Difference and Repetition What Difference does Deleuze ' s Difference Make ?

Philosophies of difference, where difference maintains its grounds from beginning to end without being eclipsed by identity, are exceedingly rare. 1 In fact, if we subtract from their ranks those which, in their struggle to maintain the primacy of difference, succumb to the ineffable and give up on the creation of concepts, the number of philosophical heterologies turns out to be minuscule. Of course, it is not by chance that the fortunes of philosophical heterologies are better served inside process philosophies. To be a process philosopher, however, is not a guarantee that one will also be a philosopher of pure difference, movement, and the reflection on movement that constitute the raison d'etre of the philosophies of process which offer a rich soil for the nurture of tou heterou philia. In the distance traveled between the Heraclitian river with its flowing waters being eternally qualified as aI/a kai aI/a (different upon different) and the Bergsonian duree, the birthrights of difference are well protected. But a process philosophy, in order to support a purely heterological thought, has to be capable of doing without subjects steering the process or being steered by it, without substantive names designating "blocks" in motion, and without pOints of origin or destination invigilating over the permitted trajectory. In the final analysis, only a process philosophy where process and product are the same can hope to prevent the subordination of difference to identity. It seems to me that Gilles Deleuze's philosophy meets all these requirements and represents, in the wake of Nietzsche, the most consistent difference philosophy of all.