The Mysticism of the Eternal Return

After thinking about it for a few days, I find I can't leave the subject of the religious aspect of ER without thinking some more about the parallels between it and Buddhism.

Ultimately, I think ER functions for Deleuze as a kinda of mystical limit of philosophical thought.  Consider the way it unifies all opposites.  Repetition for-itself converts into Difference in-itself.  This precise moment is the unique and final end of time only if we realize that it is just a moment like any other.  The qualitative difference of actual and possible get joined into a single image that synthesize all of time.  The pure and empty (ie. formless) form of time that fractures its line into before and after once and for all, simultaneously describes how time continuously repeats this phase change, producing a never-ending novelty of new forms.  The formless form of time creates the form of formlessness.  

Or some shit like that.  The point of all these different formulations is just to push our thinking to the point of breakdown, really to induce the paradoxical thought of Eternal Return directly, so that we reach "the magic formula we all seek: PLURALISM = MONISM".  The practice of this kinda of thinking is the climax Deleuze's philosophy builds towards again and again -- one formulation, by definition, can never be enough.  You have to go over 'the same' pattern endlessly, each time creating 'it' anew.  Which is why it's appropriate here to quote what I wrote in the margin at the end of chapter 1:

The system is a (non)-system.  But this has nothing to do with the "harmony and balance of opposites".  Yin and Yang are not an equilibrium, even a dynamic one.  They are the symbol of productive difference, internal to everything, always producing more difference.  They just shouldn't be drawn symmetrically.

So I think you can see Deleuze as a sort of mystic.  After all, isn't his hero Spinoza, captain of rational mysticism, the famous atheist who believed that God is Nature?  Perhaps at one point I would have fought tooth and nail against this interpretation of his philosophy.  In retrospect I think that was mostly because I had an inadequate understanding of what mysticism could be.  I thought of mysticism as entirely devoted to the idea of the essential unity of all things.  Maybe this was a little better than imagining all things as created according to some heavenly bearded dude's inscrutable plan, but it still seemed to involve a transcendence that leveled all distinctions as illusory.  Of course, mysticism could be, and often is, exactly that.  But I've come to appreciate that it has another potential, so long as you come to see it as a practice, rather than a doctrine.

While this reevaluation of mysticism has probably been brewing ever since I read Spinoza (I called myself an anarcho-theist for a while), it's really been consistently practicing meditation that has brought me back to it.  The reason is very simple.  I experience a significantly altered version of reality on a daily basis.  While I can't say that I experience mystic oneness with the cosmos every morning, I certainly experience a dissolution of my physical boundaries and a direct transformation of my self-understanding.  If you practice this consistently enough you simply become unable to dismiss these experiences mere "hallucinations" in the way we (obviously also incorrectly) dismiss people's drug trips.  The conclusion is not so much that these experiences are necessarily somehow deeper or realer than everyday experience, but simply that they too are real; our customary everyday boundaries are only one possible way of dividing up the world.  

The key here is the practice, the training of the mind/body, the experimentation.  Ultimately, this is way more important than exactly what the practice leads you to conclude is the underlying reality.  In fact, we should look at all religious beliefs in this same manner -- how does believing X (or not) affect the way you live?  As Deleuze puts it, "Eternal return is not a faith, but the truth of faith", or in another context, "Pascal wagers on the transcendent existence of God, but the stake, that on which one bets, is the immanent existence of the one who believes that God exists".  Pascal wagers that God exists not as a cynical way to cover his ass in the event of a posthumous pearly gates interview, but because he wants to live like someone who is willing to take that risk, to make the bet of belief.  Similarly, to believe in mysticism is to bet that investigating the altered states and redrawn boundaries can help us live better.  I'm willing to wager that these experiences are as real as any others, because if I make this wager I can live like someone who experiences new stuff all the time, stuff hidden in plain sight.

Basically I'm arguing that there is a version of mysticism, rooted in the practice of concentration, that fits well with Deleuze's philosophy -- it takes the mystical unity of experience not as a limit to what's out there, but as a principle to motivate the investigation and production of more experience.  Repetition for-itself is difference in-itself.  

A lot of this reinterpretation of mysticism is just now crystalizing for me as I read Shinzen Young's The Science of Enlightenment.  If he's "taking the mist out of mysticism" I guess Deleuze must be putting it back in.  I won't go deeply into the book at the moment since my colleagues over at The Capitalist Axiomatic are hard at work on the forthcoming full review.  The important bits in this context are his review of the overlap between very the different mystical traditions of the world in Chapter 3 and the way his explanations of the paradoxes of Buddhist doctrines so often remind one of Deleuze in Chapters 5-10.  

After seeing Young's less denominational version of mysticism I'm tempted to reinterpret everything I've read about Buddhism in its light.  For example, I've been noodling around with a different understanding of the The Three Characteristics.  Usually these are stated as impermanence, suffering, and no-self.  What the Buddha Taught already suggested that a couple of these were almost mis-translations, or at least easily subject to misinterpretation.  Impermanence is still just what it sounds like -- nothing is permanent, the world is Heraclitean flux.  "Suffering", though, should apparently be more like "unsatisfactoriness", which already eases some of my problems with the term -- no thing is an island, sufficient unto itself or "self-satisfying".  And "no-self" should apparently be construed less in the sense of self-abnegation or annihilation than as a statement of the fact that you are not a substantial thing with certain essential properties, but a process that comes together (or doesn't) to produce you.  

If you massage these concepts around a little, you might see them as descriptions of a single experience from three different angles.  Impermanence describes experience from the outside, as if you were watching bubbles float by on the river.  They come into view and pass out of it.  Unsatisfactoriness describes experience from the inside.  No experience is completely unlinked from the totality of experience, none is a final stopping or stable resting point since one always leads to the next and the next.  It's easy to see how this unsatisfactoriness becomes suffering if you've identified your self with this inside experience; the experience isn't stable or peaceful but always splitting into others, connected to other experiences which lead outside it.  Finally, if you put these two points of view next to one another, you become unsure where "you" fit.  Your experience constantly alternates between these two.  Are you watcher or watched?  And neither point of view is stable enough to provide for anything like a substantive on-going I/eye.  Should we say that you are "fractured" between these two views of yourself?  That "you" only emerge from some process by which they are placed into relationship?  And isn't the process we're talking about here basically Time?

I won't belabor this by trying to make it match Deleuze's description of Eternal Return point for point.  I do think you can see how all the same elements are present, the analogies are suggestive, and the underlying spirit is very similar.  If PLURALISM = MONISM, then does ETERNAL RETURN = ENLIGHTENMENT?

The Third Synthesis as Eternal Return

There's only one piece of business left before we leave this section (pg. 85-96) on the third synthesis of time.  We have to understand how the third synthesis is the same as Nietzsche's Eternal Return.  We have to understand that connection not merely as an ontological proposition about how the new is effectively produced, which is how we've approached it so far.  We also have to understand it as an almost religious doctrine, which is the light Deleuze casts it in when he compares it to the concept of faith in Kierkegaard and Péguy in the final couple of paragraphs.

Let's start by reviewing all the places I've already written about ER in hopes of minimizing my repetitiveness (too late).

The Eternal Return -- ER asks us to live each moment for exactly what it is, the connection or culmination of all other moments.

Double Wassup! -- ER is the only way that identity is produced, it is the moment when something becomes equal to itself.

The Univocity of Being 4 -- The History of Univocity --  ER conceives this moment as an infinite series of productions of productions.

The Aleatory Point -- ER is not a circle but a crazy space filling curve where the center constantly jumps around.

The Simulacrum is symmetry breaking in time -- ER is the process of production of time (or a synthesis of time) defined by its symmetry breaking into past and future.  The moment of symmetry breaking occurs when the product becomes directly related to the process.

Plain English motherfucker, do you speak it!? --  ER happens when the actual and the possible are present together at the same time, when this moment itself includes all the variations and possibilities that led up to it.

The 'superior form' is not to have a form -- ER dissolves all forms because it relates them directly to the never complete process of their formation.

So from a technical standpoint, it's pretty clear that 'believing in' the Eternal Return requires us to hold two sides of a moment simultaneously in mind.  We have to relate the past, conceived as all the possible variations that make it up, to the present, conceived as the necessary outcome of a single actual path through that field of variations.  We have to understand the given experience, as well as the conditions under which that experience is given (this is what makes it a transcendental condition, an a priori and necessary condition).  What happens when we se that past as necessarily leading up to the present, as almost conspiring to produce the present as if this were its true and final aim?  

Basically, we create the future.  Because we know already that this moment right now is not the final end of time.  It will immediately pass, and then this moment that everything was destined for will be destined to become the condition for something new.  By living the full grandeur of this instant, by tracing the winding odyssey by which we become-equal to such a "unique and tremendous event", to such a revolution, we realize that this moment is exactly like all the others -- just another random dot of experience.  If this realization that all the moments repeat one another, that they are all one and the same chaos, doesn't kill us, it liberates us.  'I realized that I was free, that the death I had gone through had liberated me'.  We become free to see ourselves as provisional, impermanent, always a transitional species.  We become free to ask, "what bright future is this incredible present the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional of"?    And not merely to ask this, but to effectively create this future, one that will someday bring us back to the same moment of wide-eyed wonder we started from.  This is the secret of ER as a condition of action.  

Eternal return, in its esoteric truth, concerns - and can concern - only the third time of the series. Only there is it determined. That is why it is properly called a belief of the future, a belief in the future. Eternal return affects only the new, what is produced under the condition of default and by the intermediary of metamorphosis. However, it causes neither the condition nor the agent to return: on the contrary, it repudiates these and expels them with all its centrifugal force. It constitutes the autonomy of the product, the independence of the work. It is repetition by excess which leaves intact nothing of the default or the becoming-equal. It is itself the new, complete novelty. It is by itself the third time in the series, the future as such.  As Klossowski says, it is the secret coherence which establishes itself only by excluding my own coherence, my own identity, the identity of the self, the world and God.

It's always difficult to talk about the Eternal Return, but I think we've assembled most of the pieces.  Ultimately we're tying to understand the form of time as difference-in-itself, difference with no bottom, difference that keeps on differentiating itself.  The "keeps on" here is a form of repetition that continually produces novelty.  The form of this production is always a split between two qualitatively different sides, two different levels.  The irreconcilable difference between before and after, actual and possible, gets captured in one special image with two sides -- the simulacrum, the 'tremendous' event.  But the simulacrum turns out to be just like all the other images, not some special or unique moment at all.  We become capable of producing it only when we discover that it's always already being produced.  Our identification with that moment dissolves our personal identity and turns us into, "the man without name, without family, without qualities, without self or I, the 'plebeian' guardian of a secret, the already-Overman" -- the everyman.  So the simulacrum can't serve as some special model, and the event can't capture all of time, once and for all.  Its internally split nature is like the potential difference that powers a giant potter's wheel that constantly throws out new and different stuff that prevents us from taking anything as a model or from seeing any moment as final.

The order of time has broken the circle of the Same and arranged time in a series only in order to re-form a circle of the Other at the end of the series. The 'once and for all' of the order is there only for the 'every time' of the final esoteric circle. The form of time is there only for the revelation of the formless in the eternal return. The extreme formality is there only for an excessive formlessness

Finally at this point I think we can glimpse Eternal Return as a sort of religious doctrine.  It is a type of faith, of belief.  But it's a faith in this world, a faith that there is no other world but this one, not because this world is perfect or could not be different, but because this world is constantly different, and immanently produces and contains all its own possibilities. Ultimately, it's a faith that we don't need another world, because this one always provides us with more of itself.  It's a belief in the future.  This is why Deleuze contrasts it to Péguy and Kierkegaard, who apparently both understood the problem of repetition without identity but wanted to restore some special divine identity outside this world, something we can believe in once and for all times.

As always though, the truth of a belief is measured by what it lets you do.

Eternal return is not a faith, but the truth of faith: it has isolated the double or the simulacrum, it has liberated the comic in order to make this an element of the superhuman. That is why - again as Klossowski says - it is not a doctrine but the simulacrum of every doctrine (the highest irony); it is not a belief but the parody of every belief (the highest humour): a belief and a doctrine eternally yet to come. We have too often been invited to judge the atheist from the viewpoint of the belief or the faith that we suppose still drives him - in short, from the viewpoint of grace; not to be tempted by the inverse operation - to judge the believer by the violent atheist by which he is inhabited, the Antichrist eternally given 'once and for all' within grace.

Believing in the Eternal Return means believing in this world, in the endless dynamic possibilities within this world, instead of the reality of something outside of this world.  So the next time someone asks why you're an atheist, why you can't overcome your doubt and become a believer in God, ask them instead why they can't overcome their doubt in this world -- why aren't they a believer in this world?

The Three Repetitions

Last time I tried to lay out the high level view that connects the idea of repetition-for-itself to the production of the absolutely new: "repetition is, for itself, difference in itself."  Now we have to go back and specify more exactly how Deleuze gets from A to B.

I think the place to start is a couple of puzzling quotes that constitute a sort of Deleuzian theory of history.

Historians sometimes look for empirical correspondences between the present and the past, but however rich it may be, this network of historical correspondences involves repetition only by analogy or similitude. In truth, the past is in itself repetition, as is the present, but they are repetition in two different modes which repeat each other. Repetition is never a historical fact, but rather the historical condition under which something new is effectively produced.  It is not the historian's reflection which demonstrates a resemblance between Luther and Paul, between the Revolution of 1789 and the Roman Republic, etc. Rather, it is in the first place for themselves that the revolutionaries are determined to lead their lives as 'resuscitated Romans', before becoming capable of the act which they have begun by repeating in the mode of a proper past, therefore under conditions such that they necessarily identify with a figure from the historical past.  Repetition is a condition of action before it is a concept of reflection. 

The emphasis is there in the original, and I think it's meant to constitute a kind of paradox that prompts us to think about how it could make sense (Deleuze's favorite rhetorical device).  When we commonly say that "history is repeating itself" we usually mean that there is an analogy between the present and the past.  But to form an analogy we have to compare point by point the identity of two things that are already given to us.  What would it mean to reverse this order and try to think about the action of repetition before thinking about the identity of the things repeated?  How does becoming capable of a new action necessarily involve some sort of repetition of history?  Wouldn't that sort of repetition just produce the same old thing again and again?  It seems like repetition should surely be the outcome of action, and not its condition.  And of course, by definition, it shouldn't produce anything new.

Deleuze returns to this paradoxical idea on the next page when he talks about Marx.

Marx's theory of historical repetition, as it appears notably in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, turns on the following principle which does not seem to have been sufficiently understood by historians: historical repetition is neither a matter of analogy nor a concept produced by the reflection of historians, but above all a condition of historical action itself.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte turns out to be where the earlier examples linking Luther with Paul and the Revolution of 1789 with the Roman Republic came from. I haven't read the whole works, but I think you really only need to go over the first five paragraphs of Chapter 1 to understand what Deleuze is getting at.  Basically, Marx is not talking about just any action, but about revolutions in particular.  His theory is that the novelty of revolutions has always needed to hide behind the mask of returning to or channeling some past epoch.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

It's not clear from the little I read whether Marx considers this just a cynical rhetorical strategy on the part of these revolutionaries. Is it just meant to recruit people to something they can rally behind, while concealing the true end?  Or do the revolutionaries themselves not know what they are creating?  Also not clear from Chapter 1 is whether his communist revolution will need this sort of goosing from behind.  

I don't think any of those questions matter to Deleuze though.  He's just pulling out the idea that you cannot create something revolutionarily new without understanding both the past, and your present relationship to that past.  Revolutions are self-consciously 'historic' in that sense -- this is a historic moment.  They involve the idea that some present revolutionary agent has somehow become capable of changing the patterns of power that conditioned the past.  The revolution's TV airtime may be long overdue, but it cannot happen until the moment is ripe.  You can see how this connects to our discussion of the structure of Hamlet, whose central drama is how he becomes capable of his tragic act.  Revolutions illustrate the three part order of time that Deleuze uses to define the third synthesis.  There is always some moment before the revolution, when the revolutionary is yet incapable of acting, still controlled by the powers of the past, "repeating in the mode of a proper past."  It's not a revolution without something to overthrow, something you were just part of.  And the job of the revolution is to use something about its present circumstances to transform itself into a force capable of overthrowing its own past and creating a new future.

Now when we substitute "revolution" in our initial paradox, we get:

Repetition is a condition of revolution before it is a concept of reflection. 

and 

... historical repetition is neither a matter of analogy nor a concept produced by the reflection of historians, but above all a condition of historical revolution itself.

... which makes a lot more sense.  If you're still in doubt that Deleuze is asserting that there's no concept of revolution without a concept of repetition, this reference to Harold Rosenberg should settle the matter.

... historical actors or agents can create only on condition that they identify them- selves with figures from the past. In this sense, history is theatre: 'their action became a spontaneous repetition of an old role.... It is the revolutionary crisis, the compelled striving for "something entirely new", that causes history to become veiled in myth ...'

-----

Now that we know that the 'repetition' in the third synthesis is actually 'revolution' we can start to inquire how exactly this kind of repetition is related to the first two.  I think the basic idea is that the repetition of the third synthesis happens when the repetitions involved in the first two are seen as repeating some 'thing'.  In other words, the third repetition is a repetition of repetitions -- it is repetition repeating itself.   Remember that the whole idea of the third synthesis is to kick the problem up a level (to the transcendental) to ask about the form of pure and empty repetition, without any content repeated.  

This all sounds mind-bendingly circular and meta.  But Deleuze does give us some signposts that lend a little more body to the abstraction.  The first synthesis of time was the repetition of habit that defined the identity of an agent.  All of time was seen as a present, albeit a present that inevitably passed and repeated itself.  The second was the repetition of memory that presented the whole past as a default a priori condition.  All of time was the seen as the past, and each passing present was just the tip of the iceberg poking above the waterline, or the telescoping of the whole down to a point.  The first synthesis produced and reproduced organic forms, tangible agents.  The second synthesis was related to the way the same process could be repeated, each time producing a different form as output depending on the conditions.  

If we read these two repetitions in the context of what happens in a social revolution, we can start to see how the simple idea that the present repeats the past could take on new meaning.  A revolutionary is someone who at first sees their present habits as conditioned by the past in the same manner as always.  Somehow though, they become able to see how those habits were conditioned, and how they as agents are 'conditioned' to repeat them and become yet another output of the same process.  But in becoming-revolutionary, it's exactly the past that shaped those habits that needs to be overthrown.  Now we see the violence inherent in the system.  

It's realizing or becoming conscious of the way the present repeats the past that opens the door to the future.  The condition of revolutionary action is directly conceiving that form of repetition, simultaneously holding in mind the past process and present product as related.  This is a bit odd though, since the revolutionary is the product, at the same time as they are also the holding together.  Further, that ability to hold the two together actually transforms them from a first product (so to speak) into something else -- the creator of future.  So the tension of holding past and future together splits the revolutionary consciousness into before and after.  Becoming capable of making that split is what a revolution is all about.  That's how Deleuze believes you make a future.  The price of the future though is the transformation of the agent and their habits out of all recognition (and remember that according to the first synthesis, the agent is their habits).  Basically, the old agent must die tragically to create the future.

In all three syntheses, present, past and future are revealed as Repetition, but in very different modes.  The present is the repeater, the past is repetition itself, but the future is that which is repeated.

A philosophy of repetition must pass through all these 'stages', condemned to repeat repetition itself. However, by traversing these stages it ensures its programme of making repetition the category of the future: making use of the repetition of habit and that of memory, but making use of them as stages and leaving them in its wake; struggling on the one hand against Habitus, on the other against Mnemosyne; refusing the content of a repetition which is more or less able to 'draw off' difference (Habitus); refusing the form of a repetition which includes difference, but in order once again to subordinate it to the Same and the Similar (Mnemosyne); refusing the overly simple cycles, the one followed by a habitual present (customary cycle) as much as the one described by a pure past (memorial or immemorial cycle); changing the ground of memory into a simple condition by default, but also the foundation of habit into a failure of 'habitus', a metamorphosis of the agent; expelling the agent and the condition in the name of the work or product; making repetition, not that from which one 'draws off' a difference, nor that which includes difference as a variant, but making it the thought and the production of the 'absolutely different'; making it so that repetition is, for itself, difference in itself.

I think it's on the right track to call this a resonance between present and past that allows for the agent to transform their habits and create a future.  The image is of two separate systems that get linked indirectly, setting up a feedback loop of interaction that can ultimately blow both of them apart.  I still feel like this is a bit mysterious though.  I remind myself that it happens in a caesura, off-stage.  I also keep in mind that Deleuze is literally saying that the present and the past repeat the future; the future is the 'model' not the copy in the scheme, an obvious paradox.  Which makes me think that the mysteriousness is actually inherent to the concept, rather than (completely) a failure of my understanding.  At bottom, I even think there is a sense in which absolute novelty, absolute difference, is -- to borrow the term Stengers applies to Whitehead's notion of creativity -- 'the ultimate' mystery in Deleuze's philosophy.  It's a concept so central to his philosophy that it cannot be explained or defined in itself without dragging in everything else.

And yet (at the risk of repeating ourselves) we can try to understand this a little better.   Let's think about what needs to happen for the first two types or levels of repetition to touch and couple without becoming the same.  The first synthesis of habit has to do with the repetition of actual organic parts, separate distinct identities or forms.  The second synthesis of memory has to do with the repetition of a whole process that produces a variety of possible forms.  

[Deleuze usually calls this second the realm of the virtual in order to dissuade us from the idea that it is just like the actual, but, you know, not here and now.  The possible isn't all laid out in advance as a complete phase space, with our actual moment occupying one distinct point.  It's more like the possible grows alongside the actual, changing and responding to it through a process of mutual adaptation.  Some day I will write something about Stuart Kaufmann's idea of the adjacent possible and the Library of Babel.   But Deleuze hasn't really gone into this distinction yet in Difference and Repetition, so I think it's easiest to keep using the 'possible' for now.] 

So the moment we're interested in is when the actual touches the possible.  Each side of this encounter is a repetition.  The first a repetition of parts, the second a repetition of a whole.  It turns out we've already talk a little about this structure.  In discussing the first synthesis we considered the mutual adaptation of organism and environment.  The organism repeats itself because the environment repeats itself, and vice versa.  In fact, the environment is nothing but the organisms, and vice versa.  These are two ways of looking at 'the same' thing.  I think Deleuze's idea that these two repetitions repeat one another suggests not only that these sides oscillate back and forth, going round and round in a feedback loop of coevolutionary adaptation, but also that they share a common form, that is, they are both examples of the construction of identity.  In other words, the identity of the organisms and the identity of the environment, the actual part and the possible whole, are created together at the same moment by some mechanism of resonant coupling that knows nothing about those identities.  

It's very difficult to get a handle on how to express this state that is, as it were, before the identities of part and whole, organism and environment.  Deleuze talks about it as 'the future', but it is a future that envelops all of time, and in fact it is what is repeated by both past and present.  What they are repeating is the yet-to-come, the production of qualitative change -- ie. the future.   This future constantly creates novel identities, but only by using the interaction of the prior identities of organism and environment as a base.  The by product of this new creation, however, is the dissolution of the identities that fed it.  That's why Deleuze continually emphasizes the way the third synthesis sweeps away with the conditions of the past and transforms the agent that helped produce it, precisely like a revolution does. 

Eternal return affects only the new, what is produced under the condition of default and by the intermediary of metamorphosis. However, it causes neither the condition nor the agent to return: on the contrary, it repudiates these and expels them with all its centrifugal force. It constitutes the autonomy of the product, the independence of the work. It is repetition by excess which leaves intact nothing of the default or the becoming-equal. It is itself the new, complete novelty.

It's as if it were dissolving turles all the way down.  It's impossible to figure out whether the future comes before or after.  It's actually the form of distinction between before and after, a pure and empty form that nevertheless constantly produces more.