The 'superior form' is not to have a form

Deleuze has repeatedly contrasted the 'average form' as conceived by the Greeks with the 'superior form' as created by Eternal Return.  We've already delved deeply into the way Aristotle's average forms tame difference, and limit it within the bounds of a representative concept.  Translated into the context of ER, the same thought process outlines the easiest way to misread it as a circle -- an identity that happens a first time is duplicated as the circle passes through it a second time; from this we extract the average or the commonality of the two different moments as the essential thing-in-itself.  The 'superior form' changes this picture by starting with an ongoing flow of difference or differentiation that somehow leads to the possibility of their being two.   While we first became aware of this possibility by looking at symmetrical objects, the real multiplicity built into the superior form is between the actual and the possible.  I'm using 'possibility' here in colloquial sense to avoid falling back on a technical term like 'the virtual', but we already know that we have to think of possibility not as another copy of something that already exists with a few details changed, but as the structure of the process that produced the actual moment to begin with.  In other words, the superior form puts two different things into relationship just like the average form, but these things are different in kind -- actual versus possible -- rather than just numerically different -- original 1 and copy 2.

If, as we have seen, eternal return serves to establish a difference in kind between the average and the superior forms, then there is also a difference in kind be- tween the average or moderate positions of the eternal return (whether these involve partial cycles or approximate global return in specie) and its strict or categorical position. For eternal return, affirmed in all its power, allows no installation of a foundation-ground. On the contrary, it swallows up or destroys every ground which would function as an instance responsible for the difference between the original and the derived, between things and simulacra. It makes us party to a universal ungrounding. By 'ungrounding' we should understand the freedom of the non-mediated ground, the discovery of a ground behind every other ground, the relation between the groundless and the ungrounded, the immediate reflection of the formless and the superior form which constitutes the eternal return.

Boiled down though, this means that the superior form isn't a form at all, in the sense we usually use this term.  It's actually the formlessness of this singular moment captured as such by relating it to its possibility.  As we tried to describe more prosaically last time, it's this moment conceived through all the variations that make it what it exactly what it is.  On the one hand, the form is like finding the instantaneous trajectory of this moment of flux.  On the other, it reaches out towards everything, to all the nested and overlapping contexts that form the form, so to speak.  At the limit, this form, every form, is everything.  Which accounts for its superiority and its eternity.  Everything always is.

And it also accounts for its near schizophrenic descent into chaos.  Because ultimately that's what we're after here, conceiving untamed difference, total and unlimited possibility, chaos.  There's a temptation to ask exactly how the repetition happens and exactly how an actual and a possible dimension get conjoined in a particular moment.  I'm sure we'll start asking that question in the "Repetition for Itself" chapter.  Right now though we're still focused on difference in itself, on trying to think of a world without identity.  Which of course means a world without our identity.  Eternal Return is a paradoxical concept that blows itself up in a new and different way each time you approach it.  As Klossowski puts it in footnote 19:

'Does this mean that the thinking subject loses its identity on the basis of a coherent thought which excludes it? ... What is my role in this circular movement in relation to which I am incoherent, in relation to that thought so perfectly coherent that it excludes me at the very moment I think it?'

ER never lets us rest.  It strips all the forms out of the world and gives us only movement.  The moment it makes coherent keeps slipping away from us.  This isn't because of the way it takes time to articulate the present, as if we were continually repeating, "now ... now ... now ..." to periodically mark a completed instant.  The moment slips away because of the way in which it is never complete.  The thought of difference in itself has possibility built directly into it; there is always more difference.  The real repetition here is the immediate relationship of actual to possible, the 'alternation' of which is like the very pulse of time, and already extends to infinity from the beginning.

In reality the 'nth' power does not pass through two, three or four: it is immediately affirmed in order to constitute the highest power; it is affirmed of chaos itself and, as Nietzsche said, chaos and eternal return are not two different things.

I think the endlessness of difference, the way we keep coming back to it, is meant to be a description of why or how time flows.  In fact, in the cinema books, Deleuze will talk about "crystals of time" which seems like the perfect image here.  "It’s frozen, at the same time it’s vibrating"