Repetition as a conduct and as a point of view concerns non-exchangeable and non-sustainable singularities.

Reflections, echoes, doubles and souls do not belong to the domain of resemblance or equivalence; and it is no more possible to exchange one's soul than it is to substitute real twins for one another.

If exchange is the criterion of generality, theft and gift are those of repetition. There is, therefore, an economic difference between the two. (p 1)

...(I)t seemed to me that the powers of difference and repetition could be reached only by putting into question the traditional image of thought. By this I mean not only that we think according to a given method, but also that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think. (xv)

If repetition is possible, it is due to miracle rather than to law. It is against the law: against the similar form and the equivalent content of law. If repetition can be found, even in nature, it is in the name of a power which affirms itself against the law, which works underneath laws, perhaps superior to laws. If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to the ordinary, an instantaneity opposed to variation and an eternity opposed to permanence. In every respect, repetition is a transgression. (p 3)

It is not enough, therefore, to propose a new representation of movement; representation is already mediation. Rather, it is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct signs for mediate representations; of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind.
(p 8)

We repeat because we repress... Freud was never satisfied with such a negative schema, in which repetition is explained by amnesia. It is true that, from the beginning, repression was considered a positive power. However, he borrowed this positivity from the pleasure principle or from the reality principle: it was merely a derived positivity, one of opposition. The turning point of Freudianism appears in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: the death instinct is discovered, not in connection with the destructive tendencies, not in connection with aggressivity, but as a result of a direct consideration of repetition phenomena. Strangely, the death instinct serves as a positive, originary principle for repetition; this is its domain and its meaning. (p 16)

In short, orgiastic representation has the ground as its principle and the infinite as its element, by contrast with organic representation which retains form as its principle an the finite as its element. It is the infinite which renders determination conceivable and selectable: difference thus appears as the orgiastic representation of determination and no longer as its organic representation. (p 43)

In very general terms, we claim that there are two ways to appeal to ånecessary destructionsÇ: that of the poet, who speaks in the name of a creative power, capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm Difference in the state of permanent revolution which characterizes eternal return; and that of the politician, who is above all concerned to deny that which ådiffersÇ, so as to conserve or prolong an established historical order, or to establish a historical order which already calls forth in the world the forms of its representation. (p 53)

Nietzsche contrasts two conceptions of the affirmation-negation relation.
In one case, it is negation which is the motor and driving force. Affirmation results from it. It may well be that two negations are not too many to produce a phantom of affirmation. Affirmation is indeed produced, but in order to say yes to all that is negative and negating, to all that can be denied. Thus ZarathustraÇs Ass says yes, but for him to affirm is to bear, to assume or shoulder a burden. He bears everything: the burdens with which he is laden (divine values), those which he assumes himself (human values), and the weight of his tired muscles when he no longer has anything to bear (the absence of values).
According to the other conception, difference is primary: it affirms difference and distance. Difference is light, aerial and affirmative. To affirm is not to bear but, on the contrary, to discharge and to lighten. It is no longer the negative which produces a phantom of affirmation like an ersatz, but a No which results in affirmation.

Gilles Deleuze was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris until his retirement in 1987. DeleuzeÇs original and controversial critique of identity is central toward intitating a shift in French thought away from Hegel and Marx and towards Nietzsche and Freud. His other books include Nietzsche and Philosophy , Dialogues , The Logic of Sense , and with Felix Guattari, the Anti-Oedipus , and Kafka .

Translated from French by Paul Patton, Columbia, New York, 1994. Pub. 1969.