An Image of Time (from Repetition) Part 2

[Continues part 1] [Image from the Spanish edition of Jorge Luis Borges' The Aleph] Deleuze clarifies that the past he is referring to in the second synthesis “is not the former present itself but the element in which we focus upon [that former present]” (80). Deleuze characterizes the former present (has been) as a particular…

An Image of Time (from Repetition) Part 1

[Claude Monet's La Gare Saint Lazare (1877)] In the preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition (1968; 1994), Gilles Deleuze writes “that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think” (xvi). This is the infamous image of thought that…

The Virtual, the Actual, and the Intensive

DeLanda explains in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy that “Deleuze is not a realist about essences, or any other transcendent entity.” Nonetheless, he is a realist. “A non-realist can simply declare essences mental entities, or reduce them to social conventions.” Not Deleuze. Deleuze “does not get rid of essences until [he] replaces them with something else” to “explain what gives objects their identity and what preserves this identity through time.” This something else consists (using the terminology of Difference and Repetition) in the virtual, the actual, and the intensive.