What's the Diff?

For Deleuze, philosophy has been complicit with a wider cultural tendency to promote identity and sameness and a neglect towards novelty and difference. Even the very notion of difference has characteristically been defined ‘negatively, as the not-sameness of two or more entities’ whether those things are understood to differ in terms of ontologicalstatus - like the live performance and its document - or in terms of position, or genre. In each case, it is the entities or ‘things’ that are understood to come first, and the difference that is understood to derive from them. In contrast, as Todd May explains, ‘What Deleuze wants is not a derivative difference, but difference in itself, a difference that he believes is the source not only of the derivative difference but of the sameness on the basis of which derivative difference is derived’ (May 2003: 144) In other words, Deleuze is, perhaps first and foremost, a process philosopher for whom relations of force have ontological primacy with respect to the ‘things’ – that is, objects or subjects – they constitute. In this sense, we could say that Deleuze, like Heidegger and Derrida, wants to break with the privileging of being-as-presence. “Being”, for Deleuze, is not about fixed identities but about an unstable flux that is understood to found those identities. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example, Deleuze sides with Heraclitus rather than Parmenides in insisting that ‘there is no being beyond becoming’ (1983: 23) or, in other words, that ‘becoming is the final reality’ (May2003: 143). Presence is becoming, then, for Deleuze.

- Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, "Deleuze & differential presence in performance"