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal….This world is the will to power — and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power — and nothing besides!
It is the world where things flow and crash, the world which Deleuze has mentioned above of pre-individual singularities, before Identity. And so, of course in this world the eternal return cannot bring back identity, since identity only happens after the return. What repeats, then, can only be pure difference, the same before it is identical, before it can be turned into a concept. And how would you select these differences if they cannot be conceptualised? Because they pass the test on their own, they will themselves, deploy all their power to repeat themselves.
I understand this in the Bergsonian sense of elan vital, in the way that at each moment things, broadly considered the world, repeat themselves, persist as the world ticks over. Only those things with Will to power have the strength to persist in each new moment.
Infinite representation
Following this hint at what the real nature of difference might be, Deleuze asks if, while Aristotle and finite representation failed to find real difference, might infinite, orgiastic, representation do so? Leibniz and Hegel both use the Large and the Small in terms of the infinite. Orgiastic representation is opposed to the organic representation of finite concepts. Instead of the Aristotelian concept tree which maps the thought of individual selves, orgiastic representation has to do with an Infinite Self.
In Leibniz and Hegel, whether you reach the infinite via the Small or the Large does not matter. What matters, is that in infinite representation, the infinite (the world) is the element of representation, and the principle which selects it is the ground, understood as the Law (what is Good: Leibniz), or negativity (struggle or labour: Hegel).
What does this mean? In Hegel, the infinite is absolute spirit, attained through the contradiction of contradiction (the spiral upward of dialectic). This spirit, in very reductionist terms, is absolute knowledge of the world, all of Nature self-conscious, developed throughout history as logic and thought builds. Through labour, spirit attains the infinite.
In Leibniz, the infinite is understood as the world as a collection of monads. The monad being something like a soul, an indivisible perspective on the world. Each monad presents a finite difference in its own differing perspective on the world. And in Leibniz, the world, the infinite, exists only as that collection of monads, that collection of finite differences, which are compossible with each other. It is through a test not only of what finite differences are compossible then, because there are an infinite number of these, but of which compossibility is greatest in goodness.
I won’t pretend to completely understand Deleuze’s reading of either of these two thinkers, especially since each is so complicated. But in both cases, the infinite is related to identity, and so, because difference is in service of the infinite, so is difference. In Hegel, differences only exist as contradictions temporarily, in order to drive the dialectic further toward the infinite identity which is absolute spirit. In Leibniz, identity is that notion of compossibility, the idea that only a world which is self-consistent might exist. All the finite differences of monads are allowed to exist only insofar as they come together in a final identical whole.
So whence real difference, difference in itself?
Difference-in-itself
Such a difference will be defined by subordinating opposition to itself; by making opposition and identity an after-image of itself. When it makes itself the object of affirmation, rather than being the element of negation.
There exist, in this image of difference, positive differential elements (the will to power, desiring machines, one hesitates to guess) that determine the genesis of difference and its affirmation. The elements which drive the selection of values, timeless, brute things.
Such a difference will differentiate itself from the difference of representation. Representation, ‘has only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective’. It comes from a Self, an identity or a subject who sees the world only mediated, who must represent things to herself. Representation is mediation. Infinite representation only makes things worse, relates all things to an even more singular unity, a universal Self or the limits of the possible.
Transcendental empiricism must be the study of real difference, possible only where what is apprehended in the sensible is only what can be sensed — pure difference, potential difference, and difference in intensity. This is in contrast to classical aesthetics which is concerned with what can be represented in the sensible.
In this section I finally think I understand the use of the eternal return. Each difference which populates this realm of the sensible can only will itself amongst all the others, through all the others. The eternal return is there in every difference, every flux, not secondary but the motor of it, as all differences find themselves returning in that new one which continues their Will. Eternal return is thus understood as the way the past, the collection of all differences, renews itself in every moment.
So the eternal return is not a circle, a flat repetition of the identical, but a dynamic repetition that occurs in an infinitely forward moving line. It is more like the Freudian return of the repressed, the way the past bubbles up into the present and makes itself felt.
And this, the eternal return, is finally the ground, the swelling movement of differences repeating themselves.
What remains in Plato?
The chapter closes with an analysis of what, in Plato, is still relevant to an investigation of pure difference. The Idea or the Form in Plato is not quite a concept of identity, a representation that would submit the world to its needs. Indeed, Deleuze finds that the Idea is precisely that, in things, which is not “representable”, subordinate to the requirements of the thinking Self.
Perhaps what is meant by this is that the Idea is not definable in the same way other concepts are. It has no predicates save itself (Justice is what is just), a kind of circular self-determination.
The Idea is that which divides, but not in the way Aristotle divides genera into species, which merely serves to distribute the existing identities of concepts. The Idea divides in search of itself. It assumes not an identical genus from which to depart but a genus as consisting of a mixture, from which must be selected that which exhibits the Idea most purely.
Here, division is a method of authenticating. The claimants are measured against the myth who is the true Idea, the only who can really lay claim to being its representative. Whosoever most closely fulfils this ideal may be the one who is selected. Ideas are thus comprised: the true claimant in the form of a myth; the true participant who most closely models that myth; and the order in which the other claimants follow these two.
The question is, does the myth play the role of mediator? Or does it play the role of ground, of final cause, a foundation against which to measure differences? Myth plays the role of selector in division, the Will to continue.
Those claimants to a myth, to an Idea, participate in it. They follow afterward, in second, third, fourth, nth place. Only the ground participates first. (Justice alone is just). This is to say that every phenomenon, every thing that happens, is a matter of participation, of laying claim to an originary ground.
Thus, division is not about, as in a Porphyritic tree, delineating species in breadth. Rather it is about following the line of difference, of an idea, as deep as it will go, at each juncture deciding which group of claimants is the best model of the Idea, until the best one is found.
True claimants, who do participate in the ground of the idea, have rivals who participate in varying degrees. They also have simulacra or counterfeits who lay claim to all Ideas and in doing so have no ground whatsoever (groundlessness).
In the test of the true claimant, there is always a further puzzle to be resolved. Each time the claimants are split a further question must be answered. In the Platonic dialectic, it is the problem which plays the role of motivator (decidedly not the negative, as in Hegelian dialectics). The problem is not a moment of lack. Objects themselves are problematic, claims Deleuze, insofar as they can be grasped as signs. In the object which is knowledge, the problematic subsists as that which allows one to go further and learn.
In the division of the Idea, the essence of the problem is precisely the Idea which one is trying to grasp through the dialectic. It is as though there is a gap in the non-being of the question through which the Being of the Idea comes. Here, Being is difference itself, the difference of the problem. This problematic relation is the differential unit which drives difference itself, which affirms difference.
The Platonic dialectic thus consists of four movements: selection of difference — installation of a mythic circle — establishment of foundation — position of a question-problem complex. Difference is still related, in this procedure, to the Same or the One. This is still not the identity of the concept, since the Idea is conceived of as a thing itself, a bare object. Yet it still plays the role of ground in the sense that it makes what is grounded identical.
To overturn Platonism then means to do away with the Platonic obsession with the Idea, with the true, and to embrace the simulacra and the reflections which constitute material particulars. And this occurs in the eternal return, where each thing can only possibly exist as a copy. There is no original, only simulacra, only so many masks which turn out to be the superior form of that which is, not in their Truth or Originality, but because they have passed the problematic test (but a problematic which does not exhibit the groundedness of an Idea) of repetition in the eternal return.
This is the non-being mentioned above. The idea that these differences do not have Being, but are instead posited by problems, themselves only another problem to solve, in a constant drive toward more problems, since there can be no founding Idea which would end the problematic.
Summary
Deleuze contrasts his project with representation. “The elementary concepts of representation are the categories defined as the conditions of possible experience.” Everything must be subordinate to the identity of those categories. And so aesthetics has been split, so far, into a theory of the sensible as far as it conforms to those categories; and a theory of the beautiful, that which escapes those categories, the real as real.
Instead, we must look for the simulacrum, in which to find the conditions not of possible experience as determined by categories, but of real experience as determined by the sensible. Here is “the lived reality of a sub-representative domain”. The simulacrum is that which does not fail to repeat a model but which overturns the very idea of a model in the first place, in every instance. Each simulacrum is a unique perspective; but one which only repeats all the others, which only exists by the repetition of all the others. Each moment, therefore, in the eternal return, in the play of elan vital, is mere simulacrum.
Addenda and thoughts
One interesting thing to note is that each of the philosophies Deleuze discusses is a method. In each, it is not clear if difference plays the role of a metaphysical agent employing this method, or a dialectical tool employed by a subject as a way to talk about the world. Or at least, in each it seems as if difference sways between the two: for Aristotle a way of creating categories and species; for Hegel an actual force driving the world spirit; for Plato a method in the discovery of Ideas; in Nietzsche a test for ethics.
But perhaps it is just this, that the world operates based on a method, not quite a Law, but a test for how things will proceed. This is the idea of the problem and the question. The world posits, the eternal return posits, and answers only with more questions, which of course contain all those prior. And at each question there are always two or more answers, new series which are produced and somehow echo those next door to them, without necessarily being just their contradiction.
