Deleuze and Cosmology

by Janae Sholtz (Editor), Alain Beaulieu (Editor)

Overview

This edited collection investigates how Deleuze’s interventions into cosmological thinking have transformed, challenged, or influenced, as well as been influenced by, the ways that cosmology has been thought and determined from the perspective of the philosophic tradition as well as from the perspective of science and arts.



These sixteen essays apply Deleuze’s cosmological perspective to a range of scientific, metaphysical, philosophical, and aesthetic issues, illustrating the intertwinement of the various modes of thought (philosophy, science and arts) on a cosmic scale, which lead to new ways of understanding relational beings, time/space, processes of variation, folding, potentiality and creativity. By integrating the observations and speculations of quantum theory, as well as other areas of cosmological thinking, with Deleuze’s cosmological vision, we find that philosophy, sciences and arts can provide each other with mutual inspiration, pushing the boundaries of thought to the outer reaches of the known and beyond.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399560894
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2026
Series:	Deleuze Connections
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Janae Sholtz is Professor of Philosophy, Director of General Education, and Coordinator of Women’s and Gender Studies at Alvernia Universityand Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg Philosophy Department. Sholtz received the Senior Neag Scholar award and the Junior Neag Scholar award from Alvernia University. She is the author of The Invention of a People, Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political (Edinburgh UniversityPress), co-editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism, and French and Italian Stoicisms: From Sartre to Agamben. She is an internationally recognized feminist and Deleuzian scholar, publishing on social justice and gender; aesthetics, affect, and desire; and Deleuze and the cosmic, currently writing on Deleuze, new materialism and a new image of thought.

Alain Beaulieu is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Laurentian University, Canada. He has a Doctorat de 3e cycle in philosophy from the Universityé de Paris 8 with a thesis on Gilles Deleuze et la phénoménologie (Sils Maria/Vrin, 2nd ed. 2006). He published Cuerpo y acontecimiento. La estética de Gilles Deleuze (Letra Viva, 2012), Gilles Deleuze et ses contemporains (Harmattan, 2011) and (co)edited the following works: Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics (Lexington, 2014), Abécédaire de Martin Heidegger (Sils Maria/Vrin, 2008), Michel Foucault and Power Today (Lexington, 2006), Gilles Deleuze. Héritage philosophique (PUF, 2005), as well as Michel Foucault et le contrôle social (PU Laval, 2nd ed. 2008).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Illustrations

Introduction: Toward a New Cosmic Sensitivity
Janae Sholtz and Alain Beaulieu

Part I. Creative Cosmology: Chaos and the Cosmic
1. What is Invention? Deleuze and Guattari and the New
Dorothea Olkowski
2. Deleuze, an Unwitting Milesian?
Arnaud Villani
3. Cosmic Triptych: A Deleuzo-Guattarian Exploration of the Transistantial, the Fleeting and the Akoúômorphical
Antoine Renzo
4. A Plastic Vortex of Spinning Waste
Macarena Rioseco

Part II. Infinite Cosmologies: Perspectives, Foldings & Time
5. Points of View: Deleuze, Leibniz and the New Cosmology
Debjyoti Sarkar
6. The Lily of the Field Sings the Glory of the Heavens: The Cosmos of the Fold
Brian Noonan
7. Deleuze’s The Fold and String Theory
Ewa Szumilewicz
8. Aion/Chronos and Living Time?
Russell Duvernoy

Part III. Cosmologies of the Quantum
9. Deleuze and Decoherence: Approaching the Measurement Problem through Intensity
Michael J. Ardoline
10. The Chaosmic of the Quantum, with Gilles Deleuze
Arkady Plotnitsky
11. Immanence, Process and Relationalism in Loop Quantum Gravity
Martin Calamari
12. Zig-Zagging Through the Deleuzian Virtual: The Dark Universe of Diagrams, Cosmology, and Quantum
jan jagodzinski

Part IV. Comparative Cosmologies
13. Caught Between a Sufficient Cosmos and a Chaosmos: Laruelle, Deleuze and Guattari on Philosophy, Cosmology and the Real
Chantelle Gray
14. Biological Philosophy and Geophilosophy in the Shadow of Cosmology: Reading Canguilhem with Deleuze and Guattari
Samuel Talcott
15. Modality as virtuality versus modality as possibility: Gilles Deleuze and David Lewis
Ilona Schweitzer
16. Deleuze, Whitehead and Process Cosmology
Keith Robinson

Notes on contributors
Index