, but there is always an unrepresented singularity who does not recognise precisely because it is not everyone or the universal…
We appeal to ‘necessary destructions’…to affirm Difference in the state of permanent revolution which characterises eternal return (at once both production of repetition on the basis of difference and selection of difference on the basis of repetition.)
On the problem of the ‘subject’:
There is a self wherever a furtive contemplation has been established, whenever a contracting machine capable of drawing a difference from repetition functions somewhere. The self does not undergo modifications, it is itself a modification (pp 78-79)
the affection of a passive self which experiences its own thought – being exercised in it and upon it but not by it
as though the I were fractured from one end to the other (pp 86)
Behind the masks, therefore, are further masks, and even the most hidden is still a hiding place, and so on to infinity…. It may be that there is necessarily something mad in every question and every problem, in their insistence through solutions and the manner in which they maintain their own openness (pp106-107)
Every object, every thing, must see its own identity swallowed up in difference, each being no more than a difference between differences. Difference must be shown differing…that movement is produced as an ‘effect’; it must will itself or find itself through all the others
things are reduced to fragments, differences through which they pass, are implicated…
indicating to philosophy a path leading to the abandonment of representation. Everything has become simulacrum – the ‘disparate’ unit
On the problem of ‘thinking’ or ‘I think’:
the lazy way – “an object of representation always in relation to a conceived identity, a judged analogy, an imagined opposition or a perceived similitude.” (pp 138)
Opposition, resemblance, identity, and even analogy are only effects produced by these presentations of difference (145)
The amicability of the act (ie Philosophy)
the impossible way – “Something forces us to think… an object of a fundamental encounter… its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed… raises itself to the level of a transcendental ‘nth’ power.” (139）
trespass; illegitimate; violence; the enemy; being unhinged; Antonin Artaud; 象
The will to create (ie avant-garde Art)
On the problem of the ‘represented’ image of thought:
Every proposition of consciousness implies an unconscious of pure thought which constitutes the sphere of sense in which there is infinite regress.
- Sense is the genesis or the production of the true, and truth is only the empirical result of sense.
A problem does not exist, apart from its solutions… it insists and persists in these solutions.
- A solution always has the truth it deserves according to the problems to which it is a response, and the problem always has the solution it deserves in proportion to its sense. The problem or sense is at once both the site of an originary truth and the genesis of a derived truth.
Problems are always dialectical.
As a result, ‘learning’ always takes place in and through the unconscious, thereby establishing the bond of a profound complicity between nature and mind… We never know in advance how someone will learn.
Learning is truly the transcendental movement of the soul, irreducible to knowledge / non-knowledge…neither given nor presupposed, but engendered
without mediating; time takes thought – time into thought.
[‘Empty time’ is thought in its pure form] This is the profound dialectics.
The problem of Time that is:
- Time in the forests
- Zhuangzi butterfly dream
- entire being into a yak horn” (Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche)
It is immanent because the movement is non linear, looping, in folds, disappearing upon appearance, continuously displaced, eternally absent in the present (the lack)
On Idea as a multiplicity – a series of multiplicities, according to rhythms that are precisely called ‘differential’, according to comparative speeds or slownesses…the movement of actualisation. (They) coexist but at points, on the edges, and under glimmerings which never have the uniformity of a natural light. On each occasion, obscurities and zones of shadow correspond to their distinction. The domain of Ideas is that of the inessential. They proclaim their affinity with the inessential in a manner as deliberate and as fiercely obstinate as that in which rationalism proclaimed its possession and comprehension of essences.
“a theatre of multiplicities opposed in every respect to the theatre of representation, which leaves intact neither the identity of the thing represented, nor author, nor spectator, nor character, nor representation… Instead, a theatre of problems and always open questions which draws spectator, setting and characters into the real movement of an apprenticeship of the entire unconscious, the final elements of which remain the problems themselves.”
(page 182-192)
To what are we dedicated if not to those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and our language?
a question of a throw of the dice – Ontology of being.
once chance is affirmed, all arbitrariness is abolished every time…. divergence itself is the object of affirmation within a problem.
the fractured I which, every time, is displaced and reconstituted according to the order of time, is
“the revelation of Being as corresponding to the question, reducible neither to the questioned nor to the questioner but that which unites both in the articulation of its own Difference…
“the work“, a process of learning or experimentation, but also something total every time, where the whole of chance is affirmed in each case, renewable every time, perhaps without any subsistent arbitrariness.
… the world of the will to power with its imperatives, its throws of the dice and its problems.
We should reserve the name ‘positivity’ for this state of multiplicity or this consistency of the problematic.
The question of being: A transcendent exercise. a work. a process. a necessity of the unconscious. an affirmation. a repetition from
(cont till page 203. Chapter: Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference)
Everywhere a staging production…
there are things, movements that it (the embryo) alone can undertake or even withstand…. to live the unlivable (is) to discover pure spatio-temporal dynamisms.
Dynamism comprises its own power of determining space and time, since it immediately incarnates the differential relations, the singularities and the progressivities immanent in the Idea.
Dramatisation (a catastrophe, a cruelty, a displacement, strains etc) takes place…. a pure staging without author, without actors and without subjects.
(page 215-221. Chapter: Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference)
Where does this power of dramatisation come from?
- Intensities – implicated multiplicities made up of relations between asymmetrical elements: ‘depth’ grounded in the potentiality
- Individuation, essentially intensive, is the act by which intensity determines differential relations to become actualised, along the lines of differenciation and within the qualities and extensities it creates.
- It does not presuppose any differenciation; it gives rise to it.
- The multiple, mobile and communicating character of individuality, its implicated character, must therefore be constantly recalled. The indivisibility of the individual pertains solely to the property of intensive quantities not to divide without changing nature. We are made of all these depths and distances, of these intensive souls which develop and are re-enveloped… the ensemble of enveloping and enveloped intensities…which ceaselessly interpenetrate one another throughout the fields of individuation.
- Individuality is not a characteristic of the Self but, on the contrary, forms and sustains the system of the dissolved Self.
- Complex systems tend to interiorise their constitutive differences: the centres of envelopment carry out this interiorisation of the individuating factors. The more the difference on which the system depends is interiorised in the phenomenon, the more repetition finds itself interior, the less it depends upon external conditions
- The error, is to believe that this indetermination or this relativity indicates something incomplete in individuality or something interrupted in individuation.
- The synthesis of time which is carried out in them refers precisely to other syntheses as though to other witnesses, thereby leading us into the domain of another nature in which there is no longer either self or the I, and in which, by contract, we encounter the chaotic realm of individuation.
(It is this role of Language – as a result of the values of implication or the centres of envelopment which endows it with its powers within internal resonance systems. The structure of the other and the corresponding function of language effectively represent the manifestation of the noumenon, the appearance of expressive values – in short, the tendency towards the interiorisation of difference.)
Important side note: consider language as that wherein the “indeterminate, floating, fluid, communicative and enveloping-enveloped: so many positive characteristics affirmed” are extended, canceled / dissolved… There is a necessary non-correspondence between death as an empirical event and death as an ‘instinct’ or transcendental instance.
A production without precedence; the return of [ x ] within that which we call out “there is a something I have never seen, I am no longer the same for it, I am the return of [ x ]. I will return to you from [ x ] and you will repeat this: “there is a something I have never seen, I am no longer the same for it, I am the return of it. I will return to you from [ x ] and you will repeat this:
It seems that it can become thinkable only when tamed – in other words, when subject to representation. Difference in itself remains condemned and must atone or be redeemed under the auspices of a reason which renders it livable and thinkable, and makes it the object of an organic representation.
how many differences and singularities are distributed like so many aggressions, how many simulacra emerge in this night that has become white… What, after all, are Ideas, with their constitutive multiplicity, if not these ants which enter and leave through the fracture in the I?
What the differences swarming behind us…
https://www.nga.gov/artists/1839-mark-rothko/artworks
Nature would never repeat.
the ultimate repetition, the ultimate theatre, encompasses everything; while in another sense it destroys everything; and in yet another sense selects among everything. a repetition of ungrounding on which depend both that which enchains and that which liberates, that which dies and that which lives within. There is eternal return only in the third time.
[ } Opening is an essence of univocity
I have now reached the end of my reading of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. These notes are mostly drawn from the text, with a few personal observations woven in. November, 2025.
Salmonlilies 