Breaking icons (re)commences the inversion of Platonism by exposing the obsession with adjudicating between bad and good images based on their putative relation to idealized models. But this is not the only use for a theological hammer. Like the “instructor” in Plato's allegory of the cave, the Deleuzian Friend is interested in loosening the chains that bind thinkers in the dark. Like Glaucon, she will agree with Socrates that these prisoners will naturally be distressed when they become aware of the extent to which their shackles have limited their perspective. For her, however, the problem is not that thinkers are fettered in such a way that they can only see simulacra, and the solution is not leading them out of the cave and up into the light so that they can contemplate the source of true knowledge. The Friend works instead to disclose and dissolve a much more powerful and far less easily perceived Chain that ties thinkers, along with their aspiring Platonist saviors, to an image of thought that is always and already itself bound up within the domain of representation, and bound to judgments based on transcendent ideals.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze loosens the fetters that constitute this theological Chain, encouraging us to become thinkers of the eternal return who refuse “to be drawn out of the cave, finding instead another cave beyond, always another in which to hide” (DR, 67).