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Deleuze and Guattari’s
Philosophy of History

JAY LAMPERT

Continuum
Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History
 Also available from Continuum:

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy

Deconstruction and Democracy – Alex Thomson
Derrida and Disinterest – Sean Gaston
Heidegger and the Place of Ethics – Michael Lewis
Deleuze and the Unconscious – Christian Kerslake
Ricoeur and Lacan – Karl Simms
Deleuze and Guattari’s
Philosophy of History

JAY LAMPERT
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038

© Jay Lampert 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or
retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Jay Lampert has asserted his right under the Copyright Designs
and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: 0–8264–8680–0 (hardback)

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd., Bodmin, Cornwall
 Contents

Preface vii
Acknowledgements viii

1 Introduction: The “Joan of Arc effect” and the philosophy

of history 1
2 Living in the contracted present – the first synthesis of time 12
3 The virtual co-existence of the past – the second synthesis of time 31
4 Navigating the dark precursors of the future – the third synthesis
of time 54
5 Dates and destiny: the problem of historical chronology 71
6 Quasi-causes and becoming-causal 97
7 Why this now? The problem of actual historical events: the
theory of beginnings 114
8 Why this now? Diagnosis of the now 143
9 Why this now? Co-existing levels of temporality 155

Bibliography 172
Index 177
vi Contents

Major texts dealt with in each chapter:

1 L’Anti-Oedipe
2 Différence et répétition, chapter 2 “La répétition pour elle-meme”
3 Différence et répétition, chapter 2 “La répétition pour elle-meme”
4 Différence et répétition, chapter 2 “La répétition pour elle-meme”
5 Mille Plateaux, 4: “20 novembre 1923 – Postulats de la linguistique”
6 Logique du sens
7 L’Anti-Oedipe, chapter 3 “sauvages, barbares, civilisés”
8 Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, chapter 1.4 “Géophilosophie”
9 Mille Plateaux, 13: “7 000 av. J.-C. – Appareil de capture”
 Preface

By now, there exist many excellent introductions to the philosophy of

Deleuze and Guattari. But a great many readers around the world are past the
point of needing an introduction. We are starting to see a good number of
books that follow up on particular themes in Deleuze and Guattari in an
extended way, drawing out implications systematically, analysing the argu-
ments in the texts in detail, and forcing Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to
confront tightly related series of philosophical problems. This book is written
for readers who are familiar with Deleuze and Guattari’s texts, and who are
sympathetic to their concepts, but who are interested in challenging the
arguments in the text to see how far they can be taken.
Many of the concepts and arguments from Deleuze and Guattari that I
discuss are summarized by commentators, but have not yet been subjected to
the detailed and demanding scrutiny that the great philosophers of the past,
from Aristotle to Husserl, have been subjected to. There is a lot of free
speculation of my own in this book concerning issues in the philosophy of
history. But I have tried to tie it to close textual analysis. For example, I have
attempted to make some headway in analysing Deleuze’s arguments for the
“pure past” in Différence et répétition. Likewise, I have attempted detailed
conceptual analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis that “becomings do not
come from history but fall back into it” (Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? 92),
along with their treatment of Nietzsche’s saying that “All the names of his-
tory, it’s me” (L’Anti-Oedipe 28), as well as many other principles. Deleuze
and Guattarian thought stands or falls on whether claims like these can be
analysed and demonstrated. My view is that their theses on history are, in a
still useful sense of the term, true. I would like to prove that, and then to
prove some other things.
Many of the interpretations in this book of Deleuze and Guattari’s argu-
ments are bound to be controversial. I look forward to reading alternative
interpretations and arguments that other writers might be incited to offer in
their place.
It goes without saying that the point of analysing a philosopher of history
is ultimately not to know what the philosopher thinks, but to investigate
what history is.
 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professors Costas Boundas, Keith Ansell Pearson, and
David Goicoechea for inviting me to present early versions of chapters 5, 6,
and 7–9 at their excellent conferences. I would also like to acknowledge the
many formative conversations I have had about Deleuze and Guattari with
the excellent Deleuzians, Olivier Serafinowicz and Mani Haghighi. I would
also like to acknowledge the contributions of Deleuze-oriented philosophers
who were in the past doctoral students of mine: Karen Houle, Jim Vernon,
Antonio Calcagno, and others. I thank a number of people for their support,
discussion, and scholarship: Catherine Malabou, Len Lawlor, Alice Craven,
Gisle Johannessen, and many others. I thank the University of Guelph for its
generous research leave support. And of course, I thank Jennifer Bates, and
Hector.
1 Introduction: The “Joan of Arc Effect” and
the Philosophy of History

Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming seems at times opposed to

the very idea of historical succession. But suppose that we want to do without
the concept of history, or to rebuild a concept of history without succes-
sion. Some quasi-historical phenomena would still need to be explained:
events, memories, retroactive interpretations, dates and causes, precursors and
themes, series and sequences and destinies and continuities and breakdowns,
not to mention the actual occurrences that have shaped the geo-social world.
How might we conceptualize these phenomena free from the constraints of
succession? If events are not related in terms of progression, then they will
have to be related in terms of co-existence or simultaneity. If the relation
among events is not causal, then it must be one of mutual distribution or
circulation. If the subjects of events are not successively individuated, then all
the names of history must be able to erupt at any moment on the body
without organs.
Since it is not obvious on the surface that Deleuze and Guattari even have
one, we should note what it usually takes to constitute a philosophy of
history. Normally, it covers five topics: (1) A philosophy of history must
distinguish between events that are historical, and two sorts of non-historical
events: natural occurrences, and everyday social occurrences. (2) It must
determine how much empirical or other evidence is required to justify claims
about history; it must also have a theory concerning how to diagnose the
meaning of historical events. (3) It must articulate a principle for ordering
events. This includes both a general theory of chronology as well as a prin-
ciple for organizing themes and their recurrences in history. (4) It must have a
theory of historical causality (whether in terms of the great man, or classes
and masses, or providence, or material conditions). In some way or other,
it must explain, for each event, why it happens when it does. (5) Finally, it
should sketch the main stages of actual human history. Put in these terms, it
will become obvious that Deleuze and Guattari do have a philosophy of
history.1
Two things that Deleuze is best known for, both in his solo works and with
Guattari, are: (a) the neo-Bergsonian theory that time is not divisible into
past, present, and future, but involves a circulation of events in a co-existing
2 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

“cone” of the pure past; and (b) the concept of virtual events on a plane
of consistency that is prior to the rigid, state-regulated historiographies of
successive states of affairs. Given the ontology and the politics of Deleuze
and Guattari, it is bound to seem controversial when I say that they are
proposing a philosophy of history. Nevertheless, they are clearly interested in
both major and minor events of what we normally call world history, and
their writings are filled with analyses of such phenomena as dates and chron-
ologies, causes and quasi-causes, and events and event-assemblages. So a
systematic and creative development of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy
encourages us to create concepts for a philosophy of co-existential time as
philosophy of history.
In this introductory chapter, I analyse one important variant on the theory
of co-existential history, namely Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the
“names of history”. In this, and the ensuing chapters, I pose the following
question: What degree of distance between events can still be accounted for,
once events are characterized as co-existing?
Deleuze and Guattari introduce the theory of the “names of history” in
AO, but the logic of time required to make it work is found in the three
temporal syntheses in Deleuze’s DR: the present Chronos of habit, the past
Aion of pure memory, and the future of the eternal return. Since the past
sustains not only innumerable names of history, but also a plurality of histor-
ies of history, we will find multiple distinctions between successive and
simultaneous series.
What is a historical person or event? How does a phenomenon become
historical for someone who looks back on it from the present? The theory of
the names of history is introduced in AO to explain how such a person as
Nietzsche existed as homo historia. Nietzsche is no self, but rather “the
Nietzschean-subject who passes through a series of states, and who identifies
the names of history with these states: ‘all the names of history, it’s me’ ”
(AO 28). The names of history are not figures who were once present and
became past, but exist as a subject’s passage back through historical personae.
A historical subject identifies not with a person but with a name. This is a
three-termed relation. “It is not a matter of identifying with persons, but
rather identifying the names of history with zones of intensity on the body
without organs, and each time, the subject cries, ‘It’s me, so it’s me!’ ” (AO
28). To identify with a figure from the past is not to identify with an
identity, but with a zone. For that matter, the historical personage could not
have been entirely self-identical in the first place, since she in turn will have
circulated through the names of history on the periphery of her own zones of
intensity. In any case, one’s own body is hardly one’s own, since the zones on
that body are liable to become somebody else; the body without a self is the
body on which all subjects circulate. The name of history is activated when I
name it, and when I name it as me, but it does not so much replace me as
fold in with me, and make me “homo historia”. “No one has ever made
 The “Joan of Arc Effect” and the Philosophy of History 3

history as much as the schizo has . . . He consumes all of universal history at

once” (AO 28).
Even traditional concepts of history try to do something like this. For they
do not try to present the past as something directly available to the present,
either in terms of our immediate knowledge of the past or in terms of the
direct causal impact of the past on us. Rather, history treats the past as a
mode of intensifying certain patterns of present activity. History is about
what becomes of the present when the past catches up with it.
History is “morphogenesis”; “everything commingles in these becomings”
(AO 101). The schizo is the paradigm case of one who “made history, who
hallucinated and experienced the delirium of universal history” (AO 101).
“(I feel that) I am becoming god, I am becoming woman, I was Joan of Arc
and I am Heliogabalus, and the Great Mongol, a Chinese, a redskin, a
Templar, I have been my father and I have been my son” (101). Once a
person is open to having their functions defined by past figures (and every
person, and plenty of non-persons, are open to this), it could be any sort of
past character or collective that does the determining. Nations, cultures, and
gods circulate on a homo historia’s body in the same way that Joan of Arc
does. Familial, social, and political groups, some concrete and some abstract,
cut across the names of history, commingling with “the Commune, the
Dreyfus Affair, religion and atheism, the Spanish war, the rise of fascism,
Stalinism, the War in Vietnam, May 68 . . .”, and so on (116). There are too
many lists of names of history in the text to cite them all here. Often the lists
overlap (Joan of Arc is co-listed again with the Great Mongol and Luther,
121). Any one of these, or any combination, could suddenly begin to define a
present-day person’s opinions, desires, or actions, given the right moment of
susceptibility. In brief, history is not the past, but the circulation of events.
As important as this is, the names of history is not one of the more
thoroughly explicated of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts.2 We can begin to
interpret it with two remarks.
First, a name of history is a running effect; just as we speak of the Kelvin
effect or the Doppler effect in physics, Deleuze and Guattari posit a “Joan of
Arc effect or a Heliogabalus effect – and so on for all the names of history”
(AO 103). An “effect” in this sense is a virtual pattern, an abstract sequence of
possibilities, which becomes actual whenever certain conditions and driving
forces fall into place. Joan of Arc performed some acts, and now those acts
can take place on our bodies, following more or less the same kinds of series,
offering more or less the same potentials for decisive changes of direction,
creating contexts and milieus for new acts of Joan of Arc, assembling sur-
rounding people into Joan of Arc’s new allies and enemies, and so on. Joan of
Arc is a diagram, an abstract machine, a vibration of potentialities; Joan of
Arc happened once to a person some centuries ago, and can happen again on
anyone who has a body. On the one hand, the Joan of Arc effect runs on us ; it
has status as a retrospective effect (164) and not as a pre-determining cause.
4 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

On the other hand, it does not depend on our personal knowledge or

imagination, but vibrates through us as an after-effect of its own virtual
reality. When we become Joan of Arc, the issue is not whether we do so in an
objectively accurate way or not, but how long the effect can maintain its
specificity before it commingles into another effect.
The second point is that names of history do not lose their singularity in
the course of their migrations across the bodies of others (AO 101). In
Deleuze and Guattari’s “machinic” account of movement, specificity is
everything: the extensive and intensive magnitudes of each character shift,
the degree of collectivity, the precision of expression, the layers of articula-
tion, the speed of interpenetration, the dating of concepts, and so on. If
the borderlines between different historical running effects are in a sense
undecidable, they are not in any way indeterminate (to use an important
Derridian distinction – any given ambiguity is a particular and determinate
one). This is one reason why individuation, i.e. the overcoded identification
with a transcendent historical model, is very different from singularization,
i.e. the flexible mapping of transecting lines. It is also a reason why the names
of history are always minority figures (125). In contrast to Deleuzian minori-
tarian history, centrist or Statist history stabilizes subjectivities and limits the
revolutionary eruptions of the names of history. A few pages before the end of
AO, some revolutionaries are listed (lists are symptomatic of a flexible
spirit): “a Castro, an Arab, a Black Panther, a Chinese on the horizon? A
May ’68 . . .” (454). Centrist history, in contrast, represses the running
effects that constitute co-existential history; to say the same thing, it represses
revolution (454).
The fact that names of history must be singular in order to commingle
raises the problem that I want to focus on, namely how history can preserve
an element of succession within a general structure of co-existence or simul-
taneity. We can raise this problem in two ways: first, in terms of the logic of
simultaneity itself; and second, in terms of the remnants of succession across
the simultaneous names of history.
In phenomenology, simultaneity is treated as a function of succession. For
Husserl (1966),3 our perceptions of an object occur successively. Two objects
of consciousness (the car speeding by, and the gum I am chewing) are present
simultaneously when two series of successions converge. Each flow of percep-
tions related to a given object retains its predecessors and anticipates its
successors. We can measure how far we have come in experiencing each
object, and then we can put the two chains of succession on the same time-
line. Simultaneity identifies a degree of fulfilment of one object, with a
different degree of fulfilment of another, and a different degree of fulfilment
of yet another, and so on, until we have constituted the simultaneity of all
objects of consciousness at once. In short, for two objects to exist “at the same
time” means that even though each object has its own rhythm of coming into
presence, the two chains of succession inhabit the same time-line. Of course,
 The “Joan of Arc Effect” and the Philosophy of History 5

the problem is whether the successive experiences of different objects really

fall on a common (subjective or objective) time-line. But whatever the tech-
nical difficulties in the theory of converging time-lines, Husserl says, there is
“no simultaneity without succession”.
In contrast, the Deleuzian names of history entail simultaneity without
succession, and as a corollary, simultaneity of difference and not of identity.
But what does simultaneity mean, if not a moment that two or more ongoing
events share? What would simultaneity mean if events did not each have their
place in the order of succession? Deleuze and Guattari certainly do not have
in mind a totum simul, a frozen bloc universe, but what is the nature of
succession in a world where the past never stops having running effects?
In addition to the formal problem of what simultaneity without succession
could refer to, it seems that the names of history themselves retain some
internal elements of succession. The theory of the names of history begins
with Bergson’s observation that memory does not always retrieve events
stepwise in reverse order, but rather can jump to any point in the past. Any
body with a memory houses all virtual pasts at once. Yet each of those pasts,
like the Joan of Arc effect, has its own internal successions of events (first her
divine visitations, then the battles, then the flames, and so on) without which
it would not be the Joan of Arc effect. A present-day person must run
through some version of that series in order to be running the Joan of Arc
effect at all.
Even if succession is merely an artifact created when we map the stages of
what is primordially a set of co-existing possibilities, that succession still
needs to be accounted for. At the very least, we cannot actualize all the
virtually co-existing historical possibilities at once; at any given moment we
have to select among alternatives. And of course, even virtually co-existing
events are dated relative to one another. When, for example, the Joan of Arc
effect is running on our bodies, it gives all our battles a low-tech character.
For in an irreducible sense, the virtual reality of Joan of Arc comes before the
virtual reality of atomic weapons, in spite of the fact that it might be a very
modern politician with an atomic arsenal at his disposal who is undergoing
the Joan of Arc effect by waving his arm as if to brandish a sword. The effects,
as events, may co-exist, but their contents are nevertheless dated. Succession
remains an issue not only because the body expresses one effect after another
in time, but also because each effect is an effect that dates from a particular
moment in history. Hence, to identify a zone of the body with the singularity
of a determinate effect, that effect has to be kept at a distance from other
effects, and even has to be diagrammed for its historical relations relative to
other effects, even while it may be running at the same time as more ancient
or more modern effects in a commingling and unpredictable series of
mutations.
To be sure, Joan of Arc is already a multiple event, which includes
unaccomplished possibilities that Joan died before achieving, puzzles and
6 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

mysteries that Joan failed to solve and that generations to this day keep trying
to solve, consequences for her contemporaries that Joan never heard about,
influences from previous events that Joan never realized, unanticipated
beginnings of future ways of life, unconscious desires that Joan would have
been horrified by – all of which may still resonate when the Joan of Arc effect
runs today. Immediately after Joan of Arc’s death, in fact, several impostors
sprung up around France, collecting funds for imaginary battles. Some
attracted followers for years afterwards.4 And by our century, the Joan of Arc
effect has already been reshaped by innumerable interpretations of Joan of Arc,
which have added to the ways that the events may now resonate in us. The
Joan of Arc effect instigates a set of problems for a body to solve (theologico-
political problems, military-gender problems, juridical-conspiratorial prob-
lems, and so on) rather than a particular set of acts to perform. For that
matter, Joan of Arc did not have a Joan of Arc blueprint from birth, so she
herself had to become Joan of Arc by running the Joan of Arc effect on her
own body, becoming a simulacrum of a form that had no original before her.
In short, the Joan of Arc effect is multiple, uncompletable, virtual, and
performative. All of these levels of the event are initiated as running effects
on somebody’s body. Someone may start running the Joan of Arc effect on
just one of its dimensions (assuming it will function as a feminist, or a
mystical, or a patriotic exemplar), only to find several other dimensions of
fifteenth-century socio-religious attitudes welling up as well. Such con-
sequences may arise because the simulator has read books about the period,
but others may enter his bodily responses just because gender–Church rela-
tions, for example, have been resonating since that time without his knowing
any history about it. Some elements of the Joan of Arc series will intersect
with other fifteenth-century motifs, but other elements might suddenly
diverge into other martyr figures from other times or other religions, and still
others might mutate into entirely different series: the sword in an evangelical
politician’s hand might become a smart bomb, one’s appeal to the divine
word might strengthen one’s adversary’s faith, the guerrillière might become
cyborg. The period-related elements, the succession-related elements, and
the co-existing elements drawn from anywhere whatsoever, can quasi-cause
each other at any point. The simultaneity of the effect first constitutes the
possibility of diagramming a successive series of events to make use of;
then, it disorders that series. It passes into the effect by habit (as present),
it contemporizes the series in memory (as past), and it returns to it in
difference (as future).
Now, there would be no ontological paradox if we could say that in his-
tory, events themselves occur successively, and that it is only in memory that
those events are retained simultaneously. But Deleuze has independent
arguments against historical succession in general.
Before we make this argument, we should note that the term “history”
is used in two ways in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings.5 In some cases, as
 The “Joan of Arc Effect” and the Philosophy of History 7

in the phrase, “the names of history”, the term “history” appeals to the
schizoanalytic phenomena of libidinal production (AO 117), the overflow of
codes and alliances (AO 155: “the end of history has no other sense”), con-
tingencies, ruptures, collectivities, retrospections, bifurcations, and lines of
flight (AO 140: “universal history is one of contingencies”), differences with-
out origin (DR), neo-archaism and ex-futurism (AO 309), rhythms and
refrains (MP); in short, “history” is sometimes a “historical rhizome”,6 an
equivalent term to “becoming”. Deleuze says that these usages are possible
thanks to the way Foucault has reinvented the term “history” (F 51).
But because of the use of the term “history” in Hegel on the one hand and
certain empiricists on the other, Deleuze and Guattari frequently say that
“history is always written from the sedentary point of view”. In this sense,
becoming should be described by nomadology, “the opposite of a history”
(MP 34). In these passages, history is treated as the opposite of becoming,
which “replaces history” (MP 200). “All history does is to translate a
co-existence of becomings into succession” (MP 537). Those who think
according to that concept of history take what is itself a flow of becomings,
and overcode it according to a conjunctive synthesis in the form “So that’s
what this meant” (AO 79–80). “History has made itself one with the triumph
of states” (MP 490) and the filiation of the father. Among its many onto-
logical errors, Deleuze and Guattari argue, history takes events as “sup-
posedly fixed terms” (MP 291); it assumes that events have their primary
causal impact on just those events which they resemble (in the terms of DR);
it treats events as if they were entirely determined by prior causes unaffected
either by chance or by subsequent events, and it reads events teleologically
(MP 537). In all of these senses, history is the reactive force (in the terms of
NP) that paranoiacally keeps itself from engaging with the living past.
In the final analysis, it is because Deleuze can speak of history either as the
(good) schizo’s deterritorialization of events, or as the (bad) paranoiac’s seg-
mentation of events, that he can say, paradoxically, that “history [in the
schizo nomadic sense] is made only by those who oppose history [in the
paranoiac centrist sense]” (MP 363).
These definitions suggest the general reason why co-existence is a feature
of events themselves, and not merely a feature of the way we remember
events. An event brings together supple flows and rigid segments, without
having a “power centre” to regulate the flows (MP 275–7). Because every
event is multiple, a cause is not a unique proximate condition, but a com-
munication across various series of events. A historical event has not so much
a cause as a “quasi-cause”, a series of “non-causal correspondences forming a
system of echoes, of reprises and resonances, a system of signs, in short, an
expressive quasi-causality” (LS 199, Series 24: “On the Communication
between Events”). And since each event becomes a different event once such
communication occurs, it “communicates with itself through its own dis-
tance, resonating across all its disjunctions” (LS 207). That is the reason why
8 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

history cannot be explained as a succession of individuated phenomena along

a single causal line.
Here we see again the relation that this book will problematize. How is
it that the simultaneous co-existence within an event, which makes it
co-existent with any other event that it intersects with, forms a system of
distances? How is there temporal distance within simultaneity?
To make matters more complicated, there is not just one logic of simul-
taneity and one logic of succession; there are three of each, because there are
three syntheses of time (in the second chapter of DR). There is the contracted
habitual time of the present, the embedded memory time of the past, and
erotic groundless time of the future’s eternal return. I will analyse at length
these three categories of time in chapters 2–4. At this point, I just want to
hint at the complexity of a theory of simultaneity. While in one sense there
are three distinct logics of time corresponding to the forms of present, past,
and future – the logic of succession, the logic of co-existence, and the logic
of dark precursors, respectively – the logic of succession has its own way of
conceiving of present, past, and future, and the logics of co-existence and of
precursors each have their own ways of conceiving all three. As a result, there
exist nine forms of present, past, and future, hence nine forms each for
succession and simultaneity, and nine movements of the name of history.
To schematize this very complex theory of time in a nutshell, and to apply
it to the philosophy of history: the synthesis of the present shows how succes-
sions are contracted into mutually relevant systems; the synthesis of the past
shows how all events co-exist simultaneously in a kind of storehouse where
mutual influences are carried out; and the synthesis of the future is a practical
synthesis where we choose how to make use of successions and simultaneities,
and to constitute a series free for chance and free for flight. Events are
singularities, but they carry pre-histories and post-histories along with them.
Genuine novelty paradoxically requires that all events already co-exist in the
form of an unbound system. That is why the future is the eternal return, in
that every event qua future throws the dice of the past and affirms whatever
line of continuation communicates its excess. As soon as one series of
co-existences passes over into another, a new series already exists. The point
of passage is a “dark precursor”.
We will see in chapter 4 how this final synthesis explains the simultaneity
of simultaneity and succession. The general problem of history concerns how
a past event can be both simultaneous with the present and also distant from
it. This will be explained by the way that each event must be at once a past, a
present and a future in independent senses. As a present, each event is one in
a succession. As a past, it is virtually contemporaneous with every event, but
in a way that makes it a cause of all of them. As a future, it is a bifurcation
point that forces movement. In all three phases, time is a type of simul-
taneity; but in the present, the passing event is also successive in the form of
chronology; in the past, the virtual event is also successive in the form of
 The “Joan of Arc Effect” and the Philosophy of History 9

causality; in the future, the groundless event is also successive in the form of
event-bifurcations. (These three topics – chronology, causality, and actual
events – constitute the topics for chapters 5, 6, and 7–9 of this book.) This
remains to be demonstrated, but the results of this book will look something
like the following.
The succession of befores and afters is a triple by-product of there being
three simultaneous simultaneities. What takes the place of the classical con-
cept of history is nothing other than these multiple forms of co-existence
with their multiple subordinate forms of serial distribution. Once it is proved
that an event’s present status and its past status are independent yet simul-
taneous, it will follow that the succession-effects of the names of history run
simultaneously, and that the past is a real place on the body.

FOUR TRADITIONAL TOPICS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Something happened a long time ago. What does that mean? It means that it
is happening now, but in a peculiar sense of now.
We set out to explain how Joan of Arc could literally be on our bodies right
now, without it ceasing to matter what Joan of Arc’s dates are. We can say
four things about how succession segments events backwards from simul-
taneity, by touching on four traditional issues in the philosophy of history. In
the course of this book, we will develop issues in the philosophy of history
that emerge in the terms of Deleuze and Guattarian philosophy, but for the
moment, we will say a few words in their terms about issues that develop in
traditional philosophies of history.
First is the issue of the freedom to reinterpret history. Following Nietzsche,
there are two forces of succession: a reactive succession whereby we submit to
a predecessor, and an active succession whereby we add a power to a predeces-
sor (in the terms of NP). These both look like responses (the first objective,
the second subjective) to the same kind of succession. But in fact, reactive
and active retrospection constitute two entirely different kinds of series: the
first constitutes history as nihilism, the second constitutes names of history as
zones of intensity. The theory of succession as causal determinacy is a theory
we simply reject, on account of its erroneous assumption that events have
power centres sufficient to determine one result rather than another. But the
theory of succession as the passage of power across mutually communicating
events, implies the inheritance of the freedom to interpret.
Second is the question whether history proceeds continuously. Too much
or too little interruption, and there is no history. Too much segmentation of
history into names of history generates the great man of history theory, and as
a result, succession and co-existence both degenerate into solipsistic historio-
graphies based on despotic interpreters. Too little segmentation generates the
theory of deterministic mass movements, and as a result, succession and
10 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

co-existence both degenerate into repetition of the same. If there is to be a

history in which all events matter and yet each event matters on its own, then
there must be a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, fluidity and segmen-
tation. Each event must be a threshold in which co-existence is laid out in
dynamic succession, and succession is contracted in interactive co-existence.
Third is the question whether an event, like the origin of capitalism, ‘could
have’7 occurred in another time or place than it did. I devote the last three
chapters to this very complex problem. In spite of their theory that events are
incorporeal transformations whose source is virtual, and independent of par-
ticular states of affairs, Deleuze and Guattari do not want to say tout court that
any event whatever can occur at any time in history. This is a difficult point in
their philosophy of history, but the key to their reasoning is that an emergent
event requires “a whole generalized conjunction that overspills and reverses the
preceding apparatuses” (MP 564–5). It may sound odd to hear Deleuze and
Guattari analyse history in terms of whole conjunctions instead of partial
disjunctions, and in terms of a systematization of predecessors instead of free
becomings. But in fact, it would be a mistake to identify free becoming with
isolated phenomena or disengaged possibilities. The freedom to take a chance
with a new event requires the resolve of staking everything on a whole system
of chances. To speak of the origin of a phenomenon like capitalism is to posit
that the whole determinate periodic history of nations and other assemblages
can be simultaneously interpreted as its pre-history and its post-history.
Events are singularities, but they are also abstract machines that produce pasts
and futures along with them. The disengaged question of what “could have”
happened is an idealist’s search for possibilities; in contrast, the affirmation of
the co-existence of all that happens, as a particular array of relations, is a
schizo’s rigorous temporal mapping of virtualities.
The fourth question is whether events of the past are accessible directly or
only through intermediaries. This is to ask whether the Joan of Arc effect will
run differently on our bodies than it will have run on bodies in the fifteenth
century, on account of the intermediary events between then and now that in
some ways dilute its effect and in other ways advance our technologies for
expressing it. Of course, our ways of becoming Joan of Arc are different from
Joan’s, but after all, “becoming and multiplicity are the same thing” (MP 305),
and the effect of history is a return of the different and not a return of the same.
This makes the fact of successive intermediaries an indispensable feature of
co-existential time. But on the other hand, as soon as we are related to the past,
any event of any given period might be the one that our bodies reanimate. In
this sense, becoming-historical is never simply a matter of continuity or pro-
gress (MP 289). To have a history, as opposed to just having a single predeces-
sor that in turn has a predecessor, means to be able to search out any moment
of the past and use it without regard to intermediaries. Becoming-historical
means getting from A to B by means of an anti-memory that deterritorializes
what happened in between. When the names of history are identified with
 The “Joan of Arc Effect” and the Philosophy of History 11

zones of intensity on the body without organs, the body becomes a pure past,
and makes decisions on a libidinal future, and so the virtual body becomes the
place that takes up the place of the concept of history.

NOTES

1 A philosophy of history should also apply Kant’s four schematisms of time: time-series,
time-fullness, time-order, and time-scope. For Deleuze and Guattari, these are covered by
theories of pure past, events, dates, and quasi-causes, respectively.
2 The names of history are close to Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of abstract machines in
MP (e.g. the “Lenin abstract machine”), and conceptual personae in QP (e.g. the philo-
sophical motifs of Descartes’ piece of wax, or Proust’s madeleine). Jacques Rancière
(1992) makes interesting companion reading, but is not directly related.
3 Edmund Husserl (1966), s. 38 pp. 76–9; also Beilage V and VII, pp. 109–11 and
115–16.
4 Pernoud and Clin (1986, pp. 337–44). That historians still debate whether an attempt
was made to poison Joan with bad herring during the trial (on “The Day of the
Herrings”, pp. 320–30), and that such a question cannot but seem of world-historical
significance to anyone who studies it in detail, testifies to the power of assemblages in
constituting events. One level of incorporeal enunciation in the “names of history” is the
fact that the name “Jeanne d’Arc” was not used for the historical figure during her
lifetime (pp. 313–16).
5 There is a helpful article collecting passages showing the two uses of the term “history” in
Deleuze by Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc (2003). Sibertin-Blanc attempts to synthesize the
two uses by means of categories that are ontological and extra-historical, for example, by
reading Deleuze on Spinoza concerning powers of action. He does not focus on resolving
the two senses at the level of history itself.
To my knowledge, there are no books that try to do the sort of thing I am doing.
Manuel De Landa’s excellent A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997) takes Deleuze
and Guattari’s discussions of history in a more materialist direction. Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000) has become a classic application of Deleuze and Guattari
to political history, but is not focused on the temporal ontology of history. Éric Alliez’s
masterful two volumes (so far) of Les Temps capitaux (1991, 1999) lay out the historical
background of Deleuze’s philosophy of time in relation to politics, but not with a focus
on philosophy of history. The approaches to Deleuze’s politics in the writings of Paul
Patton, Rosi Braidotti, Philippe Mengue, Todd May, and Eugene Holland are all
important, but different from what this book is doing with the history of political events.
There are some excellent analyses of the relevant arguments of Deleuze’s texts, particu-
larly those of Juliette Simont, Francois Zourabichvili, and Veronique Bergen, not to
mention other excellent books and articles about Deleuze by Constantin Boundas,
Charles Stivale, Dan Smith, Manola Antonioli, Keith Ansell Pearson, Bruce Baugh,
Jean-Clet Martin, Peter Hallward, the contributors to the journal Chimeres, and many
others. Like all books written on Deleuze today, mine implies a response to the
controversial but important interpretations and critiques of Deleuze by Alain Badiou.
6 Éric Alliez and Félix Guattari in AH (1986, p. 181) distinguishes the “historical
rhizomatic” from capitalism’s claim to be the “destiny” of human history.
7 I use double quotation marks when quoting the text. But when I cite a phrase that some-
one might say, but which is not actually a quotation, I use single quotation marks. This
punctuation will be used extensively in chapters 7–9, when I discuss various potential
versions of the question, ‘Why did such and such an event occur at the time it did?’
 2 Living in the Contracted Present – The
First Synthesis of Time

Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of history relies on Deleuze’s analysis

in DR of the three syntheses of time. This chapter explicates the first of
these: the synthesis of the present. Deleuze’s second synthesis is the best
known: the “pure past”, the virtual co-existence of all time. Many treat-
ments of Deleuze describe in appealing ways his account of time, but little
work has yet been done to analyse his arguments for it. As a result,
Deleuze’s first synthesis of time, the time of organic succession, is not as
well known.1 When discussed at all, succession is generally treated as the
false or superficial notion of time that co-existence is meant to replace.
But Deleuze’s philosophy does not devalue the categories of life and desire
that characterize the temporality of succession. All three syntheses are
clearly meant to co-exist as independent series of temporality. Further-
more, Deleuze’s description of succession is not merely a standard account
of time setting the stage for his original contributions concerning co-
existence; it is full of provocative and original arguments in its own right.
Most important, the details of Deleuze’s account of succession in the first
synthesis of time are precisely the premises that entail the necessity of the
second synthesis.
The second chapter of DR is one of the most important and rigorous in
Deleuze’s corpus. It contains many explicit arguments, in addition to many
other passages that I construe as arguments. Despite the length of my treat-
ment of Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, a great deal more could be said
about how to construe and develop the arguments in the text. I hope and
expect that over the years, philosophers will be poring over the details of
Deleuze’s arguments, and that a variety of different analyses of the text, at
least as detailed as my own, will appear in print.
The first problem of interpretation concerns methodology. From the
beginning of the chapter, Deleuze talks about the present as a contraction of
instants, using a Humean model. Yet his method is not explicitly either
phenomenological or positivist, transcendentalist or associationist. Nor is
there a presumption that the account of time will fit into an ontological
system (as in Hegel). What methodology prompts Deleuze to begin a theory
of difference with the topic of time, and what methodology is he using to
 The First Synthesis of Time 13

choose a starting point for thinking about time, and to draw consequences
from there on?
The stated project of DR is to consider whether a form of difference
precedes unity, totality, and identity. Time synthesizes an event simply by
virtue of holding together different moments. The theory of time is thus an
experiment in thinking difference without identity. This does not entirely
explain why time should be chosen as the paradigm difference-synthesizer
(e.g. as opposed to space, number, or writing), and perhaps Deleuze
would not want to say that time is a more fundamental assemblage than,
for example, sense, sensation, or desire. Nevertheless, Deleuze supports
Bergson’s idea that living matter produces memory, and in this sense, any
differential interaction is temporal.
Assuming, then, that time is a legitimate first topic, how do we start
describing it? We might begin with the concrete experience of time, and
indeed Deleuze cites the “lived present” early in the chapter. But “experi-
ence” could mean anything from Humean impressions to Husserlian life-
worlds, and indeed, the fact that Deleuze combines these two vocabularies
without comment suggests a difficulty. Throughout his corpus, Deleuze
interprets subject as “superject”, reducing subjects to local conjunctions of
images produced by objects. On that basis, so-called “experience” is no
more a starting point than any other formed matter in flux. In this con-
text, it is not accidental that Deleuze starts with Hume. For Hume,
“experience” need not be founded on subjectivity; it is first of all a con-
junction that allows data to “count as one” (to use Badiou’s phrase). A
Humean model of sense-experience might be neutral enough to serve as a
starting point for a theory of time, allowing us to appeal to facts of
experience without a phenomenological reduction. But as we will see, the
neutral starting point will make some later stages of the argument hard to
evaluate.
A final methodological issue concerns the rigour of Deleuze’s argumenta-
tion. Deleuze clearly says that the second synthesis follows “necessarily” from
the first (108); in other passages, it is less clear whether he intends his
analyses to be read as deductive arguments concerning the unfolding struc-
tures of time and repetition. I plan to analyse chapter 2 of DR as one long
and rigorous argument. This approach raises issues concerning systematicity
and logic, sense and implication, consistency and rhizomaticity. But the final
test of whether Deleuze’s texts should be read as rigorous arguments is
whether we can generate Deleuzian conclusions from Deleuzian premises,
whether that procedure throws light on the Deleuzian plane, and whether
it allows us to do things with Deleuzian concepts that we otherwise could
not do.
14 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

THE SYNTHESIS OF THE PRESENT

(i) Cases and instants

Deleuze begins by asking how repetition is possible (96). Suppose we consider

the occurrence of some “element”, and then consider it as an occurrence
again. If we consider the two occasions independently, there is no schema for
retaining the location of the first once there is a second. Such a repetition
“changes nothing”, as Hume says. It has no meaning with respect to the
content of what is seen, even if the “mind that contemplates” them could
remember having seen the first after the second occurs. In fact, there can be
no genuine memory if the recurring elements are taken as individual elements.
This is why, on Deleuze’s construal, Hume begins his account of repetition
not with “elements” (e.g. where A occurs, then A occurs again), but with
“cases” (e.g. where an A–B conjunction occurs, then an A occurs, anticipat-
ing a reoccurrence of B).2 Once we begin with a case, a double content, we
can explain how a second occurrence recalls a first, namely by incorporating
it. The repetition changes something, and the second appearance lets the
first’s possibilities be grasped. The repetition is the moment when the event’s
parts get distinguished (the second part of the first case being anticipated
by the first part of the second case), and in which those parts recall one
another (whether the part-to-part relation is one of identity, causality, or
independence). The mind “extracts” (soutire) a difference from the repetition.
In two ways, this is a surprising interpretation of Hume. First, Deleuze’s
interpretation makes atomistic positivism the enemy of Hume’s empiricist
associationism. Deleuze takes Hume to be a relational thinker who starts
with association, imaginative combination, and sympathetic bonds, and who
realizes that if the mind had only discrete elements to work with, it could
do nothing of what we know it does. Second, Deleuze takes Hume to be no
more subjectivist than objectivist. For the mind can only operate once the
objective content is relational. Repetition is the foundation for subjectivity,
not the converse. So far, this is traditional metaphysics, from neo-Platonism
(the first number is not One but the indefinite dyad), to Hegel (being begins
with becoming), to Husserl (objective intentionality depends on protentions
and retentions).
If a single case makes a difference, i.e. if it appears as a singular something,
it is because it appears twice. Its first appearance, as an isolated element, never
takes place as such. The first time it appears is when it appears for a second
time, namely when its antecedent looks similar yet different from its con-
sequent. The faculty of associating elements is what Hume calls “imagin-
ation” (at least on Deleuze’s interpretation – we are not testing his reading of
Hume’s texts here). Association is a faculty of “retention”, but not a receptacle
for holding images. It “contracts” two moments into one temporal unit, yet
retains them qua different. In this sense, it “founds” the two impressions that
 The First Synthesis of Time 15

it contracts into one.3 In sum, if an impression is to be grasped, it has to

include a difference, and each of the differentiated moments must be able to
call into play the others. Calling the double into play is repetition. For
this reason, Deleuze says, repetition is not primarily memory, reflection, or
conscious understanding, but a “synthesis of time” (97).
This is an important stage of Deleuze’s arguments for the priority of
passive over active synthesis, time over memory, co-existence over succession,
becoming over history, and synthesis over instants. “A succession of instants
does not make time, it unmakes it just as much” (97). A succession is not
sufficient to constitute memory. It is at best material for synthesis.4 On this
point, Deleuze employs Kantian transcendental deduction (and attributes it
to Hume): we know there is a “lived present”, a grasped content (97); succes-
sion alone will not explain it; therefore there is a faculty of repetition in
imagination that synthesizes that content. Though Deleuze introduces “lived
present” and “instants” as though they were natural and obvious, they recall
many well-travelled problems. Why does Deleuze use the vocabulary of
“instants” at all, instead of starting with, for example, (Bergsonian) durations,
or even (Hegelian) vanishings?
Perhaps Deleuze’s argument should be read as a reductio against instants,
not as a theory of how instants are assembled. But the “instant” does after
all have some genuine status, even if not an originary status. Although we
cannot have constructed the lived present out of instants, the present case
nonetheless includes temporally different parts; it “retains” past instants, and
“anticipates” future instants. Past and future instants have status as backward
and forward referents of the present. Instants are non-originary and non-
eschatological constructions that the present retroactively and proactively
targets as elements in order to interpret itself.5 Past and future do not refer to
instants outside the present, but they do refer to “dimensions of the present
itself insofar as it contracts the instants” (97).
We have to ask the text three questions: (a) Why does time begin as a
present instead of as past or future? (b) How are past and future immanent in
(“contracted” in) the present? (c) Why do past and future appear first as
instants?
(a) Time is the present just because the first experience is a case, a repeti-
tion, a contraction of a plurality into a singular phenomenon, hence some-
thing that appears all in one together before us, affirmed as what there is, as
presence. In spite of Deleuze’s differences with Hegel and Heidegger, his
argument, like theirs, hinges on an inference from contraction to presence,
from co-presentation to Now-ness. A purely independent element would not
be located on a time-line. In contrast, while a synthesis of moments is spread
out over time, it is at the same time, a synthesis for us, here and now. A past
composed of successive elements would be no past at all unless it were taken
as such in a present; the past is nothing more than the present’s way of
arraying present content itself (mutatis mutandis for the future).6 In short,
16 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

original experience is a synthesis, and even though synthetic time is extended,

it necessarily appears contracted into the present all at once.
(b) Every synthesis, therefore everything that could be something, is a
present and only a present. But precisely because it is a synthesis, there is a
schema in the present for the co-presence of the multiplicity that made up the
present. Synthesis displays the present precisely as a past-present-future array.
It does not matter whether the parts are objective moments ordered necessar-
ily, or subjective moments ordered accidentally; either way, the present
appears as already-having-been-multiple, hence as having a past dimension.
Similarly, it appears as an ongoing contraction of whatever will be coming up,
hence its future dimension. (This passage also describes present life as an
apprenticeship building on the past for the sake of the future (101).)
(c) The third point follows. Again, the present is multiple; the presentation
of the multiple as multiple is the presentation of synthesis as divisibility; and
divisibility leads back to instants.
Deleuze (drawing from Hume) describes the movement within the present
from past to future as a movement from particular to general. This has three
consequences. First, it introduces the concept of “envelopment” (97). In a
present synthesis, a moment converts a particular instant into a general field
of unfoldings.7 This does not mean that particulars are givens and universals
are constructed. Particulars are just as much products of the synthesis whereby
a temporal field is contracted into a present moment; the instants that have
already passed result from counting backward. We might think of time as the
folding and unfolding of a topological field. When folded over on to itself,
the field is present one small square at a time, with its other parts moved
around back – present but backgrounded. When unfolded out again, the
presents get reorganized, and new foregroundings take place. Instants are
always being reformulated on the shifting topology; as the smallest possible
points of view, they are in a sense real. In sum, the smallest points, and their
order of presentation, are dependent on the folds and unfoldings of the
general field that envelops them.

(ii) Passive synthesis

The second implication of the move from particular to general follows. The
general field is the sphere of synthesis, hence synthesis does not depend on
agent subjectivity; therefore, the present is “passive synthesis” (97).
This notion of passive synthesis is difficult. Even in Husserl, from whom
the term “passive synthesis” is drawn, there is a problem of interpretation.
At times, Husserl means syntheses that the experiencing subject simply
accepts as given, without conscious deliberation or action, sometimes with-
out noticing that they have taken place. The stream of experiences we have
upon waking up, or the backgrounds that we experience without attending
 The First Synthesis of Time 17

to, are examples of passive synthesis. They are synthetic, since they involve
spatial configurations, interpretations in relation to memories and conceptual
schemes, and so on. But they are not, on the surface, products of active
interpretation. Yet if we press beneath the surface, even these sorts of experi-
ences involve subjective procedures. Spatialization involves an orientation of
the body, memory involves recall, conceptual schemes require information
processing. Phenomenology has to conclude that so-called passive synthesis is
really a case of low-level active synthesis, which constitutes objects capable
of showing themselves to us while we are relaxing. Passivity is a stance of
habituation that we actively take up, or fall into. Though it is not clear that
this is what Husserl meant, this interpretation is consistent with phenomen-
ology. But such a reading is not consistent with Deleuzian principles, which
require a more radical passivity. For Deleuze, again following a Humean
spirit, the active subject is not a prior condition of object-configuration, but
is one configuration among many that come into being as syntheses fold into
one another.
Happily, Deleuze’s paradoxical conclusion is that a passive being can do more
things than an active being. This is parallel to Deleuze’s argument in DR
chapter 1 that the univocity of being allows more differentiation than multi-
vocity. If being were multivocal, then each individual thing would be deter-
mined by the particular essence appropriate to it. But since being is univocal,
each thing is free to pick up determinations from any other in a smooth space
of characteristics and forms. Likewise, passive synthesis frees the mind from
whatever structures of action would have limited its capacity for novelty. This
sketch makes some version of the mind’s passivity plausible and palatable,
but we need to explain why the temporal movement from past to future
within the present, read as a movement from particular to general, is passive.
It is primarily because synthesis is immanent that it is passive. To put it
bluntly, immanence implies that as soon as there is something then there is
everything. As soon as there is anything, there has been a contraction that has
folded a multiplicity into a singular presence. This ‘already’ confers on syn-
thesis the status of having taken place before any subject comes to look at it; it
renders synthesis passive. It is synthesis in the sense of being thought together,
and in (Heidegger’s) sense of coming-into-presence, but it is passive in the
sense of being an internal relation rather than a succession of points awaiting
action. Of course, it requires energy to realize these internal relations, and the
passive–active relation will be problematic in concrete experience.
The third implication of the transition from particular to general is that
passivity implies a time arrow, an asymmetry or non-reversibility of temporal
movement. Stengers and Prigogine (to whom Deleuze refers) emphasize this
problem in modern physics. An object can change state in either of two
directions, rising or falling, heating or cooling, increasing or decreasing
according to any given property. Formulas defining time in terms of change
of state are thus indifferent to the direction of time, so classical physics
18 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

cannot account for the time arrow that ordinary experience exhibits. Stengers
and Prigogine appeal to thermodynamic entropy to argue that certain kinds
of change are irreversible (i.e. a system can only lose energy, not gain it), and
hence to argue that physical time does have an irreversible arrow after all.
Deleuze’s argument for a time arrow is not based on physics, but nor does
it depend on the old tunes that pass for introspective description. If there is a
time arrow, the logic of contraction-production must demonstrate it. Con-
traction produces internal references from each one of its parts to the others.
The movement from one particular to another is reversible, but the movement
from a particular to a general whole introduces a difference in kind. Without
requiring active intervention, the particular has the status of something
already present, whereas the general has the status of opening into infinite
extensions. The move from particular to general within a singular contraction
follows an irreversible arrow from past to future within the present.8
Now, if passive synthesis throws so-called instants into a contracted gener-
ality, can we still speak of a “succession” of moments, or can we speak only of
a single moment in flux? Deleuze says that repetition “implies” three proceed-
ings (instances) of time (98): the “in-itself” of time that cannot be thought;
the “for-itself” of passive synthesis; and the “for-us” of active synthesis or
reflective representation. Up to now, we have been presenting the second as
the origin of temporality. But the first suggests a flux in the living present
prior to passive synthesis. Deleuze’s discussion of time in LS Series 1 and 2
begins with a similar distinction between the measureless flux of becoming
and measured instants in succession. One of the most difficult problems in
interpreting Deleuze’s account of time concerns the status of flux. Is there a
flux that is indeterminate in relation to what actually happens in time? Is the
contracted whole (one sense of history) indifferent to the distance between
events as they occur in succession (the other sense of history)? The more
emphasis put on the unthinkable flux, the less contact there will be between
simultaneity and succession, and the more indeterminate time in general will
appear. Conversely, the more that flux is embedded in the interplay between
distance and simultaneity, the more articulated time will appear. I am arguing
in general for the latter, both as a reading of Deleuze and as a working theory
of time. In any case, the in-itself, pre-thought, measureless time cannot
become present without a contraction of two or more determinate moments.
The present may well be a flux “in itself”, but it appears “for us” only after its
passive synthesis is broken down into instants or else built up into successions.
The moments that succeed one another “for us” only emerge from the flux
once we attend to them. There is a temptation to treat such secondary
reflections as mere illusions. But that is not Deleuze’s move. In NP, reflection
produces real reactive forces; in ES, it produces real cultural artifices. For
better or worse, the production of succession produces actual individual
moments. This is important for two reasons. First, since we showed that
instants cannot by themselves produce synthesis, they need to be explained as
 The First Synthesis of Time 19

offshoots of synthesis. Similarly in AO, flows and interruptions are primary,

but their secondary reifications into part-objects exist in their own manner.
As in AO, a synthesis can be analysed both in its schizo version and its fascist
version, its synthetic version and a degenerate individuating version. But why
must degeneration take place, and why must it take the form of instants? In
AO, the reasoning is that a desire to pursue a flow invests itself in each of its
moments, setting the stage for object-choices, phobic responses, and other
modes of getting stuck in an instant cut off from its milieu. In DR, perception
does a similar job, sweeping across a field until it lands on something to grasp.
Anything along the flow can be what perception fixes upon as the already-
there. In order to be perceived passively, there has to be not-yet-exhausted
material that can potentially be attended to actively.
The present’s immediately contracted singularity must therefore be able to
show itself secondarily as successive representations of part-moments held
together in present memory. But succession, the degenerative function of the
present, now takes over as Deleuze’s primary definition of present time. It is
not unusual for a phenomenon to be dominated by its degenerative aspect.
But we have to keep in mind that the logic of the present is no longer
univocal. “The present” can refer to the logic of contracted passive synthesis,
or to the logic of successive memory-representations.

(iii) Organism and intention

The justification for Deleuze’s use of the term “memory” to describe repre-
sentational succession depends on the connection of passivity with habit.
Deleuze gives an organic account of habit.
The appeal to organic life to explain temporality is unexpected here. First,
we wonder why Deleuze would have started with a perception model of
temporal repetition only to bring in an organic model later on. It can seem
on the one hand that Deleuze is trying to deduce the organism from features
of passive perception, or on the other hand that features of the organism are
brought in ex machina to solve problems that arose for the perception of
time. My attitude has been that, when reasonable, we should read the text
as a deduction, and it seems to me that Deleuze’s argument does derive
organicism from the passive synthesis at the origin of perception.
Yet in chapter 1, Deleuze argues that the greatness of Leibniz and Hegel
is that both recognized the limits of organic explanations in metaphysics.
The concept of organism suggests a genetic limit to differential transform-
ations, whereas perception has the advantage of being open to any content
from anywhere. But in chapter 2, Deleuze equates the organism with
“contemplation” (99–100), equating a kind of organic materialism with
a kind of perceptual idealism. The point is that organic perception is
neither exactly subjective nor exactly corporeal. A perception is simply an
20 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

“intentional” content, the presence of some object. (With Husserl, perception

is “consciousness of ” something, but for Deleuze, it is more “of ” than “con-
sciousness”). Content is the object-form lived as the present. Content for an
organism is life in the presence of objects, or life-with-objects, or life shaped
by objects, or life that adapts to, and engages with, objects.
To derive memory from contraction, we need to connect the concepts of
organism, habit, and intentionality. The organism, defined less by physiology
than by forces of engagement, contains pre-conscious aspects of habit. We are
used to thinking of habit as an activity we learn as a result of our own
endeavours rather than a synthesis that takes place for us in the objects
themselves. As an example, Deleuze says that in organisms, the integration of
certain nutrients in our cells is passive synthesis (100). Cellular heredity is a
synthesis of the past; it is body memory existing in the present organism.
Similarly, organic “need” is a passive synthesis of objects with a futural func-
tion. Deleuze’s examples in the same passage of “apprenticeship” and
“instinct” are more adaptational than physiological, but they suggest the
same passive syntheses of the past and future referents of life. It is difficult to
draw a firm line between passive and active syntheses, and Deleuze says that a
full account of synthesis (which he does not promise to give) would describe
manifold variations and “levels” in the interactions of passive and active
synthetic forms of life (100).9
Deleuze’s justification of organicism is far from complete, but it is enough
to draw the three conclusions we need in order to derive memory from organic
perception: first, that habit means drawing something off; second, that draw-
ing something off is a kind of contemplation; third, that contemplation is a
sign-function and hence a kind of intentionality that entails memory.
First, habit means “drawing something off”, or “extracting something”
(soutirer) (101–2). Deleuze used the term “extraction” in the first paragraph
of the chapter (96) to make the point that the mind comes into existence
when a difference is “extracted” from repetition and made into an object for
contemplation. The difference extracted is in one sense the mind itself (the
mind becomes subjective when some content is foregrounded); and is in
another sense repetition itself (a flux becomes objective when some content is
backgrounded).10
Deleuze aims to show that two different extractive functions follow from
contraction: a sign function, and a self-reference function. Together, they
constitute the proto-intentionality we need in order to draw memory out of
habit. Each part of the argument appeals to an organic phenomenon, but the
underlying principle is that it is the heterogeneous content of contraction
that extracts external sign-references and internal self-references.
The organic phenomenon that Deleuze uses to introduce the sign function
is the difference between an animal sensing the presence of water, and an
animal suffering dehydration (100). In the first case, the animal makes use of
a sign; in the latter, it does not. Deleuze does not define “sign” here, but we
 The First Synthesis of Time 21

might say that the contraction of a duration into a present makes it possible
for one content to refer outside itself to another. Signs are not primarily
representations of objects, but rather the cross-references of heterogeneous
elements that have been contracted into a single case without erasing their
difference. The contraction is, in one sense, just the two contents together,
but in another sense, it extracts a meta-character from the ensemble, a rela-
tionality functioning in a minimal sense as a sign. A sign is still passive
because it is nothing more than contraction, yet it is incipiently active in
expressing the external other.
The organic phenomenon that Deleuze uses to exhibit the self-reference
function in contraction is that animals gain pleasure not just from one body
part at a time, but from generalized excitations and relaxations of the body as
a whole (autosatisfaction) (101–2). An animal has a feeling of life, a second
meta-character added to that of the sign: perception through self-reference
added to external reference. The organism is both the synthesis of objective
contents and the self-referencing system of contents. Deleuze cites the
Plotinian thesis that there are “contemplative souls” in our muscles and our
nerves (101). The process that contracts contents enough to make the body
work, also turns them into a self-referential whole. The parts of such a whole
have an interactive momentum; they are mutually defining; they become
inseparable from the whole as parts of a whole; from then on they signal the
existence of the whole; they refer to a whole which in turn refers back to
them. It is a property of immanence11 to be on the one hand a multiplicity of
consistent, self-referencing contemplations,12 and on the other, a single bloc
of sense even across incompatible parts.
The combination of the externalizing function of signs and the internal-
izing function of auto-reference provides organic synthesis with an object-pole
and a subject-pole: sensory-motor intentionality. How does this make habit
into memory, passivity into activity, present into past?
We are about to see what effect organic habit has on the synthesis of
present time. But we first have to be clear about the three levels13 of repetition
and generality (103). (1) Repetition at the level of immediate contraction
produces generality in the sense of elements belonging together. (2) Repetition
at the level of contemplation produces generality in the sense of reference to a
whole. (3) Repetition at the level of a continuous ego produces generality in
the sense of totalizing representation. The last is inherently “third”, the
medium in which the flux of repetition is reduced to representations. Overall,
the mutual reference among contents of perception is the beginning of self-
contemplation. The three levels of repetition move towards a broadening of
generality, and an increase in subjectivity (representing itself as being more
subjective than it is), or more precisely, an increase in self-reference. The
repetition of elements in flux ends with a meta-function of self-conservation
in which instants are at the same moment divided, serialized, and made
present. The threefold distinction posits division as the mediation between
22 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

undifferentiated temporal flux and the differentiated flow of the present.

To express this last point, Deleuze says that “difference exists between two
repetitions” (104).
We can describe the three levels of repetition either (a) as a sequence (en
longeur) where the first results in the third by the mediation of the second,
or (b) as a common foundation of different experiences (en profondeur),
where the three unfold as functions of the same repetition. On the second
description, it is the synthetic act (repetition) that makes division (difference)
possible.14
We can now draw temporal consequences from the theory of habit as
quasi-intentional, quasi-organic contractive self-contemplation. These con-
sequences lay out the attributes of present time, and also prepare the way for
a temporality of pure past (with a new past-present-future distinction). We
started with a kind of time that contracts past and future within the present.
But we now have an unstable situation. “Only the present exists”, yet there
are extra-present aspects of the present, namely the past and future as sign
functions and auto-reference functions. These generate what Deleuze calls
“intra-temporality” (98), a difference in time from time itself. There is now a
sense in which the “present passes”, and this will entail a second synthesis of
time outside present time.
The original argument (98) for the presence of past and future in the
present (intratemporality) was drawn from perceptual contraction. That
argument established for present time the attribute of being quantitatively
one-many. I construe three more arguments for intratemporality in pp. 105–8.
The second draws from need, and attributes rhythm to present time. The third
draws from signs, and attributes the past perfect form to time. The fourth
combines needs and signs into questions, and attributes a field-structure to
present time.
In preparation, Deleuze gives an odd argument (105) for why there is any
multiplicity in the present at all. One would think that this had already been
established, since each time is a contraction of several times. The variation
that Deleuze gives here appeals to “physical possibility”. Why can we not, he
asks, “conceive” of the present independent of time passing, i.e. as a “per-
petual present”? Strictly speaking, we cannot conceive of time as if there were
no passing whatsoever, since time is contraction. But why can we not imagine
that each of the “succession of instants” contains a contemplation of the same
infinity, in such a way that the present content would be “co-extensive” with
all time?15 If all the contracted instants covered the same duration, no differ-
ence of intratemporality could be extracted. Deleuze’s response is that while
we can indeed “conceive” this kind of present, it is not a “physical possibil-
ity”. It is not clear what force the appeal to physicality has, but based on what
Deleuze says next, it seems the reason time cannot all be reduced to one co-
extensive present is that different physical beings at different times have their
own temporal needs.
 The First Synthesis of Time 23

(iv) Need and fatigue

The argument for intratemporality based on need: the content of each

moment of time functions as a point of view, contemplating the content of
other moments.16 Each content measures the “duration” of time passing,
and the measurement “varies” depending on its perspective on neighbouring
points of view. Each species, each individual organism, indeed each part of
each organism, has its own measurement of time. Therefore, time passes at
many speeds at once. The only thing that followed from simple contraction
was that there is a quantitative flow of moments sharing a homogeneous
measure of time. But with the premise that organisms contemplate from
points of view, we introduce variable quantifications of duration. Deleuze
highlights the counter-intuitive fact that since contractions occur at different
rates, two “successive” instants can both be “contemporaneous” with a third.
For time is not a single series of cases, but an indefinite number of super-
imposed time-lines, each measured by the sign-functions immanent in some
time-content. This defines time by movement; it defines the form of time by
the content of time. We might say with Leibniz that each monad expresses
the history of the world according to the rhythm of its own time-line, so that
one and the same event is found in different places on different time-lines.
If a given content B is immediately contracted with A on one time-line
(from one point of view), but on a different time-line is contracted with
A after an intermediary contraction with C, we can say consistently both
that B occurs two moments after A, and that it occurs one moment after
A. Or, since the first time-line held steady between A and B while the
second was in movement, A and C are successive with respect to the second
time-line but contemporaneous with respect to the first. Different time-
lines define variable durations, so different time-moments are superimposed
upon one another.17 This problem is at the root of Bergson’s argument
(against Einstein) that relativity permits a unity of time, albeit a multi-
dimensional unity. The same problem is at the root of Husserl’s analysis
of “simultaneity”. Contemporaneity, for Husserl, occurs when intentional
streams, each flowing at its own speed and requiring its own order of percep-
tions, nevertheless necessarily fix from time to time on points shared by each
other’s time-lines. It may be difficult to discern which points are shared by
two time-lines, or to define “at the same time” without regress. But the
conclusion from this first stage of the argument from need is that an organ-
ism temporalizes itself by apprehending “diverse” durations of the present at
the same time.
From variable duration, Deleuze infers the interplay of need and fatigue
(105). The fatigue in question occurs when an organism tries to contemplate
something but is unable to contract it into its own duration-line, as if there is
no room left in its time-line, or as if it has exhausted its ability to go further.
An organism is fatigued not when it has done so much that it has no energy
24 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

for more, since contraction is by definition momentum, but rather when its
contractions have slowed to a near halt. Fatigue is not like getting tired of not
fulfilling one’s needs; it is like failing to generate needs. We know from
Deleuze’s work that need is not lack; as long as one keeps one’s desires
passive, maximally needy, then they will be fulfilled by just about anything.
Contraction is always successful in propagating momentum. Needs are always
satisfied, and fatigue is the internal and external limit of that need. Externally,
fatigue occurs when satisfaction is complete, so that any remainder is out-
side the organism’s sphere of concern. This fatigue is the state of having
nothing left to do. Internally, fatigue is contraction that never gets started, a
need satisfied with having nothing. This fatigue is the state of having no
idea what to do. Need and fatigue come into focus when the momentum
of satisfaction (when contraction accelerates, it is need) alternates with
loss of momentum (when it decelerates, it is fatigue). Need is the futural
dimension of the present; fatigue is the present’s satisfaction with the past
(though need is sometimes driven by the past, and fatigue can be futural
drift).
The “present extends between two surges of need” (105). It is not just
that after one need is satisfied, another always begins. A single need surges up
twice: once at the beginning, and again when satisfaction fulfils it. The
present endures by filling itself up until it absorbs its two limit-points.
The extended present is the time in which the past has a future that satisfies
its past.
The intratemporality of past and future in the present is therefore
“inscribed” in the present’s needs and its variable speeds (106). Need is the
“for-self of repetition, the for-self of a certain duration” (106). Intratemporal-
ity is the structure of the present as such, of differential time-lines extracted
from the limits of points of view. “Starting from our contemplations, all of
our rhythms, our reserves, our reaction times, the thousand interlacings, the
presents and the fatigues that compose us, are defined. The rule is that one
cannot go faster than one’s own present, or rather, one’s presents” (106). Past
and future are the present’s way of being at, between, and beyond, its own
limits. They are the present’s rhythmic extensions of presence into other
presents. They add length to present moments and depth to the time-lines
measuring the present.

(v) Signs

The third argument for intratemporality is based on signs. Here, past and
future are treated as ontological levels of the present, rather than as time (or
time-lines) added on to the present. The argument from need added variable
quantity to homogeneously quantified perceptual time. The argument from
signs adds qualitative intratemporality.
 The First Synthesis of Time 25

As we have seen, contemplation is present in every instant’s point of view

as a signifier; as signified, it subsists as the past or future dimension (of the
present). This lets Deleuze say that temporal signs “refer to” past or future,
but “belong to the present” (106). This is not quite to say that signs are in the
present. The sign is a relation, and is not in one instant more than in another.
The sign is a sign of the present; it refers to past and future through the
present, and indeed refers to them as features of the present. The sign is
therefore not just a reference from the present to the past or future, but also
a sign directed to a feature of the present itself, albeit not its feature of
immediate presence. Furthermore, the sign is not something that exists in the
present, but is the very essence of being present as such. Deleuze appeals to
the Stoic description of a scar as a sign not of a past wound but rather of “the
present fact of having had a wound”. I will focus on the attribute of present
time introduced by “having had”. Deleuze raises issues quickly, but I linger
on four points.
First, using Stoic vocabulary, Deleuze says that “natural signs” refer to the
presence of past and future in the present, whereas “artificial signs” refer to
fictional pasts and futures, extensions out of the present. From the standpoint
of the present, the latter raises a paradox. The present’s own artificial signs
refer to a past and future at once real for it (as the limit-case of its reference
beyond the present) and unreal for it (since it cannot contract that other time
into its own).
Second, natural signs posit past and future fully as other dimensions of the
present, not just as extensions of the present. Earlier, we conceived past and
future as the multiplicity of moments in one big present. But now we are not
thinking of variable quantity but of an ontological difference between signify-
ing present and signified past and future. Points of view are variable not just
in duration, but in the way they posit virtualities (by the ways they interpret
content).
Third, to explicate “ ‘the present fact of having had a wound’ ”, we
need a distinction between “something that happened” and “something
having happened”. What does this grammatical form refer to? Deleuze’s
phrase in French (in quotations in the text because it paraphrases the
Stoics), refers to the “ ‘fait present d’avoir eu une blessure’ ” (106). Here we
have (a) the participle (what the present refers back to as its own history);
and (b) the infinitive of the auxiliary verb, “to have”, not exactly possess-
ing, but we might say quasi-possessing the past. Referring into a past (or
future) from a present requires, first, letting the past take on a status that
is not simply that of a later present, and second, positing an intermediary
that is not just present and not just past, but past in the quasi-possession
of the present.
The puzzle of “having had” shows that the conception of the past as a
dimension of the present has not given us enough resources to describe the
past that the present itself has begun to signify. The clue that the past is not
26 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

just a dimension of the present is that the past has created these paradoxes in
the present. The present contracts, and in so doing signifies a doubled time,
an auxiliary past; but while incorporating that past into its contraction, it has
no solution to the question of what kind of past it contracted itself from. In
short, the present generates paradoxes due to its simultaneous need to signify
the past and its inability to enunciate the co-existence of past and present
within the present. It will be up to the past qua past to define co-existence as
a generative principle, but to do so, it will have to enunciate the co-existence
of past and present within the past.
The present is intratemporal because it doubles as a present-present and a
present-past. The present passes not by moving from present to past; it uses
the past within it as a kind of energy reserve to dip into in order to motivate
continued contractions.
Fourth, Deleuze offers the difficult formula: “the sign is the contemplation
of the wound, it contracts all the instants that separate me from it into a
living present” (106). Each instant, as it passes, separates itself from me in the
present; but what the instant signifies pulls the instant back to me. Distance,
followed by cancelling the distance: this is how the present reads itself as
history. Further, in the sign, the present reads itself as me reading my history.
The “me” in the text is no doubt precarious. We have already seen that it is
only on the artificial, self-representational level of synthesis that the ego takes
form. But it is precisely at this level that the paradox of the present shows
itself again and again, namely when the past is (inevitably) represented. For it
is at one and the same level that instants are represented individually, that the
past is represented as independent of the present, and that the history of the
present is represented as mine.18
Deleuze’s last argument for intratemporality in the present arises because
both need and sign consist of “gaps” (béances), and a gap in sign-functions is
expressed as a “question” (106). The issue for intratemporality concerns the
nature of a “problematic field” (107). Contemplation endures through time
by small discontinuities, since any question challenges some element in the
habitual anticipation-fulfilment chain. And it endures by large discontinu-
ities, since it asks the fatiguing question, “What difference does it make?”
Questions bring to fruition the generality of the present, by extending the
gap problem throughout the domain of signs. Traversing time by gaps is not
just a negative mode of unhinging expectations, but also a positive mode of
stringing together all the little “finite affirmations” carried out by all the little
leaps of judgement by all the syntheses of contemplative souls contracting
one thing with another. In sum, the questioning soul gives present time the
structure of a “field”. The present does not just include past and future
contents; it problematizes them all at once, and this, finally, is what makes
the present intratemporal. We can still say that the difference between past
and future is a difference of rhythms and interpretations, but we will now
define a rhythm as a sign covering two beats under one question. In short, the
 The First Synthesis of Time 27

past is not just what has happened so far, but also the discontinuity of
affirmation on a general field.
To summarize, the past is a dimension of the present in four senses: (a) the
past is the other instant contracted into the present (in the tick-tock of
present perception); (b) it is the variability of time-lines (in the rhythms of
present organic habits); (c) it is the virtual having-been of “my” history (in
the signs of present contemplation); and (d) it is the field of discontinuities
(in the gaps of present questions).

(vi) Consequences

Let us consider what Deleuze’s theory of the present does, relative to other
philosophical accounts of the present.
First, in Deleuze’s account, the vanishing present does not play its tradi-
tional role. In ancient theories of time, the key issue is whether the present
exists and the past and future do not (since there is no time at which past
and future are actual; past and future consist only of memories and anticipa-
tions in the present), or else past and future exist but the present does not
(since as soon as we point to the present, it has ceased to be; the present is
specious). In one sense, both sides of the controversy can be found in
Deleuze. The non-existence of past and future can be found in his argument
that past and future are dimensions of the present. But Deleuze’s subordin-
ation of past and future to a processual present does not deny those dimen-
sions as such. In a similar way, the non-existence of the present can be
found in Deleuze’s critique of individuated instants. But here too, his sub-
ordination of the present instant to extended duration does not deny that
time can count as present. Deleuze’s concept of the present thus incorporates
what the Ancients opposed to the present. For the essence of the present is to
contract the other moments. So when Deleuze says that from the standpoint
of the present, only the present exists, the “present” here already includes
features we normally attribute to past and future, and vice versa. This is
typical dialectical argumentation.
My reference to dialectic is not gratuitous, since Hegel is the philosopher
of the vanishing present (Phänomenologie des Geists s. 95–6, 106–7). Like
Deleuze, Hegel does not deny that the Now actually appears. Rather, his
argument works by showing that the Now is already another Now, that the
Now is always a plurality, a universal, a having-been, a subjectivity and not
just a facticity. Hegel introduces multiplicities of temporal quantification
into the present, and multiplicities of qualitative subjectivities into temporal
quantification. His move is not to deny something about the present but to
add so much into the present that it no longer looks like what we thought the
present was going to be. In this way, Hegel’s logic of negation is not a logic of
absence, of lack, or even primarily of antithesis – it is a logic of genetic
28 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

multiplication, negation via hyper-affirmation. To clarify why Deleuze does

not take seriously the view that the present does not exist, it is of value to
note Hegel’s reason for not taking it seriously: namely, that what makes a
Now be another is not that it vanishes, or simply is not there, but that more
Now extends it into something else.
Second, in Deleuze’s account, the immediacy of the present does not
play its traditional role. Here the relevant contrast is between Deleuze and
Derrida. Derrida critiques the equation of present time with present objects,
using the problem of deferral. An object cannot be experienced all at once,
an expression cannot be explicated exhaustively, a context of interpretation
cannot be determined without ambiguity, and speakers/perceivers and listen-
ers/tribunals cannot be decisively marked off as autonomous consciousnesses,
or as independent language-users, or as curable unconsciousnesses, or as
continuous biographical histories. The presence of objects is deferred for
perceiving subjects whose self-presence is likewise deferred. Consequently,
the present cannot be located on a time-line, and one cannot tell which point
in a complex protention-retention chain a content fits into. For Derrida,
these facts undermine presence. Now, in various ways, Deleuze follows simi-
lar routes in affirming the multiplicity of object-forms, the foreignness of
language, the splitting of the ego, and the non-locatability of temporal
moments. But for Deleuze, none of this undermines presence. The reason for
this difference hangs on what expectation one had for the term “present”. If
one expected the term “present” to refer to an individual moment in time,
then one should stop using that term in the face of temporal complexes.
But if one expected it to refer to a field that from the first instance includes
serial, contractual, multi-dimensional, perhaps inherently unmeasurable,
non-individuable, swarming blocs of movement, then one can continue
speaking of that whole mass as “present”. This difference between Derrida
and Deleuze is terminological, but not without consequence. For Derrida,
undermining presence introduces absence; for Deleuze, multiplying presence
incorporates difference but not absence. For Derrida, the fact that the same
event occurs on different points along different time-line measurements,
means, more or less, that there is no Now-point. For Deleuze, the same fact
means, more or less, that all such points are Now-points. Indeed, for Deleuze
they are all the same Now-point – though not from the standpoint of the
present, for which all the points are contracted in multi-layered succession,
but from the standpoint of the past, for which all the points are affirmed in
simultaneous co-existence.

At this point in Deleuze’s text (108), there is a blank line, a brief summary of
the “paradox of the present”, then the statement: “We must not draw back
from the necessary consequence: there must be an other time in which the
first synthesis of time carries itself out. The latter refers necessarily to a second
synthesis” (108).
 The First Synthesis of Time 29

NOTES

1 The best commentators on this text, in my view, are Zourabichvili (1994), Simont
(1997), and Ansell Pearson (1998).
2 The relation between elements and cases is complex. Deleuze (98–9) contrasts Hume’s
beginning with A–B cases (on a model of cause–effect: tick-tock) with Bergson’s begin-
ning with A–A successions (on a model of clock time: tick-tick). Cases have their
contractions within, whereas elements have their contractions between them. In one
sense, the case seems “closed”, since its repetition is accomplished without going outside.
But in another sense, the case is internally dynamic, “open” to proportional variations.
In contrast, the element seems self-enclosed and indifferent to successors; in another
sense, it is open, since when the clock ticks 4, it is open to being various kinds of 4: 4 a.m.
or 4 p.m., 4:00 or 4:30. Deleuze concludes that case and element “refer” to one
another. A case presupposes the elements that are contracted within it, and the elements
“surpass themselves” in a case-complex. While Deleuze wants to give Hume and Bergson
equal play, his argument makes Hume’s “case” foundational. Passive synthesis tends to
experience tick-tick as tick-tock.
3 “Contraction” sometimes designates one phase of a process whose other phase is dilation
(as in Bergson), but here it designates the “fusion” of both phases (101).
4 In DR, Deleuze, discussing Hume, identifies succession with simple coming-after, and
repetition with synthesis. In ES (62–4), discussing the same point in Hume, Deleuze
identifies “repetition” with simple “coming-after”, i.e. with mechanical, quantitative
sequence; he identifies the synthesis of “contraction” (also “genesis” and “progression”)
with “habit”. However, the essence of the two texts is the same.
5 For various levels of retroactivity as backward reference, see Lampert (1995a).
6 In LS Series 2, Deleuze gives a parallel argument that the time of bodies (as opposed to
incorporeal events) is the present. A mind remembers a past or anticipates a future; but a
body is nothing other than its actual states at any given time, so it exists only in its own
present. The situation becomes more complicated once Deleuze ascribes incorporeal
attributes to bodies.
7 LS (22–3) makes a similar equation of past and future with particular and universal.
Yesterday is a particular; tomorrow is open to interpretation.
8 The move from particular to general is the past’s “living rule of the future” (97), a
phrase from Hume that Deleuze also discusses in ES (103–4).
9 This is the focus of Simont’s (1997, p. 307) account of the first synthesis. The ticking of
a clock constitutes a habit of material vibrations that are neither subjective nor objective,
active or passive.
10 In AO (50), the synthesis of “conjunction” is said to “extract” a “subject” from what is
previously a flow of connections and disjunctions. Once there is conjunction, its locus
will begin to have reflective and then projective functions. Desiring machines exist in the
full sense at the same time as subjectivity is extracted from a flow.
11 In CS (99), Guattari defines a “plane of immanence” by means of “auto-references”.
12 Daniel Dennett’s multiple processing model of mind and organism in Consciousness
Explained in the 1980s is reminiscent of Deleuze’s in the 1960s, not to mention
Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behaviour in the 1940s.
13 The distinction is confused by the fact that it is laid out in two different ways on 103
(and reprises the threefold distinction on 98; see my p. 14). Each version uses slightly
different vocabulary, and puts the three levels in a different order. All the versions indicate
the same relation between indeterminate and determinate flows by the mediation of
successive differences. If anyone would like to work through the details, email me
([email protected]).
30 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

14 In other ways, division (difference) makes synthesis (repetition) possible, as when social
division generates repeating systems of confrontation.
15 Keith Ansell Pearson (1998) gives two construals of the argument that the present is not
co-extensive with time. (1) “The fact that the present is constituted through need and
synthesized temporally through acts of repetition means that there can be no present
which could be co-extensive with time” (101). Ansell Pearson takes this to be the same as
the argument from need, while I construe them separately. On my construal, need
implies duration, but Deleuze is concerned that duration might be one single complex
present co-extensive with all time. (2) “The time of the present is fundamentally para-
doxical since in order to be ‘present’ it must not be self-present, that is, it must pass, and
it is the passing of time that prevents the present from ever being co-extensive with time”
(pp. 101–2). The second clause looks ahead to Deleuze’s argument for the pure past.
The first clause, concerning self-presentation, is what I call the argument from signs or
self-reference.
16 Ansell Pearson (ibid., p. 101) construes this argument differently: “Repetition and need
are inextricably linked since it is only through the repetition of an instant that need can
express itself as the for-itself of a certain duration.” On my construal, need is not brought
into the argument as a given in order to deduce duration; rather, duration demonstrates
that enduring beings have needs. It is difficult to be certain which construal is best.
17 Zourabichvili (1994, p. 72) construes the whole first synthesis of time this way. Need
demands density of interpretation, and fatigue allows slackening of interpretation.
Temporality is a milieu that both allows, and covers over, lacunae in the actual instants of
experience.
18 In the last paragraph on the synthesis of the present (107–8), Deleuze distinguishes the
self (moi) as subject from the self as “a thousand habits”. (a) The self of the thousand
habits is a contracting contemplation. (b) It is neither simple nor plural, but a “system”,
exemplified by Beckett’s “larval subjects”. (c) It is not active, but a “machine” that
extracts itself from its contents, and hence extracts its “right” to find itself. (d) It does not
“have” modifications, but is “the modification of something else”. (e) On the other hand,
“one is only what one has” (107). “One” is the neutral milieu that “has” a self.
3 The Virtual Co-existence of the Past – The
Second Synthesis of Time

The transition to the second synthesis of time, the pure past, is one of the
most important moves in the philosophy of Deleuze. Anyone who knows
anything about Deleuze knows his theory that the past in its entirety co-exists
with the present. The entire theory is developed within eight pages of DR
(108–15). As exciting, and as useful, as this idea is, it is essential that we be
able to demonstrate it. In this chapter, I am going to analyse the details of
Deleuze’s arguments for the pure past, to require the most rigorous demon-
strations possible, and to mine every aspect of these pages that I can find that
might be used to construct a decisive proof. I will also pull together parallel
arguments in other texts of Deleuze.
Some of these arguments compare temporal phenomena and conclude that
there are different temporal structures; others argue that the present cannot
explain time (because it is either contradictory or contains presuppositions)
and conclude that the past is its ground.

ARGUMENT 1: THE ARGUMENT FROM CONTAINMENT

The present contains the past as an immanent dimension, and this at first
seemed enough to explain the phenomenon of the past. But as the dimension
of the past in the present was explicated in terms of rhythms, signs, and
virtual fields, something about the past was being posited within the present
that the present could not contain. None of these analyses proved that there
is a past not structured by the present, or demonstrated what such a past
could be. But the point at which the present ceases to be self-explanatory is
the point that introduces the logic of the past as such.
Let us preview what the passage promises to demonstrate: “We must not
draw back from the necessary consequence: there must be an other time in
which the first synthesis of time carries itself out. The latter refers necessarily
to a second synthesis” (108). First, Deleuze announces an “other time”, as
opposed to a further characterization of the present. The promise is that we
are about to be shown a phenomenon that cannot be explained by the
multiple time-lines that branch out from the present.
32 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

Second, he announces an “other time”. An atemporal synthesis cannot

resolve the paradox of the present, but a temporal synthesis can.
Third, the necessary addition to the synthesis of the present is to be a
synthesis, as opposed to a thetic unity, a simple time-form, or an abstract time-
constant. But it is not yet clear what “time-synthesis” can mean if it is not
about time passing, i.e. if it is not a synthesis of the present.
Fourth, and most important, the second synthesis is said to be that “in
which” the first must be carried out. This is the key to the argument for the
pure past: the present requires some kind of container – a context, or
medium, or ground – in order to pass, and in order to be the present
incorporation of all time-passage. What does “in” refer to in the case of time?
Simont (308) takes the question, “in what does the present pass?” to mean,
“with what does the present contract?” On her construal, the present must be
“susceptible” of passing, of ending, hence of being past (309). The present is
“in” the past in the sense that it depends on the past superseding it. This
construal is plausible, but Deleuze seems to affirm a more literal sense of the
past as container of the present.
Fifth, the past is that in which the present “carries itself out”. The first
synthesis will not simply be reduced to a phase of the second; the second will
provide a milieu in which the first continues to operate independently.
Deleuze articulates two questions unanswerable from the standpoint of the
present (108). The first is “why the present passes”. The second is “what
prevents the present from being co-extensive with time”. The second is not
obvious. Is Deleuze asking whether some lacuna within the extended present
prevents it from filling the scope of time from end to end? Is he asking why
eternity does not consist of a single present instant? Or is he just asking why
we need to posit anything other than a series of presents? The first two seem
like straw men. For that matter, why should time have “co-extensivity” as a
property in the first place? Even if the present should turn out to be frag-
mentary (in fact, contraction is the contrary of fragmentation), why is that
a problem? The idea that another kind of time has to be posited in order
to fill up the time-scope, suggests that time should be a filled continuity,
co-extensive with itself. But why should it?
Further, the first question, namely why the present passes, is not obvious
either. Obviously, Deleuze is not looking for a final cause, but what sort of
first or proximate cause, explanation, origin, transcendental and/or material
condition, or energy source are we looking for? Are we being told now that
contraction does not even explain why two times subsist in one present, even
though that was demonstrated in the preceding pages of text? The text here is
written (like Hegel’s) as though we need to hear from Time itself that con-
traction is necessary, and not just from the subjective standpoint of the
perceiver. But this is not a proof. The passage referring to the past as a
container of the present is suggestive, but the metaphor of containment is not
entirely helpful, and the arguments remain to be given.
 The Second Synthesis of Time 33

ARGUMENT 2: THE ARGUMENT FROM THE PARADOX OF THE

PRESENT: THE PARADOX OF TIME PASSAGE

The paradox of the present is the premise from which the existence of an
independent synthesis of the past is said to follow necessarily: a “pure past”
distinct from the present’s version of the past. The core of the paradox is that
the synthesis of the present, in order to be originary, must already be
intratemporal; in order for the present to ground past and future, it must
already have contracted past and future. It is the paradox of the “present that
passes” (108).
There are many variants. The present “constitutes” time, yet it passes in
the time “constituted”. It is simple yet plural, the whole yet the parts, infin-
itely determinable yet finitely determined. It is the abstract, changeless form
of passing, yet also the concrete, changing instants that pass. The present
passes away, yet “never leaves the present”. It is the only kind of time there is,
but it incorporates kinds of time other than itself. We might have said that
this is the paradox of time as such, not just of present time. We will see,
though, that these paradoxes only hold for present time, time that passes;
past time, time that is not passing, has its own paradoxes.
The essence of Deleuze’s arguments for a pure past is that nothing about
the present explains how it “passes”. The commonsense view is that a present
moment is all there is at that moment, and that time passes when a second
moment comes along and takes its place, causing it to move into the past. But
if the present is all there is in the present, how could the second moment
enter (as if from somewhere else) into the present, in order to displace it? If
we assume that time does pass, and that it passes in the present, it follows that
some structure of time other than the present must explain that passing.
Something must explain how a moment of time can ever be a past moment.
Deleuze calls this the pure past. His theory, to lay it out in advance of proving
it, is that a temporal moment does exist in the present, and that that moment
is, at a certain point, past, but that it is not the fact that it was once present
that explains how it becomes past. A given temporal moment is a present,
and that same moment is also a past. Its presentness and its pastness are
equally essential to it, exhibiting two distinct features of time. To put it
simply, an event’s presentness consists in the way it comes into presence bit
by bit, expanding and contracting; the same event’s pastness consists in the
way it persists as a whole in a kind of storehouse of memory and potential
reactivation. One and the same event, while it happens, is a passing succes-
sion, and at the very same time, but in a different temporal sense, it is a
retrievable unit that will be available at, and in that sense contemporaneous
with, i.e. the past for, any and all later times. The presentness and the past-
ness of the event co-exist as two distinct structures of the event while it
happens, at exactly the same time.
34 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

Not all of this follows from the fact that the present contains a paradox,
but what does follow is that something other than the present has to be
introduced in order to explain how the present works.
What is at stake is what it means for time to “pass”.1 At least since
McTaggart’s The Nature of Existence (1927),2 many philosophers have denied
that time “passes”. Often, those who deny time passage appeal to post-
Einsteinian space-time; they reject the observer-independence of the present,
and plot temporal differences on Minkowski diagrams in order to show how
before–after sequences (as seen from different points of reference) can be
calculated together. Usually, they take their main opponent to be Bergsonian
lived duration. Deleuze allows that time does pass according to the stand-
point of the present; but he argues that in the past, which alone explains the
present, time does not pass. Deleuze takes this compromise denial of the
ultimacy of time passage to be Bergsonian.
Deleuze’s appeal to the paradox of time in order to sidestep time passage
works like this. The synthetic present does not strictly speaking pass; it
expands (and contracts) outwards from one moment towards a temporal
periphery. Since the present contains its own expansion, other moments
within that expanse successively present themselves as the central Now-points.
Because of the expanse, time seems to pass. The present never leaves the
present, but is already elsewhere, indeed everywhere in time, constituting all of
time. Distinct times in succession are produced consequent to the undivided
temporal totality where all the instants co-exist. Succession presupposes
co-existence.
This exposition of the present expanse sounds like it already explains the
passage of time. But Deleuze construes the paradox as an argument that time
passage requires a different structure of time altogether. Expansion shows the
“effect” of the passing present, i.e. it describes the apparent passing of time,
but it does not explain “why” time passes. This is a puzzling moment in the
text. Why do present expansions not fully explain how time just is the
passage from one Now to the next? For that matter, why should Deleuze not
come right out and conclude that the present does not actually pass when it
expands, thus obviating the need for a second synthesis?
Indeed, many philosophers since the nineteenth century replace substances
and forms with processes. Hegel and others propose that things are the pro-
cesses themselves; that when the force runs out of the process, the thing is
gone. Why should time not be thus exhausted by contractions and expansions;
why should it require some other temporal substance to hold it together, some
container or medium? If time is exhausted by contractions, then, for example,
once a memory is too distant to be contracted into the present, it disappears,
since no container holds it; why is that consequence incorrect?
But perhaps the claim that time passage takes place in time does not really
entail a container, but only means that times pass in relation to the whole
of time.
 The Second Synthesis of Time 35

ARGUMENT 3: TWO ARGUMENTS FROM THE WHOLE

(C1 AND C2 )

The argument from qualitative change in the whole (C1 18–22): (In all the
arguments for the pure past in the Cinéma volumes, Deleuze cites Bergson).
Moving in space from A to B requires succession, but “when I have reached B
and have had something to eat, what has changed is not only my state, but
the state of the whole which encompassed B, A, and all that was between
them” (C1 18). The change of the whole is qualitative, and so at the end, the
whole, and not any present moment, gives meaning to the passage from
beginning to end. Qualitative change makes the process “open” (20), since it
means the thing can become something new. Time, when seen as a whole, is
not just the succession of movements, but an indivisible duration that takes
all the past and the present as a unit. Deleuze does not always valorize wholes,
but here he does, to the extent that a qualitative change occurs over a bloc of
time (also C2 108).
The argument from acentricity (C1 85–91): from a perceiver’s perspective,
objects appear successively in the flowing present. But Bergson’s theory of
perception says that images are created in, and exist in, the objects perceived.
An object vibrates and sends sound waves into the air, which eventually enter
an ear. Once an image is captured by a perceiver, it exists in a subjective
perspective. But images themselves exist all around us at once. And because
images themselves are not centred in a subject, but are rather “acentred”, they
do not exist in any particular succession. They co-exist at various stages of
transmission through the media of light and air. In this “acentred universe
where everything reacts on everything else” (C1 90), events from various
moments of time co-exist on a temporal plane. Deleuze’s arguments in the C
volumes naturally depend on examples from particular films, so we need a
more direct demonstration of the pure past from Bergsonian premises.

ARGUMENT 4: THE ARGUMENT FROM TWO TYPES

OF MEMORY (B)

Deleuze frequently articulates his theory of the “pure past” with reference to
Bergson’s theory of “pure memory” in Matière et mémoire.
Bergson’s premise distinguishes (a) the kind of memory in which one
looks back to the past by retracing one by one the steps that led up to the
present, remembering experiences in reverse successive order, from (b) the
“pure” memory in which an experience from any point in the past can pop
up into present experience. Both types of memory clearly exist. Deleuze
draws three consequences of the second to infer the pure past (B 48–53). The
first consequence is that the memory of any point whatever is unconcerned
36 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

with how distant the memory is from the present. Therefore, it belongs more
to the past than to the present. The second consequence is one of Bergson’s
main theses in Matière et mémoire. The first kind of memory image is an
extension from the present, expressed in the present; it exists in the mind and
body of the rememberer. But given that the second kind of memory image is
not tied to the present, and is not at the present moment experienced, what is
its ontological status? Bergson says the past memory does not exist anywhere
in the present, not even in the brain, since the brain exists in the present.
Once it gets retrieved in the present, it is no longer strictly speaking a “pure
memory”, but a present experience image that refers to a past event. Bergson
concludes that pure memories exist virtually, but not actually. The status of a
memory is that if it should get expressed in a present, then it will reveal the
past, but until it does, it exists in a virtual status of its own.
The third consequence is that moving from a present to a past image
requires a “leap” (B 51–5). Once we leap into the past, we enter a zone where
the whole past is equally available: the “past in general”. We do not bring
images of the past into the present, but relocate our minds in the past, where
the virtual images are.
In short, the past is detached from the present, its reality is virtual, and the
whole past co-exists as a totality. These theses coincide largely with the four
Bergsonian paradoxes of time that Deleuze lays out in DR. But there are
difficulties in translating the arguments based on “pure memory” in B with
those aiming at the “pure past” in DR. For this reason, I am not going to
work out the details of the comparison here.3

ARGUMENT 5: THE ARGUMENT FROM FUNDAMENT

DR 109 constructs a not entirely helpful metaphor. The synthesis of the

present, or Habit, Deleuze says, is the “foundation” (fondation) of time; the
synthesis of the past, or Memory, is the “fundament” (fondement) of time.
The present is the “ground” of time and the past is its “sky”. More helpful is
the idea that the present “occupies” or “possesses” time, whereas the past
“appropriates” time. The present orders successive occurrences each in their
place; the present is territory on the map of time. In contrast, we might say
that the one who draws the map of time has a distant perspective, surveying
commensurable events from a wider perspective, placing them on, and
appropriating them for, a common time-line.
In this picture, it is the second-order, or reflective, determinability of
events in time that “makes the present pass”. The mapping of events as an
array of pasts transforms the present immediacy of lived time. Deleuze calls
the reflective synthesis of time “Memory”, in contrast to the Habit of taking
each event as it comes. The appeal is not really to a sky-level overview, but to
the “alliance” of two co-existing temporalities (109): time qua measure and
 The Second Synthesis of Time 37

time qua measured. This is not an argument, but it previews the important
idea that the map of time does not pass through time.

ARGUMENT 6: THE ARGUMENT FROM THE SURFACE AND

DEPTH OF BODIES (LS SERIES 23, “OF THE AION”)

This argument has three stages.

(a) The argument from the measureless (depth)

In LS, Chronos and Aion more or less play the roles of the syntheses of
present and past in DR. Chronos is the regulated, “immanent measure” for
the changing states of bodies over time. Deleuze asks, “Is there not a funda-
mental disturbance of the present, that is, a ground which overthrows and
subverts all measure, a becoming-mad of the depths that slips away from the
present?” (LS 193). Deleuze calls this the “measureless”, the “bad Chronos”,
which “has already given way to another reading of time”. It is not entirely
clear what Deleuze is appealing to in saying that the orderly movements of
bodies have something measureless in their depths that undermines succes-
sion. It seems the idea is something like the following. Temporal succession
depends on the way that bodies are always in the process of being blended.
But if bodies are in flux, no body can explain the successive states of it or any
other body. Succession yields an infinite regress of appeals to objects, a system
of causes that cannot form a unity. Orderly succession ultimately lies in
disorder.
Deleuze calls this a “shift of orientation” away from succession. The shift
takes place at the level of succession, but grounds an independent logic of
Aion, namely that set out below in the second stage of the argument.

(b) The argument from the incorporeal ground of language (surface)

Changes can be expressed according to types, independent of whether a body

changes in one direction or another. At any instant at which a body could get
bigger, it could also get smaller. Deleuze calls these types, which exist as
possibilities and are expressed in language, but which never occur in any
present, “incorporeal or surface effects” (194). The reason the present is a
field of confusion is that there is a temporal “instant” just before possibilities
diverge. “[The instant] is the pure moment of abstraction whose role is,
primarily, to divide and subdivide every present in both directions at once,
into past-future, upon the line of the Aion” (195). This is not an instant
that extends into past and future by causal modification, but is an instant of
38 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

sense (“sense is the same thing as event” (195)) that contains whole sets of
alternatives. Part of an event consists of possibilities that exist in a past that
never became present.

(c) The argument from the actualization and counter-actualization of the

whole in the part (to prevent confusion of depth and surface)

How could there be a measurable actualization, unless a third present

prevented it at every instant from falling into subversion and being con-
fused with it? . . . What is excessive in the event must be accomplished,
even though it may not be realized or actualized without ruin. Between
the two presents of Chronos – that of the subversion due to the bottom
and that of the actualization in forms – there is a third, there must be a
third, pertaining to the Aion. In fact, the instant as the paradoxical elem-
ent or the quasi-cause that runs through the entire straight line must itself
be represented. (196)

It is not enough for Aion to be a separate species of time; Aion must

explain how events can become actual in spite of virtually containing coun-
terfactuals, and how events can remain in flux in spite of becoming actual.
While LS refers to Aion as “the pure empty form of time” (165) just as DR
does, LS builds the pure past into the confusion in the way the present passes,
not just into the mere fact that the present passes. LS thus requires a stronger
premise concerning the present than DR does. But if the premise in the
argument in LS is true, it promises to provide a stronger explanation of how
the past becomes concrete. The past will not remain a merely formal map of
memory, but a force field of quasi-causes. This may explain why DR has to
introduce a third kind of time (the future) in addition to present and past,
while LS builds the third (as quasi-cause) into the second (the past). We will
consider time as cause in chapter 6. For now, the point is that the non-
actualized past must somehow be represented in the event without being
present.

ARGUMENT 7: THE ARGUMENT FROM REPRESENTABILITY

This argument of DR is that a given moment can be a present only if it is

contained in a temporal flow, i.e. only if it is representative of, situated in, and
a generalization of, a temporal whole. The argument from representability
contains an embedded argument from generalizability.
The presumption that a present moment presupposes another present
implies that some mode of time is already past. On the surface, it would seem
that relative to the present moment, it is the other present that is the past. But
 The Second Synthesis of Time 39

the heart of Deleuze’s thesis is that the present that has been, the “former
present”, is not the primary sense of the past. The former present is a present,
which the past is presently the past of. A child is born in the present, for
example, and later, when an adult, she will speak of her birth, a former present,
in past tense. But Deleuze’s point is that it is not qua former present that the
moment is past. The past grounds the very possibility that something could
become former. The past is not any present moment – not even a former
present – rather, as Deleuze likes to say, the past exists “between” two presents.
The past is “the element in which we aim at (vise, glimpse) the former
present” (109). This is an epistemological thesis about cognizing the past qua
past: the past is the form by which a former present remains visible. If a
present were simply present, then once it ceased being present, it would not
be cognizable at all. For a present content to be retained, it must be retained
not as former present but as simply former. That is, a present cannot be
retained at a later present simply as a former present, since a present cannot
contain anything that is not presently present; therefore, if there is such a
thing as a former present (and surely there is), it must not be part of the
present, but must co-exist along with the present in a different temporal
form, i.e. in the past.
But now, how do we reconcile this argument with the central feature of the
synthesis of the present? There, we showed that the contracted past is con-
tained within the extended present. One way to take the text would be to
read it as an Antinomy, as if the left column were a reductio argument
proving that unless the past is contained in the present then there is no past,
and the right column a reductio proving that unless the past is distanced from
the present then there is no past. Yet Deleuze seems not to reject both, as
antinomies deserve to be, but to affirm both. Another reading would be to
distinguish two phenomena of pastness: there is one kind of past that simply
is retained as the former part of the present, and another kind that is between
two presents, mediating the former present so that it appears as an independ-
ent past. The second kind of past would be found in the representation of an
event that is no longer ongoing. But does this prove that the past is not
contained in the present? If the argument were that there can be no past
within the present, it would be plausible to posit the independence of the
past. But since one kind of past does exist within the present, why can the
other kind of past not exist within the present as well? Even if the past must
be represented, why can the present not represent it in its cognitive content?
For that matter, why is there no past unless it is represented? Deleuze in
other texts opposes representationalism, but here the text insists:

The former present is to be found “represented” in the current one . . . But

now, the former present is not represented in the current one without
the current one being itself represented in this representation. It belongs
essentially to representation to represent not only some thing, but also its
40 Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History

own representivity. The former and the current presents are thus not like
two successive instants on the time-line, but the current one necessarily
entails (comporte) an additional dimension by which it re-presents the
former one and in which it is also represented. (109)

The obvious reason that not all former presents can be dragged along as
the tail of the current present is that some former presents are so distant, in
quantity and quality, that they cannot be retained merely as faded presence.
Some presents no doubt have what I will call soft representational status,
remaining in the temporal field of vision, as when an image of a moving train
lingers in the blur of shifting perspectives. But the fact that one present has a
successor would not guarantee the continuity of time, unless every present
were retained in the successor. That requires that memory retain more than
either perception or habit can.
The past makes events representable qua events, by extracting them from
their particular present contexts. Yet the past is not representable in itself,
since the past is never what is presented in the present. The key is what the
past accomplishes while we live in the present. While living in the present, if
we see what is happening as a flow, we are seeing it as the present; if we pick
out and represent an event-content in such a way that it becomes a topos of
thought, then it has the same status as an event in the distant past. The event
has become a free-standing occurrence rather than part of a flow. The past
occurs whenever something is in this way extracted from the flow and high-
lighted. An event is past as soon as it can be an item on a list, and this
guarantees that every event, not just some, gets retained.
From the standpoint of the past, the present is simply the most recent
representable, thus past, event. In fact, we often experience the present as if it
were already past, already a topic to contemplate rather than a process to wait
out. The presentness of the event is its causality in relation to its environ-
ment; its pastness is its thinkability, its sense. Presents too distant to be felt
can only be retained by hard representations, i.e. when they are represented
in present thought as alternate possible worlds in time.
The argument for the existence of a past independent of the present hangs
on the three representations mentioned in the passage quoted above: the past
is represented in the present; therefore the present is represented in the pres-
ent; therefore there is a generalized medium of representation over and above
the passing present. It is difficult to see why the second and third follow, until
we analyse generalization.

ARGUMENT 8: THE ARGUMENT FROM GENERALIZABILITY

When we think of the past as retained in the present (within the syn-
thesis of the present), past moments are particulars and the present is the
 The Second Synthesis of Time 41

generalization that contains them; in contrast, when we think of the present

as the most recent edge of time (within the synthesis of the past), most of
which has become past, then each present, including the now, is a particular,
and the past is the general term covering all the presents. This difference in
what counts as general by itself is enough to prove that present and past
embody independent logical structures. We call “habit” the retention of a
succession of particular pasts in the form of the present; we call “memory”
the representational reproduction of a succession of particular former presents
in the form of the past.
In PS (and LS), Deleuze associates the generalized past with incorporeality
and eternity, since it expands beyond any set of empirically present particu-
lars. This is the target of Badiou’s (1997) claim that Deleuze is a philosopher
of the atemporal.4 But this is of course only one side of what Deleuze says.
Deleuze does refer to the generality of time as the “extra-temporal”, but he
equally calls it, “time in a state of birth”; he calls it “eternity”, but also says
that it “envelops the multiple in the One and affirms the One in the mul-
tiple” (PS 57–60). For Deleuze, the past is atemporal only in the sense that it
generalizes from, and thus “complicates”, the present.
This strengthens the argument from representability. In the synthesis of
the present, each past represents the form of the present, and the form of the
present is general. So each present not only presents its own content, it also
presents a generality; therefore it contains a multiplicity of re-presentations.
From this it follows that the present presents what is not present, i.e. the
generality of the past, the “additional dimension” within which all the past
moments are represented. The very generality of the present, which holds
together past particulars, demonstrates that each present is a particular held
together by the generality of the past. We can now reconsider representability.

ARGUMENT 7 (REPRISE)

Insofar as the past’s generality subsumes all moments including the present, it
conserves present moments as former presents. This does not prove that every
moment must include a representation of another, and so does not prove that
there must be anything general about time. But if there is a general time into
which the present fits (a premise that is plausible even though not yet
proved), then the past is a kind of storehouse that includes all times.
This is a good moment to comment on the metaphor of the past as a
“storehouse” of temporal moments. The flaw in the metaphor is that it
suggests inert memory packages, whereas we know both from Bergson and
from neuropsychology that memories persist interactively, circulating in and
through each other while we are not thinking of them. Memories are not just
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 HORDEOLUM. STYE. ACNE.

Like acne of the skin in general, this consists in inflammation and

suppuration of a hair follicle and sebaceous gland. The whole lid or a
large part of it may be swollen, but by stroking it with the finger, a
hard, rounded, very tender spot will be detected and as the disease
advances this develops a minute collection of pus. A specially wide
orifice favors the entrance of the pus microbes, and the onset of the
disease. It has been noted in dogs (Fröhner).
For abortive treatment Fick recommends dry heat from a pocket
handkerchief or a heated teaspoon. If pus is present it must be
evacuated, and recurrence guarded against by cleanliness and
antiseptics. Use pyoktannin solution (1 ∶ 1000), or mercuric chloride
(1 ∶ 5000) or yellow oxide of mercury ointment.
 CHALAZION.

This is a pea like tumor growing from the tarsal cartilage, its
flattened side toward the mucosa, which is red and angry, and its
round surface toward the skin. When manipulated between the
fingers it moves with the tarsus. It is usually of slow growth and may
continue for years apparently unchanged. Some have thought it
tuberculous, but its true nature is uncertain. Warner records the
disease in the horse.
Treatment consists in incision and removal of the tumor,
curretting of the cavity, and after antiseptic douching, suturing the
lips.
 TUBERCULOSIS OF THE EYELID.

Described by Jewsejenke in the lower lid of birds, this is

manifested by small, hard round knots, covered by bluish red, or
yellowish red skin, and when incised showing a characteristic miliary
tubercle, with bacilli and sometimes a caseated centre. It is treated
by incision, curretting and caustics.
 TURNED IN EYELASH. TRICHIASIS.

Sometimes an eyelash grows inward so as to impinge upon the

front of the eyeball, or even to extend between this and the eyelid.
The condition exists in entropion but trichiasis is rather the
deviation of one or two cilia by reason of their false direction,
individually. It may occur as the result of a pre-existing
inflammation affecting the edge of the lid and the follicle, and the
offending hair is not only badly directed but small and shrunken as
well. On this account it is not always easy to recognize it, and
accordingly in cases of conjunctivitis without apparent cause it is
well to examine carefully with the aid of oblique focal illumination.
Treatment consists in pulling out the offending hair with ciliary
forceps, avoiding bending it lest it break off short and become at
once more irritating and more difficult of extraction. In case the hair
grows anew in the same direction extract it anew and destroy its root
with the electric cautery.
 ENTROPION. TURNING IN OF THE EYELID.

In foals, puppies, hounds, with narrow fissure, and conjunctivitis, or tarsitis.

Permanent bandaging, orbicularis spasm. Symptoms: disappearance of tarsus and
lashes by involution. Treatment: in spasm fix by plaster; suture skin; excise
elliptical section of skin and suture edges together. Release cicatrices.

Inversion of the eyelid or a portion of it, with consequent

trichiasis, conjunctivitis and lachrymation has been met with
congenitally in foals (Aubry, Bourdeau, Hamon) and puppies
(Cadiot, Almy). Hounds have especially suffered. In the older
animals it is largely determined by abnormally narrow fissure, and
by old standing disease of the conjunctiva or tarsus, with cicatricial
contraction or adhesion. Persistent bandaging turns in the cilia and
contributes to entropion. Finally a persistent spasm of the orbicularis
muscle may bring it about.
Symptoms. Trichiasis is usually, though not always, present.
In any case the tarsus is turned inward so as to press upon the
front of the bulb, or even to disappear completely. Thickening and
distortion of the lid is a not infrequent condition.
Treatment. In case of simple spasm clip or shave the hairs from
the lid corresponding to the lesion, and close to the tarsus attach a
strip of plaster. When firmly adherent draw it sufficiently to efface
the entropion and attach it to the skin of the face.
This failing, Gaillard’s sutures may succeed. With a pair of forceps
with looped, transversely elongated blades, pinch up skin and muscle
sufficient to correct the entropion, and passing a needle twice
through this fold with an interval of 3 mm., tie the suture over a
small roll of cotton. The stitches may be removed in two days and the
cicatrices may permanently obviate the deformity.
 The older plastic operation is more trustworthy: The skin of the
affected lid is pinched up to such an extent in length and breadth, as
to correct the entropion and is then excised with sharp scissors or
bistuory so as to leave a long elliptical sore. The edges of this are then
carefully sutured together and the resulting union corrects
deformity. In case the entropion is caused by an old standing
cicatrix, it may be necessary, first, to make a careful incision along
the edge of the lid so as to separate the tarsus and conjunctiva from
the cilia and Meibomian ducts, and then to proceed with the plastic
operation on the skin.
 TURNING OUT OF THE EYELID. ECTROPION.

In large dogs, in old age, debility, conjunctival swelling, cicatrized skin of lids,
distortions of lids. Symptoms: exposure of palpebral mucosa, weeping eyes,
conjunctival hypertrophy (chemosis). Treatment: scarify or excise a fold of
mucosa, astringent antiseptics, Snellen’s suture, Diefenbach’s operation, Wharton-
Jones operation.

This is much more common than entropion, but much less

injurious as the tarsi and lashes do not irritate the conjunctiva. It is
especially common in large dogs (hounds, mastiff) and usually
affects the inner part of the lower lid. Old age and debility contribute
materially to the condition, the lack of tone or paresis being an
important factor. It may, however, occur in any animal, from
conjunctivitis and swelling of the mucosa, from cicatrices or old
standing disease of the skin of the eyelids, or from imperfectly healed
wounds leaving distortions of the lower lid. It is most frequent in the
lower lid, and the slightest pendulous condition, which detaches the
tarsus from the bulb, and exposes a narrow zone of the conjunctiva is
considered to be an ectropion.
Symptoms. Beside the exposure of the zone of mucosa, there is the
overflow of tears, and in old standing and bad cases a hypertrophy of
the exposed conjunctiva, which projects as a fleshy-looking mass,
and weighs down the lid, with a continual tendency to aggravation.
Treatment. Where the main factor seems to be the infiltration of
the mucosa this may be reduced by scarification, or by the complete
excision of a fold of the membrane. Use an antiseptic wash (boric
acid) and the retraction of healing tends to brace up the lid against
the bulb.
Snellen’s suture is sometimes employed successfully. A silk thread
is armed at each end with a needle, and the needles are passed into
the conjunctiva just inside the tarsus and brought out through the
skin near the margin of the orbit, where they are tied round a small
roll of cotton. Several of these may be inserted side by side so as to
extend the whole length of the ectropion and they should be drawn
tight enough to correct the deformity. If left some days they will
usually determine cicatrices which will overcome the deformity.
The most common operation (Dieffenbach’s) is the excision of a
triangular portion of skin from just outside the lower lid and having
its base or upper side running horizontally outward from the outer
canthus. Then pare the margin of the lower lid for a distance equal to
the base of the triangle. Then bring together and suture the skin
forming the right and left sides of the triangle, and the raw edge of
the lid to the skin that formed the base of the triangle. In this way the
triangular sore formed by the operation is completely covered and
the margin of the lower lid is shortened so as to brace it up against
the bulb.
In case of cicatricial ectropion the Wharton-Jones operation is to
be adopted. A V-shaped incision is made in the skin of the lower lid
commencing just beneath the tarsus and carried down so that the
two lines of incision meet well down beneath the cicatrix. The
triangular flap of skin thus made, is detached by a bistuory from the
cicatricial tissue beneath, and allowed to shrink upward toward the
tarsus. Finally the two edges are sewed together from the angle
upward, as far as may be necessary to allow the proper application of
the tarsus against the bulb, and the remainder of these edges are
sutured to those of the triangular flap.
 TUMORS OF THE EYELIDS.

Warts. The most common tumors of the eyelids in horses, cattle,

and dogs are warts. These are most simply disposed of by seizing
them with rat-tooth forceps and clipping them off with sharp scissors
curved on the flat. Any bleeding may be checked by a pencil of silver
nitrate.
Sarcoma, melanoma, and epithelioma are common in
solipeds, especially in the gray and white. They usually form a
cauliflower-like mass red and angry and bleed easily. They may
occupy any part of the lid, the skin, the dark tarsal margin, the
connective tissue or the mucosa, and not unfrequently they involve
the eyeball, and the surrounding tissues, even the bones of the orbit.
Treatment. These may be excised like warts taking care to remove
every vestige of disease. In these cases I have usually found it
necessary to remove the entire bulb.
 FRACTURE OF THE ORBIT.

Nature and Causes. The usual seat of fracture is the orbital

process of the frontal bone, yet any portion of the orbital margin may
suffer, and even the inner wall or floor of the orbit may be broken by
a penetrating instrument. Horses and polled cattle and sheep are
especially exposed to the injury, while in horned stock the region is
in a measure protected. Carnivora, which have no bony orbital
process, are less liable but may still sustain fractures of the
remaining parts. Horses and polled ruminants suffer mainly from
beating the head on the ground or other solid body in the paroxysms
of colic and enteritis, or in nervous affections; horned stock suffer
from concussions in fighting and direct blows by the horns. All
animals suffer from blows with clubs, kicks and other mechanical
injuries.
Symptoms. With (and less frequently without) a skin wound, there
may be indication of depression, or mobility of the detached
segment, or its sharp edge may be felt, through the skin, or by the
sterilized finger introduced into the orbit. In case of a penetrating or
stab wound, which cannot be followed by the finger, it may be
followed by an aseptic probe and any fracture recognized. The
conjunctival sac must be first thoroughly washed out with an
antiseptic lotion, as the introduction of any septic germs into the
osseous wound, is likely to cause a dangerous infection or abscess.
Treatment. Simple, slight fractures with blunt instruments are
treated by rest and cooling, disinfectant lotions. If foreign bodies or
detached particles of bone are found in the wound they should be
extracted. Shot that are difficult to find, may be left, as they are often
aseptic and tend to become encapsuled. Should they cause abscess
they will usually be found in the pus sac and may then be removed.
Displaced bones may often be replaced by the finger in the orbit.
Sometimes they can be best reached by trephining the frontal or
maxillary sinus and introducing a lever through the cavity
(Hendrickx). If the sinus has been involved it must be opened in any
case. Cadiot advises bandages impregnated with black pitch to fix the
bones in certain cases. Antiseptic washes (sublimate 1 ∶ 5000) and
antiseptic cotton packing are demanded for all wounds.
 BRUISES AND WOUNDS OF THE ORBIT.

These may come from the same causes as fractures and though
less violent may occasion inflammation which involves the eye or
even the brain with fatal results. Thus in horses it has been a cause of
infective inflammation, with a fatal extension (Robellet); in cattle a
similar inflammation has extended to the cerebral meninges and
caused death (Leblanc), and in dogs an advance to the eyeball
threatens its destruction (Möller). Short of this necrosis is not
uncommon (Rey).
Treatment. This does not differ materially from that demanded by
penetrating wounds with fracture. A perfect cleansing and antisepsis
of the wound is the first demand. A solution of boric acid (4 per
cent.) or of mercuric chloride (1 ∶ 5000) liberally applied, and
maintained thereafter on soft pledgets of surgical cotton, will often
have the best results. All foreign bodies must be carefully removed,
lacerated flaps and shreds may require suturing, dead portions
excision, and finally abscesses or excessive exudate may require the
lance, but cooling, antiseptic lotions and an elevated position of the
head, are among the most prominent resorts.
 RETRO-BULBAR ABSCESS.

Schindelka has observed this in the horse, in connection with

petechial fever. If connected with meningeal abscess it will be
necessarily fatal. In favorable cases evacuate the pus as soon as
detected and dress with pledgets of cotton saturated with a mercuric
chloride solution (1:2000) or other antiseptic.
 PERIOSTITIS OF THE ORBIT.

This may be shown by the firm swelling of the bone and, in case a
wound has been formed, by the contact of the probe with the
denuded, hard, rough bone. When thus exposed or necrosed on the
surface, or when an exostosis has formed, the bone may be laid open
and scraped down to the healthy tissue, and then dressed with
antiseptic pledgets.
 TUMORS OF THE ORBIT.

These may be of different kinds, as sarcoma, encephaloid,

osteoma and actinomycosis. They demand thorough surgical
treatment, except perhaps in the case of the latter, which may
recover under iodide of potassium. Emmerich records an extensive
sarcoma of the orbit in a cow, weighing six pounds and extending
into the nasal sinuses, and chambers, and implicating the cerebral
meninges. Möller records cases of sarcoma and carcinoma of the
orbit in horses and dogs, and Leblanc in cattle. Melanosarcoma is not
uncommon in the orbits of gray horses which are changing to white.
Exotoses are common around the orbits of cattle.
If such growths do not show on the surface they cause a more or
less unsightly protrusion of the eyeball, owing to the presence of the
neoplasm in the depth of the orbit, and the removal of the bulb
becomes a necessity.
 DISEASE OF THE LACHRYMAL GLAND AND
DUCTS. DACRYO-ADENITIS.

Even in man these parts are remarkably free from disease, while in
the lower animals, we have literally no record of such conditions.
Inflammation of the gland (dacryo-adenitis) would be manifested by
a sensitive swelling under the outer part of the orbital process, and
upper eyelid and by lachrymation, and obstruction of the gland duct
and by a tense transparent rounded swelling inside the lid. A fistula
is possible from a penetrating wound of the lid in the same situation.
In both of the latter conditions an opening made through the
palpebral conjunctiva will allow the discharge of the tears in the
proper place, and healing of any external wound may be hastened by
suture or plaster.
 OBSTRUCTION OF THE LACHRYMAL PUNCTA.
ATRESIA. INFLAMMATION.

Congenital atresia of these puncta has been recorded in foals, by

Hollmann and obstruction as the result of inflammation, by Lafosse,
Verjaus and Tyvaert, and of the entrance of the seeds of bromus by
Stockfleth.
Apart from congenital atresia and impaction of foreign bodies the
symptoms are those of conjunctivitis, with escape of tears over the
face (epiphora). Injection of aseptic water into the lower puncta and
its escape by the upper, and by the nasal orifice, will determine the
patency or otherwise of the various channels.
Treatment consists in astringent collyria to check the
inflammation, in the removal of any foreign body, in the dilation or
slitting of the lachrymal canaliculi, and in case of complete atresia, in
incising the lachrymal sac. Slitting of the canaliculi is accomplished
by a small probe pointed bistuory (canaliculus knife). The lid is
drawn away from the carnucle, and the probe point inserted at first
downward, then inward and backward, and when it is well inside the
sac the handle is brought to the vertical and the walls of the duct slit
open.
In case of atresia Leblanc recommends to seize the inner canthus
with rat tooth forceps so as to include the structures about the sac
and to plunge the bistuory directly into the sac. Then by the aid of a
whalebone staff he passes three silk threads through the duct and
fixes them in place by attaching them to a copper ring at each end.
This is retained in place and moved daily until the passage has been
definitely healed and its permanency assured.
 WOUND AND FISTULA OF THE LACHRYMAL
SAC.

The lachrymal sac, which receives the tears from the canaliculi, is
situated in the infundibulum at the upper end of the lachrymal canal
and is in great measure protected against external injuries by the
prominent orbital edge of the lachrymal bone. Yet violent blows with
or without fracture, sometimes lead to rupture of the mucous walls
and the formation of a fistula. Wounds made with penetrating
bodies, more or less pointed are also liable to involve the sac. The
fistulous orifice may be through the skin at the inner canthus or
through the mucosa by the side of the carnucle. The cutaneous
opening may be a minute orifice from which tears and muco-
purulent matter escapes, to mat together the hairs on the side of the
face. Sometimes there is a reddish elevation, the size of a pin head,
and in fistula through the mucosa this is the rule, and the orifice is
elevated so that the tears flow out over the face. For the symptoms of
the attendant catarrh of the sac see below. In infected cases with
obstruction of the lachrymo-nasal duct, it has been known to extend
to the bone and even to open into the sinuses, or tooth follicles.
(Gerard, Leblanc).
The condition is found in horses, cattle and dogs.
Treatment. In fistula resulting from simple traumatism, nothing
more may be requisite than rest and soothing astringent
applications. Sutures are sometimes resorted to but are liable to
cause itching and do more harm than good. It is above all important
to keep the lachrymo-nasal duct patent, and for this purpose a lead
or silver stilet, or a thick catgut suture may be worn in the canal until
healing has ensued.
 CATARRH OF THE LACHRYMAL SAC.
DACRYOCYSTITIS.

Connected above through the canaliculi with the conjunctiva, and

below through the lachrymal duct with the nasal chamber this cavity
is liable to be more or less implicated in all cases of nasal catarrh and
conjunctivitis, (strangles, canine distemper, influenza). If the
lachrymal duct is obstructed so that the tears accumulate in the sac,
the tendency to catarrh is further enhanced by the distension and
weakening of its walls, and by the propagation of bacteria which have
entered with the tears, and find in them a favorable and abundant
culture medium; the diameter of the sac in the horse being about
⅔rds. of an inch. The presence of foreign bodies is another cause.
Lesions. Symptoms. Swelling at the inner canthus, which raises
the carnucle above the normal level, and the escape of tears over the
lower lid are the most prominent symptoms. If the swelling is
pressed it subsides, the contents, clear or purulent, escaping through
the lachrymal duct, to the nose, or through the puncta and
accumulating in the inner canthus or flowing over the cheek. The
hair beneath the inner canthus is matted together, or drops off
leaving bare patches. Wolff found in one case, a distension of the sac
to over two inches in breadth, and 1⅔ inches long. To the swelling
there is soon added conjunctival inflammation, closure of the puncta
by swelling and the escape of all tears over the face. Suppuration
supervenes in the sac, and in the larger animals the pent up pus often
makes its way outward, causing destructive ulceration of the walls of
the canaliculi and puncta, or of the walls of the sac, the skin, or even
the subjacent bone. In this way fistula results. Caries of the bone and
penetration of the molar alveoli may ensue. (Girard, Leblanc).
Treatment. The first object must be to secure a free drainage into
the nose. The evacuation of the sac by compression having been
accomplished, an astringent solution may be injected through the
nasal opening of the lachrymal duct. If the canal is pervious the sac
will be re-filled and will swell out as before. The injection may be 0.5
per cent. sulphate of zinc, 1 per cent. acetate of lead, 0.3 per cent.
nitrate of silver, 1 per cent. tannic acid, 2 per cent. boric acid, or 0.02
per cent. corrosive sublimate. Cocaine may be added in the
proportion of 5 per cent. The injection may be repeated thrice a day
at first, then twice, and finally once as the catarrh subsides.
If the injection fails to reach the sac, thoroughly sterilized, flexible
probes may be used, increasing the size as they can be passed
without too great pressure.
Or the puncta and canaliculi may be injected as in the human
subject, the conjunctiva having been first anæsthetized by cocaine, or
general ether or chloroform anæsthesia having been induced. The
slitting of the puncta and canaliculi may be resorted to, as spoken of
under atresia.
The frequent passage of a sound is usually resorted to, and a stilet
may even be worn, but there is always danger of resulting thickening
and narrowing of the duct, and, if healing can be secured without this
measure, it is to be preferred.
 STENOSIS OF THE LACHRYMO-NASAL DUCT.

Obliteration of the lachrymal duct may occur from stricture of the

canal, the result of wounds or other irritants: from pressure by the
inflamed mucosa in nasal catarrh or strangles: from polypus or
osseous tumor in the nose: from actinomycosis or other disease of
the bones.
The one manifest symptom is the escape of the tears on to the face.
To complete the diagnosis, injection of one punctum will cause
distension of the lachrymal sac.
Treatment. This may be attempted by bougies. In the horse a small
sound, metallic or whalebone bougie, thoroughly sterilized and
smeared with aseptic vaseline, or oil, is inserted from the nasal
opening and carefully passed on into the sac. In the dog the nasal
opening cannot be reached and the bougie must be passed by the
puncta and lachrymal sac. To secure the requisite dilation, it is
usually necessary to probe the passage daily, using a larger probe
when the first passes easily, until the canal has been sufficiently
dilated.
A second resort is to distend the canal by a liquid injection thrown
into the nasal opening. This will succeed when the obstruction is only
caused by concretions in the canal.
A somewhat similar resort is the insufflation of the duct by means
of a finely pointed tube inserted from below into the nasal orifice of
the duct.
Still another method is to make a new opening for the escape of
the tears into the nose. When the stenosis is at or near the nasal
opening of the duct, an artificial opening is easily made and usually
satisfactory. Under anæsthesia, a sterilized silver probe is passed
through the upper punctum, the sac and canal. When it meets
definite obstruction its position is ascertained inside the nose, and an
incision is made so as to allow its escape. The constant escape of
tears tends to prevent it from closing up again, but it is well to
examine into this until it has thoroughly healed. A silk thread worn
in the duct and held in place by a copper or aluminum ring on each
end may be resorted to.
Attempts have been made to establish a new outlet by boring
through the lachrymal bone into the nose, but without a permanent
success. It has also been advised to obliterate the lachrymal ducts
and sac, on the one hand and to excise the lachrymal gland on the
other, but the proposed cure is worse than the disease.
 DISEASE OF THE LACHRYMAL CARUNCLE.

The caruncle is inflamed in conjunctivitis. When this inflammation

leads to hypertrophy it is known as encanthis. This is a common
condition in dogs and the caruncle may increase to the size of a pea
or acorn, and by compressing the canaliculi it leads to a profuse
overflow of tears on the cheek. At first there is the acute congestion
of conjunctivitis, but later there may be induration and pallor.
The treatment of this condition consists in astringent and sedative
collyria in the early inflammatory stages, and later in the ablation of
the hypertrophied mass. The caruncle is seized with a pair of rat-
tooth forceps and snipped off with curved scissors, the free bleeding
being afterward checked by cold water.
In cases that seem, by reason of excessive vascularity ill adapted to
this method, the hypertrophied mass may be tied at its base with a
stout silk thread so as to cut off the supply of blood, and cause it to
slough off. A collyria of boric acid (4 per cent.) or mercuric chloride
(0.02 per cent.) may be used to prevent infection.
Tumors of the Caruncle are met with, such as fibroma (Wörz),
Sarcoma and Melanosarcoma. For all alike the complete extirpation
of the neoplasm is demanded.
 WOUNDS AND INFLAMMATION OF THE
MEMBRANA NICTITANS.

Like other parts of the ocular apparatus, the third eyelid and gland
of Harder are subject to accidental injuries of various kinds. What is
worse, ignorant persons seeing the cartilage and membrane
projected over the eye in ophthalmias and tetanus, have mistaken it
for a morbid product and deliberately cut it off in part. The condition
of the organ may be ascertained by parting the lids with the fingers
and pressing gently on the front of the eyeball, when the nictitating
membrane will be fully exposed.
If detached portions cannot be restored, but threaten to slough, or
cause distortions or unsightly and irritating neoplasms they should
be seized with forceps and snipped off with scissors. Otherwise the
treatment consists in soothing astringent and anodyne Collyria as in
conjunctivitis.
 TUMORS AND HYPERTROPHY OF THE
MEMBRANA NICTITANS.

Neoplasms of this organ may occur in any quadruped or bird and

may be recognized by the swelling of more or less of its substance, by
the unevenness of its free margin, or by distinct outgrowths from its
surface. They are especially common in dogs and pigs and may be
fibrous, epithelial or otherwise. The treatment is purely surgical and
in case of a malignant neoplasm should demand the removal of the
entire organ.
 ADENOMA OF THE GLAND OF HARDER.

Cases in dogs have been recorded by Fröhner and Schimmel, and it

might be expected in other carnivora, ruminants, pigs, rabbits and
birds. The treatment is by excision with forceps and scissors, and
subsequent treatment with an antiseptic zinc lotion.
 FOREIGN BODIES IN THE CONJUNCTIVAL SAC.

Frequency: seeds, glumes, awns, dust, sand, wood, metal; exudate; in

conjunctival pouch, under nictitans, in puncta. Filaria lachrymalis. Symptoms:
closure of lids, epiphora, congestion, inflammation, infection. Treatment: local
anæsthesia, forceps, lead pencil, pin’s head, collyria.

So common are foreign bodies in the conjunctival sac of the

domestic herbivora, that in any case of epiphora, hyperæmia or
inflammation of the mucosa, the first care should be given to see that
the condition is not caused by the presence of such an irritant. In
animals fed from high racks, seeds and glumes of the gramineæ,
awns of barley, and dust of various kinds often get into the eye and
stick fast. Under other conditions, insects, particles of sand, dust,
wood, metal, etc., prove equally injurious by their presence. Awns
and chaff are particularly liable to adhere to the mucosa and even to
become covered by an exudate, which renders them more firmly
adherent. Other objects lodge under the eyelids, or membrana
nictitans, or in folds of the mucosa. Their entrance into the lachrymal
puncta has already been referred to. The larger and more rounded
bodies are likely to be washed off by the excessive flow of tears,
assisted by the movements of the nictitating cartilage, but flat
glumes, or awns stick too closely to the surface, while the smaller
objects become entangled beneath the lids, or hair, or in the folds of
the mucous membrane. The filaria lachrymalis may be the cause of
trouble.
Symptoms. There is closure or semi-closure of the lids, the escape
of a profusion of tears over the cheek, and active congestion or
hyperæmia. A careful examination with everted lids, or even with
raised nictitans will usually reveal the foreign body. If overlooked or
neglected the hyperæmia rapidly advances to active inflammation,
with or without an infective complication. Foreign bodies blown into
the eye, as a rule carry with them more or less bacteria, and, if these
have any tendency to pathogenesis, the irritation of the mucosa
easily paves the way for their colonization. Thus, any grade or form
of conjunctivitis may supervene upon the introduction of a foreign
irritant.
Treatment. Nearly all such bodies are most easily and certainly
removed by a pair of fine forceps. It may be necessary to first
anæsthetize the eye with a 5 per cent. solution of cocaine. The clean
tip of the finger passed under the lid and nictitating membrane is a
safe and effective method. Less effective methods are to pick up the
offending body on the point of a lead pencil, or a small, blunt
metallic spud, or with a pin’s head covered with a clean pocket
handkerchief. This may be followed by an antiseptic (boric acid)
collyria, with or without cocaine or morphia.
 WOUNDS OF THE CONJUNCTIVA.

These occur in all domestic animals, but are especially frequent in

dogs and cats from scratching with the claws. In clumsy handling of
the eyelids, the mucosa is wounded by ragged and uneven nails.
Injuries and stings by insects which are attracted by the reflection
from the eye constitute a specially grave lesion, often proportionate
to the nature of the poison instilled.
Symptoms. There are usually closure of the eyelids, with exudation
and thickening of the conjunctiva especially in the vicinity of the
wound, a free flow of tears, mingled it may be with blood, and the
visible evidence of the lesion on the exposure of the injured part. If
the cornea is implicated, even the pupil is contracted, showing
photophobia.
Treatment. Slight noninfected wounds will heal readily under
simple astringent collyria, following upon the removal of any cause
of mechanical irritation. A solution of corrosive sublimate, 1:5000, or
of boric acid, 4 per cent. may be used. If photophobia exists ½ per
cent. of atropia sulphate or 1 per cent. of cocaine hydrochlorate will
usually give relief. Extensive wounds may require sutures, and
sloughing tissue may be excised with fine curved scissors. Excessive
granulations may be removed in the same way. For stings use a
potassium permanganate solution (2 grs. to 1 oz). Violent
inflammation may be met by a laxative and by leeching the
periorbital region.
 BURNS OF THE CONJUNCTIVA.

Burns may occur in all domestic animals from acids, alkalies,

quicklime, carbolic acid, boiling liquids, etc. The cornea usually
suffers, being the part most exposed. The caustics cause swelling,
blanching and finally exfoliation of the epithelium, or even of the
superficial layers of the cornea. In burns by hot liquids vesication
may be present. If the destruction extends deeply into the cornea
there may be escape of the aqueous humor and destruction of vision.
If less penetrating, there may still develop vascularity, and
permanent opacity by reason of the formation of a cicatrix or a
change of structure in the layers of the cornea, or, in dogs especially,
adhesion of the cornea to the eyelids (symblepharon). In the early
stages there is closure of the eyelids, with swelling, profuse
lachrymation, and photophobia.
Treatment. The first object is to remove or neutralize the offending
body. Thus sulphuric or other mineral acid would demand a free
irrigation with a 1 per cent. solution of carbonate of soda or potash.
For alkalies, carbonated water, or a 4 per cent. solution of boric acid
may be employed. For lime, Gosselin recommends free irrigation
with saccharated water. The first step, however, should be to wipe
out the particles of lime with a soft rag soaked in oil.
The pain may be met by a solution of cocaine (1 per cent.), or
atropia ½ per cent. In addition, we may irrigate with cold water or
apply weak antiseptic collyria, and employ derivation by the bowels
or the skin.