This is where Peter Hallward falls short in his otherwise excellent Out of This World, where he stresses only the aspect of the pure past as the Virtual field in which the fate of all actual events is sealed in advance, since "everything is already written" in it. At this point where we view reality sub specie aeternitatis [under the aspect of eternity], absolute freedom coincides with absolute necessity and its pure automatism: to be free means to let oneself freely flow in/with the substantial necessity. But while Hallward is right to emphasize that, for Deleuze, freedom "Isn't a matter of human liberty but of liberation from humanlty," of fully submerging oneself in the creative flux of the absolute Life, his political conclusion from this seems too facile:
since a free mode or monad is simply one that has eliminated its resistance to the sovereign will that works through it, so then it follows that the more absolute the sovereign's power, the more "free" are those subject to it.
Hallward ignores the retroactive movement on which Deleuze also insists, the way this eternal pure past which fully determines us is itself subjected to retroactive change. We are thus simultaneously less free and more free than we think: we are thoroughly passive, determined by and dependent on the past, but we have the freedom to define the scope of this determination, that is, to (over)determine the past which will determine us.
Deleuze is here unexpectedly close to Kant, for whom I am determined by causes, but I (can) retroactively determine which causes will determine me: we, subjects, are passively affected by pathological objects and motivations; but, in a reflexive way, we ourselves have the minimal power to accept (or reject) being affected in this way, in other words, we retroactively determine the causes allowed to determine us, or, at least, the mode of this linear determination.
"Freedom" is thus inherently retroactive: at its most elementary, it is not a free act which, out of nowhere, starts a new causal link, but a retroactive act of endorsing which link/sequence of necessities will determine me. Here, one should add a Hegelian twist to Spinoza: freedom is not simply "recognized/known necessity," but recognized/assumed necessity, the necessity constituted/actualized through this recognition.
So, when Deleuze refers to Proust's description of Vinteuil's music that haunts Swann — "as if the performers not so much played the little phrase as executed the rites necessary for it to appear"—he is evoking the necessary illusion: generating the sense-event is experienced as a ritualistic evocation of a preexisting event, as if the event was already there, waiting for our call in its virtual presence.
In Defense of Lost Causes S. Zizek
