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

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between both thinkers. In one of the interviews in A Winter’s Journey, Paul Virilio (1997, 42) comments that Deleuze greatly appreciated Merleau-Ponty’s last book, The Visible and the Invisible. And there is also a counterargument for the different backgrounds thesis: it is true that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud were a great inspiration to those who in the Anglophone world are called the “critical thinkers,” Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault. But they looked to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in their efforts to find answers to problems raised, among others, by phenomenologists. As such, these critical thinkers can be said to have been inspired by phenomenology. I would not go as far as Alain Beaulieu (2004, 11), who claims that phenomenology is the background against which all Deleuzean concepts are intelligible. It seems to me that this background is more diverse than that, and includes Neoplatonism, Leibniz, and Kant at least—but phenomenology is most certainly a part of it.

      The most important argument in favor of the resonance between both thinkers must be philosophical. What would such an argument be? In general, I believe both thinkers can be brought together around the same shared transcendental project. Both thinkers examine the conditions of thought, which is to say that they are not motivated by a strictly epistemological question. Moreover, their primary interests are not the empirical causes of thought: they do not spend much time discussing, for example, the rules according to which thought functions, or should function, if it is to attain truth. To the extent that the question is raised at all, it is as part and parcel of the examination of the implications of their transcendental projects. Their central question turns on what must be presupposed in order for such a phenomenon as thinking to be possible.

      These two transcendental projects share the fact that they situate the condition of thought in the empirical: their transcendental projects are both guided by immanence. One ontological consequence of this is that if the condition is to be situated within the conditioned, the condition cannot belong to a being that is fundamentally different from the being of the conditioned. Thus, Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty reject the classical conception of the transcendental condition and the dualism inherent to it: the condition can no longer be associated with the perfect, the infinite, the unchangeable, or the original; nor can it continue to be pitted against the imperfect, finite, changeable, and secondary character of the conditioned. Both thinkers exchange this dualism in favor of one immanent being, a being without hierarchy and fundamental differences, that is, differences in being.

      Moreover, both understand the relation between the condition and the conditioned as a relation of expression: the essence, which is how the condition is often understood, is expressed by or in the conditioned. As we will see, this suggests that the ontological primacy of the condition is complemented by the epistemological primacy of the conditioned, and also that the ontological power is distributed over the condition and the conditioned.

      Neither Deleuze nor Merleau-Ponty sees this immanence of being as entailing the annihilation of difference. This is well-known in Deleuze’s case—he is, after all, the thinker of difference—but it applies just as much, I hope to show, to Merleau-Ponty. Much of this book is in fact devoted to an examination of how Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty each try to explain how this immanence is not in contradiction with difference. That examination will take us through their differential understanding of the condition as well as through their descriptions of how differently conditioned things are generated from the condition.

      I am very aware that investigating the resonances between two different systems of thought can be risky. One might be all too quickly tempted to see analogies that, on a deeper level, do not necessarily hold. I have tried to avoid this trap by being especially careful not to describe the theories of the one philosopher in the idiom of the other, as that would evidently suggest a false analogy. In addition, I pay particular attention to the irreconcilable elements in their systems. There is no denying, for example, that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology focuses more on immanence than, as is the case with Deleuze, on difference. Their styles are also quite different: Merleau-Ponty’s writing is soft and poetic, especially when compared to Deleuze’s more dry and polemical prose. It remains to be seen, though, whether such differences in focus and style encompass also a more substantive difference. Last, I try to avoid the trap set by the superficial analogies by comparing the problems to which Deleuze’s and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies are an answer.

      Risky as the examination of how these two theories communicate may be, the undertaking is nevertheless necessary, for this is the only way to shed new light on the reach and scope of these theories. How does a reading of Merleau-Ponty through a Deleuzean lens, and vice versa, offer new perspectives on both theories? If we take Deleuze’s requirements for a good transcendental philosophy, namely, immanence and difference, as a starting point for a reading of Merleau-Ponty, we are immediately led away from the standard presentation of Merleau-Ponty as the phenomenologist of the body. Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception and of the central role of the body therein can, in this way, be seen as propaedeutic for the theory he will develop toward the 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.

      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

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