Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Adorno’s Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan Badiou and Derrida, Antonio Calcagno Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere, Nicholas Hewlett Deconstruction and Democracy, Alex Thomson Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Jay Lampert Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes Deleuze and the Meaning of Life, Claire Colebrook Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan-Wortham and Allison Weiner Foucault’s Heidegger, Timothy Rayner Heidegger and the Place of Ethics, Michael Lewis Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, Jason Powell Husserl’s Phenomenology, Kevin Hermberg The Irony of Heidegger, Andrew Haas Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Düttmann Sartre’s Ethics of Engagement, T. Storm Heter Sartre’s Phenomenology, David Reisman Ricoeur and Lacan, Karl Simms Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? Gregg Lambert

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

Joe Hughes

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-10: HB: 1-8470-6284-9 ISBN-13: HB: 978-1-8470-6284-0 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Hughes, Joe. Deleuze and the genesis of representation/Joe Hughes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-1-84706-284-0 (HB) ISBN-10: 1-84706-284-9 (HB) 1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995. 2. Representation (Philosophy) I. Title. B2430.D454H84 2008 194--dc22 2008001543

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For Shirley

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Contents

viii

Acknowledgments Preface

ix

Abbreviations

x Part I: Husserl and Deleuze

Chapter 1: Husserl, Reduction and Constitution Chapter 2: The Logic of Sense

3 20

Part II: Anti-Oedipus Chapter 3: The Material Reduction and Schizogenesis Chapter 4: Desiring-Production Chapter 5: Social Production

51 62 81

Part III: Difference and Repetition Introduction to Part III: Difference and Repetition Chapter 6: Static Genesis: Ideas and Intensity Chapter 7: Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time

103 105 127

Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

155 159 180 191

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ian Buchanan, Claire Colebrook, and Simon Malpas not only for reading the final manuscript and offering their invaluable advice, but also for their friendship along the way. Jeff Bell, Mary Bryden, Matt McGuire, Lisa Otty, Patricia Pisters, Mat Sletten, Dan Smith, and Alex Thomson all at one point altered the shape of this book during one of our many conversations at conferences, pubs, or muddy walks through Scotland. Above all I want to thank my friends and family for their support over the course of this long project, especially Sarah Tukua and Pat and Jana Hughes.

Preface

From its beginning Deleuze scholarship has produced a number of excellent works tracing Deleuze’s relationship to phenomenology. Most of these have focused on the differences and similarities between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty.1 A few have considered Deleuze’s relationship to Heidegger.2 But no one to my knowledge has noticed the extent of Deleuze’s deep indebtedness to Husserl and in particular to the project of genesis Husserl rigorously developed in his late works.3 In this book I want to emphasize a Husserlian inspiration behind Deleuze’s work. What I am concerned to show is not Deleuze’s appropriation, here and there, of specific Husserlian concepts, but rather that Deleuze’s entire project is essentially phenomenological to the degree that it takes up the question of genetic constitution and develops it in its own way. In the first chapter I describe Husserl’s theory of genetic constitution. In the following chapters I show how Deleuze’s three central texts—The Logic of Sense, Anti-Oedipus, and Difference and Repetition—develop a new theory of genetic constitution. I have disrupted their order of publication in my presentation in order to stress the conceptual continuity between books. This would no doubt present a problem if my intention were to provide a narrative account of the development of Deleuze’s theory of genetic constitution. My goal, however, is simply to show that at a very general level—the level of the formal structure of the works in question—Deleuze develops a consistent and perhaps systematic account of the genesis of representation.

Abbreviations

Deleuze (and friends) AO AP BG C1 C2 CC DG DI DR EC EP ES FB

Anti-Oedipus Anti-Oedipus Papers Bergsonism Cinema 1 Cinema 2 Coldness and Cruelty Dialogues Desert Islands Difference and Repetition Essays Critical and Clinical Expressionism in Philosophy Empiricism and Subjectivity Francis Bacon

CES CTM E&J FTL ITC

Foucault Kafka Kant’s Critical Philosophy The Logic of Sense Negotiations Nietzsche and Philosophy Pure Immanence Spinoza: Practical Philosophy Proust and Signs Pericles et Verdi The Fold A Thousand Plateaus Two Regimes of Madness What is Philosophy

Others

Husserl APS

FC KA KP LS NG NP PI PP PS PV TF TP TR WP

Passive and Active Synthesis Crisis of European Sciences Cartesian Meditations Experience and Judgment Formal and Trans. Logic Time-Consciousness

MM CPR PP TI

Bergson, Matter and Memory Kant, Critique of Pure Reason Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception Levinas, The Theory of Intuition In Husserl’s Phenomenology

PART I

Husserl and Deleuze

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Chapter 1

Husserl, Reduction and Constitution There is not much consensus in the current critical literature when it comes to the question of Deleuze’s relationship to phenomenology. Many critics would find the claim that Deleuze is some sort of a phenomenologist entirely misplaced. For some, this is because Deleuze’s thought is radically independent of the philosophical tradition and draws its influence from a (surprisingly canonical) list of ‘aberrant’ thinkers: Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, and so on.1 For others, Deleuze’s thought is most effective not as a description of consciousness, but as a philosophy of contemporary physics.2 For Foucault, nothing could be further from the Phenomenology of Perception than The Logic of Sense.3 But at the same time a number of critics have also made very important connections between Deleuze’s thought and Merleau-Ponty’s.4 Claire Colebrook argues that Deleuze’s thought ‘can be seen as a radicalisation of phenomenology’5 while Constantine Boundas finds this reading tempting, but ultimately unsatisfactory.6 It even seems that Deleuze himself consistently distances himself from ‘mere phenomenology’7 or ‘epiphenomenology’.8 There are several reasons behind this lack of consensus, but almost all of them come down to the impossibility of concisely defining the word ‘phenomenology’. In 1933, Eugen Fink published his ‘famous article’,9 ‘The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism’, as a defense of Husserl’s phenomenology in response to neo-Kantian criticisms. This article is useful here not only because it was extremely influential in France, but also because Fink’s general argument was that Husserl’s critics failed to understand what ‘phenomenology’ was on its own grounds, opting instead to criticize Husserl from the point of view of their own Kantianism. As a result, it gives a very broad and surprisingly precise definition of phenomenology. Fink’s explanation develops around two essential concepts that explain phenomenology: the phenomenological reduction and the problem of constitution.10 Although this book is not a detailed study of Deleuze’s relationship to particular phenomenologists, it does insist that Deleuze’s thought unfolds entirely within these two general orientations of phenomenology.

The reduction The reduction was one of the central components of Husserl’s philosophy during the middle period of his work. Husserl describes it in his Cartesian

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Meditations as the ‘inhibiting’ or ‘putting out of play’ of all positions taken toward the already given Objective world and, in the first place, all ‘existential positions’. This ‘already given Objective world’ and its ‘existential position’ are Husserl’s technical terms for describing the way in which we experience the world from the point of view of our daily activity, or what he calls our ‘natural attitude’. In this attitude we do not stop to reflect on how we see what we see and the sense we make of it. Rather, when I reach for a pair of scissors, I reach for an ‘Objective’ pair with an ‘existential position’. The scissors exist in space, on my table. When Husserl asks us to put these ‘assumptions out of play’, he is simply asking us to look at the scissors in a different way. Rather than seeing them as the actual scissors, we should see them as phenomena, as a mental representation of the scissors. The putting out of play which the reduction performs therefore ‘does not leave us confronting nothing’. On the contrary, it leaves us confronting ‘the world of phenomena’ (CTM 20; cf. 26). The reduction opens up the world that appears to consciousness. It shifts our attention away from objects as they are in the world and in our everyday experience and focuses instead on objects as representations and as accomplishments or productions of a ‘transcendental consciousness’. Put simply, rather than seeing a pair of scissors as a material object, it is necessary to look at it as a sedimentation of all the meanings that have been given to it in the course of your life and the way in which those meanings come now to define that object, all in the blink of an eye, as something for cutting paper, which your grandmother might use to cut pizza, which you should not run with, and what can be particularly effective at removing dirt from under your finger nails if you have nothing else at your disposal, and so forth. The material pair of scissors has specific measurable dimensions; it interacts with the objects around it according to the laws of physics. The phenomena or representation of the scissors, however, does not have the same dimensions or the same relations with the objects surrounding it. It is caught up in the flow of internal time and divided into a horizon of memory and of anticipation. It is mixed with the senses we have previously made of scissors and with anticipations which correspond to these ‘habitualities’. The phenomenological reduction simply asks us to stop seeing objects as material things in the world and to start looking at them as representations of things which are borne of distinct cognitive processes. In its most basic sense it is simply the treatment of the contents of consciousness as contents of consciousness rather as contents of the world (Moran 152). The first task of phenomenology is to describe these phenomena. How does a representation fit into its various horizons of anticipation and memory? Because this consciousness which the reduction reveals is a ‘transcendental consciousness’, Husserl famously described phenomenology in the Cartesian Meditations as a study of ‘transcendental experience’.11 And since this was one of his first books to be translated into French—by Levinas in 1931— Husserl’s thought became widely known as a ‘transcendental empiricism’.12

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5

Phenomenology is a ‘transcendental empiricism’ because it begins with an experience and description of the transcendental. In the introduction to The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty makes use of the reduction in a way which not only clarifies its function but unfolds a line of reasoning which Deleuze will directly take up in one of his early works. Throughout the introduction, Merleau-Ponty establishes certain characteristics of his theory of perception. The world of perception is the world in which the body interacts with its surroundings and makes sense, through a process of constitution, of the objects which it confronts or which confront it. The first two chapters of the introduction describe, among other things, two ways in which the world of perception and its ‘immanent meaning’ has been either overlooked or misrepresented by philosophy. In the first chapter, he argues that there is no such thing as ‘empiricism’s’ ‘unit of experience’. He describes this unit as the sensation of an isolated ‘undifferentiated, instantaneous, dot-like impact’ (Phenomenology 4). For Merleau-Ponty there are no solitary impressions in perception. Every object of ‘natural’ or ‘actual perception’ is always given as already belonging to a field of perception (4). Each object is always in a network of relationships with other objects and already has its own immanent sense which is produced in the body before it becomes a dot-like representation (40). In the second chapter, Merleau-Ponty extends this argument to the theories of association. ‘If we admit “sensation” in the classical sense, the meaning of that which is sensed can be found only in further sensations, actual or virtual’ (16). But meaning can never be established in this way because an atomic sensation can only relate externally to another atomic sensation. We are then faced with either an infinite regress or with the identity of two sensations and therefore a ‘thesis external to empiricism’ (17). Merleau-Ponty brings the same argument against association as he did against the empiricist theory of sensation: it overlooks that any object is already given within a context, a ‘group’, a ‘positive indeterminacy’, and with its perceptual meaning already produced before any associating can take place (18–20). Association presupposes this immanent sense. Because of this, the empiricist theory of sensation misses the ‘essential function’ of perception ‘which is to lay the foundations of, or inaugurate, knowledge’. Empiricism can ‘only see [perception] though its results’ (19). At the same time that Merleau-Ponty makes these arguments, he also asks how this conception of a discreet unit of sensation made its way into philosophy. His answer is distinctly Husserlian and repeats the methodological guidelines laid down in the notion of ‘reduction’. Merleau-Ponty writes that ‘analytic perception’ is a ‘late product of thought directed at objects’ (12). In our everyday experience, we see objects in the world, and they seem to be discreet representations: they are self-contained and have well-defined limits. A car can run into another car. Two billiard balls collide and go in their own separate directions. But these are the results of the activity of perception. They

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presuppose the work of the body and of thought which produces out of the data of perception well-defined representations. Because these are the products of the body, they cannot turn around and describe that same world out of which they are produced, in the same way that a product can not describe the raw material that it used to be, or a definition should not use the word it is supposed to define. When we do this ‘we make perception out of things perceived’ (5). Merleau-Ponty therefore argues that the idea of a unit of experience came about by transposing the characteristics of already constituted empirical objects onto the constituting activity of perception. We take the final product—the perception of an object—and use it to describe the ‘impersonal’ ‘transcendental field’ out of which it was produced (68ff.; 95ff.).13 In other words, we trace the transcendental from the empirical. This is the methodological import of the phenomenological reduction and the suspension of the natural attitude. It is a way to discover the transcendental without superimposing on it any of the characteristics of the empirical, or what is produced by the transcendental. However, it would seem that Deleuze never makes a big deal of the reduction. In fact he never even mentions it except for once in Anti-Oedipus (AO 107) and once in The Logic of Sense where he claims that Husserl discovered the neutrality of sense ‘thanks to the phenomenological methods of reduction’ (LS 101–02).14 But even here, Deleuze never gives the impression that he will take up these methods. Some critics, however, have argued that Deleuze’s thought does indeed make use of a form of the reduction, or a kind of reduction. For example, Ray Brassier, following Laruelle, finds a ‘transcendental’ or ‘hyletic’ reduction in Deleuze which isolates the ‘plane of immanence’ from both subjective and objective determinations, and Leonard Lawlor has even gone so far as to suggest that ‘The Logic of Sense takes place entirely under the sign of the phenomenological reduction’.15 Lawlor argues that unless we were already within the reduction we could never return to phenomena. Here Lawlor makes an extremely important point that I will defend over the course of the next two chapters: though it begins and continually emphasizes (or valorizes) the transcendental, Deleuze’s thought ends in phenomena, in an empirical consciousness of fully individuated objects. Despite the lack of attention Deleuze calls to the reduction, there are at least two important places where Deleuze makes significant use of it. In the first he develops an argument almost identical to the one I just outlined from the introductory chapters of the Phenomenology of Perception. In his 1964 book Proust and Signs, Deleuze explains that there are two ways Proust’s apprentice can miss the sense of a sign:16 objectivism and subjectivism. Objectivism characterizes the apprentice’s belief that sense can be found in the object which emits the sign. Subjectivism is when, after the continuous disappointments brought about by the objectivist attitude, the apprentice tries to discover the sense within himself, in his subjective chains of association (PS 34; my emphasis). But this subjectivism

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7

doesn’t give up the meaning either, but only leads the apprentice to a meaningless relativity (36). At the end of the apprenticeship, however, the apprentice discovers essence, the sense of the sign.17 This follows Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the unit of sensation (objectivism) and association (subjectivism) almost exactly by arguing that both miss the already given sense and both overlook the work of a transcendental constitution which they presuppose. Indeed, what the apprentice discovers after the failure of both objectivism and subjectivism is that ‘essence’ or ‘sense’ is responsible for the constitution of signs and their meanings (PS 38). But what is even more striking is the similarity of their explanations for the strength and influence of the objectivist interpretation. Deleuze asks, why does the apprentice initially think that sense can be found in the object emitting the sign? Why does the apprenticeship begin in objectivism? His answer is that this impulse follows from ‘the natural direction of perception or of representation’ (PS 29). Deleuze will repeat this argument several times across the course of the third chapter. Perception follows a law of constancy which directs our mind to concentrate on stable objects in perception. Our natural attitude toward the world is the one in which we confront objects according to this ‘natural direction of perception’. What the apprentice learns through his series of disappointments, then, is the necessity of the reduction, or to break from the constancy principle in order to discover sense. The second significant place in which Deleuze makes use of the reduction as a methodological tool is his sweeping critique of the history of philosophy under the title ‘the image of thought’. This critique had already made an appearance in both Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and in the first essay of Proust and Signs (1964), but it is not until Difference and Repetition (1968) that it becomes systematic. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze outlines eight postulates which he claims, adopting Kant’s terminology, define a ‘dogmatic’ image of thought. To this dogmatic image, Deleuze will oppose his own ‘critical image’. Despite their variety, all eight dogmatic presuppositions share one crucial problem: ‘We discover in all the postulates of the dogmatic image the same confusion: elevating a simple empirical figure to the status of the transcendental, at the risk of allowing the real structures of the transcendental to fall into the empirical’ (DR 154). Each postulate describes thought—or more, precisely, the work of thought—in the image of its product. From this point of view, we can see that the critique of the dogmatic image of thought merges with the general criticism leveled against philosophy throughout Difference and Repetition and the early works: namely that it gets caught in the circle of representation and fails to go beyond it. This is exactly the problem the phenomenological reduction is intended to resolve: it supposedly brackets the empirical, the natural attitude of perception directed at objects in order to allow us to more accurately describe the transcendental life of consciousness. However, a statement of intention is no guarantee that the employment of the reduction will be successful, and many of Deleuze’s criticisms will attack very subtle points where, despite embracing the reduction, many

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aspects of the natural attitude creep into Husserl’s work. Deleuze’s critique of the image of thought can thus be read as a reaffirmation of the necessity for reduction even if he does not use that particular word. Because the reduction is the motivating critical intuition at the heart of each criticism, we can extend Leonard Lawlor’s comment to cover at least Difference and Repetition, if not the whole of Deleuze’s work as Brassier has suggested: ‘The Logic of Sense takes place entirely under the sign of the phenomenological reduction’. But what does Deleuze oppose to the dogmatic image? What defines a truly ‘critical’ image of thought? Without a doubt, it is the engagement with the problem of genesis: ‘The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself’ (DR 139, my emphasis). The beyond of representation is transcendental constitution. The critical image of thought is the one which shows the genesis of thought itself. Later in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze gives a similar definition of a ‘true’ or ‘radical critique’. A radical critique is one which ‘carries out the genesis’ of what it critiques (DR 206).18 It must be the case then, that insofar as Difference and Repetition is a critique of representation, it is also necessarily at the same time an account of the genesis of representation. In opposing representation, it becomes a theory of representation. This brings us to the second of phenomenology’s defining ideas according to Fink.

Genetic constitution Perhaps even more important than the reduction is the second of phenomenology’s ‘basic systematic ideas’: Husserl’s notion of constitution.19 This holds for Deleuze as well. In Difference and Repetition, the sole reason that ‘tracing the transcendental from the empirical’ was problematic, and the primary reason that representation was criticized was that it obscured the point of view of genesis, or constitution (DR 160). The constituted does not resemble its process of production, its constitution, in the same way a car does not resemble the production line which built it. Etymologically, ‘phenomenology’ just means ‘the study of phenomena’, but Husserl’s philosophy was never just a ‘descriptive science’ limited to the description of phenomena (Fink 76). In fact the overwhelming majority of Husserl’s later writings are devoted not to the description of phenomena, but to explaining them by working out the process of their constitution—a point of view which the reduction made plausible.20 Because the reduction ensures that we approach objects as phenomena rather than as objects in the world, the expression ‘constitution of objects’ has an entirely different sense than it normally would. Considered as an object, a table is constituted by actually building it, by assembling its parts and putting a finish on it. But considered as a phenomena, ‘the constitution of objects’ means that

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that very same table is now constituted by giving sense to the data presented in perception.21 It represents the way I first made sense of what a table was as a child, and slowly accrued meanings over the course of my life so that the perception of the table attains a stable meaning. As Fink points out, ‘Phenomenology directly formulates the problem of constitution as the problem of the “bestowal of meaning (Sinn)’’’ (Fink 91; original emphasis. cf. 102). Taken in its most general sense, constitution or ‘sense-bestowal’ is the process in which a mental act (noesis) or a series of mental acts give form to or ‘animate’ sensuous data (hylé) and by doing so produces either an ideality, an object in perception or a sense (all three of which can be called a noema). This is because the sense data, by itself, is meaningless. The entire project of constitution is concerned with explaining how this meaningless data is organized into stable representations which communicate with our memories and expectations to produce meaningful objects. Much of Husserl’s earlier work investigated the various kinds of noeses and noemata. His later work continues and expands this line of research to include the deepest levels of subjectivity or constitution. Because Deleuze’s entire philosophy directly takes up the problem of genetic constitution it is worth providing a relatively detailed outline of Husserl’s understanding of the process of genesis. However, there are two models of sense bestowal in Husserl’s work, and it is only the second, later formulation that has any significance for Deleuze. In his later works, Husserl distinguished between two types of phenomenology––static and genetic. Static phenomenology concerns Husserl’s earlier works with their overwhelming emphasis on logic and their hesitation to investigate subjectivity much deeper than the life-world. When poststructuralists criticize Husserl, it is usually this phase of his work that they find problematic. Genetic phenomenology concerns Husserl’s later works—from about 1917 on—and represents a ‘turn to a philosophy of life’.22 The word ‘genesis’ has two closely related senses in Husserl’s thought. On the one hand it keeps its traditional meaning by referring to the way in which meanings become sedimented over time. Husserl will argue, for example, that I encounter an object S for the first time, and I give it a sense p. The next time I encounter that object, I encounter it as Sp; and if I give it a new sense, q, the next time I see it, I will see it as Spq, and so on.23 But, at the same time that Husserl begins describing these historical ‘sedimentations’ of sense, he also begins theorizing their foundation in the body and in temporality. In other words, genesis no longer refers to a history of predicates attached to S, but to the immediate production of S as such. This is what Donn Welton considers to be the defining characteristic of genetic phenomenology: Husserl’s emphasis on the most basic aspects of the process of perception in his development of a fully developed transcendental aesthetic rather than on the historical sedimentations of sense. Genetic analysis proper only begins when we move from the consideration of sedimentations of sense to their ‘primal institution’ in a ‘transcendental aesthetic’.24 And because it is this later theory

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of constitution that Deleuze will directly take up, it is the one that I want to outline here. We will take as a guiding thread what Husserl called ‘the doctrine of genesis’ which he outlined in notes from 1921 titled ‘On Static and Genetic Phenomenological Method’.25 At first Husserl approaches the problem of genesis, as he often does, regressively. Logical judgments presuppose a lived experience, and lived experience presupposes a passivity which produces it (APS 630; cf. E&J 50). Husserl develops his theory of genesis with the hope of finally grounding formal logic. In Husserl’s eyes logicians ignore the fact that it is impossible to make judgments without presupposing a subject who makes those judgments and understands what they mean.26 For example Husserl argues that there is no way to assert the truth value of the judgment ‘the moon is round’, without recourse to a subject. In order to determine the truth of the judgment, you need a subject first to interpret or grasp the sense of the proposition, its subject, its predicate, and their connection, and then to observe the moon itself, to see that it is in fact round, and finally to assert the adequacy of the proposition to its referent. But, how does that subject have this experience of the moon and how does it know that its experience of the moon is accurate? This question motivates Experience and Judgment in its entirety. Husserl begins regressively by moving from judgments back to their founding experience, and from experience back to its origins in perception.27 But for the doctrine of genesis itself, Husserl sets everything in its proper order. Accordingly, in the doctrine of genesis, in ‘explanatory’ [rather than ‘descriptive’] phenomenology, we have: (1) Genesis of passivity that is a general lawful regularity of genetic becoming in passivity that is always there . . .. (2) The participation of the ego and relationships between activity and passivity. (3) Interrelations, formations of pure activity; genesis as an active accomplishment of ideal objects and as an accomplishment of real generation. (APS 631) These are the three general levels of genesis which I will describe below: (1) passivity, (2) transition from passivity to activity, (3) activity. Levels one and three both contain several sets of syntheses which move us along the genesis. The first level is made up of passive syntheses; the second level describes the relationship between intensity and affection, and the third level is made up of active syntheses. (Deleuze adopts Husserl’s notions of active and passive syntheses for his own philosophy in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition and Anti-Oedipus.) To these first three terms of the doctrine, Husserl adds four more dealing with problems of memory (in the form of ‘habitualities’) and intersubjectivity. These seven terms taken together constitute what he calls, following

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Leibniz, a monad and its relations to other monads.28 Husserl’s monad, as opposed to the ego, is nothing more than the entire process of genesis, ‘an incessant process of becoming as an incessant process of constituting objectivities’ (APS 270). This is a notion of subjectivity which strongly influenced Deleuze: the subject as a process of production. When we outline this theory of genesis, then, we are at the same time outlining a theory of subjectivity which comprises three distinct moments (1) perception, (2) affection, and (3) action. The genesis as a whole moves from an indeterminate encounter with an object in passivity to the constitution of active ‘acquisitions of knowledge’. Why? Because, for Husserl, this is the natural direction of thought: the ego is ‘oriented toward the acquisition of knowledge’ (E&J 103; cf. 198 and APS). Obviously Deleuze’s criticism of the first postulate in the dogmatic image of thought— that the natural movement of thought is toward truth—would play an important role in a critique of Husserl here, 29 but we are not reading Husserl for the truth or validity of his thought or even as a model to which we can compare Deleuze point by point. We are reading him simply to become acquainted with what genesis looks like. (1) The first part of the doctrine of genesis, passivity, is the foundation of a theory of perception, and it falls under what Husserl, following Kant, describes as a ‘transcendental aesthetic’. It comprises two passive syntheses: the synthesis of time and the associative synthesis, both of which work only in the lowest ‘depths’ of subjectivity.30 The reason Husserl, and Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, describe these syntheses as ‘passive’ is that they take place outside of the jurisdiction of an ego. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant presented three syntheses which he claimed ‘constituted’ ‘actual experience’ (CPR A124–25).31 In the first edition of the Critique, the first two syntheses—apprehension and reproduction—took place in the imagination, outside of the understanding. Only the third synthesis—recognition—was governed by the transcendental unity and spontaneity of the I. In the second edition of the Critique, however, all three syntheses were governed by the understanding and were therefore capable of being actively regulated (cf. CPR B130).32 Husserl and Deleuze do not follow Kant this far and maintain the possibility of a ‘non-intellectual’ synthesis which operates outside of an I. Deleuze therefore describes a passive synthesis as one which ‘is not carried out by the mind, but occurs in the mind . . ..’ (DR 71; original emphasis). Because Husserl’s first two syntheses work outside of the I (Husserl describes this level as ‘pre-I’) and are prior to any activity characterized by spontaneity or volition, this first general level in Husserl’s doctrine of genesis is characterized by impersonality and anonymity: passivity.33 The function of these two syntheses in relation to the overall genesis is to produce the objects which will play a role both in our experience of the world and in judgments out of a nonintentional and asignifying sensuous matter or ‘hyletic data’.34 The entire genesis begins with the temporal syntheses. For

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Husserl, all objectivity and all subjectivity begins with the constitution of a primordial time, and everything which will eventually be produced throughout the genesis—the subject, its world, its beliefs and desires—are produced within the unity of the temporal field (E&J 164–66; CTM 41ff.). In the ABC’s of the constitution of all objectivity given to consciousness and of subjectivity as existing for itself, here is the ‘A’. It consists, as we might say, in a universal, formal framework, in a synthetically constituted form in which all other syntheses must participate. (APS 171, my emphases; cf. APS 181, E&J 73) Husserl emphasizes here that the temporal syntheses are purely formal. It is for this reason that they are completely unable to differentiate hyletic data according to content (APS 174).35 This role is filled by ‘association’ which Husserl describes as ‘that mode of passive synthesis founded on the lowest syntheses of time-consciousness’ (E&J 177). The specific function of the associative syntheses is to determine ‘the way in which sense data are connected in immanence’ (E&J 74). Time provides the form of immanence, but association determines and orders its content. It therefore belongs to the associative syntheses to begin the process of the individuation of objects (‘individuals’) according to their content (APS 174–76).36 Association, at this stage of the genesis, does not have much in common with the traditional empiricist or psychological theories of association which we just saw Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty criticize. The syntheses at this level begin their work within separate fields of sensory data, with the most basic and meaningless elements of perception. The syntheses begin by combining similar bits of data in a sensory modality (synthesis of homogeneity) or separating dissimilar bits of data (synthesis of heterogeneity). So, for example, if we were looking at a red dot on white paper, the synthesis of homogeneity would connect white bits with white bits and red bits with red bits. After a degree of consistency and form has been introduced to the separate sensory modalities, another associative synthesis combines the modalities in a synaesthetic synthesis. Through this series of different levels and types of synthesis, the associative synthesis styles the objects which will populate the life-world. In Husserl, just as in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, it is only after these syntheses have finished their work that these objects can later play a role in a psychological association. (2) The second moment of the doctrine of genesis is the famous life-world, the world of intensity and affection. This is the ‘world of experience immediately pregiven and prior to all logical functions’, the ‘world in which we are always already living and which furnishes the ground for all cognitive performance and all scientific determination’ (E&J 41; original emphasis). If you are walking down the street, the life-world is your immediate, but not necessarily determinate, experience of the world around you, much of which passes by without you noticing. It forms a background to whatever it is that you might be

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paying attention to. This is the world of experience and of ordinary empirical consciousness. It is also the world which the natural attitude distorts. The natural attitude is ‘a garb of ideas thrown over the world of immediate intuition’ (E&J 44–45). For example, Husserl claims that science teaches us that objects have precise spatial and temporal locations, and this might well be the case, but it only arrived at this conclusion by forming rigorously determined judgments. Husserl never contests the findings of science, but only the superimposition of the products of judgments—its ‘idealizations’—on the ‘prepredicative’ foundation they presuppose. The natural attitude puts the cart before the horse. The world of experience, in contrast to that of judgment and science, is not yet formalized into the exact space and time of science. It is always in flux or becoming (E&J 42–44). Judgment has not yet taken place because its foundations have just been laid. In fact, you could say that in order to fully appreciate the role of the life-world in genesis, one must ‘have done with judgment’.37 In relation to the ‘doctrine of genesis’ the life-world is the pivot between activity and passivity. The life-world has an ambiguous relationship to these two poles. Certainly, every object in the life-world is or was at one point produced in passivity. But imagine that you are going to cross the street without waiting for a walk signal. Your attention becomes fixed on the passing traffic, and these objects, the cars, receive the full attention of your ego and become subjects in active judgments enabling you to accurately spot a gap in traffic and to know that it is big enough for you to get though. But at the same time that you are on the lookout, people are moving in different directions behind you, and while they are present in your periphery, they remain in passivity. They are never actively taken up by an attentive ego which could say, ‘That is my friend Bill’. If they were, you would probably end up under a truck. There is thus a part of experience that is active and a part which is passive. There is the truck you are trying to dodge, and there is your friend Bill who, for the sake of your survival, you cannot notice. This is why Husserl describes the lifeworld as the moment in the genesis where an ego meets the passively constituted objects.38 Husserl describes this relationship topologically. He places the ego on one side and the objects produced in passivity on the other. These perceptual objects are said to ‘obtrude’ on the ego, and, ‘in proportion to the intensity of the obtrusiveness, what is obtrusive has greater proximity to, or remoteness from, the ego’ (E&J 77; my emphasis; cf. 150). From this point of view, the field of perception, the life-world, becomes a field of intensities. The greater the intensity, the more ‘allure’ the object exerts on the ego. The more intense an object, the closer it comes to the ego, eventually bringing the objects and the ego into contact or forcing the ego to ‘turn toward’ the object. These objects are not yet clearly differentiated, but subsist in the background, as it were, in a muddled mixture of desires, expectations, memories, and intensities.

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(3) The third level in the genesis is activity. Husserl thinks of activity as if it were on a continuous scale going from least active to most active, and he splits this progression into two general processes: receptivity and cognition. Receptivity begins with an act of ‘apprehension’. Apprehension—sometimes just called receptivity—is the ‘lowest level of activity’. Here, the ‘ego consents to what is coming and takes it in’ (E&J 79; cf. 77, 103ff.). It ‘yields’ to the intensity of the objects given in the life-world, and lets itself be taken in by their allure. But the ego does not just behold the objects. As a rule, the active apprehension of the object immediately turns into contemplation; the ego, oriented toward the acquisition of knowledge, tends to penetrate the object, considering it not only from all sides, but also in particular aspects, thus, to explicate it. (E&J 104; original emphasis) Because the ego naturally strives toward knowledge, we immediately leave apprehension and begin explicating the object. This is the next level of activity. We are still within receptivity—but now the ego begins an ‘explicative synthesis’. It is at this point that the process of sensebestowal (or the ‘constitution of sense’—both are translations of ‘Sinngebung’) begins to take place. Passivity generated an indeterminate but particular object and presented it to the ego.39 The function of the explicative syntheses is to determine the object further by turning to its ‘singularities’. These singularities are going to determine the object in a way very similar to the way predicates determine their subject in acts of judgment. For this reason Husserl talks of a ‘twofold constitution of sense’ (E&J 114; original emphasis). First, an ‘object substrate’ is constituted. The ego makes the object into something that can support determinations and that can persist as a ‘theme’ while it turns its attention to singularities. Second, the singularities themselves are constituted as properties or determinations of that very substrate or theme. Here the ego treats the singularities which it turns its attention to not as individual objects, but as determinations of an object substrate (E&J 114).40 As close as the explicative synthesis is to judgment, it is not yet there (cf. E&J 206, 233, APS 300). Cognition designates the higher stages of activity, which truly deserve to be called active because they are governed by a deliberate and ‘creative’ spontaneity (E&J 198–99). It is only from the point of view of this spontaneity that we can speak of a predicative synthesis. Even though, in the order of genesis, it takes us as far as we need to go, the predicative synthesis is somewhat anticlimactic. It simply repeats the explicative one, but it does it with a ‘changed attitude’ (E&J 208). What has changed? Most importantly, judgment breaks with the process of objectivation or perception. Everything up until now was ‘bound to the immediate intuition of the substrate’, and was concerned with the formation of individual objects—‘apprehended objectivities’ (E&J 197). Judgment, however, is founded on an act of ‘creative spontaneity’. From here, the active ego

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can validate or invalidate apprehended objectivities, and it can make both practical and logical decisions regarding these objectivities (APS 92ff.). As it runs back over the terms of the explicative synthesis, it can do so with an eye toward the affirmation or invalidation of that perception. But judgment is not only ‘a question of making the intentionality of perception patent’; it is also, and more importantly, a question of ‘appropriation through which the strivingly active ego appropriates to itself an acquisition, that is an abiding knowledge’ (APS 95; my emphasis; cf. (E&J 196)). The predicative synthesis is still an objectifying synthesis, but it no longer produces intuited or apprehended objectivities. It produces ‘categorical objectivities’, and ‘ideal objectivities’, objects which count as acquired knowledge or propositions41 and can play a role in formal logic. At this level, ‘the object is identical and identifiable beyond the time of its intuitive giveness’ (E&J 198). This is what Husserl means when he describes knowledge as an acquisition or possession: it is essentially iterable and therefore communicable (E&J 197–98). The constituted sense becomes fixed and repeatable. The same representation can be repeated in a variety of contexts, and it can be transmitted between people. Once produced in the predicative synthesis, the representation is ours and all subsequent encounters with that particular object will always take place in relation to our already acquired knowledge. Knowledge becomes a ‘habituality’—however, even the determinations in the explicative synthesis can ‘sink into passivity’ as habitualities—which is stored away in the monad until it is needed again. Husserl points out that a ‘developed consciousness . . . will hardly be able to have objects given that are not already apprehended in such a “logical structure” . . .’ so extensive is its reservoir of representations (APS 296; cf. E&J 121–22). The course of the entire genesis this far has been directed toward and motivated by the acquisition of knowledge. The predicative synthesis of judgment ends this process, and my account of the genesis will stop here with it. But the genesis continues in Husserl, and just as receptivity led to cognition, cognition will continue on into the process of conceptualization in which Husserl details the constitution first of generalities of increasing degrees and then the constitution of universals. We could therefore say that, for Husserl, as for Deleuze, the abstract no longer explains, but is itself explained—genetically. Unlike the first systematic idea of phenomenology—the reduction—which Deleuze hardly mentioned at all, the problem of genesis is present everywhere in his philosophy, from the very first book to the last. It is true that in Empiricism and Subjectivity, Deleuze refers to ‘genesis’ only four times, and that each time he is highly critical of it. But he has in mind there a very specific sense of the word genesis—the one we outlined above as the psychological theory of sedimented senses. The primary question of Empiricism and Subjectivity, however, is ‘how does the subject constitute itself within the given?’ (ES 119), how does a subject transcending the given arise out of the given? The given is described as

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the collection of ‘things as they appear—a collection without an album, a play without a stage, a flux of perceptions’ (ES 23; my emphasis). It is an unorganized ‘delirium’ (ES 23) of impressions given by sensibility to the imagination very similar to Husserl’s sensuous hylé. In other words, the question is precisely the phenomenological question of genesis: how does the fully constituted subject arise from the given? Deleuze’s answer is that the subject is constituted as the effect of certain ‘principles of human nature’ which act on this delirium by determining relations between sensations. The function of these principles is to ‘fix and naturalize the mind’, to impose order on the delirium of imagination, to make it ‘constant and settled’, to ‘organize the given into a system, imposing constancy on the imagination’, and in doing so, they make possible representation and consciousness (ES 24; my emphasis). Subjectivity and consciousness of objects, then, is the effect of the action of these principles on the sensuous given (ES 26). ‘Empirical subjectivity is constituted in the mind under the influence of principles affecting it’ (ES 29). Deleuze’s unequivocal answer to the question of the transcendence of the subject in relation to the given is that this transcendence, along with the subject, is constituted. It is from this point of view that he rejects genesis: ‘[Empiricism] envisages this constitution in the mind as the effect of transcending principles and not as the product of a genesis’ (ES 31), and each of the other three references to genesis argue that it has to be founded on the constitutive principles of human nature (ES 66, 108, 119). What Deleuze rejects, then, is a psychological genesis. But he does so in favor of a theory of constitution. These words do not at all have a stable meaning, and in Husserl’s later work, ‘constitution’, ‘genetic constitution’, and ‘genesis’ all mean the same thing. This early preoccupation with genesis is not specific to Empiricism and Subjectivity. In the rest of this book, I argue that Deleuze maintains this concern with constitution throughout all of his later works, even if he gives it a different name—‘actualization’ (Bergsonism), ‘apprenticeship’ (Proust and Signs), ‘individuation’ (Difference and Repetition), ‘genesis’ (Logic of Sense), ‘process of production’ (Anti-Oedipus), creation (What is Philosophy?), and so on—and even if he doesn’t explicitly acknowledge it as a dominant theme. The only way to understand Deleuze’s texts is to understand them as a theorization of genesis, and the only way to understand a Deleuzian concept—whether it be ‘line of flight’, ‘body without organs’, or even, in What is Philosophy?, ‘science’, ‘art’, and ‘philosophy’—is to determine its place and function within the genesis in which it participates.

Deleuze and Kant Deleuze’s relationship to Kant will be a recurrent theme in what follows, but here it is possible to settle on the most general relation between them.42

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Deleuze’s entire engagement with Kant revolves around the problem of genesis, and his philosophy can be read as a rethinking of Kantianism from the point of view of the production of concrete experience. Deleuze considered Kant to be the first phenomenologist, and he gave two reasons for this claim: (1) Kant moved philosophy from an ontology of substance or essence to an ontology of sense; and (2) he discovered the notion of transcendental subjectivity.43 The first point is one that Deleuze maintained in his own philosophy across his life without much modification. His ontology is always an ontology of sense, not of substance.44 It does not ask what lies behind appearances, but how appearances were produced. The second point, however, Deleuze altered significantly. Kant’s transcendental was purely formal, and Deleuze continually criticized this aspect of Kant’s philosophy in the form of two closely related slogans which he usually attributed to Salomon Maïmon or ‘post-Kantians’ in general: Kant was concerned with possible experience, not real, or, Kant was content to substitute simple conditioning for real genesis.45 But, as Jean Hyppolite points out in his narrative tracing the gradual movement toward concrete philosophy of German Idealism, it was not until Hegel that philosophy really reached concrete experience.46 It is true that Fichte, Schelling, and Maïmon all made compelling arguments on the behalf of genesis.47 But none of these thinkers founded genesis on ‘real experience’ as Deleuze claims. That move, rather, defines phenomenology, and we find Deleuze’s claim in every one of the major phenomenologists and throughout much of the critical literature of the time.48 Lyotard emphasizes this aspect of phenomenology. For Lyotard, Kant only explains the a priori conditions of pure knowledge (pure mathematics of physics), but not the real conditions of concrete knowledge: the transcendental Kantian ‘subjectivity’ is simply the set of all conditions governing all possible objects in general, the concrete ego is dismissed to the sensible level as object . . . and the question of how real experience enters the a priori realm of all possible knowledge . . . remains unanswered . . . (Lyotard 44–45; 53)49 This is a clear summary of the problem: in Kant concrete experience remains unaccounted for. But for Lyotard, the solution consists in a ‘refusal to proceed to explanation’. Instead, ‘one must remain with the piece of wax itself, describe only what is given, without presuppositions’ (Lyotard 33). But as I pointed out above, this insistence on description and the refusal of explanation is characteristic only of static phenomenology. Genetic phenomenology takes a completely different route: it proceeds to explanation. In ‘The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Esthetics’, Deleuze again repeats the claim— now attributed only to the post-Kantians—that Kant held fast to the point of view of conditioning without ever reaching genesis, but this time, he argues that Kant had in fact discovered the conditions of a true genesis in the last Critique (DI 61). Deleuze argues that in the first two Critiques, Kant simply assumes that

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the faculties are already there, ‘ready-made’, and further, that they are capable of entering into determinate relationships. These relationships are always hierarchical. There is always a dominant faculty under whose supervision the other faculties go about their work. In the first two Critiques . . . we cannot escape the principle of an agreement of the faculties among themselves. But this agreement is always proportioned, constrained, and determinate: there is always a determinative faculty that legislates, either the understanding for a speculative purpose or reason for a practical purpose. (DI 57; original emphasis) In the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, the imagination schematizes, but it does so only under the influence of the understanding. Were the imagination to be left to itself, instead of schematizing, it would reflect (DI 59). For Deleuze, the importance of the third Critique, and the reason it discovers the idea of genesis, lies in the fact that it went beyond pregiven faculties and their preestablished harmony. Here, Kant begins to study the faculties before any determinate relationships rise up between them and before they have a specific function. He discovers a ground where neither the faculties themselves nor their agreement are assumed—‘free exercise’ and ‘free agreement’ (DI 69). Furthermore, Kant discovers here the genetic principle the post-Kantians criticized him for lacking: the ‘soul’, ‘the suprasensible unity of our faculties, “the point of concentration”, the life giving principle that “animates” each faculty, engendering both its free exercise and its free agreement with the other faculties’ (DI 69; my emphasis). For this reason, Deleuze claims that the Critique of Judgment ‘constitutes the original ground from which derive the other two Critiques’ (DI 69). The third Critique ‘ceases to be a simple conditioning to become a transcendental Education, a transcendental Culture, a transcendental Genesis’ (DI 61; original emphasis).50 But it is precisely from this point of view of genesis that we can no longer talk of an idealism. An idealism is a philosophy that assumes already given or constituted forms. In the first two Critiques, Kant ‘appeals to faculties that are ready-made, whose proportions he seeks to determine’ (DI 61). In the last Critique, however, Kant is in a position to recognize the genesis of these forms. Insofar as he accomplishes this—in Deleuze’s reading—the forms are no longer pregiven, and thus there is no idealism. This is one reason why Deleuze, who takes up Kantianism only at this point, describes his thought as a transcendental empiricism in contrast to Kant’s transcendental idealism.51 I will suggest at various points below that Deleuze resurrects almost the entire structure of Kant’s transcendental subject, except now from the point of view of genesis. Deleuze will ‘substitute for the simple point of view of conditioning a point of view of effective genesis’ (DR162.) ‘[W]ithout this reversal, the famous Copernican Revolution amounts to nothing’ (162).

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Conclusion Whether or not we call Deleuze’s philosophy a ‘phenomenology’ is of little importance. What is important and what I am going to argue below is that his thought moves almost entirely within the two coordinates which Fink outlined. The significance of Fink’s definition of phenomenology is that it manages to be very precise without limiting phenomenology to Husserlian notions. Phenomenology is not synonymous with intentionality or with the solipsistic ego of Ideas I. It is a continuous philosophical project which attempts to explain thought in all its forms (genesis), and which employs a very basic method by which to observe phenomena (reduction). It is not enough to say that Deleuze is antiphenomenological because there is no absolute consciousness at the base of the genesis or because there is no theory of intentionality. I will argue in what follows that Deleuze’s thought does indeed take place entirely under the sign of the reduction, and that it is concerned almost exclusively with the problem of genesis.

Chapter 2

The Logic of Sense The primary purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive and detailed account of Deleuze’s theory of genetic constitution as it appears in The Logic of Sense. The next two parts of the book show how the structure of this genesis informs Anti-Oedipus and Difference and Repetition. This chapter provides the model according to which I read Deleuze’s other works. The Logic of Sense is the book in which Deleuze most clearly and directly engages with Husserl. But what I want to study here is not the degree to which Deleuze takes up or rejects specific concepts developed by Husserl. Instead I want to show the degree to which the entire conceptual structure of The Logic of Sense directly continues the genetic project of Husserl’s late work. In order to make this argument it is necessary to give a relatively complete picture of The Logic of Sense, and in particular to show the way in which 'Deleuze's concepts all come together to form a consistent, if not systematic, theory of genetic constitution. In order to get at the totality of The Logic of Sense we need, to borrow a distinction from narratology, to separate the story from the plot. In his preface to the work Deleuze described it as ‘an attempt to develop a logical and psychological novel’.1 The story that this novel tells is the genesis of representation or the way in which consciousness is produced in the interactions between the body and its affections. The plot, or the way in which this story is presented to the reader, completely obscures this story. I give two accounts of this genetic process in what follows: the first is a general account from the top down. The second is a detailed account from the bottom up. In the first half of the chapter I describe the overall structure of genesis by following Deleuze’s regressive analysis first from the proposition back to sense and then from sense back to sensation. In the second half I describe the process in greater detail from the genetic point of view, moving from sensation up to sense up to the proposition.

Regression The three levels of genesis The genesis I want to describe here traverses three different levels which Deleuze names the ‘primary order’, the ‘secondary organization’, and the

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‘tertiary order’.2 Deleuze often imitates Husserl’s regressive approach to the question of genesis. As I described in the previous chapter, Husserl’s regressive method begins by describing judgments and then discovering their conditions. Similarly, in The Logic of Sense Deleuze begins with an analysis of the logical proposition, and uncovers its conditions. This proposition defines the ‘tertiary order’. Deleuze argues that a proposition has four essential relations, three overt, and one implicit. The three overt and formal relations are denotation, manifestation, and signification (LS 12). Denotation expresses the relation of the proposition to an ‘external’ and ‘individuated’ ‘state of affairs (datum)’ (LS 12; original emphasis). It is the relation of the proposition to what it denotes or points to. For example, in the linguistic proposition ‘the sky is orange’, the denoted state of affairs would be the actual orange sky. Manifestation is the relation of the proposition to the psychological—not transcendental—subject who speaks the proposition. It refers to the one who says ‘I’, the ‘unity capable of saying I’ (78). Signification is the relation to the concept or to the meaning of the proposition. For example, it refers to the concept you might have of an orange sky even when the sky is blue. Denotation relates to the thing, signification to its meaning or concept, and manifestation to the subject of language. ‘The one who begins to speak is the one who manifests; what one talks about is the denotatum; what one says are the significations’ (181). These dimensions of the proposition do not describe the dimensions of language alone however. The propositions which Deleuze is interested in are not necessarily linguistic or logical propositions. They also describe a certain stage in the genesis of thought itself, or a specific moment, close to the end, in the logical-psychological story: ‘consciousness, or rather the preconscious, has no other field than that of possible denotations, manifestations and significations— that is, the order of language which arises from all that which has preceded’ (LS 244). The form of the proposition is also the form of an empirical consciousness. Deleuze is very Husserlian in this. Husserl too treated the logical proposition as a proposition of an active, knowing, predicating consciousness. For Husserl active—rather than passive—consciousness is always preoccupied with judgment and its product, ‘knowledge’,3 and knowledge is expressed in propositional form. Heidegger, concerned to highlight the degree to which this conception of consciousness and knowledge depended upon a long philosophical tradition, provides a terse summary of this aspect of Husserl’s thought: ‘Traditionally, knowing was conceived in terms of self-contained and finished cognitions formulated in assertions, propositions, judgments, where judgments are composed of concepts and complexes of judgments are syllogisms’ (History of the Concept of Time 77). The proposition represents a ‘finished cognition’, an assertion, a fully individuated piece of knowledge which is outside of becoming and has a stable

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structure which allows it both to be repeated and to function in relation to other propositions or finished cognitions.4 What distinguishes Husserl—and Deleuze with him—from this tradition, however, is that they both insist on seeing knowledge in relation to its process of production. They both affirm and go to great lengths to describe a prepredicative life which extends well beyond the limits of discreet and iterable propositions and which is responsible for their genesis.5 As we saw in the previous chapter, Husserl’s monad was defined as that entire genesis which moved from the body and its passive confrontation with hyletic data all the way to an active, judging ego which apprehended and explicated the objects which had been produced in passivity. This means that Husserl’s monad has a significant ‘pre-predicative’ mode of existence. Its experience is not confined to the forms of judgment. The subject of the life-world which confronts the objects produced in passivity confronts these objects as intensities, as objects blurred together in relation to both passing experience and to the habitualities of the monad’s own past experience. When it actively takes these objects up in its spontaneity, it is able to pass judgments about them, or affirm their predicates. The monad therefore moves from a prepredicative world to the predicative, from lived experience as an uneasy mixture of thought and affection to a conscious thought in which we formulate with certainty propositions regarding everything from the objects in our environment to mathematical truths. And indeed, the possibility of judgment and apodicity rests firmly on the foundations of this earlier experience. Deleuze too makes a similar move, and this is why it is necessary to distinguish in Deleuze, as I did in passing above, between a psychological and a transcendental subject. It is the psychological subject which is manifested in the proposition. But this subject, and the entire tertiary order of the proposition which structures its consciousness, presupposes a prepropositional process of production. The tertiary order therefore refers to what Deleuze calls ‘secondary organization’. The level of secondary organization is a prepersonal transcendental field which has the function of constituting the tertiary order. Deleuze has many names for this transcendental field: the ‘cerebral’ or ‘metaphysical surface’, the ‘pre-individual and impersonal transcendental field’, ‘pure thought’ and ‘verbal representation’ are among the most common. In Difference and Repetition, he calls it the ‘virtual’.6 He introduces it here, however, as ‘sense’, the fourth, implicit, relation of the proposition. It is the transcendental dimension of the proposition which has the function of actually producing the entire tertiary order at the same time that it gives it its ‘sense’. The whole order of language is the result of [secondary organization], with its code of tertiary determinations [. . .]. [W]hat matters here is the preliminary, founding, or poetic7 organization—that is, this play of surfaces in which only an a-cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual field is deployed [. . .]. (LS 245–46)

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The a-cosmic, impersonal, and preindividual field to which Deleuze refers is the transcendental field of sense. This field both ‘founds’ and produces the tertiary order. If the transcendental field of sense is called ‘secondary organization’ this is because, as we will see below, its primary function is to provide a field free from the action and passion of bodies so that thought can make sense of what is affecting it by organizing it outside of the determinism implied in these affections. All of this will be discussed in more detail below. What is important for now is simply to see that sense is the genetic element of both the proposition and of the active consciousness which is coextensive with representation. What is perhaps the most remarkable thesis that The Logic of Sense will develop is that sense itself, the virtual, is produced: ‘There is no reason to repeat that sense is essentially produced. It is never originary but is always caused and derived’ (LS 95; original emphasis).8 The regression therefore continues. Just as the individuated objects, the concepts, and the subjects of the tertiary order referred to sense as their genetic element, sense now refers to a field of unindividuated bodies, a ‘measureless pulsation’, which is responsible for its production. Individuation in bodies, the measure in their mixtures, the play of persons and concepts in their variations—this entire [tertiary] order presupposes sense and the pre-individual and impersonal neutral field within which it unfolds. It is therefore in a different way that sense is produced by bodies. The question is now about bodies taken in their undifferentiated depth and in their measureless pulsation. (LS 124; my emphasis) Sense is produced by bodies. Not the individuated bodies of the tertiary order, but bodies taken as an unindividuated measureless pulsation of matter. Below the transcendental field and responsible for its production lies what Deleuze calls the ‘primary order’, the ‘corporeal’, ‘schizophrenic’ mixture of ‘depths’. This is a field in which unindividuated bodies clash with one another. In contrast to the formal order of language or consciousness, this measureless pulsation of matter represents the world of sensation. It is because neither the objects which affect us nor the body which is affected are yet constituted that Deleuze employs such inventive language to describe this world of sensation. Unindividuated bodies mix with our own as yet unconstituted body. Deleuze often describes this depth as the realm in which one either eats or is eaten. To eat or to be eaten, however, is a figurative way of describing this world as one of immediate action and passion. To eat is to be active and to be eaten is to be passive, or to endure another body’s action (240). In depth, ‘everything is passion and action’ (192; original emphasis). This is a very close approximation to the account Deleuze gave of the ‘plane of immanence’ in Cinema 1. In fact, just as the plane of immanence was characterized there, following Bergson, as the action and reaction of every image on all the others, in all their parts, and in all their facets,9 Deleuze here characterizes the realm of bodily mixture as

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one in which ‘a body penetrates another and coexists with it in all of its parts, like a drop of wine in the ocean, or fire in iron’ (LS 5–6). There are not yet, then, any egological coordinates in place. The primary order represents the communication of materiality with itself. It is the world of ‘schizophrenia’ where ‘Everything is body and corporeal. Everything is a mixture of bodies, and inside the body, interlocking and interpenetration’ (87). Bodies ‘burst and cause other bodies to burst in an universal cesspool’ (187; original emphasis). A body, human or otherwise, is here taken only as a pure thing without even considering the possibility that this thing might eventually become the foundation for thought. The entire regressive movement from knowledge to sense to sensation is encapsulated in the following quotation: ‘From the tertiary order, we must move again up to the secondary organization, and then to the primary order in accordance with the dynamic requirement’ (LS 246; original emphasis). But because this is a regressive movement, just as in Husserl, we have to reverse the direction in order to account for everything genetically. Therefore, for these three stages, there are two geneses: a static genesis and a dynamic genesis. The basic distinction between these two geneses comes across most clearly in Deleuze’s introduction of the dynamic genesis: It is no longer a question of a static genesis which would lead from the presupposed event [i.e., sense] to its actualization in a state of affairs and to its expression in propositions. It is a question of a dynamic genesis which leads from states of affairs to events, from mixtures to pure lines, from depth to the production of surfaces, which must not implicate at all the other genesis. (LS 86; original emphasis)10 In this passage Deleuze clearly articulates the difference between the two geneses in terms of the three levels I have just described. A dynamic genesis moves from the primary order to secondary organization, from matter to purity, from sensation to sense. If this genesis is called ‘dynamic’, it is because it begins in depth where there is only movement and not time (namely, the movement of bodies which penetrate one another). A static genesis then takes over and moves from secondary organization to the tertiary order. It moves from sense to a propositional consciousness. Its keyword is ‘actualization’. If this genesis is called ‘static’, it is because sense is not, like the mixture of bodies in depth, defined by movement, but by time, and specifically by ‘the empty form of time’ which Deleuze describes elsewhere, following Kant, as the form of everything that changes, but which does not itself change. It is, therefore, static.11 These two geneses take their names from their starting points. The dynamic genesis begins in movement; the static genesis begins in a

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Static Genesis

Tertiary Order

Dynamic Genesis

Secondary Organization

Primary Order

time without movement. Schematically we can outline the general process as given above. The entire movement of The Logic of Sense follows these two geneses as it moves from a corporeal depth to a propositional consciousness.

The two modes of time Primary order, secondary organization, and tertiary order are the three levels of the genesis. There are also two times: Aion and Chronos.12 Much of Deleuze’s book builds on the work of Maurice Blanchot—so much so that it would not be an overstatement to say that The Logic of Sense is a formalization and systematization of much of Blanchot’s thought, even though at times it leaves the context of that thought altogether.13 This is above all true in relation to the two readings of time. Throughout The Space of Literature and The Book to Come, Blanchot describes two kinds of time.14 First, there is the time of ordinary everyday activity which always happens in the present—a reading of time which Levinas described as ‘the time of clocks made for the sun and for trains’.15 But in addition to this time, there is also the ‘essential’ or ‘original’ time of ‘the work’. In this time there is no present, but only an indefinite past and future which subdivides the present so that you could not say that something is happening, but only that it has always just happened and is always about to happen. It is the time in which an impersonal thought makes mobile connections between memories and expectations. Deleuze calls the time with a present ‘Chronos’, and, within the overall structure we have just traced, this time corresponds directly to the primary order. It is the time of bodies and their mixture in the

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schizophrenic depths (LS 162, 87). It is ‘the always limited present, which measures the action and passion of bodies as causes and the state of their mixture in depth’ (61). Deleuze renames Blanchot’s time without a present ‘Aion’. In opposition to Chronos, Aion is an immaterial time, freed from the movement of bodies. It is, as Deleuze says, ‘the empty form of time’ (62, 165). This time, like Blanchot’s time of the work has no present, but infinitely subdivides the present into a past and a future. Just as Chronos corresponded to the primary order of depths, Aion corresponds to the secondary organization and to the ‘events’ which populate the transcendental field of the surface.16 If Chronos characterizes the primary order, and if Aion characterizes the secondary organization, what time defines the tertiary order? It seems that Chronos has two forms. Its first form is the present understood as the unindividuated corporeal mixture of bodies: the primary order. A dynamic genesis begins in this chaotic mixture of bodies and produces a transcendental surface. It is because of this genesis that this surface leaves its materiality behind and becomes incorporeal. In leaving the movement of unindividuated bodies behind, this genesis produces a completely different kind of temporality: Aion. But the genesis does not stop here, and this surface founds a second, static genesis which will in turn produce the tertiary order of the proposition. The static genesis returns us to Chronos, but now Chronos takes on a completely different form. The static genesis returns to a present which has become, thanks to the work of genesis, ‘a denotable state of affairs in view of a physical time characterized by succession’ (LS 184; my emphasis). The Chronos of the depths was defined by a physical present which did not pass, a present which was in principle infinite because, in relation to the immediate action and passion of bodies, you could always extend their present to encompass a body’s causes and effects as far backward and forward in time as you wanted. The Chronos of the proposition and its denotable state of affairs, however, is defined by succession. It is a present which passes in representation. The difference between the two forms of Chronos comes down to the fact that in the return to matter, matter has become individuated. Since it has well-defined limits, it can pass. Whereas the Chronos of depths was unindividuated and defined by the violence of bodies acting and reacting directly on one another, here everything is individuated, orderly, and packed into the forms of language.17 By noticing the way in which Chronos appears twice in the order of genesis, we can get a very clear picture of the general gesture and shape of this genesis—a trajectory which, in the end, looks surprisingly Hegelian: ‘Between the two presents of Chronos—that of the subversion due to the bottom [i.e. primary order] and that of actualization in forms [i.e. in the forms of the tertiary order]—there is a third, there must be a third, pertaining to Aion’ (168; cf. 63).18 The dynamic genesis takes us out of corporeality; the static returns us to it. The first encounter with corporeality is an experience with an unindividuated, meaningless, and chaotic matter. When we return to it at the end of the

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genesis, we find the same state of affairs individuated in the form of orderly and meaningful representations.19 I hope to have provided in this first part of the chapter the general structure in which the genesis unfolds or, the three major events—the three levels—of the logical-psychological story. In what follows I will describe these two geneses in more detail, beginning with the dynamic genesis and then continuing to the static. By the end of this chapter I hope to have described a general model of genesis which informs Deleuze’s thought across the rest of his career.

Genesis The dynamic genesis The dynamic genesis is the movement from the primary order to secondary organization. It comprises three passive syntheses and, corresponding to each synthesis, three distinct stages.20 In what follows I describe each one of these stages one-by-one after a preliminary account of the schizophrenic depths which define the primary order.

Depths The dynamic genesis begins in the primary order or the ‘noise’ of the corporeal depths. As I mentioned above, these depths represent Deleuze’s description of sensation at the level of unindividuated bodies and of our own as yet unconstituted body. It is in order to avoid importing elements from the natural attitude and traditional philosophy that Deleuze makes use of such idiosyncratic language to describe this world of sensation. Above I briefly described the dynamics of this world: here there is only the movement of fragments which penetrate one another in all their parts and all their facets; everything is immediate action and passion. This is the way Deleuze describes the material depths in the early sections of the book. When he turns in the last third of the book to a systematic description of the dynamic genesis however, he leaves this earlier vocabulary behind and takes up the language of psychoanalysis. Within this new vocabulary, the bodies or fragments which clash with one another are called ‘partial objects’. Partial objects are material fragments—‘bodies’—which exist in the communication of depths (187). To this previous account of depth as a mixture of bodies I would like to add two things, both of which not only clarify the function of genesis in relation to this starting point, but also reinforce the claim that we are dealing with a novel description of sensation. First of all, there is an ego lodged in the depths which Deleuze calls the ‘body without organs’ (LS 88–89, 189, 203). There is an ego here because one of the bodies which is tossed around in the ‘universal variation’ of depth is our body.

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‘A tree, a column, a flower, or a cane grow inside the body; other bodies always penetrate our body and coexist with its parts’ (87). In the language of psychoanalysis, this is the body of ‘the infant’. The ‘infant’ participates in the world of partial objects. Deleuze uses the example of the nursing infant to make this point: ‘The introjection of these partial objects into the body of the infant is accompanied by a projection of aggressiveness onto these internal objects, and by a re-projection of these objects into the maternal body’ (187; cf. 190). Partial objects, in the form of nourishment, are ‘introjected’ into its body, but, at the same time, the infant ‘projects’ them back outside of itself. This is simply a transposition of the earlier account of sensation to the language of psychoanalysis. The mechanisms of introjection and projection are simply the mechanisms by which the undeveloped body—the infant—participates in the universal communication of corporeal depths. The body of the infant is passive in relation to partial objects, but also, through its reprojection of them, it is active. It eats, and it is eaten. According to Deleuze, this is not a pleasant experience for the ego. It has no control over its affections. It cannot anticipate the objects which will affect it, and, even if it is capable of acting on these objects through a reprojection of the partial objects, its action is little more than a reaction. It is dissolved in them like a drop of wine in the ocean. As Deleuze describes it in his essay on Tournier included as an appendix to The Logic of Sense, here each thing ‘slaps us in the face or strikes us from behind’ (LS 306). These beginnings express one immediate need for the ego and a function for genesis: the transcendence of the given, or the escape from materiality. The ego needs to escape from these conditions, and the dynamic genesis which ensues from this state of affairs will provide the means by which the ego can not only escape from its corporeality, but can also hold it at bay.21 This escape from corporeality is made possible by ‘the body without organs’. The infant’s body is not yet a fully constituted body, and at this point in the genesis all that Deleuze says of the ego, the body of the depths, is that it is a simple power of synthesis.22 This power of synthesis is also its means of escape. Even if the ego is lodged in the depths of bodies and communicates in them according to a law of immediate action and passion, it still forms a different kind of mixture. In depth there are two mixtures: ‘one is made of hard and solid fragments which change; the other is liquid, fluid, and perfect, without parts or alteration because it has the property of melting and welding’ (189). The first mixture of hard solid fragments is the corporeal mixture of depth. The second mixture describes the body without organs, or the infant’s body. Here it is attributed the ‘property’ of ‘melting’ and ‘welding’. In other words, it has the power to synthesize. What it melts and welds are precisely the material particles of the first mixture. As Deleuze puts it, the body without organs is ‘a liquid principle capable of binding all of the morsels together, and of surmounting such a breaking apart . . .’ (189; my emphasis). Whereas the first

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mixture of depths represents a set of distinct fragments which act and react on one another, the body without organs represents the synthesis of these objects, and through its synthesis (melting and welding) it surmounts them.23 Beyond the highly varied and suggestive language, two things become apparent regarding the body without organs: (1) it is capable of a synthesis: it synthesizes the partial objects of the corporeal depth which ‘whirl about and explode’. (2) But, in so doing, it also becomes capable of ‘surmounting’ this depth. Its synthesis opens up a route of escape. The second thing I would like to add to the account of corporeal depths anticipates the problems of meaning and of language which dominate the tertiary order. These depths are completely meaningless. This is because they represent a pure materiality. In depth ‘the entire world loses its meaning’, and the ‘word loses its sense’ (87). Far from transmitting meanings, words now ‘act directly on the body, penetrating and bruising it’ (87). This is why the first stage of the genesis is called ‘noise’. It treats words as purely physical phenomena: either as vibrations of air which penetrate our ears or as vibrations of light in a series of black marks on a white page which penetrate our eyes. ‘Every word is physical, and immediately affects the body’ (87). The word is thus just one more indistinguishable member of the universal variation of depths. Its ‘fragments merge with unbearable sonorous qualities, invade the body where they form a mixture . . .’ (88). Here it becomes clear that the corporeal depths are Deleuze’s description of our body’s participation in the physical world and what that participation would feel like and look like from the point of view of the body itself. The corporeal depths are the disorganization and fragmentation of physical objects as they affect us, the way in which the object is nothing more, at the tips of our fingers for example, than the sensory nerves it excites, or the way in which a sound is nothing more than an activation of the motor neurons in our ear. It is Deleuze’s account of what Merleau-Ponty called ‘the world of perception’. Under these conditions, Deleuze says, language, or the formal and organized tertiary order, is impossible. This is because there are many different sounds in the world, but only a few of them—those contained in the alphabet and their combinations—belong to language. The sound of a mouth chewing food and the utterance of a meaningful word are two completely different sounds both of which our mouths can make. ‘It is always a mouth which speaks; but [in the tertiary order] the sound is no longer the noise of a body which eats . . .’ (181). It is the mouth which speaks meaningful sentences that belongs to the tertiary order. But this order has its ultimate genetic foundation in the primary order where it is impossible to tell whether or not the series of sounds which a mouth makes is the consequence of its chewing food or of its uttering a word. It is necessary to process this purely material information in order to find out. As we have seen, in the primary order, the ego has no control over what affects it. All of its actions are reactions. In order for language to become possible in these conditions, it is

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necessary for the ego to leave the world of depths in order to find the freedom and the time to distinguish between the different types of sounds which affect it.24 To render language possible thus signifies assuring that sounds are not confused with the sonorous bodies of things, with the sound effects of bodies, or with their actions and passions. What renders language possible is that which separates sounds from bodies and organizes them into propositions, freeing them for the expressive function. (181) In order for language to be possible, sound has to become something other than a pure passion and a pure matter. Sounds have to be separated from bodies and then organized into propositions. This separation and organization takes place in the transcendental field of secondary organization which provides a time, independent of matter, in which our affections can be ‘progressively determined’ (121). But in order to get from the depths of the body and the material word to this metaphysical or ‘cerebral’25 surface, it takes an entire ‘dynamic’ genesis, and in particular, it requires a ‘body without organs’ which initiates this genesis and the escape of the ego from corporeality. It is the body without organs which makes the genesis of sense possible by beginning the synthesis of the body’s affections (89). We can therefore identify a second general aim of the genesis: to produce sense. Even if Deleuze presents this as a problem of language, its scope is much wider. The role of genesis is to make sense of all of our affections and not just the ones which are formulated into active judgments which we as speaking subjects utter. Genesis does not only make formal language possible. It also allows us to recognize the sound of a chewing mouth as the sound of a chewing mouth. The ego of the depths—the body without organs—is therefore in a situation very similar to Husserl’s monad from the point of view of its passivity. Husserl’s passive monad in the first stage in the ‘doctrine of genesis’ is assaulted by sensory information and is charged with making sense of it. In order to make sense of it however, it has to find conditions in which it is no longer overcome by incoming data. This is accomplished, in Deleuze as in Husserl, through a regime of passive syntheses.26 I want to suggest here that Deleuze’s ‘partial objects’ represent a pure hyletic data which affects the body and that the body without organs, as a ‘fluid principle’, represents the first synthesis of this genesis. These are the two aims of genesis which I wanted to outline here: (1) to escape from the determinism of corporeality and (2) to produce sense, or to make sense of one’s affections. It is the power of synthesis in the body without organs which makes this escape or this ‘surmounting’ possible.

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Connection and conjunction The first two stages of the dynamic genesis, ‘pregenital’ and ‘genital sexuality’, take the form of two passive syntheses: a connective synthesis and a conjunctive synthesis (224ff.). The first synthesis, which corresponds to what Deleuze calls ‘pregenital sexuality’, is responsible for the production of ‘partial surfaces’ around ‘erogenous zones’. It is this synthesis which begins the ‘surmounting’ of depths and the progressive development of the ego. These surfaces have to be produced because, as I pointed out above, the ego which lived the corporeal depths was nothing more than the power of synthesis and its body was not yet constituted. ‘Precisely because the entire surface [of the body] does not preexist, sexuality in its first (pregenital) aspect must be defined as a veritable production of partial surfaces’ (197). However, once produced, these partial surfaces will be brought together into one complete surface. This is the function of the second passive synthesis, the conjunctive synthesis, which coordinates the partial surfaces into one whole surface. This complete surface is the ‘physical surface’, of ‘our sexual body’. How is this production of the partial and then complete physical surface carried out? It seems that the advent of partial surfaces corresponds directly to the body without organ’s initial escape from the determinism of depths. In fact, a partial surface is defined precisely as an assemblage of both the ego which has attained a relative independence from the partial objects of depth and of the image that this ego contemplates (197). This independence is realized through a complex dialectic between the body without organs and something Deleuze calls the ‘good object’. When the body without organs synthesizes the partial objects of depth it also makes possible the formation of a ‘good object’ (190). This good object then comes to represent a second, active layer of the ego, the ‘super-ego’. The superego attempts to make a complete representation out of the objects which the body without organs contemplates. The ego itself is always a contemplation: it contemplates its affections. But whatever it is that the ego contemplates, the good object, the active half of the subject, always attempts to turn that thing into an image. It tries to make complete images out of the partial objects which the ego contemplates. It is this duality in the subject that allows it to escape from the depths. In producing images, the good object gives the ego something to contemplate other than its affections. It is by turning its attention away from the actual partial objects of depth to the images of partial objects that the ego leaves the determinism of depths (198, 199). It is by turning its attention to this image of the object that the body without organs becomes a partial surface and the possibility of developing beyond the present of immediate affection becomes

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an immediate reality. Here Deleuze is very close to early Levinas. In Existence and Existents Levinas also posited a two-layered subject which was able to escape from the assault of anonymous being precisely because it was ‘folded back on itself’. This conditioned the production of the present in which an existent was able to constitute, or ‘hypostasize’ itself.27 This escape, initiated by the first synthesis, is secured in the second synthesis. As soon as the body without organs becomes a partial surface, it continues its synthesis and becomes related to other partial surfaces in a ‘conjunctive synthesis’. The conjunctive synthesis gathers together partial surfaces so that they form a full body. It represents a new stage of the genesis: ‘genital sexuality’. Deleuze describes this bodily synthesis in the language of psychoanalysis. The partial surfaces of the first synthesis are ‘erogenous zones’. The full body is the coordination of these zones. While each partial surface is organized around an ‘erogenous zone’, it is a particular erogenous zone, the genital zone, which is responsible for their coordination, hence the designation of this stage of the genesis as ‘genital sexuality’. The image of the phallus gathers together all of the partial surfaces into one complete surface. The phallus should not penetrate, but rather, like a plowshare applied to the thin fertile layer of earth, it should trace a line at the surface. This line, emanating from the genital zone, is the line which ties together all the erogenous zones, thus ensuring their connection [. . .]. (LS 201; original emphasis) 28 This line which the phallus traces will become very important in the next stage of the genesis. But before leaving this stage, I want to point out that the second synthesis appears to be a synthesis of the first synthesis. The first, connective synthesis produced partial surfaces. The second, by synthesizing these partial surfaces in the image of the phallus, creates a complete physical surface. From the point of view of a phenomenological genesis, we can describe the process thus far as follows. In pregenital sexuality, the ego moved from a direct, if fragmented, contemplation of its object to the contemplation of an image which stood for the object that had affected it. In genital sexuality these images of its affections have been coordinated and put in relation to one another by virtue of a second kind of image: the phallus. This second passive synthesis represents the attempt on the part of the ego to produce a global picture of both itself and its affections.

Disjunction However, Deleuze differs from Husserl (and also from Kant who furnished the model for these three passive syntheses) in that the third and final synthesis, far

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from succeeding in the attempt to create a global object, represents a failed synthesis. In Husserl, passive synthesis produced an individuated object which was given, across the space of the life-world, to an active ego which could take up that object and, through progressive variations, pass judgments and formulate truths regarding that object.29 In Deleuze, passivity is unable to individuate the object. It is the failure of bodily synthesis to account for its affections that leads to the creation of an incorporeal surface and a new kind of synthesis. Thus, to continue our narrative, the third stage of the dynamic genesis refers to a new kind of synthesis, the disjunctive, and along with it a new kind of sexuality, oedipal sexuality. This synthesis begins just as the previous two did. Just as the second synthesis took the products of the first as its object, this synthesis will try to take both the first and the second synthesis as its object and bring them together into one image. However, in oedipal sexuality Deleuze introduces a new distinction between an intended action and an actually accomplished action (206–07). The child, or the synthesizing ego, intends to bring two images together in a synthesis, but actually ends by affirming their incompatibility in an ‘affirmative’ or an ‘inclusive disjunctive synthesis’.30 Deleuze says that the intended action belongs to the physical surface, but that the actually accomplished action moves us to an entirely different surface, the metaphysical surface of sense or what we referred to above as secondary organization (207–08). And indeed, oedipal sexuality is the last stage of the dynamic genesis. The advent of the disjunctive synthesis and the problems which it produces is also the beginning of the ‘metaphysical’ or ‘cerebral’ surface of sense. Oedipal sexuality, or the third synthesis, begins by ‘splitting’ the good object into two separate images: the maternal body and the phallus (205). These two images contained in the good object are images of the preceding stages of the genesis (cf. 226). The ‘mother-image’, or the ‘maternal body’ refers to the first synthesis or the nursing infant’s confrontation with materiality (187, 204). The ‘father-image’, on the other hand, is the image of the phallus, or the principle of organization in the second synthesis. The attempt to bring these two images together represents the child’s intention, a ‘willed action’, an ‘action = X’ or an ‘action in general’ (207). Here Deleuze is clearly following the Kantian model of synthesis. The first passive synthesis was a reinterpretation of the Kantian synthesis of apprehension. It was the imagination’s survey of its affections. The second passive synthesis, insofar as it was the coordination and recuperation of the apprehended, is the correlate of Kant’s synthesis of reproduction. In this third synthesis, what is at issue is whether or not the ego can accomplish a synthesis of recognition.31 Can the ego recognize the compatibility of the first synthesis (the mother-image) with the second (the father-image)? Deleuze’s answer is that it can’t. Recognition fails. In contrast to the intended action, what actually happens is that the synthesis fails and the incompatibility of the previous positions comes to light. The two

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images which the good object had contained are found to be incompatible. The mother, in fact, has no organizing principle (phallus). Her body stands for the immediate corporeal present. The father, however, stands for a principle of unity which has abstracted itself from that present. There is an irresolvable discrepancy between these two, between the partial objects and their unity. From the point of view of the ego’s attempt to escape the determinism of depth, this synthesis represents the attempt to return to origin and to bring its current state of development in line with its beginnings: in other words, it is the attempt to make sense of its affections and to integrate its own history into one thought. But this is impossible, and it has the effect of pushing the ego even further away from the depths into a space where it finally becomes possible to make sense of its affection: ‘sense’. From the point of view of a phenomenology of perception it represents the attempt of the ego to recognize a unified series of perceptions in a chaotic series.

Sense Castration It is at this point that the transcendental field of sense is produced. This production depends heavily on the preceding stage of the genesis. The consequence of the oedipal stage is that the child loses his or her phallus. He or she is ‘castrated’. To be castrated means nothing more than to lose a principle of organization: the phallus, or the conjunctive synthesis of partial surfaces. Thus Deleuze writes that castration ‘marks the failure or illness, the premature mold, the way in which the surface prematurely rots, and the surface line [that had united partial surfaces] rejoins the deep Spaltung [fissure or crack] . . .’ (206). To say that the ego has been castrated simply means that the ego loses that particular mode of organization which had defined it as a complete physical surface. For this reason ‘castration’ marks the failure of synthesis, and with that failure, the dissolution of the body and of the ego which had accompanied it at every step of the genesis (213). But this line does not only dissolve, and the ego does not entirely disappear. The castrated phallus comes to represent a new kind of synthesis which organizes the dissolved body and ego in a transcendental time and space of organization: secondary organization. Between castration and the metaphysical surface, the ‘phallic line’ (the phallic synthesis of partial surfaces) and our entire ‘sexual history’ which led up to that line is taken up and projected onto another surface. The metamorphoses do not end with the transformation of the phallic line into a trace of castration on the physical or corporeal surface. We must also concede that the trace of castration corresponds to a crack marking an entirely different incorporeal and metaphysical surface [. . .]. (208)

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In place of the ‘still intact phallus’ of the physical surface, we receive a new principle of organization: the ‘castrated phallus’ of the metaphysical surface (228). Deleuze has many names for this new principle of organization: the ‘object = x’, the ‘quasi-cause’, and the ‘aleatory point’. But what I want to emphasize is that ‘castration’ and the concomitant move to another kind of surface comes back, in the end, to a new kind of organization. This new mode of organization, ‘secondary organization’, produces a surface of ‘thought’ at once freed from its corporeal origins but at the same time still in possession of those origins (here too Deleuze appears unexpectedly Hegelian). This transcendence and recuperation are accomplished by two mechanisms with roots that are as much Hegelian as they are Freudian: sublimation and symbolization.

Sublimation and symbolization When the body and its ego dissolve, their contents are subject to a double process of sublimation and symbolization. ‘Sublimation’ refers to ‘the operation through which the sexual surface and the rest [i.e. the surface of the body along with the earlier stages genesis that led to that surface] are projected at the surface of thought’ (219). Deleuze gives a particularly vivid description of this process in relation to the ego: it is ‘the movement by which the ego opens itself to the surface and liberates the a-cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual singularities which it had imprisoned. It literally releases them like spores and bursts as it gets unburdened’ (LS 213; cf. 222). In other words, while the body itself dissolves, its contents become projected, ‘sublimated’, onto the transcendental surface of ‘thought’. Through this sublimation the material fragments which had affected the body in the primary order have become immaterial or incorporeal. They have been ‘liberated’ and distributed in a ‘nomadic distribution’ outside of the constraints imposed on them by the body.32 In Difference and Repetition Deleuze calls these immaterial fragments ‘ideal elements’. They are the meaningless fragments between which differential relations will be established by an ‘aleatory point’. This process produces what Deleuze calls in both books the ‘event’ or transcendental Idea (LS 48ff., DR 191ff.). The new surface of thought is not defined by its contents however, but specifically by the new mode of organization to which it submits the liberated affections. At the same time that everything is recovered at the surface through sublimation, it is also reorganized or ‘symbolized’. ‘Symbolization’ refers to ‘the operation through which thought reinvests with its own energy all that which occurs and is projected over the surface’ (219). How does thought reinvest these images? ‘The answer is that thought does it in the guise of the Event. It does it with the part of the event that we should call non-actualizable, precisely because it belongs to thought and can be accomplished only by thought and in thought’ (220). The nonactualizable part of the event, what Deleuze calls the ‘Event’, is the ‘castrated phallus’, or the principle of organization which comes

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to replace the ‘still intact phallus’ of the physical surface. The Event is the aleatory point mentioned above which runs through the sublimated ideal elements and establishes differential relations between them, thereby producing events or ‘Ideas’. Deleuze describes this new mode of organization in several ways which all amount to the same thing. Whether he calls it the aleatory point, the disjunctive synthesis, a question, a castrated phallus, the instant as ‘a being of reason’ in Aion, the verb, Eventum tantum or univocal Being,33 it always refers to a synthesis which makes all of the sublimated fragments of our sexual history communicate or ‘resonate’ on the surface of thought. When the physical surface dissolves, each thing opens itself up to the infinity of predicates though which it passes, as it loses its center, that is, its identity as a concept or as self. The communication of events replaces the exclusion of predicates. We have already seen the procedure of this affirmative synthetic disjunction: it consists of the erection of a paradoxical instance, an aleatory point with two uneven faces which traverses the divergent series as divergent and causes them to resonate through their distance and in their distance. (174) The aleatory point runs through the series of ideal elements and makes them communicate. Earlier in the book, Deleuze describes this synthesis from the point of view of the new form of time, Aion, which corresponds to the immateriality of thought or sense: The Aion is the straight line [of empty time] traced by the aleatory point. The singular points of each event are distributed over this line, always in relation to the aleatory point which subdivides them ad infinitum, and causes them to communicate with each other, as it extends and stretches them out over the entire line. Each event is adequate to the entire Aion; each event communicates with all the others, and they all form one and the same Event. (64) This new organization by ‘inclusive disjunction’, ‘communication’, or ‘resonance’ defines the form of the transcendental field or the metaphysical surface. It is a new kind of synthesis which Deleuze will call ‘eternal return’ or, in Difference and Repetition, the ‘ideal synthesis of difference’. The importance of these two notions—sublimation and symbolization—from the point of view of genesis is that they describe the way in which, through a logic of ‘double causality’, the transcendental field is able to attain independence from its material cause. First sublimation transfers material fragments to a new register: thought. The fragments thus become incorporeal. But in linking up with the aleatory point, or the quasi-cause in symbolization, events take on a new point of reference. They no longer attest to their material cause because

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they are swept away in a new synthesis. They are no longer the partial objects which had affected us, but refer to one another by virtue of the communication which the aleatory point brings about. This communication of liberated affections in a transcendental synthesis defines the impersonal transcendental field of sense.34

Eternal return and counter-actualization By approaching The Logic of Sense from the point of view of genesis and by clearly establishing the order in which this genesis unfolds, we can give simple and clear definitions to two difficult concepts developed in this book: eternal return and counter-actualization. The two processes described above, sublimation and symbolization, are also two aspects of the eternal return and its relation to two types of becoming: the becoming of corporeal depths and the incorporeal becoming of the metaphysical surface.35 The first moment of the eternal return expresses the way in which our sexual history returns to the surface of thought. Sublimation takes place in the ‘phantasm’. The phantasm is ‘the site of the eternal return’ (220). This is because it returns to its beginning which remained external to it (castration); but to the extent that that beginning itself was a result, the phantasm also returns to that from which the beginning had resulted (the sexuality of corporeal surfaces); and finally, little by little, it returns to the absolute origin from which everything proceeds (the depths). (219) This is the first aspect of the eternal return: the recovery of our sexual history on the surface of thought. The return here is a return to genetic origins, or rather the way those origins are sublimated, or return to, the metaphysical surface. The second aspect of the eternal return expresses the way in which, once on the cerebral surface, all of the events communicate with, or ‘return to one another’ in the Event (179). It is an eternal return . . . of pure events which the instant, displaced over the line, goes on dividing into already past and yet to come. Nothing other than the Event subsists, the Event alone, Eventum tantum for all contraries [cf. LS 4–7], which communicates with itself through its own distance and resonates across all its disjuncts. (176; cf.178) The ‘return’ here, is the way in which each sublimated element communicates with, or returns to, all the others by virtue of the aleatory point which unites them in a synthesis. These two aspects of the eternal return have the function of liberating thought from its material origins. In projecting the matter of

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sensation onto the surface in the form of ideal elements (first aspect) and then by making all of these communicate in relation to the Event (second act), the transcendental field no longer refers to its material cause, but to the ‘quasicause’ (the Event) which defines it. Counter-actualization is the way in which thought maintains its independence from materiality. For Deleuze, thought is characterized by a persistent fragility. There is always the possibility that the corporeal depth, the material cause of sense, might make its way to the metaphysical surface and overturn it. ‘Nothing is more fragile than the surface’ (82)—a surface which Deleuze compares to porcelain resting on top of the volcanic line of depths (cf. DR 227, 241; LS 154ff.). For this reason sense needs a way of holding the depths at bay and maintaining the independence of thought. This role is filled by ‘counteractualization’ (168), and specifically by the nonactualizable part of the event—the aleatory point, the castrated phallus, the Event, and so on. From this point of view, counter-actualization would simply seem to be another word to add to this list of synonyms for the aleatory point. It simply names one of its functions: to maintain independence from matter. But counter-actualization is often presented as an ethical principle (149ff.).36 Deleuze says that ‘it is here that our greatest freedom lies’ (212; cf. 152). We should understand this in a rather traditional way. Counter-actualization holds the determinism of depths at a distance. It represents our freedom from mechanism. Whether or not there really is a mechanical determinism matters little from the point of view of the subject who lives the depths. What matters is that it is tossed around uncontrollably and unpredictably in the communication of bodies. Counter-actualization represents the way in which thought is no longer determined by its affections, the way in which it makes sure that its escape is not temporary, and that it remains free to ‘develop and lead the event to its completion’ (212; cf. 161). In holding the corporeal depths at a distance, counter-actualization represents the autonomy of thought in relation to the relative determinism of its affections.

Deleuze and Blanchot What Deleuze calls ‘sense’ corresponds very closely to what Blanchot calls the space of the ‘work’ or ‘literary space’. Not only do they both compare this space to a throw of the dice, but they both ascribe to it the same time (Aion); they both describe it as an impersonal transcendental field which founds a genesis of the empirical or the ‘everyday’; and both Deleuze and Blanchot describe the dynamics of this field in almost the exact same way. There is not enough space here to describe these similarities in detail. But I do want to take the simplest definition Blanchot gives of the literary space and suggest that it can give us a concrete understanding of what Deleuze means by ‘sense’. In his essay, ‘The Book to Come’,37 Blanchot describes the literary space as

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the place of extreme vacancy where, before becoming determined and denotative words, language is the silent movement of relationships, that is to say ‘the rhythmic scansion of being’. Words are always there only to designate the extent of their connections: the space where they are projected and which, scarcely designated, is folded and bent, not actually existing anywhere it is [. . . .]. A sentence [phrase] is not content with unfolding in a linear way; it opens up. This opening allows to be arranged, extricated, spaced, and compressed, at depths of different levels, other movements of phrases [phrases], other rhythms of words, which are related to each other according to firm determinations of structure, though foreign to ordinary logic—the logic of subordination—which destroys the space and makes the movement uniform. (235–36; (fr.) 286–87; my emphasis; translation modified) Blanchot describes this space as one which is folded and bent and which attests to another logic, a logic of sense, in which words are related to one another in mobile structures. It is indistinguishable from a throw of the dice (236), in which words and sentences are defined not by their significations, manifestations, or denotations, but entirely by the mobile connections between them.38 This space is almost exactly what Deleuze called sense. Blanchot’s mobile structures correspond to Deleuze’s events, problems, or Ideas which are defined precisely, as I describe below, by the relations established between ideal elements, and the variation of these relations which is determined by ‘a throw of the dice’ or the aleatory point. According to Blanchot however, this transcendental space, far from being something exceptional and foreign to our ordinary experience, is ‘something we achieve at every moment in everyday language’ (Space 195). We regularly experience this transcendental space of the work in our everyday use of language.39 As we saw in the first chapter, Paul Ricoeur described Husserl’s philosophy as a ‘transcendental empiricism’ because it implied an experience of the transcendental.40 The same is true of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, and, despite the rather abstract terms which define sense, this transcendental field is something which we experience concretely every time we try to make sense of something. As Ian Buchanan puts it, ‘the event is the sense we make of what happens’ (Buchanan 79; original emphasis).41 The aleatory point, or what Deleuze calls in Anti-Oedipus the ‘nomadic subject’42 which tours and affirms all of the fragments suspended in the neutrality of sense, is the action of our own minds whenever we try to make sense of something. We are the aleatory point. When we are confronted by a problem, we become the nomadic subject or the aleatory point. The ‘problem’, or the event, Deleuze says, ‘does not at all express a subjective uncertainty, but, on the contrary, it expresses the objective equilibrium of a mind situated in front of the horizon of what happens or what appears: Is it Richard or William?’ (LS 57; my emphasis). Reformulated in the form of an inclusive disjunction, we ask: is it A or B or both? Richard,

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William or Rilchiam?43 In this passage the situation of the mind confronting the horizon of what appears is very similar to that of Husserl’s active ego confronting, in the life-world, the objects produced in passivity which I described in the previous chapter.44 When Deleuze says the ‘horizon of what happens or what appears’ he means all of those ideal elements which were sublimated when the sexual surface collapsed, but which took the entire dynamic genesis to transform into a content suitable for thought. The mind which confronts this horizon is nothing more than the aleatory point. The nomadic subject is the mind which surveys its affections in an attempt to make sense of them by progressively determining connections between the ideal elements and thereby producing an Idea of what is happening by subdividing it into what has already happened and what is about to happen. The aleatory point is not an obscure ‘structuralist’ principle then, but the mind itself in front of a problem, and the virtual, or sense, is the transcendental field, the form of determinability, in which the mind is free to construct mobile connections and form Ideas regarding its affections.

Static genesis The dynamic genesis was the process in which the transcendental field of sense was produced by submitting the body’s affections to a regime of passive syntheses. This genesis came to an end with the failure of the third passive synthesis, the sublimation of the affections onto an incorporeal surface, and the symbolization of those affections in a new synthesis. In contrast to this dynamic genesis, the static genesis is the process by which the mind will return to materiality, or to that unindividuated world of affection of the primary order, but in doing so will individuate it and give it a determinate form, quality, and temporality. The static genesis moves from sense to representation. The static genesis, more often referred to as the actualization of events, is described in much greater detail in Difference and Repetition. In fact, whereas the dynamic genesis was developed in a relatively linear fashion in the last third of The Logic of Sense, the static genesis is explicitly described in only two short chapters: ‘The Static Logical Genesis’ and ‘The Static Ontological Genesis’. In the remainder of this chapter I briefly describe these two geneses and outline the significant stages in the same way that I did for the dynamic genesis. The ‘logical’ and ‘ontological’ geneses are two different static geneses which together express the movement from the transcendental field of sense, or secondary organization, to the tertiary order of the proposition, or consciousness. The reason that there are two geneses, one logical and one ontological, is that every proposition has a referent.

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It appears that sense . . . is doubly generative: not only does it engender the logical proposition with its determinate dimensions (denotation, manifestation, and signification); it also engenders the objective correlates of this proposition which were themselves first produced as ontological propositions (the denoted, the manifested, and the signified). (120; my emphasis)45 This passage makes two things clear. First it clarifies the relation and the difference between the logical and ontological geneses. The static logical genesis refers to the production of the three dimensions of the proposition itself: denotation, manifestation, and signification. The static ontological genesis refers to the production of what is actually denoted, manifested, and signified. The two geneses are thus opposed to one another as signifier (logical) and signified (ontological). They produce and develop the distinction between the two series of words and things which governs, roughly, the first two-thirds of The Logic of Sense.46 The second thing that this passage tells us is that the ontological genesis comes first. First the denoted, the manifested, and the signified are constituted. Then they become incorporated into a propositional consciousness.

Static ontological genesis: good and common sense The static ontological genesis ascends from sense to the proposition by passing though what Deleuze calls the forms of good and common sense. Good sense defines the first stage of the ontological genesis, and common sense defines the second. Good sense takes over where the dynamic genesis left off. When the singularities burst out of the dissolved ego they did not do so in any set order and neither did the aleatory point put them in one. As Deleuze had already stressed in Difference and Repetition, it is absolutely essential that the relations and variations of relations which the aleatory point establishes between the ideal elements be arbitrary (or aleatory) (DR 198–200). This is why Deleuze calls the distribution of singularities a ‘nomadic distribution’. The primary function of good sense is to begin the containment of these singularities and to enclose them within a ‘sedentary distribution’. As Deleuze says, good sense is ‘agricultural, inseparable from the agrarian problem, the establishment of enclosures . . .’ (76). It represents the way in which the transcendental field, traversed by a nomadic subject, becomes cordoned off. Good sense fixes beginnings and ends (78). It establishes territories. In the language of Anti-Oedipus and his later works with Guattari, it is ‘territorializing’. But as soon as good sense has begun its work, it is taken up by common sense. Common sense submits these territories to two forms: the form of the object and the form of the subject.

42

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation Subjectively, common sense subsumes under itself the various faculties of the soul, or the differentiated organs of the body and brings them to bear upon a unity capable of saying ‘I’. One and the same self breathes, sleeps, walks, eats. [. . .]. Objectively, common sense subsumes under itself the given diversity and relates it to the particular form of object [. . .]. (78)

Objective common sense, by subsuming a given diversity and relating it to the form of an object, grounds denotation. It makes possible the constitution of the denoted object. Subjective common sense, in engendering a ‘unity capable of saying ‘I’’, grounds manifestation. It makes possible the presence of a speaking subject. We might notice that subjective common sense seems to correspond to Kant’s unity of apperception whereas objective common sense corresponds to Kant’s transcendental object, or object = x. There are two significant differences between Deleuze’s notions and Kant’s however. It is obvious, first of all, that as soon as good sense begins territorializing the transcendental field, common sense begins its work. This means that neither of these two forms are pure or empty forms. Rather they are born of the body’s affections and work on an indeterminate content. This is closely related to the second important difference. Deleuze says that good sense and common sense are ‘undermined by paradox’. This does not mean, however, that they can be left behind because we have discovered some other notion that will replace them. It is not as if Deleuze does away with the form of the object and the form of the subject altogether. Rather, he argues that these forms need to be produced rather than simply given. This is why Deleuze says that good sense and common sense are ‘undermined’ by paradox understood as ‘the principle of their production’ (117; my emphasis). In other words, they are undermined only from the point of view of the regressive endeavor which attempts to seek the genetic origins of these forms without presupposing them. But, from the point of view of genesis, paradox does not undermine them so much as it actually produces them. Because these forms were treated as given in Kant, he called his philosophy a transcendental idealism. For Deleuze, on the other hand, these forms are produced in the interaction between the body and its affections. They presuppose an experience of the unindividuated world and of the transcendental field. This is why Deleuze called his philosophy a transcendental empiricism. It does not presuppose an already given form, but produces form from a primordial or ‘savage’ experience. Because they are not meant to be discarded but represent essential stages in the production of representation, these two notions—good sense and common sense—come to serve as the first two stages of the static ontological genesis (115–16). Together they explain the way in which the sublimated contents of the transcendental field are cordoned off into territories (good sense) which are then subsumed under the form of the subject and the object (subjective

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and objective common sense). Together good and common sense make the nomadic distribution a ‘sedentary’ one. They bring the events of sense within the stable forms of an object and a subject so that they can function in the proposition (76). These two moments of the static genesis describe the production of the denoted and the manifested. What about the signified? The third stage of the ontological genesis—the concept, or the signified—presupposes these first two stages, and in particular the subjective form of common sense. This is because the concept has, for Deleuze, a degree of generality which neither the denoted object nor the manifested subject possess by themselves (112). This generality is a consequence of the stability of the subject and its capacity to retain a degree of self-identity across different worlds. In the immediate confrontation with an object, as in denotation, each predicate is a singularity in the Husserlian sense of that word. ‘When a predicate is attributed to an individual subject, it does not enjoy any degree of generality; having a color is no more general than being green’ (112). Or, as he says a little later, ‘This rose is not red without having the red color of this rose’ (112; my emphasis). Without subjective common sense, red will always be this singular red, here and now, and the sense ‘red’ will change with each different rose. With the advent of subjective common sense, ‘One and the same self breathes, sleeps, walks, eats’ (78). The subject is no longer tied to the conditions of its emergence. The same subject crosses different worlds, and it is only under this condition that generality becomes possible (112). When the ‘person’47 enters the garden mentioned above, the garden ‘may contain a red rose, but there are in other worlds or in other gardens roses which are not red and flowers which are not roses’ (115). It is only by being able to maintain an identity across other worlds, or gardens, that the subject is able to make connections between these different worlds and thus form a general concept of individuals.

Static logical genesis Because of the relationship between the concept and generality, the production of the signified moves us to the order of language and to the static logical genesis. Deleuze writes that this third element of the ontological genesis . . . is not embodied in a third proposition which would again be ontological. Rather, this element sends us over to another order of the proposition, and constitutes the condition or the form of possibility of the logical proposition in general. (118; my emphasis) Language is born with generality. Deleuze seems to have in mind something like Nietzsche’s description of the relation between concepts and words in his essay ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’. Words are concepts for

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Nietzsche in the sense that they subsume under themselves a given diversity. ‘Just as it is certain that no leaf is ever exactly the same as any other leaf, it is equally certain that the concept “leaf” is formed by dropping these individual differences arbitrarily’ (Nietzsche 145). For him, words are at the heart of concept formation because they never designate the thing in its irreducible individuality. The word ‘leaf’ always means the concept leaf, and not a particular leaf. The form of the person sends us over to the order of language by producing a relatively stable subject. It thus opens up the possibility of generality. The subject is no longer tied to the immediacy of its affections, but now persists across an encounter with a multiplicity of leaves. While the actual process of concept formation is not clear in The Logic of Sense, it is clear that the generality of the concept presupposes a stable subject and that this same stability makes language possible. In Deleuze, it seems, it is not language which determines the possibilities of the subject, but rather the subject which determines the possibilities of language. ‘Language does not seem possible without this subject which expresses and manifests itself in it, and which says what it does’ (78; my emphasis). Deleuze presents these arguments at the beginning of the chapter titled ‘The Static Logical Genesis’. But, unfortunately, he never actually develops this genesis beyond that statement. Unlike his relatively detailed development of the ontological genesis and the dynamic genesis, he does not continue to describe the production of the different dimensions of the logical proposition. Instead he spends the rest of the chapter anticipating the dynamic genesis. If we can say anything about the logical proposition, it seems that it is simply a formal space which takes on its three dimensions by focusing on one of the three elements produced in the ontological genesis (119). But because Deleuze ends his account of the process of production here, I will too.

Deleuze and psychoanalysis But before concluding, I want to briefly contextualize the claim I have repeated throughout this chapter that Deleuze’s employment of a psychoanalytical vocabulary should not be read as an active engagement with the problems and methods of a theoretical psychoanalysis. Despite the fact that Deleuze develops the entire dynamic genesis within the language of psychoanalysis, he nonetheless puts psychoanalysis at the service of a transcendental phenomenology. This is not as strange as it sounds if we remember that one of the fundamental problems of transcendental phenomenology as it manifested itself in France was to describe how meaning could be produced out of a completely meaningless corporeal experience. This problem animates Paul Ricoeur’s 1965 interpretation of Freud in Freud and Philosophy.48 In this book Ricoeur clearly develops the problem of the genesis of sense within the framework

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of Freudian psychoanalysis. How does Freud’s metapsychology, which explains psychic phenomena from the point of view of an economic, energetic, and therefore meaningless discourse, relate to Freud’s more popular, interpretive approach in which successive meanings are uncovered by the analyst? What is the relation between a meaningless libidinal economy and a meaningful psychology? It is true that Ricoeur claims that the economic approach goes beyond phenomenology because it leaves the problem of consciousness behind: it does not involve ‘a reduction to consciousness but a reduction of consciousness’ (Ricoeur, Freud 424). For Ricoeur, psychoanalysis takes us beyond the point of view of consciousness to that of its genesis in an impersonal transcendental field. But at the same time, Ricoeur also suggests that phenomenology might have already attained this point of view: ‘In this regard the later Husserl indicates the area and direction of research when he structures all investigation of constitution upon a passive genesis’ (425). In other words, when Ricoeur talks of the ‘antiphenomenological’ nature of the theory of libidinal economy, he is opposing it only to a static phenomenology which excludes the consideration of passive genesis. Psychoanalysis and the passive genesis of later Husserl are entirely compatible with one another. The Husserl that Deleuze engages with is precisely the ‘later Husserl’ which Ricoeur mentions, and, in particular, the problem of ‘passive genesis’ in later Husserl which I described above. Ricoeur goes further, however, and even isolates the point at which an economic Freudianism might meet up with the notion of passive genesis in Husserl: the theory of instincts (Freud 393ff.). This is no doubt why, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze renames the three corporeal and passive syntheses as ‘Habitus’, ‘Eros’, and ‘Thanatos’, and then shows how the empirical structures of consciousness, which are related to the active syntheses, are founded on these three passive syntheses. He reformulates the Freudian instincts as passive syntheses in a new description of the unconscious which elides the Husserlian conception with the Freudian. Deleuze himself articulated this ‘transcendental’ approach to psychoanalysis in several important passages. In Coldness and Cruelty (and again in Difference and Repetition) Deleuze says that in his metapsychological papers Freud engaged not in psychological reflection but in ‘philosophical reflection’, where ‘Philosophical investigation should be understood as “transcendental’’’ (CC 111; cf. DR 96). Deleuze repeats this claim again in relation to Lacan who, for Deleuze, says more clearly than anybody else that ‘empirical psychology is not only founded, but determined by a transcendental topology’ (DI 174). Deleuze’s approach to psychoanalysis takes place entirely within this ‘philosophical’ or ‘transcendental’ context in which a libidinal economy, under the influence of the instincts reformulated as passive syntheses, acts as the genetic condition of an empirical psychology. Deleuze takes up psychoanalysis only when it becomes ‘metapsychological’ or ‘transcendental’, which is to say once it takes up the question of the constitution of sense within an economic, or purely meaningless and

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material, given. The Deleuzian unconscious is not the conflictual unconscious of repressed meanings but is simply the body, its affections, and its drives or its syntheses. This is not a critique of the Freudian unconscious. It bears on something entirely different: the conditions for the possibility of anything resembling a meaningful unconscious.49 Deleuze’s unconscious is a transcendental and differential unconscious defined, as we will see below, by the confrontation of three passive syntheses with the intensities presented by a transcendental sensibility.50

Conclusion We can now fill out the schematic representation of genesis that I provided above. Between the primary order and secondary organization lies the entire

Tertiary Order: The Logical Proposition and Empirical Consciousness

Static Ontological Genesis

(Denotation, Signification, Manifestation)

Common Sense (The Signified and the Manifested)

Good Sense (The Denoted)

Secondary Organization: Sense, Aleatory Point, Univocal Being Empty form of time

Dynamic Genesis

Disjunctive Synthesis (Dissolution of the Body, Sublimation, Symbolization)

Conjunctive Synthesis (Complete Corporeal Surface)

Connective Synthesis (Partial Corporeal Surfaces)

Primary Order: Corporeal/Material Depths, Schizophrenia, Body Without Organs, Movement

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dynamic genesis, its egos and its syntheses. Between secondary organization and the tertiary order lie the ontological and logical static geneses. The entire genesis, taken in its totality expresses the movement from the body to representations in consciousness. For that reason, it is not hard to see its relationship to the concerns of late Husserl. But we might also notice that The Logic of Sense represents a phenomenology according to Deleuze’s own definition. In Foucault, Deleuze defined phenomenology as a philosophy which maintained the possibility of a prelinguistic or ‘savage’ experience. 51 If language presupposes the form of generality, and generality the form of the person, and if the entire static genesis presupposes sense and its production, than the entire genesis presented here, except for the very last stage, represents a description of a prelinguistic, prepredicative, and savage experience.52

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Part II

Anti-Oedipus

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Chapter 3

The Material Reduction and Schizogenesis Introduction Anti-Oedipus, and the long partnership with Guattari that grew out of it, is usually interpreted as representing a decisive break with Deleuze’s earlier work. I want to argue here however that this is not at all the case. Published three years after The Logic of Sense, Anti-Oedipus is a direct continuation of the themes and structures I outlined in the previous chapter. It is true that there is virtually no significant continuity of technical terms between the two books. Jean-Jacques Lecercle notes throughout Deleuze and Language almost all of the significant differences between The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus: Deleuze drops the theme of surfaces, of phantasms, of structure, of depths, of paradox, good sense, common sense, the emphasis on sense and propositional form, and so on. This list could go on but the point is made: there is virtually no continuity between the two books. What I want to show over the next two chapters however is that at a formal level there is indeed a very significant overlap which prevents us from declaring a radical break in Deleuze’s thought. Anti-Oedipus develops a theory of the genesis of representation which is strikingly similar in shape to the one developed in The Logic of Sense. In addition to this formal argument there are at least two more reasons that should encourage us to hesitate before concluding that the discontinuity between Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense represents a radical turning point in Deleuze’s thought—a move from a pre-Guattari, structuralist, and psychoanalytic Deleuze, to a post-Guattari, poststructuralist, and antipsychoanalytic Deleuze. First, Guattari repeatedly complained that he was unable to ‘recognize’ himself in Anti-Oedipus.1 While there can be no doubt that many of the themes and concepts from Guattari’s letters to Deleuze worked their way into the final text of Anti-Oedipus, it is just as clear that the entire conceptual structure and formal network which gives a determinate sense to those concepts was entirely absent from the letters, and as we will see, it is precisely because of Deleuze’s impressive orchestration of concepts that Guattari found his influence lacking. It therefore seems unlikely that the difference can be attributed in any great degree to Guattari’s influence. Second, we cannot forget that the apparent break between Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense is no greater than the break between The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. Indeed, many

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of the themes which Lecercle finds absent in Anti-Oedipus are absent from Difference and Repetition as well. And if we widened the set of texts under consideration, we would find that there is significant discontinuity in the technical vocabulary Deleuze employs between all of his books. The real task is to show what they have in common. Despite the absence of many of The Logic of Sense’s themes, the most significant theme does in fact carry over: that of genesis. In Anti-Oedipus we find the central problem to be that of the production of representation and of a Husserlian subject—a subject, that is, which is nothing more than its constant genesis. The difference is that here, ‘genesis’ is called ‘process of production’. This overall process of production is split into two smaller processes: desiringproduction and social production. Can we call these two processes of production ‘dynamic genesis’ and ‘static genesis?’ To what degree does the process of production in Anti-Oedipus draw from or correspond to the geneses of The Logic of Sense? This is the primary question of the next three chapters. I argue that there is no significant difference between the two geneses except for the words used to describe them. In this first chapter I want to show how Deleuze and Guattari’s various criticisms of Kant, structuralism, and psychoanalysis lay the ground for the theory of genetic constitution that they develop in Anti-Oedipus. In the following two chapters I describe that genesis in detail and show the degree to which it corresponds to the genesis Deleuze already elaborated by himself in The Logic of Sense.

The critique of Oedipus and the material reduction At the end of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari write an odd sentence which seems to have little relation to the surrounding text: ‘It is certain that psychoanalysis has not made its pictorial revolution’ (AO 352). In order for psychoanalysis to become a ‘rigorous discipline’, it requires a ‘pictorial revolution’. This sentence echoes another in Difference and Repetition which might encompass both Deleuze’s entire philosophical undertaking and the way in which he carried it out: ‘The theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the theory of thought without image’ (DR 276).2 The Logic of Sense provided one such theory of thought without image (if ‘image’ can be assimilated to ‘representation’ as in the preceding quote). In that book it took two geneses to bring the subject under the form of representation. It was only in the third stage of the static genesis that the tertiary order of the proposition became dominant. The rest of the subject, or process of production, was sub-representative. Its experience was a ‘savage experience’. In the language of Difference and Repetition, one could say that such a subject is free from the ‘iron collars of representation’ (DR 262); in the language of Anti-Oedipus, however, you would say that it is free from ‘the iron collar of Oedipus’ (AO 45, 53).

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The critique of Oedipus seems to repeat, at least on a very general level, the central criticisms of the history of philosophy which Deleuze developed in his earlier books and which culminated in Difference and Repetition with his description of a ‘dogmatic image of thought’. The dogmatic image of thought clings to the form of representation and interprets subjectivity in its image. To this dogmatic image Deleuze opposed his own ‘critical image’ or ‘thought without image’. To achieve a critical image of thought, one must, as I argued in the first chapter of this book, bracket the form of representation, or put it ‘out of play’, in order to discover subjectivity as an unending process which produces representation as an effect, but is by no means defined by that product. At its most basic, this critique in both Difference and Repetition and Anti-Oedipus says that the form of representation suppresses and inhibits the discovery of the genetic element of that form. In Anti-Oedipus, desire plays the role that difference does in Difference and Repetition. Desire, like difference, is productive.3 Oedipus, on the other hand, plays the role of ‘representation’. Here Oedipus is presented as a form produced at the end of a long genesis which defines the structure of representation. Deleuze and Guattari’s most general criticism is that by emphasizing the product rather than the process of production we end up completely misunderstanding both. Oedipus is taken as an ideal form, given by right outside of a genesis, and subjectivity becomes a static consciousness closed in on itself. For this reason the three books which I am studying here have similar aims: to rediscover the genesis of representation or its forms without presupposing those forms at the beginning of the genesis. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze gave two reasons for why representation posed a problem—a practical reason and a theoretical reason. Theoretically, representation prevents the discovery of the transcendental, or the process of production. Practically, rather than being affirmed in itself, our entire prepredicative life is reduced to what can be expressed in judgments and their constitutive elements: representations. In Anti-Oedipus these two dimensions form the two aspects of their critique of Oedipus. Theoretically, Oedipus obscures the genetic point of view. Deleuze never criticizes representation because it is inherently bad: without representation we would not have consciousness, nor would we be able to evaluate our environment and make decisions which ensure the repetition of joyful affections. Theoretically, representation poses a problem because its transparency allows us to forget that it is only an epiphenomena whose genesis we need to explain. In other words, because, clearly evoking the spirit of the phenomenological reduction, we inevitably determine the transcendental (genesis of representation) according to the laws and characteristics of the empirical (representation). This is exactly the complaint leveled against Oedipus in Anti-Oedipus, except that the terms have slightly changed: Oedipus gives us a false picture of desire— where desire is the genetic element of ‘reality’—by submitting it to the laws of representation. When a psychoanalyst tries to interpret the lived experience of

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a patient from the point of view of Oedipus, the ‘whole of desiring-production is crushed, subjected to the requirements of representation, and to the dreary games of what is representative and represented in representation’ (AO 54; original emphases). ‘We therefore reproach psychoanalysis for having stifled this order of production, for having shunted it into representation’ (AO 296; cf. 24). This is why psychoanalysis stands in need of the phenomenological reduction. It has, until now, Deleuze and Guattari argue, failed to think the subject outside of the forms of representation, and this seriously compromises its claims to rigor. In order to think subjectivity, one must bracket the form of representation. In a passage which very clearly echoes Husserl and his concerns regarding the scientific rigor of phenomenology, Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘Psychoanalysis cannot become a rigorous discipline unless it accepts putting belief [in the Oedipal structure] in parentheses, which is to say a materialist reduction of Oedipus as an ideological form’ (107; original emphasis). Psychoanalysis needs to bracket the forms of representation in order to rediscover the origin of those forms. If Deleuze and Guattari describe this reduction as a materialist reduction, it is because, as we will see below, that this reduction reveals a primordial material field at the foundation of subjectivity. Practically, Oedipus reduces all experience to the expression of an ideal structure. Deleuze and Guattari consistently emphasize the ‘sheer terrorism’ of analyses like Freud’s analysis of Judge Schreber or Melanie Klein’s analysis of ‘Dick’ in which she teaches a four-year-old autistic boy that the train station in which he parks his toy is in fact his mother and that the train is the child himself: ‘I explained: “The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy’’’ (AO 45; original emphasis). In contrast to this reduction of the child’s experience to expressions of Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that experience should be taken in its diversity without ever trying to fit it within the limits of a form. ‘A child never confines himself to playing house, to playing at being daddyand-mommy. He also plays at being a magician, a cowboy, a cop or robber, a train, a little car. The train is not necessarily daddy, nor is the train station necessarily mommy’ (AO 46). None of these activities are reduced to a symbolic representation of Oedipus. Each is taken in its singularity as an actual and original lived experience of the child (no matter how clichéd that activity might be). Playing house is simply playing house. As they suggest in one passage, to deny the singularity of lived experience, to reduce life to a form, or to ‘oedipalize’ someone is equivalent—to put it politely—to ‘sodomizing’ them: It should be noted that Judge Schreber’s destiny was not merely that of being sodomized, while still alive, by rays from heaven, but also that of being posthumously oedipalized by Freud. From the enormous political, social and historical content of Schreber’s delirium, not one word is retained, as though the libido did not bother itself with such things. (AO 57; original emphasis)

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Anti-Oedipus isn’t so much a critique of psychoanalysis as it is an enormous affirmation of the lived experience of ordinary everyday life. In these passages psychoanalysis appears as a renewed Platonism, or what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘neoidealism’ (308). The Oedipal ‘structure’ (form) finds itself ‘expressed’ (instantiated) in the particularity of experience and becomes the truth and meaning of that experience. The child playing house is no longer repeating a cultural and historical ‘content’ but is giving expression to a transcendent form which makes him or her nothing more than the expression of that form. To this neoidealism of psychoanalysis, and the ‘interpretation’ it requires—where interpretation is the art of making A = B4—Deleuze and Guattari oppose ‘schizoanalysis’ and its ‘experimentation’. Schizoanalysis is the affirmation of the unbounded lived experience of the subject (unbounded by right, but not necessarily in fact). For this reason schizoanalysis implies a specific understanding of a transcendental unconscious which is both essentially open to the outside or to a political, social, and historical content of the subject’s experience and which develops along a course which is not predetermined.5 And indeed, all of the above quotations suggest that this unconscious will not be defined in the Kantian/Psychoanalytic manner of a hardwired structure. The criticism of Oedipus therefore merges with a very general criticism of Kantianism and also of structuralism. At first, in two crucial passages, Deleuze and Guattari seem to elide their position with Kant’s. The process of production begins in the productive or ‘transcendental unconscious’, and (in a classic phenomenological move) Deleuze and Guattari claim that this concern with a transcendental unconscious is precisely what differentiates their approach from a psychoanalytical or ‘psychological’ approach. In a Kantian spirit, they find themselves compelled to say that psychoanalysis has its metaphysics—its name is Oedipus. And that a revolution—this time materialist—can proceed only by way of a critique of Oedipus, by denouncing the illegitimate use of the syntheses of the unconscious as found in Oedipal psychoanalysis, so as to rediscover a transcendental unconscious defined by the immanence of its criteria, and a corresponding practice that we shall call schizoanalysis. (75; my emphasis) This is an important point, and, risking overquoting, I want to quote a similar passage in order to emphasize this transcendental point of view and its relation to Kantianism. Schizoanalysis is at once a transcendental and a materialist analysis. It is critical in the sense that it leads the criticism of Oedipus, or leads Oedipus, to the point of its own self-criticism. It sets out to explore a transcendental unconscious, rather than a metaphysical one; an unconscious that is material rather than ideological; schizophrenic rather than Oedipal; [. . .]; productive rather than expressive. (109–10)

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In both of these passages, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize two things: the Kantian spirit of their endeavor—their emphasis on auto-critique and legitimation—and their criticism of Oedipus in the name of a transcendental but material unconscious. But Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the transcendental differs sharply from Kant’s. I argued at the end of my first chapter that Deleuze makes a decisive break with Kant, and that this break brings to light a distinctive difference between the Kantian and the phenomenological notions of the transcendental. This difference defines the understanding of the transcendental at work in Anti-Oedipus. The Kantian transcendental is formal and conditioning. It contains the forms of possible experience, and, to adopt the language of Anti-Oedipus, these forms are ‘expressed’ in an empirical consciousness. Insofar as these forms are pregiven outside of a genesis, formalism is an idealism. The Deleuzian transcendental on the other hand is productive. This notion of the transcendental comes back to late Husserl who used the word ‘transcendental’ in ‘the special sense, as apodictically necessary for the genesis of a subjectivity (which is indeed only conceivable in genesis)’.6 Genesis doesn’t presuppose ideal forms. It actually produces them at the same time that it produces a subject and the representations which fascinate that subject. The transcendental in Deleuze is the site of the genesis of form rather than a set of pure and pregiven forms. It concerns the real experience of an actual subject rather than the possible experience of an ideal subject. This difference between the two notions is enough to move philosophy from an idealism to an empiricism7 (where the ‘experience’ is that of the body without organs dissolved in partial objects). This is also enough, I would argue, to move Deleuze’s thought out of Kantianism and into phenomenology, since the production of real rather than possible experience—and the explanation of the abstract and its formal logic—was the primary problem of a genetic phenomenology from its inception. Deleuze and Guattari’s criticism of Oedipus is therefore a veiled criticism of Kant which takes for its primary target, as in Deleuze’s earlier work, precisely the notion of a pregiven and formal transcendental. This is why the psychoanalytic version of Oedipus takes the form of an idealism or a ‘neoidealism’ (AO 24).8 But Deleuze and Guattari also criticize structuralism for the very same reasons. Structuralism too posits a pregiven form which is the truth and meaning of lived experience.9 As we have seen, Deleuze and Guattari consistently argue that psychoanalysis ignores the actual lived experience of patients by reducing it to the ‘great monotony’ of an expression of Oedipus. Everything becomes an expression of a general or universal structure (52ff., 306). Structuralism, insofar as it simply posits the existence of these structures outside of a genesis, just like Kantianism, becomes an idealism (55).10 From the point of view of genesis, psychoanalysis, Kantianism and structuralism all share a common fate when Deleuze and Guattari substitute a productive unconscious for a formal one: ‘Production as process overtakes all idealistic categories . . . ’ (5). Structuralism

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is criticized because it put forward an image of thought as the expression of pregiven social structures; Kantianism is criticized because it put forward an image of thought as conditioned by pregiven formal structures. Just as in Deleuze’s independent work, the primary concern of Anti-Oedipus is with genetic constitution or production. ‘Production as process overtakes all idealistic categories . . . ’. This means that the defining characteristic of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, in opposition to the philosophies they criticize, is that it replaces a description of pregiven structures with an account of genesis. Anti-Oedipus must be read from the point of view of production, or of ‘schizogenesis’ (267). Desire is immediately production, a ‘process of production’ or of ‘constitution’ (12). We have seen that their concern with genesis is what grounds the criticisms of representation, form, and structure by acting as that one instance which they all suppress but which also gives rise to them all. It is the point of view of genesis which necessitates a materialist reduction and which replaces the static, idealist theory of subjectivity. But it is also the point of view which comprehends the formal structure and the unity of the book and which therefore allows us, in the two following chapters, to present a relatively complete picture of it. It is true that Anti-Oedipus can be read as a critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and as an attempt at a synthesis of Marx and Freud via Lacan,11 but it accomplishes this synthesis from the point of view of a renewed phenomenology. The book, far from undertaking a completely negative enterprise as its title might suggest, thus has an enormous positive aspect. The positive project of Anti-Oedipus is to understand the unconscious as a process of production, and, as in Deleuze’s earlier works, Anti-Oedipus becomes a ‘systematic phenomenology’, a theory of genetic constitution which supports and undermines its object at the same time.

The material field In their elucidation of the foundation of the transcendental unconscious, Deleuze and Guattari consistently insist on one point: the transcendental unconscious is not closed in on itself in a radical solipsism. Rather, it is ‘open to the outside’. At first this might seem to be an implicit critique of Husserl, but as we saw in the first chapter of this book, it is only the Husserl of Ideas that confidently held on to a theory of a solipsistic ego, and even there Husserl seems to waver between solipsism and impersonality. It is almost as if the confidence of his statements regarding the ego were the index of a deeper uncertainty. In fact, for Levinas, ‘What is most interesting about the Husserlian conception [of consciousness] is its having put contact with the world at the very heart of the being of consciousness’ (TI 43; cf. 63 and 71). And Merleau-Ponty will directly allude to this aspect of Levinas’s interpretation of Husserl in his own theory of perception in the Phenomenology of Perception (PP 256–57). At the very

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heart of the being of consciousness for Husserl then, is contact with the world or with ‘the outside’. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘desiring-production’ is immediately ‘social production’. It is precisely this ‘outside’, or the coimplication of desiring and social production that the material reduction allows Deleuze and Guattari describe. It is this field at the foot of schizogenesis in which consciousness touches the world that I want to briefly describe in the remainder of this chapter. What do Deleuze and Guattari mean by desiring-production and social production and how does their implication relate to a subjectivity opened on to the outside? The duality between desire and the social is first developed in relation to Kant’s theory of productive desire elaborated in the Critique of Practical Reason (and the duality maintains this primary sense throughout the book—even, I will argue, through the discussions of universal history and the theory of various modes of social production which at first glance appear more Marxist than Kantian).12 According to Deleuze and Guattari, for Kant, desire produces objects, but these objects are produced only in the absence of a real, present object given in intuition. Desire, internal to the subject, produces objects, but absent, imaginary objects. The real object has its own process of production which is completely external to the imagination’s process of production:' . . . we are all well aware that the real object can be produced only by an external causality and external mechanisms . . . ’ (AO 25). In this description of the Kantian model, social production represents the objective production of a real object without any contribution from thought. This production by an external causality and external mechanism is what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘social production’ in Kant because the object is individuated not in immanence, but in a public world or nature. ‘Desiring-production’, from the Kantian point of view, refers to the work of the productive imagination. The objects it produces are merely fantasies and representations of real objects which are no longer present. Desiring-production is therefore said to lack its object and produces only empty representations lacking any claim to reality. [T]he real object that desire lacks is related to an extrinsic natural or social production, whereas desire intrinsically produces an imaginary object that functions as a double of reality, as though there were a ‘dreamed-of object behind every real object’, or a mental production behind all real productions. (25–26; my emphasis; cf. 28) There is a clear duality at work in this passage between mental productions and real productions, subjects and objects, inside and outside, desiring-production and social production. The duality between desiring-production and social production repeats the classic division between subject and object. The Kantian understanding of ‘desiring-production’ associates it exclusively with the order

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of the subject and its ‘dreamed-of’ mental objects whereas ‘social production’ belongs to the order of the object in all of its reality and its certainty. Social production is guaranteed objectivity by virtue of its external causality while the productions of subjectivity are relegated to the word of dream or fantasy. Even if Deleuze and Guattari’s entire description of the transcendental unconscious will be directed toward destabilizing this duality, the redesignation of these traditional philosophical terms (subject and object) as desiring-production and social production goes a long way toward explaining what is happening in Anti-Oedipus. The Kantian model assumes, a priori, a distinction between subject and object which results in a series of philosophical positions Deleuze and Guattari will try to avoid.13 First, it ‘personologizes’ desiring-production or subjectivity (55, 24). By instituting the subject-object split prior to the advent of the transcendental field, this field becomes determined as a subjectivity cordoned off from the world. The subject is determined as a solipsistic consciousness from the start. Second, this personologization of the transcendental field leads directly to the Kantian position of a desiring-production which is reduced to fantasy production. As a result of the irreducible gap between subject and object, the productions of a solipsistic unconscious will never be able to attain either apodicity or reality since reality is always already outside of the subject. The subject’s only link to this outside will consist of various devices of mediation which will call any claim to certainty into question. All mental productions then have the appearance of fantasy productions. This results, thirdly, in the impossibility of ever understanding the real process of production or the genetic constitution of the real. The way in which objects and subjects are actually constituted is watered down into a series of uncertain correlations between fantasy and reality. In order to get around this chain of problems, Deleuze and Guattari begin their account before this distinction itself is given. They begin with the unity of social and desiring- production in the depths of the unconscious. For them, ‘[i]t is not possible to attribute a special form of existence to desire, a mental or psychic reality that is presumably different from the material reality of social production’ (30).14 Desire is at once mental and material. Or again: ‘Man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other . . . ; rather they are one and the same essential reality . . . ’ (4–5).15 Social production and desiring-production are inextricably bound together in the same material ‘molecular multiplicity’. In opposition to this Kantian model, for Deleuze and Guattari, the duality between subject and object cannot be assumed to be present at the beginning of the genesis since it is only a late product of thought directed at objects. In the transcendental unconscious the duality is nonexistent. In this they are deeply Husserlian.16 Desiring-production is immediately social production. Subject is object, and object is subject. The subject is, therefore, immediately open to the outside, and we might even say with Bergson, that the subject

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‘coincides with the object perceived and which is, in fact, exteriority itself’ (MM 66). Just as the ego of depths in The Logic of Sense is dissolved like a drop of wine in the ocean, here, the mental is dissolved in the real and both are indistinguishable from one another. But then how do Deleuze and Guattari both maintain this duality and do away with it at the same time? First, they maintain it by stacking the two processes on top of one another: desiring-production, subjectivity, gives rise to social production, or objectivity. We saw this already in The Logic of Sense: the denotated objects produced in the static genesis were possible only on the foundation of the three passive syntheses of the dynamic genesis. Instead of starting out with a subject/object split, Deleuze and Guattari begin before this split has been constituted. It is essential here not to confuse two other forms of reality. In place of the subject-object distinction, they introduce a new distinction between the molecular and molar (280). If we can say that social production and desiring-production, object and subject, are inextricably bound together in the same multiplicity, it is necessary to say at the same time that that multiplicity is molecular. Desiring-production, itself a process that remains entirely molecular, merges only with a molecular social field, which is to say at a stage in the process of production which is prior to the advent of sense, meaning, or knowledge. This molecular multiplicity in which subject and object are mixed corresponds to the un-individuated materiality of the primary order in The Logic of Sense whereas the objectities produced in social production correspond to the individuated objects of the static genesis. All of this will be developed over the next two chapters, but it is necessary to clarify here that it is only at the level of the unindividuated molecular that there is no possible distinction between subject and object. Here ‘everything is objective or subjective, as one wishes’ (345). The formal distinction between objects and subjects itself can only come about after the process of production has run its course and has produced both subjects and objects. It is only from the point of view of molar ‘objectities’ that we can distinguish subjects from objects. From this point of view, social production is no longer the production of objects according to an external mechanism. ‘The truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions’ (29; original emphasis). Social production is still the production of objects—of objectities—but their genesis has become immanent to the subject at the same time that the subject becomes transcendent or social: the two categories dissolve into an impersonal field of ‘molecules’ which are both objective and subjective. Rather than following two parallel processes of production, the two merge into one genesis founded on a desire that is already social, on a subject that is exteriority itself. It is from this point of view that Deleuze and Guattari give desire and ‘the Real’ (the product of desiring-production) one of its most precise definitions. Desire is ‘the natural and sensuous objective being, at the same

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time as the Real is defined as the objective being of desire’ (311; original emphases). According to Deleuze and Guattari, this condition of the molecular unity of social and desiring-production is sufficient to overcome the problems generated by the uncritical presupposition of an a priori disjunction between subject and object. First, rather than ‘personologizing’ production, it removes the personal in favor of an impersonal material field. Desire does not lack its object, ‘It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject’ (26; original emphasis). If desire is immediately social and social production is already desiring-production, then at its foundation, the unconscious is not closed in on itself but exists only in an essential ‘relation to the outside’. Second, the productions of the transcendental unconscious are not, as in the Kantian model, imaginary. ‘If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality’ (26).17 In other words, that reality which might later become the object of a fantasy is itself first produced as a late product of this impersonal material field. Just as in The Logic of Sense, the process of production described here is the genesis of reality. Deleuze and Guattari call these real objects ‘objectities’. Finally, it is only under these conditions that an account of the genetic constitution of reality can be undertaken.

Chapter 4

Desiring-Production

Partial objects and microperception The entire process of production in Anti-Oedipus begins with these two elements: (1) the passive syntheses of desiring-production and (2) the partial objects which these syntheses take as their object. ‘Desiring-production’ is the set of ‘passive syntheses’ which ‘engineer’ or combine ‘partial objects’. Partial objects are the ‘ultimate elements of the unconscious’ (324). They are ‘ultimate’ in the sense that they represent the material beginnings of the transcendental unconscious. They are the indistinguishably subjective and objective elements which constitute the molecular field at the foundation of the genesis that I briefly described in the last chapter. The various interactions between these two elements—partial objects and passive syntheses—will constitute the entire transcendental unconscious. It is absolutely essential then to understand exactly what partial objects are and how the passive syntheses work with them. In what follows I will argue that what Deleuze calls ‘partial objects’ here correspond to what he called ‘partial objects’ in The Logic of Sense—namely the set of bodies which affect our bodies in a corporeal mixture.1 This implies that the process of production here begins in the same place as the genesis of representation did in that book. Anti-Oedipus emphasizes two new and rather straightforward characteristics of partial objects which will help to determine further how they function in the overall genesis. As I suggested in the previous chapter, the distinction between the molecular and the molar corresponds to the two poles, the beginning and end, of the process of production taken in its totality. Genesis begins in the molecular and ends in the molar. In relation to The Logic of Sense, the molecular represents the primary order or the communication of fragments in the corporeal depths whereas the molar represents the tertiary order of the proposition or of representation itself. In Anti-Oedipus the process of production begins with molecular elements of the unconscious and follows them as they pass through the series of syntheses and then through different stages of social production during which they come to form larger and larger aggregates of cognition. This, then, is the first characteristic of partial objects: they are small. Partial objects are the molecules themselves of a molecular unconscious (AO 309, 323).

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Their second characteristic is that they exist in a state of ‘positive dispersion in a molecular multiplicity’ (342). Deleuze and Guattari describe this state of partial objects, prior to their organization in the syntheses, as a ‘multiplicity’. It should be clear, however, that the expression ‘multiplicity’ does not refer to the transcendental Idea as it does in Difference and Repetition, but simply to the ‘strange unity’ of partial objects in a state of dispersion (324–26, 42).2 In fact, the famous ‘multiplicity’ of Difference and Repetition corresponds to a completely different register of genesis than the multiplicity of Anti-Oedipus. By saying that this multiplicity is characterized by a ‘positive dispersion’ Deleuze and Guattari mean that the only relation between the partial objects in the depths of the unconscious is the absence of a relation (309, 323). This absence of a relation between partial objects allows them to describe the objects as ‘singularities’ (324). But again this word—at this very early stage in the genesis—no longer has the topological sense of an extension of a singular point across a series of ordinary points which Deleuze uses in Difference and Repetition, but rather its philosophical, Hegelian sense expressing an absolute particularity at the heart of sensibility.3 These, then, are the two primary characteristics of partial objects: they are small, and they have no relation to one another. They are affected by what Deleuze had called in Difference and Repetition ‘the rule of discontinuity’. While the characterization of partial objects as ‘molecular’, as well as the merging of subject and object in this field, can be directly traced back to Bergson’s descriptions of ‘impersonal perception’ in Matter and Memory,4 these two characteristics of partial objects also have significant roots in Deleuze’s readings of both Hume’s and Leibniz’s theories of perception. This allusion to Hume and Leibniz allows us to settle on a concrete definition of partial objects. The lack of relations between partial objects recalls Deleuze’s descriptions of Hume’s theory of perception. Two points from Empiricism and Subjectivity seem particularly relevant here: Deleuze’s characterization of the given and his account of the foundational concept of empiricism. I have already briefly argued that the central problem of both Empiricism and Subjectivity and The Logic of Sense is how the given can transcend itself and become a subject, or how it can escape from the determinism of corporeality. In Empiricism and Subjectivity Deleuze describes ‘the given’ as a collection of ‘things as they appear—a collection without an album, a play without a stage, a flux of perceptions’ (ES 23; my emphases). It is the unorganized ‘delirium’ (ES 23; my emphasis) of impressions given by sensibility to the imagination in the order that they affect the subject.5 Deleuze then goes on to explain the way in which the subject is constituted as the effect of certain principles of human nature. The function of these principles is to ‘fix and naturalize the mind’, to impose order on the delirium of imagination, to make it ‘constant and settled’, to ‘organize the given into a system, imposing constancy on the imagination’ (ES 24; my emphasis). These principles of human nature—the principles of association combined with the principles of the passions—accomplish their task by creating relations between the impressions.

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The subject, its objects, and their meanings are constituted by establishing relations between the scattered impressions of the given. This touches on the foundational notion of all empiricisms according to Deleuze: at the heart of delirium, relations are completely external to their terms (ES 98–99). Conversely, terms are external to their relations and do not ‘account for the nature of the operations we perform on them’ (ES 101).6 It is true that Deleuze does not go so far as to say in this early work that the only relation between impressions is their lack of relation. But by saying that terms are external to their relations, he comes very close to the description of partial objects in Anti-Oedipus. Further, we can easily see the more general similarity between the major projects of The Logic of Sense, Empiricism and Subjectivity, and Anti-Oedipus: all thought begins in delirium and attempts to rise out of it by creating relations between terms. Because these relations give the terms their meaning at the same time that they determine a subject, this escape from delirium is also a genesis of the subject, its objects, and the sense of both. If impressions do not account for the operations we perform on them, from the point of view of thought (defined as those ‘operations’ which consist in establishing relations), then conversely there is no relation present in the given. The only relation is the absence of a relation. Deleuze and Guattari therefore seem partially inspired by Deleuze’s Hume in their account of the problem of the absence of significant relations in the foundational delirium of thought. The general movement from unorganized perception to organized knowledge also structures Deleuze’s 1988 book on Leibniz. There Deleuze distinguishes two kinds of perception in Leibniz: microperception and macroperception. Microperceptions populate the ‘depths’ of the monad, its ‘unconscious’ or its body which, since the upper level of the monad is windowless, is also its ‘relation to the outside’ (TF 85–86). Microperceptions belong to the obscurity of the corporeal unconscious whereas macroperceptions belong to the clarity of consciousness. In his 1980 lectures on Leibniz, Deleuze summarizes one of Leibniz’s examples of microperception: imagine you are near the sea and are listening to waves. You listen to the sea and you hear the sound of a wave . . .. Leibniz says: you would not hear the wave if you did not have a minute unconscious perception of the sound of each drop of water that slides over and through another, and that makes up the object of minute perceptions. There is the roaring of all the drops of water, and you have your little zone of clarity, you clearly and distinctly grasp one partial result from this infinity of drops, from this infinity of roaring, and from it, you make your own little world, your own property. (04/14/1980)7 The roaring of all the drops at once can only be experienced in the ‘dark depths of the monad’, or in its body (TF 90). But in the depths of the body, these perceptions are completely unorganized—as in Hume: ‘it is a lapping of waves,

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a rumor, a fog, or a mass of dancing particles of dust. It is a state of death or catalepsy, of sleep, of drowsiness, or of numbness’ (ES 86).8 However, in the same way that the delirium of the given in Empiricism and Subjectivity will become organized into a ‘system’, these minute perceptions will become organized and integrated through the work of an automatism—which is to say, passively—into our ‘little world’, or our ‘zone of clarity’. In Empiricism and Subjectivity impressions are organized by the principles of human nature. In The Fold, this integration is accomplished according to the laws of differential calculus: ‘differential calculus is the psychic mechanism of perception, the automatism that at once and inseparably plunges into obscurity and determines clarity: a selection of minute, obscure perceptions, and a perception that moves into clarity’ (TF 90; my emphasis). This movement from obscurity to clarity is also a movement from small to large, from microperception to macroperception, from the unconscious to consciousness, and, more importantly here, from ‘molecular perceptions to molar perceptions’ (TF 87; my emphases). In other words, the genesis in The Fold begins in a world of molecular microperceptions, passively establishes relations between these unorganized impressions, and thereby determines molar, meaningful conscious perceptions. Again, we can see several important correspondences here with the partial objects in Anti-Oedipus, in particular the determination of the size of perceptions as ‘molecular’, the lack of organization in the depths, and the movement to the molar by way of a process of integration and organization. All of these characteristics, in both The Fold and Empiricism and Subjectivity come together to suggest that the partial objects of Anti-Oedipus are nothing more than ‘minute perceptions’, ‘things as they appear’, a ‘flux of perceptions’, the Deleuzian ‘given’. All three books characterize them as an unorganized delirium or as the ‘vertigo’ of thought. In relation to the two characteristics of partial objects I outlined above—their lack of relation and their small size—Empiricism and Subjectivity sheds light on the characteristic lack of relations in partial objects, whereas The Fold suggests their size and their relation to a molar consciousness.9 Partial objects are the hyletic data of an impersonal perception. Wouldn’t this mean, however, that partial objects are just parts of complete objects despite the fact that Deleuze repeatedly emphasizes that this is not the case? Not at all. Such a conclusion confuses the product of genesis with its origins. It mistakes what can only be given in an empirical consciousness as already constituted—molar ‘objectities’—for what can never be given in consciousness and what properly belongs only to the transcendental unconscious—molecular perceptions. It is only from the point of view of a molar ‘preconsciousness’ ‘that the partial objects of a molecular order appear as a lack at the same time that the whole itself is said to be lacked by the partial objects’ (AO 342). Deleuze repeatedly affirms throughout the perception chapter of The Fold that perception has no object, that conscious perception is always a hallucination which refers back to

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differential relations established between minute perceptions, and that these perceptions express only the affections of our material bodies by other material things, never in the form of complete objects, but as ‘molecular movements’ (TF 93–97, cf. 89). Perception is hallucinatory because it has no object and presupposes no object. It has no object because that object has not yet been constituted.10 The molar point of view is, strictly speaking, impossible at the level of the molecular. From the point of view of an already constituted preconsciousness maybe we can turn around and say that partial objects are in fact parts of objects, but from the point of view of the transcendental unconscious itself there is no such thing as a whole or complete object to which partial objects belong. There are only the deliriums of unorganized fragments which have no origin and which elude even the determinations ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’. The question of a thing in itself which will find itself repeated as a representation in a molar consciousness is a false question whose sole function will be to inscribe the empirical in the transcendental. If representation is the ultimate repetition, we can see why it can never be a repetition of the same. It is precisely that first instance, the object to be repeated, which is constituted in repeating. Despite their eventual totalization, in the form of a multiplicity in dispersion, partial objects are nothing more than natural and sensuous being, the body’s interaction with bodies.

The passive syntheses One of the reasons it is so important to read Anti-Oedipus from the point of view of the process of production is that it begins to make the terminology easier to understand. In fact, if the book is read as a collection of separate concepts with only ambiguous relations to one another, it becomes impossible to understand. This is because from the point of view of genesis three kinds of concepts appear: (1) those that have a very specific role at a particular moment of the genesis (intensity or multiplicity, for example); (2) those that persist through the genesis and take on different roles in each stage (the body without organs); and (3) those that describe an entire portion of the genesis and thus contain within themselves several more specific concepts (desiring-machine). Before I turn to a reading of the three syntheses, I briefly want to point out three concepts of this third type: desire, desiring-production, and the transcendental unconscious. These three notions all describe the same general process from different points of view. In general, throughout Anti-Oedipus the process of production is composed of two smaller processes: desiring-production and, founded on top of it, social production. Desiring-production has three ‘aspects’: connection, disjunction, and conjunction (41). But since Deleuze and Guattari understand the subject, just as Husserl did, as nothing more than the process itself, the ‘transcendental unconscious’ is coextensive with desiring-production.11 As a result, these three ‘aspects’—connection, disjunction, conjunction—can also

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be called the three passive syntheses of the transcendental unconscious. These three syntheses are what schizoanalysis as a transcendental analysis sets out to explore (109). This also seems to be exactly how they understand desire. Desire, Deleuze and Guattari say, has to be understood as productive of the real (AO 22ff.). As such, ‘Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects . . .. The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious’ (26; original emphasis; cf. 325). These three terms, then, are all equivalent blanket terms that describe the productive unconscious as a process of production: desire, desiring-production, and the transcendental unconscious. The first as the energy which drives the second, the process, which taken in its totality is equivalent to the third. The process of production, begins in the depths of the transcendental unconscious, as it did in The Logic of Sense, with ‘the direct confrontation between desiring-production and social production’ (54). This direct confrontation takes place between a first synthesis and the partial objects understood as ‘the ultimate elements of the unconscious’ but also as a ‘relation to the outside’. We have just seen that this world of partial objects was the molecular world of microperception in which it was impossible to distinguish either subject or object, and that this is what Deleuze and Guattari meant by the molecular unity of desiring-production and social production (AO 30ff.). The microperceptions thus appear as a pure hyletic data without meaning or sense, and which have both objective and subjective origins. It is these meaningless objects which the three passive syntheses take up and ‘engineer’. There is one very short account of the syntheses which describes them from the point of view of ‘the identity of nature and man’ (108), of object and subject, and shows how this identity is not specific to the molecular multiplicity, but, in fact, persists through at least the first half of the genesis: Bonnafé recognizes in the magic object the existence of the three desiring syntheses: the connective synthesis, which combines the fragments of the person with those of the animals or plants; the included disjunctive synthesis, which records the man-animal composite; the conjunctive synthesis, which implies a veritable migration of the remainder or residue. (326n) All three syntheses are present in this account along with their general functions: (1) a connective synthesis which connects both objective and subjective molecules and therefore further mixes man and nature; (2) a disjunctive synthesis which records this mixture, or as they put it later, ‘appropriates’ the partial objects (372; cf. 10)); and (3) a conjunctive synthesis in which a wandering and residual subject which, we will see, consumes and lives the consequences of the first two syntheses. Even if a distinction were possible between objective and subjective microperceptions before the first synthesis, this synthesis immediately mixes the two. From this point of view, one particular function of

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desiring-production is highlighted: it ensures the mixture of desire and the social, of subject and object, and thus makes their complication systemic. When the formal representations of objects are later produced at the end of social production as objectities, their reality will be guaranteed by this mixture which ensures that the subject is already object and vice-versa. There are two immediate reasons why the connective synthesis connects without regard to origins or the qualities of its objects: one pertaining to the objects, another to the syntheses. First of all, as I will argue in more detail below, partial objects are meaningless. They have no sense which is why Deleuze and Guattari say that we can only ask of the unconscious the question ‘How does it work?’ and not ‘What does it mean?’. At a certain point in the process of social production, meaning will be produced and the question ‘what does it mean?’ can begin to be asked. Experimentation will then give way to interpretation (AO 206, 214). But at this point there is, strictly speaking, nothing to distinguish one partial object from another. Each is completely meaningless and has no relation to the next. The second reason that these syntheses further mix subject and object is that they are passive. Deleuze takes the notion of passive synthesis here, as in Difference and Repetition, from Husserl. Like Husserl, Deleuze defines ‘passivity’ in Difference and Repetition from a theoretical point of view: syntheses are passive insofar as they are ‘non-intellectual’, or take place outside of the jurisdiction of an ego. The synthesis is carried out in the mind, but not by the mind (DR 71). In Anti-Oedipus, passivity still implies the absence of an active and legislating ego. In fact it is only at the moment that a constituted subject is introduced to the regime of syntheses that they cease to be passive and become active or illegitimate (AO 70–72). But, in addition to this theoretical definition, Deleuze and Guattari give a practical description of passivity. They describe it from the point of view of the activity of synthesis itself. Deleuze and Guattari describe three closely related characteristics: (1) the syntheses operate in a ‘domain of free syntheses where everything is possible’:12 they are ‘free’ and operate ‘without a plan’ (309); (2) they are indirect (324); and (3) quoting Jacques Monod, the syntheses are ‘the play of blind combinations’ (328)—they are indifferent to the objects which they synthesize (12). All three of these characteristics are perhaps covered by the third: a passive synthesis is a blind synthesis. It takes no regard of its objects. The syntheses ‘pound away and throb in the depths of the unconscious’ and are completely indifferent, it would seem, to whatever it is they work on and without any sort of determining cause or telos (54). The syntheses do not distinguish, then, man from nature and inevitably blindly synthesize the two.

The first synthesis and the body without organs Just as in The Logic of Sense, the genesis here takes the form of an escape. To follow the three passive syntheses is also to follow the way in which the body without organs, or the ego of corporeal depths, manages to free itself from those depths,

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shuffle off its materiality, and become incorporeal. The way that this escape is developed in Anti-Oedipus is slightly different at first sight than the escape I described in The Logic of Sense, but all of the major stages are still present. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze drew a distinction between the body without organs as the ego of depths and the ego of partial surfaces which had escaped from the depths. Here, these two aspects of the ego are both contained under the heading ‘connective synthesis’. There are therefore two important aspects of the first synthesis of Anti-Oedipus. The first aspect and function of the connective synthesis is to bring about the corporeal interpenetration of partial objects which had defined the corporeal depths of The Logic of Sense. This is because, in Anti-Oedipus, partial objects are defined by their lack of relation. In other words, they do not seem to communicate to infinity as the fragments of depth did in The Logic of Sense. The first aspect of the connective synthesis is simply the connection or synthesis of partial objects, and this is why at one point, Deleuze and Guattari describe the first synthesis as the production ‘of actions and passions’ (AO 4), or, as we saw above, as the implication of both ‘man’ and ‘nature’. This first aspect of the first synthesis is described in many different ways throughout the book. Perhaps the most common is in the language of flows. In the connective synthesis, the partial objects begin to emit flows, and each one ‘always breaks the flow that another object emits’ (325). To ‘connect’ therefore means to emit and to interrupt flows (6). These are just different ways of describing the same act. In the current of these flows, a body without organs is produced. This is the second aspect of the connective synthesis. It expresses the way in which a body without organs is produced and escapes, like the ego of partial surfaces, from the cycle of flows and their interruption. In several important passages, Deleuze and Guattari seem to insist that the body without organs is not only produced, but is produced at a very specific moment. Here are two of those passages:13 The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis [. . .]. (8) The body without organs is produced as a whole, but in its own particular place within the process of production alongside the parts that it neither unifies nor totalizes. (43) The body without organs is produced ‘at a certain time and a certain place’ in the connection. It has ‘its own particular place’. How are we to understand this? We can draw very general conclusions and say that the body without organs is not given but is produced, and that the dispersion of partial objects is therefore primary in the order of genesis.14 This is why partial objects are called the ultimate elements of the unconscious. But these passages suggest, more specifically, that the body without organs is produced at a specific moment. How and when is it produced? What is this ‘certain place’ and ‘certain time?’

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Deleuze and Guattari suggest an answer only once in the early pages of the book before we have managed to get our bearings. The body without organs is produced in the third stage of the ‘binary-linear series’ as ‘the identity of producing and the product’ (AO 7–8; my emphasis). This statement needs to be decomposed into its constituent parts. The ‘binary-linear series’ refers simply to communication of partial objects and the way in which they emit flows and interrupt each other’s flows, or the first aspect of the synthesis. By saying that the body without organs is ‘the third stage of the binary linear series’, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that at this stage of the genesis, the body without organs never leaves the plane of partial objects. It belongs to the same dimension as the linear series of connection. The body without organs thus maintains a degree of materiality, and indeed, it is at one point defined as the second of the ‘two material elements of the schizophrenic desiring-machines [. . .].’ (AO 327)—the other material element being the partial objects. The ego has not yet begun its escape from the series of partial objects. It is still lodged in the depths and therefore is identical to what Deleuze called the body without organs in The Logic of Sense, the body of the infant communicating with other fragmented bodies. The second part of the expression, ‘the identity of producing and product’, refers to another way in which Deleuze and Guattari describe the first synthesis. Early in the book, they describe the connection of partial objects among themselves as being subject to ‘the rule of continually producing production, of grafting producing onto the product’ (AO 7). In the language of flows, to produce is to emit a flow. To be a product is to interrupt a flow. This rule states then that at the same time that every partial object is the interruption of a flow (a product), it must always produce another flow (production) (AO 7). In other words, it must be connected with another partial object. The rule is simply another expression of the connective synthesis.15 However, if the body without organs is defined as ‘the identity of producing and product’ then, it is defined as the very moment of synthesis itself. The ‘particular place’ and ‘certain time’ in which the body without organs is produced is the moment of synthesis, or the coming together of two or more partial objects in a connection. I will argue below that Deleuze had already developed this notion of the ego in Difference and Repetition in relation to Hegel’s analyses of sense-certainty. What he calls the ‘contemplative soul’ or the ‘spontaneous imagination’ in that book corresponds directly to what he calls a body without organs here. The contemplative soul or the spontaneous imagination is indistinguishable from both the synthesis it brings about and the objects of that synthesis. The ego which ‘draws off a difference’ between partial objects is nothing more than the difference drawn. ‘[T]he eye binds light, it is itself a bound light’ (DR 96). In Anti-Oedipus, the body without organs at the moment of its birth is simply a synthesis of a hyletic data. It is an apprehension of the outside.

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What is important from the point of view of desiring-production, is that at this point, at the moment of its production in the connection of partial objects, the body without organs is still part of the ‘binary linear series’. It is constituted as a part alongside other parts and is still therefore subject to ‘the rule of continually producing production’ which means that the body without organs itself needs to be connected to partial objects. As Deleuze and Guattari say, as soon as the body without organs is produced, it is ‘perpetually reinserted into the process of production’ (AO 8). We will have to wait until Deleuze’s analysis of fatigue in Difference and Repetition to see why the body without organs finds this situation exhausting, but Deleuze and Guattari write here that at this point the body without organs experiences the partial objects ‘as an overall persecution apparatus’ (9). This persecution is the primary motive for escape: ‘in order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows, it sets up a counter flow of amorphous undifferentiated fluid’ (9). Rather than submitting to the rule of continually producing production, then, in its exhaustion the body without organs becomes an instance of ‘anti-production’. It does not interrupt a flow, and it does not emit a flow. To do either would be to remain within the limits of production. It would be to remain a product or to be productive. Instead it undertakes a ‘repression’ or a ‘repulsion’ of the partial objects. This ‘repulsion’ or ‘primary repression’ defines the body without organs as a ‘paranoiac machine’. The paranoiac machine is the exact equivalent in Anti-Oedipus of the ego of partial surfaces in The Logic of Sense: it marks the beginning of the body without organs’s escape from the binary linear series of partial objects. Paranoia describes the way in which the body without organs curls up into itself and leaves the world of immediate confrontation with materiality behind. It is at this point that we leave the ‘binary-linear’ series of the connection of partial objects. In opposing itself to the partial objects, the body without organs becomes their limit. ‘When it repels the organs, as in the mounting of the paranoiac machine, the body without organs marks the external limit of the pure multiplicity formed by these organs themselves. . .. ’ (AO 326; my emphasis). The body without organs thus moves outside of the linear series, and in this movement, when it leaves the series altogether—but maintains its power of synthesis—we move from the first synthesis to the second. The ‘genesis of the machine lies precisely here: in the opposition of the process of production of desiring-machines and the nonproductive stasis of the body without organs’ (9).16

The second synthesis As soon as the body without organs becomes the external limit of the partial objects, it reappropriates the first synthesis: ‘the productive connections pass from the machines to the body without organs’ (12; original emphasis). There

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are also two aspects to this reappropriation. On the one hand, the second synthesis of recording records the connections of the first synthesis on the surface of body without organs. It therefore appears as the simple repetition of the connective synthesis, now on the surface of the body without organs itself. Deleuze and Guattari will thus say that it is a recording of the ‘associative flow’ (36), that is, of the actions and passions of the partial objects in the first synthesis. But, on the other hand, when it appropriates these old connections, it also places them within a new form of organization: ‘The data, the bits of information recorded, and their transmission form a grid of disjunctions of a type that differs from the previous connections’ (38). The partial objects are now recorded not in the form of an ‘associative flow’ but in the form of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘signifying chains’ (38). It is extremely important, however, to recognize that this codification into signifying chains, despite the name, does not result in the production of signification or meaning: ‘The chains are called “signifying chains”’ because they are made up of signs, but these signs are not themselves signifying’ (38).17 We are thus still at a stage of the genesis which is firmly antecedent to the origin of meaning. We are still in the asignifying depths, or in the middle of a ‘savage experience’. This second synthesis marks the beginnings of the possibility for meaning, just as it did in The Logic of Sense, by further removing the ego from the determinations of depth. The recording of the initial actions and passions is sufficient to move us out of the world of unorganized objectivity into the world of signs and the possibility of organization—and at this point, as signs, the partial objects are subjected to a new set of connections, just as random as the first. In the second synthesis the body without organs presents itself as ‘unengendered’ and as the source of the partial objects which had, in fact, produced it. This movement is called ‘miraculation’, and it works according to the logic of double causality developed in The Logic of Sense. There the transcendental field had an immediate and material cause, the body, which was responsible for its production. But on the surface of the transcendental field itself there was a mobile element which Deleuze called the ‘quasi-cause’ (or aleatory point or castrated phallus, and so on) whose function was to submit the transcendental field to a different organization than the one given to it by its production in the dynamic genesis, and in so doing, to liberate it from its subjection to immediate action and reaction. In this way, the transcendental field was able to reappropriate or sublimate depth without being constrained to a strict causality. The quasi-cause ensured the independence of the transcendental field at the same time that it allowed for the ‘sublimation’ of its material cause. In The Logic of Sense, however, the logic of double causality is specific to the moment of genesis which moves from corporeality to incorporeality. In Anti-Oedipus its use is extended to every moment of the genesis and it becomes the general mechanism for the progression from one moment of the genesis to the next.18 Miraculation is the name given to the logic of double causality in Anti-Oedipus.

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In the second synthesis, the body without organs is thus a ‘miraculating machine’ because it appropriates the connections of the first synthesis at the same time that it leaves, transcends, or negates the binary linear series of the sensible. The second synthesis represents the way in which the body without organs, after withdrawing from the partial objects returns to them as meaningless signs. It does so in two ways as I pointed out above: (1) it records the connections of the binary linear series on its own surface but (2) also submits them to its own mode of organization in ‘signifying chains’. It represents an ‘appropriation’ of the partial objects outside of the binary linear series, and in these two aspects of the appropriation, we should see the logic of double causality at work. The body without organs first records or ‘sublimates’, and then it reorganizes in signifying chains, or ‘symbolizes’. If the partial objects represent the material of perception, a hyletic data (AO 36), the body without organs in the first synthesis represents an apprehending ego which is precisely the synthesis of that hyletic data. The body without organs of the second synthesis then represents a form of memory, recording, or retention. From this point of view we can see that we can call the body without organs whatever we like: receptive plate, Imagination,19 memory. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze calls it an ego, a ‘spontaneous imagination’,20 a ‘contemplative soul’, a ‘mens momentanea’, and in The Logic of Sense, an ‘infant’, an ‘ego’, and a ‘body without organs’. But in reality, these names only get in the way of understanding the concept (not that the expression ‘body without organs’ ever helped). To say ‘the body without organs is the Deleuzian Imagination’ is to not go far enough. It is only to substitute a familiar and comfortable notion for an uncomfortable one. What we need to know instead is its function or, what amounts to the same thing, its relation to surrounding concepts. The body without organs is the space in which perceptions are recorded and organized in such a way as to gradually produce, not a complete perception, but, as we will see, differing degrees of intensity which will themselves determine the production or differenciation of a complete perception or ‘objectity’.

The third synthesis The third synthesis of ‘consumption and consummation’ is, in a way, the most important of the three. Like the previous syntheses, it too has two aspects: (1) the production of intensities and (2) the production of a ‘nomadic subject’ who lives (consumes and enjoys) these intensities. The third synthesis also corresponds to a third moment in the evolution of the body without organs. After being born as an apprehension of the outside and rejecting that outside as a paranoiac machine; after then recording the outside as ‘miraculating machine’, in this third synthesis the body without organs takes on a third form and becomes a field of intensities, or, in a metaphor Deleuze used to represent intensity in Difference and Repetition, it becomes ‘an egg, crisscrossed with axes,

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banded with zones, localized with areas and fields, measured off by gradients, traversed by potentials, marked by thresholds’ (AO 84). These intensities, I will argue below, are produced as expressions of the body without organs’ various relations to the outside. Within this field of intensity there is also a nomadic subject that traverses the surface of the body without organs and lives its intensities much in the same way that the aleatory point traversed the transcendental field of sense in The Logic of Sense. This is not an active subject however: it is an ‘apparent subject’ rather than a ‘real subject’. Just as in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze and Guattari allude to Blanchot in their emphasis on the impersonality and preindividual character of this subject and its field of experience: ‘the apparent subject never ceases to live and travel as a One’ (330; original emphasis). This ‘apparent’ subject is anonymous and almost hallucinatory. There is a subject, but it is still not separate from the conditions of its emergence or the states of affairs through which it passes: ‘this me is merely the residual subject that sweeps the circle and concludes a self from its oscillations on the circle’ (88; original emphasis). The circle that the subject sweeps is populated by intensities, and the nomadic subject lives the intensities as affections. Each intensity is an ‘intensive emotion’, an affect, or a feeling (84). As it sweeps this circle of intensities, this subject ‘consumes and consummates each of the states through which it passes . . .’ (41). The subject’s life in the third synthesis is thus an affective life, a life that is nothing more than a ‘feeling, a series of feelings and emotions and feelings as a consummation and a consumption of intensive quantities’ (AO 84; cf. 18 and 330). Intensities are affects. But intensity and affect are not random notions that make an abrupt appearance in the genesis here and which we can take outside of the philosophical context in which they appear. To understand why affect and intensity emerge at this stage of the genesis, we have to pay close attention to what happened in the preceding two stages. In the first synthesis the ego apprehended the outside. In the second synthesis the ego recorded its apprehensions. In the third synthesis, the ego determines the quantity of its affection, the intensity or degree to which the outside assaults it. The three syntheses condition our receptivity, or our capacity to be affected. Together they constitute the general possibility of any experience. Wasn’t this exactly the function of passivity in Husserl’s genesis: to produce objects with differing degrees of intensity whose allure draws the attention of the ego and thus conditions its affection? Intensity is produced. How are we to understand this production of intensity? What is an intensity such that it can be produced in this third synthesis, and what does it express? Deleuze and Guattari ask the same question early on in the book and give a rather straightforward answer. ‘Where do these pure intensities come from? They come from the two preceding forces, repulsion and attraction, and from the opposition of these two forces’ (AO 21; my emphasis). Intensity ‘comes from’ the repulsion of the body without organs as a paranoiac machine and the

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attraction of the body without organs as a miraculating machine. It is generated as a synthesis of the past two lives of the body without organs. Intensity is thus produced as the synthesis of the first synthesis and the second. Let us then review the history of the body without organs. If a concept like the body without organs is so difficult to define it is because it has several different lives. It persists through multiple stages of the genesis and takes on a different form each time. The final and conclusive definition of the body without organs cannot be ‘field of intensity’. If we follow the overall trajectory of the genesis, we can see that the body without organs has three significant stages: (1) apprehension, (2) reproduction, and (3) affection. It is first a paranoiac machine, second a miraculating machine, and finally, in the third synthesis, a ‘celibate’ machine. Each one of these machines is also a way of looking at the position of the body without organs in each passive synthesis. In the first passive synthesis, the body without organs is produced as a material part alongside other parts. As a paranoiac machine, it exists alongside partial objects and repels them in what Deleuze and Guattari called ‘primary repression’ and which we discussed above as the means by which the body without organs escapes from the binary-linear series of partial objects. In the second synthesis, the body without organs attracts partial objects to its surface by recording them and appropriates them as though they had not just produced it, as though it were self-caused. The third synthesis completes the reconciliation between the body without organs and partial objects which had begun in the attraction of the second synthesis: We must examine how this [third] synthesis is formed or how the subject is produced. Our point of departure was the opposition between desiringmachines and the body without organs. The repulsion of these machines, as found in the paranoiac machine of primary repression, gave way to an attraction in the miraculating machine. But the opposition between attraction and repulsion still exists. It would seem that a genuine reconciliation of the two can take place only on the level of a new machine, functioning as a ‘return of the repressed’. (AO 17) Insofar as this third synthesis is the production of intensities, these intensities can only be the expression of the relation between the body without organs (as a spontaneous imagination) and partial objects (as minute perceptions). Intensity expresses the quantity of affection. The third synthesis marks ‘the return of the repressed’. But what was repressed was precisely the set of partial objects which had affected the body in its materiality. In the third synthesis, the repelled or repressed minute perceptions ‘return’ in the form of intensities which the nomadic subject consumes and enjoys. If the body without organs is now called a ‘celibate machine’ it is easy to see why: it takes its pleasure from itself alone, it is the form of auto-affection.

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The body without organs is the degree-zero of intensity. Its various relationships with the partial objects become expressed as intensities which fill the body without organs to varying degrees (19, 309). ‘The forces of attraction and repulsion, of soaring ascents and plunging falls, produce a series of intensive states based on the intensity = 0 that designates the body without organs . . . ’ (21; cf. 330). It seems from this point of view, intensity expresses precisely the degree to which a spontaneous subject is affected by the objects of its environment. The body without organs encounters its object as a paranoiac, records the encounter as miraculating machine, and measures the one against the other and expresses that relation in the form of an intensity as a celibate machine. If we read partial objects as minute perceptions, we can now determine a significant difference between Deleuze’s, Kant’s, and Husserl’s accounts of intensity which should help to clarify the function of intensity in Deleuze’s thought. The difference between Deleuze and Kant is more straightforward and reconfirms the relation I have been drawing between desiring-production and the dynamic genesis. Deleuze and Guattari cite Kant’s theory of intensity when they put forward their own, and their revision of the notion of intensity is essentially a consequence of the difference between a transcendental idealism and a transcendental empiricism—between a ‘theoretical subject’ and a ‘practical subject’, to borrow an expression from Empiricism and Subjectivity (ES 104). In the ‘Anticipations of Perception’, Kant distinguishes between empirical consciousness and pure consciousness. Empirical consciousness is consciousness of the material real, of that which cannot be anticipated, whereas pure consciousness is the pure intuition of space and time which is always anticipated. Now from empirical consciousness to pure consciousness a graduated transition is possible, the real in the former completely vanishing and a merely formal a priori consciousness of the manifold in space and time remaining. Consequently there is also possible a synthesis in the process of generating the magnitude of a sensation from its beginning in pure intuition = 0, up to any required magnitude. (CPR B 208) The same notions are at work in both the Deleuzian and Kantian systems, but with one major qualification. Kant moves from the pure forms of time and space as intensity = 0 to the material real of sensation which fills the forms of intuition to varying degrees. But Deleuze and Guattari, it would seem, begin with the material real: the body without organs produced as the second material object of the transcendental unconscious. In the third synthesis, however, the body without organs seems to lose its materiality. It becomes intensity = 0, the pure form of time, the form of auto-affection. (This is exactly what happens in both Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense I will argue in my chapters on Difference and Repetition.) The empty form of time, ‘Aion’, unfolds from the corporeal depths, and, in its unfolding, releases Difference in itself as pure

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intensity. The difference between Deleuze and Kant, then, is simply that in Kant the empty form of time is given, whereas for Deleuze, it is produced. To compare Deleuze and Husserl, however, takes us in quite a different direction. In Husserl’s account, intensity played its most important role in the life-world by determining the relation between the passive and active syntheses. The passive syntheses of time and association produced the objects of experience and ascribed to them varying degrees of intensity. The more intense the object, the more likely the ego was to turn toward it and actively take it up in its active syntheses. In a way, this is exactly the role of intensity in Deleuze and Guattari, but things are also considerably different. Let us first consider the differences in their notions of passive synthesis, and second, the relation of the ego to intensity in Deleuze and Guattari. Despite Husserl’s insistence on the reduction, it still seems that certain characteristics of representation made their way into his account of the associative synthesis, namely, the forms of identity and of recognition.21 Husserl describes the associative synthesis either as the synthesis of like with like in a synthesis of homogeneity or as a synthesis which separates dissimilar elements—an exclusive disjunctive synthesis—in a synthesis of heterogeneity. But from a Deleuzian point of view, we have to ask, how a passive synthesis can combine like with like unless it already has the model or formula of identity laid out before it? If we take as a guide the four forms of representation laid out in Difference and Repetition—identity, opposition, resemblance, and analogy—we can see that Husserl presupposes the form of identity as governing the passive syntheses of homogeneity and the form of opposition as governing the passive syntheses of heterogeneity. Resemblance and analogy, which play explicit roles in Husserl’s active syntheses, therefore seem to be the only forms of representation which Husserl guards against by means of the reduction in his determination of a transcendental consciousness. Deleuze and Guattari’s passive syntheses clearly do not have this problem. They synthesize randomly, indirectly, and blindly. They are free syntheses which operate without a plan, completely indifferent to the objects they synthesize. They do not choose objects; they do not combine like with like. They simply ramify connections and relations without a determining cause or a telos. This, however, presents its own problems from the point of view of the individuation of things or the production of identities and representations for a thetic (pre)consciousness such as the one Deleuze developed in The Logic of Sense. How is it possible that a series of completely random syntheses could serve any function other than messing things up? How could they possibly lead from the chaos of the initial delirium to a more or less organized and stable representation at the molar end of subjectivity? It is because their sole function is to produce intensities which will lead only later to the determination of identities. If partial objects are minute perceptions, it becomes clear, first of all why intensities are equivalent to affects: they express the degree to which the

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body without organs is affected by partial objects. Second, it seems that the first two syntheses from this point of view do nothing more than ensure the affection, while the third, ensures the consumption of those affections. Whereas Husserl’s life-world was populated by ‘individuals’ with varying degrees of intensity, the corresponding stage in Deleuze’s genesis has no objects yet and seems to be nothing more than a zone of intensities which will only be the catalyst for the later production of individuals. (It is as if what Husserl condensed into the two passive syntheses, Deleuze extended across his entire philosophy, as if Deleuze’s second major criticism of Husserl after the problem of consciousness was that Husserl moved too quickly.) The role of the passive syntheses is not to produce complete objects. It is simply to produce a field of intensity that will be subject to a more complex, virtual synthesis which I describe in greater detail in the chapters below on Difference and Repetition.

Conclusion In conformity with the requirements of a transcendental empiricism, none of the three syntheses are pregiven. All that is given, it would seem, are partial objects in their evanescence. The three syntheses are produced as the result of the interactions among partial objects. Each synthesis produces the next. The body without organs, which conditions recording (since the recording is done on its surface) is produced in the first synthesis, and recording is just the new form of connection on the body without organs. But the third synthesis itself is produced on the foundations of the first and second. Deleuze and Guattari seem to confirm this reading of the successive nature of the syntheses in the following passage: the production of recording itself is produced by the production of production. Similarly, recording is followed by consumption, but the production of consumption is produced in and through the production of recording. (AO 16) However, there are two important points at which Deleuze and Guattari call into question this reading (4, 327). But we cannot follow Deleuze and Guattari on this point. On the one hand it would immediately contradict their empiricist thesis. If there is a set structure of syntheses, pregiven, which can act in any order whatsoever, the picture they paint of subjectivity would be idealist. There would be a pregiven structure of subjectivity which would give form, through three passive syntheses, to an empirical hyletic data. More than anything it is the idea of genesis or production which is the defining characteristic of Deleuze’s thought. What is important from this point of view is that the three syntheses are produced, and that is what I hoped to show, or at least

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suggest, in this half of the chapter. When Deleuze and Guattari call into question the successive order of the syntheses, we have to understand that this is only the case for an already constituted subjectivity. It is clear that there could be no intensity (third synthesis) if there were no relations of attraction and repulsion between a body without organs and partial objects since intensity is produced precisely by these relations. But there could be no recording/ attraction (second synthesis) if there were not a body without organs on which partial objects and their connections were recorded. There could not be a body without organs/repulsion unless there was a first synthesis which produced it or was the body without organs itself. What are we to make of their claim then? Perhaps it is only a question of a point of view? Deleuze will often describe what things look like from within the system itself. In Difference and Repetition, for example, Deleuze plants himself inside his system and views it from that particular place so that he can say without contradicting himself that only the present exists (DR 76); only the past exists (82); only the future exists (93). These two contradictory statements in Anti-Oedipus were perhaps written from the point of view of the conclusion of desiring-production. Theoretically, the stages are rigorously separated. Necessarily so, even if in the process of production we move imperceptibly from one moment to the next, but from the point of view of practice, of the constituted desiring machine which ‘eats, shits, and fucks’ (but does not judge or recognize), these three syntheses continue their work blindly. We thus have to insist on the genetic point of view: the first synthesis conditions and produces the second, and the second conditions and produces the third. As I suggested above, all three passive synthesis share several important characteristics with those of The Logic of Sense and, as I will argue in the third part of this book, with the passive syntheses of Difference and Repetition as well. The similarities between Anti-Oedipus and Deleuze’s earlier books, however, seem to stop here. It may be clear that desiring-production is a reformulation of the dynamic genesis, but if Anti-Oedipus really was the continuation of the theory put forward in The Logic of Sense, the genesis would have continued into a static genesis in which objects would be individuated and given a sense through the actualization of Ideas into extensity. But in Anti-Oedipus, we turn to a sort of renewal of Marxism and to a theory of social production that at first seems completely unrelated to anything like the static genesis of the earlier books. Rather than moving on in the order of genesis to the forms of good sense, common sense, and the forms of the proposition, we leave the field of intensity for historical moments of representation, for a theory of ‘universal history’ founded on contingency. But, as I have been suggesting throughout this book, Deleuze’s use of language is highly unreliable, and rather than actively taking up Marxism from the point of view of its own problems and theories, Deleuze and Guattari submit the language of Marxism to the workings of their own philosophy. Social production and universal history are, I will argue in the next chapter, nothing

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more than the production of ‘objectities’ or fully constituted noematic representations of the unindividuated things that had affected the unconscious subject. This opens up the possibility of reading the second process of production, social production, as a simple repetition of the static genesis from The Logic of Sense.

Chapter 5

Social Production

Social production In the previous chapter I argued that the three passive syntheses of desiring-production took up a set of molecular partial objects functioning as hyletic data or microperceptions and transformed it into a field of intensity traversed by a nomadic subject. Together, these three syntheses condition receptivity, or function as a faculty of sensibility. From this point of view, the three passive syntheses seemed very similar to the three bodily syntheses of The Logic of Sense which also took up something like a hyletic data, also called ‘partial objects’, and transformed it into a transcendental field traversed by a nomadic subject or aleatory point. Desiring-production therefore seems to be a simple reformulation of the dynamic genesis. And further, just as the transcendental field of The Logic of Sense inspired a second, static genesis, it is precisely at this point in Anti-Oedipus—the production of a field of intensity—that a second genesis, ‘social production’, begins. It begins in the field of intensity which was produced in the third passive synthesis of desiring-production, and it undertakes the slow transformation of intensity into ‘extensity’. Social production puts desire outside of itself. In doing so, it is also described as the movement from the molecular to the molar: when intensity is externalized, it is placed within the limits of ‘large’ molar aggregates. The primary question of this chapter is whether or not social production is also a new formulation of the static genesis in the same way that desiring-production repeats the dynamic genesis. The immediate answer to this question seems negative: instead of moving through the forms of good sense, common sense, and ending in the form of representation in a propositional consciousness like the ontological static genesis did in The Logic of Sense, social production seems to go in a completely different direction. On the foundation of the transcendental unconscious of desiring-production, Deleuze and Guattari deduce the course of ‘universal history’, not the constitution of representations. The first period to be established on the foundation of the field of intensity is the territorial age. This evolves into the despotic age, and history comes to an end in the capitalist age. Like the ontological static genesis, social production does have three distinct stages, but

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rather than representing moments of a genesis of representation which would happen here and now in the immediate presence of an affection, these stages seem to represent instead periods of history. Despite the fact that they represent historical periods, these three ages are each determined by the particular degree of development of the body without organs. Just as the body without organs took on three forms in desiringproduction (paranoiac, miraculating, celibate), it also takes on three forms in social production: the body of the earth, the body of the despot, and the body of capital. These three forms directly determine the historical age in question. The body of the earth produces the territorial age; the body of the despot produces the despotic age; and the body of capital produces the age of capitalism. But because social production is the process by which intensity is transformed into extensity, these three forms of the body without organs are doubled. They have an intensive and an extensive aspect. Although it is hard to find consistency on this point, the expression ‘full body’ usually refers to the degree of development of the intensities distributed across any particular type of body without organs (cf. 343), whereas the expression ‘socius’ usually refers to the form that the body without organs takes in extensity (cf. 203)—its form in extensity being that particular historical age which is determined by the degree of development of the intensities on the full body. In desiring-production, desire and the social, subject and object, were mixed together in a molecular multiplicity. In social production these two moments come apart. Deleuze and Guattari often say that social production is the same thing as desiring-production only under determinate conditions. The three forms of the intensive full body mentioned above are the determinate conditions. They determine desiring-production to produce social aggregates, and this determination of desiring-production is called ‘social production’. Under the different influences of these forms, ‘molecular formations constitute molar aggregates’ (343; cf. 287–88). The ‘molecular formations’ are the three passive syntheses working under the influence of the intensities they had originally given rise to. Under the influence of these intensities, the syntheses ‘constitute’ different ‘molar aggregates’. In other words, the degree of development of intensities determines the production of different kinds of molar aggregates. The specific state of intensities on a full body determines a particular use and configuration of the three passive syntheses. Each historical age, as we will see, is defined specifically by its employment of the three passive syntheses. This employment transforms the intensities into molar aggregates. This is one reason for the extreme complexity of the third chapter of AntiOedipus. Each historical moment is a reconfiguration of all three passive syntheses according to the state of intensities on the full body. By simplifying a lot, we can say that the savage territorial machine operated on the basis of connections of production, and that the barbarian despotic

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machine was based on disjunctions of inscription derived from the eminent unity. But the capitalist machine, the civilized machine, will first establish itself on the conjunction. (224; cf. 262) This is a simplification for at least two reasons, one technical, one linguistic. First of all, in each age all three syntheses work together. The territorial machine, for example, is not defined by one form of synthesis, the connective, or even by the dominance of one form of synthesis. In each age all three passive syntheses reappear and take on an essential role in transforming intensity into extensity. In fact, the significant difference between the employment of the three passive syntheses in history as opposed to their role in desire is that if in desire they were free, blind, passive, but also successive, in history they are all coordinated and therefore become—we can assume—active. In each age, the third synthesis determines the employment of the first two. In Kantian terminology, Deleuze and Guattari call the free and passive use of the syntheses their ‘legitimate’ use, and the active, regulated use, the ‘illegitimate’ use. Social production is defined by the illegitimate use of the syntheses. Second, the role of the syntheses is far from clear because the syntheses are renamed and take on multiple forms. In the primitive territorial machine, for example, connection becomes ‘alliance’, disjunction becomes ‘filiation’, and conjunction becomes the ‘declension’ of the two or the way in which they work together under the name ‘surplus value’ (149–50; cf. 188, 200). There is not enough space in this chapter to get into the mechanics of the system and to describe in detail the contribution of the syntheses to the production of history. This is because before that move should even be made, the prior argument has to be made that Deleuze and Guattari are not actually giving a more rigorous theorization to those problems of history and structuralism which were popular in the 1960s. They are not engaging with problems of kinship structure as such, but are dealing with the structure of subjectivity and the phenomenological production of reality itself. This becomes most clear in Deleuze and Guattari’s somewhat unexpected description of the historical molar aggregates as ‘objectities’. In a note on their use of this word, the translators of Anti-Oedipus suggest that it corresponds to the German word ‘objektität’ (AO 301). However this word also has a specific Husserlian heritage which carries with it a meaning which is the one, I would argue, that Deleuze and Guattari are alluding to here. When Husserl was translated into French, it was the German word ‘Gegenständlichkeit’, not ‘objektität’, which was translated by the French word ‘objectité’.1 In English, ‘Gegenständlichkeit’ was translated as ‘objectivity’ or ‘objectivites’. Husserl distinguishes primarily between two types of objectivities: objectivities of receptivity and objectivities of the understanding.2 Objectivities of the understanding are things like logical and mathematic truths which have reality, apodicity, and objectivity, but no corresponding material object.3 You could say that they are

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real without being actual. Throughout his work Deleuze often alludes to this notion of ideal objectivity in reference to his theory of transcendental Ideas.4 But the objectities which Deleuze and Guattari allude to in Anti-Oedipus, I will argue below and in the following chapters, are not those of the understanding, but refer to Husserl’s ‘objectivities of receptivity’. These are nothing more than the objects produced in the passive genesis which I described in my first chapter. Husserl describes them as follows: ‘they are pregiven in an original passivity with their structures of association, affection, etc.’ (E&J 250). Objectivities of receptivity are simply the objects which passivity constitutes out of our hyletic data. Deleuze and Guattari’s strange choice of the word ‘objectity’ to describe molar aggregates emphasizes a tension which I will amplify without entirely resolving throughout the remainder of the chapter. It is the tension between modes of a more or less individual representation and universal history. On the one hand, if desiring-production can be understood as the series of relationships between a synthesizing ego and its affections, or microperceptions, it would make perfect sense that social production would be the production of a series of representations of these affections. The objectities (of receptivity) would then be the finished product of that process which operates on microperceptions. We could then understand social production as the production of complete ‘molar’ objects corresponding to the fragmented objects which took the form of hyletic molecules. Not only would this make sense in relation to the correspondence I argued for in the last chapter between desire and the social and subject and object, but it would correspond to the theory of macroperception in The Fold, and to the ontological static genesis of The Logic of Sense. Indeed, this reading would suggest that despite the historical vocabulary, social production is a new formulation of the static genesis. But, on the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari clearly seem to suggest that these molar phenomena describe the modes of representation specific to entire historical ages and would in no way be able to describe the production of representations of our immediate affections.

Objectities There are three types of objectities that Deleuze and Guattari describe: those produced by ‘myth’, by ‘tragedy’, and by an ‘infinite subjective representation’. But what do Deleuze and Guattari mean by myth and tragedy such that the two genres could be understood as productive of ‘objectities?’ Myth and tragedy ‘are systems of symbolic representations that still refer desire to determinate exterior conditions as well as to particular objective codes’ (300). They grasp ‘the essence of desire, but by referring it to large “‘objectities”’ as to the specific elements that determine its objects, aims, and sources’ (301). Myth and tragedy

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therefore intervene between desire and its externalization. They are the historical methods by which intensity becomes translated into extensity. They ‘grasp the essence’ of desire, but in so doing, they put it outside of itself. ‘Myth’ and ‘tragedy’, as we will see below, are nothing more than technical terms for describing the ways in which desire is externalized. I pointed out above that the general logic behind social production was that in it desiring-production is folded back on itself. The intensities produced in the third synthesis turn back on the passive syntheses and determine a particular active and illegitimate use of the syntheses. This new configuration of the three syntheses produces a kind of objectity or molar aggregate specific to each historical age. ‘Myth’ therefore refers to the way in which desire is externalized in an objective representation in the territorial age. ‘Tragedy’ is the way in which desire is externalized in the despotic age. And the treatment of objective representations as subjective defines the capitalist age. The words ‘myth’ and ‘tragedy’ take on entirely new definitions within the context of this system—namely, they represent the externalization of desire in a social field. In what follows I want to explore this process of externalization and the constitution of objective representation in greater detail. Deleuze and Guattari claim that by understanding ‘symbolic representations’ we may develop ‘a systematic phenomenology of these elements and objectities’ (301).5 In other words, their theory of universal history is a systematic description of the kinds of representation (objectity) produced in every historical age. In the rest of this chapter I want to describe the contours of this systematic phenomenology.

The territorial machine To follow this process of externalization requires only that we follow the general structure of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of universal history. Desiring-production ended with the production of a field of intensity. This is precisely where social production begins. The genesis thus continues to build upon itself. It takes the product of the last stage as the object to be transformed in the current stage. At the end of the third synthesis, the body without organs supported a field of intensity. The form that the body without organs takes at the beginning of social production in the primitive territorial machine is ‘the full body of the earth’. The full body of the earth too is defined as a field of intensity. The territorial age, and its corresponding mode of representation, therefore takes as its primary problem the movement from intensity to extensity, the problem of ‘passing from an intensive energetic order to an extensive system, which comprises both qualitative alliances and extended filiations’ (154). An intensive energetic order is externalized into quality and extensity.

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This movement is accomplished through the interaction of the connective and disjunctive syntheses in their illegitimate forms of alliance (connection) and filiation (disjunction). These syntheses are already at work in their legitimate form in the determination of the full body. But in the territorial machine, as the socius miraculates itself, it ‘falls back on’ these syntheses of desiringproduction and puts them to an illegitimate use in the service of social production (154). From this point of view, It is necessary that the connections [of desiring-production] reappear in a form compatible with the inscribed disjunctions [which determine the body of the earth as a field of intensity], even if they react in turn on the form of these disjunctions. Such is alliance . . .: alliance imposes on the productive connections the extensive form of a pairing of persons, compatible with the disjunctions of inscription, but inversely reacts on inscription by determining an exclusive and restrictive use of these same disjunctions. (154–55; cf. 160) In the territorial machine, the syntheses take on an ‘extensive form’. This passage describes the movement between three dimensions which we can describe abstractly as (1) the system in intensity, (2) the movement from intensity to extensity, and (3) the system in extensity. In this particular passage (1) is the full body of the earth, (2) is the interaction of illegitimate syntheses, and (3) is the extensive system which results.6 The general function of the territorial machine is the externalization of desire accomplished through the interaction of the illegitimate uses of the passive syntheses. The territorial problem is one of moving from intensity to extensity. But I also want to suggest that, universal history aside, we could pose the problem from the point of view of a systematic phenomenology. If desiring-production could be read as the interaction between an ego and its affections, and if that series of affections ended only in a field of intensity, then the problem which follows for the affected subject is precisely how that field of intensity can be made sense of. How can intensive becoming be translated or ‘codified’ and thereby take on a relative stability? How are discreet and knowable representations produced on the foundation of intensity or becoming? For the flows to be codable, their energy must allow itself to be quantified and qualified; it is necessary that selections from the flows [first synthesis] be made in relation to [declension, or third synthesis] detachments from the chain [second synthesis]: something must pass through, but something must also be blocked and something must block and cause to pass through. Now this is only possible in the system in extension [ . . . which makes] an exclusive use of the disjunctive synthesis, and a conjugal use of the connective synthesis. Such is indeed the meaning of the incest prohibition conceived as the establishment of a physical system in extension: one must look in each case for the part of

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the flow of intensity that passes through, for what does not pass, and for what causes passage or prevents it, according to the patrilateral or matrilateral nature of the marriages [first synthesis (alliance)], according to the patrilineal or matrilineal nature of the lineages [second synthesis (filiation)], according to the general régime [third synthesis (declension)] of the extended filiations and the lateral alliances. (163; my emphasis)7 In the above passage, I tried to emphasize in brackets that the ‘codification’ of flows was accomplished through a complex interaction of the three passive syntheses (despite the various ways Deleuze and Guattari talk about synthesis— for example, the synonymy of selection, alliance, and connection, or of detachment, filiation, and disjunction). Deleuze and Guattari go into great detail in describing this coordination and the way in which it introduces ‘segments’ into the intensive flux (cf. 152), and therefore begins to bring stability to the intensive becoming. In order to produce segments, the first synthesis and the second synthesis must be coordinated in the third. This coordination is governed by a rule: the incest prohibition. The incest prohibition fulfills this role because, in saying that you cannot marry your father, mother, brother, or sister, it coordinates the syntheses of alliance and of filiation by determining marriage (alliance) according to lineage (filiation). Incest appears as a rule which has the double function of limiting the kinds of alliances and filiations which are possible at the same time that it ensures that these two syntheses work together. This declension leads directly to the segmentation of intensity (152). And in this process of segmentation, internal difference becomes external difference. Desire begins to take on well-defined limits. Territories are established within a field previously defined by its intensive becoming. The incest prohibition thus functions as a rule for the transformation of intensity into extensity and the stabilization of becoming so that it can be brought under the forms of representation. It is from this point of view that we can understand how ‘myth’ can contribute to the production of objective representations or objectities. When Deleuze and Guattari claim that myth produces objectities, they have in mind a very specific definition of mythology, and, in particular, a ‘formal property’ of the language of mythology. They take this characterization from Robert Jaulin: ‘Robert Jaulin says it well: “the mythical discourse has as its theme the passage from indifference to incest to its prohibition. Implicit or explicit, this theme underlies all the myths; it is therefore a formal property of this language’’ ’ (160). Without a doubt this is a superficial move, and one which appears to be almost purely formal. They do not evaluate the claim Jaulin makes—which is extreme and probably inspired by the very form of reasoning Anti-Oedipus sets itself against. They simply use the quotation to give an extremely specific definition to ‘myth’. Myth is the form of discourse which has embedded within it the prohibition of incest. But, as I just described, this prohibition also has a very

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specific and idiosyncratic meaning within their system. It represents the coordination of alliance with filiation which are now understood as the illegitimate forms of the passive syntheses of connection and disjunction.8 Mythology, then, contributes to the production of objectities by determining the movement from intensity to extensity by controlling the interaction between alliance and filiation by means of the incest prohibition, which is to say, by regulating the illegitimate forms of the connective and disjunctive syntheses.

The despotic machine This results in the production of segments or ‘blocks’ on which the next moment of universal history is founded. When the despotic age makes its appearance on the stage of universal history, it does not return to the field of intensities produced in desiring-production. Rather, it builds directly on top of the territorial machine by instituting a ‘new alliance’ and a ‘direct filiation’, a new connection and a new disjunction, a new use of the first synthesis and a new use of the second (192–93). If territorial representation codes by translating intensity into extensity, despotic representation overcodes by bringing several codes under a form of unity. The segments produced in the declension of alliance and filiation appear in the despotic state as ‘blocks’ which are submitted to a new form of organization specific to despotism, further rigidifying them into ‘bricks’. In point of fact, this is what forms the specific character of Asiatic9 production: the autochthonous rural communities subsist and continue to produce [first synthesis], inscribe [second synthesis], and consume [third synthesis]; in effect, they are the State’s sole concern. The wheels of the territorial lineage machine subsist, but are no longer anything more than the working parts of the State machine. The objects, the organs, the persons, and the groups retain at least part of their intrinsic coding, but these coded flows of the former régime find themselves overcoded by the transcendent unity that appropriates surplus value. The old inscription remains, but is bricked over by and in the inscription of the State. The blocks subsist, but have become encased and embedded bricks, having only a controlled mobility. The territorial alliances are not replaced, but are merely allied with the new alliance . . .. (196; my emphasis). The entire organization of the territorial machine, including its distribution of the three syntheses, persists in the form of a content which the new despotic organization of the syntheses will form. The segments or territories, the ‘autochthonous rural communities’, produced in the territorial machine become the parts of a new machine, and this is brought about through a new configuration of the three syntheses. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari are clear

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once again on this reappropriation of the three syntheses by the despotic state in a new and original form: new alliance is the despotic form of connection, direct filiation is the despotic form of disjunction, and the convergence of these two into the ‘transcendent unity’ of the despot is the form of conjunction (198). It is this third instance, conjunction, despite the fact that despotism is characterized by the dominance of the disjunctive synthesis, which seems to be the defining characteristic of despotism: ‘the State is the transcendent higher unity that integrates relatively isolated subaggregates, functioning separately, to which it assigns a development in bricks and a labor of construction by fragments’ (198). In despotism, a ‘transcendent higher unity’ gathers together ‘isolated subaggregates’ or independent territories. It is the synthesis of territoriality. Deleuze and Guattari cite Kafka as providing the definitive description of this process, and in their later book, Kafka, they provide a diagram which gives the reader a vivid impression of this process. At the center of the image is a tower. This tower organizes around its periphery, at a distance, a series of ‘discontinuous blocks’ (KA 74). The ‘tower’ represents the despotic unity, and the ‘discontinuous blocks’ represent the territories which this unity gathers together. The organization of territories into a common project is the defining characteristic of the despotic age. This new organization is ‘governed’ or ‘controlled’ by the transcendent unity of the despot. This is an essential point. It suggests that at this point in history a form of spontaneity capable of intention or control enters the picture. Whereas territorial representation was more or less haphazard and still retained a degree of passivity, despotic representation has the force of volition behind it. In despotism passivity recedes and activity comes to the fore. As for the subaggregates themselves, the territorial machines, they are the concrete itself, the concrete base and beginning, but their segments here enter into relationships corresponding to the essence, they assume precisely this form of bricks that ensures their integration into a higher unity, and their distributive operation, consonant with the great collective designs of this same unity . . .. (AO 199; my emphasis) But this subordination of the concrete according to the designs of a transcendent unity also marks, from the point of view of a systematic phenomenology, what is perhaps the most important moment in the Deleuzian system and deserves far more attention than previously given because it is at this moment that meaning and its accomplices—judgment, knowledge, representation, signification, purpose, law, and so forth—make their first appearance in the process of production.10 Despotism marks the moment in history at which meaning is produced. It is the constitution of the ‘shores of representation’ (316). If we were in Husserl’s system, we would call it the moment of ‘sense-bestowal’, but we

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already know that for Deleuze sense is not a predicate qualifying the tragic objectity produced in despotism, but rather the transcendental field out of which signification is produced. For that reason, we should talk about what comes about at this stage of the genesis as the bestowal of ‘meaning’ or ‘signification’ as opposed to ‘sense’. Despotism is the moment of meaning-bestowal. It is therefore the correlate, as I will argue below, of the production of signification in the static ontological genesis in The Logic of Sense. What Deleuze called signification there corresponds to the kind of meaning produced here. Deleuze and Guattari insist that ‘at this juncture’, the question the analyst must ask begins to shift from ‘How does it work?’ to ‘What does it mean?’: ‘The question “What is the use of that?” fades more and more, and disappears in the fog of pessimism, of nihilism, Nada, Nada!’ (214; cf. 206). Things no longer have uses. They have meanings. This point has extremely important consequences in relation to the use Frederic Jameson and other critics have made of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘functionalism’ when they argue that the literary critic inspired by Deleuze and Guattari should no longer ask what a text means, but only how it works.11 It seems that functionalism, however, has well-defined limits, and that the question of function is only relevant in those periods of history prior to despotism. These limits of functionalism become very clear if we notice that as we move through Deleuze and Guattari’s system, we move from the molecular unconscious to the molar preconscious, from small partial objects to massive objectities, but also, simultaneously, from nonsense to meaning. The reason the schizoanalyst cannot ask what partial objects mean, but only how they work, is simply that partial objects have no meaning. The question of how things work is relevant only in a situation where the objects of the question have no signification. At the end of the book, Deleuze and Guattari cite a ‘practical rule laid down by Leclaire’,—the same rule Deleuze used in The Logic of Sense (LS 233, 358n7)— which they summarize here as ‘the rule of the right to non-sense as well as to the absence of a link’ (AO 314; my emphasis). Even if, at the moment of this citation, the nonsense they are referring to belongs to ‘the ultimate elements of the unconscious’, this absence of meaning, present at the foundation of the genesis, will persist straight through the process of production until the moment at which the despotic ‘transcendent object’ leaps outside of the ‘territorial chain’ (205). It is exactly ‘in place of nonsignifying signs that compose the networks of a territorial chain’ that ‘a despotic signifier from which all the signs uniformly flow in a deterritorialized12 flow of writing’ establishes itself (206; my emphases).13 Territorial representation is ‘nonsignifying’. Meaning has not yet been produced. In contrast to the still nonlinear and a-signifying territorial writing however, there appears a despotic writing which is linear and meaningful. In contrast to the ‘pure designation’ or denotation of territorial representation (204, 214), despotic representation is a pure signification (214). In despotic representation, ‘signs become signifying under the action of a despotic symbol that totalizes them in the absence of its withdrawal’ (310). Or, to put it another way, the despot forms ‘a transcendental

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dimension that gives rise to linearity’, a transcendental dimension whose specific function is to introduce meaning into the order of genesis (205–06). This is why Deleuze and Guattari always attack a ‘molar functionalism’. A reading of the book which ignores its systematicity by treating the equation ‘meaning = function’ as a either a ‘critical concept’ or as a statement on the nature of meaning in general (e.g. Jameson) poses significant problems. All molar functionalism is false, since the organic or social machines are not formed in the same way they function, and technical machines are not assembled in the same way they are used, but imply precisely the specific conditions that separate their own production from their distinct product. Only what is not produced in the same way it functions has a meaning, and also a purpose, an intention. The desiring-machines on the contrary represent nothing, signify nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what is made with them, what they make themselves. (288; my emphases)14 It makes no sense to say then that the equation of meaning and function works at the level of a literary text, which is itself often signifying. The identity of meaning and use is accurate only under the conditions of the absence of meaning. It only makes sense to talk of a molecular functionalism because at the molecular level there is no meaning. As soon as meaning and volition enter the picture, which is to say, at the moment of the production of a despotic state, functionalism no longer holds.15 At this point, the ‘question “What does it mean?” begins to be heard, and the problems of exegesis prevail over problems of use and efficacy’ (206).The question Jameson failed to ask was whether or not we read at the level of desiring-production. But as long as reading goes beyond pure designation, as long as what we read has a meaning of almost any kind, the question ‘how does it work’ ceases to be relevant. Deleuze and Guattari seem to be clear on this point: insofar as there is meaning, we have not yet reached the molecular. But conversely, when there is meaning, we are no longer in the presence of the molecular and the questions and methods of investigation must change. Schizoanalysis must give way to interpretation. In despotism, writing becomes linear, and production is reduced to representation (310). Reading, even our reading of Deleuze and Guattari, is only possible at the level of despotic representation when writing has become linear and meaning has been produced: here ‘The eye no longer sees, it reads’ (206).16

Good and common sense But how are we to understand this? How is it possible that meaning only comes about at that specific historical moment when a despot comes to power? Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly emphasize that there was no meaning in territorial

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societies, and that their mode of representation consists only of nonsignifying signs. But, read literally, this proposition is not only historically inaccurate but self-contradicting as well: Deleuze and Guattari themselves make use of the mythology of primitive societies in order to explain the structure of those societies and their relation to reality. They themselves require that there was signifying language in which those myths were recorded and that there was communication in territorial societies in a language which went beyond the pure designation or denotation (which could only be seeing, pointing, and grunting). What, for example, would the ‘waters of death’, or even the plant which bestows immortality, in Gilgamesh denote? Has anyone ever denoted immortality? Or is it rather a concept which pervaded territorial mythology? It is precisely this characterization of territorial representation as purely denotative and the characterization of despotic representation as a pure signification that points to a possible solution to this too-obvious problem and overly simple correspondence between historical ages and the genesis of meaning. As I described in the first part of this book, denotation and signification were two successive moments of the static genesis in The Logic of Sense. We have already noted a degree of play in Deleuze’s use of terminology and a certain deception with regard to his subject matter. From this point of view, Deleuze’s criticism has to go as far as it can in its infidelity to the event of Deleuze. What if it were the case that Deleuze and Guattari were not interested in a theory of universal history, and that their apparent development of such a narrative says absolutely nothing about history, but is rather a reformulation of the static genesis in yet another vocabulary (The Logic of Sense used the vocabulary of The Cartesian Meditations whereas Difference and Repetition makes use of the language of thermodynamics and biology)? This kind of reading would certainly make sense in relation to their characterization of historical representations as ‘objectities’. We could accurately describe the products of the ontological static genesis in The Logic of Sense—the denoted, the signified, and the manifested—as objectities, since they were precisely those constituted subjects, objects, and concepts which were the correlates of the dimensions of language. They played the same role in that books as objectivities of receptivity did in Husserl. This parallel between AntiOedipus and The Logic of Sense can be significantly strengthened by noticing that the static ontological genesis progressed according to the forms of good and common sense. Denotation rested on the form of good sense, and signification and manifestation depended on the two forms of common sense. Deleuze gives a comprehensive description of these forms in a passage in Difference and Repetition which I want to quote at length: Common sense was defined subjectively by the supposed identity of a Self which provided the unity and ground of all the faculties, and objectively by the identity of whatever object served as a focus for all the faculties. This double identity, however, remains static. We no more find ourselves before

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a universal indeterminate object than we are a universal Self. Objects are divided up in and by fields of individuation, as are Selves. Common sense must therefore point beyond itself towards another, dynamic, instance capable of determining the indeterminate object as this or that, and of individualizing the self situated in this ensemble of objects. This other instance is good sense, which takes its point of departure from a difference at the origin of individuation. However, precisely because it ensures the distribution of that difference in such a manner as it tends to be cancelled in the object, and because it provides a rule according to which the different objects tend to equalize themselves and the different Selves tend to become uniform, good sense in turn points toward the instance of common sense which provides it both with the form of a universal Self and that of an indeterminate object. (DR 226; cf. 133 and LS 78) Schematically, this passage can be reduced to four key points. (1) Good sense takes as its point of departure a ‘difference at the origin of individuation’, a difference which in Difference and Repetition is described as an ‘intensity’. I will suggest in the next part of this book that this notion of intensity is identical to the one developed in Anti-Oedipus. (2) Good sense puts this difference outside of itself. It ‘cancels’ difference as it moves from intensity to extensity, from the difference which governs individuation to the individuated object, and it provides a rule according to which these objects become equalized. However, at this point in the constitution of objects, Deleuze runs into two problems Kant gave famous answers to: the unity of the object (the transcendental object or object = X) and the unity of the subject (the transcendental unity of apperception). While good sense patiently transforms intensity into extensity, it is incapable of determining the unity of the objects which it is in the process of producing. (3) Common sense in its objective form therefore provides the form of an indeterminate object which gives unity to the different adumbrations produced in good sense. In its subjective form, (4) common sense gives unity to a subject to whom the representations appear.17 What is striking about the four main aspects of this schematic description is that each one seems to be behind the stages of what Deleuze and Guattari described in Anti-Oedipus as the course of universal history. The forms of good and common sense seem to structure history: (1) Good sense presupposes a field of intensity. This was precisely the field of intensity produced in the third synthesis of desiring-production which the full body of the earth represented. (2) Good sense determines the cancellation of difference and provides it with a rule. We saw that the primary problem of the territorial machine was the movement from intensity to extensity or the production of a system in extension out of the intensive full body. As Deleuze and Guattari put it,

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‘The system in extension is born of the intensive conditions that make it possible, but it reacts on them, cancels them, represses them, and allows them no more than a mythical expression’ (AO 160). The rule which the territorial system establishes is the prohibition of incest which forces the first two syntheses to work together in the fabrication of blocks or segments. These segments represent the externalization of intensity, or desire outside of itself. It is also worth noticing in this context that three years prior to the publication of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze described good sense in The Logic of Sense precisely as ‘agricultural, inseparable from the agrarian problem, the establishment of enclosures’ (LS 76; my emphases). The form of good sense was defined there too as the problem of establishing territories. (3) Common sense functions as the transcendental object or the object = x. This indeterminate object is nothing more than the despot himself who ensures both the successful integration of the blocks produced by good sense into a higher unity and that this ‘distributive operation’ is ‘consonant with the great collective designs of this same unity . . .’ (AO 199). And further, just as good sense and common sense presuppose one another, so too do the despotic and territorial machines. Not only does the territorial machine persist in its entirety in the despotic machine as its foundations, as the content which the despotic state gives form to (199), but, ‘in the end, one no longer really knows what comes first, and whether the territorial machine does not in fact presuppose a despotic machine from which it extracts the bricks or that it segments in turn’ (210). But what about (4), the subjective form of common sense, which has a function analogous to the Kantian transcendental unity of apperception? It seems that this is precisely the function of the next stage of universal history. After the despotic age, or the form of objective common sense, comes what Deleuze and Guattari call the age of the Urstaat. They describe this Urstaat as a ‘principle of reflection’ (219; my emphasis). It expresses the way in which the despotic state steps outside of history but, in the form of a ‘cerebral ideality’ or an ‘abstraction that belongs to another dimension’, conditions universal history as the horizon common to what comes before and what comes after: Being the common horizon for what comes before and what comes after, it conditions universal history only provided it is not on the outside, but always off to the side, the cold monster that represents the way in which history is in the ‘head’, in the ‘brain’—the Urstaat. (221) Or again: It appears to be set back at a remove from what it transects and from what it resects, as though it were giving evidence of another dimension, a cerebral

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ideality that is added to, superimposed on the material evolution of societies, a regulating idea or principle of reflection (terror) that organizes the parts and flows into a whole. (219) The Urstaat has a role similar to the transcendental object, the despot, but it ceases to be explicit, it ceases to be the form specific to a particular set of concrete bricks and falls behind the scenes, all the while continuing the work of unification proper to the despotic state. Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly emphasized that the Urstaat is not an age closed in on itself, but bears on the entire course of history. It is what unites history into one process of production. However, it does not only unify what came before—territorialism and despotism—but also what comes after: capitalism. The Urstaat has the peculiar characteristic of underlying the whole flow of decoded representations (images) which characterize capitalism. The Urstaat ‘supersects what comes before, but resects the formations that follow’ (220).18 In other words, it coordinates the entire process. It makes the forms of good and common sense all parts of the same process and ensures that what comes after these forms will also belong to this process. The unification the Urstaat performs thus bears on what came before and what comes after. Is this not very similar to the way in which Kant described the transcendental unity of apperception? Despite the radical difference in Kant between a ‘passive’ intuition (CPR B153–54) and an active understanding, the unity of apperception is what brings all representations, even those of intuition, within the limits of a consciousness so that the empirical subject can say that these are my representations (B132–33). Even though the entire philosophical context (phenomenology, not idealism) and problem (genesis, not conditioning) has shifted between Deleuze and Kant, and with it the entire nature of the concept, the Urstaat seems to perform a function not far from that of the unity of apperception. The Urstaat, the ‘subjective essence’, is that which steps outside of the process of production in the form of a ‘cerebral ideality’, a principle of reflection, and ‘gathers together’ what came before and what came after. The entire genesis is therefore united in this cerebral ideality as its history. The Urstaat brings the entire process of production within the limits of a principle of reflection or apperception. If capitalism is the historical age in which objectities are no longer treated as representative of objective reality, but only of subjective reality, we can finally see why. The Urstaat brings the production of objectities firmly within the limits of a subject whose representations they are. In relation to the earlier stages of the genesis, it is a kind of second-order unity which no longer organizes the concrete as the despotic state did, but organizes the organization of the concrete. It binds the objectities. It unifies the process itself and thus, in this way, as the subjective form of common sense, conditions capitalism or the age of ‘infinite subjective representation’ (AO 222).

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Capitalism When we read Vincent Descombes’s claim that Deleuze was ‘above all a post-Kantian’, we have to wonder if Descombes was aware of how accurate this description was (Descombes 152). Just a superficial glance over the preceding stages of the process of production will very quickly reveal the deeply Kantian structure of AntiOedipus. I argued in the previous chapter that the three passive syntheses, insofar as they take up a hyletic data and transform it into a field of intensities, must be read as a new account of sensibility. As we have seen Deleuze and Guattari themselves even go so far as to describe the intensities produced in the third synthesis as affections. The Urstaat and Despotism, which function as the transcendental object and subject, very clearly echo Kant’s description of the forms of the understanding. And if, finally, the territorial age is what brings intensity to the understanding by transforming it into segments which can then be related to the form of the object and the subject, then undoubtedly, its function is analogous to that of the imagination in Kant. In all of this, however, one thing is missing: reason. As odd as it might sound, here I want to argue, or at least sketch out an argument, that what Deleuze and Guattari call capitalism is actually a reformulation of the faculty of reason from a genetic point of view, and indeed, Anti-Oedipus could then be read as the realization of Kantianism as a philosophy of genesis. Structurally, then, we could compare Deleuze and Kant as follows: Kant

Deleuze

Sensibility

Sensibility: (1) First synthesis (2) Second synthesis (3) Third synthesis: Intensity

Imagination

Territorialism

Understanding

Despotism

Reason

Capitalism

The significant difference between Deleuze and Kant—beyond the obviously more developed account of receptivity in Deleuze—is that in Deleuze, each moment of the genesis conditions and produces the one which follows in line with the genetic and empiricist requirement. In contrast, in Kant, content with idealism, these faculties are pregiven outside of a genesis. To really articulate this argument and to show the way in which the Kantian concepts are transformed when they are forced to function in a process of production rather than a static conditioning would take up more space than I have, and easily an

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entire book. As a result, for now, I want to leave the argument at the level of a suggestion, and to further suggest in what immediately follows that capitalism is the age of reason. What does capitalism, as the age of infinite subjective representation have in common with the faculty of Ideas? What does this characterization of capitalism’s ‘objectity’ as ‘infinite subjective representation’ mean? Representation is subjective, we have seen, because the Urstaat brings the objective representations of the earlier stages of history under the form of the subject. They become the representations of that subject. This introduces a whole new dynamic into history. All representation up until the Urstaat had been objective. Territorial objectities were produced by an act of ‘coding’. Despotic objectities were produced by an act of ‘overcoding’. When representation becomes subjective, these objectities are first decoded, but then immediately ‘axiomatized’ in a process which leads to ‘reterritorialization’.19 Representation is subjective in capitalism because it unfolds in the form of the subject. It is infinite because whenever a decoded flow appears that cannot be axiomatized, a new axiom is simply added which is capable of organizing and reterritorializing the aberrant flows: ‘The strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones’ (250). From this point of view, capitalism is defined by its totalizing function. There is no flow that can escape its reterritorialization through the axiomatic. But this is not a blind totalization. Capitalism is defined as the regulation of this axiomatic. ‘Capitalism merely ensures the regulation of the axiomatic; it regulates or even organizes the failures of the axiomatic as conditions of the latter’s operation; it watches over and directs progress toward a saturation of the axiomatic and the corresponding widening of the limits’ (252). In other words all of the flows are not only totalized, but this aggregation is regulated. This is exactly how Kant defined the legitimate use of reason and its transcendent ideas in The Critique of Pure Reason. For Kant, reason forms concepts of which we can have no experience— namely the self, the world, and God. He calls these concepts of reason transcendent ideas. While it is completely illegitimate to assert the existence of the objects of these ideas, the idea itself does have an important legitimate function as regulative. The situation which the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject finds itself in at the end of the age of despotism is very similar to that of the Kantian subject after it has subsumed the sensible manifold under the forms of the understanding: they both have before them empirical representations of objects. For the Kantian subject, it is very tempting to begin relating its objects to one another and forming the idea of a world which would be the totality of all possible objects. This is precisely the impulse of reason: to systematize. For Kant, to say that systematic totality of objects actually exists would result in a series of antinomies. The Idea, however, has an important regulative function: it provides an ideal of unity toward which thought can direct its cognitions. In the

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same way that the understanding brings unity to the sensible manifold, the Idea brings unity to the objects determined in the understanding. It attempts to systematize the objects and discover ‘not merely a contingent aggregate but a system interconnected in accordance with necessary laws’ (CPR A646/B674). This is what happens in capitalism. The subject of despotism only has before it different objectities which are produced contingently, as the unification of those affections which have been transformed into intensities and externalized in territorialism. The subject of capitalism is able to ‘decode’ these objects and realign them within an axiomatic, or ‘a system interconnected in accordance with necessary laws’. Capitalism is the regulative idea which attempts to bring the totality of despotic objectities within its ‘widening limits’ (AO 252).

Conclusion: Deleuze and Guattari We can thus see the importance of reading the expression ‘social production’ within the Kantian context in which it was first used. To put it somewhat colloquially and within the coordinates of a philosophy alien to Deleuze’s, ‘social’ just means out there, beyond me, transcendent. Social production is the production of transcendent objects, ‘objectities’ (this ‘egological’ terminology is not foreign to Deleuze—see Pure Immanence). My reading depended entirely on the formal structure of Anti-Oedipus in relation to The Logic of Sense, but it also presupposes my following reading of Difference and Repetition where we will see the Idea of the world reappear at the end of the genesis under the name ‘the Other’. What I hope to have shown in the preceding two chapters is that AntiOedipus and The Logic of Sense share very similar structures. They both begin in the same place: a field of materiality. They both end in the same place: some form of representation. And they both traverse the space between matter and representation in a nearly identical way: three passive syntheses produce a transcendental field which itself produces the forms of good sense, common sense, and representation. This structural homology needs to be accounted for. There is a strong thesis and a weak one with which to approach this problem. A possible weak thesis would say that Deleuze and Guattari are imitating one of those enlightenment-style investigations into origins in which each moment of a genealogy is the consequence of the domination of a certain faculty.20 The fact that any particular faculty still functions within us is what allows us to know what life was like in earlier times. This thesis would have the advantage of maintaining or justifying much of the language used in the text. The strong thesis would say, on the other hand, that Deleuze and Guattari are not speaking of history or of psychoanalysis or of Marx. The entire book represents the development of a systematic phenomenology, and the language of psychoanalysis and Marxism that the authors employ needs to be rigorously ignored. The specific contribution of Anti-Oedipus to the two books immediately

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preceding it, which more directly develop this phenomenology, is that it works out in greater detail the role of the syntheses in the static genesis. Universal history simply expresses the evolution of a representation from its molecular origins in a hyletic data to its molar destination of a representation within a horizon of anticipation and recollection. No doubt there is a happy medium between the two theses, but I want to put forward the strong thesis for two reasons. First and simply because I think things need to be taken this far. Second because the structural similarity between the earlier two books is astounding, and its rigor has consequences that need to be explored in much greater detail before a convincing conclusion can be drawn. One of the more immediate consequences which arises from this structural similarity turns on the question of the relation between Deleuze and Guattari in the composition of Anti-Oedipus and the claim that Anti-Oedipus marks the beginning of a new period in Deleuze’s thought or that it is doing something radically new. The perceived break between Deleuze’s supposedly naive preGuattari work21 and his more enlightened and radical work now seems much less apparent. Guattari’s own comments seem definitive on this point. In that same journal entry from October 13, 1972, in which he was trying to find himself in the work, he identified exactly what excluded him: Gilles conquered with ease and even some virtuosity the right to move about in a relational field that I have been tangled up in for twenty years [. . .]. I still have no control over this other world of systematic academic work, secret programming over dozens of years. Keep my penmanship, my style. But I don’t recognize myself in the A.O. I need to stop running behind the image of Gilles and the polishedness, the perfection that he brought to the most unlikely book. (AP 402) It is Deleuze’s mastery of the relational field, the way in which he can secretly program the more or less haphazard and tangled concepts into a polished and perfected work which prevents Guattari from recognizing himself in AntiOedipus. We find these kinds of comments scattered throughout the Anti-Oedipus Papers: ‘I want to make an outline this time, but I can tell it’s going to be a mess again!’ (254). ‘Same mess all over again. I’m so jealous of your ability to organize and classify things!’ (246). In a letter to Deleuze as early as May 1970, he gave a precise characterization of Deleuze’s contribution: ‘When I read you I have the impression of rediscovering all sorts of powerfully orchestrated refrains that I have proposed to you [. . .]’ (411). All of these images—orchestration, secret programming, organization, and classification—alongside Guattari’s own chaotic mode of presentation—‘Surfing’ on the crest of concepts. ‘Quickly’ (224)—suggest that what is particularly Deleuzian in 1972 about Anti-Oedipus is its organization.22 Despite the very wide terminological and thematic gap between The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus it is precisely this organization or

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structure that persists between the two books which defines the similarity between them. This structure is a genesis of representation in two parts. A dynamic genesis comprising three passive syntheses begins in the movement of partial objects and ends in the empty form of time, or intensity = 0. From here a second, static genesis begins which transforms the product of the first genesis according to the forms of good sense, common sense, and finally representation. Obviously this is only the first of many books that they would write together, and the story of Guattari’s contribution is much more complex than this general structure. But the structural similarity between the two books goes a long way to suggesting that the break was not nearly as dramatic as the terminological shift would make it seem. This is especially true because Deleuze had already been in the practice of altering his technical vocabulary between books before Guattari ever came on the scene. Rather than attempting to show that this structure indeed persists all the way through their collaborative work to What is Philosophy?, I want to turn instead to the central text of Deleuze’s oeuvre, Difference and Repetition, where the vocabulary is again significantly different from that used in The Logic of Sense and hopefully give further consistency to this genesis of representation which I have been outlining here. I will argue that in Difference and Repetition we find again the same structure of the genesis that appeared in The Logic of Sense, but also in a completely different technical vocabulary.

Part III

Difference and Repetition

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Introduction to Part III

Difference and Repetition In the previous two parts of this book, I argued that the two works published immediately after Difference and Repetition shared almost identical formal structures, and that they both could be read as developing a story of the genesis of phenomena, of representations, or of objectities. In The Logic of Sense the world of phenomena is the world of propositions and their relations; in Anti-Oedipus it was the world of the objectities of ‘social production’. Each book described one very broad genesis which moved from microperceptions to molar representations. In both books, this larger process of production was broken down into two smaller processes of production. In The Logic of Sense the genesis which moved from microperception to sense was called the dynamic genesis. In Anti-Oedipus, this same process was called ‘desiring-production’. In The Logic of Sense, the genesis which moved from sense to propositions and their three dimensions was called the static genesis. In AntiOedipus, this genesis was called ‘social-production’. In both parts I made frequent reference to Difference and Repetition. In this chapter I want to clarify those references and explicitly argue that Difference and Repetition also shares this same general structure and project. The genesis that it describes also begins in the world of microperception and theorizes the production of the virtual, or sense. Then, on the foundation of the virtual, a second genesis is founded which moves from sense to representation. Schematically, the parallel structures of the three books look like this: The Logic of Sense

Anti-Oedipus

Difference and Repetition

Dynamic genesis Static genesis

Desiring-production Social production

Production of time Differenciation-individuation

But to read Difference and Repetition in this way goes completely against the grain of current interpretations of the book which read it more or less as a theory only of the static genesis.1 They emphasize only the virtual—understood as the ontological foundation of all reality—and its relation to intensity. The entire purpose of the next two chapters is to justify reading Difference and Repetition alongside the other two works, and, in particular, this means reading the

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process of differenciation-individuation and the virtual, which this process or genesis takes as its origin, as founded on the production of time. The virtual engenders an individuated actuality—there is no question about that. However, an unindividuated actuality engenders the virtual, and that is what I hope to capture here.

Chapter 6

Static Genesis: Ideas and Intensity

The notion of the virtual has been subject to a number of debates in recent years revolving around the question of whether or not, despite Deleuze’s avowed project of thinking Being in its ‘immanence’, he actually ended up positing a transcendent ground to reality. And, indeed, if we abstract the notion of the virtual from the function it plays within the overall conceptual structure of Deleuze’s thought, it is easy to be sympathetic with Hallward’s and Badiou’s complaints that the virtual sounds a lot like another world, even if we insist that it is only the other side of this one. If, however, this picture of the virtual as the other worldly ontological foundation of all that happens in this world is less an argument that Deleuze makes than it is one which Deleuze’s readers have tended to make, this is because all of these debates are founded on a failure to take into consideration the underside of virtuality itself. Hallward, who has formulated the most concentrated arguments that the virtual is other-worldly does in fact realize that Deleuze claims that the virtual is produced by a corporeal depth (Hallward 43). But for Hallward, Deleuze never explains this process: You might expect, then, an explanation of how the causal depths determine these surface effects. Deleuze duly accepts that every event does indeed emerge from the ‘depth of corporeal causes’. However, the general effort of the book is to complicate if not disrupt the mechanics of this production. (Hallward 43) But we have already seen that this is not at all the case. The last third of The Logic of Sense, in its development of the dynamic genesis, is devoted in its entirety to just such an explanation. In fact, it is the only part of the genesis that is presented in a linear fashion. Far from disrupting the mechanics, the account of dynamic genesis is the most clearly developed part of the entire book. One of the primary projects of the next two chapters is simply to show that this theory of the production of virtuality was already well developed in Difference and Repetition. In order to make this argument, however, I have reversed the order of presentation. Rather than following the course of genesis from the dynamic to the static, I will begin with the static, with a description of the virtual and the

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genesis which ensues from its foundations. In the next chapter I show how the virtual is produced in the interaction of the temporal syntheses. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze defines the virtual as the time in which transcendental Ideas are progressively determined. ‘The reality of the virtual is structure’, and structure is nothing other than a transcendental Idea (209; cf. PI 31). In order to understand the virtual then, we need to understand Ideas. In order to understand Ideas we need to know three things: (1) what Ideas are in themselves; (2) where they come from—because Deleuzism could never be an overturning of Platonism if Ideas were given outside of a genesis; and (3) where Ideas go, or what their function is in the overall system of thought developed in Difference and Repetition.

Ideas We already briefly encountered Ideas in The Logic of Sense. There, as in Difference and Repetition, they went by many names, the most common of which were ‘structures’, ‘problems’, and ‘events’. These events populated the transcendental field of sense and communicated with one another in relation to an ‘aleatory point’. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze, besides using these names, also calls them ‘virtual’ or ‘differential multiplicities’.1 An Idea ‘is neither one nor multiple, but a multiplicity constituted of differential elements, differential relations between those elements, and singularities corresponding to those relations’ (DR 278; cf. 181–83). From this definition, we can identify three aspects of the Idea which need to be defined for themselves: 1. Differential or ideal elements 2. Differential relations 3. Singularities These three elements are related to one another through a process of production which moves from an entirely undetermined Idea to a completely determined Idea: (1) The Idea begins its life as a completely undetermined— but determinable—set of ‘ideal elements’. (These ideal elements are precisely those ‘liberated’ partial objects which were ‘sublimated’ or projected onto the transcendental field in The Logic of Sense.)2 Deleuze consistently attributes several important characteristics to these ideal elements: they are meaningless, they are functionless, and they are entirely virtual. ‘The elements of the multiplicity must have neither sensible form nor conceptual signification, nor, therefore, an assignable function. They are not even actually existent, but inseparable from a potential or a virtuality’ (DR 183).3 (2) Between these meaningless elements, differential relations are then established by an ‘aleatory point’ which begin to give the amorphous set of ideal elements a degree of

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consistency. The determination of these relations represents the beginning of something recognizable as structure: the ideal elements become caught up within a network of relations. (3) But it is only when these relations lead to the production of singularities that the structure is completely determined. One could say that at this point the Idea has, at last, a relatively permanent and communicable/repeatable form.4 But, at this stage, the Idea still remains purely virtual, purely quantitative, and purely formal. Deleuze borrows a distinction from the mathematician Albert Lautman to express this: complete determination bears on singularities only from the point of view of their ‘distribution’ and their ‘existence’. It takes the entire process of actualization to give these singularities qualities, or a ‘nature’. The completely determined Idea is thus completely virtual. In this account of Ideas, it is apparent that the complete notion of a multiplicity comprising the three dimension outlined above is actually a process. We begin with an inchoate set of ideal elements, establish differential relations between them, and then singularities ‘corresponding’ to or ‘dependent upon’ these relations. This is why Deleuze describes the process of production of Ideas as ‘progressive determination’. To each one of these three moments of the progressive determination of Ideas there corresponds a moment of what Deleuze calls ‘sufficient reason’. Exactly what the Idea is a reason of I will soon discuss. These three moments are: 1. Determinability 2. Reciprocal determination 3. Complete determination Each one of these moments expresses a degree of determination characterizing the Idea. Ideal elements are determinable; differential relations reciprocally determine these elements; and this leads to a state of complete determination in which the stable form of an Idea is expressed in singularities. The entire purpose of this theory of ‘progressive determination’ is to describe the genesis of virtual structures. This is, you could say, a third genesis which takes place between the dynamic and the static.5 Deleuze turns to Galois’s and Abel’s group theory for a more precise theory of how a structure might be progressively determined. There are two relevant quotations which seem to express what Deleuze has in mind: Starting from a basic ‘field’ R, successive adjunctions to this field (R’, R’’, R’’’ . . . ) allow a progressively more precise distinction of the roots of an equation, by the progressive limitation of possible substitutions. There is thus a succession of ‘partial resolvants’ or an embedding of ‘groups’ which make the solution follow from the very conditions of the problem. (DR180)

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In effect, the reciprocity of determination does not signify a regression, nor a marking time, but a veritable progression in which the reciprocal terms must be secured step by step, and the relations themselves established between them. The completeness of the determination also implies the progressivity of adjunct fields. In going from A to B and then B to A, we do not arrive back at the point of departure [. . .] rather the repetition between A and B and B and A is the progressive tour or description of the whole problematic field. (DR 210; my emphasis) On the one hand, Deleuze is very clearly describing here a semi-mathematical process. Group theory is the theory of how to determine structures. It accomplishes this by first transforming a group and then by asking what changed and what did not change across the transformation. In Deleuze’s first example, the ‘basic “field” R’ was the original group. The ‘successive adjunctions to this field (R’, R’’, R’’’ . . .)’ are the transformations which allow an invariant to be abstracted.6 This invariant is the Idea. The determination of groups thus proceeds by creating variations on an original set and abstracting a general structure from those variations. Despite this mathematical context, I want to insist, however, that for Deleuze mathematics is only an example or a ‘technical model’7 for explaining aspects of ‘thought’, and further that it is necessary to understand what function this turn to group theory is intended to serve in relation to what must be understood as an essentially cognitive process. As he says of singularities in his seminar on Leibniz, they are ‘mathematical-psychological’. The same is true of the progressive determination of structure. At this point we again confront Husserl. Deleuze’s description of the progressive determination of the Idea is very similar to what Husserl called ‘imaginative variation’.8 For Husserl, imaginative variation was a way of determining the essence or the ‘Idea’ of any given ‘image’ or ‘experienced objectivity’. It accomplishes this by arbitrarily producing in the imagination free variations or modifications of the image until a unity arises which functions as the general essence of any given thing. Husserl writes, by an act of volition we produce free variants, each of which [. . .] occurs in the subjective mode of the ‘arbitrary’. It then becomes evident that a unity runs through this multiplicity of successive figures, that in such free variations of an original image, e.g., of a thing, an invariant is necessarily retained as the necessary general form, without which an object such as this thing, as an example of its kind, would not be thinkable at all. (E&J 341; original emphases) Now, it seems that Deleuze is saying nothing more than this in his appropriation of group theory. What is Deleuze-Abel’s ‘basic field R’ but that ‘original image’ which is submitted to free variation, and what are the ‘successive

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adjunctions to this field (R’, R’’, R’’’ . . . )’ if not the variations/transformations themselves? In both Husserl and Deleuze-Abel, the process has the same end: the production of an Idea.9 Ricoeur thus describes this process of imaginative variation precisely as ‘the progressive determination of objectivity’ (Ricoeur, Husserl 43). There are several major differences between Deleuze and Husserl however. First, what is submitted to variation in Husserl is precisely that objectivity of receptivity produced in passivity and partially explicated by the active syntheses. By contrast, in Deleuze, there is not yet a fully constituted objectity. There is only a field of meaningless ‘ideal elements’, or what we called in relation to The Logic of Sense, liberated affections. This is likely why Deleuze turned to the mathematical example for which the quality of the elements does not matter. A second major difference is that for Husserl free variation is a volitional and intermittent practice and pertains only to the higher orders of cognition whereas for Deleuze, it seems, it is a permanent installment of thought and one of its most basic structures. This comes out most clearly when Husserl discusses the relation between free variation and the individual (or the object). Ordinarily for Husserl the individual object is produced in passivity with a certain degree of intensity attached to it. This intensity inspires a ‘commitment’ to the object on the part of the ego which inhabits the other side of the life world (activity). But for Husserl free variation is not constrained by this commitment: it is free (E&J 343–44).10 For Deleuze, on the other hand, it seems that this arbitrariness and this freedom are essential structures of thought and rather than being independent of intensity, is directly related to it in a complex relationship which I describe below. Free variation isn’t something carried out by a spontaneous and active ego confronting its affections. It is carried out by the aleatory point, the ‘apparent subject’ (AO 330) or the ‘overman’ (LS 107, 178), as it surveys its sublimated affections. But the similarities between Deleuze and Husserl on the genesis of the Idea are just as strong as the differences, and to see the degree to which they correspond on this point it is necessary to complicate, and in a way, complete the picture before it is ready to be completed. Husserl points out that there is a specific kind of temporality implied in the progressivity of determination which has two characteristics. First, it takes time to move from one variant to another. And second, as a condition of possibility for this transition from one variant to the next, the ‘subjective mode of the arbitrary’, also implies an ideal of continuity in which the variants can ‘overlap’ (E&J 343). The field in which the successive transformations are made must be continuous.11 These two aspects of temporality which Husserl so clearly describes—the condition of continuity and the time it takes to imagine variations—are also the two aspects of the temporality that correspond to two moments of the progressive determination of the virtual. Here we have to anticipate the conclusions of my next chapter, but doing so will make much of what follows much clearer.

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The form of continuity or ‘overlapping’ which provides the condition of determinability—the first aspect of sufficient reason—is nothing more than the empty form of time (DR 86). It is the ideal synthesis in which the sublimated affections communicate with one another or resonate under the influence of the aleatory point. But within this continuity, as the aleatory point traverses the determinable ideal elements it creates differential relations between them (198–99). This too takes time, and the time that this takes is the time it takes for the future to become present. For Deleuze, the continuity in which Ideas are progressively determined has the character of the future. This is because the ‘future’ does not refer to those actual presents that are coming my way, but to the horizon on which the indeterminate becomes progressively determined the closer it comes to the present. The future is the general element in which ‘the new’ takes shape. The time which it takes to progressively determine and then actualize an Idea—where to actualize means to make present—therefore corresponds to the time it takes for time itself to pass (210–11). To say that the indeterminate becomes progressively determined and actualized is to say nothing more than that the future becomes present. This is why Deleuze says at one point that ‘creative actualization’ is the ‘true meaning’ of time (216). The process of actualization which we will be examining below is thus the process by which the future becomes present.12 There are therefore two aspects of time at work in Deleuze’s description of progressive determination: the condition of continuity, and the time of variation or progressive determination. In this section I wanted to describe the Idea in itself as an assemblage of elements, relations, and singularities. But the process by which these three aspects of the Idea relate to one another— progressive determination—already suggests the other two aspects of the virtual I outlined at the beginning of this chapter: where Ideas come from and where they go. They take as their origin and condition the form of determinability, but their destination is to become present and to pass in time.

Origins of Ideas Deleuzism could never be an overturning of Platonism if it presupposed Ideas outside of a genesis. There are two ways to approach the question of the origin of Ideas, both of which I will follow in this section. If we follow Deleuze’s texts, we see that Ideas find their origin in an ‘ideal game’. Every time Deleuze poses the question of the origin of Ideas in Difference and Repetition he immediately turns to the metaphor of the game. This game is Deleuze’s Nietzschean modification of Mallarmé’s famous throw of the dice.13 Many philosophers and literary critics of the time had been adjusting Mallarmé’s throw of the dice to their own theories, and Deleuze is no exception.14 Deleuze describes two kinds of games. The first is what he describes as the ‘human game’, a game which is ‘indistinguishable from the practice of representation’ (DR 283). Contrary to this game,

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there is an ideal game which conditions the practice of representation, or the first game. There are thus two games, one human, one inhuman, each with its own set of rules, but one which comes before and conditions the other. The first set of rules defines what Deleuze understands by human representation, empirical thought, propositions of consciousness, cases of solution, and so forth—all of these expressions, I will argue below, are synonymous. The second set of rules are the rules for an element of pure, impersonal thought in which Ideas are born and progressively determined. This game defines the future.15 The significance of Deleuze’s account of the two kinds of game is not that they contribute (rather weakly, if at all) to game theory, but that they define the dynamics of two worlds: the virtual and the actual, the Ideal and the empirical. The question of genesis is how we get from one set of rules to another, how we get from Ideas to representations. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze schematically compares these two types of games.16 The human game has four characteristics: (1) It is necessary that in every case a set of rules preexists the playing of the game, and, when one plays, this set takes on categorical value; (2) these rules determine hypotheses which divide and apportion chance . . . ; (3) the hypotheses organize the game according to a plurality of throws which are really and numerically distinct. Each one of them brings about a fixed distribution corresponding to one case or another . . . ; (4) the consequences of the throws range over the alternative ‘victory or defeat’. (LS 58–59) In contrast to these games ‘with which we are familiar’, the Ideal game has four characteristics of its own: (1) There are no preexisting rules, each move invents its own rules; it bears upon its own rule. (2) Far from dividing and apportioning chance in a really distinct number of throws, all throws affirm chance and endlessly ramify it with each throw. (3) The throws therefore are not really or numerically distinct. They are qualitatively distinct, but are the qualitative forms of a single cast which is ontologically one. [. . .] (4) Such a game—without rules, with neither winner nor loser, without responsibility, a game of innocence, a caucus-race in which skill and chance are no longer distinguishable—seems to have no reality. [. . .] (LS 59–60) The first game, as I have said, defines the world of representation. Representations are numerically and really distinct.17 This means that they are discreet,

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external to one another, and have clearly defined limits—partes extra partes—so much so that they appear to have separate substances. They are subject to a set of preexisting rules which play the role of categories. Whether these are categories of language or of Being does not seem to matter to Deleuze. All that matters is that representations do not give their own rule but find one outside of themselves. This is why Deleuze characterizes the world of representation as a fixed or sedentary distribution of singular points: they are distributed in already defined forms according to preestablished rules. The second game, however, defines the world of an impersonal thought. Deleuze says that this Ideal game ‘is the reality of thought itself’ (LS 60; cf. NP 32), and indeed, the rules of this game define the dynamics of the ‘metaphysical’ or ‘cerebral’ surface of sense—that is, the virtual. The word ‘thought’ clearly does not mean what we ordinarily think of as thinking. Thought here is defined by what we might call, following Husserl’s description of the space of free variation, a ‘structure of arbitrariness’. Here, contrary to the categories of representation, there are no rules. The ideal game is defined by chance and the production of rules. And this production of rules is not arbitrated by some benevolent and wise force which would guarantee lawfulness and regularity, but by an aleatory point, by pure chance (DR 284). It is the aleatory point which throws the dice and which causes the relations between elements to become progressively more determined. In the description of progressive determination above, it is the aleatory point, like the nomadic subject of the eternal return in Anti-Oedipus, which makes ‘the progressive tour or description of the whole problematic field’ (210). These characteristics define the conditions for the production of Ideas outside of the categories or constraints of representation: chance and freedom. (This freedom, we see in the next chapter, is a consequence of the third synthesis of time.) This description of thought owes much to Blanchot. For Blanchot, the unread book is a pure materiality no different from a rock. It is a collection of dead letters. It has to be read, and in reading it, it is actually produced (Blanchot, The Space of Literature 193, 197; cf. 23). As I have described in my chapter on The Logic of Sense this involves a move between two notions of time, Chronos and Aion: the material time of the unread book is time with a present, Chronos; the time of the work is time without a present, Aion, the empty form of time. For Blanchot, the essential condition for an authentic (re)production, and the condition under which this production ceases to be human, subjective, and arbitrary, is that the mind must approach the work of art without any expectations and within a structure of arbitrariness. What defines the aesthetic experience/experiment is that nothing is known in advance. [R]eading, seeing, hearing the work of art demands more ignorance than knowledge. It requires a knowledge endowed with an immense ignorance and a gift which is not given ahead of time, which has each time to be received and acquired in forgetfulness of it, and also lost. Each painting, each piece of

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music makes us a present of the organ we need to welcome it; each one ‘gives’ us the eye and the ear we need to see and hear it. (Blanchot 192) This quotation has its origins in a quotation of Valéry given earlier in the book: All his life the true painter seeks painting: the true poet, poetry, etc. For these are not determined activities. In them one must create the need, the goal, the means, and even the obstacles. (Blanchot 87)18 In both passages the experience/experiment of the work first presupposes a completely free field of creativity out of which the work itself is produced each time for the first time. There are no pregiven categories, and there are no rules. Nothing is given in advance except for the possibility of anything whatsoever. Instead of finding its rules outside of itself, each work gives us the rules insofar as we approach it within this structure of arbitrariness.19 Blanchot thus describes this open field in which the work can take shape without any extrinsic determination as a genetic field. It represents ‘the wonder of [the work’s] constant genesis and the swell of its unfurling’ (207). Like Blanchot’s description of the work of art, the production of Ideas in Deleuze is not a determined activity. It takes place in an open and free field. Ideas have their origin in an ideal game, and the only rule of this game is that nothing is given in advance. There are no rules. Deleuze directly alludes to Blanchot when he defines this playing field: If one tries to play this game other than in thought, nothing happens; and if one tries to produce a result other than a work of art, nothing is produced. This game is reserved then for thought and art. (LS 60) Here, ‘the work of art’ alludes to Blanchot’s very specific definition of the work. But, within the context of Difference and Repetition this work of art is the Idea, and the work of thought is the progressive determination of Ideas. In relation to Deleuze’s description of the ideal game, then, the origin of Ideas is this field of pure chance and determinability. Deleuze’s ideal game is only one way to approach the question of the origin of Ideas. But we can also leave the image of the ideal game behind and simply notice that, as we saw above, the first aspect of sufficient reason is the form of determinability. Ideas begin as ‘positive indeterminacies’ or as ‘problems’.20 Before differential relations are established, an Idea is simply a set of ‘ideal elements’ which require determination. The ‘problem’ is precisely that of their determination. As Deleuze says in The Logic of Sense, Ideas express ‘the objective equilibrium of a mind situated in front of the horizon of what happens or what appears: Is it Richard or William?’ (LS 57; cf. DR 169). In Difference and

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Repetition this ‘horizon’ is the form of determinability. ‘What happens’ or ‘appears’ are the ideal elements. The entire activity of pure and free thought is to make these indeterminacies determinate. It determines the problem, and then finds a solution which is adequate to the problem. The origin of Ideas from this point of view is simply the form of determinability or the empty form of time (cf. DR 276, 86–88). Within this structure of arbitrariness, the immediate origin or cause of Ideas is the aleatory point (DR 200). It is this point which ‘carries out the calculation of problems, the determination of differential elements or the singular points which constitute a structure’ (198).21 Aleatory points ‘animate ideal problems, determining their relations and singularities’ (283). The aleatory point is the actual agent of determination. It determines differential relations and the singularities which correspond to these relations. The empty form of time as the condition of the determinability of ideal elements merely makes this determination possible. This is the dual origin of Ideas then: the structure of arbitrariness which is provided by the empty form of time; and the aleatory point as the determining agency. Ideas have the empty form of time as their condition and the aleatory point as their genetic principle. What happens to them then, after they are produced?

Destination of Ideas After the course of progressive determination has run its course, we have in front of us a well-determined Idea in its three dimensions: elements, relations, singularities. Deleuze uses the vocabulary of differential calculus to introduce a now well-known distinction between differentiation and differenciation. Differentiation refers to the progressive determination of an Idea in its virtuality. Even though the Idea is completely determined, it is still completely virtual. As we saw above, at this point singularities are determined from the point of view of their distribution and existence within a virtual structure, but not from the point of view of their ‘nature’ or the specific quality and extensity that will cover the Idea. Differenciation, on the other hand, describes the actualization of an Idea, or the process by which the differentiated Idea takes on an actual existence and leaves behind its purely virtual origins: ‘What the complete determination lacks is the whole set of relations belonging to actual existence . . .. There is thus another part of the object which is determined by actualisation’ (209; my emphasis). The process of actualization is therefore the movement from a completely determined virtual Idea to an actual ‘object’. The Idea becomes covered over by a quality and an extensity, and becomes determined according to its ‘nature’. Differentiation and differenciation are two processes which determine the two halves, virtual and actual, of any object: ‘in order to designate the integrity or integrality of the object’, Deleuze proposes ‘the complex notion of different/ ciation’ (209; my emphasis).

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It is well established in the current literature on Deleuze that actualization is the movement from virtual to actual, but the relation of this to objects is rarely elaborated. Indeed, the fact that this is a move between two states of ‘the object’—the object in the Idea and the actual object—is rarely emphasized, because more attention is often paid to the examples—mostly biological—that Deleuze uses to describe the process. From the beginning of the Ideas chapter Deleuze draws a strong correlation between Ideas and things, especially when he takes the Kantian notion of the Idea out of the supersensible and, following Kant’s lead in The Critique of Judgment, puts it at the heart of the sensible in the form of a positive indeterminacy or as a ‘focus or horizon within perception’.22 Following this transposition, I want to suggest here that the Deleuzian Idea is the form that any concrete object takes before we fully recognize or know what that object is. In the Idea, the object itself becomes a problem for thought. Progressive determination would then be nothing more than the progressive determination of a concrete object of perception. If we turn to Deleuze’s 1968 paper, ‘The Method of Dramatization’, this conflation of the Idea and the object of perception becomes even more clear. After a short introduction in which Deleuze establishes that his paper will have two primary functions (both of which make the Idea suitable to functioning in sensibility)—(1) to relate the Idea to the accident, to make it include the inessential, and (2) to give it spatio-temporal coordinates—he abruptly proceeds to the question ‘what is the characteristic or distinctive trait of a thing in general?’ (DI 96; my emphasis). His answer is that Such a trait is twofold: the quality or qualities which it possesses, the extension which it occupies. [. . .]. In a word, each thing is at the intersection of a twofold synthesis: a synthesis of qualification or specification, and of partition, composition or organization. (96).23 Quality and extensity, or a thing’s spatial structure, are thus the two coordinates of ‘the thing in general’. In this analysis of the object, Deleuze is clearly alluding to the traditional coordinates of sensation: each object has its secondary qualities such as its color, texture or smell, and its primary quality, the way it fills out extension through its substantial, spatial, and geometrical characteristics.24 The ‘thing’ or the ‘individual’ is defined in exactly the same way in Difference and Repetition: it is a synthesis of quality and extensity. And further, in both Difference and Repetition and ‘The Method of Dramatization’, the specific quality, and extensity of any given thing are determined by the Idea itself. Quality and extensity are the two end-points of actualization or differenciation. They represent the destination of Ideas. These two end-points, however, refer back to two aspects of differentiation, or the progressive determination of Ideas. Differentiation ‘has two aspects of its own, corresponding to the varieties of relations and to the singular points dependent upon the values of each variety’

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(DR 210). It is these two aspects of differentiation which directly determine the two aspects of actualization: ‘differenciation in turn has two aspects, one concerning the qualities or diverse species which actualize the varieties [of differential relations], the other concerning number or the distinct parts actualizing the singular points’ (210). Differential relations are actualized as qualities. Singularities are actualized as extensities. There is therefore a simple parallel and direct correspondence between the aspects of the virtual Idea and of the actual object: virtual relations become actual qualities; virtual singularities become actual parts. And further, these two aspects are inseparable. There is no such thing as a quality without a space or form defined by singularities and there is no such thing as a space which does not have a quality: ‘There is in general no quality which does not refer to a space defined by the singularities corresponding to the differential relations incarnated in that quality’ (210). At this point, Difference and Repetition seems to confirm Deleuze’s description of the object and its origins in a transcendental Idea in ‘The Method of Dramatization’. Each individual object is defined by its occupation of a space and its specific quality, and these two aspects are directly determined by the object’s Idea. But Difference and Repetition also seems to go beyond the account of the thing in ‘The Method of Dramatization’ by adding yet a third characteristic: the time of the thing. The object receives its duration from the time of progressive determination (DR 210–11 and 216–19). I will return to this in more detail shortly in a discussion of the role of intensity in actualization, but for now we can see that the complete characterization of ‘the thing in general’ is that it has (1) a space, (2) a quality, and (3) a time, and further that these three characteristics have their origins in transcendental Ideas from the point of view of, respectively, (1) their singularities, (2) their differential relations, and (3) their time of progressive determination. Because the three characteristics of things find their immediate origin in the characteristics of Ideas, it is easy to understand why throughout his paper on dramatization Deleuze consistently referred to the completely virtual or differentiated Idea as ‘the thing in Idea’ (DI 100). The virtual Idea is the sufficient reason of any given ‘thing’ insofar as that thing is extended, has a quality, and passes in time. We could also call it more precisely, following Husserl, the ‘sensible schema’ or ‘phantasm’ of the thing. In Husserl, the sensible schema was a purely formal assemblage of the thing’s space, time, and quality. It is clear, if we consider that the elements of the Idea determine the time (progressive determination), the spatial structure or form (singularities), and the quality (relations) of an object, that the transcendental Idea is nothing more than this sensible schema. What is differenciated in actualization, then, is the object of sensation. This suggests an important conclusion regarding Deleuze’s relation to science. Despite the fact that Deleuze used the vocabulary of biology and the example of differenciation in the egg almost exclusively to describe the process of actualization, we have to notice that the outcome of this process is not a chicken.

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What is produced is an object in general with its three correlate aspects: quality, extensity, and time. The differential relations in the Idea determine the actual quality of things; the virtual singularities determine actual parts, or form; and the time of progressive determination determines an object’s duration. Deleuze consistently points out that he turns to science only for examples: ‘The entire Idea is caught up in the mathematico-biological system of different/ ciation. However, mathematics and biology appear here only in the guise of technical models which allow the exposition of the virtual and processes of actualization . . .. ’ (DR 220–21).25 This is why the ‘art of multiplicities’ is understood as ‘the art of grasping the Ideas and the problems they incarnate in things, and of grasping things as incarnations, as cases of solution for the problems of Ideas’ (DR 182; my emphases). The description of progressive determination as sufficient reason seems particularly apt from this point of view. Every thing has its reason which is its Idea.

Ideas and representation This, however raises an extremely important question. If we have established that the Idea is actualized in objects, we have yet to establish whether or not this actuality is, to put it plainly, something pertaining to human thought— representations—or rather to something independent of thought—things in themselves—as many interpretations, and especially the scientistic readings, of Deleuze seem to suggest. If the Idea is the sufficient reason of the thing, what sort of ‘thing’ is this? If we turn to Bergsonism, the answer is quite clear: ‘it is the actualization (and it alone) that constitutes psychological consciousness’ (BG 63; my emphasis).26 On Deleuze’s reading, Bergsonian actualization is the movement from a transcendental, impersonal unconscious to a psychological and empirical consciousness that actualization actually creates. ‘The actual’ describes ‘psychological consciousness’. But Bergson is not Deleuze, and Deleuze’s Bergsonism, even if it is not doctrinal Bergson, is not necessarily a straightforward Deleuze either, so we have to ask whether or not Difference and Repetition warrants this interpretation as well: the actual object is the representation of an object for an empirical-psychological-human consciousness. We should note from the start, however, that this interpretation is already justified by ‘The Method of Dramatization’ where Deleuze again quite clearly states that what he means by the ‘thing in general’ is specifically ‘the representation of things in general’ (DI 96; my emphasis). As he says again later in the essay, differenciation ‘expresses the actualization of these relations and singularities in qualities and extension, species and parts, as objects of representation’ (102; my emphasis). When Deleuze defines the two characteristics of the thing as quality and extensity, he clearly understands these characteristics as applying to representations of things. It would seem that here, as I argued was the case in Anti-Oedipus, objects

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are what Husserl called ‘objectivities of receptivity’. What does Difference and Repetition have to say on this point? Are Ideas actualized in representations for a psychological consciousness or in things themselves?27 While Deleuze does not go to great lengths to emphasize this point in Difference and Repetition, he does say at least twice that quality and extensity define not only the end-point of a static genesis, but that they also constitute the ‘elements of representation’ (DR 235). The qualities and extensities in which Ideas are actualized are the ‘developed qualities and extensities of the perceptual world’, of ‘the represented world of perception’ (281). Just as in ‘The Method of Dramatization’ then, quality and extensity are characteristics not of physical objects independent of consciousness but of represented objects. Conversely, representation, which ‘as a whole is the element of knowledge’,28 has the same form as objects, so that we can say with Deleuze in Bergsonism that actualization produces psychological consciousness or what he calls in Difference and Repetition, ‘the perceptual world’. The static genesis thus ends—just as it did in The Logic of Sense—with the constituted objects of perception. This point is further borne out by the numerous synonyms Deleuze uses to talk about Ideas and their actualization. We have already seen this with his description of the two types of games: the ideal game, the virtual, conditions the ‘human’ game in which representation prevails (DR 283; LS 58ff.). In addition, Deleuze often describes Ideas as ‘problems’ and the process of actualization as the determination of ‘solutions’. Deleuze thus writes, ‘whereas differentiation determines the virtual content of the Idea as a problem, differenciation expresses the actualization of this virtual and the constitution of solutions’ (209; my emphasis). It is clear, first, that these cases of solution are ‘actual’ (cf. 200), and second that these actual solutions take the form of ‘propositions’: ‘problems give rise to propositions which give effect to them in the form of answers or cases of solution’ (267). Further, just as in The Logic of Sense, these propositions are precisely ‘propositions of consciousness’ or ‘conscious propositions’ (267). In other words, within the context of the problem-solution metaphor, the ‘problem’ corresponds to the virtual Idea, and the ‘solution’ in which that Idea is actualized constitutes a proposition of consciousness. As in Bergsonism, actualization, or the determination of solutions constitutes consciousness, and the solutions populating consciousness are determinate pieces of knowledge.29 The expressions ‘actual’, ‘solution’, ‘representation’, ‘quality/extensity’, the ‘perceptual world’ all define the inhabitants of the world of representation, the rules and regulations of which are defined by the human game. There can be no question about it: the actual is an empirical and human actual. Actualization is the process which leads from the virtual Idea to the representation of a thing in an empirical consciousness. We can now see the truth of an early definition of the Idea as ‘the structure of phenomena as such’ (47; cf. 182; my emphasis).30 The theory of actualization is thus a theory of the genesis of phenomena.

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The legitimate use of representation We are now in a position to understand the major project of Difference and Repetition: the determination of the legitimate and illegitimate uses of representation. This project touches on an almost (late) Husserlian epistemology in which what is known takes its apodicity from its process of production.31 For Deleuze, as we have just seen, in order for us to know something, it has to be represented in consciousness (‘representation as a whole is the element of knowledge’). But in The Logic of Sense Deleuze distinguishes between two kinds of representations: dead or senseless representations, and living representations. Dead representations are detached from their process of production. Living representations are attached to their process of production by virtue of an ‘expression’, a ‘problem’, a ‘sense’, or an ‘Idea’ (these terms are synonymous) that the representation envelops and which is its sufficient reason. Deleuze writes in The Logic of Sense that ‘two types of knowledge have often been distinguished, one indifferent remaining external to its object, and the other concrete, seeking its object wherever it is’ (LS 146). These two types of knowledge are the two types of representation, dead and living. One empty and external to its object; the other concrete and which comes undone when its object escapes it. Deleuze continues by saying that, ‘Representation attains this topical ideal only by means of the hidden expression which it encompasses, that is, by means of the event it envelops. There is thus a “use” of representation without which representation would remain lifeless and senseless’ (LS 146; my emphasis). This is the legitimate use of representation. The representation is linked to its concrete, life-giving, conditions of production through the ‘event’ or Idea. As we saw above, the Idea fills this role by acting as a sort of transcendental object, and is, in fact, often simply called ‘the object in the Idea’ or ‘the virtual half of the object’. It is under this condition alone, Deleuze repeatedly claims, that representation can have any truth.: ‘In every respect, truth is a matter of production, not of adequation’ (DR 154); ‘Sense is the genesis or the production of the true, and truth is only the empirical result of sense’ (154); ‘The problem or sense is at once both the site of an originary truth and the genesis of a derived truth’ (159). 32 In every instance truth is a matter of production. The condition of apodicity is the immediacy of genesis, an immediacy guaranteed by ‘sense’ or the Idea. In order for knowledge to have truth, or, to put it another way, in order for representation to have a legitimate use, it has to reach the point at which it envelops its cause in the form of an event; ‘representation, when it does not reach this point remains only a dead letter confronting that which it represents, and stupid in its representiveness’ (LS 146). This attempt to establish a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate uses of representation seems to be the ultimate aim of Difference and Repetition, and perhaps of Deleuze’s philosophy in this middle period as a whole. Our

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experience of difference is not dependent on representations external to one another. Difference is not something between discreet identities, or, as Deleuze puts it, difference does not turn around representation, but rather representation, insofar as it finds its genetic principle in difference, turns around difference. ‘This reversal is not merely speculative but eminently practical, since it defines the conditions of the legitimate use of the words “identical” and “similar” . . .’ (DR 301; cf. DR 40–41, 57, 116–17). Representation is legitimate insofar as it is tied to its process of production. The process of production which ends in the production of representation goes by many names: static genesis, social production, actualization, differenciation, and, as we will see, individuation. But in all of these cases, we understand that it is the point of view of genesis which links difference and representation. This genesis begins in the empty form of time rather than in the dispersion of the material object in movement (as in the dynamic genesis of Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense) and ends in the representation of things in general for a human consciousness. It is thus a static rather than a dynamic genesis.

The origin and destination of Ideas I wanted to establish two things in the first part of this chapter: (1) that the destination of Ideas is representation in a human consciousness, and (2) that Ideas have their origin in the form of determinability. Both this origin and this destination are clearly expressed in the following quotation: Upon precisely what ground, however, is this multiple reason [i.e. sufficient reason as progressive determination] engendered and played out; in what unreason is it submerged, and from what new type of game or lottery does it draw its singularities and its distributions . . .? In short, sufficient reason or the ground is strangely bent: on the one hand, it leans toward what it grounds, towards the forms of representation; on the other hand, it turns and plunges into a groundlessness which resists all forms and cannot be represented. (DR 274–75; original emphasis) Ideas exist in the space between the groundlessness of the empty form of time and the representations in human consciousness which they produce. But despite all of this there are still two important questions that need to be answered. First of all, we need to know by what mechanism Ideas come to be actualized. We have not yet said what takes them out of their virtuality and places them into an actuality in which they can form legitimate representations. Second, we need to find out whether or not this empty form of time and the ‘unreason’ in which Ideas are submerged is produced or if it is simply given. To answer the first question—how do Ideas become actualized?—we have to

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turn to the process of individuation: ‘Individuation ensures the embedding of the two dissimilar halves’ of the object or thing, virtual and actual (DR 280). The second question requires a chapter of its own.

Individuation33 There is a tendency to confuse intensity, or difference in itself, with the virtual. This is because the virtual has become a catch-all phrase which encompasses all of the more tumultuous Deleuzian concepts. But Deleuze very clearly distinguished between the two. An intensity, for example is a type of relation which is different from a differential relation and which belongs to a completely different realm than the virtual (DR 244). This is because in relation to the static genesis which concerns us here, intensities and Ideas follow two different processes even if these processes are intimately related. Intensities and Ideas are both subject to a genesis which puts them outside of themselves by pushing them into the world of representation. But this is a complex genesis which comprises two distinct processes. Ideas are ‘actualized’, ‘differenciated’, or ‘solved’.34 Intensities are ‘individuated’, ‘explicated’, or ‘cancelled’. Deleuze therefore insists that these two cannot be confused and that any confusion ‘compromises the whole philosophy of difference’ (318). Their difference from one another is complex, but what I want to suggest in the remainder of this chapter is that in the final analysis the distance between them comes back to the different dimensions of time to which they belong. Intensity and its process, individuation, belongs to the present. As in AntiOedipus, intensity expresses the degree to which we are affected in an immediate present. Ideas and their process coexist in a future understood as the transcendental element in which the new is progressively determined. This was the realm of sense described in The Logic of Sense in which we make sense of our affections. Whereas intensity and individuation seem concerned only with the immediate present, the process of actualization borders the divide between future and present and represents the way in which Ideas leave their home in the future and become present. If the passage of time is from a virtual future to an actual present (210–11, 216), there must be a point at which virtuality meets up with the present of intensity. This meeting is what the process of individuation describes.35 It is from this point of view that Deleuze describes the ‘asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible’ as a ‘continuation’ of the ‘reciprocal synthesis of the Idea’: it continues the Idea into the present (244). In the static genesis these two dimensions of time are united. We will come back to this. Intensity expresses an environmental present. As representative of the present, intensity takes on many of its specific functions in relation to the order of genesis. Its primary function is to select the Ideas which are to be actualized ‘in intuition’ (231). It does so according to the requirements of a specific

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environment. But this immediate present environment before any sense can be made of it must itself be understood as a field of intensities. Deleuze says that ‘A living being is not only defined genetically’, that is to say, by its DNA or the Idea which it envelops, ‘but also ecologically’, by its relation to an environment or to the outside (216). Earlier in the book he had said much the same thing: The genesis of development in organisms must therefore be understood as the actualization of an essence, in accordance with reasons and at speeds determined by the environment, with accelerations and interruptions, but independently of any transformist passage from one actual term to another. (DR 185; my emphasis) If we transpose this metaphor back to the register of thought, the ‘essence’ which is actualized is the Idea. The environment which determines the ‘reasons’ and ‘speeds’ which control the actualization of that essence is expressed in thought as a flux of intensity. In both quotations, the specific role of intensity in relation to Ideas is to select an Idea according to the dynamics of the environment in which it is to be actualized. Actualization is always accomplished according to ‘reasons’ determined by the environment at hand. Intensities do not actively select Ideas to be actualized. It is not as though there were an element of volition or intelligence involved. Selection is passive. Here we should be sensitive to the way Deleuze merges two traditional understandings of intensity: (1) intensity as the senseless flux of corporeal materiality which affects our body, and (2) intensity as the expression of a quantity of affection, a quantity which engages the attention of the ego and provokes a commitment on its part. In both senses, as we saw in Anti-Oedipus, the notion of intensity is indistinguishable from affection. In the first, it expresses what affects us in our environment. Ultimately, this sense relates back to Freud’s metapsychology where each excitation takes the form of an influx of nervous energy which must be ‘bound’ or canceled in order for the ego to live under the rule of the pleasure principle.36 Although Freud never used the word ‘intensity’, the energetic metaphor within which he was working, makes the association clear.37 In its second sense as a principle of selection, however, it takes on its Husserlian definition as that which inspires the active ego’s commitment to one object over the other. It expresses the comparative influence which objects exert and the way that an object’s ‘quantity of excitation’ competes for our attention with other passively produced objects. Although it does not affect an active ego in Deleuze as it does in Husserl, it does have a significant role in the selection of Ideas (which define the faculty of pure thought (DR 192)). These two aspects of the expression ‘intensity’ and the role intensity plays in the selection of Ideas becomes clear in Deleuze’s example of the role of intensity in biological individuation. The ‘protoplasm’ of the egg provides an ‘intensive environment’—a present circumstance—according to which Ideas are selected

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and in which they are actualized. This environment selects, it would seem, in a completely passive way, and entirely according to a law of the greatest intensity. Deleuze writes, An intensity forming a wave of variation throughout the protoplasm distributes its difference along the axes and from one pole to another. The region of maximal activity is the first to come into play, exercising a dominant influence on the development of the corresponding parts at a lower rate: the individual in the egg is a genuine descent, going from the highest to the lowest and affirming the differences which comprise it and in which it falls. (DR 250; my emphasis)38 Within the protoplasm—the intensive environment—there are differing degrees of intensity. It is the ‘region of maximal activity’, or of the greatest intensity, is the first to come into play while regions of a lower intensity become individuated later. As Deleuze said earlier in Difference and Repetition, there is an ‘ethics’ of intensity in which each difference is affirmed, beginning with the highest, but always moving all the way to the lowest (DR 234–35). If we transpose this biological example to the register of cognition, it is clear that the higher the intensity, the more likely that ‘region’ is to be selected and actualized. This is why it often seems that intensity is the most important factor in genesis and that it has all of the important roles and characteristics. Not only does Deleuze say—because intensity is the environment to be individuated—that it is what creates the actual quality and extensity which the Idea differenciates and gives sense to; it is also what determines one Idea or another to be actualized; it is what initiates genesis in the first place; and it is what governs the course of both differenciation and individuation. ‘Individuation is the act by which intensity determines differential relations to become actualized, along the lines of differenciation and within the qualities and extensities it creates’ (DR 246; my emphases). In this, as in many other passages, intensity clearly has the directive role.39 It is tempting to see the influence of Bergson here: in Deleuze, as in Bergson, it is the ‘law of life’ is activity. All thought is directed toward the present defined as an intensive environment.40 Deleuze even goes so far as to say that ‘Individuation precedes differenciation in principle’ (DR 247). But what this passage does not say is that intensity precedes differentiation as well. In fact the opposite is the case. ‘Intensities presuppose and express only differential relations; individuals presuppose only Ideas’ (252; my emphasis; cf. 246, 277). This has two important consequences, one general and one specific in relation to the problem at hand (the relationship between Ideas and intensities in the static genesis). Generally, this means that ‘difference in itself’ is far from primary in the order of genesis. It clearly ‘presupposes’ and expresses the differential relations and singularities of the

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already completely determined Idea. Deleuze often expresses this by saying that intensity is something which pertains to the individual whereas the virtual is beyond and prior to the individual (‘the pre-individual field is a virtual-ideal field’ (246)). Deleuze insists on this point. Only the virtual is impersonal and preindividual.41 What this suggests is that there is an important discursivity between Ideas and intensities. Ideas are the DNA of genesis. Intensity can inspire and govern the static genesis, but this genesis will go nowhere or turn in circles without the Idea which differenciates what is to be individuated and gives it a sense. At the same time however, Ideas are purely formal: once the relations and singularities are determined, ideal elements drop out of the picture in favor of the sensible schema. Determined Ideas have no content, but only the program or schema for a content. Without an intensity to take them out of their virtuality they remain a lifeless sensible schema. The discursivity between these two concepts, and the problem of their relation, therefore takes a form very similar to that between concepts and intuition in Kant, so much so that one could say that without intensity the Idea is empty; but without the Idea, intensity is blind. This discursivity is not so much the consequence of a static formalism, however, but follows directly from the two dimensions of time which separate intensity and Ideas.42 The present remains a senseless flux of intensity without Ideas, but the future remains a lifeless possibility (rather than a virtuality) if it doesn’t ‘plug into’ intensity. The way in which Ideas and intensities presuppose one another becomes clearer when Deleuze lays out what he calls ‘the order of reasons:’ ‘differentiation—individuation—dramatization—differenciation’ (251). If we follow this order, the way in which things unfold in the static genesis would be as follows. First, the Idea is completely determined in the future ((1) differentiation). This makes possible the (2) individuation of the present, but only insofar as ‘spatiotemporal dynamisms’, which simultaneously express both Ideas and intensities, (3) ‘dramatize’ an Idea in the immediate present. Through this process of dramatization, the Idea (4) differenciates and gives sense to the present object which then takes the form of a represented individual (extensity + quality). This series of relations is relatively clear, and every term has been discussed except for spatio-temporal dynamisms and the dramatization they enact. The concepts of spatio-temporal dynamism and dramatization are rather straightforward in theory. Spatio-temporal dynamisms ‘are the differenciating agencies’ (214). This means that they have the specific function of actualizing an Idea in an intensive present which that Idea differenciates. A spatio-temporal dynamism can accomplish this task because, on the one hand, ‘it immediately incarnates the differential relations, the singularities and the progressivities immanent in the Idea’ (219). On the other hand, it expresses differing degrees of intensity (118, 215).43 It therefore inhabits the border of the future and the present, of Ideas and intensities, and acts as the link between them both. For this reason Deleuze compares them to Kant’s schemata. In Kant, the schemata were

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able, by means of ‘a hidden art in the depths of the human soul’,44 to determine intuition—defined by the forms of space and time—according to the form of a concept. Similarly, in Deleuze, the spatio-temporal dynamism, as its name implies, is a dynamism of space and time. It ‘agitates’ a space and a time (DI 96). But instead of agitating the forms of intuition according to the concept, it agitates an unindividuated intensive field according to the relations, singularities, and ‘progressivities’ of an Idea. From its privileged position as the simultaneous expression of intensities and Ideas, it ‘create[s] a space and a time particular to that which is actualized’ (DR 214; my emphasis). The spatio-temporal dynamism’s agitation of this intensive field is far from an arbitrary agitation. It agitates according to the schema of the Idea. Space and time, extensity and duration, are always ‘particular to that which is actualized’ or to the Idea. The function of these dynamisms is therefore to individuate the present according to the sensible schema determined in the Idea. By itself the present is a meaningless flux of intensity, but by incarnating the three dimensions of Ideas, the dynamisms cut out a space and a time which makes the present into an actual ‘thing’ for an ‘empirical sensibility’ always turned toward the activity of the present. In this way, the present becomes ‘differenciated’ and takes on a sense. It becomes an individual object with determinate qualities and welldefined limits (extensity) which passes in the time of representation. The metaphor of dramatization is thus clear: the spatio-temporal dynamism is the actor, and the Idea is its role. The dynamism moves about in an unindividuated present, but always according to the role that it is charged with playing. Finally, not only does this ‘asymmetrical synthesis’ of the virtual Idea and the actual intensity individuate a represented object, it also causes that present to pass within representation. In order to individuate this present, we have seen, intensities have to ‘express Ideas’, and conversely Ideas give shape to the present. But by ‘expressing’ Ideas, intensity also forces them to become present. When Ideas are expressed by intensities they move into a new dimension of time: the individuated present which passes. Intensity or difference in itself [. . .] expresses differential relations and their corresponding distinctive points. It introduces a new type of distinction into these relations and between Ideas a new type of distinction. Hence forward, the Ideas, relations, variations in those relations and the distinctive points are in a sense separated: instead of coexisting, they enter into states of simultaneity or succession. (DR 252; my emphasis) Intensity separates Ideas and causes them to succeed one another or pass in time. This then is the sense of the process of individuation: an unindividuated present becomes differenciated by the Idea at the same time that an indeterminate future separated from its surrounding Ideas and pulled into the present. This present which is produced in this process is nothing more than ‘the given’,

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the represented object endowed with a determinate quality, extensity, and duration, and which passes in an empirical sensibility or the ‘represented world of perception’.45 The difference between the two processes of individuation and actualization can therefore be precisely stated by saying that individuation pertains to the present whereas actualization goes from future to present.

Conclusion What I wanted to show in this chapter was that the entire process of individuation-actualization required two distinct dimensions in order to take place. It requires first of all the virtual or the space in which Ideas as the sensible schema of things were progressively determined. It required second of all an intensive spatium in which intensities were able to focus on the differential relations and singularities of transcendental Ideas. But from the point of view of genesis one inevitably has to ask: where do these three elements themselves come from? From the point of view of intensity, in Anti-Oedipus we saw that those intensities constitutive of thought were produced in the third passive synthesis of desiring-production. From the point of view of Ideas, I argued above that the virtual of Difference and Repetition was another way of talking about ‘sense’ and Aion. In The Logic of Sense we saw that the essential characteristic of sense was that it was produced in a dynamic genesis, which I argued was repeated in Anti-Oedipus. Everything points to the interpretation that the virtual is produced through the passive syntheses of time which Deleuze describes in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition. It is to these syntheses that we now turn.

Chapter 7

Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time

This chapter deals almost entirely with the second chapter of Difference and Repetition. At the end of the last chapter I had argued that the static genesis in Difference and Repetition was composed of two separate geneses which worked side by side: actualization, which moved from the future to the present, and individuation which remained in the present and moved from a less-developed present to a more developed present. There were thus two distinct elements that needed to be accounted for genetically: (1) intensities and (2) Ideas. Neither of these are given. Both are subject to a genesis. In the previous two parts of this book we have seen how the two works published immediately after Difference and Repetition theorized the genesis of both intensities and Ideas. (1) Anti-Oedipus unambiguously argued that intensity was produced as the expression of relations of attraction and repulsion between the body without organs and partial objects across the three passive syntheses of a transcendental unconscious. The third passive synthesis of consumption measured the repulsion of the first synthesis against the attraction of the second and determined intensities as expressions of this relation between a body without organs and partial objects. A primary aim of this chapter is to show that this theory of the production of intensity is described in Difference and Repetition as well. (2) In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze described the way in which a dynamic genesis produced both ‘sense’ or a virtual field of determinability and an ‘aleatory point’ which traversed this transcendental field. In both Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense then, intensities and Ideas are produced as the effect of a regime of passive syntheses. The constitution of time in Difference and Repetition, which ends with the production of the empty form of time and the eternal return—and therefore of the virtual—I argue below is the correlate of both the dynamic genesis of The Logic of Sense and the process of desiring-production in Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze gives three different accounts of the passive syntheses in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition, and each one of these accounts makes use of different technical vocabularies which it is necessary to distinguish from the start, even if they all say essentially the same thing. The first makes use of a traditional philosophical vocabulary. The second unfolds in the language of psychoanalysis. The third is in the language of physics. In order to distinguish

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between them then I will call them simply the ‘philosophical account’ (DR 70–96), the ‘psychoanalytic account’ (96–116), and the ‘physical account’ (116–26).1 In general and at the outset we can say that there are at least five syntheses which are described in this chapter. However only three of them are properly passive and sub-representative and play a role in the transcendental production of time. The other two are active and play a role in the empirical representation of time.2 Of the three passive syntheses, the ‘first’ is ‘Habit’; the ‘second’ is ‘Mnemosyne’; and the ‘third’ is ‘Thanatos’. Together these three passive syntheses constitute the ‘unconscious’.3 But unlike the passive syntheses constituting the transcendental unconscious of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze says that these three syntheses produce time. The first produces the present, the second, the past, and the third, the future. Because they are transcendental syntheses, they do not produce past, present, and future moments, but the dimensions of time themselves. They produce the present in general, the past in general, and the future in general understood as the elements in which any representation can be empirically known as past, present, or future. In addition to the three passive syntheses, then, there are at least two active syntheses: memory, which reproduces a past present, and understanding, which reflects a present present (DR 80–81). From the point of view of the active syntheses, ‘present’ means ‘representation’, and, reciprocally, ‘representation’ means ‘the present which passes’.4 These presents which are reproduced and reflected in an empirical memory and an empirical understanding are the very representations for human consciousness that we encountered at the end of both The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus as well as in the conclusion to the static genesis of Difference and Repetition which I described in my previous chapter. Now, however, these representations are described from the point of view of their temporality. (As Deleuze says in this chapter, the active syntheses are ‘for-us’ (DR 71, 76.) These two active syntheses operate in the world of representation whereas the passive syntheses are entirely sub-representative. One of the central problems of this chapter revolves around the question of the order in which the syntheses operate. Unlike the account of the passive syntheses in Anti-Oedipus, in Difference and Repetition Deleuze does not always give a linear account along the lines of a genesis, and at one point he even suggests that the third synthesis is the ground of the first two, that it comes before them and distributes its difference to them.5 Rather than giving a linear account of the syntheses he discusses the passive and sub-representative syntheses in direct relation to the active and representative syntheses.6 This is why the chapter often reads, as James Williams has pointed out, like a transcendental deduction.7 The structure of the argument in the first, philosophical account of the syntheses runs as follows: (1) Deleuze begins with the first passive synthesis, then immediately proceeds to the active synthesis founded on top of this; (2) he then says that this active synthesis would not be possible unless it were

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founded on a second passive synthesis; (3) he then describes this second synthesis, but always in relation to the active syntheses founded on top of it; (4) he then says that this passive synthesis, along with the first, gets caught in a closed circularity, and thus requires a third synthesis which would keep representation open in principle and condition the production of ‘the new’. The argument only progresses by explaining each passive synthesis as the condition of a representative synthesis which is incompletely founded on the previous passive synthesis. In Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense however each synthesis depended on the previous and engendered the next without recourse to representation. In this first account of Difference and Repetition we can only get from the first synthesis to the second by taking a detour through representation. Each synthesis appears as a transcendental condition of representation. However, there are two reasons why I think the syntheses in Difference and Repetition need to be read in a linear fashion. The first comes from Deleuze’s general overview of the system in his brief description of a ‘doctrine of the faculties’. Everything begins with the transcendental sensibility I described in my previous chapter. This sensibility encounters fragmented objects in the form of ‘intensities’ (144) or ‘excitations’ (96). Sensibility then ‘transmits its constraint imagination’, which transmits its constraint to the memory, which finally transmits its constraint to thought (144). These three faculties which follow on the heels of sensibility—imagination, memory, and thought—are precisely the faculties involved in each passive synthesis. In fact we could describe each passive synthesis as the transcendental exercise of a particular faculty. Habit is the transcendental employment of the imagination; Eros is the transcendental employment of Memory; and Thanatos is the transcendental employment of thought. What is important here, however, is that Deleuze not only reads all three of these syntheses as operating well below the radar of representation of active syntheses so that the emphasis on representation in the philosophical account of the syntheses is purely a function of its presentation—but also that Deleuze clearly sees this communication unfolding as a series with a specific order: ‘There is indeed a serial connection between the faculties and an order in that series’ (145). Beyond this philosophical account, the two other accounts of the syntheses in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition also insist on the order highlighted in the doctrine of the faculties. I will therefore follow this order, beginning with a description of the fragmented object given to transcendental sensibility, then showing its synthesis in the imagination, memory, and thought.

The rule of discontinuity and originary subjectivity Perhaps the most important aspect of Deleuze’s theory of time, but also one of the more difficult to characterize by sticking to Difference and Repetition alone, is its beginning. In the philosophical account of the syntheses he calls this beginning

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‘repetition in-itself’. There are many different and almost unrelated senses of the word ‘repetition’ at work in this chapter. In this particular expression, repetition is something that describes a material object which is subjected to a ‘rule of discontinuity’. ‘The rule of discontinuity or instantaneity in repetition tells us that one instance does not appear unless the other has disappeared . . .’ (70). Even though Deleuze will say that, as a consequence of this discontinuity, there is no such thing as repetition in-itself—repetition requires a connection between instants in order to exist—he still makes significant use of this notion. He often does so, however, under the guise of a different name: ‘material repetition’. ‘Repetition in-itself’ is material because the rule of discontinuity bears on objects. It characterizes ‘repetition in the object’ (71). Nominally, this notion of a material or ‘bare’ repetition refers back to the first chapter where it was intended to express what we understand by ‘repetition’ in our ordinary everyday usage of the word: two or more identical instances separated in time but still affirmed as identical. But in this chapter Deleuze has transposed the notion of material repetition to an entirely different register. Here it no longer refers to represented identities which function in judgments. Rather, it describes the way in which a fragmented object appears to a transcendental sensibility. Several things make this transposition clear. First of all, in the introduction to Difference and Repetition, material repetition depended on the form of representation and required a rather traditional distribution of identity and difference. In this chapter, however, material repetition is sub-representative, unrepresentable, and unthinkable.8 In the conclusion of Difference and Repetition Deleuze even goes so far as to suggest that it is precisely in order to represent this unthinkable repetition that the regime of passive syntheses are employed (286). It therefore functions in a realm entirely antecedent to that of scientific judgment. Second, if we turn to the psychoanalytic account of the syntheses, we see that the position of material repetition in relation to the passive syntheses is now filled by ‘excitations’ which are understood precisely as those differences in intensity which are apprehended by a transcendental sensibility (96). Again, here material repetition describes the world of bodily affection and not that of empirical representation. Third, and finally by anticipating the analysis to come, we can recognize here the starting point of both Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense. In Anti-Oedipus, everything began in a world of microperceptions described as a multiplicity of ‘partial objects’ or microperceptions whose only relation was the absolute lack of relation. In Difference and Repetition the expressions ‘the rule of discontinuity’, ‘repetition in the object’, or ‘material repetition’, all express nothing more that this absence of relations between fragments of the objects which affect our body. Material repetition and its correlate in the psychoanalytic account—excitations—define the hyletic data on which the syntheses operate. It refers to the material content of a transcendental sensibility.

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This discontinuity which divides the object into a succession of instants might seem a lot like time—what is time if not a succession of instants?—but it is not. Time requires a synthesis. A succession of instants does not constitute time any more than it causes it to disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth. Time is constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants. This synthesis contracts the successive independent instants into one another, thereby constituting the lived, or living, present. It is in this present that time is deployed [se déploie]. (70/97; my emphases) The first synthesis of time ‘operates on the repetition of instants’ and thus produces what Deleuze calls, following Husserl, the ‘living present’. It does so by gathering together, or ‘contracting’, the successive instants of the material repetition. This living present is not time as such, but the general element in which time itself will unfold or spread out across the other two passive syntheses and the static genesis founded on top of them. All of this is discussed below. To make sense of this claim that time requires a synthesis and cannot be a succession of instants it is helpful to turn to Bergson. Many philosophies of time begin by describing the impossibility of finding time in a succession of instants—most notably Bergson’s.9 Indeed Deleuze repeats here, almost verbatim, some of Bergson’s arguments from the third chapter of Duration and Simultaneity. In Duration and Simultaneity, as in Creative Evolution, Bergson insisted on the impossibility of time existing without memory. For Bergson, it is impossible to think of time as a succession of separate instants because time is what happens between two instants. To think time and not just snapshots of instants requires a ‘bridge’ between the two instants. And this requires that we insert an impersonal or non-‘anthropomorphic’ consciousness between the successive instants. 10 Without an elementary memory that connects the two moments, there will only be the one or the other, consequently a single instant, no before, no after, no succession, no time. We can bestow on this memory just what is needed to make the connection; it will be, if we like, this very connection, a mere continuing of the before into the immediate after with a perpetually renewed forgetfulness of what is not the immediately prior moment. (Duration and Simultaneity 48) Deleuze is clearly echoing Bergson’s arguments when he says that time can not be constituted by a succession of instants but only by an originary synthesis. But Deleuze follows Bergson even further. Bergson suggests here that, at the very least, the constitution of time requires an impersonal memory which is itself nothing more than the contraction of two instants. Deleuze too institutes at this

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point an ‘originary subjectivity’ which actually carries out the synthesis. In order for the first synthesis to take place, there must be an ‘originary subjectivity’, a ‘contemplative soul’, or a ‘spontaneous imagination’ which acts as the synthesizing agent (70; cf. 286). These contemplative souls, like Bergson’s nonanthropomorphic memory, are nothing more than the connection they bring about or the instants they contract.11 Synthesis moves us from the order of the fragmented object to that of the subject. ‘Time is subjective, but in relation to the subjectivity of a passive subject’ (71)12 The object given to sensibility, the material repetition understood as the unraveling of an object in an unrepresentable13 and unthinkable ‘temporality’, has two characteristics: (1) it is material, and (2) it is discontinuous or fragmented. We can thus see the relationship with the starting point of desiring-production in Anti-Oedipus where the ‘ultimate elements of the unconscious’ were both material and lacking any relation to one another. They formed a ‘molecular multiplicity in positive dispersion’. I will discuss the first synthesis and the subjectivity it implies in more detail below, but I want to insist on this essential starting point: in Deleuze time begins with the experience of an object. It does not begin with a purely formal synthesis, or with ‘Being’ temporalizing itself, or with an empty form awaiting schematization. It begins with the direct experience of a fragmented materiality subject to the ‘rule of discontinuity’.

Synthesis of the imagination: Habit These two characteristics of the given—its materiality and discontinuity—relate directly to the two significant characteristics of the ‘contemplative soul’ or ‘spontaneous imagination’ which contemplates and synthesizes the discontinuous fragments. (1) In relation to the materiality of the object, the contemplative soul appears as an originary intentionality; it ‘contemplates’ the fragmented objects, and it is the object it contemplates. (2) In relation to the dispersion of the object in a succession of unrelated instants, the contemplative soul is subject to a natural contractile range; it can only hold so much within its grasp. Both of these characteristics are encompassed in the expression ‘contracting contemplation’. The soul is a ‘mind’ which contemplates the material repetition. It intends its object. In contemplating it however, it runs though it and gathers together the successive instants of material repetition into one thought (DR 74).14 This gathering together is a contraction. Contraction refers to ‘the fusion of that repetition in the contemplating mind’ (74; my emphasis).15 We can therefore distinguish three senses of the word ‘synthesis’ in Deleuze’s description of the act at this stage of the genesis. (1) Synthesis is a contemplation. It takes something as its object. (2) Synthesis is a contraction. It runs through and gathers together whatever it is that it contemplates. (3) But it is

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also, importantly, an identification of the contemplating and contracting ego with that which it synthesizes. The ego is what it contemplates and contracts. The third aspect is one of the most important at this early stage of the genesis. This first synthesis is a synthesis of the object which discontinuity has divided. However, this synthesis is less a first step toward the unity of the object than it is a confusion of the synthesizing subject with the discontinuous object. In the first synthesis the contemplative soul comes into possession of its object: ‘it contracts all the instants which separate us from [the object of contemplation] into a living present’ (77). This is a complex sentence. First, it repeats that the synthesis is a contraction of instants. But second, it also positions the soul in relation to these instants. Before the synthesis it is just one instant among others. But through the synthesis itself, the ego and all of the instants are brought together in a living present which is as much objective as it is subjective. The mind is not on one side and the object on the other. The mind is nothing more than what it contemplates. This is why Deleuze says that the mind is what it has, being is having (79). Conversely, the mind itself ‘comes undone once its object escapes’ (79). At this point in the genesis, in the language of Anti-Oedipus, desire and the social are completely mixed in a molecular multiplicity. Deleuze repeats this unity of subject and object several times in each of the three formulations of the passive syntheses: the mind that contemplates is indistinguishable from what it contemplates: ‘the eye binds light, it is itself a bound light’ (DR 96).16 We are always Actaeon by virtue of what we contemplate, even though we are Narcissus in relation to the pleasure we take from it. To contemplate is to draw something from. We must always first contemplate something else—the water, or Diana, or the woods—in order to be filled with an image of ourselves. (DR 74–75) In contemplating something else, the mind is filled with the image of itself. For this reason, in the psychoanalytic account, Deleuze calls these contemplative souls ‘narcissistic egos’. The fact that these egos should be immediately narcissistic is readily explained if we consider narcissism to be not a contemplation of oneself but the fulfillment of a self-image through the contemplation of something else: the eye, the seeing ego, is filled with an image of itself in contemplating the excitation that it binds. It produces itself or ‘draws itself’ from what it contemplates [. . .]. (DR 97/129; translation modified)

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We can say without exaggeration then that this first synthesis is an originary intentionality. But intentionality here doesn’t refer to a ‘ray’ aimed at objects and emanating from a solipsistic ego: the ego is what it intends, or contemplates. It is a consciousness which is always a consciousness of something else where this ‘something else’ is indistinguishable from the ego. This isn’t therefore ‘intentionality’ in the sense it had in Husserl’s static phenomenology, as a transcendence within immanence. It was precisely in order to found the static sense of intentionality that Husserl had to turn to the passive syntheses. Rather, Deleuze’s notion of intentionality here is captured perfectly by Blanchot when he describes ‘mind’ as that ‘empty power to exchange itself for everything’ (The Space of Literature 88).17 This is exactly the operation of the contemplative soul: it exchanges itself for everything.18 We cannot think of Blanchot, however, without thinking of Hegel. Blanchot’s description of mind, and indeed, the entire description of the contemplative soul’s relation to materiality in Deleuze, echoes (especially Hyppolite’s) Hegel’s description of sense consciousness. For Hegel, sense experience was defined by the discontinuity of objects and experiences. Each object is a ‘singularity’ without any relation to other objects.19 Each consciousness appears as indistinguishable from the singularity which it ‘aims at’ or intends.20 Sense-consciousness takes these singularities as its object and is strictly coextensive with them—as Hyppolite says describing Hegel, ‘The sensuous soul does not distinguish itself from its object’ (Hyppolite, Genesis 84; my emphasis; cf. Hegel §§104).21 And in Hegel, as in Deleuze, this sense-consciousness ‘comes undone once its object escapes’ (DR 96; Hyppolite 94; Hegel §§93, 109). I have already suggested that in AntiOedipus Deleuze’s genesis begins in a situation very similar to Hegel’s analysis of sense-certainty. In Anti-Oedipus, everything began with partial objects dispersed in a positive multiplicity. We understood these partial objects to be minute perceptions and therefore fragments of the sensible object, even though we could not admit the totality of that object. Because their only relation was a lack of relation, Deleuze described these minute perceptions, following Hegel, as ‘singularities’.22 I argued above that in the language of Difference and Repetition, the ‘positive multiplicity in dispersion’ is the object under the rule of discontinuity. At one point in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze even goes so far as to make the comparison with Hegel himself when he describes the material repetition as ‘the identity of spirit—in other words, of the concept, but in the form of an alienated concept, without self-consciousness and outside of itself’ (DR 286). If it is true the three passive syntheses begin in a contemplation of matter as the concept outside of itself, and if they end by founding the virtual which will itself found a static genesis which returns to this primary matter and gives it a sense, then the commonplaces regarding Deleuze’s difference from Hegel may be entirely unfounded. All I wanted to say with this comparison at this point, however, is that there is no significant difference between this contemplation of the discontinuous object which produces a passive ego identical to the object, and

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a Blanchotian-Hegelian style intentionality. The first synthesis, and the shape of consciousness involved, represents the empty power of mind to exchange itself for everything. In relation to the materiality of the discontinuous object, the first characteristic of the contemplative soul was that it was an originary intentionality. It intends a material content and becomes that content. In relation to fragmentation of the object into successive instants, however, we see that this ego is subject to a ‘contractile range’. This second aspect provides us with a significant link between Difference and Repetition and the attraction-repulsion model of AntiOedipus (and therefore of an explanation for the production of intensity). But in order to elaborate this link, it is necessary to make a very brief detour through two of Levinas’s early works: On Escape and Existence and Existents. In these two works, Levinas analyzes the experience of need and fatigue in relation to a synthesis of the instant. These books begin with the description of a situation not far from that of Hegel’s sense consciousness. They both begin by describing the situation of a larval ego which is caught up in ‘existence’. Levinas’s analysis sounds very similar to Deleuze’s description of the ego’s situation in the corporeal depths, battered by the unmediated action of partial objects: ‘Being is essentially alien and strikes against us. We undergo its suffocating embrace like the night, but it does not respond to us. There is a pain in Being’ (Levinas, Existence 9).23 As a result of this suffocation and violence, Levinas’s original position and problem is the same as Deleuze’s: how can we escape from being? How can we transcend the given? How do we get from Existence to existents? For Levinas, it is precisely the phenomenon of fatigue and the refusal that it implies that makes this escape possible. ‘In the midst of the anonymous flow of existence, there is stoppage and a positing’ (Levinas, Existence 23). This stoppage is the consequence of the subject’s weariness with existence. Fatigue represents a ‘refusal to exist’ (11), a ‘way of curling up into oneself’ (18). Fatigue’s ‘whole reality is made up of that refusal’ (11). Weariness or fatigue entails a refusal to go on and a rejection of that alien being which strikes against us. Instead of flowing with existence, the subject begins to fall behind. But, falling behind, it makes another ‘effort’ to come to terms with existence. This is how the living present is constituted in Levinas: a subject weary with existence steps out of the flow momentarily, but then returns to it through effort. The present is constituted as this ‘lag’ in the anonymous flow of existence, created in the dialectic of fatigue and effort (23, 25). We see a similar formula in Deleuze’s account of the first synthesis. Habit contracts, but it has a natural contractile range, and this range defines the concrete ‘finitude’ of the subject (79). Each soul can contract only so many successive instants, and, as a result, the ‘duration of an organism’s present [. . .] will vary according to the natural contractile range of its contemplative souls’ (DR 77). The limit of contraction is experienced in the saturated soul as fatigue. ‘Fatigue marks the point at which the soul can no

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longer contract what it contemplates . . .’ (77). But here Deleuze says something, almost in passing, which is extremely important. ‘Fatigue marks the point at which the soul can no longer contract what it contemplates, the moment at which contemplation and contraction come apart’ (77). Fatigue is the moment at which contemplation and contraction come apart. Contemplation separates from its object and the synthesis loses its relation to the outside. The saturated soul refuses its object and curls up into itself. Above we saw that being was having and that the contemplative soul came undone once its object escaped (DR 79). This is an entirely different situation. In fatigue, it is not the object which escapes from the subject. Rather, the subject escapes from the object. Here a saturated contemplation escapes or refuses the object. Contemplation and contraction come apart, but the soul, the contraction, still remains in possession of its object. It simply ceases to be an intentionality. It no longer contemplates a present, but only itself as a present that was. It has become a memory which conserves itself in itself. This moment corresponds directly to the body without organ’s escape from the ‘binary-linear series’ of partial objects in Anti-Oedipus. The contemplative soul is the body without organs. Fatigue explains why the body without organs, when it becomes the external limit of the plane of immanence, experiences the partial objects as an ‘overall persecution mechanism’ which forces it to become a ‘paranoiac machine’ and remove itself completely from the ‘binary-linear series’ of partial objects: it is tired of them. It can no longer contract what it contemplates, and so it ceases to be a contemplation. This separation from the present, or this refusal of the instants which pass according to the rule of discontinuity is therefore also the separation of an originary ego, a contemplative soul, a spontaneous imagination or a body without organs from the plane of immanence. It marks the beginning of a transcendence of the given or an escape from being. Before I discuss the consequences of this and the second synthesis which it conditions, it is worth returning briefly to the kind of time produced in the first synthesis. The first synthesis produces the present in time. This is not at all the present which passes. It is the dimension of the present in general. It provides ‘the general possibility of any present’ (DR 81).24 It is therefore necessary to distinguish between two of the many notions of the present in Deleuze. The present which passes defines the empirical present of representation as ‘for-us’. That is to say, it defines the temporality of those representations produced at the intersection of individuation and actualization which I described in the previous chapter and which pertain here specifically to the active syntheses. The living present needs to be rigorously separated from the present which passes. The living present is ‘contemplative and contracting, but non-representing and non-represented’ (DR 286; my emphasis; cf. 84). Far from producing a present representation, it produces

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the present in general, or the general element of any given present in a space far below the level of representation.

Synthesis of memory: Mnemosyne The second synthesis of time produces ‘the pure, a priori past, the past in general or as such’ (DR 81). Just as the first synthesis did not produce a present representation, but the general possibility of any present, the second synthesis does not produce an actual past present, but ‘the element in which we focus upon [a past present]’ (80).25 This synthesis has a specific relationship to both kinds of present outlined above—the living present and the present which passes in representation. In conjunction with the first passive synthesis, this second synthesis is, in principle, sufficient to ground the active syntheses of representation or the present which passes (80–81). In relation to this present, the pure past plays ‘the role of ground’ (82). Its relation to the living present is more complex. To say that the represented present is the one which passes, does not mean, however, that the living present itself does not pass. It passes, but not in the same way that the represented present passes. When the living present passes, it passes away for good: it dies. When a represented present passes, it becomes a memory. This distinction between the two ways of passing should help clarify Deleuze’s own transition from the first synthesis to the second in the philosophical account of the syntheses. In order to move from his discussion of the first synthesis to the second, Deleuze presents a problem in the form of a paradox: This is the paradox of the present: to constitute time, but to pass in the time constituted. We cannot avoid the necessary conclusion—that there must be another time in which the first synthesis can occur. This necessarily refers us to a second synthesis. By insisting on the finitude of contraction, we have shown the effect; we have by no means shown why the present passes, or what prevents it from being coextensive with time. (79/108; original emphasis; translation modified) This would seem to be a rather straightforward statement: because the present passes, the synthesis of time must take place in another time. But for all of its clarity, it really does not make sense at all—and not just because it would lead to an infinite regress (this past which is itself constituted by a synthesis would need to find another time in which its synthesis could occur, and so on). It does not make sense because, as we have just seen, the past is not the cause of the ego’s exhaustion. The ego suffers fatigue because it has a natural contractile range: it exhausts itself because it contemplates too much, because it tries to

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possess too many instants in one grasp. This difficulty can be resolved by noticing two senses of the word ‘cause’ at work in Deleuze’s thought as a whole: the material cause and the quasi-cause. If the past is the ‘cause’ of the living present’s passing here, it is because the first synthesis is not sufficient to constitute time—for the same reasons that Hegel said sense-certainty is not certainty at all (Hegel §§109–10): this first ego, riveted to the present, passes away with the expanded present it produced. Unlike the present of representation which passes into memory, when the living present passes, it passes for good. Although it provides a temporary solution to the problem which Bergson pointed out, the phenomenon of fatigue tells us that this solution itself will pass. Bergson’s initial problem then reappears on another level. We now need a bridge between these saturated contemplations which pass in order to know them as passing. This bridge is provided by the second passive synthesis of time, Eros, whose specific function is to gather together these local egos. In the psychoanalytic account of the syntheses Deleuze writes that the second synthesis ‘gathers up the particular narcissistic satisfaction and relates it to the contemplation of a virtual object’ (DR 108–09). The expression ‘particular narcissistic satisfaction’ refers to the passive and narcissistic ego of the first synthesis. The ‘virtual object’ is the agent of synthesis itself (109), it is the ‘phallus’ which gathers together the narcissistic egos, and, in doing so, comes to ‘signify’ or ‘stand for’ the pure past, or the past in general (103). The general element of the past is thus constituted in the synthesis of passing presents. From this point of view, the past is the cause of the present in the same way that the body without organs as a recording surface was cause of the partial objects: it is its quasi-cause, a ‘miraculation’. That is to say, the past takes up the saturated egos and submits them to a new synthesis and a new organization in a new ego.26 This is why Deleuze describes the second passive synthesis as an ‘extension’ of the first, and the second passive ego as an ‘extension’ of the contemplative soul, the spontaneous imagination, or the body without organs: the second synthesis is ‘the extension of passive syntheses and the passive egos which correspond to them’ (100/133); in the move from the first synthesis to the second, ‘the first synthesis is extended in the form of a second passive synthesis’ (108/144); this extension is the correlate of an ‘extended passive ego’ (100/132). The verb Deleuze uses in these passages is ‘approfondir’ which implies that rather than a lateral extension, this synthesis involves a deepening. The question at hand is whether or not this depth preexists the first synthesis in principle, or whether, rather, it presupposes the first synthesis in order to deepen it subsequently (so that it is indeed within the living present, as Deleuze said earlier, that ‘time is deployed’). That is, whether or not the first present has to first reach its point of satiety and then, in its exhaustion, begin its escape from being; or whether, in order to even contemplate, it had to already exist in a pure past outside of being. Deleuze suggests the former when, discussing the

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second passive synthesis in relation to the first, he writes, ‘The present difference is then no longer, as it was above, a difference drawn from a superficial repetition of moments in such a way as to sketch a depth without which the latter would not exist. Now, it is this depth itself which develops itself for itself’ (286–87; my emphasis). Here the depth of the first synthesis is clearly what is developed for itself—‘deepened’—in the second. This reading in which the first synthesis comes first and the second, second, makes even more sense once we notice that the second synthesis repeats the form of the first—as it did in both The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus. In the first, a passive ego gathered together different instants of a fragmented object. In the second, the first passive egos of habit are themselves the object of the synthesis. They take the place of the material repetition and are gathered together in the image of a ‘virtual object’ or a ‘partial object’27 which has now come to define a ‘deepened’ passive ego. From this point of view, it is hard to see how the second synthesis could come before the objects which it gathers together. The advantage of reading the genesis in this way is that it explains how memory is produced rather than given. At the moment that contraction and contemplation come apart in the first synthesis, the ‘depth’ of the saturated ego ‘develops itself for itself’. This means that it takes itself—rather than an external object—as the object of its contemplation, or, to put it differently, that it begins to contract itself rather than something else. It continues to hold what it already possesses without looking elsewhere. As such, it is no longer an originary intentionality opened on to the outside but has become a specific and local memory which conserves itself in itself. This local memory either passes away and dies with the object as in the passing of the living present, or it is taken up in a second synthesis where it is coordinated and preserved in relation to a virtual object along with those other egos which have also become memories. In this appropriation and coordination of narcissistic egos, we reencounter the form of attraction in Anti-Oedipus. In the second passive synthesis of AntiOedipus, the body without organs as a recording surface attracted the partial objects to itself and then submitted them to a new type of organization in a process called ‘miraculation’. Miraculation specifically expressed the way in which the body without organs appeared to be the ‘cause’ of the partial objects even though they in fact were the condition of its production. In Difference and Repetition, ‘attraction’ is the coordination of all the local egos around the image of a virtual object which, in its synthesis creates a transcendental memory, or the element of the pure past in general. As I described above, the phallus, or the synthesis itself is the pure past.28 ‘Miraculation’ is the process whereby this newly created past presents itself as the cause of the objects it synthesized. It is the appropriation of the first synthesis by the second or the extension of the first into the second. Because Deleuze describes this virtual object as the phallus, and because its function is to coordinate the local egos, it also provides us with the link between

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Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. This stage corresponds exactly to what Deleuze called in The Logic of Sense ‘genital sexuality’, or the ‘coordination of the physical surface’. There the phallus coordinated all of the local egos of partial surfaces in order to produce a full body or a complete physical surface. Despite the complete disparity in technical vocabulary between books, there is a very strong correspondence in their separate descriptions of these early stages of the genesis. However, even if this reading sounds plausible, and even if we are willing to admit with some hesitation that the paradox of the passing present is resolved according to the logic of quasi-causality, and that the past is therefore cause of the present in the same way the body without organs was the cause of the partial objects in the second synthesis of Anti-Oedipus, what about the three paradoxes of the past in general which Deleuze seems to inherit directly from Bergson (DR 81–82)? Their names alone—coexistence, contemporaneity, and preexistence—all suggest that the pure past grounds the first synthesis by coming before it and coexisting with it, and these paradoxes are often read this way. The three paradoxes, however, do not describe the relation of the element of the pure past in general to the living present, but only to the present in representation which the first synthesis conditions but is by no means synonymous with. All three paradoxes express the difference between the pure transcendental past and an empirical present. It is precisely this empirical present which both Habit and Mnemosyne condition together. In fact, far from expressing the relationship between the first and second passive syntheses, the paradoxes go in the other direction: they form the argument for the necessity of a third synthesis by emphasizing the compatibility of the first and second syntheses with the representations that they condition. But before moving to a description of the third synthesis, it is worth pointing out here that it is only in the first of the three accounts of the syntheses in the chapter that the order of the syntheses, after all is said and done, needs to be read in reverse so that the third is read as the cause of the second which is the cause of the first. This is because the first account is presented as a deduction. Each synthesis is presented as providing the ground and condition of the previous. This gives the impression that, in the final analysis we should reverse the order and see the third synthesis as the source of the other two. But the other two accounts of the syntheses make this reversal seem less plausible. The second, psychoanalytic account, begins with the description of an undeveloped ego with its undifferenciated drives and progresses to a developed and mature ego with well differenciated drives. This development is repeated in a more developed fashion in the dynamic genesis of The Logic of Sense along the lines of what appears—at the surface—to be a rather straightforward Freudian account of the development of the ego. If we were to reverse the order in the final reading, we would have to say that the fully developed and differenciated ego is in

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fact the condition of the embryonic ego and prior to it in the order of genesis.29 This clearly makes no sense. The same problem appears in the third, physical account of the syntheses where Deleuze makes use of a ‘physical model’, or a ‘pendular structure’ (LS 239), to describe the three syntheses. Here, Habit is called coupling; Eros, resonance; and Thanatos, forced movement (DR 118).30 Manuel DeLanda gives a very clear description of these syntheses in ‘the phenomenon of frequency entrainment’: For two grandfather pendulum clocks to entrain, weak signals must be transmitted from one to the other to couple them (in some cases, these are weak vibrations in the wooden floor on which the clocks are placed). If the frequencies of the two clocks are close to each other they may resonate and the two clocks will lock into a single frequency. The resulting entrainment of the two oscillators represents a much stronger linkage (forced movement) between the two oscillators than the weak signals which originally coupled them. (DeLanda 145n.53; original emphases, my bold) Here, the first two syntheses are presented as instruments for measuring time as a function of movement—pendulums—whereas the third, presented as the effect of the resonance of the first two, goes beyond them. The third appears as a synthesis of the first two, and it clearly requires the initial coupling and communication of the pendulums before it can come about. It makes absolutely no sense from this point of view to reverse the order in the final reading. We cannot begin with forced movement, or the third synthesis, and see it as the cause and ground of the second and first syntheses, since it clearly presupposes them. The last two sections of the syntheses chapter therefore prevent reading the third synthesis as the ground and cause of the other two, unless, of course, we do so along the lines of the logic of miraculation and quasi-causality which was at work at every level of the genesis in Anti-Oedipus and which had the specific function of maintaining the order of genesis while explaining how each synthesis can then be seen as the cause of the elements involved in the previous stage through its reproduction of them.

Synthesis of thought: Thanatos This entire enquiry into the production of time in Difference and Repetition was motivated by the attempt to explain the foundations of the static genesis in which intensities enveloped the relations and singularities of an Idea and thereby individuated a present representation. For this reason we had at least two expectations of the passive genesis: it must show the production of (1) the virtual-ideal field and (2) intensity. However neither Habit nor Mnemosyne provided this foundation.

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Because the first two syntheses did not provide the ground for the static genesis, we now have to apply our expectations to the third synthesis alone. What needs to be produced in the third synthesis is both the field in which Ideas are developed and the field in which intensities can focus on Ideas. I will first describe the genesis of intensity, and then of the virtual.

The genesis of intensity In Anti-Oedipus, intensity was clearly produced by the synthesis of the first two syntheses, and specifically as a synthesis of the relations of attraction and repulsion. I have argued that these relations are again present in Difference and Repetition in the form of fatigue (repulsion) and the coordination of local egos around a virtual object (attraction). I want to argue here that intensity as difference in itself is also produced in the third synthesis of Difference and Repetition as a synthesis of the first two syntheses. In the third, physical account of the syntheses, this production of intensity is explicitly described. Here, the third synthesis has the same general form as the previous two. The first synthesis contracted material instants. In one formulation of the first synthesis, Deleuze says that it ‘draws off’ the difference between instants and that it is this difference drawn (DR 78–79; 286). The difference which has been subtracted from the instants defines the local egos or contemplative souls. The second synthesis then takes the local egos of the first as its object. Deleuze says that it therefore ‘includes difference’. If this synthesis includes difference, it does so, again, by drawing off a difference—this time the difference between egos. This synthesis ‘includes difference’ because it is a synthesis of the contemplative souls which are themselves the difference drawn off of material fragments. The third synthesis, like the second, turns back to synthesize the product of the previous synthesis. However, it does not only take the second synthesis as its object, but it takes the local egos of the first as well. It therefore draws off two kinds of difference—that between material instants and that between egos—and it expresses the relationship between these two forms of difference. This is how Deleuze describes the production of intensity in the physical account of the syntheses. The first synthesis is described as a coupling, the second as a resonance, and the third as a forced movement. We have to be attentive then to three kinds of difference involved in this account. Since this is difficult territory, I will develop it slowly by taking each moment of the physical metaphor on pg. 117 one at a time. (1) ‘A system must be constituted on the basis of two or more series, each series being defined by the differences between the terms which compose it’. The first synthesis produces these series. In relation to the philosophical account of the syntheses, the ‘terms’ of the series are the discontinuous

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instants of the material object. The differences between these terms, however, are not the differences which discontinuity introduced into the object. While this reading is tempting, we should notice that the terms are not scattered in a schizophrenic mixture but are organized in ‘series’. The first synthesis, coupling, is what puts the terms into series. The differences between terms are therefore precisely those ‘differences drawn’ in the first synthesis. Coupling is the physical analogue of Habit in the philosophical account and of the binding of excitations in the psychoanalytic account. (2) ‘If we suppose that the series communicate under the impulse of a force of some kind, then it is apparent that this communication relates differences to other differences, constituting differences between differences within the system’. This ‘force’ is the second synthesis, or the virtual object, which gathers up the local egos. These egos are, as we have just seen, nothing more than the differences between terms of the series. This ‘force’ therefore enacts ‘the communication’ of difference, or the relation of difference to difference, by relating the egos themselves (differences drawn) to one another in the image of a virtual object. Deleuze calls this communication of differences ‘resonance’, which is clearly the physical analogue of the production of the pure past in the philosophical account and of the synthesis of local egos in the psychoanalytic account. (3) As DeLanda so clearly described, resonance can lead—not always—to a forced movement (cf. LS 239–40). Deleuze writes, from resonance ‘is derived a forced movement the amplitude of which exceeds the basic series themselves’. (DR117; original emphasis) This forced movement is a new, third kind of difference which is precisely the notion of intensity which is developed for itself in the last chapter of Difference and Repetition. Deleuze describes it here as follows: The nature of these elements whose value is determined at once both by their difference in the series to which they belong [coupling], and by the difference of their difference from one series to another [resonance], can be determined: these are intensities, the peculiarity of intensities being to be constituted by a difference which itself refers to other differences (E-E’ where E refers to e-e’ and e to ε−ε’ . . .). (DR 117; my emphasis) This is the third synthesis. Here, intensity is unequivocally ‘constituted’ as a ‘difference which refers to other differences’. These other differences to which intensity refers are those involved in the prior two syntheses: the difference

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drawn off (coupling) and the difference included (resonance). The intensity at the heart of thought and its genesis is this difference which presupposes precisely the first two syntheses of time. It is clear that this definition of intensity resonates well with the account of its production in Anti-Oedipus. It is much less clear how this relates to what I said about intensity in the previous chapter. Deleuze seems to make two contradictory statements about intensity. On the one hand intensity is what is given at the start to a transcendental sensibility. Intensity describes the form in which the transcendental sensibility ‘encounters’ or experiences ‘the outside’ (DR 144). This sensibility then ‘transmits its constraint’ to the imagination (first synthesis), which passes the difference on to the memory (second synthesis), which passes the difference on to thought (third synthesis). But, on the other hand, we have just seen that intensity is very clearly ‘constituted’ in this third synthesis. It seems to be there at the beginning of the dynamic genesis at the same time that it is precisely what this genesis needs to produce. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between two kinds of intensity: intensity as that which is initially given and intensity as a produced quantity of affection. I already briefly distinguished between these two in the previous chapter.31 The description of the given as intensity was at work in Freud’s metapsychology. The description of intensity as a produced quantity of affection was at work in Husserl’s theory of affection. These two forms of intensity are also both present within Deleuze’s different accounts of the three syntheses. At the beginning of the psychoanalytic account, Deleuze described the Id, which was (as in The Logic of Sense) the starting point of the three syntheses and therefore of the entire genesis, as ‘a field of individuation in which differences of intensity are distributed here and there in the form of excitations’ (DR 96). He is here clearly alluding to the Freudian notion of intensity: intensities take the form of excitations. They are what the first synthesis apprehends, the second records, and the third fails to recognize. But on the other hand, as we have just seen, in the physical account of the syntheses, intensity is produced in the third synthesis.32 Intensity is no longer the given excitation, but the quantity of excitation. In the first synthesis intensity takes the form of excitation. It is the way in which a transcendental sensibility experiences a fragmented object. In all three books studied here, the three passive syntheses work in the same way despite their different names: the first synthesis directly takes up what is given to it by sensibility. The second records that apprehension in a transcendental memory. The third synthesis, however, measures the first synthesis against the second. What this means then is that while intensity takes the form of excitation in sensibility, the quantity of that excitation is by no means given. Through apprehending, recording, and then measuring the one against the other, the quantity of excitation is determined. Intensity is at first a simple excitation. After the three syntheses have done their work, this initial difference has been transformed into an expression of the degree to which the ego (the body

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without organs, the spontaneous imagination, the synthesizing agent) is affected. It is now a difference which refers to other differences where those other differences are the difference drawn of the first synthesis (apprehension) and the difference included of the second (recording). This progressive synthesis of excitation yields the notion of intensity at work in Husserl, but also in Kant: it is ‘the degree of influence on sense’ (CPR B208), or the degree to which a subject is affected in an instant (‘the degree designates only that magnitude the apprehension of which is not successive, but instantaneous’ (CPR A168–69/B210).33 This is extremely important in relation to what I said about intensity in the last chapter. Intensity had two roles in relation to the overall static genesis. On the one hand, it was representative of the present. Now we see why. It is an expression of the degree to which a body is affected in the instant. Second, intensity had to select Ideas from the future. We saw that this selection was undertaken according to an ‘ethics’ of intensity in which ‘regions of maximal activity’ were the first to be individuated while regions of lesser activity were individuated later. In other words, intensity here refers to the competing influences on sense, or the way passivity exerts its allure on the future, and this is only possible after it has been taken up and transformed in the regime of passive syntheses. While intensity is given in the form of an excitation at the outset, it seems that there is no significant difference in the quantity of excitations at this point. It takes the entire set of passive syntheses to determine the magnitude of affection which then affects thought and selects an Idea. The three syntheses move us from the Freudian to the Kantian/Husserlian notion of intensity.

The genesis of the virtual What is the empty form of time? Anti-Oedipus is strangely silent on this point, and the only way we could tease it out of the text there was through a series of complex allusions to Kant and oblique references to Deleuze’s other texts. In general, the account of the third synthesis in Anti-Oedipus never goes beyond Difference and Repetition’s physical account of the syntheses. But the philosophical and psychoanalytic accounts of this synthesis in Difference and Repetition describe the third synthesis in a way that is seemingly different from the physical account. In these accounts the synthesis itself is called the empty form of time. While this description is absent from Anti-Oedipus, it does have a strong but complex presence in The Logic of Sense. In The Logic of Sense, the empty form of time is called Aion, the time without present which infinitely subdivides the event into an indefinite past and future: Whereas Chronos was inseparable from circularity and its accidents [. . .] Aion stretches out in a straight line, limitless in either direction. Always already passed

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and eternally yet to come, Aion is the eternal truth of time: pure empty form of time, which has freed itself of its present corporeal content and has thereby unwound its own circle, stretching itself out in a straight line. (LS 165) Aion is the time of sense, in which time, ‘freed’ of its ‘present corporeal content’, subdivides that content and thus ‘ensures the progressive and complete determination of the domain under consideration (Aion)’ (LS 121). In The Logic of Sense, the expression ‘empty form of time’ or Aion clearly describes the transcendental field of sense alone. Time is ‘empty’ in the sense that it is incorporeal; it has, as we saw above, completely removed itself from the action and passion of bodies and has become the space in which ‘ideal elements’ can be progressively determined and actualized into an empirical consciousness. It is a ‘form’ for the same reason: it has no content. As Deleuze says in Difference and Repetition, it is a purely formal distribution of time without regard to content. In several respects, this description of Aion holds for the notion of the empty form of time in Difference and Repetition as well. The empty form of time is again the space in which Ideas can be progressively determined. It is precisely that form of continuity and determinability which conditions the progressive determination of Ideas that I described in the last chapter. In the second chapter of Difference and Repetition Deleuze also emphasizes that it is empty because it has become incorporeal and immaterial. In the philosophical account, this is expressed by saying that it ‘abjures its empirical content’. In the psychoanalytic account, it is expressed by saying that the ego ‘abandons all possible mnemic content’ (DR 111). In the physical account, it is expressed by saying that the forced movement exceeds the basic series of the two pendulums (remember that a pendulum is an instrument which measures time according to movement). But the notion of the empty form of time as it is presented in Difference and Repetition is also much more complex than this description of the immaterial field of determinability which The Logic of Sense emphasizes. Whereas Aion came about only on the metaphysical surface, after the Oedipal stage of sexuality had ended in castration, the empty form in Difference and Repetition is presented as an entire synthesis which gives rise to the virtual as the form of continuity and determinability (DR 110, 294). In Difference and Repetition this synthesis comprises three distinct aspects which are: (1) the purely formal order of time; (2) the totality of time expressed as a symbol; and (3) the series of time which is the result of the interaction between the order and the totality (not much significance should be attached to these expressions; only their function, which I will discuss below, is important). We saw that the first synthesis of Difference and Repetition corresponded to the local egos and their partial surfaces of The Logic of Sense, and that the second synthesis corresponded to the coordination of the entire physical surface in the image of the phallus. The empty form of time as a synthesis comprising three distinct

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stages corresponds directly to the stage of Oedipal sexuality. Despite terminological differences, the parallel is exact. These three aspects of the third synthesis—order, totality, and series—all define separate stages of the process in which the synthesis is actually brought about. In what follows I want to briefly describe these three moments of the third synthesis: (1) order, (2) totality, and (3) series. Deleuze describes the order of time as a distribution of a before, a during, and an after ‘in the function of a caesura’ (DR 89). What does this order divide into these three parts? In the psychoanalytic account, it is the ‘narcissistic ego’ (DR 110). When Deleuze says ‘narcissistic ego’ here, he specifically means a third form of that ego which we have been following across the past two syntheses. In the first synthesis, the ego was the ego of depths which lived the singularity of sensuousness in the form of an originary intentionality and which died with its object unless it undertook an escape from the discontinuity of being. In the second synthesis, the ego was the ego which coordinated these little saturated egos in the image of a ‘virtual’ or ‘partial object’. In the third synthesis, it is this ego of the second synthesis which the formal order divides and in so doing leads to its characterization as a dissolved self, or a ‘larval subject’. The ‘distribution’ which the order of time enacts is simply a determination of the two objects which are to be brought together in the synthesis. If we wanted to use the structure of a judgment to describe the synthesis we could say that the ‘order’ of time determines the antecedent and the consequent which are to be brought together in a judgment (or an act of recognition). When the order of empty time divides the ego, it divides it according to the two previous syntheses which form the ego’s history. Deleuze never explicitly says this, but this reading is still possible from three separate points of view. First, in relation to the series of the empty form (which I will describe below), it is the first two syntheses which are brought together. Second, the physical account of the syntheses, which I described above, clearly describes the third synthesis as a synthesis of the first two. Third, and finally, the Oedipal stage of sexuality in The Logic of Sense which is the correlate of this synthesis began by dividing the ‘good object’ (which stands here for the totality of the entire passive assemblage of ego, synthesis, and image) into a mother image (which represented partial objects, or the objects of the first synthesis) and a father image (which represented the phallic organization of the partial surfaces, or the second synthesis). All three of these points of view suggest, even if it is entirely speculative, that what happens in this stage of the synthesis is that the ego is divided into its constituent parts, its past and its present—the failed synthesis of which will determine a future. The totality of empty time expresses the way in which the division that the order produced in the ego is synthesized in an image. This image is the image of an ‘action in general’ or a ‘formidable action’. Deleuze says that the action can be anything empirically (294), but at the level of the passive syntheses, the

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action is specifically that of bringing together the first two syntheses. Whereas the order of time determined the objects which were to be brought together, the totality of time expresses the static, almost preliminary, synthesis of the order of time (294, 88). To continue the logical metaphor, whereas the ‘order’ set in place the antecedent and the consequent, the ‘totality’ functions as the copula itself, the relation between the antecedent and consequent. In Difference and Repetition the function and necessity of this image of the action is not entirely clear. In the correlate stage of Oedipal sexuality, this image appears as the advent of intention or volition (LS 207).34 It is the ‘intended action’ as opposed to the ‘action effectively accomplished’. In this context it expressed the intent on the part of the child to heal the wounded mother (local egos) and the absent father (coordinating phallus/ego) (LS 203–07). In other words, it is the intention to recognize, to synthesize the first and second syntheses. What actually happens when the child attempts to realize this intention— castration—is outlined in Difference and Repetition as the next aspect of the synthesis: the series of time. In The Logic of Sense it concerns another surface. If the order of time established the two elements which were to be brought together, the totality expresses, as Deleuze says in The Logic of Sense, the intention to do so, or the model. The ‘formidable action’ is the desire to bring together a divided self into a unity. The third aspect of the empty form of time is its temporal series: ‘The temporal series designates the confrontation of the divided narcissistic ego with the whole of time or the image of the action’ (DR 110). In other words, the order of time (which divided the ego) and the image of its totality (which was the idea of synthesis) come together to create a temporal series. This is the actual moment of synthesis: the synthesis of the order and the totality. This means putting the first two syntheses in relation to an image of the totality of time (94, 296). The three times of the temporal series—the a priori past, present, and future— express the different relationships which result. Here things are extremely complicated, and because Deleuze never gives a reliable account, they are very unclear and one can never tell whether the confusion which takes place in this third synthesis is a result of the process Deleuze is trying to describe, or if it is simply because the accounts of this process are short, obscure, and dispersed across large sections of unrelated text (the major descriptions of this process are on 89–94, 110–16, and 294–301 ).35 Between these three accounts, things appear to unfold as follows. Each synthesis—Habitus and Mnemosyne—goes though a series of transformations and exchanges its role and area of influence with the other synthesis. The second synthesis becomes directed toward the Id and its excitations. The first is to the coordinated Ego of Memory. Memory is forced to become present. Habitus becomes past. Memory becomes a ‘condition by default’: that is, it no longer grounds representation, and its form and contents become insignificant. It is a condition simply because it is there, but any other material would do. The first synthesis becomes a present of ‘metamorphosis’. But

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change is entirely antithetical to the nature of habit (92; cf. 295–96).36 In this exchange of functions, the two syntheses appear to be completely incompatible and unable to be brought within one image.37 But it was precisely this compatibility of the first and second synthesis that representation in the active syntheses seemed to depend upon. Even though, in principle, all that representation seemed to require was the first two syntheses, it appears, in fact, that their coordination is no simple process and that it has to be rigorously regulated so that the active syntheses can produce a present which passes in representation. It cannot come about in passivity. To conclude the logical metaphor, then, the third synthesis represents the impossibility of recognition or of judgment. There is only one possible relation that could exist between the antecedent and the consequent: the inclusive disjunction (it’s either A, or B, or both). The impossibility of judgment results in a third time ‘in which the future appears . . .’ (89), ‘the ultimate synthesis concerns only the future . . .’ (115). Just as the living present was not a specific present which passes in representation, but the condition for any present in general; and just as the element of the pure past in general was not the reproduction of a past moment, but the general element in which past moments could be focused upon; in other words, just as the other two passive syntheses produced not representations in specific temporal modalities, but the transcendental possibility of those modalities themselves, this third synthesis does not produce a determinate future, but the transcendental element of the future in general. The future in general is the element in which we confront ‘the new’. This future is defined by the eternal return, and as Deleuze says, the eternal return does not concern what is present, or what has been present. It concerns only the new: ‘it is itself the new, complete novelty’ (90).38 Novelty, however, is not predetermined according to set rules (as in the human game). Instead it is completely fortuitous. Neither is it an already determined moment, but the horizon in which a moment becomes progressively determined. For Deleuze, the future can only be an affirmation of chance because we never know what is coming our way. ‘The eternal return is a force of affirmation, but it affirms everything of the multiple, everything of the different, everything of chance . . .’ (115). This is why ‘the eternal return is properly called a belief of the future, a belief in the future’ (90): ‘If there is an essential relation with the future, it is because the future is the deployment and explication of the multiple, of the different, and of the fortuitous . . .’ (115; my emphasis). The word ‘multiple’ has two senses here. On the one hand, it has a general philosophical sense opposing it to the One, or the form of identity. It is precisely this form of identity which defines the presents which pass in representation. But these presents are produced, we saw in the last chapter, in the passing of time from future to present. This highlights the second, specific technical sense of the word ‘multiplicity’ here. The eternal return or the future makes possible the ‘deployment’ of multiplicities or Ideas. It ‘gives birth’ to a ‘multiplicity’ (90). This is why Deleuze says in his conclusion to the psychoanalytic account

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of the syntheses that ‘[t]he system of the future [. . .] must be called a divine game, since there is no preexisting rule, since the game bears already upon its own rules and since the child-player can only win, all of chance being affirmed each time and for all times’ (DR 116). This is the same divine game that was at the origin of Ideas. The multiplicities to which the future gives birth are the transcendental Ideas themselves. The virtual is produced in the third synthesis. But besides showing the genesis of the virtual and of intensity, we also had to see how it came to be that they occupied two different times. Ideas were progressively determined in the future and were actualized into a present which they differenciated. This present was defined as a field of intensities. The difference in dimensions is a consequence of the eternal return, and is perhaps better expressed in The Logic of Sense. In Difference and Repetition, the eternal return as the third time of the series completely breaks with the other elements of the empty form of time: its order, the larval subject which this order splits, the symbolic totality, and the first two times of the series. Deleuze continually insists that the eternal return concerns only the future.39 It ‘causes neither the condition nor the agent to return: on the contrary it repudiates these and expels them with all its centrifugal force’ (DR 90; original emphasis). The future which the eternal return produces is completely autonomous and independent of everything that led up to its production. In The Logic of Sense, this difference between two times is formulated as the difference between two surfaces. The entire Oedipal stage of sexuality concerns the physical surface. The Oedipal synthesis results in the dissolution of this surface and the production of a new surface— pure thought—in which Aion progressively determines problematic events or transcendental Ideas. From the point of view of the genesis in general however, we could say that because at this point the eternal return determines the progressive determination of Ideas, and that the process of individuation and actualization brings Ideas back to the present and installs them in the flesh of the very larval subjects which the eternal return had left behind, this autonomy is only momentary. In other words, it discovers this autonomy only to return to what it left behind. In his description of the ideal game in Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze makes use of a quotation which describes perfectly the entire trajectory of genesis: ‘We temporarily abandon life, in order to then temporarily fix our gaze upon it’ (NP 25). Both books say the same thing in different ways. (For this reason we can also say that the very clear description of the eternal return in The Logic of Sense works just as well for Difference and Repetition.)

The Other The last stage of the entire genesis is the advent of what Deleuze calls the ‘Other’. Traditionally, in phenomenology, the Other is always another ego

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transcendent to mine. The problem of the Other is then how I can recognize another ego not as an object but as an living subject across the gulf that separates us. We should notice, however, that Deleuze’s theory of subjectivity is multilayered and extremely complex. The ‘other’ in Deleuze is not another ‘I’ set against me, it is rather an ‘other’ that thinks in me. We saw in The Logic of Sense that the traditional notion of the I was constituted in the form of common sense in the static genesis. In this, Deleuze is following Sartre’s arguments at the end of The Transcendence of the Ego where the traditional notions of self and I are described as transcendent objects which must themselves be constituted by an impersonal transcendental field (Sartre, Transcendence 60ff.). However, we can regress from this product of the static genesis to another form of subjectivity in Deleuze. The transcendental field itself, in Deleuze, is called a ‘fractured I’. And below this ‘fractured I’ there is an even deeper form of subjectivity: the ‘dissolved self’, or the egos of the passive syntheses (DR 256ff., 284). In Deleuze, the Other which the psychological I of common sense confronts refers specifically to the fractured-I of the transcendental field. The ‘otherstructure’ therefore refers to the relationship between an empirical subject and a transcendental subject. From this point of view it has three essential functions, all of which help to bring the genesis to an end: (1) it encloses the virtual within the limits of representation; (2) at the same time, it provides the means by which the product, representation, expresses its origins in an impersonal thought; and (3) it reproduces the form of the living present at the level of representation thereby allowing the psychological subject to live in a present cushioned by anticipation and something like a short-term memory. The first function of the Other-structure is to enclose the representations which are ‘offered to perception’ within the limits of a relatively stable subject and object. Thus Deleuze writes, ‘Everything happens as though the Other integrated the individuating factors and pre-individual singularities within the limits of objects and subjects, which are then offered to representation as perceivers or perceived’ (DR 281–82; original emphasis). ‘Offered to representation’ or ‘perception’ here mean given to the empirical sensibility discussed above. From this point of view, the Other represents the way in which both the transcendental field and the intensive field are brought under the two forms of common sense: its objective form, the transcendental object, and its subjective form, the unity of apperception. An open, nomadic distribution, is thereby contained and made sedentary. The two becomings of materiality and virtuality are made to fit within the stable forms of representation.40 From this point on, the active syntheses can take over, and manipulate the products of Deleuze’s transcendental aesthetic according to the forms of association and judgment. This is closely related to its second function. The Other does not territorialize the transcendental without at the same time providing a means by which the representations of perception express their intensive and virtual origins. The fully constituted individual still attests to its intensive origins by way of what

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Deleuze calls ‘centres of envelopment’ (DR 258ff.). We already confronted the importance of this aspect in relation to legitimate and illegitimate uses of representation above. The centers of envelopment are the way in which a representation remains connected to the genesis which produced it. From this point of view, Deleuze writes that ‘[a]t the moment when they are explicated in a system (once and for all) the differential, intensive, or individuating factors testify to their persistence in implication’ (256). ‘Implication’ refers to the way in which difference persists and communicates amongst itself underneath all quality and extensity (228). It is this order of implication that is expressed in representation by means of the Other and which legitimates a representation or determines it as ‘living’ rather than as ‘dead’ (260; cf. 259). From the point of view of the conscious subject, the intensive origin of differenciated individuals appears as a ‘swarm of potentials’ around any given representation: ‘In every psychic system there is a swarm of possibilities around a reality, but our possibles are always others’ (DR 260; cf. 259). Deleuze is directly alluding here to what, in The Cartesian Meditations, Husserl called the idea of the world.41 For Husserl every actual lived experience is set within a horizon of ‘possibilities’ or ‘potentialities’ specific to that actual experience: ‘every actuality involves its potentialities, which are not empty possibilities, but rather possibilities intentionally predelineated in respect of content [. . .] and, in addition, having the character of actualities actualizable by the Ego’ (CTM 44; original emphases).42 Any representation for Husserl is surrounded by potentialities or possibilities for what might come next. The set of possibilities takes the form of what Deleuze called in Anti-Oedipus an ‘infinite subjective representation’: an Idea in the Kantian sense. Husserl writes, ‘here it is a matter of an infinite regulative idea’ (54; original emphasis), and specifically, the idea of the world: ‘a world itself, is an infinite idea, related to infinities of harmoniously combinable experiences’ (62; original emphasis).43 What this means concretely is that we always live within a horizon of expectation, of protention and retention. There is always a set number of potentialities which we expect to follow from a current experience. Jokes, for example, capitalize on this. The punch line of a good joke always exceeds the set of potentialities of any sentence. Husserl therefore emphasizes two aspects of the idea of the world (beyond the idea of an open, but systematic totality). (1) He emphasizes its temporal nature, the way in which each representation is set within a living present. Each representation is bordered by an immediate past, ‘retention’, and an immediate future, ‘protention’. (2) However, anticipation and retention are determined in relation to the present and are defined as potentialities. It is not an empty and formal past and future, but one determined in relation to the present. This is exactly how Deleuze describes the Other in his 1967 essay ‘Michel Tournier and the World Without Others’ (LS 301–21).

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The world without others is the world of schizophrenic depth, the primary order of The Logic of Sense, the transcendental sensibility of Difference and Repetition in which every encounter takes the form of a ‘slap in the face’ (LS 306). It is a ‘harsh and black world without potentialities or virtualities’ (LS 306). It is this situation which made genesis, or the escape from being, necessary. By the end of the genesis however we now live a world with others. Deleuze’s description of the Other in this essay closely resembles his description in Difference and Repetition: around each object that I perceive or each idea that I think there is the organization of a marginal world, a mantel or background, where other objects and other ideas may come forth in accordance with laws of transition which regulate the passage from one to another. (LS 304) Deleuze says, clearly alluding to Husserl, that this ‘Other-structure’ is precisely ‘the structure of the world’ (306). This allows us to make two important points. First, we have here rediscovered the conclusion of history in Anti-Oedipus. For Deleuze and Husserl, the transitions between representations are not arbitrary. Each potentiality is determined in relation to a present representation. This is why Deleuze says that other objects ‘come forth in accordance with laws of transition which regulate the passage from one to another’. Husserl says the same thing: ‘any object whatever (even an immanent one) [what Deleuze calls “ideas” in the above passage], points to a structure, within the transcendental ego, that is governed by a rule’ (CTM 53). The presence of this rule is precisely what leads Husserl to define this structure as a regulative idea, and infinite representation (CTM 55). This is also, I would argue, exactly what Deleuze means, in AntiOedipus by the axiomatization of representations in capitalism—where ‘capitalism’ means the faculty of Ideas, reason. The capitalist axiomatic is the rule which governs transitions. It is the idea of the world. The second thing I would like to emphasize here is that the idea of the world has an essential temporal structure. Time is the universal characteristic of all thought for Deleuze as much as it was for Kant, Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger. These transitions and margins which the Other provides are precisely temporal transitions. They express the fully formed cogito’s relation to the potentialities of the past and the future. Deleuze’s Other is simply the molar form of the living present, the way in which Spirit can return to itself without devouring itself.

Conclusion Difference and Repetition, as a whole, is Deleuze’s transcendental aesthetic. The genesis begins in a transcendental sensibility with an account of an unthinkable

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and unrepresentable materiality, a discontinuous hylé. It moves through three passive syntheses to the virtual, a transcendental space in which thought is free to survey its affections and to abstract a sensible schema. The genesis then returns to an empirical sensibility—in which the sensible schemata are actualized—defined according to the classic coordinates of sensibility. Each object given to ‘perception’ is an aggregate of quality, duration, and extension. What is perhaps the most important aspect of this account of genesis, however, is that in Difference and Repetition Deleuze describes the entire process of production in relation to the different modalities of time that are produced along the way, and I have emphasized this throughout my reading. The transcendental aesthetic begins with the production of the ‘general elements’ of the three dimensions of time: the three syntheses produce the general possibility for any present, past, and future representation. In the third synthesis, however, time ceases to be transcendental. By means of the progressive determination and actualization of Ideas, time becomes a representation which passes in the present of an empirical consciousness. Deleuze thus shows the temporal inflection of the entire genesis, and the way it moves from a transcendental present to an empirical present. This movement can be expressed schematically as follows. MATTER (1) (2) (3) (4)

Present: Past: Future: Future:

(5) Present: (6) Past:

First synthesis Molecular empirical Second synthesis Third synthesis Virtual/Transcendental Progressive determination Actualization/ Individuation Molar empirical Empirical memory PERCEPTION IN THE WORLD (OTHER)

Passivity

Activity

Conclusion

Jean-Jacques Lecercle has argued that taken as a whole Deleuze’s philosophy is, like Nietzsche’s or Kierkegaard’s, coherent, but not systematic (Lecercle 16). In this conclusion I would like to suggest that exactly the opposite is the case—at least within the major texts of Deleuze’s middle period which I have considered here. Deleuze’s philosophy is systematic, but incoherent. Deleuze is incoherent because, while a relatively stable structure persists throughout all three books, the technical terms used to describe that structure change. What’s more, these same technical terms reappear in different books with entirely different meanings. Throughout this book I described many instances of these transformations. Perhaps the most obvious example can be seen in the different uses of the expressions ‘multiplicity’ and ‘singularity’. In both Anti-Oedipus and Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes ‘multiplicities’ which comprise a set of ‘singularities’, but the sense and function of these concepts are completely different in each book. In Anti-Oedipus the world of schizophrenic depths in which the body, in its materiality, communicates with all other bodies is described as a ‘multiplicity’ of ‘singularities’. The singularities are the partial objects, or the parts of fragmented and unindividuated bodies which form the material of sensation. In Difference and Repetition, however, Deleuze describes this world of corporeality as ‘repetition in-itself’, the material object subject to a rule of discontinuity which says that the only relation between parts of the fragmented object is a lack of a relation. There is no talk of singularities or of multiplicities. This happens only at the level of the virtual where ‘multiplicity’ refers to the transcendental Idea and its differential elements, relations, and ‘singularities’. Here ‘singularity’ has its mathematical sense as that which determines the form of a surface or line. It would be easy to multiply examples of this distortion in sense. This is why Deleuze is incoherent. If Deleuze is systematic, it is because, in spite of the changing senses and changing names, there is still a relatively stable structure. The only way we can tell that what Deleuze calls a multiplicity of singularities in Anti-Oedipus is the same thing as what he calls ‘repetition in-itself’ in Difference and Repetition is by noticing that they are both described in similar ways (material, lacking

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relation), but also and primarily by noticing that they both stand at the foundation of a dynamic genesis comprising three passive syntheses. They are both the material taken up in these syntheses. In other words, it is the position of a concept in relation to the structure of the genesis that gives the concept its sense and gives us our bearings. The body without organs is a prime example of this. It is easy to see that insofar as the body without organs is that power of synthesis which takes up a fragmented materiality and submits it to a series of passive syntheses that (1) the expression ‘body without organs’ is stable between Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense, but (2) is called the ‘spontaneous imagination’, and a host of other names, in Difference and Repetition. This also gives us its sense. A term which has been notoriously difficult to define in the history of Deleuze criticism actually has an extremely simple and straightforward definition. Depending on your philosopher of choice you could call it a memory, an imagination, a receptive surface, and so on. Its function and its sense is simply that it serves as a surface on which our affections are recorded and organized. It is a principle of synthesis and, as such, it is a way of describing a passive thought. What I hope to have provided in this book is only the beginning of a description of this system. I wanted to show that across three completely different texts there was in fact a stable structure that gave sense to the concepts involved. Each book describes the way in which this structure produces itself out of a field of materiality. The following table is a broad outline of that system and shows the most general correspondences between the three books that I outlined below.

First passive synthesis Second passive synthesis Third passive synthesis

Primary Order of Partial Objects First passive synthesis Dynamic Genesis

Production of Time

Discontinuous Matter (Sensation)

The Logic of Sense

Third passive synthesis

Sense Good Sense

Common sense

Common sense

First passive synthesis Second passive synthesis Third passive synthesis Intensity Territorialization

Social Production

Good Sense

Representation (Consciousness)

Multiplicity of Partial Objects in Dispersion

Static Genesis

Individuation

Virtual + Intensity

Second passive synthesis

Anti-Oedipus

Desiring-Production

Difference and Repetition

Propositional Consciousness

Molar Objectities

Despotism

Conclusion

157

Each of these three books develops an account of the genesis of representation in its own language. Without a doubt, the expression used to denote each stage changes between books, and each book takes a different point of view on the structure, but each of the three books goes through these eight stages in this particular order: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Unindividuated materiality First passive synthesis Second passive synthesis Third passive synthesis Transcendental field Good sense Common sense Representation

But acknowledging this raises as many questions as it answers. How detailed is this structural similarity? These eight stages are very general. Is it an identical theory that Deleuze develops? Why does Deleuze consistently change the language he uses? What I have emphasized are the similarities between books. What changes between books? Do these changes relate to the subject matter which provides Deleuze with his technical vocabulary? One of the most pressing is whether this structure holds for the later books as well, or if it is simply a phenomenon of this middle ‘structuralist’ period? There is no way to provide a rigorous answer in the space of a conclusion since the argument would have to be founded on an account of the entire structure of the work in question. Taking Deleuze one concept at a time will never work. He is a systematic and totalizing thinker. However, just a cursory look at Deleuze’s last major book What is Philosophy? will show that this general structure indeed persists all the way to the end. ‘Art’ studies the dynamic genesis, the movement from sensation, the ‘plane of composition’, to virtuality. ‘Philosophy’ studies the virtual itself, here the ‘plane of immanence’1 on which ‘concepts’ or ‘incorporeal events’ are constructed by an ‘aleatory point’ (WP 152), the ‘point in a state of survey’ (32).2 ‘Science’ studies a ‘plane of reference’ in which ‘concepts’ are actualized as determinate objects (133). We could extend this description to show that the three syntheses reappear as the means of transition from art to philosophy (168) and that good and common sense determine the movement from philosophy to science, but the point I think is already sufficiently made: despite a new technical vocabulary, the conceptual structure Deleuze developed in his middle period provides formal backbone of his last major work. Art’s plane of composition is a reformulation of the material field we saw at the foundation of each of the three geneses outlined below; philosophy’s plane of immanence is a reformulation of the virtual; and science’s plane of references is a reformulation of the individuated world of representation.

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But why all these reformulations? What purpose do they serve? Do the different vocabularies Deleuze takes up contribute something specific to the process of production, or do they just serve as a set of terms that he can virtuosically rearrange in a linguistic game to make them map onto the contours of his own philosophical system? He famously described his method for reading other philosophers as one in which he takes thinkers from behind to produce monstrous offspring, the products of ‘all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions’ (NG 6). Are we to understand that all of these slippages and dislocations slide in one direction and tend toward this eight part structure as an ideal limit? These questions are beyond the scope of this book. They move in a different direction altogether and emphasize the differences rather than the similarities between Deleuze’s works. Instead of answering them, I want to leave them open. What is the specific contribution of each book to the general structure it actualizes? What I hoped to have shown here was simply that there is a very general yet consistent conceptual structure behind Deleuze’s three central texts, and that this structure traced out a consistent theory of the genesis of representation.

Notes

Preface 1

2

3

See Jeff Bell’s The Problem of Difference; Leonard Lawlor’s Thinking Through French Philosophy; Dorothea Olkowski’s Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation; and Jack Reynolds and John Roffe’s ‘Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity, and Phenomenology’. For a few brief remarks regarding Deleuze’s relation to Heidegger see Miguel de Beistegui’s Truth and Genesis. For an excellent and more detailed reading see Jeff Bell’s Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos, pg. 114ff. Claire Colebrook’s Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed is a notable exception to this; see also Alberto Toscano’s The Theatre of Production; and Jean-Clet Martin’s La philosophie de Gilles Deleuze.

Chapter 1 1

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See, for example, Badiou, Theoretical Writings pg. 246n4 and Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time pg. 39–40. Cf. NG 86, 88. Manuel DeLanda (DeLanda ‘Immanence and Transcendence’ 132) and Timothy Murphy (Murphy ‘Quantum Ontology’ 211–13) both argue that the context of Deleuze’s thought is contemporary physics. In Intensive Science, DeLanda broadens this context to encompass not only physics but anything vaguely mathematical or scientific. Foucault claims that no book could be more alien to Deleuze’s work than the Phenomenology of Perception (Foucault Counter-Memory 170). In Modern French Philosophy Vincent Descombes suggests in passing several important similarities between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty (70–71). Leonard Lawlor provides a more nuanced summary of similarities and differences between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty in Thinking Through French Philosophy. See also Jeff Bell’s The Problem of Difference; Dorothea Olkowski’s Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation; and Jack Reynolds and John Roffe’s ‘Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity, and Phenomenology’. Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze pg. 6. Boundas, ‘Introduction’ to ES pg. 4–5. Exactly why this reading is unsatisfactory is unclear—especially because what Boundas considers nonphenomenological falls well within the framework of Husserl’s thought even before any ‘radicalization’ by later thinkers.

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AO 10. DR 52. This is Lyotard’s description. See Lyotard, Phenomenology 53. See also Leonard Lawlor’s defense of this adjective in Derrida and Husserl pg. 11ff. and pg. 236n1. In addition to Lawlor’s comments, we might add that much of the popularity and influence of this essay came from the attention Ricoeur gave to it in his introduction and running commentary to Ideas 1. This commentary has been translated into English as A Key to Edmund Husserl’s Ideas 1. Fink describes ‘the theory of reduction and the theory of constitution’ as ‘phenomenology’s two central and basic systematic ideas’ (Fink 102; cf.131). These two central aspects repeatedly appear throughout French commentaries on phenomenology. See CTM §§11–16. For just two instances, see Ricoeur, An Analysis 107ff. and Bachelard 156. For a discussion of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of the transcendental field, see Leonard Lawlor’s essay ‘The End of Ontology’ in Lawlor, Thinking pg. 80–94. Lawlor argues Merleau-Ponty’s conception differs from Deleuze’s in that Merleau-Ponty describes this field as a generality. Nominally, this would be a strong opposition, but Merleau-Ponty seems to understand generality in the sense of a ‘positive indeterminacy’—the same way Deleuze understands the events populating his transcendental field (DR 169). See Derrida Genesis 70ff. especially pg. 71 for a good discussion of the relation between sense and neutrality in Husserl. See Brassier, Alien Theory pg. 61ff. and Lawlor, Thinking pg. 83. See also Alliez pg. 9. The attempt to distinguish the Deleuzian reduction from the more general phenomenological reduction suffers from several ambiguities, the most important of which is that Deleuze was by no means the only thinker to describe ‘the transcendental field’ as impersonal. Not only do Heidegger (cf. the Letter on Humanism, and On Time and Being), Sartre (cf. The Transcendence of the Ego), Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible), Blanchot (The Space of Literature and The Book to Come), Levinas (Existence and Existents), and Derrida (Introduction to the Origin of Geometry), all do the same, but even Husserl in his later work described the primordial depths of transcendental constitution as ‘anonymous’ and consistently specified, as I will discuss in more detail later, that the qualification of these syntheses as ‘passive’ was meant to indicate that they took place outside of an ego. The notion of an impersonal transcendental field was a permanent installment of phenomenology from the start. Ricoeur refers to this as ‘one of the most difficult aspects of transcendental phenomenology’ (Ricoeur, A Key 110). For an excellent account of impersonality in Husserl, see Gurwitsch’s ‘A Non-Egological Conception of Consciousness’. Gurwitsch convincingly argues that, with the exception of Ideas 1, for Husserl ‘the ego, like all other objects, falls under the phenomenological reduction’ (330). For Gurwitsch this is true not only of the empirical ego—which even in Ideas 1 was bracketed—but of the transcendental ego as well. Levinas will repeatedly return to this point throughout TI (cf. 29, 42, 48, and 50). The English translation reads ‘the meaning of signs’. Deleuze uses the French word ‘sens’ for ‘meaning’. See Proust et les signes 36ff.

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Deleuze maintains this identity of sense and essence throughout all of his works. See, for example LS 105 and DR 191. He makes the same argument in NP. Especially in third chapter and, in particular, section 9 of that chapter. Here Deleuze argues that a true critique is equivalent to creation (genesis). Nietzsche, in opposition to Kant, discovers ‘a principle of internal genesis’, and this is what allows Nietzsche to realize a true critique (NP 91). Unlike the reduction which was not fully articulated until later, the theory of constitution was already motivating Husserl’s very first work Philosophy of Arithmetic. See Sokolowski, Constitution pg. 6; cf. Moran 146 and Fink, ‘The Phenomenological Philosophy’ 76. Both Derrida and Sokolowski argue that constitution was the primary problem which occupied Husserl for his entire career. See Derrida, Genesis 70. Cf. Husserl E&J 50–51, APS 270–71. See APS 624ff. for Husserl’s adoption of Dilthy’s distinction between descriptive and explanatory psychology to his own static and genetic. Dermot Moran, in Introduction to Phenomenology, explains that ‘constitution’ refers to the manner in which objects are ‘built up’ for consciousness out of a synthesis of sensory intuitions and various categories which are applied according to rules, a meaning which continues in Husserl’ (164). Moran traces this use of the word back to Kant—as he also does with the word ‘phenomenology’ (6–7). (In his lectures Deleuze too considers Kant to be the first phenomenologist.) For more on the relation between Kantian and phenomenological constitution, see Fink 135ff and Sokolowski 214ff. Sokolowski pg. 189; Sokolowski frequently compares Husserl’s later ‘life philosophy’ to Nietzsche’s (cf. 184). See E&J §56, 216, APS 296ff. Cf. Sokolowski pg. 170–72. See Welton pg. 175–79. See also A. D. Smith 117. See APS pg. 624–45. See FTL 65. Of course, by ‘logicians’ I mean Husserl’s contemporaries. This is especially clear in E&J and FTL. Fink described Husserl’s philosophy as a ‘monadology’ (Fink 128). Husserl frequently makes use of this presupposition to move from one stage of the genesis to the next. Cf. E&J 112: ‘. . . the ego cannot long remain with a merely simple contemplation and apprehension; rather, the tendency inherent in the contemplation of an object pushes it beyond this’. Each synthesis that I discuss—the temporal, associative, explicative, and predicative—is really a general name subsuming a variety of syntheses. For a great overview of the syntheses in general, see the first two chapters of Rudolph Makkreel’s book Imagination and Interpretation in Kant. Makkreel pg. 27–29, Steinbock xl. Cf. Steinbock: ‘Whereas the understanding has the spontaneous character of active syntheses that hold together and connect the sensuous manifold according to rules, sensibility has the character of passivity, since inner and outer sense merely receive sense data’ (xl; original emphases). See Husserl E&J 60, 110, 123, 179; see A. D. Smith pg. 98, 111; for ‘pre-I’, pg. 122–23. Husserl’s genesis is firmly grounded in the body, and this sensuous matter which association will organize comes directly from the senses. The data is ‘asignifying’

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or meaningless because no bestowal of sense has yet taken place (E&J 72). See Sokolowski’s Constitution pg. 210–12 (cf. 176–78) for a strong account of the status of sensory data in genetic phenomenology. For a description of the relation of hyletic data to time—a temporal hylé—see E&J §64ff. ‘We see very quickly that the phenomenology of association is, so to speak, a higher continuation of the doctrine of original time-constitution’ (APS 163; cf. E&J 74, 177). See Alain Beaulieu’s essay ‘Gilles Deleuze et la litterature’ for a comparison of Husserl and Deleuze’s surpassing of judgment, pg. 428. Husserl is careful to specify that ‘the distinction between passivity and activity is not inflexible, that it is not a matter here of terms which can be established definitively for all time . . .’ (E&J 108). He is very close to Deleuze on this point as we will soon see. Husserl quotes Kant on this point: ‘As long as nothing else takes place, the object is indeed only “the indeterminate object of empirical intuition”, to speak with Kant’ (APS 291). Deleuze’s notion of the ‘complex theme’ (see PS, DR, and LS) has roots in this stage of Husserl’s genesis. When the ego turns its attention from the particular object to its singularities, it is able to recognize the singularities as determinations of that object because the object persists (through the shift of attention) in the form of a ‘theme’. In later Husserl, ‘proposition’ or ‘judicative proposition’ describes an active judgment. He uses the word for the sake of precision—to clearly separate judgment as the process leading up to the proposition from the judicative proposition itself and from the ‘primitive judgments’ of the explicative synthesis (APS 299). I only discuss the relation between Deleuze and Kant from the point of view of genesis. For a more general account see Christian Kerslake’s article ‘The Vertigo of Philosophy’; Daniel Smith’s work in general, but particularly his excellent introduction to the US edition of Francis Bacon, his dissertation, Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference, and his article ‘Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas’; Melissa McMahon’s dissertation, Deleuze and Kant’s Critical Philosophy; and James Williams’s Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and also the first chapter of his The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze. See Deleuze’s lectures on Kant, Lecture 1 (03/14/1978) and Lecture 3 (03/28/1978). ‘Philosophy must be an ontology, it cannot be anything else; but there is no ontology of essence, there is only an ontology of sense’ (DI 15; original emphasis). Cf. NP 2; BG 34, 56–57; PS 13–14, 38–41, 47; DR, 187, 191–99; LS 53, 71, and 105. Cf. DR 170: ‘Kant held fast to the point of view of conditioning without attaining that of genesis’ (cf. 154, 173, 232). See also NP 49–51, 89–91; PS 16, 95; TF 89; Dan Smith gives a very strong reading of this in his dissertation, Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference. See 104–06. Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, 5–11. See Guéroult’s introduction to L’évolution et la structure de la doctrine de la science chez Fichte. L'évolution et la structure de la doctrine de la science chez Fichte.

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Husserl (APS 171 and 211), Merleau-Ponty (PP 44, 71, 256, 335, and 340). Derrida writes of Husserl’s ‘objection’ to Kant: ‘If the transcendental is not merged originarily with its empirical content, if it is not presented as parallel to experience itself, the transcendental, being thematized outside experience, becomes logical and formal. It is no longer a constituting source but the constituted product of experience. [. . .] Husserl begins with a radical refusal of Kant’s formalism’. (Derrida, Genesis 10). This is why Levinas describes Husserl’s notion of consciousness as an ‘eminently concrete phenomenon’ (TI 71) which puts ‘contact with the world at the very heart of the being of consciousness’ (43). Lyotard further argues that Kant’s conception of the transcendental was taken ready-made from the empirical—Kant did not have the method of reduction. Cf. Phenomenology pg. 32. Deleuze makes the same argument in KP chapter 3, published in the same year. See Claire Colebrook’s Philosophy and Post-Structuralist Theory pg. 202ff. for a more detailed description of the relation between transcendental empiricism and transcendental idealism.

Chapter 2 1 2

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LS xiv. These three levels are most clearly described by Deleuze in the last series of The Logic of Sense, pp. 239–49. Jean-Jacques Lecercle has also described them very clearly in his excellent book Deleuze and Language. See also Stephen J. Arnott’s article, ‘Solipsism and the Possibility of Community in Deleuze’s Ethics’. See especially E&J pg. 103 and 197–98. This is also a constant theme of Husserl’s lectures on passive synthesis. See, for example, APS pg. 95. While Heidegger had the Logical Investigations in mind, these characteristics come out even more clearly in Experience and Judgment. See especially Husserl’s long introduction to that work. Michel Serres is another thinker who equates the endpoint of genesis, knowledge, with judgment, representation and form. See Genesis pg. 14, 15, and 18. I will make a brief argument for treating the ‘virtual’ and ‘sense’ as synonymous below. For direct evidence, see DR pg. 191; C2 pg. 99; and BG pg. 57. On LS 185, Deleuze defines sense as ‘poetry itself’. Deleuze does, however, frequently repeat this claim in the pages immediately preceding the quotation: cf. LS 70, 72, 81, and 86. See C1 pg. 58ff; Bergson, MM pg. 17. LS 119–20. See DR 89; EC pg. 28–29; and the introduction KP. Cf. Kant CPR pg. A182–84/ B224–28. For an excellent discussion of these two times and many of the themes which appear below, see Jeff Bell’s The Problem of Difference pg. 187ff. A clear description of these two times from the point of view of the Stoic tradition which Deleuze invokes can be found in Philip Turetzky’s Time, pg. 41ff.

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The most important of Blanchot’s texts for Deleuze are the series of essays that Blanchot wrote between 1953 and 1958 which are collected in The Book to Come, and Blanchot’s book The Space of Literature which represents, in Levinas’s words, the ‘culmination’ of these essays (Levinas, Proper Names 129). These two times, however, are not specific to Blanchot. They also appear throughout Poulet’s work, in later Ricoeur, and in Bataille. Levinas, Existence 101. Deleuze often describes Aion as ‘the time of event-effects’ (LS 62) or ‘the locus of incorporeal events’ (LS 165). In the work from which Deleuze took the title ‘The Logic of Sense’, Hyppolite provides a memorable description of a similar process in Hegel: ‘While poetry tends to rediscover reflectively the reflective magic of language, the understanding smashes the concrete representation into its elements which are fixed and determinate’ (Logic and Existence 40). See Leonard Lawlor’s introduction for a brief discussion of the importance of Hyppolite’s book to Deleuze. This present of Aion is the present as a ‘being of reason’, for example, a mathematical point with no extension, which infinitely subdivides the instant into a past and future (LS 61ff.). For this dialectic between an un-individuated and an individuated state of affairs, see LS 124. Although Deleuze does not use the expression ‘passive synthesis’ in The Logic of Sense, he does in both Difference and Repetition (1968) and Anti-Oedipus (1972). Because of the similarity between his account of the syntheses across these three books and because these syntheses are not governed by an active consciousness, we can accurately describe them as passive. This theme was already present in Deleuze’s first book Empiricism and Subjectivity. There he asked the very Levinasian question of how ‘the given’ could transcend itself and become subject. The given was defined in a way which is very similar to the dispersion of partial objects in depth. The given is the collection of ‘things as they appear—a collection without an album, a play without a stage, a flux of perceptions’ (ES 23; my emphasis). It is the unorganized ‘delirium’ (ES 23; my emphasis) of impressions given by sensibility to the imagination. This is why Deleuze, alluding to the Kantian definition of the imagination as the faculty of synthesis, gives the body without organs the name ‘spontaneous imagination’ in Difference and Repetition (DR 70ff.). In Genesis, Michel Serres also describes a genesis beginning with these two mixtures, except he calls them ‘the multiple’ and ‘the one’. The significant difference between Serres and Deleuze, as we see in the next few chapters, is that the body without organs is produced whereas, in Serres, ‘the one’ seems to be presupposed. ‘In order for language to be possible’, it is necessary to ‘draw the sounds from their simple state of corporeal actions and passions’ (LS 166). Cf. LS 207, 218, 220, 241. For the way in which Husserl’s passive syntheses negotiate sensory data, see APS §§26–31 and E&J §16. See Levinas’s Existence and Existents. pg. 18ff. and pg. 70ff. Cf.: ‘. . . the direct and global function of integration or of general coordination, is normally vested in the genital zone’ (LS 200).

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See E&J 77; cf. 150. In logic an exclusive disjunction separates two statements. It says ‘either A or B, but not both’. An inclusive disjunction, however, separates two statements but maintains the possibility of them both: ‘either A or B or both’. For Deleuze, it therefore takes the form of a problem, or a positive indeterminacy. Is it A or B or both? Is it William or Richard or Rilchiam? It calls for a decision. For two excellent accounts of the ‘threefold synthesis’ in Kant, see Longuenesse, Chapter 2 and Makkreel, Chapter 1. On this point cf. LS 218 regarding the development of images. See LS 180: ‘. . . Being is the unique event in which all events communicate with one another . . .’ This gives us an opportunity to clearly state a significant difference between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty. The difference is clearly not, as Foucault has suggested in ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, that Merleau-Ponty begins with the body and that Deleuze begins with the phantasm. Deleuze does begin with the body, and the phantasm—which is synonymous with sense (Deleuze uses the word to suggest that sense is the immaterial double of its material foundations)—is produced as an effect of this body. (Foucault’s misreading is a consequence of the fact that he understood the word ‘phantasm’ in LS to have the same sense it did in DR. As will become increasingly apparent throughout this book, Deleuze’s technical terms almost always vary their senses between books.) The difference between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, and indeed, between Deleuze and many of his peers, is that in Deleuze the transcendental field is produced. In MerleauPonty, the body was a given impersonal transcendental field. In Levinas, Existence, or what corresponds to Deleuze’s corporeal depths, functioned as an anonymous transcendental field out of which the subject is hypostasized. For both MerleauPonty and Levinas, the transcendental field is given. For Deleuze, however, this impersonal field is produced and implies the dissolution of both the body and of Levinas’s ‘existence’. Blanchot is the only one who shares this understanding of impersonality with Deleuze. Deleuze draws this distinction between two becomings in LS 165. For a more detailed description of counter-actualization as an ethical principle see Lecercle’s Deleuze and Language pg. 116ff. and 173ff.; Ian Buchanan’s chapter ‘Transcendental Empiricist Ethics’ in Deleuzism; Constantin Boundas’ brief discussion in his introduction to Deleuze and Philosophy pg. 17; and Paul Patton’s attempt at a practical interpretation of this and other Deleuzian notions Deleuze and the Political. Deleuze directly alludes to this essay when he is describing the dynamics of sense in his essay on structuralism (cf. DI 187). Throughout both The Book to Come and The Space of Literature, Blanchot periodically opposes the space of the work and its ‘essential language’ or ‘language of thought’ to these three dimensions of the proposition which define what he calls ‘the language of the world’. See in particular The Space of Literature, pg. 41, where he claims that in the language of thought, words ‘are not obliged to serve to designate anything [i.e. denote] or give voice to anyone [i.e. manifest]’. And far from representing the space of signification, the space of the work ‘is the production and the expression of signification itself’ (41). Just like Deleuze’s notion of

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sense or the virtual, Blanchot’s literary space represents the impersonal transcendental space in which everyday language is determined and produced. See especially Blanchot’s essay ‘Mallarmé’s Experience’ in The Space of Literature pg. 38ff. Ricoeur, An Analysis 107ff. This essay, first published in 1954, had a significant influence on Deleuze’s thought, especially, as we will see below in relation to the problem of the Other. See also DR 153–65. Deleuze refers to the aleatory point as the ‘subject’ of sense, the ‘overman’ in LS 107 and 178. Deleuze quotes Carroll: ‘Justice Shallow had felt certain that it was either William or Richard, but had not been able to settle which, so that he could not possibly say either name before the other, can it be doubted that, rather than dies, he would have gasped out “Rilchiam”!’ (LS 46). In both Anti-Oedipus and Difference and Repetition the three syntheses of the dynamic genesis are passive syntheses. From this point of view, we could say that ‘the horizon of what appears’, in Deleuze as in Husserl, is produced in passivity, that the dynamic genesis is a passive genesis. Cf. LS 95 and 126. Cf. LS 186. Deleuze is alluding to the traditional philosophical notion of the person which Kant describes as that which ‘is conscious of the numerical identity of itself in different times’ (CPR A 361). See also part one of Descartes Principles of Philosophy and Leibniz’s New Essays Concerning Human Understanding pg. 230–37. We should note that while the publication of this book predates many of Deleuze’s significant writings on psychoanalysis, the most important aspects of Deleuze’s encounter were already established in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962). Deleuze’s comments on Bergson’s relation to psychoanalysis seem equally valid for Deleuze himself. In Bergsonsim, Deleuze writes that Bergson’s theory of the virtual, ‘would lose all its sense if its extra-psychological range were not emphasized’ in itself’(BG 55). Deleuze explains, ‘the word “unconscious” since Freud, has become inseparable from an especially effective and active psychological existence. . .. Bergson does not use the word ‘unconscious’ to denote a psychological reality outside consciousness, but to denote a nonpsychological reality—being as it is in itself (BG 55–56). See also Deleuze’s lecture on Leibniz delivered on 04/29/1980. See ‘the unconscious is differential and iterative by nature; it is serial, problematic and questioning’ (DR 108; cf. 194). ‘The unconscious of the structure is a differential unconscious’ (DI 181). (See FC, 50–51, 82, 108–09). Deleuze explicitly argues that there is such a savage experience in the cinema books when he draws a distinction between semiology, or linguistic systems, and semiotics, or ‘the system of images and signs independent of language in general’ (C2 29; cf. C2 31 and 33; and C1 ix and 12). This entire nonlinguistic system was the one developed in C1 in which movement-images, or the ‘non-language-material’ (C2 29) were transformed into various types of other nonlinguistic images by a ‘material subjectivity’.

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See The Anti-Oedipus Papers pg. 404. In a journal entry or note from 1972 Guattari wrote ‘Keep my penmanship, my style. But I don’t really recognize myself in the A.O’. Cf. DR 56ff. See pg 26. Cf. 296: ‘The order of desire is the order of production . . .’ (original emphasis). See KA pg. 7 and Frederic Jameson’s introduction to The Political Unconscious, pg. 22. See 356–57 for desire’s essential ‘relation to the outside’. Esp. ‘. . . desire does not survive cut off from the outside’ (357). It will become clear below that this ‘outside’ is not at all the Blanchotian ‘outside’ which corresponds, in Deleuze, to the transcendental field of sense. Rather, it refers to the way in which the ego of depths is dissolved in the interpenetration of corporeal fragments. In this passage Husserl explicitly opposes his concrete notion of the transcendental to the formal Kantian transcendental (APS 171). Cf. CES for Husserl’s most developed account of the word ‘transcendental’; as well as the first meditation in CTM. In both places the word ultimately refers to this ‘special sense’ of a world constituting consciousness. For both Deleuze and Husserl we can say that genesis is ‘transcendental’ very much in the scholastic sense: it encompasses all of the categories. It is trans-categorical. Cf. Heidegger’s comment in his lectures on Hegel where he talks of Husserl’s ‘conviction, held by him for a long time now and mentioned often, that phenomenology represents empiricism and positivism, properly understood’ (Heidegger, Hegel 20). In relation to recent critical debates surrounding Husserl’s thought in English this is a very contentious point. It is important however to notice that in France the idea of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology as radically empiricist was almost a given thanks to Ricoeur’s persistent commentaries. See especially Ricoeur, An Analysis pg. 10-12 and 202ff. ‘Yet in becoming more and more existential the phenomenology of the late Husserl became more and more empirical, for the whole order of the understanding [. . .] henceforth proceeds from passive synthesis initiated on the very level of perception’ (205). ‘Oedipus is the idealist turning point [in Freud]’ (55; cf. 111, 265). In contrast, the elements of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘transcendental unconscious’, ‘never form a mental structure that is autonomous and expressive’ (98; cf. 265). See AO 52, 97, 111, 173, 186ff., and 306. This attempt to rethink structuralism from the point of view of the genesis of structure is made in Deleuze’s essay, ‘How do we Recognize Structuralism?’ in DI 170ff. Deleuze’s arguments there are repeated in both The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition as well. See Lecercle’s book on Deleuze (99ff.) on the importance of this essay for LS. See my arguments in the third part of the book that Difference and Repetition does not break with this structuralist model as some commentators have suggested. Nonetheless, they carefully distance themselves from Althusser, whose project can be described in almost the same way, in the first few pages of the book (see in

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particular their critique of the notions of ‘relative autonomy’ (4) and structural expression (6)). Following Deleuze’s arguments regarding Nietzsche in NP, Dan Smith, in his dissertation, convincingly argues that Difference and Repetition represents Deleuze’s attempt to rewrite the Critique of Pure Reason. In his article, ‘Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas’ he suggests that the AO is Deleuze’s Critique of Practical Reason. Their arguments here have much in common with Merleau-Ponty’s in the first chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, and they lead Deleuze and Guattari to a position very similar to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of an impersonal transcendental field (which itself has roots in Bergson’s similar conception of a pure, impersonal perception opened on to the outside in the first chapter of Matter and Memory). Cf.: ‘There is no particular form of existence that can be labeled “psychic reality”’ (27); and: ‘We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of productions’ (29). Cf. ‘Indeed, in this sense we must say that the unconscious has always been an orphan—that is, it has engendered itself in the identity of nature and man, of the world and man’ (108). Levinas finds this discovery of a reality prior to the division of subject and object to be one of the most compelling and interesting aspects of Husserl’s thought and he returns to it continually throughout his study of Husserl: ‘Husserl, by overcoming the substantialist concept of existence, was able to demonstrate that a subject is not something that first exists and then relates to objects. The relation between subjects and objects constitutes the primary phenomenon in which we can find what are called “subject” and “object’’’ (TI 42; cf. 25, 35, and 51). Derrida too will highlight this aspect of Husserl’s thought throughout his dissertation. See also Heidegger, HTC 96, 111, and 120. ‘Desire produces reality, or stated another way, desiring-production is one and the same thing as social production’ (30).

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This argument is necessary because one can never count on the consistency of Deleuze’s technical vocabulary between books. Deleuze’s use of the term here is very close to Husserl’s in CTM (cf. §18), whereas his use of the term in DR is very close to the categorical multiplicities of FTL (chapter 3). Suzanne Bachelard is very good on this point (43ff.). See also Alberto Toscano’s brief discussion on pg. 165ff. of The Theatre of Production. However, Toscano slightly exaggerates the distance between Husserl and Deleuze. See Hyppolite’s reading of sensibility in Hegel in the second chapter of Logic and Existence. For Bergson’s theory of an ‘impersonal’ or ‘pure perception’ in which the perceiving subject is ‘exteriority itself’, see MM 34. For his description of this exteriority as ‘molecular’, see MM 22ff.

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What Deleuze calls ‘the given’ in ES is therefore entirely different from what he calls ‘the given’ in DR (cf. DR 222). In DR the given is what appears as already constituted to an ‘empirical sensibility’. In ES, however, it is what is given to a ‘transcendental sensibility’. See DR 144. On this point see also Deleuze’s 1972 essay (published in the same year as AO) on Hume in PI, especially pg. 35–41. See Leibniz, ‘Principles of Nature and Grace’ §13 Deleuze returns to this example and others—including dog beating—in The Fold. See esp. 86-87. Cf. ‘. . . the vertigo and dizziness of minute and dark perceptions’ (TF 92). Cf. DR: ‘Partial objects are the elements of little perceptions. The unconscious is differential, involving little perceptions, and as such it is different in kind from consciousness. It concerns problems and questions which can never be reduced to the great oppositions or the overall effects that are felt in consciousness (we shall see that Leibnizian theory already indicated this path)’ (DR 108; cf. DR 245; DI 181 and Deleuze’s lecture on Leibniz on 04/29/1980). It is true that the third synthesis produces a residual subject, but this is only the ‘apparent subject’. The unconscious as process is the ‘real subject’ (324). AO 54 and 300; my emphasis following 328. In addition to these, see AO 326–27. It is true that Deleuze and Guattari often describe the body without organs as ‘unengendered’, without papamummy, but the concept itself is of the second type that I outlined above: it changes its definition according to the moment of genesis at which we consider it. It is only in the second synthesis, as a miraculating machine that the body without organs presents itself as unengendered. ‘Hence the coupling that takes place within the partial object-flow connective synthesis also has another from: product/producing’ (AO 6). In this quote ‘desiring-machines’ refers to partial objects. Cf. Deleuze’s similar claim in Difference and Repetition that the first synthesis results in the production of natural signs (DR 77). It therefore takes the place of projection as the mechanism of genesis which was dominant in The Logic of Sense. This explains the absence of the good object in Anti-Oedipus. See especially Hyppolite’s interpretation of the Hegelian imagination from the point of view of genesis in Logic and Existence, especially on the negation and transcendence of the sensible (LE 28–31). The primary difference between the Deleuzian and the Hegelian transcendence of the sensible is that dialectical logic determines the Hegelian imagination in relation to already constituted meanings whereas Anti-Oedipus shows the production of the body without organs as absolute (without relation) before it becomes involved in the play of representations. It is hard to deny a Hegelian inspiration on this point, especially in relation to my earlier suggestion that Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of the sensible as a multiplicity of singularities also seemed to have Hegelian roots. This, in addition to the fact that the neoplatonic versions of Deleuze’s system put forward in Proust and Signs and especially in the cinema books repeatedly emphasize that once sense is discovered it is discovered as always having been already there at the outset (a move which results the formulation of movement-images (sensible singularities) as always having one half participating in the absolute or time) goes even further in

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suggesting an extremely strong Hegelian influence that needs to be further explored especially in relation to Hyppolite’s genetic and impersonal Hegel. Perhaps we will eventually have to overturn a second of Foucault’s claims and one of the current commonplaces of Deleuze’s criticism: Anti-Oedipus is a flashy Hegel (the primary difference being that history has become a history of contingency: there is no teleology in the Deleuzian evolution, even if, as we will see, it still progresses according to a dialectical logic of sublimation or ‘double causality’. DR 76. Fink already suggested the following criticisms in his paper ‘L’analyse intentionnelle et le problème de la pensée speculative’. Deleuze takes up Fink’s criticisms directly, although from the point of view of the static rather than dyamic genesis, in LS (97–98).

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See for example, Derrida’s translation of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry. For a detailed discussion of these two expressions see André de Muralt’s 1958 The Idea of Phenomenology pg. 123–24. See FTL §57–58 and especially E&J §63. See, for example, Husserl’s Origin of Geometry where he also includes literary works amongst Ideal objectivities (Derrida, Origin 160). See DR 159, LS 54 and 57 (where ‘objectité’ is translated as ‘objective’), and DI 182. It would be very interesting to compare Deleuze and Husserl on this point. In Deleuze Ideal objectivities, or transcendental Ideas, as I argue in detail in my next chapter, come before and produce the objectities of receptivity. In Husserl, it is the other way around. A complete object is submitted to imaginary variations from which the Idea objectity is abstracted. Here, ‘systematic phenomenology’ does not mean the process of production of objectities but rather, ‘phenomenology’ retains the sense they gave it earlier in the book as the science of description rather than of explanation (cf. 10). From the point of view of the territorial system of representation developed later, (1) is the representative of desire or ‘germinal implex’, (2) is the repressing representation or alliance and extended filiation, and (3) is the displaced represented or desire outside of itself in extensity or the ‘somatic complex’ (162). The role of alliance and filiation in this process of selection and codification is described in great detail on pg. 152. At one point they broaden the meanings of these syntheses even more to purely spatial and temporal forms by suggesting that filiation is simply a temporal synthesis whereas alliance is a spatial synthesis (201). Deleuze and Guattari consider Asiatic production to be the ‘purest’ manifestation of the despotic state (198). For the genesis of judgment and knowledge in despotism, see 294; of representation, see 310; of signification, see 206ff.; of law, 212; and for the introduction of teleology, 288. Interestingly, this stage also theorizes the genesis and interaction of both metaphor and metonymy (212). This seems to be an allusion to Jakobson’s

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theory that the entire genesis of language can be demonstrated from the interaction of these two devices. From this point of view, it seems that Deleuze and Guattari might even be suggesting a phenomenological foundation for the entirety of natural language. See, for example, Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious pg. 22 and 58 and Bruce Baugh’s essay ‘How Deleuze Can Help Us Make Literature Work’, pg. 35ff. To ‘deterritorialize’ here just means to move away from territoriality and does not imply the dissolution of boundaries. In this case, the deterritorialization that the despotic machine performs rigidifies boundaries by turning segments into bricks. From this point of view, Deleuze and Guattari seem to parallel Husserl by describing the genesis as progressing along a continuum of passivity and activity. Territorial representation appears in this passage as the pivot between passivity and a Deleuzian form of spontaneity. And taking this continuum as our axis, it is also worth pointing out that the expression ‘deterritorialization’ has two directions. In the current literature on Deleuze it is used exclusively as the movement from territoriality back to the molecular. However, in this quotation, and in most of its uses in AO, it describes the movement forward from territorial to despotic representation. ‘Deterritorialization’ is simply the movement away from territorial representation whether that be in the direction of the dissolution of territoriality or of its further formalization. On the issue of molar functionalism, see also AO 178. For more on the relationship between meaning and use and between the different practices they call for, interpretation and schizoanalysis, see AO 67, 77, 109, 133, 179–81, 204–08, 213–14, 288, and 322ff. But perhaps it is also at this point that these expressions like ‘despotic state’ should be treated skeptically. It seems unlikely that Deleuze and Guattari are describing a political organization. This would produce massive problems if we were to follow their suggestion and advocate a move to a molecular state which consists in the pure absence of meaning. Of course Deleuze champions those kinds of writing which move us beyond meaning to the nonsense of the molecular. Minor literature (or painting, film, sculpture, and so on) is ‘minor’ because it refuses to make sense and thus remains, literally, minor, small, molecular. I have in mind, for these last two points and their relation to Kant’s questions, the definition of common sense given in LS: good sense ‘could not distribute any diversity if it did not transcend itself toward an instance capable of relating the diverse to the form of a subject’s identity, or to the form of an object’s or a world’s permanence’ (LS 78; cf. the entire page). Obviously, this Deleuzian answer is completely different from the Kantian, even though, taken out of their contexts, they seem almost identical. Common and good sense have nothing to do with a purely formal transcendental subject or object which would be present, even if nonactive, in the earlier stages of the genesis. The important point is that these two forms are produced only secondarily as the effects of sense. Cf. Guattari’s note to Deleuze: ‘I’m flattered that you kept the term “Urstaat”. Do you think that our—future—readers will understand on their own the pun with

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Ur of Chaldea (Sumer) . . . Abraham’s departure city? [. . .] The origin of every promised land, the future Jerusalems, real and celestial! Maybe we could slip in a pun, or a joke . . . It’s like for Lulu . . . People won’t get it!’ (The Anti-Oedipus Papers 441; original emphasis). What’s interesting is that Guattari’s comment seems to have determined the first sentence of the chapter (but not without Abraham taking on a specific conceptual persona as the new alliance of despotism): ‘The city of Ur, the point of departure of Abraham or the new alliance’ (AO 217). It is as if Deleuze were not interested in willful and exclusive obscurity. For decoding see AO 218, for the subject-object conflict, see 258–60. See Catherine Labio, Origins and the Enlightenment pg. 98–101. Cf. Deleuze’s claim that Guattari ‘rescued’ him from psychoanalysis (NG 144). See also the editor’s introduction to the Anti-Oedipus Papers, pg. 16.

Introduction to Part 3 1

Specifically, Miguel de Beistegui’s Truth and Genesis, Alberto Toscano’s Theatre of Production, Jay Lampert’s Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, Peter Hallward’s Out of this World, Philip Turetzky’s Time, and James Williams’s critical guide to Difference and Repetition. All of these books, with the exception of Williams’s emphasize the point of view of genesis, but they only think of genesis as moving from the virtual to the actual. Only Lampert’s and Williams’s books consider the relation of the virtual to the temporal syntheses, but not in the way I put forward here. As far as I know the only critic to take the dynamic genesis seriously, although not in the context of Difference and Repetition, is J. J. Lecercle in Deleuze and Language.

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For an excellent account of Deleuze’s theory of Ideas, see Dan Smith’s essay ‘Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas’. For an account which engages with the mathematical examples Deleuze uses, see Dan Smith’s, ‘Axiomatics and Problematics as Two Modes of Formalization: Deleuze’s Epistemology of Mathematics’. See above, pg. 35. It is worth noticing that Deleuze clearly thinks of this process of determination as taking place between receptivity and the understanding. The allusion to Kantian coordinates resonates strongly with my arguments below that the virtual intervenes between receptivity—or the three syntheses—on the one hand, and meaningful representations on the other. Deleuze repeats this characterization of ideal elements in two other places: see Difference and Repetition (‘elements without figure or function’ (DR 278)) and especially Deleuze’s essay ‘How Can We Recognize Structuralism?’, where the elements of symbolic ‘structures’ ‘cannot be defined either by pre-existing realities to which it would refer and which it would designate, or by the imaginary or conceptual contents which it would implicate,

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and which would give it a signification. The elements of a structure have neither extrinsic designation, nor intrinsic signification’ (DI 173). For a basic definition of singularities and the way in which they determine the form of an object by extending themselves across its ordinary points, see the seminars on Leibniz from (4/19/1980) and (6/5/1980). See also Dan Smith’s very clear account of all of the mathematical notions at work in Deleuze’s account of Ideas in his article ‘Axiomatics and Problematics. While the genesis of Ideas is absent from Anti-Oedipus, it does make a very brief appearance in The Logic of Sense (LS 121). For a more detailed description of group theory, see Dan Smith’s article ‘Axiomatics and Problematics and Part 9 of Newman’s collection The World of Mathematics. Manuel DeLanda is also particularly good on this point, see Intensive Science esp. 16ff. and 182ff. See DR 220. E&J 339ff. is very clear on this. Cf Lyotard, Phenomenology, 38ff. and Suzanne Bachelard’s A Study of Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, pg. 173ff. What Husserl says of this Idea holds for Deleuze as well: ‘This general essence is the eidos, the idea, in the Platonic sense, but apprehended in its purity and free from all metaphysical interpretations, therefore taken exactly as it is given to us immediately and intuitively in the vision of the idea which arises in this way’ (E&J 341; my emphasis). See Suzanne Bachelard, pg. 177–79. One could therefore describe the multiplicity which Husserl has in mind as a continuous and virtual multiplicity rather than a discreet and extensive one (E&J 343). Husserl often describes the temporal multiplicity as ‘continuous multiplicity’ throughout ITC. Deleuze has always counted Husserl alongside Bergson as the philosopher of multiplicity. It is commonplace in Deleuze’s criticism—with the exception of Jay Lampert (Lampert 55)—that the virtual actually defines the element of the past in general. I explain why this is not the case (namely that the virtual as past is not sufficiently free of content to found the free determination of Ideas) at the end of the next chapter. Cf. NP 25–34 and DR 283–85. Deleuze himself cites Eugen Fink’s book , Le jeu comme symbole du monde and Kostas Axelos’s Vers la penseé planétaire (DR 332n5). Although neither of these works has been translated, parts of Axelos’s book have been translated in Yale French Studies under the title ‘Planetary Interlude’ as has an earlier essay by Fink on the same subject, ‘The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play’. Deleuze’s 1970 review of Axelos’s book, ‘The Fissure of Anaxagoras and the Local Fires of Heraclitus’ is an important elaboration of the note in Difference and Repetition. To these two it is worth adding both Poulet’s essay on Mallarmé in The Interior Distance and Blanchot’s essay on Mallarmé—‘The Book to Come’—in his book of the same title. ‘The system of the future [. . .] must be called a divine game . . .’ (DR 116). See also NP 25ff. and DR 116, 198, 282. Deleuze gives traditional definitions of these two terms in both of his books on Spinoza. Perhaps the clearest and most functional definition, however, comes from a footnote toward the end of Anti-Oedipus (AO 309n2).

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In commenting on this line, Blanchot says, ‘Every work and each moment of the work, puts everything into question all over again . . .’ (Blanchot 87). Blanchot’s essay, ‘There could be no question of ending well’, in The Book to Come deals with all of these points. Merleau-Ponty develops the notion of positive indeterminacy throughout the Phenomenology of Perception. See PP pg. 7, 14, 33–36, 196, 519. Cf. DI: ‘In fact, it is in relation to [the aleatory point] that the variety of terms and the variation of differential relations are determined in each case’ (DI 184). On this point, see Dan Smith’s introduction to the US edition of Francis Bacon and his essay on ‘Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas’ in Deleuze and Philosophy. In Difference and Repetition these two ‘syntheses’, ‘spécification’ and ‘qualification’, have been translated as ‘determination of species’ and ‘determination of qualities’. Deleuze makes this allusion clear in DR, pg. 223. If he describes primary quality as ‘extensity’ rather than as ‘extension’ it is because extension does not preexist the objects which populate it but is, rather, produced as a characteristic specific to each individual object. See Deleuze’s comments on Maïmon (DR 174). See also DR 179, 181, 240–41, 243, as well as Deleuze’s review of Simondon in DI 86ff. Both James Williams and Mark Hansen are particularly good at pointing this out. Cf. earlier in the same text: ‘. . . sense is actualized in the psychologically perceived sounds, and in the images that are psychologically associated with the sounds’ (BG 57). We should recognize in this duality—sounds and images—the two lines along which sense was actualized in the static genesis of The Logic of Sense—the logical genesis (which corresponds to the sounds, or the sign which denotes, signifies, or manifests) and the ontological genesis (which corresponds to the image, or what is actually denoted, signified, or manifested). Although he directly addresses this question in DR 209 and 247, he does so within the context of discussion of Kant, so it is not immediately clear that these expressions would have the same sense in Deleuze’s own thought. DR 191; cf. 197 and 156ff. In LS Deleuze draws a correlation between knowledge and extensity: ‘. . . the known is subject to the law of a progressive movement which proceeds from one part to another—partes extra partes’ (LS 48). See in particular: ‘representation and knowledge are modelled entirely upon propositions of consciousness which designate cases of solution’ (192); and the equation of ‘propositions of consciousness’ with ‘representations of knowledge’ in DR 197. In Husserl we find a similar conflation of knowledge, representation, and the proposition or statement. See, for example, the introduction to E&J pg. 21–22, 28, 38, and 62. On of the great strengths of Miguel de Beistegui’s reading of Deleuze is that he insists on this relation between the actual and the phenomena. See Truth and Genesis pg. 247 and 292. See the introduction to E&J. Cf. Levinas, TI pg. 15–16. For Deleuze (and for Husserl) homoiosis will always be secondary to the production of the two terms supposed to be adequate. This was already the case in Deleuze’s first book: ‘The relation of truth to subjectivity is manifested in the

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affirmation that a true judgment is not a tautology’ (ES 98). See also DR 56 and 196ff. and LS 121ff. Miguel de Beistegui gives a very good and much more detailed account of individuation in Truth and Genesis as does Alberto Toscano in The Theatre of Production than I will here. My primary concern is to bring out the relationships between all of these concepts and, in particular, to emphasize temporal characteristics. ‘. . . these four terms are synonymous: actualize, differenciate, integrate, and solve’ (DR 211). Deleuze writes that ‘Individuation ensures the embedding of the two dissimilar halves’ of the object or thing, the virtual and actual half (DR 280). See, for example, Beyond the Pleasure Principle pg. 5. Cf. Klossowski, 20ff. and 47ff. Lacan brings this out in his seminars—especially in book II—as does Ricoeur in Freud and Philosophy, pg. 69ff. Deleuze often describes the role of the subject in the eternal return—in reference to Klossowski’s interpretations—as the affirmation of the highest and the lowest. ‘Individuation always governs actualization: the organic parts are induced only on the basis of the gradients of the intensive environment . . .’. (251). ‘It is because of the action of the field of individuation that such and such distinctive points (pre-individual fields) are actualised—in other words, organized within intuition along lines differenciated in relation to other lines’ (247; my emphasis). See MM, 150; cf. 179. Whereas intensities focus on and express differential relations and their singularities, Ideas are ‘unaware of the individual’ (DR 246; cf. 254). This discursivity is already the problem of Empiricism and Subjectivity where the problem of the relation between the principles of association (which correspond to Ideas) and the principles of the passions (intensity) is posed and resolved in the last chapter. Interestingly Boundas alludes to this discursivity in his introduction, but unfortunately does not develop it. This same problem also motivates the last half of The Fold. In ES, ‘purposiveness’ links the two dimensions; in TF the ‘vinculum’ does. Cf. DR 245: ‘It is intensity which is immediately expressed in the basic spatiotemporal dynamisms and determines an “indistinct” differential relation in the Idea to incarnate itself in a distinct quality and a distinguished extensity’. CPR A141/B180–81. For Deleuze’s discussion of empirical sensibility, see DR 144 and 231.

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Deleuze makes this distinction himself in formal divisions of the chapter (which are not retained in the English edition). In this distinction between passive and active syntheses, as well as in his adoption of certain concepts throughout the chapter (living present, retention, reproduction), Deleuze is very clearly indebted to Husserl. However Deleuze’s syntheses are also very different from Husserl’s. Recall that Husserl had observed

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only two passive syntheses, time and association. All three of Deleuze’s passive syntheses are, in this account, dedicated to the production of time, whereas association clearly belongs to the realm of activity or representation (cf. DR 80). This point echoes my earlier claim that Husserl already installed the form of identity in his associative synthesis, and thus violated the more radical employment of the reduction which we find in Deleuze. It is probably for this reason that Deleuze considers the associative synthesis to be an active one. Recall also that Husserl’s temporal synthesis was purely formal. This is why, as we saw in the first chapter, that Husserl turned to passive associative synthesis in order to explain how the content of the impression was connected. This is not the case in Deleuze. Here, we will see, a molecular empirical content comes before the form of time, and time is produced as an effect of the synthesis of a primordial hylé. ‘It is these three syntheses which must be understood as constitutive of the unconscious’ (DR 114; original emphasis). On this point cf. DR 83, 101, 109, 114. See DR 292–93. For this reason James Williams, among others, interprets the order of syntheses as moving from the third to the second to the first. We have to remember though that just as in The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus (and we might well add Kant), the third synthesis is precisely the synthesis of the first and the second syntheses. It is from this point of view that it ‘distributes difference’ to these other two. This was also the case, I suggested, in The Logic of Sense where Deleuze took recourse to the representations projected by the good object and the active coordination of the ego. See his critical guide to Difference and Repetition, pg. 84–86. Here ‘this bare and material model is, properly speaking, unthinkable. (How can consciousness, which has only a single presence, represent to itself the unconscious?)’ (DR 286). The word ‘unconscious’ here refers to an ‘alienated’ matter. See especially Time and Free Will, Creative Evolution and Duration and Simultaneity; but also Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (477) and Kant (CPR A 95ff.) Cf. Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (122). Deleuze summarizes these arguments in the opening chapters of Cinema 1. Deleuze describes the contemplative soul as a ‘modification—this term designating precisely the difference drawn’ (DR 79; cf. 286). Deleuze’s three syntheses correspond very closely to Kant’s, and his choice of the word ‘modification’ at this point is a significant allusion to Kant’s synthesis of apprehension (CPR A97–98). Manuel DeLanda is right to say, however, that this does not actually mean that time is subjective (DeLanda, Intensive Science 110): this is not a psychological subject: it is a passive and transcendental subject, and even though Deleuze will call it an ego, it shares none of the activity or volition ordinarily attributed to a consciousness. Like Bergson’s, it is impersonal. The subject at the beginning of time is a corporeal and passive subject. Indeed, Deleuze defines the body as a collection of contemplative souls (DR 74–76). DR 286. In the psychoanalytic account of the syntheses, Deleuze says that the contemplative soul ‘binds excitations’.

Notes 15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23 24

25

26

27

28

177

The body without organs in The Logic of Sense—in its capacity as a ‘liquid principle’—was also defined as a ‘fusion’ of partial objects (LS 89–90). Deleuze is alluding to both Tournier (Cf. LS 310) and Bergson (MM 39, 50, 64, 66). See Deleuze’s comments on intentionality in C1 60 and DR 220. Levinas had already described intentionality in this way in Theory of Intuition (TI 44–45). Cf. Ricoeur: ‘Intentionality only signifies that consciousness is, in the first place, outside of itself’ (An Analysis 8). Cf. DR 220: It is not enough to say that consciousness is consciousness of something: it is the double of this something . . .’. In the English translation of Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure, the French word ‘singularitié’ has been translated as ‘specificity’. Hyppolite, following Hegel (§§ 105–06), describes this identification of subject and object at the level of sense-certainty as an ‘intentionality’ or an ‘aiming at’ (Cf. 87, 90, 94). Hyppolite’s description continues in a way which strongly resonates with Deleuze’s description of the plane of immanence in the cinema books or the schizophrenic and corporeal mixtures in The Logic of Sense: ‘The sensuous soul does not distinguish itself from its object. It experiences within itself the whole universe of which it is the reflection, but it is not aware of the universe . . .’ (Hyppolite, Genesis 84). It is worth restating that these singularities of sense-consciousness are not those of the transcendental Idea. See also section 1 of On Escape. This is also exactly how Heidegger described the transcendental form of Kant’s first synthesis—the synthesis of apprehension: it does not produce an empirical present, but ‘the “present in general’’’ (Heidegger, Kant 126). Again, Heidegger says the very same thing in relation to the pure form of Kant’s second synthesis, reproduction: this synthesis ‘can be called pure “reproduction” not because it attends to a being which is gone nor because it attends to it as something experienced earlier. Rather, [it can be called pure “imitation”] to the extent that it opens up in general the horizon of the possible attending-to, the having-been-ness . . .’ (Heidegger, Kant 128). Deleuze therefore completely reverses Levinas’s dialectic of effort and fatigue, even though he makes use of Levinas’s descriptions of these phenomena. In Levinas, the weary ego begins to lag behind existence, but is pulled back into it by an effort. This produces the present. In Deleuze, the ego begins with effort, a synthesis. This produces a present. But it soon finds itself exhausted. In its refusal of existence, it is taken up in a second synthesis. This produces a past. Again, the expression ‘partial object’ has a completely different sense here than it does in either The Logic of Sense or Anti-Oedipus. This is just one more of the many instances where, between books, Deleuze completely alters the sense, function, and context of a technical term (which are precisely what one would expect to remain constant). ‘The symbol [or phallus] is the always displaced fragment, standing for a past which was never present . . .’ (DR 103). Cf. DR 109 where Deleuze describes the ‘virtual object’ as the ‘principle of the second synthesis’.

178 29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

Notes

If we were to stick to a straightforward Freudianism, this might make sense within the context of Beyond the Pleasure Principle where the death drive as a return to inanimate matter was considered as primary. But this is precisely the model which Deleuze criticizes (DR 111–13), and then revises by developing a death instinct which is ‘drawn from’ Eros and ‘constructed upon his remains’ (113). This physical metaphor is also repeated in the dynamic genesis of The Logic of Sense (239–40). In the philosophical account, too, Deleuze says that the third synthesis is ‘the thought and the production of the “absolutely different”,’ or ‘difference in itself’ (DR 94). For a more developed and very strong account of the notion of intensity in Kant, see Béatrice Longuenesse’s Kant and the Capacity to Judge, pg. 298ff. The description of this ‘action = x’ or action in general in DR as any empirical action insofar as ‘the circumstances allow its “isolation” and that it is sufficiently embedded in the moment such that its image extends over time as a whole . . .’ (DR 294) clearly corresponds very closely to the description of the ‘action in general’ given in LS which is ‘not at all a particular action [i.e. empirical], but any action which spreads itself out at the surface and is able to stay there’ (LS 207). One especially strange place that this same process appears is in Deleuze’s description of Bergson’s arguments for going beyond Einstein’s theory of the relativity of time. See BG 80-84. What Deleuze describes as the lived experience of the ego in DR becomes a line of abstract reasoning in BG. In The Logic of Sense too, the two images are brought together in a synthesis which confuses their specific functions: the mother is asked to be organized, but is discovered as castrated (without phallus) and thus lacking an organizing principle; the father (or the phallus as element of the past in general) is asked to become present (LS 203–06). Here is the greatest difference between Deleuze’s third synthesis and Kant/ Heidegger’s. Deleuze’s third synthesis indeed belongs to the faculty of pure thought and involves an abortive cogito or an active I in the form of an ‘ego Ideal’—that is, the ego which becomes equal to the image of the action—which would seem very similar to Heidegger/Kant’s nonsubstantial ‘I’ (Cf. DR 86 on the ‘receptive phenomenal subject appearing in time’). Further, the entire third synthesis would also seem to mirror that of ‘recognition’ where the first is recognized as similar to the second. But despite these similarities, in Deleuze recognition fails. Rather than the future serving as the element which can coordinate the two other syntheses, it is the element in which a whole new synthesis is to be determined: the ideal synthesis of difference in the Idea. On this point see Dan Smith’s recent article in Deleuze Studies, ‘The Conditions of the New’. See also the opening pages of Bergson’s Matter and Memory from which Deleuze takes both his description of the plane of immanence or the corporeal depths or material repetition and his formulation of the problem of the new. When Deleuze calls the eternal return ‘the new’, he means, like Bergson, both that we experience it as affect and that it is independent of the determinism of the corporeal depths (LS)/plane of immanence (C1)/material repetition (DR)/binary-linear series (AO).

Notes 38

39 40

41 42

179

‘Eternal return, in its esoteric truth, concerns—and can only concern—the third time of the series’ (90; cf. 91). For the two becomings, see LS 165. See Ricoeur’s commentary in that same essay in which he describes Husserl as a ‘transcendental empiricist’: An Analysis 90–105; cf. CTM §19–22 and 28. Cf. Ricoeur, An Analysis 97. Cf. Ricoeur, An Analysis 100.

Conclusion 1

2

The expression ‘plane of immanence’ is also one of those expressions which refers to different concepts between books. In the cinema books, for example, the expression stands for the material field or the primary order, or art’s ‘plane of composition’ (Cf. C1 58–59). In What is Philosophy?, the expression stands for the virtual or secondary organization. This clearly is not the consequence of an evolution in Deleuze’s way of thinking about immanence since both the primary order and the secondary organization are present in both books. He simply transposes the word from one register to the other. It is not at all true, therefore, that the notion of the ‘aleatory point’ makes only a brief appearance in Deleuze’s thought as an obscure ‘structuralist’ principle (even though it’s clearly a genetic principle) as numerous critics have maintained. There is no such thing as a ‘structuralist’ period in Deleuze. The aleatory point is a permanent installment of Deleuze’s thought from very early on all the way until the last book, and without it, the notion of the virtual loses all sense.

Bibliography

Works by Gilles Deleuze Deleuze, Gilles. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. Trans. Constantin Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991 [1953]. —. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986 [1962]. —. Nietzsche et la philosophie. Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1999. —. Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1963]. —. Proust and Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 [1964]. —. Proust et les signes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976. —. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1991 [1966]. —. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. Trans. Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books, 1991 [1967]. —. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books, 1990 [1968]. —. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [1968]. —. Différence et repetition. Paris: PUF, 2003. —. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990 [1969]. —. Logique du sens. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969. —. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988 [1970]. —. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Dan Smith. London: Continuum, 2003. —. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 [1983]. —. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989 [1985]. —. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 [1986].

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Works by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983 [1972]. —. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986 [1975]. —. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]. —. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [1991].

Works by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet Deleuze, G. and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam, and Eliot Ross Albert. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 [1977].

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Secondary Literature on Gilles Deleuze and/or Félix Guattari Alliez, Eric. The Signature of the World, Or, What Is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy? Trans. Eliot Ross Albert and Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum, 2004.

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Index

Aleatory Point 35–41, 72, 74, 81, 106, 109–10, 112, 114, 127, 157, 179n2 Althusser, Louis 167n11 Badiou, Alain 105–6 Bergson, Henri 23, 59–60, 63, 117–18, 123, 131–2, 138, 140, 166n49, 168n13, 173n11, 178n34, 178n37 Blanchot, Maurice 25–6, 38–40, 74, 112–14, 134–5, 164n13, 165n34, 165n38, 167n5 body without organs 27–30, 31–3, 56, 68–79, 82, 127, 135–40, 156, 169n13 as ‘imagination’ or ‘contemplative soul’ 70, 73, 136, 138, 144–5, 156, 164n22, 169n18 as principle of synthesis 28 production of 69–71 Boundas, Constantine 3, 159n6 Brassier, Ray 6, 160n15 Buchanan, Ian 39 Colebrook, Claire 3 Counteractualization 37–8 DeLanda, Manuel 141, 159n2 Descombes, Vincent 96 Deterritorialization 171n12, 171n13 Eternal Return 36, 37, 112, 149–50 event 35–6, 39 see also Idea Event, see Aleatory Point Experimentation and interpretation 55, 68, 90–1

Fink, Eugen 3ff., 19, 160n9, 160n10 Foucault, Michel 3, 165n34, 170n18 Freud, Sigmund 35, 45–6, 57, 122, 144–5, 166n49, 178n29 Galois, Évariste 107–8 Guattari, Félix 41, 51, 99–100 Gurwitsch, Aron 160n15 Hallward, Peter 105–6 Hegel, GWF 17, 26, 35, 63, 70, 134–5, 138, 169n18, 177n20 Heidegger, Martin 21–2, 177n24, 177n25 Hume, David 63–6 Husserl, Edmund 3ff., 20–2, 24, 30, 32–3, 39–40, 43, 45, 47, 52, 56, 57, 59, 66, 68, 74, 76–8, 83–4, 89–90, 92, 108–09, 118–19, 122, 131, 134, 144–5, 152–3, 167n6, 167n7, 173n9, 173n11, 174n29, 175n2 Hyppolite, Jean 17, 164n17, 177n20–1 Idea 35–6, 39–40, 84, 106–26, 149–50 and the represented object 115–18 Inclusive disjunction 36, 39–40, 113, 149, 165n30 Intentionality 19, 134–5, 177n16–18 Interpretation, see Experimentation and interpretation Jakobson, Roman 170n10 Jameson, Frederic 90–1

192

Index

Kant, Immanuel 7, 16–18, 24, 32–3, 42, 52, 55–61, 76–7, 83, 93–9, 115, 124–5, 145, 152, 161n21, 163n48, 166n47, 172n3, 178n36 Lacan, Jacques 45, 57 Lawlor, Leonard 6, 160n13 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 51–2, 155 Leibniz, G.W. 63, 64–6, 108 Levinas, Emmanuel 4, 25, 32, 57, 135–6, 163n48, 165n34, 168n16, 177n26 Lyotard, Jean-François 17 Maïmon, Solomon 17 Mallarmé, Stéphane 110 Marx, Karl 57, 79, 99 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 3, 5–7, 29, 57, 160n13, 165n34 168n13, 174n20 Nietzsche, Friedrich 44, 110, 155, 161n18

and Heidegger 177n24, 177n25, 178n36 and Husserl 10–12, 32–3, 68, 77, 175n2 and Kant 11, 32–3, 81, 83, 96, 176n11 order of 78–80, 128–9, 138–41, 176n5 and static genesis 81–8 Plane of immanence 23, 136, 157, 177n21, 179n1 Reduction 4ff., 45, 53–4, 57, 77 Ricoeur, Paul 39, 45, 109, 160n9, 167n7, 179n40 Sartre, Jean-Paul 151 Serres, Michel 163n2, 164n23 Smith, Daniel W. 168n12

Other 98, 150–4

Unconscious 45–6, 55–7, 62–9, 76, 117, 166n49, 176n8 as set of passive syntheses 66–7, 128

Passive synthesis 31–4, 66–80, 96, 98, 100, 127–50, 154

Welton, Donn 9 Williams, James 128