Folds and folding

Folds and folding count among the most vital and resonant terms in Deleuze's copious and varied writings. The modest monosyllable, "pli", that refers both to a twist of fabric and to the origins of life, bears a lightness and density that mark many of the philosopher's reflections on questions of being and on the nature of events. Like the "events" of May 1968 in Paris, in 1988 the publication of Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque) became an event in itself and has since been a point of reference for the oeuvre in general. The intention behind the book, states the terse endnote on the back cover, is to show how, in the Baroque age that extends from the Counter Reformation to the Neo-Baroque in contemporary times, the fold can be taken as a figure and a form bearing almost infinite conceptual force. Leibniz's philosophy of the monad can be labelled "Baroque" because in the world of his fragmentary writing "everything folds, unfolds, refolds" (Deleuze, Le Pli, back cover). The soul is conceived as a monad, an enclosed space in a room without either doors or windows that draws its "clear perceptions" from a dark background (Le Pli, back cover). Deleuze notes that the German philosopher's response to the Cartesian concept of the soul can be understood only by analogy with the inside of a Baroque chapel, whose inner walls are erected with slabs of black marble. "Light arrives only through openings imperceptible to the viewer inside." Thus, he adds, the "soul is replete with obscure folds" (ibid.). Implied is that the soul he finds in the chapel also inhabits the neo-Baroque worlds of poetry, literature, painting and music that include the work of near-contemporary creators from Mallarmé, Proust and Boulez to Hanta'i. It is further suggested that the timeless question

refer to an original or individual subject but to a "being-language", and things visible point to a "being-light" that illuminates "forms, proportions, perspectives" that would be free of any intentional gaze (FCLT: 109, trans, mod.). Anticipating his work on Leibniz, Deleuze notes that Foucault causes intentionality to be collapsed in the gap between "the two monads" (FCLT: 109, trans, mod.) of seeing and speaking. Thus phenomenology is converted into epistemology. To see and to speak is to know, "but we don't see what we are speaking of, and we don't speak of what we are seeing" (FCLT: 109, trans, mod.). Nothing can precede or antedate knowledge (savoir), even though knowledge or knowing is "irremediably double" (FCLT: 109, trans, mod.) - hence folded - as speaking and seeing, as language and light, which are independent of intending subjects who would be speakers and seers.