We should say of this identity and this resemblance that they are 'simulated': they are products of systems which relate different to different by means of difference (which why such systems are themselves simulacra). same and the similar are fictions engendered by the eternal return. This time, there no longer error but illusion: inevitable illusion which the source of error, but may nevertheless be distinguished from it. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 126 Immanence and the Optical Illusion of Identity Consider a place where two flows of water converge-for example, where water diverted by a weir, and then flows back into the main body of a river. Regular patterns of lines and bubbles appear on the surface, forming shapes that are never fully stable but persist over time. These shapes can be compared to each other or to some model of a particular type of shape; the distances between them can be measured and their relative positions can be plotted; and, if one were to freeze the scene in a snapshot, these patterns might appear to be not surface shapes but something more stable and substantial-which would make far easier to establish resemblances, differences, and measurements. But this focus on superficial-albeit visible-effects will necessarily fail to grasp the dynamics of the invisible water flows that produce them. Moreover, the principles of similarity, dissimilarity, and spatial and temporal difference and distance, which can certainly be applied to examine these surface patterns if they are taken in abstraction, will likely be wholly inappropriate to the depths. Transpose these considerations onto the realm of the self. Freud's topographical model of the psyche often described in terms of an iceberg: only the tip, the conscious ego, appears to the outer world, while the vast depths of the psyche remain hidden. But suppose, rather than ice rising from the water, there are only the surface patterns and the projection of solidity as a kind of ego effect. ego, then, would not be the product of a repression that forms a never-fully-stable unity of the self, so much as what Nietzsche maintains is: an erroneous interpretation of the flows of psychic life.' Repression might still be involved in this error, but would play a decidedly secondary role, consolidating a misunderstanding rather than forming a substance. error would be that such a substance actually exists, regardless of whether taken to be pre-existent or constructed. One of the central themes of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy that identities are nothing more than optical illusions. They are merely apparent stabilities, which have been used as markers in order to comprehend change and difference. These pseudo-stabilities, for Deleuze, are the products of the disjointed convergence of flowing differences, and, like the patterns on the water's surface, they are no less real for being surface effects, but they do not have the substantiality often attributed to them. Deleuze's thesis parallels those of Bergson and Nietzsche, which treat the notion of a substratum persisting through change-a body, an ego, etc.-as an error that may be necessary for action (Bergson) or for life (Nietzsche), but that has no higher truth.2 Indeed, for both Nietzsche and Bergson, not identity, as a substantiality persisting over time, that grounds difference and change; rather, change and becoming engender a simulated identity or solidity: as Bergson says, it a certain regulating of mobility on mobility which produces the effect of immobility.3 status of identity as a surface effect a necessary consequence of Deleuze's project of a philosophy of pure immanence. When treated as more than they are, these optical illusions generate the transcendental illusions that surround representation,4 leading thought towards transcendence. The poisoned gift of Platonism, Deleuze writes, is to have introduced transcendence into philosophy, to have given transcendence a plausible philosophical meaning. …
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Jul 12, 2006
Alessio Alexiadis 
Open Access
