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This chapter introduces the motivations and method behind Deleuze’s philosophical project. It begins with a detailed reading of Deleuze’s review of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence, in which Deleuze first articulates his claim that the goal of philosophy is to create a logic of sense, rather than a metaphysics of essence. This review introduces Deleuze’s central criticism that the history of philosophy has for too long given a foundational role to certain features of our naïve representation of the world, instead of explaining the genesis of these features. Among these is an understanding of difference as opposition that finds its ultimate expression in Hegelian contradiction. Deleuze briefly invokes Leibniz as a figure who is perhaps capable of providing an alternative concept of difference. The chapter then turns to the opening chapters of Difference and Repetition, where Deleuze again outlines a critique of the history of philosophy’s treatment of difference and its subordination to the structure of representation. This time Deleuze traces a history through Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz and Hegel. In Leibniz he identifies for the first time a world of “restless” infinitely small differences which will become central to all his later readings.

This chapter argues that there is a dimension of ontology that exceeds the limits of the ontogenetic problematic. Difference and Repetition sets the transcendental field as the realm of Ideas. Immanence is transcendence itself that is transcendent to the immanence within which it unfolds. Gilles Deleuze's use of the concept of expression in A Thousand Plateaus is entirely consistent with that of Expressionism, and aims to define the same process. It then describes the stratification, and highlights the fact that Deleuze associates it with a process of transcendence. In addition to the plane of organisation and development, and as the plane from which it grows, Deleuze is concerned to draw an altogether different plane, namely, the plane of consistency, or immanence. It is noted that philosophy is more akin to artistic creation.

This chapter examines the relation between autopoietic theory and Gilles Deleuze's thought. It addresses Deleuze's claim in the second chapter of his Difference and Repetition that there are thousands of little selves underneath the three passive perceptual syntheses. The chapter explains that perceptual syntheses are always linked to organic or metabolic syntheses as exemplified by research on Escherichia coli, and stresses the need to move beyond focusing on adult functioning and homeostatic regulation and to begin to focus on the process of ontogenesis.

This chapter examines the influence of David Hume on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. It discusses the central tenets of Deleuze's Empiricism and Subjectivity and evaluates the extent to which this work provides an implicit foundation for the metaphysics of Difference and Repetition. The chapter suggests that Hume's continued influence on Deleuze is irreducible to a homology of doctrine. It explains that while the philosophy of association in its Humean form has no place in Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, Deleuze's philosophy remains Humean.

This chapter addresses the question of how Gilles Deleuze adopts the standpoint of immanence. Deleuze agrees with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's own praise of Baruch Spinoza, and the privileged position which he occupies in the history of philosophy. He also precisely considers Spinoza as a way out of Hegel and the false movement of dialectic. His concern with immanence is closely wrapped up with his reading of Spinoza. The connection between immanence and emanation is demonstrated. Thought and Extension both express the essence of substance, but determine that essence into different forms. Immanence represents the unity of complication and explication, of inherence and implication. It is noted that Deleuze's two doctoral theses, namely Difference and Repetition and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, complement one another. In Difference and Repetition, expression becomes differenciation.

Like the “instructor” in Plato’s allegory of the cave, the iconoclastic theologian is interested in loosening the chains that bind thinkers in the dark. Like Glaucon, she will agree with Socrates that these prisoners will naturally be distressed when they become aware of the extent to which their shackles have limited their perspective. For her, however, the problem is not that thinkers are fettered in such a way that they can only see simulacra, and the solution is not leading them out of the cave and up into the light so that they can contemplate the source of true knowledge. Engaging Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, this chapter discloses and dissolves a much more powerful and far less easily perceived Chain that ties thinkers, along with their aspiring Platonist saviours, to an image of thought that is always and already itself bound up within the domain of “representation,” and bound to judgments based on transcendent ideals.

This chapter investigates how Hoëne Wronski and Francis Warrain influenced the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and explains that in Deleuze's discussion of calculus in his Difference and Repetition, he expressed his preference for Wronski's properly Kantian approach to the calculus. It argues that it is Warrain's earlier works, published in the first decade of the twentieth century, which may turn out to be more significant for understanding Deleuze's avowedly esoteric interpretation of the differential calculus.

This chapter uses concepts from Leibniz’s philosophy to provide an account of the metaphysical system Deleuze constructs in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense. This account has four key components. 1) An ideal continuum populated by reciprocally determined differential relations, from which individuals are produced. Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus is the technique most suited to describe this continuum. 2) The singularities or events which populate the continuum and which eventually form the “predicates” which are included within individuals. An inverted version of Leibniz’s theory of infinite analysis, which Deleuze dubs ‘vice-diction’, allows us to describe how these singularities are distributed. 3) The relations of compossibility between singularities which allow the articulation of a structure prior to any logical relations of opposition or contradiction. In Leibniz, a divergence between singularities marks a bifurcation into two distinct possible worlds. In Deleuze, by contrast, divergent series resonate and communicate with one another. 4) An “ideal game” which presides over the actualisation of this pre-individual continuum through the genesis of individuals. In Leibniz this game is subject to the rules of a divine calculus in which God selects a “best of all possible worlds” whose harmony is guaranteed. Deleuze, however, will reject this theological constraint.

This chapter examines the relation between Gilles Deleuze's theory of Ideas and the theme of immanence, particularly with regard to the theory of Ideas found in Immanuel Kant's three critiques. It argues that if the theory of Ideas can be seen as the thread that unites Kant's critical project, Deleuze's own differential and immanent theory of Ideas can similarly be seen as the ‘rhizome’ that gathers together the diverse strands of Deleuze's own philosophical project. It highlights the similarities between Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and Anti-Oedipus with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason.

This chapter explores how to read Gilles Deleuze's texts in relation to one another and in relation to the problems and concepts they appear to share. The Logic of Sense presents one of the most detailed accounts of the incorporeal realm of becoming and the pure event to be found anywhere in Deleuze. In Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense and What is Philosophy?, Deleuze cites the same passage from Charles Péguy's Clio. In the first two texts, the passage is used to support the idea that there are two levels or dimensions of time. What is Philosophy? refers to the same passage in support of a different thesis. Deleuze and Félix Guattari's conception of history depends on the outline according to which virtual movements find expression in actual historical processes. They developed concepts that express the virtual dynamics of historical and other kinds of event.

Immanence is itself not a concept, but an image or a plane that is the condition of thought. Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense may have marked an initial stage on the way to the conquest of immanence, and the uncovering of the world of anonymous, pre- individual and impersonal singularities. The plane of immanence can unfold only by presupposing a plane of organisation, ruled by functions and forms, and from which transcendence may grow. The plane of transcendence, or analogy, is always shot through with processes it cannot control. Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, Marcel Proust, and Francis Bacon show the point at which their life becomes a life, and the illusion of transcendence dissolves into pure immanence. ‘Immanence: a life’ is Gilles Deleuze's last word on life, and his final celebration of it.

This chapter analyses Gilles Deleuze's engagement with the philosophical thoughts of Gottfried Leibniz. It suggests that though having published a book-length study of Leibniz entitled The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque in 1988, Deleuze's important engagement with Leibniz had already occurred in Difference and Repetition in 1968 and in Logic of Sense in 1969. The chapter shows how Deleuze used Leibniz to deduce the necessity of a principle of difference by making his way through the four fundamental principles of Leibniz's philosophy: identity, sufficient reason, indiscernibility, and the law of continuity.

In 2007, Governor Rick Perry of Texas issued an executive order requiring all girls in the sixth grade (between the ages of 11 and 12) to be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus (HPV). However, no sooner than the new vaccines were announced did controversies begin to swirl. This chapter uses this little vignette from Texas politics both as a launching point for a criticism of how we currently discuss ethics, and to underline some salient features of ethical ‘phenomenology’. It argues that the dominant traditions of ethical thought are almost entirely useless with respect to genuine ethical problems, and that fundamentally they approach the question and problem of ethics from the wrong side, focusing as they do on rule-based models of ethical deliberation. The HPV vaccine controversy is a sort of parable for the impotence of this sort of ethical thought — dominated by utilitarian and Kantian deontological models of ethical deliberation — fit only for classroom exercises where students are made to apply abstract rules and principles that have little bearing on the sort of situations that evoke ethical controversy. In place of these transcendent rule-based models of ethical deliberation where everything is known in advance, the chapter proposes a problem-based model of ethical composition without pre-existing αρχή or foundation, where the ethical is not understood as the application of pre-existent moral principles to particular situations, but is conceived as the emergence of a problem and the re-composition of a collective undertaken in response to this problem. The chapter draws heavily on the ethical thought developed by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition.

This chapter analyses Gilles Deleuze's engagement with the philosophical thoughts of Raymond Ruyer. It explains that Deleuze only briefly mentioned Ruyer in his Difference and Repetition, and that Deleuze's most extended treatment of Ruyer appears in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, though it occupied only two or three pages. Despite this, Ruyer can be considered as one of the most important influences on Deleuze's philosophy of biology, and a significant force in the development of Deleuze's ontology as a whole.

This chapter examines Gilles Deleuze's commentaries on the philosophical beliefs of Plato. It discusses the contents of Difference and Repetition and in the first appendix to The Logic of Sense, where he developed his most extensive analysis of Plato. The chapter explains Deleuze's opinion that modern philosophy has never had any other task than the overturning or renversement of Platonism, and suggests that Deleuze turned to Plato not only to recover the originary motive and force of the Idea, but to demystify the power of the Idea to adjudicate among rivals, such that the great Platonic dualism of Idea and image, of model and copy, lapses into indiscernibility of depths.

This chapter examines the influence of John Duns Scotus on Gilles Deleuze's concepts of univocity or univocal being. It compares Deleuze's and Duns Scotus's engagements with the ancient and medieval controversies surrounding the relations possible within primary diversity, and demonstrates that even where it is put in the service of Platonist-Christian thought, univocity nevertheless speaks to difference. The chapter discusses Deleuze's view on the fundamental limitation of the Scotist ontology and suggests that his discussion of Duns Scotus in the difference in itself section of his Difference and Repetition is central to the development of Deleuze's overall philosophy.

This chapter examines the influence of Karl Marx on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. It explains that Deleuze's Difference and Repetition laid the groundwork for his analysis of capitalism, and that it is where he identified representation and exchange as the enemies of the difference he champions. The chapter suggests that Deleuze shared with Marx what Marxists would call a dialectical evaluation of capitalism and that what Deleuze admires most about capitalism is the ways in which the socialisation of production, the development of productive forces and the spread of the market actively promote difference.