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Isn't this the answer to the question "what are we?" We are habits, nothing but habits-the habit of saying "I." Perhaps, there is no more striking answer to the problem of the Self.
Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity x
This is a paper on habit.1 Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition treats it as one of three syntheses constitutive of a temporal metaphysic. I suggest that it has yet to receive the attention it deserves in its own right. Habit is, in Jay Lampert's words, "not as well known" as one of Deleuze's conceptions of time; and when it is discussed, it "is generally treated as a false or superficial notion of time that [the second synthesis of] co-existence is meant to replace" (Lampert 12). On such an account, Deleuze's second synthesis of time is intended to supplant the first, and his third synthesis is intended to supplant the second. He is, in other words, delineating the nature of habit only in order move beyond it. The consequence of this kind of reading is, however, a lack in the secondary literature of thoroughgoing analyses of Deleuze's first synthesis. Indeed, as John Protevi recently noted, the major commentators on Difference and Repetition pay no special attention at all to this synthesis and the organic syntheses that underlie it-especially not in their relevance for thinking the organism ("Deleuze, Jonas, and Thompson"). The present paper intervenes here. I'll argue that out of the passive temporal syntheses of habit that constitute the present emerge not only the rhythmic contractions of what Deleuze calls the "larval self," but the polyrhythmic network of what I'll call the "organismic subject" as well. I start with Humean repetition and the difference that marks it, move from there to the claim that every organ draws from repetition such a difference, and conclude by pushing habit to its limit in the organism. My claim that every organism produces its own temporality will find its footing in an extended analysis of organic habit. Far from miring activity in a mechanically repetitive conservatism, habits make the earth fluoresce; and it is only by thinking them fully that we can learn to see in time a fluidly anarchic distribution of temporal fields, that we can learn to see in...