Repetition without working trough the status of repetition between Freud and Deleuze

Abstract

The text aims to present the quarrel between Sigmund Freud and Gilles Deleuze about the notion of “repetition” – a fundamental notion both for the metapsychology of the first, and for the philosophy of the second. Through Deleuze’s criticism of the eminently negative and “derivative” character of repetition in Freud (an idea that, in Freud’s case, appears mainly in two fundamental texts: “Remembering, Repeating and Working”, from 1914, and “Beyond the pleasure principle”, from 1920), the itinerary of the “synthesis of time”, present in the work Difference and repetition, will be redone, pointing to a positive notion of repetition, without, however, incur the figures of the Same and the primacy of representation. A “complex repetition”, which is accompanied by a “pure difference”, whose most appropriate temporality is that proper to the logic of multiplicity, an “unreconciled” time, to paraphrase Peter Pál Pelbart’s expression.