Difference Comes First: Deleuze’s Ontology Beyond Identity

Nietzsche’s dice throw

Introduction

The history of philosophy is marked by an obsession with identity. From Plato’s ideal Forms to Hegel’s dialectic, difference has traditionally been defined as a derivative — a deviation, a negation, or a limit imposed upon the identical. Gilles Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition (1968/1994), turns this order upside down. His project is nothing less than a new ontology: one in which difference precedes identity, and being itself is understood as a field of differentiation rather than a collection of stable substances.

Deleuze’s challenge to metaphysics consists in thinking difference “in itself,” without reducing it to comparison or opposition. What appears as identity, permanence, or repetition is, for him, only the visible pattern of an underlying movement of becoming. Through this reversal, Deleuze opens the possibility of an affirmative philosophy of life, one that celebrates creation, transformation, and multiplicity.

The Reversal of Metaphysics: From Identity to Difference

Deleuze’s point of departure is a critique of the philosophical tradition that subordinated difference to the identical. Plato defined difference as deviation from an ideal Form; Aristotle grounded it in genus and species; Kant located it within pre-given categories of understanding; and Hegel understood it as contradiction resolved through synthesis. In each case, difference was a derivative relation, secondary to a stable unity.

Deleuze’s revolution is to invert this logic. He writes that “difference is not diversity, and repetition is not generality” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 1). The world is not composed of identical substances that later become different; rather, it is made of differences that generate the appearance of identity. This is what he calls difference-in-itself (la différence en soi).

Instead of beings that change, there is only becoming, a continual differentiation of forces and intensities. Identity, in this sense, is a temporary stabilization, an effect produced by the repetition of difference across time. Being is not substance but process, not sameness but variation. As he insists, “difference is the condition for the genesis of identity itself” (p. 28).

The Conceptual Constellation of Difference

Difference is not an isolated notion in Deleuze’s philosophy; it is the gravitational center of a whole conceptual constellation. Around it orbit several interrelated ideas that extend its logic across time, structure, and reality.

• Repetition expresses the return of difference. What repeats is never the same — every iteration alters what came before. “Repetition,” he writes, “is difference without a concept” (1994, p. 28).
• Becoming is difference unfolding in time. To become is to differ from oneself. There is no static being, only continual transformation.
• Multiplicity (multiplicité) replaces unity as the basic ontological category. The world is not one substance divided, but a network of interwoven differences, like a field of forces.
• Virtual and Actual designate two dimensions of reality: the virtual, a field of differential potentials; and the actual, their concrete realization. The virtual is not unreal, it is the generative matrix of the real.

This relational ontology recalls Saussure’s linguistic theory, where meaning arises not from intrinsic content but from opposition within a system. Similarly, Deleuze’s concepts define one another by intensity rather than hierarchy. Identity, whether of words or things, is the effect of difference sustained by a structure.

Illustrations of Difference: The Wave, the Organism, and the Dice Throw

To make this new ontology perceptible, Deleuze turns to concrete illustrations. The wave offers the clearest image: it appears continuous and self-identical, yet it exists only through the successive movement of different particles of water. Its “form” persists, though its elements constantly change. What endures is the pattern of difference, not the material itself.

The organism follows a similar logic. A body maintains itself by replacing its components; cells die and regenerate, yet the living form remains. The organism is a dynamic multiplicity, a system that persists through variation. Identity, here, is a rhythm of change, a balance of transformation and continuity.

The dice throw, taken from Nietzsche, exemplifies Deleuze’s conception of repetition. Each throw produces a new combination; what “returns” eternally is not the same outcome, but the act of differing itself. The repetition of difference is the affirmation of chance and creativity, the refusal of fixed order.

Across these examples, identity emerges as a function of process. The wave, the organism, and the dice all demonstrate that persistence does not require sameness. What Deleuze calls “difference-in-itself” is not opposition between entities but the generative principle that allows entities to appear.

Conclusion

By reversing the traditional priority of identity over difference, Deleuze reconfigures the foundations of ontology. Being, for him, is not a static substance but an immanent field of differentiation. Every repetition is creative; every identity, provisional. His thought dissolves the metaphysical comfort of stability and invites us to affirm the world as an endless unfolding of difference.

This philosophy has ethical and aesthetic implications: to affirm life is to affirm becoming, multiplicity, and transformation. As Deleuze’s metaphysics teaches, everything that exists, from thought to matter, is difference in motion, a wave that never ceases to form.

References

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1968)
Deleuze, G. (1990). The Logic of Sense (M. Lester & C. Stivale, Trans.). Columbia University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (2006). Thus Spoke Zarathustra (A. Del Caro & R. B. Pippin, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.