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This introductory chapter briefly examines how, out of the formative encounter between Deleuze and Lucretius, Lucretian atomism provoked Deleuzeanism. Although Deleuze consistently expressed his admiration for Lucretian atomism throughout his life, his relationship to this ancient philosophy has been almost completely ignored. Hence, the aim of this chapter is to briefly explore the idea of atomism as a provocative predecessor to Deleuze's own theory of ideas. To put another way, atomism articulates the problem to which Deleuzeanism is one response, where the problems and concepts that characterised, structured, and defined atomism, especially in its Lucretian form, have generated many of the main problems and concepts operating in Deleuze's writings.

This chapter develops an Epicurean-Deleuzean ethics as the articulation of the practice of an immanent naturalism that links ancient atomism to Deleuze by means of a ‘great tradition’ in ethics, following ‘a secret link between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, and Nietzsche’. Using Deleuze's formulation of the Nietzschean method of symptomatology, the chapter returns to the concept of the atomic idea. Lucretian atomism, for Deleuze, takes nature to be the object shared by both a speculative and a practical philosophy, and so is a fully affirmative naturalism in both thought and act. Deleuzean-atomic ethics is then an immanent theory that links up directly with the problems or ideas that have been seen, in previous chapters, to operate in metaphysics, physics, and epistemology or sensation. In this way, Deleuze's atomism is a thoroughgoing and affirmative naturalism.

This concluding chapter returns to the St Jerome story of the love potion before addressing some lingering issues on the Deleuze-Lucretius encounter thus presented. It considers what is meant with the claim that Lucretian atomism produced portions of Deleuzeanism, returning once again to the term used to characterise this relationship — ‘encounter’. From here, the chapter considers yet another question: what is an encounter for Deleuze and why is it so important to this story of his philosophical relationship with Lucretius? After exploring this issue further, the chapter concludes the story of the encounter with a final observation on why Deleuze's theory of immanent ideas was selected for discussion in this volume.