EXCERPT By his own admission, Gilles Deleuze was a pure metaphysician. Of course, his thought is broader than this. He made interesting and potentially lasting contributions to social theory, ethics, politics, and aesthetics, to name but a few other philosophical fields. However, it’s important to understand not only that his deepest and most significant insights come from his work on metaphysics, but also that most of his insights in other domains flow from these metaphysical innovations. If we wish to understand the real import of Deleuze’s work, then we must be willing to plumb the depths of his metaphysical system. Moreover, we must be willing to approach Deleuze’s metaphysics as a system. It’s all too easy to focus on one thread of his innovative metaphysical tapestry to the exclusion of others, thereby isolating it from the complex interweaving themes that determine its true significance. This means that we have to be willing to take the road less travelled and approach Deleuze’s metaphysics holistically—to tackle his system qua system. This is a tall order for a single paper. I’m simply not able to present the whole of Deleuze’s metaphysics in the present context. However, it is possible to pick out certain fundamental structural features that tie the whole together—the skeleton of the system, as it were. This is the goal of this paper, then: to trace the metaphysical bones from which the meat of Deleuze’s philosophy hangs.…