The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

by Gilles Deleuze

In The Fold, Gilles Deleuze argues that Leibniz’s writings constitute the grounding elements of a Baroque philosophy and of theories for analyzing contemporary arts and science. A model for expression in contemporary aesthetics, the concept of the monad is viewed in terms of folds of space, movement, and time. Similarly, the world is interpreted as a body of infinite folds and surfaces that twist and weave through compressed time and space. According to Deleuze, Leibniz also anticipates contemporary views of event and history as multifaceted combinations of signs in motion and of the “modern” subject as nomadic, always in the process of becoming.

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Nonfiction, Theory, France, Metaphysics, 20th Century

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Deleuze is a key figure in poststructuralist French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence. He argued, then, that there is no good and evil, but rather only relationships which are beneficial or harmful to the particular individuals. This ethics influences his approach to society and politics, especially as he was so politically active in struggles for rights and freedoms. Later in his career he wrote some of the more infamous texts of the period, in particular, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These texts are collaborative works with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and they exhibit Deleuze’s social and political commitment.

Gilles Deleuze began his career with a number of idiosyncratic yet rigorous historical studies of figures outside of the Continental tradition in vogue at the time. His first book, Empirisism and Subjectivity, is a study of Hume, interpreted by Deleuze to be a radical subjectivist. Deleuze became known for writing about other philosophers with new insights and different readings, interested as he was in liberating philosophical history from the hegemony of one perspective. He wrote on Spinoza, Nietzche, Kant, Leibniz and others, including literary authors and works, cinema, and art. Deleuze claimed that he did not write “about” art, literature, or cinema, but, rather, undertook philosophical “encounters” that led him to new concepts. As a constructivist, he was adamant that philosophers are creators, and that each reading of philosophy, or each philosophical encounter, ought to inspire new concepts. Additionally, according to Deleuze and his concepts of difference, there is no identity, and in repetition, nothing is ever the same. Rather, there is only difference: copies are something new, everything is constantly changing, and reality is a becoming, not a being.

He often collaborated with philosophers and artists as Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, René Schérer, Carmelo Bene, François Châtelet, Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, Jean-François Lyotard, Georges Lapassade, Kateb Yacine and many others.

Reviews

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henri Bergson is as widely unknown today as Gottfried Leibniz which is unfortunate since most people are familiar with Bergson’s concepts such as lived time, elan vital and creative evolution. Leibniz’s contributions today are widely known but the great thinker who created them is often obfuscated by the fog of history. Deleuze does quote from Bergson frequently in this book and the overlap between the two is obvious as it is laid in this book as Deleuze synthesis Leibniz’s thoughts into a coherent narrative, and all of Bergson’s greatest hits are within Leibniz’s life project.

First, many people (probably almost everyone) don’t realize the influence that Leibniz still wields today with some of his very original thoughts. Here’s just a sampling of what Leibniz wrote and thought about before anyone else. Leibniz coined the word Theodicy (how God allows evil), gets mocked by Voltaire in Candide for thinking this is the best of all possible worlds is the first to get at the unconscious mind as a reservoir of hiddenness using his petites perceptions, created the principal of sufficient reason, and explains his world view with Monads as ultimate substances of the universe that enable a pre-established harmony resolving complementariness between the extended thing and the thinking thing (reconciling Descartes’ world of two different substances), and oh yeah, I forget to mention he discovered the calculus and he did that before Newton published his Principia. Yes, Leibniz wrote about all these things but usually due to the fog of history we’ve lost sight of recognizing the creator of those major accomplishments.

This book, The Fold integrates almost all of Leibniz’s great thoughts with concepts to today (1988) and gives Leibniz a grand uniform narrative to his life time project. The focal point for this book is to focus it through a lens of Leibniz’s Monadology, an abortion of a book with a truly goofy world view, but as one reads it one gleams out the brilliance from the nuttiness and realizes that it is truly worthy of reading today. Yes, it’s goofy but it has within it a foundation that could apply itself on top of quantum physics and resolve the double slit paradox or even open up some avenues for Hugh Everett III’s Multi World Universe interpretations, or as I like to believe offer support that we really do live in a simulation created by Bob, the perfect computer of the universe. Regardless, I would say this book, The Fold is vital reading for those of us who love their Leibnitz and their Bergson (it is never a waste of time to read the Nobel Literature prize winning book, Creative Evolution).

The inflection of the exclusion as the tangent of the curve gets determined by approaching a limit of something only slightly more than nothing leading to a fold of space, movement and time dependent on monads. Monads have no windows to the world while they perceive everything in the universe such that their reciprocal will sum to the universe as a whole and give us God since they are ideal abstract thoughts within themselves and for themselves, each individual abstract (monad) is valuable by itself and for itself but it takes the whole in order to understand the individual (John Duns Scotus does a very similar thing with his synchronic contingency). Monads resolve the dichotomy between the two attributes of mind and body by providing a pre-establish harmony between the two attributes. As a quick aside, Kant synthesizes Hume’s experiential worldview with Leibnitz’s monads and writes Critique of Pure Reason.

Deleuze explains Leibnitz resolving the vertical (infinite, God) and horizontal (finite, human) perspective through the Fold coming together by making existence a predicate since the now determines the subject which leads to the ontological difference (a Heidegger term, but not used in this book, though Heidegger does get mentioned frequently) between the subject and the object.

In this book, Deleuze uses Bergson and some of his concepts from Difference and Repetition, and when he is talking about capitalism connecting it to the Baroque and how they reflect each other and he would point it back to similar thoughts he expressed in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and he has this way of thinking in the same manner as John Duns Scotus that was obvious to this reader, at the heart of this book is an integration of who Leibniz was and how there was a coherence to what he was saying as illustrated by The Fold.

[Daniel Coffeen · Rating 5 out of 5]

So exquisite I want to weep and scream for joy at the same time.

[Alex Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this difficult book, Gilles Deleuze takes the figure of Leibniz as a starting point to reach a determinate position of differentiation. Another way to say this is that Deleuze abstracts/extracts conceptions of change and inflection from infinitesimal nuances. Building upon the figure of the monad as indecipherable but also holographic, Deleuze forces us from the position of understanding ontology as a passive substance and active concept. From here, we need first to select a context and then abstract from that context the mode of change that operates throughout it. Deleuze would have us absorb melody from pure harmony, building concepts and trends from the multitude of monads which would pose a mass of singularities.

Another way to put this? Deleuze outlines a project by which we can choose the scale at which we are to determine what we are looking at. This free-for-all view, lacking any selected distance from its object is different from the philosophic tradition which centers itself on subjectivity as the primordial figure. By zooming in on the monad and then zooming out, Deleuze gives us two vectors (two floors as he calls it) by which we can start to carve out difference between them. This makes all determination a matter of scale, which is another way of saying that it's a matter of categorization. Which set of monads should we take to be primary? Which collection expresses the trends we wish? If not on the level of monad, then on the level of concept. What Deleuze poses for us is a radical de-substantialization of thought. Thought was often taken as a reference to something, or as a pure given form for something. Thought, in philosophy, is conceived as a reference point for purity of form. Rather than taking a metaphysics of presence as the primary scene, he deontologizes thought by collapsing it into its constituent particles, called monads. From there, we can build the scene of determination rather than skipping ahead to universals that are simply given.

What makes Deleuze radical in this regard, is how he debunks the classical categories which philosophy has sought to make necessary for its condition of philosophy. He pulls the monad from difference itself, as Leibniz did, and then reconstitutes concepts from it. The concepts are nonetheless pure concepts, as they ride on harmonies between monads, of the monads but never determined by monads. In fact, towards the end of the book, Deleuze shows us that monads can subsume other monads. From here we get the change of scale, that the figure of the monad as a compete singularity can also bind other monads. In this way, we can see how Deleuze's monads run against a stricter line of Badiou's set theory in which sets can be constituted in any desired size to be the primary set, the limit cardinal. This puts Deleuze closer to math than you might imagine, as this book is written in poetic language. Yet this poetry is essential in the sense that Deleuze wishes for us to saddle the inflection point between the two floors, before monads disappear from view and Being is revealed, or before Being is dissolved into a mass of monads that have yet to organize into coherency as a concept.

As always, Deleuze doesn't go easy on us. He forces us to the edge of conception and leaves us there to sit and watch. Unfortunately, most of us probably won't know what we are looking at. In the absence of our familiar points of reference I suspect much of this would appear to be senseless and unusable to most of us, even though in our daily lives, we go through the process of (re)constitution all the time.

[Paul H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Franz Rosenzweig, the Jewish philosopher and theologian, attended renowned Neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen's lectures for the first time in 1914. Rosenzweig wasn't expecting much -- Neo-Kantianism, for those who are blissfully, rightfully unaware, is God's cruel joke on the history of continental philosophy, a sort of unconscious Dadaist art project of trying to figure out how to make the most boring, tedious rationalist system ever. Heidegger and Rosenzweig and many others basically wrote their philosophy as a response to their Neo-Kantian teachers. Anyway, after attending Cohen's lecture, Rosenzweig writes:

I had the surprise of my life. I am used to professors of philosophy who are subtle, acute, lofty, profound, and whatever other attributes are used to praise a thinker--instead, I found something I hadn't expected, a philosopher. . . . Here was no trace of that desperate lack of content or indifference to content from which all contemporary philosophizing seems to suffer . . . with Cohen, you feel perfectly convinced that this man must philosophize, that he has within him the treasure which the powerful word forces to the surface.

Deleuze is, for me, the Hermann Cohen of the 'class of May 1968' group of French postmodernists. I came in expecting yet another con artist, another grifter, another lightweight who had somehow managed to impress bearded post-post-ironic hipster grad students in a few PhD programs in the United States, pretentious and/or naive people who haven't read philosophy, and literally no one else, but instead I found an astonishing font of creativity. Deleuze's thought is obviously kind of batshit insane, but in a really interesting genius-level way, rather than a tedious "let's just rehash Nietzsche and use lots of jargon" way. There are more original ideas in The Fold, or any of Deleuze's other major works, than in the collected works of most twentieth-century philosophers. Apart from Derrida's first 4-5 books and a few passages in Foucault, Deleuze is really where it's at, for the '68 postmodernists.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the product of Deleuze's final seminar (held at Vincennes-St. Denis) in 1986-87, but also of years of study of and reflection on Leibniz. The translation has some issues, but the difficulty is not entirely due to the translation: Deleuze's method is to take the voluble and expansive lectures of the 20 seminars (as well as his previous, 5-part seminar from 1980) and to distill them to the finest essence of this thought, often in extremely elliptical fashion (hence, the inherent difficulty). Furthermore, Deleuze's frames of reference, much like Leibniz's, go well beyond what might be called (narrowly) philosophical in order to embrace a broad range of fields, from art and literature and architecture to science and mathematics. So this "final" Deleuze book on a single philosopher is not for the debutant in Deleuze reading, but one can also read it as a prelude, as it were, for his and Guattari's final collaborative effort, What Is Philosophy?

[r0b · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very difficult! Very abstruse!
I only give it 3 stars because of my lack of understanding it all...it could very well deserve a higher rating...

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Firstly, I must admit my rather inadequate knowledge of Leibniz stems from the lack of his works that I have yet read. That being said, Deleuze, as always, masterfully enacts the concerted play of the other's thought, differentiating it in order to open it up to alternate lines of flight for further thinking.

I especially admire Deleuze's transformed understanding of Leibniz's so called parallelism, displacing the idea of causation and substance through his thinking of events and becomings. The bits about monadic point of view and the worlding-song of the monadic choir in order to express the inflected infinite line of the world was beautifully explicated or unfolded.

The fold, playing in its enfolding and unfolding to infinity throughout the work, weaves a thread that is but a folding line tying the work together in its differentiated foldings and unfoldings. A masterful work on Deleuze's part, as always. Again, as with all of Deleuze's works, this book aids in the understanding and thinking through not only of the philosopher in question (Leibniz, in this case), but also of Deleuze's differentiated and intricate thought as well. Though a challenge (as all worthwhile reads should be), I would recommend this book to any - you won't be disappointed. Deleuze never fails to inspire creative thought through his writings, and this work is no exception.

[Nil · Rating 5 out of 5]

aquest llibre és una absoluta bogeria

[Adam Goddard]

Not gonna r8 this one atm cause to be honest I didn't grasp a whole lot of it. Will revisit in the future

[Javee]

se me ha plegado el cerebro

[Feijiao Huo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything … are the folded things! There is no form, no content, no container, but only folds! Gilles Deleuze enthusiastically defends for the art of folding inspired of Baroque. This is a world of folding, in which time and space are generated by folding, expanding and refolding. He proposed that the bending/inflection are ideal basic elements that can be regarded as "pure events on the line or point".

How to explain human complexity? Complexity of the world? How to understand their internal and external with the system? How the relationship between things, unified and divided, both confuse their different facts, however, to been seen clearly? There is an answer and only one answer should help to answer these mysteries: a fold is a simple line, a geometry basic operations, driven by Gilles Deleuze, has been promoted to the potential height of the philosophical concepts, and to become a key graphics to be able to be close to the world.

Can we see these architecture are utilizing this folding theory? like Yokohama International Passenger Terminal (Japan) by FOA and Taichung Metropolitan Opera House by Ito Toyo.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

two floors, fold 'em up, see what happens when organic/inorganic, indogenous/exogenous, private/public stop being polite and start getting real

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“inflection is the pure Event of the line or of the point, the Virtual, ideality par excellence. It will take place following the axes of the coordinates, but for now it is not yet in the world“

“If plastic forces can be distinguished, it is not because living matter exceeds mechanical processes, but because mechanisms are not sufficient to be machines. A mechanism is faulty not for being too artificial to account for living matter, but for not being mechanical enough, for not being adequately machined.
Our mechanisms are in fact organized into parts that are not in themselves machines, while the organism is infinitely machined, a machine whose every part or piece is a machine, but only "transformed by different folds that it receives. "Plastic forces are thus more machinelike than they are mechanical, and they allow for the definition of Baroque machines. It might be claimed that mechanisms of inorganic nature already stretch to infinity because the motivating force is of an already infinite composition, or that the fold always refers to other folds. But it requires that each time, an external determination, or the direct action of the surroundings, is needed in order to pass from one level to another; without this we would have to stop, as with our mechanisms. The living organism, on the contrary, by virtue of preformation has an internal destiny that makes it move from fold to fold, or that makes machines from machines all the way to infinity. We might say that between organic and inorganic things there exists a difference of vector, the latter going toward increasingly greater masses in which statistical mechanisms are operating, the former toward increasingly smaller, polarized masses in which the force of an individuating machinery, an internal individuation, is applied.”

“It is an envelope of inherence or of unilateral "inhesion": inclusion or inherence is the final cause of the fold, such that we move indiscernibly from the latter to the former. Between the two, a gap is opened which makes the envelope the reason for the fold: what is folded is the included, the inherent. It can be stated that what is folded is only virtual…a virtuality that currently exists only in the folds of the soul which convey it, the soul implementing inner pleats through which it endows itself with a representation of the enclosed world. We are moving from inflection to inclusion in a subject, as if from the virtual to the real, inflection defining the fold, but inclusion defining the soul or the subject, that is what envelops the fold, its final cause and its completed act.”

“The Baroque invests in all of these places in order to extract from them power and glory. First of all, the camera obscura has only one small aperture high up through which light passes, then through the relay of two mirrors it projects on a sheet the objects to be drawn that cannot be seen, the second mirror being tilted according to the position of the sheet." And then transformational decors, painted skies, all kinds of trompe l'oeil that adom the walls: the monad has furniture and objects only in trompe l'oeil. Finally, the architectural ideal is a room in black marble, in which light enters only through orifices so well bent that nothing on the outside can be seen through them, yet they illuminate or color the decor of a pure inside. (Is it not the Baroque manner, such as this, that inspires Le Corbusier in the Abbey of La Tourette?) The Leibnizian monad and its system of light-mirror-point of view-inner decor cannot be understood if they are not compared to Baroque architecture. The architecture erects chapels and rooms where a crushing light comes from openings invisible to their very inhabitants. One of its first acts is in the Studiolo of Florence, with its secret room stripped of windows. The monad is a cell. It resembles a sacristy more than an atom: a room with neither doors nor windows, where all activity takes place on the inside.”

“Domestic architecture of this kind is not a constant, either of art or of think-ing. What is Baroque is this distinction and division into two levels or floors.
The distinction of two worlds is common to Platonic tradition. The world was thought to have an infinite number of floors, with a stairway that descends and ascends, with each step being lost in the upper order of the One and disintegrated in the ocean of the multiple. The universe as a stairwell marks the Neoplatonic tradition. But the Baroque contribution par excellence is a world with only two floors, separated by a fold that echoes itself, arching from the two sides according to a different order. It expresses, as we shall see, the transformation of the cosmos into a ‘mundus’.”

“Matter that reveals its texture becomes raw material, just as form that reveals its folds becomes force. In the Baroque the coupling of material-force is what replaces matter and form”

“These undefinables are obviously not reciprocal inclusions, like definitions, but they are autoinclusions: they are Identicals in the pure state, each of which includes itself and includes only itself, each only capable of being identical to itself. Leibniz draws identity into infinity: the Identical is an auto-position of the infinite, without which identity would remain hypothetical (if A is, then A is A . . .).
This mark of identity can allow us to demonstrate that Leibniz makes a very special, indeed Baroque, conception from these principles. In this respect Ortega y Gasset makes a set of subtle remarks: on the one hand, Leibniz loves princi-ples, and he is probably the only philosopher who invents them endlessly. He invents them with pleasure and enthusiasm, and he brandishes them like swords.
But on the other hand, he plays with principles, multiplies formulas, varies their relations, and incessantly wants to "prove" them as if, loving them too much, his respect for them were lacking. Leibniz's principles are not universal empty forms; nor are they hypostases or emanations that might turn them into beings.
But they are the determination of classes of beings.
If the principles appear to us as cries, it is because each one signals the presence of a class of beings that are themselves crying and draw attention to themselves by these cries. In this way we could not be led to believe that the principle of identity causes us to be aware of nothing, even if it does not make us penetrate into this awareness. The principle of identity or, rather, the principle of contradiction, as Leibniz says, makes us become aware of a class of beings, that of the Identicals, which are complete beings. The principle of identity — or rather, of contradiction - is only the cry of the Identicals. It cannot be an abstraction.
It is a signal. Identicals are undefinables in themselves and exist perhaps beyond our ken; they have, no less, a criterion that the principle makes us aware of or able to hear.”

“And even when the subject will be the monad without parts, predicates will continue to be "affections and relations," at least in the lexicon of the Monadology.”

“The two nominal characters on which everyone agrees in principle, from Aristotle to Descartes, are: on the one hand, sub-stance, what is concrete, determined, individual, in the sense that Aristotle speaks of this, and Descartes, of that stone; on the other hand, substance is subject to inherence or inclusion, in the way that Aristotle defines accident as
"what is present in substance," and Descartes states that substance is a "thing in which what we conceive exists formally or eminently." But no sooner than we search for a real definition of substance, it appears that the two characters are removed for the sake of an essential, necessary, and universal essence or attribute in the concept. Thus, for Aristotle, the attribute is not in the subject as if by accident, but is affirmed by the subject, such that it can be treated as a second substance. And for Descartes the essential attribute is confused with sub-stance, to the point that individuals now tend only to be modes of the attribute as it generally is. Far from proving individuality and inclusion, attribution and the definition of substance call them into question.”

“And if we return to motives in order to study them for a second time, they have not stayed the same.
Like the weight on a scale, they have gone up or down. The scale has changed according to the amplitude of the pendulum. The voluntary act is free because the free act is what expresses the entire soul at a given moment of its duration. That act is what expresses the self.“

“That another degree implies another soul and another world does not hinder this degree from actualizing the liberty of a given soul in this world.
The automaton is free not because it is determined from within, but because every time it constitutes the motive of the event that it produces.”

“eternity consists, much less in forging ahead or in going backwards, than in coinciding each time with all the passages that follow in the order of time”

“It is only to the detriment of the damned, who are freely cut away. Their worst punishment may be that of serving the progress of others, not by the negative example that they offer, but through the quantity of positive progress that they involuntarily leave to the world when they renounce their own clarity. In this sense, despite themselves, the damned could be attached in no better way to the best of all possible worlds.”

“What are the conditions that make an event possible? Events are produced in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes.
Chaos does not exist; it is an abstraction because it is inseparable from a screen that makes something - something rather than nothing — emerge from it.
Chaos would be a pure Many, a purely disjunctive diversity, while the something is a One, not a pregiven unity, but instead the indefinite article that designates a certain singularity. How can the Many become the One? A great screen has to be placed in between them. Like a formless elastic membrane, an electromagnetic field, or the receptacle of the Timaeus, the screen makes something issue from chaos.“

“A concert is being performed tonight. It is the event. Vibrations of sound disperse, periodic movements go through space with their harmonics or submultiples. The sounds have inner qualities of height, intensity, and timbre. The sources of the sounds, instrumental or vocal, are not content only to send the sounds out: each one perceives its own, and perceives the others while perceiving its own. These are active perceptions that are expressed among each other, or else prehensions that are prehending one another: "First the solitary piano grieved, like a bird abandoned by its mate; the violin heard its wail and responded to it like a neighboring tree. It was like the beginning of the world. . . ."
The origins of the sounds are monads or prehensions that are filled with joy in themselves, with an intense satisfaction, as they fill up with their perceptions and move from one perception to another. And the notes of the scale are eternal objects, pure Virtualities that are actualized in the origins, but also pure Possibilities that are attained in vibrations or flux."


“For Leibniz, as we have seen, bifurcations and divergences of series are genuine borders between incompossible worlds, such that the monads that exist wholly include the compossible world that moves into existence. For Whitehead (and for many modern philosophers), on the contrary, bifurcations, divergences, incompossibilities, and discord belong to the same motley world that can no longer be included in expressive units, but only made or undone according to prehensive units and variable configurations or changing captures. In a same chaotic world divergent series are endlessly tracing bifurcating paths. It is a
"chaosmos" of the type found in Joyce, but also in Maurice Leblanc, Borges, or Gombrowicz. 'Even God desists from being a Being who compares worlds
richest comossible.“

“If, with Kant, it is objected that such a conception reintroduces infinite un-derstanding, we might be impelled to remark that the infinite is taken here only as the presence of an unconscious in finite understanding, of something that cannot be thought in finite thought, of a nonself in the finite self, the presence that Kant will himself be forced to discover when he will hollow out the difference between a determinant and a determinable self.”

“Clearly, there is nothing new about the formula of "having a body," but what is new is that analysis bears upon species, degrees, relations, and variables of possession in order to use it to fashion the content or the development of the notion of Being.
Much more than Husserl, Gabriel Tarde fully discerned the importance of this mutation, and he called in question the unjustifiable primacy of the verb "to be." "The true opposite of the self is not the non-self, it is the mine; the true opposite of being, that is, the having, is not the non-being, but the had.”

“That relations are predicates is in no way paradoxical, but only if we understand what a predicate is, what makes it differ from an attribute; and the preestablished harmony implies no outer relation among the monads, but only ties regulated on the inside.
In contrast, the paradox appears insurmountable as soon as appeal is made to an extrinsic possession: that is, a relation that clearly has a subject, but that is not in its subject, and that is not a predicate. There Leibniz discovers that the monad as absolute interiority, as an inner surface with only one side, nonetheless has another side, or a minimum of outside, a strictly complementary form of outside. Can topology resolve the apparent contradiction? The latter effectively disappears if we recall that the "unilaterality" of the monad implies as its condition of closure a torsion of the world, an infinite fold, that can be unwrapped in conformity with the condition only by recovering the other side, not as exterior to the monad, but as the exterior or outside of its own interiority: a partition, a supple and adherent membrane coextensive with everything inside. Such is the vinculum, the unlocalizable primary link that borders the absolute interior.”

“We can also remark that derivative forces are exerted on secondary matter, or that they belong to it. It is because material aggregates themselves possess structures and figures that conform to statistical laws of equilibrium, of contact or of field, of thrust or of traction, as we have seen for the extrema. But such laws or secondary linkages imply that forces en masse are exerted upon the aggregates, and may be collective without being, for that, statistical. These derivative forces are effectively those of dominated monads that, however, conserve their individ-uality, each in respect to another body where it is projected as a primary force or a dominant monad. And further, all clusters of dominated monads, along with their derivative forces, exist only in the pure individuality of their dominant as a primary force of surveillance.
Derivative forces thus trace an entire area that can be called mixed, or rather, intermediary, between statistical collections and individual distributions, and which is made manifest in the phenomena of crowds.' It is still more interindi-vidual and interactive than it is collective.”

“Would it not be a misreading to identify derivative forces - whether elastic or plastic — with species of monads? Every monad is an individual, a soul, a sub-stance, a primal force, endowed with a solely inner action, while derivative forces are said to be material, accidental, modal, "states of a substance" that are exerted on bodies. But the issue involves knowing what is meant by state, and if it is reducible to a predicate. If derivative forces cannot be substances by virtue of their recognizable characters, it is impossible to see how they could ever be predicates contained in a substance. We believe that the terms "state" or "modification" must be understood in the sense of predicate, but as a status or a (public) aspect. Derivative forces are none other than primary forces, but they differ from them in status or in aspect. Primary forces are monads or substances in themselves or of themselves. Derivative forces are the same, but under a vinculum or in the flash of an instant. In one case, they are taken in multitudes and become plastic, while in the other they are taken in a mass and become elastic, because masses are what change at every instant (they do not go from one instant to another without being reconstituted). Derivative force is neither a substance nor a predicate, but several substances, because it exists only in a crowd or in a mass. They might be called mechanical or material forces, but in the sense in which Leibniz also speaks of "material souls," because in the two cases they belong to a body, they are present to a body, an organism or an aggregate. They are no less really distinct from this body, and they do not act upon it any more than they act upon one another. If they are present to the body, it is by requisition, in the name of requisites. And this body to which they belong is not their own, but a body that on its account belongs to a monad removed from its status, from a multitude, and from a mass, in and by itself, as a primary force.
The latter is also present to its body, and without acting upon it, but in a different way. It is present by projection. Now, in their turn, derivative forces have a body that belongs to them, but insofar as they abandon their status in order to return in and of themselves, each one becomes the primal force that it never ceased to be. We have seen how Whitehead, by way of Leibniz, had developed the public and the private as phenomenological categories.”

“We can consider the different appearances of the word "harmonic." They constantly refer to inverse or reciprocal numbers: the harmonic triangle of numbers that Leibniz invented to complete Pascal's arithmetical triangle; the harmonic mean that retains the sums of inverses; but also harmonic division, harmonic circulation, and what will later be discovered as the harmonics of a periodic movement. However simple these examples, they allow us to understand certain traits of the theory of monads, and first of all why we go, not from monads to harmony, but from harmony to monads. Harmony is monadological, but because monads are initially harmonic. The programmatic text states the point clearly: when the infinite Being judges something to be harmonic, it conceives it as a monad, that is, as an intellectual mirror or expression of the world. Thus the monad is the existant par excellence.”

“Harmony is twice pre-established: by virtue of each expression, of each expressant that owes only to its own spontaneity or interiority, and by virtue of the common expression that establishes the concert of all these expressive spontaneities. It is as if Leibniz were delivering us an important message about communication: don't complain about not having enough communication, for there is always plenty of it. Communication seems to be of a constant and preestablished quantity in the world, akin to a sufficient reason.
The most general given has vertical harmony in accords in a position subordinate to horizontal melody, to the horizontal lines of melody.“

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

honestly might be more useful if you're looking to understand Spinoza and Hegel rather than Leibniz. I am told that in its original French this is less of a nightmare to read (was told this by the translator of Guattari's Machinic Unconscious so consider it a pro-tip)

[oscar amcoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well developed envelope

[Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

re loco pero alto capo el pibe Deleuze

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Squisito saggio di Deleuze incentrato sulla filosofia di Leibniz che offre molti spunti, soprattutto nella prima parte e nell'ultimo capitolo, per un'interpretazione storica e contemporanea del Barocco attraverso il concetto di "piega".

Ciò che il filosofo francese presenta è una rilettura della teoria delle monadi di Leibniz per mostrare come tutto ciò che faccia parte della nostra realtà si erga su di essa: una teoria alquanto discutibile, se chiedete a me, ma che Deleuze riesce a rendere estremamente affascinante, grazie soprattutto ad un saggio apporto del calcolo differenziale e della analisi, le cui nozioni non sono estremamente complesse ma sono accessibili esclusivamente a chi le sappia interpretare al di fuori di macchinose formule. Ed ecco che la percezione viene spiegata attraverso rapporti di infinitesimi dy/dx, i cui stessi rapporti danno luogo a pieghe che ci permettono, a detta di Deleuze stesso, di cogliere tra un infinitesimo rapporto di blu e di giallo del verde in sfumature differenti, o addirittura la teoria dell'armonia prestabilita, del funzionamento perfettamente accordato tra monadi, interpretato attraverso la serie armonica 1/n.

Insomma, la filosofia di Leibniz è Barocca per eccellenza, scrive Deleuze, poiché ha offerto l'apparato concettuale per poter vivere nello stupore della piega, tra gli arditi versi del Marino, i seducenti panneggi del Bernini o le intense sinfonie di Bach, e riconoscere noi stessi sotto una nuova armonia. Poiché, a detta dello stesso Deleuze, il nostro periodo è un "neo-barocco" in cui l'armonia di fondo è rimasta la stessa ma è solo mutata la concezione della piega.

Come primo testo di Deleuze, mi ha lasciato davvero un'impressione di soddisfazione: Leibniz è un punto di riferimento grandissimo per la matematica, tuttavia la sua teoria delle monadi mi ha sempre lasciato piuttosto contrariato, ed è fantastico scoprire la voce di un filosofo che questa teoria è riuscita a viverla ed ha saputo proiettarla in un significato globale con un'unità di arrivo, in questo caso l'armonia (essendo la filosofia di Deleuze basata sul "rizoma").

Ne consiglio la lettura a patto che si conoscano il pensiero di Leibniz e i fondamenti dell'analisi quali calcolo differenziale ed integrale e serie: forse, proprio per questo, è stata una lettura molto leggera ma con costanti punti di interesse.

[Alexander Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a book that takes Leibniz to an extreme that Leibniz would have never done himself, this book is excellent and drawing him out to what could be seen as his philosophical ends. This is a great piece of historical philosophy in that sense. However, if we understand this as one of Deleuze's works of unorthodox philosophical history, which it is, then we must understand there are some abuses in context relative to his goals. Namely, what Deleuze offers is a context in which Leibniz is right in just such a way that bodies and logical inquiry of God enable such a utopian system in that God can't fail, but rather succeeds, through the damnation, the sins, the "failures" of much of humanity. In showing such a system, Deleuze creates instruments of how to think about bodies and the consistency of rational approaches. Doing this allows him to reconsider what Kant was attempting, and what much of the enlightenment philosophers were attempting. This is a huge step in the metaphysics of empiricism that is expressed in Deleuze's _Difference and Repetition_.

However, if one wished to problemitize this account of logical inquiry, one would only need to look to Godel's incompleteness theorems. As the basis of Deleuze's inquiry into Leibniz is roughly an account of the metaphysics of set theoretic or algebraic inquiry, it would seem not to difficult to suggest that Deleuze's analysis of Leibniz (whether or not Leibniz would have been aware of such a thing in his time) is open to criticism in his utopian vision of the completeness of the infinite due to the failures of consistency or completeness in the metamathematical statements of related to functional analysis that also seems at least analogous to Deleuze's accounts of difference (differences being directly related to derivatives in mathematics).

The folds themselves may find difficulty in their completeness of account through such a connection between the "rational" logic of mathematicians and the empirical of scientific.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found myself confused throughout this text. This confusion resulted not because of the content itself (which is dense, but penetrable, especially given a prior reading of Leibniz), but as a result of not knowing how this text fits into Deleuze's oeuvre. In many of Deleuze's historical studies, Deleuze uses the author he is working as he wishes to develop parts of his own thought. In Negotiations he famously said that he take the author by the rear and gives birth to a monster (the other exception to this being the Kant book). In The Fold it is as Deleuze himself that is being taken by Leibniz, and giving birth to a Deleuzian monster with Leibnizian thought, rather than the other way around. It is a becoming Leibniz of Deleuze, rather than a becoming Deleuze of Leibniz. The only sections that seem to fit with typical Deleuzian writing are the 6th chapter on Whitehead, and the final two paragraphs of the book which discuss a movement from a monadology to a nomadology. It is possible that these two paragraphs were originally meant to be extended and Deleuze ran out of steam, but I don't have anything to support this. In any case, I'm still confused, though I have a theory that this text relates to the Foucault one insofar as he is developing an understanding of Leibnizian and classical episteme, rather than putting forward a metaphysical treatise. more work would need to be done to establish this theory.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm wondering what gets lost between Deleuze's universal fold and the Baroque fold of Leibniz's philosophy. Do I experience a scattering of microprecepts concentrated by some sort of organizational monadical relationship? Do psycho-physics really have any currency beyond trying to explain God's relationship to the world for Leibniz? I found this book neat, but my criticism is 1) towards the manifesto-like calling of Deleuze to use this any way we can today. I get it for artists, but for scholarship that does NOT research chiaroscuro, Bach, or other relavent art works, I don't see the cash value. It is both too arcane and too prolix and unfocused. I don't want to fuck the tradition of Aristotle in the ass, at least not by these means. 2) Scholars who try to bring these ideas into contemporary scholarship that is, again, not focused on the Baroque period. We might as well dig up something from an old Hindu text or Buddhist sutra to explain our experience in the world. There is nothing wrong with doing this, but at what point is it an aesthetic move and at what point is it really thought out.

Maybe I am being too harsh here and don't understand what Deleuze is doing fully, but I was a bit dismayed to see that all the hoopla was based on some very difficult and obscure writing that most people don't fully understand whether they admit it or not.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting in that Deleuze can turn a dull philosopher into a radical with a few witty lines. Definitely something that had the pages turning when I picked it up. Someday, i will write a book entitled From Monads to Nomads (on Deleuze and Leibniz) until that day, keep your ear to the grindstone and hear all the silence about this book - very few scholars even pay attention to it...at their own peril I believe.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful little book. It combines the daring and romance of Difference and Repetition with the clarity and ease of Kant: The Doctrine of the Faculties. It has certainly made me want to go away and read Leibniz.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautifully written (and translated) formal inspiration (at least for me...)

[Massimiliano Mauro · Rating 5 out of 5]

4 anni per leggerlo e credo di aver compreso solo la Biografia, ma ampiala mente.

[Steen Ledet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense reading but insightful on double-articulations and, obviously, the richness of folds.

[Valentín Serrano García · Rating 4 out of 5]

Performativo, como tanta de su producción, mas sesudamente filosófico en el sentido mas implicado de su naturaleza, "El pliegue" supone un análisis formidable del pensamiento leibniziano filtrado por la provocación deleuziana (acontecimiento, deseo múltiple, devenir infinito, multiplicidad no universal....).

Plegando y replegando, desplegando e inflexionando, Deleuze hila matemáticas, arquitectura, lingüística y música para deleitarnos con una sinfonía de sugerencias fluidas, esquizoides y polivalentes. Siempre bajo el claroscuro de las monadas, entre fachadas católicas impermeables y tensiones alto-bajo conectadas por sutiles vectores ondulantes y curvados.

El pliegue será, pues, la fusión de lo orgánico y lo inorgánico, de lo sensible y lo ininteligible, del mundo hecho subjetividad y de una infinitesimal(idad) que quizás sea nuestra propia deformidad viscosa, entre tanto pliegue barroco, dispuesta a acontecerse y blablabla....

[Nick Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this short book, despite Deleuze's highly abstract style of writing. He has done a service in channeling Leibniz thought into a coherent picture, with comparisons made to other thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson (who Deleuze has also written a book on). I especially found the analysis of monads - their particular, eclectic manner of internalizing or containing the total world, their properties of synthesis (in the vinculum) and subordination (similar to Whiteheadian societies of societies), and their relationships to one another and to the transcendent dimension or "God" - very helpful for my own thinking on the comparative evolution of philosophical and religious systems.

[Regn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Fold is as fascinating as it is infuriating. It’s probably one of my favourite books by Deleuze, but also one of the most difficult at the same time. The enormous range of concepts that he uses, from Baroque architecture and music to physics and calculus, is par for the course when it comes to Deleuze, but it all feels almost more ‘serious’ when it comes to the metaphysics he develops in the process of his complicated and intertwining arguments. I strongly recommend reading something like Affirming Divergence by Alex Tissandier to make sense of this work, but getting through it is definitely worth the effort.

[Linda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not for me. There was something beguiling about his Baroque house model, with its windowless rooms and veiled ceiling, (reminiscent as it was of Freud’s model of the subconscious, Borge’s Labyrinthine library, or Susana Clarks’ book titled Piranesi), and I liked his notion of “chaosmos”. Otherwise, it was a book of ideas that took a long time to go nowhere obvious. Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) 1000 Plateaus was an interesting read, but this was exhausting. I just didn’t understand it enough to make further comment.

[Ella Frances · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve never disagreed with Deleuze. The meandering nature of thought seems to transcend criticism. Or, at least, any worthy criticism would have to fit into the bounds of shared conceptual parameters, which would be a difficult and joyless undertaking. So, all that's left to do is celebrate these beautiful ideas. One of my favourite thinkers, largely because the pockets within pockets he gracefully materialises form untouched objects and symbols. I will definitely re-read his work in Southern France during the summer.