At the end of the last chapter we saw how Deleuze concludes Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza by briefly invoking an image of ‘Leibniz's world’. This world, we learned, is ‘a continuum in which there are singularities, and it is around these singularities that monads take form as expressive centres’ (EPS 329). We noted how this statement hints at a much richer reading of Leibniz than the one presented throughout most of EPS. Indeed, we also observed how out of place this statement appeared, lacking as we did the resources necessary to understand this richer reading.

Looking at the quote again, we can identify two central moments in Deleuze's reading of Leibniz. First, there is the ‘continuum in which there are singularities’; this is Deleuze's vision of a Leibnizian world. Second, there are ‘monads as expressive centres’; this is Deleuze's vision of Leibnizian subjects. The Leibnizian world, Deleuze believes, is a kind of ideal topological structure, the nature of which was only hinted at in EPS. This structure pre-exists the individual subjects which come to express it. Deleuze often repeats Leibniz's claim that God creates the world in which Adam sins before he creates Adam the sinner. The world has its own structure, defined by the distribution of singularities within it, and this world is subsequently expressed by individuals which come to occupy a particular point of view on it. This idea ultimately culminates in Deleuze's description of monads in The Fold as beings-for-the-world.

We will use sections from Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense in order to describe the first of these two moments: the structure of this Leibnizian world. In these books, at various points, we find Deleuze operating within a carefully constructed ‘Leibnizian theatre’ (LS 113). In Part III, when we turn to The Fold, we will see how this Leibnizian theatre comes to be expressed by individual monads.

We note already that this Leibnizian theatre suggests a new, more unified reading of Leibniz compared to the fragmented references we were faced with in EPS. But we also note that this unity is above all the result of Deleuze's own creative drawing-together of various disparate elements of Leibniz's philosophy.