to his theory of perception and to his reversal of Cartesianism, and Deleuze’s by combining an analysis of the famous “Image of Thought” chapter in Difference and Repetition with a reading of Proust and Signs.
The question of the nature, and the condition, of original thought requires an examination of its subject and object, and this in turn obliges us to delve into Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s ontologies. The second chapter looks at how their refusal to account for original thought through the thinking subject and the thought object goes hand in hand with (1) a conception of being as fundamentally one, even if constituted by differences; and (2) a conception of being as indetermination, as built around an emptiness that cannot be filled up, because the emptiness is constitutive.
In chapter 3, we will examine the general philosophical problem at the root of the “epistemological” and ontological arguments examined in the first two chapters. While the latter compile an extensive list of similar or kindred philosophical concepts and ideas, the third chapter indicates why Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty found it necessary to create these concepts in the first place. The answer to this question has to do with a general view of what philosophy is, or what it should do. Both thinkers, in fact, believe that philosophy should tackle the problem of the condition of phenomena, which is, moreover, to be situated within the empirical. In order to reveal what is specific to the approaches favored by Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, we will examine how they differ from Kant and Husserl.
If we are to get a handle on what this transcendental empiricism entails for both thinkers, and if we are to know whether they can really be paired, we need to push our investigation of their unorthodox account of the relation between the condition and the conditioned still further. And so, in chapter 4, I concentrate on what Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty both call the “simultaneity” of the condition and the conditioned. My goal there is to determine the degree of resonance in their accounts of this simultaneity by examining how they treat the thinker who was their direct source of inspiration in this respect: Henri Bergson. We will pay particular attention to how Bergon figures in their accounts of depth.
Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the notion of “expression,” which, as already mentioned, is central to Deleuze’s and Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the relation between the condition and the conditioned. In chapter 5, I set out to detect the specificity of this ontological notion by zooming in on literary expressions, and more specifically on the relation between literary expressions and what they express. Since both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty have extensively written about Marcel Proust, their references to the latter offer an ideal place for examining the correspondences between their accounts of literary expression. The fact that Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty both give a special place in their thought for Paul Cézanne, whose paintings can be described as visual expressions, was a reason for dedicating chapter 6 to their discussions of Cézanne. These two chapters reveal that expression names a relation grounded on a paradox: the actual (literary or visual) expressions ground the expressed, from which they nevertheless issue forth.
While chapters 4, 5, and 6 explore how Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty try to ensure the immanence or unity of the condition and the conditioned, the last chapter examines how Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty explain the differentiality of the condition and the difference between the condition and the conditioned. More specifically, I claim that a solid immanence requires a differential theory of how the condition generates the conditioned (which nevertheless determines it). Since structuralism represents one of the first attempts at working out a differential account of the condition and of the process of individuation, and since both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty discuss Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics extensively, I base the comparison of this differential aspect in their systems on their treatment of Saussure.
The figures that link Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty are not restricted to Husserl, Bergson, Proust, Cézanne, and Saussure. I refer also to Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Maldiney, and Gilbert Simondon. However, as the common references to these thinkers were not extensive enough to justify a separate chapter, my discussion of them is incorporated into chapters 3, 6, and the conclusion, respectively.
The conclusion brings together all the resonances and divergences discovered and discussed in the body of the book to see whether we should consider Merleau-Ponty a Deleuzean avant la lettre, or whether there are elements that attest to some fundamental differences between the two theories. In this context, I linger on Deleuze’s criticism of Merleau-Ponty in What Is Philosophy? and Foucault. Is Deleuze right in claiming that Merleau-Ponty corrupts immanence (What Is Philosophy?) and annihilates differences (Foucault)? How should we understand this charge?
WHAT I HAVE NOT DONE
It is perhaps prudent to say a few words about what I have not done here. I do not deal extensively with the books Deleuze wrote in collaboration with Félix Guattari. Rather, my focus is almost exclusively on the early Deleuze. The reason for this is that Deleuze’s transcendental project is clearest in his early writings. When I discuss concepts or theories by Deleuze and Guattari, I do so primarily in order to investigate whether or not we can find seeds of the pragmatic dimension of the coauthored works in the early Deleuze and, if so, if there is an equivalent in Merleau-Ponty.
My reasons for concentrating on the late Merleau-Ponty are similar. Since Merleau-Ponty’s project becomes a fully fledged transcendental project only at the end of his life, The Visible and the Invisible is my primary source for the argument of this book. As already mentioned, I also discuss Phenomenology of Perception, but as propaedeutic for the ontology Merleau-Ponty will develop in The Visible and the Invisible.
That explains why I do not examine the resonances and divergences between Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s theories of perception. Unlike Merleau-Ponty’s, Deleuze’s theory of perception (developed in The Fold and Cinema 1: The Movement-Image) is directly situated not against an “epistemological” or ontological horizon, but against a pragmatic or “ethical” horizon, as Deleuze puts it. Its frame is the question not of being but of the affective power of machinations and how to increase it. Deleuze’s theory of perception and of the body is an experimentation with intensities and forces. Hence, it is more meaningful to compare Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception not with Deleuze’s theory of perception, but with the “epistemological” and ontological claims of the early Deleuze.
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