Alex Tissandier - Affirming Divergence: Deleuzes Reading of Leibniz

AFFIRMING DIVERGENCE

Deleuzes Reading of Leibniz

Alex Tissandier

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Alex Tissandier, 2018

Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 1776 1

The right of Alex Tissandier to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

This book is the result of postgraduate research at the University of Warwick. I am very grateful to have been immersed in the unique mix of Deleuzian ideas which animated the philosophy department throughout my time there. My thanks to Miguel de Beistegui, Keith Ansell-Pearson and Stephen Houlgate for making such an atmosphere possible.

My biggest thanks to my fellow researchers especially Stephen Barrell, Benjamin Berger, Justin Laleh and Peter Wolfendale for countless hours of intense discussion, shared confusion, and ambitious reading groups (a few of which even made it past the first chapter).

Thanks to Henry Somers-Hall and Beth Lord for their comments on the first draft, and to the staff and editors at EUP.

Dedicated to my parents for their unwavering, enthusiastic support.

Plateaus New Directions in Deleuze Studies

Its not a matter of bringing all sorts of things together under a single concept but rather of relating each concept to variables that explain its mutations.

Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations

Series Editors

Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong
Claire Colebrook, Penn State University

Editorial Advisory Board

Keith Ansell Pearson, Ronald Bogue, Constantin V. Boundas, Rosi Braidotti, Eugene Holland, Gregg Lambert, Dorothea Olkowski, Paul Patton, Daniel Smith, James Williams

Titles available in the series

Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze

Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, translated by Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton

Simone Bignall, Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism

Miguel de Beistegui, Immanence Deleuze and Philosophy

Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature

Ronald Bogue, Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History

Sean Bowden, The Priority of Events: Deleuzes Logic of Sense

Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuzes Philosophy of Creativity

Aidan Tynan, Deleuzes Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms

Thomas Nail, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo

Franois Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event with The Vocabulary of Deleuze edited by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith, translated by Kieran Aarons

Frida Beckman, Between Desire and Pleasure: A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality

Nadine Boljkovac, Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema Daniela Voss, Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas

Daniel Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence

F. LeRon Shults, Iconoclastic Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism

Janae Sholtz, The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political

Marco Altamirano, Time, Technology and Environment: An Essay on the Philosophy of Nature

Sean McQueen, Deleuze and Baudrillard: From Cyberpunk to Biopunk

Ridvan Askin, Narrative and Becoming

Marc Rlli, Gilles Deleuzes Transcendental Empiricism: From Tradition to Difference translated by Peter Hertz-Ohmes

Guillaume Collett, The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School

Ryan J. Johnson, The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter

Allan James Thomas, Deleuze, Cinema and the Thought of the World

Cheri Lynne Carr, Deleuzes Kantian Ethos: Critique as a Way of Life

Alex Tissandier, Affirming Divergence: Deleuzes Reading of Leibniz

Forthcoming volumes

Justin Litaker, Deleuze and Guattaris Political Economy

Nir Kedem, A Deleuzian Critique of Queer Thought: Overcoming Sexuality

Felice Cimatti, Becoming-animal: Philosophy of Animality After Deleuze, translated by Fabio Gironi

Visit the Plateaus website at edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/plat

References to Leibnizs philosophy appear constantly throughout Deleuzes work. Despite often repeating the same themes, we find marked differences in tone, as if Deleuze is unable to arrive at a conclusive judgement. This book explores these various engagements and tries to account for these shifts in tone. Ultimately it will argue that focusing on Deleuzes interpretation of Leibniz both his appropriations and his criticisms helps us to understand some key moments in Deleuzes own philosophical development. A close reading, emphasising the particular context and terminology of Leibnizs work, will open a narrow point of access into some of the most difficult areas of Deleuzes philosophy. In the course of this reading, it will become clear that it is precisely Leibnizs ambiguous status for Deleuze which makes an investigation into their relationship so fruitful: by not only explaining Leibnizs positive influence, but also pinpointing the precise grounds for their eventual divergence, we hope to better articulate some of Deleuzes own philosophical priorities.

Any close reading must thus begin by taking this ambiguous status seriously. There are two opposing tendencies that allow us to identify two distinct sides to Leibnizs philosophy, or indeed, the presence of two distinct Leibnizes, in Deleuzes readings. Leibniz, in fact, is not unused to undergoing such partitions. The first biography of Leibniz, in a eulogy by Bernard Fontenelle (the secretary of the Acadmie des Sciences in Paris upon Leibnizs death), likens his propensity for broad study to a charioteer expertly managing each of his horses. Fontenelles eulogy insists that we decompose and make many geniuses out of one Leibniz, a maxim which has generally set the standard for later scholarship. But where traditionally the lines of Leibnizs decomposition have been drawn according to discipline (Leibniz the philosopher, Leibniz the logician, Leibniz the mathematician, and so on), in Deleuzes reading we find Leibniz split by two opposing tendencies that are not only philosophical but also theological, moral and political.