The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

Please forgive me for commenting on an English translation that I have not read, but honestly I was put off from purchasing the English edition by the complaints of several reviewers, so I purchased a French edition instead. I am familiar with Deleuze and Leibniz, but not a specialist in either per se. I read French well enough, but not with the acumen of a French professor. However, Deleuze's French is deliberate and concise, startlingly brilliant and terse. Moreover, the substantive content of the text is not particularly difficult for anyone who has some mastery of the philosophical issues behind Leibniz' mathematics and the development of the calculus or a general mastery of Deleuze. After spending a few days with the French text, I find it highly unlikely that a Harvard French professor with the complicity of the University of Minnesota Press would botch such an important translation. Just for example, one reviewer complained about the word "corps." In Leibniz's philosophical writings on mathematics, natural philosophy, or the mathematical qua philosophical problem of the continuum, for example, he uses the word "body" and "bodies" any number of times in mathematical contexts ... for example "On Minima and Maxima: On Bodies and Minds" (1672-73), "On Body, Space, and the Continuum" (1676), "A Body is not a Substance" (1679), just to name a few. If you are interested in Deleuze's wonderful little book and can't read the French with as much profit or pleasure as an English translation, I suspect you needn't worry about the quality of the translation. With all due respect to the opinions of others... Stuart MacNiven, Rutgers University

While my French is not good enough to judge others, I find it very easy to believe that this translation is not good. I found this book the most difficult of Deleuze's works, and I think the translator did not understand his task. To recover I needed to undertake a rereading of Leibniz so I could see through the English text before me and re-establish the original terms and questions. Still, if you do not read French well, this very important book should not escape you even in this edition. Leibniz was a giant at the watershed between faith and science who was able to span this divide and think with complexity and innovation about the soul and mathematics. Since then, few can handle either vocabulary with such perspective, and almost none, save Deleuze, have tried to understand the demands of both. If one does not, as almost all do, take for granted the givens of the centered subject and the rational world, their mutual differences demand a theory as powerful as the complexities they evoke. This book attempts to place that theory in play again with vigor.

An earlier reviewer questioned what Deleuze was doing with Leibniz's calculus. While Leibniz's calculus is of course crucial for Deleuze, in this work Deleuze keeps returning to one equation that almost acts as a sort of musical refrain, and through it he uses Leibniz's invention to express a philosophical concept. This is an excellent example of the refinement and elegance of Deleuze's thought that pervades the book as a whole. Here is the equation: d(y)/d(x). This is certainly not a differential equation that a mathematician would have hit upon. Instead it is Deleuze's expression of a philosophical concept via calculus. When plotted out the equation produces a clinamen, or swerve, with no constant, only variables. It is "a world that no longer has its center" as Deleuze phrases it on page 125 of the translation. It is a structure without a center, as Derrida would call it. But whereas Derrida's notion can only be stated as a paradox (because by definition there can be no such thing as a centerless structure), Deleuze succeeds in expressing it as a simple differential equation. In other words, there are nothing but differences (and, Deleuze would maintain, force). Returning to the equation, the function d(y) is dependent on d(x), which it is divided by. d(y) is dependent on a differential function d(x), that is, a continuously displaced variable. Absolutely useless to mathematicians, it is however a succint expression of Deleuze's thought, conveyed via Leibniz's calculus, that creates a distribution of remarkable points. Michel Serres' 700 page tome "Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques" is a wonderful companion to Deleuze's little book. It was published in English as "The System of Leibniz" by Clinamen Press.

Deleuze's sojourns into the history of philosophy, as everyone knows by now, paint a stark contrast to his "independent" works; the former being wonders of concision and clarity, each one like a diamond cutter, and the latter being drawn-out, often tedious, and in general more difficult to pentrate. The Fold falls somewhere in between the two as he wrote it so late in his life when most assumed he was done with history. We should be thankful that he wasn't. In order to get through this book, I'll just offer my opinion for those who it may affect: when I first picked it up, I read the first two chapters and almnost threw it across the room. I didn't pick the book up again because--presumptuous me--I thought the whole book was going to be like that. WRONG! As I said, Deleuze mixes it up here, and while you may not get every chapter, there will be those, like the short, almost curt, "What is an Event?" that will, um, blow your mind. As for this being a discourse on Leibniz. Hard to say when we've read so little Leibniz, but Deleuze is willing to stick with his "compossible" world throughout all of the book until the end, which is pretty amazing---you know, since for Deleuze's world one of the first requirements is the reality of incompossibles. But it will give you a passion for Leibniz regardless, as the last reviewer made clear. Finally, I think Deleuze here tries to answer some of the most difficult questions that faced him after years of expanding and 'deterritorializing' D & R and LofS. If you read the latter, for instance, did you have a sort of empty feeling when he got to the "Dynamic Genesis" and afterwards, as if his tying the incorporeals to the corporeals from the point of view of bodies wasn't as solid as from the point of view of sense? Deleuze will repay you here with interest, giving one of the most fascinating and detailed accounts of a body and its connection to monads I've ever read. It may not solve all of the problems for his materialism, but then again, it might. That's a judgment call and regardless of how you judge, this book will have riches for you. 10 stars.

Deleuze's book is, at least for no other reason, a worthwhile read for its sheer imagination. Secondly, it is worth reading as it shows just what is so wonderfully interesting about Leibniz. If you know Leibniz, read this book, even just a single section, and then you will understand why there do exist, in small obscure places, Leibnitians. If you are looking for a splendidly imaginative perspective, read up.