Leibniz and the Baroque, Lecture 2, 04 November 1986

<p>The Deleuze Seminars is a collection of audio recordings, transcriptions, and English translations of, and supplemental materials from, the lectures French philosopher Gilles Deleuze gave during his career at the University of Paris 8. This seminar clearly prepares publication of his 1988 book on Leibniz, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque. This second lecture is organized within a 20-lecture seminar that Deleuze taught between October 1986 and June 1987, presented on November 4, 1986.</p>

<p>Having set out the basic hypotheses in the initial session, with the fold as the fundamental aspect of a definition of the Baroque, Deleuze now adds another layer to previous hypotheses, starting by reviewing some well-known philosophical principles (identity; contradiction; excluded middle; existence; causality; finality), and hypothesizing that Leibniz’s proliferation of principles is assured by the milieu of infinity in which his thought develops. Deleuze reaches the conclusion that only the irrational number founds the necessity of an infinite series, and suggests that the continuous is a labyrinth, an infinite series of folds like the irrational number, distinguishing 17<sup>th</sup>-century mathematics (notably Descartes) from Leibniz and, much more recently, from aspects of the fractal object developed by Mandelbrot. So Deleuze returns to the upper floor by insisting that the fold be considered as inflection of the infinite series and also going to inclusion, folding to infinity and closes by appealing to students to reflect over the following two weeks (a holiday occurred on November 11) on the connection of the three notions of fold, infinite series, and irrational numbers.</p>

<p>This dataset includes one .mp3 audio file of the original recorded lecture and the complete French transcription and English translation in odt format.</p>

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<p>Les Séminaires de Deleuze sont une collection d'enregistrements audio, de transcriptions et de traductions en anglais et de documents complémentaires des conférences que le philosophe français Gilles Deleuze a donné lors de sa carrière à l'Université de Paris 8.</p>

<p>Ayant établi les hypothèses de base dans la première séance, avec le pli comme aspect fondamental d’une définition du baroque, Deleuze reprend ce même aspect, d’abord, avec une récapitulation des éléments déjà proposés, puis avec l’introduction d’une mathématique baroque, une théorie des points, et le passage du pli à la série infinie.</p>