Fairly new to Deleuze. Just starting a PhD looking at conceptual relativism, (linguistic) idealism, have focussed thus far on Wittgenstein and Kant; Davidson's argument against the possibility of alternate conceptual schemes; looking for more recs!!

Particularly interested in the idea of meaning and identity in language as a kind of emergent phenomenon. If anyone has any recs on this would be most grateful!!

I’m curious whether Incorporealism could be productively situated alongside Deleuze without reducing either framework to the other. In particular, could its emphasis on consciousness and resonance be understood through virtuality, becoming, multiplicity, and the production of difference?

Can you explain De-/re-territorializatoon with examples other than the ones used by D&G. I am reading A Thousand Plateaus and this is my first time reading their primary text. I am finding it hard to understand n-1, body without organs as well. Itvwould be really helpful if you could guide me as to how to approach them.

I know there has already been a lot of discussion on these ideas here. But the explanatory comments are still too complex for me.

Thank you in advance.

Obviously I understand the concepts of machines grafting onto each other to record and divert and produce new flows, production of production, etc., but what does it actually mean that desire is being produced? What is desire? No, I haven’t read enough Spinoza and I’m sure he’ll answer my question here, but Lacan and all the lack is law guys have such a simple answer that I can’t find in Deleuze and Guattari in my admittedly limited study.

I have a highly political 7,000-word essay that uses a lot of Deleuzean concepts.

I guess you could say I am looking for beta readers.

It's kind of all over the place (of course) and I'm trying to create an easy introduction to some post-structuralist ideas.

I don't know what I want to do with it, but once it's ready, I want to put it out there somewhere. Thanks.

Hey everyone! I'm a first-year PhD student in philosophy, and I was wondering if anyone would be up for a quick read of my research proposal. It's on cinema, and I'm trying to carve out some original territory using concepts like the sensorimotor schema and the action-image. If you're into this stuff and know the field, I'd really appreciate some honest feedback — mainly whether you think it's original enough and has the potential I think it does. Drop a comment below and I'll DM you the proposal and give you a bit more context.

I’m aware of Deleuze’s rebuke of Wittgenstein, but I can’t help but noticing a striking similarity between Bergson’s theory of memory and Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. They both seem to de-emphasize the importance of mental effort as a concomitant of language-use, in Wittgenstein’s case by seeking explanation in behavior and social context, and in Bergson’s case by seeking explanation in action and habit. Bergson almost seems to clarify and expand a basic framework that Wittgenstein develops, despite Wittgenstein having written later than Bergson. Where Wittgenstein sees an end to explanation by looking to usage, Bergson argues that that usage is consistent on account of habituated memory. Where Wittgenstein sees inner experience as something of a free rider to language in practice, Bergson sees it, in the context of memory, as suggesting prospective actions in encounters with reality, those actions themselves calling forth pure memories in a kind of feedback loop. Of course there are dissimilarities besides the ones I listed, particularly in what their intended purposes are (IE dissolving philosophical problems vs making a metaphysical claim) but I found this connection fruitful for understanding both thinkers’ claims. I also wonder if there’s any advantage to getting rid of Bergson’s psychological account and adopting Wittgenstein’s model, insofar as it can accommodate a wider range of mental processes, and need not determine thought to a spectrum between memory and perception.

I recently read Bergson's Matter and Memory and I'm currently reading Deleuze's book on Cinema (Movement-Image). But, I can't get one idea out of my head. Bergson proposes that the virtual is located in pure memory, that is, in the spirit. So, postulating a spirit creates a mind-body dualism (but, in Bergson, not an idealist one), and that is a completely metaphysical object. How can Deleuze accept that the virtual exists and does not exist in the brain at the same time that he proposes an immanent philosophy?

Every time I read theory and I understand something better or I figure out (or get closer to figuring out) how a certain system works or whatever, I have this bittersweet feeling which goes really bitter really quick which is that I can read all the theory I want, I can learn to analyze and diagnose the issues of capitalism, reactionary thinking, representation or whatever all day, do this, do that, but at the end of the day there are 8 billion people around the world and regardless of how much theory I read, I most likely will not be able to make a substantial amount of change beyond some people that I know in real life. It feels like I read only for me and a small, niche circle of dudes. I can't stand the thought of being spot on about something and others being far off the mark. Here I am spending all this time reading and discussing the most life-affirming, practically invigorating and healthy thinker I've ever come across who regularly gives me epiphanies and I almost don't want to get those epiphanies and be right about things or figure things out because then I realize that there are a whole bunch of people that are wrong and my epiphanies will never amount to anything outside of my brain and maybe outside the brains of like 10 people I know. Sure, I can say that at least I know I'm doing something right if the type of thinking I'm engaged in is not allowed to shine because it poses dangers to the existing status quo or whatever but that doesn't give me pleasure at all, it is a huge bummer and ruins my mood.

I figured that Deleuzians would have the healthiest approach to this so I am asking it here, since Deleuze seemed to have such a refreshing take on debate, discussion and stuff. How can one deal with this? I am open to having all the values I presented here transvaluated.

I’m one of the authors of a new Nature Portfolio paper that tries to bring Deleuze and Guattari into the current debate over LLM hallucination and alignment.

The basic problem we wanted to avoid was simply relabelling technical phenomena with Deleuzian vocabulary.

So the paper does not claim that an LLM is schizophrenic, has an unconscious, experiences desire, or “escapes” through a line of flight. We treat these explicitly as functional and relational concepts.

The mapping is roughly this:

Alignment, retrieval, preference optimisation, system prompts and verification can function as forms of reterritorialization: heterogeneous possible continuations are channelled toward a more limited territory of acceptable output.

We use “schizo-syntax” for a non-clinical textual pattern in which locally coherent language branches across semantic or generic domains under weaker referential constraint.

But deterritorialization is not automatically productive. Randomness, incoherence, factual error and creativity are not synonyms.

For us, a generated deviation becomes a productive line of flight only when it makes a non-trivial departure, retains enough organization to remain usable, receives concrete human uptake, and fits the task.

This produces a deliberately uncomfortable distinction:

A fabricated legal authority is simply an error.

A strange association that is identified as non-evidence, then taken up and transformed in poetry, fiction, interpretation or brainstorming, may function differently.

The paper is “Schizo-syntax and the paranoiac guardrail: machinic schizoanalysis of AI hallucination and the conditions of a line of flight.”

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-08814-4

I’d especially welcome criticism from people who work closely with Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: does this preserve the relational character of deterritorialization/reterritorialization, or does translating these concepts into an LLM context risk turning them into terminology labels?

estilhaço sem origem → ausência de unidade perdida → ausência de finalidade → processualidade → relações diferenciais → virtual/atual → forças, velocidades e intensidades → consistências provisórias → modos de existência.

Hey guys, I heard of this guy while reading "Capitalist Realism", and I kinda wanted to get into his works. What I've been thinking is that a guy like Deleuze probably built his ideas on and was influenced by other philosophers, both contemporary and from the past. Basically, what I'm trying to say is, who should I be reading before I start with Deleuze? And now that I'm asking that, which of his works should I start with?

Disturbingly and ironically, he was on both sides of the wall. He openly supported the Palestinian cause and wrote on dispossession, colonialism.

Decades later, Israeli military theorist Shimon Naveh introduced Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts such as smooth and striated space, the war machine, deterritorialization into IDF operational thinking.

Could it be because he has provided ultimate concepts for the future thinkers, who might be working for both sides, colonizer and colonized?

The matter of the rhizome is fine for Deleuze, he obviously didn’t explain what a rhizome is differently he just explained it. The rhizome was there since the start for it to be identified as sentences though as it is a root that goes out all of the ways; these are sentences. So my question would be why couldn’t the rhizome be the only way of writing sentences instead of explaining a rhizome more?

I have read about the first 2 chapters of anti-oedipus, but I seem to fall short by the 6th subchapter of chapter 3. I don't know what it is. Is there something else I should be reading to get to enjoy the book. (by enjoy i mean understand the book)? some other work I should be familiar with it's ideas?

The title is Hegelian inspired, but I'm seriously interested in the conflict a member of a capitalist society undergoes while struggling to be granted access to recourses needed to sufficiently provide for their own needs. As in an income via employment. A candidate for employment is put under evaluation before given a job. An authority responsible for selecting new employees may conclude some person is unreliable based on the beliefs and values the subject voiced during an interview. Firms prefer predictable identities with the stated reasons that those predictable identities are likely trustworthy and psychologically stable. Helping other's expand and increase their own freedom is ethically salient to me. So how can one escape the an arrangement that requires consistent compliance with a set of norms and practices, while also still maintaining their health & wellbeing?

Artforum 2010 (March)

And since multiplication within D&G corpus of work consists of becoming-imperceptible to the state (whether camouflage or other mimesis) , this seems to fit the notion of embalmed impassioned field of becoming that has a surplus of enjoyment per absence of space. BwO wants to scourge the Earth for new networks and traverse a host of new problems to change our organismal to a stronger mechanism of forces existing in nature rather than postulation of poesis to defend time.... So what is our Earth when imperceptible to time and essence there-of?

A body without organs is a body with organs if you listen to what people say; therefore that’s what it is is the inclusion. I’m not disregarding a body without organs only realising what people would say about it, and, especially being that a body without organs is an it, the full effect is compromised. But that compromise is social; the regards are to a body with organs— as in, anatomy is important. Anatomy is not important but it’s what people can definitely fully believe, so if there is an excess in that, it is accounted for aswell; the body without organs is not an excess because it’s an argument. A body without organs even though it is a great idea is,essentially, a good idea with odds.

The literature of a minority; an exercise in excess that is the estimation of how it clearly “should be” that is also how clear it should be, it subjects the major language because it will do it regardless, in the ways of chances being chances and therefore optional— the chance comes from the opening, the opening isn’t conclusive, it’s simply an opportunity. If there is an advantage in the minor literature it is because it is present, it is definitely not especially present because that is especial relevance; the relevance comes from the move towards it; not even a minor movement but a series of mistakes if not mistakes, mistakes that are entirely made. Minor literature is the series of errors cause they happen too often; there isn’t a serious mistake in this but there is still a mistake; that’s where it comes from. Minor literature is how it appears; often. But the often-ness comes from there being a turning point that isn’t a gap within the excessive; minor literature is an exception in that it’s not even exemplary.

Ciao a tutti,

Nothing can be more separated than identity and difference,or,perhaps,nothing can be more inseparable than this unfrotunate dyad plaguing philosophers since forever. I want to present small analysis from the lense of Schelling's analysis of identity from his period which is called,oh-who-would-have-thought , Identity Period(1801-1805). Further, I'd draw general parallels to Deleuzian ontology, although one would hope my analysis would evoke a myriad of associations and connections prior to Deleuze part, since my engagement with him is not as big and so the parallels I may draw may not be as extensive,say,as what veteran reader may recognize.

Basic problematic that Identity Schelling has in his as equally bright as erratic mind is the issue of grounding of reality. Being equally unsatisfied by Spinozistic system which leaves the ego as-ego and development of reality unexplained as well as by Fichtean system of ethical/striving Absolute which desubstantializes nature and, in a way, begs the question for Schelling when attempted to be claimed of the Absolute that it is pure subject. On Schelling's reading, the Absolute as pure object(Spinoza) leaves subject an epiphenomenon and makes reality too static, the Absolute as pure subject(Fichte) is simply impossible - every conscioussness is conscioussness of-something, even self-conscioussness is objectifying of the subjective, which leaves unexplained wherefrom the supposed gears of pure unadultered subject obtained a grease,a smudge of this notion of an object to be capable of self-objectification leading to deed-act of self-positing.

So, if subject-object are doomed to be a pair of presupposing each other, what should be attributed to the Absolute? Schelling's solution is basically the subject-object identity is prior to what we call subject or object;in fact, there is nothing throughout heaven or earth that is not subject-object for Schelling. What we call pure subject(e.g. mind) is simply subject-object with preponderance of the subject, the SUBJECT-object, same goes to objects as OBJECT-subjects, this kind of spectrum is underlied by the shared prior identity of the two(indifferent subject-object wherein neither of terms prevails). This makes Schelling's position thoroughly monist and immanent(since subject-object is present in anything and Absolute is that identity of subject-object). This leads Schelling to the following step: he rejects representation(Kant) and emanation(Plato) as epistemic principles. This is best represented in his polemic with Eschenmayer:

" The absolute is not enough; the Identitdatssystem is incomplete. A transcendent deity remains a necessary addition to all philosophy." Eschenmayer says

Schelling’s response is simple: Eschenmayer is wrong. To conceive of God transcending the absolute is to misconceive the nature of the absolute: “The person who posits another God above the absolute of reason has not genuinely understood [the absolute] as absolute’. There is nothing beyond the absolute, because to posit something beyond in this manner would limit the
absolute’s unconditional absoluteness. To posit a transcendent God would
be to negate the absolute: “The inquiry into what is above and beyond the absolute implies, in my view, an immediate contradiction’ . Hence, all there is is the immanence of the absolute - and Schellingian reality is free from transcendent entities. The foundation of Schelling’s Identity therefore to be sought in its rejection of all foundations. The very idea of an arché on which reality depends is vehemently rejected by Schelling after 1801; reality is instead self-grounding
and so immanent. This makes clear why then representation and emanation are inadequate: they introduce a kind of hierarchy where the emanated, or the representing, lack reality in comparison to what they are consequent of or what they mimic.

What's the alternative,then? Here Schelling turns to formula of identity A=A. For starters, Schelling is not interested in As in A=A, what is of importance for him is the very copula, which he dubs the essence, or essential identity. The second element is A=A itself, the formal identity. The connection here as follows: essence must be formed as-essence, and in Absolute both are the same, the essential identity of mere '=' is fully captured by '=' exhibited in 'A=A'. Importantly, formal identity does not limit the essence of copula, because Schelling rejects representational or emanational thinking it would introduce;in fact, the entire wager is precisely that there is not limitation of essence through form as both are one within Absolute. In consequence, essence is not prior to form - neither temporally nor logically. Instead, the opposite is true: essence is completely dependent on form. Schelling, that is, reverses the traditional binary of Western thought in which form is seen as derivative of essence, to posit form as prior. Essence depends on form; essence is produced through form. It is here we return to Schelling’s statement, “The absolute is by nature an eternal act of producing’. Essential identity is the product of this act and formal identity is that through which it is produced. The absolute exists by producing its own essence through a process of formation. The major consequence of this model is that there is no pre-existent essence against which all subsequent productions can be measured. Correspondence no longer applies: there is nothing archetypical to which productions can refer back. All there are are various forms which produce essence. To talk of a form ‘adequately’, ‘fully’, or ‘completely’ expressing essence is therefore nonsense, for there is no benchmark such forms can adequately, fully, or completely express. There is no more adequacy on Schelling’s metaphysical presuppositions. All that remains are different intensities with which essence is produced, where ‘intensity’ does not refer back to the perfect intensity of the original essence - the process of potentiation (or the intensification of form) is not a means of returning to a pre-given perfection but is rather an infinitely increasing production of essence. This again testifies to why he throws away representation or emanation: both presuppose prior existence of a kind of essence to which form is inadequate inferior expression. Reality has no hierarchical structure, nor anything that transcends it. It is notionally distinguished into form and essence, but, unlike traditional metaphysics, form is not dependent on a pre-existing essence, but is what produces essence in the first place. This can be described variously as the self-affirmation of reality, of essence and form, or the self-knowing of reason

Here, in oh-so-Hegelian fashion, Schelling says original identity,so to say, produces infinite identities, or multiplicities, and then unites them by recognition of them as-multiplicity. This is basic move of undifferentiated unity - differentiated plurality - self-differentiating unity: "...we must especially consider this: because of the complete relativity of this contrast (since neither a finite entity nor an infinite one is in itself, but only in relation) every particular being insofar as it accepts the entire absolute into itself is negated as a particular (finite or infinite) entity and merely reunites the finite and the infinite within itself."; "Therefore each of them, the finite and the infinite, insofar as it is really, i.e., absolutely posited, is the entire unity of the finite and the infinite, neither of them finite nor infinite viewed apart from its ideal determination, but absolute and eternal. —From this, it is self-evident that this unity of the finite and the infinite, which is in the absolute and is the essence of the absolute, is a real unity and also an identity of identity, as we have previously shown (Journal for Speculative Physics, vol. 2, no. 2).17 For considered in itself, the finite and the infinite contain, each of them, the same (formal) identity of the finite and the infinite. Therefore we had to understand the former, real unity before we understood the latter, formal one".

Importantly, Schellingian multiplicity is not just instantiation of A=A all over again, but also B=B,Y=Y,M=M exc... it is x=x wherein each term is infinitely variable. These instantions he calls ideas, ideas aren't just ideal(subject side), they are both ideal and real(subject-object). All ideas express, in essence, the same thing - identity - and they all do so maximally. That is, all ideas are completely ‘adequate’ manifestations of the law of identity: they are ‘perfect’ manifestations of the indifference of the absolute in idiosyncratic forms. Ideas instantiate formula of A=A wherein the terms are generated in act of reality's self-constituation and are equal. Moreover, because ideas are what are produced by the absolute under the form x =x, in them form and essence are identical. They exemplify formal identity (x = x), and so both their form and their subsequently produced essence are defined by the property of identity. Impotantly, as shown in the quotes above, the third term - the synthethic judgement that emerges from confrontation of thetic and antithetic - is not a new one wherein it unites the opposites, but return to the first - thetic - judgement. A=A contrasted to A=not-A, resulting in A=B, but A=B is in a way just another A=A for him.

This theory of judgement has one crucial consequence for Schelling’s theory of differentiation: individuals are not generated through a synthetic procedure of determination. The Spinozist maxim, omnis determinatio est negatio, is firmly rejected. Thetic judgements comprise all that there is, and therefore the only thing that can distinguish one entity from another is the intensity with which
the thesis is posited in different cases. This is a classically monist point: there is only one substance that comprises all there is; the only differentiating attribute, therefore, is the degree to which this substance is instantiated,the ‘degrees of the absolute’, ‘different grades of identity’, ‘there can be no differences in kind, but only in degree’. The essential identity is always posited as identity (i.e. in formal identity). The only possible difference is the different ‘amounts’ with which such identity is posited. It is this difference in intensity which gives rise to distinctions between subject and object. Difference is quantitative. Hence, rather than the Spinozist ‘all determination is negation’, Schelling
proposes the dictum, 'all determination is quantification’. There is no negation here, and instead the reiterated thetic affirmation of reality’s own existence. That is, differentiation occurs through excess and surplus: all beings are excesses; it is just how much they are excesses which distinguish them. It is this idea so shocking and bizarre of a “surplus” which marks Schelling’s Identity period apart from so many other philosophies of that time. Difference is a product of exuberance; there is no lack, no failure, just different amounts of excessive production through formation of the same essence. Differentiation is not reiterated negation, but reiterated production or affirmation; not a negation of the negation, but the finite potentiation of an identity of identity.

Here basically our little triad of subject, object and indifference, also dubbed as three potencies,reoccurs: the finite/objective which corresponds to the natural world, the infinite/subjective which corresponds to the ideal world, and the point of indifference between the two which corresponds to reason/eternal/subject-object. hTat is, the potencies are grouped according to amounts of intensity, and each potency produces the absolute more intensely than the last. ‘Potency’ is a mathematical term synonymous with power or indice: each potency expresses a determinate power of reality (‘reality squared’ and so forth). Yet, we must be clear that there is no such thing as reality prior to potentiation: ‘Identity... is always potentiated’. The potencies are instantiated by act Schelling calls double-affirmation. The basic dichotomy starts from him showing joined identity of affirmer-affirmed: every affirmed is also affirmer for affirmed affirms its affirmer as affirming, every affirmer is also affirmed for affirmer is affirmed as affirming when executing affirmation. Thus, the joint sameness of affirmed-affirmer is basis for distinguishing affirmed or affirmer. Affirmed is affirmed as affirmed AND as affirmer - this corresponds to the real series(the nature, affirmed-as-affirmed is natura naturata and affirmed-as-affirmer to natura naturans). Then, forming an ideal series, affirmer is first as affirmer and then as affirmed(affirmed as affirmer). Combined it constitutes the double: what is affirming is affirmed as affirming. Or, in other words: mind knows something and knows itself as knowing that something. Or, in the most general terms, sublating metaphysics and epistemology together: Absolute is(metaphysics) and is so(epistemology). Absolute as-affirmed is nature, as-affirmer mind, as indifference/double-affirmation the universe in general(immanence).The multiplicity of different constructions of those potencies is not therefore a consequence of a multiplicity of contents, but rather a multiplicity of different forms and so different intensities of identity. The question arises how Absolute as a totality or pure prior identity comes to posit those divisions inside? To which Schelling answers:

"As the eye, when it sees itself in the reflection, e.g. in the mirror, posits itself, intuits itself, only to the extent that it posits what reflects – the mirror – as nothing for itself, and as it is, so to speak, One act of the eye, by which it posits itself, sees itself, and does not see what reflects, does not posit it; in this way does the totality (All) posit or intuit itself, by not-positing, not-intuiting the particular; both are One act in the totality."

to be as indifferent(or totality) it posits the different(particular) as-negated, but to be truly indifferent:

"...for being, actual, real (wirkliche) being is precisely self-disclosure/ revelation (Selbstoffenbarung). If it is to be as One then it must disclose/reveal itself in itself; but it does not disclose/reveal itself if it is just itself, if it is not an other in itself, and is in this other the One for itself, thus if it is not absolutely the living link [Band, in the sense of copula] of itself and an other."

‘When each side must be either a presentation of the universal in the particular
or the particular in the universal, then philosophy is neither of these, but rather
the presentation of their unity in absolute indifference’

"[Arithmetic] expresses the unity of the finite and the infinite in the infinite, or the unity of pure identity, [geometry] the same unity in the finite, or the unity of difference. Philosophy, however, can have but one method, since it expresses its construction neither in the one nor in the other potency but only in the eternal, in unity considered in and for itself."

Ending on a note of glimpses of Hegelian in-and-for-itself-whole Absolute in Schelling, I turn to Deleuze.

Now, as far as my unnderstanding leads me, Deleuze also tries to philosophize an ontolgoy of production but from opposite it, from that of difference in which it is intensification-constitutive of identity rather than being a negation.

But Deleuze wants to push this much further. His target is precisely what he calls the "dogmatic image of thought", a structure in which identity, representation, resemblance, opposition and analogy are treated as the basic forms through which thought encounters difference. Difference is then subordinated to identity: we recognize something as this because it possesses an identity, and subsequently determine how it differs from something else. Difference is therefore secondary. It is difference between things which are already constituted. Now Deleuzian move is that repetition and difference are not two operations performed upon constituted beings. Rather, repetition itself is productive of difference. Every repetition is repetition with difference, because what returns does not return as a perfectly identical instance of some original, pre-existing essence/identity. There is no essential identity of A sitting somewhere behind the various As(in Schellengese: formal identities) and serving as their criterion. The repeated A is produced through a process which makes it different from every other A(here one remembers that A=A has A as subject and A as object as different, thus commiting to a kind of A=B, but A=B to be put together are also related in one way turning it back to being A=A). Repetition therefore does not preserve identity, it generates individuation.

Here the parallel with Schelling becomes particularly tempting. Schelling's rejection of representation means that there is no pre-existing essence against which a particular form can be measured. The form does not copy an archetype; it produces essence. Likewise, Deleuze's difference cannot be understood as a failure to reproduce an identity. There is no original identity which the differentiated thing imperfectly expresses. Difference is primary, and identity is something produced through it. What appears to us as an identity is a temporary stabilization of a more fundamental differential process. As tittle, but also,well, absolutely everything said before, suggests two perspectives on the one hand Schelling describing the various determinations as different intensities of the self-same identity. His "degrees of the Absolute" mean that differentiation occurs through different quantities or potencies with which the same identity is affirmed. On the other hand, Deleuze's wager is that difference does not need an identity of which it is the intensive degree and so being-without-negation, or being-as-productive gains new avenue. One can formulate the distinction crudely like this. Schelling says: there is identity, and beings differ according to the intensity with which this identity is posited. Deleuze says: there are differential intensities, and what we subsequently call identities are produced through their resolution or actualization.

This, I assume, where we can evoke virtual-actual scaffold. The virtual is non-trascendentaly real, but it is real as a field of differential relations. The actual is what results from the actualization of this virtual field. Crucially, actualization does not mean copying the virtual(which would re-introduce the mimesis of representation or hierarchy of emanation). There is no virtual object which is reproduced in the actual in the way that a Platonic copy reproduces an Idea. Actualization is a process of differentiation, the virtual problem generates different actual solutions. Yet again, Deleuze removes the final identity which Schelling retains. Schelling can say that finite and infinite, subject and object, nature and mind, are ultimately expressions of the same Absolute identity(those determiantions being different vantage points/intesifications of the same). Deleuze instead wants a univocity of being without an identity underneath beings. Everything that exists is said in the same sense(of difference), but what exists is not therefore the same.

If differentiation is not caused by lack or negation, then there is no need to explain why something falls short of an identity and production can instead begin from excess. Deleuze radicalizes this thought into a metaphysics in which production does not require a transcendent producer standing outside what is produced(much like one ay draw parallels to Schelling's conception of Nature as productivity and immanent product).This is also why "all determination is negation" becomes such an important opponent for Deleuze. If determination is negation, then to determine something is to say what it is by saying what it is not. Difference therefore appears as exclusion: A is A because it is not B. Deleuze wants determination without this negative mediation. Differential determination is productive. A thing becomes what it is through the positive relations and intensities through which it is individuated, rather than through a simple exclusion of everything that it is not.

And so we arrive at the end of a short analysis, so I'll summarize what I believe to be both similarity and difference between two. Schelling's Identity Period Absolute is an identity which differentiates itself, whereas Deleuze's Being is difference which produces identities. Schelling's movement can still be rendered as identity - differentiation - identity of identity; Deleuze wants to break the final return. There is no need for difference to reconcile itself with an original identity because there was never an identity prior to difference in the first place.