The Deleuzian reversal of Platonism

Abstract

Of the many books that Deleuze devoted to the history of philosophy, none focuses on ancient philosophy. And yet, one could argue that few thinkers of the twentieth century have engaged with ancient philosophy, and drawn from it, as much and as systematically as Deleuze. Naturally, one could think of Heidegger as another twentieth-century philosopher whose thought was shaped through his confrontation with Greek philosophy. But where Heidegger eventually mobilizes the Presocratics against Plato and Aristotle, and seeks to extract from them possibilities of thought beyond the “closure” of metaphysics, Deleuze doesn’t envisage the history of philosophy in the same terms, and simply refuses to identify what he calls “the metaphysics of representation,” or “Platonism,” with metaphysics as such . That being said, it would be difficult to ignore that his entire philosophy – up until Logic of Sense at least – unfolds under the Nietzschean injunction to reverse, overturn, and overcome Platonism, stressing all the while the need to construct another “image of thought.” Most striking, perhaps, is the extent to which his effort to produce another image of thought requires a new thought of the image , one that he finds already at work in Greek philosophy itself. My goal, here, is threefold: to return to the source of Platonism by following the thread of the image, and show the extent to which philosophy is, from the start, and irreducibly, a matter of ethics, aesthetics, and politics; to reveal the extent to which Deleuze saw resources to overturn Platonism in ancient, and even Platonic, philosophy itself; to indicate the manner in which, drawing on those resources, Deleuze develops an anti-Platonism based on the concepts of “difference” and “repetition.”

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