Joe Hughes-Deleuze and The Genesis of Representation (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy) (2008) PDF

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy

Series Editor: James Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series
from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work
makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research.
Adornos Concept of Life, Alastair Morgan
Badiou and Derrida, Antonio Calcagno
Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere, Nicholas Hewlett
Deconstruction and Democracy, Alex Thomson
Deleuze and Guattaris Philosophy of History, Jay Lampert
Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation, Joe Hughes
Deleuze and the Meaning of Life, Claire Colebrook
Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake
Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston
Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan-Wortham and Allison Weiner
Foucaults Heidegger, Timothy Rayner
Heidegger and the Place of Ethics, Michael Lewis
Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis
Heideggers Contributions to Philosophy, Jason Powell
Husserls Phenomenology, Kevin Hermberg
The Irony of Heidegger, Andrew Haas
Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler
Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer
The Philosophy of Exaggeration, Alexander Garcia Dttmann
Sartres Ethics of Engagement, T. Storm Heter
Sartres Phenomenology, David Reisman
Ricoeur and Lacan, Karl Simms
Whos Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? Gregg Lambert
Deleuze and the Genesis of

Representation
Joe Hughes
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ISBN-10: HB: 1-8470-6284-9
ISBN-13: HB: 978-1-8470-6284-0
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Hughes, Joe.
Deleuze and the genesis of representation/Joe Hughes.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-1-84706-284-0 (HB)
ISBN-10: 1-84706-284-9 (HB)
1. Deleuze, Gilles, 19251995. 2. Representation (Philosophy) I. Title.
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Contents
viii
Acknowledgments
Preface
ix
Abbreviations
x
Part I: Husserl and Deleuze
Chapter 1: Husserl, Reduction and Constitution

Chapter 2: The Logic of Sense
3
20
Part II: Anti-Oedipus

Chapter 3: The Material Reduction and Schizogenesis
Chapter 4: Desiring-Production
Chapter 5: Social Production
51
62
81
Part III: Difference and Repetition

Introduction to Part III: Difference and Repetition
Chapter 6: Static Genesis: Ideas and Intensity
Chapter 7: Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time
103
105
127
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
155
159
180
191
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ian Buchanan, Claire Colebrook, and Simon Malpas not only for reading the final manuscript and offering their invaluable
advice, but also for their friendship along the way. Jeff Bell, Mary Bryden,
Matt McGuire, Lisa Otty, Patricia Pisters, Mat Sletten, Dan Smith, and
Alex Thomson all at one point altered the shape of this book during one of
our many conversations at conferences, pubs, or muddy walks through Scotland. Above all I want to thank my friends and family for their support over the
course of this long project, especially Sarah Tukua and Pat and Jana Hughes.
Preface
From its beginning Deleuze scholarship has produced a number of excellent

works tracing Deleuzes relationship to phenomenology. Most of these have
focused on the differences and similarities between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty.1
A few have considered Deleuzes relationship to Heidegger.2 But no one to my
knowledge has noticed the extent of Deleuzes deep indebtedness to Husserl
and in particular to the project of genesis Husserl rigorously developed in his
late works.3 In this book I want to emphasize a Husserlian inspiration behind
Deleuzes work. What I am concerned to show is not Deleuzes appropriation,
here and there, of specific Husserlian concepts, but rather that Deleuzes entire
project is essentially phenomenological to the degree that it takes up the question of genetic constitution and develops it in its own way. In the first chapter
I describe Husserls theory of genetic constitution. In the following chapters
I show how Deleuzes three central textsThe Logic of Sense, Anti-Oedipus, and
Difference and Repetitiondevelop a new theory of genetic constitution.
I have disrupted their order of publication in my presentation in order to
stress the conceptual continuity between books. This would no doubt present a
problem if my intention were to provide a narrative account of the development of Deleuzes theory of genetic constitution. My goal, however, is simply to
show that at a very general levelthe level of the formal structure of the works
in questionDeleuze develops a consistent and perhaps systematic account of
the genesis of representation.
Abbreviations
Deleuze (and friends)

AO
AP
BG
C1
C2
CC
DG
DI
DR
EC
EP
ES
FB
Anti-Oedipus
Anti-Oedipus Papers
Bergsonism
Cinema 1
Cinema 2
Coldness and Cruelty
Dialogues
Desert Islands
Difference and Repetition
Essays Critical and Clinical
Expressionism in Philosophy
Empiricism and Subjectivity
Francis Bacon
CES
CTM
E&J
FTL
ITC
Foucault
Kafka
Kants Critical Philosophy
The Logic of Sense
Negotiations
Nietzsche and Philosophy
Pure Immanence
Spinoza: Practical Philosophy
Proust and Signs
Pericles et Verdi
The Fold
A Thousand Plateaus
Two Regimes of Madness
What is Philosophy
Others
Husserl
APS
FC
KA
KP
LS
NG
NP
PI
PP
PS
PV
TF
TP
TR
WP
Passive and Active

Synthesis
Crisis of European Sciences
Cartesian Meditations
Experience and Judgment
Formal and Trans. Logic
Time-Consciousness
MM
CPR
PP
TI
Bergson, Matter and Memory

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception
Levinas, The Theory of
Intuition In Husserls
Phenomenology
PART I
Husserl and Deleuze
Chapter 1
Husserl, Reduction and Constitution

There is not much consensus in the current critical literature when it comes to
the question of Deleuzes relationship to phenomenology. Many critics would
find the claim that Deleuze is some sort of a phenomenologist entirely
misplaced. For some, this is because Deleuzes thought is radically independent
of the philosophical tradition and draws its influence from a (surprisingly
canonical) list of aberrant thinkers: Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson,
and so on.1 For others, Deleuzes thought is most effective not as a description
of consciousness, but as a philosophy of contemporary physics.2 For Foucault,
nothing could be further from the Phenomenology of Perception than The Logic of
Sense.3 But at the same time a number of critics have also made very important
connections between Deleuzes thought and Merleau-Pontys.4 Claire
Colebrook argues that Deleuzes thought can be seen as a radicalisation of
phenomenology5 while Constantine Boundas finds this reading tempting, but
ultimately unsatisfactory.6 It even seems that Deleuze himself consistently distances himself from mere phenomenology7 or epiphenomenology.8 There
are several reasons behind this lack of consensus, but almost all of them come
down to the impossibility of concisely defining the word phenomenology.
In 1933, Eugen Fink published his famous article,9 The Phenomenological
Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism, as a defense of
Husserls phenomenology in response to neo-Kantian criticisms. This article is
useful here not only because it was extremely influential in France, but also
because Finks general argument was that Husserls critics failed to understand
what phenomenology was on its own grounds, opting instead to criticize
Husserl from the point of view of their own Kantianism. As a result, it gives a
very broad and surprisingly precise definition of phenomenology. Finks explanation develops around two essential concepts that explain phenomenology:
the phenomenological reduction and the problem of constitution.10 Although
this book is not a detailed study of Deleuzes relationship to particular phenomenologists, it does insist that Deleuzes thought unfolds entirely within these
two general orientations of phenomenology.
The reduction
The reduction was one of the central components of Husserls philosophy
during the middle period of his work. Husserl describes it in his Cartesian
Meditations as the inhibiting or putting out of play of all positions taken

toward the already given Objective world and, in the first place, all existential
positions. This already given Objective world and its existential position are
Husserls technical terms for describing the way in which we experience the
world from the point of view of our daily activity, or what he calls our natural
attitude. In this attitude we do not stop to reflect on how we see what we see
and the sense we make of it. Rather, when I reach for a pair of scissors, I reach
for an Objective pair with an existential position. The scissors exist in space,
on my table. When Husserl asks us to put these assumptions out of play, he is
simply asking us to look at the scissors in a different way. Rather than seeing
them as the actual scissors, we should see them as phenomena, as a mental
representation of the scissors. The putting out of play which the reduction
performs therefore does not leave us confronting nothing. On the contrary, it
leaves us confronting the world of phenomena (CTM 20; cf. 26). The
reduction opens up the world that appears to consciousness. It shifts our attention away from objects as they are in the world and in our everyday experience
and focuses instead on objects as representations and as accomplishments or
productions of a transcendental consciousness.
Put simply, rather than seeing a pair of scissors as a material object, it is necessary to look at it as a sedimentation of all the meanings that have been given to it
in the course of your life and the way in which those meanings come now to define
that object, all in the blink of an eye, as something for cutting paper, which your
grandmother might use to cut pizza, which you should not run with, and what can
be particularly effective at removing dirt from under your finger nails if you have
nothing else at your disposal, and so forth. The material pair of scissors has specific
measurable dimensions; it interacts with the objects around it according to the
laws of physics. The phenomena or representation of the scissors, however, does
not have the same dimensions or the same relations with the objects surrounding
it. It is caught up in the flow of internal time and divided into a horizon of memory
and of anticipation. It is mixed with the senses we have previously made of scissors
and with anticipations which correspond to these habitualities. The phenomenological reduction simply asks us to stop seeing objects as material things in the
world and to start looking at them as representations of things which are borne
of distinct cognitive processes. In its most basic sense it is simply the treatment
of the contents of consciousness as contents of consciousness rather as contents of
the world (Moran 152).
The first task of phenomenology is to describe these phenomena. How does
a representation fit into its various horizons of anticipation and memory?
Because this consciousness which the reduction reveals is a transcendental
consciousness, Husserl famously described phenomenology in the Cartesian
Meditations as a study of transcendental experience.11 And since this was
one of his first books to be translated into Frenchby Levinas in 1931
Husserls thought became widely known as a transcendental empiricism.12
Phenomenology is a transcendental empiricism because it begins with an

experience and description of the transcendental.
In the introduction to The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty makes
use of the reduction in a way which not only clarifies its function but unfolds a
line of reasoning which Deleuze will directly take up in one of his early works.
Throughout the introduction, Merleau-Ponty establishes certain characteristics
of his theory of perception. The world of perception is the world in which the
body interacts with its surroundings and makes sense, through a process of
constitution, of the objects which it confronts or which confront it. The first two
chapters of the introduction describe, among other things, two ways in which
the world of perception and its immanent meaning has been either overlooked or misrepresented by philosophy. In the first chapter, he argues that
there is no such thing as empiricisms unit of experience. He describes this
unit as the sensation of an isolated undifferentiated, instantaneous, dot-like
impact (Phenomenology 4). For Merleau-Ponty there are no solitary impressions
in perception. Every object of natural or actual perception is always given as
already belonging to a field of perception (4). Each object is always in a network
of relationships with other objects and already has its own immanent sense
which is produced in the body before it becomes a dot-like representation (40).
In the second chapter, Merleau-Ponty extends this argument to the theories
of association. If we admit sensation in the classical sense, the meaning of
that which is sensed can be found only in further sensations, actual or virtual
(16). But meaning can never be established in this way because an atomic
sensation can only relate externally to another atomic sensation. We are then
faced with either an infinite regress or with the identity of two sensations and
therefore a thesis external to empiricism (17). Merleau-Ponty brings the same
argument against association as he did against the empiricist theory of
sensation: it overlooks that any object is already given within a context, a group,
a positive indeterminacy, and with its perceptual meaning already produced
before any associating can take place (1820). Association presupposes this
immanent sense. Because of this, the empiricist theory of sensation misses the
essential function of perception which is to lay the foundations of, or
inaugurate, knowledge. Empiricism can only see [perception] though its
results (19).
At the same time that Merleau-Ponty makes these arguments, he also asks
how this conception of a discreet unit of sensation made its way into philosophy. His answer is distinctly Husserlian and repeats the methodological
guidelines laid down in the notion of reduction. Merleau-Ponty writes that
analytic perception is a late product of thought directed at objects (12). In
our everyday experience, we see objects in the world, and they seem to be
discreet representations: they are self-contained and have well-defined limits.
A car can run into another car. Two billiard balls collide and go in their own
separate directions. But these are the results of the activity of perception. They
presuppose the work of the body and of thought which produces out of the
data of perception well-defined representations. Because these are the
products of the body, they cannot turn around and describe that same world
out of which they are produced, in the same way that a product can not describe
the raw material that it used to be, or a definition should not use the word it is
supposed to define. When we do this we make perception out of things
perceived (5).
Merleau-Ponty therefore argues that the idea of a unit of experience came
about by transposing the characteristics of already constituted empirical objects
onto the constituting activity of perception. We take the final productthe
perception of an objectand use it to describe the impersonal transcendental
field out of which it was produced (68ff.; 95ff.).13 In other words, we trace the
transcendental from the empirical. This is the methodological import of the
phenomenological reduction and the suspension of the natural attitude. It is a
way to discover the transcendental without superimposing on it any of the characteristics of the empirical, or what is produced by the transcendental.
However, it would seem that Deleuze never makes a big deal of the reduction.
In fact he never even mentions it except for once in Anti-Oedipus (AO 107) and
once in The Logic of Sense where he claims that Husserl discovered the neutrality
of sense thanks to the phenomenological methods of reduction (LS 10102).14
But even here, Deleuze never gives the impression that he will take up these
methods. Some critics, however, have argued that Deleuzes thought does
indeed make use of a form of the reduction, or a kind of reduction. For example,
Ray Brassier, following Laruelle, finds a transcendental or hyletic reduction
in Deleuze which isolates the plane of immanence from both subjective and
objective determinations, and Leonard Lawlor has even gone so far as to suggest
that The Logic of Sense takes place entirely under the sign of the phenomenological reduction.15 Lawlor argues that unless we were already within the
reduction we could never return to phenomena. Here Lawlor makes an
extremely important point that I will defend over the course of the next two
chapters: though it begins and continually emphasizes (or valorizes) the transcendental, Deleuzes thought ends in phenomena, in an empirical consciousness
of fully individuated objects.
Despite the lack of attention Deleuze calls to the reduction, there are at least
two important places where Deleuze makes significant use of it. In the first he
develops an argument almost identical to the one I just outlined from the
introductory chapters of the Phenomenology of Perception. In his 1964 book Proust
and Signs, Deleuze explains that there are two ways Prousts apprentice can miss
the sense of a sign:16 objectivism and subjectivism. Objectivism characterizes the
apprentices belief that sense can be found in the object which emits the sign.
Subjectivism is when, after the continuous disappointments brought about by
the objectivist attitude, the apprentice tries to discover the sense within himself,
in his subjective chains of association (PS 34; my emphasis). But this subjectivism
doesnt give up the meaning either, but only leads the apprentice to a meaningless relativity (36). At the end of the apprenticeship, however, the apprentice
discovers essence, the sense of the sign.17 This follows Merleau-Pontys critique
of the unit of sensation (objectivism) and association (subjectivism) almost
exactly by arguing that both miss the already given sense and both overlook the
work of a transcendental constitution which they presuppose. Indeed, what the
apprentice discovers after the failure of both objectivism and subjectivism is
that essence or sense is responsible for the constitution of signs and their
meanings (PS 38). But what is even more striking is the similarity of their explanations for the strength and influence of the objectivist interpretation. Deleuze
asks, why does the apprentice initially think that sense can be found in the
object emitting the sign? Why does the apprenticeship begin in objectivism?
His answer is that this impulse follows from the natural direction of perception
or of representation (PS 29). Deleuze will repeat this argument several times
across the course of the third chapter. Perception follows a law of constancy
which directs our mind to concentrate on stable objects in perception. Our
natural attitude toward the world is the one in which we confront objects
according to this natural direction of perception. What the apprentice learns
through his series of disappointments, then, is the necessity of the reduction, or
to break from the constancy principle in order to discover sense.
The second significant place in which Deleuze makes use of the reduction as
a methodological tool is his sweeping critique of the history of philosophy
under the title the image of thought. This critique had already made an
appearance in both Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and in the first essay of Proust
and Signs (1964), but it is not until Difference and Repetition (1968) that it becomes
systematic. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze outlines eight postulates which
he claims, adopting Kants terminology, define a dogmatic image of thought.
To this dogmatic image, Deleuze will oppose his own critical image. Despite
their variety, all eight dogmatic presuppositions share one crucial problem: We
discover in all the postulates of the dogmatic image the same confusion: elevating
a simple empirical figure to the status of the transcendental, at the risk of allowing
the real structures of the transcendental to fall into the empirical (DR 154).
Each postulate describes thoughtor more, precisely, the work of thoughtin
the image of its product. From this point of view, we can see that the critique of
the dogmatic image of thought merges with the general criticism leveled against
philosophy throughout Difference and Repetition and the early works: namely that
it gets caught in the circle of representation and fails to go beyond it. This is
exactly the problem the phenomenological reduction is intended to resolve: it
supposedly brackets the empirical, the natural attitude of perception directed
at objects in order to allow us to more accurately describe the transcendental
life of consciousness. However, a statement of intention is no guarantee that the
employment of the reduction will be successful, and many of Deleuzes criticisms
will attack very subtle points where, despite embracing the reduction, many
aspects of the natural attitude creep into Husserls work. Deleuzes critique of
the image of thought can thus be read as a reaffirmation of the necessity for
reduction even if he does not use that particular word. Because the reduction
is the motivating critical intuition at the heart of each criticism, we can extend
Leonard Lawlors comment to cover at least Difference and Repetition, if not the
whole of Deleuzes work as Brassier has suggested: The Logic of Sense takes place
entirely under the sign of the phenomenological reduction.
But what does Deleuze oppose to the dogmatic image? What defines a truly
critical image of thought? Without a doubt, it is the engagement with the
problem of genesis: The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are
the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and
the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself (DR 139, my emphasis). The
beyond of representation is transcendental constitution. The critical image of
thought is the one which shows the genesis of thought itself. Later in Difference
and Repetition, Deleuze gives a similar definition of a true or radical critique.
A radical critique is one which carries out the genesis of what it critiques
(DR 206).18 It must be the case then, that insofar as Difference and Repetition is a
critique of representation, it is also necessarily at the same time an account of
the genesis of representation. In opposing representation, it becomes a theory
of representation. This brings us to the second of phenomenologys defining
ideas according to Fink.
Genetic constitution
Perhaps even more important than the reduction is the second of phenomenologys basic systematic ideas: Husserls notion of constitution.19 This holds for
Deleuze as well. In Difference and Repetition, the sole reason that tracing the
transcendental from the empirical was problematic, and the primary reason
that representation was criticized was that it obscured the point of view of genesis, or constitution (DR 160). The constituted does not resemble its process of
production, its constitution, in the same way a car does not resemble the production line which built it. Etymologically, phenomenology just means the
study of phenomena, but Husserls philosophy was never just a descriptive science limited to the description of phenomena (Fink 76). In fact the overwhelming
majority of Husserls later writings are devoted not to the description of phenomena, but to explaining them by working out the process of their
constitutiona point of view which the reduction made plausible.20 Because
the reduction ensures that we approach objects as phenomena rather than as
objects in the world, the expression constitution of objects has an entirely different sense than it normally would. Considered as an object, a table is
constituted by actually building it, by assembling its parts and putting a finish
on it. But considered as a phenomena, the constitution of objects means that
that very same table is now constituted by giving sense to the data presented in
perception.21 It represents the way I first made sense of what a table was as a
child, and slowly accrued meanings over the course of my life so that the perception of the table attains a stable meaning.
As Fink points out, Phenomenology directly formulates the problem of constitution as the problem of the bestowal of meaning (Sinn) (Fink 91; original
emphasis. cf. 102). Taken in its most general sense, constitution or sense-bestowal is the process in which a mental act (noesis) or a series of mental acts
give form to or animate sensuous data (hyl) and by doing so produces either
an ideality, an object in perception or a sense (all three of which can be called
a noema). This is because the sense data, by itself, is meaningless. The entire
project of constitution is concerned with explaining how this meaningless data
is organized into stable representations which communicate with our memories and expectations to produce meaningful objects. Much of Husserls earlier
work investigated the various kinds of noeses and noemata. His later work continues and expands this line of research to include the deepest levels of
subjectivity or constitution. Because Deleuzes entire philosophy directly takes
up the problem of genetic constitution it is worth providing a relatively detailed
outline of Husserls understanding of the process of genesis.
However, there are two models of sense bestowal in Husserls work, and it is
only the second, later formulation that has any significance for Deleuze. In his
later works, Husserl distinguished between two types of phenomenologystatic
and genetic. Static phenomenology concerns Husserls earlier works with their
overwhelming emphasis on logic and their hesitation to investigate subjectivity
much deeper than the life-world. When poststructuralists criticize Husserl, it is
usually this phase of his work that they find problematic. Genetic phenomenology concerns Husserls later worksfrom about 1917 onand represents a
turn to a philosophy of life.22 The word genesis has two closely related senses
in Husserls thought. On the one hand it keeps its traditional meaning by referring to the way in which meanings become sedimented over time. Husserl will
argue, for example, that I encounter an object S for the first time, and I give it
a sense p. The next time I encounter that object, I encounter it as Sp; and if
I give it a new sense, q, the next time I see it, I will see it as Spq, and so on.23 But,
at the same time that Husserl begins describing these historical sedimentations of sense, he also begins theorizing their foundation in the body and in
temporality. In other words, genesis no longer refers to a history of predicates
attached to S, but to the immediate production of S as such. This is what Donn
Welton considers to be the defining characteristic of genetic phenomenology:
Husserls emphasis on the most basic aspects of the process of perception in his
development of a fully developed transcendental aesthetic rather than on the
historical sedimentations of sense. Genetic analysis proper only begins when we
move from the consideration of sedimentations of sense to their primal
institution in a transcendental aesthetic.24 And because it is this later theory
10
of constitution that Deleuze will directly take up, it is the one that I want to
outline here.
We will take as a guiding thread what Husserl called the doctrine of genesis
which he outlined in notes from 1921 titled On Static and Genetic Phenomenological Method.25 At first Husserl approaches the problem of genesis, as he
often does, regressively. Logical judgments presuppose a lived experience, and
lived experience presupposes a passivity which produces it (APS 630; cf. E&J 50).
Husserl develops his theory of genesis with the hope of finally grounding formal logic. In Husserls eyes logicians ignore the fact that it is impossible to make
judgments without presupposing a subject who makes those judgments and
understands what they mean.26 For example Husserl argues that there is no way
to assert the truth value of the judgment the moon is round, without recourse
to a subject. In order to determine the truth of the judgment, you need a subject first to interpret or grasp the sense of the proposition, its subject, its
predicate, and their connection, and then to observe the moon itself, to see
that it is in fact round, and finally to assert the adequacy of the proposition to
its referent. But, how does that subject have this experience of the moon and
how does it know that its experience of the moon is accurate? This question
motivates Experience and Judgment in its entirety.
Husserl begins regressively by moving from judgments back to their founding
experience, and from experience back to its origins in perception.27 But for the
doctrine of genesis itself, Husserl sets everything in its proper order.
Accordingly, in the doctrine of genesis, in explanatory [rather than
descriptive] phenomenology, we have:
(1) Genesis of passivity that is a general lawful regularity of genetic becoming
in passivity that is always there . . ..
(2) The participation of the ego and relationships between activity and
passivity.
(3) Interrelations, formations of pure activity; genesis as an active accomplishment of ideal objects and as an accomplishment of real generation.
(APS 631)
These are the three general levels of genesis which I will describe below:
(1) passivity, (2) transition from passivity to activity, (3) activity. Levels one and
three both contain several sets of syntheses which move us along the genesis.
The first level is made up of passive syntheses; the second level describes the
relationship between intensity and affection, and the third level is made up of
active syntheses. (Deleuze adopts Husserls notions of active and passive syntheses
for his own philosophy in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition and
Anti-Oedipus.) To these first three terms of the doctrine, Husserl adds four more
dealing with problems of memory (in the form of habitualities) and intersubjectivity. These seven terms taken together constitute what he calls, following
11
Leibniz, a monad and its relations to other monads.28 Husserls monad, as

opposed to the ego, is nothing more than the entire process of
genesis, an incessant process of becoming as an incessant process of constituting objectivities (APS 270). This is a notion of subjectivity which strongly
influenced Deleuze: the subject as a process of production. When we outline
this theory of genesis, then, we are at the same time outlining a theory of
subjectivity which comprises three distinct moments (1) perception, (2) affection,
and (3) action.
The genesis as a whole moves from an indeterminate encounter with an
object in passivity to the constitution of active acquisitions of knowledge. Why?
Because, for Husserl, this is the natural direction of thought: the ego is oriented
toward the acquisition of knowledge (E&J 103; cf. 198 and APS). Obviously
Deleuzes criticism of the first postulate in the dogmatic image of thought
that the natural movement of thought is toward truthwould play an important
role in a critique of Husserl here, 29 but we are not reading Husserl for the truth
or validity of his thought or even as a model to which we can compare Deleuze
point by point. We are reading him simply to become acquainted with what
genesis looks like.
(1) The first part of the doctrine of genesis, passivity, is the foundation of a
theory of perception, and it falls under what Husserl, following Kant, describes
as a transcendental aesthetic. It comprises two passive syntheses: the synthesis
of time and the associative synthesis, both of which work only in the lowest
depths of subjectivity.30 The reason Husserl, and Deleuze in Difference and
Repetition, describe these syntheses as passive is that they take place outside of
the jurisdiction of an ego. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant presented three
syntheses which he claimed constituted actual experience (CPR A12425).31
In the first edition of the Critique, the first two synthesesapprehension and
reproductiontook place in the imagination, outside of the understanding.
Only the third synthesisrecognitionwas governed by the transcendental
unity and spontaneity of the I. In the second edition of the Critique, however, all
three syntheses were governed by the understanding and were therefore capable of being actively regulated (cf. CPR B130).32 Husserl and Deleuze do not
follow Kant this far and maintain the possibility of a non-intellectual synthesis
which operates outside of an I. Deleuze therefore describes a passive synthesis
as one which is not carried out by the mind, but occurs in the mind . . ..
(DR 71; original emphasis). Because Husserls first two syntheses work outside
of the I (Husserl describes this level as pre-I) and are prior to any activity characterized by spontaneity or volition, this first general level in Husserls doctrine
of genesis is characterized by impersonality and anonymity: passivity.33
The function of these two syntheses in relation to the overall genesis is to
produce the objects which will play a role both in our experience of the world
and in judgments out of a nonintentional and asignifying sensuous matter or
hyletic data.34 The entire genesis begins with the temporal syntheses. For
12
Husserl, all objectivity and all subjectivity begins with the constitution of a
primordial time, and everything which will eventually be produced throughout
the genesisthe subject, its world, its beliefs and desiresare produced within
the unity of the temporal field (E&J 16466; CTM 41ff.).
In the ABCs of the constitution of all objectivity given to consciousness and of
subjectivity as existing for itself, here is the A. It consists, as we might say, in a
universal, formal framework, in a synthetically constituted form in which all other
syntheses must participate. (APS 171, my emphases; cf. APS 181, E&J 73)
Husserl emphasizes here that the temporal syntheses are purely formal. It is for
this reason that they are completely unable to differentiate hyletic data according
to content (APS 174).35
This role is filled by association which Husserl describes as that mode of
passive synthesis founded on the lowest syntheses of time-consciousness
(E&J 177). The specific function of the associative syntheses is to determine
the way in which sense data are connected in immanence (E&J 74). Time
provides the form of immanence, but association determines and orders its
content. It therefore belongs to the associative syntheses to begin the process of
the individuation of objects (individuals) according to their content (APS
17476).36 Association, at this stage of the genesis, does not have much in common with the traditional empiricist or psychological theories of association
which we just saw Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty criticize. The syntheses at this
level begin their work within separate fields of sensory data, with the most basic
and meaningless elements of perception. The syntheses begin by combining
similar bits of data in a sensory modality (synthesis of homogeneity) or separating
dissimilar bits of data (synthesis of heterogeneity). So, for example, if we were
looking at a red dot on white paper, the synthesis of homogeneity would
connect white bits with white bits and red bits with red bits. After a degree of
consistency and form has been introduced to the separate sensory modalities,
another associative synthesis combines the modalities in a synaesthetic synthesis. Through this series of different levels and types of synthesis, the associative
synthesis styles the objects which will populate the life-world. In Husserl, just as
in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, it is only after these syntheses have finished
their work that these objects can later play a role in a psychological association.
(2) The second moment of the doctrine of genesis is the famous life-world,
the world of intensity and affection. This is the world of experience immediately
pregiven and prior to all logical functions, the world in which we are always
already living and which furnishes the ground for all cognitive performance
and all scientific determination (E&J 41; original emphasis). If you are walking
down the street, the life-world is your immediate, but not necessarily
determinate, experience of the world around you, much of which passes by
without you noticing. It forms a background to whatever it is that you might be
13
paying attention to. This is the world of experience and of ordinary empirical
consciousness. It is also the world which the natural attitude distorts. The natural attitude is a garb of ideas thrown over the world of immediate intuition
(E&J 4445). For example, Husserl claims that science teaches us that objects
have precise spatial and temporal locations, and this might well be the case, but
it only arrived at this conclusion by forming rigorously determined judgments.
Husserl never contests the findings of science, but only the superimposition of
the products of judgmentsits idealizationson the prepredicative foundation they presuppose. The natural attitude puts the cart before the horse. The
world of experience, in contrast to that of judgment and science, is not yet formalized into the exact space and time of science. It is always in flux or becoming
(E&J 4244). Judgment has not yet taken place because its foundations have
just been laid. In fact, you could say that in order to fully appreciate the role of
the life-world in genesis, one must have done with judgment.37
In relation to the doctrine of genesis the life-world is the pivot between
activity and passivity. The life-world has an ambiguous relationship to these
two poles. Certainly, every object in the life-world is or was at one point produced in passivity. But imagine that you are going to cross the street without
waiting for a walk signal. Your attention becomes fixed on the passing traffic,
and these objects, the cars, receive the full attention of your ego and become
subjects in active judgments enabling you to accurately spot a gap in traffic
and to know that it is big enough for you to get though. But at the same time
that you are on the lookout, people are moving in different directions behind
you, and while they are present in your periphery, they remain in passivity.
They are never actively taken up by an attentive ego which could say, That is
my friend Bill. If they were, you would probably end up under a truck. There
is thus a part of experience that is active and a part which is passive. There is
the truck you are trying to dodge, and there is your friend Bill who, for the
sake of your survival, you cannot notice. This is why Husserl describes the lifeworld as the moment in the genesis where an ego meets the passively
constituted objects.38
Husserl describes this relationship topologically. He places the ego on one
side and the objects produced in passivity on the other. These perceptual
objects are said to obtrude on the ego, and, in proportion to the intensity of
the obtrusiveness, what is obtrusive has greater proximity to, or remoteness
from, the ego (E&J 77; my emphasis; cf. 150). From this point of view, the
field of perception, the life-world, becomes a field of intensities. The greater
the intensity, the more allure the object exerts on the ego. The more intense
an object, the closer it comes to the ego, eventually bringing the objects and
the ego into contact or forcing the ego to turn toward the object. These
objects are not yet clearly differentiated, but subsist in the background, as it
were, in a muddled mixture of desires, expectations, memories, and
intensities.
14
(3) The third level in the genesis is activity. Husserl thinks of activity as if it
were on a continuous scale going from least active to most active, and he splits
this progression into two general processes: receptivity and cognition. Receptivity
begins with an act of apprehension. Apprehensionsometimes just called
receptivityis the lowest level of activity. Here, the ego consents to what is
coming and takes it in (E&J 79; cf. 77, 103ff.). It yields to the intensity of the
objects given in the life-world, and lets itself be taken in by their allure. But the
ego does not just behold the objects.
As a rule, the active apprehension of the object immediately turns into
contemplation; the ego, oriented toward the acquisition of knowledge, tends
to penetrate the object, considering it not only from all sides, but also in
particular aspects, thus, to explicate it. (E&J 104; original emphasis)
Because the ego naturally strives toward knowledge, we immediately leave
apprehension and begin explicating the object.
This is the next level of activity. We are still within receptivitybut now the
ego begins an explicative synthesis. It is at this point that the process of sensebestowal (or the constitution of senseboth are translations of Sinngebung)
begins to take place. Passivity generated an indeterminate but particular object
and presented it to the ego.39 The function of the explicative syntheses is to
determine the object further by turning to its singularities. These singularities
are going to determine the object in a way very similar to the way predicates
determine their subject in acts of judgment. For this reason Husserl talks of a
twofold constitution of sense (E&J 114; original emphasis). First, an object
substrate is constituted. The ego makes the object into something that can support determinations and that can persist as a theme while it turns its attention
to singularities. Second, the singularities themselves are constituted as properties
or determinations of that very substrate or theme. Here the ego treats the
singularities which it turns its attention to not as individual objects, but as
determinations of an object substrate (E&J 114).40 As close as the explicative
synthesis is to judgment, it is not yet there (cf. E&J 206, 233, APS 300).
Cognition designates the higher stages of activity, which truly deserve to be
called active because they are governed by a deliberate and creative spontaneity (E&J 19899). It is only from the point of view of this spontaneity that we can
speak of a predicative synthesis. Even though, in the order of genesis, it takes us
as far as we need to go, the predicative synthesis is somewhat anticlimactic. It
simply repeats the explicative one, but it does it with a changed attitude
(E&J 208). What has changed? Most importantly, judgment breaks with the
process of objectivation or perception. Everything up until now was bound to
the immediate intuition of the substrate, and was concerned with the formation of individual objectsapprehended objectivities (E&J 197). Judgment,
however, is founded on an act of creative spontaneity. From here, the active ego
15
can validate or invalidate apprehended objectivities, and it can make both

practical and logical decisions regarding these objectivities (APS 92ff.). As it
runs back over the terms of the explicative synthesis, it can do so with an eye
toward the affirmation or invalidation of that perception. But judgment is not
only a question of making the intentionality of perception patent; it is also,
and more importantly, a question of appropriation through which the strivingly
active ego appropriates to itself an acquisition, that is an abiding knowledge
(APS 95; my emphasis; cf. (E&J 196)).
The predicative synthesis is still an objectifying synthesis, but it no longer
produces intuited or apprehended objectivities. It produces categorical objectivities, and ideal objectivities, objects which count as acquired knowledge or
propositions41 and can play a role in formal logic. At this level, the object is
identical and identifiable beyond the time of its intuitive giveness (E&J 198).
This is what Husserl means when he describes knowledge as an acquisition or
possession: it is essentially iterable and therefore communicable (E&J 19798).
The constituted sense becomes fixed and repeatable. The same representation
can be repeated in a variety of contexts, and it can be transmitted between
people. Once produced in the predicative synthesis, the representation is ours
and all subsequent encounters with that particular object will always take place
in relation to our already acquired knowledge. Knowledge becomes a
habitualityhowever, even the determinations in the explicative synthesis can
sink into passivity as habitualitieswhich is stored away in the monad until it
is needed again. Husserl points out that a developed consciousness . . . will
hardly be able to have objects given that are not already apprehended in such
a logical structure . . . so extensive is its reservoir of representations (APS 296;
cf. E&J 12122).
The course of the entire genesis this far has been directed toward and motivated by the acquisition of knowledge. The predicative synthesis of judgment
ends this process, and my account of the genesis will stop here with it. But the
genesis continues in Husserl, and just as receptivity led to cognition, cognition
will continue on into the process of conceptualization in which Husserl details
the constitution first of generalities of increasing degrees and then the constitution of universals. We could therefore say that, for Husserl, as for Deleuze, the
abstract no longer explains, but is itself explainedgenetically.
Unlike the first systematic idea of phenomenologythe reductionwhich
Deleuze hardly mentioned at all, the problem of genesis is present everywhere
in his philosophy, from the very first book to the last. It is true that in Empiricism
and Subjectivity, Deleuze refers to genesis only four times, and that each time
he is highly critical of it. But he has in mind there a very specific sense of the
word genesisthe one we outlined above as the psychological theory of sedimented senses. The primary question of Empiricism and Subjectivity, however, is
how does the subject constitute itself within the given? (ES 119), how does a
subject transcending the given arise out of the given? The given is described as
16
the collection of things as they appeara collection without an album, a play

without a stage, a flux of perceptions (ES 23; my emphasis). It is an unorganized
delirium (ES 23) of impressions given by sensibility to the imagination very
similar to Husserls sensuous hyl. In other words, the question is precisely the
phenomenological question of genesis: how does the fully constituted subject
arise from the given? Deleuzes answer is that the subject is constituted as the
effect of certain principles of human nature which act on this delirium by
determining relations between sensations. The function of these principles is to
fix and naturalize the mind, to impose order on the delirium of imagination,
to make it constant and settled, to organize the given into a system, imposing constancy on the imagination, and in doing so, they make possible representation
and consciousness (ES 24; my emphasis). Subjectivity and consciousness of
objects, then, is the effect of the action of these principles on the sensuous given
(ES 26). Empirical subjectivity is constituted in the mind under the influence
of principles affecting it (ES 29). Deleuzes unequivocal answer to the question
of the transcendence of the subject in relation to the given is that this transcendence, along with the subject, is constituted. It is from this point of view that
he rejects genesis: [Empiricism] envisages this constitution in the mind as the
effect of transcending principles and not as the product of a genesis (ES 31),
and each of the other three references to genesis argue that it has to be founded
on the constitutive principles of human nature (ES 66, 108, 119). What Deleuze
rejects, then, is a psychological genesis. But he does so in favor of a theory of
constitution. These words do not at all have a stable meaning, and in Husserls
later work, constitution, genetic constitution, and genesis all mean the
same thing.
This early preoccupation with genesis is not specific to Empiricism and
Subjectivity. In the rest of this book, I argue that Deleuze maintains this concern
with constitution throughout all of his later works, even if he gives it a different
nameactualization (Bergsonism), apprenticeship (Proust and Signs), individuation (Difference and Repetition), genesis (Logic of Sense), process of
production (Anti-Oedipus), creation (What is Philosophy?), and so onand even
if he doesnt explicitly acknowledge it as a dominant theme. The only way to
understand Deleuzes texts is to understand them as a theorization of genesis,
and the only way to understand a Deleuzian conceptwhether it be line of
flight, body without organs, or even, in What is Philosophy?, science, art, and
philosophyis to determine its place and function within the genesis in which
it participates.
Deleuze and Kant

Deleuzes relationship to Kant will be a recurrent theme in what follows, but
here it is possible to settle on the most general relation between them.42
17
Deleuzes entire engagement with Kant revolves around the problem of genesis,
and his philosophy can be read as a rethinking of Kantianism from the point of
view of the production of concrete experience. Deleuze considered Kant to be
the first phenomenologist, and he gave two reasons for this claim: (1) Kant
moved philosophy from an ontology of substance or essence to an ontology of
sense; and (2) he discovered the notion of transcendental subjectivity.43 The
first point is one that Deleuze maintained in his own philosophy across his life
without much modification. His ontology is always an ontology of sense, not of
substance.44 It does not ask what lies behind appearances, but how appearances
were produced. The second point, however, Deleuze altered significantly.
Kants transcendental was purely formal, and Deleuze continually criticized
this aspect of Kants philosophy in the form of two closely related slogans which
he usually attributed to Salomon Mamon or post-Kantians in general: Kant
was concerned with possible experience, not real, or, Kant was content to
substitute simple conditioning for real genesis.45 But, as Jean Hyppolite points
out in his narrative tracing the gradual movement toward concrete philosophy
of German Idealism, it was not until Hegel that philosophy really reached
concrete experience.46 It is true that Fichte, Schelling, and Mamon all made
compelling arguments on the behalf of genesis.47 But none of these thinkers
founded genesis on real experience as Deleuze claims. That move, rather, defines
phenomenology, and we find Deleuzes claim in every one of the major phenomenologists and throughout much of the critical literature of the time.48
Lyotard emphasizes this aspect of phenomenology. For Lyotard, Kant
only explains the a priori conditions of pure knowledge (pure mathematics of
physics), but not the real conditions of concrete knowledge: the transcendental
Kantian subjectivity is simply the set of all conditions governing all possible objects
in general, the concrete ego is dismissed to the sensible level as object
. . . and the question of how real experience enters the a priori realm of all
possible knowledge . . . remains unanswered . . . (Lyotard 4445; 53)49
This is a clear summary of the problem: in Kant concrete experience remains
unaccounted for. But for Lyotard, the solution consists in a refusal to proceed
to explanation. Instead, one must remain with the piece of wax itself, describe
only what is given, without presuppositions (Lyotard 33). But as I pointed out
above, this insistence on description and the refusal of explanation is characteristic only of static phenomenology. Genetic phenomenology takes a completely
different route: it proceeds to explanation.
In The Idea of Genesis in Kants Esthetics, Deleuze again repeats the claim
now attributed only to the post-Kantiansthat Kant held fast to the point of
view of conditioning without ever reaching genesis, but this time, he argues that
Kant had in fact discovered the conditions of a true genesis in the last Critique
(DI 61). Deleuze argues that in the first two Critiques, Kant simply assumes that
18
the faculties are already there, ready-made, and further, that they are capable
of entering into determinate relationships. These relationships are always hierarchical. There is always a dominant faculty under whose supervision the other
faculties go about their work.
In the first two Critiques . . . we cannot escape the principle of an agreement
of the faculties among themselves. But this agreement is always proportioned,
constrained, and determinate: there is always a determinative faculty that
legislates, either the understanding for a speculative purpose or reason for a
practical purpose. (DI 57; original emphasis)
In the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, the imagination schematizes, but it
does so only under the influence of the understanding. Were the imagination
to be left to itself, instead of schematizing, it would reflect (DI 59). For Deleuze,
the importance of the third Critique, and the reason it discovers the idea of
genesis, lies in the fact that it went beyond pregiven faculties and their preestablished harmony. Here, Kant begins to study the faculties before any determinate
relationships rise up between them and before they have a specific function. He
discovers a ground where neither the faculties themselves nor their agreement
are assumedfree exercise and free agreement (DI 69). Furthermore, Kant
discovers here the genetic principle the post-Kantians criticized him for lacking: the soul, the suprasensible unity of our faculties, the point of
concentration, the life giving principle that animates each faculty, engendering both its free exercise and its free agreement with the other faculties (DI 69;
my emphasis). For this reason, Deleuze claims that the Critique of Judgment constitutes the original ground from which derive the other two Critiques (DI 69).
The third Critique ceases to be a simple conditioning to become a transcendental Education, a transcendental Culture, a transcendental Genesis (DI 61;
original emphasis).50
But it is precisely from this point of view of genesis that we can no longer talk
of an idealism. An idealism is a philosophy that assumes already given or constituted forms. In the first two Critiques, Kant appeals to faculties that are
ready-made, whose proportions he seeks to determine (DI 61). In the last
Critique, however, Kant is in a position to recognize the genesis of these forms.
Insofar as he accomplishes thisin Deleuzes readingthe forms are no longer
pregiven, and thus there is no idealism. This is one reason why Deleuze, who
takes up Kantianism only at this point, describes his thought as a transcendental
empiricism in contrast to Kants transcendental idealism.51 I will suggest at various points below that Deleuze resurrects almost the entire structure of Kants
transcendental subject, except now from the point of view of genesis. Deleuze
will substitute for the simple point of view of conditioning a point of view of
effective genesis (DR162.) [W]ithout this reversal, the famous Copernican
Revolution amounts to nothing (162).
19
Conclusion
Whether or not we call Deleuzes philosophy a phenomenology is of little
importance. What is important and what I am going to argue below is that his
thought moves almost entirely within the two coordinates which Fink outlined.
The significance of Finks definition of phenomenology is that it manages to be
very precise without limiting phenomenology to Husserlian notions. Phenomenology is not synonymous with intentionality or with the solipsistic ego of Ideas I.
It is a continuous philosophical project which attempts to explain thought in all
its forms (genesis), and which employs a very basic method by which to observe
phenomena (reduction). It is not enough to say that Deleuze is antiphenomenological because there is no absolute consciousness at the base of the genesis
or because there is no theory of intentionality. I will argue in what follows that
Deleuzes thought does indeed take place entirely under the sign of the reduction, and that it is concerned almost exclusively with the problem of genesis.
Chapter 2
The Logic of Sense

The primary purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive and detailed
account of Deleuzes theory of genetic constitution as it appears in The Logic of
Sense. The next two parts of the book show how the structure of this genesis
informs Anti-Oedipus and Difference and Repetition. This chapter provides the
model according to which I read Deleuzes other works. The Logic of Sense is the
book in which Deleuze most clearly and directly engages with Husserl. But what
I want to study here is not the degree to which Deleuze takes up or rejects specific concepts developed by Husserl. Instead I want to show the degree to which
the entire conceptual structure of The Logic of Sense directly continues the
genetic project of Husserls late work. In order to make this argument it is necessary to give a relatively complete picture of The Logic of Sense, and in particular
to show the way in which 'Deleuze's concepts all come together to form a consistent, if not systematic, theory of genetic constitution.
In order to get at the totality of The Logic of Sense we need, to borrow a distinction from narratology, to separate the story from the plot. In his preface
to the work Deleuze described it as an attempt to develop a logical and psychological novel.1 The story that this novel tells is the genesis of representation
or the way in which consciousness is produced in the interactions between
the body and its affections. The plot, or the way in which this story is presented to the reader, completely obscures this story. I give two accounts of
this genetic process in what follows: the first is a general account from the
top down. The second is a detailed account from the bottom up. In the first
half of the chapter I describe the overall structure of genesis by following
Deleuzes regressive analysis first from the proposition back to sense and
then from sense back to sensation. In the second half I describe the process
in greater detail from the genetic point of view, moving from sensation up to
sense up to the proposition.
Regression
The three levels of genesis
The genesis I want to describe here traverses three different levels which
Deleuze names the primary order, the secondary organization, and the
The Logic of Sense
21
tertiary order.2 Deleuze often imitates Husserls regressive approach to the

question of genesis. As I described in the previous chapter, Husserls regressive
method begins by describing judgments and then discovering their conditions.
Similarly, in The Logic of Sense Deleuze begins with an analysis of the logical
proposition, and uncovers its conditions. This proposition defines the tertiary
order.
Deleuze argues that a proposition has four essential relations, three overt,
and one implicit. The three overt and formal relations are denotation, manifestation, and signification (LS 12). Denotation expresses the relation of the
proposition to an external and individuated state of affairs (datum) (LS 12;
original emphasis). It is the relation of the proposition to what it denotes or
points to. For example, in the linguistic proposition the sky is orange, the
denoted state of affairs would be the actual orange sky. Manifestation is the relation of the proposition to the psychologicalnot transcendentalsubject who
speaks the proposition. It refers to the one who says I, the unity capable of
saying I (78). Signification is the relation to the concept or to the meaning of
the proposition. For example, it refers to the concept you might have of an
orange sky even when the sky is blue. Denotation relates to the thing, signification to its meaning or concept, and manifestation to the subject of language.
The one who begins to speak is the one who manifests; what one talks about is
the denotatum; what one says are the significations (181).
These dimensions of the proposition do not describe the dimensions of language alone however. The propositions which Deleuze is interested in are not
necessarily linguistic or logical propositions. They also describe a certain stage
in the genesis of thought itself, or a specific moment, close to the end, in the
logical-psychological story: consciousness, or rather the preconscious, has no
other field than that of possible denotations, manifestations and significations
that is, the order of language which arises from all that which has preceded
(LS 244). The form of the proposition is also the form of an empirical
consciousness.
Deleuze is very Husserlian in this. Husserl too treated the logical proposition
as a proposition of an active, knowing, predicating consciousness. For Husserl
activerather than passiveconsciousness is always preoccupied with judgment and its product, knowledge,3 and knowledge is expressed in propositional
form. Heidegger, concerned to highlight the degree to which this conception
of consciousness and knowledge depended upon a long philosophical tradition, provides a terse summary of this aspect of Husserls thought: Traditionally,
knowing was conceived in terms of self-contained and finished cognitions formulated in assertions, propositions, judgments, where judgments are composed
of concepts and complexes of judgments are syllogisms (History of the Concept of
Time 77). The proposition represents a finished cognition, an assertion, a fully
individuated piece of knowledge which is outside of becoming and has a stable
22
structure which allows it both to be repeated and to function in relation to

other propositions or finished cognitions.4 What distinguishes Husserland
Deleuze with himfrom this tradition, however, is that they both insist on seeing knowledge in relation to its process of production. They both affirm and go
to great lengths to describe a prepredicative life which extends well beyond the
limits of discreet and iterable propositions and which is responsible for their
genesis.5
As we saw in the previous chapter, Husserls monad was defined as that entire
genesis which moved from the body and its passive confrontation with hyletic
data all the way to an active, judging ego which apprehended and explicated
the objects which had been produced in passivity. This means that Husserls
monad has a significant pre-predicative mode of existence. Its experience is
not confined to the forms of judgment. The subject of the life-world which
confronts the objects produced in passivity confronts these objects as intensities, as objects blurred together in relation to both passing experience and to
the habitualities of the monads own past experience. When it actively takes
these objects up in its spontaneity, it is able to pass judgments about them, or
affirm their predicates. The monad therefore moves from a prepredicative
world to the predicative, from lived experience as an uneasy mixture of thought
and affection to a conscious thought in which we formulate with certainty propositions regarding everything from the objects in our environment to
mathematical truths. And indeed, the possibility of judgment and apodicity
rests firmly on the foundations of this earlier experience.
Deleuze too makes a similar move, and this is why it is necessary to distinguish
in Deleuze, as I did in passing above, between a psychological and a transcendental subject. It is the psychological subject which is manifested in the proposition.
But this subject, and the entire tertiary order of the proposition which structures
its consciousness, presupposes a prepropositional process of production.
The tertiary order therefore refers to what Deleuze calls secondary organization. The level of secondary organization is a prepersonal transcendental field
which has the function of constituting the tertiary order. Deleuze has many
names for this transcendental field: the cerebral or metaphysical surface, the
pre-individual and impersonal transcendental field, pure thought and verbal representation are among the most common. In Difference and Repetition, he
calls it the virtual.6 He introduces it here, however, as sense, the fourth,
implicit, relation of the proposition. It is the transcendental dimension of the
proposition which has the function of actually producing the entire tertiary
order at the same time that it gives it its sense.
The whole order of language is the result of [secondary organization], with its
code of tertiary determinations [. . .]. [W]hat matters here is the preliminary,
founding, or poetic7 organizationthat is, this play of surfaces in which only an
a-cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual field is deployed [. . .]. (LS 24546)
The Logic of Sense
23
The a-cosmic, impersonal, and preindividual field to which Deleuze refers is

the transcendental field of sense. This field both founds and produces the
tertiary order. If the transcendental field of sense is called secondary organization this is because, as we will see below, its primary function is to provide a field
free from the action and passion of bodies so that thought can make sense of
what is affecting it by organizing it outside of the determinism implied in these
affections. All of this will be discussed in more detail below. What is important
for now is simply to see that sense is the genetic element of both the proposition and of the active consciousness which is coextensive with representation.
What is perhaps the most remarkable thesis that The Logic of Sense will develop
is that sense itself, the virtual, is produced: There is no reason to repeat that
sense is essentially produced. It is never originary but is always caused and derived
(LS 95; original emphasis).8 The regression therefore continues. Just as the
individuated objects, the concepts, and the subjects of the tertiary order referred
to sense as their genetic element, sense now refers to a field of unindividuated
bodies, a measureless pulsation, which is responsible for its production.
Individuation in bodies, the measure in their mixtures, the play of persons
and concepts in their variationsthis entire [tertiary] order presupposes
sense and the pre-individual and impersonal neutral field within which it
unfolds. It is therefore in a different way that sense is produced by bodies. The
question is now about bodies taken in their undifferentiated depth and in
their measureless pulsation. (LS 124; my emphasis)
Sense is produced by bodies. Not the individuated bodies of the tertiary order,
but bodies taken as an unindividuated measureless pulsation of matter. Below
the transcendental field and responsible for its production lies what Deleuze
calls the primary order, the corporeal, schizophrenic mixture of depths.
This is a field in which unindividuated bodies clash with one another. In contrast
to the formal order of language or consciousness, this measureless pulsation of
matter represents the world of sensation. It is because neither the objects which
affect us nor the body which is affected are yet constituted that Deleuze employs
such inventive language to describe this world of sensation. Unindividuated
bodies mix with our own as yet unconstituted body.
Deleuze often describes this depth as the realm in which one either eats or is
eaten. To eat or to be eaten, however, is a figurative way of describing this world
as one of immediate action and passion. To eat is to be active and to be eaten is
to be passive, or to endure another bodys action (240). In depth, everything is
passion and action (192; original emphasis). This is a very close approximation
to the account Deleuze gave of the plane of immanence in Cinema 1. In fact,
just as the plane of immanence was characterized there, following Bergson, as
the action and reaction of every image on all the others, in all their parts, and
in all their facets,9 Deleuze here characterizes the realm of bodily mixture as
24
one in which a body penetrates another and coexists with it in all of its parts,
like a drop of wine in the ocean, or fire in iron (LS 56). There are not yet,
then, any egological coordinates in place. The primary order represents the
communication of materiality with itself. It is the world of schizophrenia where
Everything is body and corporeal. Everything is a mixture of bodies, and inside
the body, interlocking and interpenetration (87). Bodies burst and cause
other bodies to burst in an universal cesspool (187; original emphasis). A body,
human or otherwise, is here taken only as a pure thing without even considering the possibility that this thing might eventually become the foundation for
thought.
The entire regressive movement from knowledge to sense to sensation is
encapsulated in the following quotation: From the tertiary order, we must
move again up to the secondary organization, and then to the primary order in
accordance with the dynamic requirement (LS 246; original emphasis). But
because this is a regressive movement, just as in Husserl, we have to reverse the
direction in order to account for everything genetically. Therefore, for these
three stages, there are two geneses: a static genesis and a dynamic genesis. The
basic distinction between these two geneses comes across most clearly in
Deleuzes introduction of the dynamic genesis:
It is no longer a question of a static genesis which would lead from the presupposed event [i.e., sense] to its actualization in a state of affairs and to its
expression in propositions. It is a question of a dynamic genesis which leads
from states of affairs to events, from mixtures to pure lines, from depth to the
production of surfaces, which must not implicate at all the other genesis. (LS 86;
original emphasis)10
In this passage Deleuze clearly articulates the difference between the two geneses in terms of the three levels I have just described. A dynamic genesis moves
from the primary order to secondary organization, from matter to purity, from
sensation to sense. If this genesis is called dynamic, it is because it begins in
depth where there is only movement and not time (namely, the movement of
bodies which penetrate one another).
A static genesis then takes over and moves from secondary organization to the
tertiary order. It moves from sense to a propositional consciousness. Its keyword
is actualization. If this genesis is called static, it is because sense is not, like
the mixture of bodies in depth, defined by movement, but by time, and specifically by the empty form of time which Deleuze describes elsewhere, following
Kant, as the form of everything that changes, but which does not itself change.
It is, therefore, static.11 These two geneses take their names from their starting
points. The dynamic genesis begins in movement; the static genesis begins in a
The Logic of Sense
25
Static Genesis
Tertiary Order
Dynamic Genesis
Secondary Organization
Primary Order
time without movement. Schematically we can outline the general process as

given above.
The entire movement of The Logic of Sense follows these two geneses as it
moves from a corporeal depth to a propositional consciousness.
The two modes of time

Primary order, secondary organization, and tertiary order are the three levels of
the genesis. There are also two times: Aion and Chronos.12 Much of Deleuzes
book builds on the work of Maurice Blanchotso much so that it would not be
an overstatement to say that The Logic of Sense is a formalization and systematization of much of Blanchots thought, even though at times it leaves the context
of that thought altogether.13 This is above all true in relation to the two readings
of time. Throughout The Space of Literature and The Book to Come, Blanchot
describes two kinds of time.14 First, there is the time of ordinary everyday activity which always happens in the presenta reading of time which Levinas
described as the time of clocks made for the sun and for trains.15 But in addition to this time, there is also the essential or original time of the work. In
this time there is no present, but only an indefinite past and future which subdivides the present so that you could not say that something is happening, but
only that it has always just happened and is always about to happen. It is the
time in which an impersonal thought makes mobile connections between
memories and expectations. Deleuze calls the time with a present Chronos,
and, within the overall structure we have just traced, this time corresponds
directly to the primary order. It is the time of bodies and their mixture in the
26
schizophrenic depths (LS 162, 87). It is the always limited present, which
measures the action and passion of bodies as causes and the state of their mixture in depth (61). Deleuze renames Blanchots time without a present Aion.
In opposition to Chronos, Aion is an immaterial time, freed from the movement of bodies. It is, as Deleuze says, the empty form of time (62, 165). This
time, like Blanchots time of the work has no present, but infinitely subdivides
the present into a past and a future. Just as Chronos corresponded to the primary order of depths, Aion corresponds to the secondary organization and to
the events which populate the transcendental field of the surface.16
If Chronos characterizes the primary order, and if Aion characterizes the
secondary organization, what time defines the tertiary order? It seems that
Chronos has two forms. Its first form is the present understood as the unindividuated corporeal mixture of bodies: the primary order. A dynamic genesis
begins in this chaotic mixture of bodies and produces a transcendental surface.
It is because of this genesis that this surface leaves its materiality behind and
becomes incorporeal. In leaving the movement of unindividuated bodies
behind, this genesis produces a completely different kind of temporality: Aion.
But the genesis does not stop here, and this surface founds a second, static
genesis which will in turn produce the tertiary order of the proposition. The
static genesis returns us to Chronos, but now Chronos takes on a completely
different form. The static genesis returns to a present which has become, thanks
to the work of genesis, a denotable state of affairs in view of a physical time characterized by succession (LS 184; my emphasis). The Chronos of the depths was
defined by a physical present which did not pass, a present which was in principle infinite because, in relation to the immediate action and passion of bodies,
you could always extend their present to encompass a bodys causes and effects
as far backward and forward in time as you wanted. The Chronos of the proposition and its denotable state of affairs, however, is defined by succession. It is a
present which passes in representation. The difference between the two forms
of Chronos comes down to the fact that in the return to matter, matter has
become individuated. Since it has well-defined limits, it can pass. Whereas the
Chronos of depths was unindividuated and defined by the violence of bodies
acting and reacting directly on one another, here everything is individuated,
orderly, and packed into the forms of language.17
By noticing the way in which Chronos appears twice in the order of genesis,
we can get a very clear picture of the general gesture and shape of this genesisa trajectory which, in the end, looks surprisingly Hegelian: Between the
two presents of Chronosthat of the subversion due to the bottom [i.e. primary order] and that of actualization in forms [i.e. in the forms of the tertiary
order]there is a third, there must be a third, pertaining to Aion (168;
cf. 63).18 The dynamic genesis takes us out of corporeality; the static returns us
to it. The first encounter with corporeality is an experience with an unindividuated, meaningless, and chaotic matter. When we return to it at the end of the
The Logic of Sense
27
genesis, we find the same state of affairs individuated in the form of orderly and
meaningful representations.19
I hope to have provided in this first part of the chapter the general structure
in which the genesis unfolds or, the three major eventsthe three levelsof
the logical-psychological story. In what follows I will describe these two geneses
in more detail, beginning with the dynamic genesis and then continuing to the
static. By the end of this chapter I hope to have described a general model of
genesis which informs Deleuzes thought across the rest of his career.
Genesis
The dynamic genesis
The dynamic genesis is the movement from the primary order to secondary
organization. It comprises three passive syntheses and, corresponding to each
synthesis, three distinct stages.20 In what follows I describe each one of these
stages one-by-one after a preliminary account of the schizophrenic depths
which define the primary order.
Depths
The dynamic genesis begins in the primary order or the noise of the corporeal
depths. As I mentioned above, these depths represent Deleuzes description of
sensation at the level of unindividuated bodies and of our own as yet unconstituted body. It is in order to avoid importing elements from the natural attitude
and traditional philosophy that Deleuze makes use of such idiosyncratic language to describe this world of sensation. Above I briefly described the dynamics
of this world: here there is only the movement of fragments which penetrate
one another in all their parts and all their facets; everything is immediate action
and passion. This is the way Deleuze describes the material depths in the early
sections of the book. When he turns in the last third of the book to a systematic
description of the dynamic genesis however, he leaves this earlier vocabulary
behind and takes up the language of psychoanalysis. Within this new vocabulary, the bodies or fragments which clash with one another are called partial
objects. Partial objects are material fragmentsbodieswhich exist in the
communication of depths (187). To this previous account of depth as a mixture
of bodies I would like to add two things, both of which not only clarify the function of genesis in relation to this starting point, but also reinforce the claim that
we are dealing with a novel description of sensation.
First of all, there is an ego lodged in the depths which Deleuze calls the body
without organs (LS 8889, 189, 203). There is an ego here because one of the
bodies which is tossed around in the universal variation of depth is our body.
28
A tree, a column, a flower, or a cane grow inside the body; other bodies always
penetrate our body and coexist with its parts (87). In the language of psychoanalysis, this is the body of the infant. The infant participates in the world of
partial objects. Deleuze uses the example of the nursing infant to make this
point: The introjection of these partial objects into the body of the infant is
accompanied by a projection of aggressiveness onto these internal objects, and
by a re-projection of these objects into the maternal body (187; cf. 190). Partial
objects, in the form of nourishment, are introjected into its body, but, at the
same time, the infant projects them back outside of itself. This is simply
a transposition of the earlier account of sensation to the language of psychoanalysis. The mechanisms of introjection and projection are simply the mechanisms
by which the undeveloped bodythe infantparticipates in the universal communication of corporeal depths. The body of the infant is passive in relation to
partial objects, but also, through its reprojection of them, it is active. It eats, and
it is eaten.
According to Deleuze, this is not a pleasant experience for the ego. It has no
control over its affections. It cannot anticipate the objects which will affect it,
and, even if it is capable of acting on these objects through a reprojection of the
partial objects, its action is little more than a reaction. It is dissolved in them
like a drop of wine in the ocean. As Deleuze describes it in his essay on Tournier
included as an appendix to The Logic of Sense, here each thing slaps us in the
face or strikes us from behind (LS 306). These beginnings express one immediate need for the ego and a function for genesis: the transcendence of the
given, or the escape from materiality. The ego needs to escape from these conditions, and the dynamic genesis which ensues from this state of affairs will
provide the means by which the ego can not only escape from its corporeality,
but can also hold it at bay.21
This escape from corporeality is made possible by the body without organs.
The infants body is not yet a fully constituted body, and at this point in the
genesis all that Deleuze says of the ego, the body of the depths, is that it is a
simple power of synthesis.22 This power of synthesis is also its means of escape.
Even if the ego is lodged in the depths of bodies and communicates in them
according to a law of immediate action and passion, it still forms a different
kind of mixture. In depth there are two mixtures: one is made of hard and
solid fragments which change; the other is liquid, fluid, and perfect, without
parts or alteration because it has the property of melting and welding (189).
The first mixture of hard solid fragments is the corporeal mixture of depth.
The second mixture describes the body without organs, or the infants body.
Here it is attributed the property of melting and welding. In other words, it
has the power to synthesize. What it melts and welds are precisely the material
particles of the first mixture. As Deleuze puts it, the body without organs is a
liquid principle capable of binding all of the morsels together, and of
surmounting such a breaking apart . . . (189; my emphasis). Whereas the first
The Logic of Sense
29
mixture of depths represents a set of distinct fragments which act and react on
one another, the body without organs represents the synthesis of these objects,
and through its synthesis (melting and welding) it surmounts them.23 Beyond
the highly varied and suggestive language, two things become apparent regarding the body without organs: (1) it is capable of a synthesis: it synthesizes the
partial objects of the corporeal depth which whirl about and explode. (2) But,
in so doing, it also becomes capable of surmounting this depth. Its synthesis
opens up a route of escape.
The second thing I would like to add to the account of corporeal depths anticipates the problems of meaning and of language which dominate the tertiary order.
These depths are completely meaningless. This is because they represent a pure
materiality. In depth the entire world loses its meaning, and the word loses its
sense (87). Far from transmitting meanings, words now act directly on the body,
penetrating and bruising it (87). This is why the first stage of the genesis is called
noise. It treats words as purely physical phenomena: either as vibrations of air
which penetrate our ears or as vibrations of light in a series of black marks on a
white page which penetrate our eyes. Every word is physical, and immediately
affects the body (87). The word is thus just one more indistinguishable member
of the universal variation of depths. Its fragments merge with unbearable sonorous qualities, invade the body where they form a mixture . . . (88).
Here it becomes clear that the corporeal depths are Deleuzes description of
our bodys participation in the physical world and what that participation would
feel like and look like from the point of view of the body itself. The corporeal
depths are the disorganization and fragmentation of physical objects as they
affect us, the way in which the object is nothing more, at the tips of our fingers
for example, than the sensory nerves it excites, or the way in which a sound is
nothing more than an activation of the motor neurons in our ear. It is Deleuzes
account of what Merleau-Ponty called the world of perception.
Under these conditions, Deleuze says, language, or the formal and organized tertiary order, is impossible. This is because there are many different
sounds in the world, but only a few of themthose contained in the alphabet and their combinationsbelong to language. The sound of a mouth
chewing food and the utterance of a meaningful word are two completely
different sounds both of which our mouths can make. It is always a mouth
which speaks; but [in the tertiary order] the sound is no longer the noise of
a body which eats . . . (181). It is the mouth which speaks meaningful sentences that belongs to the tertiary order. But this order has its ultimate
genetic foundation in the primary order where it is impossible to tell whether
or not the series of sounds which a mouth makes is the consequence of its
chewing food or of its uttering a word. It is necessary to process this purely
material information in order to find out. As we have seen, in the primary
order, the ego has no control over what affects it. All of its actions are
reactions. In order for language to become possible in these conditions, it is
30
necessary for the ego to leave the world of depths in order to find the freedom and the time to distinguish between the different types of sounds which
affect it.24
To render language possible thus signifies assuring that sounds are not confused with the sonorous bodies of things, with the sound effects of bodies, or
with their actions and passions. What renders language possible is that which
separates sounds from bodies and organizes them into propositions, freeing
them for the expressive function. (181)
In order for language to be possible, sound has to become something other
than a pure passion and a pure matter. Sounds have to be separated from bodies and then organized into propositions. This separation and organization
takes place in the transcendental field of secondary organization which provides a time, independent of matter, in which our affections can be progressively
determined (121). But in order to get from the depths of the body and the
material word to this metaphysical or cerebral25 surface, it takes an entire
dynamic genesis, and in particular, it requires a body without organs which
initiates this genesis and the escape of the ego from corporeality. It is the body
without organs which makes the genesis of sense possible by beginning the
synthesis of the bodys affections (89).
We can therefore identify a second general aim of the genesis: to produce
sense. Even if Deleuze presents this as a problem of language, its scope is
much wider. The role of genesis is to make sense of all of our affections and
not just the ones which are formulated into active judgments which we as
speaking subjects utter. Genesis does not only make formal language possible. It also allows us to recognize the sound of a chewing mouth as the sound
of a chewing mouth. The ego of the depthsthe body without organsis
therefore in a situation very similar to Husserls monad from the point of
view of its passivity. Husserls passive monad in the first stage in the doctrine
of genesis is assaulted by sensory information and is charged with making
sense of it. In order to make sense of it however, it has to find conditions in
which it is no longer overcome by incoming data. This is accomplished, in
Deleuze as in Husserl, through a regime of passive syntheses.26 I want to suggest here that Deleuzes partial objects represent a pure hyletic data which
affects the body and that the body without organs, as a fluid principle,
represents the first synthesis of this genesis.
These are the two aims of genesis which I wanted to outline here: (1) to
escape from the determinism of corporeality and (2) to produce sense, or to
make sense of ones affections. It is the power of synthesis in the body without
organs which makes this escape or this surmounting possible.
The Logic of Sense
31
Connection and conjunction

The first two stages of the dynamic genesis, pregenital and genital sexuality,
take the form of two passive syntheses: a connective synthesis and a conjunctive
synthesis (224ff.). The first synthesis, which corresponds to what Deleuze calls
pregenital sexuality, is responsible for the production of partial surfaces
around erogenous zones. It is this synthesis which begins the surmounting of
depths and the progressive development of the ego. These surfaces have to be
produced because, as I pointed out above, the ego which lived the corporeal
depths was nothing more than the power of synthesis and its body was not yet
constituted. Precisely because the entire surface [of the body] does not preexist,
sexuality in its first (pregenital) aspect must be defined as a veritable
production of partial surfaces (197).
However, once produced, these partial surfaces will be brought together into
one complete surface. This is the function of the second passive synthesis, the
conjunctive synthesis, which coordinates the partial surfaces into one whole
surface. This complete surface is the physical surface, of our sexual body.
How is this production of the partial and then complete physical surface
carried out?
It seems that the advent of partial surfaces corresponds directly to the body
without organs initial escape from the determinism of depths. In fact, a partial
surface is defined precisely as an assemblage of both the ego which has attained
a relative independence from the partial objects of depth and of the image that
this ego contemplates (197). This independence is realized through a complex
dialectic between the body without organs and something Deleuze calls the
good object.
When the body without organs synthesizes the partial objects of depth it also
makes possible the formation of a good object (190). This good object then
comes to represent a second, active layer of the ego, the super-ego. The superego attempts to make a complete representation out of the objects which the
body without organs contemplates. The ego itself is always a contemplation: it
contemplates its affections. But whatever it is that the ego contemplates, the
good object, the active half of the subject, always attempts to turn that thing
into an image. It tries to make complete images out of the partial objects which
the ego contemplates.
It is this duality in the subject that allows it to escape from the depths. In
producing images, the good object gives the ego something to contemplate
other than its affections. It is by turning its attention away from the actual
partial objects of depth to the images of partial objects that the ego leaves the
determinism of depths (198, 199). It is by turning its attention to this image of
the object that the body without organs becomes a partial surface and the
possibility of developing beyond the present of immediate affection becomes
32
an immediate reality. Here Deleuze is very close to early Levinas. In Existence

and Existents Levinas also posited a two-layered subject which was able to escape
from the assault of anonymous being precisely because it was folded back on
itself. This conditioned the production of the present in which an existent was
able to constitute, or hypostasize itself.27
This escape, initiated by the first synthesis, is secured in the second synthesis.
As soon as the body without organs becomes a partial surface, it continues its
synthesis and becomes related to other partial surfaces in a conjunctive synthesis. The conjunctive synthesis gathers together partial surfaces so that they
form a full body. It represents a new stage of the genesis: genital sexuality.
Deleuze describes this bodily synthesis in the language of psychoanalysis. The
partial surfaces of the first synthesis are erogenous zones. The full body is the
coordination of these zones. While each partial surface is organized around an
erogenous zone, it is a particular erogenous zone, the genital zone, which is
responsible for their coordination, hence the designation of this stage of the
genesis as genital sexuality. The image of the phallus gathers together all of
the partial surfaces into one complete surface.
The phallus should not penetrate, but rather, like a plowshare applied to
the thin fertile layer of earth, it should trace a line at the surface. This line,
emanating from the genital zone, is the line which ties together all the
erogenous zones, thus ensuring their connection [. . .]. (LS 201;
original emphasis) 28
This line which the phallus traces will become very important in the next
stage of the genesis. But before leaving this stage, I want to point out that
the second synthesis appears to be a synthesis of the first synthesis. The
first, connective synthesis produced partial surfaces. The second, by synthesizing these partial surfaces in the image of the phallus, creates a
complete physical surface. From the point of view of a phenomenological
genesis, we can describe the process thus far as follows. In pregenital sexuality, the ego moved from a direct, if fragmented, contemplation of its
object to the contemplation of an image which stood for the object that
had affected it. In genital sexuality these images of its affections have been
coordinated and put in relation to one another by virtue of a second kind
of image: the phallus. This second passive synthesis represents the attempt
on the part of the ego to produce a global picture of both itself and its
affections.
Disjunction
However, Deleuze differs from Husserl (and also from Kant who furnished the
model for these three passive syntheses) in that the third and final synthesis, far
The Logic of Sense
33
from succeeding in the attempt to create a global object, represents a failed

synthesis. In Husserl, passive synthesis produced an individuated object which
was given, across the space of the life-world, to an active ego which could take
up that object and, through progressive variations, pass judgments and formulate truths regarding that object.29 In Deleuze, passivity is unable to individuate
the object. It is the failure of bodily synthesis to account for its affections that
leads to the creation of an incorporeal surface and a new kind of synthesis.
Thus, to continue our narrative, the third stage of the dynamic genesis refers
to a new kind of synthesis, the disjunctive, and along with it a new kind of sexuality, oedipal sexuality. This synthesis begins just as the previous two did. Just as
the second synthesis took the products of the first as its object, this synthesis will
try to take both the first and the second synthesis as its object and bring them
together into one image. However, in oedipal sexuality Deleuze introduces a
new distinction between an intended action and an actually accomplished
action (20607). The child, or the synthesizing ego, intends to bring two images
together in a synthesis, but actually ends by affirming their incompatibility in an
affirmative or an inclusive disjunctive synthesis.30 Deleuze says that the
intended action belongs to the physical surface, but that the actually accomplished action moves us to an entirely different surface, the metaphysical
surface of sense or what we referred to above as secondary organization
(20708). And indeed, oedipal sexuality is the last stage of the dynamic genesis.
The advent of the disjunctive synthesis and the problems which it produces is
also the beginning of the metaphysical or cerebral surface of sense.
Oedipal sexuality, or the third synthesis, begins by splitting the good object
into two separate images: the maternal body and the phallus (205). These two
images contained in the good object are images of the preceding stages of the
genesis (cf. 226). The mother-image, or the maternal body refers to the first
synthesis or the nursing infants confrontation with materiality (187, 204). The
father-image, on the other hand, is the image of the phallus, or the principle
of organization in the second synthesis. The attempt to bring these two images
together represents the childs intention, a willed action, an action = X or an
action in general (207).
Here Deleuze is clearly following the Kantian model of synthesis. The first
passive synthesis was a reinterpretation of the Kantian synthesis of apprehension. It was the imaginations survey of its affections. The second passive
synthesis, insofar as it was the coordination and recuperation of the apprehended, is the correlate of Kants synthesis of reproduction. In this third
synthesis, what is at issue is whether or not the ego can accomplish a synthesis
of recognition.31 Can the ego recognize the compatibility of the first synthesis
(the mother-image) with the second (the father-image)? Deleuzes answer is
that it cant. Recognition fails.
In contrast to the intended action, what actually happens is that the synthesis
fails and the incompatibility of the previous positions comes to light. The two
34
images which the good object had contained are found to be incompatible.
The mother, in fact, has no organizing principle (phallus). Her body stands for
the immediate corporeal present. The father, however, stands for a principle of
unity which has abstracted itself from that present. There is an irresolvable discrepancy between these two, between the partial objects and their unity. From
the point of view of the egos attempt to escape the determinism of depth, this
synthesis represents the attempt to return to origin and to bring its current
state of development in line with its beginnings: in other words, it is the attempt
to make sense of its affections and to integrate its own history into one thought.
But this is impossible, and it has the effect of pushing the ego even further away
from the depths into a space where it finally becomes possible to make sense of
its affection: sense. From the point of view of a phenomenology of perception
it represents the attempt of the ego to recognize a unified series of perceptions
in a chaotic series.
Sense
Castration
It is at this point that the transcendental field of sense is produced. This production depends heavily on the preceding stage of the genesis. The consequence
of the oedipal stage is that the child loses his or her phallus. He or she is castrated. To be castrated means nothing more than to lose a principle of
organization: the phallus, or the conjunctive synthesis of partial surfaces. Thus
Deleuze writes that castration marks the failure or illness, the premature mold,
the way in which the surface prematurely rots, and the surface line [that had
united partial surfaces] rejoins the deep Spaltung [fissure or crack] . . . (206).
To say that the ego has been castrated simply means that the ego loses that particular mode of organization which had defined it as a complete physical
surface. For this reason castration marks the failure of synthesis, and with that
failure, the dissolution of the body and of the ego which had accompanied it at
every step of the genesis (213).
But this line does not only dissolve, and the ego does not entirely disappear.
The castrated phallus comes to represent a new kind of synthesis which organizes the dissolved body and ego in a transcendental time and space of
organization: secondary organization. Between castration and the metaphysical
surface, the phallic line (the phallic synthesis of partial surfaces) and our
entire sexual history which led up to that line is taken up and projected onto
another surface. The
metamorphoses do not end with the transformation of the phallic line into a
trace of castration on the physical or corporeal surface. We must also concede that the trace of castration corresponds to a crack marking an entirely
different incorporeal and metaphysical surface [. . .]. (208)
The Logic of Sense
35
In place of the still intact phallus of the physical surface, we receive a new
principle of organization: the castrated phallus of the metaphysical surface (228).
Deleuze has many names for this new principle of organization: the object = x,
the quasi-cause, and the aleatory point. But what I want to emphasize is that
castration and the concomitant move to another kind of surface comes back, in
the end, to a new kind of organization. This new mode of organization, secondary
organization, produces a surface of thought at once freed from its corporeal
origins but at the same time still in possession of those origins (here too Deleuze
appears unexpectedly Hegelian). This transcendence and recuperation are
accomplished by two mechanisms with roots that are as much Hegelian as they are
Freudian: sublimation and symbolization.
Sublimation and symbolization

When the body and its ego dissolve, their contents are subject to a double process
of sublimation and symbolization. Sublimation refers to the operation
through which the sexual surface and the rest [i.e. the surface of the body
along with the earlier stages genesis that led to that surface] are projected at
the surface of thought (219). Deleuze gives a particularly vivid description of
this process in relation to the ego: it is the movement by which the ego opens
itself to the surface and liberates the a-cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual
singularities which it had imprisoned. It literally releases them like spores and
bursts as it gets unburdened (LS 213; cf. 222). In other words, while the body
itself dissolves, its contents become projected, sublimated, onto the transcendental surface of thought. Through this sublimation the material fragments
which had affected the body in the primary order have become immaterial or
incorporeal. They have been liberated and distributed in a nomadic distribution outside of the constraints imposed on them by the body.32 In Difference and
Repetition Deleuze calls these immaterial fragments ideal elements. They are
the meaningless fragments between which differential relations will be established by an aleatory point. This process produces what Deleuze calls in both
books the event or transcendental Idea (LS 48ff., DR 191ff.).
The new surface of thought is not defined by its contents however, but specifically by the new mode of organization to which it submits the liberated
affections. At the same time that everything is recovered at the surface through
sublimation, it is also reorganized or symbolized. Symbolization refers to the
operation through which thought reinvests with its own energy all that which
occurs and is projected over the surface (219). How does thought reinvest
these images? The answer is that thought does it in the guise of the Event. It
does it with the part of the event that we should call non-actualizable, precisely
because it belongs to thought and can be accomplished only by thought and in
thought (220). The nonactualizable part of the event, what Deleuze calls the
Event, is the castrated phallus, or the principle of organization which comes
36
to replace the still intact phallus of the physical surface. The Event is the aleatory point mentioned above which runs through the sublimated ideal elements
and establishes differential relations between them, thereby producing events
or Ideas.
Deleuze describes this new mode of organization in several ways which all
amount to the same thing. Whether he calls it the aleatory point, the disjunctive
synthesis, a question, a castrated phallus, the instant as a being of reason in
Aion, the verb, Eventum tantum or univocal Being,33 it always refers to a synthesis
which makes all of the sublimated fragments of our sexual history communicate
or resonate on the surface of thought. When the physical surface dissolves,
each thing opens itself up to the infinity of predicates though which it passes,
as it loses its center, that is, its identity as a concept or as self. The communication of events replaces the exclusion of predicates. We have already seen the
procedure of this affirmative synthetic disjunction: it consists of the erection
of a paradoxical instance, an aleatory point with two uneven faces which
traverses the divergent series as divergent and causes them to resonate
through their distance and in their distance. (174)
The aleatory point runs through the series of ideal elements and makes them
communicate. Earlier in the book, Deleuze describes this synthesis from the
point of view of the new form of time, Aion, which corresponds to the immateriality of thought or sense:
The Aion is the straight line [of empty time] traced by the aleatory point. The
singular points of each event are distributed over this line, always in relation
to the aleatory point which subdivides them ad infinitum, and causes them to
communicate with each other, as it extends and stretches them out over the
entire line. Each event is adequate to the entire Aion; each event communicates with all the others, and they all form one and the same Event. (64)
This new organization by inclusive disjunction, communication, or resonance defines the form of the transcendental field or the metaphysical surface.
It is a new kind of synthesis which Deleuze will call eternal return or, in Difference and Repetition, the ideal synthesis of difference.
The importance of these two notionssublimation and symbolizationfrom
the point of view of genesis is that they describe the way in which, through a
logic of double causality, the transcendental field is able to attain independence from its material cause. First sublimation transfers material fragments to a
new register: thought. The fragments thus become incorporeal. But in linking
up with the aleatory point, or the quasi-cause in symbolization, events take on a
new point of reference. They no longer attest to their material cause because
The Logic of Sense
37
they are swept away in a new synthesis. They are no longer the partial objects
which had affected us, but refer to one another by virtue of the communication
which the aleatory point brings about. This communication of liberated affections in a transcendental synthesis defines the impersonal transcendental field
of sense.34
Eternal return and counter-actualization

By approaching The Logic of Sense from the point of view of genesis and by clearly
establishing the order in which this genesis unfolds, we can give simple and
clear definitions to two difficult concepts developed in this book: eternal return
and counter-actualization. The two processes described above, sublimation and
symbolization, are also two aspects of the eternal return and its relation to two
types of becoming: the becoming of corporeal depths and the incorporeal
becoming of the metaphysical surface.35 The first moment of the eternal return
expresses the way in which our sexual history returns to the surface of thought.
Sublimation takes place in the phantasm. The phantasm is the site of the
eternal return (220). This is because it
returns to its beginning which remained external to it (castration); but to the
extent that that beginning itself was a result, the phantasm also returns to
that from which the beginning had resulted (the sexuality of corporeal surfaces); and finally, little by little, it returns to the absolute origin from which
everything proceeds (the depths). (219)
This is the first aspect of the eternal return: the recovery of our sexual history on
the surface of thought. The return here is a return to genetic origins, or rather the
way those origins are sublimated, or return to, the metaphysical surface.
The second aspect of the eternal return expresses the way in which, once on
the cerebral surface, all of the events communicate with, or return to one
another in the Event (179). It is
an eternal return . . . of pure events which the instant, displaced over the line,
goes on dividing into already past and yet to come. Nothing other than the
Event subsists, the Event alone, Eventum tantum for all contraries [cf. LS 47],
which communicates with itself through its own distance and resonates across
all its disjuncts. (176; cf.178)
The return here, is the way in which each sublimated element communicates
with, or returns to, all the others by virtue of the aleatory point which unites
them in a synthesis. These two aspects of the eternal return have the function
of liberating thought from its material origins. In projecting the matter of
38
sensation onto the surface in the form of ideal elements (first aspect) and then
by making all of these communicate in relation to the Event (second act), the
transcendental field no longer refers to its material cause, but to the quasicause (the Event) which defines it.
Counter-actualization is the way in which thought maintains its independence
from materiality. For Deleuze, thought is characterized by a persistent fragility.
There is always the possibility that the corporeal depth, the material cause of
sense, might make its way to the metaphysical surface and overturn it. Nothing
is more fragile than the surface (82)a surface which Deleuze compares
to porcelain resting on top of the volcanic line of depths (cf. DR 227, 241;
LS 154ff.). For this reason sense needs a way of holding the depths at bay and
maintaining the independence of thought. This role is filled by counteractualization (168), and specifically by the nonactualizable part of the
eventthe aleatory point, the castrated phallus, the Event, and so on. From
this point of view, counter-actualization would simply seem to be another word
to add to this list of synonyms for the aleatory point. It simply names one of its
functions: to maintain independence from matter.
But counter-actualization is often presented as an ethical principle (149ff.).36
Deleuze says that it is here that our greatest freedom lies (212; cf. 152). We
should understand this in a rather traditional way. Counter-actualization holds
the determinism of depths at a distance. It represents our freedom from mechanism. Whether or not there really is a mechanical determinism matters little
from the point of view of the subject who lives the depths. What matters is that
it is tossed around uncontrollably and unpredictably in the communication of
bodies. Counter-actualization represents the way in which thought is no longer
determined by its affections, the way in which it makes sure that its escape is not
temporary, and that it remains free to develop and lead the event to its
completion (212; cf. 161). In holding the corporeal depths at a distance, counter-actualization represents the autonomy of thought in relation to the relative
determinism of its affections.
Deleuze and Blanchot

What Deleuze calls sense corresponds very closely to what Blanchot calls the
space of the work or literary space. Not only do they both compare this space
to a throw of the dice, but they both ascribe to it the same time (Aion); they
both describe it as an impersonal transcendental field which founds a genesis
of the empirical or the everyday; and both Deleuze and Blanchot describe the
dynamics of this field in almost the exact same way. There is not enough space
here to describe these similarities in detail. But I do want to take the simplest
definition Blanchot gives of the literary space and suggest that it can give us
a concrete understanding of what Deleuze means by sense. In his essay, The
Book to Come,37 Blanchot describes the literary space as
The Logic of Sense
39
the place of extreme vacancy where, before becoming determined and denotative words, language is the silent movement of relationships, that is to say
the rhythmic scansion of being. Words are always there only to designate the
extent of their connections: the space where they are projected and which,
scarcely designated, is folded and bent, not actually existing anywhere it is
[. . . .]. A sentence [phrase] is not content with unfolding in a linear way; it
opens up. This opening allows to be arranged, extricated, spaced, and compressed, at depths of different levels, other movements of phrases [phrases],
other rhythms of words, which are related to each other according to firm
determinations of structure, though foreign to ordinary logicthe logic of
subordinationwhich destroys the space and makes the movement uniform.
(23536; (fr.) 28687; my emphasis; translation modified)
Blanchot describes this space as one which is folded and bent and which attests
to another logic, a logic of sense, in which words are related to one another in
mobile structures. It is indistinguishable from a throw of the dice (236), in
which words and sentences are defined not by their significations, manifestations, or denotations, but entirely by the mobile connections between them.38
This space is almost exactly what Deleuze called sense. Blanchots mobile structures correspond to Deleuzes events, problems, or Ideas which are defined
precisely, as I describe below, by the relations established between ideal elements, and the variation of these relations which is determined by a throw of
the dice or the aleatory point. According to Blanchot however, this transcendental space, far from being something exceptional and foreign to our ordinary
experience, is something we achieve at every moment in everyday language
(Space 195). We regularly experience this transcendental space of the work in
our everyday use of language.39
As we saw in the first chapter, Paul Ricoeur described Husserls philosophy
as a transcendental empiricism because it implied an experience of the transcendental.40 The same is true of Deleuzes transcendental empiricism, and,
despite the rather abstract terms which define sense, this transcendental field
is something which we experience concretely every time we try to make sense
of something. As Ian Buchanan puts it, the event is the sense we make of what
happens (Buchanan 79; original emphasis).41 The aleatory point, or what
Deleuze calls in Anti-Oedipus the nomadic subject42 which tours and affirms
all of the fragments suspended in the neutrality of sense, is the action of our
own minds whenever we try to make sense of something. We are the aleatory
point. When we are confronted by a problem, we become the nomadic subject or the aleatory point. The problem, or the event, Deleuze says, does not
at all express a subjective uncertainty, but, on the contrary, it expresses the
objective equilibrium of a mind situated in front of the horizon of what happens or
what appears: Is it Richard or William? (LS 57; my emphasis). Reformulated in
the form of an inclusive disjunction, we ask: is it A or B or both? Richard,
40
William or Rilchiam?43 In this passage the situation of the mind confronting

the horizon of what appears is very similar to that of Husserls active
ego confronting, in the life-world, the objects produced in passivity which
I described in the previous chapter.44 When Deleuze says the horizon of what
happens or what appears he means all of those ideal elements which were
sublimated when the sexual surface collapsed, but which took the entire
dynamic genesis to transform into a content suitable for thought. The mind
which confronts this horizon is nothing more than the aleatory point. The
nomadic subject is the mind which surveys its affections in an attempt to make
sense of them by progressively determining connections between the ideal
elements and thereby producing an Idea of what is happening by subdividing
it into what has already happened and what is about to happen. The aleatory
point is not an obscure structuralist principle then, but the mind itself in
front of a problem, and the virtual, or sense, is the transcendental field, the
form of determinability, in which the mind is free to construct mobile connections and form Ideas regarding its affections.
Static genesis
The dynamic genesis was the process in which the transcendental field of
sense was produced by submitting the bodys affections to a regime of passive syntheses. This genesis came to an end with the failure of the third
passive synthesis, the sublimation of the affections onto an incorporeal surface, and the symbolization of those affections in a new synthesis. In contrast
to this dynamic genesis, the static genesis is the process by which the mind
will return to materiality, or to that unindividuated world of affection of the
primary order, but in doing so will individuate it and give it a determinate
form, quality, and temporality. The static genesis moves from sense to
representation.
The static genesis, more often referred to as the actualization of events, is
described in much greater detail in Difference and Repetition. In fact, whereas the
dynamic genesis was developed in a relatively linear fashion in the last third of
The Logic of Sense, the static genesis is explicitly described in only two short chapters: The Static Logical Genesis and The Static Ontological Genesis. In the
remainder of this chapter I briefly describe these two geneses and outline the
significant stages in the same way that I did for the dynamic genesis.
The logical and ontological geneses are two different static geneses which
together express the movement from the transcendental field of sense, or secondary organization, to the tertiary order of the proposition, or consciousness.
The reason that there are two geneses, one logical and one ontological, is that
every proposition has a referent.
The Logic of Sense
41
It appears that sense . . . is doubly generative: not only does it engender the
logical proposition with its determinate dimensions (denotation, manifestation, and signification); it also engenders the objective correlates of this
proposition which were themselves first produced as ontological propositions
(the denoted, the manifested, and the signified). (120; my emphasis)45
This passage makes two things clear. First it clarifies the relation and the
difference between the logical and ontological geneses. The static logical
genesis refers to the production of the three dimensions of the proposition
itself: denotation, manifestation, and signification. The static ontological
genesis refers to the production of what is actually denoted, manifested, and
signified. The two geneses are thus opposed to one another as signifier (logical) and signified (ontological). They produce and develop the distinction
between the two series of words and things which governs, roughly, the first
two-thirds of The Logic of Sense.46 The second thing that this passage tells us
is that the ontological genesis comes first. First the denoted, the manifested,
and the signified are constituted. Then they become incorporated into a
propositional consciousness.
Static ontological genesis: good and common sense

The static ontological genesis ascends from sense to the proposition by passing
though what Deleuze calls the forms of good and common sense. Good sense
defines the first stage of the ontological genesis, and common sense defines the
second.
Good sense takes over where the dynamic genesis left off. When the singularities burst out of the dissolved ego they did not do so in any set order and
neither did the aleatory point put them in one. As Deleuze had already
stressed in Difference and Repetition, it is absolutely essential that the relations
and variations of relations which the aleatory point establishes between the
ideal elements be arbitrary (or aleatory) (DR 198200). This is why Deleuze
calls the distribution of singularities a nomadic distribution. The primary
function of good sense is to begin the containment of these singularities
and to enclose them within a sedentary distribution. As Deleuze says, good
sense is agricultural, inseparable from the agrarian problem, the establishment of enclosures . . . (76). It represents the way in which the transcendental
field, traversed by a nomadic subject, becomes cordoned off. Good sense
fixes beginnings and ends (78). It establishes territories. In the language of
Anti-Oedipus and his later works with Guattari, it is territorializing.
But as soon as good sense has begun its work, it is taken up by common sense.
Common sense submits these territories to two forms: the form of the object
and the form of the subject.
42

Subjectively, common sense subsumes under itself the various faculties of the
soul, or the differentiated organs of the body and brings them to bear upon
a unity capable of saying I. One and the same self breathes, sleeps, walks,
eats. [. . .]. Objectively, common sense subsumes under itself the given
diversity and relates it to the particular form of object [. . .]. (78)
Objective common sense, by subsuming a given diversity and relating it to the

form of an object, grounds denotation. It makes possible the constitution of the
denoted object. Subjective common sense, in engendering a unity capable of
saying I, grounds manifestation. It makes possible the presence of a speaking
subject.
We might notice that subjective common sense seems to correspond to Kants
unity of apperception whereas objective common sense corresponds to Kants
transcendental object, or object = x. There are two significant differences between
Deleuzes notions and Kants however. It is obvious, first of all, that as soon as good
sense begins territorializing the transcendental field, common sense begins its
work. This means that neither of these two forms are pure or empty forms. Rather
they are born of the bodys affections and work on an indeterminate content. This
is closely related to the second important difference.
Deleuze says that good sense and common sense are undermined by paradox.
This does not mean, however, that they can be left behind because we have discovered some other notion that will replace them. It is not as if Deleuze does away
with the form of the object and the form of the subject altogether. Rather, he
argues that these forms need to be produced rather than simply given. This is why
Deleuze says that good sense and common sense are undermined by paradox
understood as the principle of their production (117; my emphasis). In other words,
they are undermined only from the point of view of the regressive endeavor which
attempts to seek the genetic origins of these forms without presupposing them.
But, from the point of view of genesis, paradox does not undermine them so much
as it actually produces them. Because these forms were treated as given in Kant, he
called his philosophy a transcendental idealism. For Deleuze, on the other hand,
these forms are produced in the interaction between the body and its affections.
They presuppose an experience of the unindividuated world and of the transcendental field. This is why Deleuze called his philosophy a transcendental empiricism.
It does not presuppose an already given form, but produces form from a primordial or savage experience.
Because they are not meant to be discarded but represent essential stages in
the production of representation, these two notionsgood sense and common
sensecome to serve as the first two stages of the static ontological genesis
(11516). Together they explain the way in which the sublimated contents of
the transcendental field are cordoned off into territories (good sense) which
are then subsumed under the form of the subject and the object (subjective
The Logic of Sense
43
and objective common sense). Together good and common sense make the
nomadic distribution a sedentary one. They bring the events of sense within
the stable forms of an object and a subject so that they can function in the
proposition (76).
These two moments of the static genesis describe the production of the denoted
and the manifested. What about the signified? The third stage of the ontological
genesisthe concept, or the signifiedpresupposes these first two stages, and in
particular the subjective form of common sense. This is because the concept has,
for Deleuze, a degree of generality which neither the denoted object nor the manifested subject possess by themselves (112). This generality is a consequence of the
stability of the subject and its capacity to retain a degree of self-identity across different worlds. In the immediate confrontation with an object, as in denotation,
each predicate is a singularity in the Husserlian sense of that word. When a predicate is attributed to an individual subject, it does not enjoy any degree of generality;
having a color is no more general than being green (112). Or, as he says a little
later, This rose is not red without having the red color of this rose (112;
my emphasis). Without subjective common sense, red will always be this singular
red, here and now, and the sense red will change with each different rose. With
the advent of subjective common sense, One and the same self breathes, sleeps,
walks, eats (78). The subject is no longer tied to the conditions of its emergence.
The same subject crosses different worlds, and it is only under this condition that
generality becomes possible (112). When the person47 enters the garden mentioned above, the garden may contain a red rose, but there are in other worlds or
in other gardens roses which are not red and flowers which are not roses (115). It
is only by being able to maintain an identity across other worlds, or gardens, that
the subject is able to make connections between these different worlds and thus
form a general concept of individuals.
Static logical genesis

Because of the relationship between the concept and generality, the
production of the signified moves us to the order of language and to the static
logical genesis. Deleuze writes that this
third element of the ontological genesis . . . is not embodied in a third
proposition which would again be ontological. Rather, this element sends us
over to another order of the proposition, and constitutes the condition or the form
of possibility of the logical proposition in general. (118; my emphasis)
Language is born with generality. Deleuze seems to have in mind something
like Nietzsches description of the relation between concepts and words in his
essay On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense. Words are concepts for
44
Nietzsche in the sense that they subsume under themselves a given diversity.
Just as it is certain that no leaf is ever exactly the same as any other leaf, it is
equally certain that the concept leaf is formed by dropping these individual
differences arbitrarily (Nietzsche 145). For him, words are at the heart of
concept formation because they never designate the thing in its irreducible
individuality. The word leaf always means the concept leaf, and not a particular leaf.
The form of the person sends us over to the order of language by producing
a relatively stable subject. It thus opens up the possibility of generality. The
subject is no longer tied to the immediacy of its affections, but now persists
across an encounter with a multiplicity of leaves. While the actual process of
concept formation is not clear in The Logic of Sense, it is clear that the generality
of the concept presupposes a stable subject and that this same stability makes
language possible. In Deleuze, it seems, it is not language which determines the
possibilities of the subject, but rather the subject which determines the possibilities of language. Language does not seem possible without this subject which
expresses and manifests itself in it, and which says what it does (78; my emphasis).
Deleuze presents these arguments at the beginning of the chapter titled The
Static Logical Genesis. But, unfortunately, he never actually develops this genesis beyond that statement. Unlike his relatively detailed development of the
ontological genesis and the dynamic genesis, he does not continue to describe
the production of the different dimensions of the logical proposition. Instead
he spends the rest of the chapter anticipating the dynamic genesis. If we can say
anything about the logical proposition, it seems that it is simply a formal space
which takes on its three dimensions by focusing on one of the three elements
produced in the ontological genesis (119). But because Deleuze ends his
account of the process of production here, I will too.
Deleuze and psychoanalysis

But before concluding, I want to briefly contextualize the claim I have
repeated throughout this chapter that Deleuzes employment of a psychoanalytical vocabulary should not be read as an active engagement with the
problems and methods of a theoretical psychoanalysis. Despite the fact that
Deleuze develops the entire dynamic genesis within the language of psychoanalysis, he nonetheless puts psychoanalysis at the service of a transcendental
phenomenology. This is not as strange as it sounds if we remember that one
of the fundamental problems of transcendental phenomenology as it manifested itself in France was to describe how meaning could be produced out of
a completely meaningless corporeal experience. This problem animates Paul
Ricoeurs 1965 interpretation of Freud in Freud and Philosophy.48 In this book
Ricoeur clearly develops the problem of the genesis of sense within the framework
The Logic of Sense
45
of Freudian psychoanalysis. How does Freuds metapsychology, which explains

psychic phenomena from the point of view of an economic, energetic, and
therefore meaningless discourse, relate to Freuds more popular, interpretive
approach in which successive meanings are uncovered by the analyst? What is
the relation between a meaningless libidinal economy and a meaningful psychology? It is true that Ricoeur claims that the economic approach goes
beyond phenomenology because it leaves the problem of consciousness
behind: it does not involve a reduction to consciousness but a reduction of
consciousness (Ricoeur, Freud 424). For Ricoeur, psychoanalysis takes us
beyond the point of view of consciousness to that of its genesis in an
impersonal transcendental field. But at the same time, Ricoeur also suggests
that phenomenology might have already attained this point of view: In this
regard the later Husserl indicates the area and direction of research when he
structures all investigation of constitution upon a passive genesis (425).
In other words, when Ricoeur talks of the antiphenomenological nature of
the theory of libidinal economy, he is opposing it only to a static phenomenology which excludes the consideration of passive genesis. Psychoanalysis and the
passive genesis of later Husserl are entirely compatible with one another. The
Husserl that Deleuze engages with is precisely the later Husserl which Ricoeur
mentions, and, in particular, the problem of passive genesis in later Husserl
which I described above. Ricoeur goes further, however, and even isolates the
point at which an economic Freudianism might meet up with the notion of passive genesis in Husserl: the theory of instincts (Freud 393ff.). This is no doubt
why, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze renames the three corporeal and passive syntheses as Habitus, Eros, and Thanatos, and then shows how the
empirical structures of consciousness, which are related to the active syntheses,
are founded on these three passive syntheses. He reformulates the Freudian
instincts as passive syntheses in a new description of the unconscious which
elides the Husserlian conception with the Freudian.
Deleuze himself articulated this transcendental approach to psychoanalysis
in several important passages. In Coldness and Cruelty (and again in Difference and
Repetition) Deleuze says that in his metapsychological papers Freud engaged
not in psychological reflection but in philosophical reflection, where Philosophical investigation should be understood as transcendental (CC 111; cf. DR
96). Deleuze repeats this claim again in relation to Lacan who, for Deleuze, says
more clearly than anybody else that empirical psychology is not only founded,
but determined by a transcendental topology (DI 174). Deleuzes approach to
psychoanalysis takes place entirely within this philosophical or transcendental context in which a libidinal economy, under the influence of the instincts
reformulated as passive syntheses, acts as the genetic condition of an empirical
psychology. Deleuze takes up psychoanalysis only when it becomes metapsychological or transcendental, which is to say once it takes up the question
of the constitution of sense within an economic, or purely meaningless and
46
material, given. The Deleuzian unconscious is not the conflictual unconscious

of repressed meanings but is simply the body, its affections, and its drives or its
syntheses. This is not a critique of the Freudian unconscious. It bears on something entirely different: the conditions for the possibility of anything resembling
a meaningful unconscious.49 Deleuzes unconscious is a transcendental and differential unconscious defined, as we will see below, by the confrontation of three
passive syntheses with the intensities presented by a transcendental sensibility.50
Conclusion
We can now fill out the schematic representation of genesis that I provided
above. Between the primary order and secondary organization lies the entire
Tertiary Order:
The Logical Proposition and Empirical Consciousness
Static Ontological
Genesis
(Denotation, Signification, Manifestation)
Common Sense
(The Signified and the Manifested)
Good Sense
(The Denoted)
Secondary Organization:
Sense, Aleatory Point, Univocal Being
Empty form of time
Dynamic Genesis
Disjunctive Synthesis
(Dissolution of the Body,
Sublimation, Symbolization)
Conjunctive Synthesis
(Complete Corporeal Surface)
Connective Synthesis
(Partial Corporeal Surfaces)
Primary Order:
Corporeal/Material Depths, Schizophrenia,
Body Without Organs, Movement
The Logic of Sense
47
dynamic genesis, its egos and its syntheses. Between secondary organization
and the tertiary order lie the ontological and logical static geneses. The entire
genesis, taken in its totality expresses the movement from the body to representations in consciousness.
For that reason, it is not hard to see its relationship to the concerns of late
Husserl. But we might also notice that The Logic of Sense represents a phenomenology according to Deleuzes own definition. In Foucault, Deleuze defined
phenomenology as a philosophy which maintained the possibility of a prelinguistic or savage experience. 51 If language presupposes the form of generality,
and generality the form of the person, and if the entire static genesis presupposes sense and its production, than the entire genesis presented here, except
for the very last stage, represents a description of a prelinguistic, prepredicative, and savage experience.52
Part II
Anti-Oedipus
Chapter 3
The Material Reduction and Schizogenesis

Introduction
Anti-Oedipus, and the long partnership with Guattari that grew out of it, is
usually interpreted as representing a decisive break with Deleuzes earlier work.
I want to argue here however that this is not at all the case. Published three
years after The Logic of Sense, Anti-Oedipus is a direct continuation of the themes
and structures I outlined in the previous chapter. It is true that there is virtually
no significant continuity of technical terms between the two books. Jean-Jacques
Lecercle notes throughout Deleuze and Language almost all of the significant differences between The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus: Deleuze drops the theme
of surfaces, of phantasms, of structure, of depths, of paradox, good sense, common sense, the emphasis on sense and propositional form, and so on. This list
could go on but the point is made: there is virtually no continuity between the
two books. What I want to show over the next two chapters however is that at a
formal level there is indeed a very significant overlap which prevents us from
declaring a radical break in Deleuzes thought. Anti-Oedipus develops a theory
of the genesis of representation which is strikingly similar in shape to the one
developed in The Logic of Sense.
In addition to this formal argument there are at least two more reasons that
should encourage us to hesitate before concluding that the discontinuity
between Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense represents a radical turning point in
Deleuzes thoughta move from a pre-Guattari, structuralist, and psychoanalytic Deleuze, to a post-Guattari, poststructuralist, and antipsychoanalytic
Deleuze. First, Guattari repeatedly complained that he was unable to recognize himself in Anti-Oedipus.1 While there can be no doubt that many of the
themes and concepts from Guattaris letters to Deleuze worked their way into
the final text of Anti-Oedipus, it is just as clear that the entire conceptual structure and formal network which gives a determinate sense to those concepts was
entirely absent from the letters, and as we will see, it is precisely because of
Deleuzes impressive orchestration of concepts that Guattari found his influence lacking. It therefore seems unlikely that the difference can be attributed
in any great degree to Guattaris influence. Second, we cannot forget that the
apparent break between Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense is no greater than
the break between The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. Indeed, many
52
of the themes which Lecercle finds absent in Anti-Oedipus are absent from
Difference and Repetition as well. And if we widened the set of texts under consideration, we would find that there is significant discontinuity in the technical
vocabulary Deleuze employs between all of his books. The real task is to show
what they have in common.
Despite the absence of many of The Logic of Senses themes, the most significant theme does in fact carry over: that of genesis. In Anti-Oedipus we find the
central problem to be that of the production of representation and of a Husserlian subjecta subject, that is, which is nothing more than its constant
genesis. The difference is that here, genesis is called process of production.
This overall process of production is split into two smaller processes: desiringproduction and social production. Can we call these two processes of production
dynamic genesis and static genesis? To what degree does the process of production in Anti-Oedipus draw from or correspond to the geneses of The Logic of
Sense? This is the primary question of the next three chapters. I argue that there
is no significant difference between the two geneses except for the words used
to describe them. In this first chapter I want to show how Deleuze and Guattaris various criticisms of Kant, structuralism, and psychoanalysis lay the ground
for the theory of genetic constitution that they develop in Anti-Oedipus. In the
following two chapters I describe that genesis in detail and show the degree to
which it corresponds to the genesis Deleuze already elaborated by himself in
The Logic of Sense.
The critique of Oedipus and the material reduction

At the end of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari write an odd sentence which
seems to have little relation to the surrounding text: It is certain that psychoanalysis has not made its pictorial revolution (AO 352). In order for psychoanalysis
to become a rigorous discipline, it requires a pictorial revolution. This sentence
echoes another in Difference and Repetition which might encompass both Deleuzes
entire philosophical undertaking and the way in which he carried it out: The
theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from
representation to abstraction. This is the theory of thought without image
(DR 276).2 The Logic of Sense provided one such theory of thought without image
(if image can be assimilated to representation as in the preceding quote). In
that book it took two geneses to bring the subject under the form of representation. It was only in the third stage of the static genesis that the tertiary order of the
proposition became dominant. The rest of the subject, or process of production,
was sub-representative. Its experience was a savage experience. In the language
of Difference and Repetition, one could say that such a subject is free from the iron
collars of representation (DR 262); in the language of Anti-Oedipus, however, you
would say that it is free from the iron collar of Oedipus (AO 45, 53).
53
The critique of Oedipus seems to repeat, at least on a very general level, the
central criticisms of the history of philosophy which Deleuze developed in his
earlier books and which culminated in Difference and Repetition with his description of a dogmatic image of thought. The dogmatic image of thought clings to
the form of representation and interprets subjectivity in its image. To this dogmatic image Deleuze opposed his own critical image or thought without
image. To achieve a critical image of thought, one must, as I argued in the first
chapter of this book, bracket the form of representation, or put it out of play,
in order to discover subjectivity as an unending process which produces representation as an effect, but is by no means defined by that product. At its most
basic, this critique in both Difference and Repetition and Anti-Oedipus says that the
form of representation suppresses and inhibits the discovery of the genetic element of that form. In Anti-Oedipus, desire plays the role that difference does in
Difference and Repetition. Desire, like difference, is productive.3 Oedipus, on the
other hand, plays the role of representation. Here Oedipus is presented as a
form produced at the end of a long genesis which defines the structure of representation. Deleuze and Guattaris most general criticism is that by emphasizing
the product rather than the process of production we end up completely misunderstanding both. Oedipus is taken as an ideal form, given by right outside
of a genesis, and subjectivity becomes a static consciousness closed in on itself.
For this reason the three books which I am studying here have similar aims: to
rediscover the genesis of representation or its forms without presupposing
those forms at the beginning of the genesis.
In Difference and Repetition Deleuze gave two reasons for why representation
posed a problema practical reason and a theoretical reason. Theoretically,
representation prevents the discovery of the transcendental, or the process of
production. Practically, rather than being affirmed in itself, our entire prepredicative life is reduced to what can be expressed in judgments and their
constitutive elements: representations. In Anti-Oedipus these two dimensions
form the two aspects of their critique of Oedipus. Theoretically, Oedipus obscures
the genetic point of view. Deleuze never criticizes representation because it is
inherently bad: without representation we would not have consciousness, nor
would we be able to evaluate our environment and make decisions which ensure
the repetition of joyful affections. Theoretically, representation poses a problem because its transparency allows us to forget that it is only an epiphenomena
whose genesis we need to explain. In other words, because, clearly evoking the
spirit of the phenomenological reduction, we inevitably determine the transcendental (genesis of representation) according to the laws and characteristics
of the empirical (representation).
This is exactly the complaint leveled against Oedipus in Anti-Oedipus, except
that the terms have slightly changed: Oedipus gives us a false picture of desire
where desire is the genetic element of realityby submitting it to the laws of
representation. When a psychoanalyst tries to interpret the lived experience of
54
a patient from the point of view of Oedipus, the whole of desiring-production is

crushed, subjected to the requirements of representation, and to the dreary games
of what is representative and represented in representation (AO 54; original
emphases). We therefore reproach psychoanalysis for having stifled this order
of production, for having shunted it into representation (AO 296; cf. 24).
This is why psychoanalysis stands in need of the phenomenological reduction. It has, until now, Deleuze and Guattari argue, failed to think the subject
outside of the forms of representation, and this seriously compromises its claims
to rigor. In order to think subjectivity, one must bracket the form of representation. In a passage which very clearly echoes Husserl and his concerns regarding
the scientific rigor of phenomenology, Deleuze and Guattari write, Psychoanalysis cannot become a rigorous discipline unless it accepts putting belief [in
the Oedipal structure] in parentheses, which is to say a materialist reduction of
Oedipus as an ideological form (107; original emphasis). Psychoanalysis needs
to bracket the forms of representation in order to rediscover the origin of those
forms. If Deleuze and Guattari describe this reduction as a materialist reduction, it is because, as we will see below, that this reduction reveals a primordial
material field at the foundation of subjectivity.
Practically, Oedipus reduces all experience to the expression of an ideal structure. Deleuze and Guattari consistently emphasize the sheer terrorism of
analyses like Freuds analysis of Judge Schreber or Melanie Kleins analysis of
Dick in which she teaches a four-year-old autistic boy that the train station in
which he parks his toy is in fact his mother and that the train is the child himself: I explained: The station is mummy; Dick is going into mummy (AO 45;
original emphasis). In contrast to this reduction of the childs experience to
expressions of Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that experience should be
taken in its diversity without ever trying to fit it within the limits of a form.
A child never confines himself to playing house, to playing at being daddyand-mommy. He also plays at being a magician, a cowboy, a cop or robber, a
train, a little car. The train is not necessarily daddy, nor is the train station necessarily mommy (AO 46). None of these activities are reduced to a symbolic
representation of Oedipus. Each is taken in its singularity as an actual and original lived experience of the child (no matter how clichd that activity might be).
Playing house is simply playing house. As they suggest in one passage, to deny
the singularity of lived experience, to reduce life to a form, or to oedipalize
someone is equivalentto put it politelyto sodomizing them:
It should be noted that Judge Schrebers destiny was not merely that of
being sodomized, while still alive, by rays from heaven, but also that of being
posthumously oedipalized by Freud. From the enormous political, social
and historical content of Schrebers delirium, not one word is retained, as
though the libido did not bother itself with such things. (AO 57; original
emphasis)
55
Anti-Oedipus isnt so much a critique of psychoanalysis as it is an enormous

affirmation of the lived experience of ordinary everyday life.
In these passages psychoanalysis appears as a renewed Platonism, or what
Deleuze and Guattari call a neoidealism (308). The Oedipal structure (form)
finds itself expressed (instantiated) in the particularity of experience and
becomes the truth and meaning of that experience. The child playing house is
no longer repeating a cultural and historical content but is giving expression
to a transcendent form which makes him or her nothing more than the expression of that form. To this neoidealism of psychoanalysis, and the interpretation
it requireswhere interpretation is the art of making A = B4Deleuze and
Guattari oppose schizoanalysis and its experimentation. Schizoanalysis is the
affirmation of the unbounded lived experience of the subject (unbounded by
right, but not necessarily in fact). For this reason schizoanalysis implies a specific understanding of a transcendental unconscious which is both essentially
open to the outside or to a political, social, and historical content of the subjects experience and which develops along a course which is not predetermined.5
And indeed, all of the above quotations suggest that this unconscious will not
be defined in the Kantian/Psychoanalytic manner of a hardwired structure.
The criticism of Oedipus therefore merges with a very general criticism of
Kantianism and also of structuralism. At first, in two crucial passages, Deleuze and
Guattari seem to elide their position with Kants. The process of production begins
in the productive or transcendental unconscious, and (in a classic phenomenological move) Deleuze and Guattari claim that this concern with a transcendental
unconscious is precisely what differentiates their approach from a psychoanalytical or psychological approach. In a Kantian spirit, they find themselves
compelled to say that psychoanalysis has its metaphysicsits name is
Oedipus. And that a revolutionthis time materialistcan proceed only by way
of a critique of Oedipus, by denouncing the illegitimate use of the syntheses of
the unconscious as found in Oedipal psychoanalysis, so as to rediscover a transcendental unconscious defined by the immanence of its criteria, and a
corresponding practice that we shall call schizoanalysis. (75; my emphasis)
This is an important point, and, risking overquoting, I want to quote a similar
passage in order to emphasize this transcendental point of view and its relation
to Kantianism.
Schizoanalysis is at once a transcendental and a materialist analysis. It is critical in the sense that it leads the criticism of Oedipus, or leads Oedipus, to the
point of its own self-criticism. It sets out to explore a transcendental unconscious, rather than a metaphysical one; an unconscious that is material rather
than ideological; schizophrenic rather than Oedipal; [. . .]; productive rather
than expressive. (10910)
56
In both of these passages, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize two things: the
Kantian spirit of their endeavortheir emphasis on auto-critique and legitimationand their criticism of Oedipus in the name of a transcendental but
material unconscious.
But Deleuze and Guattaris notion of the transcendental differs sharply from
Kants. I argued at the end of my first chapter that Deleuze makes a decisive
break with Kant, and that this break brings to light a distinctive difference
between the Kantian and the phenomenological notions of the transcendental.
This difference defines the understanding of the transcendental at work in
Anti-Oedipus. The Kantian transcendental is formal and conditioning. It contains the forms of possible experience, and, to adopt the language of Anti-Oedipus,
these forms are expressed in an empirical consciousness. Insofar as these
forms are pregiven outside of a genesis, formalism is an idealism. The Deleuzian
transcendental on the other hand is productive. This notion of the transcendental comes back to late Husserl who used the word transcendental in the
special sense, as apodictically necessary for the genesis of a subjectivity (which
is indeed only conceivable in genesis).6 Genesis doesnt presuppose ideal
forms. It actually produces them at the same time that it produces a subject and
the representations which fascinate that subject. The transcendental in Deleuze
is the site of the genesis of form rather than a set of pure and pregiven forms.
It concerns the real experience of an actual subject rather than the possible
experience of an ideal subject. This difference between the two notions is
enough to move philosophy from an idealism to an empiricism7 (where the
experience is that of the body without organs dissolved in partial objects).
This is also enough, I would argue, to move Deleuzes thought out of Kantianism and into phenomenology, since the production of real rather than possible
experienceand the explanation of the abstract and its formal logicwas the
primary problem of a genetic phenomenology from its inception. Deleuze and
Guattaris criticism of Oedipus is therefore a veiled criticism of Kant which
takes for its primary target, as in Deleuzes earlier work, precisely the notion of
a pregiven and formal transcendental. This is why the psychoanalytic version of
Oedipus takes the form of an idealism or a neoidealism (AO 24).8
But Deleuze and Guattari also criticize structuralism for the very same reasons. Structuralism too posits a pregiven form which is the truth and meaning
of lived experience.9 As we have seen, Deleuze and Guattari consistently argue
that psychoanalysis ignores the actual lived experience of patients by reducing
it to the great monotony of an expression of Oedipus. Everything becomes an
expression of a general or universal structure (52ff., 306). Structuralism, insofar as
it simply posits the existence of these structures outside of a genesis, just like
Kantianism, becomes an idealism (55).10 From the point of view of genesis,
psychoanalysis, Kantianism and structuralism all share a common fate when
Deleuze and Guattari substitute a productive unconscious for a formal one:
Production as process overtakes all idealistic categories . . . (5). Structuralism
57
is criticized because it put forward an image of thought as the expression of

pregiven social structures; Kantianism is criticized because it put forward an
image of thought as conditioned by pregiven formal structures.
Just as in Deleuzes independent work, the primary concern of Anti-Oedipus is
with genetic constitution or production. Production as process overtakes all
idealistic categories . . . . This means that the defining characteristic of Deleuze
and Guattaris thought, in opposition to the philosophies they criticize, is that
it replaces a description of pregiven structures with an account of genesis.
Anti-Oedipus must be read from the point of view of production, or of schizogenesis (267). Desire is immediately production, a process of production or
of constitution (12). We have seen that their concern with genesis is what
grounds the criticisms of representation, form, and structure by acting as that
one instance which they all suppress but which also gives rise to them all. It is
the point of view of genesis which necessitates a materialist reduction and which
replaces the static, idealist theory of subjectivity. But it is also the point of view
which comprehends the formal structure and the unity of the book and which
therefore allows us, in the two following chapters, to present a relatively complete picture of it. It is true that Anti-Oedipus can be read as a critique of Freudian
psychoanalysis and as an attempt at a synthesis of Marx and Freud via Lacan,11
but it accomplishes this synthesis from the point of view of a renewed phenomenology. The book, far from undertaking a completely negative enterprise as its
title might suggest, thus has an enormous positive aspect. The positive project
of Anti-Oedipus is to understand the unconscious as a process of production,
and, as in Deleuzes earlier works, Anti-Oedipus becomes a systematic phenomenology, a theory of genetic constitution which supports and undermines its
object at the same time.
The material field

In their elucidation of the foundation of the transcendental unconscious,
Deleuze and Guattari consistently insist on one point: the transcendental
unconscious is not closed in on itself in a radical solipsism. Rather, it is open to
the outside. At first this might seem to be an implicit critique of Husserl, but as
we saw in the first chapter of this book, it is only the Husserl of Ideas that confidently held on to a theory of a solipsistic ego, and even there Husserl seems to
waver between solipsism and impersonality. It is almost as if the confidence
of his statements regarding the ego were the index of a deeper uncertainty.
In fact, for Levinas, What is most interesting about the Husserlian conception
[of consciousness] is its having put contact with the world at the very heart of
the being of consciousness (TI 43; cf. 63 and 71). And Merleau-Ponty will
directly allude to this aspect of Levinass interpretation of Husserl in his own
theory of perception in the Phenomenology of Perception (PP 25657). At the very
58
heart of the being of consciousness for Husserl then, is contact with the world
or with the outside. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, desiring-production is
immediately social production. It is precisely this outside, or the coimplication of desiring and social production that the material reduction allows
Deleuze and Guattari describe. It is this field at the foot of schizogenesis in
which consciousness touches the world that I want to briefly describe in the
remainder of this chapter.
What do Deleuze and Guattari mean by desiring-production and social production and how does their implication relate to a subjectivity opened on to the
outside? The duality between desire and the social is first developed in relation
to Kants theory of productive desire elaborated in the Critique of Practical Reason
(and the duality maintains this primary sense throughout the bookeven,
I will argue, through the discussions of universal history and the theory of various modes of social production which at first glance appear more Marxist than
Kantian).12 According to Deleuze and Guattari, for Kant, desire produces
objects, but these objects are produced only in the absence of a real, present
object given in intuition. Desire, internal to the subject, produces objects, but
absent, imaginary objects. The real object has its own process of production
which is completely external to the imaginations process of production:' . . . we
are all well aware that the real object can be produced only by an external causality and external mechanisms . . . (AO 25). In this description of the Kantian
model, social production represents the objective production of a real object
without any contribution from thought. This production by an external causality
and external mechanism is what Deleuze and Guattari call social production
in Kant because the object is individuated not in immanence, but in a public
world or nature.
Desiring-production, from the Kantian point of view, refers to the work of
the productive imagination. The objects it produces are merely fantasies and
representations of real objects which are no longer present. Desiring-production
is therefore said to lack its object and produces only empty representations
lacking any claim to reality.
[T]he real object that desire lacks is related to an extrinsic natural or social
production, whereas desire intrinsically produces an imaginary object that
functions as a double of reality, as though there were a dreamed-of object
behind every real object, or a mental production behind all real productions. (2526; my emphasis; cf. 28)
There is a clear duality at work in this passage between mental productions and
real productions, subjects and objects, inside and outside, desiring-production
and social production. The duality between desiring-production and social production repeats the classic division between subject and object. The Kantian
understanding of desiring-production associates it exclusively with the order
59
of the subject and its dreamed-of mental objects whereas social production
belongs to the order of the object in all of its reality and its certainty. Social
production is guaranteed objectivity by virtue of its external causality while the
productions of subjectivity are relegated to the word of dream or fantasy. Even
if Deleuze and Guattaris entire description of the transcendental unconscious
will be directed toward destabilizing this duality, the redesignation of these traditional philosophical terms (subject and object) as desiring-production and
social production goes a long way toward explaining what is happening in
Anti-Oedipus.
The Kantian model assumes, a priori, a distinction between subject and object
which results in a series of philosophical positions Deleuze and Guattari will try
to avoid.13 First, it personologizes desiring-production or subjectivity (55, 24).
By instituting the subject-object split prior to the advent of the transcendental
field, this field becomes determined as a subjectivity cordoned off from the
world. The subject is determined as a solipsistic consciousness from the start.
Second, this personologization of the transcendental field leads directly to the
Kantian position of a desiring-production which is reduced to fantasy production. As a result of the irreducible gap between subject and object, the
productions of a solipsistic unconscious will never be able to attain either apodicity or reality since reality is always already outside of the subject. The subjects
only link to this outside will consist of various devices of mediation which will
call any claim to certainty into question. All mental productions then have the
appearance of fantasy productions. This results, thirdly, in the impossibility of
ever understanding the real process of production or the genetic constitution
of the real. The way in which objects and subjects are actually constituted is
watered down into a series of uncertain correlations between fantasy and
reality.
In order to get around this chain of problems, Deleuze and Guattari begin
their account before this distinction itself is given. They begin with the unity of
social and desiring- production in the depths of the unconscious. For them,
[i]t is not possible to attribute a special form of existence to desire, a mental or
psychic reality that is presumably different from the material reality of social
production (30).14 Desire is at once mental and material. Or again: Man and
nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other . . . ; rather they
are one and the same essential reality . . . (45).15 Social production and desiring-production are inextricably bound together in the same material molecular
multiplicity. In opposition to this Kantian model, for Deleuze and Guattari, the
duality between subject and object cannot be assumed to be present at the
beginning of the genesis since it is only a late product of thought directed at
objects. In the transcendental unconscious the duality is nonexistent. In this
they are deeply Husserlian.16 Desiring-production is immediately social production. Subject is object, and object is subject. The subject is, therefore, immediately
open to the outside, and we might even say with Bergson, that the subject
60
coincides with the object perceived and which is, in fact, exteriority itself
(MM 66). Just as the ego of depths in The Logic of Sense is dissolved like a drop
of wine in the ocean, here, the mental is dissolved in the real and both are
indistinguishable from one another.
But then how do Deleuze and Guattari both maintain this duality and do
away with it at the same time? First, they maintain it by stacking the two processes on top of one another: desiring-production, subjectivity, gives rise to social
production, or objectivity. We saw this already in The Logic of Sense: the denotated objects produced in the static genesis were possible only on the foundation
of the three passive syntheses of the dynamic genesis. Instead of starting out
with a subject/object split, Deleuze and Guattari begin before this split has been
constituted. It is essential here not to confuse two other forms of reality. In
place of the subject-object distinction, they introduce a new distinction between
the molecular and molar (280). If we can say that social production and desiring-production, object and subject, are inextricably bound together in the same
multiplicity, it is necessary to say at the same time that that multiplicity is
molecular.
Desiring-production, itself a process that remains entirely molecular, merges
only with a molecular social field, which is to say at a stage in the process of
production which is prior to the advent of sense, meaning, or knowledge. This
molecular multiplicity in which subject and object are mixed corresponds to
the un-individuated materiality of the primary order in The Logic of Sense
whereas the objectities produced in social production correspond to the individuated objects of the static genesis. All of this will be developed over the next
two chapters, but it is necessary to clarify here that it is only at the level of the
unindividuated molecular that there is no possible distinction between subject
and object. Here everything is objective or subjective, as one wishes (345).
The formal distinction between objects and subjects itself can only come about
after the process of production has run its course and has produced both subjects and objects. It is only from the point of view of molar objectities that we
can distinguish subjects from objects.
From this point of view, social production is no longer the production of
objects according to an external mechanism. The truth of the matter is that
social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate
conditions (29; original emphasis). Social production is still the production of
objectsof objectitiesbut their genesis has become immanent to the subject
at the same time that the subject becomes transcendent or social: the two categories dissolve into an impersonal field of molecules which are both objective
and subjective. Rather than following two parallel processes of production, the
two merge into one genesis founded on a desire that is already social, on a subject that is exteriority itself. It is from this point of view that Deleuze and Guattari
give desire and the Real (the product of desiring-production) one of its most
precise definitions. Desire is the natural and sensuous objective being, at the same
61
time as the Real is defined as the objective being of desire (311; original
emphases).
According to Deleuze and Guattari, this condition of the molecular unity of
social and desiring-production is sufficient to overcome the problems
generated by the uncritical presupposition of an a priori disjunction between
subject and object. First, rather than personologizing production, it removes
the personal in favor of an impersonal material field. Desire does not lack its
object, It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a
fixed subject (26; original emphasis). If desire is immediately social and social
production is already desiring-production, then at its foundation, the unconscious is not closed in on itself but exists only in an essential relation to the
outside. Second, the productions of the transcendental unconscious are not,
as in the Kantian model, imaginary. If desire produces, its product is real. If
desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can
produce only reality (26).17 In other words, that reality which might later
become the object of a fantasy is itself first produced as a late product of this
impersonal material field. Just as in The Logic of Sense, the process of production
described here is the genesis of reality. Deleuze and Guattari call these real
objects objectities. Finally, it is only under these conditions that an account of
the genetic constitution of reality can be undertaken.
Chapter 4
Desiring-Production
Partial objects and microperception

The entire process of production in Anti-Oedipus begins with these two
elements: (1) the passive syntheses of desiring-production and (2) the partial
objects which these syntheses take as their object. Desiring-production is the set
of passive syntheses which engineer or combine partial objects. Partial objects
are the ultimate elements of the unconscious (324). They are ultimate in the
sense that they represent the material beginnings of the transcendental unconscious. They are the indistinguishably subjective and objective elements which
constitute the molecular field at the foundation of the genesis that I briefly
described in the last chapter. The various interactions between these two
elementspartial objects and passive syntheseswill constitute the entire transcendental unconscious. It is absolutely essential then to understand exactly what
partial objects are and how the passive syntheses work with them. In what follows
I will argue that what Deleuze calls partial objects here correspond to what he
called partial objects in The Logic of Sensenamely the set of bodies which affect
our bodies in a corporeal mixture.1 This implies that the process of production
here begins in the same place as the genesis of representation did in that book.
Anti-Oedipus emphasizes two new and rather straightforward characteristics of
partial objects which will help to determine further how they function in the
overall genesis. As I suggested in the previous chapter, the distinction between
the molecular and the molar corresponds to the two poles, the beginning and
end, of the process of production taken in its totality. Genesis begins in the
molecular and ends in the molar. In relation to The Logic of Sense, the molecular
represents the primary order or the communication of fragments in the corporeal
depths whereas the molar represents the tertiary order of the proposition or of
representation itself. In Anti-Oedipus the process of production begins with
molecular elements of the unconscious and follows them as they pass through
the series of syntheses and then through different stages of social production
during which they come to form larger and larger aggregates of cognition. This,
then, is the first characteristic of partial objects: they are small. Partial objects are
the molecules themselves of a molecular unconscious (AO 309, 323).
Desiring-Production
63
Their second characteristic is that they exist in a state of positive dispersion in

a molecular multiplicity (342). Deleuze and Guattari describe this state of partial
objects, prior to their organization in the syntheses, as a multiplicity. It should
be clear, however, that the expression multiplicity does not refer to the transcendental Idea as it does in Difference and Repetition, but simply to the strange unity
of partial objects in a state of dispersion (32426, 42).2 In fact, the famous multiplicity of Difference and Repetition corresponds to a completely different register of
genesis than the multiplicity of Anti-Oedipus. By saying that this multiplicity is
characterized by a positive dispersion Deleuze and Guattari mean that the only
relation between the partial objects in the depths of the unconscious is the
absence of a relation (309, 323). This absence of a relation between partial objects
allows them to describe the objects as singularities (324). But again this wordat
this very early stage in the genesisno longer has the topological sense of an
extension of a singular point across a series of ordinary points which Deleuze uses
in Difference and Repetition, but rather its philosophical, Hegelian sense expressing
an absolute particularity at the heart of sensibility.3 These, then, are the two primary characteristics of partial objects: they are small, and they have no relation to
one another. They are affected by what Deleuze had called in Difference and Repetition the rule of discontinuity.
While the characterization of partial objects as molecular, as well as the
merging of subject and object in this field, can be directly traced back to
Bergsons descriptions of impersonal perception in Matter and Memory,4 these
two characteristics of partial objects also have significant roots in Deleuzes
readings of both Humes and Leibnizs theories of perception. This allusion to
Hume and Leibniz allows us to settle on a concrete definition of partial objects.
The lack of relations between partial objects recalls Deleuzes descriptions of
Humes theory of perception. Two points from Empiricism and Subjectivity seem
particularly relevant here: Deleuzes characterization of the given and his
account of the foundational concept of empiricism. I have already briefly
argued that the central problem of both Empiricism and Subjectivity and The Logic
of Sense is how the given can transcend itself and become a subject, or how it can
escape from the determinism of corporeality. In Empiricism and Subjectivity
Deleuze describes the given as a collection of things as they appeara collection without an album, a play without a stage, a flux of perceptions (ES 23; my
emphases). It is the unorganized delirium (ES 23; my emphasis) of impressions
given by sensibility to the imagination in the order that they affect the subject.5
Deleuze then goes on to explain the way in which the subject is constituted as
the effect of certain principles of human nature. The function of these principles is
to fix and naturalize the mind, to impose order on the delirium of imagination, to make it constant and settled, to organize the given into a system, imposing
constancy on the imagination (ES 24; my emphasis). These principles of human
naturethe principles of association combined with the principles of the
passionsaccomplish their task by creating relations between the impressions.
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The subject, its objects, and their meanings are constituted by establishing
relations between the scattered impressions of the given.
This touches on the foundational notion of all empiricisms according to
Deleuze: at the heart of delirium, relations are completely external to their
terms (ES 9899). Conversely, terms are external to their relations and do not
account for the nature of the operations we perform on them (ES 101).6 It is
true that Deleuze does not go so far as to say in this early work that the only
relation between impressions is their lack of relation. But by saying that terms
are external to their relations, he comes very close to the description of partial
objects in Anti-Oedipus. Further, we can easily see the more general similarity
between the major projects of The Logic of Sense, Empiricism and Subjectivity, and
Anti-Oedipus: all thought begins in delirium and attempts to rise out of it by
creating relations between terms. Because these relations give the terms their
meaning at the same time that they determine a subject, this escape from delirium is also a genesis of the subject, its objects, and the sense of both. If
impressions do not account for the operations we perform on them, from the
point of view of thought (defined as those operations which consist in establishing relations), then conversely there is no relation present in the given. The
only relation is the absence of a relation. Deleuze and Guattari therefore seem
partially inspired by Deleuzes Hume in their account of the problem of the
absence of significant relations in the foundational delirium of thought.
The general movement from unorganized perception to organized knowledge also structures Deleuzes 1988 book on Leibniz. There Deleuze
distinguishes two kinds of perception in Leibniz: microperception and macroperception. Microperceptions populate the depths of the monad, its
unconscious or its body which, since the upper level of the monad is windowless, is also its relation to the outside (TF 8586). Microperceptions belong to the
obscurity of the corporeal unconscious whereas macroperceptions belong to
the clarity of consciousness. In his 1980 lectures on Leibniz, Deleuze summarizes one of Leibnizs examples of microperception: imagine you are near the
sea and are listening to waves.
You listen to the sea and you hear the sound of a wave . . .. Leibniz says: you
would not hear the wave if you did not have a minute unconscious perception
of the sound of each drop of water that slides over and through another, and
that makes up the object of minute perceptions. There is the roaring of all the
drops of water, and you have your little zone of clarity, you clearly and distinctly
grasp one partial result from this infinity of drops, from this infinity of roaring,
and from it, you make your own little world, your own property. (04/14/1980)7
The roaring of all the drops at once can only be experienced in the dark depths
of the monad, or in its body (TF 90). But in the depths of the body, these
perceptions are completely unorganizedas in Hume: it is a lapping of waves,
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65
a rumor, a fog, or a mass of dancing particles of dust. It is a state of death or

catalepsy, of sleep, of drowsiness, or of numbness (ES 86).8 However, in the
same way that the delirium of the given in Empiricism and Subjectivity will become
organized into a system, these minute perceptions will become organized and
integrated through the work of an automatismwhich is to say, passivelyinto
our little world, or our zone of clarity. In Empiricism and Subjectivity impressions are organized by the principles of human nature. In The Fold, this
integration is accomplished according to the laws of differential calculus: differential calculus is the psychic mechanism of perception, the automatism that
at once and inseparably plunges into obscurity and determines clarity: a selection of minute, obscure perceptions, and a perception that moves into clarity
(TF 90; my emphasis).
This movement from obscurity to clarity is also a movement from small
to large, from microperception to macroperception, from the unconscious
to consciousness, and, more importantly here, from molecular perceptions to
molar perceptions (TF 87; my emphases). In other words, the genesis in The
Fold begins in a world of molecular microperceptions, passively establishes relations between these unorganized impressions, and thereby determines molar,
meaningful conscious perceptions. Again, we can see several important correspondences here with the partial objects in Anti-Oedipus, in particular the
determination of the size of perceptions as molecular, the lack of organization
in the depths, and the movement to the molar by way of a process of integration
and organization.
All of these characteristics, in both The Fold and Empiricism and Subjectivity come
together to suggest that the partial objects of Anti-Oedipus are nothing more than
minute perceptions, things as they appear, a flux of perceptions, the Deleuzian
given. All three books characterize them as an unorganized delirium or as the
vertigo of thought. In relation to the two characteristics of partial objects I outlined abovetheir lack of relation and their small sizeEmpiricism and Subjectivity
sheds light on the characteristic lack of relations in partial objects, whereas The
Fold suggests their size and their relation to a molar consciousness.9 Partial objects
are the hyletic data of an impersonal perception.
Wouldnt this mean, however, that partial objects are just parts of complete
objects despite the fact that Deleuze repeatedly emphasizes that this is not the
case? Not at all. Such a conclusion confuses the product of genesis with its origins.
It mistakes what can only be given in an empirical consciousness as already constitutedmolar objectitiesfor what can never be given in consciousness and
what properly belongs only to the transcendental unconsciousmolecular perceptions. It is only from the point of view of a molar preconsciousness that the
partial objects of a molecular order appear as a lack at the same time that the
whole itself is said to be lacked by the partial objects (AO 342). Deleuze repeatedly affirms throughout the perception chapter of The Fold that perception has
no object, that conscious perception is always a hallucination which refers back to
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differential relations established between minute perceptions, and that these

perceptions express only the affections of our material bodies by other material
things, never in the form of complete objects, but as molecular movements
(TF 9397, cf. 89). Perception is hallucinatory because it has no object and
presupposes no object. It has no object because that object has not yet been constituted.10 The molar point of view is, strictly speaking, impossible at the level of
the molecular. From the point of view of an already constituted preconsciousness
maybe we can turn around and say that partial objects are in fact parts of objects,
but from the point of view of the transcendental unconscious itself there is no
such thing as a whole or complete object to which partial objects belong. There
are only the deliriums of unorganized fragments which have no origin and which
elude even the determinations subjective or objective. The question of a thing
in itself which will find itself repeated as a representation in a molar consciousness is a false question whose sole function will be to inscribe the empirical in the
transcendental. If representation is the ultimate repetition, we can see why it can
never be a repetition of the same. It is precisely that first instance, the object to be
repeated, which is constituted in repeating. Despite their eventual totalization, in
the form of a multiplicity in dispersion, partial objects are nothing more than
natural and sensuous being, the bodys interaction with bodies.
The passive syntheses

One of the reasons it is so important to read Anti-Oedipus from the point of view
of the process of production is that it begins to make the terminology easier to
understand. In fact, if the book is read as a collection of separate concepts with
only ambiguous relations to one another, it becomes impossible to understand.
This is because from the point of view of genesis three kinds of concepts appear:
(1) those that have a very specific role at a particular moment of the genesis
(intensity or multiplicity, for example); (2) those that persist through the
genesis and take on different roles in each stage (the body without organs); and
(3) those that describe an entire portion of the genesis and thus contain within
themselves several more specific concepts (desiring-machine). Before I turn to
a reading of the three syntheses, I briefly want to point out three concepts of
this third type: desire, desiring-production, and the transcendental unconscious. These three notions all describe the same general process from different
points of view. In general, throughout Anti-Oedipus the process of production is
composed of two smaller processes: desiring-production and, founded on top
of it, social production. Desiring-production has three aspects: connection,
disjunction, and conjunction (41). But since Deleuze and Guattari understand
the subject, just as Husserl did, as nothing more than the process itself, the
transcendental unconscious is coextensive with desiring-production.11 As a
result, these three aspectsconnection, disjunction, conjunctioncan also
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67
be called the three passive syntheses of the transcendental unconscious. These

three syntheses are what schizoanalysis as a transcendental analysis sets out to
explore (109). This also seems to be exactly how they understand desire. Desire,
Deleuze and Guattari say, has to be understood as productive of the real (AO
22ff.). As such, Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects
. . .. The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as
autoproduction of the unconscious (26; original emphasis; cf. 325). These
three terms, then, are all equivalent blanket terms that describe the productive
unconscious as a process of production: desire, desiring-production, and the
transcendental unconscious. The first as the energy which drives the second,
the process, which taken in its totality is equivalent to the third.
The process of production, begins in the depths of the transcendental unconscious, as it did in The Logic of Sense, with the direct confrontation between
desiring-production and social production (54). This direct confrontation
takes place between a first synthesis and the partial objects understood as the
ultimate elements of the unconscious but also as a relation to the outside. We
have just seen that this world of partial objects was the molecular world of
microperception in which it was impossible to distinguish either subject or
object, and that this is what Deleuze and Guattari meant by the molecular unity
of desiring-production and social production (AO 30ff.). The microperceptions thus appear as a pure hyletic data without meaning or sense, and which
have both objective and subjective origins. It is these meaningless objects which
the three passive syntheses take up and engineer.
There is one very short account of the syntheses which describes them from
the point of view of the identity of nature and man (108), of object and
subject, and shows how this identity is not specific to the molecular multiplicity,
but, in fact, persists through at least the first half of the genesis:
Bonnaf recognizes in the magic object the existence of the three desiring
syntheses: the connective synthesis, which combines the fragments of the
person with those of the animals or plants; the included disjunctive synthesis,
which records the man-animal composite; the conjunctive synthesis, which
implies a veritable migration of the remainder or residue. (326n)
All three syntheses are present in this account along with their general
functions: (1) a connective synthesis which connects both objective and subjective
molecules and therefore further mixes man and nature; (2) a disjunctive
synthesis which records this mixture, or as they put it later, appropriates the
partial objects (372; cf. 10)); and (3) a conjunctive synthesis in which a wandering
and residual subject which, we will see, consumes and lives the consequences of
the first two syntheses. Even if a distinction were possible between objective
and subjective microperceptions before the first synthesis, this synthesis immediately mixes the two. From this point of view, one particular function of
68
desiring-production is highlighted: it ensures the mixture of desire and the

social, of subject and object, and thus makes their complication systemic. When
the formal representations of objects are later produced at the end of social
production as objectities, their reality will be guaranteed by this mixture which
ensures that the subject is already object and vice-versa.
There are two immediate reasons why the connective synthesis connects
without regard to origins or the qualities of its objects: one pertaining to the
objects, another to the syntheses. First of all, as I will argue in more detail below,
partial objects are meaningless. They have no sense which is why Deleuze and
Guattari say that we can only ask of the unconscious the question How does it
work? and not What does it mean?. At a certain point in the process of social
production, meaning will be produced and the question what does it mean?
can begin to be asked. Experimentation will then give way to interpretation
(AO 206, 214). But at this point there is, strictly speaking, nothing to
distinguish one partial object from another. Each is completely meaningless
and has no relation to the next.
The second reason that these syntheses further mix subject and object is that
they are passive. Deleuze takes the notion of passive synthesis here, as in Difference
and Repetition, from Husserl. Like Husserl, Deleuze defines passivity in Difference
and Repetition from a theoretical point of view: syntheses are passive insofar as they
are non-intellectual, or take place outside of the jurisdiction of an ego. The
synthesis is carried out in the mind, but not by the mind (DR 71). In Anti-Oedipus,
passivity still implies the absence of an active and legislating ego. In fact it is only
at the moment that a constituted subject is introduced to the regime of syntheses
that they cease to be passive and become active or illegitimate (AO 7072).
But, in addition to this theoretical definition, Deleuze and Guattari give a
practical description of passivity. They describe it from the point of view of the
activity of synthesis itself. Deleuze and Guattari describe three closely related
characteristics: (1) the syntheses operate in a domain of free syntheses where
everything is possible:12 they are free and operate without a plan (309);
(2) they are indirect (324); and (3) quoting Jacques Monod, the syntheses are
the play of blind combinations (328)they are indifferent to the objects
which they synthesize (12). All three of these characteristics are perhaps covered by the third: a passive synthesis is a blind synthesis. It takes no regard of its
objects. The syntheses pound away and throb in the depths of the unconscious
and are completely indifferent, it would seem, to whatever it is they work on
and without any sort of determining cause or telos (54). The syntheses do not
distinguish, then, man from nature and inevitably blindly synthesize the two.
The first synthesis and the body without organs

Just as in The Logic of Sense, the genesis here takes the form of an escape. To follow
the three passive syntheses is also to follow the way in which the body without
organs, or the ego of corporeal depths, manages to free itself from those depths,
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69
shuffle off its materiality, and become incorporeal. The way that this escape is
developed in Anti-Oedipus is slightly different at first sight than the escape I
described in The Logic of Sense, but all of the major stages are still present. In The
Logic of Sense Deleuze drew a distinction between the body without organs as the
ego of depths and the ego of partial surfaces which had escaped from the
depths. Here, these two aspects of the ego are both contained under the heading connective synthesis. There are therefore two important aspects of the
first synthesis of Anti-Oedipus.
The first aspect and function of the connective synthesis is to bring about the
corporeal interpenetration of partial objects which had defined the corporeal
depths of The Logic of Sense. This is because, in Anti-Oedipus, partial objects are
defined by their lack of relation. In other words, they do not seem to communicate to infinity as the fragments of depth did in The Logic of Sense. The first
aspect of the connective synthesis is simply the connection or synthesis of partial objects, and this is why at one point, Deleuze and Guattari describe the first
synthesis as the production of actions and passions (AO 4), or, as we saw above,
as the implication of both man and nature. This first aspect of the first synthesis is described in many different ways throughout the book. Perhaps the
most common is in the language of flows. In the connective synthesis, the partial objects begin to emit flows, and each one always breaks the flow that
another object emits (325). To connect therefore means to emit and to interrupt flows (6). These are just different ways of describing the same act.
In the current of these flows, a body without organs is produced. This is the
second aspect of the connective synthesis. It expresses the way in which a body
without organs is produced and escapes, like the ego of partial surfaces, from
the cycle of flows and their interruption. In several important passages, Deleuze
and Guattari seem to insist that the body without organs is not only produced,
but is produced at a very specific moment. Here are two of those passages:13
The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at
a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis [. . .]. (8)
The body without organs is produced as a whole, but in its own particular
place within the process of production alongside the parts that it neither
unifies nor totalizes. (43)
The body without organs is produced at a certain time and a certain place in
the connection. It has its own particular place. How are we to understand this?
We can draw very general conclusions and say that the body without organs is
not given but is produced, and that the dispersion of partial objects is therefore
primary in the order of genesis.14 This is why partial objects are called the
ultimate elements of the unconscious. But these passages suggest, more specifically, that the body without organs is produced at a specific moment. How and
when is it produced? What is this certain place and certain time?
70
Deleuze and Guattari suggest an answer only once in the early pages of the
book before we have managed to get our bearings. The body without organs is
produced in the third stage of the binary-linear series as the identity of producing and the product (AO 78; my emphasis). This statement needs to be
decomposed into its constituent parts. The binary-linear series refers simply to
communication of partial objects and the way in which they emit flows and
interrupt each others flows, or the first aspect of the synthesis. By saying that
the body without organs is the third stage of the binary linear series, Deleuze
and Guattari suggest that at this stage of the genesis, the body without organs
never leaves the plane of partial objects. It belongs to the same dimension as
the linear series of connection. The body without organs thus maintains a
degree of materiality, and indeed, it is at one point defined as the second
of the two material elements of the schizophrenic desiring-machines [. . .].
(AO 327)the other material element being the partial objects. The ego has
not yet begun its escape from the series of partial objects. It is still lodged in the
depths and therefore is identical to what Deleuze called the body without
organs in The Logic of Sense, the body of the infant communicating with other
fragmented bodies.
The second part of the expression, the identity of producing and product,
refers to another way in which Deleuze and Guattari describe the first synthesis.
Early in the book, they describe the connection of partial objects among themselves as being subject to the rule of continually producing production, of
grafting producing onto the product (AO 7). In the language of flows, to
produce is to emit a flow. To be a product is to interrupt a flow. This rule states
then that at the same time that every partial object is the interruption of a flow
(a product), it must always produce another flow (production) (AO 7). In other
words, it must be connected with another partial object. The rule is simply
another expression of the connective synthesis.15 However, if the body without
organs is defined as the identity of producing and product then, it is defined
as the very moment of synthesis itself. The particular place and certain time
in which the body without organs is produced is the moment of synthesis, or the
coming together of two or more partial objects in a connection. I will argue
below that Deleuze had already developed this notion of the ego in Difference
and Repetition in relation to Hegels analyses of sense-certainty. What he calls the
contemplative soul or the spontaneous imagination in that book corresponds
directly to what he calls a body without organs here. The contemplative soul or
the spontaneous imagination is indistinguishable from both the synthesis it
brings about and the objects of that synthesis. The ego which draws off a difference between partial objects is nothing more than the difference drawn. [T]he
eye binds light, it is itself a bound light (DR 96). In Anti-Oedipus, the body without organs at the moment of its birth is simply a synthesis of a hyletic data. It is
an apprehension of the outside.
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71
What is important from the point of view of desiring-production, is that at

this point, at the moment of its production in the connection of partial objects,
the body without organs is still part of the binary linear series. It is constituted
as a part alongside other parts and is still therefore subject to the rule of continually producing production which means that the body without organs itself
needs to be connected to partial objects. As Deleuze and Guattari say, as soon
as the body without organs is produced, it is perpetually reinserted into the
process of production (AO 8). We will have to wait until Deleuzes analysis of
fatigue in Difference and Repetition to see why the body without organs finds this
situation exhausting, but Deleuze and Guattari write here that at this point the
body without organs experiences the partial objects as an overall persecution
apparatus (9). This persecution is the primary motive for escape: in order to
resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows, it sets up a counter flow of
amorphous undifferentiated fluid (9).
Rather than submitting to the rule of continually producing production, then,
in its exhaustion the body without organs becomes an instance of anti-production. It does not interrupt a flow, and it does not emit a flow. To do either would
be to remain within the limits of production. It would be to remain a product or
to be productive. Instead it undertakes a repression or a repulsion of the
partial objects. This repulsion or primary repression defines the body without
organs as a paranoiac machine. The paranoiac machine is the exact equivalent
in Anti-Oedipus of the ego of partial surfaces in The Logic of Sense: it marks the
beginning of the body without organss escape from the binary linear series of
partial objects. Paranoia describes the way in which the body without organs
curls up into itself and leaves the world of immediate confrontation with materiality behind.
It is at this point that we leave the binary-linear series of the connection of
partial objects. In opposing itself to the partial objects, the body without organs
becomes their limit. When it repels the organs, as in the mounting of the paranoiac machine, the body without organs marks the external limit of the pure
multiplicity formed by these organs themselves. . .. (AO 326; my emphasis). The
body without organs thus moves outside of the linear series, and in this movement, when it leaves the series altogetherbut maintains its power of synthesiswe
move from the first synthesis to the second. The genesis of the machine lies precisely here: in the opposition of the process of production of desiring-machines
and the nonproductive stasis of the body without organs (9).16
The second synthesis

As soon as the body without organs becomes the external limit of the partial
objects, it reappropriates the first synthesis: the productive connections pass
from the machines to the body without organs (12; original emphasis). There
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are also two aspects to this reappropriation. On the one hand, the second
synthesis of recording records the connections of the first synthesis on the surface of body without organs. It therefore appears as the simple repetition of the
connective synthesis, now on the surface of the body without organs itself.
Deleuze and Guattari will thus say that it is a recording of the associative flow
(36), that is, of the actions and passions of the partial objects in the first synthesis.
But, on the other hand, when it appropriates these old connections, it also
places them within a new form of organization: The data, the bits of information recorded, and their transmission form a grid of disjunctions of a type that
differs from the previous connections (38). The partial objects are now
recorded not in the form of an associative flow but in the form of what Deleuze
and Guattari call signifying chains (38). It is extremely important, however, to
recognize that this codification into signifying chains, despite the name, does
not result in the production of signification or meaning: The chains are called
signifying chains because they are made up of signs, but these signs are not
themselves signifying (38).17 We are thus still at a stage of the genesis which is
firmly antecedent to the origin of meaning. We are still in the asignifying
depths, or in the middle of a savage experience. This second synthesis marks
the beginnings of the possibility for meaning, just as it did in The Logic of Sense,
by further removing the ego from the determinations of depth. The recording
of the initial actions and passions is sufficient to move us out of the world of
unorganized objectivity into the world of signs and the possibility of organizationand at this point, as signs, the partial objects are subjected to a new set of
connections, just as random as the first.
In the second synthesis the body without organs presents itself as unengendered and as the source of the partial objects which had, in fact, produced it.
This movement is called miraculation, and it works according to the logic of
double causality developed in The Logic of Sense. There the transcendental field
had an immediate and material cause, the body, which was responsible for its
production. But on the surface of the transcendental field itself there was a
mobile element which Deleuze called the quasi-cause (or aleatory point or
castrated phallus, and so on) whose function was to submit the transcendental
field to a different organization than the one given to it by its production in the
dynamic genesis, and in so doing, to liberate it from its subjection to immediate
action and reaction. In this way, the transcendental field was able to reappropriate or sublimate depth without being constrained to a strict causality. The
quasi-cause ensured the independence of the transcendental field at the same
time that it allowed for the sublimation of its material cause. In The Logic of
Sense, however, the logic of double causality is specific to the moment of genesis
which moves from corporeality to incorporeality. In Anti-Oedipus its use is
extended to every moment of the genesis and it becomes the general mechanism for the progression from one moment of the genesis to the next.18
Miraculation is the name given to the logic of double causality in Anti-Oedipus.
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In the second synthesis, the body without organs is thus a miraculating machine
because it appropriates the connections of the first synthesis at the same time
that it leaves, transcends, or negates the binary linear series of the sensible.
The second synthesis represents the way in which the body without organs,
after withdrawing from the partial objects returns to them as meaningless signs.
It does so in two ways as I pointed out above: (1) it records the connections of
the binary linear series on its own surface but (2) also submits them to its own
mode of organization in signifying chains. It represents an appropriation of
the partial objects outside of the binary linear series, and in these two aspects of
the appropriation, we should see the logic of double causality at work. The
body without organs first records or sublimates, and then it reorganizes in
signifying chains, or symbolizes. If the partial objects represent the material of
perception, a hyletic data (AO 36), the body without organs in the first synthesis represents an apprehending ego which is precisely the synthesis of that
hyletic data. The body without organs of the second synthesis then represents a
form of memory, recording, or retention.
From this point of view we can see that we can call the body without organs
whatever we like: receptive plate, Imagination,19 memory. In Difference and
Repetition, Deleuze calls it an ego, a spontaneous imagination,20 a contemplative soul, a mens momentanea, and in The Logic of Sense, an infant, an ego, and
a body without organs. But in reality, these names only get in the way of understanding the concept (not that the expression body without organs ever
helped). To say the body without organs is the Deleuzian Imagination is to not
go far enough. It is only to substitute a familiar and comfortable notion for an
uncomfortable one. What we need to know instead is its function or, what
amounts to the same thing, its relation to surrounding concepts. The body
without organs is the space in which perceptions are recorded and organized in
such a way as to gradually produce, not a complete perception, but, as we will
see, differing degrees of intensity which will themselves determine the production or differenciation of a complete perception or objectity.
The third synthesis

The third synthesis of consumption and consummation is, in a way, the most
important of the three. Like the previous syntheses, it too has two aspects:
(1) the production of intensities and (2) the production of a nomadic subject
who lives (consumes and enjoys) these intensities. The third synthesis also
corresponds to a third moment in the evolution of the body without organs.
After being born as an apprehension of the outside and rejecting that outside
as a paranoiac machine; after then recording the outside as miraculating
machine, in this third synthesis the body without organs takes on a third form
and becomes a field of intensities, or, in a metaphor Deleuze used to represent
intensity in Difference and Repetition, it becomes an egg, crisscrossed with axes,
74
banded with zones, localized with areas and fields, measured off by gradients,
traversed by potentials, marked by thresholds (AO 84). These intensities, I will
argue below, are produced as expressions of the body without organs various
relations to the outside.
Within this field of intensity there is also a nomadic subject that traverses the
surface of the body without organs and lives its intensities much in the same way
that the aleatory point traversed the transcendental field of sense in The Logic
of Sense. This is not an active subject however: it is an apparent subject rather
than a real subject. Just as in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze and Guattari allude to
Blanchot in their emphasis on the impersonality and preindividual character of
this subject and its field of experience: the apparent subject never ceases to live
and travel as a One (330; original emphasis). This apparent subject is anonymous and almost hallucinatory. There is a subject, but it is still not separate
from the conditions of its emergence or the states of affairs through which it
passes: this me is merely the residual subject that sweeps the circle and concludes a self from its oscillations on the circle (88; original emphasis). The
circle that the subject sweeps is populated by intensities, and the nomadic subject lives the intensities as affections. Each intensity is an intensive emotion, an
affect, or a feeling (84). As it sweeps this circle of intensities, this subject consumes and consummates each of the states through which it passes . . . (41).
The subjects life in the third synthesis is thus an affective life, a life that is nothing more than a feeling, a series of feelings and emotions and feelings as a
consummation and a consumption of intensive quantities (AO 84; cf. 18
and 330).
Intensities are affects. But intensity and affect are not random notions that make
an abrupt appearance in the genesis here and which we can take outside of the
philosophical context in which they appear. To understand why affect and intensity emerge at this stage of the genesis, we have to pay close attention to what
happened in the preceding two stages. In the first synthesis the ego apprehended
the outside. In the second synthesis the ego recorded its apprehensions. In the
third synthesis, the ego determines the quantity of its affection, the intensity or
degree to which the outside assaults it. The three syntheses condition our receptivity, or our capacity to be affected. Together they constitute the general possibility
of any experience. Wasnt this exactly the function of passivity in Husserls genesis:
to produce objects with differing degrees of intensity whose allure draws the attention of the ego and thus conditions its affection?
Intensity is produced. How are we to understand this production of intensity?
What is an intensity such that it can be produced in this third synthesis, and
what does it express? Deleuze and Guattari ask the same question early on in
the book and give a rather straightforward answer. Where do these pure intensities come from? They come from the two preceding forces, repulsion and attraction,
and from the opposition of these two forces (AO 21; my emphasis). Intensity comes
from the repulsion of the body without organs as a paranoiac machine and the
Desiring-Production
75
attraction of the body without organs as a miraculating machine. It is generated

as a synthesis of the past two lives of the body without organs. Intensity is thus
produced as the synthesis of the first synthesis and the second. Let us then
review the history of the body without organs.
If a concept like the body without organs is so difficult to define it is because
it has several different lives. It persists through multiple stages of the genesis
and takes on a different form each time. The final and conclusive definition of
the body without organs cannot be field of intensity. If we follow the overall
trajectory of the genesis, we can see that the body without organs has three
significant stages: (1) apprehension, (2) reproduction, and (3) affection. It is
first a paranoiac machine, second a miraculating machine, and finally, in the
third synthesis, a celibate machine. Each one of these machines is also a way
of looking at the position of the body without organs in each passive synthesis.
In the first passive synthesis, the body without organs is produced as a material
part alongside other parts. As a paranoiac machine, it exists alongside partial
objects and repels them in what Deleuze and Guattari called primary repression and which we discussed above as the means by which the body without
organs escapes from the binary-linear series of partial objects. In the second
synthesis, the body without organs attracts partial objects to its surface by recording them and appropriates them as though they had not just produced it, as
though it were self-caused. The third synthesis completes the reconciliation
between the body without organs and partial objects which had begun in the
attraction of the second synthesis:
We must examine how this [third] synthesis is formed or how the subject is
produced. Our point of departure was the opposition between desiringmachines and the body without organs. The repulsion of these machines,
as found in the paranoiac machine of primary repression, gave way to an
attraction in the miraculating machine. But the opposition between attraction and repulsion still exists. It would seem that a genuine reconciliation of
the two can take place only on the level of a new machine, functioning as a
return of the repressed. (AO 17)
Insofar as this third synthesis is the production of intensities, these intensities
can only be the expression of the relation between the body without organs (as
a spontaneous imagination) and partial objects (as minute perceptions). Intensity expresses the quantity of affection. The third synthesis marks the return of
the repressed. But what was repressed was precisely the set of partial objects
which had affected the body in its materiality. In the third synthesis, the repelled
or repressed minute perceptions return in the form of intensities which the
nomadic subject consumes and enjoys. If the body without organs is now called
a celibate machine it is easy to see why: it takes its pleasure from itself alone, it
is the form of auto-affection.
76
The body without organs is the degree-zero of intensity. Its various relationships
with the partial objects become expressed as intensities which fill the body without organs to varying degrees (19, 309). The forces of attraction and repulsion,
of soaring ascents and plunging falls, produce a series of intensive states based
on the intensity = 0 that designates the body without organs . . . (21; cf. 330).
It seems from this point of view, intensity expresses precisely the degree to
which a spontaneous subject is affected by the objects of its environment. The
body without organs encounters its object as a paranoiac, records the encounter as miraculating machine, and measures the one against the other and
expresses that relation in the form of an intensity as a celibate machine.
If we read partial objects as minute perceptions, we can now determine a
significant difference between Deleuzes, Kants, and Husserls accounts of
intensity which should help to clarify the function of intensity in Deleuzes
thought. The difference between Deleuze and Kant is more straightforward
and reconfirms the relation I have been drawing between desiring-production
and the dynamic genesis. Deleuze and Guattari cite Kants theory of intensity
when they put forward their own, and their revision of the notion of intensity is
essentially a consequence of the difference between a transcendental idealism
and a transcendental empiricismbetween a theoretical subject and a practical subject, to borrow an expression from Empiricism and Subjectivity (ES 104).
In the Anticipations of Perception, Kant distinguishes between empirical consciousness and pure consciousness. Empirical consciousness is consciousness of
the material real, of that which cannot be anticipated, whereas pure consciousness is the pure intuition of space and time which is always anticipated.
Now from empirical consciousness to pure consciousness a graduated transition is possible, the real in the former completely vanishing and a merely
formal a priori consciousness of the manifold in space and time remaining.
Consequently there is also possible a synthesis in the process of generating
the magnitude of a sensation from its beginning in pure intuition = 0, up to
any required magnitude. (CPR B 208)
The same notions are at work in both the Deleuzian and Kantian systems, but
with one major qualification. Kant moves from the pure forms of time and
space as intensity = 0 to the material real of sensation which fills the forms of
intuition to varying degrees. But Deleuze and Guattari, it would seem, begin
with the material real: the body without organs produced as the second material
object of the transcendental unconscious. In the third synthesis, however, the
body without organs seems to lose its materiality. It becomes intensity = 0, the
pure form of time, the form of auto-affection. (This is exactly what happens in
both Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense I will argue in my chapters on
Difference and Repetition.) The empty form of time, Aion, unfolds from the
corporeal depths, and, in its unfolding, releases Difference in itself as pure
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77
intensity. The difference between Deleuze and Kant, then, is simply that in Kant
the empty form of time is given, whereas for Deleuze, it is produced.
To compare Deleuze and Husserl, however, takes us in quite a different
direction. In Husserls account, intensity played its most important role in the
life-world by determining the relation between the passive and active syntheses.
The passive syntheses of time and association produced the objects of experience and ascribed to them varying degrees of intensity. The more intense the
object, the more likely the ego was to turn toward it and actively take it up in its
active syntheses. In a way, this is exactly the role of intensity in Deleuze and
Guattari, but things are also considerably different. Let us first consider the differences in their notions of passive synthesis, and second, the relation of the
ego to intensity in Deleuze and Guattari.
Despite Husserls insistence on the reduction, it still seems that certain characteristics of representation made their way into his account of the associative
synthesis, namely, the forms of identity and of recognition.21 Husserl describes
the associative synthesis either as the synthesis of like with like in a synthesis of
homogeneity or as a synthesis which separates dissimilar elementsan exclusive disjunctive synthesisin a synthesis of heterogeneity. But from a Deleuzian
point of view, we have to ask, how a passive synthesis can combine like with like
unless it already has the model or formula of identity laid out before it? If we
take as a guide the four forms of representation laid out in Difference and Repetitionidentity, opposition, resemblance, and analogywe can see that Husserl
presupposes the form of identity as governing the passive syntheses of homogeneity and the form of opposition as governing the passive syntheses of
heterogeneity. Resemblance and analogy, which play explicit roles in Husserls
active syntheses, therefore seem to be the only forms of representation which
Husserl guards against by means of the reduction in his determination of a
transcendental consciousness. Deleuze and Guattaris passive syntheses clearly
do not have this problem. They synthesize randomly, indirectly, and blindly.
They are free syntheses which operate without a plan, completely indifferent to
the objects they synthesize. They do not choose objects; they do not combine
like with like. They simply ramify connections and relations without a determining
cause or a telos.
This, however, presents its own problems from the point of view of the individuation of things or the production of identities and representations for a
thetic (pre)consciousness such as the one Deleuze developed in The Logic of
Sense. How is it possible that a series of completely random syntheses could
serve any function other than messing things up? How could they possibly lead
from the chaos of the initial delirium to a more or less organized and stable
representation at the molar end of subjectivity? It is because their sole function
is to produce intensities which will lead only later to the determination of
identities. If partial objects are minute perceptions, it becomes clear, first of all
why intensities are equivalent to affects: they express the degree to which the
78
body without organs is affected by partial objects. Second, it seems that the first
two syntheses from this point of view do nothing more than ensure the affection, while the third, ensures the consumption of those affections. Whereas
Husserls life-world was populated by individuals with varying degrees of intensity, the corresponding stage in Deleuzes genesis has no objects yet and seems
to be nothing more than a zone of intensities which will only be the catalyst for
the later production of individuals. (It is as if what Husserl condensed into the
two passive syntheses, Deleuze extended across his entire philosophy, as if
Deleuzes second major criticism of Husserl after the problem of consciousness
was that Husserl moved too quickly.) The role of the passive syntheses is not to
produce complete objects. It is simply to produce a field of intensity that will be
subject to a more complex, virtual synthesis which I describe in greater detail in
the chapters below on Difference and Repetition.
Conclusion
In conformity with the requirements of a transcendental empiricism, none of the
three syntheses are pregiven. All that is given, it would seem, are partial objects
in their evanescence. The three syntheses are produced as the result of the
interactions among partial objects. Each synthesis produces the next. The body
without organs, which conditions recording (since the recording is done on its
surface) is produced in the first synthesis, and recording is just the new form of
connection on the body without organs. But the third synthesis itself is
produced on the foundations of the first and second. Deleuze and Guattari
seem to confirm this reading of the successive nature of the syntheses in the
following passage:
the production of recording itself is produced by the production of production. Similarly, recording is followed by consumption, but the production of
consumption is produced in and through the production of recording.
(AO 16)
However, there are two important points at which Deleuze and Guattari call
into question this reading (4, 327). But we cannot follow Deleuze and Guattari on this point. On the one hand it would immediately contradict their
empiricist thesis. If there is a set structure of syntheses, pregiven, which can
act in any order whatsoever, the picture they paint of subjectivity would be
idealist. There would be a pregiven structure of subjectivity which would give
form, through three passive syntheses, to an empirical hyletic data. More than
anything it is the idea of genesis or production which is the defining characteristic of Deleuzes thought. What is important from this point of view is that
the three syntheses are produced, and that is what I hoped to show, or at least
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79
suggest, in this half of the chapter. When Deleuze and Guattari call into question the successive order of the syntheses, we have to understand that this is
only the case for an already constituted subjectivity. It is clear that there could
be no intensity (third synthesis) if there were no relations of attraction and
repulsion between a body without organs and partial objects since intensity is
produced precisely by these relations. But there could be no recording/
attraction (second synthesis) if there were not a body without organs on which
partial objects and their connections were recorded. There could not be a
body without organs/repulsion unless there was a first synthesis which produced it or was the body without organs itself. What are we to make of their
claim then? Perhaps it is only a question of a point of view? Deleuze will often
describe what things look like from within the system itself. In Difference and
Repetition, for example, Deleuze plants himself inside his system and views it
from that particular place so that he can say without contradicting himself
that only the present exists (DR 76); only the past exists (82); only the future
exists (93). These two contradictory statements in Anti-Oedipus were perhaps
written from the point of view of the conclusion of desiring-production. Theoretically, the stages are rigorously separated. Necessarily so, even if in the
process of production we move imperceptibly from one moment to the next,
but from the point of view of practice, of the constituted desiring machine
which eats, shits, and fucks (but does not judge or recognize), these three
syntheses continue their work blindly. We thus have to insist on the genetic
point of view: the first synthesis conditions and produces the second, and the
second conditions and produces the third.
As I suggested above, all three passive synthesis share several important characteristics with those of The Logic of Sense and, as I will argue in the third part of
this book, with the passive syntheses of Difference and Repetition as well. The similarities between Anti-Oedipus and Deleuzes earlier books, however, seem to stop
here. It may be clear that desiring-production is a reformulation of the dynamic
genesis, but if Anti-Oedipus really was the continuation of the theory put forward
in The Logic of Sense, the genesis would have continued into a static genesis in
which objects would be individuated and given a sense through the actualization of Ideas into extensity. But in Anti-Oedipus, we turn to a sort of renewal of
Marxism and to a theory of social production that at first seems completely
unrelated to anything like the static genesis of the earlier books. Rather than
moving on in the order of genesis to the forms of good sense, common sense,
and the forms of the proposition, we leave the field of intensity for historical
moments of representation, for a theory of universal history founded on contingency. But, as I have been suggesting throughout this book, Deleuzes use of
language is highly unreliable, and rather than actively taking up Marxism from
the point of view of its own problems and theories, Deleuze and Guattari submit
the language of Marxism to the workings of their own philosophy. Social
production and universal history are, I will argue in the next chapter, nothing
80
more than the production of objectities or fully constituted noematic

representations of the unindividuated things that had affected the unconscious
subject. This opens up the possibility of reading the second process of
production, social production, as a simple repetition of the static genesis from
The Logic of Sense.
Chapter 5
Social Production
Social production
In the previous chapter I argued that the three passive syntheses of
desiring-production took up a set of molecular partial objects functioning as
hyletic data or microperceptions and transformed it into a field of intensity
traversed by a nomadic subject. Together, these three syntheses condition
receptivity, or function as a faculty of sensibility. From this point of view, the
three passive syntheses seemed very similar to the three bodily syntheses of The
Logic of Sense which also took up something like a hyletic data, also called partial objects, and transformed it into a transcendental field traversed by a
nomadic subject or aleatory point. Desiring-production therefore seems to be a
simple reformulation of the dynamic genesis. And further, just as the transcendental field of The Logic of Sense inspired a second, static genesis, it is precisely
at this point in Anti-Oedipusthe production of a field of intensitythat a second genesis, social production, begins. It begins in the field of intensity which
was produced in the third passive synthesis of desiring-production, and it undertakes the slow transformation of intensity into extensity. Social production
puts desire outside of itself. In doing so, it is also described as the movement
from the molecular to the molar: when intensity is externalized, it is placed
within the limits of large molar aggregates. The primary question of this chapter is whether or not social production is also a new formulation of the static
genesis in the same way that desiring-production repeats the dynamic genesis.
The immediate answer to this question seems negative: instead of moving
through the forms of good sense, common sense, and ending in the form of
representation in a propositional consciousness like the ontological static
genesis did in The Logic of Sense, social production seems to go in a completely
different direction. On the foundation of the transcendental unconscious of
desiring-production, Deleuze and Guattari deduce the course of universal
history, not the constitution of representations. The first period to be established
on the foundation of the field of intensity is the territorial age. This evolves into
the despotic age, and history comes to an end in the capitalist age. Like the
ontological static genesis, social production does have three distinct stages, but
82
rather than representing moments of a genesis of representation which would

happen here and now in the immediate presence of an affection, these stages
seem to represent instead periods of history.
Despite the fact that they represent historical periods, these three ages are
each determined by the particular degree of development of the body without
organs. Just as the body without organs took on three forms in desiringproduction (paranoiac, miraculating, celibate), it also takes on three forms in
social production: the body of the earth, the body of the despot, and the body
of capital. These three forms directly determine the historical age in question.
The body of the earth produces the territorial age; the body of the despot
produces the despotic age; and the body of capital produces the age of capitalism.
But because social production is the process by which intensity is transformed
into extensity, these three forms of the body without organs are doubled. They
have an intensive and an extensive aspect. Although it is hard to find consistency on this point, the expression full body usually refers to the degree of
development of the intensities distributed across any particular type of body
without organs (cf. 343), whereas the expression socius usually refers to the
form that the body without organs takes in extensity (cf. 203)its form in
extensity being that particular historical age which is determined by the degree
of development of the intensities on the full body.
In desiring-production, desire and the social, subject and object, were mixed
together in a molecular multiplicity. In social production these two moments
come apart. Deleuze and Guattari often say that social production is the same
thing as desiring-production only under determinate conditions. The three
forms of the intensive full body mentioned above are the determinate conditions.
They determine desiring-production to produce social aggregates, and this
determination of desiring-production is called social production. Under the
different influences of these forms, molecular formations constitute molar
aggregates (343; cf. 28788). The molecular formations are the three passive
syntheses working under the influence of the intensities they had originally
given rise to. Under the influence of these intensities, the syntheses constitute
different molar aggregates. In other words, the degree of development of
intensities determines the production of different kinds of molar aggregates.
The specific state of intensities on a full body determines a particular use and
configuration of the three passive syntheses. Each historical age, as we will see,
is defined specifically by its employment of the three passive syntheses. This
employment transforms the intensities into molar aggregates.
This is one reason for the extreme complexity of the third chapter of AntiOedipus. Each historical moment is a reconfiguration of all three passive
syntheses according to the state of intensities on the full body.
By simplifying a lot, we can say that the savage territorial machine operated
on the basis of connections of production, and that the barbarian despotic
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83
machine was based on disjunctions of inscription derived from the eminent

unity. But the capitalist machine, the civilized machine, will first establish
itself on the conjunction. (224; cf. 262)
This is a simplification for at least two reasons, one technical, one linguistic.
First of all, in each age all three syntheses work together. The territorial machine,
for example, is not defined by one form of synthesis, the connective, or even by
the dominance of one form of synthesis. In each age all three passive syntheses
reappear and take on an essential role in transforming intensity into extensity.
In fact, the significant difference between the employment of the three passive
syntheses in history as opposed to their role in desire is that if in desire they
were free, blind, passive, but also successive, in history they are all coordinated
and therefore becomewe can assumeactive. In each age, the third synthesis
determines the employment of the first two. In Kantian terminology, Deleuze
and Guattari call the free and passive use of the syntheses their legitimate use,
and the active, regulated use, the illegitimate use. Social production is defined
by the illegitimate use of the syntheses.
Second, the role of the syntheses is far from clear because the syntheses are
renamed and take on multiple forms. In the primitive territorial machine, for
example, connection becomes alliance, disjunction becomes filiation, and
conjunction becomes the declension of the two or the way in which they work
together under the name surplus value (14950; cf. 188, 200). There is not
enough space in this chapter to get into the mechanics of the system and to
describe in detail the contribution of the syntheses to the production of history.
This is because before that move should even be made, the prior argument has
to be made that Deleuze and Guattari are not actually giving a more rigorous
theorization to those problems of history and structuralism which were popular
in the 1960s. They are not engaging with problems of kinship structure as such,
but are dealing with the structure of subjectivity and the phenomenological
production of reality itself.
This becomes most clear in Deleuze and Guattaris somewhat unexpected
description of the historical molar aggregates as objectities. In a note on their
use of this word, the translators of Anti-Oedipus suggest that it corresponds to the
German word objektitt (AO 301). However this word also has a specific Husserlian heritage which carries with it a meaning which is the one, I would argue,
that Deleuze and Guattari are alluding to here. When Husserl was
translated into French, it was the German word Gegenstndlichkeit, not objektitt, which was translated by the French word objectit.1 In English,
Gegenstndlichkeit was translated as objectivity or objectivites. Husserl distinguishes primarily between two types of objectivities: objectivities of receptivity
and objectivities of the understanding.2 Objectivities of the understanding are
things like logical and mathematic truths which have reality, apodicity, and
objectivity, but no corresponding material object.3 You could say that they are
84
real without being actual. Throughout his work Deleuze often alludes to this
notion of ideal objectivity in reference to his theory of transcendental Ideas.4
But the objectities which Deleuze and Guattari allude to in Anti-Oedipus, I will
argue below and in the following chapters, are not those of the understanding,
but refer to Husserls objectivities of receptivity. These are nothing more than
the objects produced in the passive genesis which I described in my first chapter.
Husserl describes them as follows: they are pregiven in an original passivity with
their structures of association, affection, etc. (E&J 250). Objectivities of receptivity are simply the objects which passivity constitutes out of our hyletic data.
Deleuze and Guattaris strange choice of the word objectity to describe
molar aggregates emphasizes a tension which I will amplify without entirely
resolving throughout the remainder of the chapter. It is the tension between
modes of a more or less individual representation and universal history. On the
one hand, if desiring-production can be understood as the series of relationships
between a synthesizing ego and its affections, or microperceptions, it would
make perfect sense that social production would be the production of a series
of representations of these affections. The objectities (of receptivity) would
then be the finished product of that process which operates on microperceptions. We could then understand social production as the production of
complete molar objects corresponding to the fragmented objects which took
the form of hyletic molecules. Not only would this make sense in relation to the
correspondence I argued for in the last chapter between desire and the social
and subject and object, but it would correspond to the theory of macroperception in The Fold, and to the ontological static genesis of The Logic of Sense. Indeed,
this reading would suggest that despite the historical vocabulary, social production
is a new formulation of the static genesis. But, on the other hand, Deleuze and
Guattari clearly seem to suggest that these molar phenomena describe the
modes of representation specific to entire historical ages and would in no
way be able to describe the production of representations of our immediate
affections.
Objectities
There are three types of objectities that Deleuze and Guattari describe: those
produced by myth, by tragedy, and by an infinite subjective representation.
But what do Deleuze and Guattari mean by myth and tragedy such that the two
genres could be understood as productive of objectities? Myth and tragedy
are systems of symbolic representations that still refer desire to determinate
exterior conditions as well as to particular objective codes (300). They grasp
the essence of desire, but by referring it to large objectities as to the specific
elements that determine its objects, aims, and sources (301). Myth and tragedy
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85
therefore intervene between desire and its externalization. They are the historical methods by which intensity becomes translated into extensity. They grasp
the essence of desire, but in so doing, they put it outside of itself. Myth and
tragedy, as we will see below, are nothing more than technical terms for
describing the ways in which desire is externalized.
I pointed out above that the general logic behind social production was
that in it desiring-production is folded back on itself. The intensities produced in the third synthesis turn back on the passive syntheses and determine
a particular active and illegitimate use of the syntheses. This new configuration of the three syntheses produces a kind of objectity or molar aggregate
specific to each historical age. Myth therefore refers to the way in which
desire is externalized in an objective representation in the territorial age.
Tragedy is the way in which desire is externalized in the despotic age. And
the treatment of objective representations as subjective defines the capitalist
age. The words myth and tragedy take on entirely new definitions within
the context of this systemnamely, they represent the externalization of
desire in a social field. In what follows I want to explore this process of externalization and the constitution of objective representation in greater detail.
Deleuze and Guattari claim that by understanding symbolic representations
we may develop a systematic phenomenology of these elements and objectities (301).5 In other words, their theory of universal history is a systematic
description of the kinds of representation (objectity) produced in every historical age. In the rest of this chapter I want to describe the contours of this
systematic phenomenology.
The territorial machine

To follow this process of externalization requires only that we follow the
general structure of Deleuze and Guattaris theory of universal history.
Desiring-production ended with the production of a field of intensity. This is
precisely where social production begins. The genesis thus continues to build
upon itself. It takes the product of the last stage as the object to be transformed
in the current stage. At the end of the third synthesis, the body without organs
supported a field of intensity. The form that the body without organs takes at
the beginning of social production in the primitive territorial machine is the
full body of the earth. The full body of the earth too is defined as a field of
intensity. The territorial age, and its corresponding mode of representation,
therefore takes as its primary problem the movement from intensity to extensity, the problem of passing from an intensive energetic order to an extensive
system, which comprises both qualitative alliances and extended filiations
(154). An intensive energetic order is externalized into quality and extensity.
86
This movement is accomplished through the interaction of the connective

and disjunctive syntheses in their illegitimate forms of alliance (connection)
and filiation (disjunction). These syntheses are already at work in their legitimate form in the determination of the full body. But in the territorial machine,
as the socius miraculates itself, it falls back on these syntheses of desiringproduction and puts them to an illegitimate use in the service of social
production (154). From this point of view,
It is necessary that the connections [of desiring-production] reappear in a
form compatible with the inscribed disjunctions [which determine the body
of the earth as a field of intensity], even if they react in turn on the form of
these disjunctions. Such is alliance . . .: alliance imposes on the productive
connections the extensive form of a pairing of persons, compatible with the
disjunctions of inscription, but inversely reacts on inscription by determining
an exclusive and restrictive use of these same disjunctions. (15455; cf. 160)
In the territorial machine, the syntheses take on an extensive form. This passage describes the movement between three dimensions which we can describe
abstractly as (1) the system in intensity, (2) the movement from intensity to
extensity, and (3) the system in extensity. In this particular passage (1) is the full
body of the earth, (2) is the interaction of illegitimate syntheses, and (3) is the
extensive system which results.6 The general function of the territorial machine
is the externalization of desire accomplished through the interaction of the
illegitimate uses of the passive syntheses.
The territorial problem is one of moving from intensity to extensity. But I also
want to suggest that, universal history aside, we could pose the problem from
the point of view of a systematic phenomenology. If desiring-production could
be read as the interaction between an ego and its affections, and if that series of
affections ended only in a field of intensity, then the problem which follows for
the affected subject is precisely how that field of intensity can be made sense of.
How can intensive becoming be translated or codified and thereby take on a
relative stability? How are discreet and knowable representations produced on
the foundation of intensity or becoming?
For the flows to be codable, their energy must allow itself to be quantified
and qualified; it is necessary that selections from the flows [first synthesis] be
made in relation to [declension, or third synthesis] detachments from the
chain [second synthesis]: something must pass through, but something must
also be blocked and something must block and cause to pass through. Now
this is only possible in the system in extension [ . . . which makes] an exclusive
use of the disjunctive synthesis, and a conjugal use of the connective synthesis.
Such is indeed the meaning of the incest prohibition conceived as the establishment
of a physical system in extension: one must look in each case for the part of
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the flow of intensity that passes through, for what does not pass, and for what
causes passage or prevents it, according to the patrilateral or matrilateral
nature of the marriages [first synthesis (alliance)], according to the patrilineal or matrilineal nature of the lineages [second synthesis (filiation)],
according to the general rgime [third synthesis (declension)] of the
extended filiations and the lateral alliances. (163; my emphasis)7
In the above passage, I tried to emphasize in brackets that the codification of
flows was accomplished through a complex interaction of the three passive
syntheses (despite the various ways Deleuze and Guattari talk about synthesis
for example, the synonymy of selection, alliance, and connection, or of
detachment, filiation, and disjunction). Deleuze and Guattari go into great
detail in describing this coordination and the way in which it introduces
segments into the intensive flux (cf. 152), and therefore begins to bring stability
to the intensive becoming. In order to produce segments, the first synthesis and
the second synthesis must be coordinated in the third. This coordination is
governed by a rule: the incest prohibition. The incest prohibition fulfills this
role because, in saying that you cannot marry your father, mother, brother, or
sister, it coordinates the syntheses of alliance and of filiation by determining
marriage (alliance) according to lineage (filiation). Incest appears as a rule
which has the double function of limiting the kinds of alliances and filiations
which are possible at the same time that it ensures that these two syntheses work
together. This declension leads directly to the segmentation of intensity (152).
And in this process of segmentation, internal difference becomes external
difference. Desire begins to take on well-defined limits. Territories are established
within a field previously defined by its intensive becoming. The incest prohibition
thus functions as a rule for the transformation of intensity into extensity and
the stabilization of becoming so that it can be brought under the forms of
representation.
It is from this point of view that we can understand how myth can contribute
to the production of objective representations or objectities. When Deleuze
and Guattari claim that myth produces objectities, they have in mind a very
specific definition of mythology, and, in particular, a formal property of the
language of mythology. They take this characterization from Robert Jaulin:
Robert Jaulin says it well: the mythical discourse has as its theme the passage
from indifference to incest to its prohibition. Implicit or explicit, this theme
underlies all the myths; it is therefore a formal property of this language
(160). Without a doubt this is a superficial move, and one which appears to be
almost purely formal. They do not evaluate the claim Jaulin makeswhich is
extreme and probably inspired by the very form of reasoning Anti-Oedipus sets
itself against. They simply use the quotation to give an extremely specific definition to myth. Myth is the form of discourse which has embedded within it the
prohibition of incest. But, as I just described, this prohibition also has a very
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specific and idiosyncratic meaning within their system. It represents the

coordination of alliance with filiation which are now understood as the illegitimate forms of the passive syntheses of connection and disjunction.8 Mythology,
then, contributes to the production of objectities by determining the movement
from intensity to extensity by controlling the interaction between alliance and
filiation by means of the incest prohibition, which is to say, by regulating the
illegitimate forms of the connective and disjunctive syntheses.
The despotic machine

This results in the production of segments or blocks on which the next moment
of universal history is founded. When the despotic age makes its appearance on
the stage of universal history, it does not return to the field of intensities produced
in desiring-production. Rather, it builds directly on top of the territorial machine
by instituting a new alliance and a direct filiation, a new connection and a new
disjunction, a new use of the first synthesis and a new use of the second (19293).
If territorial representation codes by translating intensity into extensity, despotic
representation overcodes by bringing several codes under a form of unity. The
segments produced in the declension of alliance and filiation appear in the
despotic state as blocks which are submitted to a new form of organization specific to despotism, further rigidifying them into bricks.
In point of fact, this is what forms the specific character of Asiatic9 production: the autochthonous rural communities subsist and continue to produce
[first synthesis], inscribe [second synthesis], and consume [third synthesis];
in effect, they are the States sole concern. The wheels of the territorial lineage machine subsist, but are no longer anything more than the working parts
of the State machine. The objects, the organs, the persons, and the groups
retain at least part of their intrinsic coding, but these coded flows of the
former rgime find themselves overcoded by the transcendent unity that
appropriates surplus value. The old inscription remains, but is bricked over
by and in the inscription of the State. The blocks subsist, but have become
encased and embedded bricks, having only a controlled mobility. The
territorial alliances are not replaced, but are merely allied with the new
alliance . . .. (196; my emphasis).
The entire organization of the territorial machine, including its distribution of
the three syntheses, persists in the form of a content which the new despotic
organization of the syntheses will form. The segments or territories, the
autochthonous rural communities, produced in the territorial machine
become the parts of a new machine, and this is brought about through a new
configuration of the three syntheses. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari are clear
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once again on this reappropriation of the three syntheses by the despotic state
in a new and original form: new alliance is the despotic form of connection,
direct filiation is the despotic form of disjunction, and the convergence
of these two into the transcendent unity of the despot is the form of
conjunction (198).
It is this third instance, conjunction, despite the fact that despotism is characterized by the dominance of the disjunctive synthesis, which seems to be the
defining characteristic of despotism: the State is the transcendent higher unity
that integrates relatively isolated subaggregates, functioning separately, to
which it assigns a development in bricks and a labor of construction by fragments (198). In despotism, a transcendent higher unity gathers together
isolated subaggregates or independent territories. It is the synthesis of territoriality. Deleuze and Guattari cite Kafka as providing the definitive description of
this process, and in their later book, Kafka, they provide a diagram which gives
the reader a vivid impression of this process. At the center of the image is a
tower. This tower organizes around its periphery, at a distance, a series of
discontinuous blocks (KA 74). The tower represents the despotic unity, and
the discontinuous blocks represent the territories which this unity gathers
together. The organization of territories into a common project is the defining
characteristic of the despotic age.
This new organization is governed or controlled by the transcendent unity
of the despot. This is an essential point. It suggests that at this point in history a
form of spontaneity capable of intention or control enters the picture. Whereas
territorial representation was more or less haphazard and still retained a degree
of passivity, despotic representation has the force of volition behind it. In
despotism passivity recedes and activity comes to the fore.
As for the subaggregates themselves, the territorial machines, they are the
concrete itself, the concrete base and beginning, but their segments here
enter into relationships corresponding to the essence, they assume precisely
this form of bricks that ensures their integration into a higher unity, and their
distributive operation, consonant with the great collective designs of this same unity
. . .. (AO 199; my emphasis)
But this subordination of the concrete according to the designs of a transcendent unity also marks, from the point of view of a systematic phenomenology,
what is perhaps the most important moment in the Deleuzian system and
deserves far more attention than previously given because it is at this moment
that meaning and its accomplicesjudgment, knowledge, representation, signification, purpose, law, and so forthmake their first appearance in the
process of production.10 Despotism marks the moment in history at which meaning is
produced. It is the constitution of the shores of representation (316). If we were
in Husserls system, we would call it the moment of sense-bestowal, but we
90
already know that for Deleuze sense is not a predicate qualifying the tragic
objectity produced in despotism, but rather the transcendental field out of
which signification is produced. For that reason, we should talk about what
comes about at this stage of the genesis as the bestowal of meaning or signification as opposed to sense. Despotism is the moment of meaning-bestowal. It
is therefore the correlate, as I will argue below, of the production of signification in the static ontological genesis in The Logic of Sense. What Deleuze called
signification there corresponds to the kind of meaning produced here.
Deleuze and Guattari insist that at this juncture, the question the analyst must
ask begins to shift from How does it work? to What does it mean?: The question
What is the use of that? fades more and more, and disappears in the fog of pessimism, of nihilism, Nada, Nada! (214; cf. 206). Things no longer have uses. They
have meanings. This point has extremely important consequences in relation to
the use Frederic Jameson and other critics have made of Deleuze and Guattaris
functionalism when they argue that the literary critic inspired by Deleuze and
Guattari should no longer ask what a text means, but only how it works.11 It seems
that functionalism, however, has well-defined limits, and that the question of function is only relevant in those periods of history prior to despotism. These limits of
functionalism become very clear if we notice that as we move through Deleuze and
Guattaris system, we move from the molecular unconscious to the molar preconscious, from small partial objects to massive objectities, but also, simultaneously,
from nonsense to meaning. The reason the schizoanalyst cannot ask what partial
objects mean, but only how they work, is simply that partial objects have no meaning. The question of how things work is relevant only in a situation where the
objects of the question have no signification.
At the end of the book, Deleuze and Guattari cite a practical rule laid down by
Leclaire,the same rule Deleuze used in The Logic of Sense (LS 233, 358n7)
which they summarize here as the rule of the right to non-sense as well as to the
absence of a link (AO 314; my emphasis). Even if, at the moment of this citation,
the nonsense they are referring to belongs to the ultimate elements of the unconscious, this absence of meaning, present at the foundation of the genesis, will
persist straight through the process of production until the moment at which the
despotic transcendent object leaps outside of the territorial chain (205). It is
exactly in place of nonsignifying signs that compose the networks of a territorial
chain that a despotic signifier from which all the signs uniformly flow in a deterritorialized12 flow of writing establishes itself (206; my emphases).13 Territorial
representation is nonsignifying. Meaning has not yet been produced. In contrast
to the still nonlinear and a-signifying territorial writing however, there appears a
despotic writing which is linear and meaningful. In contrast to the pure designation or denotation of territorial representation (204, 214), despotic representation
is a pure signification (214). In despotic representation, signs become signifying
under the action of a despotic symbol that totalizes them in the absence of its
withdrawal (310). Or, to put it another way, the despot forms a transcendental
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dimension that gives rise to linearity, a transcendental dimension whose specific

function is to introduce meaning into the order of genesis (20506).
This is why Deleuze and Guattari always attack a molar functionalism.
A reading of the book which ignores its systematicity by treating the equation
meaning = function as a either a critical concept or as a statement on the
nature of meaning in general (e.g. Jameson) poses significant problems.
All molar functionalism is false, since the organic or social machines are not
formed in the same way they function, and technical machines are not assembled in the same way they are used, but imply precisely the specific conditions
that separate their own production from their distinct product. Only what is
not produced in the same way it functions has a meaning, and also a purpose, an
intention. The desiring-machines on the contrary represent nothing, signify
nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what is
made with them, what they make themselves. (288; my emphases)14
It makes no sense to say then that the equation of meaning and function works
at the level of a literary text, which is itself often signifying. The identity of
meaning and use is accurate only under the conditions of the absence of meaning.
It only makes sense to talk of a molecular functionalism because at the molecular
level there is no meaning. As soon as meaning and volition enter the picture, which
is to say, at the moment of the production of a despotic state, functionalism no
longer holds.15 At this point, the question What does it mean? begins to be
heard, and the problems of exegesis prevail over problems of use and efficacy
(206).The question Jameson failed to ask was whether or not we read at the
level of desiring-production. But as long as reading goes beyond pure designation,
as long as what we read has a meaning of almost any kind, the question how
does it work ceases to be relevant. Deleuze and Guattari seem to be clear on
this point: insofar as there is meaning, we have not yet reached the molecular.
But conversely, when there is meaning, we are no longer in the presence of the
molecular and the questions and methods of investigation must change. Schizoanalysis must give way to interpretation. In despotism, writing becomes linear,
and production is reduced to representation (310). Reading, even our reading
of Deleuze and Guattari, is only possible at the level of despotic representation
when writing has become linear and meaning has been produced: here
The eye no longer sees, it reads (206).16
Good and common sense

But how are we to understand this? How is it possible that meaning only comes
about at that specific historical moment when a despot comes to power? Deleuze
and Guattari repeatedly emphasize that there was no meaning in territorial
92
societies, and that their mode of representation consists only of nonsignifying

signs. But, read literally, this proposition is not only historically inaccurate but
self-contradicting as well: Deleuze and Guattari themselves make use of the
mythology of primitive societies in order to explain the structure of those societies
and their relation to reality. They themselves require that there was signifying
language in which those myths were recorded and that there was communication
in territorial societies in a language which went beyond the pure designation or
denotation (which could only be seeing, pointing, and grunting). What, for
example, would the waters of death, or even the plant which bestows immortality, in Gilgamesh denote? Has anyone ever denoted immortality? Or is it
rather a concept which pervaded territorial mythology? It is precisely this characterization of territorial representation as purely denotative and the
characterization of despotic representation as a pure signification that points to
a possible solution to this too-obvious problem and overly simple correspondence between historical ages and the genesis of meaning.
As I described in the first part of this book, denotation and signification were
two successive moments of the static genesis in The Logic of Sense. We have already
noted a degree of play in Deleuzes use of terminology and a certain deception
with regard to his subject matter. From this point of view, Deleuzes criticism has
to go as far as it can in its infidelity to the event of Deleuze. What if it were the
case that Deleuze and Guattari were not interested in a theory of universal
history, and that their apparent development of such a narrative says absolutely
nothing about history, but is rather a reformulation of the static genesis in yet
another vocabulary (The Logic of Sense used the vocabulary of The Cartesian
Meditations whereas Difference and Repetition makes use of the language of
thermodynamics and biology)?
This kind of reading would certainly make sense in relation to their characterization of historical representations as objectities. We could accurately
describe the products of the ontological static genesis in The Logic of Sensethe
denoted, the signified, and the manifestedas objectities, since they were
precisely those constituted subjects, objects, and concepts which were the
correlates of the dimensions of language. They played the same role in that
books as objectivities of receptivity did in Husserl. This parallel between AntiOedipus and The Logic of Sense can be significantly strengthened by noticing that
the static ontological genesis progressed according to the forms of good and
common sense. Denotation rested on the form of good sense, and signification
and manifestation depended on the two forms of common sense. Deleuze gives
a comprehensive description of these forms in a passage in Difference and
Repetition which I want to quote at length:
Common sense was defined subjectively by the supposed identity of a Self
which provided the unity and ground of all the faculties, and objectively by
the identity of whatever object served as a focus for all the faculties. This
double identity, however, remains static. We no more find ourselves before
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a universal indeterminate object than we are a universal Self. Objects are

divided up in and by fields of individuation, as are Selves. Common sense
must therefore point beyond itself towards another, dynamic, instance
capable of determining the indeterminate object as this or that, and of
individualizing the self situated in this ensemble of objects. This other
instance is good sense, which takes its point of departure from a difference at
the origin of individuation. However, precisely because it ensures the distribution of that difference in such a manner as it tends to be cancelled in the
object, and because it provides a rule according to which the different objects
tend to equalize themselves and the different Selves tend to become uniform,
good sense in turn points toward the instance of common sense which
provides it both with the form of a universal Self and that of an indeterminate
object. (DR 226; cf. 133 and LS 78)
Schematically, this passage can be reduced to four key points. (1) Good sense
takes as its point of departure a difference at the origin of individuation,
a difference which in Difference and Repetition is described as an intensity. I will
suggest in the next part of this book that this notion of intensity is identical to
the one developed in Anti-Oedipus. (2) Good sense puts this difference outside
of itself. It cancels difference as it moves from intensity to extensity, from the
difference which governs individuation to the individuated object, and it
provides a rule according to which these objects become equalized. However, at
this point in the constitution of objects, Deleuze runs into two problems Kant
gave famous answers to: the unity of the object (the transcendental object or
object = X) and the unity of the subject (the transcendental unity of apperception). While good sense patiently transforms intensity into extensity, it is
incapable of determining the unity of the objects which it is in the process of
producing. (3) Common sense in its objective form therefore provides the form
of an indeterminate object which gives unity to the different adumbrations
produced in good sense. In its subjective form, (4) common sense gives unity to
a subject to whom the representations appear.17
What is striking about the four main aspects of this schematic description is
that each one seems to be behind the stages of what Deleuze and Guattari
described in Anti-Oedipus as the course of universal history. The forms of good
and common sense seem to structure history:
(1) Good sense presupposes a field of intensity. This was precisely the field of
intensity produced in the third synthesis of desiring-production which
the full body of the earth represented.
(2) Good sense determines the cancellation of difference and provides it with a rule.
We saw that the primary problem of the territorial machine was the
movement from intensity to extensity or the production of a system in
extension out of the intensive full body. As Deleuze and Guattari put it,
94
The system in extension is born of the intensive conditions that make it

possible, but it reacts on them, cancels them, represses them, and allows
them no more than a mythical expression (AO 160). The rule which the
territorial system establishes is the prohibition of incest which forces the
first two syntheses to work together in the fabrication of blocks or segments. These segments represent the externalization of intensity, or
desire outside of itself. It is also worth noticing in this context that three
years prior to the publication of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze described good
sense in The Logic of Sense precisely as agricultural, inseparable from the
agrarian problem, the establishment of enclosures (LS 76; my emphases).
The form of good sense was defined there too as the problem of establishing territories.
(3) Common sense functions as the transcendental object or the object = x. This indeterminate object is nothing more than the despot himself who ensures
both the successful integration of the blocks produced by good sense
into a higher unity and that this distributive operation is consonant
with the great collective designs of this same unity . . . (AO 199).
And further, just as good sense and common sense presuppose one another, so
too do the despotic and territorial machines. Not only does the territorial machine
persist in its entirety in the despotic machine as its foundations, as the content
which the despotic state gives form to (199), but, in the end, one no longer really
knows what comes first, and whether the territorial machine does not in fact presuppose a despotic machine from which it extracts the bricks or that it segments
in turn (210). But what about (4), the subjective form of common sense, which
has a function analogous to the Kantian transcendental unity of apperception?
It seems that this is precisely the function of the next stage of universal history.
After the despotic age, or the form of objective common sense, comes what
Deleuze and Guattari call the age of the Urstaat. They describe this Urstaat as a
principle of reflection (219; my emphasis). It expresses the way in which the despotic state steps outside of history but, in the form of a cerebral ideality or an
abstraction that belongs to another dimension, conditions universal history as
the horizon common to what comes before and what comes after:
Being the common horizon for what comes before and what comes after, it
conditions universal history only provided it is not on the outside, but always
off to the side, the cold monster that represents the way in which history is in
the head, in the brainthe Urstaat. (221)
Or again:
It appears to be set back at a remove from what it transects and from what it
resects, as though it were giving evidence of another dimension, a cerebral
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ideality that is added to, superimposed on the material evolution of societies,

a regulating idea or principle of reflection (terror) that organizes the parts
and flows into a whole. (219)
The Urstaat has a role similar to the transcendental object, the despot, but it
ceases to be explicit, it ceases to be the form specific to a particular set of
concrete bricks and falls behind the scenes, all the while continuing the work
of unification proper to the despotic state.
Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly emphasized that the Urstaat is not an age
closed in on itself, but bears on the entire course of history. It is what unites
history into one process of production. However, it does not only unify what
came beforeterritorialism and despotismbut also what comes after: capitalism. The Urstaat has the peculiar characteristic of underlying the whole
flow of decoded representations (images) which characterize capitalism. The
Urstaat supersects what comes before, but resects the formations that follow (220).18 In other words, it coordinates the entire process. It makes the
forms of good and common sense all parts of the same process and ensures
that what comes after these forms will also belong to this process. The unification the Urstaat performs thus bears on what came before and what comes
after.
Is this not very similar to the way in which Kant described the transcendental unity of apperception? Despite the radical difference in Kant between a
passive intuition (CPR B15354) and an active understanding, the unity of
apperception is what brings all representations, even those of intuition, within
the limits of a consciousness so that the empirical subject can say that these
are my representations (B13233). Even though the entire philosophical context (phenomenology, not idealism) and problem (genesis, not conditioning)
has shifted between Deleuze and Kant, and with it the entire nature of the
concept, the Urstaat seems to perform a function not far from that of the
unity of apperception. The Urstaat, the subjective essence, is that which
steps outside of the process of production in the form of a cerebral ideality,
a principle of reflection, and gathers together what came before and what
came after. The entire genesis is therefore united in this cerebral ideality as its
history. The Urstaat brings the entire process of production within the limits
of a principle of reflection or apperception. If capitalism is the historical age
in which objectities are no longer treated as representative of objective reality,
but only of subjective reality, we can finally see why. The Urstaat brings the
production of objectities firmly within the limits of a subject whose representations they are. In relation to the earlier stages of the genesis, it is a kind of
second-order unity which no longer organizes the concrete as the despotic
state did, but organizes the organization of the concrete. It binds the objectities. It unifies the process itself and thus, in this way, as the subjective form
of common sense, conditions capitalism or the age of infinite subjective representation (AO 222).
96
Capitalism
When we read Vincent Descombess claim that Deleuze was above all a post-Kantian, we have to wonder if Descombes was aware of how accurate this description
was (Descombes 152). Just a superficial glance over the preceding stages of the
process of production will very quickly reveal the deeply Kantian structure of AntiOedipus. I argued in the previous chapter that the three passive syntheses, insofar
as they take up a hyletic data and transform it into a field of intensities, must be read
as a new account of sensibility. As we have seen Deleuze and Guattari themselves
even go so far as to describe the intensities produced in the third synthesis as affections. The Urstaat and Despotism, which function as the transcendental object and
subject, very clearly echo Kants description of the forms of the understanding.
And if, finally, the territorial age is what brings intensity to the understanding by
transforming it into segments which can then be related to the form of the object
and the subject, then undoubtedly, its function is analogous to that of the imagination in Kant. In all of this, however, one thing is missing: reason. As odd as it might
sound, here I want to argue, or at least sketch out an argument, that what Deleuze
and Guattari call capitalism is actually a reformulation of the faculty of reason
from a genetic point of view, and indeed, Anti-Oedipus could then be read as the
realization of Kantianism as a philosophy of genesis. Structurally, then, we could
compare Deleuze and Kant as follows:
Kant
Deleuze
Sensibility
Sensibility:
(1) First synthesis
(2) Second synthesis
(3) Third synthesis: Intensity
Imagination
Territorialism
Understanding
Despotism
Reason
Capitalism
The significant difference between Deleuze and Kantbeyond the obviously

more developed account of receptivity in Deleuzeis that in Deleuze, each
moment of the genesis conditions and produces the one which follows in line
with the genetic and empiricist requirement. In contrast, in Kant, content with
idealism, these faculties are pregiven outside of a genesis. To really articulate
this argument and to show the way in which the Kantian concepts are
transformed when they are forced to function in a process of production rather
than a static conditioning would take up more space than I have, and easily an
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entire book. As a result, for now, I want to leave the argument at the level of a
suggestion, and to further suggest in what immediately follows that capitalism
is the age of reason.
What does capitalism, as the age of infinite subjective representation have in
common with the faculty of Ideas? What does this characterization of
capitalisms objectity as infinite subjective representation mean? Representation is subjective, we have seen, because the Urstaat brings the objective
representations of the earlier stages of history under the form of the subject. They
become the representations of that subject. This introduces a whole new dynamic
into history. All representation up until the Urstaat had been objective. Territorial
objectities were produced by an act of coding. Despotic objectities were
produced by an act of overcoding. When representation becomes subjective,
these objectities are first decoded, but then immediately axiomatized in a process which leads to reterritorialization.19 Representation is subjective in capitalism
because it unfolds in the form of the subject. It is infinite because whenever a
decoded flow appears that cannot be axiomatized, a new axiom is simply added
which is capable of organizing and reterritorializing the aberrant flows: The
strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never
saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones
(250). From this point of view, capitalism is defined by its totalizing function.
There is no flow that can escape its reterritorialization through the axiomatic.
But this is not a blind totalization. Capitalism is defined as the regulation of
this axiomatic. Capitalism merely ensures the regulation of the axiomatic; it
regulates or even organizes the failures of the axiomatic as conditions of the
latters operation; it watches over and directs progress toward a saturation of
the axiomatic and the corresponding widening of the limits (252). In other
words all of the flows are not only totalized, but this aggregation is regulated.
This is exactly how Kant defined the legitimate use of reason and its transcendent ideas in The Critique of Pure Reason.
For Kant, reason forms concepts of which we can have no experience
namely the self, the world, and God. He calls these concepts of reason
transcendent ideas. While it is completely illegitimate to assert the existence of
the objects of these ideas, the idea itself does have an important legitimate function as regulative. The situation which the Deleuzo-Guattarian subject finds itself
in at the end of the age of despotism is very similar to that of the Kantian subject
after it has subsumed the sensible manifold under the forms of the understanding: they both have before them empirical representations of objects. For the
Kantian subject, it is very tempting to begin relating its objects to one another
and forming the idea of a world which would be the totality of all possible
objects. This is precisely the impulse of reason: to systematize. For Kant, to say
that systematic totality of objects actually exists would result in a series of
antinomies. The Idea, however, has an important regulative function: it provides an ideal of unity toward which thought can direct its cognitions. In the
98
same way that the understanding brings unity to the sensible manifold, the Idea
brings unity to the objects determined in the understanding. It attempts to
systematize the objects and discover not merely a contingent aggregate but a
system interconnected in accordance with necessary laws (CPR A646/B674).
This is what happens in capitalism. The subject of despotism only has before it
different objectities which are produced contingently, as the unification of
those affections which have been transformed into intensities and externalized
in territorialism. The subject of capitalism is able to decode these objects and
realign them within an axiomatic, or a system interconnected in accordance
with necessary laws. Capitalism is the regulative idea which attempts to bring
the totality of despotic objectities within its widening limits (AO 252).
Conclusion: Deleuze and Guattari

We can thus see the importance of reading the expression social production
within the Kantian context in which it was first used. To put it somewhat colloquially and within the coordinates of a philosophy alien to Deleuzes, social
just means out there, beyond me, transcendent. Social production is the production of transcendent objects, objectities (this egological terminology is
not foreign to Deleuzesee Pure Immanence). My reading depended entirely on
the formal structure of Anti-Oedipus in relation to The Logic of Sense, but it also
presupposes my following reading of Difference and Repetition where we will see
the Idea of the world reappear at the end of the genesis under the name the
Other. What I hope to have shown in the preceding two chapters is that AntiOedipus and The Logic of Sense share very similar structures. They both begin in
the same place: a field of materiality. They both end in the same place: some
form of representation. And they both traverse the space between matter and
representation in a nearly identical way: three passive syntheses produce a transcendental field which itself produces the forms of good sense, common sense,
and representation. This structural homology needs to be accounted for. There
is a strong thesis and a weak one with which to approach this problem.
A possible weak thesis would say that Deleuze and Guattari are imitating one
of those enlightenment-style investigations into origins in which each moment
of a genealogy is the consequence of the domination of a certain faculty.20 The
fact that any particular faculty still functions within us is what allows us to know
what life was like in earlier times. This thesis would have the advantage of maintaining or justifying much of the language used in the text.
The strong thesis would say, on the other hand, that Deleuze and Guattari are
not speaking of history or of psychoanalysis or of Marx. The entire book represents the development of a systematic phenomenology, and the language of
psychoanalysis and Marxism that the authors employ needs to be rigorously
ignored. The specific contribution of Anti-Oedipus to the two books immediately
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preceding it, which more directly develop this phenomenology, is that it works
out in greater detail the role of the syntheses in the static genesis. Universal history simply expresses the evolution of a representation from its molecular
origins in a hyletic data to its molar destination of a representation within a
horizon of anticipation and recollection. No doubt there is a happy medium
between the two theses, but I want to put forward the strong thesis for two reasons. First and simply because I think things need to be taken this far. Second
because the structural similarity between the earlier two books is astounding,
and its rigor has consequences that need to be explored in much greater detail
before a convincing conclusion can be drawn.
One of the more immediate consequences which arises from this structural
similarity turns on the question of the relation between Deleuze and Guattari
in the composition of Anti-Oedipus and the claim that Anti-Oedipus marks the
beginning of a new period in Deleuzes thought or that it is doing something
radically new. The perceived break between Deleuzes supposedly naive preGuattari work21 and his more enlightened and radical work now seems much
less apparent. Guattaris own comments seem definitive on this point. In that
same journal entry from October 13, 1972, in which he was trying to find himself in the work, he identified exactly what excluded him:
Gilles conquered with ease and even some virtuosity the right to move about
in a relational field that I have been tangled up in for twenty years [. . .]. I still
have no control over this other world of systematic academic work, secret
programming over dozens of years. Keep my penmanship, my style. But I
dont recognize myself in the A.O. I need to stop running behind the image
of Gilles and the polishedness, the perfection that he brought to the most
unlikely book. (AP 402)
It is Deleuzes mastery of the relational field, the way in which he can secretly
program the more or less haphazard and tangled concepts into a polished and
perfected work which prevents Guattari from recognizing himself in AntiOedipus. We find these kinds of comments scattered throughout the Anti-Oedipus
Papers: I want to make an outline this time, but I can tell its going to be a mess
again! (254). Same mess all over again. Im so jealous of your ability to organize
and classify things! (246). In a letter to Deleuze as early as May 1970, he gave a
precise characterization of Deleuzes contribution: When I read you I have the
impression of rediscovering all sorts of powerfully orchestrated refrains that I
have proposed to you [. . .] (411). All of these imagesorchestration, secret
programming, organization, and classificationalongside Guattaris own
chaotic mode of presentationSurfing on the crest of concepts. Quickly
(224)suggest that what is particularly Deleuzian in 1972 about Anti-Oedipus is
its organization.22 Despite the very wide terminological and thematic gap
between The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus it is precisely this organization or
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structure that persists between the two books which defines the similarity
between them. This structure is a genesis of representation in two parts.
A dynamic genesis comprising three passive syntheses begins in the movement
of partial objects and ends in the empty form of time, or intensity = 0. From
here a second, static genesis begins which transforms the product of the first
genesis according to the forms of good sense, common sense, and finally representation. Obviously this is only the first of many books that they would write
together, and the story of Guattaris contribution is much more complex than
this general structure. But the structural similarity between the two books goes
a long way to suggesting that the break was not nearly as dramatic as the terminological shift would make it seem.
This is especially true because Deleuze had already been in the practice of
altering his technical vocabulary between books before Guattari ever came on
the scene. Rather than attempting to show that this structure indeed persists all
the way through their collaborative work to What is Philosophy?, I want to turn
instead to the central text of Deleuzes oeuvre, Difference and Repetition, where
the vocabulary is again significantly different from that used in The Logic of Sense
and hopefully give further consistency to this genesis of representation which I
have been outlining here. I will argue that in Difference and Repetition we find
again the same structure of the genesis that appeared in The Logic of Sense, but
also in a completely different technical vocabulary.
Part III
Introduction to Part III

In the previous two parts of this book, I argued that the two works published
immediately after Difference and Repetition shared almost identical formal
structures, and that they both could be read as developing a story of the genesis of phenomena, of representations, or of objectities. In The Logic of Sense
the world of phenomena is the world of propositions and their relations; in
Anti-Oedipus it was the world of the objectities of social production. Each
book described one very broad genesis which moved from microperceptions
to molar representations. In both books, this larger process of production
was broken down into two smaller processes of production. In The Logic of
Sense the genesis which moved from microperception to sense was called the
dynamic genesis. In Anti-Oedipus, this same process was called desiring-production. In The Logic of Sense, the genesis which moved from sense to
propositions and their three dimensions was called the static genesis. In AntiOedipus, this genesis was called social-production. In both parts I made
frequent reference to Difference and Repetition. In this chapter I want to clarify
those references and explicitly argue that Difference and Repetition also shares
this same general structure and project. The genesis that it describes also
begins in the world of microperception and theorizes the production of the
virtual, or sense. Then, on the foundation of the virtual, a second genesis is
founded which moves from sense to representation. Schematically, the parallel structures of the three books look like this:
The Logic of Sense
Anti-Oedipus
Dynamic genesis
Static genesis
Desiring-production
Social production
Production of time
Differenciation-individuation
But to read Difference and Repetition in this way goes completely against the grain
of current interpretations of the book which read it more or less as a theory
only of the static genesis.1 They emphasize only the virtualunderstood as the
ontological foundation of all realityand its relation to intensity. The entire
purpose of the next two chapters is to justify reading Difference and Repetition
alongside the other two works, and, in particular, this means reading the
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process of differenciation-individuation and the virtual, which this process or

genesis takes as its origin, as founded on the production of time. The virtual
engenders an individuated actualitythere is no question about that. However,
an unindividuated actuality engenders the virtual, and that is what I hope to
capture here.
Chapter 6
Static Genesis: Ideas and Intensity
The notion of the virtual has been subject to a number of debates in recent
years revolving around the question of whether or not, despite Deleuzes avowed
project of thinking Being in its immanence, he actually ended up positing a
transcendent ground to reality. And, indeed, if we abstract the notion of the
virtual from the function it plays within the overall conceptual structure of
Deleuzes thought, it is easy to be sympathetic with Hallwards and Badious
complaints that the virtual sounds a lot like another world, even if we insist that
it is only the other side of this one. If, however, this picture of the virtual as the
other worldly ontological foundation of all that happens in this world is less an
argument that Deleuze makes than it is one which Deleuzes readers have
tended to make, this is because all of these debates are founded on a failure to
take into consideration the underside of virtuality itself. Hallward, who has formulated the most concentrated arguments that the virtual is other-worldly does
in fact realize that Deleuze claims that the virtual is produced by a corporeal
depth (Hallward 43). But for Hallward, Deleuze never explains this process:
You might expect, then, an explanation of how the causal depths determine
these surface effects. Deleuze duly accepts that every event does indeed
emerge from the depth of corporeal causes. However, the general effort of
the book is to complicate if not disrupt the mechanics of this production.
(Hallward 43)
But we have already seen that this is not at all the case. The last third of The Logic
of Sense, in its development of the dynamic genesis, is devoted in its entirety to
just such an explanation. In fact, it is the only part of the genesis that is
presented in a linear fashion. Far from disrupting the mechanics, the account
of dynamic genesis is the most clearly developed part of the entire book. One of
the primary projects of the next two chapters is simply to show that this theory of
the production of virtuality was already well developed in Difference and Repetition. In order to make this argument, however, I have reversed the order of
presentation. Rather than following the course of genesis from the dynamic to
the static, I will begin with the static, with a description of the virtual and the
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genesis which ensues from its foundations. In the next chapter I show how the
virtual is produced in the interaction of the temporal syntheses.
In Difference and Repetition Deleuze defines the virtual as the time in which
transcendental Ideas are progressively determined. The reality of the virtual is
structure, and structure is nothing other than a transcendental Idea (209;
cf. PI 31). In order to understand the virtual then, we need to understand Ideas.
In order to understand Ideas we need to know three things: (1) what Ideas are
in themselves; (2) where they come frombecause Deleuzism could never be
an overturning of Platonism if Ideas were given outside of a genesis; and
(3) where Ideas go, or what their function is in the overall system of thought
developed in Difference and Repetition.
Ideas
We already briefly encountered Ideas in The Logic of Sense. There, as in Difference
and Repetition, they went by many names, the most common of which were
structures, problems, and events. These events populated the transcendental
field of sense and communicated with one another in relation to an aleatory
point. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze, besides using these names, also calls
them virtual or differential multiplicities.1 An Idea is neither one nor multiple, but a multiplicity constituted of differential elements, differential relations
between those elements, and singularities corresponding to those relations
(DR 278; cf. 18183). From this definition, we can identify three aspects of the
Idea which need to be defined for themselves:
1. Differential or ideal elements
2. Differential relations
3. Singularities
These three elements are related to one another through a process of
production which moves from an entirely undetermined Idea to a completely
determined Idea: (1) The Idea begins its life as a completely undetermined
but determinableset of ideal elements. (These ideal elements are precisely
those liberated partial objects which were sublimated or projected onto the
transcendental field in The Logic of Sense.)2 Deleuze consistently attributes several important characteristics to these ideal elements: they are meaningless,
they are functionless, and they are entirely virtual. The elements of the multiplicity must have neither sensible form nor conceptual signification, nor,
therefore, an assignable function. They are not even actually existent, but
inseparable from a potential or a virtuality (DR 183).3 (2) Between these meaningless elements, differential relations are then established by an aleatory
point which begin to give the amorphous set of ideal elements a degree of
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consistency. The determination of these relations represents the beginning of

something recognizable as structure: the ideal elements become caught up
within a network of relations. (3) But it is only when these relations lead to the
production of singularities that the structure is completely determined. One
could say that at this point the Idea has, at last, a relatively permanent and communicable/repeatable form.4 But, at this stage, the Idea still remains purely
virtual, purely quantitative, and purely formal. Deleuze borrows a distinction
from the mathematician Albert Lautman to express this: complete determination bears on singularities only from the point of view of their distribution and
their existence. It takes the entire process of actualization to give these
singularities qualities, or a nature. The completely determined Idea is thus
completely virtual.
In this account of Ideas, it is apparent that the complete notion of a multiplicity comprising the three dimension outlined above is actually a process. We
begin with an inchoate set of ideal elements, establish differential relations between
them, and then singularities corresponding to or dependent upon these relations. This is why Deleuze describes the process of production of Ideas as
progressive determination. To each one of these three moments of the progressive determination of Ideas there corresponds a moment of what Deleuze
calls sufficient reason. Exactly what the Idea is a reason of I will soon discuss.
These three moments are:
1. Determinability
2. Reciprocal determination
3. Complete determination
Each one of these moments expresses a degree of determination characterizing
the Idea. Ideal elements are determinable; differential relations reciprocally
determine these elements; and this leads to a state of complete determination
in which the stable form of an Idea is expressed in singularities. The entire
purpose of this theory of progressive determination is to describe the genesis
of virtual structures. This is, you could say, a third genesis which takes place
between the dynamic and the static.5
Deleuze turns to Galoiss and Abels group theory for a more precise theory
of how a structure might be progressively determined. There are two relevant
quotations which seem to express what Deleuze has in mind:
Starting from a basic field R, successive adjunctions to this field
(R, R, R . . . ) allow a progressively more precise distinction of the roots of
an equation, by the progressive limitation of possible substitutions. There is
thus a succession of partial resolvants or an embedding of groups which
make the solution follow from the very conditions of the problem. (DR180)
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In effect, the reciprocity of determination does not signify a regression, nor a

marking time, but a veritable progression in which the reciprocal terms must
be secured step by step, and the relations themselves established between
them. The completeness of the determination also implies the progressivity
of adjunct fields. In going from A to B and then B to A, we do not arrive back
at the point of departure [. . .] rather the repetition between A and B and B
and A is the progressive tour or description of the whole problematic field.
(DR 210; my emphasis)
On the one hand, Deleuze is very clearly describing here a semi-mathematical
process. Group theory is the theory of how to determine structures. It accomplishes this by first transforming a group and then by asking what changed and
what did not change across the transformation. In Deleuzes first example, the
basic field R was the original group. The successive adjunctions to this field
(R, R, R . . .) are the transformations which allow an invariant to be
abstracted.6 This invariant is the Idea. The determination of groups thus proceeds by creating variations on an original set and abstracting a general structure
from those variations. Despite this mathematical context, I want to insist, however, that for Deleuze mathematics is only an example or a technical model7
for explaining aspects of thought, and further that it is necessary to understand what function this turn to group theory is intended to serve in relation to
what must be understood as an essentially cognitive process. As he says of singularities in his seminar on Leibniz, they are mathematical-psychological. The
same is true of the progressive determination of structure.
At this point we again confront Husserl. Deleuzes description of the progressive determination of the Idea is very similar to what Husserl called imaginative
variation.8 For Husserl, imaginative variation was a way of determining the
essence or the Idea of any given image or experienced objectivity. It accomplishes this by arbitrarily producing in the imagination free variations or
modifications of the image until a unity arises which functions as the general
essence of any given thing. Husserl writes,
by an act of volition we produce free variants, each of which [. . .] occurs in
the subjective mode of the arbitrary. It then becomes evident that a unity
runs through this multiplicity of successive figures, that in such free
variations of an original image, e.g., of a thing, an invariant is necessarily
retained as the necessary general form, without which an object such as this
thing, as an example of its kind, would not be thinkable at all. (E&J 341;
original emphases)
Now, it seems that Deleuze is saying nothing more than this in his appropriation of group theory. What is Deleuze-Abels basic field R but that original
image which is submitted to free variation, and what are the successive
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adjunctions to this field (R, R, R . . . ) if not the variations/transformations

themselves? In both Husserl and Deleuze-Abel, the process has the same end:
the production of an Idea.9 Ricoeur thus describes this process of imaginative
variation precisely as the progressive determination of objectivity (Ricoeur,
Husserl 43).
There are several major differences between Deleuze and Husserl however.
First, what is submitted to variation in Husserl is precisely that objectivity of
receptivity produced in passivity and partially explicated by the active syntheses.
By contrast, in Deleuze, there is not yet a fully constituted objectity. There is
only a field of meaningless ideal elements, or what we called in relation to The
Logic of Sense, liberated affections. This is likely why Deleuze turned to the mathematical example for which the quality of the elements does not matter.
A second major difference is that for Husserl free variation is a volitional and
intermittent practice and pertains only to the higher orders of cognition
whereas for Deleuze, it seems, it is a permanent installment of thought and one
of its most basic structures. This comes out most clearly when Husserl discusses
the relation between free variation and the individual (or the object). Ordinarily
for Husserl the individual object is produced in passivity with a certain degree
of intensity attached to it. This intensity inspires a commitment to the object
on the part of the ego which inhabits the other side of the life world (activity).
But for Husserl free variation is not constrained by this commitment: it is free
(E&J 34344).10 For Deleuze, on the other hand, it seems that this arbitrariness
and this freedom are essential structures of thought and rather than being
independent of intensity, is directly related to it in a complex relationship which
I describe below. Free variation isnt something carried out by a spontaneous
and active ego confronting its affections. It is carried out by the aleatory point,
the apparent subject (AO 330) or the overman (LS 107, 178), as it surveys its
sublimated affections.
But the similarities between Deleuze and Husserl on the genesis of the Idea
are just as strong as the differences, and to see the degree to which they correspond on this point it is necessary to complicate, and in a way, complete the
picture before it is ready to be completed. Husserl points out that there is a
specific kind of temporality implied in the progressivity of determination which
has two characteristics. First, it takes time to move from one variant to another.
And second, as a condition of possibility for this transition from one variant to
the next, the subjective mode of the arbitrary, also implies an ideal of continuity
in which the variants can overlap (E&J 343). The field in which the successive
transformations are made must be continuous.11 These two aspects of temporality which Husserl so clearly describesthe condition of continuity and the time
it takes to imagine variationsare also the two aspects of the temporality that
correspond to two moments of the progressive determination of the virtual.
Here we have to anticipate the conclusions of my next chapter, but doing so will
make much of what follows much clearer.
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The form of continuity or overlapping which provides the condition of

determinabilitythe first aspect of sufficient reasonis nothing more than the
empty form of time (DR 86). It is the ideal synthesis in which the sublimated
affections communicate with one another or resonate under the influence of
the aleatory point. But within this continuity, as the aleatory point traverses the
determinable ideal elements it creates differential relations between them
(19899). This too takes time, and the time that this takes is the time it takes for
the future to become present. For Deleuze, the continuity in which Ideas are
progressively determined has the character of the future. This is because the
future does not refer to those actual presents that are coming my way, but to
the horizon on which the indeterminate becomes progressively determined the
closer it comes to the present. The future is the general element in which the
new takes shape. The time which it takes to progressively determine and then
actualize an Ideawhere to actualize means to make presenttherefore corresponds to the time it takes for time itself to pass (21011). To say that the
indeterminate becomes progressively determined and actualized is to say
nothing more than that the future becomes present. This is why Deleuze says at
one point that creative actualization is the true meaning of time (216). The
process of actualization which we will be examining below is thus the process by
which the future becomes present.12
There are therefore two aspects of time at work in Deleuzes description of
progressive determination: the condition of continuity, and the time of
variation or progressive determination. In this section I wanted to describe the
Idea in itself as an assemblage of elements, relations, and singularities. But the
process by which these three aspects of the Idea relate to one another
progressive determinationalready suggests the other two aspects of the virtual
I outlined at the beginning of this chapter: where Ideas come from and where
they go. They take as their origin and condition the form of determinability,
but their destination is to become present and to pass in time.
Origins of Ideas
Deleuzism could never be an overturning of Platonism if it presupposed Ideas
outside of a genesis. There are two ways to approach the question of the origin
of Ideas, both of which I will follow in this section. If we follow Deleuzes texts,
we see that Ideas find their origin in an ideal game. Every time Deleuze poses
the question of the origin of Ideas in Difference and Repetition he immediately
turns to the metaphor of the game. This game is Deleuzes Nietzschean modification of Mallarms famous throw of the dice.13 Many philosophers and literary
critics of the time had been adjusting Mallarms throw of the dice to their own
theories, and Deleuze is no exception.14 Deleuze describes two kinds of games.
The first is what he describes as the human game, a game which is indistinguishable from the practice of representation (DR 283). Contrary to this game,
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there is an ideal game which conditions the practice of representation, or the

first game. There are thus two games, one human, one inhuman, each with its
own set of rules, but one which comes before and conditions the other. The
first set of rules defines what Deleuze understands by human representation,
empirical thought, propositions of consciousness, cases of solution, and so
forthall of these expressions, I will argue below, are synonymous. The second
set of rules are the rules for an element of pure, impersonal thought in which
Ideas are born and progressively determined. This game defines the future.15
The significance of Deleuzes account of the two kinds of game is not that they
contribute (rather weakly, if at all) to game theory, but that they define the
dynamics of two worlds: the virtual and the actual, the Ideal and the empirical.
The question of genesis is how we get from one set of rules to another, how we
get from Ideas to representations.
In The Logic of Sense Deleuze schematically compares these two types of
games.16 The human game has four characteristics:
(1) It is necessary that in every case a set of rules preexists the playing
of the game, and, when one plays, this set takes on categorical value;
(2) these rules determine hypotheses which divide and apportion chance . . . ;
(3) the hypotheses organize the game according to a plurality of throws
which are really and numerically distinct. Each one of them brings about
a fixed distribution corresponding to one case or another . . . ;
(4) the consequences of the throws range over the alternative victory or
defeat. (LS 5859)
In contrast to these games with which we are familiar, the Ideal game has four
characteristics of its own:
(1) There are no preexisting rules, each move invents its own rules; it bears
upon its own rule.
(2) Far from dividing and apportioning chance in a really distinct number of
throws, all throws affirm chance and endlessly ramify it with each throw.
(3) The throws therefore are not really or numerically distinct. They are
qualitatively distinct, but are the qualitative forms of a single cast which
is ontologically one. [. . .]
(4) Such a gamewithout rules, with neither winner nor loser, without
responsibility, a game of innocence, a caucus-race in which skill and
chance are no longer distinguishableseems to have no reality. [. . .]
(LS 5960)
The first game, as I have said, defines the world of representation. Representations are numerically and really distinct.17 This means that they are discreet,
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external to one another, and have clearly defined limitspartes extra partesso
much so that they appear to have separate substances. They are subject to a set
of preexisting rules which play the role of categories. Whether these are categories of language or of Being does not seem to matter to Deleuze. All that matters
is that representations do not give their own rule but find one outside of themselves. This is why Deleuze characterizes the world of representation as a fixed
or sedentary distribution of singular points: they are distributed in already
defined forms according to preestablished rules.
The second game, however, defines the world of an impersonal thought.
Deleuze says that this Ideal game is the reality of thought itself (LS 60; cf. NP 32),
and indeed, the rules of this game define the dynamics of the metaphysical or
cerebral surface of sensethat is, the virtual. The word thought clearly does not
mean what we ordinarily think of as thinking. Thought here is defined by what we
might call, following Husserls description of the space of free variation, a structure of arbitrariness. Here, contrary to the categories of representation, there are
no rules. The ideal game is defined by chance and the production of rules. And
this production of rules is not arbitrated by some benevolent and wise force which
would guarantee lawfulness and regularity, but by an aleatory point, by pure chance
(DR 284). It is the aleatory point which throws the dice and which causes the relations between elements to become progressively more determined. In the
description of progressive determination above, it is the aleatory point, like the
nomadic subject of the eternal return in Anti-Oedipus, which makes the progressive tour or description of the whole problematic field (210). These characteristics
define the conditions for the production of Ideas outside of the categories or constraints of representation: chance and freedom. (This freedom, we see in the next
chapter, is a consequence of the third synthesis of time.)
This description of thought owes much to Blanchot. For Blanchot, the unread
book is a pure materiality no different from a rock. It is a collection of dead
letters. It has to be read, and in reading it, it is actually produced (Blanchot,
The Space of Literature 193, 197; cf. 23). As I have described in my chapter on
The Logic of Sense this involves a move between two notions of time, Chronos and
Aion: the material time of the unread book is time with a present, Chronos; the
time of the work is time without a present, Aion, the empty form of time. For
Blanchot, the essential condition for an authentic (re)production, and the
condition under which this production ceases to be human, subjective, and
arbitrary, is that the mind must approach the work of art without any expectations and within a structure of arbitrariness. What defines the aesthetic
experience/experiment is that nothing is known in advance.
[R]eading, seeing, hearing the work of art demands more ignorance than
knowledge. It requires a knowledge endowed with an immense ignorance
and a gift which is not given ahead of time, which has each time to be received
and acquired in forgetfulness of it, and also lost. Each painting, each piece of
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music makes us a present of the organ we need to welcome it; each one
gives us the eye and the ear we need to see and hear it. (Blanchot 192)
This quotation has its origins in a quotation of Valry given earlier in the
book:
All his life the true painter seeks painting: the true poet, poetry, etc. For these
are not determined activities. In them one must create the need, the goal, the
means, and even the obstacles. (Blanchot 87)18
In both passages the experience/experiment of the work first presupposes a
completely free field of creativity out of which the work itself is produced each
time for the first time. There are no pregiven categories, and there are no rules.
Nothing is given in advance except for the possibility of anything whatsoever.
Instead of finding its rules outside of itself, each work gives us the rules insofar
as we approach it within this structure of arbitrariness.19 Blanchot thus describes
this open field in which the work can take shape without any extrinsic determination as a genetic field. It represents the wonder of [the works] constant
genesis and the swell of its unfurling (207).
Like Blanchots description of the work of art, the production of Ideas in
Deleuze is not a determined activity. It takes place in an open and free field.
Ideas have their origin in an ideal game, and the only rule of this game is that
nothing is given in advance. There are no rules. Deleuze directly alludes to
Blanchot when he defines this playing field:
If one tries to play this game other than in thought, nothing happens; and if
one tries to produce a result other than a work of art, nothing is produced.
This game is reserved then for thought and art. (LS 60)
Here, the work of art alludes to Blanchots very specific definition of the work.
But, within the context of Difference and Repetition this work of art is the Idea,
and the work of thought is the progressive determination of Ideas. In relation
to Deleuzes description of the ideal game, then, the origin of Ideas is this field
of pure chance and determinability.
Deleuzes ideal game is only one way to approach the question of the origin
of Ideas. But we can also leave the image of the ideal game behind and simply
notice that, as we saw above, the first aspect of sufficient reason is the form of
determinability. Ideas begin as positive indeterminacies or as problems.20
Before differential relations are established, an Idea is simply a set of ideal elements which require determination. The problem is precisely that of their
determination. As Deleuze says in The Logic of Sense, Ideas express the objective
equilibrium of a mind situated in front of the horizon of what happens or what
appears: Is it Richard or William? (LS 57; cf. DR 169). In Difference and
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Repetition this horizon is the form of determinability. What happens or

appears are the ideal elements. The entire activity of pure and free thought is
to make these indeterminacies determinate. It determines the problem, and
then finds a solution which is adequate to the problem. The origin of Ideas
from this point of view is simply the form of determinability or the empty form
of time (cf. DR 276, 8688).
Within this structure of arbitrariness, the immediate origin or cause of Ideas
is the aleatory point (DR 200). It is this point which carries out the calculation
of problems, the determination of differential elements or the singular points
which constitute a structure (198).21 Aleatory points animate ideal problems,
determining their relations and singularities (283). The aleatory point is the
actual agent of determination. It determines differential relations and the singularities which correspond to these relations. The empty form of time as the
condition of the determinability of ideal elements merely makes this determination possible. This is the dual origin of Ideas then: the structure of arbitrariness
which is provided by the empty form of time; and the aleatory point as the
determining agency. Ideas have the empty form of time as their condition and
the aleatory point as their genetic principle. What happens to them then, after
they are produced?
Destination of Ideas
After the course of progressive determination has run its course, we have in
front of us a well-determined Idea in its three dimensions: elements, relations,
singularities. Deleuze uses the vocabulary of differential calculus to introduce a
now well-known distinction between differentiation and differenciation. Differentiation refers to the progressive determination of an Idea in its virtuality. Even
though the Idea is completely determined, it is still completely virtual. As we
saw above, at this point singularities are determined from the point of view of
their distribution and existence within a virtual structure, but not from the
point of view of their nature or the specific quality and extensity that will cover
the Idea. Differenciation, on the other hand, describes the actualization of an
Idea, or the process by which the differentiated Idea takes on an actual existence
and leaves behind its purely virtual origins: What the complete determination
lacks is the whole set of relations belonging to actual existence . . .. There is thus
another part of the object which is determined by actualisation (209; my emphasis).
The process of actualization is therefore the movement from a completely
determined virtual Idea to an actual object. The Idea becomes covered over by
a quality and an extensity, and becomes determined according to its nature.
Differentiation and differenciation are two processes which determine the two
halves, virtual and actual, of any object: in order to designate the integrity or
integrality of the object, Deleuze proposes the complex notion of different/
ciation (209; my emphasis).
115
It is well established in the current literature on Deleuze that actualization is

the movement from virtual to actual, but the relation of this to objects is rarely
elaborated. Indeed, the fact that this is a move between two states of the
objectthe object in the Idea and the actual objectis rarely emphasized,
because more attention is often paid to the examplesmostly biologicalthat
Deleuze uses to describe the process. From the beginning of the Ideas chapter
Deleuze draws a strong correlation between Ideas and things, especially when
he takes the Kantian notion of the Idea out of the supersensible and, following
Kants lead in The Critique of Judgment, puts it at the heart of the sensible in the
form of a positive indeterminacy or as a focus or horizon within perception.22
Following this transposition, I want to suggest here that the Deleuzian Idea is
the form that any concrete object takes before we fully recognize or know what
that object is. In the Idea, the object itself becomes a problem for thought.
Progressive determination would then be nothing more than the progressive
determination of a concrete object of perception.
If we turn to Deleuzes 1968 paper, The Method of Dramatization, this
conflation of the Idea and the object of perception becomes even more clear.
After a short introduction in which Deleuze establishes that his paper will have
two primary functions (both of which make the Idea suitable to functioning in
sensibility)(1) to relate the Idea to the accident, to make it include the inessential, and (2) to give it spatio-temporal coordinateshe abruptly proceeds to
the question what is the characteristic or distinctive trait of a thing in general?
(DI 96; my emphasis). His answer is that
Such a trait is twofold: the quality or qualities which it possesses, the extension
which it occupies. [. . .]. In a word, each thing is at the intersection of a twofold synthesis: a synthesis of qualification or specification, and of partition,
composition or organization. (96).23
Quality and extensity, or a things spatial structure, are thus the two coordinates
of the thing in general. In this analysis of the object, Deleuze is clearly alluding
to the traditional coordinates of sensation: each object has its secondary qualities such as its color, texture or smell, and its primary quality, the way it fills out
extension through its substantial, spatial, and geometrical characteristics.24
The thing or the individual is defined in exactly the same way in Difference
and Repetition: it is a synthesis of quality and extensity. And further, in both
Difference and Repetition and The Method of Dramatization, the specific quality,
and extensity of any given thing are determined by the Idea itself. Quality and
extensity are the two end-points of actualization or differenciation. They represent the destination of Ideas. These two end-points, however, refer back to two
aspects of differentiation, or the progressive determination of Ideas. Differentiation has two aspects of its own, corresponding to the varieties of relations
and to the singular points dependent upon the values of each variety
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(DR 210). It is these two aspects of differentiation which directly determine the
two aspects of actualization: differenciation in turn has two aspects, one concerning the qualities or diverse species which actualize the varieties [of
differential relations], the other concerning number or the distinct parts actualizing the singular points (210). Differential relations are actualized as
qualities. Singularities are actualized as extensities. There is therefore a simple
parallel and direct correspondence between the aspects of the virtual Idea and
of the actual object: virtual relations become actual qualities; virtual singularities
become actual parts. And further, these two aspects are inseparable. There is no
such thing as a quality without a space or form defined by singularities and
there is no such thing as a space which does not have a quality: There is in
general no quality which does not refer to a space defined by the singularities
corresponding to the differential relations incarnated in that quality (210).
At this point, Difference and Repetition seems to confirm Deleuzes description
of the object and its origins in a transcendental Idea in The Method of Dramatization. Each individual object is defined by its occupation of a space and its
specific quality, and these two aspects are directly determined by the objects
Idea. But Difference and Repetition also seems to go beyond the account of the
thing in The Method of Dramatization by adding yet a third characteristic: the
time of the thing. The object receives its duration from the time of progressive
determination (DR 21011 and 21619). I will return to this in more detail
shortly in a discussion of the role of intensity in actualization, but for now we
can see that the complete characterization of the thing in general is that it has
(1) a space, (2) a quality, and (3) a time, and further that these three characteristics have their origins in transcendental Ideas from the point of view of,
respectively, (1) their singularities, (2) their differential relations, and (3) their
time of progressive determination. Because the three characteristics of things
find their immediate origin in the characteristics of Ideas, it is easy to understand why throughout his paper on dramatization Deleuze consistently referred
to the completely virtual or differentiated Idea as the thing in Idea (DI 100).
The virtual Idea is the sufficient reason of any given thing insofar as that thing
is extended, has a quality, and passes in time.
We could also call it more precisely, following Husserl, the sensible schema
or phantasm of the thing. In Husserl, the sensible schema was a purely formal
assemblage of the things space, time, and quality. It is clear, if we consider that
the elements of the Idea determine the time (progressive determination), the
spatial structure or form (singularities), and the quality (relations) of an object,
that the transcendental Idea is nothing more than this sensible schema.
What is differenciated in actualization, then, is the object of sensation. This
suggests an important conclusion regarding Deleuzes relation to science.
Despite the fact that Deleuze used the vocabulary of biology and the example
of differenciation in the egg almost exclusively to describe the process of
actualization, we have to notice that the outcome of this process is not a chicken.
117
What is produced is an object in general with its three correlate aspects: quality,
extensity, and time. The differential relations in the Idea determine the
actual quality of things; the virtual singularities determine actual parts, or
form; and the time of progressive determination determines an objects duration. Deleuze consistently points out that he turns to science only for examples:
The entire Idea is caught up in the mathematico-biological system of different/
ciation. However, mathematics and biology appear here only in the guise of
technical models which allow the exposition of the virtual and processes of
actualization . . .. (DR 22021).25 This is why the art of multiplicities is understood as the art of grasping the Ideas and the problems they incarnate in things,
and of grasping things as incarnations, as cases of solution for the problems of Ideas
(DR 182; my emphases). The description of progressive determination as sufficient reason seems particularly apt from this point of view. Every thing has its
reason which is its Idea.
Ideas and representation

This, however raises an extremely important question. If we have established
that the Idea is actualized in objects, we have yet to establish whether or not this
actuality is, to put it plainly, something pertaining to human thought
representationsor rather to something independent of thoughtthings in
themselvesas many interpretations, and especially the scientistic readings, of
Deleuze seem to suggest. If the Idea is the sufficient reason of the thing, what
sort of thing is this? If we turn to Bergsonism, the answer is quite clear:
it is the actualization (and it alone) that constitutes psychological consciousness (BG
63; my emphasis).26 On Deleuzes reading, Bergsonian actualization is the movement from a transcendental, impersonal unconscious to a psychological and
empirical consciousness that actualization actually creates. The actual describes
psychological consciousness. But Bergson is not Deleuze, and Deleuzes
Bergsonism, even if it is not doctrinal Bergson, is not necessarily a straightforward Deleuze either, so we have to ask whether or not Difference and Repetition
warrants this interpretation as well: the actual object is the representation of an
object for an empirical-psychological-human consciousness. We should note
from the start, however, that this interpretation is already justified by The
Method of Dramatization where Deleuze again quite clearly states that what he
means by the thing in general is specifically the representation of things in general (DI 96; my emphasis). As he says again later in the essay, differenciation
expresses the actualization of these relations and singularities in qualities and
extension, species and parts, as objects of representation (102; my emphasis).
When Deleuze defines the two characteristics of the thing as quality and extensity, he clearly understands these characteristics as applying to representations of
things. It would seem that here, as I argued was the case in Anti-Oedipus, objects
118
are what Husserl called objectivities of receptivity. What does Difference and
Repetition have to say on this point? Are Ideas actualized in representations for
a psychological consciousness or in things themselves?27
While Deleuze does not go to great lengths to emphasize this point in
Difference and Repetition, he does say at least twice that quality and extensity
define not only the end-point of a static genesis, but that they also constitute
the elements of representation (DR 235). The qualities and extensities in
which Ideas are actualized are the developed qualities and extensities of
the perceptual world, of the represented world of perception (281). Just
as in The Method of Dramatization then, quality and extensity are
characteristics not of physical objects independent of consciousness but of
represented objects. Conversely, representation, which as a whole is the element
of knowledge,28 has the same form as objects, so that we can say with Deleuze in
Bergsonism that actualization produces psychological consciousness or what
he calls in Difference and Repetition, the perceptual world. The static genesis
thus endsjust as it did in The Logic of Sensewith the constituted objects of
perception.
This point is further borne out by the numerous synonyms Deleuze uses to
talk about Ideas and their actualization. We have already seen this with his
description of the two types of games: the ideal game, the virtual, conditions the
human game in which representation prevails (DR 283; LS 58ff.). In addition,
Deleuze often describes Ideas as problems and the process of actualization as
the determination of solutions. Deleuze thus writes, whereas differentiation
determines the virtual content of the Idea as a problem, differenciation expresses
the actualization of this virtual and the constitution of solutions (209; my emphasis).
It is clear, first, that these cases of solution are actual (cf. 200), and second that
these actual solutions take the form of propositions: problems give rise to
propositions which give effect to them in the form of answers or cases of
solution (267). Further, just as in The Logic of Sense, these propositions are precisely propositions of consciousness or conscious propositions (267). In other
words, within the context of the problem-solution metaphor, the problem corresponds to the virtual Idea, and the solution in which that Idea is actualized
constitutes a proposition of consciousness. As in Bergsonism, actualization, or
the determination of solutions constitutes consciousness, and the solutions
populating consciousness are determinate pieces of knowledge.29 The expressions actual, solution, representation, quality/extensity, the perceptual
world all define the inhabitants of the world of representation, the rules and
regulations of which are defined by the human game. There can be no question
about it: the actual is an empirical and human actual. Actualization is the process
which leads from the virtual Idea to the representation of a thing in an empirical
consciousness. We can now see the truth of an early definition of the Idea as
the structure of phenomena as such (47; cf. 182; my emphasis).30 The theory of
actualization is thus a theory of the genesis of phenomena.
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The legitimate use of representation

We are now in a position to understand the major project of Difference and
Repetition: the determination of the legitimate and illegitimate uses of representation. This project touches on an almost (late) Husserlian epistemology in
which what is known takes its apodicity from its process of production.31 For
Deleuze, as we have just seen, in order for us to know something, it has to be
represented in consciousness (representation as a whole is the element of
knowledge). But in The Logic of Sense Deleuze distinguishes between two kinds
of representations: dead or senseless representations, and living representations. Dead representations are detached from their process of production.
Living representations are attached to their process of production by virtue of
an expression, a problem, a sense, or an Idea (these terms are synonymous) that the representation envelops and which is its sufficient reason.
Deleuze writes in The Logic of Sense that two types of knowledge have often been
distinguished, one indifferent remaining external to its object, and the other
concrete, seeking its object wherever it is (LS 146). These two types of knowledge are the two types of representation, dead and living. One empty and
external to its object; the other concrete and which comes undone when its
object escapes it. Deleuze continues by saying that, Representation attains this
topical ideal only by means of the hidden expression which it encompasses, that
is, by means of the event it envelops. There is thus a use of representation
without which representation would remain lifeless and senseless (LS 146;
my emphasis). This is the legitimate use of representation. The representation
is linked to its concrete, life-giving, conditions of production through the event
or Idea. As we saw above, the Idea fills this role by acting as a sort of transcendental object, and is, in fact, often simply called the object in the Idea or the
virtual half of the object.
It is under this condition alone, Deleuze repeatedly claims, that representation
can have any truth.: In every respect, truth is a matter of production, not of
adequation (DR 154); Sense is the genesis or the production of the true, and
truth is only the empirical result of sense (154); The problem or sense is at
once both the site of an originary truth and the genesis of a derived truth
(159). 32 In every instance truth is a matter of production. The condition of
apodicity is the immediacy of genesis, an immediacy guaranteed by sense or
the Idea. In order for knowledge to have truth, or, to put it another way,
in order for representation to have a legitimate use, it has to reach the point
at which it envelops its cause in the form of an event; representation, when
it does not reach this point remains only a dead letter confronting that which it
represents, and stupid in its representiveness (LS 146).
This attempt to establish a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate
uses of representation seems to be the ultimate aim of Difference and Repetition,
and perhaps of Deleuzes philosophy in this middle period as a whole. Our
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experience of difference is not dependent on representations external to one

another. Difference is not something between discreet identities, or, as Deleuze
puts it, difference does not turn around representation, but rather representation, insofar as it finds its genetic principle in difference, turns around
difference. This reversal is not merely speculative but eminently practical,
since it defines the conditions of the legitimate use of the words identical and
similar . . . (DR 301; cf. DR 4041, 57, 11617). Representation is legitimate
insofar as it is tied to its process of production. The process of production which
ends in the production of representation goes by many names: static genesis,
social production, actualization, differenciation, and, as we will see, individuation. But in all of these cases, we understand that it is the point of view of
genesis which links difference and representation. This genesis begins in the
empty form of time rather than in the dispersion of the material object in movement (as in the dynamic genesis of Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense) and ends
in the representation of things in general for a human consciousness. It is thus
a static rather than a dynamic genesis.
The origin and destination of Ideas

I wanted to establish two things in the first part of this chapter: (1) that the
destination of Ideas is representation in a human consciousness, and (2) that
Ideas have their origin in the form of determinability. Both this origin and this
destination are clearly expressed in the following quotation:
Upon precisely what ground, however, is this multiple reason [i.e. sufficient
reason as progressive determination] engendered and played out; in what
unreason is it submerged, and from what new type of game or lottery does it
draw its singularities and its distributions . . .? In short, sufficient reason or the
ground is strangely bent: on the one hand, it leans toward what it grounds,
towards the forms of representation; on the other hand, it turns and plunges
into a groundlessness which resists all forms and cannot be represented.
(DR 27475; original emphasis)
Ideas exist in the space between the groundlessness of the empty form of time
and the representations in human consciousness which they produce. But
despite all of this there are still two important questions that need to be
answered. First of all, we need to know by what mechanism Ideas come to be
actualized. We have not yet said what takes them out of their virtuality and
places them into an actuality in which they can form legitimate representations.
Second, we need to find out whether or not this empty form of time and the
unreason in which Ideas are submerged is produced or if it is simply given.
To answer the first questionhow do Ideas become actualized?we have to
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turn to the process of individuation: Individuation ensures the embedding of

the two dissimilar halves of the object or thing, virtual and actual (DR 280).
The second question requires a chapter of its own.
Individuation33
There is a tendency to confuse intensity, or difference in itself, with the virtual.
This is because the virtual has become a catch-all phrase which encompasses all
of the more tumultuous Deleuzian concepts. But Deleuze very clearly distinguished between the two. An intensity, for example is a type of relation which is
different from a differential relation and which belongs to a completely different realm than the virtual (DR 244). This is because in relation to the static
genesis which concerns us here, intensities and Ideas follow two different processes even if these processes are intimately related. Intensities and Ideas are
both subject to a genesis which puts them outside of themselves by pushing
them into the world of representation. But this is a complex genesis which comprises two distinct processes. Ideas are actualized, differenciated, or solved.34
Intensities are individuated, explicated, or cancelled. Deleuze therefore
insists that these two cannot be confused and that any confusion compromises
the whole philosophy of difference (318).
Their difference from one another is complex, but what I want to suggest in
the remainder of this chapter is that in the final analysis the distance between
them comes back to the different dimensions of time to which they belong.
Intensity and its process, individuation, belongs to the present. As in AntiOedipus, intensity expresses the degree to which we are affected in an immediate
present. Ideas and their process coexist in a future understood as the transcendental element in which the new is progressively determined. This was the
realm of sense described in The Logic of Sense in which we make sense of our
affections. Whereas intensity and individuation seem concerned only with the
immediate present, the process of actualization borders the divide between
future and present and represents the way in which Ideas leave their home in
the future and become present. If the passage of time is from a virtual future to
an actual present (21011, 216), there must be a point at which virtuality meets
up with the present of intensity. This meeting is what the process of individuation describes.35 It is from this point of view that Deleuze describes the
asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible as a continuation of the reciprocal
synthesis of the Idea: it continues the Idea into the present (244). In the static
genesis these two dimensions of time are united. We will come back to this.
Intensity expresses an environmental present. As representative of the
present, intensity takes on many of its specific functions in relation to the order
of genesis. Its primary function is to select the Ideas which are to be actualized
in intuition (231). It does so according to the requirements of a specific
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environment. But this immediate present environment before any sense can be
made of it must itself be understood as a field of intensities. Deleuze says that
A living being is not only defined genetically, that is to say, by its DNA or the
Idea which it envelops, but also ecologically, by its relation to an environment
or to the outside (216). Earlier in the book he had said much the same thing:
The genesis of development in organisms must therefore be understood as
the actualization of an essence, in accordance with reasons and at speeds determined by the environment, with accelerations and interruptions, but
independently of any transformist passage from one actual term to another.
(DR 185; my emphasis)
If we transpose this metaphor back to the register of thought, the essence
which is actualized is the Idea. The environment which determines the reasons and speeds which control the actualization of that essence is expressed
in thought as a flux of intensity. In both quotations, the specific role of intensity
in relation to Ideas is to select an Idea according to the dynamics of the environment in which it is to be actualized. Actualization is always accomplished
according to reasons determined by the environment at hand.
Intensities do not actively select Ideas to be actualized. It is not as though
there were an element of volition or intelligence involved. Selection is passive.
Here we should be sensitive to the way Deleuze merges two traditional understandings of intensity: (1) intensity as the senseless flux of corporeal materiality
which affects our body, and (2) intensity as the expression of a quantity of affection, a quantity which engages the attention of the ego and provokes a
commitment on its part. In both senses, as we saw in Anti-Oedipus, the notion of
intensity is indistinguishable from affection. In the first, it expresses what affects
us in our environment. Ultimately, this sense relates back to Freuds metapsychology where each excitation takes the form of an influx of nervous energy
which must be bound or canceled in order for the ego to live under the rule
of the pleasure principle.36 Although Freud never used the word intensity, the
energetic metaphor within which he was working, makes the association clear.37
In its second sense as a principle of selection, however, it takes on its Husserlian
definition as that which inspires the active egos commitment to one object over
the other. It expresses the comparative influence which objects exert and the
way that an objects quantity of excitation competes for our attention with
other passively produced objects. Although it does not affect an active ego in
Deleuze as it does in Husserl, it does have a significant role in the selection of
Ideas (which define the faculty of pure thought (DR 192)).
These two aspects of the expression intensity and the role intensity plays in
the selection of Ideas becomes clear in Deleuzes example of the role of intensity
in biological individuation. The protoplasm of the egg provides an intensive
environmenta present circumstanceaccording to which Ideas are selected
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and in which they are actualized. This environment selects, it would seem, in a
completely passive way, and entirely according to a law of the greatest intensity.
Deleuze writes,
An intensity forming a wave of variation throughout the protoplasm distributes its difference along the axes and from one pole to another. The region of
maximal activity is the first to come into play, exercising a dominant influence on
the development of the corresponding parts at a lower rate: the individual in
the egg is a genuine descent, going from the highest to the lowest and affirming the differences which comprise it and in which it falls. (DR 250;
my emphasis)38
Within the protoplasmthe intensive environmentthere are differing
degrees of intensity. It is the region of maximal activity, or of the greatest
intensity, is the first to come into play while regions of a lower intensity become
individuated later. As Deleuze said earlier in Difference and Repetition, there is an
ethics of intensity in which each difference is affirmed, beginning with the
highest, but always moving all the way to the lowest (DR 23435). If we transpose this biological example to the register of cognition, it is clear that the
higher the intensity, the more likely that region is to be selected and
actualized.
This is why it often seems that intensity is the most important factor in genesis
and that it has all of the important roles and characteristics. Not only does
Deleuze saybecause intensity is the environment to be individuatedthat it
is what creates the actual quality and extensity which the Idea differenciates and
gives sense to; it is also what determines one Idea or another to be actualized; it
is what initiates genesis in the first place; and it is what governs the course of
both differenciation and individuation. Individuation is the act by which intensity determines differential relations to become actualized, along the lines
of differenciation and within the qualities and extensities it creates (DR 246;
my emphases). In this, as in many other passages, intensity clearly has the directive role.39 It is tempting to see the influence of Bergson here: in Deleuze, as in
Bergson, it is the law of life is activity. All thought is directed toward the present
defined as an intensive environment.40
Deleuze even goes so far as to say that Individuation precedes differenciation in principle (DR 247). But what this passage does not say is that intensity
precedes differentiation as well. In fact the opposite is the case. Intensities
presuppose and express only differential relations; individuals presuppose only
Ideas (252; my emphasis; cf. 246, 277). This has two important consequences,
one general and one specific in relation to the problem at hand (the relationship between Ideas and intensities in the static genesis). Generally, this means
that difference in itself is far from primary in the order of genesis. It clearly
presupposes and expresses the differential relations and singularities of the
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already completely determined Idea. Deleuze often expresses this by saying that
intensity is something which pertains to the individual whereas the virtual is
beyond and prior to the individual (the pre-individual field is a virtual-ideal
field (246)). Deleuze insists on this point. Only the virtual is impersonal and
preindividual.41
What this suggests is that there is an important discursivity between Ideas and
intensities. Ideas are the DNA of genesis. Intensity can inspire and govern the
static genesis, but this genesis will go nowhere or turn in circles without the Idea
which differenciates what is to be individuated and gives it a sense. At the same
time however, Ideas are purely formal: once the relations and singularities are
determined, ideal elements drop out of the picture in favor of the sensible schema.
Determined Ideas have no content, but only the program or schema for a content.
Without an intensity to take them out of their virtuality they remain a lifeless sensible schema. The discursivity between these two concepts, and the problem of
their relation, therefore takes a form very similar to that between concepts and
intuition in Kant, so much so that one could say that without intensity the Idea is
empty; but without the Idea, intensity is blind. This discursivity is not so much the
consequence of a static formalism, however, but follows directly from the two
dimensions of time which separate intensity and Ideas.42 The present remains a
senseless flux of intensity without Ideas, but the future remains a lifeless possibility
(rather than a virtuality) if it doesnt plug into intensity.
The way in which Ideas and intensities presuppose one another becomes
clearer when Deleuze lays out what he calls the order of reasons: differentiationindividuationdramatizationdifferenciation (251). If we follow this
order, the way in which things unfold in the static genesis would be as follows.
First, the Idea is completely determined in the future ((1) differentiation). This
makes possible the (2) individuation of the present, but only insofar as spatiotemporal dynamisms, which simultaneously express both Ideas and intensities,
(3) dramatize an Idea in the immediate present. Through this process of
dramatization, the Idea (4) differenciates and gives sense to the present object
which then takes the form of a represented individual (extensity + quality). This
series of relations is relatively clear, and every term has been discussed except
for spatio-temporal dynamisms and the dramatization they enact.
The concepts of spatio-temporal dynamism and dramatization are rather
straightforward in theory. Spatio-temporal dynamisms are the differenciating
agencies (214). This means that they have the specific function of actualizing an
Idea in an intensive present which that Idea differenciates. A spatio-temporal
dynamism can accomplish this task because, on the one hand, it immediately
incarnates the differential relations, the singularities and the progressivities immanent in the Idea (219). On the other hand, it expresses differing degrees of
intensity (118, 215).43 It therefore inhabits the border of the future and the
present, of Ideas and intensities, and acts as the link between them both. For this
reason Deleuze compares them to Kants schemata. In Kant, the schemata were
125
able, by means of a hidden art in the depths of the human soul,44 to determine
intuitiondefined by the forms of space and timeaccording to the form of a
concept. Similarly, in Deleuze, the spatio-temporal dynamism, as its name implies,
is a dynamism of space and time. It agitates a space and a time (DI 96). But
instead of agitating the forms of intuition according to the concept, it agitates an
unindividuated intensive field according to the relations, singularities, and progressivities of an Idea. From its privileged position as the simultaneous expression
of intensities and Ideas, it create[s] a space and a time particular to that which is
actualized (DR 214; my emphasis). The spatio-temporal dynamisms agitation of
this intensive field is far from an arbitrary agitation. It agitates according to the
schema of the Idea. Space and time, extensity and duration, are always particular
to that which is actualized or to the Idea.
The function of these dynamisms is therefore to individuate the present
according to the sensible schema determined in the Idea. By itself the present
is a meaningless flux of intensity, but by incarnating the three dimensions of
Ideas, the dynamisms cut out a space and a time which makes the present into
an actual thing for an empirical sensibility always turned toward the activity
of the present. In this way, the present becomes differenciated and takes on a
sense. It becomes an individual object with determinate qualities and welldefined limits (extensity) which passes in the time of representation. The
metaphor of dramatization is thus clear: the spatio-temporal dynamism is the
actor, and the Idea is its role. The dynamism moves about in an unindividuated
present, but always according to the role that it is charged with playing.
Finally, not only does this asymmetrical synthesis of the virtual Idea and the
actual intensity individuate a represented object, it also causes that present to
pass within representation. In order to individuate this present, we have seen,
intensities have to express Ideas, and conversely Ideas give shape to the
present. But by expressing Ideas, intensity also forces them to become present.
When Ideas are expressed by intensities they move into a new dimension of
time: the individuated present which passes.
Intensity or difference in itself [. . .] expresses differential relations and their
corresponding distinctive points. It introduces a new type of distinction into
these relations and between Ideas a new type of distinction. Hence forward,
the Ideas, relations, variations in those relations and the distinctive points are
in a sense separated: instead of coexisting, they enter into states of simultaneity or
succession. (DR 252; my emphasis)
Intensity separates Ideas and causes them to succeed one another or pass in
time. This then is the sense of the process of individuation: an unindividuated
present becomes differenciated by the Idea at the same time that an indeterminate future separated from its surrounding Ideas and pulled into the present.
This present which is produced in this process is nothing more than the given,
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the represented object endowed with a determinate quality, extensity, and duration, and which passes in an empirical sensibility or the represented world of
perception.45 The difference between the two processes of individuation and
actualization can therefore be precisely stated by saying that individuation pertains to the present whereas actualization goes from future to present.
Conclusion
What I wanted to show in this chapter was that the entire process of individuation-actualization required two distinct dimensions in order to take place.
It requires first of all the virtual or the space in which Ideas as the sensible
schema of things were progressively determined. It required second of all an
intensive spatium in which intensities were able to focus on the differential relations and singularities of transcendental Ideas. But from the point of view of
genesis one inevitably has to ask: where do these three elements themselves
come from? From the point of view of intensity, in Anti-Oedipus we saw that
those intensities constitutive of thought were produced in the third passive synthesis of desiring-production. From the point of view of Ideas, I argued above
that the virtual of Difference and Repetition was another way of talking about
sense and Aion. In The Logic of Sense we saw that the essential characteristic of
sense was that it was produced in a dynamic genesis, which I argued was repeated
in Anti-Oedipus. Everything points to the interpretation that the virtual is
produced through the passive syntheses of time which Deleuze describes in the
second chapter of Difference and Repetition. It is to these syntheses that we
now turn.
Chapter 7
Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time
This chapter deals almost entirely with the second chapter of Difference and
Repetition. At the end of the last chapter I had argued that the static genesis in
Difference and Repetition was composed of two separate geneses which worked
side by side: actualization, which moved from the future to the present, and
individuation which remained in the present and moved from a less-developed
present to a more developed present. There were thus two distinct elements
that needed to be accounted for genetically: (1) intensities and (2) Ideas.
Neither of these are given. Both are subject to a genesis. In the previous two
parts of this book we have seen how the two works published immediately after
Difference and Repetition theorized the genesis of both intensities and Ideas.
(1) Anti-Oedipus unambiguously argued that intensity was produced as the
expression of relations of attraction and repulsion between the body without
organs and partial objects across the three passive syntheses of a transcendental
unconscious. The third passive synthesis of consumption measured the repulsion of the first synthesis against the attraction of the second and determined
intensities as expressions of this relation between a body without organs and
partial objects. A primary aim of this chapter is to show that this theory of the
production of intensity is described in Difference and Repetition as well. (2) In The
Logic of Sense, Deleuze described the way in which a dynamic genesis produced
both sense or a virtual field of determinability and an aleatory point which
traversed this transcendental field. In both Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense
then, intensities and Ideas are produced as the effect of a regime of passive
syntheses. The constitution of time in Difference and Repetition, which ends with
the production of the empty form of time and the eternal returnand therefore of the virtualI argue below is the correlate of both the dynamic genesis
of The Logic of Sense and the process of desiring-production in Anti-Oedipus.
Deleuze gives three different accounts of the passive syntheses in the second
chapter of Difference and Repetition, and each one of these accounts makes use of
different technical vocabularies which it is necessary to distinguish from the
start, even if they all say essentially the same thing. The first makes use of a traditional philosophical vocabulary. The second unfolds in the language of
psychoanalysis. The third is in the language of physics. In order to distinguish
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between them then I will call them simply the philosophical account (DR
7096), the psychoanalytic account (96116), and the physical account
(11626).1
In general and at the outset we can say that there are at least five syntheses
which are described in this chapter. However only three of them are properly
passive and sub-representative and play a role in the transcendental production
of time. The other two are active and play a role in the empirical representation
of time.2 Of the three passive syntheses, the first is Habit; the second is
Mnemosyne; and the third is Thanatos. Together these three passive syntheses
constitute the unconscious.3 But unlike the passive syntheses constituting the
transcendental unconscious of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze says that these three syntheses produce time. The first produces the present, the second, the past, and
the third, the future. Because they are transcendental syntheses, they do not
produce past, present, and future moments, but the dimensions of time themselves. They produce the present in general, the past in general, and the future
in general understood as the elements in which any representation can be
empirically known as past, present, or future.
In addition to the three passive syntheses, then, there are at least two active
syntheses: memory, which reproduces a past present, and understanding, which
reflects a present present (DR 8081). From the point of view of the active syntheses, present means representation, and, reciprocally, representation
means the present which passes.4 These presents which are reproduced and
reflected in an empirical memory and an empirical understanding are the very
representations for human consciousness that we encountered at the end of
both The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus as well as in the conclusion to the static
genesis of Difference and Repetition which I described in my previous chapter.
Now, however, these representations are described from the point of view of
their temporality. (As Deleuze says in this chapter, the active syntheses are
for-us (DR 71, 76.) These two active syntheses operate in the world of representation whereas the passive syntheses are entirely sub-representative.
One of the central problems of this chapter revolves around the question of
the order in which the syntheses operate. Unlike the account of the passive
syntheses in Anti-Oedipus, in Difference and Repetition Deleuze does not always
give a linear account along the lines of a genesis, and at one point he even suggests that the third synthesis is the ground of the first two, that it comes before
them and distributes its difference to them.5 Rather than giving a linear account
of the syntheses he discusses the passive and sub-representative syntheses in
direct relation to the active and representative syntheses.6 This is why the chapter often reads, as James Williams has pointed out, like a transcendental
deduction.7 The structure of the argument in the first, philosophical account of
the syntheses runs as follows: (1) Deleuze begins with the first passive synthesis,
then immediately proceeds to the active synthesis founded on top of this;
(2) he then says that this active synthesis would not be possible unless it were
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founded on a second passive synthesis; (3) he then describes this second

synthesis, but always in relation to the active syntheses founded on top of it;
(4) he then says that this passive synthesis, along with the first, gets caught in a
closed circularity, and thus requires a third synthesis which would keep representation open in principle and condition the production of the new. The
argument only progresses by explaining each passive synthesis as the condition
of a representative synthesis which is incompletely founded on the previous
passive synthesis. In Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense however each synthesis
depended on the previous and engendered the next without recourse to representation. In this first account of Difference and Repetition we can only get from
the first synthesis to the second by taking a detour through representation.
Each synthesis appears as a transcendental condition of representation.
However, there are two reasons why I think the syntheses in Difference and Repetition need to be read in a linear fashion. The first comes from Deleuzes general
overview of the system in his brief description of a doctrine of the faculties.
Everything begins with the transcendental sensibility I described in my previous
chapter. This sensibility encounters fragmented objects in the form of
intensities (144) or excitations (96). Sensibility then transmits its constraint
imagination, which transmits its constraint to the memory, which finally transmits its constraint to thought (144). These three faculties which follow on the
heels of sensibilityimagination, memory, and thoughtare precisely the faculties involved in each passive synthesis. In fact we could describe each passive
synthesis as the transcendental exercise of a particular faculty. Habit is the
transcendental employment of the imagination; Eros is the transcendental
employment of Memory; and Thanatos is the transcendental employment of
thought. What is important here, however, is that Deleuze not only reads all three
of these syntheses as operating well below the radar of representation of active
syntheses so that the emphasis on representation in the philosophical account of
the syntheses is purely a function of its presentationbut also that Deleuze clearly
sees this communication unfolding as a series with a specific order: There is
indeed a serial connection between the faculties and an order in that series
(145). Beyond this philosophical account, the two other accounts of the syntheses in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition also insist on the order
highlighted in the doctrine of the faculties. I will therefore follow this order,
beginning with a description of the fragmented object given to transcendental
sensibility, then showing its synthesis in the imagination, memory, and thought.
The rule of discontinuity and originary subjectivity

Perhaps the most important aspect of Deleuzes theory of time, but also one of
the more difficult to characterize by sticking to Difference and Repetition alone, is
its beginning. In the philosophical account of the syntheses he calls this beginning
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repetition in-itself. There are many different and almost unrelated senses of
the word repetition at work in this chapter. In this particular expression, repetition is something that describes a material object which is subjected to a rule
of discontinuity. The rule of discontinuity or instantaneity in repetition tells
us that one instance does not appear unless the other has disappeared . . . (70).
Even though Deleuze will say that, as a consequence of this discontinuity, there
is no such thing as repetition in-itselfrepetition requires a connection between
instants in order to existhe still makes significant use of this notion. He often
does so, however, under the guise of a different name: material repetition.
Repetition in-itself is material because the rule of discontinuity bears on
objects. It characterizes repetition in the object (71). Nominally, this notion of
a material or bare repetition refers back to the first chapter where it was
intended to express what we understand by repetition in our ordinary everyday usage of the word: two or more identical instances separated in time but
still affirmed as identical. But in this chapter Deleuze has transposed the notion
of material repetition to an entirely different register. Here it no longer refers
to represented identities which function in judgments. Rather, it describes the
way in which a fragmented object appears to a transcendental sensibility.
Several things make this transposition clear. First of all, in the introduction to
Difference and Repetition, material repetition depended on the form of representation and required a rather traditional distribution of identity and difference.
In this chapter, however, material repetition is sub-representative, unrepresentable, and unthinkable.8 In the conclusion of Difference and Repetition Deleuze
even goes so far as to suggest that it is precisely in order to represent this
unthinkable repetition that the regime of passive syntheses are employed (286).
It therefore functions in a realm entirely antecedent to that of scientific judgment. Second, if we turn to the psychoanalytic account of the syntheses, we see
that the position of material repetition in relation to the passive syntheses is
now filled by excitations which are understood precisely as those differences
in intensity which are apprehended by a transcendental sensibility (96). Again,
here material repetition describes the world of bodily affection and not that of
empirical representation. Third, and finally by anticipating the analysis to
come, we can recognize here the starting point of both Anti-Oedipus and
The Logic of Sense. In Anti-Oedipus, everything began in a world of microperceptions described as a multiplicity of partial objects or microperceptions whose
only relation was the absolute lack of relation. In Difference and Repetition the
expressions the rule of discontinuity, repetition in the object, or material
repetition, all express nothing more that this absence of relations between
fragments of the objects which affect our body. Material repetition and its correlate in the psychoanalytic accountexcitationsdefine the hyletic data on
which the syntheses operate. It refers to the material content of a transcendental sensibility.
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This discontinuity which divides the object into a succession of instants might
seem a lot like timewhat is time if not a succession of instants?but it is not.
Time requires a synthesis.
A succession of instants does not constitute time any more than it causes it to
disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth. Time is
constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of
instants. This synthesis contracts the successive independent instants into one
another, thereby constituting the lived, or living, present. It is in this present
that time is deployed [se dploie]. (70/97; my emphases)
The first synthesis of time operates on the repetition of instants and thus produces what Deleuze calls, following Husserl, the living present. It does so by
gathering together, or contracting, the successive instants of the material repetition. This living present is not time as such, but the general element in which
time itself will unfold or spread out across the other two passive syntheses and
the static genesis founded on top of them. All of this is discussed below. To
make sense of this claim that time requires a synthesis and cannot be a succession of instants it is helpful to turn to Bergson.
Many philosophies of time begin by describing the impossibility of finding
time in a succession of instantsmost notably Bergsons.9 Indeed Deleuze
repeats here, almost verbatim, some of Bergsons arguments from the third
chapter of Duration and Simultaneity. In Duration and Simultaneity, as in Creative
Evolution, Bergson insisted on the impossibility of time existing without memory. For Bergson, it is impossible to think of time as a succession of separate
instants because time is what happens between two instants. To think time and
not just snapshots of instants requires a bridge between the two instants. And
this requires that we insert an impersonal or non-anthropomorphic consciousness between the successive instants. 10
Without an elementary memory that connects the two moments, there will only
be the one or the other, consequently a single instant, no before, no after, no
succession, no time. We can bestow on this memory just what is needed to make
the connection; it will be, if we like, this very connection, a mere continuing of the
before into the immediate after with a perpetually renewed forgetfulness of
what is not the immediately prior moment. (Duration and Simultaneity 48)
Deleuze is clearly echoing Bergsons arguments when he says that time can not
be constituted by a succession of instants but only by an originary synthesis. But
Deleuze follows Bergson even further. Bergson suggests here that, at the very
least, the constitution of time requires an impersonal memory which is itself
nothing more than the contraction of two instants. Deleuze too institutes at this
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point an originary subjectivity which actually carries out the synthesis. In order
for the first synthesis to take place, there must be an originary subjectivity,
a contemplative soul, or a spontaneous imagination which acts as the synthesizing agent (70; cf. 286). These contemplative souls, like Bergsons
nonanthropomorphic memory, are nothing more than the connection they
bring about or the instants they contract.11 Synthesis moves us from the order
of the fragmented object to that of the subject. Time is subjective, but in relation to the subjectivity of a passive subject (71)12
The object given to sensibility, the material repetition understood as the
unraveling of an object in an unrepresentable13 and unthinkable temporality,
has two characteristics: (1) it is material, and (2) it is discontinuous or fragmented. We can thus see the relationship with the starting point of
desiring-production in Anti-Oedipus where the ultimate elements of the unconscious were both material and lacking any relation to one another. They formed
a molecular multiplicity in positive dispersion. I will discuss the first synthesis
and the subjectivity it implies in more detail below, but I want to insist on this
essential starting point: in Deleuze time begins with the experience of an object. It
does not begin with a purely formal synthesis, or with Being temporalizing
itself, or with an empty form awaiting schematization. It begins with the direct
experience of a fragmented materiality subject to the rule of discontinuity.
Synthesis of the imagination: Habit

These two characteristics of the givenits materiality and discontinuityrelate
directly to the two significant characteristics of the contemplative soul or
spontaneous imagination which contemplates and synthesizes the discontinuous fragments. (1) In relation to the materiality of the object, the contemplative
soul appears as an originary intentionality; it contemplates the fragmented
objects, and it is the object it contemplates. (2) In relation to the dispersion of
the object in a succession of unrelated instants, the contemplative soul is subject to a natural contractile range; it can only hold so much within its grasp.
Both of these characteristics are encompassed in the expression contracting
contemplation. The soul is a mind which contemplates the material repetition.
It intends its object. In contemplating it however, it runs though it and gathers
together the successive instants of material repetition into one thought
(DR 74).14 This gathering together is a contraction. Contraction refers to the
fusion of that repetition in the contemplating mind (74; my emphasis).15 We
can therefore distinguish three senses of the word synthesis in Deleuzes
description of the act at this stage of the genesis. (1) Synthesis is a contemplation. It takes something as its object. (2) Synthesis is a contraction. It runs
through and gathers together whatever it is that it contemplates. (3) But it is
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also, importantly, an identification of the contemplating and contracting ego

with that which it synthesizes. The ego is what it contemplates and contracts.
The third aspect is one of the most important at this early stage of the genesis. This first synthesis is a synthesis of the object which discontinuity has
divided. However, this synthesis is less a first step toward the unity of the
object than it is a confusion of the synthesizing subject with the discontinuous object. In the first synthesis the contemplative soul comes into possession
of its object: it contracts all the instants which separate us from [the object
of contemplation] into a living present (77). This is a complex sentence.
First, it repeats that the synthesis is a contraction of instants. But second, it
also positions the soul in relation to these instants. Before the synthesis it is
just one instant among others. But through the synthesis itself, the ego and
all of the instants are brought together in a living present which is as much
objective as it is subjective. The mind is not on one side and the object on the
other. The mind is nothing more than what it contemplates. This is why
Deleuze says that the mind is what it has, being is having (79). Conversely,
the mind itself comes undone once its object escapes (79). At this point in
the genesis, in the language of Anti-Oedipus, desire and the social are completely mixed in a molecular multiplicity.
Deleuze repeats this unity of subject and object several times in each of the
three formulations of the passive syntheses: the mind that contemplates is indistinguishable from what it contemplates: the eye binds light, it is itself a bound
light (DR 96).16
We are always Actaeon by virtue of what we contemplate, even though we are
Narcissus in relation to the pleasure we take from it. To contemplate is to
draw something from. We must always first contemplate something elsethe
water, or Diana, or the woodsin order to be filled with an image of ourselves. (DR 7475)
In contemplating something else, the mind is filled with the image of itself. For
this reason, in the psychoanalytic account, Deleuze calls these contemplative
souls narcissistic egos.
The fact that these egos should be immediately narcissistic is readily explained
if we consider narcissism to be not a contemplation of oneself but the fulfillment of a self-image through the contemplation of something else: the eye, the
seeing ego, is filled with an image of itself in contemplating the excitation that
it binds. It produces itself or draws itself from what it contemplates [. . .].
(DR 97/129; translation modified)
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We can say without exaggeration then that this first synthesis is an originary
intentionality. But intentionality here doesnt refer to a ray aimed at objects
and emanating from a solipsistic ego: the ego is what it intends, or
contemplates. It is a consciousness which is always a consciousness of something
else where this something else is indistinguishable from the ego. This isnt
therefore intentionality in the sense it had in Husserls static phenomenology,
as a transcendence within immanence. It was precisely in order to found the
static sense of intentionality that Husserl had to turn to the passive syntheses.
Rather, Deleuzes notion of intentionality here is captured perfectly by Blanchot when he describes mind as that empty power to exchange itself for
everything (The Space of Literature 88).17 This is exactly the operation of the
contemplative soul: it exchanges itself for everything.18
We cannot think of Blanchot, however, without thinking of Hegel. Blanchots
description of mind, and indeed, the entire description of the contemplative
souls relation to materiality in Deleuze, echoes (especially Hyppolites) Hegels
description of sense consciousness. For Hegel, sense experience was defined
by the discontinuity of objects and experiences. Each object is a singularity
without any relation to other objects.19 Each consciousness appears as indistinguishable from the singularity which it aims at or intends.20 Sense-consciousness
takes these singularities as its object and is strictly coextensive with themas
Hyppolite says describing Hegel, The sensuous soul does not distinguish itself from
its object (Hyppolite, Genesis 84; my emphasis; cf. Hegel 104).21 And in Hegel,
as in Deleuze, this sense-consciousness comes undone once its object escapes
(DR 96; Hyppolite 94; Hegel 93, 109). I have already suggested that in AntiOedipus Deleuzes genesis begins in a situation very similar to Hegels analysis of
sense-certainty. In Anti-Oedipus, everything began with partial objects dispersed
in a positive multiplicity. We understood these partial objects to be minute perceptions and therefore fragments of the sensible object, even though we could
not admit the totality of that object. Because their only relation was a lack of
relation, Deleuze described these minute perceptions, following Hegel, as singularities.22 I argued above that in the language of Difference and Repetition, the
positive multiplicity in dispersion is the object under the rule of discontinuity.
At one point in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze even goes so far as to make the
comparison with Hegel himself when he describes the material repetition as
the identity of spiritin other words, of the concept, but in the form of an
alienated concept, without self-consciousness and outside of itself (DR 286). If
it is true the three passive syntheses begin in a contemplation of matter as the
concept outside of itself, and if they end by founding the virtual which will itself
found a static genesis which returns to this primary matter and gives it a sense,
then the commonplaces regarding Deleuzes difference from Hegel may be
entirely unfounded. All I wanted to say with this comparison at this point, however, is that there is no significant difference between this contemplation of the
discontinuous object which produces a passive ego identical to the object, and
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a Blanchotian-Hegelian style intentionality. The first synthesis, and the shape of

consciousness involved, represents the empty power of mind to exchange itself
for everything.
In relation to the materiality of the discontinuous object, the first characteristic
of the contemplative soul was that it was an originary intentionality. It intends a
material content and becomes that content. In relation to fragmentation of the
object into successive instants, however, we see that this ego is subject to a
contractile range. This second aspect provides us with a significant link
between Difference and Repetition and the attraction-repulsion model of AntiOedipus (and therefore of an explanation for the production of intensity). But
in order to elaborate this link, it is necessary to make a very brief detour through
two of Levinass early works: On Escape and Existence and Existents.
In these two works, Levinas analyzes the experience of need and fatigue in
relation to a synthesis of the instant. These books begin with the description of
a situation not far from that of Hegels sense consciousness. They both begin by
describing the situation of a larval ego which is caught up in existence. Levinass
analysis sounds very similar to Deleuzes description of the egos situation in the
corporeal depths, battered by the unmediated action of partial objects: Being
is essentially alien and strikes against us. We undergo its suffocating embrace
like the night, but it does not respond to us. There is a pain in Being (Levinas,
Existence 9).23 As a result of this suffocation and violence, Levinass original position and problem is the same as Deleuzes: how can we escape from being? How
can we transcend the given? How do we get from Existence to existents?
For Levinas, it is precisely the phenomenon of fatigue and the refusal that it
implies that makes this escape possible. In the midst of the anonymous flow of
existence, there is stoppage and a positing (Levinas, Existence 23). This stoppage is the consequence of the subjects weariness with existence. Fatigue
represents a refusal to exist (11), a way of curling up into oneself (18).
Fatigues whole reality is made up of that refusal (11). Weariness or fatigue
entails a refusal to go on and a rejection of that alien being which strikes against
us. Instead of flowing with existence, the subject begins to fall behind. But, falling behind, it makes another effort to come to terms with existence. This is
how the living present is constituted in Levinas: a subject weary with existence
steps out of the flow momentarily, but then returns to it through effort. The
present is constituted as this lag in the anonymous flow of existence, created
in the dialectic of fatigue and effort (23, 25).
We see a similar formula in Deleuzes account of the first synthesis. Habit
contracts, but it has a natural contractile range, and this range defines the
concrete finitude of the subject (79). Each soul can contract only so many
successive instants, and, as a result, the duration of an organisms
present [. . .] will vary according to the natural contractile range of its contemplative souls (DR 77). The limit of contraction is experienced in the
saturated soul as fatigue. Fatigue marks the point at which the soul can no
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longer contract what it contemplates . . . (77). But here Deleuze says something, almost in passing, which is extremely important. Fatigue marks
the point at which the soul can no longer contract what it contemplates, the
moment at which contemplation and contraction come apart (77). Fatigue is the
moment at which contemplation and contraction come apart. Contemplation separates from its object and the synthesis loses its relation to the outside.
The saturated soul refuses its object and curls up into itself. Above we saw that
being was having and that the contemplative soul came undone once its
object escaped (DR 79). This is an entirely different situation. In fatigue, it is
not the object which escapes from the subject. Rather, the subject escapes
from the object. Here a saturated contemplation escapes or refuses the
object. Contemplation and contraction come apart, but the soul, the contraction, still remains in possession of its object. It simply ceases to be an
intentionality. It no longer contemplates a present, but only itself as a present
that was. It has become a memory which conserves itself in itself.
This moment corresponds directly to the body without organs escape
from the binary-linear series of partial objects in Anti-Oedipus. The contemplative soul is the body without organs. Fatigue explains why the body without
organs, when it becomes the external limit of the plane of immanence, experiences the partial objects as an overall persecution mechanism which
forces it to become a paranoiac machine and remove itself completely from
the binary-linear series of partial objects: it is tired of them. It can no longer
contract what it contemplates, and so it ceases to be a contemplation. This
separation from the present, or this refusal of the instants which pass according to the rule of discontinuity is therefore also the separation of an originary
ego, a contemplative soul, a spontaneous imagination or a body without
organs from the plane of immanence. It marks the beginning of a transcendence of the given or an escape from being. Before I discuss the consequences
of this and the second synthesis which it conditions, it is worth returning
briefly to the kind of time produced in the first synthesis.
The first synthesis produces the present in time. This is not at all the
present which passes. It is the dimension of the present in general. It provides the general possibility of any present (DR 81).24 It is therefore
necessary to distinguish between two of the many notions of the present in
Deleuze. The present which passes defines the empirical present of representation as for-us. That is to say, it defines the temporality of those
representations produced at the intersection of individuation and actualization which I described in the previous chapter and which pertain here
specifically to the active syntheses. The living present needs to be rigorously
separated from the present which passes. The living present is contemplative and contracting, but non-representing and non-represented (DR 286; my
emphasis; cf. 84). Far from producing a present representation, it produces
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the present in general, or the general element of any given present in a

space far below the level of representation.
Synthesis of memory: Mnemosyne

The second synthesis of time produces the pure, a priori past, the past in general or as such (DR 81). Just as the first synthesis did not produce a present
representation, but the general possibility of any present, the second synthesis
does not produce an actual past present, but the element in which we focus
upon [a past present] (80).25 This synthesis has a specific relationship to both
kinds of present outlined abovethe living present and the present which
passes in representation. In conjunction with the first passive synthesis, this
second synthesis is, in principle, sufficient to ground the active syntheses of
representation or the present which passes (8081). In relation to this present,
the pure past plays the role of ground (82). Its relation to the living present is
more complex.
To say that the represented present is the one which passes, does not mean,
however, that the living present itself does not pass. It passes, but not in the
same way that the represented present passes. When the living present passes,
it passes away for good: it dies. When a represented present passes, it becomes
a memory. This distinction between the two ways of passing should help clarify
Deleuzes own transition from the first synthesis to the second in the philosophical account of the syntheses. In order to move from his discussion of the
first synthesis to the second, Deleuze presents a problem in the form of a
paradox:
This is the paradox of the present: to constitute time, but to pass in the time
constituted. We cannot avoid the necessary conclusionthat there must be
another time in which the first synthesis can occur. This necessarily refers us to a
second synthesis. By insisting on the finitude of contraction, we have shown
the effect; we have by no means shown why the present passes, or what prevents it from being coextensive with time. (79/108; original emphasis;
translation modified)
This would seem to be a rather straightforward statement: because the present
passes, the synthesis of time must take place in another time. But for all of its
clarity, it really does not make sense at alland not just because it would lead
to an infinite regress (this past which is itself constituted by a synthesis would
need to find another time in which its synthesis could occur, and so on). It does
not make sense because, as we have just seen, the past is not the cause of the
egos exhaustion. The ego suffers fatigue because it has a natural contractile
range: it exhausts itself because it contemplates too much, because it tries to
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possess too many instants in one grasp. This difficulty can be resolved by noticing two senses of the word cause at work in Deleuzes thought as a whole: the
material cause and the quasi-cause.
If the past is the cause of the living presents passing here, it is because the
first synthesis is not sufficient to constitute timefor the same reasons that
Hegel said sense-certainty is not certainty at all (Hegel 10910): this first ego,
riveted to the present, passes away with the expanded present it produced.
Unlike the present of representation which passes into memory, when the
living present passes, it passes for good. Although it provides a temporary solution to the problem which Bergson pointed out, the phenomenon of fatigue
tells us that this solution itself will pass. Bergsons initial problem then reappears
on another level. We now need a bridge between these saturated contemplations which pass in order to know them as passing.
This bridge is provided by the second passive synthesis of time, Eros, whose
specific function is to gather together these local egos. In the psychoanalytic
account of the syntheses Deleuze writes that the second synthesis gathers up
the particular narcissistic satisfaction and relates it to the contemplation of a
virtual object (DR 10809). The expression particular narcissistic satisfaction
refers to the passive and narcissistic ego of the first synthesis. The virtual object
is the agent of synthesis itself (109), it is the phallus which gathers together
the narcissistic egos, and, in doing so, comes to signify or stand for the pure
past, or the past in general (103). The general element of the past is thus constituted in the synthesis of passing presents. From this point of view, the past is
the cause of the present in the same way that the body without organs as a
recording surface was cause of the partial objects: it is its quasi-cause, a miraculation. That is to say, the past takes up the saturated egos and submits them to
a new synthesis and a new organization in a new ego.26
This is why Deleuze describes the second passive synthesis as an extension
of the first, and the second passive ego as an extension of the contemplative
soul, the spontaneous imagination, or the body without organs: the second synthesis is the extension of passive syntheses and the passive egos which
correspond to them (100/133); in the move from the first synthesis to the
second, the first synthesis is extended in the form of a second passive synthesis
(108/144); this extension is the correlate of an extended passive ego
(100/132). The verb Deleuze uses in these passages is approfondir which
implies that rather than a lateral extension, this synthesis involves a deepening.
The question at hand is whether or not this depth preexists the first synthesis in
principle, or whether, rather, it presupposes the first synthesis in order to
deepen it subsequently (so that it is indeed within the living present, as Deleuze
said earlier, that time is deployed). That is, whether or not the first present has
to first reach its point of satiety and then, in its exhaustion, begin its escape
from being; or whether, in order to even contemplate, it had to already exist in
a pure past outside of being. Deleuze suggests the former when, discussing the
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second passive synthesis in relation to the first, he writes, The present difference is then no longer, as it was above, a difference drawn from a superficial
repetition of moments in such a way as to sketch a depth without which the
latter would not exist. Now, it is this depth itself which develops itself for itself (28687;
my emphasis). Here the depth of the first synthesis is clearly what is developed
for itselfdeepenedin the second.
This reading in which the first synthesis comes first and the second, second,
makes even more sense once we notice that the second synthesis repeats the
form of the firstas it did in both The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus. In the first,
a passive ego gathered together different instants of a fragmented object. In the
second, the first passive egos of habit are themselves the object of the synthesis.
They take the place of the material repetition and are gathered together in the
image of a virtual object or a partial object27 which has now come to define a
deepened passive ego. From this point of view, it is hard to see how the second
synthesis could come before the objects which it gathers together.
The advantage of reading the genesis in this way is that it explains how memory is produced rather than given. At the moment that contraction and
contemplation come apart in the first synthesis, the depth of the saturated ego
develops itself for itself. This means that it takes itselfrather than an external
objectas the object of its contemplation, or, to put it differently, that it begins
to contract itself rather than something else. It continues to hold what it already
possesses without looking elsewhere. As such, it is no longer an originary intentionality opened on to the outside but has become a specific and local memory
which conserves itself in itself. This local memory either passes away and dies
with the object as in the passing of the living present, or it is taken up in a second synthesis where it is coordinated and preserved in relation to a virtual
object along with those other egos which have also become memories.
In this appropriation and coordination of narcissistic egos, we reencounter
the form of attraction in Anti-Oedipus. In the second passive synthesis of AntiOedipus, the body without organs as a recording surface attracted the partial
objects to itself and then submitted them to a new type of organization in a
process called miraculation. Miraculation specifically expressed the way in
which the body without organs appeared to be the cause of the partial objects
even though they in fact were the condition of its production. In Difference and
Repetition, attraction is the coordination of all the local egos around the image
of a virtual object which, in its synthesis creates a transcendental memory, or
the element of the pure past in general. As I described above, the phallus, or
the synthesis itself is the pure past.28 Miraculation is the process whereby this
newly created past presents itself as the cause of the objects it synthesized. It is
the appropriation of the first synthesis by the second or the extension of the
first into the second.
Because Deleuze describes this virtual object as the phallus, and because its
function is to coordinate the local egos, it also provides us with the link between
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Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. This stage corresponds exactly to
what Deleuze called in The Logic of Sense genital sexuality, or the coordination
of the physical surface. There the phallus coordinated all of the local egos of
partial surfaces in order to produce a full body or a complete physical surface.
Despite the complete disparity in technical vocabulary between books, there is
a very strong correspondence in their separate descriptions of these early stages
of the genesis.
However, even if this reading sounds plausible, and even if we are willing
to admit with some hesitation that the paradox of the passing present is
resolved according to the logic of quasi-causality, and that the past is therefore cause of the present in the same way the body without organs was the
cause of the partial objects in the second synthesis of Anti-Oedipus, what
about the three paradoxes of the past in general which Deleuze seems to
inherit directly from Bergson (DR 8182)? Their names alonecoexistence,
contemporaneity, and preexistenceall suggest that the pure past grounds
the first synthesis by coming before it and coexisting with it, and these paradoxes are often read this way. The three paradoxes, however, do not describe
the relation of the element of the pure past in general to the living present,
but only to the present in representation which the first synthesis conditions
but is by no means synonymous with. All three paradoxes express the difference between the pure transcendental past and an empirical present. It is
precisely this empirical present which both Habit and Mnemosyne condition together. In fact, far from expressing the relationship between the first
and second passive syntheses, the paradoxes go in the other direction: they
form the argument for the necessity of a third synthesis by emphasizing the
compatibility of the first and second syntheses with the representations that
they condition.
But before moving to a description of the third synthesis, it is worth pointing
out here that it is only in the first of the three accounts of the syntheses in the
chapter that the order of the syntheses, after all is said and done, needs to be
read in reverse so that the third is read as the cause of the second which is the
cause of the first. This is because the first account is presented as a deduction.
Each synthesis is presented as providing the ground and condition of the previous. This gives the impression that, in the final analysis we should reverse the
order and see the third synthesis as the source of the other two. But the other
two accounts of the syntheses make this reversal seem less plausible. The second, psychoanalytic account, begins with the description of an undeveloped
ego with its undifferenciated drives and progresses to a developed and mature
ego with well differenciated drives. This development is repeated in a more
developed fashion in the dynamic genesis of The Logic of Sense along the lines of
what appearsat the surfaceto be a rather straightforward Freudian account
of the development of the ego. If we were to reverse the order in the final reading, we would have to say that the fully developed and differenciated ego is in
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fact the condition of the embryonic ego and prior to it in the order of genesis.29
This clearly makes no sense.
The same problem appears in the third, physical account of the syntheses
where Deleuze makes use of a physical model, or a pendular structure (LS
239), to describe the three syntheses. Here, Habit is called coupling; Eros, resonance; and Thanatos, forced movement (DR 118).30 Manuel DeLanda gives a
very clear description of these syntheses in the phenomenon of frequency
entrainment:
For two grandfather pendulum clocks to entrain, weak signals must be transmitted from one to the other to couple them (in some cases, these are weak
vibrations in the wooden floor on which the clocks are placed). If the frequencies of the two clocks are close to each other they may resonate and the
two clocks will lock into a single frequency. The resulting entrainment of the
two oscillators represents a much stronger linkage (forced movement) between
the two oscillators than the weak signals which originally coupled them.
(DeLanda 145n.53; original emphases, my bold)
Here, the first two syntheses are presented as instruments for measuring time as
a function of movementpendulumswhereas the third, presented as the
effect of the resonance of the first two, goes beyond them. The third appears as
a synthesis of the first two, and it clearly requires the initial coupling and communication of the pendulums before it can come about. It makes absolutely no
sense from this point of view to reverse the order in the final reading. We cannot begin with forced movement, or the third synthesis, and see it as the cause
and ground of the second and first syntheses, since it clearly presupposes them.
The last two sections of the syntheses chapter therefore prevent reading the
third synthesis as the ground and cause of the other two, unless, of course, we
do so along the lines of the logic of miraculation and quasi-causality which was
at work at every level of the genesis in Anti-Oedipus and which had the specific
function of maintaining the order of genesis while explaining how each synthesis can then be seen as the cause of the elements involved in the previous stage
through its reproduction of them.
Synthesis of thought: Thanatos

This entire enquiry into the production of time in Difference and Repetition was
motivated by the attempt to explain the foundations of the static genesis in which
intensities enveloped the relations and singularities of an Idea and thereby individuated a present representation. For this reason we had at least two expectations
of the passive genesis: it must show the production of (1) the virtual-ideal field and
(2) intensity. However neither Habit nor Mnemosyne provided this foundation.
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Because the first two syntheses did not provide the ground for the static genesis,
we now have to apply our expectations to the third synthesis alone. What needs to
be produced in the third synthesis is both the field in which Ideas are developed
and the field in which intensities can focus on Ideas. I will first describe the genesis
of intensity, and then of the virtual.
The genesis of intensity

In Anti-Oedipus, intensity was clearly produced by the synthesis of the first two
syntheses, and specifically as a synthesis of the relations of attraction and repulsion. I have argued that these relations are again present in Difference and
Repetition in the form of fatigue (repulsion) and the coordination of local egos
around a virtual object (attraction). I want to argue here that intensity as difference in itself is also produced in the third synthesis of Difference and Repetition as
a synthesis of the first two syntheses. In the third, physical account of the syntheses, this production of intensity is explicitly described. Here, the third synthesis
has the same general form as the previous two. The first synthesis contracted
material instants. In one formulation of the first synthesis, Deleuze says that it
draws off the difference between instants and that it is this difference drawn
(DR 7879; 286). The difference which has been subtracted from the instants
defines the local egos or contemplative souls. The second synthesis then takes
the local egos of the first as its object. Deleuze says that it therefore includes
difference. If this synthesis includes difference, it does so, again, by drawing off
a differencethis time the difference between egos. This synthesis includes
difference because it is a synthesis of the contemplative souls which are themselves the difference drawn off of material fragments. The third synthesis, like
the second, turns back to synthesize the product of the previous synthesis. However, it does not only take the second synthesis as its object, but it takes the local
egos of the first as well. It therefore draws off two kinds of differencethat
between material instants and that between egosand it expresses the relationship between these two forms of difference.
This is how Deleuze describes the production of intensity in the physical
account of the syntheses. The first synthesis is described as a coupling, the second as a resonance, and the third as a forced movement. We have to be attentive
then to three kinds of difference involved in this account. Since this is difficult
territory, I will develop it slowly by taking each moment of the physical metaphor on pg. 117 one at a time.
(1) 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.
The first synthesis produces these series. In relation to the philosophical
account of the syntheses, the terms of the series are the discontinuous
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instants of the material object. The differences between these terms,

however, are not the differences which discontinuity introduced into the
object. While this reading is tempting, we should notice that the terms are
not scattered in a schizophrenic mixture but are organized in series. The
first synthesis, coupling, is what puts the terms into series. The differences
between terms are therefore precisely those differences drawn in the first
synthesis. Coupling is the physical analogue of Habit in the philosophical
account and of the binding of excitations in the psychoanalytic account.
(2) 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.
This force is the second synthesis, or the virtual object, which gathers up the
local egos. These egos are, as we have just seen, nothing more than the differences between terms of the series. This force therefore enacts the
communication of difference, or the relation of difference to difference, by
relating the egos themselves (differences drawn) to one another in the image
of a virtual object. Deleuze calls this communication of differences resonance, which is clearly the physical analogue of the production of the pure
past in the philosophical account and of the synthesis of local egos in the
psychoanalytic account.
(3) As DeLanda so clearly described, resonance can leadnot alwaysto a
forced movement (cf. LS 23940). Deleuze writes, from resonance is
derived a forced movement the amplitude of which exceeds the basic series
themselves. (DR117; original emphasis)
This forced movement is a new, third kind of difference which is precisely the
notion of intensity which is developed for itself in the last chapter of Difference
and Repetition. Deleuze describes it here as follows:
The nature of these elements whose value is determined at once both by their
difference in the series to which they belong [coupling], and by the difference of their difference from one series to another [resonance], 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 . . .). (DR 117; my emphasis)
This is the third synthesis. Here, intensity is unequivocally constituted as a difference which refers to other differences. These other differences to which
intensity refers are those involved in the prior two syntheses: the difference
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drawn off (coupling) and the difference included (resonance). The intensity at
the heart of thought and its genesis is this difference which presupposes precisely the first two syntheses of time. It is clear that this definition of intensity
resonates well with the account of its production in Anti-Oedipus.
It is much less clear how this relates to what I said about intensity in the
previous chapter. Deleuze seems to make two contradictory statements about
intensity. On the one hand intensity is what is given at the start to a transcendental sensibility. Intensity describes the form in which the transcendental
sensibility encounters or experiences the outside (DR 144). This sensibility
then transmits its constraint to the imagination (first synthesis), which passes
the difference on to the memory (second synthesis), which passes the difference on to thought (third synthesis). But, on the other hand, we have just seen
that intensity is very clearly constituted in this third synthesis. It seems to be
there at the beginning of the dynamic genesis at the same time that it is precisely what this genesis needs to produce.
It is therefore necessary to distinguish between two kinds of intensity: intensity
as that which is initially given and intensity as a produced quantity of affection.
I already briefly distinguished between these two in the previous chapter.31 The
description of the given as intensity was at work in Freuds metapsychology. The
description of intensity as a produced quantity of affection was at work in Husserls
theory of affection. These two forms of intensity are also both present within
Deleuzes different accounts of the three syntheses. At the beginning of the psychoanalytic account, Deleuze described the Id, which was (as in The Logic of Sense)
the starting point of the three syntheses and therefore of the entire genesis, as a
field of individuation in which differences of intensity are distributed here and
there in the form of excitations (DR 96). He is here clearly alluding to the Freudian notion of intensity: intensities take the form of excitations. They are what the
first synthesis apprehends, the second records, and the third fails to recognize. But
on the other hand, as we have just seen, in the physical account of the syntheses,
intensity is produced in the third synthesis.32 Intensity is no longer the given
excitation, but the quantity of excitation.
In the first synthesis intensity takes the form of excitation. It is the way in
which a transcendental sensibility experiences a fragmented object. In all three
books studied here, the three passive syntheses work in the same way despite
their different names: the first synthesis directly takes up what is given to it by
sensibility. The second records that apprehension in a transcendental memory.
The third synthesis, however, measures the first synthesis against the second.
What this means then is that while intensity takes the form of excitation in sensibility, the quantity of that excitation is by no means given. Through
apprehending, recording, and then measuring the one against the other, the
quantity of excitation is determined. Intensity is at first a simple excitation.
After the three syntheses have done their work, this initial difference has been
transformed into an expression of the degree to which the ego (the body
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without organs, the spontaneous imagination, the synthesizing agent) is affected.

It is now a difference which refers to other differences where those other differences are the difference drawn of the first synthesis (apprehension) and the
difference included of the second (recording).
This progressive synthesis of excitation yields the notion of intensity at work
in Husserl, but also in Kant: it is the degree of influence on sense (CPR B208),
or the degree to which a subject is affected in an instant (the degree designates
only that magnitude the apprehension of which is not successive, but instantaneous (CPR A16869/B210).33 This is extremely important in relation to what
I said about intensity in the last chapter. Intensity had two roles in relation to
the overall static genesis. On the one hand, it was representative of the present.
Now we see why. It is an expression of the degree to which a body is affected in
the instant. Second, intensity had to select Ideas from the future. We saw that
this selection was undertaken according to an ethics of intensity in which
regions of maximal activity were the first to be individuated while regions of
lesser activity were individuated later. In other words, intensity here refers to
the competing influences on sense, or the way passivity exerts its allure on the
future, and this is only possible after it has been taken up and transformed in
the regime of passive syntheses. While intensity is given in the form of an excitation at the outset, it seems that there is no significant difference in the quantity
of excitations at this point. It takes the entire set of passive syntheses to determine the magnitude of affection which then affects thought and selects an
Idea. The three syntheses move us from the Freudian to the Kantian/Husserlian notion of intensity.
The genesis of the virtual

What is the empty form of time? Anti-Oedipus is strangely silent on this point,
and the only way we could tease it out of the text there was through a series of
complex allusions to Kant and oblique references to Deleuzes other texts. In
general, the account of the third synthesis in Anti-Oedipus never goes beyond
Difference and Repetitions physical account of the syntheses. But the philosophical and psychoanalytic accounts of this synthesis in Difference and Repetition
describe the third synthesis in a way that is seemingly different from the physical account. In these accounts the synthesis itself is called the empty form of
time. While this description is absent from Anti-Oedipus, it does have a strong
but complex presence in The Logic of Sense.
In The Logic of Sense, the empty form of time is called Aion, the time without
present which infinitely subdivides the event into an indefinite past and future:
Whereas Chronos was inseparable from circularity and its accidents [. . .] Aion
stretches out in a straight line, limitless in either direction. Always already passed
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and eternally yet to come, Aion is the eternal truth of time: pure empty form of time,
which has freed itself of its present corporeal content and has thereby unwound
its own circle, stretching itself out in a straight line. (LS 165)
Aion is the time of sense, in which time, freed of its present corporeal
content, subdivides that content and thus ensures the progressive and
complete determination of the domain under consideration (Aion) (LS 121).
In The Logic of Sense, the expression empty form of time or Aion clearly
describes the transcendental field of sense alone. Time is empty in the sense
that it is incorporeal; it has, as we saw above, completely removed itself from the
action and passion of bodies and has become the space in which ideal elements can be progressively determined and actualized into an empirical
consciousness. It is a form for the same reason: it has no content. As Deleuze
says in Difference and Repetition, it is a purely formal distribution of time without
regard to content.
In several respects, this description of Aion holds for the notion of the empty
form of time in Difference and Repetition as well. The empty form of time is again the
space in which Ideas can be progressively determined. It is precisely that form of
continuity and determinability which conditions the progressive determination of
Ideas that I described in the last chapter. In the second chapter of Difference and
Repetition Deleuze also emphasizes that it is empty because it has become incorporeal and immaterial. In the philosophical account, this is expressed by saying that
it abjures its empirical content. In the psychoanalytic account, it is expressed by
saying that the ego abandons all possible mnemic content (DR 111). In the physical account, it is expressed by saying that the forced movement exceeds the basic
series of the two pendulums (remember that a pendulum is an instrument which
measures time according to movement).
But the notion of the empty form of time as it is presented in Difference and
Repetition is also much more complex than this description of the immaterial
field of determinability which The Logic of Sense emphasizes. Whereas Aion came
about only on the metaphysical surface, after the Oedipal stage of sexuality had
ended in castration, the empty form in Difference and Repetition is presented as
an entire synthesis which gives rise to the virtual as the form of continuity and
determinability (DR 110, 294).
In Difference and Repetition this synthesis comprises three distinct aspects which
are: (1) the purely formal order of time; (2) the totality of time expressed as a
symbol; and (3) the series of time which is the result of the interaction between
the order and the totality (not much significance should be attached to these
expressions; only their function, which I will discuss below, is important). We
saw that the first synthesis of Difference and Repetition corresponded to the local
egos and their partial surfaces of The Logic of Sense, and that the second synthesis
corresponded to the coordination of the entire physical surface in the image of
the phallus. The empty form of time as a synthesis comprising three distinct
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stages corresponds directly to the stage of Oedipal sexuality. Despite terminological differences, the parallel is exact. These three aspects of the third
synthesisorder, totality, and seriesall define separate stages of the process in
which the synthesis is actually brought about. In what follows I want to briefly
describe these three moments of the third synthesis: (1) order, (2) totality, and
(3) series.
Deleuze describes the order of time as a distribution of a before, a during, and
an after in the function of a caesura (DR 89). What does this order divide into
these three parts? In the psychoanalytic account, it is the narcissistic ego (DR
110). When Deleuze says narcissistic ego here, he specifically means a third
form of that ego which we have been following across the past two syntheses. In
the first synthesis, the ego was the ego of depths which lived the singularity of
sensuousness in the form of an originary intentionality and which died with its
object unless it undertook an escape from the discontinuity of being. In the
second synthesis, the ego was the ego which coordinated these little saturated
egos in the image of a virtual or partial object. In the third synthesis, it is this
ego of the second synthesis which the formal order divides and in so doing
leads to its characterization as a dissolved self, or a larval subject.
The distribution which the order of time enacts is simply a determination of
the two objects which are to be brought together in the synthesis. If we wanted
to use the structure of a judgment to describe the synthesis we could say that the
order of time determines the antecedent and the consequent which are to be
brought together in a judgment (or an act of recognition). When the order of
empty time divides the ego, it divides it according to the two previous syntheses
which form the egos history. Deleuze never explicitly says this, but this reading
is still possible from three separate points of view. First, in relation to the series
of the empty form (which I will describe below), it is the first two syntheses
which are brought together. Second, the physical account of the syntheses,
which I described above, clearly describes the third synthesis as a synthesis of
the first two. Third, and finally, the Oedipal stage of sexuality in The Logic of
Sense which is the correlate of this synthesis began by dividing the good object
(which stands here for the totality of the entire passive assemblage of ego, synthesis, and image) into a mother image (which represented partial objects, or
the objects of the first synthesis) and a father image (which represented the
phallic organization of the partial surfaces, or the second synthesis). All three
of these points of view suggest, even if it is entirely speculative, that what happens in this stage of the synthesis is that the ego is divided into its constituent
parts, its past and its presentthe failed synthesis of which will determine a
future.
The totality of empty time expresses the way in which the division that the
order produced in the ego is synthesized in an image. This image is the image of
an action in general or a formidable action. Deleuze says that the action can
be anything empirically (294), but at the level of the passive syntheses, the
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action is specifically that of bringing together the first two syntheses. Whereas
the order of time determined the objects which were to be brought together,
the totality of time expresses the static, almost preliminary, synthesis of the
order of time (294, 88). To continue the logical metaphor, whereas the order
set in place the antecedent and the consequent, the totality functions as the
copula itself, the relation between the antecedent and consequent. In Difference
and Repetition the function and necessity of this image of the action is not
entirely clear. In the correlate stage of Oedipal sexuality, this image appears as
the advent of intention or volition (LS 207).34 It is the intended action as
opposed to the action effectively accomplished. In this context it expressed
the intent on the part of the child to heal the wounded mother (local egos) and
the absent father (coordinating phallus/ego) (LS 20307). In other words, it is
the intention to recognize, to synthesize the first and second syntheses.
What actually happens when the child attempts to realize this intention
castrationis outlined in Difference and Repetition as the next aspect of the
synthesis: the series of time. In The Logic of Sense it concerns another surface.
If the order of time established the two elements which were to be brought
together, the totality expresses, as Deleuze says in The Logic of Sense, the intention
to do so, or the model. The formidable action is the desire to bring together
a divided self into a unity.
The third aspect of the empty form of time is its temporal series: The temporal
series designates the confrontation of the divided narcissistic ego with the
whole of time or the image of the action (DR 110). In other words, the order of
time (which divided the ego) and the image of its totality (which was the idea of
synthesis) come together to create a temporal series. This is the actual moment
of synthesis: the synthesis of the order and the totality. This means putting the
first two syntheses in relation to an image of the totality of time (94, 296). The
three times of the temporal seriesthe a priori past, present, and future
express the different relationships which result. Here things are extremely
complicated, and because Deleuze never gives a reliable account, they are very
unclear and one can never tell whether the confusion which takes place in this
third synthesis is a result of the process Deleuze is trying to describe, or if it is
simply because the accounts of this process are short, obscure, and dispersed
across large sections of unrelated text (the major descriptions of this process are
on 8994, 11016, and 294301 ).35 Between these three accounts, things appear
to unfold as follows. Each synthesisHabitus and Mnemosynegoes though a
series of transformations and exchanges its role and area of influence with the
other synthesis. The second synthesis becomes directed toward the Id and its
excitations. The first is to the coordinated Ego of Memory. Memory is forced to
become present. Habitus becomes past. Memory becomes a condition by
default: that is, it no longer grounds representation, and its form and contents
become insignificant. It is a condition simply because it is there, but any other
material would do. The first synthesis becomes a present of metamorphosis. But
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change is entirely antithetical to the nature of habit (92; cf. 29596).36 In this
exchange of functions, the two syntheses appear to be completely incompatible
and unable to be brought within one image.37 But it was precisely this compatibility of the first and second synthesis that representation in the active syntheses
seemed to depend upon. Even though, in principle, all that representation
seemed to require was the first two syntheses, it appears, in fact, that their coordination is no simple process and that it has to be rigorously regulated so that the
active syntheses can produce a present which passes in representation. It cannot
come about in passivity. To conclude the logical metaphor, then, the third synthesis represents the impossibility of recognition or of judgment. There is only one
possible relation that could exist between the antecedent and the consequent:
the inclusive disjunction (its either A, or B, or both).
The impossibility of judgment results in a third time in which the future
appears . . . (89), the ultimate synthesis concerns only the future . . . (115).
Just as the living present was not a specific present which passes in representation,
but the condition for any present in general; and just as the element of the pure
past in general was not the reproduction of a past moment, but the general element in which past moments could be focused upon; in other words, just as the
other two passive syntheses produced not representations in specific temporal
modalities, but the transcendental possibility of those modalities themselves, this
third synthesis does not produce a determinate future, but the transcendental
element of the future in general. The future in general is the element in which
we confront the new. This future is defined by the eternal return, and as Deleuze
says, the eternal return does not concern what is present, or what has been
present. It concerns only the new: it is itself the new, complete novelty (90).38
Novelty, however, is not predetermined according to set rules (as in the human
game). Instead it is completely fortuitous. Neither is it an already determined
moment, but the horizon in which a moment becomes progressively determined.
For Deleuze, the future can only be an affirmation of chance because we never
know what is coming our way. The eternal return is a force of affirmation, but it
affirms everything of the multiple, everything of the different, everything of
chance . . . (115). This is why the eternal return is properly called a belief of the
future, a belief in the future (90): 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 . . . (115; my emphasis).
The word multiple has two senses here. On the one hand, it has a general
philosophical sense opposing it to the One, or the form of identity. It is precisely this form of identity which defines the presents which pass in representation.
But these presents are produced, we saw in the last chapter, in the passing of
time from future to present. This highlights the second, specific technical sense
of the word multiplicity here. The eternal return or the future makes possible
the deployment of multiplicities or Ideas. It gives birth to a multiplicity
(90). This is why Deleuze says in his conclusion to the psychoanalytic account
150
of the syntheses that [t]he system of the future [. . .] must be called a divine
game, since there is no preexisting 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 (DR 116). This is the same divine game that was at
the origin of Ideas. The multiplicities to which the future gives birth are the
transcendental Ideas themselves. The virtual is produced in the third
synthesis.
But besides showing the genesis of the virtual and of intensity, we also had to
see how it came to be that they occupied two different times. Ideas were progressively determined in the future and were actualized into a present which
they differenciated. This present was defined as a field of intensities. The difference in dimensions is a consequence of the eternal return, and is perhaps better
expressed in The Logic of Sense. In Difference and Repetition, the eternal return as
the third time of the series completely breaks with the other elements of the
empty form of time: its order, the larval subject which this order splits, the symbolic totality, and the first two times of the series. Deleuze continually insists
that the eternal return concerns only the future.39 It causes neither the condition nor the agent to return: on the contrary it repudiates these and expels them
with all its centrifugal force (DR 90; original emphasis). The future which the
eternal return produces is completely autonomous and independent of everything that led up to its production. In The Logic of Sense, this difference between
two times is formulated as the difference between two surfaces. The entire Oedipal stage of sexuality concerns the physical surface. The Oedipal synthesis
results in the dissolution of this surface and the production of a new surface
pure thoughtin which Aion progressively determines problematic events or
transcendental Ideas. From the point of view of the genesis in general however,
we could say that because at this point the eternal return determines the progressive determination of Ideas, and that the process of individuation and
actualization brings Ideas back to the present and installs them in the flesh of
the very larval subjects which the eternal return had left behind, this autonomy
is only momentary. In other words, it discovers this autonomy only to return to
what it left behind. In his description of the ideal game in Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze makes use of a quotation which describes perfectly the entire
trajectory of genesis: We temporarily abandon life, in order to then temporarily fix our gaze upon it (NP 25). Both books say the same thing in different
ways. (For this reason we can also say that the very clear description of the eternal return in The Logic of Sense works just as well for Difference and Repetition.)
The Other
The last stage of the entire genesis is the advent of what Deleuze calls the
Other. Traditionally, in phenomenology, the Other is always another ego
151
transcendent to mine. The problem of the Other is then how I can recognize
another ego not as an object but as an living subject across the gulf that separates us. We should notice, however, that Deleuzes theory of subjectivity is
multilayered and extremely complex. The other in Deleuze is not another
I set against me, it is rather an other that thinks in me. We saw in The Logic
of Sense that the traditional notion of the I was constituted in the form of common sense in the static genesis. In this, Deleuze is following Sartres arguments
at the end of The Transcendence of the Ego where the traditional notions of self
and I are described as transcendent objects which must themselves be constituted by an impersonal transcendental field (Sartre, Transcendence 60ff.).
However, we can regress from this product of the static genesis to another form
of subjectivity in Deleuze. The transcendental field itself, in Deleuze, is called a
fractured I. And below this fractured I there is an even deeper form of subjectivity: the dissolved self, or the egos of the passive syntheses (DR 256ff., 284).
In Deleuze, the Other which the psychological I of common sense confronts
refers specifically to the fractured-I of the transcendental field. The otherstructure therefore refers to the relationship between an empirical subject and
a transcendental subject. From this point of view it has three essential functions, all of which help to bring the genesis to an end: (1) it encloses the virtual
within the limits of representation; (2) at the same time, it provides the means
by which the product, representation, expresses its origins in an impersonal
thought; and (3) it reproduces the form of the living present at the level of
representation thereby allowing the psychological subject to live in a present
cushioned by anticipation and something like a short-term memory.
The first function of the Other-structure is to enclose the representations
which are offered to perception within the limits of a relatively stable subject
and object. Thus Deleuze writes, Everything happens as though the Other integrated the individuating factors and pre-individual singularities within the limits of
objects and subjects, which are then offered to representation as perceivers or
perceived (DR 28182; original emphasis). Offered to representation or perception here mean given to the empirical sensibility discussed above. From this
point of view, the Other represents the way in which both the transcendental
field and the intensive field are brought under the two forms of common sense:
its objective form, the transcendental object, and its subjective form, the unity
of apperception. An open, nomadic distribution, is thereby contained and
made sedentary. The two becomings of materiality and virtuality are made to fit
within the stable forms of representation.40 From this point on, the active syntheses can take over, and manipulate the products of Deleuzes transcendental
aesthetic according to the forms of association and judgment.
This is closely related to its second function. The Other does not territorialize
the transcendental without at the same time providing a means by which the
representations of perception express their intensive and virtual origins. The
fully constituted individual still attests to its intensive origins by way of what
152
Deleuze calls centres of envelopment (DR 258ff.). We already confronted the

importance of this aspect in relation to legitimate and illegitimate uses of representation above. The centers of envelopment are the way in which a
representation remains connected to the genesis which produced it. From this
point of view, Deleuze writes that [a]t the moment when they are explicated in
a system (once and for all) the differential, intensive, or individuating factors
testify to their persistence in implication (256). Implication refers to the way
in which difference persists and communicates amongst itself underneath all
quality and extensity (228). It is this order of implication that is expressed in
representation by means of the Other and which legitimates a representation
or determines it as living rather than as dead (260; cf. 259).
From the point of view of the conscious subject, the intensive origin of differenciated individuals appears as a swarm of potentials around any given
representation: In every psychic system there is a swarm of possibilities
around a reality, but our possibles are always others (DR 260; cf. 259).
Deleuze is directly alluding here to what, in The Cartesian Meditations, Husserl
called the idea of the world.41 For Husserl every actual lived experience is set
within a horizon of possibilities or potentialities specific to that actual
experience: every actuality involves its potentialities, which are not empty possibilities, but rather possibilities intentionally predelineated in respect of
content [. . .] and, in addition, having the character of actualities actualizable
by the Ego (CTM 44; original emphases).42 Any representation for Husserl
is surrounded by potentialities or possibilities for what might come next.
The set of possibilities takes the form of what Deleuze called in Anti-Oedipus
an infinite subjective representation: an Idea in the Kantian sense. Husserl
writes, here it is a matter of an infinite regulative idea (54; original
emphasis), and specifically, the idea of the world: a world itself, is an infinite
idea, related to infinities of harmoniously combinable experiences (62; original
emphasis).43
What this means concretely is that we always live within a horizon of expectation, of protention and retention. There is always a set number of potentialities
which we expect to follow from a current experience. Jokes, for example, capitalize on this. The punch line of a good joke always exceeds the set of
potentialities of any sentence. Husserl therefore emphasizes two aspects of the
idea of the world (beyond the idea of an open, but systematic totality). (1) He
emphasizes its temporal nature, the way in which each representation is set
within a living present. Each representation is bordered by an immediate past,
retention, and an immediate future, protention. (2) However, anticipation
and retention are determined in relation to the present and are defined as
potentialities. It is not an empty and formal past and future, but one determined in relation to the present. This is exactly how Deleuze describes the
Other in his 1967 essay Michel Tournier and the World Without Others
(LS 30121).
153
The world without others is the world of schizophrenic depth, the primary
order of The Logic of Sense, the transcendental sensibility of Difference and Repetition in which every encounter takes the form of a slap in the face (LS 306). It
is a harsh and black world without potentialities or virtualities (LS 306). It is
this situation which made genesis, or the escape from being, necessary. By the
end of the genesis however we now live a world with others. Deleuzes description of the Other in this essay closely resembles his description in Difference and
Repetition:
around each object that I perceive or each idea that I think there is the
organization of a marginal world, a mantel or background, where other
objects and other ideas may come forth in accordance with laws of transition
which regulate the passage from one to another. (LS 304)
Deleuze says, clearly alluding to Husserl, that this Other-structure is precisely
the structure of the world (306). This allows us to make two important points.
First, we have here rediscovered the conclusion of history in Anti-Oedipus. For
Deleuze and Husserl, the transitions between representations are not arbitrary.
Each potentiality is determined in relation to a present representation. This is
why Deleuze says that other objects come forth in accordance with laws of transition which regulate the passage from one to another. Husserl says the same
thing: any object whatever (even an immanent one) [what Deleuze calls ideas
in the above passage], points to a structure, within the transcendental ego, that is
governed by a rule (CTM 53). The presence of this rule is precisely what leads
Husserl to define this structure as a regulative idea, and infinite representation
(CTM 55). This is also, I would argue, exactly what Deleuze means, in AntiOedipus by the axiomatization of representations in capitalismwhere
capitalism means the faculty of Ideas, reason. The capitalist axiomatic is the
rule which governs transitions. It is the idea of the world.
The second thing I would like to emphasize here is that the idea of the world
has an essential temporal structure. Time is the universal characteristic of all
thought for Deleuze as much as it was for Kant, Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger.
These transitions and margins which the Other provides are precisely temporal
transitions. They express the fully formed cogitos relation to the potentialities
of the past and the future. Deleuzes Other is simply the molar form of the living present, the way in which Spirit can return to itself without devouring
itself.
Conclusion
Difference and Repetition, as a whole, is Deleuzes transcendental aesthetic. The
genesis begins in a transcendental sensibility with an account of an unthinkable
154
and unrepresentable materiality, a discontinuous hyl. It moves through three

passive syntheses to the virtual, a transcendental space in which thought is free
to survey its affections and to abstract a sensible schema. The genesis then
returns to an empirical sensibilityin which the sensible schemata are
actualizeddefined according to the classic coordinates of sensibility. Each
object given to perception is an aggregate of quality, duration, and extension.
What is perhaps the most important aspect of this account of genesis, however,
is that in Difference and Repetition Deleuze describes the entire process of
production in relation to the different modalities of time that are produced
along the way, and I have emphasized this throughout my reading. The transcendental aesthetic begins with the production of the general elements of
the three dimensions of time: the three syntheses produce the general possibility for any present, past, and future representation. In the third synthesis,
however, time ceases to be transcendental. By means of the progressive determination and actualization of Ideas, time becomes a representation which
passes in the present of an empirical consciousness. Deleuze thus shows the
temporal inflection of the entire genesis, and the way it moves from a transcendental present to an empirical present. This movement can be expressed
schematically as follows.
MATTER
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Present:
Past:
Future:
Future:
(5) Present:
(6) Past:
First synthesis
Molecular empirical
Second synthesis
Third synthesis
Virtual/Transcendental
Progressive
determination
Actualization/
Individuation
Molar empirical
Empirical memory
PERCEPTION IN THE WORLD (OTHER)
Passivity
Activity
Conclusion
Jean-Jacques Lecercle has argued that taken as a whole Deleuzes philosophy is,
like Nietzsches or Kierkegaards, coherent, but not systematic (Lecercle 16). In
this conclusion I would like to suggest that exactly the opposite is the caseat
least within the major texts of Deleuzes middle period which I have considered
here. Deleuzes philosophy is systematic, but incoherent.
Deleuze is incoherent because, while a relatively stable structure persists
throughout all three books, the technical terms used to describe that structure
change. Whats more, these same technical terms reappear in different books
with entirely different meanings. Throughout this book I described many
instances of these transformations. Perhaps the most obvious example can be
seen in the different uses of the expressions multiplicity and singularity. In
both Anti-Oedipus and Difference and Repetition, Deleuze describes multiplicities
which comprise a set of singularities, but the sense and function of these concepts are completely different in each book. In Anti-Oedipus the world of
schizophrenic depths in which the body, in its materiality, communicates with
all other bodies is described as a multiplicity of singularities. The singularities are the partial objects, or the parts of fragmented and unindividuated
bodies which form the material of sensation. In Difference and Repetition, however, Deleuze describes this world of corporeality as repetition in-itself, the
material object subject to a rule of discontinuity which says that the only relation between parts of the fragmented object is a lack of a relation. There is no
talk of singularities or of multiplicities. This happens only at the level of the
virtual where multiplicity refers to the transcendental Idea and its differential
elements, relations, and singularities. Here singularity has its mathematical
sense as that which determines the form of a surface or line. It would be easy to
multiply examples of this distortion in sense. This is why Deleuze is
incoherent.
If Deleuze is systematic, it is because, in spite of the changing senses and
changing names, there is still a relatively stable structure. The only way we can
tell that what Deleuze calls a multiplicity of singularities in Anti-Oedipus is the
same thing as what he calls repetition in-itself in Difference and Repetition is by
noticing that they are both described in similar ways (material, lacking
156
relation), but also and primarily by noticing that they both stand at the foundation of a dynamic genesis comprising three passive syntheses. They are both the
material taken up in these syntheses. In other words, it is the position of a concept in relation to the structure of the genesis that gives the concept its sense
and gives us our bearings. The body without organs is a prime example of this.
It is easy to see that insofar as the body without organs is that power of synthesis
which takes up a fragmented materiality and submits it to a series of passive
syntheses that (1) the expression body without organs is stable between
Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense, but (2) is called the spontaneous imagination, and a host of other names, in Difference and Repetition. This also gives us its
sense. A term which has been notoriously difficult to define in the history of
Deleuze criticism actually has an extremely simple and straightforward definition. Depending on your philosopher of choice you could call it a memory, an
imagination, a receptive surface, and so on. Its function and its sense is simply
that it serves as a surface on which our affections are recorded and organized.
It is a principle of synthesis and, as such, it is a way of describing a passive thought.
What I hope to have provided in this book is only the beginning of a description of this system. I wanted to show that across three completely different texts
there was in fact a stable structure that gave sense to the concepts involved.
Each book describes the way in which this structure produces itself out of a field
of materiality. The following table is a broad outline of that system and shows
the most general correspondences between the three books that
I outlined below.
First passive
synthesis
Second passive
synthesis
Third passive
synthesis
Primary Order of Partial

Objects
First passive synthesis
Dynamic Genesis
Production of Time
Discontinuous Matter
(Sensation)
The Logic of Sense
Third passive synthesis
Sense
Good Sense
Common sense
Common sense
First passive
synthesis
Second passive
synthesis
Third passive
synthesis
Intensity
Territorialization
Social
Production
Good Sense
Representation
(Consciousness)
Multiplicity of Partial
Objects in Dispersion
Static
Genesis
Individuation
Virtual + Intensity
Second passive
synthesis
Anti-Oedipus
Desiring-Production
Propositional Consciousness
Molar Objectities
Despotism
Conclusion
157
Each of these three books develops an account of the genesis of representation in

its own language. Without a doubt, the expression used to denote each stage
changes between books, and each book takes a different point of view on the
structure, but each of the three books goes through these eight stages in this
particular order:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Unindividuated materiality
First passive synthesis
Second passive synthesis
Third passive synthesis
Transcendental field
Good sense
Common sense
Representation
But acknowledging this raises as many questions as it answers. How detailed is

this structural similarity? These eight stages are very general. Is it an identical
theory that Deleuze develops? Why does Deleuze consistently change the language he uses? What I have emphasized are the similarities between books.
What changes between books? Do these changes relate to the subject matter
which provides Deleuze with his technical vocabulary?
One of the most pressing is whether this structure holds for the later books as
well, or if it is simply a phenomenon of this middle structuralist period? There
is no way to provide a rigorous answer in the space of a conclusion since the
argument would have to be founded on an account of the entire structure of
the work in question. Taking Deleuze one concept at a time will never work. He
is a systematic and totalizing thinker. However, just a cursory look at Deleuzes
last major book What is Philosophy? will show that this general structure indeed
persists all the way to the end. Art studies the dynamic genesis, the movement
from sensation, the plane of composition, to virtuality. Philosophy studies
the virtual itself, here the plane of immanence1 on which concepts or incorporeal events are constructed by an aleatory point (WP 152), the point in a
state of survey (32).2 Science studies a plane of reference in which concepts are actualized as determinate objects (133). We could extend this
description to show that the three syntheses reappear as the means of transition
from art to philosophy (168) and that good and common sense determine the
movement from philosophy to science, but the point I think is already sufficiently made: despite a new technical vocabulary, the conceptual structure
Deleuze developed in his middle period provides formal backbone of his last
major work. Arts plane of composition is a reformulation of the material field
we saw at the foundation of each of the three geneses outlined below; philosophys plane of immanence is a reformulation of the virtual; and sciences plane
of references is a reformulation of the individuated world of representation.
158
But why all these reformulations? What purpose do they serve? Do the different vocabularies Deleuze takes up contribute something specific to the process
of production, or do they just serve as a set of terms that he can virtuosically
rearrange in a linguistic game to make them map onto the contours of his own
philosophical system? He famously described his method for reading other philosophers as one in which he takes thinkers from behind to produce monstrous
offspring, the products of all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions (NG 6). Are we to understand that all of these slippages and
dislocations slide in one direction and tend toward this eight part structure as
an ideal limit? These questions are beyond the scope of this book. They move
in a different direction altogether and emphasize the differences rather than
the similarities between Deleuzes works. Instead of answering them, I want to
leave them open. What is the specific contribution of each book to the general
structure it actualizes? What I hoped to have shown here was simply that there
is a very general yet consistent conceptual structure behind Deleuzes three central texts, and that this structure traced out a consistent theory of the genesis of
representation.
Notes
Preface
1
See Jeff Bells The Problem of Difference; Leonard Lawlors Thinking Through French
Philosophy; Dorothea Olkowskis Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation; and Jack
Reynolds and John Roffes Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity,
and Phenomenology.
For a few brief remarks regarding Deleuzes relation to Heidegger see Miguel
de Beisteguis Truth and Genesis. For an excellent and more detailed reading see
Jeff Bells Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos, pg. 114ff.
Claire Colebrooks Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed is a notable exception to this;
see also Alberto Toscanos The Theatre of Production; and Jean-Clet Martins La philosophie de Gilles Deleuze.
Chapter 1
1
5
6
See, for example, Badiou, Theoretical Writings pg. 246n4 and Serres, Conversations
on Science, Culture, and Time pg. 3940. Cf. NG 86, 88.
Manuel DeLanda (DeLanda Immanence and Transcendence 132) and Timothy
Murphy (Murphy Quantum Ontology 21113) both argue that the context of
Deleuzes thought is contemporary physics. In Intensive Science, DeLanda broadens
this context to encompass not only physics but anything vaguely mathematical or
scientific.
Foucault claims that no book could be more alien to Deleuzes work than the Phenomenology of Perception (Foucault Counter-Memory 170).
In Modern French Philosophy Vincent Descombes suggests in passing several important similarities between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty (7071). Leonard Lawlor
provides a more nuanced summary of similarities and differences between Deleuze
and Merleau-Ponty in Thinking Through French Philosophy. See also Jeff Bells The
Problem of Difference; Dorothea Olkowskis Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation;
and Jack Reynolds and John Roffes Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence,
Univocity, and Phenomenology.
Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze pg. 6.
Boundas, Introduction to ES pg. 45. Exactly why this reading is unsatisfactory is
unclearespecially because what Boundas considers nonphenomenological falls
well within the framework of Husserls thought even before any radicalization by
later thinkers.
160
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Notes
AO 10.
DR 52.
This is Lyotards description. See Lyotard, Phenomenology 53. See also Leonard
Lawlors defense of this adjective in Derrida and Husserl pg. 11ff. and pg. 236n1. In
addition to Lawlors comments, we might add that much of the popularity and
influence of this essay came from the attention Ricoeur gave to it in his introduction and running commentary to Ideas 1. This commentary has been translated
into English as A Key to Edmund Husserls Ideas 1.
Fink describes the theory of reduction and the theory of constitution as
phenomenologys two central and basic systematic ideas (Fink 102; cf.131).
These two central aspects repeatedly appear throughout French commentaries
on phenomenology.
See CTM 1116.
For just two instances, see Ricoeur, An Analysis 107ff. and Bachelard 156.
For a discussion of Deleuze and Merleau-Pontys conceptions of the transcendental field, see Leonard Lawlors essay The End of Ontology in Lawlor, Thinking
pg. 8094. Lawlor argues Merleau-Pontys conception differs from Deleuzes in
that Merleau-Ponty describes this field as a generality. Nominally, this would be a
strong opposition, but Merleau-Ponty seems to understand generality in the sense
of a positive indeterminacythe same way Deleuze understands the events populating his transcendental field (DR 169).
See Derrida Genesis 70ff. especially pg. 71 for a good discussion of the relation
between sense and neutrality in Husserl.
See Brassier, Alien Theory pg. 61ff. and Lawlor, Thinking pg. 83. See also Alliez
pg. 9. The attempt to distinguish the Deleuzian reduction from the more general
phenomenological reduction suffers from several ambiguities, the most important of which is that Deleuze was by no means the only thinker to describe the
transcendental field as impersonal. Not only do Heidegger (cf. the Letter on
Humanism, and On Time and Being), Sartre (cf. The Transcendence of the Ego),
Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible), Blanchot (The Space of Literature and The Book to Come), Levinas (Existence and Existents),
and Derrida (Introduction to the Origin of Geometry), all do the same, but even Husserl in his later work described the primordial depths of transcendental
constitution as anonymous and consistently specified, as I will discuss in more
detail later, that the qualification of these syntheses as passive was meant to indicate that they took place outside of an ego. The notion of an impersonal
transcendental field was a permanent installment of phenomenology from the
start. Ricoeur refers to this as one of the most difficult aspects of transcendental
phenomenology (Ricoeur, A Key 110). For an excellent account of impersonality
in Husserl, see Gurwitschs A Non-Egological Conception of Consciousness.
Gurwitsch convincingly argues that, with the exception of Ideas 1, for Husserl the
ego, like all other objects, falls under the phenomenological reduction (330).
For Gurwitsch this is true not only of the empirical egowhich even in Ideas 1 was
bracketedbut of the transcendental ego as well. Levinas will repeatedly return
to this point throughout TI (cf. 29, 42, 48, and 50).
The English translation reads the meaning of signs. Deleuze uses the French
word sens for meaning. See Proust et les signes 36ff.
Notes
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
161
Deleuze maintains this identity of sense and essence throughout all of his works.
See, for example LS 105 and DR 191.
He makes the same argument in NP. Especially in third chapter and, in particular,
section 9 of that chapter. Here Deleuze argues that a true critique is equivalent to
creation (genesis). Nietzsche, in opposition to Kant, discovers a principle of
internal genesis, and this is what allows Nietzsche to realize a true critique
(NP 91).
Unlike the reduction which was not fully articulated until later, the theory of
constitution was already motivating Husserls very first work Philosophy of Arithmetic.
See Sokolowski, Constitution pg. 6; cf. Moran 146 and Fink, The Phenomenological Philosophy 76. Both Derrida and Sokolowski argue that constitution was the
primary problem which occupied Husserl for his entire career. See Derrida, Genesis 70. Cf. Husserl E&J 5051, APS 27071.
See APS 624ff. for Husserls adoption of Dilthys distinction between descriptive
and explanatory psychology to his own static and genetic.
Dermot Moran, in Introduction to Phenomenology, explains that constitution refers
to the manner in which objects are built up for consciousness out of a synthesis
of sensory intuitions and various categories which are applied according to rules,
a meaning which continues in Husserl (164). Moran traces this use of the word
back to Kantas he also does with the word phenomenology (67). (In his
lectures Deleuze too considers Kant to be the first phenomenologist.) For more
on the relation between Kantian and phenomenological constitution, see Fink
135ff and Sokolowski 214ff.
Sokolowski pg. 189; Sokolowski frequently compares Husserls later life philosophy to Nietzsches (cf. 184).
See E&J 56, 216, APS 296ff. Cf. Sokolowski pg. 17072.
See Welton pg. 17579. See also A. D. Smith 117.
See APS pg. 62445.
See FTL 65. Of course, by logicians I mean Husserls contemporaries.
This is especially clear in E&J and FTL.
Fink described Husserls philosophy as a monadology (Fink 128).
Husserl frequently makes use of this presupposition to move from one stage of
the genesis to the next. Cf. E&J 112: . . . the ego cannot long remain with a
merely simple contemplation and apprehension; rather, the tendency inherent
in the contemplation of an object pushes it beyond this.
Each synthesis that I discussthe temporal, associative, explicative, and predicativeis really a general name subsuming a variety of syntheses.
For a great overview of the syntheses in general, see the first two chapters of
Rudolph Makkreels book Imagination and Interpretation in Kant.
Makkreel pg. 2729, Steinbock xl.
Cf. Steinbock: Whereas the understanding has the spontaneous character of
active syntheses that hold together and connect the sensuous manifold according
to rules, sensibility has the character of passivity, since inner and outer sense
merely receive sense data (xl; original emphases). See Husserl E&J 60, 110, 123,
179; see A. D. Smith pg. 98, 111; for pre-I, pg. 12223.
Husserls genesis is firmly grounded in the body, and this sensuous matter which
association will organize comes directly from the senses. The data is asignifying
162
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
Notes
or meaningless because no bestowal of sense has yet taken place (E&J 72). See
Sokolowskis Constitution pg. 21012 (cf. 17678) for a strong account of the
status of sensory data in genetic phenomenology.
For a description of the relation of hyletic data to timea temporal hylsee
E&J 64ff.
We see very quickly that the phenomenology of association is, so to speak, a
higher continuation of the doctrine of original time-constitution (APS 163; cf.
E&J 74, 177).
See Alain Beaulieus essay Gilles Deleuze et la litterature for a comparison of
Husserl and Deleuzes surpassing of judgment, pg. 428.
Husserl is careful to specify that the distinction between passivity and activity is
not inflexible, that it is not a matter here of terms which can be established definitively for all time . . . (E&J 108). He is very close to Deleuze on this point as we
will soon see.
Husserl quotes Kant on this point: As long as nothing else takes place, the object
is indeed only the indeterminate object of empirical intuition, to speak with
Kant (APS 291).
Deleuzes notion of the complex theme (see PS, DR, and LS) has roots in this
stage of Husserls genesis. When the ego turns its attention from the particular
object to its singularities, it is able to recognize the singularities as determinations
of that object because the object persists (through the shift of attention) in the
form of a theme.
In later Husserl, proposition or judicative proposition describes an active judgment. He uses the word for the sake of precisionto clearly separate judgment
as the process leading up to the proposition from the judicative proposition itself
and from the primitive judgments of the explicative synthesis (APS 299).
I only discuss the relation between Deleuze and Kant from the point of view of
genesis. For a more general account see Christian Kerslakes article The Vertigo
of Philosophy; Daniel Smiths work in general, but particularly his excellent
introduction to the US edition of Francis Bacon, his dissertation, Gilles Deleuze and
the Philosophy of Difference, and his article Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas; Melissa McMahons dissertation, Deleuze and Kants Critical Philosophy;
and James Williamss Gilles Deleuzes Difference and Repetition and also the first chapter of his The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze.
See Deleuzes lectures on Kant, Lecture 1 (03/14/1978) and Lecture 3
(03/28/1978).
Philosophy must be an ontology, it cannot be anything else; but there is no ontology of essence, there is only an ontology of sense (DI 15; original emphasis). Cf.
NP 2; BG 34, 5657; PS 1314, 3841, 47; DR, 187, 19199; LS 53, 71, and 105.
Cf. DR 170: Kant held fast to the point of view of conditioning without attaining
that of genesis (cf. 154, 173, 232). See also NP 4951, 8991; PS 16, 95; TF 89;
Dan Smith gives a very strong reading of this in his dissertation, Gilles Deleuze and
the Philosophy of Difference. See 10406.
Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, 511.
See Guroults introduction to Lvolution et la structure de la doctrine de la
science chez Fichte. L'volution et la structure de la doctrine de la science chez Fichte.
Notes
48
49
50
51
163
Husserl (APS 171 and 211), Merleau-Ponty (PP 44, 71, 256, 335, and 340).
Derrida writes of Husserls objection to Kant: If the transcendental is not
merged originarily with its empirical content, if it is not presented as parallel to
experience itself, the transcendental, being thematized outside experience,
becomes logical and formal. It is no longer a constituting source but the constituted product of experience. [. . .] Husserl begins with a radical refusal of Kants
formalism. (Derrida, Genesis 10). This is why Levinas describes Husserls notion
of consciousness as an eminently concrete phenomenon (TI 71) which puts
contact with the world at the very heart of the being of consciousness (43).
Lyotard further argues that Kants conception of the transcendental was taken
ready-made from the empiricalKant did not have the method of reduction. Cf.
Phenomenology pg. 32.
Deleuze makes the same argument in KP chapter 3, published in the same year.
See Claire Colebrooks Philosophy and Post-Structuralist Theory pg. 202ff. for a more
detailed description of the relation between transcendental empiricism and transcendental idealism.
Chapter 2
1
2
7
8
9
10
11
12
LS xiv.
These three levels are most clearly described by Deleuze in the last series of
The Logic of Sense, pp. 23949. Jean-Jacques Lecercle has also described them very
clearly in his excellent book Deleuze and Language. See also Stephen J. Arnotts
article, Solipsism and the Possibility of Community in Deleuzes Ethics.
See especially E&J pg. 103 and 19798. This is also a constant theme of Husserls
lectures on passive synthesis. See, for example, APS pg. 95.
While Heidegger had the Logical Investigations in mind, these characteristics come
out even more clearly in Experience and Judgment. See especially Husserls long
introduction to that work.
Michel Serres is another thinker who equates the endpoint of genesis, knowledge, with judgment, representation and form. See Genesis pg. 14, 15, and 18.
I will make a brief argument for treating the virtual and sense as synonymous
below. For direct evidence, see DR pg. 191; C2 pg. 99; and BG pg. 57.
On LS 185, Deleuze defines sense as poetry itself.
Deleuze does, however, frequently repeat this claim in the pages immediately
preceding the quotation: cf. LS 70, 72, 81, and 86.
See C1 pg. 58ff; Bergson, MM pg. 17.
LS 11920.
See DR 89; EC pg. 2829; and the introduction KP. Cf. Kant CPR pg. A18284/
B22428.
For an excellent discussion of these two times and many of the themes which
appear below, see Jeff Bells The Problem of Difference pg. 187ff. A clear description
of these two times from the point of view of the Stoic tradition which Deleuze
invokes can be found in Philip Turetzkys Time, pg. 41ff.
164
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
Notes
The most important of Blanchots texts for Deleuze are the series of essays that
Blanchot wrote between 1953 and 1958 which are collected in The Book to Come,
and Blanchots book The Space of Literature which represents, in Levinass words,
the culmination of these essays (Levinas, Proper Names 129).
These two times, however, are not specific to Blanchot. They also appear throughout Poulets work, in later Ricoeur, and in Bataille.
Levinas, Existence 101.
Deleuze often describes Aion as the time of event-effects (LS 62) or the locus of
incorporeal events (LS 165).
In the work from which Deleuze took the title The Logic of Sense, Hyppolite
provides a memorable description of a similar process in Hegel: While poetry
tends to rediscover reflectively the reflective magic of language, the understanding smashes the concrete representation into its elements which are fixed and
determinate (Logic and Existence 40). See Leonard Lawlors introduction for a
brief discussion of the importance of Hyppolites book to Deleuze.
This present of Aion is the present as a being of reason, for example, a mathematical point with no extension, which infinitely subdivides the instant into a past
and future (LS 61ff.).
For this dialectic between an un-individuated and an individuated state of affairs,
see LS 124.
Although Deleuze does not use the expression passive synthesis in The Logic of
Sense, he does in both Difference and Repetition (1968) and Anti-Oedipus (1972).
Because of the similarity between his account of the syntheses across these three
books and because these syntheses are not governed by an active consciousness,
we can accurately describe them as passive.
This theme was already present in Deleuzes first book Empiricism and Subjectivity.
There he asked the very Levinasian question of how the given could transcend
itself and become subject. The given was defined in a way which is very similar to
the dispersion of partial objects in depth. The given is the collection of things as
they appeara collection without an album, a play without a stage, a flux of perceptions (ES 23; my emphasis). It is the unorganized delirium (ES 23; my emphasis)
of impressions given by sensibility to the imagination.
This is why Deleuze, alluding to the Kantian definition of the imagination as the
faculty of synthesis, gives the body without organs the name spontaneous imagination in Difference and Repetition (DR 70ff.).
In Genesis, Michel Serres also describes a genesis beginning with these two mixtures,
except he calls them the multiple and the one. The significant difference between
Serres and Deleuze, as we see in the next few chapters, is that the body without
organs is produced whereas, in Serres, the one seems to be presupposed.
In order for language to be possible, it is necessary to draw the sounds from
their simple state of corporeal actions and passions (LS 166).
Cf. LS 207, 218, 220, 241.
For the way in which Husserls passive syntheses negotiate sensory data, see APS
2631 and E&J 16.
See Levinass Existence and Existents. pg. 18ff. and pg. 70ff.
Cf.: . . . the direct and global function of integration or of general coordination,
is normally vested in the genital zone (LS 200).
Notes
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
165
See E&J 77; cf. 150.

In logic an exclusive disjunction separates two statements. It says either A or B,
but not both. An inclusive disjunction, however, separates two statements but
maintains the possibility of them both: either A or B or both. For Deleuze, it
therefore takes the form of a problem, or a positive indeterminacy. Is it A or B or
both? Is it William or Richard or Rilchiam? It calls for a decision.
For two excellent accounts of the threefold synthesis in Kant, see Longuenesse,
Chapter 2 and Makkreel, Chapter 1.
On this point cf. LS 218 regarding the development of images.
See LS 180: . . . Being is the unique event in which all events communicate with
one another . . .
This gives us an opportunity to clearly state a significant difference between
Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty. The difference is clearly not, as Foucault has suggested in Theatrum Philosophicum, that Merleau-Ponty begins with the body
and that Deleuze begins with the phantasm. Deleuze does begin with the body,
and the phantasmwhich is synonymous with sense (Deleuze uses the word to
suggest that sense is the immaterial double of its material foundations)is produced as an effect of this body. (Foucaults misreading is a consequence of the fact
that he understood the word phantasm in LS to have the same sense it did in
DR. As will become increasingly apparent throughout this book, Deleuzes technical terms almost always vary their senses between books.) The difference
between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, and indeed, between Deleuze and many of
his peers, is that in Deleuze the transcendental field is produced. In MerleauPonty, the body was a given impersonal transcendental field. In Levinas, Existence,
or what corresponds to Deleuzes corporeal depths, functioned as an anonymous
transcendental field out of which the subject is hypostasized. For both MerleauPonty and Levinas, the transcendental field is given. For Deleuze, however, this
impersonal field is produced and implies the dissolution of both the body and of
Levinass existence. Blanchot is the only one who shares this understanding of
impersonality with Deleuze.
Deleuze draws this distinction between two becomings in LS 165.
For a more detailed description of counter-actualization as an ethical principle
see Lecercles Deleuze and Language pg. 116ff. and 173ff.; Ian Buchanans chapter
Transcendental Empiricist Ethics in Deleuzism; Constantin Boundas brief discussion in his introduction to Deleuze and Philosophy pg. 17; and Paul Pattons attempt
at a practical interpretation of this and other Deleuzian notions Deleuze and the
Political.
Deleuze directly alludes to this essay when he is describing the dynamics of sense
in his essay on structuralism (cf. DI 187).
Throughout both The Book to Come and The Space of Literature, Blanchot periodically opposes the space of the work and its essential language or language of
thought to these three dimensions of the proposition which define what he calls
the language of the world. See in particular The Space of Literature, pg. 41, where
he claims that in the language of thought, words are not obliged to serve to designate anything [i.e. denote] or give voice to anyone [i.e. manifest]. And far
from representing the space of signification, the space of the work is the production and the expression of signification itself (41). Just like Deleuzes notion of
166
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
Notes
sense or the virtual, Blanchots literary space represents the impersonal transcendental space in which everyday language is determined and produced.
See especially Blanchots essay Mallarms Experience in The Space of Literature
pg. 38ff.
Ricoeur, An Analysis 107ff. This essay, first published in 1954, had a significant
influence on Deleuzes thought, especially, as we will see below in relation to the
problem of the Other.
See also DR 15365.
Deleuze refers to the aleatory point as the subject of sense, the overman in LS
107 and 178.
Deleuze quotes Carroll: Justice Shallow had felt certain that it was either William
or Richard, but had not been able to settle which, so that he could not possibly
say either name before the other, can it be doubted that, rather than dies, he
would have gasped out Rilchiam! (LS 46).
In both Anti-Oedipus and Difference and Repetition the three syntheses of the dynamic
genesis are passive syntheses. From this point of view, we could say that the horizon of what appears, in Deleuze as in Husserl, is produced in passivity, that the
dynamic genesis is a passive genesis.
Cf. LS 95 and 126.
Cf. LS 186.
Deleuze is alluding to the traditional philosophical notion of the person which
Kant describes as that which is conscious of the numerical identity of itself in
different times (CPR A 361). See also part one of Descartes Principles of Philosophy
and Leibnizs New Essays Concerning Human Understanding pg. 23037.
We should note that while the publication of this book predates many of Deleuzes
significant writings on psychoanalysis, the most important aspects of Deleuzes
encounter were already established in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962).
Deleuzes comments on Bergsons relation to psychoanalysis seem equally valid
for Deleuze himself. In Bergsonsim, Deleuze writes that Bergsons theory of the
virtual, would lose all its sense if its extra-psychological range were not emphasized in itself(BG 55). Deleuze explains, the word unconscious since Freud,
has become inseparable from an especially effective and active psychological existence. . .. Bergson does not use the word unconscious to denote a psychological
reality outside consciousness, but to denote a nonpsychological realitybeing as
it is in itself (BG 5556). See also Deleuzes lecture on Leibniz delivered on
04/29/1980.
See the unconscious is differential and iterative by nature; it is serial, problematic and questioning (DR 108; cf. 194). The unconscious of the structure is a
differential unconscious (DI 181).
(See FC, 5051, 82, 10809).
Deleuze explicitly argues that there is such a savage experience in the cinema
books when he draws a distinction between semiology, or linguistic systems, and
semiotics, or the system of images and signs independent of language in general
(C2 29; cf. C2 31 and 33; and C1 ix and 12). This entire nonlinguistic system was
the one developed in C1 in which movement-images, or the non-language-material (C2 29) were transformed into various types of other nonlinguistic images by
a material subjectivity.
Notes
167
Chapter 3
1
2
3
9
10
11
See The Anti-Oedipus Papers pg. 404. In a journal entry or note from 1972 Guattari
wrote Keep my penmanship, my style. But I dont really recognize myself in the
A.O.
Cf. DR 56ff.
See pg 26. Cf. 296: The order of desire is the order of production . . . (original
emphasis).
See KA pg. 7 and Frederic Jamesons introduction to The Political Unconscious,
pg. 22.
See 35657 for desires essential relation to the outside. Esp. . . . desire does not
survive cut off from the outside (357). It will become clear below that this outside is not at all the Blanchotian outside which corresponds, in Deleuze, to the
transcendental field of sense. Rather, it refers to the way in which the ego of
depths is dissolved in the interpenetration of corporeal fragments.
In this passage Husserl explicitly opposes his concrete notion of the transcendental to the formal Kantian transcendental (APS 171). Cf. CES for Husserls most
developed account of the word transcendental; as well as the first meditation in
CTM. In both places the word ultimately refers to this special sense of a world
constituting consciousness. For both Deleuze and Husserl we can say that genesis
is transcendental very much in the scholastic sense: it encompasses all of the
categories. It is trans-categorical.
Cf. Heideggers comment in his lectures on Hegel where he talks of Husserls
conviction, held by him for a long time now and mentioned often, that phenomenology represents empiricism and positivism, properly understood (Heidegger,
Hegel 20). In relation to recent critical debates surrounding Husserls thought in
English this is a very contentious point. It is important however to notice that in
France the idea of Husserls genetic phenomenology as radically empiricist was
almost a given thanks to Ricoeurs persistent commentaries. See especially Ricoeur,
An Analysis pg. 10-12 and 202ff. Yet in becoming more and more existential the
phenomenology of the late Husserl became more and more empirical, for the whole
order of the understanding [. . .] henceforth proceeds from passive synthesis initiated on the very level of perception (205).
Oedipus is the idealist turning point [in Freud] (55; cf. 111, 265). In contrast,
the elements of Deleuze and Guattaris transcendental unconscious, never
form a mental structure that is autonomous and expressive (98; cf. 265).
See AO 52, 97, 111, 173, 186ff., and 306.
This attempt to rethink structuralism from the point of view of the genesis of
structure is made in Deleuzes essay, How do we Recognize Structuralism? in
DI 170ff. Deleuzes arguments there are repeated in both The Logic of Sense and
Difference and Repetition as well. See Lecercles book on Deleuze (99ff.) on the
importance of this essay for LS. See my arguments in the third part of the book
that Difference and Repetition does not break with this structuralist model as some
commentators have suggested.
Nonetheless, they carefully distance themselves from Althusser, whose project
can be described in almost the same way, in the first few pages of the book (see in
168
12
13
14
15
16
17
Notes
particular their critique of the notions of relative autonomy (4) and structural
expression (6)).
Following Deleuzes arguments regarding Nietzsche in NP, Dan Smith, in his dissertation, convincingly argues that Difference and Repetition represents Deleuzes
attempt to rewrite the Critique of Pure Reason. In his article, Deleuze, Kant, and
the Theory of Immanent Ideas he suggests that the AO is Deleuzes Critique of
Practical Reason.
Their arguments here have much in common with Merleau-Pontys in the first
chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, and they lead Deleuze and Guattari to a
position very similar to Merleau-Pontys notion of an impersonal transcendental
field (which itself has roots in Bergsons similar conception of a pure, impersonal
perception opened on to the outside in the first chapter of Matter and Memory).
Cf.: There is no particular form of existence that can be labeled psychic reality
(27); and: We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it
is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any
mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation in order to
invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of productions (29).
Cf. Indeed, in this sense we must say that the unconscious has always been an
orphanthat is, it has engendered itself in the identity of nature and man, of the
world and man (108).
Levinas finds this discovery of a reality prior to the division of subject and object
to be one of the most compelling and interesting aspects of Husserls thought
and he returns to it continually throughout his study of Husserl: Husserl, by
overcoming the substantialist concept of existence, was able to demonstrate that
a subject is not something that first exists and then relates to objects. The relation
between subjects and objects constitutes the primary phenomenon in which we
can find what are called subject and object (TI 42; cf. 25, 35, and 51). Derrida
too will highlight this aspect of Husserls thought throughout his dissertation. See
also Heidegger, HTC 96, 111, and 120.
Desire produces reality, or stated another way, desiring-production is one and
the same thing as social production (30).
Chapter 4
1
This argument is necessary because one can never count on the consistency of
Deleuzes technical vocabulary between books.
Deleuzes use of the term here is very close to Husserls in CTM (cf. 18), whereas
his use of the term in DR is very close to the categorical multiplicities of FTL
(chapter 3). Suzanne Bachelard is very good on this point (43ff.). See also Alberto
Toscanos brief discussion on pg. 165ff. of The Theatre of Production. However,
Toscano slightly exaggerates the distance between Husserl and Deleuze.
See Hyppolites reading of sensibility in Hegel in the second chapter of Logic and
Existence.
For Bergsons theory of an impersonal or pure perception in which the perceiving subject is exteriority itself, see MM 34. For his description of this
exteriority as molecular, see MM 22ff.
Notes
5
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
169
What Deleuze calls the given in ES is therefore entirely different from what he
calls the given in DR (cf. DR 222). In DR the given is what appears as already
constituted to an empirical sensibility. In ES, however, it is what is given to a
transcendental sensibility. See DR 144.
On this point see also Deleuzes 1972 essay (published in the same year as AO) on
Hume in PI, especially pg. 3541.
See Leibniz, Principles of Nature and Grace 13 Deleuze returns to this example and othersincluding dog beatingin The Fold. See esp. 86-87.
Cf. . . . the vertigo and dizziness of minute and dark perceptions (TF 92).
Cf. DR: Partial objects are the elements of little perceptions. The unconscious is
differential, involving little perceptions, and as such it is different in kind from
consciousness. It concerns problems and questions which can never be reduced
to the great oppositions or the overall effects that are felt in consciousness (we
shall see that Leibnizian theory already indicated this path) (DR 108; cf. DR 245;
DI 181 and Deleuzes lecture on Leibniz on 04/29/1980).
It is true that the third synthesis produces a residual subject, but this is only the
apparent subject. The unconscious as process is the real subject (324).
AO 54 and 300; my emphasis following 328.
In addition to these, see AO 32627.
It is true that Deleuze and Guattari often describe the body without organs as
unengendered, without papamummy, but the concept itself is of the second
type that I outlined above: it changes its definition according to the moment of
genesis at which we consider it. It is only in the second synthesis, as a miraculating
machine that the body without organs presents itself as unengendered.
Hence the coupling that takes place within the partial object-flow connective
synthesis also has another from: product/producing (AO 6).
In this quote desiring-machines refers to partial objects.
Cf. Deleuzes similar claim in Difference and Repetition that the first synthesis results
in the production of natural signs (DR 77).
It therefore takes the place of projection as the mechanism of genesis which was
dominant in The Logic of Sense. This explains the absence of the good object in
Anti-Oedipus.
See especially Hyppolites interpretation of the Hegelian imagination from the
point of view of genesis in Logic and Existence, especially on the negation and transcendence of the sensible (LE 2831). The primary difference between the
Deleuzian and the Hegelian transcendence of the sensible is that dialectical logic
determines the Hegelian imagination in relation to already constituted meanings
whereas Anti-Oedipus shows the production of the body without organs as absolute
(without relation) before it becomes involved in the play of representations. It is
hard to deny a Hegelian inspiration on this point, especially in relation to my earlier suggestion that Deleuze and Guattaris characterization of the sensible as a
multiplicity of singularities also seemed to have Hegelian roots. This, in addition to
the fact that the neoplatonic versions of Deleuzes system put forward in Proust and
Signs and especially in the cinema books repeatedly emphasize that once sense is
discovered it is discovered as always having been already there at the outset
(a move which results the formulation of movement-images (sensible singularities)
as always having one half participating in the absolute or time) goes even further in
170
19
20
Notes
suggesting an extremely strong Hegelian influence that needs to be further

explored especially in relation to Hyppolites genetic and impersonal Hegel.
Perhaps we will eventually have to overturn a second of Foucaults claims and one
of the current commonplaces of Deleuzes criticism: Anti-Oedipus is a flashy Hegel
(the primary difference being that history has become a history of contingency:
there is no teleology in the Deleuzian evolution, even if, as we will see, it still progresses according to a dialectical logic of sublimation or double causality.
DR 76.
Fink already suggested the following criticisms in his paper Lanalyse intentionnelle et le problme de la pense speculative. Deleuze takes up Finks criticisms
directly, although from the point of view of the static rather than dyamic genesis,
in LS (9798).
Chapter 5
1
2
3
10
See for example, Derridas translation of Husserls Origin of Geometry. For a

detailed discussion of these two expressions see Andr de Muralts 1958 The Idea
of Phenomenology pg. 12324.
See FTL 5758 and especially E&J 63.
See, for example, Husserls Origin of Geometry where he also includes literary works
amongst Ideal objectivities (Derrida, Origin 160).
See DR 159, LS 54 and 57 (where objectit is translated as objective), and DI
182. It would be very interesting to compare Deleuze and Husserl on this point.
In Deleuze Ideal objectivities, or transcendental Ideas, as I argue in detail in my
next chapter, come before and produce the objectities of receptivity. In Husserl,
it is the other way around. A complete object is submitted to imaginary variations
from which the Idea objectity is abstracted.
Here, systematic phenomenology does not mean the process of production of
objectities but rather, phenomenology retains the sense they gave it earlier in
the book as the science of description rather than of explanation (cf. 10).
From the point of view of the territorial system of representation developed later,
(1) is the representative of desire or germinal implex, (2) is the repressing representation or alliance and extended filiation, and (3) is the displaced represented
or desire outside of itself in extensity or the somatic complex (162).
The role of alliance and filiation in this process of selection and codification is
described in great detail on pg. 152.
At one point they broaden the meanings of these syntheses even more to purely
spatial and temporal forms by suggesting that filiation is simply a temporal synthesis whereas alliance is a spatial synthesis (201).
Deleuze and Guattari consider Asiatic production to be the purest manifestation of the despotic state (198).
For the genesis of judgment and knowledge in despotism, see 294; of representation, see 310; of signification, see 206ff.; of law, 212; and for the introduction of
teleology, 288. Interestingly, this stage also theorizes the genesis and interaction
of both metaphor and metonymy (212). This seems to be an allusion to Jakobsons
Notes
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
171
theory that the entire genesis of language can be demonstrated from the interaction of these two devices. From this point of view, it seems that Deleuze and
Guattari might even be suggesting a phenomenological foundation for the
entirety of natural language.
See, for example, Fredric Jamesons The Political Unconscious pg. 22 and 58 and
Bruce Baughs essay How Deleuze Can Help Us Make Literature Work,
pg. 35ff.
To deterritorialize here just means to move away from territoriality and does not
imply the dissolution of boundaries. In this case, the deterritorialization that the
despotic machine performs rigidifies boundaries by turning segments into
bricks.
From this point of view, Deleuze and Guattari seem to parallel Husserl by describing
the genesis as progressing along a continuum of passivity and activity. Territorial
representation appears in this passage as the pivot between passivity and a Deleuzian
form of spontaneity. And taking this continuum as our axis, it is also worth pointing
out that the expression deterritorialization has two directions. In the current literature on Deleuze it is used exclusively as the movement from territoriality back to the
molecular. However, in this quotation, and in most of its uses in AO, it describes the
movement forward from territorial to despotic representation. Deterritorialization
is simply the movement away from territorial representation whether that be in the
direction of the dissolution of territoriality or of its further formalization.
On the issue of molar functionalism, see also AO 178. For more on the relationship between meaning and use and between the different practices they call for,
interpretation and schizoanalysis, see AO 67, 77, 109, 133, 17981, 20408,
21314, 288, and 322ff.
But perhaps it is also at this point that these expressions like despotic state
should be treated skeptically. It seems unlikely that Deleuze and Guattari are
describing a political organization. This would produce massive problems if we
were to follow their suggestion and advocate a move to a molecular state which
consists in the pure absence of meaning.
Of course Deleuze champions those kinds of writing which move us beyond
meaning to the nonsense of the molecular. Minor literature (or painting, film,
sculpture, and so on) is minor because it refuses to make sense and thus remains,
literally, minor, small, molecular.
I have in mind, for these last two points and their relation to Kants questions, the
definition of common sense given in LS: good sense could not distribute any
diversity if it did not transcend itself toward an instance capable of relating the
diverse to the form of a subjects identity, or to the form of an objects or a worlds
permanence (LS 78; cf. the entire page). Obviously, this Deleuzian answer is
completely different from the Kantian, even though, taken out of their contexts,
they seem almost identical. Common and good sense have nothing to do with a
purely formal transcendental subject or object which would be present, even if
nonactive, in the earlier stages of the genesis. The important point is that these
two forms are produced only secondarily as the effects of sense.
Cf. Guattaris note to Deleuze: Im flattered that you kept the term Urstaat. Do
you think that ourfuturereaders will understand on their own the pun with
172
19
20
21
22
Notes
Ur of Chaldea (Sumer) . . . Abrahams departure city? [. . .] The origin of every

promised land, the future Jerusalems, real and celestial! Maybe we could slip in a
pun, or a joke . . . Its like for Lulu . . . People wont get it! (The Anti-Oedipus Papers
441; original emphasis). Whats interesting is that Guattaris comment seems to
have determined the first sentence of the chapter (but not without Abraham taking on a specific conceptual persona as the new alliance of despotism): The city
of Ur, the point of departure of Abraham or the new alliance (AO 217). It is as if
Deleuze were not interested in willful and exclusive obscurity.
For decoding see AO 218, for the subject-object conflict, see 25860.
See Catherine Labio, Origins and the Enlightenment pg. 98101.
Cf. Deleuzes claim that Guattari rescued him from psychoanalysis (NG 144).
See also the editors introduction to the Anti-Oedipus Papers, pg. 16.
Introduction to Part 3
1
Specifically, Miguel de Beisteguis Truth and Genesis, Alberto Toscanos Theatre of

Production, Jay Lamperts Deleuze and Guattaris Philosophy of History, Peter Hallwards Out of this World, Philip Turetzkys Time, and James Williamss critical guide
to Difference and Repetition. All of these books, with the exception of Williamss
emphasize the point of view of genesis, but they only think of genesis as moving
from the virtual to the actual. Only Lamperts and Williamss books consider the
relation of the virtual to the temporal syntheses, but not in the way I put forward
here. As far as I know the only critic to take the dynamic genesis seriously, although
not in the context of Difference and Repetition, is J. J. Lecercle in Deleuze and
Language.
Chapter 6
1
2
3
For an excellent account of Deleuzes theory of Ideas, see Dan Smiths essay
Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas. For an account which
engages with the mathematical examples Deleuze uses, see Dan Smiths, Axiomatics and Problematics as Two Modes of Formalization: Deleuzes Epistemology of
Mathematics.
See above, pg. 35.
It is worth noticing that Deleuze clearly thinks of this process of determination as
taking place between receptivity and the understanding. The allusion to Kantian
coordinates resonates strongly with my arguments below that the virtual intervenes between receptivityor the three syntheseson the one hand, and
meaningful representations on the other. Deleuze repeats this characterization of
ideal elements in two other places: see Difference and Repetition (elements without
figure or function (DR 278)) and especially Deleuzes essay How Can We Recognize Structuralism?, where the elements of symbolic structures cannot be
defined either by pre-existing realities to which it would refer and which it would
designate, or by the imaginary or conceptual contents which it would implicate,
Notes
7
8
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
173
and which would give it a signification. The elements of a structure have neither
extrinsic designation, nor intrinsic signification (DI 173).
For a basic definition of singularities and the way in which they determine the
form of an object by extending themselves across its ordinary points, see the seminars on Leibniz from (4/19/1980) and (6/5/1980). See also Dan Smiths very
clear account of all of the mathematical notions at work in Deleuzes account of
Ideas in his article Axiomatics and Problematics.
While the genesis of Ideas is absent from Anti-Oedipus, it does make a very brief
appearance in The Logic of Sense (LS 121).
For a more detailed description of group theory, see Dan Smiths article Axiomatics
and Problematics and Part 9 of Newmans collection The World of Mathematics.
Manuel DeLanda is also particularly good on this point, see Intensive Science esp.
16ff. and 182ff.
See DR 220.
E&J 339ff. is very clear on this. Cf Lyotard, Phenomenology, 38ff. and Suzanne
Bachelards A Study of Husserls Formal and Transcendental Logic, pg. 173ff.
What Husserl says of this Idea holds for Deleuze as well: This general essence is the
eidos, the idea, in the Platonic sense, but apprehended in its purity and free from all
metaphysical interpretations, therefore taken exactly as it is given to us immediately and intuitively in the vision of the idea which arises in this way (E&J 341; my emphasis).
See Suzanne Bachelard, pg. 17779.
One could therefore describe the multiplicity which Husserl has in mind as a
continuous and virtual multiplicity rather than a discreet and extensive one (E&J
343). Husserl often describes the temporal multiplicity as continuous multiplicity throughout ITC. Deleuze has always counted Husserl alongside Bergson as
the philosopher of multiplicity.
It is commonplace in Deleuzes criticismwith the exception of Jay Lampert
(Lampert 55)that the virtual actually defines the element of the past in general.
I explain why this is not the case (namely that the virtual as past is not sufficiently
free of content to found the free determination of Ideas) at the end of the next
chapter.
Cf. NP 2534 and DR 28385.
Deleuze himself cites Eugen Finks book , Le jeu comme symbole du monde and
Kostas Axeloss Vers la pense plantaire (DR 332n5). Although neither of these
works has been translated, parts of Axeloss book have been translated in Yale
French Studies under the title Planetary Interlude as has an earlier essay by Fink
on the same subject, The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play.
Deleuzes 1970 review of Axeloss book, The Fissure of Anaxagoras and the Local
Fires of Heraclitus is an important elaboration of the note in Difference and
Repetition. To these two it is worth adding both Poulets essay on Mallarm in The
Interior Distance and Blanchots essay on MallarmThe Book to Comein his
book of the same title.
The system of the future [. . .] must be called a divine game . . . (DR 116).
See also NP 25ff. and DR 116, 198, 282.
Deleuze gives traditional definitions of these two terms in both of his books on
Spinoza. Perhaps the clearest and most functional definition, however, comes
from a footnote toward the end of Anti-Oedipus (AO 309n2).
174
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
Notes
In commenting on this line, Blanchot says, Every work and each moment of the
work, puts everything into question all over again . . . (Blanchot 87).
Blanchots essay, There could be no question of ending well, in The Book to Come
deals with all of these points.
Merleau-Ponty develops the notion of positive indeterminacy throughout the Phenomenology of Perception. See PP pg. 7, 14, 3336, 196, 519.
Cf. DI: In fact, it is in relation to [the aleatory point] that the variety of terms and
the variation of differential relations are determined in each case (DI 184).
On this point, see Dan Smiths introduction to the US edition of Francis Bacon
and his essay on Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas in Deleuze
and Philosophy.
In Difference and Repetition these two syntheses, spcification and qualification,
have been translated as determination of species and determination of
qualities.
Deleuze makes this allusion clear in DR, pg. 223. If he describes primary quality
as extensity rather than as extension it is because extension does not preexist
the objects which populate it but is, rather, produced as a characteristic specific
to each individual object. See Deleuzes comments on Mamon (DR 174).
See also DR 179, 181, 24041, 243, as well as Deleuzes review of Simondon in
DI 86ff. Both James Williams and Mark Hansen are particularly good at pointing
this out.
Cf. earlier in the same text: . . . sense is actualized in the psychologically perceived sounds, and in the images that are psychologically associated with the
sounds (BG 57). We should recognize in this dualitysounds and imagesthe
two lines along which sense was actualized in the static genesis of The Logic of
Sensethe logical genesis (which corresponds to the sounds, or the sign which
denotes, signifies, or manifests) and the ontological genesis (which corresponds
to the image, or what is actually denoted, signified, or manifested).
Although he directly addresses this question in DR 209 and 247, he does so within
the context of discussion of Kant, so it is not immediately clear that these expressions would have the same sense in Deleuzes own thought.
DR 191; cf. 197 and 156ff. In LS Deleuze draws a correlation between knowledge
and extensity: . . . the known is subject to the law of a progressive movement
which proceeds from one part to anotherpartes extra partes (LS 48).
See in particular: representation and knowledge are modelled entirely upon
propositions of consciousness which designate cases of solution (192); and the
equation of propositions of consciousness with representations of knowledge
in DR 197. In Husserl we find a similar conflation of knowledge, representation,
and the proposition or statement. See, for example, the introduction to E&J pg.
2122, 28, 38, and 62.
On of the great strengths of Miguel de Beisteguis reading of Deleuze is that he
insists on this relation between the actual and the phenomena. See Truth and
Genesis pg. 247 and 292.
See the introduction to E&J. Cf. Levinas, TI pg. 1516.
For Deleuze (and for Husserl) homoiosis will always be secondary to the production of the two terms supposed to be adequate. This was already the case in
Deleuzes first book: The relation of truth to subjectivity is manifested in the
Notes
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
175
affirmation that a true judgment is not a tautology (ES 98). See also DR 56 and
196ff. and LS 121ff.
Miguel de Beistegui gives a very good and much more detailed account of
individuation in Truth and Genesis as does Alberto Toscano in The Theatre of
Production than I will here. My primary concern is to bring out the relationships between all of these concepts and, in particular, to emphasize temporal
characteristics.
. . . these four terms are synonymous: actualize, differenciate, integrate, and
solve (DR 211).
Deleuze writes that Individuation ensures the embedding of the two dissimilar
halves of the object or thing, the virtual and actual half (DR 280).
See, for example, Beyond the Pleasure Principle pg. 5. Cf. Klossowski, 20ff. and 47ff.
Lacan brings this out in his seminarsespecially in book IIas does Ricoeur in
Freud and Philosophy, pg. 69ff.
Deleuze often describes the role of the subject in the eternal returnin reference to Klossowskis interpretationsas the affirmation of the highest and the
lowest.
Individuation always governs actualization: the organic parts are induced only
on the basis of the gradients of the intensive environment . . .. (251). It is because
of the action of the field of individuation that such and such distinctive points
(pre-individual fields) are actualisedin other words, organized within intuition
along lines differenciated in relation to other lines (247; my emphasis).
See MM, 150; cf. 179.
Whereas intensities focus on and express differential relations and their singularities, Ideas are unaware of the individual (DR 246; cf. 254).
This discursivity is already the problem of Empiricism and Subjectivity where the
problem of the relation between the principles of association (which correspond
to Ideas) and the principles of the passions (intensity) is posed and resolved in
the last chapter. Interestingly Boundas alludes to this discursivity in his introduction, but unfortunately does not develop it. This same problem also motivates the
last half of The Fold. In ES, purposiveness links the two dimensions; in TF the
vinculum does.
Cf. DR 245: It is intensity which is immediately expressed in the basic spatiotemporal dynamisms and determines an indistinct differential relation in the
Idea to incarnate itself in a distinct quality and a distinguished extensity.
CPR A141/B18081.
For Deleuzes discussion of empirical sensibility, see DR 144 and 231.
Chapter 7
1
Deleuze makes this distinction himself in formal divisions of the chapter (which
are not retained in the English edition).
In this distinction between passive and active syntheses, as well as in his
adoption of certain concepts throughout the chapter (living present, retention,
reproduction), Deleuze is very clearly indebted to Husserl. However Deleuzes
syntheses are also very different from Husserls. Recall that Husserl had observed
176
4
5
7
8
10
11
12
13
14
Notes
only two passive syntheses, time and association. All three of Deleuzes passive syntheses are, in this account, dedicated to the production of time, whereas
association clearly belongs to the realm of activity or representation (cf. DR 80).
This point echoes my earlier claim that Husserl already installed the form of
identity in his associative synthesis, and thus violated the more radical employment of the reduction which we find in Deleuze. It is probably for this reason that
Deleuze considers the associative synthesis to be an active one. Recall also that
Husserls temporal synthesis was purely formal. This is why, as we saw in the first
chapter, that Husserl turned to passive associative synthesis in order to explain
how the content of the impression was connected. This is not the case in Deleuze.
Here, we will see, a molecular empirical content comes before the form of time,
and time is produced as an effect of the synthesis of a primordial hyl.
It is these three syntheses which must be understood as constitutive of the unconscious (DR 114; original emphasis).
On this point cf. DR 83, 101, 109, 114.
See DR 29293. For this reason James Williams, among others, interprets the
order of syntheses as moving from the third to the second to the first. We have to
remember though that just as in The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus (and we might
well add Kant), the third synthesis is precisely the synthesis of the first and the
second syntheses. It is from this point of view that it distributes difference to
these other two.
This was also the case, I suggested, in The Logic of Sense where Deleuze took
recourse to the representations projected by the good object and the active coordination of the ego.
See his critical guide to Difference and Repetition, pg. 8486.
Here this bare and material model is, properly speaking, unthinkable. (How can
consciousness, which has only a single presence, represent to itself the unconscious?) (DR 286). The word unconscious here refers to an alienated matter.
See especially Time and Free Will, Creative Evolution and Duration and Simultaneity;
but also Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception (477) and Kant (CPR A 95ff.)
Cf. Heideggers Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (122).
Deleuze summarizes these arguments in the opening chapters of Cinema 1.
Deleuze describes the contemplative soul as a modificationthis term designating precisely the difference drawn (DR 79; cf. 286). Deleuzes three syntheses
correspond very closely to Kants, and his choice of the word modification at this
point is a significant allusion to Kants synthesis of apprehension (CPR A9798).
Manuel DeLanda is right to say, however, that this does not actually mean that
time is subjective (DeLanda, Intensive Science 110): this is not a psychological
subject: it is a passive and transcendental subject, and even though Deleuze will
call it an ego, it shares none of the activity or volition ordinarily attributed to a
consciousness. Like Bergsons, it is impersonal. The subject at the beginning of
time is a corporeal and passive subject. Indeed, Deleuze defines the body as a collection of contemplative souls (DR 7476).
DR 286.
In the psychoanalytic account of the syntheses, Deleuze says that the contemplative soul binds excitations.
Notes
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
177
The body without organs in The Logic of Sensein its capacity as a liquid principlewas also defined as a fusion of partial objects (LS 8990).
Deleuze is alluding to both Tournier (Cf. LS 310) and Bergson (MM 39, 50, 64,
66). See Deleuzes comments on intentionality in C1 60 and DR 220.
Levinas had already described intentionality in this way in Theory of Intuition
(TI 4445). Cf. Ricoeur: Intentionality only signifies that consciousness is, in the
first place, outside of itself (An Analysis 8).
Cf. DR 220: It is not enough to say that consciousness is consciousness of something: it is the double of this something . . ..
In the English translation of Hyppolites Genesis and Structure, the French word
singulariti has been translated as specificity.
Hyppolite, following Hegel ( 10506), describes this identification of subject
and object at the level of sense-certainty as an intentionality or an aiming at
(Cf. 87, 90, 94).
Hyppolites description continues in a way which strongly resonates with
Deleuzes description of the plane of immanence in the cinema books or the
schizophrenic and corporeal mixtures in The Logic of Sense: The sensuous soul
does not distinguish itself from its object. It experiences within itself the whole
universe of which it is the reflection, but it is not aware of the universe . . .
(Hyppolite, Genesis 84).
It is worth restating that these singularities of sense-consciousness are not those
of the transcendental Idea.
See also section 1 of On Escape.
This is also exactly how Heidegger described the transcendental form of Kants
first synthesisthe synthesis of apprehension: it does not produce an empirical
present, but the present in general (Heidegger, Kant 126).
Again, Heidegger says the very same thing in relation to the pure form of Kants
second synthesis, reproduction: this synthesis can be called pure reproduction
not because it attends to a being which is gone nor because it attends to it as
something experienced earlier. Rather, [it can be called pure imitation] to the
extent that it opens up in general the horizon of the possible attending-to, the
having-been-ness . . . (Heidegger, Kant 128).
Deleuze therefore completely reverses Levinass dialectic of effort and fatigue,
even though he makes use of Levinass descriptions of these phenomena. In Levinas, the weary ego begins to lag behind existence, but is pulled back into it by an
effort. This produces the present. In Deleuze, the ego begins with effort, a synthesis. This produces a present. But it soon finds itself exhausted. In its refusal of
existence, it is taken up in a second synthesis. This produces a past.
Again, the expression partial object has a completely different sense here than
it does in either The Logic of Sense or Anti-Oedipus. This is just one more of the
many instances where, between books, Deleuze completely alters the sense, function, and context of a technical term (which are precisely what one would expect
to remain constant).
The symbol [or phallus] is the always displaced fragment, standing for a past
which was never present . . . (DR 103). Cf. DR 109 where Deleuze describes the
virtual object as the principle of the second synthesis.
178
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
Notes
If we were to stick to a straightforward Freudianism, this might make sense within

the context of Beyond the Pleasure Principle where the death drive as a return to
inanimate matter was considered as primary. But this is precisely the model which
Deleuze criticizes (DR 11113), and then revises by developing a death instinct
which is drawn from Eros and constructed upon his remains (113).
This physical metaphor is also repeated in the dynamic genesis of The Logic of
Sense (23940).
In the philosophical account, too, Deleuze says that the third synthesis is the
thought and the production of the absolutely different, or difference in itself
(DR 94).
For a more developed and very strong account of the notion of intensity in Kant,
see Batrice Longuenesses Kant and the Capacity to Judge, pg. 298ff.
The description of this action = x or action in general in DR as any empirical
action insofar as the circumstances allow its isolation and that it is sufficiently
embedded in the moment such that its image extends over time as a whole . . .
(DR 294) clearly corresponds very closely to the description of the action in general given in LS which is not at all a particular action [i.e. empirical], but any
action which spreads itself out at the surface and is able to stay there (LS 207).
One especially strange place that this same process appears is in Deleuzes description of Bergsons arguments for going beyond Einsteins theory of the relativity of
time. See BG 80-84. What Deleuze describes as the lived experience of the ego in
DR becomes a line of abstract reasoning in BG.
In The Logic of Sense too, the two images are brought together in a synthesis which
confuses their specific functions: the mother is asked to be organized, but is discovered as castrated (without phallus) and thus lacking an organizing principle;
the father (or the phallus as element of the past in general) is asked to become
present (LS 20306).
Here is the greatest difference between Deleuzes third synthesis and Kant/
Heideggers. Deleuzes third synthesis indeed belongs to the faculty of pure
thought and involves an abortive cogito or an active I in the form of an ego
Idealthat is, the ego which becomes equal to the image of the actionwhich
would seem very similar to Heidegger/Kants nonsubstantial I (Cf. DR 86 on the
receptive phenomenal subject appearing in time). Further, the entire third synthesis would also seem to mirror that of recognition where the first is recognized
as similar to the second. But despite these similarities, in Deleuze recognition
fails. Rather than the future serving as the element which can coordinate the two
other syntheses, it is the element in which a whole new synthesis is to be determined: the ideal synthesis of difference in the Idea.
On this point see Dan Smiths recent article in Deleuze Studies, The Conditions of
the New. See also the opening pages of Bergsons Matter and Memory from which
Deleuze takes both his description of the plane of immanence or the corporeal
depths or material repetition and his formulation of the problem of the new.
When Deleuze calls the eternal return the new, he means, like Bergson, both
that we experience it as affect and that it is independent of the determinism of
the corporeal depths (LS)/plane of immanence (C1)/material repetition
(DR)/binary-linear series (AO).
Notes
38
39
40
41
42
179
Eternal return, in its esoteric truth, concernsand can only concernthe third
time of the series (90; cf. 91).
For the two becomings, see LS 165.
See Ricoeurs commentary in that same essay in which he describes Husserl as a
transcendental empiricist: An Analysis 90105; cf. CTM 1922 and 28.
Cf. Ricoeur, An Analysis 97.
Cf. Ricoeur, An Analysis 100.
Conclusion
1
The expression plane of immanence is also one of those expressions which

refers to different concepts between books. In the cinema books, for example,
the expression stands for the material field or the primary order, or arts plane
of composition (Cf. C1 5859). In What is Philosophy?, the expression stands for
the virtual or secondary organization. This clearly is not the consequence of an
evolution in Deleuzes way of thinking about immanence since both the primary
order and the secondary organization are present in both books. He simply transposes the word from one register to the other.
It is not at all true, therefore, that the notion of the aleatory point makes only a
brief appearance in Deleuzes thought as an obscure structuralist principle (even
though its clearly a genetic principle) as numerous critics have maintained. There
is no such thing as a structuralist period in Deleuze. The aleatory point is a permanent installment of Deleuzes thought from very early on all the way until the last
book, and without it, the notion of the virtual loses all sense.
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. Pricls et Verdi: La philosophie de Franois Chtelet. Paris: Les ditions de Minuit,

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Index
Aleatory Point 3541, 72, 74, 81, 106,

10910, 112, 114, 127, 157, 179n2
Althusser, Louis 167n11
Badiou, Alain 1056
Bergson, Henri 23, 5960, 63, 11718,
123, 1312, 138, 140, 166n49,
168n13, 173n11, 178n34, 178n37
Blanchot, Maurice 256, 3840, 74,
11214, 1345, 164n13, 165n34,
165n38, 167n5
body without organs 2730, 313,
56, 6879, 82, 127, 13540, 156,
169n13
as imagination or contemplative
soul 70, 73, 136, 138, 1445, 156,
164n22, 169n18
as principle of synthesis 28
production of 6971
Boundas, Constantine 3, 159n6
Brassier, Ray 6, 160n15
Buchanan, Ian 39
Colebrook, Claire 3
Counteractualization 378
DeLanda, Manuel 141, 159n2
Descombes, Vincent 96
Deterritorialization 171n12, 171n13
Eternal Return 36, 37, 112, 14950
event 356, 39 see also Idea
Event, see Aleatory Point
Experimentation and interpretation 55,
68, 901
Fink, Eugen 3ff., 19, 160n9,

160n10
Foucault, Michel 3, 165n34, 170n18
Freud, Sigmund 35, 456, 57, 122, 1445,
166n49, 178n29
Galois, variste 1078
Guattari, Flix 41, 51, 99100
Gurwitsch, Aron 160n15
Hallward, Peter 1056
Hegel, GWF 17, 26, 35, 63, 70, 1345,
138, 169n18, 177n20
Heidegger, Martin 212, 177n24,
177n25
Hume, David 636
Husserl, Edmund 3ff., 202, 24, 30, 323,
3940, 43, 45, 47, 52, 56, 57, 59, 66,
68, 74, 768, 834, 8990, 92, 10809,
11819, 122, 131, 134, 1445, 1523,
167n6, 167n7, 173n9, 173n11,
174n29, 175n2
Hyppolite, Jean 17, 164n17, 177n201
Idea 356, 3940, 84, 10626,
14950
and the represented object 11518
Inclusive disjunction 36, 3940, 113, 149,
165n30
Intentionality 19, 1345, 177n1618
Interpretation, see Experimentation and
interpretation
Jakobson, Roman 170n10
Jameson, Frederic 901
192
Index
Kant, Immanuel 7, 1618, 24, 323, 42,

52, 5561, 767, 83, 939, 115, 1245,
145, 152, 161n21, 163n48, 166n47,
172n3, 178n36
Lacan, Jacques 45, 57
Lawlor, Leonard 6, 160n13
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 512, 155
Leibniz, G.W. 63, 646, 108
Levinas, Emmanuel 4, 25, 32, 57, 1356,
163n48, 165n34, 168n16, 177n26
Lyotard, Jean-Franois 17
Mamon, Solomon 17
Mallarm, Stphane 110
Marx, Karl 57, 79, 99
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 3, 57, 29, 57,
160n13, 165n34 168n13, 174n20
Nietzsche, Friedrich 44, 110, 155,
161n18
and Heidegger 177n24, 177n25,

178n36
and Husserl 1012, 323, 68, 77,
175n2
and Kant 11, 323, 81, 83, 96,
176n11
order of 7880, 1289, 13841,
176n5
and static genesis 818
Plane of immanence 23, 136, 157,
177n21, 179n1
Reduction 4ff., 45, 534, 57, 77
Ricoeur, Paul 39, 45, 109, 160n9, 167n7,
179n40
Sartre, Jean-Paul 151
Serres, Michel 163n2, 164n23
Smith, Daniel W. 168n12
Other 98, 1504
Unconscious 456, 557, 629, 76, 117,

166n49, 176n8
as set of passive syntheses 667, 128
Passive synthesis 314, 6680, 96, 98, 100,

12750, 154
Welton, Donn 9
Williams, James 128

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Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy

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Chapter 1: Husserl, Reduction and Constitution

Part II: Anti-Oedipus

Part III: Difference and Repetition

From its beginning Deleuze scholarship has produced a number of excellent

Deleuze (and friends)

Passive and Active

Bergson, Matter and Memory

Husserl and Deleuze

This page intentionally left blank

Husserl, Reduction and Constitution

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

Meditations as the inhibiting or putting out of play of all positions taken

Husserl, Reduction and Constitution

Phenomenology is a transcendental empiricism because it begins with an

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

Husserl, Reduction and Constitution

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

Husserl, Reduction and Constitution

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

Husserl, Reduction and Constitution

Leibniz, a monad and its relations to other monads.28 Husserls monad, as

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

Husserl, Reduction and Constitution

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

Husserl, Reduction and Constitution

can validate or invalidate apprehended objectivities, and it can make both

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

the collection of things as they appeara collection without an album, a play

Deleuze and Kant

Husserl, Reduction and Constitution

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

Husserl, Reduction and Constitution

The Logic of Sense

The Logic of Sense

tertiary order.2 Deleuze often imitates Husserls regressive approach to the

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

structure which allows it both to be repeated and to function in relation to

The Logic of Sense

The a-cosmic, impersonal, and preindividual field to which Deleuze refers is

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

The Logic of Sense

time without movement. Schematically we can outline the general process as

The two modes of time

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

The Logic of Sense

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

The Logic of Sense

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

The Logic of Sense

Connection and conjunction

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

an immediate reality. Here Deleuze is very close to early Levinas. In Existence

The Logic of Sense

from succeeding in the attempt to create a global object, represents a failed

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation