Reversals are central to Deleuze’s philosophical practice—not only as rhetorical devices, but as structural, aesthetic, and conceptual operations. In Difference and Repetition, he does not merely reframe or critique canonical figures such as Kant and Freud; he inverts the very foundations on which their thought rests.
This essay follows three such reversals. First, the reversal of the Kantian subject: where the self is no longer a pre-given unity grounding experience, but a product of pre-individual syntheses, passively contracted and only contingently unified through active orientation toward the world. Second, the reversal of the Freudian drive: where repetition does not follow from the pleasure principle but rather is a condition of it, producing drive as a consequence of establishing a path of systematic discharge. Third, the reversal of repression: where disguise is not the result of psychic blockage, but the structural condition of any repetition that turns around an object it cannot present directly.
Each of these reversals opens onto a different image of subjectivity—no longer grounded in identity, temporality, or intention, but in a topology of relation to the virtual object. Displaced, fragmentary, and structurally lacking, the virtual object functions not as a hidden content, but as a formative absence.
I. Reversal of the Kantian Subject
With the groundwork of passive synthesis we already laid in earlier discussions, we can now turn to Deleuze’s treatment of the emergence of active synthesis. The binding of excitations into structured patterns—what he names reproductive synthesis or habitus—belongs to the realm of passivity. But with this bound excitation entering into a relation with an external object, and with that object functioning as the correlate of an organized action, the synthesis becomes active. The object here is not a final cause but a structural pole—an emergent point of orientation around which action is organized.
This orientation toward an object is what activates the ego—not as a unified given, but as a topological operation through which the partial, passive egos are drawn into a provisional unity. The ego, in this view, is not simply formed but distinguished from the id through its relation to an object. Where the id is a mobile field of passive syntheses, the ego begins to coalesce only in the act of projecting outward—of relating to something as external, as actual.
Yet even here, Deleuze is precise: the passive egos that constitute this attempted unity are themselves local integrations—products of passive synthesis of the second degree. Active synthesis operates in the direction of a global coordination, drawing these disparate fragments into a provisional self through directed relation to the world. But no matter how far this coordination extends, it never constitutes an a priori ground. It remains an outcome, not a given; a product of relational organization, not a presupposition of experience.
This is where Deleuze’s reversal of the Kantian subject becomes most explicit. Against the idea that the subject is the transcendental condition for the possibility of experience, Deleuze asserts that the subject is itself conditioned. What we call the self is assembled retroactively through a play of syntheses—passive and active, actual and virtual. It is not a universal form but a provisional torsion, a fold between tendencies that cannot be reduced to it.
To visualize this, Deleuze invokes a topological figure: the number 8. In this diagram, each circle of the eight represents a distinct process. One circle corresponds to active synthesis, objectal relations, and the constitution of the global ego in relation to the actual world. The other represents passive synthesis, the formation of virtual objects and partial egos. At the crossing point—where the two loops intersect—what we call the ego takes form: not as a stable center, but as a folding point, a momentary torsion between two irreducible but co-functioning registers of synthesis.
This presented topology marks a genuine shift in the concept of subjectivity: from unity to multiplicity, from form to fold, from the a priori to the emergent. The Kantian subject, which grounds experience through a synthetic unity, is replaced by a subject grounded in disjunction—internally divided, temporally stratified, always traversed by processes it cannot master. This is dramatic reconfiguration of the very space in which the subject appears.
Read the full essay here: Deleuze’s Three Reversals: subject, drive, repression