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).

Deleuzian Transference

Now transference is still repetition: above all it is repetition.…In transference, however, repetition does not so much serve to identity events, persons and passions as to authenticate the roles and select the masks (19)

Lacanian Repetition

Freud is not dealing with any repetition residing in the natural, no return of need…Repetition demands the new. It is turned towards the ludic, which finds its dimension in this new…Whatever, in repetition, is varied, modulated, is merely alienation of its meaning. The adult, and even the more advanced child, demands something new in his activities, in his games. But this ‘sliding away’ (glissement) conceals that what is the true secret of the ludic, namely, the most radical diversity constituted by repetition itself (61).

Deleuze hates on psychoanalysis

The traditional theory of the compulsion to repeat in psychoanalysis remains essentially realist, materialist and subjective or individualist (104)

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)

Two Repetitions (w/r/t Idea)

In every case, repetition is difference without a concept. But it one case, the difference is taken to be only external to the concept; it is a difference between objects represented by the same concept, falling into the indifference of space and time. In the other case, the difference is internal to the Idea; it unfolds as pure movement, creative of a dynamic space and time which correspond to the Idea. (23-24)

Repetition is not generality.

Repetition is not generality. (1)

We therefore find ourselves confronted by two questions

We therefore find ourselves confronted by two questions: what is the concept of difference – one which is not reducible to simple conceptual difference but demands its own Idea, its own singularity at the level of Ideas? On the other hand, what is the essence of repetition – one which is not reducible to difference without concept, and cannot be confused with the apparent character of objects represented by the same concept, but bears witness to singularity as a power of Ideas? (27)

One can speak of repetition only by virtue of the change or difference that it introduces into the mind

Does not the paradox of repetition lie in the fact that one can speak of repetition only by virtue of the change or difference that it introduces into the mind which contemplates it? (70)