Hamlet

Or Oedipus.  Or Zarathustra.  It doesn't really matter which we use to illustrate the time of the third synthesis.  Deleuze claims that, "Drama has but a single form involving all three repetitions".  For reasons we'll see in a minute, his examples are all drawn from characters who killed God the Father, but he doesn't mean that all dramas have this same Freudian form.  The idea is more that what we call dramatic is the enactment of some transformation through identification that makes us capable of something new.  As the old theory of catharsis would have it, drama is a way for the audience to feel an emotion or understand an idea by living it through identification with the characters.  Drama is an experience, rather than a conceptual representation.  In this sense is fundamentally about "becoming who we are", and its single form is the identification of who we are by means of transforming ourselves into another. 

[Now that I hear myself describing it, this sounds an awful lot like the description of Freudian transference that appeared in the introduction (pg. 18-19).  We'll have to come back to this idea.]
 

That's a bit abstract though, so let's talk about Hamlet.  To avoid any spoilers, I encourage you to first refresh your memory by watching the Laurence Olivier version.  That boy can really act.  The play is pretty simple really.  It's basically the story of how he gets up the gumption to kill his Uncle/Father/King.  Most of it is taken up with Hamlet's wavering indecisiveness in the face of the tremendous deed the ghost of his real father exhorts him to.  He's too depressed.  He's too calculating. He's just too 'mad', in every sense, to get anything done.  He cannot act.  The play is basically the story of how he becomes capable of action. 

In effect, there is always a time at which the imagined act is supposed 'too big for me'. This defines a priori the past or the before. It matters little whether or not the event itself occurs, or whether the act has been performed or not: past, present and future are not distributed according to this empirical criterion. Oedipus has already carried out the act, Hamlet has not yet done so, but in either case the first part of the symbol is lived in the past, they are in the past and live themselves as such so long as they experience the image of the act as too big for them.

Hamlet the play mostly illustrates this before.

So then, when does Hamlet actually reach the point of being able to carry out the act?  Note that this is not the same moment in which the act is carried out -- Deleuze distinguishes between the event (the during of becoming equal to the act), and the act itself.  The event is the moment when a character becomes capable of the act, when the act becomes 'thinkable', when it enters into the realm of possibility, regardless of when this moment lies in relation to the moment of the act itself.  For Hamlet, it turns out that he reaches clarity and becomes capable of killing Claudius in a moment that happens off stage.  

I had never noticed this weird aspect of the play, but it's very obvious once someone points it out.  The first three quarters of the play are taken up with Hamlet dicking around.  Will he or won't he?  He swears to the ghost of his father but then hems and haws.  He falls in love with Ophelia and then falls right back out.  He accidentally kills Polonius.  He has a blowout fight with his mom.   And he passes up a golden opportunity to off Claudius.  Then, the still extant King sends Hamlet off on a sea voyage to England, along with a sealed letter addressed to his traveling companions Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (who are dead), ordering his death by 'accident'.  When he returns though, saved by an attack of noble pirates along the way, he's suddenly all business.  He's completely determined to kill Claudius.  There's no trace of the earlier indecisiveness, and the little bit of the play that's left is mostly occupied by the improbable action-adventure finale that probably triggers PTSD in poison control hotline operators.  

In other words, the psychological climax the play has been building towards isn't even in the play!  We hear about the sea voyage through a couple of letters.  These are embellished in the film into some flashbacks.  But basically, the moment we've been waiting for, the moment when dithering Hamlet somehow transforms himself into death dispensing agent of justice, is not shown.  The during that should naturally come between before and after is missing.  The hinge on which time would swing is not there, and in place of the transformation we're interested in, we get a gap, a cut, a caesura.  I think of John N.R. Wayne, who would have won this year's WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head.  Or as Deleuze puts it:

The second time, which relates to the caesura itself, is thus the present of metamorphosis, a becoming-equal to the act and a doubling of the self, and the projection of an ideal self in the image of the act (this is marked by Hamlet's sea voyage and by the outcome of Oedipus's enquiry: the hero becomes 'capable' of the act). 

We could go through a detailed analysis of the way the caesura works works in Oedipus as well, but I think it will take us too far afield.  In this case, the crucial moment is in the play -- according to Hölderlin, it's the fight between Oedipus and Tiresias towards the beginning -- but the whole point of this moment is to be hugely significant precisely because it is ignored.  When Oedipus inquires who killed the former king, his father Laius, Tiresias tells him flat out that it was Oedipus himself.  Oedipus is too blind to hear this answer, so to speak, yet his rage at hearing what turns out to be the simple truth sets the whole play in motion.  So, like with Hamlet, there's a sense in which the crux is missing, in this case almost the act of missing itself or the moment when the self becomes divided from itself.  Oedipus is blind to what is right in front of his eyes; he's already committed the act that he's only just now becoming capable of seeing.

Finally, following the before and during, there is an after, which is basically the future created by the act itself.  This future is not really about the effect of the act as a cause of other, more distant, acts.  If anything, it's the effect of the event by which the actor becomes equal to the act.  So we're thinking more about a future in which this act has become possible, thinkable, real in whatever sense this makes it, regardless of whether the act is actually accomplished in fact.  It's more like thinking about a whole world that would include this act.  As in: "what would the world have to be like in order for this act to actually exist?"  This clearly carries with it the subquestion: "who would I have to become to be the actor capable of this act?"  

At this point we realize why Deleuze's examples are drawn from tragedies.  The grandeur and audacity of the act require the actor to transform themselves into something completely new.  To act, the old self must die.  

As for the third time in which the future appears, this signifies that the event and the act possess a secret coherence which excludes that of the self; that they turn back against the self which has become their equal and smash it to pieces, as though the bearer of the new world were carried away and dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth: what the self has become equal to is the unequal in itself.

The death may be metaphorical of course.  Oedipus merely blinds himself.  The point is that to become capable of the act, we have to change.  We have to develop.  Time has to be made to pass from before to after.  But this doesn't occur because we reach some pre-determined moment of maturity where we're finally licensed to kill God the Father King and take his place.  The identity that would define the hinge on which time revolves has gone missing.  So when we say we live out the drama of transformation through identification, we mean that we are identifying with the future.  By asking the question "Who am I? Who would I have to be?" we become equal to the change needed to produce something new.  This is what Deleuze means by the self being split, becoming equal to the unequal, to time as the changeless form of change.  

Now I think we're in a position to more completely understand the way Delueze introduces the idea of a temporal series as the correlate of the pure order introduced by the caesura.  

Having abjured its empirical content, having overturned its own ground, time is defined not only by a formal and empty order but also by a totality and a series. In the first place, the idea of a totality of time must be understood as follows: the caesura, of whatever kind, must be determined in the image of a unique and tremendous event, an act which is adequate to time as a whole. This image itself is divided, torn into two unequal parts. Nevertheless, it thereby draws together the totality of time. It must be called a symbol by virtue of the unequal parts which it subsumes and draws together, but draws together as unequal parts. Such a symbol adequate to the totality of time may be expressed in many ways: to throw time out of joint, to make the sun explode, to throw oneself into the volcano, to kill God or the father. This symbolic image constitutes the totality of time to the extent that it draws together the caesura, the before and the after. However, in so far as it carries out their distribution within inequality, it creates the possibility of a temporal series.

Time is split by a moment of transformation.  This moment isn't 'in' time though, since its defined by gap or missing piece.  Instead, it synthesizes or defines time as change, transformation, movement from before to after.  To capture this unusual idea that the moment which splits time is equal to the whole of time, and yet is not part of it, the way it is always either too big or too small, we need to see that the split itself is split.  The symbol of the split is itself divided between the act (the totality of time) and the event of becoming equal to the act, or the act becoming possible (the caesura that divides time).  What divides simultaneously holds together, so like a fractal, it is itself held together by division.  This is the essential paradox of the third synthesis.

It's pretty hard to talk about the third synthesis without getting lost in abstraction.  Deleuze tries to help us by giving us a section (pg. 91-96) that looks at all three syntheses as a whole, and relates them to the idea of how 'history repeats itself'.  In that context, I'm finding it useful to think about the repetition implied by the third synthesis as a sort of resonance between the first two.  The future is created by a resonance of past and present.  The symbol of the third synthesis is created by a resonance of the passing present (first synthesis, the event of becoming equal) and the pure past (second synthesis, time as a whole, the act).  Resonance is an interesting image to me because it expresses a force that can be very powerful but that really isn't anything in-itself; it is nothing but the coupling between two systems.  We'll see if I can expand on that concept next time.