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.
