The Fold

Gilles Deleuze built this study around Leibniz, reading the seventeenth-century philosopher's works as a foundation for a Baroque mode of thought. He suggests these ideas also offer tools for understanding present-day art and science. The book's central figure is the monad, which Deleuze considers as a model of expression in contemporary aesthetics and as a fold of space, motion, and time.

From this starting point, Deleuze describes the world as an endless set of folds and surfaces that bend and interlace within compressed space and time. He also finds in Leibniz an anticipation of recent ideas about events and history, which he treats as layered arrangements of moving signs. Deleuze further locates in this thinking a picture of the modern self as nomadic and always becoming.

The Fold was originally published in French as Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque and appeared in an English translation by Tom Conley. It suits readers interested in continental philosophy, Leibniz, and the intersections of philosophy with the arts.