ABSTRACT
This chapter explains one moment in the history of deconstruction, in order to complicate the narrative usually told about deconstruction more generally. It examines that moment is 1968, the near simultaneous appearance of texts by both Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze against 'Platonism'. The chapter looks at how Derrida and Deleuze characterise the need to overcome Platonism, with primary attention to Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, and Derrida's 'Plato's Pharmacy'. As Derrida says, Benedictus de. Spinoza presents a 'radical critique of finalism'. One might suggest, given that Derrida repeatedly interrogates the tendency of history to lapse into teleology, an adequate history of deconstruction would violate the usual narrative practices of history enough that some would declare it incomprehensible. In short, the masochist uses suffering as a way of constituting a body without organs and bringing forth a plane of consistency of desire.
