Deleuze and The Fold: A Critical Reader Deleuze and The Fold: A Critical Reader Edited by Sjoerd van Tuinen and Niamh McDonnell Selection and editorial matter © Sjoerd van Tuinen and Niamh McDonnell 2010 Chapters © their individual authors 2010 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-55287-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-349-36272-1 ISBN 978-0-230-24836-6 (eBook) .DOI10 105 7/9780230248366 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Transferred to Digital Printing in 2014 Contents List of Figures vi Preface vii Notes on Contributors viii Abbreviations List x Introduction 1 Niamh McDonnell and Sjoerd van Tuinen 1 Four Things Deleuze Learned from Leibniz 25 Mogens Lærke 2 The Free and Indeterminate Accord of ‘The New Harmony’: The Significance of Benjamin’s Study of the Baroque for Deleuze 46 Timothy Flanagan 3 Leibniz’s Combinatorial Art of Synthesis and the Temporal Interval of the Fold 65 Niamh McDonnell 4 Leibniz, Mathematics and the Monad 89 Simon Duffy 5 Perception, Justification and Transcendental Philosophy 112 Gary Banham 6 Genesis and Difference: Deleuze, Maïmon, and the Post-Kantian Reading of Leibniz 132 Daniel W. Smith 7 A Transcendental Philosophy of the Event: Deleuze’s Non-Phenomenological Reading of Leibniz 155 Sjoerd van Tuinen 8 Towards a Political Ontology of the Fold: Deleuze, Heidegger, Whitehead and the “Fourfold” Event 184 Keith Robinson 9 Two Floors of Thinking: Deleuze’s Aesthetics of Folds 203 Birgit M. Kaiser 10 Capacity or Plasticity: So Just What is a Body? 225 Matthew Hammond Index 243 v List of Figures 4.1 The tangent to the curve at P 91 4.2 Leibniz’s example of the infinitesimal calculus using ordinary algebra 93 4.3 Newton’s geometrical reasoning about the gradient of a tangent as a limit 95 4.4 The singular points of a curve 101 4.5 The meromorphic function 104 6.1 An Algebraic Example of the Calculus 148 vi Preface The aim of this volume is to provide, through a series of close textual engagements, critical readings of Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Le pli. Leibniz et le baroque, 1988). As interest in the Deleuzean corpus grows, more detailed expositions of his work become necessary. The Fold is a notoriously intricate text that presents a unique reading both of Leibniz and of the Baroque by bringing them together under an operative concept that also happens to be integral to Deleuze’s own work. Since its appearance, the book has seen its readership grow inces- santly, inspiring creative work across the fields of philosophy, aesthetics and cultural theory. However, surprisingly little sustained critical work has been undertaken with regard to it. This volume is not just a book on Deleuze-on-Leibniz. It opens up a number of key areas of difficulty and complexity within the text in order to provide a readership across different fields with a number of critical perspectives on this work. The impetus for this volume came in 2005, from a workshop on ‘Gilles Deleuze and The Fold’ hosted by the Research Group in Post- Kantian European Philosophy of the University of Warwick. The organisers, Darren Ambrose and Siobhan McKeown, decided that both the high quality of the work presented at this event and the creative momentum it provided could best be kept up in the form of a reader. Then, for personal reasons, they had to abandon their project. Instead of simply stopping the entire project, however, they generously passed it on. We would like to thank Darren and Siobhan, firstly, for the enthu- siasm and work they put into this project before handing it over to us and, secondly, for their confidence in our capacities to further extend it. We would like to thank the contributors for the privilege of the close reading of their essays, and our editor Priyanka Gibbons at Palgrave Macmillan for making corrections and providing support. vii Notes on Contributors Gary Banham is Reader in Transcendental Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He is the author of Kant’s Transcendental Imagination (2006), Kant’s Practical Philosophy (2003) and Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics (2000). He is also the editor of Husserl and the Logic of Experience (2005), co-editor of Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of A Future (2007) and Series Editor of the Palgrave Macmillan series Renewing Philosophy. Simon Duffy is an ARC research fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of The Logic of Expression: Quality, Quantity and Intensity in Spinoza, Hegel and Deleuze (2006), and is editor of Virtual Mathematics: The Logic of Difference (2006). Timothy Flanagan received his Ph.D. from the University of Dundee for a thesis entitled ‘Presentation of Reciprocity: An Interpolative Study of the Baroque Works of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze’. He has taught at the universities of Greenwich and Wolverhampton, UK, and has previously contributed a chapter to the edited collection Deleuze and History (2009). Matthew Hammond is an independent scholar whose research inter- ests include seventeenth-century rationalism, Hume, Deleuze, Foucault and Dickens. He regularly publishes work on subjects ranging from Plato to Deleuze on an arts and philosophy website. These essays will be assembled in a forthcoming book titled A History of Justice. He has taught political philosophy at the University of Exeter, UK. Birgit Kaiser received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. She teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature, Utrecht University. Her research revolves around the philosophy of literature, Deleuze, Foucault, and recently, around redefinitions of the postcolonial. She is author of Figures of Simplicity. Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville (2009). Mogens Lærke received his Ph.D. in history of philosophy from the University of Paris Sorbonne - Paris IV in 2003 and is Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Leibniz lecteur de Spinoza. La genèse d’une opposition complexe (2008) and of numerous articles on early modern philosophy. viii Notes on Contributors ix Niamh McDonnell is a graduate from Goldsmiths University of London, UK. In 2008 she received her Ph.D. on Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz entitled: On Diagrammatics – Leibniz’s ‘Art of Combinations’ in the Deleuzian Diagram. Her current research investigates a neo-monado- logical approach to reading the objects of epistemological and aesthetic analysis as performative philosophical texts. Keith Robinson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Dakota, US. He is interested in post-Kantian philosophy and has published work on Foucault, Deleuze and Whitehead. His most recent book, an edited collection of papers titled Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections was published by Palgrave Macmillan (2009). Daniel W. Smith teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University, US. He has translated Gilles Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation and Critique et clinique (with Michael A. Greco), as well as Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux and Isabelle Stenger’s Invention des sciences modernes. He has published widely on topics in contemporary philosophy, and is currently writing a book on Gilles Deleuze. Sjoerd van Tuinen teaches Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He is the author of Peter Sloterdijk. Ein Profil (2006) and has received his Ph.D. in philosophy at Ghent University for a dissertation on Deleuze and Leibniz entitled Mannerism in Philosophy. His current research revolves around a neo-monadological approach to speculative philosophy, aesthetics and theoretical sociology. Abbreviations List Works by Gilles Deleuze ABC L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, DVD (Paris: Editions Montparnasse). AO Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, with F. Guattari, translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane (London/New York: Continuum, 2003). ATP A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, with F. Guattari, translated by B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). B Bergsonism, translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991). C1 Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by H.