By thus positing an infinity of possible worlds, Leibniz in no way reintroduces a duality that would turn our relative world into the reflection of a more profound, absolute world. (Deleuze 1993, 60)
Can he think possibilities without the priority of the possible?
An individual is established first of all around a certain number of local singularities, which are its 'primary predicates'. . . . That is the real definition of the individual: concentration, accumulation, coincidence of a certain number of converging preindividual singularities (it being said that singular points can coincide in a same point, as the different summits of separate triangles coincide at the common summit of a pyramid). It resembles the nucleus of a monad. At the kernal of every monad, according to Geroult's hypothesis, there exists no 'simple notion.' (Deleuze 1993, 63)
Is Deleuze right that "a singularity can always be isolated, excised, or cut from its prolongations"? (Deleuze 1993, 64)
Breaking with everyone who opposes the individual to the concept. For some, the Nominalists, individuals would be the only existants, concepts being only carefully ordered words; for others, the Universalists, the concept has the power of being infinitely determinable, the individual referring only to accidental or extraconceptual determinations. But for Leibniz, at the same time only the individual exists, and it is by virtue of the power of the concept: monad or soul. Thus this power of the concept (to become a subject) does not consist in determining a genre to infinity, but in condensing and in prolonging singularities. The latter are not generalities but events, or droplets of an event. (Deleuze 1993, 64)
Could 'grammar' be not rules to be applied but trajectories assembling possible singularities? (Does it make sense to talk of possible singularities? Or only of possibilities at singularities?) Forms of life rather than rulebooks?
Deleuze was the first to think through the notion of difference independent of the Hegelian idea of opposition, and that was the start of the radical anti-hegenialism which has characterized French intellectual life in the last decades. This position--the trashing of totality, the trashing of mediation, the valorization of difference outside the subject-object opposition, the decentering of the subject--all these features we now associate with postmodernism and post-structuralism go back to Deleuze's ressurection of Nietzsche against Hegel. (Cornell West, in Stephanson 1988, 275)
But is Deleuze as far as he thinks from a chastened Hegel*?
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001