Time and Intensity in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition

By

Kieran Aarons

Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Faculty of Graduate Studies

The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada

© Kieran Aarons 2007

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Certificate of Examination ................................................................................................. ii

Abstract ............................................................................................................................. iii
Dedication ......................................................................................................................... iv

INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER 1 – FROM THE LIVED PRESENT TO THE PURE PAST –
THE PASSAGE OF TIME & THE PROBLEM OF GROUND ................................ 10
1.1 - REPRESENTATIONAL TIME – KANT’S THREE SYNTHESES ...................................... 10
1.2 - THE LIVED PRESENT, OR THE SYNTHESIS OF CONTRACTION-CONTEMPLATION ...... 14
1.3 - TRANSITION TO THE SECOND SYNTHESIS................................................................ 19
The wholeness of time ............................................................................................... 20
The paradox of passage and the problem of memory ............................................... 20
1.4 - THE PURE PAST OF CO-EXISTENCE, OR THE TRANSCENDENTAL SYNTHESIS OF
MEMORY ........................................................................................................................ 21
The Argument From Active Synthesis ........................................................................ ii
The Three Paradoxes of the Pure Past ...................................................................... 23
The Two Repetitions .................................................................................................. 25
1.5 - REPETITION AND THE PROBLEM OF GROUND .......................................................... 26
The Insufficiency of the Pure Past: Circularity and Relativity of the Ground .......... 27
Confirmation of the Circularity of the Ground Through its Subordination to
Representation ........................................................................................................... 29
1.6 - CONCLUSION – THE DEFAULT CHARACTER OF THE PURE PAST AND THE NECESSITY
OF A THIRD SYNTHESIS ................................................................................................... 30

CHAPTER 2 – EXCURSUS ON BADIOU’S DELEUZE ........................................... 34

2.1 - AN ONTOLOGY OF THE ONE .................................................................................... 34
2.2 - FORMAL DIFFERENCE AND DISJUNCTIVE SYNTHESIS .............................................. 35
2.3 - METHOD AND INTUITION – THE NOMINAL TWO AND THE ONTOLOGICAL ONE……37
2.4 - THE VIRTUAL GROUND AND THE PROBLEM OF COMPLETE DETERMINATION ......... 39
2.5 - INDISCERNIBILITY AND THE DOUBLED OBJECT ....................................................... 42
2.6 - INDIVIDUATION AND THE SPLITTING OF TIME ......................................................... 44
2.7 - THE KANTIAN PROBLEM OF DETERMINATION ........................................................ 46
2.8 - DIFFERENCE AND DETERMINATION......................................................................... 48
CHAPTER 3 – ONTOLOGICAL REPETITION - THE THIRD SYNTHESIS &
THE UNGROUNDING OF TIME ................................................................................ 51
3.1 - FROM TRANSCENDENTAL CONDITIONS TO ONTOLOGICAL REPETITION .................. 51
3.2 - OBJECTIVE INDETERMINATION IN CINEMA 2 ........................................................... 52
3.3 - EXPLODING THE SKY – THE CAESURA AND THE EMPTY FORM OF TIME ................. 54
3.4 - DETERMINATION AND THE ABSTRACT LINE ........................................................... 58
CHAPTER 4 – INTENSIVE SYSTEMS & THE RETURN OF DIFFERENCE ..... 60
4.1 - TOWARD A GENETIC PHILOSOPHY OF THE INDIVIDUAL .......................................... 61
4.2 - THE COMPOSITION OF STRUCTURE AS VIRTUAL MULTIPLICITY ............................. 63
4.3 - STATIC GENESIS AND THE IDEAL TIME OF IDEAS…………… ... …………………67
4.4 - DYNAMIC DETERMINATION AND THE DRAMATIZATION OF IDEAS .......................... 69
4.5 - THE SYNTHESES OF TIME AND THE PROBLEM OF COEXISTENCE ............................. 73
Recapitulation of the Problem .................................................................................. 73
The Dark Precursor and the Coexistence of Series .................................................. 74
Intensity and Extensity............................................................................................... 77
Intensity, Implication, and Coexistence .................................................................... 76
Individuation and Ideas ............................................................................................. 87
Individuation and Transcendental Time.................................................................. 100
4.6 - CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................ 104

CHAPTER 5 – CONCLUSION ................................................................................... 108

5.1 - FROM DEPTH TO SURFACE - INTENSITY AND TOPOLOGY ..................................... 108
5.2 - HISTORY AND INTELLIGIBILITY ............................................................................ 111

NOTES ........................................................................................................................... 114

BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................... 119

CURRICULUM VITAE............................................................................................... 123

Abstract

This thesis is a systematic study of the ontology of difference and the philosophy of time
in the work of contemporary French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The purpose of its
argument is to demonstrate the historical legacy of Kant's critical philosophy in Deleuze's
work. My specific argument is that there is a variant of the Kantian notion of the
“schematism” in Deleuze’s concept of intensity, which explains how Deleuze can
reconcile the formal principles of temporal synthesis with the dynamic individuation of
concrete existence. The argument centers on the concepts of temporal synthesis and
individuation in Deleuze’s magnum opus, "Difference and Repetition". The thesis
demonstrates the philosophical interdependence of Deleuze's formal logic of time upon
his dynamic theory of what he calls "intensity" (how individuality emerges).The thesis
concludes with a consideration of the significance of Deleuze’s interpretation of the
Nietzschean “eternal return”.

Keywords: Time, Ontology, Transcendental Philosophy, Difference, Deleuze, Kant,

Nietzsche, Simondon.

iii
 For My Mother, With Love and Gratitude.
K.A.

iv
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Introduction

This thesis is a meditation on the philosophy of time. Although problems of time and
temporality are as old as the discipline of philosophy itself, this particular project will
limit itself to reading all of its problems through the internal logic of the magnum opus of
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.1 I should warn the reader
that while the relevance of this meditation ultimately should extend to the philosophy of
time and of Being more generally, it is built upon an extremely idiosyncratic framework,
and its rhetorical thrust concerns itself immediately with the composition of this
framework alone. Written within a context in which the practice and discipline of
philosophical thinking seem to fit nowhere within the increasingly privatized ambitions
of the university institution as a whole, this project is unapologetically philosophical in
spirit. It represents the scholastic exercise of philosophically negotiating the conceptual
network of connections comprising a system of thought. While I certainly hope it will be
of interest to the reader, I expect its relevance is most likely to extend to the philosophical
discourse surrounding the work of Deleuze, and not far beyond. However it will be up to
the reader to decide this.
The approach to the problem of time adopted here could aptly be characterized as
post-Kantian. Kant was (to my knowledge) the first to explicitly and rigorously proclaim
that the problem of time in its philosophical significance is inextricably bound up with a
problem of synthesis. Among the central tasks of Kant’s famous transcendental inquiry
into the constitutive structures of experience was the discernment of such formal
temporal syntheses in their specificity, along with the demonstration of their necessity.
As is easily seen, the fact that all lived experience takes place in a time which passes
away means that the problem of a ‘time in general’ (as opposed to contingent moments in
their abstract isolation) must to a certain degree always be a formal one. For one to ask
about the transcendental constitution of temporal experience involves inquiring into the
consistent form of organization by which this passing of time occurs, irrespective of its
immediate contents in a given phenomenon. Time therefore seems to exhibit a certain
indifference to that which passes through it, an indifference which makes it possible to
declare that it applies equally to every experience which remains ‘possible’ for us. Kant’s
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apprehension of this formal aspect of time was only one element of the broader initiative
he inaugurated of seeking the ‘transcendental conditions of any possible experience;’ i.e.
the a priori formal syntheses that constitute our world as we know it. The specific nature
of Kant’s syntheses will be problematized at the beginning of the next chapter. For now,
what is important to highlight is the idea that in order to talk about time after Kant, we
are to a certain degree forced to look past the empirical contents of experience to a form
of synthesis whose function is to make even their most rudimentary presentation possible,
producing the experience of time as a consistent regularity, and yet one which does so
immutably and indifferently.
Deleuze’s philosophy of time undoubtedly inherits several decisive Kantian
problematics. Whenever such an appropriation occurs, the problem undergoes shifts in
the determinate coordinates and the singularities that constitute its sensitive points or
specific horizon of importance. Therefore, we may say that a problem is Kantian even
when it is not always formulated in Kantian language per se, since the singular issues that
cause our interpretation to take one route or another proceed in ways that I hope to show
repeat certain problems which animate Kant’s thinking of time as well. One such
problematic, which will in fact serve as a focus for our engagement with Deleuze’s
account of synthesis, is the problem of individuation, or the concrete instantiation of pre-
individual processes in their determinate existential modalizations.
A difficult paradox is located at the crossroads of time and individuation, one which
(as I shall claim) is decisively Kantian in the end. For if transcendental philosophy must
attempt to apprehend the formal nature of the temporal syntheses producing experience
irrespective of the content that fills it, their apprehension alone is never sufficient to carry
this activity out. Time is real, and while its contemplation may be an exercise in
abstraction, this abstraction nonetheless bears upon a concrete articulation in a lived
situation. One of Deleuze’s most admirable contributions to the post-Kantian discourse
on temporal synthesis is to have developed a rigorous positive theory of individuating
difference capable of supplying a philosophical foundation from which to think the
dynamic instantiation of time as it temporalizes itself in real movements of being. Added
to the logical necessity of formal conditions of experience, therefore, is the dynamic
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insistence and exigency of material processes in their contingency, in their internal

difference and non-principial or anomalous character. The problem therefore becomes
how to conceive of a transcendental account of time that would at the same time secure a
concrete perspective on determinate temporalities and articulations of time – a ‘concrete
transcendental’ that was at the same time a ‘transcendental theory of the concrete’; or, in
Deleuze’s terms, a ‘transcendental empiricism’ of time itself.
This problematic intersection of the static formal aspect of time and the dynamic
anomalous aspect is not unrelated to Kant’s famous ‘art of the soul’, the Schematism of
the Imagination. For the schematism is precisely that instance in which the static or
logical forms comprising the concepts of the understanding are divided and distributed
into dynamic and concrete quantities of existence. Coupled with this problem is the
question of what Deleuze refers to as “Determination as such,” which, as we shall also
see, is drawn directly from Kant’s transformation of the Cartesian Cogito, and which
takes on a distinctly ontological sense at the hand of Deleuze. Functioning at the
intersection of the two sides of time (static and dynamic), ‘Determination’ is precisely
that instance through which an ontological account of time is conceivable. Furthermore, it
is, I will claim, ‘intensive’ by nature. With this in mind, one of the goals of this thesis
broadly speaking is to re-orient what is frequently a quasi-Bergsonian interpretation of
temporal synthesis in Deleuze by reading it in relation to the intensive synthesis of
individuation and the problem of ‘grounding.’ In the chapters that follow, I will attempt
to demonstrate this latter connection by insisting on the necessary interrelation between
the third synthesis of time (the Aion or Eternal Return as ‘ungrounding’) and the
metaphysical nature of intensive systems. This involves several interrelated arguments.
First of all, with regard to static synthesis I will attempt to demonstrate that if the
analysis of the three syntheses of time elaborated in Difference and Repetition is to have
an ontological significance, it is ultimately only on the basis of the third synthesis. In
order to establish this priority it is necessary to read the relation between the three
syntheses according to the polemic Difference and Repetition wages against the
metaphysical concept of ‘ground’ or ‘grounding.’ What I see to be at issue in the last
instance is the overcoming of a too-simple dyad between a grounding a priori and a
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grounded empirical content. The final chapter of Difference and Repetition arrives at the
logical conclusion that the second synthesis of time (the pure past as a priori totality) has
efficacy only as a result of (and at the level of) the activity proper to the third synthesis of
time (Aion). It is only through the latter that we comprehend being in its ungrounding, as
that which of necessity requires an empty form in which to liquidate all substantial or
permanent solidity from the movement of temporalization: an Ungrund beyond all
ground.
The preceding point involves the dynamism of intensity in two ways. First, I aim to
suggest that the selective and distributive activity of the third synthesis draws its power
exclusively from the intensive synthesis of individuation as described in detail in chapters
2 and 5 of Difference and Repetition. This consists of a logical conclusion as well as a
dimensional localization which I will attempt to show is necessary for several reasons,
the most important of which again concerns Deleuze’s conception of the effondement, or
the “universal ungrounding” proper to the ontological repetition of the 3rd synthesis of
time (DR 293). This ontological effondement will be read alongside Deleuze’s absolute
insistence on the independence of the order of intensive individuation, an independence
which it is granted due to its having its own essential process. In order to articulate the
precise way in which the third synthesis acts in concert with the individuation of being,
the function of each of these must be clarified separately first. Chapter three will deal
exclusively with the function of the third synthesis and its relation to the other two
syntheses. The first half of Chapter four will address the order of individuation and its
relation to Ideal multiplicities, and will fill out the groundwork necessary for the second
half of the chapter. Finally, in the latter half of the fourth chapter the connection between
the third synthesis of time and the processural nature of intensity will be elaborated at
length.
In the course of elaborating the aforementioned connection, I would also like to draw
from Deleuze’s analysis of intensity an alternate way of accounting for the co-existence
of events, emphasizing the Leibnizian elements of this concept as opposed to the typical
Bergsonian reading. Instead of conceiving of co-existence as occurring by default as a
result of the totality of the pure past as an a priori substantive multiplicity, it will be
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suggested that co-existence should rather be apprehended as an effect produced by the

power of implication and envelopment that is characteristic of intensities. Emphasis is
therefore placed on the power of intensities to divide by changing nature, to always
implicate distant series at the same time that they connect locally, and to force this
communication between series, endlessly ramifying them. It will be argued that this
activity of implication and ramification is not carried out within the synthesis of the pure
past, but by a synthesis independent of it by definition. This distinction makes it possible
to challenge the ‘storehouse’ metaphor frequently invoked when describing the virtual.
The main initiative behind my rejection of the idea of a ‘storehouse’ or totality of
events in favor of intensive syntheses and serialized coexistence stems from my desire to
insist upon the forces of the concrete, and of difference or asymmetry as genuinely
productive yet at the same time not universal. In his recent study The Theatre of
Production, Alberto Toscano expresses a similar sentiment which I take to be crucial in
this respect. After a careful and important exegesis of Simondon’s notion of the
preindividual and Deleuze’s concept of individuation, Toscano’s work concludes by
insisting on “the indivisibility of a material production of temporality and a temporal
production of matter.” According to Toscano, if it is to be capable of supplying a
rejoinder to Badiou’s critical reading, the prioritizing of Deleuze’s concept of
individuation entails the de-emphasizing of any “principial totality” or “sufficiency of the
virtual.”2 Toscano’s work will be addressed at greater length in what follows.3 For the
moment I wish only to highlight this important concern.
This problem is not unrelated to one of the central paradoxes of time developed in
chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition, which concerns the question of how a dimension
that cannot be located within the series of successive present moments can all the same
supply this series with its power of ‘passing.’ In other words, how can a synthesis that
never presents itself provide the condition of passage from one present to another,
producing the succession-effect between them? Above all others, it is this problem that
propels the logical argument from the first to the second synthesis of time, and (as will be
emphasized) from the second to the third. As Deleuze stresses, it is not sufficient to say
that each successive present co-exists in relation to a virtual object or level in the pure
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past. One must still explain how this virtual object can both be independent of the series
of present moments and capable of producing the succession-effect between them. In
other words, it must be neutral as regards these presents, but have a sufficiently
problematizing and generative force capable of making them enter into a succession,
while making the events that they actualize enter into relationships of a different sort. It is
along these lines that I will attempt to show how a nuanced understanding of what
Deleuze refers to as the ‘dark precursor’ allows us to make sense of the complex of
double-differenciation, or “different/ciation” co-extensive with both processes: first, the
‘precursor’ is that which determines events by forcing them to enter into relations of
succession and simultaneity, giving rise to the time of the present; second, it
simultaneously enacts a virtual concrescence or communication across the neutral and
problematic field of the events actualized in this present, which supplies each
temporalization of being with a determinate potentiality proper to its actuality. Chapter
four will elaborate these notions at some length. What is important to see is the way in
which these temporal problems of succession, simultaneity, and coexistence surfacing
throughout Difference and Repetition in various contexts only receive an adequate
resolution capable of explaining their effects and interrelation once they are brought to
bear on the analysis of intensive syntheses, and the serial logic they involve.
The most difficult thought, here as elsewhere, is that of the Eternal Return. The
notion of ‘returning’ is a singularly tortuous one, but without a doubt constitutes the crux
of Deleuze’s meditations on time in Difference and Repetition. What I hope to show is
how and why Deleuze’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Eternal Return bears upon the play
of intensity, and it alone. Read in this light, it is a matter of determining the precise
manner in which the synthesis of intensive difference, or ‘the asymmetrical synthesis of
the sensible,’ gives rise to what I will refer to as a differenciation of dimensionality as
such. The machine of determination that distributes distinct kinds of repetition to the past
and present, without leaving itself as difference, must be developed from the perspective
of individuation as a serial construction. In this way, the double differenciation of virtual
objects or problems and their actual solutions in the lived present find in the Eternal
Return a single distributive figure, which encompasses, destroys, and simultaneously
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selects among everything; it can play the role of an ultimate instance as regards the
problem of time only insofar as it makes impossible any principial or totalizing ground
for it.
Finally, by reading the eternal return through the problem of temporal dimensionality
or the “returning” of time through the problem of individuating difference, this reading
strives to throw into question any crude characterization of the ‘virtual/actual’ split. Any
separation that might allow this difference to be seen as either a dualism in need of a third
term, or as a unilateral monism of creativity should find no support in this reading, and
should ideally be refuted by what follows. Although my emphasis when dealing with this
problem will focus on what Badiou referred to as the paradox of indiscernibility between
virtual and actual, the alternate problem of whether there exists a scission holding the two
dimensions apart, a scission which would itself have a substantial or ontological dualism
as its consequence, is also rendered impossible according to the reading offered here. The
success of these two refutations will lie in my ability to demonstrate that there is a
synthetic activity prior to any distinction between the two, one which cannot be categorial
or principial, but rather a properly ‘paradoxical’ or ‘anomalous’ agent of synthesis, and a
perhaps finite or at least non-absolute one at that. Only in this way can the doctrine of
univocity be ‘realized’ without falling into a mystical contemplation of the One or a
reactionary flight from the concrete.

It seems important to explain the near-total lack of any reference to psychoanalysis in this
thesis. As anyone familiar with Difference and Repetition is aware, Deleuze explicates
the three syntheses of time twice, first in a philosophical argumentation and then again in
a psychogenetic formulation drawing heavily on Freud, Klein, and even Lacan. It is
obviously the case that any extension of this project would have to take this second
account into consideration, and tarry with the complicated relationship Deleuze’s work
maintains with psychoanalysis. There are two principal reasons I have avoided this
analysis in the present work. First of all, it would take too long and would demand a
specialization in psychoanalytic literature I do not at the current time possess. Second,
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there have recently been several important book-length contributions addressing this
relationship between psychoanalysis and time in Deleuze. To cite only the three most
recent books: Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time by Keith Faulkner, Deleuze and
Guattari’s Philosophy of History by Jay Lampert, and Deleuze and the Unconscious by
Christian Kerslake, all of which came out last year. Each of these authors engage the
problem of time and the unconscious in different and contradictory manners. For
example, Faulkner’s study emphasizes the Freudian content in chapter 2 of Difference
and Repetition as a key to understanding Deleuze’s concept of time.4 Against this,
Kerslake has argued that the usage of such a notion as ‘Thanatos’ in Difference and
Repetition as a model for the third synthesis of time, whether only in an explanatory
fashion or as a literal association, ultimately “has nothing to do with Freud or
psychoanalysis.”5 On the contrary, Kerslake asserts that, “[W]hen their doctrines are
invoked by Deleuze, Freud and Lacan always serve as masks for other forces.”6
Lampert’s study asserts the libidinal significance of the syntheses while avoiding this
debate entirely, which arguably leads to an ambiguity as to the meaning of the
unconscious in his usage of the term. How one chooses to approach this question is a
matter of considerable debate, one familiar to any reader of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Setting it aside in the present study, I wish nonetheless to affirm with
Kerslake that, “for Deleuze, the notion of the unconscious cannot be adequately treated
outside of the temporal syntheses that characterize human cognition,” a statement
Faulkner and Lampert would no doubt endorse (assuming we could be clear on what such
cognition meant). For this reason, the interpretation of temporal synthesis laid out in what
follows may be viewed as laying out a preliminary groundwork for a more
comprehensive explication of Deleuze’s notion of the unconscious that I hope to develop
in dialogue with the aforementioned authors in years to come.

As far as methodology is concerned, the relation between the concepts of temporal

synthesis and intensity will be read according to the important passages in Difference and
Repetition where Deleuze provides an early but important description of the functioning
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of concepts. There we are told that “concepts should intervene, with a zone of presence,
to resolve local situations. They themselves change along with the problems. They have
spheres of influence where … they operate in relation to ‘dramas’ and by means of a
certain cruelty. … They must receive their coherence from elsewhere” (DR xx/3.
Translation slightly modified). This “cruelty” of philosophical concepts is distinct from
the functioning of representational categories insofar as their transportability from one
domain or dimension to another occurs only on condition that “they impose their own
scenery, that they set up camp there where they rest momentarily” (DR 285/365).
Consequently, the reading proposed here assumes no pretense of interpretive neutrality.
Besides being generally suspect in itself, such a notion is in any event clearly inimical to
Deleuze’s thought. We won’t rehearse the well-worn metaphor Deleuze invokes
regarding strategic readings. Preferable perhaps is the way in which he replies to an
interlocutor during the “Roundtable on Proust” published in Two Regimes: “I am not
asking whether a dimension of this sort appears in Proust’s work. I am asking what it was
used for. And if Proust needs it, why he needs it.”7 This claim, coupled with those cited
above describing the functioning of the concept, helps to flesh out the methodological
presuppositions of this project.
The practice of reading here is less concerned with the objective demonstrability of a
claim than with the efficacy of its force with respect to the object in question. Critique
operates by resuscitating the imperative force of a work, the problematic that drives it,
and by harnessing this questioning power in order to take it in new directions. From this
point of view it is innocuous to critique an interpretation on the grounds of infidelity. If
one must critique, it seems preferable to do so only by demonstrating the poverty of such
and such a reading, and concomitantly to give even more back to the author in question,
to show the ways in which that author exceeds the low estimation bestowed on him. It is
therefore unnecessary to note that this thesis is premised on a deep admiration for
Deleuze’s thought, an admiration which is inseparable from a relentless disturbance his
thought continues to effect upon me, which the solutions offered here seek as much to
flee as to celebrate.
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Chapter One
From The Lived Present to the Pure Past – The Passage of Time and the Problem of
Ground

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the first two syntheses of time developed in
chapter two of Difference and Repetition, "Repetition For Itself," and to problematize the
relation of grounding between them. Deleuze's analysis of this relation provides a crucial
backdrop for understanding the importance of the third synthesis of time and its relation
to individuation, which is the focus of this thesis and its reading of Difference and
Repetition. This chapter seeks to answer several important questions. Why does time
require multiple syntheses? Specifically, why does the present need to be grounded in a
pure past? What arguments does Deleuze develop for this pure past? Why is this pure
past ultimately insufficient as the ground of time? What are the consequences of trying to
ground time in itself, i.e. of seeking a substantial temporal element on which to ground
the syntheses of the lived present? Before responding to these questions, a brief
consideration of Kant’s account of temporal synthesis in the Critique of Pure Reason will
supply us with an instructive comparison.

1.1 Representational Time – Kant’s Three Syntheses

It is important to recall how Kant has distributed the capacity for synthesis amongst the
faculties in the Critique of Pure Reason.8 According to Kant, the faculty of intuition
(sensibility) is purely receptive, containing in itself no power of synthesis. Synthesis is
performed solely by the three active faculties, i.e. imagination, understanding, and
reason. These account respectively for the synthetic activity of representation, the unity of
this synthesis, and its totality.9 Synthesis is always the synthesis of what is presented –
thus it does not constitute or create its object (that which is synthesized, i.e. presentation
itself). For this reason, although bereft of the spontaneous capacity of synthesis, intuitive
sensibility nonetheless occupies an originary role in the overall economy of the subject,
as it is only through intuition that the pure a priori formal diversity of space and time
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themselves, as well as the apparition of the a posteriori empirical diversity which fills it,
can appear.
From the point of view of temporality, synthesis is effected upon the manifold of
intuition by two of the three active faculties: imagination and the understanding. The
passivity of the appearing self, as well as the manifold of objects external to it, are subject
to a temporalization that orders and connects the representations of inner sense, bringing
them into temporal relation with one another, and gathering experience into a coherent
and conceptualizable unity. Kant describes three temporal syntheses through which the
imagination and the understanding carry out this task.
First, a synthesis of successive apprehension grasps the manifold of presentation and
gathers it into a single representation, unifying it and thus constituting the present
moment as a structural coherency. The manifold must be “run through, and held
together” (CPR A99). If, by virtue of this holding-together, this initial apprehension is
said to be the “transcendental ground of the possibility of all modes of knowledge
whatsoever”, it will still require a second operation to reproduce this consistency from
one moment to another (ibid).
The second synthesis of reproduction explains both the passage from one moment to
the next, as well as the preservation of former presents as a dimension within the new
present which succeeds it. This synthesis therefore does not act upon the pure manifold of
intuition itself – its job is to synthesize distinct presents themselves, to create a continuity
between them. Were it not for this stretching of moments into one another, the
consistency of the object won by the first synthesis would be incapable of permitting any
nomination of their contents, as these would be subject to constant fluctuation without
any retention of that which passed. By virtue of the passage of a moment from present-
present to its status as former-present, a past is produced out of the succession of time, by
virtue of which the identity of objects is secured across a span of duration.
However, neither of the first two syntheses specifically guarantees the unity of the
experience of the object as such. As Kant explains, without the additional wholeness of a
consciousness capable of recognition, even rudimentary experiences like that of counting
would be impossible, since the concept of a “total being produced” requires a further
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moment of synthesis beyond that of the mere repetition of a phenomenon (i.e. the simple
fact of its taking place again). Thus it is the function of the synthesis of recognition in the
concept to bring to the gathered and reproduced phenomena the a priori form of an object
in general. This ‘object in general’ does not unify the concrete objects of our
representations per se – rather, it supplies the pure form of conceptual objectivity as such.
Having no content of its own, this “transcendental object = x” is nothing but an empty
formal function of synthesis that makes a conscious relation to empirical objects possible
as such (CPR A108-9). In this sense, what is unified by the synthesis of apperception is
representational consciousness itself as a coherent phenomenon capable of apprehending
a self-same identical object. This pure form of objectivity is a necessary component of all
conscious experience, since it supplies a supplementary synthesis by which the series of
present moments is able to be represented by a consciousness present to them. As
Deleuze notes, “it is of the essence of representation not only to represent something but
to represent its own representivity” (DR 80/109). Apperception ensures that every
representation also be accompanied by an “I think,” which represents its own
representivity at the same moment that it represents the world and the passive self
appearing within it. Just as the formal manifold of space and time provides the a priori
ground of all sensible intuition, apperception provides the a priori ground of all
conceptual representation. It therefore grounds objective knowledge as such. In short,
apprehension synthesizes a sensible manifold into a moment, reproduction synthesizes
moments together by ensuring both their passage and their persistence as ‘past,’ while
apperception confers a unity and a reflective dimension upon experience as a perpetually-
renewed holistic phenomena.
As convenient a model as this was for Kant’s purposes, several questions seem to go
unanswered in Kant’s account.10 First, if our experience of time is a result of syntheses
carried out behind our backs (so to speak),11 does Kant ever explain how this synthesis
occurs? As regards time, the “Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding” in
the first Critique has two functions: first, to show the necessity of a certain temporality of
representation for the possibility of objective knowledge and conscious experience in
general (i.e. what must be the case if we represent the world as we do); second, it enlists
 13  
 
 

faculties as the principle agents which carry out this synthesis (i.e. it shows where these
operations take place). However, saying that synthesis is necessary, and telling us where
to look for it is not the same thing as explaining how this synthesis takes place. It is a
circular argument to explain the function of a faculty on the basis of the problem it was
created to solve. What, if anything, conditions the different synthetic acts? How do these
syntheses accomplish that which they are designed to do? What relationships of logical
priority and ontological primacy hold between them? To answer this, the power of
synthesis itself requires a transcendental account.
Second, if time is nothing but the form of relation between representations, does
temporality only emerge at the level of the represented? As passive subjects, we can only
appear to ourselves as existing in time, and yet the instance of synthesis, the ‘I think’ of
apperception which accompanies every appearance, as well as the object = x which
confers unity on them, are effectively atemporal. In this sense the split in the subject
divides not only the two respective faculties of sensibility and understanding, but opens a
chasm between the unconditioned act of synthesis and its effect, which we are as time.12
The ‘I think’ of apperception carries out the unification of time, and yet is (as act) outside
of time as such, suspended in a kind of eternal formality. Undoubtedly, part of the
problem here is the fact that Kant seems to assume that a rational subject emerges in the
world fully-formed and capable of upright thought. As a result of this presupposition, the
faculties do not themselves develop, being accorded the status of quasi-eternal attributes
of the human. Not only is no attempt made to explain the human being in its
developmental aspects, but since the active synthesis of apperception issuing from the
faculty of understanding is already granted this quasi-eternal status (as transcendentally
unknowable in itself), it is eo ipso impossible to consider anything as being antecedent to
its operation. The act of representation, although for the most part unconscious to us, is
essentially unconditioned, and thus capable of grounding itself in its own synthetic act.
Here it is necessary to point to the inadequacy, at least after Freud, of Kant’s denial of
any form of passive synthesis, and for two reasons. On the one hand, passive syntheses
are needed in order to explain the necessary developmental stages or topological shifts
which give rise to the existence of the passive subject, and the passive non-
 14  
 
 

representational syntheses of non-human organic beings from which we have developed

as on a continuum. Second, after Freud (one might even say after Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche) it is difficult if not impossible to accept the suggestion that there is nothing
conditioning representational synthesis. Despite one’s opinion of the specifics,
psychoanalytic theory has long shown that the unconscious, whether timeless or not,
contains a synthetic component that constitutes itself not through recognition, but by
disguise and displacement, perpetually problematizing the active syntheses of
representation which sublimate its symptom. While Deleuze’s position towards
psychoanalysis is undoubtedly complicated and requires careful consideration elsewhere,
he clearly indicts Kant on account of this neglect of passive synthesis. Although it would
be a mistake to think that the discovery of a passive synthesis functioning as a foundation
for representation entailed the outright denial of the active syntheses – this is not the case
– it is nonetheless imperative that they be repositioned within the overall economy of
temporal synthesis as such. Once one abandons the presupposition of fixed and
unchanging faculties, the passive self can no longer be conceived of as an unconditioned
a priori capacity for receptivity. No longer merely a priori and formal, the reception of
sensations must be accounted for within the broader scope of an organic synthesis which
conditions its development. In effect, the very synthetic production of sensibility as a
faculty must receive a genetic account, as must the other faculties as well. A more
originary aesthetic, transcendental in nature although passive and unconscious, will refer
the perceptual syntheses described by Kant back upon a “sensibility of the senses … a
primary sensibility that we are” (DR 73/99).

1.2 The Lived Present, or the Synthesis of Contraction-Contemplation

Time is fundamentally synthetic. There is no temporal experience that is not the result of
syntheses. In fact, we must continue to say with Kant that there is, properly speaking, no
experience whatsoever that is not underwritten by a temporal synthesis. One cannot have
an ‘experience’ of a pure unmediated instant in itself, not because such instants do not
exist, but because a lone instant or even a succession of isolated instants cannot actually
 15  
 
 

constitute time. We can speak of time proper only once a contraction of successive
instants into a lived moment, a ‘now,’ has taken place. As we saw above, the function of
Kant’s synthesis of apprehension was to ensure a contraction of precisely this sort. Yet by
what logic can we attribute this contraction to an activity of the mind? Is it at all obvious
that the repetition of an instant is actively produced by mental activity? In what pre-
temporal domain does the subject gain the power of receiving or sensing that which it
synthesizes?
“Contraction is not a matter of reflection” – on the contrary, Deleuze argues,
reflection and mental activity are themselves founded on an originary contraction from
whence their very power derives (DR 70/97). The synthesis of habit is a passive
connective synthesis, the function of which is to place disjointed and unrelated instants
into relation with one another, and in this way to order them. By placing these instants
into relations of past and future, a living present is produced on the basis of which the
active syntheses of reproduction and understanding may deploy themselves. How does it
prepare the way for these syntheses?
In terms of its broader ‘metaphysical’ position, the habit synthesis presides over the
final stages of actualisation, functioning as the synthesis responsible for ordering our
phenomenological experience of the world. It is the lived time of the actual, of
‘extensities.’ Extensity is produced when the internal differences filling a problematic
field ‘solve’ themselves by cancelling their difference, i.e. through equalization. Since it
measures a duration that coincides with this cancellation of internal difference, the time
of extensities is essentially asymmetrical, moving from immediate past to near future as
from particular to general – “from the particulars which it envelops by contraction to the
general which it develops in the field of its expectation” (DR 71/97). Because it is
synthetic, what it contracts are successive independent elements or instants into one
another. In this contraction, it establishes the difference between past and future as two
dimensions internal to it. By contracting preceding instants, the present retains them as an
immediate past within itself. In the same act, a future of expectation is formed as an
anticipation. This past of retention and future of anticipation are dimensions of the
present, formed by this contraction of instants. “The present does not have to go outside
 16  
 
 

itself in order to pass from past to future” (ibid). This is not a temporality of ex-stasis, but
rather of synthetic envelopment 13 – the present contracts the particular preceding instants
at the same time it opens onto the future, yet both are enveloped in the present, as the
span internal to it.
The fundamental asymmetry of the present, its ability to place instants into relations
of past and future with one another, entails that a certain difference maintain itself as the
present. By contracting instants together, the ‘mind’ extracts a difference, mainly that
between past and future. In this way it produces the repetition of seemingly identical
sensible qualities and objects. Although this synthesis is constitutive, its passive character
indicates that it is not carried out as an operation of the mind, but rather takes place in the
mind prior to memory and reflection, which rely on its extractive effects for their own
operation.14 Deleuze shows how this extraction operates on two levels, each separate and
yet acting in concert. The distinction here is between a repetition of elements (taken from
Bergson), and a repetition of cases (taken from Hume). The repetition of elements (the
‘tick tick tick’ of a clock) presupposes a contraction of elementary excitations,
themselves occupying the unexperiencable status of an instant in-itself. In order for the
clock-ticks to register as ‘four o’clock,’ we must “contract the[m] into an internal
qualitative impression within this living present or passive synthesis which is duration.
Then we restore them in an auxiliary space, a derived time in which we may reproduce
them, reflect on them, or count them like so many quantifiable external impressions” (DR
72/98). Our sensible impression therefore arises out of a contraction capable of
constituting itself as a unified phenomenon. The logic of cases constitutes itself when two
or more elements are delimited into a set, such as a ‘tick-tock,’ or AB AB A succession.
When AB AB occurs, the appearance of A is no longer the same as the initial
appearance…a difference has been extracted by the mind, such that it anticipates the
appearance of B. The repetition of an object in which the sensible quality locates itself
therefore presupposes a contraction of cases or sets of elements which constitute the
repetition of a ‘particular.’ Both repetitions, that of elements and that of cases,
presuppose a contraction which draws-off a difference, such that their appearance is
capable of functioning as the instantiation of a unified or identical phenomenon or object.
 17  
 
 

In this way memory is founded in an original way upon the contracting synthesis of habit.
“On the basis of the qualitative impression in the imagination, memory reconstitutes the
particular cases as distinct, conserving them in its own ‘temporal space’” (DR 71/98). No
longer the immediate retention established by contraction, a reflexive space of
representation now reproduces and reflects the case or quality as a constituted
particularity. The same applies to the future, which, no longer an immediate anticipation,
now becomes a domain capable of prediction based upon a generalization of the
understanding (ibid). A two-fold active synthesis of representation marked by memory
and understanding is thus founded upon the passive contraction which has supplied it
with the material it redeploys. Deleuze schematizes the three moments constitutive of
repetition in a parodically Hegelian fashion: “An in-itself [en-soi] which causes it to
disappear as it appears, leaving it unthinkable; the for-itself [pour-soi]of the passive
synthesis; and, grounded upon the latter, the reflected representation of a ‘for-us’ [pour-
nous] in the active syntheses” (DR 71/98). In this way, the active syntheses of the
imagination (apprehension and reproduction) described by Kant are shown to derive their
foundation from a prior passive synthesis. In order for the imagination to reproduce an
object, a prior contraction must already have carried out a repetition of elements and
cases which is capable of extracting the difference between past and future in and as the
experience of a lived present. In this way the how of synthetic activity begins to receive
an answer. Furthermore, it is evident that the activity of representation must be founded
upon a constitutive passivity. However, we have not yet answered the final question that
was posed to Kant, that of the genesis of the faculties themselves. I cited Deleuze’s claim
that contraction is not a matter of reflection. Yet it must still be shown that it cannot be
subjective or personal either, that the very form of the personal self and selfhood is
derivative, or produced by a process not assignable within their coordinates.
Prior to the passive perceptual syntheses described above lies an even more
constitutive domain of organic syntheses, which are like the “sensibility of the senses…a
primary sensibility that we are.” This organic contraction constitutes the very capacity to
sense. “We are made of contracted water, earth, light and air – not merely prior to the
recognition or representation of these, but prior to their being sensed” (DR 73/99).
 18  
 
 

Although these organic syntheses are still within the order of contraction and are
therefore still within the scope of the habit synthesis, we are no longer dealing with a
synthesis that can in any way be confused with a mental activity, but rather with what
Deleuze refers to as a “vital sensibility” (ibid). This incipient sensibility has less to do
with a perception than with organic drives as such, themselves inseparable from the
constitution of a lived present. For example, the dimension of the contracted past here is
represented in cellular heredity, while the future is expressed in need, the “organic form
of expectation” (ibid). In its very organic being, humans and non-humans alike are
produced by a contraction of elements. Each of these elementary contractions forms a
sign capable of being interpreted and transported via active syntheses into the space of
representation. All signs are “contemplations” by virtue of their ability to draw something
from that which they contract, i.e. that from which organisms contract themselves. “We
do not contemplate ourselves, but we exist only in contemplating” – as contemplations
we are produced by the extraction of thousands of “primary habits that we are […] the
thousands of passive syntheses of which we are organically composed” (DR 74/101). By
drawing something off, habit is a kind of contemplation (albeit non-reflective). This
contemplation produces a sign function –signs which are always signs of the present,
although they signify only by contracting that from which they come. These signs
constitute a kind of quasi-intentionality, which involves a memory function and an
associative function.15
It is on the basis of the lived present established by the habit synthesis that organic
beings composed of elements and cases of repetition occupy a temporality based in need
(as the organic form of expectation) and its fulfillment in a further contraction (the
beatitude of pleasure pre-figured by this synthesis of contraction). This interplay between
contraction-contemplation and need gives rise to a milieu of action. Prior to the active
synthesis of a constituted agent-subject, the self is constituted as a multiplicity of passive
syntheses giving rise to thousands of partial or larval selves – “contemplative souls”
located in muscles, in nerves – in every domain of the actual. “Selves are larval subjects;
the world of passive syntheses constitutes the system of the self…but it is the system of a
dissolved self. There is a self wherever a furtive contemplation has been established,
 19  
 
 

wherever a contracting machine capable of drawing a difference from repetition functions

somewhere. The self does not undergo modifications, it is itself a modification – this term
designating precisely the difference drawn” (DR 79/107). The very composition of the
faculties themselves are not innate quasi-eternal capacities of thinking beings as Kant had
implicitly suggested, but accomplishments carried out constantly by the flux of organic
life.

1.3 Transition to the Second Synthesis

The position of the past within time has so far been accounted for exclusively through the
synthesis of the present, contained within its dimensional contraction. From the point of
view of the first synthesis, the past was produced inside the present by the contraction of
successive instants or elements. Since it is not an instant outside the present but a
dimension internal to it, the past ultimately occupied the status of one of the two poles of
the asymmetrical passage produced by an equalization of difference. The ‘arrow of time’
is the being of the present insofar as it envelops a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ internal to itself.
The necessity of a second synthesis emerges at the moment this present is no longer
able to account for itself on its own terms, therefore requiring the deduction of another
synthesis. There are two distinct problems which trigger the necessity of a second
synthesis. First, there is the problem of the wholeness of time, or the inability of the
present to be co-extensive with time as a whole. The second concerns the necessity of a
double foundation for the active synthesis of memory in order for representation of the
present to be possible. The ‘passing’ of the present, its intratemporal character, lies at the
root of both of these problems. Our analysis will follow a similar course as that of
Deleuze, leading from the two limitations of the present to the pure past which
supplements them. As we shall see, these arguments for the necessity of the second
synthesis contain several formulations crucial to the ontological status of time as a whole.
 20  
 
 

i. The wholeness of time

According to Deleuze, because the present is always constituted through need and
synthesizes time through acts of repetition, it is incapable of being co-extensive with time
as a whole. The present is always the deployment of time, but that which is deployed by it
is ‘in’ time, and thus cannot be co-extensive with time as such. This problem is slightly
ambivalent, and seems to be established only retroactively through subsequent
arguments. It is not at all clear why the present should be co-extensive with the whole, or
why time itself should be a whole at all, and not essentially fragmented? If time were
filled with constitutive lacunae, or if it were an emptiness always filled only by
fragmented contents, it is not clear why this would be a problem.16 The import of the
problem is not entirely clear. All we are told is that because the present passes (i.e.
because it is intratemporal), it cannot be whole and therefore requires a supplement. This
problem returns in the The Logic of Sense, where it becomes a question of why the causal
series of bodies extendable to infinity (Chronos) cannot be absolute or eternal. Because
the arguments there concern an important distinction between infinity and eternity that is
not pressing in Difference and Repetition, the problem will be set aside in this context to
be taken up at a later time.

ii. The paradox of passage and the problem of memory

The present constitutes time, but time thus constituted must always pass, “moving by
leaps and bounds which encroach upon one another” (DR 79/108). Here we encounter a
problem, for it is obvious that the present must pass, but it is not obvious whether this
passage can be accounted for on the basis of the contraction synthesis alone. There is a
distinction then between the contraction that fills the present, and the passage from one
moment to another. Because the first synthesis coincides with the cancellation of an
inequality, and contracts this inequality by extracting the difference from it, it is able to
embed instants in one another by placing them into relations of past and future. It
connects these instants according to this asymmetrical relation. Yet these contracted
 21  
 
 

moments must also pass, and it is this passage that the habit synthesis cannot explain.
However, we know that it passes, and always passes as present. “By insisting upon the
finitude of contraction we have shown the effect; we have by no means shown why the
present passes” (DR 79/108). If our everyday experience of events places them always in
the present, as what is ‘happening’ at a given point in a successive series of moments, the
passing of this succession occurs when a new event replaces the first, causing the former
to slip into the past. However, if the contraction of instants produces the sensible
qualities and objects that fill the present, how is this non-present event able to enter into
it? By the same token, how does an event that was once present suddenly become past?
The problem of passage is given a concrete basis through the importance it serves for
the active synthesis of memory. In order to explain how reflection can reproduce a former
present within the present, we must discover a basis for the problem of passage proper to
reflection as such. The concrete question on the basis of which the problem of passage is
first addressed is the following: how does reflection carry out the transposition from the
retention of habit to the reproduction of a ‘re-presentation’? Between these two levels
lies the passing of a moment from present to former-present. As Deleuze remarks, “At
first sight, it is as if the past were trapped between two presents: the one which it has
been and the one in relation to which it is now past” (DR 80/109). On the basis of what
addition to the present does this present become capable of doubling itself in reflection?
The broad problem of the passing of the present and the specific problem of a
supplementary ground for reflection bring the analysis of the present to its limit,
necessitating another synthesis.

1.4 The Pure Past of Co-Existence, or the Transcendental Synthesis of Memory

On first reading, it appears that Deleuze has installed the second synthesis of time
precisely to resolve the problem of temporal passage. We are told that a transcendental
synthesis of memory “causes the present to pass [fait passer le present]” (DR 80/109). I
will follow the argumentation behind this claim closely in what follows, for it is
 22  
 
 

important to my overall project to show precisely how this synthesis is installed and what
function it is designed to serve.

i. The Argument From Active Synthesis

The problem of the active synthesis of reflection is a problem specific to representation,

i.e. it is deduced from the immediate experience of the activities of consciousness. The
problem is as follows. If the active synthesis of memory is able to represent both the
former present and the present present in a single representation, it must be grounded in a
dimension perpendicular to the present, which supplies it with a general element in which
to “focus” upon the present as a particularity. Previously, the past of retention contracted
by the habit synthesis had been shown to be particular with respect to the successive
instants it contracted in a present present, while the future had been the element of
generality opened onto by the field of expectation it generated (need). However, with the
addition of this perpendicular element, former presents may be focused upon as
particulars on the background of a general field that “mediates” between presents (DR
80/109). This allows reflection to select a particular former present in order to re-present
it within the present present. However, it cannot do so without simultaneously reflecting
this present present, since, as was already noted in our discussion of Kant, “it is of the
essence of representation not only to represent something but to represent its own
representivity” (ibid). By carrying out this bi-directional synthesis (of the former present
with the present present), representation functions as the embedding of presents, but
always “with respect to the pure element of the past.” We should notice then that before
Bergson is even mentioned in the text, a paradox of contemporaneity proper to the
activity of representation is discovered: the moment that the active synthesis forms the
memory of the former present is the same moment that it reflects itself as a present
present. The past is formed contemporaneously with the reflection of the present - “The
present and former presents are not, therefore, like two successive instants on the line of
time; rather, the present one necessarily contains an extra dimension in which it
represents the former and also represents itself” (ibid). The two asymmetrical functions
 23  
 
 

of the active synthesis, reproduction (memory) and reflection (recognition), depend on a

supplementary dimension precisely because of the contemporaneity of their operations.
And we should make no mistake, this is no trifling question – the contemporaneity of
these two operations “may be regarded as the principle of representation under this
double aspect: reproduction of the former present and reflection of the present present”
(DR 81/110). This “and”, italicised in the original, represents the paradox of
contemporaneity from the point of view of active synthesis. It is the reason this synthesis
requires a supplementary ground by a dimension perpendicular to the present; without
this “and” representation would be impossible.

ii. The Three Paradoxes of the Pure Past

Having shown the necessity of a supplementary ground, Deleuze then turns to Bergson’s
famous thesis of a pure past in order to give this ground a more positive concept. Here as
elsewhere, Matter and Memory is celebrated for its exemplary exploration of the
paradoxes constitutive of this transcendental synthesis, extracting the past as such from
its ensnarement between the present moment and the former present. Neither of the two
aspects of the passing of the present (the entrance of the new and the passage of the
present into the past) can explain the constitution of the past as such, for “if the new
present were required for the past to be constituted as past, then the former present would
never pass and the new one would never arrive” (DR 81/111). The problem is the same:
what makes the present pass? The Bergsonian paradox of contemporaneity is effectively
a transcendental version of the same paradox Deleuze already outlined vis-à-vis active
synthesis. The past must be constituted at the same time as the present if the present is to
be able to pass. There is no other argument supplied by the text at this point. We are
simply told that because the past must be contemporaneous with the present, that
therefore it is.
The second paradox of coexistence follows from the first. If each past is always
contemporaneous with each present, then “all of the past must coexist with the new
present in relation to which it is now past” (DR 81-2/111). The argument from a
 24  
 
 

particular contemporaneity to a coexisting whole hinges on the absence of the pure past
from the series of the present. While the past of retention was contracted as an internal
dimension of the present, the pure past coexisting with the present that it was cannot be
considered a dimension of time, because it never actually materializes as present. Rather,
Deleuze argues, it is because it never presents itself but rather insists, subsists, and is the
“reason” of the passing from one present to another, that it comes to form an a priori
element of which the present and the future constitute the dimensions. “It is the in-itself
of time, as the final ground of the passage of time.” (DR 82/111). The pure past is
therefore that which is presupposed as having already-been there, and in this way a third
paradox of pre-existence follows necessarily from the coexistence of the whole.
The third paradox of pre-existence can be viewed as an attempt to resolve a problem
that had been lingering from the analysis of the first synthesis: what is the status of the
succession of independent instants prior to being contracted? From where does the
present draw its content? If the dimensions internal to it are formed by synthesizing a
disparity, this disparity must pre-exist its synthesis in the present. It cannot, properly
speaking, ‘exist’ in another dimension of time, nor exhibit the particularity of a ‘now’
since such particularity is only formed through a synthetic act. From the second paradox
of coexistence we learned that the pure past coexists as a whole, and is a synthesis of all
time, of which the present and the future are only dimensions. What does it mean to
synthesize ‘all of time’? How must this whole be constituted such that it avails itself of
synthesis? Deleuze’s proposal that it is a synthesis of totalities. There are therefore two
perspectives on repetition and contraction: from the point of view of the habit synthesis,
the present consists of unrelated independent instants in a state of partial cohesion or
contraction; however, from the point of view of the pure past, this same present is itself
the most contracted degree of the whole of time, understood as a coexisting totality.
Every synthesis of habit contracts a particular level of the whole, which coexists with
itself in an infinity of differentiated levels in various degrees of relaxation and
contraction. Thus while the “empirical” series of presents proceeds by progressively
contracting instants which encroach on one another and enter into relations of succession
and simultaneity, there is a “vertical” or “noumenal” accretion of coexisting levels
 25  
 
 

entering into relation by virtue of “non-localisable connections, actions at a distance,

resonance and echoes” (DR 83/113). The two syntheses are correlated by the respective
limits proper to each: “the sign of the present is a passage to the limit, a maximal
contraction which comes to sanction the choice of a particular level as such” (ibid). If the
limit of the present lies precisely at the limit of the ability to contract, this limit coincides
at a deeper level with a displacement effected by the difference between levels within the
totality of the past. This difference between levels insists and subsists in the present that
contracts it, always at its edges, at the periphery of the “destiny” this difference opens up
for the agents actualised along its fringe. Destiny here refers to the effect of continuity
produced by the successive concrescence of levels, the “sense” produced in each of us
that every present moment “plays out ‘the same life’ at different levels” (DR 83/113).

iii. The Two Repetitions

The fact that the ever-increasing coexistence of levels can produce the external effect of
continuity indicates a central issue concerning the relation between these two repetitions,
one that Deleuze is by no means insensitive to.
First, the two repetitions cannot be mutually exclusive. They do not operate
independently of one another, each having its own causal efficacy. On the contrary, the
fact that the repetition of levels in the pure past is itself a transcendental or noumenal
synthesis means precisely that the empirical or “bare” repetition must be its effect, and be
produced only on the basis of the former. The two repetitions must be conceived as
operating within the same process. As Deleuze insists, “It is always in one and the same
movement that repetition includes difference … and that it must receive a positive
principle which gives rise to material and indifferent repetition” (DR 289/370).
Supplying this positive principle is what drives the entirety of Difference and Repetition
from the point of view of the philosophy of time. Why is such a positive principle
necessary?
Representation does not comprehend or conceive of the displaced and disguised
repetition of levels and totalities that makes it possible. Rather at its hands repetition
 26  
 
 

suffers the same fate as that of difference: it becomes explained by a difference without
concept, i.e. as numerical difference between contracted cases held external to one
another by virtue of their internal relation to the concept that supplies them with the form
of the Same. The general thrust of Difference and Repetition from this point of view is to
show both the inadequacy of the representational understanding of these two concepts,
and at the same time to ensure that the positive principles of difference and repetition it
replaces them with are capable of accounting for the illusions they produce. The
transcendental character of the argument is fulfilled to the degree that the positive
operations of an internal difference (Ideal multiplicity) and a clothed repetition (intensive
envelopment) are able to explain the illusions of representation, without being left in a
position of paralysis or relativity in light of it. Does this relation between the bare and the
clothed repetition (or the first and second synthesis) avoid such a paralysis? Since the
bare repetition of the habit synthesis is said to be only the external envelop of the clothed
repetition of levels in the pure past, and finds its ground only in the latter, the
‘sufficiency’ of the solution to this problem requires that the positive principle governing
the clothed repetition not remain relative to its effect, or its ‘external envelop.’ In other
words, repetition cannot be positively accounted for so long as its principle is put in place
only to guarantee the reality of its perceptual effect. It must be shown to produce this
effect as a consequence of its own nature, which must itself be given a positive account.
In order to determine the positivity and sufficiency of the synthesis of the pure past,
we must determine the conditions under which it is said to function as a “ground” for the
series of presents in relation to which it pre-exists. Deleuze opens his discussion of this
synthesis with an important description of this relation, which must be read in light of the
arguments developed so far.

1.5 Repetition and the Problem of Ground

The first synthesis, that of habit, is truly the foundation [fondation] of time; but we must distinguish
the foundation [fondation] from the ground [fondement]. The foundation concerns the soil [sol]: it
shows how something is established upon this soil, how it occupies and possesses it; whereas the
ground comes rather from the sky, it goes from the summit to the foundations and measures the
possessor and the soil against one another according to a title of ownership [titre de propriété]. Habit
is the foundation of time, the moving soil occupied by the passing present. The claim [la prétension]
of the present is precisely that it passes. However, it is what causes the present to pass [ce qui fait
 27  
 
 

passer], that to which the present and habit belong, which must be considered the ground of time.
(DR 79/108)

This passage provides an important shorthand account of the relation between the two
repetitions, or the first and second syntheses. In it are visible the two crucial limitations
of the pure past as a figure of a pure ground in itself.

i. The Insufficiency of the Pure Past: Circularity and Relativity of the Ground

We may begin by noting that the function of the foundation is described here in terms of
taking up a claim, or establishing a relationship of possession. Deleuze had already
indicated this aspect of the first synthesis in his discussion of larval subject formation a
few pages earlier. There he writes that, “We are contemplations, we are …claims and
satisfactions. The phenomenon of claiming is nothing but the contracting contemplation
through which we affirm our right [droit] and our expectation in regard to that which we
contract, along with our self-satisfaction in so far as we contemplate” (DR 74/101). The
claim [prétension] is therefore a relation established between a contracted content filling
a present and an instance prior to it, which it comes into being by contracting. A ‘self’
(albeit larval or partial) acquires its ‘claim’ to be, its ‘right’ to exist, only insofar as the
ground [le fond] distributes this ‘proprietary title’ to it. The ground therefore functions by
measuring the claimant according to its position with respect to the soil in which it takes
root. If the soil is the partial totality of the present demarcated by the variable limits of its
contractile power (the machines at its service), we may read this as saying that the ground
distributes to the content of the present its position within a successive series. However,
since it is the ground that carries out the distribution of this relative position with respect
to other contents or contingent factors within the present, the contracted self must also be
marked by an absolute position with respect to the ground that it contracts.
However, the problem for us concerns the potentially circular distribution this
implies. The ground “measures the possessor and the soil against one another according
to a title of ownership.” The ‘absolute position’ of any present with respect to its ground
is established precisely through the distribution of this title. Here we rediscover the same
danger, i.e. that the ‘title of ownership’ distributed by the ground could remain entirely
 28  
 
 

relative to that which it measures, in which case the ground would only function as an
appendage of that which it grounds. Again, everything hinges on the necessity and the
positivity of the notion of ground at stake in the concept of the pure past. On what basis
has this necessity proven itself? If its function is to ground the claim of the present by
‘measuring it against the soil,’ in what does this measurement consist? Can such a
measurement remain autonomous from that which it measures, so as not to be constructed
in a relation of dependency upon it?
What is at issue is a certain equivocation implicit in the notion of the ‘past in-itself.’
The “physical, periodic or circular time” that defined the dominant image of time prior to
Kant was subordinate to the measurement of movement. Time unfolded in cycles,
seasons, and patterns defined by the events that it is designed to measure as the natural
rhythms of the movement of the cosmos.17 In Plato’s schema, this time was all the same
grounded in a pure past in-itself characteristic of the Ideas, which ordered the series of
presents in a circle based upon their increasing or decreasing resemblance to the ideal
ground. Yet this in-itself distributed itself as a ground only by measuring the grounded
according to itself. Deleuze states the problem succinctly: “The shortcoming of the
ground is to remain relative to what it grounds, to borrow the characteristics of what it
grounds, and to be proved by these” (DR 88/119). If we are left solely with the concept
of a pure “in-itself” that grounds its claimants by distributing them in a circle of
resemblance and similarity to themselves, without introducing a destabilizing difference
that carries them beyond both the ground and the circular patterns it inaugurates thereby,
then time remains relative to the measurement of movement. Movement here means that
the contracted present receives its ground on the basis of its resemblance to the in-itself
that founds it. Does the ground of the second synthesis remain relative to the grounded?
We must evaluate this from the point of view of its relation to active synthesis.
 29  
 
 

ii. Confirmation of the Circularity of the Ground Through its Subordination to

Representation

The relationship of grounding holding between the successive presents and the pure past
contracted by them must be considered with respect to the difference that their relation
implies. It is sufficient to consider the measurement of the ground in light of the problem
that we began with, mainly the transposition of contractile retention into reflective re-
presentation, or reproduction. The only necessity of this ground that has truly been
demonstrated so far lies precisely in its capacity to serve as the enabling condition of the
active synthesis, the latter being the “principle of representation” (DR 81/110). We saw
how the pure past is needed in order to enable a representational “embedding of
presents.” However it goes without saying that in this capacity the ground of the pure past
becomes the very vehicle of the cancellation of difference, for the reproduction of the
former present in the present present cannot establish itself otherwise than through the
“variable relations of resemblance and contiguity known as forms of association” (DR
80/109). Representation is synonymous with the cancellation of the inner difference
characteristic of the pure past, or ‘spiritual repetition.’ As Deleuze notes,

Once it has become an object of representation, [the clothed] repetition is subordinated to the
identity of the elements or to the resemblance of the conserved and added cases. Spiritual repetition
unfolds in the being in itself of the past, whereas representation concerns and reaches only those
presents which result from active synthesis, thereby subordinating all repetition to the identity of
the present in reflection, or to the resemblance of the former present in reproduction. (DR 84/114)

If the “measurement” with which the ground supplies the present with its claim finds
nothing other than representational criteria to explain it, then the pure past can be nothing
but a transcendental principle of the Same and the Similar. “Always the same ambiguity
on the part of the ground [du fondement]: to represent itself in the circle that it imposes
on what it grounds [ce qu’il fonde], to return as an element in the circuit of representation
that it determines in principle” (110/145).
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1.6 Conclusion – The Default Character of the Pure Past and the Necessity of a
Third Synthesis

The pure past remains relative to the operations of the active synthesis, and for this
reason cannot escape the circular constitution according to which the ground succumbs to
the illusion of representation. We may note at this point that Deleuze has left the second
synthesis in a rather ambivalent position. For although the thesis of the pure past does
describe a substantial temporal element existing as a ground unto itself in an infinity of
levels, the logical necessity of its relation to the contracted present and the reconstituted
time of the active synthesis has been established only by default.
What does this mean, ‘by default?’ Take the example of the first paradox of
contemporaneity, which says that the past must be constituted at the same time as the
present if the present is to be able to pass. As we saw, Deleuze initially claims that the
principle of contemporaneous constitution “gives us the reason for the passing of the
present” (ibid). The claim was that the present is able to pass because the past is
contemporaneous with it. Yet it seems all we have done is taken a paradox (the past must
be constituted at the moment it is reflected) and created a principle in order to solve it.
The deductive feel of this claim hearkens back to Kant’s strategy of creating syntheses to
answer the question of how the experience of identity is possible. In other words, in
addition to its consequences, the argument itself seems to be circular.
The other arguments seem no less decisive in this respect. It is by default that the pure
past must exist so that representation can carry out its reflective activity. The embedding
of presents it presupposes requires a dimension in which former present and present
present can coexist, and pass from the latter to the former. Likewise, it is by default that it
must exist so that the series of the present can be supplied with a pre-existing element of
which it is the contraction. And it must be total and exist in-itself pre-temporally as a past
that was never present so that the dimensionality of the present (“before” and “after”)
may be internal to the contracted present, i.e. so that it may pass without going outside of
itself.
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It should not be concluded that the characteristics of the second synthesis are being
denied per se. We should not conclude as a result of the default character of the pure past
that the problem of coexistence, for example, does not require a solution. Events must be
said to coexist in some fashion, as must the elements that the present contracts. A
dimension of coexistence that at the same time produces the effect of pre-existence is also
still necessary. Thus we should not assume simply because the function of a “ground in
itself” leads to such equivocations that these aspects of the pure past are no longer on the
table. The same applies to the problem of the passing of the present. Deleuze initially
claimed that the principle of contemporaneous constitution “gives us the reason for the
passing of the present,” i.e. that the present is able to pass because the past is
contemporaneous with it. Was this ever given a proof? It was established that the past
must be coexistent with the present if passage is possible, but was it ever shown from
whence the past derives the power to make this passage happen? The pure past cannot
explain this passage, as it presents nothing which would allow us to explain the power of
passage on its basis. Now, while it may in fact be the case that the paradoxes Deleuze
initially drew upon are integral in the explanation of this passage, it nonetheless remains
that they cannot exclusively be associated with the second synthesis.
The problem of passage is a problem of how to “make the difference” between the
two repetitions, i.e. of how to supply the envelopment of the coexisting levels within the
bare repetition of presents with a positive principle of motion. In an important passage in
the conclusion, Deleuze expresses his hesitation to identify all the characteristics of the
clothed or implicated repetition with the synthesis of the pure past:

It therefore amounts to the same thing to say that material repetition has a secret and passive subject,
which does nothing but in which everything takes place, and that there are two repetitions, of which
the material is the most superficial. Perhaps it is incorrect to attribute all the characteristics of the
other to Memory, even if by memory is meant the transcendental faculty of a pure past…Memory is,
nevertheless, the first form in which the opposing characteristics of the two repetitions appear. (DR
287/367).

The pages that follow make clear that this is not a passing remark, but that it indicates a
necessary delimitation of the scope of the second synthesis. In short, the second synthesis
alone cannot account for the clothed repetition. That is, although the internal difference
 32  
 
 

initially associated with a pure past must still be accounted for, it is not principally within
memory (Mneumosyne) that we will discover its secrets.
At the same time, the problem of passage raises two further problems that the
synthesis of the past does not account for. First, there is the problem of how to account
for the distribution of difference within the present, i.e. that through which the division of
‘before’ and ‘after’ is effected. We know that the contraction of instants envelops a past
of retention and a present of expectation, and further that the arrow of time which this
envelopment produces is internal to the present as an intratemporal synthesis. In addition,
it was said that this arrow coincides with the cancellation of a difference, and measures
the duration of such a cancellation. Although it was shown that the limits of contraction
within the present correspond to a more profound difference between levels or totalities
in the past, it would be incorrect to assume that it is the latter difference that the arrow of
time in the present cancels. The difference between levels coincides with the limits of the
present as its ground, and as we saw is covered over by the active synthesis of the
reflected present. As its ground, the pure past was that from which the present contracts
itself. The contraction of instants into a present is at the same time an increasing
coexistence of levels in the past, and the difference between levels is strictly identical to
the ‘contemplation’ of a virtual totality that each present is. However, there is a more
fundamental order of differences that distributes the relationship of contemplation
between grounding and grounded, and it is this difference which divides the present into
a before and an after. We are in need of an explanation as to how the succession and
simultaneity of the present, the coexistence of the past, and the emergence of the new fit
together into a coherent operativity of time, without splitting-off into non-communicating
ontological orders of being. The splitting by virtue of which the asymmetry of before and
after is distributed must ensure that this contraction of instants in the present also
envelops the difference between levels in the past. In short, it must ensure that the
embedding of presents in reflection also effect a concrescence of virtual coexistence, and
that the division of the present result in a distribution of series capable of producing the
new. Contrary to the notion of totality proper to the pure past, a more profound synthesis
 33  
 
 

creates a totality of dimensions as such. This will be addressed at greater length in what is
to come.
“Just as the ground is in a sense ‘bent’ and must lead us towards a beyond, so the
second synthesis of time points beyond itself in the direction of a third which denounces
the illusion of the in-itself as still a correlate of representation” (DR 88/119). Developing
the consequences of this denunciation and the ‘bend’ beyond the ground of the second
synthesis will be the focus of chapter three.
 34  
 
 

Chapter 2
Excursus on Badiou’s Deleuze

In the previous chapter I attempted to demonstrate that the grounding relationship

between a pure past and the partially-closed present ultimately does not avoid two
important pitfalls –on the one hand, the cyclical repetition of the classical image of time;
on the other hand, the relativity of the grounding ‘substance’ of time to the present
instants that this cyclical repetition presupposes. Before proceeding to Deleuze’s analysis
of the third synthesis of time which these remarks serve to preface, a short excursus on
Alain Badiou’s Deleuze: the Clamor of Being18 will serve both to broaden and to sharpen
the scope of this problematic. It should be noted that although this excursus will conclude
by outlining some reservations I have about the criticisms Badiou levels against the
notion of the virtual, I am not intending this to be a systematic or complete response to
his challenging study of Deleuze. The hope is simply that by installing this excursus here
in the present text, the problems it raises will resonate throughout the chapters that
follow.

2.1 An Ontology of the One

Opposed to the analytic as much as the phenomenological strains of contemporary

philosophy, it is Badiou’s conviction that Deleuze must be read as a consummate
ontologist, for whom the guiding question of philosophy is nothing less than the question
of Being as such. For this reason, Badiou distinguishes both Deleuze and himself from
the critical injunction of Kantian philosophy, which attempted to render such an
undertaking impossible. Indeed, his characterization of “classical” philosophy depends
solely on this basic distinction: classical philosophy consists of that thinking which
purports to approach the question of Being unscathed by the Kantian prohibition against
metaphysics (CB 20).
Badiou’s investment in his reading of Deleuze is made clear from the outset of the
text: “I gradually became aware that, in developing an ontology of the multiple, it was
vis-à-vis Deleuze and no one else I was positioning my endeavor” (CB 3). The decisive
 35  
 
 

problem is then immediately posed: the task of philosophy that Badiou understands both
he and Deleuze to be fulfilling in different ways is that of “an immanent
conceptualisation of the multiple” (CB 4). However, as he quickly informs us, his
intention is to demonstrate that despite this common philosophical task, “Deleuze’s
fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking
to a renewed concept of the One” (CB 10). Badiou extracts the requirements of this
metaphysics of the One from an important passage in the Logic of Sense: “one single
event for all events; a single and same aliquid for that which happens and that which is
said; and a single and same being for the impossible, the possible and the real” (LS
180/211). It is the attainment of this “one single” that Badiou sees Deleuze’s work to be
seeking in all its variations.
The importance of Badiou’s study lies in its rigorous demonstration that behind the
various names given it throughout Deleuze’s oeuvre, the meaning of Being always
defaults to a One-All subsuming all ontological reality. “[Deleuze’s] work is concerned
with thinking thought (its act, its movement) on the basis of an ontological
precomprehension of Being as One.” Although the univocity of this One-All does not
preclude the difference proper to thought, or thought’s ability to conceive of being in
many “formally distinct senses,” what must nonetheless be understood, he claims, is that
despite the proliferation of such a formal or modal difference, Deleuze will always insist
on the ontological status subtending this manifold, always refer it to a “single designated
entity, ontologically one” (DR 35/53, cited by Badiou).

2.2 Formal Difference and Disjunctive Synthesis

The formal/real distinction forms the basis of Badiou’s demonstration of the “expressive
sovereignty of the One,” because it supplies the mechanism by which all differences may
be said to be derivative of a univocal claim (CB 20-22). The emphasis on this distinction
leads him to privilege a very particular reading of the disjunctive synthesis in Deleuze.
The argument is that because thought is understood as the expressive deployment of the
One, its element cannot permit an internalized relation within any of its contents, or at
 36  
 
 

least one which would potentially permit any contents the privilege of internalizing any
others. The “equality” of being therefore entails that its modalities be mutually external to
one another, that “nothing of what is ever [have] the slightest internal relation to anything
else” (CB 20-21). The nonrelation of actual beings follows necessarily from the neutral
equality of the One which supplies their content. This actualisation-without-relation is
how Badiou understands the disjunctive synthesis in Deleuze – that is, as the radical
power of separation effected by being upon the terms of its existence. The task, as Badiou
understands it, must be to demonstrate in what way “the nonrelation is still a relation, and
even a relation of a deeper sort” (Foucault, 63, translation modified; cited p.21 CB). It is
consequently not between actualised beings that this more “profound” relation will be
sought, but rather between thought and the Being that constitutes it (CB 20-21).
It is important to appreciate the centrality of this relation between formal distinction
and disjunctive synthesis to Badiou’s reading. The fact that the multiplicity of beings is
formal means, effectively, that individuation is merely modal, and that individuating
difference ultimately does not possess a reality capable of distributing sense (which is
unique). Consequently, Badiou is able to claim that “for Deleuze, beings are local
degrees of intensity or inflections of power that are in constant movement and strictly
singular. And as power is but a name of Being, beings are only expressive modalities of
the One” (CB 25). While the “power of the One” is understood as the power to effect the
disjunctive synthesis producing the formal differences of the multiple, the membra
disjuncta produced by this synthesis exist in relation to this productive operation as to an
ontological identity common to all of them, and yet no less unique on this account.
Since the multiple possesses a purely formal difference as regards its forms, and a
purely modal or numerical difference as regards its individuations, its difference is
thereby not ontologically “real”; the multiple is always on this account a “theatre of the
simulacra of Being” (CB 25). This ‘relation-of-nonrelation’ between the modal
individuation of the multiple and the univocal One is the crux of Deleuze’s purported
“Platonism.” It is Platonistic because the relation between the multiple and the One is
established in Badiou’s reading via a ‘participatory’ schema. Understood as simulacra,
the multiple form the “equivocal cases of univocity” that affirm, “by an inflection of
 37  
 
 

intensity whose difference is purely formal or modal,” the ontological identity of the One
that produces them in their divergence.
How is this ‘ontological identity’ to be understood? Badiou is careful to underline
that the univocity of the One cannot be confused with numerical identity, since numerical
distinction only applies to the formal manifold of the multiple. As the immanent
productive power of divergence, the One creates the world as a “work, and not a state. It
is demiurgic.” For this reason, simulacra are not to be negatively defined against a real
that they lack, for what is real is precisely the originary disjunction that produces beings
in their formal or modal difference. Yet the One is said to be no less unique as well.
Owing to its uniqueness, this disjunction must be aligned with a pure event, an
eventuation of the One in a single Event.

2.3 Method and Intuition – the Nominal Two and the Ontological One

As Badiou sees it, the thorny question arises not with respect to this reasoning from
uniqueness to a unique event, but how this uniqueness and identity can come to be
named. Badiou’s claim is that for Deleuze a single name alone is incapable of naming
univocity – one always requires two. Why is a two needed to name a One? Badiou’s
reasoning is as follows:

Being needs to be said in a single sense both from the viewpoint of the unity of its power, and
from the viewpoint of the multiplicity of the divergent simulacra that this power actualizes in itself
… it is as though the univocity of being is thereby accentuated for thought through its being said,
at one moment, in its immediate ‘matter,’ and, in the next, in its forms or actualisations. (CB 28)

If univocity is to take centre stage in Deleuze’s philosophy, both his method and its
various permutations and expressions must be conceived as deliberately designed with
the single and sole aim of taking up a relation to the One, making it the drive par
excellence of philosophical thought. For this reason it is Badiou’s contention that the
“intuition” of the One is the principal motif of Deleuze’s philosophy. This “singular
intuition” cannot be taken up according to fixed and unequal forms of distribution, such
as categories or species/genera couplings, for the simple reason that such mediations and
generalities are always approximations based on the preliminary movements of formal
 38  
 
 

and modal divisions of being. The task is therefore to attempt to think both the univocity
of being and the equivocity of beings together – and this requires a resolutely anti-
dialectical method. Binaries such as that of active/passive, effectuation/counter-
effectuation are merely preliminary (and hence still “categorical”) moments of thought’s
passage to the limit of its power, which once reached allows it to apprehend Being in the
“neutrality of what Deleuze calls ‘extra-being’” (CB 34). Confronted with this neutrality,
every relation and distribution dissolves, leaving only the Univocal to perpetually return
in thought.
Intuition initially involves a two-fold procedure. Badiou’s reading of this neutrality at
the limit of thought invokes the Leibnizian notions of the clear-confused and distinct-
obscure deployed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition against the Cartesian method
of intuition. By initially preserving the dimensional language of ‘depth’ associated with
this Leibnizian property of Ideas in Difference and Repetition, Badiou describes the
method of intuition as necessitating a “plunging” beyond the “clear intensity” of beings
in their distinctness and separation, so as to recover that which remains obscured by their
dissimulation, i.e. the being of their Ground. This submersion and descent is coupled with
an inverse and complementary direction of re-ascent. Intuition first descends, submerging
formal and modal differences so as to think beings in their ultimate non-separation in the
One, then proceeding to

re-ascend from the One toward the singular being, in following the immanent productive lines of
power, and thereby presenting the being in question as a simulacrum of Being … Thought is
completed when, under the constraint of a case, it has succeeded in thoroughly unfolding that
duplicity of beings which is simply the formal expression of the fact that univocity is expressed as
equivocity. (CB 36)

This two-fold movement of intuition ultimately amounts to a merely introductory

distinction, since what is ultimately of capital importance is the unity of the transition
from beings to Being and backwards, which relates the closed contents of a system to
their ‘open duration’ and which at the same time relates this open duration back to them.
Invoking the ‘superficiality’ of sense in LS and its “donation” by the univocity of
nonsense, Badiou makes clear that “‘ascending and descending’ are only the obligatory
pair of names required to name what the being of thought is: an intuition, which is,
 39  
 
 

integrally and completely, a movement of and within the surface, or in other words, a
violent superficial tension” (CB 39). His intention is therefore not to force the distinction
between barren surface and profound depth (which is only preliminary), but to secure the
precondition for an “adequation” of thought to being in the notion of univocity. What
intuition does is therefore to provide a methodological confirmation of the identity of the
movement of thought to that of Being as such. In this identity lies the secret of univocity:
“When we have grasped the double movement of descent and ascent, from beings to
Being, then from Being to beings, we have in fact thought the movement of Being itself,
which is only the interval, or the difference, between these two movements.” (CB 39)
Since the intuitive method coincides with the movement of Being itself, and “the One is
its own movement (because it is life or infinite virtuality)” a non-categorical grounding
for thought is secured, and thought “attains intellectual beatitude, which is the enjoyment
of the impersonal” (ibid).
It appears then that the dualisms invoked along the way, of thought and being, of
formal difference and ontological identity, have the destiny of being methodically
cancelled out in favor of one of their sides. Thought moves from beings to Being only to
eventually discover that Being is this movement itself. This is the recurrent rhetorical
maneuver of Badiou’s readings over the course of the second half of his study. Indeed, he
makes this maneuver explicit at the opening of chapter 4, “the Virtual”: “We are now
familiar with the Deleuzian logic of the One: two names are required for the One in order
to test that the ontological univocity designated by the nominal pair proceeds from a
single one of these names” (CB 43).

2.4 The Virtual Ground and the Problem of Complete Determination

The next couple queued for an intuitive dismantling is that of the virtual/actual. Thus one
expects the argument to be that this conceptual couple is merely a preliminary to
discovering the truth of the actual in the Being of virtuality, and indeed, this is the way
Badiou opens the chapter: “We require the couple virtual/actual in order to test that an
actual being univocally possesses its being as a function of its virtuality. In this sense the
 40  
 
 

virtual is the ground of the actual” (ibid). Badiou begins by distinguishing the sense of
the word “ground” from the Platonist “mimetic” vision of being, according to Deleuze’s
well-known critiques of the model/copy paradigm in ancient philosophy.19 Beings cannot
be evaluated as mimetically participating in an internal relation of resemblance to a
superior ontological model or form of Being, one is left with an equivocity of Being
(depending on the proximity of the beings it is said of to the model) and a categorical
distribution which partitions being to the real ground, the copies, and those that fit
nowhere, the simulacra. Univocity demands the destruction of this hierarchical image of
thought, for in it beings “are an immanent production of the One, and not at all images
governed by similarity. They are fortuitous modalities of the univocal and, being as far
removed as possible from any mimetic hierarchy, can only be thought in their anarchic
coexistence through disjunctive synthesis” (CB 44). All the same, it is Badiou’s
contention that Deleuze does not strive for a weak and sickly “ungrounded” image of
thought, but rather one with a “restricted” conception of what grounding means. For
Badiou, a restricted ground means nothing other than the fact that the modally and
formally distinct differences all receive a univocal determination as singular beings. The
anarchic coexistence produced through disjunctive synthesis must therefore always
receive an “eternal ‘share’” mooring its equivocal difference in the absolute unity of the
One. For this reason, the paradox Badiou’s reading aims to show up is that the very
thought of multiplicity in Deleuze necessitates an invariant non-hierarchical ground. In
other words, that we can only have multiplicity when it is grounded in a One. The virtual
is the concept Deleuze most consistently invokes in this capacity as ground.
According to Badiou, the virtual is the “the very Being of beings, …[or] beings qua
Being, for beings are but modalities of the One, and the One is the living production of its
modes” (CB 48). It cannot be confused with the possible, which is only the shadow
resurrected after the fact and retroactively posited as its pre-existing concept. Whereas
the possible is the static and equivocal image of the created separated from the act of
creation, the virtual is the reality of the process of actualisation as the “infinite power of
the One to differentiate itself on its own surface […] the virtual is this process” (CB 49).
Thus although Badiou insists on the unified and absolute grounding power of the virtual,
 41  
 
 

he nonetheless acknowledges its processural status. Since it produces beings in the unity
of its disjunctive synthesis, and is coextensive with the perpetual emergence or
production of the (formal and modal) ‘new,’ it can never be “given in its totality” (ibid).
It is the Open as the process of constant change.
Despite the connotation of the notion of a unified “One”, Badiou nonetheless follows
Deleuze’s insistence that the virtual cannot be an indeterminate or formless reservoir for
the actual. The virtual must therefore be completely determined. The actual is referred not
to the virtual but to virtualities in the plural, to differentiated and determined problems
producing the actual as cases of solution. Having already declared the One to be not a
numerically identical ‘thing’ but a process, Badiou sees no contradiction in referring to
the virtual as a “locus of problems” to which a double sovereignty applies:

On the one hand, the being of the actual is a transitory modality of the One, which is thought as
virtuality. On the other, the Being-One of the problems or virtualities is the virtual as the real of
the problematic in general, as the universal power of problems and their solutions. The virtual is
the ground for the actual…but the virtual is also the ground for itself, for the being of virtualities,
insofar as it differentiates, or problematises them. (CB 50)

In other words, there is an intra-problematic determination in which the virtual

determines itself and differentiates itself, and this is coextensive with the disjunction
producing beings in their actuality. The two levels of determination emerge
simultaneously. And in keeping with the logic of collapsing binaries, we can anticipate
Badiou’s privileging of one above the other. Returning again to the metaphor of “depth,”
Badiou distinguishes the “small circuit” of the surface (correlated with the
differentiation20 of the actual) from the “deep” determination that concerns the expansion
and differentiation of the virtualities themselves, and which “forms, despite everything, a
sort of interior of the One (or of the Whole)” (CB 51).
There seems to be a stumbling block at this point. Badiou never in fact explains how
this double determination can be accounted for in light of the unity of the operativity of
the One. Having welded the disjunctive synthesis of the One strictly to the formal/real
distinction responsible for producing numerically distinct inflections of the One through
its “small circuit”, what sort of distinction or logic of difference can account for the
internal difference proper to the “interior” differentiation of virtualities themselves?
 42  
 
 

Hence the “despite everything” in the quote cited above – Badiou has not thus far made
any room for difference that is not either numerical or processural. And while it is no
doubt the case that the problematic field of virtualities is processural and provides in
Deleuze a “pure element of quantitability”,21 it is no less the case that the differential
relations filling this field are not composed partes extra partes, as extrinsically or
numerically distinct. The figure of disjunction and the formal difference it produces seem
inadequate tools to explain how this virtual differentiation can be conceived otherwise
than in the image of the actual.

2.5 Indiscernibility and the Doubled Object

Badiou concludes his analysis of the virtual with a critique of the doubled object it
requires. Because the virtual provides a ground for actual objects, it cannot be thought
apart from them. This follows strictly from the requirements of the univocity of Being,
which would cease to be univocal if it needed to be said according to a division between
the sphere of produced beings and their objective virtual correlates. Citing Deleuze’s
claim that “the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object – as though the
object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an
objective dimension” (DR 209/269), Badiou fails to see how the distinction between a
virtual image, being in itself completely determined, can be conceived at the same time as
a part of an actual object, albeit as “unequal odd halves” (ibid). Undoubtedly this is due
to his guiding assumption that “it is impossible for the virtual, as the power proper to the
One, to be a simulacrum” (CB 52). The very notion that the virtual could itself be
‘reduced’ to an image is contrary to Badiou’s driving assumptions, since the virtual is
precisely that which gives rise to images as simulacra of itself. On the other hand, if the
two dimensions are held apart from one another, and the actual object is said to be a
virtual image, its being as an image cannot be said to be a part of the object. Badiou
refers to this paradox as the “precarious theory of the Double” (ibid).
In attempting to expand the consequences of this Double status of the” image-being,”
Badiou forces the paradox all the way to the heart of time itself. Claiming that an
 43  
 
 

“analysis of indiscernibles” is Deleuze’s solution to the problem, Badiou compares the

“splitting” of the object into its two unequal ‘halves’ to the Bergsonian “surging-forth of
time” developed in Cinema 2. Time is said to split into two dissymmetrical flows, one
making the present pass, the other preserving its virtual image in the totality of the past.22
Identifying the actual with the present and the virtual (One) with the past, Badiou
declares that “the real object is therefore exactly like time: it is a splitting or a duplicity.
We can say that the image-object is time, which is to say, once again, that it is a
continuous creation that is, however, only effective in its division” (CB 52).
Having identified the theory of the Double with the dissymmetrical surging of time
understood as a creative division or splitting, have we not arrived once again at the unity
of the All-One expressive power of Being again? Interestingly, Badiou refuses this
conclusion. As he reads it, this would entail a threat to univocity, since Being would have
to be said according to the present in its closed actuality and according to the past in its
open and totalizing virtuality. He concludes rather that a principle is lacking by which
this splitting or distinction between virtual past and actual present can be made. In order
to avoid the equivocity of categories and the negativity of dialectics, Deleuze is forced to
posit an indiscernible object existing at the intersection of the two images, actual and
virtual. He concludes his indictment by stating that “the complete determination of the
ground as virtual implies an essential indetermination of that for which it serves as a
ground. For any intuitive determination is necessarily disoriented when, regarding the
two parts of the object, ‘we do not know which is one and which is the other’ (C2
81/109)” (CB 53). The virtual cannot therefore fulfill the requirement of the univocal
since it supplies us with no concept by which intuition can distinguish it from the actual.
At the expense of the complete determination of the virtual as a problematic field comes
the indetermination of the actual it produces, “because [the actual] phantasmically splits
into two. In this circuit of thought, it is the Two and not the One that is instated” (ibid).
According to Badiou, the ultimate consequence of Deleuze’s ‘fidelity to the One’ is that
he arrives at the figure of an “unthinkable Two” via an “obscure metaphor of the ‘mutual
image.’” From this vantage point, “the virtual is no better than the finality of which it is
the inversion” (ibid).
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2.6 Individuation and the Splitting of Time

A few critical remarks are necessary at this point. I will group these remarks around
three problems: a) the question of individuation, b) the splitting of time, and c) the
problem of ground, or pure determination.
As was mentioned already, Badiou’s concession to virtual plurality or “deep
determination” seems ultimately unsupportable on his own terms. For Deleuze the virtual
is a multiplicity composed of problematics that differentiate one another and enter into
overlapping and reciprocally determinative relations. And while Badiou wants to
acknowledge the differential character of the problematic field, I have already indicated
above that it seems impossible on his terms to account for the differentiation that could
explain this “interiority” or “deep determination,” for it would require an account of
internal difference lacking in his treatment. On Badiou’s reading (so far as I can tell), all
difference seems to consist of relations proper to actual beings, which possess merely an
extrinsic form of difference, i.e. one of separation. As we saw, Badiou begins by
emphasizing the nonrelation between constituted beings. This enables him to privilege the
at-once singular and universal relation between beings and their ground in the One-All.
Yet the very disjunctive synthesis responsible for producing them in their being is the
self-same function that places them in a relation-of-nonrelation with each other. It seems
then that the operativity of the One as creative process of production ultimately functions
to determine beings through an exclusive disjunction. How then can this same One
produce internal difference, which must always be implicating and enveloping other
differences, creating resonances, and reciprocally determining them, and is absolutely not
nonrelational? It is necessary to put the question simply: does the fact that Badiou claims
the virtual to be processural and composed of differentiated problematic structures mean
he gives adequate priority to the intensive, as the strata of individuation and internal
difference? It appears he does not, for the simple reason that he claims the intensive to be
produced by the One, and furthermore because he attributes to intensities the
characteristics of actual beings. This is most evident in his critique of the ‘complete
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determination’ of the virtual, and therefore relates to the problem of time as well. This
difference in kind between the order of intensities and that of the actual will be addressed
at length in chapter four below.
Second, it seems to me that the reason Badiou stumbles on the difference between the
complete determination of the virtual and the extrinsic difference of the actual is because
he has overlooked the very synthesis of time whose meaning lies precisely in the splitting
and embedding of the two, i.e. the third synthesis of time.23 For this reason, it seems all
the less surprising that he relates the problem of the doubled object immediately to that of
the splitting between past and present. As was shown in the previous chapter, if the
analysis of time were to rest content with only the pure past and the series of actual
presents, the relation of grounding remains too unilateral, too circular, and ultimately
cannot account for the order, totality, and series characteristic of the deployment of the
present and the preservation of the past. Indeed, Badiou gestures ever so subtlety to the
third synthesis in a tongue-in-cheek manner when he complains that the inverse
consequence of an emphasis on the complete determination of the virtual is a
“phantasmic” splitting of the actual into two (CB 53). This is more literal than it may at
first appear. The phantasm is integrally related to the third synthesis or the Aion, whose
function is precisely to ensure this splitting of time in the present. Finally, if the problem
behind the indiscernibility of the two halves of the object concerns precisely the
requirements of univocity as such, it is of no small importance that Deleuze goes to some
length in Difference and Repetition to show that the relations of grounding and the power
of determination he had at first located in the relation between pure past and the actual
present are in fact internal to this third synthesis. It is consequently only from the point of
view of the latter that the argument for univocity can fully be laid out. Stopping short at
the second synthesis and criticizing the inadequacy of the determination of the actual
overlooks the fact that the third synthesis coincides with the pure form of time and is the
instance of determination as such. These two problems, ground and determination,
require careful attention.
Rather than dismissing Badiou’s analysis of determination due to an insufficient
emphasis either on individuation or on the ungrounding of Aion (which incidentally I
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view as inseparably linked), it is more important to tarry with the problem he poses on its
own terms, while keeping these issues in mind. As Badiou goes to great lengths to show,
Determination as such concerns a relation between a ground and an instance of
determination that is internal to the being determined by it (as opposed to an extrinsic
causal determination between beings, for example). Because Badiou chooses to
emphasize the real/formal distinction above all other considerations, a participatory
model comes to govern the relation between simulacra and the One. A disjunctive
synthesis distributes differences, but only by ensuring that this difference is ultimately
ineffectual and epiphenomenal, having no ontological consequence. The “proprietary
title” or “eternal share” apportioned to the multiple in its formal difference is ensured
precisely by the unilateral character of this difference. What does it mean for the
determination to be unilateral? Does the ground remain neutral when it rises to the
surface and determines beings? What happens in this instance of pure determination?

2.7 The Kantian Problem of Determination

Badiou is absolutely correct to assume that how we think ground is inseparable from our
ability to develop a rigorous conception of determination as such, and therefore to
associate the two problems. It is important, before unfolding this problem, to recognize
its Kantian legacy, which concerns the transcendental not from the point of view of
Kant’s rejoinder against metaphysics, but rather through the problem of time as the
discovery of transcendental difference as such.
If Difference and Repetition can be said to have a Kantian heritage, it is because of
the centrality of the problem of determination to its argument. If the legacy of this
problem of determination is Kantian, this is due to the fact that Deleuze tends to read the
Copernican revolution and the discovery of the transcendental entirely through Kant’s
famous rejoinder to Descartes, which concerned precisely the problem of the form of
determination. Deleuze’s analysis of this Kantian problem can be found in pages 85-87 of
Difference and Repetition [116-118 in original]. In its original expression, the Cartesian
Cogito contains two logical values: a moment of determination, and an undetermined
 47  
 
 

content. For Descartes, the determination ‘I think’ directly implies an undetermined

existence (‘I am,’ since to think one must exist). The latter is then directly converted
under the form of the initial determination, resulting in the existence of a ‘thinking
substance.’ Kant’s objection, which Deleuze at one point totalizes the entire Kantian
Critique under (85/116), consists of claiming that it is impossible to simply convert the
undetermined directly under the form of the determined. Thus although there is no doubt
that in order to think one must exist, a pure self-intuition does not supply sufficient
criteria with which to ground the determination of this existence. Deleuze summarizes
Kant’s solution as follows:

Kant therefore adds a third logical value: the determinable, or the form in which the undetermined is
determinable (by the determination). This third value suffices to make logic a transcendental
instance. It amounts to the discovery of Difference – no longer in the form of an empirical difference
between two determinations, but in the form of a transcendental Difference between the
Determination as such [LA détermination] and what it determines. No longer in the form of an
external difference which separates, but in the form of an internal Difference which establishes an a
priori relation between thought and being. Kant’s answer is well-known: the form under which
undetermined existence is determinable by the ‘I think’ is that of time. (DR 86/116).

In this short passage we may identify two distinctions that are crucial to the project of
Difference and Repetition. First, there is the difference between an empirical and a
transcendental instance of logic. The difference between the fact of the ‘I think’ and the
obvious conclusion that this thinking must entail an existence can only be resolved once
the determination of this existence is granted a value prior to its instantiation, giving the
form of this determination a transcendental status. In other words, the difference between
the form of determination and that which it determines (existence) is not an empirical
distinction, but a transcendental one. The transcendental is the locus of determination as
such [LA détermination]. Second, this transcendental difference between determination
and the determined cannot be extrinsic, i.e. a difference between two empirical existences
or objects. It must be internal to the thing determined, and have an entirely other manner
of relating to this thing than that of external objects or causes. It is an a priori relation, a
relation unconditioned by the contingent circumstances of its existence. This relation is
identified with Difference – not empirical difference (a difference between, or one that
separates), but Difference in-itself, or internal Difference. It is necessary to read this
 48  
 
 

passage in light of the opening discussion of chapter one, “Difference in-Itself.” In other
words, to read the problem of determination as a problem of ground.

2.8 Difference and Determination

As was already seen vis-à-vis Kant, the problem of determination concerned a particular
kind of relationality, one marked by an internal difference. Chapter One of Difference
and Repetition, “Difference in Itself,” begins by developing this same point, except with
the crucial difference that here the problem of transcendental determination is cast in
terms of a relation between the grounded and its ground. We are told that difference in
itself cannot be located between two empirical things, or determinations – it concerns
rather the determination of a more originary or ‘fundamental’ kind of relation, mainly the
relation between an empirical object or existing thing and that which grounds it,
supplying this thing with its distinction or individuality. The question of difference in-
itself initially inquires into the ground for individuality as such. Not individual
differences, which would be empirical, but the difference of the individual as such, the
difference from which the individual stems. Since this relation between a thing and its
ground is the very means by which this thing becomes the thing that it is, this is a
question about the determination of beings in their being. As Deleuze remarks,
“Difference is the state in which we can speak of determination as such [on peut parler
de LA détermination]” (DR 28/43). Hence, if the problem of difference is inseparable
from that of determination as such, and this does not concern an extrinsic determination
between two things (‘this is this and therefore not that’), then a distinction of quite
another sort must characterize this relation between things and that which grounds them.
It is at this point that Deleuze first articulates the relation between ground and
grounded as a “unilateral” distinction, by asking us to imagine a sort of distinction in
which “that from which [something] distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from
it” (Ibid). In this relation, the thing becomes the thing that it is by being distinguished
from an indeterminate ground. This indeterminate ground persists as a ground for this
thing, remains stuck to it, rises to the surface with it. Although this distinction is
 49  
 
 

considered unilateral precisely due to the ground’s power of remaining ground, the
ground does not remain ‘below’ as a pure indeterminate, but in rising to the surface
“acquires autonomous existence; the form reflected in this ground is no longer a form but
an abstract line acting directly upon the soul” (DR 28/43). Deleuze describes such
determination as a “mirror in which both determinate and the indeterminate combine in a
single determination which ‘makes the difference’” (Ibid). Determination therefore
consists in this ‘ascent’ of the ground to the surface through which the thing receives its
individuating distinction. Alternately put, “difference is this state in which determination
takes the form of unilateral distinction,” it is made through it (ibid). If a certain kind of
“participation” still persists here it is one marked by cruelty and violence – monstrosity.
Determination consists of this relation between a raised ground and a form dissolved in
its reflection.
We have seen that the difficulty with Badiou’s assessment of this relation concerned
his articulation of the internal difference generated by this distinction. Yet it appears we
have now introduced two kinds of internal difference – the virtual differentiation of
problems (complete determination) on the one hand, and the internal difference of the
individual, which is an individuating difference existing between it and the ground in
relation to which it is determined. Are these the same? According to Badiou, it would
appear they are, since the virtual is the ground univocally individuating the formal
difference of beings. Therefore the difference of the individual corresponds precisely to
the “eternal share” of the ground that the being is as an immanent modalization of the
One. However, what if determination as such were not an action of the ground per se?
What if it were related to grounding only by virtue of a constitutive ungrounding that
caused the ground to return as difference? What if individuation were not merely formal
and disjunctive, but emerged precisely in and through the ungrounding of the ground as a
more fundamental disjointedness between the grounding and the grounded?
As Deleuze indicated in the quote above, when forms are reflected in the ground,
this reflection dissolves into an “abstract line acting directly upon the soul.” This abstract
line constitutes the meeting point of the grounded and the ground. If the abstract line
were coextensive with the ground as such, then the logic of the One as Badiou has
 50  
 
 

presented it would seem to govern this relation as a unilateral constitution. However, if

the intersection between ground and grounded were shown to be irreducible to either of
these two, then the ground would be displaced from its central role in the determination
of beings, and univocity would have to be reconsidered in light of whatever power or
agent had carried out this displacement.
This thought of determination does not reach its conclusion until late in the final
chapter of Difference and Repetition. There Deleuze articulates a crucial connection
internal to determination as such, welding thought to the abstract line and syncing it up to
the labyrinthine trajectory of the pure and empty form of time, or the Aion:
It is the empty form of time which introduces and constitutes Difference in thought, on the basis of
which it thinks, in the form of the difference between the indeterminate and the determination. It is
this form of time which distributes throughout itself an I fractured by the abstract line, a passive
self produced by a groundlessness that it contemplates. It is this which engenders thought within
thought, for thought thinks only by means of difference, around this point of ungrounding. It is
difference or the form of the determinable which causes thought to function – in other words, the
entire machine of determination and the indeterminate. (DR 276/354)

The abstract line, as the pure and empty form of time, functions as the point of
ungrounding which makes the machine of determination function. It makes the
difference. How can a line neither grounding nor grounded perform this function?
Why does Deleuze need the abstract line, or an empty form of time? Answering this
question will be the task of the chapter 3.
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Chapter 3
Ontological Repetition - The Third Synthesis and the Ungrounding of Time

At the extreme limit of pain, nothing remains but the conditions of time and space. -Hölderlin

The ultimate repetition, the ultimate theatre, therefore encompasses everything; while in another
sense it destroys everything; and in yet another sense selects among everything. -Deleuze

In the preceding chapters, three distinct problems came into focus: the problem of the
indiscernibility between virtual and actual (or ‘objective indetermination’), the
problem of the intra and inter-dimensionality of time (or its ‘totality’), and the
inadequacy of a ground in itself to explain the latter (the problem of the ‘in-itself’ as
representational). In this chapter, I will elaborate the formal character of the third
synthesis of time insofar as it provides a solution to these problems. This discussion
will outline the functions that this synthesis carries out, by emphasizing the nature of
its relation to the other two syntheses discussed. As we shall see, there are three
essential aspects proper to this relation. The third synthesis distributes the order,
totality, and the series of the other two syntheses. As the above quote indicates, it
encompasses these other syntheses at the same time as it carries out their
simultaneous destruction and selection. The next chapter will analyze the specific
mechanisms on the basis of which such functions are possible. Before doing so, the
significance of these mechanisms to Deleuze’s ontology of time must first be
assessed.

3.1 From Transcendental Conditions to Ontological Repetition

The first thing that must be noted with regard to the third synthesis of time is that we
are not describing one more dimension of time, or merely a perspective on time. And
while it is true that Deleuze does occasionally speak ‘from the point of view of the
third synthesis,’ this is strictly a nominal expression. The third synthesis is and can
only be the ontological repetition of time as such, the being of time in its pure form.
As a result of its purity and its ontological priority, it can only be empty. It is the a
priori form in which the other two dimensions of time are distributed, selected, and
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determined in their relation to one another. Although it is apprehended as Ideational

[Idéel], since it is the being of time as such this a priori cannot be relative to the
cognitive operations of a transcendental subject. On the contrary it “distributes
throughout itself an I fractured by the abstract line, a passive self produced by a
groundlessness that it contemplates” (DR 276/354). In this way the form of time
may be ideal, but only for a passive self distributed by it, and which exists as the
contemplation of an instance that excludes its coherence as a thinking subject. It
constitutes the highest thought of Difference, but at the same must therefore be the
principle of the Same, insofar as the relation of different to the different causes
difference to return to itself and produce the external effect of the Same. This
synthesis of difference will be the focus of the next chapter. It is first necessary to
outline the formal character of the third synthesis as it relates to the problems
developed already.

3.2 Objective Indetermination in Cinema 2

As we saw in the previous chapter, the disjunction between the virtual and the actual
in the object led Badiou to criticize the notion of the virtual as a threat to the doctrine
of univocity. On his reading, the disjunction between virtual and actual splits the
unity of being into two distinct orders, while leaving the actual inherently
indeterminate. Since Badiou’s reference point on this question is not Difference and
Repetition but Cinema 2, let us look at the specific passage he has in mind.
The pages in question are 80-83/108-11; the quotes that follow are cited from
them. There Deleuze describes the relation between an actual object and the virtual as
taking place both through “small circuits” and “deeper circuits.” Small circuits refer
the (actual) object to its own past, the immediate past it must always contract into its
present, while deeper circuits mobilize the whole of the past, perpetually expanding in
order to keep the small or “relative” circuits open. The small circuit is “relative”
precisely because its variations depend on this expansion of the Whole. The relation
between the small and the deep circuits is internal to the object itself. It is “from the
inside” that they make contact, and do so “directly.” The problem then becomes how
 53  
 
 

to explain the splitting as well as the contact. Since the problem of the object is a
temporal one, only an operation of time can explain this.
The “most fundamental operation of time” can be seen in what Deleuze calls the
crystal. The crystal is not time itself, however it is the essence of time that the crystal
permits us to see, the splitting-in-two that it must continually carry out. The
contemporaneity of the constitution of the past with that of the present entails that
time perpetually split in two, into present and past, “or, what amounts to the same
thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is
launched toward the future, while the other falls into the past.” The present passes,
while the past is preserved all at once. In its most fundamental operativity, time is this
splitting, this division of the present along a pure line moving toward the future and
the past, while holding the present apart from the past and future.
The object is the site of this splitting, yet its “image-being” never accomplishes a
complete separation of its dimensions, of virtual and actual, small and deep circuits.
Rather, it “constantly exchanges the two distinct images which constitute it…distinct
yet indiscernible, and all the more indiscernible because distinct.” In the crystal-
image, it is impossible to tell which we are seeing, a thing or its virtual image. It is
“unequal exchange, or the point of indiscernibility, the mutual image.” The two
cannot be separated precisely because what one sees in the crystal is time itself as the
pure operativity of the division between the two halves of the object, or two jets of
time dividing it in the present. Time is a “perpetual self-distinguishing, a distinction
in the process of being produced.” As the image of time, the crystal-image is the point
of indiscernibility between that which is produced as different through it. What we
see in this image is time itself, the instance of its pure division, “a bit of time in its
pure state, the very distinction between the two images which keeps on reconstituting
itself.” However, the two images must not be understood as external reflections –
neither of them is a duplicate or copy of an original instance – Deleuze makes this
quite clear. The a priori synthesis does not operate on an inert substance or in-itself; it
is a putting-into-abyss [mise-en-abyme] that can only split in two, an “endlessly new
splitting.” What is reconstituted endlessly is precisely the distinction between the two
 54  
 
 

halves of the object, virtual past and actual present. For this reason, the most
fundamental operation of time is responsible for distributing the differences of and
between the dimensions it divides.
Cinema 2 locates this indiscernibility in the crystal-image, and shows that it must
be internal to time as such. Different “crystalline states” correspond to diverse figures
and actualisations, formations carried out in the splitting-open of time. Each of these
states is a “crystal of time.” Since my interest here lies in the formal character of this
splitting more than in its distinctive articulations, Cinema 2 will not be of as much
importance to the remainder of this discussion. However, this is not because the
concrete analyses of distinct crystals of time is not of great value – on the contrary – I
am interested in demonstrating why such an analysis is necessary and important,
given Deleuze’s philosophy of time. In this sense the argumentation here begins a
step back, both in the logical sequence and in the biographical one as well. For if the
ontological differentiation of dimensionality as such (or the difference between the
first two syntheses) is internal to the third synthesis of time, it is necessary to return to
Difference and Repetition in order to better define the consequences of such a view.

3.3 Exploding the Sky – The Caesura and the Empty Form of Time

As we saw in the first chapter, the in-itself character of the second synthesis meant
that its capacity as ground for the actual was established by the donation of a
measurement, a title of propriety. Consequently however, it means the ground cannot
escape its dependence on the events and movements that unfold within it and which it
measures. A circular order of time is formed here, since a temporality that defaults to
the measurement of the cardinal points that rotate in this circle cannot throw itself
outside of the associative patterns of resemblance and similarity that function as its
ratio, its periodic regularity.
The cardo, the joint, must be thrown out, dislocated. To do so Deleuze invokes a
turn of phrase adapted from Hölderlin’s meditation on the peculiarly formal character
of his reading of Sophocles’ Thebean tragedies. For Hölderlin, the presentation of the
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tragic depends on the ability for the drama to gather itself into a totality by an
inaugural rupture dividing the events that unfold in its course along a formal fracture
purified of their naturalized milieu, purified of the cardinality of man’s rhythm of life:
“The presentation of the tragic rests primarily on the tremendous … on the boundless
union purifying itself through boundless separation.” 24 The caesura is the pure form
of this fracture that divides events. The caesura distributes a before and an after, and
establishes a formal relation that interrupts their empirical succession by aligning
them in its “counter-rhythmic rupture.” Time is thrown out of joint. For this reason
the rupture cannot emerge from within the empirical succession as one event among
others. Rather, as Hölderlin notes, it “has to lie there from the beginning so that the
first half is as it were protected against the second one; and precisely because the
second one is originally more rapid and seems to weigh more, the equilibrium will
incline from the end toward the beginning due to the counteracting caesura.” In the
case of the Thebean tragedies, the caesura is always marked by the speeches of
Tiresias, which function to remove man from the center of his inner life-rhythms and
insert him “into another world and into the excentric sphere of the dead,” into a time
cracked-open from within (Hölderlin, 1988: 102). Thrown out of joint, time is
liberated from the “overly simple circular figure, freed from the events which made
up its content, its relation to movement overturned. In short, time present[s] itself as
an empty and pure form” (DR 88/119-120).
Here one discovers the first function of the third synthesis. As a purely formal
distribution of the unequal broken apart in the caesura, it constitutes an order of time.
This order is necessarily static, since it is no longer derived from or dependant upon
an empirical succession. Future and past are not dynamic emergences in a perpetually
contracting present, or empirical occurrences, but “fixed and formal characteristics
which follow a priori from the order of time … time is the most radical form of
change, but the form of change does not change” (DR 89/120). As Hölderlin notes,
this order distributes the before and the after in such a way that it draws the two
together, holding time open and forming itself into a totality precisely through the
fracture from which its difference emerges; “A form is relevant precisely because the
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infinite, like the spirit of states and the world, cannot be grasped other than from an
askew perspective” (116). According to Deleuze, this drawing-together into a totality
must be conceived as a symbol, a symbolic image of “an act which is adequate to time
as a whole.” The image here functions as a symbolic action = x, enveloping within it a
simultaneity of before, during, and after, each of which corresponds to a distinct
aspect of the synthesis of difference giving rise to the totality.
In addition to an order and a totality, the third synthesis also enables the
possibility of a temporal series. By distributing time in the inequality of the caesura,
the totality of time divides itself in the objective present, without merging with it.
Viewed in the crystal-image, this splitting gives the effect of an indiscernibility of
virtual and actual, constituting the perpetually displaced frontier of time along the
pure line of before and after distributed by the caesura. However, this splitting is only
indiscernible insofar as one places the effect of the splitting ahead of its operative
instance, or confuses its content with the static formal synthesis producing it in its
dimensional difference. In its pure operativity, the empty form of time is indifferent
to the distinction between the two dimensions of past and future, since it forces their
asymmetrical emission to continually rise and spread out along a pure surface at the
very moment the present contracts its difference into itself. The image of the act
adequate to the totality of time, whether parricidal (to kill the Father), suicidal (to leap
into a volcano), or of cosmic annihilation (to make the sun explode), is ‘adequate’
precisely insofar as it distributes the difference between past, future, and present from
the point of view of the agency proper to them, and therefore is not predicable of any
one of them per se.
This brings us to a crucial question, which concerns the formal relationship
between the first two repetitions we viewed in chapter 1, and this third ‘ontological’
repetition. For Deleuze the third synthesis of time is aligned with the future and the
eternal return because of its ability to carry out a selection that bears upon the other
two, which as present and past must be conceived as “dimensions of the future: the
past as condition, the present as agent” (DR 93). For this reason, although there are
three repetitions, the first two are properly speaking only dimensions of the third. The
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first repetition concerns organic and perceptual syntheses. It is a physical repetition of

contracted habits, in which difference is drawn-off. The second is a metaphysical or
psychic repetition and functions as the default condition for the latter, supplying it
with a determinate field of coexisting events or a vertical dimension by which it may
contract itself. Beyond both of these lies the ontological repetition of the eternal
return, distributing difference to these other two, and supplying the pure form through
which they enter into relation while simultaneously preventing them from
encompassing all of time either into a limited and finite moment or into a coexisting
totality which would function as a container of all events.
To expound their logical relations, we may nominally refer to each synthesis as a
‘point of view’ on the whole of time, so long as it is understood that such a nominal
definition is not valid in the last instance. In fact, Deleuze uses this perspectival
metaphor himself. Thus from the point of view of the first synthesis, the present is the
passive foundation of all time. From its vantage point the past is no more, the future
constitutes an enveloped field of expectation, and both of these depend upon the
foundation of the present, which alone exists as the agency of all of time, its existence
and deployment. From the point of view of the second synthesis time is a pure past,
which functions as the ground providing a default condition of possibility for the
passing of the present. Here the past exists as a whole, a totality unto itself of which
the present is merely an external shell. It is important to recall the difficulty we faced
with the relation of “grounding” that the pure past had in respect of the present, which
left this ground in a position of relativity and dependence on the present. The import
of the formal character of the third synthesis was precisely that it supplied a synthesis
unconditioned by movement, one not designed to be a measure of the empirical or
cyclical. Because it is unconditioned, the third synthesis is capable of carrying out a
selection of the prior two, according to which the present as agent and the past as
default only return by being expelled or expunged in favor of the product they
produce, the absolutely different. The present, as agency and deployment of time may
therefore be considered the “repeator.” Since it contracts the past in itself, this past in
its totality of levels is already repetition in-itself. However, once internal to the third
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synthesis or the future, it is the future that is “repeated,” twice signified by its agent
and condition, both of which are destined to be erased. The future “subordinates the
other two to itself and strips them of their autonomy” (DR 94/125). Both the
condition by default and the metamorphosis of the agent disappear in the
unconditioned character of the product. Unconditioned in its selectivity, formless in
the effect produced by its formal rupture, the third synthesis carries out the
ungrounding of past and present by making them strictly relative to the pure line of
the caesura that simultaneously distributes and dispenses with them.

3.4 Determination and the Abstract Line

Deleuze’s formula for the relation between the three repetitions is admittedly
paradoxical. How can the relation between a condition and that which it conditions
give rise to an unconditioned product? What does it mean to ‘produce the
unconditioned?’
We have already anticipated this paradox through the problem of determination as
such [LA determination], and its relation to the grounding-grounded dyad. The
abstract line is the moment of pure determination between indeterminate and
determined, or ground and grounded. It splits the two at the same time as it distributes
their relation by undermining the claim of both. In this sense LA determination means
that neither the condition by default nor the metamorphosis it produces in the agent
can supply an originary instance, an archē-series of which the other would be
derivative. Nor can such an originary relation hold between two present instants
either (e.g. the illegitimate privilege of the ‘infantile series’ of childhood experiences
which would purportedly have a quasi-mystical hold over those of our adult lives).
For this reason, the explanatory metaphor of each synthesis, according to which each
would be the whole of time from a specific ‘point of view,’ remains merely nominal
and ultimately inadequate. Neither the grounding in the pure past nor the relations of
succession and simultaneity established within the present can have an originary
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position, since their relation to one another is always only established through the
caesura of the third synthesis.
In short, the third synthesis is the synthesis of temporal dimensions as such. The
relation between the past as ground and the present as grounded must be established
by the instance of determination or the abstract line capable of distributing difference
to them as well as their difference from one another. The abstract line is that which
splits time into its two dissymmetrical directions, constituting the past in the same
time as it displaces the present by producing a serial succession. It splits into two jets
or emissions, one successively opening onto the future and making the present pass,
the other preserving this present in a past co-existent with it. It ensures that the
asymmetry of this splitting returns always as difference, selects itself as different, and
thereby differentiates the other two syntheses.
We have seen that the succession of present moments and the whole of the past
they contract must stand in a relation of coexistence with one another, so that the past
may be constituted contemporaneously with the deployment of time in the present. As
an empty form of time, the third synthesis must have the capacity to determine the
other two by supplying a means by which their coexistence can be established,
thereby accounting for the passage of time as well. At the same time, as the selective
power of eternal return, ontological repetition is coextensive with the differentiation
of difference, where difference already means a difference between temporal
dimensions. Put otherwise, ontological difference is temporal by virtue of its
differentiation of time. But what is differentiation? How does differentiation precede
succession, while immutably producing it as its effect? How does the differentiation
of difference produce a coexistence of temporal dimensions? How does it distribute
difference to each of them? We must discover the mechanism which distributes the
difference proper to each repetition (that which is drawn-off and that which is
implicated). This mechanism must at the same time produce the illusion by which
they are effected while preventing the error into which they fall. To answer these
questions, an analysis of the concept of intensive individuation is necessary.
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Chapter 4
Intensive Systems and the Return of Difference

As was indicated in the introduction, the privilege I grant to the problem of time and its
relation to individuation is due to the import it has for philosophy’s ability to take up an
ontological perspective on concrete processes of existence, while not giving in to the
sway of common sense or representational coordinates of interpretation. However, it is
difficult to see how formal temporal syntheses alone can properly speaking be ‘concrete’,
without stretching the meaning of this word to an incoherent point. Simply put, what is
concrete must be more than merely formal. It must articulate being in its individuation,
and therefore in its contingency, its corporeality, uniquely and distinctly. The connection
between the syntheses of time and a sense of the concrete is still undeveloped in my
analysis. The goal of this chapter is therefore to traverse Deleuze’s concept of intensive
individuation by assessing its importance to the temporalization of the real, and thereby
to draw a line of convergence tying time and intensity together.
My analysis so far has drawn primarily from chapter two of Difference and
Repetition, “Repetition In Itself”, and the Conclusion. In order to comprehend the
intensive systems and the logic of production that mobilizes time and space in its
synthetic operativity, it is now necessary to traverse two other chapters, “The Ideal
Synthesis of Difference” and “The Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible”.
As we have seen, there are roughly speaking three orders of time, or rather three
repetitions. A present of extensity, a pure past of coexistence, and a third formal time
which ensures the coexistence of the latter with the former, and of which these first two
constitute a priori dimensions by virtue of its ability to split and distribute their
differences. All the same, it has been claimed that it is inadequate to refer either to the
pure past or to the contracted present as the ‘whole of time from a certain point of view.’
Certainly a point of view corresponds to each, but since it is only by virtue of the third
synthesis that their distribution is conceivable, they cannot constitute the whole of time,
as they are internal to the latter in the end. Thus the eternal return is able to constitute a
cosmic doctrine, and not merely a limited or subjective operation; at the same time, we
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are able to conceive of the eternal return without falling prey to the circles and
resemblances characteristic of the other two syntheses, which would be the necessary
consequence of giving foundational status to either one of them.
What is needed now is a problem through which to map the analysis of repetition
onto an analysis of the productivity of the virtual and its Ideal structures. The problem of
coexistence will serve as the thread for this connection below, as it has largely guided the
foregoing analysis thus far. Some of the parallels I will draw out here have already been
implicit or even explicit in what has been said so far, some still require elaboration. I will
begin by pursuing a top-down approach (so to speak), following the path of creation from
the question-problem complexes of the differentiated virtual multiplicities to their
actualisations in the extensive qualities and quantities composing empirical phenomena
and organic bodies. This will provide a host of vocabulary whose temporal import may
then be developed.

4.1 Toward a Genetic Philosophy of the Individual

Deleuze’s account of individuating differences takes place on the backdrop of his theory
of differential Ideas or virtual structures, and their relationship to the actualisations they
bring about in the empirical present. These three orders (Ideas, individuating differences,
and actual beings or ‘extensities’) are collectively signified in the complex notion of
‘indi-drama-different/ciation’, which refers to the process of ontological determination
as such. We must begin by determining the ontological specificity and function of each of
these three orders by discerning their relationship to one another, and the logic of the
‘determination’ of being which emerges as a result.
The decisive question behind the problem of individuation is a genetic one: if the
individual is an empirical result of a process that gives rise to it, how can this process be
accounted for? A logic of production is necessary to account for the genesis of the
individual, both in its constituted form as an actuality possessing a certain quality and
quantity of existence (a species and a body endowed with parts), as well as in its capacity
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to undergo movements, changes, and fluctuations over a determinate duration or span of

time. Hence it must account for both the fixity and the malleability of the individual.
The originality of Deleuze’s ontogenetic account of the determination of individuals
lies in the rigor through which he demonstrates his claim that individuation must
logically and ontologically precede the emergence of constituted individuals. Following
the conditions laid out by Gilbert Simondon in his influential work L’individu et sa
genese physio-biologique,25 if actual individuals are produced as an effect of a more
fundamental process supplying the conditions of their actualisation, this genetic process
must be conceived independently of the predicates belonging to the individuals it gives
rise to. In other words, the constituted individual cannot be presupposed in its own
explanation without a vicious circle arising. The genesis of the individual must in-itself
therefore be preindividual.
If it is not to re-constitute a transcendent design or otherworldly creator, the
preindividual genetic elements must remain “strictly a part of the real object – as though
the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an
objective dimension” (DR 209/269). This quotation appeared already alongside the
problem of the indiscernibility raised by Badiou. I have addressed this problem once from
the point of view of time. We must now approach it from the twofold point of view of
structure and its productivity.
The reality of the virtual is structure. The task is to conceive of this structure while
avoiding two pitfalls: one which would ascribe an actuality to it, making a genetic
account impossible; the other which would treat it as an undetermined figure of the One
or an undifferentiated abyss, which cancels or obscures the differences which constitute
it. Is this not precisely the stumbling block we saw with respect to Badiou, i.e. how to
think internal difference? Deleuze’s theory of Ideas is an attempt to respond to this
precise problem. As was briefly touched upon already, a reciprocal and complete
determination constitute the reality of the virtual, which when properly understood make
it impossible to confuse with an undifferentiated or undetermined ground or abyss. All
the same, Deleuze’s “double-image” of the object requires that this reciprocal and
complete determination not be identified with the object in its “entirety” or as a “whole,”
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since it constitutes only its ideal “half.” To conceive of the object in its entirety requires
the addition of an actuality that does not belong to the virtual.
First though, in what does this virtual half consist?

4.2 The Composition of Structure as Virtual Multiplicity

Rather than discovering substantial, theorematic, ousiological or eternal essences beneath

the order of empirical things, Deleuze discovers only events, accidents, senses,
everywhere produced by differential structures or “Ideas.” An Idea is defined as an “n-
dimensional, continuous, defined multiplicity.” First and foremost, the concept of
multiplicity indicates an attempt to think difference without treating it as derivative of
identity, or as differences ‘between’ self-identical elements. Difference cannot be
“diversity,” which remains relative to the extrinsic distinctions between the elements
composing a collection. If the opposition between the One and the Many is inherently
representational, it does not therefore apply to the being of multiplicity since the latter is
not subject to the groupings or identities of representational objects or sets. If multiplicity
is “substantive,” if it is “substance itself,” it is so only provided we insist on the
irreducibly internal difference that constitutes it, and the concomitant primacy of relations
over elements that this implies.
Functionally, the “dimensions” of an Idea determine the variables or coordinates
demarcating the phenomena that actualise it, while its “continuity” is nothing but the set
of relations between changes in these determinative variables. Ideas can therefore be
described as the relational matrix governing the in-form-ation or emergence of actual
objects and organisms in the empirical world. We saw in chapter one how the synthesis
of habit contracts elements and relations into a “primary sensibility that we are.” The
organism is the integration of a fluctuating nexus of relations between the elements that it
contracts. Deleuze provide a lucid example in chapter two of Difference and Repetition:

What we call wheat is a contraction of the earth and humidity, and this contraction is both a
contemplation and the auto-satisfaction of that contemplation. By its existence alone, the lily of the
field sings the glory of the heavens, the goddesses and god-- in other words, the elements that it
contemplates in contracting. What organism is not made of elements and cases of repetition, of
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contemplated and contracted water, nitrogen, carbon, chlorides and sulphates, thereby intertwining
all the habits of which it is composed? (DR 75/102)

The organic world contracts the series of water, nitrogen, carbon, chlorides, sulphates,
and proteins, which relate to one another by virtue of differential relations established
in the Idea. By the same token, the organism is inseparable from the singular points that
arise through the interaction of these different series of elements. Taken together, the
relations between the different series of elements and the singularities that arise when
the elements interact constitute the “objecticity” of an Idea, its “problematic field.” The
empirical world represents the cases of solution produced on the basis of this relational
nexus, which are on this account the real conditions for the articulation of the actual.26
The “definition” of an Idea refers to the elements reciprocally determined in
relation to one another, which are constituted in such a way that any change in these
dimensions involves a complete change of the metric and order of its constituent
multiplicity. Multiplicities cannot change dimensions without changing in nature,
without this change affecting the entirety of the affected relations. All the same, were a
change somehow not to take place, it is still not possible to attribute an identity to a
multiplicity, for they supply no basis for such an ascription, having neither sensible
form nor conceptual signification. Ideas are potentialities, but they cannot be confused
with possibilities, precisely owing to the fact that as structures they come to be and
become actualised without any prior conceptual identity (even one stripped of its
actuality). Whereas the possible is the representational principle of the object under the
twofold categories of identity (identity of what is representing, and the self-
resemblance of what is being represented),27 the virtuality of the Idea must be
conceived under the condition of a strict non-resemblance to the actuality it produces,
actualizing itself rather through divergence and differenciation in a genuine creation.
If Ideas are both substantive and wholly differential, while at the same time being
entirely internal, this is due to a threefold “sufficiency” which characterizes them. First,
they are undetermined in themselves (dy is literally nothing in relation to y, just as dx is
literally nothing in relation to x). Their indetermination “renders possible the
manifestation of difference freed from all subordination” (DR 183/237). Second, they are
determinable only in relation to one another (the relationship dy/dx generates a set of
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points or values). While the elements are in themselves indeterminate, they must in every
case be determined reciprocally, forming “non-localizable ideal connections” whose
definition presupposes no external reference or recourse to a uniform milieu which would
measure them from without. For this reason the multiplicity of an Idea can only be
internally or intrinsically defined, rendering them constitutively different from spatio-
temporal objects and concepts. Objects in space-time retain multiplicity but lose
interiority, being partes extra partes or extrinsically defined. Concepts on the other hand
retain interiority but lose multiplicity, being general or unified by the identity of an “I
think” or the noematic content of a thought. The reciprocal determination of differentials
describes the emergence of a structuring instance out of syntheses proper to the virtual,
an emergence governed by the play of chance rather than by rational necessity. Finally,
such multiplicities bear an ideal of complete determination with regard to their
potentialities, encompassing the entire field of variation within their nexus without
requiring any supplementary lack or non-being.
In sum, Ideas are intrinsically defined structures composed of differential relations
and multiple ideal connections whose processural being is coextensive with their
“incarnation” in real relations and actual terms. The destiny of every multiplicity is to
have its relations actualised in “diverse spatio-temporal relationships,” while its elements
are incarnated in a “variety of terms and forms.” The being of a structure is its ability to
determine a genetic or productive relation not between one actual being and another (as
between Hume’s billiard balls, for example), but between itself as a virtual multiplicity
and its incarnations in the actual, between the conditions circumscribing a “complex
theme” or a question-problem complex and the cases of solution it generates, “which
constitute at each moment the actuality of time.”
If Ideas must always be understood in the plural, as the composition of multiplicities
rather than an undifferentiated abyss or pure indeterminate, there must be a form of
distinction in which their internal differentiation is distributed. Since the reciprocal
determination of relations and the complete determination of singular points that
distribute their values cannot take the form of an extrinsic distinction, the form of
distinction proper to Ideas as internal multiplicities cannot be the same as that of the
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forms and terms in which they are incarnated. Deleuze proposes the term perplication to
designate the “distinctive and coexistent state of Ideas.” Perplication refers not to actual
beings but to the composition and overlapping of multiplicities in their virtuality, as well
as the orders and levels of multiplicity as such. Varieties of Ideas always include in
themselves sub-varieties. Deleuze distinguishes three levels of variety characteristic of
the virtual: first, a vertical dimension refers to ordinal varieties which are distinguished
according to the nature of their elements and relations. Traditional discursive distinctions
break down along such ordinal lines, e.g. mathematical, biological, chemical,
sociological, linguistic, and social or political Ideas. Second, each ordinal variety
contains a horizontal distribution of its characteristic varieties, which correspond to the
“degrees of a differential relation…and to the distribution of points for each degree” (DR
187/241). A linguistic multiplicity contains a variety of languages just as a biological one
contains a variety of animals. Finally, in the dimension of depth we can distinguish
axiomatic varieties which distribute a “common axiom for differential relations of a
different order, on condition that this axiom itself coincides with a third-order differential
relation.” Since the dimension of depth requires a separate analysis still to come, I will
return to this below.
As a result of the orders of Ideas, the characteristic varieties that they distribute, and
the rules of their composition, Ideas may be said to coexist. However it is crucial to not
be careless in how this coexistence is understood. Deleuze writes that,
In a certain sense all Ideas coexist, but they do so at points, on the edges, and under glimmerings
which never have the uniformity of a natural light. On each occasion, obscurities and zones of
shadow correspond to their distinction…They are objectively made and unmade according to the
conditions which determine their fluent synthesis. (DR 187/241)

Why does their coexistence only apply under conditions of obscurity? Why must the
complete determination of the virtual include shadows and oblique edges around its
points?
A (quasi-)Leibnizian rejoinder to Descartes is at work here. For Descartes,
representation entails a principle of “clarity and distinctness”, such that the two
determinations are essentially proportionate to one another. An idea becomes clearer the
more distinction it possesses, such that the clear and the distinct become determinations
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of the natural light which supplies thought with an innate affinity with the true. Deleuze
celebrates Leibniz’s reply to Descartes that “a clear idea is in itself confused; it is
confused insofar as it is clear [en tant que claire].” And while Leibniz may have intended
this to indicate only a difference in degree such that an idea could always be further
clarified with regard to all of its parts, Deleuze pushes this further, all the way to a
difference in kind between the clear and the distinct, so that “the clear would be in itself
confused and the distinct in itself obscure.” Standing by the seaside, Leibniz’s “little
perceptions” are distinct and obscure (not clear) because they grasp the differential
relations and singularities of the objective Idea, yet obscure because they are not yet
differenciated or actualised. “These singularities then condense to determine a threshold
of consciousness in relation to our bodies, a threshold of differenciation on the basis of
which perceptions are actualised…in an apperception which in turn is only clear and
confused; clear because it is distinguished or differenciated, and confused because it is
clear” (DR 213/275). The problem is not therefore one of logical completion, where a
distinct idea would become progressively clearer as it surveyed more of the “whole”
phenomenon. It is rather a distinction characteristic of the relation of production and
expression holding between the virtual and the actual. It is in the nature of the Ideal
multiplicities of the virtual to remain distinct and obscure, “differentiated without being
differenciated, and complete without being entire” (DR 214/276). In any clear or
distinguished phenomenon there insist and subsist obscure non-localisable connections
between the problematic field it contracts and the nexus of other Ideas it is perplicated by.
It is in this sense that we may understand Deleuze’s description of the Idea as a ‘complex
theme.’

4.3 Static Genesis and the Ideal Time of Ideas

How ought the temporal nature of Ideas be characterized? Since we are dealing with a
“genesis without dynamism, evolving necessarily in a supra-historicity, a static genesis
[must] be understood as the correlate of a passive synthesis” (DR 183/237). Deleuze
makes this clear with reference to the Althusserian notion of a structural causality. ‘The
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economic’ resists historicist interpretations because it “never acts transitively following

the order of succession in time; rather, it acts by incarnating its varieties in diverse
societies and by accounting for the simultaneity of all the relations and terms which, each
time and in each case, constitute the present” (DR 186/241). In other words, the
economic does not form a continuity of cases by virtue of its being deduced as such on
the basis of a succession of present moments spanning the development of a society.
Rather, a society is produced in the simultaneity of a present moment only by forming a
case of solution to a synthetic and problematizing field proper to it, a differential
virtuality which must always be interpreted as it is perpetually covered over by its forms
of actualisation.28
The Idea is a virtual problematic which must be progressively determined by the
adjunction of an indefinite series of fields, securing the reciprocal terms step-by-step,
establishing the relations between them and causing the singularities to condense and
precipitate situations. As a result of this progressivity of Ideas, they are said to have “a
purely logical, ideal, or dialectical time.” The time of Ideas cannot therefore be measured
by the solutions which incarnate them, but must be subtracted from them and viewed as
that which determines the rhythms and speeds of the differenciations that it gives rise to
as cases of solution. Deleuze is thus able to state that “this virtual time determines a time
of differenciation … which correspond[s] to the relations and singularities of the structure
and … measure[s] the passage from virtual to actual” (DR 211/272). What is the
difference then between this ideal time of static genesis and the dynamic rhythms of
actualisation? Is the operativity of the dynamisms ultimately only a modalization or
‘expression’ of the static structure? Can they be read as mutually determinative? If the
progressive determination of structures itself requires the actualisation of its terms for it
to be differentiated as virtual, then the relationship seems more complicated than it may
at first appear. If we are not to believe that a timeless unchanging “stasis” of Ideas
indifferently manifests its order in the real, then the composition of virtual structures
must itself be subject to an instance of determination which renews the differences
composing it at the same time as these differences have a structuring efficacy with
respect to the extensities in which they are actualised.
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4.4 Dynamic Determination and the Dramatization of Ideas

In its actuality, the empirical or actual object has two traits: the quality or qualities it
possesses, and the extension it fills. It is not necessary to be able to identify or distinguish
the specific arrangement of pieces that compose an object to note that it nonetheless
possesses distinctive points and regions that make up its extension, both internally, in the
way its corporeality is composed, but also in the way it determines and occupies an
external milieu, as a fish returns home or a beaver builds a dam. At the core of its being
there is a twofold synthesis producing empirical objects in their actuality – a synthesis of
“qualification or specification,” and one of “partition, composition, or organization” (DI
96/134). Every quality fills an extension as it diffuses, every species has parts or points
that compose its body. A species is made up of differential relations among genes, while
its organic parts incarnate singularities or “loci” (DI 100/140). Every object therefore
exists at the intersection of these two syntheses or lines of actualization - species and
parts, qualities and quantities, specification and organization. Insofar as actualisation is
always the differenciation of an Idea, the two syntheses of the actual correspond to the
virtual relations and points which compose multiplicities, albeit without resembling them.
Differential relations are actualised in qualitatively distinct species and forms, while the
singularities distribute parts and terms.
It would be a mistake to assume that the differential relations and singularities that
make up the Idea were capable of actualising themselves of their own accord. Ideas
possess no such power, nor could we explain how something like a differential relation is
itself progressively differentiated in its own virtuality if we could refer them only to an
infinite regression of other relations coexisting since the beginning of time, or an infinite
order of variations. The agents of differenciation are not the Ideas themselves but what
Deleuze describes as “spatio-temporal dynamisms.” Although covered over by the
constituted qualities and extensities they actualise, these dynamisms nonetheless preside
over the orientations, the axes of development, and the differential speeds and rhythms by
which they come into existence. They create a space and a time peculiar to that which is
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actualised. They are, as Deleuze describes, “agitations of space, holes of time, pure
syntheses of space, direction, and rhythms” (DI, 98/137). The branch that is not yet an
animal’s leg, the ordering of directions and orientations within an embryo, the vital
movements, torsions and drifts that every fully-constituted organism and all generic and
specific differences depend on, are carried out by these dynamisms.
Dynamisms presuppose a field in which they are produced, an unextended intensive
spatium preexisting the constituted qualities and extension it gives rise to. In “The
Method of Dramatisation” as well as in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze situates this
intensive spatium in a dimension of depth which envelops pure intensities and constitutes
a field or environment of individuation. Intensity is the power of differenciation, of the
unequal in itself. However the differenciation of the actual is the effect of an
organizational operation prior to it, which supplies its condition and carries out its
constitutive distribution. This prior operation is that of dramatization, or individuation.
Dramatization is carried out by spatio-temporal dynamisms, and involves movements that
a fully-constituted subject could not survive. This does not mean that the intensive
spatium these movements constitute are subjectless. It simply means that the subjects that
populate it are “rough drafts, not yet qualified or composed, rather patients than agents”
(DI 97/136). Such a subject is “larval.” Larval subjects populate the intensive spatium, as
passive patients of the movement of determination it carries out. Under what conditions
does this intensive population of selves, this “pure determination,” take place?
Serialization is the organizational principle of intensive synthesis. The concept of the
series provides Deleuze a means of conceiving the operation by which the different
organizes itself and relates itself to the different without any mediation by the identical or
the similar, i.e. outside of the requirements of representation. As Deleuze notes, it is
technically a tautology to even refer to ‘intensive differences,’ or ‘differences of
intensity’, as the concept of intensity is already inseparable from a system in which
differences relate to other differences without mediation. How are such systems
organized?
The four concepts of connection, coupling, internal resonance, and forced movement
describe the basic operations of serialization. A “series” is formed in the vicinity of a
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singularity or singular point, insofar as this point generates a succession of ordinary

points that extend all the way to the vicinity of another singularity. Every series is
oriented around singularities, and extends from one in the direction of another, or others.
From the point of view of their composition, series are formed when elements enter into a
connective synthesis that envelops the differences between the terms that compose it,
giving rise to a first aspect of difference internal to each series itself. These elements may
be anything, whether elementary excitations in the Id, morphemes and phonemes in
speech, degrees of temperature in an energetic system, etc. Next, since the serial form is
always multiple, no series can possibly exist in isolation; each must always be coupled or
made to communicate with other series. A second conjunctive synthesis is required for
this coupling to take place. Since series are already constituted by the differences
between the terms that compose them, this second synthesis occurs when two or more
series communicate by relating their constitutive differences to those of the other series,
forming differences of differences. It is tempting to view this as a secondary level of
difference occurring when two series enter into relation, and Deleuze does refer to it in
this way. This would be correct except for the fact that, because no series can exist in
isolation, the coupling with other series is always present to begin with and is therefore
determinant for the terms within each series. In any event, it is clear that the relation
between series always amounts to differences between differences. This ‘secondary’
difference constitutes an internal resonance within a system, from which is derived a
forced movement “the amplitude of which exceeds that of the basic series themselves.”
The “second-degree differences” differenciate the first degree differences by relating
them to one another. They “play the role of differenciator” (DR 117/155). In this case
we should understand that the differences which compose a base series cannot relate to
one another, the series cannot ‘return’ to itself as it unfolds, except by way of
communication with another series which functions as differenciator to it. As we shall
have a chance to see below, a power of implication peculiar to intensities must be drawn
upon in this differenciating relation between series, one which is decisive for the
temporal significance of such systems.
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If the serial system is intensive, this is precisely because an intensity is defined as an

“element whose value is determined at once both by their difference in the series to
which they belong, and by the difference of their difference from one series to another…a
difference which itself refers to other differences” (DR 117/155). If the intensive system
requires that series enter into communication, what ensures this communication? What
agent forces intensive connections between series to be enacted, to differenciate one
another relating different to different? This is the function of what Deleuze refers to as
the “dark precursor” [le precurseur sombre]. For any two heterogeneous series, the
precursor plays the part of the differenciator of their differences, it “puts them into
immediate relation with one another: it is the in-itself of difference or the ‘differently
different – in other words, difference in the second degree, the self-different which relates
different to different by itself” (DR 117/156). Its path becomes visible only in reverse, as
though “intagliated” [comme en creux], since its activity is immediately covered over by
the phenomena it gives rise to. The precursor is missing from its place, and is essentially
lacking its own identity. Its operativity requires that it be perpetually displaced within
itself and disguised in the series it forces into a displaced relation to one another. The
forced movement created by this displacement exceeds the amplitude of either of the two
series it erupts between, causing the qualities-events and signs to flash between the two
series arising from the depths, which will lasts as long as its constitutive difference
requires to be nullified. Every type of system has its own precursors proper to it, whether
of words or concepts, psychical, biological, energetic or geological. It is the excessive
element in every system, that which causes the movement of the system through a
perpetual deregulation of its centre, bringing about its mobility by enacting the
conjunctive syntheses of its basic series on the basis of which subjects and objects are
produced through specification and partition. We have said that the subjects that populate
dynamisms are essentially processural, passive syntheses in a process of becoming or
development that have not yet actualized themselves in a constituted form; they are
“larval selves.” We now see that the larval subject is passive precisely because it is a
patient of the forced movement the dark precursor causes it to endure: nightmares a fully-
formed waking person could not tolerate; geological migrations of islands and masses
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that undergo reorientations and shifts; embryonic dynamisms taking place in an

individuating spatium.
Dynamisms and their intensive spatium apply no less to representation than they do to
the biological or geological. Thought has a dynamism proper to it, a “terrifying
movement” irreconcilable with the fully-constituted subject such as the representational
cogito. “No concept could receive a logical division in representation, if this division
were not determined already by sub-representational dynamisms” (DI 96/134). The
dynamisms of thought do not resemble a fully constituted image or picture, but rather “a
group of abstract lines coming from the unextended and formless depth… a strange
theatre comprised of pure determinations, agitating time and space, directly affecting the
soul, whose actors are larva – Artaud’s name for this theatre was ‘cruelty’” (DI 98/137,
emphasis mine). The dynamism of the concept is what allows its specification and
division in a world of representation – it is the “material system beneath all possible
representation” (ibid). In this way it resembles the Kantian schema, which was indeed the
“a priori determination of space and time corresponding to a concept.” It permits the
division of the concept into straight and curved. The great mystery of nearly all post-
Kantian philosophy lies in how to explain the power of this “hidden art”, the power that
can dramatize the concept dynamically while having a nature entirely different than it.
Deleuze’s contribution to this debate is to argue (following in the lineage of Solomon
Maimon)29 that the dramatization of the concept is possible as an effect only because
spatio-temporal dynamisms first actualize or incarnate not concepts but Ideas.

4.5 The Syntheses of Time and the Problem of Coexistence

i. Recapitulation of the Problem

The problem of coexistence first arose when we tried to determine a coexistence of

clothed repetition (a past constituted contemporaneously with the present, and which
insists and subsists in it) and bare repetition (a present which repeats by drawing off a
difference). From this emerged two ‘points of view’ on time. The first (Habitus)
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emphasized the succession and simultaneity of present moments. In it, the contraction
of a past of retention and a future of expectation gives rise to a series of moments
constituting a lived experience of the passage of time in the present. The second
synthesis, that of an a priori past existing in itself purportedly provided a substantial
temporal element with which this present of Habit was able to contract itself.
However, after demonstrating the inadequate ‘default’ character of the second
synthesis, we were able to discover in the third synthesis a caesura distributing a
before and an after which made the past and the future a priori dimensions of an
abstract line which splits time into its two dissymmetrical directions. From the point
of view of the caesura, the dimensions of past and future may finally be said to
coexist, at least insofar as their differenciation from one another is carried out by the
abstract line. It was concluded from the logic of Deleuze’s argument that only the
third synthesis can supply the means by which this coexistence can be established.
Furthermore, it must also account for the passage of time as well. Our paradox
therefore concerns how the passing of time and the coexistence of its dimensions can
be determined all at once. As has been suggested, an integral connection between
intensive individuation and the third synthesis is at work here, which must now be
clarified. What is the relation between the differentiation of difference in intensive
systems and the differentiation and distribution of temporal dimensions? How does
the differentiation of difference produce a coexistence of temporal dimensions? How
does it distribute difference to each of them?

ii. The Dark Precursor and the Coexistence of Series

The essential point is the simultaneity and contemporaneity of all the divergent series, the fact that
they all coexist. From the point of view of the presents which pass in representation, the series are
certainly successive, one ‘before’ and the other ’after’. It is from this point of view that the second
is said to resemble the first. However, this no longer applies from the point of view of the chaos
which contains them, the object = x which runs through them, the precursor which establishes
communication between them or the forced movement which points beyond them: the
differenciator always makes them coexist. (DR 124/162, last emphasis mine)

The above quote contains in an abbreviated form the answer to the problem of
coexistence. Yet it will require a careful exegesis to develop the network of claims that
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render it coherent, which will be the task of the remainder of this chapter. At this point
we may note two things about this remark. First, we see that the two readings of time
Deleuze emphasizes with respect to the temporality of intensive series are those we have
emphasized already, i.e. successive presents on the one hand, and their coexistence with
respect to the agent of communication or differentiation on the other. This confirms the
suspected inadequacy of an a priori past in its initial Bergsonian formulation (the past by
default) which was criticized in chapter one. The problem of coexistence cannot be
adequately answered if it is assumed by default; it must be proven by accounting for the
agency that produces it. Second, we may note in the citation above that the dark
precursor has been assigned precisely this function of producing a coexistence among
series, which means it will be necessary to relate the agency of this precursor to the
caesura of the Aion, the third synthesis.
In the passage that follows the one cited above, Deleuze provides an example of the
functioning of such a precursor in Freudian terms. In the psychic life of the unconscious,
Freud’s notion of phantasy aimed to show how a phenomenon of “delay” allowed
infantile experiences to affect adult experiences at a distance, in an experience which
resembles it and supposedly derives its sense from this effect. The problem of ‘action at a
distance’ therefore concerns a relation between two series, one pre-genital and located in
the past, and the other genital and post-pubescent, experienced in the present of adult life.
From the point of view of the “solipsistic unconscious” of the subject in question, it may
be clear that these two events are successive (one earlier and one later), and yet the delay
separating them creates a paradox: how can the former present can act at a distance on
the present present? If the two series are to enter into relation in order to resonate, what
ensures this communication? There must be an instance in relation to which they may be
said to coexist. Deleuze’s point is that the problem cannot be resolved so long as both
series are situated internally within a single subject. Rather, he claims, there is an
“intersubjective unconscious” within which the two series are distributed. The childhood
event itself is in this case not a former present existing as a real series on the line of
succession but that which functions as the dark precursor by establishing communication
between the basic series, “the adults we knew as a child and … the adult we are among
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other adults and other children.” Deleuze’s interpretation of Proust provides a second
example of such a psychic precursor:

So it is with the hero of In Search of Lost Time: his infantile love for the mother is the agent of
communication between the two adult series, that of Swann with Odette and that of the hero
become adult with Albertine – and always the same secret in both cases, the eternal displacement,
the eternal disguise of the prisoner, which thereby indicates the point at which the series coexist in
the intersubjective unconscious. (DR 124/162-3)

What is the status of this “delay” in relation to which the two series symbolically coexist?
Deleuze’s solution is to claim that the problem of action at a distance only leads to an
aporia when the event is separated from its function of ensuring coexistence and posited
as an individuated real present in the successive series. For in that case it is a matter of
one individuated present acting on another. However, if the event is not a present
moment, and if we do not separate the event from its effectivity, “there is no [longer any]
question as to how the childhood event acts with a delay. It is this delay.” If it cannot be
located within the successive series of real presents, what is the temporal status of this
event? Delay, that which functions as dark precursor in psychic systems by ensuring the
coexistence of presents (former and current), can only be the pure form of time. “Delay
itself is the pure form of time in which before and after coexist” (DR 124/163).
The coexistence of the heterogeneous series (in this case of the psychic unconscious)
is enacted by a dark precursor that forces them into communication, and which does not
itself constitute a series, but rather the instance that differenciates them. “The
differenciator always makes them coexist.” We may note then that the symbolism of the
childhood event is not based on an ‘action’ carried out by one series upon another.
Neither the adult series we knew as a child nor the adult series that we presently are
among other adults can be said to be originary; thus neither can be derived either. As
Deleuze remarks, “it is in the same movement that the series are understood as
coexisting, outside any condition under which one would enjoy the identity of a model
and the other the resemblance of a copy” (DR 125/163). The simultaneity of the
unfolding of the two series in relation to one another makes it such that neither is in a
privileged relation to the other; there is no “master” series, neither reproduces or imitates
the other. Any incidental similarity between the two series is a ‘functional effect’ of the
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differenciation that the precursor provokes in each when it forces them to communicate.
“The sole origin is difference, and it causes the differents which it relates to other
differents to coexist independently of any resemblance. It is under this aspect, without
doubt, that the eternal return is revealed as the groundless ‘law’ of this system.” If dark
precursor creates the coexistence and simultaneity of the series as the pure form of time,
and it is this that ensures the law of eternal return always be founded on difference, it is
not surprising Deleuze would insist that this question of the coexistence and simultaneity
of series is an “essential point.” Indeed, the problem of coexistence seems to me to be the
fundamental connection first of all between eternal return and the pure form of time
(Aion), and perhaps even more importantly between this pure form of time and the
intensive systems which individuate being and produce the concrete in its lived actuality.
We would do well then to try and unpack the relation between these three concepts
(eternal return & Aion; Aion & intensity; intensity & concrete actuality) one by one, and
as clearly as possible. This requires we look closely at the arguments put forward in
Chapter Five, “The Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible,” where intensities and their
serial systems become the primary focus of Deleuze’s analysis. Since Deleuze begins
with the relation between intensity and actuality (or what may be preliminarily called ‘the
concrete’), we will begin with this connection as well.

iii. Intensity and Extensity

As we have noted, serial systems are intensive by virtue of the fact that they relate
different to different outside the form of the Same or of representation. The relation
between representation and these systems must now be clarified. The phenomena which
constitute the content and object of representational judgments are not irreducible. Seen
from the point of view of their genesis, they are produced on the basis of the intensive
series we have already begun to develop. The communication of series, insofar as it
enacts a differenciation of the basic series it draws together, constitutes in its resonance
and movement what Deleuze refers to as a “sign-signal system.” “Every phenomenon
flashes in a sign-signal system. Insofar as a system is constituted or bounded by at least
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two heterogeneous series, two disparate orders capable of entering into communication,
we call it a signal. The phenomenon that flashes across this system … is a sign.” The
phenomenon is therefore always the effect of a composition of different series, a
communication between the disparate, each series of which is already composite insofar
as it is defined by the difference between its constitutive terms. The phenomenon is
always a composite being, a composite of the composites or “sub-phenomena” of each
series. Insofar as the phenomenon produced by these intensive sign-signal systems
becomes that which is empirically sensed or what appears to consciousness, intensity
may be called the “reason of the sensible.” “Disparity – in other words, difference or
intensity… is the sufficient reason of all phenomena, the condition of that which appears”
(DR 222/286). The extrinsic diversity that makes up the empirical world is given by the
internal difference or inequality of intensity, which is not the phenomenon but “the
noumenon closest to the phenomenon…the condition of the world. […] Every diversity
and every change refers to a difference which is its sufficient reason” (ibid).
The phenomenal world is produced when the communication between series causes
the tension, problem, or constitutive difference of an intensity to be cancelled or
“solved.” Actualisation is always the equalization of intensities or inequalities, which are
themselves always unique to the individuating spatium from which a specific actuality
emerges. As such, each individuation is a unique creation within being, even if their
results resemble one another from the point of view of the phenomenal or individuated
entity. This creation entails that a communication be perpetually occurring between the
actualized individual and the interiorized difference and problematic field (the
heterogeneous series) of intensity in the process of its ongoing individuation. The virtual
dimension of differential relations and their singularities is the diagram of the extensity of
the actualized entity, while the “sign” is the intensity that flashes between the two series
functioning as a spatio-temporal dynamism presiding over this communication and the
creative actualization it gives rise to.
If the phenomenon is always a composite formed by differences, it remains the case
that its nature is such that it tends toward a cancellation of these differences in and
through its very constitution. Intensity can only be “known” as already developed within
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an extensity or actuality. However, since the two lines of actualization (specification and
partition) that develop intensive differences in an extensity naturally cover its constitutive
difference over with qualities it develops, there is a complimentary tendency to treat
intensity as an empirical concept, an “impure mixture of a sensible quality and extensity,
or even a physical quality and an extensive quantity.” The reason for this lies in the
nature of the sign-signal systems themselves. While a sign can only be formed through
the differenciation of two communicating series, the forced movement which is produced
nonetheless effects a cancellation of the difference it flashes across. Qualities produced
by these systems “measure the time of an equalization – in other words, the time taken by
the difference to cancel itself out in the extensity in which it is distributed” (DR 223/288).
Deleuze’s principal example is the founding role thermodynamics plays in the scientific
interpretation of phenomena, and philosophy’s complicity with this image in its image of
thought. The image of thought governing thermodynamics measures the auto-dissipation
of difference or intensity through a probability calculus moving from less probable (past)
to more probable (future), taking as its object differences which, left on their own over a
successive duration, tend towards a resolution. However, such probability-based
distribution is not limited to thermodynamics – the “suicidal” character of intensity’s
auto-cancellation also founds the distributive model for the representational image of
thought more generally. Deleuze diagrams the constitutive elements of this image in
Chapter Three of Difference and Repetition. Common sense and good sense form its two
central mechanisms, respectively comprising the static form of thought and the
distribution of the latter in a dynamic object or content. As the form of representational
thought “common sense” has an objective and a subjective aspect: “Common sense [is]
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” (DR 226/291). However, for representation to function it is not
enough for it to presuppose the identity of the Self and the pure form of its object, for in
themselves these concepts remain purely formal, static, and indeterminate. We do not
encounter a pure object, but always objects, and the ‘selves’ that encounter them are
always individuated. An individuating field presides over the specification and division
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of objects and subjects, and for this reason the static instance of common sense requires a
complimentary dynamic instance. Good sense determines the indeterminate object,
ensuring that in each case we encounter ‘this or that’ object, and always as an
individuated self. Good sense “takes its point of departure from a difference at the origin
of individuation,” and ensures that this difference is empirically distributed so as to
cancel itself out, i.e. in a “thermodynamic” or “suicidal” way. It does so by providing a
“rule according to which the different objects tend to equalize themselves and the
different selves tend to become uniform.” Good sense therefore points reciprocally back
to common sense precisely insofar as the rule of distribution it supplies requires the ideal
form of a universal Self and that of an indeterminate object. Its subjective and objective
definitions therefore correspond on the one hand to a rule universally distributed (by a
universal subject), and on the other a rule of universal distribution (the form of all
objects).
How do these two complimentary instances of common sense and good sense in
representation relate to the two-fold synthesis of the actual already discussed above, i.e.
specification and partition? Deleuze summarizes this relation as follows:

In view of this reciprocity and double reflection, we can define common sense by the process of
recognition and good sense by the process of prediction. The one involves the qualitative
synthesis of diversity, the static synthesis of qualitative diversity related to an object supposed
the same for all the faculties of a single subject; the other involves the quantitative synthesis of
difference, the dynamic synthesis of difference in quantity related to a system in which it is
objectively and subjectively cancelled. (DR 226/292)

Specification is the synthesis of qualitative diversity and is therefore the object of

recognition for common sense, while partition refers to the quantities and parts of objects,
their singular points, which are subject to a distributive cancellation in good sense.30
When Deleuze writes that qualities produced by sign-signal systems “measure the time of
an equalization – in other words, the time taken by the difference to cancel itself out in
the extensity in which it is distributed,” the temporality at stake here is that of the first
synthesis of time, Habitus. We saw in chapter one that the lived time of the present
moved from past to future as from particular to general, where the future is constituted as
a field of expectation. Good sense, as the dynamic distribution of the representational
forms of common sense, is based upon this first synthesis of time. It defines the particular
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moments of the contracted past as “improbable” or less probable (as ‘behind’ the
observer), while “at the heart of the same system, the future, the probable and the
cancellation of difference are identified in the direction indicated by the arrow of time”
(DR 225/291). It was noted already in chapter one that the arrow of time measured the
duration of a cancellation of difference – it is this cancellation which grounds prediction
itself, as the quantitative synthesis of good sense bolstered reciprocally by the ideal
qualitative form of the Same and of the Universal in common sense.
The relation between intensity and extensity may now be more broadly characterized.
Since difference is always explicated in systems in which it will be tend to be cancelled,
it is “essentially implicated…its being is implication” (DR 228/293). It implicates itself
in the extensities and qualities in which it appears outside itself and in which it is
cancelled and hidden. The sign is the definitive function embodying this
implication/explication between intensity and extensity, since it refers to and is
constituted by an order of internal differences while at the same time giving rise to an
extension in which a perceptual effect is created of which “we are the victims.”
Extensities cannot account for their own individuation; it is always on the basis of the
implication of difference intrinsic to the sign as occurring between two dimensions which
differ in kind that accounts for extensity. “The high and the low, the right and the left, the
figure and the ground are individuating factors which trace rises and falls, currents and
descents in extensity. However … they flow from a ‘deeper’ [plus profonde] instance –
depth itself [la profondeur elle-même], which is not an extension but a pure implex” (DR
229/295). It is always by virtue of an alteration in this dimension of depth that shifts in
the extensive factors or dimensions occur. The key point is not to interpret this dimension
of depth as an extensity, since it differs in kind from the latter. The three dimensions of
extensities (right-left, high-low, figure-ground) emerge only on the basis of a depth which
provides their “matrix;” the ground [fond] as it appears in extensity is always “a
projection of something ‘deeper’” (DR 229/296).
Depth is space as a whole, Deleuze claims, not as extensive magnitude but rather as
intensive quantity, a pure spatium or dynamism. The Kantian definition of intuition as
extensive quantities provides Deleuze with a convenient counterexample. Kant refused
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the reduction of space and time to the faculty of the understanding arguing that (among
other reasons) space and time cannot be concepts because they presupposed a kind of
difference which is not conceptual. ‘Entiomorphic bodies’ (e.g. the symmetry of left and
right hands) involve an internal or non-conceptual form of difference since, Kant argued,
nothing about the concept of a hand can account for the difference between the left hand
and the right. Thus while denying a logical extension to space and time within the
understanding (as faculty of concepts), his solution nonetheless required he maintain a
‘geographical’ extension for them within the quantities of matter or reality filling the
forms of intuition, which Kant described as ‘intensive.’31 However, Kant’s notion of
intensive difference as non-conceptual defaulted to an extrinsic form of difference, one of
external relation between magnitudes of extensity. The concept of the spatium in depth
accounts for these relations of right/left, up/down, etc., and while he clearly maintains
Kant’s language of intensity, Deleuze denotes the principal difference between his
account and that of Kant as follows:

Intensity as a transcendental principle is not merely the anticipation of perception but the source of
a quadruple genesis: that of the extensio in the form of schema, that of extensity in the form of
extensive magnitude, that of qualitas in the form of matter occupying extensity, and that of the
quale in the form of the designation of an object […] While space may be irreducible to concepts,
its affinity with Ideas cannot nevertheless be denied – in other words, its capacity (as intensive
spatium) to determine in extensity the actualisation of ideal connections (as differential relations
contained in the Idea). (DR 231/298-9)

How does the spatium carry out this organization? How does intensity synthesize? From
what internal dimensions do these external coordinates or magnitudes become
determined? We have seen that the dynamisms produced through intensive serialization
were described as “pure determinations.” How does this determination function?
Although the intensive synthesis of space in depth cannot be judged by the apparent
magnitude of the objects it produces, Deleuze nonetheless insists there is a type of
‘distancing’ that is proper to this spatium which determines the production of extensive
magnitudes.

Depth envelops in itself distances which develop in extensity and explicate in turn apparent
magnitudes. It appears that depth and distances, in this state of implication, are fundamentally linked to
…intensities. […] Depth and intensity are the same at the level of being, but the same insofar as this is
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said of difference. Depth is the intensity of being, or vice versa. Out of this intensive depth emerge at
once the extension and the extensum, the qualitas and the quale. (DR 230-1/297-8).

We have seen that the relation between intensity and extensity is one of implication and
explication (or exteriorization), with its characteristic cancellation of difference. It has
also been shown that this exteriorization characteristic of extensity and its concomitant
representational aspects are dependent upon the first synthesis of time. Yet the distances
characteristic of depth have not been articulated, nor the temporality proper to intensities.
Deleuze reiterates this relation between extensities and the first synthesis on page
230/296, while adding two other connections which we must now pursue. He writes that,
“The explication of extensity rests upon the first synthesis…but the implication of depth
rests upon the second synthesis, that of Memory and the past. Furthermore, in depth the
proximity and simmering of the third synthesis make themselves felt, announcing the
universal ‘ungrounding’.” Deleuze remarks on the previous page that “only [depth] may
be called Ungrund or groundless [sans fond]” (DR 229/296). If the dimension of depth
can be said to be “groundless,” this can only be by virtue of its intensive character and the
function of the empty form of time within it. It is this relation which we must eventually
elaborate, although several points must first preface its exegesis. It is imperative to follow
the text closely on these points since they are decisive for the overall project at hand here.

iv. Intensity, Implication, and Coexistence

The first distinction we must take note of is between the resolution of intensity as it
cancels itself by explication, and its activity as intensity amongst other intensities. The
former has been accounted for above. What do we mean when we refer to intensity in
itself? Is it not the nature of intensities to cancel themselves in extensities? We have said
that one can only ‘know’ intensities as explicated in extensities. However the fact that
their own constitutive synthesis amongst themselves cannot be made an object of
recognition does not preclude its transcendental reality. It is necessary to comprehend
what is proper to this synthetic activity in exclusion from its consequences in the actual,
especially if it is only on the basis of intensity that the actual comes to be. As Deleuze
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notes, “Extensity can emerge from the depths only if depth is definable independently of
extensity” (DR 232/296).
The crucial point to note here is that the cancellation in extensity does not dissolve
intensity as such – intensity remains in itself as difference throughout this process. “The
difference of the intensive spatium subsists in itself even when explicated. It explicates
itself but only in a different plane [that it creates], so that in itself it remains difference”
(DR 232/299). This distinction between the intensive and its ‘planar’ explication is
decisive, for it allows us to give an account of the communication of intensive series
independently of their matrix of actualisation. Since intensity affirms difference, “it is
through inequalities that we can establish the convergence of a series” (DR 234/301).
The fact that the inequality constituting the intensive serial systems is their first
definitive feature leads us to a second aspect of their synthesis, which concerns
affirmation. Since it is already difference, intensive series refer always to a series of other
differences which it can be said to “affirm by affirming itself.” The dimension of depth is
a matrix of affirmation, endlessly extending itself through the relation of different to
different. How does this affirmative referral occur?

Everything goes from high to low, and by that movement affirms even the lowest: asymmetrical
synthesis. High and low, moreover, are only a manner of speaking. It is a question of depth, and of
the lower depth which essentially belongs to it. There is no depth which is not a ‘seeker’ of a
lower depth: it is there that distance develops, but distance understood as the affirmation of that
which it distances, or difference as the sublimation of the lower. (DR 234-5/302-3)

Negativity does not enter the picture here, because according to Deleuze it is a figment of
the ‘conservative’ character of extensity, alien to the affirmative order of depth. The
relations of opposition that characterize the negative are always local to an extensive
plane, and express in a distorted way the original depth from which they are derived.

Every field of forces refers back to a potential energy, every opposition refers to a deeper
‘disparateness’, and oppositions are resolved in time and extensity only to the extent that the
disparates have first invented their order of communication in depth and rediscovered that
dimension in which they envelop one another, tracing hardly recognizable intensive paths through
the ulterior world of qualified extensity. (DR 236/304, my emphasis)
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These two characteristics of intensity, i) that it remains in itself at the same time it is
expressed, and ii) that it constitutes an order of affirmation within itself, mean that
intensities must have a way of inventing a communication amongst themselves that
affirms difference, prior to and apart from their explication in extensity. How is this
accomplished?
In addition to their inclusion of the unequal in themselves, and their consequent
affirmation of difference, intensity is an “implicated, enveloped, or ‘embryonized’
quantity.” This implication is not the same one holding between intensity and extensity,
which is secondary in comparison with the implication we see here. Two determinations
characterize the communication between intensive series: that which is implicating and
that which is implicated. Deleuze describes this relation as follows:

We must conceive of implication as a perfectly determined form of being. Within intensity, we

call that which is really implicating32 and enveloping difference, and we call that which is really
implicated or enveloped distance. […] Difference, distance and inequality are the positive
characteristics of depth as intensive spatium. (DR 237/305, 238/307, suffix emphases mine)

By virtue of this implicating-implicated constitution of intensities, their method of

division is constitutively different from that of extensities. Unlike extensities, whose
relatively equivalent units permit a division which leaves the nature of the divided in tact,
intensities cannot divide without changing both their nature and their metric, for their
parts are not constituted autonomously in themselves. Differences in a series attain their
being only by being differenciated by differences within another series, and any change
in the one series implies a total shift in its relationship to the auxiliary series it involves.
If intensities are “quantities,” they are ‘smaller’ or ‘greater’ “according to whether the
nature of the given part presupposes a given change of nature or is presupposed by it”
(DR 237/306). For this reason intensive difference is “ordinal” rather than cardinal; the
nature of that which cannot change without changing in nature is that of an asymmetrical
relation between heterogeneous series defined in every instance by the envelopment of
difference and enveloped distances. Whether a given series is enveloped or enveloping
determines its ordinal quantity of difference within the system overall.
It appears that we are presented with a two-fold movement of implication:
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We must therefore distinguish two orders of implication or degradation: a secondary implication

which designates the state in which intensities are enveloped by the qualities and extensity which
explicate them; and a primary implication designating the state in which intensity is implicated in
itself, at once both enveloping and enveloped. (DR 240/309)

The secondary aspect concerns the implication of intensity as it exteriorizes itself in an

extensity, while a primary implication simultaneously implicates the series responsible
for this explication in other lateral intensities populating the field of individuation. Those
which are directly explicated are (to use a trite phrase) ‘always-already’ implicated in
ever ‘greater’ ordinal intensities. How does this dual aspect of implication relate to the
Ideas which are dramatized in these intensities?
We saw above that in their static character Ideas may be described as distinct-
obscure. Their clear-confused expression through differenciation or actualisation involves
a change of nature that nonetheless implicates this distinct-obscure in it, while all the
same allowing the latter to persist in itself. This distinction between the distinct-obscure
and the clear-confused lies at the heart of the relation between intensities and Ideas, for if
the function of intensive systems is precisely to dynamically dramatize the ideal or static
logical relations composing the internal multiplicities of Ideas, the relation between that
which is clearly/confusedly explicated in extensities and that which distinctly-obscurely
implicates itself simultaneously can only be established through intensity itself. The
problem is that what is clearly/confusedly actualised concerns only the ideal points and
relations which directly coincide (without resembling) with the parts and qualities of the
actual bodies and percepts of the organism in question. However, the distinct/obscure
relations and connections implicated in this actualisation extend beyond those
immediately actualised, and express the entire nexus of relations composing the local
problematic field of individuation of which a given organism is only one part. These
connections are expressed in greater or lesser degrees of obscurity depending on the
values of implication within the dynamic field. There is therefore a greater span of
connections within the implicated and obscure series than are confusedly expressed in the
distinguished entity. How does intensity implicate this wider nexus of distinct-obscure
and perplicated connections of the Idea while only exteriorizing a limited number of
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them? Deleuze’s example of this problem is taken from a discussion by Leibniz of a man
standing by the seashore. The drops of water in the sea are,

[L]ike so many genetic elements with the differential relations, the variations in these relations and
the distinctive points they comprise. … [Whereas] our perception of the noise of the sea
…confusedly includes the whole and clearly expresses only certain relations or certain points by
virtue of our bodies and a threshold of consciousness which they determine. (DR 253/325-6)

In order to determine how intensities can provide a means of accounting for both the
obscure and the confused, we must first assess more generally the relation between
individuation and the Idea.

v. Individuation and Ideas

Intensities are the individuating factors that “determine an ‘indistinct’ differential relation
in the Idea to incarnate itself.” Deleuze makes an important distinction between
differenciation and individuation (or explication), which must be attended to here. He
writes that, “We speak of differenciation in relation to the Idea which is actualised. We
speak of explication in relation to the intensity which ‘develops’ and which, precisely,
determines the movement of actualisation.” It would not be precise to say that intensity
plays a ‘reproductive’ role in relation to the relations and points it incarnates from the
Idea. Intensity literally “creates the qualities and extensities in which it explicates itself,”
and the latter have a condition of absolute non-resemblance in relation to the ideal
relations which are actualised in them. “Differenciation implies the creation of the lines
along which it operates” (DR 246/316). The decisive point which must be noted
regarding intensity is the independence of its process, certainly from the extensities
which always presuppose it, but arguably from Ideas as well. It is independent “by virtue
of the order of implication which defines it…by virtue of its own essential process,”
which is individuation as such. All intensive quantities are individuating factors. We have
already glimpsed the features of individuation in our discussion of the sign-signal system,
and since “individuals are sign-signal systems,” all individuality is “intensive, and
therefore cascading [cascadante]33, stepped [éclusante], and communicating, comprising
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and affirming in itself the difference in intensities by which it is constituted” (DR

246/317).
It is here that Deleuze invokes the strikingly original work of Gilbert Simondon to
outline the “metastable state” that this individuating process implies. Such a state implies
the “existence of a ‘disparateness’ such as at least two orders of magnitude or two scales
of heterogeneous reality between which potentials are distributed.” The singular points
that define the existence and distribution of this potential define an “‘objective’
problematic field” determined by the heterogeneity of the two orders and their
communication, which is established as soon as individuation solves the potentials in an
actualisation that “establishes communication between disparates” (DR 246/317). Alberto
Toscano has recently written some admirable pages describing these Simondonian
themes.34 Preindividual (or ‘pre-phased’)35 being is defined as affected by ‘disparation’
… the tension between incompatible –as yet unrelated – dimensions or potentials in
being. As Toscano describes it, for Simondon, the fundamental operation of
individuation is precisely the production of a relation between these potentials.
Individuation creates a relational system that ‘holds together’ what prior to its occurrence
was incompatible (T 139). Such a metastable state cannot be a “virtual totality lying in
wait for actualisation,” since, Toscano claims, it is in itself an inherently untotalizable
domain: “the originary disparateness of pre-individual being forbids any totalization”. To
affirm the relativity of individuation - its provisional and ‘insubstantial’ character –
requires that individuality not be related to any ‘higher’ or ‘totalizing’ reality (T 141).
The differential character of pre-phased being means that “every operation, and every
relation within an operation, is an individuation that doubles and de-phases preindividual
being.”36 The operation constitutes an enveloping relation by moving from the initial
non-relation of disparation to an individual sign-signal system, by virtue of a genetically
functional relation between separate terms (T 142-3). Every relation emerges only
through what Toscano characterizes as the “event of individuation,” i.e. as the emergence
of relation (intra or inter-individuality) out of the non-relation of disparation. The event
of individuation is the “making-compossible of a structure,” and must be invented, as it
cannot pre-exist itself in the metastability of disparation (T 145-6). In Deleuze’s
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language, such an event functions by “integrating the elements of the disparateness into a
state of coupling which ensures its internal resonance” (DR 246/317). Individuation
functions like a “germ of structure” that catalyzes the resolution of the disparate tensions
in the pre-individual, modulating an incompossible domain without providing a model
capable measuring its own order or probabilizing it. “Simondon retains…the asymmetry
of a temporalizing process of individuation, which advances from the insertion of a germ
to the ‘contagious’ structuring of a domain (T 146).” For Simondon as for Deleuze, these
germs of individuation do not evaporate in the event that actualizes them. They persist in
themselves, and account for the continuous process of creation constituting the individual
as the resolution of its intensive disparation, its latent and heterogeneous potentiality. “If
the individual is an agent, it is only to the extent that it is first and foremost a theatre of
operations, a node or relay of an individuation in progress” (T 225).
Pre-individual being constitutes a “field” of individuating differences. This field is a
“determinable” domain, in which the disparate tensions of individuating differences
function as the potentials that a germ of structure can resolve and modulate. Although the
resolution in extensity is the processural terminus of the potentials that populate the
individuating field, it must be rigorously distinguished from the extensities it produces.
Deleuze insists on this point: “Any confusion between the two processes, any reduction
of individuation to a limit or complication of differenciation, compromises the whole
philosophy of difference” (DR 247/318). In itself, the field is both determinate (populated
by intensities, real conditions of individuation that are neither arbitrary nor indifferent)
and untotalisable (since its dimensions are not the parts of a whole but tensions of a
system). Since “individuating difference must not only be conceived within a field of
individuation in general, but must itself be conceived as an individual difference [such
that] the form of the field must be necessarily and in itself filled with individual
differences,” one should always speak in the plural of ‘pre-individual fields’, where
Being is the untotalisable plane that these fields populate. Individuations always result
from an event that resolves the determinable potentiality within a given field, where field
and event are reciprocally defined. How then does this individuation individuate Ideas?
What is the status of time in this relation?
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The static synthesis of Ideas, their “ideational [Idéel] time”, is static precisely insofar
as they remain indeterminate, or not yet determined by the dramatization which will
articulate them in concrete spatio-temporal dynamisms. The “static” character indicates
that the Idea, as a purely differential relation, is in-itself without a determinate relation to
a content which will incarnate the relations in an intensive differenciation. In this sense,
differenciation always involves a dynamic instance, for it is impossible to grant an
existence or actuality to a pure relation as such. In order for the Ideational reality of a
relation to pass into actuality, it must receive a content that itself determines a
differentiation of Ideas at the same time as it incarnates these relations in actual qualities
and quantities. The intensive dynamisms, by serializing the relations and points which in
themselves can only have an Ideal status, create by actualizing what remains merely
potential in Ideas. It is only when this potential is abstracted from the instance of creation
that it remains wholly “static.”
The key thing to note then is that the static synthesis is static only when thought
apprehends the multiplicity of relations and points in itself apart from its dynamic
individuation and the actualities which incarnate it. And yet, abstracted from its
incarnation, the Idea remains indeterminate and one-sided. Moreover, a crucial point is
missed, which has been implicit so far and must now be made explicit. As we saw in
section 4.3 above, the static synthesis of Ideas “acts by incarnating its varieties in diverse
societies and by accounting for the simultaneity of all the relations and terms which, each
time and in each case, constitute the present” (my emphasis). Althusser and Balibar teach
us that an economic Idea is not derived from an empirical succession of cases, but rather
refers to the way a society is produced in the simultaneity of a present moment only by
forming a case of solution to a synthetic and problematising field proper to it. The
“static” or “Ideal” time of the Idea refers to the simultaneity proper to the differential
relations that enter into communication when the communication of series is enacted (e.g.
of the two series ‘adults I knew as a child’ and ‘adults in my life now’, which interact
simultaneously under the influence of a dark precursor, and which only on this basis may
enter into relations of ‘before’ and ‘after’). Since it is the dark precursor that creates the
coexistence and simultaneity of the series as the pure form of time, it is in relation to this
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precursor that the simultaneous determination of the basic series of a system must be
‘said’ or referred to. On the other hand, it has frequently been claimed that when two or
more heterogeneous series enter into communication and thereby differenciate one
another, Ideas are said to be dramatized. A complicated knot is formed here between the
precursor, the ideal relations, and the dynamisms that select and dramatize these
relations. The problem is, if the simultaneity of serial systems is a function of the dark
precursor, functioning as that instance in relation to which series may be said to coexist,
how then do we determine its precise position within the relation between the static
synthesis of Ideas and the dynamisms that dramatize them?
This relation between static and dynamic genesis is coextensive with what I have
referred to as the problem of coexistence, and is the core problem lying at the root of this
whole project, insofar as our guiding question has been how temporal synthesis and
intensive individuation relate to one another and determine both the concrete (dynamic)
rhythms and speeds of actualisation as well as the differentiation of formal (static)
temporal dimensions as such from the point of view of time more generally. In the course
of this analysis, this problem has been divided into several interrelated problems which
must now be brought to bear on this relation between Ideas and intensities.
In the first chapter, the problem of coexistence was coupled with that of the passage
of time, so that the passing of the present at the same time entails the production of its
relation to a contemporaneously constituted past. This is a problem of temporal synthesis.
Events must be said to coexist in some fashion, as must the elements that the present
contracts. A dimension of coexistence that at the same time produces an effect of pre-
existence seemed necessary. An a priori pure past cannot explain this passage, as it
presents nothing which would allow us to explain the power of passage on its basis. The
problem of passage is a problem of how to “make the difference” between the two
repetitions, i.e. of how to supply the envelopment of the field of coexisting events within
the bare repetition of presents with a positive principle of motion.
In short, what we have sought is an explanation as to how the succession and
simultaneity of the present, the coexistence of its genetic precursors, and the emergence
of the new fit together into a coherent and concrete operativity of time without splitting-
 92  
 
 

off into non-communicating ontological orders of being. This last qualification stemmed
from what was referred to as the problem of indiscernibility. It was claimed that, as the
instance of determination as such, the third synthesis of time carries out the
differenciation of dimensionality as such, and hence can resolve the problem of
indiscernibility by splitting past and present within its own a priori operativity. The
splitting by virtue of which the asymmetry of before and after is distributed must ensure
that this contraction of instants in the present also envelops the difference between levels
in the past. In short, it must ensure that the embedding of presents in reflection also effect
a concrescence of virtual coexistence, and that the division of the present result in a
distribution of series capable of producing the new. Contrary to the notion of totality
proper to a ‘pure past,’ the third synthesis is called upon to produce a totality of
dimensions as such. Although we have seen the logical necessity of such a capacity, the
vehicle of this splitting as well as the means by which the distribution of difference to
each dimension (the two repetitions) is carried out in the third synthesis is still in need of
an account.
The distribution of difference in the differentiation of dimensions as such must be
related to the intersection of intensity and Ideas. In doing so, we must try to specify how
the distinction between the clear-confused and distinct-obscure of the Idea is itself
internal to the operativity of intensity. In an important passage worth quoting in full,
Deleuze describes the intersection of Ideas and intensities in precisely these terms:

Intensity or difference in itself thus 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. Henceforward, the Ideas, relations, variations in those relations and
distinctive points are in a sense separated: instead of coexisting, they enter states of simultaneity
or succession. Nevertheless, all the intensities are implicated in one another, each in turn both
enveloped and enveloping, such that each continues to express the changing totality of Ideas, the
variable ensemble of differential relations. However, each intensity clearly expresses only certain
relations or certain degrees of variation. Those that it expresses clearly are precisely those on
which it is focused when it has the enveloping role. In its role as the enveloped, it still expresses all
relations and all degrees, but confusedly. (DR 252/325)

We should not therefore say that intensities coexist. It is Ideas that coexist in relation to
the series which communicate in an intensive system. Intensity is rather the instance that
forces Ideal relations to coexist by introducing relations of simultaneity and succession
into the series that dramatize them. This is not the same thing as coexisting. The dynamic
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implicating and enveloping power may not itself be formal, but the instance of
communication it brings about creates the formless opening in the system in which the
coexistence of the relations in communication can be achieved through envelopment. I
will return to this shortly. We may for now say that coexistence (as a static genesis)
occurs when a dynamic instance produces a relation between unrelated elements of a
structure. Once placed in relation, that which functions as the precursor to this relation,
that is, what has put them in relation and which continues to do so by enveloping
obscurely all the other ordinal degrees in its intensive plane, now coexists in relation to
them. The precursor coexists in respect to the series it forces to communicate. By taking
on this role of coexistence, relations of enveloping-enveloped are established between the
intensive couplings or serial systems, through which the clarity and obscurity
characteristic of the expression of Ideas is established. The specific nature of these
relations, and the position of a given intensive series within them, seems to be the
mechanism by which the clear expression of an Idea is confused insofar as it is clear,
confused precisely because what is clear maintains an implicating relation to the distinct-
obscure.
We must try to push the concept of implication further, since so much rides on its
comprehension. Deleuze distinguishes between the enveloping and the enveloped role in
the intensive synthesis, identifying them not only with different aspects of the expression
of Ideas, but insofar as it is only on the basis of its own essential process that intensity
individuates and facilitates the expression of Ideas, the enveloping and the enveloped
constitute distinct aspects of this process as well. With regard to the former, we see in the
quote above that the enveloping role carries out a selection of a certain group or nexus of
ideal connections to be ‘clearly’ expressed, while as enveloped it implicates all the other
intensities ‘confusedly.’ This two-fold determination has consequences for the process of
individuation as well. Deleuze writes that,

The order of implication includes the enveloping no less than the enveloped, depth as well as distance.
When an enveloping intensity clearly expresses certain relations and certain distinctive points, it still
expresses confusedly all other relations, all their variations and points. It expresses these in the
intensities it envelops. These latter enveloped intensities are then within the former. The enveloping
intensities (depth) constitute the field of individuation, the individuating differences. The enveloped
intensities (distances) constitute the individual differences. The latter necessarily fill the former.
 94  
 
 

[…]There is a variable order according to which the ensemble of relations is diversely implicated in
these secondary [enveloped] intensities. (DR 254/326)

It was mentioned already that one should always speak in the plural of ‘pre-individual
fields.’ The reason for this was that the field in which individuating differences populate
is not indifferent or uniform, but rather “must itself be conceived as an individual
difference [such that] the form of the field must be necessarily and in itself filled with
individual differences.” If the significance of this remark earlier was oblique, it is now
possible to grasp its importance. The two-fold determination of intensity, as both
enveloping and enveloped, confused and clear, difference and distance, means that
properly speaking the field that intensity populates is itself created by intensity and
constantly modulated with it. The field is intensity itself, it has no other component or
definition than this process. A field of enveloped-implicated virtuality is produced by the
enveloping-implicating of an intensity at the same time the latter is solved. Indeed,
individuation is one disparate process, with two aspects. That is why Deleuze repeatedly
drills home the point that “the clear is confused by itself, it is confused insofar as it is
clear” (DR 254/326).
The movement by which a ‘primary’ intensity simultaneously envelops all other
intensities (expressed confusedly) and is itself enveloped (expressed clearly in a
‘secondary’ intensity) embodies “the fundamental property” of intensities – “namely, the
power to divide in changing their nature.” The enveloping-implicating field undergoes a
change of nature by being enveloped and implicated in the ‘solving’ of its potential in
extensity. Actualisation is always a differenciation that involves a difference in nature, as
intensities pass from being quantities of difference to extensive differences in kind
(qualities) and quantitative differences. As we have seen, the total notion is (indi)drama-
different/ciation. To describe the intensive change in nature that the implication of
primary intensity undergoes by being implicated and enveloped in a secondary intensity
or an actualisation, Deleuze adopts Leibniz’s notion of the “metaschematism.” The
notion is intended to indicate the variable relations of envelopment and implication
circulating across the field of individuation, in which the individual is composed through
a perpetually fluctuating “theatre” of “intensive souls which develop and are re-
enveloped.” However it is not a coincidence that the notion of a transpersonal or pre-
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subjective “schematism” should emerge at this point. The division of intensity by which
it changes nature is not unrelated to the Kantian schematism. As the pure form of
determination, determination as such, the schematism is precisely that instance in which
static and indeterminate logical relations are divided and distributed dynamically in
existing things. In Kant this power relates the pure concepts of the understanding to the
dynamic content of time and space by way of a ‘mystery of the soul.’ Dynamism in Kant
establishes a relation between concepts as the pure form of the Same or of logical identity
and the disparate intensive quantities of reality filling intuition. As we saw, this is
precisely how common sense and good sense function: common sense represents on the
one side the purely logical or static form of recognition in the concepts of the
understanding, while good sense carries out the dynamic distribution in existing
individuated subjects and objects which the schematism divides and apportions in
congruence with this static ideal. Deleuze’s “metaschematism” refers no less to a
convergence of static and dynamic synthesis; however, everything hinges on the
intersection of the two outside of (or at least in such a way as to not be relative to)
representation. This explains the ‘meta’ of ‘metaschematism.’ In an important passage,
Deleuze writes that “the Kantian schema would take flight and point beyond themselves
in the direction of a conception of differential Ideas, if they were not unduly subordinated
to the categories which reduce them to the status of simple mediations in the world of
representation” (DR 285/364). The division that produces a change of nature in
intensities constitutes or creates the meeting point of the static synthesis in the distinct-
obscure Ideas and the dynamic distribution and envelopment of such relations in
diversely distinguished lines of actualisation. How is this comprehensible as a
schematism? We know that Kant’s schematism coincided with a “pure form of time” or a
“pure determination” which Deleuze has already associated with the third synthesis of
time as a “pure” or “abstract” line. The temporal differentiation of dimensions is
coextensive with the metaschematism of intensive or individuating differences. As
Deleuze writes,

Are not all the repetitions ordered in the pure form of time? In effect, this pure form or straight line
defined by an order which distributes a before, a during, and an after; by a totality which incorporates
all three in the simultaneity of its a priori synthesis; and by a series which makes a type of repetition
 96  
 
 

correspond to each. […] Everything depends on the distribution of repetitions in the form, the order,
the totality and the series of time. (DR 294-5/376-7).

In distributing an order to the series which it determines, the pure form of time makes a
type of repetition correspond to them. As we have seen already, the difference between
the first and second syntheses ultimately amounted to a distinction between two sorts of
repetition which required an unconditioned instance in which to establish their relation.
By establishing this relation between the first and second synthesis, the third synthesis
carries out a differentiation of dimensionality as such. This differentiation establishes a
totality of time, where totality indicates nothing other than the pure act or event splitting
time into a before, during, and after, as well as the enacting of a concrescence of virtual
relations coexisting in relation to the present. However, as has also been said, while it
distributes the two repetitions and situates them in relation to one another, the third
synthesis simultaneously “eliminates the two intracyclic and extracyclic [repetitions]…it
undoes them both and puts time into a straight line, … rendering the other two
repetitions impossible … [it] excludes them” (DR 297/379). In this capacity the third
synthesis constitutes the “expulsive and selective force of the eternal return, its
centrifugal force” (DR 297/380). The problem we must address concerns how these two
aspects of the third synthesis (as order and distribution of repetition and its dimensions,
and as exclusion of all but the different itself) can be conceived in one and the same
process.
Once again, we are seeking the meeting point of static and dynamic genesis. Yet it
has been exceedingly difficult so far to establish precisely how these two align
themselves. The problem remains unsolvable so long as a coexistence by default, whether
of an a priori past in general or of Ideas (even once they are “separated from the forms of
memory”), is presupposed in itself as static, for in this case everything dynamic becomes
placed a position of circularity in which the derived refers back to an in-itself defined in
its image. Against this reading, it is necessary to rethink the notion of the static synthesis
not on the basis of the second synthesis (of coexistence by default) but rather through the
third synthesis (of coexistence through disjointedness, or the Caesura). A pure form of
time cannot but be a static synthesis; yet we do not yet know of what sort it is, and what
its relation to the content that fills it will be.
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We must essentially distinguish between the pure form and the empirical contents. The empirical
contents are mobile and succeed one another, while the a priori determinations of time, on the
contrary, are fixed or held, as though in a photo or a freeze-frame, coexisting within [a] static
synthesis. (DR 294/376)

The necessary compliment to this passage is one that appears a few pages after, and
identifies the content which should be associated with the pure form. The passage is
worth quoting in full, as it is absolutely indispensable to our problem and must be
carefully considered:

What, however, is the content of this third time, this formlessness at the end of the form of time, this
decentered circle which displaces itself at the end of the straight line? What is this content which is
affected or ‘modified’ by the eternal return? We have tried to show that it is a question of simulacra
and simulacra alone. The power of simulacra is that they essentially implicate at once the object = x in
the unconscious, the word = x in language, and the action = x in history. Simulacra are those systems in
which different relates to different by means of difference itself. […] It is all a matter of difference in
the series, and of differences of difference in the communication between series. What is displaced and
disguised in the series cannot and must not be identified, but exists and acts as the differenciator of
difference. Moreover, repetition necessarily flows from this play of difference in two ways. On the one
hand, because each series is explicated and unfolded only in implicating the others, it therefore repeats
the others and is repeated in the others, which in turn implicate it. However, it is implicated by the
others only insofar as it simultaneously implicates those others, with the result that it returns to itself as
many times as it returns to another. Returning to itself is the ground of the bare repetitions, just as
returning to another is the ground of the clothed repetition. (DR 299-300/382-83, final emphasis mine)

This passage makes several important connections, the consequences of which should go
a long way toward answering the majority of our questions here. First, we may note that
the problem of the relation between static and dynamic genesis is properly posed only as
a relation between the third synthesis of time as empty form and the intensive simulacral
systems which it affects and is effective through. When Deleuze notes that it is intensity,
or systems of simulacra which implicate the object = x, we know by now that this refers
to the dark precursor which enacts the communication between series and functions to
differenciate them. It is “displaced and disguised” in these series, missing from its place,
and its path is only determinable as though in reverse, “intagliated.” It is specifically by
virtue of this relation between the dark precursor and intensive series that the latter may
be seen to have an essential relation with the empty form of time. The second portion of
the passage indicates why this is the case. We have said that the dark precursor ensures
the differenciation of each series, and does so by constituting a ‘second kind of
difference’ as a relation between series which has a constitutive effect on the terms within
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the basic series. The terms of any series are essentially modified by being implicated in a
relation with the terms of the other series with which it is coupled. The “differenciation”
of the one series by the other refers to the fact that the serial form is always multiple, and
relates different to different immediately and by difference. As a result of this irreducibly
implicated character of the serial form, a given intensity must always be both implicating
other series at the same time it is itself implicated by them.
Now, we have sought, at base, to understand two things about intensity: i) how the
clear-confused is distinguished from the distinct-obscure, and ii) how the two repetitions
are able to enter into relation. What the passage above indicates is that there is a single
instance that carries out both operations. By implicating (or differenciating) other series,
each intensity repeats them in its own constitutive formation. By being implicated by
them at the same time, it returns to itself as implicating, for it is only in the process of
being-differenciated that an intensity comes to be at all. We saw that the problem of the
clear-confused and distinct-obscure concerned the question of how an explicated or
enveloped intensity can clearly express certain relations while at the same time
enveloping a whole nexus of other relations. Again, the profundity of this operation lies
in the fact that the two aspects of expression occur in one and the same instance: through
implication, an intensity is differenciated by other series and therefore undergoes a
division causing a change of its nature which solves itself in a clear-confused expression.
However (and here we grasp the Janus-headed character of individuation), since an initial
implication of and by a multiplicity of other series is the initial reason for this division,
the clear expression of a singular instance of division (i.e. the individuation of a particular
body or quality) returns to itself and becomes expressed only by returning to all the other
series whose implicative values caused it to undergo the division. It is in light of this
twofold operation that we must understand Deleuze when he says in the quote above that
“when an enveloping intensity clearly expresses certain relations and certain distinctive
points, it still expresses confusedly all other relations, all their variations and points. It
expresses these in the intensities it envelops.”
The same division is no less temporal than ‘structural.’ The relation between the two
repetitions is formed in and through this very same process. The returning to others
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(enveloping) and returning to self (being-enveloped) is the basis for the second and first
syntheses of time. This point is crucial to comprehend. We know already that the first
synthesis coincides with the time of an equalization of a difference, which is precisely
what occurs when an intensity returns to itself and changes nature by being explicated on
a new plane which draws off its difference. However the constitution of a past must occur
simultaneously with the explication of a present; this was the ‘Bergsonian’ paradox of
contemporaneity discussed in chapter one. We may now see that what was previously
referred to as a “pure past of coexistence” (the second paradox which was deduced from
the first) should more precisely refer to the nexus of distinct-obscure intensive series that
implicate and differenciate each intensity and bring about its actualisation. Since
intensities do not disappear by being explicated, but continue to persist in themselves as
difference, the nexus of implicated series through which a given actualisation maintains
an essential relation may therefore be said to insist, subsist, and persist in it, without yet
being actual as such, i.e. while remaining purely potential for it. Since every actualisation
constitutes a present or a contemplation-contraction, each present has a nexus of distinct-
obscure potentialities which it implicates and which alone pertain to it, and in addition
implicate this present in every other intensity which it returns to by virtue of returning to
itself. It is therefore in one and the same instance that a problematic field is composed (as
enveloping individuating difference) and solved (as enveloped explicated actuality). The
enveloping difference constitutes a determinate field of potentiality which replaces the
notion of a pure past in itself by fulfilling its requirements of contemporaneity and
coexistence, while the enveloped explication constitutes a lived present which contracts
itself by cancelling itself as difference. Both paradoxes of time are therefore resolvable
strictly through the movement of intensity and the division which causes it to change in
nature.
In chapter three it was argued that the two repetitions must be internal dimensions of
the third synthesis. If the individuation of intensity is now being called upon to explain
this relation between the clothed and the bare repetitions, how does the Aion of the third
synthesis fit into this picture? How does the pure form of time coincide with Difference
as “the instance in which we can speak of determination as such”? And if this overcomes
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the too-simple relation between ground and grounded, what is the role of the “abstract
line” in all of this?
So as to be clear as to the problem, we should briefly recall the essential role of the
third synthesis as it was articulated in the previous chapter. As an empty form of time, the
third synthesis must have the capacity to determine the other two by supplying a means
by which their relation can be established, thereby accounting for the passage of time as
well. At the same time, as the selective power of eternal return, this ‘ontological’
repetition is coextensive with the differentiation of difference, where difference must also
mean a difference between temporal dimensions. Strictly speaking, this dimensional
problem is the same as the relation of the two repetitions. It was said that the third
synthesis distributes this dimensional differenciation by ‘ungrounding’ the past and
present, and that it does so by making them strictly relative to the pure line of the caesura
that simultaneously distributes and dispenses with them. The caesura is nothing in itself:
it is the pure operation of splitting which separates the before and the after, the clothed
and the bare repetitions, without going outside itself as an empty form. Strictly from the
‘point of view’ of the splitting, or rather as the ‘dimensions of its form’, before and after
(past and present) coexist along a straight line that distances them by differentiating their
difference. How then does this splitting relate to intensity?

vi. Individuation and Transcendental Time

Through the division that changes their nature, each intensity moves in both
directions at once. Intensity is always both enveloping (moving laterally in the dimension
of depth to implicate other intensities virtually, transforming the field of potentiality and
expressing obscurely a nexus of Ideal connections and events) and simultaneously
enveloped (insofar as it is expressed by being solved in an extensity, expressing concrete
potentials in a local contingent node within a problematic horizon ). Since both
‘directions’ are simultaneously carried out in the ‘solving’ or the ‘event of individuation,’
it seems possible to claim that intensive individuation is the functional or operational
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side of the Caesura of past and future, a pure line that differentiates an implicated field
of problems in the explicated solutions of a present moment.
In the pure operation of division, intensity forges an abstract line of pure
determination. The line is traced ‘in reverse’ by the dark precursor, whose function is
identical with the secondary difference established between series. Since this secondary
difference is established when an implicating and implicated communication between
series takes place, and it is the latter that gives rise to (or rather is) their division, the dark
precursor is a pure line of division that simultaneously distributes and ungrounds the
relation between the indeterminate ground (the past implicating itself obscurely, or the
second synthesis) and the grounded (the present of distinguished extensities), distributing
both although subject to neither of them. Properly speaking, they are internal to its pure a
priori synthesis. However, since the division or “splitting” is carried out in the
individuating synthesis of intensity, this a priori is always distributive in a concrete
situation or actualisation. This is a crucial point to be clear about. The static synthesis of
the Aion as “determination as such” receives by virtue of its link with intensity all the
qualifications of individuation mentioned above. In this regard it is non-universal and
non-totalisable. Static synthesis has nothing to do with a ‘virtual totality lying in wait for
actualisation.’ Due to the composition of the pre-individual field mentioned above, if a
static synthesis does in fact constitute a ‘totality,’ this is not a totality of elements pre-
existing their actualisation, but a formal totality of dimensions rather than elements. The
‘container’ metaphor for the virtual must be discarded,37 as it invariably implies a unity
and a wholeness foreign to the field of intensity. Referring individuality to its genetic
precursors in intensity absolutely does not entail relating it to a ‘higher’ or ‘totalizing’
reality. As I read it, the truth of the static synthesis in the last instance refers exclusively
(at least in Difference and Repetition) to the play of differences in intensive quantities
which, by implicating an ordinal multiplicity as it explicates a cardinal extensity,
implicates confusedly a coexistence of relations as it explicates a finite set of these
relations in and as the present. In this way the relation between the pure form of time as a
“static” synthesis and the individuation of intensity makes possible a conception of time
at once transcendental and contingent, ontological while nonetheless concrete. In an
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important passage in “The Ideal Synthesis of Difference” chapter Deleuze articulates this
point in an exemplary way with respect to the relation between intensity as a
transcendental ‘principle’ and the concrete actualities it distributes:

Intensive quantity is a transcendental principle, not a scientific concept. ..an empirical principle is
the instance which governs a particular domain. Every domain is a qualified and extended partial
system […] But the domains are distributive and cannot be added: there is no more an extensity in
general than there is an energy in general within extensity. […] The transcendental principle does
not govern any domain but gives the domain to be governed to a given empirical principle; it
accounts for the subjection of a domain to a principle. The domain is created by difference of
intensity, and given by this difference to an empirical principle according to which and in which
the difference itself is cancelled. Moreover, while the laws of nature govern the surface of the
world, the eternal return ceaselessly rumbles in this other dimension of the transcendental or the
volcanic spatium” (DR 241/310-11).

While not explicitly dealing with time, this passage may easily be read for its temporal
importance. The form of time cannot be neutral or indifferent to its content. On the
contrary, there is no such thing as a ‘content in general.’ Just as an empirical principle
applicable to an extensive phenomenon refers more fundamentally to a play of intensities
which gives this domain to it, the domains which can be subsumed under the principle are
not universal. From the point of view of time, I take this to mean that although the pure
form of time carries out the static synthesis in and through the division of intensities, this
does not tell us anything about the composition of the domain distributed therein. The
simultaneity of the basic series is “distributive, and cannot be added.” In other words, the
fact that time is distributed in the process of individuation in and through a pure form
suggests that the instance of determination as such cannot be predicted or anticipated. No
principal can totalize the field of intensity which temporalizes being, and hence the being
of time is as ‘anomalous’ as the individuation of being. Static synthesis merely indicates
that from the point of view of the philosophy of time, philosophy can articulate how a
present moment is formed, but not what its coordinates, constitutive series, or
individuating factors will give rise to. Repetition from one moment to another always
implicates diverse series traversing the gamut of ideal connections in their perplicative
co-constitution, and the result is never general but local, specific to a determinable region
within the problematic field which itself must be individuated simply by giving rise to a
moment at all.
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If the pure form cannot be a representational category, this is ultimately because it is

incapable of functioning as a substantial essence or principal which would ground the
ordinal play of individuation in an order that is transcendent to it. The ungrounding of the
condition by default (or the implicating and obscure potential field) and the agent as
metamorphosis (or the clear and distinguished actualized bodies) is an intrinsic property
of intensive synthesis, since individuation always differentiates the problematic field and
the solutions it gives rise to, and the pure form of this division is determination as such,
transcendental Difference. How then do we explain the fact that this ungrounding
synonymous with the third synthesis of time in depth, the eternal return of the different, is
so easily misunderstood as grounded in a substantial foundation? Despite its ontological
truth, the double operations of intensive different/ciation nonetheless give rise to the
“surface illusion” of a simplistic relation of grounding, which the dominant history of
representation testifies to. The reason for this lies in the way in which representation
attempts to apprehend the distinct-obscure as a prior foundation for the actualisation of
the extensity expressing it. To do so, it must reconstitute the dark precursor after the fact,
and retroactively ascribe to it a substantial causal agency that in truth does not belong to
it. What remains unthought in such a retroactive reconstitution (of the Ideas as ground
and their actualisation as the grounded) is the instance of determination as such, the
abstract line in which indeterminate and determined rise up and co-determine one
another. As we have seen, the abstract line traced by the dark precursor through the
individuating field itself creates this field by implication at the same time it is solves it,
and therefore it cannot be properly called ‘pre-existing’, even if representation inevitably
apprehends it in this way. The very word ‘precursor,’ if allowed to indicate a mechanism
external to serialization itself, could lead one to posit an agent beyond multiplicity which
organized its syntheses. However this would be contrary to everything we’ve tried to
indicate as regards the notion of determination as such, which always a both a difference
between differences and a twofold division of difference as such as it changes nature, and
never an instance beyond difference as such.38 For this reason, the third Bergsonian
paradox of preexistence seems to be only an external effect of the functioning of the
system, and not an ontological postulate of intensity or the individuation of time.
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4.6 Conclusion

By tracing the logic of Deleuze’s arguments for temporal synthesis through his concept
of intensive individuation and reading these two themes through the concept of the third
synthesis of time, we have attempted to provide a multifaceted reading of the problem of
determination as such in Difference and Repetition. As I have attempted to show, the
profound interest of such a concept is that it integrates the philosophy of time in a logic
of concrete individuating processes, always distributive and untotalisable by nature,
which carry out movements of creative temporalization conceivable without any recourse
to the principles of representation. The non-representational concept of determination has
above all hinged on a problematic most properly (and perhaps ironically) Kantian in
nature, i.e. the problem of how to relate static and dynamic genesis to one another.
Deleuze’s answer has seemed ultimately to involve a bizarrely Nietzschean solution, or at
least one consonant with Deleuze’s idiosyncratic reading of the eternal return.
The eternal return, as the “more terrible labyrinth” of the expulsive and selective pure
form of time, may be read as the interlocking of static and dynamic syntheses. It is the
formlessness at the heart of time, the line of a pure intensive caesura which circles only at
the end, selecting and differentiating the different while displacing the Same and
preventing it from returning.39 The formless here refers to the caesura of time in its static
or formal character, while the selective character indicates the intensive power of series,
which, once placed into relation by this formal caesura, differenciate one another and
ramify themselves through implication and envelopment, i.e. through the power of
difference alone. In the eternal return static time and the dynamic play of series mutually
individuate the real; the play of difference in itself co-differentiates the past and the
present by conferring on them a difference proper to each (implication in the past and
explication in the present). Moreover, while it takes the static synthesis to make the
simultaneity of serial composition possible, it is in dynamic individuation that this formal
caesura concretizes itself, dividing time into its dissymmetrical directions in the present,
by making this division and the forced movement it produces the enabling condition of
coexistence between events or dramatizations. In sum, when coupled together the
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interaction of the static and the dynamic component of temporal individuation constitute
the “machine of determination as such”, an abstract line tracing non-localisable
connections which endlessly covers its tracks, as though ‘intagliated.’
The distinction between implicating and being-implicated functioning in this machine
of determination enables us to understand one of the more surprising claims of Deleuze’s
later discussions of time in Cinema 2. There Deleuze writes that “The actual is always
objective, but the virtual is subjective: it was initially the affect, that which we experience
in time; then time itself, pure virtuality which divides itself in two as affector and
affected, ‘the affection of self by self’ [Kant] as definition of time” (C2 83). In its
connection with intensity we should consider the remark from Difference and Repetition
regarding the alliance between intensity and depth, where Deleuze describes it as “an
alliance between Being and itself in difference.” “Depth and intensity”, he says, “are the
same at the level of being, but the same insofar as this is said of difference. Depth is the
intensity of being, or vice versa.” This remark could perhaps render questionable
Badiou’s claim that binaries such as active and reactive are merely “introductory”,
always overcome by the unity of intuition. For if intuition has a mechanism by which
thought carries it along a trajectory of virtual images, its logic is precisely one of
implication. Thought can only think by implicating and being-implicated – in this way it
opens onto a world by virtue of the centre of envelopment demarcating its intensive field.
Moreover, this alliance bears directly on the problem of time, for the eternal return
whose motor is precisely the implicating power of intensity lies at the base of repetition
as a for-itself: “The eternal return is indeed the consequence of a difference which is
originary, pure, synthetic and in-itself […] Difference is the first affirmation; eternal
return is the second, the ‘eternal affirmation of being’ or the ‘nth’ power which is said of
the first” (125/164, 243/313). We saw in the problem of indiscernibility that Badiou’s
complaint regarding the virtual is that the synthesis of time that splits the virtual from the
actual requires that Being be said according to both sides, but differently. This claim
seems at first glance to be vindicated by Deleuze’s assertion that the third synthesis
distributes distinct types of difference to the bare and the clothed repetitions. As we have
seen, one involves a difference that is drawn-off, the other a displacing and disguising, a
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difference between levels or totalities. Thus it would seem correct that these orders of
difference constitute distinct orders of being, and that the fact that the third synthesis of
time distributes these distinct repetitions would imply that its very operativity is the ruin
of univocity, the fracturing of being. And as Badiou insists (as does Peter Hallward40),
this would inevitably come at the cost of a de-valuing of the actual, leaving it
indeterminate, a vague shell or shed skin.
Yet everything would change if this distribution of difference were not bipolar,
bisecting itself into two orders without resemblance... If, contrary to such a hypothesis,
the distribution of difference would be shown to have one and only one process, that the
two orders of difference were in fact not properly speaking distinct, but were rather
constituted at the same time and by the same differences that separate them. In this case
the univocity of being would not be split, but on the contrary, univocity could only be
said of the division of intensive difference and its implicating-enveloping power. What
would this involve? How can the two orders, the extensity and extrinsic difference of the
actual and the enveloped Ideal relations and implicating series of the virtual coincide
without falling into dualism? Deleuze’s answer, as we have seen, is that there is a
dimension prior to their distinction, whose living force is irreducible to either of them
precisely owing to the fact that the process it introduces is the path of communication
between the two, their differentiation, their individuation. Yet since Badiou has neglected
to consider the notion of internal difference in his discussion of the disjunctive synthesis
of production, and consequently conflates individuation with actuality, it is not surprising
that he should end up positing a One-All in the place of this individuation. For if all
difference was extensive, and one needed to account for its production through a
dimension differing in kind from it, what would the virtual be if not a One-All?
We have seen on the contrary that the individuating difference is differentiated as a
potential field in and through the very process that solves it in the actual. As a result,
there is no longer a problem of indiscernibility, for the division between the
differenciated extensities and the intensive implex or spatium is established precisely by
the nature of intensity itself as a fundamental ontological process responsible for the
immanent genesis of the real. Time and intensity are coextensive and implicated in one
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another precisely insofar as there is no individuation which is not a temporalization of

being, and no time that is not produced through the intensive differentiation of
dimensionality as such. Between the two aspects of determination lies the abstract line:
“where a powder fuse forms the link between the Idea and the actual – the ‘temporally
eternal’ is formed, and our greatest mastery or greatest power is decided, that which
concerns problems themselves” (DR 189/244).
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Chapter 5
Conclusion

Rather than reiterating the conclusions of the preceding chapters, I would like to bring
this meditation to a close by indicating some extensions of this project which would take
it beyond its current parameters and lead it into problems of a different sort. In my view,
the conclusions of the preceding chapters with regard to the problem of temporal
individuation in Difference and Repetition will discover their true consequences only
when they function as a basis for a more extended encounter with several other more
traditional philosophical problems, which may be developed on their platform. I would
like to indicate just a couple of the potential lines of inquiry through which this project
may first of all be extended into the work which followed Difference and Repetition, i.e.
The Logic of Sense. Before doing so, some prefatory remarks on the differences between
the two texts are necessary.

1. From Depth To Surface - Intensity and Topology

Between Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense a dimensional transposition
has taken place, which has the effect of resituating both the concept of intensity as well as
the first and third syntheses of time. If one follows Deleuze’s work chronologically from
the early essays on Bergson collected in Desert Islands, through his Bergsonism and into
Difference and Repetition (i.e. if one tries to read him as a ‘good Bergsonist’ through and
through), one will almost inevitably stumble when one reaches The Logic of Sense. I have
already sought to indicate the reason for this in the preceding chapters: what Difference
and Repetition concluded by way of the intensive synthesis is that the Bergsonian notion
of a “pure immemorial past” co-existing by default, an ontological memory, remains
burdened by the metaphysics of representation and identity. Despite his earlier attempts
to think this ontological memory as degrees of difference in itself, it is clear by the time
of Difference and Repetition that a synthesis of coexistence can only be established by
excising the forms of memory and the default substantial ground of time they imply, and
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replacing them with an empty form of time and an intensive ungrounding which turns
around a serial logic. It is not a coincidence then that the notion of the series plays such a
pivotal role in The Logic of Sense, for the logic of series is always intensive in nature.
This helps to explain why it is that The Logic of Sense is able to nearly do away with the
second synthesis of time altogether. The coexistence which we have seen to be a result of
intensity is, in this latter work, read strictly through the interaction of Aion (as empty
form or pure line of division) and Chronos (as the lived present or state of affairs) which
the former divides. The virtue of this re-situation is that its questions revolve
predominantly around that no-place of division where intensity carries out its returning,
through which dimensions of time are distributed, and in doing so it tries to glance
‘horizontally’, so to speak, at the two-fold movement this involves. Deleuze is
consequently able to give a distinct account of both operations (implication as well as
being-implicated, or the pure line and that which is explicated through it). As we have
seen, it is certainly the case that it is in one and the same process that intensity divides
and changes in nature and in doing so gives rise to an insisting obscure potential and a
confused and clear explication or actualisation. Both the obscure and the clear are
constructed and differentiated whenever series interact. However, the splitting of the two
(the division of the obscure and the clear) gives way to a new kind of topological
organization in The Logic of Sense. This new dimension is the ‘surface.’ The topology of
time which coincides with the double-differenciation of Aion and Chronos is articulated
through a logic of the event, one which is in my view entirely consonant with the notion
of Eternal Return traced through the logic of intensive synthesis already, yet with minor
differences and additions which make The Logic of Sense an original elaboration on the
themes which preceded it a year before.
One example of such originality concerns a problem we might characterize as the
‘unilaterality’ of production. Aside from two brief suggestive remarks in chapter three,
the concept of counter-actualisation is not explicitly developed at any length in
Difference and Repetition. One of the unfortunate consequences of this fact lies in what
can potentially seem like a unilaterality of productive genesis in the work. However, this
unilaterality would in this case not simply be a negative consequence of a missing claim
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(i.e. an underdeveloped concept of sterility or neutrality). On the contrary, if the genesis

of the actual seems to move unidirectionally from virtual co-existence to actual
extensities, it seems to me this is more accurately a result of the restriction of the concept
of intensity to a particular dimension (depth), which has the effect of potentially
defaulting the originary determinants of production to the level of co-existing Ideas. I
have tried throughout the preceding chapters to insist, against this view, on the priority of
intensity as the instance of determination which supplies the very distinction between
virtual and actual with its condition of emergence and its mobile frontier or ungrounded
line of articulation. However, Deleuze himself notes in his ‘Preface to the Italian Edition
of The Logic of Sense’ that the concept of ‘depth’ still presents a problem even from this
latter point of view. In fact, his characterization of the shift taking place between the two
books provides an invaluable indication as to how the transposition from depth to surface
taking place between Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense should be read:

For my part, when I was no longer content with the history of philosophy, my book Difference and
Repetition still aspired nonetheless toward a sort of classical height and even toward an archaic
depth. The theory of intensity which I was drafting was marked by depth, false or true; intensity
was presented as stemming from the depths … In The Logic of Sense, the novelty for me lay in the
act of learning something about surfaces. The concepts remained the same: “multiplicities,”
“singularities,” “intensities,” “events,” “infinities,” “problems,” “paradoxes,” and “propositions” –
but reorganized according to this dimension. The concepts changed then, and so did the method, a
type of serial method, pertaining to surfaces; and the language changed, a language which I would
have wanted to be ever more intensive. (Two Regimes, 65).

We may note then that the problem is not with intensity as a concept, but with the way in
which it was conceived vis-à-vis the dimensions it distributes. There is a sense in which
the account of extensity in Difference and Repetition tends to undermine the ability of
actual circumstances and agents to have consequences beyond those immediately
determined by the virtual structure producing them. It is here that one discovers the
singular importance of the concept of ‘counter-actualisation’ in The Logic of Sense.
Through the latter concept we come to see that there is a necessary incompletion of the
productive event, which grants it the ability to be extracted and forced into
communication with other events in a quasi-causal continuation. It is this quasi-causal
communication between events that opens up what Deleuze describes as the space of
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‘freedom’ of eternity. It is here that the profound superficiality of intensity in The Logic
of Sense aligns itself most importantly with the finitude of evental synthesis, enabling the
incompletion of actualization to always open onto a vertical surface of simultaneity
enveloping and implicating unactualised factors of the event. Such factors insist, subsist,
but are not yet collected in a co-existing totality that would pre-exist this second moment
of freedom. They must be made to co-exist, be drawn together, forced to enter into
relations of enveloping-enveloped with one another, communicating across distances and
on their ‘edges’, like the growth of a crystal. This occurs through an intensive
prolongation that the neutrality (the inverse side of the causal relation) makes possible.
Such prolongation and continuation of events comes into singular focus through the
dimensional shift staged by The Logic of Sense, and deserves a lengthy meditation not
possible here, but which I hope to carry out in the near future as a way of building upon
the conclusions developed in this project.
Two other issues of central relevance to this project deserve mention at this point, as
they constitute the immediate directions I see this work leading toward, and perhaps even
in need of, if the reflections on time carried out here are to achieve their full significance.

2. History and Intelligibility

Any extension of this project would first and foremost need to consider the problem of
history, which I have completely neglected due to space constraints as well as the
singular difficulty of the topic. At the same time, it is my contention that any adequate
understanding of history in Deleuze would require as preliminary to its analysis a
nuanced understanding of the relation between static and dynamic genesis and its
importance for the individuation of time more broadly. For this reason the analysis
carried out in the preceding chapters should ideally serve as an indispensible tool for a
study of the problem of history of greater scope. Such a project would inevitably need to
consider the relation between the individuation of time and Deleuze’s concept of
dialectics, and the important (but conceptually difficult) speculative method it entails.
Contrary to Hegelian dialectics (which, rightly or wrongly, Deleuze accuses of being
bolstered by a representational fixation on the negative and its figures of opposition and
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contradiction), Deleuze’s concept of dialectics is founded on thought’s ability to

apprehend Ideas as structural multiplicities. To describe the method of apprehension
appropriate to the dialectical thinker Deleuze coins the term “vice-diction.” Drawing
from the logic of cases and ‘inessentiality’ that he finds in Leibniz, vice-diction names
the capacity for thought to apprehend static ideal relations within an Idea, while at the
same time dynamically precipitating situations and being itself produced by them as an
expressive force. The notion of counter-actualisation mentioned above provides the
correlate for the method of vice-diction with respect to the logic of the event in The Logic
of Sense. In both cases, the ideal analysis of a structure or the communicating field of
events producing the contemporaneity and simultaneity of a lived present is inseparable
from a pragmatics of thought involving what Deleuze refers to as the ‘genesis of thought
in thinking,’ or a transcendental empiricism. This being the case, in order to pose the
question of transcendental empiricism as a problem of history it would first be necessary
to elaborate the relation between vice-diction/counter-actualisation (as the method of
apprehending and describing multiplicities) and the individuation of time (as the
determination and actualisation of real concrete multiplicities in the present).
Another way of posing this problem is to seek a way of posing to Deleuze Sartre’s
famous question from the Critique of Dialectical Reason, mainly whether a de-totalized
notion of history can still be intelligible? How does the dialectic of Ideas or
communication of events enable the thinker in a concrete situation to raise thought to the
instance by which the contemporaneity of the present emerges from the problematic or
obscure field of historical connections and ideal liaisons determining it? How can the
individuation of time, the caesura of the Aion which splits the present along a pure line
which distributes to it a totality, order and series, give rise to an intelligible universe in its
compossibily as a synthesis of communicating worlds?41 Certainly the method of
apprehension must be conceived outside the coordinates of representational thought or
‘knowledge,’ i.e. good sense and common sense. Perhaps we must approach history from
the perspective of the future first and foremost, as a field in which we should ‘learn’
rather than interpret, ‘encounter’ rather than decipher. If it is Deleuze’s contention that
only a thinker of eternal return can truly be a dialectician, then the individuation of
 113  
 
 

thought must be brought to bear on the problem of time just as forcefully and thoroughly
as we have tried to read the relation of time and intensity.
On this note, I should acknowledge an important lacunae in the aforementioned
chapters, which has to do with the unresolved status of the active synthesis of
representation. Its characteristic forms of good sense and common sense have been noted,
as well as the way in which these coincided with a cancellation of a difference in the
qualitative and extensive syntheses of the actual; however, the means by which these
passive contractions of habit become redeployed in active syntheses remain unclear,
especially since it seemed to us that the default character of the second synthesis provided
an inadequate means of accounting for it. The problem is itself crucial insofar as it
requires a careful assessment of Deleuze’s difficult notions of psychic individuation and
the death drive. How does the double genesis of thought and temporalized being take
place within the single and sole resource of intensive individuation? The Kantian problem
of uniting thought and existence, for which Kant required the third term of the
schematism, returns here again to haunt Deleuze’s text through the two-fold problematic
of freedom, as thought’s counter-actualisation or vice-diction of the event, and history, as
the ideal or potentially intelligible (non)-essence of history and structure. I will not
attempt to resolve this problem here. I simply wish to state that such a problem is of
absolutely central importance to the destination of this project, and should constitute the
first step toward a more encompassing theoretical comprehension of the meaning and
relevance of the question of time for philosophy as a whole.
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1
Deleuze, Gilles; Difference and Repetition, Trans. P. Patton, (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994). First published in French by P.U.F (Paris, 1968). Cited hereafter as DR, with English page first, then
the original French page after the forward slash.
2
Toscano, Alberto, Theatre of Production; Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze
(London: Palgrave, 2006), p. 193. Cited hereafter as TP.
3
See the lengthy footnote in chapter four in which the relevant connections between my work here and
that of Toscano are addressed.
4
See Faulkner, Keith, Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time (London: Lang, 2006).
5
For yet another reading of this, See Keith Ansell Pearson’s Germinal Life – the Difference and Repetition
of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 104-114.
6
See Kerslake, Christian, Deleuze and the Unconscious (London: Continuum, 2006), p.189.
7
Deleuze, Gilles; Two Regimes of Madness, (New York: Semiotexte, 2006), p.39.
8
Kant, Immanuel; Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith, (London: Macmillan, 1953). Cited hereafter
as CPR, with A/B pagination from the German edition
9
Deleuze, Gilles; Kant’s Critical Philosophy: the Doctrine of the Faculties, trans. H. Tomlinson,
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p 9. Cited hereafter as KCP.
10
On the critique of Kant’s notion of time, Keith Faulkner’s Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time
(London: Lang Publishing, 2006) was of use to me, especially pages 2-5. I have not followed his account
beyond the scope of his introductory critique of Kant, however.
11
“Synthesis in general, as we shall hereafter see, is the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind but
indispensable function of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which
we are scarcely ever conscious” (CPR B103, my emphasis).
12
Deleuze’s discussion of the introduction (through this ‘chasm’) of an internal Transcendental Difference
establishing an a priori relation between thought and being, will be addressed below.
13
The elaboration of this difference between the phenomenological ex-stasis of the present and Deleuze’s
contracted present requires a focused and careful analysis not possible here. The analysis of this difference
could begin with a distinction between two ways of elaborating the differenciation of dimensionality with
regard to the present (that is, by asking about different ways of conceiving the difference between past,
present, and future). In the Heidegger of Being and Time, ex-stasis has to do with the co-constitution of the
‘Existentials’ of time. The always-already (past) and the anticipatory character (future) of Dasein always
pull it out of the present and throw it outside the 'moment', in the has-been-will-be circle of "originary"
time. Here the present functions as the site of the displacement of the subject into the past and future, as the
‘care structure’ of Being and Time demonstrates.
It seems to me that Deleuze proposes an entirely different way to approach this whole question. Deleuze
views the present as itself produced by a synthesis that folds instants into one another, extracting the
difference between past and future by cancelling an asymmetry. The cancellation of asymmetry produces
the 'arrow of time' effect that is the passing of the present as a lived phenomenal time, appropriate to good
sense and common sense (connective synthesis, or the '1st' synthesis). One question then would be whether
the present has to always-already be ahead of itself and therefore outside of itself (and in some sense
liquidated), or is the present itself conceivable rather as that which measures the equalisation of an
asymmetry, therefore containing within its own contraction the difference between instants, enveloping this
difference and deploying it under the forms of good sense.
14
See Keith Ansell Pearson’s Germinal Life – the Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London:
Routledge, 1999), p. 100.
15
In Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History (New York: Continuum, 2006), Jay Lampert has
recently provided a lucid and careful analysis of Deleuze’s arguments concerning signs and intra-
temporality. Since the more pressing concern of this chapter concerns Deleuze’s account of the relation
between the syntheses, I will not focus on the intricacies of the organism and its semiotic milieu, but rather
refer the reader to the arguments contained in this important contribution. See Ch. 1, p. 18-30.
16
I am in agreement with Lampert on this point, who also fails to see the import of this problem at this
point in the text. See Lampert, 2006, p.32.
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17
On the distinction between the “ancient” understanding of time (epitomized by Aristotle) which remains
subordinate to movement and Kant’s Copernican revolution, which proposed a novel conception of time as
static, subjective, and formal/ transcendental, see KCP vii-ix, DR 88-91/119-22, 241-44/311-14, and
298/380-1.
18
Badiou, Alain; Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Trans L. Burchill (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2000). Cited
hereafter as CB.
19
See the Appendix to The Logic of Sense, p.253-265/292-306.
20
Contrary to Deleuze’s own insistence on the difference between differentiation [différentier] (of
problems) and the differenciation [différencier] (of solutions), Badiou invokes the same term for both. See
the translator’s note to the English edition, p.xxi.
21
See DR 170-76/221-28.
22
See Cinema 2, Trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1989), p. 81/108-9. Cited
hereafter as C2, with English and French pagination.
23
I am not the first to indicate this oversight. Veronique Bergen locates in this omission of the third
synthesis the crucial flaw of Badiou’s treatment of Deleuze. See V. Bergen, ‘À propos de la formule de
Badiou, “Deleuze un platonicien involuntaire”’ in Gilles Deleuze, ed. P. Verstraeten and I. Stengers (Paris:
Vrin, 1998), p.24.
24
Hölderlin, Friedrich, “Remarks on ‘Oedipus’”, in Essays and Letters on Theory, Trans. T. Pfau (New
York: SUNY, 1988), p.107.
25
Simondon, Gilbert; L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. (Grenoble: Éditions Jérôme Millon,
1995).
26
Regular discussions of these and other Deleuzian topics by Levi Bryant over the years have often assisted
my comprehension of these issues. See http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/.
27
“The Method of Dramatization” in Desert Islands, Texts and Interviews 1953-1974 (New York:
Semiotexte, 2004), p.101/141. Cited hereafter as DI with English and French Pagination (Paris: Les
Éditions de Minuit, 2002).
28
See Althusser, Louis and Balibar, Etienne; Reading Capital, Trans. B. Brewster. (New York: New Left
Books, 1969), p. 40-105.
29
Dan Smith has written several excellent essays which elaborate on this Kantian heritage of the Ideas,
especially in connection with Maimon. To cite only the most recent, see “Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of
Immanent Ideas” in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2006), p.43-61.
30
For purposes of simplification I have generalized the two figures of specification and partition to all
extensities. Technically speaking the figures of actualisation vary depending on the type of extensity in
question. For example, Deleuze writes that “qualification and partition are the two aspects of physical
actualisation, just as organization and the determination of species are of biological actualisation.”
Therefore, to be precise it would be necessary to address the fact that “the qualities differenciated by virtue
of the relations they actualise impose their own requirements, as do the extensities differenciated by virtue
of the distinctive points they actualise” (DR 245/316). Hence a (perhaps open-ended?) typography would
need to be done to determine the precise forms of qualification and extension each field of individuation
gives rise to depending on its determining factors. Since this is beyond the scope of the present study, I
simply ask that the reader bear this in mind.
31
See Kant’s discussions of intensive quantity in the Critique of Pure Reason, found in the section entitled
“Anticipations of Perception.”
32
There is an error here in the English translation. The word in French is “impliquant”, which should be
rendered “implicating.” However the translator has rendered it “implicated,” which is an error, and a
confusing one at that.
33
Patton has translated “cascadante” as “serial” in the English version, which does not ultimately seem
wrong in light of Deleuze’s theory of individuation, but simply imprecise. If Deleuze had wanted to say
“sériel”, there is no reason preventing him from having done so.
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34
Toscano, Alberto; The Theatre of Production; Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze
(London: Palgrave, 2006). Cited hereafter as ‘T, page number’.
35
Simondon, 1995, p.209.
36
Ibid, 24. Cited in Toscano, p. 141.
37
This has been in my view a common misunderstanding in much of Deleuze’s reception, and stems in my
opinion from a too-literal transposition of Bergson’s work into that of Deleuze. A recent example can be
seen in Lampert (2006), p.2, where he associates the Aion with a “pure memory” and proceeds, on p.8, to
write that “the past shows how all events co-exist simultaneously in a kind of storehouse.” How a pure line
can be considered a “storehouse” is not at all evident to me. In any event, Deleuze clearly identifies the
Aion with the third synthesis on page 284/363; “The fracture or hinge is the form of empty time, the
Aion…”
Although I disagree with Lampert on this aspect of his interpretation, I nonetheless sincerely acknowledge
the profound importance and rigor of his recent study, and earnestly hope that it gets the attention it duly
deserves from other Deleuzian scholars.
38
Yet this is precisely the accusation brought forward by Albert Toscano in his recent study, when he seeks
to excise the notion of static synthesis altogether. According to Toscano, the “consequences of
structuralism,” when brought to bear by Deleuze on his philosophy of internal multiplicities, leads Deleuze
to prioritize – above the Ideas-multiplicities as bearers of internal difference – the role of a “speculative
instance that would permit the productive communication between ideality and actuality, propositions and
bodies” (172-3). Toscano’s claim then is that by seeking an unconditioned instance in order to explain the
relation of different with different, or the communication of disparate series (e.g. to eat/to speak in the
unconscious), Deleuze has imported something “speculative” into the account of ontogenesis that has no
place in the pre-individual logic of disparation or intensive individuation as ontogenesis. What then is this
instance he is singling out? It is nothing other than that of the “dark precursor or the disparate (in
Difference and Repetition) and of the quasi-cause or aleatory object (in The Logic of Sense)” (173). What’s
wrong with the dark precursor/aleatory object? Why does it diverge from ontogenetic account of the
transcendental field? How precisely can it be called “speculative”?
As we know from our preceding discussions, the dark precursor is what ensures the communication of
series by playing the function of a differenciator of difference and the instance in relation to which the
series are made to coexist in the simultaneity of determination as such. Toscano’s rationale is that the
assignation of this communicative and differenciating function to an entity (albeit one ‘failing to observe its
own identity, resemblance, equilibrium and origin’) is “speculative” insofar as it runs the risk of
“constituting a totalizing structural principle upon which differences themselves in turn would depend”.
That is, he argues, it leads to a “slide towards an ultimate Differenciator, a pure principle of anarchic
production […] The strictly exceptional character of the [dark precursor] …appears to reinstate the very
principial economy that Simondon’s critique of classical and modern models of individuation had sought to
suspend” (173). Toscano acknowledges that the precursor cannot itself provide a principle of individuation
in the representational sense, yet according to him this does not prevent its unconditioned character (insofar
as it supplies the condition of any individuation) from functioning as a “guarantee of a principle, however
paradoxical this principle might be.” As he reads it, the dark precursor is that which secures the paradoxical
or anomalous character of individuating internal difference, but does so “qua principle” (173-4).
Toscano is not without resources for this point. Indeed, more than one passage would confirm his
suspicion, in particular the one in Difference & Repetition where Deleuze writes that, “there must be a
differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differenciator, a Sich-unterscheidende, by virtue of
which the different is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance,
identity, analogy or opposition” (DR 117/154). Given this passage it seems all the more striking that
Toscano views such an operator of heterogenesis as “far less necessary a component of Difference and
Repetition than to The Logic of Sense.” Setting aside for now Toscano’s equalization of the function carried
out by the ‘Operator’ in the two books, the association of an operator of communication with a “principle”
of difference does not in my opinion constitute adequate basis for a dismissal of either the dark precursor of
Difference and Repetition or the aleatory object The Logic of Sense. Moreover, his suggestion that it
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“betrays the promise of the theory of multiplicity” by supplying a conceptual account of the interaction
between multiplicities and their constitutive series seems an ironic one at best (174). I would argue that,
contrary to Toscano’s claim, it is only on the basis of the function carried out by the dark precursor that
difference does not become presupposed as an in-itself. Were thought not capable of formulating the
mechanism through which series created the dynamic movement and implication that extends their
differentiation and perplication at the same moment that it actualises them, we would be left in a position of
assuming the play of difference in itself simply on the basis of its default necessity, certainly an alternative
presupposition to the dogmatic presuppositions of representation, but a presupposition nonetheless.
Intensity as a transcendental principle would be no more than a negative proof were we incapable of
apprehending in any given constellation of series the precursor which functioned to differenciate them. And
this apprehension would, in its “anomalous” character, make the relay of one structure to another, the
method of vice-diction, and the communication and extension of events into one another through their
quasi-causal linkage into nothing more than a mysterious art buried in the heart of an unconceptualisable
play of differences unto themselves. Indeed, what is the instance of determination if not precisely that
which activates the schematism of difference itself by dynamically serializing and implicating the intensive
field in order to actualise and solve the potentialities of the problematic field that it simultaneously re-
distributes? How can one celebrate the notion of spatio-temporal dynamisms as Toscano does without
thinking that which draws the series that constitute them into relation?
Attempting to uphold the virtues of the dynamic genesis against the function of the static synthesis,
Toscano writes that

Without the determination afforded by these individuating factors [the dynamisms], the asymmetrical genesis
moving from virtual structures to constituted individuals would be not just static, but purely ideal, or even
idealist […] In this theory [that of dynamisms in Difference and Repetition], the constitution of intensive
systems characterized by the interaction of individuating factors obviates the structuralist temptation, still at
work in The Logic of Sense, of positing an asymmetrical duality between actual (material) causation and
static (ideal) genesis […] it is here, in the distinction between individuation and actualisation (differenciation)
…that the sufficiency of the virtual which Deleuze’s encounter with structuralism had threatened to impose, is
to a certain extent countered. ” (177-8).

Is it not a sleight of hand? As the attentive reader will note in following his study, Toscano has developed
the notion of spatio-temporal dynamisms only after having already laid out his critique of the static genesis
in The Logic of Sense, which allows him to completely overlook the way in which the function of intensive
envelopment and implication has been transformed in being displaced onto an original play of surfaces and
bodies in The Logic of Sense. The sleight happens when he accuses the Logic of Sense of not explicitly
engaging the dynamisms Deleuze had already developed at length a year earlier in Difference and
Repetition, and then invokes this earlier work as a means to critique the later one. To disregard the truly
original play of surfaces in The Logic of Sense by accusing it of reverting to a ‘principled’ means of
communication between differences (located in the dark precursor, which, as I have gone to great lengths to
show, is absolutely decisive to Difference and Repetition, at least as much as the aleatory entity is to The
Logic of Sense, and is NOT principial as Toscano would accuse it of being but rather an internal
mechanism of individuation itself) only to then celebrate Difference and Repetition as somehow
‘overcoming’ the Logic of Sense which had chronologically followed it, does not seem to me to amount to a
rigorous consideration of the issues at stake in Deleuze’s investigation of the dimensions of surfaces; far
from it. In the end, it remains unclear how Toscano can either excise static genesis from Deleuze’s theory
of individuation, or for that matter explain how we can even think individuation without the role played by
the dark precursor.
39
Miguel De Beistegui has also emphasized this connection between eternal return and the pure form of
time in his recent study of Deleuze. See Truth and Genesis; Philosophy as Differential Ontology
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004) p.324.
40
Hallward, Peter; Out of This World; Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, (New York: Verso, 2006).
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41
On the problem of compossibility and incompossibility as a means by which to think the communication
of worlds, see the ‘Sixteenth Series of Static Ontological Genesis’ in LS. See also DR, p. 254-61/327-337
on the concept of a ‘centre of envelopment’ as the precursor to such a logic of world, which accounts for
the importance it plays for thinking the distributions of intensity within the actual.
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Kant, Immanuel; Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith, London: Macmillan, 1953.
Cited as CPR, with A/B pagination from the German edition.
Kerslake, Christian; Deleuze and the Unconscious. London: Continuum, 2006.
--------‘The Vertigo of Philosophy: Deleuze and the Problem of Immanence.’ Radical
Philosophy 113, May/June 2002.
--------‘Deleuze, Kant, and the Question of Metacritique.’ The Southern Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 17, 2004.
Lampert, Jay; Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History. New York: Continuum,
2006.
Land, Nick; ‘Making It With Death; Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring-Production,
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 24, January 1993.
Nancy, Jean-Luc; ‘The Deleuzian Fold of Thought’ in Deleuze : A Critical Reader. Ed. P.
Patton. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996.
Simondon, Gilbert; L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique. Grenoble: Éditions
Jérôme Millon, 1995.
--------‘Une pensée de l'individuation et de la technique. Paris: PUF, 1994.
Smith, Dan; “Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas” in Deleuze and
Philosophy, ed. C. Boundas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
--------‘Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality’ in Deleuze : A
Critical Reader, Ed. P. Patton. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996.
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Toscano, Alberto, Theatre of Production; Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant

and Deleuze. London: Palgrave, 2006. Cited as TP.
Williams, James; Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Difference and Repetition’, a Critical Introduction
and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.
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Routledge, 2004.
 123

Vita

Name: Kieran Aarons

Education
▪ Master of Arts, University of Western Ontario, 2005-2007.

▪ Bachelor of Arts (Cum Laude), University of Oregon, 2002-2004.

Conferences:
▪ Respondent: “Proving Reality by Inventing Ontology; a Thematic Analysis of Frege
and Merleau-Ponty” by Jason Jordan; 8th Annual Pacific University Undergraduate
Philosophy Conference, Forest Grove, Oregon. April 2-3, 2004.

▪ “The Other and the Impossible; Notes on Bataillean Communication.” Paper presented
at “The Human and Its Others”, the American Comparative Literature Association
Annual Meeting in Princeton, N.J., March 24-26, 2006;

▪ “On the Materialist Concept of Communication in Georges Bataille.” Paper presented at

“Dark Matters”, 8th Annual Graduate Conference at the University of Western Ontario,
April 6-8th 2006.

Publications:
▪ “Truth, Error, and the Collapse of Metaphysical Dualisms in Nietzsche.” Unterschrift.
Vol.1, Issue 1, 2002. University of Oregon Press;

Scholarships:
▪ Recipient, 2004 George Rebec Prize for Best Essay in Philosophy, the University of
Oregon Department in Philosophy

▪ S.S.H.R.C. Master’s Fellowship 2005-2006.

▪ S.S.H.R.C. Doctoral Fellowship, 2007-2011.

Activism / Student Government:

▪ Council Member / Department Representative for the Centre for Theory and Criticism
at the Graduate Student Union, University of Western Ontario, September 2005 – April
2006.