The following is a conference paper delivered at the British Phenomenological Society Annual Conference 2023 at Manchester Metropolitan University on August 2023.

Introduction

In this paper I am primarily concerned with how Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition can give us an insight into the structures forming a “lived experience” and how we might challenge what these underlying structures reveal to us, allowing for creativity through self-critique. I will briefly introduce lived experience as I understand it, then describe Deleuze’s “phenomenology” in Difference and Repetition (Hughes, 2009), before finally detailing how Deleuze believes we can use this knowledge to bring about effective change in our lives.

Lived Experience

The focus on lived experience was an attempt, at least in the case of Husserl, to provide an eidetic science through which we could determine things in their immediate reality and not in abstract. (Husserl, 1931:43,147) Robert Burch gives a good outline of the roots of the phrase “lived experience”. He describes how the origin of the phrase is found in the German word Erlebnis. The term was coined to help differentiate the kind of experience that people commonly live out from the more technical term for experience (in German Erfahrung). Burch writes:

[…] Er-lebnis would mean more literally what unfolds and endures from life by virtue of life itself. […] In the first instance, the expression signifies in strictly ontological terms human experience as such […] and it implies that essence of this experience lies precisely in its “lived” character. Moreover, the term suggests that this lived character consists not simply in what is felt or undergone by sentient beings in the passage of time but of what from this passing sentience is meaningfully singled out and preserved.’ (1990:133)

Erlebnis, Burch argues, has a double meaning. In one instance, Erlebnis means the experience as it is lived, the personal and immediate. (1990:132) Also, it has an ontological meaning when one considers the etymology of the word. The self-feeling that comes with lived experience indicates something significant about the experience which allows it to be held in memory for recognition and remembrance.

Lived experience is evaluated upon reflection and taken up as a “past presence”, which can be reflected on in the here and now and tell us something of what was experienced at that time. The allocation of meaning, it could be argued, is not solely by virtue of whether or not something can be remembered, but for the sake of brevity, let us say that a component of recollection is an evaluative moment on behalf of the individual determining whether to find the memory. The fact a lived experience can be remembered is at least indicative of its meaning to the individual.

The lived experience in this objectification through thought can tell us a great deal about the function of experience for the individual. As Wilhelm Dilthey writes:

Life is a process which is connected to a whole through a structural system which begins and ends in time. For a spectator this presents itself as a closed identity because of the sameness of the phenomenal body in which this process takes place. At the same time, it must be contrasted to the emergence, growth, decline and death of an organic body by noting the peculiar fact that every part of it is <connected> with the other parts in one consciousness by means of some kind of lived experience of continuity, connectedness and self-sameness. (Dilthey, 1985:223-4)

The phenomenal body can provide an experience of the external world, the ways relations between one and one’s world can be the site of experience. The lived experience is when that experience, brought about by the relation to something outside of oneself, relates to oneself. There is a relation to grief brought on by the death of a loved one, but it is a lived experience when I grieve the loss of someone I loved. (1985:224) The evaluative process which allocates meaning; the process of memory selection; the translation of sensibility into experience – all these reveal something of the way “self-sameness” arises for each of us. Deleuze offers an account of how these evaluations, selections, translations occur in the production of experience, especially when in pursuit of self-sameness.

Deleuze and Repetition

Deleuze provides an account of three distinct syntheses that our experience of sensibility undergoes to give rise to what we can call our lived experience. Although the third synthesis is, arguably, the more fascinating and significant of the three, I will outline the first two syntheses only as these introduce us to the topic of the narcissistic ego and how we can use that knowledge to our advantage.

Habitus or Habit is the first synthesis and it is defined as a means for providing a grounds for the reproduction of an image of the self which Deleuze draws out of his reading of Hume. According to Hume, the mind is a loose collection of ideas which are connected to one another by the imagination. Hume proposes that the imagination provides a relational power contracting ideas together (DR 97). Imagination is not capable of governing what it connects. For that, imagination relies upon principles. Principles create a tendency which, through repetition, becomes a habit determining which ideas are connected by imagination. Where do these principles come from?

The principle in question is essentially Deleuze’s interpretation of Sigmund Freud’s pleasure principle, in brief: a predisposition to pursue pleasure, and this is what directs habits and the contemplations which habits try to fulfil. Contemplation is the search for the fulfilment of a habit based on whether it can contract certain ideas. Deleuze writes:

It is simultaneously through contraction that we are habits, but through contemplation that we contract. We are contemplations, we are imaginations, we are generalities, claims and satisfactions. The phenomenon of claiming is nothing but the contracting contemplation through which we affirm our right and our expectation in regard to that which we contract, along with our self-satisfaction in so far as we contemplate. We do not contemplate ourselves, but we exist only in contemplating – that is to say, in contracting that from which we come. (DR 98)

Whenever habit provides a contraction of ideas affirming the question-problem posed by a contemplation, an image is produced. The contemplation requires the response to be the image of a unified self and it is from this affirmation by contracting and relaxing ideas that we derive pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure ends in the auto-satisfaction of contemplation. If habit is the foundation of the pleasure principle, the pleasure principle is also found in the contemplation of virtual objects or representations in the memory.

In Deleuze’s work, memory helps to constitute the ongoing existence of the individual’s identity as it relates to a past that the individual believes belongs to them. There are two aspects to this relation: Mnemosyne and Eros. Mnemosyne is the pure past, not something that we recall, but what precedes all present moments. The pure past can be drawn upon by the activity of Eros, which would constitute remembrance and recognition. The concept of Eros is a crucial component of Freud’s theory of the drives. It is the drive which pursues pleasure, procreation and self-preservation. If habit begins at the moment of our pre-individual, pre-reflective experience, Eros is the recollection of it. The images are representations, virtual objects, and far removed from the immediate sensibility that habit and contemplation synthesised and organised respectively. How, then, do Deleuze’s first two syntheses, habit and memory, relate to Narcissus?

An account of the myth of Narcissus is told by Ovid in his poem Metamorphosis. In short, Narcissus is a proud individual who scorns any who love him. One day, he cruelly rejects an already cursed woman, Echo, who enters a cave and is never seen again. Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, learns of this and plots Narcissus’ retribution. He finds a lake so still that its surface is like a mirror to look upon. As he kneels by the water, he sees his reflection for the first time. In awe of his remarkable good looks, he is unable to pull himself away. The love he feels for himself, never reciprocated, leads to him fading away over time, consumed by his self-infatuation.

The myth stood behind the psychological concept of autoeroticism. Later, this notion of self-infatuation was used by psychoanalysts, such as Freud, to include a broader range of behaviours. In his essay “On the Introduction of Narcissism”, Freud explores the concept of narcissism in relation to his theory of the drives. In particular, he is addressing the question of how we can understand the relation between autoeroticism and narcissism as a differentiation of the sexual energy of the libido from the non-sexual energy of the ego (Freud, 1914,2003:4,6).

The libido is driven by attachment to objects (object-libido) and is used to fulfil the desires of the ego (ego-libido). Object-love is a direction dictated by the ego and the desire of the ego is fulfilled if the object of desire becomes its possession (that is, the libido becomes attached to it). In this instance the ego is negatively affected by the loss of whatever it is pursuing and positively affected if the object of its love is achieved or obtained.

The ego that cannot be fulfilled is repressed. ‘In the case of repressed libido, the love-cathexis is experienced as a severe depletion of the ego; no gratification of the love is possible; replenishment of the ego can be achieved only by the withdrawal of the libido from its objects.’ (2003, 28) A libido unable to find fulfilment in a love-object will return to the ego and make a love-object of the ego instead. At this point, ego-libido and object-libido are indistinguishable and we have a clear case of narcissism. A change has occurred in the ego’s distribution of the libido such that it turns away from a love object and projects desire on the ego itself as a perfect love-object, known as the ego-ideal.

What does all this psychoanalysis have to do with Deleuze? How does it relate to phenomenology? And in what way does it help us with our understanding of lived-experience? Deleuze relates the work of our ego to two myths, that of Narcissus and Actaeon. He writes:

We are always Actaeon by virtue of what we contemplate, even though we are Narcissus in relation to the pleasure we take from it. To contemplate is to draw something from. We must always first contemplate something else – the water, or Diana, or the woods – in order to be filled with an image of ourselves. (Deleuze, 2013:99)

In light of the Freudian understanding of narcissism, we can interpret this as suggesting that Actaeon is representative of love-object fulfilment and ego-accordance, while Narcissus is representative of the libido’s redistribution toward an ego-ideal as its love-object. Translating this back to the phenomenological syntheses at work, according to Deleuze, they relate to expectation and pleasure respectively. Contemplation is the expectant search for the love-object, while the auto-satisfactory pleasure from affirmation is the repression of that flow of desire and its redistribution to the ego-ideal.

Critiquing Desire

The image of thought produced by contemplations which are affirmed within the first synthesis can stifle the original creativity of the imagination and its initially experimental contractions. The image of thought arises out of the repression of the libido. That is, the image of thought signifies a limit that is imposed by the narcissistic ego. The reproduction of that image of thought prevents creativity from introducing too much novelty, such that the novelty makes an image unrecognisable. Why is this an issue? Without breaking free of re-presentation there can be no access to new concepts. Novelty and creativity are required for new concepts to be discovered and explored. Only through opportunities for creativity can we have change, growth, and development. Daniel Smith writes:

‘Concepts, for instance, are necessarily inseparable from affects and percepts; they make us perceive things differently (percept) and they inspire new modes of feeling in us (affect), thereby modifying, as Spinoza would say, our power of existing.’ (Smith, 2012:127)

When concepts change something within us or have a profound effect on us that requires us to respond to it, that concept necessarily changes us either for the better or for the worse. That is, our freedom or power to act can be increased or diminished by our relation to that concept. We must search for those concepts which increase our power of existing and help us to be more active and free in our lives.  

The creation of new concepts is beyond the reproductive power of Eros and thus demands a change in how we think. Deleuze writes: ‘For the new – in other words, difference – calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognised and unrecognisable terra incognita.’ (DR 179) He goes on to write: ‘The conditions of true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself.’ (DR 183) Deleuze insists that our creativity is spurred on by difference, that is whatever has an affect and percept that cannot be recognised in memory or affirmed by habit. The question is whether we can create the conditions through which one’s encounter can cause one to think or if the experience of the unrecognisable is always involuntary?

The unrecognisable, the beyond, is always present; we are able to reach into it once we find the delineations of our thinking. (ATP 174) Any image of thought ceases to be new once it has become integrated into our identity. We can see from our having encountered and then codified the new how, providing we are receptive to it, we can always discover the new again. ‘The new,’ writes Deleuze, ‘with its power of beginning and beginning again, remains forever new […]’. (DR 179) Considering what was said earlier, we can see how representation is related to rigidity and re-cognising whereas becoming, which is a central theme for Deleuze, is open to change, growth, adaptability, ingenuity and all the avenues for experimentation. In response to that question of how much of our own volition can be poured into the pursuit of the new we can turn to this: experimentation.

Experimentation requires a moment of indeterminacy and this is provided not by talking of beginnings or endings, but by embracing becoming. The notion of experimentation brings us to how Deleuze is inspired by Nietzsche’s experimentalism. In his work on Nietzsche, Deleuze writes ‘With the exception of Heraclitus, [philosophers of antiquity] did not face up to the thought of pure becoming, nor the opportunity for this thought. That the present moment is not a moment of being or of present “in the strict sense”, that it is the passing moment, forces us to think of becoming, but to think of it precisely as what could not have started, and cannot finish, becoming.’ (NP 48) We have here the alternative approach to thinking in general, but in the context of our discussion we have the access, as it were, to novelty and change. The self is not fixed, not in the sense that our identity is somehow beyond our capacity for experimentation. As with the increased power to act that comes with creating concepts, we also have the ability to see our self as becoming.

Critique as a means to be creative via the destruction of some limitation is the process by which we can open up to experimentation. To use the language of drives, where the libido is stopped or blocked by the ego’s pleasure principle we must find ways to remove that blockage and invite an openness to the aforementioned terra incognita, the pure difference which is always just outside the territory of the image of the self (the Id and habit) and the individual I (the Ego and memory). The goal is to use lived experience as a grounds for a critique of how our desires are directed and how that libidinal energy is repressed or blocked.

One’s lived experience provides an insight into those blockages of production. How we remember the way we felt can tell us a great deal about the way we make ourselves feel. Upon reflecting on these, we can critique them, namely their function and how they affect us. Deleuze and Guattari suggest the following questions:

What drives your own desiring-machines? What is their functioning? What are the syntheses into which they enter and operate? What use do you make of them, in all the transitions that extend from the molecular to the molar and inversely, and that constitute the cycle whereby the unconscious, remaining a subject, produces and reproduces itself? (AO 331)

Experimentation is made possible through critique. Critique is destructive so that it can invite creation. Creation as an act means a new trajectory or line of flight for the individual to determine whether a path is good or bad. In short, to experiment with one’s selfhood is to be open to redirection in pursuit of the discovery of, to use Spinoza and Nietzsche’s terms, a good relation, an active relation which is empowering and freeing.

What is this point of self-criticism? It is the point where the structure, beyond the images that fill it and the Symbolic that conditions it within representation, reveals its reverse side as a positive principle of non-consistency that dissolves it.

[…] Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction – a whole scouring of the unconscious, a complete curettage. […] And aren’t all the destructions performed by schizoanalysis […] more a part of an affirmative task? (AO 354,355,381)

Schizoanalysis is Deleuze and Guattari’s answer to the obsession with representation, rigidity and restriction they argue is inherent in psychoanalysis. An aim of schizoanalysis is the identification of flows and blockages of desire and the ensuing destruction or redirection of those in such a way that the limitless production that follows can create alternatives which are affirmational.

Conclusion

Lived experiences are coagulated by the narcissistic ego and its distribution of desire, and this is how we can find the breaks and cracks to redistribute those flows of desire. Ultimately, we are looking to introduce creativity so that we can make real and positive changes to our lives, in the form of increasing our power to act. As Tamsin Lorraine puts it:

Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of an immanent ethics calls on us to attend to the situations of our lives in all their textured specificity and to open ourselves up to responses that go beyond a repertoire of comfortably familiar, automatic reactions and instead access creative solutions to what are always unique problems. (Lorraine, 2011:1)

Lorraine’s emphasis on the pragmatism of Deleuze and Guattari’s work resonates with what we have explored here. Namely that the possibility for living an empowered and active (as opposed to reactive) life rests in the critique of one’s self. Through critiquing one’s lived experience, one can find those aspects of one’s life that are in need of destruction and would benefit from creative novelty.

Bibliography

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