Time empty and out of joint

Time empty and out of joint, with its rigorous formal and static order, its crushing unity and its irreversible series, is precisely the death instinct.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 136

Repetition is a historical condition

Repetition is never a historical fact, but rather the historical condition under which something new is produced.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 113

The past is the synthesis of all time

For this reason the past, far from being a dimension of time, is the synthesis of all time of which the present and the future are only dimensions. We cannot say that it was. It no longer exists, it does not exist, but it insists, it consists, it is.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p.103

There must be another time

This is the paradox of the present: to constitute time while passing in the time constituted. We cannot avoid the necessary conclusion – that there must be another time in which the first synthesis of time can occur.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p.100

A contemplative soul

A soul must be attributed to the heart, to the muscles, nerves and cells, but a contemplative soul whose entire function is to contract a habit.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 95

A sum of contractions

Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 93

A succession of instants does not consitute time

A succession of instants does not consitute time any more than it causes it to disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth. Time is constituted only in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants. This synthesis contracts the successive independent instants into one another, thereby constituting the lived, or living, present. It is in this present that time is deployed. To it belong both the past and the future: the past in so far as the preceding instants are retained in the contraction; the future because its expectation is anticipated in this same contraction.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 91

The simulacrum is the true character or form

When eternal return is the power of (formless) Being, the simulacrum is the true character or form – the "being" – of that which is. When the identity of things dissolves, being escapes to attain univocity, and begins to revolve around the different. That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 80

The work of art leaves the domain of representation

Every object, every thing, must see its own identity swallowed up in difference, each being no more than a difference between differences. Difference must be shown differing. We know that modern art tends to realise these conditions: in this sense it it becomes a veritable theatre of metamorphoses and permutations. A theatre where nothing is fixed, a labyrinth without a thread (Ariadne has hung herself). The work of art leaves the domain of representation in order to become "experience", transcendental empiricism or science of the sensible.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 68

Representation and difference

Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective, and in consequence a false depth. It mediates everything, but mobilises and moves nothing. Movement, for its part, implies a plurality of centres, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially distort representation: paintings or sculptures are already such "distorters", forcing us to create movement – that is, to combine a superficial and a penetrating view, or to ascend and descend within the space as we move through it.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 67

Conflict and difference

There is a false profundity in conflict, but underneath conflict, the space of the play of differences. The negative is the image of difference, but a flattened and inverted image, like the candle in the eye of the ox – the eye of the dialectician dreaming of a futile combat?

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 62

Returning is becoming

That identity not be first, that it exists as a principle but as a second principle, as a principle become; that it revolve around the Different: such would be the nature of a Copernican revolution which opens up the possibility of difference having its own concept, rather than being maintained under the domination of a concept in general already understood as identical. Nietzsche meant nothing more than this by eternal return. Eternal return cannot mean the return of the Identical because it presupposes a world (that of the will to power) in which all previous identities have been abolished and dissolved. Returning is being, but only the being of becoming.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 50

Distinction is form

The Platonists used to say that the not-One distinguished itself from the One, but not the converse, since the One does not flee that which flees it; and at the other pole, form distinguishes itself from matter or from the ground, but not the converse, since distinction itself is form.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) pp. 36-37

Blueprints

'Anna, it occurs to me – surely I can't be so bad – if I can imagine how one ought to be, if I can imagine really loving someone, really coming through for someone... then it's a kind of blueprint for the future, isn't it?'
Well these words moved me, because it seems to me half of what we do, or try to be, amounts to blueprints for the future that we try to imagine.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Flamingo Modern Classic, 2002) p.434

To do without something one wants

It seems to me like this. It's not a terrible thing – I mean, it may be terrible, but it's not damaging, it's not poisoning, to do without something one wants. It's not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I'm capable of doing something bigger. Or I'm a person who needs love, and I'm doing without it. What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Flamingo Modern Classic, 2002) p. 242

Literature is analysis after the event

Literature is analysis after the event.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Flamingo Modern Classic, 2002) p.210

The choice between arts and sciences

As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose [...] between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture.

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Flamingo Modern Classic, 2002) p. 15