Whose?

Deleuze dedicates the last couple pages of the section ending on pg. 115 to summarizing the third synthesis and the way it relates to the other two.  I won't spend a ton of time here because we've seen all this before in much greater detail.  Continuing the theme of the last post, I feel like the main question lurking behind these pages is what agent we could be talking about once we reach the point of dissolution of identity implicit in the third synthesis.  Deleuze highlights the issue by italicizing the "of" in his summary of the components of the third synthesis.

It is all in the same movement that there is a reflux of Eros on to the ego, that the ego takes upon itself the disguises and displacements which characterise the objects in order to construct its own fatal affection, that the libido loses all mnemic content and Time loses its circular shape in order to assume a merciless and straight form, and that the death instinct appears, indistinguishable from that pure form, the desexualised energy of that narcissistic libido.

The narcissistic ego discovers that it itself is the ultimate erotic virtual object continually displaced onto and disguised within the world.  It was never a lost memory, even a mythical one, that it was searching for.  It was always only its self, namely the process of the formation of those memories through an endless displacement and disguise, without any original content.  As a result there is nothing to circle back to but this process of unfolding, no object of the ego except itself taking itself taking itself ... as object.   When the ego realizes itself as this infinitely splitting line, the object loses all its mysterious erotic pull and becomes desexualized.  The sexual energy that was invested in it is freed, unbound from the ego which has dissolved itself along with its object.  

But wait?  So now whose energy is it?  Who died?  And if this is the moment where the activity of the ego become thought, then whose thought is it?  How can it be the energy "of" the narcissistic libido if this is precisely what's dissolving?  Our normal idea of ownership, of a subject that owns some properties, is going haywire here, as if we carried our compass to the North Pole.  The desexualized energy is only produced by the narcissistic libido, and yet that ego consumes itself in the process of the production.  So what are we left with afterwards?

I think that Deleuze's answer is basically that we are left almost where we began, with the unconscious.  Not my unconscious or your unconscious though, but the unconscious, its unconscious.  Remember how we began our discussion of psychoanalysis:

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' 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' of excitations and resolutions. 

This primary layer of the id was quickly bound and organized by habit in the first synthesis.  But we have returned to this field of difference where excitations are unbound from any form.  

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

In other words, the unconscious has become an agent.  "It" is the answer to all our questions (or perhaps more accurately the source of them).  The liberated energy 'belongs' to the unconscious.  We are a local excitation and resolution within that impersonal field.  And thinking is the energy that discharges through it like a lightning strike, drawing an abstract line that encloses no form.  Thinking arises from within this unconscious, and returns to it.  Thought, "distinguishes itself -- and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it".  

I believe this is what Deleuze is trying to get across with his reference to Artaud here.  

... it is no longer a question of knowing whether thought is innate or acquired. It is neither innate nor acquired but genital -- in other words, desexualised and drawn from that reflux which opens us on to empty time. In order to indicate this genesis of thought in an always fractured I, Artaud said: 'I am an innate genital', meaning equally thereby a 'desexualised acquisition'. It is not a question of acquiring thought, nor of exercising it as though it were innate, but of engendering the act of thinking within thought itself.

This gets only slightly clearer when Deleuze quotes Artaud more fully on pg. 148:

To think is to create -- there is no other creation -- but to create is first of all to engender 'thinking' in thought. For this reason Artaud opposes genitality to innateness in thought, but equally to reminiscence, and thereby proposes the principle of a transcendental empiricism: 

I am innately genital. ... There are some fools who think of themselves as beings, as innately being. I am he who, in order to be, must whip his innateness. One who innately must be a being, that is always whipping this sort of non-existent kennel, 0 bitches of impossibility! ... Underneath grammar there lies thought, an infamy harder to conquer, an infinitely more shrewdish maid, rougher to overcome when taken as an innate fact. For thought is a matron who has not always existed.

Thinking doesn't belong to us innately.  It's the unconscious that thinks through us, as it were.  Yet we don't acquire thought from somewhere else as a new property for ourselves either.  It's more like thinker and thought are produced together.  In other words, we are a necessary vehicle for thought.  Not that I in particular, or the human species in general, is a necessary vehicle.  But some vehicle, some thinker, some agent or conceptual personae (as D&G put it in What is Philosophy?) is necessary.  This thinker must be whipped into existence from the "bitches of impossibility" as simultaneously necessary and utterly disposable, destined to erase itself with one hand as it draws itself with the other.   

Now though we've ended up in a very strange place.  Because not only has the thinker dissolved but so has the unconscious.  We began with the unbound excitations of an unconscious field, subject here and there to spontaneous resolution.  But we've discovered that this energy is only produced as liberated from the dissolution of the ego we called thinking.  It's unclear what's the given and what's the endpoint.  "The" unconscious we were talking about doesn't pre-exist as some sort of original totality.  The third synthesis produces the unbound and ungrounded starting point for the first.  

At this extreme point the straight line of time forms a circle again, a singularly tortuous one; or alternatively, the death instinct reveals an unconditional truth hidden in its 'other' face - namely, the eternal return in so far as this does not cause everything to come back but, on the contrary, affects a world which has rid itself of the default of the condition and the equality of the agent in order to affirm only the excessive and the unequal, the interminable and the incessant, the formless as the product of the most extreme formality.

It's as if the lightning strike of thought turned out to be the background radiation of the universe.  As if the once and for all split of time into before and after that characterized the third synthesis turned out to be every moment.  And we already know that to live every moment as if it were once and for all is the whole point of the enteral return.