Leibniz and the Baroque, Lecture 5, 06 January 1987

<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 fifth lecture is organized within a 20-lecture seminar that Deleuze taught between October 1986 and June 1987, presented on January 6, 1987.</p>

<p>After the 16 December 1986 session devoted mostly to review of previous work, Deleuze clearly judged that he needed one more session on the opening theme, “Leibniz as Baroque Philosopher.” Unfortunately, the transcription of this session is based on the available fragmentary recording. Given what follows, the material missing at the start of the session probably consisted of another review of previously covered concepts (see session 4), and then possibly turned to material developed at the end of <em>The Fold</em>, chapter 2 and into chapter 3, "What Is Baroque?", on the monad in relation to the Baroque house. Deleuze begins with a “parenthesis” (developed in <em>The Fold</em>, chapter 1) in which he relates the notions of preformation and epigenesis in the 17<sup>th</sup> century to Leibniz’s view that the organism never dies. Returning then to the communication of floors, upper and lower, in the Baroque house, Deleuze focuses on how monads communicate without doors or windows, via musical harmony attuned to another’s tune or melodic line, a sound inflection, linked to the basic intrinsic singularity. With “individual”, i.e., the monad excluding the world, distinct from “singular”, i.e., the event undergone by the subject, Deleuze says that the latter would require a mathematical theory of singularities.  Then considering the 17<sup>th</sup> century “problem of numbers” and Leibniz’s “combinatories”, Deleuze’s notes Leibniz’s interest in a Chinese mode of calculus, linking this to Leibniz’s physics as related to creating the fold, in contrast to use of “the fold” by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre (the dynamic of the hole). Deleuze concludes that the Baroque operation is the fold going to infinity, which Deleuze relates to Leibniz’s interest in veins of marble, i.e., inflections, inclusions, pleats of matter, virtual figures within the soul, hence, marble as the figure of the world.</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>Fragment: La préformation et l’épigénèse, et la monade, les âmes, et Dieu -- La transcription, faite grâce à l’enregistrement disponible de la BNF, n’est donc que fragmentaire dans la mesure où la séance commence pendant ce que Deleuze va appeler "une parenthèse," à mi-chemin de la séance. Cette conclusion d’une partie omise est soutenue aussi par la courte durée de l’enregistrement (82 minutes), au lieu d’une longueur normale (d’à peu près 2 heures et demie).</p>