Glancing again over Alain Badiou’s Deleuze book, and came across this great quotation about the virtual eternity of the great ideas of the history of philosophy, their persistence as powers able to be actualised and revivified in all manner of new contexts:
Deleuze’s “historian” style cuts across the classical opposition between objectivist history and interpretative history. It is a style in which the most precise knowledge of texts and contexts is inseparable from the movement by which they are drawn toward Deleuze. It partakes neither of archives nor of hermeneutics. For at issue is one things alone, namely, that great conceptual creations return. And the singularity of Deleuze functions as a power of reception for this return. This is why his philosophy can restore Spinoza, Bergson, or Nietzsche to their exact eternity, which is never anything other than that of their power – and as such, an eternity that is living only when actualized in living thought.
(A. Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. by L. Burchill [Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 2000], p. 99)
