"A Copy of a Copy of a Copy": Productive Repetition in Fight Club

Abstract

The argument of this paper is twofold. First, on the more technical side, it is proposed that there are two types of repetition: one that repeats based on identities and one that repeats differences. While the former is the common-sense view that understands difference to be the difference between two substantial things, the latter argues that, against this common-sense interpretation of repetition, it is difference itself that repeats and that, in fact, it is a failure to repeat identically that defines this latter version. Further, and as an extension of the claim that it is difference that repeats, identity (the notion that there exist self-subsistent things that are repeated identically) is dependent on difference, and not the other way around. Through an analysis of Deleuze’s conception of repetition as a repetition of difference in itself, this paper interprets Fight Club as a vehicle for addressing the question of how it is possible for something new to arise out of a seemingly stifling world of repetition and concretized identities. In Fight Club , the narrator is depicted as seeing himself trapped in a repetitive world with no possibility of escape from the vicious circle of the recurrence of the same (this is the first type of repetition, the repetition that repeats identically). By repeating differently, however, that is, by repeating difference, the narrator is opened up to the virtual dimension of potentiality, and as a result, Tyler Durden is born. Although a mirage—and the result of an insomnia-induced delusionality—Tyler Durden is nonetheless a real virtual element that results from the narrator’s affirmation of difference. As it turns out, there happens to be a potential emancipatory element located in the narrator himself that, unbeknownst to him, resides as his unactualized virtual potential. Secondly, it is argued that there are two series running through the text: the series of the narrator (representing the first type of repetition) and that of Tyler Durden (representing the second). These series form a dynamic interrelation that, by affecting one another mutually, works to provoke an alteration of both. This alteration manifests itself in the form of a multiplicity of new series containing alternative iterations that are not reducible to either series prior to the alteration. It is thus argued that seriality operates intra-textually, and through the tension built up by means of the dynamic interaction between series, an untapped reserve of virtual potential is opened up, which lends itself to alternative readings and interpretations of the text. Given Deleuze’s ontology of immanence (which holds that everything exists on the same plane), fictional characters are no less real than flesh-and-blood people and, therefore, it is argued that alternative readings are actually offered up by the text itself, and not imposed by the reader from a transcendent point of view. In other words, following Deleuze’s notion of repetition of difference and dynamic seriality, literary texts are opened up to their own immanent becoming, a becoming that eventuates not only in the altering of the terms of the text, but, given the plane of immanence, in the reader as well.