The Birth of Philosophy

The chapter focuses on the beginning of Deleuze’s career, charting his confrontation with Simondon, from whose work he takes the notion of crystal individuation. It then turns to Deleuze’s early reading of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. Stressing in particular Lucretius’ notion of the ‘light of Venus’, the chapter reads Deleuze’s luminous ontology against Thomas Nail’s argument that Lucretius’ work proposes a fluid and processual ontology. The chapter concludes that the ideas Deleuze distils from Lucretius concern a love of the multiplicity of the world and of life, and that Deleuzian philosophy is a response to the question of where Lucretius’ love of life and of a given multiplicity takes philosophy. Nowhere in Deleuze’s work is the positivity and affirmation that he finds in Lucretius put into question. All horrors are immanent to this more profound love of a multiplicitous life and light, which Deleuze also finds in Nietzsche and Bergson.