Today’s meditative reading of Difference and Repetition (And I call it meditative because, at that point, I’m just reading the text from the beginning to end of a given section without worrying whether I’m getting it or not. I’m basically letting it flow through me just to see what happens. Compare this, for instance, to the study point I return to later and take my time to take notes: that which results in pretty much almost every post I make here.) brought back to me the moral element involved in repetition. One of the main oppositions (as I understand it (and that is among modern and postmodern thinkers (against representation is the overcoding of reality that it represents, often in the form of assuming something that can be perfectly repeated. We see this, for instance, in Kant’s Categorical Imperative. This, consequently, is the main motivation behind the post(modern gravitation towards the eternal elusiveness of difference: that which art specializes in as compared to science. And in that sense of it, we can see Difference and Repetition as Deleuze’s attempt to rescue Repetition (that is given its import to the creative process (from those who would turn it into a moral imperative.
That said (and I apologize for the clumsy segway (?: does anyone know how that word is actually spelled; I keep getting the finger wag from Word (allow me to connect this with the quote I offered yesterday:
“Finally, in this book it seemed to me that the powers of difference and repetition could be reached only by putting into question the traditional image of thought. By this I mean not only that we think according to a given method, but also that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think. For example, we suppose that thought possesses a good nature, and the thinker a good will (naturally to ‘want’ the true); we take as model the process of recognition –in other words, a common sense or employment of all the faculties on a supposed same object; we designate error, nothing but error, as the enemy to be fought; and we suppose that the true concerns solutions –in other words, propositions capable as serving as answers. This is the classic image of thought, and as long as the critique has not been carried to the heart of that image it is difficult to conceive of thought as encompassing those problems which point beyond the propositional mode; or as involving encounters which escape all recognition; or as confronting its true enemies, which are quite different from thought; or as attaining that which tears thought from its natural torpor and notorious bad will, and forces us to think. A new image of thought -or rather, a liberation of thought from those images which imprison it: this is what I had already sought to discover in Proust. “–from Deleuze’s preface to the English version of Difference and Repetition
Only this time I want to focus on the first part:
“Finally, in this book it seemed to me that the powers of difference and repetition could be reached only by putting into question the traditional image of thought. By this I mean not only that we think according to a given method, but also that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think. For example, we suppose that thought possesses a good nature, and the thinker a good will (naturally to ‘want’ the true); we take as model the process of recognition –in other words, a common sense or employment of all the faculties on a supposed same object; we designate error, nothing but error, as the enemy to be fought; and we suppose that the true concerns solutions –in other words, propositions capable as serving as answers.”
Now here, we (by which I mean “I” but tend to work and write better with the philosophical convention of “we” –excuse the arrogance or, rather, cockiness of it (can see the reference to overcoding that evolved into Deleuze’s (as well as Guatarri’s (sense of overcoding involved in the Anti-Oedipus, mainly as concerns the Oedipal Complex as described by Freud and possibly elaborated on by Lacan. And this resistance and rejection of overcoding seems to be an important theme throughout the process of Deleuze as well as post(modern thought: think, for instance, of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. Deleuze didn’t work in a vacuum.
This was the import of the Image of Thought as well as Common sense which, as Deleuze describes it, involves a stimulation of all the faculties (sensibility, imagination, memory, and thought) in such a way that the subject is deluded into believing they have achieved some kind of final epiphany. And this is what comes from taking “the model of recognition”, the process described in the doctrine of the faculties, as the model of thought: as that by which we come to true knowledge.
And, once again, we return to the oblique and poetic approach Deleuze chooses (over straight denotation (as a kind of strange attractor towards that which even he can’t fully describe and invites us (like two people on Acid (to describe with him. Joe Hughes, in his reader guide to Difference and Repetition, describes Deleuze’s free indirect discourse as a kind of exchange with whatever great writer he has participated in an “engagement” with. But I, with all humility, would argue that he is also (if not equally (interested in his “engagement” with his reader.
He, like Rorty, is more interested in stimulating discourse in ways that most people are not interested or willing to do –that is as compared to controlling it: of overcoding- and sees that as the only way out of the mess we have created for ourselves.