3 - Theory of Delay in Balibar, Freud and Deleuze: Décalage, Nachträglichkeit, Retard

Summary

This chapter explores some relations between delay, retroactivity and history.

State history (which Deleuze and Guattari often refer to simply as ‘history’) describes an ordered succession of regimes, while revolutionary history (which Deleuze and Guattari generally call ‘becoming’, but sometimes also call ‘history’) assembles contemporaneous series from across the historical field. But of course, contemporaneous becomings cannot all occur at the same time. History therefore consists of diachrony within synchrony; or, to put it in reverse, succession is delayed simultaneity.

In another text (Lampert 2006a), I discussed Deleuze and Guattari's analyses in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus of simultaneity and delay in history. At a certain point in this chapter, that discussion would be relevant; but rather than rework that material here, I will switch gears. My goal is to examine two of Deleuze's resources for a theory of delay: Balibar and Freud. In Chapter 2 of Différence et répétition, Deleuze says that ‘there is no question as to how a childhood event acts only with a delay (retard). It is this delay’ (Deleuze 1969: 163). Applying this thesis in the ‘Apparatus of Capture’ Plateau of Mille Plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the historical encounters that made capitalism possible, encounters that allow capitalism to capture all past ages in its historicisations and at the same time allow something post-capitalist to become what will always have been escaping from it.