deleuze's encounters with whitehead

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Deleuze’s Encounter With Whitehead Steven Shaviro [email protected] In a sho rt chapter of (1993 ) that consti tute s hi s only ex tended di scussion of Alf red North Whi teh ead, Gi lle s Del euze prai ses Whi tehead for asking th e ques- tion, What Is an Event?(76). Whiteheads (1929/1978) marks only the third time – after the Stoics and Leibniz – that events move to the center of philosophi cal thought. Deleuze wrote less about Whitehead than he did about the other gures in his philosophical counter-canon: Lucretius, the Stoics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Foucault. But Whiteh ead is arguably as important to Deleuze as any of these other thinkers. It is only today, in the wake of Isabelle Stengers’ great book (2002), that it has become possible, for the rst time, to measure the full extent of Deleuze’s encounter with Whitehead. My work here is deeply indebted to Stengers, as well as to James Williams (2005) and to Keith Robinson (2006), both of whom have written illuminatingly about Whitehead and Deleuze. “Wha t is an ev ent ?” is, of course, a qui nte ssen tia lly Dele uzi an questi on. And Whitehead marks an important turning-point in the history of philosophy because he afrms tha t, in fac t, ever yth ing is an event. The wor ld, he says , is made of eve nts, and nothi ng but events: happen ings rather than things, verbs rather than nouns, processes rather than substan ces. Becomi ng is the deepest dimens ion of Bei ng. Even a see min gly soli d and perma nent obj ect is an event; or , bet ter, a multi plici ty and a series of ev ents. Whiteh ead gives the example of Cleopa tra’ s Needle on the Victo ria Embankment in London (1920/2004, 165ff.) . Now , we kno w, of cours e, tha t this monu men t is not jus t “ther e. It has a his tor y . Its granite was sculpted by human hands, sometime around 1450 BC. It was moved from Heliopolis to Alexandria in 12 BC, and again from Alexandria to London in 1877-1878 AD. And some day, no doubt, it will be destroyed, or otherwise cease to exist. But for Whitehead, there is much more to it than that. Cleopatra’s 1

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