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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