Back to the Cogito. Let us now return to Descartes’s cogito. According to Merleau-Ponty, the cogito reveals not so much the certainty of my having mental contents or ideas—I can always doubt my idea that I saw my mother yesterday—as the certainty that I am performing an act of thinking: I cannot doubt that I am thinking that I saw my mother yesterday. Since it is impossible to be certain of the act without also being certain of the object to which the act is oriented, I can say that if I think I saw my mother yesterday, then it is impossible to doubt the reality of my having seen her. If I think I saw her yesterday, then I am also sure (though this certainty is not necessary) that my seeing her was real. Since this certainty is based on the performance of the act of thinking, and since this act always transgresses itself toward something outside of ourselves, this certainty cannot be said to stem from a coincidence of subject and object, one that in its turn implies a complete immanence of the latter to the former. In contrast to the certainty whose necessity is based on the coincidence of subject and object, this certainty involves a kind of contingency. For the way in which I am performing the act of thinking is determined, as the example of geometric thought illustrates, by my psychophysiological constitution and by the constitution of the world. But since the world, and I myself, could have been constituted differently, the certainty is fundamentally contingent. Hence, Merleau-Ponty concludes: “Ontological contingency, the contingency of the world itself, being radical, is, on the other hand, what forms the basis once and for all of our ideas of truth. The world is that reality of which the necessary and the possible are merely provinces” (PP, 398).
Descartes argues that the cogito reveals the certainty of the act of thinking. This certainty, however, does not reveal, as he also believes, that I coincide with myself. On the contrary, it reveals that I am always oriented toward something outside myself: “The primary truth is indeed ‘I think,’ but only provided that we understand thereby ‘I am-to-myself insofar as I am-to-the-world’” (PP, 407; translation modified).9 Or, in the words of Alphonse De Waelhens: “It is true [. . .] that the subject has a certain immediate contact with itself, but this contact, far from being a meaningful truth, is only an invitation for it to constitute one, and that immediately throws us back onto the world, its certainty and its ambiguity” (1970, 285). The cogito does not reveal the closed character of a world constituted by me, but an open world. Merleau-Ponty replaces Descartes’s closed cogito with an open one: “What I discover and recognize through the Cogito is not psychological immanence, [. . .] the blind contact of sensation with itself. It is not even transcendental immanence, the belonging of all phenomena to a constituting consciousness, the possession of clear thought by itself. It is the deep-seated momentum of transcendence which is my very being, the simultaneous contact with my own being and with the world’s being” (PP, 377).
How, then, are we to understand the presence of thought to itself mentioned earlier? What does it mean to say that the world needs to be thought before it can actually be perceived and spoken about? How is the immanence of the world to thought distinguished from the immanence of a transcendental subject? The notion of expression offers an answer to these questions. The world needs to be thought before it can actually be perceived in the sense that the ground needs to be expressed in order for it to manifest itself. The world, or, more correctly, our lived existence, is the ground of thought in the sense that it makes thought possible or real. This condition, however, receives form and content only within concrete thoughts and theories. Thus, the need to think the world for it to exist does not mean that thought constitutes the world. As already indicated, the ground or the expressed cannot be reduced to the expressions. It will always exceed all expressions. It has ontological priority. What it means, then, is that the world is the crack between expressions. In the next chapter, we will see how central the notion of divergence (écart) is in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. The (lived) world is the crack between expressions, and, as such, it is clearly immanent. But because it cannot be reduced to the expressions, this immanence does not entail a complete coincidence between subject and object. It is always characterized, instead, by displacements, by holes. In sum, Merleau-Ponty keeps the intimate connection Descartes articulates between thought and world, but he corrects Descartes by preventing one pole from absorbing the other, from coinciding fully with the other.10
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We can conclude from the above that Merleau-Ponty does not see thought as a mediating activity. The thinking subject is not separated from the world it tries to think. On the contrary, it is familiar with the world. It has direct contact with the world, in the sense that the world is not external to the thinking subject but is in a certain sense shaped by it. However, the immanence of the world to the thinking subject does not imply that the thinking subject designs the world or, more correctly, is the ground of the world, as Descartes has it. It does not follow from the immanence of the world to the thinking subject that the world coincides with the image the subject has of it. Differently put: the fact that the world is not external does not make it completely transparent to the thinking subject. The transcendence of the world, the noncoincidence of world and thinking subject, is due to the asymmetry pinpointed with the notion of Fundierung, which characterizes the relation between world and subject. Hence, despite the impossibility of fixing the origin of thought on one specific point, and despite the impossibility of separating the world from the thinking subject, the early Merleau-Ponty still situates the origin in a vague area of existence that includes the thinking subject.
DELEUZE’S CRITICISM OF REPRESENTATIONAL THOUGHT
As I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Deleuze believes that the history of philosophy exhibits numerous false accounts of the nature of thought, all built upon thought’s so-called representational function. In a seminal chapter of Difference and Repetition titled “The Image of Thought,” Deleuze explains the presuppositions and consequences of the notion of “representation” by means of eight postulates. I will use these eight postulates as a guideline for describing Deleuze’s criticism of representational thought. However, in line with Deleuze’s affirmative philosophy, I will complement this description of what thought is not with a description of what it is or should be. For this positive characterization, however, I will turn to Deleuze’s Proust and Signs and to The Logic of Sense. As the positive characterization of thought serves as the structuring principle of the discussion, I have taken the liberty not to follow the order of the eight postulates in Difference and Repetition (the titles for the postulates are mine).
Thinking Thought as the Attempt to Unravel the Sense of a Sign (First Postulate)
According to Deleuze, original thought begins with the encounter with a sign. Thought is confronted with a sign that is foreign to it and that shakes it to its foundations; opinions, once defended, cease to be evident, and regularly used distinctions cease to be valid. These shifts ask for reflection; the sign forces thought to interpret. The confrontation with a sign cannot but be followed by an attempt to understand the sign, to unravel the sign, or, better said, one of its contents. The encounter with a sign is not only violent, in that it does violence to our thinking (PS, 61) and in that it is characterized by a radical exteriority, it is also inevitable. Thought is overcome by the sign, and this means that it no longer has the initiative, that it is no longer itself the origin of its activity. It has lost its autonomy to chance. Deleuze combines the accidental nature of thought and the necessity of interpretation in the notion of “involuntary” (PS,