Difference and Repetition

Introduction

Deleuze submitted the book as his main doctoral thesis and published it in 1968. In the preface he writes that a book of philosophy should be partly a very particular kind of detective novel, partly a kind of science fiction. Against a tradition that thinks difference only as difference between things already identified, he develops difference and repetition as concepts in their own right, and criticises the “image of thought” that assumes thinking is naturally directed at truth. The book also contains a theory of three syntheses of time. Reviewing it in 1970, Foucault wrote that one day, perhaps, the century would be known as Deleuzian.

Connections

Builds on

• Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order1677 · Baruch de Spinoza
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra1883 · Friedrich Nietzsche
• Creative Evolution1907 · Henri Bergson

Criticizes

• Republicc. 375 BCE · Plato

More works by Gilles Deleuze

• 1962Nietzsche and Philosophy
• 1972Anti-Oedipus
• 1980A Thousand Plateaus