INTRODUCTION

In this volume of essays I approach the question of time and the question of life through the elaboration of a philosophy of the virtual (the conjunction of the two questions constitutes the enigma of the book). In recent years the notion of the virtual has assumed a degree of extraordinary importance for attempts to articulate new experiences of the real (see, for example, the studies by Heim 1993, Levy 1998, Hayles 1999). As a conceptual innovation within philosophic modernity the notion is associated with the work of Bergson and assumes a role of vital importance in the texts of Deleuze. Indeed, Alain Badiou has gone so far as to claim that it is the principal name of Being in Deleuze’s thinking. Within Bergson and Deleuze we have the distinction between virtual (continuous) multiplicities and actual (or discrete) multiplicities, a conception of the evolution of life as involving an actualization of the virtual in contrast to the less inventive or creative realization of the possible; the attempt to show that both perception and memory involve virtual images; and, in the case of Deleuze, a thinking of the event as virtual (pure reserve). Deleuze’s conceives the virtual as a productive power of difference, a simplicity and potentiality, which denotes neither a deficient nor an inadequate mode of being. Hence the key formula, borrowed from Proust’s Time Regained: the virtual is real without being

actual, ideal without being abstract. The virtual presents an ontological challenge to our ordinary conceptions of perception and memory, of time and subjectivity, and of life in its evolutionary aspects. As we shall see in this series of studies, the virtual has important ontological referents and is allied to problems that have been central to philosophy from the beginning. But the notion also works in the context of specific set of modern problems regarding the nature of time, memory, consciousness, and evolution.