SNS
INTRODUCTION
A DIFFICULT UNDERTAKING
Those familiar with the work of Gilles Deleuze probably know of Michel Foucault’s claim that Deleuze’s Logic of Sense “can be read as the most alien book imaginable from Phenomenology of Perception” (1994, 79). If Foucault is right, then the philosophies of Deleuze and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, at least as expressed in those two books, are radically opposed. This book sets out to question that thesis by looking for and at the resonances between both thinkers. The task is far from self-evident, not least because it goes not only against Foucault’s interpretation, but also against how Deleuze himself has characterized his relationship to Merleau-Ponty in particular, and to phenomenology in general. Indeed, he rarely discusses Merleau-Ponty: in all of his books, there are about a dozen, mostly negative, references. This may suggest that Deleuze has no (positive) interest in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. What is more, despite the fact that Deleuze published his first text on Bergson in Les philosophes célèbres, edited by Merleau-Ponty, there never was, as far as anyone knows, any other significant contact or exchange of ideas between the two thinkers.
Another issue often raised against any possible resonance between their work is the different backgrounds against which they developed their theories. Deleuze belongs to a generation of thinkers who were inspired by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Merleau-Ponty’s frame of reference, on the other hand, was Hegel’s dialectics and Husserl’s phenomenology. Which is not to say that Deleuze was unfamiliar with Hegel or Husserl. Quite the contrary; while he was a student, between 1943 and 1948, the study of the “three Hs” (Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl) was the dominant focus of philosophical instruction at French universities (Descombes 1979, 13, 21; Dosse 2007, 137). Deleuze’s supervisors were Jean Hyppolite and Jean Beaufret, Hegel and Heidegger specialists, respectively.1 But Deleuze did not find in these thinkers his main source of inspiration, as did the thinkers at the center of the philosophical stage in France around 1945, namely, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Merleau-Ponty explicitly presents himself as a Husserl disciple, and the title of one of Sartre’s books, Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), is an explicit reference to Hegel and Kant.
A PROMISING UNDERTAKING
Still, it is possible to invoke another philosophical authority to suggest that there is a resonance between both thinkers. In one of the interviews in A Winter’s Journey, Paul Virilio (1997, 42) comments that Deleuze greatly appreciated Merleau-Ponty’s last book, The Visible and the Invisible. And there is also a counterargument for the different backgrounds thesis: it is true that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud were a great inspiration to those who in the Anglophone world are called the “critical thinkers,” Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault. But they looked to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in their efforts to find answers to problems raised, among others, by phenomenologists. As such, these critical thinkers can be said to have been inspired by phenomenology. I would not go as far as Alain Beaulieu (2004, 11), who claims that phenomenology is the background against which all Deleuzean concepts are intelligible. It seems to me that this background is more diverse than that, and includes Neoplatonism, Leibniz, and Kant at least—but phenomenology is most certainly a part of it.
The most important argument in favor of the resonance between both thinkers must be philosophical. What would such an argument be? In general, I believe both thinkers can be brought together around the same shared transcendental project. Both thinkers examine the conditions of thought, which is to say that they are not motivated by a strictly epistemological question. Moreover, their primary interests are not the empirical causes of thought: they do not spend much time discussing, for example, the rules according to which thought functions, or should function, if it is to attain truth. To the extent that the question is raised at all, it is as part and parcel of the examination of the implications of their transcendental projects. Their central question turns on what must be presupposed in order for such a phenomenon as thinking to be possible.
These two transcendental projects share the fact that they situate the condition of thought in the empirical: their transcendental projects are both guided by immanence. One ontological consequence of this is that if the condition is to be situated within the conditioned, the condition cannot belong to a being that is fundamentally different from the being of the conditioned. Thus, Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty reject the classical conception of the transcendental condition and the dualism inherent to it: the condition can no longer be associated with the perfect, the infinite, the unchangeable, or the original; nor can it continue to be pitted against the imperfect, finite, changeable, and secondary character of the conditioned. Both thinkers exchange this dualism in favor of one immanent being, a being without hierarchy and fundamental differences, that is, differences in being.
Moreover, both understand the relation between the condition and the conditioned as a relation of expression: the essence, which is how the condition is often understood, is expressed by or in the conditioned. As we will see, this suggests that the ontological primacy of the condition is complemented by the epistemological primacy of the conditioned, and also that the ontological power is distributed over the condition and the conditioned.
Neither Deleuze nor Merleau-Ponty sees this immanence of being as entailing the annihilation of difference. This is well-known in Deleuze’s case—he is, after all, the thinker of difference—but it applies just as much, I hope to show, to Merleau-Ponty. Much of this book is in fact devoted to an examination of how Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty each try to explain how this immanence is not in contradiction with difference. That examination will take us through their differential understanding of the condition as well as through their descriptions of how differently conditioned things are generated from the condition.
A NECESSARY UNDERTAKING
I am very aware that investigating the resonances between two different systems of thought can be risky. One might be all too quickly tempted to see analogies that, on a deeper level, do not necessarily hold. I have tried to avoid this trap by being especially careful not to describe the theories of the one philosopher in the idiom of the other, as that would evidently suggest a false analogy. In addition, I pay particular attention to the irreconcilable elements in their systems. There is no denying, for example, that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology focuses more on immanence than, as is the case with Deleuze, on difference. Their styles are also quite different: Merleau-Ponty’s writing is soft and poetic, especially when compared to Deleuze’s more dry and polemical prose. It remains to be seen, though, whether such differences in focus and style encompass also a more substantive difference. Last, I try to avoid the trap set by the superficial analogies by comparing the problems to which Deleuze’s and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies are an answer.
Risky as the examination of how these two theories communicate may be, the undertaking is nevertheless necessary, for this is the only way to shed new light on the reach and scope of these theories. How does a reading of Merleau-Ponty through a Deleuzean lens, and vice versa, offer new perspectives on both theories? If we take Deleuze’s requirements for a good transcendental philosophy, namely, immanence and difference, as a starting point for a reading of Merleau-Ponty, we are immediately led away from the standard presentation of Merleau-Ponty as the phenomenologist of the body. Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception and of the central role of the body therein can, in this way, be seen
