Leibniz invented the concept of possible worlds to explain why God chose this particular universe to exist. Deleuze accepts the concept of possible worlds while dismantling the theology that holds it together. The remainder is what one would term incompossibility without divine arbitration. This is a pivotal move that Deleuze makes in his book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. We will attempt to trace the theoretical arc from Leibniz’s original doctrine to its Deleuzeian reinterpretation. What happens when divergence ceases to mark a boundary between worlds and begins to characterize the very structure of the universe?

Leibniz Said God Chose Our World From Infinitely Many Possible Ones

To understand Deleuze’s intervention, we should first reconstruct the original doctrine.

Leibniz elaborates on the possible world as being a coherent logical structure; a set of compossible events that could have existed if God had chosen otherwise. Possibility, in Leibniz’s system, has a very specific weight. It means more than something that can be imagined. It means that something fits within a complete, harmonious whole.

Prior to the selection and creation of one specific world (ours) – infinitely many possible worlds exist in the divine intellect. God surveys them all, calculating which combination of individuals, events, and relations yields the maximum richness, the greatest variety of beings with the greatest order and simplicity of laws. The one world God selects thereby passes from possibility to existence. The rest of the worlds remain as possibilities; they never become real.

It is within the realm of possibilities that Adam never sinned against God, that Caesar never crossed the Rubicon, and the Roman Empire never came into existence. But none of these scenarios belong to the “best of all possible worlds,” which means none were ever going to take place in our universe.

The framework has wider implications. It resolves some ancient problems about contingency. Events that happened need not have happened. Caesar’s crossing was not logically necessary in itself; it was only incompossible with other possible worlds; it was compossible with ours. But this does not make the determinism of events any less real.

The distinction between absolute necessity and relative certainty, a distinction Leibniz labors to maintain against Spinozist determinism, rests entirely on the architecture of possible worlds. What exists is certain relative to God’s choice, but it is not necessary in the metaphysical sense. Alternative scenarios were genuinely available, even if God, in his wisdom, did not select them.

Compossibility Is Leibniz’s Rule for Which Events Can Share a World

The concept of compossibility is Leibniz’s most distinctive philosophical invention, and Deleuze certainly pays his proper respects. Two events are compossible when they can belong to the same possible world without contradiction. They are incompossible when including both in a single world would produce a logical conflict.

Incompossibility is not just difference. Adam-who-sins and Adam-who-does-not-sin are not simply two descriptions of the same individual under different circumstances. They are, for Leibniz, two distinct individual notions, each belonging to a different possible world, each incompossible with the other. This is quite distinct from possibility in the normal sense.

The foundation for thinking possibility this way is Leibniz’s notion of substance. Every monad contains within itself, as predicates, all the events that will ever happen to it. The monad Caesar includes the predicate “crosses the Rubicon” within the totality of its concept. A different Caesar, though possible, would nonetheless be an entirely different individual with a distinct overall conception, belonging to a different world. It would be a different monad.

Identity is therefore irreducibly tied to the totality of one’s life, to the entire series of one’s predicates. To a world. Changing any predicate ramifies throughout the entire series of events, producing a different world. There is a sense in which Leibnizian determinism encompasses contingency.

What holds a possible world together is the convergence of series. Each monad expresses the entire world from its own point of view, and all compossible monads express the same world from theirs. Their series are convergent: they fit together harmoniously, each reinforcing and completing the others. Chaos, in Leibniz’s cosmological metaphor, is the sum of all possibles pressing for existence.

The world that exists is sifted through what Deleuze, following Leibniz, calls a screen; the screen allows only compossible events to pass through per given world. For Leibniz, God is the screen. God selects the convergent, harmonious, maximally rich world.

Deleuze Cuts God From the System and Lets Worlds Diverge Inside One Reality

Deleuze does not tamper excessively with Leibniz’s logical constructions: the convergent series, the divergent series, compossibility, incompossibility, these remain largely intact. He does, however, sever these structures from the theological function they were designed to serve. In this sense, one could argue, the intervention is quite drastic.

With Leibniz, incompossibility is a border concept. It marks the line separating the possible worlds. It serves as a justification for God’s selectivity and explains the closure of the actual world. Deleuze poses a subversive question: what if divergence does not mark a border between worlds, what if the world itself is in fact divergent?

In The Fold, Deleuze describes this shift as the passage from the Baroque to the neo-Baroque. Classical reason, the one Leibniz attempted to save at a moment of historical crisis, required an immediate resolution of the problem of divergences. The existence of contradictions was attributed to the conflict between different possible worlds pressing against the border of the real one. Within our world, such conflicts were ultimately resolved into harmony; a harmony that was pre-established and God-given.

The Baroque was, for Deleuze, the last great attempt to reconstitute classical reason by “dividing divergences into as many worlds as possible, and by making from incompossibilities as many possible borders between worlds.”

The neo-Baroque abandons this approach. Divergent series are now allowed to unfurl within the same world. Incompossibilities irrupt within the stage of the actual world. Sextus both rapes and does not rape Lucretia, which was the founding crime of the Roman Republic in Leibniz’s view. Caesar crosses and does not cross the Rubicon. These are not alternative scenarios assigned to different possible worlds by divine selection. They are co-present in a world no longer governed by God.

As Deleuze explains, God ceases to be a Being who compares worlds and selects the richest combination. He becomes Process: a process that affirms incompossibilities and passes through them rather than resolving them. This is a radical new ontology and a powerful departure from classical Leibniz.

Deleuze’s Leibniz Runs Straight Into Whitehead and David Lewis

Deleuze shows how the Leibnizian world rippled through analytic philosophy as well. The Fold makes this connection explicit, referencing Alfred North Whitehead as an example.

Deleuze describes Whitehead as the true successor to Leibniz. Whitehead, he says, was a philosopher who independently arrived at many of the same problems as himself. For Whitehead, prehensions, inspired by monads, are not closed like the Leibnizian monads. Each prehension is open onto the world. It is directly connected to some prehensions while excluding others. Whitehead’s picture does not require pre-established harmony; it is clear how this was an inspiration for Deleuze.

The analytic tradition’s engagement with possible worlds runs through David Lewis as well. Lewis established modal realism: the view that possible worlds are as real as the actual world. The only difference is a matter of access. We just happen to be inhabiting the real world, not the possible ones.

Lewis’s framework inherits the basic Leibnizian architecture: possible worlds are maximally consistent totalities, and individuals exist in only one world at a time. What Deleuze does, as opposed to Lewis, is to refuse the assumption that possible worlds must be consistent totalities at all. If divergent series can coexist in the same world, then the very concept of a “world” as a closed, coherent totality is brought into question.

The contrast is sharpest around the concept of transworld identity. For Leibniz and Lewis alike, an individual cannot literally inhabit two possible worlds simultaneously. The Deleuzian neo-Baroque move is to allow the bifurcation to reside within the same ontological space. This is not a logical contradiction. It is an alternative view of reality. The world is thereby understood as an open multiplicity where incompossibilities coexist.

Deleuze Turned Leibniz’s Closed System Into an Open World of Difference

The current series of articles traced a path through Deleuze’s The Fold, moving from the general concept of the fold itself, through the two floors of Baroque metaphysics, the Leibnizian monad, Deleuze’s reshaping of it, and forward onto the question of possibility that grounds and unsettles the whole system.

Leibniz used incompossibility to explain why God chose this world rather than another, and to incorporate the contingency of events into his deterministic world. Deleuze traverses the concept, turning it into a tool for opening up the world.

A world structured by incompossibility without God is a world where identity is liberated from the totality of a closed concept. It is a world where divergence, bifurcation, dissonance, and other rhizomatic tensions become constitutive. We are confronted with a world where novelty becomes possible. Deleuze’s Leibniz is an altogether different creature. It is a philosophical metamorphosis that results from pressing the Leibnizian machinery to its breaking point.

The fold has functioned as the operative concept: it connects matter and soul, inside and outside, the visible and the legible, the possible and the real. With Leibniz, the fold closes possible worlds off from one another. With Deleuze, the fold unfurls, and the worlds communicate.

Deleuze carries not the inheritance of a Leibnizian system, but that of a Leibnizian problem: How does the infinite variety of the world cohere without being reduced to a single principle that eliminates difference? Leibniz’s answer was the screen, God, and pre-established harmony. Deleuze’s answer is a world without closure, a “chaosmos” of divergent series where an irreconcilable, productive polyphony replaces harmony. Reading The Fold is an encounter with a resurrection of Leibniz, so real and animated, that it is almost unrecognizable.

Questions of motion, change, time, and novelty are among the oldest in philosophy. Bergson’s approach may resonate with older thinkers in the history of thought, but he remains one of the most original contributors to the philosophy of time. Bergson wants to understand time as it is experienced directly. To do so, our conception of time must be stripped away from the spatial representations that science tends to impose on it. The result of the suspension is the concept of duration. Deleuze recovers the concept with precision and moves beyond.

Clock Time Measures Space, Not the Flow of Lived Time

The distinction between clock time and lived time is one of the oldest problems in the philosophy of temporality. Bergson offers a fresh and precise new interpretation with added philosophical weight. The question is significantly more complex than the difference between subjective time and measured time. The issue at hand is the fact that the two perspectives on time involve fundamentally different structures of reality.

Their confusion has led to numerous unnecessary, false problems in the history of philosophy.

Clock time is time spatialized. When we measure duration with a clock, we do not actually measure the flow of time. We measure the position of a hand on a dial, which serves as a spatial reference used as an arbitrary unit of time.

The hours and minutes we extract from this procedure are artificial constructs that do not reflect the nature of lived experience. They represent marks on a homogeneous, divisible medium constructed for practical purposes. Each unit is identical to every other. And unlike real moments of experiential time, they have no qualitative character; nothing distinguishes one instant from another. The past hour and the coming hour are, in clock time, completely interchangeable.

Bergson refers to experiential time as duration, or in French, la durée. Duration is not structured according to clock time. It is a continuous flow in which each moment is qualitatively distinct from the preceding and the following one. Duration analyzed is duration altered. An hour of hard work and an hour of leisure are completely different hours. They are distinct, qualitatively heterogeneous forms of duration.

Duration Is a Multiplicity That Changes in Kind When You Divide It

Deleuze further refines the concept of duration by bringing to the surface another latent philosophical concept from Bergsonism. It is crucial, Deleuze argues, to understand duration as a specific type of multiplicity.

Deleuze traces Bergson’s term back to the mathematician Bernhard Riemann, who had introduced the term multiplicity (Mannigfaltigkeit) to describe a space whose metric is not fixed in advance but varies from point to point. Riemann distinguished discrete multiplicities, which carry their own measure, from continuous ones, which do not.

A discrete or numerical multiplicity can be divided without changing kind. Take any number: a number can be subdivided indefinitely, and each subdivision yields something of the same type as the whole. The unit remains homogeneous throughout the operation. Space is the philosophical model of this multiplicity.

Duration is a multiplicity of a fundamentally different kind. Duration cannot be divided without altering its own essence. In the essay “Time and Free Will,” Bergson offers an example of a feeling.  For instance, take a complex affectivity that combines love and anxiety.

As long as this state remains unanalyzed, it has a particular qualitative character that belongs to it as a whole. The moment one tries to understand it and isolate its parts, the original state will be altered. What results from the division is a set of qualitatively distinct states that differ from one another in kind, and they are distinct from the original complex as well. Duration is fundamentally heterogeneous. Its essence is variation.

Duration is not indivisible, as Bergson himself might sometimes, rather misleadingly, suggest. It does divide, constantly even. But it is not made up of clearly distinct parts; it is made up of multiple diverging tendencies. Identifying these tendencies is no simple matter, as the process of naming and categorizing alters the thing named.

Difference in Kind Is Bergson’s Sharpest Tool Against Confusion

Let us focus on the distinction between differences in kind and differences in degree. It is, as Deleuze argues, the central critical instrument of the entire system. The blade, so to speak, with which Bergson cuts through some of the philosophical confusions that plague both science and metaphysics.

A difference in degree is a quantitative variation within a homogeneous medium. It is, one might say, more or less of the same thing. These are objective differences that can be measured, ranked on a scale, and expressed as numerical ratios.

Calculation in general presupposes that the terms being compared belong to the same kind. Once again, this is the domain of spatial composition. Multiple relations of substitutability or the relation between container and contained. Every spatial distinction is ultimately a distinction of position, dimension, or quantity within a uniform medium.

A difference in kind, by contrast, is not a matter of more or less along any scale at all. It is a difference in nature: two things differ in kind when no common measure ranks them, because they are not variations of a single underlying quantity.

Time does not really divide; it does not really work as a collection of {t1, t2,t3 … tx} moments, where each one is identical to any other. Duration does not produce smaller portions of the same homogeneous stuff. It produces states that are qualitatively distinct, irreducible to one another, and irreducible to any common system of measurement.

It is through this prism that Bergson identifies the history of philosophy to be largely a history of confusions. Philosophers have confused differences in kind for differences in degree. This is the fundamental metaphysical diagnosis. The physicist treats matter and consciousness as nothing but two diverging points on a single scale of being. Whereas in truth, they are genuinely distinct modes of reality.

Deleuze’s Own Move: Duration Is the Ground of All Difference

It is important not to conflate Bergson with Deleuze’s Bergson. Deleuze offers more than just a commentary. In some ways, one might say Deleuze aims to rehabilitate Bergson for the contemporary age. Deleuze’s Bergsonism is therefore more than just a summary of Bergson’s work. Deleuze builds on Bergson and invents his own concepts. One of the strictly Deleuzian contributions is the idea that duration is the ontological ground of difference.

This sets Deleuze apart as an independent creative thinker, while remaining deeply influenced by Bergson. Bergson uses duration primarily as a corrective concept; a way of restoring to philosophy what the spatialization of time has effectively concealed. The argument aims to rescue the complexity of experience from the distortions of spatialized thinking.

Deleuze reverses the direction. Rather than moving from the experience of duration toward a critique of false problems, he moves from duration as ontological structure toward a general theory of difference. Duration becomes a proper metaphysical postulate in the classical sense. Deleuze argues that duration is, in fact, ontologically before clock time.

Deleuze thereby fundamentally rearranges the relationship between time and space, perhaps in a way that Bergson could not even anticipate. With Bergson, space is an impure element in the sense that it obscures the operations of duration, unless properly distinguished. Deleuze takes this further: Not only must space be distinguished, but it must be seen that space or quantity is itself grounded in the temporal flux of becoming.

Deleuze uses Bergson’s work to shape his own methodology. Bergsonism thereby anticipates Deleuze’s own later project in Difference and Repetition. Within Deleuzian metaphysics, difference is primary, identity is derivative, and time is not the measure of movement but a primordial foundation of reality.

Why Confusing Time With Space Has Consequences Beyond Philosophy

There is more to the distinction between clock time and lived time than meets the eye. Much less than a change of aspect, these structures signal two entirely divergent forms of understanding and perception. The homogeneous discrete time of the clock is a construction. It is indispensable for science. However, it is simultaneously constitutively unable to capture the real dimension of time.

The second, duration, is a qualitative multiplicity whose parts cannot be separated without being transformed thereby in doing so. Duration is both continuous and heterogeneous. Time and space are two multiplicities that are fundamentally different in kind.

The concept of multiplicity sharpens the Bergsonist account considerably. Bergson, via Deleuze, relied on Riemann to frame duration as a specific type of multiplicity. Duration is not vague. Duration is divisible, but only in a way that changes its fundamental features.

The distinction between difference in kind and difference in degree, once again is the core of Bergsonism.

The persistent scientific tendency to reduce qualitative heterogeneity to quantitative gradation and to see differences of degree where there are differences in kind, as useful as it is, remains a dangerous intellectual monopoly that might even have detrimental ethical and political consequences. Despite being a structural feature of the way intelligence operates, or perhaps precisely because intelligence has a natural propensity to operate this way, it requires a deliberate methodological corrective.

For Aristotle (384-322 BC), bravery means acting nobly when confronted with danger. He considered bravery in battle the exemplary instance of this virtue, which may make it seem outdated. However, every day, bravery is called for more than ever. He wrote at least two, possibly three (opinions differ), treatises on ethics. The best-known is Nicomachean Ethics, which contains his most important teachings on the art of leading a good life, teachings that remain relevant today.

Understanding Fear, Risk, and How Aristotle Defined Our Response to Danger

In Nicomachean Ethics (Book III, sections 6-9), Aristotle, discussing the virtue of bravery, explains that bravery is the mean between confidence and fear, these two dispositions being inversely proportional: an excess of fear involves a lack of confidence (and vice versa). Although bravery is a mean, Aristotle explains that it consists primarily in opposing what inspires fear, since it is more difficult to endure pain than to abstain from pleasure.

Fear arises from the anticipation of evil. It is not therefore a mere feeling, but a belief or judgment that anticipates future loss or harm. Not all fears are bad, nor do all concern bravery. It is healthy and beneficial to fear what might harm our character or reputation. Also, one is not brave if they are fearless in the face of just punishment (which borders on shamelessness). Rather, one should feel remorse, and fear the vice that contributed to the crime.

In defining the type of fear to which bravery relates, Aristotle sought the paradigmatic case by identifying the most extreme example of fear: death. He then identified the noblest way to exemplify fearlessness in the face of death, which he thought was bravery in battle, for in such extreme exigencies, one’s qualities of character can shine through. Bravery, therefore, consists of standing firm when one’s all is risked.

Finding the Golden Mean Between Rashness, Cowardice, and True Courage

Although we may react differently to terrible situations, some are beyond what human strength can endure (e.g., terrible earthquakes or floods). Bravery concerns only those trials that one can endure. The brave person engages the particularities of an action— duration (how long an act lasts), timeliness (when an act is performed), objects (to whom or what the action is directed), instruments (the tools or means used), manner (how the action is carried out), and motive, appropriately—and for a noble end or because it would be shameful to submit, renege, or flee. Bravery as a mean means that we fear what should be rationally feared (and don’t disregard the risks), but that we nevertheless press forward as reason dictates.

The vice of excess can manifest in two ways: first, while exceptionally rare, is a person who fears nothing at all, whom Aristotle calls mad or insensible; the more common form is rashness. The rash person is not brave because they do not desire to stand their ground for a noble end.

The rash person wishes to appear brave and, from this desire, overextends and overestimates themselves, taking on more than they can handle. For this reason, they do not act as the brave person does, for when faced with difficulties, they are confronted with the truth of their false confidence and falter. The rash person is a mixture of cowardice and the zealous desire to seem courageous.

The vice of deficiency is cowardice. The coward fails by having too much fear or by fearing what should not be feared. Aristotle remarks that such a person may be prone to despair. They may find themselves incapable of acting, moving forward, and meeting new challenges successfully, thus being unable to grow or live life. The coward, rash, and brave person are all confronted with the same facts but react differently to them: the difference between living well and slipping up.

The 5 Types of False Courage, Skill, and Imitation Bravery

Aristotle separates out false from true forms of bravery. First are those who face danger out of fear of punishment or a desire for glory, but these motives make them unreliable since they are not motivated by a firm commitment to achieving noble ends. Second are those who act bravely due to their experience or skill. But when facing unfamiliar threats, they may hesitate, making their bravery only apparent.

Third are those who passionately defend themselves when provoked. They are guided by emotion, and while passion may aid bravery, it does not define it. Fourth are those who are confident because of past successes and act bravely because they expect to succeed. This makes their confidence situational rather than based on stable character. Finally, there are those who act bravely out of ignorance. But this is not true bravery because virtue requires acting with choice from a place of knowledge.

Everyday Heroes, Resistance, and What True Bravery Looks Like in the Modern World

Bravery, for Aristotle, is about facing danger by choice to achieve what is noble. Acts such as conscientious objection to war, resistance to anti-democratic actions in a democratic republic, whistleblowing, upholding journalistic integrity, fighting against powerful corporations or leaders who threaten the environment, and providing humanitarian aid in perilous situations, therefore, would all constitute acts of bravery.

Bravery is doing what’s right even when confronting overwhelming opposition, defending the good and the true despite pressures to conform to what is ignoble or popular. Bravery is good for us since complicity with evil harms the soul and compromises happiness and integrity. Bravery is also praiseworthy because it demonstrates the priority given to the good despite pressures to cave. The brave person actively opposes adversity and endures suffering, sometimes death, for noble causes, demonstrating to all what nobility humankind can achieve, against what misanthropes might like to think.

Ordinarily, the virtual either refers to something that has to do with computers, the internet, or otherwise to something unreal and abstract. With Deleuze, the term has a very different and technical, as opposed to technological, definition. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s radical theorization of memory, Deleuze shapes an original ontology of creation. The virtual becomes as real as the actual: an intensive matrix of forces. Deleuze delivers a cosmic architecture of pure creation; he shows how our universe remains an open system in constant flux.

In Philosophy, the Virtual Is Real, Not Digital or Simulated

It is time to perform another rescue mission. One must rescue the philosophical term virtual from its technological connotations. The Deleuzian use of the notion is something very different from the conventional meaning: something is considered virtual if it is digitally simulated: a virtual meeting, a virtual reality, a virtual assistant.

One of the dangers of the regular use of the word is that the virtual becomes associated with something that replaces the real, a pale or approximate version of what exists (the actual). In short, to call something virtual is, in ordinary language, to register it as a deficit.

The Deleuzian take on the concept of the virtual reverses the whole ontological hierarchy. The virtual is not a lesser form of what is real. The virtual is no less real than the actual, but it carries a different mode of existence. Understanding the distinction is arguably the single most important conceptual move for understanding Deleuze’s reading of Bergson. And Bergson’s work is in turn key to understanding Deleuze’s method of doing philosophy.

The distinction in question is between the virtual and the actual. Both are real. What distinguishes them is their mode of being. The actual is that which is clearly, perceptually given. It must occupy a determinate position in space and time. The virtual is what exists without being actualized in the present. Nonetheless, the effects of the virtual are as real as the effects of the actual.

Bergson’s analysis of memory is an excellent case.

According to Bergson, the past does not disappear; nor is it stored somewhere on the brain’s “hard drive” waiting to be retrieved. And it most certainly is not some faded copy or a neurological trace. Pure memory continues to exist in a virtual capacity. It is constantly present to the subject and actively serves it according to the needs and requirements of action in the present.

For Bergson, the Past Is Fully Real but No Longer Present

Bergson’s theory of memory begins with a distinction that cuts diagonally across almost every common assumption. Philosophers and psychologists have typically treated memory as a fading perception. Something like a dim copy, a sensorial echo of an experience.

The difference between a present perception and a memory is, in other words, a difference of degree. Perceptions are vivid and immediate; memories are distant and obscure. Bergson argues against the conventional interpretations. The difference between the present and the past is not a difference of degree. Once again, it is a difference in kind.

The common picture of memory stems from the common picture of time, that is, a linear understanding of time. One moment follows another; the only difference between one instant and the next, between the present and the past, is the difference in perceived clarity.

Bergson rejects the linear interpretation. It is, in contrast, the present that is perpetually ceasing to be, perpetually passing. The past, by contrast, remains stable. Without memory, there is no perception. The past coexists virtually with every successive present. The present is the mode of active becoming; the past is the mode of pure being. As Deleuze puts it in his book, Bergsonism, the past has ceased to act or be useful, but it has not ceased to be. It is identical with being in itself.

We are led thereby to one of Bergson’s most counterintuitive claims: the past is contemporaneous with the present. It does not come after the present and then recede. It is constituted simultaneously with the present, at the very moment that the present is experienced.

Deleuze Turns Bergson’s Memory Into the Structure of the Universe

Deleuze’s decisive intervention lies in translating Bergson’s insights from a philosophy of internal experience into a grand, cosmic ontology. Where Bergson was often misread as a theorist of human psychology, confining duration and memory to the theater of consciousness, Deleuze strips away any lingering subjectivism. And with it, some of the critique leveled at Bergson by science and analytic philosophy.

Deleuze elevates the Bergsonian concept of pure memory to the status of the virtual. It thereby becomes a standalone, objective dimension of being. The virtual is not a psychological archive tucked away in our minds; it is the structural, unextended matrix of the universe itself. It continues to vibrate with its own reality before crystallizing into material objects.

By rendering the virtual a matter of cosmic architecture, Deleuze ensures a successful escape from the passive vacuum of traditional metaphysics and from psychological reductionism.

The virtual is indeed fully real, and it persists as a fluid landscape of differential forces, intensities, and genetic tendencies. Importantly, the virtual realm does not sit idly; its own activity distinguishes it. The virtual serves as the primary engine driving the production of the actual.

When the virtual undergoes actualization, it by no means copies itself onto reality like a stamp or a mold. The virtual is productive as it differentiates, breaking out into genuinely unexpected, novel forms. Through this conceptual upgrade, Deleuze transforms a theory of memory into a radical ontology of pure creation, proving that the universe is never a static, finished product but an open system in constant flux and turbulent becoming.

Actualization Creates, Realization Only Copies: Why the Difference Matters

Having established the virtual as a complete dimension of being, Deleuze introduces another distinction that sharpens his account: the difference between actualization and realization. These two processes are easily conflated. Deleuze takes care to show how they are fundamentally opposed. Furthermore, confusing them is one of the most persistent errors for both common sense and philosophy.

During realization, something possible becomes real. Realization presupposes a possibility of the real that is fully formed in advance. What occurs then, during realization, is that the possible simply comes into existence; a transition from non-being to being.

According to Aristotelian logic, the possible is just a phantom; a projection of the real. Bergson identifies this as the source of one of philosophy’s deepest illusions: the retrograde movement of the true. The retrograde movement of the true is a process whereby we project a ready-made image of the real back into the past and then refer to it as a possibility. The possible resembles the real since it was constructed after its image.

Bergson’s example for explaining this illusion is a work of art. Once a symphony or a novel exists, we say it was “possible” all along. However, before it was created, that specific possibility did not wait anywhere to be realized. We read the possibility backward into the past only after the real thing appears, then forget we did so and imagine the possible came first. This back-projection is what Deleuze labels as the retrograde movement of the true.

Actualization is drastically different. The virtual does not resemble its productions. It does not contain, whether in miniature or in outline, the diversity of forms and entities that will emerge from it. When the virtual actualizes, it simultaneously differentiates. It creates genuinely novel forms through divergent lines of development that could not have been predicted from the structure of the virtual.

Actualization is therefore irreducibly creative. This is why Deleuze insists that the movement from the virtual to the actual is a matter of genuine production, contrasting it with the simpler disclosure of realization.

The Virtual Makes Reality an Open System That Never Stops Creating

Deleuze’s insistence on the virtual-actual axis is more than an exercise in semantic gymnastics.

A close reading reveals a reclamation of the world’s inherent creativity. By tracing this trajectory from Bergson’s psychological ontology of pure memory to a cosmic architecture of pure becoming, the static and pre-packaged illusions of realization and the “possible” are thoroughly dismantled. Reality ceases to be a sterile vending machine for dispensing pre-formed blueprints. One is rather forced to confront a universe that is radically open, intensively structured, and full of forces that refuse to align with their constructions.

The paradigm shift hinges entirely on how the virtual undergoes actualization. Unlike the sterile mechanism of realization, which merely molds entities from phantoms and phantoms from entities, actualization demands a radical and unpredictable divergence. One might even claim, in a Deleuzian fashion, that it demands a line of flight.

Perhaps multiple lines of flight that branch out into resistant, rhizomatic chains of becoming. The virtual matrix contains no miniature blueprints of what is to come; the future is radically open as it makes reality into a perpetual self-differentiating force. The world morphs at the very moment of its physical emergence.

Deleuze makes philosophy, and therefore reality, come alive. We are no longer observing a sequence of static snapshots; we feel the dynamic pressure of a virtual past shaping our present, forcing the universe to reinvent its own creative parameters endlessly.

In this light, the distinction between the virtual and the actual becomes arguably Deleuze’s most vital philosophical contribution. To understand the virtual is to refuse the reduction of the world to a homogenous series of polished museum exhibits. It is rather an intellectual embrace of an open system that re-creates itself endlessly.

From overlapping traces of a body in motion to the fluid capture of a drop to the vibrant stroke of a brush, Deleuze’s Neo-Baroque philosophy reminds us that beneath the apparently stable surfaces of our daily lives, reality remains undeniably alive.

Beyond the caricature of some unexplained mystical force, Henri Bergson’s élan vital is a rigorous critique of mechanistic determinism and pre-programmed teleology. By redefining time as pure duration rather than a homogeneous spatialized function, Bergson positions life as an open whole that advances solely through unpredictable, divergent differentiation. Here we will trace the vital impetus as it manifests across evolutionary lineages of instinct and intellect. The following will be an exploration of Gilles Deleuze’s profound metaphysical reading. For Deleuze, the élan vital is virtuality, or a cosmic force that drives our continually unfolding reality. 

The Élan Vital Is Not a Mystical Force but a Movement of Differentiation

Bergson’s work has been a target of multiple attacks. His work has effectively been reduced to a caricature. Especially notable is the strawman version of the Élan Vital. The phrase is often translated as the vital impulse. The idea has been misread and dismissed as a mystical force smuggled into biology through a sleight of hand. It has been labeled as a piece of romantic obscurantism dressed up in philosophical lingo.

Bertrand Russell famously wiped the floor with it. Analytic philosophers in general and for the most part ignored it. Even sympathetic readers of Bergson have often treated it as the weakest link in the system, an embarrassing residue of vitalist thinking that his otherwise rigorous philosophy would have been better off without.

Deleuze’s interpretation provided in his book Bergsonism makes short work of the criticisms and dismissals. The caricature, he argues, mistakes the élan vital for a positive entity. But it is neither a mysterious substance nor some hidden force magically injected into matter from the outside. It rather points to a movement; the movement of differentiation through which a virtual totality actualizes itself along multiple divergent lines. It is duration in the process of becoming life.

The confusion arises from our habit of thinking of life in the same way we think about manufactured artifacts. We imagine that a complex organ like the eye must have been assembled piece by piece, either by chance, trial and error, or through the guidance of a pre-existing plan.

Clearly, Bergson rejected both views in his book Creative Evolution (1907).

Life does not proceed by assembling or incorporating parts from the outside. It operates from the center, working itself outward, dividing and differentiating the primordial unity that carries its own internal impulsion. That impulsion is the élan vital – the very movement of creative divergence that constitutes life.

Bergson Rejects Both the Clockwork Universe and the Pre-Written Plan

Radical mechanism is a view that sees the universe as a deterministic clockwork system governed by unchanging physical laws. The view posits all change exclusively as spatial displacement. Governed by the principle of substitutability, the future and the past become transparent, calculable functions of the present. The mechanistic ideal is epitomized by Laplace’s notion of the superhuman intellect. The Laplacian Demon can hypothetically grasp the movement of all bodies and atoms in a sweep.

Bergson claims that Laplace’s demon deals only with an abstract, mathematical time. Such an understanding of time manifests computationally as a system of isolated correspondences. It ignores the flowing, continuous intervals that ensure the transition from one discrete moment to the next. The spatialized, analytic mode of interrogating time strips it of any real efficacy.

Another view is on the table: radical finalism, or teleology, is, one could claim, just an inverted mechanism. Instead of an impulsion that pushes the system from the past to develop deterministically into the future, finalism hypostasizes a force of attraction that pulls the present into the future.

Take the example of Leibniz. Leibniz treats time as ideal, an order of succession grounded in something timeless. Einstein, on a different plane, reduced time to a coordinate within four-dimensional spacetime, treating the subjective flow of lived time as physically irrelevant. Bergson rejects both routes to the demotion of duration, though the two are not the same route.

Bergson prefers finalism to mechanism, but he insists on an important correction. Classical teleology mistakenly restricts finality to internal harmony, in which every part of an organism is perfectly aligned with the telos. However, living components such as autonomous cells and phagocytes often exhibit radical independence and conflict.

For Bergson, true finality does not imply a pre-existing goal. Rather, life possesses creative directions that are actively invented along with the evolutionary mutations that run through them, opening the organism onto a virtual whole that is itself essentially novel and unpredictable.

Life Advances by Splitting Into Divergent Lines, Not by Following a Plan

The élan vital is primarily a force of dissociation. The vital impetus is fundamentally an internal explosive power that manages to preserve its creative momentum by splitting up, branching as it were, into radically divergent directions. Far from an outlier in evolutionary theory, Henri Bergson understands differentiation as the very core activity that defines life.

The reason for the divergence is the initial impulse that carries an immense, unstable intensity of virtual tendencies. When virtuality encounters the passive resistance of materiality, it becomes limited and can express only certain tendencies, while forgoing others. These tendencies then separate into various domains: single organism, species, and so forth.

Matter acts as a kind of filter or prism, refracting a unitary ray of life-force into a colorful spectrum of distinct evolutionary traits. Where mechanism sees accidental mutations and where teleology sees the unfolding of a harmonious plan, Bergson points to the process of dissociation.

The major divisions of nature: vegetative torpor, instinct, intelligence; they are not successive stages on a ladder. They are co-extensive, divergent solutions to the same vital problem: how to accumulate and use energy. Photosynthesis, mobility for hunting, various specialized instinctual tools, and finally intellect itself—these are only so many differences.

Deleuze brings this profound Bergsonian insight into sharper relief by noting how the intensive virtual is always actualized and never realized. A pre-formed concept, a possibility, can realize itself within the domain of human creations.

But nature is immensely more complex. Nature can create through non-resembling means. Real novelty, the actualization of the virtual, entails a process more complex than division and reproduction. That is what life as differentiation refers to.

For Deleuze, the Élan Vital Is Where Duration, Memory, and Life Converge

Deleuze attempts to demonstrate how the élan vital is the precise point where the three fundamental concepts of Bergsonism converge into a single philosophical vision.

First, duration defines a virtual multiplicity, a qualitative heterogeneity that differs from itself, that is, differs in nature from itself. Second, memory is the coexistence of all degrees of the aforementioned multiplicity, the virtual cone in which every level of expansion and contraction subsists simultaneously. And finally, life, that is the élan vital itself, is the virtual totality that is set in motion as it actualizes itself along divergent lines of differentiation that correspond to its internal degrees.

Deleuze insists that evolution must be understood as actualization rather than realization. The distinction, already established in the previous article in this series, carries its full weight here. If life proceeded by realizing pre-formed possibilities, it would merely keep unfolding what was already given, a homogeneous cosmic unboxing of the same. Genuine novelty would cease to exist. Actualization, by contrast, is irreducibly creative.

The virtual does not resemble what it produces. Each line of differentiation is a genuine invention. The élan vital is the name given to this inventive power operating at the level of life as a whole.

Deleuze’s original contribution to Bergsonism is the ontological weight he places on this account. For Bergson, the élan vital remains in some respects still biological. For Deleuze, it becomes the expression of a fundamental metaphysical claim: that difference and not identity is primary. Life is the domain in which the virtual most visibly actualizes itself through divergence and creation rather than through repetition or resemblance.

The Élan Vital Makes Evolution a Story of Real Novelty

Bergson’s target in Creative Evolution (1907) is a disjunction he thinks is false: that evolution must be either mechanism or finalism. Both treat the future as given in advance, one by pushing from prior states, the other by pulling toward a goal.

Bergson’s alternative is dissociation. Life carries an internal tendency of high virtual intensity, and when this meets the resistance of matter it can express only some tendencies at a time, so it splits. Vegetative torpor, instinct, and intelligence are not rungs on a ladder but divergent solutions to one problem: how to store and release energy.

Deleuze’s contribution is to raise this from biology to ontology. He reads the élan vital through the actualization/realization distinction: realization unfolds a possibility that already resembles it, whereas actualization produces forms that do not resemble the virtual they come from.

This is why evolution, on his account, is invention rather than the execution of a plan, and why the élan vital names the priority of difference over identity at the level of life as a whole. It is also the point where the three concepts of the series meet, since duration supplies the virtual multiplicity, memory its coexisting degrees, and life its actualization along divergent lines.

What follows is a specific claim, not a general uplift. If actualization does not resemble what it actualizes, then the history of life cannot be read backward as the realization of possibilities that were waiting to be realized. The future of an evolutionary line is underdetermined by its virtual conditions, which is what “novelty” means here in a precise sense rather than a rhetorical one.

That is the payoff of reading Bergson through Deleuze: an account of life in which difference is productive rather than derivative, and in which what a lineage becomes is settled in the becoming, not before it.

Beyond its traditional definition as an extravagant style, the Baroque is reframed by Gilles Deleuze as a unique philosophical condition of thought. Drawing on the metaphysics of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the Fold replaces Cartesian dualism with a universe of absolute connectivity, vital force, and continuous variation. Through the allegory of the Baroque House and the mathematical genius Leibniz, Deleuze demonstrates how reality operates as an unbroken, shifting fabric. This perspective provides an alternative genealogy of modernity that effectively challenges contemporary reductive, mechanistic rationality.

For Deleuze, the Baroque Is Not a Style but a Way of Thinking

Typically, the word Baroque forces one’s mind to drift toward the sensory opulence of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. One pictures the dramatic, high-contrast chiaroscuro of a Caravaggio painting, the twisting, ecstatic marble sculptures of Bernini, the dizzying architectural illusions of Roman church ceilings. The famous art historian Heinrich Wölfflin defined the Baroque by contrast against the serene balance and linearity of the Renaissance.

The traditional art historical view, however, defines the Baroque by its extravagance. The Baroque is massive in every sense; it privileges motion over stasis, and it submits to an overabundance of ornate detail. A stylistic wave that broke over Europe and eventually receded into the orderly shores of Neoclassicism.

Gilles Deleuze has other things in mind.

The French philosopher has, in fact, staged a radical intervention. Deleuze reorients the Baroque as a philosophical concept. A philosophical interpretation of the Baroque offers an understanding of the style as a specific condition of thought. Baroque thereby becomes something more than a style. It begins to refer rather to a unique way of processing, organizing, and experiencing reality. An infinite production of folds.

By transforming the Baroque from an art-historical style into a philosophical concept, Deleuze shapes a new way of thinking about the relationship between mind, matter, unity, and multiplicity. The Baroque style is characterized by an insatiable curiosity for the labyrinthine, the curved, the continuous. One rarely encounters discrete structure or clean breaks, rigid boundaries, or stark dichotomies. These are all forms that are often encountered with the ideas of Enlightenment rationality. Baroque philosophy treats reality as an unbroken, shifting fabric. Everything is interconnected. Infinite pleats of matter.

The Deleuzian liberation of Baroque frames it as a fresh metaphysical framework. It provides an alternative genealogy of modernity. One that celebrates a world teeming with complexity and intensive forces. Deleuze’s work on Leibniz and the Baroque bridges aesthetics and metaphysics.

Deleuze Names Leibniz the True Philosopher of the Baroque

The Baroque is therefore a philosophical concept that manifests materially and rationally as a series of infinite folds and continuous variation. According to Deleuze, the supreme thinker of the Baroque is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. One is surprised by the contrast: Leibniz seems like an odd choice, despite the historical relevance, for such an extravagant aesthetic movement. He was, after all, a logician, and a co-inventor of calculus.

How does one reconcile the extravagance of the Baroque with what Deleuze terms the Leibnizian “policing” of philosophy?

It is useful to contrast Leibniz with his predecessor, René Descartes. Descartes was a substance dualist. He laid down an ontology that split the universe into two distinct substances: Extended matter and non-extended thought.

The Cartesian worldview reduced physical bodies and inorganic matter to a dead, inert mechanism governed by simple mechanical laws. Leibniz rejected this. As noted by philosopher Paul Janet, Leibniz did not discard the mechanical explanations of physics. Still, he insisted that the very laws of mechanics must be grounded in a deeper, living metaphysics of force. Leibniz saw matter as something animate, possessing an internal activity, a vital impetus.

In the Discourse on Metaphysics, Leibniz paints a universe where every individual substance, which he later, in the Monadology, terms a monad, is a world unto itself. Within this system, the In-Esse principle dictates that every true predicate of an individual is already virtually contained within its initial concept.

The biggest challenge Deleuze found with the principle, and what is, for the most part, the main driving force of his project with Leibniz, is its application to the physical world. In other words, not only are analytic statements necessary, but everything that occurs in the world must unfold by the same strict necessity. Because this is the world that God chose to bring into being. Therefore, every action made by any individual must be deduced a priori: Julius Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon, for instance.

This difficulty, according to Deleuze, a difficulty that is almost a compulsion to demonstrate how the most contingent, chaotic, and complex events unfold due to determinate reasons, is effectively what forces Leibniz into a Baroque style of philosophizing.

Leibniz’s Baroque House Stacks Matter Below and Soul Above

A vivid illustration of the Leibnizian Baroque is Deleuze’s reconstruction of the famous architectural allegory of the Baroque House. The building is divided into two distinct levels that actively repel one another, but they still form a single, unified structure. The Baroque House is an attempt at a non-Cartesian solution for the mind-body problem.

The lower floor of the Baroque House is the domain of matter. Physical things are considered to be porous and open to the outside world, punctured, so to speak, by windows and doors. Matter behaves like a fluid, heavy textile—a space with weight, gravity, springs, and mechanical resistance. A place where things are endlessly divided into smaller, shifting parts, creating an infinite texture of physical pleats. It is the domain of organic life, where bodies bump into one another, creating ripples, friction, and continuous material changes.

The upper floor is a sacred, closed space. A windowless chamber. The realm of monads. Leibniz declared that monads have no openings or windows through which anything could enter or leave. This is the domain of the soul, the autonomous spirit; of pure metaphysical expression. No external light can enter. The interior walls are decorated with a living canvas tapestry that generates its own internal light. These are the soul’s innate ideas and perceptions that unfold spontaneously from within its own nature.

The only way for the two floors to communicate is through Leibniz’s concept of pre-established harmony. The movements and vibrations of the lower material world, the pleats of matter, trigger corresponding folds in the tapestries of the upper floor, the soul. When a physical body undergoes an experience, the soul shifts its internal perception, translating a confused physical murmur into a clear, conscious thought.

The Baroque house shows us a universe where the material flesh below and the spiritual soul above are eternally distinct yet beautifully folded together in a synchronized cosmic dance.

The Fold Is the Single Operation That Makes the Baroque Work

The core that orchestrates Leibniz’s metaphysics, at least so according to Deleuze, is the concept of the Fold. The Fold is the operative trait of the Baroque because it serves as the universal conceptual tool that bypasses traditional philosophical traps.

Historically, philosophers struggled to reconcile the One and the Many, the continuous and the discrete, the simple and the complex. The Fold gives an elegant solution that resolves these tensions. Through the operation of folding, a thing can be multiplied, differentiated, made more complex without giving up its fundamental continuity.

Deleuze identifies two primary directions of folding that mirror the two floors of the Baroque house.

First, the pleats of matter: a physical process where material is pleated, compressed, packed. Matter is never treated as a collection of hard, unyielding atomic marbles. It is understood as a continuous fabric, like a sheet of paper or a fluid mass that can be folded in infinite ways without tearing.

Second, the folds in the soul: a metaphysical process where perceptions, ideas, and inclinations unfold within the mind, as the soul itself is a bundle of infinite inflections, constantly adjusting its perspective and unfolding its pre-contained truths over time.

One can see the mathematical genius of the Fold in Leibniz’s invention of infinitesimal calculus, which is fundamentally the mathematics of curves, inflection points, and continuous variation. Calculus is itself Baroque. Lines bending to infinity without the sharp, fractured breaks of classical geometry. In a Baroque universe, a straight line is merely a rare, accidental limit of a curve; everything is inherently curvilinear. We see, therefore, that the contrast between mathematical structure and Baroque form is perhaps only that of superficial interpretation.

When thought itself becomes folded, rationality ceases to be a tool for categorizing, separating, or locking concepts into rigid boxes. Thinking begins to resemble baroque forms; it starts to unfold, revealing what was wrapped inside, while at the same time folding minds outward to embrace the contours of the world.

The Baroque Fold Is an Antidote to Modern Either-or Thinking

From seventeenth-century Leibnizian metaphysics to Deleuze’s twentieth-century radicalism, we discover that the Baroqueshouldn’t be regarded as a bygone era of architectural indulgence. Baroque thought can be revived once again to challenge the foundations of contemporary reductive, mechanistic rationality.

Mainstream post-Cartesian modernism has effectively disenchanted the world by chopping it up into measurable, isolated, and easily exploitable parts. The Baroque tradition can offer an alternative vision of absolute connectivity, in which matter is alive with force, and the soul is a singular expression of the cosmos.

The profound harmony between style and thought within the Baroque framework shows how the same creative impulses can drive philosophy and art. Philosophers craft concepts, like artists; they invent them, sculpting perspectives and draping reality in new, imaginative styles. Leibniz used the concept of the monad to transform the cold physics of his day into a breathtakingly complex, animated universe.

Centuries later, Deleuze recognized that this system provides a perfect antidote to the rigid, dogmatic thinking that often plagues contemporary discourse.

The Baroque can serve as a useful reminder that truth is not always found in binaries. Reality is labyrinthine, filled with nuances, curves, and intensive variations that resist categorization. By embracing the concept of the Fold, one could learn to appreciate the intricate textures of existence and the deep, underlying harmony that connects the material world to our inner spiritual lives.

The Baroque style of thought invites us to stop looking for clean breaks and instead find meaning in the beautiful, infinite complexity of a world that is constantly folding, unfolding, and refolding itself anew.

Albert Camus was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of seventeen. In 1930, this was effectively a death sentence. Lying in a hospital bed and coughing up blood, Camus began to think about his own mortality and death in general. From these beginnings came an obsession with death and the humiliation of illness and old age. Already prone to anxiety, largely caused by his health issues, Camus’s self-esteem suffered an enormous blow after the catastrophic reception of The Rebel (1951). Yet from this, he managed to produce his masterpiece, The Fall (1956).

 Death Sentence at Seventeen

In December of 1930, after a bout of severe coughing fits that left him spitting blood, Albert Camus was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He was seventeen years old. For a boy from the poor districts of Algiers, a diagnosis of TB was considered by most to be a death sentence. A deadly disease, TB was particularly dangerous for the young. Indeed, it was known at one point as “the robber of youth.”

There were no antibiotics to treat the illness in the 1930s, and so Camus had to undergo artificial pneumothorax. This involved deliberately collapsing the infected lung to give it a chance to heal. During this process, the teenage Camus had plenty of time to think about his own mortality.

TB takes time to kill a person. Due to the gap between diagnosis and death, it was thought by the romantically inclined that sufferers could achieve a “good death.” That is, people had time to get their affairs in order. Camus was well aware of this idea and tried to be philosophical. One of his first youthful musings on illness and death was on the one positive of TB: the sufferer could not shirk thinking about death; it was a reality that must be confronted and prepared for.

Due to the combination of lung collapse treatments and better diet (thanks to the meat provided by his uncle, a local butcher), Camus started feeling better and returned to his studies. But in 1935, his second lung became infected.

Camus was always active, a keen swimmer and talented soccer player, but after 1935, strenuous activity became too much for him. For a proud man like Camus, who prized physical fitness and beauty, this was a serious blow.

University Diploma and Marriage Troubles

In 1936, Camus submitted his diploma thesis on Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism. At this time, he was already married to his first wife, Simone Hié. The plan was to get his teaching license and pursue a career in philosophy teaching. However, the French government had other ideas. Afraid of the risk of having to pay out pensions to sick teachers, it was decided to reject TB sufferers on medical grounds.

As can be imagined, this rejection was very difficult for Camus.

Not only was it a blow to his self-esteem, but he and his wife were also struggling to support themselves financially. Camus received some money from his uncle, and his mother-in-law paid the couple’s rent. With his career plans thwarted, Camus had to find odd jobs to support himself and his wife.

Things were made more complicated by Simone’s drug habit. She had become addicted to morphine after being legally prescribed the drug as a child. Already a wild and free spirit—something that had attracted Camus to her—the effects of her addiction often made living with her difficult.

Simone would frequently embarrass Camus with her behavior. For example, to earn money, he began tutoring students in their homes, and Simone would deliberately interrupt the sessions with petty requests and demands.

Something else relating to Simone’s drug use that put a strain on the marriage was Camus’s belief that he could save her from addiction. That he could not was another personal blow to his pride. Their marriage would end in 1936 after a disastrous and humiliating European trip that would greatly influence Camus’s early writing.

Health Humiliation and Marriage Breakdown

In July of 1936, Camus and his wife embarked on a kayaking trip in Europe with Yves Bourgeois, one of Camus’s friends. It was hoped that the time away from the drug dealers of Algiers would help Simone get clean.

Camus was in a strange mood from the beginning of the trip. He felt uneasy in Prague and wrote of his strong dislike for the city, calling it sinister. Going as far as to say that he detested the inhabitants of Prague with all his heart, it seems clear that Camus was experiencing an episode of profound anxiety. In a letter to friends, he said that the whole trip had an “aura of fear.”

The plan was to kayak along long stretches of water, with Yves and the luggage in one canoe, and Camus and Simone in another. However, the physical toll of paddling was too much for Camus’s lungs. He awoke one morning in immense pain. After that, the three of them decided that Yves and Simone would carry on with the canoes, and Camus would take the bus to various rendezvous points. It was a deeply humiliating concession for Camus.

To make matters worse, at one of the post offices where the group had arranged to have their mail forwarded, Camus accidentally opened a letter addressed to Simone. He discovered that she was illicitly obtaining drugs from her doctor and that she was sleeping with him.

Devastated, Camus decided to end the marriage. On returning to Algiers, he went to live with his brother, and Simone went to live with her mother.

Let us now look at how Camus’s health and his marriage affected his philosophy and writing. We will begin with his health and how this led to a lifelong obsession with death.

Difficulty Breathing

One of the few treatments available for TB patients was to spend long periods living in high altitudes. Accordingly, Camus spent a lot of time in the mountains in the hope of easing his lungs. This self-imposed isolation must have played into his fascination with estrangement. Indeed, he was stuck in the mountains while The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus (his essay on the absurd) were both making waves on the Parisian literary scene. It was yet another sign for Camus that his health was separating him from others.

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) is an exploration of the absurd and human beings’ estrangement from the world. Among other things, the essay explores justifications for suicide. Camus accepts that sometimes suicide might be the appropriate response to specific problems individuals might have, but what he is really interested in is whether evidence can be found that life itself—not any specific life—is worth the suffering of living.

Returning to a theme we have already discussed, Camus explores the idea that most people go out of their way to avoid thinking about life in this way. Instead, they prefer to lie to themselves and pretend life is something that it is not.

While The Myth of Sisyphus asks questions about the justification for taking one’s own life, The Rebel (1951) explores justifications for taking the lives of others. In this book-length essay, Camus traces the history of the human instinct to rebel and how various revolutions have twisted rebellion into something that justifies degradation and murder.

Camus was considered a member of the French Left when he published The Rebel, and many of his colleagues were shocked by its tone and contents. The furor that followed almost broke Camus.

The Fall of Camus

Before publishing The Rebel, Camus had been reasonably confident that he knew what people thought of him, but now he was not so sure. There were many people he thought admired him and were his friends, who he discovered were secretly (or not so secretly) enjoying his downfall.

Psychologically, this was difficult to take, and Camus’s confidence was shattered. He experienced terrible writer’s block and found he could not continue with his planned works. To make matters worse, his lungs had deteriorated to the point he could no longer breathe properly. Camus was, in effect, slowly suffocating.

Somehow, out of all of this psychological turmoil, Camus managed to produce one of his greatest works, The Fall (1956). In this short book, the narrator, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, gives a masterclass on what moral narcissism actually is and how it has infected modern politics. But more than this, Camus also offers a confession, of sorts, revealing in Clamence many traits and flaws he recognized in himself.

The Creation of a Masterpiece

The narrator of The Fall shares many characteristics with the author, just as Patrice from A Happy Death and Meursault from The Stranger share traits with Camus. Clamence is not a journalist or writer but a Parisian lawyer. It is a job in which his quick wits and charm serve him well. He finds it easy to find lovers, but rather than seeing them as individuals, he thinks only about how they can help him (particularly regarding his self-esteem). Camus was much the same.

After his marriage to Simone Hié broke down, he married Francine Faure but also kept a string of mistresses. For much of his life, Camus convinced himself that this was normal and perfectly acceptable. And in some ways, within the circles within which Camus moved, it was. However, Francine saw things differently. In 1953, while hospitalized due to her nerves, Camus’s wife attempted suicide by jumping from a window. Fortunately, she survived, but Camus was left devastated.

In The Fall, the life-changing event for Clamence occurs after he fails to stop or help a woman committing suicide by jumping from a Paris bridge.

The Fall is a masterpiece that can be read in many ways. One way of reading the text is as Camus’s attempt to work through his anxiety and demons. Every troubling aspect of Camus’s life, discussed here, appears in the book. His problems with image and self-esteem, failure to act at key moments, difficulties in communication, and the looming specter of moral narcissism. The work is simultaneously a confession and a damning indictment of contemporary society.

Rather than attempting to take films as material that can have unintended philosophical resonances, Gilles Deleuze spent the later years of his career indulging his cinephile tendencies to show how the moving image exists within the world itself and how it offers up the sort of encounter with the world necessary for creative thought to occur. Not wanting to reduce these images to simple fodder for philosophical commentary, he demonstrates how their imitation of human thought offers opportunities to go beyond the habits of anthropocentric thought.

Deleuze as a Philosopher and Film Nerd

Deleuze is a thinker who can provide unique philosophical approaches to various topics in different fields. Fundamentally, his work develops a theoretical framework emphasizing the immediacy and continuity of everything in the world without appealing to some external determining rule or law. We don’t turn to some single idea that determines various world phenomena while remaining outside of them, as in Plato. Instead, the things of the world are understood as momentarily static entities emerging from a world of perpetual difference.

Deleuze approaches the film with an emphasis on the cinematic image as immanent within the world, that is, as a particular type of image selected and removed from the mass of images that constitute the rest of the visual world. Understanding images in this way means that we conceptualize the cinematic image as directly capturing the movement of the world as experienced in time. This means that the Deleuzean approach to cinema avoids confining these images as a separate domain of experience but rather as an extension of visual experience.

Cinema is the first art form capable of drawing directly upon our visual experience of the world precisely because it captures movement. The camera, however, can exceed our natural experience: it can go beyond simply imitating human perception and begin seeing the world in ways that would be physically impossible for us. Cameras can approach phenomena in ways that humans cannot, which leads to them confronting us with increasingly unfamiliar images.

Because they capture movement directly, such images can offer the same sort of encounter with the world itself that Deleuze feels is necessary for creative thought. Deleuze depicts this encounter as a “shock” of some kind, where the world doesn’t easily fit into the various categories that we already have to think with.

Two Regimes of Cinematic Images

Deleuze approaches cinema through the lenses of two other thinkers from the early 20th century: the French philosopher Henri Bergson and the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce.

From Bergson, he derives an approach to the cinematic image grounded in questions of movement and time. This means that when we’re thinking about images, we are concerned with how the image acts as movement, depicting time itself.

From Peirce, Deleuze draws an understanding of how we experience signs in the world. We encounter objects in three different primary ways: initially according to their “firstness,” that is, the quality or nature of the sign as object; their “secondness,” which is when we experience an object through its relation to other objects; and their “thirdness,” which is how we represent objects to ourselves as symbols.

Deleuze approaches images through a combination of these two theories. He is concerned with how images depict and imitate the relation of human sensory experience in the world and applies Peirce’s categorization of encounters with objects to Bergson’s model of experience to develop a logic of signs inherent within moving images. This allows Deleuze to organize these series of images into a “regime.”

Deleuze argues that there are two distinct regimes of images throughout the history of cinema, two systems governing how images relate to one another. These systems can be understood as two logics, which entail connections between images that determine the nature of those images as sub-divisions of each dominant image. To illuminate these systems, Deleuze understands each regime as composed of signs that can be combined to create these different sub-categories of images.

The Movement-Image

The first regime Deleuze (2022) calls the movement-image, in which the flow of images imitates the human experience by making the human the central recurring image. In reference to this central image, all the other images of the film are understood. This imitates Bergson’s sensory-motor schema, emphasizing the relation between the human and the world in terms of ‘intensities’ that emerge from the perception of the world acting as ‘affects’ upon our bodies, causing both bodily action and thought to occur. The images of this regime imitate such a relation.

This establishes a logic of relations from which we can derive various sub-types of images, ranging from “affect images,” in which we witness the emergence of relations within a world, to “action images,” in which we witness the behavior of these relations, and “mental images,” which represent thought about the world. Of course, these images can be combined and broken down, entailing yet more sub-types of images to depict the complexity of human sensory experience.

Through this movement-image, Deleuze can provide an account of the structure of the image, which is comprised of three parts. The first is the frame, which establishes the image as a closed set of elements that implicitly relate to everything beyond the frame, outside the image. The second is the shot, which determines what movement occurs within the image and acts as a relation between the moving elements within the image and the perpetual movement of the world beyond. The third and final component is a montage, which allows cinema to connect these images and bring them into communication with one another.

The Time-Image

The second regime is that of the time-image (Deleuze, 2021), in which we experience the world in a more fragmentary manner, without a privileged image establishing relations to all others, and where the gaps between images come to be more important. The coordinates of the sensory-motor schema become ruptured, meaning that time isn’t represented indirectly through movement.

Rather, these images engage with time directly, depicting how things emerge as actual entities within the world. Where there had once been a logical connection between images, we find an ‘interstic,’ a gap where obvious connections once were, which isolates the image and makes it appear as if they’re momentarily emerging from a ‘void.’

This is because time-images have more intimate connections between what is actually in the image and what Deleuze calls the “virtual.” In short, the virtual is that which is “real without being actual,” a domain of reality that is real insofar as it provides the structure for the emergence of a given object. Time-images demonstrate correlations between the actual image and the virtual coordinates, allowing for its emergence and how images emerge concerning a past, present, and future.

Less of a flow of distinct images, Deleuze’s methodology outlines the various ‘signs’ of time-images. This regime rather has two distinct poles in which images can move, and this is between either the ‘opsign,’ a purely visual image without sound, and a ‘sonsign,’ a purely auditory image without visual content. Various signs demonstrate the emergence of new images within this regime between these two points.

Thought and Image

Thought is always present in cinema, but the relationship between image and idea grows more complex over time. Cinema can depict thought within the film and bring about a theoretical engagement between spectator and image. Depicting thought, films can present us with mental images presenting dreams or hallucinations distinct from the film’s fundamental “reality.” In the movement-image regime, this is grounded in the experience of a person and their reality, but the fragmentary nature of the time-image regime makes things more complex and depends more upon the viewer engaging with these obscure images to determine what may be real and what is mental. As such, the spectator takes up lines of thinking presented to them by such combinations of images and finishes their train of thought for them.

However, beyond this depiction of thinking within a narrative, the image relates to thought as a more purely visual expression of analogous philosophical concepts. Films are capable of acting as the shock necessary for creative thought to occur, and as such, they allow thinking to take place emerging from an encounter between spectator and image. This thought depends upon the relation between what is present in the image and that which is outside of it.

In the movement-image regime, the thought occurs as a movement between the image and the idea it represents. This is brought about through montage, which Deleuze describes as imitating the process of thought. For the time-image, thought occurs concerning these interstices between images, these gaps that confront us with an inability to think of the world with such confidence. Particular images within the time-image regime depict how thought confronts problems without a clear answer. As such, we are confronted with the “powerlessness” of thought, which always acts as the beginning of new ways of thinking.

What Sort of Thinking is Happening Here?

Through this imitative capacity, the image can imitate thought and offer productive opportunities for spectators to think through philosophical problems. Going beyond the confines of human perception can offer up particular approaches to ideas that may not occur to us naturally by bringing about unique shocks to experience.

Contemporary philosopher Francoise Laruelle (2012) has argued that Deleuze is actually outlining a sort of “parallelism” between cinema and philosophy here. The image may provide opportunities for thinking but is still subordinated to philosophical thought. The image depends upon philosophy to finish its thinking for it.

Another contemporary theorist, David Deamer (2016), emphasizes a specific cinematic thought that emerges from the relations of images when brought into contact with philosophical engagement. Cinematic images become an opportunity for cinema to “awaken” thought and thought to “conjoin” with cinema.

Deleuze himself will later say that conceptual thought is the domain of philosophy, while art concerns itself more with the sensorial and will ultimately need theoretical elaboration through philosophy. However, this implies that approaches to concepts are already implicit within the artistic domain. However, this has not stopped later theorists from drawing upon Deleuze’s work to explore the nature of thought in an environment permeated by media and images.

Images Beyond Cinema

Deleuze ended his cinema works on an anxious note concerning the images of mass media, particularly the fact that they permeate the world and, as such, it can appear as if there’s no world outside them. Particularly, he sees these digital images as replacing nature with information. This is important because these images seem to lack the relation to what is outside of them necessary for thought.

Creative thought necessarily entails thinking through and engaging with concepts beyond the easily recognizable. As such, Deleuze is worried that the perpetual presence of such images prevents critical thinking towards them, while the images themselves only think in terms of cliches. A world saturated with such images cannot offer the shock necessary for creative thought.

Contemporary thinkers like Deane-Freeman (2024) have applied Deleuze’s approaches to digital images and outlined possible conceptualizations of an ‘outside’ to digital images, facilitating creative thought. To do so, he brings Deleuzean cinematic thinking into conversation with contemporary technology and information theories to reflect critically on our condition amongst perpetual flows of images. This, and other projects like it, demonstrates both the increasingly intimate relation between thought and images in a modern world where mass media shapes the nature of such images and the continued usefulness of Deleuze’s cinematic works for confronting such a situation.

Bibliography

Deamer, David (2016) Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images (Edinburgh University Press)

Deane-Freeman, Timothy (2024) Deleuze, Digital Media, and Thought (Edinburgh University Press)

Deleuze, Gilles (2021) Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Bloomsbury Academic)

• (2022) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Bloomsbury Academic)

Laruelle, Francoise (2012) Photo-Fiction, A Non-Standard Aesthetics (Univocal)

One could say Deleuze decided to “fold Leibniz in half.” But as he folded him once, he had to fold him again, over and over again, until each fold produced more folds. The infinite crimping, which the Leibnizian rationalist system should have been very susceptible to, suddenly produced as many neat folds as it gave birth to crumpled corners and numerous productive contradictions. And as the folds and creases accumulated, the more difficult it became to tell the difference between the inside and the outside of the surface. Resulting in a monstrous creation: the Fold.

Deleuze Turned to Leibniz Because the Most Orderly Metaphysician Was the Hardest to Fold

Due to his original, one might say eccentric reading of the history of philosophy, Gilles Deleuze has without a doubt earned his badge as a provocative thinker. His interpretations of Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, and Bergson can be described as productive and open.

He once described his method as a kind of philosophical “buggery”: approaching a thinker from behind, producing something that is recognizably the thinker’s offspring but monstrous, surprising, not quite expected. His points always move well beyond summary or commentary. Deleuze always attempts to pull something new, a concept specifically, in a way that allows him to shape something unseen, unheard of, from one historical figure to the next.

This makes Deleuze’s extended engagement with Leibniz all the more inspirational. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, published in 1988 near the end of Deleuze’s major solo work, is his most sustained treatment of a single philosopher. The book spans across metaphysics, mathematics, music, architecture, and painting. The center of this discourse is occupied by a concept that Deleuze deploys throughout, namely the Fold.

Why choose Leibniz, though? Leibniz was, without a doubt, the least likely target for Deleuzian appropriation, given the general style of philosophizing he adhered to. Leibniz, unlike Deleuze’s other chosen thinkers, is an orderly metaphysician; a theologian even.

The Leibnizian God is very different from a Spinozian God. The Leibnizian monads are each simple, indivisible substances; mirrors that operate like links in a perfectly determinate chain of the universe. A pre-established harmony ensures that all the different perspectives on the world align perfectly. Each monad operates in its own line of activity like a soldier. There is a distinct hierarchical structure and a theological, fundamentally rationalist confidence in the intelligibility of all things.

This sounds like the philosophical system of an arch-enemy, rather than an influence, on Deleuze.

The Fold Is Not a Shape but an Operation That Turns Outside Into Inside

Some negative definitions of the Fold can offer a good starting point. The Fold is irreducible to a shape or a figure.

The first intuitive mental image that may occur to someone is that of crinkled paper or a curtain pleat. Strictly speaking, these associations are not wrong. But probably the most important aspect of the Fold is to think of it not as a noun, but rather as a verb, an activity, an operation. The Fold refers to the way in which matter and thought organize themselves.

The notion of the Fold informs the relationship between inside and outside. Normally, we think of interiority and exteriority as distinct zones, separated by a clear, or even by a somewhat opaque boundary. The organism’s skin is a clear instance. A wall is another, painfully obvious example. In each case, the inside and outside delimit different kinds of space.

But for Leibniz, the monad, for instance, is a kind of entity that has no windows; nothing passes in or out. It is, counter-intuitively, a pure interiority. An interiority that has no outside, and by that effect, it encompasses the entirety of the outside. A single monad contains the entire universe. Every monad carries inside itself a representation of the whole of creation. The inside of the monad is the outside world; it is folded inward, compressed, taken up into a perfectly singular perspective.

This is what Deleuze calls the Fold: the operation by which exteriority is internalized. Internalized, that is, without being reduced to sameness, and by which interiority is always already a form of expression that is also directed outward. The inside becomes the outside. The fold does not abolish the distinction between inside and outside; it rather makes it into a matter of degree and direction.

For Deleuze, the Baroque Is Not a Style but a Way of Thinking in Folds

The subtitle of Deleuze’s book Leibniz and the Baroque is distinctive. Firstly, Deleuze does not treat the Baroque as a historical period or an art-historical style that happens to be the milieu, an accident surrounding Leibniz’s philosophy. For Deleuze, the Baroque is a philosophical concept. A structuring effect of matter and thought that finds its philosophical expression with Leibniz. It is not that the Baroque influenced Leibniz, but that he embodied it.

For Deleuze, ornament, exuberance, theatricality, or other commonplace notions associated with the term are not the defining traits of the Baroque. It is the Fold. The Fold is the Baroque. Baroque art is characterized by surfaces that refuse flatness. Baroque spaces keep opening onto other spaces, folding as if endlessly, and the distinction between inside and outside starts to collapse. Light modulates chaotically; it does not illuminate uniformly; it does so selectively and dramatically, creating zones of indiscernibility.

The Baroque does not resolve tensions into stable equilibrium. It multiplies and intensifies them. Leibniz’s philosophy operates according to this very logic precisely. The complex multiplicity of irresolvable tensions continues to reproduce itself indefinitely through conceptual pairs: continuity and individuation, matter and spirit, the infinite divisibility of matter and the indivisibility of the monad.

Leibniz holds all of these in a complex, layered, labyrinthine system. The two floors of the metaphysical edifice are the material floor below, and the spiritual floor above—they fold into one another.

The Baroque, most importantly for philosophers, is a way of thinking. A mode of thought that could perhaps be reactivated today. The final chapters of The Fold gesture toward this exact possibility. A form of “neo-Baroque” where the Leibnizian architecture could be salvaged without its theological overtones.

Tracing Deleuze’s Leibniz, From the Baroque to Incompossible Worlds

The rest of the articles in this series trace the major threads of Deleuze’s engagement with Leibniz, moving from the most general to the technically most specific.

What Is the Baroque? Deleuze and Leibniz on Style and Thought will offer a detailed exposition of the philosophical concept of Baroque.

What does it mean to say that an aesthetic style is also a way of thinking? How does Deleuze construct the Baroque from first principles rather than simply borrowing the term from art history? And what is the relationship between Leibniz’s metaphysical architecture and the visual and spatial logic of Baroque architecture and painting?

Deleuze Turned Leibniz’s Windowless Monad Into a Folded Space will carry the central metaphysical argument.

The standard, non-Deleuzian reading of the Leibnizian monad emphasizes closure, its windowlessness, its hierarchical ordering under God’s pre-established harmony. Deleuze’s reframing transforms this picture significantly, as the monad becomes less of a sealed container and more of a folded space. Perception thereby becomes an active, perspectival expression of the world, rather than a passive mirror. The article will close in on the precise Deleuzian surplus that dissents from the standard reading. Needless to say, its philosophical relevance and productivity will be underlined.

The fourth article, Incompossible Worlds: Deleuze on Leibniz and Possibility, will address one of the most philosophically precise and consequential moments of The Fold.

For Leibniz, incompossible worlds are worlds that cannot exist at the same time. God has created one possible world to the exclusion of all others. Deleuze poses the question: What will happen to this framework if one considers it without the theological superstructure? What if incompossible worlds can, in fact, coexist? This time, not as rivals for divine selection but as genuinely simultaneous divergent series. This move bears on the same terrain that analytic modal metaphysics maps with possible worlds, though Deleuze’s move cuts against the Leibnizian assumption that possible worlds compete for a single actualization.

The Fold Still Matters Because It Lets Us Think a World Without Fixed Boundaries

Deleuze’s encounter with Leibniz moves well over and above historical commentary. It is a radical, violent resuscitation, and no less a philosophy that stands on its own. Having stripped Leibniz of his rigid theological scaffolding, the totalizing God, and the neatly synchronized universe, Deleuze constructs a dynamic philosophy of movement.

The Fold re-enters the battleground of metaphysics and the history of ideas as the mechanism that shapes and organizes life and thought. An outside that is drawn inward, compressed, and expressed, shot forward as it were, as a singular perspective.

As the following articles in the series will hopefully demonstrate, the labyrinthine material and metaphysical architecture of the Deleuzo-Leibnizian Baroque holds wide-ranging implications. It becomes, if not a vital, then at least a useful and original weapon for reconsidering the nature of contemporary reality.

By tracing the movement from the dramatic, shadow-filled spaces of the Baroque, through the infinite interiority of the monad, to the dizzying coexistence of multiple, conflicting worlds, we discover a mode of thought that might just be well adapted to our own fragmented modernity. That is at least the not-so-humble promise of the Deleuzian neo-Baroque.

It does seem that the Leibnizian child, brought to the twentieth century by the midwife of a Deleuzian reading, is exactly what he intended: monstrous and usefully creative. If we can train ourselves to think through the logic of the fold, we could maybe stop looking for fixed boundaries where there aren’t any and shouldn’t be. Accordingly, we could stop seeing the universe as a stack of windowless monads and start seeing it as a single surface folded over itself without end.

When people think of ancient philosophy, they often think of Stoicism: a philosophy of resilience, self-command, and living well. But another ancient tradition offered a different starting point: Skepticism, which asks us to question what we think we know. Rather than opposing each other, these two approaches may offer more when combined.

In this episode of TheCollector, philosopher and K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York, Dr. Massimo Pigliucci, explains how Skepticism can complement Stoicism, and what both traditions can teach us about living a meaningful life today. His latest book, How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic, turns to Cicero and the ancient Skeptical tradition for lessons on doubt, uncertainty, and living well.

I still think Stoicism is one of the most useful philosophies of life ever articulated, but things can always be improved. A little bit of Skepticism peppered on top of the main dish of Stoicism makes for a very good combination.

What Is the Difference Between Stoicism and Skepticism?

Stoicism emerged in Athens in the early 3rd century BC. It became one of the major schools of Hellenistic philosophy. Stoics believed that living well meant developing strong character and learning to respond wisely to the things we can control. The philosophy later influenced Roman thinkers such as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.

Skepticism developed around the same time, but took a different approach. Skeptics focused on how we form our beliefs and what we can truly know. They didn’t reject knowledge outright, but they questioned whether we could ever be completely certain that our beliefs were true.

The Roman statesman Cicero offers an important connection between the two ancient Greek philosophies. Deeply influenced by Stoicism, he was also associated with Academic Skepticism in Rome and emphasized examining different philosophical positions. For Dr. Pigliucci, this combination provides a way to consider how doubt and practical philosophy might work together.

How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic by Massimo Pigliucci

In How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic, Dr. Pigliucci turns to Cicero as a guide for applying ancient Skepticism to modern life. Drawing on Cicero’s biography and writings, he considers how doubt and intellectual humility can help us form our values, nurture friendships, participate in civic life, and face grief, pain, and death.

Here, doubt is not an end in itself, but a practice of curiosity and inquiry: questioning our assumptions while remaining open to better answers. For Dr. Pigliucci, Skepticism can complement Stoicism, reminding us that living well also requires examining what we believe.