Analogy

If Being can't be genus, are we now stuck with an infinity of possible concepts (genera) that can form the starting points for a specific description of reality?  This seems like a mess.  In fact, it seems like precisely the mess that specific difference was meant to solve at a lower level.  There, we found a small set of principal differences, organized by their opposition, that were meant to guarantee we could produce a description of anything and everything within the genus.  Here, we've got the same problem one level up.  We don't know how many genera we will need, we don't know how they're organized (not by contraries though) and we don't know if we're able to cover every aspect of Being with whatever concepts we can think up.  

This is where analogy rides in to save the day.  Being isn't officially a genus, but it is like a genus.  The general concepts that divide it aren't related to one another as opposites nor related as parts to a whole, but they are organized by analogy.  This is actually a pretty nifty solution to our earlier problems.  Sure, Being is equivocal and there are an infinity of thinkable concepts that might divide it.  But if they are all analogous to one another this makes perfect sense and restores the order that seemed lost.  Of course we can find as many analogies for a something as we would like to produce.  But this myriad doesn't lead us into confusion, because they are all really just abstract transformations of some underlying thing.  True, it's hard to say exactly what this root thing is; what is the "most analogous analogy" for something?  But still, we have a sense of simpler and more direct analogies and more distant and labored ones.  And most importantly, we can be sure that all the analogies reflect the same underlying unity, each in their own way.  Now it doesn't matter how many genera we need to "cover" Being, nor do we need to worry that parts of its will escape coverage, or that our concepts will get disorganized.  Every concept speaks of Being in an analogous way.  Analogy is actually a wonderful way to tame infinity.  

This concept of Being is not collective, like a genus in relation to its species, but only distributive and hierarchical: it has no content in itself, only a content in ,proportion to the formally different terms of which it is predicated. These terms (categories) need not have an equal relation to being: it is enough that each has an internal relation to being. The two characteristics of the concept of being - having no more than a distributive common sense and having a hierarchical primary sense - show clearly that being does not have, in relation to the categories, the role of a genus in relation to univocal species. They also show that the equivocity of being is quite particular: it is a matter of analogy.

I'm not completely sure why Deleuze brings up judgement in this context.  Perhaps the idea is that whereas specific difference divided the unity of a concept into real units, generic difference is really a conceptual division of Being into concepts that differ categorically (generically, as opposed to specifically).  And a conceptual division needs a subject to perform it and to verify that two things that aren't "really" related are in fact two different analogies for the same thing?  At any rate, it's clear that when we call two things analogous we are employing some idea of conceptual identity and unity -- analogous things are identical under some transformation.

Analogy is itself the analogue of identity within judgement ...

 

That is why we cannot expect that generic or categorial difference, any more than specific difference, will deliver us a proper concept of difference. Whereas specific difference is content to inscribe difference in the identity of the indeterminate concept in general, generic (distributive and hierarchical) difference is content in turn to inscribe difference in the quasi-identity of the most general determinable concepts

Now we can see why this whole section was presented as an investigation of the Large and the Small.  There are two levels at work here, but they both take a concept of identity as their way of corralling all possible differences.  What's more, the two levels, though distinct, work together.  We trust that the Small differences will give us the real units of the world because they are based off the Large differences that are all analogous approaches to the same unity.  

In effect, difference allows the passage from similar neighboring species to the identity of a genus which subsumes them - that is, the extraction or cutting out of generic identities from the flux of a continuous perceptible series. At the other pole, it allows the passage from respectively identical genera to the relations of analogy which obtain between them in the intelligible.

 

Difference has been completely tamed by identity.  It can now be classified as a Large or a Small difference, and the combination of those two will deliver all possible differences.  Deleuze's final example of how this works is the way we classify even embryological differentiations as Large or Small, based on whether we find a relationship of resemblance or analogy between the outcomes.    

Even neo-evolutionism will rediscover these two related aspects of the categories of the Large and the Small, when it distinguishes the large precocious embryological differenciations from the small, tardy, adult, species or intraspecies differenciations.

I think he's referring to those comparative embryological drawings here and the way we think of only small late differentiations accounting for, say, more hair or longer arms on a chimp than a human, but large early differentiations accounting for whether we find fins, or their analogous counterpart, arms.