Abstract

In a lecture course on Foucault, Deleuze said that he would like, one day, to teach a course on Tarde. As we now know, he did not give such a course. Yet across Deleuze’s books is a fragmentary interpretation of Tarde. Would it be possible to reassemble and identify the guidelines, in retrospect, of what such a course could have been? In our opinion, yes. It could have been developed along three main axes: 1) Tarde as precursor to a philosophy of difference and repetition; 2) Tarde as inventor of microsociology; 3) Tarde as founder of an Echology intended to take the place of more traditional Ontology. In this article I propose to deepen, through a direct encounter with the texts, the relevance of these three lines of interpretation.