The reading group on The Fold progresses well, with a core of 6 people attending and a rhythm to the sessions as we work through various moments in each chapter before trying to establish something like a broader ‘shape’.  Yesterday’s session focused on Chapter 5, ‘Incompossibility, Individuality, Liberty’, where the text moves onto a different terrain from the ‘ontological’ pure and simple.  The famous example of ‘Adam the sinner’ and the world in which he sins being the best possible world is what the chapter opens with and the dynamic is to work from the concept of incompossibility through to the ‘moral’ problem addressed by the Theodicy.  The chapter title, naming these three peculiar concepts, tracks this trajectory.

As usual we retired to the Amersham Arms after the session for a pint or two and a decompression, finding ourselves drinking in the outside garden, a kind of side alley to the pub strewn with a vibrant graffiti art exhibition.  Towards the end of the reading session I had increasingly questioned the viability of the account of morality that Deleuze draws and we had encountered one of the perennial questions of Deleuze scholarship and discussion – does a Deleuzian ontology exhibit a kind of moral injunction to radical lifestyle?  There is a reading of Deleuze, that is now frowned upon perhaps, which used to take the work of Deleuze and use it to justify ‘extremities’ of lifestyle – wine and strange drugs as a means to ontological intellectual intuition.  It’s doubtful that it much matters whether this is an ‘accurate’ reading of Deleuze since it is no doubt possible to draw upon his work to either justify or berate such a lifestyle, such means of knowledge.  It is clear, even from just this chapter of F, that there is some sort of injunction that can be drawn from Deleuze, an injunction that is found here in the form of ‘increase the clear region of your monad’.  Take the following for example:

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Chapter 2 of F begins, if possible, even more obscurely than Chapter 1.  The first line of F, Chapter 1, is ‘The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait’ (F:3).  This might be a dense sentence in that it’s implications will need to be unpacked and explored but compared to the first sentence of Chapter 2 it seems relatively transparent.

‘Inflection is the ideal genetic element of the variable curve or fold.’ (F:14)  So begins Chapter 2.  It continues – ‘Inflection is the authentic atom, the elastic point.  This is what Klee extracts as the genetic element of the active, spontaneous line’ (ibid).

One of my fellow readers at the group had done some useful background research and traced the diagram or illustration that occurs at the beginning of Chapter 2 (F:15), tracking it to Klee’s ‘Pedagogical Notebooks’ where I didn’t notice any immediate reference to inflection but where the curve is described as ‘an active line on a walk for a walk’s sake’, which a number of us commented on as it seemed close to the image of the schizophrenic on a walk that Deleuze and Guattari use at the beginning of Anti-Oedipus.

These ‘backgrounds’ that can be filled in by tracking down some of the more allusive and elusive sources that fill Deleuze’s work help in the activity of familiarising ourselves with the text.  In particular the diagram, which stands in the text unsourced, becomes less random and seems located, allowing us to feel like there is a work of unpacking to be done in reading F that is not without some point or purpose – that we’re not, as it were, on a wild goose chase.  Nothing in the Klee reference, however, immediately illuminates quite what this notion of ‘inflection’ is doing here.

Another reader had tracked down some background that more specifically focused on the meaning of inflection, tracking it to a a possible geometric source where we can find that there is a use within the realm of differential calculus, where an inflection (inflexion) point has a specific role to play.  Now it is not the case that the geometric usage needs to tally with the claim Deleuze makes (‘Inflection is the ideal genetic element of the variable curve or fold.’) since it is not a geometric claim that is being presented, at least I am not taking it to be such.  It is rather a philosophical claim.  It is clear from the presentation that it is Klee, not geometry, which Deleuze is drawing on and moreover it is Klee’s ‘methodological’ or ‘philosophical’ comments. Quite what philosophical claim is it, however, that Deleuze is attempting to put forward? 

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