The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

"There are souls down below, sensitive, animal; and there even exists a lower level in the souls. The pleats of matter surround and envelop them."
pg. 4

"Dividing endlessly, the parts of matter form little vortices in a maelstrom, and in these are found even more vortices, even smaller, and even more are spinning in the concave intervals of the whirls that touch one another.
Matter thus offers an infinitely porous, spongy, or cavernous texture without emptiness, caverns endlessly contained in other caverns: no matter how small, each body contains a world pierced with irregular passages, surrounded and penetrated by an increasingly vaporous fluid, the totality of the universe resembling a 'pond of matter in which there exist flows and waves.'"
pg. 5

"...a flexible or an elastic body still has cohering parts that form a fold, such that they are not separated into parts of parts but rather divided to infinity in smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion."

"The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold, not the point which is never a part, but a simple extremity of the line."

"Unfolding is thus not the contrary of folding, but follows the fold up to the following fold."
pg. 6

"In contrast to compressive or elastic forces, Leibniz calls them "plastic forces," They organize masses but, although the latter prepare organisms or make them possible by means of motivating drive, it is impossible to go from masses to organisms, since organs are always based on these plastic forces that preform them, and are distinguished from forces of mass, to the point where every organ is born from a preexisting organ."
pg. 7

"It might be claimed that mechanisms of inorganic nature already stretch to infinity because the motivating force is of an already infinite composition, or that the fold always refers to other folds."

"The living organism, on the contrary, by virtue of preformation has an internal destiny that makes it move from fold to fold, or that makes machines from machines all the way to infinity."

"...the organic body thus confers an interior on matter, by which the principle of individuation is applied to it..."

"Folding-unfolding no loger simply means tension-release, contraction-dilation, but enveloping-developing, involution-evolution. The organism is defined by its ability to fold its own parts and to unfold them, not to infinity, but to a degree of development assigned to each species. Thus an organism is enveloped by organism  . . . like Russian dolls."

"And when an organism dies, it does not really vanish but folds in upon itself."
pg. 8

". . .to unfold is to increase, to grow; whereas to fold is to diminish, to reduce."

"...the inorganic fold happens to be simple and direct, while the organic fold is always composite, alternating, indirect (mediated my an interior site).
pg. 9

"...the organ does not arch back to a preexisting organ, but to a much more general and less differentiated design. Development does not go from smaller to greater things through growth or augmentation, but from the general to the special, through differentiations of an initially undifferentiated field either under the action of exterior surrounding or under the influence of internal forces that are directive..."
pg. 10

"Plastic forces of matter act on masses, but they submit them to real unities that they take for granted."

"Life is not only everywhere, but souls are everywhere in matter. Thus, when an organism is called to unfold its own parts, its animal or sensitive soul is opened onto an entire theater in which it perceives or feels according to its unity, independently of its organism, yet inseparable from it."

"In the Baroque the soul entertains a complex relation with the body. Forever indissociable from the body, it discovers a vertiginous animality that gets it tangled in the pleats of matter, but also an organic or cerebral humanity (the degree of development) that allows it to rise up, and that will make it ascend over all other folds."
pg. 11

"Even in a physical sense we are moving across outer material pleats to inner animated, spontaneous folds."
pg. 12


Gilles Deleuze
The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque
translation: Tom Conley
University of Minnesota Press
1997