Eternal Return
Deleuze writes of Nietzsche’s eternal return:
“Whatever you will, will it in such a manner that you also will its eternal return.”
Imagine that everything you choose, everything you experience, every detail of your life were to occur again, an infinite number of times. Would you still choose it?
As an ethical thought, the eternal return asks you to choose in such a way that you could also will the endless return of that choice.
The highest affirmation of life would be the ability to say yes not merely to the pleasant parts of existence, but to the whole of your life: its suffering, mistakes, losses, accidents, consequences, pleasures, and transformations. You would will your life so completely that you would not subtract anything from it.
This does not necessarily mean willing the literal repetition of an identical past. In Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, what returns is not simply “the same,” but becoming itself. The past becomes incorporated into what you are already becoming, while “to will something” is to act upon one’s future.
You might knowingly choose something difficult and still will its occurrence because what it produces is worth the cost. The eternal return asks whether you can affirm that decision—not once, but again and again.
Eternal return cannot mean the return of the Identical because it presupposes a world (that of the will to power) in which all previous identities have been abolished and dissolved. Returning is being, but only the being of becoming. The eternal return does not bring back ‘the same’, but constitutes the only Same of that which becomes. Returning is the becoming-identical of becoming itself. Returning is thus the only identity, but identity as a secondary power; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or turns around the different. Such an identity, produced by difference, is determined as ‘repetition’. Repetition in the eternal return, therefore, consists in conceiving the same on the basis of the different. However, this conception is no longer merely a theoretical representation: it carries out a practical selection among differences according to their capacity to produce — that is, to return or to pass the test of the eternal return.
Only the extreme forms return — those which, large or small, are deployed within the limit and extend to the limit of their power, transforming themselves and changing one into another. Only the extreme, the excessive, returns; that which passes into something else and becomes identical.
Eternal return or returning expresses the common being of all these metamorphoses, the measure and the common being of all that is extreme, of all the realized degrees of power.
We must discover what Nietzsche means by noble: he borrows the language of energy physics and calls noble that energy which is capable of transforming itself. When Nietzsche says that hubris is the real problem of every Heraclitean, or that hierarchy is the problem of free spirits, he means one — and only one — thing: that it is in hubris that everyone finds the being which makes him return, along with that sort of crowned anarchy, that overturned hierarchy which, in order to ensure the selection of difference, begins by subordinating the identical to the different. In all these respects, eternal return is the univocity of being, the effective realization of that univocity. In the eternal return, univocal being is not only thought and even affirmed, but effectively realized. Being is said in a single and same sense, but this sense is that of the eternal return as the return or repetition of that which is said. The wheel in the eternal return is at once both production of repetition on the basis of difference and selection of difference on the basis of repetition.
— Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Reference
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.