From Presence to Eternity: Time and Timelessness in Deleuze's Early Philosophy of the Unconscious
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Bergsma, Theodore
- Graduate Program:
- Philosophy
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 11, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Leonard Richard Lawlor, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Leonard Richard Lawlor, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Amy Rebekah Allen, Committee Member
Nicolas J De Warren, Committee Member
Claire Mary Colebrook, Outside Member
Amy Rebekah Allen, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Bergson
consciousness
Deleuze
eternity
Freud
Husserl
ontology
phenomenology
presence
psychoanalysis
time
timelessness
unconscious - Abstract:
- This dissertation offers a comprehensive account of Gilles Deleuze’s thought on the nature and constitution of time. The work focuses on two of Deleuze’s early texts, Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969), and situates them within the broader framework of the philosophy of time. Despite some notable points of intersection between the two accounts that Deleuze offers, the conceptual shifts that he executes between them prohibits, I argue, any direct translation of one into the other. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze understands time as it unfolds in experience to be constituted by three passive syntheses: the living present, the a priori past, and the pure and empty form of time. In the Logic of Sense, however, Deleuze replaces his tripartite theory with a dyadic one, theorizing time under the dual structures of what he calls Chronos and the Aion. Despite this troublesome reduction, I suggest that Deleuze’s theory of time may be coherently articulated if the two accounts are positioned in relation to a historically inherited problematic concerning the relationship between conscious and unconscious processes. Drawing on the intellectual resources of Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, and Sigmund Freud, Deleuze’s approach to time can be understood as one that begins with what is given in the presence of consciousness and moves towards its virtual grounds in the unconscious. In this way, I argue that Deleuze offers an advancement of Freud’s thesis concerning the timelessness of the unconscious, supplementing it with the Husserlian and Bergsonian innovations and producing through this synthesis a novel conception of eternity. Both irreducible to and inseparable from the presence of consciousness, eternity as Deleuze understands it represents the transcendental conditions by virtue of which time unfolds as an irreversible becoming.