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exteriority. Merleau-Ponty, for example, stresses the fact that we cannot coincide with the object of our thought, that there will always be something ungraspable about the object. Deleuze, for his part, explains the sign’s exteriority in terms of its disorienting effect on our thought and in terms of the fact that it is always displaced with respect to itself. In contrast to Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze manages thus to explain why the object of thought cannot be fully captured: because sense is always displaced with respect to itself; because sense is determined by the difference between the series it brings together, it cannot be grasped by one word or image. It is true that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of field points to the same idea, in which something is defined by its differences from other elements rather than by its identity, but Merleau-Ponty never explicitly considers this to be the reason for the exteriority of the object of thought. I will come back to this comparison in the second chapter and in the chapter on structuralism. With the idea of the exteriority of the object of thought, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze clearly distance themselves from the Cartesian description of thought, where thought has divine characteristics: it itself constitutes what is to be thought. As a result, nothing exists outside thought. It is all-encompassing.

      What are we to do, then, with Merleau-Ponty’s acceptance of Descartes’s idea that thought bears in itself the sketch of its own object? How is Merleau-Ponty’s idea that we are always already familiar with existence to be reconciled with the exteriority of the object of thought? Can we find something similar in Deleuze, and, if so, how does he solve this apparent contradiction? Before examining the last question, it is important to sketch out the context of this idea, which Merleau-Ponty takes over from Descartes. As we will see, this context is quite compatible with some of Deleuze’s ideas concerning sound thought.

      Merleau-Ponty’s idea of thought’s familiarity with its object primarily needs to be understood in contrast with the idea that thought is about reproducing essences that are given, essences that precede thought. According to Merleau-Ponty, thought has nothing to do with re-presentation, but with presentation or creation.¹⁵ Because, in a sense, thought creates its own object, it can be said to be familiar with it. Deleuze agrees with this view of thought as nonrepresentational and creative.¹⁶ He describes thinking as the creation of problems, rather than the solving of problems, as the production of truth rather than its discovery. Moreover, just as Merleau-Ponty describes the relation between thought and the ground/object of thought as a relation of Fundierung, which implies that the ground of thought needs to be expressed by thought to manifest itself, Deleuze thinks that the sense implied in the sign needs to be explicated to keep sense from being an empty concept. Hence, both authors replace the classical understanding of a grounding 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

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