Like Derrida, Deleuze will reject Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche, and will find in Nietzsche's thought a way of thinking difference beyond Hegelian difference. In the case of Derrida, we saw that he rejected the first of Heidegger's three criticisms, the substantiality of will to power, on the basis of his understanding that Nietzsche is not formulating an ontology. If he were an ontological thinker, then not only would the first of Heidegger's criticisms work (inasmuch as any logos of being will always be bound up with the demand for presence), but the subsequent two follow as well, from which it follows that Nietzsche reverses Platonism, but in so reversing it, remains ensnared by it.

On the contrary, Deleuze will affirm Nietzsche as an ontological thinker, rejecting however that the Being he thinks is the self-presencing substantiality of the will as Heidegger conceives it. Nietzsche indeed reverses Platonism, but does so by freeing up a marginalised category in the Platonic subtext, the simulacrum, thinking the simulacrum in terms of its own internal difference, as its constitutive, essential truth. When the simulacra are thought on their own terms, rather than as degraded copies, what results is a model of difference in which the returning of the Same is in fact the returning of the different, identity is displaced and secondary, and the negative is abolished. The affirmation of the simulacra destroys both model and copy, in favour of the thought of the selective character of Being, the eternal return, the play of chance and destiny, and the dual affirmation of both.

Nietzsche and the reversal of Platonism

Nietzsche, Derrida says, cannot be carrying out a reversal of Platonism, for ‘all reversals’, he claims, remain ‘a captive of that metaphysical edifice which it professes to overthrow’. Deleuze, on the contrary, unapologetically says, ‘What does it mean “to reverse Platonism”? This is how Nietzsche defined the task of philosophy or, more generally, the task of the philosophy of the future’, elsewhere calling this reversal, ‘the task of modern philosophy’. Moreover, in response to Derrida's concern about remaining ‘captive’ to a system that one reverses, Deleuze appears uninterested: ‘That this overturning should conserve many Platonic characteristics is not only inevitable but desirable.’