Revisiting Deleuze's medievalism: Intensive quantity and the problem of individuation

Abstract The aim of this article is to revisit and disambiguate Deleuze's redeployment of the medieval language of intensities. Deleuze scholars usually discus this within the context of scholastic debates concerning the problem of the intensive variation of qualities. However, Deleuze's use of the notion of intensity should, I argue, primarily be understood in relation to a different medieval problem—the problem of individuation, especially as it was approached by Duns Scotus. This article reconstructs Scotus's concept of intensive quantity as an individuating difference and analyzes its appropriation by Deleuze. What is usually unrecognized by Deleuzian readers of Scotus is the distinction between the categorial and transcategorial senses of Scotus's concept of intensive quantity. My article will thereby (i) work through the details of this distinction, (ii) show how intensive quantity in a transcategorial sense is tacitly employed in Scotus's account of individuation, and (iii) analyze the way this notion of intensive quantity is adopted by Deleuze. It will then (iv) demonstrate how and why Deleuze argues, contra Scotus, that intensive, individuating difference must assume ontological primacy over specific and categorial differences, and why, in an affront to Scotus, individuating difference, for Deleuze, must become a sui generis transcendental.