This article is about Gilles Deleuze's book Le Pli. Leibniz et le Baroque from 1988. It shows how Deleuze's notion of folding captures some basic intuitions in Leibniz and how they relate to each other. To this purpose, I propose five figures, all referring to the same basic fold, all illustrating how the consideration of such figures allows developing central elements of Leibniz's monadology. These figures can help, I hope, alleviate some of the fundamental difficulties in understanding Deleuze's approach to (...) the Monadology from the non-Deleuzian perspective of contemporary Leibniz scholarship and give a sense of the synthetic, explanatory force that Deleuze's notion of folding has in relation to Leibniz's monadological metaphysics. (shrink)

The reconstruction of Leibniz’s metaphysics that Deleuze undertakes in The Fold provides a systematic account of the structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics in terms of its mathematical foundations. However, in doing so, Deleuze draws not only upon the mathematics developed by Leibniz—including the law of continuity as reflected in the calculus of infinite series and the infinitesimal calculus—but also upon developments in mathematics made by a number of Leibniz’s contemporaries—including Newton’s method of fluxions. He also draws upon a number of subsequent (...) developments in mathematics, the rudiments of which can be more or less located in Leibniz’s own work—including the theory of functions and singularities, the Weierstrassian theory of analytic continuity, and Poincaré’s theory of automorphic functions. Deleuze then retrospectively maps these developments back onto the structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics. While the Weierstrassian theory of analytic continuity serves to clarify Leibniz’s work, Poincaré’s theory of automorphic functions offers a solution to overcome and extend the limits that Deleuze identifies in Leibniz’s metaphysics. Deleuze brings this elaborate conjunction of material together in order to set up a mathematical idealization of the system that he considers to be implicit in Leibniz’s work. The result is a thoroughly mathematical explication of the structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics. This essay is an exposition of the very mathematical underpinnings of this Deleuzian account of the structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics, which, I maintain, subtends the entire text of The Fold. (shrink)

Contre Platon et Aristote, c’est dans les corps que les stoïciens et les épicuriens veulent voir les seules réalités, ce qui agit et ce qui pâtit. Par une espèce de rythme, leur physique reproduit celle des physiciens antérieurs à Socrate. Ainsi les stoïciens rejettent, dans les incorporels, les non-être comme le lieu ou le temps.

An incisive analysis of Deleuze's philosophy of eventsSean Bowden shows how the Deleuzian event should be understood in terms of the broader metaphysical thesis that substances are ontologically secondary with respect to events. He achieves this through a reconstruction of Deleuze's relation to the history of thought from the Stoics through to Simondon, taking account of Leibniz, Lautman, structuralism and psychoanalysis along the way.This exciting new reading of Deleuze focuses firmly on his approach to events. Bowden also examines and clarifies (...) a number of Deleuze's most difficult philosophical concepts, including sense, problematic Ideas and intensive individuation, and engages with material by Lautman and Simondon that has not yet been translated into English. (shrink)

In his early discussion of the structure of matter and motion, Leibniz quite explicitly appeals to Aristotle's characterization of continuity, and seems to adopt something like it as his own. Commentators usually assume that Leibniz continues to understand the notion of continuity in this way for the rest of his life. This paper argues that although he does continue to use something like the Aristotelian conception well into the mature period of his thought, he articulates a second sense of continuity (...) in his later writings that proves to be a greater importance to the exposition of his mature metaphysics. (shrink)

In “Reconstructing Bergson’s Critique of Intensive Magnitude” John Bagby defends Bergson against the criticism that I develop in “Bergson and Intensive Magnitude: Dismantling...

ABSTRACT This article examines Bergson’s critique of intensive magnitude in Time and Free Will. I demonstrate how his rejection of a different kind of quantity that is ordinal and does not allow measurement, and the underlying strict dualism of quantity and quality, is inconsistent with both the letter and the spirit of his later philosophy. I dismantle two main strategies for explaining these inconsistencies. Furthermore, I argue that Bergson’s simplistic conception of quantity in terms of homogeneous multiplicity, which is operative (...) in his rejection of an alternative conception of quantity, lacks justification in the face of the transformations that the concept of quantity underwent in the history of mathematics and physics. (shrink)

This thesis argues that key aspects of Deleuze's philosophy can be explained by looking closely at his relationship to Leibniz. By confining itself to the particular context and set of terminology which Leibniz's philosophy provides, it hopes to avoid many of the dangers of a more general, and necessarily abstract, interpretation or reconstruction of Deleuze's philosophy. I identify, across Deleuze's career, three distinct, important engagements with Leibniz. In each of these, I argue, Deleuze presents Leibniz as an ambiguous figure, caught (...) somewhere between two opposing tendencies. On the one hand, Deleuze characterises Leibniz's philosophy as the last attempt by theology to ground an ordered world, demonstrated by his preoccupation with questions of harmony and sufficient reason, as well as his insistence that to each kind of problem there must respond a rational principle. But on the other hand, beneath this conservative, theological sentiment, Deleuze also discerns the obscured outlines of a philosophy shot through with dynamism, whose 'dizzying creation' of principles and Baroque complexity reveal an alternative, radicalised image of Leibniz. I argue that from this second, radical Leibniz, Deleuze takes two ideas, returning to them again and again in order to express key aspects of his own philosophy. First, Deleuze believes he has found in Leibniz's theory of 'incompossibility' a concept of difference which is not reducible to a form of opposition between two identities. This theory becomes a crucial component of Deleuze's account of a subrepresentational transcendental field. Second, Deleuze draws on Leibniz's theory that individual monads clearly express a certain region of the world in order to explain how the singular points or events which populate this transcendental field are expressed or actualised by individuals. Explaining how Deleuze appropriates and uses these two ideas provides a narrow point of access into one of the most important areas of his philosophy. At the same time, however, I show that eventually there is always a point where Leibniz's conservative, theological commitments force Deleuze to leave him behind. I thus argue 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 on Deleuze, but also pinpointing the precise grounds for their eventual divergence, we can better articulate Deleuze's own philosophical priorities. (shrink)

L'auteur analyse les pensées de W. James, A. N. Whitehead et de G. Marcel qui ont en commun une volonté de prendre la mesure de la réalité dans toute son épaisseur, les opposant aux grands systèmes idéalistes et dialectiques qui les ont précédées.