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In this essay I will show that Deleuze's deployment of the concept of the "fold," and its coupling in several texts with the concept of the "event," amounts not only to a general confrontation with Leibniz and phenomenology but especially with later Heidegger and his thinking of the "fourfold" and "event." This confrontation is approached in important ways, albeit indirectly and obliquely, throughout Deleuze's works but especially in his extraordinary book The Fold: Leibniz and the ">Baroque. This book developed out of Deleuze's lecture courses on Leibniz given at Vincennes in 1980 and then again in late 1986 and 1987. In Chapter 6 of that book and elsewhere Deleuze invokes Whitehead in order, I argue, to press beyond and extend Heidegger's renewal of ontology and his onto-logy of the event to the point where, as Deleuze says, "is" finally gives way to "and." Deleuze finds in the fold not only a means of returning to Leibniz, but also an effective critique of phenomenology and, with the Whiteheadian event, the conceptual resources to displace Heideggerian being. Thus, Deleuze's challenge to phenomenology will also be a path beyond being, a path prepared by rethinking with Whitehead the concept of the event and its fourfold structure. This displacement of "being" implies a new answer to the questions of not only how thinking and experience are possible, but also of how to be at "home" in or in harmony with the world, of what it means to believe in and live in the world.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230248366_9

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