AFFIRMING DIVERGENCE: Deleuze's Reading of Leibniz by Alex. Tissandier

Author:Alex. Tissandier [Tissandier, Alex.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Metaphysics, History & Surveys, Modern, Renaissance
ISBN: 9781474455886
Google: qLmJwgEACAAJ
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2019-11-30T01:10:33.955000+00:00

PART III

The Fold

5

Material Folds and the Lower Level of the Baroque House

The Leibnizian structure we discovered in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense returns in The Fold. Although its central elements remain the same, there are some key differences. Here, for the first time, Deleuze is careful to introduce each element of his reading of Leibniz in a particular order. In the lecture series on Leibniz that Deleuze gave in 1986, at around the same time The Fold was written, Deleuze calls this a ‘non-philosophical reading’ of a philosopher, and insists it must accompany any philosophical understanding of Leibniz. This non-philosophical reading relies on a kind of intuitive deduction of the impetus behind Leibniz’s creation of certain concepts: ‘all sorts of sensible intuitions that you must allow to be born within you; extremely rudimentary sensible intuitions, but by the same token, extremely lively’ (16/12/1986). Thus, for example, we will see that when Deleuze initially asks ‘why are things folded?’, the intuitive answer he relies on to advance his account is ‘in order to be put inside something’. It is only on this basis that we move from the folded nature of predicates or events to their ‘inclusion’ in subjects or individual notions. Regardless of how we interpret the legitimacy of this method, it at least demonstrates the extent to which The Fold presents Leibniz’s philosophy, for the first time, as a unified whole, all of whose elements are connected.1

The Fold starts with a discussion of curvature in Leibniz’s conception of matter. Deleuze draws on Wölfflin’s analysis of Renaissance and Baroque architecture to characterise the propensity for curved forms with fuzzy edges and the neglect of sharp edges – a propensity that finds its correlate both in the contemporary mathematical problem of curved lines and figures and in Leibniz’s own philosophical conception of infinitely divisible matter. We discover, however, that Leibniz’s infinitely divisible, continuous matter ends up referring to centres of unity that exist outside of the material domain. Deleuze’s non-philosophical progression thus moves us to a different domain, where metaphysical unities or souls exist. It is here that Deleuze’s Leibnizian structure returns in familiar form. Once again, Deleuze describes a process through which singular points (this time themselves understood as points of inflection or folds) are enveloped by monads that come to occupy certain points of view. Deleuze describes the clear region of the world that these monads express in terms of Baroque painting, whose characteristic chiaroscuro style allows clear forms to emerge from an obscured dark background. We also see here Deleuze’s most explicit attempt to equate the Leibnizian monad with the singular complete notion. The singularities enfolded in a monad are simultaneously the predicates which are included in the monad’s complete notion. What we ‘see’ in the monad, Deleuze thinks, we ‘read’ in the monad’s notion.

In The Fold we find Deleuze’s own characterisation of the two images of Leibniz we have traced through his work. Any ‘portrait of Leibniz’, he will write in chapter 3, is marked

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