Jay Lampert's Deleuze and Guattari's Philosophy of History, is reviewed by Keith Ansell Pearson. The book is a suprise because a philosophy of history (Hegel) is alien to Deleuze. Or so I thought. I had understood Deleuze's work to be a criticism of this approach to history, locating a historicism in modern thought from Hegel to Husserl (and Heidegger) from which he is keen to distance his own project. For Deleuze, Hegel and Heidegger are historicists in the sense that they posit history as a form of interiority in which Spirit or Being develops of necessity and a secret destiny is unveiled.

Pearson says that the first part of the book deals with Deleuze's philosophy of time, with Lampert arguing that Deleuze makes a far-reaching contribution to overturning commonsensical views of the passage of time.

Chapters two to four of the book form a set that attempt to illuminate Deleuze's treatment of the three syntheses of time in his major work of 1968, Difference and Repetition. The first of these is the contracted present of habit, the second is the virtual coexistence of past and present (the curious time of memory conceived as a pure past), and the third is the belief in the future that Deleuze locates, ingeniously but questionably, in Nietzsche's theory of the eternal return....Deleuze's treatment of the syntheses of time is unique on account of the resources he draws upon to make them work. Principally these are Hume on repetition for the first synthesis, Bergson on memory for the second, and Nietzsche on the future for the third (in Nietzsche and Philosophy of 1962 there is no third synthesis; rather, Nietzsche's synthesis of eternal return is read, in its ontological aspect, through the lens of Bergson).

One issue that is of interest to me is 'event', which i struggle to understand. Pearson mentions this in relation to May '68, which Deleuze offers as an example of a pure event. May '68:

can be grasped not on the level of empirical description because in an event there is an aspect that is not reducible to social determinism or causal chains. This is the aspect that escapes those historians who always seek to restore causality after the fact. As Deleuze conceives it, an event is a splitting off from and breaking with causality, a bifurcation and a deviation with respect to laws, an unstable condition that opens up a new field of the possible. Deleuze freely acknowledges that May '68 was characterised by agitations, slogans, idiocies, and illusions, but for him these are not what count. What counts is what amounts to a visionary phenomenon, as if society suddenly sees what is intolerable in it and the possibility of something else comes into perspective. In this happening, the possible does not pre-exist but is created by the event. The event, then, creates a new existence, evident for example in the form of new modes of subjectivity, including new relations with the body and new conceptions of time, of sexuality, of work and culture, and so on.