Zeal For Truth

After looking at Kierkegaard’s concept of faith and Nietzsche’s introduction to semiotics, we now turn to the primary philosopher of difference, Gilles Deleuze. He’s a bit unknown, even in philosophy circles. In Deleuzian terms, Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith embodies difference. He is unrepeatable, paradoxical, and contradictory. He is a multiplicity. Here, I want to outline what difference is and why this is an integral part of Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith. Our primary text is Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.

Determining Difference
Deleuze writes that “difference is the state in which one can speak of determinations as such” (D&R, 28). It is this as such that is important for Deleuze. Difference is not a constant process but an immediate event. His example is lightning distinguishing itself from the undifferentiated, from the void of indifference. Difference occurs between the undifferentiated like a “struggle against an elusive adversary, in which the distinguished opposes something which cannot distinguish itself from it but continues to espouse that which divorces it” (D&R, 28).

It is common to perceive difference in terms of the opposition of extremes or contraries (e.g., black vs. white), but this only scrapes the surface of difference. When these two extremes are taken to infinity, it becomes clear that they are simply opposite forces of the same quality. In other words, they are repetitions of the indifferent. To think of difference, one must deny the indifferent in order to make the different. Difference must be pushed to its limit, “the ground which is no less its return or its reproduction than its annihilation” (D&R, 45).

Being Different
It was Duns Scotus who has made the only ontological proposition: “Being is univocal” (D&R, 35). This has always been the only ontology and it is what is echoed in all ontology before and after, from Parmenides to Heidegger. At the limits of infinity, we can see that difference does not presuppose some sort of identity, as Hegel had concluded, but rather that identity, through the opposition of identities, presupposes difference and even distorts it. It is not enough to say that “difference in itself is not ‘already’ contradiction” but also that difference cannot be reduced to contradiction (D&R 51). Difference is the mirror which inverts the surface of identity, Lewis Carroll’s looking glass.

It was Nietzsche who first saw this concept and it is his philosophy of contradictions that really sought out difference. Reading Nietzsche’s concepts such as “beyond good and evil” as a simple rejection of morality is faulty because it still follows the conflict which Nietzsche rejects: “Thus Nietzsche reproaches all those selection procedures based upon opposition or conflict with working to the advantage of the average forms and operation to the benefit of the ‘large number’” (D&R, 54). Through Nietzsche’s eternal return, univocal Being is dissolved and “the superior form of everything that is” is uncovered. Eternal return itself “makes the difference” and displays the “univocity of the different” (D&R, 55).

Learning Difference
The activity of learning may be the most profound insight into difference. Being corresponds to the problem or question as though “there was an ‘opening’, a ‘gap’, an ontological ‘fold’ which relates being and the question to one another” (D&R, 64). Being, here, is difference as well as non being. This non-being should be understood as the negation of being but rather the “being of problem and question” (D&R, 64). Non-being is also difference. In this sense, non-being “should rather be written (non)-being or, better still, ?-being” (D&R, 64). By confusing this (non)-being with negation, contradiction is brought into being and the sight of difference is lost to it.