Pure commodification erases monopoly advantages

The bland homogeneity that goes with pure commodification erases monopoly advantages; cultural products become no different from commodities in general.

David Harvey, Rebel Cities (Verso, 2013) pp. 92-93

The purity of a being is never unconditional or absolute

It is a mistake to postulate anywhere a purity that exists in itself and needs only to be preserved.... The purity of a being is never unconditional or absolute; it is always subject to a condition. This condition varies according to the being whose purity is at issue; but this condition never inheres in the being itself. In other words: the purity of every (finite) being is not dependent on itself... For nature, human language is the condition of its purity that stands outside of it.

Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (University of Chicago Press, 1994) p. 206

The simulacrum is the true character or form

When eternal return is the power of (formless) Being, the simulacrum is the true character or form – the "being" – of that which is. When the identity of things dissolves, being escapes to attain univocity, and begins to revolve around the different. That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 80

The work of art leaves the domain of representation

Every object, every thing, must see its own identity swallowed up in difference, each being no more than a difference between differences. Difference must be shown differing. We know that modern art tends to realise these conditions: in this sense it it becomes a veritable theatre of metamorphoses and permutations. A theatre where nothing is fixed, a labyrinth without a thread (Ariadne has hung herself). The work of art leaves the domain of representation in order to become "experience", transcendental empiricism or science of the sensible.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 68

Representation and difference

Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective, and in consequence a false depth. It mediates everything, but mobilises and moves nothing. Movement, for its part, implies a plurality of centres, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially distort representation: paintings or sculptures are already such "distorters", forcing us to create movement – that is, to combine a superficial and a penetrating view, or to ascend and descend within the space as we move through it.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 67

Conflict and difference

There is a false profundity in conflict, but underneath conflict, the space of the play of differences. The negative is the image of difference, but a flattened and inverted image, like the candle in the eye of the ox – the eye of the dialectician dreaming of a futile combat?

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 62

Returning is becoming

That identity not be first, that it exists as a principle but as a second principle, as a principle become; that it revolve around the Different: such would be the nature of a Copernican revolution which opens up the possibility of difference having its own concept, rather than being maintained under the domination of a concept in general already understood as identical. Nietzsche meant nothing more than this by eternal return. Eternal return cannot mean the return of the Identical because it presupposes a world (that of the will to power) in which all previous identities have been abolished and dissolved. Returning is being, but only the being of becoming.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 50

Distinction is form

The Platonists used to say that the not-One distinguished itself from the One, but not the converse, since the One does not flee that which flees it; and at the other pole, form distinguishes itself from matter or from the ground, but not the converse, since distinction itself is form.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) pp. 36-37

We therefore here arrive at a decisive moment dialectically, in which difference, by gradually extending its dominion over everything, ultimately comes to liquidate identity as such, in a well-nigh suicidal meltdown in which it must itself also disappear (inasmuch as difference is necessarily predicated on identity in the first place).

Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations (Verso, 2010) p. 24