In our last post I was a little surprised by how radical Kant sounded. I associate the death of God and the dissolution of the self with a guy like Nietzsche, who ended up in a madhouse telling anyone who would listen he was "Dionysus", and not a guy like Kant, who used suspenders even for his socks, and whose walks you could literally set your watch by. Of course, this is a classic example of Deleuze's interpretations -- he sneaks up behind another philosopher and shows you a problem that they themselves briefly opened up, only to immediately "solve" in an inadequate way. Which, when you think about it, is basically the Socratic method; he lets you put words in your own mouth, so to speak.
If the greatest initiative of transcendental philosophy was to introduce the form of time into thought as such, then this pure and empty form in turn signifies indissolubly the death of God, the fractured I and the passive self. It is true that Kant did not pursue this initiative: both God and the I underwent a practical resurrection. Even in the speculative domain, the fracture is quickly filled by a new form of identity - namely, active synthetic identity; whereas the passive self is defined only by receptivity and, as such, endowed with no power of synthesis. On the contrary, we have seen that receptivity, understood as a capacity for experiencing affections, was only a consequence, and that the passive self was more profoundly constituted by a synthesis which is itself passive (contemplation-contraction). 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.
WARNING: below is kind of a mess that only came together for me in the final paragraph. Proceed at your own risk. I'm leaving it all here because live blogging is not a highlight reel and some nights the Grateful Dead just sucked.
All my experience, including my experience of myself, happens within time. This is the transcendental condition which makes experience possible. If there is any underlying thing doing this thinking, an existing self to which this thinking me would belong as its property, it comes from somewhere else, and is provided to the thinking me as already given. In other words, my thought isn't mine but comes from somewhere else (alternatively, I think you could also phrase this the opposite direction -- my thought, my "own intelligence, that by virtue of which it can say I" feels like mine, but my being seems to come from somewhere else).
The somewhere else of being is the passive self. The activity of thinking and identifying myself seems to somehow attach to a distinct passive self that was already around. Perhaps another way to put this is to say that, yes, for there to be a thinking me there had to be a me to begin with -- but since I didn't spontaneously produce myself by thinking, these aren't the same me. Kant makes us aware of this split, but then effectively skips over where the being-me comes from and simply assumes that there is an existing me that is capable of receiving sensations like thinking; my being is out there, continuously intact and in-itself, even if I can only get at it by thinking within time. He's not interested in how this being got made. It's there. It's an identity, a unity. It's ready to receive our thinking. You might think of it as a sort of blank screen that our thought is projected on.
Deleuze considers this assumption of the pre-existing identity of our passive self to be an ad hoc attempt to put the genie back in the box. He has already shown us that the passive self is constructed, synthesized out of the habits of the world, and cannot simply be taken for granted. This was exactly the point of the first passive synthesis of habit. The world already provides us a foothold, a point of view or place our thinking can attach to it. Roughly speaking, it provides our thought with a body. In a sense this foothold is us. We are this body. Though of course in another sense, this body exists outside of "us" as thinkers.
Kant points out that we are aware of this mind-body split within our thought. We are aware that our thinking implies a being that is somehow not us, that we cannot identify with. But he then quickly assumes that this other-being within our thoughts is some pre-constituted identity that is fully furnished and ready for our thought to move into. (I'm finding it easy to construe as our body, though Deleuze doesn't quite say this). There's a fracture within thought (ie. we are aware of it) that refers to something outside of thought. But this fracture is quickly healed because the thing outside of thought -- our being in-itself -- is assumed to have a ready made form that our thought can actively identify with to immediately reconstitute a unified thinking-and-being self.
But if the passive self is itself a complicated synthesis based on the repetitions of organic life, the situation is much more complicated and the fracture much harder to repair. I think, therefore I am. But I think in time, so all I can really establish by thinking is that there's something thinking right now. Is this me doing the thinking? Not in the sense of a stable on-going unified self. I think therefore ... I am aware of this thinking and the way this thinking implies a being outside this thinking. I think therefore I fracture my self. Either the being or the thinking is not me. In my being though -- in the non-thinking subconscious bodily being that is implied by my thinking -- in my organic animal-being, if you will -- I am the contemplation-contraction of all the habitually repeated elements that make me possible. My being is synthesized out of these elements, out of the way their repetition leads to my repetition. This being is really the world's contemplation of the possibility of there being a me. So if I try to identify my thinking with this passively synthesized self, instead of healing the fracture present in thought by identifying my troubled thinking-self with a simple unitary being-self, I end up making the situation even worse, and blow myself apart into the contemplation of all the elements that made me. The fracture in my thinking widens into the dissolution of myself.
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