Against Continuity Gilles Deleuze's Speculative Realism

Against Continuity is the first book to demonstrate that the beating heart of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy is a systematic ontology of irreducible, singular entities. This requires a radical break with decades of Deleuzian orthodoxy, according to which Deleuze's metaphysics revolves around the dissolution of discrete entities into a continuous world of flows and events.

With reference to all of Deleuze's work, including published and untranslated seminars and the recently published Lettres et autres textes, Arjen Kleinherenbrink critically compares Deleuze's ontology to seven related contemporary thinkers: Levi Bryant, Maurizio Ferraris, Markus Gabriel, Manuel DeLanda, Graham Harman, Tristan Garcia and Bruno Latour. These comparisons establish Deleuze as an important precursor to object-oriented speculative realism and open up exciting new avenues of thought for critics and supporters of Deleuze alike.

Arjen Kleinherenbrink is Assistant Professor in the Center for Contemporary European Philosophy, in the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen.

List of Figures
Abbreviations
Preface

Introduction: The Machine Thesis
All Entities are Machines
A Speculative Philosophy Method and Structure

1. Deleuze and Ontology
Much Ado About Ontology
To the Things Themselves
A Fourfold and Three Syntheses
First Note--Levi Bryant and Twofold Machines

2. The Externality Thesis
Relations are External to Terms
The Experience of Externality
Speculative Arguments for Externality

3. Critiques of Internalism
Difference and Repetition
Depth and Height
The Image of Thought

4. The Machinic Body
No Being Without a Body
All Bodies are Problematic
Second Note--Maurizio Ferraris and Unamendable Objects

5. Relations between Machines
The Connective Synthesis
Sense at the Surface
Actuality is a Twofold
Third Note--Markus Gabriel and Fields of Sense

6. Inside the Machines
The Powers that Be
Essence is a Twofold
Fourth Note--Manuel DeLanda and Assemblage Theory

7. Machines and Change
The Disjunctive Synthesis
Fifth Note--Graham Harman and Fourfold Objects
The Notion of Becoming
Assemblages and Intensities

8. The Construction of Machines
The Conjunctive Synthesis
Sixth note--Tristan Garcia and Formal Things
Rhizomes and Hierarchies

9. Machine Ontology and Thought
Self and World
Seventh Note--Bruno Latour and Irreducible Actants
Platonism and Paralogisms
A Transcendental Empiricism

Conclusion: Ontology and Discontinuity

Bibliography

Primary Sources: Published
Primary Sources: Unpublished
Secondary Sources: Published
Secondary Sources: Unpublished

Acknowledgements