DRAFT – please do not disseminate without the author’s written permission On Plato’s Εἴδη, Deleuze’s Simulacra, and Zeno 1 Carlos A. Segovia Abstract: In this short essay I scrutinise Deleuze’s critique of Plato and outline the Zenonian overtones of Deleuze’s anti-Platonic reasoning on “pure becoming,” whose elusiveness of the present I dispute against the backdrop of Deleuze’s own notion of a “pure empty form of time.” I furthermore contend that paradoxically Deleuze’s defence of allegedly non-eidetic “simulacra” draws tacitly on, and ultimately supports, the unchanging nature of Plato’s εἴδη, of which I offer a new interpretation that stresses their situatednes qua predicates and that finds in Sophocles’s Philoctetes their true raison d’être against their typically post-Nietzschean normative depiction. Keywords: becoming; eidos; noesis; Platonism Now, do we not know that this Eleatic Palamedes argues so very artfully that the same things appear to his listeners to be both similar and dissimilar, one and many, still and in motion? 2 Plato, Phaedrus, 261d On pure becoming The first chapter The Logic of Sense bears the title: “First Series of Paradoxes – of Pure Becoming.” In its 3 opening lines Deleuze writes: Alice and Through the Looking-Glass involve a very special kind of things: events, pure events. When I say “Alice becomes larger,” I mean that she becomes larger than she was. By the same token, however, she becomes smaller than she is now. Certainly, she is not bigger and smaller at the same time. She is larger now; she was smaller before. But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than one was and smaller than one becomes. This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. […] It pertains to the essence of becoming to move an to pull in both directions at once: Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa. Good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or direction (sens); but paradox is the affirmation of both senses at the same time. 4 And immediately afterwards he mentions Plato in following terms: Plato [in Philebus 24a–25a and Parmenides 154a–157b] invites to distinguish [ex hypothesis] between two dimensions: (1) that of limited and measured things, of fixed qualities, permanent or temporary which always presuppose pauses and rests, the fixing of presents and the assignation of subjects (for example, a particular subject having a particular largeness or a particular smallness at a particular moment); and (2) a pure becoming without measure, a veritable becoming-mad, which never rests […] [but] eludes the present, causing future and past, more or less, too much and not enough to coincide in the simultaneity of a rebellious matter, 5 This piece is a sequel – perhaps it would be better to say a small addendum – to my essay: “Εἶδος⧹Utupë – or Yet Another Take on 1 the Dissymmetric Reciprocity of the Real and the Symbolic.” In particular it prolongs the contents of n30 therein (the question of the singular, the nature of Plato’s εἴδη Deleuze’s critique of these, etc.). “[Τ]ὸν οὖν Ἐλεατικὸν Παλαµήδην λέγοντα οὐκ ἴσµεν τέχνῃ, ὥστε φαίνεσθαι τοῖς ἀκούουσι τὰ αὐτὰ ὅµοια καὶ ἀνόµοια, καὶ ἓν καὶ 2 πολλά, µένοντά τε αὖ καὶ φερόµενα.” Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp. 1–3. 3 Ibid., p. 1. 4 Ibid., pp. 1–2. 5 1