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
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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
