Forget the Virtual, What Matters Is Intensity: Situating Intensity in Deleuze’s Early Thought

Recent Deleuze scholarship has become more focused on Deleuze’s notion of intensity and, in particular, the relationship developed in Difference and Repetition between virtual Ideas and their actualization on one side and intensity and individuation on the other side. This chapter proposes an interpretation of this relationship and its development in Deleuze’s thought by linking it first to the relationship between force and will to power that Deleuze offers in Nietzsche and Philosophy and then to underappreciated ideas that further develop the distinction in The Logic of Sense. It will first examine the idea in Nietzsche and Philosophy that the will to power determines forces from the double point of view of their quantity and their quality before linking this to Deleuze’s contention in Difference and Repetition that intensive processes of dramatization and individuation determine the differenciation of the virtual in actualized species and parts. It will then examine how these intensive processes, for Deleuze, do not actualize but rather incarnate Ideas, and that it does so by way of a synthesis of the disparate that does not constitute a substantial individual as such but rather a perspective, again along lines articulated in Deleuze’s Nietzsche book where the will to power constitutes distinct moral perspectives dramatized in the figures of noble and slave. Finally, it will turn to Deleuze’s exploration of effectuation and counter-effectuation in The Logic of Sense, showing how these processes relate to individuation and de-individuation that for Deleuze entail the ungrounding of actualized categories of representation.