Difference and Repetition I

I've been struggling with a text by Gilles Deleuze over the last week or so. It's Difference and Repetition and reading Deleuze is probably the quickest way to demonstrate to one's own lack of intellectual finesse. Anyway, in order to extract what I can from the book, I've decided to do a series of posts that "opens up" the text via quotations, questions and "workings out" of the ideas presented in Difference and Repetition.

I'm glad (or perhaps I should be embarassed) to say that I've hung around Deleuzean thought for quite long while. It's been at least ten years since I first started reading Anti-Oedipus. I know that sounds silly but there are difficulties in his thought that I think forces (or seduces?) the reader back to him. Also, there is that vast referentiality that is involved such that to understand a single concept more precisely, one has to reader three or four OTHER people that Deleuze refers to in a single breath. I don't have a background in academic philosophy (though much may be imbibed because one is literate) so there bound to be philosophical catch-phrases that are thick with meaning that I'll miss. Part of the difficulty as well!

Perhaps the most well-known contribution of Delueze (and his later collaborator, Felix Guatarri) is rhizomic 'structure'. In an attempt to dismantle top-down / bottom-up hierarchies and systems of thought, organization and being, they propose a counter structure, that of the rhizome. They oppose this to the more traditional 'aboreal' (tree-like) structures, which schematize from the root the the crown, and that dominate most spheres of knowledge. Instead, they posit a multiplicity of centers and a dense networks of relation and force that emerge out of these different networks. Obviously, they've been credited as prophets of sorts for the wonderful world of the internet, which seems to be the human endeavor that resembles the rhizomic most closely.

Difference and Repetition is an early work (and one of Deleuze's PhD theses) and Deleuze's project involves thinking how we might think "difference" in-itself. I guess the starting point has to do with the way we usually quickly gloss over the idea of "difference". We normally think of differences as the identifiable features that are manifest between two or more objects. But this isn't good enough for Deleuze who thinks that this makes difference a mere adjunct to "identity", merely a conceptual, representational idea.

In effect, Deleuze's project ends up as a crazy meditation on the dominance of "representation" in Western philosophy. He attempts to dismantle the tyranny of the "original-copy" relationship that is the basis of transcendental thought by demonstrating that difference can be "affirmative". He does this because he thinks that while difference has been invoked by a great many philosophers in the Western tradition, they have merely been, well, dancing with shadows. Taking on "difference" in 1968 would have been significant because of the growing disenchantment with structuralism and emergence of now well-enshrined dogma that semiotic phenomena merely operate through a network of arbitrary difference. Deleuze isn't content with the revolutionary insights and freedoms that "arbitrary" affords: he wants "difference".

From the Preface:

"We tend to subordinate difference to identity in order to think it (from the point of view of the concept or the subject: for example, specific difference presupposes an identical concept in the form of a genus). We also have a tendency to subordinate it to resemblance (from the point of view of perception), to opposition (from the point of view of predicates) and to analogy (from the point of view of judgement). In other words, we do not think difference in itself. With Aristotle, Philosophy was able to provide itself with an organic representation of difference, with Leibnitz and Hegel an orgiastic representation: it has not, for all that, reached difference itself."