Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 16:54:11 -0800 (PST)
From: Mark Crosby <Crosby_M-AT-rocketmail.com>
Subject: Re: Deleuzian Repetition


Hi Paul, perhaps the "pure past" is that time, just
before sleep shuts out the lights, when talkative
Reason has already said good-night (and not a creature
is stirring, not even..) when smooth sheets of past
have a direct line to.. when what to my wondering eyes
should appear but.. (I'll spare you the details ;)
Suffice it to say that Eros and Mnemosyne are free to
play..

The pure past is the dream, thru which we usually
sleep, although Beckett's Exhausted does it walking,
and Emerson talks of this "Experience" where "Sleep
lingers all our lifetime ... All things swim and
glitter... Ghost-like we glide through nature, and
should not know our place again". Object x of the
dream "as the immanent limit of the series of virtuals
... the pure past assuming thereby the status of a
former present, albeit mythical, and reconstituting
the illusion it was supposed to denounce,
resuscitating the illusion of an original and a
derived" (D&R 109).

But, Emerson points out, "In times when we thought
ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that
much was accomplished, and much was begun in us...
Some heavenly days must have been intercalated
somewhere" ("Experience" 1844). The pure past is the
time of what Emerson calls "this evanescence and
lubricity of all objects". But, while I have just
settled down for a long winter's nap, and find this
all pretty pleasant -- and present -- others will be
finding that they have moved past.. As Emerson puts
it: "Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that
with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is
reality that will not dodge us". 

Likewise Deleuze, even in 1968 or so, was saying that,
while "Eros leads its life as a cycle ... the opposing
element can only be Thanatos at the base of memory"
(D&R 109). But, I will say, "becoming desexualized and
forming a neutral displaceable energy" may ultimately
be "serving Thanatos" (111), only as a superstructure,
not as a base, Socrates' necrophilia not withstanding
-- there are many slower means of dissipation just as
honorable..

"The essential point, however, is the persistence of
the triadic structure" (D&R 92). Thanatos / Eschaton
can never plunge completely into ultimate Singularity
while Eros and Mnemosyne still slip away on either
side.. Peter Sloterdijk finds that Heidegger forgets
being-in the world while becoming lost between
coming-into and going-out-of the world. Similarly, CS
Peirce charged Hegel with being blind to Secondness
and sublimating Firstness directly under Thirdness --
Really, the past insists, the present exists, that the
future persists.. It only becomes a dualism if one
forgets the aion betwixt the tick and the tock!

Try these _Empiricism and Subjectivity_ pair a doxes
on for size: "the imagination reflects affection",
but, "something within the affections escapes all
reflection... Imagination, as it reflects on the forms
of its own stability, liberates these forms, and
liberates itself from them ... The power of the
imagination is to imagine power... It is in this sense
that reflection and extension are one" (59) -- that
is, univocal, reflecting "the fundamental link between
artifice and fancy" (61). 

As we continue through the hall of mirrors: "the
illusion is no less real than the understanding which
denounces it; culture is a false experience, but it is
also a true experiment" (62). Perhaps that's
transcendental empiricism in a nut shell? Or, as the
needle strikes a similar vein: "a critique of rules by
rules" (72). A view outside the self from inside the
self?
----
I've also found _Empiricism and Subjectivity_ very
helpful for understanding the three syntheses of time
in _Difference and Repetition_, revealing the "secret
coherence" here. But, the "Platonic reminiscence"
seems distracting to me, with "the pure past of the
Ideas ... as immemorial model [of] the Same and the
Similar... [which] introduces movement into the soul
rather than time into thought" (88). Still, flowing
below, the unfolding of the syntheses of time here
follows the same schema as in _Empiricism &
Subjectivity_ pages 94-96. 

Here, in D&R, however, Deleuze is schizoanalyzing the
great characters of human history - from Oedipus to
Socrates, from Saint Paul to Martin Luther.. It is not
how they are similar that matters, it's how they
differ while maintaining a "secret coherence" where
what is eternally returned is the surety of
metamorphosis and the ruin of representation -- BUT, I
would deny that power to Thanatos *alone* without,
always, Eros & Mnemosyne.. (Thanatos is bin Laden in
his cave, seeing only shadows on the wall, sniffing
funeral-pyre fumes, preparing for the big blow-out,
eternal return of the martyr..)

Having a life-yet-to-come, _Empiricism and
Subjectivity_ picks up the three syntheses and tends
to more worldly matters: "We embark upon a
transcendental critique when, having situated
ourselves on a methodologically reduced plane that
provides an essential certainty" (the certainty of
Thanatos and death) "we ask: how can there be a
given?" On the other hand, "The critique is empirical
when, having situated ourselves in a purely immanent
point of view ... we ask: how can the subject be
constituted in the given?" (E&S 87). 

Ultimately: "we formulate three problems: what are the
characteristics of the subject in the case of belief
and invention? Second, by means of what principles is
the subject constituted in this way? ... Finally, what
are the various stages of this synthesis ... First, in
relation to time... To speak of the subject now is to
speak of duration, custom, habit and anticipation" --
habit here is NOT just a bare or brute repetition! --
"the thrust of the past and the elan toward the future
- are, at the center of Hume's philosophy ... It is
not necessary to force the texts in order to find in
the habit-anticipation most of the Bergsonian /duree/
or memory... the subject, at root, is the synthesis of
time -- the synthesis of the present and the past in
the light of the future... this synthesis is
productive, creative, and INVENTIVE" (E&S 92-94).
----
Mark, liking the way this unlabeled tape recorded from
the radio years ago, pops up by chance in the deck and
synchronistically sings: "Ever on I sail, Celestial
Waves / And in the Light of my Years, Shown the Rest
of my Days... Star-Riders / take me to the Stars!"



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