Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty - Judith Wambacq Series in Continental Thought

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(méchanceté), for example, cannot simply be explained as failures of true, identical thought. More than that, Deleuze thinks that the negative of thought is not caused by external forces but is part of thought itself. It forms the structure of thought as such because it makes thought possible. In order to indicate that he is talking about the negative of thought as a transcendental feature and not an empirical fact, Deleuze exchanges “error” for “stupidity.”

      The cogitandum, the unthinkable that is at the same time that which must be thought, already indicates that the negative of thought, understood as that which is not thought and cannot be thought, is part of the very structure of thought. Deleuze develops this idea further. How is stupidity possible? “It is possible by virtue of the link between thought and individuation” (DR, 189), an important notion of Deleuze’s ontology, which we will examine in the following chapters. For now, suffice it to say that individuation is used in distinction to specification. Specification refers to the process by which individuals distinguish themselves from one another, whereas individuation refers to a process that precedes and conditions specification. Individuation allows individual qualities or determinations to be formed. As a condition, it is not itself determined or qualified. On the contrary, it “involves fields of fluid intensive factors which no more take the form of an I than of a Self” (DR, 190). Individuation, or the process through which individual determination originates, issues forth from a formless, indeterminate, chaotic ground. During this process of determination, this ground can rise to the surface. More than that, this ground always rises to the surface of forms; individual determination implies that the individual distinguishes itself from the ground out of which it originates, without, however, being able to completely detach itself from it. Hence, the distinction between the ground and the individual is never a complete separation. This indeterminate ground is a threat to the individual and to every form in the sense that it can suddenly manifest itself and unsettle all determination or form. This is the moment when hideousness, staggering chaos, and an absolute exterior shine through the human face, determined forms, and the familiar. Stupidity, then, “is neither the ground nor the individual, but rather this relation in which individuation brings the ground to the surface without being able to give it form” (DR, 190). In this sense, stupidity is the “highest finality of thought” (DR, 193). As the moment in which determinations lose stability, such that the faculties are brought to confront their limits and are forced to create something new, stupidity “constitutes the greatest weakness of thought, but also the source of its highest power in that which forces it to think” (DR, 345).

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      According to Deleuze, the eight postulates that describe the different characteristics of representational thought manifest a confusion of empirical facts and transcendental features. More specifically, 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).

      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

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