Date: Thu, 12 Jan 1995 08:26:40 -0600 (CST)
From: CND7750-AT-UTARLG.UTA.EDU
Subject: RE: presence/presents


I just love discussing Deleuze on time, although I don't know what his
theory of time is.

When the 'present' is mentioned is D's texts i thnk it is almost always
in relation to Time and not what Derrida or Heidegger mean by 'presence/'
Now, when Malgosia mentioned 'presence,' and then linked it to saying
something like "Yeah, i was fully present.", I could not help but think
that presence was being used in a way not like Deleuze's 'prsent', but
rather like Deleuze's 'ontological expression' of absolute immanence
and univocity. Thus I chimed in with the distinctin between present for
Deleuze, presence for Derrida/Heidegger, and 'expression' for Deleuze.
Perhaps, however, Malgosia did not intend to use 'presence' in a ay
that corresponds to Derrida/Heidegger's use of it, which, again, i think
Deleuze calls 'expression' rather than 'presence.' But i don't know. Does
Deleuze discuss 'presence' in C1 or C2? Or I may simply be misunderstanding
Malgosia's sense of the word 'presence.'

But on time: i think Deleuze's theory of time is crucial to what he means
by transcendental empiricism.

"Time is not interior to us, but just hte opposite, the interiority in which
we are, in which we move live and change. Berson is much closer to Kant than
he himself thinks: Kant defined time as a form of interiority, in the sense
that we are internal to time (but Bergson conceives this form quite 
differently from Kant), ...   Subjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is
the soul or the spirit, the virtual. The actual is always obejctive, but
the virtual is subjective: it was initially the affect, that which we
experience in time; then time itself, pure virtuality which divides itself
in two as affector and affected, 'the affection of self by self' as
definition of time."      C2 p. 82-3

But not only is time the 'affection of self by self,' in the sense tht time
is repetition of a resonating subjectvity, but , since it is the repetition
of difference, it is also the dissolution of the self as it is understood
in the form of a human agent: time is the subject, but not he subject of the
human. 

"As for the third time in which the future appears, this signifies that the
event and the act possess asecret coherence which excludes that of the self;
that they turn back against the self which has become their equal and
smash it to pieces, ... what the self has become equal to is the unqual
itself [repetition understood sa difference, cd]. In this manner, the I which
is fractured according to the order of time and the self which is divided
according to the temporal series correspond and find a common decendent
in the man without name, without family, without qualities, without Self
or I, the 'plebeian' guardian of a secret, the already-Overman whose
scattered members gravitate around the sublime image."
DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, pp. 89-90

I would hazard a guess that transcendental empiricism is a falculty of feeling
that refers to the formation of subjects rather thanj the sense of feeling
of a subject. The 'transcendental field' as the domain of unconscious
singularities is defined in the fifteenth series of THE LOGIC OF SENSE, pp.
100-108.

all of this also, i think, describes Deleuze's theory of 'otherness,' which
he defines not as an internal non-being or negative, but rather as
the 'conditioning' perceptual field. This explains all his talk of the 'I'
as an other, for the I is the cracked form of time, and becmones an I only
via the perpection of 'others,' not a transcendental apperception. Thus
a series that constitutes an I is not one of consciousness, as Kant
attempted to slip in, but only of an unconscious and passive nature. The
active or disjunctice series has nothing to do with gnerality, but rather
constitutes the function of the general, the re-presented, as pure function
and nothing else. Time is a crystal image and not an organic iamge.

chris

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