Last time we tried to get a handle on the way the third synthesis was related to the other two. To recapitulate the recapitulation ...
There was a first synthesis of form, where difference was produced by a habitual repetition as something external to it. There was a second synthesis of process, where different forms were included within a repeating process that pre-existed them. Finally, we reached a third synthesis that considered the whole process of the second synthesis as a form in itself. We can think of this as reflecting the second synthesis back on itself or as synthesizing the first two syntheses together. With the third synthesis we reach the point where process and form have become 'identical' and the only thing repeating is differentiation itself. This is basically Deleuze's definition of time -- the empty form of qualitative change from before to after -- "time is the most radical form of change, but the form of change does not change".
We did not get as far as connecting this to Freud's idea of the death drive and its relationship to the super-ego, because I foresaw that it would require an extended detour into The Ego and the Id to fully appreciate what Deleuze is up to here.
Aside from that connection, the basic idea is fairly simple. Death is the symbol of time. It involves a before and after separated and yet joined by a moment of qualitative change. It is, famously, the one constant of life (I no longer pay my taxes). Death, time itself, the continual process of qualitative transformation -- which is to say difference -- is the only thing that's repeated identically.
When the narcissistic ego takes the place of the virtual and real objects, when it assumes the displacement of the former and the disguise of the latter, it does not replace one content of time with another. On the contrary, we enter into the third synthesis. It is as though time had abandoned all possible mnemic content, and in so doing had broken the circle into which it was lead by Eros. It is as though it had unrolled, straightened itself and assumed the ultimate shape of the labyrinth, the straight-line labyrinth which is, as Borges says, 'invisible, incessant'. Time empty and out of joint, with its rigorous formal and static order, its crushing unity and its irreversible series, is precisely the death instinct.
[Incidentally, the reference to Borges' Death and The Compass provides a beautiful image of the third synthesis -- Zeno's infinitely splitting line:
"In your labyrinth there are three lines too many," he said at last. "I know of a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line. Along this line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so too. Scharlach, when, in some other incarnation you hunt me, feign to commit (or do commit) a crime at A, then a second crime at B, eight kilometers from A, then a third crime at C, four kilometers from A and B, halfway enroute between the two. Wait for me later at D, two kilometers from A and C, halfway, once again, between both. Kill me at D, as you are now going to kill me at Triste-le-Roy."
"The next time I kill you," said Scharlach, "I promise you the labyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting."
He stepped back a few paces. Then, very carefully, he fired.
]
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So now let's go back and enrich this abstract definition of time as death by relating it to Freud's ideas. To understand how Deleuze's version of the death instinct plays off of Freud, we need to cover Freud's dualistic theory of drives, as well as his three part theory of the psyche.
We already talked a little about Freud's idea of the instincts when we asked whether consciousness was just the opposite of the unconscious. All instincts, for Freud, have a "regressive" character in the sense that they seek to repeat an earlier state of things; that's in fact why we call them instincts, because they come to us a ready made drives to do X, again, just like our ancestors did. But these instincts come in two dualistically opposed flavors. The life instincts (Eros) seek to bind things together. Freud somewhat bizarrely suggests this may be a desire to repeat an ancient state of mythical unity like the description of a hermaphroditic garden of Eden that Plato puts into the mouth of Aristophanes at the end of the Symposium. The death instinct seeks to take things apart. It is the drive that all organic life has to return to its objective original inorganic (ie. dead) state. Here's how Freud himself (writing in The Ego and the Id) summarizes the thesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle:
I have lately developed a view of the instincts which I shall here hold to and take as the basis of my further discussions. According to this view we have to distinguish two classes of instincts, one of which, the sexual instincts or Eros, is by far the more conspicuous and accessible to study. It comprises not merely the uninhibited sexual instinct proper and the instinctual impulses of an aim inhibited or sublimated nature derived from it, but also the self-preservative instinct, which must be assigned to the ego and which at the beginning of our analytic work we had good reason for contrasting with the sexual object-instincts. The second class of instincts was not so easy to point to; in the end we came to recognize sadism as its representative. On the basis of theoretical considerations, supported by biology, we put forward the hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state; on the other hand, we supposed that Eros, by bringing about a more and more far-reaching combination of the particles into which living substance is dispersed, aims at complicating life and at the same time, of course, at preserving it. Acting in this way, both the instincts would be conservative in the strictest sense of the word, since both would be endeavouring to re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life. The emergence of life would thus be the cause of the continuance of life and also at the same time of the striving towards death; and life itself would be a conflict and compromise between these two trends. The problem of the origin of life would remain a cosmological one; and the problem of the goal and purpose of life would be answered dualistically
Deleuze follows Freud in thinking of instincts -- passions, things that happen to us and come from outside us -- as related to repetition. However, Deleuze rejects both the dualistic theory of instincts, as well as the theory of repetition associated with it. As you can see from the quote above, repetition for Freud is either the repetition of some objective first state of things, or some ancient mythical state of things. Both of these repetitions are measured by the logic of counting the number of copies of a self-identical model. When repetition is subordinated to a model like this, it also immediately subjugates difference to an opposition between the reality of the model and the appearance of the copy. In Freud's case this means that the unconscious becomes a battleground between the drive of Thanatos to restore an original state of equilibrium (aka. death), and the non-equilibrium perturbations of Eros that oppose and cover over that initial state. Deleuze doesn't believe in a conflict between the instincts because this reduces their difference to opposition of negation, difference between, and fails to give us difference-in-itself. And he doesn't believe that the "passion for repetition" they make evident is a drive to repeat some objective model, because this wouldn't give us repetition-for-itself, but repetition of something.
But does Deleuze offer a theory of instincts of his own? In fact, we might think of each of the passive syntheses as a type of instinct that has a particular type of repetition that corresponds to it. 1) Habitus and the repetition of form as bound difference -- a habitual instinct 2) Eros-Mnemosyne and the repetition of process -- our intertwined sexual and self-preservative instincts 3) Thanatos and the repetition of the empty form of repetition -- a death instinct.
Alternatively, we could look at each of these syntheses as developments of a single unconscious 'instinct' (scare quotes to indicate that this instinct is related to a repetition that never had a first time, and has no goal). Each synthesis would then correspond to a newly differentiated layer of the psychic structure. Together, they describe the way the unconscious differentiates itself into the Id, the Ego, and the Super-Ego just like an embryo differentiates itself into a full blown organism.
It is these three syntheses which must be understood as constitutive of the unconscious.
But to understand this perspective, and to connect it to the death instinct, we need to back up a bit and review how Freud arrived at his three part structure.
We've encountered some of Freud's ideas about the id and the ego already. Psychoanalysis, with its hypothesis of unconscious desires, takes the unknown id as its starting point. This doesn't mean that the id in itself has no structure or is some amorphous matter. In fact, we already saw in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that excitations in the id could be bound or unbound. Freud thought that the ego is responsible for this binding, which seemed essentially to amount to a blocking or channeling of a flow of 'psychic fluid' so to speak, by a surface. The little Freud I've read does not make it completely clear how this surface ego first appears on the scene. Since the analogy is to a cell membrane, maybe he thinks of it it from an almost anatomical evolutionary perspective, as something that must be around if we are to separate inside from outside, my id from yours, and have an organism to begin with. Or maybe the causality implied in question is less important than it seems -- the Id differentiates itself into a surface level, and then this new functional level appears to react back upon the id. However it arises, it's clear that Freud considers the ego a surface differentiation of the id, and he relates it to the perceptual-motor system that governs the interactions between our inner drives and the outer world. Once it forms to interface with the external world, the ego also becomes capable of binding excitations that come from within the organism, and repurposing them for its own use. This binding organizes the unruly flow of the id by making the pursuit of pleasure the principle of its operation. Synthesis #1.
The part we have yet to discuss is the organization of the ego itself. In The Ego and the Id, Freud outlines his theory of how the ego further differentiates itself into another layer: the ego-Ideal or super-ego. The key to this theory turns out to be his idea of "secondary narcissism". It's not that the ego loves itself directly, it's that at a certain point in its development, it substitutes itself in place of a sexual object that the id has been forced to give up.
When it happens that a person has to give up a sexual object, there quite often ensues an alteration of his ego which can only be described as a setting up of the object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia; the exact nature of this substitution is as yet unknown to us. It may be that by this introjection, which is a kind of regression to the mechanism of the oral phase, the ego makes it easier for the object to be given up or renders that process possible. It may be that this identification is the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects. At any rate the process, especially in the early phases of development, is a very frequent one, and it makes it possible to suppose that the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and that it contains the history of those object-choices.
... this transformation of an erotic object-choice into an alteration of the ego is also a method by which the ego can obtain control over the id and deepen its relations with it—at the cost, it is true, of acquiescing to a large extent in the id's experiences. When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and is trying to make good the id's loss by saying: 'Look, you can love me too—I am so like the object.'
This would seem to imply an important amplification of the theory of narcissism. At the very beginning, all the libido is accumulated in the id, while the ego is still in process of formation or is still feeble. The id sends part of this libido out into erotic object-cathexes, whereupon the ego, now grown stronger, tries to get hold of this object-libido and to force itself on the id as a love-object. The narcissism of the ego is thus a secondary one, which has been withdrawn from objects.
It's as if the surface ego becomes a projective screen -- when the id looks out, all it sees is the ego in place of its former objects. From the point of view of that ego though, this implies a sort of division or differentiation where it ends up positing itself as outside itself, so to speak. On the one hand the ego is meant to control and direct the id, to channel its desires. But on the other hand this controller now itself becomes an object of desire. There's some sort of process of reflection implied here that's difficult to describe. Perhaps we can imagine the ego acquiring two layers composed of one-way mirrors -- an inner one that reflects the world but let's the excitations of the id pass through, and an outer one that allows the world in while reflecting back the desires of the id (functioning as projective screen). The ego is then formed by being trapped between these two mirrors. Synthesis #2.
What is created by this modification of differentiation of the ego is the super-ego. Freud's full explanation of this is complex. However, I don't think we need to go into it deeply to understand Deleuze. The simple summary would be that as male (everyone is male for Freud) children we sexually desire our mothers and identify with our fathers (the Oedipus Complex). At some point though, reality sets in and we realize that we are never going to lay mom because dad stands in the way. Cock-blocked, our ego responds by offering itself in place of mom, meaning that we've also now produced a narcissistic identification with our mother. This resolves the external Oedipus complex because we've given up the mother as a sexual object, but at the price of introducing a new structural modification in the ego.
The broad general outcome of the sexual phase dominated by the Oedipus complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of a precipitate in the ego, consisting of these two identifications in some way united with each other. This modification of the ego retains its special position; it confronts the other contents of the ego as an ego ideal or super-ego.
The super-ego is, however, not simply a residue of the earliest object choices of the id; it also represents an energetic reaction-formation against those choices. Its relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precept: 'You ought to be like this (like your father).' It also comprises the prohibition: 'You may not be like this (like your father)—that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative.' This double aspect of the ego ideal derives from the fact that the ego ideal had the task of repressing the Oedipus complex; indeed, it is to that revolutionary event that it owes its existence. Clearly the repression of the Oedipus complex was no easy task. The child's parents, and especially his father, were perceived as the obstacle to a realization of his Oedipus wishes; so his infantile ego fortified itself for the carrying out of the repression by erecting this same obstacle within itself. It borrowed strength to do this, so to speak, from the father, and this loan was an extraordinarily momentous act.
[Note to self: Freud uses ego ideal and super ego interchangeably, whereas for Delezue they are subtly distinct.]
As you can see from this story, the super ego stands in an ambivalent relationship to the ego. It is both an image to aspire to and identify with, as well as a threat of destruction that appears to come from outside the ego, even if, like the ego proposing to control the id, it is carried internally as a newly differentiated layer of the ego. It is the consciousness of wanting to kill your dad and sleep with your mom, as well as the repression of this consciousness. The latter accounts for why we are not directly conscious of the super ego; its very creation depends on being hidden through an unconscious internalization that identifies the deepest drives of the id as the things most distant from 'us' ( our ego).
All that remains now is for us to combine our discussion of Freud's opposed instincts with what we learned about the three parts of the psyche. This brings us finally to chapter 4 of The Ego and the Id, which is the reference of the footnote on pg. 111 of Difference & Repetition. Yeah, all this for a freaking footnote.
It is natural that we should turn with interest to enquire whether there may not be instructive connections to be traced between the structures we have assumed to exist—the ego, the super-ego and the id—on the one hand and the two classes of instincts on the other; and, further, whether the pleasure principle which dominates mental processes can be shown to have any constant relation both to the two classes of instincts and to these differentiations which we have drawn in the mind.
We can see the main point of contact between Freud's instincts and his structures if we note the odd change in the sexual instincts that happens with the differentiation of the super ego. When the ego narcissistically substitutes itself for the lost love object, it desexualizes the erotic energy that was invested in or bound to that object. The moms goes from being a sex object, to being a part of our ego we identify with. Himself is transformed from erotic rival for her affections into a special moral prohibition against consummating these. This is the origin of Freudian sublimation, a theory that explains all the 'higher' impulses, like religion or philosophy or art, as the result of a transformation of originally sexual energy. Once desexualized, the objects that made us horny become sublime expressions of our inner essence.
The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization—a kind of sublimation, therefore. Indeed, the question arises, and deserves careful consideration, whether this is not the universal road to sublimation, whether all sublimation does not take place through the mediation of the ego, which begins by changing sexual object-libido into narcissistic libido and then, perhaps, goes on to give it another aim.
However, this transformation is more than just the substitution of one sexual object, even a more sublime one, for another. It brings into play the qualitative difference between the two instincts. The desexualization has the effect of unbinding the sexual energy from any object, creating exactly the free and mobile excitation that we saw was in need of binding in order to begin formation of the ego and the the organization of the id. Freud believes that this creates a neutral and displaceable energy, no longer necessarily tied to either Eros or Thanatos, but now available for either instinct. In fact, it's at just this point that the two opposing instincts can become unbalanced, so to speak, and appear to us separately (defused as Freud calls it) rather than locked in their usual cycle of fluctuation around equilibrium.
The new displaceable energy may serve a 'higher' purpose like thinking which (we presume) strives to bind together a unity and reinforce the ego.
If this displaceable energy is desexualized libido, it may also be described as sublimated energy; for it would still retain the main purpose of Eros—that of uniting and binding—in so far as it helps towards establishing the unity, or tendency to unity, which is particularly characteristic of the ego. If thought-processes in the wider sense are to be included among these displacements, then the activity of thinking is also supplied from the sublimation of erotic motive forces.
Or it may end up augmenting the death instinct which seeks the annihilation of the ego and a return to dust.
The other case will be recollected, in which the ego deals with the first object cathexes of the id (and certainly with later ones too) by taking over the libido from them into itself and binding it to the alteration of the ego produced by means of identification. The transformation [of erotic libido] into ego-libido of course involves an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization. In any case this throws light upon an important function of the ego in its relation to Eros. By thus getting hold of the libido from the object cathexes, setting itself up as sole love object, and de-sexualizing or sublimating the libido of the id, the ego is working in opposition to the purposes of Eros and placing itself at the service of the opposing instinctual impulses. It has to acquiesce in some of the other object cathexes of the id; it has, so to speak, to participate in them. We shall come back later to another possible consequence of this activity of the ego.
This quote becomes much clearer if we include the later consequence it refers to:
It is remarkable that the more a man checks his aggressiveness towards the exterior the more severe—that is aggressive—he becomes in his ego ideal. The ordinary view sees the situation the other way round: the standard set up by the ego ideal seems to be the motive for the suppression of aggressiveness. The fact remains, however, as we have stated it: the more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense becomes his ideal's inclination to aggressiveness against his ego. It is like a displacement, a turning round upon his own ego. But even ordinary normal morality has a harshly restraining, cruelly prohibiting quality. It is from this, indeed, that the conception arises of a higher being who deals out punishment inexorably.
I cannot go further in my consideration of these questions without introducing a fresh hypothesis. The super-ego arises, as we know, from an identification with the father taken as a model. Every such identification is in the nature of a desexualization or even of a sublimation. It now seems as though when a transformation of this kind takes place, an instinctual defusion occurs at the same time. After sublimation the erotic component no longer has the power to bind the whole of the destructiveness that was combined with it, and this is released in the form of an inclination to aggression and destruction. This defusion would be the source of the general character of harshness and cruelty exhibited by the ideal—its dictatorial 'Thou shalt'.
Freud hypothesizes that the conflict between Eros and Thanatos stretches back to time immemorial. But over and over again he finds it difficult to find examples of the death instinct in action. He will associate our outwardly aggressive and destructive instinct with it.
It appears that, as a result of the combination of unicellular organisms into multicellular forms of life, the death instinct of the single cell can successfully be neutralized and the destructive impulses be diverted on to the external world through the instrumentality of a special organ. This special organ would seem to be the muscular apparatus; and the death instinct would thus seem to express itself—though probably only in part—as an instinct of destruction directed against the external world and other organisms
But he knows that this is a pretty weak argument. We don't need anything as strange as the death instinct to explain why I'm going to mow down the next numb nuts who fails to signal a left hand turn. The pleasure principle more than suffices for that. The question of the death instinct only becomes acute when our violence is directed at ourselves. This, finally, provides the connection between the death instinct and the super ego. The desexualized energy that is freed up alongside the differentiation of the super ego can now be turned back against the ego, and pointedly reveal what for Freud was there all along -- the death instinct. The ego's narcissistic substitution of itself as erotic object creates an unbound energy capable of sweeping away the very ego we started with. Synthesis #3
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After that detour through Freud, we're prepared to read the next few pages. In fact, Deleuze follows Freud's scheme fairly closely. However, as we already pointed out above, for Deleuze, the death instinct isn't a hidden force operating from the beginning, eternally in conflict with the life instinct. Instead, the death instinct is synthesized as the third synthesis of time. It is produced by the same mechanism of narcissistic reflection Freud describes (minus the Oedipus complex baggage). It also corresponds to an unbinding of energy and a dissolution or fracturing or differentiation of the ego. But, unlike Freud's material model of death as equilibrium, what's repeated here is the process of unbinding itself. The death instinct simply is the liberation of energetic difference become unbound: "this energy does not serve Thanatos, it constitutes him". Deleuze has constructed it as a reflection of a reflection that empties it of any content or memory that would serve as model, and identifies the ego with nothing more than the process of its own construction (and destruction).
The death instinct does not enter into a cycle with Eros, but testifies to a completely different synthesis. It is by no means the complement or antagonist of Eros, nor in any sense symmetrical with him. The correlation between Eros and Mnemosyne is replaced by that between a narcissistic ego without memory, a great amnesiac, and a death instinct desexualised and without love. The narcissistic ego has no more than a dead body, having lost the body at the same time as the objects. It is by means of the death instinct that it is reflected in the ego ideal and has a presentiment of its end in the superego, as though in two fragments of the fractured I. It is this relation between the narcissistic ego and the death instinct that Freud indicated so profoundly in saying that there is no reflux of the libido on to the ego without it becoming desexualised and forming a neutral displaceable energy, essentially capable of serving Thanatos.
Like many of Deleuze's ideas, we can consider this a subtle modification of another philosopher. Instead of putting Thanatos at the beginning, in conflict with Eros, he puts it at the end. As a result, instead of repeating an original inorganic equilibrium, death repeats the process of change. Of course, that subtle difference changes everything. Death is no longer the end the opposite of life, but its ongoing transformation. The (non)-being that death implies is no longer the negation of life, but becomes the symbol of a process that can produce many lives, all the intersubjective moments of our life. And we've already seen what type of being a process has -- a (non)-being without negation, ?-being, the being of questions and problems.
For death cannot be reduced to negation, neither to the negative of opposition nor to the negative of limitation. It is neither the limitation imposed by matter upon mortal life, nor the opposition between matter and immortal life, which furnishes death with its prototype. Death is, rather, the last form of the problematic, the source of problems and questions, the sign of their persistence over and above every response, the 'Where?' and 'When?' which designate this (non)-being where every affirmation is nourished.
I wish I could better convey the sense of climax I read in this passage. It's taken such a long time to reach a fuller understanding of it that I've made it seem plodding and arcane. But Deleuze is actually going very very fast here, moving through the elaborate structure that he's built on top of psychoanalysis to reach this new concept of death. To me this lends a great depth to what might seem a simple phrase. Death is a question. It's the question. About what difference life makes. It's not about the end. It's not about the afterlife opposed to this one. It's about here and now, about how we live today, constantly dying and being reborn in the perpetual present. It's a question of how we become alive to ourselves as a process of continual transformation.
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