by Corry Shores
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[The following is summary. All boldface, underlining, and bracketed commentary are my own. Proofreading is incomplete, so please forgive my typos and other distracting mistakes. Somers-Hall is abbreviated SH.]
Summary of
Henry Somers-Hall
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition:
An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide
Part 1
A Guide to the Text
Chapter 1. Difference in Itself
1.7 The Eternal Return (40–2/50–2)
Very brief summary:
By means of the Nietzschean idea of the eternal return, we may have a univocal understanding of being that would see difference as intensive. All being is variations in power between competing forces that express their will and potency at their fullest each moment. Such a purely affirmative view of the world would mean that we find every moment of our lives as perfect and as full as they can be, and thus we would want to relive these moments infinitely throughout eternity.
Brief summary:
In Nietzsche’s eternal return, we re-experience every moment of our lives exactly as we have, but infinitely more times throughout eternity. If we view the world as made of delimitable subjects that may make moral choices as to how much power to exert over others, then we would be inclined to think that certain circumstances in our lives could have been better somehow. We therefore would not want to affirm the eternal returnability of every aspect of our lives and self-experience. However, if we saw that fundamentally there are no such substantial divisions in our world but rather just forces competing and always expressing their will and power to their fullest in any instance, given their struggles with other forces, then we would see that every moment of our lives is as perfect as can possibly be. And for that reason, we would want to affirm the eternal returnability of our entire lives. By means of this concept of eternal return, then, we may have a univocal understanding of being, since all being is variations in differential power relations, while also maintaining an intensive view of differences in being.
Summary
[SH will draw from Nietzsche’s formulation of the eternal return in The Gay Science, §341.]
Nietzsche formulates the eternal return as follows [the following is Nietzsche quotation]:
What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ . . . Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ (Nietzsche 2001: §341)
(SH 42)
SH identifies two questions regarding the eternal return that are relevant at this place in Difference and Repetition (DR). 1) What is eternally returning? and 2) what is the eternal return a test for? SH begins with the first question. We previously saw Deleuze’s two ways to understand how the world is made-up: a) sedentary distribution “understands the world as a collection of things with properties” (SH 42). But Deleuze is not interested in this sort of understanding of the world as based on identities, so we will not regard what is returning as being a subject as a center of identity. Rather, b) “Instead, what returns is the nomadic distribution” (43). [What SH says at this point I do not entirely grasp, but that is probably because he is giving a preview of the elaboration to come. Somehow what returns is “the intensive, nomadic distribution”. This has something to do with the ground for modes being a “a pre-judicative field of becoming” (43). Whatever does return is something prior to identity. But how it is that the distribution returns is not entirely clear to me, especially since we cannot understand the distribution itself as an identifiable thing (as it is in the sentence) that returns.]
For Deleuze, taking up the eternal return, the ground (or, as we shall see, unground) for modes is going to be a pre-judicative field of becoming: it is the intensive, nomadic distribution which returns. ‘Only the extreme, the excessive, returns; that which passes into something else and becomes identical . . . Eternal return or returning expresses the common being of all these metamorphoses . . . of all the realised degrees of power’ (DR 41/51). The priority of difference does not, therefore preclude the existence of identities, but asserts that what returns is not these identities themselves, but something prior to identity, which Deleuze characterises as difference.
(SH 43a.b)
The ‘test’ of the eternal return is whether or not we can only see the world as a sedentary distribution or if we can instead also see it as a nomadic distribution. [I do not understand clearly what this has to do with the ‘what we can do’ idea, but perhaps the idea is if we can see that nothing about our lives is ever lacking, since each moment and its conditions are an expression of power in its fullness. And I suppose if we see each moment as perfectly full and lacking in no way, that we would want to affirm it and desire to re-experience it for eternity.]
The eternal return appears as a test – whether we can bear the heaviest burden of the demon’s truth. What is this a test for? The lamb and the bird of prey both see the world in terms of different distributions; the former according to the sedentary distribution, the latter according to the nomadic distribution. In this case, deciding between them is straightforward, but it may be difficult to see whether something is governed by a sedentary or nomadic distribution. The eternal return allows us to differentiate those two classes. Only that which is pure affirmation, or which is not separated from what it can do, can truly will the repetition of everything that makes it what it is. Those who cannot affirm this do not have their ground in the affirmative field of differences, but are instead, like the lamb, grounded in the sedentary distribution. The fact that they make a distinction between what can be done and what is done (they posit agency), means that they as agents are not the same as their actions. For the lamb, therefore, positing its own return is not identical with positing the return of everything which is. The eternal return therefore allows us to differentiate ‘the superior form of everything that “is” ’ (DR 41/51) from those beings that are really not (as the sedentary distribution is not a well-founded way of understanding the world). In doing so, it allows us to characterise that set of entities which genuinely are, and are not merely secondary effects, just as the lamb’s attitude is a secondary effect of the bird of prey’s.
(SH 43)
Citations from:
Somers-Hall, Henry. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 2013.
Or if otherwise noted:
DR:
[Deleuze] Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994/London: Continuum, 2004.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (2001), The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
*[What SH says at this point I do not entirely grasp, but that is probably because he is giving a preview of the elaboration to come. Somehow what returns is “the intensive, nomadic distribution”. This has something to do with the ground for modes being a “a pre-judicative field of becoming” (43). Whatever does return is something prior to identity. But how it is that the distribution returns is not entirely clear to me, especially since we cannot understand the distribution itself as an identifiable thing (as it is in the sentence) that returns.]
ReplyDeleteYes, the intensive is dealt with in more detail later in DR. The main point here is that thinking the eternal return for Deleuze involves thinking the field of intensity that gives rise to actual states of affairs. As we’ll see, this involves understanding the world in terms of what Deleuze calls ‘ideas’ – these are transcendental structures that can be actualized in different states of affairs. Since the same idea can be actualized in different states of affairs, thinking the eternal return involves understanding the world in terms of this (un)ground regardless of the different states of affairs it gives rise to.
*[I do not understand clearly what this has to do with the ‘what we can do’ idea, but perhaps the idea is if we can see that nothing about our lives is ever lacking, since each moment and its conditions are an expression of power in its fullness. And I suppose if we see each moment as perfectly full and lacking in no way, that we would want to affirm it and desire to re-experience it for eternity.]
The idea, really, is that it is only when we think of ourselves as subjects with properties/agents with actions that we can conceive of being ourselves, but lacking a particular property/having not committed a particular act (i.e., as our actions as being separable from who we are). I.e., it’s only when we conceive of ourselves in terms of sedentary distributions that we can understand the notion of regret as having had the possibility of doing something differently in the past. For the bird of prey, there is no separation of action from doer, and so there is no way of affirming who we are without also affirming all of our actions, and everything that happens to us. The question of affirmation therefore opens the way to the question of what kind of distribution we use as the basis for understanding the world.