"if you think childlike, you'll stay young. If you keep your energy going, and do everything with a little flair, you're gunna stay young. But most people do things without energy, and they atrophy their mind as well as their body. you have to think young, you have to laugh a lot, and you have to have good feelings for everyone in the world, because if you don't, it's going to come inside, your own poison, and it's over" Jerry Lewis "I don’t believe in the irreversibility of situations" Deleuze
by Corry Shores
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by Corry Shores
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[James Williams, Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time, Entry Directory]
[The following is summary of Williams, with boldface and bracketed commentary being my own additions. Note, I drafted this six years ago so it may seem discontinuous with current entries. For example, I do not in brackets here try to clear up what is said or note what I failed to understand.]
Summary of
James Williams
Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time:
A Critical Introduction and Guide
Chapter 5
Time and eternal return
5.2
Eternal return and death
Brief Summary:
The eternal return is not a recycling of identical things, because “then there would be no sense of return in them due to the lack of any way of telling there had been a return.” (119b) The eternal return also opens the third synthesis of time, which is thus somehow both circular while also having a before and after and an asymmetrical series. This is conceivable if we view it as the cycling of pure difference, which combines the features of return with non-identity. As conscious beings, we are to live time’s passage in such a way that we participate in the eternal return of difference, and if we fail in that, we die. Deleuze critiques the Freudian notion of the inorganic death drive, because the eternal return is not cycles of life and death. Rather, it is “the passing away of that which is inanimate in sameness and identity and the eternal return of multiple forms of difference.” (123bc) Humans in fact do not dread the inanimate state of death but instead that which makes all beings who are fixed in their identity pass away in time. We should distinguish this sort of death resulting from remaining self-same while time moves past us with the vital death involved in evolving, growth, and change where we affirm continuous differentiation and thereby participate in the eternal return of pure difference. Thus the third synthesis of time is tied both to death and eternal return.
Summary
The eternal return in its purest form also involves death, violence and “the most difficult tests put to living beings” (118c), and
Williams then gives an excellent formulation for why the eternal return is not of something similar or identical. “No two cycles of return could be internally identical, for then there would be no sense of return in them due to the lack of any way of telling there had been a return.” (119b) If we hold this view, we might suffer from two sorts of anguish, the anguish we feel as dear things pass-away, and the anguish about the return of things we do not want to see again. (119c.d) Anguish is what humans feel, but the eternal return is a process applying more broadly than just human experience. (120c) Deleuze writes that we must conceive eternal return as the selecting thought. (120d) But this does not mean it depends on our thinking to operate. (121a) It is the highest test to conceive eternal return as purely differential [perhaps because preexisting concepts will be inadequate?]. (121c)
Williams wonders, how can the third synthesis be both circular but also have a before and after and an asymmetrical series? “The answer is that the third synthesis is both an irreversible series and a cyclical return.” (122a) The third synthesis orders things that remain the same, but for pure difference it is the cycling of pure difference. As conscious beings, how are we to live time’s passage so that we participate in the eternal return of difference? (122b) Deleuze says that if we do not pass this test, we die, as would any being that did not pass the test. (122c)
Williams writes that there are different kinds of processes at work, those working towards an identity and those working in becoming and change, novelty, and transformation. (123a) So a process resisting change is doomed to fall out of existence.
Deleuze critiques Freud’s work on death and also he critiques “any definition of death as a return of the living beings to undifferentiated and inanimate matter.” (123b) For Deleuze, the eternal return is not cycles of life and death, but rather it is “the passing away of that which is inanimate in sameness and identity and the eternal return of multiple forms of difference.” (123bc) So death is not the inanimate state humans dread. It is rather what makes any and every being that remains fixed in its identity pass away in time. (123cd)
But death is not just about the passing of identities but also the survival of difference. Thus evolution and change are forms of death, because they involve the passing of certain beings but also “the moving towards new processes through difference in itself.” (124a) Thus there are two deaths, our personal one concerning the I and self, and the impersonal one that causes things to persist. (124b) “death as subject and death as difference affirming process”. (124b) Because the future is “the deployment and explication of the multiple” (Deleuze qtd 124bc) and because the eternal return promotes the death of all fixed things, we can see how the third synthesis is tied both to death and eternal return. (124bc)
Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
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by Corry Shores
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[The following is summary. All boldface, underlining, and bracketed commentary are my own. Proofreading is incomplete, so please forgive my typos and other distracting mistakes. Somers-Hall is abbreviated SH and Difference and Repetition as DR.]
Summary of
Henry Somers-Hall
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition:
An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide
Chapter 2. Repetition for Itself
Chapter 2 of DR examines the role of repetition in the three syntheses of time and of the psyche. A) The three syntheses of time. The first time synthesis is of habitual contraction, which synthesizes the living present. The second is of the memory, which synthesizes the pure past. The third is of the pure form of time, and it synthesizes the future. This third synthesis is ‘time out of joint’, which takes two forms: time 1) as formal and pre-successive, as with Kant’s a priori intuition of time, 2) as passively synthesized by the eternal return. When we affirm the eternal returnability of the present, we anticipate not the same states of affairs in the future but rather that, like now, the future will be composed of differential intensity. It impregnates the present with the future, which liberates us from the past. B) The three psychic synthesis. The first is the compulsion to repeat, which is a habitual synthesis. The second is the virtual object, which recalls a past experience that never happened, but which satisfies a current need. The third is the death drive, which for Freud tends backward toward a prior inorganic state but for Deleuze tends forward toward a future self-variation.
Very brief summary:
Chapter 2 examines repetition in the three syntheses of time and of the psyche. The first synthesis is of the contraction of habit and of the living present. Often one experience will follow another. We then anticipate the second when experiencing the first. In these habitual contractions we constitute the living present as an experience of “waiting.” The second synthesis is of memory or of the pure past. All present experience is from the beginning integrated in with all other past experiences in the pure past. The past then determines the character of the present, while the present at the same time alters that character. We can experience the past-in-the-present either in expansion as individual parts of the past come to mind or in contraction when we express past moments all in one habitual action, like performing something we rehearsed many times. The third synthesis is of the pure form of time as the eternal return or of the future. Time experienced as a regular and unitized motion of success is “in joint”. It can be out of joint in two ways: 1) when it is not successive, as with Kant’s a priori intuition of time. 2) when it is not constituted actively by a transcendental ego, as with Kant, but rather passively or automatically by the eternal return. This happens when we affirm the present as eternally returnable. It liberates us from the past by impregnating the future in the present. (By the way, we see this structure with Hamlet, only not in an affirmative form. He is stuck in the past, and lingers in an uneventful present, with the past and present relating to an anticipated but delayed future). What is affirmed as returnable is not the current states of affairs but rather the world as composed of differential intensities, like it presently is. This brings the future into the present, and thus is the synthesis of the future. Deleuze sees repetition and time involved also in Freud’s three psychic syntheses. The first synthesis is the compulsion to repeat. This compulsion contracts traumatizing excitations into the psychic system, which manages them in accordance with the pleasure principle. It is thus also a synthesis of habitual contraction and of the present. The second synthesis is of the virtual object. We might substitute something we need with a virtual object that recalls a satisfying experience in the past, like sucking the fingers while waiting for the mother’s breast. But since this substitute was never a real source of satisfaction in the past, it is a pure past. Thus it is a synthesis of memory and of the past. The third synthesis is of the death drive. For Freud, the compulsion to repeat strives to bring the organism back toward a previous inorganic state, and is thus a variation on the death drive. For Deleuze, however, this death is not a movement to a past inorganic state but rather toward a future mutation. It is identity in its variability. As such, it is the synthesis of the pure form of time as the eternal return and of the future.
Brief summary:
Chapter 2 looks at the role of repetition in time synthesis and in Freud’s model of the psyche, and also it looks at how time synthesis can be seen as passively constructive of subjects rather than actively conducted by a pregiven subject. Deleuze discusses Freud’s and the time syntheses using Kant’s three syntheses of time: the sense intuition constitutes the moving present of experience, while the imagination constitutes the memorial past, all while the understanding conceptually prefigures all futures of experience. Deleuze’s first synthesis of time is of habit and the living present. We find patterns of correspondence between events that are frequently coupled in succession. Then when we experience the first, we anticipate the second, which is contracted with the first even before we experience it. In this way we experience time in the form of waiting, which is the living present. The second synthesis of time is of memory or the past. All present moments from the beginning are also registered in the memorial past. They are expressed at some degree of expansion or contraction. It expands when we imagine it in sustained recollection, and it is contracted when many past moments express themselves at once in our habitual behavior, like when performing something we rehearsed many times. The third synthesis is of the pure or empty form of time, which is the synthesis of the future. Time is in joint when it is seen as following a mechanically regular circular motion that can be measured by means of units when it enters into fixed ratios with other regular movements. This enables an extension of successive moments. It is out of joint when it is not successive. This is the case for Kant’s a priori intuition of time, which is time in its structure (in its pure form) prior to the experience of actual successions. For Kant, the unity of the formal transcendental “I” is needed to unify all the temporally various moments of experience. But for Deleuze, it is not needed, since the synthesis of the world and of the self comes about by means of a passive synthesis. That synthesis is the eternal return. When we affirm the present, we are affirming a situation of intensive difference, and what repeats is not the same states of affairs but rather another such situation of intensive difference, unique all its own. Zarathustra first is stuck in the past, since he is fixated on revenge. But when he affirms each moment as eternally returnable, he is freed from the past. Hamlet, however, since he is stuck in the past (he never decides on the past command to commit murder) remains in the present (in his present indecisively), with the past and present relating to the future (of the coming murder). Zarathustra has this same structure, but it is affirmative. He is liberated from the past, and sees each present as more vital since it is pregnant with the future. So for Deleuze, the eternal return synthesizes time by bringing the past, present, and future into relation, since the eternal return impregnates the present with the future in liberation of the past. As such, the eternal return auto-synthetically synthesizes time, and unlike with Kant, it does not require an active transcendental ego. We then see the three syntheses in Freud. Freud thinks our psyche is a system that minimizes damage by managing destabilization excitations. The pleasure principle is what does this managing. But sometimes the excitations are so powerful that they cannot be managed by the pleasure principle. On account of such traumas, there is then an excess of excitations that spill outside or remain outside the system. The compulsion to repeat habitually contracts them into the system. This is the first synthesis of psychic habitual contraction. The disruptions can lead to destabilizing the psyche in a way that can cause it to mutate. So since the compulsion to repeat wants to maintain that stability, it wants to move the organism back closer to a non-organic material state. As such, it is a variation of the death drive. Freud’s second synthesis is of the virtual object. A child may suck the fingers as a virtual object for sucking the absent mother’s breast. This is a pure past that is brought into the present, since there never really was a time that the fingers gave milk. The third synthesis is the death drive. For Freud it is a personal loss. But for Deleuze, it is the flexibility of self-identity that allows for evolution, adaptation, and self-creation.
Summary
(2.1 Introduction) Chapter 2 has two themes. 1) Repetition seems to require two conditions which are impossible together: the repeated thing needs somehow to be the same, or else it is something new entirely and not something repeated, while also, it needs somehow to be different from prior instances, since otherwise it is a continuation and not a repetition of the prior thing. So how is repetition possible? 2) How can the world be constituted without a unified subject performing the synthetic unification of the parts of the world? (2.2 Background: Kant’s Three Syntheses of Time) For Kant, the unity of a subject is the basis for the synthetic unification of the world we cognize. Sensibility receives the manifold of intuition. Imagination retains chucks of it from recently passed moments and arranges them coherently. It does this constructive arranging on the basis of the unities of concepts in the understanding. These unifications allow us to make representational subject-predicate judgments. Also, since the parts are given at different moments, the a-temporal unity of the subject is the basis for them all to come together in one act of cognition. (2.3 Deleuze’s First Synthesis of Time: Hume) Deleuze has three time syntheses that follow Kant’s three levels of synthesis, starting with sense intuition. The first synthesis is the synthesis of habit and the present. We undergo a series of experiences, A, B, C, D, etc. But certain patterns in the series form pairings in our mind. So we see smoke, then we look down and see fire. We see this often, such that when we see smoke, we anticipate seeing fire. This creates an experience of duration. When we see the smoke, it contracts implicitly the future experience of fire into it. So the first synthesis of habit constitutes the experience of the living present. It is the experience of time as “waiting”. A self is any entity or activity that contracts anything whatsoever. So a heart contracts blood, and it is always “waiting” for more blood. It is thus a self, and we have many such selves inside us. All of which are waiting and thus have their own temporality. (2.4 Deleuze’s Second Synthesis: Bergson) Deleuze’s second time synthesis is of memory or the past. The present moment is replaced by a new one. But that means firstly the present needs to make room for the second. But that can only happen if there is a place in the past into which it is moving. But this means that the present somehow almost from the beginning and in its actual act of passing is in the past. For Bergson, this is so, because the past and present form one large entity with no discrete parts. When we remember something, we expand some layer of the past. When we are not expanding memories to be seen by our mind’s eye, we are expressing them implicitly in our habitualized behaviors, which contract all prior experience. This is evident for example when we perform something that we rehearsed many times before, and thus the performance is the sum of all those rehearsals. Or afterward we might sit back and recall one such rehearsal. The past is inserted into the present and helps determine it, just as the present determines modifications in the whole of consciousness. We cannot control these things. But we can control which parts to expand and when to expand them. This mixture of freedom and determinacy Deleuze calls Destiny. (2.5 The Third Synthesis 1: The Pure Form of Time) The third synthesis is the pure/empty form of time and the synthesis of the future. Time that is “in joint” is like the steady motion of a wheel around an axle. Ratios between such regular circular motions enable the flow of time to be unitized and measured. But time can also come out of joint. One sense of this is the experience of time without the experience of successive moments. Kant’s pure a prior intuition of time gives us this pure form of non-successive temporality, and is thus time out of joint. (2.6 The Third Synthesis 2: Two Different Paralogisms) We further understand time out of joint in the context of Kant’s cogito argument. For Kant, the “I think” accompanies all representations. But it does not alone determine us, like Descartes argues. Kant notes that there still needs to be some determination. Our “I” for Kant is formally just the glue that unifies all the variations we experience of the world and of ourselves through time. But it is just a unity, and it does not itself make any determinations of who we are. This requires we experience ourselves in the flow of time. We never actually experience our “I” or fundamental formal self. At any rate, for Kant, this transcendental, formal self actively synthesizes all empirically given intuitions. But Deleuze thinks that the unities of our world and of ourselves arise from a passive synthesis not conducted by a pre-given active subjectivity. (2.7 The Third Synthesis 3: Hamlet and the Symbol of the Third Synthesis) Deleuze uses Hamlet and Zarathustra to further elaborate the notion of time out of joint and how the third synthesis synthesizes the future. Hamlet is initially indecisive, so we do not know whether or not Hamlet’s actions conform to law, and thus time is out of joint. Also, Hamlet is stuck in the past when he was charged with his murderous task, which makes him live in a suspended present. Both this past and present gain their significance in relation to the anticipated future when he will commit murder. Zarathustra, also is stuck in the past, since he is concerned with revenge. But when he instead can fully affirm each present moment, he is freed from the past and sees each present moment as anticipatable as repeating eternally in the future. In a way like this, to break from time in joint is to see the future in the present, and in this way the future is synthesized. (2.8 The Third Synthesis 4: The Esoteric Doctrine of the Eternal Return) For Kant, time is a form of intuition, and is thus different in kind from the understanding. Kant could have further developed this insight by looking at how time and the subject synthesize passively or “auto-synthetically” rather than somehow be governed by the understanding and a transcendental subject. However, he instead holds to a formal subject that performs the active synthesis of time. Deleuze instead thinks time can be synthesized without the help of a transcendental ego. It is instead synthesized by the pure empty form of time understood as the eternal return, which is responsible both for the newness of each moment (as a return of intensive difference) while also it is responsible for the synthesis of time (since it anticipates a future as an affirmation of the present). (2.9 Freud) Freud is interested in the repetitions of past traumas in our actions and mental life. They result from a repressed experienced. As such, they cannot be represented, but only repeated. The psychic system for Freud manages excitations that threaten the stability of the system. When excitations are minimized or maintained, this leads to pleasure, in accordance with the pleasure principle or principle of homeostasis. When it cannot manage the excitation, there is displeasure. The system might defer pleasure now in exchange for pleasure in the future, in accordance with the reality principle. But since past traumatic events are unpleasant, their repetition cannot be explained by the pleasure principle. (2.10 Freud’s First Synthesis) Sometimes we have so strong of a threatening excess of excitation (a trauma) that in order to minimize its destructive influence, we habitually contract it and distribute it into our psychic system. This is the compulsion to repeat and the libido. The compulsion to repeat comes prior to the pleasure principle, since it merely contracts the excitations into the system, while the pleasure principle is what secondarily manages those contracted excitations. But these disruptive excitations also cause a system to mutate and evolve. Because the compulsion to repeat wants to return the system back to an earlier stage, which is closer to our inorganic origins, it is a variation of the death drive. (2.11 Freud’s Second Synthesis) To manage the trauma of the absent mother and the lack of milk, the child can realize the breast will come in the future, and in the meantime suck on their fingers. It serves then as a virtual object that provides excitations that lessen their inner distress. The fingers refer to a past experience of the breast. But since the fingers never actually gave milk like the breast did, it is a pure past. (2.12 Freud’s Third Synthesis: The Death Drive) For Freud, the death drive fuels the compulsion to repeat, since it is the tendency toward our inorganic material origins. As such, it is a material repetition. Deleuze however sees the compulsion to repeat in the creation of the virtual object. It is the repetition of a pure past, and as such is a spiritual repetition. Also, death for Freud is a personal loss, where for Deleuze death is more the variation of self-identity involved in evolution, adaptation, and self-creation.
Citations from:
Somers-Hall, Henry. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 2013.
Or if otherwise noted:
DR:
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994/London: Continuum, 2004.
by Corry Shores
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[The following is summary. All boldface, underlining, and bracketed commentary are my own. Proofreading is incomplete, so please forgive my typos and other distracting mistakes. Somers-Hall is abbreviated SH and Difference and Repetition as DR.]
Summary of
Henry Somers-Hall
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition:
An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide
Part 1
A Guide to the Text
Chapter 2. Repetition for Itself
2.11 Freud’s Second Synthesis (98–111/122–35)
Brief summary:
The pleasure principle is what makes our inner workings manage surplus excitations, trying to minimize their harmful effect. But sometimes doing so blindly leads to more damage to the system. A hungry child without its mother present might become traumatized by the distress of concluding that they will die. So the active syntheses that manage the excitations need a further principle to govern them more effectively. They need the reality principle, which defers gratification. But this requires an active interaction with the external world of objects. The child must recognize that the mother comes and goes. So her breast will arrive at some point in the future. In the meantime, the child sucks its fingers. This is a virtual object which provides excitations that lessen the inner distress. Because it is linked to a past experience of breast-feeding that it substitutes, it is a shred of the past. This past is pure, because there never was a real event when the fingers provided the nourishment they are substituting. Also, virtual objects are what link past and present “associatively,” since what is shared by such linked events of different times is not resemblances each have to the others but rather that all somehow share the same virtual object.
Summary
We previously examined the first synthesis in Freud, which is the habitual contraction of external surplus energies into the internal organic system. We now note that there is more to the story, because organisms do more than merely deal with their own inner workings. They behave in ways that are directed outwardly to the world. This means that there could be as well an active synthesis. SH says that in fact the second synthesis has both an active and a passive synthesis, and he begins with the active since it is more straightforward.
[Recall Kant’s complicated theory of active synthesis. An object is given in a manifold over a series of distinct moments. What allows it to become unified in our cognitions is that we have an active transcendental ego whose a priori unity provides the basis for the temporally distributed manifold to become unified. However, we cannot cognize our transcendental ego. We can only cognize our empirical ego, since it is given in intuition, which is necessary for cognition. I am not exactly sure, however, if this is what SH is saying in the following sentence:] “We can start by recalling one of the central axioms of Kant’s model of active synthesis, which was that the subject makes the object possible, and vice versa” (91). Deleuze also thinks that since we interact with external objects, this necessitates a subject or ego. For Deleuze, our ego actively unifies all our composing passive egos. In Freud’s model,
Sometimes one drive may seek satisfaction in a way which threatens the integrity of the organism. Freud therefore supplements the pleasure principle with the reality principle, which overrides the interests of the particular satisfaction of drives in favour of the pleasure (and survival) of the organism as a whole. This in turn leads to the constitution of the represented subject
(91)
The reality principle, then, postpones gratification and temporarily tolerates unpleasure as a means to later obtain pleasure (91).
SH writes, “As well as the extension of active synthesis, we also have an extension of a passive synthesis” [Although I am not entirely certain what is meant by “extension”, it seems that the pleasure principle is already a sort of active synthesis, since it operates on the passively synthesized energies, and the reality principle is an extension of it, since it governs and manages the ways this is done. The passive synthesis again is the contraction, but we will see there is an extension of it as it will be also mediated through signs.] This extension of the passive synthesis involves “the somewhat obscure notion of a virtual object” (SH 91), with the example from Deleuze being, it seems, that the child in the absence of the mother’s breast places several fingers in its mouth, thereby relating to the virtual object of its “virtual mother” (SH 91-92, referencing DR 99/123).
So, to deal with passive synthesis, we need “a separate conception of an object” (SH 92) [I am not sure but it seems SH is saying we have one concept of the object, as for example the mother, being the source of external excitations, and another separate concept of an object, the virtual object, being some sort of significatory substitute for that original object.] SH then explains why we need this other concept. His first point is “if the child is going to continue to be able to bind excitations, then clearly it needs to relate in some way to a source for those excitations” (92) [I am not exactly sure why the child cannot merely operate internally by managing the contracted excitations. Perhaps this is because of the problem mentioned before where doing so blindly can be bad for the organism, and so it needs the reality principle, which necessitates an active governing ego. And this ego needs to be aware of external objects in order to do its job. It would be nice to have an illustration. Perhaps the idea with the child is that in the absence of the mother, it will be distressed that it is not being nourished. Were it only operating internally on contracted excitations, it would not know how to deal with that distress, since it would seem to be possibly a permanent condition and thus it will die. However, by being aware of the external world where the mother is sometimes there and sometimes not, and also that the fingers are always there, it can suck on the fingers to lessen its internal distress.] Since the child needs to relate to its external excitations in order to manage its inner workings, it must have a relation to the outside. [The next point builds from an idea I did not understand from the prior section. Let me quote it again:
The pleasure principle therefore rests on the integration of excitations that are originally unbound. It’s helpful here to note that there are parallels with the first synthesis of time. Just as there the contraction of impressions led to the constitution of a subject, here the binding of free flowing energy leads to the constitution of a system capable of supporting the pleasure principle. The binding of energy is, therefore, for Deleuze, a process actually constitutive of a subject with the pleasure principle operating as an active synthesis on top of this process: ‘an animal forms an eye for itself by causing scattered and diffuse luminous excitations to be reproduced on a privileged surface of its body. The eye binds light, it is itself a bound light. (DR 96/120). Deleuze’s point is also that as the self is constituted by the integration or contraction of excitations, it simply is these excitations. This gives us the reason why Deleuze calls these contracting egos ‘narcissistic’. What they relate to is, in a sense, themselves, or an image of themselves, in the form of the excitations | that they bind. The movement of binding therefore finds satisfaction in a narcissistic relation to its own image. In this sense, the fact that the egos constituted by the binding process are narcissistic parallels the way in which the selves that were contracted habits in the first synthesis of time related not to objects, but to signs. So just as a heartbeat appears as a sign in our world that doesn’t resemble the movement of the heart itself, the binding of excitations constitutes egos that do not relate directly to objects, but to images of themselves.
(88)
This refers to a prior section. Let me quote it too:
Deleuze has said that the heart contemplates, and obviously, the heart is a part of us. What is the relation between us and our heart, and all of the other organs and constituents of organs that make us up? We ourselves, according to Deleuze, are systems of syntheses [the following up to citation is Deleuze quotation]:
The self, therefore, is by no means simple: it is not enough to relativise or pluralise the self, all the while retaining for it a simple attenuated form. Selves are larval subjects; the world of passive syntheses constitutes the system of the self, under conditions yet to be determined, but it is the system of a dissolved self. (DR 78/100)
The notion of sign is important here, because the relations between levels of the self cannot be understood as if the self were a series of distinct elements brought into relation with one another. We don’t have interactions between different substances, but interactions between levels of the same substance. Rather than a causal interaction between entities, we therefore have signals between levels. Our heartbeat appears as a ‘sign’ in our world, but this sign does not resemble the movement of the heart itself. The signs transmitted between levels are different in kind from the selves that generate them.
(65)
I still do not understand what SH means by sign here. My best guess is that we are first to understand our body as being made of many parts each doing their own sorts of habitual contractions. Our heart habitually contracts muscular movements and blood pulses. Our brain contracts nervous signals. But our brain is not contracting blood, and our hearts are not contracting nervous signals. So they are not interacting on the same level with each other. But they are communicating. The brain does not know what it is like to contract blood, but it can read the signals coming from the heart as signs of certain properties of its operation, like speed and intensity. The heart also receives information in the form of triggers that change its workings. This cannot be the correct interpretation, but I am unable to conceptualize very clearly what SH means by a sign in these contexts. At any rate, returning to the current section, his next point seems to be that since the inner and outer worlds are on different levels, they can only relate by means of signs. The point that follows seems a bit more complicated. It appears to be something like the following. The child’s passive synthesis of contraction can only deal with external excitations. When it sucks the mother’s breast, it is dealing with the excitations resulting from that process. In absence of the breast, the child’s inner active syntheses compel it to place its fingers in its mouth. But this does not mean that the child is dealing with a representation of the breast. The fingers only replicate the action of sucking. Since that action is not an object that can be represented, the excitations are contracted by a sub-representational passive synthesis. SH might really be saying something a bit different, so I will quote.]
Why might we need a separate conception of an object to deal with passive syntheses? Well, the first point to note is that if the child is going to continue to be able to bind excitations, then clearly it needs to relate in some way to a source for those excitations. This implies some kind of relationship to the outside (it needs to relate to some kind of object that generates excitations). Now, as we noted, binding does not relate to objects, but rather to signs – binding is an integration of excitations rather than a relation to a representation. This means that the kind of external object that allows for the generation of excitations will be different in kind from the actual objects of representation ( just as the heartbeat doesn’t resemble the motion of the heart). Bearing this in mind, we can understand Deleuze’s claim that ‘sucking occurs only in order to provide a virtual object to contemplate in the context of extending the passive synthesis’ (DR 99/123). Here we find a similar situation, since in sucking its thumb, the child is not interested in the actual object it relates to (the thumb), but rather in providing virtual signs for a passive synthesis. Thus, the thumb takes the place of the mother’s breast as providing excitations for the organism. Now, given that passive syntheses do not operate with representations, the child does not take the thumb to be the breast, but rather that aspect of the breast which satisfied the original binding process. This aspect is an action, or an image of an action. The thumb therefore provides a series of excitations that can be bound by a sub-representational passive synthesis.
(92)
[The next paragraph is also a bit complicated. The first point is that we see we have both an actual object and a virtual object. The next point is that the virtual object is dealing with “shreds” of the pure past. I am not exactly sure how. Perhaps in the case of the finger sucking, the child is dealing with part of their past experience of feeding. So when it does suck the breast, it is actual and present, but when it sucks the fingers, it is virtual and past. The third point is trickier. The idea seems to be that on the one hand, our virtual objects are fragments of real things. The fingers are not as complete as the breasts, since they only substitute for the action of the breast and not for all its other features. But on the other hand, we need that representation to be complete, thus we incorporate it “in the series of reals”. The reason the virtual object needs to be complete is that “a representation has to be a coherent object separate from the particular perspective from which it is presented, the process of subtraction actually changes its nature (a gesture without a gesturer is incoherent as a representational object, for instance)” (93). But I do not know why it needs to be coherent. What would go wrong if it were incoherent? Would the child for example lose the sense of an overall coherent reality? The other thing I do not understand is how the virtual object is incorporated into the series of reals. Is it by regarding it really as a food source? Or is it by regarding it really as fingers but virtually as nourishment? I will quote.]
Once we accept this account of the nature of the virtual object, we can start to piece together Deleuze’s analysis of it. The fact that we have two types of objects, one of which is actual, and one of which is virtual, should put us in mind of the notion of the pure past that Deleuze introduced in his discussions of the syntheses of time, and in fact, he characterises virtual objects as ‘shreds of pure past’ (DR 101/126). So how are they constituted? Deleuze gives the following description of the constitution of the virtual object [the following up to citation is Deleuze quotation]:
We see both that the virtuals are deducted from the series of reals and that they are incorporated in the series of reals. This derivation implies, first, an isolation or suspension which freezes the real in order to extract a pose, an aspect or a part. This isolation, however, is qualitative: it does not consist simply in subtracting a part of the real object, since the subtracted part acquires a new nature in functioning as a virtual object. (DR 100/125) |
When we are dealing with an object of representation that we intend towards, we cannot help but think of the object as a totality. We cannot help but think that if we walked around the object then we would continue to be presented with different perspectives on it. Now, the binding process isn’t concerned with the totality of the object, but only with those aspects of the object which are capable of generating excitations. It thus subtracts from the total object those aspects that are capable of creating excitations in it. It is only interested in a particular gesture, motion or aspect, and not, for instance, the object which actually moves to create the gesture. But as a representation has to be a coherent object separate from the particular perspective from which it is presented, the process of subtraction actually changes its nature (a gesture without a gesturer is incoherent as a representational object, for instance). Virtual objects are then incorporated in the series of reals. Virtual objects have to in some sense motivate behaviour – they have to be found in the world somewhere. So when the child sucks his thumb, it is relating to a virtual object, but only on the basis that this is incorporated into, or supervenient on, an actual object.
(92-93)
[So the first function of the virtual object is that it helps maintain the homeostasis of the organism’s inner workings.] The virtual object also has another function. First recall the problem of association that we discussed before. Supposedly a new present has a resemblance to a former present, and on the basis of that resemblance, we recall the former present experience. But all experiences bear some resemblance to many others. So on what basis do we say the present experience recalls some certain other one rather than any of the others it is similar to? The answer SH seems to be saying that Deleuze now gives is that the past and present moment share the same virtual object. I am not sure how to exemplify this, as the child-fingers example might not apply. SH gives the example that we see similar actions of a person in different situations. Perhaps an example would be something like the following. The child, instead of seeking out the mother or crying out for her, instead substitutes the fingers. That child later in life deals with their problems passively rather than taking actions to meet their needs. This is because in all situations of needs not being met, they share the same virtual object of the breast substitution. But I am not sure, so I quote again.]
The virtual object performs a second function, which is that, once again, positing a non-actual series paralleling the actual world allows us to explain the notion of association. Deleuze poses the following question [the following up to citation is Deleuze quotation]:
The difficulties in conceptualising repetition have often been emphasised. Consider the two presents, the two scenes or the two events (infantile and adult) in their reality, separated by time; how can the former present act at a distance upon the present one? How can it provide a model for it, when all its effectiveness is retrospectively received from the later present? (DR 129)
When we looked at the syntheses of time, the problem with understanding association as operating purely in terms of actual memory was that everything was like everything else in some way. That meant that it was impossible to explain why a particular experience conjured up this memory. For Deleuze, what ties together two series of events is that the same virtual object is at play (incorporated) in both series. This explains why a past event can still influence the present, not because of the actual events themselves, but because of the virtual object incorporated into them. This also explains why it is the case that we can see, for instance, in someone’s character, a repetition of the same relationships, or the same actions, in different situations. The subject does not reason by | analogy on the basis of their past responses, but is reacting to the same event incorporated into a different state of affairs.
(93)
[The fingers as really nourishing was never an actual, present experience for the child. They were only ever experienced as a substitute.]
In this sense, we can say that what is repeated is something that has never actually been present, but rather that the ‘same’ virtual object is present in disguise in the various states of affairs that make up the repetition. There is no first term to the series itself, however, as repetition takes place in response to the drives rather than the ego and its object.
(94)
Citations from:
Somers-Hall, Henry. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 2013.
Or if otherwise noted:
DR:
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994/London: Continuum, 2004.
by Corry Shores
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[The following is summary. All boldface, underlining, and bracketed commentary are my own. Proofreading is incomplete, so please forgive my typos and other distracting mistakes. Somers-Hall is abbreviated SH and Difference and Repetition as DR.]
Summary of
Henry Somers-Hall
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition:
An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide
Part 1
A Guide to the Text
Chapter 2. Repetition for Itself
2.10 Freud’s First Synthesis (96–8/119–22, 111–14/136–40)
Very brief summary:
The first synthesis is habitual contraction. For Freud, an organic system habitually contracts surplus, stability-threatening external excitations into itself so that the pleasure principle can effectively neutralize them by incorporating them safely into the system’s workings. The first synthesis in Freud, then, is passive, since it is a mechanism operating independently of an active ego that seeks pleasure. It is also an expression of the death drive. This is because the compulsion to repeat wants to preserve the system by keeping it in its current state of homeostasis. But all the while, it is naturally evolving away from its current state. Thus it is tending backward in evolution, toward its inorganic, non-living origins.
Brief summary:
In Freud’s model, an organic system has a relatively ordered dynamics, which can be disrupted by an excess of external excitations. One way it deals with this threatening excess is to habitually contract it into the system, which then has its ways of minimizing its destructive influence. [For example, if we suffer a trauma, we have an excess of disruptive excitation in our systems. Then we relive it for example repeatedly in our dreams, which use associations to distribute it relatively safely throughout the rest of our psyche]. This tendency to incorporate the surplus energy habitually is the compulsion to repeat and as well the libido. The pleasure principle is the tendency of the system to take that already contacted surplus energy and to manage it. The more it can be minimized or kept under control, the more pleasure we feel. However, the more it disrupts the system, the more unpleasure we experience. Thus the pleasure principle must be understood as distinct from the compulsion to repeat, since they are performing different actions. This can explain why it is we repeat traumas even though they are unpleasant; for, the compulsion to repeat them does not operate according to the pleasure principle. It is merely a mechanical feature of the organic system, and it is like the first passive synthesis of contracted habit. The contraction habit is a self-preservation drive, but it is a variation on the death drive. This is because the compulsion to repeat is an expression of a movement away from evolution toward the creature’s inorganic evolutionary origins.
Summary
Deleuze claims that Freud’s concern in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is not examining the exceptions to the pleasure principle but rather in determining “the conditions under which pleasure effectively becomes a principle” (SH 85, qtg DR 96/120). We previously discussed an organizing principle of the psyche in Freud’s account, which tries to maintain stasis of excitation [and prior to that we saw Kant’s transcendental ego as providing the unity of experience and thought.] Deleuze thinks that “prior to the organising principle of the ego” there is already a “biopsychical life” that is “a field of individuation in which differences in intensity are distributed here and there [Ça et là] in the form of excitations” (85 qtg DR 96/119). These levels of excitation will vary over time, and pleasure would be understood as a process operating in this system (85). Deleuze equates the here and there [ça et là] with Freud’s id [Ça]. Although this equation is problematic, it also helps us pose this sections key question, namely, “how does pleasure cease to be a process in order to become a principle that organises the life of the unconscious?” (85). [I do not completely grasp what SH says next. Perhaps the ideas are like this. If we assumed there was a subject, we can say that the subject gives value to pleasure, and on the basis of this value, the subject organizes their psychic life and behavior. But if we remove that subject, then there is nothing to give value to pleasure in the first place, and thus there would be no reason to pursue it. So if, like Freud and Deleuze, we remove that pre-given subject, we need to explain how a psychic system comes to organize itself in such a way that it maximizes pleasure, when that pleasure is of no greater value than displeasure. Let me quote.]
Now, in spite of the problematic nature of the argument, it does seem like a reasonable equation, and it allows us to raise the key question of this section, which is, how does pleasure cease to be a process in order to become a principle that organises the life of the unconscious? An answer such as ‘pleasure is pleasing’ is tautologous, and misses the point. If we try, as Freud has, to give an account of pleasure that does not already presuppose the existence of a subject who values it, then we have to be able to account for how this value gets attached to this particular biological process in the first place. That is, how a (value neutral) process becomes a principle of organisation and action.
(85)
When we receive an excitation, our consciousness recognizes that something happened, and it is stored into memory. Freud claims that “it is not possible within a given system for something both to enter consciousness and also to leave a memory trace’ (Freud 2003a: 64)” (SH 85d). SH explains that
The reason for this is that if traces of excitation remained in consciousness, then they would prevent the system from registering | new excitations. We therefore need to see the processes of memory and consciousness as operating within two parallel systems, much as habit and memory were different in kind in the first account of the three syntheses.
(85-86)
SH continues “We can begin with the most primitive form of life, an ‘undifferentiated vesicle of irritable matter’ (Freud 2003a: 65)” (SH 86) [but I do not understand what such a being would be. Would a single celled organism be such a thing? If so, is it not internally differentiated? If not, what simpler life-form is there?] As this creature is affected by external stimuli, “its nature changes so that it is able to transmit them without its elements changing” which for Freud is the origin of consciousness (86). [I am not sure what it would mean to transmit the shocks without changing its nature. I suppose it is something like nervous signals and reflexes, but I am only guessing. I also do not understand very well the next part. The idea is that as these simple organisms evolve, they channel the excessive excitations to the inorganic, namely, the to skull. I do not understand that, since I would think the signals go to the brain and not the skull, and thus not to something inorganic. And, in even higher creatures the stimulations are further processed by separating out the perceptual aspects, which are the particular senses. It is still unclear for me. Is the idea that simpler organisms just have a simple kind of signal that means physical impact, and thus only have touch, and higher organisms have more senses?] “As the system evolves, it develops protection against excessive stimulation from the outside by partially reverting to the inorganic (the skull), and, in higher creatures, by separating off the perceptual aspects further (the development of particular senses)” (86). This model allows Freud to explain many of psychoanalysis’ most important findings. Also, excitations can come from within. Now, shocks from the outside can be reduced by a barrier [I am not sure what that is. I do not know if the barrier is something we discussed already, like repression (which does not seem like a barrier since it is dealing with the trauma from an external shock that already entered the system and did its damage), or if it is a new idea, like a sort of desensitization or something like closing the eyes when light is too bright.] But there are no such barriers for internal traumas. So, “Traumas which affect the organism from the inside therefore have a far greater role within the economy of the organism than those which affect it from the outside” (86). Also, projection occurs when the organism interprets an internal trauma as originating from the outside (86).
In Freud’s account, we have trauma when there is surplus excitation that cannot be incorporated into the system. The organism might manage by channeling that energy into the system, thereby destabilizing it and creating unpleasure. This is a case where the pleasure principle does not explain the psyche’s workings. One example is war trauma. [The idea seems to be that the patient relives the traumatic experience, since its energy cannot be eliminated, so it is recycled. But because it is rechanneled into the system, that is a way to master it.]
In cases of trauma or pain, Freud claims, rather than seeking to maintain the lowest possible level of psychic energy, the organism may attempt to stabilise the psychic system by suspending the pleasure principle, and instead annex the free flowing energy into the system of the psyche. This means that the pleasure principle does not always govern the operations of the psyche. This process of annexing energy from the outside can explain some of the situations where it appears as if the pleasure principle has been contravened. In the case of severe trauma, the system experiences unpleasure in order to retain its overall integrity. War trauma, for instance, would be a retrospective attempt to master the phenomena in question, that is, to assert control over them. Now, in the case of war trauma, this attempt to master and bind energy within the system leads | to the repetition of past experiences which lead to unpleasure on the part of the subject. Freud therefore claims that such compulsions to repeat simply cannot be understood according to the pleasure principle. (86-87).
In order for the pleasure principle to operate, there needs to be a way for excess energy to be systematically channeled rather than randomly jumping about (87). [I will quote this part, since I am not sure I got it right.]
Prior to the application of the pleasure principle, there needs to be some process of binding or annexation of excitation so that excitations can have ‘systematic resolution’, rather than arbitrarily traversing the life of the organism. So some kind of integration or organisation is necessary for us to be able to relate pleasure to a principle. Freud himself makes this point as follows [The following up to citation is Freud quotation]:
As the drive-impulses all act on our unconscious systems, it is scarcely a new departure to assert that they follow the primary process, and it is also no very great step to identify the primary psychic process with Breuer’s ‘free-flowing’ cathexis, and the secondary one with his ‘annexed’ or ‘tonic’ cathexis. This would then mean that it was the task of the higher echelons of the psychic apparatus to annex excitations originating from the drives and reaching it via the primary process. Any failure of this annexion process would bring about a dysfunction analogous to traumatic neurosis. Only when the annexion has taken place would the pleasure principle (or, once the latter has been duly modified, the reality principle) be able to assert its dominion unhindered. In the meantime, however, the psychic apparatus’s other task of controlling or annexing the excitation would be very much to the fore – not, it is true, in opposition to the pleasure principle, but independently of it, and to some extent quite heedless of it. (Freud 2003a: 74–5)
The pleasure principle therefore rests on the integration of excitations that are originally unbound.
(SH 87)
SH then notes some parallels with the first synthesis of time. Recall how “a contraction of impressions led to the constitution of a subject” (87). Here the free flowing energy is contracted into the system, which is productive of the subject. [I am not sure I understand the point SH here makes about signs, so I will quote:]
Deleuze’s point is also that as the self is constituted by the integration or contraction of excitations, it simply is these excitations. This gives us the reason why Deleuze calls these contracting egos ‘narcissistic’. What they relate to is, in a sense, themselves, or an image of themselves, in the form of the excitations | that they bind. The movement of binding therefore finds satisfaction in a narcissistic relation to its own image. In this sense, the fact that the egos constituted by the binding process are narcissistic parallels the way in which the selves that were contracted habits in the first synthesis of time related not to objects, but to signs. So just as a heartbeat appears as a sign in our world that doesn’t resemble the movement of the heart itself, the binding of excitations constitutes egos that do not relate directly to objects, but to images of themselves.
(87-88)
[I am not sure about the next point, but the reasoning seems to be like the following. The psychic system habitually contracts surplus energy into its workings. On this basis pleasure is possible, since this brings more balance to the system, even though in another sense it is somewhat disruptive to it.] “It is not the case that pleasure gives rise to habit, therefore, in the sense that we might talk of repeating something enjoyable, but rather it is the existence of habits that leads to pleasure” (89). [The next point seems to be something like the following. Freud’s model places a basic mechanical operation as the basis for pleasure. In this sense, it is a passive synthesis, since it is not an ego who favors pleasure and on that basis organizes the surplus excitations.]
In the discussion of habit, Deleuze claimed that habit was only conceived of as reproduction when it was incorporated into a mathematicised ‘temporal space’ by the imagination. Similarly here, it is only by relating pleasure to the past and the future and by instituting the pleasure principle that we are able to see pleasure as operating prior to habit. That is, by talking about ‘pleasure in general’, we introduce the ‘idea of pleasure’. Once pleasure is no longer related to a passive synthesis, but is seen as organised in relation to a principle, we have an active synthesis that relates to an ego. The result of this is that the pleasure principle will now be seen as primary, since without some kind of external organising principle, it is impossible to explain how indifferent processes can form a coherent system, and how individual excitations can be related to one another (how habits are formed). One final thing to note is that binding and the pleasure principle relate to different objects. Binding operates on free excitations in order to enable the pleasure principle to relate them together into a system.
(88)
[The final point made above is that we need to distinguish two different things: 1) the passively synthetic binding operation that incorporates the surplus energy into the system, and 2) the pleasure principle, which aims to reduce the quantity of energy within the system. The pleasure principle only deals with the surplus energy once it has been incorporated into the system, and thus it is not the pleasure principle which is responsible for those contractions in the first place. But it is not entirely clear to me at this point what the pleasure principle does with the surplus energy that has been incorporated. At any rate, the compulsion to repeat is the binding operation, which is also for Freud the death drive. We later learn why.]
There are therefore two principles operative within the psyche. The first is to increase pleasure within the psychic apparatus by reducing the quantity of energy within it. This is the pleasure principle. The second is a principle that attempts to convert unbound energy into bound energy by mastering excitations. This is the compulsion to repeat, which will become the death drive. Freud’s claim is that it is only once excitations have been annexed by the psyche that the pleasure principle can become operative.
(88)
So, Freud grounds the compulsion to repeat in the organism’s basic, original structure. This means the compulsion can be analyzed as a “basic function of life itself” (88d), perhaps in the sense of a mechanical operation of the organism that is not fundamentality tied to higher order cognitions or to an active ego. [The next part is a bit complicated. It would be convenient to simplify it. Perhaps we can say the following. (But please check the quotation that follows to get the complete account.) Were the organism to allow its system to further become disorganized by surplus excitations, it would be more able to evolve as a creature, since it would be mutating or self-varying. But since it wants to minimize disruption, it is tending toward a prior state in its evolution. (Yet, it is not clear to me why staying in the same stage is understood as going backward a step. Perhaps this is because its forward movement is already set in motion.) The next point is that evolution is the development from the inorganic to the organic. Thus the tendency to find stasis through repetition, that is, through the habitual contractive incorporation of surplus energy into the system, is the death drive. For, it is the drive to go toward the inorganic evolutionary origins. Thus we have two drives, the drive to repeat, which preserves the organism, and the death drive, which wants the organism to become more inorganic. Since their aims are different, they are not the same drive, but the libido is a variation on the death drive.]
While the compulsion to repeat can operate in accordance with the | libido, it can also operate as a tendency of life to return to an earlier stage. Freud characterises this tendency to return in the following terms [the following up to citation is Freud quotation]:
At this point we cannot help thinking that we have managed to identify a universal attribute of drives – and perhaps of all organic life – that has not hitherto been clearly recognized, or at any rate not explicitly emphasized. A drive might accordingly be seen as a powerful tendency inherent in every living organism to restore a prior state, which prior state the organism was compelled to relinquish due to the disruptive influence of external forces; we can see it as a kind of organic elasticity, or, if we prefer, as a manifestation of inertia in organic life. (Freud 2003a: 76)
What leads Freud to this conclusion? Central to this conception are, I think, two primary assumptions in the account we have been looking at so far. The first is that the organism is defined essentially as closed off from the world. Organic life’s engagement with the world is seen as essentially traumatic and disruptive for Freud. Second, there is the belief that organisms, in their particular development, tend to repeat their development as a species. If we combine these two assumptions, then we have the claim that change (and hence development) is traumatic, and therefore generates a tendency for the organism to return to a prior, less traumatic state. Now, Freud claims that this movement can be seen in the fact that fish, when spawning, return not simply to their own birthplace, but also ‘to the previous domain of their species, which, in the course of time, they have exchanged for others’ (Freud 2003a: 77). Here the second claim, the recapitulation theory of embryo development, comes into play, as each animal carries with it the history of its development from the simplest forms of life. In fact, this movement is not simply to the earliest forms of life, but to the origin of life itself in the move from the inorganic to the organic. Thus, the drive to repeat is not simply a drive to return to an earlier form of life, but in fact, a death drive. In this sense, the compulsion to repeat/return and the death drive are equivalent: ‘The goal of all life is death, or to express it retroactively: the inanimate existed before the animate’ (Freud 2003a: 78). Freud’s account of the origin of repetition therefore ultimately traces it back to the constitution of consciousness itself. Life can be seen as playing out the relations between two different drives. First, there is the libido, which aims at conserving life by protecting the organism from external traumas that threaten to destabilise it. This conservation of life is ultimately to be understood as simply making more complex the more fundamental drive, the death drive, which seeks to return the organism to its primal state.
(88-89)
SH notes a key feature of Freud’s account. Since the organism wants to move back toward its inorganic origins, its death is not always to be attributed merely to external forces. SH then addresses the question, if life wants to dissolve into the inorganic, why do life forms exist at all? [The answer is not entirely clear to me, but it seems to be saying that the death drive remains dominant, but is channeled through more life preserving drives. The reasoning why I do not quite grasp, so please read the following quotation. Perhaps SH is saying that the simplest life forms in early evolution lived and died quickly, as we would expect from them having a death drive and also a primitive self-sustenance system. It is only because of some accidental structural feature of their chemical make-up that there is a delay between birth and death. Then, the creature evolves more complicated chemical structures which further that delay. It is still not clear why those self-sustaining structures would develop if the death drive aims to minimize them. Perhaps it is all an accident of evolution.]
Well, death is at first ‘still easy for living matter; the course of life that had to be gone through was probably short, its direction determined by the newly created organism’s chemical structure’ (Freud 2003a: 78–9). Over time, however, the complexity of life means that more and more detours are incorporated between life and death. These drives delay the movement towards death, and so appear to be conservative. They are the ‘guardians of life’ in that they allow the organism to perpetuate itself, but in the end, these drives, such as the sexual drives, are ultimately subordinated to the death drive. They are determined by the fact that the organism wants to choose its own death, rather than succumb to external influences.
(90)
[SH’s concluding point seems to be that because of the death drive, there is repetition in the organic system. And so this is like Deleuze’s notion of the eternal return as a repetition of difference. But for Freud, what is repeating is a similar sort of action in an extending chain of moments, where for Deleuze what repeats is intensive difference.]
In essence, this death drive plays the same role that the eternal return plays in Deleuze’s account. The ground of Freud’s account is here characterised as a mode of repetition. Once again, however, we can see that rather than repetition being conceived of as a field of intensive difference, it is here understood as an extensive, physical structure, much as time was equated with passive extension in Kant’s philosophy. As we shall see, Deleuze will retain the structure of the death drive, but instead understand death in terms of a field of intensive difference. Before turning to Deleuze’s account of the third synthesis as the death drive, we need to briefly look at the second synthesis.
(90)
Citations from:
Somers-Hall, Henry. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 2013.
Or if otherwise noted:
DR:
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994/London: Continuum, 2004.
Freud, Sigmund (2003a), ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, trans. John Reddick, London: Penguin Books, 43–102.
by Corry Shores
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[The following is summary. All boldface, underlining, and bracketed commentary are my own. Proofreading is incomplete, so please forgive my typos and other distracting mistakes. Somers-Hall is abbreviated SH and Difference and Repetition as DR.]
Summary of
Henry Somers-Hall
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition:
An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide
Part 1
A Guide to the Text
Chapter 2. Repetition for Itself
2.9 Freud (16–19/18–22, 96/119–20)
Brief summary:
Deleuze is interested in non-representational repetition. Similarly, Freud is interested in repetitions of past traumas in our behaviors and psychic life that result from an experience that is non-representational, since it has been repressed. But while for Freud the compulsion to repeat is the brute repetition of matter, for Deleuze it is the intensive repetition of difference. In Freud’s account, the psyche is understood as a system that manages excitations, trying to keep itself in dynamic balance. Minimizing or keeping constant the levels of excitation leads to pleasure, and this is called the pleasure principle or a principle of homeostasis. Sometimes there is more excitation than it can handle, as in traumatic experiences, which leads to unpleasure. Yet, at times we now defer pleasure for greater pleasure in the future. This is the reality principle. But the repetition of past traumatic events cannot be explained by the pleasure principle.
Summary
Previously we discussed the eternal return. Deleuze then moves to a new topic, “biopsychic life (DR 96/119)” (SH 83). It is more of a repetition of the previous topic, now in terms of Freud rather than of Kant. “In this section Deleuze aims to show once again that at the root of the psyche is a field of intensive difference” (83). On the one hand, Deleuze would seem to side with Freud, since “Freud recognises that repetition falls outside of representation” (83). However, Deleuze does agree with Freud that “the source of our compulsion to repeat [is] the brute repetition of matter rather than the intensive repetition of difference” (84).
Freud is concerned with repression. In his account of it, he relates repetition, repression, and representation. He does so by saying that whatever a patient forgets and represses [that is, perhaps, whatever memorial representations they block from their recollections], they repeat by acting them out without being aware they are doing so (84).
A psychoanalyst could treat such patient by helping them “to form a representation of an initially unrepresentable trauma, which the patient repeats without being able to represent this repetition” (84). [I do not grasp this clearly. Perhaps the representation that the patient forms is something similar to a memory or some other repeatedly imagined image that somehow substitutes for the repressed one. I am not sure how the repetitions of this image would not be represented, and I am not sure why those repetitions need to not be represented. Perhaps the analyst guides the patients to repeat the image without them knowing the analyst is trying to do so and without knowing that doing so has some therapeutic value. And perhaps the patient must not be able to represent this repetition so that they do not put up defenses and block it. I am merely guessing.] Since Deleuze is also interested in non-representational repetition, Freud’s notion “bears certain structural analogies with that which Deleuze is interested in” (84). But, to understand Freud’s thinking, we must begin with his concept of pleasure. It would seem obvious that we act in order to maximize the pleasure we feel (84). To understand what Freud means by pleasure, we first note that for him, the psyche is a “system subjected to excitations from both inside and outside” (84). Sometimes the excitations can be too much for the psyche to handle, shocking and traumatizing it and thereby threatening its stability. Such destabilizing excitations would be “interpreted by consciousness as ‘unpleasure’” (84). [It seems then there can be a surplus of energy that the system cannot handle. When this surplus is reduced, we feel pleasure.] “A relaxation of the psyche, which involves a reduction in energy which hasn’t been incorporated into the psychic system, is seen, on the contrary, as involving pleasure” (84). The psyche tries to minimize the destabilizing energy. Such efforts, then, strive for the constancy of homeostasis, that is, to minimize or at least keep constant the quantity of excitation (84).
Yet, sometimes we defer pleasure, thereby experiencing unpleasure, for the sake of greater pleasure later on. This is the reality principle. Or, we may “repress particular drives in order that other parts of the psychic system can experience pleasure” (84). But when we repeat traumatic experiences, we are doing something that the pleasure principle cannot explain and perhaps is contrary to it. [SH writes “Reliving past traumas, for instance, or even the stability of our characters, are situations where it appears that our repetition of behaviours is either underdetermined by the pleasure principle, or worse, actually opposed to it” (84), but I do not know what he means by reliving the stability of our characters and how it goes against a principle of homeostasis.] SH ends this section by writing: “Deleuze sees Freud’s attempt to account for this fact as providing a transcendental account much like his own three syntheses of time” (85).
Citations from:
Somers-Hall, Henry. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 2013.
Or if otherwise noted:
DR:
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994/London: Continuum, 2004.
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