Difference and Repetition: Deleuze on the Comic

While I was plodding through "Repetition for Itself" feeling drowsy, I was suddenly wakened up by the passage "Note on the Three Repetitions." The reason was simple. The comic was involved:

According to Marx, repetition is comic when it falls short--that is, when instead of leading to metamorphosis and the production of something new, it forms a kind of involution, the opposite of an authentic creation. Comic (end of Page 91) travesty replaces tragic metamorphosis. However, it appears that for Marx this comic or grotesque repetition necessarily comes after the tragic, evolutive and creative repetition ('all great events and historical personages occur, as it were, twice...the first time as tragedy, the second as farce'). This temporal order does not, however, seem to be absolutely justified. Comic repetition works by means of some defect, in the mode of the past properly so called. The hero necessarily confronts this repetition so long as 'the act is too big for him': Polonius's murder by mistake is comic, as is Oedipus's enquiry. The moment of metamorphosis, tragic repetition, follows. It is true that these two moments are not independent, existing as they do only for the third moment beyond the comic and the tragic: the production of something new entails a dramatic repetition which excludes even the hero. However, once the first two elements acquire an abstract independence or become genres, then the comic succeeds the tragic as though the failure of metamorphosis, raised to the absolute, presupposed an earlier metamorphosis already completed.

--Difference and Repetition* (91-92)

*Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition (1968). Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.