The rights of Simulacra: Deleuze and the univocity of being

Abstract

Alain Badiou's recent monograph on Deleuze argues that the latter does not ‘reverse Platonism’ but instead presents a ‘Platonism of the virtual’ which appears in his unswerving attention to the univocity of being, and for this reason Deleuze is not truly a thinker of multiplicity but of the One. But this interpretation, which is not unknown in Deleuze literature, rests upon a mistaken conflation of the univocity of being with the Oneness of being. This paper reconstructs the medieval Aristotelian debates around univocity and analogy as they relate to Deleuze's thesis, found primarily in Difference and Repetition, in order to show that Deleuze does indeed reverse Platonism and restore the rights of simulacra and multiplicity.