Life begins with an E; it certainly did for me…Deleuze is right, Repetition is always of the singular (event); not repetition as a series of iterations of the same instance/individuation. It is the singular “first time” or Difference that repetition itself repeats – “the event” - to use Deleuze’s own examples: the festival, Monet’s lilies etc… When the Woodstock rock festival 'emerged out' (of all the previous rock festival repetitions) it was a singular event, all the subsequent series of Woodstocks (Woodstock 2000, 2001, 2002 etc..) are not a repetition of the same Woodstock festival iterating itself as the same festival throughout time, but rather the repetition of that singular event (i.e. the original Woodstock festival). This has the paradoxical meaning that what is actually involved in repetition is the always repetition of a singularity - not repetition of/as the same, the common or the general'
A real Repetition always involves a series (of itself through iteration) but what it repeats in-itself, is the first instance of itself - what Deleuze calls “Difference in itself”. It is this Difference that instigates and generates the subsequent series of (its) singular iterations – then, repetition breaks its serial line or continuum with a discontinuity and a Difference emerges out of the “same” singular repetition; which starts another series along another continuum which in turn produces a discontinuity (difference in itself) and a singularity or an event “emerges out”, and creates its singular series…and so on…
Philosophy is the ecstasy of thought, the heroin of contemplation: one of the reasons for my obsession for philosophy is the sheer disbelief that my being is bound or limited by chemistry (Deleuze always believed in the “Pharmacy” as he says in his Abecedary) and the subsequent realisation that one needs to fill in the chemistry with something else (philosophy is of course the worse "content" drug of all).
What Deleuze calls the “Virtual” is a deeply adequate conception for the realm of subjectivity (and nature which Deleuze "subjectivises" without the ontological primacy of the subject): there are whole potential intensities which are waiting endogenously to be actualized in our subjectivities, whole virtual spectrums of intensities which are hidden and made inaccessible by our habits and “ordinary means”…The Vital question is why something “Different in itself” is needed to access those virtual intensities, why the “intensive” needs an asymmetry, a disjunction, a disequilibrium to upset the habits of our mind and world. And it is always a question of relations, what new relations can effect a change in the “temporary nodal coagulations” (TNC) of Substance and Subject, not the Substance itself which has no dynamics. No essences only relations, such is the art of Rhizomatics (i.e. relations are external to their temporary subject which is in-itself just a bundle of previous relations)
The art of drug taking is to develop a symbiotic relationship which does not destroy you in the process - on the edge of Chaos: without falling into the abyss (what Deleuze aptly calls a black hole) such is the balancing act which has to be simultaneously maintained with and within an “vertrix” of disequilibrium - the intensive ethics-aesthetics of the Chaosmos:…seeking to reach the intensive ideal of crystals and their process of crystallization: the Deleuzian “body without organs”; not the “corpse without organs”, such is the challenge…
