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

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the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences of Ghent University for its institutional and financial support; Marijke de Waal for her dietary suggestions that allowed me to get through the last phase of writing the book; my family (Dirk, Dido, Felix, Johan, Jeanine, Freek, Peggy, Roza, and Lambert); and my friends (Ellen especially) for their moral support and love.

      ABBREVIATIONS

      DELEUZE

CC Essays Critical and Clinical. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. London: Verso, 1998.
D Dialogues. Coauthored with Claire Parnet. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
DI Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Michael Taormina. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004.
DR Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 2004.
F Foucault. Translated and edited by Seán Hand. London: Athlone Press, 1988.
FBLS Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum, 2003.
FLB The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. London: Continuum, 2006.
LS The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. London: Continuum, 2004.
MI Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press, 1986.
NP Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
PS Proust and Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Continuum, 2008.
TI Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London; Continuum, 2005.
TP A Thousand Plateaus. Vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Co-authored with Félix Guattari. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004.
WP What Is Philosophy? Coauthored with Félix Guattari. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

      MERLEAU-PONTY

EM “Ontology and Painting: Eye and Mind,” by Galen A. Johnson. In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, translated and edited by Michael B. Smith, 35–58. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993.
MSME Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression: Cours au Collège de France; Notes, 1953. Edited by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert and Stefan Kristensen. Geneva: MetisPresses, 2011.
NC Notes de cours, 1959–1961. Edited by Stéphanie Ménasé. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.
PP Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.
PriP The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Translated by James M. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964.
PW The Prose of the World. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by John O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
S Signs. Translated by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964.
SB The Structure of Behavior. Translated by Alden L. Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.
SNS Sense and Non-Sense. Translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964.
TLCF Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, 1952–1960. Translated by John O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
VI The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

      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.

      Still, it is possible to invoke another philosophical

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