Gilles Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy

Since the pandemic began, I’ve dedicated much of my reading to slowly going through the works of Nietzsche, plus occasionally taking in an academic text on his philosophy along the way. Of the latter, no other book has had a more eye-opening impact on my understanding of the German philosopher than Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy. What Deleuze offers is in no way the usual summation of Nietzsche’s key concepts typically found in books aimed at either lay readers like myself or undergraduate students. Instead, Deleuze offers a unique and exciting interpretation that is equal parts Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Deleuze’s own brand of philosophy. I wish to focus here on one aspect of Deleuze’s book and that is his interpretation of the eternal return.

For myself, I’ve always understood Nietzsche’s eternal return along the two usual lines of thought: (i) the literal return of the whole of human history in all its tedious sameness, a cyclical process that has been repeating itself an infinite number of times; and (ii) as a thought experiment constituting something of a revision of Kant’s categorical imperative as a determiner of ethical behaviour.

Regarding the former, Deleuze completely rejects this interpretation. Drawing heavily from The Will to Power and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Deleuze argues that, rather than seeing the eternal return as a metaphorical hourglass that endlessly turns over every time the last grains of sand fall through its neck, the return is something that happens continuously, ceaselessly, with the slippage of the present moment into the past and the future into the present. As Zarathustra’s animals say: “In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity” (“The Convalescent” §2; my emphasis).

Understood this way, as the above quote illustrates, the eternal return is inseparable from how we conceive of identity, of being, within this endless cycle.  Deleuze writes:

We misinterpret the expression “eternal return” if we understand it as “return of the same”. It is not being that returns but rather the returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs. (48)

Within this endless cycle of repetition there is always something new—difference—and therefore there can be no being as such, no equilibrium or stasis, no final resting state, let alone perfection, but only becoming, and becoming is a product of affirmation. As a result, the eternal return must be conceived as a “synthesis of diversity and its reproduction, a synthesis of becoming and the being which is affirmed in becoming” (48). This affirmation is inextricable from the will to power (a whole other discussion best left for another time). Understood in this way, Deleuze’s interpretation of the eternal return is redolent of §26 in The Gay Science, which I quote here in full:

What is life?—Life—that is: continually shedding something that wants to die. Life—that is: being cruel and inexorable against everything about us that is growing old and weak—and not only about us. Life—that is, then: being without reverence for those who are dying, who are wretched, who are ancient? Constantly being a murderer?—And yet old Moses said: “Those shalt not kill.”

In Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, the eternal return is also closely tied to the dice throw, that is to say, the element of chance that lies within that gap of difference in the return. Enormous potentiality and terrifying, exciting, even liberating uncertainty lie in this gap; for the dice throw, Deleuze writes, “affirms becoming and it affirms the being of becoming” (25). In the section entitled “Before Sunrise,” Zarathustra says, “‘By Chance’—that is the most ancient nobility of the world, and this I restored to all things: I delivered them from their bondage under Purpose. This freedom and heavenly cheer I have placed over all things like an azure bell when I taught that over them and through them no ‘eternal will” wills.” For Zarathustra, there is no “spider web of reason”; rather, the universe is a “divine table for divine dice and dice players.” What Zarathustra implicitly condemns here is the teleological notion inherent in Christian theology of divine purpose, a notion that, even among some atheists, still retains its superstitious hold: that “everything happens for a reason.” For the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche writes in Daybreak, chance—“this realm of the incalculable”—was called Moira, “and set it around their gods as the horizon beyond which they could neither see nor exert influence” (§130), while Christianity, on the other hand, eliminated chance and called it instead “God’s will” (§130).

For Deleuze, “Nietzsche turns chance into an affirmation” (26), and failure to affirm the results of the dice throw is not only demonstrative of not knowing how to play but is also a manifestation of negation, a manifestation of what Nietzsche calls ressentiment—or the spirit of revenge inherent in Christian theology. To play correctly is to celebrate the dice throw and is an intrinsic part of Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati.

Regarding the second aspect of the eternal return, Deleuze writes that as a thought, the eternal return “gives the will a practical rule … as rigorous as the Kantian one” (68). Quoting from the Will to Power, Deleuze adds, “Whatever you will, will it in such a way that you also will its eternal return. ‘If, in all that you will you begin by asking yourself: is it certain that I will to do it an infinite number of times? This should be your most solid centre of gravity.’” (68). Deleuze adds that it is the thought of the eternal return that “eliminates from willing everything which falls outside the eternal return, it makes willing a creation, it brings about the equation ‘willing = creating.’” As a thought experiment, the eternal return is a powerful motor, particularly when it comes to those crossroads in our lives that can determine not only ethical behavior but also the elimination of regret. As only the confident (or fool) can say when looking back on his or her life: “I’d do it all over again if I had to.”

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Deleuze’s interpretation of the eternal return is fascinating to consider, and its practical manifestations can be seen all around us. Time-lapse photography depicting, say, the sped-up emergence of a seedling from the ground into a flowering plant over a given number of days is one way of visualizing it. What remains the same in each frame, in every passing moment? What is different? Even the plant itself: what minute differences does it exhibit from other plants of the same species? And how has the species itself evolved over the millennia? And wherever there is difference within this cycle of repetition lies the assertion of something new, an act of creation: the product of the will to power.

Imagine as well the Olympic diver or the concert pianist, both of whom have practiced their moves countless times, yet no two performances are ever the same. For the diver, the multiple spins and final splash will always be slightly different; for the pianist there is always the chance of the discordant note—and it is this element of chance and the enormous potential for the unexpected, for error, that makes the diving competition or the piano concert a thrill to watch.

But of course, that’s to view the eternal return in terms of specific actions that by definition involve repetition, for we need not look any further than our own lives to understand Deleuze’s interpretation. For myself, reading Deleuze’s book coincided with the 15th anniversary of the death of my partner in Korea, and to mark the occasion I went through old photo albums of my time there. What struck me as I gazed at those old pictures was how everything in them, and not just my partner, is now dead. Who I was then is not the person I am today—that person is long gone. And much of what I had once affirmed in myself—my interests and preoccupations, my desires, my Korean language skills, my beliefs, semi-closeted identity during those years—I no longer affirm, or those that I do are of a different quantity, a different quality, different directions. Even my body is not the same. I have aged. Even the children (my partner’s niece and nephew) who sit on our shoulders in one photo in particular, no longer exist; that is to say, who they are today is a mystery to me and would no doubt be unrecognizable if I were to pass them on the street. The city of Seoul, too, the entire ethos of the place, is no longer the same. The world of the early 2000s, the world prior to social media and smart phones, prior to Trump, to pandemics, a world in which the US was about to invade Iraq and all that that unleashed, may as well be ancient history. As the cliché goes, photos capture an instant in time, but when considered in terms of Deleuze’s interpretation of the eternal return, photos also offer a vivisection of the multiplicity of forces at play, both conscious and unconscious, positive and negative, internal and external, active and reactive; forces that the subject is capable of willing, of affirming, and forces that act upon the subject (my semi-closeted life at the time; the cancer that, perhaps even then, had taken root in my partner’s body and slowly began to assert its dominance)—forces, in short, that are far too complex and many to fully appreciate in all their breadth. But what hit me like a thunderbolt as I gazed at those photos after having read Deleuze’s book was discovering why I sometimes find it impossible to reply to emails from old friends and acquaintances from that time who have reached out: they wouldn’t know me. I am no longer the person they remember, and neither is my correspondent; we cannot return to the past, to the beings we once were in that moment in time in that never-ending process of becoming.