French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-95) was something of a cult figure among his university students in the 1970s and 1980s, "telling ghost stories with the voice of an ogre" (Jaeglé, 2005:10). More recently, academic interest in the educational possibilities of his work has grown considerably in Anglophone countries. Perhaps texts such as "A Thousand Plateaus" (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004b3), which discuss "things which, at the time, didn't fully exist, and which just seemed science fiction," have become more readable since 21st-century shifts in geo-politics, notably the events associated with 9/11 and their echoes in current affairs (Antonioli in Dosse, 2007, p. 583). Questions remain as to whether Deleuze's well-known suggestion in 1968 that his empiricism necessarily has affiliations with science fiction (Deleuze, 1994) can really shift attention from the current focus on outcomes to the "actual ontology" of practice (Strom, 2015, p. 10), thus informing more socially just teacher education and research. In this article, the author addresses this question by examining the potential of Deleuze's "science fiction" ontology, where being is expressed in the reciprocal determination of virtual and actual (Deleuze, 1996, 179-185), to enhance social justice.