ABSTRACT
It is one of the ironies of Gilles Deleuze's thought that although it counts itself as a rigorous thought of difference, it often uses for its models philosophers whose own work has been considered tightly unitary or monistic. This chapter argues that juxtapositions of unity and difference are not accidental, but are indeed the requirements of Deleuze's thought. The attempt to assess Deleuze's claims about difference cannot proceed, however, in a traditional philosophical fashion. For Deleuze, the project of philosophy is one of creating, arranging, and rearranging perspectives; it is, as he puts it, the discipline that consists in creating concepts. Philosophy is a practice whose operations are to be evaluated by the effects that they give rise to. The concept of life that Deleuze invokes periodically in his writings reflects his ambiguity about evaluation. Philosophy is a project of creation, of bringing into being concepts that define new perspectives.
