About
I launched Differences and Repetitions (D&R) in autumn 2005, inspired by a graduate course I was teaching on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The site is named for Deleuze’s book Difference and Repetition, which was and remains one of my favorite academic books of all time. I’m not sure exactly when I added the tag-line “Media, Philosophy, and the Politics of Culture,” but in any case it points to how the subject matter of this site evolved as I discovered my voice as a blogger.
D&R also grew out of my frustrations with traditional academic publishing. Whenever I read Deleuze’s work, I’m struck by how many short, speculative pieces he managed to publish in his lifetime. Today, there’s little room for work like this in the humanities, which tends to reward long-form finished products rather than concise provocations. Humanities journal publishing also is notoriously slow. How can you respond quickly to current events, I often wondered, when it takes forever minus a day for scholarly peer-review to run its course? D&R began as a way for me to circumvent the one-size-fits-all approach to academic publishing and to accelerate the frustratingly slow vetting process.
Sometimes I even manage to have some fun around here, too.
D&R was originally hosted on Google’s proprietary Blogger platform and moved to its current address in summer 2010. The site is now powered by the open source content management system, WordPress. All posts and comments have been imported from the D&R legacy site, which remains accessible if you’re interested in seeing how it all began.
Now in its fifth year, Differences & Repetitions continues to grow and transform. If you haven’t visited the site before, take a few minutes to browse the tag cloud appearing in the sidebar at right. That’ll give you a sense of the topics I like to write about. I welcome your comments, questions, and feedback and hope that you’ll participate in the D&R community by sharing, liking, or tweeting about my posts.
–Ted Striphas, July 2010
