Continuity and Event in Leibniz and Deleuze: Poetics of the Fold

by Hamed Movahedi

Overview

Hamed Movahedi reconstructs a Deleuzian concept of continuity and event through comparative readings of The Fold, Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense. His analysis of The Fold in dialogue with Leibniz opens a new conceptual space for continuity, one that entails both irreducible heterogeneity and ontological inseparability. This concept, which challenges conventional notions of continuity and discontinuity, discloses its implicit yet decisive presence in Deleuze’s philosophy of genesis in Difference and Repetition and the genesis of language in Logic of Sense. Deleuze’s story of genesis, preoccupied with the conditions of formation across various fields, is recounted in terms of continuity, which turns out to be a poetics, a prelude to art and politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399550666
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	12/31/2025
Series:	Plateaus - New Directions in Deleuze Studies
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Hamed Movahedi is a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill Universityand a Postdoctoral Fellow at Pennsylvania State University. His research centers on the metaphysics of genesis and the new across social, artistic and biological fields. He has published articles in Continental Philosophy Review, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Philosophy Today, Parrhesia, and Dialogue.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgment
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Problem of Continuity
Continuity of Nature, Nature of Continuity

Part I: Continuity qua Fold: The Fold
CHAPTER 1: Proliferation of Folds: A Baroque Image
1.1 The New: Impossibility of the Repetition of Past; The Repetition of an Impossible Past
1.2 The Fold, And, A Baroque Leibniz
1.3 The Baroque Proliferation of Folds
1.3.1 The Folds of Inorganic Matter
1.3.2 The Organic Folds of Matter
1.3.3 Birth, And, Death
1.3.4 Leibniz’s Law of Continuity
1.4 Second Floor of the Baroque House
CHAPTER 2: A Metaphysical Ten(or)sion: From Inflection to Inclusion
2.1 Leibniz’s Universe: An Infinite Interlaced Fabric
2.2 The Folds in the Soul: From Inflection to Inclusion
2.3 The Metaphysical Tension
CHAPTER 3: Proliferation of Events: Affirmation of Bifurcation And Divergent Continuity
3.1 Towards a Logic of Events
3.2 Substance and Unity in a World-Event
3.3 Genesis of Worlds: Compossibility and Incompossibility
3.4 Affirmation of Bifurcation and Divergence
3.5 Complication of Divergent Series: The Chaosmos
CHAPTER 4: Constellation of Continuity as Logic: Leibniz, Peirce, Blanchot
4.1 Reconcilability of Principles: The Identity of Indiscernibles and Continuity
4.2 Incarnation in a Body
4.3 Actualization and Realization
4.4 Event: A Deleuzian Dialogue with Blanchot and Peirce

Part II: Genesis and Continuity: Difference and Repetition
CHAPTER 5: Ideas and Divergent Continuity
5.1 Transcendental Field
5.2 Problematization of Ontology
5.3 Ideality of the Virtual
5.4 Biological Idea
5.5 Proliferation of Continuity: Anger Face and Love Face of Ideas
CHAPTER 6: Torsional Continuity: Dramatization and Poeticization of Ideas
6.1 Ideas of Society
6.2 Ideas of Art
6.2.1 Erewhon: The Non-Localizable Locus of the Artist
6.3 Dramatizing the Obscure Ideas
6.4 Poeticization: The Poeticity of Ideas
CHAPTER 7: Intensive Continuity
7.1 The Critical and Creative Faces of Ideas: Art and the Political
7.2 Intensity qua “Who” of Expression
7.3 Intensive Continuity: A Leibnizian Image, Intensities Enveloping and Enveloped
7.4 Torsional Continuity: Intensities and Ideas
7.5 An Embryonic Heteroverse

Part III: Genesis of Language and Continuity: Logic of Sense
CHAPTER 8: Logic of Sense and Continuity
8.1 Philosophizing at the Surface: The Stoic Incorporeals
8.2 Sense: The Fourth Dimension and the Possibility of Language
8.3 Inherent Dualities and Paradoxes of the Structure
8.4 The Mobile Decentered Paradoxical Element
Chapter 9: Nonsense, Event, Continuity
9.1 Problematization of Series
9.2 Nonsense and Static Genesis
9.3 Continuity, Aion, Chronos
9.4 Dedekind Cut, Point-Fold, False-Divergent Continuity
9.5 Ethics of the Event, Counter-Actualization of the Actor-Dancer
9.6 Univocity, Poeticity, Continuity

Conclusion: Heteropoietic Continuity
Continuity and Genesis: Four Continuities
Continuity, Ethics, Dramas, and Poeticity
Continuity, Event, Linguistic Actualization

Appendix: Continuity and the History of Calculus: Leibniz’s Predecessors
Aristotle’s Conception of Continuity
Calculus and its Historical Development
Baroque Curves: Archimedes
Baroque Motions: Galileo and Kepler
Calculus and Algebra
Leibniz and the Development of Calculus

References