Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Difference and Repetition’: A Critical Introduction and Guide by James Williams (review)

In the world of computer hardware, Moore’s Law states that processing power doubles roughly every two years. On recent evidence, the same might be said of the Deleuze industry, which surely cannot be far from collapsing under its own weight. Even before production reached its peak, Deleuze studies attracted trilogists, exemplified by the brilliantly original Keith Ansell-Pearson and the wonderfully lucid Claire Colebrook, writing, when the field was still nascent, in the 1990s and early 2000s. The old master Ronald Bogue produced a hat-trick in 2003 alone — the year of the first edition of James Williams’s book, his first of three on the philosopher. Unlike the aforementioned, Williams has specialized in high-end primers on Deleuze’s major works, the other two being Gilles Deleuze’s ‘The Logic of Sense’: A Critical Introduction and Guide(Edinburgh University Press, 2008) and Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide(Edinburgh University Press, 2011), the latter focusing heavily on both Différence et répétitionand Logique du sens. The competition has increased since that first edition, notably with Joe Hughes’s Deleuze’s ‘Difference and Repetition’: A Reader’s Guide(London, Continuum, 2009), which reads the work as a rewriting of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and Henry Somers-Hall’s tightly argued Deleuze’s ‘Difference and Repetition’: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide(Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Rather than engage with new work on Deleuze’s magnum opus by major figures like Bernard Stiegler and François Laruelle, these newcomers are discussed generously in a closing chapter that marks the most obvious addition to Williams’s second edition. The revised ending also justifies some criticisms of the first edition (the absence of Gilbert Simondon, for example), while correcting others, such as its ‘tendency to quote Deleuze’s text as evidence for my more simple claims, instead of quoting passages then giving my interpretation of them’ (p. 226). If this tendency amounts to an (un-Deleuzian) repetition of identity, in place of difference, there is nonetheless a balance to be struck between avoiding hermetic entrapment and becoming so far detached as to lose one’s object of study. Williams does admirably in respect of the former, bringing a wealth of philosophical experience to bear on elucidations of key terms like difference and repetition (obviously), univocity, singularity, multiplicity, idea and reality, among others. With a writer as difficult as Deleuze, though, some sustained commentary on the style of harder passages would have helped readers to orientate themselves in relation to the original — however much one might dispute ‘the original’ as a concept. The combination of helpfully broad critical purview and less rigorous adhesion to texts is reflected elsewhere in promising but undersubstantiated references to analytic philosophy. In another Deleuzian twist, Williams supplements his explanations with noirish literary parentheses to vocalize the multiple voices at work in the process of thought: ‘( a sadder smile, faster tears, less furrowed brow — this time around)’ (p. 51). They add a schizophrenic charm to proceedings, but hint that this very good philosopher would make a less successful novelist.