ABSTRACT
Alain Badiou has described the virtual as the principal name of Being in Deleuze and claims that his thinking amounts to a Platonism of the virtual. Badiou argues that in Deleuze the virtual is presented as ‘the ground of the actual’, and moreover, that it is the ground of itself as the ‘being of virtualities’. Badiou likes to speak of the virtual as that which lies ‘beneath’ as in “‘beneath” the simulacra of the world’ (Badiou 2000a: 46). This explains why he has such problems with any talk in Deleuze of the virtual in terms of an image. Is not the ‘image’ the status only of the actual? How can the virtual, conceived by Badiou as the ‘power proper to the One’, be a simulacrum? No doubt, he says, ‘the virtual can give rise to images but it is difficult to determine how an image can be given of it or how it can itself be an image’ (52). There is a Berkeleyean dimension to Badiou’s point which serves to disclose the somewhat peculiar nature of his question. In his Principles of Human Knowledge Berkeley poses a problem with regard to soul or spirit in terms that bear a strikingly similarity to the way Badiou has posed the problem of the virtual qua image. If spirit is One, that is, simple and undivided, and if it is the primary ‘active’ being, how can an ‘idea’ or image be formed of it since inert ideas/images cannot represent to us that which acts? (Berkeley 1962: 77). The incorporeal and immaterial substance
cannot be represented, cannot itself be an idea or image, since it is the causal ground of them.
