The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism

The concept of the simulacrum, along with its variants (simulation, similitude, simultaneity, dissimulation), has a complex history within twentieth-century French thought. The notion was developed primarily in the work of three thinkers—Pierre Klossowski, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard—although each of them conceived of the notion in different yet original ways, which must be carefully distinguished from each other. Klossowski, who first formulated the concept in his extraordinary series of theologico-erotic writings, retrieved the term from the criticisms of the Church fathers against the debauched representations of the gods on the Roman stage ( simulacrum is the Latin term for “statue” or “idol,” and translates the Greek phantasma).Deleuze, while acknowledging his debt to Klossowski, produced his own concept of the simulacrum in Difference and Repetition, using the term to describe differential systems in which “the different is related to the different through difference itself” (DR 299). Baudrillard, finally, took up the concept of the simulacra to designate the increasingly “hyperreal” status of certain aspects of contemporary culture.It would thus be possible to write a philosophical history of the notion of the simulacrum, tracing out the intrinsic permutations and modifications of the concept. In such a history, as Deleuze writes, “it’s not a matter of bringing all sorts of things under a single concept, but rather of relating each concept to the variables that explain its mutations” (N 31). That history, however, still remains to be written. What follows is a single sequence of that history, one that focuses on Deleuze’s work, and attempts to specify the components of Deleuze’s own concept of the simulacrum. As such, it can be conceived as a contribution to a broader reconsideration of the role that the notion of the simulacrum has played in contemporary thought.