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Presses Universitaires de France

Deleuze and Whitehead

Author(s): Arnaud Villani
Source: Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 101e Année, No. 2, PHILOSOPHIE POLITIQUE (
Avril-Juin 1996), pp. 245-265
Published by: Presses Universitaires de France
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 Deleuze and Whitehead

"Life refuses to be embalmed alive".

LHlTEHEhD
"It is with Leibniz that the problem
that will continue to haunt Whitehead
and Bergson arises in philosophy: not
how to reach the eternal, but under
what conditions does the objective
world allow a subjective production of
novelty, a creation?
DmEUZE

In addition to the references shared by Deleuze and Whitehead, which

form triangulations that are impossible to analyze here (one with Leibniz,
the other with Bergson), an oblique link between the two is the French
philosopher's admiration for Process and Reality, among other texts. As he
confessed in a recent letter: "I can only remember being dazzled by the
emergence of such bizarre categories at the beginning of Process and
Reality, and then by a kind of hypnosis I experienced in front of the eternal
objects. What a book!" This discovery i s nothing new, as already
mentioned in Difference and Repetition: "Categories belong to the world of
representation, and philosophy has often been tempted to oppose them with
notions of a different, real nature.

1. DuuoncEr sketches such a study at the beginning of "Whitehead ou le cosmos torren-

tiel", Archives de Philosophie, 1984-1985. Works used: Wiurzitcm, Process and Reality,
corrected edition, New York-London, Free Press, 1979, trans. fr. Charles, Ëlie, Fuchs,
Gautero, Janicaud, Sasso, Villani, Paris, Ciallimard, 1995; La fonction de la Raison, et autres
essais, trans. Philippe Devaux et al, Paris, Payot, 1969; Le devenir de la religion, trans.
Devaux, Paris, Aubier, 1939; Science and Modem World, trans. fr. Paul Couturiau, Paris, Éd.
du Rocher, 1994; Adventures of Ideas, New York, 1933, trans. fr. Parmentier- Breuvard, A
ventures des Idées, Paris, Le Cerf, 1994; CESSELIx, La philosophie organique de Whitehead,
Paris, P.U.F., 1950; DUMONCEL, art. cit.; Witrreunno's articles, "Mathe- matics and the
good"; "Immortality"; DzvEUZE's complete works.

Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, N° 2/199ö 245

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Arnaud Villani

the list of empirical-ideal notions found in Whitehead, which makes

Process and Reality one of the greatest books of modern philosophy"2 .
Deleuze's admiration for Whitehead is undiminished, as he devotes an
entire chapter of Le Pli on the philosophy of Leibniz' to the Anglo-
American philosopher.
But although philosophy is, as White-Head in turn reminds us, first and
foremost astonishment, such an affect i s clearly not enough t o establish a
philosophical relationship between the two thinkers. And it would not be
good comparative philosophy to juxtapose analo- gies, even structural ones,
between the two systems. My intention, as a critical ins- piration, will
therefore be to reveal the value of a differential between the two authors,
one that might indicate in return the strong points, but also the weak points,
where, perceptibly or not, the thinkers are "unscrewing"'. Deleuze, in the
light of Whitehead, the latter in the raw light of Deleuze, philosophers,
caught in a reciprocal pre- hension from which a new road for philosophy
might perhaps emerge.

THE ADVENTURES OF BECOMING

Both philosophers have a sense of adventure. Whitehead's title,

Adventures of Idea, echoes Deleuze's enthusiasm for the differential
calculus, "the algebra of pure thought, the superior irony of problems, the
only calculus beyond Good and Evil", and Deleuze's philosophy could be
summed up in the following formula: "it is t h e whole adventurous
character of Ideas (of differentials) that remains to be described". Similarly,
Whitehead proclaims the value of the categorical schema and comments:
"To set limits to speculation i s to betray the future"6 . He pleads for the
"instinct for intellectual adventure that every age demands"7 .

2. Dezzuza, Différence et répétition, Paris, P.U.F., 1969, p. 364. In his recent work,
Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (in collaboration with Guerre, Paris, Ëd. de Minuit, 1991),
Deœuzc refers to English philosophy as a ri libre et sauvage création de concepts" (p. 101).
3. Dzmuzz, Le pli. Leibniz et le baroque, Paris, Ëd. de Minuit, 1988. "What is an event?"
4. Metaphor at the end of Heidegger's Schelling.
5. DELEUZE, Différence et Répétition, henceforth D.R., op. cit. p. 235.
6. Wurrziœnn, La fonction..., op. cit., p. 156 ¡"Speculation expresses transcendence
beyond any particular method" {idem, p. 150).
7. Wm'rErtsm, Process and Reality (henceforth P.R.), "Speculative philosophy",
section 6.

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 Defense and Whftehead

In the Western speculative tradition, both "feel themselves to be pure

metaphysicians". And the very nature of speculation is to refuse t o leave
methods a l o n e .
As is the rule in adventure, speculation is first and foremost an assault on
common sense. Both thinkers have an identical relationship to classical
"bifurcations", which provide an artificial and rela- tively stable image of
thought. Agreeing with Whitehead in "Mathema- tics and the Good" and
"Immortality", Deleuze notes that the alternative of finite and infinite
applies very poorly to difference, because it constitutes only "the antinomy
of representation". As for Whi- tehead, he mixes the two instances - the
finitude of events, the finite character of the consequent God, the infinite
character of the primordial God - to such an extent that the distinction no
longer makes sense. He also overturns the traditional division of subjects
and objects, of the thinking and the extended, of the subject and the
predicate. Descartes' error consisted in the "simple localization" of a
spatially and temporally defined here, qualifiable in substance and quality at
any g i v e n moment. But there is no such thing as matter o n t h e one
hand, a n d soul on the other, but rather physical and mental events. The
"fallacy of misplaced concreteness" is t h e origin of the substantivation of
realities such as "time" ,
"space", "matter", "spirit". This error is reinforced by the dogmatic illusion
of clear and distinct premises'2 . The verifiability of a scheme must be
sought in its general success, not in the certainty or clarity of its premises.
Deleuze, identically, in well-known texts, deconstructs the image of
thought, with its pair of One and Multiple, its Meaning and its Being, its
Identity, its Subject and all the cascading consequences of an
overestimation of representation".
More subtly concealed in common thinking, the malposition of the
caesura between the potential and the real explains, for both, the insistence
on asserting the full reality of the virtual, even if it is not actual. Eternal
objects" are reality itself, but in search of actua-

8. G. Deleuze's reply to a questionnaire, 1982.

9. Partially translated at the end of the work cited by Cesselin.
10. DEI.EUZE, D.R., op. cit. p. 338.
11. WinTzasm, La fonction..., op. cit. p. 138 and DEEEUZ€, D.R., op. cit. p. 326. See also
Baumgarten.
12. Wiirrzitcno, P.R., op. cit., Conclusion.
13. DzLsuzz, Proust et les signes, Paris, P.U.F., 1964, republished 1979, Conclusion of the
I" partie ; DzI.zUZE, D. R., op. cit. chapter 3, pp. 169-217.

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Arnaud Kif/ani

lity, and use "actual entities" as tele-organisms to acquire what they lack.
Deleuze's recurrent expression "real without being actual, ideal without
being abstract, multiplicity of virtual coexistence" is well known.
Speculation is then (and this is again a problem of caesura and places) the
adventure and risk of a fundamental redefinition of the Subject, which the
Copernican revolution seemed to have put out of reach. One can appear pre-
Kantian, a n d therefore regressive (this is part of the accusation levelled at
Deleuze by those who do not consider themselves Nietzscheans) when one
attempts a Copernican anti-revolution. For Whitehead and Deleuze, the
world does not come from the Subject, but the Subject from the World. But
even more than desubjectivation - which the triumphant naivety of Kant's
pages on the dynamic sublime nevertheless makes desirable, when
compared to the complexities of German Romanticism and Idealism, to the
forms of "decline" (Nietzsche, (Nietzsche, Trakl), metamorphosis (Novalis,
Kleist, Kafka), unconsciousness (Groddeck) or pluralization (Butler, Hesse)
- a multiplication of the subject, in which the gulf between matter and
thought dwindles to nothing. Dumoncel writes: "There is not even the most
familiar physical world that is not strewn w i t h effects in w h i c h we can
see so many anticipations o f the mental life in which consciousness will
only have, so to speak, to flow - thus echoes, reflections, traces, prismatic
deformations, perspectives, thresholds, folds". For his part, Deleuze finds in
a Plotian influence, an identification of contraction and contemplation that
would explain the neoplatonism of certain empiricists, and their tendency to
erase the clear-cut separations between the kingdoms: the plant
contemplates by contracting the luminous elements, and fills itself with
carbon, salts, as well as colors and flavors". It is, in any case, a constant
feature of Whitehead's work that, under presentationnal immediacy, causal
eficacy c a n be traced back to plant, animal and even matter. The reci-
proque reversion of the psychic and the non-psychic can be seen i n the fact
that every ("subjective" ) prehension becomes the matter ( stu ff) of
another ("subjective") prehension becomes the matter (stu ff) of another
("subjective") prehension. of another

14. DzrsuzE, D.R., op. cit. pp. 266-270, and "From problematic ideas to intensities as
cases of problem solving", D.R., op. cit. p. 315.
15. DimoxcE£, art. cité, p. 573.
16. D£LEUZz, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? op. cit. p. 200, citing Pvoro, Enneades, III,
8 and Huus, Traité de la nature humaine, III, 14. See also H. REfsV£s, Patience dans / azur,
Paris, Le Seuil, 1988, p. 116, 150 on auto-cataIyse.

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 Deleuze and Whitehead

prehension, so that causality is only a case of prehension. This brings us to

the larval subject, common t o both philosophers: "there are indeed actors
and subjects, but they are larvae, because they alone are capable of
withstanding the tracings, shifts and rotations" that affect the admirable
capacity for novelty displayed by embryos17 . But de-subjectification is not
the same as de-individuation. Thus, the efficient causality of the cenes- thic
body, active in Whitehead's work under the illusory predominance of
immediate representation, and Deleuze's organizing egg, the larval
dynamism individuating under the "I-cracked" and "I-dissolved". "We
believe in a world of larvae", Deleuze's famous proclamation responds to
Whitehead's "non-mental, larval" perception9 . And so rises another soil,
terra incognita, "before man" (Ritsos), whose struc- ture dispels the
preoccupation noted in Whitehead by
B. Russell, concerning the "gulf left between physics and per-
ception "2 '.
And yet, on reading one of Deleuze's pages, a hint of the irreducibility of
the two positions comes to mind. Deleuze evokes the ultimate ruse of
representation, which consists in making itself as infinite as possible, in
order to endorse the "aorgic" and put an end to difference in itself (the Trop,
the excess rejected by Plato in the Philebus). Deleuze takes the case of
Leibniz, for whom representation may be infinite, but it does not acquire the
power to affirm divergent series, and is content with compossible
convergences. In this way, nothing has fundamentally changed: "we have
only discovered more subtle ways o f atoning" for difference in itself (that
which nothing relates to identity). Does Whi- tehead fall under this
criticism? Has he found a clever way to
"2 '? This question will be one of the objects of elucidation in our study.
This question postponed until later, such a convergence of general
attitude, method and criticism in Deleuze and Whitehead may come as a
surprise. Where does this consensus come from? We believe i t i s , for
reasons

17. DELEUz s, D.R., op. cit. p. 283.

18. DELEUzc, D.R., op. cit. p. 330-334.
19. Wurreusno, Le devenir..., op. ci/., p. 120.
20. WiirreiiEno, Histoire de mes idées philosophiques, trans. CE. Auclair, Paris, Galli-
mard, 1961, p. 130.
21. DEtzuZE, D.R., op. cit. p. 337. As an early defense of Whitehead, we may note his
strong resistance to the "superstitious respect with which infinity has been the object in
phiIoso- phy": "Mathematics and the good", op. cit., p. 223.

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Arnaud Villani

In various ways, the mathematical underpinnings of this convergence. First

and f o r e m o s t , the common reference to Leibniz guarantees both
Deleuze and Deleuze's respect for the infinitesimal principle as micro-logic.
Deleuze is a micrologist, t o a v o i d "swallowing big" and being trapped
by "concepts as big as hollow teeth" . His distinction between the molar
(line to segment) and the molecular (flux to quanta) clearly indicates the
meaning of this micrology. It is based on t h e idea that a change of scale
reveals a completely different reality, so that thought must construct a new
image for itself when it takes into account what lies beyond the macro-
objects2 ', and therefore privileges the minor over the major, the grass over
t h e tree. Similarly, Russell notes th e effect of Whitehead's method,
which would have him
He invented a method for constructing points, instants and particles as
groups of events, each o f infinite extent"2 '.
If, on the other hand, we know that Whitehead held as immense décou-
verte the idea o f a "dependence of qualitative elements in the world on
mathematical relations" (which represents no less than the realization, in a
single universal thesis, of qualitative and quantitative metretics, or Husserl's
double geometry)2 ', if we know that he advises us to change scale as
frequently as possible ("ashes to a millionth of an inch")2 ', we can better
understand the founding role played by the theory of the differential, that of
multiplicity, in the development of his philosophy. And on this point, the
two philosophies are indistinguishable. Whitehead holds that concrescence
is non-temporal, in that it generates a quantum of time and space. Russell
reports that he "assumed that all events are of finite extent, but that there is
no minimal limit to the extent of an event"27 . All this allows for the
delocation of the event, illocalisable because it is a creator of space. If
Deleuze, for his part, interprets Butler's Erewùon a s both an inverted
nowhere and now-here, it's because his whole philosophy,

22. DELEUz£, D.R., op. cit. pp. 235-239, 262.

23. See GuaiTnni, La révolution moléculaire, U.G.E., 1977; Process and Reality, end of
section X; my article: "Deleuze et la philosophie microphysique", Publication de la Faculté des
Lettres de Nice, Les Belles Lettres, 1983, p. 47 ff.
24. RusszLz, Histoire de mes idées philosophiques, op. cit., p. 128.
25. Wiuti r, Adventures of Ideas, op. cit., p. 146; HusSEni, Krisis, Paris, Galli-
mard, republished 1989, p. 62 ff.
26. Winniæm, "Mathematics and the good", op. cit., p. 223.
27. Russzrr, Histoire de mes idées philosophiques, op. cit., p. 130.

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 Deleuze and Whitehead

from the "ideal and asymmetrical syntheses" of Différence et Répétftion, to

Le Pli, is based on the paradox of a tangent point, turning, "jumping over
itself". He writes: "I tend to think of things as sets of lines [...] to be
intersected. I don't like points; making the point seems stupid to me. It's not
the line that's between two points, but the point at the intersection of two
lines [...] the point is only the inflection of the line [...] things and thoughts
grow or grow in the middle, and t h a t 's where you have to settle, t h a t ' s
always where it bends"2 '. This echoes remarks made in Le Pli: "The unit of
matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth is the fold, not the point, which
is never a part, but a simple end of the line"2 . And Deleuze indicates the
object of his research: the intrinsic singularity, as opposed to the extrinsic
singularities of extrema (maximum and minimum), i.e. the nomadic point,
irreducible to coordinates, unfinished but real and cosmogenetic.
But could a point of this nature be better represented than by the
differential? If we forget the infinitesimal approach of a limit, we find in
this notion an overabundance of genetic concepts: the indeterminacy of a
fraction of zero quantities, virtuality, speed (instantaneous = limit), so that
the differential appears, in the wake of Salomon Maimon, as an Idea.
Maimon writes: "The particular rule of the production o f an object, or the
mode of its differential, is what makes it a particular object [...] red is
different from green - [it cannot be] a relation of sensible qualities
(otherwise the question of Quid juris? would remain unanswered) but,
either, in accordance with Kant, the relation of their spaces as a priori
forms, or, in accordance with my theory, the relation of their differentials,
which are a priori Ideas". Such an ideal generation of discontinuities is one
of the nerve centers of both philosophies. A remarkable example of ideal
genesis in language is to be found in the work of Gustave Guillaume (le
virtuel et l'actuel, 1' "en-pensée" de la psycholinguistique), in the biological
notions of axes of development, of specific speeds and rhythms, creators o f
space and of

28. DE£Euzc, Pourparlers. Paris, Éd. de Minuit, 1990, p. 219.

29. DELEuzE, Le pli, op. cit., p. 9; Lxiesiz, Lettre à Des Billettes: "in such a way that there
can be an infinite number of folds, some smaller than others, without the body ever dissolving
into points or minima".
30. Versuch über Transzandantalphilosophie, p. 33; GUEROULT, La philosophie trans-
cendantale de S. Mai'mon, p. 53 et 76; Dzrzuzz, D.R., op. cit., p. 221 ff.

23 J

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temps qui s'actualisent3 ', or, in the theory o f Species, in Geoffroy Saint-
Hilaire's idea o f folding the Animal into itself. In sculpture, we'd choose
the work of Germaine Richier, with its virtuality of contracted, stretched,
bloated humanity, a dream o f humanity that seeks its form and draws itself
out with differential dice. For Deleuze, the sensible does not come from
contrariety in quality, but from différen- tielle in 1'intensité'2 .
There are no shortcuts to truth," notes Whitehead. The differential may
well be one. But it doesn't shortcut, since it produces proliferating von Koch
curves everywhere. Yet it leads to the truth, as does the theory of
multiplicity. Suffice it to say, as Deleuze does with Bergson", that
multiplicity has two definitions. One is external, simultaneous, of
juxtaposition, of order, homogeneous, n u m e r i c a l , discontinuous. The
other is internal, of succession, fusion, orga- nization, heterogeneous,
irreducible to number, continuous. The former divides without changing its
nature, while the latter refuses to do so. The former depends on the identical
One as its master, while the latter is freed from it. The first is a set o f
actuals, the second a line of virtuals. In a very similar sense, Whitehead
declares: "In the instant, there i s nothing", and sees the truly real only in a
"thickness that touches every time the confines of the universe". The
consequences of Whitehead's consistent use of multiplicity ("micro-
multiplicity", as Deleuze and Guattari would say) and differentiation can be
seen i n the details of the two works'6 .
And first of a l l this fact, which in Whitehead becomes what replaces all
facts (and "factalism")": relatedness or r e l a t i v i t y . Relation of every
event to God, so that by its "face

31. VOÎï DELEUZz, D.R., op. cit. p. 277. Guillaume's best example would be the
difference in actualization of the Chinese language and Indo-European languages, because
upstream, in the virtual, a balancing act from particularization to universalization could not be
achieved: "Discernement et entendement dans les langages", Langage et science du langage,
Paris-Québec, Nizet-P.U. Laval, 1969.
32. D.R., p. 305.
33. WmTziicnn, Le devenir..., op. cit., p. 96.
34. Le Bergsonisme, Paris, P.U.F., 1968, pp. 30-31.
35. WiiitEitsno, The Function of Reason, op. cit., pp. 196-199.
36. These concepts, in the strong sense of a philosophical event, are a t t h e origin o f the
problem theory shared b y both authors: the denunciation o f false problems and poorly
analyzed mixtures. D.R.. "Synthèse idéelle de la différence"; Le Bergsonisme, "L'intuition
comme méthode".
37. NtsTzscim, Gdnéalogie de la Morale, Conclusion.

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fine", he introduces it into the world". Relation of each event to the world
as a whole, relation of everything to everything in a
"39 : "The vision of the world I propose is that o f a world in which only
functional activity is exercised. Every actual thing is something by virtue of
its activity, its nature consists in the relationship (royalty) it maintains with
other things, its individua- lity consisting in synthesizing other things"^. An
object is an abs- traction, as much as an instant, life is but a history of
interwoven circumstances, n o t h i n g is ever causa sui, n o t h i n g h a s
permanent attributes, no one subsists distinct.
Prehensions are precisely not properties but relations4 ', which leads to a
kind of reciprocal contamination, a maximum contagion that breaks down
all partitions42 . Thus, "there i s no reality that has an isolated self-
sufficient existence", finitude is not self-supporting'3, "there are no facts that
would support themselves, floating in nothingness". Descartes' gross error
on the causa sui character of substances.
Deleuze is less explicit about this relational aspect. But desire is
everywhere, never to be interpreted, always experimenting, arranging and
machining, in a perspective that is always constructivist and never
spontaneist". In t h e form of Eros, declared by Plato's f'fés (the one who
goes, who is on the way), it never ceases to stir and mix, so that the
"between" triumphs. Deleuze also makes relation a concrete fact through
the effect of the milieu or intermezzo'. Desire and relation are the vectors
and tenants of an active, perpetual and living world, in a gigantic process of
becoming. Deleuze sums it up strikingly: "Beings of sensation are varieties,
beings of concept are variations, beings of function are variables"47 . For
b o t h , nature is a factory, not a process.

38. WniTzuExo, de devenir..., op. cit. p. 183.

39. WmT5Hsao, No fonction..., op. cit. p. 23.
40. Ibid, p. 44.
41. Hence the movement o f complete activity where the prehending and the prehended
exchange roles, and where ingression is converse with prehension: see DuuoncEL, art. cit., .
570.
42. WiuTEusm, Le devenir..., op. cit. p. 105.
43. Wiirraiæm, "Mathematics and the Good", op. cit. p. 222.
Ä4. WHITEIlEAn, P.R. I, 5, "Speculative philosophy".
45. DzLxuze, Dialogues avec Claire Parnet, Paris, Flammarion, 1977, p. 115.
46. Ibid. among others: "Like all creative things and people, it is in the middle, it passes
through the middle" (p. 19); "grass only exists between large cultivated spaces. It grows
between [...]. Grass is a moral lesson"; Virginia WooLr: "I stretch like mist between the
people I know best" (pp. 30-40).
47. DzLEUZE, Dialogues, op. cit., p. 166.

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theater4 '. Processes are extended beyond all limits, making them
indivisible, but not indeterminate or indiscernible, and without re-editing
the ancient notion of the infinite (apeiron). The procession of forms is
replaced by the form of a process: a rhythm.
"Intense energy is a transcendental principle"9 . The nuance of a dif- ference
between the noun process and the verb "to become-" does n o t break the
total kinship o f a processualism where the ultimate, named creativity, is to
be sought in the process and not in the fact'0 .
Yet the difficult thing about becoming is t o prevent it, in Nietzche's
words, from "running off like rain on stone". Dem Werden den Charakter des
Seins aufzuprägen must therefore be imprinted with the character o f being.
For both philosophers, this means that
The "new" and the "event" are the instruments. In a creative advance, the
new cannot be lacking. "How do we increase the content of the notion of
pure activity?" asks Whitehead'1 . "Any factor that emerges constitutes a
difference"' 2 and it is the self-enjoyment of each prehending subject, thus
seizing itself as an "overjet" (superjet) that produces the possibility of the
new: Actua- lity is the self-enjoyment of importance, "the essence of life
is the teleological intro- duction of novelty"". The emergent subjective
feeling is new in relation to the prehistoric feeler. With memory comes
reaction against the pure domination of the average prevailing in matter.
With intensity as trace comes the preservation of the durative, in a kind of
Zeitobjekt capable of contracting and recording vibration, an event atom
entitling to a supplemental phase where contrasts are synthesized into a
higher unity.
What i s an event? Deleuze often returns to this question,
in terms that refute common temporal perception: its "tem-

48. DELEuzE and GuATTARl, L'Anti-Œdipe, Paris, Éd. de Minuit, 1975, p. 58.
49. DELEUZE, D. R., op. cit. p. 310, and my quoted article, pp. 55-58. Also CzSSELln, op.
cit., p. 178; "The essence of completely real reality is becoming".
50. WiiITEHEm, P.R., op. cit. in "Speculative philosophy", section 2.
51. Wiiirzucm, La fonction..., op. cit. p. 221.
52. Ibid, p. 208.
53. See La fonction..., op. cit. p. 200.
54. Dzczuzs, D.R., op. cit. p. 244; Logique du Sens, "Des effets de surface", "De
l'événement", 2- and 21- series; Le Pli, op. cit. chap. 6. "What i s an event?
p. 208. True entities are events as becoming-. Thus the becoming-animal of Ahab's Pentheles;
the molecular becoming of R. Carter (Demons and Wonders); the becoming-tree of Henri
d'Ofterdingen, the becoming-silence of Trakl... No more structure, just verbs, incorporeals: a
dog - bark - attack. "Catastrophe". In LETiau, see the character of Manig, king of becomings,
Auftritt Manig, Carl Hanser Verlag, trans. fr. Julien Hervier, Manig fait son entrée, Paris,
U.G.E., 1964.

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porellement éternel" is Whitehead's answer to everlastingness and objective

immor- tality. The latter clarifies the possible fallacy of event duration: "An
event by no means implies a rapid chan- gement; the persistence of a block
of marble is an event", so t h a t , in a baroque juxtaposition, such nano-
second events adjoin eight-hundred-million-year-old enduring objects (the
rocks), and events that have molded themselves into their own eternal being
(the pyramid). This immediately confronts Whitehead's thinking with the
alternative of saving and perishing. Deleuze is at odds with this alternative.
His event is a leap, a feature of becoming (and what becomes i s always
speed - absolute, even if slow), which brings Deleuze's philosophy face to
face with another problem, that of syntheses". These are the two points at
which the philosophies in question really begin to diverge.

SAVE OR PERISH, OR THE MEANING OF THE PRESENT

The problem of perishing is not Deleuzian; on the contrary, it is crucial to

Whitehead. Whitehead's childhood was envi- ronmentally full of historical
evidence: Roman, Saxon and Norman ruins. In Sherborne, the school he
attended was twelve hundred years old. Trinity College, Cambridge, and all
the other colleges in this timeless city give him the opportunity to
contemplate serenely the extraordi- nary meditative trees, venerable
libraries and ancient courtyards. From a visit to the Medici Tombs, he
brings back the clear idea that Day, Night, Twilight and Dawn, which are
their ornaments, are both temporal and eternal. Dante teaches him, through
Aristotle and St. Thomas, how man has learned to eternalize himself.
Shelley tells him poetically of change, Wordsworth of perma- nence. But
always with the positive comes the debt: the value and limit of time. It's
hardly surprising, then, that this is the philosophy of rythmoi (stable flows)
of all kinds, that it can represent, for example, the eternal being of the smile
on the cat's face in Alice's Adventures.

55. On the synthetic power of the event as an "overview" , see Dialogues, op. cit. p. 173
and Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? op. cit., I, p. 21 ff. The event is not a state of things, but is
actualized in a state of things: synthesis.

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cize that the eternal object is necessarily (as Whatness or quiddity)

transcendent to occasions, "how of becoming as a form of being" (to use
Cesselin's formula), i .e. a virtual and determined individual haunting time
in spirit (Geist-Ghost) that seeks incarnation.
The smallest, most destitute "drop of experience" is also rhythmic: a
vibration, where the gulf is filled (vibration is physical movement and
affection) and the last word of the Whiteheadian universe is pronounced:
aesthetics56 . A kind of Pythagoreanism where the ultimate reality is a
frequency. And right down to the overjet, which "never really is" and can
only be interpreted in terms of perishing, but preserves itself in objective
immortality. Whitehead quotes Ezekiel: "They clothe the dry bones with the
flesh o f real being."'7 .
Now, in the Conclusion to Process and reality, Whitehead draws the
following parallel: just as the pure perishing of immediate presentation is
haunted by efficient causality, the conceptual feeling that prehends eternal
objects in an order where novelty means loss, is haunted by "another order
without shipwreck or voyage" where everything is permanent. Perishing
leads to saving, and Whitehead's philosophy becomes explicitly a sote-
riology. God becomes the measure of the world's aesthetic cohesion. He is
its evaluation. The tenderness and solicitude of a God who gathers and, in
the words quoted by Hegel, "foams immensity towards himself". In its
concern not to lose anything, Whiteheadism becomes a surplatonism in
which i t is all phenomena that can lay claim to salvation. The theory of the
lure f o r feeling is thus perhaps best explained - if Deleuze, the immanentist
with a decisiveness all of its own, can affirm "
th
e skin of feeling", Whitehead affirms "the lure of feeling", its lure. This is
the bait that God uses to actualize himself as a reserve of forms, and to
exchange in a sublime oxymoronic chiasmus his deficiency in primordial
actuality for consequent actuality, his unconsciousness for consciousness,
h i s infinity for limitation, h i s completeness for incompleteness. Without,
however, losing the qualities it exchanges, a n d thus also offers to all the
events of the universe. Understanding God

56. Vibration is also an essential moment in the philosophy of Goethe and Nietzsche (the
great Alcyonian style, the return of force to its highest expression, the serene vibration of
contained strength).
57. WHITEHEAD, P.R., op. cit, "The order of nature".
58. WinrEi£czo, Le devenir..., op. cit. p. 118.
59. WHITEllEno, Le devenir..., op. cit. p. 187.

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 Deleuze and Whitehead

by each creature, a grasp of each creature in God. God, "per- suasion"^ , a

guarantee of the suitability of eternal objects in the process of creation, the
missing peg of a world in torrential becoming, so that a saving
sempiternality may come into being.
On this point, Deleuze has taken the refusal of totalities or substances to
the extreme. God doesn't enter his world. What could He do among the
ejects, larvae, objectiles and superjects that scatter themselves into I-
fragments, tele-organisms and dissolved selves? But a world, whatever it
may be, requires, if not reconciliation, at least synthesis, and here all the
more so as it does not benefit, as in Whitehead's case, from the immense
housfng of a God with two natures, taking the world as if between two
tongs, the physical (consequent nature) and the conceptual (primordial
nature, receptacle of eternal objects). Where Whitehead synthesizes by
including the transcendent in the immanent, Deleuze synthesizes by
excluding the transcendent from the immanent.
Deleuze's central theory of syntheses reconstitutes a triad on the Kantian
model6 '. If desire as flux becomes a machine by entering into a system of
cuts, captures, connections and deriva- tions, the first (connective)
synthesis62 admits of two uses, immanent (the "and... and") and
transcendent (the "and furthermore"). The second (disjunctive) says with
the immanent: "either... or", with the transcendent, "or else... or else".
The third (conjunctive) draws immanent ("c'était donc ça!") or
transcendent ("c'était donc toi!", "c'était donc moi!") income. Rather than
Oedipus, let's apply the scheme to Kleist's Amazon. The amazed "c'était
donc ça!" of Penthesilee's discovery of love quickly gives way to an
astonished "c'était donc toi!" as she confronts t h e man she loves, then a
furious "c'était donc ça (ta tratrise)!" when the Amazon realizes that
Achilles is keeping her prisoner, and finally a "c'était donc moi!" of pure
horror when she finally realizes that it w a s she who tore Achilles' body
apart with her teeth.

60. "God is persuasion towards an ideal coordination", says "immortality".

61. KANT, Critique of Pure Reason. Transcendental Deduction, "On Apprehension in
Intuition", "On Reproduction i n Imagination", "On Recognition in Concept".
62. DELEUZE, D.R., op. cit. pp. 106, 132, 150; Dz£EuzE, Anti-Œdipe, op. cit. pp. 20,
147; in Deleuze's case, the syntheses take the following names, in triads: "Habitus
Mnémosyné - Eros; Le lieu - la tache - la gomme; Libido - Numen - Voluptas". See also Mille
Plateaux, p. 124; Dialogues, op. cit. p. 70.

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If we wanted to compare Kantian and Deleuzian syntheses,

he would come :

Kant Deleuze Whitehead

is Deleuze's connection in its and Whitehead's prehension in

T o apprehension two forms: its two forms:
Ch°^ Kif'lt — immanent (stammering) — immanent (self-grasping)
— transcendent (comput) — transcendent (grasping God)

is Deleuze's disjunction in its and Whitehead's ingression in its

To reproduction two forms: two forms:
Ch°* K°Rt — immanent (metamorphosis) — immanent
— transcendent (forbidden) — transcendent

corresponds to Deleuze's and Whitehead's two forms of

conjunction in its two forms:
A la recognition
chez kant — immanent (ecstasy, enjoyment)
— transcendent (accusation,
guilt)
satisfaction:
— immanent (self-satisfaction)
— transcendent (satisfaction of
God)

Deleuze's roads of immanence: stammering, metamorphosis, ecstasy;

roads of transcendence: comput, prohibition, guilt. Pro- duction and return
of the operation, with the moment of leap out of the system
(metamorphosis, or barrage of the forbidden: variants of the between).
Trans- posed to Whitehead, the system o f syntheses is flatter: change and
permanence, God and creation, the intermediate synthesis of ingres- sion,
when eternal objects are actualized, constituting the bridge from the trans-
cendent to the immanent. If, for Deleuze, the bad thing about syntheses is
their m i s u s e , for Whitehead, all prehension being good in itself, and
synthesis being principally the meeting of the immanent and the trans-
cendent, there is no m i s u s e . Deleuze makes good use of synthesis, and
Whitehead makes good use of it. The metamorphosis o f immanence
ensures the salvation of the Whiteheadian real, while Deleuze attempts,
through the rotation of the immanent and its absolute speed, to obtain the
ejection of the transcendent (this is, moreover, his theory of t h e active
force and eternal return in Nietzsche).
Such a difference on the problem of syntheses gives rise to a

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 Deleuze and Whftehead

second major difference in the meaning of the present. At the outset,

however, there is an identity of views. Perhaps inspired by that text which
Deleuze does not hesitate to describe as a masterpiece - and rightly so, in
our view - von Uexküll's Mondes anf'maux et monde humain3 , Whitehead
highlights in "Symbolism" "the pairing of presentationnal immediacy and
causal efficacy as a new
"functional circle". Thus, underneath the "optic" lies the "haptic "*. If, for
Whitehead, symbolic reference is the relationship between these two types
of prehension, and if immediate presentation, as a disinterested grasp o f
the "crust of things" , can then allow the emotion of the tragic to rise6 ' by
manifesting the value of the pereunt et imputantur of the passing of hours
and time in the sparkle of the present, i t is in t h e reverse that we find
ourselves closest to the Deleuzian position. Everything is desire, the
movement of vibrating machines. But bodies never cease t o be reclaimed
by coordinates and striations. It is at the crossroads of the "striated" line
with the "smooth" of the "incorporeal" , "light vapor between bodies"6 ',
that the becoming is indicated. The notions of contrast, vivacity and
vibration apply to b o t h . But having frequented Hopkins or Lawrence,
Stifter or Friedrich, Cézanne or Powys, has undoubtedly given the
Deleuzian surface the astonishing depth of fine events, be they only
meteorological, hecceities that we will never see again. No condemnation,
then, of immediate presentation, the skin of the world allowing it to
breathe, a reserve of the variegated, moiré and brilliance that so seduces us.
the ichthyosaur that Powys says is hidden deep inside everyone".

63. Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen - Bedeutungslehre, trans. fr.
Kriszat, Gonthier, 1956.
64. First text of The Function of Reason.
65. The tick i s von Uexküll's illustrious example of this functional circle. Deleuze sees it
as the phi1osophical animal, in preference to the owl: Dialogues, op. cit. p. 75.
66. See E. Strauss, Worringer, Riegl, Maldiney and Deleuze on this distinction. A. Gehlen
has attempted to explain t h e attenuation of the Wirkwelt in favor of the Merkwelt i n man on
the basis of domestication, non-specialization, neoteny, euryoecy, ludic activity. See Loncsz,
Trois essais sur le comportement animal et humain, trans. fr. Fredet, Paris, Seuil, 1970.
67. "Symbolism", p. 62.
68. Bnûiiœs, La théorie des incorporels dans l'ancien stoi'cisme, Paris, Vrin, 1962 and
DELEUzz, among others, Logique du sens.
69. John COWPER POWYs, A pologie des sens {in defence of sensualit y, trans. Tran Van
Khai, Pauvert, 1975).

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The difference between the two treatments of discourse is all the more
clear. Orphaned, aphasic and simulacral, Deleuzian dispars cannot
accommodate this Whiteheadian coincidence o f opposites, w i t h a view
to a higher harmony. Whitehead's sense of the present resembles a "quadre"
where virtual value and transitory occasion are exchanged, where the Sons
of the Earth and the Friends of the Ideas prepare the banquet of
reconciliation70 . "Philosophy's task is to recapture the totality obscured b y
selection. "The lesson of the transformation of efficient causality into
immediate presentation is that great goals are achieved by life in the
present, a life that is fresh and immediate, but derives its richness from the
heritage of an animal body. The Deleuzian present is that kind of
suspended, overhead turntable and switch that lifts the real out of its
obligatory passages and commits it to the purely new. The Whiteheadian
present i s like heaven brought down to earth, or earth elevated to the status
of a celestial station.

THE ROAD AND THE VANISHING LINES

We are invited on two journeys, one heterogeneous, the other relatively

homogenous. The second takes the form of a Pilgrim's Journey, admittedly
more inventive than the original". But the first cuts off the road (as
Bunyan's "Hypocrite" does) and then takes the tan- gente. We are
confronted with two uses of the line, two concep- tions of the middle.
Deleuze, if he'd had the idea, might have schematized Whitehead's system,
brought full circle by his philosophy of reli- gion, as a "despotic regime" of
signs. What draws the road (the expressions "occasional road", "epochal
road" are frequent in Whitehead's work) specific to each of these
philosophies. The notion of importance, recurrent in Whitehead's2 , the
concepts of value, ends, self-presentation in relation to ends" explain why,

70. "Immortality", op. cit. p. 230.

71. Bunyan's edifying work.
72. See also Deleuze: ri It is probable that the notions of the singular and the regular, the
remarkable and the ordinary, have a greater ontoIo8ic importance for philosophy than truth
and falsity" {D.R., op. cit., p. 317). And WiiilEHEno, Le devenir..., op. cit., p. 132.
73. "Everything disappears under the sign of its value: pereunt et imputantur":
"Symbolism", p. 72.

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for this philosopher, the real is constructed and the road moves forward, a
ball of potentialized unis- sons. The fulguration, as innocent as a throw of
the dice, helps us understand why the real unravels in Deleuze, and why his
road flees. And the strange narratology o f Whiteheadian ingression, self-
seizure and satisfaction, and his strange neo-Baroque empirical-ideal
categories, c a n n o t hide the profound irreducibility of their respective
positions. Indeed, w e need only consider the theory of lines as summed up
in the Dfalogues with Claire Parnet7 ', to understand that, all things
considered, Whitehead would be on the side of class stability, not mass
movements, on the side, therefore, o f territorializing accumulation. We
could say that eternal objects are the reterritorialization of events and
subjects, and Whitehead's approach i s exactly as Deleuze describes it in
the absolute: "T h e r e is an accumulation of reterritorializations, a class
emerges t h a t benefits from them, and homogenizes and codes all the
segments"7 '. Seen from Deleuze's point of view, Whitehead's system admits
o f no line of escape between deterritorializations, and a harmony secretly
armed with discordance controls all escape.
In Deleuze's work, there is indeed a salvation, but it is not that of a
soterio-logy. It's about the affirmation of all t h i n g s , especially the
lowest. The unevenness per se of the activity of the dispars "disparation"
always goes off at an angle to join the elements of the series in an
instantaneous grip. Thus, only an asymmetrical synthesis can affirm the
lowest, forming the image of a "first degradation" (while the second
degradation would consist in the fall of the top into the bottom: disparifion)7
'. If Whitehead's roads of occasions wind in on themselves, it's because each
occasion proposes its experience as a foundation for a consequent: "a mind
must be a road whose occa- sions present community as regards the value
instituted, bequeathed by the preceding elements"7 '. Whitehead's fidelity to
a fundamental Humean problematic: causality-consecution. We are indeed
dealing with a world on the move, "with inconceivable slowness" indeed,
but progressing by accumulating the new (added value) "towards new
creations among which the physical world will end up resembling a tiny
splash barely discernible from nothingness".

74. Op. cit. p. 165.

75. Ibid.
76. DELEUzE, D. R., op. cit. p. 303.
77. WnrrsaEm, Le devenir..., op. cit. p. 130.
78. Idem, p. 188, Conclusion.

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Deleuze cannot deny that there are routes coded and oriented in this way.
They are the foundation of the main sign regimes7 . But that's not what' s
essential. The new is in Erewhon, elsewhere than nowhere and in the
present. Always escaping coding and itself, the vanishing line is
nonetheless extendable: such is the rhizome, a cascade of random
intensities, where successive planes form their "dispars", where serial
elements take two by two, with no continuation other than this confusing
line of successive angu- larities.
Here, Whitehead is perhaps a prisoner of Leibniz. And although he extols
at length the genial discovery of the baroque fold, Deleuze adds to it a
possibility only sketched in the original, and which Deleuze sees as consti-
tuting Nietzsche's own legacy: the affirmation o f divergent series. We
noted above that, by retaining differential and limit, Deleuze reverses the
approach, turning these concepts into "speed changes" ("plateaux").
Whitehead homogenizes "occa- sional flashes" capable of "differential" (in
the mechanical sense). He writes: "The fact of religious vision is the sole
basis of our optimism. Apart from this, human life is a flash of occasional
joy illuminating a heap of suffering and misery, a trifle of transitory
experience" (Science and the Modern World). Deleuzian optimism,
incapable of such Schopenhauerian admissions, relies precisely on the
acephalous flash that submits to no finality.
Neither God nor Reason in Deleuze. But there is a Reason in Whi-
tehead, a major and pervasive one. Nature is inherently coherent,
h a r m o n i o u s . It is Reason that emphasizes the new, elevating an
occasional flash of insight to t h e actual apprehension, then realization, o f
a fact. And only "fatigue" can block the impulse towards the new. The Best
and the End, the "nôus kratei" of Anaxagoras' Promise, then return.
"Reason is the special element in us that invests disciplined action against
the anarchic tendency and the tendency to repetition, and saves the world".
In a very Hegelian way, Whitehead endows Reason with the power of
Guile, which splits the Logos into transcendence, which asserts itself above
the world, and immanence, as the "Logos".

79. Mille plateaux, "De quelques régimes de signes" (On a few sign regimes).
80. WiuTrsHfAD, La fonction..., op. cit. p. 115, 127 (emphasis added).

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the very factor of the world: Plato and Ulysses," h e says. T h e r e ' s little
chance of escaping this order of Reason if Whitehead's God occupies the
two places of primordial and consequent, anhistorical and historical: "There
is a Kingdom of Heaven prior to the present passage of present things, and
the same Kingdom is completed in the fulfillment of that passage"'2 . It also
holds all the stages of the journey: "The positive determination balancing
the world requires a present entity imposing its own cohesion of immutable
character on each phase. Otherwise, the superabundant richness of the
possible would leave each creative phase unable to synthesize "".
Consequence: all evil, in its immediate triumph, is good in itself. Evil is
positive and destructive, good is positive and creative'4 . This affirmation of
the positive at all costs would not displease Deleuze: for him, negation is
merely the double of representation in the world of big concepts. But the
type of Whiteheadian affirmation is teleological and soteriolo- gical for a
tender collection of the world: "The wisdom of subjective purpose grasps
all actuality for what it can be in such a completed system, its pains, [...] its
joys - woven by the rightness of feeling into a har- mony that is universal,
immediate, plural, one, advancing without ever perishing. The harvests of
the destructive evil that never considers anyone but itself are reduced to the
insignificance of mere individual facts, and t h e good they have
accomplished [...] in the introduction of necessary contrasts, is still saved by
its relation to the completed whole: tender concern to see nothing lost". God
is thus the poet of the world, which he directs through his vision of
goodness, truth and beauty.
The term "Reason" would make Deleuze flee: it is responsible for the
image of thought that prevents philosophizing. The Whi- teheadian pilgrim
sees his path cut by a ludion, an elusive Manig. We've seen that Deleuze
always takes everything in stride, even if it means getting thrown out, in
order to avoid ordiri ab ovo or assuming an end. The new in Deleuze's work
disjuncts, shunts. What's interesting is the untimely, Péguy's Internet".
Capture, rupture, in medias res, confusing the circles of

81. Wiirr£irEm, La fonction..., op. cit. p. 106-107. In this way, Reason can act in the
smallest of organisms, a tick or a paramecium. Positive and negative prehensions may also
have something to do with the uexküllian scheme of the paramecium in its positive or
negative (repulsive) relationship with the environment.
82. WmTEHfm, Le devenir..., op. cit. p. 106.
83. WinTEii£m, Le devenir..., op. cit. p. 113.
84. Idem, p. 114.
85. WHiiziisno, P.R., op. cit. conclusion, 4.
86. DELEuzz, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? op. cit. p. 106-107.

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pure centration'7 . Undeniably, Whitehead centers his system and locks it

down. Process and Reality cannot be considered a Deleuzian Preface, but
rather a categorical schema that overpowers the work, a subtle self-
reference, since the gift of a form or schema is the essence of the creative
process and the guarantee of major satisfaction. In a way, unconsciously no
doubt, White- head makes himself God of his work, endowing it with the
schema as Plato did for the City (a/fi la) and Hegel for the Real. The result
is the supreme satisfaction of an all-encompassing physical and conceptual
subjective grasp.
In the final analysis, the difference between the two thinkers is absolute
and irreducible. In spite of all the affinities and complicities we thought
we'd be able to add to the dossier, what remains is the great divide between
a world without God and a world in God. There's Dionysus, of course, and
the conceptual characters so delightful in Deleuze. But the absence of God
leads to a deeper exploration of the here-and-now, whose value is inverted
by the refutation of the classical image of thought and the choice of a
Nietzschean anti-platonism. Geography and cartography culminate in recent
Deleuzian essays on the types of planes of consistency, reference,
composition, immanence and insistence. But one senses in a Deleuzian
reti- cence to the description of "prospects" how much the philosopher, in
search of potential difference as intensity, is becoming m o r e and more
clearly a thinker of art, a poet of philosophy: so that it is less the plane than
the possibility for any plane to be a plano- mène, a plateau of isotropy,
reminiscent of Cézanne's zones of indeterminacy or plan-plis, that arouses
his interest and his research. T h e idea behind Qu'est-ce que la
philosophie? Chaoids: planes drawn from chaos, just as conics come from
encounters between cone and plane. "Philosophy wants to save the infinite
by giving it consistency; it traces a plane of immanence that carries to
infinity events or concepts consisting in the action of conceptual characters.
Science renounces infinity to gain reference: it traces a plane of only
indefinite coordinates, which defines states of affairs, functions and
referential propositions, under the action of partial observers. Art wants to
create a finite that gives back the infinite - it traces a compositional plane
that in turn carries composed movements or sensations, under t h e action of
aesthetic figures". While it's true that

87. Deleuze often cites Anglo-American novelists in this connection, and develops the
idea of stammering, theft (of language) or minority.
88. DziEuzE and GuarTani, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? op. cit. p. 186.

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Whitehead, too, would have these virtual cuts into chaos, but they would
be chronoi "des, while Deleuze would have them spatiOf'des. The
importance of the anhistorical and the timeless, of illocalisable absolute
speed in the former, the insistence of time (perishing, non-actual
eternity, objective immortality, sempiternality, history of the world and
of God) in the latter. Where is the (placeless) place of becoming as
creator of the new, that's what fascinates Deleuze. Where is t h e time of
becoming as creator of a world in God? This is the question Whitehead
addresses.
Whitehead and Deleuze see their world subordinated to a decision that
seems external, the affirmation that goes so far as to bring back the
bottom on the one hand, the justification of every occasion in the name
of an ultimate return, on the other. Can we then discover, according to
the principles of Deleuze's neo-baroque post-structuralism, an
engagement between a series of elements named Deleuze and another
series of elements named White- head, a dispars that appears and
disappears, even if it means reappearing to marcotter in another plane?

Arnaud VnLANI

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