ABSTRACT
From the viewpoint of representation and common sense, the actual world provides a foundation or external model (transcendence), and thought ought to be a faithful copy or replication of the actual. Against representation, and its assumption that behind thought there is a standard thinker of good will and common sense, Deleuze suggests other instances of thinking which demonstrate quite different possibilities. Language and representation would then be a way of organising these different beings. Difference or language or relations would be secondary or subordinate to being and identity. German has two words for experience, Erlebnis and Ehrfahrung: one refers to the experience of an object, the other to the flow of experience or lived experience. The key challenge of Deleuze’s thought lies in its acceptance of the problem of both genesis and structure. Only positive difference can explain the emergence of any differentiated thing, whether that be the system of differences of a language or the differentiated human individual.
