To quote this text : Juliette Simont, « Intensity, or the Encounter », Jean Khalfa (éd.), An Introduction to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze , New York- Londres, Continuum, p. 26-50. Juliette Simont : INTENSITY, OR: THE “ENCOUNTER” The Philosopher, a man under pressure “It's difficult: one can't understand it, yet it's beautiful”: so remarks a philosophy professor to his students while explicating Hölderlin and Kant. Meanwhile we, the readers, laugh. In this laughter, one could hear a bitter joy, maybe tinged with resentment: here is some professor or textualist who, instead of clarifying his subject, makes it more opaque, vague and aesthetical. In fact, the laughter of the Deleuzian cyber-lector running over the ‘second lesson on Kant’ of March 1978 is quite different. It comes from the pleasure of the shortcut, which is to say, of speed. Often in his lectures, Deleuze goes faster than he might have permitted himself in a book. But inasmuch as his books define speed as one of the constitutive factors, perhaps the constitutive factor, of philosophy, the speed of a seminar cannot be explained by the urgency of a moment nor construed as a form of disrespect. In What is Philosophy? speed appears at three different levels. First, the speed of chaos, of the dark depth where everything differentiates, the speed of infinite chaos into which the philosopher plunges to re-emerge, giving a shape to the inchoate: “Chaos is characterized less by the absence of determinations than by the infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish” (WP, p.42). Next, speed of the plane of immanence, “a sieve stretched over the chaos” (WP, p.43), by which the philosopher decides, pre-philosophically, what is worthy of thought - the infinite speed of this infinite movement through which the philosopher unwinds his net, running back and forth, laying out the double horizon of being and thought. “We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind…Take Michaux’s plane of immanence, for example, with its infinite, wild movements and speeds” (WP, p.41). And finally the speed of the concepts by which the philosopher populates and structures the plane; infinite speed of a finite movement articulating the features or parts of a concept, finite in number, the concept itself being nothing other than their infinitely rapid flight. The concept “is infinite through its survey [survol] or its speed but finite through its movement that traces the contour of its components.” WP, p.21 As soon as