Introduction: The Canonical Incorporeals

Having considered Deleuze's engagement with the Stoic theory of incorporeality and how it relates to their perverse physics of causality and quasi-causality, we can now begin elaborating a heterodox account of Stoicism, the full account of which spans the rest the book. Let us restate the heterodoxy at the start.

According to all scholarship on Stoicism – from their Hellenistic and Roman contemporaries to twenty-first-century philosophers and classicists – it is agreed that there are four types of incorporeals: void, place, λϵκτα and time. For example, Jacques Brunschwig calls these the ‘canonical incorporeals’, and Émile Bréhier considers them ‘the four species of incorporeals admitted by the Stoics’. Bréhier continues: these four ‘constituted, on the side of real beings, bodies, something fleeting and elusive, a “nothingness”’ (TI 60). Despite what Brunschwig and Bréhier write, in fact, contrary to what everyone says about Stoic physics, we argue for a different understanding of the set of Stoic incorporeals. Without simply saying that the canonical reading is completely wrong, we tap into the perverse power of Stoic materialism in order to develop a new reading, one that appears only through Deleuze's Stoicism. Hence our heterodoxical claim: there are three, not four, incorporeals. Hence the heterodoxical list of incorporeals: space, λϵκτα and time. On our reading, void and place are folded into space, and this chapter will argue for this folding.

We begin by considering reasons for and advantages of our heterodoxical claim. We then turn to the first of the three incorporeals – space – by demonstrating how and why the two canonical incorporeals – place and void – are really two articulations of spatiality in Stoic metaphysics. This requires thinking through ancient accounts of infinite divisibility, Aristotle's discussion of place in his Physics, and Epicurus’ account of void, including the Stoic responses to Epicurus’ atomism. This leads us into delicate interpretations of vague passages on Stoic physics, before we fold place and void into a single incorporeal: space. Space, as one perspective of the incorporeal surface, has two sides: place is the side facing bodies because it is extensively organised, and void is the side facing away from bodies because it is intensively organised.