Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time by Williams James

Author:Williams, James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

PAST AND PRESENT AS DIMENSIONS OF THE FUTURE

Once Deleuze has set out the main deductions of his philosophy of time, he summarises its three syntheses in a single paragraph (DRf, 125; DRe, 93–4). The point of the summary is to insist upon the main turn of the work on the third synthesis. Just as the move from the first synthesis to the second involved a change in dimensions, where the present became a dimension of the past, in the third synthesis, present and past become dimensions of the future. As such dimensions, the past becomes a condition of the future and the present becomes an agent. What does this mean and what is stake in this shift? Deleuze explains it in terms of the central ideas of foundation and founding. In the first synthesis, the living present is the foundation of past and future, they depend on how they are contracted in a living present and the present is prior to both of them, where prior means that they follow from a synthesis in the living present. There is no past or future independent of each synthesis in a living present. In the second synthesis, present and future are founded by the past. Relations between presents must accord with the dynamic nature of the pure past. There is no present that is not accompanied by a dynamic change in relations in the past that it has no control over. Each present is only founded as passing. The relation between present and future is founded on the impossibility of a return of any present. The future is left undetermined by the passing away of each present and the pure past founds the future as open.

It seems odd, therefore, to think that the past becomes a dimension of the future by becoming a condition. Is not the role of condition the sign of a prior position in Deleuze’s transcendental philosophy? This puzzle can be resolved when we realise that what matters is the change when a process becomes a dimension of another. For the past to become a condition and a dimension of the future – when the past was a founding in the second synthesis – is a profound change in priority. This is because when the past is a condition for the future, it is the future that sets what returns from the past. This explains why Deleuze says that the past becomes a condition ‘by default’. The past is a condition that fails in relation to the future. Deleuze sums this up in the following way: ‘The repetition of the future is the royal one as it subordinates the other two and strips them of their autonomy’ (DRf, 125). It is very important to study this statement in detail. It does not mean that the third repetition is independent of the other two as process; on the contrary, they remain necessary dimensions of the future as actor and condition. It does not mean that the other two are completely

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