Strategies, Vol. 15, No.

1, 2002

Flesh to Desire: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson,

Deleuze
Dorothea Olkowski
Affectivity, the feeling of pleasure and pain, and its relation to thought as well
as to social or cultural life have, for some time now, been theorized nearly
exclusively within the domain of psychoanalysis. From the psychoanalytic
perspective, affectivity or feeling arises from instinctual sources whose deeper
origins are likely to be physiological. Thought or consciousness also arises out
of this physiological basis as the redirection of libidinal energy into culture for
the sake of preserving the individual if not the species. Yet, philosophers who
are not strictly psychoanalytic or who argue against the psychoanalytic interpretation of feeling as instinctual and physiological have also concerned
themselves with the relation between the body and consciousness. These
philosophers are interested in how the inclusion of affectivity in a philosophy of
embodiment alters our conceptions about mind and body, life and desire. This
is particularly the case if, as Gilles Deleuze argues, theorizing existence in terms
of desire necessitates certain kinds of reective and embodied practices that are
the condition of the possibility of any concepts, not only those directly related
to pleasure and pain.
Undoubtedly, the work of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
whose conception of embodied consciousness is a sustained attempt to overcome mindbody dualism, continues to be a signicant part of this philosophical
tradition. However, although Merleau-Pontys ontology of the esh purports to
connect the embodied life of the individual with a kind of cosmological embodiment and to connect embodiment with language, I will maintain that his efforts
in this direction in the end do not succeed without the intervention of something
like Bergsons analysis of affective life. From there, I will turn to Deleuzes
multifaceted conception of positive desire in order to constitute a practice and a
theory of positive desire, which I call, following Bergson, resonance. Although
this analysis will begin with Merleau-Pontys philosophical investigation of
perception, and move from there to Bergsons analyses of affection and duration,
to the question of creation and desire in concrete human actions in its reading
of Deleuze, the point is not to trace a progressive movement from one to the
next. Rather, it is by interweaving certain of their ideas that I will develop the
notion of resonance and explore its manifestations in embodied life.
Such interweaving is fruitful even though Deleuzes philosophy of creative
desire deliberately eschews any ties to phenomenology. Nonetheless, Deleuzes
work always plays with and upon the notion of desire, and desire turns upon
Deleuzes conception of the body, so that when the connections between esh,
feeling, and desire are examined in terms of the body, the relationship between
Merleau-Ponty, Bergson and Deleuze begins to reveal itself to be as deep as it
is broad. Merleau-Ponty addresses Bergsons ideas frequently throughout his
ISSN 1040-2136 print/ISSN 1470-1251 online/02/010011-14
DOI: 10.1080/ 10402130220127825

2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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own work in chapters, essays, and commentaries found in In Praise of Philosophy,

The Visible and the Invisible, and La Nature, to name three of the most signicant.
The Phenomenology of Perception may even be considered a rewriting of Bergsons
Matter and Memory from the point of view of spatiality and pure perception in
order to contest the very existence of an independent affective life, which
Bergson calls duration. Likewise, Gilles Deleuzes lifelong fascination with and
use of Bergsonism begins with the essay La conception de la difference chez
Bergson, and continues with the book Bergsonism as well as extensive theoretical
developments in Difference and Repetition, Cinema I, Cinema II, and the two
volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The two books on cinema can also be
read as an extended engagement with the Merleau-Pontean perception-image
and the Bergsonian affection-image.
Undoubtedly, Bergson is an important link between Merleau-Ponty and
Deleuze and further motivation for bringing these three together, insofar as
Bergsons conception of affective duration presents a formidable challenge to
Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of perception, which is grounded in spatiality,
and also provides a theoretical basis for the development of Deleuzes ideas
about creation and desire in relation to the perception-image and the affectionimage. In this way, the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty can be characterized in
terms of a movement that begins with making sense of the body in relation to
consciousness and ends with revealing the body in relation to esh, a much
broader concept that includes relations between self and world and between
oneself and others.
This task begins, for Merleau-Ponty, with The Structure of Behavior, which seeks
a way out of the dilemma of positing consciousness as either the transcendental
ego, the container of emotions, structures, and states or, as reducible to
pseudo-physical processes from which consciousness arises as the conglomeration of physical or quasi-physical states. Thus, Merleau-Ponty begins to develop
an account, not of consciousness, but of the structure and organization of the
embodied being whose relations to the world are organic, psychological, and
social. The task becomes one of seeking a theory that does not view embodied
beings as entities that exist on a sea of processes of which we know and
experience nothing.1 Merleau-Ponty argues that no human behavior can possibly be the result of only organic functions or of consciousness because the
so-called impersonal life is permeated by personal, meaningful, and symbolic
behavior. In fact, he will argue that every bodily act is psychological, not
physical, mechanical or transcendental, so that even the physical world must
always be made sense of on the basis of experience.
Thus, the human order of existence, which is bodily and psychological, is
what has to be accounted for rst, and this can only be done, for Merleau-Ponty,
through a phenomenology of perception which values both the physical body
and consciousness and which explains how it is that we experience them
together as an indistinguishable, existential process operating in every human
activity. The experience of the body and consciousness as integrated rather than
separated from one another occurs because humans have the unique capacity to
vary their relations to things in the world by moving their own bodies and/or
moving objects in the world. Human beings can free up any situation from its
concrete dependence on the mechanical or physical present by imaginatively
projecting it into the future. Unlike a chimpanzee, who cannot use a stick to pull

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13

down fruit from a tree unless the stick is already set in the right position for use,
human beings can gure out how to make and use tools of all kinds, sometimes
even fashioning them merely for play. It is this understanding of human activity
full of possibilities that guides Merleau-Pontys thinking.
Merleau-Ponty worked his entire life to nd a meeting ground for the body,
which expresses our instinctual nature and the consciousness, which chooses
and acts. Claiming that physiology is permeated by personal, meaningful, and
symbolic behavior, Merleau-Ponty analyzes the manner in which seemingly
natural, physiological structures of behavior undergo imperceptible changes
and are elevated to the level of human acts. Likewise, he leaves open the
possibility for the disintegration of human behaviors into what he thinks of as
mere habits, without meaning or reference. This is possible because, as he tries
to show, the physical and the psychic are intimately intertwined in existence.
Nevertheless, this intimacy of the physical and physiological with the psychological and cognitive is built upon an understanding of the nature of the
relations between consciousness and nature, or as Freud would say, life and
death, which although it seeks to break free of physiological determinism,
remains fettered by precisely that system of ideas. In the example referred to
above, when Merleau-Ponty describes a chimpanzee which fails to use available
objects as instruments for reaching desirable food, he ascribes this failure to a
sort of animal physics immanent in behavior, according to which animals
remain subject to the unvarying needs of the species.2 For human beings, the
world is much less a natural material plenum of juxtaposed parts than it is a
staging ground for behavior; it is the outward projection of internal possibilities.
Nonetheless, using an existential model, Merleau-Ponty argues that conscious
activity, which always posits the other as the object of my perception or action,
must cease in order for the other to be recognized by any agent. This seems to
imply that consciousness is an impediment to a shared intersubjective human
world and brings into question once again the interconnection between the
physical and the psychological worlds.3
Each species, according to Merleau-Ponty, has a distinct structural reality and
physics must concede that rather than existing as an objective mechanism that
operates according to unvarying principles, the natural world consists of a
milieu and environments in which natural stimuli count and play a role only
insofar as they belong to the structural reality of that species. Ultimately,
Merleau-Ponty thinks that we can divide the world into three distinct orders:
quantity or matter, order or life, and signication or minds. They are differentiated, he argues, only as a matter of degree, that is, each of these orders
represents a different degree of integration between matter and mind in a
hierarchy that aims for progressive individuation in the direction of
signication. It is precisely with this idea that we encounter the limits of
Merleau-Pontys conception of the relationship between matter and mind, body
and world.
If matter, life, and mind coexist as different degrees of integration or disintegration of an organized world, they do so, for Merleau-Ponty, because they are
homogenous and hierarchized. Physical laws are possible only within a reality
supported and maintained by the complete ensemble of relations in the physical
universe; thus physical laws operate within a structure but structure must also
operate within those physical laws, to constitute those laws. This is the case

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because even though science uses numbers and mathematics to characterize its
objects, when it speaks about the physical universe, it must express its laws in
terms of concrete perceived wholes, that is, in terms of the interests and actions
of human beings. Ultimately, the distinction between physical and vital or
inorganic and organic life is not as great as it might at rst appear to be. At each
level, equilibrium between living beings and their environment is sought and
maintained, yet Merleau-Pontys notion of equilibrium seems to have been
modeled on the physical worlds constraint of equilibrium. This appears to be
the case when Merleau-Ponty argues that the living or phenomenal body with
its gestures and attitudes must have a proper structure, an immanent
signication, a certain type of behavior that can be traced to the unities and a
prioris of biological science.4
Merleau-Pontys reformulation of nature and consciousness into physical,
vital, and human structures whose differences are differences of degree brings
him directly into contact and conict with the philosophy of Henri Bergson. In
arguing for the superiority of his own conception of structure, Merleau-Ponty
accuses Bergson of acts of magic. Specically Merleau-Ponty attacks the idea of
an elan vital, the temporal and explosive force of life, characterized in human
behavior as a zone of indetermination in which one can choose to act or to
refrain from action. For Merleau-Ponty, Bergsons claim that the interval produces the new is simply not possible because it would amount to a break in the
chain of physical causality. Merleau-Ponty wants to insist that the physical,
material world establishes an equilibrium with respect to the forces in the
milieu. Likewise, the animal equalizes instinct and need with milieu, and a
human being also establishes an equilibrium between itself and the physicochemical stimuli that make up its world in order to carry out its activities. The
point, for Merleau-Ponty, a point which he believes Bergson misses, is that
although each of these worlds strives for equilibrium, only human acts have
their own signicance. So, for example, a face perceived upside down deprives
the face and features of signicance because it is no longer part of a system of
possible actions dened by task and situation.
This is evidence, for Merleau-Ponty, that perceptions are relevant to our
bodies because they give us a world. We participate in the world by actively
selecting what interests us in our perception and acting upon it. Thus, MerleauPonty will argue, we respond to the world as it calls upon the body. None of this
would be possible if we were tied either to physiology or to the transcendental
ego constituting the world. That is, there would not be several ways for a body
to be a body and a consciousness to be a consciousness; there would be only
one.5 This is why psycho-physical phenomena such as sexuality or repression
cannot be reduced to physiology. Sexuality is not simply a release of energy and
repression, not merely a technique for the reduction of psychic pain. For
Merleau-Ponty, vital, instinctual, and physiological behavior disappear as isolatable when they are integrated into a whole that is a structure of behavior.
In fact, I want to emphasize the argument that, for Merleau-Ponty, sexuality
and desire play a signicant role in perception, that they are fundamental to our
being-at-the-world (etre-au-monde). Let us try to see how a thing or a being
begins to exist for us through desire or love and we shall thereby come to
understand better how things and beings can exist in general.6 As Marc Van
den Bossche sees this, Merleau-Ponty posits the existence of a fundamental erotic

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15

perception. There must be an Eros or a Libido which breathes life into an

original world, gives sexual value or meaning to external stimuli and outlines
for each subject the use he shall make of his objective body.7
A body is not perceived as an object only, the perception has a ground in a more
fundamental kind of perceptionMerleau-Ponty calls it secret: the visible body
is carried by a sexual scheme, which is strictly individual. This perception is
erotic and has nothing to do with a cogitatio that aims at a cogitatum Through
its embodiment, the perception aims at another body and this is executed in the
world, not in consciousness. According to Merleau-Ponty, a comprehension (une
comprehension) exists which does not belong to the domain of understanding
(lentendement). For understanding catches an experience in an idea, while desire
comprehends blindly through its connecting a body with another body.8

Nonetheless, while I want to recognize the signicance of positing a fundamental erotic perception, I want to question the ontological basis of MerleauPontys analysis of this blind comprehension. I will argue that it continues to
presuppose the existence of two separate worlds bordering one another. One is
a mechanical or organic realm of forces, while the other is that of an active
subject engaged with the world. Merleau-Pontys dialectic of existence remains
too much of an idealization because the embodied world is structured too much
from the perspective of what is said, thought, and perceived. As such it turns out
to be little more than the realm of the pre-discursive, the pre-reective, and
perhaps even the pre-perceptual, a realm whose positive and generative characteristics are often only vaguely articulated. This is to say that there are great
difculties in positing a body of impersonal existence facing off a consciousness
of personal acts. It is, in fact, the recognition of this dualism which leads
Merleau-Ponty to posit a philosophy of esh according to which the body
sensed and the body sentient are conceived of as the obverse and reverse of one
another. Merleau-Ponty is lead to extend the concept of esh so that it also
characterizes the relation between the impersonal and personal body, and the
relation between bodies and world. Flesh is then the name of the passiveactive
nature of the body, the body as seen and seer, as touched and touching and it
is the name for the world.
Flesh is the world, for Merleau-Ponty, when each of these distinctions come to
be understood as differentiations out of one integrated reality and not as
independent and positive phenomenon. Thus, Merleau-Ponty envisages the
impersonal body, that level of physiological, instinctual life, not as an invisible
cause of visible actions, but as something that is present in every perception of
the world, thus as something we can apprehend in terms of both our interests
in the world and our actions in that world. In short, to make sense of the
objective or physical world, we must look to experience, insofar as it is the
order of the phenomenal which is precisely to be justied and rehabilitated as
the foundation of the objective order.9
From a Bergsonian perspective, however, Merleau-Pontys primacy of perception is spatialized, thus homogeneous, insofar as within the perceptual eld,
behavioral differences are characterized as differences of degree and not of kind.
For Bergson, the difference between objective, material relations and meaningful,
human and social relations is not merely a matter of degree. The difference
between determination and freedom is not, again, merely a matter of degree.

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Bergson agrees with Merleau-Ponty that perception tends to divide up matter

according to our needs, thereby facilitating action. Yet this would require not a
normative equilibrium like that of natural phenomena, not even a structure of
behavior, but something else. It requires that perception be continually revised
and revisable as our interests and needs change. When we imagine, as MerleauPonty does, that there is a normative mode of perception, guaranteed by the
spatiality of the body, without which there will be no signication, such a view
presumes the existence of a spatialized equilibrium which guarantees those
norms with respect to both behavior and meaning.
Against this, Bergson argues that extensity and not abstract space is the most
salient quality of perception but that our perception of space as homogeneous
conceals this qualitative aspect of spatial experience, and that the qualitative
aspect is what produces change because it is change. Quality, by expanding and
extending itself, gives rise to extensity and ultimately to spatiality, homogenous
units of homogeneous space. However, quality is not spatial nor homogeneous;
thus it requires philosophical intuition, the search for differences in nature or
kind rather than mere differences of degree. The parameters of this method are
quite distinct from ordinary philosophical analysis. Intuition avoids oppositions
and divides experience into two tendencies, instinct and intelligence, time and
space, which are differences in nature or kind, each of which usually contains
some elements of the other.10 This is in contrast to the Hegelian notion whereby
a thing differs rst of all from what it is not, making difference into contradiction. In the Hegelian conception, a thing differs from what it is not; it thus differs
from what is located elsewhere in space, whereas for Bergson, a thing must rst
of all differ from itself; it must have internal, qualitative differences and this is
where the recognition of quality begins.
Like Merleau-Ponty, Bergson also begins with perception but does not focus
on the objects of perception, that is, the actual perceptual eld. Rather, working
only with images, without theories of matter and spirit or mind, Bergson asks
about the conditions in which sensory images are produced. He discovers that
most perceptions are of the world, but one particular perception is given from
within, through affections, and that one unique perception is the perception of
ones own body. Between the multiplicity of excitations received from without
and the movements executed in response to those excitations, there is an interval
of affectivity, in which one feels the inuence of the world upon ones body. For
Bergson, perception is one tendency and affection is another, and he will
characterize the former in terms of space and quantication and the latter in
terms of time and the affective awareness of qualitative differences. Perception
orients the living being towards matter, spatiality, and the world; it prepares one
to act, while affection moves in the direction of temporality, memory, and mind,
the durational ow of life in which differences are qualitative and so invite
reection. Thus, between these two directions there is a difference in quality,
nature, or kind. Without affective life, the body would be a purely impersonal
existence, a thing among things in the world. However, affectivity is not
restricted to human beings. Everywhere in the world, every living being with
the power of mobility engages in the dual functions of perception and affection.
The former is related directly to action in the world, while the latter is the
immediate contact with and the inuence of the world upon any body. The
former induces speed since it involves ready-made actions in a pre-made world,

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17

while the latter, because every aspect of it is differentiated both from itself and
from any other affective process, slows things down, opening up an interval for
reection. For human beings, the interval in which affections arise constitutes a
break between the perception and our response to it. This interval makes it
possible for us to reect and act differently or to choose not to act at all. This
means that affective life is a moment of freedom, a moment of indetermination.
And because in this moment of hesitation between a stimulus and a response we
may reect and insert new images into the present perception, it is also a matter
of the creation of new modes of existence.
Bergson argues that the simplest forms of life are often indiscernibly physical,
chemical and vital. This is because, for Bergson, life begins to evolve in
accordance with the habits of inert matter, entering into it in order to draw it
out. Thus, the rst animate forms were extremely simple, minute masses of
protoplasm. Even so, they possessed the internal push that eventually raised
them to the highest forms of life. This push or eclat is a splintering that can be
understood not as a magical force, but as contraction of the outside to the inside.
As that which is outside the body is contracted into it, it inuences the body and
so changes it, whether this outside is another organism or something nonorganic.11 This does not mean that life is merely an effect of environmental factors.
If it were, living things would be purely mechanical. What advances life in the
contraction of the outside is a special kind of passive synthesis in which the
living thing is literally is affected by what touches it and either ees from it or
takes into itself either some actual thing or a sensation. This affective contraction
inuences the body and so organizes it temporally, literally creating a temporal
duration such that the contraction of each new present (from outside to inside)
is simultaneously the upsurge of the bodys past and future. This is why each
contraction is followed by the impulse to expand, to grow, and to scatter.
As Gilles Deleuze articulates this, every organism is, in its receptive and
perceptive elements, but also in its viscera, a sum of contractions, retentions, and
protentions. At the level of this vital, primary sensibility, the lived present
already constitutes in time a past and future.12 Each new moment is, for the
living being, a complete reinterpretation of the past and the creation of a new
future. Change is constant and inevitable. This is why Bergson suggests that
rather than conceiving of experience in spatial terms, as a matter of normative
structures that adhere to certain physical a prioris, we might begin with
affectivity, the nervous system that is open to a succession of qualitative changes
which permeate one another so as to constitute our pure duration, our temporality. If every being is a contraction, retention, and protention of fundamental
elements on the plane of sensibility, then every being is a living present
constituting the past and future from out of that present. This indicates that with
respect to life, time is more fundamental than space; time is the form of
everything living, everything that moves and changes.
The transformation of this perceptual and affective structure into an account
of interesting and remarkable human actions comes about, principally, in the
work of Gilles Deleuze. If affection-contraction always takes place in the present,
and past and future emerge out of the present as our continually altering point
of view, then the past is never a former present but is always simultaneous with
the current present. Thus, a trauma produced by a childhood experience is not
a sign of a past wound; it is a past that only emerges in the present as the

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present experience of having had a trauma or wound. This is what Bergson

means when he says that the entire past coexists with each new present and that
the actual present is nothing but the entire past in its most contracted state,
brought to bear upon the present in the moment of reection between a
perception and our response to that perception.
When the affective past contracts into the present, it emerges as memory-images that ll up a present perception. If one does not hesitate and reect, a
habitual memory-image will complete the perception. You will see, hear, taste,
touch, and feel what you have always seen, heard, tasted, touched, or felt. But
if, in the interval between perception and action, you reect upon the multiple
and heterogeneous memory-images that make up the affective ontological
unconscious, bringing a new image to bear upon the present, then the perception can be completely new and so it can give rise to a completely novel action.
This is because the memory preserved in the bodys motor mechanisms is
habitual, but the qualitative memory-images of the ontological unconscious are
constantly undergoing change. Attentive, reective perception stops the habitual
response of the body and reinterprets the present perception from the point of
view of memory-images, thereby creating something new. In Deleuzes terms, it
opens the being to desiring production.
Freud had certainly made it possible to conceive of desire as polymorphous
perversity, but what is different for Deleuze (with Felix Guattari) is that desire
is no longer taken to be the desire for something in particular. This would mean
that the erotic body of desire has to be transformed as well and, for Deleuze and
Guattari, it becomes the desubstantialization and demystication of sexuality,
such that the signicance of desire is no longer strictly determinable. It is not
able to be regulated by social norms because what desiring production does,
unstoppably, is make connections. If desire is repressed by social forces, this is
because, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, every position of desire, no matter how
small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society. Not
that desire is asocial; on the contrary, it opens up all social avenues as well as
avenues into the natural world. This, I argue, is due to affective life, which
manifests itself ontologically as resonance, what Deleuze and Guattari also call
a desiring-machine. Resonance is the ever-present, ongoing affective relation
between all living things with mobility. But it is explosive; there is no desiringmachine capable of being assembled which cannot also demolish entire social
sectors.13 Thus desiring production is commensurate with creation; it is the very
process of affective creation, that explosive and disruptive production of what is
new which is always and everywhere at risk of being captured, organized,
hierarchized, exploited, and subjected to repetition of the same, the habitual, the
common. If such resonance can be argued to exist, it accounts for MerleauPontys insight that erotic perception is fundamental to our being-at-the world.
For resonance would be precisely that erotic perception, the affective perception
making connections, instinctual (in Bergsons use of the term) or machinic
connections, which, no matter how apparently insignicant, nevertheless have
the capacity to demolish social sectors.
On the ontological level, resonance operates between all things with mobility.
As such, it could be claimed that erotic perception is ontological (a structure of
the world) and unconscious (instinctual in a very limited and precise sense of
the term). On the human level, instinctual connections constitute desiring-ma-

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chines; they are the passions and actions of bodies. Taking a cue from Bergson,
instinct can be redened not as a physical, material process, nor as an inner
drive, but as a mode of organization of life. As a mode of organization, it is
simply the tendency to connect whatever invariable instruments are at hand. It
is, as Deleuze and Guattari conceive of it, the domain of free syntheses [of]
nonexclusive disjunctions, non-specic conjunctions, partial objects and ows,
in short, that realm of duration in which everything outside can be and is
connected with and contracted to the inside.14
Freudians theorize that such connections are infantile only, as when the baby
takes the breast, but for Deleuze and Guattari, they are found everywhere a
direct connection occurs and opens affective, durational ows. The body turns
toward a source of warmth, the eye connects with the movement a body sliding
past it, the ear is lost in the sound of the chime. Each of these connections
engages a sensory element and even though they are each direct and singular,
each begins with the passive reception or resonance of the moving element and
each connection is acted out as the response to that resonance. For connective
desire, passion or contraction gives way to a singular act that afrms the
resonance and so afrms the connection. Yet, there is also choice; any conscious,
living being may hesitate before choosing from among several different connections. Thus, desiring production (what was earlier referred to as erotic perception) is not blind, as Merleau-Ponty claims; rather it is singular, an effect of
choice regarding specic pleasures and pains. The specialization or singularity
of each desiring resonance precludes their being subject to an organizing
signier. Nonetheless, when life organizes it does so by means of such desiring
conjunctions or associations which connect elements, but which have become
highly specic, even predictable. The disjunctions take over, excluding one
element of each connective pair. So, for example, anything may be said to
engage in actions or passions, pleasure or pain, instinct or intelligence but never
both because rather than conceiving of them as qualitative tendencies, each one
of which may contain some of the other, they have become exclusive categories,
conceived spatially as separable and therefore necessarily separate. This ordering of desire has the advantage of creating stable patterns and habits, but it also
leads to stasis.
As freely owing connections or associations, desire has no object or objects.
It is qualitative connectivity and not a desire for something in particular. That is,
there is desire because there is resonance, hesitation, choice and connection.
So-called erotic perception is, in fact, fundamental to being-at-the-world. But
when intelligence emerges as a different tendency or direction from that of
instinct, its emergence signals the inception of a kind of spatialized thinking.
Intelligence, exhibiting a difference in nature from instinct, does not connect
qualitatively but quantitatively, by means of homogeneous, spatial relations.
Thus intelligence links like to like, cause to effect, attribute to subject, treating
everything like inert matter, stopping ows and imposing spatial discontinuity.
When connections or conjunctions become habitual, when disjunction imposes
the rule of exclusion (either this or that), then intelligence is at work in the realm
of desire. This is both benecial and limiting.
When affective ows are stabilized and made habitual, then intelligence can
begin to construct tools, patterns, organs with determinate functions. These
determinate functions, if maintained, will block the creation of anything new.

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However, if intelligence reects, pauses in the interval between perception and

action, then it may fall back upon newly made qualitative connections which can
free up the habits and patterns intelligence relies on, once again making it
indeterminate and open to change. In this way, a tool, a habit, an organ destined
for one particular function can be wrested from its original use and be reoriented
to carry out another function. This is the very meaning of creativity and there is
no question but that intelligence is at the very core of such creativity. A major
language that has become the organ of authority, for example, may suddenly be
reoriented, put to use against itself, and all its orders and imperatives reused in
the context of expressing sentiment or passion. The result surely is humorous
and clumsy, witty and awkward, mad and emotional, thus inclusive rather than
exclusive. But such reorientation does break down the habitual order and
authority of the language, opening it up to a completely new affective life,
unhinging it from its restrictive ordering and functioning.
It is this orientation of desire that Deleuze and DeleuzeGuattari open up for
the rst time as an ontology of change. It differs in particular from MerleauPontys ontology of esh in that it differentiates between affective, qualitative
life (which includes extension) and pure spatiality, the physical imperative that
all differences are nothing but differences of degree. In doing so, it recognizes
that not only human acts are creative, but that the entire cosmos is involved in
a creative becoming. But, on the human level in particular, there are certain
powerful social and political forces that mitigate against change. That is, when
intelligence does not leave open the affective and reective interval between
perception and action, precisely when it excludes the rest of the world except as
an object of action, then it circumscribes all cultural life in a manner which
stabilizes hierarchically or which continuously destabilizes society only in order
to subject it to greater limitations. Thus, it is absolutely necessary to ask if erotic
resonance still plays any role in our experience. Or, have we already been
overrun by images of ourselves that are policed by predetermined narrative
structures, while all desiring ows have been subjected to capitalist capture in
which market value and the system of exchange ruthlessly undermine and
eliminate all traditional meanings and any existing social codes, not in order to
open affective connections, but only in order to impose the axiomatic of
quantication?
Nowhere in the work of Deleuze is this conict so completely worked out as
in his analysis of lm. That lm would play such a large role may at rst seem
curious, but when we consider how important the perceptual element in lm is,
then we can begin to make sense of this. Deleuze argues that in lm, as in
perception, the camera and the perceiver often pass from one object to another
by means of associations that remain on the same plane. Such a sensory-motor
image characterized by spatial extension brings together two kinds of movement-images, the perception-image and the action-image.15 These two types of
image, along with the affection-image, are three aspects of what Deleuze refers
to as the movement-image in lm, and it is the rst two forms of movement-image in particular that encourage reading lm images through a prescribed
narrative. For Merleau-Ponty the world forms the horizon of the bodys sensorymotor intentions (the perception-image) to which the human being as a center of
indetermination or choice reacts. This secondary operation is characterized by
Deleuze as the action-image. Now, this center is only capable of actingin the

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sense of organizing an unexpected responsebecause it perceives and has

received the excitation on a privileged facet, eliminating the remainder.16 What
is grasped is the virtual action of things on the subject and the possible action
of the subject on things.
This, however, is as far as Merleau-Ponty will take his analysis of perception.
He explicitly denies the existence of a third sort of experience, which would
constitute a third image, that of affect, and so named, the affection-image.
Merleau-Ponty argues that the notion of sensation, understood as the way in
which I am affected and the experiencing of a state of myself, is completely
confused and corresponds to nothing in our experience. 17 The gure on a
ground, he maintains, is the simplest sense-given available to us, for anything
that could be perceived must form part of a eld whereas a pure impression
would be undiscoverable, imperceptible, and so, inconceivable.18 This is why he
argues, later in the Phenomenology, that perception bypasses the color and goes
straight to the thing. So-called qualities are properties of objects which
themselves are made up of bits of matter and have spatial points that are
external to one another. A color appears only in virtue of an object as an element
in a spatial conguration, occupying an area of a certain size, and carrying
meanings that reside in it.19 Any pure sensation would amount to no sensation
because consciousness must always be consciousness of something.20 At most,
we may have an indeterminate sensation, but we always perceive something or
other.21
For his part, Deleuze offers up a different perspective. According to Deleuze,
privileging the sensory-motor image produces an image that is stabilized and
made determinate by narration, when in fact, narration is not primary in images
(including lm images). The reproblematization of this dilemma lies at the heart
of Deleuzes analysis of lm but also at the heart of this concept of creation. The
answer to this dilemma is met by the idea of movement, and the link between
movement and lm is the notion that image is movement.22 The analysis
derives from Henri Bergson who, as we have seen, posits the material world as
a system of closely linked images. Every body is an image among others
insofar as each body transmits movement and receives movement back from
other bodies. This is an exceedingly interesting characterization of experience
and it consequences are many and of the utmost importance.. Most important
for our purposes here is, rst, that movement is not, as in mathematics, a matter
of varying the distance from points of reference, and, second, that every image,
in principle, resonates with every other image by means of the transmission of
movement.23
When we represent, that is, when we narrate a series of actions, Bergson
insists, what we do is constitute permanence in the form of bodies and we
represent changes among those bodies not as the transmission of motion but by
means of homogeneous movements in space. What such narration or representation entirely circumvents is the sensation of movement, the rhythms of the
transmission of movements. Nonetheless, for Bergson, the sensation of movement is a reality insofar as something is really happening and we grasp that
reality as a change of state or of quality; the sensation of movement is then a real
change of quality and, Deleuze maintains, it is changes of quality that modern
lm images directly express.
Deleuze writes that in certain lm images, Some characters, caught in certain

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pure, optical and sound situations, nd themselves condemned to wander about

or go off on a trip, these are pure seers, who no longer exist except in the
interval of movement.24 What has occurred in such situations is that time is out
of joint, which means time is not the measure of movement, it is not the
sequential tracking of solid bodies in uniform space. Rather, the image consists
of pure optical and sound situations rather than of bodies moved predictably in
space; it is virtual. Like the movement-image, it is real, but unlike the
movement-image, which can only indirectly represent time through changes in
the movements of bodies, it is not actualized in a homogeneous spatiality. How
is such an image possible at all, especially in lm? The movement-image passes,
by association, from one object to another, yielding an indirect image of time,
but of homogenous, that is, sequential time, a time for action.
In an example of this kind of image, lm theorist Andre Bazin describes how
a camera passes from a hungry man to the food he desires and back to the
hungry man who is now busy eating. As Deleuze notes, everything happens on
the same plane, nothing occurs that is not accessible through the sequential
series of camera shots. But what would happen if the camera were able to pass
through different planes? What would it mean to pass through different
planes? It means according to Deleuze that rather than insisting on the image
as the representation of what interests uswhat in this sense is habitual, what
we expect, what is customary, regular, or routine in such cases, what is
habitually inscribed in our sensory-motor associations of one object with another
(like, for example, a hungry man who encounters a table full of food and
eats)the time-image is instead a matter of pure optics and pure sound, lacking
any intrinsically habitual association; the time-image is completely new.
The time-image arises out of a zone of recollections, dreams, or thoughts that
habitual or inscribed perception never has access to. This is because, as we have
seen in Bergson, there are two forms of memory and so two forms of present
experience. The rst consists of the sensory-motor system of the living body, the
habitual body that responds to the world in pre-established ways that advance
its interests in the world but which are nearly completely predictable and
socially circumscribed. The second manner in which the past subsists is as
virtual, that is, in the form of independent memory-images that are the effect of
our affectivity, our affective as opposed to our active lives. Affection is the action
of the body upon itself. It is localized, evidence that the action of external causes
does threaten to disintegrate the body, but evidence also that the bodys surface
is both perceived and felt.25 In the perceptual struggle with an external object,
some of the action is absorbed as affection while, the rest is reected back into
the world as perception and action. Such affections are then memory-images, but
they are not a past that has once been present. Memory-images subsist as virtual,
each memory-image subsists as the contraction of the entire past from a certain
plane, a certain point of view, but the whole of this affective memory swells and
grows with the ow of becoming, always available to answer the call of attentive
recognition and in this process to be transformed into something completely
new.26
Under the conditions of attentive recognition, this second memory, laden
with the whole of the past, responds to the appeal of the present state [by]
translation, by which it moves in its entirety to meet experience, thus contracting
more or less, though without dividing.27 Such translation is the process of

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creating out of ontological memory, with its multiple, perhaps innite virtual
levels or regions, each of which is the whole past in a more or less contracted
state, but from a particular plane or point of view. Emerging into the present,
this whole diverges and dissociates, producing a powerful optical and sonorous
time-image. The affective past coexists with itself as a whole at various levels or
planes, and in various degrees of contraction and relaxation. Each level or plane
is a different interpretation of the entire past from the point of view of a
particular present, a plane of existence. Joining with a present perception, any of
these planes may contract so as to constitute a present image and to constitute
a subject, a receptive being, who experiences motion and who is thereby made
a subject by that durational ow. When a habitual memory is precluded from
immediately lling up the image of a present perception, then there is an
interval for passive (one could say unconscious) reection from which the
in-itself of affective or ontological memory emerges, to ll the perception, as a
past that has never been present, in this pure form of time, the memory-image
is always differentiated insofar as the passive ego is given its own thought and
lives it like an other within itself. This is the form of interiority that splits the
subject so that it can never be wholly integrated.
As passive, we are always thrown back upon our stock of memory-images.
We are subjected, made a subject by our own past, and if we are able to live it
like an other within ourselves, then and only then, in the repetition of a past that
has never yet been present, something new emergesspirited, creative life. Time
surges forth, the image emerges, the past is transformed into something totally
new. As if the gestator of the new world were being swept along and dispersed
by the shattering of that which it gave birth to in the multiple.28 What is really
going on in the image is in some sense left to each spectator. Each viewing, even
by the same person, each circuit, obliterates and creates a new object.29 The
constant making and remaking of the image indicates that subjectivity has
emerged in the image; subjectivity is in this sense spiritual, meaning creative,
memory is constantly at play with matter, and such play, I would argue, is the
work of desire, the free ow of affective, qualitative life that explodes into the
present as the creation of something new.
Notes
1. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968) The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis (trans.)
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press), p. 232.
2. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1967) The Structure of Behavior, Alden L. Fisher (trans.)
(Boston: Beacon Press), p. 115.
3. The Structure of Behavior, p. 157.
4. The Structure of Behavior, pp. 125126.
5. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith (trans.),
Forrest Williams (ed.) (New York: Routledge Press), p. 124.
6. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 154.
7. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 156.
8. Van Den Bossche, Marc (2000) Merleau-Pontys Erotic Perception, read at the
International Merleau-Ponty Conference, George Washington University, September.
9. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 209.
10. Deleuze, Gilles (1956) La conception de la difference chez Bergson in Les Etudes Bergsoniennes 4, pp. 83, 85.

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11. Bergson, Henri (1944) Creative Evolution, Arthur Mitchell (trans.) (New York: Modern
Library), p. 99.
12. Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, Paul Patton (trans.) (New York:
Columbia University Press), p. 73, translation altered.
13. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattarti, Felix (1983) Anti-Oedipus, Robert Hurley, Mark Seem
and Helen R. Lane (trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 138.
14. Anti-Oedipus, p. 63.
15. Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema II, The Time-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 45.
16. Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Cinema I, The Movement-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 64.
17. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 3.
18. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 4.
19. Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 45.
20. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 5.
21. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 6.
22. Cinema I, p. 58.
23. Bergson, Henri (1988) Matter and Memory, N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (trans.) (New
York: Zone Books), p. 193.
24. Cinema II, p. 4.
25. Matter and Memory, pp. 56, 57.
26. Olkowski, Dorothea (1999) Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley:
University of California Press), pp. 110112.
27. Matter and Memory, pp. 168169.
28. Difference and Repetition, pp. 8990.
29. Cinema II, p. 46.