My Session 01 Introduction Notes (as requested)

I was asked to post my intro to yesterday’s session. I think it’s important to emphasize that anything I write here is subject to scrutiny and prone to error since I am still very much a student of philosophy, particularly when it comes to Kant and Hegel who I have yet to read directly but have gathered information about them from (hopefully reliable) secondary literature.

Intro:
This book is written in the contemporary spirit of a “generalized anti-Hegelianism”: “difference and repetition have taken the place of the identical and the negative, of identity and contradiction. For difference implies the negative, and allows itself to lead to contradiction, only to the extent that its subordination to the identical is maintained. The primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of representation. But modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities, and of the discovery of all the forces that act under the representation of the identical.” (Preface, xv)

For Henry Sommers-Hall,
“Both Hegel and Deleuze can be seen as attempting to overcome the limitations of Kantian philosophy, on the one hand, and an abstract and external image of thought, on the other.” (Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation)

Kant provides a representationalist account of the conditions of possible experience based on a transcendental deduction of the universal a priori categories that form the empirical world and judgements that form our knowledge of the empirical, prior to any given experience. In this account, the multiplicity of sensory data is synthesized into the unity of the subject in accordance with these universal a priori conditions. On the one hand, this account establishes a certain affinity between thought and being such that knowledge is possible, yet on the other hand, being is foreclosed from being thought of ultimately in terms that are independent of thought, which is expressed by the concept of the noumenal.

Hegel radicalized Kant by demonstrating dialectically how the categories unfold dynamically out of their necessary interconnections. Instead of the categories occupying a static place in the transcendental subject, their dynamic unfolding points to a process in reality itself, leading Hegel to posit an identity of thought and being.

Deleuze, in contrast, provides a genetic account of the transcendental conditions of actual experience centered around the deeply interrelated dynamic notions of difference and repetition without recourse to, and perhaps even in opposition to, the primacy of identity and negativity as they play out in Hegel’s thought.

What I was able to get from this first chapter (or at least, what I think I got) is that there are two kinds of repetition: bare repetition (which is reiteration of the same based on a single concept) and “covered repetition” or repetition in itself (a dynamic principle of “differenciation” for which there is no representative concept).

The distinction between these two kinds or orders of repetition is closely related to a distinction between two kinds of difference: an epiphenomenal kind of difference that is defined as the negative of an ostensibly primary identity and an originary kind of positive difference that makes the play of identity and difference possible, the latter of which is difference in itself.

Since Deleuze seeks to work beyond the limits of representational thinking, his concepts of difference and repetition cannot be explained in terms of the representationalist criteria that truth be a matter of correspondence between pre-existing identities and the static categories or concepts that capture them, since for Deleuze such ostensible identities are derivative of a deeper level of difference where repetition functions without a corresponding concept. Difference in itself and Repetition are not necessarily alternatives to their representationalist correlates (difference in the concept and bare repetition) but what makes those correlates possible and what is disguised within those correlates.

Deleuze’s concepts of difference and repetition are therefore aligned or allied with the related concepts of creativity, evolution, and learning since these are really made possible by the functions of difference and repetition understood independently of how they may be understood from a representationalist perspective.

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