Difference and Repetition III

This is a final post on the book. I'll just put all that emerged from reading about half of the work here. I've put it aside for another day when I feel like another bout of intellectual flagellation:

Difference in itself

About sixteen pages into the chapter (page 52), just before Deleuze discusses Hegel and Leibnitz, he begins to discuss "the Small and the Large". This seems to be an important moment in the discussion because it appears that through these, the "infinite" is discovered "within representation", and this promises to be a way for difference to break the mold of identity, of being just secondary or negative, where "organic representation" gives way to "orgiastic representation". I find what immediately follows, as well as the discussion of Hegel and Leibnitz to be difficult to follow (Which is why I now own a copy of Phenomenology of Spirit and probably have to work through that some time soon...) What happens with the discovery of infinity within representation appears to be a simultaneous experience of extremes: "a short-sighted and a long-sighted eye are required in order for the concept to take upon itself all moments ...." Is Deleuze suggesting that a moment like this forces the breakdown of representation and allows pure difference to emerge? What confuses me most at this moment is the way "the concept" is mapped onto "the Whole" and why this is important to the argument.

Repetition for itself

The hardest element, for me, is the third notion of time, the passive synthesis of memory. I can't really put a handle on what this third experience of time/memory is. I get the sense that the first synthesis (the passive synthesis) is a kind of instinctual, habitual whirring of impulses, that the second (the active synthesis) involves memory, recording and signification, but the third thing is difficult to get at. Despite what Deleuze says about Hegelian dialectic being a false, abstract movement of thought, he seems to involve in that kind of dialectical thought in unearthing this third synthesis: he seems to suggest that we know of this third synthesis because of a kind of joining of "Habitus" and "Mnemosyne" (page 101 in my edition, about 11 pages into the chapter).

Deleuze seems to be clearest when he uses Proust as an example and says that this is actually "reminiscence ... an involuntary memory which differs in kind from any active synthesis associated with voluntary memory" (page 107 in my edition, about 17 pages into the chapter). I don't think he's differentiating active and passive memory on the grounds of volition, the will or the act of deliberately trying to remember something (or is he?) even though there is the sense that the active synthesis of memory requires self-consciousness to put it into effect. He seems to be saying that there is an unconscious (?) element to memory itself, that escapes the active synthesis of memory but persists (or as he puts it "insists") as a "pure past" that is "beneath representation".

Another thing that came to my mind as I was reading this was the possible links that this has with Anti-Oedipus and the three synthesis that Deleuze and Guattari lay out in the open sections of the book. I think there are some similarities between the first two pairs, because in both cases there is a correlation between the instinctual/connective (the first synthesis) and the recording of the second synthesis. It's the third pair that doesn't quite seem to match up because in Anti-Oedipus the focus seems to be consumption and residual production of a sense of "subjectivity", while in Difference and Repetition, the third synthesis, involves some kind of presence that is never properly remembered.