Short Update
Posted by evanduq on June 26, 2007
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…
