Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque by Gilles Deleuze
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In this difficult book, Gilles Deleuze takes the figure of Leibniz as a starting point to reach a determinate position of differentiation. Another way to say this is that Deleuze abstracts/extracts conceptions of change and inflection from infinitesimal nuances. Building upon the figure of the monad as indecipherable but also holographic, Deleuze forces us from the position of understanding ontology as a passive substance and active concept. From here, we need first to select a context and then abstract from that context the mode of change that operates throughout it. Deleuze would have us absorb melody from pure harmony, building concepts and trends from the multitude of monads which would pose a mass of singularities.
Another way to put this? Deleuze outlines a project by which we can choose the scale at which we are to determine what we are looking at. This free-for-all view, lacking any selected distance from its object is different from the philosophic tradition which centers itself on subjectivity as the primordial figure. By zooming in on the monad and then zooming out, Deleuze gives us two vectors (two floors as he calls it) by which we can start to carve out difference between them. This makes all determination a matter of scale, which is another way of saying that it’s a matter of categorization. Which set of monads should we take to be primary? Which collection expresses the trends we wish? If not on the level of monad, then on the level of concept. What Deleuze poses for us is a radical de-substantialization of thought. Thought was often taken as a reference to something, or as a pure given form for something. Thought, in philosophy, is conceived as a reference point for purity of form. Rather than taking a metaphysics of presence as the primary scene, he deontologizes thought by collapsing it into its constituent particles, called monads. From there, we can build the scene of determination rather than skipping ahead to universals that are simply given.
What makes Deleuze radical in this regard, is how he debunks the classical categories which philosophy has sought to make necessary for its condition of philosophy. He pulls the monad from difference itself, as Leibniz did, and then reconstitutes concepts from it. The concepts are nonetheless pure concepts, as they ride on harmonies between monads, of the monads but never determined by monads. In fact, towards the end of the book, Deleuze shows us that monads can subsume other monads. From here we get the change of scale, that the figure of the monad as a compete singularity can also bind other monads. In this way, we can see how Deleuze’s monads run against a stricter line of Badiou’s set theory in which sets can be constituted in any desired size to be the primary set, the limit cardinal. This puts Deleuze closer to math than you might imagine, as this book is written in poetic language. Yet this poetry is essential in the sense that Deleuze wishes for us to saddle the inflection point between the two floors, before monads disappear from view and Being is revealed, or before Being is dissolved into a mass of monads that have yet to organize into coherency as a concept.
As always, Deleuze doesn’t go easy on us. He forces us to the edge of conception and leaves us there to sit and watch. Unfortunately, most of us probably won’t know what we are looking at. In the absence of our familiar points of reference I suspect much of this would appear to be senseless and unusable to most of us, even though in our daily lives, we go through the process of (re)constitution all the time.
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