What is the justification for Deleuze's 3rd synthesis of time?

Question

In Difference and Repitition by Deleuze, he comes up with 3 syntheses of time. The first being habitus, which is the conditioning of actual experience through pre-existing material patterns for the Subject to interact with. The second is the Bergsonist coincidence of the past in the present (pure memory), and the presentation of the virtual/actual distinction over the possible/real distinction. The third is the Kantian synthesis, in which the issue with the first two syntheses is that under them the only thing which repeats in future time is the Same, or the Eternal Return as commonly interpreted from Nietzsche.

However, this is when Deleuze proposes that the third synthesis in order to break from this eternal cycle of the Same is with difference, and he gives an interpretation of Nietzsche in which what survives the Eternal Return is difference in itself, thereby giving structure for future time for the Subject.

All of this I understand, but I do not quite know how this is justified. If this third synthesis was introduced in the same place as the first or second I'm sure that his conception of time would not require the Eternal Return. In addition, he implies in his writing that some sort of conflict is made within the subject from the first two syntheses, which does not seem apparent to me.

I am asking if any of y'all know if there is any sort of real justification or necessity for the third synthesis to be the third postulated in that series of syntheses, or how the assumption of the Eternal Return is necessary, as this is not obvious or intuitive for me and seems to just come from Deleuze's desire to quote Nietzsche and Kant.

Answer 1

Deleuze's 3rd synthesis of time is clearly related to what Derrida is referring to in Heidegger: The Question of Being & History, (pages 180-181) quoted below. It can be connected to will and eternal return, since will is the motive force of any 'self-activation'.

To clarify what he calls Kant’s “obscure assertion” that “time affects a concept, in particular, the concept of the representations of objects” (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 133), Heidegger shows what time as pure intuition must signify: originarily, it can in no way signify affection of something by something, affection of a being by another being, affection of an existing subject by something outside it: because time is nothing, as such it cannot affect anything. It is affection of self by self. Auto-affection, a concept that is as incomprehensible as is, in truth, the movement of temporalization. This auto-affection as temporality is not a characteristic affecting transcendental subjectivity, one of its attributes; it is, on the contrary, that starting from which the self, the Selbst, the I think constitutes itself and announces itself to itself. Heidegger writes, [French] p. 244:

As pure self-affection, time is not an acting affection that strikes a self which is at hand (vorhandenes Selbst). Instead, as pure it forms the essence (Wesen) of something like self-activating (Sich-selbst-angehen as self-relating, to relate to self, angegangen werden zu können). However, if it belongs to the essence of the finite subject to be able to be activated as a self, then time as pure self-affection forms the essential structure of subjectivity. Only on the grounds of this self-hood can the finite creature be what it must be: dependent upon taking things in stride (angewiesen auf Hinnahme). (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 132) [GA 3, 1929]

Clarifying the connection of 'will' and 'eternal return', quoting from Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track [GA 5, 1943], pages 176 & 177.

As the essence of will, the essence of the will to power is the fundamental trait of all reality. Nietzsche writes (The Will to Power, no. 693, from 1888): The will to power is "the inmost essence of being." Here "being" is used in accordance with the language of metaphysics: beings in general. As the fundamental character of beings, therefore, the essence of the will to power and the will to power itself are not to be ascertained through psychological observation; rather, it is the other way round: psychology itself gets its essence, i.e., the ability to set and to recognize its object, only through the will to power.

. . . Since will is the overpowering of itself, no richness [Reichtum] of life will satisfy it. It has its power in overreaching [im Überreichen] - namely, in reaching over its own will. Thus it, as the same, is constantly coming back unto itself as the Same. The mode in which beings (whose essentia is the will to power) in their entirety exist, their existentia, is the "eternal return of the same." The two fundamental terms of Nietzsche’s metaphysics, "will to power" and "eternal return of the same," determine beings in their being in accordance with the perspectives which have guided metaphysics since antiquity, the ens qua ens in the sense of essentia and existentia.