Leibniz and the Baroque, Lecture 4, 16 December 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 fourth lecture is organized within a 20-lecture seminar that Deleuze taught between October 1986 and June 1987, presented on December 16, 1986.</p>

<p>The four-week gap since the previous session (due to student strikes across France) explains the format for this seminar, the point-by-point recapitulation of the material covered in the first three meetings (28 October, 4 November, 18 November) corresponding roughly to chapters 1 & 2 of <em>The Fold</em>. Only in the latter part of the session, from the “Ninth Remark” onward, does Deleuze move forward with his development, hoping to wrap up the first part of the course. Deleuze develops the question of Leibniz’s term “monad”, i.e., the individual in its notion, that envelops infinity, grasped through the notion of the concept, i.e., through understanding and extension.  Having hoped for time to develop the floors in terms of painting, arguing that between the floors, their relations will be named “harmony”, one of Leibniz’s great concepts, Deleuze closes rather allusively by suggesting that a topic for reflection on this concept is the harmonic mean of numbers, in contrast to the arithmetic mean, dealing with the number and its inverse.</p>

<p>Note that although the date provided for the session both at WebDeleuze and on the YouTube recordings is November 25, Deleuze indicates in the session that it is taking place on the final Tuesday, December 16, before Christmas break.</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>La lacune de quatre semaines depuis les séances précédentes (à cause des grèves en France) explique le format de cette séance, la récapitulation systématique des thèmes considérés lors des trois premières séances (le 28 octobre, le 4 novembre, et le 18 novembre), qui correspondaient grosso modo aux chaptres 1 et 2 de Le Pli. Il n’y a que la dernière partie de la séance, à partir de la “neuvième rémarque,” où Deleuze avance dans le développement afin de pouvoir terminer la première partie du cours (sur “Leibniz comme philosophe baroque”).</p>

<p>Notez bien : la date de l’enregistrement, le 25 novembre 1986, ne correspond aucunement à la vraie date de la séance étant donné que Deleuze précise dans la séance qu’elle a lieu le mardi qui précède le congé de Noël.</p>