The Law and Repetition

Okay, so, where are we at here most of the way through page 5?  The key concept so far is that exact repetition breaks (or makes?) the law because the thing being repeated doesn't pre-exist the repetition.    

Laws are all about taking individualized units or instances and either classifying their lowest common denominator (resemblance) or deducing examples from some abstract first principle (equivalence).  In other words, laws are about generalization.  There isn't any real thing being repeated because no matter how close the model may be to any of its copies, each one is going to be slightly different.  I'm leaving it open that maybe there's some sense in which the model is being repeated, but I feel like this is a tricky issue because, at least for right now, we're taking "modeling" to be a uniquely human activity known more colloquially as thinking.  

Repetition seems to be about catching the creation of the law, the creation of the model, in the act.  In this way it's above the law.  The repeated terms aren't pre-formatted individualized units we take as given.  Repeating and repeated are somehow part of the same process, as if the model and the copy lost their categorical distinction and somehow got caught in a sort of feedback loop with each side extending the other.  This is why Deleuze emphasizes the connection between repetition and singularity.  Each instance is not a new distinct copy of the model; all the instances are one, but this singularity can only elaborate itself through the multiple instances.  

This all sounds very paradoxical and we're not really sure how it works yet.  But hey, page 5 dude.  It's a book not a tweet.  Patience young grasshopper.  

We do have one concrete image which provides food for thought.  Holidays repeat some historic event, and there's some weird feedback loop between that original event and the repetition.  Without the repetition in the form of a holiday, the event wasn't really very historic, now was it?  But without the event being historic in advance, no one would bother repeating it as a holiday (eg. I have had little luck getting the celebration of Interdependence Day off the ground, and I don't think that's just because we haven't yet, quite, reached the Year of the Depends™ Adult Undergarment).  Past and present are mixed up here in a funny way that testifies to the importance of some singular event that's not in time the same way as normal events.