Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze's Speculative Realism

by Arjen Kleinherenbrink

Against Continuity is the first book to demonstrate that the beating heart of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy is a systematic ontology of irreducible, singular entities. This requires a radical break with decades of Deleuzian orthodoxy, according to which Deleuze’s metaphysics revolves around the dissolution of discrete entities into a continuous world of flows and events.With reference to all of Deleuze’s work, including published and untranslated seminars, as well as the recently published 'Lettres et autres textes', Arjen Kleinherenbrink critically compares Deleuze’s ontology to seven related contemporary Levi Bryant, Maurizio Ferraris, Markus Gabriel, Manuel DeLanda, Graham Harman, Tristan Garcia and Bruno Latour. These comparisons establish Deleuze as an important precursor to object-oriented speculative realism and open up exciting new avenues of thought for critics and supporters of Deleuze alike.

Genres: Philosophy

328 pages, Hardcover

Published January 22, 2019

Reviews

[Cheng Wen Cheong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly argued with an approachable prose. The clarity of language here puts all Deleuzian scholars to shame - there's scarcely any schizophrenic infection in Arjen's analysis. Instead, he lays out all the critical terms one by one, strips them of philosophical baggage, and constructs his own command from scratch, patiently reminding the reader of what he meant precisely whenever new concepts are presented. An instance of contemporary philosophy done well.

[KeyForLocked · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very provocative. The author wants to argue that almost all of Deleuze's explanations are wrong.
The idea is simple: there is no virtual continuum, only machines. Contrary to popular interpretation, virtuality is the irreducible inner core of every machine; It is only in the actual dimension that each machine is next to each other and interacts with each other. This is because:
1 / the relation has externality: the relation is external to the term, so the core of the term cannot be restored by the relation;
2 / Everything is a machine: every machine is produced by a machine, which produces other machines.
Although because of 1 , the machines as terms can never be reduced to factories and products...

But I think the author's interpretation of the externality of relation is wrong.

[Joey Z · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Kleinherenbrink’s Deleuze-equivalent of the Bounds of Sense. Noncoincidentally, he takes seriously the Logic of Sense in a way that many orthodox Deleuzians fail to grasp. My biggest concern was his lack of treatment of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, but this was addressed towards the end and was ameliorated. He doesn’t conflate his machine ontology with transcendental empiricism, but one might wonder the extent of the link as Kleinherenbrink construes it. Cool stuff