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Deleuze and the image of thought

In his essay ‘Philosophies of art’ for the ‘Continuum (now Bloomsbury) Companion to Continental Philosophy’ (2009), Dronsfield identifies a schism in the work of Gilles Deleuze which to his knowledge has nowhere been discussed. The present paper examines the problem and its consequences for our understanding of Deleuze. The early Deleuze of ‘Différence et répétition’ (1968) advocates the destruction of what he names ‘the image of thought’ and calls instead for a thinking ‘without image’. For the later Deleuze the task is to think a ‘new image of thought’. Indeed, by the time of the posthumous ‘Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?’, ‘great philosophers’ are defined by their ability to construct new images of thought. It is important to delineate this difference internal to Deleuze’s thinking because it embodies a certain struggle philosophy has in dealing with the image. The paper was first given by invitation at an international conference on contemporary philosophy at the American University in Beirut, alongside Martin Hagglund, Nina Power, Alberto Toscano, and Dan Smith. It is important for Dronsfield’s work that it be seen not just to speak ‘about’ a problem, but to perform it in an encounter with the problem in a form proper to it, one which makes its theory ‘visible’ and ‘tests’ the theory in practice by presenting it as practice. To this end the paper was re-written as a film script for an experimental film, ‘Futures Reader’ by Trine Marie Riel. The film was then submitted as a ‘conference paper’ to the 2011 annual ‘Deleuze Studies’ conference and was accepted. It was screened as a paper. This is an example of theory as practice where the same text counts as both, where the difference is given not by philosophical content but by performativity. The essay has been abstracted in ‘Philosopher’s Index’, Winter 2013.