The Resonance of the Dark Precursor

The way I'm dividing it, the second part of this penultimate re-presentation of the three syntheses runs from pg. 119 through the note about Proust on pg. 122.  It introduces the "dark precursor", which is clearly patterned on the missing-in-place virtual objects of the pure past that we struggled so mightily with in the examining the second synthesis.

Picking up where we left off in our discussion of series or oscillators, we might say that the question asked now is how or why the two oscillators got coupled to form a system to begin with.  We saw that if we started with two series of differences, they could get coupled, resonate, and finally produce a resonant feedback loop that made the two series into a single system capable of showing all kinds of interesting emergent dynamics.  But didn't we take the eventual construction of this system for granted at the outset by assuming that the two series were already coupled?  How did this happen?  What force or agent couples certain series and not others?

When we speak of communication between heterogeneous systems, of coupling and resonance, does this not imply a minimum of resemblance between the series, and an identity in the agent which brings about the communication? Would not 'too much' difference between the series render any such operation impossible? Are we not condemned to rediscover a privileged point at which difference can be understood only by virtue of a resemblance between the things which differ and the identity of a third party?

To begin with, what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? Thunderbolts explode between different intensities, but they are preceded by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which determines their path in advance but in reverse, as though intagliated. 

Deleuze's basic answer to this is that they are coupled by nothing.  The dark precursor he proposes as the agent of and reason for the connection is the same type of constantly displaced and disguised no-thing-in-itself that we've seen before as the pure past and the virtual object.  I think it's a huge mistake to conceive of this non-entity along the lines of Lacan and Zizek as some sort of "substantial void" or as some simplistic version of the Buddhist emptiness.  This reifies the nothingness into a thing, a unity, an identity.  It's the same void every time; there's only one nothing if you think of it this way.  Really, this version of Nothing is just Being with a minus sign.  This would solve our problem of how two series get coupled as part of one system -- generally, because they resemble one another in some way, in the final instance and at a minimum in the way all things resemble one another in nothingness/being -- but only at that price of reintroducing some abstract identity at the base of all difference.  Instead, Delezue wants us to consider a type of nothing that inherently involves time and circulation, that is never identical to itself, but always comes back transformed by a new disguise.  It's a nothing much closer to chaos than the void.  

The dark precursor is a virtual object and a shred of pure past, and is just as difficult to characterize as those were.  We can go back and review all the November, December 2019 and the April 2020 posts to refresh ourselves on our various attempts.  Here I'll just deal with the two interesting new images these concepts get associated with.  These are the lightning strike, and resonance.

While it's not completely clear from the text, some material that appears in the A to Z interviews makes it apparent that when Deleuze says the dark precursor invisibly precedes the lightning strike he is making a direct reference to the phenomena called a lightning leader.  Turns out, the reason that we see a lightning discharge that moves from A to B along a certain path is because this path has been specified in advance by the growth of a channel of ionized air.  It's only afterwards that we see this path lit by a discharge.  Here's a wonderful long quote from Stivale's book about the interviews summarizing the discussion under Z for Zigzag.

         So what happens in Zed, he asks? Musing aloud, he sees Zen as the reverse of Nez (nose), which is also a zigzag. (Deleuze gestures the angle of a nose in the air.)  Zed as movement, the fly, is perhaps the elementary movement that presided at the creation of the world.
         Deleuze says that he's currently (1989) reading a book on the Big Bang, on the creation of the universe, an infinite curving, how it occurred. Deleuze feels that at the origin of things there's no Big Bang—there's the Zed, which is, in fact, the Zen, the route of the fly. Deleuze says that when he conceives of zigzags, he recalls what he said earlier (in section U) about no universals, but rather aggregates of singularities. He considers how to bring disparate singularities into relationship—or to bring potentials into relationship, to speak in terms of physics. Deleuze says one can imagine a chaos of potentials, so how can one bring these into relation? Deleuze tries to recall the "vaguely scientific" discipline in which there is a term that he likes a lot and that he used in his books (in fact, Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition). Someone explained, he says, that between two potentials occurs a phenomenon that was defined by the idea of a "dark precursor" (précurseur sombre). This dark precursor places diverent potentials into relation, and once the journey (trajet) of the dark precursor takes place, the potentials enter into a state of reaction from which emerges the visible event.          So there is the dark precursor and (Deleuze gestures a Z in the air) then a lightning bolt, and that's how the world was born. There is always a dark precursor that no one sees, and then the lightning bolt that illuminates, and there is the world. He says that's also what thought should be and what philosophy must be, the grand Zed, but also the wisdom of the Zen. The sage is the dark precursor, and then the blow of the stick comes, since the Zen master passes among his disciples, striking them with his stick. So for Deleuze, the blow of the stick is the lightning that makes things visible . . .
           Here, he pauses and says, "And so we have finished." 

This quote kinda has everything (and the "vaguely scientific discipline" is called fulminology by the way).  The dark precursor connects different potentials.  It is what holds them together as potentials of a single process, just like the virtual object held together possible experiences and possible selves.  It does this an invisible way though, or at least in way that only later becomes visible. Which is why we end up taking the effect for the cause.

Are identity and resemblance here the preconditions of the functioning of this dark precursor, or are they, on the contrary, its effects? If the latter, might it necessarily project upon itself the illusion of a fictive identity, and upon the series which it relates the illusion of a retrospective resemblance? Identity and resemblance would then be no more than inevitable illusions - in other words, concepts of reflection which would account for our inveterate habit of thinking difference on the basis of the categories of representation. All that, however, would be possible only because the invisible precursor conceals itself and its functioning, and at the same time conceals the in-itself or true nature of difference.

The lightning leader is also a great image because it forms a path defined at each step by differences of potential differences.  It is a "cleared path" as Freud called it, a path of least resistance, but one that is only defined piecewise and locally (as a stepped leader) by seeking out a potential difference that would let it extend itself.  The identity of the whole path of the lightning strike is just an effect of this series of differences between potential differences.  

Resonance is the other image new to this section that helps us understand the strange connection of the dark precursor.  We already discussed how two series can resonate even though they have nothing in common, no shared identity or direct connection.  But you might think that they would at least be characterized by sharing an identical fundamental frequency.  However, even this doesn't need to be the case.  While it's again pretty indirect, I think Deleuze may be referring to the fact that even things with widely different fundamentals could resonate through their series of overtones.  With resonance, two things can be coupled not because the they are similar -- because the difference between them is small in terms of proximity or fundamental frequency.  Instead they could resonate because of their difference in fundamental.  So long as this difference is distributed in a certain way it produces their interaction as part of the same system.  That is, it seems to produce their identity.

It is well known that in certain cases (in certain systems), the difference between the differences brought into play may be 'very large'; in other systems it must be 'very small'.  It would be wrong, however, to see in this second case the pure expression of a prior requirement of resemblance, which would then be relaxed in the first case only by being extended to the world scale. For example, it is insisted that disparate series must necessarily be almost similar, or that the frequencies be neighbouring (W neighbour of W0) - in short, that the difference be small. If, however, the identity of the agent which causes the different things to communicate is presupposed, then there are no differences which will not be 'small', even on the world scale. We have seen that small and large apply badly to difference, because they judge it according to the criteria of the Same and the similar. If difference is related to its differenciator, and if we refrain from attributing to the differenciator an identity that it cannot and does not have, then the difference will be small or large according to its possibilities of fractionation - that is, according to the displacements and disguise of the differenciator. In no case will it be possible to claim that a small difference testifies to a strict condition of resemblance, any more than a large difference testifies to the persistence of a resemblance which is simply relaxed.

This seems to take us into the question of whether difference is quantized or not.  Since we've seen this issue of large and small a number of times now, this brings to mind a whole set of connections that I will need to explore.  Clearly, Deleuze doesn't want to think of a relative test of largeness and smallness that defines these terms by calculating a distance from an identity.  Aristotle tried to tame difference this way by fitting it into a well behaved normal distribution.  Even if we allow for infinitely large and infinitely small distances like with Hegel and Leibniz, we fall into the same trap of judging difference on the basis of identity.  

But Deleuze also doesn't want to give up on the idea of the large and small completely. We saw recently that in the case of the unconscious, he conceived these terms as applying absolutely and qualitatively.  The unconscious was composed of "little differences in series" because these were partial, passive, local processes.  Now, it seems as if a small difference is defined as an indivisible relationship, where a large one will be divisible, or have some "possibility of fractionation".  This seems to imply a minimum viable unit difference, as if perhaps there were a smallest local process that cannot be further divided without ceasing to exists.  By contrast, a large difference would be divisible, but only in the sense in which a series of overtones is divisible.  These form a quantized series of intensities that don't multiply or divide like an extensive variable such as length or mass.  Every time you try to divide an overtone, you get a qualitatively different pitch.  In this simple example division leads to the just intonation scale.  But could we imagine the same type procedure applying to water at varying intensities of pressure and temperature?  Is the phase diagram of water a map of which differences in those variable are objectively small and which are large (obviously defined with respect to a water system)?  

Home Stretch

Well, we're closing in on the end of chapter 2, and just in time for the second anniversary of the blog!  There's really just two sections left.  I think we should construe the longer first one (from pg. 116 after the Borges quote to pg. 126) as revisiting the three different repetitions from a structural or systemic perspective.  Accordingly, this section breaks down into three parts, one for each figure of repetition.  There's various ways to understand these three, which I think recur throughout Deleuze's work.  We've talked about them here as form -- process -- the realization that processes are forms and forms processes.  Deleuze has called them Habit -- Eros -- Thantos in this chapter.  In What is Philosophy? he and Guattari will talk about concepts -- conceptual personae -- the plane of immanence, and in A Thousand Plateaus we find assemblages -- abstract machines -- the plane of consistency.  You might also call them object -- subject -- transcendental field or thought -- thinker -- image of thought.  I might describe the way they appear in this particular section as dynamic system -- singularity -- chaos.  Obviously, there's not one true version of the trinity, so we shouldn't worry if our mileage varies for each description.  As far as I can tell, the only thing preserved though all these transformations is that #1 and #2 start off as qualitatively distinct, but in #3 are considered 'the same' -- held together as different by a sort of fractal reflexivity.  Step 3 is the crucial one that gets us all the way to difference in-itself, but it requires the initial difference between steps 1 and 2 (or maybe more accurately produces their identity as an effect).  Step 3 also internalizes the difference between steps 1 and 2, which means that in a sense all three steps are different aspects of the same process.

... difference must immediately relate the differing terms to one another. In accordance with Heidegger's ontological intuition, difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differenciator, a Sich-unterscheidende, by virtue of which the different is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance, identity, analogy or opposition. As for these latter instances, since they cease to be conditions, they become no more than effects of the primary difference and its differenciation, overall or surface effects which characterise the distorted world of representation, and express the manner in which the in-itself of difference hides itself by giving rise to that which covers it.

Anyhow, let's get down to cases and cover the first part of the section (pg. 116-119), where Deleuze discusses dynamic systems theory.   The section starts off with an interesting reference to Leví-Strauss, and we might almost call it Deleuze's structuralist take on metaphysics, since the idea is to isolate a structure of relationships of differences between terms without any intrinsic importance to what the terms are in themselves.  The same theory can then apply to physical, biological, psychic, literary, and philosophical systems indiscriminately.  All of these are described as intensive systems because they couple one set of differences to another.  

In physics, people normally define an intensive variable as one that doesn't change if the system is cut into pieces.  So things like pressure, density, and temperature are intensive because if I took a cube of gas (at equilibrium) and sliced is into 8 smaller cubes of gas, these variables would be the same in each of the small cubes as they were in the original big cube.  The extensive properties are the ones that would be reduced by 1/8th in this example -- volume, mass, number of molecules of gas, etc ... If Deleuze is referring to this typical definition it's a bit oblique.  Given the structuralist context, I do think he means to convey that intensities are systems level or bulk properties that don't apply to atomic units individually.  As a consequence of the definition of an intensive variable, it doesn't make any sense to ask what the temperature or pressure of a single gas atom is; these are only defined for a collection of atoms.  Similarly, the structuralists emphasized that the meaning of a signifier is based on its usage in a whole language context.  In other words, the signifier is arbitrary.  It's role is just to be different from other possible signifiers.  It has no inherent connection to what it signifies, and doesn't even have the ability to point to it by itself, but only acquires this ability because of its role in the structure of the language.  This is all to say something fairly obvious but perhaps often forgotten: a language is a system that relates differences between words to differences between ideas -- this is how it's able to mean anything at all.

Beyond the reference to a systems level or contextual property, I'm not quite sure why Deleuze refers to differences of differences as intensities.

The nature of these elements whose value is determined at once both by their difference in the series to which they belong, and by the difference of their difference from one series to another, can be determined: these are intensities, the peculiarity of intensities being to be constituted by a difference which itself refers to other differences (E-E' where E refers to e-e' and e to f.-f.' ...). 

He may be referring to the way a change in intensity can produce a qualitative change in a system.   For example, changes in temperature are associated with phase transitions in a material that result in discontinuities in its behavior -- ice, water, steam.  If you try to divide up an intensive variable itself (instead of dividing up the extensive size of the system in question like in the standard definition) you find that it doesn't divide smoothly but breaks up into regimes or zones.  Which is to say that quantitative differences (in the energy you supply in the form of heat) cause other qualitative differences to appear (in phase of matter).  This is the interpretation Manuel DeLanda uses in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy.  You might think of language too as a system filled with differences that lead to phase transitions.  How far do I have to change my articulation of the phoneme b/v before "bat" becomes "vat"?  What quantity of pause do I need in my speaking to distinguish the redneck who "eats, shoots, and leaves" from the qualitatively different panda who "eats shoots and leaves"?  Any system of coded communication is intensive in this sense, as continuous differences in physical signifier lead to discontinuous differences in the meaning.  This turns out to have been one of the main assertions of structuralism -- social, literary, and psychic systems are all structured like a language.

... words are genuine intensities within certain aesthetic systems; concepts are also intensities from the point of view of philosophical systems. Note, too, that according to the celebrated 1895 Freudian Project for a Scientific Psychology, biophysical life is presented in the form of such an intensive field in which differences determinable as excitations, and differences of differences determinable as cleared paths, are distributed.

Finally, the reference to Freud here gives us another interesting way to think of intensive systems.  An intensity is an energetic difference or excitation that gets coupled to another energetic difference in a process of discharge, or clearing a path through a field of such excitations.  The lightning strike image implicit here is one of Deleuze's favorites.  Now we can see the lightning strike of thought directly associated with the dynamic system that is the brain.  In the end, how different is a thought from a lightning strike if both are literally a cleared path of electrical discharge?

Actually though, while it's fundamental to his overall work, Deleuze doesn't come back to the concept of intensity in this particular section. Instead, he focuses on the three components or moments of an intensive system -- coupling, resonance, and forced movement.

A system must be constituted on the basis of two or more series, each series being defined by the differences between the terms which compose it. If we suppose that the series communicate under the impulse of a force of some kind, then it is apparent that this communication relates differences to other differences, constituting differences between differences within the system. These second-degree differences play the role of the 'differenciator' - in other words, they relate the first-degree differences to one another. This state of affairs is adequately expressed by certain physical concepts: coupling between heterogeneous systems, from which is derived an internal resonance within the system, and from which in turn is derived a forced movement the amplitude of which exceeds that of the basic series themselves. 

It seems clear that Deleuze is describing the classic dynamic system, a set of coupled oscillators.  The initial series are the two oscillators, each of which is characterized by a frequency at which it alternates between the differences that define it as a (square wave) oscillation.  These two are then coupled to form a single system where they can communicate with one another and pass energy back and forth through a process of mutual resonance.   Finally, if the frequencies are adjusted correctly, a resonant feedback loop can develop where the oscillators reinforce one another and their amplitude increases indefinitely. 

Naturally, since this is our third time through the theory of repetition, we've already seen these elements.  Habitus was a repeating oscillation that couples repetitions in an environment to the repetition of forms in that environment.  Eros was like the resonance between the internal and external, real and virtual, needs of that form -- the sexual and self-preservative drives that keep it intact and extend it.  Then Thanatos was like a resonant feedback loop between real and virtual that blows the whole form apart.  

Above all, however, the syntheses of the Psyche incarnate on their own account the three dimensions of these systems in general: psychic connection (Habitus) effects a coupling of series of excitations; Eros designates the specific state of internal resonance which results; and the death instinct amounts to the forced movement whose psychic amplitude exceeds that of the resonating series themselves (whence the difference in amplitude between the death instinct and the resonating Eros).

I really like the concept of resonance here because it conveys a sense of the way the series interact without touching, so to speak.  The Tacoma Narrows Bridge is about the best image I can imagine of forced movement leading to a death instinct.  Of course there's a real physical force involved, but this huge bridge blows apart in light wind as if by magic.  The concept really nuances our simple billiard ball notion of causality, even as that applies to this simple static structure.  Because the bridge has its own structure with a certain resonant frequency, the relatively small amount of instantaneous energy supplied by the wind can, if applied with the correct frequency, manage to add up and tear the whole bridge down.  The pendulum swings further and further in a forced movement driven by some invisible source.  If you extend this idea to apply to a non-equilibrium structure that already has its own internal source of energy, then even a tiny amount of external energy could set off a huge resonant motion if delivered at the correct frequency.  This sets up a communication mechanism a lot like language, where the minuscule amount of sound energy transmitted to me when you say, "pass the salt" actually manages to accomplish quite a lot of work in the world, essentially because you are pushing me at a frequency I was already tuned to, so to speak.  In other words, resonance is a mechanism for generating what seems kinda like spooky action at a distance. The force that's doing the work seems almost invisible, or at least to cover itself over.  Instead of working like a cause, it acts like a trigger.  We'll come back to resonance in the next post as well, when we talk about the dark precursor.

Together the three components -- series, resonance, feedback -- form a dynamic system.  It's not completely clear, but I think that Deleuze is going as far as saying that the behavior of this system actually creates space, time, and meaning.  Which is to say that he's proposing a sort of metaphysics here.  We've already explored the meaning part a bit in the context of structuralism.  Words in a language can only refer to something because the language has a structure of its own.  The corollary of this is that the world (whether physical or ideal) has to have a structure of its own to serve as the object of reference.  The two sides each have a structure of differences, and then these series of differences get coupled together and resonate.  Coupled 'oscillators' is essentially a structuralist reworking of the theory of meaning.  

I'm a little more vague on how the system would create space and time.  

Once communication between heterogeneous series is established, all sorts of consequences follow within the system. Something 'passes' between the borders, events explode, phenomena flash, like thunder and lightning. Spatio-temporal dynamisms fill the system, expressing simultaneously the resonance of the coupled series and the amplitude of the forced movement which exceeds them. 

I have the impression that he's taking the amplitude of forced movement between the oscillators as constitutive of space here.  And perhaps the resonance, which you'll notice has effectively replaced the idea of any identity or correspondence between the series, is meant to serve as the basis of a repetition that defines time?  I suspect Deleuze will come back to spatio-temporal dynamism at a later point, and we are only seeing a brief glimpse here (as we saw with intensity).

Though perhaps we actually do get another indirect clue about how to think of space-time in this section.  Deleuze goes on to talk about the type of subject that his definition of a dynamic system might support.  It's an important question because it's hard to see how this world of differences of differences would support anything like the stable identity of a subject or self.  

The system is populated by subjects, both larval subjects and passive selves: passive selves because they are indistinguishable from the contemplation of couplings and resonances; larval subjects because they are the supports or the patients of the dynamisms. 

At first I was tempted to read larval subject and passive self as synonyms in this passage.  But Deleuze is extremely careful with his language and actually seems to be referring to three different entities here.   There are two types of passive selves -- the local passive self of the first synthesis of habit that was a contemplation of coupled series (habitus), and the extended passive self of the second synthesis of memory that was a contemplation of resonances (eros).  Then a larval subject is meant to be distinguished from these passive selves as an active form of identity.  However, this should not be confused with the reality based active ego we saw in the second synthesis.  Instead, I think the larval subject is meant to be the active but fractured I, the subject that appears only when the ego dissolves into narcissistic reflection in the third synthesis.  This synthesis is the movement that constitutes the peculiar activity called thought.  

Now that I've stumbled onto it, this interpretation clears up a lot of dangling bits that hadn't quite come together for me.  For example, if we search under "larval" we find a couple of puzzling passages.

Selves are larval subjects; the world of passive syntheses constitutes the system of the self, under conditions yet to be determined, but it is the system of a dissolved self. (pg. 78)

This active but fractured I is not only the basis of the superego but the correlate of the passive and wounded narcissistic ego, thereby forming a complex whole that Paul Ricoeur aptly named an 'aborted cogito,. Moreover, there is only the aborted Cogito, only the larval subject. (pg. 110)

The "system of the self" is precisely the system of the three syntheses.  It culminates in producing a full blown thinking self in the third synthesis, but it only produces that self as fractured, or aborted, or dissolved.  Which is to say that the full self is the larval subject.   It's this larval subject that supports and suffers from (is the patient of) thought.  

The reason we're calling the subject "larval" also becomes apparent now.  It is produced as a system of difference differentiating itself.  This is the egg.  The embryo.  The body without organs.  An undifferentiated system capable of differentiating itself.  A place where program and product have become entangled.  The support for the dynamics of difference.  I knew we would come back to embryogenesis. 

In effect, a pure spatio-temporal dynamism, with its necessary participation in the forced movement, can be experienced only at the borders of the livable, under conditions beyond which it would entail the death of any well-constituted subject endowed with independence and activity. Embryology already displays the truth that there are systematic vital movements, torsions and drifts, that only the embryo can sustain: an adult would be torn apart by them. There are movements for which one can only be a patient, but the patient in turn can only be a larva.

So the space-time fabricated by the systems we're talking about here should be imagined as the developmental space of the egg.  A space that progressively twists and folds as intensities of chemical concentrations pass across it and through which the organs differentiate themselves -- difference creating more difference.  But in this case it's not the differentiated bodily organs that are developing, but the differentiated thoughts of a thinker who has dissolved in (and been produced by) the activity thinking.  

In this sense, it is not even clear that thought, in so far as it constitutes the dynamism peculiar to philosophical systems, may be related to a substantial, completed and well-constituted subject, such as the Cartesian Cogito: thought is, rather, one of those terrible movements which can be sustained only under the conditions of a larval subject.

There's a lot of paradoxical confusion still lurking here that I'll need to come back to untangle.  The larval subject that does the thinking seems to be produced only at the end of the the chain of syntheses.  Yet the image of the embryo seems to point us in the direction of the starting point of difference, or the space in which thinking develops itself.  This confusion is deliberate.  It's inherent in the paradoxical image of (the chicken or) the egg.  But it also implies some confusion between the thinker and the thought, or even worse, between the creator of the space, the things that come to occupy it, and the space itself.  Like we said at the beginning, somehow 1, 2, and 3 are all the same.

Eternally Returning

Deleuze always comes back to the eternal return as the high point of his attempt to think of difference in-itself as repetition for-itself.  As befits the content of the concept, each time is appears it has a slightly different form.  This time, the emphasis is on it's relationship to possibility and to a pure chance the removes all traces of the concept of necessity.  Eternal return is linked to the death instinct, but the death it implies liberates a sense of play and invention.  As Nozick put it in Invariances: "only lack of invention is the mother of necessity".

At first sight it's not obvious that the ER would be opposed to the idea of necessity.  On the contrary, if we understand it as the proposition that at some point everything will repeat again in identical fashion, it seems to suggest that absolutely everything necessarily must be just as it is and was, as if it were all part of God's inscrutable plan for the universe. [Note: I am going to use "world" and universe" synonymously here]  After all, this is not even the first time it's all happening, right?  However, no philosopher has ever worked as hard to be misunderstood as Nietzsche, and ER has to be his most misunderstood concept.  In fact, the idea is meant to lead us in exactly the opposite direction of a fixed and necessary repetition by forcing us to ask some questions about how that would work.  It takes quite a bit of work to see this reversed perspective though.

You ask yourself, for example: when did the latest cycle of the universe start?  Obviously, the answer is: after the last one ended.  So, maybe when time ends, it repeats again from the beginning.  The form of time and its contents would both be both finite and repeating.  Or maybe, rather than starting again, we might instead conceive of time as progressing in an infinite straight line.  Since matter and space are finite though, if things keep moving around long enough they will inevitably end up back in the starting position (at least that's the intuition, I rather liked George Simmel's counter-example here).  In that case the form of time would be infinite, but its contents are finite and repeating (which when you think about it kinda defeats the idea of its form being infinite, see below). These are two not actually very different flavors of how the universe could repeat itself.   

Given our ideas about the big bang and the heat death of the universe, they may sound plausible to the modern ear.  We might wonder whether it repeats again exactly, with the exact same initial conditions at the Big Bang leading, via the inexorable laws of physics, to the exact same evolution of the universe, right down to me typing this exact same sentence with it's reference to G-Eazy, followed immediately by zombie apocalypse and heat death.  But, regardless of whether we start with the same initial conditions every time or whether we try to argue that ER is wrong and no two universes are alike because of tiny random variation in the initial conditions, the basic idea seems to make conceptual sense -- 'everything' could repeat.

It make sense to us because we are so accustomed to the basic assumptions of a materialist worldview.  We situate ourselves outside of the world, looking at it from above as a closed totality with beginning and end, governed by specifiable laws that are also outside that world.  What's repeated empirically (or not) would be the universe as a whole.   And what's repeated transcendentally, as a condition necessary for thinking about the first repetition, are the identity of the immaterial laws that govern it.  It's only from this viewpoint outside the material world that we can stand back and see what counts as a full cycle and count the number of times it has repeated.  This is the perspective that gives time a hinge that divides one repetition from the next.  This is the only perspective from which we can imagine running the experiment of the universe a second time.

That all seems like a perfectly coherent perspective till I write it down.  I mean that literally.  Because as I write it down, I somehow appropriate that external perspective for myself.  Yet, the last time I checked, I was still just a hairless chimp floating through space on an unremarkable rock, seemingly as much a part of the universe as anything else.  So how did I, or any part within this universe, manage to attain the perspective of looking at it from without, the only perspective that would enable me to see whether or not it repeats?  

Or maybe more succinctly, we might ask: how did I write this whole blog post down the first time?  After all, the first spin of the merry-go-round was not a repetition.  The unit of repetition had yet to be formed.  So of course that time I was not busy writing about how it repeats, because it hadn't yet.  But, well, I'm writing this and you're reading it, so either this is indeed the first time, or this time is somehow different from it precisely because I'm here identifying the repetition.  In either case, my thought that the universe repeats is true it would count as evidence that it does not repeat.  

Or maybe we think there was no first time, and the unit of repetition has simply always been there.  I've always sat here writing this exact same line, and you've always sat here reading it.  But then, how would we know?  How would we ever figure out which number repetition we're in?  We would have to have some memory of the last time around with which to confirm the identity, but like we saw with Hume, this would add a privileged point or extra dimension to the experience that makes each time around different.  But if this unit is simply all there ever is over and over again, and there is no overlap or static supplementary dimension, doesn't the whole idea of a repetition lose all meaning?  

It kinda reminds me of the sophomoric notion of base reality.  Sure, maybe we're in a simulation instead of base reality.  But then again maybe it's just a simulation of a simulation.  Or etc ... And how would you know the difference between base reality and a simulation, or one simulation and another, unless you find some way of passing from one to the next?  And even if Elon Musk perfects astral travel before he gulps another red pill, how would one level announce itself as more real or base than any other?  The act of considering possible simulations renders the concept of base reality meaningless.  

The point with all this analytic rambling is that if there's someone who can think this thought or write this very sentence, then the idea that the universe repeats exactly becomes internally incoherent.  There's a non-obvious paradox built into the eternal return, a self-referential structure perhaps a bit like the diagonal method or Gödel's proof.  This is why it comes up again here in the context of the death instinct, which for Deleuze is associated with a dissolving self-referential process. 

As Klossowski says, it is the secret coherence which establishes itself only by excluding my own coherence, my own identity, the identity of the self, the world and God.

But just when you thought this had gotten dizzying enough, you can see in this quote the glimmer of yet another twist.  The expression of the idea that the history of the world is a unit that necessarily repeats seems to dissolve that very idea.   The natural contrary would seem to be that the world must only unfold one time, once and for all, as a completely unique entity.  Except, part of that universe is busy imagining that the universe, and it itself, repeats.  You might say that this is just some sort of hallucination.  This is the simplest refutation of what I wrote above -- the idea that the universe repeats just isn't true.  But now your base reality must contain perfectly real hallucinations, objective illusions.  These hallucinations actually work just like little simulated thought images of our whole universe, except with the added difference that in those simulations it is all happening again the same way.  But of course that makes it different from the perspective of the thinker of the simulation, who has to hold reality and the simulation together to image their relationship as one of repetition.  So if we have just one universe in which the question of the eternal return has been asked, it suddenly fragments into miniature copies of itself, each of which is actually a different repetition of the whole, within that whole, ad infinitum.  Even if that question is an illusion or a hallucination, it still produces this fragmentation as real effect, and in fact, our only approach to this whole is through these hallucinations that are now objectively part of it.

The world is neither finite nor infinite as representation would have it: it is completed and unlimited. Eternal return is the unlimited of the finished itself, the univocal being which is said of difference. 

It's difficult to talk about the eternal return because it has this strange circulation built directly into the idea.  Paradox in general has this sort of effect.  "This statement is false".  If it is, it isn't, and if it isn't, it is.  There's an internal movement or restlessness.  With a simple paradox that doesn't get you anywhere because you just move in a circle.  But with ER, you get back a new world every time, but in the form of the possibilities that were already inherent in this one.  If I think that the world repeats then it must not, but if it doesn't then my thought that it does creates a repetition that didn't exist before, and then this cycle repeats, splitting into new worlds again and again.  The thought of a unique world repeating is the thought of an infinite multiplicity of different worlds.

When we asked who annihilates themself with the death instinct, we discovered that the unbound energy produced by the third synthesis actually provided the fuel for the first synthesis.  The universal unconscious appeared as the remains of a multitude of dissolved consciousnesses that had reached a high point of self-annihilation.  Similarly, ER can't become incoherent and dissolve the idea of repetition without taking the thinker and the whole world along with it.  It's a thought that dissolves all the forms of identity, including its own.  God, self, and world -- natural law, conceptualizer of that law, and universe -- all dissolve together.

The eternal return is a force of affirmation, but it affirms everything of the multiple, everything of the different, everything of chance except what subordinates them to the One, to the Same, to necessity, everything except the One, the Same and the Necessary.  It is said that the One subjugated the multiple once and for all. But is this not the face of death? And does not the other face cause to die in turn, once and for all, everything which operates once and for all?  If there is an essential relation between eternal return and death, it is because it promises and implies 'once and for all' the death of that which is one.  If there is an essential relation with the future, it is because the future is the deployment and explication of the multiple, of the different and of the fortuitous, for themselves and 'for all times'.

It's brain-busting to try and conceive of the "completed but unlimited" fractal world that the eternal return implies.  Nested within 'the' world are an infinite number of other worlds, and nested within those are ... 'The' world is this monstrous and completely unique infinite totality that nevertheless repeats itself internally.  The crazy structure is necessitated by thinking about the world as a whole, including about how you could possibly be thinking about it as a whole.  The only thing that is not present in this infinite unfurling is any stopping point, any natural unity, or pre-established harmony, or fixed set of laws that remain outside it.  It's everything -- a cosmos as chaos, where anything can happen because everything does happen.  

We began our exploration of whether the universe repeats by separating the question into the application of a fixed set of external laws to some initial condition.  The laws were presumed to always be the same, but the condition might (or might not) be chosen randomly every time we run the experiment of the world, so to speak.  This gave the world a single fixed probability distribution of possible outcomes once and for all.  But chimp science seems to pose an insoluble metaphysical problem for this way of looking at the world.  Instead, we're forced to imagine a unique world where the laws themselves change with each 'repetition', as if there were another stage of randomness in which certain laws were chosen, and from there an initial condition selected.  But this goes on ad infinitum, because what distribution of possible laws were the particular laws selected from?  Etc ...  What we end up trying to conceive is a sort of total chance, chance multiplied by itself again and again, raised to a higher power.  Hopefully this thought illuminates Deleuze's reflections on the infinite game that the eternal return represents.

It is claimed that man does not know how to play: this is because, even when he is given a situation of chance or multiplicity, he understands his affirmations as destined to impose limits upon it, his decisions as destined to ward off its effects, his reproductions as destined to bring about the return of the same, given a winning hypothesis. This is precisely a losing game, one in which we risk losing as much as winning because we do not affirm the all of chance: the pre-established character of the rule which fragments has as its correlate the condition by default in the player, who never knows which fragment will emerge. The system of the future, by contrast, must be called a divine game, since there is no pre-existing rule, since the game bears already upon its own rules and since the child-player can only win, all of chance being affirmed each time and for all times. Not restrictive or limiting affirmations, but affirmations coextensive with the questions posed and with the decisions from which these emanate: such a game entails the repetition of the necessarily winning move, since it wins by embracing all possible combinations and rules in the system of its own return.

Finally, Deleuze is right that absolutely no one has done better than Borges in imagining this dizzying world of total chance.  I won't re-quote the Borges on pg. 116 here because we ought to just re-read the two stories that the quote mashes up.  The Lottery of Babylon, and The Garden of the Forking Paths.

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.  

How can I die if there is no me to begin with?

I take that to be the shortened rhetorical version of the two aspects of death that Deleuze identifies in Blanchot on pg. 112 and 113.  We actually stumbled across this question way back in the introduction when we wondered why repetition was somehow related to death and terror.  Death is always going to be a question of identity.  Who dies?  Which begs the question: who am I?  At this point, we now have an entire framework for thinking about how our identity might arise as a second principle, through a repetition of difference.  Which is to say that we are no longer taking our identity for granted at the outset.  Hence the questions.  If my identity is produced through a process of repetition -- a process that we've seen is structurally equivalent to the unfolding of time, its cleaving into the qualitative difference of before and after (the process, you might say) -- then what is lost when this identity disappears?

Deleuze points out that the answer to this question depends on what we mean by identity.  If we mean my particular identity as a personal I or ego, then of course everything is lost in death.  It is the negation of my existence.  If, however, we mean my 'identity' as that repeated process of unfolding, well ... then there is no I to die.  Nothing can be lost because there is nothing to lose.  Or we might equivalently say that I am dying all the time. Though the I that is dying here is not a particular identity but a process that produces a whole series of identities.   Death is the symbol of precisely this process, or rather, the paradoxical way that this process can take itself as an object or 'identity', and hence repeat the empty form of time.  All that is lost in this sense of death is the first form of identity.  

Thus there are two types of death, which correspond to two ways of identifying ourself.

The first signifies the personal disappearance of the person, the annihilation of this difference represented by the I or the ego. This is a difference which existed only in order to die, and the disappearance of which can be objectively represented by a return to inanimate matter, as though calculated by a kind of entropy

The other death, however, the other face or aspect of death, refers to the state of free differences when they are no longer subject to the form imposed upon them by an I or an ego, when they assume a shape which excludes my own coherence no less than that of any identity whatsoever. There is always a 'one dies' more profound than 'I die', and it is not only the gods who die endlessly and in a variety of ways; as though there appeared worlds in which the individual was no longer imprisoned within the personal form of the I and the ego, nor the singular imprisoned within the limits of the individual - in short, the insubordinate multiple, which cannot be 'recognised' in the first aspect.

We can see in this quote anther concept that reminds me of another connection made in the introduction that it seems we never discussed.  Death is related to liberation, to freedom.

If repetition makes us ill, it also heals us; if it enchains and destroys us, it also frees us, testifying in both cases to its 'demonic' power. 

How can this game be related to the death instinct? No doubt in a sense close to that in which Miller, in his wonderful book on Rimbaud, says: 'I realized that I was free, that the death I had gone through had liberated me.'

What we are freed from in the second version of death is the imprisoning limits of our particular identity.  And we are freed to experience the multiple as the power a singularity (like death) has to repeat itself.  A singularity that has a type of (non)-being or ?-being that repeats, and that contains a multiplicity within itself, is the central paradox of Deleuze's idea of repetition.  

To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent. And perhaps this· repetition at the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular. This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an 'unrepeatable'. They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the 'nth' power. 

I can't leave this topic without mentioning that the second conception of death seems to me as good an explanation of Nirvana as any I have heard.  A "blowing out" or a "quenching".  A "cessation" that liberates one from a cycle of desiring.  An idea at least closely related to non-self (maybe the same thing).  In other words, an ending that keeps on happening.  Somehow  at once singular and related to time and change, as if it were frozen but vibrating internally.  We could multiply analogies here, but I'm not sure it would help convince any skeptic of their striking connection; one could always wonder whether all paradoxical things are ultimately the same. 

What's more interesting to me than trying to convince anyone of the merits of the comparison is the way Deleuze's description can perhaps guide my meditation practice.  He provides a whole mechanism for how the 'nirvana instinct' arises, the key piece of which seems to be the way the self folds back on itself and takes itself as the perpetually displaced virtual object that circulates through all our desires.  Somehow this circularity is meant to dissolve us and liberate us at the same time, as if we become identified with the question, "who am I?" rather than identifying ourself with any of the answers.

The Synthesis of Death 2

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.

] 

--------

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.