This essay stages a confrontation between the state of precariousness at the level of being and thought in Deleuze's vitalist ontology of the continuum and that of Badiou's ontology of the multiple, which lacks the virtual One-All. It wishes to show how a philosophy based on the continuity between being and thought (Deleuze) and a philosophy settling for the disjunction between thought and being (Badiou) situate precariousness according to different co-ordinates.

Deleuze establishes a kind of continuity between being and thought such that, in their simultaneous genesis, an identity between Physis and Nous is sketched, with the result that the engendering process of the mind coincides with the process of generation of things themselves. Being is apprehended as organic life – as a field of immanence in a state of becoming, agitated by fluxes and differences in intensity and produced in a variety of actual cases. Its production occurs along the lines of a genesis inscribed in the virtual-actual couple that is opposed to the schema of the possible-real. The possible-real shuts itself up in the circle of the similar, rendering impossible the emergence of anything original and making the real a mere copy of the possible. Existence, in this case, turns out to be nothing but a selection from a depository of possibles that are already always given. On the other hand, the virtual-actual couple is able to account for the univocity of a being that is never distinct from its existing concretions – its expressions – by positing every actual solution as an ephemeral, creative differenciation, with no resemblance to the virtual problems that it develops. Events are the novel singularities that flash endlessly inside states of affairs.