Some commentators interpret the book as Deleuze's attempt to rewrite Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) from the viewpoint of genesis itself.

[1] It has recently been asserted that Deleuze in fact re-centered his philosophical orientation around Gabriel Tarde's thesis that repetition serves difference rather than vice versa.

He describes his philosophical motivation as "a generalized anti-Hegelianism" (xix) and notes that the forces of difference and repetition can serve as conceptual substitutes for identity and negation in Hegel.

Deleuze suggests that, unlike Hegel, he creates concepts out of a joyful and creative logic that resists the dualism of dialectic: "I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentered centre, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiates them" (xxi).

In the preface to the English edition, Deleuze highlights the third chapter (The Image of Thought) as foreshadowing his later work with Félix Guattari.

In the human realm, behavior that accords with norms and laws counts as generality for similar reasons.

The Borges story, in which Pierre Menard reproduces the exact text of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, is a quintessential repetition: the repetition of Cervantes' work by Menard takes on a magical quality by virtue of its translation into a different time and place.

As in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze identifies humor and irony as lines of escape from the generalities of society.

Deleuze describes repetition as a shared value of an otherwise rather disparate trio: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Péguy.

Deleuze paints a picture of philosophical history in which difference has long been subordinated to four pillars of reason: identity, opposition, analogy, and resemblance.

In the Freudian register, this synthesis describes the displaced energy of Eros, which becomes a searching and problematizing force rather than a simple stimulus to gratification.

The me and the I give way to "the man without name, without family, without qualities, without self or I...the already-Overman whose scattered members gravitate around the sublime image" (90).

Empty time is associated with Thanatos, a desexualized energy that runs through all matter and supersedes the particularity of an individual psychic system.

The model for thought comes from the educational institution, in which a master sets a problem and the pupil produces a solution which is either true or false.

This image of the subject supposes that there are different faculties, each of which ideally grasps the particular domain of reality to which it is most suited.

Deleuze points out that philosophy of this type attempts to eliminate all objective presuppositions while maintaining subjective ones.

One discovers that the real path to truth is through the production of sense: the creation of a texture for thought that relates it to its object.

Deleuze's alternate image of thought is based on difference, which creates a dynamism that traverses individual faculties and conceptions.

To do so, it engages with scientific and mathematical concepts that relate to difference, in particular, classical thermodynamic theory.

Correspondingly, while extensive properties can be subject to division (the object can be cut in half), intensive qualities cannot be simply reduced or divided without transforming their bearer entirely.

"It is intensity which is immediately expressed in the basic spatio-temporal dynamisms and determines an 'indistinct' differential relation in the Idea to incarnate itself in a distinct quality and a distinguished extensity" (245).

That is, even after individuation takes place, the world does not become passive background or stage on which newly autonomous actors relate to each other.

Distinct from the singular form of Levinasian ethics, this scene is important for Deleuze because it represents the possibility and openness associated with an individuated unknown.

Deleuze occasionally departs from the realm of pure philosophy to make explicitly sociopolitical statements.

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" (268).

"The more our daily life appears standardised, stereotyped, and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art must be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition, and even in order to make the two extremes resonate—namely, the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death" (293).