November 11, 2019

This week I read the three prefaces in Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. The translator’s preface briefly outlines the phrases that the translator uses to describe some of the concepts that Deleuze uses in French and why those words were chosen over other translations. In the Preface to the English Edition, Deleuze says, “We do not think of difference in itself (p. xv).” In other words, difference is always looked at as a relation to something else. He describes repetition as conventionally thought of as a repeat or difference without a conceptual change. In that case, repetition seems to cover and hide variance. Deleuze asks readers to conjure a “new image of thought” in order to rethink what we imagine these terms to be.

In the Preface of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze begins by placing difference and repetition in relationship to the negative, contradiction, and identical. He goes on by saying that modern life comes from “failure of representation, the loss of identities…, and the representation of the identical (p. xix).” Modern life is of simulacra. 

 “Repetition already plays upon repetitions, and difference already plays upon differences. Repetitions repeat themselves, while the differentiator differentiates itself. The task of life is to make all these repetitions coexist in a space in which difference is distributed.”

Deleuze mentions that Difference and Repetition is based on both the concepts of pure difference and complex repetition: “the perpetual divergence and decentering of difference corresponded closely to a displacement and a disguising within repetition (p.xx).” 

One of the sections more closely related to my work begins of the bottom of p.xx and onto p.xxi. Deleuze talks about Empiricism, Erewhon, and Niezsche’s concept of “the untimely.” He says that empiricism treats concept as an object of encounter, as a here-and-now along a moving horizon. He quotes Nietzsche saying that the untimely is “acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come.” He says, "we believe in a world in which individuations are impersonal, and singularities are pre-individual: the splendor of the pronoun 'one.'" I would like to think of my world as both untimely and pre-individual. 

Finally, before describing how the history of philosophy is a reproduction of philosophy itself--much like this summary is a reproduction of philosophy--Deleuze says:

"How else can one write but of those things which one doesn't know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow--or rather, to make it impossible."

Because of this, I write. I am summarizing like I once did when I was told to digest theory in Contemporary so that I might transform my ignorance into meaning. I write so that I might get from point A (theory) to point B (the thesis that is due this very week). By getting things onto this blog, I find that even a mere reproduction might bring me closer to my own understanding by which I might feel empowered to create.