Philosophy’s Joy

The chapter first follows Deleuze’s theory of crystal individuation into his reading of Hume. After returning to the motif of lightning, and in light of Deleuze’s reading of Kant, it then explicates Deleuze’s notion of the three syntheses in Difference and Repetition, which complicates Deleuze’s notion of the complementarity of virtual intensity and actual extensity, and which can be read as a sustained argument against the notion of a natural light in philosophy. From there, the chapter turns to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s luminist expressionism, which sets an immanent, expressive light against an emanating, representational light, and which conceptualizes substance as a simultaneously white and diffracted light: lux and lumen. After following Deleuze’s reading of Proust, the chapter conceptualizes a Deleuzian historical studies by way of his formal distinction between events and matters-of-fact, the notion of the informal diagram in Francis Bacon’s paintings, and in Max Ernst’s strategy of frottage.

Philosophical Times and Spaces

In luminist and cinematic registers, the chapter first explicates Deleuze’s complementary chronologics of Aion and Chronos. While durational Aion is the time of luminist glow, flickering Chronos is the time of strobe light: wave and particle. Shifting from time to space, the chapter then addresses Deleuze’s topologics. After introducing the notion of fractal space in terms of Deleuze’s notion of becoming-imperceptible, it delineates, via Leibniz’ images of the baroque house and the camera obscura, Deleuze’s transformation of the spatial dualism of light surface and dark depth into the luminous space of a fractal chiaroscuro, and it shows how Deleuze’s luminous philosophy resonates with Leibniz’ proposition that monads, as points or centres of light, have a luminous nature. After explicating the mathematical concept of the ‘real projective plane,’ the chapter argues that Deleuze’s shift from a Cartesian to a projective topology of thought is fundamental for an understanding of his philosophy.

Conclusion: White Light, White Life

Shortly before his suicide, Deleuze writes “Immanence: A Life”; a short text that, like “The Actual and the Virtual,” has the feel of both testament and legacy. Unlike the former, however, it stresses the decomposition rather than the composition of crystals, and it proposes a purely transcendental plane of anonymous life; a purely virtual, white plane that lacks nothing, not even its actualization. Entering its pure glow is to enter the white-out of a fully virtual, non-actualized storm of light. However, as ‘a life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through’, this white life and white death are also part of actualized, refracted life. ‘Dying is the figure which the most singular life takes on in order to substitute itself for me’ Deleuze notes. In both life and death, to reach both philosophy’s and life’s luminous ‘point-at-infinity’ means to literally ‘step into the light.’

The Birth of Philosophy

The chapter focuses on the beginning of Deleuze’s career, charting his confrontation with Simondon, from whose work he takes the notion of crystal individuation. It then turns to Deleuze’s early reading of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. Stressing in particular Lucretius’ notion of the ‘light of Venus’, the chapter reads Deleuze’s luminous ontology against Thomas Nail’s argument that Lucretius’ work proposes a fluid and processual ontology. The chapter concludes that the ideas Deleuze distils from Lucretius concern a love of the multiplicity of the world and of life, and that Deleuzian philosophy is a response to the question of where Lucretius’ love of life and of a given multiplicity takes philosophy. Nowhere in Deleuze’s work is the positivity and affirmation that he finds in Lucretius put into question. All horrors are immanent to this more profound love of a multiplicitous life and light, which Deleuze also finds in Nietzsche and Bergson.

Introduction: Lightning and Crystals

The introduction contours, by way of Deleuze’s notion of the dark precursors that pilot the dynamics of lightning, Deleuze’s notion of an immanent light or light of immanence, which he stakes against a natural and a divine light respectively. It shows that the moment of lightning encapsulates the logic of Deleuze’s luminous philosophy, in which difference is set against, but simultaneously complementary to, an indifferent diversity. Deleuze develops the idea of a formal distinction but ontological complementarity against the dualisms of idealisms and materialisms. ‘Lightning distinguishes itself from the black sky but must also trail it behind, as though it were distinguishing itself from that which does not distinguish itself from it’, Deleuze notes, defining difference as ‘this state in which determination takes the form of unilateral distinction’. Crystals, which align the actual and the virtual, and thus thought and life, are Deleuze’s figures of this unilateral and luminous distinction.

Luminous Philosophy

The photonic plane is the most comprehensive of Deleuze’s planes of immanence. The chapter first explains the photon’s complementarity, and the luminous framework from within which Deleuze develops his notion of a universal concrete. It then shifts to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s folding of the logic of light onto the logic of affects, and to Foucault’s luminism, in which statements and visibilities emerge from the sonorous and luminous planes of immanence respectively. After contrasting the actual colour that defines luminism in painting with the virtual light that defines cinematic luminism, it explicates the philosophical complementarity of Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, which embody, both in terms of content and of form, Deleuze’s luminous and projective philosophy. In the crystal image, as the real projective plane’s point-at-infinity, the actual and the virtual become identical. This unthinkable, intensely luminous point marks the vertigo of Deleuze’s philosophy and is its ultimate conceptual koan.