Notes

¹ Instead of a concrete plan of action seeing a particular result, the Idea is a momentary contingency of virtual relations that produces a sensation from the point of view of the actual.  As such Deleuze associates Ideas with a kind of "solution" without a concept or representation in the actual. Deleuze explains that Ideas

precipitate all the circumstances, points of fusion, congelation or condensation in a sublime occasion, Kairos, which makes the solution explode like something abrupt, brutal and revolutionary. . . . It is as though every Idea has two faces, which are like love and anger: love in search of the fragments, the progressive determination and linking of the ideal adjoint fields; anger in the condensation of singularities which, by dint of ideal events, defines the concentration of a "revolutionary situation" and causes the Idea to explode into the actual. (190)

Ideas are thus a solution without a concept and a happening without precedent, but it is for this very reason that Ideas are the necessary engine, as it were, for the emergence of a radical revolutionary difference in the world. This is not to say that such a revolutionary happening would realize any sort of utopian hopes; all Ideas affirm is difference. While the critical utility of Deleuzean Ideas for a piece of literary analysis is admittedly tough to grasp, my hope for this paper is neither to offer an exhaustive definition of Deleuzean Ideas, nor to say that what Blake does in America is necessarily an expression of authorial intention that prefigures Deleuze's thought, but rather this paper simply suggests that the Deleuzean Idea offers one way that revolution, as it is presented in America, may be conceived outside of historical allegory.
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² For my reading of revolution in Blake's America, Deleuze's eternal return offers a way to see the dissolution of the subject in what I identify as America's third repetition as the event which marks the effect of the virtual upon the actual. My paper is not directly concerned with Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche, but rather the way in which Deleuze also sees in Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonapart two senses of revolution that imply a third revolution, that is the eternal return. In this sense, Blake's America does not go beyond representation, but rather it shows us what the virtual/real Idea of revolution produces as an event in the actual/real of historical action.

In Difference & Repetition in particular, Deleuze's sense of the term repetition is a product of his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's eternal return in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Deleuze employs eternal return as the term to encompass what difference and repetition can produce as an effect in the actual/real. Rather than seeing Nietzsche's eternal return as an infinite repetition of the past, Deleuze finds "Nietzsche's proposition as the fundamental axiom of a philosophy of forces in which active force separates itself from and supplants reactive force and ultimately locates itself as the motor principle of becoming" (Spinks 83). Through his reading of Nietzsche, Deleuze casts the first repetition as a critique of representation, the second as a critique of identity. The third, implied, repetition of the eternal return in Thus Spoke Zarathustra coincides with Deleuze's sense of difference and repetition. By seeing the eternal return only in its third repetition, Difference & Repetition asserts a third that is beyond its two actual appearances in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the first version of eternal return (III "Of the Vision and the Riddle"), the Dwarf characterizes Zarathustra as "'Condemned by yourself and to your own stone-throwing; o Zarathustra, far indeed have you thrown your stone, but it will fall back on you" (251). This first version of return is the return of the past as a repetition of the same. Here, all eternity is simply a circular repetition of what has been—repetition is inextricably tied to its prior representation.  Zarathustra resists this. In the second version of eternal return (III "The Convalescent"), Zarathustra's animals claim to know what Zarathustra is "and must become: behold, you are the teacher of the eternal recurrence, that is now your destiny!" (252). In this instance, the eternal return is attached to the repetition of Zarathustra's identity as the recurrence of the same. Zarathustra's becoming "the teacher of the eternal recurrence . . . [is simultaneously his] destiny!" (252). Here, the eternal return is a straight line that leads to the realization of an identity that was always guaranteed as "destiny." As Deleuze observes "Zarathustra, feigning sleep, no longer listens to them, for he knows that eternal return is something different again, and that it does not cause the same and the similar to return" (298). If the eternal return, as a third repetition, eschews the recurrence of both identity and representation, what is its content? Deleuze answers:

We have tried to show that it is a question of simulacra, and simulacra alone. The power of simulacra is such that they essentially implicate at once the object = x in the unconscious, the word = x in language, and the action = x in history. Simulacra are those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance.  It is all a matter of difference in the series, and of differences of differences in the communication between series. (299)

This is not to say that the eternal return in its third repetition is simply the production of the simulacra, but that "simulacra" best captures the way the active force of difference that decenters identity in favor of a perpetual becoming—an ontology without origin—in the philosophical construction of the actual/real that Difference and Repetition strives to articulate.
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