Philosophical Phantasms: ‘the Platonic Differential’ and ‘Zarathustra’s Laughter'

How might relations between face and mask, nature and artifice, escape from a Platonic dramaturgy? In which theatrical worlds might metaphysics become displaced by phantasmaphysics? Between Foucault and Deleuze, how does the drama of thought become manifest in a specifically philosophical theatre? And how might this relate to the claims of universality in a modernity that constantly disavows its colonial particularity? Exploring his reading of Deleuze, this essay extends Foucault’s sense of a “rebirth of phantasmaphysics” to a reading of cinema (with Jean Rouch’s Les Maîtres Fous) and the transformation of erstwhile ethnographic museums into “museums of world cultures”.