DELEUZE AND THE IMAGE OF THOUGHT
Jonathan Dronsfield
La pensée est comme le Vampire, elle n’a pas
d’image, ni pour constituer modèle, ni pour
faire copie. 1 voice. This gives us a clue as to how to under-
Deleuze & Guattari
Thought Without Image
There is a schism in the work of Gilles
Deleuze. The early Deleuze of, primarily,
Différence et répétition (1968), the first book
written in his “own voice,” advocates the destruc-
tion 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 Qu’est-ce que la
philosophie?, published the same year as the
English “Preface,” “great philosophers” are de-
fined by their ability to “dresse une nouvelle im-
age de la pensée.”4 It is important to delineate this
difference internal to Deleuze’s 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 authen-
tic 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 im-
age 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 Différence et répétition is the third chapter,
“L’image de la pensée.” 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
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
404 © DePaul University 2012
which the foreigner or the minority is given
stand 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
Deleuze’s logic we would have to say that it is in
this chapter that what is foreign to Deleuze’s
thought is voiced by him.
The image of thought is Deleuze’s characteri-
sation 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. It’s 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 conceptu-
ally. 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 suppo-
sition of a natural capacity to think in this way
that permits philosophy to claim to begin without
suppositions. It is a supposition which is en-
dowed with the power to undercut the conditions
of the present moment and its attendant perver-
sions. It is not a particular image of thought that
worries Deleuze; it’s that thought is pre-con-
ceived as an “image in general.” This is philoso-
phy’s subjective presupposition and the frame of
Deleuze’s critique. “Nous ne parlons pas de telle
ou telle image de la pensée,” he says, “variable
suivant les philosophies, mais d’une seule Image
en général qui constitue le présupposé subjectif
de la philosophie dans son ensemble.”5
WINTER 2012
 Part of the image, its stance as it were, is that
thought is construed as “naturally upright.” “Up-
right” 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. Be-
cause thinking is subjective in this way the sub-
ject’s model of thought is recognition. The fac-
ulty of sensibility can grasp only that which can
be recognised by all the other faculties in the sub-
jective act of recognition. When thinking is mod-
elled on recognition, that which can be recog-
nised 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 ques-
tion 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 im-
age.6 Deleuze is unequivocal then about the ne-
cessity of theorising a thinking without image.
Deleuze’s thought must be measured by the ex-
tent to which it thinks without image. Its new-
ness, its “répétition authentique,” will be its
thinking without image. Indeed, so rigorous
would the denunciation of the image as non-phi-
losophy 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 re-
nounced 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 il-
lusion in which thought is “covered over” [se
recouvre] by an image, it implies that in over-
coming representation the image must be re-
moved t;hought is only “uncovered” once the
shroud of the image is taken down.8
DELEUZE AND THE IMAGE OF THOUGHT
© DePaul University 2012
The insistence that thought can and should
happen “without images” extends even to valo-
rising creator-writers, writers who are creators
before they are authors, as “blind.” Deleuze’s
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 cre-
ators, creators precisely because they are not au-
thors. For as soon as the designation “author” is
made, thought is once again determined as an im-
age [“qu’on soumet la pensée à une image”], and
writing made an activity of life.9 Creation is en-
counter, in which the writer encounters himself,
and a writing which because it is its own life ne-
cessitates 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 qu’aveuglants”]10—a 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 dark-
est 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 im-
age as such. It is as if an image can only order, or-
der correct ideas rooted in goodwill and recogni-
tion 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-medi-
tated 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 recog-
nise 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-
405
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 at—if, that is, that
otherness is to be encountered and bring us into
question—without 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 al-
lows 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 meta-
morphosed. Recognition is defeated only if the
ground is turned or “bent” [“coudé”] 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 ground-
lessness 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 ques-
tion sensibility poses to each of them in turn: if
what can be sensed is at the same time impercep-
tible, might there not be an imaginandum which
cannot be imagined or a loquendum which can-
not be locuted? And for a complete doctrine of
the faculties might there not be a vitality inclu-
sive of monstrosity, a sociability inclusive of an-
archy? For Deleuze these are transcendent ob-
jects, 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 exer-
cised 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 demon-
strates. The question sensibility poses to each
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
406 © DePaul University 2012
faculty in turn is the very commencement of the
faculties. Thinking is born of a “fundamental en-
counter“ [rencontre fondamentale]14 with the be-
ing of the sensible, a privilege accorded sensibil-
ity 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 dis-
tinct. There is no predestination in such an en-
counter, nothing friendly, nothing voluntary; on
the contrary, it is the point of the “transcendent
‘aleatory’” [“point aléatoire” transcendant], the
contingency of which is the guarantee of the ne-
cessity of that which is thereby forced to be
thought.15 And it’s 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 Différence et répétition Antonin Artaud is
the favoured example. Artaud’s “terrible révél-
ation d’une pensée 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 it—indeed, as Georges Bataille and
André Masson amongst others have shown us,
the headless figure of the Acéphale, genitals visi-
bly 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 “com-
pletely destroyed.”18 But this does not tell us what
a “thought without image” is. The very last lines
of this pivotal third chapter of Différence et
répétition read: “La pensée qui naît dans la
pensée, l’acte de penser engendré dans sa
génitalité . . . est la pensée sans image. Mais
qu’est-ce qu’une telle pensée, et son processus
dans le monde?”19
It seems we find the resources for answering
this question, the demand for thought without
image, in art. In the conclusion to Différence et
répétition we find: “La théorie de la pensée est
comme la peinture, elle a besoin de cette
révolution qui la fait passer de la représentation à
l’art abstrait; tel est l’objet d’une théorie de la
pensée sans image.”20 Except that there never
was such a revolution. Not even for Deleuze. Ab-
straction did not overcome representation, be-
cause abstraction represents two tendencies op-
posed to the liberation of the affect in the form of
the transcendental object—according to the Ba-
con book the affect is either negated or codified
by abstraction; 21 and in Qu’est-ce que la
philosophie? it is “spiritualised” by abstraction.22
Either way, the affect is blocked. According to
Deleuze’s history of painting in the Bacon book,
abstraction is either geometric or it is expression-
ist, 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 Mondrian—is a purely optical space rid of the
tactile, a symbolic code which usurps the dia-
gram and leaps over chaos—the 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
hand—and here Deleuze cites Pollock—is 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 Qu’est-ce
que la philosophie? abstraction becomes one of
two ways of dematerialising sensation, by “spiri-
tualising” it such that sensation becomes the sen-
sation of a concept.25 In either case, geometric or
expressionist, there is no revolutionary function
attached to abstraction.
After Différence et répétition 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 de-
sired third path between abstraction and expres-
sionism.26 Bacon economises the diagram by
localising it on the canvas spatially and tempo-
rally. 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
DELEUZE AND THE IMAGE OF THOUGHT
© DePaul University 2012
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 transfor-
mation and precipitation, be made visible and
sensation be liberated. The relations the figure
has to force are not ones of resemblance under-
stood representationally; rather they are non-fig-
urative 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 ab-
straction would appear to lead us back to the im-
age, 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 cliché, broken up and
heterogenised by the diagram. What is encoun-
tered is sensed. And as something sensed it is op-
posed to something recognised. And what is
sensed cannot be separated from how it with-
draws. 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 Deleuze’s 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 Différence et répétition is to seek out “a
new image of thought—or rather a liberation of
thought from those images which imprison it.”28
To seek out a “new image of thought” is ut-
terly 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 be-
tween a “new image of thought” and “thought
liberated from images,” because Deleuze is refer-
407
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 ap-
peal 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 that’s 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 Différence et répétition. Per-
haps 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 philoso-
phy’s dogmatic pre-supposition. It is still re-
ferred 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 dogmatic—it
is representational in nature, and dogmatic about
representation. But to make the distinction be-
tween image and representation does not answer
the question as to why Deleuze characterises the
form of thought he critiques, that is representa-
tional thought, as an image; on the contrary it
poses it anew and more forcefully. Nor does it ex-
plain 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-
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
408 © DePaul University 2012
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 in-
stead to construe the image non-representation-
ally. Perhaps another way of saying this is that we
must not literalise representation. Then is it that
Deleuze is acknowledging that his own philoso-
phy requires a certain return of the representa-
tional if it is to overcome representation? Hence
the retention of the figure in de-figuration.
We might try and account for this revindi-
cation of the image in Deleuze by seeking to un-
derstand why he called that which philosophy
dogmatically presupposes about thought an im-
age in the first place. Perhaps he did so first be-
cause what it shows is representation, the thought
of which it is an image, is representational; but
second because the manner of its showing is rep-
resentational. In which case the image of thought
would be doubly representational, the represen-
tation 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 rep-
resentational. So to displace such an image of
thought with a way of thinking which is non-rep-
resentational 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 per-
haps 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 “com-
pletely destroying” the image of thought, instead
transforms it, as called for in Différence et
répétition. In doing so we find that the image of
thought being brought into question is not as
common-sensical or we might say representa-
tional as Deleuze first contends, and that the im-
age Deleuze opposes to the dogmatic image is
not so non-commonsensical or non-sensical as
Deleuze would like to argue. In each case the im-
age philosophy counterpoises to the dogmatic
image is not simply oppositional, or if it is, it is so
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 Eng-
lish 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 up-
rightness 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 imagée of Nietzsche’s means of expres-
sion, but they have a determinate relation, un rap-
port déterminable, to philosophy.30
But we can problematize the claim that it is the
verticality of thought which Nietzsche chal-
lenges. For a movement of central importance
Nietzsche introduces into thought is that of walk-
ing. Zarathustra is not thinkable as a figure who
does not walk, it is the condition of possibility of
Zarathustra’s encounters, and Zarathustra him-
self was encountered by Nietzsche through walk-
ing. The walk of “The Wanderer” in Human, All
Too Human is precisely what enables him to chal-
lenge the fixity and destinality of moral and na-
tional identity. The Wanderer could not be
adestinal without his being a walker. From his
earliest texts, “The Future of Our Educational In-
stitutions” (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 coun-
terpoised to the stance of the uprighteous ones,
an essential part of the re-learning is the acquisi-
tion of a gait and a step which is not simply op-
posed to the upright, not least in its making visi-
ble the step, the foot, and the leg in order that one
DELEUZE AND THE IMAGE OF THOUGHT
© DePaul University 2012
see these as one’s 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 some-
thing 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 stand-
ing up straight, and insisting instead that we run
out and along the horizon, we cannot help notic-
ing that Deleuze’s supposed alternatives, to run
and to push, are no less an image of uprightness
than what they run from or push against. The pas-
sage in question goes on: “Et encore avons-nous
avec nous l’ami, 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-même, d’être 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 für
dich gehn? . . . Man muß wissen, was man will
und daß man will.”34
II) Second, in a conversation with Raymond
Bellour and François Ewald from 1988, “Sur la
philosophie,” we find Deleuze setting out pre-
cisely the power that an image of thought has to
transform thinking. There’s a secret image of
thought [une image secrète de la pensée] he says,
and it’s called the rhizome.35 The rhizome is
Deleuze’s antidote to what he calls “tree logic.”
The image of the tree is not just one of “those im-
ages” 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
409
thought, to which he opposes the rhizome, the
“vegetal model of thought,” the two “in opposi-
tion,” that we begin to see how Deleuze’s think-
ing on images begins to flip over.36
Deleuze opposes metaphor; the tree’s binar-
ism naturalizes as a necessity the choosing of one
way as if it were opposed to another. As Lecercle
points out, if Deleuze’s critique of binarism is to
take account of language’s non-binary, a-centred
an-archism, then the rhizome must amount not
just to a change of metaphor, indeed not to a met-
aphor at all, but a concept.37 In which case it can-
not be an image. But in what way is this vegetal
“model of thought” less an image than the
arborescent? Because the rhizome is the “hid-
den” image of thought, says Deleuze. It extends
beneath the tree image [s’étend sous celle des
arbres]. It is what is imperceptible from the point
of view of recognition. In other words, in the im-
age of the tree, the rhizome is that which cannot
be recognised: as it unfolds and mutates this se-
cret or hidden image of thought inspires the ne-
cessity of creating new concepts, “non pas en
fonction d’un déterminisme externe, mais en
fonction d’un devenir qui emporte les problèmes
eux-memes.”38 But if the rhizome is the imper-
ceptible of the image and the non-recognisable of
the image, it is no less of the image than is the per-
ceptible and the recognisable. Both belong to the
same image, the image of a landscape for exam-
ple, a garden or a potato patch, especially if the
rhizome is that which strangles roots: “N’est-ce
pas le propre d’un 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 trans-
late 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 im-
age, 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 de-
sire in the garden of Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandt-
schaften.
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
410 © DePaul University 2012
It should be noted that the rhizome is nowhere
mentioned in Différence et répétition; it is a con-
cept which was created later in collaboration
with Félix Guattari, work which was prepared for
by Différence et répétition and the attempt to “de-
stroy” the image of thought. In the last lines of the
later “Preface” to the English translation the rhi-
zome 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
l’opposé de l’arbre, le rhizome n’est pas objet de
reproduction: ni reproduction externe comme
l’arbre-image, ni reproduction interne comme la
structure-arbre.”41 They come close here to say-
ing 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,” “hid-
den,” or in other words “un-representable,” in the
same way that Artaud proclaimed a “thought
without image”: “la conquête d’un nouveau droit
qui ne se laisse pas représenter.”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 im-
age in which the tree appears. But in a classic
philosophical gesture Deleuze and Guattari cre-
ate a concept—if that is what they are doing bor-
rowing a “model of thought” from the vegetal
world—and ring-fence its showing by art, or de-
limit its effect such that it is excluded from the
realm of art: “A l’opposé du graphisme, du dessin
ou de la photo, à l’opposé des calques, le rhizome
se rapporte à une carte qui doit être produite,
construite, toujours démontable, connectable,
renversable, modifiable, à entrées et sorties mul-
tiples, 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
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 rhi-
zome 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 heccéité.” With no begin-
ning no end no origin no destination the walk,
made up only of lines, is a rhizome. 44
Before outlining a third moment in Deleuze’s
turn back towards the image we should pause to
comment on what Deleuze supposes to be a fun-
damental difference his thought has to that of
Martin Heidegger, whose “pre-ontological un-
derstanding of being” Deleuze contends in
Différence et répétition is no less a subjective
presupposition than the dogmatic image of
thought presupposed by the history of thinking
Heidegger’s 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
profoundly—but how Deleuze does not say.45
Presumably one might find the presupposition in
what Heidegger has to say about the tree, in par-
ticular with his conception of rootedness. But
again the matter is not as straightforward as is
suggested by Deleuze’s 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’ anal-
ogy (in a letter to his translator Picot) that “Ainsi
toute la Philosophie est comme un arbre,”
Heidegger argues that it is misleading to under-
stand the roots as if they were metaphysics. On
DELEUZE AND THE IMAGE OF THOUGHT
© DePaul University 2012
the contrary, the roots of a tree forget and aban-
don themselves for the sake of the tree. They still
belong to the tree, but in so belonging they squan-
der 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
Deleuze’s sense. But this leads to an objectifying
of the ground itself, as if it were pre-given, or
subjectively presupposed in Deleuze’s terms
(which happen to be Heidegger’s too in other of
his texts). Thus representational thinking can
never grasp its own ground. If we are to under-
stand ground we must think rootedness as some-
thing “unsaid” [Ungesagtes], and the hiddenness
of the root not as something we can reveal or pre-
suppose as having been but as a play of appearing
and withdrawing and always “to come.”46 Here
then we find a distinct resonance with Deleuze’s
thinking of the ground and what is rooted in it be-
ing 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 Deleuze’s
move away from calling for the destruction of the
image of thought towards advocating instead a
new image of thought. In Qu’est-ce que la
philosophie? published the same year (1994) as
the “Preface” to the English translation of Differ-
ence 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 d’immanence n’est pas
un concept pensé ni pensable, mais l’image de la
pensée, l’image qu’elle se donne de ce que
signifie penser, faire usage de la pensée,
s’orienter dans la pensée. . . . La pensée
revendique «seulement» le mouvement qui peut
être porté à l’infini. Ce que la pensée revendique
en droit, ce qu’elle sélectionne, c’est le
mouvement infini ou le mouvement de l’infini.
C’est lui qui constitue l’image de la pensée.”48
Here then its being an image is precisely what al-
lows thought to “give itself” back to itself. And
no philosopher is great who does not draw such
an image: “n’est-ce pas chaque grand philosophe
411
qui trace un nouveau plan d’immanence, apporte
une nouvelle matière de l’être et dresse une nou-
velle image de la pensée.”49 It is no longer that the
thought cannot be imaged, it is that the image
cannot be thought, because thought needs the im-
age in order to think. Until the end Deleuze
cleaved to a fundamental difference between phi-
losophy and art. Art cannot create concepts, phi-
losophy 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 encoun-
tered provoke the thinking of cinema.50 If thought
is to think it needs a figure, a line, the two form-
ing 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 some-
thing new, something not habitual, something not
at home. Only then will thought produce move-
ment, and be given the possibility of movement
to act in turn on that which encounters it. This is
what works of art stage, and it’s art’s 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-
NOTES
1. Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux:
Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Paris: Les éditions de
minuit, 1980), 468.
2. Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris:
Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 173 and pas-
sim.
3. Gilles Deleuze, “Preface to the English edition,” Dif-
ference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xvi–xvii.
4. Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la
philosophie? (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1991),
52.
5. Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 172. Note here and
elsewhere Deleuze’s capitalisation of Image.
6. Ibid., 192.
7. Ibid., 173.
8. Ibid., 361.
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
412 © DePaul University 2012
counter with the creativeness of art, the “secret
pressures” [pressions secrètes] 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 cre-
ative his thinking about images became, to the
extent that in the later texts it was philosophy’s
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 cre-
ativity 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 Différence et repeti-
tion—where the image of thought is to be ne-
gated in favour of thought without image—to the
time of writing the “Preface” for the English
translation of Difference and Repetition—where
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
9. Gilles Deleuze et Claire Parnet, Dialogues [1977]
(Paris: Flammarion, 1996), 33.
10. Ibid., 32.
11. Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes [1964] (Paris:
Presses universitaires de France, deuxième édition,
1998), 122 and 119.
12. Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 197.
13. Ibid., 200.
14. Ibid., 182.
15. Ibid., 188–89; and Deleuze, Proust et les signes, 118.
16. Ibid, 192. Here it is worth comparing Jacques
Derrida, for whom Artaud’s overturning of upright-
ness is the overcoming of the concept of work and, as
with Deleuze, the metaphor: “érection métaphorique
dans l’oeuvre écrite,” for art works are always works
of death: “Mais l’oeuvre, comme excrément, n’est
que matière: sans vie, sans force ni forme. Elle tombe
 toujours et s’effondre aussitôt hors de moi. C’est
pourquoi l’oeuvre — poétique ou autre — ne me
mettra jamais debout. Ce n’est jamais en elle que je
m’érigerai. Le salut, le statut, l’être-debout, ne seront
donc possibles que dans un art sans oeuvre.” Jacques
Derrida, “La Parole Soufflée,” in L’écriture et la
différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 275 and
273. In De la grammatologie Derrida characterizes
the “epoch of writing” as “la suspension de l’être-
debout.” Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie
(Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1967), 127n31. Note
that Derrida admits to hearing differently another
word for uprightness, droiture, when reading
Lévinas, and we repeat it here in virtue of its rele-
vance to the encounter: “innocence sans naïveté, 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 Lévinas, Quatre lectures
talmudiques (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1968),
105; cited in Jacques Derrida, Adieu à Emmanuel
Lévinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997), 12–13.
17. Acéphale, a revue published by Bataille from 1936–
39 (first issue 24 June 1936), the cover of which car-
ries a drawing of a headless figure by André Masson
based on de Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (c.1487).
18. Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 191.
19. Ibid., 217.
20. Ibid., 354; my emphasis.
21. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, logique de la sensa-
tion, tome 1 (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1981),
67.
22. Deleuze et Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?,
187.
23. Gilles Deleuze, “La peinture enflamme l’écriture’
[1981], in Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens
1975–1995 (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 2003),
167; and Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 9.
24. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, chapitre XII.
25. Deleuze et Guattari, Qu’est-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.
26. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 71.
27. Ibid., 101.
28. Deleuze, “Preface to the English edition,” Difference
and Repetition, xvi–xvii.
DELEUZE AND THE IMAGE OF THOUGHT
© DePaul University 2012
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 fröh-
liche Wissenschaft [1882], KSA III, Werke: Kritische
Gesamtausgabe, Hrsg von Giorgio Colli und
Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1967–1977).
32. Jacques Derrida, “Force et signification,” in
L’écriture et la différence, 49. Derrida quotes the
well-known passage from Nietzsche’s Götzen-
Dämmerung: “On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis
(G. Flaubert). —Damit habe ich dich, Nihilist! Das
Sitzfleisch ist gerade die Sünde wider den heiligen
Geist. Nur die ergangenen Gedanken haben Wert.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Sprüche und Pfeile,” §34,
Götzen-Dämmerung oder Wie man mit dem Hammer
philosophiert [1888], KSA VI.
33. Gilles Deleuze, “Sur la philosophie,” entretien avec
Raymond Bellour et François Ewald [1988], in
Pourparlers 1972–1990 (Paris: Les éditions de
Minuit, 1990), 202–03.
34. Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung, §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,” 204–05.
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, “Hav-
ing an idea in cinema (on the cinema of Straub-
Huillet),” trans. Eleanor Kaufman, in E. Kaufman
and K. J. Heller, eds., Deleuze and Guattari: New
Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 16–
17.
41. Deleuze et Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 32; my empha-
sis.
42. Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 192.
43. Deleuze et Guattari, Mille Plateaux, 32; my empha-
sis.
44. Ibid., 321.
413
45. Gilles Deleuze, “La vie comme oeuvre d’art,”
entretien avec Didier Eribon [1986], in Pourparlers,
130–31.
46. Martin Heidegger, “Einleitung zu: “Was ist
Metaphysik?” [1949], in Weg m a r ken ,
Gesamtausgabe Band 9 (Frankfurt am Main:
Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), 365–67.
47. This is one of many correspondences in Deleuze’s
thought to that of Heidegger, few of which are ac-
knowledged by Deleuze or his disciples. Deleuze’s
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 l’Être (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 “Désistance” [1989], trans. Christopher
Fynsk, in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989),
17n10. See also my “Between Deleuze and
University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AT, United Kingdom
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
414 © DePaul University 2012
Heidegger There Never is Any Difference,” in David
Pettigrew and François Raffoul, eds., French Inter-
pretations of Heidegger (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2008), 151–65.
48. Deleuze et Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?,
39–40.
49. Ibid., 52.
50. Gilles Deleuze, “On Nietzsche and the Image of
Thought,” interview with Jean-Noël Vuarnet [1968],
in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–74, trans.
Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e),
2004), 141.
51. Deleuze, Proust et les signes, 119.
52. See the entry for “R as in Resistance” in Charles
Stivale’s “Overview” of Deleuze’s and Claire
Parnet’s L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, dir. Pierre-
André Boutang (1996), at http://www.langlab.
wayne/edu/CStivale/D-G/ABC3.html.
53. This paper was made into a film and presented to the
4th International Deleuze Studies Conference, Co-
penhagen Business School, Denmark, 29 June 2011.
Futures Reader, directed by Trine Marie Riel (Den-
mark, 2011).