Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

atheism and theology’ that for him was Hegelianism (Nietzsche and

Philosophy, 195).

Deleuze means that it is not true that the creativity of the mind is

necessarily composed of idealism, of historicism, that is, the sequel

negation-realization that is the essential aspect of Hegel’s thought.

If we wish to question the formation of idealism along the develop-

ment line of Spinoza’s practical philosophy, we need to insist on the

duplicity of the perspective along which the mind-world interaction

unfolds: explication presupposes implication, complication. First the

world becomes fold, and then the mind is projected through the

unfolding of the world.

In other words, one must closely connect the notion of fold and

explication with that of the event. It is not by chance that the central

chapter of the book on Leibniz, The Fold, is a reflection on the concept

of the event.

Deleuze asks, What is an event?

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. (The Fold, 76)

But what does chaos mean?

According to a cosmological approximation, chaos would be the

sum of all possibles, that is, all individual essences insofar as each

tends to existence on its own account; but the screen only allows

compossibles – and only the best combination of compossibles – to

be sifted through ... From a psychic point of view, chaos would be a

universal giddiness, the sum of all possible perceptions being

infinitesimal or infinitely minute; but the screen would extract

differentials that could be integrated in ordered perceptions. (The

Fold, 76–7)^5

The product of the selection that the screen operates on the infinite

generation of possibles is precisely the event. In this way, Deleuze

responds to the question posed by Leibniz, Bergson and Whitehead – the

question that points to renewing the internal modus operandi of

Western thought, of metaphysics and science: not how to attain the

eternal, but rather under what conditions does the objective world

allow a subjective production of novelty, that is, a creation? (cf. The

Fold, 76).

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