Difference and Repetition II

A difficult moment from the Introduction:

The introduction actually begins in a rather enchanting fashion. Delueze tries to show how "generality" and "repetition" are extremely incompatible concepts. He demonstrates that the "general" relates to that which can be exchanged, the substitutable, to laws that may be applied; whereas "repetition" involves the return of the singular, that it is "a necessary and justified conduct only in relation to that which cannot be replaced." Some of the writing is extremely moving. For instance: "The repetition of a work of art is like a singularity without concept, and it is not by chance that a poem must be learned by heart. The head of the organ of exchange, but the heart is the amorous organ of repeitition."

After dealing with what repetition opposes, and the distinction between "false" and "true" movement, Deleuze turns to specifying a "third opposition [between repetition and generality] from the point of view of concepts or representation". And then the going gets tough.

His discussion of artificial and natural "blockages" to a concept is baffling. I don't quite see how "the concept" (which enters the discussion at this point) stands in for or is related to "representation". Does "the concept" belong to a category of thought objects that are somehow "false" because they are abstractions and which only exist via representation?

Anyway, he seems to suggest that there is a certain limitation to "the concept" as regards to its ability to completely confer absolutely differentiated identity, which leads to paradoxical phenomena such as "twins" who are individuals but cannot be differentiated in conceptual terms. What I have difficulty getting is how this links up to "repetition". Is he suggesting that in spite of the failure of "the concept", in spite of these blockages that put limits, the actual existence of these things argue for some quality that proves their existence apart from "the concept"? This seemed to be an interesting and important moment for me because apart from "Epicurean atoms", he uses "words" as an example. What seems to be at stake here is the distinctiveness of identity that is based on an "abstract" or categorical definition of "self". Delueze seems bent on upsetting that cornerstone of thought – "the concept" – in order to radicalize what comes out of thought.

He later goes on to describe repetition as "difference without a concept, repetition which escapes indefinitely continued conceptual difference." This seems to be another pithy formula (!?) that appears to tie everything up nicely and relate all the terms but one that I can't quite unpack. Is he suggesting that it is only in getting at "repetition" that we get at something truly new and entirely singular?

"Perhaps the mistake of the philosophy of difference , from Aristotle to Hegel via Leibnitz, lay in confusing the concept of difference with merely conceptual difference, in remaining content to inscribe difference in the concept in general. In reality, so long as we inscribe difference in the concept in general, we have no singular Idea of difference, we remain only with a difference already mediated by representation. We therefore find ourselves confronted by two questions: what is the concept of difference -- one which is not reducible to simple conceptual difference but demands its own Idea, its own singularity at the level of Ideas? On the other hand, what is the essence of repetition -- one which is not reducible to difference without concept, and cannot be confused with the apparent character of objects represented by the same concept, but bears witness to singularity as a power of Ideas?"