Philosophical Times (Strobe and)

Difference and Repetition (1968), The Logic of Sense (1969)

THERE ARE TWO theories of time in Deleuze, or three, if one counts the one that Deleuze develops in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. The most elaborate of these concerns the three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition. First synthesis: the time of perception as the synthesis of ‘the lived, or living, present’ (DR: 70). Second synthesis: the time of memory as the synthesis of the present and the past. Third synthesis: the time of consciousness as the synthesis of the present, the past and the future. (On time, see also James Williams’ indispensable Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time (2011).) The first synthesis is a passive synthesis that defines and makes up the lived and living present. Its time, which ‘contracts … successive independent instants into one another’ (70), lies outside of both memory and consciousness. Deleuze relates this time to the ‘spontaneous imagination’ (77) which contracts, in the same way in which the first synthesis contracts singular temporal points into clusters, heterogeneous instants into the temporal surface of the present.