In his essay on Plato from The Logic of Sense (253-66), Deleuze invites us to think identity and sameness not as the logical ground from which difference ensues but as “the manifest content” of “a condensation of coexistences and a simultaneity of events” (262).
Deleuze’s Freudian dream terminology here need neither confuse nor mislead us. As manifest content, identity is not the mere distortion of a latent and disconcerting but ostensibly much truer or more primal difference. In the context of this Deleuzian sameness and identity, the order of participation, the fixity of distribution, and the determination of hierarchy are all rendered impossible. Though the products of a deep disparity, identity and sameness speak of neither normative copies, nor melancholic and hence failed duplicates.
The psychoanalytic echo here is not that of the Freud of 1899 whose schema in The Interpretation of Dreams designates the latent thought as primary at the expense of all the other components of a dream. In the first degree, it is to the Freud of 1925 who, in a footnote to his most favoured text, identified productive work (condensation, displacement, symbolization, and revision) as the essence of dreaming and the explanation of its differentiating and individualizing nature (The Interpretation of Dreams, 649-50 n2). In the second degree, it is to Eric Erikson who later insisted on the unique constellation of the three indispensable elements of the dream: latent thought, manifest content, and dream work.
I read Deleuze as pursuing for the couplet identity/difference what Erikson before him had done to dream analysis. Deleuze however went one step further: his identity is highlighted not only as a produced, aleatory, and hence potentially dispensable effect instead of a fixed category, but also as a product that may or may not be re-inscribed in a circuit of differences leading to future products and effects.
I would like to carry the trope yet another step further and invoke the challenge of Adam Phillips. Philips recounts Kafka’s parable of the leopards whose regular storming of the temple is subsequently interpreted by the believers as a necessary part of their religious ceremony (Terrors and Experts, 67-71). Phillips argues for at least the possibility of a parallel scenario whereby dreams, whose initial appearance into the analytic setting may have been coincidental, have since overtaken the entire process as its foundation and primary mode of operation.
Likewise, couplets such as identity/difference, or theory/practice and subject/object for that matter, and in whatever combination or order of relevance—Freudian, Deleuzian, or otherwise—may very well turn out to be the leopards that have infiltrated our own conceptual and clinical ceremonies. Some may choose to continue in the rituals as they stand, leopards et al; others are more than justified in at least contemplating the possibility of rituals sans leopards, the possibility of thinking, as Teresa de Lauretis once put it, “elsewhere and otherwise.”
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Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester and ed. Constantine Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interprestation of Dreams. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.
Phillips, Adam. Terrors and Experts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.
