Deleuzian Difference

Deleuze is known as a “philosopher of difference”. Difference is a central concept in his ontology, it is a concept that is critical to his philosophy as a whole. Deleuze uses this concept to deconstruct hitherto all existing concepts of representation and Being. In Deleuze philosophy it is not easy to understand, it is almost an abstract concept and written in a very vague manner. Before we understand Deleuzian difference it is important to ask why difference, what purpose it solves in Deleuzian philosophy? to which Deleuze himself have answered at some length, in his own words:” It is very difficult why one becomes attached to a particular problem: why was it difference and repetition which preoccupied me rather than something else, and why the two together rather than separately? These were not exactly new problems , since the history of philosophy and especially contemporary philosophy, dealt with them constantly. But perhaps the majority of philosophers had subbordinated difference to Identity or the same, to the similar, to the Opposed or to the analogous; they had introduced difference into the identity of the concept, they had put difference in the concept itself, thereby reaching a conceptual difference, but not a concept of difference” . It is clear from the passage at some extent that issue is no doubt of representation and the conceptual thinking of ‘subject’ that has been brought in to the philosophy of history through the difference.  Philosophers tend to subordinate difference to identity in order to think it from the point of view of the concept or the subject: for example, specific difference presupposes an identical concept in the form of a genus. Deleuze raises the  problem of difference to show that how their very conceptual difference is not a difference at all but a repetition of the same . “Concept of difference” i.e. a new concept still does not exist and Deleuze tries to bring it through his philosophy of difference. According to majority of his interpreters : His critic of difference is also a critic of representation. It means Difference is the very concept that is complete and total on which lies the foundation of his philosophy.

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