Difference and Repetition

Difference and Repetition is a book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, published in Paris in 1968. It was his principal doctoral thesis, supervised by Maurice de Gandillac, and it appeared alongside a secondary thesis on Spinoza. After a series of studies on thinkers such as Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, Kant and Spinoza, Deleuze set out to build a metaphysics of difference that would reverse a long tradition in which identity comes first and difference is treated as secondary.

The central claim is a critique of what Deleuze calls "representation": a way of thinking in which things become intelligible only when placed under concepts, compared, categorised and recognised. Against it, he proposes concepts of difference in itself and repetition for itself, logically and metaphysically prior to any concept of identity. For Deleuze, true repetition is the repetition of difference. He draws on Spinoza, Leibniz and Bergson, pushing their systems to a "differential" limit and stripping away God, the world and Being as terminal points. Structuralism also left its mark, since the book seeks the conditions for the creative transformation of categories rather than a fixed set of conditions for belonging to them.

The work has a preface, an introduction, five chapters and a conclusion. In the preface Deleuze presents his project as a generalised anti-Hegelianism and offers difference and repetition as conceptual substitutes for Hegel's identity and negation. The introduction separates repetition from generality: generality is the regularity science describes through laws, cycles and equalities, whereas repetition concerns singular series that have no equivalent, and it is linked to transgression, humour and irony. The chapters move through difference in itself, through repetition for itself across three temporal levels (the passive synthesis of habit, the active synthesis of memory, and an empty time tied to eternal return), and through a critique of the image of thought.

Its influence on later philosophy, literary theory, the arts and political thought has been considerable. As a curiosity, in 1986 the Argentine playwright Elio Gallipoli wrote a play titled Repetición y diferencia, staged in 1987.