Our investigation began by problematising the possibility of a ‘political Deleuze’. This led to the prior question of the relation between Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari; to ask about this relation in turn, we need to start by asking where Deleuze's philosophy is to be found. What sanctions the extraction of a ‘philosophy’ from texts whose self-imposed task is the relentless interpretation of something other than, strictly, Deleuze's philosophy? And if this a valid gesture, what makes it so? Any meaningful discussion of Deleuze must take its departure from here.

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Helpfully, this question is one that has already been formulated by Alain Badiou. It is worth analysing this in detail. Badiou begins with the apparently dismissive claim that Deleuze always and everywhere says the same things. ‘Certainly, the starting point required by Deleuze's method is always a concrete case’ (Badiou 2000: 14). Deleuze did not care for general theories, instead always opting to start his reflections from a particular. However, according to Badiou this does not imply that Deleuze considered each determinate case to be irreplaceable, unsubstitutable with any other; on the contrary, the endless array of cases (debates in the history of philosophy in Difference and Repetition, a canonical philosopher like Spinoza, art forms such as cinema, a great contemporary like Foucault, literary figures of the likes of Proust …) are all reduced to mere examples, each displaying ‘no significative difference’. This is because ‘[i]t is always a question of indicating particular cases of a concept’ (2000: 14; original emphasis). True, Deleuze sets off from the concrete case, but he does this only to inspect how the various concepts he has developed in advance (say, the ‘Virtual’) are at work in them. And, Badiou continues, these concepts are uniformly ‘monotonous’ (2000: 15):