Difference and Repetition

Deleuze's main thesis for his state doctorate and the most systematic statement of his own philosophy. Its target is the philosophy of representation, which since Plato and Aristotle has subordinated difference to identity, treating differences only as differences between things already defined by concepts. Deleuze tries to think difference in itself and repetition for itself. Repetition, he argues, is not the return of the same but the production of difference. A central chapter sets out three syntheses of time: habit, which makes the living present; memory, which makes the pure past; and the eternal return, read through Nietzsche as the repetition of difference that opens the future. Another chapter attacks the dogmatic image of thought, the assumption that thinking naturally seeks truth. Drawing on Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Nietzsche and the differential calculus, Deleuze describes a world of virtual problems and Ideas actualised through intensities, and defends the univocity of being.

It is the key to Deleuze's thought and to much later work on difference, becoming and process, and it offers a demanding alternative to thinking in fixed categories.