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69 Appendix Love and Music: Theme and Variations I. “THE THEME IS PRESENTED AND PURSUED BY VARIATIONS” In music the theme is presented and pursued by variations. We cannot express the theme itself directly, we can only represent it by means of its variations: it is from the variations that one identifies the theme. We proceed in the same way when investigating the style of an historical epoch. All the forms of life of a time, the Renaissance, Baroque, etc., are known as variations of a theme. That they are variations of one theme, expressions of a basic relation of man to the world, gives them, in spite of all their material differences, a unity of style. We can but inadequately express the theme itself; we have the multifariousness of the phenomena before our eyes which, however, we grasp as the manifold aspect of a unity and not as the repetition of one and the same thing.1 This passage, taken from the neuropsychiatrist and philosopher Erwin Straus’ masterpiece Von Sinn der Sinne, effectively condenses the question of “Platonism ” and its “reversal” as it will be later raised by Gilles Deleuze. In his essay originally entitled Renverser le platonisme Deleuze invites us to consider the following “two formulas: ‘only that which resembles differs’ and ‘only differences resemble each other’” (LS, 302/261), explaining that These are two distinct readings of the world: one invites us to think difference from the standpoint of a previous similitude or identity; whereas the other invites us to think similitude and even identity as the product of a fundamental disparity. (ibid.) It is precisely in the passage from the first to the second of these “readings of the world” that Deleuze tends to see the possibility of ‘reversing Platonism.’ By Platonism Deleuze means a simplified version of the philosophy to which Plato, more than anyone else, has contributed in shaping that “image of 70 AN UNPRECEDENTED DEFORMATION thought”—asDeleuzecallsit2 —withinwhoseparameterswearestillaccustomed to thinking. In reformulating such an image in the terms suggested by Straus, we could claim that, similarly to what for him happens in music, in thinking, according to Platonism, “the theme”—that is to say, “that which resembles”— “is presented and pursued by variations.” Hence, the notion of “Theme” can be linked up with the one of “Idea” intended as “essence” or “form,” in short, as eidos. Correlatively, according to the terms of Straus’ passage, the notion of “variations” turns out to be another way to designate the “multifariousness” of the always “inadequate” (because intrinsically partial) “phenomena” of the theme itself. Indeed, Deleuze assimilates the notion of “Theme” and the one of “Idea” as he wonders what, in Proust’s Recherche, “serves as a law for the series of our loves” (PS, 93/75). An original difference presides over our loves. Perhaps this is the image of the Mother—or that of the Father for a woman, for Mlle Vinteuil. More profoundly , it is a remote image beyond our experience, a Theme that transcends us, a kind of archetype. Image, idea or essence rich enough to be diversified in the beings we love and even in a single loved being, but of such a nature too that it is repeated in our successive loves and in each of our loves taken in isolation. (PS, 83–84/67) Therefore, in order to find the sense of our love experiences we should not isolate them from one another, concentrating on each one separately. Instead, we shall consider them as variations through which we can indirectly see the theme that connects them and thus serves as a law for the series of our loves. Yet where does the theme of our love experiences come from? As Deleuze himself implicitly suggests, according to Freudian psychoanalysis the “objectchoice ” toward which each one of us directs his or her own libido3 is related to the child’s fixation of tenderness aimed at the mother or the father.4 According to this formulation of the problem, even in the case of our loves “the theme is presented and pursued by variations.” In the above case, the theme is presented as the desire generated by a lack: the lack of the “original” parental relationship. In such a way, even the structure of Eros is still thought of in terms of Platonism. On the other hand, Deleuze highlights the suggestion, emerging from the Recherche, of problematizing the identification between the theme and the mother in order to show that “the series of our...

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