more from the Repetition Project

It is repetition itself whose face [Freud], as much as Kierkegaard, renews for us in the division of the subject, the fate of scientific man. Let another confusion be dispelled; it bears no relation to Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ (307).

The limit of death…

represents the past in its real form; it is not the physical past whose existence is abolished, nor the epic past as it has become perfected in the work of memory, nor the historical past in which man finds the guarantor of his future, but rather the past which manifests itself in an inverted form of repetition.47 (262)

Footnote 47, (268): “(Added in 1966:) These four words [renversé dans la repetition] in which my latest formulation of repetition is found (1966), have been submitted for an improper recourse to the ‘eternal return’ [toujours present dans l’éternel retour], which was all that I could get across at that time.”

…a complete reversal of the world of representation, and of the sense that ‘identical’ and ‘similar’ had in that world.

The eternal return is indeed the Similar, repetition in the eternal return is indeed the Identical – but precisely the resemblance and the identity do not pre-exist the return of that which returns. The do not in the first instance qualify what returns, they are indistinguishable from its return. It is not the same which returns, it is not the similar which returns; rather, the Same is the returning of that which returns, — in other words, of the Different; the similar is the returning of that which returns, – in other words, of the Dissimilar. The repetition in the eternal return is the same, but the same in so far as it is said uniquely of difference and the different. This is a complete reversal of the world of representation, and of the sense that ‘identical’ and ‘similar’ had in that world. (300)

Deleuze’s curse

Nietzsche announces only a light punishment for those who do not ‘believe’ in eternal return: they will have, and be aware of, only an ephemeral life! (55)

How could the reader believe that Nietzsche, who was the greatest critic of all these categories…

How could the reader believe that Nietzsche, who was the greatest critic of all these categories, implicated Everything, the Same, the Identical, the Similar, the Equal, the I and the Self in the eternal return.? How could it be believed that he understood the eternal return as a cycle, when he opposed ‘his’ hypothesis to every cyclical hypothesis? How could it be believed that he lapsed into the false and insipid idea of an opposition between a circular time and a linear time, an ancient and a modern time? (299)

There is eternal return only in the third time

There is eternal return only in the third time: it is here that the freeze-frame begins to move once more, or that the straight line f time, as though drawn by its own length, reforms a strange loop which in now way resembles the earlier cycle, but leads into the formless, operates only for the third time and for that which belongs to it. (297)