Deleuzian Difference and Deleuzian Repetition (Or, Against the Concept)
I wrote this a couple of years ago now, but it still holds up as a primer on what Deleuze is up to with 'difference' and 'repetition' as a pair of terms (and not, ' Difference and Repetition ' the book). So we begin with a question: What is (the significance of) ‘difference’ and ‘repetition’ in Deleuze? Part I: Basics Before getting to grips with Deleuze’s understanding of ‘difference’ and ‘repetition’, the most important term to understand is the concept . As we’ll come to see, both difference and repetition are, in some ways, opposed to the idea of the concept. What is a concept? Very roughly, a concept is a ‘general’ idea that is ‘instantiated’ in particular instances of that idea. For instance(!), you have a concept 'horse', on the one hand, and then particular horses, horses which actually exist, on the other. The idea is that the concept always remains the same such that for the diversity of actually existing horses, there is always one and the sam...