The question has been not so much how to reconcile Deleuze’s natural philosophy with fundamental tenets of science, as to establish what it might mean in a scientific register to accommodate the direction of travel. With respect to Deleuze’s stated arguments against the substantive existence of entropy, the answer appears to be simply: ‘nothing’. The arguments Deleuze adopts against entropic processes risk being dismissed as ‘not even wrong’, ironically not because they contradict scientific common sense, but because they are unable to secure enough distance from that common sense to meaningfully contradict it. Nor is there more than suggestive support from chaos theory. Even the most forthright advocates of chaos theory stop short of pronouncing any other destination but equilibrium in the very long term. To establish the illegitimacy of generalising from the ideal (unachievable) experimentally enclosed system to the world in the wild cannot in itself establish that the world will finally, after all deviations and deferments, avoid the same moribund fate as the enclosed system. Chaos theory cannot ultimately underwrite the broader metaphysical import of Deleuze’s critical argument. In the end, however, I hope to have shown that it is not in the critique of entropy that we can triangulate Deleuze’s resistance to the second law, but in the positive aspects of his metaphysics more generally. Disparity and dissymmetry take on their own powers at the cosmological scale. From one epoch to another, evolution outruns entropy.

Ultimately, at this scale too, we can learn the value of Deleuze’s insistence that the Event is ceaseless, always diverging but not contingently on chaotic bifurcation – the principle which sets him apart from an overly complete assimilation to chaos theory. If we are to subscribe to this claim, we must conceive the Event as independent of contiguity, both spatially and temporally. That foreign war a decade ago and this