The Same of Difference

On page 69 of Deleuze’s ‘Difference and Repetition’ (Bloomsbury ed.) we read:

“[..] Nietzsche reproaches all those selection procedures based upon opposition or conflict with working to the advantage of the average forms and operating to the benefit of the “large number”. Eternal return alone effects the true selection, because it eliminates the average forms and uncovers “the superior form of everything that is”. The extreme is not the identity of opposites but rather the univocity of the different; the superior form is not the infinite, but rather the eternal formlessness of the eternal return itself[.]”

This passage clearly confounds the common understanding of Deleuze’s Eternal Return (of Difference) as “that which is different will return” - e.g. an artist produces something which is radically different, by virtue of which it will return (influence others, be imitated etc.).

While this process of ‘survival of the different’ still holds this understanding of the Eternal Return do not really make sense with the above quote, as a selection procedure that presents or expresses the univocity of the different. It can only be a secondary evolutionary selection and not the method of an artist (except for the artist who employs a genetic algorithm or something of the like, as DeLanda seems to have drawn from this.)

No, the above quoted passage rather resonates with what Hunter Hunt-Hendrix wrote in one of her old tumblr posts from 2016 (on reignarray.tumblr.com):

“The “same” in question - it is that sameness that can be apprehended only intuitively perhaps. Something like the sense that we are all ‘the same’ even though we’re totally different. The phenomenological state one is in when there’s a crisis, or someone dies … that tearful ‘I get it, I see it, we’re all the same, everything is holy’. The idea I think is that this ‘same’ is not just an emotional experience, it’s a productive force. Or if it is a perspective, it’s a perspective from the astral plane, the subtle body, the ‘decreated’ place where ethics and art are possible.”

Thus the Eternal Return of the Same (which is Difference) is a perspective but also (primarily) a force, which we may perhaps characterise as the most unadulterated force of the Univocity of Being. This is a selection procedure out of the ocean of difference directly rather than extrapolation of existing forms (however far they are ‘pushed to the limit’).

As Hunter hints at we can also here refer to a mystical state - as Nietzsche has more than a foot in Hindu philosophy it does not seem like a stretch to here invoke the fundamental mystery of Advaita (non-dual) Vedanta: that the Atman and the Brahman are the same, the non-two-ness, literally the univocity of being. Thus the Eternal Return of the Same is very much akin to the mystical experience of the souls sameness with God (no wonder Deleuze liked Meister Eckhart).

Here we reach the creative moment in Deleuze: the arrival of the new comes from the pulsation of this sense of non-duality, it will still fulfil the evolutionary criteria described above, if only because the ‘different’ is an expression of God and not a shadow-play of old stale ‘yesses’.

The image which arises is staggeringly beautiful: of a flickering God which continuously keep finding herself to create the radically new once again (I want to say Ex Nihilo but Deleuze might not have liked that). We may ask, why does God forget herself? She does not really, or, the adulterated forms which precedes from the sameness are swept in amnesiac shadow-play, but the proper moment of sameness of Atman = Brahman happens always in Light (and really the Atman is de-realized when it is not There).

Addendum: it may be worth pointing out that we have to be careful in speaking of the ER as an experience that a person has, or through the formula Atman = Brahman, because there is a danger of slippage into a too strong notion of a detached self-identical subject (which is then conjoined with God through the ER) - which is not really true to either Deleuze or Advaita. Therefore it is more proper to speak of the ER as a force primarily, which finds it’s expression in individuals. This is akin to the unfortunate slippage of talking about mystical experience that >you< have, because, when “you are having them” you are not you.

Another thing I want to tack on here: this understanding of the Deleuzean ER is not actually a complete departure from Nietzsches ER as thought-experiment, which very much is a selection procedure. It is actually more true to this than the common reading of Deleuzean ER as described above. This thought-experiment is a kind of Nietzschean Yoga to come into contact with the Eterenal Return of Difference if you will.