---
slug: paper-deleuze-g-1968-difference-and-repetition
title: Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (1968)
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/paper-deleuze-g-1968-difference-and-repetition
---

## What Deleuze Saw
Gilles Deleuze wrote Difference and Repetition as his principal doctoral thesis. The book appeared in French in 1968. Paul Patton translated it into English in 1994 for Columbia University Press. Deleuze examined how philosophy had treated difference as secondary to identity, resemblance, opposition, and analogy. He treated repetition as difference without a concept.

Deleuze replaced representation with a process that begins in pure difference. He traced three syntheses of time: habit, memory, and eternal return. These syntheses operate through intensity rather than through static forms.

## Core Results
The book establishes intensity as the driver of individuation. Intensity precedes extensity. It generates qualities and extended space from virtual multiplicities. Chapter 5, titled "Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible," develops this account in detail.

Deleuze links intensity to a critique of classical thermodynamics. Energy flow does not simply cancel differences toward equilibrium. Instead, intensity affirms difference and produces new structures through repetition.

## Exact Passages
Deleuze states: "It is intensity which is immediately expressed in the basic spatio-temporal dynamisms and determines an 'indistinct' differential relation in the Idea to incarnate itself in a distinct quality and a distinguished extensity" (Difference and Repetition, 245).

He continues: "Individuation is mobile, strangely supple, fortuitous and endowed with fringes and margins; all because the intensities which contribute to it communicate with each other, envelop other intensities, and are in turn enveloped" (254).

On the tendency of intensity: intensity "seems to rush headlong into suicide" while still generating extensity (223–224, 235).

Chapter 5 opens with the problem of difference and diversity, then moves to intensity as the unequal in itself (222).

These passages come from the 1994 English edition. The original French text uses "Différence et répétition" (Presses Universitaires de France, 1968).

## Convergence Patterns
The work touches difference and repetition as a core pattern. It connects energy flows to structure through intensity. It addresses bounded chaos in the form of asymmetrical syntheses. Scale invariance appears in the way virtual multiplicities actualize across domains. The account supports the Ladder from difference to flow to structure to memory to life to mind. Intensity supplies the differential principle that individuates without requiring an external observer.

The Mirror Layer aligns here because the reader encounters these processes from inside the field of intensities.

## Distance from the Full Synthesis
Deleuze supplies an ontology of intensity that matches the grain of energy flows producing reliable patterns. He does not name branching, spirals, waves, or flow networks explicitly. His focus remains on philosophical repetition and the virtual. The work reaches the level of individuation and time syntheses but stops short of biological or cognitive mechanisms described in later sciences.

## Honest Limits and Disconfirming Edges
Deleuze works at the level of metaphysical description. No empirical measurements or laboratory data appear. The thermodynamic critique targets classical accounts but does not engage statistical mechanics or information theory developed after 1968.

Reductionist readers, following Weinberg-style arguments, can object that intensity remains a philosophical construct without direct physical reduction. Deleuze himself treats the virtual as real yet non-actual; this distinction invites charges of dualism from strict materialists.

The book contains no discussion of specific biological evolution or neural mechanisms. Its claims about eternal return stay interpretive rather than predictive.

## How These Fit the OIP Loop
Object: virtual multiplicity as Idea. Invoke: intensity as differential driver. Ledger: the three time syntheses. Receipt: actualized individual with fringes. Replay: repetition that affirms difference. Repair: eternal return that selects the intensive.

## Related Paths
See /a/oip-the-ladder for the sequence from difference to mind. See /a/oip-principles for the role of intensity in object invocation. See /a/oip-the-mirror-layer for the reader inside the field.

## What Remains Open
Later readers can test whether Deleuzian intensity maps onto measurable energy gradients in physical systems. No direct experiment follows from the text itself.
