Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide by James Williams (review)

James Williams ranks Deleuze’s philosophy of time on a par with the philosophies of Kant, Bergson, and Heidegger. His case is strong and this book will become a reference on both Deleuze and time. Since past and future are not, time is often seen as the construct of a consciousness that retains and anticipates the present (as no longer or not yet), synthesizing a continuum out of discrete instants. Deleuze’s originality is to show the three dimensions of time — past, present, and future — as irreducibly different processes, nevertheless linked in a circle of transcendental conditions of possibility, implying each other but, crucially, under no transcendental subjectivity. Rather, the subject itself is constituted through passive syntheses and thus ‘fractured’. Moi and je never coincide: ‘je est un autre’, a familiar theme to readers of Différence et répétition (1968), the main work studied here. The interest of Williams’s study is to delineate in this critique of subjectivity a new philosophical doctrine. He painstakingly follows the conceptual unfolding of Deleuze’s book, gives original examples, and confronts it with other works and with extensive critical debates — significant (if sometimes tedious) technical points or questions of more general import (Badiou’s (mis)readings, for instance). His book shows clearly how the first two syntheses of time call for a third one, and how much this is really the heart of Deleuze’s philosophy: in the first synthesis — time as living present or habit — the past is a dimension of the present (the starting points are Hume’s associationism and Kant’s critique of Cartesian subjectivity); in the second — time as memory — the present is a dimension of the past (this draws on, but also takes a distance from, Bergson). Since the self is constituted by and through these processes (Proust is only alluded to, but this analysis will be illuminating for readers of the Recherche), their progress would appear to preclude any sense of the future as an independent dimension and of action as a meaningful notion. But Williams stresses how both depend on an activity in the present that cannot be derived from them (p. 116 is pivotal here). A deduction of the synthesis of the future as radical novelty, and a study of the caesura in time are required and carried through. This is expanded in a strong chapter on Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Eternal Return, seen by Deleuze as the return of difference (non-return of the same), and on action and morality. The final chapters tally this philosophy of time with that of Logique du sens (1969) and warn against taking the cinema books as exposés of the doctrine: they return to Bergson and, in the moving image, collapse the syntheses in a unified time. Williams also ring-fences this philosophy from scientific interpretations (presumably to spare it the prompt obsolescence of Bergson’s Durée et simultanéité). Thus bared, Deleuze’s transcendental deductions will feel scholastic or, as Williams writes, ‘speculative’. His merit is to tackle the issue clearly and to show how much there is to learn nevertheless from this unique metaphysical enterprise.