A. N. Whitehead1

Nardina Kaur (Guy Callan) Freelance philosopher andexperimental theatre practitioner

Isabelle Stengers (2011) Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and WildCreation of Concepts, trans. Michael Chase, Cambridge and London:Harvard University Press

Didier Debaise (2006) Un Empirisme spculatif: Lecture de Procs etralit de Whitehead, Paris: Vrin

A. N. Whitehead (2011) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles ofNatural Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press[paperback re-issue of 1955 reprint of 1925 2nd edn]

A. N. Whitehead (2011) The Principle of Relativity with Applicationsto Physical Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press [paperbackre-issue of 1922 edn]

Abstract

Two books on Whitehead, a major study by the noted philosopherof science, Isabelle Stengers, and a shorter one by Didier Debaise arereviewed, along with two earlier mathematical and scientific works byWhitehead himself, which have been re-issued. This provides the basisfor a wide-ranging discussion of the relationships between Whiteheadslove of poetry and Heideggers approach to it, Whiteheads backgroundin mathematics and theoretical physics and his attitude to empiricalscience and more general problems of the philosophy of the event, inparticular how radical change can come about.

Keywords: Whitehead, Heidegger, poetry, philosophy of the event,philosophy of science, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

Deleuze Studies 8.4 (2014): 542568DOI: 10.3366/dls.2014.0169 Edinburgh University Presswww.euppublishing.com/dls

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A. N. Whitehead (18611947) has a rather peculiar place in thehistory of modern Western philosophy. His books on mathematicsand theoretical physics are still read by specialists in those fields,but his philosophical work has never really become part of themainstream curriculum of the subject in Anglo-Saxon countries. Indeedanalytic philosophers have sometimes regarded him as slightly loopyand not entirely to be taken seriously.2 It is mostly theologians andeducationalists who have been attracted by his metaphysical ideas andhave sometimes responded to him as a kind of cult figure. The situation isdefinitely better with regard to Francophone philosophy, where there hasbeen a small but steady current of interest in his thought, starting withthe seminal work by Jean Wahl, Vers Le Concret, where the treatmentof Whitehead is remarkable, given the fact that it was published asearly as 1932, that is only three years after the publication of Processand Reality.3 The problem with Francophone philosophers is that theyhave had a tendency, at least until fairly recently, to subtly elideWhiteheads ideas with those of Bergson and Husserl. Of course, thereare real affinities between the work of the three philosophers, all ofwhom started as mathematicians, and Whitehead does refer positivelyto Bergson, but there are also real differences. This is important, notonly for the history of ideas, but also for precision of thought in anycreative philosophy that draws on the work of any or all of these threethinkers.

Bergson, Husserl andWhitehead all started off as mathematicians, butthe first two moved on to philosophy very quickly, whereas Whiteheadwas still producing works on mathematics and theoretical physics inhis fifties. This is the key to understanding the difference betweenWhitehead and the other two thinkers. Both Bergson and Husserl triedto establish an autonomous, well-grounded mode of thought which wasan alternative to positivist science. In Bergson, this mode of thought isintuition, and the contrast between it and science is unequivocal, butHusserls mode of thought is ambiguous: he was trying to establisha type of science that did not depend upon objective fact external toconsciousness. In later phenomenology, this became a primordial pre-scientific mode of thought, upon which scientific or logical modes ofthought were necessarily based, but there were also tinges of anti-science.One can see why Bergsons ideas had such an enormous impact on thearts, while those of Husserl were immensely important for the socialand human sciences.4 By contrast, Whitehead continued to think like amathematician throughout his career, and he never lost faith in science,which he greatly stretched from the empirical towards the speculative by

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means of his mathematics. In a sense, he is not far from a philosopher ofscience such as Meyerson or Duhem or a philosophical mathematiciansuch as Poincar, even if there are clear divergences between their ideasand his. Whiteheads ideas can also be related to more theoretical and/orholistic currents in twentieth-century science, such as quantum physics,evolutionary development biology (Evo Devo) or ethology.5

However, there is another dimension to Whitehead which takes himbeyond a subtle philosophy of science or a more holistic scientificpractice. In 1932, another seminal work was published, this time inEngland: New Bearings in English Poetry by F. R. Leavis. In it, theauthor traced the marginalisation and decline of English poetry in theface of the modern industrial world in the late nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, and he saw Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Gerard ManleyHopkins as the initiators of poetic renewal.6 Near the beginning ofthe second chapter of The Concept of Nature, Whitehead states thatnatural philosophers should consider everything perceived as being innature, the glow of the sunset just as much as the molecules andelectric waves used to explain the phenomenon.7 A sense of poeticand scientific observations being equally valid as empirically basedknowledge is bound up with the rejection of the bifurcation of nature,and Whitehead does indeed cite verses by Shakespeare or the EnglishRomantic poets in support of his philosophical arguments.8 Of course,he is going back to writers from before the decline noted in NewBearings in English Poetry, but Leavis judgement, which could also beapplied to other art forms in England, would not be relevant to poetryor other art forms of the same time in French- or German-speakingcountries. Here, an autonomous, self-referential, aestheticising, proto-modernist culture exploring inner consciousness grew up, particularlyin France after the dbcle of 18701 and in the Austro-Hungarianempire, where psychoanalysis originated, but there were clear tendenciesin this direction, not simply in Austria and France, much earlier in thenineteenth century. This is the kind of shift in subjectivity that preparedthe way for Bergson and Husserl and to which they greatly contributed.9

Except perhaps for Keats, the major English Romantic poets managedto more or less bypass the problematic subject bequeathed to Westernculture by Descartes. Even if Coleridge became a drug addict and losthis poetic gift and Wordsworth a pompous bore, their achievement inthe Lyrical Ballads its first edition was in 1798 was astonishing, evenif one tends to forget this because of the familiarity of the poems. Thereis a limpid ease with which the subject encounters nature, other humans,both strangers and intimate family members, and its own thoughtful

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self-reflection. The latter is deep and not infrequently troubled thisunproblematic subject is not a shallow one but this trouble is neverall-engulfing and can always be assuaged in a way that is sprituallyprofound but not invested with excessive angst. Perception is direct,observation acute, nature is felt on a delicate scale, and language istransparent and simple. Of course, all this artlessness comes from verycomplex art, as is made explicit in the fairly short Advertisement to theoriginal edition of the Lyrical Ballads, which became a greatly expandedPreface in the later editions. Tintern Abbey demonstrates very clearlythe combination of a gentle but complex emotional chiaroscuro with asmooth movement across the boundaries of the body and mind withinthe subject, subject and nature, past, present and future of the subjectand subject and other related subject, in this case Wordsworths sister.The lines: And I have felt/ A presence that disturbs me with the joy/Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/ Of something far more deeplyinterfused,/ Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns/ And the roundocean and the living air,/ And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,/A motion and a spirit, that impels/ All thinking things, all objects of allthought,/ And rolls through all things shows the scumbled blurring ofwhat could have been broken down into its discrete parts by a morerigourous, problematising analysis. This kind of intuitional, holisticempiricism will be very important for Whitehead.10

Yet there is a complexity in what Tintern Abbey omits: one wouldnever know from the poem that the Wye valley had been an importantmetallurgical centre since the sixteenth century and played an importantrole in the early Industrial Revolution. There is a real element ofdenial here, which will lead to Leavis diagnosis of the marginalisationand decline of poetry in the course of the nineteenth century. Thereis an interesting contrast with a slightly later, major French writer,Nerval. Four works from the end of his life, that is from the early1850s, involve quasi-autobiographical journeys to the north of Paris,where the author had partly grown up: Anglique, Les Nuits doctobre,Sylvie and Promenades et souvenirs. They epitomise a problematic,disjunctive, fragmented subject, at times ironic, at times overwhelmedby intense emotions, at times on the edge of hallucination. All fourworks, especially Sylvie, contain impressive descriptions of nature andlocal customs Nerval is much more self-projective or immersed inthese descriptions than Wordsworth but there are also references tothe railways that had only recently been built to the north of Paris inthree of the works and to social changes that resulted from the railwaysin Sylvie.11

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Nerval was strongly influenced by German literature, which, alongwith mental illness, brings him very close to two of Heideggerspoets: Hlderlin and Trakl. There are also interesting affinities betweenHeidegger and Whitehead, in that there is a similarly concrete qualityto the relationship between the human subject and the world of objectsin the former and the actual entity among other actual entities in thelatter. Heidegger clearly focuses on poetry in a much more sustainedway than Whitehead, but neither isolates it as aesthetic. Whiteheadmoves easily from the glow of the sunset to molecules and electricwaves, from poetry to science, while Heidegger is well known for notreading poems as a literary critic or historian. Indeed his readingsoften feel like medieval biblical exegesis, with quasi-decontextualisedutterances being turned into insights into the essence of being in hiscase or Christian spirituality in the case of the commentators fromthe Middle Ages. With Heidegger, this is part of a deliberate processof de-subjectivising and de-aestheticising artistic modernism in orderto regain a primordial, authentic access to the essence of being, butthere is a correlate: technology is rejected along with artistic modernism.Whitehead has no problems with technology, and he does not need toconfront artistic modernism in English Romantic poetry. In a sense,Heidegger had to reject the technology to which modernism was reactingwhen he rejected modernism, while Whitehead was able to establishan undifferentiated creativity as ultimate in Process and Reality.12 Italso means that the latters anti-Cartesianism is very nuanced: he doesnot so much launch a frontal attack on the problematic subject asconduct subtle operations that transform it, and he greatly enrichesthe notion of modern science that had Cartesian thought as its basiswithout completely destroying those foundations. This is why he wasso drawn to Leibniz, who fully accepted the philosophy, science andmathematics of his age but maintained a highly fruitful, very criticaldialogue with the ideas of Descartes, Locke and Newton throughout hiscareer.13

Language and Freges theory of meaning (or the philosophicaltradition behind it) are central concerns in both analytic philosophyand Heidegger, even if they approach it in almost diametrically opposedways. As has been shown, the latter extensively explores poetic languageand is trying to uncover a primordial truth anterior to propositionaltruth, while the former uses simplified, clear statements, such as Thepresent King of France is bald to pursue an essentially Fregeanprogramme. That the binary quality of subject and predicate, senseand reference in analytic philosphy reinforces the rigidity of Cartesian

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subjectobject relations is evident, but one could say that Heideggernever really succeeds in overcoming them, in spite of all his efforts to doso. Whitehead was not insensitive to language: indeed he is always a veryprecise and not infrequently a downright elegant writer, but he thoughtlike a mathematician or geometrician, not in the narrow, reductive senseof the isolating of variables and finding a function to link them, inorder to establish a numerical essence for reality, but in the infinitelyexpanding sense of continuously reframing mathematical problems innovel and illuminating ways. One is reminded of Emerson:

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle anothercan be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning;that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deepa lower deep opens. (Emerson 2003: 225)14

This enabled him to put subjectobject relations into a new context,in which they could be opened out and radically rethought. Clearly,this was of immense importance for Deleuze: Difference and Repetitionand The Fold are profoundly influenced by this aspect of Whiteheadsphilosophy.

However, there is an important distinction to be made here, inthat one can argue as to how metaphorical Deleuzes mathematicsare,15 whereas the difficulty simply does not arise with Whitehead: hesimply was a mathematician, and he published mathematical work. Theproblem, though, is that the mathematical work is difficult for non-mathematicians and can be separated out from the rest of his thought, sothere is a tendency to ignore it. This is particularly true of the responseto The Concept of Nature, where the geometric sections are usuallyskipped and the metaphysical comments are extracted as indications ofhow its author was to develop as a fully-fledged philosopher, but thisis a profoundly mistaken approach, as it is precisely the grittiness ofWhiteheads relational mathematical engineering that takes him beyonda vague Swedenborgian panpsychism, however mystical or poeticalhe sometimes is. This is why the paperback re-issue of An EnquiryConcerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge and The Principleof Relativity with Applications to Physical Science is particularlysignificant. The former first appeared in 1919 but had a second edition in1925, while the latter was published in 1922: together with The Conceptof Nature, which came out in 1920, they form a kind of interlockingtrilogy.An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge covers

much the same material as The Concept of Nature, but it is not

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mostly based on lectures, as the latter book is: it is more like a well-organised textbook, broken down into a very clearly defined structureof larger sections and smaller subsections. This means that althoughit is more dense scientifically and has a fair sprinkling of reasonablycomplicated diagrams and equations, an attentive reading of it is aninvaluable supplement to The Concept of Nature, where the long verbaldescriptions and lack of diagrams sometimes make it hard to graspWhiteheads four-dimensional geometry in a precise, concrete way, andthe different concepts can begin to blend into each other in a kindof oral flow, even if there is a visionary element in compensation forthis. Near the beginning of An Enquiry Concerning the Principles ofNatural Knowledge, Whitehead deals with Berkeley in the same waythat a mathematician would deal with another mathematician: he goesback to the problem behind the solution and recasts it in a way thattransforms it. The gap between moment by moment perception and theworld of objects is replaced, with some intervening input from Kant, bythe relationship between perceptual experience and knowledge, with thelatter only occurring within the former.16 There are two mathematicalsystems elaborated in both An Enquiry Concerning the Principlesof Natural Knowledge and The Concept of Nature: (1) extensiveabstraction, which corresponds to the basis for scientific explorationand (2) a four-dimensional relational geometry of instantaneous space,which is a way of trying to understand ongoing, lived perceptualexperience, with the former being derived from the latter. Hard work onthese systems enormously enhances ones understanding of Whiteheadsphilosphy, even when it shifts from the relationship between perceptionand knowledge to that of perception and ontology in his more maturephilosophical thought.The Concept of Nature is pervaded by the theory of relativity or

aspects of science, mathematics or geometry associated with it, butit is only mentioned specifically in chapter VIII, where Whiteheadbriefly explores the differences between his ideas and those of Einstein.This means that The Concept of Nature can to a certain extentbe read in a relatively non-scientific way, even if such a reading isbound to be somewhat skewed, but this is definitely not true ofThe Principle of Relativity, which is a sustained contribution by apractising mathematical physicist to the extraordinarily rich debateconcerning relativity in the scientific community around 1920, withimportant books by Weyl, Lorentz, Born and Pauli, all offering subtledevelopments and alternatives to Einsteins theories: even when theseauthors have ideas which are no longer accepted today, they are still

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very thought-provoking. This is true of the most interesting divergencefrom the classic model in The Principle of Relativity:

The possibility of other such laws [of gravitation], expressed in sets ofdifferential equations other than Einsteins, arises from the fact that on mytheory there is a relevant fact of nature which is absent on Einsteins theory.This fact is the whole bundle of alternative time stratifications arising fromthe uniform significance of events. (85)

As this quotation indicates, there are some serious alternativemathematics associated with this divergence in what is a verymathematical book, but the idea had already been explored en passantin The Concept of Nature. Here it emerges as a consequence of the four-dimensional instantaneous (as opposed to timeless) space configuredaround the event-particle. One could say that the event-particle andits spacetime relationship with the rest of the universe form a radicallysingular, momentary, indissoluable cluster, and that none of the elementsof this cluster can be fully generalised to any other such cluster. What isbeautiful about this thought is that it can be built into a world that singswith a deep harmony between interdependence and spontaneity: it is asif Leibnizs monads still reflected the other monads but had been put inBrownian motion.17

This network of related movement in spacetime, electromagneticwaves and gravitational pull, explored in an ongoing way by four-dimensional geometry and equations, the latter mostly coming fromtensor calculus, is not without real emotional investment by Whitehead.The very first page of An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of NaturalKnowledge contains a prominent dedication to Whiteheads youngestson, who was killed in action in France in 1918, and at the end of thePreface there is a reference to the anxiety during the war and at lastthe anguish which is the price of victory (viii). The final section of the1919 edition of the book, that is just before the Notes added in 1925,concludes that the permanence of the individual rhythm within natureis not absolutely associated with one definite set of material objects,and then Whitehead quotes poetry from Tennyson and Wordsworth andcites Bergsons lan vital (199200).

At the beginning of his beautiful essay, Wozu Dichter?, first deliveredin 1946 after another world war, Heidegger speaks of the poets abilityto feel the traces of the departed gods in the abyss at the centre of thenight of the worlds misery, so that this abyss can become the groundof a change in direction for humanity. How is this done? One can avoidconcentrating exclusively on poetry and therefore parallel the dual use

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of geometry and equations in Whiteheads mathematics (and elsewherein the theory of relativity) by comparing Trakl and Van Gogh, bothof whom were very important to Heidegger. The poet and painter putobjects on the paper or canvas in a way that is not aesthetic, emphasisingtheir isness or thingness, and compacting object and object or objectand space together so that lines of force appear between and aroundthose objects. These are the traces of the gods and of the future, butas Heidegger says near the end of Wozu Dichter?, these are not overtpredictions of a future which is to come, but traces from the future whichwork best when their action is unconscious. The lines of force are alsothe Wesen, that is essence, of being, but Wesen in Heidegger is nevertranscendent or eternal: it is always immanent and of the moment ofperception and/or revelation.

Strictly speaking, mathematical physics does come close to makingpredictions, in that there is hope that what has been positedgeometrically or in equations will eventually be observed empirically.This means that one should be very careful about crossing the boundarybetween the theory of relativity and philosophy, however stimulatingthe former may be to the latter, especially with regard to the nature oftime. Furthermore, the theory of relativity does not necessarily lend itselfto one particular type of philosophy: Cassirers neo-Kantian, Marburgschool approach to it is quite different from that of Whitehead, who isalready beginning to speculate about its application outside physics inthe very first sentence of the main text of The Principle of Relativity (3).

It is worth noting that the tensor calculus brought into the theoryof relativity by Einstein is also used by engineers to determine thestresses and strains in solids and liquids, and this gives it a quality ofan explorative-constructive instrument that has definite affinities withwhat is happening in Trakls poems or Van Goghs paintings. Even ifHeidegger is a mystical philospher of poetic depths and Whitehead amathematician of heuristic conceptual frames, both avoid the discrete,circumscribed object and resolve its finitude or transience in eternal,continuous process. One could argue that Deleuze brings these twovisions together and adds a mediating surface between them, withLogic of Sense having a rather more interior quality than the veryWhiteheadianDifference and Repetition. Derrida may refer more overtlyto Heidegger, but there is a definite element of Heideggerian authenticityin Deleuzes concept of being worthy of the event, although the influencemay have been felt indirectly via Sartre.18

Isabelle Stengers and Didier Debaise are both at the Universit Librede Bruxelles, which means that there is a certain family resemblance

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between their two books Stengers Thinking with Whitehead19 andDebaises Un Empirisme spculatif even if the two works are ratherdifferent in scope. Stengers is a distinguished doyenne of the philosophyof science, and her book is her magnum opus, in which she exhaustivelyexplores all of Whiteheads metaphysical work in relation to her ownrichly matured thoughts on science and ontology, while Debaise isa talented younger colleague and former student of hers who hasproduced an excellent but relatively limited study of a single text, Processand Reality. Nevertheless, there are a number of shared elements inthe approaches of the two authors. First, an important problem inWhitehead scholarship is the degree to which there is a radical breakor continuity between The Concept of Nature and the later metaphysics.Both Stengers and Debaise opt for nuanced continuity, with extensivepassages in Thinking with Whitehead being devoted to Science andthe Modern World and Religion in the Making, two understudiedtransitional works between The Concept of Nature and Process andReality. Second, both authors also try to rectify the subtle assimilation ofWhiteheads ideas to those of Bergson or phenomenology in Continentalphilosophy, while simultaneously establishing affinities with WilliamJames. There are excellent passages doing one or the other in bothStengers and Debaise, although hers are more extensive, as hers is byfar the longer book. Third, Whitehead has a very distinctive, rathercreative and not un-Deleuzian relationship with the philosophers fromDescartes to Kant, even if, as Stengers says, he tends to treat them asother mathematicians, appropriating individual ideas and transformingthem, whereas Deleuze is more in the mould of Gueroult, a radical butscholarly re-interpreter of the thought as a whole of significant figuresfrom the philosophical past. There are many excellent passages detailingWhiteheads treatment of individual concepts in Descartes, Leibniz,Locke or Hume in both Stengers and Debaise, and the former comesvery close indeed to cracking one of the key problems in Whitehead:how he scrambles the history of the philosophy of perception in theWest and ontology in an interlocking and reflecting but complexlyasymmetrical way.20 Fourth, both authors mention Deleuze, but Stengersdoes not always clearly distinguish between the ideas of Whitehead andthose of solo Deleuze or Deleuze and Guattari, while Debaise has avery interesting section in which he explores the differences betweenindividuation in Whitehead and in Deleuze and Simondon. This contrastprobably stems from the fact that Stengers is often discussing herown ideas with reference to other philosophers or thinkers who haveinfluenced her at the same time as she is maintaining an ongoing dialogue

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with Whitehead, who of course is the main influence on her. Fifth, bothDebaise and Stengers are very good at dealing with the etymology orassociations of important words in Whitehead, in particular the nameshe gives to concepts, types of entity or operations to which entities aresubject. Stengers is also aware of subtle problems in the existing Frenchtranslations of Whitehead, but obviously his texts are now given intheir original English. Debaise is a little disappointing in this respect: heonly cites these French translations of Whitehead, which are actually ascompetent as translations can be, and some of them do have runningpage references to the original English publications, but citations ofboth French and English texts would have been better. Sixth, Stengersdemonstrates a quite exceptional mastery of Whiteheads work fromwhich she can pretty much quote at will and the literature connectedwith it and with his creative process, but she has opted for a bookwithout footnotes and a relatively limited bibliography, while Debaisehas scholarly footnotes and an exhaustive and up-to-date bibliographyof publications on Whitehead in both English and French. One shouldnot allow the vast scale of Thinking with Whitehead to diminish the veryconsiderable achievement of Un Empirisme spculatif: in not that muchmore than 150 pages of main text, Debaise has managed to producean admirably lucid, very concise, intellectually subtle and beautifullyorganised account of the principal themes of Process and Reality, a workthat is renowned for its sprawling and rather inaccessible nature.

The central spine of Stengers book is made up of extended and denseexegeses of Whiteheads most important works from The Concept ofNature onwards. She follows the twists and turns of thought fromwork to work in a way that respects individual moments of creativityin problem solving but also establishes a remarkably unified trajectoryfor Whiteheads overall philosophical journey. Broadly, it is a visionthat combines a belief in traditional empirical science with elements ofspeculation, holistic thinking and inclusivity that prevent it from beingreductive and an ontology that involves a very amorphous subject ina very interactive relationship with its world. What is missing is thekind of divided subject one finds in Deleuze, Lyotard or Derrida, andthis is because such a subject is probably missing from Whiteheadsphilosophy and has to be added to it, but that may be a way ofdeveloping or expanding his work, which is something Stengers wishesto do. While a divided subject can seem too binary, as if it were simplytwo partial subjects instead of one, Stengers amorphous subject can stillseem too individualistic, only with more blurred boundaries and a lesssolid internal consistency. This is not to say that she is wrong there

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is a great deal of validity in her approach but that by eschewing thedivided subject, she is forgoing the opportunities it gives as an operationfor collapsing the subject from within and turning it into drives, whichcan be linked to external forces. For example, in Arnolds problemof whether the perimeter of a rectangle is increased by a sequence offolding and unfolding, one can relate the pattern of the folding andunfolding to the actions that have caused them and see the perimeter assomething responding to continuities that cross it rather than the resultof something within it.21 The divided subject is probably associatedwith the types of thought that Stengers seems to be attacking in anoblique way throughout the whole of Thinking with Whitehead. It isdifficult to be sure about what she is attacking critical epistemology,something like Marxist critique and Rorty are alluded to en passant butone assumes that deconstruction and poststructuralism would be partof what she is rejecting in favour of her very subtle but still rathertraditional belief in the efficacy of empirical science. Again, she is notwrong, but as with Heidegger, there are aspects of Derrida and Lyotardthat could be cross-phased in a fruitful and complementary way withWhiteheads philosophy.

However much one might disagree with certain aspects of thedirection in which Stengers takes Whiteheads ideas, there is no doubtthat her exegesis of his work is superb and that it benefits enormouslyfrom her being a creative philosopher in her own right. She beginswith The Concept of Nature, concentrating on its metaphysical sideand ignoring the extensive discussions of geometry, as is normal inWhitehead studies. This section of Stengers book seems longer than itis: it takes up seven of the main twenty-five chapters, but these chaptersare quite short, and there is quite a lot of quotation from Whitehead.Nevertheless, she distils the essence of The Concept of Nature: with mindas ultimate, it circumvents the bifurcation of nature. Everything theglow of the sunset and the molecules and electric waves is in the sameboat. With due attention, one can extend ones perceptual capacity,so that one is not seeing a reality behind appearance but a furtherdimension of a reality that always remains undivided. A sort ofengrenage or complementarity is proposed between respondent andworld: there seems to be enough of a fit between what one can perceiveand what is out there that one can in general rely on ones perceptionsas a basis for knowledge and survival. Mind is still ultimate here, sothat is why interlocking is closer to what is happening than fusion.Stengers introduces the image of the mountaineer climbing the mountainas a means of conveying what this relationship is like, and it turns

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into the concept of having a hold on the world as she enters into avery long discussion of Science and the Modern World, a rather hybridand confusing work that Whitehead specialists have tended to neglect.Stengers thorough exploration of this text is a particularly originalaspect of Thinking with Whitehead, and it very much provides the basisfor the rich and convincing link she makes between The Concept ofNature and the later more purely metaphysical work.

It is now that the problem of misplaced concreteness is tackled. Onecan observe reality and isolate certain variables, say: velocity, frequencyand wavelength, and then combine them into a function, in this casev = f, which can be tested empirically. Even if there continues to be nodisproof of the function, and it remains true, it is still not out there. Tothink so is misplaced abstraction, that is confusing the tool that one hasused to come to grips with reality with something that is actually outthere and has been discovered. There is an important distinction to bemade between the fact that the universe appears to be mathematisableand human beings seem to be able to do it and the existence of a kindof mathematical fact at the root of the universe. This is very muchthe way mathematicians think: they usually prefer to make ongoingcontributions to as yet unsolved or perhaps insoluble problems, ratherthan just finding answers.22 Stengers continually emphasises the way inwhich Whitehead thinks like a mathematician throughout the whole ofher book. This means that it is particularly clear that the expansivequality of due attention in The Concept of Nature and the argumentsagainst the reductive quality of misplaced concreteness in Science and theModern World are two sides of the same intellectual coin and how muchthe holistic quality of their authors thought comes from his training asa mathematician.

Another key problem in Whitehead is how one moves from eternalobjects to actual entities. He addresses this problem in a sustainedway in Science and the Modern World, using God as ultimate, andStengers closely tracks what one could call his rough workings forthe more finished achievement of Process and Reality, although evenhere, Whitehead was continuously fine-tuning his ideas by insertingnew sentences into paragraphs which had already been written. Partof Stengers purpose in making this detailed exposition is to show howWhitehead was driven by the logic of the problem, but what is perhapsmore interesting is that it allows her to treat Process and Reality in a lessmonolithic way and to see what it says as in a certain sense provisionaland therefore capable of further extension, something she herself doesin the later chapters of her book. It also helps one to understand how

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difficult ontology is, how difficult it is to understand the relationshipbetween permanence and transience, how easy formulae or positions willnot work and how the problem is perhaps insoluble but always open tofresh attempts at a deeper understanding by heuristic reframings.

God is replaced as ultimate by creativity in Processs and Reality, buthe is still there in another very important role. How Whitehead usesGod is a third key problem in the philosophers work, and Stengershandles it very impressively. She does not simply block at the wordGod and the religious vocabulary associated with him: she gets behindthis to see what problem Whitehead is trying to solve and how he isusing God as a concept in relation to it.23 This is in fact an approach onecould use with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers thatwere so important to Whitehead, and it is not surprising that Stengers isparticularly good at the difference between his notion of God and thatof Leibniz. For the Whiteheadian, what is best for that impasse seemsinitially quite close to the Leibnizian best of all possible worlds, and bothconceptions are trying to get hold of the fact that the universe somehowseems to work, but one involves omniscient divine foresight from theoutside, while the other has God as a kind of operator within actualityinducing a certain overall positive directionality. Divine eternity becomesmore about conserving what is transient by allowing it to somehowbe incorporated into what is to come, rather than some permanentground beyond or within the transient. Stengers chapter twenty-four,God and the World, is a long, intellectually very disciplined andextremely beautiful exploration of the relationship between God, theworld, creativity and actuality.

What one could call the other side of the intellectual coin of whatis best for that impasse is the trick of evil. This is when the progressof actuality is forced, when something comes before its time, andit is undoubtedly an important Whiteheadian concept, but Stengersalso emphasises it for her own reasons. Her resistence to types ofthought such as critical epistemology and Rortys philosophy is notunconnected with her antipathy to what one could call vanguardradicalism. By and large, one is happy to eschew along with her theIm so left-wing, I wouldnt even suck milk from my mothers rightbreast tendency, and Whitehead himself was probably a consensualprogressive, as Stengers seems to be, but the very methodical natureof his system means that there is potentially much more room forspontaneity than she seems to allow. Indeed it is possible that she neverquite succeeds in bringing together and defining properly the parallelleaps in speculative empiricism and in the movement from eternal objects

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to actual entities.24 The way in which the link between the methodicaland the spontaneous can be developed in Whitehead can be explored inrelation to Stanislavskian theatre technique, in which there has been abifurcation between (1) the early Stanislavskian technique of emotionalrecall which was taken up in particular by Lee Strasberg in Americabut generally dropped in Russia itself and (2) the detailed scoring of thetext, breaking the action down into beats and units, something that isdone everywhere to a certain degree but can be done in minute detail inRussia.

When one puts these two strands back together, one can gowell beyond the bourgeois naturalism or emotional self-indulgenceoften associated with Stanislavskian work. The present author playedMordecai in Lope de Vegas Esther as a Hasidic Jew in a productionset in something like 1940s Hungary during the Horty regime. Thetheatre was small, with the audience on the same level as the actors,so close contact was possible between them. There was an intenselyemotional scene in which Mordecai was told of the impending holocaustof the Jews, for which the present author used emotional recall based ona personal traumatic childhood episode, of course stitched into otherelements of historical or mimetic research, but not in itself to do withbeing Jewish or the Holocaust. Such use of emotional recall is not anexploratory exercise, the results of which are later repeated by the use ofmotor memory, but the reproduction of the actual emotional experienceevery performance, with however the use of muscular controls, in thepresent authors case mainly learnt through isolation work with RyszardCieslak and biomechanics with Gennadi Bogdanov. It is as if ones bodyhas become a map of muscles that can be pressed like the stops of amusical instrument to mould the palpable emotional flow one seems tobe channelling. The key to Stanislavski is production from the inside, notcopying from the outside, and such work has an authenticity that canimpact directly on the nervous system of audience members. In the caseof Esther, a significant percentage of the spectators on certain nightswere Jewish concentration camp survivors. On those nights, audiencemembers began spontaneously to talk to Mordecai, to console him,and he began to have a probing, gliding motion, similar to Africanperformers using masks to be spirits, with whom the present author hadworked.

It is important to underline the highly personal and apparentlyirrelevant nature of the emotional recall material. Plaited into themore objective elements of the process, this material helps to createa kind of broad space, simultaneously low density and superconductive,

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permitting slides between self and other, and higher density, solidifying,connecting them, but this could not happen if the material was notin some way a response to the text or the directors interpretation ofit, however intuitive a leap it might be. The author played the olderof two male characters in a shortish piece by Dostoyevsky (AnotherMans Wife or The Husband Under The Bed), where the director(Anatoli Vasiliev) wanted to explore the bullying of the older generationby the younger one and a certain collapse of shared Enlightenmentvalues in post-Soviet Russia. The author happens to be male to femaletransgendered, but has not had a sex change, and drew on an episode inwhat one would now call her female (or transgendered)25 experience fora certain section. This choice was primarily triggered by a scene from aproduction of Lermontovs Masquarade by Vasiliev which he showedin rehearsal, where the bullied character was female. This element ofclivage in the preparation was the basis for a complex effect duringa monologue in the section in question, where the authors charactertalked about his feelings as if he were someone else in the distancelooking at the scene. The distance between the character and his doublewas felt, but the two points were brought together, while the emotionalmoment was extended, mainly by controlling the muscles of the face.One seems very close here to the contraction of space and dilation of timethat one finds in the theory of relativity and that underpin Whiteheadsbeautiful descriptions of the event, simultaneity and temporal thicknessin The Concept of Nature.26

Stengers first degree was in chemistry, and she is a distinguishedphilosopher of science, so she tends to turn to the natural sciences whenshe wants to explore her own ideas as a response to and developmentof Whiteheads thought. This happens throughout Thinking withWhitehead, but the roughly 140-page section of chapters nineteen totwenty-three does this in an especially concentrated way. Each of thesefive chapters uses exegeses of short passages from Process and Realityor Modes of Thought as a springboard for an extended discussion ofa particular area. Chapter twenty-three, Modes of Existence, Modesof Thought, which moves from a relatively reductive but importantbiochemical model of life to a more holistic ethological one, is especiallyimpressive, but chapter nineteen, Justifying Life?, in which the subtleWhiteheadian notion of a society is explored, and chapter twenty,The Adventure of the Senses, which involves a very sophisticateddiscussion of the problem of sensa, are also both extremely stimulating.Quantum physics is perhaps less successfully examined in chaptertwenty-one, Actuality between Physics and the Divine: the connections

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with Whitehead possibly are not established with sufficient precision.His ideas do feel close to quantum physics because of his sustainedengagement with the theory of relativity, but while the two approachesto physics are definitely cousins, in practice they tended to evolveseparately from each other, so some bridging work needs to be donewhen one brings them together.

Another key problem in Whitehead is how his scrambling of thehistory of the philosophy of perception in the West and ontology isrelated to feeling in the broader sense: the holistic tendency in histhought is very much bound up with this relationship. Stengers dealsas impressively with this problem as she does with the other ones, butthere is a subtle difficulty here. Her predilection for the natural sciencesinduces, perhaps semi-consciously, a self that is rather autonomous,unfissured and slightly passive, that progresses evenly towards aricher understanding of the world, based on a sophisticated modelof speculative leaps and empirical observation. She is so concernedto overcome the bifurcation of nature and to establish the engrenagebetween mountaineer and mountain and the hold that humans have onwhat is external to them that she does not sufficiently convey the realdangers of mountain climbing and losing ones hold and their effect onthe psyche. Even her excellent discussion of negative prehensions and thescars they leave at the end of chapter eighteen, Feeling Ones World,makes what is happening seem very safe. There is never the sense ofdisturbing disjunction of Rimbauds Le Dormeur du val, a short butvery intense sonnet from 1870 in which a young soldier appears to besleeping in a delicately described landscape only for one to discover inthe last line that he has deux trous rouges au ct droit. Of course,Stengers is not wrong in terms of a strict exegesis of Whiteheadsthought: his obsessiveness probably betrays some kind of underlyingdisquiet or anxiety, but it is very much sublimated in mathematics,metaphysics and poetic beauty. He is more Upanishadic or Buddhist thantantric in his approach to evil, death or impermanence.

Nevertheless, one needs to look at activities which are more proactive,constructive or engaged, such as the arts, engineering, medical researchor social or political action, to fully understand Whiteheadian creativity,even if one wishes to remain within the relatively smooth connectivityand progession of his universe. One could take team sports as amodel, where there are moments of exceptional individual brilliance thatcompletely change matches, but they are still very much bound into therhythm of the team and the game as a whole. However, the structuredeveloped by Whitehead is so strong that one can explore a much higher

A. N. Whitehead 559

level of fear and inner turmoil to be mastered in the self and muchmore radical and surprising transformations of the world, times whennew heaven, new earth and new self all emerge together. Heideggerianauthenticity and prophecy can be fused in a complementary way withWhiteheadian mathematics and cosmology, thus avoiding the perils ofeither going off the rails or simply going with the flow. There is also areal parallel between Whiteheads very Shakespearean sense of time andthe event and Heideggers use of kairos, an early Greek concept that wasalso very important in the Renaissance.27 One could go even further andfactor in poststructuralist or deconstructive techniques from Deleuze,Derrida and Lyotard, all of which enable desire to pick out latent strandsfrom dominant ones and resculpt reality as a painter employs the strokesof his or her brush to pull and push colours into different shapes andtextures.

The 1834 workers uprising in Lyons was the second of two suchuprisings in that city after the regime change that took place in Francein 1830. The first one, which happened in 1831, had been more of ageneral workers uprising, but the 1834 event was distinctly political,that is republican. By then, a large number of regular troops had beenstationed in the city, and the insurrection was put down with greatbrutality and destruction. It was much closer to civil war or what ishappening in Homs or Aleppo today than to large-scale urban rioting.Was it a trick of evil in the Whiteheadian sense, an action at the wrongtime which led to nothing but bloodshed and chaos? It is very difficultto be sure about what was a trick of evil in the extremely fluid andconflictive politics of nineteenth-century France, out of which, however,a very serviceable democratic model did emerge. Which trick of evilled to which component of that model? Was the monarchie de Juilletprogressive in the way that it allowed the bourgeoisie to establishits political power, or did it continue to betray the real ideals of theRevolution? Were the insurgs lyonnais simply trouble-makers harkingback to a Revolution that was in itself a trick of evil, or were theyasserting a right to take to the streets that their non-white Frenchdescendants could take up? The modern French state inherits from bothsides in 1834, in that the bourgeoisie will never be in work camps, butbarricades will always be a possibility.28

A major poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (17861859) was inLyons throughout the 1834 uprising. She was working as an actress atthe Grand Thtre, but she also had three children with her who werestill quite young: they had all been born in the first half of the 1820s. Shewrote a number of poems in connection with the uprising, but two stand

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out as being particularly significant: A Monsieur A.L., which appearedin Pauvres Fleurs in 1839, and Dans La Rue, which no one dared topublish until after her death. The first poem is very intense emotionallyand needs to be taken in slowly in order for its complexity to comethrough. Three images of birds are very beautifully deployed in it: (1) aswallow that returns to its young ones in its nest during a lightning stormin the first two stanzas; (2) a bird that is trying to hide from hunters ina forest in the third and fourth stanzas; and (3) a nightingale in the twopenultimate stanzas that the poet can hear singing in the destroyed cityuntil it is killed by an exploding shell. The deployment of the imagesis beautiful because the birds are simultaneously vulnerable creatures inperil imagined or heard by the poet, but they are also the poet herselfstaying in her house in Lyons, protecting her children and hiding fromthe soldiers brutally putting down the insurrection.

This link is established in the swallow stanzas in a way that has allof the simultaneity and thickness of the event in Whitehead. Initially,the flight of the swallow is crossed by a lightning flash. This pulls theswallow back to the flatness of the sky and makes the crossing of thetwo lines seem like an image seen by an observer in the distance. Butthe swallow is afraid and is flying to its nest to be with its eggs, whichbecome hatched fledglings in the next stanza: this sudden shift fromtendres oeufs to le duvet dont se recouvre peine,/ Leur petite me nueet leur gosier chanteur (Desbordes-Valmore 1983: 123) is an exampleof the quite magical effects of Desbordes-Valmores language. Becausethe swallow in its nest becomes the poet in her house in later stanzas,it is as if the swallow has flown into the observers house and becomeher. A swallows flight has a rapidly skimming, bobbing up and glidingquality to it that seems to fill up the space between the far-off image andthe observer. There is a similar link between the bird in the forest hidingfrom the hunters and the poet in the house hiding from the soldiers andthe nightingale singing its lament in the devastated city and the poetsinging the lament that is her poem. There is a beautiful movementhere from being silenced by terror to crying out against injustice, whichfinds a parallel in the bold fifth stanza of Dans La Rue, where Lesvivants nosent plus se hasarder vivre./ Sentinelle solde, au milieu duchemin,/ La mort est un soldat qui vise et qui dlivre/ Le tmoin rvoltqui parlerait demain . . . (144).

This network of interconnections acts as a kind of Whiteheadian four-dimensional instantaneous space, and they frame the central sectionof A Monsieur A.L., which is the tableau of the citys destructionthrough her window. Even here there is spatial ambiguity: the twice

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repeated Jtais l! (Desbordes-Valmore 1983: 124) can mean bothI was in Lyons during the uprising and I was out there when itwas happening. But now the extraordinary concrete, compacted, slamdunk imagery makes Desbordes-Valmore one of Heideggers poets thatfeel the traces of the departed gods in the abyss at the centre of the nightof the worlds misery. Lines such as Tuant jusqu lenfant qui regardaitsans voir,/ Et rougissant le lait encore chaud dans sa bouche . . . (124)and Et cousant au linceul sa livide moiti,/ Ecrase au galop de la guerrecivile!/ Savez-vous que cest froid le linceul dune ville! (125) could beTrakl, and one can see why Nerval read Desbordes-Valmore, who doesindeed feel the traces of the gods in the Whiteheadian event that fuses herfear as a vulnerable mother with her defiant empathy for the brutalisedcitizens of Lyons. One can still read her and hope for Homs and Aleppo,that their suffering is not in vain.29

One cannot really do this with a poem one could compare with AMonsieur A.L. and Dans La Rue: Shelleys The Mask of Anarchywritten in 1819 in response to the Peterloo Massacre, which was ofcourse a relatively minor incident compared with the Lyons uprisingof 1834. Nevertheless, the authorities still behaved in a violent andrepressive way. Shelleys poem is intellectually complex: it uses thedouble meaning of mask as masquerade and false disguise to explorehow the government and not the people are the real perpetrators ofanarchy. This analysis of the ruses of power is astute, and it is achievedthrough subtle poetic means, but one does not really have the samesense of a swelling towards the future that one has in Desbordes-Valmore, even though parliamentary reform was eventually achieved,and over half of the poem is an address by Hope to the men ofEngland. Shelley is in Italy, far away from what is happening which hedoes acknowledge but he increases that distance by his very rhetoricallanguage, however strong some of the ideas and images may be.30

Desbordes-Valmore is physically with the insurgents, and she is pushinglanguage to express her emotional journey of fear, compassion anddefiance. She is also on a more novel trajectory as a poet, emerging asa very distinctive female voice. She had already published the utterlysweet but rather thoughful Le Coucher dun petit garon in 1830, andshe was to compose the heartbreaking and profound durcharbeitungof Rve intermittent dune nuit triste, one of the most powerful ofall poems in French, in 1846. In 1834, Lyons saw the cross-phasingof two emerging entities, intersecting like waves from two sourcesin a ripple tank, but this image is not enough. It gives a good ideaof a Whiteheadian network, but it does not fully explore tapping

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into the latent or virtual that one can find in Deleuze, Derrida andLyotard.Thinking with Whitehead is an exceptionally rich and deep book. It

is not easy to take in on a first reading, but it does have to be readthrough from beginning to end to sense the overall compelling shape ofits argument. It is also a book to return to on innumerable occasions.Whatever criticisms this author may have levelled at Stengers, theyhave always been a response to the stimulus of her well-sustained andvigorous mental energy, and it has always felt as if it was a privilege toreview her work.

Notes1. The ideas in this review have benefited from enormously stimulating and

generous exchanges with James Williams.2. A random example of this is Kneale 1949: 723, where the author adopts a

distinctly patronising tone in his discussion of Whiteheads arguments againstthe unrestricted universality of natural laws.

3. See Wahl 2004. There are three studies in this book: one on William James,which is based on a reading of his letters; another on the speculative philosophyof Whitehead; and a third on Marcels Journal mtaphysique. The Whiteheadstudy is remarkably scholarly: Wahl uses all of the solo works published by thephilosopher up to 1929 and refers to innumerable reviews, books and articlesthat respond to them. The essay is quite balanced in the weight it gives toWhitehead as contributor to the theory of relativity, philosopher of science andmetaphysician. There are also some interesting comparisons between his ideasand those of Heidegger.

4. Bergson deals most extensively with intuition as such in La Pense et lemouvant, which has been re-edited with an extensive dossier critique by PressesUniversitaires de France as part of its superb critical edition of all of Bergsonswork: see Bergson [1938] 2009. There is an English translation of this text withthe title The Creative Mind: see Bergson 1992. For Husserls final, posthumouslypublished statement on his phenomenology the Krisis see Husserl 1970. It isilluminating to compare what Husserl is trying to do in the famous appendix tothis work, The Origin of Geometry, with Whiteheads extensive use of geometryin The Concept of Nature. Husserl considers geometry only in the context ofthe relationship between a specifically human consciousness and the world,and he seeks a primal, hidden geometry underneath or within the history ofgeometry, that is an imminent universal for any lived particular. Whiteheaddiscusses geometry in a number of different ways, but he mainly develops itas a required spatial framework, embedded in the moment and not timeless,for exploring the implications of knowledge as ultimate, with nature not beingbifurcated in relation to mind, that is an enabling structure permitting subjectand object to be fused in a perceptual event without being abstracted from theinfinite continuum. Of course, these two approaches do not have to be mutuallyexclusive. Merleau-Ponty was influenced by both Husserl, especially by his latework, and Whitehead. For the latters influence on him, see Robert 2011 and theexceptionally rich and scholarly Hamrick and Van der Veken 2011.

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5. For Whitehead and quantum physics, see Lacoste Lareymondie 2006. For agood recent book on evolutionary development biology, see Carroll 2006. Thekey idea in Evo Devo is that all the organs and appendages in all animals haveevolved from a very limited number of basic genes, which means that fins, wings,arms and legs all come from the same primordial gene, for example. It would beinteresting to connect this with the relationship between eternal ideas and theongoing capacity for new singularites in actual entities in Whitehead. Of couse,the Deleuze who co-wrote A Thousand Plateaus, in which ethology is absolutelycentral, had already been deeply influenced by Whitehead.

6. See Leavis 2008.7. Whitehead 1964: 29. It is worth noting that the choice of this example

for exploring the bifurcation of nature almost certainly reflects the centralimportance of electromagnetic waves and the speed of light in the earlier specialtheory of relativity.

8. In particular, his lectures at Harvard were sprinkled with references to hisfavourite poets, Wordsworth and Shelley. Notes taken from Whiteheadslectures are being transcribed and made accessible online by the WhiteheadResearch Project at . Look underResearch and then Whitehead Lecture Notes.

9. Obviously, the literature on poetry and other art forms in the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries in French- and German-speaking countries is vast, butsee Richard 1955 for a very beautiful, now classic, phenomenological study ofnineteenth-century French poetry, with essays on Nerval, Baudelaire, Verlaineand Rimbaud, and see Raitt 1981 and 1986 for excellent scholarship on Villiersde lIsle-Adam, a very important figure in French symbolism. For Husserl andFreud, see Trincia 2008. Trincia is an Italian philosopher who has producedvaluable work on the area between Husserl, Heidegger and Freud; he alsopublishes in English.

10. For a recent edition of the Lyrical Ballads, see Wordsworth and Coleridge 2006.For extremely perceptive remarks on Wordsworth within a number of different,fruitful contexts, see Man 1984, in particular the chapter on his poetry and thatof Hlderlin (1984: 4765).

11. There is an enormous amount of excellent criticism devoted to Nerval, butChambers 1969: 168219, 23868, 30742 and 1993: 83117 are especiallyilluminating for the four works in question. See also Kofman 1979 andKristeva 1992: 13972 for extremely stimulating philosophical/psychoanalytictreatments of Nerval.

12. A certain amount of clarity is required in citing the English translations ofHeideggers works on poetry, as they did not initially correspond to the originalGerman publications, as the French translations did. More recently, though,they have done so: Heidegger 2000 translates all of Erlauterungen zu HlderlinsDichtung, while Heidegger 2002 does the same for Holzwege. Heidegger 1982did translate all bar one of the essays in Unterwegs zur Sprache the pieceon Trakl is in this volume but Heidegger 1975 includes the essay omittedfrom Heidegger 1982 and various essays from Heideggers other Germanpublications, including three pieces from Vortrge und Aufstze and two fromHolzwege. The introduction to Heidegger 1975 by the translator is short butexcellent. Heidegger 1977 includes two essays from Holzwege and two fromVortrge und Aufstze, one of which is The Question Concerning Technology.Heidegger also gave three lecture series on hymns by Hlderlin, which have beenpublished as volumes 39 (on Germanien and Der Rhein), 52 (on Andenken)and 53 (on Der Ister) in the Gesamtausgabe. Only the series on Der Ister hasbeen translated into English: see Heidegger 1996. For recent high-quality work

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on Heidegger and poetry, see Lacoue-Labarthe 2007 and Stephens 2007, whileThomson 2011 is a valuable book that deals primarily with Heidegger and thevisual arts.

13. For Leibniz and Descartes, see the very scholarly Belaval 1960, and for Leibnizand Locke, see the equally impressive Jolley 1986.

14. This quotation is from the end of the first paragraph of Circles, which isthe tenth essay in First Essays. Emerson was a close friend of William Jamesfather: James is the contemporary philosopher with whom Whitehead almostcertainly had the greatest affinity. For Emerson and the James family, see James2008: xvxxxiv. For an important book of contributions by various authors onperspective in Leibniz, Whitehead and Deleuze, see Timmermans 2006.

15. It is mainly Badiou, originally trained as a mathematician, who has criticisedDeleuze for not being genuinely mathematical: see in particular Badiou 2000.See Hallward 2003 for an excellent work on Badiou as philosopher andmathematician. Of course, Badiou deals with the philosophy of the subject andthe event in a way that is quite different from Deleuze and is not especiallyWhiteheadian, although it would be interesting to explore Badious Platonic sidein relation to the residual traces of Platonism in Whitehead.

16. It is not surprising that Whitehead had a sustained interest in Berkeley.The latter had anti-Cartesian and anti-Newtonian positions with regard tomathematics, motion, abstraction and scientific method. There has been animmense amount of excellent work on him in the last thirty or forty years.For his ideas on mathematics, see Jesseph 1993, and for two important generalinterpretations, see Winkler 1994 and Pappas 2000. Andr Breton was alsointerested in Berkeley, and Gueroult wrote on him: as with his beautiful workon Malebranche, he manages to combine an impeccable historical sense with thecapacity to make the ideas as fresh as if they had been written yesterday. It wouldbe interesting to compare Whiteheads, Gueroults and Deleuzes treatment oflate seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Western philosophy.

17. See Whitehead 1964: 967, 1769, 192. One cannot emphasise enough thatan understanding of Whitehead and the philosophy of the event can be greatlyenhanced by some serious reading on concepts of space and time in modernphysics. Four books, none of which requires difficult mathematics, initially standout. Born 1965 is a revision of the authors text first published in Germanin 1920 and is a deep but accessible work by a brilliant physicist, Davies1977 is over thirty years old but is still fine for the classic model and isexceptionally clear, Sklar 1992 is a now classic work that combines physics andphilosophy, while the more recent Ryckman 2005 does the same, but his booktakes a different approach from that of Sklar: he focuses on what he sees as atranscendental idealist tendency early on in the theory of relativity as opposed tothe logical empiricist one which eventually became dominant. Whitehead doesnot really fit into either of these categories: he was not Kantian and Husserlianin the way that Weyl was Weyl was a major figure in the first tendency buthe was clearly not a logical empiricist. Reichenbach, a key influence onSklar, is the main theorist for this second tendency, which is explicitlyanti-metaphysical.

18. For Wozu Dichter?, see What Are Poets For? in Heidegger 1975: 91142 orWhy Poets in Heidegger 2002: 20041; for Heidegger on Trakl, see Languagein Heidegger 1975: 189210 and Language in the Poem in Heidegger 1982:15998 these are different essays; and for Heidegger on Van Gogh, see TheOrigin of the Work of Art in either Heidegger 1975: 1787 or Heidegger 2002:156. For a recent discussion of Heidegger and Van Gogh, see Thomson 2011,especially ch. 3, Heideggers Postmodern Understanding of Art, pp. 65120.

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For a valuable study on poetry and language that deals extensively withHeidegger, see Allen 2008. For an important work on time combining physicsand philosophy, see Reichenbach 1999. For Cassirers approach to the theoryof relativity, see Cassirer 1953. For a book on tensor calculus and the theory ofrelativity that begins at a reasonably simple level mathematically, see Lowden2002.

19. For the original French edition, see Stengers 2002. The English translationis excellent: it was done by Michael Chase, who has an Australian mastersdegree and a French doctorate in the history of philosophy, specialising in neo-Platonism. He has also translated at least five books by Pierre Hadot.

20. A second reading of Stengers very long and dense book might show that she hasin fact succeeded in doing this.

21. For the rumpled dollar problem, see Arnold 2005.22. Arnold 2005 is a beautiful book by a great mathematician that exemplifies this

approach, which does not of course have to be limited to mathematics. Forexample, the idea in Barthes that there can be multiple readings of a text comesto mind: see especially Barthes 1991.

23. Her exploration of how Whitehead uses God in various ways as a conceptin Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality is enriched by herdiscussion of Religion in the Making, a neglected work by Whitehead that comesbetween the other two works. Both Science and the Modern World and Religionin the Making have recently been re-issued by Cambridge University Press.

24. Again, a second reading of her book might show that she does do this.25. The present author lives full-time as female, but she used to do male roles in

the theatre: hence the radical split in her experience she could draw on in thisproduction. She no longer plays male roles, so the process would be different,although something similar would clearly be possible.

26. See Whitehead 1964, in particular pp. 526. The great twentieth-centuryRussian theatre practitioner/theorists treat performance problems in a way thatbrings them very close indeed to philosophical problems, such as identity,self and other, intention, agency, emotion, actions and events, even if thematerial is obviously not presented as philosophy. One has more substantialwritings, occasional pieces, transcriptions of teaching and reported remarks.For Stanislavski, one is well served in English, and Michael Chekhov endedup in America, so the material connected with him was in English from thestart. With Meyerhold, Tairov and Vakhtangov, one is better off in French, inwhich LAge dHomme has published complete editions of all three directorswritings. Meyerholds ideas on actions and emotions are remarkably close tothose of William James in The Principles of Psychology. Vasiliev (or Vassilievwhen transliterated into French) has worked a great deal in France, so there isa great deal of material connected with him in French. He initially trained as achemical engineer before moving on to study theatre. One should also not forgetLee Strasberg, who was American but is important, and Grotowski, who wasPolish but trained in Russia.

27. See Sipiora and Baumlin 2002 for a volume of excellent essays on kairos atdifferent periods in history and Dosse 2010 for an extremely wide-rangingdiscussion of the concept of the event in modern thought.

28. For the classic work on the Lyons uprisings, see Rude 2007, which was firstpublished in 1982. The 2007 re-edition has a valuable postface by LudovicFrobert. It is important to remember there were ex-combattants from theNapoleonic Wars amongst the insurgents, which meant that they were tacticallyaware. In 1834, they used a very successful combination of defensive barricadesand attacking columns, while in 1834, they could be said to have founded

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modern urban guerrilla warfare. In a real sense, they created a new physicallanguage of resistence.

29. Yves Bonnefoys preface to this volume is very perceptive. For a good recentbook on Desbordes-Valmore by the main specialist on her, see Bertrand 2009.

30. See Shelley 2009: 40011, 75962.

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