ABSTRACT
As a philosophical author concerned with breaking apart the notion of discrete and autonomous selves, Kierkegaard made extensive use of the notion of 'echo'. H e also employed other metaphors relating to music and to sound for his ontology of becoming, in which novelty is the norm and in which identity is birthed out of repetition. Analogously, in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offer the 'ritournelle' (refrain, repeated chorus, 'riff ' or musical phrase) as one of a number of concepts that can be used philosophically to provide continuity and coherence within a frame that privileges 'becoming' - and thus undermines 'being'. In effect, Deleuze employs aural repetition as a counter to Kant's schematism of the imagination, and to substitute for Kant's 'permanent' objects that are linked linearly in a unified and homogenized space-time.
