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Gilles Deleuze (1925-1996) appears to inherit many of his priorities and strategies most directly from Nietzsche and from Michel Foucault, though his affinities specifically encompass as well Spinoza and the Roman Stoics. He has also written exceptionally clear and penetrating accounts of many other past thinkers. His own thought typically tracks how differences take root in social life and spread, and how they are shaped and reshaped as they participate both in other processes similar to themselves and in processes at pains to contain and instrumentalize them. The course of his thought suggests the kind of organization seen in fractal geometry, where similar patterns iterate at different scales to produce irregular structures. He uses most any kind of source material and in quite unexpected ways, reminding some perhaps of the literary strategies of a novelist like Thomas Pynchon.

Deleuze's thinking is resolutely polyglot, ranging to map reality on reality's own terms. His work fits well into our 'biological' model of mind as exhibiting modes of linguistic fact which serve the plasticity of human needs and desires in maintaining circulations, disseminations and reproductions of mutating informational inheritances on a ground of accreting - and also dissolving - potentially informational structural residues. In Deleuze's writing, descriptions of segmentations, flows, and lines of flight characterize lived patterns in more accord with the language of physical phase than that of signifying structures. The kind of plurality Deleuze exhibits is no static domain of 'facts': it emphasizes reality's active overflow, the excessive productions that subvert or are repressed by the reigning pretenses of order - if the latter cannot ignore or make use of them.

Deleuze employs biology's lexicon outside its strict referentiality, but he says his use of such figures are NOT metaphors. His work in any case powerfully evokes the kinds of processes we observe in life at its cellular and molecular levels, and is especially provocative concerning the extent to which we might look at language and social life as incorporating a 're-incarnation' of life's most elemental processes. Deleuze wants language to be encountered as communication which codes and 'over-codes' desires, which territorializes and 'deterritorializes' power, and which spreads and 'organizes' in the patterns of rhizomes. He challenges us to recognize in language an aspect where meaning and reference are less important than pattern, where we leave behind talking about the world in favor of a talk matching the world's flows and breaks and relative movements. Deleuze addresses the gap between what can be shown and what can be said, a favored theme for thinkers as diverse as Wittgenstein and Foucault, through a polyrhythmic saying which aims to make LANGUAGE show itself.

We bring Deleuze's work as exemplifying a more adequately pluralistic approach to the layer of facts called for in our model, but his work also serves in pointing the way toward the fundamental reorientation of the tradition which has been indicated. In section VI(b), above, we identified the kind of transcendence associated with conceptual activity as insistence. This was based on (1) giving priority to the incessance of forms' recurrent instantiations, and (2) identifying potentialities as the context for such activities. Between Nietzsche's and Whitehead's versions of such a picture, the power of unification evident in conceptual realizations had already shifted from the kind of ideality supportive of traditional subjective identity to moments essentially objective. Deleuze continues that shift so far that for him 'conceptual' activity becomes completely transactional, absent of any reference to identity: unifying only in events' discharge as convergent potentials (and contexts' sufferance of the recurrence thereof); singularities punctual in the modality of a beat.

Deleuze eschews any core principle of subjectivity, and though we differ from him in that, the zeal with which he exorcises formative activity from the subject - and from a principle of identity - and drives it into a dimension generating objective multiplicity - serves both the model we have deployed and the reorientation of the tradition we support.