As we would expect, this section ends with another discussion of the eternal return. This time Deleuze presents it as the law governing the system of difference he has been describing. Or perhaps it would be better to describe it as a law that continually produces differences as coexisting, and therefore constituting a system, which then appears to follow this law. It's a strange sort of law that governs the production of chaos. A law that allows for, even requires, everything, and prohibits nothing, even the things that would seem to break it. The governor and the governed, the law of eternal return and the system derived from it, are not different things here. They too coexist in this most abstract chaos.
It is therefore proper to say that the system excludes the assignation of an originary and a derived as though these were a first and second occurrence, because the sole origin is difference, and it causes the differents which it relates to other differents to coexist. It is under this aspect, without doubt, independently of any resemblance, that the eternal return is revealed as the groundless 'law' of this system. The eternal return does not cause the same and the similar to return, but is itself derived from a world of pure difference. Each series returns, not only in the others which imply it, but for itself, since it is not implied by the others without being in turn fully restored as that which implies them. The eternal return has no other sense but this: the absence of any assignable origin - in other words, the assignation of difference as the origin, which then relates different to different in order to make it (or them) return as such.
The repetition in the eternal return is as close as we can come to the principle of identity. It's as close as we can come to embracing the chaotic totality of all the differences as the One, or the Same, or the Universe. As we've seen though, to define a unit of repetition, we actually need to see it three times, first as thing, then as process, then as the difference between and coexistence of process and thing. Sure enough, the final paragraph of this section lays out three versions of the identity of the eternal return, as if to illustrate that "the" eternal return is already a misnomer. The only thing that is the Same in the eternal return is its perpetual difference from itself.
In the first sense, the Same designates a supposed subject of the eternal return. In this case it designates the identity of the One as a principle. Precisely this, however, constitutes the greatest and the longest error. Nietzsche correctly points out that if it were the One which returned, it would have begun by being unable to leave itself; if it were supposed to determine the many to resemble it, it would have begun by not losing its identity in that degradation of the similar. Repetition is no more the permanence of the One than the resemblance of the many.
This first sense puts to rest the idea that eternal return is a law in the normal sense of a principle from which the behavior of a system else can be derived. Laws always require the permanent transcendence of the form of the law, and the pre-existent identity of the contents to which it applies. In this sense the law is what always reappears or stays put in every possible incarnation of the world. It doesn't matter whether we conceive of this law as scientific or spiritual. I think the description above alludes to the law of the Hegelian dialectic in which Absolute Spirit does its endless backflip. Neither form of law does anything to account for why there is any world at all for them to apply to.
Alternatively, in the second sense, the same and the similar are only an effect of the operation of systems subject to eternal return. By this means, an identity would be found to be necessarily projected, or rather retrojected, on to the originary difference and a resemblance interiorised within the divergent series. We should say of this identity and this resemblance that they are 'simulated': they are products of systems which relate different to different by means of difference (which is why such systems are themselves simulacra). The same and the similar are fictions engendered by the eternal return. This time, there is no longer error but illusion: inevitable illusion which is the source of error, but may nevertheless be distinguished from it.
The second sense of the eternal return is an improvement. It takes a world of difference as its starting point, and asks instead why we have any idea of unity and law at all in such a world. Instead of wondering why God made the world, we wonder why the world ever invented the illusion of God. While I imagine it's mostly related to Deleuze's definition of the simulacra as a sign that "interiorizes the conditions of its own repetition", the mention of simulation is intriguing. Here, we cannot define simulation in our usual sense as a fake or virtual or abstract version of a thing. There is no original thing here to be copied or falsified or abstracted. The simulation actually has to create for itself the unity of the thing simulated by coupling differences in the subject running the simulation to differences in the object simulated in such a way that the two series of differences resonate together. Like I say, I find this intriguing in the context of the brain, though I'm not totally clear on what all it might mean. Presumably in a biological context, resonating together means something like the two being connected so that they allow for the simulation to continue reproducing itself.
Finally, in the third sense, the same and the similar are indistinguishable from the eternal return itself. They do not exist prior to the eternal return: it is not the same or the similar which returns but the eternal return which is the only same and the only resemblance of that which returns ... Although it is the source of the preceding illusion, it engenders and maintains it only in order to rejoice in it, and to admire itself in it as though in its own optical effect, without ever falling into the adjoining error.
In the final sense, we reach the idea that the only unity in the world is the eternal return itself. Not as a originary law, or a derived simulation, but as a sort of self-simulation, a simulation that produces itself as it simulates. The final lap around the wheel of repetition always has this dizzying quality of self-reference to it. Here, it's as if the reality of the One, the Same, Universe as a Whole, were literally brought into being only by my thinking it or speaking it, even though the only way to do that is to embrace the infinite propagation of differentiation that includes even this speaking. And etc ... The transformative caesura. The nonsense within sense. Diagonalization. Or the eternal return, like Narcissus, falling in love with a world that just happens to be itself. It gives a whole new dimension to the idea of the abyss gazing back into you.
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