Repetition and Revolution: Primal Historicization in Deleuze, Regnault and Harrington

Are there repetitions in history? Are there "historical repetitions"? If so, what is the relation between historical repetition and revolution? In Difference and Repetition Deleuze says that there is a Marxist theory of historical repetition, and locates its source in Marx's 1852 pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Marx's theory of historical repetition, as it appears notably in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, turns on the following principle, which does not seem to have been sufficiently understood by historians: historical repetition is neither a matter of analogy nor a concept produced by the reflection of historians, but above all a condition of historical action itself. Harold Rosenberg illuminates this point in some fine pages: historical actors or agents can create only on condition that they identify themselves with figures from the past. In this sense, history is theatre.

(91/123)

Deleuze says that a kind of "identification" is a condition of historical agency, or of intervention in history. He indicates that he believes Marx's text on the Eighteenth Brumaire has been misinterpreted. On the surface, Marx's text concerns the difference between the bourgeois revolutions of 1649 and 1789 and the coming proletarian revolutions. Whereas the former indeed involve an element of "theatrical" identification (with Cromwell identifying with figures from the Old Testament, and Robespierre with the founders of the Roman republic), the proletarian revolution, it would seem, abandons the theatre of historical repetition. Deleuze's suggestion about the role of "identification" in historical agency, on the face of it, appears to advocate a return to the "bourgeois," "theatrical" conception of historical agency. However, the context of his discussion, the theme of "difference and repetition" applied to history, indicates something more complex--that he is gesturing toward a sense in which the "theatrical" processes of identification found in the first revolutions may rediscover some sort of validity within the structures of the coming proletarian revolution. Elaborating Marx's idea about the difference between the two kinds of revolution, Deleuze in fact wants to argue for a process of repetition at work through the sequence of revolutions.

Marx's initial point of departure is the observation that "the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living" (Marx, 595). That this is all the more true of revolutionary periods than conservative periods is the reason for his advance to a distinction between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. In both cases, even when something entirely new appears to be in the process of emerging, it appears mediated through uncanny and surprising repetitions:

Just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and language.

(ibid., 595)

Robespierre and Saint-Just performed the tasks proper to their time "disguised" in Roman costume, uttering a neo-Roman language; just as "at another stage of development, a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed speech, passions and illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution" (ibid., 596). According to Marx's schema, Cromwell repeats the discursive features of the Old Testament; Robespierre repeats those of the Roman republic, while the revolutionary ferment of 1848 in turn repeats those of French Revolution. The problem is that bourgeois revolutions, as a rule, remain "short lived," like manic spectacles. Shortly after they attain their zenith, "a long depression takes hold of society" (ibid., 597). Marx indicates that the problem is the way they relate to the past, or, we could say, their mode of repetition. "Earlier revolutions required world-historical recollections in order to drug themselves concerning their own content." Robespierre's repetition of the founding of the Roman republic still contained an "external," artificial and non-dialectical element, at odds with the actual historical process. But with the dawn of proletarian revolutions, the process of repetition undergoes a transformation...