stankovic, sasa thesis.pdf - Atrium - University of Guelph

The passive synthesis: take two
“Hume takes as an example the repetition of cases of the type AB, AB, AB, A...Each case or
objective sequence AB is independent of others” (DR 70). Hume attempts to explain in what
sense there can be a repetition of cases. In order to answer this question, Hume introduces what
he calls imagination. “Hume explains that the independent identical or similar cases are
grounded in the imagination. The imagination is defined here as a contractile power like a
sensitive plate, it retains the one case when the other appears” (DR 70). There are not just
successive independent instants. There are contracted cases. That there are contracted cases
means that there is some sort of weight, some sort of meaning. In this sense, Deleuze argues,
imagination forms the first synthesis of time. “When A appears, we expect B with a force
corresponding to the qualitative impression of all the contracted ABs. This is by no means a
memory, nor indeed an operation of the understanding: contraction is not a matter of reflection.
Properly speaking, it forms the synthesis of time” (DR 70). In what sense does time need to be
constituted at all in this case? “A succession of instants does not constitute time any more than it
causes it to disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth” (DR 70). A
succession of independent instants becomes time in the sense that imagination contracts such
instants into cases. These cases constitute the living presents, in other words, the presents that are
weighty or meaningful. “Time is constituted in the originary synthesis which operates on the
repetition of instants. This synthesis contracts the successive independent instants into one
another, thereby constituting the lived, or living, present. It is in this present that time is
deployed” (DR 70). What about the past and the future? The contracted case does not come
before or after anything. There is no individual yet. Thus it just is the contracted case. But what
is the contracted case? Contraction is retention and expectation. In this sense, rather than coming
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