This article argues for a new interpretation of the relation between Deleuze’s engagements with Nietzsche and Plato in the first chapter of Différence et répétition (1968). It (a) argues scholarship has overlooked important features of this relation, (b) reconstructs the text’s motivating problem of the reduction of difference to identity, (c) rethinks Deleuze’s use of “faire la différence” to show its methodological significance relative to Nietzsche and Plato, (d) proposes an account of the basic movement of differential being or becoming (...) figured as the Nietzschean “test” of the eternal return, (e) examines Deleuze’s derivation of the concept of simulacrum from Platonism for his revisionist theory of beings, and (f) proposes a solution to a problem unresolved in existing interpretations of the text: namely, how the text’s theory of beings as simulacra and its theory of being or becoming as the differential movement of the eternal return can have systematic unity. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the nature of Deleuze’s commitment to an affirmative naturalism that is based on certain Epicurean principles and insights. The essay is divided into two main parts. In the first part I bring to light some of the key features of Lucretius’s great poem on the nature of things, and I do so with the aid of Bergson and his reading of the teaching as fundamentally melancholic. In the second part I switch my attention to Deleuze (...) and show how he links together physics and ethics as a way of providing an emancipatory and affirmative philosophy of life and one that aims to defeat sadness. In the conclusion I return to the question of melancholy and indicate how the problem might be best negotiated. (shrink)