Deleuze’s differential ontology is a sustained attempt to think and affirm difference as opposed to the unity of identity he insists philosophical thought has tended to privilege. However, by distinguishing between three senses of identity, termed identity of the identical, same, and common, I show that, while Deleuze’s differential ontology offers a powerful critique of identity in the senses of the identical and same, at numerous points in his analysis, such as the virtual-actual movement, the transcendental conditions defining different forms (...) of thinking, and the relationship between the forms of thinking, it appears Deleuze’s affirmation of difference depends on identity in the sense of the common. Rather than using these instances to offer a critique of Deleuze’s differential ontology, I follow his exhortation to read a philosopher creatively and suggest that distinguishing between three senses of identity reveals the complexity of the difference-identity relationship and acts as a stimulus to rethinking this relationship. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to explicate the relationship between Spinozist expressionism and philosophical constructivism in Deleuze's work through the concept of immanent causality. Deleuze finds in Spinoza a philosophy of immanent causality used to solve the problem of the relation between substance, attribute and mode as an expression of substance. But, when he proceeds to take up this notion of immanent causality found in Spinoza in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze instead inverts it into a modal one such that the (...) identity of substance may be said only of the difference of the modes. Complicating this further, Deleuze and Guattari claim in A Thousand Plateaus that substance, attribute, and mode are each, themselves, multiplicities. What is Philosophy? takes up immanent causality once again, this time through a constructivist lens aimed at resolving the question of the relation between philosophical multiplicities: ‘plane,’ ‘persona,’ and ‘concept.’ By following the different formulations of immanent causality in these works this essay hopes to discover the relationship between Spinozist expressionism and philosophical constructivism in Deleuze's work. (shrink)

A standard approach to examining Deleuze's concept of difference in Difference and Repetition is to follow his critique of representation through an overturning of Platonism, which Deleuze finds to be the definitive task of philosophy after Nietzsche. While engaging this largely critical project, however, there is a tendency to overlook the dimensions of Platonism that Deleuze rehabilitates in a differential and immanent register. This paper aims to recover the essential dimensions of Platonism at the very heart of Deleuze's philosophy of (...) difference. This recovery is accomplished by distinguishing Nietzsche's overturning of Platonism through his evaluation of the reactive politics of the Idea from Deleuze's own reversal of Platonism through his evaluation of the active politics of simulacra. (shrink)