ABSTRACT
As we have seen briefly in the previous chapter, Badiou’s central claim regarding Deleuze – that his philosophy is oriented around the thesis that Being is One – deviates substantially from a number of important moments in the latter’s work. However, the strength of Badiou’s argument is that the elaboration of this thesis takes place across a range of key concepts in Deleuze. In fact, these concepts mirror the four key concepts in Badiou’s Being and Event : being (the One, the virtual), the event, truth and subject (thought). In other words, Badiou’s claim is not simply that Deleuze’s philosophy is explicitly a meditation on the single question of the One; indeed, he insists from the beginning of his text that the surface of the Deleuzean text is constituted by a massive profusion of particularities (cinema, Kafka, Kant, Carmelo Bene, mathematics, etc.). Badiou will even claim, correctly to my mind, that the word “Being” is one that Deleuze “only uses in a preliminary and limited manner” (DCB 28/45). Rather, Deleuze proceeds on Badiou’s account by examining a vast array of particular “simulacra”(qua equivocal and ephemeral emanations of the One) in order to establish in thought their common being in the One:
In a considerable part of his work, Deleuze adopts a procedure that, starting from the constraint exercised by a particular case-of-thought – it does not matter if it concerns Foucault or Sacher-Masoch – consists in trying out a name of Being and in constructing a protocol of thought (that is to be as automatic as possible) by which the pertinence of this name can be evaluated with respect to the essential property that one expects it to preserve (or even to reinforce in thought): namely, univocity.
(DCB 28/45)