Intersubjectivity and Transindividuality Leibniz, Husserl, Deleuze, and the Composition of Worlds (Animal Monadology)

In his Cartesian Meditations (1929), Edmund Husserl proposes a monadological solution
to the epistemological problem of transcendental solipsism. At the basis of intersubjectivity
lies the lived body (Leib). After the famous bracketing of the empirical validity of experience,
Leibniz is invoked for a second reduction, meant to determine the sphere of appurtenances
that originally belongs to each subject and that accounts for communication with the Other.
Husserl thus arguably grounds the constitutive lifeworld in body integrity and possessive
individualism, i.e. the ontological distribution of physical properties based on the identity
of self-consciousness By contrast, Deleuze in The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque (1988) discovers
in Leibniz a “crisis of property” that reflects the first great crisis of capitalism. Unlike
Husserl, who raises the organic intentionalities by which humans are inserted into the world
to a transcendental level, Leibniz never managed to find a final solution to the problem of
the union of body and soul, precisely because he held the body itself to be a world teeming
with non-human others. The problem of the Other refers to a micropolitics of mobile and
non-localizable captures rather than individual closures, such that intersubjective monadology
is inseparable from an animal monadology with its twin components of animism and
totemism. In my contribution I demonstrate how Leibniz’s metaphysical account of composite
substances and its 20th century ramifications, precisely because they are fundamentally
problematic, could contribute to a contemporary yet non-phenomenological understanding
of the transindividual constitution of communities. By contrasting Deleuze’s later reading of
Leibniz with Negri’s reading of Spinoza and Balibar’s critique of Leibniz, I demonstrate how
the monstrous animality of the baroque socius remains a possibility endemic to the present