The concept of the simulacrum: Deleuze and the overturning of Platonism

Continental Philosophy Review

Volumn 38, Issue 1-2, 2005, Pages 89-123

  Smith, Daniel W ^a  

^a PURDUE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 55449133136     PISSN: 13872842     EISSN: 15731103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s11007-006-3305-8     Document Type: Article

References (85)

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, tr. Sophie Hawkes (Boston: Eridanos Press, 1990), pp. 132-138, as well as Jean-Francois Lyotard's commentaries (notably on the Augustine-Varro debate) in Libidinal Economy [1974], tr. lain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 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. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) (hereafter, DR), p. 299, tr. mod.
3. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, tr. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), esp. "The Precession of Simulacra," pp. 1-42. For an analysis of Baudrillard's conception of simulacra, see
4. Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 76-84.
5. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, tr. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) (hereafter, N), p. 31.
6. See Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, tr. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale; ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) (hereafter, LS), which includes Deleuze's well-known article "Plato and the Simulacrum" as an appendix. 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, no. 4 (Oct-Dec 1966), pp. 426-438; 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), pp. 163-177, under the title "Reversing Platonism (Simulacra)" (hereafter, RP).
7. Nietzsche, Grossoktavausgabe (Eeipzig, 1905 ff.), Vol. 9, p. 190,
8. as cited in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol. I: The Will to Power as Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 154.
9. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I: The Will to Power as Art, pp. 151-152. Heidegger himself analyzes Nietzsche's anti-platonism in terms of the "raging discordance" between truth and art (see, pp. 151-220).
10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, tr. Walter Kaufman, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1954), pp. 485-486.
11. Deleuze, Abécédaire, "H as in 'History of Philosophy'" (overview by Charles J. Stivale available on-line at .)
12. See, above all, Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982),
13. and Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, tr. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1999), esp. Ch. 5,
14. "The Process of Secularization" (in French, laicisation), 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
15. and the City," in The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World, tr. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 249-262.
16. Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) (hereafter, WP), pp. 86-88. On the distinction between the state and the city as social formations, see
17. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) (hereafter, TP), pp. 432-433.
18. 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. Ch. 8, "Space and Political Organization in Ancient Greece," pp. 212-234. On relations of rivalry,
19. see Jean-Pierre Vernant, "City-State Warfare," in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1990), esp. pp. 29/41-42.
20. This is the theme of Michel Foucault's The Use of Pleasure, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 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.
21. 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 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, AntiOedipus, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977), pp. 139-271, and TP, pp. 351-473.
22. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, tr. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981) (hereafter, NP), pp. 5-6/107.
23. See also Alexandre Kojève, "Tyranny and Wisdom," in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (New York: Free Press, 1963), p. 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.
24. WP, p. 9, tr. mod. This concept of the "friend" is explored by Deleuze and Guattari in their introduction to What is Philosophy?. See also N, pp. 162-163; Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, tr. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 100-103;
25. and Gilles Deleuze, Périclès et Verdi (Paris: Minuit, 1988), p. 16.
26. The important notion of "Conceptual Personae" is developed by Deleuze and Guattari in Ch. 3 of What is Philosophy?, pp. 61-83. See also Vernant, Origins, pp. 102-118.
27. Jean-Pierre Paye, La raison narrative (Paris: Balland, 1990), pp. 15-18: "It took a century for the word 'philosophers,' no doubt invented by Heraclitus of Ephesus, to find its correlate in the word 'philosophy,' no doubt invented by Plato the Athenian. The first philosopher were foreigners, but philosophy is Greek."
28. 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.
29. Gilles Deleuze, "Plato, the Greeks," in Essays Critical and Clinical, tr. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) (hereafter, FCC), p. 137.
30. See Aristotle, Prior Analytics, I, p. 31
31. , and Posterior Analytics, II, p. 5/13, along with Deleuze's comments in LS, 254 and DR, pp. 59-60.
32. Plato, Statesman, 303 d-e. On the distinction between antiphasis and amphisbetesis, see DR, p. 60, and LS, p. 293.
33. DR, pp. 61-62. 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" (p. 34).
34. 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 actually 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, p. 29).
35. See DR, p. 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."
36. For Deleuze's interpretation of the Neo-platonic heritage, see "Les plages d'immanence," in L'art des confins: Mélanges offerts à Maurice de Gandillac, ed. Annie Cazenave and Jean-François Lyotard (Paris: PUF, 1985), pp. 79-81
37. ; and "Immanence and the historical components of expression," in Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, tr. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990), pp. 169-186.
38. 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 Etienne Gilson, Introduction à l'étude de saint-Augustin (Paris: Vrin, 1929), p. 268.
39. On height, depth, and surface as orientations of thought, see LS, Series 18, "Of the Images of Philosophers," pp. 127-133.
40. Plato, Sophist, 268b.
41. 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, pp. 264c-268d; and Republic, Book 10, 601d ff.
42. LS, 296. Jean-Pierre Vernant has questioned the importance Deleuze ascribes to this distinction in "The Birth of Image," in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 164-185, esp. p. 169. But he nonetheless 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" (p. 182).
43. Michel Foucault, "Theatrum Philosophicum," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 167. Deleuze employs the Homeric image in LS, p. 254.
44. DR, p. 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 the nature its authentic depth, the becoming and the virtualities that are inherent in it, the being that is immanent to it" (p. 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" (in LS, pp. 266-279): "To distinguish in men what amounts to myth and what amounts to Nature, and in Nature itself, what 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" (p. 278). The latter is clearly a reference to Plato.
45. On the use of the term "representation," see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), which identifies a "classic" world of representation in the 17th-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)."
46. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 3.
47. Philebus, p. 24d. On this theme, see LS, Series 1, "On pure becoming," pp. 1-3.
48. 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 Lnglish terms nonetheless indicate the essential distinction between an icon and a simulacrum that Deleuze is attempting to establish. The Oxford English Dictionary 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 OLD 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), pp. 172-173.
49. Jacques Derrida, in his essay "Plato's Pharmacy," in Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 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, p. 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.
50. The simulacrum, in short, is a differential system, "a system where difference is related to difference through difference itself" (DR, p. 277). It is precisely such systems that Deleuze analyzes in Difference and Repetition.
51. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978), esp. pp. 88-89.
52. Augustine, Concerning The City of God Against the Pagans, tr. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 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, pp. 82-84/131-138.
53. On all these themes, see "La Prose d'Acteon," in La Nouvelle Revue Française, 135 (1964), pp. 444-459.
54. "Reversing Platonism (Simulacra)," pp. 170-171.
55. For a discussion of Roussel's work, see Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986), especially Ch. 2. For Deleuze's analyses, see DR, pp. 22/121, and LS, pp. 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 nonetheless can extract an immense wealth from this poverty - but more precisely on possibility of saying two things with the same word, inscribing a maximum of difference within the repetition of the same word.
56. DR, p. 66. See also p. 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."
57. The notion of mimesis appears not to have used in discussions of art prior to the fifthcentury. Until that time, following Gorgias, the fifth-century founder of the theory of artistic prose, 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," p. 165, and note 2.
58. LS, p. 265. On these points, see Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art, tr. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 162-199.
59. Plato, Republic, VII, 523b ff.
60. For an analysis of Warhol's work in this context, see Paul Patton, "Anti-Platonism and Art," in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 141-156.
61. NP, p. 103 (tr. mod.). See Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "Reason in Philosophy," §6: "For 'appearance' in this case [the artist] means reality once more, only by way of selection, reinforcement, and correction. The tragic artist is no pessimist: he is precisely the one who says Yes to everything questionable, even to the terrible - he is Dionysian" (p. 484).
62. FCC, p. 137. Deleuze claims that "only the philosophies of pure immanence escape Platonism - from the Stoics to Spinoza or Nietzsche."
63. See DR 319, note 30. In the Theaetetus, for example, Socrates speaks of "two patterns eternally set before humanity, the one blessed and divine, the other godless and wretched" (176e). Similarly, the Timaeus (27d-28d) sets before the demiurge two possible models for the creation of the world, and before humanity two possible models for science ("Which of the patterns had the artificer in view when he created the world - the pattern of that which is unchangeable, or of that which is created?"). In A Thousand Plateaus (pp. 361-374), Deleuze analyses various "minor" sciences (Archimedean geometry, the physics of the atomists, the differential calculus, etc.) that were based on such a model of becoming. They replaced the hylomorphic model (the static relation of form-matter), which searches for laws by extracting constants, with a hydraulic model (the dynamic relation of material-forces), which placed the variables themselves in a state of continuous variation.
64. See DR, p. 127: "Insinuated throughout the Platonic cosmos, difference resists its yoke .... It is as though there were a strange double which dogs Socrates' footsteps and haunts even Plato's style, inserting itself into the repetitions and variations ofthat style." On the effect that this "double" has on Plato's style, see DR, p. 319, note 29: "Plato's arguments are marked by stylistic reprisals and repetitions which testify to a meticulous attention to detail, as though there were an effort to 'correct' a theme in order to defend it against a neighboring, but dissimilar, theme that is 'insinuating' itself into the first."
65. Gilles Deleuze, "La méthode de dramatisation," in Bulletin de la Sociétéfrançaise de Philosophie, Vol. 61, No. 3 (July-Sept. 1967) (hereafter, MD), p. 91. See also DR, p. 64: "Being (what Plato calles the Idea) 'corresponds' to the essence of the problem or the question as such. It is as though there were an 'opening,' a 'gap,' an ontological 'fold' which relates being and the question to one another."
66. On the question "What is...?" in Plato, see Richard Robinson, Plato 's Earlier Dialectic, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), esp. Ch. 5, "Socratic Definition," pp. 49-60.
67. Contemporary "antifoundationalism" implies, at the very least, the rejection of this platonic form of questioning, of this search for a foundational essence. "I cannot characterize my standpoint better," wrote Wittgenstein, "than to say it is opposed to that which Socrates represents in the Platonic dialogues. For if asked what knowledge is (Theatatus 146a) I would list examples of knowledge, and add the words 'and the like' ..., whereas when Socrates asks the question 'What is knowledge?' he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge." Ludwig Wittgenstein, manuscript p. 302, ∥14, as quoted in Garth Hallett, A Commentary to Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 33-34; see also
68. Philosophical Investigations ∥65. In general, however, Deleuze was hostile to Wittgenstein's philosophy, which he thought had had a pernicious effect on Anglo-American philosophy; see Deleuze, Abécédaire, "W as in Wittgenstein" (see note 9 above).
69. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, tr. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 119.
70. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1967), §556, p. 301: "The question 'What is that?' is an imposition of meaning from some other viewpoint. 'Lssence,' the 'essential nature,' is something perspectival and already presupposes a multiplicity. At the bottom of it there always lies 'What is that for me' (for us, for all that lives, etc.)?"
71. See Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, tr. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 119-120. On all these points, see MD, pp. 91-92/105-106/115; DR, p. 188; NP, pp. 75-78.
72. See DR, pp. 16-19 (on Freud); and pp. 87-88/141-142 (on Plato).
73. On the theme of series in Proust, see Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), Ch. 6, "Series and group," pp. 67-83. One of the essential critiques that Deleuze and Guattari level against psychoanalysis is that it reduces the unconscious to the familial coordinates of the primal scene or the oedipal triangle ("daddy-mommy-me"); see, for instance, AntiOedipus, pp. 97/91: "The father, mother, and the self are directly coupled to the elements of the political and historical situation: the soldier, the cop, the occupier, the collaborator, the radical, the resister, the boss, the boss's wife .... The family is by nature eccentric, decentered .... There is always an uncle from America; a brother who went bad; an aunt who took off with a military man .... The father and mother exist only as fragments ... inductors or stimuli of varying, vague import that trigger processes of an entirely different nature."
74. DR, p. 299.
75. Jacques Lacan develops this theme most famously in his "Seminar on The Purloined Letter? tr. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies, p. 48 (1972), p. 55: "What is hidden is never but what is missing from its place, as the call slip puts it when speaking of a volume lost in the library. And even if the book be on an adjacent shelf or in the next slot, it would be hidden there, however visibly it may appear." See also LS, pp. 40-41, which cites a parallel text of Lewis Carroll's.
76. See Deleuze, Proust and Signs, p. 75: The Complete Text, tr. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Chapter six of this book explores the mechanisms of difference and repetition exemplified in Proust's serial conception of love: difference as the law or essence of the series; the repetition of the terms as variation and displacement. In the conclusion of Part I ("The image of thought," pp. 94-102), Deleuze analyzes the the "anti-Greek" image of thought found in Proust, implicitly aligning it with Nietzsche's theme of an "inverted Platonism."
77. DR, p. 105/300.
78. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, tr. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1966), 289/229. See also LS, pp. 129/263.
79. For a discussion of the process of selection in a philosophy of immanence, see Daniel W. Smith, "The place of ethics in Deleuze's Philosophy: Three Questions of Immanence," in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lleanor Kaufman and Kevin Heller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 251-269.
80. See DR, p. 54: "Nietzsche reproaches all those selection procedures based upon the opposition or conflict with working to the advantage of the average forms and operating to the benefit of the 'large number.' Lternal return alone effects the true selection, because it eliminates the average forms and uncovers 'the superior form of everything that is.'"
81. ECC, p. 127; cf. pp. 41-42 on the immanence of Christ.
82. DR, p. 117; see also LS, pp. 261-262. The two formulas are derived from Claude LéviStrauss, Totemism, tr. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), p. 77. Arthur Danto makes a similar point in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 171: "The paradigm of a philosophical difference is between two worlds, one of which is sheer illusion, as the Indians believed this one is, and the other of which is real in the way we believe this very world is. Descartes' problem of distinguishing waking experience from dream experience is a limited variation of the same question .... A world of sheer determinism might be imagined indistinguishable from one in which everything happens by accident. A world in which God exists could never be told apart from one in which God didn't.... Carnap would have said that such a choice is meaningless precisely because no observation(s) could be summoned to effect a discrimination.... Whatever the case, it is plain that philosophical differences are external to the worlds they discriminate."
83. DR, p. ix, tr. mod. See also DR, 301: "The history of the long error is the history of representation, the history of icons."
84. See Gilles Deleuze, "Lettre-préface," in Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: La philosophie de Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1993), p. 8.
85. See LS, p. 129: "Nietzsche takes little interest in what happened after Plato, maintaining that it was necessarily the continuation of a long decadence."