2 - Faith and Repetition in Kierkegaard and Deleuze

Summary

In this chapter, I want to develop some of the associations of the preceding chapters in order to compare Deleuze and Kierkegaard on the concept of ‘repetition’, which serves both philosophers as a critical metaphysical and practical concept. By focusing on this concept, I will show not only that Deleuze's and Kierkegaard's ethical or practical philosophies share much in common, but will also defend Kierkegaard against certain limitations that Deleuze ascribes to his conception in his earlier work. To this end, I will also respond to an important criticism frequently levelled against Kierkegaard from the perspective of Deleuzian scholarship, to the effect that Kierkegaard's conception of selfhood is too much grounded in a resuscitation of substantial identity to adequately reflect the sort of values and premises of Deleuze's philosophy. In replying to this claim, I hope to show both that a rigorous understanding of Kierkegaard's work already accounts for this critique, and also that Deleuze in fact corrects this criticism in his later work, evolving in his understanding of Kierkegaard to more properly appreciate Kierkegaard's thought. What we will see, in what follows, is that for both Kierkegaard and Deleuze, the critical question of their normative thought is how one might best adapt oneself to the fact of becoming, so that the Kierkegaardian notion of ‘faith’ will have much in common with the Deleuzian ideal of ‘becoming-active’ or ‘self-overcoming’, as articulated in works like Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition. In the next chapter, I will broaden this account, in order to show that in fact this common ground on the topic of repetition reflects a more general shared ‘immanent-ethical’ conception of morality in Deleuze and Kierkegaard, before we go on to sketch the features of a synthetic account of selfhood across Deleuze and Kierkegaard's writings in subsequent chapters.

In this chapter, then, I will begin by situating the category of repetition in the work of both Deleuze and Kierkegaard before elaborating the two philosophers’ normative understanding of this concept. This will be followed by an account of Deleuze's criticisms of Kierkegaard's concept, before showing how Kierkegaard might reply to these criticisms, and defending a Kierkegaardian conception of faith as repetition. This will serve to situate the Deleuzian and Kierkegaardian accounts in their relationship to a conception of selfhood that will be developed in subsequent chapters.