The Anonymous Temporality of Animal Life

Author(s): Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault Year: 2025 Type: paper (journal article, Continental Philosophy Review 58:445–467)

Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze offer accounts of passivity capable of grounding a philosophy of time-constitution that operates outside the structure of human consciousness. Drawing primarily on MP's The Structure of Behavior and Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, the paper argues that both thinkers develop parallel accounts of "organic syntheses" — non-anthropomorphic articulations of a "here and now" that precede fully-fledged consciousness — and that these passive syntheses are already open to an unlimited past (Deleuze's "Aion"), subverting the common view that animals are confined to the immediate present. The paper's culminating argument is that emergence in organic systems is "multilateral" and non-teleological: disorganization is equally productive as organization, and the human subject can be unmade back into its constitutive multiplicities.

Core Arguments

  1. Claim: The organic constitution of the living present hinges on the institution of signs that articulate heterogeneous series around "remarkable points," creating temporal succession from undifferentiated instants. Because: In MP's SB, a rat in a labyrinth institutes signs through trial-and-error; the "now" of finding food retroactively determines the value of all other nows (SB 125). In Deleuze's DR, "every organism... is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations" (DR 73). Both thinkers use the same mechanism (institution of signs) to explain how organisms constitute time without requiring subjective consciousness. Against: Stimulus-response mechanism (behaviorism), which would leave the organism in "undifferentiated punctual instants."

  2. Claim: Deleuze extends MP's insight by refracturing the living present into "thousands of little witnesses" — passive syntheses at every level of organic composition (cell, muscle, organ, organism). Because: Even the cell constitutes time: dehydration constitutes a future (need/organic expectation); DNA heredity constitutes a past (cellular retention). Each level is a "contemplation-contraction" constituting its own sign-system. The concept of the "larval subject" names these organized multiplicities. Against: The requirement of a unified consciousness for temporal synthesis (standard Husserlian reading).

  3. Claim: Passive time-constitution is already open to unlimited time (Aion), not confined to a bounded present (Chronos). Chronos and Aion are complementary at the organic level. Because: Memory as passive synthesis (Deleuze's second synthesis) contracts the first synthesis's coherent succession into further presents. The sign instituted through habit contracts "an entire past." Cellular heredity is the encounter-point of Chronos and Aion: "each present is divided into past and future, ad infinitum" (LS 62). Against: Heidegger's "the animal is poor in world"; the early MP's own position that animals display an "adherence to the here and now, a short and heavy manner of existing" (SB 126).

  4. Claim: Emergence in organic systems is multilateral and non-teleological. Disorganization is as productive as organization. Because: Emergence is problematically determined — a response to a problem, not a pre-established telos. Deleuze's third synthesis reveals time as "empty form" through the je fêlé (cracked I), and the passive syntheses can resurface as disorganized. The painter's "squinting" (MP), Kafka's Gregor (Deleuze & Guattari) — both demonstrate creative disorganization. Against: Teleological accounts of emergence (entelechy, finalism). Also against the implicit hierarchy in early MP's "vertical transcendence" model.

  5. Claim: MP's later works shift from a "vertical" to a "lateral/horizontal" model of the human-animal relation — a chiasmic intertwining, not a hierarchy. Because: The Nature Lectures: "not a hierarchical relation, but lateral, an overcoming that does not abolish kinship" (Nature 268). Toadvine: "such becoming has the structure of a chiasmus: a becoming-animal of the human that is a becoming-human of the animal." Against: The early MP's own hierarchy (SB's chimpanzee "adhering to the here and now").

Key Findings

  • The rat-in-the-labyrinth is a shared figure between MP and Deleuze for the organic constitution of time through behavior — the paper's strongest evidence for their convergence
  • The institution of signs is the shared mechanism across both thinkers: each contraction constitutes a sign that is deployed in further syntheses, and the sign ensures communication between heterogeneous series
  • Deleuze's three syntheses of time (habit, memory, the eternal return) provide the systematic architecture that MP's passivity and institution courses gesture toward but do not formalize at the organic level
  • The paper treats Deleuze's third synthesis as providing the "ontological grounding" for the later political concept of becoming-animal (Deleuze & Guattari)

Methodology

Comparative philosophical analysis. The paper reads MP's early works (Structure of Behavior, Phenomenology of Perception) alongside Deleuze's Difference and Repetition ch. 2, supplemented by MP's later works (Institution and Passivity, Nature Lectures) and Deleuze's Logic of Sense. Ted Toadvine's The Memory of the World (2024) is the key secondary interlocutor, providing the concepts of "animal stratum" and "vertical/horizontal transcendence." John Protevi's reading of Deleuze on emergence provides the scientific-philosophical bridge.

Concepts Developed

  • multilateral-emergence — the paper's own concept: non-teleological, bidirectional emergence in organic systems, where disorganization is as productive as organization
  • Organic synthesis / contemplation-contraction — the shared MP-Deleuze mechanism for time-constitution at sub-subjective levels, through the institution of signs along behavior acquisition

Concepts Referenced

  • generative-passivity — Beith's framework (cited via footnote 16) is confirmed and extended by the Deleuzian parallel
  • passivity — MP's concept is the background condition; the paper adds the sub-subjective organic dimension
  • institution — used as established concept from SB and I&P; "not that the human does not have animal institution, but because of the use that he makes of it" (IP 18)
  • interanimality — referenced indirectly via the laterality of the animal-human relation and the chiasmic structure of becoming-animal
  • chiasm — invoked via Toadvine's reading of becoming-animal as having "the structure of a chiasmus"
  • wild-being — referenced in passing: Cézanne painting "a pre-world where there were still no men," the sauvage world of perceptual syntheses
  • retrograde-movement-of-the-true — implicit in the argument that possibility is retroactively constituted: "From the moment that the animal is made, it was not absent at the moment when it was not yet made" (Nature 157)
  • tacit-cogito — mentioned as expressing MP's movement toward the pre-reflective

Key Passages

"each moment does not occupy one and only one point of time; rather, at the decisive moment of learning, a 'now' stands out from the series of 'nows,' acquires a particular value and summarizes the groupings which have preceded it as it engages and anticipates the future of the behavior; this 'now' transforms the singular situation of the experience into a typical situation and the effective reaction into an aptitude." (SB, p.125)

"From this moment on, behavior is detached from the order of the in-itself [en soi] and becomes the projection outside the organism of a possibility which is internal to it. The world, inasmuch as it harbors living beings, ceases to be a material plenum consisting of juxtaposed parts; it opens up at the place where behavior appears." (SB, p.125)

"Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations. At the level of this primary vital sensibility, the lived present constitutes a past and a future in time. Need is the manner in which this future appears, as the organic form of expectation. The retained past appears in the form of cellular heredity." (DR, p.73)

"We speak of our 'self' only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says 'me.'" (DR, p.74)

"Each contraction, each passive synthesis, constitutes a sign which is interpreted or deployed in active syntheses. The signs by which an animal 'senses' the presence of water do not resemble the elements which its thirsty organism lacks." (DR, p.73)

"not that the human does not have animal institution, but because of the use that he makes of it and that usage transforms institution genuinely." (IP, p.18)

"It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time. In this form it is the correlate of the passive self which appears in time." (DR, p.86)

"not a hierarchical relation, but lateral, an overcoming that does not abolish kinship." (Nature, p.268)

What's Not Obvious

  1. The paper's real target is not Heidegger but the early Merleau-Ponty. The paper is structured as a response to Heidegger's "poverty in world," but its most sustained critical work is directed at the early MP — specifically, at the implicit hierarchy in The Structure of Behavior where the chimpanzee's "adherence to the here and now" (SB 126) establishes a deficiency model. The paper argues that MP's own later works (Nature Lectures, Institution and Passivity) overcome this hierarchy through the concept of laterality — but that Deleuze is needed to complete the overcoming, because MP never fully systematizes the organic-temporal dimension. This self-critical reading of MP (using his later work against his earlier work) is more philosophically interesting than the Heidegger-bashing, which serves mainly as a framing device. (§3.1, §4.3)

  2. The institution of signs, not contemplation, is the real shared mechanism. Deleuze's vocabulary of "contemplation-contraction" might suggest that the convergence is about perception or receptivity. But the paper's actual argument locates the convergence at the level of the sign: "Each contraction, each passive synthesis, constitutes a sign" (DR 73). This links directly to the wiki's institution concept — institution as the founding of signs that articulate heterogeneous series — and shows that institution is not merely an MP-ism but has a precise Deleuzian analogue. The convergence is semiotic, not perceptual. (§2.2, connecting to §4.3's concluding formula: "time itself is made possible by contractions of meaningful signs")

  3. The paper inadvertently exposes a weakness in Beith's framework. The paper cites Beith (footnote 16) approvingly, but Beith's tripartite schema (static, genetic, generative passivity) maps onto Husserl's framework and remains within the phenomenological tradition. Deleuze's three syntheses provide a parallel but independent architecture (habit, memory, eternal return) that arrives at similar conclusions from post-Humean/post-Bergsonian premises. The paper does not address whether these two frameworks are genuinely compatible or merely superficially similar — which is precisely the kind of question that would test both frameworks' self-understanding. The assumed commensurability between MP and Deleuze is the paper's most significant undefended assumption. (Implicit across §2–§4)

Critique / Limitations

  • The claimed commensurability between MP's phenomenological vocabulary and Deleuze's post-Humean framework is assumed rather than argued. The paper repeatedly states that the two thinkers arrive at "similar" or "complementary" conclusions, but does not address the substantial methodological differences between phenomenological description and Deleuze's transcendental empiricism. Whether "institution of signs" (MP) and "contemplation-contraction" (Deleuze) name the same mechanism or merely analogous mechanisms is left open.
  • The extension of Chronos/Aion to the cellular level (§3.2) is the paper's most speculative move. The claim that DNA heredity constitutes "the contraction of an entire past" in the Deleuzian sense is suggestive but risks metaphorizing the concepts beyond their intended scope.
  • The paper does not engage with the significant secondary literature on the differences between MP and Deleuze (e.g., the well-known disagreement about whether phenomenology can genuinely reach the transcendental, or whether it remains trapped in the empirical). This omission weakens the comparative argument.
  • The paper relies heavily on Toadvine (2024) for its reading of MP's later works on animality. Toadvine's reading is one among several; the paper does not engage with alternative readings.

Connections

  • builds on beith-2018-birth-of-sense — confirms and extends Beith's framework (organic institution, generative passivity) by adding the Deleuzian parallel
  • extends merleau-ponty-2003-nature — draws on the Nature Lectures for the laterality of the animal-human relation and the retrograde temporality of animal life
  • extends merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity — uses the I&P passage on animal institution ("the use that transforms institution genuinely")
  • reads alongside Deleuze's Difference and Repetition ch. 2 and Logic of Sense — the primary Deleuzian texts
  • builds on Toadvine, The Memory of the World (2024) — the key interlocutor for the "animal stratum" and "vertical/horizontal transcendence"
  • complements alloa-chouraqui-kaushik-2019-contemporary-philosophy — specifically Protevi's framing of Deleuze's three syntheses as metabolic/perceptual/thought, and Wambacq's Thinking Between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty (2017)