Abstract

This essay describes and evaluates the conception of mereological structure that underpins Deleuze’s account of ontogenesis in Difference and Repetition. A theory of mereology is a theory of composition: it asks what it is to be a part making a whole, what it is to be a whole collecting its parts; in short, in what the relation of making or composing consists. The locus classicus for modern mereology is the third of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (‘On the Theory of Wholes and Parts’), which deduces the definitions, axioms and principles governing the relation of parthood and associated notions, such as wholeness, separation, simplicity and complexity. My question is this: what happens to these notions when they are no longer the terms of a ‘calculus of individuals’ and, instead, become the terms of a differential calculus of individuation?