text:
BADIOU'S DELEUZE
BADIOU'S DELEUZE

JON ROFFE

First published in 2012 by Acumen

Published 2014 by Routledge

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© 2012 Jon Roffe

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_L'histoire des hommes est la longue succession des synonymes
d'un même vocable. Y contredire est un devoir._ René Char
CONTENTS

_Abbreviations_

1. The history of a disjunctive synthesis

2. Is Deleuze a philosopher of the One?

3. Method

4. The virtual

5. Truth and time

6. The event in Deleuze

7. Thought and the subject

8. A singular palimpsest

_Notes_

_Bibliography_

_Index_
ABBREVIATIONS

The following abbreviations are used throughout. Where two page numbers are listed, they refer to the English and French, respectively; any deviation from the published translation will be noted by the appendage of "tm" Where no English translation is referred to, the translations from the French are my own. In addition, references to Spinoza's _Ethics_ will follow the standard usage of indicating book, proposition followed by any required specification. Likewise, reference to Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ will be made to the respective pagination of the A and B editions.

TEXTS BY DELEUZE

AO | _Anti-Oedipus_
---|---
B | _Bergsonism_
DR | _Difference and Repetition_
DRF | _Deux Régimes de Fous: Textes et entretiens 1975–95_
EPS | _Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza_
ES | _Empiricism and Subjectivity_
F | _Foucault_
FLB | _The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque_
KCP | _Kant's Critical Philosophy_
LS | _The Logic of Sense_
ID | _L'Île Déserte et Autres Textes_
M | _Masochism_
MI | _Cinema 1: The Movement Image_
N | _Negotiations_
NP | _Nietzsche and Philosophy_
PS | _Proust and Signs_
TI | _Cinema 2: The Time Image_
TP | _A Thousand Plateaus_
WP | _What is Philosophy?_

TEXTS BY BADIOU

BE | _Being and Event_
---|---
CM | _The Concept of Model_
CT | _Court Traité d'Ontologie Transitoire_
DCB | _Deleuze: The Clamor of Being_
DVO | "Of Life as a Name of Being, or, Deleuze's Vitalist Ontology"
LM | _Logics of Worlds_
NN | _Number and Numbers_
TS | _Theory of the Subject_
TW | _Theoretical Writings_
1. THE HISTORY OF A DISJUNCTIVE SYNTHESIS

Over what were to be the final years of his life, Gilles Deleuze engaged in a long written correspondence with Alain Badiou. Badiou, in the light of his _magnum opus Being and Event_ ( _L'Être et l'événement_ ), published in 1988, had come to see Deleuze's philosophical project as the closest among those of his contemporaries to his own, and in turn saw Deleuze as his key rival in the attempt to present a philosophy of multiplicity and immanent being. This correspondence, unfortunately never published owing to Deleuze's dissatisfaction with its abstract tone (DCB 6/14), concluded at the end of 1994, shortly before the latter's death. In 1997, Badiou published _Deleuze: The Clamor of Being_ ( _Deleuze: Le clameur de L'Être_ ), which was a final letter to Deleuze, a summary of their epistolary disagreements and a restatement of the critical appraisal of Deleuze's thought first expressed directly to Deleuze himself.

_The Clamor of Being_ is presented as a work of demystification, an attempt to reinstate a classical image of the latter's philosophy in the face of a pervasive attempt to cast him as a thinker of "the heterogeneous multiplicity of desires" (DCB 8/17): in place of the caricature, "A faithful portrait of the master" (DCB xii). The central claim of this work is infamous: that Deleuze, far from being a philosopher dedicated to propounding the fundamental status of multiplicity and difference, is rather concerned with the ultimate status of ontological unity: "Deleuze's fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One" (DCB 10/19). Ranging across a number of Deleuze's works – above all his two key monographs from the late 1960s, _Difference and Repetition_ and _The Logic of Sense_ – Badiou presents a surprising and, for some, shocking account of a philosopher who was often thought to be already understood.

Badiou's portrait of Deleuze was (and remains) particularly confronting for many who considered themselves partisans of his thought. The response of Arnauld Villani, who declared that "this is a false book, the falsest book imaginable', is characteristic: "in the place of the most beautiful movement of life, [Badiou] has only proposed an abstract field, he only manages to strike up a dirge" (1998). And, while Villani himself, along with many others, sided with Deleuze, yet others again manned the barricades on behalf of Badiou. _The Clamor of Being_ thus became the epicentre of conflict in thought.

The epistolary sequence concluded by _The Clamor of Being_ is rooted in an engagement with Deleuze's thought that begins much earlier. Its first incarnation is entirely polemical in nature, and is manifested in _Théorie de la contradiction_ , published in 1975, and two texts from 1976, all of which directly attack the aspect of Deleuze's philosophy that Badiou will later declare to be inessential, namely, the account of desire and multiplicity found in that grimoire, _Anti-Oedipus_ (1972) and the text "Rhizomes" (1976), which would later take the form of the infamous first chapter of _A Thousand Plateaus_ (1980).

_Théorie de la contradiction_ , a thoroughly Maoist presentation of contradiction and the dialectic, adds "saint Gilles (Deleuze), saint Félix (Guattari)" and "saint Jean-Frangois (Lyotard)" to Marx's Saint Max (Stirner). For Badiou, their philosophies, committed as they are to "propulsive desire, evasive flux", to "the heterogeneous", and to the critique of "all organization" and "'totalitarian' Marxist-1 eninism", merely repeat "word for word" the kind of claims that Marx and Engel's _German Ideology_ needed to "tear to pieces" in order to present a cogent revolutionary program (Badiou 1975: 61).

The same critical rejection is registered in _De l'ideologie_ , a presentation of a fascinating Maoist _logical_ communism, written with Frangois Balmès and published in 1976. There, after citing Deleuze and Guattari's praise of the Reichian theme, according to which fascism must not be explained by recourse to misrecognition or illusion but rather in terms of what the masses in fact desired, Badiou writes:

This opposition between an argument on the basis of "illusion" and an argument on the basis of "desire" is itself argued on the basis of a rejection of reality. The reality is that the masses, under the general effect of the great "physical" defeats of the proletariat... have seen their organic capacity for resistance in no way annulled, but rather weakened, and in a profound way.

(Badiou & Balmès 1976: 38)

Finally, "The Flux and the Party", the single most substantial text dedicated by Badiou to Deleuze before _The Clamor of Being_ , oscillates between a rhetorically wide-ranging promotion of Marxist-Leninism, a mockery of _Anti-Oedipus_ and what border on _ad hominem_ attacks on Deleuze him-self. Badiou's key contention here is that the political metaphysics of _Anti-Oedipus_ is effectively a renewed form of Kantian philosophy in its most traditional sense. We are presented, Badiou loudly inveighs, with nothing more than the Kantian notions of freedom, the autonomous subject and the Good once the rhetorical fog is waved off: "Deleuze and Guattari don't conceal this very well: return to Kant, that's what they came up with to exorcise the Hegelian ghost" (2004a: 79tm). And, as in _Théoriedela contradiction_ , Badiou presents this approach as entirely irrelevant to contemporary political struggle, concluding by writing: "Look at them, these old Kantians who pretend they're playing at scattering the trinkets of Culture. Look at them: the time is nigh, and they're already covered in dust" (ibid.: 84). A text published by Badiou in the following year under the pseudonym Georges Peyrol, unfortunately entitled "The Fascism of the Potato" puts the point even more bluntly: "Deleuze and Guattari are protofascist ideologues" (Badiou [Peyrol] 1977: 51).

While the initial overt moments of this debate – Badiou notes that related sentiments were expressed verbally around this period (DCB 2/8–9) – revolved around politics and polemic, the next discussion takes the form of a considered philosophical critique, found in the 1982 _Theory of the Subject_.

Badiou claims here that Deleuze adopts one of the two theses characteristic of materialism ("there is only matter", the thesis of the One) at the expense of the other ("matter is primary in relation to thought", the thesis of the Two). Moreover, anticipating the central line of argument of _The Clamor of Being_ , Badiou argues that this commitment necessarily involves the demotion of multiplicity: "There are others, like Deleuze, who posit the Multiple, which is never more than a semblance since positing the multiple amounts to presupposing the One" (TS 22). Interestingly, Badiou finesses this by claiming something that _The Clamor of Being_ and the texts that follow it would fundamentally reject: he characterizes Deleuze's materialism as an "ultra-l eftism", stating that "the leftist deviation adopts the perspective of flight. It is a radicalism of novelty that breaks all mirrors" (TS 207).

This sequence, which poses Deleuze as a combatant entirely external to and distant from Badiou's own programme, is to a significant degree resolved in Badiou's interesting review of Deleuze's _The Fold_ (Badiou 1994), and in _The Clamor of Being_ itself. These texts, while remaining critical, proceed on the basis of the recognition that he and Deleuze share a number of fundamental tenets. In particular, Badiou notes the following points as indicative of a common ground of sorts:

• the rejection of the idea that philosophy and metaphysics are exhausted or have come to their natural end;

• the elaboration of a philosophy of the multiple; and in particular

• the importance of the concept of multiplicity;

• the thesis of ontological immanence; and

• the affirmation that thought is bound up with singularity.

The critique that Badiou offers, then, is made possible by the assessment that, in fact, he and Deleuze "constituted... a paradoxical tandem" (DCB 4/12). To be more precise, the possibility of _a more refined and exact disagreement_ became possible for Badiou as a result of an emerging closeness between his work and Deleuze's with respect to fundamental philosophical questions, an opening for a new kind of debate, one that would "cut straight to the _sensitive point_ at which different conceptual creations separate" (DCB 5/13).

Whether or not this mode of engagement is in fact put into play in _The Clamor of Being_ is the subject of the pages to follow, but what is striking is that the texts published on Deleuze after this tend increasingly to emphasize the differences between the two projects, rather than their closeness, and the goal of obtaining the sensitive point of divergence is gradually replaced with an external opposition of two blocs of thought. And, while the genre of these subsequent statements remains philosophical, some of the rhetorical flavour of "The Flux and the Party" begins to return. "One, Multiple, Multiplicity" (TW 67–80), Badiou's somewhat bewildered defence and restatement of _The Clamor of Being_ , while beginning _"at the point of greatest proximity_ " (TW 68), depicts Deleuze's philosophy as a "natural mysticism" (TW 80), which impoverishes (TW 70) and metaphorizes (TW 75) mathematics, and neutralizes formal thinking as such by subordinating it to empirical sensibility. Many of the same notes are sounded in "Deleuze's Vitalist Ontology", a text from the same – immediately post _-Clamor of Being_ – period.

In the chapter devoted to Deleuze in Badiou's 2006 _Logics of Worlds_ , entitled "The Event in Deleuze', the increasingly disjunctive quality of the latter's approach is even more evident. Badiou claims there that "a quite good axiomatic of what I call 'event'" (LM 384/406) can be arrived at by inverting Deleuze's philosophy of the event. Most recently of all, in the notes that close his _Pocket Pantheon_ , Badiou is to be found presenting the two respective positions in starkly opposing terms: "Finally: Platonism and anti-Platonism" (2008b: 175). This is in keeping with the claim found in _Logics of Worlds_ that "there are in effect only three crucial philosophers in my eyes: Plato, Descartes and Hegel. Note that these are precisely the three that Deleuze could never manage to love" (LM 527/552).

Thus, at the end of this lengthy engagement, the theoretical proximity whose recognition underpinned the epistolary sequence at the end of Deleuze's life, replacing the rhetorical hostility of "Flux and the Party", is finally disassembled, to be replaced with an unbroachable stand-off. The "non-rapport" (BE 1/6tm) is made complete.

***

Despite these recent developments, and this potted lengthy polemic, there is no question that _The Clamor of Being_ is at the very centre of Badiou's engagement with Deleuze. It is not only the single longest moment of this history, but it unfolds in a systematic fashion that is much less pronounced elsewhere. As Badiou's works on aesthetics and politics are to _Being and Event_ , so are "One, Multiple, Multiplicity" and "Deleuze's Vitalist Ontology" to _The Clamor of Being_.

The goal of this study is to carefully and critically examine the account of Deleuze's philosophy presented by Badiou in this sequence. It will argue with respect to each significant point made by Badiou in _The Clamor of Being_ that he misunderstands and misrepresents Deleuze's philosophy. More importantly, however, it argues that Badiou's thesis, according to which Deleuze mounts and defends a metaphysics of the One, functions not as a conclusion drawn on the basis of a careful study of the latter's texts, but as an initial axiom, a filter or lens through which the material under consideration is examined. It is principally this mode of approach that leads Badiou astray from the very beginning, and the divergence between the account in _The Clamor of Being_ only increases as Badiou's reading moves on to the difficult terrain of Deleuze's work at the end of the 1960s.

To this point, examinations of Badiou's reading of Deleuze have been either specific to certain concepts, insufficient with respect to the breadth of their treatments of _both_ philosophical positions, or prohibitively partisan. What follows aims to present a fully fledged reading and critique of Badiou's account of Deleuze's philosophy, and a defence of the latter's metaphysics on the points of contention. This is to say that I am not concerned to defend Deleuze's entire work, a project whose possibility and desirability remain to be demonstrated.

I hope to show that the sensitive points at which Deleuze and Badiou part ways are not themselves revealed in Badiou's critique of Deleuze. The search for these, a laborious endeavour given the degree and variety of misrecognition at work, is a task that remains to be comprehensively undertaken, despite its significance for a number of key debates in contemporary thought. This book, then, is presented as a prolegomena of this more demanding and involved work of archaeology.
2. IS DELEUZE A PHILOSOPHER OF THE ONE?

The claim that orients Badiou's entire reading of Deleuze is infamous: "This philosophy is organized around a metaphysics of the One" (DCB 17/30). As philosopher of the One, Badiou claims that Deleuze has for the most part been remarkably successful. We are dealing therefore not with a failed or impossible philosophical project, but one that Deleuze has more or less successfully executed on behalf of contemporary thought. The closing lines of _The Clamor of Being_ invoke Deleuze as "truly a most eminent apostle" (DCB 102/150) of the Spinoza for whom Being is radically unary in nature. If, as I shall come to argue, Badiou's argument on this point fails, then the veracity of the rest of his reading of Deleuze is profoundly challenged.

The next few pages endeavour not themselves to argue for this conclusion, but to initiate a procedure of _testing_ , in which Badiou's claims about Deleuze are brought into contact with the Deleuzean text. As we proceed, an increasingly rich picture of Deleuze will allow us to make a progressively more refined set of determinations about both Badiou's Deleuze and Deleuze's thought itself.

PORTRAIT OF DELEUZE AS A NEO-PLOTINIAN

The argumentative chain by which Badiou asserts this fundamental claim of his reading of Deleuze is founded upon what the former describes as a kind of pre-ontological move or decision on Deleuze's part, and is elaborated according to what Badiou characterizes as the "two abstract theses in which this principle is unfolded" (DCB 24/39).

Badiou begins the first chapter of _The Clamor of Being_ by noting a claim that Deleuze makes throughout his work, from his articles on Bergson in the 1950s onward: that the One-Many dyad is insufficient for thinking either difference or being. However, Badiou claims that Deleuze's renunciation of this dyad is not radical, and that, rather than moving to another concept to replace it, Deleuze in fact deploys the dyad hierarchically, asserting the supervenience of the One over the Many. He writes that, "as always with Deleuze, going beyond a static (quantitative) opposition always turns out to involve the _qualitative_ raising up of one of its terms" (DCB 10/19). Thus, in contrast to his reception as one of the "bearded militants of 1968" (DCB 12/22), a serious and philosophical reading of Deleuze reveals that it is the One rather than the many that is raised to the superior position.

On the basis of this decision in thought, Badiou claims, we can identify in Deleuze's philosophy two correlative theses. The first of these concerns the superior side of the dyad, the One. According to Badiou, Deleuze does not think that Being is One in either a numerical sense ("thought has already abdicated if it supposes that there is a single and same Being" [DCB 24/39]) or as a quasi-mystical tautological thought ("the One is the One" [DCB 24/39]). Rather, the ipseity of Being is formulated through the claim that the unity of Being is not broken by the "existence of multiple _forms_ of Being" (DCB 24/39). The philosopher that Badiou evokes in companionship with Deleuze at this point is Spinoza: "this is true of Spinoza's Substance, which is immediately expressed by an infinity of attributes" (DCB 25/40). Thus Badiou's first thesis is that, for Deleuze, "the multiple acceptations of being must be understood as a formal multiple, while _the One alone is real_ " (DCB 25/40, emphasis added). Not numerical, logically tautological or formal, the unity of being is fundamentally substantial or quidditative.

The assertion of the merely formal nature of the multiple is Badiou's second thesis. Badiou writes that "In each form of Being, there are to be found 'individuating differences' that may well be named beings... beings are local degrees of intensity or inflections of power that are in constant movement and entirely singular" (DCB 25/40).

Badiou indeed goes on to strengthen this claim: given that "there is, definitively, only the One-All" (DCB 25/40), the ontological status of the multiple is effectively _nothing in itself_. Badiou notes, in terms that will be brought into question later:

[T]he price one must pay for inflexibly maintaining the thesis of univocity is clear: given that the multiple (of beings, of significations) is arrayed in the universe by way of a numerical difference that is purely formal as regards the forms of being to which it refers (thought, extension, time, etc.) and purely modal as regards its individuation, it follows that, ultimately, the multiple can only be of the order of simulacra. And if one classes – as one should – every difference without a real status, every multiplicity whose ontological status is that of the One, as a simulacrum, then the world of beings is the theater of the simulacra of Being.

(DCB 26/41)

In short, given that Being falls on the side of the One, the multiple (or beings) have no being of their own: they are ghosts, epiphenomena. For Badiou, Deleuze's philosophy relentlessly plunges the apparent reality of beings into the more fundamental realm of the One-All, and as a result the former appear essentially and increasingly "irreal, indetermined, and finally non-objective" (DCB 53/81).

Now, this characterization bears the greatest similarity to an ontological position first found in the Neoplatonists, and which is identified by Deleuze as the _emanative_ schema. Emanative ontologies assert precisely these two theses, according to which the apparent richness of the material world is but a secondary and inessential manifestation of a superior reality. This – essentially Plotinian – view is quite legible in Badiou's account of Deleuze. The previous passage finishes with the following thought:

Strangely, this consequence has a Platonic, or even Neoplatonic, air to it. It is as though the paradoxical or supereminent One immanently engenders a procession of beings whose univocal sense it distributes, while they refer to its power and have only a semblance of being.

(DCB 26/41–2)

The first pages of _Number and Numbers_ also attest to this particular form of connection between the One and the Multiple from Badiou's point of view:

The Greek thinkers of number related it back to the One, which, as we can still see in Euclid's _Elements_ , was considered not to be a number. From the supra-numeric being of the One, unity is derived. And a number is a collection of units, an addition. Underlying this conception is a problematic that stretches from the Eleatics through to the Neoplatonists: that of a procession of the Multiple from the One.

(NN 7)

In keeping with this view, the role of the philosopher is that of the seer, in the literal sense of the word: the one who sees through the ephemera of apparent reality to the _profundus_ of the One.

A PHILOSOPHER OF THE ONE?

In order to consider the strength of Badiou's presentation of the One-Many relation in Deleuze, it is not enough to simply cite the many passages in Deleuze's work that would seem to depart from it, a procedure that is necessary but not sufficient. What is required is the examination of the _consequences_ of this central claim as it is unfolded alongside Deleuze's philosophy. It is by measuring the gap between these trajectories that the fidelity of Badiou's reading will be revealed. As I noted above, these consequences are elaborated throughout the entire course of Badiou's engagement with Deleuze. A final judgement must be withheld until all the key issues have been examined. Here, I shall seek, in an introductory mode, to examine certain specific texts found throughout Deleuze's philosophy that depart from this opening sketch of Badiou's reading. Each presents more or less starkly a philosophical investment that deviates from the presentation of Deleuze as a philosopher of the One: the theme of substantive multiplicity; the doctrine of univocity; simulacra and the theme of crowned anarchy; and the theme of expression. This opening examination must not be conceived as an outright rejection, but seeks rather to introduce _in fine_ a dissonance into the refrain of the One.

FROM ONE-MANY TO SUBSTANTIVE MULTIPLICITY

The first remark to be made here concerns in a direct fashion the alleged primacy of the One: contrary to Badiou's assertion, Deleuze's rejection of the One-Many _dispositif_ is never followed by "the _qualitative_ raising up of one of its terms". In fact, this critical rejection is "always" (DCB 9/19) followed by a very different move: the replacement of the entire dyad with a new concept, that of substantive multiplicity, irreducibly plural in nature. In Badiou's account of Deleuze's ontology, the word _multiplicity_ only ever appears in places where it is clearly interchangeable with the word multiple (e.g. DCB 26/41), which erases, at the level of terminology, a decisive Deleuzean theme.

It is all the more peculiar that Badiou does not recognize the perennial nature of this move of Deleuze's, because he time and again asserts that the fundamental conflict between his thought and that of Deleuze concerns the status of multiplicities (e.g. DCB 47–8/71–2). And in Deleuze's philosophy, the theme of multiplicity is _everywhere premised by a critique not of the relative subordination of the One to the Many, but by rejecting this dyad outright_. While many examples might be called on, I shall present only two: the first is from _Bergsonism_ , the text in which Deleuze first introduces his interest in the concept of multiplicity; the second is an example that Badiou himself introduces in discussing this topic, found in Deleuze's later work _Foucault_. These texts, published twenty years apart, show no divergence at all in their characterization of multiplicity, something that cannot be said for many of Deleuze's other concepts, as we shall see in what follows.

While the second chapter of _Bergsonism_ begins by situating itself in relatioin to the psycho-personal theory of duration elaborated by Bergson early in his work, it is in fact largely dedicated to elaborating Bergson's theory of multiplicity, itself drawn from G. B. R. Reimann. Deleuze, who puts great store on this theme in his reading of Bergson, writes:

Too little importance has been attached to the use of this word "multiplicity'! It is not a part of the traditional vocabulary at all... The word "multiplicity" is not there as a vague noun corresponding to the well-known philosophical notion of the Multiple in general.

(B 38–9)

Later in the same chapter he adds:

A very important aspect of the notion of multiplicity is the way in which it is distinguished from a theory of the One and the Multiple. The notion of multiplicity saves us from thinking in terms of "One and Multiple."

(B 44)

In fact, it is the category of multiplicity . which enables us to condemn the mystification of a thought that operates in terms of the One and the Multiple.

(B 47)

Despite the fact that this account of multiplicity is embedded in a discussion of Bergsonian _durée_ , in _Foucault_ we find similar points in an entirely different (if not antithetical) context. Speaking of Foucault's concept of the statement _(énoncé)_ as it is found in _The Archaeology of Knowledge_ , Deleuze claims:

They are multiplicities. It was Riemann in the field of physics and mathematics who dreamt up the notion of "multiplicity" and different kinds of multiplicities. The philosophical importance of this notion then appeared in Husserl's _Formal and Transcendental Logic_ , and in Bergson's _Time and Free Will_ . But the notion died out in these two areas, either because it became obscured by a newly restored simple dualism arising from a distinction made between genres, or because it tended to assume the status of an axiomatic system. Nonetheless, the core of the notion is the constitution of a substantive in which "multiple" ceased to be a predicate opposed to the One . Multiplicity remains completely indifferent to the traditional problems of the multiple and the one... _There is neither one nor multiple_.

(F 13–14tm, emphasis added)

In both cases, two points are evident: on the one hand, in no way does Deleuze proceed from a rejection or critique of the One-Many dyad to an assertion of the qualitative supersession of the One. In fact, to the contrary, Deleuze in both cases claims that the One-Many dyad _as such_ must be surpassed by a new or renovated concept of substantive multiplicity. What is also remarkable about these passages is how keenly they address themselves to Badiou's presentation of Deleuze as a thinker of the One. It seems implausible to maintain this claim of Deleuze in the face of his direct rejections of the alternatives and misunderstandings that the concept has been subject to. It is, of course, possible that Deleuze's theory of multiplicity may in itself be insufficient. This point, though, in no way should distract us from the repetition – sometimes almost _ad nauseam_ – by Deleuze of the claim that multiplicity overthrows the entirety of the One-Many dyad for Deleuze, a point that _The Clamor of Being_ never registers.

THE UNIVOCITY OF BEING

Despite the concept of univocity being one of the more well-known tropes in Deleuze's philosophy, its sense and specific role are not grasped as well as they might be. The following passage, which contains the subtitle of Badiou's _Deleuze_ , is exemplary:

There has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being is univocal. There has only ever been one ontology, that of Duns Scotus, which gave being a single voice. We say Duns Scotus because he was the one who elevated univocal being to the highest point of subtlety, albeit at the price of abstraction. However, from Parmenides to Heidegger it is the same voice which is taken up, in an echo which itself forms the whole deployment of the univocal. A single voice raises the clamor of being.

(DR 35/52)

We can begin our explication of the meaning of univocity for Deleuze by noting this surprising reference to Scotus. In a series of pieces, Nathan Widder (2001; 2002: ch. 5; 2008: 27–43) demonstrates four fundamental aspects of Scotist univocity that must be kept in mind when reading Deleuze's treatment of the concept, found for the most part in important moments of both _Difference and Repetition_ and _The Logic of Sense_.

First, the concept originates with and finds its premier champion in (as a part of the pantheon of figures that Deleuze discusses) the work of Scotus himself. While in _Difference and Repetition_ Deleuze also lists Spinoza and Nietzsche as thinkers of univocal being, neither of these philosophers speak of univocity as such. Second, the key resource for Scotus is the philosophy of Aristotle; in fact, for Scotus, it is Aristotle who is the first thinker of univocity. The sense of the famous Aristotelian dictum according to which "Being is not a genus", on Scotus's account, is that the various genres or primary senses in which being is said (substance, modality, time, etc.) are said equally. He writes: "it is clear that 'being' has a primacy of commonness in regard to the primary intelligibles, that is, to the quidditative concepts of the genera, species, individuals, and all their essential parts, and to the Uncreated Being" (1987: 4).

This leads us in turn to the third point. While every being is equal in this quidditative sense, _particular_ beings cannot be thought exclusively according to or from the point of view of univocal being. For Scotus, something exceeds univocity, namely, particular beings, or what he calls _haecceities_. Thus ontology and individuation come to be treated separately for essential reasons. In other words, it is only reality _qua_ being that is univocal; the examination of the reality of particular haecceities exceeds this consideration, is unintelligible to human reason, thus falling beyond the ambit of affirmation. It is for this reason that Deleuze describes Scotus's thought of univocity as neutral in nature (DR 39/57), merely asserting as it does a common Being in general while being unable to affirm the univocal status of beings as such.

Finally, Deleuze's account of univocity on his own terms definitively breaks with the Scotist position, and in two respects (both of them related to Scotus's Aristotelian heritage). At the level of greatest generality, he rejects the use of categories in thinking being in so far as they multiply the senses of being. Thus for Deleuze, Aristotle's account only manages a quasi-univocity, deployed across the categories, which is to say that the univocity Scotus finds in Aristotle is there subordinate to an ontological equivocation that relativizes its scope. On the other hand, Deleuze wants to extend univocity to singular individuals, which Scotus's account of univocity rules out. In particular, the ultimate goal for Deleuzean univocity is the affirmation of the univocal being for precisely haecceities as such, the anomalous, difference-in-itself. The locus of Deleuzean univocity is thus an inversion of Scotus's: rather than providing an ontology capable of including beings of the greatest extrinsic difference in the same quidditative sense of being, it is the rights of subconceptual differences that are at issue.

As these points already make apparent, it seems that Deleuze's use of univocity – and particularly his deviation from the Aristotelianism of Scotus – is a poor fit for Badiou's reading. The fourth point is particularly instructive, for Badiou claims in passing that it is "Duns Scotus who is perhaps the most radical" (DCB 24/39) thinker of univocity for Deleuze, a claim explicitly contradicted by the Deleuzean text, as we shall see.

To recapitulate, Badiou's account of univocity in Deleuze is presented as two complementary theses. When we examine Deleuze's own formulation of the theme, we find the same form, but a content that deviates from Badiou's presentation. The first of these propositions we have already seen: being is said in a single manner. There is in no way a "division within Being or plurality of ontological senses" (DR 303/387). We have also seen how this corresponds to the posit of the One prior to all beings on Badiou's account. Deleuze's second thesis, though, is provoked by the recognition that this first claim leaves itself open to a certain potential misinterpretation: "It is true that such a point of view is not sufficient to prevent us from considering these senses [of being] as analogues and this unity of being as an analogy" (DR 35/52). We can add, in light of Badiou's reading, that Deleuze's first thesis is not sufficient to prevent us from considering the unity of being in question as _the_ substantive reality from which all other beings proceed as simulacra or emanations. This is because the first thesis says nothing about the manner in which this univocity relates to beings as such: that is to say, several possibilities exist for resolving this question. Beings may be expressed analogically (Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas), non-analogically but still equivocally (Descartes, Leibniz), emanatively (Plotinus, Proclus, Maimonides) or univocally. Thus Deleuze adds the following crucial thesis, which is repeated as a corrective to the first at a number of places in both _Difference and Repetition_ and _The Logic of Sense_ :

In effect the essential in univocity is not that Being is said in a single and same sense, _but that it is said, in a single and same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities_. Being is the same for all these modalities, but these modalities are not the same. It is "equal" for all, but they themselves are not equal. It is said of all in a single sense, but they themselves do not have the same sense. The essence of univocal being is to include individuating differences, while these differences do not have the same essence and do not change the essence of being... it is said of difference itself.

(DR 36/53, emphasis added)

While for Deleuze what is decisive in this formulation is that what is univocally expressed is difference (keeping in mind one of the charges of _Difference and Repetition)_ , for us here it is the fact that what is affirmed by univocal being is not itself as One, but beings in themselves. This second thesis is supplemented by the claims of _The Logic of Sense_ : it is not just beings, but also events and sense that are said in the same way. There is no division in Being between beings, the sense which are their attributes, or the events which inhere in changes in states of affairs (LS 180/211).

What, then, ultimately does the unity of univocity refer us to, if not a substantive unity as Badiou would have it? Finally it comes to this: univocity signifies the unity of the _manner in which beings are expressed_. There is no Substance behind beings, a point that will be reaffirmed when we later examine Deleuze's theory of time. Beings all express being in the same way, although they themselves arise on the basis of, and ultimately constitute, irreducible differences.

In this respect, it is interesting to note that in his review of _The Fold_ , Badiou asserts of Deleuze's ontology that it is, like Leibniz's, a mannerism. This text, published several years before _The Clamor of Being_ , differs from the latter on the topic of univocity, touching something essential in Deleuze's project. Indeed, mannerism is a fine term to describe Deleuze's ontology. The two theses of univocity in Deleuze can be rephrased accordingly: beings are all expressed in the _same manner_ , even though they differ from each other and, more fundamentally, are synthetic products of difference-in-itself.

In sum then, and contrary to Badiou's reading, Deleuze's ontology seems to have no place for Being as such, Being as the supreme _Ens_ , radiant in its splendid isolation. Substantive unity is here completely dissolved in favour of a modality or a manner _of_ being. To use the Bergsonian-inflected terminology found in the conclusion of _Difference and Repetition_ , the ground of beings, when followed around the bend beyond which experience can no longer grasp it, completely dissolves in both form and content, becoming pure difference. This is why Deleuze's discussion of univocity turns finally to a reformation of the Nietzschean theme of the eternal return, in so far as, for Deleuze, what the eternal return categorically excludes from being is any unity, fundamental or otherwise. Thus he writes:

[E]ternal return is the univocity of being, the effective realisation of that univocity. In the eternal return, univocal being is not only thought and even affirmed, but effectively realised. Being is said in a single and same sense, but this sense is that of eternal return as the return or repetition of that of which it is said. The wheel in the eternal return is at once both the production of repetition on the basis of difference and the selection of difference on the basis of repetition.

(DR 41–2/60–61)

In other words, the manner in which being is unified excludes in principle any settling out of identity, unicity or the One. Indeed, the eternal return involves the inverse of a centrifugal movement: instead of everything solid consolidating itself at the foundation, it is cast out in favour of what is fortuitous or different. Anticipating discussions to follow in later chapters, for Deleuze, univocity only succeeds in so far as beings rest not on any fixed ground but are subject to an ultimate ungrounding. It is only when difference itself is the object of affirmation that being becomes univocal, irrevocably unmoored from any unified foundation.

SIMULACRUM

If we turn now to Badiou's treatment of the second half of the One-Many dyad, we know that the Many are figured – on his account – as lacking in any being of their own. They are emanations of the One, which Badiou defines with one of Deleuze's most well-known terms, _simulacra_. A being is a simulacrum of Being. It is far from certain, however, that Deleuze's own concept of simulacra can be squared with Badiou's use of the term in his account of Deleuze's ontology.

Despite Deleuze's claim to Jean-Clet Martin that "it seems to me that I have totally abandoned the notion of simulacra, which was never of great importance" (DRF 339), there is no question that this concept played a key role in both _Difference and Repetition_ (where it is dealt with in a number of different contexts) and _The Logic of Sense_ (where it organizes four of the five appendices at the close of that work, and is used as a term for the bodily depths that constitute states of affairs [see LS 187–8/218–19]).

What role does it play there? In the first instance, the concept of the simulacrum appears in Deleuze in the context of his version of the overturning of Platonism. What is in question is the structure that Deleuze takes to be at the heart of Plato's philosophy, namely, the relationship between the Forms, material or empirical copies of these Forms (Plato's _icōnes)_ , and the perverse copies of these copies (Deleuze's Latin _simulacra_ translates the Platonic term _phantasmata)_. What matters for Plato, on Deleuze's account, is the capacity to distinguish between the first-order copies of the Forms (the just man in accordance with the Form of Justice) on the one hand, and what appear to be second-order copies of copies, those semblants that differ internally from that which they appear to copy, the simulacra, on the other. Thus the ultimate sense of the tripartite division of model/copy/simulacrum is "to screen the claims and to distinguish the true pretender from the false one" (LS 254/293). For it is only the first that bear the mark of the Forms with propriety; the latter merely _appear_ to be legitimate copies, while lacking any interior or essential relation with the Forms at all.

Deleuze draws from this the point central to his championing of the concept of simulacrum:

If we say of the simulacrum that it is a copy of a copy, an infinitely degraded icon, and infinitely loose resemblance, we then miss the essential, that is, the difference in nature between simulacrum and copy. The copy is an image endowed with resemblance, the simulacrum is an image without resemblance.

(LS 257/297)

What lies at the heart of the Platonic effort to distinguish the good copy from the bad is the fact that the simulacra contains a genuine creative power that Deleuze will later go on to call the power of the false: the capacity to integrally _produce_ reality without any recourse to a transcendent model, rather than represent what are apparently the most profound elements that preexist _in reality_. This capacity (errant, ungrounded creation), the dangerous departure from the model/copy schema, is, for Plato, what is most troubling and subversive about them, and precisely what Deleuze considers to be their profound value for any serious ontology. For the concept of the simulacra, productive and untethered, accounts for being itself. Rather than figuring as fallen and second-hand copies of things and Forms, "The thing is the simulacrum itself, the simulacra are the superior forms" (DR 67tm/93).

The key point in all this is the following: rather than expressing one half of the One-Many dyad, the concept of simulacra is meant to convey something about _beings in general_ , namely, that the structure of being as such in no way involves a division between the regime of the ideal, self-identical, superior, supereminent and that of inferior material, ephemeral products. Rather, beings must be thought _solely_ as simulacra: "By simulacrum we should not understand a simple imitation but rather the act by which the very idea of a model or privileged position is challenged and overturned" (DR 69/95). It would be exceedingly difficult, at a minimum, to understand the affinity Deleuze feels with the ontology of images espoused by Bergson, nor the philosophy of the cinema that is related to it, if this is not understood, not to mention Deleuze's reformation of the Platonic notion of the Idea.

This point is itself only intelligible once Badiou's radical division between the One and simulacra is left to one side. However, one part of this account is correct here: simulacra are indeed beings, singular existents, for Deleuze. They are images without any corresponding model. This does not mean, though, that they are but ontological epiphenomena, flickers crossing the synapses of Being: they are the expressions of being as such. The One appears in turn as an epiphenomena of the play of simulacra, and _not the reverse_.

CROWNED ANARCHY AND THE DISJUNCTIVE SYNTHESIS

In the course of the first chapter of _The Clamor of Being_ , Badiou touches on one of the more evocative images found in Deleuze's _Difference andRepetition_, that of "crowned anarchy", which is introduced in the discussion of univocity that we have seen above. There, Deleuze writes:

The words "everything is equal" may therefore resound joyfully, on condition that they are said of that which is not equal in this equal, univocal Being... Univocity of being thus signifies equality of being. Univocal Being is at one and the same time nomadic distribution and crowned anarchy.

(DR 37/55)

To this Badiou responds: "One should not be misled by the use of the word 'anarchy' to designate the nomadism of singularities, for Deleuze specifies 'crowned anarchy, and it is crucial to think also – indeed, to think above all – the crown" (DCB 13/23). For Badiou, the crown is the sign of the One, the mark manifest in each individual being that indicates its foundation in the One.

Once more, however, Badiou's reading of this moment proceeds by substantializing the moment of univocity rather than grasping it as manner. Ultimately, the role of the "crown" here is the role of univocal affirmation of what is crowned, namely, the in-principle-non-hierarchical nature of being. In other words, what is crucial to think is the _manner_ in which the anarchy of beings (DR 37/55) is crowned, and how this allows us to distinguish it from the hierarchy involved in analogical accounts of being.

This point can also be used to grasp in an initial manner – although a thorough assessment awaits a more detailed discussion of _The Logic of Sense_ – the use to which Deleuze puts the term "disjunctive synthesis'. On Badiou's account, of central importance here is the moment of synthesis, where each of the disjunctive singularities or simulacra are thought according to their origin in the supreme reality of the One. However, this is very much to the contrary of the Deleuzean text. If we turn our attention to the key central chapters of _The Logic of Sense_ (notably, those devoted to causality, singularity, genesis and the compossibility of events), a different account can be found. It is certainly the case that Deleuze claims a unity of all events in a single Event. What is in question, however, is precisely the nature of the unity involved. It is this that characterizes what Deleuze calls _"Eventum tantum"_ (LS 176/207), and here Badiou's error seems to involve forcing the figure of the One on the nature of the internal relations characteristic of this Event.

"Divergence and disjunction are affirmed as such" (LS 172/201). But, Deleuze continues:

[W]hat does it mean to make divergence and disjunction the objects of affirmation? As a general rule, two things are simultaneously affirmed only to the extent that their difference is denied, suppressing from within, even if the level of this suppression is supposed to regulate the production of difference as much as its disappearance. To be sure, the identity here is not that of indifference, but it is generally _through identity_ that opposites are affirmed at the same time, whether we accentuate one of the opposites in order to find the other, or whether we create a synthesis of the two. We speak, on the contrary, of an operation according to which two things or two determinations are affirmed through their difference, that is to say, that they are the objects of simultaneous affirmation _only insofar as their difference is itself affirmed_.

(LS 172/201–2, latter emphasis added)

The import of this statement is clear: that the disjunctive synthesis that characterizes the relations between events, and thus describes the structure of the single Event, can be grasped only once the theme of identity is superseded in the direction of a unilateral and immanent account of difference as positive distance. What is at stake, then, in disjunctive synthesis, is the manner by which differences co-exist _as such_. The synthesis in question does not go beyond this manner of co-existence: it _is_ this manner. The synthesis has no higher moment, or, rather, in the spirit of Deleuze's account of disjunctive synthesis itself, this synthesis is in fact the highest form of synthesis, because it involves no subordination to a finality beyond what is engaged in the synthesis itself.

This quote is revealing in two other respects as well, first in so far as it challenges a key aspect of Badiou's central claim about Deleuze. Here Deleuze is insisting that it is difference that inhabits identity, rather than being – as in Badiou's account – excluded from it. It is difference that is superior, interior and supereminent (in a certain genetic if not ontological respect) to the One. In addition, Deleuze describes and repudiates the very mechanism that Badiou locates at the heart of the assertion of the primacy of the One. To quote again,

As always with Deleuze, [this] going beyond a static (quantitative opposition) always turns out to involve the qualitative raising up of one of its terms. And, contrary to the commonly accepted image... it is the occurrence of the One – renamed by Deleuze the One-All – that forms the supreme destination of thought.

(DCB 10–11/19)

If this was indeed Deleuze's central _modus operandi_ , it would serve him poorly. In the place of such a movement, in which the reconciliation of opposites is achieved by realizing them within a unity that accentuates one term in relation to another, to the other, Deleuze seeks to secure difference in relation to difference, and, more profoundly, difference-in-itself.

EMANATION AND EXPRESSION

Now, as we have already seen, Badiou's claim about the status of the One in Deleuze's philosophy also includes a correlative thesis concerning difference, or the many, namely, that beings are simulacra or emanations of this One, epiphenomenal effects whose being is at best ephemeral. Thus his central proposition concerning Deleuze's ontology is that it is emanative in nature. Badiou's claim that, for Deleuze, "the univocal real of Being that supports... difference within itself and distributes to it a single sense" (DCB 26/42), is an excellent formulation of the emanative schema, where Being is a unique One-Agent, irreducible and distant from its productions and yet their active source. It is worth insisting on this point because Deleuze himself engages directly with emanative ontological positions, and rejects them in favour of an expressivist account.

The main text in question is found in his long study of Spinoza, _Expressionism in Philosophy_ , entitled "Immanence and the Historical Components of Expression". This chapter is devoted to a consideration of the development of certain philosophical themes found in Spinoza's immanent theory of being. Deleuze's essential claim is that post-Platonic philosophy elaborates a new ontology in order to resolve certain tensions within Platonic thought around the theme of participation. This Neoplatonic ontology posits a higher unity or One from which particular beings proceed, and in relation to which these beings have no causal efficacy nor any comparable degree of reality. This post-Platonic emanative ontology mutates in contact with Christianity on the side of philosophy, but it also gives rise to or makes room for an alternative schema with which it has much in common, namely, expressive ontology, according to which (taking Spinoza as an example), "Substance expresses itself to itself" (EPS 185).

The history of this strain of ontological consideration carries us, on Deleuze's account, from Plotinus to Spinoza, unfolding through a variety of complex formations of the two positions: "Expressive immanence is grafted onto the theme of emanation, which in part encourages it, and in part represses it" (EPS 178). It is with Spinoza's philosophy that expressive ontology makes a complete break with its emanative travelling companion. In turn, it is this feature of Spinozism relative to the history of ontology since Plato that Deleuze wishes to champion:

The significance of Spinozism seems to me this: it asserts immanence as a principle and frees expression from any subordination to emanative or exemplary causality. Expression itself no longer emanates, no longer resembles anything. And such a result can be obtained only within a perspective of univocity.

(EPS 180)

Nonetheless, as has already been well remarked, Badiou claims an emanative theory of being for Deleuze. In keeping with his account, though, it is less Spinoza than Augustine who must be accounted the primary point of reference. For the latter, as Deleuze presents him: "God expresses himself in his Word or in an exemplary Idea; but the exemplary Idea expresses the multiplicity of creatable and created things . Expression is like a radiation that leads us from God, who expresses himself, to the things expressed" (EPS 179). Radiation (a term Deleuze uses a number of times here) is a term that fits well within Badiou's account. Being, or God, would be the pure causal origin of these flickers of radiation, playing themselves out on the surface of this immaculate Sphere.

There are a number of key differences between emanative ontological accounts and what Deleuze takes to be the strictly expressivist position adopted by Spinoza. In the current context, however, it is the issue of causality that presents itself as the most significant. This is because, for Badiou, the One is the sole causal force, being, after all, all that exists in the final analysis. What characterizes Deleuze's ontology on Badiou's account is a claim about the causal origins of actual beings in relation to the One. On this point, Deleuze will agree: the issue of causality is here fundamental. Deleuze writes:

_While an emanative cause remains in itself, the effect it produces is not in it, and does not remain in it_. Plotinus says of the One as first principle or cause of causes: "It is because there is nothing in it that all things come from it." In reminding us that an effect is inseparable from its cause, he is thinking of a continuity of flow or radiation.

(EPS 171–2)

In Spinoza, the alternative to this account of emanative causality (and the poverty of existents that it implies) is the famous _causa sui_ : "God is the cause of all things in the same way that he is the cause of himself" (EIP25S). Rejecting the strictly external nature of the relationship between being and its expressions, Spinoza is, for Deleuze, the philosopher for whom efficient causality is _the_ decisive causal modality. There is no ultimate _telos_ of being, nor an order of formal reality that has any direct causal efficacy on existing beings (the modes). There is no ontological gap in Spinoza between cause and effect, and every "power is always an act or, at least, in action" (EPS 93).

Let me insist once more that Deleuze considers Spinoza's riposte to the complex tradition of emanative ontology a complete success, just as he considers himself a Spinozist in this sense. To repeat: "The significance of Spinozism seems to me this: it asserts immanence as a principle and frees expression from any subordination to emanative or exemplary causality" (EPS 180).

This point can also be put in relation to the Platonic theme of participation, concerning which, Deleuze says, "everything may, it seems, be traced back to" (EPS 169). In effect, emanative and expressive ontologies propose inverse accounts of the nature of the relationship between being and its modalities. The emanative scheme inverts (EPS 170) the Platonic account by concerning itself no longer with particular beings (when it asks how they manage to participate in the Ideas), but with that which beings participate in:

The participated does not in fact enter into what participates in it. What is participated remains in itself; it is participated insofar as it produces, and produces insofar as it gives, but has no need to leave itself to give or produce. Plotinus formulates the program of starting at the highest point, subordinating imitation to genesis or production, and substituting the idea of a gift for that of a violence. What is participated is not divided, is not imitated from outside, or constrained by intermediaries which would do violence to its nature. Participation is neither material, nor imitative, nor demonic: it is emanative. Emanation is at once cause and gift: causality by donation, but by productive donation. True activity comes from what is participated; what participates is only an effect, receiving what it is given by its cause.

(EPS 170)

Despite the originality of this view, Deleuze once more aligns himself with Spinoza, for whom:

to participate is to have a part in, to be a part of, something. Attributes are so to speak dynamic qualities to which corresponds the absolute power of God. A mode is, in its essence, always a certain degree, a certain quantity, of a quality. Precisely thereby it is, within the attribute containing it, a part so to speak of God's power.

(EPS 183)

As we have already seen, on the expressivist account, "Substance expresses itself to itself" (EPS 185). We might say in sum that, for emanative ontologies, participation ultimately tends towards insignificance, since the beings that participate in the One do so at an irremediable divide; for expressive ontologies, it is participation as such that defines the unity of being (there is no One as such, but only the universal _fact_ of participation), except that the last barriers between participant and what is participated in have been torn down.

Or, indeed, all but one of them. We must add that Deleuze, despite nominating himself on many occasions as a Spinozist, ultimately considers the Spinozist philosophy of expression to have a profound weakness. This weakness concerns precisely the priority and primacy of substance in Spinoza's thought. After praising Spinoza as the thinker who charged the principle of univocity with an affirmation (the affirmation of expressions as such, rather than of a principled being in general) that Scotus could or did not, Deleuze turns to the third in his trinity of thinkers of univocity, Nietzsche, in order to supplement or radicalize Spinoza himself. On what grounds? In Spinoza, there still remains a difference between substance and the modes:

Spinoza's substance appears independent of the modes, while the modes are dependent on substance, but as though on something other than themselves. Substance must itself be said of the modes and only of the modes. Such a condition can be satisfied only at the price of a more general categorical reversal according to which being is said of becoming, identity of that which is different, the one of the multiple, etc. That identity not be first, that it exist as a principle but as a second principle, as a principle become; that it revolve around the Different: such would be the nature of a Copernican revolution which opens up the possibility of difference having its own concept, rather than being maintained under the domination of a concept in general already understood as identical.

(DR 40–41/95)

This striking passage, which seems to contain the kernel of a Deleuzean philosophy of being irreducible to Badiou's account, could not be clearer: the problem with Spinoza is the way in which his account of substance enacts a subordination of singular and singularized expressions of difference (the modes) to identity. The final page of _Difference and Repetition_ is equally to the point: "All that Spinozism needed to do for the univocal to become an object of pure affirmation was to make substance turn around the modes – _in other words, to realise univocity in the form of repetition in the eternal return_ " (DR 304/388). The expressive manner of being must no longer be subject to a substantive unity.

So when Badiou asks of Deleuze's allegiance to Spinoza, "What else would a self-proclaimed disciple of Spinoza be concerned with" but the One (TW 78), the response is, of course, as follows:

What interested me most in Spinoza wasn't his Substance, but the composition of finite modes. I consider this one of the most original aspects of my book. That is: the hope of making substance turn on finite modes, or at least of seeing in substance a plane of immanence in which finite modes operate.)

(EPS 11)

In other words, what is decisive in Spinoza's philosophy is that "it asserts immanence as a principle and frees expression from any subordination to emanative or exemplary causality" (EPS 180), and what remains problematic is its continuing subordination of the principle of immanence to a primordial substantive unity.

AN ONTOLOGICAL MANNERISM

It seems, then, in an initial sense, that Badiou's direct claims of Deleuze appear to a large extent mistaken. There is certainly a preoccupation with ontological unity in Deleuze, but this unity is the unity of _manner_ rather than the unity of _substance_. The _univocity_ of beings, the _being_ of the simulacrum, _crowned_ anarchy, and disjunctive _synthesis_ refer us not to a substantial unity or ontological priority of unity (or the One) over diversity (or the Many), but to the manner by which difference can be thought on its own terms. We might even say that what makes Deleuze unique as a philosopher is the extent to which he provides a rational means of thinking differences (i.e. multiplicity) and the nature of the relations that hold between them. Certainly this is what the concepts examined in this chapter are testament to, whether or not we judge them successful.

However significant this divergence may seem at this junction, what has been indicated here must be taken as preliminary. This is true for Badiou as well. In _The Clamor of Being_ , the claim that Deleuze is a philosopher of the One is not supported entirely, or even for the most part, at the level of the latter's various direct claims about ontology. Rather, Deleuze demonstrates his commitment to such a philosophy on Badiou's account in the very way in which his philosophy unfolds: it is as much a methodological commitment or orientation as a doctrine. It is to the methodological substrate of _The Clamor of Being_ that we now turn.
3. METHOD

As we have seen briefly in the previous chapter, Badiou's central claim regarding Deleuze – that his philosophy is oriented around the thesis that Being is One – deviates substantially from a number of important moments in the latter's work. However, the strength of Badiou's argument is that the elaboration of this thesis takes place across a range of key concepts in Deleuze. In fact, these concepts mirror the four key concepts in Badiou's _Being and Event_ : being (the One, the virtual), the event, truth and subject (thought). In other words, Badiou's claim is not simply that Deleuze's philosophy is explicitly a meditation on the single question of the One; indeed, he insists from the beginning of his text that the surface of the Deleuzean text is constituted by a massive profusion of particularities (cinema, Kafka, Kant, Carmelo Bene, mathematics, etc.). Badiou will even claim, correctly to my mind, that the word "Being" is one that Deleuze "only uses in a preliminary and limited manner" (DCB 28/45). Rather, Deleuze proceeds on Badiou's account by examining a vast array of particular "simulacra"( _qua_ equivocal and ephemeral emanations of the One) in order to establish in thought their common being in the One:

In a considerable part of his work, Deleuze adopts a procedure that, starting from the constraint exercised by a particular case-of-thought – it does not matter if it concerns Foucault or Sacher-Masoch – consists in trying out a name of Being and in constructing a protocol of thought (that is to be as automatic as possible) by which the pertinence of this name can be evaluated with respect to the essential property that one expects it to preserve (or even to reinforce in thought): namely, univocity.

(DCB 28/45)

Thus the fruit of Badiou's reading of Deleuze should be judged not just on the basis of explicit endorsements of the emanative theme of the One, but rather with respect to the way that it manifests itself in the particular cases that traverse and constitute Deleuze's thought.

The key to such a reading of Deleuze is presented by Badiou in terms of the former's _method_. That is, on Badiou's account, we can identify a certain structure in Deleuze's treatment of particular cases that engage them in the figure of the One, a structure that is common to all of Deleuze's texts from beginning to end: a virtuoso series of "monotonous productions" (DCB 14/25). It is this insistence on method that forms the hinge around which Badiou's account turns, and on which, more than the thesis of the One, his reading of Deleuze turns. This chapter will thus be devoted to an examination of Badiou's account of Deleuze's method in _The Clamor of Being_ , relative to Deleuze's thought.

(METHODOLOGICAL) THESES THREE AND FOUR: NOMINATION AND INTUITION

With the emanative structure in mind, Badiou's account of Deleuze's method is explicated in two moments, or, by adding them to the two ontological theses of the previous chapter, by presenting two additional theses to the central claims of _The Clamor of Being_.

_Double nomination_

The first of these (third thesis) is the following: that in order to think the ontological grounding of a particular simulacrum in the One, one must think according to a pair of names, the first for the One itself, and the second for the simulacrum that emanates from it: "in order to say that there is a single sense, two names are necessary" (DCB 28/45). Or, more strongly, "it is by experimentation with as many nominal doublets as is necessary that the verification, under constraint, of the absolute unity of sense is wrought" (DCB 29/46). Thus ontological thought is essentially a form of test, an _essay_. The test operates on the ore of the multiple in order to render the pure matter of the One, or, rather, like Descartes' meditator who examines the idea of the infinite he possesses for that which, beyond his finitude, has marked him, Deleuze would on this account examine each effusive instance of the multiple for what, beyond it, makes its being possible.

At issue, according to Badiou, is a profound problem – which he takes the methodological establishment of double nomination to solve – concerning the relationship between ontological discourse and being, a problem, as we have seen, that Badiou is keenly aware of, and deals with directly in the first Meditation of _Being and Event_. In _The Clamor of Being_ , and in accordance with Badiou's construal of Deleuze's project, the problem is presented as follows:

What, indeed, would be the appropriate name for that which is univocal? And if Being is said in a single sense, how is the sense of this "single sense" to be determined? Or, yet again: is it possible to experiment, to test, whether a name of Being makes sense of univocal sense?

(DCB 27tm/44)

This is the question underlying the third of Badiou's key theses on Deleuze's philosophy: if the sense of being is unified, how can discourse adequately grasp it, since discourse (being discourse _about_ ) seems _prima facie_ to split the unity of sense? Let us recognize here a demand in an inverted form that plays an important role at the start of _Being and Event_ , namely, the demand to think being in a fashion appropriate to its character. For Badiou, it is the inexplicable multiplicity of being that calls for an appropriately implicit and axiomatic method: on Badiou's account, Deleuze's investment in the philosopheme of the One that demands a novel method involving double nomination.

Badiou's answer to this question posed on Deleuze's behalf is – in light of what we have already seen – not difficult to anticipate: for Deleuze, the second name is but a means to discover the superiority of the first, and thus its own inessential character. Like Wittgenstein's ladder, their use is provisional: "Clearly, this emphasis on the Two is purely introductory" (DCB 34/54). Certainly, the name chosen for simulacra relative to the One must not be arbitrary; it must provide support to thinking. Its use is finished, however, once the simulacrum in question is adequately articulated to the One. Deleuze's thought would thus operate in a fashion somewhat analogous to the Jewish mystical tradition, in which the use of various names for God substitutes for the use of the original and Ineffable Name, whose correct pronunciation has been lost.

To characterize Deleuze's methodology in this way is, however, premature. In fact, double nomination furnishes us only with a structural account, one that is more or less derivative of Badiou's fundamental thesis. In chapter three of _The Clamor of Being_ , Badiou turns to an account of how such a thought in fact works: the dynamism at the heart of the structure. If Deleuze perennially proceeds by invoking nominal pairs, it is to describe the terminal moments of a _movement of thinking_ , only one of which is essential.

_Intuition_

On the basis of this fundamental thesis, Badiou claims that Deleuze's method for thinking the One and the multiple together cannot involve any of the three pre-eminent methods found in the history of philosophy. The first is Aristotelian in nature, and proceeds by thinking Being according to and on the basis of the categories that are proper to Being itself. Given that Deleuze is above all a thinker of the One, Badiou argues, such a method could never be assented to:

The true philosophical method must absolutely refrain from any dividing up of the sense of Being by categorical distributions, or from any approximation of its movement by preliminary formal divisions, however refined these may be. The univocity of Being and the equivocity of beings (the latter being nothing other than the immanent production of the former) must be thought "together" without the mediation of genera or species, types or emblems: in short, without categories, without generalities.

(DCB 32/51)

Now, in turn, and for related reasons, a second candidate must be rejected, namely, _dialectics_ , which relies above all on the category of mediation. The case that Badiou recalls here is Hegel, for whom mediation is embedded in the movement of determinate negation. For Deleuze, "insofar as Being is affirmation through and through, the negative is totally impossible" (DCB 32/51). The third possibility that Badiou rules out for Deleuze is what might be characterized as _external intellectual intuition_ , whereby thought, independent and according to its own capacities, grasps being directly and without mediation. Here, Badiou recalls the Descartes of the _Meditations_ , who thinks his own being in the ambient context of a natural light proper to it. In sum, Badiou asserts, on the basis of his fundamental ontological commitments, Deleuze's method in thought must be _acategorical, anti-dialectical, intrinsic to being_ and _only possible under its mandate_. Thus we are led to the fourth central thesis presented by Badiou, that Deleuze's method is an intuitive method:

A thought without mediation, a thought constructing its movement beyond all the categorical divisions that it has first been tempted to use as a means of protecting itself from the inhuman neutrality of Being, can only be – as Bergson so sovereignly set down – an _intuitive thought_. Deleuze's method is the transposition in writing of a singular form of intuition.

(DCB 35/54–5, emphasis added)

Deleuze's method, for Badiou is – _must be_ – intuitive in nature.

There are four significant characteristics of Deleuze's method of intuition on Badiou's account. The first is that, contrary to Descartes' approach, the intuition in question is what might be characterized as _intrinsic intuition_. Thought proceeds _within_ the movement of univocal Being, and does not examine it from without according to any kind of natural light. We do not examine Being and its emanations from a point of view extrinsic to their relation, but rather from within the genetic movement of Being itself. This presents thought as intuition with a primary characteristic, namely, that while it begins in what seems to be the regime of the clear-distinct, the world of beings-simulacra, it must plunge into what grounds these, namely, the confused-obscure One. Thought "has to plunge into the clear intensity to grasp its confused-being, and revive the 'deadened' distinctness of the separated being by uncovering what of it remains obscure: namely, the living immersion that is precisely dissimulated by its isolation" (DCB 35–6/56).

We might note in passing that this reconstruction of a certain Leibnizian moment in Deleuze by Badiou proceeds according to a veritable scrambling of the terms in question. At issue in Leibniz (and, following him, Deleuze), is never an opposition between the clear-distinct, on the one hand, and the confused-obscure, on the other, but rather a distinction between the clearconfused (pertaining in Deleuze to the actual) and the distinct-obscure (pertaining to the virtual). Despite quoting passages from the same section of _Difference and Repetition_ , Badiou seems to have completely overlooked the following remarks: "We cannot overemphasize the importance of a remark that Leibniz constantly makes in his logic of ideas: a clear idea is in itself confused; it is confused _insofar as it is clear_ " (DR 213/275). And, a little later, "The nature of the virtual] Idea is to be distinct and obscure" (DR 214/276). As we shall see in the next chapter, at issue here for Deleuze is in no way the task of rendering either the confused distinct or the obscure clear: these characterizations are ontological in nature, pertaining to ideas and actualized, extended and qualified reality as such. We might even say that to task thought with such activity is to make a meaningless claim in relation to Deleuze's philosophy: above all because this structure is, as we shall see, at once the condition of "subjective", conscious thought, and thought itself, essentially unconscious in nature. In [Chapter 7, where the topic of thought is discussed in detail, we shall further see that the figure of the individual, completely overlooked in Badiou's account, is of decisive significance for Deleuze, but a peculiar conception of the individual, one that plays the role of a mutable focal lens, rather than that of a conscious agent.

The second characteristic of Deleuzean intuition on Badiou's account concerns precisely its active nature, the manner in which it moves between the double nomination of simulacrum-being and Being-One. This "athletic trajectory of thought" (DCB 36/56) proceeds in the first instance under the impulsion of a particular case, a particular being or simulacrum of Being. As we shall discuss in more detail below, these cases in Deleuze are more often than not particular figures, or bodies of work that answer to their proper names – Foucault, Bergson, Nietzsche, Proust and so forth – but also concepts or practices, such as literature, cinema, repetition or essence. What, though, is the force of this impulsion? Or rather, according to Badiou, the question is: what do such impulsions force us to think? The answer, as no doubt will be expected, is the univocity of Being. In particular, what the method of intuition thinks is the fact of the univocity of Being _in so far as_ its sense is unbroken by its expression in the case in question.

Thus intuition begins under such an impulsion, and proceeds to affirm univocity with respect to a particular case; in turn, according to the necessity of this impulsion, thought affirms the univocity of Being as such. This is what separates it from the Cartesian model of intuition, replacing the intellectual _Augenblick_ with a "progressive", yet unified, "description of the whole" (DCB 35/56).

Third, and as a result of this trajectory of intuition and its internal nature, we must realize that thought cannot be considered to be a regime apart from Being. In fact, Badiou asserts, _"when we have grasped the double movement of descent and ascent, from beings to Being, then from Being to beings, we have in fact thought the movement of Being itself_ (DCB 40/63). Or, as he later states, "the power of the One qua thought is... precisely this: there is only one intuition" (DCB 69/105–6). Here we are only one step away from what Badiou will come to suggest in the final chapter of _The Clamor of Being_ , namely, that Deleuze everywhere triumphantly asserts the famous Parmenidean claim: "The Same is at once thinking and being" (quoted at DCB 78/117). Thought truly takes place when this claim is asserted on the basis of an impulsion of a particular case, of every being-simulacrum that emanates from the One.

Finally, intuition as method is characterized as a restrained movement or movement of restraint. It does not – contrary to the image of Deleuze that Badiou evokes as the opening of his text – support the view of Deleuze as the thinker who affirms the mess of the world. Instead, we are to see Deleuze as the thinker for whom the abandonment of empirical variety is essential to the commencement of genuine ontological thought. This is ultimately why Badiou, in one of the more well-known moves in _The Clamor of Being_ , attributes to Deleuzean philosophy "an ethics of thought that requires dispossession and asceticism" (DCB 17/30). The goal of philosophy here is only achieved by way of a certain kind of intellectual reduction, more radical and far-reaching than its Husserlian counterpart. Everything accidental to the particular case must be progressively stripped away according to a rigorously methodological ascesis, one that suspends "everything inessential" in order to return to what is primary and "indestructible" (Badiou 1995: 19), that which gives the case in question its sense, its being: namely, the One. Thus the circuitous trajectory of intuition proceeds by the disposal or denigration of the secondary features that allow one being-simulacrum to be distinguished from another, in favour of returning thought to the common ground of every actual thing.

So, in sum, Badiou claims:

[W]hen thought succeeds in constructing, without categories, the looped path that leads, on the surface of what is, from a case to the One, then from the One to the case, it intuits the movement of the One itself. And because the One is its own movement (because it is life, or infinite virtuality), thought intuits the One.

(DCB 40/63)

Now, across a number of interpretive registers, the Deleuzean text itself seems to be in some tension with the account that Badiou provides of it. In what follows, three of these points will be discussed in some detail. The first concerns the nature of Deleuze's explicit engagement with the theme of intuition, which, as Badiou himself notes, is in the context of his reading of Bergson. The second point concerns Deleuze's account of the theme of method as such in _Difference and Repetition_. Third, there remains the possibility that, even should Badiou present an inaccurate view of the explicit account of method in Deleuze, there exists an implicit method that, although at odds with the surface of Deleuze's text, properly accounts for its movement. In all three cases, I shall argue that Badiou's account is not only false, but does more to obscure what is really at stake than clarify it. In sum, I shall also suggest that the account of Deleuze's method in _The Clamor of Being_ fails to support Badiou's reading of Deleuze as a philosopher of the One.

INTUITION IN DELEUZE'S BERGSON

As I have just indicated, for Badiou, the method of intuition in Deleuze is best accounted for on the basis of his Bergsonian filiation. Indeed, it is in this part of his text that Badiou asserts that "Deleuze is a marvelous reader of Bergson, who, in my opinion, is his real master" (DCB 39/62), and that it is the amalgam "Bergson-Deleuze" (DCB 40/63) who considers intuition as an intrinsic thought of Being as vital process. Thus, in analysing Badiou's claim, we are fully justified in looking towards Deleuze's readings of Bergson for proof of his support of intuition as method; indeed, in Deleuze's work, it is only in this context that such a method is discussed. Can we draw on this idea of method in characterizing Deleuze's own philosophy as Badiou claims?

Departing from the account of intuition as it appears in both modern rationalism, where intellectual intuition of various kinds is the source of truth in thought (Spinoza's third kind of knowledge, for example, or in the paradigmatic form given to it by Descartes in the second _Meditation_ ), and in Kantian critical philosophy (where the role of intuition is relativized and accounted for on the basis of the passive receptivity of the faculty of sensibility), Deleuze takes Bergsonian intuition to be a critical and rigorous philosophical _method_. As Deleuze isolates it (B 13–35), there are three aspects of Bergson's account of intuition as method: it is problematizing, differentiating and temporalizing. In the first case, intuition as a method devotes itself to the criticism of poorly formed concepts. To take the example of the concept of possibility (not just any example for Deleuze, as we shall see in the next chapter), we can say with Bergson that the possible is not a more basic concept than the real, but rather a more complex one, in which the concept of a real state of affairs has added to it a lack of reality. As a result, it is a mistake to consider the possible to be the more primordial of the two, and a ground for the conditioning of the real. It is, rather, an extrapolation that obfuscates that which it is extrapolated from. The goal of the method of intuition is, in each case, to divide concepts into their constitutive elements in order to uncover illicit structures, such as we find in the case of possibility, but also non-being, negation, unity and so forth.

In the second case, we can characterize intuition as a differential method. This is already the case with respect to the first characteristic. Bergson extends this point, however, to claim that intuition as method is essentially concerned with differences in kind, as opposed to differences in number or degree. It aims to establish profound or fundamental division rather than remaining caught up in superficial or merely apparent divisions.

The key example in this regard that Deleuze considers is the division, central for Bergson, between spatiality and temporality. In one of the essential moves in his reading of Bergson, Deleuze extracts from him a rigorous ontological treatment of temporality, irreducible to any claim for the primordiality of extended spatiality. What the method of intuition reveals is the difference in kind between these two posits on the nature of being. Bergson goes even further though, on Deleuze's account, since the method also reveals – beyond the difference in kind between matter and duration – the fact that within extended matter itself there are only differences in degree, and duration is itself characterized as intrinsically difference in kind.

We must also add the following observation, which is crucial. Bergson's method of intuition, for Deleuze, does not insist on a radical ontological dualism in the manner of Plato or Descartes, where the sensible or extended worlds are considered to have less being, or to be less essential. Rather, the claim is that only by proceeding from differences in degree at the level of spatiality to differences in kind (both between space and duration, and within duration itself) are we able to provide an account of how it is that the differences in kind come about. In this sense, it springs from a methodological orientation that is indeed Platonic, but which refutes the orienting dualism that dominates the lion's share of Plato's metaphysics: "Intuition as method is a method of division, Platonic in inspiration. Bergson is aware that things are mixed together in reality; in fact, experience itself offers us nothing but composites. But that is not where the difficulty lies" (B 22).

The difficulty lies rather in explaining composite being itself on the basis of more fundamental differences. As Deleuze notes on a number of occasions, this is what gives Bergson's method something of the character of transcendental philosophy, something that Deleuze's own theory of the transcendental will extend some way towards a more Kantian framework, as we shall see in the next chapter: "Intuition leads us to go beyond the state of experience towards the conditions of experience. But these conditions are neither general nor abstract. They are no broader than the conditioned: they are the conditions of real experience" (B 27).

In the third case, Deleuze understands the method of intuition as founded on the primordiality of duration. Intuition takes duration as its element, and grasps problems and concepts from this point of view. As in the case of the second characteristic with respect to the first, this temporalizing aspect to intuition encompasses the first two characteristics also. In the first case, it is a matter of seeing that the spatial or extensive conception of being is what grounds the possibility of many of the poorly formed concepts found in philosophy ("Space only ever presents, and the intelligence only ever discovers, composites, e.g. the closed and the open" [ID 47]); in the second, the goal is to produce an account of differences in kind that ultimately turn around the differences of kind between matter and duration, on the one hand, and, on the other, the role that differences in kind play within the constitution of duration itself. In short, what this third characteristic states is, on the one hand, that duration is the proper medium of thinking, and, on the other, that duration itself is characterized by a primordial multiplicity. Deleuze argues that it is the method of intuition that motivates the unfolding of Berg-son's thought. At the same time, however, as the third characteristic of this method asserts, it is only on the basis of an adequate account of being as duration that thought can grasp being itself. Thus the possibility of ontology is grounded in being itself in a certain sense.

In light of this brief characterization, a number of points deserve to be emphasized in contrast with Badiou's account. Where Badiou asserts of intuition in Deleuze that it proceeds by thinking according to the movement of being itself, this is clearly at odds with the _critical_ aspect of the account that we find in Deleuze's text itself. That is, rather than being ascetic, reductive or minimalist in nature, Bergsonian intuition _multiplies_ the terms of the analysis, locating a given object in the context of more complex relational structures. This is what allowed us above to characterize it as a differential method. Furthermore, it is fundamentally conceptual in nature. Its object as method is not Being itself, even if it is oriented by ontological commitments, but concepts.

Nonetheless, something like the dual-term structure that Badiou elaborates does seem to be at work here, between differences in kind and differences in degree. Furthermore, one of these terms (differences in kind) is provided with a more profound ontological sense than the other. Both of these similarities, however, are less telling than they first appear. On the one hand, for Bergson on Deleuze's reading, the ultimate _telos_ of the method of intuition is to show that both differences in degree (and spatial categories) and differences in kind (and temporal categories, along with the structure of the relationship between them) are together constitutive of being. On the other hand, while duration is without a doubt ontologically primary in a certain sense, this primacy is not exclusive according to the manner in which Badiou wishes to describe it. In fact, as I have already noted, Deleuze thinks we find the kernels of something like a properly transcendental philosophy in this account, whereby duration is the condition for both differences in degree and differences in kind, and their mixture. In sum, we would be mistaken in thinking that this priority is an exclusive one reserved for duration, difference-i n-kind as such, alone. If the third aspect of the method, which insists on proceeding according to temporal rather than spatial categories, is so important, it is because only such a temporal view can account for the coexistence of space _and_ time, whereas other methodological approaches precisely exclude a consideration of duration in advance, by construing it on the basis of spatial categories and thereby reducing its difference in kind from spatiality rather than highlighting it. Rather than proceeding extrinsi-cally from cases of the order of spatiality to the supereminence of a supreme and foundational temporality, intuition proceeds by insisting on the genetic and integral _perichoresis_ or interpenetration of spatial categories within temporal ones, and of the transcendental rather than supereminent status of being as duration.

Finally, we cannot overlook the fact that duration itself, even characterized in Badiou's terms, is, for Bergson, on Deleuze's account _without any fundamental unity_. This is the central claim, for example, of Deleuze's "The Conception of Difference in Bergson" (ID 43–72), one that is nonetheless repeated in _Difference and Repetition_ , namely, that the pure past, duration as such, is a differential structure lacking any prior or eminent unity. At the heart of being, there is only difference. Thus, even if we overlook the incongruity between Badiou's account of intuition and that which Deleuze finds in Bergson, we would have to conclude that his reading fails on this point, in so far as it is not the One that finds itself ultimately affirmed, but difference. This is what will lead Deleuze to claim, in a striking phrase, that "Intuition is the _jouissance_ of difference" (ID 45).

DELEUZE'S CRITIQUE OF METHOD

Beyond the theme of intuition, however, the broader issue of method in Deleuze deserves examination. In a brief passage at the close of chapter three of _Difference and Repetition_ , whose brevity, in fact, is somewhat misleading since it brings together a long meditation on the nature of faculties of thought, Deleuze directly addresses the question of method, subjecting it to a strong and direct critique in the Kantian mode, a critique whose goal is not to dismiss but to properly locate the role of the category of method relative to the nature of thought.

Its essential coordinates, which will be supplemented later in Chapter 7 when the question of the relationship between thought and subjectivity is examined, are as follows. While this text is presented as a critique of the postulates of what Deleuze calls the dogmatic image of thought, its most important aspect is the elaboration of a new theory of thought, which is in turn embedded in a surprising theory of the faculties. Here Deleuze is engaging in an aspect of the Kantian philosophical tradition, namely the doctrine of the faculties. Deleuze's internal break or modification of this long tradition concerns, on the one hand, the supposed _pre-existence_ of faculties (that is, capacities, facilities in thought) that would be capable of grasping what is presented in experience, and, on the other, the supposed _common exercise_ of the faculties. It is this static and harmonious view of thought that Deleuze wants to replace with a dynamic, genetic and discordant view, one that (in the final postulate of the eight that he identifies in the dogmatic image of thought) casts the concept of method in a critical light.

In opposition to this view, Deleuze proposes that the capacity to think a given matter is in no way innate or structurally implicit in the architecture of thought. Indeed, perhaps the most dominant theme of _Difference and Repetition_ with respect to thinking is an elaboration and extension of the famous Heideggerian maxim according to which "Man can think in the sense that he possesses the possibility to do so. This possibility alone, however, is no guarantee to us that we are capable of thinking" (quoted at DR 144/188).

For Deleuze, we must presuppose a fundamental inability to think, one that can be forced into activity only on the basis of something happening to it: "Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental _encounter_ " (DR 139/182). The same point is expressed (in a magnificent text) in relation to philosophy:

Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy: everything begins with misophy. Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think.

(DR 139/181–2)

Thus we are led in the first instance to reject the arguably dominant tradition in Western philosophy pertaining to the relationship between thought and its object. We can characterize the central thesis of this view in the following way: thought is an activity capable of recognizing and, on this basis, cognizing whatever object is presented to it. Deleuze's inverse claim, as we have seen, is that thought is not innate, and must be engendered in thinking itself in _response_ to an encounter for which there is no pre-existing schema. To use Artaud's more colourful phrase: thought is not an innate capacity, but one that emerges upon the whipping of innateness (DR 148/192).

What is required, then, is an account of how thought becomes capable of thinking its object. We are forced – and here we come upon a theme found throughout Deleuze's mature work, one that is indexed primarily to the names of Leibniz and Solomon Maimon (whose relation to Deleuze we shall touch on in the next chapter) – to move beyond the Kantian account of faculties as the agents of external conditioning, and in their place to found a theory of the faculties concerned with the internal genesis of thought as such. It is a faculty of thought that arises on the basis of an encounter, and which renders thought possible in this regard on subsequent occasions. Deleuze's own theory of the faculties thus revolves around the claim that it is the faculties themselves that are generated in thought in the first instance. An encounter raises a singular act of thought up to its level, elaborates or focuses a capacity to think _this Thing_ , whose own powers and dimensions are radically unknown, but which nonetheless addresses itself only to it.

Deleuze will also oppose the view that faculties are by their nature harmonious in operation. This is related to the previous point, since the genesis of a faculty in thought relies on a moment that in principle cannot be grasped by another: hence the need for such a genesis. "Rather than all the faculties converging and contributing to a common project of recognising an object, we see divergent projects in which, with regard to what concerns it essentially, each faculty is in the presence of that which is its 'own'" (DR 141/184).

We can characterize faculties in thought – in their primary sense – as _monomaniacal_ in operation. What concerns each faculty concerns it alone, and it operates as if its object is the sole moment in being and thought. Thought engages no fundamental common sense, but a disparate and disjunct ensemble of operations that cannot communicate with one another through any ideal form of the object that they all share.

We ask, for example: What forces sensibility to sense? What is it that can only be sensed, yet is imperceptible at the same time? We must pose this question not only for memory and thought, but also the imagination – is there an _imaginandum_ , a _phantasteon_ , which would also be the limit, that which is impossible to imagine?; for language – is there a _loquendum_ , that which would be silence at the same time?; and for the other faculties which would find their place in a complete doctrine – vitality, the transcendent object of which would include monstrosity; and sociability, the transcendent object of which would include anarchy – and even for faculties yet to be discovered, whose existence is not yet suspected. For nothing can be said in advance.

(DR 143/186–7)

Finally, for Deleuze, thought only becomes the familiar, habitual structure, the operation of faculties in harmony in the calmness of an uninterrupted interiority, on the basis of these more fundamental harrowing and monomaniacal torsions in thought. In _Difference and Repetition_ , this is formulated in terms of two manners of the operation of faculties: transcendent in the first instance, with respect to that which only the newly engendered faculty is (or rather, strives to become) equal to, and transcendental, when it settles into a general and quasi-hypothetical mode.

How does method relate to this problematic? The postulate of method, for Deleuze, formalizes the dogmatic image of thought with respect to the presuppositions made about the operation of thinking as it relies on the other doxological features we have already seen (recognition, the common exercise of the faculties on an object supposed self-same, the innate capacity of thought with respect to its object, and so forth). A method for thinking proceeds on the basis of these assumptions; it concerns "the calm possession of a rule enabling solutions" (DR 164/214). Deleuze writes:

We never know in advance how someone will learn: by means of what loves someone becomes good at Latin, what encounters make them a philosopher, or in what dictionaries they learn to think.... There is no more a method for learning than there is a method for finding treasures, but a violent training, a culture or _paideïa_ which affects the entire individual... Method is... the manifestation of a common sense or the realisation of a _Cogitatio natura_ , and presupposes a good will as though this were a "premeditated decision" of the thinker.

(DR 116/215)

In sum, method in thought is precisely what formally doubles the natural movement of thinking. Method, indeed, characterizes thought as _ascetic_ in nature, as Badiou has claimed, since it renounces any need for artifice: thought moves appropriately of its own nature. Method formalizes this supposedly native capacity.

Three points by way of summary. First, the account of thought that Deleuze elaborates here seems particularly ill suited to the account of his method proposed by Badiou. On Badiou's presentation of Deleuze, let us recall, a true thought of the One takes place when thought divests itself of what is extraneous in a particular case, and engages itself in the very movement of the expression of this One in the case. For Deleuze, though, what is fundamental in thought is an incapacity, and an incapacity _in each new genre of encounter_. What is key, though, is that any given case that we become capable of thinking is thought only _as such_. The kind of generality that Badiou ascribes to the method of intuition could only ever belong to a secondary, placid and established thought, one that remains within the structures developed under earlier, traumatic and indeed repressed, conditions.

Second, if we recall one of Badiou's preliminary points regarding the method of intuition – namely that it must not be confused with a certain Cartesian intuition according to the clear and distinct, an extrinsic intuition – a certain fairly problematic disjunction appears. For to insist that Deleuze has a fixed method in thought is, on Deleuze's account, to insist that he has submitted thought to precisely the representational model he is so bent on criticizing. Indeed, Deleuze suggests in his preface to the English translation of _Difference and Repetition_ that this chapter "now seems to me the most necessary and the most concrete, and which serves to introduce subsequent books" (DR xvii). To misunderstand the critique of method, then, is to (at the very least) misunderstand what Deleuze took to be central to a reading of his work after its publication.

Finally, it is strange to assert of Deleuze that he has a clear, established and everywhere repeated method, given his critical reappraisal of the very idea of method itself. We must either claim that Badiou has misunderstood the nature of Deleuze's method, or that Deleuze does not have a fundamental method. Both of these options seem to undermine Badiou's analysis. We can also admit a third option: that Badiou has recognized in Deleuze's philosophy a method that the latter did not or could not admit was at work there. This is certainly a possibility, and one that nothing so far has ruled out. Its consequences, however, would seem to be as problematic for Badiou as for Deleuze himself, since it would imply that Deleuze's thought is quite incoherent, rent in two by an irreducible and unreconstructed conflict.

THE _DE FACTO_ QUESTION OF METHOD

Nonetheless, such a hypothesis deserves consideration: is there not perhaps a method deployed by Deleuze that is neither some analogue of the doxological one criticized in _Difference and Repetition_ nor a Bergsonian one? Does Deleuze have a de facto method on which neither his in-principle objections to the very notion of method nor his broader commitments come to bear?

Given that a complete answer to this question would take us well beyond the scope of the current study, three examples will have to suffice, chosen somewhat arbitrarily but with an eye to the (at least apparent) variety of Deleuze's work. In any case, the point here is that should notable exceptions to Badiou's thesis be discovered in particular cases, the applicability of the general claim – especially in light of what has already been presented in this chapter – loses a significant measure of its validity. After all, if Deleuze's philosophy is "monotonous" (DCB 14/25) in nature, we should be able to find evidence of Badiou's claim about method everywhere.

The first example I shall take is Deleuze's early study _Nietzsche and Philosophy_. How does this work proceed? Deleuze's method here has two notable features, features that are arguably shared with his other studies of individual thinkers. On the one hand, and in opposition to a common view that takes Nietzsche to be above all a poetic ruminator who expresses himself in disconnected aphoristic works, Deleuze's Nietzsche is a systematic metaphysical thinker of the highest order, whose work comprises a holistic theory of being and ethics, time and subjectivity. As Graham Jones argues in his masterful treatment of Deleuze's _Difference and Repetition_ , "The key to Deleuze's approach... is the fact that he invariably seeks a nascent systematicity in the work of other thinkers" (2001: 34), finding in Nietzsche a systematic philosophy that others have, for whatever reason, been unable or unwilling to find.

The surprising opening lines of the work already present us with this coherent systematicity: "Nietzsche's most general project is the introduction of the concepts of sense and value into philosophy" (NP 1). This notion of Nietzsche's "general project" is carried through the study from beginning to end. The study not only presents this project according to the attainment of a far-reaching and systematically coherent metaphysics, but also relies on a belief in the diachronic unity of Nietzsche's work. This systematic reading finds its locus in the detailed analysis of the series of concepts concerning force, power and will, culminating in a tabular contrast (NP 146) between the active and reactive types, according to the categories of variety, mechanism, principle, product and quality of the will-to-power.

On the other hand, Deleuze's presentation of Nietzsche foregrounds concepts not normally considered to be at the heart of the latter's project. A notable case here is the concept of difference, which he installs at the very heart of Nietzsche's system as he presents it, in terms of irreducible differences in force that have no common measure or ground. This emphasis, like the drive to systematicity, can be found in all of Deleuze's studies of other figures, even in places where it seems at least initially at odds with the philosopher in question, for example Bergson.

The second example is _Difference and Repetition_ , arguably Deleuze's key work. This book is structured around an approach that is so obvious as to be often overlooked. Certainly, it is Deleuze's mature statement of his own philosophy, no longer presented from within the thought of another writer. However, this "own philosophy" emerges out of an immense series of confrontations and negotiations with other figures in the history of Western thought. One would be hard pressed to find a significant thinker between Plato and Heidegger that Deleuze does not meaningfully engage with, not to mention the array of non-classical or less well-known philosophers. Here, if we can speak of a method, it would be characterized primarily as a _method of reading_. Deleuze's own philosophy emerges piecemeal: a harlequin's cloak stitched out of the fabric of the whole history of Western thought.

But the more meaningful difference from his earlier work is to be found in the concepts that orient this large-scale reconstruction of philosophy since Plato. While the book proposes a thorough and thoroughly novel genetic ontology, it connects at every point of its trajectory with the twinned themes of difference and repetition. Whatever else it manages to accomplish, it is certainly an explication of these themes. Deleuze's preface is both clear and perfectly summary with respect to the argument that follows:

Two lines of research lie at the origin of this book: one concerns a concept of difference without negation, precisely because unless it is subordinated to the identical, difference would not extend or "would not have to extend" as far as opposition and contraction; the other concerns a concept of repetition in which physical, mechanical or bare repetitions (repetition of the Same) would find their _raison d'être_ in the more profound structures of a hidden repetition in which a "differential" is disguised and displaced.

(DR xix–xx)

In light of these points, it would seem that Badiou's assertions about Deleuze's method are also misplaced in this case. It might, however, be objected that the general goals of _Difference and Repetition_ are besides the point, in so far as it still presents numerous claims about the univocity of being. But this is not at issue here. Even should one agree with Badiou about the core of Deleuze's philosophy, it seems mistaken to assert that _Difference and Repetition_ manifests the double trajectory of a method of intuition, a work that is constituted of a complex series of engagements with the history of philosophy that make contact with the concepts of difference and repetition, on the way to proposing a genetic ontology – not a paean to the multiple productions of the One.

I turn finally to the _Cinema_ volumes, on which Badiou draws frequently in _The Clamor of Being_. While packed with discussions of "cases" – particular films or bodies of cinematic work by particular directors – two methodological features are discernible. The first bears on the cinema as such. Despite the fact that both volumes are packed with discussions of specific films (which might perhaps be considered "cases" in Badiou's sense), not to mention the celebrated commentaries on Bergson, Deleuze is not interested in bringing all of these cases in line with any account of the One. Rather, and this is a point that even a cursory examination reveals, both _Cinema_ books present a complex and ramified taxonomy of cinematic signs. Indeed, the original preface of _The Movement Image_ begins with the following words: "This study is not a history of the cinema. It is a taxonomy, an attempt at the classification of images and signs" (MI xix). The categories of movement-image and time-i mage are themselves general categories in this taxonomy, which the respective books deal with in terms of the many subsidiary categories beneath them and their interrelations and transformations.

The second feature concerns the relationship between philosophy and cinema, and thus more directly engages with Badiou's claims about Deleuze's method. In well-known passages at the close of _The Time Image_ , Deleuze makes explicit the relationship he thinks holds between cinema and philosophical thought:

For many people, philosophy is something which is not "made", but is pre-existent, ready-made in a prefabricated sky. However, philosophical theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object. It is no more abstract than its object. It is a practice of concepts, and it must be judged in light of the other practices with which it interferes. A theory of cinema is not "about" cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in general having no privilege over others, any more than one object has over others. It is at the level of the interference of many practices that many things happen, beings, images, concepts, every kind of event.

(TI 280tm)

A key term here is "interfere'! It describes the manner in which Deleuze envisages the relationship between philosophy and cinema, and presages the treatment of the interrelations between philosophy, science and art in _What is Philosophy_? and, in a different way, _The Fold_. Philosophy – _qua_ thought – is not inferior, subsequent and consequent (as it is for Badiou himself) nor superior to the artistic practice of the cinema, but is engaged in a complex relationship through which the two discourses _trouble_ each other. Because of this, there is no question that cinema and more specifically cinematic images could be grist for the mill of a Deleuzean philosophy oriented around the One, where philosophy would depart from certain images as a case: the interference between the two is irreducible and perennial.

Considering these three examples – all of them significant works in Deleuze's _oeuvre_ , as Badiou himself acknowledges – we thus note that none of them conform to Badiou's general picture of the double trajectory of the movement of intuition between the Many and the One, the case and Being. Not only do they differ from each other, a not-insignificant point that cannot be pursued here, but they all present modes of thought that dwell on the matter at hand – perhaps from an unusual or biased perspective – and elaborate on that matter from within. The locus of the thought at work in _Nietzsche and Philosophy_ , in _Difference and Repetition_ , and in the _Cinema_ works is to be found _within_ Nietzsche, _within_ the complex history of Western thought, _within_ cinema, and not beyond it in a supereminent unity of being.

A CONFLICT BETWEEN FORM AND CONTENT IN _THE CLAMOR OF BEING_

Before passing to the first of the nominal pairs that Badiou takes to be exemplary of Deleuze's thought, one final point must be emphasized. Whatever the extent to which Badiou's account of Deleuze's method seems a poor fit, the intuitive method, as Badiou presents it, is both of a piece with the fundamental thesis of his reading (the supremacy of the philosopheme of Being as One), and quite coherent. However, when we examine _The Clamor of Being_ itself, it is not according to his assertions about this method that Badiou proceeds. Of the four chapters that complete the body of the book after the account of method, only the first deals with a nominal pair arrayed across the supposedly fundamental division of Being (fundamental One)-Simulacra (fictional Multiple), which deals with the famous Deleuzean couplet of the virtual and the actual. The subsequent chapters consider only half of each pair, the half devoted to the One. _The Clamor of Being_ is thus somewhat paradoxical in structure: more given to a repetition of Badiou's central thesis than to reading Deleuze according to the method that the former claims to have found there. That is, while the virtual-actual division lines up quite well with Badiou's third thesis, the three subsequent pairs (time-truth, eternal return-chance, the fold-thought) all pertain to the One and not its multiple simulacrul effervescence on Badiou's own account.

However, even in the light of this point, and the deviations that mark the gap between Deleuze's explicit accounts of intuition and method and Badiou's characterization of them, it is possible that Badiou's analysis accurately accounts for Deleuze's project on the level of its operative concepts. In other words, while nothing in Deleuze seems to explicitly affirm the supereminence of the One, nor the use of a global method for the affirmation of this One, it is possible that the key concepts that animate the Deleuzean corpus are nonetheless marked by the figure of an ultimate unified Being. The validity of Badiou's analysis must therefore be tested with respect to particular cases. The cases in question are the objects of the four chapters of _The Clamor of Being_ , which form its most detailed readings of the Deleuzean _corpus_ , and which are devoted, as we have seen, to four pairs of concepts. It is thus finally only on the careful consideration of these analyses that a final assessment can be made of Badiou's Deleuze.
4. THE VIRTUAL

The heart of Badiou's reading of Deleuze is found in his reconstruction and critique of Deleuze's virtual–actual distinction. Indeed, the assertion that "'Virtual' is without any doubt the principal name of Being in Deleuze's work" (DCB 43/65) makes clear an important touchstone of Badiou's reading, namely, that while he thinks that Deleuze's philosophy unfolds by way of a series of hierarchical pairs, these pairs are organized hierarchically. As a result, it is no surprise to find numerous repetitions of the claims about the virtual–actual distinction throughout _The Clamor of Being_ , even when it is not this distinction as such that is at issue.

There is no doubt that the concept of the virtual is an important concept in Deleuze. Should we try to offer a preliminary definition of the virtual, however, we find ourselves within a thicket of problems, one of which seems particularly pressing. The term "virtual" can be found at numerous points in Deleuze's work, beginning with the early texts on Bergson in the 1950s, through _Difference and Repetition_ , and up to and including his final article "Immanence: A Life...." Between these various presentations of the virtual, however, there are diplacements in the sense of the term, its precise role in the given text and the conceptual terrain within which it is located. In some cases, these displacements seem minor, but in others the differences are striking and even puzzling. As with many of Deleuze's key concepts, it would seem that we should no longer speak of a general and homogenous definition but rather – to borrow an apt turn of phrase that Joe Hughes (2009a: 75) uses in relation to the concept of the body without organs – a kind of narrative or life story of the virtual.

Nonetheless, Badiou adopts the global approach to the concept in _The Clamor of Being_ , defining the virtual by including elements from a number of disparate presentations of the concept, in particular those in _Difference and Repetition_ , _The Time Image_ and _What is Philosophy?_ , but without in any way distinguishing them. Such a homogenizing reading is in keeping with his view that Deleuze's metaphysics is "monotonous" (DCB 14/25) in nature. And yet, in approaching the concept of the virtual on the basis of this assumption, much is obscured. It would seem that Badiou makes an interpretive decision before examining the material in question. Here, at least, Deleuze's putative monotony is a procrustean bed providing the means to lop off those claims that do not fit the interpretive schema.

This chapter will not attempt a thorough genealogical approach to the virtual in Deleuze's philosophy. Instead, I would like primarily to examine what is a decisive text in Deleuze's various elucidations of the virtual, chapter four of _Difference and Repetition_. This text is not only the lengthiest explicit treatment, but also provides the most comprehensive set of connections between one of Deleuze's accounts of the virtual and what he considers to be its precursors in other writers, and it forms a part of what is one of the key works in Deleuze's _oeuvre_ , other aspects of which we shall engage with later in relation to time and thought. Such an approach also avoids egregious reductive tendencies such as Badiou puts in play.

BADIOU'S RECONSTRUCTION OF THE VIRTUAL–ACTUAL DISTINCTION

Let me begin by presenting a summary of Badiou's argument on this point, which, for all its brevity, is not always clear. He begins by asserting that Deleuze's philosophy, like his own, is not a critical project in the Kantian sense (and is therefore "classical" [DCB 45/69]), being instead a metaphysics of the ground, where "the term 'ground' can legitimately be given to that which is determined as the real basis of singular beings" (DCB 45/68). Badiou then asserts that the virtual, on Deleuze's account, is the ground of the actual. Relying on the characterization of the plane of immanence in _What is Philosophy?_ – and on the discussions of this topic in his correspondence with Deleuze – Badiou goes on to assert the "absolute pre-predicative givenness" (DCB 46/70) of the virtual, its priority not just in relation to being but also in relation to thought: "the virtual here is the ground as the 'there is', preceding all thought" (DCB 46/70). And, in turn and on the basis of this analysis, Badiou proceeds to offer a critical summary of the virtual thus grasped as primordial _Urgrund_ of the actual, one that recapitulates many of his broader claims about the One–Multiple structure:

(i) The virtual as ground is the Being of beings, or its immanent power. Assuch, the actual, actual beings or existents, are products or creations – indeed, they are "simulacra" (DCB 49/74).

(ii) The virtual must not be confused with the possible, because it is fully real – its reality resides in its dynamic agency.

(iii) The virtual is in no way indeterminate; it is fully determined, and also determining, once with respect to the actual, and once with respect to itself. Virtualities problematize other virtualities.

(iv) The virtual and the actual cannot be radically separated; they are two halves of every object, but also the two composite images of each image. Here Badiou sees the "stumbling block for the theory of the virtual" (DCB 51/78): the virtual cannot be an image, since it is the productive power that brings images about ("the virtual... cannot itself be an image" [DCB 52/78]).

(v) The virtual and the actual are in fact indiscernible. The fact, consequently, that the virtual is completely determined means that the actual is essentially indetermined: "The more Deleuze attempts to wrest the virtual from irreality, indetermination, and non-objectivity, the more irreal, indeterminate, and finally non-objective the actual (or beings) becomes" (DCB 53/81).

In conclusion, Badiou argues that the "heroic effort" (DCB 53/80) constituted by Deleuze's attempt to unfold an ontology of the virtual is doomed to failure:

In this trajectory of thought, the Two is established in the place of the One. And when the only way of saving – despite everything – the One, is by resorting to an unthinkable Two, the indiscernibility is beyond remedy, and the reconciling and obscure metaphor of the "mutual image," one says to oneself that, most decidedly, the virtual is no better than the finality of which it is a version.

(DCB 53/81)

Before returning to these characterizations more thoroughly and, indeed, more critically, one cannot help but notice something peculiar about Badiou's line of argument in this final statement: it comes to the conclusion that, all things considered, Deleuze's philosophy of the One is _in fact_ a philosophy of the Two. The claim that Deleuze is a philosopher of the One seems to lose traction at the point considered as essential by Badiou himself. If the theory of the virtual commits Deleuze to an irremediable split in his ontology, surely an assiduous reading of his philosophy ought take this into account, and present it as an unreconstructed dualism?

KANT, MAIMON AND AHE METAPHYSICS OF THE CALCULUS

I turn now to _Difference and Repetition_ in order to briefly present a number of orientating points for the discussion to follow. As I have noted above, it is in chapter four, "The Ideal Synthesis of Difference", that the most important and concentrated presentation of the virtual is to be found.

While Deleuze draws on many references in this notorious chapter, there are arguably three principal articulations with other thinkers: Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ ; the philosophy of Maimon (Kant's important contemporary and critic); and mathematics, specifically the differential calculus. Here I shall address, in outline and with an eye to Badiou's reading, each of these three.

_Kant_

Kant's presence in Deleuze's work is profound and long-standing, extending well beyond his excellent summary _Kant's Critical Philosophy_. Even _Anti-Oedipus_ , that supposed grimoire of anarchy, includes an important if heavily modified use of synthesis in the Kantian mode, to the extent that Deleuze himself encourages us to read this work as "a sort of _Critique of Pure Reason_ for the unconscious" (DRF 289). In the fourth chapter of _Difference and Repetition_ , however, Deleuze lays out the central rafts of his critical reappropriation of Kant, which is focused on the Kantian theory of Ideas (while elsewhere in _Difference and Repetition_ also engaging with the doctrine of the faculties and the schemata in Kant's philosophy). This theory is a central aspect of the first _Critique_ , in so far as this work involves reassessing the role of reason and its capacity to engage with objects of thought that have no experiental correlate. For Kant, the goal of such a reassessment is to properly locate the activity of reason by, on the one hand, establishing the boundary of reason's activity _vis-à-vis_ experience, and, on the other, to maintain that reason does play a positive, if non-constitutive, role. Deleuze's goal, in turn, will be to take up and radicalize this already radical Kantian theory of Ideas in order to provide a theory of what he will call the virtual.

The central characteristic of Kant's conception of Ideas for Deleuze is their problematic status. The opening passage of the first edition preface of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ is exemplary: "Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer" (CPR Avii).

This passage already indicates the nature of reason itself, which is, as Deleuze puts it, "the faculty of posing problems in general" (DR 168/218). Later, we read in the Transcendental Dialectic that a concept of Reason must be considered as a " _problem_ to which there is no solution" (CPR A328/B384; cf. A646/B674). What do these characterizations mean for Kant himself? Unlike the concepts of the understanding, which, along with the spatiotemporalized manifold of sensation provided by sensibility, constitutes experience in the womb of the imagination on Kant's account, the concepts of reason – what Kant calls Ideas – are regulative in nature. They provide the means by which accumulated knowledge can be structured, a means that sensibility and the understanding cannot themselves engineer.

Now, in what sense are Ideas, for Kant, problems without solutions, that is, intrinsically problematic? Ideas, taken as regulative concepts, in posing horizons or orientations for the systematization of knowledge, are not themselves part of experience. God, totality and the soul never receive the stamp of the real. Like Gatsby's green light, they serve as a focal point towards whichexperience gestures or accumulates (for example, the Idea of the world, or totality, serves to organize or orient the multiplicity of scientific endeavour) the various particular epistemic claims that arise through experience, while totality as such remains beyond the reach of scientific investigation. Whatever advances take place with respect to the growth of knowledge, the Idea of totality is always gesturing for more, repeating its question, always luring the investigator on towards the _next_ experiment.

Thus (and this is a point I shall return to below) Ideas have an irreducibly indeterminate aspect, like an object that is missing a part that can never be ultimately replaced except by a series of surrogates, each in turn superseded. It is also why Kant, and then Deleuze, will insist that Ideas are intrinsically problematic in nature. It is also the basic means by which the latter will characterize the virtual: as the regime of problematic Ideas.

"Problematic" must therefore be understood in this case in a way that deviates from its common acceptation. There is nothing negative in the Idea that makes it problematic. Problematicity is an objective feature of Ideas, a structural or formal determination. Rather than being problems that do not _yet_ have solutions, the problem of the receptivity of light, for example, is solved or rather resolved in various contexts (eyes of various kinds, antennae, etc.), but is never solved once and for all.

"Problematic" does not only mean a particularly important species of subjective acts, but a dimension of objectivity as such which is occupied by these acts. An object outside experience can be represented only in problematic form; this does not mean that Ideas have no real object, but that problems _qua_ problems are the real objects of Ideas.

(DR 169tm/219)

As we shall later see, in the process of actualization (or the advent of solutions, in this context), the virtual problematic Idea tends to be obscured, a theme discussed throughout our examination of the virtual. That is, actualization is attended by a transcendental illusion, in which the instance of the solution obscures the being and the role of the problem in its constitution.

_Maimon_

These schematic remarks already lead us to the thought of Solomon Maimon. While working within the broadly understood framework of critical transcendental philosophy, Maimon subjects the Kantian system to a number of severe critiques. We shall focus here on the critical attitude he adopts towards the regulative account of Ideas. The Kantian account of transcendental philosophy proceeds on the basis of what Deleuze calls a hypothetical mode of reasoning, since it aims to establish the conditions for _possible_ experience. Maimon (in his Humean mode, according to which he identifies himself as an "empirical sceptic", in contradistinction with the empirical realism Kant affiliates himself with in the Refutation of Idealism [CPR B274]) objected that, even should the Kantian system be internally coherent, we still have no way of establishing whether or not it _in fact_ applies; it may be, indeed, that the entire apparatus of the _Critique_ is nothing but a castle floating mid-air. What transcendental philosophy ought to aspire to do, for Maimon, is provide an account of the _real_ conditions of _actual_ experience. This is why Deleuze insists that "Maimon's genius lies in showing how inadequate the point of view of conditioning is for a transcendental philosophy" (DR 173/225).

Now, Maimon's remarkable – neo-Leibnizian – solution to the _de facto_ question of genesis involves arguing that experience is generated _within thought_ , and the genetic elements at the root of this process are Ideas, the "principles for the explanation of the genesis of objects" (Beiser 1987: 298). If we take Leibniz's example of the sound of the sea, an example often returned to by Deleuze, we can say that the wave as an object of experience is not given as such, but is rather a sum or composition of the many infinitesimally small _petites perceptions_ , the noise of each droplet crashing on the beach, and that this composition takes place in thinking itself. Furthermore – and the sense and significance of this claim will become clear later in this chapter – these Ideas must be thought of as differential in nature. Every object of experience is generated according to the integration of the differential relations that hold among these many infinitesimal ideal elements.

How does this account of Ideas as genetic differential principles explain the genesis of objects in thought? For Maimon, Ideas are not "ideals", not forms in the Platonic sense, but rather transcendental rules for the constitution of idealities in thinking. In the words of Samuel Atlas, they are "the ultimate lawful relations of objects" (1964: 62). The genesis of a certain experience of the colour red, for example, involves the synthetic integration of the differential relations in the regime of colour, producing the experience as a result.

In sum, then, Maimon's critical reassembly of the Kantian paradigm as we have very briefly and partially presented it here leads to two consequences for the theory of Ideas that Deleuze will take up: (i) Ideas are elements in the production of experience, and not merely the regulation of these products – they are _genetic_ in nature; and (ii) Ideas are neither thoughts nor ideal and fixed forms, but transcendental differential structures.

We need only add two deviations from Maimon instituted by Deleuze before mentioning the latter's use of the calculus. The first takes issue with Maimon's theory of the faculties. In solving another of the problems posed by Kant's philosophy (the seeming impossibility of accounting for the communication of the two radically different faculties of the sensibility and the understanding), Maimon (in his Leibnizian mode) collapses the two into the understanding, grasping sensation as a degraded or inferior act of intellection. Likewise, he does away with the faculty of reason, locating Ideas (the genetic instances of experience) within the understanding. For Deleuze, this is an unacceptable solution. Not only does it bring its own problems with it, we can also see how it reinstates a certain peculiar form of common sense, in so far as it assures the internal harmony of all thought, which would take place within the single ordered regime of an infinite understanding. As Deleuze forcefully argues in chapter three of _Difference and Repetition_ , once we discard the unquestioned assumption of native faculties in thinking, and ask ourselves about the advent of specific capacities, we are led to conclude that this advent has no relationship to other existing faculties, being the product of a violent and irreducible encounter, and consequently must maintain a disjunctive and non-harmoniously violent relationship with other faculties. To locate the genetic elements of experience within a single faculty is to once and for all exclude change from the world, imagining a peaceful (if penumbral and mournful, for Maimon) silence at the heart of being.

The second difference between Deleuze and Maimon is more significant, even if it is not as well marked on the surface of the Deleuzean text. Maimon, following Kant, is concerned principally with the twinned issues of experience and knowledge. His _Essay_ thus begins with a reformulation of the question of _a priori_ knowledge, which Kant also introduces in the opening pages of the first _Critique_ (the famous synthetic _a priori_ ). For Deleuze, however, much more is at stake. The goals of a genetic transcendental philosophy extend further than accounting for knowledge and experience, but for reality as such, including knowledge and experience but no longer limited to them. Now, it is true that such a project is not entirely anathema to Maimon, but this is because of his Leibnizian idealism, whereby the experience–knowledge pair exhausts the fundamental range of being, reality being entirely ideal in character. Deleuze, though, is not an idealist in the Maimonian mould, and is forced therefore in the direction of a transcendental empiricism capable of explaining not just phenomenal manifestation but sensible reality itself.

_Differential calculus_

Finally, let us turn to Deleuze's use of differential calculus. The status of the calculus in his work can be summed up in the following fashion: it provides a decisive, rigorous and structurally complex means to adequately think and richly detail the nature of the constitutive problematic ideas espoused and developed through the encounter with Kant and Maimon's metaphysics, but beyond the confines of both Kant's subject-oriented thought (calculus provides a means to think problems as such, without reference to any surface of experience) and Maimon's error at the level of the doctrine of the faculties (calculus provides a way to think problems as such, without any need to have recourse to a pre-existent facultative framework).

The introduction of this branch of mathematics into the discussion is, in the first instance, provided with reference to three earlier thinkers: Maimon himself, Hoëne Wronski and Jean Bordas-Desmoulin. Furthermore, they are introduced not as mathematicians, but as members of what Deleuze calls an "esoteric history of differential philosophy" (DR 170/221). In the same passage, he will indicate that "a great deal of heart and a great deal of truly philosophical naivety is needed in order to take the symbol _dx_ seriously" (DR 170/221). Both remarks call for comment by way of introduction.

With respect to a differential philosophy, framed by reference to this obscure trinity, it is clear that in comparison with Badiou's use of set theory, Deleuze's use of the infinitesimal calculus will be marked by a greater distance from a strictly intramathematical deployment. Indeed, we would be right in characterizing it as a kind of creative and critical reconstruction of the history of the calculus, one that highlights features of this history that will be of particular use in his own differential philosophy, and in particular in his construction of the concept of the virtual as we find it in _Difference and Repetition_.

With respect to the second citation, we find here the reference to the key element of Deleuze's reconstruction of the calculus: _dx_ itself. Let us recall that differential calculus is, to adopt for a moment its elementary geometrical formulation, that mathematical method used to derive the function of the tangent of a prior function at a given point on the graph of that function, which is to say the gradient of a tangent at any point of the function in question. As is well known, both Newton and Leibniz introduced independent formulations of this method; nonetheless, for both thinkers, and for the quotidian understanding of the calculus, the process of differentiation moves from the function to the derivative or differential relation, which is to say that the differential is subsequent (indeed, literally derived) from the function.

Departing from these early modern points of origin, the history of mathematics has considered differential calculus in a series of more complex ways. In particular, this history departed from the belief, held by both Newton and Leibniz in different ways, that the calculus is inextricably bound up with infinitesimal quantities. This was, in short, because the calculation of the gradient of a tangent for a variable function (i.e. a function that is not itself a straight line) involved for them the approximation of the derivative. We can already see why this is so with reference to the crude case introduced above. What is being sought is effectively the rate or ratio of change, which the calculus supplies through the differentiation of a function at a point – hence the intuitively paradoxical yet mathematically rigorous formulation sometimes used to characterize the goal of differentiation with respect to changes in speed: the measure of an _instantaneous_ rate of change. The fact that differential calculus was inextricably bound up with infinitesimal quantities for Leibniz in particular is due to the fact that what differentiation actually produces is the rate of change, not of an instant or a fixed point on a curve, but of an infinitely small portion of the curve, or an infinitely short period of time. These infinitesimals were defined as smaller than any given number, without being equal to zero.

Now, while Leibniz had no trouble invoking strange, intriguing and apparently paradoxical notions in his philosophy, the postulation of such infinitely small quantities sat uncomfortably with many of the early readers of his work on differential and integral calculus, the most well-known example being, of course, George Berkeley, whose empiricist repudiation of the infinitesimal in _The Analyst_ includes the famous rhetorical question: "May we not call them the Ghosts of departed Quantities?" (1734: 59). In the nineteenth century, mathematicians worked to find an alternative way of formulating the method of differential calculus while disposing of these problematic quantities, a movement that began with Bernard Bolzano and Augustin Cauchy and reached its terminus in the work of Karl Weierstrass, the key figure in the elimination of the infinitesimal from analysis. Weierstrass's means of excluding the infinitesimal from the calculus involved replacing the implied dynamic movement of approximation with the postulation of a static limit. He did this by effecting a shift in the terrain on which differential calculus operated. In Simon Duffy's words, for Weierstrass:

[I]t was necessary for the idea of a function, as a curve in the Cartesian plane defined in terms of the motion of a point, to be completely replaced with the idea of a function that is, rather, a set of ordered pairs of real numbers. The geometric idea of "approaching a limit" had to be replaced by an arithmetised concept of limit that relied on static logical constraints on numbers alone.

(2004: 202)

In other words, Weierstrass's reformulation did away at once with the necessity to refer to any ambient geometrical framework, any movement or dynamism, and any reliance on the notion of infinitesimals. Instead, the function and the tangent both are figured entirely in terms of ordered sets of real numbers, entirely static: a method, borrowing terminology from Cauchy, that Weierstrass called the epsilon-delta method. This method provided the foundation for all formal accounts of the nature and function of the differential calculus up until the work of Abraham Robinson, whose work on non-standard analysis provided an alternative rigorous (although not uncontroversial) method.

Deleuze takes on board a number of these developments in his metaphysical account of the calculus, and engages in a double inversion of the common interpretation of the calculus in accordance with them. In the first case, he will agree with the elimination of the infinitesimal _qua_ infinitely small quantity from the thought of the differential calculus, but with an important caveat. On this he is explicit: "it is a mistake to tie the value of the symbol _dx_ to the existence of infinitesimals" (DR 170/221). Later he writes, in recognition of this series of historical developments, that "[t] he interpretation of the differential calculus has indeed taken the form of asking whether infinitesimals are real or fictive. From the beginning, however, other issues were also involved" (DR 176/228). In sum, Deleuze agrees with Weierstrass that infinitesimal quantities, indeed, have no part to play in a rigorous formulation of the calculus, nor by extension in his metaphysics of the calculus or a differential philosophy.

This does not mean in turn that the differential itself has no ontological status at all for Deleuze. Rather, it is by insisting on the differential as a decisive ontological category that we become able to arrive at an acceptable alternative formulation of the relationship between the differential and quantity (the relationship that is explicitly marked by Deleuze [DR 244ff ./314ff .] and which, in broad terms, is the concern of the final two decisive chapters of _Difference and Repetition_ ). In relation to the material we have just seen on Kant and Maimon, it is easy to see exactly where this ontological status of the calculus will be located: "Neither real nor fictive, differentials express the nature of a problematic as such" (DR 178/231).

The second key move Deleuze will make is again indebted to Weierstrass, who reoriented or rather inverted the relationship between the differential and the function. This is to say, a point once more emphasized by Duff y, that Deleuze adopts a differential point of view of the calculus, rather than the point of view afforded by the function. As Duffy puts it, "[a]ccording to Deleuze's reading of the infinitesimal calculus from the differential point of view, a function does not precede the differential relation, but rather is determined by the differential relation" (2004: 204). Consequently, "[t] he differential relation is used to determine the overall shape of the curve of a function primarily by determining the number and distribution of its distinctive points, which are points of articulation where the nature of the curve changes or the function alters its behaviour" ( _ibid_.: 203–4).

Beyond these two very schematic points, Deleuze adds a third, which bears on the nature of relations between differentials. While formulated in terms of a fraction, the relation _dy/dx_ does not figure a ratio or quotient: the understanding of the relation held by Leibniz, for example. In one sense, this follows from the anti-quantitative reading of the calculus indicated above. Deleuze writes: "The relation _dy/dx_ is not like a fraction established between particular quanta in intuition, but neither is it a general relation between variable algebraic magnitudes or quantities. Each term exists exclusively in relation to the other" (DR 172tm/223). The upshot of this point is that the being of _dx_ or _dy_ is in itself indeterminate, requiring relations with other differentials to obtain a minimal level of determination. In other words, we must speak of differentials not as ideal objects, but as relational "all the way down", and indeed as elements in a relational multiplicity.

It is worth pausing to note the irony, therefore, contained in one of Deleuze's famous definitions, according to which the elementary principle of empiricism is that relations are external to their terms, since this is precisely what this reading of the differential relation presents us with. The most significant theoretical resource that is marshalled in the support of this thesis anywhere in Deleuze's work is not a reference to _A Treatise of Human Nature_ , to the empiricisms of Bertrand Russell (who is often invoked alongside this thesis) or William James. It is rather the differential calculus, and its metaphysical extrapolation, that lies at the root of the most rigorous formulation of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism.

In sum, then, Deleuze considers differential calculus to provide, in Daniel W. Smith's words, "the primary mathematical tool we have at our disposal to explain the nature of reality, the nature of the real – the _conditions of the real_ " (2007: 14). This is the case in so far as: (i) we conceive of the differential, in the wake of Weierstrass, as the logically prior genetic instance, rather than a derivative product; (ii) we conceive of the differential without any intrinsic reference to quantity, including the infinitely small quantities of the Leibnizian infinitesimal; and (iii) that we conceive differentials as irreducibly relational in nature, which is to say individuated only in relation to one another. All these points will be replayed in a number of ways in the final two chapters of _Difference and Repetition_ , evidence of which we shall see in what follows. And it is this way of thinking differential calculus that will lead to one of the more striking passages in _Difference and Repetition_ :

If Ideas are the differentials of thought, there is a differential calculus corresponding to each Idea, an alphabet of what it means to think. Differential Calculus is not the unimaginative calculus of the utilitarian, the crude arithmetic of calculus which subordinates thought to other things or to other ends, but the algebra of pure thought, the superior irony of problems themselves – the only calculus "beyond good and evil".

(DR 181–2/236)

These points present us with some basic elements that Deleuze will transform into his theory of the virtual in _Difference and Repetition_ , and which will form important touchpoints in what follows. In sum, the virtual is the transcendental regime of differential Ideas, which operate as problematic moments – ideal grains of sand in the shells of oysters – in the constitution of material reality and the experience of it. This constitutive vision is underpinned not by reference to a fundamental subjectivity, whether that of a _res cogitans_ , an idealist self in the mode of either Kant or Fichte, but rather to a framework provided by a metaphysical reading of the calculus from the differential point of view.

With this preliminary explication in hand, we can turn to Badiou's own five-part characterization of the virtual.

THE VIRTUAL AND THE GROUND

We start with Badiou's opening claim, that despite Deleuze's philosophical "punning" on the concept of ground, there is a conception of the ground in Deleuze, and this ground is the virtual. Can the virtual be defined as "the ground of the actual" (DCB 42/65)?

The theme of the ground is an often overlooked but in fact very important part of the argument of _Difference and Repetition_ , even if its most explicit discussion on its own terms is to be found in the conclusion. There are, Deleuze argues, two characteristics of the ground. On the one hand, the ground, properly understood, "rises to the surface" (DR 28/44): "Something of the ground rises to the surface, without assuming any form but, rather, insinuating itself between the forms; a formless base, an autonomous and faceless existence. The ground which is now on the surface is called depth or groundlessness" (DR 275/352). There are a number of aspects of this characterization that I shall leave aside, but we must at the very least assert that the ground clearly cannot be characterized as a transcendence, but must rather be thought of as the regime of _immanent determination_. In place of the insistence that there must be a ground that is substantial (Spinoza), ideal (Plato) or takes the form of a subjective act (Descartes in one respect, Fichte in another), Deleuze will insist that we only grasp the ground in its fundamental operation when we realize that it precisely undoes all of these unities, unmooring them from any fixed reference point, casting them adrift in the most profound way.

On the other hand, the ground must not only be able to provide sufficient reason as such – that is, an account of the nature of determination in so far as it "makes the difference" (DR 29/43) – but also provide the sufficient reason for that which obscures it, namely the regime of identity or the actual. This is what characterizes Deleuze's project in _Difference and Repetition_ as a genetic philosophy, in so far as critique is extended to the point where even what is subject to critique can still be accounted for on the genetic level, a point that is emphasized in relation to the way Deleuze thinks the relationship between ground and ungrounding in his theory of time, as we shall see.

This is why Deleuze claims that, while "something of the ground" is aligned with groundlessness or determination, the ground _per se_ is caught up in a much more complex torsion. In a striking passage, Deleuze presents the topology of the ground in the following terms:

_[S]ufficient reason or the ground is strangely bent_ : on the one hand, it leans towards what it grounds, towards the forms of representation; on the other hand, it turns and plunges into a groundlessness beyond the ground which resists all forms and cannot be represented. If difference is the fiancée, Ariadne, then it passes from Theseus to Dionysus, from the grounding principle to the universal "ungrounding".

(DR 275/349)

That is, the ground as such, the regime of determination, is _bivalent_. In one respect it finds itself "attracted by the representation that it grounds", tending towards a "fall into the grounded", but in another it constitutes an originary groundlessness (DR 274/351). Thus, to employ a famous Leibnizian philosopheme, identity and difference are both grounded, where the latter is grounded in being itself (or rather, _is_ being itself) while the former is a well-grounded illusion or fiction, what Kant would come to call a transcendental illusion. Or, rather, difference itself is the ground of identity, the multiplicitous fog on which islands are grounded, whose clarity mistakes the nature of the fog to which it owes its _ratio existendi_.

Ground, understood as both immanent and bivalent, is thus a key Deleuzean concept, or rather Deleuze's formulation of the ground is what expresses a central set of convictions: it is only when the ground is considered as immanent, and as that which grounds both representation and what is beyond all representation, that an adequate metaphysics is possible. All of Deleuze's critical remarks found in _Difference and Repetition_ in particular can be phrased in relation to this double requirement. Neither Hegel (intrinsically) nor Leibniz (extrinsically, thanks to his theological commitments, what Badiou calls his "popish theology") manage to make the ground immanent, even though they both account for the ground as the ground of both representation and what exceeds it. Aristotle makes the opposite error, for in his thought the ground is indeed immanent (the immanence of form to matter), but the conceptual nature of the ground here only accounts for representation (what is grasped by concepts) and not what exceeds them. Plato fails on both counts: the ground is transcendent (the Ideas as self-identical moments of transcendence, or what Gilles Châtelet [2975: 263] called "coups de transcendance"), and cannot account for what exceeds representation (the simulacra). The case of Kant is, however, the most striking: his philosophy is an incredible mixture of bold new attempts to raise the ground to the surface, which is to say banish transcendence ("Kant is the one who discovers the prodigious domain of the transcendental. He is the analogue of a great explorer – not of another world, but of the upper and lower reaches of this one" [DR 135/176]), which is nonetheless distorted by remnants of transcendence (the categories, the thing-in-itself, the unquestioned status of geometrical extension _vis-à-vis_ sensible experience, and in general the derivation of the so-called transcendental aspects of experience from the empirical). In turn, while representations dominate Kant's account of the possibility of experience, Ideas as problematic instances that give sense to this experience are irreducible to this schema, themselves non-representational and anempirical.

_Time as ground_

Having arrived at an outline of Deleuze's theory of the ground as immanent and bivalent determination, we already seem at a distance from Badiou's somewhat anaemic account. At the very least we see that the ground cannot be conceived in terms of a substantial depth or height. However, a more important point should be registered. Without moving too far into the territory of a later chapter, we should ask ourselves to what Deleuze is referring while making these points: what answers to the name of ground in Deleuze? The answer is _time_. It is time that, for Deleuze, is bivalent, lending its syntheses to the establishment of an order of good and common sense, and at the same time subjecting this order to a radical overturning or ungrounding. The syntheses of habit and memory work to create and conserve a stable surface, while the disjunctive synthesis constituted by the eternal return undermines this stability. Thus we can recall well-known passages such as the following:

The first synthesis, that of habit, is truly the foundation [ _fondation_ ] of time, but we must distinguish the foundation from the ground [ _fondement_ ]... Habit is the foundation of time, the moving soil occupied by the passing present. The claim of the present is precisely that it passes. However, it is what causes the present to pass, that to which the present and habit belong, which must be considered the ground [ _fondement_ ] of time. The ground of time is Memory.

(DR 79tm/108)

In turn, it would be hard to avoid noticing that Deleuze's "punning" on the theme of ungrounding ( _effondement_ ), as Badiou calls it, is always and only ever undertaken in the name of the eternal return: "the ground has been superseded by a groundlessness, a universal _ungrounding_ which turns upon itself and causes only the yet-to-come to return" (DR 91tm/123).

All these points will need to be supplemented in what follows, but we are certainly in a position to assess Badiou's claim that the virtual plays the role of the ground in Deleuze and the implications of this claim. First of all, this assertion finds no support in the text, where the positing of foundation and ground, their interrelation, and their concomitant "ungrounding" are all concepts relative to the temporal order. It may be objected that, since Badiou equates both the virtual and time with the One, this is a distinction without a difference. Perhaps. But while the equation of time and the One in Deleuze will be examined in the next chapter, the least that can be said is that Deleuze himself never asserts that the virtual is the ground of the actual.

Second, we can see against the backdrop of this analysis the peculiarity of Badiou's series of claims about the theory of the ground in Deleuze:

(i) that the ground is repudiated by Deleuze due to its moral character;

(ii) that this "restricted" or stereotypical conception of ground is an insufficient one;

(iii) that further, Deleuze himself has a more substantial though esoteric view of the ground, which is the virtual.

As we have just seen, the theory of the ground is in no way repudiated by Deleuze in any form. Nor is it fair to say that, thanks to its moral character, it is repugnant to Deleuze. Indeed, the very strength of Deleuze's genetic theory of the ground is that it can account for the advent of conservative or moral structures themselves (the bivalence of the ground). This is why Deleuze insists that "to ground is always to ground representation" (DR 274/351). To consider this theory of the ground hidden or esoteric is also clearly mistaken, since the discussion of the ground relative to time is explicit and to be found throughout _Difference and Repetition_. If it is a secret at all, it can only be a _secret de Polichinelle_ , a purloined letter that Badiou, playing the role of the authorities, cannot see right in front of him, looking as he is for something that is necessarily hidden. All one can say is that, should Deleuze have an even more esoteric account of the ground, it is well hidden indeed.

VIRTUAL, POSSIBLE, REAL, DYNAMIC

The theme of the ground as Badiou accounts for it is not very revealing. The second of Badiou's claims, on the other hand, takes us to the heart of the Deleuzean text. This claim has effectively two aspects. The first reminds us of a perennial theme in Deleuze's discussions of the virtual, namely the distinction between the virtual and the possible, and the dangers of confusing them. The second is that the virtual has in Deleuze a full reality (unlike possibility), a reality that is manifest as dynamic agency. We shall treat each of these points in turn.

_The virtual and the possible_

It is indeed decisive to grasp the distinction between the virtual and the possible for Deleuze. He is at pains to insist that this difference, found already in the two early pieces on Bergson in the 1950s, "[is not] a verbal dispute" (DR 211/273), but concerns two very different ontological pictures. I have already mentioned the critique of the possible as it is found at the start of _Bergsonism_ in the course of the elaboration of the method of intuition. There, Deleuze argues that the problem with the category of the possible is that it invokes a pre-existent reality "waiting in the wings", entirely real and yet lacking the singular quality of reality (or rather supplemented by this lack). One way to extract the ontological consequences of this is to say that the category of possibility, of a possible world, for example, does not attain an ontological point of view, but only presumes in a hypothetical fashion that possibles have some relation to the world without explaining what this relation is. Furthermore, the root of this presumption lies in the view that non-existent realities resemble our own, submitting the thought of the variety of being once more to an unjustified assumption of a fundamental regime of identity. We might also invoke here the Maimonian (or what Deleuze, also thinking of Schelling, often simply refers to as "post-Kantian") critique of the Kantian metaphysics of possible experience: we may conceptualize alternative possibilities, but why should we dignify them with any fundamental role in organizing actual reality?

This is why Deleuze will say, in a well-known passage, that "the only danger in all this is that the virtual could be confused with the possible" (DR 211/272). It is also why Deleuze will always insist on the _reality_ of the virtual; in the same passage, he writes that "the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself" (DR 211/273).

However, Deleuze does not stop here, introducing the consequences of distinguishing virtual from possible, consequences that are decisive in the current discussion. He writes: "The possible and the virtual are further distinguished by the fact that one refers to the form of identity in the concept, whereas the other designates a pure multiplicity in the Idea which radically excludes the identical as a prior condition" (DR 211–12/273).

_The virtual and multiplicity_

This passage indicates a characteristic of the virtual that we have yet to introduce directly (although it was the point around which the earlier summaries of Deleuze's use of Maimon and the calculus revolve): its intrinsic multiplicity. Before I explain this, note the location of the virtual in this passage with respect to the identity–multiplicity distinction. Rather than falling on the side of identity, which is what one would expect should Badiou's central thesis be correct, it is identity that is associated with the possible instead. Thus, for all his insistence on the importance of distinguishing the virtual and the possible in Deleuze, Badiou refuses and indeed contradicts this important rule every time he equates the virtual and a fundamental identity.

What exactly is the relationship between the virtual and multiplicity for Deleuze? The following three points must be noted.

First, as is the case with every use of the term multiplicity to be found in Deleuze's work (as we have already seen above), its supposition is meant as a radical foil to any return to identity, any figure of the One. Indeed, _Difference and Repetition_ includes many well-known passages to this effect, precisely in its discussion of the virtual:

Ideas are multiplicities: every idea is a multiplicity or a variety. In this Reimannian usage of the word "multiplicity" (taken up by Husserl, and again by Bergson) the utmost importance must be attached to the substantive form: multiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organization belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system. The one and the many are concepts of the understanding which make up the overly loose mesh of a distorted dialectic which proceeds by opposition. The biggest fish pass through... That the one is _a_ multiplicity (as Bergson and Husserl showed) is enough to reject back-to-back adjectival propositions of the one-many and the many-one type.

(DR 182/236)

And, since we know that the Idea being referred to here is nothing other than the figure of the virtual ("The virtual... is the characteristic state of Ideas" [DR 211/273]), it should be clear that Deleuze in _Difference and Repetition_ will brook no equation of the virtual with the One. This is, of course, directly counter to Badiou's reading.

The second and third points are both also indicated in the above citation, and concern structure (or organization) and the dialectic. Throughout the account of the virtual in _Difference and Repetition_ , Deleuze puts into play the language of structure and, indeed, structuralism to account for the nature of the virtual. From this structural point of view, we must, for Deleuze, see the virtual as an irreducibly complex multiplicity of coexisting Ideas, themselves irreducibly multiple in nature (and distinguished from one another according to a set of determinations that we shall examine next).

The Idea is... defined as a structure. A structure or an Idea is a "complex theme", an internal multiplicity – in other words, a system of multiple, non-localisable connections between differential elements which is incarnated in real relations and actual terms.

(DR 183/237)

Furthermore, this structure can be locally characterized according to detailed criteria, criteria that pertain not just to "individual" Ideas but their various ways of relating to one another.

It may seem surprising to find Deleuze invoking the theme of the dialectic in relation to the virtual. "Everyone knows", after all, that Deleuze's thought has nothing in common with Hegel, and it would seem, therefore, that dialectics would be the enemy of Deleuze's theory of multiplicity on this basis; certainly, Badiou takes this approach in his discussion of the dialectic in _The Clamor of Being_ , going so far as to begin his treatment of Deleuzean methodology under the heading "An Anti-Dialectic" (DCB 31/49).

That the acceptance of this wrong-headed view marks even Badiou's text is a testament to the power of cliché, for while it is certain that much in Hegel's project is critiqued by Deleuze, he is unwilling to allow the concept of dialectic to be discarded along with the teleology of infinite representation atplay in the Hegelian form of dialectical holism. Indeed, a brief examination of _Difference and Repetition_ on the topic demonstrates that it is the Platonic dialectic that Deleuze is most concerned to refute and reappropriate (see e.g. DR 66–9/91–5). This reappropriation goes by way of an attempt to entirely resituate the scope of dialectics within the regime of the virtual. Deleuze writes: "dialectic is the art of problems and questions, the combinatory or calculus of problems as such" (DR 157/204), according to which Ideas are individuated by the dialectic relations that constitute them: "by 'dialectic' we do not mean any kind of circulation of opposing representations which would make them coincide in the identity of a concept [as in Hegel], but the problem element insofar as this may be distinguished from the... element of solutions" (DR 178/231) – which is to say, distinguished from the actual.

Taking these ideas of structure, system and dialectic together with the notion of radical multiplicity, we get the following definition of the virtual Idea, which is helpful despite the fact that it awaits later discussions for a full explication: "The problematic or dialectical Idea is a system of connections between differential elements, a system of differential relations between genetic elements" (DR 181/235). The virtual Idea must, therefore, be characterized as an irreducible multiplicity, a differential dialectical system.

Now, the value of this discussion of these themes is that it calls attention to the abundance of structural characteristics _within the regime of the virtual_ , for Deleuze, far in excess of Badiou's account of the virtual as a unary emanative One. In fact, to maintain such a view involves overlooking almost the entire account of the virtual in _Difference and Repetition_ , which so heavily revolves around these kinds of internal complexities. I should add that while these points by themselves are strong grounds for rejecting the truth of Badiou's reading, the use of differential calculus by Deleuze to further characterize the virtual – not to mention the account of determination within the virtual to which we shall shortly turn – also points strongly in the same direction.

_The virtual and dynamic agency_

We are left with a term that Badiou adds to the virtual–real pair, which is that of _agency_. He writes, in a text that echoes many that we have already seen in the previous chapters: "We may... state that the virtual is (formally) opposed to the actual, as long as we remember that both are real – _the former as the dynamic agency of the One_ , the latter as simulacrum" (DCB 49/74, emphasis added).

Is the virtual active in this way for Deleuze? Let us note first that the active– passive pair plays an important role in Badiou's reading of Deleuze, one to which I shall return directly in the penultimate chapter below. The issue here, though, is more specific, since it concerns the definition of the virtual itself. We must, therefore, also separate it from the question of actualization, which will also be pursued below, since what we need to discover is if Deleuze thinks that the virtual is active _on i_ ts own terms, or in other words whether the term "actual" adds anything meaningful to the discussion of the dynamism of the virtual as Badiou posits. Is the virtual _in itself_ productive?

We turn once more to the text of _Difference and Repetition_. What immediately becomes clear, above all in the crucial chapter four, which we have been examining here, is that the virtual itself has no immediate causal role attributed to it whatsoever. Page after page is devoted to articulating the structure of virtual Ideas with respect to Kant, to Maimon, and to various branches of mathematics, above all differential calculus, but at no point does Deleuze ever present the virtual as an agency on its own terms.

Without introducing the discussions of the complex process of actualization in the final chapter of the book, which also attribute no direct causal role to the virtual, the two themes that come closest to the topic of agency here are those of _genesis_ and _actualization_ , which we shall address in turn.

Deleuze presents his account of the virtual as a rejoinder to the insistence on two classical oppositions, those that hold between event and structure – according to the idea that the event is what ruptures structure, as it does in Badiou – and between structure and genesis, where genesis poses the same problem as the notion of event, even if it maintains a less radical profile (DR 247/191). On the basis of Badiou's reading, we might suppose that the apparent opposition between the latter two categories is resolved by realizing that the (virtual) structure is also the (genetic) agency responsible for the production of the actual.

Such an approach is immediately ruled out by Deleuze himself. The following text is emblematic of the path that Deleuze himself pursues:

[G]enesis takes place... between the virtual and its actualization – in other words, it goes from the structure to its incarnation, from the conditions of a problem to the cases of solution, from the differential elements and their ideal connections to actual terms and diverse real relations which constitute at each moment the actuality of time. This is a genesis without dynamism, evolving necessarily in the element of a supra-historicity, a _static genesis_.

(DR 183/238)

In other words, the virtual has no genetic _power_ , but rather forms the problematic nexus in relation to which processes of genesis take place. This is why it lacks all dynamism, contrary to Badiou's claim that the virtual is "the dynamic agency of the One" (DCB 49/74).

Turning to the closely related theme of actualization, we find precisely the same state of affairs. At no point in _Difference and Repetition_ does Deleuze invoke the virtual as the causal agent in the processes of actualization. These processes, which are complex and multiple (individuation, dramatization, differenciation) will be dealt with in what follows, but it is enough here as a way in to the issue to present Deleuze's own direct answer to the question "How is the Idea determined to incarnate itself?... The answer lies... in intensive quantities" (DR 245/316). It is at the level of intensity – which must not be confused with the virtual in any sense for Deleuze – that actualization takes place.

The essential in all of this is the following: Deleuze's account of both genesis and actualization in _Difference and Repetition_ gives the virtual absolutely no active role in the production of the actual. The virtual is actualized, but it is not the agent of actualization. We therefore have no grounds for agreeing with Badiou's claim of a profound, indeed unique, agency for the virtual.

_Badiou's rhetoric_

Before proceeding, let me note that Badiou shores up his invocation of the activity of the virtual by referring to Bergson, and he cites both _The Movement Image_ – the only text he presents in defence of his theory of a dynamic virtual – and its citation of _Creative Evolution_ in the following paragraph, which I, in turn, quote in full:

That the virtual is real – and indeed, that face of the real which is the One – amounts consequently [i.e. on the basis of the dynamism of the virtual] to thinking the specific manner in which the One, as the pure power of occurrence of its simulacra, is never given in its totality. This is impossible, because its real consists precisely in the perpetual actualizing of new virtualities. So the affirmation that the virtual is real becomes, in its turn – with Deleuze writing here under the influence of Bergson – a hymn to creation: "if the whole is not giveable, it is because it is the Open, and because its nature is to change constantly, or to give rise to something new, in short, to endure. 'The duration of the universe must therefore be one with the latitude of creation which can find place in it'".

(DCB 49/74–5; quoting MI 9)

This passage is particularly significant since it very clearly manifests the rhetorical strategy that can be found throughout _The Clamor of Being_. This strategy involves the systematic collapse of all Deleuze's work into a proposed single and monotonous philosophical paradigm, where terms such as "virtual" have the same meaning across every text, however different in appearance: here, the difference between the use of the virtual in _Difference and Repetition_ and the _Cinema_ works is erased, a point I shall return to below. The latter is to likewise collapse Deleuze's reading of other philosophers into the same paradigm as well. Here, we have the erasure of any difference between Deleuze and Bergson. The correlative consequence of these two erasures is that the theoretical armature of Bergson's thought, increasingly indistinguishable from Deleuze's own, becomes a resource from which Badiou can draw support for his reading of the virtual in Deleuze. Third, and this is perhaps the most telling point in the current context, while the paragraph begins with the virtual, the passage cited from _The Movement Image_ does not include any reference to it. This kind of text, so prevalent in _The Clamor of Being_ , derives rhetorical force on behalf of its conclusions (or presuppositions) on the basis of a slippage between terms. Here, the virtual is linked to the One, and both are linked to the idea of dynamism, which allows Badiou to conclude from his citation of Deleuze that all three can be yoked in turn to "the latitude of creation". In place of argument, here as elsewhere, the force of Badiou's reading is amplified by a _coup de force_ harnessing of signifiers.

None of this is meant to challenge the idea that Bergson is of profound importance to Deleuze. Rather, in order to determine the (perhaps shifting) relationship of Deleuze to Bergson's work, we must do more than trade on the material identity of signifiers if we would be worthy of these two intricate bodies of philosophical work.

THE VIRTUAL AND DETERMINATION

Badiou's third claim regarding the virtual concerns its status _vis-à-vis_ determination, and is twofold. On the one hand, he insists that we must never consider the virtual as radically indeterminate, "a formless reservoir of possibilities that only actual beings identify" (DCB 50/76); on the other, he will insist that a "virtuality" (DCB 50/75) is determined by other virtualities, and in turn determines the actual.

We are therefore to understand that the virtual is a ground as a function of a double determination. For while it is determined as a problem, or as the virtuality of an invented solution, it is equally determined by the circulation in the virtual of the multiplicity of problems, or seeds of actualization, because every virtuality interferes with all the others, just as a problem is only constituted as a problematic locus in the proximity of other problems.

(DCB 50/76)

Once again, as with the discussion of the virtual–possible distinction, Badiou is drawing on points made in _Difference and Repetition_ , and once more he seems to adopt the language of determination in a way that ill suits the text itself.

Deleuze's own introduction of the issue of determination goes by way of the Kantian account of Ideas, which has three correlative aspects (DR 169– 70/219–20). First, for Kant, Ideas are objectively indeterminate. The Ideas of Reason, such as freedom or totality, are indeterminate because their objects can never be given in intuition. However, and this is the second point, they are also _determinable_ in relation to objects of experience. This is how the Ideaof totality, while indeterminate with respect to a single object of experience, can nonetheless work in a regulative fashion to gather the various moments of knowledge in scientific experimentation (for example) around a locus, goal or horizon: "In effect, the undetermined object, or object as it exists in the Idea, allows us to represent other objects (those of experience) which it endows with a maximum of systematic unity" (DR 169/219). Finally, and in light of this second point, there is a sense in which an infinite determination is proper to Ideas also, this time with respect to the rules for cognition that provide objects to reason, namely the understanding. While particular objects of experience work to determine the Ideas in a progressive fashion, it is with respect to the faculty of the understanding in the first _Critique_ that the objectively problematic concepts of Reason find their locus or purposive end.

Deleuze's account of the virtual adopts all three of these aspects of determination in his own account of virtual Ideas, with some important changes that borrow heavily from both Maimon and his reading of the differential calculus. We already know that the name "virtual" designates an ideal differential field. This field, for Deleuze, is in one sense radically indeterminate. This follows precisely from the fact that it is a differential structure, not a structure based around any given nodes which would be like ideal identities, and manifests one part of Deleuze's commitment to the radical nature of difference: virtual Ideas "imply no prior identity, no positing of a something which could be called one or the same. On the contrary, their indetermination renders possible the manifestation of difference freed from all subordination" (DR 183/237).

But the virtual differential field is not only indeterminate for Deleuze, since it is also subject to a mode of determination that does not eradicate its proper indeterminacy. The determination in question "is not opposed to the indeterminate and does not limit it" (DR 275/352). This face of determination Deleuze calls _reciprocal determination_. Thus the virtual is not just an indeterminate differential field, but internally determined by way of relations between differential elements. It is important to see that this approach means that the virtual can be grasped in the mode of its determination but _without imposing any form of identity_. If there were necessary or transcendent modes of structuration that pertained to the virtual as such, then Deleuze's attempt to provide an immanent philosophy would entirely collapse in the same way that Kant's did, relying as it does on the importation of the classical-Aristotelian table of judgement into the immanent field of experience, thereby forfeiting the right to the name "critical idealism".

The third aspect or face of the determination proper to the virtual departs even further from the Kantian account. This is because of the role that the understanding plays in Kant's philosophy, the faculty that provides the rules for cognition, namely the categories. For Kant, these rules are necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. For Deleuze, however (for reasons that we have not examined here and which are treated at length in chapter three of _Difference and Repetition_ ), there are no globally necessary rules for the constitution of thought – even if each Idea brings with it a savage necessity in its role as problematic in so far as it is dramatized by the temporal syntheses – and, furthermore, we know that the Kantian mode of the transcendental is unsatisfactory in so far as it anchors itself within the modality of the possible rather than that of the real. In any case, we have already seen Deleuze's alternative view of what constitutes a rule for thought: virtual Ideas. This is, once again, a thoroughly Maimonian view.

What, finally, plays the role filled by the infinite or complete determination of an Idea in Deleuze's scheme? The answer is to be found in the category of _singularity_ , or what Deleuze also calls "the element of potentiality" (DR 175/227). Simply put, every differential relation that constitutes the differential determination proper to the Idea has a corresponding singularity, or, better, for every such relation a singularity exists that expresses it.

Taking these three moments of determination together, which Deleuze at one point defines as "the figure of sufficient reason" (DR 176/228), we arrive at the following definition: "the reality of the virtual consists of the differential elements and relations along with the singular points which correspond to them" (DR 209/269–70). Or, to recapitulate all three points in the terminology of differential calculus that I presented briefly above:

(i) _dx_ is, in relation to _x_ , "completely undetermined" (DR 172/223), and likewise _dy_ in relation to _y_ ;

(ii) however, both _dx_ and _dy_ are reciprocally determined in relation to one another ( _dy_ / _dx_ ); further,

(iii) there are specific values of _dy_ / _dx_ that are the singularities or distinctive points of the differentiated equation, and which determine the distribution of points in their neighborhood.

Thus Deleuze's summary claim: " _dx_ is the Idea... the 'problem' and its being" (DR 171/222).

With these points in mind, we can return to the question: how does Badiou's presentation of the role of determination in Deleuze stack up against this account? The first thing to notice is that Badiou's claim on behalf of the virtual that it is "perfectly differentiated and determined", and in no way "a kind of indetermination" (DCB 50/75), is not precisely correct. In fact, as we have just seen, the virtual is _at once_ indeterminate and reciprocally determined for Deleuze.

But it is the second half of Badiou's thesis on this point that – in the light of _Difference and Repetition_ – appears particularly strange. He first adds the claim that the virtual determines the actual. One cannot help but notice, though, that determination, as Deleuze refers to it in relation to the virtual, is pertinent to the virtual _and only to the virtual_. The triple strata of the determination – as we have just seen – is described by Deleuze without any mention of the actual. Readers of _Difference and Repetition_ have to wait for the final chapter of that work to see the full story of the virtual–actual relation unfold. Deleuze is very clear on this point. For example, discussing the status of the third moment of determination, he writes that "Complete determination carries out the differentiation of singularities, but it bears only upon their existence and their distribution" (DR 210/271). In other words, the determination of the virtual with respect to singular points does not carry us beyond their ideal location with respect to differential relations. Likewise, for Deleuze, reciprocal determination (as he accounts for it in _Difference and Repetition_ ) is a relation proper to the virtual, and constitutes the elementary moment of structure, but does not require or imply anything at all on its own terms for the actual.

Even more peculiar is the assertion that virtual Ideas determine one another. When Badiou writes that "the virtual is also the ground for itself, for it is the being of virtualities, insofar as it differentiates, or problematises, them" (DCB 50/76), one is struck by the apparently paradoxical nature of such a claim. How is the virtual to be the ground (or "being") of the virtual? Is it that the virtual ( _qua_ name for being) is the Being of the actual, and also the Being of virtualities? On Deleuze's account, virtual Ideas are problematic, but, as in Kant, they are problematic not for themselves but with respect to the matter on which they come to bear. As in Maimon, they are rules, not for themselves, but for the construction of objects. It is false to claim, as Badiou does, that "a problem (a virtuality) is determined as the differentiation of another problem (another virtuality)" (DCB 50/76). Deleuze will rather insist that "Ideas are complexes of co-existence" (DR 186/241), with (as I have already noted) a complex set of criteria for distinguishing them from one another (DR 187/242).

Once more, then, Badiou's characterization of the virtual appears as a construction standing at some distance from Deleuze's work itself. And in the case of determination, we should be clear that it is only in _Difference and Repetition_ that this issue is addressed in any more than passing fashion.

THE VIRTUAL IMAGE

As I have already noted above, Badiou's treatment of the concept of the virtual in Deleuze disregards the intertextual (not to mention intratextual) differences in its deployment. Thus, when Badiou introduces the terminology of images into his examination, we are forced to move beyond the text of _Difference and Repetition_ – which only uses this terminology once and in passing (DR 209/270–71) – and towards the two _Cinema_ books. This is particularly significant because with the concept of the virtual image Badiou's account turns in the direction of explicit critique. Thus, _a priori_ , it is not clear that this critique is relevant to Deleuze's treatment of the category of the virtual as a whole – even should the critique be a telling one – since it presupposes, without argument or demonstration, the unity of this category across two texts that differ in a great many respects. We might, in other words, take seriously Badiou's critique of the virtual as it appears in the _Cinema_ works without in any way finding the arguments of _Difference and Repetition_ (or _Bergsonism_ , or _What is Philosophy?_ , etc.) challenged.

This said, let me first recall and elaborate to some extent the fourth of Badiou's summary remarks concerning the virtual. He begins by noting a characteristic of Deleuze's account that is, indeed, to be found in a number of the discussions of the virtual, which is the presentation of the object as having two halves, one actual and one virtual. For instance, in the passage in _Difference and Repetition_ where the notion of the possible is critiqued in favour of the virtual, Deleuze writes that "the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object – as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension" (DR 209/270), and asserts later that "every object is double without it being the case that the two halves resemble one another... They are unequal odd halves" (DR 209–10/270). Badiou notes this argument with approval, since it seems to him that "were we to separate the virtual from the actual object, univocity would be ruined, for Being would be said according to the division of the objective actual and the non-objective virtual" (DCB 51/78).

However, he says, such doctrine brings with it the problem of articulating these two apparently dissimilar faces of the object. It is in response to this question that Badiou writes, and I quote at length in order to present the key moment of the argument:

In my opinion, the answer [Deleuze] gives is far from satisfactory and it is here that I see the stumbling block for the theory of the virtual. This answer stipulates that "Every object is double without it being the case that the two halves resemble one another, one being a virtual image and the other an actual image. They are unequal odd halves." We can see clearly how Deleuze takes advantage here of the fact that every object, or every being, is a mere simulacrum; for this allows the timely injection of an immanent theory of the double, backed up by an optical metaphor (the possible double status of images). But it is extremely difficult to understand how the virtual can be ranked as an image, for this would seem to be the status proper to the actual, whereas it is impossible for the virtual, as the power proper to the One, to be a simulacrum.

(DCB 50–51/78)

In other words, for Badiou, the invocation of the two halves of the object, and the support of a metaphor of the double image, is and can only be a distraction from an abyssal gap between the two orders of being that Deleuze talks about but does not have the means to explicitly articulate.

Unfortunately, this paragraph, rather than stating a fundamental objection to Deleuze, manifests a ramifying series of false assertions that lead us very far from the Deleuzean theory of the virtual as we find it in either _Difference and Repetition_ or _The Time Image_. In response to Badiou, we must insist on three important claims. First, the final suggestion that there cannot be, for Deleuze, an account of the image that is virtual in character must be dispensed with. If Badiou was correct in suggesting that Deleuze's understanding of the virtual could be identified with "the power proper to the One", such a point would be telling indeed. However, as we have seen in the earlier parts of this chapter, the virtual for Deleuze does not play the role of a dynamic agency, and nor can we think the virtual as it appears in _Difference and Repetition_ at least in terms of a unary aspect of Being, given its complex internal characteristics.

Moreover, to assert that the virtual is an image is not to say that it is a simulacrum. As I have already noted, the simulacrum is a concept of a particular provenance that plays an active part only in certain of Deleuze's texts. This kind of terminological conflation is, as a result, an extremely unfortunate act on Badiou's behalf. This is the case _per se_ , of course, but should we note the text in which the notion of the simulacrum plays the greatest role, _The Logic of Sense_ , one cannot help but notice that Deleuze is very careful there to give the notions of image and simulacrum very different meanings.

Second, it should be clear that if Deleuze's only response to the nature of the relationship between the virtual and actual had been – as Badiou asserts – simply to state that the two halves are unequal, then it seems unlikely that Badiou would have been the first person to have mounted an attempt at a fundamental critique. Indeed, it beggars belief that Badiou would devote a book to Deleuzean thought if it was brought to ruin by a theoretical inadequacy of such gross character. In fact, Deleuze's answer to the question concerning the relation between the virtual and the actual is extensive and rigorous, concerning what he calls the intensive _implication_ and _explication_ of the relations and singular points proper to the _perplicated_ regime of differential Ideas, a discussion of which will be pursued towards the end of this book. Here, though, we can begin by reminding ourselves in a preliminary manner that Deleuze espouses an expressivist ontology, where the relationship between events and states of affairs, sense and bodies, the virtual and the actual is not conceived on causal grounds, but in terms of the capacity for the former terms to maintain an _expressive_ relationship with the latter.

The third point turns on the virtual–image relationship. Let us note right away that Badiou's objection to this possibility has the air of a rhetorical foreclosure: the virtual simply _cannot_ be an image. If such a proposal seems impossible to Badiou, it is because, it would seem, he has already decided in an _a priori_ fashion on the nature of the virtual in Deleuze. In any case, we are left to ask ourselves, in light of this passage, about this relation as it appears in Deleuze's work.

_The virtual in The Time Image_

As I have already noted, the treatment of the virtual as image is present in _Difference and Repetition_ only very briefly and in passing, finding its locus elsewhere, principally in _Bergsonism_ and the _Cinema_ works. The key citations in _The Clamor of Being_ are, however, from _The Time Image_ , and it is the doctrine of what Deleuze calls the small circuit of the virtual image and its actual double that we shall examine here. This will also allow us to question Badiou's equation – found throughout his engagement with Deleuze, but particularly in "One, Multiple, Multiplicity" – of the virtual–actual distinction with that of the large circuit and small circuit.

Although the term "virtual" emerges at a number of points in both _The Movement Image_ and _The Time Image_ , it does so for the most part somewhat diffidently, as if the term on its own is not entirely significant. Short texts (e.g. MI 106) introduce the virtual only to immediately subsume the contents of the claim under other categories. The exception is the chapter dedicated to "The Crystals of Time" in _The Time Image_ (TI 68–97).

Deleuze's goal in this chapter is to make sense of the underlying schema of a range of images that break from the sensorimotor schema that provide the classical cinema with its anchor in the viewer, from the op- and son-signs of Ozu and Italian neorealism to the recollection-image (Mankiewicz's flash-backs) and the dream-image (such as the dance sequences in Hollywood musicals like those of Minnelli). His investigation revolves around the notion of the crystal-image, and concludes by asserting that "the crystal reveals a direct time-image, and no longer an indirect image of time deriving from movement" (TI 98).

Strictly speaking, the crystal figures what Deleuze will call "the smallest internal circuit" (TI 70), or the point at which an image reveals its own proper grounding in an obscure local background from which it cannot be separated; this is the point at which the image (which is actual) and its virtual double coalesce. The crystal is thus the smallest figure of the relation between the virtual and the actual as it is presented in _The Time Image_.

According to Deleuze, these two halves of the crystal – the two images-in-tandem – are equally irreducible, figuring in a relationship described as "reciprocal presupposition" (TI 69; not to be confused with the reciprocal determination discussed above). But they are also for the same reason essentially _indistinguishable_. Now, it is important to be clear on this point. Deleuze's account turns around the reciprocal relationship between the two instances _which form the crystal image_. It is not a claim about the virtual and the actual as a whole. The crystal therefore forms not only the smallest circuit, but also a horizon where earth and sky finally become unable to be disentangled. The crystal image is thus also a hinge around which a thought of one genre of time-images revolves. Above all, however, we must take note of the local character of the indiscernibility that Deleuze evokes.

Finally, the two halves of the crystal image are entirely _reversible_ : "there is no virtual which does not become actual in relation to the actual, the latter becoming virtual through the same relation" (TI 69). This is what explains the basic structure that Deleuze is concerned with in this context. He begins with the claim that "The cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world" (TI 66), which is nothing other than an alternative presentation of the relation between an actual image and its virtual context or, taken together, the large circuit. If the actual and virtual are reversible at the level of the crystal or the small circuit, it is because any image can become a part of the context for any other: the reflection, having taken on a life of its own, now finds itself in a world proper to it. If the actual can itself become virtual, it is not so _en masse_ , but in the case of particular images. The "world" that surrounds every image, that obscure underbelly of each distinct image into which the image "frays" into and fulgurates from, is the virtual, but what constitutes this world is perpetually shifting, relating to new determinations that are not at present themselves actual.

Note that, for Deleuze, the small circuit is not, contrary to Badiou's reading, another name for the actual. Rather, both the small circuit and the large circuit both include the virtual and the actual. The difference is one of specificity or generality. Each actual image is indeed in relation to the virtual Whole, the world or the cosmos (this is the large circuit) but is locally intertwined with its own enigmatic double (the small circuit). In place of the structural account of the virtual in _Difference and Repetition_ , we find in _The Time Image_ that the difference between virtual and actual is itself a matter of a location or specificity _within a broader structure_ constituted by the ensemble of images.

We should also note that, should we examine _The Time Image_ for more information about the nature of the large circuit, which is for Badiou a name for the One-All, we find the following text: " _the dream represents the largest visible circuit or 'the outermost envelope' of all the circuits_ " (TI 56). Initially it would seem, then, that the large circuit is dealt with in terms of the relationship between perception and recollection in dreams, essentially following Bergson's analyses of these phenomena in _Matter and Memory_ : dreams – not the One, and not the virtual-in-itself – in so far as they represent the most relaxed form of the contraction of the recollection-perception matrix. Later, though, Deleuze goes on to extend his analysis in the direction of the ontological. The key passage reads as follows:

[E]arlier, we were able to assimilate virtual images to mental images, recollection-images, dream or dreaming: these were so many incomplete solutions, but on the track of the right solution. The more or less broad, always relative, circuits, between the present and the past, refer back, on the one hand, to a small internal circuit between a present and _its own_ past, between an actual image and _its_ virtual image; on the other hand, they refer to deeper and deeper circuits which are themselves virtual, which each time mobilize the whole of the past, but in which the relative circuits bathe or plunge to trace an actual shape and bring in their provisional harvest. The crystal-image has these two aspects: internal limit of all the relative circuits, but also outer-most, variable and reshapable envelope, at the edges of the world, beyond even moments of world. The little crystalline seed and the vast crystallizable universe: everything is included in the capacity for expansion of the collection constituted by the seed and the universe. Memories, dreams, even worlds are only apparent relative circuits which depend on the variations of this Whole. They are degrees or modes of actualization which are spread out between these two extremes of the actual and the virtual: the actual and _its_ virtual on the small circuit, expanding virtualities in the deep circuits. And it is from the inside that the small internal circuit makes contact with the deep ones, directly, through the merely relative circuits.

(TI 80–81)

What is perhaps most significant about this thesis in the current context is that the Whole is not the source or origin of the actual, but rather the _de jure_ projection of the expanse of the virtual (reminiscent of the refrain of the cosmos celebrated in _A Thousand Plateaus_ ), which is never presented or presentable in total, not the insistence on a _de facto_ substantial ground. In _The Time Image_ Deleuze is clear: we need not go as far as the posited Whole (which is, to repeat, not crystallized but only ever locally _crystallizable_ ) in order to encounter the virtual, since this latter doubles the present, and permeates every image with its capacity to emerge anew in the world. Omnipresent in the smallest of details, the virtual resonates with its actual double. It is this capacity for novelty that is out of _this_ world, indeed – but not _beyond_ it – and to which cinema provides us access.

To summarize then, we can see that (i) Deleuze certainly does account for the virtual as image; but (ii) only in a specific context that cannot be extrapolated to others, particularly not to _Difference and Repetition_ ; and (iii) the small circuit–large circuit distinction in _The Time Image_ bears no resemblance to the distinction between the virtual and the actual in _Difference and Repetition_.

These three points are sufficient to show that both Badiou's way of framing the issue of the double-sided object and the objections that he mounts on the basis of this are of no real pertinence to Deleuze's philosophy.

NOTE ON KEITH ANSELL-PEARSON'S DEFENCE OF THE VIRTUAL

Before proceeding, I should like to consider an alternative defence of the Deleuzean theme of the virtual proposed by Keith Ansell-Pearson in his _Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual_. For Ansell-Pearson, "it is legitimate to describe [Deleuze] as a thinker of the One" (2002: 98). Later he asserts that "[w]e agree with Badiou: Deleuze _is_ a thinker of the One. But he is also a pluralist and an immanently qualified one. There are [however] good reasons for positively hesitating in describing Deleuze as a Platonist of the virtual" ( _ibid_.: 114).

The grounds for this agreement are to be found in a common basic assumption on the part of both Badiou and Ansell-Pearson: that Deleuze's project is basically a restatement in different terms of Bergson's metaphysics.

Thus, in keeping with Badiou's assertion that "Deleuze is a marvelous reader of Bergson, who, in my opinion, is his real master" (DCB 39/62), Ansell-Pearson frequently asserts their effective unity. The following text is emblematic: "In order to demonstrate in more precise terms the nature of Deleuze's dual commitment to the One and to pluralism (the One of pluralism) I want to give a fairly close and exacting reading of the 1956 and 1966 essays on Bergsonism" (Ansell-Pearson 2002: 105). In order to defend Deleuze, then, Ansell-Pearson insists on a _different_ reading of Bergson on the virtual, the central claim of which is that "In _Bergsonism_ it is neither accidental nor incidental that Deleuze should repeatedly speak of the virtual as a _simple_ virtual" ( _ibid_.: 99).

Before proceeding, let me note that the invocation of a simple virtual in _Bergsonism_ is less than straightforward in four senses. First, it is clearly a claim made on behalf of Bergson, and the appearance of this theme is framed in terms of an interpretive question put to Bergson's philosophy, and (for Deleuze) resolved therein:

But this [the emergence of divergent lines of actualization] leads to the question of how the Simple or the One, "the original identity," has the power to be differentiated. The answer is already contained in _Matter and Memory_. And the linkage [ _enchaînement_ ] between _Creative Evolution_ and _Matter and Memory_ is perfectly rigorous.

(B 100)

Second, to claim that Deleuze "repeatedly" speaks of the virtual as simple is something of an exaggeration. There are only four such uses of this idea in _Bergsonism_ , all of them nominal indexes of the problem of actualization or differentiation rather than the title of a doctrine, all of them found within the space of half a dozen pages.

Third, the reference to simplicity at this general level is immediately complicated at every point of _Bergsonism_ , principally because the very idea of a simple Time or Virtual is the manifestation of a unity that is fundamentally more complex than simple: its simplicity, that is to say, does not tell us much about its nature, which is amply attested to at each point in Deleuze's treatment of Bergson. The following sentiment is _a propos_ : "What, then, is duration? Everything Bergson ever says about it comes down to this: duration _is what differs from itself_ " (ID 51). The following from the closing passage of _Bergsonism_ emphasizes the same point:

At the outset we asked: what is the relationship between the three fundamental concepts of Duration, Memory and the _Elan Vital_? What progress do they indicate in Bergson's philosophy? Itseems to us that Duration essentially defines a virtual multiplicity ( _what differs in nature_ ), Memory then appears as the coexistence of all the _degrees of difference_ in this multiplicity, in this virtuality. The _élan vital_ , finally, designates the actualization of this virtual according to the _lines of differentiation_ that correspond to the degrees.

(B 112–13)

All things considered, we might simply translate "simple" as coexistent in the sense that this passage indicates, a passage that moreover leaves no doubt about the founding role of difference in Deleuze's interpretation of Bergson, a not-insignificant point with respect to Badiou's reading of Deleuze.

Fourth, the use of "simple" in this strong sense to characterize the virtual is immediately connected to a range of other terms, all likewise capitalized, and all likewise articulated in terms of the movement of actualization (i.e. the movement of the _élan vital_ ): Duration (B 93–4), Difference (B 93), Time (B 93, 100), Whole (B 93, 100, 103–7), One (B 93, 100), Life (B 94, 106), Simple (B 96, 100), Pure (B 96), Virtual (B 96), Unity (B 100), Simplicity (B 100) and Nature (B 107). Even such a crude analysis of the surface of the text in the passages of significance for Ansell-Pearson's interpretation reveal the relative insignificance of simplicity in the chain of concepts found there. The figure of the Whole [ _le Tout_ ] dominates to a significant degree Deleuze's rhetoric there.

Beyond these textual points, a first question with respect to the substance of this interpretation of Deleuze (and no longer simply of Deleuze's Bergson) would concern what exactly this simplicity entails: how can simplicity be distinguished from the ipseity that Badiou's account supposes? Ansell-Pearson states its significance as follows: "In Deleuze, by contrast [with Plotinus], the simplicity of the virtual denotes the pure positivity of being as a power of self-differentiating" (2002: 99).

This statement, however, arguably raises more problems than it solves. On the one hand, it is not clear that this distinguishes Ansell-Pearson's position from Badiou's numerous near-identical claims that we have examined in this chapter, claims that also come attached to an obligatory reference to Bergson: "the affirmation that the virtual is real becomes, in its turn – with Deleuze writing here under the influence of Bergson – a hymn to creation" (DCB 49/75). On the other hand, what justifies this restriction of consideration to _Bergsonism_ and the early writings of Bergson from the 1950s when the virtual is considered? For when we ask what meaning the alleged _simplicity_ of the virtual could have for the Deleuze of _Difference and Repetition_ , or _What is Philosophy?_ , we find Ansell-Pearson in precisely the same position as Badiou, that is, lacking any textual means to extend the analysis beyond very specific contexts.

This question becomes particularly pressing when we turn to examine _Difference and Repetition_. There, the status of the virtual past and the unity proper to it are confronted with the theme of the eternal return, on the one hand, which Deleuze sees as exceeding the purview and import of the pure past (as we shall see in some detail in the next chapter), and we also encounter, on the other, the figure of a complex set of structural determinations proper to the virtual as such.

In other words, we see that the past itself as integral self-differentiating virtuality is exceeded by the eternal return as the pure form of time as such, a point that is as telling with respect to Badiou as it is to Ansell-Pearson, and one that we shall turn to later. In brief, were we to claim that time has only two fundamental tenses (the passing present and the virtual past), a loop would be established whose ultimate ontological consequence is the circulation of a specular identity, bringing us close in an interesting way to the psychoanalytic theory of fantasy (including its role in trauma but also memory as such). Where _Bergsonism_ presents the virtual past as the source of the new, _Difference and Repetition_ demands that the past be superseded by a further time, one that tears temporality as such in two, and which guarantees absolute difference as fundamental. In addition, as we have just seen, the virtual is a complex of coexisting and reciprocally (in)differentiated Ideas, each marked by their own proper ideal singularities. It is this point that eludes Badiou; as Ansell-Pearson has it, "he fails to comprehend" the profundity of pluralism in Deleuze's thought (2002: 114). But the danger of the recourse to, and overemphasis of, the Bergsonian motif of simplicity in accounting for the nature of the virtual in Deleuze is that it seems unequal to the pluralism of the virtual that it is supposed to champion.

THE VIRTUAL AS THE RUIN OF THE ACTUAL

We come now to the ultimate moment of Badiou's characterization and critique of the virtual in Deleuze, in which he presents a critique of the Deleuzean theory of the virtual such that, on his account, Deleuze's "heroic effort... seems incapable of succeeding" (DCB 53/80). He rounds out his argument by making the following claims:

(i) The two sides of the object are isomorphic and indeed identical to the two halves of time ("the image-object _is_ time" [DCB 52/79]) as they are formulated according to the famous Bergsonian motif of the two jets.

(ii) This splitting, in both the register of the object and that of time, reintroduces a dualism into Deleuze's thought.

(iii) The spectre of dualism thus conjured is dealt with by insisting on the indiscernibility of the virtual and the actual (or the past and the present, or the two halves of the object): "the only way of saving – despite everything – the One, is by resorting to an unthinkable Two, and indiscernibility without remedy" (DCB 53/81).

(iv) Finally, such an insistence means that there is an impoverishment of the actual to the degree that the virtual is determined: "the complete determination of the ground as virtual implies _an essential indetermination of that for which it serves as a ground_ " (DCB 53/80).

For the time being (once more), we must delay in considering these assertions with respect to the temporal register, since a great deal more background will be required in order to establish the validity of the past–virtual connection. Nonetheless, the charge of an obfuscated dualism can be examined here in relation to the doctrine of the double-sided object discussed over the past few pages. The first question is thus whether or not the double object is a manifestation of an ontological dualism.

Whenever this kind of question emerges with respect to Deleuze, the first thing that must be recalled is that Deleuze's explicit claims on this matter reject in the strongest terms any form of ontological dualism. The concepts of univocity and expression, the lengthy critique of emanative, analogical or equivocal ontological positions found in almost all of Deleuze's work from the early texts on Bergson through to "Immanence: A Life..." must not be overlooked. This means that all attempts to argue that Deleuze is a dualist must begin by asserting that Deleuze did not or could not recognize this fundamental reality about his own thought – or that he maintained an esoteric dualist philosophy parallel to his explicit rejections of the same view – and then substantiate the claim.

The real content, however, of Badiou's final remark about the virtual concerns not dualism but the question of discernibility. The problem with the Deleuzean theory of the virtual, for Badiou, is that it forces us into an increasingly severe evacuation of the actual in our attempts to specify it. More precisely, by attempting to maintain a philosophy like the one that Badiou attributes to Deleuze, we find ourselves ultimately without any means to distinguish between the virtual and the actual. We find ourselves lacking "a mark or criterion... by which to distinguish them" (DCB 53/80).

Once again, the reference points that Badiou puts into use in order to establish this indiscernibility as a part of Deleuze's thought is a single passage – two pages, to be precise – of _The Time Image_. The extrapolation of these two pages to inflect the rest of Deleuze's thought follows. As we have seen above, however, the theory of the virtual image and its interchangeable double is particular to _The Time Image_ , and has no significant counterpart in _Difference and Repetition_.

Nonetheless, we are presented with the question: how is the virtual distinguished from the actual more generally? It is not difficult to dispel such questions with reference to _Difference and Repetition_ , and I shall mention here only the most important such means of distinction, which returns us to the category of determination. Contrary to Badiou's account of this topic, Deleuze is at pains here to insist that the virtual must be defined, in contradistinction from the actual, as _lacking determination_ in a way that the actual is not. Consider, for example, this account of the difference between the virtual and the actual, where Deleuze puts his distinction between differen _c/t_ iation into play:

The question of the _ens omni modo determinatum_ must be posed as follows: something which exists only in the Idea may be completely determined (differentiated) and _yet lack those determinations which constitute actual existence_ (it is undifferenciated, not yet even individuated).

(DR 280/358, emphasis added)

It is for this reason that Deleuze assigns a certain _positive_ non-being to the virtual in relation to the actual in order to designate its problematic character: "non-Being is Difference: _heteron_ , not _enantion_. For this reason non-being should rather be written (non)-being, or, better still, ?-being" (DR 64/89). That the virtual exists in the mode of being of the problematic means that it lacks the forms of determination that give the actual their actuality: the form of object and subject, the entire grid of identity imposed by representation.

But what is even stranger is the fact that Badiou himself off ers numerous distinguishing traits; indeed, his whole reading of Deleuze is predicated on radical divisions of this kind. _In the same chapter_ where he argues for the ultimate indistinction of the virtual from the actual, he offers many such decisive (if false, as I have tried to show) criteria: the virtual is the Being of beings, where the actual is its product; the virtual is dynamic power while the actual is created simulacrum; the virtual is the process whereby the actual comes about; the virtual is fully determined while the actual is indeterminate.

Further, it is puzzling to find Badiou asserting that the actual is in danger of dissolving into a flickering light refracted by an active and completely determined virtual. After reflecting on such claims for a moment, we might simply note that, in many cases, Deleuze presents the virtual rather than the actual as the category in need of an active programme of advocacy. That is, rather than seeming like the exemplary obvious moment in his ontology, Deleuze frequently goes out of his way to lend it argumentative resources in order to substantiate its role. We must ask, in the end, why it is that Deleuze is so concerned to establish the category of the virtual in the face of the actual if, in the order of being, things stand in the inverse relationship? Why exactly is it that we find Deleuze "insisting as always on the _reality_ of the virtual" (DCB 46/70)? It is as though each definition of the virtual in Deleuze carries with it a certain combative quality, as though this is what will be necessary to assert it as a category in its own right, in the face of the hegemony of the possible and the real, the actual and the material.

In sum, it is very strange to see Badiou's entire chain of argumentation _vis-à-vis_ the virtual – which is for him, as we have seen, "the principle name of Being in Deleuze's work" (DCB 43/65) – come down to the invocation of two pages in _The Time Image_ and the dubious extraction of generalized consequences from them. It is as if the other commentaries on this theme found throughout his work, including the most substantial such discussions, did not exist. Walter Benjamin once wrote of polemics that they "mean to destroy a book in a few of its sentences. The less it has been studied the better" (1979: 78), which is, of course, to say that the ultimate _asylum ignorantiae_ is nothing but ignorance as such.

Badiou begins his chapter by noting the important role the virtual plays in Deleuze's philosophy, and in this he is undoubtedly correct. However, in detailing the examination of Badiou's interpretation, it becomes clear that very little is reminiscent of the Deleuzean texts we have examined, principally the text of _Difference and Repetition_ , but also moments of _The Time Image._

Badiou's anaemic presentation of the virtual in Deleuze, an account that treats all of Deleuze's work on the topic as unified while, as I have argued, failing to engage in a proper examination, leaves everything still to be said. The "entire adventurous character of Ideas remains to be described" (DR 182/236).
5. TRUTH AND TIME

Badiou's discussion of the themes of time and truth constitutes the most peculiar moment in his study of Deleuze. This discussion, found in chapter five of _The Clamor of Being_ , is structured around a surprising string of equations such that, by the end of the chapter, the following terms have all been posited as synonymous: time, truth, the virtual, atemporal eternity, Relation and the One. Here, my concern will be less to argue against this bold string of equations, but rather to deal with the central link: the equation of time and truth. We must then discover, at least schematically, what role time and truth play in Deleuze's philosophy, and the manner in which they are articulated.

It is easy to see why Badiou takes this theme to be such an important aspect of Deleuze's philosophy: his own thought gives a decisive important role to truth as the created foundation of change in situations. Likewise, when Badiou writes – in order to distinguish himself from Deleuze – that "Truths are actual multiplicities with a much higher 'Dionysian' value than that accruing to any sort of phenomenological salvaging of time" (DCB 60/91), the force of his point is once more derived from his own account of the novelty inherent in truth.

Rather, though, than seeing Deleuze as the enemy of truth as such, chapter five of _The Clamor of Being_ goes out of its way to argue that Deleuze is the champion of an obscure or esoteric theory of truth irreducible to the familiar representational or "analogical" account:

This other idea of truth, I would suggest, is one that Deleuze, with the violent courtesy that I discern in his style and thought, was to implacably defend: an idea that is all the more devious for giving to truth the name of the false – the _power_ of the false – and for the fact that the process of this truth is no longer judgment, but (in conformity with the requisites of the intuition, which, as we have seen, is always a looped trajectory) a sort of _narration_.

(DCB 57/86)

For Deleuze, on Badiou's account, then, truth is narration. Immediately, though, he connects this thesis with his more basic claims in _The Clamor of Being_ , deploying the truth-falsity distinction across the space of the virtual and the actual:

For those for whom the univocity of Being requires that it be essentially _virtual_ , the theme of truth is necessarily given as _power_. From the viewpoint of this power, the actual forms of beings can indeed be considered as simulacra, or anarchic agencies of the false. For truth is coextensive with the productive capacity of the One-virtual, and does not reside as such in any particular actual outcome, in isolation from the rest. Accordingly, the difficulty in this instance is no longer that of isolating forms-of-the-true in the actual, but of linking the anarchy of the simulacra to an immanent affirmation-of-the-true. However, this affirmation exists nowhere else than in its actualizations and the power is really the power _of the false_.

(DCB 59/88)

I could continue this quotation at length, but the interpretive or expressive technique that Badiou is employing is clear: the case in question (here, time) is posed by Badiou against the background of the interpretive structure that has already been put in place. Once more, we see the familiar reference to simulacra _qua_ actualized emanations of the One-virtual.

In any case, it is in the context of assigning to Deleuze the equation of the value of truth to the power of the false that Badiou introduces his discussion of time: "the 'royal road' of Deleuze's idea of the true is his theory of time" (DCB 59/89). It is Deleuze's theory of time that will provide the grounds on which to elaborate this theory of truth.

What, for Badiou, is this theory of time? Badiou's answer is surprisingly limited: surprising because time is a category that Deleuze returns to again and again throughout his work. The answer, such as it is, is once more stated in terms of the virtual-actual distinction (or, as Badiou writes, it "strictly conforms to the logic of the One" [DCB 61/92]). On the one hand, there is "sensible time – concrete time " (DCB 61/92), and, on the other, time as "the One qua integral virtuality" and _"the power of the false"_ (DCB 61/91): Being and ground. This division is also presented in quasi-Bergsonian terms: "the present is, in fact, a point where the One opens up (but the One is the Open), and there is an intermingling of a variation of the One (of pure duration) and superficial mobility" (DCB 62/93).

With these two definitions, we can easily see why Badiou might be led to assert that truth is time for Deleuze: they both fall back on the great mediating figure of the One that organizes the entire course of _The Clamor of Being_. Questions remain, though, about the accuracy of such an assessment: how appropriate is this interpretive approach with respect to the categories of time and truth in Deleuze?

THE DELEUZEAN CATEGORY OF TRUTH

Before examining how closely the time–truth–virtual complex fits with Deleuze's work, the status of truth as such should be elucidated on its own terms. What is striking is that it is not just in late texts that the category of truth is put to use by Deleuze as Badiou claims ("It is in his _Foucault_ that the most appeased texts on truth written by Deleuze are to be found" [DCB 65/97]). In fact, in some of Deleuze's earliest works, the concept of truth is given sustained and detailed attention, which is in each case at least minimally positive. Furthermore, the concept of truth is given several sustained treatments in the mature works of the late 1960s, which, although they all include strongly critical remarks, certainly do not discard the concept of truth as such, but rather deploy it in a new register.

_Truth in Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche_

The category of truth is first substantially engaged with by Deleuze in _Nietzsche and Philosophy_. What is striking about this presentation is that, while including elements of the critique of the category of truth as presented by Badiou, it does not foreclose the category as such. In _Nietzsche and Philosophy_ , and then later in _Proust and Signs_ , what could be called a _differential theory of truth_ is discernible. The critical aspect of the argument will be familiar to readers of Nietzsche: the central question concerning truth is not "What is true?" but rather "Who wants the truth?", and what (in the one who wants the truth) wants it? Deleuze firmly upholds the Nietzschean diagnosis that the category of truth frequently masks "values superior to life" (NP 95), and thereby denigrates life itself.

This is not only the negative or critical moment of the argument, however, for it contains the kernel of a broader assessment, even a transvaluation. The point of view that Deleuze adopts is well expressed in the following text:

There are truths of baseness, truths that are those of the slave. Conversely, our highest thoughts take falsehood into account; moreover, they never stop turning falsehood into a higher power, an affirmative and artistic power that is brought into effect, verified and becomes-true in the work of art.

(NP 104–5)

In sum, it is not truth as such that is a bad or life-betraying category, but the use to which it is put, the goals and investments that animate it. While the figure of the moralist or the priest imbricates the category of truth with reductive and nihilistic ends, it is the artist, the creator or the figure of the child who manages to invest in it a force that breaks the connection between truth and morality.

For the artist, _appearance_ no longer means the negation of the real in this world but this kind of selection, correction, redoubling and affirmation [of life, of the will to power]. Then truth perhaps takes on a new sense. Truth is appearance. Truth means bringing of power into effect, raising to the highest power.

(NP 103)

When truth is invested in the triumph of moral values and the denigration of life, it must be condemned as such. However, when the category of truth is put into play by "the highest power of falsehood, it magnifies the 'world as error'" (NP 102). That is, truth becomes articulated not with the faithful copy, but rather with the power to break with the copy and institute something new; all in all, as Badiou argues, "It is quite possible therefore that the processes of the 'power of the false' are strictly indiscernible from the repertoire composed by the processes of the power of the true" (DCB 57/86). This theory is therefore hardly a "secret ... idea of truth" (DCB 57/86), only available to the reader of Deleuze by implication and association.

_Truth in Deleuze's reading of Proust_

The differential account of truth – according to which the category of truth itself is elaborated, and must be examined, on the basis of the goals in the name of which it is mobilized – is extended in _Proust and Signs_. The key to the presentation of the category of truth here lies in the use of a theme first found in _Nietzsche and Philosophy_ , but which is emphasized in many of Deleuze's early and middle-period writings, namely, the theme of the intrinsic passivity of thought. Thought itself does not naturally think, and it does not innately seek the truth: "The mistake of philosophy is to presuppose within us a benevolence of thought, a natural love of truth" (PS 16).

In _Proust and Signs_ , what engenders the activity of thinking is the encounter with signs. All thought – including the search for truth – begins when the centripetal sink of subjective habits is interrupted by something that, unrecognized, shocks thinking into unprecedented action. Thus, in a wonderful phrase, Deleuze likens the beginning of thought to the spur of jealousy: "Who searches for truth? The jealous man, under the pressure of the beloved's lies" (PS 16). The jealous lover moves in thought under the impetus of signs: a short delay in a phone conversation, an over-long glance, the sudden sense of a new distance, the missing keys. Here, the regime of signs in question is that of love, but it is equally the other kinds of signs that Deleuze uncovers in Proust – wordly signs, sensuous signs and the signs of art – which spur thought at each point along the path of apprenticeship.

Now, in this text, we find Deleuze explicitly positing one of Badiou's claims about truth: "truth has an essential relation to time" (PS 15). Despite the apparent similarities between the Deleuzean text and Badiou's accounting of it on this theme, there is a more complex set of issues at stake.

This claim is made in the context of a chapter dedicated to "Signs and Truth", and the status of the category of truth will be posed in accordance with the temporal status of each domain of signs. In other words, the sense of the category of truth changes with each kind of sign, and the apprenticeship of the sign that Deleuze identifies in Proust's novel is at the same time the elaboration of truth in a manner that suits the sign in question (this is, once more, the differential aspect of Deleuze's position). This is why Deleuze writes that "The Search for lost time is in fact a search for truth" (PS 15), but a search that must be recommenced each time the searcher enters the orbit of a new regime of signs: "To seek truth is to interpret, decipher, explicate. But this 'explication' is identified with the development of the sign in itself" (PS 17).

In sum, rather than tying the category of truth to the analysis of existential investments, and ultimately the drives and the will-to-power of particular individuals and societies, as he does in the case of Nietzsche, in _Proust and Signs_ it is the regimes of signs themselves that engender the sense in which truth is to be understood, each sign giving rise to an order of truth proper to it. This is to say, once more, that the interpretation of each regime of signs involves the pursuit each time of truth from the beginning, without any preordained course or goal. Likewise, to return to the theme of time, relative to each regime of signs, the search for truth involves the subordination of thought to a unique temporal structure, and the discovery in thought of a new experience of time. In the case of the regime of worldly signs, it is a time wasted; signs of love, time lost; sensuous signs, time rediscovered; and finally, in the regime of the signs of art, time regained. In each case, it is not that the _same_ time is lost, wasted, rediscovered and regained, but that being-regained, being-wasted and so on are proper and unique modalities of time as such.

We thus arrive at a unique differential sign-time-truth complex: "the signs do not develop, are not to be explained according to the lines of time without corresponding or symbolizing, without intersecting, without entering into complex combinations that constitute the system of truth" (PS 25). This statement includes two of the elements that we find later in Deleuze's theory of time, to which I shall return shortly, and which problematize Badiou's interpretation. Time is at once irreducibly complex in nature, and also engaged in a series of different interrelations, which, in _Proust and Signs_ , engender the various manners in which signs are produced and grasped in the world. Thus, when we read that "truth has an essential relation to time" (PS 15), we must understand that, for Deleuze, this relationship does not take the form of a unity, and nor does it fall under the category of an ultimate One.

_Truth in the dogmatic image of thought_

Now, this differential account of truth gives way, in _Difference and Repetition_ , to the resituation of the category of truth no longer with respect to signs or time in a direct way, but rather to the category of the problem. It is here that we find the most significant use of the concept of truth in Deleuze's philosophy. The discussion of the truth and falsity of problems, and the relationship between truth and sense, in one of Deleuze's most important texts is, however, a much better indication of the view held by Deleuze himself.

In chapter three of _Difference and Repetition_ , Deleuze presents two interrelated assertions about the nature of truth in the context of his critique of the dogmatic image of thought. In particular, he devotes the sixth and seventh postulates of his account of this image to its status and nature. The first of these claims is that, predominantly, truth has been understood as a characteristic pertaining to language _qua_ designation, an assertion that he will develop at greater length in _The Logic of Sense_. In other words, it is at the level of the proposition that the question of truth and falsity arises: "designation is taken to be the locus of truth, sense being no more than the neutralized double or the infinite doubling of the proposition" (DR 167/217). In other words, it is propositions that are subject to the judgement concerning their truth and falsity. This is the view of truth that Badiou notes is "founded on the Same of the model and the Similar of the copy", and of which he rather implausibly claims: "it has never been advanced by any philosopher other than as a mediatory image that the philosopher's entire thought will subsequently be devoted to dismantling" (DCB 57/85). In contrast, Deleuze will argue that it is sense that is prior to designation, rather than being its phantom double, and that the issue of truth arises in the first instance in relation to sense and not designation: "sense is the genesis or the production of the true, and truth is only the empirical result of sense" (DR 154/200).

In turn, we are led to ask about the specific nature of the truth-sense relationship, which is the topic of the seventh postulate. Again, according to the common view, a problem is a simple reformulation of a proposition: we move from "This is a cat" to "Is this a cat?", where the problem is "copied or traced from the propositions themselves" (DR 158/205). It is only with respect to the solution or answer to the question that truth and falsity come into play, once more subordinating the entirety of the problem-truth-sense complex to the ultimate form of the proposition. "There is, therefore, a seventh postulate to add to the others: the postulate of responses and solutions according to which truth and falsehood only begin with solutions or only qualify responses" (DR 158/206). Or, in the case of the philosophical extension of this natural prejudice, problems are thought in terms of the possibility of their solution. Deleuze's intent is once more to critique this primacy of the proposition and the view of the problem that it brings with it. This involves, first, insisting on the fundamental and irreducible character of problems. Problems are (as we have already seen in the previous chapter) objective transcendental instances, or what Deleuze here calls "objec-ticities" (DR 159/206; see also 164/213), whose solution neither is brought about by the activity of judgement, nor results in the dissolution of the problem, which "insists and persists in [its] solutions" (DR 163/212). Second, and most importantly here, it means that truth and falsity, having been disconnected from the proposition, are conceived as qualifications for _problems as such_. In what sense? What exactly is a true problem as opposed to a false one? The fundamental difference lies in whether or not the problem is taken as a genuinely transcendental structure, as opposed to a second-order result of the process of ontogenesis that this structure plays a central role in. Whenever thought "is content to trace problems from propositions, it loses its true power and falls under the sway of the power of the negative, necessarily substituting for the ideal objecticity of the problematic a simple confrontation between opposing, contrary or contradictory, propositions" (DR 164/213).

Thus the distinction between true and false problems is a _critical_ distinction, in Kant's sense. A false problem is a problem illegitimately extracted or traced from particular empirical instances. A true problem, on the other hand, is the problematic as such, that is, instances of the differential structure of the virtual. I would even hazard a stronger formulation: if we think of problems in terms of solvable formulations derived from prior propositions, then we are not thinking of problems at all in Deleuze's terms.

The primary point of interest in these points from _Difference and Repetition_ , given our current concerns, is that truth here maintains, on the one hand, an _adjectival character_. Deleuze's concern is not with the being of truth, but rather with true and false problems, where, to repeat, their truth depends not on correspondence with reality, the mutual coherence of truth claims, nor (as in Badiou) on the construction of a rupture in the order of knowledge, but uniquely on the nature of the problem in question. On the other hand, truth (as a substantive) is subject to a more fundamental regime: that of sense.

In sum, then, Deleuze's philosophy already includes a rich and interesting meditation on the category of truth, one that supersedes any simple pseudo-Nietzschean rejection of it on genealogical grounds. Certainly, this account is in one part critical, since it liquidates the category of truth in any substantive sense. It does so, though, only to relocate truth in a new adjectival sense with respect to problems, and subordinating it to the ontological register of sense.

THE TWO DELEUZEAN SCHEMATA OF TIME

We are still left with the question of whether truth and time come to the same thing in Deleuze's philosophy, or, in other words, whether even this richer understanding of the category of truth in Deleuze does not in any case confirm Badiou's account. In order to resolve these matters, I would like to discuss two aspects that are central to Deleuze's philosophy of time, namely the _complexity_ of time (which refutes Badiou's insistence on the simplicity of the temporal order in Deleuze), and the _passivity_ involved in this account (which complicates the link between temporality and activity or productive power).

Before doing so, however, it is necessary to note that across his work Deleuze does not offer a single coherent theory of time, but rather, broadly speaking, presents two different temporal schemata, one _dyadic_ in nature, and the other _triadic_.

The dyadic schema presents time under two aspects. On the one hand, there is lived time, the time of the present. On the other, Deleuze insists on a more fundamental sense of time that accompanies and indeed grounds the other (taking the word "ground" in the complex sense we saw in the previous chapter). This dyadic schema is found in all of his early work, including _Empiricism and Subjectivity, Bergsonism_ (both of which operate with reference to a disjunction between the passing present and memory) and then later, and most importantly, _The Logic of Sense (Aiôn_ and _Chronos_ ).

The triadic schema – which is to be found in _Proust and Signs, The Time Image, Foucault_ and, above all, in _Difference and Repetition_ – invokes both the past and the present as modalities of time, and, in keeping with the dyadic schema, the past is associated with a much more fundamental transcendental moment. However, the third temporal aspect, which is associated with a moment of ungrounding, appears as more fundamental yet again.

Due to these two tendencies in Deleuze's own texts on time, any claim about the Deleuzean approach to temporality is confronted with a perhaps irreducible difficulty at the outset, a not-insignificant problem for Badiou correlative to the problems posed by the diverse accounts of the virtual in Deleuze. However, the very least that can be said, in conformity with the texts, is that the triadic schema plays the absolutely central role in the texts in which it appears. Time as the formal ungrounding of both sequential time (an image of time abstracted from the movement-image and in accordance with the sensorimotor schema) and memory (the recollection-image or Mnemosign) in _The Time Image_ could not be more central; the crystal-image (hyalosign), an image that ensures an exchange and connection between virtual and actual, still relies on being freed from the subordination of the sensorimotor schema (or the primacy of movement over time), and this freedom is in the end guaranteed not by another time-image, but by the irrational cut, which unshackles time from movement. _Proust and Signs_ , as we have just seen, contains an elaborate discriminatory apparatus that applies to signs, regimes of truth and time. There, the time of essence (fourth time, time regained) "gives us an image of eternity ... it is also an absolutely original time" (PS 26). This ultimate form of time is incarnated as involuntary memory (proper to the third time) at the cost of introducing a "minimum of generality" (PS 62), such that "essence is realized in involuntary memory to a lesser degree than in art; it is incarnated in a more opaque manner" (PS 61). This is why Deleuze gives a key chapter of this book the title "The Secondary Role of Memory'! In turn, however, involuntary memory is vastly superior to the basic habitual or sensible reality of time (first time, wasted time, and the second time, lost time, which pertains to the regime of the signs of love). Finally, and most importantly, the category of the eternal return in _Difference and Repetition_ is the heart, however enigmatic, of that book. We shall turn to this text again in what follows.

Now, the significance of the triadic schema in the works where they appear is one reason to take it as more important than the dyadic schema. We do not need to take this as the decisive point, however, since the very fact that the dyadic position is itself a part of the triadic account is enough to lead us to the conclusion that the latter are to a greater degree definitive of a Deleuzean philosophy of time. A third, heuristic reason for their significance might also be considered: the fact that Badiou overlooks this third dimension. As we have already seen, Badiou's account of time in Deleuze is organized around a reading and presentation of the dyadic account. In order to assess the accuracy of his reading, significant weight rests on the extent to which the third aspect of time enriches the dyadic schema.

TEMPORAL PLURALITY

In what follows, I would like to explicate the account of time offered in _Difference and Repetition_ , particularly in its second chapter, which is devoted to the theme of repetition. This account has several features that make it central in the consideration of Badiou's claims on the status of time in Deleuze. First, it is the most detailed and extended account of time found anywhere in Deleuze's work, with the possible exceptions of _Bergsonism_ and _The Logic of Sense_ , both of which, as noted, only make use of the dyadic account. Furthermore, given that Badiou approaches Deleuze principally as a philosopher, and reads him in terms of a fundamental metaphysical project, it would be difficult to maintain that a work other than _Difference and Repetition_ is the locus of this project in Deleuze with respect to time (this point does not hold universally – the theory of the event provided in _Difference and Repetition_ , for example, is only a minimal rehearsal for the full-blown account in _The Logic of Sense_ ).

There are three features of this account that I shall not dwell on here, although they are in and of themselves decisive: the broader links Deleuze establishes between time and repetition (and, in turn, the relationship between difference and repetition that is made through Deleuze's meditation on time), between time and biopsychical life, and the characterization of time as intrinsically synthetic in nature. I shall mention all of these aspects in passing. This makes the summary here incomplete in a variety of ways, should it be taken as definitive. However, the goal is to examine three facets of Deleuze's account that suffice to severely trouble Badiou's reading: (i) the plural nature of time on Deleuze's account; (ii) the importance and characterization of the third modality of time (concerned with the future and with the figure of the eternal return); and (iii) the role played in all three temporal modalities by passivity.

_Habit and the time of the present_

What is striking about the account of time in _The Clamor of Being_ is that it revolves around a unified picture of temporality. The equations of time, truth, the One, productive power and memory revolve around a monolithic and undifferentiated posit of time as the pure past: "an enormous total 'memory,' which is the being of time as pure duration – that permanent qualitative change where all the past is operative, just like all the virtual" (DCB 62/93). At once glacially still and fired with the essence of change, time emerges as a self-sufficient and unified ultimate metaphysical _quidditas_. It is striking because even cursory attention to the account of time in _Difference and Repetition_ would demonstrate that it is irreducibly plural and complex in nature.

Deleuze begins with what he characterizes as "the lived, or living, present" (DR 70/97). This first sense of time is intrinsically tied to habituation – this living present is brought about through the synthesis or contraction of sensible impressions, but also matter as such: "What we call wheat is a contraction of the earth and humidity" (DR 75/102). The word "living" in the phrase "living present" thus extends the purview of time well beyond the phenomenological experience of human beings. Deleuze's _paean_ to habituation opens wide arms to the entire world of the living and to the universe of the inanimate beyond and beneath it:

What organism is not made of elements and cases of repetition, of contemplated and contracted water, nitrogen, carbon, chlorides and sulphates, thereby intertwining all the habits of which it is composed? Organisms awake to the sublime words of the third _Ennead_ : all is contemplation!

(DR 75/102)

Now, this lived, habituated present is not meant to be thought of as one part of a three-part puzzle, along with distinct but equal instances of the past and the future. On the one hand, as we are about to see, the differences between each of the modalities of time are strictly irreducible, rendering them unequal at root; on the other, the living present has its own past and future, in the form of a protentive and retentive reach or "shading off". This is why Deleuze writes in an important and overlooked passage that "It is not that the present is a dimension of time: the present alone exists. Rather, synthesis constitutes time as a living present, and the past and the future as dimensions of this present" (DR 76/105). Speaking of empirical reality, of actuality, there is only the present in time, the lived present, the rich fullness of hunger and satiety. As I shall discuss later in this chapter, it is the case that derivative senses of the future and the past (as projected and retained instants) flank the passing present, but also a derivative sense of the present as constituted as the experience of instants. However, in so far as the past and the future are each accorded a distinct status, it is not on the basis of either lived experience or the habitual foundation of the present.

The geometric figure we might align with the living present is the circle. Habitual temporality is conservative and cyclical in nature. We already see both of these aspects in Hume's philosophy, where habit is the foundation for the expectation of the return of the same ("the sun will rise tomorrow").

So time must be thought _in the first instance_ as the habitual and contractile time of the present, and, as such, we already find ourselves at the border of a dispute with Badiou's portrayal of Deleuze, which entirely focuses on memory, something that Deleuze certainly does not do.

Nonetheless, memory does play an absolutely decisive role in Deleuze's account of time. He introduces it by noting that, should we consider time as solely habitual, we would have no explanation for the _passing of time_ :

Although it is originary, the first synthesis of time is no less intratemporal. It constitutes time as a present, but a present which passes. Time does not escape the present, but the present does not stop moving by leaps and bounds which encroach upon one another. This is the paradox of the present: to constitute time while passing in the time constituted... The claim of the present is precisely that it passes. However, it is what causes the present to pass, that to which the present and habit belong, which must be considered the ground of time. It is memory which grounds time.

(DR 79/108)

Before saying anything else, let us note a few features of Deleuze's position that, even in this short passage, problematize Badiou's reading: there are intra-temporal relations within time (there is little sense in simply claiming that "time is not temporal" [DCB 61/91]); in turn, time is not a simple vital Eternity, but constituted by a more complex set of differentiations (which will only multiply as we continue here); also, once we take into account the discussion of Deleuze's own notion of ground (elaborated in the previous chapter), it is not clear that this relationship of grounding between the past and the present can be reduced to the opposition of a virtual and active Memory and an actual and inanimate product.

For Deleuze, then, the habitual time of the lived present requires a ground, which is memory. He claims that, without it, there would be no experience of the present: the present without a past as such is "not physically possible" (DR 76/105). We should recognize here that this claim is quite clearly analogous to the Kantian procedure of transcendental deduction. Whereas the first time is _empirical_ in nature, and is embedded in the regime of the actual – it is psychological, physical, visceral – the second time of memory is _transcendental_ (DR 81/110).

_Memory and the time of the past_

In accounting for memory in this transcendental sense, it is to Bergson that Deleuze turns, and it is here that Badiou's account of time in Deleuze most closely resembles Deleuze's own claims. The passing present is constituted on the basis of an enormous and integral virtual memory. This memory is not the active (preconscious) memory of a human subject, but memory in an independent ontological sense.

The geometrical figure to associate with memory is that of the cone, as in the famous Bergsonian example first used in _Matter and Memory_ that Deleuze frequently invokes. Each level of this cone must be considered as the entirety of this pure past, contracted (or, conversely, relaxed) to a certain degree. The tip of the cone is the point at which the past is most contracted, and makes contact with the present itself.

Now we must again assert, with Deleuze, that the past thus understood is not just one aspect of time:

The past does not cause one present to pass without calling forth another, but itself neither passes nor comes forth. For this reason the past, far from being a dimension of time, is the synthesis of all time of which the present and the future are only dimensions. We cannot say that it was. It no longer exists, it does not exist, but it insists, it consists, it _is_. It insists with the former present, it consists with the new or present present. It is the in-itself of time as the final ground of the passage of time. In this sense it forms a pure, general, _a priori_ element of all time.

(DR 82/111)

We are able to square this with the claim that the living present is the entirety of time only by understanding Deleuze as talking here about the past as transcendental in an important (if not entirely Kantian) sense. It is not that we now notice the real nature of time, and must discard the claims about the status of the present. Rather, the argument moves from establishing the global nature of habitual time to noting that it requires a transcendental ground, and to the elaboration of this ground, without which the global habitual present would not be possible. The past is indeed the _a priori_ element of all time, and it is _a priori_ in relation to a global lived time whose rhythms and routines mark time for all of nature. While the living present has its own conservative synthesis, it requires a more fundamental synthesis in turn in order to be provided with the continued production of the present to synthesize.

Let me repeat that Badiou's account of memory in _The Clamor of Being_ , at least at the points that are irreducible to the general framework of his account, is a more or less faithful presentation of Deleuze's own position. However, beyond this point there is a sharp break. For Badiou, the Deleuzean treatment of time begins and ends with the posit of virtual Memory. For the Deleuze of _Difference and Repetition_ , though, memory and habit are together _insufficient_ to account for time. Why? Deleuze's answer, in relation to the position mapped out in _The Clamor of Being_ , could hardly be more instructive. In an absolutely crucial text, too often overlooked, he writes:

The pure past... is itself... necessarily expressed in terms of a present, as an ancient _mythical_ present. This equivocation, all the ambiguity of Mnemosyne, [is] already implicit in the second synthesis of time. For the latter, from the height of its pure past, surpassed and dominated the world of representation: it is the ground, the in-itself, noumenon and Form. However, it still remains relative to the representation that it grounds. It elevates the principles of representation – namely, identity, which it treats as an immemorial model, and resemblance, which it treats as a present image: the Same and the Similar. It is irreducible to the present and superior to representation, yet it serves only to render the representation of presents circular or infinite . The shortcoming of the ground is to remain relative to what it grounds, and to be proved by these. It is in this sense that it creates a circle: it introduces movement into the soul rather than time into thought. Just as the ground is in a sense "bent" and must lead us towards a beyond, so the second synthesis of time points beyond itself in the direction of a third which denounces the illusion of the in-itself which remains a correlate of representation.

(DR 88tm/119)

The problem with the first two temporal modalities is that by themselves they form a circle, oriented around _identity_ , the _Same_ and the _Similar_. However differential the virtual past is in structure, it is nonetheless structured according to the superficial values of identity that are in fact nothing but "a kind of 'effect, like an optical effect" (DR 88/119), erected on the basis of habit, which memory, as the ground of habit, is relative to.

_The eternal return and the time of the future_

The story so far is thus the following: since the present passes only in so far as there is another time in which it passes, we must posit a second time, memory. Memory and habit, through their very operation, revolve around a specular image of identity that arises on the basis of their operation. This revolution is thus centripetal, and turns around the axis of identity: the passing present, thanks to memory, never ceases to enrich the well of eternity, the pure past, but nothing new ever comes about. Habit and memory, then, are not only embedded in the false apparition of unity, but are also intrinsically conservative in operation. This is not initially meant in a moral sense (although that is a consequence), but rather presents a problem for the theory of time. Simply put, this problem is that if the first two syntheses revolve around the same, it becomes impossible, on these grounds alone, to explain how anything new can come about. We are confronted with a problem analogous to that which confronted the self-sufficiency of the living present: how can we account for the _advent of the new_ if all of time works around the already? As Deleuze will note in his discussion of Sacher-Masoch, transcendental reasoning – here, an investigation into grounding – cannot be stopped whenever one wishes (M 114).

Deleuze's answer to this question is infamous: he introduces a wideranging set of claims about the time of the future, a third time, inspired by the Nietzschean eternal return. It is surprising, then, to see that Badiou gives no attention in his discussion of time to this pivotal moment in _Difference and Repetition_. When the eternal return enters into his account, it is solely as a figure of chance _with no relationship to time_ : "Ultimately, the eternal return is the One as the affirmation of chance, or affirmation of the fact that chance is affirmed in a single throw, which returns as the active being of all casts, of all fortuitous events" (DCB 74–5/113). Here, the interpretive gamble constituted by Badiou's One-All is stretched to near breaking point. For it is certainly the case that the eternal return and chance have an intrinsic relationship for Deleuze, but this relationship is inexplicable unless one sees that it is played out _in entirely temporal terms_.

If we can characterize Deleuze's recourse to the eternal return as infamous rather than famous, it is because its renown pales in comparison with the difficulty of its elaboration. In the context of this minimalist account of the Deleuzean theory of time, though, much can be said without plunging into the obscure. Whereas the passing present provides the rich empirical content in temporality, and virtual memory both the transcendental ground for the passing of the present and its virtual depth (as past that has never been present), the future, or the time of the eternal return, is the formal condition for time as such. In other words, this third time is a _pure form_ imposed on the other two, which cracks open the recuperative and conservative circle that they establish in order that something new can come about: "the third synthesis unites all the dimensions of time . and causes them to be played out in the pure form" (DR 115/151).

Deleuze uses three geometric figures in order to elucidate the nature of the eternal return, which can serve as our guides here. The first is the figure of the line, which supersedes that of the circle: "I know of a Greek labyrinth that is but one straight line. So many philosophers have been lost upon that line that a mere detective might be pardoned if he became lost as well" (Borges 1999: 149). To return to the conservative figure of the present-past centripetal complex, Deleuze claims that the eternal return, rather than providing the final stamp of approval, knocks time from its orbit around the figure of identity. In some memorable passages, he evokes the decentring quality of the advent of the future:

The Northern Prince says "time is out of joint". Can it be that the Northern philosopher says the same thing: that he should be Hamletian because he is Oedipal? The joint, _cardo_ , is what ensures the subordination of time to those properly cardinal points through which pass the periodic movements which it measures (time, number of the movement, for the soul as much as for the world). By contrast, time out of joint means demented time or time outside the curve which gave it a god, liberated from its overly simple circular figure, freed from the events which made up its contents, its relation to movement overturned... Time itself unfolds (that is, apparently ceases to be a circle) instead of things unfolding within it (following the overly simple circular figure).

(DR 88/119–20)

It might seem odd to claim that the image of time as a line (time as ordinal) is a radical overthrow of the idea of time as circle (time subordinate to pre-established points: the seasons, the revolution of a day, the passing of hours or other metrics of time). Of the two images, the former seems infinitely simpler than the latter. This peculiarity evaporates the moment we recall what such a change involves for the axis of the circle, namely identity. Let us recall Deleuze's claim: identity is not original, but is rather a product of the way the living present and the pure past come to grips with their proper contents. What the eternal return imposes on time is an impassive and inflexible next, which breaks open the circle and arrays it in the form of a before and an after. The line, in contrast to the circle, has no centre. The postulate of identity that the form of the circle maintains is replaced in turn by the necessity of a series, an always "and then...". This is why Deleuze also speaks of the eternal return (more closely following the letter of the Nietzschean text) as a torturous decentred circle (DR 115/151), which, like a centrifuge, casts out everything of the same: "to throw time out of joint, to make the sun explode, to throw oneself into the volcano, to kill God or the father" (DR 89/120); and, again, why the figure of the caesura or break, the image of time torn in two, equally well summarizes the import of the third synthesis of time (DR 89/120).

Once more, we are led by Deleuze to pose the absolute or universal import of a synthesis of time, here the eternal return. It is the ungrounding of _all time_. If habit _founds_ the possibility of the active synthesis of time, and memory is the _ground_ of habit and its active syntheses alike, the eternal return is the final ground, but one that, rather than making possible or providing the sufficient reason for unity and identity as they are manifest in the other syntheses, undoes this unity. We can see, then, why Deleuze can claim that the eternal return is the return of difference and not identity, since it is identity, the product of the passive syntheses of habit and memory, that is undone by it.

In the final analysis, it seems somewhat amazing that Badiou was able to overlook the fundamental claim at the heart of the theory of time in not just chapter two of _Difference and Repetition_ (and, in different ways, in the other works that espouse a triadic theory of time), but in fact this whole work, relative to the significance of the eternal return with respect not to unity or the One, but _difference_. "One misses everything if one disregards such explicit declarations as" (DCB 20/32):

The eternal return is a force of affirmation, but it affirms everything of the multiple, everything of the different, everything of chance _except_ what subordinates them to the One, to the Same, to necessity, everything _except_ the One, the Same and the Necessary.

(DR 115/152)

This oversight is also what allows for claims such as the following: "the great total past that is one with the virtual, cannot be qualified as temporal because it is the being of time, its univocal designation according to the One" (DCB 62/94). But this is not true for Deleuze, at least in _Difference and Repetition_. In the first instance, the virtual past is itself subject to another temporal instance, namely the eternal return, so it is integrally intra-temporal. Second, given the Deleuzean temporal matrix as we find it in _Difference and Repetition_ , it is difficult to see what would answer to the name "the being of time". If (as Badiou does with respect to the virtual), we understand this as a reference to the _ground_ of time, we are once more thrown on to the cruel and impassive eternal return, which is the ungrounding of every ground, and specifically the ground provided for lived time by the virtual past. If it is a question of _determination_ , then the eternal return has the final say once more, since every determination of identity, being subject to time, is undone. There is no profound being, no ground, no essence, that is not subject to time in Deleuze's philosophy as it appears in _Difference and Repetition_.

TEMPORAL PASSIVITY

But this is not all that Badiou overlooks. The account of time in _The Clamor of Being_ also ties together temporality and productive activity. As we have already seen in the case of the virtual, Badiou's Deleuze is one for whom activity and reality are on the side of what is essential: the One and virtuality. Likewise, activity and power are associated with time. Now, when we look at this complex tripartite temporal structure presented in _Difference and Repetition_ , we cannot help but note an essential feature of this account, namely, a discriminating and productive distinction between active and passive.

_The passive synthesis of habit_

In fact, the skeletal account of time in _Difference and Repetition_ that I have presented above is only a fraction of the total picture. Deleuze's presentation of the first time or the time of the present characterizes it not just as a habitual time of the living present, but as a _passive synthesis_ of time. This synthesis "constitutes our habit of living, our expectation that 'it' will continue" (DR 74/101), rather than any active capacity of an agent, whether human or otherwise. "Underneath the self which acts are the little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject" (DR 75/103). If the evocation of a world of contemplation provides Deleuze with an opportunity for poetic expression, the world of passive syntheses is no less compelling:

These thousands of habits of which we are composed – these contractions, contemplations, pretensions, presumptions, satisfactions, fatigues, these variable presents – thus form the basic domain of passive syntheses. The passive sense is not defined simply by receptivity – that is, by means of the capacity to experience sensations – but by virtue of the contractile contemplation which constitutes the organism itself before it constitutes the sensations.

(DR 78/107)

Not only is experience contractile and habitual in nature, but, for Deleuze, the very subjects of experience emerge on the basis of the same passivity. Beneath the habits that we acquire, we ourselves are nothing but a tissue of habits: "We speak of our 'self' only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says 'me'" (DR 75/103). Now, Deleuze extends this analysis of time in the following way: the first order of time, the passive synthesis of habit, is literally fundamental to three _active_ temporal modalities, namely, the active syntheses of the present, past and future. These are derivative syntheses of time that find their foundation in habit: "these organic syntheses are redeployed in the active syntheses of a psycho-organic memory and intelligence (instinct and learning)" (DR 73/100). At this active level, time is experienced consciously in terms of the "active faculties [of] reflective representation, memory and intelligence" (DR 77/106). This is the regime of the clear and distinct, of the parade of instants and their impartial interrogation, the regime of "particularity" (DR 80/109).

The most serious error of interpretation that one can make of Deleuze's position on time, therefore, is to invert the passive-active dyad, and install activity at its heart. A key theme of _Difference and Repetition_ 's treatment of time is thus a series of reminders of the fundamental nature of passivity (e.g. "Given that contemplation never appears at any moment during the action – since it is always hidden... – it is easy to forget it" [DR 75–6/103]), and critiques of various ways of understanding things the other way around. The most significant case here is Freud, but Deleuze also finds psychology in a more general sense guilty of this error:

The illusions of psychology [have] made a fetish of activity. Its unreasonable fear of introspection allowed it to observe only that which moved. It asks how we acquire habits in acting, but the entire theory of learning risks being misdirected so long as the prior question is not posed – namely, whether it is through activity that we acquire habits... or whether, on the contrary, it is through contemplating? Psychology regards it as established that the self cannot contemplate itself. This, however, is not the question. The question is whether or not the self itself is a contemplation, whether it is not in itself a contemplation, and whether we can learn, from behaviour, and from ourselves other than through contemplation.

(DR 73/100)

As we have seen, however, above and in the previous chapter, Deleuze also provides a more important reason why we take activity as basic, by arguing that the ground in one aspect tends towards what it grounds. The more profound issue is thus that transcendental illusion is an unavoidable by-product of grounding relationship. And again, as we have seen in the previous chapter, a common philosophical error Deleuze calls "tracing" works back in the other direction: by taking activity as primary, a secondary and entirely derivative pseudo-ground is postulated in the image of the active itself.

With the distinction between active and passive syntheses of the present in hand, we can also critically assess another of Badiou's claims, this time about what he takes as the fleeting actual correlate of virtual memory:

An object is never anything else than an immobile section of duration or instantaneous dimension of the present. It cannot therefore, _in itself_ , bear a relation to other objects because no pure present can communicate directly with any other. Presents are simple, transient coexistences.

(DCB 62/93)

What this claim demonstrates – aside from a strange theory of the object that to my mind has no correlate in Deleuze's work, not even in the _Cinema_ books to which it gestures – is that Badiou identifies the present with the active synthesis of the present, the analytic and calculative regime of representational consciousness, rather than what is clearly the more important sense of the present in Deleuze, namely, the passive synthesis of habit, the foundation of all time. This constitutes a clear short-circuiting of Deleuze's categories.

_The passive synthesis of memory_

I turn now to the second synthesis: memory. As in the case of habit, Deleuze insists that the pure past is engaged in passive synthesis, and, once more, it is contraction that is involved; we have already seen the figure of the cone, in which the entirety of the past coexists at different levels of contraction and relaxation. The difference, however, concerns what is contracted: on the one hand, "successive elements or instants which are in themselves independent of one another", in the habitual synthesis, and on the other, in memory, "the entire past, which is itself like a co-existing totality" (DR 82/111).

This second passive synthesis also has a special relationship to the _active_ synthesis of the past prosecuted on the basis of the living present. Thus Deleuze writes:

We have seen how memory, as a derived active synthesis, depended upon habit: in effect, everything depends upon a foundation. But this does not tell us what constitutes memory. At the moment when it grounds itself upon habit, memory must be grounded by another passive synthesis distinct from habit. The passive synthesis of habit in turn refers to this more profound passive synthesis of memory: _Habitus_ and _Mnemosyne_.

(DR 79–80/108)

In other words, the past involves the synthesis of what was first synthesized by habit. Each present constitutes one level in the gigantic cone, more or less contracted in relation to the present present.

_The impassive form of the future_

Finally, we arrive once more at the eternal return. Again, Deleuze claims this as a passive synthesis in the same fashion as those pertaining to the present and the past. However, in this case, we must insist on a further point: "The synthesis [of the future] is necessarily static, since time is no longer subordinated to movement; time is the most radical form of change, but the form of change does not change" (DR 89/120).

So not only is the eternal return a passive synthesis that subordinates all time to the before and the after, to the centrifuge that affirms only difference, but it is also static, and we have already seen why. Unlike the first two passive syntheses, the eternal return is purely formal, without any content. It is a pure _and then_ , a next, to which the passing of time necessarily submits, a "formal and empty order" (DR 89/120). Superficially, we seem to be close to Badiou's claim of what is essential in time for Deleuze: "the profound being of time, its truth, is immobile" (DCB 61/92). Is this "immobile" not Deleuze's "static"? On Badiou's account, time is essentially immobile in so far as it is the being of all mobility, the power of the false incarnate. It is what provides movement its sufficient reason. For Deleuze, though, the future has no substance, unity or effective causal force; it is empty, impassive, neutral.

_Critical consequences_

The foundation of time is habit, on the basis of which a secondary set of syntheses comes about. These are, effectively, lived abstractions that necessarily obscure the order of foundations-grounds which make them possible, subordinating them to the figure of agency. In turn, the passive synthesis of habit is grounded in the pure past, an integral virtual memory that also serves as the ground for the active synthesis of the past (recollection). Finally, all syntheses of time are subject to the groundless ground of the eternal return, a pure static form that breaks open the concentric movement of the present and the past in order to introduce the future.

There are four general points to be taken away from this summary account of Deleuze's theory of time. The first is that, contrary to Badiou's fundamental claims, time for Deleuze is irreducible to the virtual past in Bergson's sense. It ranges across both passive and active syntheses, and engages with the rich lived present of habitual time and the impassive formal imposition of the eternal return as well as the infinite depths of memory. Second, as a result, the ultimate ground of time is not the virtual past, but the eternal return, which is the groundless ground from which nothing (no "being of time", for example) is exempted. Third, and given the ungrounding form of the third modality of time, time cannot be equated with the One, nor with any other form of unity, since it is precisely this unity that is evicted from being by time. Finally, there is an important sense in which time is allied not with productive power but with a fundamental passivity. Or rather, and this would be the most profound point, the productive power of time is _passive_ in nature. Yes, time creates – it creates unities of many kinds, both material and spiritual, ideal and organic, illusory and real – but the mode through which it does this is irreducible to any kind of emanative causality.

THE CURATE'S EGG

I opened this chapter by noting that it is organized around the elaboration of a serial equation, which claims that time = truth = the virtual = the One = power. While these terms were treated independently here in relation to the Deleuzean text, one should note the internal problems with this equation. Consider the following quotations, which are the most important moments in Badiou's text in support of the equality of these concepts in Deleuze:

This other idea of truth... is all the more devious for giving to truth the name of the false – the _power_ of the false.

(DCB 57/86)

It is quite possible therefore that the processes of the "power of the false" are strictly indiscernible from the repertoire composed by the processes of the power of the true.

(DCB 58/87)

For truth is coextensive with the productive capacity of the One-virtual.

(DCB 59/88)

All in all, "power of the false" is exactly the Deleuzean name, borrowed from Nietzsche, for truth.

(DCB 59/89)

Time _is_ truth itself.

(DCB 61/61)

As truth, time is not temporal: it is integral virtuality.

(DCB 61/91)

_[T]he temporal power of the false is thought_... _as one and the_

(DCB 61/91)

[T]he profound being of time, its truth, is immobile.

(DCB 61/92)

[S]plitting is the _operation_ of time as a configuration of the power of the One.

(DCB 62/93)

[I]f time is truth, then the being of time, as the being of truth, has to be able to be thought under a concept from which all temporal dimension has been eliminated.

(DCB 63/94–5)

Truth is ultimately memory.

(DCB 64/97)

[T]ruth is the immanent preservation (as virtuality, or as concept) of what, inherent to the One, has testified to its power.

(DCB 64/97)

The first thing to note is the equivocal character of many of these assertions. Rather than asserting claims about the nature of truth as such, they deal in the _name_ of truth in Deleuze, on the one hand (bringing to mind the analysis of the name and the referent in _The Logic of Sense_ ), and, on the other, an "indiscernibility" or "coextensivity" of the activity of truth with the activity of the false. Both rhetorical features of Badiou's analysis raise questions about the status with respect to accuracy of what Badiou claims for Deleuze on the topic of time.

Second, while we can string together these equations, it seems difficult to see how they could all be mutually inclusive. From within the framework Badiou provides in _The Clamor of Being_ , how should we understand, for example, the equation of memory and the power of the false? Or the claim that the _power_ of the true must be thought "under a concept from which all temporal dimension has been eliminated"? Or that which allies "immanent preservation" alongside "productive capacity"? Similarly, how is it that an "immobile time" can perform the operation of splitting that is proper to it?

Third, given in particular the decisive and rigid distinction established in _Being and Event_ between the being of a truth and truth as such, which is strictly indiscernible, it would seem mistaken to see claims here about the "being of time" and the "being of truth" as being assimilable into claims about time and truth as such, even though, in one of the claims above (DCB 63/95), Badiou makes this shift immediately, as if it were perfectly transparent. In the same vein, what can Badiou possibly mean by introducing the thought that "the profound being of time, its truth, is immobile"? What is the truth of time when time is truth? And if the being of time is immobile, what is its relation to process?

Unfortunately, the argumentative backbone of this chapter, when subject to any sort of scrutiny, begins to appear a bit like the proverbial dog's dinner.

But what of these individual claims? I have argued here that Badiou's appreciation of the concept of time in Deleuze is limited in three crucial ways. First, it assimilates the whole treatment of this concept into a Berg-sonian framework that ill suits it, and second (and most importantly), it entirely ignores the modality of the future, which is at the very heart of the most deliberate and extended discussions of time in Deleuze's mature work. Even were one to assume that Deleuze is at root a Bergsonian thinker, the role of the eternal return in _Difference and Repetition_ presents a clear and unambiguous deviation from, if not Bergson's philosophy as such – which does not concern us here – then certainly from the Bergson we find presented in Deleuze's philosophy, and certainly from Badiou's Deleuze. Third, Badiou fails to grasp the important relationship between time and passivity in Deleuze, a relationship that usurps the equation of the virtual past or memory with ultimate productive activity.

This lack of appreciation is mirrored with respect to the category of truth. Rather than advancing truth ( _qua_ adequation or analogy) as a straw man, behind which is hidden a more profound "taste" for a productive and temporally oriented account, Deleuze's philosophy in the 1960s contains a long string of interesting and positive discussions of truth, culminating in the third chapter of _Difference and Repetition_. This picture of truth is differential (there is no single truth, only truths relative to perspectives, regimes of signs or problems), and non-substantive in nature, thereby departing from Badiou's presentation at its signal moments.

All these points work against the central contention we are concerned with here, namely, the equation of time and truth. Neither Badiou's account of truth in Deleuze, nor his account of Deleuze's theory of time, resembles Deleuze's own claims. Furthermore, neither of Deleuze's actual positions on time and truth could in any feasible way be identified; how, after all, are we to equate a complex structure of passive and active temporal syntheses with the consideration of the proper regime and prominence of signs, perspectives and problems? Like all speculative equations, the claim that time is truth for Deleuze promises revelation, but it is, all things considered, a promise that is not delivered on.
6. THE EVENT IN DELEUZE

EVENT AND ESSENCE

In a late interview, Deleuze claims that "I've tried in all my books to discover the nature of events; it's a philosophical concept, the only one capable of ousting the verb 'to be' and its attributes" (N 141). As we have seen, however, Badiou is manifestly correct in asserting that Deleuze's philosophy is wedded to ontology, primarily with respect to two themes, as we have seen: those of the univocity of being and of the virtual. We have also seen a great deal of evidence in Deleuze's own work to support this. Furthermore, it is not until _The Logic of Sense_ that the theme of the event is treated in any substantial manner. Even in _Difference and Repetition_ , the discussion is limited to a few pages that rehearse in a limited way the key points of the later book, but without granting the event as such pride of place. There he is concerned to specify further the nature of virtual Ideas: "Ideas are by no means essences. In so far as they are the objects of Ideas, problems belong on the side of events, affections, or accidents rather than on that of theorematic essences" (DR 187/242–3).

A much better characterization of Deleuze's thought of the event – which this quotation already indicates – is that it forms one half of a dyad with the concept of _essence_. However, the notion of essence in question must be distinguished from its orthodox acceptation. As we read in _The Logic of Sense_ , the two errors with respect to the event, errors that erase its singular character by equating it to other concepts by way of external correlations, are to confuse it with essence on the one hand and accident on the other: "A double struggle has as its object the rejection of every dogmatic confusion between event and essence, and also every empiricist confusion between event and accident" (LS 53–4tm/69).

In the case of essence, however, we must not overlook the assignation of dogmatism. It is not essence _per se_ that Deleuze wants to question in its relation to the event, but essence conceived as ideal purity, ipseity, and transcendence, according to the long tradition that comes to us from Par-menides by way of Plato. To claim, then, that Deleuze's philosophy is distributed along a line that proceeds from essence to event is not to say that he comes to establish an auto-critique. What we, in fact, find is the elaboration of a _new_ concept of essence, one that Deleuze opposes to essence in the dogmatic sense (in his writings in the late 1950s and 1960s), and this comes to be both identified with essence in this new sense in some cases, and simply proposed as a replacement to the orthodox account of essence in others.

Put differently, we can say that at least until _The Logic of Sense_ , Deleuze's philosophy is intended as a philosophy of difference, understood as a philosophy that is devoted to providing difference with the ontological dignity that it has often been denied. We can even formulate this point by saying that Deleuze wishes to establish that difference is what is "essential", and not identity. While such a formulation is clearly paradoxical in nature – difference being, with respect to the orthodox account of essence, what cannot be essential – this is precisely what he comes to claim. Consider, for example, the important role that the concept of essence has in _Proust and Signs_ , where no qualms are expressed about this term at all. Indeed, Deleuze even goes so far as to claim that "essence is always difference" (PS 75). In Proust, Deleuze claims, essence is the ultimate ground or reason for all signs, subjective experience, language itself and the meaning that pertains to it. Thus, "[b]eyond the sign and the meaning, there is Essence, like the sufficient reason for the other two terms and for their relation" (PS 91). This is the reason for the ultimate privilege of art (or of the fourth kind of sign, the signs of art) in Proust, which provide a means of thinking together all the lesser sign-forms (worldly signs, the signs of love and sensuous signs). Once more, however, this is not essence as pure ideal identity, but something altogether different, difference as such: "What is essence as revealed in the work of art? It is a difference, the absolute and ultimate Difference. Difference is what constitutes being, what makes us conceive being" (PS 41).

The following sentiment in _Difference and Repetition_ signals at once the nominal value of the term "essence", and the reason why the concept of the event would come to take a more significant role in what follows:

The events and singularities of the Idea do not allow any positing of an essence as "what the thing is'! No doubt, if one insists, the word "essence" might be preserved, but only on condition of saying that the essence is precisely the accident, the event, sense; not simply the contrary of the contrary: multiplicity is no more appearance than essence, no more multiple than one.

(DR 191tm/248)

While the final phrase is, of course, apposite to our concerns here, it is clear that Deleuze's issue with the concept of essence is bound to the model of essence based around identity, fixity and transcendence. This is why, in _The Logic of Sense_ , we read both that a superior account of essence involves grasping it "as sense, essence as expressed" (LS 34/48), and, at the same time, that sense is its superior substitute: "It is true that sense is the characteristic discovery of transcendental philosophy, and that it replaces the old metaphysical Essences" (LS 105/128).

When we move past these works, we begin to see an increasing emphasis on the theme of the event as such. This tendency in Deleuze reaches its apotheosis in _The Fold_ , where Deleuze devotes a whole chapter to the event in Leibniz and Whitehead (FLB 76–82/103–12, chapter six, "What is an event?"). Indeed, while many texts written after _The Logic of Sense_ invoke the concept of event, with the exception of _The Fold_ Deleuze does not elaborate what could properly be called a theory of the event, and certainly not an alternative theory. In sum, and contrary to the claim of Deleuze's that we began the chapter with, rather than seeing in his work a philosophy of event that overturns any possible philosophy of being, it is rather that the concept of the event – in replacing essence understood as static identity – energises the philosophy of being, providing it with the means to go beyond the dogmatic-empiricist dyad and assert the dignity of the event in the order of ontology itself. The seemingly paradoxical goal is to broaden our conception of being such that it includes – or reinstates – events _as what is essential in being_. It is not the overthrow of ontology that Deleuze attempts to engineer, but its expansion and correction.

In contrast to Deleuze's own intermittent attention to this theme, Badiou's interest in Deleuze's position in this regard spans the entirety of the engagement, and it is not hard to see why. For Badiou himself the theme of the event is of absolutely irreducible significance, since it marks the single possible locus for the advent of change, and, indeed, never has any other alibis, no other names or alternative formulations: it is Badiou's philosophy that ought to deserve the name "philosophy of the event", and not Deleuze's. Badiou is thus perhaps led to the category of the event in _The Clamor of Being_ more on the basis of his own convictions than on the significance of the category in Deleuze.

On one side, in his review of _The Fold_ , Badiou does not hesitate to see the theory of the event, heavily indebted to Leibniz but also Whitehead, as the centre of that book. On the other side, we have the chapter of _Logics of Worlds_ devoted to "The Event in Deleuze". These engagements, spanning almost twenty years, in the end come to conclude that Deleuze's view excludes every important feature of the event in the terms of Badiou's own account, above all its excessive status with respect to being, and as a result its capacity to rupture in the most fundamental sense with what is. Indeed, Badiou even goes so far as to insist that the Deleuzean trope of the event ends up presupposing the infamous Leibnizian theme of pre-established harmony ("Deleuze often adopts the Leibnizian principle of Harmony" [LM 408]), even though the catalogue of Deleuze's most memorable claims about Leibniz include the admission that, while "[w]e remain Leibnizian... accords no longer express our world or our text" (FLB 137tm/189). For Deleuze, the notion of pre-established harmony is exemplary of the kind of approach to difference that has dominated Western thought, according to which identity is invoked as a necessary external and transcendent criteria.

In light of all of these points, it is surprising to find that no sustained discussion of the event is to be found in _The Clamor of Being_ , despite the fact that Badiou somewhat strangely subordinates his discussion of the virtual and the actual to the theme of "the doctrine of the event" (DCB 29/46). However, we do confront a frequently repeated claim that extends the basic theses of the book – that the event is an avatar for the One – supported by his reading of one of Deleuze's formulations of the univocity of Being: "Being is the unique event in which all events communicate with one another" (LS 10; DCB 11/20). This lack of direct and extended treatment, however, does not mean that Badiou's text is absent of all discussion on this matter, for in fact it is engaged with by Badiou under the joint rubric of the eternal return and chance.

In what follows, then, I shall use the brief text found in _Logics of Worlds_ as a means to explore Badiou's claims about the affinity of the event and the One – since this short text on Deleuze also proceeds under the auspice of the central thesis of _The Clamor of Being_ – before assessing it in the light of Deleuze's own text. In concluding, I shall turn with a critical eye to the relationship that Badiou presents between the eternal return and the event.

BADIOU'S ACCOUNT OF THE EVENT IN _LOGICS OF WORLDS_

Badiou's "The Event According to Deleuze" offers what it calls "the four Deleuzean axioms of the event" (LM 382/404). It then moves on to coun-terpose four axioms of its own, before summarizing on the basis of these a conservative Deleuzean religion of the One, in which the event does not attain the radicality ascribed to it by Badiou. In all essential respects, the argument here is of a piece with that provided in _The Clamor of Being_ : the event is, for Badiou, extra-being (without instantiating an ontological transcendence), a radical rupture with everything that is, and impossible to think from within the current network provided by language and knowledge.

The first of the axioms of the event that Badiou ascribes to Deleuze concerns the relationship between the event and the One: "The event is the ontological realisation of the eternal truth of the One, of the infinite power _[puissance]_ of Life" (LM 382/404). In other words, it is the event that names the capacity of the One to produce its emanative effects, that is, beings. This is why he writes that "the event immanently exposes the One of becomings, it makes this One become. The event is the becoming of becoming: the becoming(-One) of (unlimited) becoming" (LM 382/404), and why the text of Deleuze's that Badiou uses as an exemplar of this axiom is: "Unlimited becoming becomes the event itself".

The second and third axioms speak to the relationship between the event, on the one hand, and temporality and actuality, on the other. Thus of the first ("The event is always that which has just happened and that which is about to happen, but never that which is happening" [LS 8/16; cf. LS 63/79–80]), Badiou writes:

The event is a synthesis of past and future. In truth, as the expression of the One within becomings, it is the eternal identity of the future as a dimension of the past. For Deleuze just as for Bergson, the ontology of time does not accept any figure of separation. Furthermore, the event cannot be what lies "between" a past and a future, between the end of one world and the beginning of another. Rather, it is encroachment and connection: it realises the indivisible continuum of Virtuality. It exhibits the unity of the passage that binds the one-just-after to the one-just-before.

(LM 382tm/404–5)

This claim, of course, resonates strongly with the presentation of time in _The Clamor of Being_ , as discussed in the previous chapter. The event is the emanative power of the One (axiom one), but this power is a power of unification or connection with respect to time. The event is what articulates one moment onto the next, thereby excluding any possibility of temporal "separation" (LM 383/405). The third axiom draws on one of Deleuze's most striking formulations in _The Logic of Sense_ with respect to the event, that the event is an effect: "the event affects bodies, because it is what they make or support as an exposed synthesis. It is the advent within them of the One that they are, as distinct nature (virtual rather than actual) and an homogenous result" (LM 383tm/405).

For Badiou, then, the fact that events are in a certain sense _effects_ constitutes them as so many signatures of the ultimate ontological unity in which actual bodies (or states of affairs) participate. In turn, the final axiom also emphasizes the role that the event has in unifying particular states of affairs. Citing Deleuze's claim that "a life is composed of a single and same Event, lacking all the variety of what happens to it" (LS 170tm/199), Badiou writes that:

Amidst the disparate material of a life, the Event is the Eternal Return of the identical, the undifferentiated power _[puissance]_ of the Same... Regardless of which multiplicity is engaged by it, it is of the essence of the Event to compose them into the One that they are, and to exhibit this unique composition in potentially infinite variations.

(LM 384tm/406)

We have already seen the extent to which such a reading of the eternal return is misplaced. The general point is, however, quite clear: the Event (and no longer events plural) has as its _raison d'être_ the unification of disparates. In methodological terms, the Event is the movement of Being as such, which the singular method of intuition submerges itself in. We arrive, that is to say, at the negation of the entire programme of _Being and Event_ , since Deleuze, for Badiou, has set out everywhere to write _Being_ as _Event_.

Here, however, we are still engaged with Deleuze. From these axioms, and the points they assert or rely on, I would like to extract what could be characterized as the three key assertions that Badiou formulates with respect to the concept of the event in Deleuze, which I shall examine in what follows:

(i) the Event must be aligned with the figure of the One, and thus considered as unary, and also ontologically primary with respect to states of affairs;

(ii) events are _effects_ and not causes; and,

(iii) as such, they are incapable of providing the basis for the irruption of the new in a given situation.

THE EVENT IN DELEUZE

We have already seen a key attribute of the event for Deleuze: that it must be thought as replacing the dogmatic or theorematic view of essence at the heart of a metaphysics of being with a concept of event _as essence_. This point already works against Badiou's reading, specifically the first claim, in so far as it strives to do away with any figure of primary unity (at the level of essential being) in favour of multiple changes (or what we might call the inessential movements of becoming). In what follows, the three claims that organize Badiou's reading of the Deleuzean event will be dealt with. In short, I would like to show:

(i) that while in one sense, events are certainly effects for Deleuze, they also inhabit a regime that is _quasi-causal_ in nature; that is, they are not merely products, but play a key role in the production of states of affairs;

(ii) that events are essentially plural for Deleuze, and the figure of the Event (or _Eventum Tantum_ ) is not a figure of the One, but of univocity; and

(iii) that, on the one hand, events thus understood can be taken to describe the introduction of novelty into a given state of affairs and, on the other, events are irreducible to their actualization, and this evental excess is precisely what allows for the kind of deviation from normality that Badiou sees at work in the event as excessive undecidable multiplicity.

In establishing each of these points we are also able to demonstrate some striking aspects of the Deleuzean project with respect to the category of the event. In the first case, what emerges is a properly transcendental account, whose role is to consider events as the genetic conditions for the emergence of new states of affairs. With respect to (ii), Deleuze provides a remarkable account of the nature of the communication between events that provides new grounds to assert that the univocity of being must not be reduced to any promotion of a quidditative unity. In the case of (iii), something like a Deleuzean version of Badiou's subject of fidelity to an event emerges.

Badiou is certainly right to assert that " _The Logic of Sense_ is the most considerable effort on the part of Gilles Deleuze to clarify his concept of the event" (LM 404). While the concept is addressed throughout his later work, as we have seen, it is here that it is treated directly and in the most sustained fashion. Even the chapter of _The Fold_ dedicated to the question "What is an event?", addressed through a discussion of Leibniz and Whitehead, is in the end less significant, illustrating the earlier positions without exceeding them in any significant direction.

The account of events for Deleuze begins by radically distinguishing between two orders, those of cause and effect, following in the first instance the Stoics, while drawing heavily on Lewis Carroll. On the one side, we have the order of causes, which operates between bodies: "There are no causes _and_ effects among bodies. Rather, all bodies are causes – causes in relation to each other and for each other" (LS 4/13). Here, bodies are not just medium-sized objects, but rather everything that might fall under the category of material beings, thus including bodies as they are normally understood, but also speech, writing or _marks_ in general as the material aspect of language (as opposed to its meaning). Thus the exclamation found in _A Thousand Plateaus_ in the context of a later discussion of the Stoics: "Representations are bodies too!" (TP 86). Deleuze will also call bodies in this extended sense _states of affairs_ , and here we must certainly understand these to be equivalent to the extended and qualified regime of the actual as it is presented in _Difference and Repetition_. In fact, Deleuze will come to speak of the relationship between events and states of affairs in terms of actualization. On the other side, we have the regime of effects:

all bodies are causes... of certain things of an entirely different nature. These effects are not bodies, but, properly speaking, "incorporeal" entities. They are not physical qualities and properties, but rather logical or dialectical attributes. They are not things or facts, but events. We cannot say that they exist, but rather that they subsist or insist, having this minimum of being which is appropriate to that which is not a thing, but a nonexisting entity.

(LS 4–5tm/13)

In other words, the causal interaction between bodies produces effects that are not bodies themselves, but ideal _attributes_ of these bodies. To refer to one of Deleuze's favoured examples, when I am cut, the "being cut" must be seen not as an effect rendered on one body by another, but as an ideality produced on the incorporeal level or what he also calls the metaphysical surface. It is a pure "to cut" that is attributed to a body or bodies, and which is neutral with respect to the various modalities in which it is actualized (here, the one who is cut and the one who wields the knife are actualizing the same event from the passive and active positions respectively). Likewise, it is not the case that a tree grows, shrinks, becomes green in spring, and so on. Rather, each of these is an incorporeal effect that inheres in the tree: to grow, to shrink, and even to green ("The tree 'greens'..." [LS 6/15]).

This "new dualism" (LS 6/15) is striking: while bodies, taken together, form an integral causal whole (a "unity called Destiny" [LS 4/13]), it is the regime that Deleuze will come to identify as _sense_ in which effects come to exist (or rather, as indicated above, _subsist_ ) in their own right. "It is not at all the dualism of the intelligible and the sensible, of Idea and matter, or of Ideas and bodies. It is a more profound and secret dualism hidden in sensible and material bodies themselves" (LS 2/10). It is this latter level that characterizes the regime proper to events: an event is precisely an incorporeal attribute that certain bodies express as a result of their causal interactions. Thus it is irreducible to the order of causes themselves: "the event is not what happens (an accident), it is rather the pure expressed _within_ what happens" (LS 149tm/175; emphasis added).

EVENT AS EFFECT, EVENT AS QUASI-CAUSE

Let us admit the first consequence of this: that Badiou is certainly right to assert that, for Deleuze, the event is _an effect_. However, this is only half of the full account that Deleuze presents in _The Logic of Sense_. We have already seen the split imposed between causes at the level of bodies, and events as such. Now, to consider events as effects of bodily interaction or products of states of affairs is, as it were, to consider them from the point of view of bodies. For Deleuze, though, we must also take into account the point of view of the event itself. That is, we must consider the event in so far as it forms a part of a transcendental field: "The idea of singularities, and thus of anti-generalities, which are however impersonal and pre-i ndividual, must now serve as our hypothesis for the determination of this domain and its genetic power" (LS 99/121). Or, correlatively, "Only when the world, teaming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singularities, opens up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental" (LS 103/125). For Deleuze, this second aspect of the event – its part in a transcendental field – is accounted for in relation to five characteristics.

(i) events _(qua_ singularities) are a part of heterogenous series "endowed with a potential energy";

(ii) events partake in a process of auto-unification (forming a single Event in which events are articulated);

(iii) the transcendental field, upon which events are arrayed, must be grasped as a surface – that is, as lacking dimensions, immediately in contact with, inhering in, or "surveying [survole]" (LS 104tm/127) states of affairs;

(iv) the transcendental field thus constituted is the locus of sense; and

(v) singularities-events are problematic in nature; this field of problematic singularities and senses thus provides "the conditions of true genesis" (LS 105tm/127–8).

The central issue, however, is how these two aspects of the event are interrelated: how can we effect "the passage from sterility to genesis" (LS 97/118)? Or again, "How can we maintain both that sense [or the event] produces even the states of affairs in which it is embodied, and that it is itself produced by these states of affairs or the actions and passions of bodies (an immaculate conception)" (LS 124/149)? The first move that Deleuze makes in response to these concerns is to stipulate that we really do have two different modalities of the event.

When we say that bodies and their mixtures produce sense [or cause events], it is not by virtue of an individuation which would presuppose it. Individuation in bodies, the measure in their mixtures, the play of persons and concepts in their variations – this entire order presupposes... the neutral, pre-individual and impersonal field within which it is deployed. It is therefore in a different way that sense [and events are] produced by bodies.

(LS 124tm/149)

In other words, "Being a pure effect, it is nevertheless the locus [ _lieu_ ] of a quasi-cause" (LS 124/150), which is to say that no direct causal relationship holds even though the event plays an irreducible role in the constitution of particular states of affairs. In turn, we must distinguish between the event taken as causal product and the event as problematic instance, but only in order to thereby rearticulate them in a new way. Events, or sense, provide the problematic loci around which the regime of bodies or states of affairs is organized. The very individuation that brings about a state of affairs – a tree, for example – is a structure of singularities–events, and it is the potential energy expressed by this structure that is actualized in the causal relations of bodies. When the same tree is engaged in causal relations, such that it grows, or becomes green, this event is inscribed or included in this structure in turn, redistributing the differential relations between events, and the potential energy bound up by them, with respect to the singularities in question. Events as effects enter into the distribution of singularities in the transcendental field, thus "partak[ing] of the quasi-cause attached to it" (LS 125/151).

This account, and the topology that it presents, is one in which the impassivity and neutrality of events from the point of view of the initial causal chain (causal bodies produce immaterial events) becomes, from the point of view of the transcendental regime of events themselves, engaged in a complex asymmetrical circuit of interactions. In turn, the apparent blind activity found in the depths of bodies must be seen in a second sense too, as an activity that – for all its blindness – displaces and complicates the problems that provided it with its genetic basis. Or, as Deleuze puts it, "the depth acts in an original way, _by means of its power to organize surfaces and to envelop itself within surfaces"_ (LS 124/150). Any particular state of affairs, that is, orients the transcendental field around the interactions that govern its local causal network, embodying or even inhaling the problematic, such that it forms an inner lining or layer across which its activities are played out.

From a more general point of view, this peculiar double structure of causality returns us to the theme of expression that was discussed in Chapter 2. It is only this category that can adequately describe the disjunctive circuit of events, above all because no direct causal mechanism could ever account for it. Between events and states of affairs, there is a true expressive relationship, in which events (effects) express the consequences of the causal interactions of bodies, and in which events (genetic singularities) are expressive problems in relation to which states of affairs array themselves: the event of battle in which relations of enemies, pitted against each other to the death in the actual, withdraw, and in which there is no direct antagonism, but a complex multiplicitous relation with the battle itself. It is not from the bones that lie in the depths of bodies that an avenger arises; the event itself provides the genetic kernel that every revenge, every act of war, expresses. It is that certain _aliquid_ , that some _thing_ that, like the grain of sand in an oyster, engenders the production of novelty in these depths.

_EVENTUM TANTUM_ AND EVENTS PLURAL

We must add that events are internally engaged in expressive relations with each other (they are, Deleuze says, "inter-expressive" [LS 177/208]); once again, no standard causal or logical mechanism can be used to account for them, even if their relations are irreducibly important in the constitution of reality. Like the reciprocal and differential structure of the virtual outlined in _Difference and Repetition_ , the regime of events in _The Logic of Sense_ involves a complex serial organization irreducible to a unity. Even after restoring to the event its primacy with respect to the regime of causality, the most formidable of Badiou's critical points remains. Indeed, if there is any moment in Deleuze's work that provides real evidence that he is elaborating a theory of the One, it is in _The Logic of Sense_ , and it pertains to what Deleuze names, as we have seen, the Event. The following passage is exemplary: "Nothing other than the Event subsists, the Event alone, _Eventum Tantum_ for all contraries, which communicates with itself through its own distance and resonates across all of its disjunctions" (LS 176tm/207). And the following, which Badiou himself partially quotes (LM 383/405):

What makes an event compatible or incompatible with another? We cannot appeal to causality, since it is a question of a relation of effects among themselves. What brings destiny about at the level of events, what brings an event to repeat another in spite of all its difference, what makes it possible that a life is composed of a single and same Event, despite the variety of what might happen, that it be traversed by a single and same fissure, that it play one and the same air over all possible tunes and all possible worlds?

(LS 170tm/199)

Clearly, these moments support something like Badiou's two basic propositions about Deleuze: that a unified ontological moment (the Event, _Eventum Tantum_ ) is primary in relation to its multiplicitous and fleeting emanations (events, plural, _qua_ states of affairs). However, Deleuze's use of these expressions are themselves embedded less in such a structure than in an attempt to grasp the nature of relations between events in their own terms (i.e. as ideal singularities).

This point is already indicated by the second quotation above, which is oriented by the question: what makes an event compatible or incompatible with another? More specifically, what are the relations between events such that a given body or state of affairs can express or actualize a number of events? We know that the tree becomes green, grows larger or smaller, and so on – that the tree is a locus of actualizations – but how are "to green" and "to grow" or "to shrink" articulated in and of themselves? It is in answering this question that Deleuze is led to posit "the Event" as a category that accounts for the unique manner of the interrelation of events.

The key passages in this regard are to be found in the two chapters of _The Logic of Sense_ (series twenty-four and twenty-five) dedicated to the communication of events and univocity respectively. In elaborating an answer to this question, Deleuze proceeds much as he did in _Difference and Repetition_ with respect to the thesis of univocity. Once more, three key moments are elaborated, each going further than the previous. In _Difference and Repetition_ , the series in question is Duns Scotus-Spinoza-Nietzsche. Here, the three positions can be aligned with the nominal chain of Stoic, Leibnizian and properly Deleuzean theories, although the latter involves reference to many other figures, Nietzsche included.

_The Stoic opening_

Deleuze's method, as he traverses this series, is effectively _subtractive_ in nature. He is interested in discovering the nature of the communication between events by stripping away any structures or values that are in fact native to the regime of states of affairs and which, when imposed on the communication of events, obscure its nature. In other words, to approach an adequate thought of the interrelation of events, we must subtract every explanatory theme that arises external to the regime of events themselves. The first moment is the Stoics. Deleuze, as we have seen, draws heavily on the Stoic theory of sense in order to elaborate a distinction between ideal sense-events and their actualization in bodies. And, in the course of their thought, they come to be the first thinkers to attempt to account for the compatibility or incompatibility between events in non-conceptual or alogical terms. To use the example provided by Deleuze, we can oppose two species of butterflies – those that are black and vigorous and those that are grey and weak – but only in terms of the pure events "to turn grey" and "to turn black", both of which are equally positive. If a grey vigorous butterfly is an incoherent concept, it is not because of a logical incompatibility at the level of concepts. To impose this criterion would be to ascribe to the events themselves characteristics that do not pertain to them.

Nevertheless, the Stoics do not elaborate an alternative to dyadic logic in order to account for the relationship between events. To assert that these two events ("to turn grey" and "to turn black") are equally positive is not yet to account for their ideal coexistence. Hence, Deleuze claims, "the Stoics may not have been able to resist the double temptation of returning to simple physical causality or to logical compatibilities" (LS 171tm/200).

_Leibniz, theoretician of the event_

Thus "the first theoretician of alogical incompatibilities, and for this reason the first important theoretician of the event, was Leibniz" (LS 171/200). Leibniz's genius in this regard is the elaboration of the original category of compossibility. Whereas contradiction is concerned with logical claims (and thus falls on the side of states of affairs), and which cannot account for the coexistence of contrary events ("to grow larger", "to grow smaller"), compossibility is proposed by Leibniz as a criteria belonging to events as such.

Indeed, Leibniz goes even further, restructuring the entire subject-predicate relationship in keeping with this insight: it is no longer predicates as logical (and hence non-contradictory) attributions that pertain to or characterize the subject, but rather _events themselves_ , in so far as they are com-possible with the entire field of events in the world in which the course of the subject unfolds. This is why Deleuze insists on the claim that, for Leibniz, God does not create Adam who sins, but rather the world in which Adam-who-sins exists (e.g. LS 111/135; FLB 25/35). Alternatively, the world in question is one in which the event-predicate "to sin" is an attribute of Adam, in compossibility with the entirety of the infinite number of other sequences of event-attributes, in Adam and in every other monad.

Compossibility therefore asserts that what logical compatibility would consider contrary events might subsist together at the same time, in so far as they are a part of a series that fits into the general regime in question. Here, in keeping with the mathematical theory of singularities elaborated in the context of the calculus, Deleuze writes: "Compossibility must be defined in an original manner, at a pre-i ndividual level, by the convergence of series which singularities of events form as they extend themselves out over lines of ordinary points" (LS 171tm/201). Equally original is the counterpart of compossibility: incompossibility. Rather than being a simple contradiction (as in bivalent logic, and consequently as in any orthodox understanding of the subject–predicate relationship), incompossibility concerns two series of events that diverge from each other.

Incompossibility must be defined by the divergence of such series: if another Sextus than the one we know is incompossible with our world, it is because he would correspond to a singularity whose series would diverge from the series of our world, clustered about the Adam, the Judas, the Christ, and the Leibniz we know. Two events are compossible when the series are organized around their singularities extend in all directions; they are incompossible when the series diverge in the vicinity of constitutive singularities. Convergence and divergence are entirely original relations which cover the rich domain of alogical compatibilities and incompatibilities.

(LS 171–2tm/201)

However, Deleuze finds the Leibnizian scheme wanting. While providing a striking theory of the relationships between events that would be considered to be contradictory on the dyadic schema of contradiction, one that was lacking in the Stoics, Leibniz's account remains bound to certain "theological exigencies" (LS 172/201) that ruin his ultimate value for the theory of events. At issue here is the famous theme of the best of all possible worlds. On Leibniz's account, God is the one who chooses between all the possible worlds, according to the twin criteria of the greatest variety and the fewest laws. However, there is a more primary criteria than these, and that is compossibility itself. Of the possible worlds that God chooses between, those that contain incompossible series or disjunctive events are ruled out in advance. Thus, Leibniz affirms events in their alogical incom-possibility only after _a priori_ excluding the possibility that these disjunct series might unfold in the same world. In other words, it is only in so far as incompossibility is brought under the regime of the One (of integral compossibility) that Leibniz will admit it to being. Or, as Deleuze puts it, Leibniz puts into use the theme of disjunction but only in a negative or exclusive manner.

_Beyond Leibniz: inclusive disjunction_

For Deleuze, this is once more unacceptable: like the Stoics, Leibniz has reintroduced criteria pertaining to a regime external to that of events themselves in order to account for the relations between events. For Deleuze, the key point thus appears to be the following: that we must affirm events in their difference as such if we are to have any theory of the event at all. Rather than affirming events with respect to some identity, we must concern ourselves with "an operation according to which two things or two determinations are affirmed _through_ their difference, that is to say, that they are the objects of simultaneous affirmation only insofar as their difference is itself affirmed and is affirmative'. He continues, writing:

We are no longer in any way dealing with an identity of contraries, which would still be inseparable as such from a movement of the negative and of exclusion. We are rather faced with a positive distance of differents [ _différents_ ]: faced no longer with the identification of two contraries with the same, but the affirmation of distance as that which relates the one to the other insofar as they are "differents".

(LS 172–3tm/202)

Here we see the kernel of the third moment, the properly Deleuzean theory of the relations between events. It is incompossibility itself – as disjunction, or as intrinsic difference – that must found such a theory. Deleuze's theory finally posits, therefore, that events are related to one another, in their ideal coexistence, according to a synthesis that brings all differences together without eradicating these differences in any figure of identity. This is the theme of the _disjunctive synthesis_.

In a certain way, the entire debate around Badiou's reading of Deleuze could centre on the explication of this phrase, as we have already seen in Chapter 2. For Badiou, it is the _synthesis_ that is decisive, and which (at the very least) implies a resultant synthetic unity. For Deleuze, however, what is above all to be thought is the role of disjuncts or differents _as the subject of synthesis_ :

It is not that the disjunction has become a simple conjunction... The whole question, and rightly so, is to know under what conditions the disjunction is a veritable synthesis, instead of being a procedure of analysis which is satisfied with the exclusion of predicates from one thing in virtue of the identity of its concept.

(LS 174/203–4)

In other words, "The disjunction is not at all reduced to a conjunction; it is left as a disjunction, since it bears, and continues to bear, upon a divergence as such" (LS 174/204). To summarize any critique of Badiou's reading of Deleuze, therefore, we might simply state that he has subordinated disjunction to a supposed conjunction, one that Deleuze rejects outright. The alleged unity of all events in a single Event is not the subordination of differences to an ultimate identity, but the affirmation of eventality as such.

Eventum tantum

Why, then, does Deleuze so often seem to invoke the very opposite claim? The passage we have been discussing here finishes with the following claim, one we have already seen: "Nothing other than the Event subsists, the Event alone, _Eventum Tantum_ for all contraries, which communicates with itself through its own distance and resonates across all of its disjunctions" (LS 176tm/207). Deleuze's answer, which is double as we shall see, passes again by way of the concept of univocity. I argued earlier that, on the basis of Deleuze's presentation of this theme, he should be characterized as an ontological mannerist. The key to grasping the theme of the single Event, _Eventum Tantum_ , in _The Logic of Sense_ , I would contend, relies on adopting this point of view. The key passage reads as follows:

A position in the void of all events in one, an expression in the nonsense of all senses in one, univocal Being is the pure form of the Aion, the form of exteriority which relates things and propositions. In short, the univocity of Being has three determinations: one single event for all events; one and the same aliquid for that which happens and that which is said; and one and the same Being for the impossible, the possible and the real.

(LS 180/211)

Let us remark the radicality of this claim: it is in no way a monism, and certainly no materialism. Events, impossible idealities (the square circle, _perpetuum mobile_ ), physical bodies, sonorous matter: these all _are_ in the same manner. The thesis of the univocity of being thus not only does away with singularized substantive Being in any sense, but also demolishes – or rather demotes – any logical or formal distinction of the order of modality. Whatever the being – material, subsistent, impossible or evental – the manner of their being is the same.

In other words, the key term in this formulation is _form_ : to speak of the univocity of Being is to speak of the unity of the manner in which beings exist, their _formal_ unity and not their substantive ground. What then is the Event, the single and same Event? It is the formal unity of all events: in other words, it is disjunctive synthesis as such. Or we might even answer in a Badiouian fashion: _Eventum tantum_ , rather than being a substantive of any kind, is the Deleuzean term for eventality, for the properly evental character of the event. In so far as an event is grasped in its ideal sense, as a subsistent singularity, it is thought eventally. Thus Badiou is certainly right to state that "Event" is another term for the univocity of being, on the condition that we treat univocity in its properly Deleuzean sense, divorced from the figure of the One.

EVENTS AND NOVELTY: COUNTER-ACTUALIZATION

As I have noted, chapter twenty-five of _The Logic of Sense_ ("Twenty-Fifth Series of Univocity") provides two answers to the status of the Event as such. The chapter opens, reflecting on the theme of disjunctive synthesis, with the words: "It seems that our problem, in the course of our investigation, has changed altogether" (LS 177/208). And it is on the following page that the redefined problem is posed:

The problem is therefore one of knowing how the individual would be able to transcend his form and his syntactical link with a world, in order to attain to the universal communication of events, that is to the affirmation of a disjunctive synthesis beyond logical contradictions, and even beyond alogical incompatibilities. It would be necessary for the individual to grasp herself as event; and that she grasp the event actualized within her as another individual grafted onto her. In this case, she would not understand, want, or represent this event without also understanding and wanting all other events as individuals, and without representing all other individuals as events.

(LS 178/208–9)

The term "individual" has a technical definition in _The Logic of Sense_ that we have not discussed here (as the correlate to the order of denotation in language, and as infinite analytic proposition), which is very close to the individual found in _Difference and Repetition_ discussed in the next chapter, while departing from it in a variety of respects; likewise, the notion of representation (which here is synonymous with bodies or states of affairs, in so far as they actualize events). Nonetheless, to consider all events as individuals has an immediate sense: it is to directly affirm events as events, and in so far as they are or could be actualized. To affirm oneself as event is to affirm the Event as such (which means to affirm the eventality proper to being, as we have seen – the opening of states of affairs on to the disjunctive eventual chains), to affirm the irruption of problems into states of affairs.

However, what Deleuze has in mind is more specific than some kind of willing of being as becoming. What is counter-actualization? With reference to the figure of the Stoic sage, he writes:

the sage waits for the event, that is to say, understands the pure event in its eternal truth, independently of its spatio-temporal actualization, as something eternally yet-to-come and always already passed... But, at the same time, the sage also wills the embodiment and the actualization of the pure incorporeal event in a state of affairs and in his or her own body and flesh. Identifying with the quasi-cause, the sage wishes to "give a body" to the incorporeal effect, since the effect inherits the cause.

(LS 146–7/172)

So we initially see two aspects in play in Deleuze's analysis. The first consists in a certain orientation towards events that grasps them as excessive with respect to their actualization, and also therefore with respect to their material cause. Its obverse is described by Deleuze as a certain _ressentiment_ : "To grasp whatever happens as unjust and unwarranted (it is always someone else's fault) is, on the contrary, what renders our sores repugnant – _ressentiment_ in person, _ressentiment_ of the event" (LS 149tm/174–5). In other words, the primary ethical gesture is to consider the event as i rreducible to the order of causes, which is also the order of blame, and the source of moral terminology (of which Deleuze writes "What is really immoral is the use of moral notions like just or unjust, merit or fault" [LS 149/175]).

The second aspect of counter-actualization concerns – perhaps surprisingly – an act of the will, according to Deleuze, and consists in inverting the view I have of myself as an agent. Counter-actualization is an act whereby I "leap in place" (LS 149/175), identifying with myself no longer as simply a body subject to the causal nexus, but instead as the event that is my genetic condition: I sidestep my place in the causal order, and begin miming or acting (I become a humour-actor, Deleuze says, referring to Joë Bousquet) of the event, no longer invested in what _is_ here and now, but instead with what _in_ what is here and now that could be the locus of an otherwise. To counter-actualize is to traverse the path of actualization diagonally with an eye to how the event could be actualized otherwise. In other words, it is a matter of changing the locus of my actions from immediate (we might even say _efficient_ ) causality to the quasi-causal event, or from a causal agent to an agent of potential energy. This, in turn, furnishes an entire panoply of motivations, orientations: in short, an entirely new _nature_.

The ethical import of this position provides an illuminating point of view on the enigmatic Nietzschean demand to become what one is (Nietzsche 2001: §335). In fact, this is ultimately the single ethical maxim of _The Logic of Sense_ , provided that we grasp this "oneself" (in a now familiar and paradoxical way) as the difference that inhabits me in the form of the event. It is not an esoteric doctrine of action, but a doctrine of action according to which what is esoteric or occult _within oneself_ – namely, the event that one embodies – provides the means to assert what has not been embodied in you as a principle of change (and, beyond this, the decisive significance of other events in the same way). In turn, ethics in _The Logic of Sense_ is irreducible to an act of representational thought, but concerns rather one's most intimate relationship with what one is, some other _thing_ within me that is like my specular double, but also the means by which I can grasp the capacity for change as such.

_Counter-actualization, becoming and the evental subject in Badiou_

Can we not recognize, to an important extent, something like the subject in Badiou's sense in the figure of counter-actualization? For Badiou, the subject is uniquely oriented by an event that cannot be an object of knowledge or of language (as an object of representation). And as for Badiou, this subject is not (or is no longer) simply a native inhabitant states of affairs (represented situations), but emerges in response to an event. As for Badiou, it is only through the subject that novelty in the strong sense is capable of being introduced into states of affairs, and in accordance once more with the event.

However, the differences are just as striking. Whereas the subject-event relationship is strictly exterior in Badiou, for Deleuze the event – or, strictly speaking, events – that I embody as a counter-actualizing subject is what is primary in what I "am". And whereas, for Badiou, the event is characterized by its (dis-)apparition, for Deleuze the event eternally (or better, atempo-rally, the time of the event – _Aion_ – being what evades the present) subsists together with all other events in a complex serial structure. Perhaps most significantly, while Badiou considers that the course of the subject can be accounted for in its being in a completely formal manner, Deleuze is led to include determinants such as the body and the will as definitive for an account of counter-actualization.

Contrary to certain characterizations of the event in Deleuze – including Badiou's – which consider the event itself as the locus of novelty in Deleuze's philosophy, bringing with it the idea of a self-elaborating and self-changing being, what we find at the heart of Deleuze's theory of the event in its most sustained presentation is something very different. Certainly, being must be grasped as irreducible to either the static notion of essence or the ideal ipseity of the Platonic Forms. But it is not on the basis of events that the most decisive sense of novelty is introduced. Rather, the introduction of novelty in the strong sense relies on an intervention.

Even the great Deleuzo-Guattarian theme of becoming-other can be thought in the context of the theory of counter-actualization. To engage in a becoming would be to counter-actualize oneself in relation to an event that is beyond what conspired in my constitution as a body or state of affairs. This would also imply a doubling of the movement of becoming itself, in accordance with the two relationships that hold between the event and the individuals that incarnate it. There would be two becomings: one ordained by nature understood as the vast interlocking motions of an inorganic life, and the other practised behind nature's back. The relationship of becoming that holds between the wasp and the orchid concerns actualization as such, the constitution of reality according to the differenciation of a problematic event; the human being, however, engaged in becoming-animal, is involved in the shadowy double of this fundamental relationship. In becoming-horse, in the manner of Little Hans for example, the subject attempts to extract from the event that constitutes them an affirmation of the event in its difference as such. To enter into a becoming would be to exceed the individual that one is in favour of other events, other problems, whose existence we can only sense, like a glimmer or an apprehension of a movement beyond our line of sight (glimmers to which Deleuze will give the name phantasms in the closing chapters of _The Logic of Sense_ ).

THE ETERNAL RETURN, CHANCE AND THE EVENT

We have already seen Badiou's conclusion that since, for Deleuze, all chance is made subject to the eternal return as such, it stands unified and thus essentially forecloses on chance. It is by critically evaluating this claim that I shall conclude here. In fact, it is precisely the same logic that is problematically imposed on the disjunctive synthesis as the characteristic of the _Eventum tantum_ that Badiou also mobilizes with respect to the eternal return in relation to chance.

Badiou begins by outlining what he characterizes as the three misunderstandings that are liable to befall the doctrine of the eternal return. These he terms the Parmenidean (the eternal return signals the permanence of the One as static Being [DCB 68/102–3]), the cosmological (the return as universal law of the Same imposed on Being) and the statistical or regulatory (the eternal return regulates or organizes chaos). In each case, we are confronted with a way of defaulting on Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche's doctrine by returning it to the closure of a fundamental unity. To these three misreadings, he presents what he takes to be the result of "Deleuze's fidelity to the eternal return" (DCB 67/101), namely a fourth alternative: that the eternal return is essentially the affirmation of all chances in a single gesture.

Badiou's response to this presentation is to reject all four options thus outlined (critiquing in passing Deleuze's reading of Mallarmé's _Un Coup dedès_ ) and, beyond these, "all possible senses of the eternal return of the Same" (DCB 76/115), on the grounds that it is an inadequate thought of chance _per_ se.

In other words, what is at stake in the thought of the event, for Badiou, is the status of chance itself, _vis-a-vis_ being. As we have already seen, the category of chance is central for Badiou's own philosophy: not only is the advent of the event radically disjunct from any capacity for prediction, but the very structure and movement of the subject is diagonal or transversal to any category of knowledge in the situation to which it belongs, and thus irreducible to regularity or any thought of order. In other words, chance is the very mark of the event and everything connected to it, all of which are in important senses disjunct to the ordered regularity of re-presented being. Thus we can understand one of the central passages in this chapter of _The Clamor of Being_. Drawing on Deleuze's use of the metaphor of the dice-throw, Badiou writes:

Ultimately, the eternal return is the One as the affirmation of chance, or affirmation of the fact that chance is affirmed in a single throw, which returns as the active being of all casts, or all fortuitous events. But one can just as well say that chance is the One as eternal return, for what makes an event fortuitous is that it has as its unique active power, as its generic virtuality, that which returns – namely, the original Great Cast.

(DCB 74–5/113)

In sum, the Deleuzean thematization of chance in the figure of the eternal return (even released from its various misunderstandings) does not adequately account for chance on its own terms, rather suturing it to being. While each chance is affirmed by the eternal return, it is only in so far as the eternal return itself, the guarantor of chance, is synonymous with Being and its emanative power. Or, to use Badiou's own phrase, the eternal return in its Deleuzean manifestation excludes the Chance of chances:

It is by chance that a particular chance happens. All in all, the contingency of Being is only completely realized if there is also the Chance of chances. But, for Deleuze, insofar as contingency falls under the law of the One, it is realized in a single stroke. The Chance of chances does not exist – and this is the price paid for Being to be full.

(DCB 76/115–16)

Thus the eternal return, for Badiou, can only amount to another name for Being, another moment in the affirmation of the One in the serial exercise of a single intuition. Or, in terms of the event, the eternal return is the single Event of being whose being is itself absolute and necessary, but which expresses itself in plural events, each of which is subject to chance. As such, the affirmation of chance (just like the claimed ontological ground of all events in an Event) is of a different regime than chance itself, the regime of the eternal effective One.

Now, Badiou's summary of the potential misunderstandings of the eternal return is instructive and helpful, not just for its quite correct grasp of Deleuze's concerns about the misinterpretations that this concept is liable to, but also because Badiou's own critique partakes in all three errors. He, in fact, claims that the eternal return on Deleuze's account evicts Chance because it insists on the One; it is the One that organizes all contingent being; and that the Being of beings is the One. And such claims are precisely the notions that the doctrine of the eternal return, for Deleuze, _a priori_ excludes from an ontology of difference.

Indeed, not only are these the claims that Badiou makes of the eternal return, chance and the event, but they are of the genre of claims that govern his reading – quite explicitly, as we have seen – of Deleuze as a whole. The aleatory, the simulacra, disjunction, events in their plurality and beings in theirs: all of these postulates are made subordinate to the One. The One (or the eternal return, or the Event) is the ideal and singular real apex of a pyramid from which its emanative results emerge and towards which they are oriented: Deleuze becomes, all in all, a kind of hyper-i nformed twentieth-century Gnostic.

_The eternal return as empty form and differential affirmation_

We have already seen in the previous chapter that Badiou equates time and being in Deleuze, and we have seen some reasons to question this equation. Badiou's reading of the eternal return is another such reason. Here, we need only recall two qualities of the eternal return, as Deleuze presents it, to put into question the Badiouian account I have just elaborated.

The first of these is the _formal_ nature of the eternal return for Deleuze. As we have seen in the previous chapter, rather than being "the One as the affirmation of chance" (DCB 74/113), the eternal return signals time as form without content: "the empty form of time" (DR 88/119). It is the ultimate form of time imposed at once on the past and the present (what Deleuze calls the condition and the agent of time, respectively [DR 90/122]), but which equally tears apart that which is made subject to it. As form, it cannot be considered as either substantial or quidditative ground (the One), nor as a power of expression (the emanative power of the One). While, as we have seen in the previous chapter, both the present and the past are wedded to specific content (habituated _corpus_ in the first case and virtual past as such in the second), the eternal return signals time finally freed from any subordination to space or object: "Time itself unfolds... it ceases to be cardinal and becomes ordinal, a pure _order_ of time" (DR 88/120). The eternal return "causes neither the _condition_ [the past] nor the _agent_ [the present] to return: on the contrary, it repudiates these and expels them with all its centrifugal force... It is itself the new, complete novelty" (DR 90/121–2).

We could also put this point more directly, dispensing with the esoteric chicanes of the Deleuzean account: what the eternal return signifies is that _nothing returns_. The return is simply the expulsion of every possible content of time. Or, again, what returns is simply the form of time itself, pure and empty, and it returns to once again fall on the present and the past and disturb the integrity of beings bestowed on them by the syntheses of the past and the present.

We might also object to Badiou's claim about the radicality of chance in relation to the event on his own account. For there is one aspect of the event in _Being and Event_ that is in no way subject to chance, and that is its structure as discerned by ontology. In other words, there are only events in so far as they are the eternal repetition of the same. It is this _same_ that renders the event thinkable. As Badiou himself notes in _The Clamor of Being_ , on his account, "the form of all events is the same" (DCB 75–6/114). This means that ontology provides the thought of the Same in every event, even though its advent evades every means available to grasp it other than in the form of a retrospective subjective fidelity.

Second, for Deleuze, the eternal return is _differential_ in nature: it is the return of difference itself. Badiou elides every emphasis placed by Deleuze on the intrinsic link between the eternal return and _difference as such_ , directly articulating the eternal return with the thesis of the One. This is a remarkable feat, since Deleuze's discussions of this topic insists on few – if any – other aspects so heavily. The thought of the eternal return, "the thought and the production of the 'absolutely different'; making it so that repetition is, for itself, difference in itself" (DR 94/126).

Once more we are presented with the primacy of difference in Deleuze with respect to any and all unity. But Badiou, on the contrary, attempts to achieve the articulation of the One and the eternal return, thereby bypassing the thought of difference in itself, by way of the theme of affirmation. For Deleuze, though, it is precisely the differential nature of the eternal return that provides it with its affirmative mandate. "The eternal return is a force of affirmation, but it affirms everything of the multiple, everything of the different, everything of chance except what subordinates them to the One, to the Same and the Necessary" (DR 115/151). In an earlier passage that complements this, Deleuze writes:

As for the third time in which the future appears, this signifies that the event and the act possess a secret coherence which excludes that of the self; that they turn back against the self which has become their equal and smash it to pieces, as though the bearer of the new world were carried away and dispersed by the shock of the multiplicity to which it gives birth.

(DR 89–90/121)

This passage signals the rupture, in the regime of the subject, that doubles the interruption of every figure of unity in the regime of being according to the empty form of the future. The multiplicity that gives birth to unities of every kind is vouchsafed by the ultimate truth of time: time is the affirmation of difference as such; "This is how the story of time ends" (DR 114/151).
7. THOUGHT AND THE SUBJECT

ACTIVE AND PASSIVE, THOUGHT AND BEING

In the methodological passages near the start of _The Clamor of Being_ , Badiou argues that any familiarity with Deleuze's thought will reveal that "one could draw up an endless list of the conceptual couples that are organized according to this paramount formal opposition of the active and the passive", and claims that "this duality clearly runs throughout Deleuze's entire work" (DCB 33/52). For Badiou, though, this level of organization of the Deleuzean text must, however, only be treated as rhetorical or preliminary in nature. Thus he adds that "The active/passive duality indisputably exercises a strong influence on Deleuze's philosophical language or, let's say, his spontaneous rhetoric. Nonetheless, it is just as unquestionable that Deleuze does everything in his power to escape from this influence" (DCB 33–4/53). Whether or not this is true of Deleuze's rhetoric, what is certain is that Badiou, rather than following what he considers Deleuze's lead on this front, persists in organizing his reading around this opposition: not on a rhetorical level, but rather on the level of concepts themselves.

_Being and power_

This is perhaps most notable with respect to the categories of the virtual and the actual, where Badiou's principle thesis about Deleuze (the primacy of the One) leads him to assert that the virtual is, as we have already seen, the supreme name for Being in Deleuze's work, associated with plenitude, ultimate ontological status and activity. In comparison, the actual is the regime of passive products. Thus we read:

For Deleuze, beings are local degrees of intensity or inflections of power that are in constant movement and entirely singular. And as power is but a name of Being, beings are only expressive modalities of the One.

(DCB 25/40)

The One is life or production.

(DCB 39/61)

Such claims also underpin Badiou's more general characterization of Deleuze as a vitalist: "What is it in Deleuze that fixes the thought of being to its Nietzschean name, life? This: that being must be evaluated as power" (DVO 193).

In contrast to this claim, I argued in Chapter 3 that the virtual as it is presented in _Difference and Repetition_ is to be associated with a certain profound passivity of its own (it does not act, it _is_ ). Rather than being the regime of production, the virtual there is figured as a transcendental structure in relation to which the actual is organized. How this passage from the virtual to the actual is effectuated is in part the object of the current chapter, for we shall see here that, strictly speaking, it is not the virtual (problematic differential Ideas) that brings about the actual, but that this dynamic genesis involves a complex process on the side of the actual.

The same structure, as we have seen, was also in play with respect to time. In this case, Badiou aligns memory with activity on the one hand, and sensible time with passivity on the other. Once more, though, as I argued there, this way of grasping the work on time in Deleuze overlooks a number of decisive factors, including the ascription of a fundamental _passivity_ to the temporal syntheses. Deleuze's analysis in _Difference and Repetition_ indeed culminates by referring the first two modalities of time to the third passive synthesis, the time of the future or the eternal return, which is nothing but a pure form, a purely formal and empty time which neither acts nor reacts.

Finally, as we saw in the previous chapter, Badiou's analysis of the event in Deleuze (and the eternal return – "Ultimately, the eternal return is the One as the affirmation of chance, or affirmation of the fact that chance is affirmed in a single throw, which returns as the active being of all casts, of all fortuitous events" [DCB 74–5/113]) entirely collapses it into the proposed Deleuzean One of being. On the other hand, the multiple products of the supreme "Being=Event" (DVO 198) – the dispensed simulacra – are inert. To claim this, though, Badiou has to ignore the many prominent passages in _The Logic of Sense_ devoted to the impassivity and sterility of the event. Not only are relations between events irreducible to the mechanism of efficient causality that governs states of affairs, the relationship between events and their actualization is on the one hand causally inverted (states of affairs cause events), and on the other engaged in an altogether non-active relation (that of serial interlacement) of quasi-causality.

The other significant moment of this theme in Badiou's reading comes in the context of his presentation of Deleuze's account of the subject and thought, in the chapter of _The Clamor of Being_ entitled "The Outside and the Fold". While the details will be examined in what follows, Badiou's central contention is that the names Thought, Fold and Subject are also names for the One in Deleuze, and thus also name the productive capacity of this One.

Now, Badiou recognizes immediately that Deleuze abandons the figure of the classical autonomous subject: "this subject _results_ from a topological operation that can be situated in the outside, and that it is thus in no way constitutive, nor autonomous, nor spontaneous" (DCB 90tm/133). Here, Badiou is certainly correct. At issue, though, is not whether the subject in Deleuze is foundational in a Cartesian, Kantian or crude phenomenological sense – Deleuze, as much as Badiou, is opposed to such a view – but rather concerns the relationship between thought and subjectivity.

_Being and thought_

Badiou's reconstruction of the category thought in Deleuze proceeds in the following fashion. He begins by asserting the primordial significance of three Parmenidean questions for philosophy _tout court_. What is thinking? What is being? And in what sense do we assert that '"The Same is at once thinking and Being"' (DCB 79/117)? Turning to Deleuze, Badiou insists that, having already established answers to the first two questions – Being is "One, virtual, inorganic life, immanence [etc.]", and thought "disjunctive synthesis and intuition, the casting of dice, the ascetic constraint of a case, and the force of memory" (DCB 79/117–18) – we must "examine in greater depth the theory of [their] interlacement" (DCB 79/118).

To take these questions as primary is central for Badiou: the overturning of the Parmenidean equation of being and the One founds for him the possibility of a finally adequate ontology. Badiou's own account of this interlacement concerns the figure of the null set, the single (empty) point at which the tangent of ontological discourse makes contact with being _qua_ being. For Badiou, though, such a subtractive solution is not available to Deleuze, owing to his alleged accounts of thinking and being, which rest so heavily on the virtues of plenitude and activity. Instead, he claims, Deleuze thinks an aspect of the productive activity of being itself _as_ thought: "Thought... _is_ the fold of being" (DCB 87/130). What, though, is specific about this activity of folding that would allow us to distinguish it from the more general activity of the production of inert simulacra? The answer, Badiou tells us, concerns the subject. Thinking is folding, and the activity of folding creates an "internal pocket" (DCB 89/133), which is nothing but the subject as such: "we can say that _the subject_ ( _the inside_ ) _is the identity of thinking and being_ ' (DCB 90/133).

So, on Badiou's interpretation, the productive moment of the One operates in two distinct ways. On the one hand, it produces and continually remakes the regime of the actual. On the other, through a "topological densification of the outside" (DCB 86/130), it provides the ground for the advent of thought; thus "Thinking coincides with Being when it is a fold (the construction of a limit as a fold) whose living essence is the fold of Being" (DCB 89/133).

These claims clearly depend in many respects on features of Badiou's reading of Deleuze that I have been calling into question. Nonetheless, as we have throughout, we shall take Badiou's claims at face value. In what follows, then, three questions will be addressed, in order to once more test Badiou's account against the Deleuzean text: what role is played in Deleuze's work by the concept of the fold? What is the relationship between thought and being in Deleuze? And, finally, what is the relationship between thought and subjectivity? The first of these questions directs us, of course, towards _The Fold_ , but also to _Foucault_ , while the second and third lead back to _Difference and Repetition_ , where they are resolved in a somewhat surprising way. Once again, I shall argue that Badiou's reading here does little justice to Deleuze's own position.

THE FOLD

Let us begin by examining the theme of the fold in Deleuze. Aside from a short text on Heidegger in _Difference and Repetition_ , the theme is to be found most at work in two of Deleuze's later books, namely _Foucault_ and _The Fold_ itself. We shall examine each of these in turn, with an eye to the question: what relationship does the concept of the fold have to that of the subject in Deleuze?

_Heidegger and the fold_

The use of the theme of the fold in _Difference and Repetition_ , which appears in the context of the note on Heidegger's philosophy of difference in the first chapter (DR 89–91/64–6) is unusual in a number of respects. This is the case not least because Deleuze invokes Merleau-Ponty rather than Heidegger directly – and the two names will appear together again on this point, as we shall see – who, in contrast to Sartre, "undoubtedly followed a more thoroughly Heideggerian inspiration in speaking of 'the fold [ _pli_ ]' or of 'pleating [ _plissement_ ]"' (DR 64tm/90).

The relevant passage runs as follows:

It seems that the principal misunderstandings which Heidegger denounced as misreadings of his philosophy after _Being and Time_ and "What is Metaphysics?" have to do with the following: the Heideggerian _Not_ refers to Being as difference rather than the negative in Being, to questioning rather than to negation. When Sartre analysed interrogation at the beginning of _Being and Nothingness_ , he made it a preliminary to the discovery of the negative and negativity... Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, undoubtedly followed a more thoroughly Heideggerian inspiration in speaking of "the fold" or "pleating" (by contrast with Sartrean "holes" and "lakes of non-being") from _The Phenomenology of Perception_ onwards, and in returning to an ontology of difference and questioning in the posthumous book _The Visible and the Invisible_.

(DR 64/89)

This passage is unambiguously concerned with ontological questions strictly speaking, although the fold is invoked in relation to the Sartrean conception of the nothingness that comes "into being" through the radical freedom of the _pour-soi_ or subjectivity. When the fold is once more evoked, however, this possibility is clearly not at issue:

This difference [the ontological difference in Heidegger] is not "between" in the ordinary sense of the word. It is the Fold, the _Zwiefalt_ [twofold]. It is constitutive of Being and of the manner in which Being constitutes beings, in the double movement of "clearing" and "veiling".

(DR 65tm/90)

The fold is figured here in such a way that it has no intrinsic relation to subjectivity as such, but rather describes for Deleuze the fundamental ontological structure according to Heideggerian thought.

_Foucault and the fold_

If we turn our attention to _Foucault_ , we find, as in _Difference and Repetition_ , that the invocation of both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger occurs once more, but this time in what amounts to an identification, at least with respect to the doctrine of the fold. We pass from the "in Heidegger, and then in Merleau-Ponty" of _Difference and Repetition_ to "Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty" (F 110, 111).

One of the peculiar characteristics of Deleuze's reading of Foucault is the fact that much of this reading is constructed within the framework of terminology drawn from only one of the latter's books, _The Birth of the Clinic_ ; indeed, it sometimes almost seems as if Deleuze finds Foucault's work animated not by a Nietzschean _gai savoir_ , but by Xavier Bichat's 1827 _Traité des membranes_. The relationship between life and death, the importance of Bichat for this relationship, the pseudo-dynamic of the seen and the said – emphases that repeat themselves time and time again in _Foucault_ – all derive from this early work, a work that, moreover, Foucault himself presents serious criticisms of. Thus the invocation of the fold, even if we take it in the terms of the _Zweifalt_ or twofold, only describes Deleuze's reading in _Foucault_ in a superficial way, since the pair of twofold concepts of greatest interest for Deleuze are life and death (via Bichat) and the seen and the said, above all in the chapter that nominally is addressed to the theme of the fold (let me note that the concept of the fold appears only in this final chapter). One cannot help but be struck by the almost unbelievable movement of Deleuze's argument in this chapter, which begins by asking about the lacuna in Foucault's writing after _La Volonté du savoir_ , only to move, almost immediately, back to Bichat's formulation of life as a struggle with death, before returning us to _The History of Madness, Raymond Roussel_ and _The Archaeology of Knowledge_ in that order (the predominance of Blanchot here is equally striking).

In the final chapter of _Foucault_ , Deleuze pursues a complex and not altogether clear exposition of the final period of Foucault's thought, to be found in its explicit form in the second and third volumes of _The History of Sexuality_ , namely the supplementation of the analyses of knowledge and power with that of ethics as an aesthetic and ascetic self-fashioning. The latter is explicitly cast by Deleuze as a procedure of folding.

Deleuze emphasizes two aspects of this folding activity that initially seem at odds with one another. The first is the idea that folding as a self-reflexive ethical practice is subsequent to the emergence of subjectivity, a reading that is arguably at the heart of Foucault's own understanding of what his work is concerned with during this period. We are already subjects with respect to both the regime of knowledge, which Deleuze will characterize in terms of what provides us with an epistemological and historical location, and also with respect to power, which he characterizes in terms of those relations with others that provide us with a social and political location (F 100). Deleuze will present the folded relation to oneself as derivative of these two regimes, but nonetheless independent from them. This is even for Deleuze Foucault's "fundamental idea": that there is "a dimension of subjectivity derived from power and knowledge without being dependent on them" (F 101).

Further, Deleuze will insist that the advent of this reflexive possibility has a sociohistorical specificity. It is, in the first instance, marked by its specifically Greek origins. He states on two occasions that the Greeks do "a lot less, or a lot more, depending on your choice" (F 113, 100) than Heidegger's treatment of the history of the forgetting of Being claims. Rather than uncovering the more general movement of the fold of Being and beings, they discover that it is possible to "bend the outside, through a series of practical exercises" (F 100). According to Deleuze, this discovery also tends to emerge in a particular practical context: the self relation is "destined to encounter sexuality" (F 105). Despite this, Deleuze will insist that folding activity of the self with respect to the self is irreducibly _strategic_ in nature for Foucault.

The first way in which the fold appears in _Foucault_ is thus in the form of an ethical relation of self-fashioning, a relation that goes to work on an existing subjectivity according to the agency of that subjectivity: an agency that is, moreover, bound by very specific conditions, and which does not seem to conform to Badiou's much broader ontological account of the figure of the subject in Deleuze. This broader point of view is, however, embodied in the second modality of the fold that Deleuze discusses. Not only is the activity of folding a specific form of self-fashioning (understood as the modification of the existing self), but it is also the formal possibility according to which the present, undergirded by the past, is open to the future, the formal possibility of thought and subjectivity as such.

In what sense? This second, ontological, treatment of the fold in _Foucault_ emphasizes the dynamic relationship between the outside and the inside (the specific form of the fold that Badiou himself invokes), where the inside is figured throughout as a reciprocal doubling of the outside. Deleuze will insist heavily on this doubling, referring not just to Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, but also Roussel and Alfred Jarry: "The theme which has always haunted Foucault is that of the double" (F 97–8). This outside is attached to a variety of different names by Deleuze – including "absolute memory" (F 99), chance (F 117) and the "unthought" (F 118) – but the two most frequent and important are those of the _past_ and _force_. These in turn correspond to the regimes of knowledge and power.

From the point of view of this ontological account of the fold, thought becomes the activity that constitutes the subject within the regime of powerknowledge. This subject is not, though, the intentional subject of phenomenology, but a kind of fugitive and aleatory point: "There never 'remains' anything of the subject, since he is to be created on each occasion, like a focal point of resistance, on the basis of the folds which subjectivize knowledge and bend each power" (F 105). Earlier, Deleuze will describe the outside as "a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside _of_ the outside" (F 96–7).

These two moments – the ethical and the ontological – are brought together by Deleuze initially through the assertion of a homology between the two registers, before insisting on their unity:

If the inside is constituted by the folding of the outside, between them there is a topological relation: the relation to oneself is homologous to the relation with the outside and the two are in contact, through the intermediary of the strata which are relatively external environments (and therefore relatively internal).

(F 119)

Deleuze will then capitalize on the idea of relative externality to describe the self-relation put to work by the already constituted subject as a local engagement that effects the same kind of reflexive structure that holds more generally between the outside and the inside (or the past and the present), but with the goal of modification rather than institution. We see, in short, a kind of generalization of the figure of the fold across orders of magnitude, a generalization that will attain its greatest scope in _The Fold_ , as we shall see below. We also see here a certain move that also appears in _Difference and Repetition_ , which involves reformulating the relationship between _de jure_ and _de facto_ conditions. Rather than opposing them in the way we find in, for example, Kant, they form two moments in the fractured continuum of the genesis of beings.

But this treatment also finds a double of its own in the account of counter-actualization in _The Logic of Sense_ , where the relationship between sense and events on the one hand, and the intermixture of bodies on the other, is literally perverted in the name of an alternative movement of actualization. And in accordance with the observations made in the discussion of counter-actualization in the previous chapter, there is also something reminiscent of Badiou's own theory of the subject at work here. In particular, let us recall that the movement of fidelity – for Badiou the unconscious construction of a generic truth – is in fact the constitution of a counter-state, an alternative ordering of existent multiples. While the geometric character of the fold is at odds with the static, set-theoretic rhetorical universe that Badiou inhabits, there is a remarkable similarity between this theory of subjective alter-state construction and the self-reflexive work of the fold that creates new ways of thinking and living. In both cases, changes are made in the present in order to open up a different future, and in both cases this future will itself become normal once more, calling for a permanent revolution in subjectivity at the hands of the subject. Finally, both views are ultimately rooted in an ethical framework that lacks any determinate _métier_ , relying instead on the continuation of a deviant forward momentum.

What can we take from this complex account with respect to Badiou's reading of the fold in Deleuze? We must agree that in the context of _Foucault_ , the fold is indeed affiliated with both the idea of the constitution of subjectivity and with thought. What is misplaced in Badiou's account of these connections is be found in terms of the orientation that is provided for them in both _Foucault_ and in Foucault's own thought. We can index this to a certain distortion in the use of the word "thought". If Deleuze's book on _Foucault_ is one of the most faithful to its subject on this point, it is because it emphasizes that thinking is never an ascetic subordination of the subject to the movement of being, but a kind of localized displacement of one's position _within_ being as it currently exists. Rather than looking up towards principles, or down towards foundations, thought in Foucault looks _around_ , it examines the contemporary for points of flexibility. What is at issue is not the fold of Being and beings, or of the virtual and the actual on Badiou's emanative reading, but with (and here Deleuze recalls Michaux): " _life_ within _the folds_ " (F 123, emphasis added). Like the dynamic of the relationship between the virtual and the actual in _The Time Image_ , the figure of a generalized ontological Outside (in the large circuit) is in fact only present in terms of a localized _otherwise_ (in the crystal-image).

_Leibniz and the fold_

The final text devoted to the theme of the fold is, of course, _The Fold_ itself. Recalling that, for Badiou, the fold is the figure of subjectivity in Deleuze, we might again note that one cannot unproblematically extract doctrines of Deleuze's own thought from his works on other thinkers. Two futher observations about the figure of the fold are worth making.

The first, very general, point is as follows: if we are willing to extend subjectivity in some sense to every monad (as Leibniz himself does), then we might very well agree with Badiou's analysis. This is because, for Deleuze, the figure of the fold is used to explain the elementary relations of compossibility, harmony and the correlative apperceptions and appetites that structure the "interior" life of every fundamental substance: "A fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern. The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold... Unfolding is thus not the contrary of folding, but follows the fold up to the following fold" (FLB 6/9). In other words, the general theory of the fold in the Leibniz book is not a theory of subjectivity, but an ontological account pertaining to existence as such, including the least expressive monads, those of "brute matter'! This is why, later on the same page, Deleuze will write that "The model for the science of matter is the 'origami, as the Japanese philosopher might say, or the art of folding paper" (FLB 6tm/9).

Because Badiou does not, however, want to extent subjectivity to all of being in his reading of Deleuze (Badiou will not insist, with Leibniz, that even the smallest part of matter is the expression of a monad – the distinction between human and animal being as profound and problematic for Badiou as it is for Heidegger), then this reading of the figure of the fold is inappropriate here. In other words, precisely in so far as the theme of the fold is Leibnizian, it is irreducible to the subject as a specific _regional_ modality of being. Also, lest we forget, Deleuze himself – in works as different as _Difference and Repetition_ and _A Thousand Plateaus_ – will not hesitate to go as far as Leibniz in the extension of ideality to everything that exists, a point that Badiou manifestly overlooks.

Deleuze's commentary moves, as it were, in the direction diametrically opposed to the Badiouian reading. Rather than extending the reach of subjectivity to everything in the style of Leibniz, Deleuze extends the theme of the fold itself beyond the closure of the relationship between thought and being. _The Fold_ is indeed a book about (among other things) the Baroque, but it is also one in pursuit of what Deleuze will call a modern neo-Baroque. The final chapter, which closes with its famous invocation of a nomadology that would overturn the principle of closure that governs Leibniz's metaphysics, is not devoted to a new theory of subjectivity, but to a treatment of music and painting, as these two move from the Baroque itself forwards into our own time (from the closed, infinitely folded world to the open, decentred universe).

Second, it is important to emphasize the "multi-directional" nature of the fold in Deleuze's treatment of Leibniz. It does not simply mark the limit at which subjectivity (Leibniz's kingdom of grace) emerges from objectivity (the kingdom of nature), which would be the hinge between what Deleuze will call the upper and lower floors of the monad, but forms the operational moment at every point in the analysis: animals are within animals, "the first fly contains all flies yet to come" (FLB 8tm/13), the texture of gold is folded within gold (FLB 47/63), each effect is folded into its cause, and each effect will itself play the role of the cause for another effect (the principle of sufficient reason).

In general terms – and this is the way in which the Heideggerian _Zwiefalt_ will appear in _The Fold_ – the fold is the generalized " _entre-deux_ " (FLB 10/16) of Leibniz's philosophy for Deleuze, the elementary form of the relation as such, the "primitive non-localizable connection" (FLB 120tm/162):

Many different answers can be made to the question, _where is the fold to be found_? As we have seen, it runs not only between essences and existences. Of course, it passes between the body and the soul, but it is already to be found between the inorganic and the organic with respect to bodies, and between the "species" of monads with respect to souls. It is an extremely sinuous fold, a zigzag.

(FLB 120tm/162)

As a result, it would be difficult to imagine how the mobile and ubiquitous form of connection that Deleuze sees in the fold could be reduced to a single articulation of thought and being, in the way Badiou presents it: just as difficult, in fact, as it would be to take this ubiquity of the fold and assert it as the virtual itself, the power of articulation. Here, we make contact again with the thesis presented in the second chapter, according to which Deleuze must be conceived of as an ontological mannerist. It is not that there is Relation, which constitutes the vital force of connection, manifesting unified things at the level of the actual, but relations plural throughout: the rejection of the universal in favour of the ubiquitous. We need only recall one of the most striking passages of _The Fold_ , in which Deleuze is contrasting the organic and the inorganic in Leibniz: "Not everything is fish, but fish are teeming everywhere... There is no universality, but rather a ubiquity of the living" (FLB 9tm/14). In turn, it is not that the fold constitutes the universal root of all beings, but that it is everywhere. In an interview on the occasion of the publication of _The Fold_ , Deleuze insists on this point: "Folds are in this everywhere, without the fold being a universal. It's a 'differentiator,' a 'differential'" (N 156).

_Deleuze and the fold_

From these schematic remarks, we can draw the following conclusions about the concept of the fold in Deleuze with respect to Badiou's reading. The three significant moments in which the concept is formulated can be said to affirm the _same_ concept only in extremely broad terms. While the reference to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and the invocation of a fundamental ontological register is found in all three cases, many other important elements change. Consequently and in turn, it is incorrect to assert that the fold is the primary figure that accounts for the relationship between being and thought in Deleuze. Where this theme is present in the strongest terms, in _Foucault_ , it must be read not only in terms of the constitution of the subject, but also as the reflexive activity of the subject, an activity moreover that is couched in terms of a (however tentative) historical and geographical specificity.

THOUGHT AND ACTUALIZATION

In any case, despite Badiou's claims, there is an alternative source for a much more robust theory of subjectivity and thought in Deleuze. The most developed account is to be found once again in the pages of _Difference and Repetition_. It is true that _What is Philosophy_? develops a thoroughgoing and nuanced account of thinking as the creation of idealities of various kinds, and that this account is articulated to a theory of order and chaos with a very real ontological sense. However, this work does not elaborate any onto-logical account of the subject who thinks, which is a key issue here. The further benefit of turning once more to _Difference and Repetition_ is that in grasping the theories of thought, individuation and subjectivity found there, we are able to refine and complete the points made in Chapter 3 about the role of the virtual in Deleuze. The interpretive strategy at work here is thus once more to present an important part of Deleuze's _oeuvre_ , rather than to attempt to traverse the whole: a difficult, if not impossible, task (for all its Sirenic attraction) and certainly something that Badiou does not succeed in doing.

In question is the final chapter of _Difference and Repetition_ , "Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible". Here, Deleuze answers a number of (quite pressing) remaining questions about the role of the virtual in relation to the actual, specifically concerning the genesis of actuality. I might add that the concerns of the _The Fold_ are not entirely absent from this moment in Deleuze's philosophy. It is the philosophy of Leibniz, and particularly his account of the figure of the monad as an expressive individual, that underpins a number of the points that follow. Despite the predominance of references to biology in this chapter of _Difference and Repetition_ , it is a monadology, however heavily modified, that is key. For Deleuze, it is "only Leibniz [who] approached the conditions of a logic of thought, inspired by his theory of individuation and expression" (DR 253/325). Indeed, these pages are among the most beautiful in Deleuze; we find here a veritable paean to expression.

_The virtual and the actual_

Let me very quickly sketch what has already been established of Deleuze's mature ontology in _Difference and Repetition_ and elsewhere. We have seen, on the one hand, an insistence on the univocity of being: bodies and language, the virtual and the actual, events and states of affairs – all are expressions of being that do not introduce any divisions into being as such. On the other hand, we have seen the account of the virtual in Deleuze, understood as the differential regime of problematic Ideas, lacking any primary ipseity; correlatively, the world of the actual appears as the regime of solutions to these virtual problems.

_Prima facie_ , this brute opposition of the virtual and the actual provides Badiou's interpretation with some of its force. How could these two aspects of being, so different from one another, enter into communication? It is not hard to see why someone (like Badiou, or Hallward, for example), would be led to claim that one can have only the virtual _or_ the actual, but not both in any full sense. It is likewise not hard to see the rationale for some of the claims we have already discussed here: "The more Deleuze attempts to wrest the virtual from irreality, indetermination, and non-objectivity, the more irreal, undetermined and finally non-objective the actual (or beings) becomes" (DCB 53/81). Either the virtual, in its impassive independence, creates its own world of ideal "beings', inscribing them on the inside of an in-principle-unbreachable limit (this is, for example, Maimon's solution), or the virtual is seen as an abstraction, a set of (perhaps unavoidable) illusory objects that are at best regulative ideals (Hume, Althusser, Lacan, etc.) and at worst the kernels of psychopathology. If Deleuze had presented only these two structurally distinct elements, it is hard to see how the kinds of problems that haunt Plato (participation), Descartes (mind-body interaction) and Kant (facultative extrinsicism) – to name only the most important victims – could be resolved at all. We would be in the presence of another irreducible dualism, whose appeal to univocity would be no more than a scholastic window dressing for a regressive metaphysics. Even the assertion that the virtual is transcendental structure for empirical actuality would be less than convincing. In fact, if this is all that Deleuze's philosophy had to offer, what would be strange would be the rarity of accusations of dualism.

But this is not all that Deleuze's philosophy claims; as the saying goes, if things were that simple, word would have got around. In fact, at one of the most philosophically advanced moments in all of his work, the final chapter of _Difference and Repetition_ , building on the structural account of the virtual, Deleuze presents a theory of the dynamic relationship between the virtual and the actual, and in doing so presents his theory of thought, which is our concern here.

_Intensity_

Deleuze is fully aware of this problem (or better, requirement) for a metaphysics of the kind he elaborates. After reiterating, as I have just done, the basic virtual–actualization-actual structure, he asks: "How is the Idea determined to incarnate itself?" (DR 245/316). How is it that this complex ideal differential structure can be expressed in the fixed and ordered world of the actual? The answer to this question takes us to what should be described – I think without any exaggeration – as the furthest extension of Deleuze's novel metaphysics, a theory of intensity. In response to his own question, he writes: "The answer lies precisely in intensive quantities" (DR 245/316).

The first part of chapter five of _Difference and Repetition_ is devoted to elaborating this theory, principally in relation to thermodynamics. For Deleuze, the search for difference-in-itself ends when we arrive at the concept of intensity. He argues that we must give this concept its true import, arguing against claims originating both from science and philosophy (Plato, Kant and Bergson) that it is subordinate to a more fundamental quality or extensity. Intensity for Deleuze has three principle characteristics. It is, first of all, irreducibly unequal in nature: it "includes the unequal in itself" (DR 232/299). To put this another (and perhaps more explicable) way, intensity is that which is irreducible _in_ extended quantity and quality, and what is irreducible is therefore not subordinate to any regime in which equality could be established. It is thus "uncancellable" (DR 233/300), both in the sense that it is necessary for quality and quantity, and in so far as it is not subject to any superior principle through which it can be explicated. This mode of argumentation is clearly transcendental in nature. Deleuze's claim is that, in order to understand quantity and quality, we are necessarily led to posit intensity as the element that brings them about (he makes this point himself [DR 240–41/310–11]). Without positing the reality of intensity, Deleuze argues, we would be unable to explain the advent of qualitative and quantitative differences, which belong to a regime of equanimity and homogeneity respectively.

The second feature of intensity, this irreducibly unequal instance in quantity and quality, is that it affirms difference: "since it is already difference in itself and comprises inequality as such, intensity... makes difference an object of affirmation" (DR 234/301). This essentially means that it is absolute; there is no limiting instance within intensity, no native ontological distinction that would determine it in terms external to its proper regime. Finally, the third point, which, according to Deleuze "includes the other two" (DR 237/305), is that intensity must be thought itself as quantity, but as implicated quantity. Why? This is because, unlike quality, which is indivisible, intensity can be divided. What, in turn, distinguishes it from extended quantity is that, in being divided, it changes in nature. Deleuze gives the examples of temperature and speed here: neither is composed of qualitatively identical quantities of themselves (50°C is not composed of fifty units of 1°C; the same is true of the speed 50 km h−1), and thus neither is irreducible to quantity, while being divisible (unlike qualities) nonetheless, even if this division necessarily produces heterogeneous results.

Taking these points together, we are presented with the fundamental unequal being of intensity, difference-in-itself, implicated quantity, which is explicated in extended quantity and in quality. Intensity is thus the foun-dational and productive moment in a system that moves from implication to explication.

An example of this implication-explication double that is as excellent as it is pertinent (given Badiou's position on the nature of number) is Deleuze's discussion of the ordinal-cardinal pair in number theory (and in fact much of the presentation of intensity is framed in number-theoretic terms). On the one hand, ordinals – Deleuze refers to the natural numbers here (DR 232/300) – are taken to be fundamentally intensive in nature, relying on an irreducible sense of distance (between two and three, for example, there is a positive distance but one that has no scale of measurement). In order to assemble the basic number line as a pure order, we cannot have any recourse to a fixed metric array, a pre-given set of points, cardinal moments, or even a set distance between the numbers, since to do so would be to immediately subordinate ordinality to cardinality. "Ordinal construction does not imply a supposed same unit but only... an irreducible notion of distance" (DR 232/300). It is only on the basis of this ordinal distribution, Deleuze claims, that the notion of cardinality (the institution of key points) can be insisted on: points or hinges at which a quantitative change in the sequence takes place. The obvious example here is the first infinite number ω0, the first infinite cardinal whose size is unattainable simply through the process of succession of finite numbers. That is to say that there is a quantitative difference marked by the leap in cardinality between the first and the second orders of the infinite, between ω0 and ω1.

We should ask ourselves what ontological status, especially in relation to the virtual, intensity holds for Deleuze. The answer – and this is the fundamental point – is that intensity _is the actual_ : it is actual being. For all his (important) remarks about the reality of the virtual, and even taking into account the structuring role of virtual Ideas, it is intensity that characterizes the being of the actual, both as implicated intensive quantity and as explicated quality and extensity.

This is a point that is, to my mind, unjustly overlooked in the scholarship on _Difference and Repetition_ , although there are indications at a number of levels in Deleuze's argumentation that this is the case. For instance, discussing the order of logical priority between the elaboration of species and individuation (to which I shall briefly turn in more detail), Deleuze warns against the subordination of the latter to the former with the following words:

In fact any confusion between the two processes, any reduction of individuation to a limit or complication of differenciation, compromises the whole of the philosophy of difference. This would be to commit an error, _this time in the actual_ , analogous to that made in confusing the virtual with the possible.

(DR 247/318, emphasis added)

Moreover, that the actual is intensity is implicit in the very account of intensity supplied by Deleuze. We already know that the actual in its most generic sense is, for Deleuze, the regime of qualified extension. If we ask ourselves what ontological status this regime has, on Deleuze's terms, we must answer that it must be accounted for as the explication of intensity, since this is, according to the logic we have just seen, the only basis on which sensible difference can arise.

Now, the equation of the actual and intensity has a further consequence: that the actual, for Deleuze, is not a fixed state of affairs, but a fluid and charged reality, where the movement of explication grounds and brings about ever new states of affairs. It is certainly hard to reconcile this with Badiou's account, in which the actual is but a series of dead letters sent by the One. Nor can we accept that the virtual "is characterized by the process of actualization", or that "the virtual _is_ this process" (DCB 49/74), since the entire process of actualization (or differenciation) necessarily lies on the side of the actual itself: it is a movement belonging entirely to the explicative course of intensive difference.

THE INDIVIDUAL

It is this conception of intensity that allows Deleuze to account for the relationship between the virtual and the actual in a quite refined manner, and, in turn, it provides us with the material to answer the question of the relationship between thought and being. This is accomplished by grasping intensity as _the determinative context and content of actualization_. But, as we have just seen, intensity is not, for Deleuze, homogenous, but rather has a kind of structuration or determination proper to it, to which Deleuze gives the name _individual_.

The concept of the individual in question must be carefully specified, since it is irreducible to a self or an I, and is not the human subject in anything like its traditional acceptation. For Deleuze, the individual is an ontological and expressive concept that provides us with a way of properly thinking intensity and its relation to the virtual. At this point in our discussion, the category of intensity lacks determinative form. If there is a dynamic movement between implication and explicated intensity, it is hard to see how it should take place.

We must first grasp, with Deleuze, that intensity does not exist in some free and natural state, but is always present as individual intensive difference. To paraphrase the well-known claims of _Anti-Oedipus_ about machinic desire, intensity is always individual, and individuality is intensive in nature. Or, as Deleuze explicitly puts it: "All individuality is intensive, and intensive quantities are individuating factors" (DR 246/317). This figure of the individual is closely related to Leibnizian monad, as I noted earlier. Like the monad, Deleuze's individual is expressive in nature: individuals express virtual Ideas, their differential relations and singular points. These relations and points are not immediately expressed by individuals in an explicated form, which would be to take individuals as the terminus of the process of actualization. Instead, they are implicated only, nascent formations that await extension and qualification, spatialization and temporalization.

Which virtual Ideas are expressed by particular individuals? The answer is once more Leibnizian: as James Williams puts it, "the individual is always an expression of the whole of Ideas" (2005a: 185). For Deleuze, every intensive individual expresses the entirety (a term of which I shall have more to say below) of the virtual field, but only a certain fraction of this field clearly. Just as each monad has a zone of clarity that constitutes its perspective or expressive scope, each individual, for Deleuze, expresses certain relations and singular points but not others. This is in part the case because of the nature of the virtual as such. We have already seen that Ideas do not have any native identity or unity, but that the determination of an Idea as an Idea involves the mechanism of reciprocal determination; this is Deleuze's renovated theory of the dialectic. As a result, we cannot speak of the implication of _an_ Idea in anything but a metaphorical manner, but only of a region of the whole virtual field, even if most of this field is expressed obscurely, and even if the set of relations and points that are expressed clearly are also intrinsically confused in so far as their differential determination _vis-à-vis_ the rest of the virtual multiplicity is not expressed in the individual in question.

The similarity with the monad must not be exaggerated, however, for the differences are also decisive. In particular, Deleuze's theory of the individual casts off the demand for harmony that so heavily characterizes Leibniz's philosophy, and likewise the commitment to the compossibility of individuals (the principle of closure). In place of the symphony of perfectly tuned and timed monads, the veritable pianola of being, intensive individuals express a cacophony, a riot of irreducibly different motifs or refrains. If we lose the harmony of Leibniz – a loss that has not been without its attendant suffering – we manage to finally arrive at _sound as such_ : in place of the rainbow, an abyssal _white light_.

It is also important to note that the individual, for Deleuze, is not an indivisible and fundamentally unchanging entity. Indeed the opposite is the case:

Individuation is mobile, strangely supple, fortuitous and endowed with fringes and margins; all because the intensities which contribute to it communicate with each other, envelop other intensities and are in turn enveloped. The individual is far from indivisible, never ceasing to divide and change its nature.

(DR 257/331)

_The individual as thinker_

Now we can address the question that has led us to this point concerning the relationship between being and thought. For Deleuze in _Difference and Repetition_ , thought takes place _at the level of the individual_ : "The thinker is the individual" (DR 253/325). But what does the individual think exactly? Once we grasp that thinking is, at this fundamental level, to be equated with expression or determination as such, we can state that the individual thinks _virtual Ideas_. And, in keeping with the a- and pre-subjective sense of this concept, Deleuze is clearly right to assert that "[e]very body, every thing, thinks and is a thought to the extent that, reduced to its intensive reasons, it expresses an Idea the actualization of which it determines" (DR 254/327).

But Deleuze goes further, and provides the means to incorporate this definition of the individual into the broader movement of actualization. "The thinker, undoubtedly the thinker of the eternal return, is the individual, the universal individual" (DR 254/327). This interesting statement provokes two further questions. The first is: what are we to make of this universality? In fact, at a point very far from anything discussed in Badiou's analysis, it points us towards a meaningful sense in which we can speak of the unity of the virtual. In and of itself (as we have seen) the virtual has no unity, homogeneity or simplicity of any kind. Given that no pertinent set of criteria exists by which to speak of the virtual as a unified entity, any attempt to do so would necessarily involve the imposition of an external framework. Where the _whole_ of the virtual can be legitimately thought is through the category of the individual. Each individual expresses the entirety of the virtual field, but, in each case, it is a different "aspect" or "face" of the virtual; different differential relations and singular points are actualized in each case. It is as though the virtual were an intricate spherical lattice, which is each time and with each individual oriented differently, thereby exposing different relations and singularities. This is the ultimate difference between Deleuze and Leibniz: the non-existence of God. In Leibniz, it is God who clearly conceives the totality, whose zone of clarity is coextensive with the universe as such. For Deleuze, there is no pre-established harmony between individuals, no final cause in the Aristotelian sense adopted by Leibniz, and no reference to the principle of indiscernibility (at least in the theological terms in which Leibniz frames it). In place of these, we have disjunctive synthesis, virtual-transcendental Ideas, and a threshold beyond which no identical beings exist in order to facilitate comparison, but only the swarming of difference-in-itself.

The second question is: in what sense is the individual the thinker of the eternal return?

It is because nothing is equal, because everything bathes in its difference, its dissimilarity and its inequality, even with itself, that everything returns – or rather, everything does not return. What does not return is that which denies eternal return, that which does not pass the test. It is quality and extensity which do not return, in so far as within them difference, the condition of the eternal return, is cancelled.

(DR 243/313)

This is a decisive passage that properly locates the eternal return in the system expounded in _Difference and Repetition_. Difference is the material for the eternal return. If the world was finally grounded on an identity or a unity, the syntheses of time could only affirm what is and will always be. Differences, left in second place, would appear only in order to be erased by the passage of time, a passage of time which would become for differences nothing but "a race to the grave" (DR 238/307).

However, if we establish difference as the ultimate principle, then the syntheses of time instead operate as Deleuze presents them: as establishing at once temporary habitual stabilities (the contraction of distances, the first synthesis) and a coincident depth of memory (second synthesis) in the face of the eternal return, which subjects everything to the "hard" law of being: "what is explicated is _explicated once and for all_ " (DR 244/314), and every actualized being, every qualified and extended real, will necessarily be returned time and time again to the intensive maelstrom from which it was born.

So, whereas the syntheses of habit and memory bring about both the regime in which individuation is expressed in actuality and its content (according to the process of dramatization, of which more below), the third synthesis of time, of the future, plunges extension and quality back into the implicated order of individuality, where they are only nascent solutions to the virtual problems expressed by the individual. This is why the individual thinks the eternal return: because the individual is nothing but the expression of difference-in-itself, restrained by neither the I nor the self, neither the form of identity nor the law of contradiction.

It is clear, then, that Deleuze's conception of thought thus far has nothing in common with the anthropocentric account embraced so profoundly by the individualist tradition that runs from Descartes through Kant to existentialism. In his own way, Badiou's subject – however irreflexive and non-foundational – is a part of this tradition too, in so far as it is _only the (human) subject who thinks_. Thought may be rare, and its capacity dependent on the advent of the event and its faithful pursuit from inchoate promise to situational change, but there is no question that without a subject, there is no thought. For Deleuze, this is simply not the case. It is an individual – _qua_ structural element of being – who thinks, not a subject. It is in the first instance being that thinks, not the subject. It thinks, principally, by implicating virtual Ideas, and thus engendering the process of actualization.

The Parmenidean equation of thinking and being, with which we began, is as a result far more appropriate for Deleuze's philosophy than it is for Badiou's. In the latter, thought touches being at a single material point; in the former, the contact is rich and complex, an interlacing which sustains the production of being as such.

NOTE: INDI-DRAMA-DIFFERENC/TIATION

We now have at hand all the key pieces (if in outline) of the complex onto-logical picture that Deleuze presents in _Difference and Repetition_. Before turning to examine the relationship between subjectivity and thought in more detail, it is worth grasping this picture as a whole, since it will allow us to finish working through the content of this part of Deleuze's philosophy by properly situating the virtual and the actual in relation to one another, and thereby demonstrating the quite significant gap on this point between _The Clamor of Being_ and _Difference and Repetition_.

Certainly the virtual–actual division is decisive for Deleuze, but it is substantially more complicated than Badiou would have us believe. The virtual itself is to be understood as the regime of perplicated Ideas, a structure constituted by differential relations and their corresponding singularities, lacking any unity or extrinsic orientation. The actual, if anything, is a more complex structure or set of structures. As the final two chapters of _Difference and Repetition_ make clear through their gradual explication of the processes of actualization, it has a number of elements or distinct regimes. In the first instance – and against the background of the fundamental reality of intensity – the actual is characterized as the regime of the individual. Individuals, as we have just seen, are an implicated expression of the entirety of the virtual; they are individuated ensembles of differences, each singular and different from each other. ("Two intensities are never identical except abstractly" [DR 254/326], a thought whose tension with the Leibnizian principle of indis-cernibles invoked above would be worth grasping.) To the _perplication_ of Ideas (each folded into the others, just as the whole world is in each monad for Leibniz) corresponds the _implication_ of Ideas in intensity.

These intensive differences or individuals are in turn _dramatized_ , expressed through spatiotemporal dynamisms. While Deleuze is less than forthcoming in his account of the spatial dimension, we have seen in some detail the nature of the temporal dynamisms in question, namely the three syntheses of time. In particular, it is the intensive difference-in-itself, the being of the actual or the sensible (DR 236/304), that is affirmed by the third synthesis of the eternal return: or, to use Deleuze's great turn of phrase, intensity is "the only landscape of the eternal return" (DR 242/312).

The product of this complex movement is, of course, explicated quantified and qualified actuality, the familiar representational world of "middlesized dry goods" and clichéd consciousness. This process is very clear in one of Deleuze's favourite examples, the egg:

The egg, in effect, provides us with a model for the order of reasons: (organic and species related) differentiation–individuation–dramatization–differenciation. We think that difference of intensity, as this is implicated in the egg, expresses first the differential relations or virtual matter to be organized. This intensive field of individuation determines the relations that it expresses to be incarnated in spatio-temporal dynamisms (dramatization), in species which correspond to these relations (specific differenciation), and in organic parts which correspond to the distinctive points in these relations (organic differenciation). (DR 251/323)

It is also of real importance to note that the virtual–actual relationship is not an immediate one. It is the differentiation–individuation–dramatization–explication structure that is fundamental in the account offered in _Difference and Repetition_ , not the virtual–actual. While "the nominal pair virtual/actual exhausts the deployment of univocal Being" (DCB 43/65), it is not the case that the simplicity of this opposition exposes the whole of the mechanism at work.

With these points in hand, we can also address the issue of Deleuze's vitalism, a term that Badiou uses (above all in "Deleuze's Vitalist Ontology") to drive a wedge between his own materialist mathematical ontology and what he takes to be the championing of the "cosmic animal" in Deleuze. We have seen that Badiou takes the virtual to be the locus of this vital force, the soul of this Animal. On the basis of Deleuze's account in _Difference and Repetition_ , we must assert a very different picture, in which it is _the actual that is characterized by dynamic activity_. In the final chapter of _Difference and Repetition_ , Deleuze often repeats the claim that it is intensity that "creates the extensities and the qualities in which it is explicated", and that "creation is always the production of lines and figures of differenciation" (DR 255/328): differen _c_ iation and not differen _t_ iation – the activity of creation and production is engendered by intensity and not the virtual. It is the "plenitude" (DR 252/324) of intensity that is the productive force in being, and this is resolutely actual in Deleuze. He is indeed a vitalist but, at the height of his philosophical endeavour, this vitalism is presented as a vitalism of unequal productive actuality, and not the impassive virtual, whose idealities direct their blind gazes within. The virtual is "unaware of the individual", which brings its problematic force into the heart of the movement in being. The virtual poses problems, but it is the actual which actively resolves them.

NOTE ON JAMES WILLIAMS'S READING OF DELEUZE'S ONTOLOGY

The reading of Deleuze on the relationship between the virtual and the actual proposed here is, in many respects, at odds with the strong reading based around the idea that the virtual and the actual are in mutual interaction with one another. The foremost contemporary proponent of this position is James Williams, whose impressive, forceful and original recent works are all oriented by it. Given the limited scope of our treatment of Deleuze here, it will not be possible to fully address this reading, although it is central. There are four points, though, that I should like to touch on.

First, Williams gives great weight to two terms, found almost exclusively in _Difference and Repetition_ , in his interpretation of Deleuze: reciprocal determination and differentiation. We have already seen these terms above, in Chapter 4, in relation to the virtual in _Difference and Repetition_. In the first case, Deleuze presents the virtual as "in itself" undetermined, but reciprocally determined through the differential relations that characterize Ideas (once we add the third moment, the constitution of singularities). It is this regime of determination proper to the virtual that is further described by the term "differentiation". The key point here is that, in _Difference and Repetition_ , both reciprocal determination and differentiation are, as I have argued above, concepts specifically applied to the virtual; they are "horizontal" determinations of the virtual. In contrast, Williams uses both terms to characterize the relation _between the virtual and the actual_ : Deleuze's dialectical philosophy, rooted in the problematic, is for Williams "the reciprocal search for actual and virtual conditions" (2003: 19). Indeed, for Williams, there is a process of reciprocal determination between the virtual and the actual, and the determinations of the virtual by the actual ("upward" determination, again speaking metaphorically) are called differentiation: "the search for conditions takes place in both directions of the construction of reality: from the virtual to the actual (what Deleuze calls 'differentiation') and from the actual to the virtual (differentiation)" ( _ibid_.: 21).

This renovated category of reciprocal determination, and the idea of differentiation that accompanies it, is given the greatest extension by Williams in his reading of Deleuze. He will not hesitate to claim that "This reciprocal quasi-causal relation between the condition and the conditioned is perhaps Deleuze's greatest metaphysical innovation and the key to understanding the power of his philosophy" ( _ibid_.: 176).

Second, and in contrast with the reading proposed here, for Williams intensity is virtual rather than actual. Near the beginning of his book on _Difference and Repetition_ , he uses the following example: "the coconut is both an actual coconut and the intensities or pure becomings it expresses in the encounter with the sensations of individuals (to become hard, to become grainy, to become hairy, to quench, to nourish)" ( _ibid_.: 7). On this reading, the relationship between the virtual and intensity is no relation at all but rather an identity: "virtual intensity" ( _ibid_.: 184). Thus, rather than seeing the final chapter of _Difference and Repetition_ as an explanation for the way in which the impassive virtual is expressed through actual intensive individuals, Williams will locate the individual on the side of the virtual, and claim that this chapter "explains and argues for the way in which individuals are syntheses of virtual Ideas and intensities through a reciprocal determination of the actual and the virtual" ( _ibid_.: 14).

Now, third, I do not think these claims can be made good on the basis of the text of _Differenceand Repetition_ alone, by which I mean to say that the categories of reciprocal determination and intensity do not seem to readily accord with the definitions Williams offers. Certainly, the maintenance of the use of technical terms must always be put at the service of a broader philosophical agenda, and there is no sense in policing terminological differences without considering the latter, especially given Deleuze's very elastic practice on this front himself. And, in fact, there is a broader agenda at work in these interpretive decisions. Williams's reading, unlike that proposed here (the current treatment of Deleuze following less the contours of Deleuze's work itself as much as it does Badiou's reading of it), is itself a synthetic endeavour. His various works on Deleuze, including the commentaries on _Difference and Repetition_ and _The Logic of Sense_ , are attempts to illuminate particular structural features of Deleuzean metaphysics as such (without, of course, erasing obvious changes of emphasis and presentation – Williams is a superior reader of Deleuze, and his attention to very specific torsions in argument and terminology present a model of careful scholarship). Furthermore, the ground and orientation of this synthetic reading is manifestly to be found in _The Logic of Sense_. Evidence of this is ubiquitous. For example, Williams's commentary on _Difference and Repetition_ frequently turns to the elucidation of concepts:

◆ that either do not appear in that work, or are first and most substantially to be found in _The Logic of Sense_ – for example, the theme of the expressive nature of infinitives ("to green", "to wound"). The category of reciprocal determination that, as I have argued here, is not to be found in _Difference and Repetition_ , and the interactionist reading of Deleuze more generally, also finds its strongest and most elaborated form in _The Logic of Sense_ , a point Williams himself makes: "this double reciprocal determination is the basic form for processes in _Logic of Sense_ " (2008: 89);

◆ that appear in only very minimal form and will be subject to massive expansion in _The Logic of Sense_ , the most important example being the concept of the event, which appears for barely more than a page in _Difference and Repetition_ (DR 188–9/244–5), while being one of the central themes of the later work;

◆ or that take on a new and more systematically important role in _The Logic of Sense_ : for example, the important theme of vice-diction (Williams 2008: 155–8), a term whose use is almost entirely limited to the approving review of the Leibnizian alternative to Hegelian contradiction elsewhere (eg. DR 46/68, DR 50/71), and which plays a much more significant role in _The Logic of Sense_.

It is also because of this orientation towards _The Logic of Sense_ , I believe, that the concept of counter-actualization, once more found in any detail only in _The Logic of Sense_ , is given such a prominent role by Williams. As we have already seen, Deleuze presents counter-actualization as the means by which we are able to modify our relationship to the events we are involved in actualizing, thereby modifying ourselves as a result. This creative act is the basis in _The Logic of Sense_ for Deleuze's ethics of the event, so admirably treated by Williams in his study. This is why, in the final analysis, I think that what Williams's reading of Deleuze offers us is a systematic reformulation of Deleuze's philosophy from _an ethical point of view_.

Finally, Williams's approach leads to the more general problem of the coherence of Deleuze's philosophy as a whole, and one of the greatest problems it poses: what broader relationship holds between _Difference and Repetition_ and _The Logic of Sense?_. It seems to me that Williams's solution to this vexed issue is to attempt an original synthesis of the two (and, indeed, many other aspects of Deleuze's philosophy). In this regard, his approach is akin to Badiou's, while succeeding where the latter fails, above all because of its much greater concern for both the letter and the spirit of Deleuze's philosophy. It would perhaps be better to say that Williams forcefully demonstrates the range of mobile possibilities afforded by Deleuze's philosophy when it is extended along lines implicated in Deleuze rather than oriented towards concepts of external provenance.

PASSIVE SYNTHESIS AND THE THINKING SUBJECT

If, for Deleuze, it is the individual who thinks, when we understand this thought as the opening movement in the process of engendering of reality, we are still left with questions about the status of conscious representational thinking. This is, however, less of a problem than it may at first appear, for the account of the intensive individual does not replace the classical philosophical interest in the subject as _res cogitans_ as much as provide a thoroughgoing account of what this conception of the subject presupposes. This is a complex moment in Deleuze's thought; here I will restrict myself to a small number of points bearing on the issues at stake.

_Time and the split subject_

We have already seen that the syntheses of habit and memory found and ground the possibility of representational thinking and the active syntheses that it involves. This is the first part of the characterization of the nature of conscious thought. What it does not explain, however, is what relationship this active thought has to the theory of individuated intensities on which the process of actualization hinges. To proceed, we can consider Deleuze's claim, made frequently in _Difference and Repetition_ , that Kant inaugurated a new era in philosophy by subjecting the thinking subject to a split constituted by time.

Now, like Kant and in his wake, Deleuze wedges time into thought, cracking it into two unequal halves. The difference lies in what it is that time splits. In Kant, it is the thinking self, which is divided between passive receptivity (the empirical self, on the side of sensible intuition) and the unifying ground of active synthesis (the transcendental unity of apperception, on the side of the formal conditions for the possibility of experience, the static machinery of sense). For Deleuze, on the one hand, and as we have just seen, the "thinker" is not a self, but rather the individual _qua_ expressive intensive determination, and "thinking" is conceived of as the movement of progressive determination, of _expressive genesis_. This is the first (according to the order of reasons) half of the picture, where the intensive implicated individual takes the place of Kant's formal transcendental unity of apperception. On the other hand, we have the self whose genesis is founded on the passive syntheses.

Ultimately, then, time does not split the subject as much as it is an irreducible determinant or moment of passage in the movement of actualization. Indeed, counter to the letter of Deleuze's text, we might even say that far from splitting the thinking subject, time is the bridge that carries the implicated Ideas of the intensive individual into the realm of explication.

_Psychic systems and the_ a priori _Other_

This is the first of four points that allow us to appreciate how Deleuze's account of the individual as thinker can be articulated with the conscious capacity for thinking that has been taken as the key feature of human nature. The second concerns the internal structure of the intensive individual in relation to the self. In the final pages of chapter five of _Difference and Repetition_ , Deleuze turns his attention to one case of explicated systems – or, rather, one structure across which the path from implication to explication runs – which he dubs the psychic system. Now Deleuze has already granted that consciousness is a characteristic of all emergent or actualized systems, so the psychic systems that he speaks of are not in the first instance characterized by the conscious-unconscious split. Instead, what characterizes psychic systems, for Deleuze, is the nature of the remaining connections to the intensive precursor of the subject that still remain manifest within it.

On the face of things, we are presented with two qualities of psychic systems that Deleuze calls the I and the self, where the former indicates a certain unity and the latter a continuation of resemblances. We have seen from a number of points of view now the grounds for the advent of the I and the self, which might properly be considered _indentities_ rather than identities: serial and stable systems of impression that are the ultimate product in the psychic regime of the movement of actualization. If the thinking subject is characterized by the form of the I and the habituated content, which we can call self, it is nonetheless still an articulation of a complex individual, which, ontogenetically, precedes it, and structural features that pertain to it, what Deleuze calls "centers of envelopment which testify to the presence of individuating factors" (DR 260/334). These factors are present within the subject (the term I am using here to account for the psychic system, including the qualifications provided by the I and the self) on Deleuze's account as "the _a priori Other_ [ _Autrui_ ]" (DR 260/334).

Deleuze immediately distinguishes his approach from those that assign the other to the status of either a subject or an object, mentioning Sartre by name. In place of these two alternatives, Deleuze characterizes the other in his sense in terms of elements of the prior intensive individual, which remain implicit in the subject: as a "swarm of possibilities around reality... possibles [that] are always Others" (DR 260/334). We must immediately note that by possible, Deleuze is not invoking the category of possibility that he had previously discarded in favour of the virtual. Rather, possibility here must be taken to indicate the implicated status of these Others that crowd our thinking lives. These implicated elements, like the rest of the figures in Deleuze's ontological cast of concepts, are expressive in nature, and Others express other possible worlds that our own individuation remains marked by. The other, in this sense, is constituted of the elements of variety in thought that the self and the I would tend to exclude, offering alternative directions for expression not at the forefront of the unfurling subject.

_The subject and transcendental illusion_

The third element of Deleuze's account of the thinking subject concerns what he would later (in _Francis Bacon_ and then _What is Philosophy?_ ) come to call cliché, and what _Difference and Repetition_ calls the dogmatic image of thought. We have already seen that an inevitable transcendental illusion accompanies all differenciation, in so far as the intensive differences expressed by individuals tend to be cancelled out in their explication: "difference is the sufficient reason of change only to the extent that the change tends to negate difference" (DR 222/286). In the case of thermodynamics, this leads to the positing of the primacy of entropy; in biology, the theories of preformism and hylomorphism. In each case, the mechanism for genesis is explicated on the basis of the result, an explanatory tendency that repeats the same mistake Deleuze diagnoses in Kant's tracing of the transcendental from the empirical.

It is at this level, the world of qualified extension and cliché, that the figure of the autonomous thinking subject is to be located. The dogmatic image of thought is ultimately a set of claims about the nature of the place of the thinker (the I and Self of psychic systems) that considers the extended and qualified _result_ of actualization to be its foundation, the ground zero of reality. To take the subject as autonomous, as, at root, the agent of an internally coherent and native representational process, and to theorize thinking on this basis, is to misunderstand everything fundamental about thought. In turn, what strikes us as odd about Deleuze's account of thinking – in particular, its non-subjective and ante-representational character – is the distance it stands at from the clichés that we inhabit.

_Transcendental empiricism_

Again, this clichéd view is, for Deleuze, entirely inevitable, but given that it is, how do we come to think the new that is perpetually emerging, which we are indeed immersed in despite ourselves? This brings us to the fourth and final point I should like to make with respect to thought, and it concerns precisely this question of the _origin_ of thought in the conscious subject for Deleuze. Its answer returns us once more to the main concepts of this chapter: intensity, time, difference.

As we have seen already in Chapter 3, the claim that thought is always engendered by a violent encounter that we are unprepared for is an important one in Deleuze's philosophy, and nowhere more than in _Difference and Repetition_ , which includes some of the most memorable passages anywhere in Deleuze's work on this very point:

Certainties force us to think no more than doubts... Concepts only ever designate possibilities. They lack the claws of absolute necessity – in other words, of an original violence inflicted upon thought; the claws of a strangeness or an enmity which alone would awaken thought from its natural stupor or eternal possibility: there is only involuntary thought, aroused but constrained within thought, and all the more absolutely necessary for being born, illegitimately, of fortuitousness in the world. Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy: everything begins with misophy. Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think... Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental _encounter_.

(DR 139/181–2)

This reads as a manifesto, and ought to be considered as one. If the nature of thought is one of the key issues in _Difference and Repetition_ , we must take as fundamental Deleuze's claim that thought is not the active product of a subject, construed however one wishes, but the product of an encounter with something extra-subjective – or rather pre-subjective – that we are fundamentally unprepared for.

How are we to assimilate these claims into the framework elaborated in this chapter thus far? Simply by noting the source of the encounters that spur on thought for Deleuze: problematic Ideas expressed in intensive individuals. It is, in short, the encounter between the individual and the subject that engenders thought in the subject. Let us also note the important fact that it is because such encounters are intensive that _Difference and Repetition_ gives such primacy to sensibility: intensity is for Deleuze experienced in the first instance through a _coup_ , a shock of sensation. This is why the citation above continues with the words: "What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that _it can only be sensed_ " (DR 139/181, emphasis added).

Our initial contact with the world is through sensation, and it is this contact that engenders thought and the particular faculties that arise in response to this shock. This is the key reason why Deleuze calls his position in _Difference and Repetition_ a transcendental empiricism. It also marks one of the fundamental deviations of Deleuze from Maimon. Where Maimon solves the issue of the communication of sensibility and the understanding by collapsing the former into the latter, Deleuze maintains the irreducibility of sensation. And to the Maimonian objection to such a manoeuvre (how could what is unintelligible – i.e. sensation – become so?), Deleuze's response is to elaborate, in chapter three of _Difference and Repetition_ , a theory of the genesis of diverse faculties, each proper to its own object, rather than maintaining Kant's representational account of the structure of thought. We are also forced to recognize the necessarily indirect role that virtual Ideas play in the genesis of thinking. As subjects, we do not think Ideas. Should we have such direct contact with the virtual, Deleuze's continual emphasis on sensibility and sensation would be beside the point, since a relation between thought and Ideas would take something like the form of intellectual intuition. It is because our contact with problematic Ideas is always in the form of contact with intensive individuals that sensibility must be primary for Deleuze: it is only through a sensible encounter that the fuse can be lit that runs from the sensation to the Idea.

Finally, we can connect this fourth point with the temporal syntheses once more. The syntheses of habit and memory have an inherently conservative tendency, counteracted by the formal time of the eternal return, which subjects them to the centrifugal explusion of any crystallization of unity. We have also just seen the sense in which the intensive individual is the "thinker" of the eternal return, the third synthesis of time, in so far as it legislates the ceaselessly repeated submersion of qualified extension in its intensive origins. With these points in mind, we can characterize the sensible shock that inaugurates all thought as the implacable consequence of the alliance between intensity and the future, between the will-to-power and the eternal return. All thought begins in contact with intensity, and this contact comes about owing to the temporal nature of actualization.

THOUGHT AND THE EVENT

Badiou concludes the main text of his work on Deleuze by abruptly shifting from questions concerning the fold to "the consequences of a political nature that follow from it" (DCB 90/135). In fact, Badiou's critical meditations come to an end by suggesting that the problem with the figure of the fold is that it once more submits the event – the advent of the new – to what already exists. Thus he writes: "I cannot bring myself to think that the new is a fold of the past, or that thinking can be reduced to philosophy or a single configuration of its act" (DCB 91/136). Given all that we have seen, this is at once an obvious consequence of Badiou's reading of Deleuze, and obviously false with respect to Deleuze himself.

Even should we grant Badiou the equation of memory and being or the One, thereby installing the past at the heart of the present, we cannot assert that the actualization of the virtual past is in any way the replaying of what has already taken place. Even Deleuze's most Bergsonian formulation of this relationship between the past and the present (found in _Bergsonism_ and the related texts from the 1950s) insists that since actualization has no set method or path these must be created:

what coexisted in the virtual ceases to coexist in the actual and is distributed in lines or parts that cannot be summed up, each one retaining the whole, but only from a certain perspective, from a certain point of view. These lines of differentiation are therefore truly creative: they only actualize by inventing, they create in these conditions the physical, vital or psychical representative of the ontological level that they embody.

(B 101)

For Deleuze, the famous Bergsonian _élan vital_ is nothing but the creative movement of actualization itself. And if Deleuze is a vitalist, as I have already argued, it is not in so far as the virtual is the vital force of being. Rather, the virtual and the actual are both caught up in the great drama of actualization, which sets the stable world of identities in motion along an incessant internal and decentralizing path, but one that, at least in _Difference and Repetition_ , solely unfolds on the side of the actual. Rather than preserving a Neoplatonic hierarchy of being, actualization "opens onto a trajectory or a spiraling expansion that moves further and further away from a centre" (FLB 137tm/188). Further, this eccentric spiralling at the heart of being – _contra_ Badiou – does not require a unified moment. Deleuze is emphatic: "Bergson was right, therefore, to say that from the point of view of differenciation, even the resemblances which appear along divergent lines of evolution (for example, the eye as an 'analogous' organ) _must be related first of allto the heterogeneity in the production mechanism_" (DR 212/274, emphasis added).

We have seen that Deleuze does not simply assert a dyadic opposition between the present and the past, between an active virtual and a passive or residual actuality. Instead, the roles are reversed. It is the actual that is the veritable motor of being, whose activity engages with the neutral problematic differential structure of the virtual, actualizing it without being caused to do so by it. And, further, this movement of actualization is not simple exteriorization but an elaborate, even baroque, movement that engages the intensive individual with the radical dynamisms in which times and spaces emerge without common _ratio_ or transcendent orientation. The world of the actual, although irreducibly engaged with genetic instances of the virtual, seethes with its own determinations, its own productive capacities, its own power for novelty. Even more important, I would argue, is the introduction of a third moment into his most developed temporal schema provided by _Difference and Repetition_ : that of the eternal return. As we have already seen, it is only on pain of ignoring this absolutely central emphasis that we could present Deleuze as an orthodox Bergsonian, for whom memory is the final word in the convoluted tempest of time.

I should like to add one final remark on Deleuze's theory of thought as we have canvassed it here. Badiou is certainly right to claim that thought, for Deleuze, begins in a generalized outside, and that the inside is constituted, a product. It is not correct, however, to say that the fold is the key concept in Deleuze's arsenal for coming to grips with this procedure. More importantly, by identifying thinking with the constitution of the self, we are provided with at most only half of the picture. We might attribute this additional aspect of Deleuze's work to his transcendental bent. Unlike Badiou, whose subtractive methodology orients his work in the direction of a minimal ontology, on the one hand, and a reductive account of the irreducible variety of being, on the other, Deleuze takes as his goal the search for the sufficient reason _for_ this variety of being. Where Badiou presents a minimal ontology, Deleuze's is maximal in scope.

Badiou's limited understanding of Deleuze's account of thought is more profound than just overlooking the secondary subjective capacity of thinking. What his account in no way indicates is a familiarity with the nature of the genetic activity to which Deleuze gives the name of thought in its fullest extension. The invocation of the fold, taken in Badiou's limited sense, does little more in this regard than schematize the result of the genesis of thought; it does not explain it. This is an important point because, should Badiou have grasped the entire gamut of concepts and processes involved in the genesis of thinking, the simple dualism that his reading of Deleuze relies on would be voided in advance.

It is clear that thought, for Badiou, is an absolutely central category. This is also true for Deleuze. However, Badiou's treatment of Deleuze's theory of thought makes little progress, other than repeating the brief narrative of the One and its emanative cinders, a narrative that, by the end of _The Clamor of Being_ , has become nothing more than a hollow formula, repeated at an increasingly large distance from Deleuze's philosophy itself.
8. A SINGULAR PALIMPSEST

This book has been prosecuted in the vein of an adversarial trial. At issue has been neither the correctness of Deleuze's philosophy, nor indeed that of Badiou, but rather the evidence in Deleuze's philosophy to support the reading offered of his work by Badiou in _The Clamor of Being_ and the texts related to it. Or, better, since it has no recourse to the moral and imperial tone of the ideal of judgement, what has been pursued is a partial set of enquiries or _queries_. These queries have concerned a list of issues and concepts, a set of cases: being, method, the virtual, time, truth, the event, subjectivity and thought. I have attempted, relative to each case, an assessment of Badiou's assertions about Deleuze in the light of specific moments in Deleuze's work, and against the background of Badiou's own account of the issues that he takes up again in Deleuze.

It may be objected that such an approach to august philosophical texts is far from philosophical. Perhaps. We should, though, recall that decisive law, one that is always put into play when we turn to the explication of another's thought, expressed by Nietzsche in _Ecce Homo_ , in an exclamation that takes on a tragic colour in the light of history: "Above all, do not mistake me for someone else!" (Nietzsche 1992: 673). Of course, the reasons by which one writer might mistake another in this fashion are not necessarily simple. The fact that such an ensemble of misinterpretations is indeed prosecuted by Badiou has nonetheless been demonstrated in each of these cases.

This will have been the first of three general conclusions established here, namely that Badiou's reading of Deleuze is marked throughout by error. Simply put, Badiou is wrong about many aspects of Deleuze's thought. Badiou's interpretive lynchpin in _The Clamor of Being_ is, as we have repeatedly seen, the idea that Deleuze's work revolves around the fundamental posit of an ultimate ontological unity. What the multiple investigations pursued here evince is a reversal of the role that the posit of the One plays in Badiou's reading. Rather than being the key element in Deleuze's thought, it is rather the _a priori_ assertion on Badiou's part that he imposes on Deleuze's work. The thesis of the One is thus used by Badiou as a lens through which he examines Deleuze; it is not a claim of Deleuzean thought that he has uncovered. It is even, perhaps, the case that the various positions that he attributes to Deleuze are presented in ways characteristic of and derived from his own philosophy, as if in order to read Deleuze's philosophy it had to be drawn near to his own, illuminated by his own light. Arguably, some of Badiou's assertions about Deleuze are really descriptions of the shadows cast from it by the light of _Being and Event_.

Now, the querulous approach pursued here has inevitably led to a quite widespread agnosticism about Deleuze's philosophy, an agnosticism concerning the general status and claims of his thought on many points. The claims advanced in this book constitute a defence of Deleuzean metaphysics only partially and _via negative_. The partial approach adopted has, however, provided the means to account in some detail for one of Deleuze's key works, namely _Difference and Repetition_ , owing to the fact that a number of the concepts investigated by Badiou find their most extensive and complex expression in that work. The locus of the defence of Deleuze presented here is thus to be found in _Difference and Repetition_ , in so far as it resists Badiou's account. Arguably, with respect to a number of concepts – in particular, time, thought and the virtual – the metaphysics proposed by Deleuze in this work is irreducible to a monotonous ontology of the One, displaying as it does both an unwavering commitment to the theme of a fundamental difference (in the twinned forms of the virtual and intensity) and the radical ungrounding nature of time. _Difference and Repetition_ can be read as the most alien philosophical work imaginable to Parmenides' inaugural paean to the One. If the stakes of this book – and its attempt to defend Deleuze against the Badiouian schema – are to be located in one particular set of claims, they are to be found in my proposed interpretation of _Difference and Repetition_.

Surveying this more or less entirely tentative and negative orientation, it would be possible to arrive at the conclusion that my argument here concludes that Badiou's reading of Deleuze has no value at all. This is not quite the case. For if Badiou's conclusions about Deleuze are in a number of ways incorrect, and sometimes profoundly so, the manner of his approach to Deleuze, his resolutely principled and philosophical mode of engagement, have provided one of the most significant incitements yet to Deleuze's readers, an incitement that is at once philosophical, vigorous and profound. The singularity of the palimpsest that is _The Clamor of Being_ is revealed not by considering the accuracy of his representation of Deleuze, but by attending to the renovated force that it has brought to the reading of that work. Although Badiou's attitude towards Deleuze has in recent years increasingly taken the form of a static opposition (as I noted in Chapter 1), the genuine engagement with Deleuzean metaphysics constituted by _The Clamor of Being_ is irreducible to any of the previous ambient or studied attitudes, whether critical or laudatory. While orienting his reading around the fallacious assertion of the primacy of the One, Badiou introduced a new way to enter into Deleuze's work, one that has not ceased to invigorate the reception of this work itself. We are led, therefore, to the assertion of a rule of thought (perhaps a correlate to the Nietzschean demand cited above) that is not inconsequential: one should always strive to have _more than one master_. This relation, however, must take the form of a submission, not to the level of human existence, but to what, in those we take as our masters, is excessive and inhuman.

As Foucault often remarked – in a sentiment that is also profoundly Deleuzean – it is the advent of problems that provokes change in the reception of an idea, a thought, a practice. It is good to be forced to re-read; it is good to listen again to familiar words when they are spoken in a foreign tongue, in a novel idiolect. While we must judge Badiou's Deleuze on the grounds of fidelity to the text, we must also reassert that there is a greater fidelity in question, and that is a fidelity to philosophy itself.

A fidelity to philosophy, as both Badiou and Deleuze argue so forcefully, is always a fidelity to the advent of something new, of a becoming whose law is irreducible to the exhaustive mappings of what exists in the sonnambulant and elastic hiatus of the present. It is a fidelity to an event in thought whose unexpected grace – a grace that is as cruel as it is sweet, cruel in the measure of its sweetness – comes to overturn accepted certainties, ways of living and feeling, modes of thought.

This is what we are reminded of by a moving passage in _The Clamor of Being_. Breaking off a critical discussion of the relationship he perceived between chance and the eternal return in Deleuze, Badiou writes:

On this particular point, Deleuze did not pursue the discussion in detail. I take it up here, but find the fact that he is no longer there to rejoin somewhat disconcerting. How I would so like him to point out to me once again, as he did with great relish in so many different passages, to what extent my philosophy has a reflexive, negative, or analogical value...

(DCB 77/116)

Beyond thetic disagreement regarding this or that, philosophy is nothing if not the continuation of the movement of a modality of thought, of a certain haggard consciousness, engendered by problems. We do not desire the continuation of disputes, of challenges, of the endless process of refining distinctions and the rigidification of boundaries, but rather something _in_ these acts that moves us forwards in thought.
NOTES

1. THE HISTORY OF A DISJUNCTIVE SYNTHESIS

 1. Quoted by Louise Burchill, translator of Badiou's _Deleuze_. The phrase is Badiou's, spoken to Jean-Clet Martin on presenting the latter with a copy of the book.

 2. A brief, somewhat partisan, but nonetheless informative summary of the Deleuze–Badiou relationship can be found in Francois Dosse's biography of Deleuze and Guattari; see Dosse (2010: 365–72).

 3. The final sentence of this text reads: "The proletariat is not the inventor of ideological resistance: it is its principal logician" Badiou & Balmès (1976 : 123). On _De l'ideologie_ , see Bosteels (2005: esp. 755–8).

 4. "Deleuze would like to be to Kant what Marx is to Hegel, Deleuze stands Kant on his head: the categorical imperative, but a desiring one; the unconditional, but materialist; the autonomy of the subject, but the subject as a fluid flux. Sadly, if you invert Kant, you find Hume, which is the same thing – and Deleuze's first academic crush... On the toboggan of Desire, the head bobs down and up again, until it doesn't know one side from the other, object from subject, any more. All in all, that this be the Good or that, Evil, is just a reversible matter of mood, with not much consequence: always act so that the maxim of your action does not, strictly, concern anybody" (Badiou 2004a: 79tm).

 5. The irony of Badiou's early critique of _Anti-Oedipus_ is that this work _is_ Kantian in a significant respect overlooked by Badiou's brash attack; Deleuze even states that it "had a Kantian ambition, it should be read as a kind of _Critique of Pure Reason_ at the level of the unconscious" (DRF 289). However, Badiou's critique lands wide of the mark in so far as it presents the Kant of _Anti-Oedipus_ as an unmodified version of the Kant of the _Critique of Practical Reason_ , overlooking the important transformations of the Kantian project that are undertaken there and, more significantly, in _Difference and Repetition_.

2. IS DELEUZE A PHILOSOPHER OF THE ONE?

 1. Indeed, Badiou claims to have been "among the first, if not the first, to have treated Deleuze as a philosopher" (TW 69). In the final chapter below, the question of the relationship between quality and quantity in Deleuze is directly addressed.

 2. In fact, B 38–47 presents a lengthy and extremely sharp critique of the One–Many dyad, as concepts that "like baggy clothes, are much too big" (B 44), lacking in the precision necessary for a thoroughgoing ontology capable of thinking the import of duration for the theory of being.

 3. The translator of _Foucault_ , Seán Hand, provides his own translation of the title of Bergson's _Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience_ (Essay on the immediate given of awareness). The standard English version of the text, however, is entitled _Time and Free Will_ , which I have substituted here.

 4. On Deleuze's account of univocity, see the definitive presentation in Smith (2001: 167–83).

 5. Aristotle (2004: 57). For an unusually clear reading of this text, see the remarks from Heidegger's 1931 lecture course, "Oneness of Being – Not as Genus but as Analogy" (Heidegger 1995: 27–34ff.).

 6. They are, though, in principle intelligible: "I grant that the singular is _per se_ intelligible as far as it itself goes. But... it is not _per se_ intelligible to some intellect – say, to ours" (Duns Scotus 1994: 112 n.192).

 7. Deleuze's critique of Aristotle that opens Chapter 1 of _Difference and Repetition_ already outlines the locus of these critiques: at both ends of the spectrum of difference (the categories and individuation), Aristotle's philosophy constitutes a failure of nerve. On the one hand, the most precise that the conceptual thought of difference can become on Aristotle's account is the level of species (differences between individuals are inessential or beneath intelligible distinction), and thus no _ratio existendi_ in the Leibnizian sense – and here is one reason for Leibniz's manifest superiority _vis-à-vis_ Aristotle – could ever be provided for individuals (why this singular being here and now?) On the other hand, Being as such can just as little be subject to thought, since it is only intelligible through the categories. In other words, the quasi-univocity of the categories actually forecloses any capacity to think the univocity of Being.

 8. Of course, as Deleuze is quite aware, Scotus's decisions in this regard are wedded to his theological commitments. The following text from _Expressionism in Philosophy_ is emblematic: "univocity in Scotus seems compromised by a concern to avoid pantheism. For his theological, that is to say 'creationist, perspective forced him to conceive univocal Being as a _neutralized, indifferent_ concept... With Spinoza univocity becomes the object of a pure affirmation" (EPS 67). This passage echoes and expands on the text mentioned above ("That is why he only _thought_ univocal being"; DR 39/59).

 9. This is not to say that "There is no Deleuzean ontology", as Francois Zourabichvili claims. The key stake in Deleuze's most important works is that ontology must become an ontology of difference, an ontology of multiplicity, and no longer an ontology of the one: the same claim, let us note, that opens _Being and Event_. It is Zourabichvilli's assent to the necessity of this connection that motivates his rejection of ontology: "If Deleuze's philosophy has an orientation, it is certainly this: the extinction of the name of 'being', and, as a result, that of ontology" (1996: 6–7). Likewise, I think it an exaggeration to claim that "It is not ontology in itself that interests Deleuze, but rather... the moment of its history in which the thesis of univocity emerges" ( _ibid_.: 9), since Deleuze clearly and in numerous texts engages with clear relish in discussions of non-univocal ontological positions, from which he draws more than merely negative conclusions.

 10. See Daniel Smith's superlative and exhaustive article "The Concept of the Simulacrum" (2006), which presents the entire course of this concept in Deleuze's thought.

 11. It is worth noting that this much cited appendix (first published in 1967) to _The Logic of Sense_ is in fact a very close rehearsal of the end of the first chapter of _Difference and Repetition_.

 12. The concept of the simulacrum is, of course, pursued by other thinkers too, most famously perhaps by Jean Baudrillard: the _locus classicus_ is without a doubt _Simulations_ (Baudrillard 1983). Closer to Deleuze, however, is Pierre Klossowski, to whom Deleuze devotes key passages in _Difference and Repetition_ , along with an appendix ("Klossowki, or Bodies-Languages"). On Deleuze's use of, and interest in, Klossowksi, see James (2009); on Klossowski's thought more generally, see Ian James's fine study _The Persistence of a Name_ (2001). See also Ashley Woodward's "Klossowski's Nietzsche" (2011), on Klossowski's reading of Nietzsche, which had an important impact on Deleuze.

 13. Now, Deleuze also notes that, at least in the _Sophist_ , there is a moment at which the entire edifice begins to lose its structural integrity: "Plato discovers, in the flash of an instant as he leans over its abyss, that the simulacrum is not simply a false copy, but that it calls into question the very notion of the copy... and of the model" (LS 294/305). This is the reason why Deleuze notes in _Difference and Repetition_ (DR 128/168) that the overturning of Platonism begins in Plato himself. On this point, see Flaxman (2009: 18–24).

 14. And, indeed, to the formulation of the theme of "nomadic distribution", introduced at the same time as that of crowned anarchy. Of course, the former suits Badiou's purposes less well, since it is difficult to abstract a moment of substantial unity in this case (the proposed "crown" in crowned anarchy). In any case, nomadic distribution (a theme that can be found in a number of key texts, including both _Difference and Repetition_ and _A Thousand Plateaus_ ) signifies a distribution lacking any external principle of ordering: beings are arrayed according to their relations with each other, lacking any ultimate _ratio_ or _logos_.

 15. Badiou's assertion that "this Event with a capital 'E'" is in all likelihood the "Deleuze's Good" (DCB 27/44) can indeed be agreed with here, but _only_ on the condition that the three central characteristics of the Good in Plato are repudiated: its ontological status as "beyond being"; its structural status as self-identical or as ideal ipseity; and its moral characteristic. The Event in Deleuze is certainly that which ruptures the order of material causality, or, rather, is the champion of a sense that is irreducible to material reality.

 16. This idea is briefly discussed in the context of Deleuze's treatment of intensity in the final chapter of _Difference and Repetition_ (DR 234/301–2), a text I shall return to below.

 17. A number of the points made here find their compacted form in Deleuze's short but powerful essay on Maurice de Gandillac, "Les Plages d'immanence" (DRF 244–6). We read, for example, the following: "without a doubt the theory [the Neoplatonist theory of emanation] never ceased to... subordinate immanence to transcendence, to measure immanent Being according to transcendent Unity" (DRF 244–5). Indeed, it would be possible for the current work to be entirely structured around this article, which moves from a general consideration of the figures of transcendence and immanence in ontology, to the history of philosophy, and then to the decisions that mark a philosophical life.

 18. Daniel W. Smith's summary of Deleuze's engagement with the thesis of univoc-ity I noted above includes the same recognition of the emanative scheme in Badiou's interpretation as I have tried to elicit here. He notes, for example, that Badiou "wrongly presents Deleuze's 'univocal ontology' as if it were a neoplatonic 'philosophy of the One'. For instance, when Badiou writes that, in Deleuze, 'the paradoxical or super-eminent One engenders, in an immanent manner, a procession of beings, whose univocal sense it distributes', he is giving an exact description of an _emanative_ ontology, not a univocal one. In general, Badiou combines transitive, emanative and immanent elements in his treatment of univocity" (Smith 2001: 181–2 n.19). The closest Deleuze ever gets to such a view is in the final chapter of _Bergsonism_ , in which he draws attention to a rough analogy between Bergson's virtual and the One of "the Platonists" (B 93) – which is, indeed, not very close.

 19. At least, this is the account that is presented in _Expressionism in Philosophy_. The other half of Deleuze's doctoral work, _Difference and Repetition_ , differs in an important respect, as we shall see shortly.

 20. It is therefore strange to read Keith Ansell-Pearson's assertion to the contrary when he writes that "In his major study of Spinoza... Deleuze's innovation was to pay careful attention to the notion of expression and to show that... there are traces of emanationist thinking in Spinoza" (Ansell-Pearson 2002: 112).

 21. This point is strongly argued in Hardt (1993), where _causa sui_ assumes a central role in his reading of Deleuze's philosophy.

 22. This is not to say that other _non-causal_ formal elements are not in play. In fact, Deleuze's account of modal essence in Spinoza holds that it maintains an _expressive_ relation with the world of modal existence, in the same way that virtual Ideas relate to the world of actuality in _Difference and Repetition_. For an account of this parallel in Deleuze's work, see Simon Duffy's _tour de force_ "Albert Lautman" (2009).

 23. This is also Deleuze's point in relation to Gilles Châtelet's Aristotelianism: "Immanence, the field of immanence, consists of a Power–Act relation. The two notions are inseparable, only existing in correlation. It is this which makes Châtelet an Aristotelian" (Deleuze 1988c: 8).

 24. It is at this point that the ontology pursued by the late Maurice Merleau-Ponty tends towards contact with Deleuze. For an argument in this direction, see Reynolds & Roffe (2006).

 25. Deleuze seems to say precisely the opposite in the original French: the passage cited above in fact begins with the claim: "Nevertheless, there still remains an _indifference_ between substance and modes [ _Pourtant subsiste encore une indifference entre la substance et les modes_ ]" (DR 40tm/59, emphasis added). There is nonetheless a justification for the inversion in the English translation, however deliberate or accidental, of difference for indifference. The indifference Deleuze is speaking of is relative to the indifference manifested by Scotus with respect to the univocal affirmation of singularity, which, despite Spinoza's advances, returns in the form of a short-changing of the independent ontological status of the mode. In other words, it is precisely in so far as there is a radical ontological _difference_ between substance and modes in Spinoza that the modes themselves can only be a matter of _indifference_ from the point of view of the affirmation of univocal being.

3. METHOD

 1. Jorge-Luis Borges' "The Writing of the God" (1999: 250–54) reveals the underlying structure of this "lost" name: that it is, rather than being lost, in fact hidden, requiring the most dedicated and ascetic search in order to discover it. The narrator in this tale indeed finds the name of God, but written on the skin of the tiger who will be his executioner. In pursuing the ascesis of nomination in search of the absolute, we arrive at the meeting point of mysticism and death so well expounded in the work of Georges Bataille. See, for example, Bataille (1986: 252–64). At some distance from Bataille, although nonetheless close to a certain mysticism, we find here a parallel once more between Badiou's Deleuze and Plotinus. In the sixth _Ennead_ , Plotinus argues that we cannot really address the One properly in language, and that even the name "the One" itself remains preliminary and external. See in particular Plotinus (1991: §6.9.5), where we read that "strictly no name is apt to it, but since name it we must there is a certain rough fitness in designating it as unity with the understanding that it is not the unity of some other thing".

 2. In fact, far from rejecting the figure of the dialectic, Deleuze wishes to rehabilitate it, stripping from it both its investment by Plato in the ultimate nature of unity and the Hegelian emphasis on negativity, thereby returning it to the regime of the problematic. We shall see this movement in the next chapter, given over to a discussion of the virtual in Deleuze. It is also worth noting that for no thinker of any importance is the dialectic simply a methodological trope: certainly for neither Plato nor Hegel.

 3. This structure, although evident in all Descartes' methodogical texts, is nowhere clearer than in "The discovery of truth according to the natural light" (Descartes 1985: 26–7).

 4. This common Leibnizian theme is to be found in even his very early published work, for example, "Meditations on Knowledge, Truth and Ideas" (Leibniz [1684] 1989: 23–7).

 5. See also TW 77–8 on the empirical as the regime of cases and the transcendental as the regime of the One.

 6. In the opening chapter of _Bergsonism_ , Deleuze is clear that the illusory problems that populate thought are not simple errors that can be done away with, and in this sense we never arrive at a truth freed from all fiction. This is, as Deleuze notes, a Kantian theme: "Although Bergson determines the nature of false problems in a completely different way and although the Kantian critique itself seems to him to be a collection of badly stated problems, he treats the illusion in a similar way to Kant. The illusion is based in the deepest part of the intelligence: it is not, strictly speaking, dispelled or dispellable, rather it can only be _repressed_ " (B 21).

 7. These claims, as we shall see, are retooled – in a somewhat counter-Bergsonian fashion – by Deleuze in the final chapter of _Difference and Repetition_ in order to characterize intensity. On this concept, see Chapter 6.

 8. See, for example, the discussions at B 23, 27 and 29 with respect to the transcendental. See also the following sentiment from Deleuze's earlier piece "Bergson's Conception of Difference": "This method is something other than a spatial analysis, more than a description of experience, and less (so it seems) than a transcendental analysis" (ID 49).

 9. Deleuze makes this point very strongly in "Bergson, 1859–1941"; see in particular ID 34–6, a passage that begins with the telling words "Do we not... see that dualism is a moment already surpassed in Bergson's philosophy?"

 10. In his short but vast treatment of the Kantian system, _Kant's Critical Philosophy_ , Deleuze will go as far as to claim that the "doctrine of the faculties forms the real network which constitutes the transcendental method" (KCP 10).

 11. It is in these pages that Deleuze introduces the memorable trope of a "philosopher-monkey" who "opens up to truth, himself producing the true, but only to the extent that he begins to penetrate the coloured thickness of a problem" (DR 164–5/214).

 12. The interview "Portrait du philosophe en spectateur" (DRF 197–203) is particularly clear on this point. There, Deleuze presents his (perhaps somewhat surprising) attitude towards taxonomies: "There is nothing more amusing than classifications, tables. They are like the skeleton of a book, its vocabulary, its dictionary... Nothing is more beautiful than the classifications of natural history" (DRF 266).

4. THE VIRTUAL

 1. Let me note that Deleuze indeed indicates that he is a classical philosopher, but, unlike Badiou, does not consider this nomination to mean non- or anti-critical in the Kantian sense. Consider the following text, which also speaks to Badiou's reading on a number of registers: "I believe in philosophy as system. The idea of system is compromised when it is related to the coordinates of Identity, Resemblance and Analogy. It is Leibniz, I believe, who was the first to identify system and philosophy, in a manner to which I too adhere. Thus questions concerning 'the overcoming of philosophy' or 'the death of philosophy' do not concern me. I feel myself to be a very classical philosopher. System, for me, must not only be in perpetual heterogeneity, but must be a _heterogenesis_ , something, it seems to me, which has never been tried" (DRF 338). Deleuze's claims about philosophy and system can be found, both explicitly and in the manner in which he presents his work, throughout.

 2. Alberto Toscano (2000) expresses a similar puzzlement in his joint review of _The Clamor of Being_ and Badiou's _Manifesto for Philosophy_.

 3. As has often been noted, Paul Patton's translation has this title as "Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference" for Deleuze's "Synthèse idéele de la difference". While the motive of this choice is certainly justifiable – given that the phrase "ideal synthesis" is prey to an obvious misunderstanding – to my mind its most problematic consequence is that it has the potential to mislead the reader into thinking that the synthesis of difference for Deleuze is entirely treated in this chapter, in relation to the virtual, that is, that the synthesis of difference occurs entirely at the ideal level. However, there is a concomitant synthesis of difference that pertains to intensity presented in _Difference and Repetition_ whose role in the metaphysics presented there is already overlooked.

 4. The most incisive works considering the chicanes that characterize Deleuze's relationship with Kantian metaphysics published thus far have been by Christian Kerslake (2002, 2004, 2007). See also James Williams's (2005a: ch. 2) treatment of this relationship, specifically as it pertains to the transcendental, and recent works by both Levi Bryant (2008) and Joe Hughes (2009a).

 5. On this point, once again see Hughes (2009a: 55–7).

 6. Of course, the problem for Kant is that this regulative function is frequently exceeded, hence the need for a critique of _pure_ reason, that is, a use of reason that is disjunct from the matter provided through sensibility and the structure provided by the understanding. As Deleuze notes, however, we make a mistake if we think this is the most important aspect of Kant's account of Ideas, even if it is his starting-point: "if, according to Kant, reason does pose false problems and therefore itself gives rise to illusion, this is because in the first place it is the faculty of posing problems in general" (DR 168/218). This is characteristic of Deleuze's approach to Kantian reason more generally. While he will not hesitate to insist that "[i]n many ways understanding and reason are deeply tormented by the ambition to make things in themselves known to us" (KCP 21), a theme that is discussed and admired in _Difference and Repetition_ (135–6/178–9), on balance he spends much more time emphasizing the positive character of reason.

 7. It is on this precise point that Deleuze's reading of the Kant Idea departs from the approach pursued by the Lacanian position of Slavoj Zizek, and which, more broadly, distinguishes Deleuze and Jacques Lacan who are, in many respects (at least in the works of the 1960s) incredibly close.

 8. Such is the result of the mistake of taking problems to be derived from propositions that have no clear or decided-on designation, which Deleuze critiques in chapter three of _Difference and Representation_ under the title of the postulate of modality, or solutions.

 9. A proper assessment in the English literature of Maimon's role in Deleuze's thought is problematized by the fact that, until quite recently, very little has been available in translation. The publication in 2010 of his _Essay on Transcendental Philosophy_ is certain to rectify this situation. A number of important secondary texts exist, however (Atlas 1965; Beiser 1987: 285–323; Buzaglo 2002), of which I think the Beiser text is the most helpful, certainly with regard to situating Maimon within the critical context. Texts on the role of Maimon in Deleuze have also been appearing more regularly in the last decade. Graham Jones's (2009) survey piece is, to my mind, the most comprehensive of these, but see also Smith (2000, 2007), Bryant (2008) and Voss (2011).

 10. Leibniz uses this example in numerous places, which Deleuze enumerates in _The Fold_ (FLB 154 n.9/116 n.9). An examplar, though, is certainly to be found in the preface of his _New Essays on Human Understanding_ (Leibniz 1981: 54).

 11. "According to an objection often made against Maimon, Ideas, understood as the differentials of thought, themselves introduce a minimum of 'given' which cannot be thought; they restore the duality of infinite and finite understanding, which function respectively as the conditions of existence and the conditions of knowledge, and which the entire Kantian Critique nevertheless proposed to eliminate" (DR 192–3/249). Deleuze's solution to these issues, discussed above, is stated in the sentences that follow this indictment: "This objection, however, applies only to the extent that the faculty of Ideas according to Maimon is the understanding, just as it was reason according to Kant; that is, in either case, a faculty which constitutes a common sense and cannot tolerate the presence within itself of a kernel on which the empirical exercise of the conjoint faculties would break... This is no longer so when Ideas are related to the transcendent exercise of a particular faculty liberated from any common sense" (DR 193/249).

 12. See Kant (CPR Introduction; esp. B19–24, "The General Problem of Pure Reason"). At the start of Maimon's _Essay_ , we read: "the question is: how is philosophy as a pure _a priori_ cognition possible? The great Kant posed this question in his _Critique of Pure Reason_... The propositions of transcendental philosophy are [like the propositions of the physical sciences] indeed also synthetic, but their principle is not experience (perception), it is rather the reverse: they are the principles of the necessary conditions of experience by means of which what in perception merely is, must be" (Maimon 2010: 6–7).

 13. Joe Hughes presents a strong counter to this position in his _Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation_ , in which he argues that Deleuze is at root a genetic phenom-enologist, in search precisely of the genetic rules for subjective experience. A proper consideration of Hughes's reading cannot be provided here. However, the following point can at least be noted: Deleuze insists throughout his work, and indeed in the pages of _Difference and Repetition_ itself, that it is not just human beings but all things that are contractile in nature, which in-habit the time of the present. Hughes is forced, by his approach to Deleuze, to neglect this claim, which would open up his account at its very starting-point (the starting-point of the dynamic genesis of representation) to the non-human and indeed non-organic (the stalks of wheat and the embryonic turtles of _Difference and Repetition_ give way to the social codification of all flows in _Anti-Oedipus_ and then the slow symphony of the earth itself in _A Thousand Plateaus_ ). An important misstep in his argument seems to be an overly narrow reading of the category of representation in _Difference and Repetition_ (on this, see in particular Hughes [2009a: 117–18]).

 14. In recent and contemporary work on Deleuze, there have been effectively four key investigations into the role of mathematics in his thought. The first and most widely known of these is provided by Manuel DeLanda's various accounts of Deleuze on the basis of a thoroughgoing account of complexity theory (I refer in particular to DeLanda [2002]). The problem with DeLanda's work in the current context is the (not necessarily problematic) lack of discussion of Deleuze's own use of mathematics, in favour of extending the framework of _A Thousand Plateaus_ in the direction of the formal sciences. Secondly, Smith has published a number of related interventions on the matter of the Badiou–Deleuze opposition on the status of mathematics particularly as it relates to the former's axiomatic approach in comparison with the latter's problematics. Smith clearly demonstrates that at issue here is quite a profound _differend_ , whereby, from Deleuze's point of view, axiomatic set theory is understood as a rigidification and calcification of creative movements in mathematical thought, while, from Badiou's vantage point, Deleuze demonstrates what Russell Grigg elsewhere amusingly calls a "Canute-like reluctance to accept one of the most magnificent achievements of modern mathematics" (Grigg is speaking of Badiou's critique of Jacques-Alain Miller and the late Lacan's use of mathematics and logic [Grigg 2005: 8]). The strength of Smith's intervention is that it presents an entirely adequate and full-bodied account of Deleuze's point of view on the matter. Thus, in this case, my claim that adopting Badiou's points of emphasis in reading Deleuze is certainly vindicated, for what Smith provides in defending Deleuze against Badiou may not have been required before, the problematic status of mathematics in Deleuze being previously obscure in nature. Third, we arrive at the very revealing historical reconstructions currently being undertaken by Kerslake around Deleuze's relationship to esoteric accounts of mathematics, particularly in relation to Hoëne Wronski and his champion in twentieth-century France, Francis Warrain (see Kerslake 2007 in particular). The strength of Kerslake's approach, on this topic and indeed many others, is double: (i) to note that the letter of Deleuze's text often does not provide enough material to make final determinations about the sense of its own fundamental claims (e.g. "when we see Deleuze returning to the notion of mathesis in _Difference and Repetition_ , explicitly appealing to ideas from Wronski, and making a clear statement that he is concerned with an 'esoteric' use of the calculus, we need to take a step back and ask whether we have at our immediate disposal all the necessary means to understand what is going on in Deleuze's philosophy of difference" [Kerslake 2009: 168]); and (ii) to be as thorough as possible when attempting to assemble the necessary means, which is to say to proceed without discarding material that crosses the boundaries of "respectable philosophy" into more murky intellectual regions. Kerslake (2007) is a textbook case of such a method, which yields many profound and valuable results. Finally, Simon Duffy is engaged in an ongoing attempt to articulate Deleuze's philosophy within the context of more general movements in mathematics, logic and their philosophical avatars. I refer in particular to Duffy (2006), which presents a profound account of the role of differential calculus in the thought of Hegel and Deleuze, in the general context of Spinoza's metaphysics. His central achievement is to present a much richer account of the mathematics invoked by Deleuze, sometimes only tangentially. It is at present, therefore, the high-water mark with respect to our understanding of the role of the calculus in Deleuze.

 15. Beyond this, Deleuze here departs from Maimon – who is dubbed the "Leibniz of the calculus" – in another sense. The former will reject (as we shall see below) any role for the infinitesimal ( _qua_ unthought quantity in the understanding) in favour of differential Ideas thought in a strictly structural sense. The irony here is, as we shall also see shortly, that this aligns him less with the founding figures of a dynamic geometrical theorization of the calculus, and more with figures such as Augustin Cauchy and Karl Weierstrass. This is not to say that Deleuze's reading of the calculus divorces it entirely from the figure of genesis: to the contrary, it rather embraces both the modern reading, which "dissociated calculus from any phoronomic or dynamic considerations" (DR 183), while remaining commited to a connection between the differential and genesis in the form of a _static_ genesis, a "genesis without dynamism" (DR 183). The significance of this static nature of ideal genesis will become apparent and even decisive once more in Chapter 8.

 16. It is owing to this creative and complex relationship to calculus that I consider Duffy's frequent recourse to the developments in Abraham Robinson's _NonStandard Analysis_ – which provide a rigorous, if indeed "non-standard", formal means to include infinitesimals within axiomatic number theory and analysis – is in a certain fashion beside the point, although it is clear that Deleuze was familiar with this work, which he cites with respect to Robinson's analysis of the figure of the monad (see FLB 129–30/177–8). Neither the reductive approach of nineteenth-century mathematicians (above all, perhaps, Weierstrass) nor the recuperation of the infinitesimal by Robinson (or equally in the theory of surreal numbers pioneered by John Conway, on which Badiou's _Number and Numbers_ rests; see NN 107–8 for a thumbnail sketch) are significant here, simply because Deleuze's treatment of the calculus involves a complex movement of metaphorical extraction and amplification. In fact, the discussions of the calculus in the fourth chapter of _Difference and Repetition_ are marked by an oscillation between two possible roles of this theory – as revealing instance, on the one hand, and as general theory of the virtual, on the other – in Deleuze's work, an oscillation that Deleuze does not (to my mind) adequately manage to master. He makes reference to these two faces of his account on a number of occasions, but the final and key passage can be found at DR 181/235, around the theme of a _diaphora_ proper to Ideas. This issue, which goes well beyond the scope of my argument here, is worthy of attention, above all perhaps with respect to Badiou's critical claims about Deleuze's metaphorical use of the calculus.

 17. Badiou himself published a striking and insightful intervention on the topic of the infinitesimal and its relation to the infinite and the limit (Badiou 1969a). As is typical in the work from this period, all of Badiou's influences are on display at once: Cantor, Lenin, Lacan and Hegel all jostle together around a detailed analysis of the treatment of the infinitesimal by Weierstrass and Robinson. And, as with other pieces of this period too, it closes with a sentiment that is at once as heavily marked by Badiou's Althusserian heritage as it is with Badiou's own abrupt and powerful rhetoric: "Quality, continuity, temporality and negation: categories subordinate to the objectives of an ideology. Number, the discrete, space and affirmation: or, better, Mark, Punctuation, Gap [ _Blanc_ ; a term that will, by _Being and Event_ , be definitively replaced with _Vide_ ] and Cause: categories of scientific processes" ( _ibid_.: 136).

 18. On Cauchy's treatment of the calculus _vis-à-vis_ , in particular, the status of infinitesimal quantities, see Boyer (1949: 275).

 19. Again, Duffy marks this peculiarity, both in _The Logic of Expression_ , and also in Duffy (2004). There we read the following: "Ironically, one of the mathematicians who contributed to the development of the differential point of view of the infinitesimal calculus is Karl Weierstrass, who considers the differential relation to be logically prior to the function in the process of determination associated with the infinitesimal calculus; that is, rather than determining the differential relation from a given function, the kinds of mathematical problems that Weirstrass dealt with involved investigating how to generate a function from a given differential relation" ( _ibid_.: 204).

 20. Indeed, the key point of Deleuze's departure from Maimon, who is dubbed the "Leibniz of the calculus" in _Difference and Repetition_ (DR 170–71/222), is the rejection of the place of the infinitesimal ( _qua_ unthought quantity in the understanding) in favour of differential Ideas (divorced from any reference to infinitesimals) present across all faculties. See DR 192–3/249–51.

 21. Maimon himself makes this claim early in his _Essay_ : "These differentials of objects are the so-called _noumena_ ; but the objects themselves arising from them are the _phenomena_. With respect to intuition = 0, the differential of any such object in itself is _dx_ =0, _dy_ = 0 etc., however, their relations are not = 0, but can rather be given determinately in the intuitions arising from them" (Maimon 2010: 21).

 22. This citation recalls the lengthy and complicated theory of the metaphysical surface in _The Logic of Sense_ , which unfortunately must be left aside here. Hughes presents some of the key elements in a short and helpful passage (2009a: 35–8). See also Widder (2008: 121–42).

 23. Kant, however, by maintaining that the transcendental is to be thought at the level of the conditioning of possible experience, does not manage to see either the general scope of this genetic form of illusion or its variety of (non-epistemological) forms. This is effectively the substance of the charge against Kant that Deleuze presents in his discussion of the fifth postulate of the dogmatic image of thought (DR 153–4/198–200).

 24. Of this dyad, Deleuze writes that "the form-matter couple is not sufficient to describe the mechanism of determination: matter is already informed, form is not separable from the model of the _species_ or that of the _morphē_ , and the whole is under the protection of the categories. In fact, this couple is completely internal to representation" (DR 275/352–3). Later, in _A Thousand Plateaus_ , this critical attitude blossoms into an entire ontological schema, by way of Louis Hjelmslev's semiology, in the third plateau "The Geology of Morals". There, Deleuze and Guattari argue for a complex quadripartite scheme involving not just form and content but also matter and expression, where forms and matters each must be further determined in terms of the matter and expression proper to them. Using this structure, Deleuze and Guattari theorize a whole range of states of affairs from materiality to subjectivity. For a somewhat convoluted account of this structure, see Genosko (1998). Hjelmslev also appears on a number of occasions in the books on _Cinema_.

 25. This passage in which this formulation (which surely pleased Deleuze) is to be found is quoted by Deleuze in his short book on Châtelet (Deleuze 1988c: 8). The entire very interesting passage, which has a bearing on the current discussion, reads as follows: "In philosophical terminology, we call any principle posed at once as a source of all explanation and as a superior reality transcendent. The word is pleasing, and I find it convenient. Impertinence, however great or small, from the leader of a small group to the president of the United States, from psychiatrist to managing director, functions through leaps of transcendence [ _coups de transcendance_ ], as the drunk does with hits of red wine [ _coups de vin rouge_ ]. The medieval God has been splintered, but without losing its force and profound formal unity: Science, the Working Class, the Party, Progress, Health, Security, Democracy, Socialism – the list would be too long – are some of its avatars. These transcendents have taken God's place (which is to say that it is still there, omnipresent), exercising with a greater ferocity their tasks of organization and extermination."

 26. An interesting and useful discussion of time as ground in Deleuze's philosophy is to be found in Véronique Bergen's _L'Ontologiede Gilles Deleuze_ (2001: 203–9). Bergen's book is characterized by an admirable attempt to draw Deleuze closer to Hegel, an attempt that is worthwhile even if in this case the result happens to obscure the real differences (and attribute the key features of Deleuze's philosophy directly to Hegel), rather than bring about an effective _rapprochement_. There are certainly many "secret affinities between Hegel and Deleuze" ( _ibid_.: 664) worthy of examination.

 27. Williams (2005a: ch. 6) stages a useful extrapolation of Deleuze's critique of the possible in relation to the theory of possible worlds found in the work of David Lewis.

 28. Consider the following, among numerous examples: "they imply no prior identity, no positing of something that could be called one or the same" (DR 183/237); "Multiplicity tolerates no dependence on the identical" (DR 191/247); "Ideas [are] the differentials of thought" (DR 192/249).

 29. This is why Deleuze is both engaged in an overcoming of the structuralist paradigm in the name of time and the event, but is also a structuralist in his own fashion, promoting – at least in _Difference and Repetition_ – a philosophical view that Graham Jones has called a _chrono-structuralism_. Deleuze's complex relationship to structuralism is perhaps nowhere better exhibited than in his fascinating "How Can We Recognize Structuralism?" (ID 238–69). For a helpful and detailed treatment of this piece, see Williams (2005b: 53–77).

 30. See DR 186–7/241–2 for Deleuze's sketch of what might be called a taxonomy of differentiations within an ideal structure.

 31. Deleuze's discussion of Hegel in _Difference and Repetition_ is to be found for the most part at DR 42–5/64–5 (and in a parallel, summary text at DR 262–3/338–40), in the context of a comparison with Leibniz on the topic of infinite representation, but in the course of presenting his own version of the dialectic, Deleuze makes frequent reference to the schema of determinative negation, mostly without invoking Hegel by name (see e.g. DR 205–6/265–6).

 32. The passage in which Badiou uses this noun begins with the following: "Virtualities, like problems, are perfectly differentiated and determined" (DCB 50/75). It is as difficult to know what Badiou means here by "virtualities" as it is to determine the precise status of this "like".

 33. Perhaps the word "interferes" here is meant to invoke the formulation of the relationship between philosophy and cinema as Deleuze presents it at the end of _The Time Image_ : "A theory of cinema is not 'about cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in general having no privilege over others, any more than one object has over others. It is at the level of the interference of many practices that things happen, beings, images, concepts, all the kinds of events" (TI 280tm).

 34. The status of the understanding in this respect is, as Deleuze so clearly presents in _Kant's Critical Philosophy_ , modified in the second and third _Critiques_ , relative to the other faculties. See in particular KCP 16–18, where the argument in _Difference and Repetition_ glossed above is also found, at times _verbatim_.

 35. This often-made point turns on the fact that, in the Analytic of Concepts, Kant takes as the framework for the concepts of the understanding a set of claims that are not deduced from within experience itself, but are rather those of classical logic. Put another way, the distinction that he maintains between what he calls "general" and "transcendental" logic (CPR A76–7/B102) is not rigorously maintained. This latter manner of presenting the issue is taken up by Badiou in _Logics of Worlds_ , see in particular book two, section four, "Grand Logique et logique ordinaire" (LM 185–94).

 36. "The Idea as a concrete universal stands opposed to concepts of the understanding, and possesss a comprehension all the more vast as its extension is great" (DR 173/224).

 37. In _The Logic of Sense_ , "simulacrum" is the name given by Deleuze to the fragmented bodies of the depths, while images are the phantasmatic projections that people the sexual surface that results from the resolution of the Oedipus complex. On this distinction, see in particular the twenty-eighth series of _The Logic of Sense_ , where the following text can be found: "It is important, once again, to distinguish, for example, between the oral stage of the depths and the oral zone of the surface; between the introjected and projected internal partial object (simulacrum) and the object of the surface, projected over a zone through an entirely different mechanism (image)" (LS 199/231–2).

 38. Badiou makes a similar error in his interpretation of Spinoza in _Being and Event_ , in fabricating a problem for Spinoza's metaphysics in the form of a supposed causal gap between infinite and finite modes. On this reading, along with a critique based in Deleuze's expressivist reading of Spinoza, see Roffe (2007).

 39. Kerslake (2005) presents a helpful account of the relation between the metaphysical aspects of the works on cinema and the project of _Difference and Repetition_. Of perennial import in relation to the specifically philosophical aspect of the Deleuzean engagement with cinema, see Bogue (2003) and Marrati (2008).

 40. Deleuze's examples include frequent reference to the figure of the mirror in films (e.g. TI 98), introducing a problematic (and ironic) _mis-en-abîme_ into his analysis, in so far as it appears he moves from the formal analysis of the images in film to the analysis of the content of the film.

 41. For example: "The stakes of philosophy consist in adequately thinking the greatest possible number of particular things (this is the 'empiricist' aspect in Deleuze – the disjunctive synthesis or the 'small circuit'), in order to adequately think Substance, or the One (which is the 'transcendental' aspect, Relation or the 'great circuit')" (TW 69).

 42. Chapter three, "Of the Survival of Images: Memory and the Mind" (Bergson 1991: 133–78) passes through the same main stages as Deleuze does in this passage from _The Time Image_. This chapter also includes the famous cone diagram of the virtual past, which we shall discuss in Chapter 5, and which Deleuze himself returns to on many occasions.

 43. It is interesting to note that the account of dreaming offered in _Difference and Repetition_ is presented not in the context of the virtual at all, but in the form of Deleuze's enigmatic theory of the Other at the close of the final chapter. See Chapter 7 for a short discussion of the status of the Other in this work of Deleuze's.

 44. For strong arguments for moderating the tendency to identify the respective projects of Deleuze and Bergson, see Widder (2008: 40–49, 86–99).

 45. "This is why Bergson is not contradicting himself when he speaks of different intensities or degrees in a virtual coexistence, in a single Time, in a simple Totality" (B 94); "a vision of the world is criticized [by Bergson] for only taking into account of differences in degree where, more profoundly, there are differences in kind... a dualism is established between differences in kind... In the second type it is a genetic dualism, _the result of the differentiation of a Simple or a Pure_ " (B 96); "One question becomes pressing: what is the nature of this one and simple Virtual?" (B 96); "But this leads to the question of how the Simple or the One, 'the original identity,' has the power to be differentiated" (B 100).

 46. _Bergsonism_ is thus entirely within the spirit of Deleuze's 1956 summary of Bergson's thought published in the collection _Lesphilosophes célèbres_ , edited by Merleau-Ponty, in which we read: "We find the entire movement of Bergson's thought concentrated in _Matter and Memory_ , in the triple form of difference in nature, co-existing degrees of difference, and differenciation" (ID 42), an emphasis that will be repeated in the very title of the other piece on Bergson from the same year – "Bergson's conception of difference" (ID 43–78). Both texts (not to mention _Bergsonism_ itself) demonstrate the extent to which Bergson is, for Deleuze, a thinker of difference and its multiple provenance. Again, one feels as though one could cite interminably on this point, from _Bergsonism_ , the other texts on Bergson, and from _Difference and Repetition_.

 47. See DCB 52/79: "[Deleuze] is guided... in all the nodal points of his system, by Bergson".

 48. The passage in which this claim is made provides another example of the equivocation that marks Badiou's argument at many points: "The real object is therefore exactly like time: it is a splitting or duplicity. We can say that the image-object _is_ time" (DCB 52/79). Badiou's reader would be justified in asking how these two claims are related.

 49. In _The Logic of Sense_ , Deleuze makes use of the theme of a "secret dualism" to account for the difference between states of affairs (bodies and their intermixtures) and sense-events (the ideal level that, in _Difference and Repetition_ , is populated by the virtual). He is very clear, however, to reject any exclusive distinction such as we find in Plato or Descartes, emphasizing, on the one hand, that the ideal has the status of an effect (in a manner we shall examine in a later chapter), and, on the other, that this does not imply any division in the sense of being. After explicitly rejecting the equivocal ontology that pertained to such a view in Aristotle, Deleuze writes (siding with the Stoics) that "states of affairs, quantities, and qualities are no less beings (or bodies) than substance is; they are a part of substance, and in this sense they are contrasted with an _extra-Being_ which constitutes the incorporeal as a nonexisting entity. The highest term therefore is not Being, but _Something_ ( _aliquid_ ), insofar as it subsumes being and non-being, what exists and what insists" (LS 7tm/16). As this claim makes clear, the dualism in no way leads to the ontological split that we find in thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and so on. There is a dualism, Deleuze is insisting, but it does not involve a distinction in being. As Williams (2008: 5) points out, Deleuze is here drawing heavily on the discussion of expression in Spinoza mounted by Deleuze in _Spinoza and the Problem of Expression_.

 50. Similar questions could be elaborated with regard to the materialist reading of Deleuze: if he is so concerned to do away with the order of ideality, then why does he go to such effort to reinvest this category with a new and surprising significance?

5. TRUTH AND TIME

 1. One strange quality of this ascription is the manner in which Badiou immediately conflates truth as narration with truth expressed _through_ narration. For example: "The theme of narration as the flexible and paradoxical vector of truth is as old as philosophy itself" (DCB 58/87). This is strictly irrelevant to the first claim, and considerably weakens its value – after all, narrative as a _vector_ of truth returns us straight away to the representational notion of truth, even if "the resources of narration" (DCB 58/87) are required for the expression of all truths. Moreover, in so far as Badiou's argument relies on reference to the works on cinema, one cannot help be struck by the fact that Deleuze's demotion of narrative (by way of situating it as an effect of the sensorimotor schema) is entirely overlooked here.

 2. Should we not ask ourselves about the equivocation introduced into this formulation (and many others) with the phrase "coextensive with"? Why not a definitive claim? I shall return to this kind of problem in the conclusion to this chapter.

 3. James Williams is, to my knowledge, the only Deleuze scholar to devote significant attention to the important _positive_ valence of truth in Deleuze's thought, and the irreducible import of truth for Deleuze. See, in particular, his study of _Difference and Repetition_ (Williams 2003), which opens with an invocation of the importance of the distinction between true and false problems for Deleuze, but also his discussion of the role of truth in _Difference and Repetition_ in the context of a comparison with Gilbert Harman that I have already mentioned above (Williams 2005a: 142–5). See also Williams (2008: 289–90).

 4. This is obviously connected to the concept of the image of thought, examined in Deleuze's books on Nietzsche and Proust, principally in _Difference and Repetition_ , and in a somewhat different fashion in _What is Philosophy?_ (where Deleuze moves from an examination of the dogmatic image as a transcendental illusion to the positing of a tension, mediated in thought, between chaos and cliché, prefigured in _Francis Bacon_ ). Indeed, the category of truth consistently emerges in Deleuze's work _in the context of a discussion of the image of thought_.

 5. It is in a related sense that we should understand Deleuze's claim of the cinema of Luchino Visconti: that in it the too-late is a proper dimension of time – "The 'too late' is not an accident that takes place in time but a dimension of time itself" (TI 96).

 6. Badiou's claim that it is in _Foucault_ that we find the most "appeased texts on truth" (DCB 65/97) is a peculiar one, since the topic of truth is barely touched on there, certainly in a much less significant manner than the early works discussed here.

 7. I shall return to this sentiment when the issue of the relationship between time and production emerges. We need also to take account of related claims such as the following: "What is essential is that there occurs at the heart of problems a genesis of truth, a production of the true in thought. Problems are the differential elements in thought, the genetic elements in the true" (DR 162/210).

 8. As in the case of Kant (DR 161/209). See also Deleuze's discussion of the history of geometry on this point (DR 160–61/209–10).

 9. A partial exception to this is the brief discussion of the future in the final chapter of _Foucault_ , where it is linked to the important Foucauldian notion of "thinking otherwise". I shall treat this text in particular in Chapter 8.

 10. On the significance and counter-Bergsonian nature of this cut, see Widder (2008: 48–9).

 11. Involuntary memory is another of the points on which Deleuze explicitly diverges from Bergson, both in _Proust and Signs_ ("Bergson does not ask essentially how the past, as it is in itself, could also be saved for us... Proust's problem is, indeed: how to save for ourselves the past as it is preserved in itself, as it survives in itself?... It is to this question that involuntary Memory offers its answer" [PS 59]) and _Difference and Repetition_ (DR 84–5/115), which also makes this point.

 12. I should note that, as these remarks indicate, Deleuze in fact distinguishes four registers of time in _Proust and Signs_ , although these four are broken into two aspects of lost time (time wasted and time lost) and time regained (time rediscovered "at the heart of lost time" [PS 26], and time regained as the time proper to art and essence), thereby maintaining a complex form of the triadic schema. This is particularly clear when one considers the Proustian doctrine of the faculties that Deleuze pursues there, which considers the first two times in terms of the (ultimately inadequate) faculties of voluntary memory and intelligence. In contrast, the second and third times of the sensuous signs and the signs of art evoke the faculty of involuntary memory and the faculty of thought respectively.

 13. This aspect of Deleuze has, in recent times, been the subject of a number of significant and helpful studies, of which I shall mention four in particular. The first is Faulkner (2006). The great strength of this volume is the extent to which it incorporates Deleuze's long discussion of Freud and Lacan into its presentation of time. Bryant (2008) systematically treats these three syntheses in detail, and in the context of the entirety of _Difference and Repetition_. Third, in Widder (2008), a series of texts that I have already mentioned, Nathan Widder devotes a number of passages to these syntheses, principally in the eighth chapter ("Difference and the Three Syntheses of Time"). What marks these brief pages out from many other studies is how clearly they manage to account for the complex connections between difference, repetition, synthesis and time in Deleuze. Finally, perhaps the most characteristic element of the treatment of Deleuze's work in Hughes (2009a) is the dominant role that the account of the three passive syntheses play. Indeed, in this _tour deforce_ , Hughes makes these three syntheses lynchpins of his attempt to unify apparently disparate moments in Deleuze's work.

 14. It is striking to contrast this quasi-mystical naturalism with the account of the constitution of the physical and biological world found in _A Thousand Plateaus_ , notably in the plateau devoted to "The Geology of Morals". Of the two, I am not convinced that the latter presentation is more appealing, or as well founded.

 15. Here Deleuze is clearly following Husserl. On this point, see Hughes (2009a: 8–16).

 16. This passage is more obscure than many in Deleuze's account of time in _Difference and Repetition_. The explanation for the need of a second time in which the time of the present can pass is much better glossed in _The Time Image_ , see in particular TI 78.

 17. See once more Williams's very helpful discussion of this issue (Williams 2005a: ch. 2).

 18. This claim, in fact, can be traced back to _Empiricism and Subjectivity_ , where Deleuze is at pains to assert the uniquely empirical character of habitual synthesis at the root of Humean subjectivity: "we defined the empirical problem in opposition to a transcendental deduction and also to a psychological genesis" (ES 119). The principal difference between this account and that provided in _Difference and Repetition_ , or rather the development that marks the passage between these works, is that Deleuze comes to see that empirical synthesis by itself is inadequate to account for either the subject or an account of temporality. It is also clear that the register of the psychological becomes, for Deleuze, not external to habitual subjectivity but a part of it. Thus the attack on psychologism found in _Empiricism and Subjectivity_ gives way to a somewhat ambiguous appreciation of the insights of psychoanalysis. Ker 5 slake has, in personal correspondence, expressed reservations about this way of relating the transcendental and the empirical with respect to the syntheses of time. For Kerslake, given that (as we shall see shortly) the synthesis of the present founds the more superficial modalities of experiencing time as past, present and future as the succession of instants, we must see even this first synthesis as transcendental in nature. Referring to the quite remarkable set of lectures entitled "Qu'est-ce que fonder?" (Deleuze 1956/7), he writes: "I... think that the passive synthesis of habit is transcendental from the beginning. It has to be, for methodological reasons (to do with the structure of transcendental argumentation) if nothing else." Now, it is true that, in "Qu'est-ce que fonder?", Deleuze presents this first synthesis as it appears in Hume as a _de jure_ rather than _de facto_ question, that is, as a foundational and transcendental question rather than a merely causal or empirical one. This is certainly the case, on Deleuze's reading of Hume. Nonetheless, as he claims in both _Empiricism and Subjectivity_ and "Qu'est-ce que fonder?", the issue is not posed at the same level as in the Kantian critique. In the latter, Deleuze even claims (contrary to the statements in the former we have just seen) that, in terms of the foundation of knowledge, "The principle itself seems psychological", and that while without Hume "there would be no Kant", Hume himself only "posed the problem, but did not answer it". All these points, taken together with the specific (if parenthetical) claim that the first synthesis of time is empirical in nature in _Difference and Repetition_ lead me to conclude that Deleuze did not want to think of this synthesis in transcendental terms.

 19. In a number of places, Jack Reynolds has argued that the structure of the present–future relationship in Deleuze in fact undersells the extent to which a habitual relationship to the world is already open to change and adaptation without the need to posit the ultimate status of a rupture in the figure of the eternal return. See, in particular, Reynolds (2006), where, adopting a Merleau-Pontian position on the lived body, Reynolds claims that we should take habit as the ultimate ground of temporality, and see the ruptures introduced into habituation as secondary, that is, as material for the modification of habit. I think that the way of posing the question I have advanced here (What accounts for the advent of the present?) partly evades his concerns by posing the issue in more formal terms, rather than dealing with the rupture of the future as a traumatic _content_ of phenomenal experience. However, the issue is also more complex, since Deleuze certainly does want to insist on the problematic (or, ultimately, and to be more specific, the _problematizing_ ) consequences for the habituated self of the _form of time as such_. The same movement of time that introduces material for habituation is also responsible for irremediably breaking open the habitual circle and forcing anew a confrontation between thought and problem. Time becomes trauma _as such_ for Deleuze: hence the connection he draws between the Kantian renovation of the theory of time and the Holderlinean thesis of the _caesura_. On the role of Holderlin's work in Deleuze, see the extremely helpful discussion of the theme of betrayal in _A Thousand Plateaus_ by Ron Bogue, "The Betrayal of God" (2004: 143–60). Widder demonstrates as clearly as one could hope the way this also provides for a _rapprochement_ between Deleuze and psychoanalysis (hence the extended treatment of psychic systems and the syntheses of time in _Difference and Repetition_ ): "The Oedipal story... refers not to a trauma occurring in time but to the traumatic organization of time itself" (Widder 2008: 94).

 20. I leave aside here the well-known difficulties concerning the felicity of Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche's various presentations of the eternal return (in _The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ and the _Will to Power_ notebooks). To my mind (a view that is hardly controversial), it is the work of Pierre Klossowski, and in particular _Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle_ (2005), that plays the mediating role.

 21. It is in relation to this point that I feel I depart ways with Williams's excellent text on the issue of the transcendental in Kant and Deleuze, where he claims that Deleuze's version of the transcendental "cannot admit a pure form" (Williams 2005a: 16). Certainly, as Williams argues, the idea of a fixed _a priori_ structure that revolves around the mutual figures of the object and the formal subject has no place in Deleuze. The eternal return, however, is the pure form of what is, although it is a form whose purity is deployed in a diametrically opposed way, as the groundless form of difference as such (which is to say that it is the pure form of what is, in so far as what is is thought as what becomes).

 22. In the final chapter, I shall address in some detail the role of the active-passive distinction in Badiou's reading of Deleuze. The formulation of three passive syntheses also plays an important role in _Anti-Oedipus_ (although in this context they are not articulated with respect to time, but unite the notion of passive synthesis with the notion of disjunction discovered in _The Logic of Sense_ ). For a striking account of this role, see once again Hughes (2009a: 66–78).

 23. This assertion, among others, is what indicates that Deleuze does not mean to assert that these syntheses of time are passive on one level (that of the subject, for example) but active on another, more primordial stage. Even the pre-subjective is included in this passive modality of synthesis, which should lead us to conclude (again, there are certainly echoes of Husserl here) that these syntheses are _intrinsically_ passive, and not passive in relation to an activity located elsewhere.

 24. This is so in much the same way as the movement-image obscures and falsifies time, as Deleuze accounts for it in his works on cinema, or the way in which psychoanalysis mistakes the status of the Oedipus complex in relation to desire, inverting the relation between production and lack. The figure of this inversion is the most characteristic way Deleuze presents transcendental illusion in _Difference and Repetition_ : "always the candle in the bovine eye" (DR 235).

 25. In his own way, then, the Deleuze of _Difference and Repetition_ answers in the affirmative the question posed in the final sentence of _Being and Time_ : "Does _time_ itself manifest itself as the horizon of _Being?_ " (Heidegger 1998: 488).

 26. The reference to concepts here is part of the discussion relating to Hegel, not Deleuze.

6. THE EVENT IN DELEUZE

 1. I find this characterization, like a number of Deleuze's other claims about the nature of his work (I am thinking of the opening lines of the sketch "The Actual and the Virtual" for example, which read "Philosophy is the theory of multiplicities" [Deleuze & Parnet 1987: 148]), to be fairly inaccurate or at least incomplete on a strictly descriptive level, for reasons that I address in this chapter. On the other hand, I do think these claims have a significant value as approaches or points of view on his work: somewhat like the role of the problematic Idea. We can, in this way, read Deleuze according to the guiding light of a concept of the event, or in terms of fulfilling an adequate thought of multiplicity, or in terms of the ideal of thought as creative, and so on. None of these are by themselves exhaustive; such approaches function by ordering the various elements of Deleuze's thought around differing conceptual horizons.

 2. On the sense of Deleuze's _agon_ with theorematics, and his championing of the problematic in its place, see Smith (2004).

 3. Etienne Gilson writes: "When he made this discovery [of being as what is common amongst beings, like water, fire, etc.], Parmenides of Elea at once carried metaphysical speculation to what was always to remain one of its ultimate limits; but, at the same time, he entangled himself in what is still for us one of the worst metaphysical difficulties" (Gilson 1949: 6–7). It is hard not to agree, and to continue to feel (as Plato did in the _Theatetus_ , as Gilson reminds us) "as much fear as reverence" ( _ibid_.: 8) when confronted with the Parmenidean poem. However, it is precisely this apparent "ultimate limit" of human thought that both Badiou and Deleuze wish to challenge. At issue here is the extent to which Badiou has been able to properly grasp the Deleuzean opening.

 4. Note that Deleuze here uses the word "accident" in a sense other than the one he is later critical of (as the quotation above from _Logic of Sense_ states). What is in question, of course, is a non-empiricist concept of accident: not a particular secondary manifestation of something essential, but an essence lacking a model; in other words, a phantasm or simulacrum. This is why Deleuze accounts for the task of overturning Platonism in the following way: "the abolition of the world of essences _and_ the world of appearances" (LS 253/292).

 5. For a discussion of this chapter, and its connection to Deleuze's more general reading of Whitehead, see Williams (2008: 282–99; 2005c). I shall discuss briefly Williams's account of reciprocal determination in § "Note on James Williams's reading of Deleuze's ontology" in Chapter 7.

 6. This is the case with the exception of the short critical remark about Deleuze's alleged materialism that we find in _Theory of the Subject_ , discussed in the Introduction.

 7. In fact, Deleuze does not hesitate to claim that this is "Leibniz's only error [viz.], to have linked difference to the negative of limitation, because he maintained the dominance of the old principle, because he linked the series to a principle of convergence, without seeing divergence itself was an object of affirmation, or that the incompossibles belonged to the same world and were affirmed as the greatest crime and the greatest virtue of the one and only world, that of the eternal return" (DR 51/72–3). This point will be investigated in somewhat more detail below.

 8. James Williams has recently mounted a very strong critique of Badiou's reading of the Deleuzean event, which, though unfolding in a somewhat different manner to the approach adopted here, arrives at the same conclusion: "though Badiou's interpretation of Deleuze is without doubt of interest and value for the elucidation of Badiou's work, it cannot be taken as the last word either on Deleuze's philosophy of the event, or of its relative worth with respect to Badiou's position. It is simply too much of a reduction, too textually selective and limited, too far removed from Deleuze's idiom and, from an interpretative point of view, too lacking in self-critique in the imposition of an unsympathetic conceptual schema without questions concerning the possible costs of such an approach". See Williams (2009: 98).

 9. For a summary of the movement from _Being and Event_ to _Logics of Worlds_ on this point and more generally, see Clemens (2006: 299–302).

 10. This exact phrase, to my knowledge, does not appear in _The Logic of Sense_. There are a number of passages reminiscent of it, however, for example: "Pure becoming, the unlimited, is the matter of the simulacrum insofar as it eludes the action of the Idea and insofar as it contests both model and copy" (LS 2/10); "the entire first half of _Alice_ still seeks the secret of events and of the becoming unlimited which they imply" (LS 9/19).

 11. The passage from which this phrase is extracted reads: "What makes an event compatible or incompatible with another? We cannot appeal to causality, since it is a question of a relation of effects among themselves. What brings destiny about at the level of events, what brings an event to repeat another in spite of all its difference, what makes it possible that a life is composed of a single and same Event, despite the variety of what might happen, that it be traversed by a single and same fissure, that it play one and the same air over all possible tunes and all possible worlds – all these are not due to relations between cause and effect; it is rather an aggregate of non-causal correspondences with formal systems of echoes, of resumptions and resonances, a system of signs – in short, an expressive quasi-causality, and not at all a necessitating causality" (LS 170tm/199). Given that Badiou's account of the event in Deleuze turns around an ascription of unity, the question of the communication between events is a crucial one, which I shall turn to address below. Let me just note at this point the tendency (exemplified here) for Badiou to quote Deleuze out of context, a tendency that does little to support his argument.

 12. As one might imagine, Badiou wishes to challenge each of these points quite radically. Point by point, he will assert his own axioms of the event, which one can see are entirely consonant with what was asserted in my earlier presentation of his philosophy in _Being and Event_ : that the event is extra-being, irreducible to an expression of the power of being; that the event breaks with temporal continuity, and offers the possibility of the elaboration of a new time; that the event is in no way an effect, and rather than being attributable to bodies but different from them, it founds the possibility of the construction of a new body (in _Being and Event_ , a generic truth; in _Logics of Worlds_ , a new subject-body [LM: book seven, "What is a Body?"] – and interestingly, the formal presentation of this new theory falls under a title perhaps deliberately chosen to be antagonistic to the Deleuzean perspective, "We Know Why a Body Exists, What it Can Do, and What it Can't"); and that the event is not a principle of unity.

 13. I am also in agreement with Smith (2009: 44), when he asserts that it is Deleuze's reading of Leibniz in _Difference and Repetition_ , rather than _The Fold_ , which is of primary significance.

 14. However, as John Sellars has argued in a series of impressive articles, Deleuze's use of the Stoics departs quite substantially from the Stoic texts, much more so than with most other thinkers he works with and among. For example, as Sellars demonstrates, "The theory of _aiôn_ and _chronos_ is an interesting element in Deleuze's philosophy that takes its inspiration from a speculative reading of the ancient Stoics, but is not an ancient Stoic theory" (Sellars 2008: 204). See also Sellars (2006, 2007).

 15. This schema, it must be noted, is profoundly similar to the account of the relationship between modal essence and existence as Deleuze presents it in _Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza_. The casual interaction at the level of existing modes (bodies, but also thoughts, and on through the infinite number of attributes) only results in temporary causal alliances between colonies of bodies. However, each configuration of bodies articulates, or rather _expresses_ , a pre-existing (or, rather, eternal) modal essence. The real point of difference between the two schemas is yet to be seen, and it turns around the complex theme of counter-actualization, which plays no role in Spinoza's metaphysics (the route of liberty concerning the affirmation of being as such, rather than the attempt to exceed what is actualized in the name of the affirmation of an event in its excess).

 16. As is made clear much later in _The Fold_ , and then in _What is Philosophy?_ (WP 210), this operation of the _survol_ ("survey" or "overflight", rather than the "hovering over" indicated by the English translation of _The Logic of Sense_ ) is drawn from the work of Raymond Ruyer (here, see Bogue 2009). Deleuze's explicit use of this concept in _The Fold_ (FLB 102–3/137–9) is in the service of explicating the controversial theme of the substantial chain in the late work of Leibniz.

 17. The serial element of events is admirably accounted for in a variety of contexts in Williams (2008: esp. 106–10).

 18. A similar moment occurs in _Difference and Repetition_ , with reference to the replaying of the past in the present: "This is what we call metempsychosis. Each chooses his pitch or his tone, perhaps even his lyrics, but the tune remains the same, and underneath all the lyrics the same tra-la-la, in all possible tones and pitches" (DR 84/114). This is perhaps the first instance in Deleuze's work of a metaphysical formulation of the refrain (or _ritournelle_ ), a concept found in great extension in _A Thousand Plateaus_ (TP 310–50, "1837: Of the Refrain").

 19. A characteristic statement by Leibniz of this theme, couched in the language of necessary and contingent truths, can be found in "On Contingency" (Leibniz 1989: 28–30).

 20. This idea of difference as positive difference is already present in _Difference and Repetition_ , where Deleuze elaborates it in relation to a certain mathematico-logical intuitionism (DR 234/301–2).

 21. An alternative reading of the _Eventum tantum_ to that which I propose here is proposed by Joe Hughes, who argues that it figures as the aleatory point that produces all the other ideal events as it circulates (Hughes 2009a: 136). My problem with such a proposal is that the category of singularity is put to use extremely frequently in _The Logic of Sense_ , but the _Eventum tantum_ only emerges in a single, very specific context.

 22. The more extreme claim presented in "Deleuze's Vitalist Ontology" cannot be maintained either: "Deleuze constructs an immense, virtuosistic, and ramified phenom-enological apparatus in order to write the ontological equation: being = event" (DVO 198). While we might assent to the idea that the unity of all events in the _Eventum tantum_ is a form of the claim that all beings are univocally expressed, to claim that Being is Event goes one step further, and this step takes us beyond the Deleuzean text.

 23. With respect to this famous claim, Badiou produces a very fine explication: "Nietzsche's 'become what you are' must be understood as follows: you are only that which you become" (DVO 196). Framing it in this way allows us to see exactly Deleuze's point: that ethics cannot mean the striving to become equal to this or that ideal (become honest, become wise, become a philosopher...), but the striving to become equal to becoming as such, to the event as such.

 24. Does Badiou's account also include such investments, albeit implicitly? With respect to the will, we must of course ask: why does someone become faithful to the event? Since there cannot be any necessity in fidelity, it seems inevitable that the will is implied in Badiou's account. This inevitability is treated by Sam Gillespie in terms of the Lacanian concept of _anxiety_ , which is posited to answer this question of motivation, which is not dealt with by Badiou himself. See Gillespie's fascinating and incisive posthumous work _The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou's Minimalist Metaphysics_ (2008), and in particular "Giving Form to Its Own Existence: Anxiety and the Subject of Truth" ( _ibid_.: 95–124).

 25. On the case of little Hans, see TP 264, and also "L'interpretation des énoncés" written with Guattari, Claire Parnet and André Scala (DRF 80–103, esp. 81–92).

 26. Cf. Brassier (2000), which presents a strong argument in Badiou's favour on this point, but one that, like Badiou, fails to grasp the sense of the dice throw in Deleuze, although, it should be noted, in a much less egregious fashion.

 27. I have already argued in the previous chapter that this is a serious oversight by Badiou, since it is first and foremost a temporal category in Deleuze.

7. THOUGHT AND THE SUBJECT

 1. This radical passivity is a consequence of two aspects of the event: its sterility with respect to direct causal efficacy ("the splendid sterility of the expressed" [LS 32] or what Deleuze will elsewhere call its impassibility), and its irreducibility, as sense, to logical laws of compatibility and exclusion, and to the order of signification, manifestation and denotation (contradiction is not a criteria with which to judge the relations between events, even as they inhere in a particular state of affairs; "to grow" and "to shrink" pertain equally to Alice precisely because they do not relate to one another according to the requirements of standard two-position logic).

 2. In the short homage to Sartre after he had refused the Nobel Prize in 1964, "Il a été mon maître" Deleuze presents almost exactly the same description of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but this time casts the latter as the philosopher further away from an ideal: "However brilliant and profound, the work of Merleau-Ponty was professorial and depended on Sartre's in many respects. Sartre willingly assimilates the existence of human beings to the non-being of a 'hole' in the world, speaking of little lakes of nothingness. Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, conceives of them as folds [ _plis_ ], simple folds and pleats [ _plissements_ ]. We can thus distinguish a tough and penetrating existentialism from a more tender and reserved existentialism" (ID 109). The gap, therefore, between this text and the composition of _Difference and Repetition_ marks a shift in, among other things, the relative value of the concept of the fold. Notably absent from the earlier description is any reference to Heidegger, so we might infer that this change took place as a result of contact with Heideggerian thought, and specifically with the concept of the _Zwiefalt_. Once the superiority of Merleau-Ponty over Sartre on this point is established, it remains unchanged; thus we read in _Foucault_ that "Sartre... remained at the level of intentionality, because he was content to make 'holes' in being, without reaching the fold of Being" (F 110).

 3. Foucault will come to think, on the one hand, that the emphasis on the theme of the medical gaze illicitly invokes the "unifying function of _a_ subject" (Foucault 2002: 60), and, on the other, that it traffics too heavily in the terminology of structure, which "threatened to bypass the specificity of the problem presented, and the level proper to archeology" ( _ibid_.: 18). Indeed, a thoroughgoing critique of Deleuze's reading of Foucault remains to be written, and would require a broad and systematic grounding in Foucault's work as a whole. It seems to me that _Foucault_ , according to a peculiar twist of fate, resembles (in a formal manner) nothing as much as Badiou's reading of Deleuze in many respects: another problematic "portrait of the master", produced in the hollow that follows their death, with the caveat that, unlike Badiou, Deleuze does not go out of his way to insist on the superior nature of his reading (e.g. "I believe I was among the first, if not the first, to have treated Deleuze as a philosopher" [TW 69]).

 4. It is difficult to agree with Deleuze when he writes that "From _The Birth of the Clinic_ on, Foucault admired Bichat for having invented a new vitalism" (F 93), for to make such a claim one would both have to obscure the specifically archeological level on which Foucault's discussion of Bichat occurs, and ignore the very important and famous theme in this early period of Foucault: that of the desirability of the eradication of the figure of the human around which _savoir_ in the modern period is woven. Bichat's vitalism, too, would be washed away by the sea of the future that Foucault invokes with such wistful power at the close of _The Order of Things_. It is, however, easy to agree when Deleuze writes of the passages on Bichat in _The Birth of the Clinic_ that Foucault's "tone demonstrates sufficiently that he is concerned with something other than an epistemological analysis: he is concerned with a conception of death" (F 95). What is at issue _in this conception of death_ , for Foucault, finds its true locus not in Bichat but in the irruption of finitude that, while it is certainly marked in morbid anatomy at one level, finds its true foundation in the work of the Marquis de Sade, who is perennially present throughout _The Birth of the Clinic_. Even the light of the medical gaze finds its ultimate parallel not in the being of truth more generally, which would mark an emergence from the darkness of superstition, of "theories and chimeras": it is "the same light, no doubt, that illuminates the _120 Journées de Sodome, Juliette_ , and the _Désastres de Soya_ " (Foucault 2003: 195–6). It is the flash of a mad and abyssal lightning, affixed to the names of Nietzsche, Sade and Artaud, that intermittently illuminates the final passages of Foucault's chapters, not the muted play of the obscure light of life found in a vitalist philosophy of the kind presented by Bichat.

 5. Foucault's term here is in fact _l'énonçable_ ; Deleuze frequently and problematically substitutes this with _le dire_. Not only are statements ( _énoncés_ ) in play in writing as much as speech, but they cannot be reduced to the order of language in any strict sense. For a typical, and typically subtractive, treatment of the category of the statement, see _The Archaeology of Knowledge_ , part 3, chapter 1, "Defining the Statement" (Foucault 2002: 89–98). On the evidence of this work, one could argue that the statement in Foucault could be treated as his term for the virtual.

 6. Many texts could be referred to at this point, though a very clear presentation can be found in the interview "On the Genealogy of Ethics" (Foucault 1997: 253–80).

 7. Deleuze will also entertain the idea that _only_ Western culture as it springs from the Greeks allows for this kind of reflexive subjectification (F 106).

 8. Deleuze will even say that "Memory is the real name of the relation to oneself" (F 107). If it is difficult to take this thesis at its word and extrapolate any specific consequences from the link to memory, this is because Deleuze equivocates with respect to whether memory is _what_ is folded (the Outside itself), or whether it is the activity of folding ("time as subject, or rather subjectivation, is called memory" [F 107]).

 9. See, for example, _Monadology_ , §19: "all simple substances or created monads can be called souls" (Leibniz 1989: 215).

 10. I refer of course to the discussion of habituation and contemplation in _Difference and Repetition_ (DR 73–9/101–8), and the third chapter of _A Thousand Plateaus_ , dedicated to the presentation of the lineaments of a remarkable ontology, in which idealities in the form of abstract machines provide the openings and stimuli for changes in the stratified forms of existence (an existence that itself ranges across the division between the material and ideal).

 11. It would be a crude reading of _What is Philosophy?_ indeed that would present the account of conceptual personae as an account of the subject who thinks, although it is one that Badiou does on occasion flirt with in _The Clamor of Being_ (e.g. DCB 86/128, where Foucault-Deleuze is invoked as one of Deleuze's conceptual personae).

 12. Likewise, the break with the fixed interiority of the monad in favour of a noma-dology that marks the final pages of _The Fold_ is also decisive, although not heavily marked, in these pages of _Difference and Repetition_. Unlike Leibniz's monad, Deleuze's intensive individual is fluid "all the way down", without being located within a network of sufficient reason bound to the twinned closure requirement of compossibility and pre-established harmony: "the individual is far from indivisible, never ceasing to divide and change its nature" (DR 257/331). This is a point to which we shall return below.

 13. It is important to see that Hallward, despite his affiliation with Badiou's project, in fact presents in _Out of this World_ (Hallward 2006) a thesis that is the inverse of the central Badiouian trope of the One in _The Clamor of Being_. Whereas Badiou wants to insist on the radicality of the virtual and the resulting impoverishment of the actual, Hallward argues that, for Deleuze, the virtual is the ephemeral, the perhaps unattainable source of change and freedom, however desultory the actual is in itself. Underpinning this different thesis (which also supports a critique of Deleuze) is nonetheless the familiar spectre of a problematic interpretive strategy. In Hallward's case, this involves a continual movement of slippage that insinuates the claims of the authors that Deleuze writes about into the latter's own _corpus_.

 14. A particularly striking moment in the pages that open this chapter is the critique or, better, a reconsideration of the status of the second law of thermodynamics, which makes use of the analysis of the synthesis of habit from earlier in the book (which we saw in Chapter 6) to show how such a claim about entropy rests on a well-founded illusion. In short, the concept of entropy relies on the belief that energy is in itself equal, subject only to external configuration rather than (as Deleuze would have it) internal change.

 15. "The Bergsonian critique of intensity seems unconvincing" (DR 239/308); "While he refuses a logical extension to space and time, Kant's mistake is to maintain a geometrical extension for it, and to reserve intensive quantity for the matter which fills a given extensity to some degree or other" (DR 231/298); of the God of Plato's _Timaeus_ , Deleuze memorably writes "Never have so many, so diverse and such demented operations been multiplied in order to draw from the depths of an intensive _spatium_ a serene and docile extensity" (DR 234/301). It should be noted, however, that Deleuze takes something important from Plato: "Plato's greatness lies in having seen that the divisible formed a nature in itself only by including the unequal" (DR 238/307; 233/300–301).

 16. "Only transcendental enquiry can discover that intensity remains implicated in itself", since "the empirical exercise of sensibility... can grasp intensity only in order of quality and extension" (DR 240/309). Compare this to very similar claims made in his discussion of Sacher-Masoch: "For there is in short _something_ that the pleasure principle cannot account for and that necessarily falls outside it, namely its own particular status, the fact that it has dominance over the whole of psychic life. In virtue of what higher connection... is pleasure a principle, with the dominance that it has? [Freud's] problem is a transcendental one" (M 113). In both cases, the need for transcendental argument is invoked because reliance on the manifest evidence provided by extended and qualified reality is at once unable to explain a range of events of the order of extended and qualified reality (the genetic point – we cannot explain the dominance of the pleasure principle solely by reference to the pleasure principle), and tends to reify or normalize particular cases of extended and qualified reality, illegitimately and mistakenly treating them as normative and/or transcendent in character (the critical point – it is a mistake to take the pleasure principle as sovereign, the kind of mistake that led to ego psychology, because it is indeed provided with its characteristic relation to its field according to a different order of determination).

 17. We might also note the following passage, given the central contentions of _The Clamor of Being_ : "The important point is that the divisible [intensity] is defined as that which bears in itself the unequal, whereas the indivisible (the Same or the One) seeks to impose an equality upon it, and thereby render it docile" (DR 233/300).

 18. Let me note the similarity of this schema with the presentation of Nietzsche's ontology in _Nietzsche and Philosophy_ , but also the account of Spinoza's modes in _Expressionism in Philosophy_. In the first we have a tripartite distinction: force (which is quantitative), quality (which corresponds to differences in forces) and the will-to-power, which is the genetic element that pertains to qualitative difference and brings them about. Clearly, the account in _Difference and Repetition_ splits the will-to-power in half, one side of which falls to the virtual ( _qua_ ensemble of ideal genetic elements) and one side to the actual ( _qua_ intensive quantity). In the latter, again a tripartite scheme, we find: actual modal existence (which is solely quantitative); the characteristic relation that individuates the complex schema of movement and rest of the composite existing mode; and intrinsically differentiated modal essences, to which an existing mode corresponds or expresses given its relations. The big difference between this schema and what we see in _Difference and Repetition_ is the lack of direct relation between modal essence and existence. Modal essence clearly corresponds to the virtual but, unlike the virtual, the fact that a given modal existence expresses an individuated modal essence has nothing to do with the essence, and everything to do with, on the one hand, God as the efficient cause of the existing mode and, on the other, the random encounters that characterize modal existence.

 19. On a number of occasions, Deleuze insists on the etymology of the word _cardo_ (hinge) in this manner, perhaps most memorably in a powerful passage in _Difference and Repetition_ invoking the destructive face of the empty form of time (DR 88–91/119–23), but it is also returned to in a more pedagogical register in "On Four Poetic Formulas Which Would Summarise Kant's Philosophy" (KCP vii–viii).

 20. One might claim – and doubtless Badiou would – that Deleuze is evincing a profound intuitionist orientation in this analysis (he does indeed, not much further on in the text, present a theory of distance, as opposed to negation, on the basis of a Brouwerian inspired logic due to Griss), and thereby abandoning the possibility of a thoroughgoing rationalist approach to mathematics. Of course, this is not a strike against Deleuze _a priori_ , but the more interesting point is to what extent mathematics can do without the figure of distance in a more diffuse, perhaps metaphorical, sense. This issue can be extended to embrace an even more significant set of issues about the capacity of mathematics to be entirely self-sustained, not in terms of an intra-mathematical foundational but as an act and series of acts. Can this series be purged not just of intuitionist tropes, but of any tropical, extra-mathematical operations?

 21. This point is already to be found in the first chapter of _Difference and Repetition_ when one looks at it from the point of view of the last (see DR 50–58/71–82). Indeed, the invocation of the eternal return there, and the alliance Deleuze asserts between the return and the concept of the simulacrum, is a compressed version of the claims he will make on the part of intensity (which there appears under the name of the _disparate_ , an excellent term given its etymological sense). This is characteristic of one of the difficulties in the reading of this work, which is not structured according to an unfolding chain of premises, but presents the same argument several times from several points of view.

 22. I refer on the issue of simplicity back to my discussion of Keith Ansell-Pearson near the close of Chapter 3 above.

 23. There is a brief and extremely tantalizing presentation of three corresponding syntheses of space in _Difference and Repetition_ (DR 230–32/296–9). This important part of Deleuze's account is perhaps yet to be fully articulated, although valuable intimations are provided by Miguel de Beistigui in the final chapter of _Truth and Genesis_ (2004), and in Gregory Flaxman's very fine piece "Transcendental Aesthetics: Deleuze's Philosophy of Space" (2005). Joe Hughes, in his _Deleuze's_ Difference and Repetition (2009b), articulates the proposed account of spatial syntheses on to the passive syntheses of time discussed earlier in _Difference and Repetition_ , and on to the tripartite structure of intensity (Hughes 2009a: 163–8), an analysis whose subtlety requires close attention.

 24. I refer in particular to works I have drawn attention to throughout, namely _Gilles Deleuze's_ Difference and Repetition (2003), _The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze_ (2005a) and _Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense_ (2008). The key argument, in many respects, is repeated in Williams (2005c).

 25. The example of the coconut cited above (Williams 2003: 7) is framed in terms of the expressive reality of infinitives, _qua_ sense, in relation to changes at the level of bodies, that is first introduced in the second series of _The Logic of Sense_ , but is not to be found in _Difference and Repetition_.

 26. It should be added, however, that the strange double ethical rule proposed by Deleuze in _Difference and Repetition_ (to connect to everything, but not to explicate too much) is a close relative of the theme of counter-actualization. This double ethic is thus, unsurprisingly, featured heavily in Williams's study of _Difference and Repetition_ , and in fact is the accent that opens the book.

 27. It seems to me that this relationship is much more problematic than what is often posed as the great gap in Deleuze's thought: that between _Difference and Repetition_ and _Anti-Oedipus_. For my part, I cannot assent to the fairly prosaic understanding of the relationship between the two books, namely that _Difference and Repetition_ was composed under strict academic restraints that _The Logic of Sense_ was free from, for at least three reasons. The first is that Deleuze himself, in discussing these two works, treats them both as overly academic in nature ("I know well enough that they're still full of academic elements" [N 7]; in the same paragraph, he notes that, at least with the concept of fatigue, _Difference and Repetition_ distinguishes itself). Second, while many of Deleuze's earlier works are specifically composed to respond to given guidelines, this never stopped Deleuze from presenting the work in his own way: nobody would ever claim that even Deleuze's most strait-laced works, like _Kant's Critical Philosophy_ , are boring. Third, in contrast to Deleuze's own claims on the matter, _Difference and Repetition_ itself is written in a style that could hardly be described as dusty and academic, containing, as it does, both some of Deleuze's most poetic writing and many tantalizing but unjustified philosophical moves.

 28. It is this "unequal" that is evoked in the title of this chapter of _Difference and Repetition_ : the asymmetrical synthesis of the sensible is asymmetrical in so far as the production of extended and qualified actuality proceeds on grounds that are foreign to it and do not resemble it.

 29. Not to mention the famous essay on Tournier's _Robinson_ , "A Theory of the Other", first published in 1967, and later included as one of the appendices in _The Logic of Sense_.

 30. "Every spatio-temporal dynamism is accompanied by an emergence of an elementary consciousness which itself traces directions, doubles movements and migrations, and is born on the threshold of the condensed singularities of the body or object whose consciousness it is" (DR 220/284). This claim need be no surprise, at least once we recall the Leibnizian terms in which this chapter (not to mention the account of habit earlier in _Difference and Repetition_ ) proceeds. Of course, Deleuze does not mean to say that rocks and trees are also _res cogitans_ in the Cartesian sense, but rather that human thinkers are in fact _like rocks and trees_ , and only secondarily _res cogitans_. Correlatively, the notion of the unconscious, for Deleuze, must be thought as common to all being, and only consequently a structure of human being.

 31. "Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and complacency bestow generously on us, have as many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things. They know nothing of this immense flight that transports them, ignorant of themselves, in the monotonous buzzing of their ever quickening steps that lead them impersonally in a great immobile movement" (Blanchot, _L'amitié_ [quoted in AO 341]).

 32. It might be objected that Deleuze proposes what looks like a native faculty of pure thought ("It is nevertheless true that Ideas have a very special relationship to pure thought" [DR 194/251]), and that it is through this faculty that we, as constituted subjects, have access to Ideas directly. The invocation of pure thought sets Deleuze several problems revolving around the "origin" of Ideas that the second half of chapter four of _Difference and Repetition_ is concerned with, and a number of complicated factors are involved that we do not have the means to deal with here. Two initial observations ought to be made, though. First, immediately after proposing this faculty of pure thought, Deleuze insists that it must be thought in the same way as all other faculties as they are presented in the chapter devoted to the image of thought, lacking the features of a given and natural capacity. Second, our capacity to think ideas is already irreducibly bound up with sensibility. In Deleuze's somewhat enigmatic words: "thought is determined in such a manner that it grasps its own _cogitan-dum_ only at the extremity of the fuse of violence which, from one Idea to another, first sets in motion sensibility and its _sentiendum_ , and so on" (DR 194/251). In other words, pure thought as a faculty only makes contact with the subject who thinks at the extreme point where Idea communicates sensation; in other words, in the form of the encounter with expressive intensity.
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INDEX

activity , , , , , –, , 179 n23

and temporality , –,

and the fold –, , 184 n8

Ansell-Pearson, Keith –, 166 n20

Anti-Platonism _see_ Platonism

Aristotle –, , 164 nn5, 7, 175n49

_Being and Event_ , , , , , , , , 164 n9, 174 n38, 180 n12

Bergson, Henri , , –, , , , –, , –, , , , –, 166 n18, 176 n11

and Keith Ansell-Pearson –

Blanchot, Maurice , 187 n31

Bogue, Ronald 178 n19

Borges, Jorge-Luis , 166 n1

Cantor, Georg 171 n17

Carroll, Lewis

chance , , –, ,

cinema , –, , –, 173 n33, 174 n39, 175 n1, 179 n24

consciousness , , , 187 n30

death , 166 n1, 183 n4

Descartes, René , –, –, , , , 167 n3, 175 n49

desire –, , 163 n4

dialectic(s) , , –, , 167 n2, 173 n31

Badiou on

James Williams on –

disjunctive synthesis –, , –, ,

Duffy, Simon –, 166 n22, 170 n14, 171 n16

Duns Scotus –, , 164 n6

duration ( _durée_ ) , –, –, 164 n2

eternal return , –, , –, , , , –, , –, , , , 178 nn19, 21, 186 n21

force –, , , , , , 185 n18

Foucault, Michel , –,

Freud, Sigmund , , 185 n16

ground –, , –, , , –, –, , –, , , 172 n26, 178 n19

Guattari, Félix , 172 n24

habit –, , –, , , , , , 177 n18, 178 n19

Hegel, G. W. F. , , , –, 167 n2, 172 n26

Heidegger, Martin , –, , , 164 n5, 183 n2

Hughes, Joe , 169 n13, 177 n13, 181 n21

Hume, David , 177 n18

identity , , , , , , , , –, –, ,

immanence , , , 165 n17 the plane of

indi-drama-differenc/tiation –

indiscernibility , , ,

the principle of

intentionality 183 n2

Kant, Immanuel , –, –, –, –, , , , –, , , 168 n6

Kerslake, Christian 168 n4, 170 n14, 177 n18

Klossowski, Pierre 165 n12, 178 n20

Lacan, Jacques , 168 n7, 182 n24

language , , , , , ,

Leibniz, Gottfried , , , , –, –, –, , 164 n7, 169 n10, 173 n31

and differential calculus –

and the fold –, –

Mallarmé Stephane

Marx, Karl , 163 n4

mathematics , , , 170 n14, 186 n20

memory –, , , –, –, , , , ,

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice , , , 166 n24

Neoplatonism , , , 165 n18

Nietzsche, Friedrich –, ,

and the eternal return ,

and truth –,

and univocity ,

and the will-to-power , ,

Oedipus complex 174 n37, 179 n24

Other, the –, 174 n43

Outside, the –, –, , 184 n8

Parmenides , 179 n3

passivity _see_ activity

Peyrol, Georges

philosophy , , –, , , , 168 n1, 173 n33

and its Parmenidean roots

and intensity

Plato , , , 167 n2, 185 n15

and Ideas ,  and participation ,

and the simulacrum –, 165 n13

Platonism , , 165 n13, 179 n4

power , –, , , , –, , –, –, , 180 n12

of the false , , ,

in Foucault –

will-to-power _see_ Nietzsche

Proust, Marcel –, , 176 n4

quality , –, , 171 n17, 185 nn16, 18

in Spinoza

quantity –

and differential calculus –, 170 n15

repetition , –, ,

Reynolds, Jack 178 n19

Sartre, Jean-Paul –, , 182 n2

simulacra , –, ,

singularity , , , 166 n25, 182 n21

Smith, Daniel W. ,

Spinoza, Benedict de , , –, , , 164 n8, 166 nn20, 22, 25, 174 n38, 185 n18

Stoics , –, 175 n49, 181 n14

surface , , –, 172 n22, 174 n37

transcendence , , –, 165 n17, 172 n25

trauma , , 178 n19

unconscious, the , , , 187 n30; _see also_ consciousness

univocity –, , –, , , , , , , , –,

Weierstrass, Karl –,

Widder, Nathan , 174 n44, 176 n10, 177 n13, 178 n19

Williams, James –, , 178 n21, 180 n5,

Whole, the , –, ,

Zourabichvili, François 164 n9

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook