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!