DELEUZE AND THE IMAGE OF THOUGHT

Jonathan Dronseld
La pense est comme le Vampire, elle na pas dimage, ni pour constituer modle, ni pour faire copie. 1 Deleuze & Guattari

There is a schism in the work of Gilles Deleuze. The early Deleuze of, primarily, Diffrence et rptition (1968), the first book written in his own voice, advocates the destruction of what he names the image of thought and calls instead for a thinking without image.2 For the later Deleuze, not least the writer of the 1994 Preface to the English translation of the same book, the task is to think a new image of thought.3 Indeed, by the time of Quest-ce que la philosophie?, published the same year as the English Preface, great philosophers are defined by their ability to dresse une nouvelle image de la pense.4 It is important to delineate this difference internal to Deleuzes thought because it embodies a certain struggle philosophy has in dealing with the image. Between the Preface and that which it prefaces, between the body and that which faces the body after the fact but which nevertheless comes before it, there is a schism and in that schism we find the play of word with image, philosophy with art. Before we are thinking, thinking in an authentic or proper sense according to Deleuze, a sense which is proper because it is improper, we are caught up in an image of thought, and this image of thought is inauthentic not because of what it is an image of but because it is an image. Deleuze devotes a good deal of his early work to critiquing the image of thought. According to its author, the most necessary and concrete part of Diffrence et rptition is the third chapter, Limage de la pense. We have cause to think that it is this section on the image of thought that leads Deleuze to remark of the book that it is the first one written in his own voice. Throughout his work Deleuze characterises the idea of own voice as a voice foreign to itself, a voice in

Thought Without Image

which the foreigner or the minority is given voice. This gives us a clue as to how to understand why Deleuze himself says in the English Preface that the chapter on the image of thought is the most necessary of this the first book written in his own voice. Were we to follow Deleuzes logic we would have to say that it is in this chapter that what is foreign to Deleuzes thought is voiced by him. The image of thought is Deleuzes characterisation of what comes before thinking: that which philosophy implicitly presupposes and explicitly projects, a pre-philosophical and natural and hence dogmatic image of what thinking is. The dogmatic image supposes that what thought wants, wants both materially and wilfully, is the true. Morality leads us to presuppose this. It is pre-supposed in the sense that everybody knows what it means to think, as though it were common sense. We all have this common picture of what it means to think. Its an image in which subject and object and being and beings are already assigned their proper place and relation one to the other. And so long as philosophy holds to this image it does not matter what it goes on to think conceptually. If the image of thought guides the creation of concepts then those concepts will be part of the same image projected. Moreover, it is the supposition of a natural capacity to think in this way that permits philosophy to claim to begin without suppositions. It is a supposition which is endowed with the power to undercut the conditions of the present moment and its attendant perversions. It is not a particular image of thought that worries Deleuze; its that thought is pre-conceived as an image in general. This is philosophys subjective presupposition and the frame of Deleuzes critique. Nous ne parlons pas de telle ou telle image de la pense, he says, variable suivant les philosophies, mais dune seule Image en gnral qui constitue le prsuppos subjectif de la philosophie dans son ensemble.5

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Part of the image, its stance as it were, is that thought is construed as naturally upright. Upright here means proper and good-willed. Thought is upright because it is the possession of the subject. As the unity of the faculties it reduces every other faculty to modes of the subject. Because thinking is subjective in this way the subjects model of thought is recognition. The faculty of sensibility can grasp only that which can be recognised by all the other faculties in the subjective act of recognition. When thinking is modelled on recognition, that which can be recognised is a reflection of the subject. The subject for whom recognition is the model of thought is filled with no more than an image of itself. Thought is left with no means of grasping that which cannot be recognised, at least whilst it remains erect and standing. But Deleuze makes clear that it is not a question of opposing another image to the dogmatic image of thought. Even the schizophrenic cannot be imaged, because the schizophrenic becomes a possibility for thought and is revealed as such only through the abolition of the dogmatic image.6 Deleuze is unequivocal then about the necessity of theorising a thinking without image. Deleuzes thought must be measured by the extent to which it thinks without image. Its newness, its rptition authentique, will be its thinking without image. Indeed, so rigorous would the denunciation of the image as non-philosophy be that it would yield the prize of the greatest destructions and demoralisations, so obstinate would a thought without image be that it would have no ally but paradox, having renounced both representation and common sense, so original would a thinking purged of the image be that thought could finally begin to think. But thought can only begin, and it is this that would allow it continually to begin again, only when liberated from the image and its postulates.7 If representation for Deleuze is a transcendental illusion in which thought is covered over [se recouvre] by an image, it implies that in overcoming representation the image must be removed t;hought is only uncovered once the shroud of the image is taken down.8

The insistence that thought can and should happen without images extends even to valorising creator-writers, writers who are creators before they are authors, as blind. Deleuzes self-understanding in the form of his dialogue with Claire Parnet in 1977, a dialogue which is no way an encounter because in it we recognise a Deleuze pre-given and decided, figures the likes of Nietzsche and Proust not as authors but as creators, creators precisely because they are not authors. For as soon as the designation author is made, thought is once again determined as an image [quon soumet la pense une image], and writing made an activity of life.9 Creation is encounter, in which the writer encounters himself, and a writing which because it is its own life necessitates that reading be an act of creation. Such encounters are acts of thought without image, and at once both blind and blinding [aussi bien aveugles quaveuglants]10a thought blind to itself, and one which refuses to form itself as an image which might enable it to be visible. It is the imperceptible, it is that which dwells in the darkest regions. This is not to argue for a thought no longer subject to recognition and representation, but to a thought no longer determinable as an image as such. It is as if an image can only order, order correct ideas rooted in goodwill and recognition and governed by an origin of representation and the already decided. And what philosopher would not hope to set up an image of thought that no longer presupposes goodwill and a pre-meditated decision? But philosophy is too much on the side of friendship to achieve this.11 In place of the image of thought rooted in such postulates Deleuze instates a thinking in which the passional, aimless and horizontal line will be favoured over the natural and upright stance, a thinking always already begun, with its beginning in the repetition of a beginning again. Thinking becomes no longer a natural capacity we all possess but an activity some of us are forced into doing by that which we do not recognise but sense; moreover sense in a way which differentiates the faculty of sensibility from all other faculties, indeed brings it into discord with them whilst at the same time confronting them with their own limits. That which cannot be re-

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cognised has neither form nor figure, yet it stares at us. It stares at us, but sans yeux.12 The thought without image is a ground. It is the ground that an individual brings to the surface, or we might have to say raises to eye-level, the level of the eye-line of the one stared atif, that is, that otherness is to be encountered and bring us into questionwithout being able to give the ground form, the ground that draws the eye from out of the body to it, a ground which penetrates thought with its stare, the unrecognised in every recognition. And that ground will be what allows for a metamorphosis productive of the new. For instance habit, the foundation of habit, will be metamorphosed into the failure of habitus, leading to the expulsion of agency in favour of a new individuality, an agency in the condition of continual expulsion. It is a ground which must be turned and brought to the surface, re-turned and repeated as surface, for only then will it be metamorphosed. Recognition is defeated only if the ground is turned or bent [coud] such that what it grounds it relates to the groundless.13 The thought without image is that which stares, even without eyes, blind and blinding, from within the imperceptible, and this thought is the groundlessness of the ground. The question then arises, how is this ground turned and brought to the surface? We envisage the following answer: by the step, underfoot, by the walk of the one metamorphosed. The discord of the faculties is at once a question sensibility poses to each of them in turn: if what can be sensed is at the same time imperceptible, might there not be an imaginandum which cannot be imagined or a loquendum which cannot be locuted? And for a complete doctrine of the faculties might there not be a vitality inclusive of monstrosity, a sociability inclusive of anarchy? For Deleuze these are transcendent objects, transcendent because they become the passion of the faculties in question; not simply that which differentiates one faculty from the other but that which forces a faculty to be exercised and at the same time draws it to the point of its dissolution. And it is precisely the possibility of these transcendent objects that art demonstrates. The question sensibility poses to each

faculty in turn is the very commencement of the faculties. Thinking is born of a fundamental encounter [rencontre fondamentale]14 with the being of the sensible, a privilege accorded sensibility because there is no ontological difference between what forces sensation and that which can only be sensed: this is its intensivity, whereas for the other faculties the two instances are distinct. There is no predestination in such an encounter, nothing friendly, nothing voluntary; on the contrary, it is the point of the transcendent aleatory [point alatoire transcendant], the contingency of which is the guarantee of the necessity of that which is thereby forced to be thought.15 And its the possibility and necessity of such an encounter that an artist writes. But the question is, to what extent does a writer force such thought without the help of the image? And in what way is a fundamental encounter conceivable in ways which do not necessitate an appeal to an image? In Diffrence et rptition Antonin Artaud is the favoured example. Artauds terrible rvlation dune pense sans image was his rejection of innateness in favour of genitality, a certain acephalism in thinking, a headlessness which would deny the subject its upright stance.16 But headlessness is no less an image of thought than the figure of an upright man, and is all the more forceful for itindeed, as Georges Bataille and Andr Masson amongst others have shown us, the headless figure of the Acphale, genitals visibly occluded, the resister of thought, is as upright as the bearer of the innate idea and the harbinger of thought.17 Thinking is not innate for Deleuze, it is something to be engendered, to be created, and in order for it to be created the pre-given and the represented image of thought must be completely destroyed.18 But this does not tell us what a thought without image is. The very last lines of this pivotal third chapter of Diffrence et rptition read: La pense qui nat dans la pense, lacte de penser engendr dans sa gnitalit . . . est la pense sans image. Mais quest-ce quune telle pense, et son processus dans le monde?19 It seems we find the resources for answering this question, the demand for thought without

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image, in art. In the conclusion to Diffrence et rptition we find: La thorie de la pense est comme la peinture, elle a besoin de cette rvolution qui la fait passer de la reprsentation lart abstrait; tel est lobjet dune thorie de la pense sans image.20 Except that there never was such a revolution. Not even for Deleuze. Abstraction did not overcome representation, because abstraction represents two tendencies opposed to the liberation of the affect in the form of the transcendental objectaccording to the Bacon book the affect is either negated or codified by abstraction; 21 and in Quest-ce que la philosophie? it is spiritualised by abstraction.22 Either way, the affect is blocked. According to Deleuzes history of painting in the Bacon book, abstraction is either geometric or it is expressionist, two of the three available directions painting could take at the time, the other being what Deleuze terms, after Lyotard, the figural [le Figural].23 Geometric abstraction the exemplar is Mondrianis a purely optical space rid of the tactile, a symbolic code which usurps the diagram and leaps over chaosthe diagram being how an artist, having randomised the givens of making art, extracts chance from his work and makes of it a necessity modulating the entire work. Abstract expressionism on the other handand here Deleuze cites Pollockis a purely manual space, where the diagram is spread over the entire surface of the painting such that it becomes nothing but chaos.24 In Quest-ce que la philosophie? abstraction becomes one of two ways of dematerialising sensation, by spiritualising it such that sensation becomes the sensation of a concept.25 In either case, geometric or expressionist, there is no revolutionary function attached to abstraction. After Diffrence et rptition Deleuze favours not abstraction but de-figuration, most notably in the form of the paintings of Francis Bacon, which for Deleuze follow Lyotard in working out a desired third path between abstraction and expressionism.26 Bacon economises the diagram by localising it on the canvas spatially and temporally. Something must be able to emerge out of the diagram, and what emerges is the figure. And the figure must be given time and space in which

to wander. Only in this way will forces to which the figure is subject and by which it is de-figured, and forces of which it is the subject and with which it figures, the double genitive of transformation and precipitation, be made visible and sensation be liberated. The relations the figure has to force are not ones of resemblance understood representationally; rather they are non-figurative resemblances. Yet they still take the form of an image: une Image uniquement figurale as Deleuze puts it at the end of the Bacon book. 27 So thought without image when worked through the problem of representation and abstraction would appear to lead us back to the image, albeit the uniquely figural one. The figural image here is the site of an encounter. The figure can only encounter the forces which de-figure it in a space cleared of clich, broken up and heterogenised by the diagram. What is encountered is sensed. And as something sensed it is opposed to something recognised. And what is sensed cannot be separated from how it withdraws. It is in this sense that it is an image. Images in Deleuze are inseparable from their dissipation, the how of their fading. A New Image of Thought In contradistinction to Deleuzes call to arms of a thought without image there is another story to tell, and Deleuze himself tells it, and he begins reciting it in the very frame of his calling for a thought without image: in the Preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition in 1994. That Preface states the following, and states it whilst stressing that the chapter on the image of thought is the most necessary part of the book, so necessary in fact that it prepares the way for the subsequent work with Guattari: that the project of Diffrence et rptition is to seek out a new image of thoughtor rather a liberation of thought from those images which imprison it.28 To seek out a new image of thought is utterly at odds with the necessity of destroying the image of thought and of coming up with a thought without image. We cannot even appeal to a possible equivocation in this passage between a new image of thought and thought liberated from images, because Deleuze is refer-

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ring in the latter not to the image singular but to images plural, those images which imprison thought. We can go further and say that the appeal to a new image of thought does not so much displace the dogmatic image of thought as displace dogmatism from the image. If the cure for the dogmatic image of thought is a new image of thought, then the illness is not the form of the image at all; on the contrary, the image becomes the cure. In its being an image lies its saving power. How can the image of thought be dogmatic for being an image if it can be displaced by another image? If image is what can displace it then surely it would be dogmatic for its not being enough of an image. We are led to conclude that the image of thought in question is insufficiently an image of thought, and that thats what makes it dogmatic. That a dogmatic image of thought can only be displaced by another image suggests that the image has a force, the force of a fundamental encounter, which Deleuze was unable to sense at the time of his finally finding his own voice when composing Diffrence et rptition. Perhaps Deleuze did not fully confront the dogmatic image of thought in that book because had he done so he would have been displaced from the dogmatism of the thought by its being an image. Note that in the later Preface Deleuze does not retract image from his conception of philosophys dogmatic pre-supposition. It is still referred to as the image of thought. A new image of thought would be non-representational, yet Deleuze still chooses to name it an image. This later Deleuze wants to overcome the image of thought not because it is an image, but because that image is representational and dogmaticit is representational in nature, and dogmatic about representation. But to make the distinction between image and representation does not answer the question as to why Deleuze characterises the form of thought he critiques, that is representational thought, as an image; on the contrary it poses it anew and more forcefully. Nor does it explain why the term image should be retained after the critique of representation carried out by the destruction of the dogmatic image of thought. What Deleuze says in the Preface to the Eng-

lish translation of that book is a tacit admission that he came to see that he cannot do away with the image in thought, that there is no such thing as thinking without image, and that the task is instead to construe the image non-representationally. Perhaps another way of saying this is that we must not literalise representation. Then is it that Deleuze is acknowledging that his own philosophy requires a certain return of the representational if it is to overcome representation? Hence the retention of the figure in de-figuration. We might try and account for this revindication of the image in Deleuze by seeking to understand why he called that which philosophy dogmatically presupposes about thought an image in the first place. Perhaps he did so first because what it shows is representation, the thought of which it is an image, is representational; but second because the manner of its showing is representational. In which case the image of thought would be doubly representational, the representation of representation. It would hold both that representational thought is our most proper way of thinking, and would present this thought representationally in the form of an image. Early Deleuze would appear to think the image as representational. So to displace such an image of thought with a way of thinking which is non-representational in both senses outlined here would require coming up with something other than an image. But this doubled representationality is at the same time a split in representation, and perhaps here in this split is where Deleuze found a way. It will help our understanding of what is nothing less than a turn back towards the image in Deleuze were we to look briefly at what Deleuze says about how philosophy, rather than completely destroying the image of thought, instead transforms it, as called for in Diffrence et rptition. In doing so we find that the image of thought being brought into question is not as common-sensical or we might say representational as Deleuze first contends, and that the image Deleuze opposes to the dogmatic image is not so non-commonsensical or non-sensical as Deleuze would like to argue. In each case the image philosophy counterpoises to the dogmatic image is not simply oppositional, or if it is, it is so

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only representationally, for in each case it borrows from that which it challenges and thus in a certain way mirrors it. I) We find first Nietzsche, who in Nietzsche et la philosophie, again in the Preface to the English translation written in 1983, twenty-one years after the book was first published, is shown to have introduced movement into the image of thought, with the consequence that philosophy has a new relationship to the arts of movement: theatre, dance and music.29 These are arts in which, in texts other than this one, Deleuze will find the resources to challenge especially the uprightness of thought, its verticality. But at the time of the Nietzsche book proper the arts do not seem to possess the force necessary for a transformative encounter: the game of concepts and philosophical thought being more profound than a game of images for Nietzsche, so Deleuze. The poem and the aphorism may be the two most image of Nietzsches means of expression, but they have a determinate relation, un rapport dterminable, to philosophy.30 But we can problematize the claim that it is the verticality of thought which Nietzsche challenges. For a movement of central importance Nietzsche introduces into thought is that of walking. Zarathustra is not thinkable as a figure who does not walk, it is the condition of possibility of Zarathustras encounters, and Zarathustra himself was encountered by Nietzsche through walking. The walk of The Wanderer in Human, All Too Human is precisely what enables him to challenge the fixity and destinality of moral and national identity. The Wanderer could not be adestinal without his being a walker. From his earliest texts, The Future of Our Educational Institutions (1871) and The Birth of Tragedy (1872), through Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885), to the publications of the late 1880s, walking is something to be re-learnt and the re-learning of walking to be valorized. Even if the gait and step as these are re-learnt, and repeated can be counterpoised to the stance of the uprighteous ones, an essential part of the re-learning is the acquisition of a gait and a step which is not simply opposed to the upright, not least in its making visible the step, the foot, and the leg in order that one

see these as ones own.31 Walking can sometimes appear to be the very condition of a worthwhile thought in Nietzsche. Certainly he distrusts those thoughts had whilst seated or sitting still, even if writing them down must be carried out in this way. Here we must also hesitate to agree with Derrida, when he contends that Nietzsche did not doubt that the writer would never be upright [debout]; that writing is first and always something over which one bends.32 For to argue this is to suppose that writing and thinking are opposed for Nietzsche. Against which we contend that for the pen to learn how to dance it is necessary for the thinker to learn how to walk. When questioning whether we should be erecting vertical axes and worrying about standing up straight, and insisting instead that we run out and along the horizon, we cannot help noticing that Deleuzes supposed alternatives, to run and to push, are no less an image of uprightness than what they run from or push against. The passage in question goes on: Et encore avons-nous avec nous lami, ou bien sommes-nous tout seul, Moi = Moi, ou bien sommes-nous des amants, ou autre chose encore, et quels risques de se trahir soi-mme, dtre trahi ou de trahir?33 We note the similarity of this image with one found in Nietzsche, the fourth question of conscience: Willst du mitgehn? oder vorangehn? oder fr dich gehn? . . . Man mu wissen, was man will und da man will.34 II) Second, in a conversation with Raymond Bellour and Franois Ewald from 1988, Sur la philosophie, we find Deleuze setting out precisely the power that an image of thought has to transform thinking. Theres a secret image of thought [une image secrte de la pense] he says, and its called the rhizome.35 The rhizome is Deleuzes antidote to what he calls tree logic. The image of the tree is not just one of those images which imprison thought, it is the image of thought par excellence. All images are for Deleuze images of the tree. There is nothing more recognisable than a tree, it is the very image of representational thought. But it is when, in the late-appended preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze holds up the image of the tree as the model of arborescent

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thought, to which he opposes the rhizome, the vegetal model of thought, the two in opposition, that we begin to see how Deleuzes thinking on images begins to flip over.36 Deleuze opposes metaphor; the trees binarism naturalizes as a necessity the choosing of one way as if it were opposed to another. As Lecercle points out, if Deleuzes critique of binarism is to take account of languages non-binary, a-centred an-archism, then the rhizome must amount not just to a change of metaphor, indeed not to a metaphor at all, but a concept.37 In which case it cannot be an image. But in what way is this vegetal model of thought less an image than the arborescent? Because the rhizome is the hidden image of thought, says Deleuze. It extends beneath the tree image [stend sous celle des arbres]. It is what is imperceptible from the point of view of recognition. In other words, in the image of the tree, the rhizome is that which cannot be recognised: as it unfolds and mutates this secret or hidden image of thought inspires the necessity of creating new concepts, non pas en fonction dun dterminisme externe, mais en fonction dun devenir qui emporte les problmes eux-memes.38 But if the rhizome is the imperceptible of the image and the non-recognisable of the image, it is no less of the image than is the perceptible and the recognisable. Both belong to the same image, the image of a landscape for example, a garden or a potato patch, especially if the rhizome is that which strangles roots: Nest-ce pas le propre dun rhizome de croiser des racines, de se confondre parfois avec elles?39 To ask such a question is not to trace a redundancy or to translate the map into an image, it is to draw out the force of the image. With the idea that there is a hidden force to the image we are returned not to the power of certain images over others, but more importantly to the power of the image as such. Writers and artists have long known about the hidden power of the de-naturalised landscape image, the landscape into which disjunction is filmed or written: see for instance the pans across deserted ground in the films of Straub and Huillet,40 and the subterranean movement of desire in the garden of Goethes Die Wahlverwandtschaften.

It should be noted that the rhizome is nowhere mentioned in Diffrence et rptition; it is a concept which was created later in collaboration with Flix Guattari, work which was prepared for by Diffrence et rptition and the attempt to destroy the image of thought. In the last lines of the later Preface to the English translation the rhizome is merely mentioned, but as a new image of thought. In the text where the rhizome was first presented to thought and where it figures most forcefully as a means of thought, Mille Plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari appear to believe that the rhizome is immune from being imaged: A loppos de larbre, le rhizome nest pas objet de reproduction: ni reproduction externe comme larbre-image, ni reproduction interne comme la structure-arbre.41 They come close here to saying that an image of the rhizome cannot be made and that all images are in essence tree-like. The rhizome is not something to be made into a model, and in that sense it cannot be generalised into an image in the way a tree can. But accepting this is not the same thing as saying that an image of the rhizome can only be imperceptible, hidden, or in other words un-representable, in the same way that Artaud proclaimed a thought without image: la conqute dun nouveau droit qui ne se laisse pas reprsenter.42 It may not be objectively representable in the form of a model, but that does not mean that it is un-representable. We have suggested that the rhizome draws its force from its relation to the tree in the same image in which the tree appears. But in a classic philosophical gesture Deleuze and Guattari create a conceptif that is what they are doing borrowing a model of thought from the vegetal worldand ring-fence its showing by art, or delimit its effect such that it is excluded from the realm of art: A loppos du graphisme, du dessin ou de la photo, loppos des calques, le rhizome se rapporte une carte qui doit tre produite, construite, toujours dmontable, connectable, renversable, modifiable, entres et sorties multiples, avec ses lignes de fuite.43 Is this not to place art in a determinate relation to philosophy? This circumscription of the power of the image in graphic art or drawing to map the rhizome in the

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manner outlined is symptomatic of the struggle with the image in the early work of Deleuze. But with what image are we to contest the idea that art cannot make graphic that which the rhizome produces? The tree root proceeds by way of dichotomy, one becoming two, two four and so on, and therefore linearly. In other words it fixes the order of relations between parts. Tree logic is a binary logic. The rhizome on the other hand proceeds multiplicitously. It multiplies in such a way that any one part could be connected to any other. The uprightness of a tree is thus grounded on binary logic; as a model it can only produce genealogical and hierarchical thinking. Above all, tree logic hierarchizes the point over the line. So what image can we give to the multiplicitous, reversible and modifiable lines of the rhizome? Well we can give it the image of a walk, and Deleuze and Guattari do exactly that: la promenade est une heccit. With no beginning no end no origin no destination the walk, made up only of lines, is a rhizome. 44 Before outlining a third moment in Deleuzes turn back towards the image we should pause to comment on what Deleuze supposes to be a fundamental difference his thought has to that of Martin Heidegger, whose pre-ontological understanding of being Deleuze contends in Diffrence et rptition is no less a subjective presupposition than the dogmatic image of thought presupposed by the history of thinking Heideggers work would otherwise confront. This is notwithstanding that in a later text Heidegger is credited, along with Foucault, with having transformed the image of thought most profoundlybut how Deleuze does not say.45 Presumably one might find the presupposition in what Heidegger has to say about the tree, in particular with his conception of rootedness. But again the matter is not as straightforward as is suggested by Deleuzes opposition of the root of the tree to the rhizome, for we discover that Heidegger no less than Deleuze problematises the image of the tree. Following Descartes analogy (in a letter to his translator Picot) that Ainsi toute la Philosophie est comme un arbre, Heidegger argues that it is misleading to understand the roots as if they were metaphysics. On

the contrary, the roots of a tree forget and abandon themselves for the sake of the tree. They still belong to the tree, but in so belonging they squander themselves [Sie verschwendet ihr Element und sich selbst]. Metaphysics might want to think that it is above-ground, that it can leave its ground and objectify beings, that it is upright in Deleuzes sense. But this leads to an objectifying of the ground itself, as if it were pre-given, or subjectively presupposed in Deleuzes terms (which happen to be Heideggers too in other of his texts). Thus representational thinking can never grasp its own ground. If we are to understand ground we must think rootedness as something unsaid [Ungesagtes], and the hiddenness of the root not as something we can reveal or presuppose as having been but as a play of appearing and withdrawing and always to come.46 Here then we find a distinct resonance with Deleuzes thinking of the ground and what is rooted in it being imperceptible and in need of turning. But whereas in Deleuze the emphasis is in drawing an image in opposition to the dogmatic one, in Heidegger it is in drawing out the play between the two.47 III) Finally then a third moment in Deleuzes move away from calling for the destruction of the image of thought towards advocating instead a new image of thought. In Quest-ce que la philosophie? published the same year (1994) as the Preface to the English translation of Difference and Repetition, the image of thought is what is now referred to as the plane of immanence, and it is no longer characterised as simply negative and dogmatic: Le plan dimmanence nest pas un concept pens ni pensable, mais limage de la pense, limage quelle se donne de ce que signifie penser, faire usage de la pense, sorienter dans la pense. . . . La pense revendique seulement le mouvement qui peut tre port linfini. Ce que la pense revendique en droit, ce quelle slectionne, cest le mouvement infini ou le mouvement de linfini. Cest lui qui constitue limage de la pense.48 Here then its being an image is precisely what allows thought to give itself back to itself. And no philosopher is great who does not draw such an image: nest-ce pas chaque grand philosophe

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qui trace un nouveau plan dimmanence, apporte une nouvelle matire de ltre et dresse une nouvelle image de la pense.49 It is no longer that the thought cannot be imaged, it is that the image cannot be thought, because thought needs the image in order to think. Until the end Deleuze cleaved to a fundamental difference between philosophy and art. Art cannot create concepts, philosophy cannot think images. If thought needs an image to think then this will be created by art and given back to be thought. When Deleuze says that Godard starts cinema thinking he means that Godard produced new images that when encountered provoke the thinking of cinema.50 If thought is to think it needs a figure, a line, the two forming the possibility of an encounter of sense; thought seeks an encounter with that which would act on it and draw it out of itself as something new, something not habitual, something not at home. Only then will thought produce movement, and be given the possibility of movement to act in turn on that which encounters it. This is what works of art stage, and its arts power to do so that Deleuze came to recognise. We have remarked on philosophy for the early Deleuze being too much on the side of friendship to achieve a non-dogmatic image of thought. At that time Deleuze felt that only an en-

counter with the creativeness of art, the secret pressures [pressions secrtes] of the work of art, art on the side of love rather than friendship, can force a thinking without image.51 The more this thought forced itself upon Deleuze, the more creative his thinking about images became, to the extent that in the later texts it was philosophys task to draw a new image of thought through an encounter with art. It is creativity that resists.52 It was the necessity of placing the emphasis on creativity that forced Deleuze to drop the ban on the image for thought. Art cannot be sidestepped. But what does not change is this: the thinking provoked by art, the pure thought that philosophy is, is not just thought purified of dogmatism and of presuppositions, of representation and recognition, it is philosophy purified of art. Nonetheless, we see how far Deleuze walked from the time of writing Diffrence et repetitionwhere the image of thought is to be negated in favour of thought without imageto the time of writing the Preface for the English translation of Difference and Repetitionwhere a new image of thought is called for. Where once the image of thought was precisely that which stood in the way of the new, the new is now not possible without an image of thought standing in the way.53

NOTES
1. Gilles Deleuze et Flix Guattari, Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrnie (Paris: Les ditions de minuit, 1980), 468. Gilles Deleuze, Diffrence et rptition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 173 and passim. Gilles Deleuze, Preface to the English edition, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xvixvii. Gilles Deleuze et Flix Guattari, Quest-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 1991), 52. Deleuze, Diffrence et rptition, 172. Note here and elsewhere Deleuzes capitalisation of Image. Ibid., 192. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 361. 9. 10. 11. Gilles Deleuze et Claire Parnet, Dialogues [1977] (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), 33. Ibid., 32. Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes [1964] (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, deuxime dition, 1998), 122 and 119. Deleuze, Diffrence et rptition, 197. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 182. Ibid., 18889; and Deleuze, Proust et les signes, 118. Ibid, 192. Here it is worth comparing Jacques Derrida, for whom Artauds overturning of uprightness is the overcoming of the concept of work and, as with Deleuze, the metaphor: rection mtaphorique dans loeuvre crite, for art works are always works of death: Mais loeuvre, comme excrment, nest que matire: sans vie, sans force ni forme. Elle tombe

2.

3.

4.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

5. 6. 7. 8.

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17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

toujours et seffondre aussitt hors de moi. Cest pourquoi loeuvre potique ou autre ne me mettra jamais debout. Ce nest jamais en elle que je mrigerai. Le salut, le statut, ltre-debout, ne seront donc possibles que dans un art sans oeuvre. Jacques Derrida, La Parole Souffle, in Lcriture et la diffrence (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1967), 275 and 273. In De la grammatologie Derrida characterizes the epoch of writing as la suspension de ltredebout. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 1967), 127n31. Note that Derrida admits to hearing differently another word for uprightness, droiture, when reading Lvinas, and we repeat it here in virtue of its relevance to the encounter: innocence sans navet, une droiture sans niaiserie, droiture absolue qui est aussi critique absolue de soi, lue dans les yeux de celui qui est le terme de cette droiture et dont le regard me met en question. Emmanuel Lvinas, Quatre lectures talmudiques (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 1968), 105; cited in Jacques Derrida, Adieu Emmanuel Lvinas (Paris: Galile, 1997), 1213. Acphale, a revue published by Bataille from 1936 39 (first issue 24 June 1936), the cover of which carries a drawing of a headless figure by Andr Masson based on de Vincis Vitruvian Man (c.1487). Deleuze, Diffrence et rptition, 191. Ibid., 217. Ibid., 354; my emphasis. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, logique de la sensation, tome 1 (Paris: ditions de la Diffrence, 1981), 67. Deleuze et Guattari, Quest-ce que la philosophie?, 187. Gilles Deleuze, La peinture enflamme lcriture [1981], in Deux rgimes de fous: Textes et entretiens 19751995 (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 2003), 167; and Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 9. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, chapitre XII. Deleuze et Guattari, Quest-ce que la philosophie?, 187. The other way of dematerialising sensation is found in conceptual art, where sensation is made a matter of decision on the part of the viewer, who is provided with sufficient information to decide whether to materialise the sensation or not. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 71. Ibid., 101. Deleuze, Preface to the English edition, Difference and Repetition, xvixvii.

29. Gilles Deleuze, Preface to the English translation, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), xiv. 30. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1962), 35. 31. Friedrich Nietzsche, 282, Der Gang, Die frhliche Wissenschaft [1882], KSA III, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe , Hrsg von Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 19671977). 32. Jacques Derrida, Force et signification, in Lcriture et la diffrence, 49. Derrida quotes the well-known passage from Nietzsches GtzenDmmerung: On ne peut penser et crire quassis (G. Flaubert). Damit habe ich dich, Nihilist! Das Sitzfleisch ist gerade die Snde wider den heiligen Geist. Nur die ergangenen Gedanken haben Wert. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sprche und Pfeile, 34, Gtzen-Dmmerung oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert [1888], KSA VI. 33. Gilles Deleuze, Sur la philosophie, entretien avec Raymond Bellour et Franois Ewald [1988], in Pourparlers 19721990 (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 1990), 20203. 34. Nietzsche, Gtzen-Dmmerung, 41. 35. Deleuze, Sur la philosophie, 205. 36. Deleuze, Preface to the English edition, Difference and Repetition, xvii. 37. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deleuze and Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 78. 38. Deleuze, Sur la philosophie, 20405. 39. Deleuze et Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 21. 40. In the films of Straub and Huillet, according to Deleuze, the image, the visible ground, sinks further and further underground the more the sound, what is voiceovered, is heard, an image/sound disjunction that only cinema can achieve. Gilles Deleuze, Having an idea in cinema (on the cinema of StraubHuillet), trans. Eleanor Kaufman, in E. Kaufman and K. J. Heller, eds., Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 16 17. 41. Deleuze et Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 32; my emphasis. 42. Deleuze, Diffrence et rptition, 192. 43. Deleuze et Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 32; my emphasis. 44. Ibid., 321.

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45. Gilles Deleuze, La vie comme oeuvre dart, entretien avec Didier Eribon [1986], in Pourparlers, 13031. 46. Martin Heidegger, Einleitung zu: Was ist Metaphysik? [1949], in Weg m a r ken , Gesamtausgabe Band 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 36567. 47. This is one of many correspondences in Deleuzes thought to that of Heidegger, few of which are acknowledged by Deleuze or his disciples. Deleuzes unwritten closeness to Heidegger is alluded to by Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 225 and 300n13; Alain Badiou, Deleuze: La clameur de ltre (Paris: Hachette, 1997), 34; and Derrida, Politics and friendship, interview with Michael Sprinker [1989], trans. Robert Harvey, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971 2001 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 155; and Dsistance [1989], trans. Christopher Fynsk, in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 17n10. See also my Between Deleuze and

48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

Heidegger There Never is Any Difference, in David Pettigrew and Franois Raffoul, eds., French Interpretations of Heidegger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 15165. Deleuze et Guattari, Quest-ce que la philosophie?, 3940. Ibid., 52. Gilles Deleuze, On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought, interview with Jean-Nol Vuarnet [1968], in Desert Islands and Other Texts 195374, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 141. Deleuze, Proust et les signes, 119. See the entry for R as in Resistance in Charles Stivales Overview of Deleuzes and Claire Parnets LAbcdaire de Gilles Deleuze, dir. PierreAndr Boutang (1996), at http://www.langlab. wayne/edu/CStivale/D-G/ABC3.html. This paper was made into a film and presented to the 4th International Deleuze Studies Conference, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, 29 June 2011. Futures Reader, directed by Trine Marie Riel (Denmark, 2011).

University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AT, United Kingdom

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