Before I move on to the next section (which actually is the last one before the brief summary that ends the introduction) I want to think a bit more about why Death is coming up in the context of Repetition. Why is their something negative about repetition? Why does it seem connected to terror somehow? And (as we'll see in the first Chapter) why is difference something potentially monstrous, and something inherently cruel? What's with all the negative energy, man?
Seems to me that this is somehow related to the shift in ontological level between thinking about things (or finished forms) and processes (or mechanisms). We're discovering that what's important about repetition is not so much that the "same" form appears again as an output, but that the same process must be at work underneath in order to produce this sameness. But the process is really indifferent to the forms it produces. The two aren't on the same level and never meet.
I think it must be this indifference to forms that accounts for the negative associations with repetition. You might phrase it as, "to death you are just a pile of molecules". But focusing on death as a return to the "material model" doesn't get it quite right. What's lost in death isn't the molecules, but the identity that held you together. In fact, you were always just a pile of molecules in some sense, but more fundamentally you were the process that animated those molecules. Or at least part of that process, if we can say it this way. After your death the molecules are swept up in other processes. Actually, even before your death, they were as well. What was properly you was a new process (temporarily) overlaid on all these others.
Looking at yourself this way involves a pretty bigradical (note: the word "radical" is being henceforth banned in philosophical discussions because its overuse has made it indistinguishable from "large" or "thorough" or "complete") change in self-definition. It seems appropriate to start talking about a soul here, and to make connections to religions (above all to buddhism). Unfortunately, it's really, really easy to slip into making the soul look just like a glowing-blue afterlife version of you that can keep coming back like Yoda's ghost in Star Wars. But that image just makes a thing out of a process; it's an error in kind. You the process doesn't look anything like "you" the result. Deleuze is constantly warning about the dangers of resemblance, of empiric-ideal doubling, of the logic of models and copies, of confusing the possible with the virtual. I'm sure we will get into all of those warnings in more detail later, but the point for right now is that process-you is completely indifferent to the form of output-you-right-now. Today's you is just one solution to the problem of being you.
Now I think it becomes easy to see why repetition as a process is linked to death, and why it can inspire terror. Defining yourself as a process obliterates all the forms of you, all the formed "yous". How much terror could this inspire if you were attached to, even identified with, those forms? And how monstrous is it to contemplate all the forms of you that you might become that are nothing like the form you recognize. But at the same time, we are talking about some concept of of you that is beyond death, indifferent even to whether there is a particular you alive at all. If this isn't the immortality of a floating blue Yoda, it's still stretching towards eternity of some sort. Not in the sense of everlasting infinite duration, but in the simpler sense of not being in time the same way as the output forms. Terror and Freedom. Saved and Enchained. Immortality was always going to be a matter of self-definition.
Seems to me that this is somehow related to the shift in ontological level between thinking about things (or finished forms) and processes (or mechanisms). We're discovering that what's important about repetition is not so much that the "same" form appears again as an output, but that the same process must be at work underneath in order to produce this sameness. But the process is really indifferent to the forms it produces. The two aren't on the same level and never meet.
I think it must be this indifference to forms that accounts for the negative associations with repetition. You might phrase it as, "to death you are just a pile of molecules". But focusing on death as a return to the "material model" doesn't get it quite right. What's lost in death isn't the molecules, but the identity that held you together. In fact, you were always just a pile of molecules in some sense, but more fundamentally you were the process that animated those molecules. Or at least part of that process, if we can say it this way. After your death the molecules are swept up in other processes. Actually, even before your death, they were as well. What was properly you was a new process (temporarily) overlaid on all these others.
Looking at yourself this way involves a pretty big
Now I think it becomes easy to see why repetition as a process is linked to death, and why it can inspire terror. Defining yourself as a process obliterates all the forms of you, all the formed "yous". How much terror could this inspire if you were attached to, even identified with, those forms? And how monstrous is it to contemplate all the forms of you that you might become that are nothing like the form you recognize. But at the same time, we are talking about some concept of of you that is beyond death, indifferent even to whether there is a particular you alive at all. If this isn't the immortality of a floating blue Yoda, it's still stretching towards eternity of some sort. Not in the sense of everlasting infinite duration, but in the simpler sense of not being in time the same way as the output forms. Terror and Freedom. Saved and Enchained. Immortality was always going to be a matter of self-definition.
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