Preface and Acknowledgments

It is well known that, as early as Différence et répétition (1968), Gilles Deleuze argued that “a search for a new means of philosophical expression . . . must be pursued today in relation to the renovation of certain other art forms, such as theatre or modern cinema.”1 What is less well known, or often ignored, is to what degree this search was singularly pursued throughout his entire philosophical project, and even constitutes fundamental and genetic principle of his style of “doing philosophy.” Beginning from the period of Deleuze’s Proust and Signs (1964), this study demonstrates how the search for a new means of philosophical expression became a central concern of all his works that followed, including the works written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari and concluding with their last work conceived (if not actually written) together, What Is Philosophy? (1991).

In highlighting this fundamental concern, I have chosen a central theme that has appeared in all of Deleuze’s works from the early book on Proust to the last work supposedly written by Deleuze shortly before his death. This is the theme of “the image of thought,” which Deleuze describes in the 1994 preface to the English translation of Difference and Repetition as “the most necessary and concrete [problematic]” that serves as an introduction to subsequent works written after 1968.2 The fact that Deleuze chooses to highlight this aspect of his work for an English-speaking audience, and in light of the reception history of his translated works to date, makes this statement an important cue, I would argue, for reorienting the understanding of his entire philosophical project both before and afterward. As Raymond Bellour recently wrote: “There would be a history to write, spanning the twenty-six books written by Deleuze alone and in collaboration [with Guattari]: a precise, tangled history of this term and idea of the Image of Thought.”3 Taking both statements to heart, this book is intended to provide a brief and accessible, yet nevertheless systematic, overview of this search for a new image of thought (or what I also refer to as a new style of philosophical expressionism), with special emphasis on the role played by modern literature (or what Deleuze and Guattari call “literary machines”) and by certain modern writers in particular (namely, Proust, Kafka, Kleist, and Melville) in forging a new means of philosophical expression in their own writings, especially in Deleuze and Guattari’s monumental work A Thousand Plateaus.

My study begins with Deleuze’s earliest exposition of the Proustian image of thought, which is one of the first instances of the problem in relation to what Deleuze and Guattari later define as “the literary machine,” and then follows the “tangled history” of the idea of the image of thought that runs through the subsequent works that follow, including Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, The Rhizome (which serves as the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus), and several of the later works from the late 1980s gathered in Essays Critical and Clinical. It concludes by showing how this concern underlies Deleuze’s studies of modern cinema in the early 1980s, where the image of thought is a predominant theme in the analysis of the cinematic image, especially in Cinema 2: The Time-Image. It also returns around the central concern of the brain that is proposed in the conclusion of What Is Philosophy?, where the brain is defined as “the nexus where the planes composed by modern philosophy, science, and art meet,” even though this conjunction will not take the form of a philosophical system, in the usual sense, because it is still guided by the major terms outlined under the style of expression that Deleuze and Guattari, beginning in the early 1970s, call “anti-philosophy.”

By connecting together the various episodes of the major problem of the image of thought that runs throughout Deleuze’s entire corpus, I hope to reorient the question of how thinking first assumes an image, and how, early on in Deleuze’s philosophy, the different images of thought become identified with the problem of expression, which later becomes a primary motive for the more experimental works of philosophy written together with Guattari. Moreover, this problem, as they argue in their last work, belongs as much to the history of philosophy as to its supposed future, and thus it is not reserved either for specialists of Deleuze’s philosophy or for what is often called philosophy in the academic context today, which for the most part continues to ignore the question of expression altogether.

This study concerns a distinctly modern relationship between the regions of philosophy and nonphilosophy (and literature and cinema, especially) that have become the hallmark of the term “Deleuzian,” even though I will argue that this aspect of the philosopher’s vision, when it has not been reduced to the question of “a certain style” (of modernism, or the postmodern, for example), has not been fully appreciated in terms of its significance for philosophy—meaning not only “for today” but, to quote Nietzsche, also “for tomorrow, and for the day after tomorrow.” One of my intentions is to focus on, or to burrow into, some of the earlier observations I made concerning this relationship in The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze;4 another is to perform what Deleuze defined as the “pedagogy of the concept.” However, this should be defined more as a process of learning than of knowledge (much less of expertise, or mastery), because I had to become both student and teacher in writing this book. As the student I had to realize that I had “learned more” than I knew before; as the teacher, I had to learn how “to say things more clearly.” Clarity, in this sense, does not define knowledge of the subject that is “clear and distinct,” but instead refers to certain stylistic and expository choices in the art of pedagogy, as well as in certain kinds of commentary, whose goal would be to guide or “to orient thinking and reflection” toward a particular region of expression in which the commentary functions as the double (or “mirror image”) of the author’s own expression, allowing the thought that remains virtual to become actualized through a process that Deleuze describes as a “highly specific and remarkable singularization.”5

Therefore, if my earlier work took up the relationship between philosophy and nonphilosophy more generally, the overall goal of this study is certainly much more modest: to provide a more genealogical narrative of the development of the image of thought in Deleuze’s philosophy to show the very pattern of a search that first becomes perceptible around the period of Proust and Signs (1964). In the Conclusion, moreover, I will argue that in the last work this search for a new image of thought did not actually conclude as much as it was proposed again as the only true object of philosophical understanding, which is still incapable of grasping this object in the very attempt to consider it as immanent to the movement of thought itself, if not with the very form of immanence as such. For if the history of philosophy is a movement of thinking that is bound up with the series of images, then the future of this movement would necessarily remain without an image and arrives from outside this history. This study will not attempt to describe, but will simply orient itself to, the passage from thinking to an image of thought, and from each image to what necessarily exceeds or surpasses it, namely, to the nature of immanence itself.

The Introduction and chapters 1–4 were originally written as a series of seminars I delivered in Seoul, Korea, in 2010–11 at Sungkyunkwan University (January 2010), Seoul National University (July 2010), and Ehwa Women’s University (January 2011). I wish to acknowledge and thank the students and faculty who honored me with an expression of intense interest and intellectual curiosity concerning a subject that might have seemed, at first, somewhat remote from their studies in literature and theory. In particular, I would like to thank all my faculty hosts: Won-Jung Kim at Sungkyunkwan University, Eun Kyung Min at Seoul National University, and Sooyoung Chon at Ehwa University; and especially my friends and most esteemed colleagues Taek-Gwang Lee and the late Gwanghyun Shin (who first introduced me to a vision of the image of thought in the moon jar at Leeam Museum in 2009, and whose art of hospitality and thoughtful companionship will remain forever part of my own conceptual persona of “the friend”).

The remaining chapters and the Conclusion are partially drawn from various published writings on the image of thought, and I would like to acknowledge the following editors: Frida Beckman, Ian Buchanan, David Collins, Gerald Greenway, Gregory Flaxman, Petr Kouba, Jim Kurt, Patricia MacCormick, Paul Patton, and John Protevi. I wish to thank my editor, Douglas M. Armato, whose support and encouragement I had felt for many years before I actually sent him this manuscript; and to the prescient insights of Ronald Bogue, Gregory Flaxman, and Jeffrey T. Nealon on earlier drafts. I wish to thank John Donohue and Wendy Nelson for the careful preparation of the manuscript for publication.

Of course, there are many others, around the world, who may or may not profess to be “Deleuzian” but nevertheless constitute this work’s collective assemblage of enunciation. Most of all, I would like to pay homage to Jacques Derrida, “my only teacher,” who first encouraged me as a graduate student to pursue my interests in the philosophy of Deleuze, because, as he said, there were already “too many Derrideans.” This book is owed, in many ways, to this early remark.