The depth of Deleuze's reading of Leibniz in The Fold allows us to determine the consequences of treating Deleuze's philosophy as a neo-Baroque, neo-Leibnizian philosophy. Such a philosophy still operates within a Leibnizian space of infinite depths, singular events, foldings and envelopments. But the Leibnizian principles governing this space have been overturned.

In Chapter 3, we saw how Deleuze's reversal of Platonism begins with the concept of the simulacrum. Simulacra were the untamed differences that could not be brought within the orderly structure of representation. In Platonism, this meant that they were excluded, and it was the role of the Ideas to provide the rules for this exclusion and thereby distinguish between well-founded copies and mere simulacra. With the overturning of Platonism, this regulative role of the Ideas is removed. Instead of being excluded, the dynamic, untamed simulacra serve as the ground for the production of a world of representation.

Deleuze's overturning of Leibnizianism does the same thing. God is no longer present to ensure that the divergent series which are produced by the infinite depths of difference are excluded from one another, and partitioned into possible worlds according to rules of order and harmony. Instead, the divergences produced by difference are allowed to coexist, resonate and communicate within a single world. This reversal thus has two key features, which we’ve seen at various points in Difference and Repetition, Logic of Sense and The Fold.

First, Leibniz's once-and-for-all divine game is replaced by a perpetual ‘ideal game’. This game no longer relies on God as the foundation and origin of the world: ‘God ceases to be a Being who compares and choses the richest compossible world; he becomes Process, a process which affirms simultaneously incompossibilities, and passes through them. The game of the world has singularly changed, since it becomes the game which diverges’ (LP 111). Crucially for Deleuze, while this game accounts for the genesis and production of representation it is itself ‘impossible to deal with in the world of representation’ (DR 283).

Second, freed from the requirements of representation and the oversight of a just God, an overturned Leibnizianism becomes, above all, an affirmation of divergence: