Deleuze’s Critique of Representation

This chapter introduces the motivations and method behind Deleuze’s philosophical project. It begins with a detailed reading of Deleuze’s review of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence, in which Deleuze first articulates his claim that the goal of philosophy is to create a logic of sense, rather than a metaphysics of essence. This review introduces Deleuze’s central criticism that the history of philosophy has for too long given a foundational role to certain features of our naïve representation of the world, instead of explaining the genesis of these features. Among these is an understanding of difference as opposition that finds its ultimate expression in Hegelian contradiction. Deleuze briefly invokes Leibniz as a figure who is perhaps capable of providing an alternative concept of difference. The chapter then turns to the opening chapters of Difference and Repetition, where Deleuze again outlines a critique of the history of philosophy’s treatment of difference and its subordination to the structure of representation. This time Deleuze traces a history through Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz and Hegel. In Leibniz he identifies for the first time a world of “restless” infinitely small differences which will become central to all his later readings.

Leibniz, Spinoza and the Anti-Cartesian Reaction

This chapter looks in detail at the three main engagements with Leibniz in the main text of Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. The first concerns the role of real definitions and proofs of possibility in arguments for the existence of God. The second concerns the theory of adequation in a logic of ideas. The third concerns mechanism, force and essence in a theory of bodies. The chapter argues that these engagements all share the same form. First, Deleuze locates a similarity between Leibniz and Spinoza in their criticism of a particular Cartesian doctrine. Second, he grounds this criticism in a shared concern for the lack of a sufficient reason operating in Descartes’s philosophy. Third, he nominates expression as the concept best suited to address this lack and fulfil the requirements of sufficient reason. Finally, he shows that the way expression functions in Spinoza’s philosophy is each time superior to Leibniz’s own use of the concept. Despite the priority given to Spinoza in this text, it nevertheless contains our first introduction to various key Leibnizian concepts which will become increasingly important in Deleuze’s later philosophy.

Introduction

References to Leibniz’s philosophy appear constantly throughout Deleuze’s work. Despite often repeating the same themes, we find marked differences in tone, as if Deleuze is unable to arrive at a conclusive judgement. This book explores these various engagements and tries to account for these shifts in tone. Ultimately it will argue that focusing on Deleuze’s interpretation of Leibniz – both his appropriations and his criticisms – helps us to understand some key moments in Deleuze’s own philosophical development. A close reading, emphasising the particular context and terminology of Leibniz’s work, will open a narrow point of access into some of the most difficult areas of Deleuze’s philosophy. In the course of this reading, it will become clear that it is precisely Leibniz’s ambiguous status for Deleuze which makes an investigation into their relationship so fruitful: by not only explaining Leibniz’s positive influence, but also pinpointing the precise grounds for their eventual divergence, we hope to better articulate some of Deleuze’s own philosophical priorities....

Spiritual Folds and the Upper Level of the Baroque House

This chapter follows Deleuze’s metaphor of the Baroque House, which runs throughout The Fold, from the lower level of matter and organisms, to the upper level of reasonable souls. It shows how Deleuze uses concepts from Paul Klee to present a new theory of singularities or singular points as points of inflection or folds. Inflection gives us a topological model for understanding the inclusion of predicates within individual monads. The chapter then turns to the most complicated theme of the book: the ideal curve or Fold which Deleuze locates between the two levels of the Baroque house itself. This Fold separates matter from souls, while simultaneously relating them to each other: in Leibnizian terms, they are really distinct but inseparable. What is actualised in individual monads is thus simultaneously realised in matter. Deleuze turns to Mallarmé to explain this complicated relationship between the visible and the intelligible.

Material Folds and the Lower Level of the Baroque House

This chapter turns to one of Deleuze’s last major works, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. It argues for Leibniz’s central role in the text, and explains the book’s complicated interplay between Leibniz’s philosophy and mathematics, and Baroque art and architecture. It rediscovers all the major elements of the Leibnizian structure outlined in the previous chapter, and finds them united by the new concept of the “infinite fold”. It then looks in detail at the opening chapter of The Fold, where Deleuze uses Wölfflin’s theory of Baroque architecture and Leibniz’s theory of preformism and biological evolution to introduce the parallelism between the repeated folds of inorganic matter and the interior, enveloping folds of organisms. The interiority of the latter eventually forces us to posit monads, or souls, which exist elsewhere and serve as the principle of their unity.

A Leibnizian World

This chapter uses concepts from Leibniz’s philosophy to provide an account of the metaphysical system Deleuze constructs in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense. This account has four key components. 1) An ideal continuum populated by reciprocally determined differential relations, from which individuals are produced. Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus is the technique most suited to describe this continuum. 2) The singularities or events which populate the continuum and which eventually form the “predicates” which are included within individuals. An inverted version of Leibniz’s theory of infinite analysis, which Deleuze dubs ‘vice-diction’, allows us to describe how these singularities are distributed. 3) The relations of compossibility between singularities which allow the articulation of a structure prior to any logical relations of opposition or contradiction. In Leibniz, a divergence between singularities marks a bifurcation into two distinct possible worlds. In Deleuze, by contrast, divergent series resonate and communicate with one another. 4) An “ideal game” which presides over the actualisation of this pre-individual continuum through the genesis of individuals. In Leibniz this game is subject to the rules of a divine calculus in which God selects a “best of all possible worlds” whose harmony is guaranteed. Deleuze, however, will reject this theological constraint.

Conclusion: The New Discord

The depth of Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz in The Fold allows us to determine the consequences of treating Deleuze’s philosophy as a neo-Baroque, neo-Leibnizian philosophy. Such a philosophy still operates within a Leibnizian space of infinite depths, singular events, foldings and envelopments. But the Leibnizian principles governing this space have been overturned....

Leibniz and Expression

This chapter looks at Leibniz’s central role in the concluding chapter of Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. His elevated presence suggests a dramatic shift in Deleuze’s reading when compared with the rest of the text. It examines Deleuze’s lengthy discussion of Leibniz’s concept of expression and argues that within this discussion there is a shift from a ‘two-term’ concept of expression to a triadic concept which is closer to the one Deleuze finds in Spinoza. It then re-examines Deleuze’s central criticism of Leibniz, this time understood as a criticism of his ‘equivocal’ concept of expression compared to Spinoza’s ‘univocal’ concept. It shows that ultimately all of Deleuze’s criticisms of Leibniz can be reduced to an aversion to certain of Leibniz’s theological commitments and motivations. Finally, it looks in detail at the penultimate paragraph which, it argues, ends with a brief description of what will ultimately become Deleuze’s double process of actualisation and counter-actualisation. Crucially, Deleuze turns to Leibniz, rather than Spinoza, in order to explain these processes.