Rivalry and Philosophy after Deleuze’s Reversal of Platonic Participation

Abstract Deleuze’s reversal of Platonism shifted the traditional emphasis on thinking that which participates in a concept to that in which a claim to participation occurs. The first part of this article presents a reading of this reversal that highlights the implications of Deleuze’s ontology for his non-ontological account of participation, highlighting how this ontology (1) builds on aspects of Plato’s philosophy recovered from beneath the later Platonic tradition of philosophy and (2) supports Deleuze’s account of the rival claims of philosophy and opinion to participate in thought. The second part outlines the difficulties presented by philosophy’s constitutive participation in friendship, love, and rivalry for it to be able to achieve its distinctive task of creating concepts that defeat opinion’s rival claims to address the problems that present themselves to thought.