Philosophy’s Joy

The chapter first follows Deleuze’s theory of crystal individuation into his reading of Hume. After returning to the motif of lightning, and in light of Deleuze’s reading of Kant, it then explicates Deleuze’s notion of the three syntheses in Difference and Repetition, which complicates Deleuze’s notion of the complementarity of virtual intensity and actual extensity, and which can be read as a sustained argument against the notion of a natural light in philosophy. From there, the chapter turns to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s luminist expressionism, which sets an immanent, expressive light against an emanating, representational light, and which conceptualizes substance as a simultaneously white and diffracted light: lux and lumen. After following Deleuze’s reading of Proust, the chapter conceptualizes a Deleuzian historical studies by way of his formal distinction between events and matters-of-fact, the notion of the informal diagram in Francis Bacon’s paintings, and in Max Ernst’s strategy of frottage.