This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you

At least that's what my dad always said before a spanking, and I think it sets the appropriate tone for this next section on pgs. 98-103.  Because this section is going to hurt both of us.

The general outline of the section is fairly clear.  The first passive synthesis of habit gets extended simultaneously in two directions.  In one direction it extends into the active synthesis of reality.  This corresponds to the construction of real objects (eg. food) that are the apparent goal of our activity.  The pleasure principle is extended into the reality principle, which posits the existence of various means to furthering the end of our pleasure.  In the other direction it extends into a second passive synthesis that posits the existence of virtual objects that likewise can be said to form a sort of goal or motivation for our activity.  Together, the interaction of these two sets of objects defines the next step in the construction of our Ego (the first step was the binding that created local passive egos).  I think it bears keeping in mind that this seems to be the underlying problem for the remainder of Chapter 2 -- how do you form (rather than assume) a human identity in world of pure difference?  In fact, this is why we're interested in psychoanalysis to begin with, since it deals with the formation of our conscious desires out of the soup of unconscious infantile experience.

The big problem is that I'm not really clear exactly what a virtual object is or how it works.  These seem to be internal to us, perhaps even constitutive of our internal organization, in contrast to the real objects which are posited as outside us. They are also somehow related to memories of prior experiences.  Though, as we saw with the earlier discussion of the second passive synthesis of memory, they are not objective memories re-presented in the present, but a sort of immemorial potential that never was present, a reminiscence that simultaneously creates the past and defines the present as related to it.  Virtual objects are paradoxical.  They have no identity in themselves, but are always fragmented, fractalized.  They are, like the pure past, always in two places at once.  I want to say that they are always in motion, or causing the motion of real object, again, like the way the pure past causes the present to pass.  They seem to be a set of possibilities that real present object can incarnate, but also the traces left over from what those incarnations never quite manage to capture -- the ineffable factor that makes the particular real object so satisfying to the pleasure principle. 

As if that whole description wasn't opaque enough already, Deleuze links virtual objects to Melanie Klein's partial objects and Lacan's object a.   At first this just makes the situation less clear since I don't know anything about either of these psychoanalysts, and what they meant by those terms is apparently notoriously slippery.  A little reading helps shed some light on the subject.  This essay summarizes Klein's ideas, and is something we can make use of.  I also found a long but quite readable essay on Lacan's object a over here.  Both of these provide good context, but integrating it all into a clear understanding of Deleuze's virtual objects is going to require further effort.  Stay tuned!

A Transcedental Aesthetic

There's one more paragraph in this section on first synthesis of binding.  I'll admit its reference to Kant and his Transcendental Aesthetic on pg. 98 seemed out of place and mostly unintelligible to me at first.  I presumed that was due to my lack of knowledge of Kant, and of course that problem still exists.  But I accidentally discovered the key to this paragraph, and why it fits perfectly here, in writing about what habitus -- the first passive synthesis of binding -- owes to Freud.  The executive summary is already there:

The binding that defines the form, that creates an inside and outside, simultaneously defines what internal drives will constitute the pleasures this form must seek in principle in order to repeat itself from moment to moment (ie. to exist).  The creation of the form, its drive to repeat itself, and the pleasure that accompanies this repetition, or anything that supports this repetition, are really all three sides of the same coin.

The idea of the interdependence of these three factors gets fleshed out as a contrast to Kant's founding aesthetics on a split between the objective a priori forms of space and time that must apply to all experience, and the subjective empirical question of whether an experience is pleasant or unpleasant for us.  

Recall our earlier discussions of Kant's critique of Descartes.  The basic idea was that Kant saw that all thinking occurs in time, or across time, whereas being we assume is some timeless category of constant existence.  This invalidated Descartes' famous conclusion because it means, roughly, that one side of the equation is a process, and the other side a thing (don't be fooled by the fact that they're both gerunds).  It also means that the thinking me and the being me aren't the same entity, a discovery which Deleuze called the "fractured I".  This was a big deal.  A Copernican Revolution in philosophy even, as it moved the human subject out of its central spot.  

However, according to Deleuze, Kant backed away from the most radical consequences of his discovery by continuing to assume that my being had a simple form of identity in itself, one that was readymade to be occupied by, or maybe identified with, experiences like 'my' thinking.  [Sorry about the scare quotes; it's hard to talk about yourself when there's really two of you!].  But the wound that cleaves the I, which is basically the form of time, is not so easily healed.  It left its mark on Kant in the form of an ongoing split between the objective form of time and the subjective content of experience bequeathed to an organism assumed ready to receive it.

That whole analysis is reprised in the first part of this paragraph:

This first beyond already constitutes a kind of Transcendental Aesthetic. If this aesthetic appears more profound to us than that of Kant, it is for the following reasons: Kant defines the passive self in terms of simple receptivity, thereby assuming sensations already formed, then merely relating these to the a priori forms of their representation which are determined as space and time. In this manner, not only does he unify the passive self by ruling out the possibility of composing space step by step, not only does he deprive this passive self of all power of synthesis (synthesis being reserved for activity), but moreover he cuts the Aesthetic into two parts: the objective element of sensation guaranteed by space and the subjective element which is incarnate in pleasure and pain.

Deleuze's whole idea of habit is meant to address this split and bring the temporal form of experience back together with its aesthetic (pleasurable or unpleasurable) content.  This is what the last part of the paragraph means:

The aim of the preceding analyses, on the contrary, has been to show that receptivity must be defined in terms of the formation of local selves or egos, in terms of the passive syntheses of contemplation or contraction, thereby accounting simultaneously for the possibility of experiencing sensations, the power of reproducing them and the value that pleasure assumes as a principle.

What experiences are possible for an organism are determined by its form, by the binding that constitutes it.  This form is a habit of nature.  It inherently evolved in time and as such is concerned with its own repetition and with repeating any sensations linked to that repetition.  Finally, the binding that defines the form installs the pleasure principle that guides and judges what actions it will seek to repeat.  With habitus, the form and content of experience are the same thing, and both are linked to a repetition in time.  

On some level, I'm presenting this as if it's Deleuze's re-working of the theory of evolution.  This isn't completely off base, but I think we should keep in mind that revisiting the first synthesis again now is probably meant to extend it beyond the production of biological forms and into the psychological, or at least 'biopsychical', realm.  The idea is perhaps to start by taking the form of the biological organism as a whole for granted and build a whole new set of passive syntheses of (now psychological) habit on top of that.  The same pattern is repeating itself, with variation, one level up, with a full blown human ego defined as the integration of many passive egos that were produced via an analogous process.

The Pleasures of Habit

I know I'm constantly saying this, but I fear my last post may have gotten a little technical, and I'd like to reexamine the same idea in less abstract terms.  I do think there's value in exploring the cell membrane interior/exterior metaphor, as it's an important component of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  But that line of thought will only appear more clearly a bit later in Difference and Repetition; right now Deleuze is more interested in Freud's conclusion than the somewhat convoluted path by which he reaches it.  And that conclusion is that a compulsion to repeat, to bind, comes before a compulsion to seek pleasure and avoid unpleasure.  

Translated into more prosaic terms, we might think of this as a solution to the sort of chicken vs. egg problem posed by the relationship between habit and pleasure.   Do we repeat habits because they produce pleasure (sex), or does a lack of pleasure force us to habitually repeat an action (food)?  Like the chicken and the egg, this paradox makes us realize that the question is poorly posed, and that habitual actions and the drive for pleasure must both have evolved from something beyond either of them.  In this case, the paradox dissolves when we understand that there is a passive habit that defines pleasure as what we continually seek.  Passive repetition and instantaneous pleasure are actually the same thing.  From this root grows both our habitual actions as well as the active seeking and avoiding behavior of the pleasure principle.  

The problem of habit is therefore badly framed so long as it is subordinated to pleasure. On the one hand, the repetition involved in habit is supposed to be explained by the desire to reproduce a pleasure obtained; on the other hand, it is supposed to concern tensions which are disagreeable in themselves, but may be mastered with a view to obtaining pleasure. Clearly, both hypotheses already presuppose the pleasure principle: the idea of pleasure obtained and the idea of pleasure to be obtained act only under this principle to form the two applications, past and future. On the contrary, habit, in the form of a passive binding synthesis, precedes the pleasure principle and renders it possible. The idea of pleasure follows from it in the same way that, as we have seen, past and future follow from the synthesis of the living present. The effect of binding is to install the pleasure principle; it cannot have as its object something which presupposes that principle. When pleasure acquires the dignity of a principle, then and only then does the idea of pleasure act in accordance with that principle, in memory or in projects. Pleasure then exceeds its own instantaneity in order to assume the allure of satisfaction in general.

We might make this point even less abstractly by putting it in Buddhist terms.  Have you ever noticed how pleasure never really seems to satisfy even though it's what we constantly seek?   Whichever habitual pleasure we're talking about, whether it's eating, talking, fucking, etc ... we always seem to want it again.  We live with the anticipation and memory of pleasure much more than the direct experience of it.  Naturally, the same thing applies to pain.  It takes quite a lot of concentration and practice to actually feel what pleasure or pain feels like right now, without representing it to ourselves as occurring at some other moment, without it pushing us immediately into action.  

Of course, in Buddhism, this connection between pleasure and repetition is the first noble truth and the source of our suffering: 

The first truth, suffering (Pali: dukkha; Sanskrit: duhkha), is characteristic of existence in the realm of rebirth, called samsara (literally "wandering").  

Usually people think of rebirth happening after you die, making it a cosmological myth very similar to the metempsychosis we already saw in Plato.  Reincarnation, however, is more usefully thought of as what happens between any two moments, not just between one life and the next.  We die and are reborn every instant, constantly repeating the habit of being.  The binding between those moments defines us as a self, an ego, existing across time, contracting two moments till they touch.  At the same time, it defines pleasure as what we are always chasing but never attaining once and for all, most fundamentally all those things that would let us repeat ourselves again.  This habit of rebirth -- which we would usually just call the persistence or existence of our self as an object -- installs pleasure as an ideal principle, which when you think about it, merely guarantees a psychical life dominated by suffering.  

You can similarly interpret the second of the three characteristics -- all experience is unsatisfactory -- in the same light.  As Deleuze says, when pleasure is elevated to a principle, it assume "the allure of satisfaction in general".  Any particular pleasure necessarily falls short of this general satisfaction and becomes unsatisfactory.  In the context of the repetition implied by habitus, no experience is an instantaneous island, but always part of an infinite archipelago that extends forwards and backwards in time (in fact, defines forwards and backwards in time).  As I vaguely sketched out at the end of my earlier ramblings about mysticism, this is closely connected to the first characteristic -- impermanence.  Each experiences that bangs into us from without is seen from the inside as unsatisfactory, not a stable stopping point.  

And all of this is the fault of being bound up within the cursed consciousness of our cell membrane!  Buddhism sees this whole narcissistic cycle of rebirth as something to be overcome.  Deleuze here has a more descriptive take, just identifying consequences of the fact that habit is a card we have always already been dealt.  But remember, this is just the first passive synthesis we've been talking about so far.  That cell membrane is destined to burst.

The Curve of Binding Energy

The first passive synthesis was habit.  But what we meant by habit was not our customary habits of mind or the habits of action of a previous identified subject.  We meant something more like the habit of the world that actually creates those subjects.  From a repetition of elements, the world 'contracts' a habit, which creates a new difference -- the existence of the subject constituted by the contraction.  

In our earlier discussion of habit we saw Deleuze illustrate this point by choosing "wheat" as the subject created by the habitual contraction of  soil, water, sun, etc ...  So it was already clear that "subject" doesn't necessarily mean human subject.  Here, he makes it even clearer that the concept of habit extends beyond the human by using the term Habitus instead.  Habitus refers to the general shape or appearance or mode of life of a thing, what you might call its morphology, or simply its form.  He also introduces another terminological change by replacing "contraction" with "binding".  This change is meant to put the concept of habit into contact with Freud's ideas and allows us to identify the form created by habit as a passive and larval type of Ego (whereas he previously used the more neutral term self for the product of a contraction).

With those changes in mind, I think we can understand the first example Deleuze gives for a binding synthesis -- the eye.  Now that I think about it, the choice is perhaps a sly pun.  

This binding is a genuine reproductive synthesis, a Habitus. An animal forms an eye for itself by causing scattered and diffuse luminous excitations to be reproduced on a privileged surface of its body. The eye binds light, it is itself a bound light. This example is enough to show the complexity of synthesis. For there is indeed an activity of reproduction which takes as its object the difference to be bound; but there is more profoundly a passion of repetition, from which emerges a new difference (the formed eye or the seeing subject).

An eye is exactly something that gathers many different reflective intensities together in one place, reproduces them on the back of the retina and binds them into a coherent image.  But from the perspective of the organism, this binding doesn't just reproduce differences that are out there in world.   It actually introduces a new difference, a new possibility, a new form, into the world.  Now the animal can see.  When the animal forms an eye for itself, it creates a new form and a new set of possible actions based on the integration of the external differences.  This is a creation of a habitus, simultaneously a morphology and a mode of living.  

It might at first seem odd to say this is the animal "contracting the habit of seeing", but when you think of it in terms of evolution, you discover that's a great description.  It's a reproduction of the world useful for the reproduction of the animal.  You might say that it's the process of the world acquiring a structure relative to the animal.  If this particular type of binding and reproduction of the world's excitations is successful enough, it leads, through the animal's reproduction, to another binding of exactly this same type.  The world and the organism both acquire a stable repeating habit, a habit expressed as the form of an eye.  As with everything in evolution though, there's no active agent -- neither the world nor the animal "want" to acquire this habit, even if once they the do acquire it, they behave as if they "want" it to continue.  In other words, the binding involved in an eye is a passive synthesis, a passion for repetition on the part of the animal, and ultimately the world.  

Now that we have some sense of what a binding is -- a contraction or integration of differences in the world that creates a new difference that we usually call a form -- we can relate this to Freud's idea of psychical binding or investment as he discusses it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  Unfortunately, Freud never really gives totally clear definition of what a bound excitation is in that book.  The first mention of it comes early on, in the context of his definition of pleasure:

We have decided to relate pleasure and unpleasure to the quantity of excitation that is present in the mind but is not in any way 'bound'; and to relate them in such a manner that unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure to a diminution.

The Standard Edition text I've got has a little footnote here referring to his Project for a Scientific Psychology (a very early work which incidentally seems like it could be quite interesting) and says that the concept of 'bound' excitations occurs throughout Freud's writings, though it doesn't try to define the term.  And indeed, the idea of binding appears in several other places in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, mostly in relation to Josef Breuer's idea that there are two types of energy in the brain that correspond to two types of psychological process -- a freely mobile energy and a bound energy.  [I didn't realize that Breuer was Freud's mentor and early co-author; you might even say he was the co-inventor of psychoanalysis.]. To give one example:

As a new factor we have taken into consideration Breuer's hypothesis that charges of energy occur in two forms; so that we have to distinguish between two kinds of cathexis of the psychical systems or their elements a freely flowing cathexis that presses on towards discharge and a quiescent cathexis. We may perhaps suspect that the binding of the energy that streams into the mental apparatus consists in its change from a freely flowing into a quiescent state.

Since I'm not familiar with Breuer, a references like this doesn't exactly clear things up, but they at least it gives us some hints.  To understand it though, we have to start with a longer detour through the argument in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  

Freud starts off with that definition of pleasure that we've already seen, along with the intuitive notion that we seek pleasure and avoid pain -- we are ruled by the pleasure principle.  But then why, if the pleasure principle is so dominant, aren't we, you know, happier?  If our whole psychical life is devoted to finding pleasure, why do we so often fail?  In particular, Freud considers whether the pleasure principle can explain cases of 'traumatic neurosis' (what we would now call PTSD) where someone constantly dreams about an unpleasant experience.  Or, for that matter, how can the pleasure principle explain people's need to reenact or relive the pain of some childhood trauma in therapy?  Why can't we just remember or realize intellectually that wanting to kill dad and sleep with mom sucked, and move on?  As a result, Freud starts to consider whether there is some other principle of psychical life beyond just the pleasure principle.  Is there some instinct that causes us to want to compulsively repeat an experience, regardless of whether it was pleasant or unpleasant?

To address this obscure psychological question, Freud sketches a (self-admittedly) speculative theory of how our conscious perceptual system is related to our unconscious.  He hypothesizes that it's just a surface layer of our mind.  It's like a skin, a barrier, mostly a shield against a hostile environment and a way of selecting and responding to the tiny chunk of environmental data relevant to our survival.  He even analogizes it to the lipid bilayer membrane of an amoeba.   In short, it divides an inside from outside, and its functional role is mainly to block, or at least channel or sample, any stimulus coming from outside.  

This theory has an interesting corollary.  Because the membrane faces out, so to speak, it is not symmetrical.  It is good at blocking or filtering external things, but is very sensitive to excitations coming from the inside.  As a result, most of what registers in conscious experience is a reflection of the various energies circulating within the organism.  Freud even suggests that repression and neurosis begin when these internal energies impinge too strongly on the conscious surface, which then attempts to block them as it does most external excitations.  They end up treated as if they had come from the outside, which accounts for the origins of psychological projection.  

The fact that the cortical layer which receives stimuli is without any protective shield against excitations from within must have as its result that these latter transmissions of stimulus have a preponderance in economic importance and often occasion economic disturbances comparable with traumatic neuroses. The most abundant sources of this internal excitation are what are described as the organism's 'instincts' -- the representatives of all the forces originating in the interior of the body and transmitted to the mental apparatus -- at once the most important and the most obscure element of psychological research.

It will perhaps not be thought too rash to suppose that the impulses arising from the instincts do not belong to the type of bound nervous processes but of freely mobile processes which press towards discharge. The best part of what we know of these processes is derived from our study of the dream-work. We there discovered that the processes in the unconscious systems were fundamentally different from those in the preconscious (or conscious) systems. In the unconscious, cathexes can easily be completely transferred, displaced and condensed. Such treatment, however, could produce only invalid results if it were applied to preconscious material; and this accounts for the familiar peculiarities exhibited by manifest dreams after the preconscious residues of the preceding day have been worked over in accordance with the laws operating in the unconscious. I described the type of process found in the unconscious as the 'primary' psychical process, in contradistinction to the 'secondary' process which is the one obtaining in our normal waking life. Since all instinctual impulses have the unconscious systems as their point of impact, it is hardly an innovation to say that they obey the primary process. Again, it is easy to identify the primary psychical process with Breuer's freely mobile cathexis and the secondary process with changes in his bound or tonic cathexis.  If so, it would be the task of the higher strata of the mental apparatus to bind the instinctual excitation reaching the primary process. A failure to effect this binding would provoke a disturbance analogous to a traumatic neurosis; and only after the binding has been accomplished would it be possible for the dominance of the pleasure principle (and of its modification, the reality principle) to proceed unhindered. Till then the other task of the mental apparatus, the task of mastering or binding excitations, would have precedence not, indeed, in opposition to the pleasure principle, but independently of it and to some extent in disregard of it.

Now we can come back to the distinction borrowed from Breuer between excitations that tend to freely discharge themselves, and ones that become 'bound' but somehow still retain their charge.  Binding seems to be some more controlled or channeled type of energetic discharge.  The distinction has an almost mechanical flavor that makes it nearly equivalent to blocked and unblocked.  Since consciousness lies at the surface layer of the mind, between the deeper unconscious mind and the world, it naturally binds the world on one side, and the internal instincts on the other.  In fact, as this definition of cathexis points out, "Freud frequently described the functioning of psychosexual energies in quasi-physical terms".  I think we're meant to imagine a flowing psychical liquid that sometimes moves following its own rheological laws, and sometimes gets blocked or channeled or captured in such a way that the energetic difference that powered the flow gets repurposed, and instead of being immediately discharged, has its charge pressed into the service of maintaining an organism -- it gets 'bound'.   In other words, binding creates a psychodynamic potential difference that enables the organism, as a non equilibrium physical system, to avoid dissipation.  Binding excitations that come from the outside creates the organism at the same time that binding excitations coming from the inside creates the organism's needs and defines its pleasures.

Deleuze equates unbound pleasure to an immanent field of difference and binding to the first synthesis of habit that defines the organisms and makes pleasure into what it seeks 'in principle'.

Biopsychical life implies a field of individuation in which differences in intensity are distributed here and there in the form of excitations. The quantitative and qualitative process of the resolution of such differences is what we call pleasure. A totality of this kind - a mobile distribution of differences and local resolutions within an intensive field - corresponds to what Freud called the Id, or at least the primary layer of the Id. The word 'id' [Ça] in this sense is not only a pronoun referring to some formidable unknown, but also an adverb referring to a mobile place, a 'here and there' [Ça et lá] of excitations and resolutions.

[It's too bad the Standard Edition translates 'das Es' as 'the Id', when it literally means 'the It'.  A 'formidable unknown' that refers to both the impersonal liquid field of difference, and its spontaneous flow that produces little vortices.  This probably makes it a misnomer to call it "you" Id.  Don't take it personally.]

It is here that Freud's problem begins: it is a question of knowing how pleasure ceases to be a process in order to become a principle, how it ceases to be a local process in order to assume the value of an empirical principle which tends to organise biopsychical life in the Id. Obviously pleasure is pleasing, but this is not a reason for its assuming a systematic value according to which it is what we seek 'in principle'. This is the primary concern of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: not the exceptions to this principle, but rather the determination of the conditions under which pleasure effectively becomes a principle. The Freudian answer is that excitation in the form of free difference must, in some sense, be 'invested', 'tied' or bound in such a manner that its resolution becomes systematically possible. This binding or investment of difference is what makes possible in general, not pleasure itself, but the value taken on by pleasure as a principle: we thereby pass from a state of scattered resolution to a state of integration, which constitutes the second layer of the Id and the beginnings of an organisation.

[The Id here starts to sounds a lot like the Body Without Organs, and Habitus a lot like the beginning of territorialization, the organ-ization of the body.]

The key things that Deleuze takes directly from Freud are the ideas that binding precedes or operates beneath the pleasure principle, and that it has something to do with a compulsion to repeat that doesn't care whether it produces pleasure or pain.  However, the meaning of the latter changes substantially as it passes from Freud to Deleuze.  As we'll see later, Freud ultimately concludes that the compulsion to repeat that founds the pleasure principle is a sort of innate drive of organic matter to 'return' to its inorganic state -- a death drive.  Deleuze, interprets the compulsion to repeat as a passion for repetition.  It is really the synthesis of habitus itself, which has a sort of fractal repeating pattern already built into it -- passively, evolutionarily, without the need for any pre-existing active agent.  In fact, for Deleuze, the repetition of habit, the binding of light we saw in the case of the eye, is the construction of a form.  The death drive becomes creative.

This change allows him to take Freud's analogy between the surface layer of consciousness and the cell membrane a step further.  The binding that defines the form, that creates an inside and outside, simultaneously defines what internal drives will constitute the pleasures this form must seek in principle in order to repeat itself from moment to moment (ie. to exist).  The creation of the form, its drive to repeat itself, and the pleasure that accompanies this repetition, or anything that supports this repetition, are really all three sides of the same coin.  In a sense, they are the existence through time of the cell membrane looked at from outside and inside.

Deleuze draws together the exterior and interior view of the binding -- the binding of elements of the exterior world into a form, and the binding or channeling of interior energies into a reproduction of that form -- into a single synthesis with two parts.  

Excitation as a difference was already the contraction of an elementary repetition. To the extent that the excitation becomes in turn the element of a repetition, the contracting synthesis is raised to a second power, one precisely represented by this binding or investment.

What is synthesized is exactly a self, a unit, an agent, a little ego. 

Investments, bindings or integrations are passive syntheses or contemplations--contractions in the second degree. Drives are nothing more than bound excitations. At the level of each binding, an ego is formed in the Id; a passive, partial, larval, contemplative and contracting ego. The Id is populated by local egos which constitute the time peculiar to the Id, the time of the living present there where the binding integrations are carried out.

And now we can see why Deleuze changed terms from "self" to "ego".  Each of the little egos becomes a center of operations for its own pleasure principle.  The binding that defined it as an ego, that contracted excitations into an enclosed form, is the same binding that now contracts internal excitations into a maintenance of that form.  That's why being alive feel so good!  When pleasure is not the random, mobile, and occasional discharge within an open field but becomes bound to the reproduction of a form it becomes narcissistic.  All pleasure is, 'in principle', as a principle guiding our actions, narcissistic. 

The fact that these egos should be immediately narcissistic is readily explained if we consider narcissism to be not a contemplation of oneself but the fulfilment of a self-image through the contemplation of something else: the eye or the seeing ego is filled with an image of itself in contemplating the excitation that it binds. It produces itself or 'draws itself' from what it contemplates (and from what it contracts and invests by contemplation).

If calling all pleasure narcissistic sounds odd, this is only because we have lost our understanding of the myth and corrupted the term. Remember, as we saw earlier, Narcissus does not fall in love with himself, per se.  He falls in love with a beautiful reflection in the water.  That reflection turns out to be his own.  He loves himself, but as an external object.  Freud also makes it clear that this is why he chose the term:

... psycho-analysis observed the regularity with which libido is withdrawn from the object and directed on to the ego (the process of introversion); and, by studying the libidinal development of children in its earliest phases, came to the conclusion that the ego is the true and Original reservoir of libido, and that it is only from that reservoir that libido is extended on to objects. The ego now found its position among sexual objects and was at once given the foremost place among them. Libido which was in this way lodged in the ego was described as 'Narcissistic'.

I think this situates the starting point for Deleuze's re-working of the rich material Freud provides in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  The high level summary might be that the habits of evolution underlie not just our morphological development, but the basic emotions that drive us (and every other creature).  

Habit underlies the organisation of the Id

Psychoanalysis: What Is It?

I'm afraid my understanding of this whole next section is going to be compromised by my lack of knowledge about psychoanalysis.  As far as I can tell, all of this long section (pgs. 96-117) is written in the shadow of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle.   That's the book where Freud introduces his famous and mysterious idea of the "death instinct".  It seems this then led directly to his developing the three-part division of the mind in The Ego and the Id  and had a big influence on some later psychoanalysts, notably Jacques Lacan.  I went and read Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which is interesting in its own right, and helps a lot with understanding this section.  Depending on how long the quarantine is maybe I'll get to The Ego and the Id, which sounds like it would also be helpful here.  Both of these are really just long essays, and Freud is generally a fairly clear writer.  However, there's no way I'm going to dig into Lacan, who I know nothing about and who has a reputation for impenetrability.  That's just asking too much from your friend and humble narrator.  We'll just have to muddle through.

In broad brushstrokes, this section repeats the three syntheses we already discussed in the first part of the chapter and applies them to the constitution of human psychic life.  In some sense, it is the combination of the synthesis of habit, the synthesis of memory, and the disjunctive synthesis of the eternal return that create us as biopsychical organisms.  Though this is a very peculiar us that is not just limited to our consciousness, but actually defines our whole passive and unconscious being, with our consciousness featuring as nothing more than the thinnest sliver at the edge of this being.

It is these three syntheses which must be understood as constitutive of the unconscious.

The basic idea seems to be that we can bootstrap a peculiar form of identity out of a field of pure difference interacting with itself, so to speak. This identity is secondary, an effect rather than a cause, but also an effect in the sense of a "special effect" like in the movies.  But this is all much too abstract to make much sense.  We'll dig into the details next time.

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