I am reading Gilles Deleuze’ The Fold Leibniz and the Baroque. My mind is spinning in what feels like mud. Never a good sign so I had to go back and reread The Monodology by Leibniz and pick up sections again from Descartes Spinoza Leibniz The Concept of Substance In Seventeenth Century Metaphysics by R.S. Woolhouse. I feel like I’m getting a little traction although that may be a delusion born of desperation.

So what is Leibniz’s monad? He does have mind-like simple substances and he defines them as without parts yet with “a multiplicity of affections and relations” (which are perceptions). Monads are what is real and the inner-directed change (without parts, and without external stimuli, change can only be directed by the monad’s perceptions) of their being and the relations between monads (based on their individual perceptions) is what gives us the “well-founded phenomenon” which is (today’s) real universe – humans included. (Get that?)This is what Deleuze is riffing off of as he goes into his idea of the fold and the event-like Baroque. The universe of appearances (bodies, etc) is really the conjunction of inner-directed perception.

When I read the next selection from The Monadology (Remark 61), I couldn’t help but think that this is where Deleuze jumped up from his chair in recognition, slamming together the idea of a folded universe and the idea of a perception-driven one.

…a soul can read in itself only what is represented there distinctly. It cannot suddenly unfold all that is folded within it, since it extends to infinity…

For Leibniz a soul is a particular kind of monad. At least this is how I read it.  He says in The Monodology that a soul (monad) plus a body results in an animal. One of the perceptual abilities of a soul-monad is the ability for it to re-assert itself upon waking – (and therefore the perceptual ability of memory?) The other thing to know is that God is the only real creator, that is, monads are a creation of God and they are individually all mirrors of the universe containing within them the enfolded totality, which is infinite, since it tracks all the way back to God. So each simple substance has some perception(s). That makes of it a limited thing but enfolded within it is the unlimited. Now this sounds like Deleuze.

So we have monads which are simple substances with perceptions that allow for internally guided change and the illusion of a physical world which is really just a “well-founded phenomenon” born of the relatively continual conjunction of monads. And we have the enfolded universe within each and every monad, there but not (normally?) accessible.

So I am going to put these two concepts (the idea of the monad, and that of the fold) under my “tires” as I continue to read, head back into Deleuze’s 20th century (with its own particular spin on reality) and hopefully I’ll get a bit closer to understanding.