by Daniel Smith
4. Deleuze and Contemporary Philosophy. The last section, finally, is devoted to analyzing the position that Deleuze occupies within contemporary philosophy, and the implications that his thought has for future philosophy. The first three essays contrast Deleuze with the work of three of his influential contemporaries with regard to a specific topic of debate: Jacques Derrida (on the relation of immanence and transcendence), Alain Badiou (on the nature of multiplicities), and Jacques Lacan (on the concept of structure). The fourth essay presents a Deleuzian reading of the work of Pierre Klossowski, an often-overlooked figure who exerted a strong influence on Deleuze. The final essay examines Paul Patton's important work on the ways in which Deleuze's thought might serve to rejuvenate the liberal tradition in political philosophy.
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Gilles Deleuze, “Letter Preface,” in Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, trans. Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 8: “I believe in philosophy as system. For me, the system must not only be in perpetual heterogeneity, it must be a heterogenesis—something which, it seems to me, has never been attempted.”
PART I
Deleuze and the History of
Philosophy
ESSAY 1
Platonism
The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism
T
he concept of the simulacrum, along with its variants (simulation, similitude, simultaneity, dissimulation), has a complex history within twentieth-century French thought. The notion was developed primarily in the work of three thinkers—Pierre Klossowski, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard—although each of them conceived of the notion in different yet original ways, which must be carefully distinguished from each other. Klossowski, who first formulated the concept in his extraordinary series of theologico-erotic writings, retrieved the term from the criticisms of the Church fathers against the debauched representations of the gods on the Roman stage (simulacrum is the Latin term for “statue” or “idol,” and translates the Greek phantasma).1 Deleuze, while acknowledging his debt to Klossowski, produced his own concept of the simulacrum in Difference and Repetition, using the term to describe differential systems in which “the different is related to the different through difference itself” (DR 299). Baudrillard, finally, took up the concept of the simulacra to designate the increasingly “hyperreal” status of certain aspects of contemporary culture.2 It would thus be possible to write a philosophical history of the notion of the simulacrum, tracing out the intrinsic permutations and modifications of the concept. In such a history, as Deleuze writes, “it's not a matter of bringing all sorts of things under a single concept, but rather of relating each concept to the variables that explain its mutations” (N 31). That history, however, still remains to be written. What follows is a single sequence of that history, one that focuses on Deleuze's work, and attempts to specify the components of Deleuze's own concept of the simulacrum. As such, it can be conceived as a contribution to a broader reconsideration of the role that the notion of the simulacrum has played in contemporary thought.
THE REVERSAL OF PLATONISM
Deleuze developed his concept of the simulacrum primarily in Difference and Repetition (1968) and Logic of Sense (1969).3 The problem of the simulacrum arises in the context of Deleuze's reading of Plato, or more precisely, in the context of his reading of Nietzsche's reading of Platonism. Nietzsche had defined the task of his philosophy, and indeed the philosophy of the future, as the reversal of Platonism. In an early sketch for his first treatise (1870–1), he wrote: “My philosophy is an inverted Platonism: the farther removed from true being, the purer, the finer, the better it is. Living in semblance as goal.”4 Deleuze accepts this gauntlet that Nietzsche throws down to future philosophy. But what exactly does it mean to “invert Platonism”? This is the question that concerns Deleuze, and the problem is more complex than it might initially seem. Could not every philosophy since Aristotle be characterized as an attempt to reverse Platonism (and not simply a footnote to Plato, as Whitehead once suggested)?5 Plato, it is said, opposed essence to appearance, the original to the image, the sun of truth to the shadows of the cave, and to overturn Platonism would initially seem to imply a reversal of this standard relation: what languishes below in Platonism must be put on top; the super-sensuous must be placed in the service of the sensuous. But such an interpretation, as Heidegger showed, only leads to the quagmire of positivism, an appeal to the positum rather than the eidos.6 More profoundly, the phrase would seem to mean the abolition of both the world of essence and the world of appearance. Yet even this project would not be the one announced by Nietzsche; Deleuze notes that “the double objection to essences and appearance goes back to Hegel, and further still, to Kant” (LS 253).
To discover “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,”7 Deleuze argues, one must go back even further, to Plato himself, and attempt to locate in precise terms the motivation that led Plato to distinguish between essence and appearance in the first place. In Deleuze's interpretation, Plato's singularity lies in a delicate operation of sorting or selection that precedes the discovery of the Idea, and that turns to the world of essences only as a criterion for its selective procedures. The motivation of the theory of Ideas lies initially in the direction of a will to select, to sort out, to faire la différence (literally, “to make the difference”) between true and false images. To accomplish this task, Plato utilizes a method that will master all the power of the dialectic and fuse it with the power of myth: the method of division. It is in the functioning of this method that Deleuze uncovers not only the sense of Nietzsche's inverted Platonism, but also what was the decisive problem for Platonism itself—namely, the problem of simulacra.
THE METHOD OF DIVISION AS A DIALECTIC OF RIVALRY
“The creation of a concept,” Deleuze writes, “always occurs as the function of a problem” (ABC H). The problem that concerned Plato was the problem of the Athenian democracy—or more specifically, the agonistic problem of rivalry. This can be clearly seen in the modus operandi of two of Plato's great dialogues on division, the Phaedrus and the Statesman, each of which attempts to isolate, step by step, the true statesman or the true lover from the claims of numerous rivals. In the Statesman, for example, Plato proposes a preliminary definition of the statesman as “the shepherd of men,” the one who knows the pastoral care of men, who takes care of humans. But in the course of the dialogue, numerous rivals—including merchants, farmers, and bakers, as well as gymnasts and the entire medical profession—come forward to say, “I am the shepherd of men!” In the Phaedrus, similarly, an attempt is made to define madness, or more precisely, to distinguish well-founded madness, or true love, from its false counterparts. Here again, all sorts of rivals—lovers, poets, priests, soothsayers, philosophers—rush forward to claim, “I am the possessed! I am the lover!” In both cases, the task of the dialogue is to find a means to distinguish between the true claimant from its false rivals. “The one problem which recurs throughout Plato's philosophy,” writes Deleuze, “is the problem of measuring rivals and selecting claimants” (DR 60).
Why did these relations of rivalry become “problematized” for Plato? Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne, in their work on the origins of Greek thought, have shown that such rivalries constituted an essential characteristic of the Athenian city. The path from myth to reason was not some sort of inexplicable “miracle” or “discovery of the mind,” they argue, but was conditioned historically by the social structure of the Greek polis, which “laïcized” the mythic forms of thought characteristic of the neighboring empires by bringing them into the agonistic and public space of the agora.8 In Deleuze's terminology, imperial states and the Greek cities were types of social formations that “deterritorialized” their surrounding rural territories, but they did so according to two different models. The archaic States “overcoded” the rural territories by relating them to a superior a
rithmetic unity (the despot), by subordinating them to a transcendent mythic order that was imposed upon them from above. The Greek cities, by contrast, adapted the surrounding territories to a geometric extension in which the city itself became a relay-point in an immanent network of commercial and maritime circuits. These circuits formed a kind of international market on the border of the eastern empires, organized into a multiplicity of independent societies in which artisans and merchants found a freedom and mobility that the imperial states denied them.9
This geometric organization was, in turn, reflected in the internal civic space of the cities. Whereas the imperial spatium of the state was centered on the royal palace or temple, which marked the transcendent sovereignty of the despot and his god, the political extensio of the Greek city was modeled on a new type of geometric space (isonomia) that organized the polis around a common and public center (the agora), in relation to which all the points occupied by the “citizens” appeared equal and symmetrical.10 What the Greek cities invented, in other words, was the agon as a community of free men or citizens, who entered into agonistic relations of rivalry with other free men, exercising power and exerting claims over each other in a kind of generalized athleticism. In the Greek city, for example, a magistracy is an object of a claim, a function for which someone can pose a candidacy, whereas in an imperial State such functionaries were named by the emperor. This new and determinable type of human relation (agonistic) permeated the entire Greek assemblage; agonistic relations were promoted between cities (in war and the games), within cities (in the political Assembly and the legal magistratures), in family and individual relations (erotics, economics, dietetics, gymnastics), and even in the relation with oneself (for how could one claim to govern others if one could not govern oneself?).11 What made philosophy possible, what constituted its historical condition of possibility, in Deleuze's view, was precisely this milieu of immanence that was opposed to the imperial and transcendent sovereignty of the State, and implied no pre-given interest, since it, on the contrary, presupposed rival interests.12
Finally, these agonistic relations of rivalry, and the social conditions that produced them, problematized the image of the thinker in a new way. Whereas imperial empires or states had their wise men or priests, possessors of wisdom, the Greeks replaced them with the philosopher, philo-sophos, the friend or lover of wisdom, one who searches for wisdom but does not possess it—and who is therefore able, as Nietzsche said, to make use of wisdom as a mask, and to make it serve new and sometimes even dangerous ends.13 For Deleuze, this new definition of the thinker is of decisive importance: with the Greeks, the friend becomes a presence internal to thought. The friend is no longer related simply to another person, but also to an Entity or Essence, an Idea, which constitutes the object of its desire (Eros). “I am the friend of Plato,” says the philosopher, “but even more so, I am the friend of Wisdom, of the True, of the Concept.” If the philosopher is the friend of wisdom rather than a wise man or sage, it is because wisdom is something to which he lays claim, but does not actually possess. In this manner, however, friendship was made to imply not only an amorous desire for wisdom, but also a jealous distrust of one's rival claimants. This is what makes philosophy Greek and connects it with the formation of cities; the Greeks formed societies of friends or equals, but at the same time promoted relations of rivalry between them. If each citizen lays claim to something, he necessarily encounters rivals, so that two friends inevitably become a claimant and his rival. The carpenter may claim the wood, as it were, but he clashes with the forester, the lumberjack, and the joiner, who say, in effect, “I am the friend of the wood!” These agonistic relations would also come to determine the realm of thought, in which numerous claimants came forward to say, “I am the friend of Wisdom! I am the true philosopher!” In the Platonic dialogues, this rivalry famously culminates in the clash between Socrates and the sophists, who “fight over the remains of the ancient sage.”14 The “friend,” the “lover,” the “claimant,” and the “rival” constitute what Deleuze calls the conceptual personae of the Greek theater of thought, whereas the “wise man” and the “priest” were the personae of the State and religion, for whom the institution of sovereign power and the establishment of cosmic order were inseparable aspects of a transcendent drama, imposed from above by the despot or by a god superior to all others.15 While it is true that the first philosophers may have been sages or wise men immigrating to Greece in flight from the empires, what they found in the Greek city was this immanent arena of the agon and rivalry, which alone provided the constituent milieu for philosophy.16
It is within this agonistic milieu that Deleuze contextualizes the procedures of division found in the Phaedrus and the Statesman. What Plato criticized in the Athenian democracy was the fact that anyone could lay claim to anything, and could carry the day by force of rhetoric. The Sophists, according to Plato, were claimants for something to which they had no right. In confronting such situations of rivalry—whether in the domain of love, politics, or thought itself—Plato confronted the question, How can one separate the true claimant from the false claimant? It is in response to this problem that Plato would create the Idea as a philosophic concept: the Idea is used as a criterion for sorting out these rivals and judging the well-foundedness of their claims, authenticating the legitimate claimants and rejecting the counterfeits, distinguishing the true from the false, the pure from the impure.17 But in so doing, Deleuze argues, Plato wound up erecting a new type of transcendence, one that differs from the imperial or mythic transcendence of the States or empires (although Plato would assign to myth its own function). With the concept of the Idea, Plato invented a type of transcendence that was capable of being exercised and situated within the field of immanence itself. Immanence is necessary, but it must be immanent to something transcendent, to an ideality. “The poisoned gift of Platonism,” Deleuze comments, “is to have introduced transcendence into philosophy, to have given transcendence a plausible philosophical meaning … Modern philosophy will continue to follow Plato in this regard, encountering a transcendence at the heart of immanence as such” (ECC 137).
From this point of view, Deleuze argues that Aristotle's later criticisms misconstrue the essential point of Plato's method. Aristotle interprets division as a means of dividing a genus into opposing species in order to subsume the thing being investigated under the appropriate species—hence the continuous process of specification in search for a definition of the angler's art. He correctly objects that division in Plato is a bad and illegitimate syllogism because it lacks a “reason”—the identity of a concept capable of serving as a middle term—which could, for example, lead us to conclude that angling belongs to the arts of acquisition, and to acquisition by capture, and so on.18 But the goal of Plato's method of division is completely different. The method of division is not a dialectic of contradiction or contrariety (antiphasis), a determination of species, but rather a dialectic of rivals and suitors (amphisbetesis), a selection of claimants.19 It does not consist of dividing genera into species, but of selecting a pure line from an impure and undifferentiated material; it attempts to distinguish the authentic and the inauthentic, the good and the bad, the pure and the impure, from within an indefinite mixture or multiplicity. It is a question of “making the difference,” but this difference does not occur between species; it lies entirely within the depths of the immediate, where the selection is made without mediation. Plato himself likens division to the search for gold, a process which likewise entails several selections: the elimination of impurities, the elimination of other metals “of the same family,” and so on. This is why the method of division can appear to be a capricious, incoherent procedure that jumps from one singularity to another, in contrast with the supposed identity of the concept. But, Deleuze asks, “is this not its strength from the viewpoint of the Idea”? With the method of division, “the labyrinth or chaos is untangled, but without a thread or the assistance of a thread” (DR 59).
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THE PLATONIC IDEA AS A CRITERION OF SELECTION
How does the concept of the “Idea” carry out this selection among rival claimants? Plato's method, Deleuze argues, proceeds by means of a certain irony. For no sooner has division arrived at its actual task of selection than Plato suddenly intervenes with a myth: in the Phaedrus, the myth of the circulation of souls appears to interrupt the effort of division, as does the myth of archaic times in the Statesman. Such is the second trap of division, the second irony: the first is the sudden appearance of rival claimants, the second this sudden appearance of evasion or renunciation. The introduction of myth seems to confirm all the objections of Aristotle; division, lacking mediation, has no probative force, and must thus allow itself to be replaced by a myth which could furnish it with an equivalent of mediation in an imaginary or narrative manner. Once again, however, this Aristotelian objection misses the sense of Plato's project. For the myth, says Deleuze, interrupts nothing, but is, on the contrary, the integrating element of division itself. If it is true that myth and dialectic are two distinct forces in Platonism in general, it is division that surmounts this duality and integrates, internally, the power of dialectic with that of myth, making myth an element of the dialectic itself.
