After dipping my toe into the source material, I proceeded on to Deleuze's discussion of Leibniz in The Fold. Not surprisingly, this is a pretty difficult book. Not only does Deleuze try to make a consistent system out of Leibniz's scattered and fragmentary work, but he also tries to connect it to Baroque painting, architecture, and music. The first task alone would be relatively monumental, since Leibniz not only wrote quite a lot, but he wrote in a number of different contexts -- pure mathematics, physics, religion, philosophy -- which we would now consider incompatible, but which Leibniz clearly saw as harmoniously related. The second part could likewise be a study in itself, especially since Deleuze does not confine himself to historical Baroque figures such as El Greco, but extends to concept to include "neo-Baroque" artists like Simon Hantai, Dubuffet, and others. And then the basic thesis of the book is that these two sides, while they are completely distinct and each possess a complicated logic of their own, are nevertheless so inseparable as to be two sides of the same coin. This, after all, is the concept of the fold -- two things that are doubled or folded over one another to form the non-dual. So it's a lot to pack into a 137 page book.
Early on in reading the book, I decided to take a different approach than I usually have to reading Deleuze. Instead of live blogging it line by line, I read the whole thing through relatively quickly and superficially (ie. in under a month). The plan was to immediately begin again with a more detailed second reading. Along the way, however, I began to feel like I hadn't read quite enough Leibniz source material to fully appreciate what was going on. Since Deleuze makes frequent reference to Leibniz's New Essays on Human Understanding, and since this was one of only two complete books Leibniz ever wrote, I thought perhaps I should go through it before returning to Deleuze. Unfortunately, what makes the essays New is that the they are commentary on Locke's mammoth: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. And Lord, you can imagine where it goes from here. I obviously enjoy reading in the history of philosophy, but 800 pages of Locke is a bit much even for me (though one interesting shortcut of sorts might be to read Dewey's commentary on the two works together).
Anyhow, after pondering the extent of this detour, I decided against it. Instead, I've planned an even longer background reading list, but of exclusively modern authors. There's a group of contemporary authors that Deleuze refers to frequently throughout his work, particularly when the context involves the question of individuation, which is one of the clear themes of The Fold. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Leibniz's monad is the way that each individual somehow contains the entire world. In fact, containing everything is almost synonymous with being a true or unique or perfected or completely determined individual. But how do you pack the infinite world into the limits of a finite being? Obviously, you fold it up. -- infinitely many times. Not only is this folding a way of packing many things into a small space, but the process of folding itself creates an inside and an outside from what was previously a continuous fabric.
Whenever Deleuze discusses this process of folding, which we might equally call a process of differentiating or of selecting, ordering and filtering the world, three names inevitably appear -- von Uexküll, Ruyer, and Simondon. I already have Simondon's On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects sitting on the shelf. I've been intending to read von Uexküll's A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning for at least a decade now because, well, how can you not want to read something with that title? And while Ruyer is a more recent addition to the list, my interest in his work was piqued after reading Daniel W. Smith's review of Neofinalism. So first I'll try to deepen my understanding of the concept of individuation by reading those three texts. After that, I'd like to check out Bernard Cache, an architect who Deleuze mentions repeatedly in The Fold, as well as to finally read Daniel W. Smith collected Essays on Deleuze. From what I've gathered over the years, Smith seems to be the best English language commentator on his philosophy. Though given that Deleuze's US reception skews towards wanky literature department types, this is admittedly a low bar to hurdle.
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