Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  Notes

  Essay 1: Plato

  The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism

  1.

  See, for instance, Pierre Klossowski, “Sacred and Mythical Origins of Certain Practices of the Women of Rome” [1968], in Diana at her Bath and The Women of Rome, trans. Sophie Hawkes (Boston: Eridanos, 1990), 132–8, as well as Jean-François Lyotard's commentaries (notably on the Augustine–Varro debate) in Libidinal Economy [1974], trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 66–76. In Klossowski, a phantasm is an obsessive but uncommunicable image produced within us by the unconscious forces of our impulsive life; a simulacrum is a reproduction of the phantasm that attempts to simulate (necessarily inadequately) this invisible agitation of the soul in a literary work, in a picture or a sculpture, or in a philosophical concept. Klossowski's concept of the simulacrum thus has very different components than those assigned to the concept by Deleuze.

  2.

  See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), esp. “The Precession of Simulacra,” 1–42. For an analysis of Baudrillard's conception of simulacra, see Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 76–84.

  3.

  Logic of Sense includes Deleuze's well-known article “Plato and the Simulacrum” as an appendix (LS 253–6). This article itself is a revised version of an earlier piece entitled “Renverser le platonisme,” which first appeared in Revue de métaphysique et de morale 71/4 (Oct–Dec 1966), 426–38; an English translation by Heath Massey is included as an appendix to Leonard Lawlor, Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), 163–77, under the title “Reversing Platonism (Simulacra).”

  4.

  Nietzsche, Grossoktavausgabe (Leipzig, 1905 ff.), Vol. 9, 190, as cited in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I: The Will to Power as Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 154.

  5.

  Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 29: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

  6.

  Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I: The Will to Power as Art, 151–2. Heidegger analyzes Nietzsche's anti-Platonism in terms of the “raging discordance” between truth and art (see 151–220).

  7.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1954), 485–6.

  8.

  See, above all, Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), and Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone, 1999), esp. Chapter 5, “The Process of Secularization” (in French, laïcisation), both of whom link the advent of “rational” thought to the structure of the Greek polis, and explore the complex relations of philosophy to its precursors. Pierre Vidal-Naquet provides a helpful overview of the debates in “Greek Rationality and the City,” in The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World, trans. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 249–62.

  9.

  WP 86–8. On the distinction between the State and the City as social formations, see TP 432–3.

  10.

  On the spatial organization of the Greek polis, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), Part 3, esp. Chapter 8, “Space and Political Organization in Ancient Greece,” 212–34. On relations of rivalry, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, “City-State Warfare,” in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone, 1990), esp. 29, 41–2.

  11.

  This is the theme of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985). Foucault argues that, within this agonistic field of power relations, the Greeks invented a new and specific form of power relation which he termed “subjectivation” (the relation of oneself to oneself), whose historical variations constituted the object of his research in last two volumes of The History of Sexuality, and of which sexuality or erotics constituted only a part.

  12.

  We are here drawing on the political theory that Deleuze and Guattari develop in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in which they sketch out a typology of different social formations (“primitive” societies, cities, states, capitalism, war machines) and the correlative “images of thought” they imply. See AO 139–271 and TP 351–473.

  13.

  NP 5–6, 107. See also Alexandre Kojève, “Tyranny and Wisdom,” in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (New York: Free Press, 1963), 156. Nietzsche adds that, although the early philosophers could not help but adopt the mask of the wise man or priest, this strategy proved decisive for philosophy, since the philosopher increasingly came to adopt that mask as his own.

  14.

  WP 9, translation modified. This concept of the “friend” is explored by Deleuze and Guattari in the introduction to What is Philosophy? (WP 2–6). See also N 162–3, F 100–3, and PV 16.

  15.

  The important notion of “conceptual personae” is developed by Deleuze and Guattari in Chapter 3 of What is Philosophy? (WP 61–83). See also Vernant, Origins, 102–18.

  16.

  Jean-Pierre Faye, La Raison narrative (Paris: Balland, 1990), 15–18: “It took a century for the word ‘philosopher,’ no doubt invented by Heraclitus of Ephesus, to find its correlate in the word ‘philosophy,’ no doubt invented by Plato the Athenian. The first philosophers were foreigners, but philosophy is Greek.”

  17.

  The word “claimant” translates the French prétendant, which can also mean “pretender,” “suitor,” or even “candidate.” Its translation as “claimant” emphasizes the relation of the prétendant to its prétention (“claim”), but loses the connotations associated with the words “pretender” and “pretentious,” which are also present in the French.

  18.

  Aristotle, Prior Analytics, I, 31 and Posterior Analytics, II, 5 and 13. See Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 92–3, 163–4, 175–9, as well as Deleuze's comments in LS 254 and DR 59–60.

  19.

  Plato, Statesman, 303 d–e. On the distinction between antiphasis and amphisbetesis, see DR 60 and LS 293.

  20.

  DR 61–2. On the relation between Platonism and archaic religion, see Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954). Eliade characterizes archaic religion by the repetition of mythic archetypes and the symbolism of the Center, and notes its explicit parallels with Platonism: “It could be said that this ‘primitive’ ontology has a Platonic structure; and in that case Plato could be regarded as the outstanding philosopher of ‘primitive mentality,’ that is, as the thinker who succeeded in giving philosophic currency to the modes of life and behavior of archaic humanity” (34). Deleuze is none the less critical of aspects of Eliade's approach to religion: “The idea that primitive societies are without history, dominated by archetypes and their repetition, is particularly weak and inadequate. It was not conceived by ethnologists, but by ideologues attached to a tragic Judeo-Christian consciousness that they wished to credit with the ‘invention’ of history” (AO 150, translation modified).

  21.

  Deleuze and Guattari argue that philosophy is a discipline that consists in the creation of concepts, but Plato's concept of the Idea is an illuminating example of the complexity of this claim. Plato says that one must contemplate the Ideas, but it was first of all necessary for him to create the concept of the Idea. In this sense, writes Deleuze, Plato teaches the opposite of what he actuall
y does:

  Plato creates the concept of the Ideas, but he needs to posit them as representing the uncreated that precedes them. He places time in the concept, but this time must be the Anterior. He constructs the concept, but as testifying to the preexistence of an objectity, under the form of a difference in time capable of measuring the distance or proximity of the possible constructor. This is because, in Platonic plane, truth is posited as presupposed, as already there. (WP 29)

  22.

  See DR 85: “Beyond the lover and beyond the mother, coexistent with the one and contemporary with the other, lies the never-lived reality of the Virgin.”

  23.

  For Deleuze's interpretation of the Neo-Platonic heritage, see “Zones of Immanence,” in TRM 261–4, and “Immanence and the Historical Components of Expression,” in EPS 169–86.

  24.

  In Augustine, for example, “absolute” dissimulation implies nothingness; thus the last of beings, if it is not nothingness, is at least an illusory simulacrum. See Étienne Gilson, Introduction à l’étude de Saint-Augustin (Paris: Vrin, 1929), 268.

  25.

  On height, depth, and surface as orientations of thought, see LS, Series 18, “Of the Images of Philosophers,” 127–33.

  26.

  Plato, Sophist, 268b.

  27.

  Plato, Sophist, 236c: “These then are two sorts of image-making [eidolopoiïke]—the art of making likenesses [eikones], and phantastic or the art of making appearances [phantasmata].” See also Sophist, 264c–268d; and Republic, Book 10, 601d ff.

  28.

  LS 296. Jean-Pierre Vernant has questioned the importance Deleuze ascribes to this distinction in “The Birth of Images,” in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 164–85, esp. 169. But he none the less supports the thrust of Deleuze's reading when he says that the problem of the Sophist is “to articulate what an image is, not in its seeming but in its being, to speak not of the seeming of appearance but of the essence of seeming, the being of semblance” (182).

  29.

  Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 167. Deleuze employs the Homeric image in LS 254.

  30.

  DR 128. For a reading of Deleuze's work along naturalistic lines, see Alberto Gualandi, Deleuze (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998). Gualandi argues that, for Deleuze, the task of a true philosophy of Nature would be “to eliminate any trace of transcendence, and at the same time, to give back to Nature its authentic depth, the Becoming and the virtualities that are inherent in it, the Being that is immanent to it” (36). For Nietzsche, this naturalistic project found its precursor in Heraclitus; for Deleuze, its great ancient representative was Lucretius, whose naturalism Deleuze analyzes in his article “Lucretius and the Simulacrum” (LS 266–79):

  To distinguish in men what amounts to myth and what amounts to Nature, and in Nature itself, to distinguish what is truly infinite from what is not—such is the practical and speculative object of Naturalism. The first philosopher is a naturalist: he speaks about nature, rather than speaking about the gods. His condition is that his discourse shall not introduce into philosophy new myths that would deprive Nature of all its positivity. (LS 278)

  The latter phrase is a reference to Plato.

  31.

  On the use of the term “representation,” see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973), which identifies a “classic” world of representation in the seventeenth century and outlines its limitations. Deleuze's characterization of Platonism bears certain affinities with this statement of Richard Rorty's: “Philosophy's central concern is to be a general theory of representation, a theory which will divide culture up into areas which will represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all (despite their pretense to do so).” Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 3.

  32.

  Philebus 24d. On this theme, see Deleuze, LS, Series 1, “On Pure Becoming,” 1–3.

  33.

  Stanley Rosen has criticized Deleuze's reading of the Sophist, noting that “an image that does not resemble X cannot be an image of X.” But Rosen here collapses Deleuze's distinction: an “image” can be either a resemblance (a true copy or icon that participates internally in the model) or a mere semblance (a false simulacrum or phantasy that feigns a merely external reflection). Though their usages overlap, these English terms none the less indicate the essential distinction between an icon and a simulacrum that Deleuze is attempting to establish. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines resemblance as “the quality of being like or similar … A likeness, image, representation, or reproduction of some person or thing” (several of the historical examples in the OED refer, significantly, to the prelapsarian state of creation). Semblance, on the contrary, is defined as “the fact of appearing to view … An appearance or outward seeming of something which is not actually there or of which the reality is different from its appearance.” Rosen's comment, it seems, would tend to collapse such terms as “image,” “resemblance,” “semblance,” and even “mimesis” into mere synonymy. See Stanley Rosen, Plato's Sophist: The Drama of Original and Image (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 172–3.

  34.

  Jacques Derrida, in his essay “Plato's Pharmacy,” in Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–171, locates a similar trinity at the heart of Platonism: the father of logos, logos itself, writing. Much of Derrida's early work focused on the Platonic conception of “writing” for precisely this reason: writing is a simulacrum, a false claimant in that it tries to capture the logos through violence and trickery without going through the father. In LS 297, Deleuze finds the same figure in the Statesman: the Good as the father of the law, the law itself, constitutions. Good constitutions are copies, but they become simulacra the moment they violate or usurp the law by evading the Good.

  35.

  The simulacrum, in short, is a differential system, “a system where difference is related to difference through difference itself” (DR 277). It is precisely such systems that Deleuze analyzes in Difference and Repetition.

  36.

  Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978), esp. 88–9.

  37.

  Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin, 1984), esp. Book VI. Klossowski's text Diana at Her Bath is explicitly presented as a kind of polytheistic inversion of Augustine's monotheistic The City of God; see his commentaries in Diana at Her Bath and The Women of Rome, 82–4, 131–8.

  38.

  On all these themes, see Foucault's important essay on Klossowski, “The Prose of Acteon,” trans. Robert Hurley, in Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault: 1954–1984, Vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1988), 123–35.

  39.

  DR 66. See also DR 301: “The Same, forever decentered, effectively turns around difference only once difference, having assumed the whole of Being, applies only to simulacra which have assumed the whole of Being.”

  40.

  For a discussion of Roussel's work, see Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986), esp. Chapter 2. For Deleuze's analyses, see DR 22, 121 and LS 39, 85. Roussel's language rests not simply on the combinatorial possibilities of language—the fact that language has fewer terms of designation than things to designate, but none the less can extract an immense wealth from this poverty—but more precisely on the possibility of saying two things with the same word, inscribing a maximum of difference within the repetition of the same word.

  41.

  See DR 69, 55–6:

  It is not enough to multiply perspectives in order to establish persp
ectivism. To every perspective or point of view there must correspond an autonomous work with its own self-sufficient sense … Representation has only a single center, a unique and receding perspective, and consequently a false depth … Movement for its part implies a plurality of centers, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially distort representation: paintings or sculptures are already such “distorters,” forcing us to create movement.

  42.

  Plato, Republic, X, 601d–608b. The notion of mimesis appears not to have been used in discussions of art prior to the fifth century. Until that time, the art of the poet had been regarded as one of “deception” (apate), and it is precisely this form of image-making that Plato aims to send into exile. See Vernant, “The Birth of Images,” in Mortals and Immortals, 165, and note 2.