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,
