Almost there with Difference and Repetition

Which means I’ll be writing some reflections on last week’s incredible experiences soon…but, for now:

We have seen all that this valorization of the negative signified, including the conservative spirit of such an enterprise, the platitude of the affirmations supposed to be engendered thereby, and the manner in which we are led away from the most important task [for philosophy], that of determining problems and realizing in them our power of creation and decision. That is why conflicts, oppositions and contradictions seemed to us to be surface effects of conscious epiphenomena, while the unconscious lived on in problems and differences. History progresses not by negation and the negation of negation, but by deciding problems and affirming differences. It is no less bloody and cruel as a result. Only the shadows of history live by negation: the good enter into it with all the power of a posited differential or a difference affirmed; they repel shadows into the shadows and deny only as the consequence of a primary positivity and affirmation. For them, as Nietzsche says, affirmation is primary; it affirms difference, while the negative is only a consequence or a reflection in which affirmation is doubled. That is why real revolutions have the atmospheres of fétes. Contradiction is not the weapon of the proletariat but, rather, the manner in which the bourgeoisie defends and preserves itself, the shadow behind which it maintains its claim to decide what the problems are. Contradictions are not ‘resolved’, they are dissipated by capturing the problem of which they reflect only the shadow.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1968), p. 268 [Translated by Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, 1994]