Learning to Swim in the Dirac Sea

Deleuze and the Cosmologies of Time and Chance

Abstract

In this article, I reflect on Deleuze’s provocative critique of the second law of thermodynamics in Difference and Repetition by drawing his philosophy into conversation with cosmology—specifically quantum physics. In dialogue with the work of the late Bill Ross, whose recent Order and the Virtual represents the most substantial critical engagement with the entropic principle vis-à-vis Deleuze, I turn to the physicist David Bohm’s distinction between explicate and implicate orders, which Ross argues bear strong similarities to Deleuze’s actual and virtual, respectively. Bohm’s theory, as Ross and others have pointed out, entails a recognition of the pluripotent creative potential of the quantum dynamisms that give rise to the spatiotemporal order—what Deleuze would describe as non-exhaustive intensive differences that are only apparently cancelled out in extensity. Here, with reference to Deleuze’s distinction between the divine and human games, and their respective distributions of chance, I propose—following Ross and Bohm, as well as contemporary loop quantum gravity—an alternative to string theory most commonly associated with the physicist Carlo Rovelli: that whereas the emergent regularities of the macroscopic world are inexorably bound to the arrow of time and thus to the law of entropy, this is not the case for the divine game that takes place within the quantum foam, and that it is here that the Eventum tantum takes place in which all of chance—including said laws—are continuously redistributed. Turning to the both non-continuous and continuous nature of this evental dynamism relative to quantum and macrophysical realities respectively, I close by considering Ross’s eschewal of dynamic systems theory in favour of other quantum-theoretic resources and suggest that perhaps both can be usefully employed to think the reciprocal becomings of Deleuze and the philosophy of cosmology.