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Abstract
Gilles Deleuzes "Riemannian geometry of sufficient reason" casts everything as a solution to a problem. John Cages 433, soap films, heronseach is comprehensible only in terms of the problem that, once posed, occasioned its genesis. These problems are virtual problems. What is "the virtual"? It seems little more than a subtle form of transcendence. How can it be then so integral a part of Deleuze's "philosophy of radical immanence"? Deleuze derives his notion of "the virtual" from two sources: Leibniz and Bergson. Of course, this derivation is not without its aberrant deviations. Leibniz is dissatisfied with mechanics. It poses questions it cannot answer, such as: Why is energy conserved? Why does light minimize time and not some other quantity? It is not possible to answer these questions without appeal to virtual force. Bergson is dissatisfied with all extant philosophies of time: they "spatialize" time, casting its "parts" as mutually external to one another. But the parts of time are not mutually external to one another: they permeate one another so emphatically that each part is virtually present to every other. Leibniz and Bergson appeal to the virtual to overcome various blind-spots haunting the philosophy of nature. Deleuze, though agreeing that any adequate philosophy of nature must involve the virtual, does not think that they have succeeded. Leibniz and Bergson each makes dogmatic decisions: Leibniz subordinates all difference to identity; Bergson conceives of organic wholes as unities rather than as multiplicities. The latter might sound minor, but it grounds Bergsons argument that mathematics and logic necessarily falsify time. Deleuze disagrees: there is a mathematical discourse that expresses something of time: topology.