Deleuze-Derrida. Towards An Almost Imperceptible Difference

DELEUZE/DERRIDA: TOWARDS AN ALMOST IMPERCEPTIBLE DIFFERENCE
Author(s): KIR KUIKEN

Source: Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 35 (2005), pp. 290-308
Published by: Brill
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DELEUZE/DERRIDA: TOWARDS AN ALMOST
IMPERCEPTIBLE DIFFERENCE
by
KIR KUIKEN
University of California, Irvine
Abstract
This paper approaches the problem of the relation between Deleuze and Derrida b
focusing on their respective readings of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche's e
nal return. It argues that the difference between Deleuze and Derrida cannot be me
sured in terms of their explicit statements about Heidegger, but in terms of how th
relate their own readings of Nietzsche to Heidegger's positioning of him as the l
metaphysician. The paper focuses on Deleuze's brief analyses of Heidegger in Differen
and Repetition and Derrida's numerous references to the eternal return throughout h
oeuvre, particularly in the essay Diffbance. I argue that Deleuze and Derrida articul
two different relations to the simulacrum through the way in which they position thei
own work in relation to Heidegger's understanding of Nietzsche.
If the simulacrum is ever going to occur, its writing must be in the inter
val between several styles. And the insinuation of the woman (of) Nietzsche
is that, if there is going to be style, there can only be more than one
The debt falls due. At least two spurs \éperons\. The anchor is lowered,
risked, lost in the abyss between them.
Derrida
The simulacrum is the instance which includes a difference within itself,

such as (at least) two divergent series on which it plays, all resemblance
abolished so that one can no longer point to the existence of an original
and a copy.
Deleuze
[I] n the beyond across the line, that is, in the space on this side of and
on the other side of the line, you speak the same language.
Heidegger
The title of this paper, "Towards an Almost Imperceptible Difference,"

is taken from an essay by Jacques Derrida entided "Ellipsis." He writes
there, concerning the link between a necessary repetition and certain clo
sure: "Once the circle turns, once the volume rolls itself up, once the
Research in Phenomenology, 35
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands 2005
TOWARDS AN ALMOST IMPERCEPTIBLE DIFFERENCE 291
book is repeated, its identification with itself gathers an imperceptible

difference which permits us, efficaciously, rigorously, that is, discreetly,
to exit from closure."1 Only a few lines down from this passage that
opens the thought or the possibility of an exit, Derrida invokes the
figure of the eternal return—a kind of 'pure repetition' that opens an
interval between the identical and the same. This is a question that
itself is a repetition, having taken the form of Heidegger's 'conversa
tion' with Hegel.2 There, this distinction (between the Identical and
the Same) is what prepares the way for an attempt to think the onto
logical difference that the Identical 'forgets'. As Heidegger insists in
the section titled the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics, the matter
(iSache) of thinking (in relation to Hegel) is the 'Same', which attempts
to think "the difference as difference."3 That is, it attempts to think
difference without its having been reduced to (and forgotten by) an
Identity (absolute thought) that determines it. It is in and through a
repetition of this distinction in Derrida and Deleuze that this paper
will attempt to pose the question of the relation or nonrelation of the
two thinkers of the title. This paper might as well have been tided
"Towards an Almost Imperceptible Difference/or a Nearly Total
Affinity,"4 citing again Derrida, this time in the only text that directly
addresses the other,5 and that marks a relation of proximity to the other
around the question of an "irreducible difference in opposition to
dialectical opposition."6 Who would be able to judge such a difference
or relation, a charting of two different, yet proximate, pathways to the
'exit'? For the question of thinking an 'almost imperceptible difference'
necessarily entails the question of territoriality, that is, the question of
the space or site in which an encounter between Derrida and Deleuze
could be staged, without the mutual effacement of the other in and
through a supposedly neutral terrain. The question amounts to the prob
lem of how to measure a difference that is still a proximity—the
difference between the identical and the same,7 or even between two
differences, without passing through an already determined identity or
territory that would be able to measure the difference or proximity
between them in advance.8
Things are made quite difficult in this regard in that their respec
tive writings rarely, if ever, turn to reflect on the other. With the
exception of Derrida's text on Deleuze, their references to each other
in their major works tend to be limited to brief footnotes. These lap
idary points of contact hardly constitute a dialogue, and one is tempted
to say that they constitute something closer to a cryptography, or the
292 KIR KUIKEN
remains of a conversation tha

notes take no distance from t
mentary, nor do they affirm a
eulogy to Deleuze, suggests some
will never take place. He insists
around his 'theses', and yet insi
regard to the 'gesture', the 'strat
ing, of reading perhaps."9 Wha
classical gesture (the distinction
being said) in fact acts to forec
tinction too precipitously. In sh
their texts as sets of proposition
ground or territory and compa
insists
on the irreducibility of a d
manners of reading and writing
relation to Deleuze also foreclos
differences to questions of 'm
reduced to something extraneou
of differences of strategies, of ge
is at stake here is the question o
towards' (or to use Heideggerian
than any specific set of assertion
What other strategy, then, co
this 'irreducible difference' of st
does one begin to read the 'terra
this will constitute a certain sta
begins with the question of rea
toriality' of the other. The imp
this: to attempt to open the qu
irreducible difference, by a pass
reading of Deleuze and Derrid
Derrida's stated 'affinity' with Del
in opposition to dialectical oppos
must pass through their respect
lar 'other' in question).11 It is a
they position themselves vis-à-
Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche
to read an act of reading, to str
of reading through Heidegger an
return. In each instance, the foc
and Heidegger's interpretation of the doctrine of the eternal return

centers on the question of its role in delimiting the 'forgetting' of
difference, and on the distinction between the Identical and the Same.
And it is this same relation that seems in part to furtively coordinate
the cryptology of the irreducible difference/affinity between them.
Derrida, to begin with, touches specifically on Deleuze's reading of
Nietzsche in his essay "Différance" around the necessity of thinking
the differential relation of forces. After a brief citation of Deleuze, Derrida
goes on to ask the question, "Is not all of Nietzsche's thought a cri
tique of philosophy as an active indifference to difference, as the sys
tem of adiaphoristic reduction or repression? Which according to the
same logic, according to logic itself, does not exclude that philosophy
lives in and on diffirance, thereby blinding itself to the same which is not
the identical."12 And then, only a few lines later, Derrida finds the
question of diffirance appearing 'almost by name' in Nietzsche once
again linked to the figure of the eternal return". "And on the basis of this
unfolding of the same as dffirance, we see announced the sameness of
diffirance and repetition in the eternal return."13 This elliptical reference
to the figure Deleuze repeatedly puts to work to define a 'difference
in itself' in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition will be our
starting point. It is at once the question of the delineation of a strat
egy of reading and writing, as Derrida makes clear in his homage to
Deleuze. Our strategy will be no different; it will thus attempt to stage
this proximity and difference with respect to Heidegger's reading of
Nietzsche's eternal return through a brief analysis of two short pas
sages from Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and through scattered ref
erences to it throughout Derrida's corpus. At stake will be an attempt
to stage a proximity between Derrida and Deleuze that is still a
difference, between the Same and the Identical, in and through a read
ing (and thus a certain repetition) of the way in which difference is
decided in the eternal return.
To begin to stage this, we must turn first to a discussion of the gen

eral outline of Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche's eternal return.
Throughout Heidegger's lecture courses on Nietzsche, he is everywhere
insistent on at least two major theses concerning the 'doctrine' of the
eternal return. First of all, he insists on the necessity of thinking
Nietzsche as the 'last' metaphysician insofar as he engages in an over
turning of Platonism through its inversion.14 And second, Heidegger
insists that the eternal return is the fundamental doctrine of Nietzsche's
philosophy and, as such, is a fundamental decision concerning the Being
294 KIR KUIKEN
of beings. It contains, in effect,

At work in each of these propos
unity and the singularity of Ni
unity, constitutes the culmination
metaphysics. And the eternal r
Nietzsche's philosophy is what
places it within the unity of a h
getting of Being. In chapter 22
lectures, Heidegger poses the questi
of the doctrine of the eternal r
configuration of the doctrine of
it possesses any configuration a
by configuration he means the
(voreeziechneten) in the doctrine. W
something exterior to it (in the
with a reason). For Heidegger t
its determination of Being as be
it within the closure of metaphy
of this thought holds firm in b
it the eternal return of the sam
beings."17 But as the fundamen
tion, according to Heidegger, it
ontological difference) under
difference, even as it preserves it
It is precisely on the matter of H
eternal return that Deleuze ex
Heidegger, to put some distance
'disagreement' with Heidegger (
relation between difference and differentiation in the eternal return.
In a long note on "Heidegger's Philosophy of Difference" in the sec

ond chapter of Difference and Repetition,18 Deleuze proceeds through, as
he sees them, the major 'theses' of Heidegger's philosophy—concern
ing the quasi-negative character of the ontological difference. It is in
the fourth thesis that Deleuze turns towards an affinity with Heidegger
around the irreducibility or 'correspondence' between the question of
difference and questioning itself, between ontological difference and the
being of the question. Deleuze writes:
Understood in this manner, difference is not an object of representation.

As the element of metaphysics, representation subordinates difference to
identity, if only in relating it to a third term as the center of a com

parison between two supposedly different terms (Being and being). . . . But
metaphysics is unable to think difference itself, or the importance of that
which separates as much as of that which unites (the differenciator). There
is no synthesis, mediation or reconciliation in difference, but rather a
stubborn différenciation. This is the 'turning' beyond metaphysics [quot
ing Heidegger]: 'Being itself can open out in its truth the difference of
Being and beings preserved in itself only when the difference explicitly
takes place.'19
Deleuze s insistence that metaphysics cannot think this diherence as

such or 'in itself' again repeats a double separating and uniting. There
is no difference between Being and beings; there is rather the strange
'unity' of a différenciation. Deleuze here states this and comes close to
making his own this statement that he gives to Heidegger. But between
those two words (between the differenciator and différenciation) lies a tak
ing leave of Heidegger through Nietzsche. For in the following para
graph, which consists in the commentary on the relative unity of the
theses he gives to Heidegger, Deleuze poses the question: "Does
[Heidegger] effectuate the conversion after which univocal Being belongs
only to difference and, in this sense, revolves around being? Does he
conceive of being in such a manner that it will be truly disengaged
from any subordination in relation to the identity of representation?"20
This question amounts to asking: does Heidegger, by opposing the
identical to the same, think difference radically enough? Does this strat
egy or this gesture prove capable of thinking difference beyond the epoch
of representation? Deleuze's answer is as absolute as it is elliptical. He
insists at the very end of his commentary on Heidegger that: "It would
seem not, given his critique of the Nietzschean eternal return."21 What
aspect of the interpretation of the eternal return Deleuze is referring to
might be said to be in question, but it is clear that the interpretation
itself places Heidegger's reading within a certain limit. The strategy
remains, for Deleuze, incomplete; it does not overturn or twist free from
Platonism, from the world of identity and analogy set up by the rela
tions between models and copies.22 It is a divergence with Heidegger,
therefore, which does not pass merely through a dispute over the quasi
negative character of the ontological difference, but rather takes place
over the relation between the Same and the Identical.
This divergence gets played out or articulated in Deleuze's reading
of the eternal return. It is as though Heidegger and Deleuze stand on
two sides of a line marked by it. Heidegger, in effect, places the eternal
296 KIR KUIKEN
return within the unity of a histo

the last moment of an invert
Platonism. Deleuze, starting wit
the affirmation of chance, pushes
reading privileges two major th
return is first of all a test of the
only those forces which are acti
that Deleuze asserts that it is an
the categorical imperative—it f
relation to the will.23 (2) The ot
the relation between Being and
eternal return. For Deleuze, as
names the Being of Becoming—
only or exclusively of differenc
closes the gap or opening that makes possible the world ot resem
blances and identities. It extricates the Same from a difference that
organizes the relation between things and simulacra, models and copies—
and what it repeats is the movement of a becoming 'in itself'. In an
early text24 the eternal return is explained through the metaphor of
the game of the dice-throw. The first moment that Deleuze analyzes
is the affirmation of chance, the throw of the dice. The second moment
is the return of the dice that 'fall back'. For Deleuze, the return to
the same, the dice which 'fall back', do so only on the basis of the
exclusion of the negative. The first is a moment of indétermination or
chance; the second is the moment of selection and affirmation of that
which differs. As Deleuze puts it later: "Returning is being, but only
the being of becoming. The eternal return does not bring back 'the
same', but returning, constitutes the only Same of that which becomes.
Returning is the becoming-identical of becoming itself."25 The eternal
return thus functions according to the logic of exception: that which
returns, the different, is everything of the different except the one, the
identical, the necessary, etc. If difference, according to Deleuze, lies
between two repetitions, then one must equally say that repetition lies
between two differences. The eternal return effects a kind of decision;
it cuts between a difference thought in terms of resemblance and a
'pure' difference that emerges out of the return of the dice that 'fall
back'. Repetition, in short, acts as the differencial of difference and is
the Being of becoming only in this way.
The world of resemblances thus falls with and in the eternal return.
If, for Heidegger, the ontological difference withdraws 'in' it insofar as
it falls back or 'out of' the eternal return, for Deleuze difference only
begins at the moment when a secondary difference withdraws in and
through it, eliminating the presupposition of representation that orga
nizes a 'secondary' difference, a difference thought in terms of iden
tity. The eternal return thus affirms a difference in-itself the universal
'becoming simulacra' of a world of images without likenesses; the world,
or universe, of Michel Tournier's "Friday or the other Island."26 It
acts as the affirmation or becoming-active of an 'otherwise than other',
through the exclusion or elimination of the structure-Other that "assures
the margins and transitions in the world. He [the Other] is the sweet
ness of contiguities and resemblances. He regulates the transformations
of form and background and the variations of depth."27 In the world
without the other, "Nothing subsists but insuperable depths, absolute
distances and differences or, on the contrary, unbearable repetitions, look
ing like precisely superimposed lengths."28 Thus, the eternal return
decides between these two differences, a difference that does not pass
between the identical and the same, but rather between "the ident
ical, the same or the similar . . . and the identical, the same and the
similar understood as secondary powers."29 Secondary powers, that is,
of a difference that "has assumed the whole of Being."30 The eternal
return thus furnishes a simulated identity of the different in the return
or repetition of that which differs, even from itself. As simulacrum,31
the eternal return decides between an image endowed with resem
blance (the copy) and an image without resemblance.
Deleuze's 'strategy' with regard to Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche's
eternal return might be said to be one of repetition and displacement.
He does not call into question that the 'doctrine' remains a funda
mentally metaphysical one, that is, that it constitutes a decision about
the Being of what is. What Deleuze attempts to displace is the rela
tion between the Identical and the Same, by situating a difference 'fur
ther back' from the ontological difference. In short, the ontological
difference, according to Deleuze, maintains a relation, in and through
its withdrawal, to the Identical. Heidegger, in short, does not think
difference radically enough; he does not "conceive of being in such a
manner that it will be truly disengaged from any subordination in rela
tion to the identity of representation."32 Not unlike Heidegger, who
attempts to think the ontological difference as other than the not-yet
present-absolute in Hegel, Deleuze repeats this gesture by insisting on
a reading of repetition in the eternal return as the 'difference of
difference', by insisting that another difference, lying 'further back',
298 KIR KUIKEN
which fissures ontological differen

the Identical. One might say tha
reading (between Deleuze and He
return, of the dice that fall back
the Being of becoming for Heid
gets the ontological difference.
the dice that fall back, a withdraw
gotten. A certain memory or trac
drawal. Insofar as the eternal r
for Deleuze, on the other hand,
'forgetting' that returns. Identity
ing for that which differs."33 I
returns and the fact of returnin
to say that a 'difference in itse
eternal return onlv as simulacrum.
It is precisely around the question of the simulacrum and of a strat

egy or gesture of reading that one can begin to situate Derrida's rela
tion to the Heideggerian reading of the eternal return. In the first
chapter of Of Grammatology, Derrida begins to outline such a strategy,
which is above all the question of a strategy of reading, "rather than
protect Nietzsche from the Heideggerian reading, we should perhaps
offer him up to it completely, underwriting that interpretation with
out reserve; in a certain way and up to the point where, the content
of the Nietzschean discourse being lost for the question of Being, its
form regains its absolute strangeness, where the text finally invokes a
different type of reading."34 The first thing to note here is that Derrida
offers very little in the way of a counter-interpretation of the eternal
return, though a difference is affirmed: Heidegger loses Nietzsche; he
'forgets' something in him (his 'absolute strangeness'). Later, in the
only text by Derrida, to my knowledge, that deals explicitly with
Heidegger's reading of the eternal return,35 he is even more explicit.
There, he insists that: "The idea of the eternal recurrence ... is not
a thought about totality. But Heidegger presents it as a thought about
totality."36 In other words, when Heidegger insists that Nietzsche thinks
eternal return in relation to the whole of beings, this is what precisely
gives him back over to the very history that he reads or delimits in
Nietzsche. Everything revolves here, for Derrida, around Heidegger's
thesis that a thinker has one great thought and that the name 'Nietzsche'
names this thought. The twin Heideggerian themes, that Nietzsche
thinks the totality of beings in the eternal return, and that insofar as
he thinks this he forgets the ontological difference, form the back

ground on which Derrida positions himself in relation to Heidegger
(through Nietzsche).
This functions most explicitly in the essay "Différance" at the moment
when, having introduced différance through a discussion of the Nietzschean
differential of forces,37 Derrida turns to the Heideggerian circumscrip
tion of the forgetting of the ontological difference. Having just sug
gested that différance appears 'almost by name' in Nietzsche's text,
Derrida poses the question: "Can différance. . . settle down into the divi
sion of the ontico-ontological difference . . . such as its 'epoch' in par
ticular is thought, 'through,' if it may still be expressed such, Heidegger's
uncircumventable meditation?"38 While the eternal return has been left
from the discussion at this point, Derrida's question implies Heidegger's

interpretation insofar as he includes it within the metaphysical epoché
of the forgetting of Being. It thus remains a question of how a read
ing of the eternal return gives itself back over to the 'absolute strange
ness' of différance, of how a reading of it would return to the question
('analogous' to Deleuze's) of a difference of difference, a difference 'fur
ther back' than the ontological difference. Derrida at once, in a ges
ture of absolute economy, simultaneously takes Nietzsche out of the
Heideggerian epoché and reinscribes Heidegger (and the question of
the history of Being) within an other (hypothetical) 'history', one in
which the very concept of the epoché itself is delimited (and which
therefore means that it is not a history, properly speaking). Derrida
writes:
Perhaps we must attempt to think this unheard-of thought, this silent

tracing: that the history of Being, whose thought engages the Greco
Western logos such as it is produced via the ontological difference, is but
an epoch of the diapherein. Henceforth, one could no longer call this an
"epoch," the concept of epochality belonging to what is within history
as the history of Being. Since Being has never had a "meaning," has
never been thought or said as such, except by dissimulating itself in
beings, then dijßrance, in a certain and very strange way, (is) "older" than
the ontological difference or than the truth of Being.39
What is proposed, then, is a strange double dissimulation (Derrida will

later on in the essay call this a 'trace of the trace'). Remaining irre
ducible to the dissimulation of the ontological difference and the for
getting of Being, différance becomes simulacrum otherwise than as the
dissimulation of the ontological difference under the aspect of the as
(as eiôoç, as will to power, etc.).
300 KIR KUIKEN
Everything here hinges aroun

ner' or 'gesture' of reading H
quasi-epochal determination of a
to' the ontological difference, i
circumscription of Nietzsche as
the fact that the gesture or m
the 'unique unity' of his thought
that it attempts to delimit. Th
the culmination, the last mome
itself succumbs to a dream of
ing its own unity as completed
of Heidegger's reading of the o
be found in his resistance to th
tion of the unique name of Bein
insisted, lends itself to numero
is the object or the qualifying t
of Being, which it only 'is' by be
egy involves bracketing a though
erns the history of Western m
of a covering over of what diss
redouble the forgetting that the
losophy had meant to recover
mines, delineates the forgetting itse
be tempted to say quickly that
difference past its withdrawal,
of a dissimulation of a trace th
lacrum of a presence that disloc
no site—erasure belongs to its s
between the trace and the trac
its forgetting in the text(s) of m
At stake, then, is a discourse
delineation, or (to keep with th
the limit, whether it is between
the Same and the Identical an
as secondary powers, or betw
difßrance that displaces it. If, a
Heidegger stand as though on
eternal return, the one insisting
Platonism, the other reading it as
indeterminate and obscure read
the problematic of the limit an
line between the text of metaphysics and its other. It is at once the
question of the very drawing of the line, and of the "same" that returns
within the very delimitation of its outline. As Heidegger insists in the
epigraph above, the same is spoken both 'on this side of and on the
other side of the line.' The term 'undecidable' might be used here if
it were not too overdetermined (and too often misunderstood). What
is at stake is as much the determination of a decision (in the sense of
decidere, 'to cut off or away') as a relation to the limit that it sets.
Derrida's reading of the eternal return (if it takes place at all) does so
under the condition that it remain 'de-limited' (to substitute for the
term 'undecidable'). Which is to say that the eternal return does not
constitute or act, properly speaking, as a limit or proper margin. In
short, this means that the text(s) of metaphysics is traversed, rather than
surrounded, by its limit. The limit redoubles itself automatically, in
almost machine-like fashion, as though, having located and affirmed
the limit that it sets (and which is its own desire, precisely, for clo
sure), metaphysics could dream nothing but its difference from itself
in the form of the eternal return.
To think a proximity and a difference, or a 'nearly total affinity',

between Derrida and Deleuze requires a measure or a 'territory' on
which to stage it. And yet the territory (namely, the eternal return)
redoubles, divides, and returns only as simulacrum. Moreover, what can
not decide the difference or proximity is the content of a reading. As
Jean-Luc Nancy suggests in his essay "The Deleuzian Fold of Thought,"
what takes place on both sides (or both readings) is a 'leaping in place'
that does not take us elsewhere—and, we must add, concerns a ges
ture or strategy with regard to the limit, of a relation to the limit. Which
means that, having not yet pierced the limit, but having doubled or
redoubled a fold that simulates the simple unity of a line,41 it is the sec
ond moment or 'return' that is 'decisive'. A reading of the simulacrum
in Derrida and Deleuze along with its relation to the return or the
dice that 'fall back' therefore becomes necessary. In short, the ques
tion would remain: how do Derrida and Deleuze each take into account
the simulacrum and its affirmation? We can at best suggest the gen
eral outlines of such a question here, but its contours could begin to
be sketched by the extent to which the simulacrum is linked with the
decision that the eternal return effectuates in Deleuze's reading, and the
extent to which it is detached from a phenomeno-logic in Derrida.
The simulacrum, in short, according to Deleuze, produces an effect.
In the first appendix to the Logic of Sense, Deleuze articulates the begin
ning of the overturning of Platonism in the eternal return as the rising
302 KIR KUIKEN
up of the simulacrum, of a po
the copy of the world of Plato
is, according to the logic of the
Deleuze, the expression of a "pr
mask, there is yet another."42
the mask that it produces, but
that, strictly speaking, does n
simulacrum is nothing but the
or their effects, which affirm
els/copies. It is this effectuatio
on to link to the eternal retur
is inseparable from the eternal
that the reversal of the icons
resentation is decided. Everyth
were opposed to a manifest con
the manifest content of the et
'Platonism in general'. In short
blance. But this is merely the effe
that must be 'passed through' t
and the similar is not presuppo
erwise. The eternal return, onc
which differs, a "resemblance
thing here depends on the read
According to Deleuze, the eter
ceeds as though there is a differe
content, between Identity and
thought as secondary powers. T
Same and the Similar, but only
insist that in the moment of th
is the Same 'itself'. What is selected/decided/excluded in the return
is precisely a return of the presupposition of the same. Deleuze's read

ing therefore requires and forecloses in advance the distinction between
the 'manifest content' (Platonism) and the 'latent content' (its over
turning) of the Same. There is no difference between resemblance à
la Plato and resemblance 'of the unmatched'; there is only the repe
tition or the becoming-simulacra of the dice that 'fall back'—in the
second moment of return which produces and denies the distinction.
Though Derrida's discussion of the simulacrum does not emerge
explicitly in relation to his reading of the eternal return, its relation
to the quasi concept of the trace brings it back into contact with his
entire strategy or gesture with regard to Heidegger's reading of the

eternal return. And it is precisely around the question of the redou
bling or refolding of the trace (in the 'trace of the trace') in diffèrance
that Derrida begins to approach the question of dissimulation and rep
etition. The trace, Derrida repeatedly insists, is not a presence but "the
simulacrum of a presence."45 It dislocates itself, bends back upon itself,
and this 'immediate' folding back upon itself causes it to disappear in
its appearance. Citing Heidegger, Derrida writes:
It is certain that the trace which "quickly vanishes in the destiny of Being
(and) which unfolds ... as Western metaphysics" escapes every determi
nation, every name it might receive in a metaphysical text. It is shel
tered, and therefore dissimulated, in these names. It does not appear in
them as the trace "itself." But this is because it could never appear itself,
as such. . . . There is no essence of dijfbance\ it (is) that which not only
could never be appropriated in the as such of its name or its appearing,
but also that which threatens the authority of the as such in general, of
the presence of the thing itself in its essence.46
That the trace never appears 'as such' does not make it the object of
a negative theology, precisely because it does not lie 'elsewhere'. Its
not appearing 'as such' relates to the 'as such' and not its non-appear
ance. In short, it does not appear as such because there is no 'as such'
(or 'in itself') of différance, only dissimulation or sheer dislocation. And
here, once again, the simulacrum is measured in terms of its effects.
The fact that the name 'différance' remains nonetheless a necessarily
metaphysical name is itself carried off by the 'differance effect', the effect
of a continual dissimulation. It is here that the effect, however, is tied
to the moment of return in a barely perceptible manner. The effect
is, precisely, reinscribed in the name. As Derrida goes on to insist: it is
itself 'enmeshed', "just as a false exit is still part of the game."47 The
dissimulation, in effect, redoubles itself in the return, in its reinscrip
tion. Having already been a dissimulation without an 'elsewhere', with
out a Being that is dissimulated, différance appears as other than it
'is'—which is nothing but dissimulation. Dissimulated in the name, the
name "différance" attempts to bear an erasure without return, inscribed in
its simulated affirmation of itself in and through the name, which is
still of the order of the Same (or of metaphysics).
In both readings we are borne between two differences that remain
irreducible, precisely in the moment of a return that simulacrizes difference.
If Derrida is the one to insist on the reinscription of the simulacrizing
304 KIR KUIKEN
effect, of its return in the neces

a dissimulation of dissimulation,
ability of the simulacrum. Betw
without resemblance, a decision
cation. The simulacrum of the re
the disparate, of an internal diff
gular (without model). If, in the De
a series of pure differences is af
difference organized in terms of re
ing of the eternal return where
this gesture or strategy is deter
thought is not played out in a being
of a universe, or of several."49 T
perhaps, one of the few reflexive
it considers the notion of return
in-the-world of resemblances and
'resemblances without resemblanc
would, then, be the site, place, or t
'being-in-the-world' and a 'virtu
sities and the world that it effe
effect, draws the line or realizes
this decision 'takes place', it is no
an 'effectivity without effectuati
a 'being-in-the-world', this decis
line. And it is perhaps in the bare
that a difference comes to be marked.
Across this 'line', having passed over to a difference that appears

to approach the 'resemblance without resemblance', or the complete
and total nonrelation of the simulacrum, something comes to 're-(as)sem
ble' itself. A redoubling or second repetition dissimulates this 'autonomous
universe' (to use Nancy's term). As Nancy asserts: "The world thus
effectuated is at the same time very like ours. . . and yet altogether
different,"50 the 'altogether different', here, having first been determined
by the 'very like ours' and the 'at the same time' in the effectuation
of the eternal return. The 'territory' of the 'virtual universe' thus
effectuates itself as a simulacrum of the world. However, in the moment
of decision—in the passage across the line, in the movement towards
the outer/inner territory of the universe of 'differences in themselves',
a secondary gap or fissure returns. To put it another way, one might
say that a proximity returns within the very distance that separates
Deleuze and Heidegger, around the question of the Being of becom
ing, and of the identity of the difference that is articulated there.51 For
in the dice that fall back, in the 'return', as Deleuze insists in the last
pages of Difference and Repetition, the eternal return must 'simulate' the
identical. Or, in Deleuze's own words, it "produces an image of resem
blance as the external effect of the disparate."52 The exit is immediately
reinscribed; the simulacrum immediately redoubles itself so that one can
only insist on the effect of the simulacrum through a sleight of hand,
since there is, strictly speaking, no effectuation. Between a 'difference in
itself' and a 'difference of resemblance' lies nothing—only the simu
lacrum of a difference /dffèrance that endlessly reproduces itself in the
undecidability of a simulation of the limit. And it is doubled, simulated,
reproduced 'again', between a difference of difference and the trace
of the trace, in its repetition. A proximity, therefore, returns in the
very drawing of the line, in the very decision that both Heidegger and
Deleuze hnd at work there, and whose delimitation Derrida reconsti
tutes in its quasi suspension. In what way does the eternal return effect
this passage? As Heidegger writes in the second volume of the Nietzsche
lectures: "The thought of the eternal return of the same is only as this
conquering thought. The overcoming must grant us passage across a
gap that seems to be quite narrow. The gap opens between two things
that in one way are alike, so that they appear to be the same."53 A
total simulacrum of identity, therefore—a difference that only appears
to be the same, carved out and decided by Heidegger and Deleuze
within the space of the eternal return. And thus a 'leaping in place'
that does not take us elsewhere, except in simulation. A total simulacrum
of difference, therefore, which is to say, and this is to say the same
thing, an almost imperceptible difference.
WORKS CITED
Baross, Zsuzsa. "Deleuze and Derrida, by Way of Blanchot: An Interview."

no. 2 (August 2000): 17-41.
Boundas, Constantin. "Gilles Deleuze: The Ethics of the Event." In Joyf
edited by David Goicochea and M. Zlomislic. St. Catherines, Ontario
House, 1992.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New Yo
University Press, 1994.
The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale;
Constantin Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
306 KIR KUIKEN
. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translat

Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other.
of Nebraska Press, 1985.
'Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche
A Critical Reader, edited by Peter R. S
1995.
-, Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1982.
-, Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Spivak. Balitmore: The Johns Hopkins
Of Spirit. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989.
. Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles. Translated by Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978.
. The Work of Mourning. Edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978.
Hardt, Michael. Gilles Deleuze. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Heidegger, Martin. Identity and Difference. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York:
Harper and Row Publishers, 1969.
. Nietzsche. Vols. 1 and 2. Translated by David Farell Krell. San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1979.
—. Nietzsche. Vols. 3 and 4. Translated by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1982.
The Question of Being. Translated by Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback. New
Haven: College and University Press, 1958.
Lawlor, Len. "A Nearly Total Affinity: the Deleuzian Virtual Image Versus the Derridean
Trace." Angelaki 5, no. 2 (August 2000): 59-71.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The Deleuzian Fold of Thought." In Deleuze: A Critical Reader, edited
by Paul Patton, 107-13. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.
NOTES
1. Jacques Derrida, "Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book," in Writing and
Difference. 295.
2. See Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference.
3. Ibid, 45.
4. Len Lawlor takes "A Nearly Total Affinity: the Deleuzian Virtual Image Versus the
Derridean Trace" as the title of his paper on the relation between Derrida and
Deleuze. Lawlor emphasizes the difference between Derrida and Deleuze as a
difference between a priority of form and language 'versus tendency and intuition'.
This essay, however, attempts to think the simultaneity of affinity and difference; these
are not necessarily opposed.
5. See Derrida, "I am Going to Have to Wander All Alone," in The Work of Mourning,
192-95.
6. Ibid, 193.
7. For a discussion of this distinction and of the attempt to think a difference within
the same, see Heidegger, "The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics," in
Identity and Difference, 42-76. There, Heidegger attempts to think the unthought of
Hegel in a 'conversation' with him that explicitly tries to distinguish the matter of
thinking for Hegel and the matter of thinking for us\ which amounts to thinking
'the Same'.
8. For a discussion of a strategy of reading (and writing) the relation between Derrida
and Deleuze, see Zsuzsa Baross, "Deleuze and Derrida, by Way of Blanchot: An
Interview." There she argues for the strategy of the inter-view in the hyphenated
sense, of a narrative that would attempt to put on view the 'between', to solicit
'something else'. While this paper stays closer to the more conventional strategy
of commentary, it nevertheless attempts to draw on this notion by neither 'choos
ing a side' nor reducing the relation to a 'comparison'.
9. Derrida, The Work of Mourning, 193.
10. Ibid., 193.
11. Len Lawlor ("A Nearly Total Affinity") suggests at the end of his paper that the
'nearly total affinity' between Derrida and Deleuze is owed to their appropriation
of "Heidegger's ontology of the question" (67). While Deleuze explicitly appropri
ates the Heideggerian privileging of the question (see below), Derrida is more cau
tious—see Of Spirit, particularly chapter 2. While this paper concurs on the
irreducibility of Heidegger for Deleuze and Derrida, the affinity perhaps passes
through Heidegger elsewhere, that is, through an affinity (and difference) over his
reading of Nietzsche.
12. Derrida, "Différance," in Margins of Philosophy, 17.
13. Ibid.
14. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, esp. chap. 1, "Nietzsche as Metaphysical Thinker,"
3-6, and chap. 24, "Nietzsche's Overturning of Platonism," 200-210.
15. See Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2, esp. chap. 1, "The Doctrine of Eternal Return as
the Fundamental Thought of Nietzsche's Metaphysics," 5-8.
16. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:166.
17. Ibid, 2:129.
18. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 64-66.
19. Ibid, 65.
20. Ibid, 66.
21. Ibid.
22. For a discussion of this distinction and its relation to Platonism see Gilles Deleuze,
The Logic of Sense, in particular, section one of the first appendix, "Plato and the
Simulacrum," 253-66.
23. See Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze, particularly chap. 2, section 5, "The Being of
Becoming: the Ethical Synthesis of the Efficient Will," 47-50, for a discussion of
the selection of affirmative will as an ethical principle.
24. See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy.
25. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 41.
26. See Deleuze, Logic of Sense, appendix 2, section 4, "Michel Tournier and the World
without Others," 301-21. For a discussion of the elimination of the 'structure
other' and its relation to Deleuze's reading of the eternal return as an ethical prin
ciple, see Constantin Boundas, "Gilles Deleuze: The Ethics of the Event."
27. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 305.
28. Ibid, 307 (my emphasis).
30. Ibid.
31. Deleuze, citing Klossowski in the first appendix to The Loge of Sense, insists that
"Klossowski is right to say of the eternal return that it is a 'simulacrum of a doc
trine': it is indeed Being {Etre), but only when 'being' [étant] is the simulacrum"
(264).
32. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 66 (my emphasis).
33. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 48.
308 KIR KUIKEN
34. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 19.

35. Derrida,"Interpreting Signatures."
36. Ibid., 66.
37. Derrida writes: "Force itself is nev
quantities. There would be no force
forces" (17). One line later he cites D
acterization of the differential of forces.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., 24.
41. The term here is Derrida's. In "Interpreting Signatures," he compares Heidegger's
thesis on the 'unique unity' of Nietzsche's thought to "the simple unity of a line
created by a fold" (54).
42. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 263.
43. Ibid, (my emphasis).
44. Ibid., 265.
46. Ibid, 25-26.
47. Ibid, 27.
48. I am indebted here to Zsuzsa Baross' analysis of Nancy's distinction (between a
being-in-the-world and a virtual universe) in her essay "Deleuze and Derrida, by
Way of Blanchot: An Interview."
49. Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Deleuzian Fold of Thought," 111.
50. Ibid, 110.
51. Deleuze writes in Logic of Sense that the eternal return "is the unique phantasm of
all simulacra (the Being of all beings)" (265).
53. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2:182.

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DELEUZE/DERRIDA: TOWARDS AN ALMOST IMPERCEPTIBLE DIFFERENCE

Author(s): KIR KUIKEN

University of California, Irvine

The simulacrum is the instance which includes a difference within itself,

The title of this paper, "Towards an Almost Imperceptible Difference,"

book is repeated, its identification with itself gathers an imperceptible

remains of a conversation tha

and Heidegger's interpretation of the doctrine of the eternal return

To begin to stage this, we must turn first to a discussion of the gen

of beings. It contains, in effect,

In a long note on "Heidegger's Philosophy of Difference" in the sec

Understood in this manner, difference is not an object of representation.

identity, if only in relating it to a third term as the center of a com

Deleuze s insistence that metaphysics cannot think this diherence as

return within the unity of a histo

If, for Heidegger, the ontological difference withdraws 'in' it insofar as

which fissures ontological differen

It is precisely around the question of the simulacrum and of a strat

he thinks this he forgets the ontological difference, form the back

from the discussion at this point, Derrida's question implies Heidegger's

Perhaps we must attempt to think this unheard-of thought, this silent

What is proposed, then, is a strange double dissimulation (Derrida will

Everything here hinges aroun

To think a proximity and a difference, or a 'nearly total affinity',

is precisely a return of the presupposition of the same. Deleuze's read

entire strategy or gesture with regard to Heidegger's reading of the

effect, of its return in the neces

Across this 'line', having passed over to a difference that appears

Baross, Zsuzsa. "Deleuze and Derrida, by Way of Blanchot: An Interview."

. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translat

-, Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago

34. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 19.

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