Saturday, January 29, 2011

Deleuze and Monad

One of Deleuze's career-long ambitions is the development of what can be termed 'Immanent Puralistic Subjectivity'. For example, simple atoms are not subjects, since they lack interiority. Furthermore, while Spinoza's Modes are immanent entities that possess interiority, on Deleuze's reading, they are not truly Pluralistic, since they are ultimately only parts of Substance, and, hence, reducible to it. In contrast, the Perspectivism of Leibniz' Monads entails all three of Deleuze's requisites. First, an entity with a Perspective is a Subject. Second, Perspective co-implicates every other Subject, so these subjects comprise an immanent system. Finally, since each perspective uniquely and irreducibly defines a subject, the system is Pluralistic. However, while the existence of God pre-establishes for Leibniz inter-Monadic harmony, for the atheistic Deleuze, society consists of only random accords and discords. Since, for Hume, the natural Sympathy that produces inter-subjective harmony is, at best, contingent and partial, Deleuze's apparent attribution to him of a subscription to Leibnizian "pre-established harmony" is puzzling.

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