JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October. What is meant by the "overthrow of Platonism"? Nietzsche thus defines the task of his philosophy, or more generally, the task of the philosophy of the future. The phrase seems to mean abolishing the world of essences and the world of appearances. Such a project would not, however, be Nietzsche's own. The double objection to essences and appearance goes back to Hegel, and further still, to Kant. It is unlikely that Nietzsche would have meant the same thing. Further, this way of formulating the overthrow has the drawback of being abstract; it leaves the motivation for Platonism obscure. To overthrow Platonism should, on the contrary, mean bringing this motivation to light, "tracking" it down-as Plato hunts down the Sophist.In very general terms, the motive for the theory of Ideas is to be sought in the direction of a will to select, to sort out. It is a matter of drawing differences, of distinguishing between the "thing" itself and its images, the original and the copy, the model and the simulacrum. But are all these expressions equal? The Platonic project emerges only if we refer back to the method of division, for this method is not one dialectical procedure among others. It masters all the power of the dialectic so as to fuse it with another power and thus to represent the whole system. One could initially say that it consists of dividing a genus into opposing species in order to place the thing under investigation within the correct species: thus the process of continuous specification in the search for a definition of the angler's art. But this is only the superficial aspect of the division, its ironic aspect. If one takes this aspect seriously, Aristotle's objection is clearly applicable; division is a bad and illegitimate syllogism, because it lacks a middle term that could, for example, lead us to conclude that angling belongs to the arts of acquisition and of acquisition by capture, and so forth.The real goal of division must be sought elsewhere. In the Statesman one finds an initial definition: the statesman is the shepherd of men. But all sorts of * "Platon et le Simulacre" is an excerpt from Logique du Sens by Gilles Deleuze to be translated and published by Columbia University Press.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
It was a commonplace of criticism in the 1960s that a strict application of symmetry allowed a painter "to point to the center of the canvas" and, in so doing, to invoke the internal structure of the picture-object. Thus "pointing to the center" was made to serve as one of the many blocks in that intricately constructed arch by which the criticism of the last decade sought to connect art to ethics through the "aesthetics of acknowledgement." But what does it mean to point to the center of a t.v. screen? In a way that is surely conditioned by the attitudes of Pop Art, artists' video is largely involved in parodying the critical terms of abstraction. Thus when Vito Acconci makes a video tape called Centers (1971), what he does is literalize the critical notion of 'pointing' by filming himself pointing to the center of a television monitor, a gesture he sustains for the 20-minute running time of the work. The parodistic quality of Acconci's gesture, with its obvious debt to Duchampian irony, is clearly intended to disrupt and dispense with an entire critical tradition. It is meant to render nonsensical a critical engagement with the formal properties of a work, or indeed, a genre of works-such as 'video'. The kind of criticism Centers attacks is obviously one that takes seriously the formal qualities of a work, or tries to assay the particular logic of a given medium. And yet, by its very mis-en-scene, Centers typifies the structural characteristics of the video medium. For Centers was made by Acconci's using the video monitor as a mirror. As we look at the artist sighting along his outstretched arm and forefinger towards the center of the screen we are watching, what we see is a sustained tautology: a line of sight that begins at Acconci's plane of vision and ends at the eyes of his projected double. In that image of self-regard is configured a narcissism so endemic to works of video that I find myself wanting to generalize it as the condition of the entire genre. Yet, what would it mean to say, "The medium of video is narcissism?" For one thing, that remark tends to open up a rift between the nature of video and that of the other visual arts. Because that statement describes a psychological rather than a physical condition; and while we are accustomed to thinking of psychological states as the possible subject of works of art, we do not think of Vito Acconci. Centers. 1971. (Photo: Kathy Dillon.
No abstract
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.