Introduction

In ‘Albumen A’, we saw Deleuze draw correlations between the two faces of time – chronos and aion – and two eternal returns. Although we then looked at the two faces of time, we have not yet considered the two eternal returns. While Deleuze claims to find ‘two very different eternal returns, themselves corresponding to the two times’, he admits they do ‘not appear (at least directly) in Stoic thought’ (LS 340n.3). While he promises to ‘return to these points’, he never does (LS 340n.3). In order to will make good on Deleuze's unfulfilled promise, we return to the two eternal returns in ‘Albumen C’.

We begin by considering the history and meaning of the Stoic doctrine of cosmic conflagration. Since this consideration evokes Nietzsche's formulation of the doctrine of eternal recurrence, we pose a question that requires the consideration of two stories of the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ and ‘Death and the Compass’. Borges's stories raise the paradox of action, which leads us to the Stoics’ principle of ateleological providence. After this, we take up Deleuze's discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald's mental breakdown as expressed in his essay ‘The Crack-Up’, and then conclude with a different kind of crack-up, the cracking up of laughter. In the final section of ‘Albumen C’, we survey four ancient forms of philosophical comedy, culminating in a theory of Stoic humour.

Cosmic Conflagration

The general doctrine most likely originated with the early Stoics, although they did not consistently use a single term that we could translate as ‘eternal return’ or ‘eternal recurrence’. Since the vocabulary varied with each Stoic, and Diogenes’ reports likely conflate the variations, let us survey these different terms.