The Present Passes

If there's one thing we know about the present, it's that is passes.  All things are impermanent.  The present doesn't pass by accident though; it must pass.  That's because we're talking about a lived present, an experienced duration, not some abstract slice of time with infinitesimal thickness that we would continually pierce as we move along a timeline.  In fact, another way of restating the active-passive distinction is to say that before we can be inside time in a psychological sense, before we can move from a remembered and represented past to a projected future, time has to be inside us, as the contractions of stuff we are made up of.

That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest paradox.  Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live, and change.

In Difference & Repetition the present must pass because it only takes form on the basis of its own repetition.  The present here is defined as the coming together of something that can be repeated, that is, something which will pass and come again.  Understanding this circularity unlocks some of the weirder passages in this first section, particularly the stuff about pleasure and fatigue.  For example, I puzzled a while over this one:

Whether pleasure is itself a contraction or a tension, or whether it is always tied to a process of relaxation, is not a well-formed question: elements of pleasure may be found in the active succession of relaxations and contractions produced by excitants, but it is a quite different question to ask why pleasure is not simply an element or a case within our psychic life, but rather a principle which exercises sovereign rule over the latter in every case. Pleasure is a principle in so far as it is the emotion of a fulfilling contemplation which contracts in itself cases of relaxation and contraction. There is a beatitude associated with passive synthesis, and we are all Narcissus in virtue of the pleasure (auto-satisfaction) we experience in contemplating, even though we contemplate things quite apart from ourselves.

The passage becomes clearer when you understand that pleasure as a principle is really the feeling of maintaining a self or repeating it from moment to moment.  Pleasure is the principle of the construction of our identity as something that can be repeated.  It is the self-fulfilling prophecy of the contraction of other things that leads to the perpetuation of us.  We are always pleased with our selves.  Narcissus falls in love with a beautiful face reflected in the water, a face which happens to be his own.  Pleasure is a principle and the passive synthesis a "beatitude" because it is the feeling of this self-love, really a self-creation, a self-contemplation.  We don't just happen to enjoy ourselves; we are self-enjoyment, self-satisfaction.

But this auto-satisfaction also contains the seed of its own failure.  It has to be constantly repeated.  It only comes together on the basis of the contraction of things outside itself, and all contraction is made on the basis of some habit of repetition.  A self is a difference, a creation, drawn from the habits of the world, and it needs those habits to repeat for that difference to repeat itself.  A self only contracts the "habit of being" through repetition, which is why we couldn't imagine a perpetual present that contracted an infinite succession of instants -- it would require the universe to be repeated in its entirety.  The fact that the series of excitations and relaxations that define us must be constantly repeated is what leads Deleuze to talk about fatigue.

The duration of an organism's present, or of its various presents, will vary according to the natural contractile range of its contemplative souls. In other words, fatigue is a real component of contemplation. It is correctly said that those who do nothing tire themselves most. Fatigue marks the point at which the soul can no longer contract what it contemplates, the moment at which contemplation and contraction come apart. We are made up of fatigues as much as of contemplations. That is why a phenomenon such as need can be understood in terms of 'lack', from the point of view of action and the active syntheses which it determines, but as an extreme 'satiety' or 'fatigue' from the point of view of the passive synthesis by which it is conditioned.

The active synthesis he's referring to here would be something like, "I need water".  It's active because it presumes a subject, an object, and an action connecting them, in this case chugging.  The object of the action can either be around or not -- right now you can lack water.  But beneath this action, remember, there is always a contemplation.  There's really no "I" to begin with without my habit of drinking.  That habit is part of my self-definition.  So while I can lack the action of drinking, "I" cannot stop contemplating water.  But this contemplation is nothing but the habit I've contracted of drinking.   If that habit is not repeated, it's as if "I" have tired of myself.  Fatigue is meant to be the opposite of the self-creation that brings together the present; it's like the self-undoing that causes the present to pass.  This isn't a negation of the present though, as if it became something other than itself (ie. as if it became the past).  The passing is part of the present.  I think it's important not to conceive of fatigue as negation.  It's more like a marker at the end of the present.  Fatigue makes contemplation have to start again.

More precisely, need marks the limits of the variable present. The present extends between two eruptions of need, and coincides with the duration of a contemplation. The repetition of need, and of everything which depends upon it, expresses the time which belongs to the synthesis of time, the intratemporal character of that synthesis. Repetition is essentially inscribed in need, since need rests upon an instance which essentially involves repetition ...

Every contraction is a presumption, a claim - that is to say, it gives rise to an expectation or a right in regard to that which it contracts, and comes undone once its object escapes.

I know this all sounds like such a self-referential mouthful.   I'm finding it particularly hard to describe how contemplation and contraction could come apart when it seemed that a contemplation was really defined as a contraction.  It's as if a repetition considers its own possibility of ending or something.  Perhaps an easier way to discuss -- the circular causality of contemplation, or the repetition of need, or the passing of the present, or the relation of contraction and fatigue, or whatever you'd like to call it -- is to compare a contemplation to a question.

Need expresses the openness of a question before it expresses the non-being or the absence of a response. To contemplate is to question. Is it not the peculiarity of questions to 'draw' a response? Questions present at once both the stubbornness or obstinacy and the lassitude or fatigue which correspond to need. 'What difference is there...?' This is the question the contemplative soul puts to repetition, and to which it draws a response from repetition. Contemplations are questions, while the contractions which occur in them and complete them are so many finite affirmations produced in the same way as presents are produced out of the perpetual present by means of the passive synthesis of time.

The question that we, as organisms, put to the world is how we can exist.  We are a difference in the world that makes a difference ... to us.  All of our needs have to be seen in light of this question.  To say that we need food and water and air is first to acknowledge their vital relevance to there being an us.  As finite creatures, there are millions of things we lack, but these factors pass by unnoticed because they aren't relevant to our existence, their repetition is not central to creating the relationship that we are.  At the same time, we can tire of a question, we can say that a factor no longer matters ('"what difference does it make?").  At the limit, maybe we can even tire of ourselves, not in the sense of self-negation, but simply because we are too tired to recreate ourselves every moment from scratch.  We lose our "habit of being".

To the first synthesis of time there corresponds a first question-problem complex as this appears in the living present (the urgency of life).

The way Deleuze defines a self may seem very strange.  But we always have to remember the world of pure difference, the world without identity that is the starting point for Deleuze.  The problem in such a world is always  "How do you make a self?"  There is no essence or identity which might define us internally.  So the only way to make your self is by passing outside yourself, by drawing a difference from the habit of repetition of something other than you, and then becoming that repetition that you are.  As loyal readers no doubt recall from pg. 41, the idea that to be is to be repeated was the whole point of the Eternal Return.

That identity not be first, that it exist as a principle but as a second principle, as a principle become ... Nietzsche meant nothing more than this by eternal return.  Eternal return cannot mean the return of the Identical because it presupposes a world (that of the will to power) in which all previous identities have been abolished and dissolved. Returning is being, but only the being of becoming. The eternal return does not bring back 'the same', but returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes. Returning is the becoming-identical of becoming itself. Returning is thus the only identity, but identity as a secondary power; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or turns around the different.