Ch.4.4 of Williams' Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

summary by Corry Shores

[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

[Central Entry Directory]
[Deleuze Entry Directory]
[James Williams, Deleuze's Philosophy of Time, Entry Directory]

[The following is summary]

Time Cut

James Williams'

Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide

Chapter 4: The third synthesis of time

Part 4: History, repetition, and the symbolic image





What does the cut in time got to do with you?

The moment right now is significant. It opens you to a new future. But that means it cuts time apart, making it fork off into a new direction.

Brief Summary

Deleuze turns to drama to further explain the third synthesis of time. It is a dramatic cut that determines before and after. It presents an undetermined future. It is the condition for novelty. As a condition for something undetermined, it is pure and empty. Time is out of joint, because it loses its cardinal points of orientation, and is pure ordering rather than an ordering governed extrinsically. The cut is not a point but an event or process of dually cutting moments apart while joining them in succession. Something is before when it is too great for the underlying processes that the subject is passive to.

Points Relative to Deleuze:

Drama determines temporal order.

Summary

The third synthesis of time is a form of repetition involved in history. (95b) But it is not that history repeats itself in the usual meaning of the phrase. (95b) We consider the other syntheses now. The past repeats only as pure past thus "it is only repetition of dynamic changes of relations in the past, rather than repetition of the same events. We repeat the past by changing it. The present is repetition, as synthesis through habit, but this synthesis is a transformation, a metamorphosis, of earlier series." (95c) Thus the past cannot be repeated in its same form.

Deleuze writes: "‘Repetition is a condition for action before it is a concept of reflection’ (DRf, 121)." (96a) This involves all three syntheses.
1st) "any present act is a passive synthesis that contracts past and future events in the present through a metamorphosis. As we saw in the chapter on the first synthesis of time, here, any present act rests on habit, which is itself a form of repetition." (96b)
2nd) "the past as dynamic repetition of past relations is a condition for the present, as active and passive." (96b)
3rd) "the new as produced in a present act and conditioned by the third synthesis of time as cut, assembly order and series is itself dependent on repetition as the eternal return of difference." (95bc)

The connections historians find, the repetitions, are based on similarity and analogy. (96d) But no events arise with "an identity capable of sustaining a claim to sameness. This is because real events have repetition as variation or differential repetition as their conditions." (96d) "the actors of history are determined to repeat before any historical reflection on repetition." (97a) This is because the new actors repeat "their past conditions as conditions for the new." (97b)

For moments to be ordered in before and after, a selection is needed. (98b) As we noted before, the cut responsible for this ordering forms an assembly of moments. An image is necessary for the subject making the selection, and the assembly must be symbolic. (98b) But symbol and representation are not the same concept for Deleuze. "Representation demands identity in the representation and the represented thing. The differences between representations and between things are then thought in terms of oppositions." (98cd)

Williams then addresses this Deleuze passage.

"Firstly, the idea of an assembly of time corresponds to this: that any caesura whatever must be determined in the image of an action, of a unique and formidable event, adequate to time in its entirety. That image itself exists in torn form, in two unequal parts; nonetheless it draws together the assembly of time. It must be called symbol, in function of the unequal parts that it subsumes or draws together, but as unequal to one another. Such a symbol, adequate to the whole of time, is expressed in many ways: to make time out of joint, to make the sun shatter, to throw oneself in the volcano, to kill God or the father. (DRf, 120)" (99a)

The image for an action must be adequate to time in its entirety. (100a) And events are "situated in relation to the caesura as before and after." We cannot assume that events are first given in linear order and that between moments are cuts, because this means that events are first representational, and thus the caesura does not determine the before and after. (100ab)

Time is asymmetrical for Deleuze. (100b) And the image must be adequate to time in its entirety. (100c) He means adequate in his Spinozistic sense. The symbolic image must express the caesura processes of division, assemblage, and ordering time.

"In the Spinoza book, Deleuze explains that ‘adequate’ means ‘the internal conformity of the idea with something it expresses’ (Deleuze, 1990: 118). However, in Spinoza, this something is the idea’s cause, something that it cannot be in the case of the symbolic image, since the whole of time is not the cause of the image, a term never used | in these sections of Difference and Repetition. In its place, we have the concept of determination and a specific form of determination as a caesura and processes dividing, assembling and ordering time in its entirety. Thus the symbolic image must express these processes in relation to the whole of time in its internal conformity. This is why it must be formidable and a great event, not through any sense of scale or horror, but rather in its range, internal division and internal asymmetry." (100-101)

Because the image must express a fracture and inequality, it can never "imply a perfect expression or one with a final identity." (101b) And there is a fracture in the self and time, and the before is the image that is 'too great for me' (101b). "The symbol has no final identity because it is composed of two unequal parts that cannot be subsumed into a whole resolving the inequality." (101c) "So the adequacy of the symbol lies in how well it draws together the entirety of time while still maintaining the inequality of before and after, and the fracture of the subjects creating the new within the time it assembles." (101d)

An example of such a symbol is not Oedipus or Hamlet but rather "a nameless being, a man without qualities, a plebeian character or ‘already-Overman whose scattered members gravitate around the sublime image’ (DRe, 90)." (102a) "To truly be a symbol we must erase any sense of the return of an identity, for instance, in the romantic image of the subject striving hopelessly against the world. We must also erase any sense of a representative subject, the extraordinary hero standing for all of us through exceptional qualities." (102b) "the most adequate symbol will be a figure with no self and no identity, with a ‘secret coherence’ (DRf, 121), meaning a coherence in faceless multiplicity rather than identity." (102c)

Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.