"Idealism is an illness congenital to the Platonic philosophy." (128)
We must "reach a secret point where the anecdote of life of the aphorism of thought amount to one and the same thing." (128) Throughout this study, we have opposed two sides of the event, states of affairs (materiality) and propositions (the incorporeal). Here, Deleuze distills this formula down to a working example. Every anecdote we tell (like Poe's story of the "Purloined Letter") must indicate an aphorism, a lesson, a structure that transcends the present. In this context, the m.o. of New Pioneerism becomes decoding every story, every bit of taken-for-granted reality, into its aphoristic moment. Every number, every shape, every sequence has a meaning in and apart from the present. What Deleuze is trying to do in this book is relay the tools necessary for this kind of deconstruction and reconstruction of the real. When Deleuze bemoans the transition from Pre-Socratic to Platonic philosophy, he is disparaging this transition from a meditation on the meaning of material reality (e.g. what is the meaning of fire?) and towards philosophical Idealism which creates distance between the philosopher and the Object.
The philosophical revolutions that Deleuze discusses in this chapter mirror the structurality of sense. There is the focus on the depths, the mixtures (pre-Socratic); the focus on the Ideal, the proposition (Platonism); and finally, the focus on the surface, the perverse locus of the event, where life is both bifurcated and "zipped up" (the Stoics). In this situation, the structurality of the philosophical revolution(s) is the "anecdote", explained above.
"There is nothing behind the curtain except unnameable mixtures, nothing above the carpet except the empty sky." (133) Deleuze says that sense is like tracing one's finger in a fogged-up windowpane. The key here is that sense emerges out of something else; it is a effect defined by a gap in the fabric of reality. Sense is uncanny and "perverse"; it twists the real into something altogether new and unexpected.
