Difference and Repetition

The repetition of a work of art is like a singularity without connect, and it is not by chance that a poem must be learned by heart. The head is the organ of exchange, but the heart is the amorous organ of repetition. ( It is true that repetition also concerns the head, but precisely because it is its terror or paradox.) Pius Servien rightly distinguished two languages: the language of science, dominated by the symbol of equality, in which each term may be replaced by others; and lyrical language, in which every term is irreplaceable and can only be repeated. Repetition can always be ‘represented’ as extreme resemblance or perfect equivalence, but the fact that one can pass by degrees from one thing to another does not prevent their being different in kind.

On the other hand, generality belongs to the order of laws. However law determines only the resemblance of subjects ruled by it, along with their equivalence to terms which it designates. Far from grounding repetition, law shows, rather, how repetition would remain impossible for pure subjects of law, particulars. It condemns them to change. As an empty form of difference, an invariable form of variation, a law compels its subjects to illustrate it only at the cost of their exchange. No doubt there are as many content as variables among the terms designated by laws, and a many permanences and preservations as there are flutes and variations in nature. However a preservation is still not a repetition. The constants of one law are in turn variables of a more general law, just as the hardest of rocks become soft and fluid matter on the geological scale of millions of years. So at each level, it is in relation to permanent large natural objects that the subject of law experiences its own powerlessness to repeat and discovers that this powerlessness is already contained in the object, reflected in the permanent object wherein it sees itself condemned. Law unites the change of water and the permanence of the river. Elie Faure said of Watteau: ‘ He imbued with the utmost transitoriness those things which our gaze encounters vas the most enduring, namely space and forests.’ This is the eighteenth century method. Wolmar, in La Nouvelle Héloïse, made a system of it: the impossibility of repetition, and change as a condition to which all particular creatures are subject by the law of Nature, were understood in relation to fixed terms ( themselves no doubt, variables in relation to other permanences and in function of other, more general laws). This is the meaning of the grove, the grotto and the ‘sacred’ object.      ………

If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive as opposed to the ordinary, an instanteinity opposed to variation and an eternity opposed to permanence. In every respect, repetition s a transgression. It puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in favour of a more profound and more artistic reality.

From  Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze