Deleuze and Time (Robert W. Luzecky, Daniel W. Smith (Eds.) )

Deleuze and Time
Deleuze Connections
‘It is not the elements or the sets which define the multiplicity. What
defines it is the AND, as something which has its place between the
elements or between the sets. AND, AND, A ND – stammering.’
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues
General Editor
Ian Buchanan
Editorial Advisory Board
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Titles Available in the Series
Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory
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Mark Bonta and John Protevi (eds), Deleuze and Geophilosophy
Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music
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Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sørensen (eds), Deleuze and the Social
Ian Buchanan and Adrian Parr (eds), Deleuze and the Contemporary World
Constantin V. Boundas (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy
Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn (eds), Deleuze and Politics
Chrysanthi Nigianni and Merl Storr (eds), Deleuze and Queer Theory
Jeffrey A. Bell and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and History
Laura Cull (ed.), Deleuze and Performance
Mark Poster and David Savat (eds), Deleuze and New Technology
Simone Bignall and Paul Patton (eds), Deleuze and the Postcolonial
Stephen Zepke and Simon O’Sullivan (eds), Deleuze and Contemporary Art
Laura Guillaume and Joe Hughes (eds), Deleuze and the Body
Daniel W. Smith and Nathan Jun (eds), Deleuze and Ethics
Frida Beckman (ed.), Deleuze and Sex
David Martin-Jones and William Brown (eds), Deleuze and Film
Laurent de Sutter and Kyle McGee (eds), Deleuze and Law
Arun Saldanha and Jason Michael Adams (eds), Deleuze and Race
Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose (eds), Deleuze and Research Methodologies
Inna Semetsky and Diana Masny (eds), Deleuze and Education
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Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Jonathan Metzger (eds), Deleuze and the
City
Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack (eds), Deleuze and the Animal
Markus P.J.Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody (eds), Deleuze and Children
Chantelle Gray van Heerden and Aragorn Eloff (eds), Deleuze and Anarchism
Michael James Bennett and Tano S. Posteraro (eds), Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory
Rick Dolphijn and Rosi Braidotti (eds), Deleuze and Guattari and Fascism
Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha and Saswat Samay Das (eds), Deleuze and Guattari and
Terror
Robert W. Luzecky and Daniel W. Smith (eds), Deleuze and Time
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Deleuze and Time
Edited by Robert W. Luzecky and

Daniel W. Smith
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Contents
Introduction: The Many Aspects of Duration 1

Robert W. Luzecky
Part I: Concepts of Time

1 Time is Real: Deleuze and Guattari, from Chaos to
Complexity11
Dorothea E. Olkowski
2 The Movement of Time 27
Thomas Nail
3 The Pure Form of Time: Deleuze’s Theory of Temporality 45
Daniel W. Smith
Part II: History of Time

4 Gilles Deleuze’s Interpretation of the Eternal Return: From
Nietzsche and Philosophy to Difference and Repetition75
James Mollison
5 Time and the Untimely: Deleuze, Foucault and the
Production of the New 98
Strand Sheldahl-Thomason
6 Kant, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and the Constitution of
Experience116
Henry Somers-Hall
7 Disjoint and Multiply: Deleuze and Negri on Time 136
Peter Trnka
vi Contents
Part III: Expressions of Time

8 Kill Metaphor: Kafka’s Becoming-Animal and the
Deterritorialisation of Language as a Rejection of Stasis161
Charlene Elsby
9 Memories of Cinema 179
Robert W. Luzecky
10 Time, Truth and the Power of the False 213
Vernon W. Cisney
11 Gilles Deleuze, A Man Out of Time 234
Charles J. Stivale
Notes on Contributors 258

Index262
Introduction:
The Many Aspects of Duration
Robert W. Luzecky
In a text on the relation between the music of Pierre Boulez and the
literature of Marcel Proust, Deleuze observes that the nameless narrator
of Proust’s expansive masterpiece was a person haunted by time (2007:
297). Indeed, the same might be said of Deleuze himself. Temporality is
a near constant theme from Deleuze’s earliest publications (on Hume, as
well as a scintillatingly brief review of Simondon) to his final publication
(‘Immanence: A Life’). Much like Bergson did with his unique concept of
duration, Deleuze continually added further nuances to his philosophy
of time. Temporality is a theme to which Deleuze continually returned
throughout the twenty-five monographs that were published during his
lifetime, in countless seminars and interviews, as well as in the texts
co-authored with Félix Guattari – the two Capitalism and Schizophrenia
volumes, the book on Kafka and What is Philosophy?
The ambit of Deleuze’s philosophy could scarcely be more expansive.
In the Foreword to Éric Alliez’s Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest
of Time, Deleuze explicitly affirms Plotinus’ claim that time is involved
in the movements of the universe’s soul (1996: xii). A few lines later –
through oblique reference to Fitzgerald, Iberall, the Stoics, Nietzsche,
Kant and S hakespeare – Deleuze further characterises these movements
as aberrant, in the sense that they are akin to the decoupling of a door
flying off its hinges; time is a cosmic dice throw that affirms the actu-
alisation of possibilities. In his two Cinema texts, as well as his other
works on Bergson’s philosophy, Deleuze suggests that temporal move-
ments involve the ongoing creation of virtual and actual modes of being.
(Here, one might also observe a subtle modification of Étienne Souriau’s
aesthetics.) The sheer number of texts that Deleuze published also hints
at a further aspect of his philosophy of time: it is non-reducible to the
thought of one key fi gure – to encounter Deleuze’s concept of time is to
participate with a plurality of thinkers. Though there are certainly some
2 Robert W. Luzecky
philosophical figures to which Deleuze often returns (as though a morsel

of time might be regained by the arduous reworking of near forgotten
claims from the history of western philosophy), it must be observed that
a robust sense of Deleuze’s concept of temporality involves bringing
philosophical thought into conversation with the thought of a dizzy-
ing array of filmmakers, physicists, painters, poets, anthropologists and
literary artists. In concrete terms, elaborating Deleuze’s philosophy of
time requires a multiplicity.
In addition to this introduction, the present volume has eleven chap-
ters, arranged into three s ections – C oncepts of Time, History of Time
and Expressions of Time.
In the first section, Dorothea E. Olkowski, Thomas Nail and Daniel W.
Smith elaborate on Deleuze’s concept of time. Developing claims from
contemporary physicists, Bergson and Pierce alike, Olkowski observes
that Deleuze conceives of time as a real, complex, continuum that par-
ticipates in the creation of new existents. Beginning from Boltzmann’s
observation that the physical universe tends to present as macroscopic
disorder, in which e ntities – i .e., particles, a toms – enjoy movement along
non-identical trajectories, Olkowski suggests that temporality is the con-
tinuum which expresses the modification of the universe. Elaborating on
themes from Bergson and Peirce, Olkowski observes that Deleuze tends
to conceive of time as a complex self-sustaining continuum that involves
the ongoing actualisation of potentials – time produces the conditions
for modifications of the universal soul.
Perhaps one of the most radical suggestions of Deleuze’s philosophy
of time is that the temporal continuum – the duration which compre-
hends all of the memorial past and the lived present, and which gives
rise to the indeterminate future – is autonomous from the movement
of physical entities. In concrete terms, time is something other than the
measurement of the spatial displacement or qualitative modification
of existent entities. Is this aspect of Deleuze’s concept of time correct?
Here, one might to turn Lucretius for the beginning of an answer. In
his nuanced chapter – w hich involves a detailed reading of Lucretius
brought into conversation with Carlo Rovelli’s reflections of the nature
of time – T homas Nail suggests that the entirety of time (including its
analytically discrete domains of past, present and future) is a develop-
ment of the indeterminate kinetic processes (i.e., movements) of material
entities. In this sense, spacetime is ontologically dependent on the swerve
of atoms.
The suggestion that Deleuze’s philosophy of time is non-monolithic
does not diminish the fact that the concept enjoys privileged elaboration
Introduction 3
in key texts. Daniel W. Smith observes that Deleuze developed his theory
of time primarily in two moments of his career: first, in the books pub-
lished in 1968 and 1969, Difference and Repetition and The Logic of
Sense, and then, sixteen years later, in his 1985 book The Time-Image,
the second volume of his work on cinema. There is, of course, a develop-
ment in Deleuze’s thinking about time from one period to the other, and
his later work makes a claim that was only hinted at in Difference and
Repetition, namely, that a revolution in our philosophical conception
of time took place with Kant. This is the point where Smith’s analysis
begins. In antiquity, the concept of time was subordinated to the concept
of movement. In Kant, time is liberated from movement and assumes an
autonomy and independence of its own. Smith traces out the history of
this revolution and shows how in Kant time becomes a pure and empty
form, which is marked by the three syntheses of habit, memory and the
new. Smith’s chapter presents a perspicacious overview of Deleuze’s
entire theory of time.
If the swerve of elementary particles is an aspect of the emergence of
time, then perhaps it should also be observed that Deleuze seemed to
never tire of suggesting that aspects of the creation of time enjoy expres-
sion through reference to Nietzsche’s concepts of the eternal return and
the will to power. In some of the most beautiful passages of Nietzsche
and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, Deleuze suggests that
the eternal return and implicated will to power may be characterised
as a dice throw that yields the creation of the new. In his fascinating
chapter on Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, James Mollison observes
that Deleuze tends to identify the will to power as a metaphysical selec-
tion. Perhaps no phrase in all of Nietzsche’s philosophy has endured so
much – s ometimes d eliberate – m
isinterpretation as ‘the will to power’.
Erroneous early interpretations suggested that the will to power may
admit of psychological interpretations – as though it were merely an
aspect of the personality of a psycho-social entity. Though Deleuze tends
to characterise the creation of the new as an affirmation of an emergent
circumstance, Mollison elegantly observes that, for both Nietzsche and
Deleuze, this characterisation is not an expression of a dubious anthro-
pomorphisation of philosophical concepts. (In this sense, the will to
power is more akin to Spinoza’s concept of conatus than it is to any
psychological drive.) Mollison further specifies that the eternal return
is an actualisation of a singularity – i.e., a point of inflection – which
involves aspects of evaluation and selection. He concludes by suggesting
that Deleuze conceived of temporality as the eternal actualisation of
difference.
4 Robert W. Luzecky
Perhaps one of the greatest philosophical friendships in the history

of philosophy was that between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault.
In his chapter, Strand Sheldahl-Thomason elaborates how Deleuze’s
and Foucault’s concepts of time are profoundly intertwined. Though
Deleuze tends to be more inclined to metaphysics than Foucault – whose
texts tend to be more aptly characterised as metaphysically informed
histories – Sheldahl-
Thomason carefully observes that both thinkers
tended to eschew appeals to the transcendent, static or continuous, in
favour of characterising time as a multiplicity of discontinuous, com-
plicated, disjunctive relations. In Individuation in Light of Notions of
Form and Information, Gilbert Simondon observes that the apparent
tension between discontinuous and continuous may be resolved if both
are implicated as aspects of a complex process of production of phe-
nomena (2020: 92). Sheldahl-Thomason suggests that, for Deleuze and
Foucault (who were both influenced by Simondon), this constitutive
relation of becoming is an expression of temporality.
The claim that temporality involves an immanent expression of the
actualisation of difference subtly diminishes the explanatory value of
the relation of temporal succession – the series t1, t2. . ., tn, where each
moment t is identified as a ‘now’ which is similar to that which pre-
ceded it in the series. Henry Somers-Hall begins with a detailed analysis
of Deleuze’s and Merleau-Ponty’s modification of Kant’s account of
the constitution of temporal experience. Kantian metaphysics tends to
conceive space and time as the forms of intuition by which perception
is organised. One of the negative implications of the Kantian approach
is that time seems to be stripped of all p
ositivity – time is characterised
as an empty form. Somers-Hall deftly observes that both Deleuze and
Merleau-Ponty were critical of this Kantian time. The claim is that a
more adequate account of time might be afforded by conceiving of it as
an immanent constitution of a process of ongoing modification. Citing
an often overlooked passage from Difference and Repetition, Somers-
Hall notes that Deleuze explicitly observes that temporal succession is
inadequate to account for the complex ways in which time constitutes
human experience. Further, in what is surely one of the most astute
observations in this text, Somers-Hall specifies that this thesis is echoed
in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. These complex analyses yield the
claim that temporal constitution tends to be far more complex than that
gestured to by Kant.
Peter Trnka’s chapter is perhaps the most explicitly political contri-
bution to this volume. Beginning with the observation that the lived
experience of political subjects tends to suggest that time is a complex
Introduction 5
assemblage of both physical and non-physical processes, Trnka argues

that the complex mutual implication of these processes yields the crea-
tion of utterly new circumstances. Here, Trnka observes that a properly
Deleuzian concept of temporality involves weaving together aspects
from the thought of Nietzsche, Bergson, Marx a nd – p erhaps most of
all – Spinoza and Negri. Trnka elegantly develops Negri’s elaboration of
Marx’s observation (in the second volume of Capital) that temporality is
intertwined with the economic modes of production. Indeed, for Marx,
economic production influences all rates of temporal progression, the
material expression of time, as well as the values associated with dura-
tion. Trnka further observes that (in the Ethics) Spinoza suggests that
time is ongoing production – the conatus is expressed as the immanent
constitution of time. Spinoza is explicit: the conatus is bereft of internal
limitation. In terms of its essence, the conatus may be characterised as
pure affirmation. Taken together, these claims suggest that time enjoys
an immanent creation that is expressed as ceaseless variation.
One of the key claims that emerges from a synthesis of the first chapters
of this volume is that Deleuze conceived of time as a complex dynamic
multiplicity composed of a manifold of irreducible, mutually implicated,
ontological and axiological processes. It might further be observed that
this multiplicity is explicitly transformative, in the sense that it involves
modifications of each of its elements as well as a transformation of the
whole. Charlene Elsby observes that these spatiotemporal modifications
are entirely non-metaphorical – they are literal, metaphysical, actual
variations. In her chapter on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s reading of Kafka,
Elsby presents a nuanced account of how a literary text expresses these
transformations. Though Deleuze and Guattari frequently use philo-
sophical terms which might be read as metaphorical in nature – e.g.,
rhizome, desert, black hole, body without o rgans – it should be observed
that throughout his philosophical career Deleuze repeatedly expressed
hostility toward metaphorical thought. In Cinema 2 he observes that it
would be dubious to assume that images of deserts (in Antonioni’s Red
Desert and Zabriskie Point) are metaphoric representations of a gen-
eralised alienation or malaise. In the second volume of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari are perhaps even more stark when
they observe that analyses of metaphor and metonymy are ‘disastrous’
attempts to discern meaning in a text (1987: 76–7). The claim here is that
metaphor is a linguistic device that tends to obscure the precise deter-
minations of philosophical concepts. Elsby resolves this implied tension
between philosophical statement and practice with the suggestion that
Deleuze tends to conceive metaphorical representation as s tymieing the
6 Robert W. Luzecky
deterritorialisation of language. In concrete terms, metaphor attempts

to establish a signifying relation between the linguistic terms of a text
and putatively signified concepts which obtain as externalities to the
text. Echoing Ingarden’s critique of Husserl, Elsby observes that reading
a text metaphorically is an act of philosophical arrogance, in the sense
that it tends to diminish the immanent becomings of the text in favour
of some ready-made concept. Taken together, these analyses yield the
complex claim that the meaning of time is expressed through a non-
metaphorical – and thus non-representational – dynamic union of reader
and text. To read a text literally is to participate in its immanent trans-
formations. The implication here is staggering: in the act of reading a
text, one involves oneself with the modification of spacetime.
I continue these elaborations of the aesthetics of time in my chapter
on cinema and time. When the Lumière Brothers unveiled their
Cinématographe to the viewing public in 1895, this heralded a radical
change in our understanding of the nature of time. No longer did time
have to languish under the inadequate concepts that consigned its dyna-
mism to the mere measurement of the relation of the movement of
discrete entities; cinema revealed entities to be dynamic elements of a
non-decomposable duration. I suggest Deleuze’s thought on the nature
of temporal expression in film may be characterised as a Bergsonian phi-
losophy of film that Bergson never found the time to write. One might
suggest that the film affords an adequate representation of reality, in the
sense that it presents entities in a manner that approximates how various
represented objectivities appear to us in reality; in film things appear to
move. This appearance of motion – the dove flying toward the sky at the
end of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner; the nearly sublime spectacle of the
crowd of workers threshing in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven – is
what Bergson identified as falling victim to the cinematographic illusion.
The Bergsonian cinematographic illusion involves the presentation of a
series of still images at rapid succession to yield the appearance that each
of elements of the series are in uninterrupted motion. Deleuze observes
that filmic sequences of shots are unified blocks of duration of duration
– i.e., they are identified as complex metastable networks of mutually
implicated virtual and actual aspects undergoing variation. The nega-
tive claim is that the relation of mutual implication is non-identical to
succession. The progression of a series is discrete from the modifications
associated with duration. This suggests that the relation of temporal
succession is inadequate to elucidate the beguiling temporality expressed
by cinema. Taken together, these claims imply that the relation between
memorial past and lived present is more complex than mere temporal
Introduction 7
succession. In concrete terms, Deleuze’s elaborations of the nature of

temporality expressed in film reveals time to be a duration in which the
tension of virtual and actual yields the simultaneous constitution of the
memorial past and lived present. The beguiling magic of cinema is that
it presents the creation of time.
Vernon W. Cisney’s chapter elaborates on the role of the powers of
the false in admitting variation (i.e., the new) into temporal progression.
Carefully weaving together claims from Nietzsche’s ‘Vision and the
Riddle’ (from Thus Spoke Zarathustra) and Proust’s observation that
time involves virtual aspects which are ‘real without being actual, ideal
without being abstract’, Cisney observes that the temporal is a singular-
ity, i.e., a time crystal, which (due to its internal interplay of mutually
implicated forces) actualises both the past and the future. In this sense,
the singularity is a rigorous determined ontogenetic field from which
time, truth and history, as well as the vast menagerie of existent entities,
are born. Perhaps it is worth observing that the minimal ontological
condition which must be met for an entity to exist is that it obtains as
something of which truth might be predicated; i.e., existing, individu-
ated entities enjoy the truth of being. Cisney observes that this minimal
truth subsists from the ontogenetic field. Stated again: the singularity is
the expression of non-individuated, mutually implicated forces, which
create truth. In perhaps one of the most heartening passages of this text,
Cisney observes that art is particularly adept at expressing the creative
powers of the false. This suggests that artists have the capacity to create
(and populate) a new world.
In his wonderful c hapter – w
hich is informed by the ongoing project
of translating Deleuze’s seminars into E nglish – C
harles J. Stivale elabo-
rates on the temporal aspects of Deleuze’s lived experience. He offers a
delightful demonstration of the concord between philosophical thought
and philosophical practice when he observes that the conceptual,
ontological and epistemological disjunctions associated with Deleuze’s
philosophy of time gain expression in the real obstacles that Deleuze
encountered in his lectures on Spinoza, Leibniz and cinema. After a visi-
tation from the ghost of his dead father, Shakespeare’s Hamlet observes
that the linear flow of time seems to have fallen out of joint. This is the
first of the four ‘poetic’ formulas that Deleuze invokes to summarise
Kantian philosophy (2003: vii). Stivale suggests that Deleuze’s seminars
involved a plurality of factors which seemed to interrupt the regular
progress of temporal succession. It is as though time was forced out of
joint by the frustratingly cramped and overcrowded lecture theatres, and
various unwelcome events that all too often stymied the timely delivery
8 Robert W. Luzecky
of course materials. Stivale observes that in one seminar Deleuze reflects

on how Nietzsche’s example of a thinker who shoots arrows without
foreknowledge of their intended target might apply to his own teaching.
The suggestion here is that to participate in one of Deleuze’s seminars
was perhaps to catch of glimpse of one of those rare, beautiful moments
in which Deleuze became something of singularity – a point of inflection
that marshals key moments of the memorial past only to propel them
into an undisclosed future.
The complex analyses contained in this volume promise to change the
way future generations of scholars will conceive of Deleuze’s philosophy
of time. Indeed, they indicate that elaborating on Deleuze’s concept of
temporality requires specifying the nature and function of mutually
implicated aspects of a complex phenomenon. Deleuze’s thought on
the nature of temporality demonstrates that it is a protean entity which
– because of the ongoing modification of its aspects – expresses fragile
indeterminacy. If it is to be suggested that the concept of time must – by
ontological necessity – still enjoy unity, then perhaps we might now
observe that this unity should be identified as the unity of a multiplicity.
In this sense, it may be better to use the nominal term ‘time’ in a plural
sense: when elaborating on the nature of temporality with reference to
the thought of Gilles Deleuze, perhaps the philosophers of the future will
identify the object of their study as ‘the times of Deleuze’.
References
Deleuze, G. (1996), ‘Foreword’, in Éric Alliez, Capital Times: Tales from the
Conquest of Time, trans. Georges Van Den Abeele, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (2003), Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties, trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Deleuze, G. (2007), ‘Occupy without Counting: Boulez, Proust, and Time’, in Two
Regimes of Madness: Texts and interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade,
trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, South Pasadena: Semiotext[e].
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Simondon, G. (2020), Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information,
trans. Taylor Adkins, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
PART I
CONCEPTS OF TIME
Chapter 1
Time is Real: Deleuze and Guattari, from
Chaos to Complexity
Dorothea E. Olkowski
Creation?
Philosophy, as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is ‘the
art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’ (1994: 4).1 More
specifically, it is ‘the discipline that involves creating concepts’, because
concepts are not ready-made, and even though they are incorporeal,
what we usually refer to as intellectual or mental, there is no heaven
of concepts; they must be created (1994: 5, 21). There are creators;
creators are not persons but personae, a force of ideas that provide a sig-
nature, a name like Descartes or Kant that is a cluster or assemblage of
concepts, and every concept is a multiplicity as there is no concept with
only one component. Every concept has some sort of history as well as
a becoming; it undergoes evolution, and so is both absolute with respect
to the problem it addresses but also relative to its components, as well
as infinite in its survol, its reach, but finite with respect to its Leibnizian
indiscernibility (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 15–21). Although many
things can be said about this designation, what I wish to draw attention
to here is the problem of the creation of concepts. What does it mean to
say that the creation of concepts is possible? How can we justify even
the possibility of creation, not merely as a linguistic phenomenon but as
a reality, even if an incorporeal one?
The reason creation rises to the level of a problem has to do both with
Deleuze and Guattari’s own philosophy and with the mathematical and
scientific framework, which their philosophy must confront in utilising
the tools offered by the mathematics and cosmology upon which they are
reliant. Beginning with a schematic history of philo-scientific accounts
of the universe, and not simply of nature, western philosophy of science
was formalised by Plato’s (fourth century BC) and Ptolemy’s (100 AD)
models of the universe, both grounded in the idea of heavenly bodies
12 Dorothea E. Olkowski
moving in perfect circular motion guided by either Plato’s ‘pilot’ (in The
Statesman) or Ptolemy’s Aristotelean god’s realm of heavenly perfection
in which nothing that is true undergoes change. Much later (1687) there
is Newton’s similarly eternal and cyclical universe (inherited by Albert
Einstein) in which any event, no matter how improbable, must occur
an infinite number of times (Smolin 1999: 143–4). As the physicist Lee
Smolin sums this up: ‘[i]n a world of atoms governed by deterministic
laws, chance alone plays the role of the pilot who returns the universe
from time to time to an ordered state that makes life possible’ (144), but
only as an improbable fluctuation in an otherwise dying universe.
The point of this selective account is to take note that from Plato to
Einstein, physics posits a world governed by deterministic laws and
improbable events, and fails to describe a world in which things –
corporeal and incorporeal – arise and evolve; that is, the creation of
something new does not seem possible. This problem is further exac-
erbated by the nineteenth- century theory of thermodynamics which
postulates the law of entropy, which states that the disorder of systems
in the direction of equilibrium must always increase (Smolin 1999: 147).
The law of increasing entropy predicts the eventual heat death of the
universe because collections of atoms are more likely to arrive at a dis-
ordered state of equilibrium than an organised, creative configuration.
Together, the Newtonian worldview along with thermodynamics give us
a sad picture of reality as both deterministic and dead.
Deleuze famously critiques the Platonic view of the universe, directly
addressing the argument of The Statesman. The Statesman, the shepherd
of men, is well founded, but below him lie the auxiliaries and slaves,
and the evil power of simulacra and counterfeits (Deleuze 1990: 255–6).
The motivation for such divisions is, as Deleuze argues, ‘to distinguish
essence from appearance, intelligible from sensible, Idea from image,
original from copy and model from simulacrum’ (256). Plato’s goal,
according to Deleuze, is to distinguish good from bad copies: to dis-
tinguish well-founded copies, internally and spiritually balanced and
endowed with resemblance to the Idea, from simulacra engulfed in dis-
similarity, underhandedly failing to pass through the Idea and internally
unbalanced. It is of consequence in this model that at the top of the
hierarchy there is a knower who possesses knowledge of the unchang-
ing and eternal Idea. Below this is the possibility of right opinion, not
knowledge of the eternal but a good copy. Lowest is the imitator who
has access only to simulation due to their inability to master the eternal
and unchanging Idea or even right opinion. The imitator advocates for a
distortion that evades the equal, the Same and the Ideal, sinking into an
Time is Real 13
unlimited becoming that challenges the authority of the knower and the
known (Deleuze 1990: 258).
In the Platonic eternality, Justice is just and so the Same; the copy is
at least the Similar. Although Plato introduces this model, it is Aristotle
who codifies it through the division into genus and species, which delim-
ited and specified the role of representation and made it easier for
Christianity to celebrate the infinitely great of the genus of Being and the
infinitely small of species – all in God’s domain – to the exclusion of the
eccentric and the divergent (Deleuze 1990: 259).
Nietzsche’s attack on Platonism was supposed to have reversed it,
abolishing the eternal world of essences as well as its impoverished
bastard – the world of appearances. But Deleuze is not entirely satis-
fied with Nietzsche’s effort, which remains all too abstract, failing to
uncover Plato’s motivation. Thus the true overturning of this eternalist
model requires affirming the rights of simulacra to deny the claims to
truth of the original eternal Idea and its copy and assert the ‘triumph of
the false pretender’ (Deleuze 1990: 262). The resemblance of the similar
to the Same is abandoned for the sake of internalised difference, and the
identity of the Same is differentiated into the ‘identity’ that is the Being
of the Different, so that what is, is only as difference. As even Nietzsche
noted, under every formerly eternal foundation, there exists a more
profound subsoil, another cave, another subterranean world (Deleuze
1990: 263; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sect. 289).
It might now seem to be the case that Deleuze has profoundly freed
his thought from the eternal and the inevitable or deterministic, but
we have yet to deal with the Newtonian version of the universe. The
question is what to make of Newtonian laws and absolute space and
time if simulation is now understood as the process of disguising, where
behind any mask is another and another, because, as Deleuze notes,
‘[s]imulation understood in this way is inseparable from eternal return’
(1990: 263). Wise to the implications of this, Deleuze quickly revises the
meaning of eternal return. It is not, he claims, the eternal return of the
Same, but the power of affirming chaos, an affirmation whose meaning
it is not a simple matter to discern. For Plato, chaos was defined in rela-
tion to order or laws; it is the ‘rebellious matter’ to be subjugated by the
Demiurge (Deleuze 1994: 68). Chaos can be currently defined in physics
as ‘a deterministic mechanism that generates the appearance of random-
ness’ and is sensitive to initial conditions (Casti 1994: 103). For Deleuze,
chaos is defined as ‘virtual chaos’, where virtuality is the ‘potential’
through which states of affairs take effect (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:
153). The task ahead is to connect this view of chaos from both early
and late Deleuze texts to a new cosmology, one that is not situated in
relation to a timeless deterministic universe.
Time is Real
‘Time is real.’ When I spoke these words to an astrophysicist at a
seminar on cosmic and human time, h e – a long with several members
of the audience, which included a number of physicists – may have
thought, ‘no it’s not, time is only a psychological phenomenon’. This
is because, for the astrophysicist, time is an illusion, and temporal flow
and its somewhat recently revealed consequence – complexity – indicate
the existence of nothing more than a temporary fluctuation arising from
some special initial conditions in our region of an otherwise determinis-
tic universe governed by the time-reversible laws of classical mechanics.
This is what is called the Newtonian paradigm. Its conditions are that
the space under consideration – configuration space – is timeless, and
solving a specific set of equations gives the entire future of the system, a
system that exists in the present because the laws governing the system
are also timeless (Smolin 2014: 139). The effect of this paradigm is
that ‘time is inessential and can be removed from the description of
the world’, and the initial conditions of the universe determine the
future down to the smallest detail (167–8). And crucially, the laws of
Newtonian physics can be reversed. The initial conditions follow the
laws to a final configuration. Starting from that configuration, the laws
can be run in the opposite direction back to the initial conditions, so
that if it were possible to make ‘[f]ilmed motions of the whole solar
system’, then run them backward, the result would be an orbit allowed
by Newton’s laws that is indistinguishable from its forward motions
(111).2
This leaves us with the dispiriting notion that our sense of time as real
is nothing more than an illusion, that the real universe is timeless, and
that the so-called history of the universe is merely a system of causal
events in a block universe (Smolin 2014: 150–1). The concept of the
block universe allows for the treatment of time as a dimension of space,
a fourth dimension since ‘[a]n event taking place at a moment of time is
represented as a point in spacetime, and the history of a particle is traced
by a curve in spacetime called its worldline’ (151). In this geometricised
version of the universe, photons are represented as moving at 45 degree
angles, and other particles – b ecause they move more slowly than the
speed of light – are represented at steeper angles. Hermann Minkowski
devised this representation, the light cone, sometime between 1907 and
Time is Real 15
1909. It is the translation of motion in time into a visual representation

of a timeless geometry (Smolin 2014: 154–5).3
This widely accepted view of a timeless and deterministic universe
was disrupted by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that
no process is possible whose sole result is that energy is transferred
from a cooler to a hotter body (Schneider and Sagan 2005: 45).4 When
Ludwig Boltzmann, who is credited with unifying classical thermody-
namics with Newtonian mechanics, modified thermodynamics allowing
for the ‘perception of linear time’, this was met with scepticism from
Friedrich Nietzsche and Jules-Henri Poincaré, who maintained, along
with many others (including Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell), that
even though randomised conditions tend toward equilibrium and thus,
increasing entropy, eternal return is still possible and there is no global
direction for time (Schneider and Sagan 2005: 47, 57). Why? Because,
they argued, future states are fixed by the initial condition and its rules
of motion, but over an infinite amount of time nothing prohibits the
return of an earlier state (Casti 1994: 87).
Like Newtonian mechanics, classical thermodynamics operates in
accordance with a specific set of restrictions. Its systems are isolated,
allow for no variables, and they are driven toward equilibrium at a
constant temperature (Schneider and Sagan 2005: 25–6; Cortês and
Smolin 2018). Of course this is not the full account of thermodynamics.
In addition to isolated systems, there are systems, such as chemical reac-
tions, that are merely closed. They allow energy but not matter to be
exchanged across their boundaries and they allow for some variables.5
Ecosystems exchange both matter and energy across borders, making
them the clearest example of open systems, but ‘stars, burning nuclear
fuel and producing high-quality light’, along with exploding supernovas,
as well as cities and bodies, all exchange matter and energy across
boundaries (Schneider and Sagan 2005: 26). Moreover, the further from
equilibrium any system is, the more difficult it is to predict its behaviour
due to the uncertain relations between changes in variables.6
Far from equilibrium systems are instances of the threshold where
fluctuations lead to unstable behaviour. Lucretius referred to this as
the clinamen, a spontaneous, unpredictable deviation that describes
turbulence, irregular on the macroscopic scale, but highly organised
microscopically (Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 141; Serres 2000). This
transition from the macroscopic to the microscopic, from chaotic to
highly organised, coherent behaviour, from stable flows to turbulence,
is now viewed as self-organisation (Prigogine and Stengers 1984: 141).
When a system interacts with the outside world, exchanging energy and
matter, these nonequilibrium conditions may be the setting for so-called

dissipative structures that do not exhibit the characteristics of energy
loss but become the sources of order – t hat is – order out of chaos.
Boltzmann recognised that irreversible increases of entropy reflect dis-
order on the molecular scale, a broad approximate description with few
variables, but that there is also a movement in the direction of increasing
probability on the microscopic scale, where there is a precise description
of the positions and motions of all the atoms in a system (Smolin 2014:
501–2). A macroscopic state of disorder and symmetry corresponds to
maximally probable microscopic states where as many particles will be
moving in one direction as in the other Prigogine and Stengers 1984:
124–5). The number and type of microstates that add up to a macrostate
indicate the amount of entropy in a system. The greater the number of
microstates, the less the entropy. We can visualise this as the difference
between a square building made of nearly identical macrostate bricks,
each of which can replace any other, and architect Daniel Libeskind’s
Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, a model of microstates (Smolin
2014: 502–3). For the latter, there is only one possible way to assemble
the titanium and granite s iding – each element has a specific and neces-
sary p
lacement – b
ut for the former, any brick will do.
The classical model does not take into account sensitivity to initial
conditions, the reality that even two very proximate initial conditions
will follow very different trajectories, but insofar as there is only one
universe we have no way to test this on a cosmological scale (Casti 1994:
90). And yet, ‘we see no evidence for our region of the universe being a
low-entropy fluctuation in a static world in equilibrium. We see instead
a universe evolving in time, with structure on every scale developing as
the universe expands’ (Smolin 2014: 516).
Deleuze, Bergson and Intuition

How to decide between these apparently contradictory views of the uni-
verse, between an entropic deterministic bloc universe and our encoun-
ter with self-organisation moving from chaos to complexity on multiple
scales? This is a considerable problem, and one that Deleuze’s philosophy
takes up along several trajectories, including Henri Bergson’s conceptu-
alisation of intuition and duration, which proves useful in confronting
the problem. Essential to Deleuze is Bergson’s revolt against Platonic
ideas, something for which Bertrand Russell criticised him intensely
on the basis of what Russell took to be Bergson’s failure to understand
mathematics and physics (Petrov 2013: 892). As Russell sees it, math-
Time is Real 17
ematics conceives change, even continuous change, as constituted by

a series of states; Bergson, on the contrary, contends that no series of
states can represent what is temporally continuous, and that ‘in change a
thing is never in any state at all’, a claim supported by Bergson’s account
of intuition and duration (Petrov 2013: 895; Russell 1914: 17).
It is possible that what we commonly refer to as intuitions are not
really intuitions at all but merely a poor use of our reflective c apacity
– a reflection on static logical formulae grounded in a perspective that
assumes the existence of unchanging laws of nature and traces them to
their apparently inevitable end, which is a deterministic and timeless
universe punctuated by fluctuations that give rise to otherwise inexplica-
ble novelty and complexity. This was the source of the conflict between
Bergson and Einstein that was fuelled by Russell. Bergson’s commitment
to what he called the philosopher’s time – d uration and its tendency
intuition – led him to resist Einstein’s claim that there is only one time,
the eternal time of the physicists and mathematicians, and resulted in
numerous accusations that Bergson did not understand relativity and so
did not understand the true nature of reality (Canales 2015: 5).7
Possibly we have forgotten the history of intuition beginning at least
with René Descartes, who in spite of rejecting sensory perception and
memory – even intellectual and mathematical memory – still argued
that pure intuitions are the most potent source of ideas. After all, how
did Descartes come to discover the cogito? Rejecting even this, we have
turned to science and the scientific m ethod – p hysics and mathematics
in particular – in order to make sense of the world around us. For us
and for Deleuze, Bergson revives our interest in and our affection for
temporal intuition.
According to Bergson, it was his reflection on duration that led him to
what he calls the philosophical ‘method of intuition’, in which intuition
does not stand in opposition to intelligence (Bergson 1946: 33). For
Bergson, what undermines the classical binary approach to intuition and
intelligence is that space is intellectualised time; it is the externalisation
of internal temporal duration, which he defines as the ‘uninterrupted
prolongation of the past into a present which is already blending into
a future’ (35). We may refer to this as continuity, although not the
classical mathematical continuity of infinitesimal points on a line, but
the continuity of an immediate consciousness hardly able to be dis-
tinguished from its object. Duration does not end with consciousness
because intuition reflects not only consciousness but also what is vital;
it enfolds an intuition of life as evolution and duration such that both
are reality (36). This occurs insofar as intuition is never static. It always
begins with movement, with the perception of movement as reality and

the perception of change as essential (37). ‘Intuition, bound up to a
duration, which is growth, perceives in it an uninterrupted continuity of
unforeseeable novelty; it sees, it knows that the mind draws from itself
more than it has, that spirituality consists in just that, and that reality,
impregnated with spirit, is creation’ (39). It is in this manner that intui-
tion is also reflection; it is the mind drawing from itself (103).
Deleuze has a great deal to say about this. Initially, he characterises
Bergson’s intuition in two ways. First, it is not inferred from something
else but arrives in person. This is why, for Deleuze, there is still philoso-
phy and not only science, as science ‘separates us from things and from
their interiority’, whereas, presumably, it is only philosophy that seeks
out the interior (Deleuze 2004: 23). Secondly and necessarily, intuition
arrives as a return; it is a return from space, intelligence and science,
and so it puts us in things, which for Deleuze is what restores us to a
philosophical relationship with the world. Intuition is one movement
but it involves two directions – the intelligible and the sensible – one
ending in the object and the other turning back, retracing the movement
from which it emerged. The return is intuition’s power of negation.
Like Socrates’ demon, it forbids. It turns away from and so forbids the
infusion of accepted ideas, evident theses, and affirmations passing for
science. It says no, ‘impossible’ (Bergson 1946: 129).
How does intuition carry out the return in two directions? It does so
as image; the image is what reaches the soul of a doctrine, as the image
is both nearly matter and nearly mind (Bergson 1946: 139). When a
philosophical doctrine takes shape, images arise ‘following the philoso-
pher through the evolutions of his thought’ (140). Such images may be
or perhaps are always u nclear – t hey are the chaos, or as Deleuze comes
to define this, virtual chaos. But the philosopher takes them up because
she has two means to express h erself – the concept and the image. ‘It is
in concepts that the system develops; it is into an image that it contracts
when it is driven back into the intuition from which it comes’ (141). If
the philosopher supersedes or overrides the image, the intuition likely
loses its vitality, becoming insipid, uninteresting and banal, and the
philosopher falls back into vague, general concepts.
Bergson introduces the chaos of images at the beginning of Matter
and Memory when he situates himself in the presence of the vaguest
of images (1988: 17). He is there in the midst of what can initially be
described as a thermodynamic system that is also a system accommodat-
ing chaos, when chaos is properly defined as ‘a deterministic mechanism
that generates the appearance of randomness’ and is sensitive to initial
Time is Real 19
conditions (Casti 1994: 103). He begins his account with chaos, with
the appearance of randomness, which is to say, a less well-organised
sensibility knowing nothing about theories of matter or spirit, or reality
or ideality, and from this he articulates how such images may lose their
vitality.
All these images act and react upon one another in all their elementary
parts according to constant laws which I call laws of nature, and,; as a
perfect knowledge of these laws would probably allow us to calculate
and to foresee what will happen in each of these images, the future of the
images must be contained in their present and will add to them nothing
new. (Bergson 1988: 17)
If these images exist in a block universe and are the effect of reciprocal
actions and passions following deterministic laws of nature, then even if
they are initially apparently chaotic they should become highly o rdered
– even homogeneous – and this system would operate deterministically.
But evolution and creation call for intuition, and intuition falls within
duration, that which differs from matter but more profoundly differs
first from itself. Thus intuition’s third and possibly most significant
characteristic, Deleuze notes, is that it is the method that seeks differ-
ence, differences in nature or kind and articulations of the real (2004:
26). ‘Space breaks down into undifferentiated matter and differentiated
duration, and duration is differentiated into contraction and expansion’
(26–7); thus quality and quantity, instinct and intelligence, vital and
geometric order, metaphysics and science, are dualities that are tenden-
cies not opposites or contradictories. Duration is the change in nature,
quality, heterogeneity, and crucially, difference from itself, and intuition
takes advantage of this to return, to seek difference between two tenden-
cies, and so to reflect on its own images.
There is a fourth characteristic. Given that space is differentiated into
matter and duration, and duration is differentiated into contraction
and expansion, the method of intuition rediscovers the simple; that
is, what persists as a convergence of probabilities (Deleuze 2004: 27).
Deleuze points to the élan vital, the virtual chaos and its actualisation,
the prolongation of the past into the present, but Bergson does not
merely remain within biology, he also points to the universe that endures
because duration is not merely cognitive or psychological (28). ‘The
more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that
duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elabora-
tion of the absolutely new. The systems marked off by science endure
only because they are bound up inseparably with the rest of the universe’
(Bergson 1983: 11), and only insofar as those systems are reintegrated
back into the ‘Whole’ – like our sun, which radiates heat and light into
the universe, and along this ‘very tenuous’ thread transmits, even to the
smallest particle of our world, the duration immanent to the whole of
the universe (10–11).
Deleuze affirms this Bergsonian method with the confirmation that
the reality of time is the affirmation of actualisation, the invention of
the virtual on any scale insofar as the virtual is the whole (2004: 30).
This is what makes it possible, in Bergson’s thought, for matter to be
the most relaxed degree of duration even as it returns and contracts
as differentiation into the past that is present and the past-present that
creates the temporally new and so creatively endures bound up with the
universe (31).
Deleuze, Peirce and the Continuum

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) would appear to have no visible
connection to either Bergson or to the concepts of duration and intuition
or chaos and complexity, but that view might be short-sighted. Bergson’s
solution to the problem of insipid generalisation in a deterministic uni-
verse is that the general idea will have been felt and passively experi-
enced in intuition and that it will be virtual prior to being thought, and
this can be found as well in Peirce’s unique conception of the continuum
as Thirdness and its manifestations Firstness and Secondness. Let us turn
to his refutation of mechanical generalisation: for Peirce, ‘every general
concept is, in reference to its individuals, strictly a continuum’, but ‘no
collection of individuals could ever be adequate to a concept in general’
(CP 4.642, 5.526; cited in Zalamea 2012: 7).8 Although Peirce goes
on to define continuity similarly to Bergson, as fluidity, he also admits
that continuity has been defined mathematically as a line consisting of
infinitesimal parts.
This does not suffice for Peirce, for whom infinity in the strictest sense
appears to exceed the possibility of direct experience. And yet, there is
one ‘real world’, one ‘positive direct evidence of continuity’, that he can
cite with some confidence, an instance surprisingly similar to that given
by Bergson:
We are immediately aware of only our present feelings – n ot of the future,
nor of the past. The past is known to us by present memory, the future by
present suggestion. But before we can interpret the present feeling which
means memory, or the present feeling that means suggestion, since that
interpretation takes time, that feeling has ceased to be present and is now
Time is Real 21
ast . . . I am trying the hypothesis that it [continuity] is real . . . If this
p
is real, the past is really known to the present . . . Then we must have an
immediate consciousness of the p ast . . . by four units, by eight units, by
sixteen units, etc. . . . Now, this is only true if the series be continuous.
Here, then, it seems to me, we have positive and tremendously strong
reason[s] for believing that time really is continuous. (CP 1.167, 1.168,
1.169)
For Peirce’s conception, just as for Bergson’s duration, continuity
arises from feeling, a present feeling immediately present in conscious-
ness as well as present memory and present suggestion, continuous
with one another. Peirce claims that according to this reasoning, space,
quality and other things, even all things, might be continuous, since,
after all, Peirce’s continuum is merely a discontinuous series with ‘addi-
tional possibilities’, and the best hypothesis is the one that ‘leaves open
the greatest field of possibilities’ (CP 1.170). And just as relevant is the
argument that when a portion of the mind acts on any other, it must be
immediately present to it, for all things ‘swim in continua’ (CP 1.171).
Real continuity arises from feeling or quality but it is a generality, a
general, because it is an absence of distinction of individuals and leaves
room for possible variables that cannot be exhausted by any multitude
of existents (CP 5.103, 5.431; Zalamea 2010: 10). This structure is
formalised in Peirce’s semiotics and his argument for the character of
continuity, wherein parts and wholes are regularised. But also, and
perhaps unexpectedly, it has to do with evolution, that is, diversifica-
tion, the passage from the unorganised to the organised, from what we
have called chaos to complexity, which Peirce refers to as an increase in
variety (CP 1.174).9 Can we say that this is crucial for an open system?
As Peirce argues, ‘were things simpler, was variety less in the original
nebula from which the solar system is supposed to have grown than it
is now when the land and sea swarms with animal and vegetable forms
. . .?’ (CP 1.174).
This view of nature and the universe, this theory, this idea of continu-
ity and evolution on all scales was and continues to be strongly opposed
by the scientific ‘algebraical apparatus of mechanical law’, which has
been asserted to be the one and only, the ‘very idea of law’, because laws
are absolute and cannot grow (CP 1.174, 1.175). The problem with this
view is that it makes the laws of nature blind and inexplicable; how can
we possibly explain the universe, the formation of its galaxies, planets,
stars and life itself on the basis of a single chance, a single role of the
dice? Whereas if continuity and the evolution of laws are real, there is
no reason not to think that the universe has undergone ‘a continuous
growth from non-existence to existence’ (CP 1.175). In chaos, there

is no regularity and so no existence, there is quality or feeling. In the
embrace of the principle of real continuity, the only explanation of the
universe and of things in the universe is that they have evolved.
Continuity is understood by Peirce to be the generality that makes
prediction possible, which he calls Thirdness. The immediate present
of which one is conscious, the quality that is immediate consciousness,
is the feeling of Firstness, as is the whole of consciousness (CP 1.318,
1.342). Thus, it is ‘[f]eeling implied in Firstness’, because feeling is ‘not
referring to anything, not lying behind anything’; it is ‘fresh, original,
spontaneous, and free’, potentiality without existence, to the point that
to describe it is already to falsify it (CP 1.327, 1.355, 1.356, 1.357).
As with any image, it is still utter indeterminacy (CP 1.1405). In the
midst of Firstness, there arises a feeling of struggle between our feeling
and some sort of stimulus. The feeling of struggle is the realisation of
Secondness, which is brute actuality, hard fact, the resistance of the
door that refuses to open, the not-self, reality (CP 1.322). There can be
no brute reality, limitation, conflict or constraint, no Secondness, ‘the
external dead thing’, without quality, the feeling of Firstness, of freedom
and freshness as quality (CP 1.358, 1.361).
The relation between Firstness and Secondness is mediated by
Thirdness; that is, Secondness is the Firstness of Thirdness, but only
when a singular and blind reactive compulsion in a moment of struggle
is replaced by a meaning, something embodied in an event of thought.
This is why Peirce calls Thirdness a sign that stands for the idea it
produces or modifies. A sign conveys meaning and the idea to which it
gives rise is its interpretant. The meaning of a representation is another
representation.
In fact, it is nothing but the representation itself conceived as stripped
of irrelevant clothing. But this clothing can never be completely stripped
off; it is only changed for something more diaphanous. So there is an
infinite regression here. Finally, the interpretant is nothing but another
representation to which the torch of truth is handed along; and as
representation, it has its interpretant again. Lo, another infinite series
(CP 1.339).
Given this, it is no wonder that we have a strong tendency toward
scepticism with respect to finding any real meaning in laws. But only
‘skepticism of the innocent and wholesome kind that tries to bring truth
to light’ is worthwhile (CP 1.344).
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that the Idea is ‘an
n-dimensional, continuous, defined multiplicity’, where dimensions refer
Time is Real 23
to variables upon which a phenomenon depends, and continuity is ‘a

set of relations between changes in these variables’ (1994: 182). This
statement resonates deeply with Peirce’s conception of the continuum.
We noted that for Peirce continuity is generality: ‘the possible is general,
and continuity and generality are two names for the same absence of
distinction of individuals’ (Zalamea 2012: 10; CP 4.172). In fact, con-
tinuity is generality that is understood as conformity to one Idea; that
is, the continuum is ‘all that is possible’ in a field so crowded that
units loose identity and so become continuous (cited in Zalamea 2012:
15; CP 7.535, n. 6; Peirce 1989: 160). As a result, the continuum is
supermultitudinous, a collection so great that its constituents have no
hypothetical existence except in their relations to one another expressive
of the continuum and so are not distinct (Zalamea 2012: 12, 20, 21; CP
3.86–7, 3.95).
This seems to be what Deleuze is aiming at when he refers to the ideal
continuity, especially because the continuum is reflexive and so cannot
be composed of points; it is mise-en-abyme, that is, the whole can be
reflected in any of its parts (Deleuze 1994: 179). This implies that the
continuum is synthetic, unable to be analytically reconstructed, and also
inextensible, unable to be divided, thus unable to be composed of points
(Zalamea 2012: 14). A continuum, where it is continuous and unbroken,
contains no definite parts; its parts are created in the act of defining them
and the precise definition of them breaks the continuity. In other words,
given that the continuum consists in real and general possibilities that
far exceed anything that exists, ‘existence is a rupture’, a discontinuity,
which is a second, Secondness. Peirce’s account thus fills in the structure
of Deleuze’s claim that solutions are like discontinuities, as discontinuity
implies an existence that is the fulfilment of a possibility.
Like Peirce, Deleuze insists that the continuum, that multiplicity that
consists of virtual events, that virtuality is the ‘potential’ through which
states of affairs take effect (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 153). For Peirce,
the richness and possibilities of the continuum far exceed the realm of
existents (Zalamea 2012: 15). Moreover, the continuum has multiple
dimensions and a plasticity that never ruptures (CP 4.512).10 Points of
time or space are ‘ideal limit[s]’, the mathematical notion of limit being
what is approached infinitely closely without ever actually being reached
in dividing time or space (Zalamea 2012: 23; Peirce 1982–2000: 3.106).
Or, as Deleuze and Guattari understand this: ‘states of affairs leave the
virtual chaos on conditions constituted by the limit (reference): they are
actualities, even though they may not yet be bodies or even things, units,
or sets’ (1994: 153).
In the broader context, Deleuze has argued that ‘[i]deal connections

constitutive of the problematic (dialectical) Idea are incarnated in real
relations which are constituted by mathematical theories and carried
over into problems in the form of solutions’, where the solutions are
like discontinuities (1994: 179). Deleuze locates the concept of the
problematic in relation to differential calculus, stating that ‘solutions
are like the discontinuities compatible with differential equations,
engendered on the basis of an ideal continuity’, where the latter is
situated as the trajectory that traces the calculated speed and direction
of an entity (179).
This calls for a structure that allows something to be grasped as a sign,
and this is the structure of the Idea that differentiates; it is the generality
that actualises quality. When Deleuze argues that problems are always
dialectical, this appears to be what he means. By contrast, solutions are
mathematical, physical, biological or sociological. Still, the continuity in
the development of mathematics has made ‘differences in kind between
differential calculus and other instruments merely secondary’ (Deleuze
1994: 181). This is because, as Deleuze argues, the dialectical Idea, the
problematic, is a system of differential relations, and dialectical Ideas
are the differentials of thought (Thirdness) engendered or incarnated in
various domains (Secondness), each of which is characterised by its own
differential calculus as determined by the problematic Idea.
In addressing the problem of how to characterise the relationship
between things and thought without resorting to dualism or certain
versions of idealism and without the bloc universe and determinism,
Deleuze has made ample use of both Bergson and Peirce. For Bergson,
it is the continuity duration-intuition that moves an image from banal
generality by returning it to intuition, each time creating a new image.
For Peirce, the richness and possibilities of the continuum far exceed
the realm of existents (Zalamea 2012: 15). The continuum cannot be
constructed starting from existents or particulars and so neither can the
virtual chaos. But the state of affairs is inseparable from the potential
through which it takes effect and which sustains its activity and develop-
ment. The continuum, the virtual chaos, the continuity of images which
may be what we refer to as complexity, continues to act as a catalyst in
the face of new or unanticipated problems (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:
153).
Time is Real 25
Notes
1. Some of the material in this essay appeared initially in my book Deleuze,
Bergson, Merleau-Ponty: The Logic and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life,
and Perception (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021).
2. Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s Special and General
Relativity are all time-reversible (see Smolin 2014: 112).
3. Smolin shows that the block universe depends on the relativity of simultaneity.
4. The statement is that of Rudolf Clausius and is cited in Atkins 1984: 25.
5. See Schneider and Sagan 2005: 26. ‘An example of a closed system is a chemical
reaction in a closed flask where excess heat from the reaction is permitted to
move outside the flask into the surroundings.’
6. See Schneider and Sagan 2005: 28. ‘A change in one variable may lead near-
linearly to a change in another variable; or it may trigger unpredictable changes
that cannot be modeled with relatively simple mathematical equations.’
7. These accusations continue to the present day.
8. References for Peirce are to The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce,
abbreviated to CP followed by volume and page number.
9. Peirce attributes this idea to the advocate of evolutionary theory, Herbert
Spencer.
10. Deleuze does not appear to follow Peirce into the ‘logic of vagueness’, bypass-
ing excluding the law of the excluded middle in favour of the concept of virtual-
ity.
References
Atkins, P. W. (1984), The Second Law: Energy, Chaos, and Form, San Francisco:
W. H. Freeman and Co.
Bergson, H. (1946), The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison, New York:
Citadel Press.
Bergson, H. (1983), Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, Lanham, MD:
University Press of America.
Bergson, H. (1988), Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott
Palmer, New York: Zone Books.
Canales, J. (2015), The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the
Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time, Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Casti, J. (1994), Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World through the
Science of Surprise, New York: Harper Collins.
Cortês, M. and L. Smolin (2018), ‘Reversing the Irreversible: From Limit Cycles to
Emergent Time Symmetry’, Phys. Rev. D 97, 026004.
Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (2004), Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David
Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina, Los Angeles, Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1931–35, 1958), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed.
Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur Burks, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1976), New Elements of Mathematics, The Hague: Mouton.
Peirce, C. S. (1982–2000), Writings, ed. Nathan Houser, Bloomington: Indiana

University Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1989), Reasoning and the Logic of Things, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Petrov, V. (2013), ‘Bertrand Russell’s Criticism of Bergson’s Views about Continuity
and Discreteness’, FILOZOFIA 68 (10): 890–904.
Prigogine, I. and I. Stengers (1984), Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with
Nature, New York: Bantam Books.
Russell, B. (1914), The Philosophy of Bergson. With a Reply by Mr. H. Wildon
Carr. Cambridge and London: Macmillan.
Schneider, E. D. and D. Sagan (2005), Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics,
and Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Serres, M. (2000), The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes, Manchester: Clinamen
Press.
Smolin, L. (1999), The Life of the Cosmos, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smolin, L. (2014), Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the
Universe, Boston: Mariner.
Zalamea, F. (2012), Peirce’s Continuum: A Methodological and Mathematical
Approach, Boston: Docent, at <https://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07
/Zalamea-Peirces-Continuum.pdf>.
Chapter 2
The Movement of Time
Thomas Nail
We talk about the movement of time but does time move, or does
movement occur in time? This is a fundamental question in the philoso-
phy of time that philosophers and physicists are still trying to answer.
Interestingly, one of the most original and shockingly contemporary
answers to this question was given by the first-century Roman poet
Lucretius almost two millennia ago. Lucretius believed that nature was
composed of continually moving matter whose spontaneous swerving
occurs in ‘no determinate time and space’ (incerto tempore, incertisque
loci). Some ancient philosophers and scientists believed that time was
linear, others that it was cyclical. Virtually no one thought it was ‘inde-
terminate’. So, unfortunately, Lucretius’ theory of time sounded so
strange that it was either ignored or misinterpreted as a reference to the
soul’s freedom.
It was not until the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze returned to this
idea in his 1969 book, Logique du sens, that Lucretius’ theory of time’s
‘swerve’ was taken seriously. In the appendix of his book, Deleuze was
the first to argue that Lucretius had put forward an indeterminate (non-
linear and non-chronological) theory of time. Deleuze argued that the
swerve of falling atoms in Lucretius’ philosophy was not the result of a
determinate collision with other atoms but was caused by a vital force or
conatus immanent to them. This was a brilliant and vital insight but also
a strange one. Lucretius was a materialist, not a vitalist, and never used
the word conatus to describe the swerve of matter. Therefore, it is hard
to reconcile Deleuze’s conatus theory of the temporality of the swerve
with Lucretius’ text. It is even harder to reconcile Deleuze’s ‘static’ view
of time in Difference and Repetition with Lucretius’ kinetic materialism.
Deleuze explicitly subordinates movement to time: ‘The [third] synthesis
is necessarily static, since time is no longer subordinated to movement;
time is the most radical form of change, but the form of change does not
28 Thomas Nail
change’ (1994: 89). Similarly, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze subordi-

nates movement and matter to time in his theory of ‘an empty form of
time, independent of all matter’ (1990: 62).
This chapter is an intervention into the strange history of the ‘inde-
terminist’ theory of time first put forward by Lucretius and partially
recovered by Deleuze. I argue that Deleuze left out the material and
kinetic aspects of Lucretius’ theory of time and that this has caused
problems for Deleuze’s theory of time. Alternately, I propose to recover
these aspects with a kinetic theory of time drawing on Lucretius.
Deleuze, Lucretius and the Temporality of the Swerve

Deleuze’s work played an essential and pivotal role in shaping the
current revival of interest in Lucretius and the philosophy of time. Since
Karl Marx, he was the first to return to Epicurus and Lucretius and
try to revive a philosophy of immanence. Unlike Marx’s dissertation,
however, people read Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense and were directly
influenced by it. Let’s take a closer look at three critical innovations in
Deleuze’s reading of Lucretius and the unique temporality of the swerve
discussed there.
1. The essence of the atom is to course and flow

Deleuze was the first philosopher since Marx to interpret the essence
of atoms as flows. ‘The ancient atom is entirely misunderstood if it is
overlooked that its essence is to course and flow’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 489). This is no small gesture since the prevailing and almost
universal interpretation of atoms is that they are discrete, self-identical
units. Deleuze explicitly credits Marx’s dissertation for this wild idea.
In his dissertation, Marx used Hegel’s idea of dialectics from The
Philosophy of Nature to reinterpret Epicurean atomism’s key concepts
as only dimensions or moments of a single continuous unfolding process.
This meant taking some significant liberties with Epicurus’ minimal
extant corpus of three letters. Needless to say, a dialectical reading of
Epicurus had very few followers in classical philology or Marxism.
I will not go into the technical details of Marx’s incredible reading of
Epicurus here, but here is one memorable quote:
The consequence of this for the monads as well as for the atoms would
therefore be – s ince they are in constant m
otion – t hat neither monads nor
atoms exist, but rather disappear in the straight line: for the solidity of the
The Movement of Time 29
atom does not even enter into the picture, insofar as it is only considered
as something falling in a straight line. (Marx 2006: 111; emphasis added)
Marx uses dialectics to completely sublate the atom’s discreteness into
its fall, swerve and movement. Deleuze was likely the first to pick up
on this idea’s wild originality and run with it. In The Logic of Sense he
does not credit Marx explicitly, but in Nietzsche and Philosophy he does
provide a short note saying that this was where he got the idea (Deleuze
1983: 6–7).
2. The swerve is non-spatiotemporal and not epistemologically

indeterminate
Deleuze also emphasised the ontologically unassignable nature of the
atom’s swerve in Lucretius. Many commentators have treated the swerve
as merely an epistemological uncertainty and treated atomism as an
otherwise standard determinism (Spencer 2014). Deleuze, by contrast,
writes:
‘incertus’ does not mean indeterminate, but rather unassignable; ‘paulum’,
‘incerto tempore’, ‘intervallo minimo’ mean ‘in a time smaller than the
minimum of continuous, thinkable time’.
This is why the clinamen manifests neither contingency nor indetermina-
tion . . . [but] the irreducible plurality of causes or of causal series. (Deleuze
1990: 270)
Deleuze thus emphasised the non- mechanistic nature of the swerve,
against the early modern interpretation of atoms as agreeing with deter-
ministic and assignable laws of nature. In Deleuze’s reading, the swerve
is neither random nor deterministic but rather irreducibly plural and
relational. There is no single law that could predict its motion, not
because the movement of matter is random but because it is so entan-
gled and relational that there is no objective view that can capture the
ontological plurality of relations. This is not merely a limit of human
knowledge but a feature of an immanent ontology where the universe is,
as Spinoza says, ‘cause of itself’ (Ethics, Book 1, Def. 1). This move also
eschews any philosophy of time where time is made of fundamentally
discrete and assignable spatiotemporal now points. The temporality of
the swerve, according to Deleuze, occurs below the minimum of any
thinkable or assignable temporal point (1990: 270). This is an extraor-
dinary and radical notion.
30 Thomas Nail
3. The swerve is immanent to the atom and not caused by

something else
The final key idea of Deleuze’s reading of Lucretius is the idea that
the swerve is irreducible to external causality. Lucretius is explicit that
external collisions do not cause the swerve but that the swerve is imma-
nent to the movement of matter. This may sound like a straightforward
reading of Lucretius, but Cicero, Plutarch and many other commen-
tators and critics thought this was a completely ridiculous and even
embarrassing idea. It was the reason why so many modern philosophers
rejected the concept of the swerve and replaced it with mechanistic
materialism. They also inserted God, the soul and human freedom back
into Lucretius’ philosophy. In short, they were unwilling to affirm the
consequences of an immanent swerve. Here, Deleuze tries to affirm the
consequences of an immanent causality. Matter swerves without any
external causality. Deleuze writes:
The clinamen or swerve has nothing to do with an oblique movement
which would come accidentally to modify a vertical fall. It has always been
present: it is not a secondary movement, nor a secondary determination of
the movement, which would be produced at any time, at any place. The
clinamen is the original determination of the direction of the movement of
the atom. (Deleuze 1990: 270)
The idea of an immanent swerve in matter is of crucial importance to
the philosophy of time. The swerve’s temporality does not occur in any
assignable time or space, and one cannot reduce it to a linear causal
sequence. It is a kinetic indeterminacy. Time without causality is a
very different notion of time. In a strict sense there is no succession of
anything at all. There is a differential process of iteration more or less
similar in each moment but never any underlying identity. All attempts
to define an external causality of matter’s motion are claims to tran-
scendence or something outside nature.
These are the three excellent ideas that I think we should take from
Deleuze’s short but profound intervention in the reception of Lucretius
and his theory of time. There are, however, some less desirable and even
inaccurate aspects of Deleuze’s interpretation that I think we should
leave behind if we want to think about the temporality of the swerve.
The Problems with Deleuze’s Interpretation of Lucretius

Even when there is a core of good ideas in their interpretations, it is also
important to acknowledge where Marx or Deleuze have gone entirely
outside the text to make their points. Epicurus did not have, and cer-
tainly did not mention, any theory of a materialist dialectic in his letters.
We have zero evidence that he said or believed anything like what Marx
said about him in the passage quoted above. Nonetheless, the idea of
atomism without discrete, isolated atoms is not entirely lacking in the
case of Lucretius, who never used the word ‘atom’.
In any case, let’s take a closer look at three key places where Deleuze’s
reading goes astray from the text in a way we may not want to connect
to the temporality of the swerve.
1. Lucretius does not use the word ‘atom’ and never says it is
discrete
Deleuze, like virtually every other commentator, talks about ‘atoms’ in
Lucretius. Still, Lucretius never used the Greek word atomos, nor did
he use the Latin word atomus, which Cicero created later to talk about
atoms. Instead, Lucretius multiplied his terms for matter, complicating
any unified concept of matter in his work.
Furthermore, in all his terms for matter, Lucretius never says that
matter is discrete or that it is particle-like. This makes the following
claim by Deleuze not quite textually accurate:
The sensible object is endowed with sensible parts, but there is a minimum
sensible which represents the smallest part of the object; similarly, the atom
is endowed with parts that are thought, but there is a minimum thought
which represents the smallest part of the atom . . . the indivisible atom is
formed of thought minima. (Deleuze 1990: 268)
There is absolutely zero textual evidence in De Rerum Natura (The
Nature of Things) to suggest that Lucretius thought that atoms have
‘parts’. Firstly, this is because Lucretius does not use the word atom or
an equivalent. Second, even if this were the definition of an atom for
Epicurus, it would not necessarily be true for Lucretius. Deleuze does
not offer any source citation or translation to support this claim either.
32 Thomas Nail
2. Lucretius does not say that atoms are made of thought

I suspect that Deleuze may have been trying to reconcile Spinoza’s
philosophy with Epicurus in suggesting the existence of thought-atoms.
It’s only a hunch based on what he says in the following passage:
The atom is that which must be thought, and that which can only be
thought . . . The atom is to thought what the sensible object is to the senses:
it is the object which is essentially addressed to thought, the object which
gives food to thought, just as the sensible object is that which is given to the
senses. (Deleuze 1990: 268)
Lucretius indeed believes that one cannot see corpora or bodily matters
with the eye because they are processes, not objects. However, this does
not mean that matter is thought. Deleuze offers no textual support from
De Rerum Natura for this claim because there is none. Instead, he cites
Epicurus as saying that ‘the atom moves “as swiftly as thought”’ (1990:
269). He then extrapolates this to mean that the atom’s reality is in
thought. If Marx mixed ancient materialism with Hegel, Deleuze mixed
it with Spinoza. Deleuze had some creative insights but also made some
wildly non-textual claims. ‘In agreement with the nature of the atom,
this minimum of continuous time refers to the apprehension of thought’
(269). Deleuze tries to make matter simultaneously thought. Although
this position is consistent with Spinoza, Deleuze does not directly credit
him here. We may want to adopt this Spinozist interpretation for other
reasons, but it is not something Lucretius said. It is inconsistent with
Lucretius’ philosophy because there are no atoms, no parts, and cer-
tainly no thought-atoms. My worry about this claim is that it heads
in an idealist direction and threatens to transform Lucretius’ radical
materialism into an idealism or panpsychism (see Nail 2018b, 2018c,
2020; Nail et al. 2019).
3. Lucretius does not say that the swerve is conatus (vital

striving) or that nature is power
Deleuze does not explicitly use Spinoza’s name, but the term conatus
and the philosophy of nature as power are sufficient to recall Deleuze’s
massive dissertation on Spinoza. Deleuze says that ‘The clinamen is the
original determination of the direction of the movement of the atom. It
is a kind of conatus’ (1990: 269). This is a key point for thinking about
the temporality of the swerve. We might surmise that time is not assign-
able, causal or linear because it is the pure vital striving of being.
Deleuze does not attempt to find a textual equivalent of conatus in

Lucretius. We have no direct textual evidence of what Epicurus thought
of the swerve, only testimonia (the most important being Lucretius). In
Lucretius’ poem, the swerve of matter is nowhere described as a vital
power or striving. Lucretius writes about the movement, fold or curva-
ture of matter without attributing any external transcendent vital cause
or any immanent vital power of any kind. Matter moves, and swerves.
As much as Deleuze rejects the early modern attempts to explain the
movement of matter by something else (god, soul, freedom, force, etc.),
he can’t keep from assigning an immanent motive power to movement
in the form of a vital striving or conatus. This is not the same as a
transcendent explanation of the swerve, but it is nonetheless completely
unnecessary and not textually supported in Lucretius or Epicurus.
Deleuze imports a vitalist temporality unknown to Lucretius.
Deleuze also claims that ‘Nature, to be precise, is power. In the name
of this power things exist one by one’ (1990: 267); and that ‘There is
the power of the diverse and its production, but there is also the power
of the reproduction of the diverse’ (271). These lines might as well be
straight from his book on Spinoza. Yet, Lucretius nowhere says that
nature is power. He says that nature moves and that it is material, but
terms like power, force and energy do not have any special status that is
not, in the end, reducible to matter in motion. If power were something
other than matter or motion then it would have no place in Lucretius’
materialist philosophy. However, if one used the term ‘power’ merely to
describe matter’s movement, then it would be completely redundant and
unnecessary.
Deleuze knew what he was doing with this interpretation. The paper
trail is explicit in a parenthesis in his earlier book, Nietzsche and
Philosophy (1962). There, Deleuze subordinates matter and motion to
force, contrasting himself and Nietzsche (and implicitly Spinoza) against
Lucretius’ and Marx’s kinetic materialism:
Only force can be related to another force. (As Marx says when he inter-
prets atomism, ‘Atoms are their own unique objects and can relate only
to themselves’ – Marx, The Difference Between the Democritean and
Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. But the question is; can the basic notion
of atom accommodate the essential relation which is attempted to it? The
concept only becomes coherent if one thinks of force instead of atom. For
the notion of atom cannot in itself contain the difference necessary for the
affirmation of such a relation, difference in and according to the essence.
Thus atomism would be a mask for an incipient dynamism. (Deleuze 1983:
6–7)
34 Thomas Nail
Deleuze finds the idea of materialism insufficient because he cannot

imagine how matter could be internally differentiated without the exist-
ence of a vital power. He cannot imagine movement without a cause
or something else to explain it. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze
is explicit that ‘the clinamen is by no means a change of direction in
the movement of an atom, much less an indetermination testifying to
the existence of a physical freedom’ (1994: 184). Matter does not have
agency and freedom on its own without some kind of dynamic power
or force.
However, I have argued elsewhere on several grounds that motion
can be differentiated without assuming any force or vital striving power
(Nail 2018a, 2020). For instance, Lucretius defines the swerve as an
indeterminate movement of matter. As a materialist, he does not attrib-
ute the swerve to any vital force or power. For him, matter is capable
of novelty on its own. I see no reason why conatus is needed to make
matter swerve, and I have tried to show this textually in my books on
Lucretius.
Therefore, I suggest that we leave this aspect of Deleuze’s interpreta-
tion where it belongs: with Spinoza. This is the case for textual reasons
but also for philosophical reasons. I think the concepts of conatus
and power are unnecessary and add nothing to our understanding of
Lucretius and the indeterminate temporality of the swerve. At the worst,
they are likely to lead readers to conflate it with Margaret Cavendish’s
early modern vitalist interpretation of Lucretius.1
In the next section, I would like to focus on what Lucretius says about
the temporality of the swerve and show how we can use it to develop a
material and indeterministic theory of time.
Lucretius and the Movement of Time

One of the things that is so interesting to me about Lucretius is that he
is one of the few in the western tradition who says that matter moves
indeterminately without any other explanation. There is no trace of
transcendence or vital forces whatsoever in his work. For Lucretius, the
indeterminate movement of matter does not occur in space and time
(which would precede motion) but produces space and time. Movement
is thus not a movement from point A to point B (points in space tra-
versed over time) – it is the process that produces the line and points AB
in the first place. If this sounds Bergsonian, it is because Lucretius was
Bergson’s first intellectual love. Bergson’s first book was a line-by-line
commentary on Lucretius’ great poem De Rerum Natura.
In Bergson’s final lectures, La Pensée et le mouvant (Thought and

Mobility, 1934), he returns to the primacy of movement, claiming that
‘time is mobility’ (2007: 8). Becoming is the continual mobility of reality
itself. ‘Reality is mobility itself’ (46). In this final work, Bergson could
hardly be any more clear or unequivocal when he writes that ‘[i]f move-
ment is not everything, it is nothing’ (155). Whatever apparent primacy
Bergson had given to so-called vital force/impetus or time/duration should
now be understood to be nothing other than the primacy of motion itself.
In my view, the philosophy of time, like force, is another historical
instance of philosophers and scientists trying to explain why matter
moves.2 Force was popular in the early modern period, and time was
popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most ontologies and
theories of time treat it as the ultimate a priori of nature (or of human
existence). Historically, this was supported by Einstein’s theory of general
relativity, even though there were still exceptional ‘singularities’ (in black
holes, for example) left unexplained by that theory. Matter, in general rel-
ativity, moves across a pre-existing curved spacetime. If quantum theory is
correct, however, there should be a quantum theory of gravity, including
space and time, in which spacetime emerges from the laws of quantum
physics. In particular, energetic vibrations below the level of space and
time should produce space and time like ripples on a pond’s surface.
Contemporary theoretical physics points in this d irection – e ven if the
formalisms of ‘quantum gravity theory’ have yet to be experimentally
verified. The race is on to prove them. Lucretius was already the pre-
cursor to this idea 2,000 years ago, and at least one quantum gravity
theorist has acknowledged this (Rovelli 1998). Matter, for Lucretius,
produces space and time through its indeterminate motion. In other
words, I think we have finally come back to Lucretius. Perhaps this indi-
cates that it is time to shift focus from ontologies of time to ontologies
of motion. Maybe it’s time to consider a new perspective. This is what I
think Lucretius can offer us: a kinetic theory of time.
Time, for Lucretius, is the kinetic dissipation of matter. Matter tends
to move from denser to less dense regions, and this provides the arrow of
time that we experience as regional beings. This is entropy: the spread-
ing out of matter. This does not mean that time is chronological. Where
would the past go when it passes? The past is still with us in the
immanent material that we are. The future, too, is here in the matter that
we are. As Bergson said in his final lectures, time is nothing but move-
ment: the transformation or redistribution of an open whole. At every
moment, the entire universe kinetically transforms its entire distribution
of space and time. There is no static nature to which the present can
36 Thomas Nail
refer as past nature. The whole thing is continually different from itself
– but tending regionally toward energetic dissipation (Bergson 1988: 47,
197; 2007: 46, 155).
In my reading, Lucretius was right about the primacy of movement
over time. Deleuze got very close but ended up inserting the ideas of
conatus, vitality, power and force. He even claims that this dynamic
time is ‘necessarily static, since time is no longer subordinated to move-
ment’ (1994: 89). The form of change does not change, and so Deleuze
calls it a ‘static genesis’ in The Logic of Sense. Deleuze’s idea that time
is formal and static sounds much more like the strobe-like ‘occasions’
or ‘Cambridge changes’ of Alfred North Whitehead than like Bergson
or Lucretius.3 According to Whitehead, change is only ‘the difference
between actual occasions comprised in some determined event’, and
thus it is ‘impossible to attribute “change” to any actual entity’ (1978:
73, 59). ‘Thus an actual entity never moves: It is where it is and what it
is’ (Whitehead 2014: 73). For Whitehead, change and motion relate to
a succession of actual entities and are constituted only by the differences
among them. Every entity is ‘what it is’, and it ‘becomes’ as the whole
of reality enters a succession of different states, but technically nothing
ever changes or moves.
The Temporality of the Clinamen

In what follows, I would like to take Deleuze’s study of the temporality
of the swerve in a more materialist direction, leaving vital forces and
Spinoza’s conatus behind. In my view, Deleuze’s critical insight about
Lucretius’ theory of time is that it does not occur in an assignable time
or space. However, in my reading, this leads us to an indeterminate
and materialist philosophy of time.4 This also significantly changes our
understanding of matter as a substance or an attribute of a substance.
Lucretius has a unique process definition of matter. I want to show that
this is a better way to think about the swerve’s temporality in Book II of
De Rerum Natura.
In his well-known description of the swerve, Lucretius highlights two
key features. It ‘occurs in an indeterminate time and space’, and it is a
‘change in motion’ (2003: 2.216–20).
Illud in his quoque te rebus cognoscere avemus, corpora cum deorsum

rectum per inane feruntur ponderibus propriis, incerto tempore ferme
incertisque locis spatio depellere paulum, tantum quod momen mutatum
dicere possis.
In this matter, there is this, too, that I want you to understand, that when
the first bodies are moving straight downward through the void by their
own weight, at times completely undetermined and in undetermined places
they swerve a little from their course, but only so much as you could call a
change of motion.
Corpora (flows of bodily matters) move downwards, carried by their

energy and momentum through and by making space (deorsum rectum
per inane feruntur ponderibus propriis) (Lucretius 2003: 2.217–18).
Without any measurable discrete time or space (incerto tempore ferme
incertisque locis spatio) (2.218–19), the corpora change, modulate or
deviate (depellere) (2.219) their motion (momen mutatum) (2.220) to
the smallest possible degree (paulum) (2.219). This is not the result of
any other external or oblique motion but is internal to the corporeal
flow’s motion. Like the turbulent currents of air that drive dust motes,
the corpora’s movement is also fundamentally turbulent because it
changes its motion on its own (momen mutatum).
These turbulent twists do not happen in spacetime but create spacetime
through their collisions. Time, for Lucretius, is nothing apart from the
relative motion, rest and sensation of things (tempus sentire fatendumst /
semotum ab rerum motu placidaque quiete) (2003: 1.462–3). Movement
is always material, and matter is always in continual motion. There is
no stasis in nature and nothing ontologically discrete.5 ‘Discontinuous
movement’ is just the difference between divisible points of spacetime
and has nothing to do with movement at all. Therefore, if we want
to say that being actually moves, such movement cannot emerge from
ontological discontinuity but must emerge from the twin conditions of
an unbroken process (solida) and motion (flux).
Lucretius is clear that the movement and modulation of the corpora
or matters do not occur in time and space (nec tempore / loci certo)
(2003: 2.259–60). Corpora are not spatial or temporal; they are the
material conditions of space and time itself. Therefore, we cannot say
that there is a point of spacetime that the corpora have not yet reached
and then measure how long it takes for them to get there. Their move-
ment produces space and time as it goes. We thus reach the radical and
paradoxical-sounding conclusion that the speed of matter is simultane-
ous, only on the condition that we understand matter to be productive
of space itself.
Showing how matter in motion produces spacetime through swerving
and folding is the holy grail of contemporary physics. There are numer-
ous theoretical models of how general relativity might be unified with
38 Thomas Nail
quantum physics to explain the emergence of space and time. These

are called ‘quantum gravity theories’. None have been experimentally
demonstrated, but physicists are presently trying to gather experimental
data that might do so.
A consequence of Lucretius’ materialist philosophy of time is that
matter can instantaneously move since space and time are material. This
was an absurd-sounding scientific idea for hundreds of years, but not
any more. Quantum entanglement experiments show that particles can
make coordinated changes simultaneously without any action at a dis-
tance. Two electrons can be entangled and then physically separated. At
a distance, the two electron spins change simultaneously in correlation
with one another. This is possible because, when one spin is changed, it
does not ‘cause’ the other to change by communicating information to
the other.
The electrons are two topological regions of the same quantum field.
There is no transfer of information across the quantum field. The field,
which spreads out over vast distances, changes what it is as a whole.
Quantum movement is an intensive transformation of the whole. We
can locate a particle in spacetime, but spacetime itself is an emergent and
metastable feature of swerving quantum matter.
These experimental findings are consistent with Lucretius’ idea that
corpora are not reducible to space and time. Furthermore, if the swerve
happens on a pre-given immaterial background of space and time, then
space and time would have emerged ex nihilo. This is the limit of general
relativity. It can describe spacetime dynamism, but it cannot explain
how spacetime itself emerged. For Lucretius, we should also not assume
that something immaterial like static formal spacetime can give birth to
something mobile and material like the swerve.
Simulacral Time: Brevi spatio, temporis in puncto

The other place where Lucretius writes about his materialist theory of
time is in Book IV of De Rerum Natura, where he discusses the simu-
lacra. Deleuze also references this section in his reading of Lucretius.
For Lucretius, matter makes spacetime by moving. This is a radical
thesis. As matter flows, it weaves figures or patterns that Lucretius calls
simulacra. Simulacra are metastable and entangled ‘things’ (simulacra
rerum). Deleuze was correct to read them as very different than copies
of copies or resemblances of something else.6 In contrast to the primary
flows of matter that Lucretius calls corpora or primordia, simulacra are
relatively discrete and spatiotemporal.
In the final lines of Lucretius’ description of simulacra, he puts forward

perhaps the most revolutionary physical thesis of Book IV, and perhaps
in all of De Rerum Natura. He argues that the origin of the emergence
of simulacra occurs in ‘brevi spatio, temporis in puncto’. This echoes the
indeterminate spacetime of the swerving of the first-threads in Book II,
‘incerto tempore, incertisque loci’:
ergo multa brevi spatio simulacra genuntur, ut merito celer his rebus dicatur
origo.
Therefore many images are produced in a brief space,
so that deservedly the birth of these things is said to be quick.
necessest
temporis in puncto rerum simulacra ferantur
it is necessary that images
be carried off from things in a point of time (Lucretius 2003: 4.159–60,
4.163–4)
Simulacra are things (simulacra rerum), and things are by definition

spatiotemporal and relatively d iscrete – a s Lucretius described in great
detail in Books I and II. Simulacra are produced (genuntur) or thrown
off from larger composite things in the fastest possible spacetime. If they
were not, then there would be some thing between them, which would
lead to an infinite regress. This is the explicit point of these lines.
However, the implicit question Lucretius is posing is: ‘What is between
spatiotemporal simulacra?’ Or even more dramatically stated: ‘What is
the origin of spacetime itself?’ In effect, Lucretius has already given us
the answer to this question. The primordia or first-threads of matter
are the origins of spacetime. Just as the flows of matter weave things
through folding, so spacetime itself emerges from the indeterminate
movement of matter. In the lines above, Lucretius temporalises space –
‘brief space’ – and spatialises time – ‘point of time’.
How fast do simulacra fly off of things? They fly off at an indeterminate
speed that is not assignable to a fixed space or time. Discrete spacetimes
are, like simulacra, folds in the threads of matter. Since we know from
Book II that matter flows by indeterminately swerving ‘incerto tempore,
incertisque loci’, we conclude that determinate spacetimes, like simulacra,
emerge from indeterminate fluctuations of matter. This sounds incred-
ible, but like most theses in Lucretius, strikingly contemporary. Today,
most theoretical physicists agree that spacetime is not an a priori or meta-
physical given but rather an emergent property of our quantum universe.
More specifically, the emergence of spacetime is a quantum effect of the
40 Thomas Nail
Simulacra Rerum Simulacra Rerum
Indeterminate
flux of indeterminately high energies at work below the level of measur-

ably discrete spacetime fluctuations called the ‘Planck limit’. Energy does
not vanish below the Planck length but instead becomes so radically
indeterminate that the known laws of physics break down. For instance,
if you put a particle in a box the size of the Planck length or smaller, the
indeterminacy of its position would be greater than the size of the box,
and its mass would produce a black hole whose radius would be double
the Planck length. The time it would take to cross this radius would be
four times the Planck time (Siegel 2019). At these ultra-intense energies,
the fluctuation and curvature of space become so indeterminate that
we cannot calculate anything meaningful about it, even with quantum
gravity theories.7 Indeterminacy becomes more considerable than any
prediction we can make. Statistical mechanics and probability theory run
aground on the shores of this radical indeterminacy at the heart of things.
Spatiotemporal discreteness is something that emerges from a more
fundamentally indeterminate flux or inclination of energy/matter.
Lucretius was thus perhaps the first to pose a version of quantum gravity
theory avant la lettre. Even more surprising is that his answer is not
inconsistent with what we currently know about the nature of the inde-
terminately high vacuum fluctuations that lurk beneath the fabric of
spacetime itself.
How then does something like our experience of the chronological
passing of time emerge from an indeterminate material process? In brief,
matter swerves into metastable patterns or loops that seem relatively
discrete and stable. The present is a metastable state which forms like
an eddy as matter moves from hotter to colder states. What we call
the passage of present moments is the dissipation of relatively stable
metastases and the formation of new ones. Time flows because of the
swerving matter that supports it and dissolves it. Time is nothing other
than the flowing, folding and unfolding of material processes. It is not a
static genesis but a kinetic genesis.
Conclusion
At the turn of the eighteenth century, the philosophy of ‘forces’ faced
a brutal empiricist critique from Hume and others. Empiricists deemed
forces metaphysical entities with no reality. However, it was not until
nearly the end of the eighteenth century that Immanuel Kant began
to replace the metaphysics of force with a new ontologically primary
descriptor: time.
At least since Aristotle, time had been considered ontologically sub-
ordinate to motion and other terms. It was not until Kant that one
of the most historically derivative ontological categories, time, became
the most primary. After Kant, almost every nineteenth- and twentieth-
century ontologist took up the ontological primacy of time.
Modern ontology became increasingly critical of the idea that space,
eternity and force were ontologically foundational categories. Time,
however, remained mostly immune to the same critiques. Time became
the new name for b eing – u
shering in an age of generalised chronophilia.
With only a few exceptions, almost all modern ontologies of the eight-
eenth through twentieth centuries, in one way or another, accept the
reality and foundational nature of time. Everything occurs in time, but
time itself was not created by or derived from anything else.
This chapter’s thesis is that time, like space, eternity and force, is a
fundamentally kinetic process. Time is derived from motion in at least
three ways.
First, by definition, time is a division between three tenses: past, present
and future; before, during, after. Without such a division, it does not
make sense to use the word time without confusion. Time, as a divided
and differential phenomenon, presupposes that which it divides, namely
the flow and swerve of motion. If temporal division were fundamental,
being would already be divided, and movement would be reduced to a
mere juxtaposition of vacuum-sealed fragments, as Whitehead and the
occasionalists describe. Nothing would secure or allow for transition
between divided points. It would be a ‘static genesis’. Time, in my view,
is therefore derivative of movement. I have tried to show the origins of
this idea in Lucretius’ theory of the swerve and the simulacra. Motion is
how metastable moments emerge and pass.
Second, contemporary accelerationist cosmology confirms the deriva-
tive nature of time. Before the existence of the known universe, most
physicists postulate a rapid unfolding of matter (as quantum fields)
moving (exploding) o utward – in a stochastic process of differentiation
and combination. All forms of current division and discreteness come
42 Thomas Nail
from the primary movement of indeterminate quantum fluctuations

below the Planck limit. Without matter in motion (the explosion) there
would be no spatial division or distinction, no rotational images of eter-
nity in the heavenly bodies, no forces or relations between bodies, and no
temporal division among a before, during and after. Temporal division
(linear or circular) is only possible based on a more primary explosion
of motion or entropic materialisation. Therefore, time is possible only
because the universe moves in a certain way and because we happen
to exist in a low-entropy universe. In high-entropy universes, or at the
Planck scale, things move differently. Therefore, it seems that time is not
ontologically foundational but derived from the kinetic process of cosmic
acceleration and materialisation (Rovelli 2018: 83–4). What we call time
is a series of metastable states in an indeterminate flow of matter.
Third, and relatedly, thermodynamics also confirms this thesis.
According to thermodynamics, time appears to us as irreversible because
it is derived from matter in entropic motion. Since heat is fundamentally
kinetic (bodies in motion), and since motion is fundamentally pedetic,
some motion is always lost or escapes any given circulation (entropy).
However, according to the law of entropy that defines this thermody-
namic foundation of time, entropy itself is not absolute. It is only a
macroscopic tendency, not a fundamentality. In other words, it is the
pedetic movement of matter that is the condition for both the emergence
and the destruction of time.
If time existed independently from matter in motion, then it would
be logically reversible. However, the postulation of such a reversal,
independence and fundamentality of time is the result of a metaphysical
presupposition in the mathematical disciplines that can demonstrate
the so-called reversibility of time in equations. Mathematicians first run
an equation (including stochastic equations) forward, laying out the
formula and inputting the physical variables. Then, having concluded,
they see if they can derive the variables from the conclusion. Invariably,
they do. What this shows, however, is not the reversibility of time but
the reversibility of equations. Starting with the solution and working
backward confirms what they discovered in the initial formula and
observations.
What the difference between thermodynamics and mathematics
shows on this point is that if time existed independently from matter
and motion, as it does in mathematics, then it would be macroscopi-
cally reversible. However, according to thermodynamics, real matter
and motion do not actually behave this way in this macroscopic region
of our universe. The metaphysical and mathematical-idealist description
of time existing independently from material motion has no absolute

reality. The movement of time forward and backward has a strictly
physical definition because it is tied to kinetic energy. This does not
mean, however, that our description of time has no reality. What ther-
modynamics shows us is precisely this fact: time is a description given
by bodies in motion of bodies in motion and nothing else outside of this.
What we are describing when we describe time can certainly be called
sequence and seriality. Being really does move and change continuously,
and it can be divided into various dimensions we can call past, present
and future. The question then is, ‘What is the kinetic status of such
dimensions and seriality?’
In this chapter, the answer I have proposed, using Deleuze and
Lucretius, is that past, present and future are emergent features of inde-
terminate material fluctuations.
Notes
1. This can be seen in several essays in Ellenzweig and Zammito 2017.
2. For a wonderful chapter arguing that time is only matter in motion see Righini
Bonelli 1973.
3. For a more detailed account of the difference between my process philosophy and
Bergson’s, Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s, see Nail 2018b, chapter three.
4. My reading of the swerve differs from Althusser’s since it is relational and not
random or ‘aleatory’, as Althusser calls it (2006: 163).
5. Plotinus has an interesting theory of the soul as more like a movement than a
thing, but for him, the soul is not material and certainly doesn’t swerve.
6. Dan Smith elaborates on the characteristics of simulacra excellently in Smith
2012: 12–16. See also Deleuze’s account in The Logic of Sense (1990: 257–67)
and Difference and Repetition (1994: 69).
7. This is what Susskind calls ‘black hole complementarity’ (2008: 237).
References
Althusser, L. (2006), Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987,
London: Verso.
Palmer, New York: Zone Books.
Bergson, H. (2007), The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, New
York: Dover Publications.
Deleuze, G. (1983), Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, New York:
Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale,
New York: Columbia University Press.
Ellenzweig, S. and J. H. Zammito, eds. (2017), The New Politics of Materialism:
History, Philosophy, Science, London: Routledge.
44 Thomas Nail
Lucretius (2003), On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), trans. Walter
Englert, Newburyport, MA: Focus.
Marx, K. (2006), The First Writings of Karl Marx, ed. Paul M. Schafer, New York:
Ig Publishing.
Nail, T. (2018a), Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Nail, T. (2018b), Being and Motion, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nail, T. (2018c), ‘The Ontology of Motion’, Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and
Social Sciences 27 (1): 47–76.
Nail, T. (2020), Lucretius II: An Ethics of Motion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Nail, T., C. N. Gamble and J. S. Hanan, ‘What is New Materialism?’, Angelaki:
Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 24 (6): 111–34.
Righini Bonelli, Maria Luisa (1973), ‘Time and Motion: Reflections on the Non-
existence of Time’, trans. Thomas B. Settle, in Joseph Needham, Mikuláš Teich
and Robert M. Young, eds., Changing Perspectives in the History of Science:
Essays in Honour of Joseph Needham, London: Heinemann Educational.
Rovelli, C. (1998), ‘“Incerto Tempore, Incertisque Loci”: Can We Compute the
Exact Time at Which a Quantum Measurement Happens?’, Foundations of
Physics, 28 (1031–43).
Rovelli, C. (2018), The Order of Time, London: Penguin.
Siegel, E. (2019), ‘What Is The Smallest Possible Distance In The Universe?’, Forbes
Magazine, 26 June.
Smith, D. W. (2012), Essays on Deleuze, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Spencer, J. M. (2014), ‘Left Atomism: Marx, Badiou, and Althusser on the Greek
Atomists’, Theory & Event 17 (3).
Susskind, L. (2008), The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to
Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics, New York: Back Bay Books.
Whitehead, A. N. (1978), Concept of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (2014), Process and Reality, New York: Free Press.
Chapter 3
The Pure and Empty Form of Time:
Deleuze’s Theory of Temporality
Daniel W. Smith
Deleuze argues that a fundamental mutation in the concept of time

occurred in Kant. In antiquity, the concept of time was subordinated to
the concept of movement: time was a ‘measure’ of movement. In Kant,
this relation is inverted: time is no longer subordinated to movement but
assumes an autonomy of its own, becoming the pure and empty form of
everything that moves and changes. In what follows, we will examine
how the inversion of the relation between time and movement came
about, and how Deleuze’s own theory of time builds on Kant’s revolu-
tion and extends it further.
Originary, Aberrant and Ordinary Time
1. Originary time: the ancient coordination of extensive and

intensive movement
For the ancients, the concept of time was subordinated to the concept of
movement. Aristotle, in the Physics, writes that time is the measure or
‘number of movement’.1 A day is a unit that measures a single revolution
of the earth on its axis (the movement from sunset to sunset); a month
measures a single revolution of the moon around the earth (a cycle of
the moon’s phases); a year measures a single revolution of the earth
around the sun (a cycle of the seasons). But since there is a plurality of
movements, there is necessarily a plurality of times. When a lion chases
a gazelle, the different movements of each animal cannot be said to
unfold in a homogeneous time. Each movement has its own duration,
its own articulations, its own divisions and subdivisions; in subduing
the gazelle, the lion incorporates the gazelle into its own movements, its
own time. This heterogeneity of movements is equally true of celestial
bodies, and the complex history of the calendar is a history of attempts
46 Daniel W. Smith
to coordinate and impose order on these heterogeneous movements (see

Aveni 1989). Given the heterogeneity of movement, the ancients were
led to ask the question: Is there something immobile or invariant, outside
of movement – o r at least a most perfect m
ovement – t hrough which all
other movements could be measured? Is there a movement of move-
ments in relation to which all other movements could be c oordinated
– a great celestial schema, or what Leibniz might have called a kind of
‘metaschematism’?2 This question wound up being answered in two dif-
ferent ways because there existed two fundamental types of movement:
the extensive movements of the cosmos and the intensive movements
of the soul. In antiquity, Plato and Plotinus provided the paradigmatic
conceptions of time for these two kinds of movement.
In the Timaeus, for instance, Plato sought to incorporate the extensive
movements of the cosmos into a vision of a ‘planetarium’ comprised
of eight globes, with the immobile earth at the centre, surrounded by
a sphere of ‘the fixed’ (the stars) turning on its axis, following a circuit
that, by some calculations, was thought to last 10,000 years. It was
precisely this movement of movements that provided a reference point
by which all other extensive movements were to be measured: an invari-
ant, a permanence. Time, in this manner, was subordinated to eternity,
to the non-temporal. In Plato’s famous formula, time was ‘the moving
image of eternity’ (Timaeus, 37d).
But Aristotle observed that time not only measures the extensive
movements of cosmic bodies, but also the intensive movements of the
soul, that is, the passage from one internal state to another. ‘If any
movement takes place in the mind’, he wrote in the Physics, ‘we at once
suppose that some time also has elapsed’ (IV.11.219a5). Husserl’s cel-
ebrated study of The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness
would later become the classic analysis of the structure of these internal
movements, such as protention and retention (Husserl 1964).
But the shift from the cosmos to the soul entails a profound change
in the nature of movement, since intensive quantities are very different
from extensive quantities.3 Suppose I have twenty bottles each filled
with a litre of water whose temperature is 50 degrees. I can pour the
water of all these bottles into a separate container: though the volume
of water will now be 20 litres, its temperature will remain 50 degrees.
This is because volume is an extensive quantity, whereas temperature
is an intensive quantity. Extensive quantities are additive, but intensive
quantities are not. If they were, as Diderot quipped, you could simply
add snowballs together to produce heat.4 Extensive quantity is a parts–
whole relation: the parts are external to each other (the exteriority of
The Pure Form of Time 47
relations), and one part does not contain another part; what contains
parts is always a whole, even if this whole is itself a part in relation
to another whole. Intensive quantity, by contrast, is a zero–unit rela-
tion. What distinguishes two intensive quantities is the variable distance
through which one comprehends their distance from zero intensity,
although these distances are non- decomposable. The distance of 40
degrees from zero is ‘greater’ than the distance of 30 degrees from zero,
but neither of these distances is divisible into parts (though the function
of thermometers is to convert intensive qualities into extensive units)
(see Knowles Middleton 1966). If time is the measure of movement,
then time becomes something different when it measures intensive move-
ments rather than extensive movements.
Plotinus’ analysis of the soul, Deleuze argues, was modelled on the
concept of intensive quantity, and his greatness was to have incorporated
the intensive movements of the soul into his vision of the movement of
the ‘One’, with its emanative processes of procession and conversion.
Plotinus’ dialectic proceeds in terms of a series of powers, beginning with
the One, and proceeding through thought, the soul, nature, phenomena
and so on (Plotinus 1991: 213–32). Intensive movement is an ordination
of non-decomposable distances, that is, an ideal fall (French: chute,
‘decrease’ or ‘drop’) that marks the relation of a series of powers to
zero.5 Time emerges as the measure of intensive movement in two ways.
Eternity (aeon) designates the fact that all ‘powers’ are each internal to
the other insofar as they are ‘One’. The ‘now’ (nun) is a privileged point
in the internal movement of the soul that is intrinsically distinguishable
from other points thorough their differing degrees of power, dividing
into a pure past and a pure future, while nonetheless remaining united in
the One. This act of distinction is thus at the same time a synthesis, and
Deleuze argues that the Neo-Platonists were the first to see that time is
inseparable from an act of synthesis.6
What one sees in both Plato and Plotinus, then, is the formation of
an originary time that serves as a measure for movement, whether it
is derived from the extensive movements of the cosmos (Plato) or the
intensive movements of the soul (Plotinus). In both cases, the result
was a hierarchisation of movements depending on their proximity to or
distance from the eternal, an originary time marked by privileged posi-
tions in the cosmos or privileged moments in the soul. The discovery of
this invariant was itself the discovery of the true, since truth required a
universally commensurable time and space over which it could govern.
One should note that the common distinction between ‘objective’ and
‘subjective’ time does not mark a break with the ancient subordination
48 Daniel W. Smith
of time to movement. Objective ‘clock time’ (or physical time) and the
subjective experience of ‘time consciousness’ both measure movement,
the sole difference being the type of movement. Objective movement
measures the extensive movement of objects in the cosmos, whereas
subjective movement measures the intensive passage from one state to
another, even though the extensive object and the intensive state are only
artificial ‘snapshots’ or ‘cuts’ extracted from the transition or passage of
time.7 Moreover, it is clear that modernity no less than antiquity still
subordinates time to movement: the International System of Units (SI)
defines a second in terms of the motion of a caesium atom (Crease 2011:
252, 264). In physics, special relativity had its roots in the problem of
the synchronisation of clocks, and if ‘time moves more slowly’ for an
object moving faster than another object, it is because the clocks on
each object are measuring different movements.8 In this sense, special
relativity remained tied to the ancient conception of time and might
even be said to have completed it.9 Despite these practical exigencies,
the fundamental issue in the theory of time is not the distinction between
objective and subjective time but rather the relation between time and
movement.
2. Derived time: aberrations of movement

The Kantian revolution was prepared for by the fact that both these
domains – the extensive movements of the cosmos and the intensive
movements of the soul – w ere haunted by fundamental aberrations
of movement, where a derived time increasingly tended to free itself
from the posited originary time. The closer one came to the earth –
what the Greeks called the ‘sublunar’ domain – the more the extensive
movements of the cosmos tended to become anomalous: the unpredict-
ability of meteorological movements, for instance, or the movement of
what comes-to-be and passes-away (becoming). Scientists can precisely
predict the time of a solar eclipse, for instance, but they cannot predict
whether or not they will be able to see it, that is, they cannot predict
with precision the ‘sublunar’ weather. The entire corpus of Aristotle
shows how anomalies of movement, with their accidental causes, were
already marking a new form of time that could no longer simply be
defined as a measure of movement.10
In short, the invariant provided by the ‘movement of movements’
was threatened by crises when cosmic movements became increasingly
aberrant. Similarly, the intensive movement of the soul became marked
by a fear that its restless movements in derived time – a real fall – would
take on an independence of their own and would cease to be submitted

to the originary time of the One, and the ‘now’ of the soul would fall
into its double, the non-being of ‘instant’, a pure disappearing. In the
doctrine of the Fall developed later in Christian theology – n otably by
Augustine – t his Neo-Platonist notion of a real fall, and its correspond-
ing fear, would take on enormous proportions.11
Aberrant movements provoked crises in the extensive movements of
the cosmos and fear in the intensive movement of the soul. It is not by
chance that, in French and many Latin languages, the same word is used
for time and weather – le temps (from the Latin, tempus) – and the term
has various cognates that are used to describe the aberrant motions
of the cosmos (tempest, temperature, temperate) as well as aberrant
motions of the soul (temper, temperament, tempestuousness) (see Serres
2000: 67; 1994: 100). The question then became: Does the sublunary
world, with its tempests and tempestuousness, obey the metaschema-
tism, with its proportional rules? Or does it enjoy an independence
from it, with its own anomalous movements and disharmonies? The
Pythagorean discovery of irrational numbers had already pointed to a
fundamental incommensurability between the speed and position of the
various cosmic spheres, and the search for ‘universals’ in philosophy is,
in a sense, a remnant of the fear provoked in the intensive time of the
soul: the very term is derived from the Latin word universus, meaning
‘turned toward the One’ (uni- ‘one’ + versus ‘turned’, the past participle
of vertere).
In Deleuze’s interpretation, these aberrant or derived movements
– marked by meteorological, terrestrial and spiritual contingencies –
remained a downward tendency that still depended on the adventures of
movement. They too posed a problem, a choice: either one could try to
‘save’ the primacy of movement (‘saving the appearances’, in the Greek
phrase), or one could not only accept but will the liberation of time with
regard to movement. In effect, there were two ways in which movement
could be saved. The extensive harmony of the world could be saved by
an appeal to the rhythms of work in the rural time of the countryside,
with the seasons and harvests as privileged points of reference in the
originary time of Nature (‘works and days’, in Hesiod’s phrase; or the
rhythm of ‘autumn’ and ‘spring’ in China).12 The intensive harmony of
the soul could be saved by an appeal to monastic time, with its privileged
moments of prayers and vespers (the clock was initially invented to
mark the hours of prayer of the monasteries); or more generally, by an
appeal to a spiritual life of interiority (Luther, Kierkegaard). By contrast,
the liberation of time would take place in the city, an ‘enemy’ that was
50 Daniel W. Smith
nonetheless engendered by both the rural communities and monasteries

themselves. The time of the city is neither a rural life nor a spiritual
life, but the time of everyday life. There is no longer either an originary
time or a derived time, but what might be called an ordinary time or an
everyday time: an abstract, uniform and homogeneous time.13 Although
Newton may have provided its initial scientific expression in his theory
of absolute space and time, ordinary or everyday time has above all
become the conventional time of our quotidian banality: the time of
clocks, watches, calendars, time zones and daylight savings.14
3. Ordinary time: toward the liberation of time

The sources of this liberation of time from movement were multiple,
having socio-cultural roots in the Reformation as well as the devel-
opment of capitalism. Max Weber, for instance, showed that the
Reformation became conscious of this liberation of time by joining
together the two ideas of a ‘profession’ – one’s profession of faith and
one’s professional activity – so that mundane professions like that of
a cobbler were deemed to be as dignified as any sacred calling. Unlike
the monk, whose duty was to be otherworldly, denying the self and the
world, the fulfilment of one’s duty in worldly affairs became the highest
form that the moral activity of individuals could take. There was only
one t ime – everyday time – a nd it is in this time that we would now find
our salvation.15
Likewise, Marx showed that this vision of temporal activity (‘What
do you do with your time?’), which is no longer grounded in a cosmic
rhythm or a spiritual harmony, would eventually find a new model in
the ‘abstract’ time of capitalism, which replaced the privileged moments
of agricultural work with the any-instant-whatever (l’instant quelcon-
que) of mechanised work. Time became money, the form under which
money produces money (usury or credit); and money itself became ‘the
course of time’: the abstract time of capitalism became the concrete time
of the city.16 It was Heidegger who would ultimately produce a pro-
digious philosophical concept of the everyday and its relation to time,
though to some degree he still maintained the old distinction between a
derived (inauthentic) time and an originary (authentic) time (Heidegger
1962a).17
This liberation of time resulted in a fundamental change in the
relationship of philosophy to the thought of everyday life (opinion).
Up until the seventeenth century, one could say that, philosophically,
everyday life was suspended in order to accede to something that was
not everyday, namely, a meditation on the eternal. By contrast, the

ordinary time of urban everydayness would no longer related to the
eternal, but to something very different, namely, the production of the
new. In other words, given the flow of average everydayness, I can either
raise myself vertically toward the transcendent or the eternal, at least on
Sundays (or Saturdays, or Fridays), through understanding or faith; or I
can remain at the horizontal flow of everydayness, in which temporality
moves toward the new rather than the eternal. The production of the
new will be the correlate of ordinary time in exactly the same way that
the discovery of the true was the correlate of originary time with the
ancients. The aim of philosophy would no longer be to discover pre-
existent truths outside of time but to create non-preexisting concepts
within time.18
The Kantian Revolution
1. The pure form of time: ‘the time is out of joint’

Deleuze argues that Kant was the first philosopher to give expression
to this new conception of time.19 In the anomalies of motion, time
had begun to free itself from its subordination to movement. What
Kant did in the Critique of Pure Reason was to derive the necessary
consequences from these anomalies, whether cosmological (the move-
ments of the universe) or psychological (the movements of the soul), in
order to reverse the movement–time relation definitively and to render
time independent and autonomous. Deleuze finds a poetic expression
of this first aspect of Kant’s revolution in Hamlet’s phrase, ‘the time is
out of joint’.20 The ‘joints’ are the privileged positions of the cosmos or
the privileged moments of the soul that characterised originary time.
Ordinary time, however, brings about a rectification of time: time ‘out
of joint’ becomes a straight line that imposes its determination on every
possible movement (Deleuze 1997: 28). On the surface, this is a surpris-
ing claim, since the common and simple image of time as a succession
of instants on a line (the ‘timeline’) is an image that most philosophers
of time have attempted to break with. (The word ‘succession’ is derived
from an old French term meaning ‘inheritance’, and the presumption
that time is successive was initially derived from the practice of measur-
ing time though the succession of kings or dynasties, where time would
begin again with each new reign.21 Paul J. Kosmin has shown that the
Seleucid Empire was the first to introduce a uniform and linear calendar
that did not restart with each successive dynasty, which became the
52 Daniel W. Smith
condition for the appearance of the first apocalyptic eschatologies of the

‘end times’.22) But for Deleuze, the straight line indicates, paradoxically,
that time has become a ‘simple, terrible, inexorable’ labyrinth that can
only be comprised of the abstract and ordinary positions and instants
irreducible to both bodies and souls (Deleuze 1997: 28).
The consequence of Kant’s revolution was that time was freed entirely
from cosmology and psychology, as well as the eternal. Such is the con-
clusion Kant draws in the Transcendental Dialectic, where the Self (the
soul), the World (the cosmos) and God (the eternal) are all shown to be
transcendent illusions of reason that are derived from our new position
in time. Time is no longer dependent on either extensive movements (the
cosmos) or intensive movements (the soul), and it thereby ceases to be
a measure of movement. Instead, all m ovements – whether originary or
derived, anomalous or a berrant – are now seen to take place within the
labyrinth of time.23
Deleuze summarises these analyses by saying that Kant reconceived
time as the pure and empty form of everything that changes and moves.
Deleuze is here giving the concept of ‘form’ a new sense, since the form
of time is not an eternal form, in a Platonic sense, but rather the pure
form of what is not eternal (Deleuze 1997: 29). When time is liberated
from movement, it ceases to be a cosmological or psychological time in
order to become a formal time: a pure deployed form. The pure form of
time is necessarily static, since time is no longer subordinate to move-
ment. Time is the most radical form of change, but the form of change
does not itself change: ‘the a priori determinations of time are fixed or
held, as though in a photo or a freeze-frame’ (Deleuze 1994: 89, 294).
If the form of time itself was changing or successive, it would have to
succeed in another time, to infinity (Deleuze 1997: 28).24
2. The pure form of time: ‘I is another’

But there is a second aspect to Kant’s revolution, which can be seen
clearly in the ‘Analogies of Experience’ section in the Critique of Pure
Reason. Before Kant, time had largely been defined by succession, space
by coexistence and eternity by permanence.25 In Kant, succession, sim-
ultaneity and permanence are all shown to be modes or relations of
time itself. Succession, as extensive movement, presupposes a plurality
of times: empirical time (within the pure form of time) is composed
of different times, and succession is the mode of relation between the
different parts of time. Simultaneity, as intensive quantity, is what exists
at the same time, it is the determination of the content of time (every
sensation that fills time has an intensive quantity) (Deleuze 1994: 38).
Permanence, finally, is the rule of what endures for all times (substance),
which constitutes the ground of both successions and simultaneities. Put
summarily, succession is the rule of what is in different times; simultane-
ity is the rule of what is at the same time; and permanence is the rule
of what is for all times. As an individual, for instance, I exist in time as
something permanent that has simultaneous states and that successively
passes from one state to another.
Yet succession, simultaneity and permanence are all modes or rela-
tions of time; they are not time itself. When Kant defines time as the
immutable form of what changes, he tells us repeatedly that ‘time cannot
by itself be perceived’.26 Because I exist in time, I am eaten away and
worn down by a time that I cannot perceive. Time is ‘no less capable of
dissolving and destroying individuals than of constituting them tempo-
rarily’ (Deleuze 1994: 38). In a sense, the form of time dis-integrates: it
devours succession, it devours simultaneity, and it devours permanence.
From the viewpoint of succession, time is a straight line which the parts
of time are unmade at the moment they are made (elles se défont à mesure
qu’elles se font). From the viewpoint of simultaneity, time is an instant
that, in terms of content, is emptied out at moment it is being filled (un
instant qui se vide à mesure qu’il se remplit). From the viewpoint of per-
manence, time decomposes an enduring substance into something that is
ceaselessly undoing and emptying itself (ne cesse pas de se défaire et de
se vider).27 Proust would later write, ‘Time, which is usually not visible,
in order to become so seeks out bodies and, wherever it finds them, seizes
upon them in order to project its magic lantern on them’, quartering the
features of an aging face according to its ‘distorting perspective’ (Proust
1993: 342, 344; translation modified; cited in Deleuze 2000: 18, 160).
The only way to extract ourselves from the disintegrating power of
time is through the power of synthesis. As Kant shows in the first
Transcendental Deduction, synthesis is a triple o peration – apprehension,
reproduction and r ecognition – that is carried out by the activity of the
‘I think’ or consciousness (1929: 129–38, A98–110). Since every sensa-
tion that appears in time is a manifold and has a multiplicity of parts,
consciousness must synthesise these parts in an act of apprehension; it
must also reproduce or remember preceding parts when the following
ones appear if a synthesis is to take place; and this sensible complex of
parts can only be recognised if it is related to the form of the object (the
‘object = x’, which is the objective correlate of the ‘I think’). Synthesis is
an activity – o
r in Kant’s language, a s pontaneity – that is exercised by
the mind on both the parts and the content of time.
54 Daniel W. Smith
But what Kant’s analysis makes clear is that the new status of time
introduces into the individual a profound ‘fracture’ (fêlure) – a scission
between the disintegrative and synthetic aspects of time that Deleuze
summarises in a second poetic formula taken from Rimbaud: ‘I is
another’ (Rimbaud 1975: 101, 103).28 On the one hand, my existence is
that of ‘a passive, receptive, phenomenal subject appearing within time’,
a time that is being undone at the moment it is constituted (Deleuze
1994: 86). On the other hand, the unity of my experience in time
depends on the active and spontaneous temporal syntheses carried out
by the a priori categories of the transcendental ‘I think’. For Deleuze,
this fracture between the passive self (intuitions in time) and the active
self (the categories of the understanding) marks ‘a precise moment in
Kantianism, a furtive and explosive moment that is not even continued
by Kant, much less by the post-Kantians’ (58). Whereas Kant himself,
as well as post-Kantians such as Fichte and Hegel, would tend to focus
primarily on the ‘I think’ and the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’,
Deleuze’s analyses will attempt to penetrate the passive self and the pure
form of time.29 In other words, Deleuze will ultimately carry the Kantian
revolution in a different direction than Kant himself.
3. From Kant to Heidegger to Deleuze

In moving beyond Kant, Deleuze was no doubt influenced by the
‘ecstatic’ conception of temporality developed by Heidegger in Being
and Time (1927), and Heidegger would himself highlight the impor-
tance of the Kantian revolution in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
(1929). Heidegger, however, had focused his analysis on the role of the
transcendental imagination, that is, on the activities of synthesis and
schematisation.30 Yet in Kant, the imagination only synthesises and
schematises under the legislation of the understanding. If Deleuze goes
beyond Heidegger, it is because he shows that the ‘source of time’ (1997:
28) in Kant must be found, not in the activity of the transcendental
imagination, but in the discordant relation between all the faculties
(sensibility, imagination, understanding, reason) that are freed from the
legislation of any particular faculty, and the theory of Ideas that grounds
them. In the third Critique, Kant had analysed the breakdown of the
activities of synthesising (in the sublime) and schematising (in symboli-
sation), recognising that there is a constant risk that something formless
(time) will emerge from beneath the ground to break or dis-integrate
the synthesis and schemata.31 At such moments, there is a presentation
of Ideas in sensible nature, of which Kant analyses four aspects: the
sublime (a negative presentation), the symbol (a positive but indirect

presentation), genius (a positive but secondary presentation, requiring
the creation of an ‘other’ nature), and finally teleology (a positive pres-
entation, primary as well as direct).32
Deleuze will carry this Kantian analysis in the Critique of Judgment
a step further by inverting it: whereas for Kant, Ideas are totalising,
unifying and transcendent, Deleuze will develop a theory of Ideas that
are differential, genetic and immanent (this is the theme of the fourth
chapter of Difference and Repetition).33 As such, Deleuzian Ideas are
pure forms of time, and conversely, the pure form of time is itself an
Idea. As Deleuze will put it, time ‘does not go from one actual term to
another [chronology] . . . but from the virtual [the Idea] to its actual-
ization’ (1994: 251). For Deleuze, the secret of time in Kant must be
found neither in the transcendental aesthetic nor in the transcendental
imagination, but in the doctrine of Ideas.
The Pure and Empty Form of Time: The Three Syntheses
1. The form of time as the idea of pure change (chaos)

In What is Philosophy? (1991), published more than two decades after
Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze and Guattari proposed the
concept of chaos to characterise the pure form of time, which might also
be characterised as the Idea of pure change (as a differential and imma-
nent Idea): ‘Chaos is characterized less by the absence of determinations
than by the infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish. This
is not a movement from one determination to the other but, on the
contrary, the impossibility of a connection between them since one does
not appear without the other having already disappeared’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 42).34 Chaos is a regime of continuous variation which
retains determinations that nonetheless appear and disappear at an infi-
nite speed with no relation to each other, neither temporally (no ‘before’
or ‘after’) nor spatially (no ‘above’, ‘below’, ‘from’, ‘toward’, ‘between’,
etc.). There is no time – or more precisely, no modalities of time – but
‘only its constantly aborted moment of birth’ (Deleuze 1994: 70).
How can the modes of time be constituted within this chaos of pure
change? Bergson had succinctly posed this problem in his 1922 book,
Duration and Simultaneity, and outlined its solution:
Consider a moment in the unfolding of the universe, that is, a snapshot that
exists independently of any consciousness. Then we shall try conjointly to
56 Daniel W. Smith
summon another moment brought as close as possible to the first, and thus
have a minimum of time enter into the world without allowing the faintest
glimmer of memory to go with this. We shall see that this is impossible.
Without an elementary memory that connects the two moments, there will
be only one or the other, consequently a single instant, no before and after,
no succession, no time. (Bergson 1965: 48)
In other words, for the modalities of time to appear, there must be a third
thing that retains a ‘first’ determination when the ‘second’ determination
appears – in other words, that synthesises the two determinations. In
Difference and Repetition, Deleuze will outline three different syntheses
of time, and it is this first synthesis that constitutes the foundation of
time under the modality of succession.
2. The first synthesis: the variable present

For many philosophers, this ‘third thing’ is linked to the operations of
the mind: for Kant, it is the faculty of the understanding that carries out
the synthesis; for Hume, it is the imagination and habit. In appealing to
an elementary memory, Bergson was willing to posit the existence of an
elementary consciousness in matter itself.35 Using a similar argument,
Leibniz defined matter as a ‘momentary mind’ (mens momentenea) that
retains one moment when the next one appears, although he consid-
ered this mind to be ‘without consciousness, sense, or memory’ (1976:
141).36
Deleuze, for his part, constructs two concepts to characterise the first
synthesis of time: contraction and contemplation.37 Both these terms
emphasise the passivity of the temporal synthesis, that is, the fact it
is not undertaken actively by the mind but rather is a synthesis that
constitutes the body passively, as when we say the body ‘contracts’ a
habit. Deleuze’s concept of ‘habit’ here is derived as much from Samuel
Butler as it is from Hume, and it refers less to the sensory-motor habits
that we have than to the primary organic habits that we are: ‘We are
made of contracted water, earth light, and a ir . . . Every organism, in
its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of
contractions, retentions, and expectations’ (Deleuze 1994: 73). Where
Husserl spoke of the temporal retentions (past) and protentions (future)
of consciousness, Deleuze points to the temporal syntheses of the organ-
ism: need is the organic form of expectation, just as cellular heredity is
the retention of the past in the present. The contemporary discipline of
chronobiology has gone far in exploring the complex coexisting con-
tractions and rhythms that are present in living organisms: heartbeats,
reproductive rhythms, sleep patterns, reaction times, migrations and so

on (see Palmer 2002).
The first synthesis produces a variable present of which the past and
the future are only dimensions. A teacher focused on an hour- long
lecture inhabits a different present than the inattentive listener in the
back row, and both their bodies integrate numerous rhythms. ‘The
duration of an organism’s present, or of its various presents, will vary
according to its natural contractile range’ (Deleuze 1994: 77). Augustine
suggested that it would be possible for the present to encompass the
entirety of time, a present of the future, a present of the present, and a
present of the past, all implicated in a single event (‘the eternal now’).38
Although in The Time-Image Deleuze discusses cinematic explorations
of what he calls ‘peaks of the present’ (pointes de present), in Difference
and Repetition he argues that a perpetual present or eternal now ‘is not
physically possible’, since the present necessarily passes: fatigue and
exhaustion are real components of an organism’s present, marking the
point where a contraction loses its capacity to sustain itself (1994: 76).
3. The second synthesis: the pure past

This leads to the second synthesis of time. If the present is the foundation
of time, it does not provide us with the ground of time, since the present
does not explain why the present passes. Indeed, Deleuze argues that the
concept of the present is marked by a kind of illusion: we tend to think
of the present as that which is, that which has being; and we think of the
past as that which is no longer, that which has ceased to be, that which is
not. But as Bergson showed, we have to reverse our ordinary determina-
tions. It is the present which is not; it is pure becoming, always outside
of itself, always passing, whether we consider the present as an instant
or as the ‘thick’ present of lived experience. By contrast, it is the past
which is, in the full sense of the word; the past is identical with being
itself. ‘Of the present, we must say of every instant that it “was”, and of
the past, that it “is”, that it is eternally, for all time’ (Deleuze 1988: 55).
That Caesar crossed the Rubicon is, for all time. The non-being of the
present implies the being of the past.
More profoundly, the past is the form under which being is preserved
in itself. The question, ‘Where are memories preserved?’ is a badly posed
problem, as if the brain were capable of preserving them. Bergson argued
that memories do not have to be preserved anywhere other than ‘in’
duration: an ontological memory rather than a psychological memory
(Deleuze 1988: 54). This claim is not as strange as it might initially seem.
58 Daniel W. Smith
In the realm of perception, we need to go to where things are in order to

perceive them: to see the table in the next room, I do not need to look
inside myself, but simply need to walk into the room. The same is true
in the realm of memory: we have to look for memories, not in ourselves,
but in the place where they are preserved – in duration. When we seek
out a memory, we must first ‘leap’ into the being-in-itself of the past, and
the recollection will gradually take on a psychological existence, passing
from a virtual to an actual state. ‘We should have no more difficulty
in admitting the virtual insistence of pure memories in time’, Deleuze
writes, ‘than we do for the actual existence of non-perceived objects in
space’ (1989: 80).
The notion that the past preserves itself entails three paradoxes, which
Deleuze develops in Difference and Repetition. The first is the contem-
poraneity of the past with the present. ‘If a new present were required
for the past to be constituted as past, then the former present would
never pass and the new one would never arrive. No present would ever
pass were it not past “at the same time” as it is present’ (Deleuze 1994:
81). The moment must be still present and already past, at one and the
same time. This is what Deleuze considers to be the fundamental opera-
tion of time: ‘since the past is constituted not after the present that it was
but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as
present and past, which differ from each other in nature’ (1989: 81). The
experience of déjà vu (paramnesia) makes this obvious point perceptible:
there is a recollection of the present that is contemporaneous with the
present itself, as closely coupled as a role to its actor.39 In The Time-
Image, Deleuze argues that, in film, it is ‘the crystal-image’ that makes
perceptible this splitting or dividing of time in two: ‘the actual image
of the present which passes and the virtual image of the past which is
preserved: distinct and yet indiscernible’ (1989: 81).
A second paradox follows: the paradox of coexistence. ‘If each past is
contemporaneous with the present that it was, then all of the past coex-
ists with the new present in relation to which it is now past’ (Deleuze
1994: 81–2). Each present, in other words, is the entirety of the past in
its most contracted state, although the concept of ‘contraction’ takes on
a new sense here. In the first synthesis, the present is the contracted state
of successive elements that are, in themselves, independent of each other.
In the second synthesis, the present designates the most contracted state
of the past, which is itself like a coexisting totality, though this totality
itself is variable and open (the whole is the open) (Deleuze 1994: 82).40
Genetics provides a concrete example of the coexistence of the past with
the present: if my organism exists in the present, it is because there is a
line of continuity between the first single-celled organism and myself,

and that entire genetic history coexists with my present.
The final paradox completes the others: the paradox of pre-existence.
The past does not cause one present to pass without bringing forth
another, but the past itself does not pass: it is non-chronological. For
this reason, we can say that the element of the past pre-exists the passing
moment. Far from being merely a dimension of time, the past is the
synthesis of all time, of which the present and future are only dimen-
sions. This is what Deleuze will call the ‘pure past’, that is, a past that
has never been present but rather forms a virtual coexistence, ‘a pure,
general, a priori element of all time’ (1994: 82). What we live empirically
as a succession of presents in the first synthesis is also the ever-increasing
coexistence of the levels of the pure past in the second synthesis.
In the second synthesis, the non-chronological temporal mode of coex-
istence replaces that of succession. Capitalism and Schizophrenia pro-
vides the most obvious example of Deleuze’s use of non-chronological
time, since the typology of social formations that the book proposes
– ‘primitive’ societies, States, capitalism and nomadic war machines –
are not successive stages in a historical or evolutionary development,
but concurrent formations that occupy a global field of coexistence.
Deleuze’s political philosophy turns the de facto problem of chronologi-
cal succession into a de jure problem of topological coexistence, which
becomes the condition for political transformation. This field of coexist-
ence is what Deleuze would call the ‘plane of immanence’, a field where
all the powers of the social machine coexist virtually, in constant becom-
ing, enveloped and implicated in each other in a stratigraphic time.41
4. The third synthesis: the new (becoming)42

The third synthesis, finally, takes us to the heart of Deleuze’s own
philosophy. The modality of the third synthesis is no longer succes-
sion or coexistence but rather the new: it concerns the genesis of the
heterogeneous or the production of difference. Deleuze tends to use the
phrase ‘the pure form of time’ in two senses: often, he explicitly links the
pure form of time to the third synthesis, but in many contexts he uses
the phrase more generally to refer to the three syntheses taken together
and to the conception of time introduced by the Kantian revolution.43
But ultimately the two senses are the same, since it is the new (difference)
that constitutes the ‘essence’ of time. As Bergson said, ‘the more we
study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration
means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of
60 Daniel W. Smith
the absolutely new’ (1911: 13). The absolutely new entails what Anti-
Oedipus calls ‘a rupture with causality’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:
377–8). If effects pre-exist in their causes, then causal processes can only
give rise to things that are new in number, but not new in k ind – the
future is already contained in the past. The third synthesis, by contrast,
requires a break with the past, since it concerns the conditions for the
production of genuine novelty (Bergson) or creativity (Whitehead). The
third synthesis constitutes a ‘pure’ future that breaks with its grounding
in the past and its foundation in habit: Nietzsche’s untimely or Butler’s
erewhon (Deleuze 1994: xx–xxi, 285).
Compared to the concise analysis of the second synthesis provided
in the third chapter of Difference and Repetition, the discussion of the
third synthesis can seem somewhat disjointed and unfocused, moving
from Descartes and Kant to Hölderlin’s analysis of Greek tragedy to
Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return. But in fact it is the entirety
of Deleuze’s oeuvre that constitutes an analysis of the third synthesis.
In Difference and Repetition, for instance, Deleuze argues that we need
to replace the possible–real opposition with the virtual–actual couple
in order to account for the form of time. In the possible, everything is
already given, and the possible simply has existence added to it when
it is ‘realised’: the real resembles the possible and does not produce
the new. But the virtual is constituted by difference, and in becoming
‘actualised’ it differentiates itself: the actual differs from the virtual, and
the actualisation of the virtual is the production of difference (Deleuze
1994: 211–12). What Deleuze calls simulacra are ‘excessive systems’ in
which the different is linked to the different in order to produce the dif-
ferent (115). Similarly, A Thousand Plateaus is an analysis of manifolds
or multiplicities, and Deleuze argues that it is the relation between
manifolds that is an act of becoming that creates the new.44
Although Deleuze’s entire philosophy can be seen as an exploration of
the third synthesis of time, it is nonetheless worth examining the quite
different presentations of the third synthesis that appear in Difference
and Repetition and The Time-Image (the latter book does not in fact
utilise the term ‘synthesis’).
5. The third synthesis in Difference and Repetition

In chapter three of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze initially explicates
the third synthesis through an appeal to tragedy and a text by Hölderlin
called ‘Remarks on Oedipus’ (Hölderlin 1988).45 Hölderlin showed that,
in Greek tragedy, Aeschylus’ tragedies unfold in an originary time where
the beginning and end ‘rhyme’ with each other, atoning for injustice,
whereas Sophocles is the first tragedian to un-curve time in an aberrant
movement in which the beginning and the end no longer rhyme but
unravel in a straight line: Oedipus’ long wandering is the incessant
march of a slow death. But it is Shakespeare’s Hamlet who is the first
hero that truly needed the pure form of time in order to act: the action
(avenging his father) marks a ‘caesura’ within the form of time between
a before and an after that is productive of something new. The before
appears in the form of an act that is ‘too big’ for Hamlet, and he remains
in a past disconnected from the present (second synthesis); the caesura is
the moment of metamorphosis, where Hamlet finally becomes capable
of the act and equal to it (first synthesis); but the after (third synthesis)
is revealed to be the production of something new that destroys both
the condition (the past) and the agent (the present): Hamlet must die.46
Yet Deleuze, following Blanchot, notes that death has two aspects:
the first is the disappearance of the person, but the second is ‘the state
of free differences when they are no longer subject to the form imposed
on them by an I or an ego’ (1994: 113). The latter ‘death’ is the object
of the third synthesis: a domain of singularities and events that are
both pre-individual and impersonal, and thus and irreducible to the self
(Deleuze 1990: 177).47 Life, in this sense, is coextensive with death: life
is traversed by ‘states of free differences’ that destabilise the organisation
of the organism as well as the identity of the self, while at the same time
producing a new self and a new body (Deleuze 1994: 113; Somers-Hall
2013: 95–6). This ‘death of the self’ is the correlate to the ‘death of
God’. If the order of God can be defined in terms of the identity of God
as the ultimate foundation, the identity of the world as the ambient
environment, the identity of the person as a well-founded agent and the
identity of bodies as the base, then the third synthesis entails the death
of god, the destruction of the world, the dissolution of the self and the
dis-integration of the b
ody – but always in terms of a new self (affects
and percepts), a new body (intensities and becomings) and ultimately the
creation of a new world, a chaosmos (singularities and events) (Deleuze
1990: 292).48
Difference and Repetition presents Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal
return as the highest expression of the third synthesis, but Deleuze inter-
prets the eternal return not as a return of the same but as the repetition
of the different.49 Zarathustra went through a transformation similar
to that of Hamlet. In the before, Zarathustra is incapable of an act, the
death of god (‘The Convalescent’); in the during – or the caesura – he
becomes equal to the act (‘On Involuntary Bliss’), though he feels the
62 Daniel W. Smith
hour has not yet come and still conceives of the eternal return as a
return of the Same; but in the after, which would have been presented
in the unwritten part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra must
die, because ultimately the eternal return only allows the return of dif-
ferences, and mercilessly eliminates the identity of the hero (the second
sense of death) (Deleuze 1994: 298–9).50 In the third synthesis, the form
of time is characterised by a totality that is divided into a series (before,
caesura, after) that produces a pure order that is constitutive of the new.
The eternal return, Deleuze writes, ‘is present in every metamorphosis
. . . It is related to a world of differences implicated one in the other, to a
complicated, properly chaotic world without identity’ (1994: 57).
6. The powers of the false in The Time-Image

In The Time-Image, by contrast, the third synthesis appears in a chapter
entitled ‘The Powers of the False’. Though this chapter seems to bear
little resemblance to the analyses in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s
definition of philosophy as ‘the creation of concepts’ (the production of
the new) is an expression of the third synthesis in thought and is a direct
consequence of the theme of the powers of the false.51 If the discovery of
originary time was one and the same as the discovery of the true, then
the freeing of time puts the concept of truth in crisis and leads to the
establishment of an autonomous and immanent concept of the false. But
what does it mean to say that the liberation of time from its subordina-
tion to movement entails the liberation of the powers of the false from
the form of the true?
Since Aristotle, the form of the true has meant the universal and the
necessary: the true is that which is universal and necessary, always
and everywhere, in all times and in all places. The false, by contrast, is
effectuated in error. The false has no form, and error consists in giving
the false the form of the true, although error itself does not itself affect
the form of the true as universal. Deleuze’s claim is that it is the form
of time the puts the form of truth in crisis. A simplistic interpretation
of this claim would be to say: truth changes with time. But the truth is
never put in crisis if it is a question of a simple change in its content,
since a change in content does not affect the form of the true. We can
say that we once ‘believed’ that the sun revolves around the earth, but
now we ‘know’ that the opposite is true and has always been true.
Error affects the content of the true, but neither error nor changes in
content affect the form of the true. Deleuze’s thesis is that what puts the
form of the true in crisis is the form of time independent of its content,
independent of what is in time – that is, what is true at one moment

and then ceases to be true the next moment. This is why Deleuze speaks
of the form of time as being both pure and empty, ‘having abjured its
empirical content’ (1994: 89). The form of time thus cannot be confused
with chronology, which affects the content of what is in time. But what
then is this ‘non-chronological’ form of time that undoes the concept of
truth?52
Not surprisingly, the confrontation between the form of truth and
the form of time had already taken place in antiquity under the clas-
sical form of the problem of contingent futures. This problem was
encapsulated most succinctly in what came to be known as the ‘Master
Argument’ of Diodorus Cronus.53 The argument goes like this: If it is
true that a naval battle may take place tomorrow, two logical paradoxes
seem to follow. The principle of non-contradiction says that, of two
contradictory propositions – ‘there will be a naval battle tomorrow’ and
‘there will not be a naval battle tomorrow’ – one is necessarily true and
the other is necessarily false. If the naval battle indeed takes place, we
can say that it was the first proposition, and only that proposition, that
was true. But this is where the paradox emerges, in a double form. On
the one hand, we began with two possible propositions, each of which
changes modality once the event takes place: the first becomes necessary,
while the second is now rendered impossible. In this case, the principle
of non-contradiction is saved only at the price of contravening a second
logical principle, namely, that the impossible cannot be derived from the
possible. On the other hand, while the proposition ‘there will be a naval
battle tomorrow’ was true yesterday, it was not necessarily true, since
yesterday it was still possible that the naval battle could have not taken
place. In this case, the principle of non-contradiction is saved by denying
that a true proposition of the past is necessarily true.54
The paradox of contingent futures thus takes on two forms: the
impossible proceeds from the possible and what is true in the past is
not necessarily true.55 It is easy to regard the paradox as a sophism, and
philosophy has been marked by numerous attempts to resolve it.56 It
nonetheless shows the difficulty of conceiving a direct relation between
truth and the form of time, which is what obliged philosophers to keep
truth in the eternal rather than in time. But the Master Argument allows
Deleuze to paint a picture of what he will call the ‘falsifier’ (le faussaire).
If the ‘truthful person’, as a conceptual persona, is someone who allows
their being to be in-formed by the form of the true, we could say that
the falsifier is someone who, from the possible, makes the impossible
emerge, or who, from the past, makes something that is not necessarily
64 Daniel W. Smith
true.57 The falsifier ‘imposes a power of the false as adequate to time,

in contrast to any form of the true that would control time’ (Deleuze
1989: 132). Readers of Deleuze know the classic examples he provides
of works that are, to a certain degree, ‘falsifying’ in this manner, such as
Jorge Luis Borges’ story ‘The Garden of the Forking Paths’, or Robbe-
Grillet’s screenplay for Alain Resnais’ film Last Year at Marienbad, or
even Leibniz’s narration of the bifurcating possibilities in the life of
Sextus in his Theodicy – all of which make a non-chronological time
appear directly in the form incompossible presents and not-necessarily-
true pasts.58
What prevented Leibniz’s God from making all these possibilities, and
even incompossibilities, pass into existence is the fact that such an opera-
tion would turn him into a mendacious God, a trickster God, a deceiving
God, an ‘evil genius’ – something Descartes and Leibniz both saw very
clearly, but shrank from with a kind of horror. For it is precisely here
that the truthful God would be replaced by a falsifying God, and the
concept of the false would achieve its autonomy. The false becomes
independent and autonomous when it is no longer subject to the form of
the true. In other words, to say that something is false no longer means
that it is ‘not true’. But when it is freed from the form of the true, the
false takes on a power, which is the power of metamorphosis, that is,
the power of creation. What stands opposed to the form of the eternal is
the production of the new or the power of metamorphosis (becoming).
But to say that the concept of the false assumes an autonomy is not to
say that ‘everything is false’. Rather, what distinguishes the eternal form
of the true from the temporal powers of the false is that the false always
appears as a plurality or multiplicity of powers (x1, x2, x3. . .). To ask
‘What is a falsifier?’ is a badly posed question, since the falsifier exists
only within a series, in a plurality: behind every falsifier there is always
another falsifier, like a mask behind every mask. But not everything is
‘equal’ in this chain of falsifiers. Even the truthful person is a falsifier:
Plato was being a falsifier when he created the concept of an ‘Idea’, and
one could say that the truthful person is the first of the powers of the
false. Nietzsche called the powers of the false the will to power, though
the will to power has two extremes, two powers: at one end, the falsifier
is the ‘higher man’, the ‘truthful person’, someone who wants to judge
life in the name of values higher than life; at the other end, the falsifier
is a ‘form of life’ that is capable of changing itself, inventing, creating,
where the powers of the false are no longer effectuated in ‘judging life’
but in ‘assuring metamorphoses’, in other words, creating the new.59
7. What is Philosophy? The pure form of time in concepts

As an example of the power of the false, we need look no further than to
Deleuze’s own philosophical concepts. One could say that the ultimate
aim of the analytic of concepts developed in What is Philosophy? was
to introduce the pure form of time into concepts, even though the word
‘time’ hardly appears in the book. To introduce time into concepts
means that concepts do not have an identity, but they do have a con-
sistency, that is, a becoming or a metamorphosis, but this consistency
must have as its necessary complement the internal variability of the
concept. Deleuze analyses these two temporal aspects of concepts under
the rubrics of exo-consistency and endo-consistency: every concept links
up with other concepts (exo-consistency) but each concept also has
its own internal components (endo- consistency). Consider Deleuze’s
concept of intensity: in Difference and Repetition, the concept of inten-
sity is primarily related to the dimension of depth, while in The Logic
of Sense the concept of intensity is retained, but is now related primarily
to the dimension of surface – same concept, different components. In
Anti-Oedipus, the concept undergoes a third metamorphosis in which it
is no longer related either to depth or surface; rather, rising and falling
intensities are now events that take place on a body without organs.60
Even within Deleuze’s corpus, the concept of intensity has a temporal
power that undergoes internal mutations and metamorphoses.
If What is Philosophy? is a book on time, or more precisely, a book
on the third synthesis, it is because it a study of the determinations
of thought that take place within the pure form of time. What Hume
called the association of ideas (resemblance, contiguity, causality) links
together our ideas in time with a minimum of constant rules, thereby
forming a realm of opinion that protects us from chaos. But philosophy,
science and art do more than this, and Deleuze describes their respective
activities using his own (created) vocabulary. From the infinite and con-
tinuous variability of time (chaos), philosophers extract variations that
converge as the components of a consistent concept; scientists extract
variables that enter into determinable relations in a function; and artists
extract varieties that enter into the composition of a being of sensation
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 202).
The power of the false can thus be said to be creative. But creative of
what? At this point, Deleuze suggests that there is no reason not to use the
word ‘truth’: the power of the false is creative of truth. But this implies
the creation of an entirely new concept of truth: the truth as something
to be created (namely, the power of the false) has nothing to do with the
66 Daniel W. Smith
truth of the truthful person, or with the form of the true. If one makes
these modifications in the concept of the truth itself, one could say that
philosophy, science and art, as powers of the false, are nothing other than
enterprises in the creation of truth within the pure form of time.61
This is only a brief overview of the three syntheses that constitute the
pure and empty form of time.62 When time is freed from its subordina-
tion to movement, its a priori determinations of time are fixed or held,
as though in a photo or freeze-frame. The first synthesis provides the
foundation of time in the passing present, while the second synthesis
provides its ground in the pure past. In the third synthesis, however,
the ground is superseded by a groundlessness, a sans-fond, a universal
un-grounding in which the freeze-frame begins to move once more.
The extreme formality of the form of time, in other words, is there to
produce the formless, that is, the new, difference-in-itself. The system of
the future is ‘the deployment and explication of the multiple, of the dif-
ferent, and of the fortuitous’, it concerns ‘excessive systems’ (simulacra)
that link the different with the different (Deleuze 1994: 115). But this is
where time forms a circle again, for the third synthesis affects a world
that has rid itself of the condition and the agent, a chaos – even if these
singularities are taken up by the first two syntheses, and the singular is
rendered regular and ordinary. ‘This is how the story of time ends: by
undoing its too well centred natural or physical circle and forming a
straight line which then, led by its own length, reconstitutes an eternally
decentred circle’ (115).
Notes
1. Aristotle, Physics, Book 4, Chapter 11, 219b5–8: ‘time is the number of move-
ment in respect of before and after’.
2. See Leibniz, Letter to Arnauld, 30 April 1687, where Leibniz faults the ancients
for substituting a concept of ‘metempsychosis’ for a ‘metaschematism’ [metem-
psychosis pro metaschematismis].
3. One of the classic analyses of intensive quantities is the ‘Anticipations of
Perception’ section of Kant’s first critique, which recapitulates a long tradition.
See Kant 1929: 201–8, B207–18. Deleuze takes up the distinction in chapter
four of Difference and Repetition, ‘The Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible’
(1994: 222–61).
4. See Duhem 1954: 112. ‘Diderot used to ask jokingly how many snowballs
would be required to heat an oven.’ Deleuze refers to this anecdote in his
seminar of 20 March 1984. Deleuze’s seminars can be accessed at ‘The Deleuze
Seminars’ project, deleuze.cla.purdue.edu.
5. On the notion of an ideal fall, see Plotinus 1991: 236. ‘Nature, asked why it
brings forth its works, might answer (if it cared to listen and to speak): . . .
“Whatever comes into being is my vision, seen in my silence, the vision that
belongs to my character who, sprung from vision, am vision-loving and create
vision by the vision-seeing faculty in me. The mathematicians from their vision
draw their figures: but I draw nothing: I gaze and the figures of the material
world take being as if they fell from my contemplation”’ (emphasis added). The
rejection of ‘drawing’ marks Plotinus’ distance from Plato’s dialectic, since the
latter entails a ‘real’ fall of the intelligible into the sensible.
6. Deleuze discusses the Platonic and Neo- Platonic conceptions of time in a
remarkable series of seminars from 7 February 1984 to 27 March 1984, which
include analyses that have no correlate in Deleuze’s published texts.
7. See Bergson 1965: 6. ‘If we go looking in time for features like those of space
[or movement] . . . we shall not have pushed on to time itself.’
8. See Gallison 2004, chapter 5, ‘Einstein’s Clocks’. Einstein’s work in the Swiss
patent office put him in a position ‘to seize clock coordination as the principled
starting point of relativity’ (260).
9. Rovelli suggests that, in physics, it was general relativity that finally brought
about ‘the destruction of the notion of time’ as a measure of movement in
favour of pure change or pure ‘events’ (2018: 96–7).
10. Deleuze suggests that the entirety of Aristotle’s c orpus – metaphysics, physics,
ethics and so on – c ould be read from the viewpoint of aberrant movements; see
the seminar lecture of 28 February 1984.
11. For a helpful discussion, see Paul Krause, ‘The Fall of the Soul from Plotinus to
Augustine’, online at Voegelin View (voegelinview.com/the-fall-of-soul-from-
plotinus-to-augustine).
12. On Chinese conceptions of time, see Hui 2016: 210–11, and his references to
the works of Marcel Granet and François Jullien.
13. In Catholic missals, the term ‘ordinary time’ (tempus per annum) refers to
the part of the liturgical year that falls outside the two primary seasons of
Christmastide and Eastertide, with their respective preparatory seasons of
Advent and Lent.
14. Newton noted his own inversion of the movement/time relation: ‘Absolute,
true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably
without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration:
relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether
accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is
commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year’
(1934: 6; 77 in the original Motte translation).
15. See Weber 2002, as well as Deleuze’s seminar of 27 March 1984.
16. Deleuze, seminar of 7 February 1984.
17. Book Two of Being and Time recapitulates, in temporal terms, the analysis of
‘everydayness’ provided in Book One.
18. Deleuze elucidates these themes in his seminars of 17 April 1984 and 4 May
1984.
19. Deleuze’s most complete analysis of Kant’s contribution to the theory of time
can be found in his seminar of 17 April 1984, to which the following analysis is
indebted.
20. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5.
21. For instance, the Gospel of Luke famously dates the beginning of the preaching
of John the Baptist by contextualising it in a nexus of reigning officials in civil
and religious institutions: ‘In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar,
Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee,
and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and
Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests,
the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness’ (Luke
3:1–2). In the ‘Christian’ calendar, time begins with the reign of Christ.
68 Daniel W. Smith
22. See Kosmin 2018. There were no ‘end times’ until the constitution of an ordi-
nary linear time in the Seleucid empire (312 to 63 BCE), and Kosmin shows that
apocalyptic eschatologies – such as the biblical Book of Daniel (c. 165 BCE),
which was fiercely anti-Seleucid – c an be seen as subversive attempts to contest
the imperial institution of ordinary time.
23. Kant 1929: 76, A32/B48: ‘The concept of motion, as alteration of place, is pos-
sible only through and in the representation of time.’
24. See Kant 1929: 214, A183/B226: ‘If we ascribe succession to time itself, we
must think yet another time, in which the sequence would be possible . . .
Without the permanent there is therefore no time-relation.’
25. See, for instance, Leibniz 1956: 15. ‘I hold it [space] to be an order of coexist-
ences, as time is an order of successions.’
26. See Kant 1929: ‘Time cannot by itself be perceived’ (213, A182/B225); ‘time
cannot be perceived in itself’ (214, A183/B226; 219, A189/B233).
27. These three formulations of the disintegrating power of time appear in Deleuze’s
seminar of 14 April 1984.
28. Letter to Georges Izambard, 13 May 1871, letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May
1871.
29. Nonetheless, even Kant recognises that ‘I cannot determine my existence as that
of a self-active being; all that I can do is to represent to myself the spontaneity
of my thought’ (1929: 169, B158n). In other words, I can never truly recognise
the spontaneity of thinking as my own: the passive self ‘represents the activity
of thought to itself rather than enacting it, it experiences its effect rather than
initiating it’ (Deleuze 1994: 86). For a penetrating commentary, see Kerslake
2005.
30. Bernard Stiegler, in his three-volume Technics and Time – especially in the third
volume, Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise – already went beyond
Heidegger’s analysis by rightly arguing that the temporal activity of schematisa-
tion, which Kant labelled a ‘mystery’, should be located in the ‘tertiary reten-
tions’ of technics (the externalisation of memory) (see e.g., Stiegler 2011: 56–7).
31. For an analysis of the role of the formless in the third critique, see Smith 2012:
222–34, esp. 228–30.
32. We are here summarising Deleuze’s important reading of Kant’s Critique of
Judgment in his 1963 article ‘The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics’ (trans.
Daniel W. Smith, in Angelaki, 5 (3), 2000, 57–70), which is an elaboration of
themes developed in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, published in the same year. See,
for example: ‘The theme of a presentation of Ideas in sensible nature is, in Kant,
a fundamental theme. There are several modes of presentation . . .’ (Deleuze
1984: 66).
33. For an analysis of how Deleuze transformed Kant’s theory of Ideas, see Smith
2012: 106–21.
34. In Difference and Repetition, the concept of the ‘white nothingness’ plays a
similar role and is characterised by what Deleuze calls ‘the rule of discontinuity
or instantaneity in repetition’: ‘one instance does not appear unless the other
has disappeared’ (1994: 28, 70).
35. ‘We place consciousness at the heart of things for the very reason that we credit
them with a time that endures’ (Bergson 1965: 49).
36. Though Leibniz held that the temporal synthesis of a body only lasts for a
‘moment’, he developed a theological theory of ‘traduction’ to account for the
propagation of minds. See Mercer 2004: e.g., 163, 223. The quote, from a letter
to Oldenburg, is cited in Mercer 2004: 164.
37. Deleuze would later speak of his affection for these analyses of fatigue and con-
templation in Difference and Repetition. See Deleuze 2006: 65.
38. Augustine, Confessions, 14.17. See also Deleuze 1989: 100. Husserl knew
Augustine well, and given his focus on the thickness of the present, Deleuze
characterised Husserl as a ‘theologian’, a kind of ‘church father’. See Deleuze,
seminar of 27 March 1984.
39. See Bergson 1920: 109–51. ‘Our actual existence duplicates itself all along
with a virtual existence, a mirror-image. Every moment of our life presents two
aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and memory on the
other’ (135). See also Deleuze 1989: 79.
40. For an analysis of Bergson’s claim that ‘the whole is the open’, see Smith 2012:
256–67.
41. On the role of the ‘field of coexistence’ in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, see
Smith 2018: 232.
42. For an analysis of the components of the third synthesis as presented in
Difference and Repetition, see Voss 2013.
43. For the first sense, see Deleuze 1994: 88: ‘the pure form of time or the third
synthesis’. For the second sense, see 299: ‘What, however, is the content of this
third time, this formlessness at the end of the form of time?’ The phrase ‘form
of time’ appears only three times in The Time-Image (1989: 130, 273, 274), and
each seems to be used in the second sense.
44. See Deleuze and Guattari 1987: plateau 10, ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-
Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . .’.
45. Deleuze cites Jean Beaufret’s influential commentary, ‘Hölderlin and Sophocles’,
in Hölderlin, Remarques sur Oedipe (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 10/18,
1965), which analyses Hölderlin’s relation to Kant.
46. For analyses of Deleuze’s use of Hamlet, see Somers-Hall 2011 and Plotnitsky
2015.
47. See Deleuze 1994: 6 on what lies beyond the laws of nature.
48. For an elaboration of these themes, see Smith 2012: 189–221.
49. See James Mollison’s chapter in this volume.
50. The titles refer to the relevant sections in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche
1954): ‘The Convalescent’, III.13, 327–33; ‘On Involuntary Bliss’, III.3,
272–5.
51. To my knowledge, the phrase ‘power of the false’ appears once in both Difference
and Repetition (1994: 128) and The Logic of Sense (1990: 263), but never in
either Anti-Oedipus or A Thousand Plateaus. It is only in The Time-Image that
Deleuze develops the theme of the power of the false in detail.
52. The term ‘non-chronological time’ appears throughout The Time-Image, usually
with regard to the second synthesis (Deleuze 1989: 99), but in certain cases also
with regard to the third (129, 181).
53. Deleuze, seminar of 29 November 1983, p. 7: ‘The problem of contingent
futures is the confrontation of the concept of truth with the form of time.’ Jules
Vuillemin, who taught at the Collège de France, wrote an important book on
the Master Argument entitled The Necessity of Contingency, which Deleuze
relies on.
54. For analyses of the Master Argument, see Vuillemin 1996 and Schuhl 1960.
Vuillemin presents Epictetus’ summary of the argument: ‘It is contradictory
to hold any two of the following propositions together with the third: “Every
true proposition about the past is necessary. The impossible does not logically
follow from the possible. What neither is presently true nor will be so is pos-
sible”’ (1996: 3). For Deleuze’s discussion, see the seminars of 8, 22 and 29
November 1983, as well as Deleuze 1989: 130–1.
55. See Deleuze, seminar of 29 November 1983, as well as Deleuze 1989: 130.
56. Aristotle, for instance, was a partisan of a solution which said that what is
70 Daniel W. Smith
ecessary is only the alternative between the two propositions. See On

n
Interpretation, 19a 24–25, 30–31: ‘It cannot be said without qualification that
all existence and non-existence is the outcome of necessity . . . A sea-fight must
either take place tomorrow or not, but it is not necessary that it should take
place tomorrow, neither is it necessary that it should not take place, yet it is nec-
essary that it either should or should not take place tomorrow.’ Leibniz analyses
the Master Argument in Theodicy, III, §§169ff. The problem is also taken up
by Kierkegaard in Philosophical Fragments, in the ‘Interlude’ entitled ‘Is the
past more necessary than the future? Or, When the possible becomes actual, is
it made more necessary than it was?’ (Kierkegaard 1936: 89ff.).
57. For analysis, see Deleuze, seminar of 29 November 198.
58. See Deleuze 1989: 130–1, as well as the seminar of 6 December 1983.
59. On these themes, see Deleuze, seminar of 12 June 1984.
60. See Deleuze 2006: 65–6. The concept of the ‘affect’ undergoes a similar meta-
morphosis. The concept first appears in Deleuze’s work on Spinoza, where
it designates the passage from one intensity to another in a finite mode that
is experienced as a joy or a sadness. In A Thousand Plateaus and What Is
Philosophy? the affect is no longer ‘the passage from one lived state to another’
but assumes an autonomous status – a long with percepts – as a static becoming
that exists between two multiplicities. ‘The affect is not the passage from one
lived state to another but the nonhuman becoming of humanity’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 173).
61. For further analysis, see Smith 2019.
62. The fullest analysis of the three syntheses can be found in Williams 2011.
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Howard V. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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72 Daniel W. Smith
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PART II
HISTORY OF TIME
Chapter 4
Gilles Deleuze’s Interpretation of the
Eternal Return: From Nietzsche and
Philosophy to Difference and Repetition
James Mollison
Deleuze famously describes his generation as ‘more or less bludgeoned

to death with the history of philosophy’.1 His means of escaping this
stifling atmosphere is infamous: ‘The main way I coped with it’, Deleuze
writes, ‘was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery . . .
I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child
that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous’ (1995: 5–6). This
provocative image makes it unsurprising if scholars working within
the philosophical tradition tend to neglect Deleuze’s readings of other
philosophers. Respectable historians of philosophy seldom fraternise
with monsters. But even if one adopts this dismissive view of Deleuze’s
historical commentaries, an exception would need to be made for his
Nietzsche and Philosophy. For, in the same ‘Letter to a Harsh Critic’,
Deleuze goes on to state: ‘It was Nietzsche . . . who extricated me from
all this. Because you can’t just deal with him in the same sort of way. He
gets up to all sorts of things behind your back. He gives you a perverse
taste for . . . saying simple things in your own way.’ Here, Deleuze
indicates that his study of Nietzsche is not an instance of interpretive
‘buggery’. In fact, reading Nietzsche relieves Deleuze’s need for such
an approach by enabling him to write in his ‘own name’ (6). Yet, there
is a cost for attributing this catalytic function to Nietzsche. If we take
Deleuze at his word when he describes Nietzsche and Philosophy as
an attempt to pay his ‘debts’ to the history of philosophy (Deleuze and
Parnet 2007: 16), then this early work seems vulnerable to the stifling
interpretative demands that Deleuze otherwise seeks to abjure.
Deleuze’s encounter with Nietzsche occurs at the boundary between
the burdens of traditional interpretation and unabashed concept crea-
tion. This is perhaps best illustrated by Deleuze’s interpretation of the
eternal return. Nietzsche reveals the idea in a demonic declaration: ‘This
life as you live it now and have lived it you will have to live once
76 James Mollison
again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in
it’ (GS 341).2 Notwithstanding the myriad controversies surrounding
this idea, its central point seems obvious enough: each detail of our lives
will repeat, endlessly and identically. Yet, in Nietzsche and Philosophy,
Deleuze takes the eternal return to express the priority of becoming over
being and to function as a selective ethical and ontological principle that
eliminates all negativity. The claim that the eternal return eliminates
all negativity is especially contentious among Nietzsche scholars. Some
argue that a selective approach to ontology violates the doctrine’s ethical
aspiration of motivating an unconditional affirmation of existence.3
Others argue that the elimination of negativity and reactive forces also
eradicates affirmation and active forces.4 And still others argue that the
attempt to purge negativity and reactivity is ethically and politically dan-
gerous.5 While it is tempting to dismiss such arguments as hermeneutic
concerns for which Deleuze has little patience, his claim that his reading
of Nietzsche occurs within the history of philosophy suggests that
things are not so simple. Nor are these concerns confined to Nietzsche
and Philosophy. In the first work Deleuze authors in his own name,
Difference and Repetition, the eternal return occupies a privileged place
in Deleuze’s theory of time, functioning as a transcendental synthesis
of the future. Little wonder, then, that Deleuze is uncharacteristically
defensive over his reading of the eternal return (1994: 297–302) – as his
reading claims that the eternal return, which seemed to guarantee the
past’s endless and identical reappearance, is really a cypher for unbri-
dled novelty. To Nietzsche scholars, the image of philosophical buggery
could hardly seem more appropriate.
In this chapter, I examine Deleuze’s interpretation of the eternal return
and advance two claims about it. First, I suggest that much of the con-
troversy surrounding Nietzsche and Philosophy’s appeal to the eternal
return as a principle of selective ontology can be mitigated by attending
to Deleuze’s novel reading of the will to power as an evaluative typol-
ogy that produces individuals’ ontological commitments. The eternal
return enacts an ontological selection, for Deleuze, by transforming the
evaluative qualities of the will. Motivating this point takes some time,
but it also sets the stage for the second claim advanced here – namely,
that Deleuze’s interpretation of the eternal return undergoes a significant
shift in Difference and Repetition. In particular, I suggest that whereas
Nietzsche and Philosophy hesitates over the metaphysical status of the
eternal return, Difference and Repetition pursues an overtly metaphysi-
cal use of this idea as a principle of transcendental empiricism.6 As a
result, the eternal return ceases to denote the present’s internal differ-
Deleuze’s Interpretation of the Eternal Return 77
entiation as simultaneously becoming-past and becoming-future, and

comes to denote the priority of the future as a passive, temporal synthe-
sis that grounds the present and past alike. In addition to revealing how
the eternal return, in Deleuze’s hands, comes to describe the future, I
hope this discussion sheds light on Nietzsche’s catalytic role in helping
Deleuze develop his philosophy of time.
Deleuze’s Will to Power
An evaluative typology
Deleuze describes Nietzsche and Philosophy by stating that ‘this book
sets out, primarily, to analyse what Nietzsche calls becoming’ (1983:
xii). It is thus unsurprising that he takes Nietzsche’s world to consist of
forces rather than beings.7 Forces, for Deleuze, are essentially relational
and plural (6). They are also necessarily unequal, such that whenever
two forces relate, one is quantitatively superior. Deleuze analyses these
quantitative disparities in terms of relations of ‘command’ and ‘obe-
dience’, though he hastens to add that such quantitative differences
produce qualitative differences, which he analyses in terms of ‘activity’
and ‘reactivity’ (40–3). Since Deleuze maintains that any relation among
forces produces a b ody – w hether chemical, biological, social or politi-
cal – Nietzsche and Philosophy examines all phenomena by treating the
active and reactive forces comprising them.
Deleuze distils Nietzsche’s tendency to analyse allegedly primitive
and simple concepts as products of dynamic principles down to a single
concept – force. He also distils Nietzsche’s tendency to explain diver-
gences among individuals’ outlooks in terms of qualitative differences
in their constitutions down to a single qualitative d istinction – a ctive/
reactive. But the active/reactive distinction cannot completely reduce
to forces’ quantitative differences. If it did, Deleuze could not explain
Nietzsche’s view that reactive forces can triumph over active forces
while remaining reactive. Slave morality is exemplary in this regard.
Nietzsche says of slave morality that ‘its action is, from the ground up,
reaction’ (GM I.10). And while slave morality defeats master moral-
ity and shapes humanity today, it remains reactive (BGE 202; GM
I.11–12). How does this occur? Nietzsche tells us that slave morality
overthrows master morality by positing ‘an indifferent substratum that
is free to express its strength – or not to’. After likening this to mislead-
ing expressions such as ‘lightning strikes’ or ‘force moves’, which add
an explanatorily otiose substratum behind activity, Nietzsche concludes:
78 James Mollison
‘there is no “being” behind the doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer”

is simply fabricated into the doing – t he doing is everything’ (GM I.13).
The lesson Deleuze draws from this is that reactive forces t riumph – n ot
by forming a quantitatively superior force, but – by decomposing active
forces (1983: 57). This decomposition is enabled by the fiction of a force
separate from its expression.
If forces’ qualities do not reduce completely to quantitative differences,
then what else explains them? Deleuze answers that qualitative differ-
ences among forces trace to qualities of the will to power, ‘the element
from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and
the quality that devolves into each force of this relation’ (1983: 50). In
its affirmative dimension, the will to power is ‘the power of transforma-
tion’ (42). In its negative dimension, it is ‘a will to nothingness’ and
‘a power of subtraction’ (57). Deleuze observes a complicity between
affirmative wills and active forces, on the one hand, and negative wills
and reactive forces, on the other, but insists that affirmative/negative and
active/reactive distinctions must not be conflated (53–4). The ability of
these distinctions to come apart enables nuanced evaluations, such as the
reactive affirmation of the ass and the negative action of priests. It also
allows nihilism to be overcome via the active negation of reactive forces.
Still, we must also resist distinguishing will from force too firmly, as this
would make the will to power a ‘metaphysical abstraction’ that violates
Nietzsche’s rejection of transcendent principles. Deleuze accordingly
analyses the will to power as ‘an essentially plastic principle that is no
wider than what it conditions, that changes itself with the conditioned
and determines itself in each case along with what it determines’ (50).
Each change in relations among forces is thus accompanied by changes
in the qualities of the will.8
Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche can be clarified by situating it
among debates over how to reconcile the will to power with Nietzsche’s
perspectivism. In its least restricted form – as when Nietzsche claims
that the world’s ‘essence is will to power’ (BGE 186) – the will to power
verges on a metaphysical concept that contradicts Nietzsche’s claim
that all knowledge is perspectival (GM III.12; GS 354). Some scholars
address this tension by prioritising perspectivism over the will to power,
for example, by taking the will to power to describe human psychology,9
or by taking it to reflect Nietzsche’s own, non-privileged perspective.10
Other scholars opt to prioritise the will to power over perspectivism, for
example, by interpreting the will to power as a metaphysical11 or quasi-
scientific hypothesis12 that holds for all perspectives. Deleuze cuts between
these extremes. He takes will to power to be a non-anthropomorphic
notion, comparable to Schopenhauer’s Will but distinguished by its

affirmative and pluralist aspects (1983: 6–8; 82–4). While this much is
common, Deleuze also claims that evaluation is non-anthropomorphic.
‘To actualise the will under any quality whatever, is always to evaluate.
To live is to evaluate’ (184). Deleuze thus reconciles the will to power
with perspectivism by pushing evaluation beyond human psychology.
The will to power, understood non-anthropomorphically, is itself per-
spectival and evaluative.
The will to power’s qualities, on Deleuze’s reading, issue distinc-
tive evaluations of the differences among forces in an ontogenetic field.
Whereas an affirmative will to power celebrates these differences, a
negative will to power opposes them. It is paramount to Deleuze’s
interpretation that affirmation and negation ‘do not have a univocal
relation’.13 Whereas negation opposes affirmation, affirmation differs
from negation. To illustrate such a relation of unilateral opposition,
we might recall Socrates’ opposition to the Sophists, which the Sophists
deny. Another example of unilateral opposition is Nietzsche’s view of
the relation between mind and body. While the mind opposes the body,
the body views the mind as a particular organic development. A third
example might be a two-way mirror, which represents space as enclosed
from one side and as continuous from the other. The import of this
notion of unilateral opposition is seen in Deleuze’s insistence that ‘we
cannot think of affirmation as “being opposed” to negation: this would
be to place the negative within it’ (1983: 188). The unilateral relation of
the will to power’s qualities thus allows Deleuze to avoid contaminating
affirmation with negation. But it also allows him to maintain that the
will to power is fundamentally affirmative, that ‘the will to power is
essentially creative and giving’ – despite its negative qualities (85; see
also 53–4, 184–5). Negative wills to power also create interpretations
and evaluations, and bestow these onto forces, though negative wills
disavow this creative activity.
Images of thought
Nietzsche regularly explains individuals’ perspectives in terms of their
values – v alues which trace to psycho-physiological and socio-historical
forces. For Deleuze, this explanatory strategy is emphatically non-
reductive. Forces themselves carry evaluations, which emerge from
still more fundamental, evaluative qualities of the will. Unflinching
commitment to the view that values extend beyond the psychologi-
cal domain reverberates in Deleuze’s comparisons of Nietzsche with
80 James Mollison
Kant.14 Notwithstanding Kant’s ‘genius’ for conceiving of ‘an immanent

critique’, Deleuze contends that Kant ‘lacked a method which permitted
reason to be judged from the inside without giving it the task of being its
own judge’. If transcendental idealism safeguards reason, it is because
it precludes the question of reason’s genesis. Genealogy, by contrast,
prompts us to ask, ‘what is the will which hides and expresses itself in
reason?’ (Deleuze 1983: 91). Against Kant’s critique of all claims to
knowledge and truth,15 Nietzsche criticises knowledge and truth them-
selves by tracing them to the evaluations of a will (89–90). It is worth
dwelling on this aspect of Deleuze’s interpretation, as it reveals how
the will to power’s qualities produce different accounts of the function
of thought. How we construe the world, and the eternal recurrence,
depends on the will’s qualities.
Deleuze takes genealogy to reveal that the unconditional valuing of
truth derives from a negative will to power (1983: 95–6). The belief
that truth is always valuable could not arise from a will not to let
oneself be deceived without assuming that truth is always beneficial.
But some truths are useless and even harmful, and some illusions are life
promoting. (To use one of Nietzsche’s preferred examples, tragedy pro-
vides an artistic illusion that affirms the way life’s exorbitant dynamism
undermines individuation.) Hence the view that truth is unconditionally
valuable must arise from a moral judgement never to deceive, not even
oneself (GS 344). It is easy to see how the belief that truth is always
valuable is life-negating in cases where truth is harmful or illusion is life-
promoting. But Deleuze further claims that attributing anything other
than instrumental value to truth is ascetic insofar as it leaves behind
life as the ultimate arbiter of value (GM III.24–7). Even more strongly,
Deleuze suggests that, if truth is valued as something that must be
sought, this is because life is already condemned to mere appearance,
because life and truth are already understood as opposed. Such opposi-
tional thinking typifies a negative will to power.
A negative will which values truth as opposed to life yields a reactive
image of thought as subordinate to knowledge. For Deleuze, knowledge
is not only quantitatively reactive, in that it emerges from consciousness’
reaction to forces superior to the body (1983: 39–41). Knowledge is also
qualitatively reactive. ‘Knowledge gives life laws that separate it from
what it can do, that keep it from acting, that forbid it to act, maintain-
ing it in the narrow framework of scientifically observable reaction:
almost like an animal in a zoo’ (100). Deleuze’s claim that knowledge
is paradigmatically reactive is bold, but it receives support from famil-
iar features of Nietzsche’s thought. Nietzsche not only explains the
emergence of the self- conscious subject in terms of the herd’s need

to hold individuals accountable for their actions (GM I.13; GS 354).
He also explains the notion of substance in these terms, analysing the
concept of substance as a projection of the ego onto forces (TI III.5;
VI.3; WP 485, 498). This, in turn, implicates causal categories – both
because efficient causation is modelled on consciousness’ ex post facto
experience of ‘willing’ bodily actions (D 121; GS 127; BGE 21, 36) and
because commonplace causal explanations posit discrete beings in place
of continuums of forces (D 6; GS 112). This also undercuts the view of
time as a series of discrete causally related moments (WP 520, 487, 545).
Without belabouring the point, we can glimpse the reasoning behind
Nietzsche’s view that ‘knowledge and becoming exclude one another’
(WP 517), such that ‘a world in a state of becoming could not, in a strict
sense, be “comprehended” or “known”’ (WP 520). And if knowledge
categorically opposes the world’s becoming, then we can also see the
reasoning behind Deleuze’s claim that ‘the spirit of revenge is the genea-
logical element of our thought, the transcendental element of our way
of thinking’ (1983: 35). The basic categories humans use to make forces
intelligible oppose life’s dynamism.
Whereas negative wills oppose life’s becoming and subordinate
thought to knowledge, affirmative wills celebrate life’s dynamism. An
affirmative evaluation of becoming entails nothing less than a new image
of thought, ‘a thought that would affirm life instead of a knowledge that
is opposed to life . . . Thinking would then mean discovering, inventing,
new possibilities of life’ (Deleuze 1983: 101). Here, Deleuze draws on
Nietzsche’s celebration of art as superior to knowledge for its ability
to affirm life. Unlike Kant’s approach to beauty from the perspective
of observers’ disinterested contemplation, Nietzsche approaches beauty
from the perspective of the artist, who is overtly interested in selecting
and amplifying active forces to stimulate further life-affirmation. If ‘the
activity of life is like a power of falsehood, of duping, dissimulating, daz-
zling and seducing’, the artist doubles this power of falsehood in ‘a will
to deceive’ (102–3). Deleuze describes this shift as one where the element
of thought is no longer truth, but sense and value (104). Whereas the
claimant of knowledge proceeds from a negative will that renounces
thought’s evaluative and creative qualities, the artist celebrates these, so
that ‘creation takes the place of knowledge’ (173).
At this point, it is important to recall Deleuze’s notion of unilat-
eral opposition. While claimants of knowledge oppose artists, artists
do not reciprocate this opposition. Strictly speaking, in a world of
becoming, all conceptual schemes are selective appropriations of forces
82 James Mollison
based on the will’s evaluative qualities. From an artist’s vantage, those

who pursue knowledge are merely conflicted artists, artists who select
reactive forces, negate life’s becoming and disavow thought’s creative
power. Affirmative artists, by contrast, select active forces, celebrate
life’s becoming and affirm the creative powers of the false. Whereas
claimants of knowledge view truth and appearance as opposed, ‘for
the artist, appearance no longer means the negation of the real in this
world but this kind of selection, correction, redoubling and affirmation.
Then truth perhaps takes on a new sense. Truth is appearance’ (Deleuze
1983: 103). For Deleuze, the difference between knowledge and art is
not epistemological, since knowledge and art both selectively falsify
becoming, but evaluative. Whereas the seeker of knowledge renounces
thought’s creative power, the artist celebrates thought’s creativity to
enable greater life affirmation.
Deleuze’s Eternal Return
Physical, temporal and selective aspects

Since the will to power’s qualities implicate our image of thought in
the broadest sense, these qualities also inform our understanding of the
eternal return. Nietzsche’s best-known statement of the eternal return
occurs in the following pronouncement, delivered by a demon:
This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again
and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every
pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably
small or great in your life must return to you in the same succession and
sequence . . . (GS 341)
Some scholars contend that this message is meant factually. On this

‘cosmological reading’, the eternal return describes the cyclical structure
of time, which ensures that everything recurs in identical fashion ad
infinitum.16 Other scholars emphasise Nietzsche’s discussion of how
we might respond to the eternal return. The idea could ‘possibly crush’
us or, if we are sufficiently well disposed toward life, we might ‘long
for nothing more fervently’ than the eternal return (GS 341). On this
‘hypothetical reading’, the eternal return is not meant as an accurate
piece of cosmology but as a thought experiment that diagnoses one’s
ability to affirm life.17
Deleuze cannot abide either of these interpretations of the eternal
return, as he thinks that they fail to affirm life’s becoming. Against the
cosmological reading, Deleuze argues that if we resolve the prima facie

tension between this view of the eternal return and Nietzsche’s emphasis
on becoming by making becoming a feature of limited perspectives
within temporal cycles, then the eternal return would resemble ancient
formulations of the idea that Nietzsche rejects (Deleuze 1983: 29).18
Likewise, if the eternal return is a thought experiment that diagnoses
one’s ability to affirm life, then, insofar as life is characterised by becom-
ing, the test’s appeal to cyclical time is inconsistent with its aim. Both
interpretations negate life by subordinating becoming to being via cycles
of time. For Deleuze, the definitive formulation of the eternal return
appears in Nietzsche’s notes, where we read: ‘That everything recurs is
the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being’
(WP 617). Deleuze thus contends that ‘return is the being said of that
which becomes’ (1983: 24).19 Similar to his extension of sense and value
beyond the psychological domain to non-anthropomorphic forces and
wills, Deleuze pushes the eternal return past its application to individu-
als’ dispositions until returning characterises becoming.
By making return said of becoming, Deleuze can appeal to the eternal
return as an explanation of time’s passage. Here, he draws from note-
book entries where Nietzsche argues against the possibility of equilib-
rium among forces and in favour of ceaseless becoming (WP 1062, 1067,
708). On the assumption that past time is infinite, Nietzsche reasons that
if an equilibrium of forces was possible, it would have been achieved.
Yet, the dynamism of the present shows that this has not occurred.
Deleuze takes these reflections to further undermine cosmological read-
ings of the eternal return, as the incompatibility between equilibrium
and becoming raises questions about why a cycle of time would begin
and why a completed cycle would give way to another (1983: 49).
Deleuze then applies this reasoning about cycles’ extreme states to the
present moment. If time were a successive series of ‘closed’ moments, we
could not explain why one moment gives way to the next. On pain of
perpetual stasis, Deleuze concludes that ‘the present must coexist with
itself as past and yet to come’ (48).20 Becoming requires that the present
is internally differentiated. Similar to how ‘it is not being that returns but
rather the returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed
of becoming’, so the present does not return, for Deleuze. Rather, by
affirming ‘the synthetic relation of the moment to itself as present, past,
and future’, returning constitutes the present (48).
While Deleuze does not confine the eternal return to the psychological
domain, he nevertheless considers its ethical application. He compares
the eternal return to Kant’s practical synthesis for action: ‘whatever you
84 James Mollison
will, will it in such a way that you also will its eternal return’ (1983: 68).
This imperative eliminates all half-hearted willing. ‘Laziness, stupid-
ity, baseness, cowardice or spitefulness that would will its own eternal
return would no longer be the same laziness, stupidity, etc.’, because
the practical thought of the eternal return pushes reactive forces to their
limit. Although this practical use of the eternal return ‘makes willing
something whole’, ‘makes willing a creation’, Deleuze thinks that this
is insufficient to overcome nihilism (69). Nietzsche describes the eternal
return as ‘the most extreme form of nihilism’ (WP 55) because reactive
forces can pass its practical test. This casts further doubt on hypothetical
readings of the eternal return, as the thought of life’s identical replica-
tion fails to transform the Last Man content with a reactive life. Deleuze
infers from this that the eternal return must carry out a second selection,
one that ‘involves the most obscure parts of Nietzsche’s philosophy and
forms an almost esoteric element on the doctrine of the eternal return’
(1983: 69).
This second selection is ontological. Whereas the first selection con-
cerns reactive forces, the second submits the will to nothingness to the
eternal return. This leads the will to nothingness to break its alliance
with reactive forces. As Deleuze puts the point, ‘only the eternal return
can complete nihilism because it makes negation a negation of reactive
forces’ (1983: 70). He illustrates this transition by distinguishing the
Last Man from the Man who actively destroys himself (69–70; 174). But
the details of this transmutation remain obscure. Inasmuch as the eternal
return forecloses the possibility of any life other than this, perhaps
it compels any evaluation which opposes life to confront its internal
contradiction, its use of life’s creative powers to negate life itself. On
this suggestion, the eternal return forces the ascetic who denies life in
favour of heaven to either abandon asceticism or to affirm asceticism as
an active negation of life. Likewise, the eternal return forces those who
pursue truth in opposition to life to either question the value of truth or
to affirm the will to truth as an active negation of life. Generalising the
point: if one attempts to affirm the practical thought of the eternal return
under the sway of nihilism, negation is pushed to break its alliance
with reactive forces and to actively pursue the destruction of reactive
forces themselves. Unfortunately, though, I suspect that such an expla-
nation of the eternal return’s selective ontology remains all-too-human.
Throughout Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze insists that the will to
power must not be confined to psychology – both because human psy-
chology is categorically reactive (21, 34, 41, 64, 167–9) and because the
will produces forces more basic than individuals’ psychological outlooks
(49–55, 84–6). The foregoing explanation of the eternal return’s selec-

tive ontology is therefore in tension with Deleuze’s reading, as it implies
that the eternal return’s selective ontology depends on the way the
thought’s practical application compels individuals to transform their
values. Deleuze’s claim that ‘in and through the eternal return negation
as a quality of the will to power transmutes itself into affirmation,
becomes an affirmation of negation itself, it becomes a power of affirm-
ing’, must somehow be understood non-anthropomorphically (72). The
eternal return must compel negative wills to overcome their opposition
to affirmation, if only to affirm themselves, and without making this
transmutation pivot on human psychology.
Selective ontology
Despite my suspicion that the eternal return’s selective ontology cannot
reduce to individuals’ reflection on its practical application, I’d like to
ask whether the eternal return’s ethical selection might yield a selec-
tive ontology. An affirmative answer to this question would amount
to a general defence of Deleuze’s reading, as scholars typically accept
his claim that the eternal return functions as an ethical principle but
resist his further claim about selective ontology.21 Examining Deleuze’s
notion of selective ontology from this vantage also allows the distinct-
ness of Difference and Repetition’s interpretation of the eternal return
to emerge in sharper relief.
The suggestion that the eternal return’s ethical application could
produce a selective ontology might seem ill formed. If ontology describes
unalterable features of reality, and if the eternal return’s ethical selection
results from a psychological transformation, then one might think that
the eternal return’s ethical application cannot affect ontology, which is
more fundamental than psychology.22 However, at least in Nietzsche
and Philosophy, Deleuze denies that ontology and metaphysics describe
the ground floor of reality. ‘According to Nietzsche the philosophy of
the will must replace the old metaphysics: it destroys and supersedes
it’ (1983: 84; see also 35). Consistent with Nietzsche’s explanations
of individuals’ ontological commitments in terms of their psychologi-
cal constitutions, Deleuze maintains that the will to power’s qualities
produce our image of thought, including our ontological categories,
such that ‘metaphysics and the theory of knowledge themselves belong
to typology’ (145). Deleuze does not shrink before the consequences of
this intrepid claim. He takes Nietzsche to replace the Platonic question
of essence (what is [x]?) with questions of sense and value (who wills
86 James Mollison
[x]?), and concludes that, ‘truth, as a concept, is entirely undetermined.

Everything depends on the value and sense of what we think. We always
have the truths we deserve as a function of the sense of what we con-
ceive, the value of what we believe’ (104). Not only is it the case that, in
a world of becoming, every phenomenon has multiple senses, such that
there is no one way the world ‘is’; even more to the point, in a world of
becoming, every ontology is selective. Granted, a negative will to power
leads thought to disavow its creative power, such that we mistakenly
think that ontology circumscribes sense and value. But under an affirma-
tive will, ‘realist’ ontologies are merely different modes of selection
– to wit, selections of reactive forces. In Nietzsche and Philosophy,
metaphysics is subordinate to typology. By transforming the evaluative
qualities of the will, the eternal return transfigures everything.
Even if ethical selection can transform individuals’ values and thereby
produce a selective ontology, one might object that any selective ontol-
ogy violates the eternal return’s ethical aspiration. That is, if affirming
the eternal return requires unconditional acceptance of the world as
it is, then selective approaches to ontology might seem to express life-
negation.23 However, the suggestion that the eternal return inspires a
global acceptance of the world is thoroughly at odds with Deleuze’s
account. To motivate this point, we can recall Deleuze’s insistence that
the world is irreducibly plural and dynamic, such that there is no one
way that the world is for us to accept. Beyond this reply, we should also
observe Deleuze’s insistence that ‘affirmation conceived of as acceptance,
as affirmation of that which is, as truthfulness of the true or positivity
of the real, is false affirmation’ (1983: 184). Acceptance, according to
Deleuze, is reactive. Affirmation differs from acceptance in compelling
creation, and ‘there is creation, properly speaking, only insofar as we
make use of excess in order to invent new forms of life rather than
separating life from what it can do’ (185). For Deleuze, affirming the
eternal return cannot entail accepting the w orld – even as pluralist
and dynamic – b ecause affirmation requires actively contributing to the
world’s becoming.
A third class of objections concerns Deleuze’s view that the eternal
return reveals that ‘negation sacrifices all reactive forces’ and that ‘there
is no return of the negative’ (1983: 175, 189). Some object to this aspect
of Deleuze’s interpretation on the grounds that active forces require
reactive forces for their distinction, such that eradicating reactive forces
also eradicates active forces.24 Others object that Deleuze’s claims about
elimination express a form of life-negation that is ethically or politically
dangerous.25 To address these concerns, recall Deleuze’s insistence that
the will to power’s qualities are not univocal. Granted, from the perspec-
tive of a negative will, the eternal return is a kind of auto-destruction.
To the extent that negative values define our human condition, affirming
the eternal return is therefore difficult indeed.26 But from an affirmative
vantage, the eternal return does not require the elimination of negation
or reactive forces; for, affirmation does not oppose negation or reaction.
This affirmative perspective on the eternal return is reflected in Deleuze’s
descriptions of t ransmutation – n ot as a sacrifice, b
ut – a s revealing that
negation depends on affirmation. The eternal return ‘makes negation a
power of affirming’ (86), so that ‘negation ceases to be an autonomous
power’ (191; see also 176–9). Similarly, reactive forces unilaterally
depend on active forces (41). And insofar as Deleuze maintains that
bodies in which active forces prevail are fundamentally active (86), there
is a sense in which reactive forces need not be eliminated but only subor-
dinated to active forces. Affirming the eternal return does not eliminate
negation and reaction in some physical sense. Rather, it reveals that
negation and reactivity depend on affirmation and activity. This is why
the eternal return produces a double affirmation (186). Selective ontol-
ogy does not select some phenomena as opposed to others; it affirms the
affirmative wills and active forces that subtend all phenomena. Negation
and reaction also rely on the affirmative powers of the f alse – t he fiction
of a will which does not create, or the fiction of forces separated from
their expression, for example. The eternal return asks whether we can
affirm such falsification to push the powers of the false still further.
Insofar as the practical thought of the eternal return forecloses the
possibility of any life other than this, it compels individuals either to
abandon life-negating values or to affirm these values as an active nega-
tion of the world. The ascetic deprived of the promise of heaven must
either abandon asceticism or affirm asceticism as an active negation of
life; the claimant of knowledge must either abandon their subordina-
tion of life to truth or affirm the will to truth as an active negation of
becoming. Either response to the eternal return produces an ontological
transformation. If the life-negating value of truth is replaced with the
life-affirming value of artistic creation, our conceptualisation of the
world becomes an artistic selection that contributes to the world’s crea-
tivity. But if negative values are actively affirmed, instead of replaced, a
profound conversion still unfolds. The ascetic who actively negates life
is not the same as the ascetic who merely reacts to forces beyond their
power. For, the active ascetic ceases to disavow the will’s creativity and
acknowledges that their will evaluates life but finds it wanting. Neither
response to the practical thought of the eternal r eturn – the replacement
88 James Mollison
of negative with affirmative values, or the active affirmation of negative

values – requires the physical destruction of negative wills or reactive
forces. Rather, the transformation is evaluative. To affirm the practical
thought of the eternal return, we must affirm the affirmative wills and
active forces that subtend all phenomena, including the negative and
reactive. Such a double affirmation actively contributes to the world’s
creative dynamism. To be clear: I am not suggesting that Deleuze’s
claim that the eternal return produces a selective ontology is beyond
reproach, but that any successful reproach to this portion of Deleuze’s
reading must confront his interpretation of the will to power as a
nonunivocal, evaluative typology that produces individuals’ ontological
commitments.
The Repetition of Difference
Transcendental empiricism
If the foregoing, sympathetic reconstruction provides a general defence
of Deleuze’s account of selective ontology, it does so by exploiting
the puzzling position occupied by the will to power and the eternal
return in Nietzsche and Philosophy. Insofar as Deleuze insists that these
concepts are not confined to psychology but describe becoming, meta-
physical interpretations of both notions seem invited. Yet Nietzsche and
Philosophy’s discussions of metaphysics primarily aim at showing that
metaphysics in general expresses a negative will to power. For Deleuze,
‘
Nietzsche . . . makes nihilism the presupposition of all metaphysics
rather than a particular metaphysics: there is no metaphysics which
does not judge and depreciate life in the name of a supra-sensible world’
(1983: 34; see also 195). But this only makes the status of affirma-
tive wills and the return of becoming more perplexing. Are these not
metaphysical? Sometimes, Deleuze seems to permit the possibility of an
affirmative metaphysics – as when he claims that ‘Nietzsche . . . develops
a philosophy which must . . . replace the old metaphysics’ (145, see also
84). Still, Nietzsche and Philosophy seems to vacillate before this pos-
sibility, leaving us with an odd picture on which the phenomenal world
is produced by non-anthropomorphic evaluations, which are affirmed
non-anthropomorphically in the process of returning – and without any
of this being metaphysical. If Deleuze wavers before the possibility of
an affirmative metaphysics in Nietzsche and Philosophy, he overcomes
this hesitation in Difference and Repetition by developing his method of
transcendental empiricism.
For orientation purposes, it helps to very briefly consider Kant’s tran-

scendental idealism as Deleuze views it.27 Deleuze takes Kant to advance
beyond Descartes’ cogito by realising, first, that determination (I think)
implies an undetermined existence (I am) and, second, that determina-
tion cannot directly bear on the undetermined. Kant therefore introduces
a third element, the form of determination, which is the form of time.
As Deleuze puts it, ‘my undetermined existence can be determined only
within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive, receptive
phenomenal subject appearing within time’, so that ‘the spontaneity
of which I am conscious in the “I think” cannot be understood as
the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only as the
affection of a passive self which experiences its own thought’. Deleuze
celebrates this glimpse of the passive self, which fractures the I, as ‘the
discovery of the transcendental’ (1994: 86). Nevertheless, he charges
Kant with concealing this fracture with ‘active synthetic identity’ (87).
Kant’s active, a priori syntheses preserve the identity of the transcen-
dental subject at the expense of making the unconditioned external to
sensibility and of making the sensibility external to the understanding.
Following Solomon Maimon, Deleuze contends that Kant’s transcen-
dental idealism only offers the conditions of possible experience, not
those of actual experience.
Transcendental empiricism emerges against this background. Whereas
Kant considers the difference between the undetermined and the deter-
mined an epistemological limitation of the transcendental subject,
Deleuze considers this difference ontologically productive. He retains
Kant’s notion of the unconditioned but renders it immanent to phenom-
ena. This ‘noumenon closest to the phenomenon’ is, of course, difference
itself (1994: 222). Difference is ‘not a sensible being but the being of
the sensible. It is not the given but that by which the given is given’
(140). Difference is thus a speculative concept that cannot be grasped
empirically. It is not an extensive relation among sensible qualities, but
an intensive relation that produces sensations. Such intensive differ-
ences produce ideas by repetition. Repeated variations among intensive
differences in light, for example, communicate a kind of violence to
the faculties, prompting the understanding to structure these intensive
differences in an idea, say, of RED. Ideas are always actualised in unique
ways; no two shades of red are identical. Like difference itself, repeti-
tion is a speculative concept, one that produces the ideas that structure
sensations.
The concepts of difference and repetition allow Deleuze to remedy
Kant’s externalisation of the unconditioned from the given and of
90 James Mollison
s ensibility from the understanding. Difference in itself produces sensible

qualities and ‘forces us to think’ by providing ‘an object not of recogni-
tion but of a fundamental encounter’ (Deleuze 1994: 139). As this
description of thought as forced upon us suggests, transcendental empir-
icism remains faithful to Kant’s discovery of the passive self. Beneath
Kant’s active synthesis of the present, Deleuze posits a prior, passive
synthesis (habit) that makes corporeal receptivity possible. Beneath the
active synthesis of the past, he posits a prior, passive synthesis (memory)
which enables time’s passage. Beneath the active synthesis of the future,
he posits a prior, passive synthesis (the new) which makes the recogni-
tion of endurance possible. Without treating these syntheses in detail,28
we can observe how they subject the Self and Ideas to the pure and
empty form of time. Just as the I is fractured into undetermined being,
the determinability of being and the process of determining being, so
Ideas are ‘undetermined with regard to their object, determinable with
regard to the objects of experience, and [bear] the ideal of an infinite
determination with regard to the concepts of the understanding’ (169).
The empty form of time fractures being and thought alike, revealing
their emergence from the repetition of difference.
Far from being the form of the immutable and eternal, the pure and
empty form of time, for Deleuze, is ‘the form of change’ itself. As the
pure and empty form of time is a transcendental form that precedes all
empirical content, Deleuze merely describes it as a ‘caesura’, which does
not so much emerge within linear time as it reorders time as a whole,
breaking time into the time before and the time after the emergence of
the New (Deleuze 1994: 89–90). The consequences of this shift can
hardly be overstated. Deleuze insists that ‘there is nothing that does not
lose its i dentity . . . when the dynamic of space and time in its actual con-
stitution is discovered’ (218). Indeed, insofar as philosophy traditionally
defines truth as eternal and unchanging, the pure and empty form of
time puts truth in crisis, revealing that concepts are not universal and
necessary essences, but singular creations produced in response to shift-
ing problematics.29 Transcendental empiricism accordingly champions
artists over truthful thinkers of common sense. Whereas the latter judge
according to the eternal form of the true, the former create by deploying
the powers of the false under the pure and empty form of time.
The eternal return of the new

Kant’s transcendental idealism denounces the notions of the substantial
self (the Soul), the totality of what exists (the World) and a first cause
of this totality (God) as transcendental illusions produced by the unre-

stricted use of reason. Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism attempts to
go beyond Kant, however, by developing an account of the transcenden-
tal that actively excludes the coherence of the Self, the World and God.
It is therefore fitting that Difference and Repetition makes much use of
Nietzsche. For, already in Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze claims
that ‘Nietzsche seems to have sought (and to have found in “the eternal
return” and “the will to power”) . . . a re-invention of the critique
which Kant betrayed at the same time as he conceived it’ (1983: 52).
Nevertheless, it is only in Difference and Repetition that Deleuze fully
elaborates on the way the will to power and eternal return might yield a
non-representational image of thought.
The notion of difference free from any dependence on identity is one
of Deleuze’s great philosophical achievements. If this concept resembles
any from the history of philosophy, it is Nietzsche’s will to power,
as Deleuze understands it. Foreshadowing Deleuze’s development of
transcendental empiricism in Difference and Repetition, Nietzsche and
Philosophy claims that ‘the will to power manifests itself, in the first
place, as the sensibility of forces and, in the second place, as the becom-
ing sensible of forces’, and that ‘thinking depends on forces which take
hold of thought’ (1983: 63, 108). But in this early work, Deleuze is
more concerned with analysing the image of thought produced by nega-
tive evaluations and reactive forces. In Difference and Repetition, by
contrast, he dispenses almost entirely with negative wills and reactive
forces to develop a thoroughly affirmative and active image of thought.
Difference and Repetition thus describes the will to power as ‘the world
of flashing metamorphoses, of communicating intensities, differences
of differences’, and claims that ‘difference in the will to power is the
highest object of sensibility’ (1994: 243). The first of these statements
characterises the will to power as a theory of singularities that escape
the notions of the Self, the World and God. The second characterises
difference – w
hich is celebrated under an affirmative will – as that
which produces the given from the unconditioned. Difference in itself
is a metaphysical concept appropriate to an affirmative will to power,
a metaphysical notion free of transcendence and of the negative evalua-
tions that characterise a representational image of thought.
The gap between sensibility and understanding is bridged by differ-
ence’s repetition, which forces ideas to emerge as ways of structuring
intensive variations. Deleuze claims, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, that
‘we can only understand the eternal return as the expression of a prin-
ciple which serves as an explanation of diversity and its reproduction,
92 James Mollison
of difference and its repetition’, and that ‘the thought of the eternal
return [as a selection of affirmative wills] goes beyond all the laws of
our knowledge’ (1983: 49, 108). While these cryptic claims foreshadow
Difference and Repetition, they cry out for elaboration inasmuch as
Nietzsche and Philosophy vacillates before the questions of what a non-
anthropomorphic affirmation of the eternal return might entail and of
how such an affirmation could be non-metaphysical. Difference and
Repetition overcomes this hesitation. There, the eternal return ‘is the
only Same which can be said of this world and which excludes any
prior identity therein’, because the eternal return is a transcendental
affirmation of difference itself. Insofar as the eternal return, as a double
affirmation and a repetition of difference, marks the emergence of
understanding from the given, Deleuze claims that ‘repetition in the
eternal return is the highest thought’ (1994: 243). Just as Difference and
Repetition dispenses with the will to power’s negative qualities to focus
on its affirmative aspect, Deleuze also dispenses almost entirely with the
cosmological and psychological uses of the eternal return in favour of a
transcendental use of the idea as an affirmation of difference. The eternal
return ceases to describe a psychological transformation that induces
a selective approach to ontology and becomes a properly ontological
selection, one which ensures that only extreme intensive differences
emerge in the understanding.
As the repetition of difference, the eternal return also marks the
passive, temporal synthesis of the future. Deleuze is forthright about the
speculative character of this portion of his interpretation of Nietzsche.
He maintains that ‘the Nietzschean doctrine of eternal return was never
stated but reserved for a future work’, and that ‘Nietzsche gave no
exposition of the eternal return’ because ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra is
unfinished’ (1994: 92, 297). While this gives Deleuze some reason to
speculate about Nietzsche’s ultimate formulation of the eternal return,
such speculation is distinct from ‘buggery’. Far from intentionally sub-
verting Nietzsche’s thought, Deleuze attempts to formulate what the
eternal return would have become were it not for Nietzsche’s collapse.
Deleuze takes his conjectures on this score to be warranted by the way
that the eternal return presupposes an absence of identity – the death of
God and the dissolution of the Self. If what returns is difference, then
sameness and identity only emerge as simulacra (126), ‘as secondary
powers’ of difference (301). Strictly speaking, then, ‘the eternal return
affects only the new’, since what repeats is always different (90). This
view of the eternal return as a transcendental synthesis of difference
entails a radical rethinking of time. While Nietzsche and Philosophy
describes the eternal return’s temporal consequence as the affirmation

of the present as internally differentiated into a simultaneous becoming-
past and becoming- future, Difference and Repetition appeals to the
eternal return as the passive synthesis of the future. Deleuze describes
this synthesis as ‘the royal repetition’, one which ‘subordinates the other
[passive temporal syntheses] to itself and strips them of their autonomy’
(94). The emergence of the New constitutes the present and past alike,
producing ‘a universal ungrounding’ (91). Everything that returns is
new; only creation returns. Many Nietzsche scholars wrestle with the
psychological consequences of the eternal return, asking how we might
overcome the weight of the past in favour of the promise of the future.
But Deleuze sidesteps these issues by making the present and the past
metaphysically dependent on the future. He largely dispenses with the
eternal return’s psychological applications in favour of a transcendental
use of the idea.
It might seem that Deleuze’s ultimate appeal to the eternal return as an
ontological selection of intensive differences leaves behind Nietzsche’s
preoccupation with the thought’s ethical consequences. However, rep-
etition is selective in the ontological and ethical senses. Repetition tests
our ability to leave behind the illusions of being and identity, so that
we might affirm a life of becoming and difference. In this sense, Deleuze
remains committed to the eternal return’s ethical challenge of demand-
ing an affirmation of life’s creative dynamism. He pursues an immanent
ethics which encourages us to go to the limits of what we can do.
While Nietzsche articulates the eternal return as a principle of the past
(as cosmological condition) and present (as conditioning ethical trans-
formation), his collapse prevented him from formulating the eternal
return as a principle of the future (as the unconditioned, the repetition
of difference). Deleuze attempts to complete Nietzsche’s project, as he
understands it, by transforming the eternal return’s ethical imperative
into a demand to be open to the new so that we might transform
ourselves into extreme and singular forms and thereby discover who we
might become.
Conclusion
Deleuze’s interpretation of the eternal return develops at the threshold
of the traditional demands of the history of philosophy. Attending to
Nietzsche’s views that evaluations subtend even the most banal descrip-
tions of the world and that becoming exceeds all knowledge leads Deleuze
to push the will to power’s evaluative qualities and the eternal return’s
94 James Mollison
transformative effects beyond psychology, until they characterise the

world’s becoming. This makes Nietzsche and Philosophy’s claim that
the eternal return produces a selective ontology more defensible than it
might seem, as Deleuze holds that the eternal return selects affirmative
wills and that the will to power is a non-anthropomorphic, nonunivocal
evaluative typology that produces one’s ontology. But this also prompts
questions about the metaphysical status of affirmative wills to power and
of a non-anthropomorphic affirmation of the eternal return. If these ques-
tions haunt Nietzsche and Philosophy, they are answered in Difference
and Repetition, where Deleuze develops a transcendental account of
the will to power as difference in itself and of the eternal return as the
difference’s repetition. This break from a psychological interpretation of
the eternal return in favour of a transcendental interpretation of it also
transforms the doctrine’s temporal consequences. Whereas Nietzsche
and Philosophy takes the eternal return to mark the present’s internal
differentiation as a simultaneous becoming-past and becoming-future,
Difference and Repetition takes the eternal return to mark the priority
of the future as a passive, temporal synthesis that constitutes the present
and past alike. The consequences of Deleuze’s admittedly speculative
interpretation of the eternal return certainly merit closer examination.
But hopefully the foregoing discussion clarifies Nietzsche’s pivotal role
in enabling Deleuze to develop his own theory of time, according to
which all that returns is new.
Notes
1. Selected portions of this chapter are adapted from Mollison (forthcoming).
2. Citations from Nietzsche use abbreviations listed in the references. Arabic
numerals refer to section numbers. Roman numerals to major divisions within
works.
3. See Schrift 1995: 139 n.32; and D’Iorio 2011.
4. See Ansell-Pearson 1994: 114–16; Ward 2010: 106–10; and Woodward 2013:
134–7.
5. See Hallward 2006: 149–52; Malabou 2010; and Woodward 2013: 140–3.
6. This shift is concealed by the tendency to interchangeably cite Nietzsche and
Philosophy and Difference and Repetition when examining Deleuze’s reading
of the eternal return. For examples, see Hallward 2006; Malabou 2010; Ward
2010; and, to a lesser extent, Woodward 2013. My developmental approach
to this topic also distinguishes my discussion from those that only appraise
Deleuze’s interpretation as a reading of Nietzsche (e.g., Ansell-Pearson 1994;
Malabou 2010; Ward 2010; D’Iorio 2011; and Woodward 2013) and those
that grant Deleuze’s interpretation to examine the use he makes of it (e.g.,
Williams 2011; and Voss 2013).
7. Deleuze’s choice to draw from Nietzsche’s Nachlass merits emphasising here.
For while Nietzsche’s publications provide some support for the claim that the
world is comprised of forces (e.g., BGE 12, 17; GM I.13), his notebooks provide
drastically more support for it. The concept of force (Kraft) is used to analyse
the world in general (WP 1064, 1062, 638, 1066), organic life (WP 641, 650,
647, 689, 702–3), human life (WP 686, 490, 660, 704), phenomenology and
psychology (WP 664, 668, 568), value judgements (WP 260, 667, 781, 931,
386, 863, 576), social phenomena (WP 750, 762, 786, 784) and aesthetic activi-
ties (WP 852, 842, 809, 812, 815).
8. D’Iorio criticises Deleuze’s interpretation of the will to power as entailing ‘a
form of dualism which Nietzsche’s monistic philosophy strives to eliminate’
(2011: 3). The portion of D’Iorio’s argument concerning the legitimacy of the
French translation of Nietzsche’s notes that Deleuze uses is well-taken (see
Montinari 1996). However, D’Iorio’s accusation of dualism is complicated by
Deleuze’s analysis of the will to power as a plastic, empirical principle.
9. For examples, see Kaufmann 1956: 152–80; and Reginster 2006: 103–48.
10. For example, see Clark 1990: 205–44.
11. For example, see Richardson 1996.
12. For example, see Schacht 1985: 212–34.
13. On this aspect of Deleuze’s reading, see Norman 2000.
14. On Nietzsche and Philosophy’s relation to Kant, see Marsden 1998.
15. This gloss is supported by Kant’s description of his critical project as a ‘ripened
power of judgement, which will no longer be put off with illusory knowledge,
and which demands that reason . . . institute a court of justice, [to] secure its
rightful claims while dismissing all its groundless pretensions’ (1998: Axi–xii).
16. For examples, see Kaufmann 1956: 274–86; Heidegger 1991; Loeb 2010; and
D’Iorio 2011.
17. For examples, see Nehamas 1985: 141–69; Clark 1990: 245–86; and Reginster
2006: 201–27.
18. A similar argument motivates Deleuze’s claim that the eternal return affirms
chance (1983: 25–9).
19. D’Iorio argues that Deleuze’s claim that difference eternally returns ‘relies on
one fragment by Nietzsche, and one fragment only’ (2011: 1). The fragment
in question results from Geneviève Bianquis’ decision to combine two notes
from Nietzsche’s Nachlass and thereby obscure the fact that these notes criticise
Johannes Gustav Vogt’s rendering of the eternal return (D’Iorio 2011: 1–3; see
also Woodward 2013: 128–9). D’Iorio is right to challenge Bianquis’ rendering
of these texts (see Montinari 1996), but I think he overstates his case against
Deleuze. Nietzsche rejects ancient formulations of the eternal return as a cycli-
cal hypothesis, insists on the priority of becoming over being, and argues that
metaphysical notions of identity abstract from reality’s complexity. Deleuze’s
claim that difference returns largely derives from the cumulative force that these
themes exert on our understanding of the eternal return. Though, as we will see,
Deleuze becomes more forthright about the speculative nature of his interpreta-
tion by the time of Difference and Repetition, where the return of difference is
emphasised over the return of becoming.
20. This point bears a striking affinity with Deleuze’s reading of Bergson – although,
whereas Deleuze takes Bergson to claim that the present and past are contem-
poraneous (Deleuze 1988: 58–9), he takes Nietzsche to claim that the present,
past and future are coeval. While Deleuze suggests that this point follows from
Nietzsche’s analysis of temporal cycles’ extreme states, Borradori (1999) argues
that Deleuze’s earlier essay, ‘Bergson’s Conception of Difference’, operates
throughout much of Nietzsche and Philosophy. So, Deleuze may be perverting
Nietzsche somewhat here.
21. For examples, see Ansell- Pearson 1994: 113–16; Schrift 1995: 139 n.32;
96 James Mollison
Malabou 2010; Ward 2010: 106–7; D’Iorio 2011; and Woodward 2013:
128–44. At the risk of seeming facile, I will not reconstruct and rebut specific
objections raised against Deleuze’s notion of selective ontology. Isolating any
one objection strikes me as overly ad hoc and reconstructing all of the rel-
evant arguments would take considerable time. Still, I think a broad defence of
Deleuze’s reading can be offered, at least insofar as one accepts that the eternal
return carries ethical implications.
22. Ward seems to have something like this in mind when he accuses Deleuze of
‘conflating two different notions of selection’. The first selection, according
to Ward, operates ‘purely as a thought, as something which forces us to think
about existence in a particular way’, whereas the second selection operates as ‘a
universal, cosmological process’ (Ward 2010: 106).
23. For objections of this sort, see Schrift 1995: 139 n.32; Ward 2010: 106–10;
D’Iorio 2011; and Woodward 2013: 134–7.
24. For examples, see Ansell-Pearson 1994: 114–16; and Ward 2010: 106–8.
25. For examples, see Hallward 2006: 149–52; Malabou 2010: 25; and Woodward
2013: 134–7, 140–3.
26. While Ward argues that Deleuze’s selective ontology makes the eternal return
‘something blandly cheering and optimistic’ (2010: 106), I think this downplays
Deleuze’s insistence that humanity is categorically reactive. The elimination of
the ego, for example, is neither comforting nor easily accomplished.
27. On Difference and Repetition’s relation to Kant, see Lord 2012.
28. For a detailed treatment of these syntheses, see Williams 2011.
29. On the relation between truth and the empty form of time, see Smith 2013.
References
Nietzsche’s Works
BGE Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002.
D Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997.
GM On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen,
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.
GS The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Naukhoff and Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.
TI Twilight of the Idols, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005.
WP The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York:
Vintage, 1968.
Other Sources
Ansell-Pearson, K. (1994), An Introduction to Nietzsche as a Political Thinker,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Borradori, G. (1999), ‘On the Presence of Bergson in Deleuze’s Nietzsche’,
Philosophy Today, 43: 140–5.
Clark, M. (1990), Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York:
Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (2007), Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press.
D’Iorio, P. (2011), ‘The Eternal Return: Genesis and Interpretation’, trans. Frank
Chouraqui, The Agonist, IV (1): 1–43.
Hallward, P. (2006), Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation,
New York: Verso.
Heidegger, M. (1991), Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell, New York: Harper
Collins.
Kant, I. (1998), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kaufmann, W. (1956), Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, New York:
Meridian.
Loeb, P. (2010), The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lord, B. (2012), ‘Deleuze and Kant’, in The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze,
ed. Daniel W. Smith and Henry Somers-Hall, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Malabou, C. (2010), ‘The Eternal Return and the Phantom of Difference’, trans.
Arne De Boever, Parrhesia, 10: 21–9.
Marsden, J. (1998), ‘Critical Incorporation: Nietzsche and Deleuze’, Journal of
Nietzsche Studies, 16: 33–48.
Mollison, J. (forthcoming), ‘Deleuze’s Nietzschean Mutations: From the Will to
Power and the Overman to Desiring-Production and Nomadism’, Deleuze and
Guattari Studies.
Montinari, M. (1996), ‘La volunté de puissance’ N’existe Pas, Paris: Éditions de
l’éclat.
Nehamas, A. (1985), Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
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Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Schacht, R. (1985), Nietzsche, Boston: Routledge.
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Smith, D. W. (2013), ‘Temporality and Truth’, Deleuze Studies, 7 (3): 377–89.
Voss, D. (2013), ‘Deleuze’s Third Synthesis of Time’, Deleuze Studies, 7 (2): 194–
216.
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Chapter 5
Time and the Untimely: Deleuze, Foucault
and the Production of the New
Strand Sheldahl-Thomason
ntimely – that is to say, acting counter to our time and thereby acting
U
on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come (Nietzsche
1997: 60)
Time is the most radical form of change, but the form of change does not
change. (Deleuze 1994: 89)
Once defined, a form is simultaneously too old and too new, too strange
and too familiar, not to be instantly rejected . . . (Foucault 1998: 167)
Introduction: Time and History

The relationship between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault was, if
not untimely, then at least out of joint. Both thinkers acted counter to
their time. Deleuze was an empiricist and a metaphysician in the time of
phenomenology and structuralism. Foucault frequently shifted shape as
he strove to develop a method for diagnosing the present. Deleuze and
Foucault seemed to dance around each other on the margins of the intel-
lectual stage that was France in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, coming closer
to the centre as their disruptions came, perhaps inevitably, to define an
age. Nietzsche deeply influenced both thinkers, but their respective uses
of Nietzsche led them down quite distinct intellectual paths. Likewise,
both frequently engaged the literary avant-garde, but Deleuze became a
champion of Anglo-American literature while Foucault’s tastes skewed
continental. Both found fault with the dominant trends in psychology
and medicine, which led Deleuze (and Guattari) to develop schizo-
analysis, and Foucault into studies of madness, hermaphrodism and
sexuality. Foucault rejected the term desire, while Deleuze made it
a central concept of his philosophy. At the same time, Deleuze criti-
cised Foucault’s attempts to rehabilitate the notions of pleasure and
Time and the Untimely 99
truth. Their magnetic dance of attraction/repulsion led to a genuine

friendship between the two, although collaboration between them was
scant, and as their careers progressed their friendship cooled. Deleuze
frequently wrote about and through other philosophers, but he wrote
Foucault only after Foucault’s untimely death in 1984. Foucault con-
tributed a flattering preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1. The two collaborated in the Groupe
d’Information sur les Prisons in the early 1970s, and they commented
on one another from time to time in interviews and articles. Yet these
encounters did not much lessen the gap between them. Deleuze said of
Foucault, ‘I do think there are a lot of parallels between our [Deleuze
and Guattari’s] work and his, although they’re kept apart, as it were,
by their widely differing methods, and purposes even’ (1995: 85). The
relationship between Foucault and Deleuze is a kind of missed encoun-
ter; one coming, one going; walking down different corridors of the
same building; disjointed; discontinuous. It is perhaps unsurprising,
then, that their approaches to time share a conceptual space but inhabit
it quite differently.1
In comparing Deleuze and Foucault’s views on time, a difficulty imme-
diately presents itself. Deleuze is primarily a thinker of time, and to the
extent that Deleuze and Guattari develop a philosophy of history, it
grows out of this thought on time. Foucault is primarily a thinker of
history, and his philosophy of history grows out of his reaction to tran-
scendental philosophies of time. Received wisdom has it that, although
Kant influences both Deleuze and Foucault, Foucault ultimately remains
more Kantian than Deleuze. But when it comes to time, it is in fact
Deleuze who is more Kantian. He borrows from Kant the notion of time
as an empty form and puts it to work in his transcendental empiricism.
Deleuze’s philosophy of time is a philosophy of a network of temporal
syntheses that make up a totality. Each synthesis of time is irreducible to
any other synthesis, yet each remains inextricably linked to the others,
and the pure, empty form of time stands out as the answer to Deleuze’s
guiding question of how novelty appears. In Difference and Repetition
and to some degree in The Logic of Sense, it is the third synthesis of
time, the future, or the pure, empty form of time, that appears as the
engine that produces the new. What this engine runs on, so to speak, is
the eternal return. What returns in the eternal return is difference, never
the same, and this return affects everything, everywhere, all at once. The
eternal return thus ungrounds what had become sedimented and reor-
ders it. Deleuze and Guattari’s positive remarks on the philosophy of
history develop in relation to Deleuze’s philosophy of time. History, of
100 Strand Sheldahl-Thomason
course, is not empty, but the content of history, namely dated events in
a relation of succession, or systems of relations between ordinal points
that are expressed as events, eras and epochs, becomes for Deleuze and
Guattari something like the pure past (the second synthesis of time)
that eternal return ungrounds and reorders. In keeping with Deleuze’s
totalising theory of time, all historical events coexist in a system that
becoming criss-crosses. Just as eternal return affects the whole of time,
so does it affect the whole of history, so that history itself is continuously
undergoing change. What Deleuze’s philosophy of time and Deleuze and
Guattari’s philosophy of history reject is homogeneous continuity. They
preserve totality and universality.
At least when it comes to time and history, Foucault’s Kantian inherit-
ance extends to his retention of the term a priori, and his philosophy
of history distinguishes between condition and conditioned. However,
Foucault makes the a priori historical, and his move to history amounts
to a rejection of transcendental philosophies of time. His analysis of
Kant’s Anthropology shows that the time of that work is a time of
dispersion that is no longer subjectively contained. Nonetheless, he
also argues that Kant never escapes the fundamental problem of tran-
scendental philosophy: that of seeking an illusory, originary ground of
finitude beyond or behind the field of experience. Foucault’s positive
philosophy of history emphasises the discontinuous. For Foucault, any
notion of universal history goes by the wayside along with the founding
subject. His discussion of the historical a priori and the archive shows
that discursive proliferation and transformation cannot be reduced to
a unified historical perspective. Foucault characterises his own work as
a history of the present, but the point of such a history is not to justify
or reify our forms of knowing. It is to reveal the groundlessness of
that which grounds our ways of knowing and living, and to spur us to
develop new ways of living that are not predicted or determined by the
present, that cannot be articulated on the grounds of the present but
rather transform those grounds. Foucault’s philosophy of history rejects
continuity, totality and universality.
Serious questions dog both thinkers. For Deleuze, the question
becomes, is the empty form of time itself immune to becoming? For
Foucault, the question is, can his philosophy of transformation remain
coherent without metaphysical intervention? Yet these questions are
unfair to both thinkers. Deleuze might respond: what sense does it
make to speak of the transformation of that which is empty? Foucault
might respond: why must I be consistent or coherent? Yet it may be that
Foucault’s refusal to engage in any attempt to trace a formal structure
of time gives him the advantage when it comes to pushing us toward the
genuinely new. As admirable and thorough as Deleuze’s efforts to spell
out a system of multiple, irreducible syntheses of time are, his adapta-
tion of Kant’s empty form of time undermines his own contention that
‘form will never inspire anything but conformities’ (1994: 134).
Deleuze’s Metaphysics of Novelty

It may strike his readers as strange to hear Deleuze, the dedicated anti-
Platonist, refer to ‘the empty form of time’ and ‘an empty and pure form’
(1994: 88). One might fairly ask why Deleuze would want to preserve
any notion of form at all. The answer can be found in Kant’s interven-
tion in the conception of time. For Kant, time is the form of inner
sense which renders undetermined subjective existence determinable. As
Daniel W. Smith notes, Kant liberates time from subordination to move-
ment, from cosmology, from psychology, and from the eternal (2012:
133). However, Deleuze is quick to point out that Kant immediately fills
up this newly purified and emptied form of time with an active synthetic
identity. Thus, whatever fracturing effect time has on the subject is
papered over. Passivity is assigned only to receptivity, and synthesis to
an active subject that seems to stand outside of time. Deleuze retains the
notion of time as the empty form in which the undetermined is determi-
nable, but he extends the fracturing effect of time’s emptiness to being
in general. Accordingly, time’s emptiness is no longer filled by an active
synthesis. Rather, Deleuze identifies three passive syntheses of time that
are independent yet form a system in which no synthesis is reducible
to any other. Neither is the system itself reducible to any synthesising
activity that lies outside or escapes it. In the words of James Williams,
what we get from Deleuze is ‘a formal network of processes defining
time as multiple’ where ‘any reduction of this multiplicity is disallowed’
(2011: 3). Very briefly, the first synthesis is the living present, or the time
of succession and bodily habit in which past and future appear as dimen-
sions relative to the present. The second synthesis is the pure past, or ‘the
virtual co-existence of all time’, and it is in the pure past that the living
present passes (Lampert 2006: 13). The third synthesis of time concerns
the appearance of the new. It is the instant ‘without extension’ that cuts
time into past and future, or before and after (Deleuze 1990: 164). The
living present retains successive particular events in an expectation of
a general future, the pure past is the condition of possibility of time’s
passage in the present, and the third synthesis makes all of time again
available for re-ordering.
The pure past is pure because it is not characterised by any set of

particular presents. Rather, it is the a priori, general form of succession
in the present. In terms of representation, the pure past is that ‘in which’
that allows a particular event in the living present to be represented as
past and as a point in a succession of other events. While the pure past
coexists with each passing present, it is itself unrepresentable. Yet the
ability to represent events as past and as ordered successively in the
present suggests a form that allows such representation. As Deleuze puts
the point: ‘It is with respect to the pure element of the past, understood
as the past in general, as an a priori past, that a given former present is
reproducible and the present present is able to reflect itself’ (1994: 81).
Although the pure past is a form of succession, and therefore not itself a
successive series of presents, an appeal to history can shed some light on
how the pure past functions. As Jay Lampert notes, ‘when we experience
something as belonging to the past, we experience it as part of a set of
histories of past elements . . . In short, we experience a scene not as the
present, but as an element in a scheme that has already been structur-
ing the past’ (2006: 44). The present gets its sense from these layered
schemes that have already been structuring the past. Furthermore, these
schemes are not themselves former presents but ‘patterns that existed in
their own right before a present is synthesized onto them’ (44). If in the
first synthesis of time succession occurs rhythmically or habitually, the
pure past makes rhythm possible as its ground.
The pure past may be pure in the sense that it is not a set of particu-
lars, but it is not exactly empty. It remains ‘relative to what it grounds’
(Deleuze 1994: 88). The characterisation of the pure past as a general
patterning and structuring that allows a present to be synthesised on
it reveals that the ground of succession and succession itself share ele-
ments. This opens even the second synthesis of time to a kind of circu-
larity in which time remains subordinated to cardinal points through
which it moves. Or, to put the point differently, the mutual structuring
of pure past and living present do not on their own ensure that the past
won’t be represented according to the present passing present. Indeed,
it always is so represented. Of the pure past Deleuze asks, ‘how can we
penetrate that in-itself without reducing it to the former present that it
was, or to the present present in relation to which it is past?’ (84). It is as
if whatever emptiness the pure past suggests is immediately filled by the
synthesis of the passing present. Deleuze calls for some further synthesis
of time that goes beyond representation and any ground of representa-
tion and that disrupts the tight circuit between pure past and passing
present. Something else is needed to break the rhythm.
It is the third synthesis of time that Deleuze identifies with the pure
and empty form of time. If the traces of the subordination of time to
movement remain from Plato even through to Deleuze’s second synthesis
of time, Deleuze’s third synthesis of time achieves the promise glimpsed
by Kant, but now freed of the Kantian baggage which takes synthesis
as the province of an active subject. According to James Williams, ‘the
third synthesis of time is . . . empty, in the sense of lacking cardinal
numbering, and pure, in the sense of lacking hierarchies associated
with numbering’ (2011: 88). On the Platonic conception of time, time
is measured according to the relation of points to the cardo, or the
joint, hinge or astronomical pole which would serve as a ground for
measurement, as in the measurement of revolutions of the earth. Even
with the pure past, content remains that gives shape to the past and the
present alike, and the passing present construes past events as cardinal
points. With the third synthesis of time, ‘Time itself unfolds . . . It ceases
to become cardinal and becomes ordinal, a pure order of time’ (Deleuze
1994: 88). It is Shakespeare who gives literary expression to the third
synthesis of time when Hamlet says, ‘time is out of joint [cardo]’. Out
of joint, time is purified of any relation to the notions of origin, copy
and succession that are associated with cardinal numbers. The third
synthesis of time is a pure ordering because it breaks the circle of time,
or introduces a caesura in time, and in so breaking the circle orders
time into a before and after, or a past and future. It is tempting to
think of this ordering as an ordinal numbering (1st, 2nd, 3rd . . .), but
that would not be correct because, temporally speaking, such ordinal
numbers are tied to cardinal points, as in the case of a line of kings. The
third synthesis of time is a pure ordering because it is devoid of empiri-
cal content. Deleuze remarks that ‘time is defined . . . by a formal and
empty order’ because it has ‘abjured its empirical content’ (89). If the
second synthesis of time grounds the ordering of events in the passing
present, the third synthesis ungrounds the ground of that ordering
and re-orders time as a whole. In other words, with the caesura, ‘the
whole of time is ordered, but it is ordered differently’ (Williams 2011:
91). This formal ordering of the third synthesis of time therefore leads
Williams to call it ‘a speculative claim about time . . . as condition for
the new’ (90). In order for the new to be genuinely new, as opposed
to more of the same (the next king), it must stand out as new. That is,
the new must be distinguished from the same-old. To be new the new
breaks the circle of time and marks the before the new as past and the
after the new as future. The caesura that accompanies the appearance
of the new, then, touches the whole of time. This is why Deleuze says
that the pure and empty form of time ‘is defined . . . also by a totality’
(1994: 89).
Deleuze’s reference to the totality of time indicates that the caesura
of the new cannot be the effect of some kind of blow from the outside
of time. Accordingly, the last important ingredient of Deleuze’s tem-
poral recipe is something borrowed from Nietzsche: eternal return. In
Williams’s fine formulation, for Deleuze, eternal return is ‘defined by the
principle that only pure difference or difference in itself returns and never
the same’ (2011: 115). Deleuze is aware of the possibility of hearing
eternal return as circular, and he points out Zarathustra’s remark that
we simplify the eternal return by relying upon the circle as its image.
Yet the image of the circle is not entirely wrongheaded, so long as what
circles back in eternal return is not understood as contents, events,
identities or representations. Deleuze characterises time as an ‘excentric
circle’, or a circle that is freed of the cardo (1994: 91). What returns
in the eternal return is difference itself. In other words, the mistake
that Zarathustra identifies is that of taking eternal return to mean the
recurrence or recapitulation of a discrete passing present. When Deleuze
calls forth the eternal return, he means the return of precisely that which
differentiates passing presents. He therefore associates eternal return
with ungrounding:
The form of time is there only for the revelation of the formless in the
eternal return. The extreme formality is there only for excessive form-
lessness (Hölderlin’s Unförmliche). In this manner, the ground has been
superseded by a groundlessness, a universal ungrounding which turns upon
itself and causes only the yet-to-come to return. (Deleuze 1994: 91)
What returns in the eternal return is that groundlessness that accompa-

nies any ground and allows it to function as ground.
If the question of what returns in the eternal return can be so answered,
there remains the question of the meaning of eternal in eternal return.
In fact, the language of the eternal return leaves Deleuze open to the
charge that, by appealing to eternity, he undermines (so to speak) his
own gesture toward groundlessness. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze
himself explicitly characterises the pure and empty form of time as ‘the
eternal truth of time’ (1990: 165). Williams puts his finger on a possible
problem with this characterisation when he asks, ‘Is eternal return the
time of a transcendent God outside the process of the world . . .?’ (2011:
125). The simplest response is that the word eternal here does not mean
outside of time or process. As Smith notes, ‘time has become the pure
and immutable form of everything that moves and changes – n ot an
eternal form, but precisely the form of what is not eternal’ (2012: 133).
Deleuze’s adaptation of Nietzsche’s eternal return is transcendental
rather than transcendent, and it is here especially that the transcenden-
tal side of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism becomes apparent. The
form of time is not separable from empirical contents but related to
the new as its transcendental condition. It is also wrong to think of the
caesura as ‘taking time’. For the cut in time to itself take time, or be tem-
porally measurable, would require another order of time, or a time of
time, according to which the cut-event could be measured. However, the
caesura does not work like this. Lampert provides a helpful summary of
Deleuze’s three syntheses of time that is illuminating here. He says, ‘Just
as the present is all of time in the sense of events in passage, and the past
is all of time in the sense of events on record, so the future is all of time
in the sense of events in play’ (2006: 55). It is the third synthesis of time
that returns all events to play, and in so doing it affects all events imme-
diately. In other words, all processes of becoming are themselves part of
a play that is not reducible to any particular move. Deleuze expresses
this when he says, ‘each event communicates with all others, and they
all form one and the same E vent . . . the Event for all events’ (1990: 64).
The eternal return is eternal in the sense that it does not change, and the
caesura by which it reorders time does so immediately as the play that
puts into play all events for (re)ordering.
The connection of Deleuze’s philosophy of time to Deleuze and
Guattari’s philosophy of history is not as straightforward as it may
seem. Deleuze and Guattari remain committed to a notion of universal
history, or the notion that all events can be subsumed under a unifying
interpretive framework, which is consistent with Deleuze’s totalising
temporal philosophy. For Hegel, contingency in history is subordinated
to the necessity of universal reason. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish
their notion of universal history from Hegel’s when they say: ‘universal
history is the history of contingencies, and not the history of necessity’
(1983: 140). According to Craig Lundy, Deleuze and Guattari’s universal
history is universal in the sense that ‘the present forms a heterogeneous
continuity with the past, and it is this continuity as a whole that continu-
ously undergoes change’ (2016: 73). Deleuze and Guattari see history
not only as a series of contingent events retrospectively posited by the
present, but as a totality of relations that are contingent everywhere all
the time. For Lundy, this ‘continual contingency’ is enough to reconcile
the appearance of the new with a history that is genuinely universal
(71). Yet a familiar problem arises again. If the connection between
the living present and the pure past devolves into one of representation
and its ground in Deleuze’s philosophy of time, Deleuze and Guattari’s

philosophy of history similarly faces the problem that even a continually
contingent history is not separable enough from the present’s retrospec-
tivity without some further, fracturing element.
Whether history is universal or not, time is not reducible to history,
and while it may encompass all relations between events, history cannot
for all that account for the appearance of new events. Deleuze and
Guattari themselves ask rhetorically, ‘How could something come
from history?’ (1994: 96). They deploy the language of becoming to
contrast the new with historical events. As Deleuze says in a 1990
interview, ‘What history grasps in the event is the way it’s actualized
in particular circumstances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope
of history’ (1995: 170). It may seem that the third synthesis of time
would function here much as it does for the other two syntheses of
time, with the difference that now the pure past and the living present
are layered over by the particular circumstances of historical events.
However, Deleuze and Guattari instead turn to Nietzsche’s notion of
the untimely (unzeitgemäss) for an explanation of the appearance of
the new. Where Nietzsche diagnoses history as it was practised in his
time as working against life, and therefore advocates untimeliness, or
acting counter to the time of this excessive historical sense, Deleuze and
Guattari make untimeliness a crucial element of becoming in relation to
history. Thus Deleuze says, ‘history amounts only to the set of precon-
ditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to . . . c reate
something new. This is precisely what Nietzsche calls the Untimely’
(171). Yet the historical past is not simply erased in becoming. Here
eternal return tacitly returns in connection to becoming. In Difference
and Repetition, Deleuze immediately moves from his discussion of the
third synthesis of time to a discussion of history and historical figures.
He notes: ‘Historical actors or agents can create only on condition that
they identify themselves with figures from the past’ (1994: 91). This
is a jarring formulation given Deleuze’s own denial that what returns
in the eternal return is ‘the identical, the similar, and the equal, in so
far as these constitute the forms of indifference’ (243). However, the
identification that Deleuze has in mind here is not indifferent but pre-
cisely different. That is, historical agents create by taking on historical
roles that they re-write through re-playing. As Lampert puts the point,
‘The earlier event has to be made earlier by the force of its successor’s
attempt to resist identifying with it’ (2006: 94). It is not only that the
historical agent acts against the past, but that the historical agent brings
a past event into play again as past event. Thus ‘historical transition
goes beyond the limits of what it surpasses by introducing a new sense

of history along with a new social order’ (123). To put past events in
play again is not to inaugurate a free-for-all that destroys the past, but
to free past events for re-grounding or re-ordering. Lundy claims, ‘if
the past is contingent then this is . . . b
ecause it itself continues to be
contingent through its continual participation in the emerging whole
that is reality’ (2016: 74). The untimely is the force through which the
past, as contingent, continues to participate in the emerging whole that
is reality. Untimeliness revitalises historical relations and makes them
circulate in new ways.
Foucault’s Histories of the Present

Unzeitgemäss is usually translated into French as inactuel. It would
therefore appear to be opposed to actuel, or the present or current. Thus
it would seem that untimeliness is opposed to one of the abiding aims of
Foucault’s work: to write a ‘history of the present’ (Foucault 1995: 31).2
Yet, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, Foucault’s interest in the present
is not an interest in idly describing an age or a passing present, and his
interest is even less a performance of retrospectivity in which the past
is interpreted according to the present. What writing a history of the
present means is to diagnose what we are already ceasing to be in order
to invent new forms of life (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 112–13). The
question, ‘What are we now?’ is the question, ‘What may we become?’
For Deleuze and Guattari, then, Foucault is as untimely a thinker as
Nietzsche, and his relationship to history parallels Nietzsche’s. This
is borne out in Foucault’s own resistance to totalising philosophies of
history à la Hegel’s. Speaking of himself and Foucault, Deleuze says in
one interview, ‘We weren’t looking for origins, even lost or deleted ones,
but setting out to catch things where they were at work, in the middle,
breaking things open, breaking words open. We weren’t looking for
something timeless, not even the timelessness of time, but for new things
being formed, the emergence of what Foucault calls “actuality”‘ (1995:
86). As we have seen, Deleuze’s philosophy of time does in fact appeal
to a certain timelessness of time insofar as the third synthesis of time is
the form of change that does not change. Even Deleuze and Guattari’s
philosophy of history and becoming, in its appeal to Deleuze’s meta-
physical reading of the eternal return as the force behind untimeliness,
tends toward abstraction. Foucault’s search for new things being formed
leads him away from time as either abstraction or ideal form and into
history as the site of the emergence of new forms of life.
Foucault’s most sustained discussion of time as such appears

in his minor thesis, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. In Kant’s
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View Foucault sees a solution
to a problem that Deleuze’s philosophy of time also solves. That is
the problem, which emerges from Kant’s critical works, of associating
synthesis with the activity of a subject while associating passivity with
mere receptivity. According to Foucault, ‘the time of the Anthropology
is assured by a dispersion which cannot be contained, for it is no longer
that of the given and passive sensibility; we are dealing with a dispersion
of the synthetic activity with regard to itself – dispersion with which
it can “Play” as it were’ (2008: 89). On Foucault’s reading, Kant’s
Anthropology dissociates synthetic activity and the unity of a subject, so
that synthesis is itself fractured. Foucault continues, ‘The synthetic activ-
ity is not contemporaneous with itself in the organization of multiplicity;
it never fails to follow on from itself, thus laying itself open to error,
and all the other unsettling slippages’ (89). In other words, in Kant’s
Anthropology the subject is returned to time and time seems to fracture
the subject yet again, which is what time does in Deleuze as well.
However, even Kant’s Anthropology does not escape what Foucault
identifies as a major problem with transcendental philosophy in general,
which in The Order of Things he comes to call the analytic of finitude.
By making anthropos the object of his later study, Kant maintains the
link between philosophy and subjectivity. The re-opening of the fracture
in subjectivity is filled, after Kant’s Anthropology, with a search for
the ground of humanity’s finitude that remains always out of reach.
Foucault says, ‘all knowledge of man is presented as either dialecticized
(dialectisée) from the start or fully dialecticizable (dialectisable) – as
always invested with a meaning which has to do with the return to the
origin, to the authentic, to the founding activity, to the reason why there
is meaning in the world’ (Foucault 2008: 123). From one side, in Kant’s
Anthropology, and from the other side, in Kant’s critical works, ‘man
appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a
subject that knows’ (Foucault 1994: 312). It is this ambiguity that tran-
scendental philosophy finds untenable and tries to resolve into a unity.
Thus, rather than freeing philosophy for the new and freeing thought for
play in its temporal dispersion, the reintroduction of the fracture in the
subject in Kant’s Anthropology sends thought on an endless search for
an elusive ground.
Foucault sees Nietzsche as pointing a way out of this anthropological
circle. In History of Madness he takes a broadly Nietzschean approach
to history, which is to say that he writes against the transcendental, his-
torical sensibility that seeks unity in history. Foucault argues that reason
itself is articulated against the background of unreason. Ascendant
reason comes to isolate unreason within itself as madness, but it cannot
fully conquer this necessary, threatening double that unpredictably
erupts into history and contests the stability of its development. It is
transcendental philosophy and the philosophy of history that grows
out of it that Foucault has in mind when he says, ‘The plenitude of
history is only possible in the space . . . of all the words without lan-
guage that appear to anyone who lends an ear, as a dull sound from
beneath history, the obstinate murmur of a language talking to itself’
(2006: xxxi). His claim is that reason, with the communication and
recognition that accompany it, needs to define itself against what it is
not. Reasonable language therefore demarcates itself and excludes from
itself whatever is left over, which becomes not only not reason but not
even language. If time is reason’s form of determination, and history is
a condition of possibility of recognition, both time and history are also
secondary to the cut by which reason inaugurates itself as opposed to
unreason. Therefore Foucault says, ‘The necessity of madness through-
out the history of the West is linked to that decisive action that extracts
a significant language from the background noise and its continuous
monotony, a language which is transmitted and culminates in time; it
is, in short, linked to the possibility of history’ (xxxii). His history of
madness is the history of reason’s ongoing relation to that which it is
not. It is the history of reason’s attempt to engulf unreason by making it
an object of knowledge and fold it into the natural history of anthropos.
Madness is not unreason, or rather madness is unreason transformed
into a knowable, treatable pathology. For all that, unreason remains at
the limit of reason, and continues to contest rational history’s necessity
and inevitability. As Foucault says, ‘the experience of unreason, such as
is evident in Hölderlin, Nerval, and Nietzsche, always leads back to the
roots of time – unreason thereby becoming the untimely (contretemps)
within the world par excellence’ (363). Foucault’s History of Madness
can only be a history of madness, and not a history of unreason, because
unreason has no history. What a history of reason’s relation to unreason
can do is show, at least, that a particular human science, psychology, is
not a route to the elusive unity of the subject-object that is anthropos. At
most it shows the contingency and arbitrariness of the very rationality,
along with its time and history, that presents itself as necessary.
These achievements are chiefly negative, and they call for a recon-
sideration of history as it is practised. The question becomes, if hope
for the unity that reason’s time promises has to be given up, what
becomes of time and history? Foucault’s response to this question is

to develop his archaeology, which takes discontinuity as its theme and
studies discontinuous modes of knowing, or ‘epistemic formations’, that
engender their own temporalities. In Foucault’s words, ‘One of the most
essential features of the new history is probably this displacement of
the discontinuous: its transference from the obstacle to the work itself;
its integration into the discourse of the historian, where it no longer
plays the role of an external condition that must be reduced, but that
of a working concept’ (2010: 9). Where Kant’s Anthropology fails to
deliver on the promise of freeing thought for the new, archaeology may
succeed by dissociating time and subjectivity and hewing closely to
time’s uncontained dispersion. The work of the archaeologist is to look
at statements as they appear and isolate those rules that allow them
to appear, to make sense as knowledge claims, and to relate to other
statements. In other words, to do archaeology is ‘to deal with a group
of verbal performances at the level of the statements and of the form
of positivity that characterizes them’ (125). The form of positivity that
allows statements to emerge does not find its ground somewhere beyond
itself. As Foucault says, ‘The time of discourse is not the translation,
in a visible chronology, of the obscure time of thought’ (122). Rather,
forms of positivity and the statements that they condition are immanent
to each other.
To account for the grounding function of what is ultimately ground-
less, and to explain the discontinuities that separate epistemic forma-
tions, Foucault historicises the a priori. Where a formal a priori is one
‘whose jurisdiction extends without contingence’, the historical a priori
functions only in a limited capacity, and only over a certain domain of
statements (Foucault 2010: 128). It is historical in one sense because it
is intimately connected to what is actually said and known, not to what
is only possibly said or known. In fact, it is more empirical than tran-
scendental, but Foucault retains the language of the a priori to explain
what allows statements to appear with a regularity that relates them and
makes them mutually intelligible. The historical a priori is historical in
the further sense that it is transformable. According to Foucault,
these rules (making up an historical a priori) are not imposed from the
outside on the elements that they relate together; they are caught up in the
very things that they connect; and if they are not modified with the least
of them, they modify them, and are transformed with them into certain
decisive thresholds. The a priori of positivities is not only the system of
a temporal dispersion; it is itself a transformable group. (Foucault 2010:
127)
There are in fact two levels of temporality at play here. On one level,
there is the temporality of the appearance of statements that contribute
to an epistemic formation. On another level, there is the temporality of
the rules that govern those statements. Not every statement inaugurates
a new historical a priori, but statements bend and distort the rules of
what may be said as they accumulate, until statements produced accord-
ing to one iteration of the historical a priori are no longer intelligible to
statements produced according to a different iteration. In fact, Foucault
refers to plural historical a prioris. What distinguishes his notion of
history from Hegelian universal history is both that there is no dialectic
in Foucault, only subtle transformations of relations between statements
that affect neighbouring relations, and that events are not all contained
in a single context susceptible to a unifying interpretive framework.
History in Foucault is not universal. There is not yet a third level of time
that would unite incommensurable historical a prioris.
Foucault’s discussion of the archive makes this last point plain. The
archive is the most general discursive feature that Foucault discusses in
The Archaeology of Knowledge. In that book, he spells out a certain
hierarchy of generality that extends from statements to discursive for-
mations to epistemes. The term episteme refers to the relations that give
rise to formal sciences. The archive is more general still because it is
that collected or sedimented background out of which any episteme can
emerge. Foucault describes the archive as ‘a complex volume, in which
heterogeneous regions are differentiated or deployed, in accordance with
specific rules or practices that cannot be superposed’ (2010: 128). The
materiality of the archive has often been noted, but it is more than a col-
lection of records. It is not something inert like the ‘library of all librar-
ies’, but a living system that is the invisible underside of those statements
that actually appear (130). Foucault distinguishes between the archive,
the corpus and language. The corpus is that inert collection of what has
been said. Language governs possible sentences that, while grammati-
cally correct, may not function as statements in a particular discourse.
The archive lies between the corpus and language as that which makes
what is said neither dead nor disconnected. Lynne Huffer character-
ises the archive as ‘the abstract and unseen operating system Foucault
describes . . . as an episteme’s condition of intelligibility’ (2020: 7). Yet
the archive is more like the computer code that flows into the mother-
board of words, powered by the electricity of language, on which the
operating system of the historical a priori runs to organise information.
It is that unsaid system of relations out of which the historical a priori
extracts rules that in turn make statements intelligible. Perhaps the best
technological metaphor for how the historical a priori and the archive
work together is that of machine learning. As discourse proliferates and
statements build up an archive, the historical a priori refines its rules to
retain certain statements and exclude others. The archive thus allows
for discursive transformation and discontinuity, or the new, rather than
reducing all that is said to one grand discourse. Foucault says ‘it is that
which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies
them in their own duration’ (2010: 129).
The archive generates incommensurable historical a prioris, which in
turn give rise to overlapping discourses which nonetheless do not share
the same duration. Since archaeology displaces continuous history and
the subjectivity and philosophies of experience that undergird continu-
ous history, history as a general term no longer makes sense except as
‘a multiplicity of time spans that entangle and envelop one another’
(Foucault 1998: 430). In fact, Foucault suggests that the archive itself,
however general, is multiple. As a ground, the archive is something
like a floating foundation or a tectonic plate, which is to say it is itself
unstable and itself roiled by the transformations that it enables. From
the perspective of the present, the ground is shifting under our feet, as it
is always shifting, but such that, while we may be able to more or less
trace previous shifts, we cannot predict the specific character of shifts
that are happening now, just as nobody can predict when and where
an earthquake will happen or how powerful it will be. Hence Foucault
says: ‘it is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from
within these rules that we speak’ (2010: 130). The rules that allow us
to speak as we do are being rewritten as we speak, and because we are
speaking. As diagnostician of the present, the archaeologist will study
the archive in its close proximity to us and isolate those rules that mark
us in our difference from what we can no longer say.
Deleuze characterises Foucault’s discontinuous history as a Markov
process, a random process in which only the current state of a system in
flux can be used to assign the probability of what the next state will be
(Deleuze 1988: 86). This is an apt characterisation, and it points to the
difference between Deleuze and Foucault concerning time and history.
Markov processes do not have a memory, so while on the one hand it
might be said that the discontinuities that archaeology identifies order
time into a before and after, or that the archive is like the event for all
events, it is on the other hand true that the archive is not a totality,
and that once-active relations can become inert, forgotten or put out
of play as the archive transforms. One of Foucault’s main purposes in
writing The Archaeology of Knowledge was to show how sciences both
ground themselves and transform. He therefore focuses on a specific

type of verbal or linguistic performance that is not merely casual. The
archive is the system of relations between these types of performances
– statements – that operate in one or another scientific discourse.
Archival transformation does not affect all verbal performances, which
are governed by other rules that Foucault does not excavate. Thus, as
epistemically jarring as discursive transformations may be, they do not
inaugurate a total reordering of experience – o ther continuities sur-
rounding the discourses in question may persist. Of course, Foucault’s
work goes on to cover non-discursive relations and their production of
our experience, as well as the self’s relation to the self and its poten-
tial to modify our experience, and an emerging consensus in Foucault
scholarship is that the archaeological model of transformation is not so
much abandoned as modified or extended in Foucault’s later work (see
for example Thompson 2016). Yet even the broader transformation of
experience is in Foucault a painstaking transformation that calls for
granular attention to multiple processes. The appearance of the new is
not, in Foucault, a decisive cut that affects everything, everywhere, all
at once. Lastly, Foucault is clear that even what he is able to say about
the archive depends on ‘the archive system that makes it possible today
to speak of the archive in general’ (2010: 130). Perhaps tomorrow one
will no longer be able to speak of the archive. That is, even Foucault’s
philosophy of history is contingent as philosophy. By contrast, because
he speaks of the pure and empty form of time that does not change,
and because he and Guattari rely on a metaphysical interpretation of
Nietzsche’s eternal return to explain historical change, Deleuze speaks
from within the present about the present, or from within becoming
about the becoming that is becoming, at least on these points. This may
be enough, though, to threaten Deleuze’s edifice of becoming for the
simple reason that transcendental or metaphysical explanation bears
with it the residue of homogeneous continuity that Deleuze otherwise
wishes to reject.
Conclusion: An Untimely Symmetry

Does ‘untimely’ describe any god better than Hermes? Hermes with his
caduceus, patron of outlaws, herald of the dead? In their sometimes
mirroring philosophies of time, history and the new, may we not see
Deleuze and Foucault as the two snakes on Hermes’ staff? On one side a
philosophy of time that gives way to a philosophy of becoming. On the
other side a philosophy of history that departs from time’s formalisation.
Untimeliness draws them together into a symmetry. Both thinkers resist

the sedimented, the continuous, the transcendent and the eternal. Both
seek the new, and grasp novelty’s complicated, fractured relation to
time. Deleuze works from a formal account of time down to the point
where its very form becomes the possibility of its formlessness. Foucault
adherence to the practice of discourse in its positivity points out the mal-
leability of that which grounds our experience. They do not quite meet
in the middle. Deleuze remains committed to metaphysics, Foucault to
diagnosis. Yet reading Deleuze and Foucault together reveals the extent
to which each thinker is invisible in the other’s work. What is most inter-
esting is not so much who has the explanatory, theoretical or practical
advantage, but how reading them now might spur our becoming.
Notes
1. For two nice synopses of the relationship between Deleuze and Foucault, see
Nicolae Morar, Thomas Nail and Daniel W. Smith, ‘Introduction: Between
Deleuze and Foucault’, and François Dose, ‘Deleuze and Foucault: A Philosophical
Friendship’, in Morar et al. (eds) 2016.
2. This well-known quote from Discipline and Punish is a translation of the French
l’histoire du présent. Foucault sometimes seems to conflate actualité and présent,
as when he says in a 1981 interview that one task of philosophy is to ‘s’interroger
sur ce que nous sommes dans notre présent et dans notre actualité’ (Berten 1988:
10). However, Deleuze and Guattari interpret him as differentiating between
présent and actualité in L’archeologie du Savoir, as when he says, ‘L’analyse de
l’archive comporte donc une région privilégiée: à la fois proche de nous, mais
différente de notre actualité, c’est la bordure du temps qui entoure notre present’
(Foucault 1969: 172). On the basis of this passage Deleuze and Guattari claim
that actualité corresponds to Nietzsche’s untimely while présent refers to what
we are, and therefore what we are in the process of no longer being.
References
Bell, J. A. and C. Colebrook, eds. (2009), Deleuze and History, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Berten, A. (1988), ‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault’, Les cahiers du GRIF, 37–38:
8–20.
Deleuze, G. (1988), Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, New
York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York:
Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (2007), Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1983), Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
Foucault, M. (1969), L’Archéologie du savoir, Paris: Gallimard.
Foucault, M. (1994), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences,
New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1995), Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York:
Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. (1998), Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: The Essential Works
of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, trans. Robert Hurley and others, New York: The
New Press.
Foucault, M. (2006), History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa,
New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (2008), Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, trans. Roberto Nigro
and Kate Briggs, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Foucault, M. (2010), The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith,
New York: Vintage Books.
Huffer, L. (2020), Foucault’s Strange Eros, New York: Columbia University Press.
Lampert, J. (2006), Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, New York:
Continuum.
Lundy, C. (2016), ‘The Necessity and Contingency of Universal History: Deleuze
and Guattari contra Hegel’, Journal of the Philosophy of History, 10: 51–75.
Morar, N., T. Nail and D. W. Smith, eds. (2016), Between Deleuze and Foucault,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1997), Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
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the Phenomenological Legacy, and the Problem of Transcendental Genesis’,
Chapter 6
Kant, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and the
Constitution of Experience
Henry Somers-Hall
In this chapter, I want to explore the relationship between Kant’s

account of the constitution of experience and the accounts developed
by Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze both hold
ambivalent attitudes toward Kant’s account of how experience is to
be understood. It is Kant who places synthesis at the centre of the
constitution of the world, and who discovers the concept of a transcen-
dental illusion, a concept central to the thought of both Merleau-Ponty
and Deleuze.1 Kant holds that basic ontological concepts such as that
of an object are simply ways of organising experience, rather than
fundamental structures given in space and time. Furthermore, Kant
breaks with the metaphysical tradition in recognising that time itself
has a positive existence outside of categorial thought.2 ‘Time is not
a discursive, or what is called a general concept, but a pure form of
sensible intuition’ (Kant 1929: A32). Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze
argue, however, that Kant leaves unexamined the nature of the world
which is to be explained through the transcendental idealist method.
Similarly, both seek to replace the notion of synthesis as a process that
takes place from nowhere with one that unfolds within the temporality
of the world. Perhaps Merleau-Ponty expresses this most clearly when
he writes that:
We must make this notion of the world, which guides the whole transcen-
dental deduction of Kant, though Kant does not tell us its provenance,
more explicit. ‘If a world is to be possible’, he says sometimes, as if he
were thinking before the origin of the world, as if he were assisting at
its genesis and could pose its a priori conditions. In fact, as Kant himself
said profoundly, we can only think the world because we have already
experienced it; it is through this experience that we have the idea of being,
and it is through this experience that the words ‘rational’ and ‘real’ receive
a meaning simultaneously. (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 16)
Kant, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze 117
Now, there are a number of key claims in this passage that will be
central to both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty’s readings of Kant. First, we
can note that Merleau-Ponty makes a distinction here between think-
ing and experience. As we shall see, this distinction introduces two
different ways of understanding what it is for something to have a
determination, and has affinities with Deleuze’s own distinction between
representation and intensity. Second, Merleau-Ponty here implies that
Kant presupposes experience, but that he does not provide a proper
analysis of it. In Deleuze too, we shall find that for every synthesis Kant
proposes, Deleuze will argue that there is a passive synthesis that makes
it possible. Third, Kant illicitly assumes that the kind of determination
that we find in thinking or representation is prior to the genesis of the
world, and is responsible for it. Once again, this will be disputed by both
Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, and here we can find an unlikely parallel
between Deleuze’s claim of a continuing ‘psychologism’ (1994: 135) in
the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason and Merleau-Ponty’s
claim that Kant mischaracterises experience as ‘mutilated thought’
(1968: 35) in the Critique. For Deleuze, psychologism relates to a model
of the subject already overrun by representation, and Merleau-Ponty’s
mutilated thought is one that similarly understands experience from the
point of view of the categories of judgement.
I want to begin by looking at Kant’s account of synthesis in the first
Critique. We will focus on the transcendental deduction, but the aim
will be to look at what Kant takes synthesis to be. We will then explore
how this ties in to his account of determination as he sets it out in
the transcendental ideal, since it is this account that Deleuze takes up
explicitly. Following that, we will turn to Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty’s
accounts of synthesis. I will argue that Merleau-Ponty’s influence on
Deleuze’s account of synthesis is significant, despite the paucity of
explicit references to Merleau-Ponty in most of Deleuze’s work. We
will see how Deleuze’s account of determination as a lightning flash
can be understood in both Deleuzian and Merleau- Pontian terms.
Having seen how Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of determina-
tion differ from Kant’s, we will then explore how this difference in
determination leads both philosophers to a radically different notion of
synthesis.
Kant on Synthesis and Determination

Given Kant’s claim that time is not conceptual, his account of synthesis
is integral to his project. For pre-Kantian philosophers, a key problem
118 Henry Somers-Hall
was justifying the correspondence of our concepts to objects in the

world. Kant solves this problem but in turn opens up a novel problem
of how concepts are to be related to our intuition of time, given their
difference from each other. The heart of Kant’s solution to this problem
is found in the Critique’s transcendental deduction, where he shows the
role of synthesis in bridging the gap between the faculties. Now, the
essential move Kant makes in the Critique is to argue that rather than
objects making representations possible, representations make objects
possible. In order to make this move, Kant asks what concepts allow
us to understand the world in terms of objects. The key concept that
makes this understanding possible is the concept of an object itself:
‘Now all experience does indeed contain, in addition to the intuition of
the senses through which something is given, a concept of an object as
being thereby given, that is to say, as appearing. Concepts of objects in
general thus underlie all empirical knowledge as its a priori conditions’
(Kant 1929: A93/B126). Since the concept of an object is not given in
intuition, the aim of the deduction becomes to show how we are able to
understand experience in terms of objects rather than simply the flux of
intuition. Ultimately, Kant’s claim will be that we can only understand
experience as experience of a world of objects insofar as we see the
subject as introducing the concept of an object to experience, and this
in turn is only possible through the application of the categories of the
understanding to the manifold of intuition.
Kant substantially rewrites the transcendental deduction between the
first and second editions of the Critique, but what is central to both
editions is the notion of synthesis. In the deduction in the second edition,
Kant begins with the claim that ‘It must be possible for the “I think”
to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would
be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is
equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at
least would be nothing to me’ (1929: B132). Without being able to see
all representations as mine, we would just have a series of fragmented
impressions with no unity. Kant notes that even if representations are
already united, then we still require a moment of synthesis here to rec-
ognise the unity within representations. Kant’s claim is that this unity of
apperception, the ‘I think’, is analytic, and presupposes a prior synthetic
unity that is actually responsible for unifying representations. Since this
transcendental unity is what makes experience possible, it itself falls
outside of experience, and therefore cannot be determined in the way we
determine empirical phenomena. It is this synthetic activity that allows
us to understand the subject as unified:
That relation comes about, not simply through my accompanying each

representation with consciousness, but only in so far as I conjoin one repre-
sentation with another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them. Only in
so far, therefore, as I can unite a manifold of given representations in one
consciousness, is it possible for me to represent to myself the identity of the
consciousness in [i.e. throughout] these representations. In other words, the
analytic unity of apperception is possible only under the presupposition of
a certain synthetic unity. (Kant 1929: B133)
What allows us to relate these representations together in one conscious-

ness is that these representations are understood as representations of
an object. The object therefore provides a point of reference to allows
us to refer the manifold given by intuition to a point of unity. Seeing
representations as referring to an object is also a requirement for being
able to distinguish representations from the self. Just as the subject is
not given in experience, so the transcendental object is simply a way of
organising what is given in experience, and hence has to be understood
as ‘something in general = x’ (Kant 1929: A104).
Understanding what Kant takes synthesis to be is complicated by the
side-lining of his account of the three syntheses in the second edition of
the Critique, and by the identification in that edition of the imagination
and the understanding. For our purposes, it is important to note that
Kant’s general definition of synthesis is as ‘the act of putting different
representations together, and of grasping what is manifold in them in
one [act of] knowledge’ (1929: A77/B103). In the first edition of the
Critique of Pure Reason, and more briefly in the second, Kant gives
an account of experience in terms of synthesis. This account, which
Kant labels a subjective deduction, involves three syntheses that together
organise intuition and relate it to the categories. First, in what he calls
the synthesis of apprehension in intuition, Kant claims we need to take
what is given as an indeterminate intuition of time, and organise it into
both individual elements and a unity of these elements as a sequence.
‘Every intuition contains in itself a manifold which can be represented
as a manifold only insofar as the mind distinguishes the time in the
sequence of one impression upon another’ (A99). This synthesis which
creates the manifold is followed by a second synthesis, the synthesis
of reproduction in imagination, which holds that if experience is to
be understood as ordered – as, for example, we find in the empiricist
claims that laws of association can make sense of experience – then
appearances must be ‘actually subject to such a rule’ (A100). Similarly,
if we are to draw a line, we need to be able to relate not just present
impressions, but also prior impressions in order to be conscious of a
sequence. Finally, Kant’s account of the third synthesis holds that in

order to understand a sequence as a whole, we do not need to simply
have the consciousness of the elements themselves, but require a con-
sciousness that the elements relate together into a unity. Such a unity of
a manifold of representations under a generic identity is a conceptual
unity, and such a conceptual unity requires consciousness of the identity
of the various elements that make it up. This unity is in turn supplied by
relating all representations to the transcendental object, and this in turn
relies on synthesising representations according to the categories, which
are transcendental forms of the functions of judgement, which we use to
make logical claims.
This account raises a number of questions about the nature of the
syntheses involved. As we have seen, Kant defines synthesis at one point
as ‘the act of putting different representations together, and of grasp-
ing what is manifold in them in one [act of] knowledge’ (1929: A77/
B103). How are we to understand this in terms of determination? When
we look at the third synthesis, which is explicitly conceptual, we can
note that since it is categorial, it has its roots in the way in which we
determine concepts in judgement. Kant is explicit, for instance, in noting
that it is the same faculty at work in unifying representations into a
judgement and unifying representations into objects. As such, it operates
by attributing properties to objects. We will return to the implications of
this in a moment, but first, let’s consider the first and second syntheses.
In the A deduction, these two syntheses are attributed to the imagina-
tion, but by the time we reach the B deduction all synthesis is seen as a
product of the understanding:
all combination – be we conscious of it or not, be it a combination of the

manifold of intuition, empirical or non-empirical, or of various c oncepts –
is an act of the understanding. To this act the general title ‘synthesis’ may
be assigned, as indicating that we cannot represent to ourselves anything as
combined in the object which we have not ourselves previously combined.
(Kant 1929: B130)
Kant argues that ‘[i]t is one and the same spontaneity, which in the
one case, under the title of imagination, and in the other case, under
the title of understanding, brings combination into the manifold of
intuition’ (1929: B162n). The situation is more complicated in the A
deduction, though Longuenesse suggests that the imagination should
be taken in the A deduction simply as a non-reflective operation of
synthesis according to rules provided by the understanding, in contrast
to the reflective operation of the understanding proper.3 Regardless of
whether we accept Longuenesse’s account here, we can note that Kant’s

account of the imagination sees it as operating in terms of the combina-
tion of determinate representations into unities. As such, whichever
faculty is responsible for the various syntheses of experience, it fulfils
the definition that Kant adopts, namely of ‘putting different representa-
tions together, and of grasping what is manifold in them in one [act of]
knowledge’ (A77/B103).
If synthesis involves conceptual determination, then what does Kant
take conceptual determination to involve? Kant’s claim is that in order
to be able to understand the world in conceptual terms, we need to be
able to assume that phenomena are so constituted that for any property
of an object, it either holds of that object or does not. Without this
claim, we won’t know when we pose a question about the nature of an
object in the world whether an answer could, even in principle, be given.
The basis for this principle is the notion of opposition:
The proposition, everything which exists is completely determined, does
not mean only that one of every pair of given contradictory predicates, but
that one of every [pair of] possible predicates, must always belong to it.
In terms of this proposition the predicates are not merely compared with
one another logically, but the thing itself is compared, in transcendental
fashion, with the sum of all possible predicates. (Kant 1929: A573/B601)
Kant combines this with a further claim that, for transcendental logic,
one of the opposed predicates must be understood as primary, and one
has to be understood as a limitation of it through the introduction of a
negation:
If, therefore, reason employs in the complete determination of things a tran-
scendental substrate that contains, as it were, the whole store of material
from which all possible predicates of things must be taken, this substrate
cannot be anything else than the idea of an omnitudo realitatis. All true
negations are nothing but limitations – a title which would be inapplicable,
were they not thus based up on the unlimited, that is, upon ‘the All’. (Kant
1929: A575–6/B603–4)
Now, we can note that for Kant this notion of complete determination
is a transcendental idea, which means that we need to assume it in order
for reason to investigate the world (if we do not assume that objects
are completely determined, then the law of excluded middle would not
hold, since it would be possible for an object to not have a particular
determination or its negation), but that its truth goes beyond the limits
of possible experience. As such, we can see that Kant’s account of the
synthesis of experience draws together two claims here. First that at
heart all synthesis operates in categorial or at least quasi-categorial

terms, and second that such a mode of synthesis is completely determin-
ing of the nature of objects we find in the world.
Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty on Symmetrical Synthesis

For Kant, therefore, experience is constituted through the synthesis
of representations into unities on a model that is analogous to the
synthesis of representations into a judgement. Now, at the heart of
the critique of Kant developed by both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze
is the claim that Kant illegitimately holds that all synthesis needs to
be understood in these terms – as operating on a manifold of discrete
moments in order to constitute it as a unity open to discursive thought.
For Merleau-Ponty, Kant understands synthesis ‘in a style that is not
the sole possible one’ (1968: 32), illegitimately equating synthesis with
categorial synthesis, and hence presupposing a vision of the world as
fully amenable to judgement. Similarly, Deleuze takes the view that
‘representation is the site of a transcendental illusion’ (1994: 265), this
illusion being that all determination operates in terms of opposition
and limitation. For both, therefore, at the heart of their criticism is the
claim that Kant extends judgement beyond its legitimate domain of
operation, thereby falsifying his account of the genesis by forcing it into
a juridical account. For the rest of this chapter, I want to look at how
Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze respond to this account of synthesis. In the
present section, I will consider their accounts of the traditional model of
synthesis before turning to their alternative accounts in the next section.
As we shall see, both see the model of synthesis as a surface effect of a
deeper process.
There is a passage in Difference and Repetition that offers up both
a Deleuzian and a Merleau-Pontian reading. What is shared by both
these readings is an attempt to develop a new account of synthesis
and determination that moves beyond our traditional understanding
of them. What Deleuze is addressing here is the traditional model of
determination that sees it as operating in terms of a relationship between
elements that share the same nature, and that are each fully determinate.
Deleuze here opposes this model to an account of determination that
sees determinations as emerging against a background that escapes from
the structure of determination. It is this claim, and the way it plays out in
relation to Kant’s transcendental deduction, that I want to explore. I will
present the passage here, then we will look at how these two readings tie
into Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty’s work:
Difference is the state in which one can speak of determination as such. The
difference ‘between’ two things is only empirical, and the corresponding
determinations are only extrinsic. However, instead of something distin-
guished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself
– and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself
from it. Lightning, for example, distinguishes itself from the black sky but
must also trail it behind, as though it were distinguishing itself from that
which does not distinguish itself from it. It is as if the ground rose to the
surface, without ceasing to be ground. There is cruelty, even monstrosity,
on both sides of this struggle against an elusive adversary, in which the
distinguished opposes something which cannot distinguish itself from it but
continues to espouse that which divorces it. Difference is this state in which
determination takes the form of unilateral distinction. We must therefore
say that difference is made, or makes itself, as in the expression ‘make the
difference’. (Deleuze 1994: 28)
What does it mean here to talk about a unilateral distinction? Normally,

we understand determination in terms of elements that are all equally
determinate, or at least are determined equally through their interaction.
We see this in terms of the difference between things, as Deleuze puts it.
For Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and for Kant, the archetypal model of this
account of determination is judging. Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty both
understand this in terms of an extensive account of relations,4 where
we take extensity to be the kind of model of space found in Euclidean
geometry, which is so central to Kant’s model of space in the Critique
of Pure Reason. Deleuze names an account of the world that operates in
these terms a sedentary distribution.5 In characterising how determina-
tion operates in extensity, he explicitly takes up the two functions of
limitation and opposition.6 We need to bear in mind that Deleuze’s
concepts often have multiple sources, but we can note that one aspect of
extensive determination is the model of determination found in Kant’s
thought. Deleuze defines it as follows:
We must first of all distinguish a type of distribution which implies a
dividing up of that which is distributed: it is a matter of dividing up
the distributed as such. It is here that in judgement the rules of analogy
are all-powerful. In so far as common sense and good sense are qualities
of judgement, these are presented as principles of division which declare
themselves the best distributed. A distribution of this type proceeds by fixed
and proportional determinations which may be assimilated to ‘properties’
or limited territories within representation. (Deleuze 1994: 36)
Merleau-Ponty foreshadows Deleuze’s notion of a sedentary distribu-

tion with what he calls ‘objective thought’, which he defines as ‘thought
applied to the universe and not to phenomena’ (2012: 50). Here too, we
have the assumption that our basic categories of understanding involve
an extensive view of the world, and rely on judgement and conceptual
determination. What are the basic characteristics of the sedentary model,
or the model of objective thought?
First, we can note that both objective thought and the sedentary
distribution deal with the existence of a field of ‘ready-made things’
(Merleau-Ponty 2012: 99). As Deleuze similarly puts it, ‘extensity does
not account for the individuations which occur within it’ (1994: 229).
In effect, for Kant, synthesis involves taking elements that already exist,
and synthesising them into unities. This allows us to see the world as ‘an
invariable system of relations to which every existing thing is subjected if
it is to be k
nown . . . like a crystal cube, where all possible presentations
can be conceived by its law of construction and that allows its hidden
sides to be seen in its present construction’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 342).
Second, the world for Kant is understood as composed of representa-
tions that themselves are all fully determinate. We have seen this already
in Kant’s notion of determination outlined above. There is thus a sym-
metry, or, as Kant argues in the Analogies, a reciprocity, between the
elements that make up the world around us. As Merleau-Ponty notes,
this model rests on an idea of temporality as a series of instantaneous
‘now’s, in which ‘every “elsewhere” is given as another here’ (2012:
348) such that everything can in principle be given at once as determi-
nate in perfect simultaneity.
Third, such a synthesis presupposes the notion of a self as the source
of the synthetic activity that relates together the representations. Kant
notes that even when the self isn’t clearly represented, it is still present in
our synthesis of the world:
that all the variety of empirical consciousness must be combined in one

single self-consciousness is the absolutely first and synthetic principle of our
thought in general. But it must not be forgotten that the bare representation
‘I’ in relation to all other representations (the collective unity of which it
makes possible) is transcendental consciousness. Whether this representa-
tion is clear (empirical consciousness) or obscure, or even whether it actu-
ally occurs, does not here concern us. But the possibility of the logical form
of all cognition is necessarily conditioned by relation to this apperception
as a faculty. (Kant 1929: A118n)
Fourth, and following from all of the claims we have looked at so far,
ultimately synthesis takes as its model the synthesis of judgement, with
its concomitant claims to subsumptive relations between determinate
representations. It is judgement that gives us an account of fully determi-

nate properties that are related together in terms of an underlying unity,
and that pushes us to ground our account of determination in terms of
the relations of a subject to an object.
Fifth, both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty follow Kant in arguing that
at the heart of this model is the ideal of God’s view of the world.7 Even
if the world is not a completed synthesis for Kant, it is still the case that
the categorial nature of the world precludes an encounter with a genuine
moment of indeterminacy in the world. This is the root of Deleuze’s
claim: ‘[f]inite synthetic Self or divine analytic substance: it amounts to
the same thing’ (1994: 58).
Finally, and following from all of these claims, both Merleau-Ponty
and Deleuze hold that the traditional account of synthesis is based
on an understanding of the subject that places it in the universal, and
denies it particularity. For both, this claim is associated with common
sense, and involves a transcendental illusion. We also find the claim
that such an account represents ‘the dogmatism of common sense’. As
such, it provides the basis for traditional scientific and philosophical
enquiry by guaranteeing a common objective framework that is ‘the
same for everyone, valid for all times and for all places’ (Merleau-Ponty
2012: 73–4), independent of the changes in perspective. The determinate
model of the world allows for clear and distinct temporally invariant
dichotomies in our characterisation of it (50), and hence makes possible
traditional models of philosophy or science.8 In effect, once we separate
our perception of things from things themselves, we are able to place
all of the indeterminacy we find in perception onto perception itself,
and thereby grant to the world outside of us a fully determinate nature.
Even in the case of Kant, therefore, time tends toward a medium within
which determinations are discovered rather than created. ‘The world,
in the full sense of the word, is not an object, it is wrapped in objec-
tive determinations, but also has fissures and lacunae through which
subjectivities become lodged in it or, rather, which are subjectivities
themselves’ (349).
Deleuze’s Asymmetrical Synthesis

Before going through the differences between the characteristics of sym-
metrical and asymmetrical syntheses, I want to give a brief outline
of what asymmetrical synthesis itself is. In the passage quoted above,
Deleuze characterises this in terms of ‘lightning, [which] distinguishes
itself from the black sky but must also trail it behind, as though it were
distinguishing itself from that which does not distinguish itself from
it’ (1994: 28). What would it mean for determination not to operate
reciprocally? Deleuze’s alternative to the sedimentary distribution is
the nomadic distribution. He describes this a situation where ‘there is
no longer a division of that which is distributed but rather a division
among those who distribute themselves in an open s pace – a space which
is unlimited, or at least without precise limits’ (36). We can see that this
also gives an account of synthesis, but not of the synthesis of a field of
elements by a subject, but rather of a field that synthesises itself. Rather
than diversity, which Deleuze associates with extensity, the nomadic
distribution instead operates in terms of difference. ‘Difference is not
diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is
given, that by which the given is given as diverse’ (222). Deleuze’s claim
is that this field of difference gives rise to the kinds of extensive proper-
ties that Kant talks about in terms of intensity.
Deleuze takes as his model here embryogenesis, with the egg as a
qualitatively indeterminate field that determines the development of the
embryo within it. Deleuze argues that the development of an embryo is a
process whereby determinate features emerge from an apparently homo-
geneous field. We can see the egg as a field that appears homogeneous,
but which is composed of gradients of intensities. The embryo develops
through an unfolding through velocities and distances that are governed
by these gradients. In effect, therefore, the egg is for Deleuze a field of
forces that determines the transformations of the embryo as it develops.
Now, Deleuze argues that ‘the world is an egg’ (1994: 251), thereby sug-
gesting that these processes can be generalised to everything that exists:
Here too, however, the positive element lies less in the elements of the given
symmetry than in those which are missing. An intensity forming a wave
of variation throughout the protoplasm distributes its difference along the
axes and from one pole to another. The region of maximal activity is the
first to come into play, exercising a dominant influence on the development
of the corresponding parts at a lower rate: the individual in the egg is a
genuine descent, going from the highest to the lowest and affirming the
differences which comprise it and in which it falls. (Deleuze 1994: 250)
We can note a number of key features that emerge from this account
of the embryo. First, the space of the embryo cannot be understood
as a simple extensive space. Rather, the development of the embryo
takes place through processes of folding the structure of space itself:
‘Embryology shows that the division of an egg into parts is secondary
in relation to more significant morphogenetic movements: the augmen-
tation of free surfaces, stretching of cellular layers, invagination by

folding, regional displacement of groups’ (Deleuze 1994: 214). These
transformations cannot be properly understood in metric terms, as ‘the
destiny and achievement of the embryo is to live the unliveable, to
sustain forced movements of a scope which would break any skeleton or
tear ligaments’ (215). The claim here is therefore that intensity operates
topologically, and hence is not determined in terms of a uniform metric.9
Second, to talk about intensive space is in fact a simplification which
emerges quite naturally from the reference to topology. The develop-
ment of the embryo could equally be understood as a process, with the
emergence of the ‘differential rhythms’ that characterise the organism. In
fact, the intensive is neither purely spatial nor temporal, and these two
terms can only be separated once explicated in extensity: ‘the distinction
is obviously relative, for it is clear that the dynamism is simultane-
ously temporal and spatial – in other words, spatio-temporal . . . The
duality does not exist in the process of actualisation itself, but only in its
outcome, in the actual terms’ (217).
Deleuze provides a model for how to think the relation between
metric and non-metric spaces with an example from mathematics. We
can begin by taking the series of cardinal numbers, 1, 2, 3, . . . Now, we
can note that in some cases, such as 7 divided by 5, we can only divide
this sequence of numbers by introducing a further set of numbers: the
fractions. These allow us to take a difference which cannot be resolved
and resolve it in a new domain. We can in turn discover within the
domain of fractions a set of numbers, namely the irrational numbers,
that cannot be determined within the domain of fractions, but can be
determined, once again, in their own domain. We have seen briefly that
the space of intensive transformations cannot be understood in terms of
precise measurements, but rather is defined by topological transforma-
tions. Deleuze notes that what makes the arithmetical relations within
the series of natural numbers possible, and similarly measurement within
space, is that both of these presuppose a basic metric unit between ele-
ments. Just as there is a difference in natural numbers that cannot be
resolved without the introduction of a new series, Deleuze asks if there
is a series that is itself resolved into the natural numbers, and argues that
this series is the ordinal numbers (first, second, third). Here, we have a
series which contains an order, but without the idea of a shared metric
(the difference between first and second does not need to be the same
as that between second and third). Deleuze takes this lack of a metric
to explain how the genesis of systems can involve transformations that
seem impossible from the point of view of fully constituted systems.
As well as understanding the genesis of space from a field which is

indeterminate from the perspective of Euclidean space, Deleuze also
argues that the notion of properties as determinations is secondary to
processes. We have just seen that intensive space involves a difference
that cannot be reduced to an identity except by explicating it in an
extensive space. Deleuze takes as his model temperature, which is not a
quality, but rather a measure of the difference in heat between different
bodies. As such, rather than a self-identical quality, temperature is a
difference. Deleuze generalises from this to argue that ‘qualities are
signs which flash across the interval of a difference’ (1994: 223), and
thus that qualities are a misrepresentation of an inherently processual
model of the world. As such, qualities are a way of representing in
extensity something that cannot be given in extensity. For Deleuze,
therefore, Kant fails to recognise that synthesis can operate in a manner
that constitutes the basic elements of extensity and quality, rather than
simply operating through a transposition of them. Before looking at the
implications of this model, I want to turn to Merleau-Ponty’s model of
asymmetrical synthesis.
Merleau-Ponty’s Asymmetrical Synthesis

At the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of Kant is a similar recogni-
tion that there is a necessary moment of indeterminacy to the world.
Merleau-Ponty claims that we tend to fall prey to what he calls the
‘experience error’, wherein ‘we immediately assume that what we know
to exist among things is also in our perception of them’ (2012: 5). As
such, we tend to attribute the kind of complete determination we think
applies to objects to our field of perception itself:
Through optics and geometry we construct the fragment of the world

whose image can, at any moment, form upon our retina. Anything outside
of this p erimeter – n
ot reflecting upon any sensitive s urface – n
o more acts
upon our vision than does light falling upon our closed eyes. We ought to
thus perceive a sharply delimited segment of the world, surrounded by a
black zone, filled with qualities without any lacunae, and subtended by
determinate size relations like those existing upon the retina. But experi-
ence offers nothing of the sort, and we will never understand what a visual
field is by beginning from the world. Even if it is possible to trace a perim-
eter around vision by beginning at the centre and gradually approaching
lateral stimuli, the results of such a measurement nonetheless vary from
one moment to the next, and the precise moment at which a previously seen
stimulus ceases to be seen can never be identified. The region surrounding
the visual field is not easy to describe, but it is certainly neither black nor
grey. (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 6)
As Merleau-Ponty notes, given that our understanding of the world is

itself grounded in perception, there is a complex circularity in under-
standing the nature of perception in terms of a field of objects, since
perception is the way in which we encounter those objects in the first
place.
Merleau-Ponty argues that this claim about the borders of our visual
field is not an accidental aspect of our perception, but rather is tied to
the fundamental nature of perception itself. If perception is understood
on the model of the world, then it is a short step to seeing the basic unit
of perception as being the correlate of a point on the retina, effectively
the kind of atomic sense-datum we find in Hume’s empiricism. Merleau-
Ponty instead argues that ‘[a] figure against a background is the most
basic perceptual figure that can be given’ (2012: 4). Now, by this he does
not simply mean that our perception is contextual but that perception
has a necessarily complex structure which involves the interrelation of
a moment of determinacy and one of indeterminacy. This immediately
pushes Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception away from the notion
that synthesis involves the interrelation of determinate elements. Rather,
for Merleau-Ponty, perception is an autochthonous mode of organisa-
tion. As such, perception, and with it the world, involves the interplay
of figure and background, which highlights its inherently perspectival
nature. When we look at extensity, according to Merleau-Ponty, we
cannot understand how basic categories such as up and down are to
be understood without presupposing a perspectival engagement with
the world. The key idea here is that attending to the world involves a
constitution of categories, rather than simply an inessential indetermi-
nacy that belongs purely to perception itself. Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘the
act of attention is . . . at least rooted in the life of consciousness, and
we can finally understand that it emerges from its indifferent freedom
to give itself a present object. The passage from the indeterminate to
the determinate, this continuous taking up again of its own history in
the unity of a new sense, is thought itself’ (33). Here, then, just as the
flash of lightning distinguishes itself from its background without the
background itself becoming distinguished, we find for Merleau-Ponty
that the figure emerges from a field of indeterminacy without itself deter-
mining its constituting field. ‘Psychological atomism is but a particular
case of a more general prejudice: the unquestioned belief in determinate
being and in the world’ (510).
Asymmetrical Synthesis
Merleau-Ponty is not mentioned in the long bibliography at the end of
Difference and Repetition, and is barely mentioned within the text itself.
Nonetheless, we find that Deleuze’s account of the three syntheses in
chapter five of Difference and Repetition makes clear the importance
of Merleau-Ponty’s work for Deleuze. Here, the concern is with space
rather than time, but ‘we should not be surprised that the pure spatial
syntheses repeat the temporal syntheses previously specified’ (Deleuze
1994: 230). In the syntheses of time, we begin with the structure of
habit and discover that habit could only be understood in terms of an
ontologically prior field of memory. Here, Deleuze begins with three
oppositions: ‘up and down, the right and the left, and the figure and the
ground’ (229, translation modified).10 Each of these oppositions is dealt
with in detail by Merleau-Ponty in relation to his discussion of extensity,
and in each case he argues that the opposition can only be properly
understood if we assume that our relation to space is perspectival. As
such, we can see here Deleuze recognising Merleau-Ponty as a precursor,
implicitly arguing that Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of perspective can be
understood as an analysis of intensity in another element.
So how do these asymmetrical syntheses differ from the symmetrical
synthesis of Kant’s philosophy? Let us return to the six characteristics
of the symmetrical synthesis, and see how they compare to those of the
asymmetrical synthesis.
First, as we saw, the symmetrical synthesis involves a combination
of ready-made representations. Now, Kant’s account is constitutive of
experience, in that the transcendental unity of apperception is outside
of time. As such, it is a synthesis of constitution from nowhere in that
it precedes space and time, and it operates in terms of ready-made ele-
ments. For Deleuze, synthesis operates between two levels, and is a con-
tinuous process of communication between these two levels: ‘In reality,
the individual can only be contemporaneous with its individuation, and
individuation, contemporaneous with the principle: the principle must
be truly genetic, and not simply a principle of reflection. Also, the indi-
vidual is not just a result, but an environment of individuation’ (Deleuze
2004: 86). This process of movement between intensity and extensity is
precisely what constituted the qualities taken up by representation, not
as states, but rather themselves as processes of difference. For Merleau-
Ponty too, we saw that through the process of attention we did not
simply have the illumination of the world, but rather the constitution
of properties. Just as for Deleuze synthesis is a continual process of
generation, for Merleau-Ponty synthesis operates by transition from one

perspective to the next, providing an account of constitution without
presupposing a moment outside of time.
Second, we saw that symmetrical synthesis operated in terms of deter-
minate properties. As we have seen, for Deleuze, synthesis is instead
constitutive of properties, as properties are a well-founded illusion gen-
erated by intensive processes of difference. For Merleau-Ponty too, the
key element in Kant’s account, the representation, is a falsification of our
notion of perspectival experience. For Kant, perception occurs through
the organisation of representations in relation to the concept of an
object. For Merleau-Ponty, while we might say that synthesis operates
through the movement between perspectives, in fact this characterisa-
tion of a movement between perspectives is an artifice of our reflection
on the constitution of experience. Instead, perspectives are not individu-
ated, and ‘the diversity of points of view is only suspected through an
imperceptible slippage, or through a certain “indeterminacy” of the
appearance’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 344). Perspectivism here operates
in a smooth space of transition that carries with it the unquantifiable
nature of the intensive.
Third, we saw that for Kant synthesis required the notion of a self
to organise experience, by analogy with judgement, which involves the
manipulation of representations by a subject. Once we see experience
itself as a process, we open up the possibility of synthesis giving rise to
the subject, rather than being a consequence of it. For Deleuze, ‘time
itself unfolds . . . instead of things unfolding within it’ (1994: 88). In
this sense, the self for Deleuze is an organisation of intensity into a set
of rhythms and differences that in turn determine it with particular
characteristics. What we normally take to be the self is merely the
representational reflection on this process of individuation: ‘Psychology
regards it as established that the self cannot contemplate itself. This,
however, is not the question. The question is whether or not the self
itself is a contemplation, whether it is not in itself a contemplation, and
whether we can learn, form behaviour and form ourselves other than
through contemplation’ (73). We find a similar claim in Merleau-Ponty’s
work, where perception constitutes the subject and object. This is the
meaning of his famous claim of the primacy of perception:
[Bergson] evokes, beyond the ‘point of view of the object’ and the ‘point of
view of the subject’, a common nucleus which is the ‘winding’ [serpente-
ment], being as a winding (what I called ‘modulation of the being in the
world’). It is necessary to make understood how that (or any Gestalt) is a
perception ‘being formed in the things’. This is still only an approximative
expression, in the subject-object language (Wahl, Bergson) of what there is

to be said. That is, that the things have us, and that it is not we who have
the things. (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 194)
Fourth, and as a direct consequence of rejecting the notions of self,

determination and the ready-made, we open up the possibility of syn-
thesis that doesn’t operate in terms of judgement. ‘Here there is, prior to
objective relations, a perceptual syntax that is articulated according to
its own rules: the breaking up of previous relations and the establishing
of new o nes – judgment – only express the outcome of this deep opera-
tion and are its final report’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 38).
Fifth, rejecting judgement involves rejecting the ideal of God. As we
saw, God is the model of complete determination for Kant. As such, in
rejecting complete determination, we reject the notion that there could
be a view from nowhere. ‘Intellectualism and empiricism do not give us
an account of the human experience of the world; they say of human
experience what God might think of the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012:
266–7). ‘The oneness and identity of the divine substance are in truth
the only guarantee of a unique and identical Self, and God is retained so
long as the Self is preserved’ (Deleuze 1994: 58).
When we take these claims together, we find an account of synthesis
that captures the particularity of our relationship with the world. We no
longer need to understand constitution in terms of judgement, but can
instead see it in terms of the genesis of a field of determinations from a
field that, in respect to them, remains indeterminate.
Conclusion
I want to conclude this chapter by considering two questions. First, why
does Kant fall into the errors that he does? And second, how do we dis-
tinguish Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze? The response to the first question
is that it is by understanding time in terms of moments that we fall into
error, and that so long as we understand synthesis to operate in relation
to judgement, we cannot help but fall into this error. Time cannot be
reconstituted once it has been broken up into discrete atomic elements.
‘It thinks it can comprehend our natal bond with the world only by
undoing it in order to remake it, only by constituting it, by fabricating
it’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 32). The ultimate implication of this for both
Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty is that traditional accounts of synthesis
are unable to explain our experience within time without recourse to
paradox. Merleau-Ponty puts the point as follows:
The definition of time, which is implicit in the comparisons made by

common sense and which could be formulated as ‘a succession of nows’,
does not merely commit the error of treating the past and the future as
presents: it is in fact inconsistent since it destroys the very notion of the
‘now’ and the very notion of succession. (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 435)
Deleuze extends this point in Difference and Repetition, where he also

develops a series of paradoxes that emerge from attempting to constitute
time through a succession of nows: ‘It is futile to try to reconstitute the
past from the presents between which it is trapped, either the present
which it was, or the one in relation to which it is now past’ (1994: 81).11
Both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty hold that the paradoxes within the
representation of synthesis lead us to recognise the unsustainability of
traditional accounts of synthesis. Judgement fails to explain constitution,
and instead ‘prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence. For
the latter creates itself through its own forces, that is, through the forces
it is able to harness, and is valid in and of itself inasmuch as it brings
the new combination into existence’ (Deleuze 1998: 135). Deleuze and
Merleau-Ponty recognise that synthesis does not have to be understood
as categorial synthesis, and so they are able to develop an alternative
model of the structure of the world which allows us to understand it as
indeterminate, but not as thereby indifferent. How do their alternative
accounts differ? Both see asymmetrical syntheses as operating between
determinacy and indeterminacy, but perhaps the fundamental differ-
ence lies in the interrelation between these fields. For Deleuze, synthesis
happens between two levels, with each being complete, even if it is not
whole.12 For Merleau-Ponty, determination and the indeterminate are
related in an asymmetrical intertwining that holds both on the same
plane. We will leave a discussion of how we distinguish between these
models for a later work.
Notes
1. For both, transcendental illusion is a key methodological discovery that is
not taken far enough by Kant himself. Merleau-Ponty explicitly takes Kant’s
account of the antinomies into his own methodology, noting that ‘One of
Kant’s discoveries, whose consequences we have not yet fully grasped, is that
all our experience of the world is throughout a tissue of concepts which lead
to irreducible contradictions if we attempt to take them in an absolute sense or
transfer them into pure being, and that they nevertheless found the structure
of all our phenomena, of everything which is for us. It would take too long
to show (and besides it is well known) that Kantian philosophy itself failed
to utilise this principle fully and that both its investigation of experience and
its critique of dogmatism remained incomplete’ (1964: 18–19). Deleuze takes
Kant’s discovery of the paralogisms to be likewise both pivotal but underex-

ploited by Kant (Deleuze 1994: 86).
2. Kant distances himself from the ‘intellectualised appearances’ (1929: A271/
B327) of Leibniz’s account of space and time. For the radicality of Kant’s depar-
ture from prior philosophers (and Plato in particular), see Deleuze 1978.
3. See Longuenesse 2001: 63–4 for her account of the interrelation of the under-
standing and imagination.
4. ‘Thus, the positing [position] of a single object in the full sense of the word
requires the composition [or co-positing] of all of these experiences in a single,
polythetic act. Therein it exceeds perceptual experience and the synthesis of
horizons – just as the notion of a universe (a completed and explicit total-
ity where relations would be reciprocally determined) exceeds the notion of
a world (an open and indefinite multiplicity where relations are reciprocally
implicated). I take flight from my experience and I pass over to the idea. Like
the object, the idea claims to be the same for everyone, valid for all times and
for all places, and the individuation of the object at an objective point of time
and space appears, in the end, as the expression of a universal positing power’
(Merleau-Ponty 2012: 73–4).
5. Deleuze sees a sedentary distribution as a set of transcendental claims about
the rules for understanding how experience is organised. The assumptions
behind sedentary distributions are discussed in more detail in chapter three of
Difference and Repetition. See Williams 2004: 65–7; Somers-Hall 2012: 38–42
for more on the interrelation of sedentary and nomadic distributions.
6. Cf., for instance, Deleuze 1994: 52.
7. While Kant posits the transcendental ideal of God as a condition for determina-
tion, it is important also to recognise that Kant breaks with what Allison calls
the ‘theocentric’ model of thought that we find in pre-Kantian metaphysics (cf.
Allison 2004: 27–34). He does so by positing a difference between the intuitive
thought of an infinite being and the discursive thought of a finite being. For an
analysis of the ambivalences this generates in Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Kant,
see Somers-Hall 2019.
8. Deleuze defines traditional metaphysics and transcendental philosophy as
holding to the claim that one must have ‘either an undifferentiated ground, a
groundlessness, formless nonbeing, or an abyss without differences and without
properties, or a supremely individuated Being and an intensely personalized
form’ (1990: 106). This is in effect once again the claim that all determination
must related to a central unity, with the only alternative being a lack of deter-
mination (in effect, either being or nothingness). Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty
both seek a new form of thinking that will be adequate to thinking the genesis
of form itself.
9. Deleuze is here breaking with much of the philosophical tradition by seeing
time as independent of measure. He will argue that, from Plato, time has been
understood simply as the medium through which causal or logical relations
are expressed, such as in Plato’s notion of the world as the ‘moving image of
eternity’, or Leibniz’s account of well-founded phenomena. Deleuze calls this
notion of intensity separated from measure the pure form of time. For Deleuze,
it is Kant who inaugurates a break with the metaphysical tradition by determin-
ing time independently of rational categories. While he recognises this difference
in kind, Kant goes wrong by understanding time as purely passive rather than
generative. See Somers-Hall 2011.
10. Patton here translates le haut et le bas as ‘high and low’, which obscures the con-
nection with Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of up and down in the Phenomenology
of Perception.
11. Cf. Ansell-Pearson 2001: 185–91 for a discussion of these paradoxes.

12. Deleuze takes this distinction from Descartes. Cf. Deleuze 1994: 209.
References
Allison, H. (2004), Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense,
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ansell-Pearson, K. (2001) Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual, London:
Routledge.
Deleuze, G. (1978), ‘Cours Vincennes: Synthesis and Time’, trans. Melissa
McMahon, at <https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/66>.
London: Athlone Press.
Deleuze, G. (1998), ‘To Have Done with Judgment’, in Essays Critical and Clinical,
trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, London: Verso.
Deleuze, G. (2004), ‘On Gilbert Simondon’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–
1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Mike Taormina, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Kant, I. (1929), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London:
Macmillan.
Longuenesse, B. (2001), Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity
in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Charles T.
Wolf, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Merleau- Ponty, M. (1964), ‘The Primacy of Perception’, in The Primacy of
Perception, ed. James M. Edie, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968), The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans.
Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012), The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A.
Landes, Abingdon: Routledge.
Somers-Hall, H. (2011), ‘Time Out of Joint: Hamlet and the Pure Form of Time’,
Deleuze Studies, 5 (supplement): 56–76.
Somers- Hall, H. (2012), Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: An Edinburgh
Philosophical Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Somers- Hall, H. (2019), ‘Merleau- Ponty’s Reading of Kant’s Transcendental
Idealism’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 57 (1): 103–31.
Williams, J. (2004), Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction
Chapter 7
Disjoint and Multiply: Deleuze and Negri
on Time
Peter Trnka
The joint, cardo, is what ensures the subordination of time to those prop-
erly cardinal points through which pass the periodic movements which it
measures . . . By contrast, time out of joint means demented time or time
outside the curve which gave it a god, liberated from its overly simple
circular figure, freed from the events which made up its content, its relation
to movement overturned; in short, time presenting itself as an empty and
pure form. Time itself u nfolds . . . instead of things unfolding within it . . .
It ceases to be cardinal and becomes ordinal, a pure order of time. (Deleuze
1994: 88; emphasis added)
Preamble
In the spirit of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s collaboration, or dein-
dividuated authorial coupling ‘between you and me’, we speak together
(or not at all) as a fused reader-writer becoming-couple; a reader reading
written signs of some writer(s) is the minimal threshold or condition.
In the imperative mode: disjoint, multiply, time or times, that is. An
imperative, however, of exhortation, not command. We speak together,
for the displacement and disjointing of unitary imposed time, that is,
work time.
Presuming for now, at least at the limit (and the limit is, as we shall
see below, the measure of the gradient or scissor angle between formal
and real subsumption), more and more, all time is work time, as if all
digital clocks had hidden punches. Work time is the marching time of
‘one-two-three-four-one-two-three-four’: regular, automatic, endlessly
repetitive, instituting fast grooves to follow-fill. So on and so on and so
on and so on.
Dis-joint, de-couple, dis-place. Favour, instead, multiplication. Love
multiplies. Add and add and then take adding to the next power. Increase
Disjoint and Multiply 137
and fold over the increases to increase faster and at different scales.
Release the folds of plural times, bloom a hundred flowers, explicate a
thousand plateaus or levels.
Practice over theory, action over representation, knowing full well
that as we use the technology or machine of language, the name of the
thing tends to insist it is done and finished, pushing any dynamic tenden-
cies, flows and fluxes of time to the margins, peripheries, and dumping
lots of error.1
As if time does not infect all things. As if names as fixed identities
do not always fail. As if we had some continued interest in thingifying,
reifying, fetishising, idolising.
The practical mode is the futural mode of what is to be done: what is
to be made, to-come to-be. Revolutionary communism2 is futural and in
the infinitive: live to multiply futures. At times these futures are exclu-
sively micropolitical, molecular, micro-futures (a shared glance across a
room), but there are also rarer molar shifts, revolutions in fundamental
modes of being. Futures, of course, come with things, whole worlds of
things in each and every new time.
Our method is to read Deleuze, his work alone and in collaboration
with Guattari, through his friend and comrade Negri. This serves the
purpose of a clear political line, to Marx that is. We begin, then, in
the next section, with Negri’s reading of Marx, and of Marx’s theory
of time. The third section features Deleuze’s thought of time, in his
singularly authored works and with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus
(oddly, for philosophy, many authorial couples in these territories:
Marx-Engels, Deleuze-Guattari and Negri-Hardt). Section four on the
time-image is something like an example of a collective phenomeno-
logical constitution of new machines and new experiences of time. The
differences between Deleuze and Negri on time appear to centre on
their differential appraisals of Spinoza’s thought of time, duration and
eternity, which we will tease out at some length in section five, with the
help of Spinoza scholars Samuel Alexander, H. F. Hallett and David
Savan.
When Negri speaks of a ‘communist idea of time’, and specifies that
‘[r]evolution is born from the pathways of a constitutive phenomenol-
ogy of temporality’ (2003: 21), he is putting the politics of time, its
production, control, circulation, distribution and exchange, at the heart
of liberation struggles. Time is not money. Time is living labour. Time
is life.
Translate academic vocabularies and grammatologies. Believe that you
can do something to change the fucked-up world. Update the eleventh
138 Peter Trnka
thesis on Feuerbach: ‘The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted

the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it.’
Negri on Marx and Time

The Marx that inspires Negri is the later or latest Marx, the Marx of
Capital but more so the Grundrisse, most fully expressed in Negri’s
Marx Beyond Marx, the title of which signals the central point, namely,
that the name ‘Marx’ here means the procedure of thinking through the
temporally dynamic historical situation with regard to desired futures-
to-come (and as such denotes a movement always and essentially beyond
any existing configuration).
Negri, in two remarkable texts written while in prison in Italy on two
different, long ‘occasions’ (first, ‘The Constitution of Time’ and, second,
‘Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo’, collected in English and published
under the joint title Time for Revolution), takes guidance primarily from
Marx and Deleuze in writing a political ontology, or radical historical
materialist dialectic, of time. Tensed and dated, subjective and objective,
time A and time B: polar oppositions in the flow and experience of time.
Oppositions often hypostatised into categories, separate realities, which
Negri seeks to coordinate, under a narrative explanation of the genera-
tive constitution of molar capital command time, and its corollary, and
antithetical, profusion of molecular times.3
Hence Negri is able to consider ‘time as its own essence, as immanent,
as human . . .’ (2003: 34) without denying or diminishing time. Instead,
the details, styles, fashions, particular ways or modes of thinking-
feeling-experiencing-living time(s) are to be thought as historical modes
of the production, distribution and circulation of time, as of anything
else (notably space, including floors, ceilings, sitting and standing areas,
lunchrooms, and so on and so on and so on, as well, of course, as all
the minutiae that go along with spacetimes, namely, ways of shaping
and doing things). There is not but one Time, there are m any – p
erhaps
discrete, potentially mutually e xclusive – times, in the emphatic plural.
Consider two faces of human time, two faces of the lived constitution
of time, temporally distinct: living labour and dead labour,4 in other
words, wages and capital, humanity split and fighting against itself, in
its division into classes and times – people of the past and people of the
future-to-come. The struggle between classes, between living labour and
dead labour, proletarian and bourgeois, Marx expresses as ‘subsump-
tion’ – that is, total control and p ossession – of ‘labour by capital’, in
two phases or modes: formal (potentiality, as authority, allowance, con-
tract) and real (the actuality, as developed, extensively and intensively).

The two phases are scissored or related as poles on a continuum, such
that the movement from formal to real is quantitative, intensive and
expressive of the measure of class exploitation and domination. To be
really fully subsumed is the limit of one’s suffering and plasticity under
capital control. As subsumption extends and intensifies, working time
becomes constitutive of life, or, in other words, the difference between
the time (and place) of work and the time and place for life (free of
work) fades and disappears.
Time for Marx becomes ‘the tautology of life’ (Negri 2003: 34–5).
Real subsumption of labour by capital is a subsumption into labour time,
a molar absolute closed time that operates on molecular, open multiple
constitutions of time. Real times have a ‘positive entropy’, writes Negri,
that ‘is richly described in that beautiful tract of the phenomenology of
time and times that is Deleuze’s and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus’
(41). The multiplication of new times is the creation of new forms of
becoming, hence new forms of time, continually (as an expanding spiral,
not an enclosing circle). Real subsumption, he continues, ‘produces and
displays a complete transcription of the real relations (individual, of
class, of force)’, i.e., the ground and shape of things and persons and
activities and relations has shifted, with real difference; real subsump-
tion ‘introduces a maximum of plurality and dynamism. Antagonistic
dispositifs open up and consolidate themselves starting precisely from
a new irreducibility of action to average value, or to unified time’ (41).
Plural times conflict with the ‘real time’ of production, the specular
spectacular time of global universal command. Each is a construc-
tion: ‘capital constructs time as collective substance’ (Negri 2003: 41).
Construction is here real material process, the making of the objective
conditions that make lives and activities this way rather than that.
Remembering, if we can, that the constructive moment does little to
dampen the hypostatising tendencies of language, that is to say, there is
always it seems the implication that the thing is in the same way that the
word is appearing fixed on its location on the page.
The logic of placing and conjoining, of displacing and disjoining,
unsettles and perturbs: ‘In my Marx Beyond Marx I demonstrated in
depth how the mechanism of displacement dominates Marx’s logic’,
Negri writes, specifying that by Marx’s logic he means
the scientific standpoint of class. When real subsumption is reached through

the development of productive forces and of the relations of production,
the displacement of all the constitutive parameters is thereby determined.
140 Peter Trnka
The synchronic rules are modified within the framework of the diachronic
transition. (Negri 2003: 42)
Ontological figures are subject to diachronic displacement. The molar

organisation of unified time finds its ontological basis in a molecular
multitude. Negri defines multiplicity ‘in materialist terms . . . as irreduc-
ibility of the many to the one, time conceived in its founding d ynamic –
and therefore, molecular reality as against any molar projection’ (2003:
43). The single unitary Time of Capital and Dead Labour coexists in
tension with the Many Times of the Resistance of Living Labour; as
Negri explains:5 ‘in the hysteresis of the dissociation of multiple times
we find opposed tendencies, material tendencies constituting themselves
as the negation of command, and therefore as logics of liberation’ (43).6
Real subsumption describes the average condition of social labour in
real crisis, where real crisis means irreversible time; real subsumption is
founded on the contradiction between the ‘plural substantial times of
subjects’, on the one hand, and the ‘analytic of command’, on the other
(Negri 2003: 55). It is not a question of subjective versus objective senses
of time, as the subject here is as objective as objective, and subjective,
get. It is a question of the conditions of genesis (the production by
capital, in many current cases, of the antinomies and the need to solve
them) (101–2). Liberated time is omnilateral, universally versatile, and
productive subjectivity. ‘Liberation occurs in the form of subjectivity,
from the refusal to work to the rediscovery of productive rational-
ity, from self-valorization to auto-determination, from spontaneity to
unfolded collective consciousness’; Negri continues to define liberated
time as collectivity itself, or the life of such, in a ‘time that cannot be
measured, precisely because liberation consists in the destruction of the
structural dimensions of time-as-measure. The one schema of organiza-
tion of liberated time is thus rediscovered in terms of a phenomenology
of collective praxis’ (120–1). Materialist phenomenology means here
a historico-genetic and critical-descriptive analysis of forms of making
and creating: ‘Liberated time is a machine of constitution’ (21).
An interrelation of procedure, subjectivity, time and machine, or
machinic assemblage or apparatus. Subjects, subject- types, move in
social alliances. Negri writes of a manuscript Deleuze worked on:
In the period of La Grandeur de Marx, Gilles Deleuze spoke of the common

notion (in the case in point, of communism) as the possibility of translating
the community of the episteme into an ontological common. The common
name is the teleological trace (a teleology of the instant, the telos of the
event) that unites the events in the construction of a community: it is thus
the ontological composition of the events that expresses itself as power and
imagines itself as reality to-come. (Negri 2003: 157)
The expression of power is at one and the same time an act of imagina-
tion: an imagining, in the full concrete desiring aching sense; imagining,
wanting, demanding and making what is to-come. Imagination is here
Hume’s constructive power, as affirmed in the mad, fabulous sense of
Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity (see Trnka 1997). Such a positive
and absolutely free imagination is far from the tamed Kantian faculty.
As constructive, in Negri’s terminology, constitutive power, imagination
is an ontological force; it is real and makes things real. Subjectivity has
real forms and real effects.
Unitary command time and the multitudes of liberated times are
opposed and co-implicated; Negri claims that ‘[w]ith these two refer-
ences (to Marx and Deleuze) before us, we find ourselves introduced
to the full experience of the power of the Kairos’ (2003: 158). What
is Kairos? It is ‘the power to observe the fullness of temporality at the
moment it opens itself onto the void of being, and of seizing this opening
as innovation. The common name is situated in the passage (Kairos)
from fullness to the void: it is a common and imaginative act of produc-
tion’ (158). It is not a decision, in some Schmittian-Hobbesian possessive
individualist nominalist ontology, but a collective historical work of the
multitudes of intellectual and manual workers, in the broadest sense of
those subjectivities who think, feel and move. The common name, such
as, for example, ‘communism’, ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘is not only the
sign of the singular existent in the instant that links the act of naming to
the thing named, nor is it solely the seeking of multiplicity in surveying
over the edge of time. Situated within the power of the production of
being, it is also the construction of the telos of generation’ (158), the
tendency of the striving and work of the collective: ‘It is this production,
that is to say this generation, which we call praxis’ (158). Praxis is col-
lective goal-oriented practical activity. Praxis makes what is to come.
What was to come and did, of course, has constituted us and our
situations, tools and weapons. To the draw of the future over the push
of the past Negri ‘give[s] the name of “to-come” . . . the horizon of
experimentation of the adequation of the name and the thing, and to
the imaginative perspective that – in realizing itself – presents itself as
new being’ (2003: 163). This is a perspective in accord with ordinary
experience:
The everyday sense of life confirms the definition of that ‘which is coming’
as to-come, rather than as future. It is . . . in the struggle for the free
142 Peter Trnka
appropriation of the present that life opens itself to the to-come, and desire
perceives – a gainst the empty and homogeneous time in which all is equal
(including, and in particular, the future) – the creative power of praxis.
(Negri 2003: 163)7
Real subjectivity as embodied material historical subjectivity lives. It

lives in individuals and groups; in the many forms of global social mul-
tiples, of groupuscules, cells, assemblies, associations and institutions; in
multiple aggregates and assemblages of imaginative acts of person-types,
aka, individuals and groups. Real subjectivity and real subjects live in
uncountable times: ‘To be in the eternal means to be in “production” . . .
If the “before” is eternal and the “after” is to-come, time – in the arrow
that constitutes it – is the immeasurableness of production between this
“before” and this “after”’(Negri 2003: 167).
Negri thinks through the character of productive or constituent power
as procedure. That is, procedure is the way of creation, the manner of
world making. In his work Insurgencies, on political r evolutions – the
British, French, American and Russian, primarily – and their transforma-
tive and emergent contribution to the historical production of collective
social imaginary forms of being, he brushes off the surface similarities
between Marx’s and Heidegger’s criticisms of clock time. Heidegger’s
mystification of time, as Negri puts it, is not the same as Marx’s identi-
fication with time: ‘temporality can be grounded in human productive
capacity, in the ontology of its becoming – an open, absolutely constitu-
tive temporality that does not disclose Being but instead produces beings’
(1999: 30). As offering such a constitutive, productive view, ‘Marx’s
metaphysics of time is much more radical than Heidegger’s’, he claims;
‘Marx frees what Heidegger imprisons.’ How so? ‘Heideggerian time
is the form of being, the indistinctness of an absolute foundation.’ In
contrast to the mystical opaqueness of Heidegger’s Being, ‘Marxian time
is the production of being and thus the form of an absolute procedure’
(30). An absolute procedure is one which is totally adequate for its task,
it is all there is and all that is needed, and it knows itself as such and acts
as such. Absolute procedure expresses its power: ‘Marxian temporality
represents the means by which a subject formally predisposed to being
adequate to an absolute procedure becomes a subject materially capable
of becoming part of this process, of being defined as constituent power’
(30). Formal to material, like virtual to actual, is a transformation and
intensification of power. Negri sums up the passional and imaginative
social character of this power: ‘Every human drive in search of the
political consists in this: in living an ethics of transformation through
a yearning for participation that is revealed as love for the time to

constitute’ (335).
Deleuze and Guattari on Time

Deleuze’s works of the late 1960s, The Logic of Sense and Difference
and Repetition, each disjoint and multiply unitary Time. The time of
Chronos is the time of chronological series, hence the time of measure
and order and work. The time of Aion, ‘the unlimited Aion, the becom-
ing which divides itself infinitely in past and future . . . always eludes
the present’ (Deleuze 1990: 5). The splitting into past and into future,
this infinite constant splitting into an ever anew generated past and
ever anew generated future, is the transcendental apparatus of Aion.
Chronos is the ordering of the moments of the expressed or generated
series. Aion is the self-renewing reservoir of time and time-production,
always has just been and about to be:
time must be grasped twice, in two complementary though mutually exclu-

sive fashions . . . e ntirely as the living present in bodies which act and are
acted upon . . . [and] entirely as an entity infinitely divisible into past and
future, and into the incorporeal effects which result from bodies, their
actions and their passions. Only the present exists in time and gathers
together or absorbs the past and future. But only the past and future inhere
in time and divide each present infinitely. (Deleuze 1990: 5)
It just has, it is just about to, but it is not now. ‘The infinitely divisible
event is always both at once’, Deleuze writes. ‘It is eternally that which
has just happened and that which is about to happen, but never that
which is happening’ (1990: 8). The vein of paradox, which Deleuze
affirms positively, is appropriate to the attempt to think time.
The logic of the time of the event is posited in a counter-actualised
Stoic ontology of sense, filled with bits of Bergsonian durée. Events are
typically out of reach, on stage, separated from the limit of one’s powers,
out of bounds, spectacularised, as in Hollywood. Desiring8 to become
an actor of one’s own events, ‘the actor delimits the original, disengages
from it an abstract line, and keeps from the event only its contour and its
splendor, becoming thereby the actor of one’s own events – a counter-
actualization’ (Deleuze 1990: 150).9 As I’ve shown elsewhere (Trnka
2001: 56), Deleuze’s ‘ultimate sense of counter- actualization’ brings
together the time of the infinitive with the construction of a concept and
the notion of an event, such that an individual involved would ‘grasp
the event actualized within her as another individual grafted onto her’
144 Peter Trnka
(Deleuze 1990: 178). (How Spinoza trumps Bergson on duration, and

how Negri takes Spinoza and Marx further in and on time than does
Deleuze, is still to come. Deleuze’s time constructions, in the cinema
books and with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, are fully consonant
with Negri. Deleuze’s major difference from Negri in the ontology of
time lies in his reliance on a Stoic logic of the event of sense and on
Bergson’s durée. Negri expands the love of immanence and univocity in
Spinoza which he shares with Deleuze, to encompass what many have
found difficult, if not impossible, namely, a Spinoza who is a friend of
real, new time.10)
Untimely opposition to the commanding flow of time disjoints the
cardinal and institutes the ordinal intensive; counter-actualisation pro-
ceeds thus through the time of Aion, or, rather, Aion is populated by the
events of counter-actualisation, infinitely into the past and infinitely into
the future to come.
The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition, together with the
Bergson book and the Bergson sections in the Cinema books, lay out
the transcendental dimension of Deleuze’s thinking of time. The later,
collaborative Capitalism and Schizophrenia volume II, A Thousand
Plateaus, is the practice of that theory. We prefer the practice. It is the
work pointed to by Negri: ‘We like Deleuze and Guattari because they
immerse temporality in the autonomy of a thousand plateaus of creativ-
ity’ (Negri 2003: 134). Brian Massumi, in his ‘Translator’s Foreword’ to
A Thousand Plateaus, explains the dating of the plateaus: ‘The date cor-
responds to the point at which that particular dynamism found its purest
incarnation in matter, the point at which it was freest from interference
from other modes and rose to its highest degree of intensity’ (1987: xiv).
The experience of each and every plateau and the sequence taken from
one to another to another is not linear, if the user instructions are to
be followed, but more in the mode of listening to a vinyl record player,
which allows placing the needle here and there, breaking from ordered
arborescence and constructing rhizomatic extensions. The rhizomatic
sequencing concerns the rhythms and cadences of time and social life.
Rhizomatics is non- linear, non-arboreal, positive expression: free
line drawing, free lines of flight. Taking a thin line through rhizomat-
ics, a free-form point-line diagrammatics and machinic construction.
Collective human creation in and of times, by way of an interrelation
of procedure, subjectivity, time and machine or machinic assemblage.
Apparatuses for the capture of times in Work Time and Trading Time.
Apparatuses for the liberation and proliferation, disjunction and dislo-
cation of times.
The contrast between arborescent and rhizomatic forms of growth,

becoming and organisation is a question of purpose: for what end?
Because we desire to do what? Muck around, play in the most serious
and most fun of senses, make different: ‘The rhizome is . . . a map and
not a tracing . . . What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it
is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real.
The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it
constructs the unconscious’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 12).
Actual, virtual, real. The actual is real and so is the virtual. There is an
interplay between virtual and actual. Rhizome maps out the interplay.
Actuality is derivative, not primary. Aion is a virtual set of forms,
like but unlike in Plato (see Appendix I to The Logic of Sense, ‘The
Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy’).
Rhizomes lie on the practical terrain of getting somewhere and
getting something done, ready to go in whichever direction is fruitful:
‘A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between
things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is
alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the
fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and . . . and . . . and . . .”’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 25). Conjoining, disjunctively synthesising,
stitching an alliance, drawing a bridge, the rhizome maps territories and
courses of activity.
Mapping of the rhizome is a machinic diagrammatics:
diagrams must be distinguished from indexes, which are territorial signs,

but also from icons, which pertain to reterritorialization, and from symbols,
which pertain to relative or negative deterritorialization. Defined diagram-
matically in this way, an abstract m achine . . . p
lays a piloting role. The
diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even
something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type
of reality. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 142)
Cinema as a new type of reality, a new type of temporal reality, is the

example or paradigm we examine in our soon to come next part, on the
time-image.
To draw an abstract line, to diagram, to make a machine, we are pro-
pelling arrows into the future, breaking up the stasis of points: ‘The line-
system (or block-system) of becoming is opposed to the point-system
of memory’, argue Deleuze and Guattari. ‘Becoming is the movement
by which the line frees itself from the point, and renders points indis-
cernible: the rhizome, the opposite of arborescence; break away from
arborescence. Becoming is an antimemory’ (1987: 294). Chronological
146 Peter Trnka
point order is disrupted, forgetting displaces memory, the abstract line

of pure imagination is freed to wander. Aion generates live possibilities
for Chronos. The liberated line in nomadic distribution runs across the
infinities of Aion for times to come: ‘There is no act of creation that is
not transhistorical and does not come up from behind or proceed by
way of a liberated line. Nietzsche opposes history not to the eternal but
to the subhistorical or superhistorical: the Untimely, which is another
name for haecceity, becoming . . .’ (296).
Time-Image Paradigm
A paradigm of the historically dynamic constitution of a machinic
assemblage of subjectivity, one that allows us to imagine time as never
before: cinema, and, more specifically, its later ‘time- image’ (which
Deleuze distinguishes in historical and formal ways from the original
‘movement-image’). Procedure led to a course of machines, producing
generations of subjectivities and multiplications of times. In the second
volume of his Cinema: The Time-Image, the machinic assemblage con-
cerns the future to come:
The French school never lost its taste for clockwork automata and clock-
making characters, but also confronted machines with moving parts, like
the American or Soviet schools. The man-machine assemblage varies from
case to case, but always with the intention of posing the question of the
future. (Deleuze 1989: 263)
The human-machine assemblage, the historical subject, that is, as pros-

thetically extended by the history of labour and technology. Deleuze
does not overextend his analysis of the human- film camera- movie
theatre to the televisual or videodromic scenes, which are newer still:
‘Clockwork automata, but also motor automata, in short, automata
of movement, made way for a new computer and cybernetic race,
automata of computation and thought, automata with controls and
feedback’ (Deleuze 1989: 264–5). The technology and collective nature
and phenomenological feel of these media all differ: ‘The electronic
image, that is, the tele and video image, the numerical image coming
into being, either had to transform cinema or to replace it, to mark its
death. We do not claim to be producing an analysis of the new images’
(265).
Cinema already transforms the rules of the game in terms of erasing
any distinction between real and imaginary, between past, present and
future, and so between memory and anticipation:
For the time-image to be born . . . t he actual image must enter into relation
with its own virtual image as such; from the outset pure description must
divide in two, ‘repeat itself, take itself up again, fork, contradict itself’.
An image which is double-sided, mutual, both actual and virtual, must be
constituted. (Deleuze 1989: 273)
The image has two sides or faces at one and the same time:
We are no longer in the situation of a relationship between the actual image
and other virtual images, recollections, or dreams, which thus become
actual in turn: this is still a mode of linkage. We are in the situation of an
actual image and its own virtual image, to the extent that there is no longer
any linkage of the real with the imaginary, but indiscernibility of the two, a
perpetual exchange. (Deleuze 1989: 273)
The two are one and yet differ in a perpetual relay of exchange. At the late
capitalist postmodern moment of spectacularised society, we affirm the
pre-eminence of imagination and the early affirmation of time and social
constitution in David Hume: ‘Repetition changes nothing in the object
repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates
it. Hume’s famous thesis takes us to the heart of a problem’ (Deleuze
1994: 70). So Deleuze situates in relation to Hume his own work on
repetition in Difference and Repetition. Deleuze glosses Hume’s thesis as
follows: ‘Time is constituted only in the originary synthesis which oper-
ates on the repetition of instants. This synthesis contracts the successive
independent instants into one another, thereby constituting the lived, or
living, present’ (70).
Imaginative constructive habit à la Hume is the basic psychic machine,
the free productive agency which gives birth to memory and reason:
The passive synthesis of habit [first] in turn refers to . . . [a] more profound
passive synthesis of memory: Habitus and Mnemosyne, the alliance of the
sky and the ground. Habit is the originary synthesis of time, which consti-
tutes the life of the passing present; Memory is the fundamental synthesis of
time which constitutes the being of the past (that which causes the present
to pass). (Deleuze 1994: 79–80)11
Hence the subject’s creation in and of time, by way of the capacity of
synthesis, of holding things together.
The time-image extends our account of Deleuze’s theory and practice
of temporal constitution, and also exemplifies an emergent quality, a
new experience and collective constitution of time that is cinema.12
Temenuga Trifonova begins her ‘A Nonhuman Eye: Deleuze on Cinema’
by linking Deleuze to the Sartre of Imagination and The Psychology of
Imagination and characterising their joint venture (with Bergson) as one
148 Peter Trnka
of plumbing the heights and depths of times or durations: ‘Deleuze’s

task in the two volumes of Cinema is to demonstrate how modern
cinema in particular has made it possible to surpass the human condi-
tion by abolishing subjectivity as a privileged image’ (Trifonova 2004:
134). The time-image expresses a new collective experience and con-
stitution of time, and as such, a transformation of subjectivity (by a
new human- machine hybridity). This transformation is a liberation:
subjectivity expresses itself more and more in pure time (leaving space
behind, so to speak): ‘when duration dictates what is happening, rather
than events determining time, the subject has restored its independence
from the world’ (135). The coincidence of actual and virtual image in
the time-image forms its self-referentiality: ‘The self-referentiality of the
image consists in the indistinguishability of the true and the imaginary
within the image’, as we saw above; ‘Time (but not spatialized time,
which is always referential and thus measurable) is self-referential in
nature: the time-image does not describe a certain state of things but is
itself that state of things’ (146). The cinematic time-image allows us to
live more in the future.
Beginning in the one and the many, the jointed and out of joint, we
have moved through living labour to dead labour and back again, and to
the future of machines, and subjective collectivities. The three syntheses
of time in Difference and Repetition will be our closing note on Deleuze,
one which allows us to express a discontent at his associating eternity
and dislocated time with the death instinct:
The first passive synthesis [of time], that of Habitus, presented repetition as
a binding, in the constantly renewed form of a living present . . . T he second
synthesis, that of Eros-Mnemosyne, posits repetition as displacement and
disguise, and functions as the ground of the pleasure p rinciple . . . When
the narcissistic ego takes the place of the virtual and real objects, when
it assumes the displacement of the former and the disguise of the latter,
it does not replace one content of time with another. On the contrary,
we enter into the third synthesis. It is as though time had abandoned all
possible mnemonic content, and in so doing had broken the circle into
which it was lead by Eros. It is as though it had unrolled, straightened itself
and assumed the ultimate shape of the labyrinth . . . Time empty and out
of joint, with its rigorous and formal and static order, its crushing unity
and its irreversible series, is precisely the death instinct . . . If there is an
essential relation between eternal return and death, it is because it promises
and implies ‘once and for all’ the death of that which is one. 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, for
themselves and ‘for all times’. (Deleuze 1994: 108–15)
Instead of Nietzsche’s eternal return and Freud’s death instinct, we go

back to Spinoza and the positive affirmation of life, but we need to sort
out some problems first.
Spinoza’s Duration Between Deleuze and Negri

Why is there almost no mention of time in Deleuze’s big book on
Spinoza? Deleuze, unlike Negri, is nervous at the end of the day con-
cerning Spinoza’s monism and expressivism; as Robert Piercey writes:
‘Deleuze thinks that although Spinoza is the philosopher of immanence,
his treatment of substance still contains a residue of transcendence
or emanation. Spinoza, in Deleuze’s view, privileges substance over
mode’ (1996: 280). Piercey cites Difference and Repetition: ‘With
Spinoza . . . there still remains a difference between substance and the
modes: Spinoza’s substance appears independent of the modes, while
the modes are dependent on substance, as though on something other
than themselves’ (Deleuze 1994: 40). Negri is a more consistent or
fully immanent interpreter of Spinoza than Deleuze, as we shall see
below.
What is the relation or situation between substance and its modes?
The immanent expressivism of Spinoza takes some wrangling to sort
out. Samuel Alexander’s Deleuzian- type reading of Spinoza against
Spinoza gives us an inkling of what this position might be. This inkling
is fattened up by Negri’s consistent affirmation of Spinoza from a future-
oriented point of view. Negri’s minor position is supported, as we shall
see, by H. F. Hallett and David Savan. This reading solves some riddles
of the substance–mode situation, and, hence, of the thought of change,
transformation and revolution.
Alexander is close to Deleuze in taking up the latter’s rude form of
philosophical commentary that turns the subject monstrous (see Trnka
2001). Accordingly, Alexander ‘propos[es] to explain what difference it
would make to Spinoza’s philosophy if, to make an impossible hypoth-
esis, he had treated Time as an attribute of God’ (1939: 353). Alexander
is wrong that his is an impossible hypothesis and wrong to ‘locate’ Time
in the attributes, as opposed to where Spinoza put it himself, namely,
in substance (or God or Nature) in its active, creative, expressive aspect
(or face), that is, as Natura naturans, rather than in its more passive,
created, expressed face (or aspect), that is, as Natura naturata. Naturing
nature is substance in its more fully substantival, that is acting, creating
role. Natured nature is substance in its substantial but now passive,
exhausted, if you will, role, showing its fruits.
150 Peter Trnka
Let us take our bearings from the Ethics itself at two points, a random
couple from Spinoza’s admittedly few explicitly positive mentions of
time in the work. Consider, first, this temporal qualification of the
nature of individuals, from IIIP8: ‘The conatus with which each single
thing endeavors to persist in its own being does not involve finite time,
but indefinite time’ (Spinoza 1982: 110). And consider this with the
later claim, at VP29, wherein Spinoza is developing his understanding
of the most virtuous form of conatus or striving, i.e., the drive to know
and love God or Nature: ‘Whatever the mind understands under a form
of eternity it does not understand from the fact that it conceives the
present actual existence of the body, but from the fact that it conceives
the essence of the body under a form of eternity’ (218). The Proof is
expansive on the relation between time as measure, the felt experience
of duration, and the eternal point of view:
In so far as the mind conceives the present existence of its body, to that
extent it conceives a duration that can be determined by time, and only to
that extent does it have the power to conceive things in relation to t ime . . .
But eternity cannot be explicated through d uration . . . T
herefore to that
extent the mind does not have the power to conceive things under a form of
eternity. But since it is the nature of reason to conceive things under a form
of eternity . . ., and since it belongs to the nature of mind, too, to conceive
of the essence of the body under a form of eternity . . . and since there
belongs to the essence of mind nothing but these two ways of conceiving
. . ., it follows that this power to conceive things under a form of eternity
pertains to the mind only in so far as it conceives the essence of the body
under a form of eternity. (Spinoza 1982: 218)
We will not explicate the full sense of this passage but only note the
differentiation between measurable and hence unreal time, on the one
side, and real duration, on the other; and, second, the possibility, as
well as the limitation and warning concerning, the movement from
duration to eternity. Alexander’s critical dismissal of Spinoza on time is
precociously quick. ‘Time has been slipped’, he alleges, ‘into Extension
out of the undefined activity of God’ (1939: 359). He continues on
to explain that while we contemporaries ‘might be tempted to say
that extension includes not only extension in space but duration in
time’ and that such a supposition would ‘solve Spinoza’s problem’,
yet ‘there is no word of it in Spinoza and could not be’. It is our
contention that there indeed could be and was. Alexander makes the
implausible assumption that Spinoza simply misconceives motion: ‘The
truth appears to be that Spinoza could pass so easily from extension
to motion because motion was conceived as it were statically’ (359).
Not so, we shall show; rather, substance is conceived by Spinoza as

essentially moving or dynamic.
Alexander then goes on to construct his time attribute ‘gloss’ (rather
than commentary) on Spinoza, which he sums up as follows: ‘In our
gloss upon Spinoza the ultimate reality is full of Time, not timeless but
essentially alive with Time, and the theatre of incessant change. It is
only timeless in the sense that, taken as a whole, it is not particularised
to any one moment or duration but comprehends them all’ (1939: 361).
It follows then that ‘[t]he grades of modal perfection are no longer a
“static” series of forms, but a hierarchy produced in the order of time’
(365); accordingly, ‘nature infected with T ime . . . does not stop, but
pushing on, evolves out of these stable forms fresh distributions and a
new order of beings with their specific character and their own conatus
to persevere in their type’. Alexander gives the name nisis (over conatus)
to this ‘striving of Space-Time’ (380) and defines it as ‘the impulse of
the world towards new levels of existence (as well as towards new kinds
of being within any one level), and the guarantee that the particular
distribution of motion attained shall not be permanent as a whole’
(382).
Deleuze grants Spinoza an originality in the theory and practice of
expressivism: ‘The significance of Spinozism seems to me this: it asserts
immanence as a principle and frees expression from any subordination
to emanative or exemplary causality. Expression itself no longer ema-
nates, no longer resembles anything. And such a result can be obtained
only within a perspective of univocity’ (1992: 180). Deleuze takes imma-
nence and univocity from Spinoza but not the thinking of duration and
eternity, or these, at least, not so much as from Bergson. Perhaps it is not
so obvious that for Spinoza substance dominates the modes and time is
an illusion. Might Spinoza be read in a more time-friendly way?
Let us go further back in time to the great 1930 work on Spinoza
which is Hallett’s Aeternitas. The immanence of which Deleuze is fond
Hallett connects to the matter of the totality and its completeness or
perfection:
Only where the condition is completely fulfilled is there real process in the
sense of production as distinct from conditioning, and here transiency gives
place to immanency. The perfection of the whole, therefore, must already
contain all the stages of its achieving . . . sub specie aeternitatis, and after
the manner in which premisses are contained in their explained conclusion:
i.e., as constituting, not an identity in mere difference, or symmetrical dif-
ference, but an identity uniting and retaining the difference of the logically
prior and the logically posterior. (Hallett 1930: 59)
152 Peter Trnka
Perfection and the expression of the totality are seen as productive and
differentiating, not representative or copying. Hallett is clear on the
real qualitative felt character of duration in distinction from time as
measure: ‘Spinoza’s theory of joy . . . m
ust be taken as his recognition
that the finite mind perceives duration, not as separated puncta, but as
quality. Pure externality belongs only to time and measure, and these
are unreal’ (1930: 59). Duration, in distinction, is process; it is qualita-
tive, not quantitative; ‘and the essence of existence, even of enduring
existence, is that very qualitative growth through which we escape the
“absolute relativity” of mere time (and the self-contradictory phrase
exactly describes the logical vice of both time and measure)’ (59). Hallett
argues that Bergson’s ‘intensive quantity, i.e., a quality’ (59), is not a
refutation of Spinoza but ‘a partial and inadequate Spinozism; for it is
not, strictly speaking, the past as past that permeates the present, but
only the past as the given, and therefore as our main source of creative
essence’ (60). What is creative production?
The creativity of duration is one with the determination of the temporal
occurrence of individual things and minds, and this again with the produc-
tion by the eternal whole of its own finite expressions or partial content.
It is the nature of the whole so to express itself and, in expressing, to
constitute itself; and since ‘matter was not lacking to him for the creation
of everything from the highest down to the lowest degree of perfection’
[Ethics I, Appendix], the expressions are of every degree of completeness,
and cannot but appear, therefore, to the finite expressions themselves as
incomplete and successive, i.e., as involving limited duration. The creativity
of duration is thus but a finite extract of real creativity, which is eternal and
constitutive. (Hallett 1930: 61)
And if that is not clear enough, the footnote spells it out: ‘All existence
is, in a sense, miraculous: that is the significance of the term “creation”;
but there is nothing in “emergent qualities” more demanding of natural
piety than in the constitution of Space-Time itself. My thesis is that
Space-Time and its so called “emergent” qualities should never have
been divorced’ (Hallett 1930: 61).
The new, emergent, positive quality is a part of the whole, expressive
and expressed, and as such, eternal in its formal essence:
positive quality is caught up into eternity, while its externality and limita-
tion, its negativity, is lost . . . J oy is the realizing of perfection in its degrees,
its temporal achieving; acquiescentia is the realization of a perfection already
achieved; blessedness is the realization of perfection and its eternal achieve-
ment; it is the ideal limit of both desire and joy as they constitute a being for
whom transformation involves no succession. (Hallett 1930: 61–2)13
For Hallett, as for Negri and, as we shall see shortly, David Savan also,
the distinction between Natura naturans and Natura naturata is real
and explanatory of Spinoza’s doctrine of creation, implying ‘an eternal
act’: ‘Substance as Natura naturans, in expressing itself in the complete
modal system, Natura naturata, in the same eternal act recreates itself
with infinite degrees of perfection, and thereby creates the nature which
it expresses, and which expresses it’ (Hallett 1930: 206).14
Qualitative, intensive synthesis, that is the character, according to
Hallett, of the movement in and to eternity. ‘Time is the phenomenon of
eternity’, he claims, and ‘eternity the infinite existence that determines
and comprehends all existence in time, and partly expresses itself in the
duration of things. Eternity at once transcends and pervades its finite
expressions’ (1930: 228). Such an eternity is ‘full’ or ‘purely intensive’;
it is qualitatively transforming but not successive.
A similar corroborating reading may be found in David Savan’s
‘Spinoza on Duration, Time, and Eternity’, which he begins by noting
his major presupposition – which we have now secured in a way in
advance – that Spinoza identifies God with Natura naturans and that
this means ‘generative action’ as per Ethics I P29S, 4 Pref (Savan 1994:
4). The participation of the modes in eternity by way of qualitative
transformation in duration is a sempiternity, as Savan defines it:
The universe is an infinite individual. Like any mode, its existence does not
follow necessarily from its essence. It endures. Since there is no individual
mode external to it that could produce it or destroy it, it must endure always
without beginning or end. Its duration must be everlasting, perpetual, or
sempiternal. Yet Spinoza called the universe an infinite and eternal mode (E
IP21, 22, & Ep 64). (Savan 1994: 7)
Sempiternal comes from semper, meaning eternal duration. Savan’s goal
is ‘to show that it is Spinoza’s new conception of eternity that enables
him to distinguish the eternity of God, incompatible with sempiternity,
and the eternity of the infinite and sempiternal universe’ (7).
Nature is eternal and durational:
The identity of essence and existence . . . is simply the identity of the
unlimited causal power of nature with the infinite variety of its actual and
intelligible effects. Eternity is infinite actual existence, natura naturata, con-
ceived as the necessary display of an infinitely originative activity, natura
naturans. There is a divergence here between what is in fact the c ase – the
identity of nature’s power with nature’s actuality – and the conceived
distinction of antecedent from consequent. Eternity is a way of conceiving
the real unity of nature, dividing that unity conceptually into two – active
cause and necessary effect. (Savan 1994: 21)
154 Peter Trnka
Savan defines Spinoza’s new concept of eternity in three stages: ‘(1)

plenary existence itself, (2) rendered intelligible to intellect as a limitless
variety of singular entities, (3) each of them freely necessary, specifying
and fixing through its unique singularity just what nature’s causal power
is’ (1994: 25).
Conclusion
The association of time with communism is consistent through much
of Negri’s work. In Marx Beyond Marx he identifies communism with
‘the negation of all measure’ (1991a: 33). Hardt and Negri in Empire
propose the following definition of time:
The new phenomenology of the multitude reveals labor as the fundamen-
tal creative activity that through cooperation goes beyond any obstacle
imposed on it and constantly re-creates the world. The activity of the
multitude constitutes time beyond measure. Time might thus be defined
as the immeasurability of the movement between a before and an after, an
immanent process of constitution. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 402)
And in the Spinoza book, Negri is clear and unequivocal concerning the
future-oriented character of Spinozism:
The anomaly of Spinoza’s thought with respect to his times is made . . .
a savage anomaly: savage because it is articulated in the density and the
multiplicity of affirmations that rise up out of the unlimited affability of the
infinite . . . When the paradox of the world and the open tension contained
in it between the positive infinity and the infinity of determinations is
developed in activity and is recognized in the constitutive process, the
pleasure of the world begins to become central, and the anomaly is made
savage: savage because it is connected to the inexhaustible multiplicity of
being, to its blossomings, which are as vast as they are agitated in flux.
(Negri 1991b: 222)
There is no concern for the subordination or impotence of the modes
on Negri’s view. He then goes on to link Spinozism to the philosophy
of the future:
The Spinozian problematic of spatial being, as spatial constitution, with
spatial production, coming to an end, is a proposal for the metaphysics
of time. Not of time as becoming, as the most recent Modern philosophy
would have it: because the Spinozian perspective excludes every object of
becoming outside of the determination of the constitution. Rather, it is
a proposal of metaphysics of time as constitution, the time that extends
beyond the actuality of being, the being that constructs and selects its
future. A philosophy of the future. (Negri 1991b: 199)
For Negri, Spinoza does a better job than Nietzsche for the future, and
perhaps Spinoza may also do better than Nietzsche and Bergson on time,
duration and eternity. Doing better in thinking time, duration and eter-
nity by way of the imaginative-selection-and-construction-of-new-being:
the inscription of power in being opens being toward the future. The
essential tension wants existence. The cumulative process that constructs
the world wants a further time, a future. The composition of the subject
acquits the past only to make it tend toward the future. Being is temporal
tension. If difference forms the future, then here the future ontologically
founds d ifference . . . A continuous transition toward always greater perfec-
tion. Being produces itself . . . Being is greater tension toward the future as
its present density grows to a higher level. The future is not a procession
of acts but a dislocation worked by the infinite mass of intensive being: a
linear, spatial displacement. Time is being. Time is the being of the t otality
. . . Being that is dislocated from one point to the next in space, in its infin-
ity, in its totality, accomplishes a passage in the order of perfection, that
is, in its construction. Not in relation to any other, but only in relation to
itself. Therefore, it is liberation, emancipation, transition. Time is ontology.
Constitution internal to production, and also internal to freedom. (Negri
1991b: 228)
For Negri, Spinoza plays a more crucial role than even the thinker of
immanence and univocity in Deleuze. Negri’s Spinoza is the philosopher
of the future and of the radical democratic communist constitution of
future times, by putting immanence and univocity within a constructive,
constitutive, dynamic totality, or growing universe. Repetition and dif-
ference, tension, extension and intensification are its basic patterns of
operation.
What times are to come? Better: what times will subjects be able
to enjoy? Let us return to the time-image. The time-image expresses
a new collective experience and constitution of time, and as such, a
transformation of subjectivity (by a new human-machine assemblage).
This transformation is a liberation: subjectivity expresses itself more and
more in pure time. The coincidence of actual and virtual image in the
time-image forms its self-reference. The cinematic time-image allows us
to live more in the future. The future works on us more by way of the
time-image. We are more and more creatures of time.
Notes
1. Class struggle, and hence much of the form of history, is in part a contest over
apparatuses of thought, including fluency and literacy in various languages
and machines of expression and dissemination; we develop a brief example of
156 Peter Trnka
such technological time intervention (activism, militancy) by way of looking

at Deleuze’s time-image below. The time-image is false in the sense of being a
fabulation, and yet it is real and furthermore a transformation of the experience
and sense of time.
2. Negri’s sense of revolutionary communism, which he and I believe is true to
Marx’s, is defined p recisely – in one of its m
odes – a s the collective constitution
of time by the liberated multitudes (see below).
3. Negri echoes McTaggart (1927), including by way of a third option, time C,
though the character of this third fundamentally differs, in that McTaggart
argues time away as an illusion whereas time C for Negri is the liberation of
time (see below).
4. Real subsumption of labour by capital in the contemporary biopolitical global
socius forms on the assumption and real development of the commodification
of the micro and macro biospheres and the proletarianisation or exploitative
coerced necessary laborisation of living, or, in simpler terms, making all things
sellable and all activity work.
5. ‘In real subsumption time divides itself in reality: on the one side, time of living
labour, on the other time of dead labour’ (Negri 2003: 62).
6. Compare: ‘The time of constituent power, a time characterized by a formida-
ble capacity of acceleration – the time of the event and of the generalization
of singularity – has to be closed, treated, reduced in juridical categories, and
restrained in the administrative routine’ (Negri 1999: 2).
7. ‘[C]onstituent power always refers to the future. Constituent power has always
a singular relationship to time. . . . [C]onstituent power is . . . an absolute will
determining its own temporality. . . . Power becomes an immanent dimension
of history, an actual temporal horizon. . . . [C]onstituent p ower . . . also repre-
sents an extraordinary acceleration of time. History becomes concentrated in
a present that develops impetuously, and its possibilities condense into a very
strong nucleus of immediate production’ (Negri 1999: 11).
8. Note on libidinal economy. Lyotard (1993), which begins ‘[o]pen the so-called
body . . .’ (1).
9. I’ve discussed critically Deleuze’s temporal ontology of event counter-
actualisation, surfaces and depths, speeds and slownesses in my ‘To Follow a
Snail’ (Trnka 2001).
10. Stumbling blocks for Spinoza reception are many, to begin with the paradox
that a book titled Ethics supposedly shows the impossibility of ethics or moral-
ity; more immediately pertinent are the common criticisms that Spinoza annihi-
lates time and is oversaturated with God/Nature.
11. ‘Repetition is a condition of action before it is a concept of reflection. We
produce something new only on condition that we repeat – once in the mode
which constitutes the past, and once more in the present of metamorphosis.
Moreover, what is produced, the absolutely new itself, is in turn nothing but
repetition: the third repetition, this time by excess, the repetition of the future
as eternal return. . . . The “once and for all” of the order is there only for the
“every time” of the final esoteric circle. The form of time is there only for the
revelation of the formless in the eternal return. The extreme formality is there
only for an excessive formlessness . . . [T]he ground has been superseded by a
groundlessness, a universal ungrounding, which turns upon itself and causes
only the yet-to-come to return’ (Deleuze 1994: 90–1).
12. And by extension, provides an answer to the residual non-human phenomenol-
ogy common to Deleuze and Negri.
13. Compare David Savan on the positive difference of modal expression: ‘to exist
is something positive, affirmative. No entity is a mere cipher, without ponder-
able force of its own, divisible without remainder, into the forces acting upon it’
(1994: 6). Savan maps time as measure, duration and eternity onto McTaggart’s
A, B and C series, which Negri (2003) appears to play with or, rather, deter-
ritorialise in his A, B, W and Y series.
14. Hallett is clear on expressionism in Spinoza: ‘The “creation” which is accepted
by Spinoza is thus not an action or set of actions initiated in time through
which what was previously non-existent came into being. God is not the causa
transiens of the world but its causa immanens, and creation is the infinite self-
manifestation of a being whose essence is to express himself. Creation is eternal.
And the distinction in the Real between that which is created and that which is
incarnate is the same as that within an “expression” between the expression of
the expressed, and the expressed expression’ (1930: 209).
References
Alexander, S. (1939), ‘Spinoza and Time’, in Philosophical and Literary Pieces,
London: Macmillan.
Deleuze, G. (1985), Cinema 2: L’Image-Temps, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. (1992), Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin,
Schizophrenia II, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Hallett, H. F. (1930), Aeternitas: A Spinozistic Study, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000), Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Hunter, G., ed. (1994), Spinoza: The Enduring Questions, Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Lyotard, J-F. (1993), Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
McTaggart, J. (1927), The Nature of Existence, Volume II, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Massumi, B. (1987), ‘Foreword’ to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Negri, A. (1991a), Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry
Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano, New York: Autonomedia/Pluto.
Negri, A. (1991b), The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and
Politics, trans. Michael Hardt, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Negri, A. (1999), Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State,
Negri, A. (2003), Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini, New York:
Continuum.
Negri, A. and M. Hardt (2000), Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Piercey, R. (1996), ‘The Spinoza-Intoxicated Man: Deleuze on Expression’, Man
and World, 29: 269–81.
158 Peter Trnka
Savan, D. (1994), ‘Spinoza on Duration, Time, and Eternity’, in Graeme Hunter,

ed., Spinoza: The Enduring Questions, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Spinoza, B. (1982), The Ethics and Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley,
Indianapolis: Hackett.
Trifonova, T. (2004), ‘A Nonhuman Eye: Deleuze on Cinema’, Substance, 33 (2):
134–52.
Trnka, P. (1997), ‘Women, Animals, and the Unknown: Hume’s Philosophy of
Nature’, The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 28 (3): 255–72.
Trnka, P. (2001), ‘To Follow a Snail: Experimental Empiricism and the Ethic of
Minor Literature’, Angelaki, 6 (3): 45–62.
PART III
EXPRESSIONS OF TIME
Chapter 8
Kill Metaphor: Kafka’s Becoming-Animal
and the Deterritorialisation of Language
as a Rejection of Stasis
Charlene Elsby
Introduction to Metaphor: The Death of the Literary Work

To assign a metaphorical meaning to a work of literature is a matter
of arrogance. One has the gall to read a literary work of art and then
declare that the author did not mean what they have written, as it was
written.1 Rather, one declares, the author meant something else entirely.
Of course, authors have written metaphorical works and done so
meticulously, in order to make some point that they felt might be better
expressed in symbol rather than literally. The metaphor is intended to
add something to the w ork – to express something that either can’t
be expressed or is less effectively expressed literally. We’re all familiar
with metaphorical works that, if written without the metaphor, would
be reduced to triviality. The metaphor works to draw out a thesis over
the course of hundreds of pages that enforce the thesis by providing a
narrative – and narrative appeals to us.
Kafka does not write such metaphors. Gregor Samsa is not metaphori-
cally a bug in the Metamorphosis; he’s very much a vermin, and the
fact that he is so isn’t a metaphor either.2 Kafka does not use language
to accomplish some task external to the text and only accomplished
through a procedural encounter with it. This mechanical concept of the
function of literature is dead. The ontology of the work of art as a living
thing, as described by the early phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, sup-
ports the becoming-animal of the work of art for Deleuze and Guattari
(to be discussed in the final section of this paper). The death of the work
of art results from our rendering it ontologically static and axiologically
neutral – s omething that no longer speaks to us, because it is no longer
open to alteration through the living symbolic relation between text and
interpretation. To quote Daniel W. Smith, ‘A philosophical concept is
not a metaphor but a metamorphosis’ (2019: 61).3
162 Charlene Elsby
Part of the fault rests in our concept of r eference – t hat is, the concept
of reference as a relation between two discrete entities, a word and a
thing, one of which symbolises the other. (This definition, which I in
no way endorse, renders all language symbolic, and only emboldens
the sophists.4) Pervasive not only in the interpretation of literature but
also in its creation is this insidious habit of always having present to
mind some significance outside of the work itself – this tendency to not
only produce or consume text but also to kill it, to assign it a meaning
outside of the text itself, to set the text aside in favour of this meaning,
and then proceed without it, the text becoming incidental to the external
significance, the stripping of all that is concrete from the story in favour
of some abstraction, which the history of western philosophy tells us is
superior to all concretions, the concrete being something of which we
must rid ourselves in order to access the idea of the text in the pure realm
of ideas, the eternal forms. Assigning metaphor to a text is practising for
death. The process fixes the text amongst the known, rendering it static.
The pigs are capitalists  capitalism is bad  the pigs are only there to
make a point, to act as a tool, a means or a metaphor, and altogether
incidental to the grander idea concerning the ideal political system.5
But since Nietzsche, the redemption of the body in philosophy has
become central to both Deleuzian and phenomenological thought. And
according to phenomenological conceptions of literature, the body of
the work is its materiality, the graphic elements of the text and their
phonetic formations, prior to and undergirding the stratum of ideal
meaning units by which we assign static meanings to terms. By refusing
to render Kafka’s text symbolic, these philosophers allow the body of
the work to stay alive. It is anima and animal. ‘Becoming-animal’, for
Deleuze, is not a metaphor; he is using the term in accordance with its
definition.
The human concept of literature, on the other hand, is its death. It’s
the rationalisation of what is specifically expressed in a non-rational
form (the literary work of art), to its detriment. While I’m sure it’s not
what Kafka meant when he said that his literary works were failures, if
only all literary works could be such failures.6
By failure here, I mean the existential dichotomy of attempting to
overcome the subjective in favour of the objective and always being
forced back into the subjective.7 (It is worthwhile to note that Deleuze
was not a fan of the idea that there existed any kind of pure cogito that
does or does not persist. All ‘subjective’ means here is ‘perspectival’, in
the sense of a zero point of orientation unique to an individual human.)
I conceive of the literary work of art as active within the realm of
Kill Metaphor 163
particulars, contrary to the attempts at objective forms of writing, in

which no viewpoint is immediately evident, which aim at universality.
Gregor Samsa is trapped in an evolving subjectivity and a particular
form of subjectivity, and his world is concrete. The attempt to apply to
the text of The Metamorphosis some universal, objective claim, which
the author intended to express through the medium of the concrete, will
fail. And we should be clear that such an attempt is in fact an attempt
at murder.
What remains to be shown is how this state of affairs came to be – the
progression of relevant ideas in the history of philosophy that have led
to Deleuze and Guattari’s resurrection of the literary work, with Kafka
as their Lazarus. To quote Réda Bensmaïa’s Foreword to Deleuze’s and
Guattari’s text on Kafka:
Thus, the art (modern art in this sense) that Kafka tried to introduce is
effectively no longer an art that proposes to ‘express’ (a meaning), to
‘represent’ (a thing, a being), or to ‘imitate’ (a nature). It is rather a method
(of writing) – of picking up, even of stealing: of ‘double stealing’ as Deleuze
sometimes says, which is both ‘stealing’ and ‘stealing away’ – that consists
in propelling the most diverse contents on the basis of (nonsignifying)
ruptures and intertwinings of the most heterogeneous orders of signs and
powers. (Bensmaïa 1986: xvii).
The spots of indeterminacy in Kafka’s work are what make it effective,

and they contribute to its long life as well.
Platonic Forms: Significance, Eternality and Death

Plato’s denigration of artists at the end of the Republic as merchants of
simulacra is certainly ironic, expressed, as it is, in the form of a drama,
such that any philosophical claims of Plato’s are presented from within
the situated viewpoint of a character. The idea in Plato’s passage is that
artists, by representing reality, present only imitations of imitations.8
Whereas material reality is an imitation of the ideal realm of the forms,
its representation in art is a secondary imitation, of that which is already
an imitation – e.g., a bed stripped of its wood and presented instead in
paint is worse even than a wooden bed, which is an instantiation of the
form of bed, the only object in this triptych worthy of Plato’s philoso-
phy. As with Deleuze’s concept of the simulacrum, there is an element
of malice in the artist’s representation. (The simulacra are not only ‘not
real’ but actually ‘counterfeit’ (Deleuze 2004: 75)). In the Republic
(597e–598c), Plato writes:
164 Charlene Elsby
We’re agreed about imitators, then. Now, tell me this about a painter. Do
you think he tries in each case to imitate the thing itself in nature or the
works of craftsmen?
The works of craftsmen.
As they are or as they appear? You must be clear about that. How do
you mean?
Like this. If you look at a bed from the side or the front or from any-
where else is it a different bed each time? Or does it only appear different,
without being at all different?
And is that also the case with other things?
That’s the way it is – it appears different without being so.
Then consider this very point: What does painting do in each case? Does
it imitate that which is as it is, or does it imitate that which appears as it
appears? Is it an imitation of appearances or of truth?
Of appearances. (Plato 1997b: 1202)
Recognising that material objects appear having fulfilled and unful-

filled aspects (a distinction later formalised by Husserl),9 Plato’s Socrates
aims to prove to Glaucon that because a painter cannot paint an entire
object but only one of its many appearances, the painted object is onto-
logically even worse than the material object it represents.10 It’s not
clear that Plato meant to denigrate artists at all,11 but even if he did,
there’s a notable disanalogy between the visual artist and the literary
artist, the latter of whom uses words not to refer to particular material
entities (such is the work of the documentarian) but to ideal entities – the
ideal meanings of terms which, together, form linguistic structures that
represent an abstract, fictional realm, and by the definition of literature,
not the realm of material objects.
Of course, this passage seems especially relevant because the redemp-
tion of literature I’m proclaiming is accomplished with the deterritori-
alisation of language (the diminishment of the priority of formalised
meanings) that Deleuze and Guattari claim Kafka achieves;12 but I bring
it up to highlight the ontology of representations that Plato describes not
only here but also in the Phaedo – where philosophy, the purge accord-
ing to which ideas are wrested from material instantiations, is conceived
of as the practice of death.
It’s enough to notice that all of Plato’s arguments presented in the
Phaedo have easily diagnosed logical errors to conclude that he did not
mean for them to be taken as authority. But if that weren’t enough,
Plato takes care to have his characters point out to the reader that
all the arguments presented in favour of the soul’s immortality in the
Phaedo are problematic. At this point, Socrates assures his interlocutors
Kill Metaphor 165
that just because these arguments are bad ones, does not mean that all
arguments are bad, and proceeds on a path to soothe his listeners’ fear
of death through another method (storytelling). It is not beyond the
possible inferences one might make to argue that if every argument Plato
has Socrates present in favour of the soul’s immortality is in fact a bad
argument, then perhaps he did not mean to argue toward the conclusion
of those arguments at all.13
And that conclusion is immediately repugnant, for the conclusion to
be drawn from the ideas that the soul is immortal and that after death
it reunites with the forms with which it claims an affinity is that death
is good. This counter-intuitive conclusion is indeed what Socrates aims
to prove – in a dialogue in which he has been sentenced to death, as a
penalty.
The aim of philosophy in the Phaedo is the pursuit of theoretical
knowledge, and this knowledge is precisely of universals. The philoso-
pher, by pursuing this sort of knowledge, escapes from the lesser world
of material instantiations (defined by their particularity) toward a realm
of pure form. While our world is characterised by particulars, subject to
temporality, the crux of the affinity argument for the soul’s immortal-
ity is to characterise immortality as significantly similar to a form’s
eternality – devoid of material, it carries on.14
But what of a negative timelessness?
It is possible, within the variables given in Plato’s dialogue, that we
are meant to notice the disanalogy between the soul’s immortality and
a form’s eternality. For one, the soul’s immortality is meant to com-
mence when time comes to an end. This is a distinct state of affairs in
comparison to the form’s eternality, as the forms were never subject to
time. Plato takes as an assumption that a soul exists in time while it is
instantiated and even has the capacity to be affected by things in the tem-
poral realm, characteristics which are not shared with the forms. If we
are meant to infer this distinction, it is reasonable to assume that death
is not good, that death is bad, and that in contradistinction to eternality,
a negative timelessness is also possible, and this is death.
We are motivated to keep the literary work of art alive only if death is
negative, if death is conceived not as eternality but as stasis – if we value
the anima and lament its destruction. A reversal of Plato, or perhaps
an argument in support of a secret Platonic argument in favour of the
lifeworld, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of Kafka’s literature as animal
reignites an axiology where particularity, situatedness and motion are
favourable to stasis, universality and death. Perhaps the universal is
problematic after all.
166 Charlene Elsby
The Universal as Symbolised in Language, the Referent of

Terms and the Abstraction of Human Reason: The Problem
of Language as Stasis
According to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, theoretical knowledge is supe-
rior to practical knowledge, while the difference between Aristotle’s
and Plato’s concepts of the source of theoretical knowledge differs.
For Plato, in the Phaedo and elsewhere, theoretical knowledge (of the
forms, existing separately from their material instantiations) is in the
soul prior to birth, and the process we call learning is actually recollec-
tion. ‘Summoners’ in the material realm remind the soul of their more
perfect counterparts amongst the forms, and we come to recollect those
forms as we simultaneously recognise the defects of the summoner. We
look at two unequal things and recognise, through them, the universal
form of equality they fail to instantiate.
For Aristotle, on the contrary, the universal is abstracted from par-
ticulars. The active intellect becomes the efficient cause of our being
able to think in universal terms, as the particular forms of perception
are universalised. Those universal thoughts are symbolised in spoken
sounds, and spoken sounds are symbolised in written language (De
Interpretatione). The referents of language are fixed, but also they aren’t.
A word comes to symbolise something by convention, and Aristotle
recognises that these conventions are not the same for all people at all
times. There are not only universal but particular terms, referring to
individuals in the perceived universe. There is a disconnect between the
referent of ‘George’ and the referent of ‘human’ such that we can’t make
the general claim that ‘all word meanings are universal’.
And universality is the problem, because this is the aspect of language
according to which we attempt to render it static, eternal – God-like,
universal. The concepts become all confused, because, according
to Aristotle, God is the form of forms, that which is universal, and
the universalisation of particularities by the active intellect is how
humanity attempts to mimic the divine – first in thought and then in
language.
We purify temporal objects of their temporality and fix them as the
referents of equally fixed terms, like ‘essence’, where both the word and
what it refers to are putatively atemporal. Meanwhile the philosophy of
language often leaves behind the cases where this is obviously not the
case, such as ‘George’. ‘George’ is uninteresting, to those who seek uni-
versal theoretical knowledge, because the term and its referent will both
die. Some will even attempt to render George a universal, a universal
Kill Metaphor 167
having only one instance, but a universal nonetheless, just to escape his
particularity.
These cases in fact open up an extremely interesting version of lin-
guistic reference as a sort of tenuous fixation. Conceived of as such, we
could avoid the death of language (and consequently, literary works)
by allowing their continuity in flux. But the term ‘tenuous fixation’ is
not even enough, for Deleuze, as it’s an attempt to describe something
novel by applying old terminology, resulting in contradiction. (For the
tenuousness of the fixation renders it unfixed, recognising that what is
tenuous is really not fixed at all.) Rather, the attempt to affix a term
to a referent in such a way as to kill them both has brought tension
to the history of the philosophy of language and metaphysics as well.
But most interestingly, the demise of the fixed nature of the relation
of signifier and signified occurs in Husserl’s grappling with Aristotle
in his analyses of linguistic signification, in Ingarden’s adaptation of
Husserl’s phenomenology to his analysis of the literary work of art, and
finally in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of expression, ultimately leading to
the collapse of the signifier and what is signified, which finally lays the
groundwork for Deleuze’s murder of the metaphor.
The Phenomenologists: Meanings and Signs

In the Logical Investigations, Husserl touches on problems related
to the syncategorematica; that is, words not included amongst those
encompassed by Aristotle’s ten categories in the Categories (a work of
linguistics, logic and metaphysics). Elucidating how there exist words
that Aristotle dismissed as insignificant (not meaning anything), Husserl
argues to the contrary that the terms are indeed significant, though their
significance is dependent. This line of thinking begins phenomenology’s
collapse of the signification relation, still very much present in Husserl,
expanding our concept of communication beyond the notion that it’s
mainly constituted by the utterance of referring terms, and redeeming
our concept of ‘meaning’ as something language does rather than some-
thing that it has. Deleuze’s eventual elimination of distance between
the text and its meaning (the death of metaphor and signification more
generally) begins with the recognition that not all terms signify, or only
signify in some reduced sense.
In order to conceive of how the syncategorematica ‘mean’, we need
first to make a distinction between ‘meaning’ as a verb and ‘meaning’
as a noun. ‘Meaning’ defined in the sense of a noun lends itself to a
representational theory of language, as does the Aristotelian usage of
168 Charlene Elsby
‘signification’ in his analyses of language. A word is ‘significant’ if there

is something definite to which the term refers, or which the term repre-
sents. There are names, which are significant sounds, and verbs, which
are significant sounds with the addition of time. Sometimes we translate
the terms as ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’, the former being the referring
terms, and the latter being referring terms with the addition of time.
To have a linguistic construct capable of being true or false, we need to
specify both a subject and predicate; whether the subject and predicate
are related in the same way as the things to which they refer are related
will determine if the statement is true or false.
The subjects and predicates are the categorical words, i.e., the words
included under the general ten categories of Aristotle’s Categories. We
can therefore take Aristotle’s list of categories as a comprehensive list
of significant words. The definition of ‘signification’, I argue, is actu-
ally independent signification. Aristotle is careful to distinguish between
terms that signify separately and those that don’t. In a lot of cases, the
same syllables are significant in separation versus those that are not;
the difference is located in their linguistic context, i.e., whether they
are presented as parts of another word or not. If, for example, we look
at the term ‘pirate-boat’, a single term translated from ἐπακτροκέλης
(which Aristotle examines in De Interpretatione 2), the terms ‘pirate’
and ‘boat’ take on a dependent meaning, in relation to one another,
which they would not have were they encountered in separation. And
the combined meaning is not a combination of the referents of the terms
encountered in separation. The relation between ‘pirate’ and ‘boat’ in
‘pirate-boat’ is not a boat-pirate hybrid, and it cannot be conceived
of as any conjunction of ‘boat’ and ‘pirate’. Rather, the complex term
‘pirate-boat’ has a referent that exists as a unity, and is itself not a
combination of pirates and boats. In short, the term cannot be decom-
posed into separate parts that retain significance in separation, just as
its referent is not decomposable into separate objects (i.e., a boat and a
pirate). Rather, the terms ‘pirate’ and ‘boat’ are dependently significant
within the term ‘pirate-boat’. They mean though they have no meaning.
Together, they constitute what Husserl calls in the Fourth Investigation
a ‘complete’ expression. He specifies that with respect to the distinction
between categorematic and syncategorematic expressions, ‘It can at least
be described by holding the former to be capable of serving as complete
expressions, finished locutions by themselves, whereas the latter cannot’
(Husserl 2001: 58).
The dependently significant terms as described by Aristotle best exem-
plify what Husserl is indicating when he conceives of how it is that words
Kill Metaphor 169
mean, rather than how they have a meaning. The intimating function of
expressions is their capacity to point toward something, ‘meaning’ in the
sense of an act, while the ‘content’ of the expression is something else;
it’s a meaning in the sense of a noun. As Husserl describes in the First
Investigation:
all expressions in communicative speech function as indications. They serve
the hearer as signs of the ‘thoughts’ of the speaker, i.e. of his sense-giving
inner experiences, as well as of the other inner experiences which are part
of his communicative intention. This function of verbal expressions we
shall call their intimating function. The content of such intimation consists
in the inner experiences intimated. (Husserl 2001: 189)
In the case of independently significant expressions, the content of the
expression is pointed toward by the intimating function of the expres-
sion. But in the case of syncategorematic terms, the intimating function
becomes internal to the expression, specifying the way in which the
terms should be conceived of as related, rather than indicating any
additional content. They mean but do not have a meaning. ‘And’ does
not signify a separately existing relation, the third thing in the expres-
sion ‘this and that’, where ‘this’, ‘that’ and ‘and’ specify three separate
entities, one of which is representative of a separately existing relation-
ship of conjunction. The ‘and’ is non-referential, or non-independently
significant. It intimates but does not have a content. It is there in order
to determine the way in which the conception of ‘this’ and ‘that’ are to
be concretised in relation to one another. ‘And’ is incomplete without
two things to conjoin.
The distinction between significant and insignificant terms, depend-
ently and independently significant words, is less prominently featured
in Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art as compared to his
analysis of the cognition of the literary work of art in The Cognition
of the Literary Work of Art. But he recognises that some phrases are
meant to convey atemporality while others are not. There is a continuing
tension in the work of Ingarden regarding the ‘ideal meaning units’ that
constitute the second stratum of a literary work of art.
That tension is precisely the ideality of the meaning units. Ingarden
conceives of the literary work of art as ontologically describable through
four strata:
(1) The material
(2) The ideal meaning units
(3) Schematised aspects
(4) Represented objectivities
170 Charlene Elsby
The base material of the literary work of art is its physical existence,
which includes not only the paper or material through which the text
survives, but also the marks on the page making up the letters that we
perceive as symbols. The ideal meaning units are the units of meaning
that these materialities invoke in us, which provide the conduit through
which we come to conceive the world of the book, its characters, hap-
penings and circumstances. The ideal meaning units are linguistic con-
structions of varying complexity, and the fact that they are of varying
complexity means that some meaning units are less obviously ‘ideal’
than others, where ‘ideal’ means their temporality has been abstracted
away.
For individual referential terms, ‘ideal’ may be applicable, as dis-
cussed above, when we are discussing abstract notions like ‘time’,
‘space’, ‘unity’ and other such concepts whose referents, we assume,
don’t die. Nevertheless, we recognise immediately that the concepts
to which these words refer do and have changed over the course of
humanity’s dealings with them. The problem is more evident when
Ingarden discusses more complex meaning units – phrases and sen-
tences. While ‘the blue frog’ may be conceived (by some) as a phrase
constituted of three independent (or dependent) meanings, the phrase
taken as a complex, as a combination, appears not nearly as necessary,
inevitable or worthy of universality as any term in particular. Sentences,
likewise, come and go. The more complex a linguistic meaning unit
becomes, the less it seems able to claim ideality. And finally, Ingarden
allows that the literary work of art, as a whole, is capable of life and
death. It is a thing that comes into being and which may eventually
die, as every copy is destroyed and every human memory of it erased.
Now it seems almost absurd that anything eternal should ever have
constituted it.
Which leads us to two possible conclusions: either a book is not
constituted of words, or those words are not ideal meaning units. The
latter conclusion seems more reasonable. What Deleuze ultimately aims
to achieve is the internalisation of the forms of language into its mate-
riality. Like an Aristotelian rejection of ideal Platonic forms that asserts
the ‘hereness’ of the eidos in the material entity, so Deleuze’s concept of
sense reintegrates meaning and phonetic material by eliminating ideality
from meaning, along with separability (contrary to a representational
model of language, the meaning of language isn’t separate from lan-
guage, but exists as an embodied eidos which, for Aristotle, is any
eidos).15 Smith correctly characterises Aristotelian hylomorphism in his
Essays on Deleuze:
Kill Metaphor 171
Matter is never a simple or homogeneous substance capable of receiv-

ing forms, but is made up of intensive and energetic traits that not only
make that operation possible but continuously alter it (clay is more or
less porous, wood is more or less resistant); and forms are never fixed
molds, but are determined by the singularities of the material that impose
implicit processes of deformation and transformation (iron melts at high
temperatures; marble and wood split along their veins and fibers). (Smith
2012: 100)
In brief, matter and form aren’t two separate things in some kind of
combat; they’re aspects and causes of a more primary unity (the thing),
separable only by abstraction.
Finally, in Merleau-Ponty, an analysis of language arises that allows
for its conception outside of pure reference. Relying heavily on Husserl
and, in particular, on the concept of the intimating function of expres-
sions, Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of speech and expression allow for a
living language better representative of the lifeworld in which it subsists.
Materiality, meaning, thought and language are all reconceived in
Merleau-Ponty, destroyer of dichotomies. The most obvious dichotomy
destruction in Phenomenology of Perception is that between the subject
and object, and it is not surprising that this dichotomy should also dis-
solve in a linguistic context. ‘Representation’, which Husserl defines at
least a dozen times in The Logical Investigations, is sidelined as nowhere
near the primary function of expression.16 Merleau-Ponty points out
that it is in fact not the case that a meaning is first conceived by a human
subject, converted to linguistic form, and then related to other nearby
subjects. Rather, expression itself generates meaning. It is meaning,
where meaning is conceived of in the sense of an act (as it is sometimes
for Husserl – see above) and not as the dead correlate of a word.17
Words mean in the same way that I do. And this is why the novels
of Kafka continue to mean after his death. It is simply wrong to think
that the book is nothing more than the recorded thoughts of a dead
man. It is a living thing that continues to mean in his absence, a sort of
quasi-subject with things to say, fully capable of meaning those things
on its own. It’s our concept of meaning that needs revision. Meaning is
not reference.
Deleuze and Guattari on Becoming-Animal and the Death of

Metaphor
I have argued that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming-
animal’ applies to the death of metaphor in the sense that language, in
172 Charlene Elsby
ecoming‑animal, rejects the fixed referent of language and thus saves

b
the literary work from stasis. This is evident in the Kafka book, where
Deleuze and Guattari write:
To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path
of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum
of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure
intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifi-
ers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of de-territorialized
flux, of nonsignifying signs. Kafka’s animals never refer to a mythology
or to archetypes but correspond solely to new levels, zones of liberated
intensities where contents free themselves from their forms as well as from
their expressions, from the signifier that formalized them. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1986: 13)
In a less abstract sense (by which I mean, turning to examine some
particular ‘becoming- animal’ rather than the universal ‘becoming-
animal’ and its definition), Kafka’s texts embody the rejection of what
is human in favour of the animal. The formalisation toward which
humanity tends, as is well known, may tend toward evil. When Arendt
calls evil ‘banal’, she indicates the technical proficiency with which
human actors enact the finite and concrete actions through which great
evils are accomplished. While Deleuze and Guattari call such diabolical
powers ‘inhumane’, they are in fact quite human. Here ‘inhumane’ does
not exactly refer to the human tendency to abstract, to rationalise, to
engage at the level of the universal with no concern for the particular;
it means to suffer at the hands of someone who doesn’t also take
into account the p articular – evils enacted at a systemic level, from
which it is easy to imagine that no particular human suffers, though it
is completely wrong to think so. All through western philosophy the
concept of humanity has been tied up in the dichotomy of the universal
and particular, the infinite and finite, the mundane and the divine,
the ‘rational animal’ wherein ‘rationality’ and ‘animality’ are taken as
contraries. Becoming-animal, while we have associated animality with
particularity, is less a subsumption to a universal than it is a r ejection
– individuality, as opposed to particularity (a unique one rather than a
one of many.)
To the inhumanness of the ‘diabolical powers’ there is the answer of
a becoming-animal: to become a beetle, to become a dog, to become an
ape, ‘head over heels and away’, rather than lowering one’s head and
remaining a bureaucrat, inspector, judge or judged. All children build or
feel these sorts of escapes, these acts of becoming-animal (Deleuze and
Guattari 1986: 12–13).
Kill Metaphor 173
The escape of which Deleuze and Guattari speak is accomplished at

the linguistic level in Kafka’s texts, especially so when forms are abol-
ished from linguistic expressions. The animal is that which has no voice,
where ‘voice’ is (since Aristotle) the enunciation of sounds that mean
something (have form). Becoming-animal is the escape from humanity
by escaping the concept of human as logos anthropos, translated not
as ‘rational animal’ but as ‘speaking animal’ (though it is assumed that
rationality and speech go together, because both constitute the imposi-
tion of form on material):
The sound or the word that traverses this new deterritorialization no longer
belongs to a language of sense, even though it derives from it, nor is it an
organized music or song, even though it might appear to be. We noted
Gregor’s warbling and the ways it blurred words, the whistling of the
mouse, the cough of the ape, the pianist who doesn’t play, the singer who
doesn’t sing and gives birth to her song out of her nonsinging, the musical
dogs who are musicians in the very depths of their bodies since they don’t
emit any music. Everywhere, organized music is traversed by a line of
abolition – just as a language of sense is traversed by a line of e scape – in
order to liberate a living and expressive material that speaks for itself and
has no need of being put into a form. (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 21)
That is to say, if expression is properly located at the material stratum
of language, then there’s no need to fix it by rendering it formal and
thus static. But to recognise that such an expression is possible is not
to exclude other expressions. For there are formal expressions. It is
the unique place of the philosopher to recognise both; and whereas the
Platonic discipline always tends toward becoming god (in the elimina-
tion of finitude by a tendency toward universality in the forms), the
contrary motion is to become animal. As Nietzsche described: ‘To live
alone, you need to be either an animal or a g od – s ays Aristotle. But he
left out the third case: you can be both – a philosopher . . .’ (2005: 156).
Conclusion
In Kafka: Toward A Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari assert
that the magic of Kafka’s literary works is nothing less than a deter-
ritorialisation of language and a becoming-animal of the literary work
(where these terms are almost synonymous). The becoming-animal of
the literary work applies specifically to Kafka, whose human characters
tend to become literally animal (e.g., Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis);
while such transformations have been interpreted as symbolic, Deleuze
and Guattari reject their symbolic nature on the basis that it would be
174 Charlene Elsby
internally contradictory to interpret a rejection of stasis as something

static. Kafka’s books, stories and letters shalt not be frozen in time.
(Signification is a territorialisation, a rendering-static or detemporalisa-
tion of a relation between what is significant and what is signified – but
there is no relation of significance if there are not, in fact, two things.)
There is nothing outside the text to which the becoming- animal
refers. Rather, becoming-animal should be interpreted metaphysically.
Becoming-animal is the rejection of the human application of formal
thinking to the literary w ork – the taking of something temporal and
rendering it static. Becoming-animal, rather, animates, i.e., resists the
death of language through the application of formal signification rela-
tions. Deleuze and Guattari believe Kafka evades this formalisation of
language. Rejecting any but a nominal distinction between the writer,
the text and some imaginary external referents, Deleuze and Guattari
kill the metaphor – the artificial application of stasis to something which
is itself not being but b ecoming – a nd thereby assert the capacity of the
literary work to move, to exist in the realm of the informal (where in the
realm of the formal, stasis reigns).
Whereas the animal is the rejection of the human, and the human is
the tendency toward formalisation, becoming-animal is the assertion
(contra Aristotle) of an unformed matter which is not prime matter (the
only unformed matter of which Aristotle conceived). And in response to
the Aristotelian concern, ‘Aren’t the animals still too formed, too sig-
nificative, too territorialized?’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 15), Deleuze
and Guattari’s text asserts a relative disinformation of the literary works
of Kafka, where form represents an atemporal aspect and materiality a
temporal one. The literary work resists its detemporalisation through
signification, retaining its anima. That is to say, becoming-animal is a
deterritorialisation and an assertion of the unformed, insignificative and
dynamic nature of the literary work, which necessitates the existence of
an unformed matter that is as capable of independent existence as the
uninstantiated form. The movement from stasis (detemporalisation) to
becoming-animal (becoming animate) is necessarily discontinuous – a
motion from immobility to mobility, which necessitates a recursive defi-
nition of motion and a negation of the definition of time as something
abstracted from motion (lest we be saddled with recursive times as well).
Notes
1. A despotic regime of significance, if you will, comparable to the malicious use
of semiotics by authoritarian psychoanalysts that Deleuze and Guattari discuss
Kill Metaphor 175
in A Thousand Plateaus: ‘Psychoanalysis is a definite case of a mixed semiotic:

a despotic regime of significance and interpretation, with irradiation of the
face, but also an authoritarian regime of subjectification and prophetism, with
a turning away of the face (the positioning of the psychoanalyst behind the
patient suddenly assumes its full significance). Recent efforts to explain that a
“signifier represents the subject for another signifier” are typically syncretic:
a linear proceeding of subjectivity along with a circular development of the
signifier and interpretation. Two absolutely different regimes of signs in a mix.
But the worst, most underhanded of powers are founded on it’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 125).
2. Another instance where Kafka has been accused of using metaphors is the end
of The Trial, when K. is killed: ‘But the hands of one of the men were placed on
K’.s throat, whilst the other plunged the knife into his heart and turned it round
twice. As his sight faded, K. saw the two men leaning cheek to cheek close to
his face as they observed the final verdict. “Like a dog!” he said. It seemed as
if his shame would live on after him’ (Kafka 2009: 165). The editor claims in
a footnote that Kafka uses references to dogs to symbolise the degradation of
the human. But there’s nothing metaphorical about K’.s treatment. He is being
treated how a dog might be treated. As Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘What
Kafka immediately anguishes or rejoices in is not the father or the superego or
some sort of signifier but the American technocratic apparatus or the Russian
bureaucracy or the machinery of Fascism’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 12).
3. I’m sure this is a reference to this statement in the Kafka book: ‘Kafka delib-
erately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification, no less than all des-
ignation. Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor. There is no longer any
proper sense or figurative sense, but only a distribution of states that is part of
the range of the word. The thing and other things are no longer anything but
intensities overrun by deterritorialized sound or words that are following their
line of escape’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 22).
4. For a newer, better concept of language’s descriptive capacity, see Robbe-
Grillet: ‘Description once served to situate the chief contours of a setting, then
to cast light on some of its particularly revealing elements; it no longer mentions
anything except insignificant objects, or objects which it is concerned to make
so. It once claimed to reproduce a pre-existing reality; it now asserts its creative
function’ (1965: 147).
5. Fun fact: at his death, Deleuze was working on a book project tentatively titled
The Grandeur of Marx.
6. See the translator’s introduction: ‘For Scarpetta, Kafka’s “failure” (the term is
his) comes from its reduction of a whole career to a single philosophic force –
from its desire to “present texts as ‘examples’ (if not as ‘symptoms’) instead of
analyzing the process they engage in”’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: xxiii, refer-
ring to Scarpetta 1975: 49).
7. Deleuze and Guattari on the relation of subjectivity and significance are very
fun: ‘There is no signifiance that does not harbor the seeds of subjectivity; there
is no subjectification that does not drag with it remnants of signifier. If the sig-
nifier bounces above all off a wall, if subjectivity spins above all toward a hole,
then we must say that the wall of the signifier already includes holes and the
black hole of subjectivity already carries scraps of wall’ (Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 182). In the Kafka book, becoming-animal is the antidote to suspect sub-
jectivities: ‘In contrast to the letters, the becoming-animal lets nothing remain of
the duality of a subject of enunciation and a subject of the statement; rather, it
constitutes a single process, a unique method that replaces subjectivity’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1986: 36).
176 Charlene Elsby
8. Compare Deleuze and Guattari’s genetic concept of language: ‘The act of
becoming is a capturing, a possession, a plus-value, but never a reproduction or
an imitation’ (1986: 14).
9. Husserl recognises the impossibility of ever perceiving a spatiotemporal object
in its entirety and designates the sides of it which are apparent to us at any
given time as ‘fulfilled’, while those that are not apparent are ‘unfulfilled’.
Unfulfilled aspects of any concrete entity may later be fulfilled and contribute
to an overall noema. He says in Ideas: ‘No perception of the physical thing is
definitively closed; there is always room for new perceptions, for determining
more precisely the indeterminatenesses, for fulfilling the unfulfilled. With every
progression the determinational content of the physical thing-noema, which
continually belongs to the same physical thing-X, is enriched. It is an eidetic
insight that each perception and multiplicity of perceptions is capable of being
amplified; the process is thus an endless one; accordingly, no intuitive seizing
upon the physical thing-essence can be so complete that a further perception
cannot noematically contribute something new to it’ (Husserl 1985: 358).
10. Deleuze and Guattari reference the statisticity of an image as memory early in
the Kafka book, in a discussion of Kafka’s use of images of people with bent
heads: ‘The memory is a family portrait or a vacation photo showing men with
bent heads, women with their necks circled by a ribbon. The memory blocks
desire, makes mere carbon copies of it, fixes it within strata, cuts it off from
all its connections. But what, then, can we hope for? It’s an impasse’ (1986:
4). In the diagram that follows, Deleuze and Guattari ascribe territoriality to
the image, on account of its being a blocked, oppressed or oppressing, or neu-
tralised desire. (Desire, as we know, is the catalyst of all motion.) It’s useful to
compare territoriality and deterritorialisation in Deleuze and Guattari to the
limited and unlimited in Pythagorean philosophy. Plato’s philosophy of forms
is a philosophy of the limited – a marking off of coherent concepts from the
maelstrom of all that is. In the Pythagorean list of dichotomies from Aristotle’s
Metaphysics 986a22, the limited has something in common with the odd, the
one, the right, the masculine, rest, the straight, light, good and the square, while
the unlimited would have something in common with the even, many, left, femi-
nine, motion, the crooked, darkness, evil and the oblong.
11. A more cautious interpretation would be that Plato meant to eliminate bad
artists, the ones who produced simulacra: ‘The Republic does not attack art or
poetry as such; it attempts to eliminate art that is simulacral or phantastic, and
not iconic or mimetic’ (Smith, 2012: 15).
12. According to Smith, Deleuze interprets Nietzsche as aiming at the inversion
of Platonism. In Deleuzian terms, this means specifically that the ‘inversion of
Platonism . . . implies an affirmation of the being of simulacra as such. The sim-
ulacrum must then be given its own concept and be defined in affirmative terms’
(Smith 2012: 12). I’ve no doubt this is what Nietzsche was doing; the question is
whether Plato meant any of what he wrote on the s ubject – i .e., if there is indeed
such a Plato to invert. Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition: ‘The whole
of Platonism, by contrast, is dominated by the idea of drawing a distinction
between “the thing itself” and the simulacra . . . Overturning Platonism, then,
means denying the primacy of original over copy, of model over image; glorify-
ing the reign of simulacra and reflections’ (2004: 80).
13. For in-depth analyses of each of these arguments in turn, see Dorter 1982.
14. Socrates’ affinity argument starts at 78b in the Phaedo. Socrates gets Cebes to
agree that there is nothing left to say against the conclusion that ‘the soul is
most like the divine, deathless, intelligible, uniform, indissoluble, always the
same as itself, whereas the body is most like that which is human, mortal, mul-
Kill Metaphor 177
tiform, unintelligible, soluble and never consistently the same’ (Plato 1997a:
70).
15. Of course, Deleuze would never say it in those words, and this is not Aristotle’s
concept of language. I’m identifying an Aristotelian hylomorphism in Deleuze’s
concept of sense. As Smith phrases it: ‘The genesis of language must be found
at the relation between the intensive depth (noise) and the extensive surface
(sense)’ (2019: 59). I’d say, the genesis of language is the relation between an
unformed matter (sound) and the imposition of some organisation (form) that
renders it sensical and which primarily defines what it is (form as essence). That
is, language is expression more than it is phonemes.
16. Cf. Chapter 4 of Investigation 2 in Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Husserl
2001).
17. Deleuze picks up the concept of a living language as genesis in The Logic of
Sense, which Smith elucidates in a fashion reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty: ‘This
is the function of the surface organisation of sense: it separates sounds from
the body and begins to turn them into the elements of speech. The creation of
sense (out of non-signifying elements) is what allows the sounds coming out of
one’s mouth to participate fully in a shared linguistic world. But the converse is
also true. If a child comes to a language it cannot yet grasp as a language, but
only as a familial hum of voices, perhaps conversely it can grasp what adults
no longer grasp in their own language, namely the differential relations between
the formative elements of language’ (2019: 53). That is to say, in the language
of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, that linguistic formations are habits that
have achieved automaticity – when people talk, we are directly aware of their
meaning, and do not (but might, if we choose) focus on the sounds which act
as media for meaning. We can confirm this experientially by noticing that when
we attempt to recall a conversation, we are more likely to remember what was
expressed rather than the individual words or actual sounds. In the Kafka book,
Deleuze and Guattari conceive of the production of a minor literature as imme-
diately operating within the realm of expression, rather than the expression
of a pre-existing content (the non-minor literatures that have come before). If
there’s a metaphor in Kafka, it’s tacked on to the text later, masquerading as the
‘content’ of yore. ‘A major, or established, literature follows a vector that goes
from content to expression. Since content is presented in a given form of the
content, one must find, discover, or see the form of expression that goes with it.
That which conceptualizes well expresses itself. But a minor, or revolutionary,
literature begins by expressing itself and doesn’t conceptualize until afterward
(“I do not see the word at all, I invent it”). Expression must break forms,
encourage ruptures and new sproutings’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986: 28).
References
Bensmaïa, R. (1986), ‘The Kafka Effect’, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Bloomsbury.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana
Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Press.
178 Charlene Elsby
Dorter, K. (1982), Plato’s Phaedo: An Interpretation, Toronto: University of

Toronto Press.
Husserl, E. (1985), Ideas, trans. F. Kersten, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. (2001), Logical Investigations, Vol. II, trans. J. N. Findlay, New York:
Routledge.
Ingarden, R. (1974), The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
Ingarden, R. (1979), The Literary Work of Art, Evanston: Northwestern University
Press.
Kafka, F. (2009), The Trial, trans. Mike Mitchell, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012), The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A.
Landes, Abingdon: Routledge.
Nietzsche, F. (2005), Twilight of the Idols, in The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight
of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans.
Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plato (1997a), Phaedo, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Complete Works, ed. John Cooper,
Indianapolis: Hackett.
Plato (1997b) Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve, in Complete
Works, ed. John Cooper, Indianapolis: Hackett.
Robbe-Grillet, A. (1965), ‘Time and Description in Fiction Today’, in For a New
Novel: Essays in Fiction, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Grove Press.
Scarpetta, G. (1975), ‘Review of Kafka, by Deleuze and Guattari’, Tel Quel, 63:
48–9.
Smith, D. W. (2019), ‘Sense and Literality: Why There Are No Metaphors in
Deleuze’s Philosophy’, in Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of Freedom:
Freedom’s Refrains, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and Eftichis Pirovolakis, London:
Routledge, pp. 44–67.
Chapter 9
Memories of Cinema
Robert W. Luzecky
Deleuze’s concept of temporality undergoes radical revision with his elab-

orations of time’s expressions in cinema. In Cinema 1: The Movement-
Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze elucidates aspects of
Bergson’s thought to present a concept of time that is no longer tethered
to the movements of entities. Deleuze – in what is perhaps one of the
oddest definitions in the history of western philosophy – characterises
cinema as attempting to move beyond the representation of the move-
ments of existents to give viewers a ‘direct presentation of time’ (1997b:
38). In the present chapter, I elucidate Deleuze’s tantalising suggestion
that cinema, the art form that has moving images as one of its ontic
bases, involves a direct representation of a sort of temporality that is
conceptually discrete from the movement of existent entities. I further
suggest that filmic expressions of time reveal it to be a singularity that
enjoys the attribute of radical indeterminacy. Deleuze further suggests
that time – a s it is presented in fi
lm – o
btains as that ongoing continuum
of variation.
My argument progresses through four stages: (1) I will critically assess
the suggestion of various commentators that the Cinema texts offer
a fraught addition to Deleuze’s philosophy of time; (2) I suggest that
Deleuze’s innovative reading of Bergson’s concept of duration is key to
understanding how time is expressed in cinema; (3) I o bserve – through
reference to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s theory of artistic descriptions – that
a direct image of time enjoys nascent expression in the form of ‘pure
optical and acoustic situations’ (i.e., moments of profound change in
any of the diegetic elements of a film story); (4) fi nally – through refer-
ence to Deleuze’s nuanced reading of Bergson’s ontology of virtual and
actual modes of e xistence – I suggest that time gains direct cinematic
expression in the peculiar ‘crystal-images’ that proliferate in post-Second
World War cinema. I observe that time’s expression in cinema involves
180 Robert W. Luzecky
a diminishment of the relative importance of the relation of temporal

succession, a prioritisation of time’s involvement with fundamental
ontological change, and a specification of the strictly simultaneous emer-
gence of past and present. Further, I suggest that this temporality forms
a continuum of variation without end. Taken together, these yield the
claim that the direct presentation of time in cinema involves characteris-
ing temporality as a singularity that is intrinsic to the cinematic mode
of artistic expression. Perhaps the most magical of all art forms, cinema
continues to delight us in no small measure due to its capacity to express
a little morsel of time as pure, unceasing variation.
Deleuze’s Phenomenology of Cinema?

The nuanced nature of Deleuze’s identification of cinema as a pres-
entation of time that is somehow removed from the movements of
photographically represented objectivities (i.e., all of the characters,
elements of setting, material entities, etc.) has produced some critical
befuddlement, in the sense that analyses of Deleuze’s claims on the
nature of cinema and its expression of temporality tend to be divided.
Commentators seem oddly flummoxed when it comes to Deleuze’s
analyses of film. This consternation is evidenced variously as hesitancy
in addressing the substantive philosophical claims about the nature of
temporality elaborated in Cinema 2, mischaracterisation of the rela-
tive importance of Deleuze’s re-evaluation of time through reference to
cinema, and a strange ambivalence evident in competing identifications
of what Deleuze is up to with his striking analyses of film.
In an otherwise superlative elaboration of Deleuze’s philosophy of
time, James Williams suggests that though the Cinema texts stand as
remarkable contributions to the philosophy of film, one should be wary
of approaching the texts as though they develop a substantive contri-
bution to Deleuze’s thought on the nature of temporality. Williams
identifies three reasons for being wary of both Cinema 1 and Cinema
2: (1) he observes an apparent ambiguity in Deleuze’s use of the term
‘image’ (2011: 160); (2) he suggests that the analyses of all the artists,
works of art and the ontological concepts expressed by these tend to be
inadequate, in the sense that these are ‘descriptive and restricted’ (160)
in comparison to more lengthy treatments offered in other of Deleuze’s
works – particularly The Logic of Sense and Francis Bacon: The Logic
of Sensation, though one also might mention Coldness and Cruelty,
Proust and Signs, as well as Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature; (3) he
claims that the mode of exposition and the development of substantive
Memories of Cinema 181
claims tends to be rather disjointed in comparison to that evidenced in

other texts.1 Here, I should point out that Williams’s reasons for his
hesitancy to elaborate on – let alone endorse – the conceptualisations
of time developed in the Cinema texts are sketchy. Deleuze’s use of the
term ‘image’, as I argue (through particular reference to the ‘crystalline
image of time’) in the penultimate section of this chapter, is consistent
with that of Bergson. In the absence of a clearly stated set of criteria and
means of evaluating the merits of one mode of philosophical exegesis
relative to another – neither of which Williams gives – one must reject
second and third putative reasons for wariness as akin to an ill-defined
axiological complaint.
Though András Bálint Kovács characterises Deleuze’s as ‘by far the
deepest and most developed theory of modern cinema [that] has been
formulated’, he also observes that it ‘does not fit in with any previous
theoretical frameworks’ (2007: 40–1). Paul Schrader, on the other hand,
starkly identifies Deleuze’s elucidation of the nature and function of
cinema as ‘the phenomenology of perception through time’ (2018: 3).2
Vivian Sobchack echoes Schrader’s sentiment with her suggestion that
Deleuze’s philosophy of film parallels phenomenology in the sense that
Deleuze’s key claims about the nature of cinematic movement and image
seem to correlate with insights in Merleau-Ponty’s later work (1992:
31). Julien Guillemet suggests pretty much the exact opposite with his
stark claim that ‘Deleuze’s relation to phenomenology appears as a
strict refusal of the traditional phenomenological model’ (2010: 94).
As is the case with most stringent interpretive claims, this reading is
dubious, in the sense that Deleuze’s relation with phenomenology in the
Cinema texts tends to be decidedly more nuanced than partisan readings
would care to admit. David Rodowick observes that Deleuze tends to
characterise phenomenology as an ‘ambiguous ally’ to the Deleuzian
conceptualisation of cinema (1997: 214). Deleuze’s nuanced critique of
the suggestion that cinematic expression involves aspects that are akin
to substantive claims of various phenomenologists (primarily Husserl,
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) involves two observations: (1) it seems that
phenomenologists tend to disregard cinematic art as something worthy
of analysis; (2) Husserlian phenomenology tends to prioritise a mode
of (natural) perception of spatiotemporally extended entities, which is
ill-fitting with the experience of viewing a film. Each of these invites
elaboration.
Deleuze’s suggestion that phenomenology has an ‘embarrassed atti-
tude’ with respect to cinema has some merit, in the sense that there seems
to be a paucity phenomenological analysis of cinematic art relative to
the analyses of other art forms (Deleuze 1997a: 57). (Here, one cannot
help but think of the numerous phenomenological analyses of paintings
and literary works by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer and their
followers.) Deleuze’s provocative observation that Husserl ‘never men-
tions cinema at all’ (56), though technically true, is not quite as scandal-
ous as one might think. Though Husserl doesn’t specifically mention
the moving images of film (i.e., cinematographic images), this shouldn’t
come as a terrible shock, if for no other reason than cinematic art was in
its infancy when Husserl was writing. The Lumière brothers are credited
with presenting the first series of documentary shorts to a paying audi-
ence on 28 December 1895 – L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat,
Déjeuner de Bébé and L’arroseur arrosé. Georges Méliès founded the
first film studio and in-house film theatre in 1896. Méliès is also credited
with producing and showing the first single-reel narrative film – Le
Voyage dans la Lune – in 1902.3 During this period, Husserl was busy
starting his philosophical career at the University of Halle before being
uprooted to take residence in Göttingen. He published the first edition
of the Logical Investigations one year before Méliès entertained audi-
ences with the images of magical aliens dancing on the moon. In all
likelihood, Husserl was unaware of the evolution of the magic lantern
in France when he published his first major phenomenological text. It
should also be noted that Husserl does discuss the moving image (albeit
briefly) during this time (2005: 66, 584n3, 645, 646). Unfortunately, the
situation does not improve much with Sartre, who – though he mentions
going to the movies with his mother in The Words and briefly elaborates
on the nature of slow motion cinema in The Imaginary – refrains from
offering a systematic analysis of the art form (Sartre 1964: 119; 2004:
130).4 Deleuze also suggests that cinema suffers from a cursory treat-
ment by Merleau-Ponty (1997a: 57).5 Perhaps it is worth noting that
Roman Ingarden discusses film in a slightly more substantive way than
Merleau-Ponty. Unfortunately, Ingarden’s brief analyses of film h ave
– until quite recently – b
een unduly neglected by North American and
French phenomenologists (Ingarden 1973, 1989). Deleuze’s observation
that phenomenologists tend to treat the filmic art form in a manner
analogous to how a family might be inclined to treat a bastard cousin is
borne out (with some modification) by history.
Deleuze offers a further clue to the fraught relation between phenom-
enology and cinematic representation with his explicit suggestion that
cinema offers an alternative to the model of natural perception offered
by Husserlian phenomenology. In a lecture on the topic given during the
autumn of 1981, Deleuze starkly notes that ‘cinematic perception is not
natural perception. Not at all’ (Deleuze 1981). The difference between

cinematic perception and natural perception involves the ontic bases
of perceived objects. Deleuze suggests that natural perception presents
objects in m
otion – e .g., the object of natural perception might be a bird
fluttering its wings, pecking at a worm, prancing along a branch. The
object of cinematic perception is explicitly the photographic representa-
tion of an entity isolated from motion. Deleuze’s analytic point is based
on the observation that we typically perceive physical entities in motion
and cinematic perception only affords us the perception of entities for
which motion is a second-order property. The claim is that the smallest
building block of our natural perception – the ontologically primary base
of naturally perceived m oments – is composed of entities enjoying inter-
related motions. Writing a few scant years after the birth of cinema in
1895, Henri Bergson observed that cinematic perception involves (as its
ontic base) ‘snapshots of a passing reality’ (1998: 307). Bergson goes on
to suggest that cinematic images are frozen in time, in the sense that they
are bereft of any movement (i.e., the cinematic image involves a negation
of the motion of the naturally perceived object). Though it is the case
that, when watching a film, we perceive entities that have the semblance
of motion – e .g., the grotesque image of the razorblade slicing an eyeball
in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), or the horrific image of the
blood gushing out of the elevator doors in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
(1980) – this is the product of the serial organisation and projection of
static photographic images. While natural perception involves entities
in motion, cinematic perception involves the mere illusion of entities in
motion. In this sense, the perceived motion of cinematic entities is an
ontologically secondary event; a cinematographic illusion conjures the
projection of still images at very specific temporal rates.6
In addition to Deleuze’s observations about the ontic base of the
cinematographic illusion of movement, one may observe a further dif-
ference between natural perception and cinematic perception. Deleuze
seems to suggest that cinematic perception differs in kind from natural
perception. Here, Deleuze’s critique is directed as much against André
Bazin as it is against Husserl. One of the fundamental observations of
Husserlian phenomenology is that ‘all consciousness is consciousness
of’ (Husserl quoted in Deleuze 1997a: 56). Natural perception sug-
gests that objects (in the real world) are presented to consciousness as
composites of various schematised aspects. Intentional consciousness
then sets about performing the complex task of fulfilling these aspects
through reference to transcendent structures of reality, structures of
consciousness, and social conditions evidenced in the lifeworld (most
of which are presented in a schematised fashion), in the ongoing crea-

tion of real objects of consciousness.7 Bazin suggests that perception
of cinema seems to involve a similar process with his observation that
the cinematic image reveals the ‘natural image of a world’; a flow of
image which is ‘uncompromisingly realistic’, in the sense that it perfectly
conveys the aspects of ‘the natural world’ (2005: 14, 27). Bazin’s claim
here is that the camera functions as a prosthesis to the human eye, which
assists in the process of perception (presenting aspects of entities in the
empirically sensed world and fomenting their fulfilment by intentional
consciousness) that is fundamentally analogous to that originally speci-
fied by Husserl. Deleuze explicitly denies this analogy when he observes
that ‘the cinema can, with impunity, bring us close to things or take
us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses both the
anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world’ (1997a: 57). The
substantive observation here is that the camera does things which the
human eye cannot do, in ways that are liberated from the direction of
the perceiver’s intentional consciousness. With these analyses, Deleuze
appears to be making a complex deduction from premises specified by
Walter Benjamin, Dziga Vertov and Robert Bresson. Benjamin makes
the astute observation that the camera ‘can bring out those aspects
of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to
the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will’ (2007: 220).
Vertov observes that cinema’s ‘kino-eye lives and moves in time and
space; it gathers and records impressions in a manner wholly different
from that of the human eye’ (1984: 15). Bresson elaborates on the
camera’s capacities to record ‘what no human eye is capable of catching,
no pencil, brush, pen of pinning d own . . . without knowing what it is,
and pins its down with a machine’s scrupulous indifference’ (1977: 14).
Deleuze observes that Husserlian phenomenology grants a privilege to
the human eye as the means by which to perceive the world. Without
hesitation, Bazin accepts this privilege, only to suggest that the camera
augments it. Benjamin, Vertov and Bresson each fundamentally deny
that the human eye enjoys this privileged status – t he movie camera (with
its swoops, long tracking shots, radical close-ups and sweeping panora-
mas) performs functions to which no human eye could dare aspire. All
of these imply that cinematic perception involves an intentionality that is
decidedly not human. The profound capacities of the kino-eye are illus-
trated in the – nearly sublime – opening sequence of Berlin: Die Sinfonie
der Großstadt (1927): the film begins with the image of the languid ebb
of calm waters, only to give way (through an abstract dissolve consisting
of multi-section white planes and a descending circle) to the metallic
arms of a railway crossing; then, there is a rapid cut to a speeding

train, which dissolves into a shot of the pistons of an engine.8 Here we
have an atypical conjunction of typical geometric forms (the abstract
dissolve), as well as images of nature viewed in unnatural ways; things
are viewed from angles that are seemingly unattainable by the human
eye – e .g., hovering over the unblemished surface of water, which is not
disturbed by the ripple caused by the immersion of a physical body.
These are illustrative of a mode of perception of that is quite removed
from any that we would identify as directed by human intentionality.
These observations of poets, filmmakers and philosophers suggest that
cinema affords a mode of perception which is radically distinct from that
so rigorously specified in Husserlian phenomenology.
When taken together, these two complex c laims – that there is scant
substantive discussion of film in the works of Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-
Ponty, and that cinema affords a modality of perception that is distinct
from (Husserlian) natural perception – imply that there is a conceptual
distance between phenomenological accounts of the cinematic art form
and that offered by Deleuze. One might add to these a further observa-
tion, which obliquely challenges the notion that Deleuze’s account of
temporal expression in cinema is akin to aspects of Husserlian phe-
nomenology. In an interview with Raymond Bellour, Deleuze starkly
observes that ‘there is no dualism at all’ involved in his account of the
nature of cinema (2020: 226). It has been observed that there is a sort
of dualism hard baked into Husserl’s phenomenology. This suggestion
enjoys ample textual support, in the sense that Husserl explicitly claims
that there is a methodological dualism involved in his phenomenology.
Husserl s tipulates – in Ideas I – that the res cogitans is separated from
the world of physical, material, spatiotemporally extended entities ‘by
a veritable abyss’ (1931: 153). Husserl tries to diminish dualism by
prescribing the application of the phenomenological method, but by lim-
iting the scope of his phenomenology to epistemology he avoids really
contradicting ontological dualism. In Phenomenology and the Crisis
of Philosophy, Husserl suggests that the function of intentional con-
sciousness is to intertwine with the external (physical and ideal) world
through various acts of clarification achieved by intentionality fulfilling
the schematised aspects of entities presented through p erception – i.e.,
by becoming conscious of entities. Were this intertwining achieved (i.e.,
9
were the process of fulfilment of schematised aspects ever completely

actualised), this would diminish any concerns about an abiding dualism.
Unfortunately, the success of Husserl’s efforts is a matter of dispute.
Françoise Dastur observes that Husserl’s phenomenology seems to be
plagued by an intractable dualism.10 Merleau-Ponty echoes this sug-

gestion with his observation that at ‘the end of Husserl’s life there is an
unthought-of element in his works which is wholly his and yet opens
out on something else’ (1964: 160). The existence of this unresolved
something else which consciousness opens toward fulfils the minimal
condition of an unresolved species of dualism at work in Husserlian phe-
nomenology. The fact that Deleuze explicitly suggests that his concept
of cinema is bereft of dualism implies that it might have less in common
with Husserlian phenomenology than one might expect.
The Filmic Duration (of Memory and Change)

Deleuze’s suggestion that temporality is afforded a direct presentation
in film involves a Bergsonian concept of temporal duration that is com-
prehensive of the memorial past (of memory), the lived present and the
creation of the new. The concept of time presented in the Cinema texts
is substantively different than that elaborated in other texts like The
Logic of Sense – in which the putatively discrete temporal domains of
past, present and future are explicitly characterised as ‘readings’ of the
various types of (logical, ontological, axiological) relations that obtain
among Aion and Chronos. Further, though Deleuze quite comfortably
elaborates on the ontological primacy of a synthesis among discrete
ontological entities as giving rise to a comprehensive time in Difference
and Repetition, in the Cinema texts, this language of syntheses has fallen
by the wayside, having been replaced by discussions of tensions among
virtual and actual modes of being as they obtain in the lived present
that is expressed in cinema. Though Deleuze had written on Bergson
prior to the publication of Difference and Repetition (both ‘Bergson
1859–1941’ and ‘Bergson’s Conception of Difference’11 are significant
texts which hint at aspects of a robust concept of temporality), it isn’t
until Bergsonism and the commentaries on Bergson in Cinema 1 and
Cinema 2 that Deleuze’s Bergsonian account of temporality receives
thorough elaboration. In the Cinema texts, Deleuze modifies his prior
concepts of temporality to offer an account of duration that involves
an ontologically comprehensive nature and a radical capacity to modify
existents. Deleuze suggests that we experience this sort of duration in the
cinematic art form – which presents the viewing audience with a series
of visible contractions among the photographically represented past
and the present; a ‘well defined tension’ (Bergson 1946: 217) among the
living present and the memorial past that is expressed in filmic sequences,
series, and framings of photographically represented events. What this
implies about the nature of temporality and of the cinematic expression

of time is staggering, if for no other reason than that it involves: (1) a
reconceptualisation of temporality that establishes an identity r elation –
i.e., the identity enjoyed by the elements of a m ultiplicity – among puta-
tively distinct temporal domains; (2) a diminishment of the claim that
temporality is reducible to a succession relation of temporal moments,
t1, t2 . . . tn; (3) a suggestion that cinema can represent these.
Bergson seems never to tire of modifying his concept of duration. In
a few remarkable pages in the second chapter of Time and Free Will,
the concept (of duration) is variously characterised as a ‘multiplicity’
of temporal moments, which (strangely) don’t enjoy any correlation
with measurable points distributed in physical s pace – i.e., a multiplic-
ity of ‘pure number’ (Bergson 2001: 78, 89); the form assumed by the
‘succession of our conscious states’ in moments of recollection (100);
an intensive magnitude (106); a mercurial ontological process which
seems to be like Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh, in the narrow
sense that it is primary to substance (111). In Matter and Memory, the
over-determined concept undergoes further revision. Here, duration is
characterised as the continuous flow of mental-states through which
psycho-social entities ‘insensibly’ pass in the ‘really lived’ experience of a
continuity that strangely conditions experience, without revealing itself
in its entirety; the dynamic ‘tension’ that obtains among various puta-
tively discrete mental states (Bergson 1991: 186). This characterisation
in particular becomes slightly more fraught when taken in conjunction
with Bergson’s careful observation that any supposed division among
mental states is ‘artificial’, in the sense that these are comprehended as
interrelated aspects of a unified – non-divisible, non-reducible – lived
experience (186). The situation doesn’t get much better when we come
to Creative Evolution. Here, Bergson characterises duration variously as
the flow of unceasing change (1998: 1–3); as a flux of putatively discrete
mental states merging into one another (3); and as the past (character-
ised as an oddly active and expanding process) which ‘gnaws into the
future and which swells as it advances’ (4). Taken together, this dizzying
array of sometimes competing definitions suggest an over-determined
concept that threatens to lose any sense of unity.
The plurality of aspects associated with the concept of duration
seems to have led to some confusion about the nature of the concept.
Rebecca Hill starkly observes that Bergson’s duration may be identified
as a dualistic relation that obtains among tendencies (i.e., proto-entities,
transcendental conditions, disparate forces, poorly identified urges, etc.,
that are involved in multiple processes of transformation). Hill seems
to undermine her initial identification when she suggests that these

tendencies are sexed, in the sense that they are inherently expressive
of masculine or feminine characteristics (2012: 92). Though it is the
case that since Bergson explicitly characterises durations as involving
pre-individuated tendencies (as opposed to clearly defined quantifiable
states), it seems odd to identify any particular s exedness – w hich would
be an individuated trait – a s an attribute of these. Bergson explicitly
notes that the complex concept of duration tends to resist identification
as a metaphysical simple (i.e., a state, or an entity, something reducible
to one aspect) in numerous places. Perhaps the clearest identification
of the involvement of tendencies and duration is found in Creative
Evolution, in a remarkable passage where Bergson characterises dura-
tion as a complex relation of pre-individuated tendencies (1998: 12–13).
Deleuze suggests that tendency and duration enjoy an ontological
identity, in the sense that both involve pure difference: ‘Duration or
tendency is the difference of self with itself; and what differs from itself
is, in an unmediated way, the unity of substance and subject’ (2002:
38). In a lecture on Leibniz, Deleuze further identifies duration as a
process of differentiation that bears a striking conceptual similarity with
conatus, in the sense that these involve ontogenetic forces.12 These two
observations – that duration is similar to a tendency and that it is akin to
a pre-individuated force (i.e., conatus) – are sufficient to demonstrate a
confusion involved in the suggestion that duration involves individuated
traits. Hill attempts to support her argument by pointing to a ‘hierarchi-
cal sexuation’ implicit in Bergson’s use of metaphor in elaborating on
the nature of duration. This is unfortunate for at least two reasons. Hill
does very little to clarify what a ‘sexuated’ hierarchy would look like.
Confronted with such a linguistic monstrosity, in the absence of any
clear definiens, one is just as apt to produce an accurate identification
of Bergsonian duration as one is to conjure a profound ontological
confusion. It might also be observed that a dualistic relation among any
of existents or tendencies would tend to be expressed as p arallelism –
i.e., an ontological relation ill-fitting the sort of formation implied by
reference to any sort of hierarchy, regardless of the identity of its relata.
Perhaps it should also be observed that Bergson tends to characterise
duration in non-hierarchical t erms – i.e., as a qualitative multiplicity; an
ontological process akin to an organic unity; a psychological ‘flux’ – all
of which tend to be analytically, logically and ontologically discrete to
the type of arrangement associated with any form of hierarchy.
Arguing from more stable conceptual ground, Jean Hyppolite sug-
gests that Bergsonian duration is identical to memory, in the sense
that it involves an interrelation of non-discrete moments that are tem-

porally prior to the present.13 Leonard Lawlor echoes this view when
he summarily characterises Bergson’s concept of duration as akin to
memory, albeit in senses that involve subtle modifications of all of its
nature, the objects of recollection, and the purposiveness implied by
various acts of recollecting (2003: 80). Indeed, in Creative Evolution,
Bergson explicitly identifies memory and duration when he observes
that ‘duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into
the future and which swells as it advances’ (1998: 4). Bergson’s choices
of metaphor and verb tense suggest a conceptualisation of memory as
a process that is substantively different from the concept of memory
as a mental repository of prior experience – i.e., a ‘mind palace’, a
mental labyrinth that is accessed through the repetition of a mnemonic
device (the calming rhythms of ‘the thread of a tune’ that guides one
to a ‘shelter’ which contains the memories of one’s childhood (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 310)) – that is typically used in filmic attempts to
visualise memory. (This concept of memory as a repository has been
referenced so often that it has become a filmic trope. Recent filmic
examples include: the ‘mental map’ used by Sherlock Holmes in the
television episode The Hounds of Baskerville (2012); the mesmerising
sequence in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1992), in which Deckard uses
the sepia-coloured photographs on his piano to unlock the memories
of his childhood – memories which resist washing away into oblivion
‘like tears in the rain’; the hellish industrial furnace where K retreats to
the memories of childhood in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049
(2017).) The primary difference between Bergson’s concept of duration
and the type of memory illustrated in these filmic representations is that
though memory palaces tend to be illustrated as domains of relative
stasis, duration is dynamic. In Matter and Memory, Bergson elucidates
memory’s activity of ‘gnawing’ into the future through reference to
the mental activity of ‘recording’ occurrences in the temporal present,
for the purpose of forming habits (which might become involved in
shaping a psycho-social entity’s behaviours at a future moment) (1991:
83). The dynamic aspect of memory is further illustrated by Bergson’s
careful observation that habit (i.e., all of what is remembered; the con-
stantly expanding content of memory) participates in the formation of
moral obligation (1935: 29). Bergson further elaborates on the aims of
memory (i.e., its functional goal or end) when he notes that each of the
moments of our lives ‘is a kind of creation’ (1998: 7). When taken in
conjunction with the stipulation that each temporal moment of existence
involves both the content of memory and the ongoing organisation of
this content, Bergson’s observation yields the implication that memory

is involved in the dynamic creation of the utterly unique. No longer
identified as merely the repository of now past, slowly fading moments,
memory, Bergson suggests, is identical to duration, in the sense that all
of its nature, processes and purpose are involved with the creation of
something without ontological correlate or precedent.
Deleuze clarifies the role of duration in the production of differ-
ence with his elucidation of Bergson’s ‘third thesis’ (of movement and
change) in Cinema 1. Though there is no explicit mention of the identity
relation among duration and memory in these densely argued passages,
one might forgive this apparent oversight, if for no other reason than the
identity of these had already been stipulated in Bergsonism.14 Deleuze
formulates Bergson’s third thesis as the complex claim that ‘not only
is the instant an immobile section of movement, but movement is a
mobile section of duration, that is of the Whole, or of a whole’ (1997a:
8). Bergson explicitly notes – in Creative Evolution – that a movement
of entities in space involves a transformation of that space.15 Bergson’s
complex ontological argument involves: (1) the stipulation of a distinc-
tion among the processes of transformation and translation; (2) positing
an uncontentious distinction in kind – i.e., a categorical distinction
– among qualities and quantities; (3) the observation that the process
of translation involves quantitative c hange – i.e., it is a translation of
quantitative values; (4) the inference that transformation involves the
modification of particular qualities; (5) the observation of the corollary
that movements in space involve qualitative changes; and finally, (6)
the assertion that a transformation of a particular quality implies a
qualitative change to the generality that comprehends the particular.
Taken together, these yield the profound claim that the displacement
of spatiotemporally extended entities implies a fundamental change to
the nature of space itself. In this sense, the domain (or medium) that
comprehends movements of particulars is revealed to be ontologically
correlated with a modification of the qualities of any particular. These
are the sorts of ontological transformations that have been illustrated to
such terrifying effect in both horror literature and film. Robert Wise’s
The Haunting (1963) – which is an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The
Haunting of Hill House (1959) – chronicles the anguish of Eleanora as
she resides in a gothic mansion that alters all of its physical dimensions,
lighting and interior temperature in response to her memories of child-
hood trauma. A similar sort of physical change to space brought about
by qualitative change is also illustrated in the fiery end of the Overlook
Hotel in Steven King’s novel (1977), though the hotel remains standing
at the end Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining – a film that is vastly superior
to King’s derivative novel, because it explicitly correlates the physical
changes of the hotel to the mental states of Jack, Wendy and Danny,
as well as the memorial history of the Colorado Rocky Mountains,
i.e., the qualitative elements of various domains. Thomas Allen Nelson
elaborates on how, in Kubrick’s film, changes to the hotel’s spatiality
are directly correlated w ith – i.e., responses to, expressions of, doublings
of – the characters’ internal states (2000: 202–8). One cannot help but
think of the spatiotemporal discontinuities evident in some of the film’s
most memorable scenes: the elevator of blood that erupts when Jack,
Wendy or Danny feel rage or terror; the appearance of the bloated
corpse of a nude crone that greets Jack’s aberrant sexual desires in room
237; the ominous appearance of an ancient scrapbook next to Jack’s
typewriter as he struggles to recall the plot of his horribly repetitive
manuscript; the disquieting appearance of the twin girls (the Grady
twins) who promise to play with Danny ‘forever and ever’; the shifting
patterns on both the hallway carpet and the Native American murals
in the Colorado Lounge; the population and de-population of the Gold
Room; the alteration in lighting of the hotel bar when Jack gets a
glass of bourbon; the shifting spatial dimensions of the hedge maze; the
strange appearance of a room full of skeletons as Wendy is confronted
with memories of Jack’s abuse of her and Danny; the deeply disturbing
appearance of an entity dressed as a bear performing fellatio on a man
in 1920s formal attire as Wendy witnesses a temporally prior event in
the hotel (the 1921 New Year’s Eve party). All of these spatiotemporal
modifications (modifications to the hotel and its surrounding area) are
reflective of qualitative variations of various character’s mental states.
Each of them expresses a spatiotemporal translation of particulars (a
quantitative translation). All involve a fundamental qualitative transfor-
mation of the whole. These moments of horror have been adduced to
aptly illustrate the ontological modification suggested by Bergson’s third
thesis on the nature of space in relation to qualitative alteration.
Deleuze suggests that filmic duration does something more profound
than merely present photographic examples of differentiation through
photographic and aural means. In ‘Bergson’s Conception of Difference’,
he explicitly identifies duration as the internally differentiated process
that involves the capacity to ‘englobe’ (i.e., ontologically comprehend)
ontologically distinct entities (2002: 39). This suggests that the particular
filmic species of duration has the capacity to comprehend modifications
within entities which are ontologically discrete from filmed persons,
settings and other photographically represented states of affairs. The
implication here is that filmic duration involves the capacity to a ffect –

qualitatively modify – the audience. Roland Barthes echoes this sugges-
tion when he observes that some films involve qualitative modifications
that will ‘bruise’ the viewer. The claim is that some images, as well
as sequences of images (due to their preternatural powers to foment
change), will modify the bodily experience of those who behold their
spectacle – t his is more than the work of a mere example.16
Cinema’s seemingly magical capacities to modify the physical states of
those who behold its spectacle hint at a complex analogy between dura-
tion and Walter Benjamin’s concept of an aura. Rodowick observes that
Benjamin’s historical reflections on the development of photographic art
suggests a similarity among what Benjamin characterises as the photo-
graphic aura and the filmic duration (1997: 8). Though Miriam Bratu
Hansen cautiously observes that Benjamin’s identification of the concept
of aura is notoriously difficult to isolate, in the sense that Benjamin
seems to subtly modify the term throughout his ‘Little History of
Photography’, On Hashish and the Arcades Project, one might observe
that the concept seems to involve two discrete aspects. The strength
of the analogy between duration and aura is demonstrated by shared
aspects.17 Benjamin’s first elucidation of the nature of an aura is the
consequence of his experimentations with hashish (on 5 March 1930).
Here, Benjamin cautiously observes that, though it is distinct in kind
from the ‘spruced-up magical rays’ that populate the fantastic visions of
spiritualists, a ‘genuine aura’ enjoys a similarity with ‘an ornamental halo
[Umzirkung], in which the object or being is enclosed’ (2006b: 58). The
suggestion here is that an aura is a sort of energy field that has the capac-
ity to comprehend existents. The ontologically comprehensive nature of
an aura is akin to duration’s capacity to ‘englobe’ entities. In this sense,
comprehensiveness is an aspect that is common to Bergsonian duration
and Benjamin’s concept of an aura. Elaborating on the sublime nature of
Eugène Atget’s surrealist photographs of Paris, Benjamin explicitly char-
acterises their aura as involving a ‘strange weave of space and time: the
unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may
be’ (2005: 518). Here, one may identify a parallel aspect in duration’s
involvement with memory’s ability to qualitatively modify spatiotem-
porally extended existents and the nature of their circumstances – i.e.,
all of psycho-social entities and their circumstances, the content of the
lived experience of humans, and their environment, however broadly
construed. Remarking on the sort of auras that accompany represented
photographic objectivities, Benjamin suggests that photographic auras
have the capacity to involve themselves in an intentional relation with
the memories of those who behold them – i.e., to ‘look back’ into the
minds and prior lived experiences of those who get transfixed by their
unblinking gaze.18 This observation echoes the suggestion that duration
modifies the qualitative aspects of the thought content of people who
participate in cinematic duration (through the concrete act of viewing
a film).
Nascent Forms of Time’s Direct Expression

eleuze – in some of the most beautiful passages of Cinema 2 – suggests
D
that filmic art enjoys the power to modify the qualitative experience of
viewers, because it has the capacity to present direct images of time.
Perhaps the most enigmatic of the concepts Deleuze develops in the
Cinema texts, the direct time-image is as mercurial as it is essential
to understanding the complex nature of temporality in film. Deleuze
starkly identifies the direct time-image as presenting a ‘little time in
its pure state’, only to clarify that this pure state is ‘the unchanging
form in which the change is produced’ (1997b: 17). The suggestion
here is that time is the general form of variation that comprehends
and is expressed in any particular change. Deleuze further observes
that this form of time is a nascent aspect of filmic motion pictures that
has only recently enjoyed a greater tendency to filmic realisation with
the advancement of cinematic art. He writes that direct time-images
involves a ‘Proustian dimension where people and things occupy a place
in time which is incommensurable with the one they have in space’ (37).
The claim here seems to be that the direct time-image involves aspects of
memory, in various senses of the term (i.e., the psychological memories
of individuated psycho-social existents, as well as the non-individuated
– ontological – memory that comprehends the entirety of the past of all
existents). Deleuze illustrates the development of this peculiar concept of
time through reference to Robbe-Grillet’s critical remarks about the role
of mimesis in artistic representation, as well as the natures of the (oddly
named) pure optical and sound situations.
One might observe that the concept of a direct presentation of any-
thing in film seems flummoxing, if for no other reason than that the
entities of a film are explicitly visually accessible entities presented as ele-
ments of a filmic universe. It might further be observed that the entirety
of the filmic universe (i.e., all its constituent elements) are represented
by photographic means in service of a director’s purposes (which usually
amounts to presenting a narrative, but may also involve explorations
of the artistic possibilities afforded cinema as an artistic medium).19
One could suggest that cinematically represented objects seem to be

distinguishable from objects which enjoy direct presentations. It would
seem that recognition of the validity of either a metaphysical distinction
between original and copy, or an aesthetic distinction between an object
and its representation (by artistic means), would suffice to adduce a cri-
tique of the notion that anything is presented directly in filmic art. These
would be perhaps even more substantive when they involve something
that has non-physical a spects – i.e., any of a species of relation; an ‘ideal’
entity; a spiritual existent; a process involving non-physical entities; a
continuum of abstract terms or relations; in short, many of the sorts of
existents we tend to associate or identify with temporality. One could
wonder how the immaterial form of time, or any of its (also immaterial)
constituent elements, could enjoy direct presentation by cinema.
Deleuze addresses these concerns through reference to Robbe-Grillet’s
theory of artistic description. The solution here is complex, in the sense
that Deleuze invites the reader to have more than a passing understand-
ing of all of Plato’s and Aristotle’s aesthetics – because a hybrid of
these functions as the unspecified target of Robbe-Grillet’s critique – as
well as the mathematics involved with architectural singularities (which
Robbe- Grillet references, but neglects to develop) (Deleuze 1997b:
44–5). Deleuze marshals these to suggest that temporality enjoys direct
presentation in film as a type of intrinsic singularity that expresses a sort
of variation that is non-mimetic. He stipulates that there is a difference
in kind among representations and expressions, in the sense that each
is a different kind of aspect of cinematic art. Perhaps one of the most
magical qualities of cinema is that it has the capacity to represent entities
and processes that enjoy existence in a mode of reality external to that of
the filmic universe, as well as the ability to express entities and processes
wholly intrinsic to its mode of presentation (i.e., existents that enjoy no
correlation with anything outside the film; a spectacle that is entirely
new, in the sense that it does not represent anything in the real world).
Though each may be an aspect of the same entity, this does not imply
that either is reducible to the other. Time enjoys direct presentation in
film because film expresses a change relative to the states of affairs in the
film. In his essay ‘Time and Description in Fiction Today’, Robbe-Grillet
offers an account of descriptions that diminishes the Ancients’ sugges-
tion that art tends to be mimetic (i.e., reducible to the representation of
objects, objectivities or processes). Robbe-Grillet cautiously observes
that, though it might have been the case that filmic and literary narra-
tives seem to involve duplication (producing a copy or representation)
of the real world, in contemporary films and literature the mimetic func-
tion seems to enjoy only a diminished role, in the sense that it has been
supplanted by a creative function.20 One might balk at this suggestion,
with the observation that mimesis has been taken to be a crucial aspect
of art since Plato’s observation – in the Republic, 604e–605a – t hat it is
the artist’s job to produce ‘multicolored imitations’ of various tangible
and intangible aspects of reality (1997: 1209). It might further be noted
that Plato’s entire condemnation of bad artists presupposes the validity
of the metaphysical claim that there exists a true reality (which good art
putatively represents).21 Robbe-Grillet modifies this characterisation of
the function of art by radicalising the artist’s creative capacities. Though
it must be noted that theories of imitation do involve aspects of artistic
creation, in the sense that they tend to identify the artist as creating an
adequate description of a reality that is extrinsic to the work of art’s
reality, this is characterised as a secondary, dependent process. Robbe-
Grillet radicalises this creativity when he suggests that the work of art
is akin to an architectural ‘point’ of invention (i.e., a singular point, a
singularity, a point of inflection) (1965: 148). Bernard Cache carefully
observes that architecture involves two analytically discrete kinds of
singularities, extrinsic singularities and ‘points of inflection’ (or intrinsic
singularities). An extrinsic singularity is a hypothetical point with which
the tangent of the physical curve, were it conceived as an ideal curve,
would be perpendicular (it is the point of a hypothetical y-axis which
is involved in the specification of one part of the curve’s coordinates).
An intrinsic singularity is identified as a point along the curve that
‘designates a pure event of curvature’ (Cache 1995: 16). Intrinsic sin-
gularities are actualised (or at least illustrated) by the ogives that are so
often instantiated in the architecture of medieval European churches.
Architectural works, it might also be observed, are a particular species
of the general class of artwork. Here, it seems that Robbe-Grillet is
stipulating that the property of a p articular – in this case, the property
of having intrinsic singularities as elements of the particular’s formal
ontological content – m ay be generalised as the property of a class.
Given that the property of a class may gain expression in any particular
species or member that is comprehended by the class, this yields the sub-
stantive observation that films and novels (because they are also works
of art) involve intrinsic singularities. Robbe- Grillet further observes
that intrinsic singularities tend to gain artistic expression as diegetic
moments of radical upheaval, profound correction, or bifurcation into
non-compossible series of events. Robbe- Grillet explicitly notes that
his conceptualisation of artistic description is distinct from the mimetic
relation through direct reference to temporality when he observes that
the types of temporal changes expressed in films need not correlate with
the temporality evidenced by the quantitative measurement of physical
(as opposed to artistically presented) clocks and calendars (1965: 151).
It should be observed that Robbe- Grillet’s suggestion implies a
subtle reformulation of Aristotle’s observation that art tends to involve
moments of great dramatic reversal. In Poetics, Aristotle suggests that
lyric poems tend to represent reality adequately, in the sense that they
involve περιπέτεια (reversals). Robbe-Grillet seems to suggest that these
moments of great reversal in the lives, fates and fortunes of the charac-
ters evidence a rupture from the mimetic order, in the sense that none
of these needs to be representative of any circumstance in the world.
These profound shifts involve an element of temporality, in the senses
that they occur within time, evidence a temporal duration and express a
moment in temporal continuum. This suggests that a direct expression
of time involves the illustration of these sorts of changes, characterised
as any of the properties (or attributes) of the relation that obtains among
entities in the artwork; thus it is discrete from the sorts of modification
that obtain as a property of the mimetic relation that might or might not
obtain between these and entities in the physical world. Stated again,
the direct expression of temporally saturated change is immanent to the
relation among fictive relata, which is different in kind and content from
the sort of changes that are involved (as attributes, immanent conditions
or emergent properties) in the relation that obtains among artistically
presented objects and their correlates in the universe populated by physi-
cal entities and psycho-social entities with physical attributes.
Deleuze observes that analogous disjunctions may be found in pure
optical and acoustic situations, which are constituted by ‘opsigns’ and
‘sonsigns’. In Cinema 1, he explains that these situations (and their
correlated signs) are filmic precursors to the direct presentation of time
(1997a: 210). Properly speaking, both opsigns and sonsigns are indica-
tive of a breakdown of the sensory-motor order (i.e., the sequence of
shots, montage) that tends to be identified with realist cinema. Each of
these discrete types of sign – though they may be, and often are, present
in the same shot, sequence or film – indicates a disjunction among any
of the photographically expressed entities relative to one another, as
well as any of the narrative, implied character arc, or thematic content
attributed to a film or its aspects. In these senses, opsigns and sonsigns
are intrinsic singularities that stand apart from (i.e., enjoy a disjunctive
relation with) other aspects of the film.22 Deleuze elucidates the natures
of these peculiar moments of filmic upheaval when he observes that
these sorts of purely optical and acoustic situations force any of the
characters or spectators of the film to encounter ‘something intoler-

able and u nbearable . . . a matter of something too powerful, or too
unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, and which henceforth outstrips
our sensory- motor capacities’ (1997b: 18). Deleuze further observes
that a character immersed in such situations behaves as though they
don’t know how to respond to their circumstance, as though they are
wandering through a terrain that – for whatever reason or confluence
of causes – h as diminished their capacities to navigate its labyrinthine
contours. Though Deleuze suggests that opsigns and sonsigns emerged
23
with striking prominence in Italian Neo- realist films, it would be a

mistake to associate them only with the films of a particular historical
period. These signs are evident in films from as diverse a set of direc-
tors as Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky
and Wim Wenders. To think of a clear expression of a purely optical
and acoustic situation, one need only recall, for example, the profound
alienation (from her dead son, her overly judgemental mother, her
utterly oblivious husband, and the seductive charms of socio-economic
privilege) evidenced on Ingrid Bergman’s face as she wanders through
the monolithic factory in Europe ’51 (Rossellini 1952); or Harry Dean
Stanton’s desperate wandering through the nameless – a nd seemingly
limitless – d esert during the mesmerising opening sequence of Paris,
Texas (Wenders 1984); or the strange industrial wasteland surround-
ing the petrol- chemical plant which causes an existential crisis for
Monica Viti’s character in Red Desert (Antonioni 1964); or Alexander
Kaidanovsky’s wandering though the strange wasteland after an acci-
dental alien visitation in Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Stalker (1979). Taken
together, these filmic expressions illustrate something more significant
than the mere psychological or physical displacement of a character; the
travails of each can be adduced as evidence of a comprehensive aliena-
tion. It is a profound indeterminacy that is reflected in these cinematic
moments of profound upheaval. Here, the claim is that the pure optical
and sound situation presents a filmic representation of the crisis of
indeterminacy; its purity is a perfection of a world without answer – a
perpetual vagueness without temporal cessation; a comprehensive lost-
ness in which characters are separated from the world of which they are
putative inhabitants.
A Direct Presentation of Temporality: Crystals of Time

If the pure optical and acoustic situations presented in film offer a
disquieting glimpse into the nature of time characterised as a singularity
– a moment of c hange – then film’s various hyalosigns (a linguistic play

on the Attic Greek ὕαλος) further develop the claim that time’s direct
expression in film amounts to a direct expression of variation. Deleuze
carefully elaborates time’s direct expression through identification of the
natures of time and its relation to filmic expressions of change through
reference to filmic ‘crystal-images’. It is important to note that crystal-
images are unities of analytically discrete processes. The ontological
implication here is that the time crystal (which is a representation of the
nature of time itself) is constituted by a series of mutually implicated
processes: (1) the continual exchange among the couple of the virtual
and the actual; (2) the relation among ‘the limpid and the opaque’; and
(3) the generative relation of ‘seed and the environment’ (Deleuze 1997b:
71). Deleuze further identifies a close conceptual proximity among the
exchange of virtual and actual, and the relation of limpid and opaque,
in the sense that the terms seem to enjoy transposability: virtuality is
akin to opacity; that which is actual (in film) tends to enjoy visibility
(71). It will be further observed that these imply a diminishment of the
relevance of temporal succession to the nature of time. The third p rocess
– involving seed and environment – suggests a temporal continuum of
ceaseless variation. Each invites elucidation.
Deleuze elaborates on the nature of each of these processes through
reference to Bergson and Proust. The suggestion that film has the
capacity to express time directly is hinted at by Bergson in Matter and
Memory and ‘Memory of the Present and False Recognition’ (Bergson
1991, 2012). In Matter and Memory he explicitly characterises the act of
recollection as akin to the mechanism of a camera focusing on a vaguely
determined intentional object.24 The metaphoric allusion to filmic (or
perhaps, theatrical) art is continued with Bergson’s observation that
the process of recollection tends to yield the psychological sensation
of neurotic depersonalisation – i.e., the disquieting feeling that one is
standing apart from oneself, a participant in the life of another, as
though they were merely an actor, a sentient simulacra reciting the lines
and performing the actions associated with someone else’s lived experi-
ence.25 Bergson further alludes to a relation between film and the virtual
when he observes that the recollected past appears to consciousness
as the changing image reflected in ‘a moving-mirror’ (2012: 165). In
addition, he observes that the recollected content of the past gradually
appears to one as the ill-defined content of dream-states, deliriums and
hallucinations –
i.e., as though ‘they were phantoms superadded to
solid perceptions and conceptions of our waking life, will-o-wisps which
hover above it’ (154). Perhaps it is worth observing that the visual image
of mirrors as well as the content of their optical reflections have been

used throughout the history of cinema to fulfil the diegetic function of
revealing something essential about the nature of particular characters.
In some of the most profound uses of this visual metaphor of the mirror,
these revelations involve a character coming to terms with their past. In
film, it tends to be the case that when there is a mirror present, someone
is undergoing a profound modification. The presence of mirrors in the
history of western cinema is evidenced by their prevalence in the films
of Orson Welles, Robert Clouse, Martin Scorsese and Wim Wenders.
Here, one cannot help but think of Rita Hayward’s riveting elaboration
of her past as she stumbles blindly through a hall of mirrors in The Lady
from Shanghai (Welles 1947); Bruce Lee’s recollection that ‘the enemy
is only images and illusions’ as he battles infinitely recurring images of
a phantasmal foe in Enter the Dragon (Clouse 1973); Robert De Niro’s
psychotic self-examination in Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1976); or Harry
Dean Stanton’s heart-breaking elaboration of his past to his ex-wife
through a two-way mirror in the penultimate sequence of Paris, Texas.
In each, there is a visual linkage among the mirror, hallucination and
moments of profound modification of at least one character. Though
it might be observed that these instances of mirrors in film prioritise
visual expressions of change, it should be pointed out that both Bergson
and Deleuze explicitly stipulate that change is an aspect of temporality.
When coupled with the observation that the filmic representation of
mirrors tends to be concomitant with change in some sense of the term
(as a modification of a character’s sense of self, a variation of the identi-
ties or motives of other characters, or a change to other elements of the
filmic universe), this implies an involvement of aspects of temporality,
and (thus) is a cinematic representation of time. Bergson’s textual allu-
sions to mirrors and the mercurial elements of the past expressed in
their reflected contents, when coupled with the plurality of filmic rep-
resentations of mirrors, suggest a conceptual foundation for Deleuze’s
elaboration of the nature of time through reference to filmic expression.
Ronald Bogue observes that Deleuze identifies filmic sequences involv-
ing mirrors as the most basic expression of virtual and actual exchange
involved in crystal-images (2003: 121). Deleuze explicitly notes that
crystal-images afford a direct presentation of time. What does it mean to
suggest that time may be the sort of metaphysical entity that may be pre-
sented directly? Deleuze contends that crystal-images express two claims
about the nature of temporality (which he formulates negatively): (1)
that temporal ordering is ‘not made up of succession’ (1997b: 274); (2)
that time is non-reducible to an isolated temporal instant (i.e., a static
moment isolated from a temporal continuum or temporal flow). The

suggestion that it would be inaccurate to artificially isolate the object
presented as a temporally extended element of a duration is uncon-
tentious on ontological g rounds – p arts are non-identical to wholes.
Deleuze’s claim that crystal-images diminish the importance of linear
temporal succession (t1, t2 . . . tn) invites explanation. The claim is that
temporality is non-reducible to succession. It is important to point out
that Deleuze is not denying that linear temporal ordering appears to
obtain in film (as it does in the non-filmic world). In this sense, Deleuze’s
distinction is analogous to Aristotle’s identification – in Physics IV,
219b2–219b926 – that time may be characterised as something other
than either what is measured (i.e., the motion of existents) or the linear
succession of numbers that one uses when one measures the motion of
existents. Deleuze modifies Aristotle’s distinction to suggest that the
measure of the movement of existents is ontologically secondary to the
form of temporality. Deleuze’s claim here is that linear temporal suc-
cession is ontologically dependent on a more fundamental ontological
relation. It is this fundamental relation that is directly expressed by
the crystal-image. Deleuze is suggesting that there is an ontological
process more fundamental to temporality than the succession of tem-
poral moments; though there still may be the succession of scenes in a
film (just as the succession of minutes, hours and years seem to obtain
as adequate measures of the moments of the durations enjoyed by the
real entities that may or may not be represented in film), there is some
ontological process primary to these. It is this process that is presented
in the crystal-image; the direct-image of time is a filmic representation of
the ontologically primary process of time.
Deleuze’s elaboration of the direct presentation of time through
filmic hyalosigns is a Bergsonian film philosophy that Bergson never got
around to writing. This philosophical lineage is evidenced by Deleuze’s
observation that crystal-images illustrate an ontologically primary ‘indi-
visible unity of an actual image and “its” virtual image’ (1997b: 79).
Each of these terms and the relation between them cries out for clari-
fication. Bergson elucidates the complex nature of the relation through
reference to the metaphor of an object and its reflection in a mirror.27
Bergson makes two stipulations about the natures of the relata: the
objects reflected by the mirror enjoy an actual mode of existence; the
reflected images are virtual. These two modes of being may be distin-
guished from one another by their respective properties (or predicates).
Bergson explicitly identifies materiality and (by implication) material
causal efficacy as the relevant predicates. The claim is that both causal
efficacy and materiality may be predicated of actual objects. Virtual

entities enjoy none of the capacities to be influenced by entities that
characterise physical material existence; virtual entities are immaterial
and neutral with respect to material causation. In contradistinction, an
entity is actual if it is causally relevant in a material circumstance. If
one were to characterise materiality and causal efficacy as ontological
conditions which must be met for an object to enjoy actuality, then
one must observe that virtual entities do not obtain as actual, because
they fail to fulfil these. Bergson positively identifies the virtual as the
ontological domain which most closely resembles ‘the plane of a dream’
(2012: 165) (i.e., the domain populated by phantasmal entities that
– for all their apparent reality – lack the capacity to affect actualised
entities). The specification that virtual entities enjoy the predication of
immateriality seems to invite a comparison of virtual entities to either
of any of the species of abstract entities (i.e., abstracta) or possibilities.
Virtual entities are none of these. Citing Proust’s formulation, Deleuze
insists that virtuality is ‘real without being actual, ideal without being
abstract’ (1991: 96; Proust 1982: 902). He observes that the possible
may be conceptualised as that which subsists in opposition to the real,
in the sense that what is possible is not yet realised: the possible does not
obtain as something realised, in the sense that it obtains as either that
which is ontologically prior to that which is realised or that which is a
potential result of a deduction that has not yet been made. The sugges-
tion here is that possibility enjoys a modality that is categorically distinct
from that enjoyed by real entities – i.e., ‘the possible has no reality’
(Deleuze 1991: 96). Deleuze further specifies that the virtual may be
identified as a species of ideality, in the sense that it enjoys the property
of immateriality – a property that tends to be associated with ideal
objects. Here, it is essential to note that the property of immateriality
does not imply indeterminacy. The quality of immateriality implies only
that an entity is not subject to quantitative determination. If Ingarden
has demonstrated anything, it is that immaterial entities – like reflections
in mirrors, literary characters, photographically represented o bjectivities
– are subject to rigorous qualitative determination. A viewer of Cool
Hand Luke (Rosenberg 1967) knows the exact nature of the protago-
nist, right down to how many hard-boiled eggs he can eat. Because
virtual entities may be qualitatively determined, they enjoy none of the
ontological ambiguity that tends to be associated with abstract entities.
It is perhaps worth noting that the metaphysical conditions implied by
the distinction between virtuality and actuality are adequate, in the sense
that were they denied, the result would be an existential terror of the
kind evoked by certain horror movies. Here one cannot help but think
of the virtual image clawing its way out of a television screen in David
Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), or the terrifying moments of mon-
sters materialising out of reflective surfaces in the trilogy of Japanese
Ring films (Nakata 1998, 1999; Tsuruta 2000). The terror elicited by
these scenes of the virtual being actualised as material is sufficient to
demonstrate the metaphysical truth of the complex distinction between
the virtual and actual.
The crystal-image involves a relation of the virtual memory and the
actual present. The tension of these is the content of time’s direct expres-
sion in cinema. Bergson suggests that the past emerges as a moment
of temporal bifurcation, a relation among the virtual and actual that
yields a division of the instant into ‘two jets exactly symmetrical, one
of which falls back toward the past, whilst the other springs forward
to the future’ (2012: 160). Deleuze explicitly characterises this relation
as the simultaneous creation of two discrete temporal modalities (the
memorial past and the fleeting present).28 The staggering implication is
that the past does not follow after the lived present – one’s memory of
an object obtains simultaneously with one’s perception of the object.
Proust beautifully illustrates this through reference to the lingering scent
of madeleines:
But let a noise or scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again
in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual,
ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitu-
ally concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self which s eemed
– perhaps for long years seemed – t o be dead but was not altogether dead,
is awakened and reanimated as it receives the celestial nourishment that is
brought to it. A minute freed from the order of time has re-created in us,
to feel it, the man freed from the order of time. And one can understand
that this man should have confidence in his joy, even if the simple taste of
a madeleine does not seem logically to contain within it the reasons for this
joy, one can understand the word ‘death’ should have no meaning for him;
situated outside time, why should he fear the future?
But this species of optical illusion, which placed beside me a moment of
the past that was incompatible with the present, could not last for long.
The images presented to us by the voluntary memory can, it is true, be
prolonged at will, for the voluntary memory requires no more exertion on
our part than the turning over of the pages in a picture book. (Proust 1982:
906)
Perhaps what is most remarkable about this eloquent elaboration of

the function of a time-crystal is that it seems to involve a denial of the
hypothesis that a dependency relation obtains among the present and the
past; the past does not subsist from the present; the two (characterised as
any of past and present, virtual and actual, perceived object and content
of recollection) emerge in immanent relation to one another as ontologi-
cal correlates, each designating a discrete temporal modality. Perceptual
moments of quantifiably existent entities are co-created as virtual enti-
ties that obtain as existing qualities. Further, Deleuze carefully notes
that a crystalline-image never reaches a state of completion – it never
obtains as ‘altogether dead’ – in the sense that its process of producing
the virtual and actual never ceases. That is, the crystal involves an ‘indis-
cernible exchange [that] is always renewed and reproduced’ (1997b:
274). The suggestion here is that time is continually regained in the
ongoing process of generating the past and the present simultaneously.
This is a regeneration of discrete modes of time, in which each enjoys a
temporal difference from what was immediately prior as well as an onto-
logical difference from the other. In this sense, the attribute of finitude
cannot be predicated of time. Though the relation among the virtual
and the actual is stabilised in the form of a relation, this stability does
not imply any temporal, logical or ontological cessation. In the most
general sense, one cannot predicate an end to time – i.e., temporality
is an ongoing relation, a continuum of differentiation. Taken together,
these elucidations reveal that the direct-image of time involves four non-
competing aspects: (1) the fundamental indeterminacy of a singularity;
(2) virtuality and actuality, which enjoy a categorical distinction (as
is demonstrated by their non-reducible properties); (3) a simultaneous
creation of the past and present, each of which is characterised as a non-
reducible (non-subsistent, relatively autonomous) way of time’s being;
(4) its expression as an ongoing stable relation (i.e., a continuum) that is
akin to the process of a seed involved in a germination, in the sense that
it produces difference, in multiple senses.
Concluding Remarks: The Time of Cinema

Perhaps there has been no greater change in the visual arts than the
tectonic shift of the camera recording the movements of the workers
leaving the Lumière brothers’ factory. No more were we condemned to
simply viewing the arrested movements of entities in repose. No more
was all visual art a still life. No more was the realism of art forced to
capture entities arrested in time. The birth of cinema changed everything
for those who were able to apprehend entities expressing themselves as
singular moments of time.
In his Cinema texts, Deleuze suggests that the changes heralded by

cinema involved a change to our conceptions of time. Film reveals
temporality to be a singularity. The cinema is a temporal art form,
in the sense that it conveys the actions of entities over a temporal
duration, and these effect qualitative changes in the lives of the audi-
ence for an extended duration of moments in time. Deleuze observes
that some of cinema’s most sublime m oments – the pure optical and
acoustic situations – suggest a deeper involvement with temporality
and cinema. In these, the viewer is treated to a glimpse of time’s radical
indeterminacy. When a character looks into a mirror or catches a reflec-
tion of themselves in the window of a passing streetcar, this reveals a
further aspect of the nature of temporal change. With the prolifera-
tion of crystal-images, cinema reveals time to be something other than
the mere succession of temporal instants. The image in the mirror
illustrates an exchange of the virtual and the actual – an occurrence
that is ontologically primary to a succession of existents. Further, it
is observed that this relation of virtual and actual involves the strictly
simultaneous and continual creation of past and present as correlated
modalities of time.
Notes
1. Referring to Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical and The Logic of Sense,
Williams observes that in these ‘concepts and artwork grow inwards and
explode outwards together, in a style with more rhythm, texture, complexity
of pace, and linguistic invention’ than is evident in either of Deleuze’s books on
Cinema (2011: 161).
2. With his suggestion that Deleuze seems to bear an affinity to various phenom-
enologists and explicitly phenomenological claims, Schrader is hardly a voice in
the wilderness. Particularly interesting recent studies advancing similar theses
include Somers-Hall 2019; Wambacq 2017; Lampert 2015; Bryant 2008; and
Shores 2014. It should be pointed out that most of these tend to focus on
ork – primarily Difference and Repetition – while leaving aside
Deleuze’s early w
Deleuze’s critiques of Husserl (and the Husserlian concept of ‘natural percep-
tion’) in The Logic of Sense, Cinema 1: The-Movement Image, and Cinema 2:
The Time-Image. François Zourabichvili suggests that when one takes Deleuze’s
characterisation of ‘becoming’ – particularly, the various cinematic becomings
that are evidenced by the changes in the way films are made, as well as the ways
cinematic narrative style has altered with the French New Wave – Deleuze’s
conceptual distance ‘from phenomenology and its heirs’ becomes apparent
(Zourabichvili 2012: 173).
3. Cook offers a lovely, condensed history of the art form, including its genesis
from the zoetrope (2016: 7–14).
4. Perhaps due to their brevity, Sartre’s observations have generated scant critical
analysis. Dana Polan is one of the few to have elaborated on Sartre’s ‘occa-
sional’ thought on cinema (Polan 1987).
5. Here, Deleuze mentions Merleau- Ponty’s remarks in Phenomenology of

Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 68). Wambaq notes that Merleau-Ponty also
makes passing reference to cinema in a few other texts (2017: 233 n.3).
6. Typically, the illusion of perceived motion is achieved by projecting still images
at a rate of rate of twenty-four frames per second. Settling on this frame rate
was the result of a fraught history of technological evolution that spanned
almost two-thirds of the nineteenth century: beginning with the invention of
Plateau’s Phenakistoscope (1832), progressing through Horner’s Zoetrope
(1832), Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope (1879) and Edison’s Kinetograph (1891),
to finally be perfected with the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe (1895).
7. Spiegelberg observes that Husserlian intentional directedness at an object
involves four discrete characteristics: (1) objectivation; (2) identification; (3)
connection; (4) constitution. The intentional act of fulfilling schematised aspects
occurs in the intuitive fulfilment of an entity which appears as an incomplete –
not yet fully determined – form. This tends to be associated with the intentional
process of connection (Spiegelberg 1971: 108–11). Mitscherling presents an
excellent elaboration of the complex process of fulfilling schematised aspects
that are presented in literary works of art. The model presented here is analogous
to the process of natural perception. Mitscherling writes: ‘When consciousness
attends to (or “intends”) a particular object, it is usually the case that only some
of the “aspects” of that object are presented immediately to consciousness, and
these aspects are said to be either fulfilled or unfulfilled. For example, when
we look to a table from above, the table presents us with the aspect of “table-
top” and “table-bottom”, and the former is fulfilled while the latter remains
unfulfilled. When we look at the table from beneath, the former (table-top)
aspect is unfulfilled, and the latter (table-bottom) is fulfilled. A similar situation
obtains in the case of the literary work of art, but here the reader is often forced
to fulfil for herself many of those aspects that are presented by the author as
unfulfilled, and she does so with regard to those aspects that are presented more
fully, i.e., as fulfilled. The latter provide the reader with a direction to follow in
her intentional activity of fulfilling these unfulfilled aspects, which are said to
have been presented as “schematised”. This intentional activity of the fulfilment
of schematised aspects is a central component of the general activity of “con-
cretisation”. As no character, for example, can ever be exhaustively presented
by an a uthor – n o character, that is to say, can ever be portrayed as fully and
completely determined – the manner in which this concretisation is to proceed
can only be schematically determined by the literary work through its stratum
of these schematised aspects’ (Mitscherling 2010: 143–4, n.10).
8. Deleuze elaborates on Walter Ruttmann’s masterful sequence during a lecture
on the movement-image (Deleuze 1982).
9. Husserl writes: ‘to the extent, however, that every-consciousness is “conscious-
ness-of”, the essential study of consciousness also includes that of consciousness-
meaning and consciousness-objectivity as such. To study any kind of objectivity
whatever according to its general essence (a study that can pursue interests far
removed from those of knowledge theory and the investigation of conscious-
ness) means to concern oneself with objectivity’s modes of givenness and to
exhaust its essential content with the process of “clarification” proper to it’
(1965: 90–1).
10. Dastur writes: ‘because, even if transcendental phenomenology remains dual-
istic in spite of Husserl’s efforts toward monism, its purpose is not to assert
dualism dogmatically, but rather to demonstrate, in line with the phenomeno-
logical way of thinking, that unity can only be given pretheoretically (vortheo-
retisch): the awakening of thought splits this unity irrevocably into pieces. That
is why, for Husserl, dualism never ceases to be a p roblem – a problem which

pointed to itself as the most thought deserving’ (1983: 65).
11. In Deleuze 2002: 22–32 and 32–52.
12. Deleuze observes: ‘In other words, if I want to speak in more scholarly terms,
mathematical or physical terms borrowed from Leibniz’s terminology, move-
ment in the process of occurring implies a differential, a differential of move-
ment. The unity of movement in the process of occurring is, in the first place, the
differential of movement, that is, the difference between the movement that has
just occurred and the one that’s occurring, or between the one that is occurring
and the one that is going to occur. We can call this differential effort (or urge);
in Latin, we will call it conatus, that is, effort, or urge, or admit that Bergson is
not far off when he calls it tendency’ (Deleuze 1987).
13. Hyppolite observes: ‘This [Bergsonian] d uration – w
hich is pure succession, the
extension of the past into the present, and therefore already m emory – is not a
series of distinct terms outside of one another, nor a coexistence of past with
present’ (2003: 112).
14. Here Deleuze observes: ‘Pure duration offers us a succession that is purely inter-
nal, without exteriority; space, an exteriority, without succession (in effect, that
is the memory of the past; the recollection of what has happened in space would
already imply a mind that endures)’ (1991: 37).
15. Bergson writes: ‘The wholly superficial displacements of masses and molecules
studied in physics and chemistry would become by relation to that inner vital
movement (which is transformation and not translation) what the position of a
moving object is to the movement of that object in space’ (1998: 37).
16. Barthes characterises this capacity as the punctum of an image. Barthes elabo-
rates: ‘it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an
arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this
prick; this mark made by a pointed instrument . . . punctum; for punctum is
also: sting, speck, cut, little h
ole – a nd also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s
punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to
me)’ (1981: 26–7).
17. Hansen highlights the fraught nature of a hermeneutic investigation of the
nature of Benjamin’s concept when she observes: ‘Anything but a clearly delim-
ited, stable concept, aura describes a cluster of meanings and relations that
appear in Benjamin’s writings in various configurations and not always under
its own name; it is this conceptual fluidity that allows aura to become such a
productive nodal point in Benjamin’s thinking’ (2008: 339).
18. Benjamin elaborates on the disquieting experience one might have when viewing
the haunting gazes of subjects in Daguerreotype images of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth c enturies – i.e., the sorts of images that would have most
certainly been familiar to Bergson when he was conceptualising the nature
of duration and the effect of the ‘cinematographic illusion’. Benjamin writes:
‘Experience of the aura thus arises from the fact that a response characteristic
of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and
inanimate or natural objects. The person we look at, or who feels he is being
looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at
means to invest it with the ability to look back at us’ (2006a: 338).
19. Avant-garde films tend to be at the vanguard of these explorations of the pos-
sibilities of filmic representation. Though rarely enjoying critical or commercial
success, these films – which are often rich in symbolic meaning and dream
sequences that confound the passive viewer – truly show the way for future cin-
ematic artists. Maya Deren’s and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes in the Afternoon
(1941) is a wonderful example.
20. Robbe-Grillet writes: ‘Description once served to situate the chief contours of
a setting, then to cast light on some of its particularly revealing elements; it no
longer mentions anything except insignificant objects, or objects which it is con-
cerned to make so. It once claimed to reproduce a pre-existing reality; it now
asserts its creative function’ (1965: 144–7).
21. It would be difficult to overstate either the longevity or importance of Plato’s
identification of art as mimetic. Charles Sanders Peirce offers only a slight
modification of Plato’s suggestion with his observation that visual art tends to
represent ‘iconic signs’ of the real (1982: 53–4). John Hyman develops the epis-
temological aspects of Plato’s claim by insisting that one can only understand
the truth of a p ainting – i.e., understand its sense – through reference to the
immaterial or material objects that it represents (2009: 495–8). This is not to
say that Robbe-Grillet is a voice in the wilderness. Echoing John Ruskin, E. H.
Gombrich observes that visual art tends to involve a creation of the ‘innocence
of the eye’ (1960: 296). One implication of Gombrich’s suggestion is that such
innocence might not pre-exist the viewer’s participation with the work of art.
This further suggests that art is non-mimetic, in the sense that it cannot resemble
(or copy) that which does not exist.
22. Deleuze continually modifies his concept of singularity. It seems each of the
books following The Logic of Sense – in which Deleuze first uses the term –
witnesses a further evolution of the nuanced nature of singularities. Though
Manuel DeLanda suggests that singularities may be characterised as ‘spaci-
otemporal dynamisms’ and ‘passive selves’, these attempts at definition seem
inadequate, in the sense that both of these are profoundly opaque, and perhaps
even involve definitional aspects that would confound any assertion of identity
(2002: 206–7). Steven Shaviro observes that Deleuze tends to identify singu-
larities as ‘acategorical’ entities, in the sense ‘that they cannot be categorized
in any terms broader than their own . . . they cannot be fitted into a hierarchy
of species and genera, of the particular and the general: just as they cannot be
derived as instances of any larger, more overarching and predetermining struc-
ture’ (2012: 89, n.11). Daniel W. Smith traces Deleuze’s concept of singularities
to a modification of Albert Lautman’s suggestion – in his Essay on the Notions
of Structure and Existence in Mathematics – that points on a geometric curve
may be distinguished from one another in terms of whether or not they are
involved in a change of direction in the curve: ordinary points do not radically
alter the direction of the curve; singular points (or singularities) are moments on
the curve at which the trajectory of the curve alters (2012: 302). Smith further
observes that Deleuze generalises the variability implied in Lautman’s strictly
mathematical definition, to suggest qualitative and affective components. It
should be noted that not all of these need be temporal, in the sense that some
have suggested that mathematical entities enjoy an a-temporal existence. Taken
together, these suggest that a singularity may by rigorously characterised as any
of a temporal or non-temporal moment of variation or difference (i.e., change).
It is conceivable that such moments could be visually or aurally represented in
film. This is plainly the case in films involving profound crisis, if it is granted
that these are not – and perhaps never aspired to be – copies, imitations or
duplications of a world marked by the striking appearance of continuity, banal-
ity or putative normalcy, all of which might be characteristics of a circumstance
bereft of profound variation. It might be further observed that all of these
apparent traits of normalcy could obtain as representations in film – the typical,
even quotidian, has often been the subject matter of some of the more fascinat-
ing films of the last hundred years of cinema; e.g., the films of Antonioni, but
this would not negate (or otherwise diminish) the possibility of singularities
being present in these, as long as one acknowledges that the seemingly banal
may involve understated crises, which are – for all their subtlety – just as pro-
found as those expressed in the most bombastic Hollywood blockbuster.
23. Deleuze elaborates: ‘These are pure optical and sound situations, in which the
character does not know how to respond, abandoned spaces in which he ceases
to experience and act so that he enters into flight, goes on a trip, comes and
goes, vaguely indifferent to what happens to him, undecided as to what must be
done’ (1997b: 272).
24. Bergson writes: ‘Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up
some period of our history, we become conscious of an act sui generis by which
we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first, in the
past – a work of adjustment, something like the framing of a camera’ (1991:
133–4).
25. Bergson writes: ‘The more he analyses his experience, the more he will split into
two personages, one of which moves about on the stage while the other sits and
looks. On the one hand, he knows that he continues to be what he was, a self
who thinks and acts comfortably to what the situation requires, a self-inserted
into real life, and adapting itself to it by a free effort of the will; this is what his
perception of the present assures him. But the memory of this present, which is
equally there, makes him believe that he is repeating what has been said already,
seeing again what has been seen already, and so transforms him into an actor
reciting his part’ (2012: 169).
26. It is important to observe the limited scope of this analogy. The conceptual dif-
ferences between Deleuze’s and Aristotle’s respective philosophies of time are
substantive, as are the differences in their metaphysics. Daniel W. Smith (2001)
elaborates on the differences between Deleuze’s and Aristotle’s metaphysics.
27. Bergson writes: ‘The memory seems to be the perception of what the object in
the mirror is to the object in front of it. The object can be touched as well as
seen; acts upon us as well as we on it; it is pregnant with possible actions; it is
actual. The image is virtual, and though it resembles the object, it is incapable
of doing what the object does’ (2012: 165).
28. Deleuze observes: ‘What constitutes the crystal-image is the most fundamental
operation of time: since past is constituted not after the present that it was but
at the same time, it has to split itself in two at each moment as present and
past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same
thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is
launched toward the future while the other falls into the past’ (1997b: 81).
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Films
Michelangelo Antonioni (dir.), Red Desert, Rizolli, 1964.
Luis Buñuel (dir.), Un Chien Andalou, Les Grands Films, 1929.
Robert Clouse (dir.), Enter the Dragon, Warner Brothers and Concord Productions
Inc., 1973.
David Cronenberg (dir.), Videodrome, Universal, 1983.
Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid (dir.), Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943.
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), The Shining, The Producer Circle Company, 1980.
Paul McGuigan (dir.), The Hounds of Baskerville, BBC, 8 January 2012.
Hideo Nakata (dir.), Ring, Ringu/Rasen Production Committee, 1998.
Hideo Nakata (dir.), Ring 2, Asmik Ace Entertainment, 1999.
Stuart Rosenberg (dir.), Cool Hand Luke, Jalem Productions, 1967.
Roberto Rossellini (dir.), Europe ’ 51, Roberto Rossellini, Carlo Ponti, Dino De
Laurentiis, 1952.
Walter Ruttmann (dir.), Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, Fox Europa, 1927
Martin Scorsese (dir.), Taxi Driver, Bill/Phillips Productions and Italo/Judeo
Productions, 1976.
Norio Tsuruta (dir.), Ring 0: Birthday, Ring 0 Production Group, 2000.

Orson Welles (dir.), The Lady from Shanghai, Mercury Productions, 1947.
Wim Wenders (dir.), Paris, Texas, Road Movies, Filmproduktion GmbH, Argos
Films S.A., 1984.
Robert Wise (dir.), The Haunting, Argyle Enterprises, 1963.
Denis Villeneuve (dir.), Blade Runner 2049, Columbia Pictures: 2017.
Chapter 10
Time, Truth and the Power of the False
Vernon W. Cisney
In his parabolic masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich

Nietzsche famously writes, ‘Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell
you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion,
finally, a child’ (1966: 25). Nietzsche traces a p rogression – o
f a people
or of an individual – through the laborious and toilsome bearing of a
culture’s ‘truths’ and values, to the sacred no-saying of leonine adoles-
cence whereby those truths are cast off, and finally to a renewed power
of innocence and f orgetfulness – akin to the affirmation and openness of
childhood – that enables genuine creation. The child knows no shame or
inhibitions, longs for and believes in the impossible, and forms playful
assemblages with anyone (human or non-human, real or imaginary)
willing and able to do so. Each day she creates her world anew, while
the man of the so-called ‘real world’ fritters his life away resentfully
paying obeisance to his ideological and corporate masters. In a surpris-
ing proximity to Nietzsche’s philosophical nemesis, we might say that
to enter the kingdom, one must become a child.1 Truth itself, Nietzsche
also famously (some might say ‘infamously’) claims, is a ‘movable
host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms . . . illusions
which we have forgotten are illusions’ (1979: 84). Unlike most of the
philosophical tradition before him, Nietzsche calls into question the
very value of truth itself and of the drive that sets truth upon its pedestal
in the clouds, sacrificing everything upon its altar: ‘The will to truth is
in need of a critique’ (1998: 110). In its place, Nietzsche provocatively
emphasises the process of truth-creation, which, he argues throughout
the body of his work, is a kind of artistry.
Given the pride of place that Nietzsche occupies in the thinking of
Gilles Deleuze, it is hardly surprising that when Deleuze approaches
the question of truth, and in particular in relation to creation, as in
his expansive, two-volume taxonomy of the cinema, his discussion is
214 Vernon W. Cisney
framed by Nietzsche’s critiques and reformulations of truth. In place of

Nietzsche’s camel, lion and child, Deleuze recasts the chain of the ‘truth-
ful man’, ‘the forger’ and ‘the artist’. This arc is traced in response to the
problem of the relation between time and truth; and it is the forger and
their relation to the artist with which this chapter is primarily concerned.
In his work, Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time, James Williams
marginalises the importance of the Cinema books for an understanding
of Deleuze’s philosophy of time. Dedicating a mere six pages to the
volumes, he refers diminutively to the Cinema project as the ‘most exten-
sive application of Deleuze’s philosophy of time’ (Williams 2011: 159).
Treating them as ‘application’ suggests a structural or methodological
form or stasis at the heart of Deleuze’s understanding of time, one that
Deleuze then merely casts, unchanged, over his taxonomical history of
cinema. This would explain why Williams defends his criticisms as ‘an
explanation of why the film works add little and in fact might take away
from [Deleuze’s] philosophy of time in its most consistent and exten-
sive form’ (161). Leaving aside the oddness in saying that the Cinema
volumes constitute a mere ‘application’ of Deleuze’s thoughts on time
(while simultaneously marking the various ways in which those books
depart from the temporal concepts of Difference and Repetition and The
Logic of Sense), more pernicious, perhaps, is the suggestion that there
could be ‘a’ philosophy of time in Deleuze’s work, a once-and-for-all
understanding that might be simply applied in various other contexts.
This is particularly unusual given that Williams himself rightly argues
throughout the book that time in Deleuze is a ‘multiplicity of processes,
where times are dimensions of one another according to asymmetrical
syntheses’ (164). If time itself is multiple – such that we should more
accurately speak of ‘times’ – it makes little sense to argue that Deleuze’s
treatments of time constitute ‘a’ singular philosophy that can be simply
applied in other contexts.2
The point of this piece, however, is not to lob criticisms at Williams’s
book, which is impressive in many respects, but rather to take as my
point of departure the rejection of Williams’s own reason for neglect-
ing a treatment of the Cinema books.3 Contrary to his view, it seems
to me that the books put into play the very elaboration of an adap-
tive temporal multiplicity that Williams’s book highlights – times that
change with the times. Through his own creative conceptual taxonomy,
Deleuze temporalises the very concept of truth, tracing the history of
the concepts of the cinema, and the ways in which these concepts think
their own history as well as the history of their present (and perhaps,
their future):
Time, Truth and the Power of the False 215
A theory of cinema is not ‘about’ cinema, but about the concepts that
cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts
corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in general having
no privilege over others. It is at the level of the interference of many prac-
tices that things happen, beings, images, concepts, all the kinds of events.
(Deleuze 1989: 280)
One of the most perplexing among the many innovative concepts in the
Cinema volumes is the ‘power of the false which replaces and super-
sedes the form of the true’ (Deleuze 1989: 131). This ‘power of the
false’, introduced as early in Deleuze’s work as 1962’s Nietzsche and
Philosophy (1983: 96, 185), is immediately connected to what, in the
Cinema volumes, Deleuze characterises as truth: ‘What the artist is, is
creator of truth, because truth is not to be achieved, formed, or repro-
duced; it has to be created. There is no other truth than the creation of
the New’ (1989: 146–7).
Overlooking for the moment the apparent tension in the fact that
Deleuze valorises the false as the supersession of the form of the true,
while also celebrating the creation of truth, there is an even more dan-
gerous obstacle afoot. For the notions that truth is in any way subject to
the force of time, such that it must be created, or that there is a power – a
positive power, no l ess – i nherent to the false, these notions are antitheti-
cal not only to banal, common-sense understandings (as when parents,
for instance, attempt to impress upon their children the obvious superi-
ority of truth to falsehood), but, more importantly, to the philosophical
tradition’s understandings of truth and falsehood. Speaking broadly, we
can say that truth is traditionally characterised in terms that are static,
atemporal and positive (in senses that are at once ontological, epistemic
and moral), while falsehood has been predominantly characterised as
an absence, a lack of truth or of reality. Thus, the task of this paper
will be to explore the connections between the power of the false and
the creation of truth. To do so, we must look at the reasons for which
Deleuze argues that ‘time has always put the notion of truth into crisis’
(1989: 130). We will characterise this crisis of truth in both Platonic and
Aristotelian senses. We will then look at the notion of incompossibility
that Deleuze adopts from Leibniz, whereby he offers a forking of incom-
possibilities as the basic ‘form’ of time, as a strategy for responding to
the notion of truth that is put into crisis – this is the sense of the ‘power
of the false’ that we will explore. Finally, we will see that this power of
the false, as Deleuze conceives it, makes possible the creation of truth, in
the form of ‘minor art’ that conduces to the invention of a people.
Time and the Crisis of Truth

Throughout the history of philosophy, there has always been an antago-
nistic relation between truth and time, in that time – its passage and the
fluctuations that it e ntails – is precisely what the philosophical concep-
tion of truth attempts to repress or overcome. This antagonism is first
put on explicit display in the fifth century BCE, between the ‘becoming’
of Heraclitus and the ‘being’ of Parmenides. Heraclitus had posited the
world as ‘an everliving fire, being kindled in measures and put out in
measures’ (DK22B30),4 an intensive chaosmos in which one cannot step
twice into the same river, as there is no stasis, either to the self who steps
or to the river itself. Despite the pre-eminence of becoming, however,
Heraclitus also holds that underlying and structuring the flow of this
everliving fire is the λογος (logos – reason, word, argument, language,
account, rational principle, etc.), the principle that, in human beings,
reflects a tiny ember of the divine: ‘It is wise to hearken, not to me, but
to the Word [logos], and to confess that all things are one’ (DK22B50).
Against this Heraclitean doctrine of flux and just a few decades later,
Parmenides posits the ‘steadfast heart of persuasive truth’ (DK28B1.29),
that what is ‘is, and that it cannot not be’ (DK28B2.3). Truth is change-
less, synonymous with being itself, and neither comes to be nor passes
away, and while the natural world may give every appearance of con-
stant becoming, this is not where the philosopher’s truth is discovered;
rather, truth is found in the knowledge of whatever there may be that is
impervious to time and change.
With his theory of forms, Plato provides the ontology and epistemol-
ogy to reconcile the Heraclitean and Parmenidean views, with his thumb
firmly on the scale for Parmenides. In echo of Parmenides’ claim that
wisdom pertains only to that which is not subject to time and change,
Plato writes:
Indeed, it isn’t even reasonable to say that there is such a thing as knowl-
edge, Cratylus, if all things are passing on and none remain. For if that
thing itself, knowledge, did not pass on from being knowledge, then knowl-
edge would always remain, and there would be such a thing as knowledge.
On the other hand, if the very form of knowledge passed on from being
knowledge, the instant it passed on into a different form than that of
knowledge, there would be no knowledge. And if it were always passing
on, there would always be no knowledge. Hence, on this account, no one
could know anything and nothing could be known either. But if there is
always that which knows and that which is known, if there are such things
as the beautiful, the good, and each one of the things that are, it doesn’t
appear to me that these things can be at all like flowings or motions, as we

were saying just now they were. (Plato, Cratylus, 440a-c)
If there is a form of knowledge, then the empirical instantiation of knowl-

edge must participate in that form. But the form of knowledge, being a
form, cannot change, and hence the empirical content of knowledge
– the knowing of the knower – must remain immobile as well. It does
so, Plato argues, by concerning itself only with those things which,
themselves, are not subject to the force of time – the beautiful, the good,
the just, etc.; that is, the forms. Indeed, in the Theaetetus, where Plato
explicitly engages the Heraclitean and Parmenidean views, highlighting
exactly what he takes from each, he writes of the Heracliteans:
We were most anxious to prove that all things are in motion, in order to
make that answer come out correct; but what has really emerged is that,
if all things are in motion, every answer, on whatever subject, is equally
correct, both ‘it is thus’ and ‘it is not thus’ – or if you like ‘becomes’, as
we don’t want to use any expressions which will bring our friends to a
standstill. (Plato, Theaetetus, 183a).
Lacking any static templates of knowledge, the Heracliteans leave them-

selves in a situation such that every statement of the form, ‘X is y’,
is no more or less true than the statement ‘X is not y’. Knowledge,
according to Plato, is impossible on such an understanding, and thus the
Heraclitean desire for the logos is doomed from the off. But of course,
as should be obvious, this argument has hidden within it the assump-
tion, outlined above, that knowledge can pertain only to that which is
fixed and atemporal (for which Plato offers up his theory of forms). As
Francis Cornford writes, ‘Plato is determined to make us feel the need
of his Forms without mentioning them’ (1935: 99). In the absence of
such static models, Plato argues, our epistemic comportment toward
the world is merely one of opinion: ‘As for those who study the many
beautiful things but do not see the beautiful itself and are incapable of
following another who leads them to it, who see many just things but
not the just itself, and so with e verything – these people, we shall say,
opine everything but have no knowledge of anything they opine’ (Plato,
Republic, V.479e). The Parmenidean presuppositions in this framework
are clear, and Plato’s understanding of the antagonistic relation between
time and truth would broadly characterise the philosophical tradition
for millennia.
Aristotle deepens and formalises this antagonism with his articulation
of the problem that would come to be known in more recent scholar-
ship as the ‘problem of future contingents’,5 statements of possibility
concerning future events. Aristotle writes: ‘With regard to what is and

what has been it is necessary for the affirmation or the negation to be
true or false . . . But with particulars that are going to be it is different’
(De Interpretatione, Chapter 9). It is either true or false to say that ‘It
is raining’, or that ‘It rained yesterday’, but the claim, ‘It might rain
tomorrow’, is subject to different considerations, it seems. To say that
‘it may rain tomorrow’ is akin to saying ‘it is possible that it will rain
tomorrow or it is possible that it will not rain tomorrow’, which opens
us to problems, in that one of these eventualities will not come to pass.
Citing Aristotle’s famous example of the sea battle, Deleuze frames
the problem in the following way: ‘If it is true that a naval battle may
take place tomorrow, how are we to avoid one of the true following
consequences: either the impossible proceeds from the possible (since, if
the battle takes place, it is no longer possible that it may not take place),
or the past is not necessarily true (since the battle could have not taken
place)’ (1989: 130, translation modified). Aristotle endeavours to solve
the problem by arguing that propositions regarding future contingents
must be understood as neither true nor false: ‘Clearly, therefore, not
everything is or happens of necessity: some things happen as chance has
it, and of the affirmation and the negation neither is true rather than
the other’ (De Interpretatione, Chapter 9). Once more, the Platonic
considerations pertaining to truth, that it is necessary, universal and
unchanging, are evident in Aristotle’s reflections, however different his
question in this instance may be.
The Stoics – in particular, Diodorus Cronus, with his so- called
‘Master Argument’ – offer a different resolution to the problem of future
contingents. Epictetus reports that, for Diodorus, ‘of the following
propositions, any two imply a contradiction to the third. They are these:
“That everything past is necessarily true”; “that an impossibility is not
the consequence of a possibility”; and, “that something is a possibility,
which neither is nor will be true”’ (1944: II.19). Diodorus, Epictetus
claims, argues for the truth of the first two propositions, at the exclusion
of the third. Contrary to appearances from within our finite situatedness
within time, there are no future contingents, in other words. Of the two
statements – ‘The sea battle will take place’, and ‘the sea battle will not
take place’ – one is true and the other false, and they are so necessar-
ily, even if we are unable to discern their truth or falsity beforehand.
However semantically overburdened this whole exercise may appear,
it nonetheless demonstrates the complications that arise whenever we
bring the concept of truth into interaction with the notion of time.
Leibniz’s Proposal – Incompossible Worlds

It is seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who, for
Deleuze, proposes the most interesting solution to Aristotle’s problem of
future contingents, and thereby, to the relation between time and truth.
Distinguishing between necessary and contingent truths, Leibniz argues
that ‘necessary truths depend upon the principle of contradiction’ (1989:
28). If we analyse the terms of the proposition, it becomes evident
that the predicate is contained within the subject, as in the hackneyed
example that ‘all bachelors are unmarried men’. It is a necessary truth
in that, in light of the very meanings of the terms, it is impossible for
it to be false. This is not so for contingent truths, however, for while it
may be true to say that ‘My car is blue’, there is nothing analytically
contradictory (however false it may be) in the claim that ‘my car is red’.
Nevertheless, even regarding contingent truths, Leibniz claims, it is still
the case that ‘there is always, underneath, a reason for the truth’, that
is, there is ultimately an exhaustive explanatory account for why it is
that I own this particular car, why that car was on the lot that day, and
why this particular car happened to have been painted blue. This is so
even if the ‘reason is understood completely only by God’ (28). Simply
put, even in the case of contingent truths, the predicate is ultimately
contained within the subject. Thus, if the proposition, ‘Caesar crossed
the Rubicon’, is true, it is so because the predicate of crossing the
Rubicon is contained within the subject of Caesar, even if it was know-
able beforehand only by God.
To see how this relates to our account of time and the crisis of truth,
we return to the example of the naval battle. The naval battle may or
may not take p lace – F leet A will go to battle with Fleet B or Fleet A
will not go to battle with Fleet B. Put otherwise, the predicate of going
to battle with Fleet B may or may not be contained within the subject
of Fleet A. But here we notice, if the predicates (‘going to battle with B’,
‘going to battle with A’) are contained within the subjects of Fleets A
and B independently of each other, they are so only because there must
a precisely tuned arrangement obtaining between the subjects – A and
B. A cannot go to battle with B without B also going to battle with A,
so their respective predicates must complement each other. Each fleet,
of course, consists of ships, each of which is guided and operated by
individual human beings, and each of these – the human beings, the
ships, the fleets – is itself a subject, containing within it all the predicates
pertaining to it, which means therefore that each subject in its own way
contains perspectives on all the rest, and ultimately, this implication can
theoretically be extended throughout the entirety of the cosmos. In his

‘Primary Truths’, Leibniz writes, ‘Every individual substance contains in
its perfect notion the entire universe and everything that exists in it, past,
present, and future’ (1989: 32).
Therefore, the predicates within any one subject could be differ-
ent only if the predicates in all other subjects were complementarily
adjusted. Each individual subject in the cosmos, along with every predi-
cate pertaining thereto, is part of a vast and intricately orchestrated,
finely tuned, series. Leibniz then accounts for the notion of possibility
by claiming that ‘There are, in fact, an infinite number of series of pos-
sible things. Moreover, one series certainly cannot be contained within
another, since each and every one of them is complete’ (1989: 29).
Each is ‘complete’ in the sense that each one consists of its plenum
of subjects, each of which is finely determined by its predicates, all of
which reflect all other predicates within all other subjects in that one
individual series (or ‘world’ in Leibniz’s terminology). Possibility, then,
is expressed in Leibniz’s terminology by way of an infinity of these
possible worlds (series) in the mind of God, each of which consists of
all possible subjects with their finely harmonised arrangement of predi-
cates, each of which reflects all the others in a unique way. However,
while each of these worlds is possible, they are each in-compossible
with all the others – o
nly one of these worlds can be real. The world in
which Adam does not sin is incompossible with the world in which he
sins. God creates ‘“sub ratione possibilitatis”, as many divergent Adams
as there are worlds, each Adam containing the entire world to which he
belongs (and to which, also by including it, belong all other compossible
monads of such a world)’ (Deleuze 1993: 63). In Cinema 2, Deleuze
writes: ‘Leibniz says that the naval battle may or may not take place, but
that this is not in the same world: it takes place in one world and does
not take place in a different world, and these two worlds are possible,
but are not “compossible” with each other’ (1989: 130). With this
notion, Leibniz attempts to sidestep the two undesirable solutions to the
problem of future contingents, as offered by Aristotle and Diodorus. We
do not have to say, with Aristotle, that the statement ‘The naval battle
might take place tomorrow’ is neither true nor false. It is true in some
possible worlds, false in others. Nor do we have to embrace the fatalism
of Diodorus in saying that one of the stated possibilities is necessarily
false while the other is necessarily true. According to Leibniz, ‘it is not
the impossible, but only the incompossible that proceeds from the pos-
sible; and the past may be true without being necessarily true’ (Deleuze
1989: 130).
Time and Possibility in Leibniz

But Leibniz’s proposed solution seems to assume an understanding of
time and the present such that each ‘instant’ is completely filled out
and determined to its limits by its unique and precise arrangement
of predicates (each of which we may imagine as a nexus of all events
pertaining to this particular subject) that can give rise to exactly one
new arrangement of predicates, ad infinitum. In his correspondence
with Samuel Clarke, Leibniz claims that ‘time is an order of successions’
(2000: 14), these successions being understood as precisely determined
configurations of things, considered at any one particular ‘moment’,
even if those moments are only theoretically isolable.6 There are at least
two problems with this characterisation, however: (1) The possibility
of an event or an eventuality is only possible on account of its existing
in one or more of the possible worlds in the mind of God. However,
given that God created this particular world and not one of the infinitely
many other possible worlds in God’s mind, it is not in fact possible that
any other eventualities, besides the ones that do occur, could occur. In
our world, Julius Caesar was not capable of not crossing the Rubicon,
because this particular Caesar was the one in this particular world,
which just so happens to be the really existent world, and this particular,
really existent Caesar contained within him, from before creation, the
predicate of crossing the Rubicon. Leibniz says, ‘I say that whatever
happens in conformity with these predeterminations is certain but not
necessary, and if one were to do the contrary, he would not be doing
something impossible in itself,7 even though it would be impossible [ex
hypothesi] for this to happen’ (1989: 45). For Caesar to not cross the
Rubicon might be possible in the mind of God, but it is entirely impos-
sible in reality, given that God created this world and not another. In
the final sections of his Theodicy, Leibniz stages a dialogue between
Theodorus and Pallas, daughter of Jupiter, in which, in a dream state,
Pallas reveals to Theodorus the pyramid-shaped ‘palace of the fates’,
replete with ‘representations not only of that which happens but also of
all that which is possible’ (2007: 375). Each hall of the pyramid contains
one of these possible worlds. In each, Theodorus is given a glimpse of
the life of a particular individual, named Sextus, which he acts out ‘as
in a stage presentation’ (376). Each individual Sextus in each individual
hall can no more alter his future than an actor in a play can alter her
script. This is also true, obviously, for the really existent Sextus, whose
choices, affects and actions are all completely determined prior even to
his birth: ‘You see that my father did not make Sextus wicked; he was
so from all eternity, he was so always and freely. My father only granted
him the existence which his wisdom could not refuse to the world where
he is included: he made him pass from the region of the possible to that
of the actual beings’ (377). His nature is written into the larger script
of a world designed in its tiniest detail entirely by God, and not subject
to change once actualised. As Deleuze writes, while this might enable
Leibniz to deal with the problem of future contingents, ‘it in no way
guarantees the character of so-called voluntary events, or the freedom
of whoever wants to engage a naval battle, or of whoever does not want
to’ (1993: 69). This seems a most limited and unsatisfying notion of
possibility, as ‘possibility’ would seem to suggest an openness of eventu-
alities. On Leibniz’s understanding, that openness is foreclosed by God
from the moment he brings into existence this particular possible world
and not some other. The infinite worlds of infinite possibilities obtain
only in the abstract, only in the mind of God. Thus, while Deleuze finds
Leibniz’s resolution to be the most interesting, it is also ‘the strangest
and most convoluted’ (1989: 130).
(2) It presents a problematic notion of time as well, insofar as there
is no reason to think that there’s a smallest isolable ‘unit’ of time that
would be required in order to determine it to its limits and establish
the unbreakable links from one arrangement of predicates to the next.8
Indeed, one of the most significant analyses in Deleuze’s 1969 text,
The Logic of Sense, is the distinction, which Deleuze lifts from the
Stoics, between the conceptions of time as ‘Chronos’, where ‘only the
present exists in time’ (1990: 162), and ‘Aion’, where ‘Instead of a
present which absorbs the past and the future, a future and past divide
the present at every instant and subdivide it ad infinitum into past and
future, in both directions at once’ (164). The time of Chronos is not
unlike Husserl’s concept of the ‘living present’ (Husserl 1991: 56), the
experiential moment, pregnant with retention and protention, past and
future. But with the notion of Chronos, we can expand this progressively
further, such that surrounding each present one can imagine an even
greater present (pregnant with past and future), with the greatest present
being God’s eternally contentful present, as the ‘external envelope’ of
all human moments (Deleuze 1990: 162). As such, the imagistic model
of Chronos is the circle, whose radius marks the infinity of God.9 The
model of the Aion, on the other hand, is the straight line, run through
by the Instant, ever displaced, forking limitlessly into past and future.
Cronos, the Forking Paths and the Power of the False

We turn, once more, to Nietzsche for our point of entry. In the famous
passage from Zarathustra titled ‘On the Vision and the Riddle’,
Zarathustra weaves a parable of a conversation between him and the
so-called spirit of gravity, the physical and intellectual embodiment of
heaviness, sombreness and austerity. Ascending a winding mountain
path, the two pause at what we are given to understand is a free-
standing doorway, and Zarathustra poses to his antagonistic fellow
traveller a problem:
Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end. This long
lane stretches back for an eternity. And the long lane out there, that is
another eternity. They contradict each other, these paths; they offend each
other face to face; and it is here at this gateway that they come together.
The name of the gateway is inscribed above: ‘Moment’. But whoever would
follow one of them, on and on, farther and f arther – d
o you believe, dwarf,
that these paths contradict each other eternally? (Nietzsche 1966: 157–8)
This passage provides one of the more famous presentations of

Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return. While many scholars interpret
eternal return as a cyclical repetition of every minute detail of cosmic
history,10 Deleuze rightly notes that Zarathustra chastises the dwarf for
his response that ‘time itself is a circle’. For Deleuze, Nietzsche’s bril-
liance lies in his reflection on the Moment itself as the ‘eternal’ instant, in
which only the past and future inhere, limitlessly colliding and dividing
each would-be ‘present’. This infinitely subdivided instant allows only
the New to return – r ather than a revolving ring of identity, a frenzied
line of becoming. It is thus not surprising that in The Logic of Sense,
the concept of eternal return is placed in a synonymic chain that also
includes ‘the pure form of the Aion’ (Deleuze 1990: 180).
Although Cinema 2 includes no appearances of the word ‘Aion’,
Deleuze’s Aionic model of time plays a significant role in the elabora-
tion of the time-image. Here it appears, explicitly but only once, under
the moniker of ‘Cronos’ (still opposed to ‘Chronos’) (Deleuze 1989:
81). But while it may be tempting to see this importation as a mere
‘application’ (as Williams would say) of the Aion, it seems, rather, that
in bringing this model into Cinema 2, Deleuze also complicates it, high-
lighting an element that is not prevalent in The Logic of Sense, namely,
the ‘virtual’.11 The notion of the virtual, contrasted with the actual
and characterised as ‘[r]eal without being actual, ideal without being
abstract’ (Deleuze 1994: 208), plays a central role in 1968’s Difference
and Repetition, but hardly appears at all just one year later in The Logic
of Sense. There, the primary ontological distinction occupying Deleuze
is the contrast of ‘bodies with their tensions, physical qualities, actions
and passions, and the corresponding “states of affairs”’, and ‘incorpo-
real events which would play only on the surface, like a mist over the
prairie’ (1990: 4–5). But with the translation of the Aion into Cronos in
Cinema 2, the virtual returns:
What constitutes the crystal-image is the most fundamental operation of

time: since the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at
the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and
past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same
thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of
which is launched toward the future while the other falls into the p ast . . .
We see in the crystal the perpetual foundation of time, non-chronological
time, Cronos and not Chronos. This is the powerful, non-organic Life
which grips the world. (Deleuze 1989: 81)12
This description of Cronos closely resembles the structure of Aion that

we saw in The Logic of Sense. However, Deleuze draws from this
discussion new implications. Specifically, insofar as what he calls in
The Logic of Sense the ‘Instant’ is limitlessly divided into past and
future, this means that past and future intensively mirror each other
within the infinite divisibility of the instant itself (hence the category of
the ‘crystal-image’ in Cinema 2). At the heart of the instant, there is a
‘point of indiscernibility’ between ‘“the immediate past which is already
no longer and the immediate future which is not yet . . .”’, virtualities
at play in the frenzied constitution of the present (Deleuze 1989: 81).
The past is already reaching into the future, and the future is already
giving way to the past, and there is no ‘present’ other than this intensive
reciprocal reflection. The present is undone and transformed before it
ever is. This is the ‘power of the false’.
To ascribe a ‘power’, positive and affirmative, to the false, is to think
it on its own, apart from the traditional binary of the true and false.
Truth, as we have seen, has been conceptualised as timeless, unchanging
and positive, synonymous with goodness and with reality itself. The
highest form in Plato’s metaphysics is the form of the good, the ‘reality’
of which supersedes even the form of being, and the knowledge of which
is essential for all other knowledge (Republic VI, 505a–509b), insofar
as the ‘truth’ of each form is its being the perfect (‘eminently good’)
template of each thing in question. The false has always (until Nietzsche)
been characterised simply as a lack of this truth. For Deleuze, the power
of the false ‘replaces and supersedes the form of the true’ (1989: 131).
It is not, in other words, simply an affirmation of the false, because to
assert the false is to operate still under the form of the true – ‘it is true
that it is false’. As Dan Smith says, the false takes on a power when
‘it is freed from the model of truth: that is, when the false is no longer
presented as being true’ (2012: 139). Likewise, the power of the false
is ‘not error or doubt’ (Deleuze 1989: 133), both of which are again
conceived as deviations from the true. It is the power that unsettles
the very form of the true, and this power is ascribed when the form of
the true is challenged by the form of time, ‘the pure form of the Aion’
(Deleuze 1990: 180). The power of the false is the power of becoming,
and it is, therefore, synonymous with the very ‘powers of life’ itself
(Deleuze 1989: 135).
Conceiving time in this Aionic way elicits a shift in our understanding
of the notion of possibility, where the possibilities of multiple eventu-
alities are in fact the pregnancy of time with multiple in-compossibil-
ities; but contrary to Leibniz’s possible worlds, these incompossibles
coexist, virtually and, in a way, simultaneously, within the real world.
Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, in his famous ‘The Garden of
Forking Paths’, writes:
In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses
one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible-
to-disentangle Ts’ui Pen, the character chooses – simultaneously – all of
them. He creates, thereby, ‘several futures’, several times, which themselves
proliferate and fork. That is the explanation for the novel’s contradictions.
Fang, let us say, has a secret; a stranger knocks at his door; Fang decides
to kill him. Naturally, there are various possible outcomes – Fang can kill
the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they can both live, they can both be
killed, and so on. In Ts’ui Pen’s novel, all the outcomes in fact occur; each
is the starting point for further bifurcations. (Borges 1998: 125)
In Deleuze’s words, Borges’ response to Leibniz is that ‘the straight line
as force of time, as labyrinth of time, is also the line which forks and
keeps on forking, passing through incompossible presents, returning to
not-necessarily true pasts’ (1989: 131). Leibniz’s band-aid for the crisis
of truth is ripped off, revealing the bleeding wound of time itself.
For Deleuze, this realisation reaches the arts in the character of the
‘forger’, understood through the ‘power of the false’ which ‘poses
the simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the coexistence of not-
necessarily true pasts’ (1989: 131). Classical, ‘truthful’, narration
assumes a logically ordered world where the instants of time connect
in the same direct, sequential, linear way that governs Leibniz’s notion
of ‘possible worlds’. Certain events in the narration necessitate certain

other events, which ultimately necessitate a specific response from the
protagonist, in accordance with what Deleuze calls ‘legal connections in
space and chronological relations in time’ (133). But who is the ‘hero’ of
the truthful narration? Deleuze, once more invoking Nietzsche, identi-
fies the ‘truthful man’ as this hero (137). For Nietzsche, the truthful man
seeks, as we have discussed, the form of the true, in order to measure
against it the imperfections of this world: ‘he makes life an “error” and
this world an “appearance”’ (Deleuze 1983: 96). The truthful man of
truthful narration is no less nihilistic, no less sanctimonious, and no less
resentful. He seeks out the criterion of order and his collection of facts,
in order to expose the rot at the core of everyday life. ‘The truthful man
in the end wants nothing other than to judge life; he holds up a superior
value, the good, in the name of which he will be able to judge, he is
craving to judge, he sees in life an evil, a fault which is to be atoned for:
the moral origin of the notion of truth’ (Deleuze 1989: 137).
Falsifying narration, on the contrary, dispenses with the assumptions
pertaining to truth. Though Deleuze employs a multitude of literary and
cinematic authors as examples,13 I will focus exclusively and only briefly
on Orson Welles, whose work best maps onto the account I’ve traced in
this chapter. From Citizen Kane in 1941, throughout the entirety of his
work, Welles is interested in questions pertaining to the nature of truth
and its relation to falsity, and the character of those persons in pursuit
of each. Citizen Kane itself concerns a multitude of points of entry into
the past of Charles Foster Kane, all in pursuit of the elusive ‘Rosebud’
(the last word he spoke before he died), which is never discovered and
is revealed to the viewer only in the film’s conclusion, when it is thrown
into the furnace.
In Touch of Evil (1958), a car bomb explodes and kills two people
near the Mexican-American border, where Miguel Vargas (Charlton
Heston) is on his honeymoon with his new bride, Susie (Janet Leigh).
Detective Hank Quinlan (Welles) arrives and the investigation begins.
Vargas, whose only stake in the affair is that it happened near him and
his wife, takes an interest and begins an investigation of his own, ulti-
mately pursuing Quinlan in order to expose what he believes (correctly,
we should note) to be Quinlan’s corrupt tendency to plant evidence in
order to collar his suspects. But while there is no doubt that Quinlan is
the villain in this story, and Vargas the hero, Deleuze argues that they
are two opposing perspectives on the same nihilistic view. Quinlan sees
the world for what it is, but rather than overcoming it through his own
adaptation, he gives into it and allows it to break him. But Vargas is no
less grotesque for his relentless pursuit of truth. His concerns lie, not so
much with the question of justice (for it is very likely that the suspected
criminal is indeed culpable), but with exposing the corruption of his
nemesis, and to this pursuit he is willing to sacrifice everything, leaving
his wife in extreme danger in order to trap his villain. Vargas is the
‘truthful man’, who has ‘strange motives, as if he were hiding another
man in him, a revenge’ (Deleuze 1989: 137).
Welles’s power of the false culminates in his masterpiece, F for Fake
(1973), which explicitly examines the nature of art, authorship, authen-
ticity and forgery. Inspired by the Clifford Irving book, Fake, the film
focuses on famous art forger, Elmyr de Hory, who fraudulently sold to
museums and galleries over a thousand hand-painted forgeries in the
artistic styles of such famous artists as Picasso, Matisse and Renoir. F
for Fake is narrated by Welles himself, who acts as a host of what is
presented in the form of a documentary, which is to say, a cinematic
presentation of factual content. Indeed, the film opens with a promise
from Welles that everything to come for the next hour will be true. He
then addresses the case of Elmyr de Hory, and in particular, the fact
that de Hory was so tremendously successful in his career as a forger,
leading Welles to speculate on the question of whether perhaps the art
critics and dealers who were fooled by his forgeries, and, by extension,
the bourgeois world of modern art, are themselves frauds. If the forger
is capable of mimicking a style so as to fool the experts, are the ‘experts’
themselves not the greater frauds? Is the forger not an expert in his own
right? The film then concludes with a story about Oja Kodar, Welles’s
partner at the time. Kodar had purportedly been at the middle of a
controversy involving Pablo Picasso and a series of twenty-two Picasso
paintings with Kodar as their subject, paintings later revealed to be
forgeries, mimicries of Picasso’s style painted by Kodar’s grandfather.
Welles then admits that the entire Kodar segment was a lie, pointing out
that the promised hour of truth had long since passed: ‘What we profes-
sional liars hope to serve is truth; I’m afraid the pompous word for that
is “art”. Picasso himself said it: “art”, he said, “is a lie, a lie that makes
us realize the truth”’.
Conclusion: The Creation of Truth

This brings us, at last, to Deleuze’s notion of the artist, in particular
to her status as a creator of truth, bringing our attention back to the
following passage: ‘What the artist is, is creator of truth, because truth
is not to be achieved, formed, or reproduced; it has to be created. There
is no other truth than the creation of the New’ (1989: 146–7). On its
face, there are multiple ways that we might understand this passage. We
might interpret it in a shallow relativistic sense, characteristic of all the
worst interpretations of ‘postmodernism’, whatever that term means –
that is, we might say that what the passage entails is that there is no such
thing as truth, and so the only truth is the one that we, that is, human
beings, assert. This opens us not only to philosophical problems, but
more immediately and dangerously, it opens us as well to serious politi-
cal concerns, because the folks adjudicating in matters of ‘the truth’ are
almost always the ones in positions of power and privilege who use their
truth-creating powers in order to hang on to and to expand that power
and privilege. Indeed, in the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential elec-
tion, with the preponderance of ‘fake news’ and the repeated doubling-
down on demonstrably false claims (not the least of which culminated in
the storming of the United States Capitol building on 6 January 2021),
there were multiple attempts in the public sphere to blame the success of
Donald Trump on ‘postmodernism’, broadly construed as a widespread
absence of truth.14
But this is not what Deleuze’s passage says. Deleuze does not say
that there is no truth, but rather, that there is no truth other than the
creation of the New. Truth, in other words, is always created, even when
it is a truth of the natural world. If it is true that it is raining today, it
is because the forces of nature constituted the atmospheric conditions
in such a way that rain, in this particular location, resulted; the forces
of the natural world created that truth. Truth, in this sense, is always
created. As we saw with the Aionic structure of time, it is the return of
the different, the miraculous production of the New. The artist, Deleuze
says, is one who recognises this secret of nature, and who participates
in that creation of the New. But this creation is no less ‘true’ or no less
‘real’ than the creations of nature; its effects, likewise, are no less true.
As Anne Sauvagnargues writes, ‘Art is real; it produces real effects on the
plane of forces and not forms’ (2013: 19). And for Deleuze, this artistic
power is evident most saliently in what we might call, following Deleuze
and Guattari’s book on Kafka, minor art, the art of the minoritarian:
‘What is opposed to fiction is not the real; it is not the truth which is
always that of the masters or the colonizers; it is the story-telling func-
tion of the poor’ (Deleuze 1989: 150). Minor art is, first and foremost,
the artistic mode that sees, beyond the world as it is, the world as it
can be. Minor art strives to constitute ‘a people’ against the forces of
capital, servitude, oppression, exclusion and domination. It utilises the
power of the false in order to give to itself a new truth, a new mythos,
a new pantheon, a new history, a new people, a new earth. It rewrites

its own story, recognising that its story is and can only ever be, one that
is created, and one that can always be re-created. Where the forces of
life are impeded, it charts new channels. ‘There is creation, properly
speaking, only insofar as we make use of excess in order to invent new
forms of life rather than separating life from what it can do’ (Deleuze
1983: 185).
Deleuze fully recognises the danger inherent to this power of the false,
in that it can easily be co-opted by the forces of domination. As he says,
‘The power of the false is delicate, allowing itself to be recaptured by
frogs and scorpions’ (1989: 147), and, we might add, Cheeto-coloured,
would-be dictators. What, then, distinguishes between a good use and
a bad use of this power? The response is embedded in the way that we
have framed the entirety of this discussion: an acute sensitivity to the
form of time, in the way that Deleuze outlines, engenders a deepening
of awareness that the power of life lies in its creativity, in its enabling
new expressions of itself and the liberation of new modes of exist-
ence. The exercise of the power of the false in order to break down
impediments to such liberation will almost always, in Deleuze’s sense,
be manifestations of ‘goodness’ or ‘generosity’ (147). As Janae Sholtz
writes, ‘A Deleuzian ethos is a practice of living that is more adequate
to the conditions of living, the genesis of beings, which celebrates the
fabulatory artifice of living, but even more so instantiates the aesthetic
in the heart of becoming’ (2015: 259). But finally, I’m going to turn
briefly to the Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe, who explicitly poses the
question of the distinction between the ‘fictions’ that undergird racism,
sexism, classism, etc., and the ‘fictions’ that give birth to a people. His
response, I think, is apropos in our reading of Deleuze: ‘What distin-
guishes beneficent fiction from such malignant cousins as racism is that
the first never forgets that it is fiction and the other never knows that it
is’ (Achebe 1988: 148). It is, to bring us back to Nietzsche, an illusion
whose illusory status its wielders have either forgotten or, more likely,
repressed, an illusion that immediately places under erasure its use of the
power of the false, because it must so eclipse that power in order to then
carry out its atrocities in the name of its truth. So the power of the false
is, admittedly, delicate, and it is dangerous. And yet, it is important to
note, tyrants, fascists and warmongers have been hard at work creating
their exploitative truths for millennia; history didn’t wait for Nietzsche
or Deleuze to talk about the ‘creation’ of truth before giving birth to
humanity’s evils. What Deleuze is attempting, I think, is to persuade the
minoritarian elements within us all to reclaim that power of the false,
that has always been exploited by the powerful, as he sees within it the
only genuinely liberatory possibilities. As Deleuze claims, ‘it is the only
chance for art or for life’ (1989: 147).
Notes
1. See St. Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 18, verse 3.
2. It is also worth noting that almost the entirety of Williams’s book is dedicated
to the three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition. The one chapter not
dedicated to Difference and Repetition is dedicated to The Logic of Sense. But
even there, Williams ultimately claims, ‘I will argue later that the two times [of
The Logic of Sense – Chronos and Aion] lead to the same six relations as the
three syntheses [of Difference and Repetition]’ (2011: 138).
3. For good measure, neither do I accept John Mullarkey’s criticisms of ‘Deleuze’s
essential dualism of the two [movement-images and time-images], born from
his non-Bergsonian dissociation of time from movement’ (2009: 101), or David
Bordwell’s characterisation of Deleuze’s ‘uncritical adherence to historiographic
tradition’ (1997: 117).
4. All DK references refer to the Diels-Kranz numbering system for Pre-Socratic
philosophy.
5. For a thorough account of this problem, see Øhrstrøm and Hasle 2015.
6. Admittedly, this is more my own extrapolation of the implications of Leibniz’s
understanding of possible worlds than it is a direct assertion about the nature
of time by Leibniz. In point of fact, Leibniz’s own reflections on time are ever
evolving and tremendously nuanced, and in many ways, as is well-known,
Leibniz’s relationalist view of time anticipates much of what would later become
the accepted physical understanding of time with Einstein’s theories of special
and general relativity in the early twentieth century. For instance, in the Leibniz-
Clarke correspondence, Leibniz claims that ‘instants, considered without the
things, are nothing at all and that they consist only in the successive order of
things’. See Leibniz 2000: 15. For an excellent account of Leibniz’s understand-
ing of time, see Futch 2008. However, for my purposes, even if time is merely
a ‘well-founded’ phenomenon, its ‘instants’ only isolable theoretically or in the
mind of God, if time is, as Leibniz says, an ‘order of successions’, a linear order
of precisely tuned cosmic arrangements, each of which is completely deter-
mined, the ‘instant’ is still there, even if only in abstraction.
7. It is not impossible in itself because it does not violate the law of contradiction.
8. There is much that can be said on this score. Broadly speaking, philosophical
views on time are typically broken into the two primary camps of absolut-
ism and relationalism. Absolutist views of time hold that time is, like space,
something of a container for events to occur in, with the container existing
independently of the events. There are ancient versions of temporal absolut-
ism, such as that of Plato, who, in the Timaeus, famously characterises time
as a ‘moving image of eternity’ (37d). This conception would be thoroughly
theologised in accordance with the doctrines of Christianity in the sixth century
CE by Boethius. Isaac Newton also famously argued for an absolute conception
of time, and it was Newton’s understanding that dominated scientific thinking
until Einstein in the early twentieth century. The most famous defenders of rela-
tionalist accounts of time are Aristotle and, as we saw above (note 6), Leibniz.
Relationalists hold that time cannot be conceived apart from the physical events
that it marks or measures. Aristotle, for instance, famously claims that ‘time
is number of movement in respect of the before and after, and is continuous

since it is an attribute of what is continuous’ (Physics IV, 220a25–220a26).
Aristotle also holds that the ‘now’ is bounded by both the future and the past,
analogous to the way in which a point divides a line. But by the same rationale,
time is not ‘made up’ of ‘nows’, any more than a line is ‘made up’ of points,
and likewise, ‘one “now” cannot be next to another, any more than a point to
a point’ (Physics IV, 218a11–218a21). An interesting outlier in this account is
René Descartes, Leibniz’s French predecessor. Descartes poses something of a
conundrum, in that, in a certain sense, he straddles the divide between absolut-
ism and relationalism. Descartes’ writings on time are notoriously complex and
difficult, but at various points in his works, he argues some version of the claim
that ‘a lifespan can be divided into countless parts, each completely independ-
ent of the other, so that it does not follow from the fact that I existed a little
while ago that I must exist now’ (1984: 33). As Newton would later hold (and
against Aristotle), Descartes explicitly asserts that time is made up of ‘parts’
(or ‘instants’), each of which is logically and ontologically independent of the
others, and it is only as a result of God’s continued ‘concurrence’ with the order
of things that time persists at all, such that divine creation and divine preserva-
tion are two ways of saying the same thing. In and of itself, there is nothing
inherently contradictory about Descartes’ understanding of time in this fashion.
However, an apparent problem arises when we consider Descartes’ views on
space and, more specifically, his rejection of physical atomism. In the Principles
of Philosophy, Descartes writes, ‘We also know that it is impossible that there
should exist atoms, that is, pieces of matter that are by their very nature indivis-
ible <as some philosophers have imagined>. For if there were any atoms, then
no matter how small we imagined them to be, they would necessarily have to
be extended; and hence we could in our thought divide each of them into two
or more smaller parts, and hence recognize their divisibility. For anything we
can divide in our thought must, for that very reason, be known to be divisible’
(1985: 231–2). If there are parts to space, Descartes argues, those parts must be
divisible, even if only in our minds, which means that they must be essentially
divisible. Hence even the smallest parts would be further divisible, and hence
there can be no ‘smallest parts’. Philosophically, it would seem that the very
same arguments that lead Descartes to conclude that there is no smallest part
of space should commensurately lead him to conclude that there is no smallest
part of time, no isolable instant that is ontologically and logically independent
of the rest. Aristotle, as we saw, uses the analogy of the line in order to argue
that, just as a line is not made up of points, time is not made up of nows. And
for Descartes, it would seem that, if there must be extension in even the small-
est ‘part’ of space, there must also be duration in the smallest ‘part’ of time.
Perhaps this conundrum arises in Descartes’ thinking because he straddles the
worlds of antiquity and of modernity. But at the very least, we can say that
Descartes’ thinking about time, as divisible into isolable instants, helps frame
what we might consider to be the common understanding of time, the puncti-
linear model of time, of the moments of time as points on a line. For an attempt
to reconcile these seemingly contradictory approaches to time in Descartes, see
Lloyd Waller 2014. For a thorough account of Aristotle’s conception of time,
see Coope 2005.
9. Indeed, Boethius explicitly compares time to a circle, the centre of which is
conceived as the eternal perspective of God: ‘Therefore as reasoning is to under-
standing, as that which becomes is to that which is, as time is to eternity, as the
circle is to its centre, so is the moving course of fate to the unmoving simplicity
of providence’ (Boethius 1973: 363).
10. See Hatab 2005; McNeil 2021; Löwith 1997.

11. See also Deamer, who appears to use the terms ‘Aion’ and ‘Cronos’ interchange-
ably, speaking of ‘the migration of the terms Chronos and Aion into Chronos
and Cronos’ (2009: 172). At the same time, it isn’t accurate to say that he com-
pletely collapses the two, because any would-be distinctions between Aion and
Cronos simply are not the focus of his piece.
12. It is worth noting that Cronos is the Titan Greek equivalent to the Roman
Saturn. This is interesting because, already in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze
writes, ‘Saturn grumbles from deep within Zeus’ (1990: 164).
13. In literature, Herman Melville, Raymond Roussel, Borges and Alain Robbe-
Grillet; and in film, Robbe-Grillet, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, among
many others.
14. The most prominent representative of this position is likely that of Michiko
Kakutani’s The Death of Truth (2018).
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Chapter 11
Gilles Deleuze, A Man Out of Time
Charles J. Stivale
I’d like to tell you, [but] we won’t have time; we never have enough time.
I don’t know, I’ll never get finished if this continues. (Deleuze)1
Of all of Gilles Deleuze’s weekly activities, teaching his seminar ranks

among the most important given the considerable preparation and
energy, both physical and mental, that he devoted to each session.2
However, a recurring theme revealed by the session recordings is the
challenges to class time and duration faced by Deleuze, who was acutely
aware of the temporal limitations for a full development of seminar
topics. Although Deleuze attempted to maintain focus, and, dare I say,
control, in order to complete adequately the segment under consid-
eration according to his demanding standards, time within his seminar
teaching was decidedly ‘out of joint’.3 Furthermore, besides such time
constraints, Deleuze faced an even greater challenge, one that was self-
imposed, in terms both of the conditions in which he taught his seminar
and of the methods for encompassing the concepts that he wished to
impart to his students. From this perspective, he was ‘out of time’ not
simply due to temporal limitations but, more importantly, due to the
difficulty of synchronising his immense grasp of the material with the
participants’ possibilities for understanding.
I propose to examine the time of Deleuze’s seminar in light of these
temporal and epistemological disjunctions by considering the obstacles
that Deleuze faced and the many tactics that he developed to unfold
successive facets of his complex thought, thereby clarifying Deleuze’s
distinct relationship with the time of the seminar. I argue that, despite
the many challenges, his goal was to practise a pedagogy of ‘Deleuze-
time’, a deliberately focused creative unfolding of concepts relying on
the participants’ active attention and participation. I also consider how
space in the seminar rooms was linked to the temporal challenges of
Gilles Deleuze, A Man Out of Time 235
these weekly encounters. For while the exchanges between Deleuze and
the participants offered openings for potential creation, such encounters
were menaced in terms of limitations to actual duration as well as
compression of space upon time.
Through access to the seminar recordings and transcripts from 1979 to
1987,4 I consider the numerous ways in which time and duration played
fundamental roles in Deleuze’s articulation of his ongoing research
within the pedagogical framework. Given this valuable research tool, I
choose to be guided in this study by the sessions themselves and the insti-
tutional contexts in which they are circumscribed to allow the practices
therein to suggest different facets of Deleuze’s strategies in relation to
time, and especially to remain open to unusual or surprising intersec-
tions that emerge from the seminar exchanges. While I acknowledge
the many perspectives developed on Deleuze’s philosophical conception
of time, by Deleuze himself in different contexts as well as in James
Williams’s masterful introduction to this topic (Williams 2011), I believe
that allowing this archive to speak its own lessons, as it were, provides
a unique opportunity for understanding Deleuze’s teaching more fully.
A Class Out of Space

Courses are something quite special, they’re a cube; it’s a space-time, . . .
something that stretches out from one week to the next. It’s a space and a
very, very special temporality. (‘P as in Professor’)
I first consider the space of the seminar, since the session recordings
convince me that the peculiarities of classroom space in the French
university system, as well as Deleuze’s own requirements, made the
‘spatial question’ a backdrop to any understanding of temporal issues.
Not just a man frequently out of time, Deleuze as an educator was
nearly always out of space. Video clips reveal Deleuze’s regular teaching
location consisting of him seated with students at his elbows, cassette
recorders arrayed around him, with room for his notes and texts.5 Why
did this esteemed professor put up with such conditions? The answer
is simple: Deleuze chose such cramped quarters rather than accept the
available solution, to schedule the seminar within a more spacious uni-
versity amphitheatre. Deleuze repeatedly opposed this option since, as
he put it, ‘What I would do would not work there’, and because ‘we
would need a microphone, so if someone wanted to say something,
they would have to come to the microphone, which puts everyone off.’
Whatever the inconveniences, then, the cramped seminar space allowed
236 Charles J. Stivale
direct exchanges with students, creating the ‘circus [quality] that amuses
me and tends to be more involved (profond)’ (‘P as in Professor’).
Besides the difficulties just noted of Deleuze’s own making, the semi-
nars’ popularity resulted in regular overcrowding, and these space diffi-
culties were but one kind of limitation, or striation, that Deleuze endured
while teaching at Vincennes and then at Vincennes/St Denis.6 Deleuze
clearly dreamed of the teaching venue as a site of an ideal smooth space,
one unfettered by any limitations whatsoever for possibilities of creative
exchange. However, given his work with Félix Guattari on these con-
cepts, Deleuze understood fully that his work unfolded within a State
institution inevitably subject to striations, that is, numerous institutional
and particularly spatial constraints.7 Deleuze also recognised that within
these smooth–striated spatial distinctions, ‘they are mixed together the
whole time’ (TDS ATP V 1–061179), meaning that the ‘smooth’ ideal he
dreamt of necessarily existed only in striated form. In short, the spatial
backdrop emphasised here had unforeseen consequences for the time of
the seminar from one year to the next.
Before shifting to temporal aspects, I note another important detail
that emerges from comments that Deleuze made following the move to
the St Denis location, notably his attempt to find a classroom adequate
for his and his students’ needs. Among numerous classroom space
issues – for example, noises and interruptions from outside the room
– one detail, the security bars placed on the classroom windows, was
something that alarmed Deleuze constantly.8 Hence, this distinguished
scholar was forced to do his own footwork to find a better location,
an effort that seemingly came to fruition during the 17 January 1984
session (in the Cinema III seminar) when Deleuze returns after a mid-
session site visit to announce that henceforth the course would meet in a
larger room, ‘a palace where we will discover happiness’ (TDS Cinema
III 8–170184).
Of course, any teacher actively seeks to obtain or create the most
effective space for teaching and learning, but in Deleuze’s case, his
requirements meant limitations that he had to accept for several years
following his arrival at Vincennes/St Denis. While possibly reflecting
some peculiar professorial idiosyncrasies, Deleuze’s demands for a more
intimate space corresponded to his conception of using the classroom to
support the potentially creative ends of his pedagogical ideals.
Inspiration and Echoes

A course is a kind of Sprechgesang, closer to music than to theater. Indeed,
there’s nothing in principle to stop courses being a bit like a rock concert.
(Deleuze 1995: 139)9
As in each course, a semester’s work begins with the best of intentions,

and in Deleuze’s case, this ‘ideal game’ cannot ‘be played by either man
or God. It can only be thought as nonsense. But precisely for this reason,
it is the reality of thought itself and the unconscious of pure thought . . .
This game is reserved then for thought and art’ (Deleuze 1990/2015:
60/62–3).10 Ideally, then, an academic year for Deleuze would include
twenty-six sessions, but the vagaries of university scheduling (holidays
breaks – notably, Christmas and Easter – as well as a semester break in
February) and unforeseen interruptions resulted in only two seminars
between 1979 and 1987 containing this complete number (Cinema IV
and Foucault). Moreover, while each session’s length was scheduled for
two hours, Deleuze almost invariably extended sessions well into the
third hour, thereby retrieving otherwise lost chronological time on the
schedule.
It is tempting to search for sessions that correspond as closely as pos-
sible to what Deleuze might consider ‘ideal’. By this, I follow Deleuze’s
comments that his prior course preparation would yield the maximum
of what he termed ‘inspiration’ through his partially improvisational,
but usually carefully outlined, session framework. For Deleuze main-
tained that ‘a course is something requiring an enormous amount of
preparation . . . to reach these moments of inspiration . . . If one hasn’t
rehearsed enough, there’s no inspiration . . . without which the course
means nothing . . . A nd to do so, one sometimes has to . . . get oneself
stimulated (se monter soi-même) to the point that one is able to speak
about something with enthusiasm: that’s what rehearsing is’ (‘P as
in Professor’). As Daniel W. Smith has discerned, ‘Deleuze’s seminar
lectures were delivered orally, without a manuscript or lecture notes.
At best, Deleuze brought small pieces of paper to the seminars (few
of which have survived) with outlines of the conceptual deduction he
wanted to undertake in the seminar, and he then delivered the lecture
spontaneously’;11 hence the students’ initiative to record the lectures on
cassette tapes, actively encouraged by Deleuze.
However, the complete audio corpus of the seminars suggests that,
much like the continuum between overlapping smooth and striated
spaces, the temporal and pedagogical continuum into which Deleuze
slid in each session was fragile, with frequent disturbances of the focus
required for him to create impulsions of inspiration. The impact of
Deleuze’s teaching ‘always [consisted of] something that was not des-
tined to be understood in its totality. A course is a kind of matter in
movement (matière en mouvement), . . . in which each person, each
group, or each student at the limit takes from it what suits him/her’ (‘P as
in Professor’). As he exhorted the participants at the start of the Cinema
IV seminar, ‘It hardly matters if you don’t understand yet; it will come,
there’s no need to hurry; first you listen, and then you understand much
later’ (TDS Cinema IV 1–301084). And in fact, following his retirement,
Deleuze expressed how much he owed to the audience in the seminars,
insisting that this process did not at all resemble ‘argument (discus-
sion)’ – ‘philosophy has absolutely nothing to do with arguing about
things’ – but rather consisted of attempting to understand ‘the problem
someone’s framing and how they’re framing it; [thus] all you should ever
do is explore it, play around with the terms, add something, relate it to
something else, never argue about it. [The seminar] was like an echo
chamber, a feedback loop, in which an idea reappeared after going, as it
were, through various filters’ (Deleuze 1990: 190–1; 1995: 139).12
Furthermore, while discussing distinctions between the modes of
time’s synthesis during the Cinema III seminar (TDS 16–170484),
Deleuze emphasises the importance of an ‘apprehension of the present’,
something that one can focalise (fixer), but that is also contingent on a
wide variability of presents between individuals. He offers the revealing
example of what occurs in his seminar:
I’m here teaching the course, you’re there listening; a third case, one of you
intervenes. When I arrive here, let’s say I have a two-hour long present,
but I mean, I have no impression of time passing. I’ve arrived focalized,
and my entire act of consciousness consists in focalizing this kind of time
period, a two-hour present, that is, these two hours are p resent . . . T
his is
why the two hours for me ultimately go so fast, whereas for you, they don’t
move fast enough at all except when this works sufficiently for you to come
into my present. At that point, you are living the same time as I do. (TDS
Cinema III 16–170484)
The challenge of selecting particular sessions as exemplary certainly

faced Claire Parnet and Richard Pinhas, who produced three different
seminars as CDs released by Éditions Gallimard – Spinoza 13–170381,
Leibniz & the Baroque 10–240287 and selected excerpts from Cinema
seminars I and III (1981–82 to 1983–84) – that provide sources for
initial commentary on the time of the Deleuzian seminar.13 Each of the
sessions in the Spinoza and Leibniz CDs was prepared by weeks of fairly
consistent development of the seminar’s ‘matter in movement’, thus
constituting these selected sessions as turning points of sorts for each
seminar’s development.
However, in each case, we glimpse how the ‘ideal game’ of a session
can go awry through temporal impediments, that is, how Deleuze’s
nearly one-pointed focus on achieving ‘inspiration’ (however fleeting)
collides with the other key facet of this process, namely, the advan-
tages he hoped to derive from extremely close proximity with seminar
participants. For, as he notes in his discussion on apprehending and
focalising the present, the participants’ apprehension tends to be briefer,
less focalised, and a participant who intervenes ‘has determined, at least
in a confused way, what he/she is going to say, why he/she wants to
intervene, the motives for intervening also determining a present, one
that is very different for others’ (TDS Cinema III 16–170484).
As regards these two presumably exemplary CD seminars, although
Deleuze intended the Spinoza session to be the last one so that he could
commence the seminar on Painting, different interventions following
his 70-minute presentation transform the subsequent 80 minutes into a
question-answer session, ultimately preventing Deleuze from returning
to the session’s main point.14 In contrast, while the 1987 Leibniz session
opens in progress on the BNF recording with a 9-minute presentation
by Richard Pinhas (omitted from the CD), Deleuze then reflects nearly
without interruption on the topics of individual choice and inclination,
and then the successive states as these relate to monads, to the soul’s
amplitude and clarity, and hence to freedom. In contrast to the previous
‘exemplary’ CD session, the participants intervene minimally, and yet
one indeed grasps Deleuze’s deep engagement with those around him,
occasionally directing remarks to different students, and clearly gaining
energy step by step as he develops these concepts at the centre of the
seminar’s focus.
Hence, the two sessions selected as sufficiently exemplary for produc-
tion as CDs by one of France’s most prestigious publishers offer dis-
tinctly different profiles in terms of Deleuze’s interaction with students:
one session is seemingly derailed by questions, the other kept steadily
on track by minimal overt student interventions. These polar differences
raise the implicit question of whether Deleuze was more inspired by
remaining open to questioning with the risk of dispersion of different
presents, or by the more subtle, implicit engagement of students quietly
following his every word and possibly focalising extensively within
his present.15 Still, both sessions constitute significant lessons that are
‘interesting’ in the threefold Deleuzian sense, at once inspirational in

terms of the ‘matter in movement’, distinctive in terms of the ‘feedback
loop’ linked to the participants, and finally crucial in terms of the ses-
sion’s place within the overall flow of ideas within the seminar. It is the
intersection of ‘matter in movement’, based on Deleuze’s prior prepara-
tion, and the ‘feedback loop’ with participants, focalising on Deleuze’s
present, that we must explore as constitutive of ‘Deleuze-time’.
Impediments
One must settle in at the extreme point of one’s knowledge or one’s igno-
rance . . . [at] this very border between knowing and non-knowing: it’s
there that one must settle in to have something to say. (‘N as in Neurology’,
in Deleuze and Parnet 1997)
The conflict between two p oles – of the ‘ideal game’ in Deleuze’s semi-
nars, that is, sessions in which ‘inspiration’ arising from the ‘matter in
movement’ yielded a possible temporal synchronisation of ‘presents’, on
the one hand, and on the other, sessions in which, for many different
reasons, this was not the o utcome – c reated a developing tension across
the years, from one seminar to the next, especially in terms of the time
of the seminar. Deleuze’s belief in his approach of seeking ‘inspira-
tion’ through the seminar’s ‘echo chamber’ collided on occasion with
his frustrations regarding classroom practices, and he sought different
approaches to assuring student interventions, provided that these might
allow him to maintain his focus on the ‘matter’ at hand.
One notable expression of frustration linked to pedagogical consid-
erations occurred at the start of the second Cinema seminar in autumn
1982. While justifying his decision to continue the same topic as the
previous y ear – since he felt that by going too fast, he had ‘let certain
things escape’ in 1981–82 – Deleuze presents an acerbic judgement of
his own teaching activity, observing that ‘for ten years, I’ve been acting
like a clown! . . . It’s a show (spectacle), since the proof is right here:
. . . I speak facing half [an audience] of humans and half tape record-
ers’ (TDS Cinema II 1–021182). Hence, he ponders how to maximise
the course’s implied goal of a collaboration between listeners and the
speaker, that is, how to ‘obtain reactions – n ot objections, which are
always painful and intolerable’ – that is, assistance from the participants
which might result in ‘correct[ing] me, to extend things longer’. As he
admitted, ‘Believe me, this [process of going back over topics] is not
meant to speed things up.’
To some extent, this insight reveals his awareness of the tension

between temporal limitations and his own need to provide greater
clarity, but these and other more tendentious organisational remarks
led to a lengthy exchange with the participants, some of whom asserted
that, despite Deleuze’s explicit request, they in fact had no place truly to
speak within this seminar. But Deleuze maintained his insistence: ‘Your
task consists in speaking either on the basis of your thoughts or of your
feelings (sentiments), but not your opinion (avis). That means saying:
yes, in your [topic] there, I get the impression that there’s something that
doesn’t work, that’s unbalanced; or else, you tell me: what you’re saying
has awakened this in me, something I hadn’t thought of.’16
Let me underscore initially the strategic circumstances of these
ongoing seminars: whatever the topic, Deleuze consistently emphasised
his own concerted focus within a set of moving problematics as well as
the steps of his arguments to which he expected the seminar participants
to respond, hence the interchange potentially returning to him in various
ways. The feedback loop he sought would constitute an in-between of
pedagogy and creation, what he termed an ‘encounter’ in a strong sense,
not with people ‘but with t hings . . . I am “on the lookout” (aux aguets)
for encounters, wondering if there might be material for an encounter, in
a film, in a painting’ (‘C as in Culture’, in Deleuze and Parnet 1997). By
projecting Deleuze’s active engagement with cultural production onto
his classroom interactions, I maintain that he is entirely ‘on the lookout’
within the flow of the feedback loop for sources of creation through
thought. Hence his concerted attempts to find a pedagogical model to
enable the ‘encounter’ within each session to produce the kind of crea-
tive research he sought.
To ensure the continued forward movement of such encounters,
Deleuze on occasion deliberately halted forward progress, particularly
at the start of a session in order to summarise previously acquired
points, most importantly after breaks and unscheduled interruptions
(for example, demonstrations and strikes). At other times, such reviews
arose from Deleuze’s severe assessment of the limitations of his own pre-
vious performance (for example, in TDS Cinema IV 3–131184), and one
might consider much of the 1982–83 Cinema II seminar in this light, as
a kind of ‘mise en ordre’ or clean-up, although clearly Deleuze’s purpose
there was to ‘reculer pour mieux rebondir’, to retreat strategically in
order better to leap forward.
However, from the perspective of the time of the seminar, numerous
impediments arose that enabled or inhibited the creative engagement that
Deleuze continually sought. While some of these temporal impediments
were external, due to the aforementioned striations of the academic

institution as well as national events,17 others were more mundane, yet
no less disruptive.18 In some cases, Deleuze’s own students caused the
disturbance, in one session by exiting one by one midway through class
with Deleuze responding: ‘Aie, aie, aie, aie, aie, aie, a ie . . . So, those who
want to leave, you just leave, but do so quickly. [Pause] . . . No, really,
this is too much . . . I can’t work in these conditions . . .’ (TDS Leibniz
& Baroque 12–100387).
The ‘ideal game’ of the seminar, of course, would consist of Deleuze’s
uninterrupted and undistracted immersion within the flow of the crea-
tive ‘matter in movement’, an event akin to a purely ‘smooth space’,
hence quite impossible. In contrast, we can now envisage how this
hypothetical, concentrated folding of ‘matter in movement’ and over-
lapping of ‘presents’ (Deleuze’s own with the participants’) yield con-
stantly to his need to negotiate various aspects of each session. In other
words, each session exists along a continuum between the intensity and
purpose of ‘Deleuze-time’, on the one hand, and sources that diminished
Deleuze’s intensity of focus, on the other. By outlining different types
of impediments, we can judge more clearly the extent to which Deleuze
manoeuvred around them to develop the creative exchanges he sought.
Mid-session breaks. As noted earlier, the seminar’s scheduled two-
hour length usually extended well into a third hour. Hence, Deleuze
often declared at a session’s start that they would break at mid-point so
he could visit the main office (closed for lunch before the end of each
session). This repeated practice actually served a pedagogical purpose:
the time pressure created by the errand, no doubt quite necessary, pro-
vided Deleuze with both a pretext and an impetus to focus even more
intensely on developing the ‘matter in movement’ within the concentra-
tion of ‘Deleuze-time’.
Anticipated questions and interventions. Another step along the con-
tinuum of ‘Deleuze-time’ is Deleuze’s use of invited student interventions,
assisting Deleuze with particular topics in depth. Privileged interlocutors
of long date include Félix Guattari (particularly during sessions in the
1970s and in the Foucault seminar) and Claire Parnet.19 Moreover, at
different times, Deleuze called on certain regular participants, notably
Éric Alliez (whose dissertation Deleuze directed), Richard Pinhas and
Georges Comtesse.20
Anticipated panels. As the Cinema IV seminar commenced, Deleuze
announced an epiphany of sorts: instead of the prepared ‘exposés’ or
interventions, Deleuze would designate participants to be interviewed
by him on specific topics with which he was less familiar and with which
they were already fully informed (TDS Cinema IV 7–181284). This

‘solution’ resulted subsequently in several sessions with designated ‘non-
presenters’, that is, interviewees who nonetheless did make brief pres-
entations before being questioned by Deleuze and other participants.21
Unfortunately, whatever its advantages, this ‘solution’ held inherent
problems: as Deleuze discovered, the participating ‘interviewees’ could
not prevent discussion with other participants from throwing the focused
direction off track.22
Unanticipated student questions. Despite the importance of exchanges
with students for Deleuze’s teaching practice, such questions were
another step on the continuum away from the hypothetical ‘ideal’. Often
when unmanaged or unforeseen interventions occurred, Deleuze would
acknowledge the contribution positively and quickly attempt to turn it
into something he could employ within the flow of the ongoing develop-
ment. Indeed, even with some questions that seemed confrontational,
Deleuze succeeded in this folding process.23 However, Deleuze often was
unable to stay within the focused flow, as illustrated by one astounding
‘contribution’ by a woman student who intervened in a session ostensibly
to make a brief presentation, but mainly to express her amorous infatu-
ation with the philosopher. Deleuze treated this somewhat confused
student very gently and generously, asking her to leave but inviting her
back the next week to present her work on semiotics. He then admitted
to the class, ‘After all this, I don’t recall what I was going to say!’ (TDS
Cinema IV 18–160485).24
The Comtesse phenomenon. As I shift toward the less productive, less
focused exchanges, those moving toward Deleuze’s decreasing inten-
sity of focus and dissipation of seminar time, it is strange to turn in
this context to possibly the most active seminar contributor, Georges
Comtesse.25 As a long-term participant – t he earliest comment by him for
which we have a record is from 1971 (TDS Anti-Oedipus I 1–171171)
– he became a privileged interlocutor, and not only in the sense that
the number of his interventions (of greater and lesser length, in over
sixty sessions) far exceed those of any other seminar participant. This
privilege is evident simply from the Foucault seminar: the only other
participants who intervened at any length in the twenty-six sessions
besides Comtesse (with three substantial presentations) were the truly
privileged interlocutors Félix Guattari, Éric Alliez and one unnamed
musicologist.26 In the best circumstances, the substance of many of
Comtesse’s questions and interventions allowed Deleuze to fold them
into the ‘matter in movement’ as he then developed quite precise and
even longer responses. And however ambivalent Deleuze’s reactions to
Comtesse might seem on certain occasions, it was clear that Comtesse

truly hoped to contribute to the seminars.
However, whatever his intentions, Comtesse stands alone among all
participants in his ability to provoke Deleuze to extreme reactions, and
usually less by the substance of the statements than by Comtesse’s manner
in stating them. The final scene of the 1976 RAI 3 video shows Comtesse
standing alone in a crowd of students, challenging Deleuze on particular
points, much to Deleuze’s and the other students’ delight.27 From this
scene, I conclude that Comtesse enjoyed contesting the ‘master’s’ word
and, most particularly, maintaining his own forthright resistance among
Deleuze’s acolytes. The number of sessions in which Deleuze takes issue
strongly with Comtesse is remarkably small, no more than five, but they
truly stand out both due to Deleuze’s vehemence and, more importantly
for this discussion, due to the disruptive result for the creative and
temporal flow.28
Two sessions, both from the Cinema IV seminar and still untranslated,
highlight how these interventions disrupted the pedagogical process. In
the first case, following a long intervention by Comtesse, Deleuze agreed
with the substance of Comtesse’s remarks, but objected to Comtesse’s
formal edicts: ‘You have a tendency to present what you’re reading
. . . a s, in its very nature, reducing everything else to z ero . . . Try to
understand that when you are speaking, you say some very interesting
things, but these things aren’t supposed to annul every other discourse.’
Deleuze then became only more aggravated by Comtesse’s attempted
justification, first, due to his failing (in Deleuze’s judgement) to provide
the actual texts on which his assertions were based, then by his seeming
to want to draw Deleuze into endorsing an unacceptable rationale and
pretending to base his perspectives on another scholar’s works: ‘[Your
statements] may well come from Derrida, but I am certain that Derrida
is much more nuanced than you are. But I insist on this: don’t come
here to tell us “Here’s the truth!” You may be able to say this in
Derrida’s course, I don’t know, but not here, not here’ (TDS Cinema IV
7–181284).29
Three months later, another point of contention arose between them,
notably Comtesse’s repeated tendency to object at great length that
‘there are other aspects’ to be considered and that these aspects ‘are
more profound’ than the ones already presented. Again, Comtesse’s
attempted justifications raised Deleuze’s ire: ‘I tell you, no, that’s your
favourite a rgument . . . it’s this Stalinist argument that disgusts me. Bah,
no, stop! Listen, because suddenly we’re getting behind.’ In other words,
not only did Comtesse’s arguments disgust him, but he was wasting the
seminar’s time. Comtesse then added insult to injury by concluding his

argument about a particular film with the arrogant demand, ‘Try to
grasp that!’ (Essayez d’entendre ça!). Here, Deleuze summed up matters
in no uncertain terms: ‘Who do you take yourself for? You dare to
finish something by saying “try to grasp that!”, try to understand the
imponderable depth of what I just said! No, that’s just wrong! I can’t
take it any more! Break time! Five minutes break!’ (TDS Cinema IV
16–190385).30
These scenes illustrate how the temporal flow and especially its intru-
sion into ‘Deleuze-time’ through discussion could throw off any attempt
to focus on the ‘matter in movement’. The 15 March 1983 session from
Cinema II reveals the variability of Deleuze’s efforts to remain in the
flow of ‘Deleuze-time’: while the participants’ objections that Deleuze
judged ‘mean’ forced him at one point to ask defensively for mercy,
his opening discussions with Pascal Auger provided Deleuze with new
insights to which he returned productively in subsequent sessions.
Infirmities. Whereas the previous examples reveal significant impedi-
ments to the flow of ‘matter in movement’, some unforeseen difficulties
brought any progress to a halt, specifically Deleuze’s fatigue, occasional
illness, forgetfulness and befuddlement, and in a very few cases, com-
plete breakdown. On the one hand, Deleuze’s weariness after four years
working on cinema and philosophy resulted in what he describes as
‘everything going blank’ (TDS Cinema IV 24–280585); on another occa-
sion, a misplaced text stopped the session (TDS Leibniz & Baroque
6–130187). On the other hand, after a five-week break, Deleuze began
session five in Cinema I with an abject apology for a scheduling error:
‘I no longer have the heart to apologize to all those who turned up for
the lesson . . . I n short, all that was just a mess, and because of this mess,
now I’m going to have to try to make up for lost time’ (TDS Cinema I
5–050182).
At other times, rather than take a break, Deleuze simply requested
delaying an answer, and in fact, he usefully reverted to this time-saving
strategy on occasion, suggesting in one case that ‘the question is so far
from what I’m involved in right now, I seriously regret having brought it
up’ (TDS Cinema II 14–150383), and in another case, saying simply that
while the question was valid, nonetheless ‘you’re getting ahead of me’
(TDS Spinoza 6–130181). However, the defensive posture adopted in
the 15 March 1983 session indicates the rare and unfortunate moment
along the continuum I have been tracing, the point at which the experi-
mentation of ‘matter in movement’ and ‘apprehending the present’
within ‘Deleuze-time’ collapses. As we shall see, this defensive posture
occurred in circumstances other than solely with Comtesse, and yet curi-
ously, it can also help us to conceptualise Deleuze’s ultimate goal within
the time of the seminar.
Temporalities and Events

With these delayed effects in a c ourse . . . there’s a kind of retroactive effect
[in comprehension]. So . . . that’s why I find interruptions so stupid, or even
certain questions people can ask. [If] you are asking a question because
you’re in the midst of not understanding, well, you would be better off
waiting. (‘P as in Professor’)
Perhaps the most poignant example of collapse occurred during session
three of the first Leibniz seminar, when Deleuze took a ‘tiny ques-
tion’ that then led to a discussion on differential calculus (TDS Leibniz
3–290480). Ironically, a question from Comtesse buffered the initial
question sufficiently to allow Deleuze to segue into his main develop-
ment. Midway through the session, however, the first student’s abruptly
repeated question inexplicably resulted in what I can only describe as a
kind of meltdown: in a rasping voice, Deleuze says, ‘Spare me (Pitié) . . .
My God . . . He broke me s ince . . . You know, speaking is a fragile thing;
speaking is a fragile thing.’ Pausing, then whispering to the extremely
silent class, Deleuze attempted to continue but finally concedes, ‘No, it’s
. . . I don’t know any more.’ During the ensuing silence, a student near
Deleuze seemed to whisper and ask if there’s something he or she could
do, to which Deleuze could only answer, ‘Ah, no, ah, no, it’s what’s in
my head.’
In some ways, this extreme example along the continuum allows us to
join both ends and examine the ongoing tension existing in every seminar
and in each session through Deleuze’s method for pursuing an ongoing
recherche, his research, not for ‘lost time’ in a Proustian way, but rather
for dual aspects of the event. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze points to
‘the two moments of sense, impassability and genesis, neutrality and
productivity’, indicating that aspects of the impassability as event ‘form
a constant without which the event would not have eternal truth and
could not be distinguished from its temporal actualizations’ (1990/2015:
100/103). In the previous example, Deleuze was ‘broken’ from his flow,
from his tenuous insertion within and expression of ‘Deleuze- time’,
whispering the words I translate as ‘speaking is a fragile thing’: ‘c’est
fragile, parler, c’est fragile’ (TDS Leibniz 3–290480). Notice the empha-
sis on the fragility that surrounds the infinitive ‘parler’; as Deleuze
asserts, ‘effects on b
odies . . . a re not things or facts, but e vents . . . that
subsist or inhere, . . . [that are] verbs, . . . not living presents, but infini-
tives: the unlimited Aion, the becoming that divides itself infinitely in
past and future and always eludes the present’ (1990/2015: 4–5/5). This
infinitive, ‘parler’/to speak, is especially fragile in the seminar, where
Deleuze’s aim is to insert himself into this fleeting interstice between
past-future and present, constantly attempting to create an ongoing
balancing act ‘to grasp [time] in two complementary though mutually
exclusive fashions . . . as the living present in bodies which act and are
acted upon [Chronos] . . . [and] as an entity infinitely divisible into past
and future [Aion], and into the incorporeal effects which result from
bodies, their actions and their passions’ (1990/2015: 5/5–6).
This insight corresponds to the ongoing struggle of sense- making
along a continuum that constituted Deleuze’s experimentation with
‘Deleuze-time’ in the seminars, aptly described as follows: ‘If the battle
is not an example of an event among others, but rather the Event in
its essence, it is no doubt because it is actualized in diverse manners
at once, and because each participant may grasp it at a different level
of actualization within its variable present’ (1990/2015: 100/103). It
is remarkable to glimpse this ‘Event in its essence’ through so many
sessions and across so many seminars and decades, from The Logic of
Sense into the Cinema seminars, with Deleuze developing this thought
from past to future, as Aion, and yet also in actualisations of Chronos.31
Just as smooth space in relation to striated space is a variable mixture of
both, the Aion–Chronos doublet is likewise conjoined yet distinct.
However, rather than considering this a limitation, say, of a pure
Aion, we can discern the event of Aion in its ongoing intersection with
Chronos. The tension between Aion and Chronos for Deleuze is his
recherche for the event as it plays out in contrast to variable actualisa-
tions within a time that inevitably in the classroom is frequently ‘out of
joint’. If Deleuze could do little about the striated space of his seminar
room (in some ways, by his own choice) as well as the educational
regime under which he worked, he attempted to parry these constraints
with the philosophical becomings toward Aion (or eternity) consisting of
‘this copresence of all the degrees of power of action (puissance)’ (TDS
Cinema III 15–270384).32 Yet, he was also fully aware that, just as one
can never reach an entirely smooth space, such movement toward Aion
could only be achieved momentarily, always in moments of extreme
fragility, ‘matter in movement’. As Deleuze suggested about listeners’
reactions within the ‘musical conception of a course’, a delayed effect is
always possible, even preferable, in grasping the ‘matter in movement’
within its ‘variable present’ (‘P as in Professor’).
Moreover, given that ‘the battle hovers over its own field, being neutral
in relation to all of its temporal actualizations . . . it is all the more ter-
rible. Never present but always yet to come and already passed, the
battle is graspable only by the will of anonymity which it itself inspires’
(Deleuze 1990/2015: 100/103). In light of the many steps along the
continuum traced above, I maintain that the extreme, inherent focus and
flow toward the ‘ideal’ end of the c ontinuum – that is, the in-between
of pedagogy and creation or ‘Deleuze-time’ at its extreme – tend toward
this neutrality, this hovering over its ‘field’, in relation to the temporal
actualisations within individual sessions. For the sessions where Deleuze
is most immersed, tending toward the extreme of ‘Deleuze-time’, are
simply those in which Deleuze is effaced and an anonymity of thought is
manifested, however difficult it is for listeners to glimpse this effacement.
The immersion into the event constitutes Deleuze’s ongoing recherche
for ‘counter-actualization’, a tending toward the Event that he described
in The Logic of Sense as ‘the actor’s or dancer’s simple, flat representa-
tion’ (1990/2015: 157/161).
This recherche becomes clearer precisely when such immersion is
impeded through the diverse actualisations traced previously. That is,
the impediments themselves, at varying degrees along the continuum,
confirm the possibility of the ‘ideal’ end of the continuum, clarifying
why, at certain moments, especially in his different comments, defensive
postures and extreme reactions, Deleuze had to take time out, to reset,
to regroup in his battle for immersion into the counter-actualisations of
‘Deleuze-time’ which had been thrown so terribly ‘out of joint’. For the
impediments that he most firmly rejected were those that he identified
unmistakably as ‘objections, which are always painful and intolerable’
(TDS Cinema II 1–021182), since they reveal the extent to which a
listener was not understanding and that waiting would be best: ‘what
someone doesn’t understand, there is the possibility that he’ll under-
stand it afterwards’ (‘P as in Professor’).33
Hence, given that for Deleuze the essential element in a course was ‘to
become alert at the right moment to grasp hold of what suits you, what
suits you personally’ (‘P as in Professor’), rather than posing objections,
Deleuze argued that the ‘[students’] task consists in speaking either
on the basis of [their] thoughts or of [their] feelings (sentiments), but
not [their] opinions (avis)’ (TDS Cinema II 1–021182). Although this
distinction might seem self-serving for Deleuze – ‘thought’ and ‘senti-
ments’ corresponding to comments with which Deleuze could agree,
‘opinions’ or ‘objections’ being quite the o pposite – this perspective at
least provides an alternative to the impression that Deleuze’s supposed
openness to students’ views was mitigated, at best. On the contrary,

as indicated above, Deleuze was almost always ready to engage with
participants’ comments, provided that he could either fold them into
his development toward counter-actualisation or readily point out more
pedagogically where a particular misunderstanding arose. In this light,
the exchanges with Comtesse would seem to fluctuate between both
extremes, usually with comments that Deleuze could encompass, but
also offering certain fixed ideas on occasion that Deleuze recognised as
repetitive and, for him, fatiguing objections. As for those moments in
which Deleuze needed a break or simply could not cope, these excep-
tions seem to indicate the intensity of his commitment to the ‘ideal’
engagement within ‘Deleuze-time’.
Feeling/Intellect
I’m going fast, really fast as you notice, very fast, but I am speaking toward
your feeling (sentiment), not your intellect (intelligence). (TDS Cinema IV
26–120684)
Deleuze insisted moreover that ‘a course entails as much emotion as

intelligence, and if there is no emotion, then there is nothing in the
course, it has no interest’ (‘P as in Professor’). The distinction Deleuze
made between ‘objections’, on one hand, and speaking on the basis
of ‘thoughts’ or ‘feelings’, on the other, complemented the important
emphasis he placed on emotion. For Deleuze repeatedly urged students
above all to embrace a strategy of allowing themselves to feel the philo-
sophical concepts and interplay of linkages between them, to grasp hold
of what suited them personally, a ‘grasping hold’ so personal that it need
not be on the level of understanding.34 While discussing Whitehead,
Deleuze maintained that ‘really, to each his (or her) own – you have no
need to know anything at all to understand, or at least to feel. As far
as “feeling” goes, according to Whitehead, you can sense and even see
this world form itself’ (TDS Leibniz & Baroque 12–100387). Beyond
these numerous modes of communicating the importance of emotion in
the learning process, Deleuze employed the verb ‘sentir’ (to feel) to state
the urgency of what he was saying, his desire for students to sense the
progress they were making, however slow or fragile it might have been.
The insistence that Deleuze expressed toward ‘feeling’ in relation to
‘intellect’ had its impetus not just in a pedagogical imperative, but also
in an ethical one, to which Deleuze allowed himself to return in several
seminars, mostly clearly in the brief, two- session question-
answer
seminar titled ‘Anti-Oedipus and Other Reflections’, the final classes at

the Vincennes campus in 1980. Returning to some crucial insights from
The Logic of Sense to discuss the possibility of the event’s realisation,
Deleuze points precisely to the event’s dual situation: on the one hand
existing only ‘in persons and states of things’, but also ‘however small it
is, however insignificant, there is something that exceeds its realization,
something not realizable’, as if there were ‘a “moreness” (un “en plus”),
an excess’, what Deleuze called ‘the most profound sphere of the event’
(TDS AO & Other 2–030680). The ethical message intersects here with
the pedagogical one in Joë Bousquet’s important dictum, ‘“Become the
man of your misfortunes; learn to embody their perfection and bril-
liance”’ (Deleuze 1990/2015: 149/154), restated in the 1980 session:
we can better understand Bousquet’s phrase: ‘The problem is to become
worthy . . .’. And here we have his whole moral, ‘to be worthy of what
happens to us’ – whatever that is, whether good or bad – . . . To accept
the event . . . doesn’t at all mean to resign ourselves or to say: ‘Oh God,
it serves me right’ . . . [but] means identifying in the event that is realized
in me or that I am realizing, to identify that part which cannot be realized
(l’ineffectuable). (TDS AO & Other 2–030680, translation modified)
A student’s question interrupted Deleuze at that point, but he reflected

fully on this once more, seven years later, providing additional aspects
of the event:
In a certain manner, one might say: every event awaits me! And it’s already
that. What interests me is an ethics (une morale) of the event because I
believe that there is no other ethics than that of the nature of people in rela-
tion to what occurs to them. Morality is never: what must one do? [Rather]
it’s: how can you endure what happens to you, whether this be good or
bad? (TDS Leibniz & Baroque 18–190587)
Reintroducing Bousquet’s dictum, Deleuze added, ‘You indeed sense

that there is a certain way to live the event as being worthy (en étant
digne) of what happens to us in the good and the bad. I would say that
it’s this aspect through which every event is addressed to my soul.’
While Deleuze addressed these points fully and explicitly only in these
two seminars, I maintain that he did so implicitly in his ongoing recherche
in every seminar and session. For this process of encounter with the event
along a very fine edge ‘is a question of attaining this will that the event
creates in us; of becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced within us,
the Operator’ (Deleuze 1990/2015: 149/153). He describes this process
as ‘reach[ing] a point at w
hich . . . w
e are faced with a volitional intui-
tion and a transmutation . . . a change of will, a sort of leaping in place
(saut sur place) of the whole body which exchanges its organic will
for a spiritual will’ (149/153–4). And I believe we can see Deleuze’s
own recherche emerging when he says: ‘My misfortune is present in all
events, but also a splendor and a brightness which dry up misfortune and
which bring about that the event, once willed, is actualized on its most
contracted point, on the cutting edge of an operation’ (149/154).
This ‘cutting edge’ is the fine line that Deleuze pursued within each
seminar. Bousquet’s dictum corresponds to his recherche: ‘“Become the
man of your misfortunes; learn to embody their perfection and bril-
liance”’, to which Deleuze adds the forceful statement:
Nothing more can be said, and no more has ever been said: to become
worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to
become the offspring (le fils) of one’s own events, and thereby to be reborn,
to have one more birth, and to break with one’s carnal birth – to become
the offspring of one’s events and not of one’s actions (oeuvres), for the
action (l’oeuvre) is itself produced by the offspring of the event. (Deleuze
1990/2015: 149–50/154)
Each seminar and each session encompassed these dual facets, Deleuze
seeking on the one hand the ‘counter-actualisation’, however fleeting,
within ‘Deleuze-time’, which necessarily included the potential ‘actu-
alisations’ of ongoing exchanges with participants, and on the other
hand, to realise the event beyond one’s misfortune, beyond one’s battles,
beyond one’s wounds, and thereby to be worthy of what happens.
We can link this recherche in the seminars to Deleuze’s ongoing inquiry
into the ‘supreme subject’ of ‘what is philosophy?’, a focus with which
Deleuze introduced the Leibniz and the Baroque seminar with great hesi-
tation: ‘So, why this [seminar’s] subject [Leibniz]? I wanted to do “What
is philosophy?”, and then I couldn’t. It’s such a sacred subject . . . that I
didn’t dare to take it on. But this [seminar] is nearly an introduction to
“What is philosophy?”’ (TDS Leibniz & Baroque 1–281087). In fact,
Deleuze had already begun this seminar topic explicitly during Cinema
seminar IV when he indicated that he would undertake it ‘on the level of
an encounter of cinema and philosophy’ (TDS Cinema IV 1–301084).
Then, in that seminar’s final session, while speculating on possible topics
for 1985–86, he again suggested that while the ‘dream course’ would be
on ‘what is philosophy?’, another topic would be to link this to consid-
eration of both Blanchot and Foucault (TDS Cinema IV 26–180685).
Indeed, Deleuze would spend half a session on this subject (TDS Leibniz
& Baroque 15–280487), urging students to connect to philosophy by
grasping hold of what suited them personally.
Hence, his ardour: ‘So, this is why it matters to me so much to create

this lineage in which, across all its innovation, there is always Nietzsche’s
expression: imagine a thinker as someone who shoots an arrow and
doesn’t know where it goes. And then, another thinker has to go find
it.’35 Deleuze urged the students to consider the year studying Leibniz
and Whitehead as establishing an initial feeling, that is, ‘this kind of jolt
from the arrow when you have already understood something because
you connect with it, . . . as a function of the way in which you yourself
live’ (TDS Leibniz & Baroque 15–280487). I believe that this insight
reflects Deleuze’s mission as a professor, his relationship with students
as a means ‘to teach them the benefit of their solitude; it’s to reconcile
them with their solitude’ (‘P as in Professor’).
This mission also connects to the question ‘what is philosophy?’
because in continuing ‘to think and live in terms of events’, however
solitary and strange that might seem, Deleuze reflected, ‘it goes without
saying that an event’s individuation is not the [same] kind of individu-
ation as for a person. Are you sure of being individuated as persons?’
(TDS Leibniz & Baroque 15–280487). For Deleuze is trying in this
session to urge students away from a mode of exchange based on ‘dis-
cussion’ (understood in the argumentative, objecting sense) and toward
being open to philosophy in an entirely different manner, one based on
affinity, on feeling. He asks:
Where do these affinities come from that each of us feels for one direction
or another, one vector or another that results in one author communicat-
ing something to us and another author, no less brilliant, communicating
nothing, that is, remaining abstract and dead writing? It’s here, if what is
philosophy has a s ense . . . These violent affinities that shoot through him/
her, really, are like flashes of fire. (TDS Leibniz & Baroque 15–280487)
In many ways, this statement hearkens back to ‘the sage’ who, like the
archer, ‘is closer to Zen’:
The sage waits for the event, that is to say, understands the pure event in
its eternal truth . . . as something eternally yet-to-come and always already
passed according to the line of the Aion. But, at the same time, the sage also
wills the embodiment and the actualization of the pure incorporeal event in
a state of affairs and in his or her own body and fl esh . . . and this applies to
the wound and to archery just as much as it applies to the stroll. (Deleuze
1990/2015: 146–7/150–1)
I would also add ‘just as much as it applies to the seminar’. Deleuze’s

lessons constitute fluctuations connecting the teacher’s present to the
students’, and these temporal fluctuations palpitate constantly between
moments of clarity through feeling and moments of corporeal varia-

tions and intensity leading away from such clarity, often translated by
students as a need for some immediate form of understanding. While
this tension within the seminar’s ‘matter in movement’ acceded, in
the proper circumstances and with patience, toward the ‘pure event’,
Deleuze’s emphasis in his teaching was on reaching those moments,
however fleeting, in which he was able to aim this flow of ‘matter’
toward the in-between of pedagogy and creation.
Notes
1. TDS Leibniz & Baroque 14–070487. See the seminar sessions at The Deleuze
Seminars database (deleuze.cla.purdue.edu) founded by Daniel W. Smith
(with research support from Purdue and the National Endowment for the
Humanities), with whom I serve as co-director as well as a principal transcriber
and translator. References to The Deleuze Seminars sessions follow this conven-
tion: TDS + seminar title (often abbreviated) + session number and date (day-
month-year).
2. See ‘P as in Professor’, in Deleuze and Parnet 1997. Cited hereafter in the text
as ‘P as in Professor’.
3. Deleuze often returned to this reference from ‘Hamlet’. See ‘On Four Poetic
Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy’, in Deleuze 1997:
27–35. See the phrase’s development also in the Kant seminar (March–April
1978) and in TDS Cinema III 5–131283 and Cinema III 12–280284.
4. See the digital archive of Deleuze’s seminars located at the Université de Paris
8, established in 1999 at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), based
on recordings faithfully made by a Japanese student, Hidenobu Suzuki. The
archive of 273 cassettes of 180 separate lectures comprises 413 hours of record-
ings, accessible online from the BNF through the Gallica search engine (https://
gallica.bnf.fr). A detailed yet partial summary of the BNF holdings has been
published by Frederic Astier (2006).
5. See the two RAI 3-produced videos from the 1986–87 Leibniz seminar (TDS
Leibniz & Baroque 3–181186 and 20–030687) and also the YouTube clip from
the mid-1970s, clearly revealing Deleuze’s compressed spatial circumstances,
the professor barely able to pass through the crowd, pointing out that an inher-
ent danger existed for everyone present both for breathing and should a fire
break out (TDS ATP I 10–240276, an approximate date). In an earlier session
(see TDS ATP I 7–130176), a full-scale revolt broke out concerning the lack of
space. This clip’s translated title is ‘Molar and Molecular Multiplicities’; see
deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/node/230 for the YouTube video link, under the title
Deleuze su molteplicità molare e molteplicità molecolare.
6. In the late 1970s, the conservative government of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
decided to destroy the Vincennes campus (deemed a hotbed of radical activ-
ity and drug trafficking) and to move the campus operation to St Denis, in
northeast Paris, starting in the autumn 1980 academic year. Hence, Hidenobu
Suzuki’s recordings correspond to the final year at Vincennes, then continue
for the entire seven years that Deleuze spent at Vincennes/St Denis. For discus-
sion of specific political issues on the Vincennes campus preceding this move,
see TDS ATP V 10–040380. On the political atmosphere at Vincennes during
Deleuze’s years there, see Dosse 2010: 347–57.
7. On these distinctions, see ‘Plateau 14. 1440, The Smooth and the Striated’, in
Deleuze and Guattari 1987.
8. Following the November–December 1986 demonstrations that created a four-
week hiatus in the Leibniz and the Baroque seminar, Deleuze vigorously encour-
ages the students to prepare a petition to have these bars removed (TDS Leibniz
& Baroque 4–161286).
9. For a remarkable overview of Deleuze’s vocalisations within his different ‘ora-
torial avatars’ (personnages oratoires) in the seminars, see Jaeglé 2005.
10. References to The Logic of Sense include pagination for both translation edi-
tions.
11. Private correspondence with author. For an example of these notes, see the
images in the French transcription of TDS Cinema III 18–150585.
12. Translation modified; as the translator Martin Joughin notes, ‘discuter [as well
as discussion] has in French a polemical resonance absent from “discuss”’
(Deleuze 1995: 200). For Deleuze’s extended explanation of why discuter
and discussions have no place in philosophy, see TDS Leibniz & Baroque
15–280487.
13. ‘Spinoza: immortalité et éternité’ (Immortality and Eternity) (Paris: Gallimard,
2001), ‘Leibniz: âme et damnation’ (Soul and Damnation) (Paris: Gallimard
2003) and ‘Gilles Deleuze Cinéma’ (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). I focus on the two
complete sessions (Spinoza and Leibniz) rather than the excerpts collected from
five different sessions (Cinéma). Both Parnet and Pinhas were long-standing par-
ticipants in Deleuze’s seminars. Parnet co-edited with Deleuze their exchanges
in Dialogues (Deleuze and Parnet 1987) and interviewed him in L’Abécédaire
de Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze and Parnet 1997). Pinhas is a musician who created,
with the Deleuze family’s permission, a still active website, WebDeleuze (web
deleuze.com) with transcriptions and translations of many seminar sessions
and including a range of resources and links for scholars interested in Deleuze’s
work. Claude Jaeglé’s (2005) overview of the seminars is based primarily on the
Spinoza and Leibniz CDs as well as L’Abécédaire.
14. As a result, the Spinoza seminar continued through the following session (on
24 March 1981) and only culminated after 54 minutes of additional questions
and answers on 31 March, following which the Painting seminar began.
15. Each session is temporally distinctive in being considerably edited for the CDs
in contrast to the BNF recordings. The Spinoza CD omits approximately 20
minutes of the recorded session, the Leibniz CD omits approximately an hour;
many of these omissions in each correspond precisely to interactions with par-
ticipants, apparently deemed ancillary by the producers.
16. Objections arose to Deleuze’s tendentious proposal to reduce the class size to
a smaller group limited to the space in which everyone could be comfortably
seated, in order to ‘return, review and perfect with me what we’ve already
done’. Unfortunately, after extensive discussion but without offering practical
details on how this reduction would work, Deleuze never attempted any of
these extreme measures, having vented frustration at the seemingly insoluble
situation.
17. Notably, during the final semester at Vincennes in 1980, with campus politics
upsetting the usual schedule, Deleuze devoted an entire session to assisting the
participants in developing concrete actions for non-violent direct protest (TDS
ATP V 10–040380); at the next session, continued unrest forced them to stop
after only 40 minutes (TDS ATP V 11–110380). See Dosse 2010, chapter 19,
for a contextual explanation of the Vincennes situation.
18. Besides student departures and arrivals, noise from sources in and outside the
building, including external students interrupting the class, the session I call ‘the
day of the squeaky door’ reveals Deleuze first irritated by a repetitive screech,
then shifting toward dark humour (‘I’m going to bring a revolver next time’),
before finally linking the hallucinatory squeak to specific points in the lecture
(TDS Cinema I 19–180582).
19. See the videos linked to TDS ATP I-Deleuze at Paris 8, seminars to which
Guattari regularly contributed, and also TDS Foucault 23–130586. As for
Parnet, she is present (seated near Deleuze) in the RAI 3 video of TDS Leibniz
& Baroque 3–181186.
20. See, for example, Alliez’s contribution (on economic doctrine and mercantilism)
in TDS ATP V 7–290180, and also six years later (TDS Foucault 24–200586,
nearly entirely inaudible). Pinhas intervened occasionally on digital technology
and music, the end of one such intervention located at the start of TDS Leibniz
& Baroque 10–240287. I discuss Comtesse’s numerous interventions below.
21. For example, musicologist Pascale Criton (TDS Cinema IV 10–220185); direc-
tor and writer Raymonde Carasco (TDS Cinema IV 12–050285); film and video
artist Pascal Auger (TDS Cinema IV 20–300485); filmmaker Dominique Vaillant
(TDS Cinema IV 22–140585); a mathematician and colleague at Vincennes/St.
Denis (designated only as Marek, TDS Leibniz & Baroque 8–270187); musi-
cologists Pascale Criton and Vincent Walls in the final session (TDS Leibniz &
Baroque 20–020687).
22. Notably, Dominique Vaillant’s interview/intervention in May 1985 on dif-
ferent aspects of sound and soundtracks in films inspired Richard Pinhas’s
lengthy (and unanticipated) intervention, followed by another invited inter-
vener, Pascale Criton, who objected to Pinhas’s perspectives. Facing precisely
the kind of exchange he detested, Deleuze shifted between alternate postures,
on one hand defending Pinhas, but on the other hand seeking common ground,
finally responding to another student’s objections with a peculiar rationale: ‘She
[Vaillant] wasn’t speaking in her own name; she had accepted to answer some
questions that I asked her, fine. I wanted to have my technical session’ (TDS
Cinema IV 22–140585). Moreover, this exchange seems to confirm Parnet’s
views on the limits of the question–answer/interview procedure (Deleuze and
Parnet 1987: 20).
23. One remarkable exchange of this kind occurred during the Spinoza seminar.
Having introduced the theme of good and evil through Spinoza’s correspondence
with Willem van Blyenbergh (a harsh critic of Spinoza’s view), Deleuze faced a
forceful critique from one participant, whom Deleuze at one point described as
‘my Blyenbergh’, and yet he succeeded in responding to the student while gener-
ally remaining within the focal development (TDS Spinoza 6–130181).
24. However, after the student departed, Deleuze first apologised quite sincerely,
expressing his concern for this young woman’s ‘little burst of delirium’, admit-
ting that she had shown up at his home several days earlier, ‘in a state of crisis’,
and that he worried that she might do something extreme. At the start of the
following session, Deleuze allowed her to make a presentation which was not
preserved on any recordings (TDS Cinema IV 19–230485). On ‘les fous’ (the
crazies) as a phenomenon in the Vincennes seminars, see ‘D as in Desire’ in
Deleuze and Parnet 1997, and in terms of the politics of so-called marginaux
(marginals), see Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 138–40.
25. Comtesse completed a dissertation in 1974 with Deleuze. The principal
Comtesse interventions to which Deleuze responded affirmatively, including
extended presentations (noted here with *), are: TDS Leibniz 4–060580*; TDS
Spinoza 4–161280; TDS Spinoza 5–060181; TDS Spinoza 6–130181; in the
Spinoza seminar, sessions 7 through 11, and 13; TDS Painting 8–050681; in
Cinema I, sessions 4, 5, 18, 19, 20*; in Cinema II, sessions 5, 9, 10, 13*, 17,
19*; in Cinema IV, sessions 2, 3, 10, 12; in the Foucault seminar, sessions 10*,
17*, 26*; TDS Leibniz & Baroque 15–280487 and 18–190587. On Comtesse’s
seminar contributions, see also Dosse 2010: 356.
26. See above for Comtesse’s Foucault presentations; Guattari participated in TDS
Foucault 23–130586, Alliez in TDS Foucault 24–200586, the musicologist
(speaking on Boulez’s composition Pli selon pli) in TDS Foucault 25–270586.
27. See the last 5 minutes of the 4-hour, 20-minute-long video titled ‘Il Senso in
Meno II’ at TDS ATP I-Deleuze at Paris VIII (deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/node/230)
and on YouTube (under this title).
28. The interventions to which Deleuze objected most strongly occur in TDS
Spinoza 12–100381; TDS Painting 5–120581; TDS Cinema IV 7–181284; TDS
Cinema IV 16–190385; TDS Leibniz & Baroque 13–170387.
29. As regards the matter of textual evidence, a remarkable exchange occurs in the
Cinema II seminar (TDS Cinema II 19–030583) in which Deleuze challenges
Comtesse on a citation from Proust, based on one word that Comtesse attrib-
uted to Proust that seemed suspicious to Deleuze. Upon verification, I have
determined that Comtesse misquoted Proust’s novel, Jean Santeuil, and cer-
tainly was unable to provide the reference to Deleuze. Moreover, Deleuze’s ire
in the cited exchange arose no doubt from his having rebuked Comtesse several
weeks before, albeit more gently, on the same lack of sources in a discussion on
Élie Faure (TDS IV 3–131184).
30. Of course, Comtesse was not the only student able to upset Deleuze. An exem-
plary session in this regard occurs in seminar Cinema II. Despite being extremely
upset by a dual confrontation with Comtesse and one other student, Deleuze
was still able eventually to return to a focused development, quite pertinent
for this discussion, in which he encompassed two figures of time, one that is
understood as an aggregate of time and another that is time as the instant, the
interval, concluding the session with ‘next time, yes, we’ll see’, following which
a pause occurred, and, as if picked up by a hot microphone, Deleuze said to
someone nearby, ‘They were so nasty today . . .’ (TDS Cinema II 14–150383).
31. For example, see the discussion on the present, the instant and the interval in
TDS Cinema II 17–190483.
32. ‘Cette coprésence de tous les degrés de puissance appartient à l’éternité, c’est-
à-dire à l’Aiôn’, the copresence that Deleuze continues to explore in Cinema III
15. See also TDS Cinema III 14–200384 and Cinema III 16–170484, in which
Deleuze juxtaposes Aion to the instant and to the Greek term nûn, or mainten-
ant (now).
33. Deleuze continued: ‘The best students were those who asked questions the fol-
lowing week . . . they would pass me a little note from one week to the n ext – a
practice I appreciated.’
34. Among the most striking locutions in Deleuze’s sessions are the phrase ‘il faut
que vous sentiez . . .’ (you must sense/feel that . . .) this or that point or concept
under consideration, and the imperative ‘Sentez que . . .’ (Sense that . . .); also,
the complimentary, supportive phrase ‘Vous sentez que . . .’ (You get/sense/feel
that . . .), from which students could infer Deleuze’s confidence in their grasping
hold.
35. This example from Nietzsche occurs often in Deleuze; see especially Deleuze
1983: 106 and 201, n.31.
References
Astier, F. (2006), Les cours enregistrés de Gilles Deleuze, 1979–1987, Mons:
Éditions Sils Maria.
Deleuze, G. (1990), Pourparlers, Paris: Minuit.
Deleuze, G. (1990/2015), The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans.
Mark Lester with Charles J. Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press/
London: Bloomsbury.
Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Deleuze, G. (1997), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael
A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (1987) Dialogues, New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (1997), L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, dir. Pierre-André
Boutang, Paris: Éditions Montparnasse (DVD: Gilles Deleuze, From A to Z, trans.
Charles J. Stivale, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi,
Dosse, F. (2010), Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah
Glassman, New York: Columbia University Press.
Jaeglé, C. (2005), Portrait oratoire de Gilles Deleuze aux yeux jaunes, Paris: PUF.
Notes on Contributors
Vernon W. Cisney is Chair and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary

Studies at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. He is the author
of Deleuze and Derrida: Difference and the Power of the Negative
(Edinburgh, 2018) as well as Derrida’s Voice and Phenomenon: An
Edinburgh Philosophical Guide (Edinburgh, 2014). In addition, he
is the co-editor of Between Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh, 2016),
Biopower: Foucault and Beyond (Chicago, 2015), Pierre Klossowski’s
Living Currency and Sade and Fourier (Bloomsbury, 2016) and The Way
of Nature and the Way of Grace: Philosophical Footholds on Terrence
Malick’s The Tree of Life (Northwestern, 2016). Most recently, he has
written articles and chapters included in Deleuze and Guattari Studies
and Batman and Theology.
Charlene Elsby, PhD, specialises in Aristotle and realist phenomenol-

ogy. She is Vice President of the North American Society for Early
Phenomenology, President of the North American Roman Ingarden
Society and the General Editor of Phenomenological Investigations.
She edited the volume Essays on Aesthetic Genesis, and her recent
essays include, ‘The Origin of Theoretical Knowledge in the
Organization of Nature’, ‘Roman Ingarden on Fictional Times’, ‘Time
and its Indeterminacy in Roman Ingarden’s Concept of the Literary
Work of Art’, and ‘Gregor Samsa’s Spots of Indeterminacy: Kafka as
Phenomenologist’. Her fictional works include Hexis, Affect, Psychros
and Musos.
Robert W. Luzecky, received his PhD from Purdue University (2021).

He is an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University.
His published articles include ‘Oppression, Speech, and Mitsein
in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’, in Clio: A Journal
of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 46 (3), 2017;

‘The Revolutionary Axiology and Non- generalizable Ontology of
Kierkegaard’s Concept of Repetition’, in Clio: A Journal of Literature,
History, and the Philosophy of History 47 (3), 2020; and ‘Deleuze’s
Elaboration of Eternity: Ontogenesis and Multiplicity’, in Deleuze and
Guattari Studies 16 (1), 2022. His other publications include Amy
Schumer and Philosophy, co-edited with Charlene Elsby (Carus, 2018);
and ‘Mitscherling’s Reading of Ingarden’, in Essays on Aesthetic Genesis
(University Press of America, 2016).
James A. Mollison is an Associate Teaching Professor at Purdue University

in West Lafayette, Indiana. His research focuses on nineteenth-century
German philosophy, twentieth-century French philosophy, and value
theory. His recent work has appeared in journals such as Deleuze and
Guattari Studies, History of Philosophy Quarterly and Inquiry: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
Thomas Nail is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver

and author of numerous books, including The Figure of the Migrant,
Theory of the Border, Marx in Motion, Theory of the Image, Theory
of the Object, Theory of the Earth, Lucretius I, II and III, Returning to
Revolution and Being and Motion. His research focuses on the philoso-
phy of movement.
Dorothea Olkowski is Professor and former Chair of Philosophy at

the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, current Director of
Humanities and Director of the Cognitive Studies Program and found-
ing Director of Women’s Studies. She is author of more than 100
articles and fourteen books, including her most recent publication,
Deleuze, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty: The Logic and Pragmatics of
Affect, Perception, and Creation (Indiana University Press, 2021). Her
other recent publications include: Deleuze at the End of the World:
An Argentinian Perspective on the Sources of his Thought, co-edited
with Julián Ferreyra (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020); Deleuze and
Guattari’s Philosophy of Freedom: Freedom’s Refrains, co-edited
with Eftechios Pirovolakis (Routledge, 2019); ‘Continental Feminist
Approaches to Philosophy of Science’, in The Oxford Handbook of
Feminist Philosophy, ed. Kim Q. Hall (Oxford University Press, 2021);
‘Deleuze’s Oedipus’, in All About Father: Psychoanalysis, the Oedipus
Complex, and the Modern Family, ed. Lilliane Weissberg (Palgrave
McMillian, 2022). She is writing on Tango and Philosophy and is
260 Notes on Contributors
completing an article on ‘Postmodernism’ for the Stanford University

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Strand Sheldahl-Thomason teaches philosophy at Purdue University

Fort Wayne. He received his PhD from Purdue University in 2018. He
writes about philosophy and literature, Michel Foucault and practices
of the self, and environmental ethics. His recent article ‘Foucault and
the Use of Exposure: Discipline, Ethics, and Self-Writing’ can be found
in Review of Communication. He is currently completing a book called
Michel Foucault’s Ethics of Writing.
Daniel W. Smith is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. He is

the author of Essays on Deleuze (2012) and co-editor of the Cambridge
Companion to Deleuze (2012, with Henry Somers-Hall), Deleuze and
Ethics (2011, with Nathan Jun), and Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text
(2009, with Eugene W. Holland and Charles J. Stivale). He is also
the translator, from the French, of books by Gilles Deleuze, Pierre
Klossowski, Isabelle Stengers and Michel Serres.
Henry Somers-Hall is Reader in Philosophy at Royal Holloway,

University of London. He is the author of Hegel, Deleuze, and the
Critique of Representation (2012), Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition
(2013) and Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy (2022),
and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze (2012, with
Daniel W. Smith) and A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy (2018, with
Jeffrey A. Bell and James Williams).
Charles J. Stivale is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of French at

Wayne State University, Detroit. He is the author of books, edited
volumes and articles on French language, literature and culture, as
well as on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. He has also translated
Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (with Mark Lester and Constantin V.
Boundas), Franco Berardi (Bifo)’s Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship,
and Visionary Cartography (with Giuseppina Mecchia), and the eight-
hour DVD interview of Deleuze by Claire Parnet, Gilles Deleuze, From
A to Z. He is currently co-director (with Daniel W. Smith) of the Purdue
University-based Deleuze Seminars archive.
Peter Trnka is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University

of Newfoundland. Born in Prague, he received his PhD and other degrees
at the University of Toronto, where he also learned about the time of
the strike during his work as president and chief negotiator for the
Canadian Union of Educational Workers Local 2. He has published
articles on Hume, Canguilhem, Derrida, Deleuze and others, as well a
cookbook and poetry. He is currently serving as editor-in-chief of Janus
Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies, launched in November 2021, and
of Codgito: Student Journal of Philosophy and Theory, launched in
spring 2022.
Index
a priori, as historical, in Foucault, Aristotle, 41, 173, 194, 217–18

110–11 Categories, 167–8
A Thousand Plateaus, 60, 137 De Interpretatione, 166, 168, 218
dating of the plateaus, 144 hylomorphism, 170–1
absolutism, 230–32n8 Metaphysics, 166
abstraction, 166–7 Physics, 45, 46, 200
Achebe, Chinua, 229 Poetics, 196
actual, 145 sublunar time, 48
in Foucault, 107 art, as superior to knowledge, 81
actualization, 20, 127 artist, 214
Aeschylus, 60 as creator of truth, 227–8
affect, in Deleuze, 70n60 Atget, Eugène, 192
affirmation, 81–2, 87, 94 atom, 31–4
Aion (eternity),143–4 and conatus, 32–4
and Chronos, 146, 186, 222–4, as flow, 28
248 not particle-like, in Lucretius, 31
in Plotinus, 47 and thought, 32
Alexander, Samuel, 137 atomism, 28, 125
on Spinoza, 149–51 Auger, Pascal, 155n21, 245
Alliez, Éric, 243 Augustine
Capital Times, 1 doctrine of the Fall, 49
anima, 174 the eternal now, 57
and animal, 162 automata, 146
Anti-Oedipus, 60, 65 autumn, in Chinese thought, 49
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 5, 197 axiology, 165
Red Desert, 5, 197
Zabriskie Point, 5 Barthes, Roland, 192
apparatus of capture, 144 Bazin, André, 183–4
apperception, in Kant, 118 becoming, 59–60, 145–6
apprehension, in Kant, 53, 119 as anti-memory, 145
arborescence, 145 becoming-animal, 171–3, 174
archaeology, in Foucault, 110 in Nietzsche, 77
archive, in Foucault, 111–12 Bellour, Raymond, 185
Index 263
Benjamin, Walter, 184, 192 Cache, Bernard, 195

Arcades Project, 192 Caesar, 57
the ‘aura’ of artworks, 192 crossing the Rubicon, 219–21
‘Little History of Photography’, caesura, 103–4
192 calendar, 45–6
On Hashish, 192 camera, as prosthetic, 184
Bensmaïa, Réda, 163 capitalism, 50
Bergson, Henri, 1, 143–4, 147, 186, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 144
200–1 and coexistent time, 59
‘Bergson’s Conception of categories, 129
Difference’ (Deleuze), 186, 191 categorial thought, 116, 120,
on cinema, 183 122
Creative Evolution, 187–8, 189, in Kant, 117–19, 124–5
190 causality, rupture with, 60
on duration and intuition, 16–17 change, 52
Duration and Simultaneity, 55–6 in film, 186–93
versus Einstein, 17 as pure form, 52
and Lucretius, 34 chaos, 13, 18–19, 55–6
Matter and Memory, 18–19, 187, as continuous variation, 55
189, 198 as infinite speed, 55
method of intuition, 17–19 chaosmos, 61
and novelty, 60 China, 49
on ontological memory, 57 chronobiology, 56
La Pensée et le Mouvant, 35 chronophilia, 41
Time and Free Will, 187 critique of, 41
time as movement, 35–6 Cicero, 30
Bergsonism, 186, 190 cinema
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, in Deleuze, 180–204
184–5 and duration, 186–93
black holes, 35 and phenomenology, 180–6
Blade Runner 2042, 189 clinamen, 15
Blade Runner, 189 clocks, 48
Blanchot, Maurice, 61, 251 synchronization of, 48
block universe, 14 Clouse, Robert, 199
Bogue, Ronald, 199 Enter the Dragon, 199
Boltzmann, Ludwig, 2, 15, 16 coexistence, 58–9
Borges, Jorge Luis, 64, 225 in Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
Boulez, Pierre, 1 59
bourgeois, 138 of past with present, 58
Bousquet, Joë, 250–1 topological, 59
Bresson, Robert, 184 Coldness and Cruelty, 180
buggery, 75 common notions, in Spinoza, 141
Buñuel, Luis, 183 common sense, 125
Un Chien Andalou, 183 communism, 137, 141
Butler, Samuel, 56, 50 Comtesse, Georges, 243–6, 249,
erewhon, 60 255n25, 255–6n25, 256n30
on habit, 56 conatus, in Lucretius, 32–4
264 Index
concepts Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix

creation of, 11, 51, 90 becoming-animal, 171–3
in Deleuze, 65–6 and the body, 162
as temporal, 65–6 Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1
conceptual persona, 63 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
consciousness, 183 1, 173, 228
contemplation, 56 philosophy of history, 105–6
contemporaneity, 58 What is Philosophy?, 1
contingent futures, 217–18 ‘Deleuze-time’, 234, 242, 245–9, 251
continuity, 20–1 democracy, 141
continuous variation, 55, 65 Denver Museum of Contemporary
ideal continuity, 23 Art, 16
time as a continuum, 203 Derrida, Jacques, 244
contraction, as synthesis, 56 Descartes, René, 11, 17
contradiction, 63 cogito, 89
counter-actualisation, 143, 144, 251 evil genius and God, 64
cosmology, in Kant, 51–2 determination
Cratylus, 216 complete, 121
creation of truth, 227–30 in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty,
creativity, in Whitehead, 60 122–5
Cronenberg, David, 202 in Kant, 117–22
Videodrome, 202 diagrammatics, 144–5
crystal-image, 58 Diderot, Denis, 46
crystals of time, 197–203 difference, 19, 61
cyclical time, in Nietzsche, 83 freed from identity, 91
in Bergson, 19
Dasteur, Françoise, 185–6 Difference and Repetition, 3, 27, 55,
daylight savings time, 50 57, 60–1, 62, 65, 75–94, 99,
De Niro, Robert, 199 122, 143, 144, 186, 214, 223–4
deduction, as a temporal problem, three syntheses, 148
118–20 differentiation, 203
déjà vu (paramnesia), 58 Diodorus Cronus, 220
Deleuze, Gilles and the master argument, 63, 218
on Bergson, 18 discontinuity, 110
chaos and virtuality, 13 discourse, 110–11
and cinema, 180–204 in Foucault, 110
‘The Deleuze Seminars’, 234–53 and language, 111
Difference and Repetition, 22–3, disjoint, 136
55 displacement, 127
relation to Foucault, 98–101 in Marx’s logic, 139
on Leibniz, 188 distribution, 123
interpretation of Lucretius, 27–43 nomadic, 126
and Antonio Negri, 136–55 sedentary, 134n5
relation to phenomenology, 181–6 duration, 1–8, 144
pure and empty form of time, in Bergson, 187
45–66 in film, 186–93
seminars, 234–53 dynamisms, spatio-temporal, 127
Index 265
Eclipses, 48 ethics, and Nietzsche’s eternal return,

Egg, 126–7 85–6
and intensity, 126–7 Euclid, 123, 128
‘the world is an egg’, 126 Euclidean space, 128
Einstein, Albert, 12, 15 Europe ’51, 197
versus Bergson, 17 evaluation, in Nietzsche, 87
general relativity, 35 event, 61, 105, 143
élan vital, 19 not captured by history, 106
embryo, 126–7 becoming worthy of, 250
and differentiation, 126–7 experience, 116
embryogenesis, 126–7 constitution of, 116–33
emergence, 133 ‘experience error’, 128
emotion, in Deleuze’s seminars, 249 extensity, 126, 128
Empiricism and Subjectivity, 141 extensive movement, 46–7
encountera, 90 in Kant, 51–2
Deleuze on the lookout for, 241 in Plato’s Timaeus, 46–7
end times, 51–2
Engels, Friedrich, 137 Fall
englobing, 191 in Christian theology, 49
entanglement, 38 in Plotinus, 47
entropy, 12, 16, 42, 139 false, 62–4, 224–5
Epictetus, 218 as creative of the true, 65–6
Epicurus, 28 in Deleuze’s works, 59n61
episteme, in Foucault, 111 false, 62–4
equations, and time, 42 as not not-true, 225
escape, 172 powers of, 62–4
eschatology, 51–2 falsifier (faussaire), 63
eternal return, 99–100, 223 far from equilibrium, 15
cosmological reading, 82–3 fatigue, 245
critiques of, 76 fear, and intensive movement, 48–9
Deleuze’s interpretation of, Feeling, 256n34
75–94 in Deleuze’s seminars, 249
as ethical thought, 83–4 and Whitehead, 249
in Gay Science, 76 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 54
of the new, 90–3 figure and background, 129
as ontological selection, 84–5 finitude, analytic of, in Foucault, 108
oriented toward the future, 93–4 firstness, secondness, and thirdness,
physical aspects, 82–5 in Peirce, 22
as selective ontology, 85–8 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1
eternity, 50, 165 flow, 246
in Kant, 51–2 force
meditation on, 51 active versus reactive, 77
as permanence, 52–3 in Nietzsche, 77
in Plato, 163–5 forger, 214, 225, 227
in Spinoza, 150 forms
time as a moving image of (Plato), in Deleuze, 101
46 in Plato and Kant, 52
266 Index
forms (cont.) habit, as passive synthesis, 147

of change, 52 Hallett, H. F., 137, 149
of the true, 62–4, 90, 215, 225 Aeternitas, 151–3
Platonic, 163–5 Hamlet, 7, 61, 103
formalisation, 172, 174 ‘the time is out of joint’, 51, 103
Foucault, Michel, 4, 251 Hardt, Michael, 137
actual and inactual, 107 Empire, 154
analytic of finitude, 108 Haunting, The, 190
Archaeology of Knowledge, Haunting of Hill House, 190
111–12 Hegel, Georg, 32, 54
History of Madness, 108–9 and dialectics, 28
histories of the present, 107–13 philosophy of history, 105
Introduction to Kant’s Philosophy of Nature, 28
Anthropology, 108 Heidegger, Martin
The Order of Things, 108 Being and Time, 54
relation to Deleuze, 98–101 on clock time, 142
relation to Kant, 99–100 and everyday time, 50
and transcendental philosophy, 100 Kant and the Problem of
foundation of time, 56–7, 60, 66 Metaphysics, 54
fourth dimension, 14 and Marx, 142
fracture, 54 Heraclitus, 216–17
of the self, 90 heredity, 56
Francis Bacon: The Logic of Hermes, 113–14
Sensation, 180 Hesiod, 49
freedom, 141 Hill, Rebecca, 187
freeze-frame, time as, 52, 66 History, 105–11
future, 63 in Deleuze and Guattari, 105
contingent, 62 as emergence, 107
as third synthesis, 103 and the event, 106
historical a priori, 110–11
game, ideal, 237, 239–40, 242 of philosophy, as ‘buggery’, 75
gender in Bergson’s duration, 187–8 of the present (Foucault), 107
genealogy, 80 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 60
gestalt, 129 the caesura of time, 61
Glaucon, 164 and madness, 109
God, 61, 64 Remarks on Oedipus, 60–1
death of, 61 Hollywood, 143
in Descartes and Leibniz, 64 Huffer, Lynn, 111
deus sive natura (Spinoza), 150 Hume, David, 1, 41, 129, 147
as falsifier, 64 association of ideas, 65
as transcendental illusion, 91 on habit, 56
Grandeur de Marx (Deleuze), 140 Husserl, Edmund, 6, 181
ground of time, 60, 63–4, 66 on expression, 168
groundlessness (sans fond), 66 Ideas I, 185
Guattari, Félix, 1, 99, 106, 137, 236, and the living present, 222
242–3, 255n19, 256n26 Logical Investigations, 167, 169,
Guillemet, Julien, 181 171
Index 267
and natural perception, 183–4 in Kant, 51–2

never mentions cinema, 182 intensive versus extensive
and phenomenology, 186 quantities, 46
Phenomenology and the Crisis of in Plotinus’ Enneads, 46–7
Philosophy, 185 International System of Units, 48
Phenomenology of Internal Time intuitions, 17
Consciousness, 46 invagination, 127
retention and protention, 56 invention of a people, 215
hylomorphism, 170–1
Hyppolite, Jean, 188–9 Jackson, Shirley, 190
judgement, 133
‘I is another’ (Rimbaud), 52, 54 in Kant, 122
‘I think’, in Kant, 118 as a model of synthesis, 124–5
Iberall, Arthur, 1
Ideas Kafka, Franz
in Deleuze, 24 and becoming-animal, 172
in Kant and Deleuze, 55 Metamorphosis, 161, 163
in Plato and Deleuze, 12 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
illusion, 122, 229 173, 177n17, 180
in Kant, 91 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 11, 45
transcendental, 125, 133n1 analogies of experience, 52
image, 146–8 Anthropology, 100, 107, 108, 110
in Bergson, 18–19 Critique of Pure Reason, 51
image of thought, 79–82 Critique of Judgment, 54
immanence, 59, 89, 144, 155 Deleuze’s critique of, 101
impossible, 63 influence on Deleuze and Foucault,
inactual, in Foucault, 107 99–100
incompossibility, 64, 219–20, 225 Merleau-Ponty’s critiques of,
indeterminacy, 8, 129, 131, 133 116–33
and determinacy, 129, 133 and Nietzsche’s eternal return,
field of, 125 79–80
moment of, 125, 128 on the ontological priority of time,
indiscernibility, 11 41
infinite transcendental deduction, 53
infinitely large and small, 13 Kierkegaard, Soren, 49
infinitesimal, 17 on contingent futures, 69–70n56
time as, 83 King, Steven, 190–1
Ingarden, Roman, 6, 161, 167 Knowledge, 80–1
The Cognition of the Literary and art, 81
Work of Art, 169 in Nietzsche, 80–1
on film, 182 Kosmin, Paul J., 51–2, 68n22
The Literary Work of Art, 169 Kovács, András Bálint, 181
instant, 222 Kubrick, Stanley, 183, 190–1
insurgency, 142
intellect versus feeling, 249–50 labor
intensive movement, 46–7 living and dead, 138
and fear, 48–9 and time, 139–40
268 Index
Lampert, Jay, 102, 105, 106 Democritean and Epicurean

language, 109–11 Philosophy of Nature, 33
in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, Grundrisse, 138
177n17 and Heidegger, 142
in Kafka, 161–2, 168, 170–174 on Lucretius, 28–29
as stasis, 166–7 Massumi, Brian, 144
last man, in Nietzsche, 84 master argument, 63, 218
Lawlor, Leonard, 189 Aristotle’s solution, 69–70n56
Lee, Bruce, 199 in Leibniz and Kierkegaard, 70n56
Leibniz, 11, 219–22 materialism, 27–43
and God, 64 in Lucretius, 27–43
and incompossible worlds, mathematics, 127
219–20 meaning, 167–71
and possibility, 221–3 ideal, 170
Theodicy, 221–2 measure, time as a measure of
‘Letter to a Harsh Critic’, 75 movement, 45
Libeskind, Daniel, 16 media, 146
life, as becoming, 81 Méliès, Georges, 182
lightning, 129 memory
as determination, 117, 123, 125 and anti-memory, 145
limit,136 in film, 186–93
in Kant, 122–3 preservation of memories, 57
mathematical notion of, 23 as synthesis, 57–9
literature, death of, 161–3 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4, 116–33,
Logic of Sense, 3, 27–9, 65, 99, 143, 181–2, 185–6
144, 145, 180, 186, 214, 222–4, and expression, 167
246–8, 250 overlooks cinema, 182
logos, 216 Phenomenology of Perception, 171
Longuenesse, Beatrice, 120–1 metamorphosis, 62, 64
Lucretius, 15 metaphor
and Bergson, 34 death of, 171–3
clinamen, 15 in Deleuze, 161–74
De Rerum Natura, 34, 38–9 metaphysics, in Nietzsche, 88
Deleuze’s interpretation of, 27–43, metaschematism (Leibniz), 46
35–6 metastability, 6
on time, 27–43 metric, and non-metric spaces, 127
Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 6, 182, microstates, 16
203 Minkowski, Hermann, 14
Lundy, Craig, 105, 107 Minor, 228–9
Luther, Martin, 49 mirror, 203
and virtual/actual relation,
Maimon, Salomon, 89 199–200
Malick, Terence, Days of Heaven, 6 Mollison, James, 69n49
Markov process, 112 monastic time, 49–50
Marx, Karl, 28, 32, 50, 137 morphogenesis, 126
Capital, 138 motion, differentiation of, 34
The Difference Between the movement, aberrant, 48–50
Index 269
Movement-Image, The, 179, 190 not-necessarily-true pasts, 63–4, 218,

multiplicity, 23, 64 225
novelty
Nakata, Hideo, 202 in Bergson, 60
Nature Deleuze’s metaphysics of, 101–7
as power, 33 now, 124
in Spinoza, 149 in Plotinus, 47
naval battle (master argument), 63 number
negation, 87 irrational, 49
active, 78–9 number theory, 127
in Kant’s deduction, 121
in Nietzsche, 76 object = x, 53, 119
Negri, Antonio, 5, 136–155 objective versus subjective time, 47–8
‘a communist idea of time’, 137 One, in Plotinus, 47
compares Spinoza and Nietzsche, opinion, 50, 65, 217, 248
155 opposition, 121–3
differences from Deleuze, 144 in Kant, 122–3
Empire, 154 in Kant’s deduction, 121
Marx Beyond Marx, 138, 139, opsigns, 196–7
154 order, 62
Savage Anomaly, 154 numeric, 127
Time for Revolution, 138 of time, 62
Nerval, Gérard de, 109
new, 19, 51, 59–60 paramnesia (déjà vu), 58
creation of, 228 Paris, Texas, 197
as eternal return, 90–3 Parmenides, 216–17
production of, 51 passive synthesis, 56, 93
Newton, Isaac, 12 past, 57–9
and absolute space, 13 not necessarily true, 63
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 8, 15, 173, paradoxes of, 58–9
226 the pure past, 57–9, 100, 102
anti-Platonism, 13 pedagogy, 234
and the body, 162 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 2, 20
eternal return, 13, 60 on continuity, 20
higher man, 64 firstness and secondness, 20
and madness, in Foucault, 109 semiotics, 21
slave morality, 77 thirdness, 21
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 7, 213, people, invention of, 215
223 perception, 125, 129
the untimely, 60, 146 in Husserl, 176n9
and will to power, 64 in Merleau-Ponty, 128–9
Nietzsche and Philosophy, 3, 29, 33, natural versus cinematic, 182–3
75–94, 215 perspectivism, 78
nihilism, 84, 88 phenomenology, 167–71
nisis, versus conatus, 151 and the body, 162
nomadic distribution, 126 and cinema, 180–6
non-chronological time, 59n62, 63–4 Deleuze’s relation to, 181–6
270 Index
philosophy, as the creation of ‘real without being actual’, 7, 201,

concepts, 11 202, 203
physics Proust and Signs, 180
contemporary, 35 psychologism, 117
as deterministic, 12 in Kant, 51–2
Piercey, Robert, 149 Ptlemy, 11
Pinhas, Richard, 239 pure and empty form of time, 3
plane of Immanence, 59 in Deleuze, 55–66
planetarium, 46 in Kant, 52
Plank, Max, 40, 42 Pythagoras, 49
Plato, 194–5
becoming-God, 173 Quantum gravity, 38
a cave behind every cave, 13 Quantum theory, 35
Cratylus, 216
and the false, 64 reason, 166–7
Ideas, 16 and unreason, 109
Phaedo, 164–6 recherche, 246–8
planetarium, 46 in Deleuze’s seminars, 250–1
Republic, 163–4, 195, 224 recognition, 53
and the simulacrum, 145 as an act of synthesis, 119–20
Statesman, 11–12 Red Desert, 197
theory of forms, 216–18 reference, 162
Timaeus, 46–7 in language, 166–7
Plotinus, Enneads, 46–7 theory of, 23
Plutarch, 30 Reformation, 50
Poincaré, Henri, 15 relations, 123
positivity, in Foucault, 110 extensive, 123–4
possible relationalism, 230–2n8
critique of, 60 repetition, 88
and the impossible, 63 of difference, 104
powers of the false, 215, 229–30 of as eternal return, 88–93
and the creation of the true, 215 in history, 106
praxis, 141–2 of the new, 93–4
pre-existence, of the past, 59 representation, 123–4
present as a transcendental illusion, 122
peaks of the present, 57 in Peirce, 22
as variable present, 57–9 reproduction, 119
probability, 16 in Kant’s deduction, 53
problematics, 90 Resnais, Alain, 64
in Deleuze, 24 rhizomatics, 144–5
profession, of faith, 50 rhythm, 127
proletariat, 138 Rimbaud, Arthur, 54
prosthetics, 184 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 64, 193–6
Proust, Marcel, 1, 198 ‘Time and Description in Fiction
‘a little time in the pure state’, 193 Today’, 194
the madeleine, 202 Rodowick, David, 181, 192
on making time visible, 53 Rosenberg, Stuart, 201
Index 271
Rossellini, Roberto, 197 Individuation in the Light of

Rovelli, Carlos, 2 Notions of Form and
rural time, 49 Information, 4
Russell, Bertrand, 15, 16 simulacra, 60, 92
on Bergson, 16–17 in Lucretius, 38–40
Ruttman, Walter, 184–5 simulacrum, in Deleuze’s
interpretation of Plato, 12
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 181–2, 185 singularity, 35, 61, 203–4
The Imaginary, 182 skepticism, 22
Imagination, 147 Smith, Daniel W., 101, 104–5, 161,
overlooks cinema, 182 225, 237, 253n1
The Psychology of Imagination, Essays on Deleuze, 170–1
147 Smolin, Lee, 12
The Words, 182 Sobchack, Vivian, 181
Savan, David, 137, 149 Socrates, 79, 164
on Spinoza, 153–4 sonsigns, 196–7
‘saving the appearances’, 49 Sophists, 79
schematism, in Kant, 54–5 Sophocles, 61
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 79 soul, 48, 164–5
Schrader, Paul, 181 and immortality, 164–5
Scorcese, Martin, 199 as intensive movement, 48
Scott, Ridley, 6, 189 Souriau, Etienne, 1
sea battle, 219–20 space, 236
and contingent futures, 217–18 as coexistence, 52–3
seasons, 45 in Deleuze’s seminars, 235–6
sedentary distribution, 123 smooth, 236
Seleucid empire, as the origin of Spinoza, 137
linear time, 51–2 ambiguities on time, 149–54
self and causa sui, 29
death of, 61 conatus, 3, 5
passive versus active, in Kant, 54 Deleuze’s critique of, 149
as source of synthesis, 124 and Lucretius, 32
self-organization, 15 Sprechgesang, 237
seminars by Deleuze, 234–53 spring, in Chinese thought, 49
semiotics, 21 Stalin, Joseph, 244
in Peirce, 20 Stalker, 197
sempiternal, 153–4 statements, in Foucault, 113
sense data, 129 states of affairs, 23
series of time, 62 static genesis, 36
Shakespeare, 103 versus kinetic genesis, 40, 41
Shakespeare, 1, 7, 61 Stiegler, Bernard, on schematism,
Sherlock Holmes, 189 68n30
Shining, The, 190–1 Stoicism, 143–4
Sholtz, Janae, 229 Stoics, 1
significance, in Plato, 163–5 subjective Time, versus objective
signs, 167–71 time, 47–8
Simondon, Gilbert, 1 sublunar time, 48
272 Index
succession, 200 derived, 48–50

as an image of time, 51 direct presentation of, 179, 193–7
denied in the Cinema books, 187, its disintegrating power, 53
199 as dispersion, 110
origin of term, 51 everyday, 50
survol (Ruyer), 11 as fourth dimension, 14
swerve (clinamen), 29 independent of measure, 134n9
as change of motion, 38–47 as infinite, 83
as immanent to the atom, in as liberated (Negri), 140
Lucretius, 30 monastic versus rural, 49
as indeterminate, 36–8 and movement, 27–43
as ontologically unassignable, 29 as ‘a moving image of eternity’
symbol, in language, 166–7 (Plato), 46
synthesis, 99, 101 in the Newtonian paradigm, 14
asymmetrical, 125–6 non-chronological, 63–4
disappears in Cinema, 186 ordinary, 50–1 as money, 50
in Deleuze, 101, 122–8 originary, 45–8
of habit (first synthesis), 56–7 out of joint (Hamlet), 51
in Kant, 54–5, 117–22 as a psychological phenomenon, 14
in Merleau-Ponty, 122–5, 128–32 as a pure and empty form, 3, 45–6,
of memory (second synthesis), 57–9 90, 99
of the new (third synthesis, 59–60 as real, 14
passive, 147 its relation to equations, 42
in Plotinus, 47 sublunar, 48
of time, 53 as succession, 52–3
and truth, 216–18
Tarkovsky, Andrei, 197 as work, 139
technology, 146 time zones, 50
temperature, 49 Time-Image, The, 3, 57–8, 60, 62–4,
as difference, 128 146, 179
temps (French term), cognates, 49 direct time-image in, 193–7
thermodynamics, 12, 15, 42 time-image paradigm, 146–9
second law, 14 timelessness, negative, 165
thermometers, 47 timeline, as an image of time, 51
thirdness, 22 to-come, 137–8, 141–2
in Peirce, 21 totality of time, 58, 62, 103–4
Thought, and experience, 117 tragedy, Greek, 60
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 61–2 transcendental empiricism, 88–90
as unfinished, 92 Trifonova, Temeneuga, 147–8
time, passim Trump, Donald, 228
abstract, 50 truth, 62–3
and the block universe, 14 creation of, 215, 227–30
command time versus liberated crisis of, 216–18
time (Negri), 141 definition of, 62
crystals of, 197–203 discovery of, 51
as cyclical, 83 form of, 62
in Deleuze’s seminars, 234–53, 238 as metaphor, 213
Index 273
in Nietzsche, 86 Weber, Max, 50

primary truths, 220 Welles, Orson
produced by the false, 65–6 Citizen Kane, 226
put in question by time, 216–18 F for Fake, 227
truthful person, 63, 214, 226 The Lady from Shanghai,
Tsuruta, Norio, 202 199
typology, 77–9 Touch of Evil, 226–7
Wenders, Wim, 197, 199
ungrounded, 93, 104 ‘What is…?’ question, 85
in Foucault, 110 What is Philosophy?, 65–6
universal, in language, 166–7 Whitehead, Alfred North, 41, 60,
universus, 49 252
univocity, 144, 155 on change and motion, 36
unreason, 109 whole, as a concept, 19
untimely, 146 will to power
in Nietzsche, 106 as evaluative typology, 77–9
and images of thought, 79–82
value, in Nietzsche, 86 Williams, James, 101, 103, 104,
variables, in scientific functions, 65 214, 223, 235
variations, in philosophic concepts, Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of
65 Time, 214
varieties, in artistic compositions, 65 on time and the Cinema books,
Vertov, Dziga, 184 180, 214
virtual, 23, 145 Wise, Robert, 190
and actual, 147, 148
versus the possible, 60 Zalamea, Fernando, 20–24
as potentiality, 13 Zarathustra, 61–2

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Deleuze and Time

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Introduction: The Many Aspects of Duration 1

Part I: Concepts of Time

Part II: History of Time

Part III: Expressions of Time

Notes on Contributors 258

philosophical figures to which Deleuze often returns (as though a morsel

Perhaps one of the greatest philosophical friendships in the history

assemblage of both physical and non-­physical processes, Trnka argues

deterritorialisation of language. In concrete terms, metaphor attempts

succession. In concrete terms, Deleuze’s elaborations of the nature of

of course materials. Stivale observes that in one seminar Deleuze reflects

1909. It is the translation of motion in time into a visual representation

matter, these nonequilibrium conditions may be the setting for so-­called

Deleuze, Bergson and Intuition

ematics conceives change, even continuous change, as constituted by

begins with movement, with the perception of movement as reality and

Deleuze, Peirce and the Continuum

growth from non-­existence to existence’ (CP 1.175). In chaos, there

to variables upon which a phenomenon depends, and continuity is ‘a

In the broader context, Deleuze has argued that ‘[i]deal connections

Peirce, C. S. (1982–2000), Writings, ed. Nathan Houser, Bloomington: Indiana

change’ (1994: 89). Similarly, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze subordi-

Deleuze, Lucretius and the Temporality of the Swerve

1. The essence of the atom is to course and flow

2. The swerve is non-spatiotemporal and not epistemologically

3. The swerve is immanent to the atom and not caused by

The Problems with Deleuze’s Interpretation of Lucretius

2. Lucretius does not say that atoms are made of thought

3. Lucretius does not say that the swerve is conatus (vital

Deleuze does not attempt to find a textual equivalent of conatus in

Deleuze finds the idea of materialism insufficient because he cannot

Lucretius and the Movement of Time

In Bergson’s final lectures, La Pensée et le mouvant (Thought and

The Temporality of the Clinamen

Illud in his quoque te rebus cognoscere avemus, corpora cum deorsum

Corpora (flows of bodily matters) move downwards, carried by their

quantum physics to explain the emergence of space and time. These

Simulacral Time: Brevi spatio, temporis in puncto

In the final lines of Lucretius’ description of simulacra, he puts forward

Simulacra are things (simulacra rerum), and things are by definition

Simulacra Rerum Simulacra Rerum

flux of indeterminately high energies at work below the level of measur-

from the primary movement of indeterminate quantum fluctuations

of time existing independently from material motion has no absolute

Deleuze argues that a fundamental mutation in the concept of time

Originary, Aberrant and Ordinary Time

1. Originary time: the ancient coordination of extensive and

to ­coordinate and impose order on these heterogeneous movements (see

2. Derived time: aberrations of movement

take on an independence of their own and would cease to be submitted

nonetheless engendered by both the rural communities and monasteries

Introduction: The Many Aspects of Duration 1

Notes on Contributors 258

assemblage of both physical and non-physical processes, Trnka argues

matter, these nonequilibrium conditions may be the setting for so-called

growth from non-existence to existence’ (CP 1.175). In chaos, there

to coordinate and impose order on these heterogeneous movements (see

line of continuity between the first single-celled organism and myself,

6. The powers of the false in The Time-Image

independent of what is in time – that is, what is true at one moment

ecessary is only the alternative between the two propositions. See On

entiation as simultaneously becoming-past and becoming-future, and

emergence of the self- conscious subject in terms of the herd’s need

s ensibility from the understanding. Difference in itself produces sensible

all combination – be we conscious of it or not, be it a combination of the

heart all synthesis operates in categorial or at least quasi-categorial

Merleau-Ponty foreshadows Deleuze’s notion of a sedentary distribu-