Gilles Deleuze – On Repetition

“1. Make something new of repetition itself: connect it with a test, with a selection or a selective test; make it the supreme object of the will and of freedom. Kierkegaard specifies that it is not a matter of drawing something new from repetition, of extracting something new from it. Only contemplation or the mind which contemplates from without ‘extracts’. It is rather a matter of acting, of making repetition as such a novelty; that is, a freedom and a task of freedom. In the case of Nietzsche: liberate the will from everything that binds it by making repetition the very object of willing. No doubt it is repetition which already binds; but if we die of repetition we are also saved and healed by it – healed, above all, by the other repetition. The whole mystical game of loss and salvation is therefore contained in repetition, along with the whole theatrical game of life and death and the whole positive game of illness and health (cf. Zarathustra ill and Zarathustra convalescent by virtue of one and the same power which is that of repetition in the eternal return).”

– Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition (pg.6)

source:

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference & Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Print.