Between Realism and Anti-realism:

Deleuze and the Spinozist Tradition

in Philosophy

Jeffrey Bell

Southeastern Louisiana University

Abstract
In 1967, after a talk Deleuze gave to the Society of French Philosophy,
Ferdinand Alqui expressed concern during the question and answer
session that perhaps Deleuze was relying too heavily upon science
and not giving adequate attention to questions and problems that
Alqui took to be distinctively philosophical. Deleuze responded by
agreeing with Alqui; moreover, he argued that his primary interest
was precisely in the metaphysics science needs rather than in the
science philosophy needs. This metaphysics, Deleuze argues, is to be
done in the style of Whitehead rather than the style of Kant, and in
developing this metaphysics Deleuze draws heavily on Spinoza. The
present essay examines this Deleuzian-Spinozist metaphysics done in
the style of Whitehead, the metaphysics science needs, drawing on
the writings of David Hume and Bruno Latour in the process. This
discussion will in turn enable us to situate Deleuzes metaphysics in
relation to contemporary debates concerning speculative realism and
correlationism, and especially Quentin Meillassouxs critique of the
latter. Our conclusion will be that the kind of metaphysics Deleuze
pursues is neither correlationist nor straightforwardly realist, but rather
charts a course between realism and anti-realism.
Keywords: Ferdinand Alqui, Spinoza, David Hume, Bruno Latour,
Quentin Meillassoux, correlationism, David Lewis

Deleuze Studies 5.1 (2011): 117

DOI: 10.3366/dls.2011.0002
Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/dls

2 Jeffrey Bell
Deleuzes thought can be situated relative to realism and anti-realism
by way of two responses he received following his talk entitled Method
of Dramatization given to the Socit Franaise de Philosophie on
28 January 1967. The first is from Ferdinand Alqui, who expressed
a concern about Deleuzes use of examples from science and psychology
to make philosophical points:
I understand that Mr. Deleuze criticizes philosophy for making the Idea a
conception that is not adaptable, as he would like, to scientific, psychological,
and historical problems. But I think that alongside these problems there
remain classical philosophical problems, namely problems having to do
with essence. In any event, I dont believe, as Deleuze does, that the great
philosophers have never posed such questions. (Alqui cited in Deleuze 2003:
106)

Coming from the man who was overseeing his work on Spinoza at
the time, this criticism got Deleuzes attention. The second question
is from Alexis Philonenko, a Kant and Fichte scholar, who sought
clarification of Deleuzes arguments concerning the relationship between
the representational and the subrepresentational. Philonenko compared
these arguments to Mamons, noting that the latters differential
elements compare to Deleuzes subrepresentational elements, and the
integration of these differentials to the representational. For Philonenko,
a consequence of this approach is scepticism, for we are left without
a criterion whereby we can discern what we produce and what the
object produces . . . [and] what is produced logically and what is not.
So, Philonenko concludes, this is what I want to know: what part does
illusion (or the illusory) have in the movement of differential elements?
(Philonenko cited in Deleuze 2003: 114).
Before addressing Deleuzes response to these two questions I first
want to show how they give rise to issues concerning realism. We
will then be better placed to introduce Deleuzes thought into the
constellation of debates that currently surround realism, anti-realism and
speculative realism.
Alquis concern with Deleuzes talk was that the distinctiveness of
philosophy was being supplanted by science. Is philosophy merely a
midwife to the sciences? For Deleuze the answer is clearly no. When
asked, for example, whether the topological model discussed in the
conclusion to A Thousand Plateaus is transposable into mathematics
[and] biology, Deleuze says it is the other way around, and to clarify
this point he adds: I feel that I am Bergsonian when Bergson says
that modern science has not found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it

Between Realism and Anti-realism

needs. It is that metaphysics that interests me (Deleuze 2007: 41). This

metaphysics should not, Deleuze stresses, be undertaken in the style
of Kant, but rather in the style of Whitehead (Deleuze 2007: 41).
What this involves will be discussed below, but it is important first to
appreciate the fact that Deleuze is interested in the metaphysics modern
science needs, rather than the science philosophy needs.
With this turn to metaphysics we also return to the choice that has
come to characterise much of post-Kantian philosophy one can follow
Humean empiricism and its positivist and nominalist variants or one can
follow Kantian critique and its idealist and rationalist variants, but, it is
generally assumed, one cannot follow both simultaneously. Philonenkos
question regarding illusion comes from the Kantian perspective. Kant
identifies as a transcendental illusion the process whereby one extends
the concepts of the pure understanding to form judgements regarding
things that are beyond the limits of possible experience (e.g., the
existence of God, the claim that the world must have a beginning in time,
etc.). The point of Kants critical project is to determine the limit that
marks the line between legitimate and illusory claims to know what is
real and what is not. But even with this project in hand, Kant admits that
the transcendental illusion does not cease even after it has been detected
and its invalidity clearly revealed by transcendental criticism (Kant
2003: 299); the mind naturally and inevitably slips into illusion. On
Philonenkos reading of Mamon, moreover, we cannot even be certain
about the line we draw between legitimate and illusory judgements, since
it is uncertain whether the integration of differentials from which our
judgements arise is the product of our own making or a real consequence
of a real object. Similarly, from the empiricist perspective, when we are
led through the association of ideas and habit to impute causality and
necessity to objective relationships, or to infer a substantial self that
accompanies our thoughts and perceptions, and Hume too would leave
us with no way to differentiate between reality and illusion other than
in terms of the strength and vivacity of our beliefs themselves, which is
certainly no guarantee. As Deleuze says of Hume, From the point of
view of philosophy, the mind is no longer anything but delirium and
madness. There is no complete system, synthesis, or cosmology that is
not imaginary (Deleuze 2001: 83).1 Deleuzes response to Philonenkos
question may thus seem surprising, but it is unambiguous for him there
is no place for illusion with respect to the subrepresentational field;
this field is perfectly determinable, as Deleuze puts it, and the illusion
only comes afterward, from the direction of constituted extension and
the qualities that fill out these extensions (Deleuze 2003: 115). For

4 Jeffrey Bell
Deleuze, therefore, the real is to be associated with the processes that
constitute the givenness of objects rather than with the constituted,
identifiable objects and categories themselves. It is for this reason that
Deleuze identifies the style of metaphysics he is interested in with
Whitehead instead of Kant; rather than base an understanding of reality
upon identifiable categories and forms of judgement, Deleuze argues
that our scientific, representational understanding of reality presupposes
subrepresentational processes that are not to be confused or identified
with whatever is identifiable as a result of these processes.
In the choice between Kant and Hume, therefore, Deleuzes preference
seems clear Hume. But where does this leave Deleuze relative to
realism, and to metaphysics in particular? At first sight it might appear
that Deleuze should be placed solidly within the anti-realist camp. After
all, if what can be said of reality may in the end be illusory, and if
Deleuze, much like Hume, is willing to say that there is no complete
system, synthesis, or cosmology that is not imaginary, then it would
seem to be difficult to place him in the realist camp. But is he therefore
an anti-realist?
To answer this question I will sketch out the difference between
realism and anti-realism by way of Quentin Meillassouxs critique of
correlationism, which, as Meillassoux himself puts it, is ultimately
a radical critique of any contemporary opponent of any realism
(Meillassoux 2007: 408). Put briefly, correlationism holds that we
cannot know reality as it is in-itself but only as it is for-us, as a
correlate of consciousness, language, culture, conceptual scheme, etc.
Meillassoux notes that Fichtes Principles of Scientific Knowledge is the
chef doeuvre of such a correlationism in that it shows how any attempt
to posit a reality as independent of any positing is still a reality that is
posited as such (Meillassoux 2007: 408). Correlationism, however, is
not committed to a subject-object dualism but more importantly rejects
any attempt to hypostatise a reality that would be autonomous and
independent. This is why Meillassoux will understand correlationism
not as an anti-realism but [as] an anti-absolutism, for it is invoked
to curb every hypostatization, every substantialization of an object of
knowledge which would turn the latter into a being existing in and of
itself (Meillassoux 2010: 11). Whether these autonomous beings are
Ideas or objects, correlationism, for our purposes, is anti-realist in that
it holds that any reality in-itself is always from the start an in-itself
correlated with something else.
Let us turn now to more traditional understandings of anti-realism,
deriving from the analytic tradition. The term itself was first used by

Between Realism and Anti-realism

Michael Dummett to characterise those positions which argue that

reality is what is necessary in order to state meaningful, true sentences.2
Dummett will refer to this as semantic realism, and others will call it
deflationary realism, but it is clear that it is a form of correlationism or
anti-realism in that the real is accounted for not as it is in-itself but only
in so far as it is necessary to the utterance of meaningful, true sentences.
As Quine famously put it: To be assumed as an entity is, purely and
simply, to be reckoned as the value of a variable. In terms of categories
of traditional grammar, this amounts roughly to saying that to be is to
be in the range of reference of a pronoun (Quine 1980: 13). Donald
Davidson, one of Quines most prominent students, will break with
what he sees as Quines continuing adherence to what Davidson calls
the third dogma of empiricism, by which he means that scheme-content
dualism whereby a pure content (sensory firings in Quines case) is
forged and translated by a conceptual scheme into the content of our
knowledge of reality.3 In rejecting the third dogma Davidson may appear to be a realist he does, after all, claim to uphold a form of monism
which asserts that there is nothing but objects and events. And yet when
he argues for the reality of these objects and events his argument in the
end largely follows Quine, claiming as it does that objects and events
(especially the latter) are real only because we could not utter the meaningful sentences we do without them.4 Finally, though we could go on,
in David Lewiss modal realism a realism that goes well beyond that of
common sense in accepting the reality of possible worlds Lewis argues
for the reality of possible worlds by showing that they are necessary if
our everyday counterfactual claims are to be meaningful and true (see
Lewis 2001). In all these cases and in others, the real is not considered
as it is in-itself but only as it is necessary to some other process (namely,
a linguistic and semantic process); in this sense, correlationism and
anti-realism are alive and well within the analytic tradition.
In his attempt to move beyond correlationism, Meillassoux draws
support from an important ontological claim that he derives from
correlationism itself, even though he admits that it is not an ontology,
strictly speaking. He argues that, according to the correlationist, if
I remove myself from the world, I cant know the residue. But this
reasoning supposes that we have access to an absolute possibility: the
possibility that the in-itself could be different from the for-us. And
this absolute possibility is grounded in turn on the absolute facticity
of the correlation (Meillassoux 2007: 431). In other words, from the
epistemological claim that one cannot know the residue of what would
be independent of what is for-us, Meillassoux draws the ontological

6 Jeffrey Bell
conclusion that the world could be other than it is for-us, which
entails, in turn, the possibility of a world without correlation, a world
without givenness. From here it is a simple step to the undermining of
correlationism, since if the real, X, can be known only as a posited X,
then it follows from the ontological conclusion concerning the facticity
of the correlation itself that there is the possibility of an X that is not
posited, a world without givenness for-us.
One of the challenges that attends Meillassouxs conclusion a
challenge that is central to what has been called speculative realism
(and which has not been ignored within the analytic tradition either) is
to account, in a noncircular manner, for the facticity of thought
itself especially the normative patterns of thought and hence for the
relationship between thought and the structure of reality from which
thought emerges. It would lead us too far astray to enter into these
debates here, but it should be noted that Meillassouxs own concerns
regarding realism and the facticity of thought are widely shared and are
being addressed from a number of different perspectives.5
To return to the relationship between philosophy and science and
clearly science has a lot to say about the origins of thought we can begin
by discussing David Lewiss Humean understanding of necessity, or
what he calls Humean supervenience. On Lewiss reading of Hume, any
claims we make regarding the world supervene upon a given distribution
of particular facts. For example, given any two worlds, if they are
identical in every way and share the same laws of nature then they will
remain identical at any and all later times. There cannot be a change
in the distribution of particular facts, or a divergence between the two
worlds, without a simultaneous change in the laws that supervene upon
these worlds and facts. Given the laws of probability, the chance that a
single throw of the dice will give me a six are one in six. Three or four
sixes may show up in a row, but given enough throws the number of
times I throw a six will approach one in six. The laws of probability
thus supervene upon a given distribution of particular facts in the world
(here rolls of the dice) up to and including time1 . If there is a nonzero chance, however, that after time1 sixes come up every time then
that would effect the chance distribution at W at time1 . It would be
something higher than one in six, but this would contradict Humean
supervenience, since the world at time1 would both be and not be in
accordance with the laws of probability up to and including time1 .
Lewis refers to this as an undermining future.6 Meillassoux, for his
part, contends that what makes the Humean understanding of necessity
possible is that there be a totality relative to which the particular facts

Between Realism and Anti-realism

are compared, and hence upon which the necessary laws supervene. It
is the totality of throws at time1 combined with the throws after time1
that gives rise to undermining futures. Following Badiou and Cantor,
however, Meillassoux argues for the non-All that cannot be totalised and
which therefore undermines the necessary laws that would supervene
upon a given totality. The notion of an undermining future would not
even arise on this reading. This is not to say that there are no particular
facts or regularities between facts. Within a large set of observations the
odds of sixes appearing may be one in six, or there may be countless
other regularities, but the laws that supervene upon these regularities
are, Meillassoux argues, contingent. They are not necessary. As Hume
said, we are unable to demonstrate any such necessity (Meillassoux
2007: 441).7
Turning now to Deleuze, we have what might be called
Deleuzian supervenience, whereby the axiomatic supervenes upon the
problematic, but the problematic forever exceeds the axiomatic: it is
the power of the continuum, tied to the axiomatic but exceeding it.
Axiomatics, or what Deleuze will also call major or royal science,
draws from problematics the necessity of inventing and innovating;
while problematics, as minor or nomad science, calls upon axiomatics
to actualise solutions to the problems it lays out. Deleuze and Guattari
are clear on this point: Major science has a perpetual need for the
inspiration of the minor; but the minor would be nothing if it did not
confront and conform to the highest scientific requirements (Deleuze
and Guattari 1984: 486). To clarify this point we can turn to Spinoza,
and to Deleuzes review essay of Gueroults first volume on Spinozas
Ethics. Here Deleuze argues that what is important about Gueroults
approach is his stress on the fact that Spinoza doesnt begin with the
idea of God (God enters the scene only with the sixth definition and
the ninth proposition). Does this mean that the first five definitions and
eight propositions are inessential to Spinozas project mere preliminary
work that had to be got out of the way before the real work began? For
Gueroult and for Deleuze the answer is no. Otherwise, Deleuze argues,
we get two misreadings of the attribute: 1) the Kantian illusion that
makes attributes forms or concepts of the understanding, and 2) the
neo-Platonic vertigo that makes attributes already degraded emanations
or manifestations (Deleuze 2003: 149).
With this claim we arrive at the central feature of Spinozism
as Deleuze understands it namely, the relentless tracking down of
transcendence in all its forms. And here we find the two misreadings of
Spinoza to which Deleuze refers, both of which call upon transcendence.

8 Jeffrey Bell
First, the Kantian illusion that turns attributes into concepts that
transcend substance as that which is applied to substance (this is also
Badious misreading of Spinoza8 ). Second, the neo-Platonic misreading
of Spinoza that sees substance as a pure One and the attributes as
degraded emanations of this One (Hegel and Bertrand Russell are guilty
of this reading). Substance, however, is neither One nor multiple, but is
rather a multiplicity, a substantive multiplicity. The attributes, therefore,
are fully real and are really distinct from one another, but they are not
numerically distinct and they do not transcend substance, nor are they
the degraded emanations of substance. They constitute, to repeat, what
Deleuze will call a substantive multiplicity:
The logic of real distinction is a logic of purely affirmative difference and
without negation. Attributes indeed constitute an irreducible multiplicity, but
the whole question is what type of multiplicity. The problem is erased if the
substantive multiplicity is transformed into two opposed adjectives (multiple
attributes and one substance). (Deleuze 2003: 150)

For Deleuze, therefore, Spinoza does not begin with God but with
the problematic, with substantive multiplicity. To understand Spinoza
adequately, therefore, it is essential to clarify what is meant by substance,
and in what way it is not to be confused with either God or the modes
and attributes. By far the most common interpretation of substance is to
understand it as a being, albeit an absolute, infinite being, that is in some
way parcelled by the modes and attributes. At the risk of anachronism,
we could apply Heideggers ontological difference and say that substance
is typically understood onto-theo-logically as being in contrast to Being.
Although I will not, as some do, assert that substance is to be understood
as Being, as no-thing in Heideggers sense of the term, I would argue
that substance is not to be conceived as a being either. It is precisely
this latter reading of substance that lends itself to the two misreadings
of the attributes listed above. One reading of Spinozas theory of
substance that avoids interpreting substance as being can be found in
H. F. Halletts works.9 For Hallett, substance is absolutely indeterminate, or in-determinate, as I have argued elsewhere.10 Halletts
interpretation is by no means the consensus view, but it does have
important textual support. For example, since God is defined in the
Ethics as absolutely infinite (1D6), God can in no way be limited or
in any way determinate, for to be determinate would entail it being
related to another that it is not. As Spinoza argues in his letter to
Jelles, all determination is negation (Spinoza 1996: 260),11 and hence
substance cannot be determinate if is to be absolutely infinite and

Between Realism and Anti-realism

affirmative, which is precisely how Spinoza understands it, as he makes

clear in a letter to Lodewijk Meyer where he claims that substance
is the infinite enjoyment of existing (Spinoza 1996: 102). This also
accounts for why God is absolutely infinite rather than infinite in
its own kind, as the attributes are, since this would require being
a determinate form of infinite and hence a form that could, when
understood conceptually by way of the understanding namely the
infinite mode of understanding be related to what it is not, to what is
other than it. Yet another reason for adopting Halletts reading follows
from a related claim Spinoza makes in his letter to Jelles that anyone
who calls God one or single has no true idea of God because, as we
have already noted, all determination is negation and God, as substance,
is the infinite enjoyment of existing, or the absolutely infinite power of
existing, as Spinoza will also put it in the Ethics.12
To clarify the Spinozist context within which Deleuzes thought
navigates, we can turn to Deleuze and Guattaris claim in A Thousand
Plateaus that God is a lobster, a double articulation. It is all too
easy to underestimate the philosophical importance of this claim, but
we can also see it at work in Deleuzes essay on Gueroult, where
Spinozas first eight propositions correspond to the first articulation, or,
as Deleuze puts it, the first eight propositions represent a first series
through which we ascend to the differential constitutive elements the
attributes. As Deleuze had stressed earlier in the essay, there is
no ascension from attributes to substance . . . to absolutely infinite
substance; rather, there is an ascension through a regressive analytic
process to the differential constitutive elements themselves, to the
substantive multiplicity. (Deleuze 2003: 150). Then there is the second
articulation, the second series running from the ninth to the eleventh
proposition, through which, Deleuze argues, the idea of God integrates
these elements and makes clear it can be constituted only by all these
elements together. The attributes, as a multiplicity of incommensurable
and really distinct entities, come to be integrated by the power of causa
sui whereby essence is the cause of the existence of substance and
the cause of the other things that derive from it (Deleuze 2003: 153).
Understood in this way, God as causa sui is both the condition that
enables the regressive analytic process which leads to a multiplicity of
really distinct attributes (first articulation) and the conditioned that is the
integration of this multiplicity (second articulation). God is self-caused,
or: God is a lobster, a double articulation.
We can now return to Alquis question and Deleuzes response,
and in turn situate Deleuze relative to realism and anti-realism. As

10 Jeffrey Bell
discussed earlier, Alqui was troubled by Deleuzes use of examples
from science in his talk, creating the impression that philosophy was a
mere expository tool in the service of science. In response to Alquis
question Deleuze stresses that he does believe in the specificity of
philosophy, and furthermore, this belief of mine derives from you
yourself (Deleuze 2003: 106); moreover, Deleuze immediately adds,
Even the concepts such as singular and regular, or remarkable and
ordinary [i.e., philosophical concepts for Deleuze], are not exhausted
by mathematics. I want to call on Lautmans theses: a theory of systems
must show how the movement of scientific concepts participates in a
dialectic that surpasses them (Deleuze 2003: 107). In other words,
and to state this in terms used above, royal science and axiomatics
develops concepts that participate in, or supervene upon, nomadic and
problematic philosophical concepts, and the latter are not exhausted
by the former. Hence there is not, pace Lewis, a one-to-one structural
supervenience between that which supervenes (axiomatics) and that
which is supervened upon (problematics), but rather a supervenience
that entails a non-causal relationship between the actualised and
structured and that which exceeds these structures, such as philosophical
concepts. Deleuzes seconding of Alquis belief in the specificity of
philosophy should thus not be underestimated, especially in light of
recent calls among philosophers to return to realism. In response to
this call, there have been roughly two distinct approaches. In the first
it is argued that the way to do justice to reality in-itself is through
mathematics. For Badiou mathematics is ontology (Badiou 2007: 19),
and Meillassoux tracks Badious approach quite faithfully, arguing that
what is mathematizable cannot be reduced to a correlate of thought
(Meillassoux 2010: 117). The second approach accounts for the reality
and nature of objects themselves by drawing on science, and dynamic
systems theory in particular (DeLandas and Protevis work loom large
here). There is tremendous work being done in each of these two
approaches, but the concern, and it is precisely this that prompted
Alquis question, is that they may reduce philosophy to being simply an
adjunct to mathematics and/or science. What is lost in these approaches
is the distinctiveness of philosophy itself.
To clarify what it is that makes philosophy distinctive for Deleuze
we can now turn to the question of how his understanding of the
principle of sufficient reason a good philosophical principle if ever there
was one differs from that of Lewis and Meillassoux. Since for Lewis
laws supervene, in the structured manner discussed above, upon the
particular facts of the world, and since worlds, both actual and possible,

Between Realism and Anti-realism

11

constitute a totality, the claims of science can adequately represent the

necessary distributions and regularities of each world. The totality of
particular facts within each world thus provides a sufficient reason
for the laws and claims that supervene upon these worlds. To clarify
by way of example: if I roll a pair of dice and it comes up sixes
20 times in a row I may begin to think there must be a reason why
this is happening either faulty or loaded dice. Similarly, if a student
happens to see their professor at the store they would likely think
nothing of it (a mere chance encounter), and they may continue to
think so even if they happen to run into them again later that day;
but if this continues then at some point they will no doubt begin to
think there is a reason that explains these encounters namely, they
are being stalked. For Meillassoux, however, what gives these examples
their sufficient reason and explanatory power is that they are held in
relationship to a set or totality of other examples. Relative to the totality
of past instances, dice do not come up sixes 20 times in a row, nor
does one run into ones professor more than once or twice on any given
day outside the classroom. For Meillassoux, by contrast, the non-All
undermines this explanatory power and with it the principle of sufficient
reason. For him, consequently, there is no necessity other than the
necessity of contingency. We cannot state why things are the way they
are rather than another way. The arguments Meillassoux uses to justify
this claim rely heavily upon the force of negation and contradiction
(Hegel lurks behind the scenes here). He will thus argue, for example,
that to be contingent you must not be contradictory, because if you are
contradictory you are everything and you cant change (Meillassoux
2007: 331). A similar claim is made in After Finitude where he argues
that a philosophy of becoming will have to do away with contradictory
entities for they cannot change and become what they are not they
already are what they are not (Meillassoux 2010: 6971). And in
his critique of correlationism itself Meillassoux calls upon Fichtes
strategy, what Meillassoux calls pragmatico-genetic contradiction, to
show that the content of a claim is contradicted by the very way in
which the claim is put forward. The content of the claim X is not
posited is contradicted by the very fact that it is posited as not posited.
Similarly, the content of correlationisms claim that all reality in-itself is
a correlate for-us is contradicted by the absolutisation of contingency
that goes along with this claim and which results in the facticity of
the correlation itself. It is on the basis of these arguments, and the
binary logic of contradiction they presuppose, that Meillassoux rejects
the principle of sufficient reason. If you want to speak about what

12 Jeffrey Bell
exists, Meillassoux argues, you can only describe, as phenomenology
does (Meillassoux 2007: 391) but the fact that it is something rather
than nothing cannot be described (Meillassoux 2007: 392). Despite
the obvious differences between Lewis and Meillassoux one accepts
the principle of sufficient reason and accepts that worlds, both actual
and possible, constitute totalities, while the other does not they both
share a commitment to a logic of representation an it is or it isnt
logic that Deleuze identifies with the actualisation of the actual world.
In short, the logic of representation presupposes the bifurcations of
actuality, the fact, as Deleuze argued in an early essay on Bergson, that
virtuality exists in such a way that it actualizes itself as it dissociates
itself; it must dissociate itself to actualize itself (Deleuze 2003: 40).
As dissociated and actualised, we have mutually exclusive differences,
either/or contradictions, and the logic of representation presupposes
these differences in order to represent that which the representation
is not.
By contrast, and following from his Spinozism, Deleuze attempts to
set forth philosophical concepts that presuppose a logic of expression
and sense rather than a logic of representation. Rather than build
upon mutually exclusive differences and contradictions, Deleuze tries
to draw from difference-in-itself a Spinozist substantive multiplicity
that presupposes a logic of purely affirmative difference and without
negation (Deleuze 2003: 150). It is this logic that accounts for the
fact that, for Deleuze, philosophical concepts are not exhausted by
scientific or mathematical concepts. Nearly 30 years after his Method
of Dramatization talk, Deleuze will continue to make much the same
point. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in What is Philosophy? science
sets out to map functions that represent the actualisation of the actual,
or that accurately describe the regularities of the world.13 Philosophy,
by contrast, creates concepts which counter-actualise the actual and
involve the problematic upon which the actual supervenes. Understood
in this way, Deleuze, unlike Meillassoux, will continue to adhere to
the principle of sufficient reason. As Deleuze argues in his book on
Leibniz, the principle of sufficient reason does not imply that every
actuality Adams eating of the apple for example was determinately
detailed and sketched in advance such that the actualisation itself was
a foregone conclusion to anyone with complete knowledge (such as
God); to the contrary, for Deleuze the principle of sufficient reason is
the substantive multiplicity, in the Spinozist sense sketched above, that
is the sufficient reason for the determinate (see Deleuze 1992: 4158).
As Deleuze will argue in numerous places, this substantive multiplicity

Between Realism and Anti-realism

13

is real but not actual it is what he will also call the virtual. Deleuzes
logic of expression, however, does not entail a rejection of the actual
world, an attempt to get out of this world and the logic of representation.
It is, rather, an attempt to intensify the actual world, including its
representations, to problematise it, and to do so while remaining fully
within it. To argue otherwise would mean allowing transcendence to
sneak in through the back door, and Deleuze, like Spinoza, is keen to
hunt down transcendence in all its forms.
From this perspective, therefore, Deleuze is neither a correlationist
anti-realist nor a straightforward realist. Deleuze is not a correlationist
since he follows no binary logic of the for-us distinct from the initself; rather, he is a monist developing philosophical concepts that
follow a logic of expression or sense rather than a binary logic of
contradiction, a logic of representation. Each actual entity, or each
mode in Spinozas terms, is thus to be understood as an expression of
substance, a substance that is only identifiable as such when expressed
in a mode. Substance, therefore, does indeed turn around its modes,
as Deleuze had said was how he understood Spinoza (Deleuze 2004:
306). As such, each actual entity is a real, determinate expression of
substance, of substance as substantive multiplicity, or it is the expression
of the nondenumerable which Deleuze and Guattari define as being
neither the set nor its elements [the one or the multiple]; rather, it is the
connection, the and produced between elements, between sets, and
which belongs to neither, which eludes them and constitutes a line of
flight (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 519). Between the elements of the
correlation, therefore, between the for-us and the in-itself, there is the
and, and it is this and that constitutes a line of flight that escapes and
eludes every correlation, every attempt to reduce reality to a correlation.
Similarly Deleuze is not an anti-realist in the analytic sense of the term
for he soundly rejects the view that the real can only be accounted
for in so far as it is necessary for meaningful, true sentences; rather,
he asserts that the real as problematic, substantive multiplicity exceeds
these representations and is irreducible to them, and thus the logic
of representation presupposes the nonsense and nondenumerable upon
which it supervenes. Deleuzian supervenience is thus not like Lewiss
Humean supervenience, since Lewis follows the logic of representation
whereby necessary laws supervene upon the particular facts of the world,
and a change in the latter entails a change in the former. These laws
therefore re-present the particular facts of the world. For Meillassoux
there is no supervenience since there is no correlation between a totalised
world and that which represents this world, even though, as we have

14 Jeffrey Bell
seen, Meillassoux continues to adhere to a logic of representation.
Deleuzian supervenience, by contrast, follows a logic of sense, and thus
the actual, the axiomatic, supervenes upon the problematic, which is
not a correlate it represents but the expressiveness and power of the
actual itself. Deleuzian supervenience, to recall our earlier comments,
does not involve a structured relationship between the axiomatic and
the problematic that it is not, but instead conveys the relationship
between the actual and the in-determinate, de-structuring power that
problematises the actual.
But Deleuze is not a straightforward realist either, if by realism one
means the affirmation of an autonomous reality with properties and
features that are independent of anyones beliefs, linguistic practices,
conceptual schemes, etc. The very idea of an autonomous reality initself presupposes, as Bruno Latour has argued, a stabilisation of
events, events that are indeed real but are neither autonomous nor
heteronomous. This has been a consistent theme for Latour, even though
he has not always used the same terms to state it; put briefly, events and
autonomous objects and facts are not to be confused with one another
even though they are not fundamentally distinct, much less different
in kind. Rather, objects and autonomous facts are stabilised events;
or, adopting Latours own metaphor, objects and autonomous facts
are the cooled down continents of plate tectonics (Latour 1993: 87).
As Latour understands it, autonomous objects and facts in-themselves
are inseparable from their unstable networks; or, as he argues the point
in Laboratory Life, what accounts for the solidity of [an] object is
that it is constituted by the steady accumulation of techniques, which
is what keeps it from becoming subjective or artefactual (Latour and
Woolgar 1986: 127). An object may become particularly stable and
even become lionised as a textbook fact, as an integral element of
what Latour refers to as ready-made science, but it may lose allies to
other objects and through a steady accumulation of techniques and
alliances give way to new textbook facts. Latour gives the example
of how, prior to Watson, chemists thought, and the textbooks stated
as an established fact, that the four DNA bases were in the enol
form. This made it much more difficult for Watson to cast doubt
upon this fact and put forth the case that the bases were actually
in the keto form (Latour and Woolgar 1986: 1712). Watson was
eventually able to problematise the established textbook fact concerning
the enol form, and this problematising process what Latour calls
science in the making led in the end to the new textbook facts
that now credit Watson (and Crick) with discovering the structure of

Between Realism and Anti-realism

15

DNA. A Latourian ontology is monistic, therefore, in that it includes

nothing but objects and events, or substantive multiplicities as Deleuze
puts it. But this is not a stable monism of autonomous objects and
lawful events; rather, it is an aberrant monism that continually moves
between stable natures and unstable, problematising events. From a
Latourian perspective, therefore, it is only when substantive multiplicity
has become actualised and stabilised that it becomes consonant with
the logic of representation, and hence only then can one say that it
consists of a determinate duality between an autonomous, objective initself and a heteronomous, correlationist in-itself-for-us, between facts
and artefacts, between realism and anti-realism. Between realism and
anti-realism, then, there is the and, the substantive multiplicity that
is tracked by the metaphysics Deleuze believes science needs. Deleuze
believes this metaphysics is possible, and sees the development of it as
the distinctive task of philosophy.

Notes
1. Deleuze reiterates this point in his short essay, Hume, where he argues again
that Hume understands the essence of the mind as delirium or fiction (Deleuze
2003: 166).
2. See Dummetts 1963 essay, Realism (in Dummett 1978).
3. See Davidsons essay, On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme (in Davidson
2001a).
4. See Davidsons essays Mental Events and Events as Particulars (in Davidson
2001b).
5. See, to give just a few examples, Millikan 1984; Tomasello 2010; and Varela
1992.
6. See Lewis 1980: 26393, and Lewis 1987.
7. For Meillassouxs discussion of the non-All, see Meillassoux 2007: 1278.
8. For my arguments to support this claim, see Bell 2006a.
9. See, for example, Hallett 1979 and 1930.
10. See my Ironing out the Differences: Nietzsche and Deleuze as Spinozists (Bell
2006b, Chapter 2).
11. Letter 50: So since figure is nothing but determination, and determination is
negation, figure can be nothing other than negation, as has been said (Spinoza
1996: 260).
12. See Spinoza 1955: IP11.
13. Now philosophy wants to know how to retain infinite speeds while gaining
consistency, by giving the virtual a consistency specific to it in other words,
philosophy creates concepts that express a logic of sense, a logic of substantive
multiplicities Science approaches chaos in a completely different, almost
opposite way: it relinquishes the infinite, infinite speed, in order to gain
a reference able to actualize the virtual i.e., science tracks the actualisation
of the virtual in accordance with the logic of representation (see Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 118).

16 Jeffrey Bell

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