Monadology

"These principles have given me a way of naturally explaining the union, or rather the agreement, of the soul and the organic body. The soul follows its own laws, and the body likewise follows it own, and they coincide by virtue of the preestablished harmony between all substances, since they are all representation of one and the same universe." [§78]

"It is also on account of this that there is never true generation, nor perfect death, taken in the rigorous sense of the term as consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. And what we call generation is development and growth, just as what we call death is enfolding and diminishing." [§73]

"Each portion of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But each branch of a plant, each limb of an animal, each drop of its humorous, is also such a garden or such a pond. And although the earth and the air interspersed between the plants in the garden, or the water in interspersed between the fish in the pond, are not themselves plant or fish, het they still contain them, though more often than not of a subtlety imperceptible to us. Thus there is nothing uncultivated, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusions, except in appearance. This is somewhat like what is apparent with a pond viewed from a distance, in which we see a confused motion and swarming of the pond's fish without making out the fish themselves." [§§67-9]

"Thus each organic body of a living thing is a kind of divine machine, or natural automaton, which infinitely surpasses all artificial automata, because a machine which is made by the art of man is not a machine in each of its parts; for example, the tooth of a brass wheel has parts of fragments which are no longer artificial as far as we are concerned, and no longer have anything about them to indicate the machine for whose use the wheel was intended. But the machines of nature, that is, living bodies, are still machines in their smallest parts, to infinity. It is in this that the difference between nature and art consists, that is, between divine art and ours." [§64]

"And in this, compounds are analogous to simples. For the whole is a plenum, which makes all matter interconnected, and in the plenum every movement has some effect on distant bodies in proportion to their distance, such that each body is affected not only by those which touch it, and in some way feels the effect of everything that happens to them, but also by means of them it is affected by those which touch the former ones, the ones which directly touch it. From this it follows that this communication extends indefinitely. Consequently every body is affected by everything that happens in the universe, so much so that the one who sees all could read in each body what is happening everywhere, and even what has happened or will happen, by observing in the present that which is remote both in time and space: sympnoia panta, as Hippocrates said. But a soul can read in itself only what is distinctly represented there; it cannot unfold all at once all that is folded within it, for this proceeds to infinity." [§61]

"The same town, when looked at from different places, appears quite different and is, as it were, multiplied in perspectives. In the same way it happens that, because of the the infinite multitude of simple substances, there are just as many different universes, which are nevertheless merely perspectives of a single universe according to the different points of view of each monad. And this is the means of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest order possible; that is, it is the means of obtaining as much perfection as possible." [§§57-8]

"Now this interconnection, or this accommodation of all created things to each other and of each to all the rest, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and that consequently it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe." [§56]

"But a sufficient reason must be found in contingent truths, or truths of fact, that is, in the series of things spread throughout the universe of created things, where resolution into particular reasons could go on into endless detail because of the immense variety of things in nature and the division of bodies to infinity. There is an infinity of shapes and motions, both present and past, which enter into the efficient cause of my present writing, and there is an infinity of minute inclinations and dispositions of my soul, both present and past, which enter into its final cause." [§36]

"Moreover, we are obliged to admit that perception and that which depends on it cannot be explain mechanically, that is, by means of shapes and motions. And if we suppose that there were a machine whose structure makes it think, feel, and have perception, we could imagine it increased in size while keeping the same proportions, so that one could enter it as one does with a mill. If we were then to go around inside it, we would see only parts pushing one another, and never anything which would explain a perception. This must therefore be sought in the simple substance, and not in the compound or machine. Moreover, this is the only thing that can be found in the simple substance, that is, perceptions and their changes. It is also in this alone that all the internal actions of simple substances can consist." [§17]

"It must also be that every monad is different from every other. For in nature there are never two beings which are perfectly alike, and in which it is not possible to find a difference which is internal, or based on an intrinsic denomination." [§9]

"There is also no way of explaining how a monad could be internally altered or changed by any other created thing, since it is not possible to rearrange anything in it or to conceive in it any internal motion that could be started, directed, increased, or diminished within it, as can occur in compounds, where there is change among the parts. Monads have no windows through which anything could enter them or depart from them. Accidents cannot become detached, or wander about outside of substances, as the sensible species of the Scholastic once did. Thus neither substance nor accident can enter a monad from outside." [§7]

"The monad, about which we shall speak here, is nothing other than a simple substance which enters into compounds, 'simple' meaning 'without parts.'" [§1]

Monadology (1714)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The Fold

Chapter 9: The New Harmony:

"Music has stayed at home; what has changed now is the organization of the home and its nature. We are all still Leibnizian, although accords no longer convey our world or our text. We are discovering new ways of folding, akin to new envelopments, but we all remain Leibnizan [sic] because what always matters is folding, unfolding, refolding." [137]

"We could hardly be satisfied in establishing binary relations between the text and music that would inevitably be arbitrary. How to fold the text so that it can be enveloped in music?" [136]

"It is as if Leibniz were delivering us an important message about communication: don't complain about not having enough communication, for these is always plenty of it. Communication seems to be of a constant and preestablished quantity in the world, akin to a sufficient reason." [134]

"Whence the double aspect of the accord, insofar as it is the product of an intelligible calculus in an affective state. To hear the noise of the sea is tantamount to striking a chord, and each monad is intrinsically distinguished by its chords. Monads have inverse numbers, and chords are their 'inner actions.'" [130]

"However simple these examples, they allow us to understand certain traits of the theory of monads, and first of all why we go, not from monads to harmony, but from harmony to monads. Harmony is monadological, but because monads are initially harmonic. The programmatic text states the point clearly: when the infinite Being judges something to be harmonic, it conceives it as a monad, that is, as an intellectual mirror or expression of the world." [129]

"Sometimes ... the object itself is broadened according to a whole network of natural relations. The object itself overflows its frame in order to enter into a cycle or a series, and now the concept is what is found increasingly compressed, interiorized, wrapped in an instance that can ultimately be called 'personal.'" [125]

"Walter Benjamin made a decisive step forward in our understanding of the Baroque when he showed that allegory was not a failed symbol, or an abstract personification, but a power of figuration entirely different from that of the symbol: the latter combines the eternal and the momentary, nearly at the center of the world, but allegory uncovers nature and history according to the order of time." [125]

"In every instance folds of clothing acquire an autonomy and a fullness that are not simply decorative effects. They convey the intensity of a spiritual force exerted on the body, either to turn it upside down or to raise it up over and again, but in every event to turn it inside out and to mold its inner surfaces." [122]

Chapter 8: The Two Floors:

"Thus we see exactly how the two floors are allotted in relation to the world they are conveying. The world is actualized in souls, and is realized in bodies. It is therefore folded over twice, first in the souls that actualize it, and gain folded in the bodies that realize it, and each time according to a regime of laws that corresponds to the nature of souls or to the determination of bodies. And between the two folds, in the in-between of the fold, the Zweifalt, the bending of the two levels, the zone of inseparability that produces the crease or seam." [120]

"The body is analogous to Theseus's ship 'which the Athenians were always repairing.' But, as no monad contains any others, domination would remain a vague notion, having only a nominal definition, if Leibniz had not succeeded in defining it exactly by means of a 'substantial vinculum.' It is a strange linkage, a bracket, a yoke, a knot, a complex relation that comprises variable terms and one constant term." [110]

"If the Baroque has often been associated with capitalism, it is because the Baroque is linked to a crisis of property, a crisis that appears at once with the growth of new machines in the social field and the discovery of new living beings in the organism." [110]

"Leibniz often insists on this point: God does not endow the soul with a body without furnishing the given body with organs." [108]

"It is not the body that realizes, but it is in the body that something is realized, through which the body itself becomes real or substantial." [105]

"What Leibniz calls for, against Newton (as does Ruyer against Gestaltists), is the establishment of a true form that cannot be reduced to an apparent whole or to a phenomenal field, because it must retain the distinction of its details and its own individuality in the hierarchy in which it enters." [103]

Chapter 7: Perception in the Folds

"I possess a clear and distinguished zone of expression because I have primitive singularities, ideal virtual events to which I am destined. From this moment deduction unwinds: I have a body because I have a clear and distinguished zone of expression." [98]

"Macroperception is the product of differential relations that are established among microperceptions; it is thus an unconscious psychic mechanism that engenders the perceived in consciousness. Thus the variable and relative unity of any given phenomenon or another can be explained: all phenomena are collective, like a herd, an army, or a rainbow." [96]

"Every perception is hallucinatory because perception has no object. Conscious perception has no object and does not even refer to a physical mechanism of excitation that could explain it from without: it refers only to the exclusively physical mechanism of differential relations among unconscious perceptions that are comprising it within the monad." [93]

"If life implies a soul, it is because proteins already attest to an activity of perception, discrimination, and distinction -- in short, a 'primary force' that physical impulsions and chemical affinities cannot explain ('derivative forces')." [92]

"[I]n the deepest Baroque regions, and in the deepest Baroque knowledge of the world, this subordination of the true to what is singular and remarkable is being made manifest." [91]

"Inconspicuous perceptions constitute the obscure dust of the world, the dark depths every monad contains. There are differential relations among these presently infinitely small ones that are drawn into clarity; that is to say, that establish a clear perception (the color green) with certain tiny, dark, evanescent perceptions (the colors yellow and blue)." [90]

"All consciousness is a matter of threshold. In each case we would probably have to state why the threshold is marked where it is." [88]

"The task of perception entails pulverizing the world, but also one of spiritualizing its dust. The point is one of knowing how we move from minute perceptions to conscious perceptions, or from molecular perceptions to molar perceptions. Is it through a process of totalization, when for instance I grasp a whole whose parts are imperceptive to me? Thus I apprehend the sound of the sea, or of an assembly of people, but not the murmur of each wave or person who nonetheless is part of each whole." [87]

Chapter 6: What Is an Event?

"With the neo-Baroque, with its unfurling of divergent series in the same world, comes the irruption of incompossibilities on the same stage, where Sextus will rape and not rape Lucretia, where Caesar crosses and does not cross the Rubicon, where Fang kills, is killed, and neither kills nor is killed. In its turn harmony goes through a crisis that leads to a broadened chromatic scale, to an emancipation of dissonance or o unresolved accords, accords not brought back to a tonality. The musical model is the most apt to make clear the rise of harmony in the Baroque, and then the dissipation of tonality in the neo-Baroque: from harmonic closure to an opening onto a polytonality or, as Boulez will say, a 'polyphony of polyphonies.'" [82]

"Figures, things, and qualities are schema of permanence that are reflected or actualized in monads, but that are realized in flux; even composite substances, as we shall observe, need an ultimate quality that marks every one of them." [80]

"But the monad has several forms of active expression that make up its ways or manners, according to the ways in which its perceptions are sensitive, active or conceptual. In this sense appetite designates the movement from one perception to another as being constitutive of a becoming. Finally, this becoming is not completed without the sum of perceptions tending to be integrated in a great pleasure, a Satisfaction with which the monad fills itself when it expresses the world, a musical Joy of contracting its vibrations, of calculating them without knowing their harmonics or of drawing force enough to go further and further ahead in order to produce something new. For with Leibniz the question surges forth in philosophy that will continue to haunt Whitehead and Bergson: not how to attain eternity, but in what conditions does the objective world allow for a subjective production of novelty, that is, of creation?" [79]

"The event is a vibration with an infinity of harmonics or submultiples, such as an audible wave, a luminous wave, or even an increasingly smaller part of space over the course of an increasingly shorter duration." [77]

"What are the conditions that make an event possible? Events are produced in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes." [76]

"With Whitehead's name there comes for the third time an echo of the question, What is an event? He takes up the radical critique of the attributive scheme, the great play of principles, the multiplications of categories, the conciliation of the universal and the individual example, and the transformation of the concept into a subject: an entire hubris. He stands provisionally as the last great Anglo-American philosopher before Wittgenstein's disciples spread their misty confusion, sufficiency and terror." [76]

Chapter 5: Incompossibility, Individuality, Liberty

"Leibniz's optimism is based on the infinity of the damned as the foundation of the best of all worlds: they liberate an infinite quantity of possible progress." [74]

"In all cases it is true that the world only exists folded in the monads that express it, and is only unfolded virtually as the common horizon of all monads, or as the outer law of the series they include. But in a more restricted sense, in an intrinsic way, it can be said that when a monad is summoned to 'live' -- yet more when it is called to reason -- it unfolds in itself this region of the world that corresponds to its enclosed enlightened zone: it is called upon to 'develop all its perceptions,' and therein its task resides. Then, at the same time, an infinity of monads has not yet been called and remains folded; another infinity of them has fallen or falls in the night, folded onto themselves; while another infinity has been damned, hardened in a single fold that it will not unfurl." [74]

"A reader is immediately struck by the similarity of Leibniz's themes to Bergson's thesis: the same critique of illusion on motives, the same conception of the inflections of the soul, the same requirement of inherence or inclusion as a condition of the free act, the same description of the free act as what expresses the self ..." [72]

"In at least two writings -- one short and the other extensive -- Leibniz inaugurates the first great phenomenology of motives." [69]

"In human eyes it does not suffice that Adam may not sin in another world, if he is certainly sinning in this world. Leibniz leaves the impression that he is condemning us even more strongly than Spinoza, for whom there at least existed a process of possible liberation, whereas for Leibniz everything is sealed off from the beginning and remains in a condition of closure." [69]

"Monads have to be conceived as dancing." [68]

"The true character of the Leibnizian game -- and what opposes it to the roll of the dice -- is first of all a proliferation of principles: play is executed through excess and not a lack of principles; the game is that of principles themselves, of inventing principles. It is thus a game of reflection, of chess or checkers, where skill (not chance) replaces old gifts of wisdom or prudence ... The Baroque is just that, at a time just before the world loses its principles. It is the splendid moment when Some Thing is kept rather than nothing, and where response to the world's misery is made through an excess of principles, a hubris of principles, and a hubris inherent to principles." [67-8]

"It is a vast play of architecture or of paved grounds: How can a space be filled with the fewest possible voids, and with the greatest possible number of figures? ... The play interiorizes not only the players who serve as pieces, but the board on which the game is played, and the material of that board." [66-7]

"The play of the world has several aspects: it emits singularities; it puts forward infinite series that go from one singularity to another; it invents rules of convergence and divergence according to which these series of possibles are organized in infinite totalities, each totality being compossible, but two totalities together being incompossible with each other; it allots the singularities of each world in one way or another in the nucleus of monads or individuals that express this world." [66]

"Individuation does not go from a genre to smaller and smaller species, in accord with a law of differentiation, but goes from singularity to singularity, under the law of convergence or of prolongation that ties the individual to one world or another." [64]

Chapter 4: Sufficient Reason

"No philosophy has ever pushed to such an extreme the affirmation of a one and same world, and of an infinite difference or variety in this world." [58]

"Leibniz is haunted by depth of the soul, the dark depth, the 'fuscum subnigrum.' Substances or souls 'draw everything from their own depths.' That is the second aspect of Mannerism, without which the first would remain empty. The first is the spontaneity of manners that is opposed to the essentiality of the attribute. The second is the omnipresences of the dark depths which is opposed to the clarity of form, and without which manners would have no place to surge forth from. The entire formula of the Mannerism of substances is: 'All is born to them out of their own depths, through a perfect spontaneity.'" [57]

"Essentialism makes a classic of Descartes, while Leibniz's thought appears to be a profound Mannerism. Classicism needs a solid and constant attribute for substance, but Mannerist is fluid, and the spontaneity of manners replaces the essentiality of the attribute." [56]

"The Stoics and Leibniz invent a mannerist that is opposed to the essentialism first of Aristotle and then of Descartes. Mannerist as a composite of the Baroque is inherited from a Stoic mannerism that is now extended to the cosmos. A third great logic of the event will come with Whitehead." [53]

"Leibnizian inclusion is based upon a scheme of subject-verb-object that since antiquity resists the scheme of attribution. Here we have a Baroque grammar in which the predicate is above all a relation and an event, and not an attribute. When Leibniz uses the attributive model, he does so from the point of view of a classical logic of genres and species, which follows only nominal requirements. He does not use it in order to ground inclusion. Predication is not an attribution. The predicate is the 'execution of travel,' an act, a movement, a change, and not the state of travel. The predicate is the proposition itself. And I can no more reduce 'I travel' to 'I am a traveling being' than I can reduce 'I think' to 'I am a thinking being.' Thought is not a constant attribute, but a predicate passing endlessly from one through to another." [53]

"Relations themselves are types of events, and problems in mathematics. In antiquity predicates were defined by events that happen to figures. Events in their turn are types of relations; they are relations to existence and to time." [52]

"Time and again we discover an incertitude that is objective: On the one hand, does the fold pass between essences and existents or, on the other, between essences of God and what follows? Or between the essences of things and existents?" [52]

"Inclusion is virtual, Leibniz specifies, because it has to be extracted, and because the predicate is included in the subject only 'under a certain power.'" [52]

"Whether intuitive, theoramtic, or problematic, essences are always understood in an infinity. Identicals themselves are intuitive essences, in this way taken as infinite forms. In contrast, it is true that in the area of essences we can always stop, and make use of a definition as if it were a final Identical, or of a Requisite as if it were a definition, of a Limit, as if it had been reached. In the area of existences, to the contrary, we cannot stop, because series are liable to be extended and must be so because inclusion cannot be localized." [51]

"We therefore have three types of inclusion: auto-inclusions, reciprocal inclusions, and unilateral inclusions that can be localized at their limits. Their corresponding term, the absolute-simples, Identicals or infinite forms lacking any relation to each other; the relative-simples, the Definables, that enter into infinite series of wholes and parts, while their definers enter into relations; the limitative-simples, Requisites or converging series that tend toward limits, with their elations among limits. It is the alphabet, the Combinatory, and the Characteristic ... Absolute Forms, Identicals, are simple and separated folds; Definables are already composite folds; Requisites with their limits resemble even more complex hems (and take up textures). monads, that necessarily imply a point of view or a grounding, cannot fail to bear resemblance to draped forms." [48-9]

"Parts or wholes do not exist any more; they are replaced by degrees for each character. The inner characters of a sound include an actual intensity, a pitch, a duration, a timbre; a color has a tint, a saturation, a value; gold, in an example that Leibniz often uses, has a color, a weight, a malleability, a resistance to melting and to dissolution in nitric acid. The real matter is not only extension; it possesses an 'impenetrability, inertia, impetuosity and attachment.' It is what is called the texture of a body, it is specifically the sum of its inner qualities, the latitude of their variation and the relationship of their limits: hence the texture of gold." [47]

"Definables are derived notions: they can be simple if they are first in their order, but they always presuppose at least two primitives that define them in a relation, under a 'vinculum,' or through the intermediary of a particle that itself can be simple or complex (for example, A in B). That is the Combinatory that goes thus from Identicals to Definables, from primary to derived beings, through a distinction of levels: level I includes the primary or the indefinable Identicals; level II is composed of the simple derived beings, defined by two primary beings in a simple relation; level III is composed of composite derived beings defined by three primaries, or by a simple primary and a simple derived being in a relation that is itself composite ..." [45]

"There we find in fact the only thesis that ties Spinoza to Leibniz, their common manner of requiring in the ontological proof of the existence of God a detour that Descartes had confidence enough to cut short: before concluding that an infinitely perfect being necessarily exists, it had to be shown that it is possible (a real definition), and that it does not imply contradiction." [44]

"Inflection is the event that happens to the line or to the point. Inclusion is the predication that places inflection in the concept of the line or the point, that is, in this other point that will be called metaphysical. We go from inflection to inclusion just as we move from the event of the thing to the predicate of the notion, or from 'seeing' to 'reading.'" [41]

Chapter 3: What is Baroque?

"[T]he search for a model of the fold goes directly through the choice of a material. Would it be the paper fold, as the Orient implies, or the fold of fabric, that seems to dominate the Occident?" [37]

"As a general rule the way a material is folded is what constitutes its texture. It is defined less by its heterogenous and really distinct parts than by the style by which they become inseparable by virtue of particular folds." [36]

"It may be that the Baroque will have to confront the Orient profoundly. This happened to be Leibniz's adventure with his binary arithmetic: in one and zero Leibniz acknowledges the full and the void in a Chines fashion; but the Baroque Leibniz does not believe in the void. For him it always seems to be filled with a folded matter, because binary arithmetic superimposes folds that both the decimal system -- and Nature itself -- conceal in apparent voids. For Leibniz, and in the Baroque, folds are always full." [36]

"Matter that reveals its texture becomes raw material, just as form that reveals its folds becomes force." [35]

"[T]he Baroque invents the infinite work or process. The problem is not how to finish a fold, but how to continue it, to have it go through the ceiling, how to bring it to infinity." [34]

"To be sure, it might be argued that the concept of the fold also remains too broad: If we restrict ourselves to the plastic arts, what period and what style would fail to recognize the fold as a trait of painting or of sculpture? It is not only in clothing, but includes the body, rocks, waters, earth, and line." [34]

"The best inventors of the Baroque, the commentators have had their doubts about the consistency of the notion, and have been bewildered by the arbitrary extension that, despite themselves, the notion risked taking. The Baroque was seen as being restricted to one genre (architecture), or to an increasingly restrictive determination of periods and places, or yet again to a a radical disavowal: the Baroque never existed. It is nonetheless strange to deny the existence of the Baroque in the way we speak of unicorns or herds of pink elephants. For in this case the concept is given, while in the case of the Baroque the question entails knowing if a concept can be invented that is capable (or not) of attributing existence to it. Irregular pearls exist, but the Baroque has no reason for existing without a concept that forms this very reason ... For our purposes the criterion or operative concept of the Baroque is the Fold, everything that it includes, and in all its extensiveness." [33]

"It is well known that the total book is as much Leibniz's dream as it is Mallarmé's, even though they never stop working in fragments. Our error is in believing that they did not succeed in their wishes: they made this unique Book perfectly, the book of monads, in letters and little circumstantial pieces that could sustain as many dispersions as combinations." [31]

"When Heidegger calls upon the Zweifalt to be the differentiator of difference, he means above all that differentiation does not refer to a pregiven undifferentiated, but to a Difference that endlessly unfolds and folds over from each of its two sides, and that unfolds the one only while refolding the other, in a coextensive unveiling and veiling of Being, of presence and of withdrawal of being." [30]

"That one is metaphysical, dealing with souls, or that the other is physical, entailing bodies, does not impede the two vectors from comprising a similar world, a similar house." [29]

"Yet the inside remains perfectly integral from the point of view, or in the mirror, that oversees its decoration, no matter how complicated it might be." [29]

"The monad is the autonomy of the inside, an inside without an outside. It has as its correlative the independence of the façade, an outside without an inside. Now the façade can have doors and windows -- it is riddled with holes -- although there may be no void, a hole being only the site of a more rarefied matter." [28]

"For ages there have been places where what is seen is inside: a cell, a sacristy, a crypt, a church, a theater, a study, or a print room. The Baroque invests in all of these places in order to extract from them power and glory." [28]

"More exactly, in Rauschenberg's work we could say that the surface stops being a window on the world and now becomes an opaque grid of information on which the ciphered line is written. The painting-window is replaced by tabulation, the grid on which lines, numbers, and changing characters are inscribed (the objectile)." [27]

Chapter 2: The Folds in the Soul:

"Because the world is in the monad, each monad includes every series of the states of the world; but, because the monad is for the world, no one clearly contains the "reason" of the series of which they are all a result, and which remains outside of them, just like the principle of their accord." [26]

As an individual unit each monad includes the whole series; hence it conveys the entire world, but does not express it without expressing more clearly a small region of the world, a "subdivision," a borough of the city, a finite sequence. Two souls do not have the same order, but neither do they have the same sequence or the same clear or enlightened region." [25]

"We can consider the series of the twelve sounds: the series can undergo in turn many variations that are both rhythmic and melodic, but that also follow the contrary, or retrograde, movement. With greater reason an infinite series, even if the variable is unique, cannot be separated from an infinity of variations that make it up: we necessarily take it in accord with all possible, orders, and we favor this or that partial sequence at this or that time. That is why only one form -- or one street -- recovers its rights, but only in respect to the entire series." [25]

"What can be apprehended from one point of view is therefore neither a determined street nor a relation that might be determined with other streets, which are constants, but the variety of all possible connections between the course of a given street and that of another. The city seems to be a labyrinth that can be ordered. The world is an infinite series of curvatures or inflections, and the entire world is enclosed in the soul from one point of view." [24]

"Everyone knows the name that Leibniz ascribes to the soul or to the subject as a metaphysical point: the monad. He borrows this name from the Neoplatonists who used it to designate a state of One, a unity that envelops a multiplicity, this multiplicity developing the One in the manner of a "series." The One specifically has a power of envelopment and development, while the multiple is inseparable from the folds that i makes when it is enveloped, and of unfoldings when it is developed." [23]

"A soul always includes what it apprehends from its point of view, in other words, inflection. Inflection is an ideal condition or a virtuality that currently exists only in the soul that envelops it. Thus the soul is what has folds and is full of folds." [22]

"Why would something be folded, if it were not to be enveloped, wrapped, or put into something else? If appears that here the envelope acquires its ultimate or perhaps final meaning: it is not longer an envelope of coherence or cohesion, like an egg, in the "reciprocal envelopment" of organic parts. Nor even a mathematical envelope of adherence or adhesion, where a fold still envelops other folds, as in the enveloping envelope that touches an infinity of curves in an infinity of points. It is an envelope of inherence or of unilateral "inhesion": inclusion or inherence is the final cause of the fold, such that we move indiscernibly from the latter to the former. Between the two, a gap is opened which makes the envelope the reason for the fold: what is folded is the included, the inherent. It can be stated that what is folded is only virtual and currently exists only in an envelope, in something that envelops it." [22]

"Leibniz can define extension (extensio) as "continuous repetition" of the situs or position -- that is, of point of view: not that extension is therefore the attribute of point of view, but that the attribute of space (spatium), an order of distances between points of view, is what makes this repetition possible." [20]

"Such is the basis of perspectivism, which does not mean a dependence in respect to a pregiven or defined subject; to the contrary, a subject will be what comes to the point of view, or rather what remains in the point of view ... A needed relation exists between variation and point of view: not simply because of the variety of points of view ... but in the first place because every point of view is a point of view on variation ... For Leibniz, for Nietzsche, for William and Henry James, and for Whitehead as well, perspectivism amounts to a relativism, but not the relativism we take for granted. It is not a variation of truth according to the subject, but the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject. This is the very idea of Baroque perspective." [20]

"The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold -- in other words, to a relation of form-matter -- but to a temporary modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form ... His [Leibniz's] is not only a temporal but also a qualitative conception of the object, to the extent that sounds and colors are flexible and taken in modulation. The object here is manneristic, not essentializing: it becomes an event." [19]

"The definition of Baroque mathematics is born with Leibniz. The object of the discipline is a "new affection" of variable sizes, which is variation itself." [17]

"Everything changes when fluctuation is made to intervene in the place of internal homothesis. It is no longer possible to determine an angular point between two others, no matter how close one is to the other; but there remains the latitude to always add a detour by making each interval the site of a new folding. That is how we go from fold to fold and not from point to point, and how every contour is blurred to give definition to the formal powers of the raw material, which rise to the surface and are put forward as so many detours and supplementary folds." [17]

"Thus inflection is the pure Event of the line or of the point, the Virtual, ideality par excellence." [15]

"Inflection is the ideal genetic element of the variable curve or fold. Inflection is the authentic atom, the elastic point. That is what Klee extracts as the genetic element of the active, spontaneous line." [14]

Chapter 1: The Pleats of Matter:

"It is because the Fold is always between two folds, and because the between-two-folds seems to move about everywhere: Is it between inorganic bodies and organisms, between organisms and animal souls, between animal souls and reasonable souls, between bodies and souls in general?" [13]

"Unity of movement is an affair of the soul, and almost of a conscience, as Bergson will later discover." [12]

"In the Baroque the soul entertains a complex relation with the body. Forever indissociable from the body, it discovers a vertiginous animality that gets it tangled in the pleats of matter, but also an organic or cerebral humanity (the degree of development) that allows it to rise up, and that will make it ascend over all the other folds." [11]

"Here is the great difference that makes Leibniz break away from Malebranche: not only is there a preformation of bodies, but also a preexistence of souls in fertile seeds. Life is not only everywhere, but souls are everywhere in matter." [11]

"With epigenesis the organic fold is produced, is unearthed, or is pushed up from a relatively smooth and consistent surface. (How could a redoubling, an invagination, or an intubation be prefigured?)" [10]

"The organism is defined by its ability to fold its own parts and to unfold them, not to infinity, but to a degree of development assigned to each species. Thus an organism is enveloped by organisms, one within another (interlocking of germinal matter), like Russian dolls. The first fly contains the seeds of all flies to come, each being called in its turn to unfold its own parts at the right time. And when an organism dies, it does not really vanish, but folds in upon itself, abruptly involuting into the again newly dormant seed by skipping all intermediate stages." [8]

"It remains the case that the organic body thus confers an interior on matter, by which the principle of individuation is applied to it: whence the figure of the leaves of a tree, two never being exactly alike because of their veins or folds." [8]

"An organism is defined by endogenous folds, while inorganic matter has exogenous folds that are always determined from without or by the surrounding environment." [7]

"If the world is infinitely cavernous, if worlds exist in the tiniest bodies, it is because everywhere there can be found "a spirit in matter," which attests not only to the infinite division of parts but also to progressivity in the gain and loss of movements all the while conservation of force is realized." [7]

"A fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern. The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold, not the point which is never a part, but a simple extremity of the line ... The model for the sciences of matter is the "origami," as the Japanese philosopher might say, or the art of folding paper." [6]

"Dividing endlessly, the parts of matter form little vortices in a maelstrom, and in these are found even more vortices, even smaller, and even more are spinning in the concave intervals of the whirls that touch one another." [5]

"Wölfflin noted that the Baroque is marked by a certain number of material traits: horizontal widening of the lower floor, flattening of the pediment, low and curved stairs that push into space; matter handled in masses or aggregates, with the rounding of angles and avoidance of perpendiculars; the circular acanthus replacing the jagged acanthus, use of limestone to produce spongy, cavernous shapes, or to constitute a vortical form always put in motion by renewed turbulence, which ends only in the manner of a horse's mane or the foam of a wave; matter tends to spill over in space, to be reconciled with fluidity at the same time fluids themselves are divided into masses." [4]

"It is the upper floor that has no windows. It is a dark room or chamber decorated only with a stretched canvas "diversified by folds," as if it were a living dermis. Placed on the opaque canvas, these folds, cords, or springs represent an innate form of knowledge, but when solicited by matter they move into action." [4]

"The multiple is not only what has many parts but also what is folded in many ways." [3]

The Fold (1988; trans 1993)

Gilles Deleuze

Formalized Music

"The vector space structure of intervals of certain sound characteristics permits us to treat their elements mathematically and to express them by the set of numbers, which is indispensable for dialogue with computers, or by the set of points on a straight line, graphic expression often being very convenient." [211]

"A new and rich work of visual art could arise, whose evolution would be ruled by huge computers (tools vital not only for the calculation of bombs or price indexes, but also for the artistic life of the future), a total audiovisual manifestation ruled in its compositional intelligence by machines serving other machines, which are, thanks to the scientific arts, directed by man." [179]

"In reality formalization and axiomatization constitute a procedural guide, better suited to modern thought. They permit, at the outset, the placing of sonic art on a more universal plane. Once more it can be considered on the same level as the stars, the numbers, and the riches of the human brain, as it was in the great periods of the ancient civilizations. The movements of sounds that cause movements in us in agreement with them 'procure a common pleasure for those who do not know how to reason; and for those who do know, a reasoned joy through the imitation of the divine harmony which they realize in perishable movements' (Plato, Timaeus)." [179]

"... I have all along continued to develop certain theses and to open up some new ones. The new chapter on "Sieves" is an example of this ... Another approach to the mystery of sounds in the use of cellular automata which I have employed in several instrumental compositions these past few years. This can be explained by an observation which I made: scales of pitch (sieves) automatically establish a kind of global musical style, a sort of macroscopic 'synthesis' of musical works, much like a 'spectrum of frequencies, or iterations,' of the physics of particles. Internal symmetries or their dissymmetries are the reason behind this. Therefore, through a discerning logico-aesthetic choice of 'non-octave' scales, we can obtain very rich simultaneities (chords) or linear successions which revive and generalize tonal, modal or serial aspects. It is on this basis of sieves that cellular automata can be useful in harmonic progressions which create new and rich timbric fusions with orchestral instruments. Examples of this can be found in works of mine such as Ata, Horos, etc." [xii]

Treatise on Harmony

"... there are four types of thirds and sixths, which is not true of any other interval ... [though] perhaps someone may still wish to characterize the seventh and the second as major and minor, since it is permissible to make use of them in this light." [II.29.182-4]

"Just as there is only one major key whose signature contains no sharps or flats, there should also be only one minor key with this characteristic." [II.25.172]

"We may only conclude a piece of music by a perfect cadence on the principal note of a mode; otherwise the spirit will not be satisfied. How absurd it is to propose modes which do not submit to these requirements!" [II.21.160]

"... we find included in these two chords [the tonic triad together with the dominant seventh] all the notes of a mode, except the sixth, which, since it has the same nature as the third, is simple to find." [II.21.158]

"Since there are only two thirds, of which one is major and the other minor, we say that there are only two modes, of which one is major and the other minor. It is understood that these words major and minor refer to the third which should accompany the fundamental sound of the mode." [II.21.157]

"A good musician should surrender himself to all the characters he wishes to portray. Like a skillful actor he should take the place of the speaker, believe himself to be at the locations where the different events he wishes to depict occur, and participate in these events as do those most involved in them. He must declaim the text well, at least to himself, and must feel when and to what degree the voice should rise or fall, so that he may shape this melody, harmony, modulation, and movement accordingly." [II.20.156]

"Harmony may unquestionably excite different passions in us depending on the chords that are used. There are chords which are sad, languishing, tender, pleasant, gay, and surprising. There are also certain progressions of chords which expression the same passions." [II.20.154]

"If the composer gives himself the satisfaction of hearing what he has written, his ear will become formed little by little." [II.19.153]

"Certainly a knowledgeable musician can compose a beautiful melodic line suitable to the harmony, but from where does this happy ability come? May nature be responsible? Doubtless. But if, on the contrary, she has refused her gift, how can he succeed? Only by means of the rules. But from where are these rules derived? This is what we must investigate." [II.19.152]

"It is harmony then that guides us, and not melody." [II.19.152]

"Music to which we may add a bass having all the properties just described [that is, of a fundamental bass] will always be good. There may be mistakes in the order of the consonances, in the melody, in the modulation [ie, harmonic progression], in the spacing of the notes which prepare, form, and resolve the dissonance, or even in the beats on which this dissonance should be prepared and heard, but there will be no mistakes in relation to the foundation of the harmony." [II.18.151]

"Further objections could be raised concerning the supernumerary sounds in chords by supposition and in the irregular cadence, and concerning that sound which borrows its fundamental from the fundamental sound itself, for these sounds are not included in our rules, and seem to demand special rules of their own. We need not be overly concerned about this for these sounds should be considered voluntary additions which in no way affect the source." [II.18.147]

"So many chords, so many lively melodies, such boundless variety, such beautiful and fitting expressions, such well-rendered feelings! All this flows from two or three intervals arranged by thirds whose source subsists in a single sound." [II.18.142]

"This reduction of intervals can be related precisely to the reduction of chords: from inverted intervals are formed inverted chords; from doubled intervals, chords by supposition; and from altered intervals, chords by borrowing." [II.18.142]

"The source of harmony does not subsist merely in the perfect chord or in the seventh chord formed from it. More precisely, it subsists in the lowest sound of these two chords, which is, so to speak, the harmonic center to which all the other sounds should be related." [II.18.141]

"Experience offers us a large number of chords susceptible of an infinite diversity, in which we shall always lose our way unless we search of the source elsewhere." [II.18.139]

"It should be noticed that a permanent sound [pedal point] escapes our attention ..." [II.17.136]

"One of the special properties of music, however, is that we may often abuse, even with success, the liberty we have to vary it infinitely. But when reason is in agreement with the ear, we may give music all the variety of which it is susceptible without sinning against its perfection." [II.17.135]

"... we often fear seeing two fifths or two octaves, even when we do not hear them." [II.17.135]

"It is necessary to know how to differentiate a fundamental chord from a derived chord, so as not to confuse their properties." [II.17.131]

"Most musicians take the term license to mean mistake ... [but] licenses are simply evident inversions of our initial perceptions." [II.17.127]

"The meager attention paid until now to the correctness and power of inversion has caused the neglect of the only place in which the secrets of harmony might have been discovered. For if we examine the significance of this inversion as it applies to everything related to harmony ... we shall no longer be able to doubt that inversion is at the center of the great and infinite variety to be found in harmony." [II.17.127]

"This is the nature of the cabal which has risen against all the skillful men of this century. Why trouble inventing entrancing music? They will only judge it worthless." [II.17.125]

"It is some time since anyone has attempted to satisfy reason where music was concerned. Our great masters are content merely to please." [II.17.124]

"... it would be giving too narrow bounds to harmony if we restrained it only to what is most natural; it would be depriving harmony of its right not to submit to all of its [own] properties." [II.17.124]

"... the natural progression of the fundamental bass is to descend a third, a fifth, or even a seventh, so that the dissonance may be prepared and resolved, the inversions of these progressions should be attributed to license, for dissonances are then heard without preparation." [II.17.124]

"From this interval [descending seventh / ascending second] arises license." [II.17.124]

"As soon as the bass descends a seventh of ascends a second, however, we begin to perceive license, even though the dissonance may be prepared and resolved by a consonance." [II.17.124]

"We may observe that when a dissonance is sounded and resolved in the most natural harmony, the fundamental bass is always to be found in the lowest sound, as if this upport were needed to fortify the lowest sound against the harshness of this dissonance." [II.17.12]

"There is still another defect in the [historically received] rules. They do not make the progression of each part clear enough, when they affirm that the sixth should follow the fifth, that the seventh should be resolved by the third, the fifth, or the sixth, etc. Sometimes one of these parts should remain on the same degree, sometimes each of them should move; sometimes one should ascend, sometimes descend, etc. We, instead, clarify this confusion by first of all giving such precise and intelligible rules of modulation, which ought to guide us everywhere, that we cannot be deceived, and by then saying that all minor dissonances should descend diatonically, while all major dissonances should ascend a semitone, no matter how the bass moves, these dissonances being easy to recognize when related to their origin." [II.16.123]

"If we examine an interval in isolation, we shall never be able to define its properties; we must also examine all the different chords in which it may occur. Here one of its sounds should descend, there it should ascend; here its progression is conjunct, there it is disjunct; here it is dissonant, there it is consonant; here it should be syncopated, there it cannot be." [II.16.120]

"What depends upon the eye is less susceptible of illusion than what depends upon the ear. Someone may approve of a chord which displeases someone else. Hence arise conflicting opinions among musicians, with each one stubbornly defending that which his imagination or his limited experience teaches him." [II.16.119]

"All those who have hitherto wished to prescribe rules of harmony have abandoned the source of these rules. As the first sound and the first chord revealed to them was given no sort of prerogative, everything was considered to be equal ... No one said why some dissonances wish to ascend and others to descend. The source was hidden and everyone, according to his own inclination, told us what experience had taught him." [II.16.119]

"... the fourth in the chords of the second [modern dominant seventh in third inversion] and of the small sixth [modern dominant seventh in second inversion] is included within the limits of the octave and all the sounds of chords which are so included may be inverted at will by the composer. We may not invert the lowest sound of the ninth and eleventh chords, however, as this sound should never change its position." [II.16.116]

"In order to convince ourselves that all dissonant chords originate from the seventh chord, we have only to consider whether all chords arising from its inversion contain fewer or more sounds and dissonances, whether they are included within the same limits, and whether they alter the modulation [ie, harmonic progression] in any way." [II.16.115]

"The lowest and fundamental sound of a perfect chord may bear either a major of a minor third." [II.16.114]

"Just as the [interval of the] seventh is the origin of all dissonances, similarly the seventh chord is the origin of all dissonant chords." [II.16.114]

"The true meaning of the rule must be grasped: it does not forbid the minor third ascending nor the major descending. It says only that it is natural and appropriate for the latter to ascend to the octave." [II.14.104]

"(We are speaking here only of the inversion of intervals [that is, upward versus downward articulation] and not of that inversion in which these intervals are related to each other by means of the octave [that is, the relationship that equates the perfect fourth to the perfect fifth, and vice versa]." [II.13.99]

"Zarlino knew no other major dissonance but the tritone, of which he spoke only in passing. Later

authors cite several others, but none have made it clear that they all originate from the major third of the fundamental sound of a seventh chord, just as all minor dissonances originate from the seventh itself. This inattentiveness has hindered these later authors from improving on the rules of Zarlino ..." [II.13.96]

"We must clarify here the difference between the fourth and the eleventh. The latter interval has not hitherto been known by this name, for it has always been confused with the fourth ... the fourth, which can be found only in an inverted chord where it represents the fifth, is consonant, while the eleventh, which determines the first chord of its species since the chord is made up only of sounds contained within this eleventh, is dissonant. Though we figure it with a 4, we do so only to follow common practice." [II.10.91-3]

"A new sound, placed a fifth below the fundamental sound, is substituted for the missing sounds. This new sound consequently forms an eleventh, and not a fourth, with the seventh of the fundamental. We may thus call this chord heteroclite, since it is not divide as are the other chords ..." [II.10.89]

"... the added sound [of a ninth or eleventh positioned beneath a seventh] can never change position. It will always occupy the lowest position, while the other parts may profit from inversion, in which they may mutually participate since they are contained within the prescribed limits of harmony ... the added sound must be regarded as supernumerary, since the fundamental harmony will always subsist without it and the progression of chords is not altered by it." [II.10.89]

"If a fifth sound can be added to the seventh chord at all, it can be added only below and not above." [II.10.88]

"We can derive any melody imaginable and diversify the harmony, by placing in the bass a sound contained in the fundamental chord instead of the fundamental sound itself. This leads directly to an inexhaustible succesion of melodies and chords from which we may shape a piece of music which constantly stirs the listener by the diversity arising from inversion ... The fundamental basses we place below all our examples prove this, and it only remains to make these matters clearer, as we hope to do." [II.8.82]

"... the progression of the dissonances depends on the consonances closest to them." [II.7.79]

"We customarily say that dissonance disturbs the ear in the same way that badly assorted colors disturb the eye, thus attributing to the senses the effect that the objects which act on them have on one another. For further proof that this idea of the collision of sounds is not simply our invention, we need only look up the literal meaning of the term syncopation, which is principally applied to the use of dissonance. This term is composed of two Greek words: syn and copto. The first signifies together and the other I hit or I collide." [II.7.78]

"The different situations in which dissonances occur oblige us to name them differently in order to facilitate their use, but there is basically only one dissonance, from which all the others are derived either directly or indirectly, as we shall see later. This dissonance, which we have already designated as the seventh, is more easily recognized as the interval of a second; this comes to the same thing, since the second is the inversion of the seventh." [II.7.78]

"A skillful man should always figure his bass, especially when his examples are in only two parts, so that these examples can be judged fairly. Otherwise, false conclusions may be drawn from them." [II.5.69]

"The major third is thus the origin of all the major dissonances and the seventh is the origina of all the minor dissonances, without exception." [II.5.65]

"The first of the two notes forming the perfect cadence in the bass is called the dominant, because it must always preceded the final note and therefore dominate it." [II.5.65]

"'The major seeks to become major, ie, to ris, and the minor to fall.' ... we should accept as a general rule that everything which is major or augmented should rise, while everything which is minor or diminished should fall." [II.5.64 quoting Zarlino]

"Though we have regarded the fifth as the primary element of all chords, this quality should also be attributed to the thirds of which the fifth is made up." [II.5.64]

"... the progression of all intervals in the perfect cadence is determined by the progression of the thirds which are predominant in the chords." [II.5.63]

"The fifth is the primary element of all chords; ie, a chord cannot subsist without either it or the fourth which represents it." [II.4.63]

"Once we are aware of the progressions appropriate for each part, we are certainly free to give one part the progression suitable for another." [II.2.62]

"Those whose voices are deep enough naturally descend a fifth at endings, while those cannot do so ascend a fourth. This is clear proof of the power of the octave, which is always present in either of the sounds forming it, and of the relationship between the fourth and the fifth arising from the division of the octave." [II.1.60]

"... intervals can not be consonant unless they are separated." [II.1.60]

"... when we give a progression to the part representing this undivided string, we can only make it proceed by those consonant intervals obtained from the first divisions of this string. Each sound will consequently harmonize with the sound preceding it." [II.1.60]

"... all derivatives of the first dissonant chord [modern dominant seventh] are distinguished by individual names ['chord of the small / large sixth', 'chord of the second'], while the derivatives of the other seventh chords have a common name, since they determine nothing but are themselves determined by the modulation [ie, harmonic progression]." [I.9.53]

"... the differences among the perfect chords and seventh chords are due only to the different positions of the thirds, or to an inversion in the order of these thirds." [I.9.52]

"If we take the seventh chord of Article iii [modern dominant seventh] and transpose its lowest and fundamental sound a semitone higher, we form the chord in question [modern diminished seventh] ... We may accept the diminished seventh chord as long as the fundamental is not destroyed by the transposition of the lowest sound. We must therefore consider this lowest and fundamental sound to be implied in the sound substituted for it, so that the source continues to exist ... in order to distinguish this last chord [modern diminished seventh] and its derivatives from the chord from which they originate, we shall call them borrowed, since they borrow their perfection from a sound which does not actually appear." [I.8.50]

"... we cannot derive one chord from another which is neither perfect nor complete ..." [I.8.48]

"This chord [modern dominant seventh] seems to exist in order to make the perfection of consonant chords more wonderful, for it always precedes them, or rather should always be followed by the perfect chord or its derivatives. This property also applies to the derivatives of this chord." [I.8.42]

"The minor perfect chord can be discussed in the same way as the major, since it is similarly constructed and gives, by its inversion, the same chords as the major." [I.8.42]

"... the perfect chords, made up of only three different sounds, can therefore produce ... only three different chords, of which it is the first and fundamental." [I.8.40]

"Notice that dissonant chords formed by adding a minor third to one of the two perfect chords are much more tolerable than those formed by adding a major third." [I.7.39]

"To make matters simpler, we could consider thirds for the time being as the sole elements of all chords. To form the perfect chord, we must add one third to the other; to form all dissonant chords, we must add three or four thirds to one another." [I.7.39]

"... though experience proves that there are some chords which exceed the octave, reason tells us that the fundamental may subsist only within this octave; thus, so as not to destroy the fundamental, it must be supposed by a new sound added a fifth or a third below it. This sound should be regarded as supernumerary, even though the interval it forms with the fundamental sounds is always one which this last sound chose for the construction of chords." [I.7.38]

"Observe that there can be no complete chord without the fifth, nor consequently without the union of the two thirds which form the fifth; for all chords should be based on the perfect chord formed from this union. As a result, if the fifth is not heard in a chord, the fundamental is either inverted, supposed, or borrowed, unless the chord is incomplete; otherwise it will be worthless." [I.7.36]

"The first chord of a species, particularly, must be given the name of the interval which includes within itself all the sounds of the chord." [I.6.34]

"Zarlino ... [is who] we should mainly follow. He has served as a model to posterity; it is to him we always turn in questions of practice; he is still the oracle for many musicians; and even M. de Brossard calls him 'the prince of modern musicians.'" [I.2.22]

"The fourth arises from the inversion of the two sounds which originally formed the fifth, the lower sound of the octave being transposed to the higher position. Such inversion is the principal subject of this work." [I.2.14]

"... every number multiplied geometrically always represents the same sound, so to speak, or rather gives the replicate of that sound which is its root." [I.2.9]

"... the number 7 ... can not give a pleasant interval ..." [I.2.6]

"... some ... attribute all the power of harmony to that of numbers; it is then only a matter of applying properly the operation on which one chooses to base one's system." [I.2.4]

When Species Meet

"The corpse is not the body. Rather, the body is always in-the-making; it is always a vital entanglement of heterogeneous scales, times, and kinds of beings webbed into fleshly presence, always a becoming, always constituted in relating." [163]

"No matter how many trips are made to the East, in its soul Western ethics is riveted to rights discourses." [156]

"... a Web site by its nature resists reduction to single purposes and dominating tropes. Links lead many places; these paths are explored by users, within the webs that designers spin but rapidly lose control over. The Internet is hardly infinitely open, but its degrees of semiotic freedom are many." [145]

"Human genetic disease is the moral, technoscientific, ideological, and financial center of the medical genetic universe. Typological thinking reigns almost unchecked in this universe, and nuanced views of the developmental biology, behavioral ecology, and genes as nodes in dynamic and multivectorial fields of vital interactions are only some of the crash victims o high-octane medical genetic fuels and gene-jockey racing careers." [143]

"... the capacity to respond, and to be responsible, should not be expected to take on symmetrical shapes and textures for all the parties. Response cannot emerge, within relationships of self-similarity." [71]

"My premise is that touch ramifies and shapes accountability. Accountability, caring for, being affected, and entering into responsibility are not ethical abstractions; these mundane, prosaic things are the result of having truck with each other. Touch does not make one small; it peppers its partners with attachment sites for world making. Touch, regard, looking back, becoming with -- all these make us responsible in unpredictable ways for which worlds take shape. In touch and regards, partners willy nilly are in the miscegenous mud that infuses our bodies with all that brought that contact into being. Touch and regard have consequences." [36]

"In my view, Margulis and Sagan's symobiogeneiss is not really compatible with their theory of autopoiesis, and the alternative is not an additive mechanistic theory but a going even more deeply into differentiation. A nice touch is that Gilbert and his students literally work on turtle embryogeny, studying the inductions and cell migrations that result in the turtle's plastron on its belly surface. Layers of turtling, indeed." [33]

"I am instructed by developmental biologist Scott Gilbert's critique of autopoiesis for its emphasis on self-building and self-maintaining systems, closed except for nourishing flows of matter and energy. Gilbert stresses that nothing makes itself in the biological world, but rather reciprocal induction within and between always-in-process critters ramifies through space and time on both large and small scales in cascades of inter- and intra-action. In embryology, Gilbert calls this 'interspecies epigenesis.' Gilbert writes: 'I think that the ideas that Lynn [Margulis] and I have are very similar; it's just that ashe was focusing on adults and I want to extend the concept (as I think the science allows it to be fully extended) to embryos. I believe that the embryonic co-construction of the physical bodies has many more imp0lications because it means that we were 'never' individuals." [32]

"Freud is our great theorist of panics of the Western psyche, and because of Derrida's commitment to track down 'the whole anthropomorphic reinstitution of the superiority of the human order over the animal order, of the law over the living,' he is my guide to Freud's approach on this question." [11]

When Species Meet

Donna Haraway

La conscienza di Zeno

"Tullio had resumed talking about his illness, which was also his chief hobby. He had studied the anatomy of the leg and the foot. Laughing, he told me that when one walks at a rapid pace, the time in which a step is taken does not exceed a half-second, and that in that half-second no fewer than fifty-four muscles are engaged. I reacted with a start, and my thoughts immediately rushed to my legs, to seek this monstrous machinery. I believe I found it. Naturally I didn't identify the fifty-four moving parts, but rather an enormous complication went to pieces the moment I intruded my attention upon it. I limped, leaving that café, and I went on limping for several days. For me, walking had become hard labor, also slightly painful. That jungle of cogs now seemed to lack oil, and in moving, they damaged one another reciprocally. A few days afterwards, I was assailed by a more serious illness, of which I will speak, that diminished the first. But even today, as I write about it, if someone watches me when I move, the fifty-four muscles become self-conscious and I risk falling." [105]

"What's definitive is always calm, because it is detached from time." [97]

"I pursued many women in my life, and many of them also allowed themselves to be overtaken. In my dreams I captured them all. Naturally I don't beautify them by changing their features, but I act like a friend of mine, a very refined painter who, when he portrays beautiful women, thinks intensely also of some other beautiful thing, for example of a piece of lovely porcelain. A dangerous dream, because it can endow the dreamed-of woman with new power and, when seen again in the light of reality, they retain something of the fruits and flowers and porcelain with which they were clad." [81]

"Without being an orator, I suffered from the disease of words. Words for me had to be an event in themselves and therefore could not be imprisoned in any other event." [76]

"The most intense life is narrated, in synthesis, by the most rudimentary sound, that of the sea-wave, which, once formed, changes at every instant until it dies!" [61]

"In the mind of a young man from a middle-class family, the concept of human life is associated with that of a career, and in early youth the career is that of Napoleon I." [61]

"The doctor is a power when he is at a sick man's bedside." [51]

"He looked around as if he sought outside himself whatever he was unable to grasp within." [41]

"The sick animal will not allow himself to be observed at any orifice through which disease or weakness can be perceived." [39]

"My yearning for health had driven me to study the human body. He, on the contrary, had been able to dispel from his memory any thought of that frightful machine. For him the heart did not beat and there was no need to recall valves and veins and metabolism, to explain how his organism lived." [34]

"Now that I am growing old and turning into a kind of patriarch, I also feel that a preached immorality is more to be punished than an immoral action. You arrive at murder through love or through hate; you propagandize murder only through wickedness." [34]

"I spoke sincerely, as in Confession: a woman never appeals to me as a whole, but rather ... in pieces! In all women I loved feet, if well shod: in many others, a slender neck but also a thick one, and the bosom, if not too heavy. I went on listing female anatomical parts, but the doctor interrupted me. "These parts add up to a whole woman."" [16]

La conscienza di Zeno

Italo Svevo

I Have A Taste For The Secret

"... naming itself would be impossible without iterability. Taking the case of Socrates, since we mentioned it a moment ago: the name Socrates has to remain the same, the same has to be repeated, but each time I say 'Socrates' the naming has to be another and to designate the same otherwise and as something other. So in naming, in nameability itself, there is iterability, or what has no name." [68]

"Why write? I always have the feeling -- at once very modest and hyperbolically presumptuous -- that I have nothing to say. I don't feel I have anything in me that's interesting enough to authorize my saying 'here's the book I planned all by myself, without anyone asking me for it'. What presumption it takes to say 'here's what I think, what I write, and it deserves to be published and launched into the world'!" [65]

"I have a taste for the secret, it clearly has to do with not-belonging; I have an impulse of fear or terror in the face of a political space, for example, a public space that makes no room for the secret. For me, the demand that everything be paraded in the public square and that there be no internal forum is a glaring sign of the totalitarianization of democracy. I can rephrase this in terms of political ethics: if a right to the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space. Belonging -- the fact of avowing one's belonging, of putting in common -- be it family, nation, tongue -- spells the loss of the secret." [59]

"... in everything I've published there are always touchstones announcing what I would like to write about later on -- even ten or twenty years later on ..." [46]

"I detest grammatical mistakes. Even when I take the liberties that some people find provocative, I do so with the feeling -- justifiable or not -- that I do in fact know the rules." [43]

"Even when I give the impression of transgressing, putting into question, displacing, it is always under their authority, with a sense of responsibility in the face of a certain philological morality, before a certain ethics of reading or of writing. In short: before the law." [43]

"Memoirs, in a form that does not correspond to what are generally called memoirs, are the general form of everything that interests me -- the wild desire to preserve everything, to gather everything together in its idiom. To gather together even that which disseminates and, by its very essence, defies all gathering." [41]

"And this is why, after that highly dialectizing first book of mine, whenever I insisted on a non-dialectizable difference, I remarked with discretion, but markedly, that it was not a question of opposing a dialectic. I have never opposed the dialectic. Be it opposition to the dialectic or war against the dialectic, it's a losing battle. What it really comes down to is thinking a dialecticity of dialectics that is itself fundamentally not dialectical." [33]

"... where there is a place for the arrivant, the text is not intelligible, the discourse bears a zone of emptiness ..." [31]

"I am tempted to say that my own experience of writing leads me to think that one does not always write with a desire to be understood -- that there is a paradoxical desire not to be understood. It's not simple, but there is a certain 'I hope that not everyone understands everything about this text', because if such a transparency of intelligibility were ensured it would destroy the text, it would show that the text has no future [avenir], that it does not overflow the present, that it is consumed immediately. Consequently a certain zone of disacquaintance, of not-understanding, is also a reserve and an excessive chance -- a chance for excess to have a future, and consequently to engender new contexts ... Thus there is a desire, which may appear a bit perverse, to write things that not everyone will be able to appropriate through immediate understanding. I have often been accused of writing things that are unnecessarily difficult, that could be simplified, and I have even been accused of doing it on purpose. I'd say that this accusation is just and unjust at the same time." [30]

"The desire to belong to any community whatsoever, the desire for belonging tout court, implies that one does not belong. I could not say 'I want to be one of the family' if in fact I was one of the family. To put it another way, I could not say 'I want to be Italian, European, to speak this language, etc.', if that were already the case. Accounting for one's belonging -- be it on national, linguistic, political or philosophical grounds -- in itself implies a not-belonging. This can have political consequences: there is no identity. There is identification, belonging is accounted for, but this itself implies that the belonging does not exist, that the people who want to be this or that -- French, European, etc. -- are not so in fact." [28]

"In a democracy, when someone asks you your name you have to answer; public space is a space in which a subject is questioned and has to answer." [26]

"I would have far fewer difficulties and reservations in accepting the image of a community that does not constitute itself on the basis of a contemporaneity of presences but rather through the opening produced by what you have called allegoresis -- that is, the interpretation of a text not given, not closed in on itself, an interpretation that itself transforms the text." [24]

"That which defies anticipation, reappropriation, calculation -- any form of predetermination -- is singularity. There can be no future as such unless there is radical otherness, and respect for this radical otherness." [21]

"Yes things do appear to look that way. But if it were really the case, then we would be dealing with two different fields, disciplines, texts or events, with philosophy on one side and literature on the other. Without mixing them up, and without reducing the one to the other, perhaps it may be said that there is always, in what we call 'philosophical', an adherence to natural language, a profound indissociability of certain philosophemes from the Greek, the German, the Latin, which is not the literary part of philosophy, but is instead something that philosophy shares with literature. And conversely, there is something translatable in literature, a promise of translation, and thus an aspect that is not extraneous to philosophy. Both philosophy and literature are bound up with natural languages: no philosophy exists that may be absolutely formalized in a reduction to a conventional or technical language. Descartes and Leibniz had their dreams, of course, but in fact the reduction is impossible, and for reasons that are not merely factual or empirical. Like literature, philosophy too is indissociably linked to idiom, to the corpora of natural languages. From this point of view, therefore, one cannot speak of language or the relation with language as a border between philosophy and literature." [11]

"It could easily be shown, in fact, in Plato as in others, that imagination has an ambiguous nature: on one hand, it is that which threatens truth and the idea -- the image is inferior to the idea; and, on the other, it has a positive function -- it is philosophically and pedagogically necessary. It is the locus of fiction, but also of a certain synthesis, a place of mediation." [5]

I Have A Taste For The Secret (1997)

Jacques Derrida & Maurizio Ferraris