Difference and Repetition: Introduction
Introduction between p. 1-27 spanning the discussion of the differences between repetition by generalities and repetition by singularities
Ch. 1 Introduction: Repetition & Difference
Economic difference: generality and repetition are distinguished by their economic natures, the former by exchange, in which each generality is a particularity due to the ability to exchange the general for the general in an equivalency of terms; repetition occupies the “non-exchangable and non-substitutable singularities” as thefts, gifts, reflections, echoes, doubles, and souls(intensive differences that do not divide into each other without changing nature nor losing the difference)
The paradox of repetition: repetition is defined by the repetition of the unique, not an extensive order in which accumulates successive moments(“They do not add a second and a third time to the first,” 1, 2, 3, discrete succession of discrete units) but at a singularity-moment, already engenders the repetitions in itself(intensive repetition, the first moment to an nth power, a singularity-uniqueness that should not be repeatable but already contains the repetition of intensities-degrees that are different in kind)
General-particular, Repetition-universal-singular: the discourse of science dominated by equalities which present repetition as “extreme resemblance” and the discourse of music dominated by degrees of differences
Law, change, permanence, exchange: the subject of law experiences a powerlessness to repeat due to its terms always being particular and therefore exchangeable with a more general law that “condemns to change” by virtue of this exchange and condemning them to permanence as well insofar each particular is a constant that maintains its own preservation; repetition is impossible with the Law
“Law unites the change of the water and the permanence of the river”
“He cannot repeat, not only because of his own change…but also because of the great natural permanences”
Repetition is therefore not defined by general laws but by “miracles” operating in a domain that “affirms itself against the law…it denounces its nominal or general character in favour of a more profound and artistic reality.”
Two generalities & repetition: Natural phenomena and experimentation are two operations of generalities, the first by resemblance of the diverse with itself and the latter as a selective mechanism which apply factors or a domain to another domain or factor in a closed system; the passage of the two present the power of repetition but only as it is confused with the passage of two generalities, “to mistake difference in kind with difference of degree.”
The stoic error: repetition cannot be contained directly within the laws of nature; it therefore passes into the moral domain to furnish a law proper for repetition, whence the moralists approach to Good & Evil, the latter defining nature and its repetition according to pleasures, pasts, and passions which only ends up in despair, and the former as a spiritual repetition a la moral duty permitting repetition by legislating power over nature(“we cannot be subjects without also being legislators”)
Hence Kant’s test of repetition: the universal maxim, what can be, in principle, reproduced, and something is only reproducible if it can be “repeated without contradiction” in a moral law
Ambiguities of the moral law: the moral law in its superiority to natural law can only be applied via a reintroduction of the image of nature, hence moral law does not escape the limits of generality
Habit: the form of habit(habit of acquiring habits), and not the particular habit(good habit, bad habit, x habit) that is the issue the generality of moral law or the form of the Good, according to whether habit is made to resemble a model to be acquired(action changes whilst intention remains the same) or the habit persists in different context(the same action under different contexts and intentions), generality is not eluded by the moral Good
Repetition by humor or irony: both are manners if eluding the law, natural or moral, the first operating by an art of consequences of “descending towards the consequences, to which one submits with a too-perfect attention to detail…suspensions and falls” and the second operating by “ascending toward the principles: challenging the law as secondary” which diverts an original or superior power
Opposition of repetition to generality by principles of propositions:
Make repetition a matter of a selection or test which repetition itself will be “the supreme object of the will and of freedom”; repetition is not a repetition of an object, but repetition for itself(a matter of acting, of making repetition as such a novelty; that is a freedom and a task of freedom…repetition the very object of willing”)
Repetition against natural law: repetition as “interior element of the will” of which the law of nature changes around, as a “will willing itself through all change, a power opposed to law, an interior of the earth opposed to the laws of its surface”
Repetition against moral law, suspension of Good & Evil: hence the subject of repetition as “private thinker” against public professor and public discourse; further the two-fold operation of irony and humor as means of repetition; Job as infinite contestation and Abraham as infinite resignation, the former reaching singularities by dismissing “second-hand explanations(the public discourse of generalities, in reaching for the superior singular principle of which is primary)” and the latter by furnishing a singularity by submission (Consequences, “the singularity of only his son whom the law commanded him to sacrifice”)
Zarathustra against Kant: only will if whatever you will also wills the eternal return(a formalism which instead of tying repetition to moral law, makes repetition itself as a form go beyond morality)
Form of repetition as form of the immediate, uniting the universal and singular, with the powers of irony-humor, within-the-law-beyond-the-law, dissolving the particularity of law and its mediations
Against habit and memory: habit is a contemplative operation from without, in the mind, through which novelty is extracted by makes repetition bear on an object, in which acts “only on the condition that there is a little Self within us that contemplates: it is this which extracts the new…the general…from the pseudo-repetition of particular cases” and memory is the recovery of the particulars dissolved in the general; repetition forgets both in making Forgetting a power of its own positively, and the unconscious as superior itself through such, of which the notion of power is no longer an accumulation of succeeding moments defining generality, but a power to the nth degree, a second degree consciousness as the unconscious uniting the eternal and instant(universal and singular), to parse out a superior form of repetition in its singularity that does not bear on any generalities-particularities(like the will to power does not “want power” but already engenders power in its singularity-form that operates by degrees of differences-the eternal return).
Movement; repetition as its own object engenders movement without any intermediary(“they want to make it act, and make it carry out immediate acts” not the mediation of Hegelian logic); hence it is a manner of producing an immediate and intensive form of movement that does not require representation(it does not need to extend that far).
Reflection, theater, & philosophy: the invention of a theater in philosophy is tantamount of engendering an inexact proximity between philosophy and art; it is not the “philosophical theater” that operates by “reflecting” either on art or philosophy
Problem of masks: Kierkegaard’s task of filling an interior emptiness of masks with absolutely different roles(hence how the knight of faith should be played; the resemblance between it and the bourgeois in his Sunday best is not a generality but an a matter of masks that are both empty and internally different as to mistake one for another, leaping between each other without mediation-immediate movement)
Same with Nietzsche in saying the Overman resembles Borgia rather than a Parsifal, or the Jesuit Order and Prussian officer corps: simulacra, of filling the interiority of masks, who are empty, with an absolute difference itself(infinity of real movement, absolute difference, empty interior)
Hegelian logic: abstract relation of particular and general a la mediation through opposition, not the intensive and empty interior form of movement, concepts instead of Idea in a theater of representation and not of repetition
Pure forces of absolute difference and absolute repetition: without intermediary, it is a language that speaks before words(nonsignifying signs preceding signification), directly natural and historical(Homo natura and Homo historia?), before the organized body(BwO, intensive field before any extension?) and simulacra
Kierkegaard vs. Nietzsche: is repetition beyond irony and humor in the reconciliation and rediscovered alliance of God & Self, in the sphere of the mind, or is it in the death of God and dissolution of Self, in the Physis(Supernatural repetition vs. natural will of Nature as Physis repetition)
Vulgarized Leibnizianism: the concept as a concept of a particular has infinite comprehension(extension=1) and is fully actualized, not virtual, and hence in a single concept, all its predicates, as form of moments in a concept, in the attribution of a subject have been preserved in the effectuations of a subject, whence infinite comprehension makes possible Memory
Principle of sufficient reason: there is one concept per particular; Principle of indiscernibles: there is one particular thing per concept; whence infinite comprehension attributed to a concept and a particular that defines conceptual difference, a generality that makes possible memory.
Real and logical use: predicates as determinations of a concept must remain fixed in this concept, whilst becoming something else in the thing that is referred(hence “animal” as a concept with a fixed predicate, becomes something else in two things, such as man and horse), hence why the comprehension can be infinite-a predicate in the concept applied to different things, entertains the predicate as an object of another predicate(the thing referred to by the concept, and hence an object of another predicate in the concept).
Hence generality: determinations of predicates are fixed in a concept but applicable to an infinity of things quid juris
Artificial blockage: the logical use of this infinite comprehension of a concept is endowed with an extension>1, hence the predicate is infinite(>1) itself, and the individual is thus subordinated to a generality since it no longer has any correspondence to a concept due to this infinite predicate(“no existing individual can correspond to [generality] hic et nunc)
Therefore conceptual difference, difference subordinate to the concept, maintains resemblance, representation, and identity(conceptual difference is determination of species, evaluation of resemblances)
Natural blockage: a concept taken at a particular moment defines a finite comprehension(extension=1) and thereby a generality(genus or species) is defined hic et nunc (a particular place in space and time); naturally a rift occurs between extension=infinity of the infinite predicates that preclude a logical entry of an individual correspondence to a genus or species, and the extension=1 of a particular, finite comprehension in a place of spacetime that does permit an entry of genus or species defined by an individuated moment; hence discrete extension as an effect, which produces an infinity of individuals identical in respect of their concept(infinity engendered in the finite, “paradox of doubles or twins” of a singularity)
Hence natural blockages of this type define a true repetition that defines the powerlessness of conceptual difference, “the pure fact of a concept with finite comprehension being forced to pass as such into existence”
Ex: Epicurean atoms: localized in a particular space-time, they engender meager finite comprehension, forcing into existence an infinity engendered in the finite as the “pullulation of individuals…an infinity of atoms of the same shape and size” hence singularity of an atom
Ex: words: should have an infinite comprehension at their spatiotemporal placement, but are forced into finite comprehension since only finite amounts of words can be used, and hence the forced existence of the infinite in the finite engenders a discrete extension of a dispersal of individuals constituting a singularity, hence repetition.
Virtual indefinite vs. actual infinite: the latter defines a concept with infinite comprehension, that being a concept whose object is distinguished from other objects; whilst a virtual indefinity of a concept entertains links to a plurality of objects and hence can pursue an indefinite comprehension(not an infinite one) due to such a plurality(a concept that is indefinitely the Same for different objects)
Hence virtual indefiniteness displays a non-conceptual difference, of purely spatiotemporal relations, of which define the minimum of repetition(opposition of two terms that do not maximize difference but are a minimal of difference of two or doubles-echoes and returns onto itself); hence the specification by concepts is always superseded due to the virtual indefiniteness that links a plurality to a concept and keeps it from distinguishing its objects, in at least two objects whose(space & time) forming a minimum of repetition in the existent precluding conceptual difference
Alienated Nature: concepts of virtual indefiniteness define repetition of partes extra partes who operates in Nature or the Mind, with its objects being those which lack memory, that do not possess their own moments(hence the alienated part) whose appropriation by the mind makes these objects acquire memories or habits in drawing novelty through the contemplative repetition of these virtual indefinite concepts(The two orders of generality)
Particular representation, infinite comprehension: endowed with memory but absent any self-consciousness; the comprehensive in-itself of a memory of a particular act is present, though the comprehensive for-itself that is consciousness, recognition, a matter of remembrance(working through memory) is missing; that latter links representation and the I as a faculty that is not restricted to any products, due to each already thought & recognized as a past product, producing a determinant change in the inner meaning of these products.
When the remembrance is missing, when consciousness is absent and the link between representation and the I is not there, the result is a matter of knowledge or memory that has only the repetition of its objects: a repetition define by being played, rather than being known or thought in a conscious link, whence repetition as the “unconscious of the free concept…of representation”
Reason for blockage to create the unconscious: repression or resistance, which repetition as the unconscious of the represented concepts, with its objects of a past product, are repeated by virtue of compulsion or constraint, due to not being brought to consciousness
Hence the Freudian influence of the relation between repetition vs. consciousness, remembering, and recognition: the more one remembers, the less one repeats; one does not repeat consciously, for repetition only occurs in the unconscious(according to Freud by repression & resistance), and remembering(working through memory) is a manner of ensuring that something is no longer repeated(“Is it not true that the only dead who return[repeat] are those whom one has buried too quickly and too deeply[who did not work through their memories]?’)
Tragic and comic repetition: two elements of the theater: the hero repeats from being separated from his infinite knowledge; knowledge acts in him whilst being blocked from being recognized or represented(“he does not know that he knows”); hence the problem of theater-that the hero must act, repeat, and enact this knowledge without it ever being known to himself(self-consciousness is precluded until recognition)
The production of repetition via conceptual blockages(discrete extension of finite comprehension, alienated mind or nature by virtue of objects lacking memory, or repression/resistance of the unconscious) still reduces repetition to mere failures of conceptual specification, and hence produce a nominal & negative explanation for repetition which remains insufficient for the latter
The death instinct and problem of Freud: albeit negatively in relation to the pleasure or reality principle, the death instinct is furnished in relation to a domain of repetitive phenomena, as properly transcendental principle, rather than the psychological pleasure principle; the repetitive phenomena are defined in relation to the masks and disguises(simulacra) in which reduce the bare, mechanical repetition of the Same(such is the theory of repression of Dora that repeats her love for her father but only through masks, roles, simulacra, “other roles filled by others…in relation to those others”).
Freud’s failure: fixation of the Id which defined repetition only through the opposition of the Id and Ego and hence the disguises of repetition proper is lost, upholding the death instinct and repetition as a mere return to inanimate matter with a physical, material repetition.
Masks & repetition: the death instinct is not material, repetition is rather defined by the Symbolic, or rather the simulacra, whose masks hide nothing but other masks and the mask defines the repetition, pure variation of absolute difference included throughout the repetition in the relations of masks to other masks.
Repression & repetition: one does not repeat cause one represses, one represses because one repeats; thus repression only bears on the what would preclude repetition, that of the Same
Eros and Thanatos: the latter furnishes a transcendental principle, positive, internal principle for Eros, which can only live through repetition, going beyond repression “properly speaking” that bears on representation, to a more primary repression that bears on pure presentations.
Working through memory means nothing to furnish repetition(“We are not…healed by simple anamnesis, any more than we are made ill by amnesia”); it still bears on a “becoming conscious” of the unconscious memories, making repetition still a negative and nominal explanation.
Transference: repetition that both heals and makes us ill is commanded through the transference as a manner of authenticating roles and masks(simulacra) rather than a manner of identifying the Same in moments, persons, or passions, pertaining to the whole relation between Eros as repetition of masks and Thanatos as the transcendental principle of the masks, furnishing the Beyond proper.
Death instinct: its intelligibility is defined by a positive principle that is both autonomous and disguising, and also furnishing an immanent meaning to the movements of selection and freedom concerning the terror of death(pure form of repetition of simulacra).
Dissymmetry: the dynamic process of repetition operates not by a division between variable figures and an identical concept, but by the combination of elements in a disequilibrium with each other, gap of sorts, missing in the cause and only disappearing in the effect; hence causality is not a mere logical category and possibility that remains only possible but never necessarily and already filled positively, but relates to a process of signaling, which are orders of disparate types, and the sign that crosses the interval between two signals, “an effect with two aspects” one which shows the productive dissymmetry and the other which cancels it, hence internal difference.
Divided causality: two types appear in the process, one as an abstract effect of the overall work, static, and bearing on the concept-figure division relating to external difference, the other as an active cause, of the dynamic type, bearing on distinctive points(singularities) as internal difference.
The dynamicism is not defined by a representative concept nor a pre-existing space for figures, but a Pure Idea.
Studies on symmetry and rhythm display such a principle, in that any equality, symmetry or bare repetition bears on a more profound repetition belonging to the domain of inequality, incommensurabilities, and dissymmetry; hence the studies on geometry and rhythm that show that bare, mechanical, external repetitions belong to a variable order defined by dissymmetry that is disguised in the whole process, as if the exterior was an envelop for an interior of the intensive type, as a genetic principle that is irreducible to external repetition.
Raymond Roussel and Charles Peguy: nominal concepts are insufficient to explain repetition and by virtue of a generalized rhyme is capable of producing a dissymmetric repetition, the former by maximizing the difference in repetition “in the heart of a word” by virtue of the ambiguous homonym, to create an “after-language” where everything is repeated, and the latter by a synonymity proceeding by a “before-language” of minimal difference(distinctive features of billard vs. pillard, and the tapestry points based on contiguity and combination, the paradoxical identity of two senses, or the attractive forces of gravity that attracts neighbors before the neighbor takes up the gravitational center of a new repetition) in any case a verticality belonging to positive repetition is opened at the heart to substitute horizontal repetitions of the nominal concept or verbal repetition.
Learning and Signs: the latter defines a heterogeneity, of three elements; the signals between disparate orders that emit the signal, the sign’s object in in itself(The Idea) which is enveloped in the Sign, and the response, which by virtue of heterogeneity cannot resemble the sign or the signal.
Learning proceeds this way: it is not a reproduction of an action that bears on a representation(The Same), but an encounter with the Other which a sign is rather encountered, whose asymmetry internal to it bears as a combination of distinctive points or singularities(Instead of “Do as I do” a “Do with me” of a sign confronted with the issued response of which the disjunction of singularities bear the relations with the Other)
Singularity-Self-Soul of repetition: it is not a matter of a subject-object relation, but of two repetitions, of the bare repetitions occupying a very minimal difference of spatiotemporal types that are indifferent(difference without a concept) differences and hence can only be explained by representations and concepts, the other of the secret subject or singularity that is disguised under the first repetition and whose nature internal difference, that being the pure movements of heterogeneity and a-presentations-the Idea.
Nature of repetition: difference without a concept, non-mediated difference, repetition defines the positive reason for the way concepts are blocked from receiving a pure identity, in its nature of being perpetually latent, coexisting in secret and disguised that constitutes it form(“forming an ‘other’ repetition at the heart of the first”)
Generality and repetition: under the former defined by laws, is the other defined by singularities, an interior of repetition that defines the reason for the blockages of concepts, and the principle of genesis for the external repetitions through an intensive space affected by an order of difference, of which the attribution of difference outside of repetition(“inadequation between difference and repetition”) that permits generality; “Gabriel Tarde suggested in this sense that resemblance itself was only displaced repetition” hence Tarde’s new dialectic rendering a greater correspondence between difference and repetition
Internal difference and principium individuationis: the principle of individuation of repetition cannot be found “in the facts” between conceptual difference as intrinsically conceptual nor in extrinsic differences defining repetition between objects subsumed under the same concept; difference has its own interior and can be internal, whilst being unrelated to concepts and representations.
Hence the dynamic, differential space of intensive quantities and singularities has its difference internal, not to a concept, but an Idea, defining internal genesis that gives rise to a synthesis of continuity a la Leibniz via a continua repetitio, as the perception of dynamic space itself without “an external position” and hence the production and relation between intrinsic differences and extrinsic types.
Difference and Repetition: repetition as difference without a concept merely positioned difference in its extrinsic state in regards to difference and hence we fall into the same issues of defining repetition only negatively from the generalities we wished to escape(natural law, moral law, habit, memory, concept, representation) and confuse the two orders of repetition of generalities and singularities with each other a la analogies and metaphors
Hence the problem is to give forth a “concept of difference” that demands its own Idea, and further engender repetition and its order of singularities as a power of Ideas themselves; an intersection of the two lines involving “the essence of repetition, the other the idea of difference.”