Two issues for Deleuze's thought converge in its encounter with combinatorial divination: (1) the problem of a philosophical affirmation of the "whole of chance" or of "all chance in a single moment" (Difference and Repetition [DR] 198; Logic of Sense [LS] 180); and (2) the serial and habitual nature of relations between the virtual and the actual (DR 208-212; LS 36-41). Both issues concern an incidence or overlap of ethics and metaphysics in Deleuze's philosophy: to affirm chance as a whole is to repeat differently the Stoic ethical submission to the unity of a rational cosmos by means of a Nietzschean conversion to the creative influx of a metaphysical "throw of the dice;" to contract the habits of a creative ethos through repetition is to index and unfold a metaphysical encounter of actualizing and virtualizing forces in some determinate context. It is solely through an affirmative and serial exercise of thought (its real practice rather than representational function) that these philosophical concerns may themselves be properly addressed. Such exercise becomes manifest most clearly in the linking of philosophy to various non-philosophical practices, and this is why in what follows we connect Deleuze's thought to modes of practice involved in systems of aleatoric divination--specifically those finite, combinatorial systems such as the I Ching and Tarot, which organize a subset of fixed elements in singular "throws" or "casts." It is hoped that this construction will shed light on Deleuze's own creative dice-cast within philosophy and that perhaps this latter may then appear less like a turn at some philosophical game of chance than a reimaging of philosophy itself through creative forms of esoteric or spiritual exercise.

Deleuze, Badiou and Throwing Dice

The image of thinking proposed by Deleuze calls for the affirmation of "the whole of chance, every time, in a single time" (DR 198). But what is chance? A flipped coin, the lucky break, running into an old friend in the street. Chance is everywhere that something happens relative to what could happen, even when what could happen is nowhere calculated or even considered in advance. To affirm chance is thus to affirm a particular kind of relation between what does and what could--but does not--happen. To affirm chance as a whole would be to affirm this form of relation in its [End Page 76] universal and perhaps ubiquitous dimension. But where and how could such an act of affirmation itself happen? And what sort of event would be constituted by this very act?

These questions in fact situate a primary differend separating the thought of Deleuze from that of Badiou, and only an analysis of chance in both its epistemological and ontological dimensions adequately clarifies the matter at stake (Brassier). Badiou's critique of Deleuze on this point presses the relation between actual affirmations of chance (diverse throws) and the common object they intend (the unique "whole" of chance). In Deleuze: The Clamor of Being Badiou implies that actual "chances" in Deleuze escape equivocal and analogical relationship to the Whole only through a kind of infinitesimalization that in the end equalizes and negates them with respect to the virtual and infinite Whole (ch. 6).

Mathematically, one can understand Badiou's basic point at once: 1/infinity = 0. Every finite act of affirmation--every particular "dice-cast"--is identically relativized and negated with respect to an infinite whole, and therefore can only be the repeated expression of a unique "event of the One" (Badiou 74). Yet in his analysis, Badiou allows for no distinction of different orders of infinity constituting chance as a whole--that is, its possible composition through a hierarchy of diverse cardinalities, both countable and uncountable--that would be relevant for distinct modes of affirmation. The result of this simplification is that any conception of an internally differentiated and dynamic field of chance that does not presuppose discrete, individuated possibilities is foreclosed. But such a field is exactly what Deleuze intends by his central concept of the virtual (DR 246-7).

The thrust of the matter is indicated by a pair of examples. First: it would be highly surprising, miraculous even, were...