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.
CHAPTER TWO
ONTOLOGY IN MERLEAU-PONTY AND DELEUZE
In the first chapter, we saw that Merleau-Ponty confirms Descartes’s idea that the relation between the thinking subject and the thought object cannot be external. The world must already exist for us if it is to be perceived. Unlike Descartes, Merleau-Ponty does not think that it follows from this that the thinking subject constitutes the world, that it coincides with the world and thus has absolute knowledge of it. Thought is familiar with the world and with itself, but this familiarity does not imply an absolute transparency. Our analysis of the perception of something remote, for example, showed that perception is grounded in the hold our body takes upon the world, and that this hold originates in a field in which the perceiving body and the world refer to one another endlessly. The gaze “prepossesses” (VI, 133) the visible before actually perceiving it, but this “prepossession” cannot be localized, nor is it possible to tell what exactly is possessed.
This nonabsolute and originless familiarity between the perceiving body and the perceived world requires an ontological foundation. If the perceiving body is to prepossess the perceived world, Merleau-Ponty needs to explain how this is ontologically possible. It is evident at the outset, however, that to do so he will have to abandon Descartes’s thesis about the fundamental difference in being between the thinking subject and the thought world, the dualism between res cogitans and res extensa.
In what concerns Deleuze, we looked at how his theory of “thinking thought” is built upon the idea of exteriority, and how this exteriority does not allow for any familiarity between thought and its “object.” However, we also saw how Deleuze conceives the relation between thought and its ground (which is also the “object” of original thought) as intrinsic. These claims have ontological implications, albeit contradictory ones; one seems to suggest a fundamental difference, whereas the other points to some sort of unity.
