Toward a Process Ontology of Energy: Deleuze on Energy, Intensity, and Time

Abstract This article develops a Deleuzian critique of classical thermodynamics by rethinking energy in terms of intensity, rather than as a conserved extensive quantity. Through a close reading of the fifth chapter of Difference and Repetition, I explain how classical thermodynamics subordinates difference to identity by treating the flow of energy as the cancellation of intensive differences within static spatial and temporal frameworks—what Deleuze called the “transcendental illusion of entropy.” I argue that the transcendental illusion of entropy emerges from the cinematographical illusion elaborated by Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution, which replaces real time with an impersonal becoming strung together by static/instantaneous states. Against this, Deleuze provides an account of intensity as the differential principle that generates extensity and quality without being extinguished by them. By developing the connection between intensity and Deleuze's three syntheses of time—habit, Memory, and eternal return of the Same—I show how energy as intensity operates as a transcendental principle of individuation in the actualization of virtual multiplicities, paving the way for a process ontology of energy beyond the cinematographical illusion. I conclude with a brief discussion of how Deleuze's novel ontology of energy can account for cognition and intersubjectivity in thermodynamic systems beyond naïve materialism as well as the affinity of Deleuze's ontology with some emerging interpretations of quantum mechanics. My wager is that Deleuze's ontology can help lay the groundwork for a revised understanding of energy in the natural and social sciences that is grounded in a process-relational metaphysics.