On Deleuze’s “Plato and the Simulacrum” – Establishing the World of Nomadic Distributions and Crowned Anarchies

     Gilles Deleuze’s essay “Plato and the Simulacrum,” which is included as an appendix to The Logic of Sense, begins with the question, “What does it mean ‘to reverse Platonism’?” (LOS 253). Almost immediately, this question leads to an extended account of the Platonic project’s fundamental motivation and modus operandi. Early in LOS, Deleuze acknowledges the Platonic notion of the divided line, but at the moment, it is not this particular distinction of Platonism with which we are primarily concerned. In a discussion of the First Series, we learned that “it is Plato who is cited as distinguishing between the two dimensions [--in matter itself--] of the limited (the named) and the unlimited (pure becoming)” (notebookeleven). Thus we are presented with a “subterranean dualism” (LOS 2) which, in the First Series, was connected with a dualism in language itself: “It is language which fixes the limits (the moment, for example, at which the excess begins), but it is language as well which transcends the limits and restores them to the infinite equivalence of an unlimited becoming” (LOS 2-3). Deleuze claims that the aim of Platonism is “to impose a limit on this becoming [-mad or unlimited], to order it according to the same, to render it similar – and, for that part which remains rebellious, to repress it as deeply as possible, to shut it up in a cavern at the bottom of the Ocean…to bring about a triumph of icons over simulacra” (LOS 258-9). The proposed reversal of Platonism would, then, obviously involve a radical overturning or prevention of this triumph. “Overturning Platonism, then, means denying the primacy of original over copy, of model over image; glorifying the reign of simulacra and reflections” (DR 66). However, upon consideration of the widespread historical influence of metaphysical systems that have made various compromises with transcendence, this seems like it would not be a very simple task.

     The chief Ideas or Forms and the circular myths of the Platonic system, as Deleuze repeatedly suggests, serve as preeminent metaphysical touchstones for use in a process of division according to which various claimants, those who claim to truly participate in an Idea’s unique characteristics, are tested for authenticity (see LOS 254-5; see also DR 60 “The search for gold provides the model for this process.”). The Platonic myths are meant to construct “the immanent model or the foundation-test according to which the pretenders should be judged and their pretensions measured” (LOS 256). However, Deleuze is a philosopher of immanence who does not share in an orthodoxy that affirms a hierarchical realm of transcendent Ideas (see TTFP 124) and, as such, “in order to institute the chaos which creates” (LOS 266), chooses to confront directly the impulse towards selective, exclusionary, and elitist authentication in Platonic idealism and its potential authorization of transcendent hierarchization. He makes this momentous confrontation with Friedrich Nietzsche and the phantasmatic power of the eternal return in his corner.

     It is Nietzsche who is cited as having boldly defined the task not only of his own philosophy but of the philosophy of the future: “to reverse Platonism” (LOS 253). We have seen what constitutes the achievement of this task, but now I would like to see how Deleuze characterizes the operation of the procedure, considering especially the role of the eternal return. In brief, Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return “confers on the flux of Becoming the semblance [a simulation?] of Being, and it does so without introducing any Being which transcends the universe… The universe is shut in, as it were, on itself. Its significance is purely immanent. And the truly strong man, the truly Dionysian man, will affirm this universe with steadfastness, courage and even joy, shunning the escapism which is a manifestation of weakness” (HP VII 416). This initial introduction to the idea of the eternal return is fairly satisfactory, considering the ultimate aims of its source, i.e., to provide an account of Nietzsche and his key ideas as situated within a vast chronological account of the historical ”canon” of Western Philosphy. In contrast, as part of a much different enterprise, Deleuze, in his book on Nietzsche, emphasizes something different about the eternal return. In a passage which deserves to be quoted at length, he says this:

     According to Nietzsche the eternal return is in no sense a thought of the identical but rather a thought of synthesis, a thought of the absolutely different which calls for a new principle outside science. This principle is that of the reproduction of diversity as such, of the repetition of difference; the opposite of “adiaphoria“. (VP II 374 “There is no adiaphoria although we can imagine it.”) And indeed, we fail to understand the eternal return if we make it a consequence or an application of identity. We fail to understand the eternal return if we do not oppose it to identity in a particular way. The eternal return is not the permenance of the same, the equilibrium state or the resting place of the identical. It is not the ’same’ or the ‘one’ which comes back in the eternal return but return is itself the one which ought to belong to diversity and to that which differs. (NP 46)

Such lines of thought will, along with the pure immanence of Spinozism and the idea of the univocity of being, eventually prove central to Difference & Repetition. These lines of thought also point to another passage in Deleuze’s work, a passage which appears to bring together, all in one mad moment/movement of becoming, as it were, the diverse range of structuralism AND psychoanalysis AND Platonism AND Nietzsche AND the reversal of Platonism AND the eternal return AND Zarathustra AND…. This passage also deserves to be quoted at extreme length (and, it is hoped, to pass as uncommented on, a final bubble/irruption of citation in the strange flux of this becoming-mad/unlimited post):

     That the Same and the Similar [of Platonism] may be simulated does not mean that they are appearances or illusions. Simulation designates the power of producing an effect. But this is not intended only in a causal sense, since causality would remain completely hypothetical and indeterminate without the intervention of other meaning. It is intended rather in the sense of a “sign” issued from a process of signalization; it is in the sense of a “costume,” or rather a mask, expressing a process of disguising, where, behind each mask, there is yet another. … Simulation understood in this way is inseparable from the eternal return, for it is in the eternal return that the reversal of the icons or the subversion of the world of representation is decided. Everything happens here as if a latent content were opposed to a manifest content. The manifest content of the eternal return can be determined in conformity to Platonism in general. It represents then the manner in which chaos is organized by the action of the demiurge, and on the model of the Idea which imposes the same and the similar on him. The eternal return, in this sense, is becoming-mad, which is mastered, monocentric, and determined to copy the eternal. Indeed this is how it appears in the founding myth. It establishes the copy in the image and subordinates the image to resemblance. Far from representing the truth of the eternal return, however, this manifest content marks rather the utilization and survival of the myth in an ideology which no longer supports it, and which has lost its secret. We would do well to recall to what extent the Greek soul in general, and Platonism in particular, loathed the eternal return in its latent signification. Nietzsche was right when he treated the eternal return as his own vertiginous idea, an idea nourished only by esoteric Dionysian sources, ignored or repressed by Platonism. To be sure, Nietzsche a few times made statements that remained at the level of the manifest content: the eternal return as the Same which brings about the return of the Similar. But how can one not see the disproportion between this flat, natural truth, which does not go beyond a generalized order of the seasons, and Zarathustra’s emotion? Furthermore, the manifest statement exists only to be refuted dryly by Zarathustra. Once to the dwarf and again to his animals, Zarathustra reproaches their transforming into a platitude what is otherwise profound, what belongs to another music into an “old refrain,” and what would otherwise be tortuous into circular simplicity. In the eternal return, one must pass through the manifest content, but only in order to reach the latent content situated a thousand feet below (the cave behind every cave . . .). Thus, what appeared to Plato to be only a sterile effect reveals in itself the intractability of masks and the impassibility of signs.

     The secret of eternal return is that it does not express an order opposed to the chaos engulfing it. On the contrary, it is nothing other than chaos itself, or the power of affirming chaos. …Between the eternal return and the simulacrum, there is such a profound link that the one cannot be understood except through the other. …The simulacrum functions in such a way that a certain resemblance is necessarily thrown back onto its basic series and a certain identity necessarily projected on the forced movement. Thus, the eternal return is, in fact, the Same and the Similar, but only insofar as they are simulated, produced by the simulation, through the functioning of the simulacrum (will to power). It is in this sense that it reverses representation and destroys icons. It does not presuppose the Same and the Similar; on the contrary, it constitutes the only Same — the Same of that which differs, and the only resemblance — the resemblance of the unmatched. It is the unique phantasm of all simulacra (the Being of all beings). It is the power to affirm divergence and decentering and makes this power the object of a superior affirmation. It is under the power of the false pretender causing that which is to happen again and again. And it does not make everything come back. It is still selective, it “makes a difference,” but not at all in the manner of Plato. What is selected are all the procedures opposed to selection; what is excluded, what is made not to return, is that which presupposes the Same and the Similar, that which pretends to correct divergence, to recenter circles or order the chaos, and to provide a model or make a copy. For all its long history, Platonism happened only once, and Socrates fell under the blade. For the Same and the Similar become simple illusions when they cease to be simulated. (LOS 263-6)

Works Cited

DR       Difference & Repetition (1968) Trans. P. Patton, Columbia University press, 1994

LOS     The Logic of Sense (1969) Trans. M. Lester w/C. Stivale, Columbia University Press, 1990

NP       Nietzsche & Philosophy (1962) Trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Columbia University Press, 2006

TTFP   Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (2003) L. Lawlor, Indiana University Press, 2003

HP VII  A History of Philosophy, Volume VII: Modern Philosophy (1963) F. Copleston, S.J., Doubleday, 1994

VP        La Volonté de Puissance Trans. G. Bianquis (from the edition of F. Würzbach), NRF, 1935 and 1937

Short Update

A word to the wise: beware the poison ivy this summer.

 I’ve been pretty busy over the past few days. Part of the weekend was spent in catching up with various background readings to prepare for a commentary on ”Plato and the Simulacrum,” the first appendix to The Logic of Sense.

 Helpful readings:

Plato’s Sophist, Phaedrus, Statesman

Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Idols

Considering Deleuze’s opening remarks in the first appendix, i.e. on Nietzsche and what it means “to reverse Platonism,” it might be helpful to remember that Nietzsche characterizes Platonism itself as a type of reversal. In the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil he says, “It amounted to the very inversion of truth, and the denial of the perspective — the fundamental condition — of life, to speak of Spirit and the Good as Plato spoke of them” (Zimmern transl.). Nietzsche maintains that Plato spoke of “pure Spirit” and the Good in itself, allegedly objective and transcendent Truth. Does this “perspective” which Nietzsche suggests factor into Deleuze’s later discussion in which, in a note, the idea of simulacra as illusion constructed around the angle of the observer is mentioned?

More later. Right now the task is to get some sleep without scratching too much my ivy rashed legs…

The Logic of Sense Discussion – Post 1

Note: This is my first reading of The Logic of Sense by Gilles Deleuze. The most recent work I’ve done with Deleuze’s thought was a paper for a graduate course on the reemergence of Epicureanism in Early Modernity. In the paper, I explored the late 20th century’s encounter with Spinoza via Althusser and Deleuze. I’m hoping to eventually revise that paper for presentation/publication. For the present reading of The Logic of Sense, I’d like to undertake a close reading of the text while checking as many of Deleuze’s references as possible.

What makes the idea of reading The Logic of Sense especially fascinating is that the work is presented as a quite serious theoretical enterprise that takes as its starting point Alice in Wonderland and many of Lewis Carroll’s other weird but captivating books.  Wait a minute. Isn’t Alice in Wonderland just a children’s story?  According to Deleuze, it’s not that simple. “The priviliged place assigned to Lewis Carroll [in The Logic of Sense] is due to his having provided the first great account, the first great mise en scène of the paradoxes of sense — sometimes collecting, sometimes renewing, sometimes inventing, and sometimes preparing them” (LS, xiii). Already in the preface, Deleuze begins to give us a feel for the kind of ”sense” with which he is dealing. This is the sense of “making sense” and the kind of sense that is usually cast in opposition to what would be thought of as nonsense. Sense, understood in this way, suggests a state of general determination, a relation of an enduring self-same subject with a world in which ordinary things normally have subsisting identities. Common sense is usually assumed to be a general knowing about how the world is. But, what about a knowing of, not just how the world is, but how the world comes to be? Does common sense know much about the world’s becoming what it is and other than what it is? What about that remainder, that which persists after matter assumes form, which seems to allow for the possibility of new configurations to be thought? To say, “I am here now in this universe” makes perfect sense (and is true), because, in fact, I am here now in this universe. This statement makes sense because the terms which are taken to be so precise and which may or may not represent the determination of a particular state of affairs, really are fairly general.

In the “Sense-Certainty” portion of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel dramatizes the attempt of sense-certainty to give an account of its alleged immediate relation to what is. However, owing to the the fundamental nature of language itself (and, perhaps, also to the dimension of reality’s continual coming to be), this process of trying to account for an immediate knowing inevitably introduces generality and a move towards abstraction with terms like now, here, I, and this. Sense-certainty literally means that it enjoys an unmediated relationship to ”this,” whatever “this” might be. But what about when this becomes something else? Is it still this? This might shed some light on the issue, if I ever get around to reading it. Can hypertext refute the dialectic of sense-certainty? <–said with tongue in cheek. I digress into Hegel only because I believe I sense him lurking somewhere beneath these opening pages and in the First Series. I’m sure he will emerge (or at least someone wearing his mask will appear) sooner or later… Back to Deleuze.

In the first paragraph of the Preface, Deleuze says that “the marriage of language and the unconscious has already been consummated and celebrated in so many ways” which is, I assume, thanks to the 20th century French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan (LS, xiii). I am not very well read in the history of psychoanalysis, but I am sure I can become somewhat proficient as we move along.

So far, we have paradoxes, a general notion of sense, and the paradoxical world of nonsense known as Wonderland. Next Deleuze talks about a “new image of the philosopher” established by Stoicism in opposition to Platonism/the preceeding images of the philosopher. The first appendix seems to be the best place to look into what might have been unsatisfactory about Platonism, whereas the First Series deals with Alice, pure events, and the rebellious becomings of matter.