The conclusion brings together all the resonances and divergences discovered and discussed in the body of the book to see whether we should consider Merleau-Ponty a Deleuzean avant la lettre, or whether there are elements that attest to some fundamental differences between the two theories. In this context, I linger on Deleuze’s criticism of Merleau-Ponty in What Is Philosophy? and Foucault. Is Deleuze right in claiming that Merleau-Ponty corrupts immanence (What Is Philosophy?) and annihilates differences (Foucault)? How should we understand this charge?
WHAT I HAVE NOT DONE
It is perhaps prudent to say a few words about what I have not done here. I do not deal extensively with the books Deleuze wrote in collaboration with Félix Guattari. Rather, my focus is almost exclusively on the early Deleuze. The reason for this is that Deleuze’s transcendental project is clearest in his early writings. When I discuss concepts or theories by Deleuze and Guattari, I do so primarily in order to investigate whether or not we can find seeds of the pragmatic dimension of the coauthored works in the early Deleuze and, if so, if there is an equivalent in Merleau-Ponty.
My reasons for concentrating on the late Merleau-Ponty are similar. Since Merleau-Ponty’s project becomes a fully fledged transcendental project only at the end of his life, The Visible and the Invisible is my primary source for the argument of this book. As already mentioned, I also discuss Phenomenology of Perception, but as propaedeutic for the ontology Merleau-Ponty will develop in The Visible and the Invisible.
That explains why I do not examine the resonances and divergences between Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s theories of perception. Unlike Merleau-Ponty’s, Deleuze’s theory of perception (developed in The Fold and Cinema 1: The Movement-Image) is directly situated not against an “epistemological” or ontological horizon, but against a pragmatic or “ethical” horizon, as Deleuze puts it. Its frame is the question not of being but of the affective power of machinations and how to increase it. Deleuze’s theory of perception and of the body is an experimentation with intensities and forces. Hence, it is more meaningful to compare Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception not with Deleuze’s theory of perception, but with the “epistemological” and ontological claims of the early Deleuze.
CHAPTER ONE
THE AREPRESENTATIONAL CONCEPTION OF THINKING THOUGHT IN MERLEAU-PONTY AND DELEUZE
One of the first things one notices when reading Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty side by side is that both distinguish between an original and a nonoriginal form of thought: the latter limits itself merely to repeating or applying acquired ideas and argumentations, while the former is truly creative. The concepts and lines of argumentation of original thought cannot be considered secondary with respect to what they express, the preceding ideas, because it is in and through the search for concepts and connections between concepts that the ideas take a new shape. And so, just as Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between speaking speech (parole parlante) and spoken speech (parole parlée), we can formulate this difference as a difference between “thinking thought” and “thought thought”; or, in Deleuzean terms, between “thought” or “learning” and “knowledge” (DR, 204–6). Needless to say, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze believe that only what we are calling “thinking thought” merits the title of philosophy. True or proper philosophy cannot limit itself to offering a survey of already existing ideas, or simply to rearranging them, or changing a detail here, another there.
In what follows I will examine how both authors develop this difference between two kinds of thought. It will become clear that both consider “thought thought” to be grounded upon representation. “Thought thought” is nonoriginal because it understands its activity as representing an already existing (ideal or concrete) reality. Deleuze, for example, introduces eight postulates to describe “thought thought,” the central one being the postulate of representation. He also claims that the “history of the long error is the history of representation” (DR, 374).1 Although Merleau-Ponty never explicitly mentions representation as the object of his criticism, he repeatedly stresses that the “object” of his philosophy, indeed, of (true) philosophy in general, cannot be represented: “What I want to do is restore the world as a meaning of Being absolutely different from the ‘represented,’ that is, as the vertical Being which none of the ‘representations’ exhaust and which all ‘reach,’ the wild Being” (VI, 253).
The idea that thinking thought is not about representing reality goes hand in hand with the idea that the access to reality—traditionally said to happen through perception and thought—cannot happen via representations. In the following sections, we will see how both authors explain this access, and thus what their alternatives for representational thought are. Since this criticism of “thought thought,” or “representational thought,” as I will call it from now on, also implies an attack on a specific conception of philosophy, we should see this chapter as a chapter on the nature of philosophical thought according to Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. However, for an expanded discussion of this topic, I refer the reader to the third chapter, where I situate their views of philosophical thought in the broader history of philosophy.
MERLEAU-PONTY’S CRITICISM OF REPRESENTATIONAL THOUGHT
In order to describe Merleau-Ponty’s theory of thought, we can take his early theory of perception as our point of departure, since “knowledge and the communication with others” continue “our perceptual life even while transforming it” (PriP, 7). Moreover, Merleau-Ponty holds that perception cannot be considered simply a condition of possibility of the act of thinking, since for him perception and thinking share the same basic structure: perception is an “originating knowledge” (PP, 43).2
A central question of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception turns on how to explain the existence of perceptual constants. We perceive the surrounding world as a collection of determinate entities, continuous over space and time. However, the functioning of the senses with which we perceive these entities is not continuous: the eyes make saccadic movements; we blink; the head and body move up and down to the rhythm of our breathing, and so on. Moreover, we always perceive from one specific point of view, determined by the position of our body. How, then, are we to determine which viewpoint reveals the true nature of an object? How are constant perceptual qualities to be explained when de facto there is only a multitude of different sensations? Are these perceptual constants constructions or are they immanent to the perceived world? In other words, is perception a mediated process, or not?
Before delving into these questions, it should be noted that Merleau-Ponty is not interested in the question of whether or not we have access to the world in itself. As this question cannot be answered—it is impossible to say something about the world beyond our experiences—he limits his examination to studying the nature and the condition of our perceptual interaction with the world as we live it, the so-called “lived world.” As an introduction to Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception, it is helpful to give a sketch of the theories from which he distances himself.
Empiricist and Intellectualist Accounts of Perception
Empiricists reduce perception to the possession of sensual qualities impressed upon the body by neutral stimuli. In this view, a perceived object is naught more than the sum of sensual qualities, and perception the function of the senses. However, empiricism explains the fact that we often perceive things or aspects of things for which there is no stimulus available—the back of a vase, for example—by appealing to attention and memory to complement the senses. In the case of an absent stimulus, the actual sensation is associated with a remembered sensation on the basis of resemblance. For example, the vase I see in front of me now is perceived as being similar to the one I saw from behind yesterday, and so I supplement the lacking sensation with the sensation from my memory.
Merleau-Ponty
