Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  In the Platonic dialogues, myth functions primarily as a narrative of foundation. In accordance with archaic religious traditions, the myth constructs a model of circulation by which the different claimants can be judged; it establishes a foundation which is able to sort out differences, to measure the roles and pretensions of the various rivals, and finally to select the true claimants.20 In the Phaedrus, for example, Plato describes the circulation of souls prior to their incarnation, and the memory they carry with them of the Ideas they were able to contemplate. It is this mythic contemplation, the nature and degree of this contemplation, and the type of situations required for its recollection, that provide Plato with his selective criterion and allow him to determine the value and order of different types of madness (i.e., that of the lover, the poet, the priest, the prophet, the philosopher, and so on). Well-founded madness, or true love, belongs to those souls that have seen much, and retain many dormant but revivable memories. True claimants are those that “participate” in contemplation and reminiscence, while sensual souls, forgetful and narrow of vision, are denounced as false rivals. Similarly, the Statesman invokes the image of a god ruling both mankind and the world in archaic times. The myth shows that, properly speaking, only this archaic god merits the definition of the statesman as “king-shepherd of men.” But again, the myth furnishes an ontological measure by which different men in the City are shown to share unequally in the mythical model according to their degree of participation—from the political man, who is closest to the model of the archaic shepherd-god; to parents, servants, and auxiliaries; and, finally, to charlatans and counterfeits, who merely parody the true politician by means of deception and fraud.21

  The Platonic conception of “participation” (metachein, lit. “to have after”) must be understood in terms of the role of this foundation: an elective participation is the response to the problem of a method of selection. “To participate” means to have a part of, to have after, to have secondhand. What possesses something firsthand is precisely the foundation itself, the Idea—only Justice is just, only Courage is courageous. Such statements are not simply analytic propositions but designations of the Idea as the foundation that possesses a given quality firsthand; only the Idea is “the thing itself,” only the Idea is “self-identical” (the auto kath’ hauto). “It is what objectively possesses a pure quality, or what is nothing other than what it is” (WP 29–30). Empirically speaking, a mother is not only a mother, but also a daughter, a lover, perhaps a wife; but what Plato would call the Idea of a mother is a thing that would only be what it is, a mother that would be nothing but a mother (the notion of the Virgin Mary could be said to be the Christian approximation of the Idea of a pure mother).22 Plato's innovation is to have created a veritable concept of the Idea of something pure, a pure quality. The Idea, as foundation, then allows its possession to be shared, giving it to the claimant (the secondhand possessor), but only in so far as the claimant has been able to pass the test of the foundation. In Plato, says Deleuze, things (as opposed to Ideas) are always something other than what they are; at best, they are only secondhand possessors, mere claimants or “pretenders” to the Idea itself. They can only lay claim to the quality, and can do so only to the degree that they participate in the pure Idea. Such is the doctrine of judgment. The famous Neo-Platonic triad follows from this: the unparticipated, the participated, and the participant. One could also say: the father (the foundation), the daughter (the object of the claim), and the suitor (the claimant). The triad produces a series of participations in length, a hierarchy (the “chain of being”) that distinguishes different degrees and orders of participation depending on the distance from or proximity to the foundational principle.23

  What is the mechanism that allows the Idea to judge this degree of elective participation? If the foundation as essence is defined by the original and superior identity or sameness of the Idea, the claimant will be well founded only to the degree that it resembles or imitates the foundation. This resemblance is not merely an external correspondence, as the resemblance of one thing with another, but an internal and spiritual (or “noetic”) resemblance of the thing to the Idea. The claimant conforms to the object of the claim only in so far as it is modeled internally on the Idea, which comprehends the relations and proportions that constitute essence. The act of founding endows the claimant with this internal resemblance and, on this condition, makes it legitimately participate in the quality, the object of the claim. The ordering of claimants or differences (classification) thus takes place within the comparative play of two similitudes: the exemplary similitude of an original identity, and the imitative or “mimetic” similitude of a more or less similar copy. This in itself marks a philosophic decision of the greatest importance to Deleuze: Platonism allows differences to be thought only by subordinating them to the principle of the Same and the condition of Resemblance (DR 127). The concept of the Idea, in Deleuze's analysis, thus consists of three components:

  1. the differential quality that is to be possessed or participated in (e.g., being just)

  2. the pre-existent foundation or Idea that possesses it firsthand, as unparticipatable (e.g., justice itself)

  3. the rivals that lay claim to the quality (e.g., to be a just man) but can only possess it at a second, third, or fourth remove … or not at all (the simulacrum) (WP 30).

  For Plato, then, “pretension” is not one phenomenon among others, but the nature of every phenomenon. The claimant [prétendant] appeals to the foundation, and it is a claim [prétention] that must be founded (e.g., the claim to be just, courageous, or pious; to be the true shepherd, lover, or philosopher), that must participate, to a greater or less degree, in the object of pretension, or else be denounced as without foundation. If Platonism is a response to the agonistic relations of power in the Greek world, the foundation is the operation of the logos; it is a test that sorts out and measures the differences among these pretensions or claimants, determining which claimants truly participate in the object of the claim.

  THE COUNTER-METHOD OF THE SOPHIST: THE SIMULACRUM

  An obvious implication follows from this analysis: does there not lie, at the limit of participation, the state of an unfounded pretension? The “truest” claimant, the authentic and well-founded claimant, is the one closest to the foundation, the secondhand possessor. But is there not, then, also a third- and fourth-hand possessor, continuing down to the nth degree of debasement, to the one who possesses no more than a mirage or simulacrum of the foundation, and is itself a mirage and a simulacrum, denounced by the selection as a counterfeit?24 If the just claimant has its rivals, does it not also have its counterfeits and simulacra? This simulacral being, according to Plato, is in fact none other than the Sophist, a Protean being who intrudes and insinuates himself everywhere, contradicting himself and making unfounded claims on everything.

  Thus construed, Deleuze considers the conclusion of the Sophist to be one of the most extraordinary adventures of Platonism. The third of the great dialogues on division, the Sophist, unlike either the Phaedrus or the Statesman, presents no myth of foundation. Rather, it utilizes the method of division in a paradoxical fashion, a “counter-utilization” that attempts to isolate, not the true claimant, but the false one, the sophist himself. From this point of view, Deleuze distinguishes between two spatial dimensions in Plato's thought. The dialogues of the Phaedrus and the Statesman move upward toward the “true lover” or the “true statesman,” which are legitimated by their resemblance to the pure model and measured by their approximation to it. Platonic irony is, in this sense, a technique of ascent, a movement toward the principle on high, the ascetic ideal.25 The Sophist, by contrast, follows a descending movement of humor, a technique of descent that moves downward toward the vanity of the false copy, the self-contradicting sophist. Here, the method of division can make no appeal to a foundational myth or model, for it is no longer a matter of discerning the true sophist from the false claimant, since the true sophist is hi
mself the false claimant.

  This paradoxical usage of the method of division leads the dialogue to a remarkable conclusion. “By dint of inquiring in the direction of the simulacrum,” writes Deleuze, “Plato discovers, in the flash of an instant as he leans over its abyss, that the simulacrum is not simply a false copy, but that it calls into question the very notion of the copy … and of the model” (LS 294). In the final definition of the Sophist, Plato leads his readers to the point where they are no longer able to distinguish the Sophist from Socrates himself: “The dissembling or ironical imitator … who in private and in short speeches compels the person who is conversing with him to contradict himself.”26 The sophist appears in Deleuze as a particular “type” of thinker, an “antipathetic” persona in the Platonic theater who haunts Socrates at every step as his double. Plato wanted to reduce the sophist to a being of contradiction: that is, the lowest power and last degree of participation, a supposed state of chaos. But is not the sophist rather the being that raises all things to their simulacral state, and maintains them in that state? Platonism in this manner “confronts sophism as its enemy, but also as its limit and its double; because he lays claim to anything and everything, there is the great risk that the sophist will scramble the selection and pervert the judgment” (ECC 136). This is the third moment of irony in Plato, irony pushed to its limit, to the point of humor, and it gives us another indication of what the overturning of Platonism entails for Deleuze. “Was it not necessary that irony be pushed to this point?” he asks, “and that Plato be the first to indicate this direction for the overthrow of Platonism?” (LS 295).

  The essential Platonic distinction is thus more profound than the speculative distinction between model and copy, original and image, essence and appearance. The deeper, practical distinction moves between two kinds of claimants or “images,” or what Plato calls eidolon.27

  1. “Copies” (eikones) are well-grounded claimants, authorized by their internal resemblance to the ideal model, authenticated by their close participation in the foundation.

  2. “Simulacra” (phantasmata) are like false claimants, built on a dissimilarity and implying an essential perversion or deviation from the Idea.

  “It is in this sense that Plato divides the domain of image-idols in two: on the one hand the iconic copies, on the other the phantastic simulacra.”28 The great manifest duality between Idea and image is there only to guarantee the latent distinction between these two types of images, to provide a concrete criterion of selection. Plato does not create the concept of the model or “Idea” in order to oppose it to the world of images, but rather to select the true images, the icons, and to eliminate the false ones, the simulacra. In this sense, says Deleuze, Platonism is the Odyssey of philosophy; as Foucault comments, “with the abrupt appearance of Ulysses, the eternal husband, the false suitors disappear. Exeuent simulacra.”29

  In Deleuze's reading, then, Platonism is defined by this will to track and hunt down phantasms and simulacra in every domain, to identify the sophist himself, the diabolical insinuator (Dionysus). Its goal is “iconology,” the triumph of icons over simulacra, which are denounced and eliminated as false claimants. Its method is the selection of difference (amphisbetesis) by the institution of a mythic circle, the establishment of a foundation, and the creation of the concept of the Idea. Its motivation is above all a moral motivation, for what is condemned in the simulacra is the malice by which it challenges the very notion of the model and the copy, thereby turning us away from the Idea of the Good (hence Plato's condemnation of certain poets along with the sophists). Put in naturalistic terms, the aim of Platonism is to deprive nature of the being that is immanent to it, to reduce nature to a pure appearance, and to judge it in relation to a moral Idea that transcends it, “a transcendent Idea capable of imposing its likeness upon a rebellious matter.”30 Finally, Platonism inaugurates a domain that philosophy would come to recognize as its own, which Deleuze terms “representation.” Although the term “representation” will take on various avatars in the history of philosophy, Platonism ascribes to it a precise meaning: every well-founded pretension in this world is necessarily a re-presentation, since even the first in the order of pretensions is already second in itself, in its subordination to the foundation. The Idea is invoked in the world only as a function of what is not “representable” in things themselves.31

  THE CONCEPT OF THE SIMULACRUM

  With this “portrait” of Platonism in hand, we are in a position to understand what Nietzsche's “inverted Platonism” means for Deleuze. It does not simply imply the denial of the primacy of the original over the copy, of the model over the image (the “twilight of the idols”). For what is the difference between a copy and a simulacrum? Plato saw in the simulacrum a “becoming-unlimited” pointing to a subversive element that perpetually eludes the order that Ideas impose and things receive.32 But in subordinating the simulacrum to the copy, and hence to the Idea, Plato defines it in purely negative terms; it is the copy of a copy, an endlessly degraded copy, an infinitely slackened icon. To truly invert Platonism means that the difference between copy and simulacrum must be seen, not merely as a difference of degree but as a difference in nature. The inversion of Platonism, in other words, implies an affirmation of the being of simulacra as such. The simulacrum must then be given its own concept and be defined in affirmative terms. In creating such a concept, Deleuze is following a maxim that lies at the core of his philosophical methodology: “What is the best way of following the great philosophers, to repeat what they have said, or to do what they have done, that is, to create concepts for problems that are necessarily changing?” (WP 28). The Deleuzian concept of the simulacrum can be defined in terms of three characteristics, which stand in contradistinction to the three components of the Platonic Idea summarized above.

  1. First, Deleuze claims that, whereas “the copy is an image endowed with resemblance, the simulacrum is an image without resemblance” (LS 257). How are we to understand this rather strange formula? Deleuze suggests that the early Christian catechisms, influenced by the Neo-Platonism of the Church fathers, have familiarized us somewhat with the notion of an image that has lost its resemblance: God created man in His own image and to resemble Him (imago Dei), but through sin, man has lost the resemblance while retaining the image. We have lost a moral existence and entered into an aesthetic one (Kierkegaard); we have become simulacra. The catechism stresses the fact that the simulacrum is a demonic image; it remains an image, but, in contrast to the icon, its resemblance has been externalized. It is no longer a “resemblance,” but a mere “semblance.”33 If the “noetic” resemblance of an icon is like the engendered resemblance of a son to his father, stemming from the son's internal participation in the father's filial line, the semblance of the simulacra, on the contrary, is like the ruse and trickery of an imposter; though his appearance may reflect the father's, the relation is purely external and coincidental, and his claim to inheritance a subversion that acts “against the father,” without passing through the Idea.34 The simulacrum still simulates the effects of identity and resemblance, but these are now completely external effects (like optical effects), divorced from any internal principle, and produced by completely different means than those at work in the copy.35

  Deleuze's theological references here are not fortuitous, for there was a whole range of Christian experience that was familiar with the danger of the simulacrum. In On Christian Doctrine, for instance, Augustine developed a Platonic semiotic aimed at “making the difference” between true signs and false signs, or rather between two modes of interpretation of the same sign. He located his criterion of selection, not in an Idea, but in God himself, the only “thing” that can (and must) be enjoyed in itself. What he called caritas is the interpretation of signs as “iconic copies” that propel the restless movement of the soul toward the enjoyment of God (for his own sake, as the firsthand possessor) and the enjoyment of one's self and one's neighbor (for the sake of God,
as secondhand possessors). Cupiditas, on the contrary, is the interpretation of signs for their own sake, the enjoyment of “one's self, one's neighbor, or any corporeal thing” for the sake of something other than God. Augustine was explicit about the aim of his theology: “the destruction of the reign of cupidity” (simulacra).36 Augustine's polemic against Varro in the City of God would recapitulate many aspects of Plato's polemic against the Sophists.37

  If simulacra later became the object of demonology in Christian thought, it is because the simulacrum is not the “opposite” of the icon, the demonic is not the opposite of the divine, Satan is not the Other, the pole farthest from God, the absolute antithesis, but something much more bewildering and vertiginous: the Same, the perfect double, the exact semblance, the doppelgänger, the angel of light whose deception is so complete that it is impossible to tell the imposter (Satan, Lucifer) apart from the “reality” (God, Christ), just as Plato reaches the point where Socrates and the Sophist are rendered indiscernible. This is the point where we can no longer speak of “deception” or even “simulation,” but rather the positive and affirmative “power of the false” (pseudos). The Temptation and the Inquisition are not episodes in the great antagonism of Good versus Evil, but variants on the complex insinuation of the Same. How does one distinguish a revelation of God from a deception of the devil, or a deception sent by God to tempt men of little faith from a revelation sent by the devil to simulate God's test (God so closely resembling Satan who imitates God so well …)? The demonic simulacrum thus stands in stark contrast to the theological “symbol” (as defined, for instance, by Paul Tillich or Mircea Eliade), which is always iconic, the analogical manifestation of a transcendent instance. It is this experience of the simulacrum that Klossowski has revived and explored throughout his work. Foucault suggests that the concern over simulacra continued through the Baroque period, and did not finally fall into silence until Descartes's great simulacrum: the Evil Genius of the first Meditation, God's “marvelous twin,” who simulates God and can mime all his powers, decreeing eternal truths and acting as if 2 plus 2 equals 5, but who is expelled from any possible existence because of his malignancy.38 If Plato maligns the simulacrum, it is not because it elevates the false over the true, the evil over the good; more precisely, the simulacrum is “beyond good and evil” because it renders them indiscernible and internalizes the difference between them, thereby scrambling the selection and perverting the judgment.