Deleuze's Incompossible Worlds: How The Fold Rewrites Leibniz Without God
In his work The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Gilles Deleuze embraces Leibniz's idea of possible worlds, yet he eliminates the role of divine intervention, leading to incompossibility without the presence of God. Leibniz introduced possible worlds to illustrate God's selection of this universe from countless coherent alternatives. Compossibility refers to events that can coexist without contradiction, whereas incompossibility signifies logical conflict. Deleuze preserves these concepts but separates them from religious context, portraying the evolution from Baroque to neo-Baroque as divergences emerge within a single world. Here, God is redefined as Process, endorsing incompossibilities. Deleuze contrasts this with Alfred North Whitehead's prehensions and David Lewis's modal realism, advocating for open multiplicity and chaosmos instead of closed totalities.
Key facts
- Gilles Deleuze develops incompossibility without divine arbitration in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.
- Leibniz held that infinitely many possible worlds exist in the divine intellect and God selects the richest, most orderly one.
- Compossibility describes events that can share a world without contradiction; incompossibility marks logical conflict.
- In Leibniz's system, Adam never sinned, Caesar never crossed the Rubicon, and the Roman Empire never existed in other possible worlds.
- Each monad contains all its predicates, so a different Caesar would be a different monad belonging to a different world.
- God functions as the screen allowing only compossible events into the actual world.
- Deleuze describes the shift from the Baroque, which divided divergences into separate worlds, to the neo-Baroque, which lets them coexist in one world.
- Deleuze cites Alfred North Whitehead as Leibniz's true successor and contrasts his position with David Lewis's modal realism.
Entities
Artists
- Gilles Deleuze
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Baruch Spinoza
- Alfred North Whitehead
- David Lewis
- Adam
- Caesar
- Sextus
- Lucretia
- Étienne Ficquet
- Henry Fuseli
- Moses Haughton Jr.
- Rembrandt van Rijn
- Andrea Sacchi
- Marcantonio Pasqualini
Institutions
- The Collector
- National Galleries of Scotland
- British Museum
- National Gallery of Art
- Wellcome Collection
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Locations
- London
- United Kingdom
- Washington, DC
- United States
- New York
- Rome
- Roman Empire