The Nietzschean nature of the crystal-image is clear insofar as each side of the seeming binary is in a constant game of tag with its opposite, so that opposition is subsequently aporetic, forging a circuit of eternal return of difference as multiplicity, a celebration and affirmation of the indeterminacy of chance. A key objective metaphor for the crystal-image is the mirror, whereby the reflected image assumes independence of its host and passes into the actual, while the actual image returns into the mirror, creating an endless reversibility, a circuit of liberation and capture. Because actual and virtual are also linked with the real and the imaginary, with the present and the past, perception and recollection, the crystal creates an indiscernibility which allows time and memory to be released and to become actualized. The crystal-image is thus the actual representation of split time, since the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past…Time consists of this split, and it is this, it is time, that we see in the crystal.
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As Deleuze confirms, when we think, ‘it is not the gods which we encounter: even hidden, the gods are only the forms of recognition. What we encounter are the demons, the sign-bearers: powers of the leap, the interval, the intensive and the instant; powers which only cover difference with more difference.’ For Deleuze, ever the Spinozan, the unthinkable of thought, the aporia that decenters thinking from thought in the form of a movement of difference, lies in the motion of a body, with all of its affects, percepts, impulses and intensities.