6.20.2022
<Technolalia> focuses on Philosophy, Culture, and Tech and how those three categories interact. The content stems from original pieces to curated links and the occasional podcast.
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Notes on Plato and Deleuze
‘I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking a philosopher from behind and giving him a child; it would be his own offspring, yet monstrous’ - Deleuze
“real but not actual, ideal but not abstract” - Deleuze and Proust.
I want to preface that it’s not simply graffing one thinker onto the other. Im preforming the Deleuzian “buggery”, to Plato and Deleuze both. The reasons for this are twofold. First, these two thinkers are not as opposed as many would cartoonishly present. Second, I also want to separate D&G as I see their joint work as an entirely different body of work from Deluze’’s monographs. Finally, the similarities, however, do require some loose readings and some “buggery,” as already warned, but at the very least, I hope this way of reading Deleuze/Plato is fun or novel.
Deleuze is well within the philosophical canon for a reason. First, his transcendental philosophy is the same as Kant’s insofar as philosophy aims not to state the conditions of knowledge qua representation as Kant had attempted. Kant says empirical identity is only possible if we can posit the Transcendental Unity of Apperception, that is, the possibility of adding “I” to our judgments. Second, Deleuze criticizes in Difference and Repetition (D&R) that a transcendental field is differential. Deleuze still wants to work back from experience since the condition cannot resemble the conditioned. Since the empirical is personal and individuated, the transcendental must be impersonal and pre-individual. The virtual is the condition for real experience, but it has no identity; identities of the subject and the object are products of processes that integrate this differential field. The Deleuzean virtual is thus not the condition of possibility of any rational experience but the condition of genesis of real experience.
This is important to understand Deleuze’s Project in Philosophy, not just as novel, for Deleuze when one is pushed to think this is when Philosophy occurs, and in these moments of rupture, the past is restructured, and our understanding shifts. Familiar but Different.
As to the quote regarding the virtual, Deleuze defines this realm of the “virtual” as “real but not actual, ideal but not abstract.” This vaguely resembles the realm of Forms initially, but upon further inquiry, we see that It’s a reversal. Plato uses simulacra pejoratively, in that , a simulacrum is a copy of the copy that participates in the self-reflex Form; but, because of this “distance” from the Form, Deleuze can orient the simulacra as that which is novel, as “differentiated”.
“From this arises the famous Neo-Platonic triad: the unsharable, the shared, the sharer.” - Plato and the Simulacrum, Gilles Deleuze and Rosalind Krauss
“Plato, by dint of inquiring in the direction of the simulacrum, 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 notions of the copy . . . and of the model. The final definition of the Sophist leads us to the point where we can no longer distinguish him from Socrates himself: the ironist operating in private by elliptical argument.” - Plato and the Simulacrum, Gilles Deleuze and Rosalind Krauss
An interesting point of comparison is chapter 1 of D&R. Plato asks, “what is x?” Following the Meno, an example is presented of that which participates in a concept. But one is never provided with a strict and deterministic methodology for how something exactly “participates.” Instead, in the sophist, he merely shows how one distinguishes true copies from the false participants. Following the logic of category, genus, and species, the question “what is x” (preferring or privileging identity) the questions traditionally is answered through differences in essence not through difference in itself. Thus, difference, is reduced to difference in identity. It is precisely the fact that Plato lacks a rigid taxonomy that makes him so worthwhile for Deleuze as compared to someone like Aristotle. In only explaining the method for distinguishing simulacra from participants. It is no longer a question of “what is x” but “which one is x?” Thus Deleuze reverses Plato but does not outright reject him.
More notes to come…
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