Huh?
a)The trouble with the synthetic is that, for all is for all its power and beauty it needs to loose sight of some of the differences it encompasses. Here time is a clear culprit. In a previous essay it was clear enough that there are three Copernican revolutions in Kant, and yet Deleuze, for one can only really find two.
b)He knows of the revolution of light in the dark, and the revolution of I is another, and yet does not grasp at all the revolution of shattered and yet fluidly coordination selves. Here one needs care, he understands as well as Hue or Spinoza) the importance of fluid multiples selves which of course he is a master of understanding the raw, The terminology in the previous essay was borrowed pretty much lock stock and barrel from Deleuze…)
c)The problem is that he wants to create a synthetic between this rendering of the self into myriad shifting parts, and the time (understood as passive yet differential). He therefore occupies in the name of time that conventional Kantian Landscape of the categories.
d)Now of course on the deepest of levels Deleuze would reject he had any time for the categories themselves. And this formally is right. The point though is that the categories are an attitude or rather a demand. He are the demand that something in the chaotic spasm of selves makes self – that it has some sort of substance, and stops being just silly.
e)Or even better they are the belief in the advent of an external reality (be that external created by my consciousness itself or where or when ever) which is somehow caught up in and responsible for the s=endless and really rather pointless death of selves.
f) In a sense there is a real sogginess here. It is as if Deleuze is morning (as some Lacain I suppose might be) for the death of the self. He wants that death not to be pointless. He want and agency worthy of killing himself. He finds that agency is time.
g)The role of the thing in itself becomes therefore something worth allowing oneself to die for.: the eternal return; that is one gains something in ponsing about willing the inevitable.
h) Or even even better, one gains something by dividing up the terror of the inevitable;, and taking it into life. Of course it needs to be said that micro-death is everywhere, if one defines death as change in a certain direction. That is as a remorseless not being as one was – then death is inevitable.
i)And yet there is surely the suspicion that one needs to understand this move as death simply because, contra Kant one has pitched humanity where one has no right or even duty to be at all.
j)For Spinoza a least the restlessness of the future which erupts is ours as we are part of the infinite immediate mode, but never ours awe are finite. The world of eruption is that which has least to do with death. That which as it cannot be personalized in this way cannot be about death at all. To insert a layer or rime of death here is to be such a desperate or Kantian that one is happy to assert oneself in the negative just so long as the entire show revolves around your absence.
k) It would after all be a waste of time for time really to care enough about us to kill us – the rules of engagement are surely rather different…
l) Time – that is the passive synthesis is surely of itself to be thought more like the sea which we love and yet which cares not two blind arses about us (or only cares about us as we too are or are not sea).
m)The deaths head has to hang of the shot gun synthesis of empirical selves and passive time. Death is what a time is doing, in that it has to be capturing all he selves and betraying them one to the other, as often as it can, in order that it has the space to be at all.
n)Empirically the real problem here lies in the ontology of perception. Time is of course absent from perception. It is the mantra of every good Kantian. Time needs to be added – for it is so very real don’t you know.
o) Well as with death, there are degrees of absence. Time understood in its absolute form is as absent as death. It is never there, and yet we all know it must really BE.
p)But why? Here Kant has an apparently cogent answer. We know it is because without truth would be impossible. The truth of time is the bulwark for truth itself.
q)Problem with this is that it begs the very question itself : that is it begs all those nagging problems about the nature of truth, which surely where really what was at issue anyway. Maybe a time does not defend a truth what then is status them?
r)Here perhaps one might have three other takes. One might along with bergson desire to confuse time with the past and memory, and attempt to re-found the nature of time in the becomings of the past. The Child is always also present across all the layers that I am.
s)Problem with this move for Deleuze, is that it looses sight of the very creative power of time to bugger p hat which has been, and find endless new ways to kill a memory:
t)that is for deleuze the Child I once was as not the child of memory any more than the child of reality. It is rather a monad (or individual) on the cusp of many becomings, and so already caught up in many pasts). The link between time and memory is ultimately far too smug to be of any real use.
u)One might also add, that the link in the very appeal to memory creates a transfiction, in which all the universe is caught in the same stuff as a human mind. The go might be exploded into the starts, and yet it remains utterly an ego.
v)The result is that one cannot understand in this prism the oddness of being with everything else. That is of the fact that ones pas is never ones own memory, but rather opens ones up to others invasion of what one it – to the possibility of becoming other, rather than the dreary imprisoning in ones own past.
w)Alternatively one can follow Heidegger’ path, and attempt to ma out a n interconnection between being and time. This move represents an attempt to blast one out of the struggle hold of a time. That is a single as in which something call it Time or time is giving me what it is.
x) It represents therefore a real try to allow for the discontinuity of in the tenses (the having been is distinct from the domain of the possible or of vision). Tense is therefore plucked out, and given a life beyond the turgid stream of time .
y)A theory or repetition is therefore set up, in which tenses repeat into ach other, without ever having to conform. Repetitions which then allow one to stretch beyond any individual existence. The link between time and individual memories as such is thereby broken. I might be always a becoming child, and yet that becoming means hat childhood is not ever mine – it belong in being itself.
z)And yet the entire enterprise is haunted by that aspect of Time which forces one to thing of the nature of Being. That is that element which demands something is alive an something has a history.
aa)This move is double comes in two stages. Firstly I clearly only become an individual in the face of death. It is death or the lose of being that makes my own being somehow peculiarly mine. Up to ha point It was always a thing I shared with all other Beings (and is so all through a life). It is in dying, as a being shuffles off into the having been, and lose possibility that I become what I am. Death provides a point an individual tumbles into their own individuality.
bb) Which is perhaps perfectly reasonable. Although one is left a little to wonder whether death really would convey such exclusivity to a being unless that being already was exclusive (in someway). Why would it matter that I shuffle off into the having been if Being, including pretty well most of what I garnered to myself as a being, continues as it was. I might be there, but unless there was an I already there that would not matter much. Death can not convey individuality therefore unless that individuality as already there…
cc)Be that as it may, the second move is clearly even more suspect. This move insists that as being includes the having been within it – there is a point or a part of time where I can act in the foreknow edge of that having been. I can act as a moment of history. I can be resolute and determined.
dd) That is in facing down death, and my having been status, in the name of Being how to act in the light of history.
ee) Trouble of course is that Being can make no such claim – and its attempt to enwrap death, merely normalizes dying, and which bought horrifically into life, in the name of those who want (come what my) to be historical.
ff)Deleuze learning from both these attempts, will essentially invert Kant. Kant had said we needed time to allow for truth.; deleuze says no – we need it to keep the world false, and therefore creative.
gg)Time is the axis where o past whatever is held down. The point where every ‘meaning’ becomes beautifully provisional and complex, and does so without the universe slipping into any vapid relativism.
hh) The perception, and their falsification in time, gains a Nounmenal truth all of its own. The be buggered by time is to be part of in its non-truth.
ii) Philosophy is th science of buggeration: that is the science of not being what one thought one was. The moment that event implode a mind.
jj)Death becomes then critical to this process, as every memory is itself a locus of death. To member is to kill one world as the memory is cast adrift into the brain.
kk)Indeed memory is the very maggots nest of death, as each memory enters into an assortment of different thoughts, betraying each one of them, as it echoes also to yet other times in the Glass Harmonica of the mind.
ll)All fine poetic stuff – and yet all of which it based on that odd problem of the status of time.
mm) Deleuze can after all only make this move by allowing for nounmena pitched just beyond the phenomena – as a world of event.
nn)He needs therefore a very basic Kantian division to allow a difference o erupt within a mind an have that mind somehow link back to a truth – cannot it the truth of falsehood).
oo)Memory might forever assassinate a soul, and yet in doing so it remains the knight errant of time, which cares enough about humans to do this.
pp)Moreover not only does time clearly acre overmuch the murder of living which is life, but also, it must be doing so in order that it is at ll.
qq) That is the reality of time that hard absolute is now linked to this act of murder. And yet remains just elusive from reality a I perceive it) as did Kant’s time. That is it remains just as bound up in huh?-that is it, of a Copernican effect. That is it is thought as an adjunct to the effect- in the oh – given I am a part of some(ano)th(er)ing (else) that is what that part must also Be.
rr)At this anothering is then ultimately defined by itself effect and a truth claim. It is no doubt the effect of time, taken as a whole o bugger up every memory, if one allows to memory the luxury of a truth claim. The Minute a memory claims to be anything real or substantive claims for example to really be about a past that really really (ontologically honest guv) did happen – time is at hand to betray.
ss)Time laughs in the face of truth. And yet why would want to make a truth claim for memory anyway/this given the complexities of perception and all was always daft (certainty needs grafted other than memory, as Spinoza knew).
tt)Moreover if one does not, then times claim to be as truth (but false) that is the point at the end of the process, the point in and of buggeration, looks less good as a claim to reality.
uu)One is tempted to say to time as one says to poor old consciousness – yes you are all that, but that like the idea of an idea does not really matter do very much. I is not where I have life (which is then why you can only talk of it in terms of death, that is it terms of what has nothing to do with me thank you very much)
vv)What time then claims is that we live in the form of tense with it all the time. To which of course life can easily say- well I will keep a theory of tense, and remove it form a theory of univocal time.
ww) At which point of course the and another thing of the third Copernican effect which pitched selves within a chaos of other selves, pitches in. It claims that the entire point of this theory lay in the act that these selves were free to row with one another (without the big stick of death or consciousness) hanging over them. The appeal to this stick is only possible when one of these little gods makes a claim for supremacy (and the others dies laughing).
xx)What matters then are the jarring of those relationship which are far closer to our being – that is tense. Which is where of course Heidegger of being and time is so very useful.
yy)Where that Heidegger fails is that he then attempts to drag being back into time (as it is understood in becoming – and through a single axis)- a move which only leads to death.
zz)Again one need caution here. This is not to dethrone Deleuze. He is certainly right given the parameters of time (and the weary claims for external truth which blight existence). one merely is wanting to add extra companions to help him on his way.
aaa)Companions which by the time of what is Philosophy he clearly desires – and yet can only reach through Leibniz and Art…