Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is an assault on philosophical dogma, unveiling each presupposition for the phantasm that it is. Difference is not monstrous errancy, he argues, but unwavering creative force. However, explaining Deleuze in opaque language does us no good, and deserves a more tangible framework. Luckily, his subversion of the Freudian death drive does just this. To understand Deleuze’s alternative to Freud, we must first set forth the traditional psychoanalytic idea of the death drive. Explicating Deleuze’s position in the same ‘closed’ manner will not do, and must instead be untangled through the voices of Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche. Both philosophers begin with an apparently conflictual dualism — mirroring that of Freud’s life/death binary — which Deleuze takes to an involutive reconciliation.
Let us begin where Deleuze and Freud — superficially — agree: the unconscious is repetitious. In other words, the subject is a series of habitual tendencies synthesized from recollected past moments. For instance, I can predict that an object will fall when I drop it only because I have experienced this causality in the past. Lived subjectivity is then the totality of these bound causal links and the habits accorded to them (I do A because I know it will lead to B). In Freud’s context, repetition compulsion determines the extrinsic value of pleasure by binding the psychic effect to an objective cause. The pleasure principle appears as the conductor of mental activity, but since pleasure in itself — ‘pleasurable pleasure’ — is like a conclusion without premises, it is this drive to repeat that constitutes it as a principle. This is essential because an excitation is only preserved in the memory through its associated causal image. Without this ‘enduring’ memory, the present dissolves into the past as a disparate succession of purely sensory moments.
Desired excitations ground repetition; one does not drink for the sake of the alcohol, but because they desire the multiplicity which surrounds it. However, the relative character of pleasure remains outside itself and tells us nothing of its contents or why it is repeated. To account for this, pleasure must yield some fixed determination. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud tells us that there is “a powerful tendency inherent in every living organism to restore a prior state…” He takes this primordial object of repetition to be death. Death stands at the foot of the past as life’s veritable despot; it is the center of entropic immateriality around which repetition revolves. In short, every desire represents a reproductive effort at death’s energetic equilibrium. Likewise, he speaks of life as the constant vie to maintain homeostasis against external destabilizing shocks. The act of binding that constitutes the subject as such is, for Freud, synonymous with turbulent suffering. We are not yet dead, so can only displace a simulacral sensation of death onto the object; every binding is to the ends of an unbinding — this is the function of the death drive.
Freud’s argument contains a visible tension: he supposes that the death drive relates the binding of pleasures to something itself unbound, but of what does this relation consist? I will examine Deleuze’s critique point by point. The trouble begins, he says, when life and death are put up as negative terms. ‘Negation’ here means a difference in kind, a determination that necessarily excludes some property; for example, the negation of ‘A’ (‘not-A’) lacks by definition the property of ‘A’. What are the negating properties of life and death? Freud has already told us that they are materiality and immateriality. The binding of pleasures to objects gives the psyche structural reconciliation; life differentiates itself from death by having an external object of repetition. Death, on the other hand, innately grounds psychic organization by being the unbound pleasure that life binds. However, we will find that the meanings of “material” and “immaterial” infinitely regress. According to Freud, the necessary exclusion of materiality defines death, with the death drive being the tendency towards this negation. That the death drive is merely a tendency towards negation — and not the negation itself — is necessitated by the aforementioned rule that a negation cannot contain what it negates. It follows then that death must also exclude a death drive, since it implies a tendency towards (and not a presence of) immateriality. Thus, the conclusion that the death drive tends towards death, but that death is only determined as negating a death drive. The determinate ground presupposes itself as already conditioned by that which it apparently conditions. In other words, no matter which way we go, we are only told about what is not rather than what is. The death drive is emptied of meaning.
Contrary to popular criticisms of Deleuze, he does not render himself a hypocrite by ‘negating’ Freud’s argument. He resolves the contradiction from within its premises — his critique is immanent. I will quickly explore this before elucidating further. Freud’s conception of life has two poles: one which is ephemerally real and the other which drives to erase this reality. Since the act of binding actualizes death’s in-itself value, and life only binds by having something unbound in the first place, life and death reciprocally determine each other. But this circularity never has any meaning to begin with if we remain at the level of a negation — thus, Freud’s dilemma. Deleuze posits that, instead of death imposing itself upon life through an anyways presupposed death drive, it is the death drive as an always already present force that grounds repetition. I will examine the consequences of this below, and only offer this brief explanation as an outline of what follows. Explaining Deleuze so rigidly goes against the fluid permeation of philosophies implicated in his own. Pulling apart this Deleuzian congelation will require a deeper look into his main progenitors: Spinoza and Nietzsche.
What difference is there other than that in kind? It is a difference in degree, but this is not separate from a negation per se. Rather, differences in kind are only abstract representations of degree. We must turn to Spinoza’s ontology of expression to reconcile this seeming contradiction. As a preliminary clarification, I will use what Spinoza calls ‘God’ interchangeably with ‘Nature’, since both lack the anthropomorphism of a divine figure (e.g. Christ). Furthermore, concision requires that I greatly simplify his proofs, meaning that the reader must take them at face value. Now, in Ethics Spinoza tells us that nothing defines Nature besides existence; existence is Nature’s essence. All else flows from this definition. On the one hand, essence is fulfilled through its ‘expression’ — it’s filling of itself — so God exists essentially through and in its expressivity. On the other hand, what exists essentially is also infinite; if there were something outside of existence, existence would be defined referentially to that thing and would not be essential. In short, Nature is total, infinite, existing necessarily and without negation. However, this totality depends on a fissure between what Spinoza calls natura naturans (Nature naturing) and natura naturata (Nature natured). The former is a verbal Nature that is always already in the process of constructing itself — expressing its essence — while the latter is a (grammatically) infinitive Nature that has always already been constructed — had its essence expressed. Freud would like to deny the mobility of Nature in the first sense and replace it with another natured Nature. But we should notice that these terms are mutually implicative: natura naturata constitutes natura naturans as the existence expressed, while natura naturans gives rise to natura naturata by expressing existence.
Planets, continents, animals, and organisms all exist as finite contractions of a God who is only their infinite expansion. I believe that Henri Bergson offers a solid visualization of this. Imagine all of Nature as a cone, the infinite cosmos at its base, and an infinitesimal particle at its apex. The cross-sections of the cone separate the base from its apex, but this separation also connects and gives coherence to the whole. The universe is not an abstract collection of atoms, but of atoms which molecularize, form cells, animals, packs, and so on. For instance, humans and plants as natura naturata appear different in kind, but are really differing degrees of nature. At the same time, that ‘everything is One’ partially misses the point. Rather, it is that everything is absolutely different — humans and plants, humans and other humans, and so on — and can only unite in a totality that acknowledges the absolute non-uniformity of what is united.
When we view death as an immanent principle, and not a transcendental signifier, life becomes affirmative. For Spinoza, every lived moment does not imply another unfulfilled possibility (e.g. death), but always carries itself to the limit of its perfection. Nothing lies outside the existence that our desires and actions express, and if there did, existence would be contingent upon that which it is not and would presuppose itself. In this sense, God’s infinite expression is a death drive. Abstracted from life, death is an indeterminate concept of unboundedness which awaits binding. Only through its permeation into life — its expressivity — does death have a positive or existent meaning (it is…) Subjectivation is not a liturgy to Thanatos (the God of death), rather death’s inherent drive towards its self-constitution.
We have not yet understood the subject as “difference-it-itself”. To do so, we must situate ourselves within Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return. The eternal return appears initially as the maxim, “whatever you will, will it in such a manner that you also will its eternal return”; in other words, one should act as though whatever they do will recur an infinity of times. But kept to the level of an ethical doctrine, absurdity envelopes the eternal return. At face value, it would permit no act since everything becomes tortuous in endless perpetuity. At any less, however, and it reduces to the truism of avoiding regrettable actions. Nietzsche virulently rejects both of these interpretations. He criticizes the Stoics for suggesting that we ought to simulate the guiding natural order of the celestial and physical harmonies. For the Ancients, repetition is always for the sake of the supra-sensible. However, if natural law cannot account for our difference, why should we deny ourselves in order to replicate it? Nietzsche is not telling us to consider a world in which our actions become mechanistic principles; put this way, Nietzscheanism is as much Kantian as Stoic — contradictio in adjecto, he would say. The eternal return is a maxim no less, but one which we cannot conflate with a realm of copied models. What returns is not the same, but the different.
Embracing difference, as Nietzsche prescribes, is not a choice. If it were we would already be dead. Deleuze opens D&R by stating that “repetition is not generality.” That is, if I call something the ‘same’ it is only because it is first ‘similar-to’; the same exists only in relation to that from which it differs. For instance, the colors of crimson, scarlet, and burgundy all contain the same concept of ‘redness’, but I cannot picture the ‘redness’ they contain outside of a particular color. Beyond this, we reveal an endless taxonomy; ‘redness’ contains the concept of ‘color’, but I cannot visualize color as an abstract concept either, and still further, the word “color” contains the concept of a noun, but there is no ‘purely nounal’ word, and so on ad infinitum. Each point on a color grid is infinitely unique, different from the one just beside it. We can draw criss crosses over it if we’d like, and perhaps we must, but it is we who draw them. We fill the space, we are space, but we are not distributed within it.
For Nietzsche, death is itself pure unfulfilled will or desire; it is a power that is carried with each movement of life. In our psychoanalytic context, it is the unbound energy that is utilized and formed by the subjective act of binding. However, willing the eternal return is not a matter of finding the most virtuous action which echoes a pure state (perhaps the will of God). Rather, the eternal return is a death drive that unveils our self-categorizations as transitory. As soon as one relegates themselves to an identity, they have already denied a part of that self. Humanism is exemplary: when one submits to a supposed ‘human essence’, they always fall short of it. This is because the concept of human (in the moralistic sense) is an aggregate of collective differences projected onto a flat surface. The general concept is always an abstraction.
Freudian eternal return says that death is the static form of all repetition. We repeat and displace it, but fall short of it until we become it. However, if death is only dead by being unbound, a binding to exclude presupposes this unboundedness. In a more literal sense, when we are dead we do not know it and only by living do we conceptualize it; death is then that which alone is beyond experience — is unthinkable. Yet, Deleuze points out that we must think it! Everything known, determined, and bound pierces through the unknown, undetermined, and unbound; we could not produce difference without an undifferentiated emptiness awaiting our touch. Subjectivity is repetition as such, and without a model, the only thing it repeats is the act of repetition. What this repetition carries, however, is difference. To live is to eternally return at each moment, but only the absolutely different returns.
Eternal return and infinite expression mean the same thing, they are both the death drive. Each iteration of Deleuze’s argument repeats the others, but transforms and constitutes the whole in the process. When he writes of both of the philosophers I’ve covered separately in Nietzsche and Philosophy and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, the simple point of Difference and Repetition remains visible. Even speaking of his work beyond D&R he says that, “all that I have done since is connected” Is Deleuze being repetitive? Perhaps, but this is obviously the point. What Deleuze repeats is never the same, but is always made different under the act of repeating: he repeats only repetition, and what is repeated is difference. This is how Deleuze embraces the death drive within his work. The ‘life’ that he gives to his philosophy when he puts it in the words of Nietzsche or Spinoza is neither a repetition of the philosopher through which he speaks nor of the philosophy he inscribes upon them; it is a synthesis of the two that transforms them both in the process. In this way, the life that we live rests upon death as an ever-coming but never-present futurity that we are at every moment.
