Table Of ContentDeleuze and Ancient Greek Physics
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Deleuze and Ancient Greek Physics
The Image of Nature
Michael James Bennett
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Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Ancient Philosophy
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
List of Abbreviations vii
Introduction 1
1 Plato: Difference and Non-Being 13
2 Stoicism: Sense and Truth 33
3 Stoicism: Surface and Paradox 61
4 Stoicism: Events and Fate 87
5 Aristotle: Analogy and Difference 117
6 Aristotle: Nature and Individuation 143
7 Epicureanism: Atoms and Minima 165
8 Epicureanism: Problematic Ideas and the Swerve 191
9 Epicureanism and Stoicism: Chaos and Thought 229
Conclusion 251
Bibliography 260
Index 272
Acknowledgments
For their support of this project from its inception and their incisive feedback
on an earlier version of it, I would like to thank Barry Allen, Ric Arthur, and
Howard Jones. Sincere thanks also to Dan Smith and Keith Ansell Pearson
for their useful feedback and welcome encouragement. My colleagues in the
Department of Philosophy at McMaster University and the University of King’s
College have indirectly improved the argument of this book with innumerable
small questions that have honed and sharpened it. My gratitude also extends to
the editors and production division at Bloomsbury Academic for their diligence.
This work was funded, in part, by the Social Studies and Humanities Research
Council of Canada, and made possible by the libraries at McGill University
and Dalhousie University where it was, for the most part, written. Finally, Kait
Pinder must be singled out for her unrelenting generosity.
List of Abbreviations
Works by Deleuze and Guattari
AV “The Actual and the Virtual”
B Bergsonism
CC Essays Critical and Clinical
D Dialogues (with Claire Parnet)
DI Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974
DR Difference and Repetition
EP Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza
F The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque
FB Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
K Kant’s Critical Philosophy
LN “Lucrèce et le naturalisme”
LS The Logic of Sense
N Negotiations: 1972–1990
NP Nietzsche and Philosophy
PI Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life
PS Proust and Signs
TP A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
TRM Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995
WP What is Philosophy?
viii List of Abbreviations
Fragments and Testimonies
DK Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, edited by H. Diels and W. Kranz
D.L. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
HP The Hellenistic Philosophers, edited by A. A. Long and David Sedley
S.E. M Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos
S.E. PH Sextus Empiricus, Purrhoneioi hupotuposeis
SVF Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, edited by H. von Arnim
Other Authors
CPR Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Introduction
[The Stoics] compare philosophy to an animal, likening logic to the bones and
sinews, ethics to the fleshier parts, and physics to the soul.
—Diogenes Laertius
Appreciating how exactly Gilles Deleuze appropriates concepts from ancient
Greek philosophy, and from Hellenistic physics in particular, is crucial for
grasping the significance of some of his best known and most important
arguments, and for getting a sense of the shape of his thought as a whole.
Deleuze develops many key concepts, like “event,” “sense,” “difference,”
“stratification,” “problem,” “differential,” “the virtual,” and “image of thought,”
in conversation with Plato, Chrysippus, Aristotle, and Epicurus.
Although Deleuze notoriously advocates the “reversal of Platonism,” this
book moves beyond the prominence of Plato and focuses on his readings of
the Stoics, Aristotle, and Epicurus. The influence of these other ancient Greek
sources on Deleuze has remained less well understood (although by no means
completely ignored), possibly because his references to them tend to be allusive
and oblique. Deleuze’s considerable classical erudition is often confined
to footnotes, brief name-checks, or staggeringly condensed arguments.
Part of my purpose here is, therefore, to reconstruct and critically evaluate
Deleuze’s interpretations of these philosophers in light of the extant texts and
contemporary scholarship on Greek philosophy.
My approach combines an appreciation of Deleuze’s wariness of the history
of philosophy as a merely reproductive discipline, and his idiosyncratic
approach to what he calls the historical “mediators” (intercesseurs) of his own
thought, with the rich philological, linguistic, and logical methods of analytic
history of philosophy. This tack reveals not only how important the Stoics
and Epicureans are to Deleuze—the influence of the latter seems to have been
seriously underappreciated—but also how these Hellenistic sources explain
