What Is an Image of Thought?

So what is an “image of thought”? Simply put, it is what philosophy has always presupposed at the beginning of the act of thinking. More precisely, the image of thought concerns the problem of presupposition in philosophy—that is, the presupposition of an image that serves as a fundamental ground for what is called thinking to appear. What kind of image is to be deduced from thought? How can thinking be determined by the image, and where does image first acquire its power over thought—that is, to induce what is called “thinking” to actually happen? Taken together, these questions pose a dilemma that philosophy, even up to its contemporary moment, has been unable to resolve: at the very moment that we begin to think, we must have already presupposed an idea of what is called thinking. From the Greek etymology, an idea (eidos) is first of all an image (eidelon). In other words, I must already have an idea of what thinking looks like in order to recognize my own subjective process, as distinct from the processes of memory and perception, and then to be able to communicate a sign of this process to others in a form that corresponds to their own image as well. Intrinsically, therefore, thinking is already bound up with an image that, in turn, provides the conditions for producing the signs of recognition and the expression of thinking.

Deleuze describes this problem in the following way: “We live with a particular image of thought, that is to say, before we begin to think, we have a vague idea of what it means to think, its means and its ends.”1 If this statement appears tautological or circular, this is because it is the circle that modern philosophy has been trying to escape from since Descartes, who first posed this circular nature of the image of thought as a fundamental problem for philosophy to resolve. In other words, with Descartes, thinking begins with the consciousness of this problem and, at the same time, with a desire to rectify this indeterminate and circular relationship by inventing a method for selecting its own pre-philosophical image in place of a “vague idea of what it means to think.” Summarizing Deleuze’s early argument from Difference and Repetition (1968), although classical philosophy resolved this problem by presupposing an image of thought that is identified with common sense (“what everyone knows”), or by proposing a natural representation of what it means to think (cogitatio natura universalis), both of these solutions exposed the philosopher’s activity as being grounded on nothing more than opinion (doxa), and more generally on a certain order of representation that formally qualified as thinking without predetermining its ends or its contents (i.e., the problem of rationalism). Eventually this led to the realization that, following Descartes, philosophy could not justify its image as being sufficiently grounded, or that, following Hume, thinking itself could be identified only as a higher form of Habit and therefore could not be grounded in Reason. Both insights, however, will turn out to provide the necessary conditions for modern philosophy, following Kant, to become truly “critical” of its own image of thought or, following Hegel, to arrange all the previous images of thought in a dialectical progression that leads up to the contemporary moment where the circular nature of the relationship between idea and image is grounded in the movement of Ideology. In this sense, we might understand Deleuze’s own formulation of the problem of the image of thought to belong to this same tradition of modern philosophy; consequently, in his search for a new image of thought, one whose genesis is grasped in the act of thinking itself, Deleuze is not that different from other contemporary philosophers (especially Heidegger). In fact, almost all can be united around the same refrain: “Yes, what we are looking for these days is a new image of the act of thought, its functioning, its genesis in thought itself.”2

But how does one approach the question of thinking without already giving it an image? In other words, how does one conceptualize thought without providing it with an image that already determines it in advance, even without determining its ends? Here one might immediately notice the recourse to temporal reference to the future, or to a spatial reference to a notion of exteriority, to an image of thought that is in both senses “outside” the present of consciousness, as a means of solving this problem by establishing a new ground upon which the image appears in relation to the “unthought,” the “yet to be thought,” or in relation to those inert forms of being “that do not think.” For example, this is the solution offered by Heidegger, and in a different sense by Foucault in The Order of Things (1966), as the image of thought that determines the conditions of a distinctly “modern cogito.”

In this form, the cogito will not therefore be the sudden illuminating discovery that all thought is thought, but the constantly renewed interrogation as to how thought can reside elsewhere than here and yet be very close to itself; how it can be in the forms of non-thinking.3

But, then, this manner of solving the problem of image and tradition introduces a new problem, which of course is the problem of repetition itself, or as Deleuze says, “Repetition In-Itself.” For even the invocation of the “unthought” does not cause philosophy to suddenly leap outside the closed circle of thinking, but merely restates the same problem, this time replacing the image of common sense, or the “vague idea of what it means to think,” with “a dimension where thought addresses the unthought and articulates itself upon it.”4 Consequently, if all thinking is already repetition and is helpless to step outside this vicious circle of virtual image and actual expression of thinking, then how does one begin to think without a predetermined image, or rather, how does one truly begin to think at all? The answer to this question is both too simple and too tortuous, at the same time, which is why it still remains unresolved by contemporary philosophy today. In the very opening of his reflections on this problem, in 1968, Deleuze comes to the conclusion “[that] there is no true beginning in philosophy, or rather that the true philosophical beginning, Difference, is in-itself already Repetition.”

For if it is a question of rediscovering at the end what was there in the beginning, if it is a question of recognizing, bringing to light or making explicit what is at first merely conceptual and abstract, what was already known implicitly without concepts—whatever the complexity of this process, whatever the apparent differences in the procedure or method—the fact remains that all this is still too simple, and that this circle is truly not yet tortuous enough. Instead, the circular image of the image of thought would reveal that philosophy is truly powerless to begin, or authentically to repeat.5

In the same year as the publication of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze already comments on a change that is taking place in the world that directly corresponds to the change of the image of thought in modern philosophy. In an interview for Lettres françaises, later titled “On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought,” Deleuze exclaims: “Obviously, no-one really believes any more in the I, the Self, in individual characters or persons. . . . Individuation is no longer enclosed in a word. Singularity is no longer enclosed in an individual.”6 In place of these forms, Deleuze remarks, “what we’re uncovering right now, in my opinion, is a world packed with impersonal individuations, or even pre-individual singularities.”7 In other words, the traditional notion of the subject is no longer seen as a vessel or an envelope that can contain these two events: individuation takes place below or before the consciousness of a subject who thinks, feels, perceives, wills, or desires; the world is no longer bounded by a horizon, but rather is constituted by events and singularities that unfold to infinity, bordering chaos. Deleuze frequently employs the poetic formula from Rimbaud to underline the above situation and its significance for both modern literature and philosophy: “I is an Other” (Je est un Autre).

But where is Deleuze’s evidence for the statement “Obviously, no-one believes any more in the I, the Self . . .”? This is not, I would argue, some joyful refrain of Nietzschean exuberance, but rather is simply based on an empirical observation of what artists and writers, for the most part, were already doing in their own domains. In other words, Deleuze is simply observing things and states of affairs that are already happening on the ground, so to speak, in order to draw the conclusion that “no one really believes.” What was happening? In the domain of literary works, writers and poets were already breaking with earlier forms and genres in an intensive period of experimentation to discover new possibilities of expression that were both highly artificial and yet more approximate to “real experience.” Here we might think of the later works of Beckett, or the writers of the Nouveau Roman to whom Deleuze is referring at this moment: “The new novelists talk of nothing else: they give voice to these non-personal individuations, these non-individual singularities.”8 In Beckett’s novels, for example, the representation of character (Molloy) is gradually dissolved until it assumes the form of a mouth speaking inside a barrel (The Unnamable); throughout the course of this dissolution, moreover, we witness fragments flying off that become individuals, characters that reproduce other characters that they mistake either for their own children or for themselves at a moment that they cannot remember; characters that have only a vague recollection that they are the same person who has been speaking all along. The form and content of the narrative are overcome by an interminable repetition until we witness only a voice that speaks incessantly, but in this way Beckett makes heard an “I” reduced to an automaton, to purely the habit of saying “I,” with no need for eyes or ears, or even a body, to persist in its strangely impersonal life.

Finally, the gesture of “painting a canvas” in the modern period has given way to “tearing or ripping,” “pasting,” “spraying”—activities that belong to a different theory of perception and that can take place only in a violence performed upon the perceived or “the consciousness of the given.” The form of sensibility that the modern artwork embodies presupposes certain violence, and the perception of the artwork cannot exist alongside the common and quotidian perceptions that constitute the everyday; instead it enters into battle with the latter in order to destroy or to “work over” (similar to the function of the dream work) the stock and clichéd sensibility. In other words, all perception must be “cut up,” “ripped open,” “destroyed and then reconstructed.” The difference between this determination of the artwork and the classical one is that the material of perception is no longer offered a “natural” or independent perspective that the artist simply amplifies and resonates with in order to transform it into a style of a personality or genius. Rather, the material of perception is already an interpretation of a dominant perspective that organizes and directs the senses and assembles the range of materials for expression. The formal procedures available to the artist at this stage are as infinite as the materials themselves; each material component has a certain range of formal properties (density, color, texture, pliability, etc.) that determine its possibilities for expression. For example, paper has certain possibilities that are absent in plaster but present in cloth; ink expresses certain attributes (the line, for instance) that metamorphose in pastel or watercolors, and even more in collage, mixed media, or metal. This heteronomy with which art is said to occupy itself—in order to draw from it its materials, its textures, its color, its figures—bears the conditions of the production of the modern artwork.

At the time when Deleuze was referring to these formal discoveries that were happening in the fields of modern literature, theatre, and painting (and, by extension, in the other modern art forms as well, such as in modern cinema, which Deleuze will make central to the philosophical search for a new image of thought in the 1980s), there was also a generally held belief that the innovation of these forms would have a transformative effect in other cultural domains, particularly in the region of philosophy, where the image of thought no longer resembles its natural presupposition by the empirical ego. However, at precisely this very same moment Deleuze also observes that philosophy still lags behind these other domains, which have undergone progressive technical and formal transformations, if not continual revolution, and express a greater openness to experimentation in the modern period. Although there may have been similar innovations taking place in the philosophy of this same period, they had little effect in revolutionizing the greater part of the Western philosophical tradition, in part because these innovations were mostly relegated to minor considerations of “style” and thus did not fundamentally transform the dominant image of thought presupposed by traditional notions of thinking and ideas of “common sense.” In this context we might understand the special importance that Deleuze at this point ascribes to the new relationship with nonphilosophy, one in which philosophy still lags behind and now attempts to infuse itself with new technical methods and, most importantly, new experimental procedures of expression.

“What are we doing in philosophy today?” Deleuze asks the same question in the preface to Difference and Repetition in 1968 and then again (with Guattari) more than twenty years later in 1991 in the opening to What Is Philosophy? On both occasions, the answer is remarkably similar. In 1968 Deleuze responds: “We’re looking for ‘vitality.’ Even psychoanalysis needs to address certain ‘vitality’ in the patient, which the patient has lost, but which the analyst has lost, too. Philosophical vitality is not much different, nor is political vitality.”9 This term has led to many mistaken assumptions that Deleuze was addressing here a traditional notion of philosophical vitalism (Lebensphilosophie), but Deleuze was referring to something else when he speaks about “vitality” in relation to the “uncovering of a world of pre-individual, impersonal singularities” in place of a world that was occupied by Individuals and Persons.

One explanation would pertain to a generalized revolt on the part of a younger generation of philosophers against the classical forms of academic philosophy, especially in France and Germany, which has often gone under the tricolored banners of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. As a result of these “new sciences of Man,” the world that was formerly occupied by individuals and persons was being determined from elsewhere, either from below in the cellar of Structure (whether the idea of structure is represented by Language, the unconscious, or the division of labor in capitalist societies) or in “things themselves.” In the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, for example, consciousness is reduced to a luminescent flesh that spreads over objects and subjects to the degree that the distinction between subject and object is no longer perceptible and constitutes the infinitesimal point of a Fold, or of multiple folds that do not line up on a single surface or volume (a world). The previous relationship in which the subject stood apart and over against a world of objects, which the subject represented to itself in conscious thought, is gradually replaced by a world that emerges only in a mottled patchwork and by a subject that was incapable of assembling this patchwork into a totality—in other words, by the presence of a reality that was immanent to experience, but yet that thought was not capable of attaining in the form of conscious representation. In place of presupposing a thought that was capable of representing the empirical I, or the Self, philosophy began to presuppose a plane of immanence that the subject could not occupy. In short, philosophy changed concepts many times in order to designate this plane, or according to Deleuze’s phrase, it changed “plans of immanence.” Nevertheless, as a result the image of thought presupposed by contemporary philosophy becomes differentiated to a degree that it can no longer be called thinking in the traditional sense, which will have profound implications for recognizing the genre of philosophy itself in the postmodern period, which gets mixed up and begins looking more like literature or conceptual art. Eventually this discovery leads to a period of intense experimentation lasting through the end of the 1970s, and certainly Deleuze and Guattari’s works from this period can be seen to belong to this moment. As Deleuze remarks, “it’s a confused and rich period.”10

Perhaps another way of addressing this confusion is to say that the contemporary philosophy could no longer identify the act of thinking with its own previous images of thought. On the one hand, as I have recounted above, this led to the most intensive phase of historicism whereby philosophy sought either to organize all these images in a systematic science of Ideology, as in the case of Hegel, or, following Heidegger, to lay bare what remains “unthought” in each epochal image and thereby to bring this history to a close with the pronouncement that “the most thought provoking thing is that we are still not yet thinking.”11 On the other hand, this also led to a period that was characterized by subjectivism and even extreme solipsism, as Deleuze often remarks, as if at the close of its modern period philosophy could not remain content with only placing in doubt all of its external presuppositions, following Descartes, but in its contemporary moment entered into the most dangerous game where it was forced to call into question—or, at least, suspend under a form of radical skepsis—most of its subjective presuppositions as well, including the “will to truth” and the innate goodwill of the thinker, exposing thought to an experience that was often compared to madness, as exemplified by Artaud and Blanchot, or to limit-experiences of amnesia and aphasia as Deleuze and Guattari themselves recall in the beginning of What Is Philosophy?12

As an example of the latter, I will briefly refer again to Heidegger as a philosopher at the close of this tradition of post-Kantian critical philosophy who brought the problem of the “image of thought,” or generally the problem of presupposition, from a vague idea of what it means to think, to its most extreme formulation. According to Heidegger’s earlier formula, in fact, “the image of thought” was actually forgotten long ago, since the early Greeks, and by every philosopher since Descartes who mistook this image for a subject of representation. Heidegger’s late philosophy further dramatizes the cause of this confusion, defined poetically as a fundamental forgetting of an original image of thought and of the autochthonous subjective identity of the thinker who as a foreigner and an emigrant has lost his language and discovers himself far from his native land. Consequently, he sets out in his own philosophy to reorient the highest task of the philosopher as the remembering and recollection of this original image, and in the late meditations on poetry, in particular, to search for “hints and clues” of this original image in the saying (Sagen) of certain poets. Of course, Heidegger turned to only a small number of German poets (especially Hölderlin), as if to relocate the original wellspring of philosophy, that is, to institute a new image of thought and to carve out a plan of immanence, on his native German soil.13

The example of Heidegger offers us only one expression of the confusion and disorientation that leads directly to a new relationship between philosophy and nonphilosophy. There are many other examples, including Wittgenstein, that do not necessarily lead through poetry, literature, or the creative arts but could be said to participate in the same task of discovering a renewed or more essential image of thought through the analysis of ordinary language. In contrast to Heidegger, who constitutes an important predecessor for other contemporaries such as Derrida, Deleuze does not define the cause of confusion as the forgetting of a more original and authentic image of thought. Although it is useful fiction to propose that the modern philosopher would wake up one day to discover that he or she no longer knows what it means to think and could no longer simply presuppose an earlier image of thought, the cause for Deleuze will be neither the forgetting of an autochthonous image nor the long history of “Error” in which thinking goes astray. Instead, Deleuze often refers to “a violent encounter” that strikes against both the objective and the subjective conditions of thought itself, and that, according to another frequent refrain, represents the force of a shock that causes the former faculties to undergo a violent rearrangement: “Discord of the faculties, chain of force and function along which each confronts its limit, receiving from (or communicating to) the other only a violence which brings it face to face with its own element, as though with its disappearance or its perfection.”14 Here we find a completely different account of “what we are doing today” than we find in the post-Heideggerian tradition of phenomenological deconstruction of the History of Metaphysics, one that finds the true source of the confusion not in the long history of an Error, nor in the infinite deferral or delay of an original source, but rather in a change in the very nature of immanence itself. In Deleuze’s philosophy, this confusion is affirmed as a rich source of possibilities for a new image of thought and, thus, as the condition of a search for a new manner of “doing philosophy” in a contemporary sense.

To summarize our brief survey of the problem of the image of thought, although contemporary philosophy continues to presuppose an image of thought, this image has threatened to become formless and chaotic and exhibits a tendency to undo any representation in the very moment it is posited.15 This happens because of the infinite speed at which thoughts tend to fly off and become too abstract, or fail to correspond to the interiority of the object-world, or by means of an infinitesimal difference that no longer relates the subject to an identity, a difference that was discovered to belong to the very order of Representation itself. This would be the basis for Derrida’s great project of deconstruction; the concept of différance (the amalgamation of ontological difference and Structuralist differentiation) has become the common presupposition of a new image of thought that belongs to a certain tradition of post-Kantian critical philosophy, the recurrent features of which have been an obsessive concern over the limits of representation and the critique of subjectivity (“anti-psychologism”), an allergic reaction to modern science and technology in the Heideggerian phase, and an ethical comportment toward otherness in an anxious reflection that tears away any remaining subjective presuppositions belonging to the natural cogito. The main objective of this tradition has been to expose the limits of all representational systems by a regressive procedure of critical reason that leads them into a state of crisis as an anticipatory step to their radical reconstruction; the second objective is to lay bare all naive and subjectivist constructions of identity, which leads to the introduction of difference from the critical perspectives of “the inert network of what does not think” (especially language, or Structure), or from an anthropological expression of alterity, as exhibited in the recent critical perspectives surrounding the animal and the posthuman. As early as 1966, Foucault already saw this movement toward the periphery of being as the final exhaustion of the last vestiges of “Humanism” belonging to the previous tradition of philosophy, after Kant, but also as resulting from the “shifted function” in phenomenology of the modern cogito, which points no longer to an apodictic existence of the being that thinks but instead to all the manners in which thought is grounded on the primacy of the multiple forms of Error.

This is why phenomenology has never been able to exorcise its insidious kinship, its simultaneously promising and threatening proximity, to the empirical analysis of man; this is also why, although it was inaugurated by a reduction to the cogito, it has always been led to questions, to the question of ontology. The phenomenological project continually resolves itself, before our eyes, into a description—empirical despite itself—of actual experience, and into an ontology of the unthought that automatically short-circuits the primacy of the “I think.”16

The obvious shortcomings of this tradition of post-Kantian philosophy, particularly deconstructive phenomenology, have been found in the fact that the anticipated radical phase of construction has never become a positive event as such, and the discovery of new possibilities for subjectivity has been through a glass darkly. In other words, the philosophies of this tradition have never fully been able to depart from a critical (or deconstructive) phase of “de-centering”; as a result, the future is posited as a static and essentially “empty form of time,” often accompanied by a highly speculative image of the event itself as the undetermined and the ungrounded, hence “radical,” commencement of an entirely new ontological order. In short, we have merely replaced one metaphysics with another, namely, a metaphysics of difference. Moreover, we have supplanted the universal pretensions of the Kantian Subject with an increasing number of new radical subjectivisms. What, after all, is the recent turn to the animal (or to the nakedness of Zoē itself) if not yet another in a series of attempts to “de-center the metaphysics of the Western [human] subject” that was already preprogrammed by this tradition of radical critique (epokhē)?

Today, it is the fundamental presupposition of difference as such that unites most postmodern philosophies, all of which now stand on the precipice of this founding presupposition and new dogmatic image of thought. In other words, these days everyone knows that difference is a common name for that which causes us to think, that the vague idea of difference is what gives food for thought, although this presupposition does not provide any reassurance with regard to whether (or not) we are still not yet thinking. In other words, the concept of difference has grown stale and no longer even provides us with an image sufficient to shock us out of our usual furrows of thought. Deleuze cautions, “We have no reason to take pride in this [new] image of thought, which involves much suffering without glory and indicates the degrees to which thinking has become more difficult: immanence.”17 But what is immanence? Is this just a new, perhaps more contemporaneous, name for difference? Although my answer will be, in some sense, affirmative, we have already been misled by posing the question of immanence in the form of a new concept. Deleuze and Guattari write, on the contrary, “The plane of immanence is not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought, the image of thought that gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought.”18

Although Deleuze and Guattari also claim that philosophers place their signatures on the concepts they have created, it naturally follows from the above statement that, because “immanence” is not a concept, it cannot be determined as an exclusive feature of Deleuze’s philosophy.19 It stands for something else, something that preexists the particular concepts that come to occupy it but that nevertheless cannot be said to actually exist outside of these concepts that presuppose it and that are described as its “inseparable variations.”20 This would serve as a word of caution to the discussions of immanence that are taking place in many circles today: the plane of immanence is not to be confused with the concept that is often spoken about currently in academic debates where Deleuze’s philosophy is contrasted with that of some other philosopher on the basis of “the concept of immanence.” It is strange to think, moreover, that philosophy had to wait for Deleuze to discover the idea of immanence itself, as if it had not been there all along, simply even hiding under another term like Substance, God, World, Being, or the One. Against this view I would argue, on the contrary, that the turn to the problem of immanence in the last works is a great and unifying gesture on Deleuze’s part, one that allows several modern philosophical approaches to share the same presupposition as an image of thought, the same “ground” or “pre-philosophical image” upon which contemporary philosophy depends in the creation of new concepts, as if to partition the same image of thought according to different “diagrammatic features” on a shared plane. In other words, the different philosophical approaches represented by often opposing methods can be understood as united in an attempt to discover a new image of thought. This also implies that the problem of immanence should not be seen as an exclusive feature of Deleuze’s thought to be used in setting his philosophy up in opposition to other approaches, as has so often been done. Deleuze himself already forewarns us against this kind of disciplinary model of the “original thinker”: “Those who do not renew the image of thought are not philosophers but functionaries who, enjoying a ready-made thought, are not even conscious of the problem and are unaware even of the efforts of those they claim to take as their models.”21

In the secondary commentary on Deleuze, regardless, there has been a noticeable tendency to lionize Deleuze as an absolutely singular thinker among his generation, without peer or influence and with a unique choice of subjects. In many respects this is a myth fabricated by those who prefer not to see that many topics were, in fact, quite unremarkable—at least, I would argue, prior to his encounter with Guattari. For example, many French philosophers of the same generation had something to say on Proust, following the critical influences of Benjamin, Blanchot, Genette, and Ricardou; they had even more to say on Artaud, Kafka, Sade, and Beckett. Likewise, Deleuze’s thesis on Hume (which became his first major book in 1953) can be partly explained by the fact that selections from Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature appeared in the English-language oral explication of the doctoral exam seventeen times between 1937 and 1958, and thus was regularly part of the concours in preparation for the exam.22 (In 1960–64, Derrida also lectured on Hume at the Sorbonne, where he taught “general philosophy and logic.”)23 Though Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) was the first book to appear on the philosopher in postwar France, and was thought to have ignited the commentary on Nietzsche during the 1960s, Alan Schrift suggests that a knowledge of French academic practices might offer another explanation for this explosion: “On the Genealogy of Morals appears on the reading list of the aggregation de philosophie—the annual examination that must be passed by anyone hoping for an academic career in philosophy—in 1958, the first time his work appears on that examination’s reading list in over 30 years.”24 Contrary to the usual portraits of Deleuze as an “untimely philosopher” (á la Nietzsche and Emerson), a portrait that he sometimes indulges in himself in interviews and video séances, the above examples might also portray a more realistic or pragmatic picture of a brilliant “professor” who chooses as his major subjects authors that are just being instituted within the educational apparatus, in part because this gives him a unique vantage from which to influence younger generations and thus direct the future of the academic discipline of philosophy in France.25

Even concerning the originality of Difference and Repetition, which Deleuze has famously described as his first “autonomous work of philosophy,” in an early interview coinciding with its publication Deleuze himself confesses that the motive for writing a systematic study of the concepts of difference and repetition was not without extrinsic influence. In fact, he describes it as absolutely unoriginal: “Yes, I finished the book—on repetition and difference (they’re actually the same thing) as the actual categories of our thought. . . . These themes must mean something if philosophers and novelists keep circling around them. . . . So why not join in?”26 Of course, the themes of difference and repetition are present in most philosophies of this period, and following Deleuze and Guattari’s own terms, we can say that it was the concept of difference that instituted a plan of immanence for many postmodern philosophies, all of which sought to lay claim to the concept in an intense rivalry or antagonism. For example, we also have Derrida’s great works Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, which were written during the same period as Difference and Repetition, even though Derrida was often viewed as a younger contemporary. In these works, the concept of difference is instituted on a plane that is defined by “the closure of Western Metaphysics,” whereby the earlier image of thought that belonged generally to a logocentric tradition of philosophy since the Greeks is exhausted and opened to an infinite differentiation brought about by modern systems of representation, at which point the possibility of philosophical thinking gets either lost or, worse, trapped by its own powers of dissimulation. Of course, in contrast to Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari will not speak of History, but only of geological movements.

Everything I have said above does not detract in the least from the significance of Deleuze’s own search for a new image of thought. Of course, in each of the examples above there are singular variations that Deleuze introduces into his reading of each of the philosophers and writers he chooses to take up—and I will not speak here of his infamous method of reproduction defined as “buggery” (encoulage)—and many of his choices are made to serve the goal of what he already defines in Difference and Repetition as “anti-philosophy.”27 But then, on its own this term explains nothing, but instead needs to be explained. In fact, it only heightens the need to determine the criteria by which one can say when a philosopher goes “against the grain,” or has provided a new image that has changed what it means to think, or has merely changed direction and reoriented the possibility for the discipline of philosophy, even if only to revitalize the belief that philosophy still has a future!

Returning to our main theme, the problem of presupposition, in order to separate the pre-philosophical image of thought, namely, the plane of immanence, from its contingent and historical features (which function like deeply held opinions that can change over time), amounts to proposing something that belongs to thought “by a kind of right!”28 According to Deleuze and Guattari, what belongs rightfully to thinking is movement, but a movement of a very particular kind—a movement toward infinity. “Thought demands only ‘movement’ that can be carried to infinity.”29 This movement neither presupposes spatiotemporal coordinates, nor a subject nor even a transcendental subject as in Kant. Thus, they write, “‘to orient oneself in thought’ implies neither objective reference point nor moving object that experiences itself as a subject and that, as such, strives for or needs the infinite.”30 As I will return to discuss in the Conclusion, this specific movement is grasped in its purest form in the Bergsonian concept of philosophical intuition, closely approximating the immediate and mystical knowledge of the universe, but, according to its modern scientific image, is mapped onto the function of the brain. This is why philosophy needs nonphilosophy today, and particularly a contemporary scientific knowledge of the brain, even though contemporary philosophy does not merely download and install this knowledge like a program running on a computer, as if this new knowledge suddenly forfeits its right to create its own concepts—this would not be called philosophy. According to Deleuze and Guattari’s last work, therefore, philosophy truly begins to become philosophy only by presupposing, and first of all as an image, a pre-philosophical or even nonphilosophical intuition of “One-All” that, nevertheless, does not exist outside of philosophy. Thus, in answer to the question “What is philosophy?” Deleuze and Guattari propose that philosophy be defined, at any given moment historically, by the specific and internal nature of this first presupposition.

Of course, in the history of philosophy there have been many presuppositions: For Descartes, it is a matter of a subjective understanding implicitly presupposed by the “I think” as first concept; in Plato, it is a virtual image of an already-thought [or idea] that doubles every actual concept. Heidegger invokes a “pre-ontological understanding of Being,” a “pre-conceptual” [existential] understanding that seems to imply the grasp of a substance of being in relationship with a predisposition of thought.31

As in all the above examples, however, the image of what is presupposed is not merely deduced from a preexisting plane of images that represent the infinite power of the One-All; in each case the philosopher must first create a concept that functions to orient thinking “toward” this pre-philosophical intuition that its concepts will “constantly develop through slight differences in intensity.”32 Nonetheless, following both Leibniz and Bergson, Deleuze also points out that inevitably the power of philosophical creation has never been equal to the task of grasping the power of the original intuition in its concept. What inevitably occurs, as in all the cases above, is that the concept loses its intensity and can no longer develop or remain consistent with the original intuition. It loses touch with the plane of immanence, which begins to dissipate once more into chaos. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari write, “the problem of philosophy is to acquire a consistency without losing the infinite into which thought plunges itself (in this respect chaos has as much a mental as a physical existence).”33 But then, this refers back to the problem concerning difference as an intensive sign. Simply put, today we have grown indifferent to its sign. It fails to shock or provoke us into the act of thinking. Merely replacing the concepts of difference and repetition with a concept of immanence will not help matters much, even though we might understand this positively in this sense as an attempt to revive and stimulate philosophy again—as Deleuze said earlier on, to “revive the patient” and make philosophy more vital again! Consequently, this is how I understand the effect of the discussions today of immanence as a first concept, which now stands for the originary intuition of the power of One-All, and most of these discussions can be viewed generously as attempts at “orienting” thinking toward a region of the problem again and, at the same time, as efforts engaged in instituting a new plan for philosophy.

But how does one begin to orient thinking today in a situation of generalized confusion and disorientation? At this point I turn to the answer given by Deleuze and Guattari to the earlier question: “What are we doing in philosophy today?” Again, the answer that they give in 1991 is the same as the one given by Deleuze in 1968—“We are looking for vitality!” Although here vitality is defined as the creative art of “forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.”34 And yet it also appears that the situation has only grown more desperate over the past twenty years and Deleuze and Guattari must admit that philosophy today can no longer even lay “a rightful claim” to the concept of creation, which now belongs to the field of conceptual art and to the technical knowledge of marketing and modern advertising. This is not to say that philosophy is no longer creative, but instead it has been encumbered by too much history, which slows it down and defines a movement that is no longer carried to infinity. What is called “philosophy” today is more like a slow-motion shot in the golden days of cinema, an expressionist canvas hanging in the Louvre, an absolute book that has become bloated by too much interpretation. Put differently, judged as an art of creating new concepts (of perception, affection, memory, and consciousness), “modern philosophy still lags behind” and still has yet to achieve and successfully pass through a period of intensive experimentation comparable to those that have taken place in both the arts and the sciences over the last two centuries. This is especially true when we consider that all the earlier hopes of infusing philosophy with the modernist principles of creative experimentation and “revolutionary stirrings” have, more recently, been replaced by the more sober and “serious” sentiments of a class of professional philosophers, for whom drugs are only a metaphor, popular culture is a dead end, and any talk of actual revolutions is a dangerous affair. After all, no one really believes any more in revolutions—at least, that is how we are speaking these days!—even though, oddly enough, we still believe in “the I, the Self, in Individuals and Persons.”

Concerning the idea of revolution, Deleuze responds, “Philosophy remains tied to a revolutionary becoming that is not to be confused with the history of revolutions.”35 In fact, in a 1974 discussion with Guattari, “On the Two Regimes of Madness,” which later becomes the title of a posthumous collection of his writings between 1975 and 1995, this is expressed in the form of an Either/Or: either we continue to find reasons to believe in “revolutionary becoming,” despite all the madness that has been associated to the idea, or we go about the business of promoting the actual madness produced by late-capitalist societies (e.g., global poverty, famine; harsh inequalities, entire populations excluded from “free markets”; new forms of slavery and human trafficking; wars, terror, and new genocides). In large part, What Is Philosophy? is written wholly in response to the bankruptcy of contemporary philosophy, which has completely failed to create any vital form of resistance to this worsening situation, and partly in response to how their own early attempts to infuse philosophy with “revolutionary becoming” were being received by a new generation of philosophers in France.36 However, despite the expressions of world-weariness and pessimism that are present in this work, Deleuze and Guattari do offer us a very modest and practical solution: “Perhaps more attention should be given to the plane of immanence laid out as an abstract machine and to created concepts as parts of the machine.”37 Of course, anyone familiar with the work of Deleuze and Guattari will understand that there is a lot of talk about machines (technical machines, social machines, desiring machines, war machines, etc.), and as is the case with understanding any machine, as well as its function, it is always primarily a matter of knowing how these machines work.38 Above all, they always caution that their conception of the machinic is entirely literal, and must not be understood as a metaphor. This way of understanding philosophy is already clearly apparent in What Is Philosophy? In responding to this question, they immediately begin describing its three component parts (concepts, a plan of immanence, conceptual personae), and a fourth component, which constitutes a surface inscription or recording (a territory and an earth) that philosophy needs in order to exist in a milieu also occupied by peoples, nations, and worlds (like the Greek or Hellenic world, the Christian world, or the Islamic world). They write, “Thinking takes place on a plane of immanence that can be populated by figures as much as by concepts . . . it is affected by what populates and reacts on it, in such a way that it becomes philosophical.”39 Secondly, Deleuze and Guattari’s famous definition of philosophy is entirely machinic and focuses only on what philosophy does and what it produces: philosophy is a machine that operates on a plane of immanence to produce concepts. That is how it works. And yet Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as a certain machine that cannot work all by itself; it needs other machines that fit into its apparatus or assemblage and provide it with contents in order to work, in order to produce concepts. The relationship that Deleuze constructs between philosophy and nonphilosophy will work no differently; it is machinic, and consequently our role will be to understand its parts, its functions, and most of all, how it works.

This is the picture that I will employ to portray the relationship between philosophy (the creation of concepts) and the domains of nonphilosophy (art, literature, and cinema) as components of a larger machine that are assembled together in order to work, occasionally to produce something called thinking. As they say, philosophy needs nonphilosophy in order to continue to function, and here is where the domains of literature and cinema—and art, to a lesser degree, but simply because I know nothing about it!—will come into play in this study, beginning with Proust, which I will define as the first “literary machine,” because these are the subjacent and molecular machines that modern philosophy connects itself to in order to continue functioning. Of course, as Deleuze describes in the chapter “Image of Thought” in Difference and Repetition, classical philosophy had its machines too, only these machines were different: Perception, Affection, Intuition, Cognition, Imagination, Will, and so on. In reading the Meditations by Descartes, he shows how these machines are reduced to their most necessary component parts in order for the cogito to function in producing certainty and clear and distinct perception; however, it is not by accident that Descartes was also haunted by the idea that the subject of thinking was merely machinic, that the mind was only a machine for producing a perception and cognition of external reality, which threatened the existence of both the Self and God as necessary components. Deleuze shows that later, in Kant, this Cartesian machine only becomes more complicated as the faculties of perception, understanding, imagination, and desire replace perception, cognition, and will. In both cases, Representation provided the machine with its order and its determination of the function of the working parts. Representation constituted the cardinal order (the framework or the dispositive) that determined how philosophy worked and what it produced. According to its rules of how things worked, “difference becomes an object of representation always in relation to a conceived identity, a judged analogy, an imagined opposition or a perceived similitude.”40

Today the situation of philosophy has changed in the sense that representation can no longer determine how the machine works, or that one of the component parts has broken down. Again, recalling what I already described above as a new dogmatic image of thought, namely “difference,” this is the simplest thing to understand. In order to work according to the requirements of Representation, philosophy must presuppose, as its pre-philosophical image of thought that is a common source of all its representational activities, an object that is shared by all the faculties (perception, memory, imagination, understanding, etc.). This is because this common image of thought provided philosophy with a means to determine “differences in thought as an object of representation always in relation to a conceived identity, a judged analogy, an imagined opposition or a perceived similitude,” which is to say, to determine them as strictly individual or personal notions.41 But what happens, according to Deleuze, when philosophy (by some accident or catastrophe, either internal or external to itself) is no longer able to presuppose this image and this common and universal sense? Today, in other words, the only thing that the faculties can be said to share in common is a notion of difference that remains abstract, because it is now understood or presupposed in nonrepresentational terms. It no longer works, at least according to the rules previously prescribed to it by Representation: it can no longer represent the reality of the self and the world according to the differences among identity, analogy, opposition, and similitude. Very simply, does this not accurately depict the situation of contemporary philosophy I have outlined above, for which in place of presupposing the world and the self as objects of natural representation, philosophy presupposes a pure plane of immanence that it is not yet capable of thinking according to a framework of representation? Is this not, in other words, the best image of what is presupposed by contemporary philosophy today?

In my view, perhaps the most crucial passage that states this directly occurs in Anti-Oedipus, where this problem is restated in the most material and even historical of terms:

We live today in an age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to turn up so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull grey outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their edges. We believe in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is the unity of all these particular parts but does not unify them; rather it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.42

The task of philosophy today is not to reassemble these bricks and shattered bits in relation to a Whole that is either bygone or still virtual and to come—that is, to express the Whole—but rather to know how to assemble a multiplicity from all the parts that have no relation to the Whole, to create a real multiplicity out of nothing but differences.

Here we witness a constant theme of Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative project, which even constitutes the metaphysical foundation of their entire philosophy, a refrain equally found in Deleuze’s solo works such as Difference and Repetition and in the early work on Proust: Only the category of multiplicity, without recourse to the predicative relation between One and the Many, can account for real desiring production.43 In other words, the metaphysical pretension of a pure multiplicity is always related to a concrete problem, if not the problem of the social, which concerns the current theorization of the nature of desiring production: how to think, how to produce the various parts whose sole relationship to each other is sheer difference, that is, without recourse to an expression of the whole, either as a nostalgic whole that has been lost or as a virtual whole that is still to come. On a materialist level, the problem of the One and the Many, or the Whole and the parts, is not merely a metaphysical problem; rather, it concerns the fragments that belong to any social organization, how they fit together to form a Whole, how they function and work together in a machine that determines the total productive capacity of a society. On a subjective and psychological level, moreover, the problem of the Whole and the parts determines the entire meaning of sexuality; although in this case the parts are not individuals or sexes, but instead machines that must be fitted together according to some arrangement in order to work. Thus, we find that the two levels—the social and productive and the subjective or psychological—are implicated in one another; the relationship is disjunctive, meaning inclusive, even though the manner in which they communicate their contents is defined by Deleuze as the problem of expression in his philosophy.

Again, I think it is crucial to notice that it is Proust who first provides Deleuze with an early intuition of the method for producing the multiplicity from a Whole that is produced alongside each of the parts, even though the Whole neither totalizes nor unifies all the parts into the One. This intuition will become the method of the “rhizome” that is applied in A Thousand Plateaus. It is the image of thought presupposed by the concept of the rhizome they have invented or created together that will allow Deleuze and Guattari to resolve the problem first proposed earlier: how to conceive of the idea of multiplicity in which the Whole is related to its parts only through sheer differences. To quote again the passage above, the concept of the rhizome represents the actual discovery of “such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is the unity of all these particular parts but does not unify them; it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.”44

It may appear provocative to say that philosophy does not know how to think real multiplicity, that only literature and the modern arts do. Of course, many philosophers would immediately object—“You must be kidding!” “What about Spinoza, or Duns Scotus? What about Leibniz, or Bergson?” In response I would only point out that, for the most part, in producing an idea of real multiplicity Deleuze and Guattari refer, not to these philosophers, but instead to certain writers or “literary machines” (Proust, in this instance, and later on Kafka), whom they reference when posing the problem, in the most rigorous of terms, concerning “how to produce, to think about fragments whose sole relationship is sheer difference.”45 But why is this a problem? This only implies that philosophy is not capable of thinking real multiplicity on its own, using only its own resources or those it has inherited from its previous traditions. It requires new machines, and the literary machine especially, to allow it to think about multiplicity, in order to furnish it with the raw materials for the concept, or using Deleuze and Guattari’s term, “the bricks that compose the Real.” The modern relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy is not that different from the relationship between science and its own technical machines, and this, I will argue, is the particular status that the literary machine has for Deleuze and Guattari’s “philosophy” as well (in terms of how it functions, or how it works vis-à-vis the philosophical apparatus). In this sense, the particular status that literary machines have for modern philosophy (in terms of how it functions, or how it works vis-à-vis the philosophical apparatus) can be likened to what Deleuze and Guattari call, in the most rigorous of terms, a “desiring machine.” Therefore, following Deleuze’s earliest intuition (or discovery), in the first chapter I will turn to the Proustian literary machine in order to describe how it works, what image of thought it produces, what it does to reorient the entire problem of presupposition in philosophy, and finally, what is actually presupposed by a Deleuzian philosophy, strictly determined, which Deleuze himself defined from the very beginning, as an “anti-philosophy.”