Excerpts from "The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy", The Logic of Sense: Gilles Deleuze
We started with an initial determination of the Platonic motivation: to distinguish essence from appearance, intelligible from sensible, Idea from image, original from copy, and model from simulacrum. But we already see that the expressions are not equivalent. The distinction wavers between two sorts of images. Copies are secondary possessors. They are well-founded pretenders, guaranteed by resemblance; simulacra are like false pretenders, built upon dissimilarity, implying an essential perversion or deviation... We are now in a better position to define the totality of the Platonic motivation: it has to do with selecting among the pretenders, distinguishing good and bad copies or, rather, copies (always well-founded) and simulacra (always engulfed in dissimilarity). It is a question of assuring the triumph of copies over simulacra, of repressing simulacra, keeping them completely submerged, preventing them from climbing to the surface, and "insinuating themselves" everywhere...
The simulacra is built upon a dissimilarity or upon a difference. It internalizes a dissimilarity. This is why we can no longer define it in relation to a model imposed on the copies, a model of the Same from which the copies' resemblance derives. If the simulacrum still has a model, it is another model, a model of the Other (l'Autre) from which there flows an internalized dissemblance... The simulacrum includes the differential point of view; and the observer becomes a part of the simulacrum itself, which is transformed and deformed by his point of view. In short, there is in the simulacrum a becoming-mad, or a becoming-unlimited, as in the Philebus where "more and less are always going a point further," a becoming always other, a becoming subversive to the depths, able to evade the equal, the limit, the Same, or the Similar: always more and less at once, but never equal. To impose a limit on becoming, to order it according to the same, to render it similar--and, for that part which remains rebellious, to repress it as deeply as possible, to shut it up in a cavern at the bottom of the Ocean--such is the aim of Platonism in its will to bring about the triumph of icons over simulacra.
Platonism thus founds the entire domain that Philosophy will later recognize as its own: the domain of representation filled by copies-icons, and defined not by an extrinsic relation to an object, but by an intrinsic relation to the model or foundation.
So "to reverse Platonism" means to make the simulacra rise and to affirm their rights among icons and copies... it has to do with undertaking the subversion of this world--the "twilight of the idols." The simulacrum is not a degraded copy. It harbors a positive power which denies the original and the copy, the model and the reproduction. It is not enough to invoke a model of the Other, for no model can resist the vertigo of the simulacrum. There is no longer any privileged point of view except that of the object common to all points of view. There is no possible hierarchy, no second, no third. . . . [Reverse Platonism] renders the order of participation, the fixity of distribution, the determination of the hierarchy impossible. It establishes the world of nomadic distributions and crowned anarchies. Far from being a new foundation, it engulfs all foundations, it assures a universal breakdown (effondrement), but as a joyful and positive event, as an un-founding (effondement): "behind each cave another that opens still more deeply, and beyond each surface a subterranean world yet more vast, more strange. Richer still . . . and under all foundations, under every ground, a subsoil still more profound."
Comments