Tumbling Dice: Gilles Deleuze and the Economy of Repetition

Abstract

Tumbling Dice: Gilles Deleuze and The Economy of Répétition Daniel W. Conway (bio) The schizo is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process—in terms of which the schizo is merely the interruption, or the continuation in the void—is the potential for revolution. . . Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. —Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus In his 1962 classic Nietzsche et la philosophie, Gilles Deleuze proposes a beguiling figure for Nietzsche’s enigmatic teaching of eternal recurrence: the dicethrow. By means of this figure, Deleuze attempts to capture the double movement that governs the economy of repetition, whereby necessity and chance, being and becoming, are simultaneously affirmed in their constitutive difference. Hence the centrifugal economy of the teaching of eternal recurrence, at least on Deleuze’s interpretation of it: any genuine affirmation of the possibility of reactive forces already involves (and in fact presupposes) the necessity of active forces. In this essay I apply the figure of the dicethrow to Deleuze’s own thought. The figure of the dicethrow serves, I contend, not only as the master trope of his political thinking, but also as a model for his account of the economy of repetition. Most importantly, the figure of the dicethrow provides us with a blueprint for putting Deleuze himself to work, as a desiring machine in his own right. Here the [End Page 7] influence of Nietzsche is doubly useful to us: we may map outbreaks of Deleuze’s own schizophrenia by charting his use and abuse of Nietzsche; and we may employ Deleuze’s experimentation with Nietzsche as a model for our own experimentation with Deleuze. On the Use and Abuse of Eternal Recurrence Gilles Deleuze situates his thought along an unexplored seismic rift, which threatens to shift the tectonic plates that undergird the unstable metaphysical landscape of post-Kantian philosophy. Having egregiously mismeasured the Richter magnitude of the Copernican revolution, Kant and his successors have systematically ignored the ramifying cracks and fissures that fault the foundation of their metaphysical projects. They consequently have failed to meet the calamitous demand placed upon philosophy by this earth-quaking critique of metaphysics: the production of difference. Positioned at a historical remove from the epicenter of Kant’s Copernican revolution, Deleuze investigates a seismic vortex in which the aftershocks of this critique reverberate with heightened severity. It is the peculiar business of metaphysics, he believes, to misplace relations of difference behind relations of binary opposition, which are weighted toward one of the two terms in accordance with the precepts of (fabricated) first principles. Metaphysicians characteristically codify the lifeworld of human experience by enforcing a farrago of standard binary oppositions: order is preferred to chaos, stability to change, unity to multiplicity, mind to body, reason to passion, and so on. While one might have thought that Kant’s leveling critique of metaphysics had cleared the way for an exploration of difference, metaphysicians continue to ply their trade, albeit now in disguised form. Deleuze’s designation for the metaphysical recidivism of post-Kantian philosophy is “the dialectic,” a term that captures under its umbrella any attempt to derive a productive result from the clash of binary opposites (Deleuze 1983, 8–10). The dialectic thus functions to redeem the oppositional nature of traditional metaphysics, by teasing from its obfuscatory operations a “higher” synthesis or truth. According to Deleuze, however, practitioners of the dialectic succeed merely in compounding the swindle perpetrated by pre-Kantian metaphysicians. By enshrining binary opposition as the preferred model for all relationships between attributes (irrespective of any productive syntheses that opposition might magically yield), the dialectic perpetuates the signature prejudices of metaphysical thinking. The dialectic thus rehabilitates metaphysics following the devastating blow dealt it by Kant, but only at the expense of [End Page 8] postponing indefinitely the investigation of difference. As Deleuze sees it, the enduring appeal of the dialectic trades on an egregious confusion of cause and effect: affirmation is not the effect of the negation of negation, but its cause or precondition. The negation of the negation, which dialecticians claim to orchestrate through the clash of binary opposites, thus presupposes affirmation as its ground and provenance...