The last section of this first chapter (pg. 59-69) is an extended reflection on Plato's theory of forms.
There's also a brief interlude that deals with Heidegger that I'll probably skip over just because it has been way too long since I read Being and Time, and it's not one of those books you can pick up and quickly skim to remember the gist. I imagine that this Heidegger section is here mainly to forestall a quick response of, "Hey, Heidegger already did that!" to Deleuze's thesis: "The task of modern philosophy has been defined: to overturn Platonism". Certainly Heidegger often claimed to be "overcoming metaphysics". Deleuze's summary of his philosophy here acknowledges that they share an aim, as well as some particular points of correspondence, but then questions whether Heidegger fully succeeded in reaching the goal. At some point soon, it might be time to go back to Heidegger. My interest was recently renewed when I read Graham Hartman's Object-Oriented Ontology, which was heavily influenced by Heidegger. I'm still a bit reluctant though since I read about half of The Question Concerning Technology a few years back and found it mildly interesting but hugely portentous.
I can't say I remember Plato any better than Heidegger really, but him at least one can relatively quickly re-read. Deleuze discusses three of the dialogues -- Phaedrus, Sophist, and Statesmen. The first is a perennial college classic, but I had never read the others. So I picked up the Sophist and gave it a cursory once over. And that shit is weird man. I guess I hadn't read any of these "late" dialogues because I had always heard that they were "dogmatic", and also were hardly genuine dialogs with opposing points of view at all. In retrospect, I understand why folks say the latter, because the main character of Socrates only gets about one line, and because very little would be lost if Plato dropped the pretense of multiple speaking characters. The Sophist is basically just a monologue by an "Eleatic stranger". Eleatic as in dude-from-Elea, home of Parmenides and Zeno. To call it "dogmatic" though seems to me a major mistake. In fact, as Deleuze points out here, it's almost the exact opposite of dogmatic. The main thrust of the Sophist seems to completely undermine our usual conception of Plato's whole theory of forms. It almost reads like an illustration of what goes wrong if you are overly dogmatic in your application of "Platonism".
Was it not inevitable that Plato should push irony to that point - to parody? Was it not inevitable that Plato should be the first to overturn Platonism, or at least to show the direction such an overturning should take? We are reminded of the grand finale of the Sophist: difference is displaced, division turns back against itself and begins to function in reverse, and, as a result of being applied to simulacra themselves (dreams, shadows, reflections, paintings), shows the impossibility of distinguishing them from originals or from models. The Eleatic Stranger gives a definition of the sophist such that he can no longer be distinguished from Socrates himself: the ironic imitator who proceeds by brief arguments (questions and problems).
So I think one way to understand the whole final section of the chapter is to build up to understanding this quote. To do this though, we have to go back to the beginning and ask what problem the dogma of the theory of forms was meant to solve to begin with. This post is already getting long, so I'll do it in installments.
Next time on FPiPE -- The Theory of Forms and The Method of Division. Stay tuned!
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