The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

Rating:
Summary: Riposte
Review: Deleuze's book is, at least for no other reason, a worthwhile read for its sheer imagination. Secondly, it is worth reading as it shows just what is so wonderfully interesting about Leibniz. If you know Leibniz, read this book, even just a single section, and then you will understand why there do exist, in small obscure places, Leibnitians. If you are looking for a splendidly imaginative perspective, read up.

Rating:
Summary: A Key of sorts
Review: Deleuze's book is, at least for no other reason, a worthwhile read for its sheer imagination. Secondly, it is worth reading as it shows just what is so wonderfully interesting about Leibniz. If you know Leibniz, read this book, even just a single section, and then you will understand why there do exist, in small obscure places, Leibnitians. If you are looking for a splendidly imaginative perspective, read up.

Rating:
Summary: one of Deleuze's very best
Review: Deleuze's sojourns into the history of philosophy, as everyone knows by now, paint a stark contrast to his "independent" works; the former being wonders of concision and clarity, each one like a diamond cutter, and the latter being drawn-out, often tedious, and in general more difficult to pentrate.
The Fold falls somewhere in between the two as he wrote it so late in his life when most assumed he was done with history. We should be thankful that he wasn't. In order to get through this book, I'll just offer my opinion for those who it may affect: when I first picked it up, I read the first two chapters and almnost threw it across the room. I didn't pick the book up again because--presumptuous me--I thought the whole book was going to be like that. WRONG! As I said, Deleuze mixes it up here, and while you may not get every chapter, there will be those, like the short, almost curt, "What is an Event?" that will, um, blow your mind.
As for this being a discourse on Leibniz. Hard to say when we've read so little Leibniz, but Deleuze is willing to stick with his "compossible" world throughout all of the book until the end, which is pretty amazing---you know, since for Deleuze's world one of the first requirements is the reality of incompossibles. But it will give you a passion for Leibniz regardless, as the last reviewer made clear.
Finally, I think Deleuze here tries to answer some of the most difficult questions that faced him after years of expanding and 'deterritorializing' D&R and LofS. If you read the latter, for instance, did you have a sort of empty feeling when he got to the "Dynamic Genesis" and afterwards, as if his tying the incorporeals to the corporeals from the point of view of bodies wasn't as solid as from the point of view of sense? Deleuze will repay you here with interest, giving one of the most fascinating and detailed accounts of a body and its connection to monads I've ever read. It may not solve all of the problems for his materialism, but then again, it might. That's a judgment call and regardless of how you judge, this book will have riches for you.
10 stars.

Rating:
Summary: one of Deleuze's very best
Review: Deleuze's sojourns into the history of philosophy, as everyone knows by now, paint a stark contrast to his "independent" works; the former being wonders of concision and clarity, each one like a diamond cutter, and the latter being drawn-out, often tedious, and in general more difficult to pentrate.
The Fold falls somewhere in between the two as he wrote it so late in his life when most assumed he was done with history. We should be thankful that he wasn't. In order to get through this book, I'll just offer my opinion for those who it may affect: when I first picked it up, I read the first two chapters and almnost threw it across the room. I didn't pick the book up again because--presumptuous me--I thought the whole book was going to be like that. WRONG! As I said, Deleuze mixes it up here, and while you may not get every chapter, there will be those, like the short, almost curt, "What is an Event?" that will, um, blow your mind.
As for this being a discourse on Leibniz. Hard to say when we've read so little Leibniz, but Deleuze is willing to stick with his "compossible" world throughout all of the book until the end, which is pretty amazing---you know, since for Deleuze's world one of the first requirements is the reality of incompossibles. But it will give you a passion for Leibniz regardless, as the last reviewer made clear.
Finally, I think Deleuze here tries to answer some of the most difficult questions that faced him after years of expanding and 'deterritorializing' D&R and LofS. If you read the latter, for instance, did you have a sort of empty feeling when he got to the "Dynamic Genesis" and afterwards, as if his tying the incorporeals to the corporeals from the point of view of bodies wasn't as solid as from the point of view of sense? Deleuze will repay you here with interest, giving one of the most fascinating and detailed accounts of a body and its connection to monads I've ever read. It may not solve all of the problems for his materialism, but then again, it might. That's a judgment call and regardless of how you judge, this book will have riches for you.
10 stars.

Rating:
Summary: terrible translation
Review: I agree with the earlier reviewer who indicated that the fault here lies with the translator and not with Deleuze's book. I wish to add a point, however, to emphasize the inappropriateness of having a literature professor, with an obvious lack of knowledge of the thinkers in question (Deleuze and Leibniz, in this case), undertake a translation of this kind. In addition to the misapprehensions of the French pointed out by the earlier reviewer, there is a whole area of vocabulary that was entirely lost on the poor translator - namely, that of mathematics. Deleuze is in general agreement with Michel Serres that an interpretation of Leibniz's system is impossible without reference to his mathematical work. In Serres's formulation, the mathematics provides the models that illustrate the system. What flummoxed professor Conley is that many French mathematical terms are also ordinary French words, that have common, non-technical usages. (The same is true of English, think of words like root, field, power, etc.) Whenever such mathematical terms are used, Conley is oblivious to the fact that mathematics is even being discussed and renders the words with their everyday meanings. Whole passages are rendered completely incomprehensible when, to pick just one example, he translates "corps" as "body." A "corps", in algebra, is what is called a "field" by English-speaking mathematicians. The book abounds in such instances. That's the sort of error you expect from automated translation software. You generally expect a human translator to base his work on an understanding of the context in which words are used.

Rating:
Summary: Riposte
Review: I am very unclear why an earlier reviewer would think that the translator, a professor of French at Harvard, would not be acquainted with Deleuze's work. In point of fact, it is more than likely that it is his profession to know his thought and, to put it very plainly, to know quite a bit more about French culture and philosophy. The previous reviewer gives a rendering of this translation (he never reviews the book as such) that is entirely baseless -- who does he think translates most books from the French, mathematicians? Certainly they can be consulted, and in certain cases they should be, but the notion that a Harvard professor of French is disqualified *because* he is a Harvard professor of French is downright silly. Obviously, something has gone awry with this recursive reasoning.

As to the other reviewer who asked what Deleuze was up to with Leibniz's calculus, one answer is that he is making it his own. Here is an example:

d(y)/d(x)

This is certainly not a differential equation that a mathematician would have hit upon: it is instead Deleuze's expression of a philosophical point through the use of mathematics. The equation produces a clinamen (or swerve) with no constant, only variables. It is "a world that no longer has its center" as Deleuze phrases it on page 125 of the translation. It is a structure without a center, as Derrida would call it. But whereas Derrida's notion can only be stated as a paradox (because by definition there can be no such thing as a centerless structure), Deleuze succeeds in expressing it as a simple differential equation. In other words, there is nothing but difference(s) (and, Deleuze would maintain, force). Returning to the equation, the function d(y) is dependent on d(x), which it is divided by. d(y) is dependent on a differential function d(x), that is, a continuously displaced variable. Try plotting it out on your computer, you'll find that you get a line that "swerves". Absolutely useless to mathematicians, it is however the perfect expression of Deleuze's thought. One can go so far as to take the plotted curve as a diagram or map of Deleuze's concept of thought.

Rating:
Summary: terrible translation
Review: I find Deleuze's earlier books on figures from the history of philosophy (Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, Hume) far more interesting and coherent than his collaborations with Guattari. However, this book finds itself in the middle of these two tendencies: no, it's Deleuze on his own, he's writing about a major (but overlooked)philosopher in a manner that can only be deemed: schizophrenic. And since Leibniz's philosophy is schizo at times, the pairing is near perfect (the best of all possible worlds).

The opening image of the Baroque is a bit vague, but then again, Deleuze has always been short on precise connections and plentiful on creative and unorthodox imageries. Some sections are plain impossible to decipher. The are best imagined than really thought-through. For example, how is Deleuze using Leibniz's calculus? I'm still lost. I'll probably never understand. But somehow, I think that he may be right about this--whatever he may be suggesting in evoking the calculus. The book is also full of other interesting and elusive scientific theories in the realm of physics, mathematics, and set-theory. (I don't know much about any of these subjects and so I shall remain silent on these matters.)

Unlike the earlier writings on the history of philosophy where Deleuze remained faithful in his readings, "The Fold" is definitely a performance of Deleuze-Leibniz--more Deleuze than Leibniz but Leibniz as, shall we say, a creative inspiration? In this sense, "The Fold" is closer to Deleuze's book on Foucault in that he creates a new philosopher: a cyborg, built out of love, remembrance, and a goal towards the future.

But then again, does Deleuze top Leibniz in outrageousness? Who was more out-there? Somehow, I think that Leibniz was a bit more out there...

Rating:
Summary: A match made in... heaven?
Review: I find Deleuze's earlier books on figures from the history of philosophy (Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, Hume) far more interesting and coherent than his collaborations with Guattari. However, this book finds itself in the middle of these two tendencies: no, it's Deleuze on his own, he's writing about a major (but overlooked)philosopher in a manner that can only be deemed: schizophrenic. And since Leibniz's philosophy is schizo at times, the pairing is near perfect (the best of all possible worlds).

The opening image of the Baroque is a bit vague, but then again, Deleuze has always been short on precise connections and plentiful on creative and unorthodox imageries. Some sections are plain impossible to decipher. The are best imagined than really thought-through. For example, how is Deleuze using Leibniz's calculus? I'm still lost. I'll probably never understand. But somehow, I think that he may be right about this--whatever he may be suggesting in evoking the calculus. The book is also full of other interesting and elusive scientific theories in the realm of physics, mathematics, and set-theory. (I don't know much about any of these subjects and so I shall remain silent on these matters.)

Unlike the earlier writings on the history of philosophy where Deleuze remained faithful in his readings, "The Fold" is definitely a performance of Deleuze-Leibniz--more Deleuze than Leibniz but Leibniz as, shall we say, a creative inspiration? In this sense, "The Fold" is closer to Deleuze's book on Foucault in that he creates a new philosopher: a cyborg, built out of love, remembrance, and a goal towards the future.

But then again, does Deleuze top Leibniz in outrageousness? Who was more out-there? Somehow, I think that Leibniz was a bit more out there...

Rating:
Summary: The Fold : Leibniz and the Baroque
Review: I want to review the contents and the summary of this book if possible. thank you.

Rating:
Summary: Marvelous book in the original; very flawed translation
Review: Merely a passable English translation of Le Pli, a late masterpiece by the sublime Gilles Deleuze, would merit five stars on the amazon.com scale, but alas...!
The explanation of how such a travesty can be perpetrated must involve both the necessity of publishing that presses upon young academics - if you can believe it, this Tom Conley is a professor of French! - and the frenetic pace of production that afflicts the publishing industry as any other under the reign of capitalism. (That's some excuse!)

"Comment aurait-il une volonté libre, celui dont 'la notion individuelle renferme une fois pour toutes ce qui lui arrivera jamais'?" When I came to this on page 94 of the French edition, it translated itself automatically, unproblematically, as: "How could he have a free will, he of whom 'the individual notion encloses once and for all what will ever happen to him'?" But here's Conley [pg.69]: "How could there be free will, a will whose 'individual notion encloses once and for all those who will never come to it'?" Now this is an interpretation that would have occurred to no one without Professor Conley's help. (Thanks a lot!) Besides the question of what Conley's sentence could possibly mean in the context of Deleuze's thought in this passage, the "individual notion" is indisputably not that of "free will" because "volonté" is feminine and the pronoun "celui" is masculine! The most amazing thing about Conley's performance is that most of this sentence is not even new Deleuzian prose, expressing a novel late-twentieth-century idea, but a direct quote of Leibniz, referring to a well-known aspect of his system: The "individual notion" of each monad includes everything that will ever happen to that monad and is thus seemingly - that is the question! - an obstacle to the monad's possession of free will. (In the back of his book, Conley lists the editions of Leibniz that Deleuze himself would have consulted and informs us that he has relied upon previous English translations, where available. Elsewhere he has "directly translated Deleuze's quotations or translations of material taken from those texts...")
Where does Conley's "those" come from? - the fantasmal subjects he has performing the hallucinated action of "never coming to" the will whose individual notion nevertheless encloses them once and for all (huh?!?). There is no plural pronoun in Deleuze/Leibniz's sentence, but Conley finds one by disassembling the idiom "une fois pour toutes" ("once and for all," "definitively"). Likewise, he interprets "arrivera" literally, "will come to," rather than idiomatically, and accurately, as "will happen." (I have detected a tendency toward overliteralness in another Conley effort, where he seems to show off his awareness of what the actual French "really" says. In this case, however, he has totally missed the primary meaning!)

When Conley writes the exact opposite of the French edition, one may suspect that a compositor has dropped a negative. But too often the confusion is clearly Conley's own - for example, when Deleuze [pg. 61] says "prime numbers are primitive/original because..." and proceeds with their definition, Conley [pg. 45] says "the first numbers ["one, two, three..."?] are primary..." Whatever that would mean.

And then there are matters of taste. Where Deleuze describes a state of indecision and the contemplation of his options of spending the evening at a nightclub or staying in and working [pg. 95], Conley changes Deleuze's "le bruit des pages" to "the hum of the word processor" [pg. 70]. Anyone who's ever seen (or read about) Deleuze's fingernails would be unable to picture him typing. Why did Conley decide that Deleuze's phrase needed updating? The philosopher's longhand seems symbolic of the time he took to formulate his thought and the infinite care he took in transmitting the thought of others.

This translation is still better than nothing for someone interested in Deleuze and unable to read him in French. But since the real shame is that, with this on the market, no one is likely to undertake another English translation anytime soon, it is to be hoped that Tom Conley will seek to correct some of the flaws of his effort.