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BOOK REVIEWS The Fold Leibniz and the Baroque By GILLES DELEUZE Translated by Tom Conley The Althone Press 1993 pp 168 18 00, clothbound, 45 00 IN HIS novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera describes the Prague Spring of 1968 in the following terms -the borders were opened and notes began abandoning the score of Bach's grand fugue and singing their own lines [though] Russia, composer of the master fugue, could not tolerate the thought of notes taking off on their own' (p 14) The image of notes (or rather monads) going on their own way summons the spirit of Nietzsche, a Baroque ontologist par excellence, whose conception of the world as a vast field of interconnecting forces presents the paradoxical but highly contemporary image of a Leibmzian monadology without the all-regulating principle of universal harmony Gilles Deleuze's text, The Fold Leibniz and the Baroque, concurs with Kundera's image of monadic entities taking their own independent line and proliferating the profusion of Becomings which constitute the world but he arrives at his vision not by a Nietzschean denial of universal harmony but by the more ingenious suggestion that Leibmzian logic generates difference rather than a universally binding sameness However, Deleuze's text presents two questions to readers not at ease with contemporary French philosophy (1) how does this text relate to Deleuze's copious oeuvre7 and (2) what bearing does it have on aesthetic concerns' Deleuze is the living confirmation of Ernst Cassirer's belief that for a philosopher there should be no discrepancy between writing on the works of other thinkers and discovering one's own philosophical voice Deleuze's engagement with Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche has served as the coping stone for his own remarkable philosophy of difference and repetition producing at the same time contributions to the field of study concerned This essay on Leibniz is no exception Not only does it offer a powerfully illuminating interpretation of Leibniz's monadic philosophy but it also effectively extends the basis of Deleuze's more anarchic monadism Deleuze's choice of philosophers is by no means arbitrary but shaped by a number of

established difficulties, and to it Banlh has added some assertions concerning musical notation which are simply wrong Thus he writes that musical notation was established by a community of professionals, 'who recognise themselves as existing above and beyond possible ethnic, geographical or linguistic confines' (p. 80) This is historically false, as anyone will know who has been faced with a music score, from, for example, China Systems of musical notation exist aplenty, and they have been no more transcontinental or atemporal than natural languages Again, he tacitly accepts the fallacy of the ideal performance, since only this makes intelligible his assertion that sound recording allows composers to record their own works, making graphic musical notation obsolete (sic p 82) Some of the views put forward on the nature of criticism are no less startling, e g , an artist can become a critic of the works of others 'only by hypothesising an obligatory passage through a moment of the "death of art"' (p 129) Why' Again, Banlh contends that critical discourse is a form of rhetoric or persuasion, and goes on to assert that were truth is not 'mathematical' there can be'only probability or opinion'(p 142) He does not even entertain the view that critical discourse might lead us to a more accurate, enriched perception There is no reason to assume, without further argument, that what a critic persuades us or brings us to see in a work of art is not there to be seen For reasons such as these, it is difficult to see members of the intended readership benefiting very greatly from this book Beginners in philosophical aesthetics are still better served by Anne Sheppard's Aesthetics, and the best recent specialist introduction to musical aesthetics is from Spain, Francisco Tello's Teort'a y estehca de la imisica (Madrid Taurus, 1988) a translation of which would benefit English-speaking readers With regard to this translation, I have not been able to obtain a copy of the Italian edition of Barllh's text it would be interesting to know what turns of phrase he behind the translator's use of 'rather', e g in 'rather consistent difference' (P 55) o r 'rather sui generis' (pp 5960), since their meaning in English is less than obvious
ROBERT WILKINSON

The Open University

BOOK REVIEWS interlocking concerns. Spinoza's study of the conatus, Nietzsche's involvement with Kraftzentren or WtlleiispunktaUonen and Leibniz's monadic conception, of e"te!eche'a all reflect Deleuze's primary interest in ontologies of Becoming Though indebted to Nietzsche's ontology of flux as a repudiation of the metaphysics of Being, Deleuze's interest in the realm of Becoming is creative rather than critical He is above all fascinated by the phenomena of emergent Becomings, with how both the arbitrary and metaphysically groundless interaction between contingent processes of flux can give rise to subsequent ones and how yet further processes can emerge between the interacting ones His concern with the Baroque is far from coincidental The Baroque's 'intense taste for life that grows and pullulates', its 'infinitely varied patterns of movement', the 'heaving, tumbling and curving' of its endlessly proliferating forms embodies Deleuze's principal concern with how to map and describe the endless interweaving and folding of monadic processes which constitute actuality's pulse This text on Leibniz emphasizes the discernibly anti-Hegelian theme of difference within Deleuze's thought Difference is a double-sided motif for Deleuze Firstly, it emphasizes, as Descombes has pointed out, an acute empirical particularism What has to be discerned, for example, is not that Matisse is a particular case of the concept painter but that particularity which makes Matisse a discernibly particular painter The difference between being 'a particular case o f and 'particularity' is 'difference per se' It is 'the being of the sensible' and is located between the concept painter and the intuition of Matisse as a very particular painter A certain parallel between Deleuze and Baumgarten might be noted here for Baumgarten's notion of the aesthetic is like difference in the sense that it too is not to be reduced to the conceptual or merely sensual As 'meaningful experience', the aesthetic inhabits the space that mutually differentiates the purely conceptual from the purely sensual. A second aspect of difference prompts Deleuze to develop what he terms a nomadic as opposed to a conventionally monadic ontology Adopting Nietzsche's repudiation of any

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unitary principle, Deleuze cannot effectively unify all things as belonging to the same substance or ground (as in the instance of Leibniz's notion of God as the ultimate all-embracing monad) Being is therefore not that in which nomadic configurations are anchored but is the unfolding territories of such configurations The philosophical task which Deleuze sets himself is not that of identifying the non plus ultra upon which all existents are predicated but that of description to describe Being as the vast array of multi-dimensional monadic folds or territories Given the character of Deleuze's ontology, Leibniz's attraction is plain but in so far as the latter appeals to a principle of grand harmony by means of which every monad expresses and reflects the 'master fugue', it could be argued that there is a radical incompatibility between the two thinkers Whereas for Leibniz, the importance of each monad is its ability to reflect the great city in which it stands, for Deleuze's monads there is no allencompassing city but as many towns and urban belts as there are monads One of the intriguing aspects of The Fold is Deleuze's claim that Leibniz's philosophy is among the first to articulate the notion of difference rather than identity 'No philosophy', he remarks, 'has ever pushed to such an extreme the affirmations of one and the same world, and of an infinite difference or variety m this world' (p 58) as Leibniz's has He implies that though Leibniz appeals to the divine city architect, he need not do so Thus Deleuze exhibits the empiricist's aversion to transcendence His thinking here might be illuminated by a certain parallel with language philosophy Whereas thinkers as diverse as Tilhch, Pannenberg and indeed Habermas and Gadamer are committed to the view that the diversity of conditioned linguistic meaning-structures impels one towards the assumption of an unconditioned meaningfulness, Wittgenstein for one resists such transcendence on the ground that what appears similar between diverse languagegames does not entitle one to say anything about 'language' as a whole. For Deleuze the fact that monadic fields fold over and interweave with each other does not require the further postulation of a single unitary city Transcendent all-embracing identity is replaced

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BOOK REVIEWS ate monadic fields makes it impossible for him to constitute one field as aesthetic as opposed to anatomical Secondly, as Tom Conley, the translator of The Fold points out, Deleuze's monadology is profoundly anti-hierarchical in that it disallows any rigid differentiation between the organic and inorganic. If all entities and events in the world are streams of monads, the view 'that humans stand as triumphant subjects among inert objects no longer holds' (p xiv) Deleuze is thereby able to present Leibniz as an ecological thinker Given, however, the collapsed demarcation between non-thing and thing, the question arises for Deleuze as to what sentient interaction between monadic fields gives rise in the (human) field to an albeit hallucinatory belief in the actuality of an aesthetic object After all, any monadology must reduce the belief in an external object to an inner interpretation of that monad's interactions Deleuze is not very forthcoming upon the nature of the specific mode of interaction that gives rise to the aesthetic and furthermore the argument that the aesthetic must be such a relationship compounds the difficulty surrounding the whole case How can any monadic configuration come to know that the 'aesthetic' is merely its inward representation to itself of its interactions with other fields when no Leibnizian monad can see beyond its 'window' in order to determine what is an hallucinatory relationship or not Thirdly, it is probably the case that Deleuze does not directly concern himself with the aesthetic since he (a) believes that monadological thought dispenses with the autonomy of the subjective and (b) because the Baroque aesthetic specifically understood as the metaphysically groundless continuity endlessly proliferating forms assumes the status of a metaphor for all being The aesthetic and the non-aesthetic are no longer differentiable because being has become art Yet, arguably, this is not 'difference' but the worst form of Schelhngian identity (or indifference) in which the world and art are no longer discernible. On the positive side of Deleuze's adaption of Leibnizian thought is the fact that the notion of virtuahty offers aesthetics a very promising account of 'origination' Deleuze touches on this theme in his book Proust and Signs (1972)

with an all-differentiating difference which recognizes only a plurality of dissimilar conurbations The aesthetic import of this mode of thought is substantial Like Descartes, Leibniz wrote little on the nature of art per se and yet what little he did say when combined with the general import of his thinking, had profound implications for aesthetic thought, as Deleuze is well aware Leibniz's ontology argues that every object is 'one' only as a unified field of the 'many' Aesthetic compositions considered as monadic aggregates are similarly composite For Baumgarten who follows this tradition, the question becomes what makes an aesthetic aggregate distinct from and irreducible to any other' Deleuze's The Fold emphasizes the dynamic within this mode of thought The question with which he becomes preoccupied is how an aesthetic work unfolds from within itself according to its own inner form In a manner which makes Baroque ontology relevant to the contemporary period, he draws bold parallels between Leibnizian monadology and the compositional techniques of such as Boulez It is not by chance as Deleuze might have pointed out that Boulez has enormous respect for the organicist techniques of Bruckner and Sibelius They both have an extraordinary mastery over the process whereby a musical thematic generates and proliferates other themes from within and entirely appropriate to itself alone However, some might be inclined to suggest that Messiaen whose musical tableaux fit together to form an unstated whole must be the composer of the Leibnizian city par excellence Also, one would like to know more from Deleuze about what makes a proliferation of distinct forms from within a monadic field an aesthetic as opposed to any other form of dynamic entity Contrary to what one might expect from such a profound philosopher of difference, the question of aesthetic differentiation is not an easy one to answer Firstly, through his approach to aesthetic phenomena as emergent Becomings of promises an analytic logic for the transitions which constitute the identifiable and self-constituting coherence of an artistic corpus, Deleuze's refusal of any element of transcendence which can externally differenti-

BOOK REVIEWS where following Bergson he speaks of the virtual as 'Real without being present, ideal without being abstract' (p 57). The twist this theme undergoes in Tlie Fold is striking The question of origination concerns not the historical origin of an artwork but what it realizes Heidegger's essay 'On the Origin of the Art Work' devotes itself to an articulation of what Deleuze would call aesthetic 'emergence' Though phenomenologically speaking, the immediate impact of such an emergence will be experienced as if it were ex mhtlo, all hermeneutical thinkers will insist that such occurrences are never merely given but the realization of a potentia In Being and Time, the relationship between the actual and the virtual is presented as that between interpretation and understanding' interpretation is the reflective grasping of that which was pre-reflectively held in the understanding Gadamer holds to a variation of this when he argues that whatever is stated in language is one realization of what lies virtual within it 1 e , the meaningfulness of the said rests upon and lights up aspects of the infinite virtuahty of the unsaid In The Fold Deleuze suggests that as the actualization of pre-existent visual and semantic possibilities, the art work as an emergent event m effect 'never stops happening and never ceases to await us' for that upon which its intelligible appearance rests is the infinity of pure virtuality and possibility (p 106) The world is the circle, the pure reserve of events which are actualized in every self and realized in every artwork (ibid) The latter are in Deleuze's terms like a naval battle an event with a potential that exceeds the soul that directs it (ibid) The hermeneutical appeal to virtuahty is, however, invariably retrospective in that it attempts to link up the aesthetic event conceived of as outcome with of a virtual but unseen potentia, the underlying existence of which only becoming apparent at the moment of realization. Deleuze's thinking emphasizes not the retrospective moment but the anticipatory moment, that which has yet to be unfolded In so far as an aesthetic configuration is only one realization of the possibilities within a potentia, that specific realization makes immanent what could yet come into being Deleuze's aesthetic ontology and its articula-

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tion of presentiment is thus the natural corollary of hermeneutic remembrance In Nietzsche Volume One The Will to Power as Art, Heidegger makes a tantalizing remark concerning how Leibniz's ontology of monads and affects is really the basis of understanding Nietzsche's equally Baroque ontology Heidegger never really develops the consequences of that idea It is Deleuze's The Fold which can be seen to pursue the implications within such a suggestion In so far as The Fold does this brilliantly, the book is to be cherished Nevertheless the question which remains is whether a degree of transcendence slips back into Deleuze's position despite his efforts Deleuze argues that monads do not look out on a universal city as there is none to see But do not such monads constitute such a city themselves though they might never see it' There may be no universal controlling master fugue but the contiguity of Kundera's wandering notes could give rise to a universal (though not controlling) motif from among themselves Contrary to his belief, is not this entirely consistent with Deleuze's notion of emergent Becoming' A Deleuzian reading of Bach (which might undercut Deleuze's anti-transcendentalism) is that his genius lies not in the production of all-controlling master fugues but in knowing how to let major themes emerge from between and thereby unify the journeying fugues of left and right hand revealing their real differences
NICHOLAS DAVEY

Cardiff Institute

Stanley Cavell Philosophy's Recounting of the

Ordinary By STEPHEN MULHALL Clarendon

Press, Oxford 1994. pp 351 35 00 THROUGHOUT HIS writing, Stanley Cavell has sought (as he called the introduction to his first collection) an audience for philosophy his perennial themes have included the possibility of, the conditions for, and the obstacles to philosophy's securing such an audience It may seem odd, therefore, that much of his writing is found impenetrableespecially by those analytical philosophers who once looked to him for insight. Of Cavell's ten books to date, only two or three seem widely known within the analytic tradition. So, as Mulhall notes, '[t]he