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ONE
INTRODUCTION

What is philosophy? Let’s imagine that a certain kind of philo-

sophical thinking, one that in English-speaking contexts goes by the
name “Continental,” passes from Germany to France after World War
II. After Husserl and Heidegger, with an assist from Bergson and
Sartre, philosophy switches territories and gears and becomes struc-
turalism, whose main purpose (again from the standpoint of Eng-
lish readers of French philosophy) is to become poststructuralism.
Poststructuralism has integrity as a (French) philosophical move-
ment, although it immediately bifurcates into deconstruction, which
attaches to the proper name of Jacques Derrida, and postmodernism,
which is invented by Jean-François Lyotard but is useful as a catch-
all to encompass most forms of poststructuralism. Let’s imagine that
there are two major French philosophers in the second half of the
twentieth century who are not easily assimilated into these categori-
cal schemas: Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. Finally, let’s consider
that there are two main problems of philosophy toward the end of the
twentieth century: First, the general problem posed by the linguistic
turn that affects all forms of philosophy in the twentieth century, ana-
lytic as well as Continental—this turn eclipses both the traditional
philosophical concerns with ontology as well as Heidegger’s renewal
of the question of being, which is also posed in terms of language.
Second, the problem that haunts twentieth-century philosophy,

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especially after World War II, is the problem of totality, which dis-
tinguishes a postwar and post-Holocaust (as well as anti-Hegelian)
philosophical attitude.
Whether the linguistic turn is associated with Frege or Nietzsche
or Saussure, language becomes the fundamental problem of philoso-
phy during the twentieth century. Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger
take up the question of language and its relation to reality in different
ways. Jürgen Habermas claims that we can see a “paradigm shift from
philosophy of consciousness to philosophy of language” around the
turn of the twentieth century.1 At the beginning of Being and Event,
Badiou declares that Heidegger is “the last universally recognizable
philosopher,” primarily because he renews the question of being. 2
However, Badiou rejects Heidegger’s poetic discourse as the primary
model for philosophy, opting instead for a mathematical ontology.
Mathematics, not poetry, “pronounces what is expressible of being
qua being.”3 According to Badiou, “there is little doubt that the cen-
tury has been ontological, and that this destiny is far more essential
than the ‘linguistic turn’ with which it has been credited.”4 Badiou
opposes the linguistic turn in philosophy that characterizes philoso-
phy of much of the century, and calls for a renewed formalization in
and of philosophy.
Heidegger raises the ontological question, but then he links ontol-
ogy with language. Post-Heideggerian French philosophy, also influ-
enced by Saussure’s linguistics, remains obsessed with questions of
language, and how it affects the discourses of phenomenology and
hermeneutics. Deleuze avoided these dominant discourses of herme-
neutics and phenomenology, and he never viewed language as a fun-
damental problem. Deleuze’s philosophy was always already onto-
logical, and it was not shaped by the linguistic turn. Badiou follows
Deleuze in evading the consequences of the linguistic turn, although
Badiou is more invested in formalizing this ontology in mathemati-
cal terms, whereas Deleuze is more interested in problematizing
philosophy, that is, seeing how philosophy asks questions and poses
problems. Badiou’s philosophy and his mathematics are axiomatic,
whereas Deleuze’s philosophy is more unsettled, and in a continual
state of becoming.

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The problem of totality is partly the theoretical response of Euro-

pean philosophy to the shocking forms of totalitarianism that emerged
in the twentieth century, most famously under the names of fascism
(Nazism) and communism (Stalinism).5 In order to avoid or oppose
totality, philosophers have sought ways of affirming pluralism, per-
spectivalism, difference, and multiplicity. Continental philosophers
attempt to think and to thematize that which resists thought and
escapes thematization. Here the immediate enemy is Hegel’s encyclo-
pedic system of dialectics, because it is seen as swallowing all forms
of thought and life. Kierkegaard’s existential protest against Hegel is
valorized as an authentic opposition to a totalizing and dehumanizing
system. Although in the early twentieth century a Marxist Hegelian-
ism was extremely influential in French thought, primarily by way of
Alexandre Kojève’s incredible synthesis,6 after the crimes of Stalinism
became apparent Hegel’s thought became suspected of being com-
plicit with the logic of totalitarianism.
For most of the late twentieth century, Hegel was viewed opposi-
tionally, and Deleuze was one of the main philosophers who wanted
nothing to do with Hegelian dialectics. At the turn of the twenty-
first century, however, Hegelianism has been rehabilitated beyond the
poststructuralist critique, which has been shown to be a caricature by
the important work of Slavoj Žižek, Catherine Malabou, and others.7
Behind the problem of totality, however, lies the problem of the One,
and hidden in the shadow of Hegel looms Plato. Deleuze opposes
Platonism and the One by liberating simulacra from their enslave-
ment to models, forms, or copies, while Badiou rehabilitates Plato but
rejects the One. Both Badiou and Deleuze valorize the multiple, but
in different ways, as will become clear in this study. Deleuze is able
to affirm multiplicity by opposing Platonism, and he sees the death
of God as the dismantling of the foundational One. Badiou, however,
claims that Deleuze cannot escape the shadow of the One, and ends
up grounding multiplicity in a renewed vision of the One, whereas for
Badiou an affirmation of Plato is possible that does not necessitate an
embrace of the One. A genuine Platonic multiplicity can be achieved
mathematically, by means of set theory, and this set theory provides
Badiou an ontology that frames an event. Even though the event

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cannot be prescribed from mathematical being as irreducible mul-

tiplicity, an understanding of being allows one to understand how it
is that events can happen. Finally, the follow-up to Being and Event,
Logics of Worlds, develops a transcendental logic that explains how
events irrupt out of being.
This book offers a counterreading of Deleuze over against and
beyond Badiou’s powerful critique in his influential work Deleuze: The
Clamor of Being, published in French in 1997, shortly after Deleuze’s
death in 1995, and translated into English in 2000. Badiou was inspired
by a series of written letters between himself and Deleuze between
1992 and 1994 that eventually came to an end and an impasse. Deleuze
told Badiou that he did not want his letters published, declaring them
too “‘abstract,’ not up to the occasion.”8 After Deleuze died, Badiou
was asked to write an essay on Deleuze, and he says that he saw this
as “one last, posthumous letter” written to a friend with whom he had
a relationship that was conflicted, and as concerning a philosophical
encounter that never quite took place.9 Badiou expresses his critique
in strong terms, although he seems ambivalent about attacking the
person he considers his only serious contemporary rival after the pub-
lication in 1988 of Being and Event. Badiou claims, despite Deleuze’s
language celebrating multiplicity, that Deleuze is ultimately a philoso-
pher of the One.
In order to open up a space for his own claim as a great philoso-
pher, Badiou is forced to criticize and ultimately distort Deleuze’s phi-
losophy, as I will show in this book. Badiou claims that, in addition
to being a philosopher of the One and deceiving most of his read-
ers about it, Deleuze is austere, aristocratic, and politically quietist
in his work. However, he reads Deleuze selectively and ignores what
does not fit the image of Deleuze that he constructs. In chapter 2,
I will exposit Badiou’s critique and show how he interprets Deleuze
in his influential book. This reading of Badiou’s book will provide a
foil against which to develop my reading of Deleuze, which occurs in
chapters 3–5. In chapter 3, I will provide my own reading of Deleuze’s
masterwork, Difference and Repetition. I claim that it is not possible
to really understand Deleuze’s thought without engaging and compre-
hending Difference and Repetition, although at the same time this is

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extremely difficult to do because Deleuze synthesizes so much philo-

sophical, scientific, and literary material, and he radicalizes it in pro-
found and unexpected ways.
In chapter 4, “Deleuze’s Logic of Double Articulation,” I focus on
Deleuze’s logic, from his follow-up to Difference and Repetition, The
Logic of Sense. In The Logic of Sense, drawing from Stoicism as well
as his reading of Lewis Carroll, Deleuze posits two series, a series of
bodies and a series of sense. This duality is not grounded in a unity,
although Badiou cannot read it any other way. I will explain how
Deleuze’s logic in The Logic of Sense develops into his logic of double
articulation in A Thousand Plateaus, written with Guattari. Further-
more, this logic of double articulation can be read as a motor schema,
to use Catherine Malabou’s phrase from her book Plasticity at the
Dusk of Writing. Although Malabou privileges Hegel, Heidegger, and
Derrida in her work, I argue that her understanding of plasticity is
informed by Deleuze and is in some respects compatible with his
philosophy, although there is a profound tension in reading Hegelian
dialectics together with Deleuzian difference. Chapter 5, “Producing
the Event as Machine, as Fold, and as Image,” takes the notion of event
that Deleuze expresses in The Logic of Sense and shows the shape it
takes in his later work, specifically Anti-Oedipus, The Fold, and the
Cinema books.
In this book I am explicitly developing a coherent interpretation
of Deleuze’s philosophy over the course of his extraordinary career.
For this reason I will not directly engage with the many important
and influential works Deleuze wrote about other figures, including
Hume, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Proust, Bergson, Kant, Sacher-Masoch,
Kafka, and Bacon. These are all valuable and important studies, and
in many ways Deleuze worked out his philosophy by means of a
profound engagement with other thinkers as well as artists, but the
danger of reading Deleuze on another figure is that the result is a
composite. Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example, is the expression of
a kind of Deleuze-Nietzsche. In this book, Deleuze helped create the
so-called French Nietzsche who became so prominent and influential
in the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, it takes a great deal of time
and effort to extract Deleuze from this composite, and if readers of

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Deleuze in English exclusively focus on these texts as opposed to the

foundational philosophical works like Difference and Repetition and
The Logic of Sense, it becomes almost impossible to adequately under-
stand Deleuze’s overall thought.
According to my interpretation, Deleuze is a philosopher of the
event. Of course, he is not the only philosopher who thematizes the
idea of the event, but his understanding of an event is crucial for
appreciating the importance this term takes on in poststructuralism
and eventually for Badiou. Badiou axiomatizes being in order to allow
for an event. In chapters 6 and 7, I will turn directly to Badiou’s phi-
losophy in his major works. Although I favor Deleuze and criticize
Badiou in this book, I am in no way dismissive of his work and its
significance. I will engage with Badiou explicitly and seriously, but
it will be a contrasting reading to the one I valorize of Deleuze, so
in this sense it is a limited (and limiting) reading. Chapter 6, “Being
a Sublime Event,” will focus mainly on Being and Event, although I
will draw a connection with his early work, The Concept of Model. In
addition to explicating Badiou’s mathematical ontology, I will criti-
cally engage it from the standpoint of Kant and the Kantian sublime.
Both Badiou and Deleuze were hostile to Kant and Kantianism, but
Deleuze acknowledged Kant’s influence more explicitly and repressed
Hegel’s, whereas Badiou acknowledges his similarity to Hegel but
repudiates Kant. I will show, however, that Badiou’s mathematical
ontology almost exactly reproduces Kant’s argument concerning
the mathematical sublime, even if Badiou expresses it in terms of
set theory.
Chapter 7, “Being a Subject in a Transcendental World,” shows how
Badiou’s Logics of Worlds remedies a lack of consideration of the sub-
ject in Being and Event. In many respects, subjectivity is downplayed
in Being and Event, and a subject comes into being out of fidelity to
an event rather than by being inscribed in being. At the end of Being
and Event, Badiou even criticizes the residual Cartesianism in Lacan,
suggesting that we need to get away from “the idea that there were
always some subjects.”10 From this extreme position, which Badiou
adopts in order to avoid the subjectivity of pathos, Romanticism, and
language, he returns to an earlier work, Theory of the Subject, in order

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to integrate the subject more deeply into being in Logics of Worlds.

I will show how the subject becomes compatible with the object in
this sequel, and how both converge on the thinking of a body. Logics
of Worlds does not constitute a break with Being and Event, but is a
qualification and complexification of the dualism that pervades Being
and Event.
I argue that Badiou’s logic in Logics of Worlds is more compatible
with Deleuze than his logic in Being and Event, even though Badiou
describes himself as becoming more Hegelian. At the same time,
Badiou’s axiomatization of mathematics in set theory still contrasts
with Deleuze’s concern with the immanent becoming of mathematics
and physics. In a more speculative chapter, I assert the significance of
theoretical physics over against theoretical mathematics, and suggest
that this emphasis on physics is not a return to the Pre-Socratics, as
Badiou charges in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Chapter 8 sketches
a provocative “Energetics of Being” that is inspired by Deleuze, but
draws out more explicitly some of the connections of his work with
theoretical physics, which Deleuze himself mostly neglected to spec-
ify. Deleuze engaged more obviously with mathematics and biology
than with physics, but he was writing at the same time that chaos
theory and complexity theory were being elaborated, and he provides
a philosophical framework that better accounts for these phenomena
than the strictures of Badiou’s thought.
In chapter 9, I argue that the creation of a time-image is a directly
political and revolutionary event for Deleuze, against the charge that
Deleuze detached himself from politics and political concerns at
the end of his life and retreated into aesthetics. Badiou argues that
Deleuze retreats into a kind of austere, solipsistic solitude toward
the end of his life. I suggest that this reading is incorrect, because
it ignores the revolutionary political significance of the time-image
that Deleuze constructs in Cinema 2. Along with Guattari, in A Thou-
sand Plateaus Deleuze with his analysis of nomadology and the war
machine presses a political analysis of territory as far as it will go,
but he realizes that deterritorialization will always be reterritorial-
ized by the state, with its apparatuses of capture. In order to escape
this inevitable reterritorialization, Deleuze turns to aesthetics, first in

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his book on Francis Bacon, and then his books on Cinema. Politics
thought as territory conforms to what Deleuze calls the movement-
image, whereas his goal in Cinema 2 is to construct a time-image,
a brain for the people who do not yet exist but can be brought into
existence. The state cannot think, which is why the state cannot create
a time-image, only appropriate it. Although Deleuze’s political event
is different from Badiou’s, I will suggest that it is no less important
and in some respects it is potentially more revolutionary. In a final
chapter on “Vodou Economics,” I will examine Haiti as a sort of case
study of what Deleuze calls “the people who are missing” in contem-
porary neoliberalism, and suggest that understanding Vodou spirits
or lwa in terms of a time-image provides striking resources for con-
ceiving a radical politics in a postsecularist context. This last chapter
is less explicitly focused on Deleuze, but it develops a quasi-Deleuzian
reading of and application for our contemporary political and eco-
nomic situation, and shows why Deleuze remains an important theo-
retical resource.

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