Affirming Divergence: Deleuze’S Reading of Leibniz

Throughout Deleuze’s work, we find two opposing characterisations of Leibniz. On the one hand, Deleuze presents Leibniz as a conservative theologian committed to justifying the order and harmony of a God-governed world. On the other, Leibniz appears as a revolutionary thinker credited with ‘the most insane concept creation we have ever witnessed in philosophy’. Alex Tissandier traces Leibniz’s ambiguous status for Deleuze to explain two key ideas in Deleuze’s own philosophy: a concept of difference that is not reducible to a relation of contradiction and an account of the genesis of the world that does not presuppose the structure of representation.