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CHAPTER ONE

THE AREPRESENTATIONAL CONCEPTION OF THINKING THOUGHT IN MERLEAU-PONTY AND DELEUZE

One of the first things one notices when reading Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty side by side is that both distinguish between an original and a nonoriginal form of thought: the latter limits itself merely to repeating or applying acquired ideas and argumentations, while the former is truly creative. The concepts and lines of argumentation of original thought cannot be considered secondary with respect to what they express, the preceding ideas, because it is in and through the search for concepts and connections between concepts that the ideas take a new shape. And so, just as Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between speaking speech (parole parlante) and spoken speech (parole parlée), we can formulate this difference as a difference between “thinking thought” and “thought thought”; or, in Deleuzean terms, between “thought” or “learning” and “knowledge” (DR, 204–6). Needless to say, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze believe that only what we are calling “thinking thought” merits the title of philosophy. True or proper philosophy cannot limit itself to offering a survey of already existing ideas, or simply to rearranging them, or changing a detail here, another there.

In what follows I will examine how both authors develop this difference between two kinds of thought. It will become clear that both consider “thought thought” to be grounded upon representation. “Thought thought” is nonoriginal because it understands its activity as representing an already existing (ideal or concrete) reality. Deleuze, for example, introduces eight postulates to describe “thought thought,” the central one being the postulate of representation. He also claims that the “history of the long error is the history of representation” (DR, 374).¹ Although Merleau-Ponty never explicitly mentions representation as the object of his criticism, he repeatedly stresses that the “object” of his philosophy, indeed, of (true) philosophy in general, cannot be represented: “What I want to do is restore the world as a meaning of Being absolutely different from the ‘represented,’ that is, as the vertical Being which none of the ‘representations’ exhaust and which all ‘reach,’ the wild Being” (VI, 253).

The idea that thinking thought is not about representing reality goes hand in hand with the idea that the access to reality—traditionally said to happen through perception and thought—cannot happen via representations. In the following sections, we will see how both authors explain this access, and thus what their alternatives for representational thought are. Since this criticism of “thought thought,” or “representational thought,” as I will call it from now on, also implies an attack on a specific conception of philosophy, we should see this chapter as a chapter on the nature of philosophical thought according to Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. However, for an expanded discussion of this topic, I refer the reader to the third chapter, where I situate their views of philosophical thought in the broader history of philosophy.

MERLEAU-PONTY’S CRITICISM OF REPRESENTATIONAL THOUGHT

In order to describe Merleau-Ponty’s theory of thought, we can take his early theory of perception as our point of departure, since “knowledge and the communication with others” continue “our perceptual life even while transforming it” (PriP, 7). Moreover, Merleau-Ponty holds that perception cannot be considered simply a condition of possibility of the act of thinking, since for him perception and thinking share the same basic structure: perception is an “originating knowledge” (PP, 43).²

A central question of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception turns on how to explain the existence of perceptual constants. We perceive the surrounding world as a collection of determinate entities, continuous over space and time. However, the functioning of the senses with which we perceive these entities is not continuous: the eyes make saccadic movements; we blink; the head and body move up and down to the rhythm of our breathing, and so on. Moreover, we always perceive from one specific point of view, determined by the position of our body. How, then, are we to determine which viewpoint reveals the true nature of an object? How are constant perceptual qualities to be explained when de facto there is only a multitude of different sensations? Are these perceptual constants constructions or are they immanent to the perceived world? In other words, is perception a mediated process, or not?

Before delving into these questions, it should be noted that Merleau-Ponty is not interested in the question of whether or not we have access to the world in itself. As this question cannot be answered—it is impossible to say something about the world beyond our experiences—he limits his examination to studying the nature and the condition of our perceptual interaction with the world as we live it, the so-called “lived world.” As an introduction to Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception, it is helpful to give a sketch of the theories from which he distances himself.

Empiricist and Intellectualist Accounts of Perception

Empiricists reduce perception to the possession of sensual qualities impressed upon the body by neutral stimuli. In this view, a perceived object is naught more than the sum of sensual qualities, and perception the function of the senses. However, empiricism explains the fact that we often perceive things or aspects of things for which there is no stimulus available—the back of a vase, for example—by appealing to attention and memory to complement the senses. In the case of an absent stimulus, the actual sensation is associated with a remembered sensation on the basis of resemblance. For example, the vase I see in front of me now is perceived as being similar to the one I saw from behind yesterday, and so I supplement the lacking sensation with the sensation from my memory.

Merleau-Ponty argues that this explanation cannot be correct because, for a sensation to be perceived as similar to a remembered one, the sensation already needs to make sense. In principle, any sensation can be compared to any other in one respect or another. But for it to be compared with the “right” property, meaning the property that will allow us to identify it, the sensation already needs to have a particular sense. Hence, empiricism does not explain how we can perceive meaningful things but presupposes meaning or sense.

It is fair to say that the intellectualist account of perception thrives on empiricism’s failure to explain perceptual “illusions.” The fact that we sometimes perceive aspects of things for which there are no physical stimuli indicates that perception is a matter not of the senses, but of the mind, of judgment. Perceiving something as a square, for example, would require deciding which of the different perspectives on the geometric figure is the correct one, the frontal view, or the rotated view, in which it appears as a diamond. In the intellectualist account, this unconscious decision is the outcome of an algorithmic processing of the information about how the position of our body transforms the spectacle in front of us. It is important to note that intellectualism recognizes that in order for one perspective to be connected with another—the frontal and the rotated view of the geometric figure—the first already needs to possess a structure or sense, which the second can complement. Since intellectualists consider the sensual givens to be merely physical, they believe it is consciousness that constitutes the whole intelligible structure of what is perceived: we perceive with our mind.

Like empiricism, intellectualism presupposes what it needs to explain, namely, the fact that we perceive the geometrical figure, now as a square, then as a diamond. Before examining how we settle upon the right perception, we need to explain how we have perceptions in the first place. Moreover, intellectualism presupposes that perception is determinate or, more specifically, that it can be decomposed into a variety of determinate elements. It claims, for example, that our perception of the size of an object is determined by an algorithm that takes into account its apparent size, the retinal image, and the distance between the perceiving body and the object. But in practice, we do not make this distinction between the size something appears to have and its actual size: we immediately perceive it as being, not seeming, big. If we correct our perception—if we realize that the object is not so big—that is not because we returned to the apparent size of the object and recalculated its relation to the retinal image and distance, but because the object makes more sense if seen as small. Moreover, intellectualism presupposes that the elements upon which perception is decided are quantifiable because they can be processed. However, experiments designed to test our ability to determine the color of an object seen in colored light have shown that we can recognize a difference in the color of objects even when the numerical equivalents of both colored objects are equal. Intellectualism, in sum, seems to adhere to an atomism that contradicts daily experience, which always “sees” indivisible and nonquantifiable entities. This atomism also implies that the atoms that compose a perception are neutral and relative. They are theoretically exchangeable because they differ from one another only numerically. But this relativism is not present in perception. It is hard to make out the content of a photograph held upside down. “Up” and “down,” in other words, do not seem to be relative, and easily exchangeable, notions. However, the algorithm that calculates what is seen by taking into account the position of the body should give the same result whether the photo is held right side up or upside down. A last problem with intellectualism is that when perception is considered to be a judgment, when a pure impression is considered to be inexistent, it becomes very difficult to determine the dividing lines between perception and thought.

Merleau-Ponty thinks that, despite their surface differences, empiricist and intellectualist accounts of perception share the same presupposition: both regard perception as a construction in which different, determinate elements are brought together into a meaningful whole that is clearly separated from the perceiver, because the meaningful whole is situated opposite him. This separation between the perceiver and the perceived allows for objectivity. Whether these elements are understood as reflections of what is given in nature or as subjective constructions, they are atoms, that is, absolutely exterior parts (partes extra partes) that bear no intrinsic relation to one another or to the perceiver. Nothing in one element refers to another. They are neutral or, as we said, relative or exchangeable. The determinacy of the elements further indicates that empiricism and intellectualism see the world as being ready-made (PP, 47) and perception as a timeless process. Empiricism thinks perception is definite because it is limited to reflecting what is already there in nature, and intellectualism thinks perception reveals only what has already been constituted by consciousness.

For Merleau-Ponty, empiricism’s conception of consciousness is too poor, and intellectualism’s too rich: “Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again, we should not be searching” (PP, 28). As perceptual “illusions” indicate, perception cannot be limited to a sensory activity (whether combined with memory or otherwise), nor can it be reduced, as the example of the photograph held upside down makes clear, to a mental processing of neutral and determinate elements. How, then, are we to understand perception?

Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Perception

Merleau-Ponty, for his part, does not understand perception as a construction based on neutral, determinate elements.³ In his account, it is more as if the subject always immediately sees what it perceives, as if the meaning of what is perceived is already present in the world to be perceived. The perceiver seems to have a direct access to the world: “I have in perception the thing itself, and not a representation”; “the thing is at the end of my gaze and, in general, at the end of my exploration” (VI, 7). How is this possible? Let’s illustrate with an example.

When we perceive a mountain as high, we do not compare the perceived size of the mountain with the perceived size of the house at the foot of the mountain and then estimate the size of the mountain on the basis of our knowledge of the average size of a house. We perceive the mountain as high because it occupies a lot of space in our visual field, because it overwhelms us. Something is high because our body cannot reach it, because it towers above our body. Similarly, we describe an object as being far away because it presents fewer, and less identifiable, points on which our eyes can fasten. It is less variegated, less strictly geared to my powers of exploration. My gaze cannot get a grip on it. In other words: the position, the size, and the shape of a perceived object are not determined by the interpretative comparison and synthesis of various determinate, perceptual qualities, but, respectively, by the orientation, scope, and hold that the body has on the object (PP, 266, 261).

However, sometimes objects can occupy a lot of space in our field of vision, as when an object is held right in front of our eyes (PP, 300), and we still do not describe them as being big. If that is so, it is because the context of perception is always included in the perception itself. However, this context can never be identified in terms of angles, or of distances between body and perceived object; this context has to be identified, instead, in terms of the kind of hold upon the object it allows. I perceive a line as horizontal, not because it is perpendicular in relation to the verticality of my standing body, but because it forms, with my body, a unity that is perfectly balanced. The tension between my body and the line is distributed in such a way that it gives rise to a certain stability. Similarly, “the distance from me to the object is not a size which increases or decreases, but a tension which fluctuates round a norm” (PP, 302). In Merleau-Ponty, consequently, the hold our body takes upon the world does not involve neutral elements but qualities. The right distance from which to look at a painting, for example, is not determined by the relation between the size of the canvas, the size of the perceiver, and how good or bad the eyes of the perceiver are, but by the perceiver’s grip on the painted spectacle: the right distance is the distance from which the perceiver has the best grip on the painting (PP, 267). Moreover, this distance is not a neutral and measurable quantity—it is not determinate—but a quality that forces itself upon the perceiver.

It is clear that describing perception in terms of the hold our body takes upon the object differs from the empiricist description of the perceiver as merely passive. And it also differs from an intellectualist, as well as from a Husserlian, account in the sense that it does not imply that the hold is constituted by the body or, more generally, by the perceiver. Merleau-Ponty (PP, 216–17) argues that perception takes place within a field, which means that the perceiving activity is distributed over all the elements of the field.⁴ How so? A field is a structure—for more on the notion of “structure,” I refer the reader to chapters 2 and 7—in which each element owes its significance to the general configuration of the other elements of the field (PP, 313). In the case of perception, this field consists, first, of all the sensual qualities of one object. This implies that a sensual quality of an object is determined by the other sensual qualities attributable to the same object. The color of a carpet, for example, is determined not only by the color of the yarn, but also by the woolly touch of the carpet, its dusty smell, the way it absorbs sounds, and so on.

Second, the perceptual field also comprises the sensual qualities of things related to the perceived object. Our sensation of the blue of the carpet, for example, is also determined by our sensation of the blue of the sky we see when we look out the window of the room, and by the blue of the ocean of our dream from the night before. Our sensations always take place against the background of other actual or virtual (past or future sensations, fantasies, etc.) sensations. One consequence of this intertwinement is that sensual qualities imply one another. When I see and touch the floor covering, I can imagine what it will sound like. Also, my perception of the carpet can already imply the perception of a room with a certain intimacy and coziness. The coziness is “perceived” through sight. In other words, every sense leaves its proper domain as it seizes onto qualities it cannot theoretically access.

For Merleau-Ponty, this intertwinement of sensations is the result not of an intellectual correlation constructed over time, but of an intertwinement that is built into our very body. Were we to appeal to an intellectual correlation, we would have to explain how the mind produced this correlation, and that would lead straight back to the sensations and confront us anew with the question of how something in one sensation can possibly refer to another one. Therefore, the “unity and identity of the tactile phenomenon do not come about through any synthesis of recognition in the concept, they are founded upon the unity and identity of the body as synergic totality” (PP, 316–17). The fact that the color of a thing is codetermined by what is actually and virtually heard, smelled, and felt at that same moment presupposes an exchange between the different senses: it presupposes the body as a synergic system. And so, for sensual qualities to determine one another, the senses themselves also need to form a field (PP, 406).

This conception of the body as a synergic system or field allows Merleau-Ponty to distance himself from a mechanistic view of the body. The body is not a complicated machine in which organs are functionally attuned to one another, directed by chemical and electric stimuli. On the contrary, the senses are constantly transgressing their own domain. They are intertwined, but, strictly speaking, this intertwinement does not serve a specific goal. In contrast to the functionalist view, which distinguishes the instrument from the goal that can be reached with it, Merleau-Ponty’s body cannot be separated from the “purpose” it serves, which is to act upon and move within the world. The body is the subject that acts in the world, and not simply the instrument that allows for actions to be taken. Hence, the intertwinement of the senses is grounded not in functionality but in the participation of the lived subject in the world, in existence. The body is fundamentally being-to-the-world (être-au-monde), and the world is always a world perceived by our body. And so, in the end, perception can also be said to presuppose a field formed by body and world: “Our body as a point of view upon things, and things as abstract elements of one single world, form a system in which each moment is immediately expressive of every other” (PP, 301).

The suggestion that perception takes place in a field implies that it originates neither in the world nor in the perceiving subject, but somewhere in between (PP, 4). More specifically, perception consists of the endless reflection of body and world in one another. Merleau-Ponty (VI, 139) illustrates this with the image generated by two opposing mirrors, which form an image whose origin cannot be traced. How must we understand this reciprocal determination of body and world? As I already mentioned, the world must already make some sense in order for us to perceive it, but it cannot already be entirely determined, as that would imply that there is no longer a need to perceive it. Baeyens writes: “Perception is a process wherein percipiens and perceptum wait for one another, are tuned to one another and become what they are thanks to one another. There is no perceptum as long as it does not receive form, dimension and structure from a percipiens, and there is no percipiens as long as it does not experience the structure and style of the perceptum” (2004, 53; translation mine). Perception can thus be described as an activity in which we adapt to what we perceive. It is not so much an activity in which we try to access what is posited in front of us, but an activity in which we try to make our inclusion in the world more explicit, more determinate (PP, 30). Body and world—but also the elements of the field “world” and of the field “body” taken separately—partake of a circular play of lending and borrowing.

What this means, first of all, is that body and world are not extrinsically related, as empiricism and intellectualism would have it: they refer to one another intrinsically. A second contrast with empiricism and intellectualism is that the world cannot be seen as being definite, or ready-made. The perceiving body has an active role in what the world is to us. It brings the world into existence for us, at which point we can explore it in perception and thought. Merleau-Ponty (PP, 213) translates this as follows: actual perception needs to be preceded by a kind of familiarity between body and world. He illustrates this with reference to the disoriented feeling we have when actual perception contradicts this preperception or familiarity. For example, when we wake up in the middle of the night, thirsty for a glass of water, and we drowsily open the fridge and take the bottle of white wine instead, we do not immediately recognize the taste of wine because the body was expecting water. It is only by going through our memories of what beverages were in the fridge and by examining meticulously the consistency and the taste in our mouth that we are able to identify the liquid in our mouth as wine. The body has to configure itself to what will be perceived in order for perception to actually occur (PP, 214). And in order for the body to configure itself rightly, it needs to already have an inkling of what will be perceived. However, the body’s active role in bringing the world to existence does not imply that the world is constituted by the body. If we want to touch something, it is precisely because we want to be confronted with something we cannot give to ourselves. Merleau-Ponty writes: “The perceiving subject must, without relinquishing his place and his point of view, and in the opacity of sensation, reach out towards things to which he has, in advance, no key, and for which he nevertheless carries within himself the project, and open himself to an absolute Other which he is making ready in the depths of his being” (PP, 325–26). Because it is impossible to decide the share of the body and of the world in perception, Merleau-Ponty prefers to describe the subject of perception as an impersonal “One” (PP, 240), and to complement “seeing” and “being seen” with a “Visibility” and a “Sensible in itself” (VI, 139). Just like the Kantian thing-in-itself, the Sensible in itself is not reducible to what a person can or cannot see. But contrary to Kant, Merleau-Ponty situates this Sensible in itself not beyond the phenomenal world, but at its very heart. The Sensible in itself is the condition of perception that is situated inside the phenomenal world. We will return to this idea in the second chapter.

Summing up what we have said so far, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis shows that perception is generated neither by a thinking subject nor by a recording body. Nor can perception be reduced to an unconscious judgment or to the passive reception of insignificant stimuli that are assembled by memory and association. Perception does not consist of constructing an image that mediates our access to the world. On the contrary, perception directly interferes with the world in the sense that it is the hold the lived body has upon the world. This hold presupposes anticipation: prior to actual perception, the body has an inkling of what will be perceived. The perceiving body is prethetically familiar with the world without, however, constituting the world. This familiarity is grounded in an original intertwinement of body and world: the body is openness to or participation in the world and the world is a world to be perceived. In this way, Merleau-Ponty replaces an atomistic and mechanistic (extrinsic) explanatory model with a holistic account based on reciprocal determination (intrinsic). Body and world form a unity or style, which is always already given with perception. This style is the field from which a specific perception receives its meaning. The actual perception can then be understood as the activity of making explicit, of shaping, this implicit, given familiarity with the world.

Merleau-Ponty’s Account of Thought

I have already mentioned that Merleau-Ponty believes that thought “must be brought to appear directly in the infrastructure of vision” (VI, 145). Therefore, and in dialogue with the foregoing observations about perception, I will examine whether thought also needs to be understood as a direct hold upon the world, rather than as the construction of representations that mediate our access to the world; and also whether it needs to be situated somewhere in between the thinking subject and the thought world, rather than in the thinking subject itself. In order to answer these questions, I will refer to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Descartes. Strangely enough, Merleau-Ponty adopts a crucial idea of the godfather of cognitivism, whom he otherwise so much contests, namely, the idea that the relation between the thinker and the world cannot be external: in order to think, thought first needs to be present to itself. Needless to say, Merleau-Ponty draws a different conclusion from this idea.

The Truth and the Falsity of the Cogito. As a phenomenologist and an opponent of empiricism, Merleau-Ponty cannot agree with the idea that thought would have access to reality itself, that is, to reality as it is, independently of how it appears to us. The reason is that a reality whose possibility we cannot presuppose will remain unnoticed, even if it is situated within our visual field. It is as in Meno’s objection to Socrates: if we have no inkling of the idea we are looking for, we will not be able to know whether we have found it. Hence, reality first needs to exist for us in order for it to be actually perceived and spoken about. Seeing a tree requires a “thought about the tree” (pensée de l’arbre) and a “thought about seeing” (pensée de voir) (PP, 370). This primordial knowledge of the things is actually a knowledge of ourselves; or, more specifically, it is thought’s awareness of itself, thought’s contact with itself. Why? If thought already needs to sketch the object it is eventually to “discover” in perception (and speech), the object cannot be considered external to thought. At this stage, which precedes perception and language, the relation between thought and the world is actually a relation between thought and itself. Since this relation between thought and itself is what we call self-awareness or self-consciousness, we have to say that perception and language, as well as positing or thetic thought, require a thought that is conscious of itself: “At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find, then, a being which immediately recognizes itself, because it is its knowledge both of itself and of all things, and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence” (PP, 371).

The philosopher who is known to have demonstrated the primacy of thought and the direct contact thought has with itself is, of course, Descartes. In order to gain a better understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s position on this matter, we will compare it to the position of Descartes.

Descartes’s discovery of the certainty of the cogito is usually explained as follows: While I can doubt the idea that I saw my mother yesterday, I cannot doubt the fact that I think I saw her yesterday. I cannot give a decisive answer to the question of whether my mental content corresponds with external reality. There is no doubt, however, regarding my having these mental contents. In other words: I can be uncertain about what I am thinking but not about the fact that I am thinking.

Merleau-Ponty translates the cogito as follows: It is absolutely certain and indubitable that I think because, were I to doubt that I am thinking, I would already be performing the act of thinking and, in so doing, thus proving that I cannot doubt it. What makes it certain is my “doing” the thinking, not my possession of mental contents. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty (PP, 378–82) remarks that I can be sure of my emotions only if my behavior corresponds to the possession of these emotions. For example: It is hard to believe that I am in love with someone, that my being is in the pangs of love, if my behavior remains entirely indifferent toward the object of my affection. Only when my behavior becomes that of a person in love (which does not mean that it needs to conform to the “standard” behavior of someone in love), only when my concrete existence is shaped by my being in love, can I be certain that I am in love. It is by performing the act of being in love, the praxis of being in love, and not by having amorous thoughts, that I am transformed into a person truly in love.

However, Merleau-Ponty differs from Descartes in the way he understands the certainty of the act that grounds the certainty of the cogito. For Descartes, the act of thinking is certain because it is based on a coincidence of subject and object. I am certain that I am thinking because I am the one who creates my mental contents. I cannot doubt the fact that I am thinking that I saw my mother yesterday, because I am the one who constitutes this idea. Thought, in Descartes, has divine characteristics: It not only precedes what is seen and said; it is, moreover, constitutive of the latter. Hence, nothing exists outside thought. Thought has no outside; it “compresses into itself everything at which it aims” (PP, 372). It is not limited by anything. Descartes (PP, 371) describes thought in a way that makes it completely autarkic and autonomous, and the result is the absolute transparency of the object to the subject.

Merleau-Ponty, for his part, does not believe that an act presupposes a coincidence of subject and object. On the contrary, an act is always oriented to an outside. This need not mean that the object is uncertain. Unlike Descartes, who affirms that it is impossible to doubt the act but doubts the object toward which the act is oriented (my belief in the existence of the world could be the effect of a malicious demon), Merleau-Ponty believes that if the act is certain, the object is so too.⁵ The reason is that it is impossible for the act to be oriented toward something and, at the same time, to deny the existence of this thing. This is not to say that we cannot be oriented toward objects that do not exist in reality, as in the case of hallucinations, but then we do not conceive of them as being unreal in the moment of the performance.

Hence, Merleau-Ponty succeeds where Descartes fails: he is able to affirm the certainty of the world. His grounds for doing so are different from the grounds of Descartes, though, for he does not stop the possibly endless chain of doubt by making subject and object coincide. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty thinks that every thought can be doubled into a thought of a thought (I think, I think that I think, I think that I think that I think, etc.); that there is no “thought conceivable without another possible thought as a witness to it” (PP, 400). This chain of doubt can be stopped only by referring to an existential context, that is, to the fact that in real life, subject and object are always separated but nevertheless connected in certainty. Merleau-Ponty thus inverses Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum: he does not deduce my existence and the existence of the world from the cogito, but grounds the cogito in their existence, in our carnal being-to-the-world. Allow me to illustrate this with the example of geometric thought.

Geometric Thought. Suppose we have the following geometric situation: We have an arbitrary triangle with angles A, B, and C. Through its apex, C, a line is drawn that is parallel to its basis. This line generates two new angles, D and E, each at either side of the angle formed by the apex C of the triangle. How do we understand the geometrical truth that the sum of the three angles, C, D, and E, equals the sum of the three angles, A, B, and C?

Before we are able to understand how the conclusion can be deduced from the premises, we need to be able to understand the premises and the conclusion in themselves. We need to be able to picture the geometrical situation, to understand the configuration of the triangle, that is, to understand, for example, what an “angle” is, what “parallel” indicates, and so on. According to Merleau-Ponty, this understanding is grounded on our living experience, on the fact that our bodies are situated in, and interact with, the world. I can understand what “parallel” is because I am myself vertically positioned with respect to the ground and have to change the direction of my body when I want to go to sleep. I can understand what an angle is because my body itself forms an angle with the things it wants to grab and with the ground upon which it stands. In sum, I understand notions such as “angle” and “parallel” because they suggest to me a field of possible movements (PP, 386). I can grasp the essence of a triangle, not because I know all of its objective features, but because I see it as “the formula of an attitude, a certain modality of my hold on the world” (PP, 386).

However, it is not only the understanding of geometric notions that relies on our lived experience. Notions that do not directly refer to the way our body is oriented in space are likewise understood from our lived body. Merleau-Ponty states, for example, that we learn a new word not by memorizing its semantic meaning, but by adopting the manner in which the body needs to comport itself in order to speak this word. This involves imitating the specific position of the speech organs, as well as the facial expression and the hand movements that accompany it. It involves the global bodily context in which a word is used. In spontaneous language acquisition, it is only after this carnal context has been internalized that the semantic meaning can be isolated. I remember, for example, that as a teenager, I was already using the word hypocrite before I could explain what it actually meant. In sum, understanding concepts, geometrical or other, requires a lived body.

If we return to the geometrical proof above, we notice that something more is happening than simply understanding the geometrical configuration. The proof also asks us to draw a relation between different concepts, to deduce a conclusion from the premises. It is clear that this is not an analytic deduction, for the conclusion is not implied in the definition or eidos of the premises. There is nothing in the idea of these three angles, C, D, and E, that already refers to the sum of A, B, and C. The conclusion does not spell out what is already given in the premises, but, on the contrary, it crystallizes, reorganizes, and synchronizes the premises. The initial confusion of meaning present in the premises, the openness of different possibilities of meaning-directions,⁶ is now organized according to one meaning and is thus reduced and, more importantly, transformed. The process of geometrical proof is fundamentally creative, or expressive. But how does the geometer do this? What is the origin of the transformation he generates? He can deduce the conclusion from the premises because he has, while picturing the triangle, experienced the possibility of a transition. The specific modality of his hold on the world—the triangle, in this case—is traversed by lines of force that lead him to something new. Merleau-Ponty says the proof is generated from the “dynamic formula of the triangle” (PP, 386), and this, again, is a function of our being situated as a body in the world. Hence, both the picturing of premises and conclusions, as well as the deduction of the latter from the first, rely on existence, or on the general structure of the way we relate as bodies to the world. Geometry, and other expressive operations as well (language and art), is entirely devoid of meaning when separated from this existential ground (PP, 102). The lived body and the way it inhabits the world is their condition of possibility.

But is this idea that thought (along with other expressive operations) is grounded in our bodily being-to-the-world in contradiction with the aforementioned idea that self-consciousness is the condition for perception, speech, and positing thought? What is the condition of all expressive operations, our lived experience of the world, or thought’s immediate contact with itself? As Rudi Visker observes, one of the central preoccupations of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is “the metaphysical problem concerning a creation which is not ex subjecto and yet [is] more than a mere reproduction of already pre-existing givens” (1999, 105). As the analysis of geometric thought shows, concepts cannot be considered merely products of the human mind. They are anchored in our carnal being-to-the-world. At the same time, however, the example of geometric proof showed that there is definitely a creative process involved, for these concepts are not merely reproductions of a given existence. In order to describe this reciprocal determination, Merleau-Ponty introduces the concept of “expression” in the chapter “The Cogito” in Phenomenology of Perception. In his later work, the notion will gradually gain more importance and will become one of the central concepts of his philosophy, as I will show in the chapters on Cézanne and Proust. By then, he will use it to refer to a dynamics proper to being itself, rather than to a dynamics between the human mind and being, and that is why he eventually replaces it with the notion of “institution.” As a way of introducing the concept of expression, I will discuss Merleau-Ponty’s observations on how language expresses the lived world.

Linguistic Expression. According to Merleau-Ponty (S, 17–18), we underestimate language’s creative power when we reduce it to being nothing more than a means for communicating to others ideas already formed in our head. Language is not only instrumental; and transmitting our ideas to others is not its only function, nor its most interesting characteristic. This is clear from the following experience: It sometimes happens that we can grasp the full range of meaning carried by our own words only once we have spoken them. We are, as it were, surprised about the depths our words subsequently seem to have: “They put responses on our lips we did not know we were capable of, teaching us, Sartre says, our own thought” (S, 17). What this experience illustrates is not so much that an idea can be the result of an accidental assembly of concepts, but rather that an idea can form itself in and through the process of expression. We have the feeling that the idea has arisen from the words and not from ourselves. Merleau-Ponty refers to this speech through which thought develops as “primary speech” or “speaking speech” (parole parlante).⁷ “Secondary speech” or “spoken speech” (parole parlée) refers to language as it is usually experienced or used, namely, as a means to communicate sedimented ideas. Merleau-Ponty illustrates this with the sobering experience we can have when we tell someone about the eye-opening conversation we had yesterday with someone else. Whereas yesterday the words had a revealing character, today they seem to have lost their magic. Instead of being telling and suggestive, they seem to have become hollow. They are merely the repetition of a thought that has taken place before: they are the sign of thought, and not the “body” through which thought can take place (PP, 181). In spoken speech, the words are merely references to an ideal reality that transcends the expression, whereas in speaking speech, language transcends itself in speech (PP, 392). In other words, in spoken speech the expression is clearly distinguished from what it expresses since it is preceded and conditioned by the latter, which is itself independent of the expression. In speaking speech, on the contrary, the expressed can appear only through the expression, which makes it dependent on the expression. However, since the expression does not come out of nowhere but is itself grounded on our lived existence—which is what is ultimately expressed—the expression also requires the expressed. Thus, in speaking speech, there is a mutual dependency of language and thought, which Merleau-Ponty describes with the Husserlian term Fundierung:

The relation of reason to fact, or eternity to time, like that of reflection to the unreflective, of thought to language or of thought to perception is this two-way relationship that phenomenology has called Fundierung: the founding term, or originator—time, the unreflective, the fact, language, perception—is primary in the sense that the originated is presented as a determinate or explicit form of the originator, which prevents the latter from reabsorbing the former, and yet the originator is not primary in the empiricist sense and the originated is not simply derived, since it is through the originated that the originator is made manifest. (PP, 394)⁸

Fundierung, this “two-way relationship,” bridges the gap between a classical ground and what it grounds and replaces it with a reciprocal determination: “Thought (pensée) and speech (parole) anticipate one another. [. . .] They are waypoints (relais), stimuli for one another. All thought comes from spoken words and returns to them; every spoken word is born in thoughts and ends up in them” (S, 17–18). Such reciprocal determination deprives the classical ground of its absolute and autonomous character: the ground itself needs the grounded. Hence why Merleau-Ponty drops such notions as “constitution,” “cause,” and “effect,” and replaces them with such terms as “culmination” and “propagation.” The condition or the ground culminates in the conditioned or the grounded. It fixes or completes itself in the conditioned (S, 173).

In this new grounding relation, it can no longer be said that the ground precedes the grounded. On the contrary, as the notion of speaking speech illustrates, the ground and the grounded almost seem to coincide. Merleau-Ponty, however, immediately nuances this relation: “The idea of complete expression is nonsensical, [. . .] all language is indirect or allusive” (S, 43). The moments when speaking and thinking coincide, when expression is complete, so to speak, are not only rare, they are also momentary. Even after speaking thus originally, even after managing to create ideas on the spot as opposed to limiting ourselves to communicating given ideas, we still have the feeling that there is something left untold. There will always be a surplus or excess of the signified over the signifying (PP, 390). The moments when speaking and thinking coincide are only waypoints in a process of expression that never stops being resumed. They are moments in an endless process of trying to bring together thought and speech, and that means that a full coincidence with the latter is impossible (see the discussion of “partial coincidence” in chapter 4 on Bergson). The moment speaking appears to coincide with thinking, thought is already “elsewhere.” In other words, even if Fundierung brings the ground and the grounded closer together in the sense that the ground ceases to be autonomous and ceases to precede the grounded, it does not, for all that, make them coincide. The expressed still has ontological priority. As we will see in the chapter on Proust, the late Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of institution precisely in the effort to dissolve the asymmetry or hierarchy still present in the notion of Fundierung, though without reducing the ground to the grounded or vice versa.

Before we return to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Descartes, there are three points I would like to highlight about the “two-way relation” between the ground and the grounded captured in the notion of Fundierung. Although I have already mentioned this, it is worth repeating that even if the expressed can manifest itself only in the expression, it does not follow that the former can be reduced to the latter. No expression is capable of entirely capturing the expressed. But that does not mean the ground is transcendent, that it belongs to an otherworldly order and is, as such, ultimately ungraspable. We do have the feeling that we understand what the other is saying, that is, that we can grasp the ground of his expression. Merleau-Ponty puts it this way: it is not that the ground is transcendent, but that it transcends itself in the expression.

The second point, related to the immanence of the ground, is Merleau-Ponty’s idea that speaking speech, despite its original character, still makes use of sedimented language. Or, more precisely: the originality of speech in speaking language is always conditioned by sedimented language. When we think as we speak, we always use words and phrasings that already exist. That we modify and reorganize these words and sentences does not change the fact that we do appeal to and use them. The new meaning we try to express is always culled from between the cracks of other expressions. It is also in this sense that the expression can be said to determine the expressed. Combining this idea with the ontological priority of the expressed, we can say that the condition of a new expression is the expressed as it exists through already given expressions.

Finally, we can see Merleau-Ponty’s implicit idea of excess as a suggestion for how we are to understand the immanence of the ground that transcends itself in the expression. I have already mentioned the idea that the expressed is a surplus or excess over the expression, insofar as the expression cannot fully grasp it, as we have seen. In his extremely clear and convincing Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, Lawrence Hass suggests that the impossibility of the expression to grasp the expressed entails neither a shortcoming of the former nor a transcendence of the latter: “The reason such a reorganizing, crystallizing operation is required for knowledge is not because our experience of the world is impoverished, but rather because it is so full of half-hidden forms and figures, overflowing in meaning and possible perspectives” (2008, 160). Because the expressed is understood as being full of perspectives and meaning-directions, formulating a specific idea or expression entails making a selection, choosing an order, and not constructing something out of thin air. This understanding of the expressed guarantees an immanent relation with the expression (the expressed somehow already needs to be there), whereas the idea of an expression ex subjecto leaves the relation with the expressed unexplained. This is not to say, however, that only the expressed is characterized by an excess. The expression can also be “in excess”; it also has, if you want, a transcending force. I have described how every perception of a specific object—the blue carpet, for example—always implies other actual or virtual perceptions, such as, for example, the blue sky I see out the window, the sound of the carpet, and the blue of the ocean in my dreams. The transcending force of the expressed and of the expression ensures their intertwinement or mutual dependence.

Back to the Cogito. Let us now return to Descartes’s cogito. According to Merleau-Ponty, the cogito reveals not so much the certainty of my having mental contents or ideas—I can always doubt my idea that I saw my mother yesterday—as the certainty that I am performing an act of thinking: I cannot doubt that I am thinking that I saw my mother yesterday. Since it is impossible to be certain of the act without also being certain of the object to which the act is oriented, I can say that if I think I saw my mother yesterday, then it is impossible to doubt the reality of my having seen her. If I think I saw her yesterday, then I am also sure (though this certainty is not necessary) that my seeing her was real. Since this certainty is based on the performance of the act of thinking, and since this act always transgresses itself toward something outside of ourselves, this certainty cannot be said to stem from a coincidence of subject and object, one that in its turn implies a complete immanence of the latter to the former. In contrast to the certainty whose necessity is based on the coincidence of subject and object, this certainty involves a kind of contingency. For the way in which I am performing the act of thinking is determined, as the example of geometric thought illustrates, by my psychophysiological constitution and by the constitution of the world. But since the world, and I myself, could have been constituted differently, the certainty is fundamentally contingent. Hence, Merleau-Ponty concludes: “Ontological contingency, the contingency of the world itself, being radical, is, on the other hand, what forms the basis once and for all of our ideas of truth. The world is that reality of which the necessary and the possible are merely provinces” (PP, 398).

Descartes argues that the cogito reveals the certainty of the act of thinking. This certainty, however, does not reveal, as he also believes, that I coincide with myself. On the contrary, it reveals that I am always oriented toward something outside myself: “The primary truth is indeed ‘I think,’ but only provided that we understand thereby ‘I am-to-myself insofar as I am-to-the-world’” (PP, 407; translation modified).⁹ Or, in the words of Alphonse De Waelhens: “It is true [. . .] that the subject has a certain immediate contact with itself, but this contact, far from being a meaningful truth, is only an invitation for it to constitute one, and that immediately throws us back onto the world, its certainty and its ambiguity” (1970, 285). The cogito does not reveal the closed character of a world constituted by me, but an open world. Merleau-Ponty replaces Descartes’s closed cogito with an open one: “What I discover and recognize through the Cogito is not psychological immanence, [. . .] the blind contact of sensation with itself. It is not even transcendental immanence, the belonging of all phenomena to a constituting consciousness, the possession of clear thought by itself. It is the deep-seated momentum of transcendence which is my very being, the simultaneous contact with my own being and with the world’s being” (PP, 377).

How, then, are we to understand the presence of thought to itself mentioned earlier? What does it mean to say that the world needs to be thought before it can actually be perceived and spoken about? How is the immanence of the world to thought distinguished from the immanence of a transcendental subject? The notion of expression offers an answer to these questions. The world needs to be thought before it can actually be perceived in the sense that the ground needs to be expressed in order for it to manifest itself. The world, or, more correctly, our lived existence, is the ground of thought in the sense that it makes thought possible or real. This condition, however, receives form and content only within concrete thoughts and theories. Thus, the need to think the world for it to exist does not mean that thought constitutes the world. As already indicated, the ground or the expressed cannot be reduced to the expressions. It will always exceed all expressions. It has ontological priority. What it means, then, is that the world is the crack between expressions. In the next chapter, we will see how central the notion of divergence (écart) is in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. The (lived) world is the crack between expressions, and, as such, it is clearly immanent. But because it cannot be reduced to the expressions, this immanence does not entail a complete coincidence between subject and object. It is always characterized, instead, by displacements, by holes. In sum, Merleau-Ponty keeps the intimate connection Descartes articulates between thought and world, but he corrects Descartes by preventing one pole from absorbing the other, from coinciding fully with the other.¹⁰

• • •

We can conclude from the above that Merleau-Ponty does not see thought as a mediating activity. The thinking subject is not separated from the world it tries to think. On the contrary, it is familiar with the world. It has direct contact with the world, in the sense that the world is not external to the thinking subject but is in a certain sense shaped by it. However, the immanence of the world to the thinking subject does not imply that the thinking subject designs the world or, more correctly, is the ground of the world, as Descartes has it. It does not follow from the immanence of the world to the thinking subject that the world coincides with the image the subject has of it. Differently put: the fact that the world is not external does not make it completely transparent to the thinking subject. The transcendence of the world, the noncoincidence of world and thinking subject, is due to the asymmetry pinpointed with the notion of Fundierung, which characterizes the relation between world and subject. Hence, despite the impossibility of fixing the origin of thought on one specific point, and despite the impossibility of separating the world from the thinking subject, the early Merleau-Ponty still situates the origin in a vague area of existence that includes the thinking subject.

DELEUZE’S CRITICISM OF REPRESENTATIONAL THOUGHT

As I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Deleuze believes that the history of philosophy exhibits numerous false accounts of the nature of thought, all built upon thought’s so-called representational function. In a seminal chapter of Difference and Repetition titled “The Image of Thought,” Deleuze explains the presuppositions and consequences of the notion of “representation” by means of eight postulates. I will use these eight postulates as a guideline for describing Deleuze’s criticism of representational thought. However, in line with Deleuze’s affirmative philosophy, I will complement this description of what thought is not with a description of what it is or should be. For this positive characterization, however, I will turn to Deleuze’s Proust and Signs and to The Logic of Sense. As the positive characterization of thought serves as the structuring principle of the discussion, I have taken the liberty not to follow the order of the eight postulates in Difference and Repetition (the titles for the postulates are mine).

Thinking Thought as the Attempt to Unravel the Sense of a Sign (First Postulate)

According to Deleuze, original thought begins with the encounter with a sign. Thought is confronted with a sign that is foreign to it and that shakes it to its foundations; opinions, once defended, cease to be evident, and regularly used distinctions cease to be valid. These shifts ask for reflection; the sign forces thought to interpret. The confrontation with a sign cannot but be followed by an attempt to understand the sign, to unravel the sign, or, better said, one of its contents. The encounter with a sign is not only violent, in that it does violence to our thinking (PS, 61) and in that it is characterized by a radical exteriority, it is also inevitable. Thought is overcome by the sign, and this means that it no longer has the initiative, that it is no longer itself the origin of its activity. It has lost its autonomy to chance. Deleuze combines the accidental nature of thought and the necessity of interpretation in the notion of “involuntary” (PS, 63) thought. “Involuntary” is not synonymous with “arbitrary”; every thought that recognizes its liability to the event that overtakes it affirms the unforeseen or the unexpected and considers this affirmation to be its necessity.

The involuntary character of thought contrasts sharply with the classical conception of thought’s autonomy. Just as Merleau-Ponty criticizes Descartes for having reduced the outside world to an idea of the outside world and thus for having minimized its exteriority and maximized thought’s autonomy, Deleuze is convinced that the history of philosophy seems to defend only the idea that thought depends on anything extrinsic to it. According to Deleuze, one of the central presuppositions of classical philosophy is that we have a natural capacity for thought and that denying this is simply to act in bad faith. By nature, we have a will to think, the so-called “good will of the thinker” (DR, 166). Moreover, thought is not only considered the natural exercise of a faculty, it is also said to have a natural affinity with truth (DR, 166). The truth, in other words, is not the exterior “object of a revelation, but the precise content corresponding to what must be said or thought” (Zourabichvili 2012, 44). And what must be said or thought is what must be said or thought according to the nature of thought. The truth, in sum, is regarded as the natural correlate of thought. It is that which thought is spontaneously—that is, according to its own nature—led to.

We should note that thought’s natural affinity with the truth does not mean that it already possesses the truth in all its details. On the contrary, thought has an impression of the truth, in the sense that it already possesses the form of it, though it is still missing its material content (DR, 167). And so, even if thought does not yet know what is true, it is naturally endowed to find it. The search for truth constitutes the original and constitutive orientation of thought. Thought has an upright or upstanding nature (DR, 166). We should note, further, that this natural affinity with truth does not mean that thought cannot make mistakes. In practice, thought often produces false knowledge; indeed, it is sometimes even incapable of thinking. But this does not alter the inner disposition of thought. The false and the inability to think need to be situated at the level of the empirical, whereas thought’s upright nature belongs to the transcendental level; it is a characteristic that belongs to thought in principle (DR, 168). Actual thought is always an attempt to act upon the natural disposition of thought and to ward off diverting influences—that is what Descartes tries to do, quite explicitly, with his methodic doubt, for example.

The first postulate of representational thought, which Deleuze calls the postulate of the Cogitatio natura universalis, combines these two elements: the goodwill of the thinker, and the natural affinity with the truth. Illustrations of this postulate include Plato’s theory of the forgotten truth or Descartes’s notion of innate ideas. This postulate runs counter to the idea of involuntary thought because it indicates how thought is its own instigator (goodwill) and how its “object” is already present in thought itself (upright nature). According to this first postulate, thought is not involuntary but voluntary, because it is not prompted by something or somebody else, and because it is both strong- and self-willed.

As already mentioned, and as indicated by the word postulate, the voluntary nature of thought is presupposed, defined a priori, which explains why Deleuze calls representational thought dogmatic. For his part, Deleuze does not want to make any presuppositions with regard to thought. Indeed, thought for Deleuze does not have a natural inclination but is, on the contrary, always provoked by something that is absolutely exterior to it. If thought has no natural orientation, then it is also impossible to continue asserting the universality supposedly implied by this natural orientation, namely, that everyone possesses a goodwill and a natural affinity for the truth. In Deleuze’s view, thought is always characterized by the singularity of the meeting or the event; no one thinks in the same way. Clearly, then, Deleuze does not think that thought has a natural inclination to the truth. In fact, it has no natural inclination whatsoever. Still, thought is about something. Deleuze calls the “object” of thought “sense” (NP, 104; LS, 120). We will see now how “sense” differs from “truth.” Throughout the discussion, I follow Mark Lester and Hugh Tomlinson, who render the French sens with “sense,” and not Richard Howard, who prefers “meaning” instead in his translation of Proust and Signs.

The Sense of a Sign Is Not Situated in the Object or the Subject, but in the Essence as Absolute Difference (Fourth and Third Postulates)

The signs that confront thought are like enigmas or hieroglyphs: They cannot simply be deciphered. They simultaneously reveal and hide themselves, for their content or sense can never be univocally grasped. Still, thought cannot but try to explicate or unfold the sense(s) implied in the sign: “Sense is like the other side [l’envers] of the sign: the explication of what it implicates” (Zourabichvili 2012, 68). Thought has no choice but to try to analyze (and simplify) the secret of the sign in explicit and determinate significations. Explication, however, does not mean that the sense is given. The explication of sense fundamentally influences the development of the sign and the sense it implies. The sign also develops itself in a parallel movement, and the self-unfolding of the sign affects the sense and its unfolding. As a consequence, the sense of a sign is always temporal, it is always affected by the singular and accidental nature of the sign.

But what is the sense of a sign? In line with Proust, Deleuze argues that the sense (or “truth”) of a sign has nothing to do with the object that emits it. The object is just the carrier, and hence it does not contain the secret, or content, of the sign. This idea contradicts what is presupposed in perception, love, and thought. Perception spontaneously attributes the qualities of the sign to the object from which they issue forth; for example, we transpose the timidity suggested by lowered eyes to the person who lowers his eyes. Love, and more specifically the tendency to want to possess the loved one, is based on a confusion of the attractiveness of the signs emitted by the loved one with the attractiveness of the loved one himself. And, finally, the fact that thought tends toward objectivity (PS, 20) is inscribed in the premise that the truth needs to be articulated and communicated. Thought searches for objective contents and for explicit and univocal significations (PS, 20) because it confuses the sign’s significance with its referent. In Deleuze (PS, 19), conversely, the sign designates an object but signifies something different. Hence, the sense of a sign cannot be grasped in words and assignable phenomena. In order to detect the sense of a sign, we need to concentrate on the multitude of signs that accompany the concerned sign. The sense of a sign becomes clear only from within the field wherein the sign is situated.

A second misconception of sense is the subjectivist one. Unlike the objectivist view described above, subjectivists confuse the sense of a sign with the associations a sign evokes in the thinker. According to Deleuze, sense cannot result from subjective association because the latter does not allow one to distinguish the sense of one sign from that of another, since everything “is permitted in the exercise of associations” (PS, 24). Two different signs can evoke the same arbitrary and ephemeral associations. Moreover, subjectivism of this sort makes the content of a sign inaccessible to others: the sense remains strictly personal and idiosyncratic.

Hence, the sense of a sign is “beyond designated objects, beyond intelligible and formulated truths, but also beyond subjective chains of association” (PS, 25). It is situated in alogical or supralogical essences or Ideas (PS, 25). Just like Platonic Ideas, Deleuze’s supralogical essence refers to the origin or ground of things and concepts: it is what unites the things and concepts that fall under the same heading; it is that from which they are generated. However, Deleuze’s essences are not general and identical, like Plato’s Ideas, but singular and differential. And they are not transcendent, but immanent. Moreover, Deleuzean essences need to be produced, whereas Platonic Ideas are to be remembered. As we will see in chapter 3, Deleuze develops his account of “Ideas” more in dialogue with Kant than with Plato. As the origin of things and concepts, as that in which specific things and concepts are not yet distinguished, the essence is that which “constitutes the true unity of sign and sense” (PS, 25),¹¹ that which unites sign and sense in a perfect adequation (PS, 33). Deleuze uses the Neoplatonic term “complication” to “designate the original state that precedes any development, any deployment, any ‘explication’” (PS, 29) of the sign. Whereas sense is implicated or implied in the sign (which, in its turn, needs to be explicated or unfolded), the complicated essence relates implication and explication to one another:

Implication and explication, envelopment and development: such are the categories of the Search. First of all, sense is implicated in the sign; it is like one thing wrapped within another. [. . .] But the metaphors of implication correspond further to the images of explication. For the sign develops, uncoils at the same time that it is interpreted. [. . .] Sense itself is identified with this development of the sign as the sign was identified with the involution of sense. So that Essence is finally the third term that dominates the other two, that presides over their movement: essence complicates the sign and the sense; it holds them in complication; it puts the one in the other. (PS, 57–58; translation slightly modified)

The complicated, ideal essence includes or implies all explications of itself, which means that implication and explication are two aspects of the same complicated, ideal being. The complication is a unity that already encompasses the multitude of the concrete expressions.

I should remark that although Deleuze distinguishes between sense and essence—the essence is what unites sense and sign—there are also numerous passages in which he does not distinguish them. He speaks, for example, of the incarnation of essences (PS, 43, 49); of works of art revealing essences (PS, 27); and of the perfect identity of sign and essence (PS, 42). In what follows, then, I will treat “essence” and “sense” as equivalent, just as Deleuze does.

Let me now explain how we are to understand Deleuze’s statement that Ideas or essences are not unique but differential. It is helpful in this context to look at art, and more specifically at a poem by an author extensively discussed in The Logic of Sense, Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. What is the sense of this poem? As the title indicates, the poem is about hunting the snark. That allows us to reduce the previous question to: What is the sense of the snark? A snark is one of those typical Carrollian portmanteau words. It is a combination of two words: snake and shark. Thus, the sense of the word snark is constituted not by something that is identical to itself but by the difference and field of tension between the two existing words. Since Carroll applies this portmanteau strategy to the entire poem, the sense of the poem is constituted by the difference between two “series,” as Deleuze calls it. The snark is the point around which two divergent series turn. Let me illustrate this with some lines from the poem:

They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care,

They pursued it with forks and hope;

They threatened its life with a railway-share;

They charmed it with smiles and soap. (Carroll 1961, 179)

On the one hand, there is the series of demonstrable bodies (thimbles, forks, railway-shares, and soap); and, on the other, the series of intangible concepts (care, hope, life, smiles). The snark assembles both series, not because it is what both series have in common—strictly speaking, the two series share nothing—but because it traverses them. It contaminates one series with the other. It reflects elements of one series in elements of the other.¹² If that is possible, it is because each series is itself not a collection of elements with something in common, but a collection of elements that exist only insofar as they differ from one another. Thus, the basis of the series, and of the synthesis of both series, is not similarity or analogy, but distance or difference. They are the result of what Deleuze calls a “disjunctive synthesis” (LS, 56). In a disjunctive synthesis, difference does not separate, it unites: “distance, [. . .] as that which relates one to the other [. . .] Incompossibility is now a means of communication” (LS, 198). It is important to note that difference does not unite series arbitrarily. Not every series can be combined. Deleuze (PS, 39) writes that the difference that constitutes the essence is not an exterior difference, but a difference that has been interiorized, that has become immanent. This means that, although it is impossible to determine what allows the artist to connect one series to another, there is something within a particular series that leads the artist to connect it with another. I will come back to this problem in the chapters on Cézanne and Proust.

Because the snark connects series—which are collections of differences—on the basis of their difference, it can be characterized as that which differentiates differences. Thus, the essence of a sign has, in itself, a differentiating or individuating function (DR, 146). This will be developed further in the second chapter. In the meantime, we can conclude that the essence is not the result of a constitution process that starts from a subject, but an origin in the sense that it forms the subject (and objects): “It is not the subject that explains essence, rather it is essence that implicates, envelops, wraps itself up in the subject. Rather, in coiling round itself, it is essence that constitutes subjectivity. It is not the individuals who constitute the world, but the world enveloped, the essences that constitute the individuals. [. . .] Essence is not only individual, it individualizes” (PS, 43).

A number of consequences attach to the differential nature of the sense of a sign. First, its instability and thus nontransparency: because each series consists of terms that owe their “identity” to their difference from other terms, and because this difference is volatile, the terms and thus the series can be said to be in perpetual displacement in relation to other terms and series (LS, 47). Since the sense turns on the communication between two different series, it can be said that sense is displaced in relation to itself. It is not a fixed identity but a becoming. Deleuze (LS, 93) describes this displacement also as a nonplace—or, more specifically, as a place without an occupant or an occupant without a place.¹³ It is an aleatory point (LS, 92). If we understand the two series as diverging lines made up of numerous points, the sense is the aleatory point that seems to be on both lines simultaneously, but never on one specific point at one precise moment. The aleatory point is like the object from another Carroll book, Alice in Wonderland: in the old sheep shop, Alice is confronted with an object that is never where she looks, but always on a higher or lower shelf (Bogue 2003a, 26).

The differential nature of sense also implies that sense is always new. In Proust and Signs, for example, Deleuze claims that the sense of the famous madeleine cookie in the Search is neither Combray as it was once experienced in the past by the narrator, nor Combray as the narrator knows it in the narrative present. On the contrary, when the narrator dips the cookie into his tea and is thus reminded of the town where he had spent his holidays as a child, the cookie reveals Combray in an absolutely new form, a form that is neither reducible to the present that Combray once was, nor reducible to the present that Combray is. Combray appears in its truth or essence, and not in its reality. The cookie reveals Combray in its eternity (PS, 8).

The idea of sense as difference is the core of Deleuze’s affirmative criticism on representational thought. According to Deleuze, representational thought is not only incapable of thinking the exterior in its exteriority (this was shown in the first postulate), it is also unable to conceive difference in itself. The first inadequacy shows itself in the assumption that thought has a natural affinity with the truth. The second inadequacy has to do with the fact that representational thought can think difference only by starting from identity. In other words, it can understand difference only as the opposite of the same, the similar, or the analogous. These four elements—the Same, the Similar, the Analogous, and the Opposed (DR, 334)—constitute the heart of the straitjacket of representation, which Deleuze describes in the fourth postulate of representation. These four elements refer to the specific way in which the search for identity determines, respectively, conception, perception, judgment, and imagination (DR, 174).

We will start by looking at how the creation of representational concepts is centered around the notion of the Same. According to Deleuze, Plato is the godfather of this identity-fetishism in conception. As is well-known, Plato distinguishes between an ideal and a sensible reality, the former being the level of the Ideas and serving as the ground for the latter. Plato’s Idea refers to that which remains the same throughout change and individual specification. Thus, it is general, unique, and, more importantly, essentially determined by its being constant, its being-what-it-is (auto kath’ auto), in contrast to the variability of the concrete world, its never-being-what-it-is. Plato’s Ideas are the perfect essences by which the changeable, singular, and multiple world can exist. However, the ideal world is not just the origin of, but also the model for, the concrete world. This means that concepts, which represent the Idea, will need to aspire to the same identity. Differently put: Only that which lends itself for conceptual identity qualifies to be thought. That which cannot be subsumed under a conceptual unity simply cannot be thought. Representational thought is Platonic in the sense that it can think only identities.

Plato also helps us to understand how the imagination is built upon the Opposed. The Idea does not only determine that the concept needs to be an identity, it also determines what identity is assigned to a concept. How so? The perfection of the Idea implies that it is determined both absolutely and completely: it is entirely this and absolutely not that. As such, the Idea introduces absolute distinctions or oppositions onto which the concept can be modeled. Concepts are determined on the basis of the oppositions offered by the Ideas.

The ideal world not only functions as a model for the determination of concepts, it is also a model for judging the truth of statements. A statement, or a proposition expressing a specific relation between concepts, is true only if it is analogous to the relations that exist at the ideal level. According to Plato, while true statements are copies that maintain an internal resemblance to the Ideas, simulacra entertain only an external, secondary resemblance to the Idea. Hence, Plato does not argue for leaving the world of copies and representations altogether, but for separating true representations from false ones, the copies from the simulacra (DR, 333–34). As such, every judgment presupposes a subordination of difference to the analogous, to that which is proven to be similar to the Idea.

Finally, the same principle of identity is also active in perception. In order to attribute one concept to what is similar among different objects, these objects need to be perceived as being similar. This similarity, in turn, presupposes a correspondence between the qualities of the different senses. In sum, in representational thought, all the facets of thought—perception, the creation of concepts, the determination of concepts, and the judgment of statements—are fundamentally oriented by the quest of identity, by trying to detect what is the same or what is similar. This implies that everything that cannot be captured in an identity, everything that disrupts the similarity or multiplies the oppositions, cannot be thought and is not considered worth thinking. Representational thought, we might say, cannot think, as Carroll does, by playing differences off against one another. It can think difference only as difference under a higher identity.

I already mentioned that the postulates concern the presuppositions that representational thought makes about itself. It presupposes that it has a natural affinity with the true (first postulate) and a natural disposition to think in identities (fourth postulate). They share the conviction that the affinity and the disposition are natural. This, of course, is already implied in the fact that these are presuppositions, for presuppositions always indicate that something is regarded as natural and evident, and hence not in need of explanation. Still, what is characteristic of representational thought is not so much its specific presuppositions, but its presuppositional nature as such, the fact that it cannot make a true beginning (DR, 164). This is what Deleuze (DR, 167) means when he says that representational thought is built upon an Image of thought. It is also the reason why the third postulate, that of recognition, is considered to be central to representational thought (together with the second and fourth postulates) (DR, 188). The claim that thought is recognition means that when you are thinking, you are confronted with something you already have an inkling about. Plato’s philosophy of reminiscence is a good example: Plato believes that thought is a matter of remembering the knowledge we had before we were born. Thus, the object of recognitional thought is never exterior to thought. It is already part of thought. It is already presupposed in the definition of thought, and thus makes a true, new beginning of thought impossible. Deleuze pits the idea of thought as encounter against this conception of thought as recognition. According to Deleuze, thought is the activity not of discovering already existing entities, but of creating sense. Thought is a producing machine. Sense does not precede thought; it comes to existence only through the relationship between thought and the sign. And thought does not precede itself, either: it is prompted by the encounter with a sign.

Thinking Thought as a Discordant Play among the Different Faculties (Second Postulate)

It is clear that the postulate of recognition is characterized by the same primacy of unity and identity that we find in the fourth postulate: things can be recognized only if they bear some resemblance to what one already knows. Moreover, something can be recognized as being this particular thing only if one presupposes that this particular thing has remained the same over time and across the different faculties. Thus, one must presuppose the harmonious collaboration of the different faculties: their qualities need to be translatable into one another and combinable into a stable and uniform concept. There is, in other words, a subjective principle that corresponds to the identity of the object and the concept, namely, that of the common sense as concordia facultatum (sens commun). That is Deleuze’s second postulate of representational thought. Deleuze describes the common sense as “an organ, a function, a faculty of identification that brings diversity in general to bear upon the form of the Same. Common sense identifies and recognizes” (LS, 89). In its turn, the concordance of the qualities and the faculties presupposes that the thinking subject, of which the different faculties are modi, forms a unity. For the faculties to complement one another, they must be connected in one way or another. The Self is the link between the different faculties; they all set out from me. Ultimately, “it is the identity of the Self” that “grounds the harmony of all the faculties and their agreement on the form of a supposed Same object” (DR, 169).

The harmony of the faculties not only presupposes a common sense as concordia facultatum but also a good sense (bon sens). The latter determines the direction according to which the faculties function. Our thoughts, for example, are causally directed (the origin always precedes the effect); temporally directed (the future turns into the present, which in turn slips into the past); and synthetically directed (from the least to the most differentiated) (LS, 88). However, the good sense is always a “unique sense” (LS, 87); our thoughts can neither move in a different direction nor move in different directions at the same time. The directional character of good sense translates into a division of labor for the different faculties: “Good sense determines the contribution of the faculties in each case” (DR, 169). Good sense ensures that each faculty concentrates on its own object: eyes focus on the visible qualities, memory on the perceived qualities, and so on. When the faculties do not respect this division of labor, an error (erreur) arises. Errors are due to a shortcoming on the part of the good sense.

Since Deleuze considers sense to be absolute difference, common sense and good sense are of no use for thinking thought. In thinking thought, there is no harmonious collaboration of the different faculties grounded on the presupposition that it is the same object that can be sensed, recalled, conceived, and so on. Rather than a concordance of the different faculties, there is a discord. Rather than one object toward which the different faculties are oriented, each faculty has its own object. How so? Deleuze (DR, 182) claims that in the encounter with a sign, the sign is first sensed: thinking thought begins with sensibility. As shown above, what is sensed is not an identity that can be recognized. Because empiricism can deal with only positive identities, Deleuze introduces the following twist: what is sensed cannot be sensed empirically. As will be explained in more detail in chapter 3, this empirical insensibility, however, is also “what gives to be sensed,” what “defines the proper limits of sensibility” (DR, 290). It is not “a sensible being but the being of the sensible. It is not the given but that by which the given is given” (DR, 176). Empirical insensibility, in other words, is also what makes sensibility possible. It is what Deleuze calls “a sentiendum.” Because of its conditioning nature, the sentiendum is what must be sensed and what can only be sensed. In the presence of the sentiendum, sensibility confronts “its own limit and raises itself to the level of the transcendental exercise,” to what Deleuze calls “the nth power” (DR, 176).

Because the sentiendum can only be sensed, it cannot simply be communicated to the other faculties. Sensibility leads memory to focus not on the same object, the sentiendum, but on its own object, the memorandum. Like the sentiendum, the memorandum refers not to something that can be recalled, actually or empirically, but to the being of the recallable, of the past. It refers to the transcendental condition of memory, rather than to a concrete memory. Because memory is forced to focus on that which makes memory possible, its object can only be recalled. Indeed, its object is that which can only be recalled. Hence, what the narrator of the Search does when he is confronted with the madeleine—or, better, what Proust does when he writes about the madeleine—is not to reminisce about the (empirical) past but to inquire into the essence of the past.

Memory, in its turn, “forces thought to grasp that which can only be thought, the cogitandum, [. . .] the Essence: not the intelligible, [. . .] but the being of the intelligible as though this were both the final power of thought and the unthinkable” (DR, 177). In sum, instead of faculties that are fitted to one another in order to be able to recognize an identity, in sound thought each faculty receives “from the other only a violence which brings it face to face with its own element” (DR, 178). Faculties confront one another with their own limits (the imperceptible, the unrememberable, the unthinkable); they bring one another to their extreme point of dissolution—Deleuze (DR, 177) speaks of unhinging the faculties—such that they fall “prey to triple violence: the violence of that which forces it to be exercised, of that which it is forced to grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, yet also that of the ungraspable (from the point of view of its empirical exercise)” (180). There is no synthesizing power that limits the contribution of each faculty in favor of recognition (common and good sense), only a para-sense, “which determines the communication between disjointed faculties” (DR, 183). Finally, renouncing notions such as “good sense” and “common sense” also implies renouncing the idea of a subjective unity implied by these notions. Deleuze no longer speaks of an in-dividual, of an indivisible entity that thinks, but of a “dissolved self” and a “fractured I” (DR, 183).

Art as the Privileged Domain to Unravel the Essence? (Sixth Postulate)

The sixth postulate is the postulate of the proposition, where Deleuze defends the view that the proposition is the appropriate expression of representational thought. The reason is that in a proposition where a predicate is attributed to a subject—propositions of the “S is P” sort—the pursuit of identity reaches its culmination point. Not only does it presuppose that subject and predicate have an identity that can be grasped in a concept, but subject and object are also equated: in the concrete case designated by S, the subject is the predicate. The identity of subject and predicate postulated in the proposition would be a representation of the identity present in reality. Thus, the identity postulated in the proposition refers to a real identity. When this reference is correct, that is, when there is actually a correspondence between both identities, the proposition is said to be true. Hence, in representational thought, truth and identity are inseparable: If one does not presuppose identities, truth cannot exist. In representational thought, the proposition is the place where the truth, understood as a correspondence between a conceptual and a real identity, is expressed.

Beyond the expression or proposition and that which the proposition designates, namely, the referent, Deleuze identifies a third level, that of sense. Sense, then, is not a proposition, thing, body, or fact. Sense is the boundary between propositions and things (LS, 25).¹⁴ Deleuze (LS, 209) defines sense as that which is expressed by the proposition and as the incorporeal attribute of the thing. One cannot confuse the expressed with the signification, for the signification of a proposition can be expressed, whereas its sense cannot. But how is it that the expressed is not expressible? Just as in the case of the sentiendum, we have to distinguish between the empirical and the transcendental levels. Deleuze is referring to the empirical level when he says that “we can never say what is the sense of what we say” (DR, 193). We can say, for example, what the different sentences of Proust’s Search mean (signification), but it is impossible to pinpoint what Proust wanted to say with this book (sense). From a transcendental point of view, however, the sense or the expressed is what we must focus on. We must try to express the sense of Proust’s Search, for it is this sense that grounds the different propositions and their significations. But how do we do this when the sense is, empirically speaking, inexpressible? According to Deleuze (DR, 193; LS, 36), the only possibility is to take the sense of proposition A as the designated or referent of another proposition, B, of which in turn we cannot express the sense. This is what we do when we say, for example, that a theater play was very Proustian. This process can then be repeated endlessly: every name refers to another name, which in turn designates the sense of the preceding one, and so on. This process of reference has no beginning or end. Deleuze is, in this way, clearly distancing himself from Descartes; there is no proposition that is absolutely clear to itself and that can, therefore, serve as the first building block of indubitable thought. Like Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze argues that the cogito has “no sense and no object other than the power of reiteration in indefinite regress (I think that I think that I think . . . ). Every proposition of consciousness implies an unconscious of pure thought which constitutes the sphere of sense in which there is infinite regress” (DR, 194).

Because the sense of a proposition has nothing to do with what a proposition designates, the aforementioned correspondence theory of truth no longer holds. For Deleuze, the true is conditioned by something else, namely, sense. The reason for this is that a false proposition such as “mammals lay eggs” can have sense, whereas a nonsensical proposition, such as “mammals dream eggs around,” can be neither true nor false. Now, it must be said that representational thought also recognizes sense to be the condition of the true, but, contrary to Deleuze, its conception of the truth is indifferent to or unaffected by what founds it. The fact that sense grounds truth and falsity does not change anything in its conception of either. The conditioning is extrinsic and arbitrary. Deleuze, for his part, considers the relation between sense and truth to be intrinsic and necessary. He is not interested in what a condition can make possible, but in what turns a condition into a reality, in the elements of the condition that already point toward the conditioned. Hence, according to Deleuze, “the relation between a proposition and what it designates [truth] must be established within sense itself” (DR, 191–92). The incorporeal and aconceptual sense leads, by itself, to the concepts designating bodies. Truth is generated in sense itself. As such, it is a matter of production, not correspondence; of genitality, not innateness or reminiscence. Thus, Deleuzean truth, which has nothing to do with a correspondence between the conceptual and the corporeal, needs to be understood as that which makes sense, that which is relevant or appropriate. A true expression is first of all an expression that conveys a meaningful evaluation of what is important and what is not, of the singular and the regular, of distinctive and ordinary points (DR, 238). Truth loses its absolute character and becomes a relative and gradual notion.

Deleuze’s understanding of truth differs from that of representational thought not only because of the intrinsic relation between sense and truth but also because of the role he attributes to nonsense. In representational thought, nonsense plays no significant role: it figures simply as the absence of sense. Deleuze (LS, 93), however, argues that nonsense is the element that makes series resonate, thus creating sense. This point here is not so much that nonsense is the ultimate condition of truth, but that there is no clear distinction between sense and nonsense. At least not on the transcendental level, where sense and nonsense form a unity: “The Idea which runs throughout all the faculties nevertheless cannot be reduced to sense, since in turn it is also non-sense. [. . .] The Idea is constituted of structural elements which have no sense themselves, while it constitutes the sense of all that it produces” (DR, 193). Why is sense also nonsense? Because, empirically speaking, we cannot express it, and we cannot grasp it. However, it is that from which every proposition issues forth, such that “the mechanism of nonsense is the highest finality of sense” (DR, 193).

To sum up: because sense is the expressed of the expression and the incorporeal attribute of things, and because a proposition expresses a designated reality, the proposition can no longer be considered an appropriate way of expressing sense. How, then, is sense to be expressed?

Although Deleuze grants, in What Is Philosophy? (5), that the production or creation of sense is not a privilege of the arts, in Proust and Signs he argues the contrary: “The fact remains that the revelation of essence (beyond the object, beyond the subject himself) belongs only to the realm of art. If it is to occur, it will occur there. This is why art is the finality of the world” (33). This claim is softened somewhat by the fact that Deleuze describes this revealing character of art, and of Proust’s Search in particular, as its philosophical bearing (PS, 60), thereby diminishing the difference between art and philosophy. But we can escape this question of privileges by rephrasing it: Why is art capable of expressing sense? For one thing, because art resists the objectivist and subjectivist reductions to which perception, desire, and thought fall prey. The sense of a work of art cannot be situated in the substance the latter consists of, or in the opinions that it would represent. According to Deleuze, in an artwork, “substances (matières) are ductile, so kneaded and refined that they become entirely spiritual” (PS, 31). Substance is reduced to a minimum. By the same token, the artwork is not a riddle that is solved once the ideas and the opinions behind it are known. On the contrary, the sense of an artwork is situated in between the different ideas and opinions that intersect in the work. The artwork passes through its substance and subjective opinions rather than dwelling in them. The second reason why art is capable of expressing sense is that it recognizes the differential character of sence (PS, 27). This shows itself, among other things, in the fact that the sense of a work of art is always multiple: it can always be interpreted in several ways. Moreover, most of the time the interpretation changes as the reader changes: the Lewis Carroll one reads as a child is not the same Lewis Carroll one reads as an adult. However, the more fundamental point is that sense itself is constantly jumping during the interpretation process: when we notice certain details, our understanding of the personality of the main character, for example, can change, and that in its turn changes our interpretation of the whole book. Thus, sense is not only ambiguous but fundamentally ungraspable. And finally, art can be considered the expression of sense because it often happens in art that the unexplainable sense of one work is taken as the referent for another work, whose sense is again inexplicable but can be taken as the referent for a third artwork, and so on. In contemporary art, in particular, this referencing game is very present.

Thinking Thought as Learning How to Create Problems (Eighth and Seventh Postulates)

Let us recapitulate what we have found out about thinking thought so far. Thinking thought is instigated by the unforeseen confrontation with a sign whose sense it needs to unfold. During this process, thought is brought to confront its own limits: the sign causes problems because it forces us to reconsider our distinctions, ideas, and so forth. Eventually, thought even comes upon the unthinkable—which is, simultaneously, that which must be thought. The essence is empirically unthinkable because it is differential by nature; its differentiality makes a definitive “com-prehension” of it impossible. To know the essence is a contradiction in terms. The interpretation of signs, conversely, is an endless process of learning: the sense of a sign can only be learned, not known.

What does it mean to describe sense as the object of learning? Learning is not, as the eighth postulate, the postulate of knowledge, states, and, as the first postulate presupposes, a preparatory and temporary stage that finally dissolves when it reaches its goal, knowledge. To learn, for Deleuze, is to “enter into the universal of the relations which constitute the Idea, and into their corresponding singularities”; knowledge, conversely, “designates only the generality of concepts or the calm possession of a rule enabling solutions” (DR, 204). In order to understand this definition, we have to look at the seventh postulate, the postulate of solutions, which holds that representational thought traces problems from supposedly preexistent propositions and evaluates them according to their solvability, to their susceptibility for a solution. Representational thought poses a problem in function of the propositions it already has, and in function of the propositions that can possibly solve the problem. The problem itself is secondary. Deleuze, for his part, wants to think problems in themselves. Hence, he understands thinking thought not so much as the process of finding solutions to problems, but as creating problems. Deleuze agrees with the representational idea that “a problem is determined at the same time as it is solved” (DR, 203), but for different reasons, namely, because a problem is explicated in the solution. Thus, the problem, rather than disappearing in the solution, insists and persists in it (DR, 203). The problem is immanent and transcendent in relation to its solutions because its persistence does not imply that it is deduced from the solutions.

Now, thinking the problem in function of the propositions we have at our disposal means thinking in terms of particularities, since propositions are always particular. These particular propositions can be examined for what they have in common so as to be able to establish general principles. Tracing problems from propositions implies thinking them in terms of generalities and particularities. However, if we think the problem in itself, we think it in function of universality and singularities. Is this not a contradiction? No. We already saw how the Idea synthesizes in a way that is disjunctive, which means that it unites not by looking for what there is in common—that is what a generality does—but by playing out the differences between what is subsumed under this unity. Universality thus comprises a distribution of singular and distinctive points (DR, 202). Hence, the difference between knowledge and learning is that in knowledge, the solution “lends its generality to the problem,” whereas in learning, the problem “lends its universality to the solution” (DR, 202). Learning is a matter of penetrating the Idea (DR, 243), that is, the problem. Learning is about starting to see where the problems are. When we learn to swim, for example, our “knowledge” of water and of our own body changes because certain things, such as the ability to breathe, for instance, lose their self-evidence. We need to explore the singular points of the water (its weight, its movement, etc.), of our body (how to regulate breathing, etc.), and of the combination of both (under what circumstances do we need to lift our head higher so as not to swallow water, for instance?). Learning is not about acquiring something that already exists but about making your world more complex, about creating more distinctions and relations.

This description of thought in terms of learning, of creating problems that do not presuppose solutions, also has implications for the notion of truth. Whereas representational thought connects truth with the solution—the solution is true or false with respect to the problem posed, which is understood in function of the solution—Deleuze connects it to the problem. A problem is false when it is overdetermined; when it mistakes banalities for profundities, ordinary points for singular points (DR, 191); or when it is underdetermined, in which case it fails to identify the singular points. In other words, the truth of a problem has to do with its meaningfulness. As such, it determines the nature of its solution: “The problem always has the solution it deserves in proportion to its own truth or falsity—in other words, in proportion to its sense” (DR, 198). A problem always has the solution that corresponds to the way the problem is posed.

Stupidity as the Highest Finality of Thinking Thought (Fifth Postulate)

I have already mentioned, in passing, how representational thought understands error: an error occurs when one faculty appropriates an object actually intended for another faculty. For example, one might say, “Good morning, Theodorus,” when, in fact, Theaetetus is the one passing by, because one confuses Theodorus, whom one saw yesterday (memory), with Theaetetus, who is right now before one’s eyes (perception). An error is due to a failure of good sense. Representational thought also offers another explanation for error, namely, the false recognition or representation resulting from a false evaluation of opposition, analogy, resemblance, and identity (DR, 186). Thus, one says “Theodorus” instead of “Theaetetus” because of an overestimation of the resemblance between the two. Both explanations, however, see error as a temporary blinding, occasioned by external forces, of a thought that is by nature upright and thus in perfect alignment with the other postulates. Representational thought considers error to be an empirical fact, an extrinsic attack on the natural affinity with the truth.

According to Deleuze, the negative of thought cannot be reduced to error. Madness (folie); stupidity (bêtise); and malevolence (méchanceté), for example, cannot simply be explained as failures of true, identical thought. More than that, Deleuze thinks that the negative of thought is not caused by external forces but is part of thought itself. It forms the structure of thought as such because it makes thought possible. In order to indicate that he is talking about the negative of thought as a transcendental feature and not an empirical fact, Deleuze exchanges “error” for “stupidity.”

The cogitandum, the unthinkable that is at the same time that which must be thought, already indicates that the negative of thought, understood as that which is not thought and cannot be thought, is part of the very structure of thought. Deleuze develops this idea further. How is stupidity possible? “It is possible by virtue of the link between thought and individuation” (DR, 189), an important notion of Deleuze’s ontology, which we will examine in the following chapters. For now, suffice it to say that individuation is used in distinction to specification. Specification refers to the process by which individuals distinguish themselves from one another, whereas individuation refers to a process that precedes and conditions specification. Individuation allows individual qualities or determinations to be formed. As a condition, it is not itself determined or qualified. On the contrary, it “involves fields of fluid intensive factors which no more take the form of an I than of a Self” (DR, 190). Individuation, or the process through which individual determination originates, issues forth from a formless, indeterminate, chaotic ground. During this process of determination, this ground can rise to the surface. More than that, this ground always rises to the surface of forms; individual determination implies that the individual distinguishes itself from the ground out of which it originates, without, however, being able to completely detach itself from it. Hence, the distinction between the ground and the individual is never a complete separation. This indeterminate ground is a threat to the individual and to every form in the sense that it can suddenly manifest itself and unsettle all determination or form. This is the moment when hideousness, staggering chaos, and an absolute exterior shine through the human face, determined forms, and the familiar. Stupidity, then, “is neither the ground nor the individual, but rather this relation in which individuation brings the ground to the surface without being able to give it form” (DR, 190). In this sense, stupidity is the “highest finality of thought” (DR, 193). As the moment in which determinations lose stability, such that the faculties are brought to confront their limits and are forced to create something new, stupidity “constitutes the greatest weakness of thought, but also the source of its highest power in that which forces it to think” (DR, 345).

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According to Deleuze, the eight postulates that describe the different characteristics of representational thought manifest a confusion of empirical facts and transcendental features. More specifically, they “elevate a simple empirical figure to the status of a transcendental” (DR, 193). Or, which is another way of saying the same thing, they “trace the transcendental from the outlines of the empirical” (DR, 181). Although we will develop this further when we turn to Deleuze’s transcendental project in chapter 3, we can already give a preliminary sketch of what this confusion consists of. I will illustrate it with an example.

In our day-to-day experience, we tend to interpret situations in a similar way. Say that you enter a shop and witness a discussion between the shop owner and a client. The client is complaining: “I bought these expensive shoes yesterday, and already today the heel broke off. I want my money back.” Everybody will understand the problem: the client feels robbed because she paid a lot of money for something of bad quality. And everybody knows the available solutions for a respectable salesperson: the client will be refunded, or given a new pair of shoes. The interpretation of this situation is built upon several presuppositions: we presuppose that these shoes are the same shoes the person bought yesterday (collaboration of perception and memory, as well as recognition, at least from the perspective of the salesperson); that the smell of leather, the noise of clicking heels, and the sight of this hollow object all refer to an object supposed to be the same (collaboration of the different senses presupposing the identity of the object); that the words of the client refer to a reality and not to a dream (proposition as location of the truth); and that this situation is qualified for complaints, as opposed to complaints about bad weather, for example, because this problem can be solved (the problem is posed in function of the solutions). Representational thought transposes all these presuppositions, which govern day-to-day reasoning, to the transcendental level. It considers them to be the conditions of thought.

Deleuze does not consider this sort of reasoning true or original thought. Original or thinking thought is not about tracing something back to what we already know. On the contrary, it has to be described as learning. It is about being forced to try to understand something unfamiliar, something that attacks our everyday ideas and distinctions. Because this unknown “thing” is that which sets thought in motion, which makes thought possible, it is transcendental. However, it is also transcendent, not in the sense that it is from another world, but in the sense that it is not entirely graspable by our words and thoughts. We try to grasp or coincide with this nonfamiliar “thing,” but we never succeed because it is always displaced with respect to itself, because it is a becoming; in sum, because it is differential. Thus, from an empirical point of view, it is fundamentally unthinkable and, as such, problematic. From a transcendental point of view, on the other hand, it is what thought must focus on. It is the condition of thought. Moreover, the way Deleuze conceives the relation between the condition and the conditioned is fundamentally different from the way representational thought understands the relation to its condition: in the latter case, the relation between condition and conditioned is extrinsic (the condition is indifferent with regards to what it conditions—the conditioned could have been different, or it could not have been at all), whereas Deleuze regards the relation as intrinsic (the conditioned is directly determined by the condition).

COMPARISON OF MERLEAU-PONTY’S AND DELEUZE’S CONCEPTIONS OF THOUGHT

Now that I have sketched the accounts of thought we find in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, it is time to venture a comparison. The first thing one notices is that both accounts focus on examining the conditions of thought. They are not overly concerned with questions about how thought can achieve truth, or what the truth consists of, or what solutions can and cannot be considered valid. Instead, they focus on how we are able to think, on what thought actually involves, on how problems are posed, and so on. It is only in the wake of such questions that they approach questions concerning the truth of thought. So much to say that both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze are concerned with a transcendental examination of thought.

How, then, are we able to think? Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze reject the idea that thought is by nature autonomous. Unlike Descartes (Merleau-Ponty) and Plato (Deleuze), Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze do not believe that thought is its own instigator, whether empirically or transcendentally. Deleuze situates the empirical origin of thought in thought’s encounter with a sign that is exterior to it, and its transcendental origin in the differential being thought tries to express. Merleau-Ponty does not really dwell upon the question of the immediate cause of thought, but his analysis of geometric thought indicates that he considers our carnal being-to-the-world to be the transcendental condition of thought. Hence, for both authors, it is too simple to say that the thinking subject is the origin of thought. Thinking surely happens through the subject, but its transcendental ground is impersonal (PP, 215; DR, 347).

Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze also believe that the transcendental origin of thought is ultimately what must be thought. Merleau-Ponty identifies thought’s final “object”—the quotation marks indicate that that which thought thinks does not have the characteristics of an object—as the mystery of wild being, of this being that precedes the distinction between subject and object and in which thought is grounded. Deleuze, for his part, writes that thought cannot but try to unravel the sense of the sign with which it is confronted. Since this sense is difference and difference is the ground of thought—this will be developed in more detail in the coming chapters—Deleuze can also be said to conceive of the ground of thought as the eventual “object” of thought.

Both authors draw the same implication from the aforementioned ideas: the object of thought is characterized by a certain exteriority. Merleau-Ponty, for example, stresses the fact that we cannot coincide with the object of our thought, that there will always be something ungraspable about the object. Deleuze, for his part, explains the sign’s exteriority in terms of its disorienting effect on our thought and in terms of the fact that it is always displaced with respect to itself. In contrast to Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze manages thus to explain why the object of thought cannot be fully captured: because sense is always displaced with respect to itself; because sense is determined by the difference between the series it brings together, it cannot be grasped by one word or image. It is true that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of field points to the same idea, in which something is defined by its differences from other elements rather than by its identity, but Merleau-Ponty never explicitly considers this to be the reason for the exteriority of the object of thought. I will come back to this comparison in the second chapter and in the chapter on structuralism. With the idea of the exteriority of the object of thought, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze clearly distance themselves from the Cartesian description of thought, where thought has divine characteristics: it itself constitutes what is to be thought. As a result, nothing exists outside thought. It is all-encompassing.

What are we to do, then, with Merleau-Ponty’s acceptance of Descartes’s idea that thought bears in itself the sketch of its own object? How is Merleau-Ponty’s idea that we are always already familiar with existence to be reconciled with the exteriority of the object of thought? Can we find something similar in Deleuze, and, if so, how does he solve this apparent contradiction? Before examining the last question, it is important to sketch out the context of this idea, which Merleau-Ponty takes over from Descartes. As we will see, this context is quite compatible with some of Deleuze’s ideas concerning sound thought.

Merleau-Ponty’s idea of thought’s familiarity with its object primarily needs to be understood in contrast with the idea that thought is about reproducing essences that are given, essences that precede thought. According to Merleau-Ponty, thought has nothing to do with re-presentation, but with presentation or creation.¹⁵ Because, in a sense, thought creates its own object, it can be said to be familiar with it. Deleuze agrees with this view of thought as nonrepresentational and creative.¹⁶ He describes thinking as the creation of problems, rather than the solving of problems, as the production of truth rather than its discovery. Moreover, just as Merleau-Ponty describes the relation between thought and the ground/object of thought as a relation of Fundierung, which implies that the ground of thought needs to be expressed by thought to manifest itself, Deleuze thinks that the sense implied in the sign needs to be explicated to keep sense from being an empty concept. Hence, both authors replace the classical understanding of a grounding relation by stressing the fundamental role of the grounded. In the next chapters, we will see how the late Merleau-Ponty expands the role of the grounded from an epistemological necessity to an ontological necessity, thus making this intrinsic relation stronger. However, for the time being, we can say that both philosophers consider the grounded term—thought—necessary, insofar as it determines the indeterminate ground. Differently put: Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze describe the relation between ground and grounded as intrinsic or immanent. Deleuze, for example, distinguishes his transcendental project from others by pointing out that his conception of the grounded is not indifferent to what grounds it. On the contrary, it is fundamentally affected by the ground. The ground refers, intrinsically and necessarily, to the grounded. However, this does not mean that the grounded is logically or teleologically implied in the ground. Deleuze recognizes the contingent nature of the connection between this specific ground and that specific grounded; what he insists on, however, is that the fact that there is a connection is not contingent. As his criticism of empiricist and intellectualist accounts of perception indicates, Merleau-Ponty is likewise opposed to an extrinsic relation between ground and grounded, and he does not consider this to be in contradiction with the contingency of their specific connection. In sum, for both authors, the creative nature of thought is due to the necessary role of thought in the grounding relation. Thought is more than merely a product of the ground.

Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze attach the same implications to the idea of the creative nature of thought. To begin with, thought relates to its “object” directly, in contrast to the representational account, which stresses mediation. In this account, representations are images or concepts situated between the thinker and the world. Merleau-Ponty’s description of thought as the “hold our body takes upon the world” clearly eliminates any mediating instance since the body is the thinking subject. Deleuze’s (DR, 143) plea for thinking difference as difference and not as secondary to identities betrays a similar suspicion of mediation.

More generally, Deleuze believes thought cannot be described as the search for what is common among objects or concepts but, on the contrary, as the “emission” of “singularities” (DR, 251). Thought is not about discovering what is general to the different particulars, but about evaluating what is singular, and what is ordinary. As the general is also a mediating concept—it mediates between different particulars—this interpretation of thought complements the implication just described. We find a similar opposition to the idea of thought as the creation of generalities in Merleau-Ponty. As his analysis of perception shows, we do not perceive by processing and thus neutralizing site-specific information. On the contrary, the position of our body is always included in our perception and determines it. When we look at a man in the distance, we do not see a man, we see a man from far away (PP, 261). In other words, we are indeed able to denominate what we see, and thus recognize general categories in the singularities of the perceived, but this generality is never devoid of singularity. The former is in fact built on the latter. Moreover, both authors consider thought not only to emit singularities but also to be itself singular. The fact that thought always needs to resume the process of expressing the ground makes it a temporary and temporal process that contrasts sharply with the timeless, because definite, nature of distinguishing generalities.

A third implication, related to the other two, turns on the idea that the creative nature of thought implies a different conception of truth. Truth no longer concerns the correspondence between the generalities discovered by thought and reality. Deleuze, for example, considers a true theory one in which a problem is rightly determined, that is, in which the distribution of singular and ordinary points is coherent, one where there is a good evaluation of what is and is not relevant. In other words, a true theory is a theory that makes sense. Merleau-Ponty defends a similar idea in arguing that when we make a perceptual mistake, we replace one perception with another not just because we have noticed elements that do not correspond to the reality, but because the new perception makes more sense.

In sum, both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze believe proper thought to be fundamentally creative, since it cannot be reduced to a mere product of its ground. This creative nature implies that it is in a direct relation to its object (in contrast to the mediating nature of representational thought), that it is about the emission of singularities (in contrast to the discovery of generalities), and that it is about making sense rather than discovering the truth. Let me now return to the question I asked earlier, namely: How does Merleau-Ponty reconcile this idea—of thought’s familiarity with its own object and with existence—with the idea of the exteriority of the object of thought? If thought is familiar with its own object and with existence, it is because there is an intrinsic or immanent relation between thought and existence. We have seen that existence must be thought if it is to manifest itself (thought could not not have been), and we have seen how every thought is made possible by existence, how every thought still bears existence within it. Thought and existence are thus not separated by a gap but maintain, if you will, a relation of familiarity. This familiarity, however, does not imply that thought is able to grasp existence in its totality. On the contrary, as Merleau-Ponty’s modification of Descartes shows, the complete coincidence of thought with its object is impossible. Even when such a full coincidence seems undeniable, as in speaking speech, it is in fact only temporary and, thus, apparent.

At first sight, there is no Deleuzean equivalent for Merleau-Ponty’s idea that thought is familiar with its own object and with existence. On the contrary, in Deleuze’s philosophy, exteriority is present at all levels: at the level of the sign that shakes thought to its foundations; at the level of the faculties that, once made to confront their limits, can no longer collaborate but only transmit differences; and at the level of individuation, in which the ground rises to the surface and unsettles all determinations. According to Deleuze, thought has no natural affinity whatsoever. There is nothing to be presupposed in thought. This radical exteriority, and the difference and violence it implies, seems to be radically different from Merleau-Ponty’s idea of familiarity, and from the harmony it suggests. However, as will be shown in the next chapters, if familiarity is interpreted in terms of immanence, the contrast is not as wide as it seems at first sight.