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?
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