Category: nietszche

I’ve gone wrong somewhere with the Eternal Return idea in chapter 1 of Difference and Repetition:

The eternal return, according to Deleuze, effectively realises Being in the following way: “Being is said in a single and same sense, but this sense is that of eternal return as the return or repetition of that of which it is said.”

The test of something’s return is it’s excessivity, it’s becoming – different:

“When Nietzsche says that hubris is the real problem of every Heraclitean, or that hierarchy is the problem of free spirits, he means one – and only one – thing: that it is in hubris that everyone finds the being which makes him return…”

(Both quotations from Difference & Repetition, Continuum Press, 2004, p. 51)

Hubris is the repetition of difference, and this repetition is the expression of univocal being. The test of returning is concerned with the idea that production is only expressed in actualising new forms, where ‘hubris’ denotes forces that transgress the qualitative state of a subject such that it is destroyed (i.e. not an oppositional but a generical difference?) and a new process of individuation starts its becoming.

(more…)