I would first point out a point made in D&G’s A thousand Plateaus (or was it Anti-Oedipus?(:
A book does not mirror the world. It forms a rhizome with it.
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In my present immersion in Gille Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition which has been a process of bouncing between not only Deleuze’s book, but Joe Hughes and James Williams’ reader guides as well, I am starting to see (or crystallize (two distinct takes on the book. It’s like what I have described before: several writers describing different books under the same title.
Hughes’ book seems to focus on the doctrine of the faculties: Deleuze via Kant’s description of how we move from immediate experience to thought: the genesis of understanding. Williams, on the other the other hand (and this is the most telling), seems to be looking backwards from Logic of Sense. His main focus seems to be on the interaction of series, events, and individuation (that founded on chancing. This, in turn, leads me to believe that Hughes, as well, cannot offer a PURE interpretation of Difference and Repetition: that is pure of the other books that Hughes has read and the concepts from them that attach their selves to his interpretation.
And Deleuze, himself, has referred to the deferred systems of meaning involved with any given system as well as infinite regress. And I’m guessing this is exactly the dynamic that Deleuze hoped to spread. He, having never been certain or clear on what it was he was approaching (that is given the evanescent nature of it), wanted to disseminate that experience of uncertainty: that experience of being almost there while never truly having it: like that French Mademoiselle who seems to be within your reach yet pulls away when you try to approach her. Think Kafka chick here.
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The main point here is that if anyone is to hope to get a taste of understanding as concerns Difference and Repetition, it must, by its very nature, require an acquaintance with other books Deleuze has written as well as books written about him AND books written by those who influenced him. It is as if he is inviting us to look for the overlaps (the individuations (that occur between the series and events attached to Difference and Repetition. Once again:
A book does not mirror the world. It forms a rhizome with it.