Gilles Deleuze and the Reversal of Platonism

“Plato and the Simulacrum” is an early text by Deleuze that sets out the central motivations driving his thought: to move beyond a metaphysics of representation toward one of change and creation. At the opening of the text, and following Nietzsche, Deleuze defines the task of the philosophy of the future as the “reversal of Platonism.” This task resurfaces a few years later in Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969), marking Deleuze’s return to Plato as a critical move in his philosophical project. For Deleuze, dismantling the foundations of “the philosophy of representation” or “the reign of the Same” is a necessary step toward the emergence of a new philosophy—a philosophy of difference.

The trajectory unfolded in “Plato and the Simulacrum” is thus crucial both for grasping “transcendental empiricism” as the philosophical method Deleuze develops in Difference and Repetition and for understanding the theory of sense he elaborates in The Logic of Sense. At the same time, the text enacts a performative philosophical gesture, transforming philosophical thought itself into a site of event and action. In this way, Deleuze demonstrates in practice how the thought of difference can turn rivals into allies. In its encounter with the philosophical “other,” Deleuze’s thought—animated by a vitalist impulse—does not aim at simple opposition or negation, but at affirmation and creation: the opening of a space of “difference” that allows the concepts of the “other” to be rethought and their latent, as yet unrealized potential, to be revealed.

Deleuze’s concept of the simulacrum in “Plato and the Simulacrum” emerges from his reading of the Sophist, particularly against the backdrop of Plato’s concern with imposture and his attempt to demonstrate the very possibility of false images. Translating this essay into Hebrew invites us to reopen the question of imposture today, in a post-secular age marked by the rise of populist leaders, the spread of fake news, and the advent of deepfake technologies. How, under these conditions, can we distinguish between images—the true and the false, the genuine and the deceptive? How can we sustain the meaning of truth when the binary boundaries between truth and falsehood are increasingly blurred? And what kind of truth comes into view once we relinquish the transcendent world of essences and redirect our gaze toward the world of appearances?