On Subjectivity in Deleuze's The Fold

Abstract

”What, or rather who, is the subject?” (Critchley 13). For Descartes, the thinking subject, which is ”rectilinear” and ”can be divided into discrete units”, stands at the center of the quincunx1 2 and conquers the world through its own rules. The Cartesian standpoint was further developed by Kant, whose transcendental subject is independent of the empirical world of causation and change, and imposes a priori logical categories upon incoming sense impressions in order to define experience. For Kant, although we cannot directly ”know” (experience) our own subjectivity (reason, mind), its unity is presupposed by the ”unity of our experience.” Over against this ”Enlightenment” subject, Deleuze incorporates different theories of subjectivity in terms of his geometrical model based on the plane, creating his rhizomatics. In Deleuze's universe, different series (the Hume-series, the Bergson-series, the Leibniz-series, the Nietzsche-Foucault-series, and the Nietzsche-Klossowski-series) interact and interpenetrate one another. Once the nostalgia for a substantial, core self fades away, the choreography between the subject and the world dazzles us with its infinite enfolding and unfolding. In this paper, I explore the concept of the subject in Deleuze's The Fold. After briefly introducing the theories of subjectivity that have dominated the last thirty years of literary and cultural studies, I will discuss Deleuze's use of Leibniz's concept of the monad. Then, noting that the notion (model, picture) of the monad's enfolding and unfolding seems congruent with that of light as wave/particle duality in quantum physics, and also with David Bohm's physics-based thinking, I will employ the wave/particle duality model of light and Bohm's concept of holomovement to illustrate the ”becoming of the subject” in the third and fourth parts of my paper^3.