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Joe Hughes Deleuze and The Genesis of Representation Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy 2008 PDF
Joe Hughes Deleuze and The Genesis of Representation Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy 2008 PDF
Joe Hughes
Continuum International Publishing Group
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Acknowledgments viii
Preface ix
Abbreviations x
Conclusion 155
Notes 159
Bibliography 180
Index 191
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ian Buchanan, Claire Colebrook, and Simon Mal-
pas not only for reading the final manuscript and offering their invaluable
advice, but also for their friendship along the way. Jeff Bell, Mary Bryden,
Matt McGuire, Lisa Otty, Patricia Pisters, Mat Sletten, Dan Smith, and
Alex Thomson all at one point altered the shape of this book during one of
our many conversations at conferences, pubs, or muddy walks through Scot-
land. Above all I want to thank my friends and family for their support over the
course of this long project, especially Sarah Tukua and Pat and Jana Hughes.
Preface
Husserl Others
APS Passive and Active MM Bergson, Matter and Memory
Synthesis CPR Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
CES Crisis of European Sciences PP Merleau-Ponty,
CTM Cartesian Meditations Phenomenology of Perception
E&J Experience and Judgment TI Levinas, The Theory of
FTL Formal and Trans. Logic Intuition In Husserls
ITC Time-Consciousness Phenomenology
PART I
There is not much consensus in the current critical literature when it comes to
the question of Deleuzes relationship to phenomenology. Many critics would
find the claim that Deleuze is some sort of a phenomenologist entirely
misplaced. For some, this is because Deleuzes thought is radically independent
of the philosophical tradition and draws its influence from a (surprisingly
canonical) list of aberrant thinkers: Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson,
and so on.1 For others, Deleuzes thought is most effective not as a description
of consciousness, but as a philosophy of contemporary physics.2 For Foucault,
nothing could be further from the Phenomenology of Perception than The Logic of
Sense.3 But at the same time a number of critics have also made very important
connections between Deleuzes thought and Merleau-Pontys.4 Claire
Colebrook argues that Deleuzes thought can be seen as a radicalisation of
phenomenology5 while Constantine Boundas finds this reading tempting, but
ultimately unsatisfactory.6 It even seems that Deleuze himself consistently dis-
tances himself from mere phenomenology7 or epiphenomenology.8 There
are several reasons behind this lack of consensus, but almost all of them come
down to the impossibility of concisely defining the word phenomenology.
In 1933, Eugen Fink published his famous article,9 The Phenomenological
Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism, as a defense of
Husserls phenomenology in response to neo-Kantian criticisms. This article is
useful here not only because it was extremely influential in France, but also
because Finks general argument was that Husserls critics failed to understand
what phenomenology was on its own grounds, opting instead to criticize
Husserl from the point of view of their own Kantianism. As a result, it gives a
very broad and surprisingly precise definition of phenomenology. Finks expla-
nation develops around two essential concepts that explain phenomenology:
the phenomenological reduction and the problem of constitution.10 Although
this book is not a detailed study of Deleuzes relationship to particular phenom-
enologists, it does insist that Deleuzes thought unfolds entirely within these
two general orientations of phenomenology.
The reduction
presuppose the work of the body and of thought which produces out of the
data of perception well-defined representations. Because these are the
products of the body, they cannot turn around and describe that same world
out of which they are produced, in the same way that a product can not describe
the raw material that it used to be, or a definition should not use the word it is
supposed to define. When we do this we make perception out of things
perceived (5).
Merleau-Ponty therefore argues that the idea of a unit of experience came
about by transposing the characteristics of already constituted empirical objects
onto the constituting activity of perception. We take the final productthe
perception of an objectand use it to describe the impersonal transcendental
field out of which it was produced (68ff.; 95ff.).13 In other words, we trace the
transcendental from the empirical. This is the methodological import of the
phenomenological reduction and the suspension of the natural attitude. It is a
way to discover the transcendental without superimposing on it any of the char-
acteristics of the empirical, or what is produced by the transcendental.
However, it would seem that Deleuze never makes a big deal of the reduction.
In fact he never even mentions it except for once in Anti-Oedipus (AO 107) and
once in The Logic of Sense where he claims that Husserl discovered the neutrality
of sense thanks to the phenomenological methods of reduction (LS 10102).14
But even here, Deleuze never gives the impression that he will take up these
methods. Some critics, however, have argued that Deleuzes thought does
indeed make use of a form of the reduction, or a kind of reduction. For example,
Ray Brassier, following Laruelle, finds a transcendental or hyletic reduction
in Deleuze which isolates the plane of immanence from both subjective and
objective determinations, and Leonard Lawlor has even gone so far as to suggest
that The Logic of Sense takes place entirely under the sign of the phenomeno-
logical reduction.15 Lawlor argues that unless we were already within the
reduction we could never return to phenomena. Here Lawlor makes an
extremely important point that I will defend over the course of the next two
chapters: though it begins and continually emphasizes (or valorizes) the tran-
scendental, Deleuzes thought ends in phenomena, in an empirical consciousness
of fully individuated objects.
Despite the lack of attention Deleuze calls to the reduction, there are at least
two important places where Deleuze makes significant use of it. In the first he
develops an argument almost identical to the one I just outlined from the
introductory chapters of the Phenomenology of Perception. In his 1964 book Proust
and Signs, Deleuze explains that there are two ways Prousts apprentice can miss
the sense of a sign:16 objectivism and subjectivism. Objectivism characterizes the
apprentices belief that sense can be found in the object which emits the sign.
Subjectivism is when, after the continuous disappointments brought about by
the objectivist attitude, the apprentice tries to discover the sense within himself,
in his subjective chains of association (PS 34; my emphasis). But this subjectivism
Husserl, Reduction and Constitution 7
doesnt give up the meaning either, but only leads the apprentice to a meaning-
less relativity (36). At the end of the apprenticeship, however, the apprentice
discovers essence, the sense of the sign.17 This follows Merleau-Pontys critique
of the unit of sensation (objectivism) and association (subjectivism) almost
exactly by arguing that both miss the already given sense and both overlook the
work of a transcendental constitution which they presuppose. Indeed, what the
apprentice discovers after the failure of both objectivism and subjectivism is
that essence or sense is responsible for the constitution of signs and their
meanings (PS 38). But what is even more striking is the similarity of their expla-
nations for the strength and influence of the objectivist interpretation. Deleuze
asks, why does the apprentice initially think that sense can be found in the
object emitting the sign? Why does the apprenticeship begin in objectivism?
His answer is that this impulse follows from the natural direction of perception
or of representation (PS 29). Deleuze will repeat this argument several times
across the course of the third chapter. Perception follows a law of constancy
which directs our mind to concentrate on stable objects in perception. Our
natural attitude toward the world is the one in which we confront objects
according to this natural direction of perception. What the apprentice learns
through his series of disappointments, then, is the necessity of the reduction, or
to break from the constancy principle in order to discover sense.
The second significant place in which Deleuze makes use of the reduction as
a methodological tool is his sweeping critique of the history of philosophy
under the title the image of thought. This critique had already made an
appearance in both Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and in the first essay of Proust
and Signs (1964), but it is not until Difference and Repetition (1968) that it becomes
systematic. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze outlines eight postulates which
he claims, adopting Kants terminology, define a dogmatic image of thought.
To this dogmatic image, Deleuze will oppose his own critical image. Despite
their variety, all eight dogmatic presuppositions share one crucial problem: We
discover in all the postulates of the dogmatic image the same confusion: elevating
a simple empirical figure to the status of the transcendental, at the risk of allowing
the real structures of the transcendental to fall into the empirical (DR 154).
Each postulate describes thoughtor more, precisely, the work of thoughtin
the image of its product. From this point of view, we can see that the critique of
the dogmatic image of thought merges with the general criticism leveled against
philosophy throughout Difference and Repetition and the early works: namely that
it gets caught in the circle of representation and fails to go beyond it. This is
exactly the problem the phenomenological reduction is intended to resolve: it
supposedly brackets the empirical, the natural attitude of perception directed
at objects in order to allow us to more accurately describe the transcendental
life of consciousness. However, a statement of intention is no guarantee that the
employment of the reduction will be successful, and many of Deleuzes criticisms
will attack very subtle points where, despite embracing the reduction, many
8 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
aspects of the natural attitude creep into Husserls work. Deleuzes critique of
the image of thought can thus be read as a reaffirmation of the necessity for
reduction even if he does not use that particular word. Because the reduction
is the motivating critical intuition at the heart of each criticism, we can extend
Leonard Lawlors comment to cover at least Difference and Repetition, if not the
whole of Deleuzes work as Brassier has suggested: The Logic of Sense takes place
entirely under the sign of the phenomenological reduction.
But what does Deleuze oppose to the dogmatic image? What defines a truly
critical image of thought? Without a doubt, it is the engagement with the
problem of genesis: The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are
the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and
the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself (DR 139, my emphasis). The
beyond of representation is transcendental constitution. The critical image of
thought is the one which shows the genesis of thought itself. Later in Difference
and Repetition, Deleuze gives a similar definition of a true or radical critique.
A radical critique is one which carries out the genesis of what it critiques
(DR 206).18 It must be the case then, that insofar as Difference and Repetition is a
critique of representation, it is also necessarily at the same time an account of
the genesis of representation. In opposing representation, it becomes a theory
of representation. This brings us to the second of phenomenologys defining
ideas according to Fink.
Genetic constitution
Perhaps even more important than the reduction is the second of phenomenol-
ogys basic systematic ideas: Husserls notion of constitution.19 This holds for
Deleuze as well. In Difference and Repetition, the sole reason that tracing the
transcendental from the empirical was problematic, and the primary reason
that representation was criticized was that it obscured the point of view of gen-
esis, or constitution (DR 160). The constituted does not resemble its process of
production, its constitution, in the same way a car does not resemble the pro-
duction line which built it. Etymologically, phenomenology just means the
study of phenomena, but Husserls philosophy was never just a descriptive sci-
ence limited to the description of phenomena (Fink 76). In fact the overwhelming
majority of Husserls later writings are devoted not to the description of phe-
nomena, but to explaining them by working out the process of their
constitutiona point of view which the reduction made plausible.20 Because
the reduction ensures that we approach objects as phenomena rather than as
objects in the world, the expression constitution of objects has an entirely dif-
ferent sense than it normally would. Considered as an object, a table is
constituted by actually building it, by assembling its parts and putting a finish
on it. But considered as a phenomena, the constitution of objects means that
Husserl, Reduction and Constitution 9
that very same table is now constituted by giving sense to the data presented in
perception.21 It represents the way I first made sense of what a table was as a
child, and slowly accrued meanings over the course of my life so that the per-
ception of the table attains a stable meaning.
As Fink points out, Phenomenology directly formulates the problem of con-
stitution as the problem of the bestowal of meaning (Sinn) (Fink 91; original
emphasis. cf. 102). Taken in its most general sense, constitution or sense-be-
stowal is the process in which a mental act (noesis) or a series of mental acts
give form to or animate sensuous data (hyl) and by doing so produces either
an ideality, an object in perception or a sense (all three of which can be called
a noema). This is because the sense data, by itself, is meaningless. The entire
project of constitution is concerned with explaining how this meaningless data
is organized into stable representations which communicate with our memo-
ries and expectations to produce meaningful objects. Much of Husserls earlier
work investigated the various kinds of noeses and noemata. His later work con-
tinues and expands this line of research to include the deepest levels of
subjectivity or constitution. Because Deleuzes entire philosophy directly takes
up the problem of genetic constitution it is worth providing a relatively detailed
outline of Husserls understanding of the process of genesis.
However, there are two models of sense bestowal in Husserls work, and it is
only the second, later formulation that has any significance for Deleuze. In his
later works, Husserl distinguished between two types of phenomenologystatic
and genetic. Static phenomenology concerns Husserls earlier works with their
overwhelming emphasis on logic and their hesitation to investigate subjectivity
much deeper than the life-world. When poststructuralists criticize Husserl, it is
usually this phase of his work that they find problematic. Genetic phenomenol-
ogy concerns Husserls later worksfrom about 1917 onand represents a
turn to a philosophy of life.22 The word genesis has two closely related senses
in Husserls thought. On the one hand it keeps its traditional meaning by refer-
ring to the way in which meanings become sedimented over time. Husserl will
argue, for example, that I encounter an object S for the first time, and I give it
a sense p. The next time I encounter that object, I encounter it as Sp; and if
I give it a new sense, q, the next time I see it, I will see it as Spq, and so on.23 But,
at the same time that Husserl begins describing these historical sedimenta-
tions of sense, he also begins theorizing their foundation in the body and in
temporality. In other words, genesis no longer refers to a history of predicates
attached to S, but to the immediate production of S as such. This is what Donn
Welton considers to be the defining characteristic of genetic phenomenology:
Husserls emphasis on the most basic aspects of the process of perception in his
development of a fully developed transcendental aesthetic rather than on the
historical sedimentations of sense. Genetic analysis proper only begins when we
move from the consideration of sedimentations of sense to their primal
institution in a transcendental aesthetic.24 And because it is this later theory
10 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
of constitution that Deleuze will directly take up, it is the one that I want to
outline here.
We will take as a guiding thread what Husserl called the doctrine of genesis
which he outlined in notes from 1921 titled On Static and Genetic Phenome-
nological Method.25 At first Husserl approaches the problem of genesis, as he
often does, regressively. Logical judgments presuppose a lived experience, and
lived experience presupposes a passivity which produces it (APS 630; cf. E&J 50).
Husserl develops his theory of genesis with the hope of finally grounding for-
mal logic. In Husserls eyes logicians ignore the fact that it is impossible to make
judgments without presupposing a subject who makes those judgments and
understands what they mean.26 For example Husserl argues that there is no way
to assert the truth value of the judgment the moon is round, without recourse
to a subject. In order to determine the truth of the judgment, you need a sub-
ject first to interpret or grasp the sense of the proposition, its subject, its
predicate, and their connection, and then to observe the moon itself, to see
that it is in fact round, and finally to assert the adequacy of the proposition to
its referent. But, how does that subject have this experience of the moon and
how does it know that its experience of the moon is accurate? This question
motivates Experience and Judgment in its entirety.
Husserl begins regressively by moving from judgments back to their founding
experience, and from experience back to its origins in perception.27 But for the
doctrine of genesis itself, Husserl sets everything in its proper order.
Accordingly, in the doctrine of genesis, in explanatory [rather than
descriptive] phenomenology, we have:
These are the three general levels of genesis which I will describe below:
(1) passivity, (2) transition from passivity to activity, (3) activity. Levels one and
three both contain several sets of syntheses which move us along the genesis.
The first level is made up of passive syntheses; the second level describes the
relationship between intensity and affection, and the third level is made up of
active syntheses. (Deleuze adopts Husserls notions of active and passive syntheses
for his own philosophy in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition and
Anti-Oedipus.) To these first three terms of the doctrine, Husserl adds four more
dealing with problems of memory (in the form of habitualities) and intersub-
jectivity. These seven terms taken together constitute what he calls, following
Husserl, Reduction and Constitution 11
Husserl, all objectivity and all subjectivity begins with the constitution of a
primordial time, and everything which will eventually be produced throughout
the genesisthe subject, its world, its beliefs and desiresare produced within
the unity of the temporal field (E&J 16466; CTM 41ff.).
Husserl emphasizes here that the temporal syntheses are purely formal. It is for
this reason that they are completely unable to differentiate hyletic data according
to content (APS 174).35
This role is filled by association which Husserl describes as that mode of
passive synthesis founded on the lowest syntheses of time-consciousness
(E&J 177). The specific function of the associative syntheses is to determine
the way in which sense data are connected in immanence (E&J 74). Time
provides the form of immanence, but association determines and orders its
content. It therefore belongs to the associative syntheses to begin the process of
the individuation of objects (individuals) according to their content (APS
17476).36 Association, at this stage of the genesis, does not have much in com-
mon with the traditional empiricist or psychological theories of association
which we just saw Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty criticize. The syntheses at this
level begin their work within separate fields of sensory data, with the most basic
and meaningless elements of perception. The syntheses begin by combining
similar bits of data in a sensory modality (synthesis of homogeneity) or separating
dissimilar bits of data (synthesis of heterogeneity). So, for example, if we were
looking at a red dot on white paper, the synthesis of homogeneity would
connect white bits with white bits and red bits with red bits. After a degree of
consistency and form has been introduced to the separate sensory modalities,
another associative synthesis combines the modalities in a synaesthetic synthe-
sis. Through this series of different levels and types of synthesis, the associative
synthesis styles the objects which will populate the life-world. In Husserl, just as
in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, it is only after these syntheses have finished
their work that these objects can later play a role in a psychological association.
(2) The second moment of the doctrine of genesis is the famous life-world,
the world of intensity and affection. This is the world of experience immediately
pregiven and prior to all logical functions, the world in which we are always
already living and which furnishes the ground for all cognitive performance
and all scientific determination (E&J 41; original emphasis). If you are walking
down the street, the life-world is your immediate, but not necessarily
determinate, experience of the world around you, much of which passes by
without you noticing. It forms a background to whatever it is that you might be
Husserl, Reduction and Constitution 13
paying attention to. This is the world of experience and of ordinary empirical
consciousness. It is also the world which the natural attitude distorts. The natu-
ral attitude is a garb of ideas thrown over the world of immediate intuition
(E&J 4445). For example, Husserl claims that science teaches us that objects
have precise spatial and temporal locations, and this might well be the case, but
it only arrived at this conclusion by forming rigorously determined judgments.
Husserl never contests the findings of science, but only the superimposition of
the products of judgmentsits idealizationson the prepredicative founda-
tion they presuppose. The natural attitude puts the cart before the horse. The
world of experience, in contrast to that of judgment and science, is not yet for-
malized into the exact space and time of science. It is always in flux or becoming
(E&J 4244). Judgment has not yet taken place because its foundations have
just been laid. In fact, you could say that in order to fully appreciate the role of
the life-world in genesis, one must have done with judgment.37
In relation to the doctrine of genesis the life-world is the pivot between
activity and passivity. The life-world has an ambiguous relationship to these
two poles. Certainly, every object in the life-world is or was at one point pro-
duced in passivity. But imagine that you are going to cross the street without
waiting for a walk signal. Your attention becomes fixed on the passing traffic,
and these objects, the cars, receive the full attention of your ego and become
subjects in active judgments enabling you to accurately spot a gap in traffic
and to know that it is big enough for you to get though. But at the same time
that you are on the lookout, people are moving in different directions behind
you, and while they are present in your periphery, they remain in passivity.
They are never actively taken up by an attentive ego which could say, That is
my friend Bill. If they were, you would probably end up under a truck. There
is thus a part of experience that is active and a part which is passive. There is
the truck you are trying to dodge, and there is your friend Bill who, for the
sake of your survival, you cannot notice. This is why Husserl describes the life-
world as the moment in the genesis where an ego meets the passively
constituted objects.38
Husserl describes this relationship topologically. He places the ego on one
side and the objects produced in passivity on the other. These perceptual
objects are said to obtrude on the ego, and, in proportion to the intensity of
the obtrusiveness, what is obtrusive has greater proximity to, or remoteness
from, the ego (E&J 77; my emphasis; cf. 150). From this point of view, the
field of perception, the life-world, becomes a field of intensities. The greater
the intensity, the more allure the object exerts on the ego. The more intense
an object, the closer it comes to the ego, eventually bringing the objects and
the ego into contact or forcing the ego to turn toward the object. These
objects are not yet clearly differentiated, but subsist in the background, as it
were, in a muddled mixture of desires, expectations, memories, and
intensities.
14 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
(3) The third level in the genesis is activity. Husserl thinks of activity as if it
were on a continuous scale going from least active to most active, and he splits
this progression into two general processes: receptivity and cognition. Receptivity
begins with an act of apprehension. Apprehensionsometimes just called
receptivityis the lowest level of activity. Here, the ego consents to what is
coming and takes it in (E&J 79; cf. 77, 103ff.). It yields to the intensity of the
objects given in the life-world, and lets itself be taken in by their allure. But the
ego does not just behold the objects.
Deleuzes entire engagement with Kant revolves around the problem of genesis,
and his philosophy can be read as a rethinking of Kantianism from the point of
view of the production of concrete experience. Deleuze considered Kant to be
the first phenomenologist, and he gave two reasons for this claim: (1) Kant
moved philosophy from an ontology of substance or essence to an ontology of
sense; and (2) he discovered the notion of transcendental subjectivity.43 The
first point is one that Deleuze maintained in his own philosophy across his life
without much modification. His ontology is always an ontology of sense, not of
substance.44 It does not ask what lies behind appearances, but how appearances
were produced. The second point, however, Deleuze altered significantly.
Kants transcendental was purely formal, and Deleuze continually criticized
this aspect of Kants philosophy in the form of two closely related slogans which
he usually attributed to Salomon Mamon or post-Kantians in general: Kant
was concerned with possible experience, not real, or, Kant was content to
substitute simple conditioning for real genesis.45 But, as Jean Hyppolite points
out in his narrative tracing the gradual movement toward concrete philosophy
of German Idealism, it was not until Hegel that philosophy really reached
concrete experience.46 It is true that Fichte, Schelling, and Mamon all made
compelling arguments on the behalf of genesis.47 But none of these thinkers
founded genesis on real experience as Deleuze claims. That move, rather, defines
phenomenology, and we find Deleuzes claim in every one of the major phe-
nomenologists and throughout much of the critical literature of the time.48
Lyotard emphasizes this aspect of phenomenology. For Lyotard, Kant
the faculties are already there, ready-made, and further, that they are capable
of entering into determinate relationships. These relationships are always hier-
archical. There is always a dominant faculty under whose supervision the other
faculties go about their work.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, the imagination schematizes, but it
does so only under the influence of the understanding. Were the imagination
to be left to itself, instead of schematizing, it would reflect (DI 59). For Deleuze,
the importance of the third Critique, and the reason it discovers the idea of
genesis, lies in the fact that it went beyond pregiven faculties and their preestab-
lished harmony. Here, Kant begins to study the faculties before any determinate
relationships rise up between them and before they have a specific function. He
discovers a ground where neither the faculties themselves nor their agreement
are assumedfree exercise and free agreement (DI 69). Furthermore, Kant
discovers here the genetic principle the post-Kantians criticized him for lack-
ing: the soul, the suprasensible unity of our faculties, the point of
concentration, the life giving principle that animates each faculty, engender-
ing both its free exercise and its free agreement with the other faculties (DI 69;
my emphasis). For this reason, Deleuze claims that the Critique of Judgment con-
stitutes the original ground from which derive the other two Critiques (DI 69).
The third Critique ceases to be a simple conditioning to become a transcenden-
tal Education, a transcendental Culture, a transcendental Genesis (DI 61;
original emphasis).50
But it is precisely from this point of view of genesis that we can no longer talk
of an idealism. An idealism is a philosophy that assumes already given or consti-
tuted forms. In the first two Critiques, Kant appeals to faculties that are
ready-made, whose proportions he seeks to determine (DI 61). In the last
Critique, however, Kant is in a position to recognize the genesis of these forms.
Insofar as he accomplishes thisin Deleuzes readingthe forms are no longer
pregiven, and thus there is no idealism. This is one reason why Deleuze, who
takes up Kantianism only at this point, describes his thought as a transcendental
empiricism in contrast to Kants transcendental idealism.51 I will suggest at vari-
ous points below that Deleuze resurrects almost the entire structure of Kants
transcendental subject, except now from the point of view of genesis. Deleuze
will substitute for the simple point of view of conditioning a point of view of
effective genesis (DR162.) [W]ithout this reversal, the famous Copernican
Revolution amounts to nothing (162).
Husserl, Reduction and Constitution 19
Conclusion
Regression
The whole order of language is the result of [secondary organization], with its
code of tertiary determinations [. . .]. [W]hat matters here is the preliminary,
founding, or poetic7 organizationthat is, this play of surfaces in which only an
a-cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual field is deployed [. . .]. (LS 24546)
The Logic of Sense 23
Sense is produced by bodies. Not the individuated bodies of the tertiary order,
but bodies taken as an unindividuated measureless pulsation of matter. Below
the transcendental field and responsible for its production lies what Deleuze
calls the primary order, the corporeal, schizophrenic mixture of depths.
This is a field in which unindividuated bodies clash with one another. In contrast
to the formal order of language or consciousness, this measureless pulsation of
matter represents the world of sensation. It is because neither the objects which
affect us nor the body which is affected are yet constituted that Deleuze employs
such inventive language to describe this world of sensation. Unindividuated
bodies mix with our own as yet unconstituted body.
Deleuze often describes this depth as the realm in which one either eats or is
eaten. To eat or to be eaten, however, is a figurative way of describing this world
as one of immediate action and passion. To eat is to be active and to be eaten is
to be passive, or to endure another bodys action (240). In depth, everything is
passion and action (192; original emphasis). This is a very close approximation
to the account Deleuze gave of the plane of immanence in Cinema 1. In fact,
just as the plane of immanence was characterized there, following Bergson, as
the action and reaction of every image on all the others, in all their parts, and
in all their facets,9 Deleuze here characterizes the realm of bodily mixture as
24 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
one in which a body penetrates another and coexists with it in all of its parts,
like a drop of wine in the ocean, or fire in iron (LS 56). There are not yet,
then, any egological coordinates in place. The primary order represents the
communication of materiality with itself. It is the world of schizophrenia where
Everything is body and corporeal. Everything is a mixture of bodies, and inside
the body, interlocking and interpenetration (87). Bodies burst and cause
other bodies to burst in an universal cesspool (187; original emphasis). A body,
human or otherwise, is here taken only as a pure thing without even consider-
ing the possibility that this thing might eventually become the foundation for
thought.
The entire regressive movement from knowledge to sense to sensation is
encapsulated in the following quotation: From the tertiary order, we must
move again up to the secondary organization, and then to the primary order in
accordance with the dynamic requirement (LS 246; original emphasis). But
because this is a regressive movement, just as in Husserl, we have to reverse the
direction in order to account for everything genetically. Therefore, for these
three stages, there are two geneses: a static genesis and a dynamic genesis. The
basic distinction between these two geneses comes across most clearly in
Deleuzes introduction of the dynamic genesis:
It is no longer a question of a static genesis which would lead from the pre-
supposed event [i.e., sense] to its actualization in a state of affairs and to its
expression in propositions. It is a question of a dynamic genesis which leads
from states of affairs to events, from mixtures to pure lines, from depth to the
production of surfaces, which must not implicate at all the other genesis. (LS 86;
original emphasis)10
In this passage Deleuze clearly articulates the difference between the two gen-
eses in terms of the three levels I have just described. A dynamic genesis moves
from the primary order to secondary organization, from matter to purity, from
sensation to sense. If this genesis is called dynamic, it is because it begins in
depth where there is only movement and not time (namely, the movement of
bodies which penetrate one another).
A static genesis then takes over and moves from secondary organization to the
tertiary order. It moves from sense to a propositional consciousness. Its keyword
is actualization. If this genesis is called static, it is because sense is not, like
the mixture of bodies in depth, defined by movement, but by time, and specifi-
cally by the empty form of time which Deleuze describes elsewhere, following
Kant, as the form of everything that changes, but which does not itself change.
It is, therefore, static.11 These two geneses take their names from their starting
points. The dynamic genesis begins in movement; the static genesis begins in a
The Logic of Sense 25
Tertiary Order
Static Genesis
Secondary Organization
Dynamic Genesis
Primary Order
schizophrenic depths (LS 162, 87). It is the always limited present, which
measures the action and passion of bodies as causes and the state of their mix-
ture in depth (61). Deleuze renames Blanchots time without a present Aion.
In opposition to Chronos, Aion is an immaterial time, freed from the move-
ment of bodies. It is, as Deleuze says, the empty form of time (62, 165). This
time, like Blanchots time of the work has no present, but infinitely subdivides
the present into a past and a future. Just as Chronos corresponded to the pri-
mary order of depths, Aion corresponds to the secondary organization and to
the events which populate the transcendental field of the surface.16
If Chronos characterizes the primary order, and if Aion characterizes the
secondary organization, what time defines the tertiary order? It seems that
Chronos has two forms. Its first form is the present understood as the unindi-
viduated corporeal mixture of bodies: the primary order. A dynamic genesis
begins in this chaotic mixture of bodies and produces a transcendental surface.
It is because of this genesis that this surface leaves its materiality behind and
becomes incorporeal. In leaving the movement of unindividuated bodies
behind, this genesis produces a completely different kind of temporality: Aion.
But the genesis does not stop here, and this surface founds a second, static
genesis which will in turn produce the tertiary order of the proposition. The
static genesis returns us to Chronos, but now Chronos takes on a completely
different form. The static genesis returns to a present which has become, thanks
to the work of genesis, a denotable state of affairs in view of a physical time char-
acterized by succession (LS 184; my emphasis). The Chronos of the depths was
defined by a physical present which did not pass, a present which was in princi-
ple infinite because, in relation to the immediate action and passion of bodies,
you could always extend their present to encompass a bodys causes and effects
as far backward and forward in time as you wanted. The Chronos of the propo-
sition and its denotable state of affairs, however, is defined by succession. It is a
present which passes in representation. The difference between the two forms
of Chronos comes down to the fact that in the return to matter, matter has
become individuated. Since it has well-defined limits, it can pass. Whereas the
Chronos of depths was unindividuated and defined by the violence of bodies
acting and reacting directly on one another, here everything is individuated,
orderly, and packed into the forms of language.17
By noticing the way in which Chronos appears twice in the order of genesis,
we can get a very clear picture of the general gesture and shape of this gene-
sisa trajectory which, in the end, looks surprisingly Hegelian: Between the
two presents of Chronosthat of the subversion due to the bottom [i.e. pri-
mary order] and that of actualization in forms [i.e. in the forms of the tertiary
order]there is a third, there must be a third, pertaining to Aion (168;
cf. 63).18 The dynamic genesis takes us out of corporeality; the static returns us
to it. The first encounter with corporeality is an experience with an unindividu-
ated, meaningless, and chaotic matter. When we return to it at the end of the
The Logic of Sense 27
genesis, we find the same state of affairs individuated in the form of orderly and
meaningful representations.19
I hope to have provided in this first part of the chapter the general structure
in which the genesis unfolds or, the three major eventsthe three levelsof
the logical-psychological story. In what follows I will describe these two geneses
in more detail, beginning with the dynamic genesis and then continuing to the
static. By the end of this chapter I hope to have described a general model of
genesis which informs Deleuzes thought across the rest of his career.
Genesis
Depths
The dynamic genesis begins in the primary order or the noise of the corporeal
depths. As I mentioned above, these depths represent Deleuzes description of
sensation at the level of unindividuated bodies and of our own as yet unconsti-
tuted body. It is in order to avoid importing elements from the natural attitude
and traditional philosophy that Deleuze makes use of such idiosyncratic lan-
guage to describe this world of sensation. Above I briefly described the dynamics
of this world: here there is only the movement of fragments which penetrate
one another in all their parts and all their facets; everything is immediate action
and passion. This is the way Deleuze describes the material depths in the early
sections of the book. When he turns in the last third of the book to a systematic
description of the dynamic genesis however, he leaves this earlier vocabulary
behind and takes up the language of psychoanalysis. Within this new vocabu-
lary, the bodies or fragments which clash with one another are called partial
objects. Partial objects are material fragmentsbodieswhich exist in the
communication of depths (187). To this previous account of depth as a mixture
of bodies I would like to add two things, both of which not only clarify the func-
tion of genesis in relation to this starting point, but also reinforce the claim that
we are dealing with a novel description of sensation.
First of all, there is an ego lodged in the depths which Deleuze calls the body
without organs (LS 8889, 189, 203). There is an ego here because one of the
bodies which is tossed around in the universal variation of depth is our body.
28 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
A tree, a column, a flower, or a cane grow inside the body; other bodies always
penetrate our body and coexist with its parts (87). In the language of psycho-
analysis, this is the body of the infant. The infant participates in the world of
partial objects. Deleuze uses the example of the nursing infant to make this
point: The introjection of these partial objects into the body of the infant is
accompanied by a projection of aggressiveness onto these internal objects, and
by a re-projection of these objects into the maternal body (187; cf. 190). Partial
objects, in the form of nourishment, are introjected into its body, but, at the
same time, the infant projects them back outside of itself. This is simply
a transposition of the earlier account of sensation to the language of psycho-
analysis. The mechanisms of introjection and projection are simply the mechanisms
by which the undeveloped bodythe infantparticipates in the universal com-
munication of corporeal depths. The body of the infant is passive in relation to
partial objects, but also, through its reprojection of them, it is active. It eats, and
it is eaten.
According to Deleuze, this is not a pleasant experience for the ego. It has no
control over its affections. It cannot anticipate the objects which will affect it,
and, even if it is capable of acting on these objects through a reprojection of the
partial objects, its action is little more than a reaction. It is dissolved in them
like a drop of wine in the ocean. As Deleuze describes it in his essay on Tournier
included as an appendix to The Logic of Sense, here each thing slaps us in the
face or strikes us from behind (LS 306). These beginnings express one imme-
diate need for the ego and a function for genesis: the transcendence of the
given, or the escape from materiality. The ego needs to escape from these con-
ditions, and the dynamic genesis which ensues from this state of affairs will
provide the means by which the ego can not only escape from its corporeality,
but can also hold it at bay.21
This escape from corporeality is made possible by the body without organs.
The infants body is not yet a fully constituted body, and at this point in the
genesis all that Deleuze says of the ego, the body of the depths, is that it is a
simple power of synthesis.22 This power of synthesis is also its means of escape.
Even if the ego is lodged in the depths of bodies and communicates in them
according to a law of immediate action and passion, it still forms a different
kind of mixture. In depth there are two mixtures: one is made of hard and
solid fragments which change; the other is liquid, fluid, and perfect, without
parts or alteration because it has the property of melting and welding (189).
The first mixture of hard solid fragments is the corporeal mixture of depth.
The second mixture describes the body without organs, or the infants body.
Here it is attributed the property of melting and welding. In other words, it
has the power to synthesize. What it melts and welds are precisely the material
particles of the first mixture. As Deleuze puts it, the body without organs is a
liquid principle capable of binding all of the morsels together, and of
surmounting such a breaking apart . . . (189; my emphasis). Whereas the first
The Logic of Sense 29
mixture of depths represents a set of distinct fragments which act and react on
one another, the body without organs represents the synthesis of these objects,
and through its synthesis (melting and welding) it surmounts them.23 Beyond
the highly varied and suggestive language, two things become apparent regard-
ing the body without organs: (1) it is capable of a synthesis: it synthesizes the
partial objects of the corporeal depth which whirl about and explode. (2) But,
in so doing, it also becomes capable of surmounting this depth. Its synthesis
opens up a route of escape.
The second thing I would like to add to the account of corporeal depths antici-
pates the problems of meaning and of language which dominate the tertiary order.
These depths are completely meaningless. This is because they represent a pure
materiality. In depth the entire world loses its meaning, and the word loses its
sense (87). Far from transmitting meanings, words now act directly on the body,
penetrating and bruising it (87). This is why the first stage of the genesis is called
noise. It treats words as purely physical phenomena: either as vibrations of air
which penetrate our ears or as vibrations of light in a series of black marks on a
white page which penetrate our eyes. Every word is physical, and immediately
affects the body (87). The word is thus just one more indistinguishable member
of the universal variation of depths. Its fragments merge with unbearable sono-
rous qualities, invade the body where they form a mixture . . . (88).
Here it becomes clear that the corporeal depths are Deleuzes description of
our bodys participation in the physical world and what that participation would
feel like and look like from the point of view of the body itself. The corporeal
depths are the disorganization and fragmentation of physical objects as they
affect us, the way in which the object is nothing more, at the tips of our fingers
for example, than the sensory nerves it excites, or the way in which a sound is
nothing more than an activation of the motor neurons in our ear. It is Deleuzes
account of what Merleau-Ponty called the world of perception.
Under these conditions, Deleuze says, language, or the formal and organ-
ized tertiary order, is impossible. This is because there are many different
sounds in the world, but only a few of themthose contained in the alpha-
bet and their combinationsbelong to language. The sound of a mouth
chewing food and the utterance of a meaningful word are two completely
different sounds both of which our mouths can make. It is always a mouth
which speaks; but [in the tertiary order] the sound is no longer the noise of
a body which eats . . . (181). It is the mouth which speaks meaningful sen-
tences that belongs to the tertiary order. But this order has its ultimate
genetic foundation in the primary order where it is impossible to tell whether
or not the series of sounds which a mouth makes is the consequence of its
chewing food or of its uttering a word. It is necessary to process this purely
material information in order to find out. As we have seen, in the primary
order, the ego has no control over what affects it. All of its actions are
reactions. In order for language to become possible in these conditions, it is
30 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
necessary for the ego to leave the world of depths in order to find the free-
dom and the time to distinguish between the different types of sounds which
affect it.24
To render language possible thus signifies assuring that sounds are not con-
fused with the sonorous bodies of things, with the sound effects of bodies, or
with their actions and passions. What renders language possible is that which
separates sounds from bodies and organizes them into propositions, freeing
them for the expressive function. (181)
The first two stages of the dynamic genesis, pregenital and genital sexuality,
take the form of two passive syntheses: a connective synthesis and a conjunctive
synthesis (224ff.). The first synthesis, which corresponds to what Deleuze calls
pregenital sexuality, is responsible for the production of partial surfaces
around erogenous zones. It is this synthesis which begins the surmounting of
depths and the progressive development of the ego. These surfaces have to be
produced because, as I pointed out above, the ego which lived the corporeal
depths was nothing more than the power of synthesis and its body was not yet
constituted. Precisely because the entire surface [of the body] does not preexist,
sexuality in its first (pregenital) aspect must be defined as a veritable
production of partial surfaces (197).
However, once produced, these partial surfaces will be brought together into
one complete surface. This is the function of the second passive synthesis, the
conjunctive synthesis, which coordinates the partial surfaces into one whole
surface. This complete surface is the physical surface, of our sexual body.
How is this production of the partial and then complete physical surface
carried out?
It seems that the advent of partial surfaces corresponds directly to the body
without organs initial escape from the determinism of depths. In fact, a partial
surface is defined precisely as an assemblage of both the ego which has attained
a relative independence from the partial objects of depth and of the image that
this ego contemplates (197). This independence is realized through a complex
dialectic between the body without organs and something Deleuze calls the
good object.
When the body without organs synthesizes the partial objects of depth it also
makes possible the formation of a good object (190). This good object then
comes to represent a second, active layer of the ego, the super-ego. The super-
ego attempts to make a complete representation out of the objects which the
body without organs contemplates. The ego itself is always a contemplation: it
contemplates its affections. But whatever it is that the ego contemplates, the
good object, the active half of the subject, always attempts to turn that thing
into an image. It tries to make complete images out of the partial objects which
the ego contemplates.
It is this duality in the subject that allows it to escape from the depths. In
producing images, the good object gives the ego something to contemplate
other than its affections. It is by turning its attention away from the actual
partial objects of depth to the images of partial objects that the ego leaves the
determinism of depths (198, 199). It is by turning its attention to this image of
the object that the body without organs becomes a partial surface and the
possibility of developing beyond the present of immediate affection becomes
32 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
The phallus should not penetrate, but rather, like a plowshare applied to
the thin fertile layer of earth, it should trace a line at the surface. This line,
emanating from the genital zone, is the line which ties together all the
erogenous zones, thus ensuring their connection [. . .]. (LS 201;
original emphasis) 28
This line which the phallus traces will become very important in the next
stage of the genesis. But before leaving this stage, I want to point out that
the second synthesis appears to be a synthesis of the first synthesis. The
first, connective synthesis produced partial surfaces. The second, by syn-
thesizing these partial surfaces in the image of the phallus, creates a
complete physical surface. From the point of view of a phenomenological
genesis, we can describe the process thus far as follows. In pregenital sexu-
ality, the ego moved from a direct, if fragmented, contemplation of its
object to the contemplation of an image which stood for the object that
had affected it. In genital sexuality these images of its affections have been
coordinated and put in relation to one another by virtue of a second kind
of image: the phallus. This second passive synthesis represents the attempt
on the part of the ego to produce a global picture of both itself and its
affections.
Disjunction
However, Deleuze differs from Husserl (and also from Kant who furnished the
model for these three passive syntheses) in that the third and final synthesis, far
The Logic of Sense 33
images which the good object had contained are found to be incompatible.
The mother, in fact, has no organizing principle (phallus). Her body stands for
the immediate corporeal present. The father, however, stands for a principle of
unity which has abstracted itself from that present. There is an irresolvable dis-
crepancy between these two, between the partial objects and their unity. From
the point of view of the egos attempt to escape the determinism of depth, this
synthesis represents the attempt to return to origin and to bring its current
state of development in line with its beginnings: in other words, it is the attempt
to make sense of its affections and to integrate its own history into one thought.
But this is impossible, and it has the effect of pushing the ego even further away
from the depths into a space where it finally becomes possible to make sense of
its affection: sense. From the point of view of a phenomenology of perception
it represents the attempt of the ego to recognize a unified series of perceptions
in a chaotic series.
Sense
Castration
It is at this point that the transcendental field of sense is produced. This pro-
duction depends heavily on the preceding stage of the genesis. The consequence
of the oedipal stage is that the child loses his or her phallus. He or she is cas-
trated. To be castrated means nothing more than to lose a principle of
organization: the phallus, or the conjunctive synthesis of partial surfaces. Thus
Deleuze writes that castration marks the failure or illness, the premature mold,
the way in which the surface prematurely rots, and the surface line [that had
united partial surfaces] rejoins the deep Spaltung [fissure or crack] . . . (206).
To say that the ego has been castrated simply means that the ego loses that par-
ticular mode of organization which had defined it as a complete physical
surface. For this reason castration marks the failure of synthesis, and with that
failure, the dissolution of the body and of the ego which had accompanied it at
every step of the genesis (213).
But this line does not only dissolve, and the ego does not entirely disappear.
The castrated phallus comes to represent a new kind of synthesis which organ-
izes the dissolved body and ego in a transcendental time and space of
organization: secondary organization. Between castration and the metaphysical
surface, the phallic line (the phallic synthesis of partial surfaces) and our
entire sexual history which led up to that line is taken up and projected onto
another surface. The
metamorphoses do not end with the transformation of the phallic line into a
trace of castration on the physical or corporeal surface. We must also con-
cede that the trace of castration corresponds to a crack marking an entirely
different incorporeal and metaphysical surface [. . .]. (208)
The Logic of Sense 35
In place of the still intact phallus of the physical surface, we receive a new
principle of organization: the castrated phallus of the metaphysical surface (228).
Deleuze has many names for this new principle of organization: the object = x,
the quasi-cause, and the aleatory point. But what I want to emphasize is that
castration and the concomitant move to another kind of surface comes back, in
the end, to a new kind of organization. This new mode of organization, secondary
organization, produces a surface of thought at once freed from its corporeal
origins but at the same time still in possession of those origins (here too Deleuze
appears unexpectedly Hegelian). This transcendence and recuperation are
accomplished by two mechanisms with roots that are as much Hegelian as they are
Freudian: sublimation and symbolization.
to replace the still intact phallus of the physical surface. The Event is the alea-
tory point mentioned above which runs through the sublimated ideal elements
and establishes differential relations between them, thereby producing events
or Ideas.
Deleuze describes this new mode of organization in several ways which all
amount to the same thing. Whether he calls it the aleatory point, the disjunctive
synthesis, a question, a castrated phallus, the instant as a being of reason in
Aion, the verb, Eventum tantum or univocal Being,33 it always refers to a synthesis
which makes all of the sublimated fragments of our sexual history communicate
or resonate on the surface of thought. When the physical surface dissolves,
each thing opens itself up to the infinity of predicates though which it passes,
as it loses its center, that is, its identity as a concept or as self. The communica-
tion of events replaces the exclusion of predicates. We have already seen the
procedure of this affirmative synthetic disjunction: it consists of the erection
of a paradoxical instance, an aleatory point with two uneven faces which
traverses the divergent series as divergent and causes them to resonate
through their distance and in their distance. (174)
The aleatory point runs through the series of ideal elements and makes them
communicate. Earlier in the book, Deleuze describes this synthesis from the
point of view of the new form of time, Aion, which corresponds to the immate-
riality of thought or sense:
The Aion is the straight line [of empty time] traced by the aleatory point. The
singular points of each event are distributed over this line, always in relation
to the aleatory point which subdivides them ad infinitum, and causes them to
communicate with each other, as it extends and stretches them out over the
entire line. Each event is adequate to the entire Aion; each event communi-
cates with all the others, and they all form one and the same Event. (64)
they are swept away in a new synthesis. They are no longer the partial objects
which had affected us, but refer to one another by virtue of the communication
which the aleatory point brings about. This communication of liberated affec-
tions in a transcendental synthesis defines the impersonal transcendental field
of sense.34
This is the first aspect of the eternal return: the recovery of our sexual history on
the surface of thought. The return here is a return to genetic origins, or rather the
way those origins are sublimated, or return to, the metaphysical surface.
The second aspect of the eternal return expresses the way in which, once on
the cerebral surface, all of the events communicate with, or return to one
another in the Event (179). It is
an eternal return . . . of pure events which the instant, displaced over the line,
goes on dividing into already past and yet to come. Nothing other than the
Event subsists, the Event alone, Eventum tantum for all contraries [cf. LS 47],
which communicates with itself through its own distance and resonates across
all its disjuncts. (176; cf.178)
The return here, is the way in which each sublimated element communicates
with, or returns to, all the others by virtue of the aleatory point which unites
them in a synthesis. These two aspects of the eternal return have the function
of liberating thought from its material origins. In projecting the matter of
38 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
sensation onto the surface in the form of ideal elements (first aspect) and then
by making all of these communicate in relation to the Event (second act), the
transcendental field no longer refers to its material cause, but to the quasi-
cause (the Event) which defines it.
Counter-actualization is the way in which thought maintains its independence
from materiality. For Deleuze, thought is characterized by a persistent fragility.
There is always the possibility that the corporeal depth, the material cause of
sense, might make its way to the metaphysical surface and overturn it. Nothing
is more fragile than the surface (82)a surface which Deleuze compares
to porcelain resting on top of the volcanic line of depths (cf. DR 227, 241;
LS 154ff.). For this reason sense needs a way of holding the depths at bay and
maintaining the independence of thought. This role is filled by counter-
actualization (168), and specifically by the nonactualizable part of the
eventthe aleatory point, the castrated phallus, the Event, and so on. From
this point of view, counter-actualization would simply seem to be another word
to add to this list of synonyms for the aleatory point. It simply names one of its
functions: to maintain independence from matter.
But counter-actualization is often presented as an ethical principle (149ff.).36
Deleuze says that it is here that our greatest freedom lies (212; cf. 152). We
should understand this in a rather traditional way. Counter-actualization holds
the determinism of depths at a distance. It represents our freedom from mecha-
nism. Whether or not there really is a mechanical determinism matters little
from the point of view of the subject who lives the depths. What matters is that
it is tossed around uncontrollably and unpredictably in the communication of
bodies. Counter-actualization represents the way in which thought is no longer
determined by its affections, the way in which it makes sure that its escape is not
temporary, and that it remains free to develop and lead the event to its
completion (212; cf. 161). In holding the corporeal depths at a distance, coun-
ter-actualization represents the autonomy of thought in relation to the relative
determinism of its affections.
the place of extreme vacancy where, before becoming determined and deno-
tative words, language is the silent movement of relationships, that is to say
the rhythmic scansion of being. Words are always there only to designate the
extent of their connections: the space where they are projected and which,
scarcely designated, is folded and bent, not actually existing anywhere it is
[. . . .]. A sentence [phrase] is not content with unfolding in a linear way; it
opens up. This opening allows to be arranged, extricated, spaced, and com-
pressed, at depths of different levels, other movements of phrases [phrases],
other rhythms of words, which are related to each other according to firm
determinations of structure, though foreign to ordinary logicthe logic of
subordinationwhich destroys the space and makes the movement uniform.
(23536; (fr.) 28687; my emphasis; translation modified)
Blanchot describes this space as one which is folded and bent and which attests
to another logic, a logic of sense, in which words are related to one another in
mobile structures. It is indistinguishable from a throw of the dice (236), in
which words and sentences are defined not by their significations, manifesta-
tions, or denotations, but entirely by the mobile connections between them.38
This space is almost exactly what Deleuze called sense. Blanchots mobile struc-
tures correspond to Deleuzes events, problems, or Ideas which are defined
precisely, as I describe below, by the relations established between ideal ele-
ments, and the variation of these relations which is determined by a throw of
the dice or the aleatory point. According to Blanchot however, this transcen-
dental space, far from being something exceptional and foreign to our ordinary
experience, is something we achieve at every moment in everyday language
(Space 195). We regularly experience this transcendental space of the work in
our everyday use of language.39
As we saw in the first chapter, Paul Ricoeur described Husserls philosophy
as a transcendental empiricism because it implied an experience of the tran-
scendental.40 The same is true of Deleuzes transcendental empiricism, and,
despite the rather abstract terms which define sense, this transcendental field
is something which we experience concretely every time we try to make sense
of something. As Ian Buchanan puts it, the event is the sense we make of what
happens (Buchanan 79; original emphasis).41 The aleatory point, or what
Deleuze calls in Anti-Oedipus the nomadic subject42 which tours and affirms
all of the fragments suspended in the neutrality of sense, is the action of our
own minds whenever we try to make sense of something. We are the aleatory
point. When we are confronted by a problem, we become the nomadic sub-
ject or the aleatory point. The problem, or the event, Deleuze says, does not
at all express a subjective uncertainty, but, on the contrary, it expresses the
objective equilibrium of a mind situated in front of the horizon of what happens or
what appears: Is it Richard or William? (LS 57; my emphasis). Reformulated in
the form of an inclusive disjunction, we ask: is it A or B or both? Richard,
40 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
Static genesis
The dynamic genesis was the process in which the transcendental field of
sense was produced by submitting the bodys affections to a regime of pas-
sive syntheses. This genesis came to an end with the failure of the third
passive synthesis, the sublimation of the affections onto an incorporeal sur-
face, and the symbolization of those affections in a new synthesis. In contrast
to this dynamic genesis, the static genesis is the process by which the mind
will return to materiality, or to that unindividuated world of affection of the
primary order, but in doing so will individuate it and give it a determinate
form, quality, and temporality. The static genesis moves from sense to
representation.
The static genesis, more often referred to as the actualization of events, is
described in much greater detail in Difference and Repetition. In fact, whereas the
dynamic genesis was developed in a relatively linear fashion in the last third of
The Logic of Sense, the static genesis is explicitly described in only two short chap-
ters: The Static Logical Genesis and The Static Ontological Genesis. In the
remainder of this chapter I briefly describe these two geneses and outline the
significant stages in the same way that I did for the dynamic genesis.
The logical and ontological geneses are two different static geneses which
together express the movement from the transcendental field of sense, or sec-
ondary organization, to the tertiary order of the proposition, or consciousness.
The reason that there are two geneses, one logical and one ontological, is that
every proposition has a referent.
The Logic of Sense 41
It appears that sense . . . is doubly generative: not only does it engender the
logical proposition with its determinate dimensions (denotation, manifesta-
tion, and signification); it also engenders the objective correlates of this
proposition which were themselves first produced as ontological propositions
(the denoted, the manifested, and the signified). (120; my emphasis)45
This passage makes two things clear. First it clarifies the relation and the
difference between the logical and ontological geneses. The static logical
genesis refers to the production of the three dimensions of the proposition
itself: denotation, manifestation, and signification. The static ontological
genesis refers to the production of what is actually denoted, manifested, and
signified. The two geneses are thus opposed to one another as signifier (log-
ical) and signified (ontological). They produce and develop the distinction
between the two series of words and things which governs, roughly, the first
two-thirds of The Logic of Sense.46 The second thing that this passage tells us
is that the ontological genesis comes first. First the denoted, the manifested,
and the signified are constituted. Then they become incorporated into a
propositional consciousness.
Subjectively, common sense subsumes under itself the various faculties of the
soul, or the differentiated organs of the body and brings them to bear upon
a unity capable of saying I. One and the same self breathes, sleeps, walks,
eats. [. . .]. Objectively, common sense subsumes under itself the given
diversity and relates it to the particular form of object [. . .]. (78)
and objective common sense). Together good and common sense make the
nomadic distribution a sedentary one. They bring the events of sense within
the stable forms of an object and a subject so that they can function in the
proposition (76).
These two moments of the static genesis describe the production of the denoted
and the manifested. What about the signified? The third stage of the ontological
genesisthe concept, or the signifiedpresupposes these first two stages, and in
particular the subjective form of common sense. This is because the concept has,
for Deleuze, a degree of generality which neither the denoted object nor the man-
ifested subject possess by themselves (112). This generality is a consequence of the
stability of the subject and its capacity to retain a degree of self-identity across dif-
ferent worlds. In the immediate confrontation with an object, as in denotation,
each predicate is a singularity in the Husserlian sense of that word. When a predi-
cate is attributed to an individual subject, it does not enjoy any degree of generality;
having a color is no more general than being green (112). Or, as he says a little
later, This rose is not red without having the red color of this rose (112;
my emphasis). Without subjective common sense, red will always be this singular
red, here and now, and the sense red will change with each different rose. With
the advent of subjective common sense, One and the same self breathes, sleeps,
walks, eats (78). The subject is no longer tied to the conditions of its emergence.
The same subject crosses different worlds, and it is only under this condition that
generality becomes possible (112). When the person47 enters the garden men-
tioned above, the garden may contain a red rose, but there are in other worlds or
in other gardens roses which are not red and flowers which are not roses (115). It
is only by being able to maintain an identity across other worlds, or gardens, that
the subject is able to make connections between these different worlds and thus
form a general concept of individuals.
Nietzsche in the sense that they subsume under themselves a given diversity.
Just as it is certain that no leaf is ever exactly the same as any other leaf, it is
equally certain that the concept leaf is formed by dropping these individual
differences arbitrarily (Nietzsche 145). For him, words are at the heart of
concept formation because they never designate the thing in its irreducible
individuality. The word leaf always means the concept leaf, and not a particu-
lar leaf.
The form of the person sends us over to the order of language by producing
a relatively stable subject. It thus opens up the possibility of generality. The
subject is no longer tied to the immediacy of its affections, but now persists
across an encounter with a multiplicity of leaves. While the actual process of
concept formation is not clear in The Logic of Sense, it is clear that the generality
of the concept presupposes a stable subject and that this same stability makes
language possible. In Deleuze, it seems, it is not language which determines the
possibilities of the subject, but rather the subject which determines the possi-
bilities of language. Language does not seem possible without this subject which
expresses and manifests itself in it, and which says what it does (78; my emphasis).
Deleuze presents these arguments at the beginning of the chapter titled The
Static Logical Genesis. But, unfortunately, he never actually develops this gen-
esis beyond that statement. Unlike his relatively detailed development of the
ontological genesis and the dynamic genesis, he does not continue to describe
the production of the different dimensions of the logical proposition. Instead
he spends the rest of the chapter anticipating the dynamic genesis. If we can say
anything about the logical proposition, it seems that it is simply a formal space
which takes on its three dimensions by focusing on one of the three elements
produced in the ontological genesis (119). But because Deleuze ends his
account of the process of production here, I will too.
Conclusion
We can now fill out the schematic representation of genesis that I provided
above. Between the primary order and secondary organization lies the entire
Tertiary Order:
The Logical Proposition and Empirical Consciousness
(Denotation, Signification, Manifestation)
Static Ontological
Common Sense
(The Signified and the Manifested)
Genesis
Good Sense
(The Denoted)
Secondary Organization:
Sense, Aleatory Point, Univocal Being
Empty form of time
Disjunctive Synthesis
(Dissolution of the Body,
Dynamic Genesis
Sublimation, Symbolization)
Conjunctive Synthesis
(Complete Corporeal Surface)
Connective Synthesis
(Partial Corporeal Surfaces)
Primary Order:
Corporeal/Material Depths, Schizophrenia,
Body Without Organs, Movement
The Logic of Sense 47
dynamic genesis, its egos and its syntheses. Between secondary organization
and the tertiary order lie the ontological and logical static geneses. The entire
genesis, taken in its totality expresses the movement from the body to represen-
tations in consciousness.
For that reason, it is not hard to see its relationship to the concerns of late
Husserl. But we might also notice that The Logic of Sense represents a phenome-
nology according to Deleuzes own definition. In Foucault, Deleuze defined
phenomenology as a philosophy which maintained the possibility of a prelin-
guistic or savage experience. 51 If language presupposes the form of generality,
and generality the form of the person, and if the entire static genesis presup-
poses sense and its production, than the entire genesis presented here, except
for the very last stage, represents a description of a prelinguistic, prepredica-
tive, and savage experience.52
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Part II
Anti-Oedipus
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Chapter 3
Introduction
Anti-Oedipus, and the long partnership with Guattari that grew out of it, is
usually interpreted as representing a decisive break with Deleuzes earlier work.
I want to argue here however that this is not at all the case. Published three
years after The Logic of Sense, Anti-Oedipus is a direct continuation of the themes
and structures I outlined in the previous chapter. It is true that there is virtually
no significant continuity of technical terms between the two books. Jean-Jacques
Lecercle notes throughout Deleuze and Language almost all of the significant dif-
ferences between The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus: Deleuze drops the theme
of surfaces, of phantasms, of structure, of depths, of paradox, good sense, com-
mon sense, the emphasis on sense and propositional form, and so on. This list
could go on but the point is made: there is virtually no continuity between the
two books. What I want to show over the next two chapters however is that at a
formal level there is indeed a very significant overlap which prevents us from
declaring a radical break in Deleuzes thought. Anti-Oedipus develops a theory
of the genesis of representation which is strikingly similar in shape to the one
developed in The Logic of Sense.
In addition to this formal argument there are at least two more reasons that
should encourage us to hesitate before concluding that the discontinuity
between Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense represents a radical turning point in
Deleuzes thoughta move from a pre-Guattari, structuralist, and psychoana-
lytic Deleuze, to a post-Guattari, poststructuralist, and antipsychoanalytic
Deleuze. First, Guattari repeatedly complained that he was unable to recog-
nize himself in Anti-Oedipus.1 While there can be no doubt that many of the
themes and concepts from Guattaris letters to Deleuze worked their way into
the final text of Anti-Oedipus, it is just as clear that the entire conceptual struc-
ture and formal network which gives a determinate sense to those concepts was
entirely absent from the letters, and as we will see, it is precisely because of
Deleuzes impressive orchestration of concepts that Guattari found his influ-
ence lacking. It therefore seems unlikely that the difference can be attributed
in any great degree to Guattaris influence. Second, we cannot forget that the
apparent break between Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense is no greater than
the break between The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. Indeed, many
52 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
of the themes which Lecercle finds absent in Anti-Oedipus are absent from
Difference and Repetition as well. And if we widened the set of texts under consid-
eration, we would find that there is significant discontinuity in the technical
vocabulary Deleuze employs between all of his books. The real task is to show
what they have in common.
Despite the absence of many of The Logic of Senses themes, the most signifi-
cant theme does in fact carry over: that of genesis. In Anti-Oedipus we find the
central problem to be that of the production of representation and of a Hus-
serlian subjecta subject, that is, which is nothing more than its constant
genesis. The difference is that here, genesis is called process of production.
This overall process of production is split into two smaller processes: desiring-
production and social production. Can we call these two processes of production
dynamic genesis and static genesis? To what degree does the process of pro-
duction in Anti-Oedipus draw from or correspond to the geneses of The Logic of
Sense? This is the primary question of the next three chapters. I argue that there
is no significant difference between the two geneses except for the words used
to describe them. In this first chapter I want to show how Deleuze and Guatta-
ris various criticisms of Kant, structuralism, and psychoanalysis lay the ground
for the theory of genetic constitution that they develop in Anti-Oedipus. In the
following two chapters I describe that genesis in detail and show the degree to
which it corresponds to the genesis Deleuze already elaborated by himself in
The Logic of Sense.
At the end of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari write an odd sentence which
seems to have little relation to the surrounding text: It is certain that psychoa-
nalysis has not made its pictorial revolution (AO 352). In order for psychoanalysis
to become a rigorous discipline, it requires a pictorial revolution. This sentence
echoes another in Difference and Repetition which might encompass both Deleuzes
entire philosophical undertaking and the way in which he carried it out: The
theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from
representation to abstraction. This is the theory of thought without image
(DR 276).2 The Logic of Sense provided one such theory of thought without image
(if image can be assimilated to representation as in the preceding quote). In
that book it took two geneses to bring the subject under the form of representa-
tion. It was only in the third stage of the static genesis that the tertiary order of the
proposition became dominant. The rest of the subject, or process of production,
was sub-representative. Its experience was a savage experience. In the language
of Difference and Repetition, one could say that such a subject is free from the iron
collars of representation (DR 262); in the language of Anti-Oedipus, however, you
would say that it is free from the iron collar of Oedipus (AO 45, 53).
The Material Reduction and Schizogenesis 53
The critique of Oedipus seems to repeat, at least on a very general level, the
central criticisms of the history of philosophy which Deleuze developed in his
earlier books and which culminated in Difference and Repetition with his descrip-
tion of a dogmatic image of thought. The dogmatic image of thought clings to
the form of representation and interprets subjectivity in its image. To this dog-
matic image Deleuze opposed his own critical image or thought without
image. To achieve a critical image of thought, one must, as I argued in the first
chapter of this book, bracket the form of representation, or put it out of play,
in order to discover subjectivity as an unending process which produces repre-
sentation as an effect, but is by no means defined by that product. At its most
basic, this critique in both Difference and Repetition and Anti-Oedipus says that the
form of representation suppresses and inhibits the discovery of the genetic ele-
ment of that form. In Anti-Oedipus, desire plays the role that difference does in
Difference and Repetition. Desire, like difference, is productive.3 Oedipus, on the
other hand, plays the role of representation. Here Oedipus is presented as a
form produced at the end of a long genesis which defines the structure of rep-
resentation. Deleuze and Guattaris most general criticism is that by emphasizing
the product rather than the process of production we end up completely mis-
understanding both. Oedipus is taken as an ideal form, given by right outside
of a genesis, and subjectivity becomes a static consciousness closed in on itself.
For this reason the three books which I am studying here have similar aims: to
rediscover the genesis of representation or its forms without presupposing
those forms at the beginning of the genesis.
In Difference and Repetition Deleuze gave two reasons for why representation
posed a problema practical reason and a theoretical reason. Theoretically,
representation prevents the discovery of the transcendental, or the process of
production. Practically, rather than being affirmed in itself, our entire prepre-
dicative life is reduced to what can be expressed in judgments and their
constitutive elements: representations. In Anti-Oedipus these two dimensions
form the two aspects of their critique of Oedipus. Theoretically, Oedipus obscures
the genetic point of view. Deleuze never criticizes representation because it is
inherently bad: without representation we would not have consciousness, nor
would we be able to evaluate our environment and make decisions which ensure
the repetition of joyful affections. Theoretically, representation poses a prob-
lem because its transparency allows us to forget that it is only an epiphenomena
whose genesis we need to explain. In other words, because, clearly evoking the
spirit of the phenomenological reduction, we inevitably determine the tran-
scendental (genesis of representation) according to the laws and characteristics
of the empirical (representation).
This is exactly the complaint leveled against Oedipus in Anti-Oedipus, except
that the terms have slightly changed: Oedipus gives us a false picture of desire
where desire is the genetic element of realityby submitting it to the laws of
representation. When a psychoanalyst tries to interpret the lived experience of
54 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
It should be noted that Judge Schrebers destiny was not merely that of
being sodomized, while still alive, by rays from heaven, but also that of being
posthumously oedipalized by Freud. From the enormous political, social
and historical content of Schrebers delirium, not one word is retained, as
though the libido did not bother itself with such things. (AO 57; original
emphasis)
The Material Reduction and Schizogenesis 55
In both of these passages, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize two things: the
Kantian spirit of their endeavortheir emphasis on auto-critique and legitima-
tionand their criticism of Oedipus in the name of a transcendental but
material unconscious.
But Deleuze and Guattaris notion of the transcendental differs sharply from
Kants. I argued at the end of my first chapter that Deleuze makes a decisive
break with Kant, and that this break brings to light a distinctive difference
between the Kantian and the phenomenological notions of the transcendental.
This difference defines the understanding of the transcendental at work in
Anti-Oedipus. The Kantian transcendental is formal and conditioning. It con-
tains the forms of possible experience, and, to adopt the language of Anti-Oedipus,
these forms are expressed in an empirical consciousness. Insofar as these
forms are pregiven outside of a genesis, formalism is an idealism. The Deleuzian
transcendental on the other hand is productive. This notion of the transcen-
dental comes back to late Husserl who used the word transcendental in the
special sense, as apodictically necessary for the genesis of a subjectivity (which
is indeed only conceivable in genesis).6 Genesis doesnt presuppose ideal
forms. It actually produces them at the same time that it produces a subject and
the representations which fascinate that subject. The transcendental in Deleuze
is the site of the genesis of form rather than a set of pure and pregiven forms.
It concerns the real experience of an actual subject rather than the possible
experience of an ideal subject. This difference between the two notions is
enough to move philosophy from an idealism to an empiricism7 (where the
experience is that of the body without organs dissolved in partial objects).
This is also enough, I would argue, to move Deleuzes thought out of Kantian-
ism and into phenomenology, since the production of real rather than possible
experienceand the explanation of the abstract and its formal logicwas the
primary problem of a genetic phenomenology from its inception. Deleuze and
Guattaris criticism of Oedipus is therefore a veiled criticism of Kant which
takes for its primary target, as in Deleuzes earlier work, precisely the notion of
a pregiven and formal transcendental. This is why the psychoanalytic version of
Oedipus takes the form of an idealism or a neoidealism (AO 24).8
But Deleuze and Guattari also criticize structuralism for the very same rea-
sons. Structuralism too posits a pregiven form which is the truth and meaning
of lived experience.9 As we have seen, Deleuze and Guattari consistently argue
that psychoanalysis ignores the actual lived experience of patients by reducing
it to the great monotony of an expression of Oedipus. Everything becomes an
expression of a general or universal structure (52ff., 306). Structuralism, insofar as
it simply posits the existence of these structures outside of a genesis, just like
Kantianism, becomes an idealism (55).10 From the point of view of genesis,
psychoanalysis, Kantianism and structuralism all share a common fate when
Deleuze and Guattari substitute a productive unconscious for a formal one:
Production as process overtakes all idealistic categories . . . (5). Structuralism
The Material Reduction and Schizogenesis 57
heart of the being of consciousness for Husserl then, is contact with the world
or with the outside. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, desiring-production is
immediately social production. It is precisely this outside, or the coimplica-
tion of desiring and social production that the material reduction allows
Deleuze and Guattari describe. It is this field at the foot of schizogenesis in
which consciousness touches the world that I want to briefly describe in the
remainder of this chapter.
What do Deleuze and Guattari mean by desiring-production and social pro-
duction and how does their implication relate to a subjectivity opened on to the
outside? The duality between desire and the social is first developed in relation
to Kants theory of productive desire elaborated in the Critique of Practical Reason
(and the duality maintains this primary sense throughout the bookeven,
I will argue, through the discussions of universal history and the theory of vari-
ous modes of social production which at first glance appear more Marxist than
Kantian).12 According to Deleuze and Guattari, for Kant, desire produces
objects, but these objects are produced only in the absence of a real, present
object given in intuition. Desire, internal to the subject, produces objects, but
absent, imaginary objects. The real object has its own process of production
which is completely external to the imaginations process of production:' . . . we
are all well aware that the real object can be produced only by an external cau-
sality and external mechanisms . . . (AO 25). In this description of the Kantian
model, social production represents the objective production of a real object
without any contribution from thought. This production by an external causality
and external mechanism is what Deleuze and Guattari call social production
in Kant because the object is individuated not in immanence, but in a public
world or nature.
Desiring-production, from the Kantian point of view, refers to the work of
the productive imagination. The objects it produces are merely fantasies and
representations of real objects which are no longer present. Desiring-production
is therefore said to lack its object and produces only empty representations
lacking any claim to reality.
[T]he real object that desire lacks is related to an extrinsic natural or social
production, whereas desire intrinsically produces an imaginary object that
functions as a double of reality, as though there were a dreamed-of object
behind every real object, or a mental production behind all real produc-
tions. (2526; my emphasis; cf. 28)
There is a clear duality at work in this passage between mental productions and
real productions, subjects and objects, inside and outside, desiring-production
and social production. The duality between desiring-production and social pro-
duction repeats the classic division between subject and object. The Kantian
understanding of desiring-production associates it exclusively with the order
The Material Reduction and Schizogenesis 59
of the subject and its dreamed-of mental objects whereas social production
belongs to the order of the object in all of its reality and its certainty. Social
production is guaranteed objectivity by virtue of its external causality while the
productions of subjectivity are relegated to the word of dream or fantasy. Even
if Deleuze and Guattaris entire description of the transcendental unconscious
will be directed toward destabilizing this duality, the redesignation of these tra-
ditional philosophical terms (subject and object) as desiring-production and
social production goes a long way toward explaining what is happening in
Anti-Oedipus.
The Kantian model assumes, a priori, a distinction between subject and object
which results in a series of philosophical positions Deleuze and Guattari will try
to avoid.13 First, it personologizes desiring-production or subjectivity (55, 24).
By instituting the subject-object split prior to the advent of the transcendental
field, this field becomes determined as a subjectivity cordoned off from the
world. The subject is determined as a solipsistic consciousness from the start.
Second, this personologization of the transcendental field leads directly to the
Kantian position of a desiring-production which is reduced to fantasy produc-
tion. As a result of the irreducible gap between subject and object, the
productions of a solipsistic unconscious will never be able to attain either apo-
dicity or reality since reality is always already outside of the subject. The subjects
only link to this outside will consist of various devices of mediation which will
call any claim to certainty into question. All mental productions then have the
appearance of fantasy productions. This results, thirdly, in the impossibility of
ever understanding the real process of production or the genetic constitution
of the real. The way in which objects and subjects are actually constituted is
watered down into a series of uncertain correlations between fantasy and
reality.
In order to get around this chain of problems, Deleuze and Guattari begin
their account before this distinction itself is given. They begin with the unity of
social and desiring- production in the depths of the unconscious. For them,
[i]t is not possible to attribute a special form of existence to desire, a mental or
psychic reality that is presumably different from the material reality of social
production (30).14 Desire is at once mental and material. Or again: Man and
nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other . . . ; rather they
are one and the same essential reality . . . (45).15 Social production and desir-
ing-production are inextricably bound together in the same material molecular
multiplicity. In opposition to this Kantian model, for Deleuze and Guattari, the
duality between subject and object cannot be assumed to be present at the
beginning of the genesis since it is only a late product of thought directed at
objects. In the transcendental unconscious the duality is nonexistent. In this
they are deeply Husserlian.16 Desiring-production is immediately social produc-
tion. Subject is object, and object is subject. The subject is, therefore, immediately
open to the outside, and we might even say with Bergson, that the subject
60 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
coincides with the object perceived and which is, in fact, exteriority itself
(MM 66). Just as the ego of depths in The Logic of Sense is dissolved like a drop
of wine in the ocean, here, the mental is dissolved in the real and both are
indistinguishable from one another.
But then how do Deleuze and Guattari both maintain this duality and do
away with it at the same time? First, they maintain it by stacking the two proc-
esses on top of one another: desiring-production, subjectivity, gives rise to social
production, or objectivity. We saw this already in The Logic of Sense: the deno-
tated objects produced in the static genesis were possible only on the foundation
of the three passive syntheses of the dynamic genesis. Instead of starting out
with a subject/object split, Deleuze and Guattari begin before this split has been
constituted. It is essential here not to confuse two other forms of reality. In
place of the subject-object distinction, they introduce a new distinction between
the molecular and molar (280). If we can say that social production and desir-
ing-production, object and subject, are inextricably bound together in the same
multiplicity, it is necessary to say at the same time that that multiplicity is
molecular.
Desiring-production, itself a process that remains entirely molecular, merges
only with a molecular social field, which is to say at a stage in the process of
production which is prior to the advent of sense, meaning, or knowledge. This
molecular multiplicity in which subject and object are mixed corresponds to
the un-individuated materiality of the primary order in The Logic of Sense
whereas the objectities produced in social production correspond to the indi-
viduated objects of the static genesis. All of this will be developed over the next
two chapters, but it is necessary to clarify here that it is only at the level of the
unindividuated molecular that there is no possible distinction between subject
and object. Here everything is objective or subjective, as one wishes (345).
The formal distinction between objects and subjects itself can only come about
after the process of production has run its course and has produced both sub-
jects and objects. It is only from the point of view of molar objectities that we
can distinguish subjects from objects.
From this point of view, social production is no longer the production of
objects according to an external mechanism. The truth of the matter is that
social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate
conditions (29; original emphasis). Social production is still the production of
objectsof objectitiesbut their genesis has become immanent to the subject
at the same time that the subject becomes transcendent or social: the two cate-
gories dissolve into an impersonal field of molecules which are both objective
and subjective. Rather than following two parallel processes of production, the
two merge into one genesis founded on a desire that is already social, on a sub-
ject that is exteriority itself. It is from this point of view that Deleuze and Guattari
give desire and the Real (the product of desiring-production) one of its most
precise definitions. Desire is the natural and sensuous objective being, at the same
The Material Reduction and Schizogenesis 61
time as the Real is defined as the objective being of desire (311; original
emphases).
According to Deleuze and Guattari, this condition of the molecular unity of
social and desiring-production is sufficient to overcome the problems
generated by the uncritical presupposition of an a priori disjunction between
subject and object. First, rather than personologizing production, it removes
the personal in favor of an impersonal material field. Desire does not lack its
object, It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a
fixed subject (26; original emphasis). If desire is immediately social and social
production is already desiring-production, then at its foundation, the uncon-
scious is not closed in on itself but exists only in an essential relation to the
outside. Second, the productions of the transcendental unconscious are not,
as in the Kantian model, imaginary. If desire produces, its product is real. If
desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can
produce only reality (26).17 In other words, that reality which might later
become the object of a fantasy is itself first produced as a late product of this
impersonal material field. Just as in The Logic of Sense, the process of production
described here is the genesis of reality. Deleuze and Guattari call these real
objects objectities. Finally, it is only under these conditions that an account of
the genetic constitution of reality can be undertaken.
Chapter 4
Desiring-Production
The subject, its objects, and their meanings are constituted by establishing
relations between the scattered impressions of the given.
This touches on the foundational notion of all empiricisms according to
Deleuze: at the heart of delirium, relations are completely external to their
terms (ES 9899). Conversely, terms are external to their relations and do not
account for the nature of the operations we perform on them (ES 101).6 It is
true that Deleuze does not go so far as to say in this early work that the only
relation between impressions is their lack of relation. But by saying that terms
are external to their relations, he comes very close to the description of partial
objects in Anti-Oedipus. Further, we can easily see the more general similarity
between the major projects of The Logic of Sense, Empiricism and Subjectivity, and
Anti-Oedipus: all thought begins in delirium and attempts to rise out of it by
creating relations between terms. Because these relations give the terms their
meaning at the same time that they determine a subject, this escape from delir-
ium is also a genesis of the subject, its objects, and the sense of both. If
impressions do not account for the operations we perform on them, from the
point of view of thought (defined as those operations which consist in establish-
ing relations), then conversely there is no relation present in the given. The
only relation is the absence of a relation. Deleuze and Guattari therefore seem
partially inspired by Deleuzes Hume in their account of the problem of the
absence of significant relations in the foundational delirium of thought.
The general movement from unorganized perception to organized knowl-
edge also structures Deleuzes 1988 book on Leibniz. There Deleuze
distinguishes two kinds of perception in Leibniz: microperception and macro-
perception. Microperceptions populate the depths of the monad, its
unconscious or its body which, since the upper level of the monad is window-
less, is also its relation to the outside (TF 8586). Microperceptions belong to the
obscurity of the corporeal unconscious whereas macroperceptions belong to
the clarity of consciousness. In his 1980 lectures on Leibniz, Deleuze summa-
rizes one of Leibnizs examples of microperception: imagine you are near the
sea and are listening to waves.
You listen to the sea and you hear the sound of a wave . . .. Leibniz says: you
would not hear the wave if you did not have a minute unconscious perception
of the sound of each drop of water that slides over and through another, and
that makes up the object of minute perceptions. There is the roaring of all the
drops of water, and you have your little zone of clarity, you clearly and distinctly
grasp one partial result from this infinity of drops, from this infinity of roaring,
and from it, you make your own little world, your own property. (04/14/1980)7
The roaring of all the drops at once can only be experienced in the dark depths
of the monad, or in its body (TF 90). But in the depths of the body, these
perceptions are completely unorganizedas in Hume: it is a lapping of waves,
Desiring-Production 65
One of the reasons it is so important to read Anti-Oedipus from the point of view
of the process of production is that it begins to make the terminology easier to
understand. In fact, if the book is read as a collection of separate concepts with
only ambiguous relations to one another, it becomes impossible to understand.
This is because from the point of view of genesis three kinds of concepts appear:
(1) those that have a very specific role at a particular moment of the genesis
(intensity or multiplicity, for example); (2) those that persist through the
genesis and take on different roles in each stage (the body without organs); and
(3) those that describe an entire portion of the genesis and thus contain within
themselves several more specific concepts (desiring-machine). Before I turn to
a reading of the three syntheses, I briefly want to point out three concepts of
this third type: desire, desiring-production, and the transcendental uncon-
scious. These three notions all describe the same general process from different
points of view. In general, throughout Anti-Oedipus the process of production is
composed of two smaller processes: desiring-production and, founded on top
of it, social production. Desiring-production has three aspects: connection,
disjunction, and conjunction (41). But since Deleuze and Guattari understand
the subject, just as Husserl did, as nothing more than the process itself, the
transcendental unconscious is coextensive with desiring-production.11 As a
result, these three aspectsconnection, disjunction, conjunctioncan also
Desiring-Production 67
Bonnaf recognizes in the magic object the existence of the three desiring
syntheses: the connective synthesis, which combines the fragments of the
person with those of the animals or plants; the included disjunctive synthesis,
which records the man-animal composite; the conjunctive synthesis, which
implies a veritable migration of the remainder or residue. (326n)
All three syntheses are present in this account along with their general
functions: (1) a connective synthesis which connects both objective and subjective
molecules and therefore further mixes man and nature; (2) a disjunctive
synthesis which records this mixture, or as they put it later, appropriates the
partial objects (372; cf. 10)); and (3) a conjunctive synthesis in which a wandering
and residual subject which, we will see, consumes and lives the consequences of
the first two syntheses. Even if a distinction were possible between objective
and subjective microperceptions before the first synthesis, this synthesis immedi-
ately mixes the two. From this point of view, one particular function of
68 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
shuffle off its materiality, and become incorporeal. The way that this escape is
developed in Anti-Oedipus is slightly different at first sight than the escape I
described in The Logic of Sense, but all of the major stages are still present. In The
Logic of Sense Deleuze drew a distinction between the body without organs as the
ego of depths and the ego of partial surfaces which had escaped from the
depths. Here, these two aspects of the ego are both contained under the head-
ing connective synthesis. There are therefore two important aspects of the
first synthesis of Anti-Oedipus.
The first aspect and function of the connective synthesis is to bring about the
corporeal interpenetration of partial objects which had defined the corporeal
depths of The Logic of Sense. This is because, in Anti-Oedipus, partial objects are
defined by their lack of relation. In other words, they do not seem to communi-
cate to infinity as the fragments of depth did in The Logic of Sense. The first
aspect of the connective synthesis is simply the connection or synthesis of par-
tial objects, and this is why at one point, Deleuze and Guattari describe the first
synthesis as the production of actions and passions (AO 4), or, as we saw above,
as the implication of both man and nature. This first aspect of the first syn-
thesis is described in many different ways throughout the book. Perhaps the
most common is in the language of flows. In the connective synthesis, the par-
tial objects begin to emit flows, and each one always breaks the flow that
another object emits (325). To connect therefore means to emit and to inter-
rupt flows (6). These are just different ways of describing the same act.
In the current of these flows, a body without organs is produced. This is the
second aspect of the connective synthesis. It expresses the way in which a body
without organs is produced and escapes, like the ego of partial surfaces, from
the cycle of flows and their interruption. In several important passages, Deleuze
and Guattari seem to insist that the body without organs is not only produced,
but is produced at a very specific moment. Here are two of those passages:13
The body without organs is produced at a certain time and a certain place in
the connection. It has its own particular place. How are we to understand this?
We can draw very general conclusions and say that the body without organs is
not given but is produced, and that the dispersion of partial objects is therefore
primary in the order of genesis.14 This is why partial objects are called the
ultimate elements of the unconscious. But these passages suggest, more specifi-
cally, that the body without organs is produced at a specific moment. How and
when is it produced? What is this certain place and certain time?
70 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
Deleuze and Guattari suggest an answer only once in the early pages of the
book before we have managed to get our bearings. The body without organs is
produced in the third stage of the binary-linear series as the identity of produc-
ing and the product (AO 78; my emphasis). This statement needs to be
decomposed into its constituent parts. The binary-linear series refers simply to
communication of partial objects and the way in which they emit flows and
interrupt each others flows, or the first aspect of the synthesis. By saying that
the body without organs is the third stage of the binary linear series, Deleuze
and Guattari suggest that at this stage of the genesis, the body without organs
never leaves the plane of partial objects. It belongs to the same dimension as
the linear series of connection. The body without organs thus maintains a
degree of materiality, and indeed, it is at one point defined as the second
of the two material elements of the schizophrenic desiring-machines [. . .].
(AO 327)the other material element being the partial objects. The ego has
not yet begun its escape from the series of partial objects. It is still lodged in the
depths and therefore is identical to what Deleuze called the body without
organs in The Logic of Sense, the body of the infant communicating with other
fragmented bodies.
The second part of the expression, the identity of producing and product,
refers to another way in which Deleuze and Guattari describe the first synthesis.
Early in the book, they describe the connection of partial objects among them-
selves as being subject to the rule of continually producing production, of
grafting producing onto the product (AO 7). In the language of flows, to
produce is to emit a flow. To be a product is to interrupt a flow. This rule states
then that at the same time that every partial object is the interruption of a flow
(a product), it must always produce another flow (production) (AO 7). In other
words, it must be connected with another partial object. The rule is simply
another expression of the connective synthesis.15 However, if the body without
organs is defined as the identity of producing and product then, it is defined
as the very moment of synthesis itself. The particular place and certain time
in which the body without organs is produced is the moment of synthesis, or the
coming together of two or more partial objects in a connection. I will argue
below that Deleuze had already developed this notion of the ego in Difference
and Repetition in relation to Hegels analyses of sense-certainty. What he calls the
contemplative soul or the spontaneous imagination in that book corresponds
directly to what he calls a body without organs here. The contemplative soul or
the spontaneous imagination is indistinguishable from both the synthesis it
brings about and the objects of that synthesis. The ego which draws off a differ-
ence between partial objects is nothing more than the difference drawn. [T]he
eye binds light, it is itself a bound light (DR 96). In Anti-Oedipus, the body with-
out organs at the moment of its birth is simply a synthesis of a hyletic data. It is
an apprehension of the outside.
Desiring-Production 71
are also two aspects to this reappropriation. On the one hand, the second
synthesis of recording records the connections of the first synthesis on the sur-
face of body without organs. It therefore appears as the simple repetition of the
connective synthesis, now on the surface of the body without organs itself.
Deleuze and Guattari will thus say that it is a recording of the associative flow
(36), that is, of the actions and passions of the partial objects in the first synthesis.
But, on the other hand, when it appropriates these old connections, it also
places them within a new form of organization: The data, the bits of informa-
tion recorded, and their transmission form a grid of disjunctions of a type that
differs from the previous connections (38). The partial objects are now
recorded not in the form of an associative flow but in the form of what Deleuze
and Guattari call signifying chains (38). It is extremely important, however, to
recognize that this codification into signifying chains, despite the name, does
not result in the production of signification or meaning: The chains are called
signifying chains because they are made up of signs, but these signs are not
themselves signifying (38).17 We are thus still at a stage of the genesis which is
firmly antecedent to the origin of meaning. We are still in the asignifying
depths, or in the middle of a savage experience. This second synthesis marks
the beginnings of the possibility for meaning, just as it did in The Logic of Sense,
by further removing the ego from the determinations of depth. The recording
of the initial actions and passions is sufficient to move us out of the world of
unorganized objectivity into the world of signs and the possibility of organiza-
tionand at this point, as signs, the partial objects are subjected to a new set of
connections, just as random as the first.
In the second synthesis the body without organs presents itself as unengen-
dered and as the source of the partial objects which had, in fact, produced it.
This movement is called miraculation, and it works according to the logic of
double causality developed in The Logic of Sense. There the transcendental field
had an immediate and material cause, the body, which was responsible for its
production. But on the surface of the transcendental field itself there was a
mobile element which Deleuze called the quasi-cause (or aleatory point or
castrated phallus, and so on) whose function was to submit the transcendental
field to a different organization than the one given to it by its production in the
dynamic genesis, and in so doing, to liberate it from its subjection to immediate
action and reaction. In this way, the transcendental field was able to reappropri-
ate or sublimate depth without being constrained to a strict causality. The
quasi-cause ensured the independence of the transcendental field at the same
time that it allowed for the sublimation of its material cause. In The Logic of
Sense, however, the logic of double causality is specific to the moment of genesis
which moves from corporeality to incorporeality. In Anti-Oedipus its use is
extended to every moment of the genesis and it becomes the general mecha-
nism for the progression from one moment of the genesis to the next.18
Miraculation is the name given to the logic of double causality in Anti-Oedipus.
Desiring-Production 73
In the second synthesis, the body without organs is thus a miraculating machine
because it appropriates the connections of the first synthesis at the same time
that it leaves, transcends, or negates the binary linear series of the sensible.
The second synthesis represents the way in which the body without organs,
after withdrawing from the partial objects returns to them as meaningless signs.
It does so in two ways as I pointed out above: (1) it records the connections of
the binary linear series on its own surface but (2) also submits them to its own
mode of organization in signifying chains. It represents an appropriation of
the partial objects outside of the binary linear series, and in these two aspects of
the appropriation, we should see the logic of double causality at work. The
body without organs first records or sublimates, and then it reorganizes in
signifying chains, or symbolizes. If the partial objects represent the material of
perception, a hyletic data (AO 36), the body without organs in the first synthe-
sis represents an apprehending ego which is precisely the synthesis of that
hyletic data. The body without organs of the second synthesis then represents a
form of memory, recording, or retention.
From this point of view we can see that we can call the body without organs
whatever we like: receptive plate, Imagination,19 memory. In Difference and
Repetition, Deleuze calls it an ego, a spontaneous imagination,20 a contempla-
tive soul, a mens momentanea, and in The Logic of Sense, an infant, an ego, and
a body without organs. But in reality, these names only get in the way of under-
standing the concept (not that the expression body without organs ever
helped). To say the body without organs is the Deleuzian Imagination is to not
go far enough. It is only to substitute a familiar and comfortable notion for an
uncomfortable one. What we need to know instead is its function or, what
amounts to the same thing, its relation to surrounding concepts. The body
without organs is the space in which perceptions are recorded and organized in
such a way as to gradually produce, not a complete perception, but, as we will
see, differing degrees of intensity which will themselves determine the produc-
tion or differenciation of a complete perception or objectity.
banded with zones, localized with areas and fields, measured off by gradients,
traversed by potentials, marked by thresholds (AO 84). These intensities, I will
argue below, are produced as expressions of the body without organs various
relations to the outside.
Within this field of intensity there is also a nomadic subject that traverses the
surface of the body without organs and lives its intensities much in the same way
that the aleatory point traversed the transcendental field of sense in The Logic
of Sense. This is not an active subject however: it is an apparent subject rather
than a real subject. Just as in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze and Guattari allude to
Blanchot in their emphasis on the impersonality and preindividual character of
this subject and its field of experience: the apparent subject never ceases to live
and travel as a One (330; original emphasis). This apparent subject is anony-
mous and almost hallucinatory. There is a subject, but it is still not separate
from the conditions of its emergence or the states of affairs through which it
passes: this me is merely the residual subject that sweeps the circle and con-
cludes a self from its oscillations on the circle (88; original emphasis). The
circle that the subject sweeps is populated by intensities, and the nomadic sub-
ject lives the intensities as affections. Each intensity is an intensive emotion, an
affect, or a feeling (84). As it sweeps this circle of intensities, this subject con-
sumes and consummates each of the states through which it passes . . . (41).
The subjects life in the third synthesis is thus an affective life, a life that is noth-
ing more than a feeling, a series of feelings and emotions and feelings as a
consummation and a consumption of intensive quantities (AO 84; cf. 18
and 330).
Intensities are affects. But intensity and affect are not random notions that make
an abrupt appearance in the genesis here and which we can take outside of the
philosophical context in which they appear. To understand why affect and inten-
sity emerge at this stage of the genesis, we have to pay close attention to what
happened in the preceding two stages. In the first synthesis the ego apprehended
the outside. In the second synthesis the ego recorded its apprehensions. In the
third synthesis, the ego determines the quantity of its affection, the intensity or
degree to which the outside assaults it. The three syntheses condition our recep-
tivity, or our capacity to be affected. Together they constitute the general possibility
of any experience. Wasnt this exactly the function of passivity in Husserls genesis:
to produce objects with differing degrees of intensity whose allure draws the atten-
tion of the ego and thus conditions its affection?
Intensity is produced. How are we to understand this production of intensity?
What is an intensity such that it can be produced in this third synthesis, and
what does it express? Deleuze and Guattari ask the same question early on in
the book and give a rather straightforward answer. Where do these pure inten-
sities come from? They come from the two preceding forces, repulsion and attraction,
and from the opposition of these two forces (AO 21; my emphasis). Intensity comes
from the repulsion of the body without organs as a paranoiac machine and the
Desiring-Production 75
We must examine how this [third] synthesis is formed or how the subject is
produced. Our point of departure was the opposition between desiring-
machines and the body without organs. The repulsion of these machines,
as found in the paranoiac machine of primary repression, gave way to an
attraction in the miraculating machine. But the opposition between attrac-
tion and repulsion still exists. It would seem that a genuine reconciliation of
the two can take place only on the level of a new machine, functioning as a
return of the repressed. (AO 17)
The body without organs is the degree-zero of intensity. Its various relationships
with the partial objects become expressed as intensities which fill the body with-
out organs to varying degrees (19, 309). The forces of attraction and repulsion,
of soaring ascents and plunging falls, produce a series of intensive states based
on the intensity = 0 that designates the body without organs . . . (21; cf. 330).
It seems from this point of view, intensity expresses precisely the degree to
which a spontaneous subject is affected by the objects of its environment. The
body without organs encounters its object as a paranoiac, records the encoun-
ter as miraculating machine, and measures the one against the other and
expresses that relation in the form of an intensity as a celibate machine.
If we read partial objects as minute perceptions, we can now determine a
significant difference between Deleuzes, Kants, and Husserls accounts of
intensity which should help to clarify the function of intensity in Deleuzes
thought. The difference between Deleuze and Kant is more straightforward
and reconfirms the relation I have been drawing between desiring-production
and the dynamic genesis. Deleuze and Guattari cite Kants theory of intensity
when they put forward their own, and their revision of the notion of intensity is
essentially a consequence of the difference between a transcendental idealism
and a transcendental empiricismbetween a theoretical subject and a practi-
cal subject, to borrow an expression from Empiricism and Subjectivity (ES 104).
In the Anticipations of Perception, Kant distinguishes between empirical con-
sciousness and pure consciousness. Empirical consciousness is consciousness of
the material real, of that which cannot be anticipated, whereas pure conscious-
ness is the pure intuition of space and time which is always anticipated.
The same notions are at work in both the Deleuzian and Kantian systems, but
with one major qualification. Kant moves from the pure forms of time and
space as intensity = 0 to the material real of sensation which fills the forms of
intuition to varying degrees. But Deleuze and Guattari, it would seem, begin
with the material real: the body without organs produced as the second material
object of the transcendental unconscious. In the third synthesis, however, the
body without organs seems to lose its materiality. It becomes intensity = 0, the
pure form of time, the form of auto-affection. (This is exactly what happens in
both Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense I will argue in my chapters on
Difference and Repetition.) The empty form of time, Aion, unfolds from the
corporeal depths, and, in its unfolding, releases Difference in itself as pure
Desiring-Production 77
intensity. The difference between Deleuze and Kant, then, is simply that in Kant
the empty form of time is given, whereas for Deleuze, it is produced.
To compare Deleuze and Husserl, however, takes us in quite a different
direction. In Husserls account, intensity played its most important role in the
life-world by determining the relation between the passive and active syntheses.
The passive syntheses of time and association produced the objects of experi-
ence and ascribed to them varying degrees of intensity. The more intense the
object, the more likely the ego was to turn toward it and actively take it up in its
active syntheses. In a way, this is exactly the role of intensity in Deleuze and
Guattari, but things are also considerably different. Let us first consider the dif-
ferences in their notions of passive synthesis, and second, the relation of the
ego to intensity in Deleuze and Guattari.
Despite Husserls insistence on the reduction, it still seems that certain char-
acteristics of representation made their way into his account of the associative
synthesis, namely, the forms of identity and of recognition.21 Husserl describes
the associative synthesis either as the synthesis of like with like in a synthesis of
homogeneity or as a synthesis which separates dissimilar elementsan exclu-
sive disjunctive synthesisin a synthesis of heterogeneity. But from a Deleuzian
point of view, we have to ask, how a passive synthesis can combine like with like
unless it already has the model or formula of identity laid out before it? If we
take as a guide the four forms of representation laid out in Difference and Repeti-
tionidentity, opposition, resemblance, and analogywe can see that Husserl
presupposes the form of identity as governing the passive syntheses of homoge-
neity and the form of opposition as governing the passive syntheses of
heterogeneity. Resemblance and analogy, which play explicit roles in Husserls
active syntheses, therefore seem to be the only forms of representation which
Husserl guards against by means of the reduction in his determination of a
transcendental consciousness. Deleuze and Guattaris passive syntheses clearly
do not have this problem. They synthesize randomly, indirectly, and blindly.
They are free syntheses which operate without a plan, completely indifferent to
the objects they synthesize. They do not choose objects; they do not combine
like with like. They simply ramify connections and relations without a determining
cause or a telos.
This, however, presents its own problems from the point of view of the indi-
viduation of things or the production of identities and representations for a
thetic (pre)consciousness such as the one Deleuze developed in The Logic of
Sense. How is it possible that a series of completely random syntheses could
serve any function other than messing things up? How could they possibly lead
from the chaos of the initial delirium to a more or less organized and stable
representation at the molar end of subjectivity? It is because their sole function
is to produce intensities which will lead only later to the determination of
identities. If partial objects are minute perceptions, it becomes clear, first of all
why intensities are equivalent to affects: they express the degree to which the
78 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
body without organs is affected by partial objects. Second, it seems that the first
two syntheses from this point of view do nothing more than ensure the affec-
tion, while the third, ensures the consumption of those affections. Whereas
Husserls life-world was populated by individuals with varying degrees of inten-
sity, the corresponding stage in Deleuzes genesis has no objects yet and seems
to be nothing more than a zone of intensities which will only be the catalyst for
the later production of individuals. (It is as if what Husserl condensed into the
two passive syntheses, Deleuze extended across his entire philosophy, as if
Deleuzes second major criticism of Husserl after the problem of consciousness
was that Husserl moved too quickly.) The role of the passive syntheses is not to
produce complete objects. It is simply to produce a field of intensity that will be
subject to a more complex, virtual synthesis which I describe in greater detail in
the chapters below on Difference and Repetition.
Conclusion
However, there are two important points at which Deleuze and Guattari call
into question this reading (4, 327). But we cannot follow Deleuze and Guat-
tari on this point. On the one hand it would immediately contradict their
empiricist thesis. If there is a set structure of syntheses, pregiven, which can
act in any order whatsoever, the picture they paint of subjectivity would be
idealist. There would be a pregiven structure of subjectivity which would give
form, through three passive syntheses, to an empirical hyletic data. More than
anything it is the idea of genesis or production which is the defining charac-
teristic of Deleuzes thought. What is important from this point of view is that
the three syntheses are produced, and that is what I hoped to show, or at least
Desiring-Production 79
suggest, in this half of the chapter. When Deleuze and Guattari call into ques-
tion the successive order of the syntheses, we have to understand that this is
only the case for an already constituted subjectivity. It is clear that there could
be no intensity (third synthesis) if there were no relations of attraction and
repulsion between a body without organs and partial objects since intensity is
produced precisely by these relations. But there could be no recording/
attraction (second synthesis) if there were not a body without organs on which
partial objects and their connections were recorded. There could not be a
body without organs/repulsion unless there was a first synthesis which pro-
duced it or was the body without organs itself. What are we to make of their
claim then? Perhaps it is only a question of a point of view? Deleuze will often
describe what things look like from within the system itself. In Difference and
Repetition, for example, Deleuze plants himself inside his system and views it
from that particular place so that he can say without contradicting himself
that only the present exists (DR 76); only the past exists (82); only the future
exists (93). These two contradictory statements in Anti-Oedipus were perhaps
written from the point of view of the conclusion of desiring-production. The-
oretically, the stages are rigorously separated. Necessarily so, even if in the
process of production we move imperceptibly from one moment to the next,
but from the point of view of practice, of the constituted desiring machine
which eats, shits, and fucks (but does not judge or recognize), these three
syntheses continue their work blindly. We thus have to insist on the genetic
point of view: the first synthesis conditions and produces the second, and the
second conditions and produces the third.
As I suggested above, all three passive synthesis share several important char-
acteristics with those of The Logic of Sense and, as I will argue in the third part of
this book, with the passive syntheses of Difference and Repetition as well. The simi-
larities between Anti-Oedipus and Deleuzes earlier books, however, seem to stop
here. It may be clear that desiring-production is a reformulation of the dynamic
genesis, but if Anti-Oedipus really was the continuation of the theory put forward
in The Logic of Sense, the genesis would have continued into a static genesis in
which objects would be individuated and given a sense through the actualiza-
tion of Ideas into extensity. But in Anti-Oedipus, we turn to a sort of renewal of
Marxism and to a theory of social production that at first seems completely
unrelated to anything like the static genesis of the earlier books. Rather than
moving on in the order of genesis to the forms of good sense, common sense,
and the forms of the proposition, we leave the field of intensity for historical
moments of representation, for a theory of universal history founded on con-
tingency. But, as I have been suggesting throughout this book, Deleuzes use of
language is highly unreliable, and rather than actively taking up Marxism from
the point of view of its own problems and theories, Deleuze and Guattari submit
the language of Marxism to the workings of their own philosophy. Social
production and universal history are, I will argue in the next chapter, nothing
80 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
Social Production
Social production
By simplifying a lot, we can say that the savage territorial machine operated
on the basis of connections of production, and that the barbarian despotic
Social Production 83
This is a simplification for at least two reasons, one technical, one linguistic.
First of all, in each age all three syntheses work together. The territorial machine,
for example, is not defined by one form of synthesis, the connective, or even by
the dominance of one form of synthesis. In each age all three passive syntheses
reappear and take on an essential role in transforming intensity into extensity.
In fact, the significant difference between the employment of the three passive
syntheses in history as opposed to their role in desire is that if in desire they
were free, blind, passive, but also successive, in history they are all coordinated
and therefore becomewe can assumeactive. In each age, the third synthesis
determines the employment of the first two. In Kantian terminology, Deleuze
and Guattari call the free and passive use of the syntheses their legitimate use,
and the active, regulated use, the illegitimate use. Social production is defined
by the illegitimate use of the syntheses.
Second, the role of the syntheses is far from clear because the syntheses are
renamed and take on multiple forms. In the primitive territorial machine, for
example, connection becomes alliance, disjunction becomes filiation, and
conjunction becomes the declension of the two or the way in which they work
together under the name surplus value (14950; cf. 188, 200). There is not
enough space in this chapter to get into the mechanics of the system and to
describe in detail the contribution of the syntheses to the production of history.
This is because before that move should even be made, the prior argument has
to be made that Deleuze and Guattari are not actually giving a more rigorous
theorization to those problems of history and structuralism which were popular
in the 1960s. They are not engaging with problems of kinship structure as such,
but are dealing with the structure of subjectivity and the phenomenological
production of reality itself.
This becomes most clear in Deleuze and Guattaris somewhat unexpected
description of the historical molar aggregates as objectities. In a note on their
use of this word, the translators of Anti-Oedipus suggest that it corresponds to the
German word objektitt (AO 301). However this word also has a specific Hus-
serlian heritage which carries with it a meaning which is the one, I would argue,
that Deleuze and Guattari are alluding to here. When Husserl was
translated into French, it was the German word Gegenstndlichkeit, not objek-
titt, which was translated by the French word objectit.1 In English,
Gegenstndlichkeit was translated as objectivity or objectivites. Husserl distin-
guishes primarily between two types of objectivities: objectivities of receptivity
and objectivities of the understanding.2 Objectivities of the understanding are
things like logical and mathematic truths which have reality, apodicity, and
objectivity, but no corresponding material object.3 You could say that they are
84 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
real without being actual. Throughout his work Deleuze often alludes to this
notion of ideal objectivity in reference to his theory of transcendental Ideas.4
But the objectities which Deleuze and Guattari allude to in Anti-Oedipus, I will
argue below and in the following chapters, are not those of the understanding,
but refer to Husserls objectivities of receptivity. These are nothing more than
the objects produced in the passive genesis which I described in my first chapter.
Husserl describes them as follows: they are pregiven in an original passivity with
their structures of association, affection, etc. (E&J 250). Objectivities of recep-
tivity are simply the objects which passivity constitutes out of our hyletic data.
Deleuze and Guattaris strange choice of the word objectity to describe
molar aggregates emphasizes a tension which I will amplify without entirely
resolving throughout the remainder of the chapter. It is the tension between
modes of a more or less individual representation and universal history. On the
one hand, if desiring-production can be understood as the series of relationships
between a synthesizing ego and its affections, or microperceptions, it would
make perfect sense that social production would be the production of a series
of representations of these affections. The objectities (of receptivity) would
then be the finished product of that process which operates on micropercep-
tions. We could then understand social production as the production of
complete molar objects corresponding to the fragmented objects which took
the form of hyletic molecules. Not only would this make sense in relation to the
correspondence I argued for in the last chapter between desire and the social
and subject and object, but it would correspond to the theory of macropercep-
tion in The Fold, and to the ontological static genesis of The Logic of Sense. Indeed,
this reading would suggest that despite the historical vocabulary, social production
is a new formulation of the static genesis. But, on the other hand, Deleuze and
Guattari clearly seem to suggest that these molar phenomena describe the
modes of representation specific to entire historical ages and would in no
way be able to describe the production of representations of our immediate
affections.
Objectities
There are three types of objectities that Deleuze and Guattari describe: those
produced by myth, by tragedy, and by an infinite subjective representation.
But what do Deleuze and Guattari mean by myth and tragedy such that the two
genres could be understood as productive of objectities? Myth and tragedy
are systems of symbolic representations that still refer desire to determinate
exterior conditions as well as to particular objective codes (300). They grasp
the essence of desire, but by referring it to large objectities as to the specific
elements that determine its objects, aims, and sources (301). Myth and tragedy
Social Production 85
therefore intervene between desire and its externalization. They are the histori-
cal methods by which intensity becomes translated into extensity. They grasp
the essence of desire, but in so doing, they put it outside of itself. Myth and
tragedy, as we will see below, are nothing more than technical terms for
describing the ways in which desire is externalized.
I pointed out above that the general logic behind social production was
that in it desiring-production is folded back on itself. The intensities pro-
duced in the third synthesis turn back on the passive syntheses and determine
a particular active and illegitimate use of the syntheses. This new configura-
tion of the three syntheses produces a kind of objectity or molar aggregate
specific to each historical age. Myth therefore refers to the way in which
desire is externalized in an objective representation in the territorial age.
Tragedy is the way in which desire is externalized in the despotic age. And
the treatment of objective representations as subjective defines the capitalist
age. The words myth and tragedy take on entirely new definitions within
the context of this systemnamely, they represent the externalization of
desire in a social field. In what follows I want to explore this process of exter-
nalization and the constitution of objective representation in greater detail.
Deleuze and Guattari claim that by understanding symbolic representations
we may develop a systematic phenomenology of these elements and objec-
tities (301).5 In other words, their theory of universal history is a systematic
description of the kinds of representation (objectity) produced in every his-
torical age. In the rest of this chapter I want to describe the contours of this
systematic phenomenology.
In the territorial machine, the syntheses take on an extensive form. This pas-
sage describes the movement between three dimensions which we can describe
abstractly as (1) the system in intensity, (2) the movement from intensity to
extensity, and (3) the system in extensity. In this particular passage (1) is the full
body of the earth, (2) is the interaction of illegitimate syntheses, and (3) is the
extensive system which results.6 The general function of the territorial machine
is the externalization of desire accomplished through the interaction of the
illegitimate uses of the passive syntheses.
The territorial problem is one of moving from intensity to extensity. But I also
want to suggest that, universal history aside, we could pose the problem from
the point of view of a systematic phenomenology. If desiring-production could
be read as the interaction between an ego and its affections, and if that series of
affections ended only in a field of intensity, then the problem which follows for
the affected subject is precisely how that field of intensity can be made sense of.
How can intensive becoming be translated or codified and thereby take on a
relative stability? How are discreet and knowable representations produced on
the foundation of intensity or becoming?
For the flows to be codable, their energy must allow itself to be quantified
and qualified; it is necessary that selections from the flows [first synthesis] be
made in relation to [declension, or third synthesis] detachments from the
chain [second synthesis]: something must pass through, but something must
also be blocked and something must block and cause to pass through. Now
this is only possible in the system in extension [ . . . which makes] an exclusive
use of the disjunctive synthesis, and a conjugal use of the connective synthesis.
Such is indeed the meaning of the incest prohibition conceived as the establishment
of a physical system in extension: one must look in each case for the part of
Social Production 87
the flow of intensity that passes through, for what does not pass, and for what
causes passage or prevents it, according to the patrilateral or matrilateral
nature of the marriages [first synthesis (alliance)], according to the patrilin-
eal or matrilineal nature of the lineages [second synthesis (filiation)],
according to the general rgime [third synthesis (declension)] of the
extended filiations and the lateral alliances. (163; my emphasis)7
This results in the production of segments or blocks on which the next moment
of universal history is founded. When the despotic age makes its appearance on
the stage of universal history, it does not return to the field of intensities produced
in desiring-production. Rather, it builds directly on top of the territorial machine
by instituting a new alliance and a direct filiation, a new connection and a new
disjunction, a new use of the first synthesis and a new use of the second (19293).
If territorial representation codes by translating intensity into extensity, despotic
representation overcodes by bringing several codes under a form of unity. The
segments produced in the declension of alliance and filiation appear in the
despotic state as blocks which are submitted to a new form of organization spe-
cific to despotism, further rigidifying them into bricks.
In point of fact, this is what forms the specific character of Asiatic9 produc-
tion: the autochthonous rural communities subsist and continue to produce
[first synthesis], inscribe [second synthesis], and consume [third synthesis];
in effect, they are the States sole concern. The wheels of the territorial line-
age machine subsist, but are no longer anything more than the working parts
of the State machine. The objects, the organs, the persons, and the groups
retain at least part of their intrinsic coding, but these coded flows of the
former rgime find themselves overcoded by the transcendent unity that
appropriates surplus value. The old inscription remains, but is bricked over
by and in the inscription of the State. The blocks subsist, but have become
encased and embedded bricks, having only a controlled mobility. The
territorial alliances are not replaced, but are merely allied with the new
alliance . . .. (196; my emphasis).
once again on this reappropriation of the three syntheses by the despotic state
in a new and original form: new alliance is the despotic form of connection,
direct filiation is the despotic form of disjunction, and the convergence
of these two into the transcendent unity of the despot is the form of
conjunction (198).
It is this third instance, conjunction, despite the fact that despotism is charac-
terized by the dominance of the disjunctive synthesis, which seems to be the
defining characteristic of despotism: the State is the transcendent higher unity
that integrates relatively isolated subaggregates, functioning separately, to
which it assigns a development in bricks and a labor of construction by frag-
ments (198). In despotism, a transcendent higher unity gathers together
isolated subaggregates or independent territories. It is the synthesis of territo-
riality. Deleuze and Guattari cite Kafka as providing the definitive description of
this process, and in their later book, Kafka, they provide a diagram which gives
the reader a vivid impression of this process. At the center of the image is a
tower. This tower organizes around its periphery, at a distance, a series of
discontinuous blocks (KA 74). The tower represents the despotic unity, and
the discontinuous blocks represent the territories which this unity gathers
together. The organization of territories into a common project is the defining
characteristic of the despotic age.
This new organization is governed or controlled by the transcendent unity
of the despot. This is an essential point. It suggests that at this point in history a
form of spontaneity capable of intention or control enters the picture. Whereas
territorial representation was more or less haphazard and still retained a degree
of passivity, despotic representation has the force of volition behind it. In
despotism passivity recedes and activity comes to the fore.
As for the subaggregates themselves, the territorial machines, they are the
concrete itself, the concrete base and beginning, but their segments here
enter into relationships corresponding to the essence, they assume precisely
this form of bricks that ensures their integration into a higher unity, and their
distributive operation, consonant with the great collective designs of this same unity
. . .. (AO 199; my emphasis)
already know that for Deleuze sense is not a predicate qualifying the tragic
objectity produced in despotism, but rather the transcendental field out of
which signification is produced. For that reason, we should talk about what
comes about at this stage of the genesis as the bestowal of meaning or signifi-
cation as opposed to sense. Despotism is the moment of meaning-bestowal. It
is therefore the correlate, as I will argue below, of the production of significa-
tion in the static ontological genesis in The Logic of Sense. What Deleuze called
signification there corresponds to the kind of meaning produced here.
Deleuze and Guattari insist that at this juncture, the question the analyst must
ask begins to shift from How does it work? to What does it mean?: The question
What is the use of that? fades more and more, and disappears in the fog of pes-
simism, of nihilism, Nada, Nada! (214; cf. 206). Things no longer have uses. They
have meanings. This point has extremely important consequences in relation to
the use Frederic Jameson and other critics have made of Deleuze and Guattaris
functionalism when they argue that the literary critic inspired by Deleuze and
Guattari should no longer ask what a text means, but only how it works.11 It seems
that functionalism, however, has well-defined limits, and that the question of func-
tion is only relevant in those periods of history prior to despotism. These limits of
functionalism become very clear if we notice that as we move through Deleuze and
Guattaris system, we move from the molecular unconscious to the molar precon-
scious, from small partial objects to massive objectities, but also, simultaneously,
from nonsense to meaning. The reason the schizoanalyst cannot ask what partial
objects mean, but only how they work, is simply that partial objects have no mean-
ing. The question of how things work is relevant only in a situation where the
objects of the question have no signification.
At the end of the book, Deleuze and Guattari cite a practical rule laid down by
Leclaire,the same rule Deleuze used in The Logic of Sense (LS 233, 358n7)
which they summarize here as the rule of the right to non-sense as well as to the
absence of a link (AO 314; my emphasis). Even if, at the moment of this citation,
the nonsense they are referring to belongs to the ultimate elements of the uncon-
scious, this absence of meaning, present at the foundation of the genesis, will
persist straight through the process of production until the moment at which the
despotic transcendent object leaps outside of the territorial chain (205). It is
exactly in place of nonsignifying signs that compose the networks of a territorial
chain that a despotic signifier from which all the signs uniformly flow in a deter-
ritorialized12 flow of writing establishes itself (206; my emphases).13 Territorial
representation is nonsignifying. Meaning has not yet been produced. In contrast
to the still nonlinear and a-signifying territorial writing however, there appears a
despotic writing which is linear and meaningful. In contrast to the pure designa-
tion or denotation of territorial representation (204, 214), despotic representation
is a pure signification (214). In despotic representation, signs become signifying
under the action of a despotic symbol that totalizes them in the absence of its
withdrawal (310). Or, to put it another way, the despot forms a transcendental
Social Production 91
All molar functionalism is false, since the organic or social machines are not
formed in the same way they function, and technical machines are not assem-
bled in the same way they are used, but imply precisely the specific conditions
that separate their own production from their distinct product. Only what is
not produced in the same way it functions has a meaning, and also a purpose, an
intention. The desiring-machines on the contrary represent nothing, signify
nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what is
made with them, what they make themselves. (288; my emphases)14
It makes no sense to say then that the equation of meaning and function works
at the level of a literary text, which is itself often signifying. The identity of
meaning and use is accurate only under the conditions of the absence of meaning.
It only makes sense to talk of a molecular functionalism because at the molecular
level there is no meaning. As soon as meaning and volition enter the picture, which
is to say, at the moment of the production of a despotic state, functionalism no
longer holds.15 At this point, the question What does it mean? begins to be
heard, and the problems of exegesis prevail over problems of use and efficacy
(206).The question Jameson failed to ask was whether or not we read at the
level of desiring-production. But as long as reading goes beyond pure designation,
as long as what we read has a meaning of almost any kind, the question how
does it work ceases to be relevant. Deleuze and Guattari seem to be clear on
this point: insofar as there is meaning, we have not yet reached the molecular.
But conversely, when there is meaning, we are no longer in the presence of the
molecular and the questions and methods of investigation must change. Schizo-
analysis must give way to interpretation. In despotism, writing becomes linear,
and production is reduced to representation (310). Reading, even our reading
of Deleuze and Guattari, is only possible at the level of despotic representation
when writing has become linear and meaning has been produced: here
The eye no longer sees, it reads (206).16
But how are we to understand this? How is it possible that meaning only comes
about at that specific historical moment when a despot comes to power? Deleuze
and Guattari repeatedly emphasize that there was no meaning in territorial
92 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
Schematically, this passage can be reduced to four key points. (1) Good sense
takes as its point of departure a difference at the origin of individuation,
a difference which in Difference and Repetition is described as an intensity. I will
suggest in the next part of this book that this notion of intensity is identical to
the one developed in Anti-Oedipus. (2) Good sense puts this difference outside
of itself. It cancels difference as it moves from intensity to extensity, from the
difference which governs individuation to the individuated object, and it
provides a rule according to which these objects become equalized. However, at
this point in the constitution of objects, Deleuze runs into two problems Kant
gave famous answers to: the unity of the object (the transcendental object or
object = X) and the unity of the subject (the transcendental unity of appercep-
tion). While good sense patiently transforms intensity into extensity, it is
incapable of determining the unity of the objects which it is in the process of
producing. (3) Common sense in its objective form therefore provides the form
of an indeterminate object which gives unity to the different adumbrations
produced in good sense. In its subjective form, (4) common sense gives unity to
a subject to whom the representations appear.17
What is striking about the four main aspects of this schematic description is
that each one seems to be behind the stages of what Deleuze and Guattari
described in Anti-Oedipus as the course of universal history. The forms of good
and common sense seem to structure history:
(1) Good sense presupposes a field of intensity. This was precisely the field of
intensity produced in the third synthesis of desiring-production which
the full body of the earth represented.
(2) Good sense determines the cancellation of difference and provides it with a rule.
We saw that the primary problem of the territorial machine was the
movement from intensity to extensity or the production of a system in
extension out of the intensive full body. As Deleuze and Guattari put it,
94 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
And further, just as good sense and common sense presuppose one another, so
too do the despotic and territorial machines. Not only does the territorial machine
persist in its entirety in the despotic machine as its foundations, as the content
which the despotic state gives form to (199), but, in the end, one no longer really
knows what comes first, and whether the territorial machine does not in fact pre-
suppose a despotic machine from which it extracts the bricks or that it segments
in turn (210). But what about (4), the subjective form of common sense, which
has a function analogous to the Kantian transcendental unity of apperception?
It seems that this is precisely the function of the next stage of universal history.
After the despotic age, or the form of objective common sense, comes what
Deleuze and Guattari call the age of the Urstaat. They describe this Urstaat as a
principle of reflection (219; my emphasis). It expresses the way in which the des-
potic state steps outside of history but, in the form of a cerebral ideality or an
abstraction that belongs to another dimension, conditions universal history as
the horizon common to what comes before and what comes after:
Being the common horizon for what comes before and what comes after, it
conditions universal history only provided it is not on the outside, but always
off to the side, the cold monster that represents the way in which history is in
the head, in the brainthe Urstaat. (221)
Or again:
It appears to be set back at a remove from what it transects and from what it
resects, as though it were giving evidence of another dimension, a cerebral
Social Production 95
The Urstaat has a role similar to the transcendental object, the despot, but it
ceases to be explicit, it ceases to be the form specific to a particular set of
concrete bricks and falls behind the scenes, all the while continuing the work
of unification proper to the despotic state.
Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly emphasized that the Urstaat is not an age
closed in on itself, but bears on the entire course of history. It is what unites
history into one process of production. However, it does not only unify what
came beforeterritorialism and despotismbut also what comes after: capi-
talism. The Urstaat has the peculiar characteristic of underlying the whole
flow of decoded representations (images) which characterize capitalism. The
Urstaat supersects what comes before, but resects the formations that fol-
low (220).18 In other words, it coordinates the entire process. It makes the
forms of good and common sense all parts of the same process and ensures
that what comes after these forms will also belong to this process. The unifi-
cation the Urstaat performs thus bears on what came before and what comes
after.
Is this not very similar to the way in which Kant described the transcenden-
tal unity of apperception? Despite the radical difference in Kant between a
passive intuition (CPR B15354) and an active understanding, the unity of
apperception is what brings all representations, even those of intuition, within
the limits of a consciousness so that the empirical subject can say that these
are my representations (B13233). Even though the entire philosophical con-
text (phenomenology, not idealism) and problem (genesis, not conditioning)
has shifted between Deleuze and Kant, and with it the entire nature of the
concept, the Urstaat seems to perform a function not far from that of the
unity of apperception. The Urstaat, the subjective essence, is that which
steps outside of the process of production in the form of a cerebral ideality,
a principle of reflection, and gathers together what came before and what
came after. The entire genesis is therefore united in this cerebral ideality as its
history. The Urstaat brings the entire process of production within the limits
of a principle of reflection or apperception. If capitalism is the historical age
in which objectities are no longer treated as representative of objective reality,
but only of subjective reality, we can finally see why. The Urstaat brings the
production of objectities firmly within the limits of a subject whose represen-
tations they are. In relation to the earlier stages of the genesis, it is a kind of
second-order unity which no longer organizes the concrete as the despotic
state did, but organizes the organization of the concrete. It binds the objec-
tities. It unifies the process itself and thus, in this way, as the subjective form
of common sense, conditions capitalism or the age of infinite subjective rep-
resentation (AO 222).
96 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
Capitalism
When we read Vincent Descombess claim that Deleuze was above all a post-Kan-
tian, we have to wonder if Descombes was aware of how accurate this description
was (Descombes 152). Just a superficial glance over the preceding stages of the
process of production will very quickly reveal the deeply Kantian structure of Anti-
Oedipus. I argued in the previous chapter that the three passive syntheses, insofar
as they take up a hyletic data and transform it into a field of intensities, must be read
as a new account of sensibility. As we have seen Deleuze and Guattari themselves
even go so far as to describe the intensities produced in the third synthesis as affec-
tions. The Urstaat and Despotism, which function as the transcendental object and
subject, very clearly echo Kants description of the forms of the understanding.
And if, finally, the territorial age is what brings intensity to the understanding by
transforming it into segments which can then be related to the form of the object
and the subject, then undoubtedly, its function is analogous to that of the imagina-
tion in Kant. In all of this, however, one thing is missing: reason. As odd as it might
sound, here I want to argue, or at least sketch out an argument, that what Deleuze
and Guattari call capitalism is actually a reformulation of the faculty of reason
from a genetic point of view, and indeed, Anti-Oedipus could then be read as the
realization of Kantianism as a philosophy of genesis. Structurally, then, we could
compare Deleuze and Kant as follows:
Kant Deleuze
Sensibility Sensibility:
(1) First synthesis
Imagination Territorialism
Understanding Despotism
Reason Capitalism
entire book. As a result, for now, I want to leave the argument at the level of a
suggestion, and to further suggest in what immediately follows that capitalism
is the age of reason.
What does capitalism, as the age of infinite subjective representation have in
common with the faculty of Ideas? What does this characterization of
capitalisms objectity as infinite subjective representation mean? Representa-
tion is subjective, we have seen, because the Urstaat brings the objective
representations of the earlier stages of history under the form of the subject. They
become the representations of that subject. This introduces a whole new dynamic
into history. All representation up until the Urstaat had been objective. Territorial
objectities were produced by an act of coding. Despotic objectities were
produced by an act of overcoding. When representation becomes subjective,
these objectities are first decoded, but then immediately axiomatized in a proc-
ess which leads to reterritorialization.19 Representation is subjective in capitalism
because it unfolds in the form of the subject. It is infinite because whenever a
decoded flow appears that cannot be axiomatized, a new axiom is simply added
which is capable of organizing and reterritorializing the aberrant flows: The
strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never
saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones
(250). From this point of view, capitalism is defined by its totalizing function.
There is no flow that can escape its reterritorialization through the axiomatic.
But this is not a blind totalization. Capitalism is defined as the regulation of
this axiomatic. Capitalism merely ensures the regulation of the axiomatic; it
regulates or even organizes the failures of the axiomatic as conditions of the
latters operation; it watches over and directs progress toward a saturation of
the axiomatic and the corresponding widening of the limits (252). In other
words all of the flows are not only totalized, but this aggregation is regulated.
This is exactly how Kant defined the legitimate use of reason and its transcend-
ent ideas in The Critique of Pure Reason.
For Kant, reason forms concepts of which we can have no experience
namely the self, the world, and God. He calls these concepts of reason
transcendent ideas. While it is completely illegitimate to assert the existence of
the objects of these ideas, the idea itself does have an important legitimate func-
tion as regulative. The situation which the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject finds itself
in at the end of the age of despotism is very similar to that of the Kantian subject
after it has subsumed the sensible manifold under the forms of the understand-
ing: they both have before them empirical representations of objects. For the
Kantian subject, it is very tempting to begin relating its objects to one another
and forming the idea of a world which would be the totality of all possible
objects. This is precisely the impulse of reason: to systematize. For Kant, to say
that systematic totality of objects actually exists would result in a series of
antinomies. The Idea, however, has an important regulative function: it pro-
vides an ideal of unity toward which thought can direct its cognitions. In the
98 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
same way that the understanding brings unity to the sensible manifold, the Idea
brings unity to the objects determined in the understanding. It attempts to
systematize the objects and discover not merely a contingent aggregate but a
system interconnected in accordance with necessary laws (CPR A646/B674).
This is what happens in capitalism. The subject of despotism only has before it
different objectities which are produced contingently, as the unification of
those affections which have been transformed into intensities and externalized
in territorialism. The subject of capitalism is able to decode these objects and
realign them within an axiomatic, or a system interconnected in accordance
with necessary laws. Capitalism is the regulative idea which attempts to bring
the totality of despotic objectities within its widening limits (AO 252).
We can thus see the importance of reading the expression social production
within the Kantian context in which it was first used. To put it somewhat collo-
quially and within the coordinates of a philosophy alien to Deleuzes, social
just means out there, beyond me, transcendent. Social production is the pro-
duction of transcendent objects, objectities (this egological terminology is
not foreign to Deleuzesee Pure Immanence). My reading depended entirely on
the formal structure of Anti-Oedipus in relation to The Logic of Sense, but it also
presupposes my following reading of Difference and Repetition where we will see
the Idea of the world reappear at the end of the genesis under the name the
Other. What I hope to have shown in the preceding two chapters is that Anti-
Oedipus and The Logic of Sense share very similar structures. They both begin in
the same place: a field of materiality. They both end in the same place: some
form of representation. And they both traverse the space between matter and
representation in a nearly identical way: three passive syntheses produce a tran-
scendental field which itself produces the forms of good sense, common sense,
and representation. This structural homology needs to be accounted for. There
is a strong thesis and a weak one with which to approach this problem.
A possible weak thesis would say that Deleuze and Guattari are imitating one
of those enlightenment-style investigations into origins in which each moment
of a genealogy is the consequence of the domination of a certain faculty.20 The
fact that any particular faculty still functions within us is what allows us to know
what life was like in earlier times. This thesis would have the advantage of main-
taining or justifying much of the language used in the text.
The strong thesis would say, on the other hand, that Deleuze and Guattari are
not speaking of history or of psychoanalysis or of Marx. The entire book repre-
sents the development of a systematic phenomenology, and the language of
psychoanalysis and Marxism that the authors employ needs to be rigorously
ignored. The specific contribution of Anti-Oedipus to the two books immediately
Social Production 99
preceding it, which more directly develop this phenomenology, is that it works
out in greater detail the role of the syntheses in the static genesis. Universal his-
tory simply expresses the evolution of a representation from its molecular
origins in a hyletic data to its molar destination of a representation within a
horizon of anticipation and recollection. No doubt there is a happy medium
between the two theses, but I want to put forward the strong thesis for two rea-
sons. First and simply because I think things need to be taken this far. Second
because the structural similarity between the earlier two books is astounding,
and its rigor has consequences that need to be explored in much greater detail
before a convincing conclusion can be drawn.
One of the more immediate consequences which arises from this structural
similarity turns on the question of the relation between Deleuze and Guattari
in the composition of Anti-Oedipus and the claim that Anti-Oedipus marks the
beginning of a new period in Deleuzes thought or that it is doing something
radically new. The perceived break between Deleuzes supposedly naive pre-
Guattari work21 and his more enlightened and radical work now seems much
less apparent. Guattaris own comments seem definitive on this point. In that
same journal entry from October 13, 1972, in which he was trying to find him-
self in the work, he identified exactly what excluded him:
Gilles conquered with ease and even some virtuosity the right to move about
in a relational field that I have been tangled up in for twenty years [. . .]. I still
have no control over this other world of systematic academic work, secret
programming over dozens of years. Keep my penmanship, my style. But I
dont recognize myself in the A.O. I need to stop running behind the image
of Gilles and the polishedness, the perfection that he brought to the most
unlikely book. (AP 402)
It is Deleuzes mastery of the relational field, the way in which he can secretly
program the more or less haphazard and tangled concepts into a polished and
perfected work which prevents Guattari from recognizing himself in Anti-
Oedipus. We find these kinds of comments scattered throughout the Anti-Oedipus
Papers: I want to make an outline this time, but I can tell its going to be a mess
again! (254). Same mess all over again. Im so jealous of your ability to organize
and classify things! (246). In a letter to Deleuze as early as May 1970, he gave a
precise characterization of Deleuzes contribution: When I read you I have the
impression of rediscovering all sorts of powerfully orchestrated refrains that I
have proposed to you [. . .] (411). All of these imagesorchestration, secret
programming, organization, and classificationalongside Guattaris own
chaotic mode of presentationSurfing on the crest of concepts. Quickly
(224)suggest that what is particularly Deleuzian in 1972 about Anti-Oedipus is
its organization.22 Despite the very wide terminological and thematic gap
between The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus it is precisely this organization or
100 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
structure that persists between the two books which defines the similarity
between them. This structure is a genesis of representation in two parts.
A dynamic genesis comprising three passive syntheses begins in the movement
of partial objects and ends in the empty form of time, or intensity = 0. From
here a second, static genesis begins which transforms the product of the first
genesis according to the forms of good sense, common sense, and finally repre-
sentation. Obviously this is only the first of many books that they would write
together, and the story of Guattaris contribution is much more complex than
this general structure. But the structural similarity between the two books goes
a long way to suggesting that the break was not nearly as dramatic as the termi-
nological shift would make it seem.
This is especially true because Deleuze had already been in the practice of
altering his technical vocabulary between books before Guattari ever came on
the scene. Rather than attempting to show that this structure indeed persists all
the way through their collaborative work to What is Philosophy?, I want to turn
instead to the central text of Deleuzes oeuvre, Difference and Repetition, where
the vocabulary is again significantly different from that used in The Logic of Sense
and hopefully give further consistency to this genesis of representation which I
have been outlining here. I will argue that in Difference and Repetition we find
again the same structure of the genesis that appeared in The Logic of Sense, but
also in a completely different technical vocabulary.
Part III
In the previous two parts of this book, I argued that the two works published
immediately after Difference and Repetition shared almost identical formal
structures, and that they both could be read as developing a story of the gen-
esis of phenomena, of representations, or of objectities. In The Logic of Sense
the world of phenomena is the world of propositions and their relations; in
Anti-Oedipus it was the world of the objectities of social production. Each
book described one very broad genesis which moved from microperceptions
to molar representations. In both books, this larger process of production
was broken down into two smaller processes of production. In The Logic of
Sense the genesis which moved from microperception to sense was called the
dynamic genesis. In Anti-Oedipus, this same process was called desiring-pro-
duction. In The Logic of Sense, the genesis which moved from sense to
propositions and their three dimensions was called the static genesis. In Anti-
Oedipus, this genesis was called social-production. In both parts I made
frequent reference to Difference and Repetition. In this chapter I want to clarify
those references and explicitly argue that Difference and Repetition also shares
this same general structure and project. The genesis that it describes also
begins in the world of microperception and theorizes the production of the
virtual, or sense. Then, on the foundation of the virtual, a second genesis is
founded which moves from sense to representation. Schematically, the paral-
lel structures of the three books look like this:
But to read Difference and Repetition in this way goes completely against the grain
of current interpretations of the book which read it more or less as a theory
only of the static genesis.1 They emphasize only the virtualunderstood as the
ontological foundation of all realityand its relation to intensity. The entire
purpose of the next two chapters is to justify reading Difference and Repetition
alongside the other two works, and, in particular, this means reading the
104 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
The notion of the virtual has been subject to a number of debates in recent
years revolving around the question of whether or not, despite Deleuzes avowed
project of thinking Being in its immanence, he actually ended up positing a
transcendent ground to reality. And, indeed, if we abstract the notion of the
virtual from the function it plays within the overall conceptual structure of
Deleuzes thought, it is easy to be sympathetic with Hallwards and Badious
complaints that the virtual sounds a lot like another world, even if we insist that
it is only the other side of this one. If, however, this picture of the virtual as the
other worldly ontological foundation of all that happens in this world is less an
argument that Deleuze makes than it is one which Deleuzes readers have
tended to make, this is because all of these debates are founded on a failure to
take into consideration the underside of virtuality itself. Hallward, who has for-
mulated the most concentrated arguments that the virtual is other-worldly does
in fact realize that Deleuze claims that the virtual is produced by a corporeal
depth (Hallward 43). But for Hallward, Deleuze never explains this process:
You might expect, then, an explanation of how the causal depths determine
these surface effects. Deleuze duly accepts that every event does indeed
emerge from the depth of corporeal causes. However, the general effort of
the book is to complicate if not disrupt the mechanics of this production.
(Hallward 43)
But we have already seen that this is not at all the case. The last third of The Logic
of Sense, in its development of the dynamic genesis, is devoted in its entirety to
just such an explanation. In fact, it is the only part of the genesis that is
presented in a linear fashion. Far from disrupting the mechanics, the account
of dynamic genesis is the most clearly developed part of the entire book. One of
the primary projects of the next two chapters is simply to show that this theory of
the production of virtuality was already well developed in Difference and Repeti-
tion. In order to make this argument, however, I have reversed the order of
presentation. Rather than following the course of genesis from the dynamic to
the static, I will begin with the static, with a description of the virtual and the
106 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
genesis which ensues from its foundations. In the next chapter I show how the
virtual is produced in the interaction of the temporal syntheses.
In Difference and Repetition Deleuze defines the virtual as the time in which
transcendental Ideas are progressively determined. The reality of the virtual is
structure, and structure is nothing other than a transcendental Idea (209;
cf. PI 31). In order to understand the virtual then, we need to understand Ideas.
In order to understand Ideas we need to know three things: (1) what Ideas are
in themselves; (2) where they come frombecause Deleuzism could never be
an overturning of Platonism if Ideas were given outside of a genesis; and
(3) where Ideas go, or what their function is in the overall system of thought
developed in Difference and Repetition.
Ideas
1. Determinability
2. Reciprocal determination
3. Complete determination
Now, it seems that Deleuze is saying nothing more than this in his appropria-
tion of group theory. What is Deleuze-Abels basic field R but that original
image which is submitted to free variation, and what are the successive
Static Genesis: Ideas and Intensity 109
Origins of Ideas
Deleuzism could never be an overturning of Platonism if it presupposed Ideas
outside of a genesis. There are two ways to approach the question of the origin
of Ideas, both of which I will follow in this section. If we follow Deleuzes texts,
we see that Ideas find their origin in an ideal game. Every time Deleuze poses
the question of the origin of Ideas in Difference and Repetition he immediately
turns to the metaphor of the game. This game is Deleuzes Nietzschean modifi-
cation of Mallarms famous throw of the dice.13 Many philosophers and literary
critics of the time had been adjusting Mallarms throw of the dice to their own
theories, and Deleuze is no exception.14 Deleuze describes two kinds of games.
The first is what he describes as the human game, a game which is indistin-
guishable from the practice of representation (DR 283). Contrary to this game,
Static Genesis: Ideas and Intensity 111
(1) It is necessary that in every case a set of rules preexists the playing
of the game, and, when one plays, this set takes on categorical value;
(2) these rules determine hypotheses which divide and apportion chance . . . ;
(3) the hypotheses organize the game according to a plurality of throws
which are really and numerically distinct. Each one of them brings about
a fixed distribution corresponding to one case or another . . . ;
(4) the consequences of the throws range over the alternative victory or
defeat. (LS 5859)
In contrast to these games with which we are familiar, the Ideal game has four
characteristics of its own:
(1) There are no preexisting rules, each move invents its own rules; it bears
upon its own rule.
(2) Far from dividing and apportioning chance in a really distinct number of
throws, all throws affirm chance and endlessly ramify it with each throw.
(3) The throws therefore are not really or numerically distinct. They are
qualitatively distinct, but are the qualitative forms of a single cast which
is ontologically one. [. . .]
(4) Such a gamewithout rules, with neither winner nor loser, without
responsibility, a game of innocence, a caucus-race in which skill and
chance are no longer distinguishableseems to have no reality. [. . .]
(LS 5960)
The first game, as I have said, defines the world of representation. Representa-
tions are numerically and really distinct.17 This means that they are discreet,
112 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
external to one another, and have clearly defined limitspartes extra partesso
much so that they appear to have separate substances. They are subject to a set
of preexisting rules which play the role of categories. Whether these are catego-
ries of language or of Being does not seem to matter to Deleuze. All that matters
is that representations do not give their own rule but find one outside of them-
selves. This is why Deleuze characterizes the world of representation as a fixed
or sedentary distribution of singular points: they are distributed in already
defined forms according to preestablished rules.
The second game, however, defines the world of an impersonal thought.
Deleuze says that this Ideal game is the reality of thought itself (LS 60; cf. NP 32),
and indeed, the rules of this game define the dynamics of the metaphysical or
cerebral surface of sensethat is, the virtual. The word thought clearly does not
mean what we ordinarily think of as thinking. Thought here is defined by what we
might call, following Husserls description of the space of free variation, a struc-
ture of arbitrariness. Here, contrary to the categories of representation, there are
no rules. The ideal game is defined by chance and the production of rules. And
this production of rules is not arbitrated by some benevolent and wise force which
would guarantee lawfulness and regularity, but by an aleatory point, by pure chance
(DR 284). It is the aleatory point which throws the dice and which causes the rela-
tions between elements to become progressively more determined. In the
description of progressive determination above, it is the aleatory point, like the
nomadic subject of the eternal return in Anti-Oedipus, which makes the progres-
sive tour or description of the whole problematic field (210). These characteristics
define the conditions for the production of Ideas outside of the categories or con-
straints of representation: chance and freedom. (This freedom, we see in the next
chapter, is a consequence of the third synthesis of time.)
This description of thought owes much to Blanchot. For Blanchot, the unread
book is a pure materiality no different from a rock. It is a collection of dead
letters. It has to be read, and in reading it, it is actually produced (Blanchot,
The Space of Literature 193, 197; cf. 23). As I have described in my chapter on
The Logic of Sense this involves a move between two notions of time, Chronos and
Aion: the material time of the unread book is time with a present, Chronos; the
time of the work is time without a present, Aion, the empty form of time. For
Blanchot, the essential condition for an authentic (re)production, and the
condition under which this production ceases to be human, subjective, and
arbitrary, is that the mind must approach the work of art without any expecta-
tions and within a structure of arbitrariness. What defines the aesthetic
experience/experiment is that nothing is known in advance.
[R]eading, seeing, hearing the work of art demands more ignorance than
knowledge. It requires a knowledge endowed with an immense ignorance
and a gift which is not given ahead of time, which has each time to be received
and acquired in forgetfulness of it, and also lost. Each painting, each piece of
Static Genesis: Ideas and Intensity 113
music makes us a present of the organ we need to welcome it; each one
gives us the eye and the ear we need to see and hear it. (Blanchot 192)
This quotation has its origins in a quotation of Valry given earlier in the
book:
All his life the true painter seeks painting: the true poet, poetry, etc. For these
are not determined activities. In them one must create the need, the goal, the
means, and even the obstacles. (Blanchot 87)18
If one tries to play this game other than in thought, nothing happens; and if
one tries to produce a result other than a work of art, nothing is produced.
This game is reserved then for thought and art. (LS 60)
Here, the work of art alludes to Blanchots very specific definition of the work.
But, within the context of Difference and Repetition this work of art is the Idea,
and the work of thought is the progressive determination of Ideas. In relation
to Deleuzes description of the ideal game, then, the origin of Ideas is this field
of pure chance and determinability.
Deleuzes ideal game is only one way to approach the question of the origin
of Ideas. But we can also leave the image of the ideal game behind and simply
notice that, as we saw above, the first aspect of sufficient reason is the form of
determinability. Ideas begin as positive indeterminacies or as problems.20
Before differential relations are established, an Idea is simply a set of ideal ele-
ments which require determination. The problem is precisely that of their
determination. As Deleuze says in The Logic of Sense, Ideas express the objective
equilibrium of a mind situated in front of the horizon of what happens or what
appears: Is it Richard or William? (LS 57; cf. DR 169). In Difference and
114 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
Destination of Ideas
After the course of progressive determination has run its course, we have in
front of us a well-determined Idea in its three dimensions: elements, relations,
singularities. Deleuze uses the vocabulary of differential calculus to introduce a
now well-known distinction between differentiation and differenciation. Differ-
entiation refers to the progressive determination of an Idea in its virtuality. Even
though the Idea is completely determined, it is still completely virtual. As we
saw above, at this point singularities are determined from the point of view of
their distribution and existence within a virtual structure, but not from the
point of view of their nature or the specific quality and extensity that will cover
the Idea. Differenciation, on the other hand, describes the actualization of an
Idea, or the process by which the differentiated Idea takes on an actual existence
and leaves behind its purely virtual origins: What the complete determination
lacks is the whole set of relations belonging to actual existence . . .. There is thus
another part of the object which is determined by actualisation (209; my emphasis).
The process of actualization is therefore the movement from a completely
determined virtual Idea to an actual object. The Idea becomes covered over by
a quality and an extensity, and becomes determined according to its nature.
Differentiation and differenciation are two processes which determine the two
halves, virtual and actual, of any object: in order to designate the integrity or
integrality of the object, Deleuze proposes the complex notion of different/
ciation (209; my emphasis).
Static Genesis: Ideas and Intensity 115
Such a trait is twofold: the quality or qualities which it possesses, the extension
which it occupies. [. . .]. In a word, each thing is at the intersection of a two-
fold synthesis: a synthesis of qualification or specification, and of partition,
composition or organization. (96).23
Quality and extensity, or a things spatial structure, are thus the two coordinates
of the thing in general. In this analysis of the object, Deleuze is clearly alluding
to the traditional coordinates of sensation: each object has its secondary quali-
ties such as its color, texture or smell, and its primary quality, the way it fills out
extension through its substantial, spatial, and geometrical characteristics.24
The thing or the individual is defined in exactly the same way in Difference
and Repetition: it is a synthesis of quality and extensity. And further, in both
Difference and Repetition and The Method of Dramatization, the specific quality,
and extensity of any given thing are determined by the Idea itself. Quality and
extensity are the two end-points of actualization or differenciation. They repre-
sent the destination of Ideas. These two end-points, however, refer back to two
aspects of differentiation, or the progressive determination of Ideas. Differen-
tiation has two aspects of its own, corresponding to the varieties of relations
and to the singular points dependent upon the values of each variety
116 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
(DR 210). It is these two aspects of differentiation which directly determine the
two aspects of actualization: differenciation in turn has two aspects, one con-
cerning the qualities or diverse species which actualize the varieties [of
differential relations], the other concerning number or the distinct parts actu-
alizing the singular points (210). Differential relations are actualized as
qualities. Singularities are actualized as extensities. There is therefore a simple
parallel and direct correspondence between the aspects of the virtual Idea and
of the actual object: virtual relations become actual qualities; virtual singularities
become actual parts. And further, these two aspects are inseparable. There is no
such thing as a quality without a space or form defined by singularities and
there is no such thing as a space which does not have a quality: There is in
general no quality which does not refer to a space defined by the singularities
corresponding to the differential relations incarnated in that quality (210).
At this point, Difference and Repetition seems to confirm Deleuzes description
of the object and its origins in a transcendental Idea in The Method of Drama-
tization. Each individual object is defined by its occupation of a space and its
specific quality, and these two aspects are directly determined by the objects
Idea. But Difference and Repetition also seems to go beyond the account of the
thing in The Method of Dramatization by adding yet a third characteristic: the
time of the thing. The object receives its duration from the time of progressive
determination (DR 21011 and 21619). I will return to this in more detail
shortly in a discussion of the role of intensity in actualization, but for now we
can see that the complete characterization of the thing in general is that it has
(1) a space, (2) a quality, and (3) a time, and further that these three characteris-
tics have their origins in transcendental Ideas from the point of view of,
respectively, (1) their singularities, (2) their differential relations, and (3) their
time of progressive determination. Because the three characteristics of things
find their immediate origin in the characteristics of Ideas, it is easy to under-
stand why throughout his paper on dramatization Deleuze consistently referred
to the completely virtual or differentiated Idea as the thing in Idea (DI 100).
The virtual Idea is the sufficient reason of any given thing insofar as that thing
is extended, has a quality, and passes in time.
We could also call it more precisely, following Husserl, the sensible schema
or phantasm of the thing. In Husserl, the sensible schema was a purely formal
assemblage of the things space, time, and quality. It is clear, if we consider that
the elements of the Idea determine the time (progressive determination), the
spatial structure or form (singularities), and the quality (relations) of an object,
that the transcendental Idea is nothing more than this sensible schema.
What is differenciated in actualization, then, is the object of sensation. This
suggests an important conclusion regarding Deleuzes relation to science.
Despite the fact that Deleuze used the vocabulary of biology and the example
of differenciation in the egg almost exclusively to describe the process of
actualization, we have to notice that the outcome of this process is not a chicken.
Static Genesis: Ideas and Intensity 117
What is produced is an object in general with its three correlate aspects: quality,
extensity, and time. The differential relations in the Idea determine the
actual quality of things; the virtual singularities determine actual parts, or
form; and the time of progressive determination determines an objects dura-
tion. Deleuze consistently points out that he turns to science only for examples:
The entire Idea is caught up in the mathematico-biological system of different/
ciation. However, mathematics and biology appear here only in the guise of
technical models which allow the exposition of the virtual and processes of
actualization . . .. (DR 22021).25 This is why the art of multiplicities is under-
stood as the art of grasping the Ideas and the problems they incarnate in things,
and of grasping things as incarnations, as cases of solution for the problems of Ideas
(DR 182; my emphases). The description of progressive determination as suf-
ficient reason seems particularly apt from this point of view. Every thing has its
reason which is its Idea.
are what Husserl called objectivities of receptivity. What does Difference and
Repetition have to say on this point? Are Ideas actualized in representations for
a psychological consciousness or in things themselves?27
While Deleuze does not go to great lengths to emphasize this point in
Difference and Repetition, he does say at least twice that quality and extensity
define not only the end-point of a static genesis, but that they also constitute
the elements of representation (DR 235). The qualities and extensities in
which Ideas are actualized are the developed qualities and extensities of
the perceptual world, of the represented world of perception (281). Just
as in The Method of Dramatization then, quality and extensity are
characteristics not of physical objects independent of consciousness but of
represented objects. Conversely, representation, which as a whole is the element
of knowledge,28 has the same form as objects, so that we can say with Deleuze in
Bergsonism that actualization produces psychological consciousness or what
he calls in Difference and Repetition, the perceptual world. The static genesis
thus endsjust as it did in The Logic of Sensewith the constituted objects of
perception.
This point is further borne out by the numerous synonyms Deleuze uses to
talk about Ideas and their actualization. We have already seen this with his
description of the two types of games: the ideal game, the virtual, conditions the
human game in which representation prevails (DR 283; LS 58ff.). In addition,
Deleuze often describes Ideas as problems and the process of actualization as
the determination of solutions. Deleuze thus writes, whereas differentiation
determines the virtual content of the Idea as a problem, differenciation expresses
the actualization of this virtual and the constitution of solutions (209; my emphasis).
It is clear, first, that these cases of solution are actual (cf. 200), and second that
these actual solutions take the form of propositions: problems give rise to
propositions which give effect to them in the form of answers or cases of
solution (267). Further, just as in The Logic of Sense, these propositions are pre-
cisely propositions of consciousness or conscious propositions (267). In other
words, within the context of the problem-solution metaphor, the problem cor-
responds to the virtual Idea, and the solution in which that Idea is actualized
constitutes a proposition of consciousness. As in Bergsonism, actualization, or
the determination of solutions constitutes consciousness, and the solutions
populating consciousness are determinate pieces of knowledge.29 The expres-
sions actual, solution, representation, quality/extensity, the perceptual
world all define the inhabitants of the world of representation, the rules and
regulations of which are defined by the human game. There can be no question
about it: the actual is an empirical and human actual. Actualization is the process
which leads from the virtual Idea to the representation of a thing in an empirical
consciousness. We can now see the truth of an early definition of the Idea as
the structure of phenomena as such (47; cf. 182; my emphasis).30 The theory of
actualization is thus a theory of the genesis of phenomena.
Static Genesis: Ideas and Intensity 119
I wanted to establish two things in the first part of this chapter: (1) that the
destination of Ideas is representation in a human consciousness, and (2) that
Ideas have their origin in the form of determinability. Both this origin and this
destination are clearly expressed in the following quotation:
Upon precisely what ground, however, is this multiple reason [i.e. sufficient
reason as progressive determination] engendered and played out; in what
unreason is it submerged, and from what new type of game or lottery does it
draw its singularities and its distributions . . .? In short, sufficient reason or the
ground is strangely bent: on the one hand, it leans toward what it grounds,
towards the forms of representation; on the other hand, it turns and plunges
into a groundlessness which resists all forms and cannot be represented.
(DR 27475; original emphasis)
Ideas exist in the space between the groundlessness of the empty form of time
and the representations in human consciousness which they produce. But
despite all of this there are still two important questions that need to be
answered. First of all, we need to know by what mechanism Ideas come to be
actualized. We have not yet said what takes them out of their virtuality and
places them into an actuality in which they can form legitimate representations.
Second, we need to find out whether or not this empty form of time and the
unreason in which Ideas are submerged is produced or if it is simply given.
To answer the first questionhow do Ideas become actualized?we have to
Static Genesis: Ideas and Intensity 121
Individuation33
environment. But this immediate present environment before any sense can be
made of it must itself be understood as a field of intensities. Deleuze says that
A living being is not only defined genetically, that is to say, by its DNA or the
Idea which it envelops, but also ecologically, by its relation to an environment
or to the outside (216). Earlier in the book he had said much the same thing:
and in which they are actualized. This environment selects, it would seem, in a
completely passive way, and entirely according to a law of the greatest intensity.
Deleuze writes,
already completely determined Idea. Deleuze often expresses this by saying that
intensity is something which pertains to the individual whereas the virtual is
beyond and prior to the individual (the pre-individual field is a virtual-ideal
field (246)). Deleuze insists on this point. Only the virtual is impersonal and
preindividual.41
What this suggests is that there is an important discursivity between Ideas and
intensities. Ideas are the DNA of genesis. Intensity can inspire and govern the
static genesis, but this genesis will go nowhere or turn in circles without the Idea
which differenciates what is to be individuated and gives it a sense. At the same
time however, Ideas are purely formal: once the relations and singularities are
determined, ideal elements drop out of the picture in favor of the sensible schema.
Determined Ideas have no content, but only the program or schema for a content.
Without an intensity to take them out of their virtuality they remain a lifeless sen-
sible schema. The discursivity between these two concepts, and the problem of
their relation, therefore takes a form very similar to that between concepts and
intuition in Kant, so much so that one could say that without intensity the Idea is
empty; but without the Idea, intensity is blind. This discursivity is not so much the
consequence of a static formalism, however, but follows directly from the two
dimensions of time which separate intensity and Ideas.42 The present remains a
senseless flux of intensity without Ideas, but the future remains a lifeless possibility
(rather than a virtuality) if it doesnt plug into intensity.
The way in which Ideas and intensities presuppose one another becomes
clearer when Deleuze lays out what he calls the order of reasons: differentia-
tionindividuationdramatizationdifferenciation (251). If we follow this
order, the way in which things unfold in the static genesis would be as follows.
First, the Idea is completely determined in the future ((1) differentiation). This
makes possible the (2) individuation of the present, but only insofar as spatio-
temporal dynamisms, which simultaneously express both Ideas and intensities,
(3) dramatize an Idea in the immediate present. Through this process of
dramatization, the Idea (4) differenciates and gives sense to the present object
which then takes the form of a represented individual (extensity + quality). This
series of relations is relatively clear, and every term has been discussed except
for spatio-temporal dynamisms and the dramatization they enact.
The concepts of spatio-temporal dynamism and dramatization are rather
straightforward in theory. Spatio-temporal dynamisms are the differenciating
agencies (214). This means that they have the specific function of actualizing an
Idea in an intensive present which that Idea differenciates. A spatio-temporal
dynamism can accomplish this task because, on the one hand, it immediately
incarnates the differential relations, the singularities and the progressivities imma-
nent in the Idea (219). On the other hand, it expresses differing degrees of
intensity (118, 215).43 It therefore inhabits the border of the future and the
present, of Ideas and intensities, and acts as the link between them both. For this
reason Deleuze compares them to Kants schemata. In Kant, the schemata were
Static Genesis: Ideas and Intensity 125
able, by means of a hidden art in the depths of the human soul,44 to determine
intuitiondefined by the forms of space and timeaccording to the form of a
concept. Similarly, in Deleuze, the spatio-temporal dynamism, as its name implies,
is a dynamism of space and time. It agitates a space and a time (DI 96). But
instead of agitating the forms of intuition according to the concept, it agitates an
unindividuated intensive field according to the relations, singularities, and pro-
gressivities of an Idea. From its privileged position as the simultaneous expression
of intensities and Ideas, it create[s] a space and a time particular to that which is
actualized (DR 214; my emphasis). The spatio-temporal dynamisms agitation of
this intensive field is far from an arbitrary agitation. It agitates according to the
schema of the Idea. Space and time, extensity and duration, are always particular
to that which is actualized or to the Idea.
The function of these dynamisms is therefore to individuate the present
according to the sensible schema determined in the Idea. By itself the present
is a meaningless flux of intensity, but by incarnating the three dimensions of
Ideas, the dynamisms cut out a space and a time which makes the present into
an actual thing for an empirical sensibility always turned toward the activity
of the present. In this way, the present becomes differenciated and takes on a
sense. It becomes an individual object with determinate qualities and well-
defined limits (extensity) which passes in the time of representation. The
metaphor of dramatization is thus clear: the spatio-temporal dynamism is the
actor, and the Idea is its role. The dynamism moves about in an unindividuated
present, but always according to the role that it is charged with playing.
Finally, not only does this asymmetrical synthesis of the virtual Idea and the
actual intensity individuate a represented object, it also causes that present to
pass within representation. In order to individuate this present, we have seen,
intensities have to express Ideas, and conversely Ideas give shape to the
present. But by expressing Ideas, intensity also forces them to become present.
When Ideas are expressed by intensities they move into a new dimension of
time: the individuated present which passes.
Intensity separates Ideas and causes them to succeed one another or pass in
time. This then is the sense of the process of individuation: an unindividuated
present becomes differenciated by the Idea at the same time that an indetermi-
nate future separated from its surrounding Ideas and pulled into the present.
This present which is produced in this process is nothing more than the given,
126 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
the represented object endowed with a determinate quality, extensity, and dura-
tion, and which passes in an empirical sensibility or the represented world of
perception.45 The difference between the two processes of individuation and
actualization can therefore be precisely stated by saying that individuation per-
tains to the present whereas actualization goes from future to present.
Conclusion
What I wanted to show in this chapter was that the entire process of individua-
tion-actualization required two distinct dimensions in order to take place.
It requires first of all the virtual or the space in which Ideas as the sensible
schema of things were progressively determined. It required second of all an
intensive spatium in which intensities were able to focus on the differential rela-
tions and singularities of transcendental Ideas. But from the point of view of
genesis one inevitably has to ask: where do these three elements themselves
come from? From the point of view of intensity, in Anti-Oedipus we saw that
those intensities constitutive of thought were produced in the third passive syn-
thesis of desiring-production. From the point of view of Ideas, I argued above
that the virtual of Difference and Repetition was another way of talking about
sense and Aion. In The Logic of Sense we saw that the essential characteristic of
sense was that it was produced in a dynamic genesis, which I argued was repeated
in Anti-Oedipus. Everything points to the interpretation that the virtual is
produced through the passive syntheses of time which Deleuze describes in the
second chapter of Difference and Repetition. It is to these syntheses that we
now turn.
Chapter 7
This chapter deals almost entirely with the second chapter of Difference and
Repetition. At the end of the last chapter I had argued that the static genesis in
Difference and Repetition was composed of two separate geneses which worked
side by side: actualization, which moved from the future to the present, and
individuation which remained in the present and moved from a less-developed
present to a more developed present. There were thus two distinct elements
that needed to be accounted for genetically: (1) intensities and (2) Ideas.
Neither of these are given. Both are subject to a genesis. In the previous two
parts of this book we have seen how the two works published immediately after
Difference and Repetition theorized the genesis of both intensities and Ideas.
(1) Anti-Oedipus unambiguously argued that intensity was produced as the
expression of relations of attraction and repulsion between the body without
organs and partial objects across the three passive syntheses of a transcendental
unconscious. The third passive synthesis of consumption measured the repul-
sion of the first synthesis against the attraction of the second and determined
intensities as expressions of this relation between a body without organs and
partial objects. A primary aim of this chapter is to show that this theory of the
production of intensity is described in Difference and Repetition as well. (2) In The
Logic of Sense, Deleuze described the way in which a dynamic genesis produced
both sense or a virtual field of determinability and an aleatory point which
traversed this transcendental field. In both Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense
then, intensities and Ideas are produced as the effect of a regime of passive
syntheses. The constitution of time in Difference and Repetition, which ends with
the production of the empty form of time and the eternal returnand there-
fore of the virtualI argue below is the correlate of both the dynamic genesis
of The Logic of Sense and the process of desiring-production in Anti-Oedipus.
Deleuze gives three different accounts of the passive syntheses in the second
chapter of Difference and Repetition, and each one of these accounts makes use of
different technical vocabularies which it is necessary to distinguish from the
start, even if they all say essentially the same thing. The first makes use of a tra-
ditional philosophical vocabulary. The second unfolds in the language of
psychoanalysis. The third is in the language of physics. In order to distinguish
128 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
between them then I will call them simply the philosophical account (DR
7096), the psychoanalytic account (96116), and the physical account
(11626).1
In general and at the outset we can say that there are at least five syntheses
which are described in this chapter. However only three of them are properly
passive and sub-representative and play a role in the transcendental production
of time. The other two are active and play a role in the empirical representation
of time.2 Of the three passive syntheses, the first is Habit; the second is
Mnemosyne; and the third is Thanatos. Together these three passive syntheses
constitute the unconscious.3 But unlike the passive syntheses constituting the
transcendental unconscious of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze says that these three syn-
theses produce time. The first produces the present, the second, the past, and
the third, the future. Because they are transcendental syntheses, they do not
produce past, present, and future moments, but the dimensions of time them-
selves. They produce the present in general, the past in general, and the future
in general understood as the elements in which any representation can be
empirically known as past, present, or future.
In addition to the three passive syntheses, then, there are at least two active
syntheses: memory, which reproduces a past present, and understanding, which
reflects a present present (DR 8081). From the point of view of the active syn-
theses, present means representation, and, reciprocally, representation
means the present which passes.4 These presents which are reproduced and
reflected in an empirical memory and an empirical understanding are the very
representations for human consciousness that we encountered at the end of
both The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus as well as in the conclusion to the static
genesis of Difference and Repetition which I described in my previous chapter.
Now, however, these representations are described from the point of view of
their temporality. (As Deleuze says in this chapter, the active syntheses are
for-us (DR 71, 76.) These two active syntheses operate in the world of repre-
sentation whereas the passive syntheses are entirely sub-representative.
One of the central problems of this chapter revolves around the question of
the order in which the syntheses operate. Unlike the account of the passive
syntheses in Anti-Oedipus, in Difference and Repetition Deleuze does not always
give a linear account along the lines of a genesis, and at one point he even sug-
gests that the third synthesis is the ground of the first two, that it comes before
them and distributes its difference to them.5 Rather than giving a linear account
of the syntheses he discusses the passive and sub-representative syntheses in
direct relation to the active and representative syntheses.6 This is why the chap-
ter often reads, as James Williams has pointed out, like a transcendental
deduction.7 The structure of the argument in the first, philosophical account of
the syntheses runs as follows: (1) Deleuze begins with the first passive synthesis,
then immediately proceeds to the active synthesis founded on top of this;
(2) he then says that this active synthesis would not be possible unless it were
Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time 129
Perhaps the most important aspect of Deleuzes theory of time, but also one of
the more difficult to characterize by sticking to Difference and Repetition alone, is
its beginning. In the philosophical account of the syntheses he calls this beginning
130 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
repetition in-itself. There are many different and almost unrelated senses of
the word repetition at work in this chapter. In this particular expression, rep-
etition is something that describes a material object which is subjected to a rule
of discontinuity. The rule of discontinuity or instantaneity in repetition tells
us that one instance does not appear unless the other has disappeared . . . (70).
Even though Deleuze will say that, as a consequence of this discontinuity, there
is no such thing as repetition in-itselfrepetition requires a connection between
instants in order to existhe still makes significant use of this notion. He often
does so, however, under the guise of a different name: material repetition.
Repetition in-itself is material because the rule of discontinuity bears on
objects. It characterizes repetition in the object (71). Nominally, this notion of
a material or bare repetition refers back to the first chapter where it was
intended to express what we understand by repetition in our ordinary every-
day usage of the word: two or more identical instances separated in time but
still affirmed as identical. But in this chapter Deleuze has transposed the notion
of material repetition to an entirely different register. Here it no longer refers
to represented identities which function in judgments. Rather, it describes the
way in which a fragmented object appears to a transcendental sensibility.
Several things make this transposition clear. First of all, in the introduction to
Difference and Repetition, material repetition depended on the form of represen-
tation and required a rather traditional distribution of identity and difference.
In this chapter, however, material repetition is sub-representative, unrepresent-
able, and unthinkable.8 In the conclusion of Difference and Repetition Deleuze
even goes so far as to suggest that it is precisely in order to represent this
unthinkable repetition that the regime of passive syntheses are employed (286).
It therefore functions in a realm entirely antecedent to that of scientific judg-
ment. Second, if we turn to the psychoanalytic account of the syntheses, we see
that the position of material repetition in relation to the passive syntheses is
now filled by excitations which are understood precisely as those differences
in intensity which are apprehended by a transcendental sensibility (96). Again,
here material repetition describes the world of bodily affection and not that of
empirical representation. Third, and finally by anticipating the analysis to
come, we can recognize here the starting point of both Anti-Oedipus and
The Logic of Sense. In Anti-Oedipus, everything began in a world of micropercep-
tions described as a multiplicity of partial objects or microperceptions whose
only relation was the absolute lack of relation. In Difference and Repetition the
expressions the rule of discontinuity, repetition in the object, or material
repetition, all express nothing more that this absence of relations between
fragments of the objects which affect our body. Material repetition and its cor-
relate in the psychoanalytic accountexcitationsdefine the hyletic data on
which the syntheses operate. It refers to the material content of a transcenden-
tal sensibility.
Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time 131
This discontinuity which divides the object into a succession of instants might
seem a lot like timewhat is time if not a succession of instants?but it is not.
Time requires a synthesis.
A succession of instants does not constitute time any more than it causes it to
disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth. Time is
constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of
instants. This synthesis contracts the successive independent instants into one
another, thereby constituting the lived, or living, present. It is in this present
that time is deployed [se dploie]. (70/97; my emphases)
The first synthesis of time operates on the repetition of instants and thus pro-
duces what Deleuze calls, following Husserl, the living present. It does so by
gathering together, or contracting, the successive instants of the material rep-
etition. This living present is not time as such, but the general element in which
time itself will unfold or spread out across the other two passive syntheses and
the static genesis founded on top of them. All of this is discussed below. To
make sense of this claim that time requires a synthesis and cannot be a succes-
sion of instants it is helpful to turn to Bergson.
Many philosophies of time begin by describing the impossibility of finding
time in a succession of instantsmost notably Bergsons.9 Indeed Deleuze
repeats here, almost verbatim, some of Bergsons arguments from the third
chapter of Duration and Simultaneity. In Duration and Simultaneity, as in Creative
Evolution, Bergson insisted on the impossibility of time existing without mem-
ory. For Bergson, it is impossible to think of time as a succession of separate
instants because time is what happens between two instants. To think time and
not just snapshots of instants requires a bridge between the two instants. And
this requires that we insert an impersonal or non-anthropomorphic conscious-
ness between the successive instants. 10
Without an elementary memory that connects the two moments, there will only
be the one or the other, consequently a single instant, no before, no after, no
succession, no time. We can bestow on this memory just what is needed to make
the connection; it will be, if we like, this very connection, a mere continuing of the
before into the immediate after with a perpetually renewed forgetfulness of
what is not the immediately prior moment. (Duration and Simultaneity 48)
Deleuze is clearly echoing Bergsons arguments when he says that time can not
be constituted by a succession of instants but only by an originary synthesis. But
Deleuze follows Bergson even further. Bergson suggests here that, at the very
least, the constitution of time requires an impersonal memory which is itself
nothing more than the contraction of two instants. Deleuze too institutes at this
132 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
point an originary subjectivity which actually carries out the synthesis. In order
for the first synthesis to take place, there must be an originary subjectivity,
a contemplative soul, or a spontaneous imagination which acts as the synthe-
sizing agent (70; cf. 286). These contemplative souls, like Bergsons
nonanthropomorphic memory, are nothing more than the connection they
bring about or the instants they contract.11 Synthesis moves us from the order
of the fragmented object to that of the subject. Time is subjective, but in rela-
tion to the subjectivity of a passive subject (71)12
The object given to sensibility, the material repetition understood as the
unraveling of an object in an unrepresentable13 and unthinkable temporality,
has two characteristics: (1) it is material, and (2) it is discontinuous or frag-
mented. We can thus see the relationship with the starting point of
desiring-production in Anti-Oedipus where the ultimate elements of the uncon-
scious were both material and lacking any relation to one another. They formed
a molecular multiplicity in positive dispersion. I will discuss the first synthesis
and the subjectivity it implies in more detail below, but I want to insist on this
essential starting point: in Deleuze time begins with the experience of an object. It
does not begin with a purely formal synthesis, or with Being temporalizing
itself, or with an empty form awaiting schematization. It begins with the direct
experience of a fragmented materiality subject to the rule of discontinuity.
In contemplating something else, the mind is filled with the image of itself. For
this reason, in the psychoanalytic account, Deleuze calls these contemplative
souls narcissistic egos.
The fact that these egos should be immediately narcissistic is readily explained
if we consider narcissism to be not a contemplation of oneself but the fulfill-
ment of a self-image through the contemplation of something else: the eye, the
seeing ego, is filled with an image of itself in contemplating the excitation that
it binds. It produces itself or draws itself from what it contemplates [. . .].
(DR 97/129; translation modified)
134 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
We can say without exaggeration then that this first synthesis is an originary
intentionality. But intentionality here doesnt refer to a ray aimed at objects
and emanating from a solipsistic ego: the ego is what it intends, or
contemplates. It is a consciousness which is always a consciousness of something
else where this something else is indistinguishable from the ego. This isnt
therefore intentionality in the sense it had in Husserls static phenomenology,
as a transcendence within immanence. It was precisely in order to found the
static sense of intentionality that Husserl had to turn to the passive syntheses.
Rather, Deleuzes notion of intentionality here is captured perfectly by Blan-
chot when he describes mind as that empty power to exchange itself for
everything (The Space of Literature 88).17 This is exactly the operation of the
contemplative soul: it exchanges itself for everything.18
We cannot think of Blanchot, however, without thinking of Hegel. Blanchots
description of mind, and indeed, the entire description of the contemplative
souls relation to materiality in Deleuze, echoes (especially Hyppolites) Hegels
description of sense consciousness. For Hegel, sense experience was defined
by the discontinuity of objects and experiences. Each object is a singularity
without any relation to other objects.19 Each consciousness appears as indistin-
guishable from the singularity which it aims at or intends.20 Sense-consciousness
takes these singularities as its object and is strictly coextensive with themas
Hyppolite says describing Hegel, The sensuous soul does not distinguish itself from
its object (Hyppolite, Genesis 84; my emphasis; cf. Hegel 104).21 And in Hegel,
as in Deleuze, this sense-consciousness comes undone once its object escapes
(DR 96; Hyppolite 94; Hegel 93, 109). I have already suggested that in Anti-
Oedipus Deleuzes genesis begins in a situation very similar to Hegels analysis of
sense-certainty. In Anti-Oedipus, everything began with partial objects dispersed
in a positive multiplicity. We understood these partial objects to be minute per-
ceptions and therefore fragments of the sensible object, even though we could
not admit the totality of that object. Because their only relation was a lack of
relation, Deleuze described these minute perceptions, following Hegel, as sin-
gularities.22 I argued above that in the language of Difference and Repetition, the
positive multiplicity in dispersion is the object under the rule of discontinuity.
At one point in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze even goes so far as to make the
comparison with Hegel himself when he describes the material repetition as
the identity of spiritin other words, of the concept, but in the form of an
alienated concept, without self-consciousness and outside of itself (DR 286). If
it is true the three passive syntheses begin in a contemplation of matter as the
concept outside of itself, and if they end by founding the virtual which will itself
found a static genesis which returns to this primary matter and gives it a sense,
then the commonplaces regarding Deleuzes difference from Hegel may be
entirely unfounded. All I wanted to say with this comparison at this point, how-
ever, is that there is no significant difference between this contemplation of the
discontinuous object which produces a passive ego identical to the object, and
Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time 135
longer contract what it contemplates . . . (77). But here Deleuze says some-
thing, almost in passing, which is extremely important. Fatigue marks
the point at which the soul can no longer contract what it contemplates, the
moment at which contemplation and contraction come apart (77). Fatigue is the
moment at which contemplation and contraction come apart. Contempla-
tion separates from its object and the synthesis loses its relation to the outside.
The saturated soul refuses its object and curls up into itself. Above we saw that
being was having and that the contemplative soul came undone once its
object escaped (DR 79). This is an entirely different situation. In fatigue, it is
not the object which escapes from the subject. Rather, the subject escapes
from the object. Here a saturated contemplation escapes or refuses the
object. Contemplation and contraction come apart, but the soul, the con-
traction, still remains in possession of its object. It simply ceases to be an
intentionality. It no longer contemplates a present, but only itself as a present
that was. It has become a memory which conserves itself in itself.
This moment corresponds directly to the body without organs escape
from the binary-linear series of partial objects in Anti-Oedipus. The contem-
plative soul is the body without organs. Fatigue explains why the body without
organs, when it becomes the external limit of the plane of immanence, expe-
riences the partial objects as an overall persecution mechanism which
forces it to become a paranoiac machine and remove itself completely from
the binary-linear series of partial objects: it is tired of them. It can no longer
contract what it contemplates, and so it ceases to be a contemplation. This
separation from the present, or this refusal of the instants which pass accord-
ing to the rule of discontinuity is therefore also the separation of an originary
ego, a contemplative soul, a spontaneous imagination or a body without
organs from the plane of immanence. It marks the beginning of a transcend-
ence of the given or an escape from being. Before I discuss the consequences
of this and the second synthesis which it conditions, it is worth returning
briefly to the kind of time produced in the first synthesis.
The first synthesis produces the present in time. This is not at all the
present which passes. It is the dimension of the present in general. It pro-
vides the general possibility of any present (DR 81).24 It is therefore
necessary to distinguish between two of the many notions of the present in
Deleuze. The present which passes defines the empirical present of repre-
sentation as for-us. That is to say, it defines the temporality of those
representations produced at the intersection of individuation and actualiza-
tion which I described in the previous chapter and which pertain here
specifically to the active syntheses. The living present needs to be rigorously
separated from the present which passes. The living present is contempla-
tive and contracting, but non-representing and non-represented (DR 286; my
emphasis; cf. 84). Far from producing a present representation, it produces
Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time 137
The second synthesis of time produces the pure, a priori past, the past in gen-
eral or as such (DR 81). Just as the first synthesis did not produce a present
representation, but the general possibility of any present, the second synthesis
does not produce an actual past present, but the element in which we focus
upon [a past present] (80).25 This synthesis has a specific relationship to both
kinds of present outlined abovethe living present and the present which
passes in representation. In conjunction with the first passive synthesis, this
second synthesis is, in principle, sufficient to ground the active syntheses of
representation or the present which passes (8081). In relation to this present,
the pure past plays the role of ground (82). Its relation to the living present is
more complex.
To say that the represented present is the one which passes, does not mean,
however, that the living present itself does not pass. It passes, but not in the
same way that the represented present passes. When the living present passes,
it passes away for good: it dies. When a represented present passes, it becomes
a memory. This distinction between the two ways of passing should help clarify
Deleuzes own transition from the first synthesis to the second in the philo-
sophical account of the syntheses. In order to move from his discussion of the
first synthesis to the second, Deleuze presents a problem in the form of a
paradox:
This is the paradox of the present: to constitute time, but to pass in the time
constituted. We cannot avoid the necessary conclusionthat there must be
another time in which the first synthesis can occur. This necessarily refers us to a
second synthesis. By insisting on the finitude of contraction, we have shown
the effect; we have by no means shown why the present passes, or what pre-
vents it from being coextensive with time. (79/108; original emphasis;
translation modified)
possess too many instants in one grasp. This difficulty can be resolved by notic-
ing two senses of the word cause at work in Deleuzes thought as a whole: the
material cause and the quasi-cause.
If the past is the cause of the living presents passing here, it is because the
first synthesis is not sufficient to constitute timefor the same reasons that
Hegel said sense-certainty is not certainty at all (Hegel 10910): this first ego,
riveted to the present, passes away with the expanded present it produced.
Unlike the present of representation which passes into memory, when the
living present passes, it passes for good. Although it provides a temporary solu-
tion to the problem which Bergson pointed out, the phenomenon of fatigue
tells us that this solution itself will pass. Bergsons initial problem then reappears
on another level. We now need a bridge between these saturated contempla-
tions which pass in order to know them as passing.
This bridge is provided by the second passive synthesis of time, Eros, whose
specific function is to gather together these local egos. In the psychoanalytic
account of the syntheses Deleuze writes that the second synthesis gathers up
the particular narcissistic satisfaction and relates it to the contemplation of a
virtual object (DR 10809). The expression particular narcissistic satisfaction
refers to the passive and narcissistic ego of the first synthesis. The virtual object
is the agent of synthesis itself (109), it is the phallus which gathers together
the narcissistic egos, and, in doing so, comes to signify or stand for the pure
past, or the past in general (103). The general element of the past is thus con-
stituted in the synthesis of passing presents. From this point of view, the past is
the cause of the present in the same way that the body without organs as a
recording surface was cause of the partial objects: it is its quasi-cause, a miracu-
lation. That is to say, the past takes up the saturated egos and submits them to
a new synthesis and a new organization in a new ego.26
This is why Deleuze describes the second passive synthesis as an extension
of the first, and the second passive ego as an extension of the contemplative
soul, the spontaneous imagination, or the body without organs: the second syn-
thesis is the extension of passive syntheses and the passive egos which
correspond to them (100/133); in the move from the first synthesis to the
second, the first synthesis is extended in the form of a second passive synthesis
(108/144); this extension is the correlate of an extended passive ego
(100/132). The verb Deleuze uses in these passages is approfondir which
implies that rather than a lateral extension, this synthesis involves a deepening.
The question at hand is whether or not this depth preexists the first synthesis in
principle, or whether, rather, it presupposes the first synthesis in order to
deepen it subsequently (so that it is indeed within the living present, as Deleuze
said earlier, that time is deployed). That is, whether or not the first present has
to first reach its point of satiety and then, in its exhaustion, begin its escape
from being; or whether, in order to even contemplate, it had to already exist in
a pure past outside of being. Deleuze suggests the former when, discussing the
Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time 139
second passive synthesis in relation to the first, he writes, The present differ-
ence is then no longer, as it was above, a difference drawn from a superficial
repetition of moments in such a way as to sketch a depth without which the
latter would not exist. Now, it is this depth itself which develops itself for itself (28687;
my emphasis). Here the depth of the first synthesis is clearly what is developed
for itselfdeepenedin the second.
This reading in which the first synthesis comes first and the second, second,
makes even more sense once we notice that the second synthesis repeats the
form of the firstas it did in both The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus. In the first,
a passive ego gathered together different instants of a fragmented object. In the
second, the first passive egos of habit are themselves the object of the synthesis.
They take the place of the material repetition and are gathered together in the
image of a virtual object or a partial object27 which has now come to define a
deepened passive ego. From this point of view, it is hard to see how the second
synthesis could come before the objects which it gathers together.
The advantage of reading the genesis in this way is that it explains how mem-
ory is produced rather than given. At the moment that contraction and
contemplation come apart in the first synthesis, the depth of the saturated ego
develops itself for itself. This means that it takes itselfrather than an external
objectas the object of its contemplation, or, to put it differently, that it begins
to contract itself rather than something else. It continues to hold what it already
possesses without looking elsewhere. As such, it is no longer an originary inten-
tionality opened on to the outside but has become a specific and local memory
which conserves itself in itself. This local memory either passes away and dies
with the object as in the passing of the living present, or it is taken up in a sec-
ond synthesis where it is coordinated and preserved in relation to a virtual
object along with those other egos which have also become memories.
In this appropriation and coordination of narcissistic egos, we reencounter
the form of attraction in Anti-Oedipus. In the second passive synthesis of Anti-
Oedipus, the body without organs as a recording surface attracted the partial
objects to itself and then submitted them to a new type of organization in a
process called miraculation. Miraculation specifically expressed the way in
which the body without organs appeared to be the cause of the partial objects
even though they in fact were the condition of its production. In Difference and
Repetition, attraction is the coordination of all the local egos around the image
of a virtual object which, in its synthesis creates a transcendental memory, or
the element of the pure past in general. As I described above, the phallus, or
the synthesis itself is the pure past.28 Miraculation is the process whereby this
newly created past presents itself as the cause of the objects it synthesized. It is
the appropriation of the first synthesis by the second or the extension of the
first into the second.
Because Deleuze describes this virtual object as the phallus, and because its
function is to coordinate the local egos, it also provides us with the link between
140 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. This stage corresponds exactly to
what Deleuze called in The Logic of Sense genital sexuality, or the coordination
of the physical surface. There the phallus coordinated all of the local egos of
partial surfaces in order to produce a full body or a complete physical surface.
Despite the complete disparity in technical vocabulary between books, there is
a very strong correspondence in their separate descriptions of these early stages
of the genesis.
However, even if this reading sounds plausible, and even if we are willing
to admit with some hesitation that the paradox of the passing present is
resolved according to the logic of quasi-causality, and that the past is there-
fore cause of the present in the same way the body without organs was the
cause of the partial objects in the second synthesis of Anti-Oedipus, what
about the three paradoxes of the past in general which Deleuze seems to
inherit directly from Bergson (DR 8182)? Their names alonecoexistence,
contemporaneity, and preexistenceall suggest that the pure past grounds
the first synthesis by coming before it and coexisting with it, and these para-
doxes are often read this way. The three paradoxes, however, do not describe
the relation of the element of the pure past in general to the living present,
but only to the present in representation which the first synthesis conditions
but is by no means synonymous with. All three paradoxes express the differ-
ence between the pure transcendental past and an empirical present. It is
precisely this empirical present which both Habit and Mnemosyne condi-
tion together. In fact, far from expressing the relationship between the first
and second passive syntheses, the paradoxes go in the other direction: they
form the argument for the necessity of a third synthesis by emphasizing the
compatibility of the first and second syntheses with the representations that
they condition.
But before moving to a description of the third synthesis, it is worth pointing
out here that it is only in the first of the three accounts of the syntheses in the
chapter that the order of the syntheses, after all is said and done, needs to be
read in reverse so that the third is read as the cause of the second which is the
cause of the first. This is because the first account is presented as a deduction.
Each synthesis is presented as providing the ground and condition of the previ-
ous. This gives the impression that, in the final analysis we should reverse the
order and see the third synthesis as the source of the other two. But the other
two accounts of the syntheses make this reversal seem less plausible. The sec-
ond, psychoanalytic account, begins with the description of an undeveloped
ego with its undifferenciated drives and progresses to a developed and mature
ego with well differenciated drives. This development is repeated in a more
developed fashion in the dynamic genesis of The Logic of Sense along the lines of
what appearsat the surfaceto be a rather straightforward Freudian account
of the development of the ego. If we were to reverse the order in the final read-
ing, we would have to say that the fully developed and differenciated ego is in
Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time 141
fact the condition of the embryonic ego and prior to it in the order of genesis.29
This clearly makes no sense.
The same problem appears in the third, physical account of the syntheses
where Deleuze makes use of a physical model, or a pendular structure (LS
239), to describe the three syntheses. Here, Habit is called coupling; Eros, reso-
nance; and Thanatos, forced movement (DR 118).30 Manuel DeLanda gives a
very clear description of these syntheses in the phenomenon of frequency
entrainment:
For two grandfather pendulum clocks to entrain, weak signals must be transmit-
ted from one to the other to couple them (in some cases, these are weak
vibrations in the wooden floor on which the clocks are placed). If the fre-
quencies of the two clocks are close to each other they may resonate and the
two clocks will lock into a single frequency. The resulting entrainment of the
two oscillators represents a much stronger linkage (forced movement) between
the two oscillators than the weak signals which originally coupled them.
(DeLanda 145n.53; original emphases, my bold)
Here, the first two syntheses are presented as instruments for measuring time as
a function of movementpendulumswhereas the third, presented as the
effect of the resonance of the first two, goes beyond them. The third appears as
a synthesis of the first two, and it clearly requires the initial coupling and com-
munication of the pendulums before it can come about. It makes absolutely no
sense from this point of view to reverse the order in the final reading. We can-
not begin with forced movement, or the third synthesis, and see it as the cause
and ground of the second and first syntheses, since it clearly presupposes them.
The last two sections of the syntheses chapter therefore prevent reading the
third synthesis as the ground and cause of the other two, unless, of course, we
do so along the lines of the logic of miraculation and quasi-causality which was
at work at every level of the genesis in Anti-Oedipus and which had the specific
function of maintaining the order of genesis while explaining how each synthe-
sis can then be seen as the cause of the elements involved in the previous stage
through its reproduction of them.
This entire enquiry into the production of time in Difference and Repetition was
motivated by the attempt to explain the foundations of the static genesis in which
intensities enveloped the relations and singularities of an Idea and thereby indi-
viduated a present representation. For this reason we had at least two expectations
of the passive genesis: it must show the production of (1) the virtual-ideal field and
(2) intensity. However neither Habit nor Mnemosyne provided this foundation.
142 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
Because the first two syntheses did not provide the ground for the static genesis,
we now have to apply our expectations to the third synthesis alone. What needs to
be produced in the third synthesis is both the field in which Ideas are developed
and the field in which intensities can focus on Ideas. I will first describe the genesis
of intensity, and then of the virtual.
In Anti-Oedipus, intensity was clearly produced by the synthesis of the first two
syntheses, and specifically as a synthesis of the relations of attraction and repul-
sion. I have argued that these relations are again present in Difference and
Repetition in the form of fatigue (repulsion) and the coordination of local egos
around a virtual object (attraction). I want to argue here that intensity as differ-
ence in itself is also produced in the third synthesis of Difference and Repetition as
a synthesis of the first two syntheses. In the third, physical account of the synthe-
ses, this production of intensity is explicitly described. Here, the third synthesis
has the same general form as the previous two. The first synthesis contracted
material instants. In one formulation of the first synthesis, Deleuze says that it
draws off the difference between instants and that it is this difference drawn
(DR 7879; 286). The difference which has been subtracted from the instants
defines the local egos or contemplative souls. The second synthesis then takes
the local egos of the first as its object. Deleuze says that it therefore includes
difference. If this synthesis includes difference, it does so, again, by drawing off
a differencethis time the difference between egos. This synthesis includes
difference because it is a synthesis of the contemplative souls which are them-
selves the difference drawn off of material fragments. The third synthesis, like
the second, turns back to synthesize the product of the previous synthesis. How-
ever, it does not only take the second synthesis as its object, but it takes the local
egos of the first as well. It therefore draws off two kinds of differencethat
between material instants and that between egosand it expresses the relation-
ship between these two forms of difference.
This is how Deleuze describes the production of intensity in the physical
account of the syntheses. The first synthesis is described as a coupling, the sec-
ond as a resonance, and the third as a forced movement. We have to be attentive
then to three kinds of difference involved in this account. Since this is difficult
territory, I will develop it slowly by taking each moment of the physical meta-
phor on pg. 117 one at a time.
(1) A system must be constituted on the basis of two or more series, each series
being defined by the differences between the terms which compose it.
The first synthesis produces these series. In relation to the philosophical
account of the syntheses, the terms of the series are the discontinuous
Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time 143
This force is the second synthesis, or the virtual object, which gathers up the
local egos. These egos are, as we have just seen, nothing more than the differ-
ences between terms of the series. This force therefore enacts the
communication of difference, or the relation of difference to difference, by
relating the egos themselves (differences drawn) to one another in the image
of a virtual object. Deleuze calls this communication of differences reso-
nance, which is clearly the physical analogue of the production of the pure
past in the philosophical account and of the synthesis of local egos in the
psychoanalytic account.
(3) As DeLanda so clearly described, resonance can leadnot alwaysto a
forced movement (cf. LS 23940). Deleuze writes, from resonance is
derived a forced movement the amplitude of which exceeds the basic series
themselves. (DR117; original emphasis)
This forced movement is a new, third kind of difference which is precisely the
notion of intensity which is developed for itself in the last chapter of Difference
and Repetition. Deleuze describes it here as follows:
The nature of these elements whose value is determined at once both by their
difference in the series to which they belong [coupling], and by the differ-
ence of their difference from one series to another [resonance], can be
determined: these are intensities, the peculiarity of intensities being to be con-
stituted by a difference which itself refers to other differences (E-E where E refers to
e-e and e to . . .). (DR 117; my emphasis)
drawn off (coupling) and the difference included (resonance). The intensity at
the heart of thought and its genesis is this difference which presupposes pre-
cisely the first two syntheses of time. It is clear that this definition of intensity
resonates well with the account of its production in Anti-Oedipus.
It is much less clear how this relates to what I said about intensity in the
previous chapter. Deleuze seems to make two contradictory statements about
intensity. On the one hand intensity is what is given at the start to a transcen-
dental sensibility. Intensity describes the form in which the transcendental
sensibility encounters or experiences the outside (DR 144). This sensibility
then transmits its constraint to the imagination (first synthesis), which passes
the difference on to the memory (second synthesis), which passes the differ-
ence on to thought (third synthesis). But, on the other hand, we have just seen
that intensity is very clearly constituted in this third synthesis. It seems to be
there at the beginning of the dynamic genesis at the same time that it is pre-
cisely what this genesis needs to produce.
It is therefore necessary to distinguish between two kinds of intensity: intensity
as that which is initially given and intensity as a produced quantity of affection.
I already briefly distinguished between these two in the previous chapter.31 The
description of the given as intensity was at work in Freuds metapsychology. The
description of intensity as a produced quantity of affection was at work in Husserls
theory of affection. These two forms of intensity are also both present within
Deleuzes different accounts of the three syntheses. At the beginning of the psy-
choanalytic account, Deleuze described the Id, which was (as in The Logic of Sense)
the starting point of the three syntheses and therefore of the entire genesis, as a
field of individuation in which differences of intensity are distributed here and
there in the form of excitations (DR 96). He is here clearly alluding to the Freud-
ian notion of intensity: intensities take the form of excitations. They are what the
first synthesis apprehends, the second records, and the third fails to recognize. But
on the other hand, as we have just seen, in the physical account of the syntheses,
intensity is produced in the third synthesis.32 Intensity is no longer the given
excitation, but the quantity of excitation.
In the first synthesis intensity takes the form of excitation. It is the way in
which a transcendental sensibility experiences a fragmented object. In all three
books studied here, the three passive syntheses work in the same way despite
their different names: the first synthesis directly takes up what is given to it by
sensibility. The second records that apprehension in a transcendental memory.
The third synthesis, however, measures the first synthesis against the second.
What this means then is that while intensity takes the form of excitation in sen-
sibility, the quantity of that excitation is by no means given. Through
apprehending, recording, and then measuring the one against the other, the
quantity of excitation is determined. Intensity is at first a simple excitation.
After the three syntheses have done their work, this initial difference has been
transformed into an expression of the degree to which the ego (the body
Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time 145
What is the empty form of time? Anti-Oedipus is strangely silent on this point,
and the only way we could tease it out of the text there was through a series of
complex allusions to Kant and oblique references to Deleuzes other texts. In
general, the account of the third synthesis in Anti-Oedipus never goes beyond
Difference and Repetitions physical account of the syntheses. But the philosophi-
cal and psychoanalytic accounts of this synthesis in Difference and Repetition
describe the third synthesis in a way that is seemingly different from the physi-
cal account. In these accounts the synthesis itself is called the empty form of
time. While this description is absent from Anti-Oedipus, it does have a strong
but complex presence in The Logic of Sense.
In The Logic of Sense, the empty form of time is called Aion, the time without
present which infinitely subdivides the event into an indefinite past and future:
Whereas Chronos was inseparable from circularity and its accidents [. . .] Aion
stretches out in a straight line, limitless in either direction. Always already passed
146 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
and eternally yet to come, Aion is the eternal truth of time: pure empty form of time,
which has freed itself of its present corporeal content and has thereby unwound
its own circle, stretching itself out in a straight line. (LS 165)
Aion is the time of sense, in which time, freed of its present corporeal
content, subdivides that content and thus ensures the progressive and
complete determination of the domain under consideration (Aion) (LS 121).
In The Logic of Sense, the expression empty form of time or Aion clearly
describes the transcendental field of sense alone. Time is empty in the sense
that it is incorporeal; it has, as we saw above, completely removed itself from the
action and passion of bodies and has become the space in which ideal ele-
ments can be progressively determined and actualized into an empirical
consciousness. It is a form for the same reason: it has no content. As Deleuze
says in Difference and Repetition, it is a purely formal distribution of time without
regard to content.
In several respects, this description of Aion holds for the notion of the empty
form of time in Difference and Repetition as well. The empty form of time is again the
space in which Ideas can be progressively determined. It is precisely that form of
continuity and determinability which conditions the progressive determination of
Ideas that I described in the last chapter. In the second chapter of Difference and
Repetition Deleuze also emphasizes that it is empty because it has become incorpo-
real and immaterial. In the philosophical account, this is expressed by saying that
it abjures its empirical content. In the psychoanalytic account, it is expressed by
saying that the ego abandons all possible mnemic content (DR 111). In the physi-
cal account, it is expressed by saying that the forced movement exceeds the basic
series of the two pendulums (remember that a pendulum is an instrument which
measures time according to movement).
But the notion of the empty form of time as it is presented in Difference and
Repetition is also much more complex than this description of the immaterial
field of determinability which The Logic of Sense emphasizes. Whereas Aion came
about only on the metaphysical surface, after the Oedipal stage of sexuality had
ended in castration, the empty form in Difference and Repetition is presented as
an entire synthesis which gives rise to the virtual as the form of continuity and
determinability (DR 110, 294).
In Difference and Repetition this synthesis comprises three distinct aspects which
are: (1) the purely formal order of time; (2) the totality of time expressed as a
symbol; and (3) the series of time which is the result of the interaction between
the order and the totality (not much significance should be attached to these
expressions; only their function, which I will discuss below, is important). We
saw that the first synthesis of Difference and Repetition corresponded to the local
egos and their partial surfaces of The Logic of Sense, and that the second synthesis
corresponded to the coordination of the entire physical surface in the image of
the phallus. The empty form of time as a synthesis comprising three distinct
Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time 147
action is specifically that of bringing together the first two syntheses. Whereas
the order of time determined the objects which were to be brought together,
the totality of time expresses the static, almost preliminary, synthesis of the
order of time (294, 88). To continue the logical metaphor, whereas the order
set in place the antecedent and the consequent, the totality functions as the
copula itself, the relation between the antecedent and consequent. In Difference
and Repetition the function and necessity of this image of the action is not
entirely clear. In the correlate stage of Oedipal sexuality, this image appears as
the advent of intention or volition (LS 207).34 It is the intended action as
opposed to the action effectively accomplished. In this context it expressed
the intent on the part of the child to heal the wounded mother (local egos) and
the absent father (coordinating phallus/ego) (LS 20307). In other words, it is
the intention to recognize, to synthesize the first and second syntheses.
What actually happens when the child attempts to realize this intention
castrationis outlined in Difference and Repetition as the next aspect of the
synthesis: the series of time. In The Logic of Sense it concerns another surface.
If the order of time established the two elements which were to be brought
together, the totality expresses, as Deleuze says in The Logic of Sense, the intention
to do so, or the model. The formidable action is the desire to bring together
a divided self into a unity.
The third aspect of the empty form of time is its temporal series: The temporal
series designates the confrontation of the divided narcissistic ego with the
whole of time or the image of the action (DR 110). In other words, the order of
time (which divided the ego) and the image of its totality (which was the idea of
synthesis) come together to create a temporal series. This is the actual moment
of synthesis: the synthesis of the order and the totality. This means putting the
first two syntheses in relation to an image of the totality of time (94, 296). The
three times of the temporal seriesthe a priori past, present, and future
express the different relationships which result. Here things are extremely
complicated, and because Deleuze never gives a reliable account, they are very
unclear and one can never tell whether the confusion which takes place in this
third synthesis is a result of the process Deleuze is trying to describe, or if it is
simply because the accounts of this process are short, obscure, and dispersed
across large sections of unrelated text (the major descriptions of this process are
on 8994, 11016, and 294301 ).35 Between these three accounts, things appear
to unfold as follows. Each synthesisHabitus and Mnemosynegoes though a
series of transformations and exchanges its role and area of influence with the
other synthesis. The second synthesis becomes directed toward the Id and its
excitations. The first is to the coordinated Ego of Memory. Memory is forced to
become present. Habitus becomes past. Memory becomes a condition by
default: that is, it no longer grounds representation, and its form and contents
become insignificant. It is a condition simply because it is there, but any other
material would do. The first synthesis becomes a present of metamorphosis. But
Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time 149
change is entirely antithetical to the nature of habit (92; cf. 29596).36 In this
exchange of functions, the two syntheses appear to be completely incompatible
and unable to be brought within one image.37 But it was precisely this compatibil-
ity of the first and second synthesis that representation in the active syntheses
seemed to depend upon. Even though, in principle, all that representation
seemed to require was the first two syntheses, it appears, in fact, that their coordi-
nation is no simple process and that it has to be rigorously regulated so that the
active syntheses can produce a present which passes in representation. It cannot
come about in passivity. To conclude the logical metaphor, then, the third synthe-
sis represents the impossibility of recognition or of judgment. There is only one
possible relation that could exist between the antecedent and the consequent:
the inclusive disjunction (its either A, or B, or both).
The impossibility of judgment results in a third time in which the future
appears . . . (89), the ultimate synthesis concerns only the future . . . (115).
Just as the living present was not a specific present which passes in representation,
but the condition for any present in general; and just as the element of the pure
past in general was not the reproduction of a past moment, but the general ele-
ment in which past moments could be focused upon; in other words, just as the
other two passive syntheses produced not representations in specific temporal
modalities, but the transcendental possibility of those modalities themselves, this
third synthesis does not produce a determinate future, but the transcendental
element of the future in general. The future in general is the element in which
we confront the new. This future is defined by the eternal return, and as Deleuze
says, the eternal return does not concern what is present, or what has been
present. It concerns only the new: it is itself the new, complete novelty (90).38
Novelty, however, is not predetermined according to set rules (as in the human
game). Instead it is completely fortuitous. Neither is it an already determined
moment, but the horizon in which a moment becomes progressively determined.
For Deleuze, the future can only be an affirmation of chance because we never
know what is coming our way. The eternal return is a force of affirmation, but it
affirms everything of the multiple, everything of the different, everything of
chance . . . (115). This is why the eternal return is properly called a belief of the
future, a belief in the future (90): If there is an essential relation with the future,
it is because the future is the deployment and explication of the multiple, of the
different, and of the fortuitous . . . (115; my emphasis).
The word multiple has two senses here. On the one hand, it has a general
philosophical sense opposing it to the One, or the form of identity. It is pre-
cisely this form of identity which defines the presents which pass in representation.
But these presents are produced, we saw in the last chapter, in the passing of
time from future to present. This highlights the second, specific technical sense
of the word multiplicity here. The eternal return or the future makes possible
the deployment of multiplicities or Ideas. It gives birth to a multiplicity
(90). This is why Deleuze says in his conclusion to the psychoanalytic account
150 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
of the syntheses that [t]he system of the future [. . .] must be called a divine
game, since there is no preexisting rule, since the game bears already upon its
own rules and since the child-player can only win, all of chance being affirmed
each time and for all times (DR 116). This is the same divine game that was at
the origin of Ideas. The multiplicities to which the future gives birth are the
transcendental Ideas themselves. The virtual is produced in the third
synthesis.
But besides showing the genesis of the virtual and of intensity, we also had to
see how it came to be that they occupied two different times. Ideas were pro-
gressively determined in the future and were actualized into a present which
they differenciated. This present was defined as a field of intensities. The differ-
ence in dimensions is a consequence of the eternal return, and is perhaps better
expressed in The Logic of Sense. In Difference and Repetition, the eternal return as
the third time of the series completely breaks with the other elements of the
empty form of time: its order, the larval subject which this order splits, the sym-
bolic totality, and the first two times of the series. Deleuze continually insists
that the eternal return concerns only the future.39 It causes neither the condi-
tion nor the agent to return: on the contrary it repudiates these and expels them
with all its centrifugal force (DR 90; original emphasis). The future which the
eternal return produces is completely autonomous and independent of every-
thing that led up to its production. In The Logic of Sense, this difference between
two times is formulated as the difference between two surfaces. The entire Oed-
ipal stage of sexuality concerns the physical surface. The Oedipal synthesis
results in the dissolution of this surface and the production of a new surface
pure thoughtin which Aion progressively determines problematic events or
transcendental Ideas. From the point of view of the genesis in general however,
we could say that because at this point the eternal return determines the pro-
gressive determination of Ideas, and that the process of individuation and
actualization brings Ideas back to the present and installs them in the flesh of
the very larval subjects which the eternal return had left behind, this autonomy
is only momentary. In other words, it discovers this autonomy only to return to
what it left behind. In his description of the ideal game in Nietzsche and Philoso-
phy Deleuze makes use of a quotation which describes perfectly the entire
trajectory of genesis: We temporarily abandon life, in order to then temporar-
ily fix our gaze upon it (NP 25). Both books say the same thing in different
ways. (For this reason we can also say that the very clear description of the eter-
nal return in The Logic of Sense works just as well for Difference and Repetition.)
The Other
The last stage of the entire genesis is the advent of what Deleuze calls the
Other. Traditionally, in phenomenology, the Other is always another ego
Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time 151
transcendent to mine. The problem of the Other is then how I can recognize
another ego not as an object but as an living subject across the gulf that sepa-
rates us. We should notice, however, that Deleuzes theory of subjectivity is
multilayered and extremely complex. The other in Deleuze is not another
I set against me, it is rather an other that thinks in me. We saw in The Logic
of Sense that the traditional notion of the I was constituted in the form of com-
mon sense in the static genesis. In this, Deleuze is following Sartres arguments
at the end of The Transcendence of the Ego where the traditional notions of self
and I are described as transcendent objects which must themselves be consti-
tuted by an impersonal transcendental field (Sartre, Transcendence 60ff.).
However, we can regress from this product of the static genesis to another form
of subjectivity in Deleuze. The transcendental field itself, in Deleuze, is called a
fractured I. And below this fractured I there is an even deeper form of sub-
jectivity: the dissolved self, or the egos of the passive syntheses (DR 256ff., 284).
In Deleuze, the Other which the psychological I of common sense confronts
refers specifically to the fractured-I of the transcendental field. The other-
structure therefore refers to the relationship between an empirical subject and
a transcendental subject. From this point of view it has three essential func-
tions, all of which help to bring the genesis to an end: (1) it encloses the virtual
within the limits of representation; (2) at the same time, it provides the means
by which the product, representation, expresses its origins in an impersonal
thought; and (3) it reproduces the form of the living present at the level of
representation thereby allowing the psychological subject to live in a present
cushioned by anticipation and something like a short-term memory.
The first function of the Other-structure is to enclose the representations
which are offered to perception within the limits of a relatively stable subject
and object. Thus Deleuze writes, Everything happens as though the Other inte-
grated the individuating factors and pre-individual singularities within the limits of
objects and subjects, which are then offered to representation as perceivers or
perceived (DR 28182; original emphasis). Offered to representation or per-
ception here mean given to the empirical sensibility discussed above. From this
point of view, the Other represents the way in which both the transcendental
field and the intensive field are brought under the two forms of common sense:
its objective form, the transcendental object, and its subjective form, the unity
of apperception. An open, nomadic distribution, is thereby contained and
made sedentary. The two becomings of materiality and virtuality are made to fit
within the stable forms of representation.40 From this point on, the active syn-
theses can take over, and manipulate the products of Deleuzes transcendental
aesthetic according to the forms of association and judgment.
This is closely related to its second function. The Other does not territorialize
the transcendental without at the same time providing a means by which the
representations of perception express their intensive and virtual origins. The
fully constituted individual still attests to its intensive origins by way of what
152 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
The world without others is the world of schizophrenic depth, the primary
order of The Logic of Sense, the transcendental sensibility of Difference and Repeti-
tion in which every encounter takes the form of a slap in the face (LS 306). It
is a harsh and black world without potentialities or virtualities (LS 306). It is
this situation which made genesis, or the escape from being, necessary. By the
end of the genesis however we now live a world with others. Deleuzes descrip-
tion of the Other in this essay closely resembles his description in Difference and
Repetition:
around each object that I perceive or each idea that I think there is the
organization of a marginal world, a mantel or background, where other
objects and other ideas may come forth in accordance with laws of transition
which regulate the passage from one to another. (LS 304)
Conclusion
MATTER
(1) Present: First synthesis Molecular empirical Passivity
(2) Past: Second synthesis
(3) Future: Third synthesis Virtual/Transcendental
(4) Future: Progressive
determination
(5) Present: Actualization/
Individuation Molar empirical Activity
(6) Past: Empirical memory
Jean-Jacques Lecercle has argued that taken as a whole Deleuzes philosophy is,
like Nietzsches or Kierkegaards, coherent, but not systematic (Lecercle 16). In
this conclusion I would like to suggest that exactly the opposite is the caseat
least within the major texts of Deleuzes middle period which I have considered
here. Deleuzes philosophy is systematic, but incoherent.
Deleuze is incoherent because, while a relatively stable structure persists
throughout all three books, the technical terms used to describe that structure
change. Whats more, these same technical terms reappear in different books
with entirely different meanings. Throughout this book I described many
instances of these transformations. Perhaps the most obvious example can be
seen in the different uses of the expressions multiplicity and singularity. In
both Anti-Oedipus and Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes multiplicities
which comprise a set of singularities, but the sense and function of these con-
cepts are completely different in each book. In Anti-Oedipus the world of
schizophrenic depths in which the body, in its materiality, communicates with
all other bodies is described as a multiplicity of singularities. The singulari-
ties are the partial objects, or the parts of fragmented and unindividuated
bodies which form the material of sensation. In Difference and Repetition, how-
ever, Deleuze describes this world of corporeality as repetition in-itself, the
material object subject to a rule of discontinuity which says that the only rela-
tion between parts of the fragmented object is a lack of a relation. There is no
talk of singularities or of multiplicities. This happens only at the level of the
virtual where multiplicity refers to the transcendental Idea and its differential
elements, relations, and singularities. Here singularity has its mathematical
sense as that which determines the form of a surface or line. It would be easy to
multiply examples of this distortion in sense. This is why Deleuze is
incoherent.
If Deleuze is systematic, it is because, in spite of the changing senses and
changing names, there is still a relatively stable structure. The only way we can
tell that what Deleuze calls a multiplicity of singularities in Anti-Oedipus is the
same thing as what he calls repetition in-itself in Difference and Repetition is by
noticing that they are both described in similar ways (material, lacking
156 Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
relation), but also and primarily by noticing that they both stand at the founda-
tion of a dynamic genesis comprising three passive syntheses. They are both the
material taken up in these syntheses. In other words, it is the position of a con-
cept in relation to the structure of the genesis that gives the concept its sense
and gives us our bearings. The body without organs is a prime example of this.
It is easy to see that insofar as the body without organs is that power of synthesis
which takes up a fragmented materiality and submits it to a series of passive
syntheses that (1) the expression body without organs is stable between
Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense, but (2) is called the spontaneous imagina-
tion, and a host of other names, in Difference and Repetition. This also gives us its
sense. A term which has been notoriously difficult to define in the history of
Deleuze criticism actually has an extremely simple and straightforward defini-
tion. Depending on your philosopher of choice you could call it a memory, an
imagination, a receptive surface, and so on. Its function and its sense is simply
that it serves as a surface on which our affections are recorded and organized.
It is a principle of synthesis and, as such, it is a way of describing a passive thought.
What I hope to have provided in this book is only the beginning of a descrip-
tion of this system. I wanted to show that across three completely different texts
there was in fact a stable structure that gave sense to the concepts involved.
Each book describes the way in which this structure produces itself out of a field
of materiality. The following table is a broad outline of that system and shows
the most general correspondences between the three books that
I outlined below.
synthesis synthesis
Dynamic Genesis
Production
Social
Static
1. Unindividuated materiality
2. First passive synthesis
3. Second passive synthesis
4. Third passive synthesis
5. Transcendental field
6. Good sense
7. Common sense
8. Representation
But why all these reformulations? What purpose do they serve? Do the differ-
ent vocabularies Deleuze takes up contribute something specific to the process
of production, or do they just serve as a set of terms that he can virtuosically
rearrange in a linguistic game to make them map onto the contours of his own
philosophical system? He famously described his method for reading other phi-
losophers as one in which he takes thinkers from behind to produce monstrous
offspring, the products of all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hid-
den emissions (NG 6). Are we to understand that all of these slippages and
dislocations slide in one direction and tend toward this eight part structure as
an ideal limit? These questions are beyond the scope of this book. They move
in a different direction altogether and emphasize the differences rather than
the similarities between Deleuzes works. Instead of answering them, I want to
leave them open. What is the specific contribution of each book to the general
structure it actualizes? What I hoped to have shown here was simply that there
is a very general yet consistent conceptual structure behind Deleuzes three cen-
tral texts, and that this structure traced out a consistent theory of the genesis of
representation.
Notes
Preface
1
See Jeff Bells The Problem of Difference; Leonard Lawlors Thinking Through French
Philosophy; Dorothea Olkowskis Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation; and Jack
Reynolds and John Roffes Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity,
and Phenomenology.
2
For a few brief remarks regarding Deleuzes relation to Heidegger see Miguel
de Beisteguis Truth and Genesis. For an excellent and more detailed reading see
Jeff Bells Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos, pg. 114ff.
3
Claire Colebrooks Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed is a notable exception to this;
see also Alberto Toscanos The Theatre of Production; and Jean-Clet Martins La phi-
losophie de Gilles Deleuze.
Chapter 1
1
See, for example, Badiou, Theoretical Writings pg. 246n4 and Serres, Conversations
on Science, Culture, and Time pg. 3940. Cf. NG 86, 88.
2
Manuel DeLanda (DeLanda Immanence and Transcendence 132) and Timothy
Murphy (Murphy Quantum Ontology 21113) both argue that the context of
Deleuzes thought is contemporary physics. In Intensive Science, DeLanda broadens
this context to encompass not only physics but anything vaguely mathematical or
scientific.
3
Foucault claims that no book could be more alien to Deleuzes work than the Phe-
nomenology of Perception (Foucault Counter-Memory 170).
4
In Modern French Philosophy Vincent Descombes suggests in passing several impor-
tant similarities between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty (7071). Leonard Lawlor
provides a more nuanced summary of similarities and differences between Deleuze
and Merleau-Ponty in Thinking Through French Philosophy. See also Jeff Bells The
Problem of Difference; Dorothea Olkowskis Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation;
and Jack Reynolds and John Roffes Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence,
Univocity, and Phenomenology.
5
Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze pg. 6.
6
Boundas, Introduction to ES pg. 45. Exactly why this reading is unsatisfactory is
unclearespecially because what Boundas considers nonphenomenological falls
well within the framework of Husserls thought even before any radicalization by
later thinkers.
160 Notes
7
AO 10.
8
DR 52.
9
This is Lyotards description. See Lyotard, Phenomenology 53. See also Leonard
Lawlors defense of this adjective in Derrida and Husserl pg. 11ff. and pg. 236n1. In
addition to Lawlors comments, we might add that much of the popularity and
influence of this essay came from the attention Ricoeur gave to it in his introduc-
tion and running commentary to Ideas 1. This commentary has been translated
into English as A Key to Edmund Husserls Ideas 1.
10
Fink describes the theory of reduction and the theory of constitution as
phenomenologys two central and basic systematic ideas (Fink 102; cf.131).
These two central aspects repeatedly appear throughout French commentaries
on phenomenology.
11
See CTM 1116.
12
For just two instances, see Ricoeur, An Analysis 107ff. and Bachelard 156.
13
For a discussion of Deleuze and Merleau-Pontys conceptions of the transcenden-
tal field, see Leonard Lawlors essay The End of Ontology in Lawlor, Thinking
pg. 8094. Lawlor argues Merleau-Pontys conception differs from Deleuzes in
that Merleau-Ponty describes this field as a generality. Nominally, this would be a
strong opposition, but Merleau-Ponty seems to understand generality in the sense
of a positive indeterminacythe same way Deleuze understands the events pop-
ulating his transcendental field (DR 169).
14
See Derrida Genesis 70ff. especially pg. 71 for a good discussion of the relation
between sense and neutrality in Husserl.
15
See Brassier, Alien Theory pg. 61ff. and Lawlor, Thinking pg. 83. See also Alliez
pg. 9. The attempt to distinguish the Deleuzian reduction from the more general
phenomenological reduction suffers from several ambiguities, the most impor-
tant of which is that Deleuze was by no means the only thinker to describe the
transcendental field as impersonal. Not only do Heidegger (cf. the Letter on
Humanism, and On Time and Being), Sartre (cf. The Transcendence of the Ego),
Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible), Blan-
chot (The Space of Literature and The Book to Come), Levinas (Existence and Existents),
and Derrida (Introduction to the Origin of Geometry), all do the same, but even Hus-
serl in his later work described the primordial depths of transcendental
constitution as anonymous and consistently specified, as I will discuss in more
detail later, that the qualification of these syntheses as passive was meant to indi-
cate that they took place outside of an ego. The notion of an impersonal
transcendental field was a permanent installment of phenomenology from the
start. Ricoeur refers to this as one of the most difficult aspects of transcendental
phenomenology (Ricoeur, A Key 110). For an excellent account of impersonality
in Husserl, see Gurwitschs A Non-Egological Conception of Consciousness.
Gurwitsch convincingly argues that, with the exception of Ideas 1, for Husserl the
ego, like all other objects, falls under the phenomenological reduction (330).
For Gurwitsch this is true not only of the empirical egowhich even in Ideas 1 was
bracketedbut of the transcendental ego as well. Levinas will repeatedly return
to this point throughout TI (cf. 29, 42, 48, and 50).
16
The English translation reads the meaning of signs. Deleuze uses the French
word sens for meaning. See Proust et les signes 36ff.
Notes 161
17
Deleuze maintains this identity of sense and essence throughout all of his works.
See, for example LS 105 and DR 191.
18
He makes the same argument in NP. Especially in third chapter and, in particular,
section 9 of that chapter. Here Deleuze argues that a true critique is equivalent to
creation (genesis). Nietzsche, in opposition to Kant, discovers a principle of
internal genesis, and this is what allows Nietzsche to realize a true critique
(NP 91).
19
Unlike the reduction which was not fully articulated until later, the theory of
constitution was already motivating Husserls very first work Philosophy of Arithmetic.
See Sokolowski, Constitution pg. 6; cf. Moran 146 and Fink, The Phenomenologi-
cal Philosophy 76. Both Derrida and Sokolowski argue that constitution was the
primary problem which occupied Husserl for his entire career. See Derrida, Gen-
esis 70. Cf. Husserl E&J 5051, APS 27071.
20
See APS 624ff. for Husserls adoption of Dilthys distinction between descriptive
and explanatory psychology to his own static and genetic.
21
Dermot Moran, in Introduction to Phenomenology, explains that constitution refers
to the manner in which objects are built up for consciousness out of a synthesis
of sensory intuitions and various categories which are applied according to rules,
a meaning which continues in Husserl (164). Moran traces this use of the word
back to Kantas he also does with the word phenomenology (67). (In his
lectures Deleuze too considers Kant to be the first phenomenologist.) For more
on the relation between Kantian and phenomenological constitution, see Fink
135ff and Sokolowski 214ff.
22
Sokolowski pg. 189; Sokolowski frequently compares Husserls later life philoso-
phy to Nietzsches (cf. 184).
23
See E&J 56, 216, APS 296ff. Cf. Sokolowski pg. 17072.
24
See Welton pg. 17579. See also A. D. Smith 117.
25
See APS pg. 62445.
26
See FTL 65. Of course, by logicians I mean Husserls contemporaries.
27
This is especially clear in E&J and FTL.
28
Fink described Husserls philosophy as a monadology (Fink 128).
29
Husserl frequently makes use of this presupposition to move from one stage of
the genesis to the next. Cf. E&J 112: . . . the ego cannot long remain with a
merely simple contemplation and apprehension; rather, the tendency inherent
in the contemplation of an object pushes it beyond this.
30
Each synthesis that I discussthe temporal, associative, explicative, and predica-
tiveis really a general name subsuming a variety of syntheses.
31
For a great overview of the syntheses in general, see the first two chapters of
Rudolph Makkreels book Imagination and Interpretation in Kant.
32
Makkreel pg. 2729, Steinbock xl.
33
Cf. Steinbock: Whereas the understanding has the spontaneous character of
active syntheses that hold together and connect the sensuous manifold according
to rules, sensibility has the character of passivity, since inner and outer sense
merely receive sense data (xl; original emphases). See Husserl E&J 60, 110, 123,
179; see A. D. Smith pg. 98, 111; for pre-I, pg. 12223.
34
Husserls genesis is firmly grounded in the body, and this sensuous matter which
association will organize comes directly from the senses. The data is asignifying
162 Notes
or meaningless because no bestowal of sense has yet taken place (E&J 72). See
Sokolowskis Constitution pg. 21012 (cf. 17678) for a strong account of the
status of sensory data in genetic phenomenology.
35
For a description of the relation of hyletic data to timea temporal hylsee
E&J 64ff.
36
We see very quickly that the phenomenology of association is, so to speak, a
higher continuation of the doctrine of original time-constitution (APS 163; cf.
E&J 74, 177).
37
See Alain Beaulieus essay Gilles Deleuze et la litterature for a comparison of
Husserl and Deleuzes surpassing of judgment, pg. 428.
38
Husserl is careful to specify that the distinction between passivity and activity is
not inflexible, that it is not a matter here of terms which can be established defini-
tively for all time . . . (E&J 108). He is very close to Deleuze on this point as we
will soon see.
39
Husserl quotes Kant on this point: As long as nothing else takes place, the object
is indeed only the indeterminate object of empirical intuition, to speak with
Kant (APS 291).
40
Deleuzes notion of the complex theme (see PS, DR, and LS) has roots in this
stage of Husserls genesis. When the ego turns its attention from the particular
object to its singularities, it is able to recognize the singularities as determinations
of that object because the object persists (through the shift of attention) in the
form of a theme.
41
In later Husserl, proposition or judicative proposition describes an active judg-
ment. He uses the word for the sake of precisionto clearly separate judgment
as the process leading up to the proposition from the judicative proposition itself
and from the primitive judgments of the explicative synthesis (APS 299).
42
I only discuss the relation between Deleuze and Kant from the point of view of
genesis. For a more general account see Christian Kerslakes article The Vertigo
of Philosophy; Daniel Smiths work in general, but particularly his excellent
introduction to the US edition of Francis Bacon, his dissertation, Gilles Deleuze and
the Philosophy of Difference, and his article Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Imma-
nent Ideas; Melissa McMahons dissertation, Deleuze and Kants Critical Philosophy;
and James Williamss Gilles Deleuzes Difference and Repetition and also the first chap-
ter of his The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze.
43
See Deleuzes lectures on Kant, Lecture 1 (03/14/1978) and Lecture 3
(03/28/1978).
44
Philosophy must be an ontology, it cannot be anything else; but there is no ontol-
ogy of essence, there is only an ontology of sense (DI 15; original emphasis). Cf.
NP 2; BG 34, 5657; PS 1314, 3841, 47; DR, 187, 19199; LS 53, 71, and 105.
45
Cf. DR 170: Kant held fast to the point of view of conditioning without attaining
that of genesis (cf. 154, 173, 232). See also NP 4951, 8991; PS 16, 95; TF 89;
Dan Smith gives a very strong reading of this in his dissertation, Gilles Deleuze and
the Philosophy of Difference. See 10406.
46
Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, 511.
47
See Guroults introduction to Lvolution et la structure de la doctrine de la
science chez Fichte. L'volution et la structure de la doctrine de la science chez Fichte.
Notes 163
48
Husserl (APS 171 and 211), Merleau-Ponty (PP 44, 71, 256, 335, and 340).
Derrida writes of Husserls objection to Kant: If the transcendental is not
merged originarily with its empirical content, if it is not presented as parallel to
experience itself, the transcendental, being thematized outside experience,
becomes logical and formal. It is no longer a constituting source but the consti-
tuted product of experience. [. . .] Husserl begins with a radical refusal of Kants
formalism. (Derrida, Genesis 10). This is why Levinas describes Husserls notion
of consciousness as an eminently concrete phenomenon (TI 71) which puts
contact with the world at the very heart of the being of consciousness (43).
49
Lyotard further argues that Kants conception of the transcendental was taken
ready-made from the empiricalKant did not have the method of reduction. Cf.
Phenomenology pg. 32.
50
Deleuze makes the same argument in KP chapter 3, published in the same year.
51
See Claire Colebrooks Philosophy and Post-Structuralist Theory pg. 202ff. for a more
detailed description of the relation between transcendental empiricism and tran-
scendental idealism.
Chapter 2
1
LS xiv.
2
These three levels are most clearly described by Deleuze in the last series of
The Logic of Sense, pp. 23949. Jean-Jacques Lecercle has also described them very
clearly in his excellent book Deleuze and Language. See also Stephen J. Arnotts
article, Solipsism and the Possibility of Community in Deleuzes Ethics.
3
See especially E&J pg. 103 and 19798. This is also a constant theme of Husserls
lectures on passive synthesis. See, for example, APS pg. 95.
4
While Heidegger had the Logical Investigations in mind, these characteristics come
out even more clearly in Experience and Judgment. See especially Husserls long
introduction to that work.
5
Michel Serres is another thinker who equates the endpoint of genesis, knowl-
edge, with judgment, representation and form. See Genesis pg. 14, 15, and 18.
6
I will make a brief argument for treating the virtual and sense as synonymous
below. For direct evidence, see DR pg. 191; C2 pg. 99; and BG pg. 57.
7
On LS 185, Deleuze defines sense as poetry itself.
8
Deleuze does, however, frequently repeat this claim in the pages immediately
preceding the quotation: cf. LS 70, 72, 81, and 86.
9
See C1 pg. 58ff; Bergson, MM pg. 17.
10
LS 11920.
11
See DR 89; EC pg. 2829; and the introduction KP. Cf. Kant CPR pg. A18284/
B22428.
12
For an excellent discussion of these two times and many of the themes which
appear below, see Jeff Bells The Problem of Difference pg. 187ff. A clear description
of these two times from the point of view of the Stoic tradition which Deleuze
invokes can be found in Philip Turetzkys Time, pg. 41ff.
164 Notes
13
The most important of Blanchots texts for Deleuze are the series of essays that
Blanchot wrote between 1953 and 1958 which are collected in The Book to Come,
and Blanchots book The Space of Literature which represents, in Levinass words,
the culmination of these essays (Levinas, Proper Names 129).
14
These two times, however, are not specific to Blanchot. They also appear through-
out Poulets work, in later Ricoeur, and in Bataille.
15
Levinas, Existence 101.
16
Deleuze often describes Aion as the time of event-effects (LS 62) or the locus of
incorporeal events (LS 165).
17
In the work from which Deleuze took the title The Logic of Sense, Hyppolite
provides a memorable description of a similar process in Hegel: While poetry
tends to rediscover reflectively the reflective magic of language, the understand-
ing smashes the concrete representation into its elements which are fixed and
determinate (Logic and Existence 40). See Leonard Lawlors introduction for a
brief discussion of the importance of Hyppolites book to Deleuze.
18
This present of Aion is the present as a being of reason, for example, a mathe-
matical point with no extension, which infinitely subdivides the instant into a past
and future (LS 61ff.).
19
For this dialectic between an un-individuated and an individuated state of affairs,
see LS 124.
20
Although Deleuze does not use the expression passive synthesis in The Logic of
Sense, he does in both Difference and Repetition (1968) and Anti-Oedipus (1972).
Because of the similarity between his account of the syntheses across these three
books and because these syntheses are not governed by an active consciousness,
we can accurately describe them as passive.
21
This theme was already present in Deleuzes first book Empiricism and Subjectivity.
There he asked the very Levinasian question of how the given could transcend
itself and become subject. The given was defined in a way which is very similar to
the dispersion of partial objects in depth. The given is the collection of things as
they appeara collection without an album, a play without a stage, a flux of percep-
tions (ES 23; my emphasis). It is the unorganized delirium (ES 23; my emphasis)
of impressions given by sensibility to the imagination.
22
This is why Deleuze, alluding to the Kantian definition of the imagination as the
faculty of synthesis, gives the body without organs the name spontaneous imagi-
nation in Difference and Repetition (DR 70ff.).
23
In Genesis, Michel Serres also describes a genesis beginning with these two mixtures,
except he calls them the multiple and the one. The significant difference between
Serres and Deleuze, as we see in the next few chapters, is that the body without
organs is produced whereas, in Serres, the one seems to be presupposed.
24
In order for language to be possible, it is necessary to draw the sounds from
their simple state of corporeal actions and passions (LS 166).
25
Cf. LS 207, 218, 220, 241.
26
For the way in which Husserls passive syntheses negotiate sensory data, see APS
2631 and E&J 16.
27
See Levinass Existence and Existents. pg. 18ff. and pg. 70ff.
28
Cf.: . . . the direct and global function of integration or of general coordination,
is normally vested in the genital zone (LS 200).
Notes 165
29
See E&J 77; cf. 150.
30
In logic an exclusive disjunction separates two statements. It says either A or B,
but not both. An inclusive disjunction, however, separates two statements but
maintains the possibility of them both: either A or B or both. For Deleuze, it
therefore takes the form of a problem, or a positive indeterminacy. Is it A or B or
both? Is it William or Richard or Rilchiam? It calls for a decision.
31
For two excellent accounts of the threefold synthesis in Kant, see Longuenesse,
Chapter 2 and Makkreel, Chapter 1.
32
On this point cf. LS 218 regarding the development of images.
33
See LS 180: . . . Being is the unique event in which all events communicate with
one another . . .
34
This gives us an opportunity to clearly state a significant difference between
Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty. The difference is clearly not, as Foucault has sug-
gested in Theatrum Philosophicum, that Merleau-Ponty begins with the body
and that Deleuze begins with the phantasm. Deleuze does begin with the body,
and the phantasmwhich is synonymous with sense (Deleuze uses the word to
suggest that sense is the immaterial double of its material foundations)is pro-
duced as an effect of this body. (Foucaults misreading is a consequence of the fact
that he understood the word phantasm in LS to have the same sense it did in
DR. As will become increasingly apparent throughout this book, Deleuzes tech-
nical terms almost always vary their senses between books.) The difference
between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, and indeed, between Deleuze and many of
his peers, is that in Deleuze the transcendental field is produced. In Merleau-
Ponty, the body was a given impersonal transcendental field. In Levinas, Existence,
or what corresponds to Deleuzes corporeal depths, functioned as an anonymous
transcendental field out of which the subject is hypostasized. For both Merleau-
Ponty and Levinas, the transcendental field is given. For Deleuze, however, this
impersonal field is produced and implies the dissolution of both the body and of
Levinass existence. Blanchot is the only one who shares this understanding of
impersonality with Deleuze.
35
Deleuze draws this distinction between two becomings in LS 165.
36
For a more detailed description of counter-actualization as an ethical principle
see Lecercles Deleuze and Language pg. 116ff. and 173ff.; Ian Buchanans chapter
Transcendental Empiricist Ethics in Deleuzism; Constantin Boundas brief discus-
sion in his introduction to Deleuze and Philosophy pg. 17; and Paul Pattons attempt
at a practical interpretation of this and other Deleuzian notions Deleuze and the
Political.
37
Deleuze directly alludes to this essay when he is describing the dynamics of sense
in his essay on structuralism (cf. DI 187).
38
Throughout both The Book to Come and The Space of Literature, Blanchot periodi-
cally opposes the space of the work and its essential language or language of
thought to these three dimensions of the proposition which define what he calls
the language of the world. See in particular The Space of Literature, pg. 41, where
he claims that in the language of thought, words are not obliged to serve to des-
ignate anything [i.e. denote] or give voice to anyone [i.e. manifest]. And far
from representing the space of signification, the space of the work is the produc-
tion and the expression of signification itself (41). Just like Deleuzes notion of
166 Notes
sense or the virtual, Blanchots literary space represents the impersonal transcen-
dental space in which everyday language is determined and produced.
39
See especially Blanchots essay Mallarms Experience in The Space of Literature
pg. 38ff.
40
Ricoeur, An Analysis 107ff. This essay, first published in 1954, had a significant
influence on Deleuzes thought, especially, as we will see below in relation to the
problem of the Other.
41
See also DR 15365.
42
Deleuze refers to the aleatory point as the subject of sense, the overman in LS
107 and 178.
43
Deleuze quotes Carroll: Justice Shallow had felt certain that it was either William
or Richard, but had not been able to settle which, so that he could not possibly
say either name before the other, can it be doubted that, rather than dies, he
would have gasped out Rilchiam! (LS 46).
44
In both Anti-Oedipus and Difference and Repetition the three syntheses of the dynamic
genesis are passive syntheses. From this point of view, we could say that the hori-
zon of what appears, in Deleuze as in Husserl, is produced in passivity, that the
dynamic genesis is a passive genesis.
45
Cf. LS 95 and 126.
46
Cf. LS 186.
47
Deleuze is alluding to the traditional philosophical notion of the person which
Kant describes as that which is conscious of the numerical identity of itself in
different times (CPR A 361). See also part one of Descartes Principles of Philosophy
and Leibnizs New Essays Concerning Human Understanding pg. 23037.
48
We should note that while the publication of this book predates many of Deleuzes
significant writings on psychoanalysis, the most important aspects of Deleuzes
encounter were already established in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962).
49
Deleuzes comments on Bergsons relation to psychoanalysis seem equally valid
for Deleuze himself. In Bergsonsim, Deleuze writes that Bergsons theory of the
virtual, would lose all its sense if its extra-psychological range were not empha-
sized in itself(BG 55). Deleuze explains, the word unconscious since Freud,
has become inseparable from an especially effective and active psychological exis-
tence. . .. Bergson does not use the word unconscious to denote a psychological
reality outside consciousness, but to denote a nonpsychological realitybeing as
it is in itself (BG 5556). See also Deleuzes lecture on Leibniz delivered on
04/29/1980.
50
See the unconscious is differential and iterative by nature; it is serial, problem-
atic and questioning (DR 108; cf. 194). The unconscious of the structure is a
differential unconscious (DI 181).
51
(See FC, 5051, 82, 10809).
52
Deleuze explicitly argues that there is such a savage experience in the cinema
books when he draws a distinction between semiology, or linguistic systems, and
semiotics, or the system of images and signs independent of language in general
(C2 29; cf. C2 31 and 33; and C1 ix and 12). This entire nonlinguistic system was
the one developed in C1 in which movement-images, or the non-language-mate-
rial (C2 29) were transformed into various types of other nonlinguistic images by
a material subjectivity.
Notes 167
Chapter 3
1
See The Anti-Oedipus Papers pg. 404. In a journal entry or note from 1972 Guattari
wrote Keep my penmanship, my style. But I dont really recognize myself in the
A.O.
2
Cf. DR 56ff.
3
See pg 26. Cf. 296: The order of desire is the order of production . . . (original
emphasis).
4
See KA pg. 7 and Frederic Jamesons introduction to The Political Unconscious,
pg. 22.
5
See 35657 for desires essential relation to the outside. Esp. . . . desire does not
survive cut off from the outside (357). It will become clear below that this out-
side is not at all the Blanchotian outside which corresponds, in Deleuze, to the
transcendental field of sense. Rather, it refers to the way in which the ego of
depths is dissolved in the interpenetration of corporeal fragments.
6
In this passage Husserl explicitly opposes his concrete notion of the transcenden-
tal to the formal Kantian transcendental (APS 171). Cf. CES for Husserls most
developed account of the word transcendental; as well as the first meditation in
CTM. In both places the word ultimately refers to this special sense of a world
constituting consciousness. For both Deleuze and Husserl we can say that genesis
is transcendental very much in the scholastic sense: it encompasses all of the
categories. It is trans-categorical.
7
Cf. Heideggers comment in his lectures on Hegel where he talks of Husserls
conviction, held by him for a long time now and mentioned often, that phenome-
nology represents empiricism and positivism, properly understood (Heidegger,
Hegel 20). In relation to recent critical debates surrounding Husserls thought in
English this is a very contentious point. It is important however to notice that in
France the idea of Husserls genetic phenomenology as radically empiricist was
almost a given thanks to Ricoeurs persistent commentaries. See especially Ricoeur,
An Analysis pg. 10-12 and 202ff. Yet in becoming more and more existential the
phenomenology of the late Husserl became more and more empirical, for the whole
order of the understanding [. . .] henceforth proceeds from passive synthesis initi-
ated on the very level of perception (205).
8
Oedipus is the idealist turning point [in Freud] (55; cf. 111, 265). In contrast,
the elements of Deleuze and Guattaris transcendental unconscious, never
form a mental structure that is autonomous and expressive (98; cf. 265).
9
See AO 52, 97, 111, 173, 186ff., and 306.
10
This attempt to rethink structuralism from the point of view of the genesis of
structure is made in Deleuzes essay, How do we Recognize Structuralism? in
DI 170ff. Deleuzes arguments there are repeated in both The Logic of Sense and
Difference and Repetition as well. See Lecercles book on Deleuze (99ff.) on the
importance of this essay for LS. See my arguments in the third part of the book
that Difference and Repetition does not break with this structuralist model as some
commentators have suggested.
11
Nonetheless, they carefully distance themselves from Althusser, whose project
can be described in almost the same way, in the first few pages of the book (see in
168 Notes
particular their critique of the notions of relative autonomy (4) and structural
expression (6)).
12
Following Deleuzes arguments regarding Nietzsche in NP, Dan Smith, in his dis-
sertation, convincingly argues that Difference and Repetition represents Deleuzes
attempt to rewrite the Critique of Pure Reason. In his article, Deleuze, Kant, and
the Theory of Immanent Ideas he suggests that the AO is Deleuzes Critique of
Practical Reason.
13
Their arguments here have much in common with Merleau-Pontys in the first
chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, and they lead Deleuze and Guattari to a
position very similar to Merleau-Pontys notion of an impersonal transcendental
field (which itself has roots in Bergsons similar conception of a pure, impersonal
perception opened on to the outside in the first chapter of Matter and Memory).
14
Cf.: There is no particular form of existence that can be labeled psychic reality
(27); and: We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it
is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any
mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation in order to
invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of productions (29).
15
Cf. Indeed, in this sense we must say that the unconscious has always been an
orphanthat is, it has engendered itself in the identity of nature and man, of the
world and man (108).
16
Levinas finds this discovery of a reality prior to the division of subject and object
to be one of the most compelling and interesting aspects of Husserls thought
and he returns to it continually throughout his study of Husserl: Husserl, by
overcoming the substantialist concept of existence, was able to demonstrate that
a subject is not something that first exists and then relates to objects. The relation
between subjects and objects constitutes the primary phenomenon in which we
can find what are called subject and object (TI 42; cf. 25, 35, and 51). Derrida
too will highlight this aspect of Husserls thought throughout his dissertation. See
also Heidegger, HTC 96, 111, and 120.
17
Desire produces reality, or stated another way, desiring-production is one and
the same thing as social production (30).
Chapter 4
1
This argument is necessary because one can never count on the consistency of
Deleuzes technical vocabulary between books.
2
Deleuzes use of the term here is very close to Husserls in CTM (cf. 18), whereas
his use of the term in DR is very close to the categorical multiplicities of FTL
(chapter 3). Suzanne Bachelard is very good on this point (43ff.). See also Alberto
Toscanos brief discussion on pg. 165ff. of The Theatre of Production. However,
Toscano slightly exaggerates the distance between Husserl and Deleuze.
3
See Hyppolites reading of sensibility in Hegel in the second chapter of Logic and
Existence.
4
For Bergsons theory of an impersonal or pure perception in which the per-
ceiving subject is exteriority itself, see MM 34. For his description of this
exteriority as molecular, see MM 22ff.
Notes 169
5
What Deleuze calls the given in ES is therefore entirely different from what he
calls the given in DR (cf. DR 222). In DR the given is what appears as already
constituted to an empirical sensibility. In ES, however, it is what is given to a
transcendental sensibility. See DR 144.
6
On this point see also Deleuzes 1972 essay (published in the same year as AO) on
Hume in PI, especially pg. 3541.
7
See Leibniz, Principles of Nature and Grace 13 Deleuze returns to this exam-
ple and othersincluding dog beatingin The Fold. See esp. 86-87.
8
Cf. . . . the vertigo and dizziness of minute and dark perceptions (TF 92).
9
Cf. DR: Partial objects are the elements of little perceptions. The unconscious is
differential, involving little perceptions, and as such it is different in kind from
consciousness. It concerns problems and questions which can never be reduced
to the great oppositions or the overall effects that are felt in consciousness (we
shall see that Leibnizian theory already indicated this path) (DR 108; cf. DR 245;
DI 181 and Deleuzes lecture on Leibniz on 04/29/1980).
10
It is true that the third synthesis produces a residual subject, but this is only the
apparent subject. The unconscious as process is the real subject (324).
11
AO 54 and 300; my emphasis following 328.
12
In addition to these, see AO 32627.
13
It is true that Deleuze and Guattari often describe the body without organs as
unengendered, without papamummy, but the concept itself is of the second
type that I outlined above: it changes its definition according to the moment of
genesis at which we consider it. It is only in the second synthesis, as a miraculating
machine that the body without organs presents itself as unengendered.
14
Hence the coupling that takes place within the partial object-flow connective
synthesis also has another from: product/producing (AO 6).
15
In this quote desiring-machines refers to partial objects.
16
Cf. Deleuzes similar claim in Difference and Repetition that the first synthesis results
in the production of natural signs (DR 77).
17
It therefore takes the place of projection as the mechanism of genesis which was
dominant in The Logic of Sense. This explains the absence of the good object in
Anti-Oedipus.
18
See especially Hyppolites interpretation of the Hegelian imagination from the
point of view of genesis in Logic and Existence, especially on the negation and tran-
scendence of the sensible (LE 2831). The primary difference between the
Deleuzian and the Hegelian transcendence of the sensible is that dialectical logic
determines the Hegelian imagination in relation to already constituted meanings
whereas Anti-Oedipus shows the production of the body without organs as absolute
(without relation) before it becomes involved in the play of representations. It is
hard to deny a Hegelian inspiration on this point, especially in relation to my ear-
lier suggestion that Deleuze and Guattaris characterization of the sensible as a
multiplicity of singularities also seemed to have Hegelian roots. This, in addition to
the fact that the neoplatonic versions of Deleuzes system put forward in Proust and
Signs and especially in the cinema books repeatedly emphasize that once sense is
discovered it is discovered as always having been already there at the outset
(a move which results the formulation of movement-images (sensible singularities)
as always having one half participating in the absolute or time) goes even further in
170 Notes
Chapter 5
1
See for example, Derridas translation of Husserls Origin of Geometry. For a
detailed discussion of these two expressions see Andr de Muralts 1958 The Idea
of Phenomenology pg. 12324.
2
See FTL 5758 and especially E&J 63.
3
See, for example, Husserls Origin of Geometry where he also includes literary works
amongst Ideal objectivities (Derrida, Origin 160).
4
See DR 159, LS 54 and 57 (where objectit is translated as objective), and DI
182. It would be very interesting to compare Deleuze and Husserl on this point.
In Deleuze Ideal objectivities, or transcendental Ideas, as I argue in detail in my
next chapter, come before and produce the objectities of receptivity. In Husserl,
it is the other way around. A complete object is submitted to imaginary variations
from which the Idea objectity is abstracted.
5
Here, systematic phenomenology does not mean the process of production of
objectities but rather, phenomenology retains the sense they gave it earlier in
the book as the science of description rather than of explanation (cf. 10).
6
From the point of view of the territorial system of representation developed later,
(1) is the representative of desire or germinal implex, (2) is the repressing rep-
resentation or alliance and extended filiation, and (3) is the displaced represented
or desire outside of itself in extensity or the somatic complex (162).
7
The role of alliance and filiation in this process of selection and codification is
described in great detail on pg. 152.
8
At one point they broaden the meanings of these syntheses even more to purely
spatial and temporal forms by suggesting that filiation is simply a temporal syn-
thesis whereas alliance is a spatial synthesis (201).
9
Deleuze and Guattari consider Asiatic production to be the purest manifesta-
tion of the despotic state (198).
10
For the genesis of judgment and knowledge in despotism, see 294; of representa-
tion, see 310; of signification, see 206ff.; of law, 212; and for the introduction of
teleology, 288. Interestingly, this stage also theorizes the genesis and interaction
of both metaphor and metonymy (212). This seems to be an allusion to Jakobsons
Notes 171
theory that the entire genesis of language can be demonstrated from the interac-
tion of these two devices. From this point of view, it seems that Deleuze and
Guattari might even be suggesting a phenomenological foundation for the
entirety of natural language.
11
See, for example, Fredric Jamesons The Political Unconscious pg. 22 and 58 and
Bruce Baughs essay How Deleuze Can Help Us Make Literature Work,
pg. 35ff.
12
To deterritorialize here just means to move away from territoriality and does not
imply the dissolution of boundaries. In this case, the deterritorialization that the
despotic machine performs rigidifies boundaries by turning segments into
bricks.
13
From this point of view, Deleuze and Guattari seem to parallel Husserl by describing
the genesis as progressing along a continuum of passivity and activity. Territorial
representation appears in this passage as the pivot between passivity and a Deleuzian
form of spontaneity. And taking this continuum as our axis, it is also worth pointing
out that the expression deterritorialization has two directions. In the current litera-
ture on Deleuze it is used exclusively as the movement from territoriality back to the
molecular. However, in this quotation, and in most of its uses in AO, it describes the
movement forward from territorial to despotic representation. Deterritorialization
is simply the movement away from territorial representation whether that be in the
direction of the dissolution of territoriality or of its further formalization.
14
On the issue of molar functionalism, see also AO 178. For more on the relation-
ship between meaning and use and between the different practices they call for,
interpretation and schizoanalysis, see AO 67, 77, 109, 133, 17981, 20408,
21314, 288, and 322ff.
15
But perhaps it is also at this point that these expressions like despotic state
should be treated skeptically. It seems unlikely that Deleuze and Guattari are
describing a political organization. This would produce massive problems if we
were to follow their suggestion and advocate a move to a molecular state which
consists in the pure absence of meaning.
16
Of course Deleuze champions those kinds of writing which move us beyond
meaning to the nonsense of the molecular. Minor literature (or painting, film,
sculpture, and so on) is minor because it refuses to make sense and thus remains,
literally, minor, small, molecular.
17
I have in mind, for these last two points and their relation to Kants questions, the
definition of common sense given in LS: good sense could not distribute any
diversity if it did not transcend itself toward an instance capable of relating the
diverse to the form of a subjects identity, or to the form of an objects or a worlds
permanence (LS 78; cf. the entire page). Obviously, this Deleuzian answer is
completely different from the Kantian, even though, taken out of their contexts,
they seem almost identical. Common and good sense have nothing to do with a
purely formal transcendental subject or object which would be present, even if
nonactive, in the earlier stages of the genesis. The important point is that these
two forms are produced only secondarily as the effects of sense.
18
Cf. Guattaris note to Deleuze: Im flattered that you kept the term Urstaat. Do
you think that ourfuturereaders will understand on their own the pun with
172 Notes
Introduction to Part 3
1
Specifically, Miguel de Beisteguis Truth and Genesis, Alberto Toscanos Theatre of
Production, Jay Lamperts Deleuze and Guattaris Philosophy of History, Peter Hall-
wards Out of this World, Philip Turetzkys Time, and James Williamss critical guide
to Difference and Repetition. All of these books, with the exception of Williamss
emphasize the point of view of genesis, but they only think of genesis as moving
from the virtual to the actual. Only Lamperts and Williamss books consider the
relation of the virtual to the temporal syntheses, but not in the way I put forward
here. As far as I know the only critic to take the dynamic genesis seriously, although
not in the context of Difference and Repetition, is J. J. Lecercle in Deleuze and
Language.
Chapter 6
1
For an excellent account of Deleuzes theory of Ideas, see Dan Smiths essay
Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas. For an account which
engages with the mathematical examples Deleuze uses, see Dan Smiths, Axiom-
atics and Problematics as Two Modes of Formalization: Deleuzes Epistemology of
Mathematics.
2
See above, pg. 35.
3
It is worth noticing that Deleuze clearly thinks of this process of determination as
taking place between receptivity and the understanding. The allusion to Kantian
coordinates resonates strongly with my arguments below that the virtual inter-
venes between receptivityor the three syntheseson the one hand, and
meaningful representations on the other. Deleuze repeats this characterization of
ideal elements in two other places: see Difference and Repetition (elements without
figure or function (DR 278)) and especially Deleuzes essay How Can We Recog-
nize Structuralism?, where the elements of symbolic structures cannot be
defined either by pre-existing realities to which it would refer and which it would
designate, or by the imaginary or conceptual contents which it would implicate,
Notes 173
and which would give it a signification. The elements of a structure have neither
extrinsic designation, nor intrinsic signification (DI 173).
4
For a basic definition of singularities and the way in which they determine the
form of an object by extending themselves across its ordinary points, see the semi-
nars on Leibniz from (4/19/1980) and (6/5/1980). See also Dan Smiths very
clear account of all of the mathematical notions at work in Deleuzes account of
Ideas in his article Axiomatics and Problematics.
5
While the genesis of Ideas is absent from Anti-Oedipus, it does make a very brief
appearance in The Logic of Sense (LS 121).
6
For a more detailed description of group theory, see Dan Smiths article Axiomatics
and Problematics and Part 9 of Newmans collection The World of Mathematics.
Manuel DeLanda is also particularly good on this point, see Intensive Science esp.
16ff. and 182ff.
7
See DR 220.
8
E&J 339ff. is very clear on this. Cf Lyotard, Phenomenology, 38ff. and Suzanne
Bachelards A Study of Husserls Formal and Transcendental Logic, pg. 173ff.
9
What Husserl says of this Idea holds for Deleuze as well: This general essence is the
eidos, the idea, in the Platonic sense, but apprehended in its purity and free from all
metaphysical interpretations, therefore taken exactly as it is given to us immediately and intui-
tively in the vision of the idea which arises in this way (E&J 341; my emphasis).
10
See Suzanne Bachelard, pg. 17779.
11
One could therefore describe the multiplicity which Husserl has in mind as a
continuous and virtual multiplicity rather than a discreet and extensive one (E&J
343). Husserl often describes the temporal multiplicity as continuous multiplic-
ity throughout ITC. Deleuze has always counted Husserl alongside Bergson as
the philosopher of multiplicity.
12
It is commonplace in Deleuzes criticismwith the exception of Jay Lampert
(Lampert 55)that the virtual actually defines the element of the past in general.
I explain why this is not the case (namely that the virtual as past is not sufficiently
free of content to found the free determination of Ideas) at the end of the next
chapter.
13
Cf. NP 2534 and DR 28385.
14
Deleuze himself cites Eugen Finks book , Le jeu comme symbole du monde and
Kostas Axeloss Vers la pense plantaire (DR 332n5). Although neither of these
works has been translated, parts of Axeloss book have been translated in Yale
French Studies under the title Planetary Interlude as has an earlier essay by Fink
on the same subject, The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play.
Deleuzes 1970 review of Axeloss book, The Fissure of Anaxagoras and the Local
Fires of Heraclitus is an important elaboration of the note in Difference and
Repetition. To these two it is worth adding both Poulets essay on Mallarm in The
Interior Distance and Blanchots essay on MallarmThe Book to Comein his
book of the same title.
15
The system of the future [. . .] must be called a divine game . . . (DR 116).
16
See also NP 25ff. and DR 116, 198, 282.
17
Deleuze gives traditional definitions of these two terms in both of his books on
Spinoza. Perhaps the clearest and most functional definition, however, comes
from a footnote toward the end of Anti-Oedipus (AO 309n2).
174 Notes
18
In commenting on this line, Blanchot says, Every work and each moment of the
work, puts everything into question all over again . . . (Blanchot 87).
19
Blanchots essay, There could be no question of ending well, in The Book to Come
deals with all of these points.
20
Merleau-Ponty develops the notion of positive indeterminacy throughout the Phe-
nomenology of Perception. See PP pg. 7, 14, 3336, 196, 519.
21
Cf. DI: In fact, it is in relation to [the aleatory point] that the variety of terms and
the variation of differential relations are determined in each case (DI 184).
22
On this point, see Dan Smiths introduction to the US edition of Francis Bacon
and his essay on Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas in Deleuze
and Philosophy.
23
In Difference and Repetition these two syntheses, spcification and qualification,
have been translated as determination of species and determination of
qualities.
24
Deleuze makes this allusion clear in DR, pg. 223. If he describes primary quality
as extensity rather than as extension it is because extension does not preexist
the objects which populate it but is, rather, produced as a characteristic specific
to each individual object. See Deleuzes comments on Mamon (DR 174).
25
See also DR 179, 181, 24041, 243, as well as Deleuzes review of Simondon in
DI 86ff. Both James Williams and Mark Hansen are particularly good at pointing
this out.
26
Cf. earlier in the same text: . . . sense is actualized in the psychologically per-
ceived sounds, and in the images that are psychologically associated with the
sounds (BG 57). We should recognize in this dualitysounds and imagesthe
two lines along which sense was actualized in the static genesis of The Logic of
Sensethe logical genesis (which corresponds to the sounds, or the sign which
denotes, signifies, or manifests) and the ontological genesis (which corresponds
to the image, or what is actually denoted, signified, or manifested).
27
Although he directly addresses this question in DR 209 and 247, he does so within
the context of discussion of Kant, so it is not immediately clear that these expres-
sions would have the same sense in Deleuzes own thought.
28
DR 191; cf. 197 and 156ff. In LS Deleuze draws a correlation between knowledge
and extensity: . . . the known is subject to the law of a progressive movement
which proceeds from one part to anotherpartes extra partes (LS 48).
29
See in particular: representation and knowledge are modelled entirely upon
propositions of consciousness which designate cases of solution (192); and the
equation of propositions of consciousness with representations of knowledge
in DR 197. In Husserl we find a similar conflation of knowledge, representation,
and the proposition or statement. See, for example, the introduction to E&J pg.
2122, 28, 38, and 62.
30
On of the great strengths of Miguel de Beisteguis reading of Deleuze is that he
insists on this relation between the actual and the phenomena. See Truth and
Genesis pg. 247 and 292.
31
See the introduction to E&J. Cf. Levinas, TI pg. 1516.
32
For Deleuze (and for Husserl) homoiosis will always be secondary to the produc-
tion of the two terms supposed to be adequate. This was already the case in
Deleuzes first book: The relation of truth to subjectivity is manifested in the
Notes 175
affirmation that a true judgment is not a tautology (ES 98). See also DR 56 and
196ff. and LS 121ff.
33
Miguel de Beistegui gives a very good and much more detailed account of
individuation in Truth and Genesis as does Alberto Toscano in The Theatre of
Production than I will here. My primary concern is to bring out the relation-
ships between all of these concepts and, in particular, to emphasize temporal
characteristics.
34
. . . these four terms are synonymous: actualize, differenciate, integrate, and
solve (DR 211).
35
Deleuze writes that Individuation ensures the embedding of the two dissimilar
halves of the object or thing, the virtual and actual half (DR 280).
36
See, for example, Beyond the Pleasure Principle pg. 5. Cf. Klossowski, 20ff. and 47ff.
37
Lacan brings this out in his seminarsespecially in book IIas does Ricoeur in
Freud and Philosophy, pg. 69ff.
38
Deleuze often describes the role of the subject in the eternal returnin refer-
ence to Klossowskis interpretationsas the affirmation of the highest and the
lowest.
39
Individuation always governs actualization: the organic parts are induced only
on the basis of the gradients of the intensive environment . . .. (251). It is because
of the action of the field of individuation that such and such distinctive points
(pre-individual fields) are actualisedin other words, organized within intuition
along lines differenciated in relation to other lines (247; my emphasis).
40
See MM, 150; cf. 179.
41
Whereas intensities focus on and express differential relations and their singu-
larities, Ideas are unaware of the individual (DR 246; cf. 254).
42
This discursivity is already the problem of Empiricism and Subjectivity where the
problem of the relation between the principles of association (which correspond
to Ideas) and the principles of the passions (intensity) is posed and resolved in
the last chapter. Interestingly Boundas alludes to this discursivity in his introduc-
tion, but unfortunately does not develop it. This same problem also motivates the
last half of The Fold. In ES, purposiveness links the two dimensions; in TF the
vinculum does.
43
Cf. DR 245: It is intensity which is immediately expressed in the basic spatio-
temporal dynamisms and determines an indistinct differential relation in the
Idea to incarnate itself in a distinct quality and a distinguished extensity.
44
CPR A141/B18081.
45
For Deleuzes discussion of empirical sensibility, see DR 144 and 231.
Chapter 7
1
Deleuze makes this distinction himself in formal divisions of the chapter (which
are not retained in the English edition).
2
In this distinction between passive and active syntheses, as well as in his
adoption of certain concepts throughout the chapter (living present, retention,
reproduction), Deleuze is very clearly indebted to Husserl. However Deleuzes
syntheses are also very different from Husserls. Recall that Husserl had observed
176 Notes
only two passive syntheses, time and association. All three of Deleuzes passive syn-
theses are, in this account, dedicated to the production of time, whereas
association clearly belongs to the realm of activity or representation (cf. DR 80).
This point echoes my earlier claim that Husserl already installed the form of
identity in his associative synthesis, and thus violated the more radical employ-
ment of the reduction which we find in Deleuze. It is probably for this reason that
Deleuze considers the associative synthesis to be an active one. Recall also that
Husserls temporal synthesis was purely formal. This is why, as we saw in the first
chapter, that Husserl turned to passive associative synthesis in order to explain
how the content of the impression was connected. This is not the case in Deleuze.
Here, we will see, a molecular empirical content comes before the form of time,
and time is produced as an effect of the synthesis of a primordial hyl.
3
It is these three syntheses which must be understood as constitutive of the uncon-
scious (DR 114; original emphasis).
4
On this point cf. DR 83, 101, 109, 114.
5
See DR 29293. For this reason James Williams, among others, interprets the
order of syntheses as moving from the third to the second to the first. We have to
remember though that just as in The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus (and we might
well add Kant), the third synthesis is precisely the synthesis of the first and the
second syntheses. It is from this point of view that it distributes difference to
these other two.
6
This was also the case, I suggested, in The Logic of Sense where Deleuze took
recourse to the representations projected by the good object and the active coor-
dination of the ego.
7
See his critical guide to Difference and Repetition, pg. 8486.
8
Here this bare and material model is, properly speaking, unthinkable. (How can
consciousness, which has only a single presence, represent to itself the uncon-
scious?) (DR 286). The word unconscious here refers to an alienated matter.
9
See especially Time and Free Will, Creative Evolution and Duration and Simultaneity;
but also Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception (477) and Kant (CPR A 95ff.)
Cf. Heideggers Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (122).
10
Deleuze summarizes these arguments in the opening chapters of Cinema 1.
11
Deleuze describes the contemplative soul as a modificationthis term designat-
ing precisely the difference drawn (DR 79; cf. 286). Deleuzes three syntheses
correspond very closely to Kants, and his choice of the word modification at this
point is a significant allusion to Kants synthesis of apprehension (CPR A9798).
12
Manuel DeLanda is right to say, however, that this does not actually mean that
time is subjective (DeLanda, Intensive Science 110): this is not a psychological
subject: it is a passive and transcendental subject, and even though Deleuze will
call it an ego, it shares none of the activity or volition ordinarily attributed to a
consciousness. Like Bergsons, it is impersonal. The subject at the beginning of
time is a corporeal and passive subject. Indeed, Deleuze defines the body as a col-
lection of contemplative souls (DR 7476).
13
DR 286.
14
In the psychoanalytic account of the syntheses, Deleuze says that the contempla-
tive soul binds excitations.
Notes 177
15
The body without organs in The Logic of Sensein its capacity as a liquid princi-
plewas also defined as a fusion of partial objects (LS 8990).
16
Deleuze is alluding to both Tournier (Cf. LS 310) and Bergson (MM 39, 50, 64,
66). See Deleuzes comments on intentionality in C1 60 and DR 220.
17
Levinas had already described intentionality in this way in Theory of Intuition
(TI 4445). Cf. Ricoeur: Intentionality only signifies that consciousness is, in the
first place, outside of itself (An Analysis 8).
18
Cf. DR 220: It is not enough to say that consciousness is consciousness of some-
thing: it is the double of this something . . ..
19
In the English translation of Hyppolites Genesis and Structure, the French word
singulariti has been translated as specificity.
20
Hyppolite, following Hegel ( 10506), describes this identification of subject
and object at the level of sense-certainty as an intentionality or an aiming at
(Cf. 87, 90, 94).
21
Hyppolites description continues in a way which strongly resonates with
Deleuzes description of the plane of immanence in the cinema books or the
schizophrenic and corporeal mixtures in The Logic of Sense: The sensuous soul
does not distinguish itself from its object. It experiences within itself the whole
universe of which it is the reflection, but it is not aware of the universe . . .
(Hyppolite, Genesis 84).
22
It is worth restating that these singularities of sense-consciousness are not those
of the transcendental Idea.
23
See also section 1 of On Escape.
24
This is also exactly how Heidegger described the transcendental form of Kants
first synthesisthe synthesis of apprehension: it does not produce an empirical
present, but the present in general (Heidegger, Kant 126).
25
Again, Heidegger says the very same thing in relation to the pure form of Kants
second synthesis, reproduction: this synthesis can be called pure reproduction
not because it attends to a being which is gone nor because it attends to it as
something experienced earlier. Rather, [it can be called pure imitation] to the
extent that it opens up in general the horizon of the possible attending-to, the
having-been-ness . . . (Heidegger, Kant 128).
26
Deleuze therefore completely reverses Levinass dialectic of effort and fatigue,
even though he makes use of Levinass descriptions of these phenomena. In Levi-
nas, the weary ego begins to lag behind existence, but is pulled back into it by an
effort. This produces the present. In Deleuze, the ego begins with effort, a synthe-
sis. This produces a present. But it soon finds itself exhausted. In its refusal of
existence, it is taken up in a second synthesis. This produces a past.
27
Again, the expression partial object has a completely different sense here than
it does in either The Logic of Sense or Anti-Oedipus. This is just one more of the
many instances where, between books, Deleuze completely alters the sense, func-
tion, and context of a technical term (which are precisely what one would expect
to remain constant).
28
The symbol [or phallus] is the always displaced fragment, standing for a past
which was never present . . . (DR 103). Cf. DR 109 where Deleuze describes the
virtual object as the principle of the second synthesis.
178 Notes
29
If we were to stick to a straightforward Freudianism, this might make sense within
the context of Beyond the Pleasure Principle where the death drive as a return to
inanimate matter was considered as primary. But this is precisely the model which
Deleuze criticizes (DR 11113), and then revises by developing a death instinct
which is drawn from Eros and constructed upon his remains (113).
30
This physical metaphor is also repeated in the dynamic genesis of The Logic of
Sense (23940).
31
In the philosophical account, too, Deleuze says that the third synthesis is the
thought and the production of the absolutely different, or difference in itself
(DR 94).
32
For a more developed and very strong account of the notion of intensity in Kant,
see Batrice Longuenesses Kant and the Capacity to Judge, pg. 298ff.
33
The description of this action = x or action in general in DR as any empirical
action insofar as the circumstances allow its isolation and that it is sufficiently
embedded in the moment such that its image extends over time as a whole . . .
(DR 294) clearly corresponds very closely to the description of the action in gen-
eral given in LS which is not at all a particular action [i.e. empirical], but any
action which spreads itself out at the surface and is able to stay there (LS 207).
34
One especially strange place that this same process appears is in Deleuzes descrip-
tion of Bergsons arguments for going beyond Einsteins theory of the relativity of
time. See BG 80-84. What Deleuze describes as the lived experience of the ego in
DR becomes a line of abstract reasoning in BG.
35
In The Logic of Sense too, the two images are brought together in a synthesis which
confuses their specific functions: the mother is asked to be organized, but is dis-
covered as castrated (without phallus) and thus lacking an organizing principle;
the father (or the phallus as element of the past in general) is asked to become
present (LS 20306).
36
Here is the greatest difference between Deleuzes third synthesis and Kant/
Heideggers. Deleuzes third synthesis indeed belongs to the faculty of pure
thought and involves an abortive cogito or an active I in the form of an ego
Idealthat is, the ego which becomes equal to the image of the actionwhich
would seem very similar to Heidegger/Kants nonsubstantial I (Cf. DR 86 on the
receptive phenomenal subject appearing in time). Further, the entire third syn-
thesis would also seem to mirror that of recognition where the first is recognized
as similar to the second. But despite these similarities, in Deleuze recognition
fails. Rather than the future serving as the element which can coordinate the two
other syntheses, it is the element in which a whole new synthesis is to be deter-
mined: the ideal synthesis of difference in the Idea.
37
On this point see Dan Smiths recent article in Deleuze Studies, The Conditions of
the New. See also the opening pages of Bergsons Matter and Memory from which
Deleuze takes both his description of the plane of immanence or the corporeal
depths or material repetition and his formulation of the problem of the new.
When Deleuze calls the eternal return the new, he means, like Bergson, both
that we experience it as affect and that it is independent of the determinism of
the corporeal depths (LS)/plane of immanence (C1)/material repetition
(DR)/binary-linear series (AO).
Notes 179
38
Eternal return, in its esoteric truth, concernsand can only concernthe third
time of the series (90; cf. 91).
39
For the two becomings, see LS 165.
40
See Ricoeurs commentary in that same essay in which he describes Husserl as a
transcendental empiricist: An Analysis 90105; cf. CTM 1922 and 28.
41
Cf. Ricoeur, An Analysis 97.
42
Cf. Ricoeur, An Analysis 100.
Conclusion
1
The expression plane of immanence is also one of those expressions which
refers to different concepts between books. In the cinema books, for example,
the expression stands for the material field or the primary order, or arts plane
of composition (Cf. C1 5859). In What is Philosophy?, the expression stands for
the virtual or secondary organization. This clearly is not the consequence of an
evolution in Deleuzes way of thinking about immanence since both the primary
order and the secondary organization are present in both books. He simply trans-
poses the word from one register to the other.
2
It is not at all true, therefore, that the notion of the aleatory point makes only a
brief appearance in Deleuzes thought as an obscure structuralist principle (even
though its clearly a genetic principle) as numerous critics have maintained. There
is no such thing as a structuralist period in Deleuze. The aleatory point is a perma-
nent installment of Deleuzes thought from very early on all the way until the last
book, and without it, the notion of the virtual loses all sense.
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Index
Aleatory Point 3541, 72, 74, 81, 106, Fink, Eugen 3ff., 19, 160n9,
10910, 112, 114, 127, 157, 179n2 160n10
Althusser, Louis 167n11 Foucault, Michel 3, 165n34, 170n18
Freud, Sigmund 35, 456, 57, 122, 1445,
Badiou, Alain 1056 166n49, 178n29
Bergson, Henri 23, 5960, 63, 11718,
123, 1312, 138, 140, 166n49, Galois, variste 1078
168n13, 173n11, 178n34, 178n37 Guattari, Flix 41, 51, 99100
Blanchot, Maurice 256, 3840, 74, Gurwitsch, Aron 160n15
11214, 1345, 164n13, 165n34,
165n38, 167n5 Hallward, Peter 1056
body without organs 2730, 313, Hegel, GWF 17, 26, 35, 63, 70, 1345,
56, 6879, 82, 127, 13540, 156, 138, 169n18, 177n20
169n13 Heidegger, Martin 212, 177n24,
as imagination or contemplative 177n25
soul 70, 73, 136, 138, 1445, 156, Hume, David 636
164n22, 169n18 Husserl, Edmund 3ff., 202, 24, 30, 323,
as principle of synthesis 28 3940, 43, 45, 47, 52, 56, 57, 59, 66,
production of 6971 68, 74, 768, 834, 8990, 92, 10809,
Boundas, Constantine 3, 159n6 11819, 122, 131, 134, 1445, 1523,
Brassier, Ray 6, 160n15 167n6, 167n7, 173n9, 173n11,
Buchanan, Ian 39 174n29, 175n2
Hyppolite, Jean 17, 164n17, 177n201
Colebrook, Claire 3
Counteractualization 378 Idea 356, 3940, 84, 10626,
14950
DeLanda, Manuel 141, 159n2 and the represented object 11518
Descombes, Vincent 96 Inclusive disjunction 36, 3940, 113, 149,
Deterritorialization 171n12, 171n13 165n30
Intentionality 19, 1345, 177n1618
Eternal Return 36, 37, 112, 14950 Interpretation, see Experimentation and
event 356, 39 see also Idea interpretation
Event, see Aleatory Point
Experimentation and interpretation 55, Jakobson, Roman 170n10
68, 901 Jameson, Frederic 901
192 Index
Kant, Immanuel 7, 1618, 24, 323, 42, and Heidegger 177n24, 177n25,
52, 5561, 767, 83, 939, 115, 1245, 178n36
145, 152, 161n21, 163n48, 166n47, and Husserl 1012, 323, 68, 77,
172n3, 178n36 175n2
and Kant 11, 323, 81, 83, 96,
Lacan, Jacques 45, 57 176n11
Lawlor, Leonard 6, 160n13 order of 7880, 1289, 13841,
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 512, 155 176n5
Leibniz, G.W. 63, 646, 108 and static genesis 818
Levinas, Emmanuel 4, 25, 32, 57, 1356, Plane of immanence 23, 136, 157,
163n48, 165n34, 168n16, 177n26 177n21, 179n1
Lyotard, Jean-Franois 17
Reduction 4ff., 45, 534, 57, 77
Mamon, Solomon 17 Ricoeur, Paul 39, 45, 109, 160n9, 167n7,
Mallarm, Stphane 110 179n40
Marx, Karl 57, 79, 99
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 3, 57, 29, 57, Sartre, Jean-Paul 151
160n13, 165n34 168n13, 174n20 Serres, Michel 163n2, 164n23
Smith, Daniel W. 168n12
Nietzsche, Friedrich 44, 110, 155,
161n18 Unconscious 456, 557, 629, 76, 117,
166n49, 176n8
Other 98, 1504 as set of passive syntheses 667, 128