The Kantian Revolution in the Philosophy of Time

The concern of this chapter will be to show that the genesis of thought presupposes a fracture or rift in the thinking subject. This fracture, as we will see, is caused by time. Deleuze takes his inspiration from Kant, that is the Kantian notion of time as a pure and empty form, a form of interiority, but he does not follow all the implications that are drawn by Kant. Quite to the contrary, Deleuze criticises Kant for attempting to reconcile the two unequal halves of the split subject, the active faculty of synthesis and the passive faculty of receptivity, and to mediate them in a new form of identity: ‘the fracture is quickly filled by a new form of identity – namely active synthetic identity; whereas the passive self [moi] is defined only by receptivity and, as such, endowed with no power of synthesis’ (DR 87/117).

Deleuze shifts the attention from the transcendental subject to the transcendental and genetic conditions. He wants to give a genetic account of the act of thinking within thought and of the subject itself. Deleuze assigns to time a very special role with regard to the constitution of the subject of thought and creation. Therefore it will be necessary to examine Deleuze's three passive syntheses of time. The first synthesis of time is constitutive of the subject, the second synthesis is a constitutive condition for acting and thinking.