## 1. Life and Works



Deleuze was born in Paris to conservative, middle-class parents, who
sent him to public schools for his elementary education; except for
one year of school in Normandy during the Occupation, he lived in the
same section of Paris his entire life. His personal life was
unremarkable; he remained married to the same woman he wed at age 31,
Fanny (Denise Paul) Grandjouan, a French translator of D. H. Lawrence,
and raised two children with her. He rarely traveled abroad, although
he did take a trip to the United States in 1975; for the most part he
minimized his attendance at academic conferences and colloquia,
insisting that the activity of thought took place primarily in
writing, and not in dialogue and discussion. The most dramatic event
in his life occurred early, when, during the Occupation,
Deleuze's older brother was arrested by the Nazis for resistance
activities and deported; he died on the train to Auschwitz.



When the Germans began their occupation of France in June 1940,
Deleuze's family was on vacation in Normandy, and he spent a
year being schooled there. Deleuze traced his initiation into
literature and philosophy to his encounter with a teacher at Deauville
named Pierre Halbwachs (son of the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs), who
introduced him to writers such as Gide and Baudelaire. Early on, he
recalled, philosophical concepts struck him with the same force as
literary characters, having their own autonomy and style. After the
Liberation, Deleuze returned to Paris and undertook his
*khagne* (an intensive year of preparatory studies) at
the well-known Lycee Henri IV, and then studied the history of
philosophy at the Sorbonne. He was taught by Jean Hippolyte and
Ferdinand Alquie, whom he "loved and admired
enormously," as well as by Georges Canguilhem and Maurice de
Gandillac. Like many of his peers he was as influenced by the writings
of Jean-Paul Sartre as he was by the work of his academic mentors.



Deleuze's historically oriented study at the Sorbonne led him to
devote his first book, *Empiricism and Subjectivity* (1953), to
Hume. In an era in which peers like Foucault and Derrida, students at
the Ecole Normale Superieure, concentrated on "the
three 'H's" (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger),
Deleuze's decision to write on empiricism and Hume was already a
provocation, early evidence of the heterodox tendencies of his
thought. From 1953 to 1962--which he later referred to as
"a hole in my life"--Deleuze published little, moving
among various teaching positions in Paris and the provinces. It was
also during this time that he contracted the recurring respiratory
ailment that would plague him for the rest of his life. In 1962,
*Nietzsche and Philosophy* was published to considerable
acclaim, cementing Deleuze's reputation in academic circles. He
followed this initial success with *Kant's Critical
Philosophy* (1963); *Proust and Signs* (1964); and
*Bergsonism* (1966). In 1968 he published *Difference and
Repetition* as his primary thesis for the *doctorat
d'Etat*, with *Spinoza and the Problem of
Expression* as the secondary thesis.



The next year, 1969, proved to be an important one for Deleuze. First,
he found a permanent teaching position in Paris, at the experimental
campus of the University of Paris VIII in Vincennes (which later moved
to its current location in St. Denis); he gave weekly seminars at this
institution until his retirement in 1987. Second, he published another
major text in his own name, *Logic of Sense*. But most
importantly, it was then that he met Felix Guattari, a radical
psychoanalyst and political militant, with whom he began a long
collaboration. Their first joint volume, *Anti-Oedipus* (1972),
was a best seller in France, a veritable *succes de
scandale*, and thrust Deleuze into the limelight as a public
intellectual. They followed this with *Kafka: Toward a Minor
Literature* (1975), and then a book which, at least in the eyes of
some, rivals *Difference and Repetition* for the title of
Deleuze's masterwork, *A Thousand Plateaus* (1980).



The 1980s were a decade of independent works for Deleuze: *Francis
Bacon: Logic of Sensation* (1981); *Cinema I: The
Movement-Image* (1983); *Cinema II: The Time-Image* (1985);
*Foucault* (1986); and *The Fold: Leibniz and the
Baroque* (1988). He then resumed his collaboration with Guattari
for their final joint work, *What is Philosophy?* (1991). His
final years were spent in very ill health, although he did manage to
publish a remarkable short essay, "Immanence: A Life" in
1995, before taking his own life on November 4, 1995.


## 2. Deleuze's Readings of Other Philosophers



Before he ever wrote "in his own name" in *Difference
and Repetition* and *Logic of Sense*, Deleuze wrote a
series of works on figures in the history of philosophy (Hume,
Bergson, Nietzsche, Kant, and Spinoza). In writing these works,
Deleuze sought to unearth the presuppositions he absorbed in his
education; chief among them, he felt, was a deep-seated privilege of
identity over difference. Deleuze thus set about trying to accelerate
however he could a departure from Hegel, whom he saw as emblematic of
that privilege. Deleuze attacks Hegel and others in what we can
call--though Deleuze did not--the "identitarian"
tradition first of all by means of a radicalized reading of Kant,
whose genius, as Deleuze explains in *Kant's Critical
Philosophy* (1963), was to have conceived of a purely
*immanent* critique of reason--a critique that did not
seek "errors" of reason produced by external causes, but
rather "illusions" that arise from within reason itself by
the illegitimate (transcendent) uses of the syntheses of
consciousness. Deleuze characterized his own work as a philosophy of
immanence, arguing that Kant himself had failed to realize fully the
ambitions of his critique, for at least two reasons: first, the
failure to pursue a fully immanent critique, and second, the failure
to propose a genetic account of real experience, resting content with
the account of the conditions of possible experience.



First, Kant made the field of consciousness immanent *to* a
transcendental subject, thereby reintroducing an element of identity
that is transcendent (that is, external) to the field itself, and
reserving all power of synthesis (that is, identity-formation) in the
field to the activity of the always already unified and transcendent
subject. (Deleuze was influenced in this regard by his reading of
Sartre's 1937 essay "The Transcendence of the Ego.")
Already in his Hume book, *Empiricism and Subjectivity* (1953),
Deleuze had pointed to an empiricist reversal of Kant. Where
Kant's question had been "How can the given be given to a
subject?" Hume's question had been "How is the
subject (human nature) constituted within the given?" In his
mature work, Deleuze argues for an "impersonal and
pre-individual" transcendental field in which the subject as
identity pole which produces empirical identities by active synthesis
is itself the result or product of differential *passive
syntheses* (for instance, in what Deleuze calls the syntheses of
habit, we find bodily, desiring, and unconscious
"contractions" which unify a series of experiences,
extracting that which is to be retained in the habit and allowing the
rest to be "forgotten"). Together the passive syntheses at
all these levels form a differential field within which subject
formation takes place as an integration or resolution of that field;
in other words, subjects are roughly speaking the patterns of these
multiple and serial syntheses which fold in on themselves producing a
site of self-awareness. Of course, Deleuze never simply proclaims this
as a bald thesis, but develops a genetic account of subjectivity in
many of his books. Taking all this into account, Deleuze summarized
his differential, immanent and genetic position by the at first glance
odd phrase of "transcendental empiricism." This is cashed
out in terms of two characteristics: (1) the abstract (e.g.,
"subject," "object," "State," the
"whole," and so on) does not explain, but must itself be
explained; and (2) the aim of philosophy is not to rediscover the
eternal or the universal, but to find the singular conditions under
which something new is produced. In other words--and this is a
pragmatic perspective from which Deleuze never
deviated--philosophy aims not at stating the conditions of
knowledge qua representation, but at finding and fostering the
conditions of creative production.



Deleuze's second criticism of Kant claims that he had simply
presumed the existence of knowledge and morality as
"facts" and then sought their conditions of possibility in
the transcendental. But already in 1789, Salomon Maimon, whose early
critiques of Kant helped generate the post-Kantian tradition, had
argued that Kant's critical project required a method of
genesis--and not merely a method of conditioning--that would
account for the production of knowledge, morality, and indeed reason
itself. In other words, Maimon called for a genetic method that would
be able to reach the conditions of real and not merely possible
experience. Maimon found a solution to this problem in a principle of
difference: whereas identity is the condition of possibility of
thought in general, it is difference that constitutes the genetic and
productive principle of real thought.



These two Maimonian exigencies--the search for *the genetic
conditions of real experience* and the positing of a *principle
of difference*--appear in almost every one of Deleuze's
early monographs. *Nietzsche and Philosophy* (1962), for
instance, suggests that Nietzsche completed and inverted Kantianism by
bringing critique to bear, not simply on false claims to knowledge or
morality, but on true knowledge and true morality, and indeed on truth
itself: "genealogy" constituted Nietzsche's genetic
method, and the will-to-power was his principle of difference.
Deleuze's anti-Hegelianism is shown in his focus on the
productivity of the non-dialectical ("affirmative")
differential forces termed by Nietzsche "noble." These
forces affirm themselves, and thereby differentiate themselves first,
and only secondarily consider that from which they have differentiated
themselves.



In *Bergsonism* (1966), Deleuze develops the ideas of
virtuality and multiplicity that will serve as the backbone of his
later work. From Maimon's reading of Kant, we know that Deleuze
needs to substitute the notion of the condition of the genesis of the
real for the notion of conditions of possibility of representational
knowledge. The positive name for that genetic condition is the
virtual, which Deleuze adopts from the following Bergsonian argument.
The notion of the possible, Bergson holds in *Creative
Evolution*, is derived from a false problem that confuses the
"more" with the "less" and ignores differences
in kind; there is not less but more in the idea of the possible than
in the real, just as there is more in the idea of nonbeing than in
that of being, or more in the idea of disorder than in that of order.
When we think of the possible as somehow "pre-existing"
the real, we think of the real, then we add to it the negation of its
existence, and then we project the "image" of the possible
into the past. We then reverse the procedure and think of the real as
something more than possible, that is, as the possible with existence
added to it. We then say that the possible has been
"realized" in the real. By contrast, Deleuze will reject
the notion of the possible in favor of that of the virtual. Rather
than awaiting realization, the virtual is fully real; what happens in
genesis is that the virtual is actualized.



The fundamental characteristic of the virtual, that which means it
must be actualized rather than realized, is its differential makeup.
Deleuze always held the critical axiom that the ground cannot resemble
that which it grounds; he constantly critiques the
"tracing" operation by which identities in real experience
are said to be conditioned by identities in the transcendental. For
instance, Deleuze criticizes Kant for copying the transcendental field
in the image of the empirical field. That is, empirical experience is
personal, identitarian and centripetal; there is a central focus, the
subject, in which all our experiences are tagged as belonging to us.
Kant says this empirical identity is only possible if we can posit the
Transcendental Unity of Apperception, that is, the possibility of
adding "I think" to all our judgments. Instead of this
smuggled-in or "traced" identity, Deleuze will want to
have the transcendental field be differential. Deleuze still wants to
work back from experience, but since the condition cannot resemble the
conditioned, and since the empirical is personal and individuated, the
transcendental must be impersonal and pre-individual. The virtual is
the condition for real experience, but it has no identity; identities
of the subject and the object are products of processes that resolve,
integrate, or actualize (the three terms are synonymous for Deleuze) a
differential field. The Deleuzean virtual is thus not the condition of
possibility of any rational experience, but the condition of genesis
of real experience.



As we have seen, the virtual, as genetic ground of the actual, cannot
resemble that which it grounds; thus, if we are confronted with actual
identities in experience, then the virtual ground of those identities
must be purely differential. Deleuze adopts "multiplicity"
from Bergson as the name for such a purely differential field. In this
usage, Deleuze later clarifies, "multiplicity" designates
the multiple as a substantive, rather than as a predicate. The
multiple as predicate generates a set of philosophical problems under
the rubric of "the one and the many" (a thing is one or
multiple, one and multiple, and so on). With multiplicity, or the
multiple as substantive, the question of the relation between the
predicates one/multiple is replaced by the question of distinguishing
types of multiplicities (as with Bergson's distinction of
qualitative and quantitative multiplicities in *Time and Free
Will*). A typological difference between substantive
multiplicities, in short, is substituted for the dialectical
opposition of the one and the multiple.



In sum, then, against the "major" post-Kantian tradition
of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, Deleuze in effect posited his own
"minor" post-Kantian trio of Maimon, Nietzsche, and
Bergson. To these he added a trio of pre-Kantians, Spinoza, Leibniz
and Hume, but read through a post-Kantian lens.



We have already touched on Deleuze's reading of Hume. Let us now
turn to Spinoza, for whom Deleuze's admiration was seemingly
limitless; for Deleuze, Spinoza was the "prince" or even
the "Christ" of philosophers. There are many Spinozist
inheritances in Deleuze, but one of the most important is certainly
the notion of univocity in ontology. Univocity--as opposed to its
great rivals, equivocity and analogy--is the key to developing a
"philosophy of difference" (Deleuze's term for his
project in *Difference and Repetition*), in which difference
would no longer be subordinated to identity. The result is a Spinozism
minus substance, a purely modal or differential universe. In
univocity, as Deleuze reads Spinoza, being is said in a single sense
of all of which it is said, but it is said of difference itself. What
is that difference? Difference is difference in degrees of
"power"; in interpreting this term we must distinguish the
two French words *puissance* and *pouvoir*. In social
terms, *puissance* is immanent power, power to act rather than
power to dominate another; we could say that *puissance* is
*praxis* (in which equals clash or act together) rather than
*poiesis* (in which others are matter to be formed by the
command of a superior, a sense of transcendent power that matches what
*pouvoir* indicates for Deleuze). In the most general terms
Deleuze develops throughout his career, *puissance* is the
ability to affect and to be affected, to form assemblages or
consistencies, that is, to form emergent unities that nonetheless
respect the heterogeneity of their components.



The final important figure in Deleuze's readings of other
philosophers is Leibniz, to whom, it must be recalled, Maimon appealed
in his criticism of Kant. In 1988, Deleuze published a book on Leibniz
entitled *The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque*, which added new
elements to the reading of Leibniz that appeared in Deleuze's
earlier books: an interpretation centered on the concept of the fold,
a development of a concept of the Baroque, and an attempt to define a
neo-Leibnizianism in terms of contemporary artistic and scientific
practices. While *The Fold* is a fascinating work, we will
concentrate here on Deleuze's early reading of Leibniz, which
plays an important role in *Difference and Repetition*.



Deleuze pushes Leibniz's thought to a point where Leibniz could
never have taken it, given his theological presuppositions. This is
the point where one begins to consider the virtual domain on its own
account, freed from its actualization in a world and its individuals.
On this score, Deleuze often likes to cite Jorge Luis Borges's
famous story, "The Garden of the Forking Paths," in which
such a virtual world is described in the labyrinthine book of a
Chinese philosopher named Ts'ui Pen: "In all
fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives, he chooses one at the
expense of others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen,
he chooses--simultaneously--all of them... In
Ts'ui Pen's work, all the possible solutions occur,
each one being the point of departure for other bifurcations."
Leibniz had in fact given a similar presentation of the world at the
conclusion of the *Theodicy*.



In Deleuze's transformation of the Leibnizian / Borgesian image,
the three Kantian transcendent Ideas of God, World, and Self all take
on a completely different demeanor. First, God is no longer a Being
who compares and chooses the richest compossible world; he has now
become a pure Process that affirms incompossibilities and passes
through them.



Second, the world is no longer a continuous world defined by its
pre-established harmony; instead, divergences, bifurcations, and
incompossibles must now be seen to belong to one and the same
universe, a chaotic universe in which divergent series trace endlessly
bifurcating paths, and give rise to violent discords and dissonances
that are never resolved into a harmonic tonality: a
"chaosmos," as Deleuze puts it (borrowing a word from
Joyce) and no longer a world. In contrast, Leibniz could only save the
"harmony" of this world by relegating discordances and
disharmonies to other possible worlds--this was his theological
sleight of hand.



Third, selves or individuals, rather than being closed upon the
compossible and convergent world they express from within, are now
torn open, and kept open through the divergent series and
incompossible ensembles that continually pull them outside themselves.
The "monadic" subject, as Deleuze puts it, becomes the
"nomadic" subject. In other words, if Deleuze is
Leibnizian, it is only by eliminating the idea of a God who chooses
the best of all possible worlds, with its pre-established harmony and
well-established selves; in Deleuze, incompossibilities and
dissonances belong to one and the same world, the only world, our
world. But they belong to our world as its virtual register;
developing the thought of the virtual is one of the great challenges
of Deleuze's masterpiece, *Difference and Repetition*, to
which we now turn.


## 3. The Philosophy of Difference


### 3.1 *Difference and Repetition*



Deleuze's historical monographs were, in a sense, preliminary
sketches for the great canvas of *Difference and Repetition*
(1968), which marshaled these resources from the history of philosophy
in an ambitious project to construct a "philosophy of
difference." Following Maimon's critique, *Difference
and Repetition* produces a two-fold shift from the Kantian project
of providing the universal and necessary conditions for possible
experience. First, rather than seeking the conditions for
*possible* experience, Deleuze wants to provide an account of
the genesis of *real* experience, that is, the experience of
this concretely existing individual here and now. Second, to respect
the demands of the philosophy of difference, the genetic principle
must itself be a differential principle.



However, despite these departures, Deleuze maintains a crucial
alignment with Kant; *Difference and Repetition* is still a
transcendental approach. Here we should remind ourselves that the
terms "transcendent" and "transcendental" have
opposing significations. Transcendental philosophy in fact critiques
the pretensions of other philosophies to transcend experience by
providing strict criteria for the use of syntheses immanent to
experience. On this score, at least, Deleuze aligns himself with
Kant's critical philosophy.



Three further preliminary notes are in order here. First, as we will
discuss in section 4 below, the *Capitalism and Schizophrenia*
project of Deleuze and Guattari will bring to the fore naturalist
tendencies that are only implicitly present in the still-Kantian
framework of *Difference and Repetition*. So, although there is
some risk of reading backwards in this formulation, we can say that
the "of" in the phrase "the experience of this
concretely existing individual here and now" is both subjective
and objective. It is the experience by human subjects of this
individual object in front of it, and it is the experience enjoyed by
the concretely existing individual itself, even when that individual
is non-human or even non-living. (Deleuze's panpsychism is
treated briefly in Protevi 2011.) Second, then, in the demand for
genetic principles to account for the real experience of concrete
individuals, Deleuze is working in the tradition of the Principle of
Sufficient Reason. Third, the notion of "genesis" is
itself double; in Chapter 3, Deleuze lays out a dynamic genesis that
moves from an encounter with intensity in sensation to the thinking of
virtual Ideas, while Chapters 4 and 5 lay out a static genesis that
moves from the virtual Idea through an intensive individuation process
to an actual entity.



We are now ready to discuss the book itself. Murphy 1992 suggests that
the first part of the book (the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2)
constitutes Deleuze's treatment of the history of philosophy,
while in the second part of the book (Chapters 4 and 5) Deleuze is
doing philosophy in his own name. From this point of view, Chapter 3,
on the "image of thought," plays a pivotal role, leading
us into Deleuze's own philosophy. This transitional role of
Chapter 3 is confirmed elsewhere when Deleuze says that the study of
the image of thought is the "prolegomena to philosophy"
(*Negotiations*, 149).



In Chapters 1 and 2, to find a differential genetic principle, Deleuze
works through the history of philosophy to isolate the concepts of
"difference in itself" and "repetition for
itself" that the assumptions of previous philosophies had
prevented from being formulated. "Difference in itself" is
difference that is freed from identities seen as metaphysically
primary. Normally, difference is conceived of as an empirical relation
between two terms which each has a prior identity of its own ("x
is different from y"). Deleuze inverts this priority: identity
persists, but is now a something produced by a prior relation between
differentials (*dx* rather than not-x). Difference is no longer
an empirical relation but becomes a transcendental principle that
constitutes the sufficient reason of empirical diversity (for example,
it is the difference of electrical potential between cloud and ground
that constitutes the sufficient reason of the phenomenon of
lightning).



In Chapter 2, the concept of "repetition for itself" is
produced as repetition that is freed from being repetition of an
original self-identical thing so that it can be the repetition of
difference. Following the formula of Deleuze's reading of
Nietzsche's eternal return, repetition is the return of the
differential genetic condition of real experience each time there is
an individuation of a concrete entity. Ultimately, then,
*Difference and Repetition* will show that the individuation of
entities is produced by the actualization, integration, or resolution
(the terms are synonymous for Deleuze) of a differentiated virtual
field of Ideas or "multiplicities" that are themselves
changed, via "counter-effectuation," in each individuating
event.



Chapter 3 lays out 8 postulates of the "dogmatic image of
thought." Between the first four and last four postulates we
find a theory of the faculties, which is thus at the crossroads of
both the chapter and the book.



Let us take up the first four postulates. The first postulate concerns
our supposed natural disposition to think; the denial of this is what
necessitates our being forced to think. The second and third
postulates concern subjective and objective unity. Subjective unity is
captured by the notion of "common sense" such that our
faculties of sensation, memory, imagination, and thought work in
harmony, while objective unity is captured by the notion of
"recognition" such that it is the same object that is
sensed, remembered, imagined, and thought. The fourth postulate
concerns "representation", a key target of Deleuze's
critique. Here difference is submitted to a fourfold structure that
renders difference subordinate to identity: 1) identity in the
concept; 2) opposition of predicates; 3) analogy in judgment; and 4)
resemblance in perception. A good way to approach Deleuze's
notion of representation is via Aristotle and Porphyry. Specific
differences are the opposed predicates that function on a horizon of
identity in the concept under division; thus animal is the genus that
is divided into rational and irrational as specific differences that
enable the isolation of the species "human." Then, we find
that the difference between individuals of the same species is
infra-conceptual and can only be made via the perception of
resemblances; Theaetetus looks like Socrates but not so much that they
cannot be distinguished. Finally, the relation of substance to the
other categories is analogical, such that being is said in many ways,
but with substance as the primary way in which it is said.



After the first four postulates, we find the theory of the faculties,
which will be Deleuze's account of what it means to be
"forced" to think in differential rather than identitarian
terms. To free a notion of "difference in itself" such
that difference need not be thought on the basis of a prior horizon of
identity, Deleuze looks for an "encounter," a sensation
that cannot be thought, that cannot find the empirical category under
which an object can be recognized, and thus forces the
"transcendent exercise" of the faculty of sensibility,
when something can only be sensed.



Here we see the dynamic genesis from intensity in sensation to the
thinking of virtual Ideas. Each step here has a distinct Kantian echo.
The faculties are linked in order; here Deleuze as well as Kant look
to the privilege of sensibility as the origin of knowledge--the
"truth of empiricism." With sensibility, pure difference
in intensity is grasped immediately in the encounter as the
*sentiendum*, that which can only be sensed. In the
differential theory of the faculties, sensibility, imagination,
memory, and thought all "communicate a violence" from one
to the other--here Deleuze works with the Kantian notion of the
sublime as discordant accord of the faculties. The "free form of
difference" in intensity moves each faculty and communicates its
violence to the next, though in this case there is no supernatural
vocation that will redeem the conflict of imagination and reason, as
there is in the resolution to the discussion of the sublime in the
*Critique of Judgment*. Rather than a reconciliation of the
faculties, with thought, a "fractured self"--here
Deleuze takes up Kant's notion of the split between the
empirical ego and the Transcendental subject--is constrained to
think "difference in itself" in Ideas.



We won't discuss the last four postulates in detail, as they
concern the theory of Ideas, the topic of Chapter 4, which we will
shortly discuss. For now, let us note that two of Deleuze's
technical terms, intensity and virtuality, occupy two different places
on this line of dynamic genesis. Intensity is the characteristic of
the encounter, and sets off the process of thinking, while virtuality
is the characteristic of the Idea.



With the notions of intensive and extensive we come upon a crucial
distinction for Deleuze that is explored in Chapters 4 and 5 of
*Difference and Repetition*. Extensive quantities, such as
length, area or volume, are divisible. A volume of matter divided into
two equal halves produces two volumes, each having half the extent of
the original one. Intensive magnitudes, by contrast, refer to
properties such as temperature or pressure that cannot be so divided.
If a volume of water whose temperature is 90o is divided in half,
the result is two volumes at the original temperature, not two volumes
at 45o. However, the important property of intensity is not that
it is indivisible, but that it is a property that cannot be divided
without involving a change in kind. The temperature of a volume of
water, for instance, can be "divided" by heating the
container from below, causing a temperature difference between the top
and the bottom. In so doing, however, we change the system
qualitatively; moreover, if the temperature differences reach a
certain threshold (if they attain a certain "intensity" in
Deleuze's terms), the system will undergo a "phase
transition," losing symmetry and changing its dynamics, entering
into a periodic pattern of motion--convection--which
displays extensive properties of size: X centimeters of length and
breadth. Drawing on these kinds of analyses, Deleuze will assign a
transcendental status to the intensive: intensity, he argues,
constitutes the genetic condition of extensive space. Intensive
processes are themselves in turn structured by Ideas or
multiplicities.



An Idea or multiplicity is really a process of progressive
determination of differential elements, differential relations, and
singularities. Let us take these step-by-step. "Elements"
must have no independent existence from the system in which they
inhere; phonemes as the elements of the virtual linguistic Idea are an
example Deleuze uses in *Difference and Repetition*. When
phonemes are actualized, they enter into differential relations that
determine the patterns of individual languages; thus the English
phoneme /p/ is reciprocally determined by its differences from /t/,
/b/, /d/, and so on. Finally, these differential relations of an
individual language determine singularities or remarkable points at
which the pattern of that language can shift: the Great Vowel Shift of
Middle English being an example, or more prosaically, dialect
pronunciation shifts.



For another example--and here, in the applicability of his schema
to widely divergent registers, is one of the aspects of Deleuze as
metaphysician--let us try to construct the Idea of hurricanes.
The differential elements would be material "flows" driven
by intensive differences in temperature and pressure but undetermined
in form (neither smooth nor turbulent, neither big nor small) and
function (neither forming nor destroying of weather events). These
flows qua differential elements enter into relations of reciprocal
determination linking changes in any one element to changes in the
others; thus temperature and pressure differences will link changes in
air and water currents to each other: updrafts are related to
downdrafts even if the exact relations (the tightness of the links,
the velocity of the flows) are not yet determined. Finally, at
singular points in these relations singularities are determined that
mark qualitative shifts in the system, such as the formation of
thunderstorm cells, the eye wall, and so on. But this is still the
virtual Idea of hurricanes; real existent hurricanes will have
measurable values of these variables so that we can move from the
philosophical realm of sufficient reason to that of scientific
causation. A hurricane is explained by its Idea, but it is caused by
real wind currents driven by real temperature supplied by the sun to
tropical waters.



To see how Ideas are transcendental and immanent, we have to
appreciate that an Idea is a concrete universal. In an early article
on Bergson ("The Conception of Difference in Bergson"
[1956]), Deleuze gave a particularly helpful example of this notion.
In *La Pensee et le Mouvant*, Bergson had shown that
there are two ways of determining what the spectrum of
"colors" have in common. (1) You can extract from
particular colors an abstract and general idea of color ("by
removing from the red that which makes it red, from the blue what
makes it blue, from the green what makes it green"). Or, (2) you
can make all these colors "pass through a convergent lens,
bringing them to a single point," in which case a "pure
white light" is obtained that "makes the differences
between the shades stand out." The former case defines a single
generic "concept" with a plurality of objects; the
relation between concept and object is one of subsumption; and the
state of difference remains exterior to the thing. The second case, on
the contrary, defines a differential Idea in the Deleuzean sense: the
different colors are no longer objects under a concept, but constitute
an order of mixture in coexistence and succession within the Idea; the
relation between the Idea and a given color is not one of subsumption,
but one of actualization and differenciation; and the state of
difference between the concept and the object is internalized in the
Idea itself, so that the concept itself has become the object. White
light is still a universal, but it is a concrete universal, and not a
genus or generality.



The Idea of color is thus like white light, which
"perplexes" within itself the genetic elements and
relations of all the colors, but which is actualized in the diverse
colors and their respective spaces. (Like the word
"problem," Deleuze uses the word "perplexion"
to signify, not a coefficient of doubt, hesitation, or astonishment,
but the multiple and virtual state of Ideas. Indeed, Deleuze adopts a
number of Neoplatonic notions to indicate the structure of Ideas, all
of which are derived from the root word *pli* [fold]:
perplication, complication, implication, explication, and
replication.) Similarly, the Idea of sound could be conceived of as a
white noise, just as there is also a white society or a white
language, which contains in its virtuality all the phonemes and
relations destined to be actualized in the diverse languages and in
the remarkable parts of a same language.



We can now move to discuss Chapter 5, on the individuation of
concretely existing real entities as the actualization of a virtual
Idea. In isolating the conditions of genesis, Deleuze sets up a
tripartite ontological scheme, positing three interdependent
registers: the virtual, intensive, and actual. Deleuze's basic
notion is that in all realms of being intensive morphogenetic
processes follow differential virtual multiplicities to produce
localized and individuated actual substances with extensive
properties. Simply put, the actualization of the virtual proceeds by
way of intensive processes. Beneath the actual (any one state of a
system), we find "impersonal individuations" or intensive
morphogenetic processes that produce system states and beneath these
we find "pre-individual singularities" (that is, the key
elements in virtual fields, marking system thresholds that structure
the intensive morphogenetic processes). We thus have to distinguish
the intense "impersonal" field of individuation and its
processes from the virtual "pre-individual" field of
differential relations and singularities that make up an Idea or
multiplicity.



Tying together the themes of difference, multiplicity, virtuality and
intensity, at the heart of *Difference and Repetition* we find
a theory of Ideas (dialectics) based neither on an essential model of
identity (Plato), nor a regulative model of unity (Kant), nor a
dialectical model of contradiction (Hegel), but rather on a
problematic and genetic model of difference. Ideas define the being of
a thing, but one cannot attain an Idea through the Socratic question
"What is ... ?" (which posits Ideas as transcendent
and eternal), but rather through "minor" questions such as
"Which one?" "Where?" "When?"
"How?" "How many?" "In which
case?" "From which viewpoint?"--all of which
allow one to define the differential Ideas immanent in the intensive
processes they structure.



From these examples we can see that Ideas structure the intensive
processes that give rise to the behavior patterns of systems, and
their singularities mark the thresholds at which systems change
behavior patterns. In a word, the virtual Idea is the transformation
matrix for material systems or bodies. Bodies are determined
"solutions" to the "problem" that lays out the
manifold options for incarnating bodies of that nature. Ideas then
respond to the question "who?" (who is it that incarnates
the Idea in this case?) rather than the essentialist "what
is?" (what are the properties of the substance that provide the
necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the class of
which the object is a member?)



For orientation purposes, it's useful to consider Gilbert
Simondon's theory of individuation as a very simple model for
what Deleuze calls "actualization." For Simondon,
crystallization is a paradigm of individuation: a supersaturated
solution is metastable; from that pre-individual field, replete with
gradients of density that are only implicit "forms" or
"potential functions," individual crystals precipitate
out. The Deleuzean virtual is composed of "Ideas" or
"multiplicities" involving differential relations among
heterogeneous components, whose rates of change are connected with
each other. For an example of such heterogeneity, let us return to
hurricane formation, the Idea of which we sketched above. Here it
should be intuitively clear that there is no central command, but a
self-organization of multiple processes of air and water movement
propelled by temperature and pressure differences. All hurricanes form
when intensive processes of wind and ocean currents reach singular
points. These singular points, however, are not unique to any one
hurricane, but are virtual for each actual hurricane, just as the
boiling point of water is virtual for each actual pot of tea on the
stove. In other words, all hurricanes share the same virtual structure
even as they are singular individuations or actualizations of that
structure.



In this treatment, we have concentrated on only some of the
metaphysics in *Difference and Repetition*; much more could be
said about the role that Nietzsche's thought of the eternal
return plays therein, in addition to Deleuze's remarks on a
dizzying array of figures from Plato and Scotus to Freud and Artaud.
In the interests of space, however, let us move to a brief treatment
of Deleuze's second major work of the late 1960s, *Logic of
Sense*.


### 3.2 *Logic of Sense*



While *Difference and Repetition* ranges over a wide field of
philosophical topics, *Logic of Sense* focuses on two aspects
of a single issue, the structure and genesis of sense. The genius of
Frege and Russell was to have discovered that the condition of truth
(denotation) lies in the domain of sense. In order for a proposition
to be true (or false) it must have a sense; a nonsensical proposition
can be neither true nor false. Yet they betrayed this insight, Deleuze
argues, because they--like Kant before them--remained
content with establishing the condition of truth rather than its
genesis. In *Logic of Sense*, Deleuze attacks this problem,
first developing the paradoxes that result from the structure of sense
and then sketching a theory of its genesis. He does this using
resources from analytic philosophy and the Stoics in the course of a
reading of Lewis Carroll--a typically innovative, if not quirky,
set of Deleuzean references.



In the first part of the book, Deleuze analyzes the structure of
sense. He begins by identifying three types of relation within
propositions:


1. Designation or denotation, which is the relation of a proposition
to an external state of affairs (theory of reference, with its
criterion of truth or falsity).
2. Manifestation, which marks the relation of the proposition to the
beliefs and desires of the person who is speaking (with its values of
veracity or illusion).
3. Signification or demonstration, which is the relation of the
proposition to other propositions (the domain of logic, with its
relations of implication and assertion).



Propositions, in other words, can be related either to the objects to
which they refer, or to the subjects who utter them, or to other
propositions. But each of these relations, in turn, can be taken to be
primary. (1) In the domain of speech, it is the "I" that
begins: manifestation not only makes denotation possible (Hume), but
is also prior to signification (Descartes' *cogito*). (2)
In the domain of language, however, it is signification that is
primary, since one is always born into a preexisting language, and
signified concepts are always primary in relation to the self as a
manifested person or to things as designated objects. (3) Yet in the
domain of logic we see the primacy of designation: as shown by the
hypothetical mode of implications, the logical value of demonstration
is not the truth, but rather the conditions of truth (the conditions
of possibility under which the proposition would be true); the
premises must thus be posited as effectively true, which forces one to
leave the pure order of implication in order to relate the premises to
a denoted state of affairs. Logical designation, in other words,
cannot fulfill its putative role as foundation, since it presupposes
an irreducible denotation.



The theory of the proposition is thus caught in a circle, with each
condition in turn being conditioned by what it supposedly conditions.
"For the condition of truth to avoid this defect," Deleuze
argues, "it would have to have something unconditioned capable
of assuring a real genesis of designation and the other dimensions of
the proposition: the condition of truth would then be defined, no
longer as the form of conceptual possibility, but as an ideal matter
or 'medium' [*matiere ou 'couche'
ideelle*], that is, no longer as signification, but as
sense" (LS 19). Sense, then, would be a fourth dimension of
propositions, for which Deleuze reserves the term expression. For
Deleuze as for Frege, sense is what is expressed in a proposition; the
two senses of "morning star" and "evening
star" are two ways in which the same *denotatum* may be
expressed in propositions.



Deleuze's contribution to the philosophy of sense really begins
to take off when he shows that the attempt to make this fourth
dimension evident is akin to Lewis Carroll's Hunt for the Snark,
or to unraveling a Mobius strip, since sense has neither a
physical nor a mental existence. Deleuze suggests that it was the
Stoics who first discovered the dimension of sense when they
distinguished between corporeal mixtures and incorporeal events. I can
attribute the proper name "Battle of Waterloo" to a
particular state of affairs, but the battle itself is an incorporeal
event (or sense) with no other reality than that of the expression of
my proposition; what we find in the state of affairs are bodies mixing
with one another--spears stabbing flesh, bullets flying through
the air, cannons firing, bodies being ripped apart--and the
battle itself is the *effect* or the *result* of this
intermingling of bodies. Sense thus has a complex status. On the one
hand, it does not exist outside the proposition that expresses it, but
it cannot be confused with the proposition, since it has a distinct
"objectity" of its own (it does not exist, but rather
"subsists" or "insists"). On the other hand,
it is attributed to states of affairs or things, but it cannot be
confused or identified with states of affairs, nor with a quality or
relation of these states. "Sense is both the expressible or the
expressed of the proposition, and the attribute of the state of
affairs. It turns one side toward things, and another side toward
propositions. But it cannot be confused with the proposition which
expressed it any more than with the state of affairs or the quality
which the proposition denotes. It is exactly the boundary between
propositions and things" (LS 22).



The structure of sense generates a number of paradoxes, which Deleuze
distinguishes from the paradoxes of signification discovered by
Russell in set theory (the set of all sets, and the "barber of
the regiment"). The first is the paradox of regress, or
indefinite proliferation: I can never state the sense of what I am
saying, but I can take the sense of what I am saying as the object of
another proposition, whose sense in turn I cannot state, ad infinitum.
This first paradox points both to the impotence of the speaker (my
inability to state the sense of what I am saying) and to the highest
power of language (its infinite capability to speak about words). The
second paradox is that of sterile reiteration or doubling: one can
avoid the infinite regress by extracting sense as the mere double of a
proposition, but at the price of catapulting us into a third paradox
of neutrality or sterility--sense is necessarily neutral with
regard to the various modes of the proposition: quality (affirmation,
negation), quantity (all, some, none), relation, and modality
(possibility, reality, necessity).



Thus extracted from the proposition, Deleuze argues that sense has the
status of a pure ideational *event*, irreducible to
propositions and their three dimensions: (1) the states of affairs the
propositions denote; (2) the experiences or mental activities
(beliefs, desires, images, representations) of persons who express
themselves in the proposition; and (3) universals or general concepts.
But how can sense be said to engender the other dimensions of the
proposition? This is the second task of a logic of sense: "to
combine the sterility of sense in relation to the proposition from
which it was extracted with its power of genesis in relation to the
dimensions of the proposition" (LS 32).



In the second half of *Logic of Sense*, Deleuze analyzes what
he calls the dynamic genesis of language, drawing in part from texts
in developmental psychology and psychoanalysis. "What renders
language possible," he writes, "is that which separates
sounds from bodies and organizes them into propositions, freeing them
for the expressive function" (LS 181). Deleuze distinguishes
three stages in the dynamic genesis, which at the same time constitute
three dimensions of language: (1) the primary order is the noise
produced in the depths of the body; (2) the secondary organization
constitutes the surface of sense (and non-sense); and (3) the tertiary
arrangement [*ordonnance*] is found in fully-formed
propositions, with their functions of denotation, manifestation, and
signification.



The first stage of the dynamic genesis of sense, the primary order of
language, is found in the newborn infant. Deleuze draws from a
tradition of developmental psychology whose insights are expressed in
the vivid image of Daniel N. Stern: the infant's experience is a
kind of human "weatherscape," made up entirely of
sequences of risings and fallings of intensity--the jolting of a
bright light or a sharp noise, the calming of a voice, or the
explosive breakout of a storm of hunger (*The Interpersonal World
of the Infant*, 1985). Deleuze will draw upon the writings of the
French writer Antonin Artaud and call this life of
intensities-in-motion the "body without organs." This
primary order of language (pure Noise as a dimension of the body)
constitutes a first type of nonsense. But in the midst of this world
of intensities, there also appears a particular noise: the sound of
the child's parents, or other adults. Long before the infant can
understand words and sentences, it grasps language as something that
pre-exists itself, as something always-already there, like a Voice on
high. But for the child the Voice has the dimensions of language
without having its condition. (Adults have the same experience when
they hear a foreign language being spoken.) For the infant to accede
to the tertiary arrangement of language (denotation, manifestation,
signification), it must pass through its secondary organization, which
is the production of the surface dimension of sense. How does this
construction take place? From the flow of the Voice, the child will
extract differential elements of various orders (phonemes, morphemes,
semantemes) and begin to synthesize them into diverse series.



At this point, Deleuze isolates three series or syntheses: connective,
conjunctive, and disjunctive. In the first, the child connects
phonemes in a concatenation of successive entities
("mama," "dada"); in the second, there is the
construction of esoteric words out of these phonemes through their
integration and conjunction ("your royal highness" is
contracted into "y'reince"); in the third, the child
starts making these esoteric words ramify and enter into relation with
other divergent and independent series. We can clearly see that the
constructions of this secondary organization of sense are not yet the
fully formed units of the tertiary arrangement of language on high,
but they are no longer merely the bodily noises of the primary order.
Before the child has any understanding of linguistic units, it
undertakes a vast apprenticeship in their formative elements. This is
why the domain of sense is the condition or ground of propositions,
not as their form of possibility, but as their "ideal matter or
'medium'": we are positioned immediately within
sense whenever we denote, manifest, or signify. Moreover, since sense
lies at the frontier of words and things--it is expressed in
propositions and attributed to states of affairs, but it cannot be
confused with either propositions or states of affairs--it
engenders both the determinate dimensions of the proposition
(denotation, manifestation, signification) as well as its objective
correlates (the denoted, the manifested, and the signified).



The domain of sense is necessarily subject to a fundamental fragility,
capable of toppling over into nonsense: the ground gives way to a
groundlessness, a *sans-fond*. The reason for this is clear.
Sense is never a principle or an origin; rather, it is an effect, it
is produced, and it is produced out of elements that do not, in
themselves, have a sense. Sense, in other words, has a determinate
relation with nonsense. Deleuze, however, distinguishes between two
very different types of nonsense. The first is that of Lewis Carroll,
who remains at the surface of sense and, like children, makes use of
the non-signifying elements of language in order to construct the
portmanteau words (snark = shark + snake; frumious = furious + fuming)
and nonsensical phrases ("'Twas brillig, and the slithy
toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe") that populate his
writing. If *Logic of Sense* is in part a reading of
Carroll's work, it is because no one knew better than Carroll
about the conditions for the production of sense, which Deleuze
elucidates in detail: the extraction of differential elements or pure
event, their organization in multiple series, and most importantly,
the aleatory point or paradoxical element that links the series (the
ideal "quasi-cause" that produces the effect of sense out
of nonsense).



But there is a second type of nonsense, which is more profound than
the surface nonsense found in Lewis Carroll. This is the terrifying
nonsense of the primary order, which found expression in the writings
of Antonin Artaud. Sense is what prevents the sonorous language from
being confused with the physical body (noise). But in the primary
order of schizophrenia experienced by Artaud, there is no longer
anything to prevent propositions from falling back onto bodies, which
mingle their sonorous elements with the olfactory, gustatory, and
digestive effects of the body (Artaud's *cris-souffles*:
"ratara ratara ratara Atara tatara rana Otara otara
katara").



Deleuze will develop his theory of the body-without-organs in his
collaboration with Felix Guattari, to which we now turn. As we
shall see, the concept of the body-without-organs is put to work in a
complex naturalistic philosophy of "desiring-production"
that moves far beyond the question of sense into the realms of nature,
history, and politics. In other words, if *Logic of Sense*
represents Deleuze's confrontation with the "linguistic
turn" that was so important for twentieth-century philosophy, it
is a confrontation that he quickly put behind him as he came to
embrace fully his materialist and naturalistic leanings.


## 4. Collaboration with Guattari



Following his work in the philosophy of difference, Deleuze meets
Guattari in the aftermath of May 1968. These famous
"events," which have marked French culture and politics
ever since, brought together students and workers, to the befuddlement
of the established guardians of the revolution, the French Communist
Party. Days of general strikes and standoffs with the police led the
French President Charles de Gaulle to call a general election. De
Gaulle's call for a parliamentary solution to the crisis was
backed by the Communists, who were evidently as scared of any
revolution from below--which by definition would lack the party
discipline they so craved--as were the official holders of State
power, to whose position they aspired. The worker-student movement
eventually collapsed, leaving memories of non-scripted social
interactions and revealing the investments of the Party, lampooned
thereafter as "bureaucrats of the revolution," in
Foucault's words in his Preface to the English translation of
*Anti-Oedipus*. The French Communist Party's agreement
with De Gaulle to allow a parliamentary solution to the social crisis
was a glaring example of the horizon of identity (the desire that
someone be in control of a central State bureaucracy) that allowed an
opposition (of the Gaullists and the Communists as rivals for control
of the State) to shackle difference.



The government response to May 1968 changed French academic life in
two ways. First, institutionally, by the creation of Paris VIII
(Vincennes) where Deleuze taught; and second, in the direction of the
philosophy of difference, which became explicitly political post-1968.
It became, in fact, a politics of philosophy dedicated to exposing the
historical force relations producing identity in all its ontological
and epistemological forms. In other words, the philosophy of
difference now set out to show how the unified objects of the world,
the unified subjects who know and hence control them, the unified
bodies of knowledge that codify this knowledge, and the unified
institution of philosophy that polices the whole affair, are products
of historical, political forces in combat with other forces.



In purely philosophical terms, the works with Guattari naturalize the
still-Kantian framework of *Difference and Repetition*. By the
time of *Anti-Oedipus* and *A Thousand Plateaus* Deleuze
and Guattari explicitly thematize that the syntheses they investigate
are fully material syntheses, syntheses of nature in geological as
well as biological, social, and psychological registers (Welchman
2009). Not just organic syntheses, but inorganic ones as well, are
"spatio-temporal dynamisms." With this full naturalization
of syntheses, the question of panpsychism is brought into full relief
(Protevi 2011), since material syntheses are as much syntheses of
experience as they are syntheses of things, as we see in the title of
Chapter 3 of *A Thousand Plateaus*: "The Geology of
Morals: Who does the earth think it is?"


### 4.1 *Anti-Oedipus*



In considering *Anti-Oedipus* we should first discuss its
performative effect, which attempts to "force us to
think," that is, to fight against a tendency to cliche.
Reading *Anti-Oedipus* can indeed be a shocking experience.
First, we find a bizarre collection of sources; for example, the
schizophrenic ranting of Antonin Artaud provides one of the basic
concepts of the work, the "body without organs." Second is
the book's vulgarity, as in the infamous opening lines about the
unconscious (the Id): "It is at work everywhere, functioning
smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it
heats, it eats. It shits and fucks [*Ca chie, ca
baise*]. What a mistake to have ever said *the* id"
(7 / 1). A third performative effect is humor, as in the mocking of
Melanie Klein's analysis of children: "Say it's
Oedipus, or I'll slap you upside the head [*sinon
t'auras un gifle*]" (54 / 45; trans. modified). There
are many more passages like this; it's safe to say very few
philosophy books contain as many jokes, puns, and *double
entendres* as *Anti-Oedipus*. A fourth element is the
gleeful coarseness of the polemics. Among many other examples,
thinkers of the signifier are associated with the lap dogs of tyrants,
members of the French Communist Party are said to have fascist
libidinal investments, and Freud is described as a "masked Al
Capone." All in all, the performative effect of reading
*Anti-Oedipus* is unforgettable.



Passing to the conceptual structure of the book, the key term of
*Anti-Oedipus* is "desiring-production," which
crisscrosses Marx and Freud, putting desire in the eco-social realm of
production and production in the unconscious realm of desire. Rather
than attempting to synthesize Marx and Freud in the usual way, that
is, by a reductionist strategy that either (1) operates in favor of
Freud, by positing that the libidinal investment of social figures and
patterns requires sublimating an original investment in family figures
and patterns, or (2) operates in favor of Marx by positing neuroses
and psychoses as mere super-structural by-products of unjust social
structures, Deleuze and Guattari will call desiring-production a
"universal primary process" underlying the seemingly
separate natural, social and psychological realms. Desiring-production
is thus not anthropocentric; it is the very heart of the world.
Besides its universal scope, we need to realize two things about
desiring-production right away: (1) there is no subject that lies
behind the production, that performs the production; and (2) the
"desire" in desiring-production is not oriented to making
up a lack, but is purely positive. Desiring-production is autonomous,
self-constituting, and creative: it is the *natura naturans* of
Spinoza or the will-to-power of Nietzsche.



*Anti-Oedipus* is, along with its conceptual and terminological
innovation, a work of grand ambitions: among them, (1) an eco-social
theory of production, encompassing both sides of the nature/culture
split, which functions as an ontology of change, transformation, or
"becoming"; (2) a "universal history" of
social formations--the "savage" or tribal, the
"barbarian" or imperial, and the capitalist--which
functions as a synthetic social science; (3) and to clear the ground
for these functions, a critique of the received versions of Marx and
Freud--and the attempts to synthesize them by analogizing their
realms of application. In pursuing its ambitions,
*Anti-Oedipus* has the virtues and the faults of the *tour
de force*: unimagined connections between disparate elements are
made possible, but at the cost of a somewhat strained conceptual
scheme.



*Anti-Oedipus* identifies two primary registers of
desiring-production, the natural or "metaphysical" and the
social or "historical." They are related in the following
way: natural desiring-production is that which social machines
repress, but also that which is revealed in capitalism, at the end of
history (a contingent history, that is, one that avoids dialectical
laws of history). Capitalism sets free desiring-production even as it
attempts to rein it in with the institution of private property and
the familial or "Oedipal" patterning of desire;
schizophrenics are propelled by the charge of desiring-production thus
set free but fail at the limits capitalist society proposes, thus
providing a clue to the workings of desiring-production.



It's important at the start to realize that Deleuze and Guattari
do not advocate schizophrenia as a "lifestyle" or as the
model for a political program. The schizophrenic, as a clinical
entity, is the result of the interruption or the blocking of the
process of desiring-production, its having been taken out of nature
and society and restricted to the body of an individual where it spins
in the void rather than make the connections that constitute reality.
Desiring-production does not connect "with" reality, as in
escaping a subjective prison to touch the objective, but it makes
reality, it is the Real, in a twisting of the Lacanian sense of the
term. In Lacan, the real is produced as an illusory and retrojected
remainder to a signifying system; for Deleuze and Guattari, the Real
is reality itself in its process of self-making. The schizophrenic is
a sick person in need of help, but schizophrenia is an avenue into the
unconscious, the unconscious not of an individual, but the
"transcendental unconscious," an unconscious that is
social, historical, and natural all at once.



In studying the schizophrenic process, Deleuze and Guattari posit that
in both the natural and social registers desiring-production is
composed of three syntheses, the connective, disjunctive, and
conjunctive; the syntheses perform three functions: production,
recording, and enjoyment. We can associate production with the
physiological, recording with the semiotic, and enjoyment with the
psychological registers. While it is important to catch the Kantian
resonance of "synthesis," it is equally important to note,
in keeping with the post-structuralist angle we discussed above, that
there is no subject performing the syntheses; instead, subjects are
themselves one of the products of the syntheses. The syntheses have no
underlying subject; they just are the immanent process of
desiring-production. Positing a subject behind the syntheses would be
a transcendent use of the syntheses. Here we see another reference to
the Kantian principle of immanence. Deleuze and Guattari propose to
study the immanent use of the syntheses in a "materialist
psychoanalysis," or "schizoanalysis"; by contrast,
psychoanalysis is transcendent use of the syntheses, producing five
"paralogisms" or "transcendental illusions,"
all of which involve assigning the characteristics of the extensive
properties of actual products to the intensive production process, or,
to put it in the terms of the philosophy of difference, all the
paralogisms subordinate differential processes to identities derived
from products.



According to the "universal history" undertaken in
*Anti-Oedipus*, social life has three forms of
"socius," the social body that takes credit for
production: the earth for the tribe, the body of the despot for the
empire, and capital for capitalism. According to Deleuze and
Guattari's reading of the anthropological literature, tribal
societies mark bodies in initiation ceremonies, so that the products
of an organ are traced to a clan, which is mythically traced to the
earth or, more precisely, one of its enchanted regions, which function
as the organs on the full body of the earth. Material flows are thus
"territorialized," that is, traced onto the earth, which
is credited as the source of all production. The signs in tribal
inscription are not signifiers: they do not map onto a voice, but
enact a "savage triangle forming ... a theater of cruelty
that implies the triple independence of the articulated voice, the
graphic hand and the appreciative eye" (189). Empires overcode
these tribal meaning codes, tracing production back to the despot, the
divine father of his people. Material flows in despotic empires are
thus "deterritorialized" (they are no longer credited to
the earth), and then immediately "reterritorialized" on
the body of the despot, who assumes credit for all production. When
tribal signs are overcoded, the signifier is formed as a
"deterritorialized sign" allowing for communication
between the conquered and the conquerors. Signifiers are a
"flattening" or "bi-univocalization": two
chains are lined up, one to one, the written and the spoken
(205-6; cf. Derrida's notion of
"phonocentrism"). The body of the despot as imperial
socius means that workers are the "hands" of the emperor,
spies are his "eyes," and so on.



Capitalism is the radical decoding and deterritorialization of the
material flows that previous social machines had zealously coded on
the earth or the body of the despot. Production is credited to the
"body" of capital, but this form of recording works by the
substitution of an "axiomatic" for a code: in this context
an "axiomatic" means a set of simple principles for the
quantitative calculation of the difference between flows (of
deterritorialized labor and capital) rather than elaborate rules for
the qualitative judgments that map flows onto the socius.
Capitalism's command is utterly simple: connect
deterritorialized flows of labor and capital and extract a surplus
from that connection. Thus capitalism sets loose an enormous
productive charge--connect those flows! Faster, faster!--the
surpluses of which the institutions of private property try to
register as belonging to individuals. Now those individuals are
primarily social (as figures of capitalist or laborer) and only
secondarily private (family members). Whereas organs of bodies were
socially marked in previous regimes (as belonging to the clan and
earth, or as belonging to the emperor, as in the *jus primae
noctis*), body organs are privatized under capitalism and attached
to persons as members of the family. In Deleuze and Guattari's
terms, capitalism's decoded flows are reterritorialized on
"persons," that is, on family members as figures in the
Oedipal triangle.


### 4.2 *A Thousand Plateaus*



Three differences between this work and its predecessor are
immediately apparent. First, *A Thousand Plateaus* has a much
wider range of registers than *Anti-Oedipus*: cosmic, geologic,
evolutionary, developmental, ethological, anthropological,
mythological, historical, economic, political, literary, musical, and
even more. Second, the results of the paralogisms of
*Anti-Oedipus* become "strata" in *A Thousand
Plateaus*: the organism (the unification and totalization of the
connective synthesis of production, or the physiological register),
the signifying totality or *signifiance*, which we can perhaps
render as "signifier-ness" (the flattening or
"bi-univocalizing" of the disjunctive synthesis of
recording, the semiotic register), and the subject (the reification of
the conjunctive synthesis of consummation, the psychological
register). Finally, while *Anti-Oedipus* has a classical
conceptual architecture, that is, chapters that develop a single
argument, *A Thousand Plateaus* is written as a
"rhizome," that is, as allowing immediate connections
between any of its points. Because of this rhizomatic structure, a
traditional summary of the "theses" and arguments of *A
Thousand Plateaus* is either downright impossible, or at best,
would be much too complex to attempt in an encyclopedia article. We
will therefore have to limit ourselves to the following remarks.



In fourteen plateaus, or planes of intensity--productive
connections between immanently arrayed material systems without
reference to an external governing source--Deleuze and Guattari
develop a new materialism in which a politicized philosophy of
difference joins forces with the sciences explored in *Difference
and Repetition*. *A Thousand Plateaus* is a book of strange
new questions: "Who Does the Earth Think It Is?,"
"How Do You make Yourself a Body Without Organs?,"
"How does the war-machine ward off the apparatus of capture of
the State?" and so on. To over-simplify, Deleuze and Guattari
take up the insights of dynamical systems theory, which explores the
various thresholds at which material systems self-organize (that is,
reduce their degrees of freedom, as in our previous example of
convection currents). Deleuze and Guattari then extend the notion of
self-organizing material systems--those with no need of
transcendent organizing agents such as gods, leaders, capital, or
subjects--to the social, linguistic, political-economic, and
psychological realms. The resultant "rhizome" or
de-centered network that is *A Thousand Plateaus* provides
hints for experimentation with the more and more de-regulated flows of
energy and matter, ideas and actions--and the attendant attempts
at binding them--that make up the contemporary world.



*A Thousand Plateaus* maintains the tripartite ontological
scheme of all of Deleuze's work, but, as the title indicates,
with geological terms of reference. Deleuze and Guattari call the
virtual "the Earth," the intensive is called
"consistency," and the actual is called "the system
of the strata." As the latter term indicates, one of the foci of
their investigations is the tendency of some systems to head toward
congealment or stratification. More precisely put, any concrete system
is composed of intensive processes tending toward the (virtual) plane
of consistency and/or toward (actual) stratification. We can say that
all that exists is the intensive, tending towards the limits of
virtuality and actuality; these last two ontological registers do not
"exist," but they do "insist," to use one of
Deleuze's terms.



Nothing ever instantiates the sheer frozen stasis of the actual nor
the sheer differential dispersion of the virtual; rather, natural or
worldly processes are always and only actualizations, that is, they
are processes of actualization structured by virtual multiplicities
and heading toward an actual state they never quite attain. More
precisely, systems also contain tendencies moving in the other
direction, toward virtuality; systems are more or less stable sets of
processes moving in different directions, toward actuality and toward
virtuality. In still other words, Deleuze and Guattari are process
philosophers; neither the structures of such processes nor their
completed products merit the same ontological status as processes
themselves. With this perspective, Deleuze and Guattari offer a
detailed and complex "open system" which is
extraordinarily rich and complex. A useful way into it is to follow
the concepts of coding, stratification and territorialization. They
are related in the following manner. Coding is the process of ordering
matter as it is drawn into a body; by contrast, stratification is the
process of creating hierarchal bodies, while territorialization is the
ordering of those bodies in "assemblages," that is to say,
an emergent unity joining together heterogeneous bodies in a
"consistency."



These concepts, and several other networks of concepts considerations
of space preclude us from considering, are put to work in addressing
the following topics. After a discussion of the notion of
"rhizome" in the first chapter (or "plateau"
as they call it), Deleuze and Guattari quickly dismiss psychoanalysis
in the second. In the third chapter they discuss the process of
stratification in physical, organic, and social strata, with special
attention to questions in population genetics, where speciation can be
thought to stratify or channel the flow of genes. In chapters 4 and 5
they intervene in debates in linguistics in favor of pragmatics, that
is to say, highlighting the "incorporeal transformations"
(labels that prompt a different form of action to be applied to a
body: "I now pronounce you man and wife") that socially
sanctioned "order words" bring about (Deleuze and Guattari
also refer to speech act theory in this regard).



They also lay out the theory of "territories" or sets of
environmentally embedded triggers of self-organizing processes, and
the concomitant processes of deterritorialization (breaking of habits)
and reterritorialization (formation of habits). Chapters 6 and 7
discuss methods of experimenting with the strata in which we found
ourselves. Chapter 6 deals with the organic stratum or the
"organism"; the notorious term of art "Body without
Organs" can be at least partially glossed as the reservoir of
potentials for different patterns of bodily affect. Chapter 7 deals
with the intersection of *signifiance*
("signifier-ness") and subjectification in
"faciality"; the face arrests the drift of signification
by tying meaning to the expressive gestures of a subject. Chapters 8
and 9 deal with the social organizing practices they name
"lines" and "segments"; of particular interest
here is their treatment of fascism.



Chapter 10 returns to the question of intensive experimentation, now
discussed in terms of "becoming," in which (at least) two
systems come together to form an emergent system or
"assemblage." Chapter 11 discusses the
"refrain" or rhythm as a means of escaping from and
forming new territories, or even existing in a process of continual
deterritorialization, what they call "consistency."
Chapters 12 and 13 discuss the relation of the "war
machine" and the State; the former is a form of social
organization that fosters creativity (it "reterritorializes on
deterritorialization itself"), while the latter is an
"apparatus of capture" living vampirically off of labor
(here Deleuze and Guattari's basically Marxist perspective is
apparent). Finally, Chapter 14 discusses types of social constitution
of space, primarily the "smooth" space of war machines and
the "striated" space of States.


### 4.3 *What is Philosophy?*



After a long period in which each pursued his own interests, Deleuze
and Guattari published a last collaboration in 1991, *What Is
Philosophy?* In answering their title question, Deleuze and
Guattari seek to place philosophy in relation to science and art, all
three being modes of thought, with no subordination among them.
Thought, in all its modes, struggles with chaos against opinion.
Philosophy is the creation or construction of concepts; a concept is
an intensive multiplicity, inscribed on a plane of immanence, and
peopled by "conceptual personae" which operate the
conceptual machinery. A conceptual persona is not a subject, for
thinking is not subjective, but takes place in the relationship of
territory and earth. Science creates functions on a plane of
reference. Art creates "a bloc of sensation, that is to say, a
compound of percepts and affects" (WP 164).



We will deal with Deleuze and the arts in some detail below. In
discussing *What is Philosophy?*, let us concentrate on the
treatment of the relation of philosophy and science. We should
remember at the outset that the nomad or minor science evoked in *A
Thousand Plateaus* is not the Royal or major science that makes up
the entirety of what Deleuze and Guattari call 'science'
in *What is Philosophy?*. The motives for this conflation are
unclear; in the eyes of some, this change considerably weakens the
value of the latter work.



Be that as it may, in *What is Philosophy?* Deleuze and
Guattari vigorously deny that philosophy is needed to help science
think about its own presuppositions ("no one needs philosophy to
reflect on anything" [WP 6]). Instead, they emphasize the
complementary nature of the two. First, they point out a number of
similarities between philosophy and science: both are approaches to
"chaos" that attempt to bring order to it, both are
creative modes of thought, and both are complementary to each other,
as well as to a third mode of creative thought, art.



Beyond these similarities, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between
philosophy as the creation of concepts on a plane of immanence and
science as the creation of functions on a plane of reference. Both
relate to the virtual, the differential field of potential
transformations of material systems, but in different ways. Philosophy
gives consistency to the virtual, mapping the forces composing a
system as pure potentials, what the system is capable of. Meanwhile,
science gives it reference, determining the conditions by which
systems behave the way they actually do. Philosophy is the
"counter-effectuation of the event," abstracting an event
or change of pattern from bodies and states of affairs and thereby
laying out the transformative potentials inherent in things, the roads
not taken that coexist as compossibles or as inclusive disjunctions
(differentiation, in the terms of *Difference and Repetition*),
while science tracks the actualization of the virtual, explaining why
this one road was chosen in a divergent series or exclusive
disjunction (differenciation, according to *Difference and
Repetition*). Functions predict the behavior of constituted
systems, laying out their patterns and predicting change based on
causal chains, while concepts "speak the event" (WP 21),
mapping out the multiplicity structuring the possible patterns of
behavior of a system--and the points at which the system can
change its habits and develop new ones.



For Deleuze and Guattari in *What is Philosophy?*, then,
science deals with properties of constituted things, while philosophy
deals with the constitution of events. Roughly speaking, philosophy
explores the plane of immanence composed of constellations of
constitutive forces that can be abstracted from bodies and states of
affairs. It thus maps the range of connections a thing is capable of,
its "becomings" or "affects." Science, on the
other hand, explores the concretization of these forces into bodies
and states of affairs, tracking the behavior of things in relation to
already constituted things in a certain delimited region of space and
time (the "plane of reference"). How do concepts relate to
functions? Just as there is a "concept of concept" there
are also "concepts of functions," but these are purely
philosophical creations "without the least scientific
value" (WP 117). Thus concrete concepts like that of
"deterritorialization" are philosophical concepts, not
scientific functions, even though they might resonate with, or echo,
scientific functions. Nor are they metaphors, as Deleuze and Guattari
repeatedly insist:



"Of course, we realize the dangers of citing scientific
propositions outside their own sphere. It is the danger of arbitrary
metaphor or of forced application. But perhaps these dangers are
averted if we restrict ourselves to taking from scientific operators a
particular conceptualizable character which itself refers to
non-scientific areas, and converges with science without applying it
or making it a metaphor" (Deleuze 1989: 129).



Deleuze and Guattari's refusal to recognize that their work
contains metaphors is due to their struggle against the
"imperialism" of the signifying regime, a major theme in
both *Anti-Oedipus* and *A Thousand Plateaus*: not every
relation between different intellectual fields can be grasped by the
most common notions of "metaphor," reliant as they are on
the notion of a transfer of sense from primary to secondary
signification.


## 5. Deleuze and the Arts



Kant had dissociated aesthetics into two halves: the theory of
sensibility as the form of possible experience (the
"Transcendental Aesthetic" of the *Critique of Pure
Reason*), and the theory of art as a reflection on real experience
(the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" in the *Critique
of Judgment*). In Deleuze's work, these two halves of
aesthetics are reunited: if the most general aim of art is to
"produce a sensation," then the genetic principles of
sensation are at the same time the principles of composition for works
of art; conversely, it is works of art that are best capable of
revealing these conditions of sensibility. Deleuze therefore writes on
the arts not as a critic but as a philosopher, and his books and
essays on the various arts--including the cinema (*Cinema*
I and II), literature (*Essays Critical and Clinical*), and
painting (*Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation*)--must
be read as philosophical explorations of this transcendental domain of
sensibility.



The cinema, for instance, produces images that move, and that move in
time, and it is these two aspects of film that Deleuze set out to
analyze in *The Movement-Image* and *The Time-Image*:
"What exactly does the cinema show us about space and time that
the other arts don't show?" Deleuze thus describes his
two-volume *Cinema* as "a book of logic, a logic of the
cinema" that sets out "to isolate certain cinematographic
concepts," concepts which are specific to the cinema, but which
can only be formed philosophically. *Francis Bacon: The Logic of
Sensation* likewise creates a series of philosophical concepts,
each of which relates to a particular aspect of Bacon's
paintings, but which also find a place in "a general logic of
sensation."



In general, Deleuze will locate the conditions of sensibility in an
intensive conception of space and a virtual conception of time, which
are necessarily actualized in a plurality of spaces and a complex
rhythm of times (for instance, in the non-extended spaces and
non-linear times of modern mathematics and physics).



For Deleuze, the task of art is to produce "signs" that
will push us out of our habits of perception into the conditions of
creation. When we perceive via the re-cognition of the properties of
substances, we see with a stale eye pre-loaded with cliches; we
order the world in what Deleuze calls "representation." In
this regard, Deleuze cites Francis Bacon: we're after an artwork
that produces an effect on the nervous system, not on the brain. What
he means by this figure of speech is that in an art encounter we are
forced to experience the "being of the sensible." We get
something that we cannot re-cognize, something that is
"imperceptible"--it doesn't fit the hylomorphic
production model of perception in which sense data, the
"matter" or *hyle* of sensation, is ordered by
submission to conceptual form. Art however cannot be re-cognized, but
can only be sensed; in other words, art splits perceptual processing,
forbidding the move to conceptual ordering. This is exactly what Kant
in the Third Critique called reflective judgment: when the concept is
not immediately given in the presentation of art. With art we reach
"sensation," or the "being of the sensible,"
the *sentiendum*.



Deleuze talks about this effect of sensation as the
"transcendent exercise" of the faculty of sensibility;
here we could refer to the third chapter of *Difference and
Repetition*, where Deleuze lays out a non-Kantian
"differential theory of the faculties." In this remarkable
theory, intensity is "difference in itself," that which
carries the faculties to their limits. The faculties are linked in
order; here we see what Deleuze calls the privilege of sensibility as
origin of knowledge--the "truth of empiricism." In
the differential theory of the faculties, sensibility, imagination,
memory, and thought all "communicate a violence" from one
to the other. With sensibility, pure difference in intensity is
grasped immediately in the encounter as the *sentiendum*; with
imagination, the disparity in the phantasm is that which can only be
imagined. With memory, in turn, the *memorandum* is the
dissimilar in the pure form of time, or the immemorial of transcendent
memory. With thought, a fractured self is constrained to think
"difference in itself" in Ideas. Thus the "free form
of difference" moves each faculty and communicates its violence
to the next. You have to be forced to think, starting with an art
encounter in which intensity is transmitted in signs or sensation.
Rather than a "common sense" in which all the faculties
agree in recognizing the "same" object, we find in this
communicated violence a "discordant harmony" (compare the
Kantian sublime) that tears apart the subject (here we find the notion
of "cruelty" Deleuze picks up from Artaud).


## 6. The Reception of Deleuze



The writings of Deleuze have provoked a large literature of
explication and introduction in both French and English; more
recently, works in German, Italian, and other European languages have
appeared. There have also been noteworthy critiques. Rather than
attempt a complete survey of the voluminous secondary literature, we
will concentrate on a few of the major critiques.


### 6.1 The feminist critique



An early wave of criticism was directed in the 1980s at
Deleuze's collaborations with Guattari by feminists such as
Alice Jardine and Luce Irigaray. Jardine 1985 criticized the concept
of "becoming-woman" in *A Thousand Plateaus*, which
Deleuze and Guattari position as the first step towards a
de-subjectivizing "becoming-indiscernible." Jardine argued
that Deleuze and Guattari's claim that even women must undergo a
"becoming-woman" amounts to a threat to the hard-fought
victories of concrete feminist struggle that allowed women to claim a
subjectivity in the first place. According to Grosz 1994's
survey of the early feminist critiques, Irigaray argued that the use
of "becoming-woman" as a figure of change incumbent upon
all, including men, amounts to a masculinist and desexualizing
appropriation of feminist struggle. In the 1990s and now into the
2000s, a number of feminists associated with the "corporeal
feminism" movement have attempted positive connections with
Deleuze in the name of an open and experimental attitude toward bodily
potentials, in both the singular and political registers, as in the
phrase "body politic." See among others Braidotti 1994 and
2002; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994 and 1995; Olkowski 1999; Lorraine 1999;
and the essays in Buchanan and Colebrook 2002.


### 6.2 The Badiouan critique



One of the most important criticisms of Deleuze was put forth in
Badiou 1997. Badiou claimed, contrary to the dominant perception, that
Deleuze is not so much a philosopher of the multiple as of the One.
Conducted in the highly technical idiom for which he is known, Badiou
criticizes Deleuze for a certain vitalism, which in Badiou's
eyes falls short of the axiomatic austerity demanded of philosophy.
Whereas Badiou merely ignored the collaborative works with Guattari,
Zizek 2003 conducts a polemic against the Guattari
collaborations in favor of a Deleuzean logic of Being characterized as
an "immaterial affect generated by interacting bodies as a
sterile surface of pure Becoming" (as in *Logic of
Sense*). A third critical work in this vein is Hallward 2005. For
Hallward, the singular logic of Deleuze's thought is analogous
to the tradition of theophantic thinkers, whereby the divine spark of
creation is entombed in creatures; the task of the creature is to
redeem that divine spark from its creatural prison. But this
redemption is not annihilation; Deleuze's philosophy is not that
of Lacanian-Zizekian
"renunciation-extinction."



In response to the Badiouan critique, we can note that one of the most
promising leads for future research in discussing the relation of
Badiou and Deleuze is to concentrate on the type of mathematics each
thinker prefers. Rather than accepting Badiou's characterization
of Deleuze as a thinker of reality in biological terms (as opposed to
Badiou's mathematical orientation), we should see Deleuze as
proposing a "problematic" version of mathematics, versus
Badiou's axiomatic conception. This tack has been taken by Smith
2003.


### 6.3 Deleuze and science



Deleuze was aware of the finitist revolution in the history of the
differential calculus, despite Sokal and Bricmont's 1999
intimations otherwise. He writes in *Difference and
Repetition*, "it is a mistake to tie the value of the symbol
*dx* to the existence of infinitesimals; but it is also a
mistake to refuse it any ontological or gnoseological value in the
name of a refusal of the latter. In fact, there is a treasure buried
within the old so-called barbaric or pre-scientific interpretations of
the differential calculus, which must be separated from its
infinitesimal matrix. A great deal of heart and a great deal of truly
philosophical naivety is needed in order to take the symbol
*dx* seriously ..." (170). It seems obvious here
that Deleuze's treatment of early forms of the differential
calculus is not meant as an intervention into the history of
mathematics, or an attempt at a philosophy of mathematics, but as an
investigation seeking to form a properly philosophical concept of
difference by means of extracting certain forms of thought from what
he clearly labels as antiquated mathematical methods. (For positive
views of Deleuze's use of mathematics as provocations for the
formation of his philosophical concepts, see the essays in Duffy
2006.)



Massumi 1992 and DeLanda 2003 attempt to show that Deleuze's
epistemology and ontology can be brought together with the results of
contemporary dynamical systems theory (popularly known as
"chaos" and "complexity" theory). Bell 2006
follows up on this work. Protevi 2001 looks at the accompanying
notions of hylomorphism and self-organization in the history of
philosophy; Bonta and Protevi 2004 treat Deleuze and dynamic systems
theory with regard to its potentials for geographical work. For other
issues on Deleuze and science, see the essays in Marks 2006. Finally,
Ansell Pearson 1999 brought attention to Deleuze and biology; see also
Toscano 2006 in this regard.


### 6.4 Deleuze Effects



As the interest in Deleuze continues to grow, three of its effects are
of interest to us, one of which is sociological and the other two of
which are philosophical.



The sociological effect is the globalization of institutions devoted
to the study of Deleuze's thought and its application in various
fields. A noteworthy institutional initiative is the series of
conferences sponsored by the journal *Deleuze and Guattari
Studies* (see Other Internet Resources) under the leadership of
Ian Buchanan. In addition to numerous conferences in Europe and North
America, an index of Deleuze's widespread impact is the success
of a number of conferences in Asia (to date, Taiwan, India, Singapore,
South Korea, China and Japan).



The two philosophical effects are that of reviving interest in those
whom Deleuze discusses explicitly or those whose influence on Deleuze
can be discerned, and that of providing a foil or counterpoint or
reference point in readings of other philosophers.



The most prominent example of the revivifying effect is Bergson,
relatively forgotten at the time of Deleuze's
*Bergsonism* (1966), but now the subject of a growing
philosophical literature. Of course, we cannot attribute all this
interest to Deleuze's book and to the subsequent secondary
literature on Deleuze that stresses the contribution of Bergson to
Deleuze's system (as we ourselves do above on the concept of the
virtual and the critique of the possible), but it is not implausible
to consider the counterfactual whereby without Deleuze's work
the interest in Bergson would not be as strong as it currently is.
Among the Bergson commentaries Mullarkey 1999, Guerlac 2006,
Moulard-Leonard 2009, Grosz 2017, and Lundy 2018 all link the two
thinkers in their works.



The post-Kantian Salomon Maimon has been for some time now a subject
of specialist interest by historians of philosophy; see the entry on
 Maimon;
 see also the recent English translation of his major work [Maimon
1790 [2010]). Maimon's relation to Deleuze is explored in Jones
& Roffe (eds.) 2009, Smith 2010, and Voss 2011.



Another example of thinker whose current level of interest was
arguably catalyzed by being noticed as an influence on Deleuze is the
mid-20th century French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, whose notions of
the "pre-individual" and of "crystallization"
were influential in the development of Deleuze's notions of the
virtual and actualization, respectively. An English translation of his
works is Simondon 2020. Among others, see Toscano 2006 and 2009, Scott
2014, Sauvagnargues 2016, Swan 2016, Alloa and Michalet 2017, and Voss
2018 and 2020 for treatments of the Deleuze-Simondon relation.



Yet another would be the early 20th century French sociologist Gabriel
Tarde, whose notion of microsociology is referred to approvingly in
Deleuze and Guattari's development of their notion of
"micropolitics" (Deleuze and Guattari 1980 [1987,
216-219]). For Deleuze-inspired treatments, see Alliez 2001,
Brighenti 2010, Read 2015, Tonkonoff 2017.



More recently and to a still muted extent is the revival of interest
in mid-20th century French thinker Raymond Ruyer, whose notion of
*survol* or "self-survey" is mentioned by Deleuze
and Guattari in their brief remarks on the consistency of the concept
in its neural instantiation in *What is Philosophy?* (Deleuze
and Guattari 1991 [1994, 210]). English translations of Ruyer's
works are Ruyer 2016 and 2018. Ruyer's relation to Deleuze is
explored in Bains 2002, Bogue 2009 and 2017, and Roffe 2017. Other
treatments of Ruyer that are relevant would be Massumi 2014 and Grosz
2017.



Finally, while it's certainly the case that Whitehead has
garnered continuous interest on his own, a good bit of current
Whitehead scholarship includes reference to Deleuze as a leitmotif, as
in Stengers 2011. A noteworthy new work influenced by both Deleuze and
Whitehead is Williams 2016. See also Shaviro 2009, Robinson 2010, and
Bell 2011 and 2012, on the Deleuze and Whitehead connection.