Thirty-First Series of Thought

The phantasm is "inseparable from a displacement, an unfolding, and a development within which it carries along its own origin." (217) The phantasm "reintegrates and retrieves everything in the retrieval of its own movement." (221)

Page 218: D speaks of the result of the phantasm developing on a "second screen". The idea of the screen is important to D's thought. (cf. D's two books on film, also The Brain is the Screen) The stuff of the depths rises to the surface as through a sieve which is the gyre or Pascal triangle or cone of virtuality, etc. (cf. Difference and Repetition). The second screen is the "cerebral or metaphysical surface on which the phantasm is going to develop". [My emphasis] ("The phantasm is the process of the constitution of the incorporeal," the "machine for the extraction of a...thought" (220) [My emphasis]; "The brain is...the inductor of another invisible, incorporeal, and metaphysical surface on which all events are inscribed and symbolized." (223))

"There is thus a leap." (218) Between the depths and the surface/screen, there is a gap, a crack, a synapse to cross, "which marks the powerlessness to think". (218) If you read D's writing on Kant (Kant's Critical Philosophy), you can see that he consciously or unconsciously is evoking Kant's sublime. The sublime is the moment where starstruck (like a trauma), we cease to think, only to be saved by reason (e.g. to become momentarily immanent with the feeling and sight beneath Niagara Falls at the "Maiden of the Mist"). Later, Deleuze writes more on immanence, and I believe the moment of immanence (and the incarnation of the plane of immanence) is just this result from the sublime moment, the "leap", as is were. Thus, the "not", the "with-out", is in fact the link or lineage between assemblages. Two become one through this crack. (cf. Alenka Zupancic's book on Nietzsche) Also, "sublimation" as Deleuze uses it here follows from this reading of the sublime. (219)

The "phantasm has the property of bringing into contact with each other the inner and outer and uniting them on a single side." (220) I.e. a Mobius Strip, the "site of the eternal return". (220) "The entire biopsychic life is a question of dimensions, axes, rotations, and foldings." (222)

The two poles: 1) the orientation of psychosis 2) the orientation of successful sublimation. (222) And between the two poles?