Leibniz and the Baroque, Lecture 8, 27 January 1987

<p>A series of lectures given by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze at the University of Paris 8. This eighth lecture is organized within a 20-lecture seminar that Deleuze taught between October 1986 and June 1987, presented on January 27, 1987.</p>

<p>The current session allows Deleuze to employ the resources of a colleague in mathematics at Paris 8, Marcel Maarek (so identified in the 3 February session), to complement Deleuze's own perspectives on point of view and singularities in relation to the fold. In order to prepare for Maarek’s intervention, Deleuze asks three generative questions that link the concepts of singularity, compossibility, and individuation: what is a singularity, or what is a singular point, once it’s been said that a singularity is there where something happens in a curve? Second, between singularities, what is the entirely original type of rapport, needed to be specified by a logic of the event; that is, what is the type of relation that allows us to define compossibility and incompossibility? Third, what is individuality or individuation? To these problems, Deleuze points to several texts as means of showing singularities and bifurcations in action: Leibniz's <em>Theodicy</em>, and a particular Baroque tale in part 3; Borges’s story, “The Garden of Forking Paths” in <em>Ficciones</em>; and Maurice Leblanc’s novel <em>La Vie extravagante de Balthazar</em>. Then follows Maarek’s superb intervention that provides a concise, well-presented historical and conceptual background to different facets of singularities, with particular reference to Abraham Robinson’s <em>Nonstandard Analysis </em>(1970).</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>La séance actuelle permet à Deleuze de profiter des ressources d’un collègue en mathématiques à Paris, Marcel Maarek (ainsi nommé pendant la séance du 3 février), afin de suppléer aux perspectives de Deleuze sur le point de vue et des singularités vis-à-vis du pli.</p>