Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

And this problematic is already implicit in the Nietzschean notion of

eternal return.

The reading of the concept of the eternal return given by Deleuze

places itself precisely on this plane: difference or repetition, becoming

other or claiming one’s own identity.

According to Nietzsche the eternal return is in no sense a thought

of the identical, but rather a thought of synthesis, a thought

of the absolutely different which calls for a new principle

outside science. This principle is that of the reproduction of

diversity as such, of the repetition of difference: the opposite of

‘adiaphoria’. (VP II 374 ‘There is no adiaphoriaalthough we can

imagine.’) ... The eternal return is not the permanence of the

same, the equilibrium state or the resting place of the identical.

It is not the ‘same’ or the ‘one’ which comes back in the eternal

return, but return is itself the one which ought to belong to

diversity and to that which differs. (Nietzsche and Philosophy,46,

translation modified)^2

Focusing on the Nietzschean question of the eternal return,

Deleuze lays out the question of the singular event, that is,

of difference understood as singularity. Singularity of the event

and the generation of identity are the two poles of the

thinkable.

Is the task of thought to understand the conditions of poss-

ibility of the unrepeatable, or is it to bring together the rules of

repetition? This is the question that Deleuze sees at the heart of

modern Western philosophy.

Within Hegelian thought, the polarity of the singular event and of

the generation of the identical finds a complete systematization. For

Hegel, experience as singular event is an appearance that needs to be

dispelled.

The place for the dialectical affirmation of Truth is History,

and in history truth makes itself Subject, abolishing and over-

coming the singular immediacy of the event. Only thanks to this

negation and abolition does identity come into being as a result.

As Hegel wrote, in The Phenomenology of Mind, ‘the real subject-

matter is not exhausted in its purpose, but in working the matter

out’ (69).

The thing in itself [the real subject-matter] does not have truth in its

immediate difference, but rather in the deployment of its identity, of

54 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography

9780230_221192_08_cha07.pdf 10/3/08 11:35 AM Page 54