On Four Poetic Formulas which Might

Summarise Difference and Repetition

Brent Adkins Roanoke College

The following papers were presented at the Deleuze Circle, 9 October

2015, which convened at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential
Philosophy’s annual meeting. Each Deleuze Circle meeting is organised
around a specific text of Deleuze, and the presentations attempt to cover
the work in its entirety. The hope is that participants can get a sense of
the whole sufficient to propel their own work. This particular Deleuze
Circle focused on Difference and Repetition. Our speakers were Henry
Somers-Hall, Jay Lampert, Fredrika Spindler, and Len Lawlor. Henry,
Jay, and Fredrika took chapters one through three respectively, and Len
spoke about chapters four and five of Difference and Repetition. As
moderator, I would like to give a brief overview of each of the papers
by shamelessly borrowing from Deleuze’s preface to Kant’s Critical
Philosophy.

I. ‘There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective

“knowing”’1
What is Platonism? How does one reverse it? Why would one want to
reverse it in the first place? None of these questions have unambiguous
answers, and yet one might see all of Deleuze’s works as engaged in
answering them in one way or another. For Nietzsche, as the formula
above shows, the need for reversing Platonism arises from the absurdity
of what it demands. In short, Platonism demands ‘that we should think
of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular
direction, in which the active and interpreting forces through which
alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking’
(Nietzsche 1967: III:12). In order for an eye to see something it must

Deleuze and Guattari Studies 13.3 (2019): 395–400

DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2019.0364
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dlgs
396 Brent Adkins

have a point of view, a perspective. One way to think about the reversal
of Platonism, then, is as the replacement of a ‘pure, will-less, painless,
timeless knowing subject’ that sees things ‘as they are’, ‘objectively’ with
an impure, wilful, embodied, untimely, and creative subject that sees
things ‘as they appear’ and thus deploys differing perspectives ‘in the
service of knowledge’ (III:12).
This distinction between seeing things ‘as they are’ and seeing things
‘as they appear’ is at the heart of Henry Somers-Hall’s paper, ‘Merleau-
Ponty and the Phenomenology of Difference’. As Henry notes, this
distinction is found in Plato’s Sophist where Plato distinguishes between
‘icon’ (seeing things as they are) and ‘phantasm’ (seeing things as they
appear). The tendency of Platonism is to valorise the icon at the expense
of the phantasm, but as Deleuze notes, the very distinction shows
that Plato is already at work reversing Platonism. In Difference and
Repetition, Deleuze takes up the reversal of Platonism in a critique
of representation. The demand that all seeing be ‘iconic’, that is, the
demand that all seeing represent things as they are is the source of
Platonism’s power and its limitations. Deleuze argues that such an iconic
seeing is impossible.
It is precisely at this point that Henry shows that crucial to Deleuze’s
project of the reversal of Platonism through the critique of representation
is the work of Merleau-Ponty. Initially this seems like an odd pairing.
Deleuze says little about Merleau-Ponty, and Merleau-Ponty says even
less about Plato. However, if we consider Merleau-Ponty’s overriding
concern with embodiment and the primacy of perception that follows
from embodiment, we can see that Merleau-Ponty’s project seeks to
ground itself in seeing things as they appear rather than seeing them
as they are. Merleau-Ponty seeks, precisely as Deleuze does, to think the
phantasm rather than the icon.

II. ‘What, then, is time? If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish

to explain to him who asks, I know not’2
For Augustine time is the ‘unknown known’. It is what he knows most
intimately, but does not know that he knows. On the one hand, it
seems absolutely central to experience, and yet, on the other hand,
it is precisely this overwhelming centrality that makes it so difficult
to grasp. Philosophy has long attempted to come to grips with the
nature of time and its relation to human experience. Numerous strategies
have been tried from Parmenides’ banishing it as illusion, to Aristotle’s
demythologising claim that time is the measure of motion. In Difference
 On Four Poetic Formulas 397

and Repetition Deleuze wades into the fray in the second chapter where
he outlines what he calls the three passive syntheses of time. Within the
context of reversing Platonism Deleuze praises Kant for introducing time
into the Cartesian subject. This is a radical departure from a tradition in
which time and truth were thought to be fundamentally opposed. How
can the subject grasp the truth (see things as they are) if either the subject
or the truth is subject to change? Kant, of course, answers this question
by making time the very form of sensibility and thus not a property
of objects or the world. Though Deleuze praises Kant here (at least in
comparison with Descartes), he is also writing about time in the wake
of Heidegger’s Being and Time, which is attempting its own reversal of
Platonism by arguing that temporality is the reinterpretation of Dasein’s
‘being-ahead-of-itself’. That is, in strikingly Kantian fashion Heidegger
argues that the conditions for the possibility of Dasein’s experience of
time are Dasein’s constitutive, existential structures. Time is thus an
unavoidable component of why things appear as they do for Heidegger.
From this perspective it is tempting to argue that the structural parallels
between the titles of Being and Time and Difference and Repetition are
not accidental.
Even if the desire to reverse Platonism is granted, do we really
understand time any better? Do Deleuze’s three syntheses of time bring
us any closer to alleviating Augustine’s bafflement about time? Jay
Lampert’s response to these questions in ‘Problems with the Future’ is an
emphatic ‘No.’ In particular, Jay focuses on the third synthesis of time
and ruthlessly pursues all of the tempting but unsubstantiated claims
surrounding it. Does the third synthesis refer to the future? If so, in what
sense? Is it the future in the normal sense of the word, or is Deleuze
developing a new sense? If so, what is the relation between the typical
use of the word and the one Deleuze introduces here? What relation is
there (if any) between the ‘empty form of time’ and the ‘form of empty
time’? Jay mercilessly lays out ten problems with the third synthesis of
time in Difference and Repetition. In short, this is a provocation. The
essay concludes by quoting Sun-Ra, suggesting that perhaps the time to
think about time is past.

III. ‘O my friends, there is no friend’3

The third formula comes from Montaigne. Or, does it come from
Aristotle? Or, was Aristotle quoting something already well known at
the time? Or, does Montaigne misremember what he read in Aristotle,
in order to invent a new concept of the friend? Derrida, of course, works
398 Brent Adkins

through the subtleties of responsibility and attribution of this quote in

The Politics of Friendship. Deleuze, too, continually returned to the close
interconnection between the origins of philosophy and friendship, where
the true friend of wisdom proves himself in a public contest among
equals. What about now? Is philosophy still a contest to prove who
is the true friend of wisdom? What would such a contest look like?
Who would participate in it? Must not such a contest now include
the mighty dead from the history of philosophy? To prove oneself the
friend of wisdom, must one now engage in hand-to-hand combat with
Plato? With Aristotle? With Kant? With Hegel? Would one be required
to write, say, a series of monographs on individual philosophers in order
to prove one’s bona fides? Does friendship require apprenticeship? If the
Greeks inaugurate philosophy with the conceptual persona of the friend,
does reversing Platonism require a new concept of the friend?
For Deleuze reversing Platonism requires a peculiar relation to the
history of philosophy and a certain kind of hatred, misosophy to be
precise. ‘Misosophy’ only appears once in Difference and Repetition
but it is absolutely crucial. ‘Thought is primarily trespass and violence,
the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy: everything begins
with misosophy’ (Deleuze 1994: 139). There is no creation without
destruction. In order to reverse Platonism the image of thought must
be destroyed. In order to think the new, in order to create new concepts,
one must destroy the iron cage of representation: identity, opposition,
analogy, and resemblance. Fredrika Spindler looks at the intersecting
issues of friendship, philosophy, and its history from the third chapter of
Difference and Repetition. In “‘All philosophy starts with misosophy”,
or On Love, Trickery and Treason’, she takes up philosophy as the
response to a violent encounter that necessitates thought. She unpacks
Deleuze’s claim that far from being a natural state, thought arises out of
violence and drives one to violence. At this point, it is not clear that there
can be any friends at all. Fredrika returns to the notion of the friend,
though, and shows that Deleuze invents a new conception of the friend
and a new conception of love. Both concepts are profoundly affective
and inextricably intertwined with hatred and violence, much as love and
contempt are intertwined for Nietzsche.

IV. Ex nihilo nihil fit

The final formula, perhaps, seems out of place here. ‘Nothing comes
from nothing’ is a formula so evocative of Platonism. For millennia it
has been wielded to bolster precisely the kind of transcendence that
 On Four Poetic Formulas 399

Deleuze thinks is antithetical to philosophy. What if the task, though,

were not simply to reject the formula but to transform it through
the kind of love and violence that Fredrika spoke about? What if the
task is ‘maximal modification’ by way of commentary? Here, several
strands of Difference and Repetition come together. Discussions of time,
perspective, and the history of philosophy culminate in the fourth and
fifth chapters with analyses of power and intensity. Strangely, though,
Deleuze begins the fourth chapter with a discussion of the history of
calculus. It seems less strange now in the wake of Badiou’s declaration
that mathematics is ontology, but at the time the idea that some obscure
cul-de-sacs in the history of mathematics could tell us anything about
philosophy was surprising to say the least. Calculus, though, has several
things to recommend it. First, it is the mathematics of change. Second,
change is articulated in terms of a differential relation (dy/dx). Third,
this differential relation remains even if y and x are zero. That is, the
relation is real, but virtual. Thus, calculus gives one a way of thinking
about a zero that is nonetheless productive, a zero that is not nothing.
Len Lawlor’s ‘Power and Intensity’ follows the zero that is not nothing
through chapters four and five of Difference and Repetition and shows
how this allows Deleuze to develop the crucial concepts of power and
intensity. More importantly, Len traces the ethical implications of power
and intensity through both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
The seeming imperative to endlessly increase intensity of Anti-Oedipus
gives way to the more prudential tone of A Thousand Plateaus where
Deleuze and Guattari enjoin us to experiment with our intensities but
not to destratify everything at once. As Len shows, Deleuze’s discussion
of power and intensity in Difference and Repetition allows us to take
seriously the possibility first raised in Plato’s Sophist of ‘non-being that,
in a sense, is’. Ex nihilo nihil fit is transformed into ‘Out of difference,
difference comes.’
Though each of the papers in this discussion pursues a different
strategy, and indeed, a different end, all of them succeed in producing
a new perspective on Difference and Repetition. Each paper is an
encounter that spurs thought. Instead of reproducing an orthodoxy, each
paper makes heterogeneous connections to an outside.

Notes
1. Nietzsche 1967: 119.
2. Augustine 1991: Bk 11, ch. 14.
3. Montaigne 1993: Bk 1, ch. 27.
400 Brent Adkins

References
Augustine (1991) Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1985) Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London:
Athlone Press.
Montaigne, Michel de (1993) The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech,
New York: Penguin Classics.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1967) On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann,
New York: Vintage.