Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty. Judith Wambacq

the sentiendum can only be sensed, it cannot simply be communicated to the other faculties. Sensibility leads memory to focus not on the same object, the sentiendum, but on its own object, the memorandum. Like the sentiendum, the memorandum refers not to something that can be recalled, actually or empirically, but to the being of the recallable, of the past. It refers to the transcendental condition of memory, rather than to a concrete memory. Because memory is forced to focus on that which makes memory possible, its object can only be recalled. Indeed, its object is that which can only be recalled. Hence, what the narrator of the Search does when he is confronted with the madeleine—or, better, what Proust does when he writes about the madeleine—is not to reminisce about the (empirical) past but to inquire into the essence of the past.

      Memory, in its turn, “forces thought to grasp that which can only be thought, the cogitandum, [. . .] the Essence: not the intelligible, [. . .] but the being of the intelligible as though this were both the final power of thought and the unthinkable” (DR, 177). In sum, instead of faculties that are fitted to one another in order to be able to recognize an identity, in sound thought each faculty receives “from the other only a violence which brings it face to face with its own element” (DR, 178). Faculties confront one another with their own limits (the imperceptible, the unrememberable, the unthinkable); they bring one another to their extreme point of dissolution—Deleuze (DR, 177) speaks of unhinging the faculties—such that they fall “prey to triple violence: the violence of that which forces it to be exercised, of that which it is forced to grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, yet also that of the ungraspable (from the point of view of its empirical exercise)” (180). There is no synthesizing power that limits the contribution of each faculty in favor of recognition (common and good sense), only a para-sense, “which determines the communication between disjointed faculties” (DR, 183). Finally, renouncing notions such as “good sense” and “common sense” also implies renouncing the idea of a subjective unity implied by these notions. Deleuze no longer speaks of an in-dividual, of an indivisible entity that thinks, but of a “dissolved self” and a “fractured I” (DR, 183).

Art as the Privileged Domain to Unravel the Essence? (Sixth Postulate)

      The sixth postulate is the postulate of the proposition, where Deleuze defends the view that the proposition is the appropriate expression of representational thought. The reason is that in a proposition where a predicate is attributed to a subject—propositions of the “S is P” sort—the pursuit of identity reaches its culmination point. Not only does it presuppose that subject and predicate have an identity that can be grasped in a concept, but subject and object are also equated: in the concrete case designated by S, the subject is the predicate. The identity of subject and predicate postulated in the proposition would be a representation of the identity present in reality. Thus, the identity postulated in the proposition refers to a real identity. When this reference is correct, that is, when there is actually a correspondence between both identities, the proposition is said to be true. Hence, in representational thought, truth and identity are inseparable: If one does not presuppose identities, truth cannot exist. In representational thought, the proposition is the place where the truth, understood as a correspondence between a conceptual and a real identity, is expressed.

      Beyond the expression or proposition and that which the proposition designates, namely, the referent, Deleuze identifies a third level, that of sense. Sense, then, is not a proposition, thing, body, or fact. Sense is the boundary between propositions and things (LS, 25).¹⁴ Deleuze (LS, 209) defines sense as that which is expressed by the proposition and as the incorporeal attribute of the thing. One cannot confuse the expressed with the signification, for the signification of a proposition can be expressed, whereas its sense cannot. But how is it that the expressed is not expressible? Just as in the case of the sentiendum, we have to distinguish between the empirical and the transcendental levels. Deleuze is referring to the empirical level when he says that “we can never say what is the sense of what we say” (DR, 193). We can say, for example, what the different sentences of Proust’s Search mean (signification), but it is impossible to pinpoint what Proust wanted to say with this book (sense). From a transcendental point of view, however, the sense or the expressed is what we must focus on. We must try to express the sense of Proust’s Search, for it is this sense that grounds the different propositions and their significations. But how do we do this when the sense is, empirically speaking, inexpressible? According to Deleuze (DR, 193; LS, 36), the only possibility is to take the sense of proposition A as the designated or referent of another proposition, B, of which in turn we cannot express the sense. This is what we do when we say, for example, that a theater play was very Proustian. This process can then be repeated endlessly: every name refers to another name, which in turn designates the sense of the preceding one, and so on. This process of reference has no beginning or end. Deleuze is, in this way, clearly distancing himself from Descartes; there is no proposition that is absolutely clear to itself and that can, therefore, serve as the first building block of indubitable thought. Like Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze argues that the cogito has “no sense and no object other than the power of reiteration in indefinite regress (I think that I think that I think . . . ). Every proposition of consciousness implies an unconscious of pure thought which constitutes the sphere of sense in which there is infinite regress” (DR, 194).

      Because the sense of a proposition has nothing to do with what a proposition designates, the aforementioned correspondence theory of truth no longer holds. For Deleuze, the true is conditioned by something else, namely, sense. The reason for this is that a false proposition such as “mammals lay eggs” can have sense, whereas a nonsensical proposition, such as “mammals dream eggs around,” can be neither true nor false. Now, it must be said that representational thought also recognizes sense to be the condition of the true, but, contrary to Deleuze, its conception of the truth is indifferent to or unaffected by what founds it. The fact that sense grounds truth and falsity does not change anything in its conception of either. The conditioning is extrinsic and arbitrary. Deleuze, for his part, considers the relation between sense and truth to be intrinsic and necessary. He is not interested in what a condition can make possible, but in what turns a condition into a reality, in the elements of the condition that already point toward the conditioned. Hence, according to Deleuze, “the relation between a proposition and what it designates [truth] must be established within sense itself” (DR, 191–92). The incorporeal and aconceptual sense leads, by itself, to the concepts designating bodies. Truth is generated in sense itself. As such, it is a matter of production, not correspondence; of genitality, not innateness or reminiscence. Thus, Deleuzean truth, which has nothing to do with a correspondence between the conceptual and the corporeal, needs to be understood as that which makes sense, that which is relevant or appropriate. A true expression is first of all an expression that conveys a meaningful evaluation of what is important and what is not, of the singular and the regular, of distinctive and ordinary points (DR, 238). Truth loses its absolute character and becomes a relative and gradual notion.

      Deleuze’s understanding of truth differs from that of representational thought not only because of the intrinsic relation between sense and truth but also because of the role he attributes to nonsense. In representational thought, nonsense plays no significant role: it figures simply as the absence of sense. Deleuze (LS, 93), however, argues that nonsense is the element that makes series resonate, thus creating sense. This point here is not so much that nonsense is the ultimate condition of truth, but that there is no clear distinction between sense and nonsense. At least not on the transcendental level, where sense and nonsense form a unity: “The Idea which runs throughout all the faculties nevertheless cannot be reduced to sense, since in turn it is also non-sense. [. . .] The Idea is constituted of structural elements which have no sense themselves, while it constitutes the sense of all that it produces” (DR, 193). Why is sense also nonsense? Because, empirically speaking, we cannot express it, and we cannot grasp it. However, it is that from which every proposition issues forth, such that “the mechanism of nonsense is the highest finality of sense” (DR, 193).

      To sum up: because sense is the expressed of the expression and the incorporeal attribute of things, and because a proposition expresses a designated reality, the proposition can no