I haven't read The Fold yet, but it is on my shortlist. After your description of the diagrams, I'm tempted to move it up the list. Really curious what the exposition of the concept of the fold there might tell me about the logic of individuation I was trying to sketch here. Deleuze talks about this in various works, but it seems to me that The Fold might be the work where this is outlined in most detail.
Oh yes do read it asap if this stuff is on your mind currently. He intimately explains the differential relationships that produce intensity / singularities through the mechanism of folding and unfolding. He utilizes the analogy of a “baroque house” that has windows of perception of the bottom floor (sensation of the outside of the monad) and the “windowless upper floor” (the interior of the monad where sensation is manipulated or processed). He paints this picture of a highly invaginated and wrapped up world manifold that defines matter and the discrete (but infinitely connected) pockets of interiority belonging to each monad. One looks up to the walls and ceiling of their own rippling monad to see the world. It culminates with the picture of a Dominata, a monad with a body (wholly one’s own) made of variable monads temporarily in one’s domain (a body of organs) and the monads themselves under domination nonetheless retain their individuality but, from the perspective of the dominating monad, only offer a specific materiality (interiors of monads being cut off from one another obviously). It directly addresses how one can become many and many can become one in a rigorous way. I read this after sartre’s being and nothingness so i synthesized some connections internally on connecting the “pleats” of the fold to nothingness (an active nothingness, one’s own nothingness) as Delueze hints at this productive nothingness as the midst that supports the remarkable (the singularities). Between Sartre’s nothingness and being oscillation mechanism and Delueze’s fold, we get an almost systemic understanding of Kant’s synthetic a priori. A closed off laboratory whose walls shake in resonance to the world at large. The fold ends with his summary of a new harmony. A harmonic resonance between the monads, the dominated monads, and the varying scales of the world to the individual. It’s much less accescible than anti-oedipus since it requires one to quickly adopt the baroque mindset but it’s worth it and not that long / very fun.
Sounds delicious! And a very helpful sketch. I've been circling in adjacent waters myself. "Productive nothingness" has a particularly intriguing ring to my ears. I should definitely move The Fold up the queue.
Yes Sartre’s Being and Nothingness should be on your list then too. He is the heir to Heidegger’s Dasein investigations. The book is long and insane to follow at times (the amount he uses terms of negation, not, negate, nothing, nothingness, etc is mind boggling). I follow it along with the audiobook that recently released (a newer translation as the source) and find myself rewinding like it’s no one’s business. Anyways, his most poignant example goes something like this: Pierre, his friend, says he will meet him at the shop at noon. Sartre enters and looks around. No Pierre. But wait? How did this happen? When Sartre looks for his friend, he looks at the collection of objects in the room and not a single one carries Pierre’s absence. Yet, as if it was a magical imposition, Pierre’s absence crashes into perception. Two moments, one of a room full of innocuous cafe things with not a single iota of Pierre-ness and one where there is a blurry cafe full of objects that only serve to be the background to Pierre’s absence. What separates these moments? Nothing. No thing. No objects. Just nothingness. This nothingness is what haunts Being. Without this nothingness, we would be frozen into a collapse, no temporality could exist. The moment of recognizing Pierre’s absence never comes. We have no way to transition from the objects immanent to us to other objects without an imposition. But an imposition from outside would nonetheless slice us up like a physical block universe. To rid our selves of this problem of infinite sliced time, we have to admit this nothingness is our own. Our own nothingness and our own being. If we take responsibility for both the objects immanent to us as ourselves and the nothingness as our own nothingness, we get a remarkably radical freedom. Our freedom is the freedom to negate our relationship to a particular object or objects. We surpass the objects, which are our perceptions of the world, into our own nothingness and back and forth. In this sense, the monad’s experience becomes continuous as there are no more discrete moments of time sliced up.
It’s pretty wild shit and I don’t see many folks connecting it to delueze and others. I think the negation language makes people wary of relating it to a positive project but I think that’s a misreading.
Yes, I can see now why you're connecting Sartre to the Fold and individuation. My own interest in nothingness as productive leans more toward a different lineage, closer to Eastern and post-Leibnizian trajectories, but that said, I appreciate very much the Sartrean dynamic you are articulating here. At the same time, I might need to pace myself a little before adding a new 900-page engaging philosophy book to my stack.
His drawings in the Fold are so obnoxiously good. One second I am saying, these scribbled curves mean nothing and the old man rambles. The next, I am drawing them myself and thinking about diagrams all day!
❣️
Have you read The Fold? I just finished. It’s goated.
I haven't read The Fold yet, but it is on my shortlist. After your description of the diagrams, I'm tempted to move it up the list. Really curious what the exposition of the concept of the fold there might tell me about the logic of individuation I was trying to sketch here. Deleuze talks about this in various works, but it seems to me that The Fold might be the work where this is outlined in most detail.
Oh yes do read it asap if this stuff is on your mind currently. He intimately explains the differential relationships that produce intensity / singularities through the mechanism of folding and unfolding. He utilizes the analogy of a “baroque house” that has windows of perception of the bottom floor (sensation of the outside of the monad) and the “windowless upper floor” (the interior of the monad where sensation is manipulated or processed). He paints this picture of a highly invaginated and wrapped up world manifold that defines matter and the discrete (but infinitely connected) pockets of interiority belonging to each monad. One looks up to the walls and ceiling of their own rippling monad to see the world. It culminates with the picture of a Dominata, a monad with a body (wholly one’s own) made of variable monads temporarily in one’s domain (a body of organs) and the monads themselves under domination nonetheless retain their individuality but, from the perspective of the dominating monad, only offer a specific materiality (interiors of monads being cut off from one another obviously). It directly addresses how one can become many and many can become one in a rigorous way. I read this after sartre’s being and nothingness so i synthesized some connections internally on connecting the “pleats” of the fold to nothingness (an active nothingness, one’s own nothingness) as Delueze hints at this productive nothingness as the midst that supports the remarkable (the singularities). Between Sartre’s nothingness and being oscillation mechanism and Delueze’s fold, we get an almost systemic understanding of Kant’s synthetic a priori. A closed off laboratory whose walls shake in resonance to the world at large. The fold ends with his summary of a new harmony. A harmonic resonance between the monads, the dominated monads, and the varying scales of the world to the individual. It’s much less accescible than anti-oedipus since it requires one to quickly adopt the baroque mindset but it’s worth it and not that long / very fun.
Sounds delicious! And a very helpful sketch. I've been circling in adjacent waters myself. "Productive nothingness" has a particularly intriguing ring to my ears. I should definitely move The Fold up the queue.
Yes Sartre’s Being and Nothingness should be on your list then too. He is the heir to Heidegger’s Dasein investigations. The book is long and insane to follow at times (the amount he uses terms of negation, not, negate, nothing, nothingness, etc is mind boggling). I follow it along with the audiobook that recently released (a newer translation as the source) and find myself rewinding like it’s no one’s business. Anyways, his most poignant example goes something like this: Pierre, his friend, says he will meet him at the shop at noon. Sartre enters and looks around. No Pierre. But wait? How did this happen? When Sartre looks for his friend, he looks at the collection of objects in the room and not a single one carries Pierre’s absence. Yet, as if it was a magical imposition, Pierre’s absence crashes into perception. Two moments, one of a room full of innocuous cafe things with not a single iota of Pierre-ness and one where there is a blurry cafe full of objects that only serve to be the background to Pierre’s absence. What separates these moments? Nothing. No thing. No objects. Just nothingness. This nothingness is what haunts Being. Without this nothingness, we would be frozen into a collapse, no temporality could exist. The moment of recognizing Pierre’s absence never comes. We have no way to transition from the objects immanent to us to other objects without an imposition. But an imposition from outside would nonetheless slice us up like a physical block universe. To rid our selves of this problem of infinite sliced time, we have to admit this nothingness is our own. Our own nothingness and our own being. If we take responsibility for both the objects immanent to us as ourselves and the nothingness as our own nothingness, we get a remarkably radical freedom. Our freedom is the freedom to negate our relationship to a particular object or objects. We surpass the objects, which are our perceptions of the world, into our own nothingness and back and forth. In this sense, the monad’s experience becomes continuous as there are no more discrete moments of time sliced up.
It’s pretty wild shit and I don’t see many folks connecting it to delueze and others. I think the negation language makes people wary of relating it to a positive project but I think that’s a misreading.
Yes, I can see now why you're connecting Sartre to the Fold and individuation. My own interest in nothingness as productive leans more toward a different lineage, closer to Eastern and post-Leibnizian trajectories, but that said, I appreciate very much the Sartrean dynamic you are articulating here. At the same time, I might need to pace myself a little before adding a new 900-page engaging philosophy book to my stack.
I hear you! I fully expect to die with many unread books around me.
His drawings in the Fold are so obnoxiously good. One second I am saying, these scribbled curves mean nothing and the old man rambles. The next, I am drawing them myself and thinking about diagrams all day!