Da Capo

The ideal of the most high spirited, alive, and world affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo [from the beginning]. (Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche).

Let's try this one more time from the top.  I feel like I've made a hash of the initial discussion of Descartes and Kant in this third passive synthesis section.  But it's now becoming clearer and I think I can improve on my earlier expositions.  

The key thing is to understand that, like the first two, this third synthesis also has a fractal structure.  There are two sides that are split from one another -- thinking and being -- but each of these sides is also fractured within itself.  

Thought is fractured by the form of time.  Since we only think in time, we are aware that this thought cannot directly connect us to a substantial I that persists across time outside this thinking.  The thinking, within itself, nevertheless implies some sort of being, outside itself.  

Being, on the other hand, is also fractured.  This is because, in a world without a transcendent concept of my identity, my being comes into existence and goes out of existence according to the external conditions of the world.  This was the content of the first synthesis, of a passive self that is the contemplation-contraction of the elements outside itself that make itself up. 

So both sides of the equation are fractured within themselves, and then there is a fracture between the two sides.  This makes things tricky to talk about.  On the one hand, when you say thought and being are fractured, you might be referring to the fracture of thought from being within thought, that is, you might be referring to the Kantian transcendental condition that all being must appear to us within time.  On the other hand, you might mean the fracture between thought and being as two distinct sides, each fractured in themselves.  I started off confusing these two fractures.  But the third synthesis is actually the 'synthesis' of these two different fractures.  I put 'synthesis' in quotes here, because the idea is a paradoxical sort of synthesis that doesn't heal the fracture and rejoin these elements into a unity.  Instead, as we'll explore more next time, this synthesis is like a set of correspondences or relays between the two sides that forces you to keep circulating from one to another, producing something new with each lap around the circuit.  In other words, the third synthesis is disjunctive, it actually holds things together by holding them apart.  Maybe imagine a stable configuration of magnets repelling one another, or the Levitron. 

I think this idea of a fractal fracture helps illuminate a lot of peculiar language in those earlier quotes that I mostly just glossed over.  Now that I'm paying more careful attention, I see that Deleuze is actually quite meticulous in using 'I' to refer to the thinking side, and 'self' to refer to the being side. 

For example:

To 'I think' and 'I am' must be added the self - that is, the passive position (what Kant calls the receptivity of intuition); to the determination and the undetermined must be added the form of the determinable, namely time. Nor is 'add' entirely the right word here, since it is rather a matter of establishing the difference and interiorising it within being and thought.

The difference, the fracture, is interiorized within both being and thought here, not simply 'added' to each as another term that would related them.  

Or another curious turn of phrase we can understand better now:

It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time. In this form it is the correlate of the passive self which appears in time. Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution.

Here it's clear that the fractured I of the third synthesis is correlated to the passive self of the first synthesis.  They are not exactly the same thing.  Each side has its own thing going on, but they communicate (maybe resonate?) with one another.

Or examine again the quote about how Kant covers over the problem and resurrects God and Self as unified forms of identity:

The possibility of receiving sensations or impressions follows from this. It is impossible to maintain the Kantian distribution, which amounts to a supreme effort to save the world of representation: here, synthesis is understood as active and as giving rise to a new form of identity in the I, while passivity is understood as simple receptivity without synthesis.

Kant endows the I that thinks with an active power to reconstitute its fractured identity on the one side, by simply assuming that the self that exists is just an inert lump of identity with no internal composition of its own. So Kant discovers the fracture on the thinking side -- the transcendental condition -- but, since he misses the fracture on the being side, he also misses the ongoing fracture between the two sides.  He takes the assumed identity of an existing self as the model for the unity of a thinking I, hence immediately healing the fracture he himself uncovered within that I, which also closes the fracture he permanently opened up between the two sides.  

For Deleuze, this is an illegitimate method, because it assumes the existence of a stable building block of identity in the form of a simple, passive, atomic, receptive self.  Since his whole goal in D&R is to understand how identity is synthesized from difference, constructed as secondary rather than given as primary, Kant's method just begs the question.  For Kant's 'I' to start engaging in an active synthesis that would close the fracture Kant himself opens, there needs to be a self to begin with.  The activity of thinking needs an actor.  Kant takes this actor for granted, while Deleuze has a theory of where this actor comes from; they are synthesized as a being capable of sensation and action according to the first passive synthesis of habit.  For Deleuze, there's nothing that doesn't require construction.  There are no actors without a passive synthesis of those actors (passive from the point of view of their subsequent activity).  Every thing has to be bootstrapped out of no-thing.

Finally, there's this telling quote that reveals the difference and correspondence between I and self.

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 descendant 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.

 We'll come back to the way the self is "divided by the temporal series" in a manner parallel to the fractured I next time.  My point here is just that 1) there are two sides 2) each has a parallel or analogous division within itself, and 3) that the interaction between these two divided sides does not stabilize and unify each as Kant hoped, but actually blows them both apart.