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.”

…affirmation of affirmation against that famous negation of the negation.

Affirmation turns back on itself and repeats or reproduces itself. The eternal return is this highest power, the synthesis of affirmation which finds its principle in the will. The lightness of that which affirms against the weight of the negative; the games of the will to power against the labour of the dialectic; the affirmation of affirmation against that famous negation of the negation. (186)

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)

Christian repetition is opposed to atheist repetition, and Kierkegaardian to Nietzschean,

Christian repetition is opposed to atheist repetition, and Kierkegaardian to Nietzschean, for in the case of Kierkegaard it is repletion itself which takes place once and for all, whereas according to Nietzsche it operates for all times. Nor is this simply a numerical difference; it is, rather, a fundamental difference between these two kinds of repetition. (295)