Deleuze contends that ‘the Stoics are the fi rst to reverse Platonism and to bring about a radical inversion’ (Deleuze 1990: 7). They do this prima-rily through an immanent dualism and a new understanding of causal-ity. Concerning the former, the Stoics conceive being as fundamentally corporeal. Its primary genus is material substrate, but all qualifi cations and dispositions of substrate, which are given in substantial terms and directly affect or modify substance, are corporeal as well. Hence the qualities ‘rational’ and ‘animal’, which delineate substrate and together
defi ne human essence (following Aristotle, man is a rational animal), are corporeal, as is virtue – an internal disposition of the corporeal soul – and fatherhood – a disposition of one body relative to another.9 However, being is part of a larger category of ‘something’, which includes four incorporeals (aso¯matos): place, void, time, and ‘sayables’
(lekta). The Stoics refuse to associate incorporeality with Platonic Ideas, holding the latter to be ‘neither somethings nor qualifi ed, but fi gments of the soul which are quasi-somethings and quasi-qualifi ed’ (Stoebius in Long and Sedley 1987: 176). Although they are distinct from corporeal bodies, which are mixtures of heterogeneous matters that include a corporeal breath or pneuma that completely infuses bodies to give them cohesion and continuity, incorporeals are nevertheless indispensable for determining the full sense and signifi cance of these bodies. Drawing on this tradition, Deleuze holds incorporeals to be an immanent excess residing on the surface of bodies and denoting a simulacral multiplicity that characterizes an immanent kind of Idea: ‘What was eluding the Idea climbed up to the surface, that is, the incorporeal limit, and represents now all possible ideality’ (Deleuze 1990: 7).
The role of incorporeals appears chiefl y in the Stoic accounts of cau-sality and language. Causation, they maintain, is corporeal and refers specifi cally and solely to the interaction of bodies, but in a special way. Bodies are causes to one another, but the effects they produce are entirely incorporeal:
The Stoics say that every cause is a body which becomes the cause to a body of something incorporeal. For instance the scalpel, a body, becomes the cause to the fl esh, a body, of the incorporeal predicate “being cut.”
And again, the fi re, a body, becomes the cause to the wood, a body, of the incorporeal predicate “being burnt.” (Sextus Empiricus in Long and Sedley 1987: 333)
These incorporeal effects are impassive, ‘not of a nature either to act or be acted upon’ (ibid.: 272), and thereby differ from the new corporeal qualities or properties that causes also induce in bodies. Fire’s action in relation to wood engenders a new corporeal mixture with the cor-poreal quality of heat, but it also produces a meaningful surface effect – an impassive being or becoming burnt. A correspondence thus exists between corporeal qualities and incorporeal attributes and effects, but they cannot be reduced to a single order. They designate distinct but interconnected levels of forceful bodies and surface effects that arise in the interstices of these bodies.
The actions of external bodies affect or impress themselves on the
corporeal soul, creating thoughts, conceptions, and cognitions, which are corporeal dispositions of the mind.10 Thought, in turn, has a power of corporeal utterance, within which subsist incorporeal ‘sayables’ that signify corporeal states of affairs. ‘Sayables’ have nominative and appel-lative elements, which denote substances and common qualities, but these cannot form propositions without verbs, which correspond to the incorporeal effects generated by bodies.11 The propositions constituted by ‘sayables’ are, like other incorporeal effects, impassive, and even though they are affi rmed of bodies, they belong to a different order.
Together, ‘sayables’ mediate the relations between utterances and the external objects and events to which their meanings refer, between corporeal thought and things.
Deleuze’s reading of the Stoics is principally indebted to Émile Bréhier’s seminal work, La Théorie des incorporels dans l’ancien stoï-cisme, and specifi cally two of Bréhier’s main claims. First, Bréhier main-tains that incorporeal effects have the character of facts, happenings, or, in the term that has so much currency in contemporary thought, events.12 For Deleuze, this character is found in both the Stoic emphasis on verbs – ‘For it is not true that the verb represents an action: it expresses an event, which is totally different’ (Deleuze 1990: 184) – and the impassive becomings of incorporeal effects (4–5). Deleuze goes on to say that the duality of sense is best expressed in the infi nitive form of verbs, which, being indifferent to the different directions or senses that the verb may take, is impassive; put simply, ‘God is’ and ‘God is not’ have the same sense (‘to be’), as does ‘the tree greens’ and ‘the tree does not green’ (‘to green’) (31–2). There is thus a pure becoming at the foundation of Stoic language, just as there is one in the incorporeal effects arising from the interactions of bodies. Second, Bréhier argues that while incorporeals may seem to have a secondary status in so far as they are effects of the interactions of bodies, their subsistence in the intersection of corporeal substances gives them a constitutive role. On the one hand, the essence of ‘sayables’ is the verb that corresponds to the surface effects of bodies.
On the other hand, bodies themselves can only interact because of the incorporeals of place and time. Holding that the extremities of bodies are neither wholes nor parts but rather incorporeals, so that it is impos-sible for two bodies to touch,13 the Stoics maintain that bodies must interpenetrate, which allows them to maintain that different bodies can occupy the same place at the same time and to posit the mixtures and immanent tensions that bring about surface effects (Bréhier 1997: 40).
Bréhier maintains that the Stoics redefi ne place as the site of this inter-penetration, making it a product of bodies but also a presupposition for
corporeal activity (52–3). With respect to time, Bréhier argues that the Stoics treat it as the structure, rather than the measure, of movement and change (55). This structure too is characterized by interpenetration, with the present being a mixture of past and future rather than an indivisible instant. It is the temporal structure that Deleuze links to pure becom-ing, which has the ‘capacity to elude the present’ (Deleuze 1990: 2).14 Time, Bréhier continues, is not a cause and does not determine bodies or events; it is rather an empty form (‘une forme vide’ (Bréhier 1997: 59)) that contours beings and surface events, giving them their sense. In these ways, the Stoics, through Bréhier’s interpretation, provide an answer to Deleuze’s paradox of how sense produces and is produced by the states of affairs in which it arises.
Deleuze’s claim that the Stoics reverse Platonism, however, is rather overstated. There is no pure becoming in two directions at once, as described in Parmenides, and the Stoics’ commitments simply would not allow it. Their blended mixtures comprise heterogeneous materials, but they hardly resemble simulacra, as any dissonance within them is subordinated to unity. Thus in the case of the most important mixture,
‘the whole of substance is unifi ed by a breath which pervades it all, and by which the universe is sustained and stabilized and made interactive with itself’ (Alexander in Long and Sedley 1987: 290). Furthermore, the Stoics’ universe remains ordered, following a pattern of birth, destruc-tion, and rebirth that realizes an eternal return of the same, in which
‘there will be nothing strange in comparison to what occurred previ-ously, but everything will be just the same and indiscernible down to the smallest details’ (Nemesius in Long and Sedley 1987: 309). Finally, their entire philosophy of language and events is governed by a will to truth, the Stoics never doubting the possibility of the wise man’s infal-lible knowledge, based on a correspondence of external bodies and events to mental dispositions and ‘sayables’. Since rational concepts arise from the traces of real bodies impressed on the mind, the two sides can correspond; because the surface events of corporeal bodies and the logical incorporeals embedded in language and thought are neither bodies nor qualities, they can also completely coincide (Bréhier 1997:
18–19, 21–2). While the Stoics introduce multiplicity into both matter and thought, with the incorporeal side of their sense irreducible to their material conditions of emergence, these multiplicities remain tempered by commitments to identity and representation.
What is required is that the incorporeals residing on the surfaces of corporeal bodies, qualities, and dispositions take on the character of ‘differenciators’ – a term Deleuze uses for the conduit that, within
the disjunctive synthesis, relates differences through their difference rather than through identity.15 With this, the resonance that marks the simulacrum can be achieved. By affi rming divergence, the differ-enciator obliterates any correspondence between thought and bodies, and between incorporeal ‘sayables’ and events, but the challenge this poses to knowledge differs from the traditional problems that the Stoics address. They hold the wise man to have the ability to distinguish true impressions – or phantasia – from false fi gments – phantasma – giving as an example of this power the ability to distinguish two objects that appear entirely the same, such as identical twins. Hence they maintain that ‘no hair or grain of sand is in all respects of the same character as another hair or grain’ (Cicero in Long and Sedley 1987: 246), thereby asserting ultimate conceptual differences between otherwise identical things. The differenciator, however, is an unrepresentable and non-conceptual excess that cannot be reduced to a lack or absence, and that exceeds the metaphysical order of truth and falsity. It is a surface multi-plicity and its effects in thought, Deleuze holds, ‘might be called “phan-tasms,” independently of the Stoic terminology’ (Deleuze 1990: 7–8).
Simulacra, Deleuze says, produce phantasms that never correspond to them because simulacra are not models that can be copied well or badly.
But phantasms nevertheless express sense, as they too, like simulacra, are multiplicities.