| Discussions of Deleuze's philosophy often ignore his endorsement and precise definition of systematic philosophy. To remedy this, I provide an overview of Deleuze's philosophy---one consistent with Deleuze's own metaphilosophical principles. Deleuze emphasizes the conceptual personages or characters inhabiting philosophies. Thus, in part one, I identify Deleuze's own conceptual personages: the philosopher, but also the academic, the pervert, etc. Deleuze defines philosophical systems as problems immanent to multiple solutions. Thus, using the characters I highlight how Deleuze's philosophy is itself the problem of the creative act---a problem that exists solely within its heterogeneous solutions or articulations.;Two common interpretations of Deleuzian thought---Deleuze as post-modernist, Deleuze as philosopher of the virtual---can be seen as interpretations of his claim to enact a reversal of Platonism. On the one hand, Deleuze's philosophy is depicted as yet another critique of the philosophical tradition, Platonism in particular. On the other hand, Deleuze's metaphysics is seen as reworking Platonic notions such as essence, universal, and Idea by way of his distinctions between virtual and actual, corporeal mixture and incorporeal sense.;The benefit of this second approach is that it acknowledges Deleuze has a metaphysics and helps explain why Deleuze declares the reversal of Platonism to be one that simultaneously preserves key Platonic gestures. The problem is that on Deleuze's reading of Platonism, the distinction between form and particular, essence and representation, is a secondary one. The Platonic commitment to essences supports the normative differentiation of modes of living and thinking---their classification as representations or simulacra. For this reason, we should expect Deleuze's reversal of Platonism to reside not in the metaphysical principles of virtuality or incorporeal sense, but in the act of privileging certain forms of living and thinking over others. Within Platonism, privileged lives receive the title of representation. The lives and bodies Deleuze privileges receive predicates such as creative and different. This account of Deleuze's metaphysics as an ethico-political metaphysics is developed through a careful reading of Deleuze's portraits of Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Spinoza as well as his books Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. |
