Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze is presented as a philosopher of becoming whose account of the Event challenges the idea that reality consists, at bottom, of stable things. Across discussions of subjectivity, modern science, and visual form, the book emphasizes a distinctive Deleuzian wager: processes and appearances can possess an autonomy that cannot be explained away by reducing them to the entities or conditions beneath them. This makes Deleuze both a materialist and a defender of the event’s irreducibility, and places his thought in a productive tension with other accounts of how novelty emerges.

Becoming and the instability of things

The book sets Deleuze against a philosophical picture in which fixed beings are primary and change is secondary. In its account of the difference between Deleuze and Henri Bergson, the contrast is pointed: rather than treating the flux of becoming as the process that generates stable beings, Deleuze’s approach can make the processes themselves appear as things. Verbs and predicates—what happens to something and how it is qualified—become substantive agents. The result is not simply a celebration of motion. It is a way of loosening the assumption that a subject is a substantial core to which attributes belong. The subject can instead be understood as a formal, empty space in which multiple agents interact, an image the book compares to accounts of memes competing for survival and reproduction.

The book also locates Deleuze within a broader twentieth-century turn toward the autonomy of phenomena. Where nineteenth-century demystification often explained elevated forms of thought by reducing them to a lower reality, phenomenology sought to observe phenomena in their own right, rather than as effects or expressions of underlying entities. The book places Deleuze in this line alongside Henri Bergson and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and connects it to approaches in which becoming and the event matter more than substantial objects. In this setting, the shift from substantial reality to event is not a change in terminology alone: it unsettles the expectation that an explanation must ultimately lead back to a set of enduring things.

The Event and its philosophical contrasts

Deleuze’s account of the Event is distinguished from those of Martin Heidegger and Alain Badiou. For Heidegger, the Event names the epochal disclosure through which a world, understood as a horizon of meaning, comes into view. For Badiou, a Truth-Event is radically heterogeneous to the order of positive being. Deleuze, by contrast, is described as a vitalist who insists on the Event’s absolute immanence to being: the Event is the One-All of the proliferating differences of Life. The contrast is substantial. Deleuze does not place the Event beyond the world of becoming; he identifies it with becoming’s immanent proliferation.

Despite their differences, the book groups Deleuze and Badiou together in one important respect. Both defend the autonomy of the apparently immaterial order of the Event while making a materialist claim. Their accounts resist the idea that a new form, a truth, or a distinctively human act can simply be reduced to the positive conditions from which it arises. This creates a deliberate difficulty for materialism: it must explain how novelty and thought are possible without turning them into mere effects of an already complete reality. The book’s argument is not that Deleuze rejects material explanation, but that materialism must make room for what cannot be reduced to a catalogue of material preconditions.

The comparison also clarifies a disagreement about where to locate the Event. Heidegger treats it as the horizon beyond which thought cannot meaningfully go; Deleuze locates it within being as its immanent becoming; Badiou insists on a sharper division between Event and being. The book uses these differences to frame a larger dispute between idealist and materialist approaches to novelty. Its own materialist question is how an Event might emerge from a gap within the order of being, rather than being either wholly beyond that order or simply identical with its unfolding.

Surface, process, and the cartoon example

The book gives Deleuze’s ontology a strikingly concrete image through cartoons. Their characters inhabit a radically plastic universe: they have no depth beneath their surfaces, no hidden interior of flesh and bones, and can behave like balloons that expand or collapse. The example makes a philosophical distinction visible. In this world, becoming is not the transformation of a solid substance with a stable interior; surface change is the reality on offer.

The book extends this image through scenarios in which a flow becomes autonomous: Alice’s tears flood a room, a child’s urination in a dream grows into a river and then an ocean, or heavy rain provokes the fear that it will never stop. In each case, the flow seems to break free of the substantial reality that would ordinarily contain it. The point is not merely that these are vivid images of excess. They show how becoming can acquire its own momentum and cease to feel securely anchored in stable things. The cartoon universe renders this logic unusually clear because it strips away the depth that might otherwise seem to explain or contain change.

A related contrast appears in the discussion of configurations in cellular automata. At the physical level, pixels switch on and off in fixed locations. At a design level, however, forms such as gliders seem to move, persist, suffer damage, or disappear when another configuration consumes them. The same pattern can be understood through the movement of a message across an electronic sign or the apparent movement of a sand-mountain as its grains shift. The levels cannot simply be collapsed into one another: the larger form has patterns of behavior and change that are meaningful at its own level. The book associates this distinction with Deleuze’s opposition between being and the flux of becoming, without treating the higher-level description as a substitute for physical reality.

Subjectivity, paradox, and the limits of reduction

Deleuze’s account of the subject is also marked by a structural paradox. Drawing on his Logic of Sense, the book describes an entity that is doubled: in relation to a structure, it occupies an empty, unfilled place; in relation to the elements within that structure, it is an excessive occupant with no proper place. The subject is therefore neither simply a substantial agent standing outside the process nor merely one of its ordinary elements. It is at once a gap in the arrangement and something that exceeds the position the arrangement can provide.

This paradox informs the book’s criticism of explanations that imagine an agent or self already present before the processes through which it becomes intelligible. The apparently prior narrator, the one assumed to be telling a story, may instead be an effect of the narrative structure; likewise, knowledge may seem to answer a question that was never actually posed in advance. Deleuze’s doubled entity helps name this conjunction of lack and surplus: the place from which a subject seems to act is also unoccupied, while the subject that seems to fill it cannot be contained by the structure.

Taken together, these arguments make Deleuze a key figure in the book’s account of why materialism must not be confused with reduction. Becoming, the Event, and the subject’s divided position each resist explanation in terms of fully constituted objects alone. Deleuze’s distinctive contribution is to hold fast to immanence while giving process, surface, and emergence their own conceptual force. The unresolved question is how to explain that force materially without erasing the difference it makes.