...has perhaps always had...

The last sentence is excellently put:

Discourses on painting are perhaps destined to reproduce the limit which constitutes them, whatever they do and whatever they say: there is for them an inside and an outside of the work as soon as there is work. A series of oppositions comes in the train of this one, which, incidentally, is not necessarily primary (for it belongs to a system whose edging itself reintroduces the problem). And there the trait is always determined as an opposition-slash.

But what happens before the difference becomes opposition in the trait, or without its doing so? And what if there were not even a becoming here? For becoming has perhaps always had as its concept this determination of difference as opposition.
-The Truth in Painting, 11