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.
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