This is the text of my presentation at the recent meeting of the ASCP at the University of Queensland, Brisbane.

Keywords: subjectivity, time, affect, love

Affect-Time

I take my cue from Deleuze and Guattari’s conjunctive synthesis, “ah, so that’s what it is, that’s who I am!” (Anti-Oedipus, 16-22), the synthesis that grounds the subject in the moment where affect, hallucination, and delirium (feeling, seeing, thinking) converge.

One gets the impression that Deleuze and Guattari are arguing for a chronological order to the emergence of the subject—post affect, post sensation, and post thought—an order that is at the very least counter-intuitive, if not altogether nonsensical.

Presumably, love, hate, sight, touch, thought, and imagination are events that require an agency by which they may be instigated, an agency that has already acquired the capacity to feel, to sense, or to think. What is nonsensical in Deleuze and Guattari is precisely that which undermines the subject that declares itself sovereign over its various faculties, the subject of reason and fact, of philosophy and technology. This subject sees itself the centre of experience and understanding; it may feel, sense, or think this or that but, surely, it is neither this nor that; it is, in principle at least, greater than both and capable of the repression and/or fulfillment of both. Or so the story goes.

With psychoanalysis, we have come to appreciate the subject as less conscious, less autonomous, less reasonable, as a subject that does not forget, for instance, but as a subject that is founded by an act of primary forgetting, a primary repression, that sets up a complex structure of conscious and unconscious processes that will subsequently endure repression and forgetting. This is a subject that does not enact a forgetting but a subject produced by and as forgetting. This, for Deleuze and Guattari, is also a subject that does not enact feeling, thinking, or sensing, but a subject produced by and as feeling, thinking, and sensing.

Hence the “ah, so that’s what it is, that’s who I am!” that marks the I as a product of the confluence of the three registers affect, sensation, thought. As such, the I is not simply influenced (troubled, pleased, perplexed, or pained) by the changes these registers undergo; it is also re-configured, re-defined, and re-produced by them—radically, differently. She may no longer see herself a woman after a radical hysterectomy in her late twenties; he may doubt his masculinity now that he is sexually attracted to another man; she may experience herself as a doctor differently now that she is an analytic patient; he may have transformed into a new person after his appointment as a university professor; and she may never regain her old self since her last tour of duty. As crises of conscious identity we may witness as well as suffer or enjoy, such turning points bespeak an ongoing process of production, of desiring production, perhaps less patently abrupt, but no less transformative.

Affect, sensation, and thought are no mere qualities or extensions of a pre-existing subject but the ground that makes the feeling, sensing, thinking I possible in a very specific register of time, precipitated by them and belonging to them. As such, the time of the I, the time in which it is created, modulated, and lived is a time of eruption. Ah! So that’s who I am! The exclamation marks a pre and a post to which, strictly speaking, it does not belong. This exclamation, rather, lies on a border between two types of time (the timeless and the timely), an interregnum, if you will, that marks a third time whose laws are distinct from both the timelessness of the eternal Subject (with the S capitalised, of course) and the timeliness of the ever so worldly object. This is a time that shares of both but is neither. This is the time of the I, the time of the verb.

“She sees light,” “he envies her,” and “she contemplates travel” do not depict facts or states of being but verbs that insinuate themselves between two entities, establish their relationship to one another and invest in each its temporary status as either subject or object. As an interregnum, the verb is hardly a bridge that allows the subject to cross over and relate to the object—a bridge that may be as conveniently forgotten as it is crossed. The verb is a weaving that links both sides of the divide, invests them with their particular subjective or objective qualities, defines the gap that separates them, and, in the process, shapes the possibilities of its crossing.

Psychoanalysis, as both a theory and a clinical practice, is replete with references, uses, and deployments of the interregnum. In fact, I would go so far as to say that psychoanalysis is primarily a theory and a practice of the interregnum. Invariably, the psychoanalytic topography is of three simultaneous and yet distinct domains, each with its own set of rules and investments, and of psychoanalysis as a sustained appreciation for and intervention in the second of these domains, occupying the space in between first and third, requiring first and third, and required by them, partaking of both in terms of dynamics and directions, and yet belonging to neither.

I offer three examples from Freud. The drive is the porous frontier between psyche and soma, communicating two sets of demands, mental and physical, in consequence of its connection to both (Instincts and their Vicissitudes, 121-22). Nestled in between a primordial hallucination set on immediate pleasure and a survivalist reality subject to the facts of nature, the dream is a process whose meaning is never a single abiding wish but a meshwork of thoughts that have no definite ending (The Interpretation of Dreams, 525). The transference is simultaneously an “artificial illness” and a “piece of real experience” that creates a region between illness and life through which the passage from the one to the other is possible (Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through, 154).

What is key about the drive, the dream, and the transference, about, in essence, the three founding concepts and experiences in psychoanalysis, is that they tell not only of a space between two otherwise incongruous realms but also of a set of rules initially borrowed from both realms but made particular by that space. This is entirely consistent with the nature of the interregnum, not as an intermediary kingdom but as an inter-kingdom and hence a kingdom in between two kings, itself without a king. Indeed, there is nothing unitary about the drive, the dream, and the transference; the drive is polymorphous, the dream is overdetermined, and the transference is multilayered.

In between primordial psychic goo that knows nothing of negation or death, that, in other words, is devoid of opposites, and an ego that abides by a commonsensical reality and its law of excluded middle and declares these selfsame opposites inadmissible, lays an unconscious that thrives in the concurrence of opposites. In between the newborn’s oceanic feeling in which there is no room, and even less need, for subjectivity and the adult’s sense of a coalesced conscious self we encounter an I that is the effect of the conjunctive synthesis, an I that much of psychoanalysis has sadly prescribed as developmental, conflict-free, depressive, oedipal, name it what you will, an I that is rather produced, situational, transitional. It is to this I that belong the drive, the dream, the transference, and, by extension, the affect, the affect as verb. But if this I emerges at the exclamation point that is the interregnum between the timeless and the timely, what then of its time and, ultimately, what of its affect’s time?

Roughly halfway through the thirteenth century, and under pressure to accommodate a growing ontological diversity of angels, pre-Christian good men, and un-baptised innocents, the scholastic philosophers, starting with Bonaventure and wrapping up with Frederic of Freiberg, articulated the aevum as a new category of time. In between aeternitas, an abiding and indivisible being that is always already perfect, and tempus, a limited and ever flowing becoming that is lack and decay, the aevum is a created perpetuity; it has an origin but is infinite in duration. A quality of neither godly nor human, the aevum is the time of the angels who are eternal in their substance but finite in their actions. The aevum is hence always already a concurrence of opposites, belonging to neither side of the divide but partaking of both; it is a “diminished” eternity where time moves, in succession, in vicissitudo, where each moment tells of a totality rather than a transient passage. The aevum is the time-stop that simultaneously holds all the parts that make up a world; it weaves them into an infinite moment so that, in fact, they do make up a world, one that is passing from without but is “forever after” from within.

I want to take leave of the Scholastics and suggest that, in marking a territory between the two worlds of being and becoming, perfection and lack, the aevum opens onto a much needed, quintessentially human, third. Between sleep and wakefulness is the world of dreaming; between rest and work is the world of playing; between hallucination and practical reason is the world of free-associating. The time of these worlds is the time that does not pass, “ce temps qui ne passe pas,” as Pontalis titled one of his monographs; it is the time-stop (Tick. Tick. Tick…) that was originally designed to measure the passage of time but instead forces time to stand still, as with the note of a bell or an alarm, a time-stop that displaced the flow of sundials and water clocks as a standard of measure, a time-stop first produced in the late thirteenth century, and hence from the same period when the aevum acquired its theological and ontological significance.

The aevum is the time of the libido, perhaps not Saint Augustine’s but definitely Freud’s. In fact, much as he tirelessly advanced the notion that the drive has a history—a radical notion for his time—Freud also held that that history does not unfold in developmental phases. The passages from narcissism to object love, from so-called repudiated homosexuality to paranoia, from any one given modality, object, or aim of the drive to another, from any one bodily locus to another, all happen in a spasmodic, paroxytic fashion. The drive moves through eruptive, discontinuous, and yet self-contained totalities in the style of a vicissitude. Freud writes: “We can divide the life of each instinct into a series of separate successive waves, each of which is homogeneous during whatever period of time it may last, and whose relation to one another is comparable to that of successive eruptions of lava” (Instincts and their Vicissitudes, 131). It is this libidinal stratification that paves the way for psychoanalysis as archaeology, albeit an inverted archaeology, since its object is the unintended (the slip, the dream, the forgotten) rather than the monumental.

The time of the drive remains altogether different from the empirical time that is decay, and the indivisible time that is perfection. The time of the drive is the time of volcanic eruption, of enumerating, in integers; it is the time of the aevum and its vicissitudes. This is precisely why the unconscious does not waft in elegant seamlessness from one configuration to another so much as it hops, in fits and starts, as Deleuze and Guattari declare in the opening lines of Anti-Oedipus. Here, there, and there again. Tick. Tick. Tick… At each location and within each interval, the components are assembled in such a way as to make sense and to lend sense.

Not surprisingly, the aevum is the time of the transference as well. Freud warns that the transference comes about “suddenly” and is “bound to surprise” the clinician; whether as love or hate, its extraordinary powers will recast the entirety of the analytic relationship and give it a new meaning that may potentially “blow away” the success of the work (An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 176). The dream too operates along these lines and it is only as an effect of secondary revision that its images acquire a semblance of chronological sequence or order, a semblance of meaning, no less conjunctive than the Deleuzo-Guattarian synthesis but much more prone to ossification than Deleuze and Guattari think it ought to be.

What, then, of the affect? Belonging to the I that is an interregnum, the affect’s time is tracked not through quantitative changes (more and less) but through abrupt and abruptly redefining vicissitudes, through “a circulation of states” of conquest, capture, and offshoots as Deleuze and Guattari say (A Thousand Plateaus, 21). Belonging to the I that is an interregnum, to, in other words, an aevum driven by the concurrence of opposites rather than their absence or inadmissibility, the affect requires its other, even and especially its most oppositional other. It does so neither out of tolerance or maturity nor out of a reasoned recognition of or a resignation to conflict, but because it is specifically alongside that other that it may begin to breathe, to make sense.

Love does not exist without hatred, not only because love stirs a dependence that inflicts a wound on one’s sense of autonomy and in turn generates a hatred toward the beloved whose very presence now speaks a narcissistic injury, not only, as with the familiar refrain, because the pleasure of desire makes manifest the pain of lack, but mainly because love is neither decaying nor perfect, neither timed nor timeless, but rather both decaying and perfect, timed and timeless, because the fabric of love is a connection (“and… and… and…”) “forceful enough to uproot the verb ‘to be’” (A Thousand Plateaus, 25), because it is the I as interregnum that loves the other and in so doing hates itself as conscious and coalesced, deprives itself of what it holds dearest under the banner of generosity, surrender, and sacrifice without which love would not be possible. Whoever thinks angels are “angelic,” that theirs is the time of beatitude and innocence, has it completely wrong.

I close by ceding to Goethe whose Faust put it thus:
One impulse art thou conscious of, at best;
O, never seek to know the other!
Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,
And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother.
One with tenacious organs holds in love
And clinging lust the world in its embraces;
The other strongly sweeps, this dust above,
Into the high ancestral spaces
(Faust, 1, 2)