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

doubt, in either case, the present appears to be the result of a contraction, but this relates us to
quite different dimensions. In one case, the present is the most contracted state of successive
elements or instants which are in themselves independent of one another. In the other case, the
present designates the most contracted degree of an entire past, which is like a coexisting
totality” (DR 82). However, Deleuze argues that reminiscence betrays the pure time at the same
time as it constitutes it. In this regard Deleuze invokes Plato.
“The first synthesis, that of habit, is truly the foundation of time; but we must distinguish
the foundation from the ground” (DR 79). If the foundation of time is contemplation, the ground
of time is reminiscence. “Habit is the foundation of time, the moving soil occupied by the
passing present. The claim of the present is precisely that it passes. However, it is what causes
the present to pass, that to which the present and habit belong, which must be considered the
ground of time. It is memory that grounds time” (DR 79). It is clear in what sense contemplation
founds time as the living present or as a way of being. But how does reminiscence ground time
as the pure past that makes one living present or one way of being pass to another? How does
reminiscence ground time as becoming? “When Plato expressly opposes reminiscence and
innateness, he means that the latter represents only the abstract image of knowledge, whereas the
real movement of learning implies a distinction with the soul between a ‘before’ and an ‘after;’
in other words, it implies the introduction of a first time, in which we forget what we knew, since
there is a second time in which we recover what we have forgotten” (DR 87). Reminiscence
constitutes time as pure past in the form of that which we have forgotten. “Former presents may
be represented beyond forgetting by active synthesis, in so far as forgetting is empirically
overcome. Here, however, it is within Forgetting, as though immemorial, that Combray
reappears. If there is an in-itself of the past, then reminiscence is its noumenon or the thought
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