Deleuze and Derrida by Vernon W. Cisney

Author:Vernon W. Cisney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Chapter 7

Deleuze, Plato’s Reversal, and Eternal Return

Like Derrida, Deleuze will reject Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, and will find in Nietzsche’s thought a way of thinking difference beyond Hegelian difference. In the case of Derrida, we saw that he rejected the first of Heidegger’s three criticisms, the substantiality of will to power, on the basis of his understanding that Nietzsche is not formulating an ontology. If he were an ontological thinker, then not only would the first of Heidegger’s criticisms work (inasmuch as any logos of being will always be bound up with the demand for presence), but the subsequent two follow as well, from which it follows that Nietzsche reverses Platonism, but in so reversing it, remains ensnared by it.

On the contrary, Deleuze will affirm Nietzsche as an ontological thinker, rejecting however that the Being he thinks is the self-presencing substantiality of the will as Heidegger conceives it. Nietzsche indeed reverses Platonism, but does so by freeing up a marginalised category in the Platonic subtext, the simulacrum, thinking the simulacrum in terms of its own internal difference, as its constitutive, essential truth. When the simulacra are thought on their own terms, rather than as degraded copies, what results is a model of difference in which the returning of the Same is in fact the returning of the different, identity is displaced and secondary, and the negative is abolished. The affirmation of the simulacra destroys both model and copy, in favour of the thought of the selective character of Being, the eternal return, the play of chance and destiny, and the dual affirmation of both.

Nietzsche and the reversal of Platonism

Nietzsche, Derrida says, cannot be carrying out a reversal of Platonism, for ‘all reversals’, he claims, remain ‘a captive of that metaphysical edifice which it professes to overthrow’.1 Deleuze, on the contrary, unapologetically says, ‘What does it mean “to reverse Platonism”? This is how Nietzsche defined the task of philosophy or, more generally, the task of the philosophy of the future’,2 elsewhere calling this reversal, ‘the task of modern philosophy’.3 Moreover, in response to Derrida’s concern about remaining ‘captive’ to a system that one reverses, Deleuze appears uninterested: ‘That this overturning should conserve many Platonic characteristics is not only inevitable but desirable.’4 ‘Plato’ marks the moment that Western philosophy first finds its voice, but as such, the decisions of the Platonic moment, which will govern the tasks and goals of the history of philosophy into the present, are made in the context of a soil that is still itself undecided. As we saw in Chapter 2, Plato flirts dangerously close to a form of the different that would undermine the entirety of his metaphysics, or, to quote Deleuze, ‘the Heraclitean world still growls in Platonism’.5 The Platonic ‘decisions’ are made upon the soil of the pre-Platonic, and for this reason any so-called reversal of the structure cannot but retain certain elements of the structure itself. This does not entail, however, that the elements themselves or the relations between the elements remain the same, if only in an inverse reflection, as Heidegger seems to think.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.