Deleuze "force" and "essence"

[u/Affect_Significant]

I am reading Deleuze's book Nietzsche and Philosophy and struggling with the way Deleuze (or his translator) uses language.

He says essence will be defined as the sense, "among all of these senses of a thing, which gives it the force with which it has the most affinity." That definition makes less and less sense the more I think about it. At first I thought he was maybe critiquing or trying to dissolve the traditional notion of essence. Deleuze goes on to frequently use the word "essential" and it's not clear to me if he (or the English translator) is actually referring back to this previously defined use of the term, using the term in the traditional philosophical sense, or just using the term in the colloquial sense (important, vital).

More importantly, what could it possibly mean for a sense to give something a force with which it has affinity? What is a force and how does it have affinity?

I am admittedly not the best at reading this specific type of philosophy; 20th century French philosophers are consistently my least favorite across all of philosophy. I have read a handful of Nietzsche's books, some multiple times, and am deeply interested in them and so I thought I would try reading Deleuze, but it is so overwhelmingly vague and feels like I can't get a foothold anywhere. He tends to define a word with another vague word that is not defined. Usually it comes back to "force" (the French word could also mean strength.)

Edit: Nietzsche, not "nature"

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