Events of Difference

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2003. Epoch,Volume 8, Issue 1 (Fall 2003). ISSN 1085-1968. pp. 141164

Events of Difference: The Fold in

between Deleuzes Reading of Leibniz

KEITH ROBINSON

Davenport University

ABSTRACT: Throughout all of Deleuzes work one finds an extended encoun-

ter with the Event of Difference. Deleuzes extraordinary work on Leibniz is

no exception. In the later work, and regarding Leibniz, Deleuze remarks,

no philosophy has ever pushed to such an extreme the affirmations of one

and the same world, and of an infinite difference and variety in this world.

This positive identification with Leibniz is not found in the earlier wave of

Deleuzian texts from the sixties where Leibniz is captured hesitating over

the possible and the virtual. Any such hesitation over the possible and the

virtual is disastrous for a philosophy of the event and difference since it

abolishes the reality of the virtual and subordinates it to the identical, re-

placing pure immanence with a theological model of creation. Is the Leibniz

of Deleuzes early texts compossible with the later? What is the significance

of the event of difference or fold that joins and separates Deleuzes continu-

ing encounter with Leibniz? We will examine what is at stake in these differing

understandings of Leibniz to Deleuzes philosophy of events of difference.

1. INTRODUCTION

Throughout all of Deleuzes work (individually and co-authored) one finds

an extended encounter with the event of difference. The extraordinary bookon Leibniz, The Fold,1is no exception. In this work, and regarding Leibniz,Deleuze remarks, no philosophy has ever pushed to such an extreme the

affirmations of one and the same world, and of an infinite differenceand variety in this world.2We are told that Leibniz implemented the sec-

ond great logic of the event3resisting the logic of attribution, developing


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142 Keith Robinson

the great network of interlocking principles, reconciling the universal

and the individual and transforming the concept into a subject: a hubris-

tic encounter with the play of the world making the world itself aproblem and an event that is predicated in every subject. Indeed, TheFold appears to effect a transversal communication with Leibnizs con-cepts, an assemblage of enunciation or intensive identification with his

signature that justifies placing Leibniz within that minor(and secret)

tradition of thinking the event that stretches from the Stoics to White-

head. In his essay on The FoldAlain Badiou argues that Deleuze primarilyinvokes Leibniz as a spokesman for the singular4 explicating sufficient

reason as the indiscernibility of the event and predicate. Badiou prefers

to speak in this regard of Leibniz-Deleuze remarking on how the voicesin The Foldmerge and resonate in a togetherness such that you neverknow who is speaking, nor who assures what is said, or declares himself

to be certain of it.5

However, in the earlier wave of Deleuzian texts from the sixties (Differ-ence and Repetition, Logic of Sense, Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy) thepositive identification with Leibniz is undermined by a certain hesita-

tion. Here, even as Deleuze refers to Leibniz as the first important

theoretician of the event,

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Leibniz is captured hesitating over the possibleand the virtual.7For Deleuze the event of difference is elided by the possible-real distinction that ultimately underpins the model of orgiastic

representation found in Leibniz. The event of difference is not a form of

realization such that something merely possible has existence added to it.

Rather it is the process of the virtualwhich is already a full realitybe-coming actual through differenciation. Thus, any such hesitation over the

possible and the virtual is, as Deleuze says, disastrous for a philosophy of

the event and difference since it abolishes the reality of the virtual and

subordinates it to the identical, replacing pure immanence with a theo-logical model of creation. Leibniz appears to be, at once, crucial to Deleuzes

evolving philosophy of difference and yet a decisive hairs-breadth away from

being its champion. In the earlier texts Leibniz never goes quite far enough

for Deleuze, even as he goes further than any before him, always stopping

short of the Dionysian Idea. In the later texts (both The Fold and theVincennes seminar) we are given a Leibniz that never stops in a constantlyrenewed effort to liberate the fold to infinity through the continuous cre-

ation and connection of concepts. Here we are told that the problem of theworlds realization is added to that of its actualization such that the world

is a virtuality that is actualized monads or souls, but also a possibility that

must be realized in matter or bodies.8 In the end, says Deleuze, we all

remain Leibnizian.9Is the Leibniz of Deleuzes early texts compossible with


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Events of Difference: Deleuzes Reading of Leibniz 143

the later? What is at stake in these differing understandings of Leibniz to

Deleuzes philosophy of events of difference?10

2. EVENT

The question of the event runs like a leitmotifthrough all of Deleuzes work.Ive tried in all of my books, he says, to discover the nature of events. Its

a philosophical concept, the only one capable of ousting the verb to be and

attributes.11The question of the event is developed with such tenacity andrichness that it would not be an exaggeration to say that Deleuzes thought

is a constant encounter with philosophy as the event of differenceun-

derstood as a continuous effort to construct a new ontological andmetaphysical image of thought and a new ethics and politicsa thought

worthy of the events that befall it. This is not an ethico-political doctrine

of acquiescence in the face of accidents that happen but rather the presup-

position of a will that extracts or counter-actualizes the pure event ofdifference from the present. Deleuze picks up the arrow first fired by the

Stoics, then Spinoza and Nietzsche, and re-launches it in a completely new

direction attempting to think difference in itself independently of the

forms of representation which reduce it to the same. 12 For Deleuze the

event of difference is always mediated and represented in the concept de-termining which difference will be made rather than thinking a difference

that makes itself in the event and outside the concept. The difference that

makes itself is for Deleuze immediate and subrepresentative and functions

as the condition of representation: difference is behind everything, but

behind difference there is nothing.13What Deleuze is concerned with, above

all, is thinking difference and repetition as and in the event of actuality, ofthinking that which we are ceasing to be as the difference and repetition of

what we are becoming. In his own terms, then, Deleuze is the diadoche, theone who succeeds to the question of the event. If Deleuze finds resources

in Leibniz to think the event of difference, in the first instance, it will be

necessary to overturn Platonism and collapse the model of representa-

tion generated by it.14

For Deleuze Platonic representation is founded as a model of the Same

which enables one to make a difference by distinguishing the thing itself

from its images, the original from the copy. This determines which differ-ence is made and ensures that difference is coherent through

reconciliation in the concept. However, internal to this structure of

Platonism Deleuze locates and locks onto another more secret and more

profound dualism: that between limited and measured things with fixed

qualities, predicates and subjects and a pure unlimited infinite becoming.


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It is the dualism between legitimate copies and false simulacra. As the mat-

ter or body of the simulacra, pure becoming eludes the action of the Idea

and contests both the model and copy at once. Limited things lie beneaththe Idea but beneath the things is there still not this mad element whichsubsists and occurs on the other side of the order that Ideas impose and

things receive?15

To explore this mad element that subsists in an indeterminate region

on the other side of the Ideas Deleuze turns to the Stoics. In the Stoics

Deleuze finds a radical reversal of the Platonic schema such that bodies

enter into causal relations creating incorporeal entities or effects. Although

bodies and the states of affairs they enter into are real and exist, the incor-

poreal effects they cause have their own reality but only a minimum ofexistence. These incorporeal entities are neither facts nor things but events:

To reverse Platonism is first and foremost to remove essences and to sub-

stitute events in their place.16 Events are characterized by an

unrepresentable pure becoming no longer subject to the action of the Idea.

Neither true or false events become effects of difference. Deleuze removes

Platonic transcendent essences and substitutes the paradoxical power of

immanent events of difference in their place. As Deleuze says, I have its

true spent a lot of time writing about this notion of the event: you see Idont believe in things17

Pressing the logic of predication beyond the Leibnizian rejection of

substance as inert and fixed, Deleuzian events no longer denote an attribute

or quality of the subject but an incorporeal relation of movement and

change that does not refer to things or a state of affairs and cannot be said

to exist. Events are, rather, self referential and insist or subsist within a

zone of immanence. Events are expressed in-between things and language

creating what Deleuze calls the fourth dimension or incorporeal predi-

cate of the proposition. This is the dimension of sense: neutral, inaccessibleand without form. Events express an encounter of forces and a disclosure

of intensities that compels thought, but this compulsion to think that eludes

recognition does not take the form of the remembrance of ideal essences

or the harmonious recognition of objects but can only be sensed in signs ofbecoming.Events then do not have being as such but are signs of processand becoming: signs of time, of space, of language and bodies in which the

many become one and are increased by one, a differential repetition that

does not follow transcendent lines of pre-formation but immanent linesof divergence and creation. This is what both Deleuze and Foucault (and

Blanchot) have elsewhere called a Thought of the Outside.18

In Difference and RepetitionDeleuze defines this intensive space of the Out-side that compels thought and being as a virtuality, a groundless spatium


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without depth that unfolds the difference within itself according to the move-

ment of actualization, a movement that we can describe as the ground rising

to the surface forming a plane. This virtual plane is not an image, resemblanceor projection of the real and neither is it a limitation or negation of the real.

The virtual has the real simplicity of being, the ens realissimumof the scholas-tics, a full reality in itself and is not to be understood as merely possible or

abstract. In relation to the definition of the virtual, Deleuze is fond of quoting

Proust: [it is] real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.19As a

purely affirmative or positive movement the virtual produces difference in

itself even if in extensity it tends to be cancelled.20If in the couple possible-

real Deleuze finds conceptual identity and static predetermination in the

virtual-actual Deleuze uncovers events of pure difference and creation. For thevirtual to become incarnated requires a movement of creative actualization in

which there is no identity, representation, or resemblance between terms only

a dynamic intensive multiplicity that seeks to express the difference in itself.

For Deleuze the event of difference has a complex doubled and invagi-

nated or folded up structure. In this the pure event is to be distinguished

from what happens as a reduction to, or equivalence with, the extensive

space of states of affairs. Rather, the event is inside what happens as the

pure expression of an internal difference; as Deleuze says it signals andawaits us.21 On the one hand there is the event that takes place in the

present, embodied within individuals and persons; and on the other hand

there is the future and past of the event, that which has already happened

and is about to happen: impersonal, pre-individual and without generality

or particularity. On the one side the accomplished act and its realization in

a state of affairs and, on the other, a radically impassive incompletion best

expressed as an infinitive: to green, to die, etc. This double structure of the

event as the two moments of sense andnonsense, of difference andrepeti-

tion is, as we will see, precisely what Deleuze is unable to find in the earlyreading of Leibniz. Deleuzes early reading of Leibniz attempts to show the

failure of Leibnizian philosophy to accede to the conditions necessary for

an affirmation of the event of difference. It is precisely in terms of Leibnizs

commitment to a form of representation that prevents him from going allthe way to the event of difference.

3. INFINITE REPRESENTATION

As we have seen, in a first moment Deleuze has Platonism found and

stake out a domain that will allow the deployment of representation, a site

of transcendental illusion.22 In a second moment, it is Aristotle who de-

ploys representation as finite, limited and organic extending from the


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highest genera to the smallest species. Yet further still, in a third moment,

Deleuze finds a determination of representation that renders it infinite.

Representation now claims the domain beneath both the most infinitelysmall species and opens itself to Being beyond the infinitely large. In this

sense, when representation discovers the infinite within itself it no longer

appears as organicrepresentation but as orgiastic representation.23Orgiasticrepresentation deploys both a short sighted and a long-sighted eye en-

abling the concept to represent the Whole in all of its least parts delivering

determination to a groundin relation to which, as Deleuze says, it is a mat-ter of indifference to Leibniz whether one is before a large or a small, or

before a beginning or an end. This is so because each relative determina-

tion or extreme coincides with a single, total movement of convergence toa ground in which it is born and disappears. It is what Deleuze calls the

infinite movement of evanescence,24a movement in which difference both

vanishes and is produced.

The infinite movement renders determination conceivable and select-

able in the same moment that it makes difference appear as orgiastic and

no longer as organic representation. This is possible because finite deter-

mination does not so much disappear in the infinite as subsist in a kind of

immanent process of vanishing or disappearing. This restlessness, asDeleuze puts it, within orgiastic representation accounts for the duality

within infinite representation as a choice between Hegel and Leibniz and

the difference between them is a matter of two ways of going beyond the

organic.25If the restlessness in both Hegel and Leibniz amounts to an in-

toxication, in Leibniz one also discovers in the finite idea a restlessness of

the infinitely small made up of giddiness, evanescence and even death. 26

Orgiastic representation is then a choice between either the procedures

and movement of contradiction in the infinitely large or what Deleuze calls

a vice-diction of the infinitely small. In contrast to Hegel, Deleuze hasLeibniz begin with cases or properties that include the essential in each

instance without the need for contradiction. Deleuze makes vicediction a

method or technique parallel with that of Hegelian contradiction and they

serve as two sides of the same coin of orgiastic representation. Even if, for

Deleuze, there is greater depth and more orgiastic or Bacchanalian delirium

in Leibniz, ultimately such intoxication is a false appearance, what Deleuze

calls a pre-formed false delirium which poses no threat to the repose

and serenity of the identical.

27

Both Leibniz and Hegel are clearly linkedtogether in their attempts to represent the infinite and, for Deleuze, both

offer a failed effort to think the event of difference since both in the end

feign the attempt to reach the mad or intoxicated element of difference


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by assigning it a reason and both confuse difference in itself with the

inclusion of difference within the identity of the concept in general.

Difference and Repetitionand The Logic of Senseconsistently link Leibnizsthought to this thesis of identity as a presupposition of infinite representa-tion and therefore the subordination of difference. Both finite and infinite

representation and the infinite representation of the finite for Deleuze re-

duce events of difference to the Same and the similar and restore identity.

If the similar has found in Leibniz the condition of convergence capable

of application to the unlimited, in the Same Deleuze finds the uncondi-

tioned principle of sufficient reason capable of making it the rule of the

unlimited. Thus, for Deleuze, infinite or orgiastic representation may mul-

tiply different points of view and join them up in series but Leibnizianprinciples ensure that they nevertheless converge upon the same object

and the same world.28

4. LEIBNIZIAN PRINCIPLES

As Deleuze says, Leibniz loves inventing principles and he brandishes them

like swords.29But throughout his work he continues to multiply their for-

mulations and vary their relations. Leibnizian principles do not just connect

up with each other as clear and distinct links in a supposed chain of rea-soning that extends from an indubitable ground or foundation as in the

Cartesian model. Rather, the principles seem to inhere or are contained

within each other like the sets of Chinese boxes that so fascinated Leibniz.

Reason is an extraordinary kind of labyrinth in Leibniz in which the prin-

ciples are folded up or implicated within one another and merely require

unraveling, unfolding or explicating to reveal their explanatory power.

One place to begin this unfolding is with theprinciple of identity.As the

classic formula A is A the principle appears both certain, finite and yetempty. A thing is what it is and identity consists in the relation between the

thing and what it is in its essence. In the formulation A is A the predicate

does not add to the subject yet it is both necessary and identical with it. It

is necessary because its negation would be a contradiction (A is not A).Alternatively, Leibniz will say that every analytic proposition is true. Ana-

lytic propositions are true not just by virtue of identity or reciprocity but

also by inclusion. Red is a colour is a true analytic proposition by inclu-

sion in that the concept of colour is not identical with the concept of red

but part of the concept of red and as predicate adds nothing to the subject.

These propositions are true by essence, they are the ratio essendi, raisondetre, or reason for being.


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The principle of identity, then, gives us a first approximation to the

question of why there is something rather than nothing (if there were no

identity there would be nothing) and it also gives a model of truth foranalytic propositions where there is either identity or inclusion between

predicate and subject. This inclusion, inherence or being contained of

predicates in the subject is also applicable to other types of proposition.

These are what Leibniz calls contingent propositions or truths of exist-

ence rather than essence. A sinning Adam, a Caesar crossing the Rubicon,

these are contingent truths of existence that are no longer finite as in the

principle of identity but are infinite. All true predication has some basis

in the nature of things30such that everything that happens is contained

in the notion or concept of that thing. Everything that happens to Adam,Alexander or Caesar is contained in the individual notion of Adam,

Alexander or Caesar. What the principle of sufficient reason adds, then, tothe principle of identity is that what is said of a thing is not just the es-

sence of the thing but everything that happens to it or belongs to it.Everything predicated of the subject is contained within it virtually or

implicitly and is actualized or explicated when there is sufficient rea-

son for it to do so. Alternatively, Leibniz will say that every true proposition

is analytical. Sufficient reason explicates the relation between a thing andits concept and includes all the properties of identity as well as express-

ing all of its predicates as being contained forever within that thing:

everything has a reason. Leibniz will say that in principle it is possible to

deduce the complete concept or notion of a subject from its predicateseven though, as Leibniz says, God alone could recognize them all. 31

Leibniz cautions us to not confuse sufficient reason with the principle ofcausality which necessarily refers to something other than the concept(as a well-founded illusion) while sufficient reason expresses the rela-

tion of the thing with its concept. The principle of causality states thenecessary cause but not the sufficient reason which encompasses the

cause. If identity gives us an answer to the question why there is some-

thing rather than nothing then sufficient reason answers the question of

why this particular thing here and now and not some other. Everything

that happens including causation has a reason.

For all the predicates that are true of a subject at a particular point in

space and time (Caesar crossing the Rubicon, Adam sinning) there will be

another (infinite) set of predicates that will constitute a sufficient reasonfor those predicates. The subject, individual substance or monad includesor, more precisely, expresses the totality of the world: Every substance islike a complete world and a mirror of God or of the whole universe.32Ev-

erything has a cause distinct from but included within reason just as one


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might say that the cause and the reason are distinct from but included within

the concept. This, then, is the principle of indiscernibles: everything has a con-

cept! We can say that for Leibniz there is only conceptual difference or thatthe concept and the individual are identical. To Leibniz, then, indiscernibility

means this: the concept, notion or monads are individual substances. Ev-

ery leaf is an individuated substance and has its own concept! Two leavesthat were indiscernible except for number would be an absurdity for Leibniz

since they would be identical and would therefore share the same concept.

If individuals shared the same concept there would not be sufficient rea-

son to explain why they had different locations in space and time.

Alternatively, we can say that every possible world containing indiscernibles

has an indiscernible possible world. God cannot choose between indis-cernible worlds (not wishing to violate the principle of sufficient reason)

so that the actual world contains no indiscernibles. Each individuated sub-

stance expresses the whole world and each notion or concept is an

expression of the world at all times. In Leibnizs extraordinary phrase the

monad is laden with the past and pregnant with the future.33(And we are

plunged into the problem of freedom).

What distinguishes individual substances from one another? Leibniz

will tell us that each individual substance expresses the totality of the worldaccording to the principle ofperspectivism orpoints of view. Each individualnotion expresses the world but only from the point of view that it inhabits

such that

just as the same city viewed from different directions appears en-

tirely different and is, as it were, multiplied perspectively, in just the

same way it happens that, because of the infinite number of simple

substances, there are, as it were, just as many different universes,

which are, nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one, corre-

sponding to the different points of view of each monad.34

We know that monads are without windows or doors and that what theyexpress is completely internalno outside or exterior. My point of view

is this interior world that I express most clearly and distinctly against the

imperceptible backdrop of that which is obscure and confused, a little

glimmer amongst the dark clamour of being. We perceive the world but

we pay attention only to the thoughts that are most distinct.35 Leibnizs

famous example here is, of course, the roaring of the sea (but he also

constantly refers to the examples of dizziness, of fainting, of drifting offto sleep and even of death). In such examples our world is a composite

made up of a vast blurred and unconscious nature only a small portion

of which is perceived with any clarity. All individual substances express


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the same obscure and confused world but not the same clear and distinct

portion of it, not the same perspective on it. This generates Leibnizs

important principle of continuity or the idea that nature never makesleaps.36Thus there are as many universes as there are clear and distinctpoints of view or perspectives on them but the community together make

up one continuous world, a world that exists uniquely as the expressed of

all individual substances. (And Leibniz never had any problem with the

supposed contradiction between continuity and indiscernibles). The in-

finity of monadic worlds together comprise the great City of God for

Leibniz, God being the only instance of a necessary Supreme Monad

and capable of an absolute and infinite clarity.

That all monads express the same world but in an obscure and con-fused way opens onto the strange logicalprinciple of incompossibility.If wereturn to the principle of identity this permits us to develop a criterion

of contradiction enabling us to demonstrate that A is not A or that a

squared circle is impossible. However, on the level of sufficient reason,

Adam not sinning or Caesar not crossing the Rubicon are clearly both

possible and non-contradictory and yet incompatible with the truths of

existence that are forever a part of the complete concept of Adam and

Caesar. How can Leibniz maintain both that Caesar crossing the Rubiconis forever contained in his individual notion and that Caesar not cross-

ing the Rubicon is possible? Of course, Adam non-sinner is possible in

itself but incompossible with the world that exists . Adam non-sinner is a pos-sibility that exists in another world but is not compossible with the worldthat God has chosen. A recurrent theme in the correspondence with

Arnauld is that God did not create Adam a sinner, but only created the

world in which Adam sinned. In order to exist it is not enough that some-

thing be merely possible it must be compossible with the world already

chosen by God. For Leibniz, in the understanding of God there are infi-nite possibles that all tend towards existence. Essence in Leibniz means

precisely this tendency to exist, a possibility seeking out existence and

all possibles want to pass into existence. Each possible on its own could

pass into existence but not all the possibles form compatible combina-

tions. We might say that some possibles are incompatible from the point

of view of existence or that some possibles are not compossible with oth-

ers. God will compare and then choose only that set of possibles that offer

the greatest quantity of perfection and are the most compossible. Whatprevents all the possibles from co-existing, then, for Leibniz is the hy-

pothesis that God calculates and chooses from the infinity of possible

worlds and, in a divine game of chess, selects the best combination, the

one richest in essence and the one that exhibits the greatest complexity


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possible from minimum effort (i.e., the most complex derived from the

most simple).

We have seen individual notions like Adam or Caesar include the entiretyof the world in their concept and this inclusion is necessarily the form in

which what each expresses is compossible with what all the other monads

express. Leibnizs strange city is composed of individual monads that are

closed and blind, without doors or windows. There is no direct communica-

tion between them and yet they express harmony,a principle ofpre-establishedharmony. Each monad is then a kind of spiritual automatonforever expressinga harmonious compossibility established by God. Deleuzes entire reading of

Leibniz will turn on exchanging, and later folding, this transcendent theo-

logical principle that guarantees disjunction in its exclusive or limitativesense,37 and which regulates the entire Leibnizian system, with an imma-

nent principle (difference, fold) that affirms disjunctive synthesis in its

inclusive, non-restrictive sense. Deleuze will argue that Leibnizian principles

form a world through something like a series of circles of convergencethat maywell become infinite but do not acquire the power to affirm either divergence ordecenteringexcluding the event of difference in itself.

5. DELEUZE-LEIBNIZ: CONVERGENCE AND EXCLUSIONOne of the distinctive features of Deleuzes early reading of Leibniz is the

deployment of a virtual or transcendental field of nomadic singularitiesanterior to the actualized world of predicates and consistent with the neu-

trality and genesis of sense/non-sense as an event. For Deleuze this field

is presupposed by Leibnizs principles even if Leibniz can only recognize

it ultimately in the form of good sense and already constituted indi-

viduals and persons. This field of singularity-events are pre-individual

and are, therefore, not to be thought of as fixed attributes of a subject butas mobile, infinitive verbs expressing an action or a passion, an affecting

or becoming affected. In the first stage of the genesis of sense a singular-

ity is actualized by being extended over a line of ordinary or regular points

up to the vicinity of another singularity and a world is born when theseries converge. Another world begins when the resulting series diverge.

To be actualized, as we have seen, is also to be expressed and in each

world the individual monads express all the singularities of this world to

infinity, with each monad enveloping a certain number of finite

singularities in a clear manner. To sin indicates a singularity-event in

the vicinity of which Adam is constituted but to be a sinner is an ana-

lytic predicate of an actualized subject. The expressed world exists, then,

in individuals but it also subsists as an event or a verb. Thus singularities


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are the genetic elements that constitute individuals and the world. Each

individual substance or monad expresses this world in all times as a con-

vergence and actualization of these singularities. Leibnizs deity, forDeleuze, forms a world on the condition that the series which depend on

each singularity converge defining compossibility. Compossibility is, then,

defined by Deleuze-Leibniz as a continuity, convergence and conjunc-

tion of singularities and incompossibility a discontinuity, divergence or

disjunction of series in the neighborhood of other constitutive

singularities. For Caesar to not cross the Rubicon is a singularity or

event that is not impossible in itself. It is incompossible with the world in

which Caesar actually crossed the Rubicon. For Deleuze Leibniz makes

use of this rule of incompossibility to exclude events from one another,making a negative use of divergence and disjunction. If this is justified

by invoking a God who calculates and chooses it is only to the extent that

events are grasped as already actualized. This is not justified if we con-

sider pure events and the ideal game that animates them.

For Deleuze there is, then, another level (differentiation) that Leibniz wasunable to fully grasp hindered as he was by theological exigencies.38 This

stage of pure events is essentially problematic and problematizing.39 The

problem-event refers to a virtual field of objective indetermination or ideal-ity abstracted from and never entirely captured in any specific determination

of its conditions. In distinguishing between the event as a particular deter-

mination of the problem (Adam sinning) and the problem-event as a set of

objectively indeterminate singularities (to be the first man, to live in a gar-

den of paradise, to have a wife created from ones own rib, etc) Deleuze opens

up the virtual or problematic space in which one may define Adam posi-

tively according to a few singularities which can be combined and

complement each other in different ways and in different worlds. Thus there

is what Deleuze calls a vague, indeterminate, floating, or nomad Adam thatfunctions as the ambiguous sign of singularities, appearing as a variable =

x in all worlds. There is now a something = x common to all worlds en-

abling the affirmation of divergence and disjunction, a bringing together or

synthesis of all the incompossibles as a compatible, resonating series. As

Deleuze says: incompossibility is now a means of communication40 such

that nothing prevents us from affirming that incompossibles belong to the

same world and that incompossible worlds belong to the same universe.

Deleuzes favourite example here is Borgess The Garden of Forking Paths, inwhich the Chinese philosopher Tsui Pen chooses all the alternative pathssimultaneously: Fang let us say has a secret. A stranger knocks at the door.

Naturally there are various outcomes. Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder

can kill Fang, both can be saved, both can die, and so on. In Tsui Pens work,


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all the possible solutions occur, each one being the point of departure for

other bifurcations.41Rather than an exclusion of predicates from a thing by

virtue of the identity of its concept, Deleuze finds in Borgess reply to Leibnizthe conditions for an affirmation of disjunctive synthesis, an affirmation

capable of carrying out the synthesis itself by drifting from one term to

another and following the distance between terms.42

The inherence of predicates in the expressive monad does indeed pre-

suppose the compossibility of the expressed world but both presuppose

the arrangement of pure singularities that are linked together in series ac-

cording to rules of convergence anddivergence. Although Leibniz may havebeen able to go quite far into the stage of the genesis of the event and sense,

the stage of actualization of individuated worlds and persons, he was onlyable to hint at the difference in itself that governs the relations between

singularities in themselves produced and distributed in a prior stage within

a pre-individual and problematic virtual field.

In Difference and RepetitionDeleuze finds this whole field of pre-indi-vidual and virtual problems is tentatively approachedyet never fully

incorporated by Leibnizs understanding of perceptual ideasespecially

when inflected by the calculus. Leibnizian Ideas are described as virtual

multiplicities composed of differential relations and singularities appre-hended at transitional moments of consciousness when one is close to

sleep, in a stupor, intoxicated or approaching death. Indeed in the NewEssays on UnderstandingLeibniz spends much of the preface redescribinghis system from the perspective of such Ideas or insensible perceptions.Such perceptions no longer relate to a recognizable object in space and

time but to the tiny, unconscious perceptions that compose it. For ex-

ample, the roaring noise of the sea becomes noticeable when the minute

or barely perceived waves or drops of water combine confusedly creating

a conscious perception. Leibniz remarks that the noise of the sea here isclear but confused because the component little perceptions are them-

selves not clear but obscure, like insufficiently distinct parts of an

aggregate. Leibnizs famous passages here suggest that clear ideas are in

themselves confused and confused insofar as they are clear. Is there a

difference in kind here between the clear and the confused? In the end,

for Deleuzes earlier reading of Leibniz the distinction between the clear

and the confused is a difference of degree and can be easily accommo-

dated within the Cartesian logic. For Deleuze, however close Leibniz comesto the differential Idea, however close he comes to encountering Dionysusat the seashore or the water mill, he continually reinstates the Cartesian

principle of representation understood as the proportionality of the clear

and the distinct. According to such a principle an idea is all the more


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154 Keith Robinson

distinct the clearer it is. If an idea is confused it is simply not clear enough

in its parts It is this clarity and distinctness that reconstitutes the pure

light of reason. As Deleuze says, it is with this pure light of reason illumi-nating the structure of ideas that the entire image of thought was

compromised as a result.43

Deleuzes pursues another reading of Leibnizs logic of Ideas pushing

them to the point of difference in itself, radicalizing the sense in which the

clear idea is in itself confused and the distinct in itself obscurea differ-

ence in kind and not just in degree. Our perception of the noise of the sea

is clear-confused comprehending the whole confusedly and expressing

clearly only certain elements and relations depending on the threshold of

consciousness and the state of our bodies. The Idea is on the contrarydistinct but obscure in that the drops of water remain distinct as genetic

elements with all the relations they enter and compose but obscure insofar

as they are not distinguished or actualized as a conscious perception. Con-

scious perception, then, becomes the effect of a differential relation thatdetermines a field of singularities and, as Deleuze says, these singularities

condense forming a threshold of differentiation on the basis of which little

perceptions are actualized, but actualized in an apperception that is clear

and confused. Unconscious or molecular perception is related to con-scious or molar perception not as a part to a whole but as a relation between

the virtual-actual. For Deleuze, ultimately, Leibnizian Ideas demonstrate a

disastrous hesitation or oscillation in that they are a realization in the

element of the possibleor rather conceived as a possible, a realized pos-sible.44For Deleuze the idea of possibility is always, in one or another, taken

from the idea of reality so that the possible is merely the concept of some-

thing that might exist but does not yet exist. Thus between the concept of

the possible and the real there isno differenceonly identity. By contrast, the

virtual is a full reality in itself which is not realized but actualized throughdifferent/ciation. The clear and distinct are separated into two divergingand differentiated systems, languages or series of events (marked by the

differential t/c) that could never unite into a natural light. Such a divergent

series are strictly incompossible for Deleuzes early Leibniz and consti-

tute an exclusion of the event of difference since it is only by maximizing

convergence or continuity within a single and same series for each point

of view that the criterion of the best of all possible worlds is obtained.

Leibnizian multiple, clear and distinct perspectives do not establishDeleuzian perspectivism either since for every point of view there must

correspond an autonomy of divergent series. For Leibniz, on the contrary,

differing points of view converge on the same world: the best of all pos-

sible worlds. However, for Deleuze the best of all worlds is not the one


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that reproduces the eternal, but the one in which new creations are pro-

duced, the one endowed with a capacity for innovation or creativity.45 In

other words, for Deleuze the best of all actual worlds is the one with thegreatest virtuality.46This whole thesis then constitutes what we have beencalling Deleuzes early reading of Leibniz and can be finalized and sum-

marized in the following passage from Difference and Repetition:

This hesitation between the possible and the virtual explains why no

one has gone further than Leibniz in the exploration of sufficient

reason, and why, nevertheless, no one has better maintained the il-

lusion of a subordination of that sufficient reason to the identical.

No one has come closer to a movement of vicediction in the Idea,

but no one has better maintained the supposed right of representa-tion, albeit at the price of rendering it infinite. No one has been

better able to immerse thought in the element of difference and pro-

vide it with a differential unconscious, surround it with little

glimmerings and singularities all in order to save and reconstitute

the homogeneity of a natural light a la Descartes.47

6. THE FOLD: DIVERGENCE AND INCLUSION

Although some facets of this thesis are retained in Deleuzes later reading

of Leibniz many aspects appear distant if not absent. The earlier readings

emphasis on the right of representation gives way to the sense in which

Leibniz frees the fold by taking it to infinity.48In the earlier reading Leibniz

is reproached over his feigned attempts at reaching the Dionysian. Rea-

son merely acts the drunkard and sings a Dionysian tune. This estimate

now yields to the assessment that Leibnizs Baroque principles push the

rationalist tradition to the very point of madness. The suspicion of iden-

tity appears now displaced, painted over in a much larger canvas of ideas.Or, rather, Leibnizian principles can now be seen as governed by a dy-

namic continuum with two poles. At one pole, the principles are constantly

folded into each other such that there is only one identical world or every-

thing is the same and, at the other pole, a continuous unfolding and

partitioning so that the world is distinguished by a proliferation of differ-

ences of degree and manner. Deleuzes two readings are distinguished by

such subtle inflections and changes of emphases that the difference be-

tween the readings is perhaps evanescent, vanishing or nothing more thanan imperceptible event of difference, a tiny, unrepresentable fold.

Perhaps we can say that in the earlier reading of Leibniz Deleuze con-

centrated on the principles that emphasize the tendency to identity,

similarity and exclusion in Leibnizs system. In the later reading Deleuze


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156 Keith Robinson

focuses much more on the systems tendency to differ and unfold itself

across zones and boundaries, constantly attempting to connect everything

by multiplying principles from within itself. Indeed this is Leibnizs Ba-roque condition for Deleuze: the effort to keep on folding and unfolding

principles to infinity in a world on the verge of losing its foundational

principles. The reading of Leibniz in The Fold, then, becomes much moreinclusivelinking Leibniz to an outside and a Baroque that is at once politi-cal, musical, aesthetic, scientific and philosophical. Deleuzes return to the

monograph form with Leibniz suggests a need to paint the whole picture

of Leibniz, a portrait of his philosophy in which Leibniz traverses the rich

historical and intellectual context of early modernity but also, in some

sense, escapes from it and speaks to we late-modern ones. Deleuze madea virtue in his previous monographs of taking the work as a whole, of

entering into the lair of a thinker and reconstructing their invisible worlds

(umwelt) or milieu as a kind of ethologyof their thought. Deleuze will de-scribe Leibnizs world in the later texts much more emphatically in terms

of events, affects and multiplicities: capacities for affecting and being af-

fected. The only thing that counts is the capacity of Leibnizs concepts to

affect and be affected, to compose and recompose relations culminating

in pure events of difference. Each Leibnizian concept becomes an event, astimulus of affect that makes up Leibnizs world: little glimmerings in the

dark depths of a vast nature. For Deleuze if you pick and choose you wont

understand these capacities, affects or associated milieus that make up the

work because you see that some element that seems less convincing thanothers is an absolutely essential step in his exploration, his alchemy, and

that he would not have reached this new revelation you find so astonishing

if he had not followed the path on which you had not initially seen the need

for this or that detour.49 Leibnizs thought is especially sensitive in this

regard since his core concepts are both close to modern ethology and, aswe have seen, connect up with each other in complex reciprocally depen-

dent patterns that form a network, structure or system. In The FoldLeibnizsconcepts are constructed now as a rhizome or open system and its pre-cisely their power as a system that brings out what is good or bad, what is

or isnt new, what is or isnt alive in a group of concepts.50Thus, the issue in

Leibniz commentary of where to begin is largely an irrelevance for Deleuze,

as it is for Leibniz, because any real effort to understand must be governed

by this commitment to unfold the whole system and in unfolding the wholesystem one can sort out what is or is not still alive and what is still of use in

constructing the event of our actuality. Effectively, in such constructivism,one always already begins in the middle and within such a complex, het-

erogeneous system one can never tell ahead of time what affects it might


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be capable of in any given relationthus one is committed to a lasting

prudence, a prolonged experimentation with a body of thought. If, in the

earlier texts, Deleuze does not recognize this commitment to Leibniz inThe Fold the hesitations voiced in the earlier texts are subordinated to

this logic of the whole. Accepting and following the work as a whole means

making oneself worthy of the events of difference that pervade the work,

remaining attentive to the signs of creative becoming that keep the work

alive. Perhaps a remark in Leibniz (that Deleuze often uses) regarding the

need for Deleuzes renewed engagement with Leibniz is apposite here: I

thought Id reached port, but found myself thrown back onto the open sea.51

In The Foldone witnesses this sense of creative becoming, of concepts

being kept alive, in the opening of Leibnizs system to a principle that con-ditions it throughout. The Fold is not a first or universal principle and nor

is it a transcendental in any pre-Kantian or Kantian sense although, as

we will see, in some ways it resembles them. The Fold differentiates and is

differenciatedit is everywhere and yet singular so that no two things are

folded the same way or in the same manner. Deleuze now describes

Leibnizs conceptual system as an inclusive multiplicity conditioned by

the Fold, actively expressing events of difference. The Fold takes us on a

journey into this strange Baroque conceptual labyrinth, a continuous laby-rinth that is simultaneously ethological, architectural and musical; equally

scientific, political and aesthetic in which the monad is opened to a multi-

plicity of divergent milieu, all inclusive within its world or inter-expressive,

as Deleuze says, and in which order is generated by immanent processesof self organization rather than transcendent, all-regulating harmony. Ev-

erything folds but not in the same way and the same thing will not always

fold in the same way. We can see this perhaps most clearly in The Foldin its

descriptions of monadic activity and physical being and the parallels and

folds between them. Thus we find ourselves in a labyrinth now constructedaccording to principles that are secreted from within itself, moving along

two infinities or floors. To take us through this labyrinth we are immedi-

ately confronted with the need for a cryptographer, a Leibniz-Deleuze who

can account for nature and decipher the soul, who can peer into the cran-

nies of matter and read into the folds of the soul.52

The pleats of matter and the folds of the soul are like two floors of the

world labyrinth or the baroque house: they are distinct but inseparable and

both act as if each influenced the other

53

They are now an inclusive disjunc-tion that folds an upper floorclosed, private and sealed, covered with a

stretched canvas and diversified by tiny folds as if it were a living dermis54

with a lower floor, pierced with windows and open to the outside. The folds

on the upper level secrete a knowledge which is triggered or solicited by the


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158 Keith Robinson

complex folds of matter on the lower level. On the upper level a spiritualizing

tendency, borne of weightlessness, giving rise to the movement of ascen-

sion and elevation and, on the lower, the descent to a gravitas or physicalmass. The two levels are in constant tension and communication even ifDeleuze will describe their relation as a non-relation.55The two forms are

heterogeneous and anisomorphic and yet mutually presuppose or even har-

monize one another but in a completely new way. They are linked together

in a bond, togetherness or belonginga vinculumthat opens an interme-diate space of overlap, the two floors passing through one another such that

we can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins.56For Deleuze-

Leibniz the event of difference is double or folded twice such that it is

actualized in the upper level and realized in the lower, folded in the souls thatactualize it according to the regime of laws that pertain to them and realized

in bodies. As Deleuze says, a Leibnizian transcendental philosophy, which

bears on the event rather than the phenomenon, replaces Kantian condi-

tioning by means of the double operation of transcendental actualization

and realization.57

7. THEEVENT OF THEACTUAL

If it is the Fold (or what Deleuze calls, following Heidegger, the Zweifalt)that moves between the two levels here, distributing its forces according to

variable configurations, it is in the centre of The Fold, in the chapter en-titled What is an Event? that we can understand the function of the

synthesis or non relation between the levels that constitutes a Deleuzo-

Leibnizian transcendental philosophy of the event of difference. In an

interesting but perhaps surprising move Deleuze invokes Whitehead as a

means to creatively re-open key Leibnizian concepts to the differences of

a new harmony, a world of captures instead of closures,58

in which it isno longer classical reason that is breaking down (as it was for Leibniz)

under the force of divergences, incompossibilities, discords and disso-

nances,59but human reason itself. As we have seen from Deleuzes early

reading, monads exclude universes that are incompossible with their worldand they express the same world without any contact, subject to a condi-

tion of closure. Bifurcations and divergences of series are irreducible

borders such that each expressive unit or monad includes the compossible

world that moves into existence. But Whiteheadian prehensive units, as

Deleuze calls them, to the contrary, are naturally open, open and always

already connected to another prehension either forming a world with them

or excluding them (what Whitehead calls negative prehensions). Thus

bifurcations, divergences and incompossibilities belong to the same world


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and can no longer be excluded from within by expressive units (monads).

The logic of exclusive disjunction is rejected in favour of an inclusiveness

and folding of differences and an affirmation of the distance that sepa-rates incompatibilities. For Deleuze, in a same chaotic world divergent

series are endlessly tracing bifurcating paths.60Rather than the earlier di-

chotomy of either transcendent organization or chaos or the event of

difference, which arguably still leaves difference captured within the terms

of an exclusive disjunction, Deleuze now presents the genesis of events of

difference as emerging dynamically, inclusively and processually from achaosmos: a chaos that includes, envelops and folds into its own forms of

order and structures of organization. As Deleuze says even God now be-

comes Process, a process that at once affirms incompossibilities and passesthrough them.61rather than the Leibnizian God who compares worlds and

chooses the most compossible.62The event of our difference, then, of our

actuality, expresses one borderless world within which Sextus will rape

and not rape Lucretia, where Caesar crosses and does not cross the Rubicon,

where Fang kills, is killed, and neither kills nor is killed. Monads can no

longer contain the world as if in a closed circle but now are kept half open

(Deleuze says as if held half open by a pair of pliers), straddling a neo-

Baroque that releases bifurcating trajectories that constantly move awayfrom any centre. Monadology is overtaken by a nomadology: a strange

kind of asundering or wandering. Musically, monadic souls spontane-

ously sang of themselves in concert with a choir of monads without either

knowing or hearing that they were in perfect accord or harmony. Yet har-mony is now in crisis; melody is submitted to a force of variation such that

any realization or resolution of accord is deferred indefinitely. The mas-

ter fugue has collapsed and the notes, abandoning their score, have become

self-actualizing entering into infinitely varied patterns of movement, find-

ing atonal discords of their own. Following Boulez, music becomes apolyphony of polyphonies.63

Deleuzes extended engagements with Leibniz reflect the subtle trans-

formations and movements of the event of difference in Deleuzes thought.

We move from the hesitation or undecidability over Leibnizs inclusive/

exclusive conception of identity/difference in the early reading to the fully

inclusive folding of Deleuzo-Leibnizian events of difference in the later

reading. For Deleuze keeping the work (and Lebinizs thought) amongst

us, then, involves the creation of new concepts like the Fold and also thefolding of new concepts. It involves constructing the events of difference

that keep the work alive. Above all, this constructivism is a response to new

problems and new conditions and amounts to a genealogy of our condi-

tion, almost a contribution to a history of the present in Michel Foucaults


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160 Keith Robinson

sense. Deleuze keeps Leibniz alive in his own thought by constructing from

Leibnizian concepts counter-actualizations to problems of contempo-

rary significance in order to assemble the event of difference of today,the event of our actuality. In what we might call the Leibniz effect TheFolddoubles the sense and force of Leibnizs thought in holding together,in the most complex and difficult way, concepts from science, philosophy

and aesthetics by showing the current and continuing relation of Leibniz

and the Baroque to our actualitya Leibniz to come. Deleuze mimes orperforms the event of our actuality, of what we are in the process of be-

coming and in this performance the extraordinary concept of the Fold

becomes an arrow shot by one thinker and picked up by another.

In Deleuzes later reading, then, between Leibniz and the Baroque, inthe and that joins and separates, the concept of the Fold emerged. The

Fold in between Leibniz and the Baroque is our singularity, a

differentiator, a differential.64If the Baroque does not exist (or lacks a

concept) it insists or subsists as a line which would move exactly accord-

ing to the fold. Deleuze makes Leibniz the philosopher of the Baroque,

capable of providing its concept and, in this, The Fold expresses Leibnizsthought as a living force, a virtual potential that may only be activated in

another world, but a world quite compossible with what ours is becoming.By demonstrating how the problem-event of The Baroquewhich con-tinues both internally conditioning who we are and externally as an active

process shaping our worldmight be counter-effectuated by extracting

its operative concept, Deleuze gives expression to this new event of our

actuality, the difference that we are in the process of becoming that has the

potential to both liberate and enslave.

Ultimately, it is in an effort to address the question of how we are to

inhabit this world that Deleuzes later reading of Leibniz itself becomes an

event, an intervention in the becoming of this world. In other words, theconditions of the problem have changed: we have a new Baroque and a

neo-Leibnizianism.65The Event of Difference or the problem of the world

that pertains to our actuality can no longer be considered from the point

of view of a closed world or one (all be it infinite) ordered universe but

must now be articulated as a problem of the compossibility of differ-

ences within multiple worlds, unfolding territories or milieu subject to a

condition of capture. The Baroque line is in us but opens out onto what

we are becoming prompting the adjustment, revisioning or folding ofLeibniz in Deleuzes thought. As Deleuze says we all remain Leibnizian

because what always matters is folding, unfolding, refolding.66


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NOTES

1. G. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (hereafter TF), trans. T. Conley

(Athlone Press, 1993).2. TF, p. 58.

3. Ibid., p. 53.

4. A. Badiou, Gilles Deleuze: The Fold: Leibniz and theBaroque, in Gilles Deleuzeand the Theatre of Philosophy, ed. C. Boundas and D. Olkowski (Routledge,1994), p.55.

5. Ibid., p. 64.

6. G. Deleuze, Logic of Sense(hereafter LS), trans. M. Lester and C. Boundas (Co-lumbia University Press, 1990), p.171.

7. G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, (hereafter DR), trans P. Patton (AthlonePress, 1993), p. 213.

8. TF, p. 104.

9. Ibid., p. 137.

10. Deleuzes early reading of Leibniz is dispersed throughout a number of texts

including Logic of Senseand Difference and Repetition, but perhaps the ear-liest references are found in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. In thelater reading I include the lecture series that Deleuze gave at Vincennes in

the early and mid eighties, references scattered throughout the Cinemavol-umes, the book on Foucaultand, of course, The Foldand the interviews thatfollowed the publication of that book. Of the secondary literature on Leibniz

there are perhaps 3 or 4 very fine readings including Bertrand Russells now

canonical The Philosophy of Leibniz (Routledge, 1992).This text, along withCouturats Le Logique de Leibniz, (George Olms, 1901) was decisive in estab-lishing a number of important claims that Deleuze will contest. Firstly, the

idea that Leibnizs metaphysics derive from his logic. Heidegger in his Meta-physical Foundations of Logic(Indiana University Press, 1984) will claim thatthe reverse is the case: that Leibnizs logic derives from his metaphysics and is

rooted within a certain conception of Being. There is of course somethingwonderfully Leibnizian about the symmetry of these claims! For Deleuze

Leibnizs logic and his metaphysics are almost indiscernible, overlap or

perhaps we should say fold through one another and choosing one as the

ground from which the other is deduced doesnt get us very far. For ex-

ample, the notion of the inclusion of the predicate in the subject appears to be

a logical claim and yet, following Leibnizs own examples, is clearly depen-

dent upon a metaphysics of the event, what Deleuze would call an event of

difference or what Heidegger would call an event (ereignis) of Being. For both

Deleuze and Heidegger thought is not a stable or constant attribute of a sub-ject but a pred icate in mov ement, an event of process, passage and

transformation. For Russell and Couturat the predicate in Leibniz is to be

understood on the (logical) model of attribution (properties). Thus for them


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162 Keith Robinson

Leibniz reduces relations to properties of things and so creates all kinds of

difficulties for himself. Leibniz exhibits a simple case of inconsistency, then,

for Russell, when he relies on examples of relation to support his case for

internal properties. For Deleuze Leibniz does nothing but talk about rela-tions because he thinks the predicate as event. In a sense this amounts to a

kind of deconstruction since the logic of examples pulls against the stated

claims of the text.

11. G. Deleuze,Negotiations: 19721990, (hereafter N), trans M. Joughin (Colum-bia University Press, 1995), p.141.

12. DR, p. xix.

13. Ibid., p. 57.

14. If there is a failure to think this event of pure becoming as real in Platonism it is

in Aristotle that Deleuze finds the greatest refusal to think difference outside

representation. For Deleuze the Aristotelian model of limited and finite or-

ganic representation makes difference a reflexive concept, a resemblance found

between the large and the small. In Leibniz, this same model, although rendered

infinite, is still retained in the element of representation.

15. LS, p. 2.

16. Ibid., p. 53.

17. N, p. 160.

18. See my Thought of the Outside: The Foucault/Deleuze Conjunction,Philoso-phy Today43:1 (Spring 1999).

19. DR, p. 208. The importance of this phrase is reflected in its almost ubiquitous

appearance throughout Deleuzes oeuvre. One can find variants of this phrase

in Difference and Repetitionas well as Proust, Bergsonism,the Cinemabooksand Foucault amongst others.

20. DR, p. 266

21. LS, p. 149

22. DR, p. 266

23. Ibid., p. 4224. Ibid.

25. Ibid., p. 45.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., p. 50

28. Although this thesis of infinite representation, as a whole, is not present in

The Fold, a version is present as an appendix in the book on Michel Foucaultthat immediately preceded The Fold. Thus one line of difference betweenDeleuzes early and later readings of Leibniz can, paradoxically, be located

here as a fold.29. TF, p. 44.

30 G. W. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and Other essays, (hereafter DM), trans.D Garber and R Ariew (Hackett Publishing Company, 1991), pp. 78.


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31 Ibid.

32 Ibid., p. 9.

33 Ibid., p.7134 Ibid., p.76.

35 Ibid., p.26.

36. Ibid., p.56. See also New Essays on Human Understanding. Trans. and ed. P.Remnant and J. Bennett (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

37. LS, p. 176.

38. Ibid., p. 172.

39. Ibid., p. 54.

40. Ibid., p. 174.

41. Ibid., p. 114.42. Ibid., p. 174.

43. DR, p. 253.

44. Ibid., p. 213.

45. TF, p. 79.

46. We could say here that if Leibniz replaces The Good with The Best then

Deleuze replaces both with The Most Creative.

47. DR, p. 213.

48. N, p. 159.49. Ibid., p. 85.

50. Ibid., p. 32.

51 Ibid., p. 151.

52 TF, p. 1.

53 DM, p. 81.

54 TF, p. 4.

55 Ibid., p. 44.

56 Ibid., p. 114.

57 Ibid., p. 120.

58 Ibid., p. 81.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid.

62. Whether Whiteheads God is actually that different from the Leibnizian deity is

an issue of real contention. In Science and the Modern WorldWhiteheads Godis clearly Leibnizian, antecedently selecting values and placing limitations upon

the realm of eternal objects. Deleuzes claim that the Whiteheadian God is aProcess.. that affirms incompossibilities and passes through them although

consistent in some respectswith the conceptuality of Process and Realitywouldtend to make the roles, purposes and functions of such a radical conception of

God practically redundant. If God passes through incompossibles what does


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164 Keith Robinson

this amount to? For a detailed analysis of these issues see Tim Clarks fine paper

A Whiteheadian Chaosmos? Process Studies28:34.

63. TF, p. 82.

64. N, p. 156.

65. TF, p. 136.

66. Ibid.

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Events of Difference