Deleuze on Thinking

“A delicate problem animates chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition. Deleuze wants to defend a pure concept of difference, an account of difference in itself, yet our experience is representational through and through.”

“Everywhere we are creatures of habit that recognize beings and therefore do not encounter difference.”

“We subordinate the beings of our experience to the same, similar, and the identical, assimilate what we experience to what we have experienced.”

“What, then, authorizes Deleuze to claim that there is something like difference in itself?”

“In chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition Deleuze will present what might be called a sort of “anti-phenomenology” that authorizes an appeal to difference in itself.”

“Where so much of phenomenology– and I know I’m not here being fair –sets out to demonstrate how we recognize things or how we always encounter them within a horizon of meaning (again a system of recognition), Deleuze will look at the dark side of experience, pointing to those moments where the system of meaning and recognition fails.”

“Thought, Deleuze will argue, only occurs under the force of an encounter.”

“Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In which tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. (DR, 139)”

“Everything goes wrong from the outset if we assimilate thought to simple cognition. This is Deleuze’s primary reproach against so much of the history of philosophy, and would no doubt be his criticism of cognitive science which takes itself to study thought: they assimilate thought to simple recognition.”

“Yet for Deleuze, thought is essentially rare.”

“We cognize and recognize all the time as creatures of habit (the first synthesis of repetition in Chapter 2), but we do not yet think.”

“It is only as a shock to our system that we begin to think. There can thus be no method of thought, nor a willing of thought, because in its initial phase, it is entirely passive.”

“For Deleuze, thought is an encounter with the different that produces difference. If it can only be sensed, this is because it cannot be perceived.”

“Perception implies recognition. “That is a glass.” “That is a book.” “There goes my wife.” Recognition is re-cognition. It is that which can be remembered or subsumed under an extant concept.”

“ut thought is the un-re-cognizable, and therefore an encounter with something that can’t be subsumed under any pre-existing concept, meaning, or memory.”

“If it can only be sensed– what Deleuze calls the “sentiendum”; and his book is designed to be a sort of sentiendum –then that is because we’ve encountered something that can’t be perceived or recognized; something that departs from all “conceptual schemes”.”

““Something is different here, yet I have no idea what it might be precisely because there isn’t yet any concept or meaning for it. This is why Deleuze claims that thought instigates a discordant functioning of the faculties.”

“Where, in perception, memory functions to show how the current experience resembles other past experiences, in the encounter thought is in discord with memory.”

“In the encounter we discover the immemorial precisely because there is no recollection, no “system of anticipations” as in Husserl, that could converge in a synthesis on this thing that can only be sensed.”

“And this is why the encounter generates the cogitandum, or that which can only be thought: the unprecedented. Thought is not the syllogism, nor subsumption under an established concept, but the invention of that for which there is yet no concept.”

“If thought is rare, then this is because thought for Deleuze is essentially invention and discovery.”

“Revolutionary science is what takes place when the paradigm itself is transformed. Deleuze would reserve the name of thought for the latter.”

“all genuine thought is poietic or inventive and it is only those moments that send us on these adventures that deserve to be called thought”