In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari attribute to Leibniz and Raymond Ruyer a vitalism of ‘a force that is but does not act’. This is a judicious characterisation of Leibniz's vitalism, but not Ruyer's. In The Fold, Deleuze presents Ruyer as a disciple of Leibniz, but if Leibniz's monads have no doors or windows, Ruyer's are nothing but doors and windows, nothing but liaisons actively forming themselves. For Ruyer, there is only one force, a consciousness-force, matter-form in sustained, non-localisable (...) self-formation. In Deleuze's reading of Leibniz's concept of the vinculum substantiale, Deleuze comes close to presenting a notion of force like that of Ruyer's, in that the vinculum inextricably interfolds monads and bodies, but ultimately the separation of the forces of monads from those of bodies prevails in a fashion incompatible with Ruyer's conception of force. Deleuze and Guattari make use of Ruyer's understanding of consciousness and the brain as the auto-overflight of an absolute surface in their concluding remarks on philosophy and the arts in What Is Philosophy?, but they depart from Ruyer in their characterisation of the relation of force to those two domains, ultimately because they reject Ruyer's advocacy of a universal, goal-directed finalism. (shrink)

From the point of view of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Raymond Ruyer's work appears to bear out two distinct tendencies of unequal appeal. On the one hand, Ruyer appears to be an anti-Aristotelian thinker of formation, rejecting any hylomorphic account of the production of reality. However, and notably despite his serious commitment to the work of the sciences of his day, he remains wedded to the ultimately conservative Leibnizian principle of closure. Nowhere is this dichotomy more striking than in (...) his account of human society. The aim of this paper is to show how his positive account of form finds a significant and convincing extension in Deleuze and Guattari's notion of social surface or socius in Anti-Oedipus. (shrink)

In The Fold, Deleuze regards Raymond Ruyer as the most recent of Leibniz’s great disciples. This claim is not self-evident, since Ruyer often criticises Leibniz and stresses the divergence of his theory from Leibniz’s monadological metaphysics. Therefore, while Ruyer does not seem to regard himself as indebted to Leibniz, and as his psychobiology is not always reconcilable with Leibniz’s philosophy, it is necessary to explore what is at stake in Deleuze’s recognition of Ruyer as a Leibnizian thinker. This essay foregrounds (...) the tacit intertwining between Leibniz and Ruyer, which can, on the one hand, contribute to Leibniz’s scholarship and uncover the contemporaneity of his thought, and on the other hand, expose certain revealing Ruyerian moments in Deleuze’s immanent philosophy. (shrink)