end of his life. The subject, decentralized in Phenomenology of Perception, is dissolved in The Visible and the Invisible. That is one reason why the late Merleau-Ponty must be situated at the limits of phenomenology (see Barbaras 1999), and why that period of his work is better described as being concerned with ontology.
By the same token, by approaching Deleuze through the similarities that can be discovered between his account of the conditions of thought and Merleau-Ponty’s, we can formulate an alternative to the characterization of his philosophy as the “Nietzschean anarcho-desiring machine fighting reactive forces of ressentiment and bad conscience” (Bryant 2008, xi). More specifically, it can show us that—and here I side with Levi Bryant—the labels usually associated with Deleuze’s work (antiestablishment, amoral, aphilosophical, etc.) can reveal their full meaning only if they are understood through the transcendental and ontological project from which they issue. It is a partial and superficial understanding to reduce Deleuze’s work to a collection of anarchic statements about politics, ethics, thought, the subject, and so on. Deleuze is primarily a metaphysician.
The challenge ahead is to find the proper balance between the respect for the singularity of Deleuze’s thought and Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and the approximation necessary to open up their theories and the shared lines running through them. If we are successful, then we will be in a position to offer a new image of the history of philosophy to which these theories belong. An age-old metaphysical problem dealt with in this book is that of the relation between thinking and being. And that problem brings with it a host of related problems: How are we to understand the difference between abstract being and concrete being? Between determined being and indeterminate being? Between conceptual thinking and artistic thinking? And so on. By grounding my search for resonances on a comparison between the ways Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty have read authors such as Kant, Husserl, Bergson, Saussure, Maldiney, Sartre, and Simondon, I am not only compensating for the lack of direct references to Merleau-Ponty in the work of Deleuze, I am also anchoring the resonances in their work to the history of philosophy. More specifically, I give an alternative image of the philosophical alliances in French academia over the last two centuries.
In other words, this book is not addressed only to the Merleau-Ponty scholars who would like to know how far ahead of his time Merleau-Ponty was, or only to the Deleuze scholars interested in learning about his predecessors. Its value extends beyond these specialized interests because it illustrates how every (good) philosopher develops concepts as answers to the problems, and answers to these problems, posed by other philosophers.
STRUCTURE
In the first two chapters, I present the resonances and divergences that stand out when one juxtaposes those texts by Deleuze and by Merleau-Ponty that deal with the question of the nature, and the condition, of original thought (chapter 1), as well as with the ontology that underlies the two accounts of thought (chapter 2). In what concerns the first chapter, I can already mention that both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty refuse to conceive original thinking—which is to be distinguished from merely repeating or continuing what one has learned—in representational terms, which of course does not mean that they deny representational thinking! I will explain Merleau-Ponty’s position by referring to his theory of perception and to his reversal of Cartesianism, and Deleuze’s by combining an analysis of the famous “Image of Thought” chapter in Difference and Repetition with a reading of Proust and Signs.
The question of the nature, and the condition, of original thought requires an examination of its subject and object, and this in turn obliges us to delve into Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s ontologies. The second chapter looks at how their refusal to account for original thought through the thinking subject and the thought object goes hand in hand with (1) a conception of being as fundamentally one, even if constituted by differences; and (2) a conception of being as indetermination, as built around an emptiness that cannot be filled up, because the emptiness is constitutive.
In chapter 3, we will examine the general philosophical problem at the root of the “epistemological” and ontological arguments examined in the first two chapters. While the latter compile an extensive list of similar or kindred philosophical concepts and ideas, the third chapter indicates why Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty found it necessary to create these concepts in the first place. The answer to this question has to do with a general view of what philosophy is, or what it should do. Both thinkers, in fact, believe that philosophy should tackle the problem of the condition of phenomena, which is, moreover, to be situated within the empirical. In order to reveal what is specific to the approaches favored by Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, we will examine how they differ from Kant and Husserl.
If we are to get a handle on what this transcendental empiricism entails for both thinkers, and if we are to know whether they can really be paired, we need to push our investigation of their unorthodox account of the relation between the condition and the conditioned still further. And so, in chapter 4, I concentrate on what Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty both call the “simultaneity” of the condition and the conditioned. My goal there is to determine the degree of resonance in their accounts of this simultaneity by examining how they treat the thinker who was their direct source of inspiration in this respect: Henri Bergson. We will pay particular attention to how Bergon figures in their accounts of depth.
Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the notion of “expression,” which, as already mentioned, is central to Deleuze’s and Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the relation between the condition and the conditioned. In chapter 5, I set out to detect the specificity of this ontological notion by zooming in on literary expressions, and more specifically on the relation between literary expressions and what they express. Since both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty have extensively written about Marcel Proust, their references to the latter offer an ideal place for examining the correspondences between their accounts of literary expression. The fact that Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty both give a special place in their thought for Paul Cézanne, whose paintings can be described as visual expressions, was a reason for dedicating chapter 6 to their discussions of Cézanne. These two chapters reveal that expression names a relation grounded on a paradox: the actual (literary or visual) expressions ground the expressed, from which they nevertheless issue forth.
While chapters 4, 5, and 6 explore how Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty try to ensure the immanence or unity of the condition and the conditioned, the last chapter examines how Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty explain the differentiality of the condition and the difference between the condition and the conditioned. More specifically, I claim that a solid immanence requires a differential theory of how the condition generates the conditioned (which nevertheless determines it). Since structuralism represents one of the first attempts at working out a differential account of the condition and of the process of individuation, and since both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty discuss Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics extensively, I base the comparison of this differential aspect in their systems on their treatment of Saussure.
The figures that link Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty are not restricted to Husserl, Bergson, Proust, Cézanne, and Saussure. I refer also to Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Maldiney, and Gilbert Simondon. However, as the common references to these thinkers were not extensive enough to justify a separate chapter, my discussion of them is incorporated into chapters
