Chapter III 
The Image of Thought 
Where to begin in philosophy has always - rightly - been regarded as a 
very delicate problem, for beginning means eliminating all presuppositions. 
However, whereas in science one is confronted by objective presupposi
tions which axiomatic rigour can eliminate, presuppositions in philosophy 
are as much subjective as objective. By objective presuppositions we mean 
concepts explicitly presupposed by a given concept. Descartes, for example, 
in the Second Meditation, does not want to define man as a rational animal 
because such a definition explicitly presupposes the concepts of rationality 
and animality: in presenting the Cogito as a definition, he therefore claims 
to avoid all the objective presuppositions which encumber those proce
dures that operate by genus and difference. It is clear, however, that he 
does not escape presuppositions of another kind - subjective or implicit 
presuppositions contained in opinions rather than concepts: it is presumed 
that everyone knows, independently of concepts, what is meant by self, 
thinking, and being. The pure self of 'I think' thus appears to be a begin
ning only because it has referred all its presuppositions back to the empiri
cal self. Moreover, while Hegel criticized Descartes for this, he does not 
seem, for his part, to proceed otherwise: pure being, in turn, is a beginning 
only by virtue of referring all its presuppositions back to sensible, concrete, 
empirical being. The same attitude of refusing objective presuppositions, 
but on condition of assuming just as many subjective presuppositions 
(which are perhaps the same ones in another form), appears when Heideg
ger invokes a pre-ontological understanding of Being. We may conclude 
that there is no true beginning in philosophy, or rather that the true philos
ophical beginning, Difference, is in-itself already Repetition. However, this 
formula, and the evocation of the idea of philosophy as a Circle, are sub
ject to so many interpretations that we cannot be too prudent. For if it is a 
question of rediscovering at the end what was there in the beginning, if it is 
a question of recognising, of bringing to light or into the conceptual or the 
explicit, what was simply known implicitly without concepts - whatever 
the complexity of this process, whatever the differences between the proce
dures of this or that author - the fact remains that all this is still too 
simple, and that this circle is truly not tortuous enough. The circle image 
would reveal instead that philosophy is powerless truly to begin, or indeed 
authentically to repeat. 
We would do better to ask what is a subjective or implicit 
presupposition: it has the form of 'Everyb.Jdy knows .. .'. Everybody 
knows, in a pre-philosophical and pre-conceptual manner ... everybody 
knows what it means to think and to be. ... As a result, when the 
philosopher says 'I think therefore I am', he can assume that the 
universality of his premisses - namely, what it means to be and to think ... - will be implicitly understood, and that no one can deny that to doubt is 
to think, and to think is to be .... Everybody knows, no one can deny, is 
the form of representation and the discourse of the representative. When 
philosophy rests its beginning upon such implicit or subjective 
presuppositions, it can claim innocence, since it has kept nothing back 
except, of course, the essential - namely, the form of this discourse. It then 
opposes the 'idiot' to the pedant, Eudoxus to Epistemon, good will to the 
overfull understanding, the individual man endowed only with his natural 
capacity for thought to the man perverted by the generalities of his time. 1 
The philosopher takes the side of the idiot as though of a man without 
presuppositions. In fact, Eudoxus has no fewer presuppositions than 
Epistemon, he simply has them in another, implicit or subjective form, 
'private' and not 'public'; in the form of a natural capacity for thought 
which allows philosophy to claim to begin, and to begin without 
presuppositions. 
But here and there isolated and passionate cries are raised. How could 
they not be isolated when they deny what 'everybody knows .. .'? And 
passionate, since they deny that which, it is said, nobody can deny? Such 
protest does not take place in the name of aristocratic prejudices: it is not a 
question of saying what few think and knowing what it means to think. 
On the contrary, it is a question of someone - if only one - with the 
necessary modesty not managing to know what everybody knows, and 
modestly denying what everybody is supposed to recognise. Someone who 
neither allows himself to be represented nor wishes to represent anything. 
Not an individual endowed with good will and a natural capacity for 
thought, but an individual full of ill will who does not manage to think, 
either naturally or conceptually. Only such an individual is without 
presuppositions. Only such an individual effectively begins and effectively 
repeats. For this individual the subjective presuppositions are no less 
prejudices than the objective presuppositions: Eudoxus and Epistemon are 
one and the same misleading figure who should be mistrusted. At the risk 
of playing the idiot, do so in the Russian manner: that of an underground 
man who recognises himself no more in the subjective presuppositions of a 
natural capacity for thought than in the objective presuppositions of a 
culture of the times, and lacks the compass with which to make a circle. 
Such a one is the Untimely, neither temporal nor eternal. Ah Shestov, with 
the questions he poses, the ill will he manifests, the powerlessness to think 
he puts into thought and the double dimension he develops in these 
demanding questions concerning at once both the most radical beginning 
and the most stubborn repetition. 
Many people have an interest in saying that everybody knows 'this', that 
everybody recognises this, or that nobody can deny it. (They triumph easily 
so long as no surly interlocutor appears to reply that he does not wish to be 
so represented, and that he denies or does not recognise those who speak in 
his name.) The philosopher, it is true, proceeds with greater disinterest: all 
that he proposes as universally recognised is what is meant by thinking, 
being and self - in other words, not a particular this or that but the form of 
representation or recognition in general. This form, nevertheless, has a 
matter, but a pure matter or element. This element consists only of the 
supposition that thought is the natural exercise of a faculty, of the 
presupposition that there is a natural capacity for thought endowed with a 
talent for truth or an affinity with the true, under the double aspect of a 
good will on the part of the thinker and an upright nature on the part of 
thought. It is because everybody naturally thinks that everybody is 
supposed to know implicitly what it means to think. The most general 
form of representation is thus found in the element of a common sense 
understood as an upright nature and a good will (Eudaxus and 
orthodoxy). The implicit presupposition of philosophy may be found in the 
idea of a common sense as Cagitatia natura universalis. On this basis, 
philosophy is able to begin. There is no point in multiplying the 
declarations of philosophers, from 'Everybody has by nature the desire to 
know' to 'Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally 
distributed', in order to verify the existence of this presupposition, for its 
importance lies less in the explicit declarations that it inspires than in its 
persistence among those philosophers who precisely leave it hidden. 
Postulates in philosophy are not propositions the acceptance of which the 
philosopher demands; but, on the contrary, propositional themes which 
remain implicit and are understood in a pre-philosophical manner. In this 
sense, conceptual philosophical thought has as its implicit presupposition a 
pre-philosophical and natural Image of thought, borrowed from the pure 
element of common sense. According to this image, thought has an affinity 
with the true; it formally possesses the true and materially wants the true. 
It is in terms of this image that everybody knows and is presumed to know 
what it means to think. Thereafter it matters little whether philosophy 
begins with the object or the subject, with Being or with beings, as long as 
thought remains subject to this Image which already prejudges everything: 
the distribution of the object and the subject as well as that of Being and 
beings. 
We may call this image of thought a dogmatic, orthodox or moral 
image. It certainly has variant forms: 'rationalists' and 'empiricists' do not 
presume its construction in the same fashion. Moreover, as we shall see, 
philosophers often have second thoughts and do not accept this implicit 
image without adding further traits drawn from explicit reflection on 
conceptual thought which react against it and tend to overturn it. In the 
realm of the implicit, it nevertheless holds fast, even if the philosopher 
specifies that truth is not, after all, 'an easy thing to achieve and within 
reach of all'. For this reason, we do not speak of this or that image of 
thought, variable according to the philosophy in question, but of a single 
Image in general which constitutes the subjective presupposition of 
philosophy as a whole. When Nietzsche questions the most general 
presuppositions of philosophy, he says that these are essentially moral, 
since Morality alone is capable of persuading us that thought has a good 
nature and the thinker a good will, and that only the good can ground the 
supposed affinity between thought and the True. Who else, in effect, but 
Morality, and this Good which gives thought to the true, and the true to 
thought? ... As a result, the conditions of a philosophy which would be 
without any kind of presuppositions appear all the more clearly: instead of 
being supported by the moral Image of thought, it would take as its point 
of departure a radical critique of this Image and the 'postulates' it implies. 
It would find its difference or its true beginning, not in an agreement with 
the pre-philosophical Image but in a rigorous struggle against this Image, 
which it would denounce as non-philosophical. 2 As a result, it would 
discover its authentic repetition in a thought without Image, even at the 
cost of the greatest destructions and the greatest demoralisations, and a 
philosophical obstinacy with no ally but paradox, one which would have 
to renounce both the form of representation and the element of common 
sense. As though thought could begin to think, and continually begin 
again, only when liberated from the Image and its postulates. It is futile to 
claim to reformulate the doctrine of truth without first taking stock of the 
postulates which project this distorting image of thought. 
It cannot be regarded as a fact that thinking is the natural exercise of a fac
ulty, and that this faculty is possessed of a good nature and a good will. 
'Everybody' knows very well that in fact men think rarely, and more often 
under the impulse of a shock than in the excitement of a taste for thinking. 
Moreover, Descartes's famous suggestion that good sense (the capacity for 
thought) is of all things in the world the most equally distributed3 rests 
upon no more than an old saying, since it amounts to reminding us that 
men are prepared to complain of lack of memory, imagination or even 
hearing, but they always find themselves well served with regard to intel
ligence and thought. What makes Descartes a philosopher is that he makes 
use of that saying in order to erect an image of thought as it is in principle: 
good nature and an affinity with the true belong in principle to thought, 
whatever the difficulty of translating this principle into fact or rediscover
ing it behind the facts. Natural good sense or common sense are thus taken 
to be determinations of pure thought. Sense is able to adjudicate with re
gard to its own universality, and to suppose itself universal and communic
able in principle. In order to impose or rediscover this principle - in other 
words, to apply the mind so endowed - there must be an explicit method. 
There is no doubt, therefore, that in fact it is difficult to think, but the most 
difficult in fact may still be the easiest in principle. This is why the method 
itself is said to be easy from the point of view of the nature of thought (it is 
no exaggeration to say that this notion of ease poisons the whole of Carte
sianism). When the presupposition of philosophy is found in an Image of 
thought which is claimed to hold in principle, we can no longer be content 
to oppose it with contrary facts. The discussion must be carried out on the 
level of principle itself, in order to see whether this image does not betray 
the very essence of thought as pure thought. To the extent that it holds in 
principle, this image presupposes a certain distribution of the empirical and 
the transcendental, and it is this distribution or transcendental model im
plied by the image that must be judged. 
There is indeed a model, in effect: that of recognition. Recognition may 
be defined by the harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon a supposed 
same object: the same object may be seen, touched, remembered, imagined 
or conceived .... As Descartes says of the piece of wax: 'It is of course the 
same wax which I see, which I touch, which I picture in my ima}ination, in 
short the same wax which I thought it to be from the start.' No doubt 
each faculty - perception, memory, imagination, understanding ... - has its 
own particular given and its own style, its peculiar ways of acting upon the 
given. An object is recognised, however, when one faculty locates it as 
identical to that of another, or rather when all the faculties together relate 
their given and relate themselves to a form of identity in the object. 
Recognition thus relies upon a subjective principle of collaboration of the 
faculties for 'everybody' - in other words, a common sense as a concordia 
facultatum; while simultaneously, for the philosopher, the form of identity 
in objects relies upon a ground in the unity of a thinking subject, of which 
all the other faculties must be modalities. This is the meaning of the Cogito 
as a beginning: it expresses the unity of all the faculties in the subject; it 
thereby expresses the possibility that all the faculties will relate to a form of 
object which reflects the subjective identity; it provides a philosophical 
concept for the presupposition of a common sense; it is the common sense 
become philosophical. For Kant as for Descartes, it is the identity of the 
Self in the 'I think' which grounds the harmony of all the faculties and their 
agreement on the form of a supposed Same object. The objection will be 
raised that we never confront a formal, unspecified, universal object but 
only this or that object delimited and specified by a determinate 
contribution from the faculties. At this point, however, we must refer to 
the precise difference between these two complementary instances, 
common sense and good sense. For while common sense is the norm of 
identity from the point of view of the pure Self and the form of the 
unspecified object which corresponds to it, good sense is the norm of 
distribution from the point of view of the empirical selves and the objects 
qualified as this or that kind of thing (which is why it is considered to be 
universally distributed). Good sense determines the contribution of the 
faculties in each case, while common sense contributes the form of the 
Same. Furthermore, if the unspecified object exists only in so far as it is 
qualified in a particular way, then conversely, qualification operates only 
given the supposition of the unspecified object. We will see below how - in 
an entirely necessary manner - good sense and common sense complete 
each other in the image of thought: together they constitute the two halves 
of the doxa. For the moment, it suffices to note the precipitation of the 
postulates themselves: the image of a naturally upright thought, which 
knows what it means to think; the pure element of common sense which 
follows from this 'in principle'; and the model of recognition - or rather, 
the form of recognition - which follows in turn. Thought is supposed to be 
naturally upright because it is not a faculty like the others but the unity of 
all the other faculties which are only modes of the supposed subject, and 
which it aligns with the form of the Same in the model of recognition. The 
model of recognition is necessarily included in the image of thought, and 
whether one considers Plato's Theaetetus, Descartes's Meditations or 
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, this model remains sovereign and defines 
the orientation of the philosophical analysis of what it means to think. 
Such an orientation is a hindrance to philosophy. The supposed three 
levels - a naturally upright thought, an in principle natural common sense, 
and a transcendental model of recognition - can constitute only an ideal 
orthodoxy. Philosophy is left without means to realise its project of 
breaking with doxa. No doubt philosophy refuses every particular doxa; 
no doubt it upholds no particular propositions of good sense or common 
sense. No doubt it recognises nothing in particular. Nevertheless, it retains 
the essential aspect of doxa - namely, the form; and the essential aspect of 
common sense - namely, the element; and the essential aspect of 
recognition - namely, the model itself (harmony of the faculties grounded 
in the supposedly universal thinking subject and exercised upon the 
unspecified object). The image of thought is only the figure in which d()xa 
is universalised by being elevated to the rational level. However, so long as 
one only abstracts from the empirical content of doxa, while maintaining 
the operation of the faculties which corresponds to it and implicitly retains 
the essential aspect of the content, one remains imprisoned by it. We may 
well discover a supra-temporal form or even a sub-temporal primary 
matter, an underground or Ur-doxa: We have not advanced a single step, 
but remain imprisoned by the same cave or ideas of the times which we 
only flatter ourselves with having 'rediscovered', by blessing them with the 
sign of philosophy. The form of recognition has never sanctioned anything 
but the recognisable and the recognised; form will never inspire anything 
but conformities. Moreover, while philosophy refers to a common sense as 
its implicit presupposition, what need has common sense of philosophy? 
Common sense shows every day - unfortunately - that it is capable of 
producing philosophy in its own way. Therein lies a costly double danger 
for philosophy. On the one hand, it is apparent that acts of recognition 
exist and occupy a large part of our daily life: this is a table, this is an 
apple, this the piece of wax, Good morning Theaetetus. But who can 
believe that the destiny of thought is at stake in these acts, and that when 
we recognise, we are thinking? Like Bergson, we may well distinguish 
between two kinds of recognition - that of the cow in the presence of 
grass, and that of a man summoning his memories: the second can serve no 
more than the first as a model for what it means to think. We said above 
that the Image of thought must be judged on the basis of what it claims in 
principle, not on the basis of empirical objections. However, the criticism 
that must be addressed to this image of thought is precisely that it has 
based its supposed principle upon extrapolation from certain facts, 
particularly insignificant facts such as Recognition, everyday banality in 
person; as though thought should not seek its models among stranger and 
more compromising adventures. Take the example of Kant: of all 
philosophers, Kant is the one who discovers the prodigious domain of the 
transcendental. He is the analogue of a great explorer - not of another 
world, but of the upper or lower reaches of this one. However, what does 
he do? In the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason he describes in 
detail three syntheses which measure the respective contributions of the 
thinking faculties, all culminating in the third, that of recognition, which is 
expressed in the form of the unspecified object as correlate of the 'I think' 
to which all the faculties are related. It is clear that, in this manner, Kant 
traces the so-called transcendental structures from the empirical acts of a 
psychological consciousness: the transcendental synthesis of apprehension 
is directly induced from an empirical apprehension, and so on. In order to 
hide this all too obvious procedure, Kant suppressed this text in the second 
edition. Although it is better hidden, the tracing method, with all its 
'psychologism', nevertheless subsists. 
In the second place, recognition is insignificant only as a speculative 
model. It ceases to be so with regard to the ends which it serves and to 
which it leads us. What is recognised is not only an object but also the 
values attached to an object (values playa crucial role in the distributions 
undertaken by good sense). In so far as the practical finality of recognition 
lies in the 'established values', then on this model the whole image of 
thought as Cogitatio natura bears witness to a disturbing complacency. As 
Nietzsche says, Truth may well seem to be 'a more modest being from 
which no disorder and nothing extraordinary is to be feared: a 
self-contented and happy creature which is continually assuring all the 
powers that be that no one needs to be the least concerned on its account; 
for it is, after all, only "pure knowledge" ... .'5 What is a thought which 
harms no one, neither thinkers nor anyone else? Recognition is a sign of 
the celebration of monstrous nuptials, in which thought 'rediscovers' the 
State, rediscovers 'the Church' and rediscovers all the current values that it 
subtly presented in the pure form of an eternally blessed unspecified eternal 
object. Nietzsche's distinction between the creation of new values and the 
recognition of established values should not be understood in a historically 
relative manner, as though the established values were new in their time 
and the new values simply needed time to become established. In fact it 
concerns a difference which is both formal and in kind. The new, with its 
power of beginning and beginning again, remains forever new, just as the 
established was always established from the outset, even if a certain 
amount of empirical time was necessary for this to be recognised. What 
becomes established with the new is precisely not the new. For the new - in 
other words, difference - calls forth forces in thought which are not the 
forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely 
other model, from an unrecognised and unrecognisable terra incognita. 
What forces does this new bring to bear upon thought, from what central 
bad nature and ill will does it spring, from what central ungrounding 
which strips thought of its 'innateness', and treats it every time as 
something which has not always existed, but begins, forced and under 
constraint? By contrast, how derisory are the voluntary struggles for 
recognition. Struggles occur only on the basis of a common sense and 
established values, for the attainment of current values (honours, wealth 
and power). A strange struggle among consciousnesses for the conquest of 
the trophy constituted by the Cogitatio natura universalis, the trophy of 
pure recognition and representation. Nietzsche laughed at the very idea 
that what he called will to power could be concerned with this. He called 
both Kant and Hegel 'philosophical labourers' because their philosophy 
remained marked by this indelible model of recognition. 
Kant, however, seemed equipped to overturn the Image of thought. For 
the concept of error, he substituted that of illusion: internal illusions, 
interior to reason, instead of errors from without which were merely the 
effects of bodily causes. For the substantial self, he substituted a self 
profoundly fractured by a line of time; while in the same movement God 
and the self encountered a kind of speculative death. However, in spite of 
everything, and at the risk of compromising the conceptual apparatus of 
the three Critiques, Kant did not want to renounce the implicit 
presuppositions. Thought had to continue to enjoy an upright nature, and 
philosophy could go no further than - nor in directions other than those 
taken by - common sense or 'common popular reason'. At most, therefore, 
Critique amounts to giving civil rights to thought considered from the 
point of view of its natural law: Kant's enterprise multiplies common 
senses, making as many of them as there are natural interests of rational 
thought. For while it is true that in general common sense always implies a 
collaboration of the faculties upon a form of the Same or a model of 
recognition, it is no less true that, depending upon the case, one active 
faculty among others is charged with the task of providing that form or 
that model, along with the contribution of the other faculties subjected to 
it. Thus, imagination, reason and the understanding collaborate in the case 
of knowledge and form a 'logical common sense'. Here, understanding is 
the legislative faculty which provides the speculative model on which the 
other two are summoned to collaborate. In the case of the practical model 
of recognition, by contrast, reason legislates with regard to the moral 
common sense. There remains a third model involving a properly aesthetic 
common sense in which the faculties attain a free accord. While it is true 
that in general all the faculties collaborate in recognition, the formulae of 
that collaboration differ according to the nature of that which is to be 
recognised: object of knowledge, moral value, aesthetic effect .... Far from 
overturning the form of common sense, Kant merely multiplied it. (Must 
not the same be said of phenomenology? Does it not discover a fourth 
common sense, this time grounded upon sensibility as a passive synthesis 
one which, even though it constitutes an Ur-doxa, remains no less prisoner 
of the form of doxa?6) We see to what degree the Kantian Critique is 
ultimately respectful: knowledge, morality, reflection and faith are 
supposed to correspond to natural interests of reason, and are never 
themselves called into question; only the use of the faculties is declared 
legitimate or not in relation to one or other of these interests. Throughout, 
the variable model of recognition fixes good usage in the form of a 
harmony between the faculties determined by a dominant faculty under a 
given common sense. For this reason, illegitimate usage (illusion) is 
explained solely in the following manner: in its natural state, thought 
confuses its interests and allows its various domains to encroach upon one 
another. This does not prevent thought from having at its base a good 
natural law, on which Critique bestows its civil sanction; nor does it mean 
that the domains, interests, limits and properties are not sacred and 
grounded upon inalienable right. Critique has everything - a tribunal of 
justices of the peace, a registration room, a register - except the power of a 
new politics which would overturn the image of thought. Even the dead 
God and the fractured I are no more than a passing bad moment, the 
speculative moment: they are resuscitated in a more integrated and certain 
form than ever, more sure of themselves, but with other, practical or 
moral, interests. 
Such is the world of representation in general. We said above that 
representation was defined by certain elements: identity with regard to 
concepts, opposition with regard to the determination of concepts, analogy 
with regard to judgement, resemblance with regard to objects. The identity 
of the unspecified concept constitutes the form of the Same with regard to 
recognition. The determination of the concept implies the comparison 
between possible predicates and their opposites in a regressive and 
progressive double series, traversed on the one side by remembrance and 
on the other by an imagination the aim of which is to rediscover or 
re-create (memorial-imaginative reproduction). Analogy bears either upon 
the highest determinable concepts or on the relations between determinate 
concepts and their respective objects. It calls upon the power of 
distribution present in judgement. As for the object of the concept, in itself 
or in relation to other objects, it relies upon resemblance as a requirement 
of perceptual continuity. Each element thus appeals to one particular 
faculty, but is also established across different faculties within the context 
of a given common sense (for example, the resemblance between a 
perception and a remembrance). The 'I think' is the most general principle 
of representation - in other words, the source of these elements and of the 
unity of all these faculties: I conceive, I judge, I imagine, I remember and I 
perceive - as though these were the four branches of the Cogito. On 
precisely these branches, difference is crucified. They form quadripartite 
fetters under which only that which is identical, similar, analogous or 
opposed can be considered different: difference becomes an object of 
representation always in relation to a conceived identi9" a judged analogy, 
an imagined opposition or a perceived similitude. Under these four 
coincident figures, difference acquires a sufficient reason in the form of a 
principium comparationis. For this reason, the world of representation is 
characterised by its inability to conceive of difference in itself; and by the 
same token, its inability to conceive of repetition for itself, since the latter 
is grasped only by means of recognition, distribution, reproduction and 
resemblance in so far as these alienate the prefix RE in simple generalities 
of representation. The postulate of recognition was therefore a first step 
towards a much more general postulate of representation. 
' ... some reports of our perceptions do not provoke thought to reconsider
ation because the judgment of them by sensation seems adequate, while 
others always invite the intellect to reflection because the sensation yields 
nothing that can be trusted. - You obviously mean distant appearances, or 
things drawn in perspective. - You have quite missed my meaning .. .'.8 
This text distinguishes two kinds of things: those which do not disturb 
thought and (as Plato will later say) those which force us to think. The first 
are objects of recognition: thought and all its faculties may be fully em
ployed therein, thought may busy itself thereby, but such employment and 
such activity have nothing to do with thinking. Thought is thereby filled 
with no more than an image of itself, one in which it recognises itself the 
more it recognises things: this is a finger, this is a table, Good morning 
Theaetetus. Whence the question of Socrates' interlocutor: is it when we do 
not recognise, when we have difficulty in recognising, that we truly think? 
. 
\ 
The interlocutor seems already Cartesian. It is clear, however, that the du
bitable will not allow us to escape from the point of view of recognition. 
Moreover, it will only give rise to a local scepticism - or, indeed, to a 
generalised method - on condition that thought already has the will to rec
ognise what essentially distinguishes doubt from certitude. The same goes 
for dubitable as for certain things: they presuppose the good will of the 
thinker along with the good nature of thought, where these are understood 
to include an ideal form of recognition as well as a claimed affinity with 
the true, that philia which predetermines at once both the image of thought 
and the concept of philosophy. Certainties force us to think no more than 
doubts. To realise that three angles of a triangle should be equal to two 
right angles does suppose thought, it supposes the will to think, to think of 
triangles and even to think of their angles: Descartes remarked that we can
not deny this equality should we think of it, but we can indeed think, even 
of triangles, without thinking of that equality. All truths of that kind are 
hypothetical, since they presuppose all that is in question and are incapable 
of giving birth in thought to the act of thinking. In fact, concepts only ever 
designate possibilities. They lack the claws of absolute necessity - in other 
words, of an original violence inflicted upon thought; the claws of a 
strangeness or an enmity which alone would awaken thought from its 
natural stupor or eternal possibility: there is only involuntary thought, 
aroused but constrained within thought, and all the more absolutely 
necessary for being born, illegitimately, of fortuitousness in the world. 
Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presup
poses philosophy: everything begins with misosophy. Do not count upon 
thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count 
upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to 
raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a 
passion to think. The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are 
the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself 
and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself. 
Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object 
not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered 
may be Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of 
affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its 
primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is 
opposed to recognition. In recognition, the sensible is not at all that which 
can only be sensed, but that which bears directly upon the senses in an 
object which can be recalled, imagined or conceived. The sensible is 
referred to an object which may not only be experienced other than by 
sense, but may itself be attained by other faculties. It therefore presupposes 
the exercise of the senses and the exercise of the other faculties in a 
common sense. The object of encounter, on the other hand, really gives rise 
to sensibility with regard to a given sense. It is not an aistheton but an 
aistheteon. It is not a quality but a sign. It is not a sensible being but the 
being of the sensible. It is not the given but that by which the given is 
given. It is therefore in a certain sense the imperceptible [insensible]. It is 
imperceptible precisely from the point of view of recognition - in other 
words, from the point of view of an empirical exercise of the senses in 
which sensibility grasps only that which also could be grasped by other 
faculties, and is related within the context of a common sense to an object 
which also must be apprehended by other faculties. Sensibility, in the 
presence of that which can only be sensed (and is at the same time 
imperceptible) finds itself before its own limit, the sign, and raises itself to 
the level of a transcendental exercise: to the 'nth' power. Common sense is 
there only in order to limit the specific contribution of sensibility to the 
conditions of a joint labour: it thereby enters into a discordant play, its 
organs become metaphysical. 
Second character: that which can only be sensed (the sentiendum or the 
being of the sensible) moves the soul, 'perplexes' it - in other words, forces 
it to pose a problem: as though the object of encounter, the sign, were the 
bearer of a problem - as though it were a problem.9 Must problems or 
questions be identified with singular objects of a transcendental Memory, 
as other texts of Plato suggest, so that there is the possibility of a training 
aimed at grasping what can only be recalled? Everything points in this 
direction: it is indeed true that Platonic reminiscence claims to grasp the 
immemorial being of the past, the memorandum which is at the same time 
afflicted with an essential forgetting, in accordance with that law of 
transcendental exercise which insists that what can only be recalled should 
also be empirically impossible to recall. There is a considerable difference 
between this essential forgetting and an empirical forgetting. Empirical 
memory is addressed to those things which can and even must be grasped: 
what is recalled must have been seen, heard, imagined or thought. That 
which is forgotten, in the empirical sense, is that which cannot be grasped 
a second time by the memory which searches for it (it is too far removed; 
forgetting has effaced or separated us from the memory). Transcendental 
memory, by contrast, grasps that which from the outset can only be 
recalled, even the first time: not a contingent past, but the being of the past 
as such and the past of every time. In this manner, the forgotten thing 
appears in person to the memory which essentially apprehends it. It does 
not address memory without addressing the forgetting within memory. The 
memorandum here is both unrememberable and immemorial. Forgetting is 
no longer a contingent incapacity separating us from a memory which is 
itself contingent: it exists within essential memory as though it were the 
'nth' power of memory with regard to its own limit or to that which can 
only be recalled. It was the same with sensibility: the contingently 
imperceptible, that which is too small or too far for the empirical exercise 
of our senses, stands opposed to an essentially imperceptible which is 
indistinguishable from that which can be sensed only from the point of 
view of a transcendental exercise. Thus sensibility, forced by the encounter 
to sense the sentiendum, forces memory in its turn to remember the 
memorandum, that which can only be recalled. Finally, the third 
characteristic of transcendental memory is that, in turn, it forces thought to 
grasp that which can only be thought, the cogitandum or noeteon, the 
Essence: not the intelligible, for this is still no more than the mode in which 
we think that which might be something other than thought, but the being 
of the intelligible as though this were both the final power of thought and 
the unthinkable. The violence of that which forces thought develops from 
the sentiendum to the cogitandum. Each faculty is unhinged, but what are 
the hinges if not the form of a common sense which causes all the faculties 
to function and converge? Each one, in its own order and on its own 
account, has broken the form of common sense which kept it within the 
empirical element of doxa, in order to attain both its 'nth' power and the 
paradoxical element within transcendental exercise. Rather than all the 
faculties converging and contributing to a common project of recognising 
an object, we see divergent projects in which, with regard to what concerns 
it essentially, each faculty is in the presence of that which is its 'own'. 
Discord of the faculties, chain of force and fuse along which each confronts 
its limit, receiving from (or communicating to) the other only a violence 
which brings it face to face with its own element, as though with its 
disappearance or its perfection. 
Let us pause, however, at the manner in which Plato determines the 
nature of the limits in each case. The text of The Republic defines that 
which is essentially encountered, and must be distinguished from all 
recognition as the object of a 'contradictory perception'. Whereas a finger 
always calls for recognition and is never more than a finger, that which is 
hard is never hard without also being soft, since it is inseparable from a 
becoming or a relation which includes the opposite within it (the same is 
true of the large and the small, the one and the many). The sign or point of 
departure for that which forces thought is thus the coexistence of 
contraries, the coexistence of more and less in an unlimited qualitative 
becoming. Recognition, by contrast, measures and limits the quality by 
relating it to something, thereby interrupting the mad-becoming. In 
defining the first instance by that form of qualitative opposition or 
contrariety, however, does not Plato already confuse the being of the 
sensible with a simple sensible being, with a pure qualitative being 
[aistheton]? The suspicion is reinforced when we consider the second 
instance, reminiscence. For reminiscence only appears to break with the 
recognition model when in fact it is content to complicate the schema: 
whereas recognition bears upon a perceptible or perceived object 
reminiscence bears upon another object, supposed to be associated with or 
rather enveloped within the first, which demands to be recognised for itself 
independently of any distinct perception. This other thing, enveloped 
within the sign, must be at once never-seen and yet already-recognised, a 
disturbing unfamiliarity. It is then tempting to say poetically that this has 
been seen, but in another life, in a mythical present: You are the image of 
.... By this means, however, everything is betrayed: first, the nature of the 
encounter in so far as this does not merely propose a particularly difficult 
test for recognition, an envelopment that is particularly difficult to unfold, 
but instead opposes all possible recognition; second, the nature of the 
transcendental memory and of that which can only be recalled. For this 
second instance is only conceived in the form of similitude in the 
reminiscence, to the point where the same objection arises: reminiscence 
confuses the being of the past with a past being, and since it is unable to 
assign an empirical moment at which this past was present, it invokes an 
original or mythical present. The importance of the concept of 
reminiscence (and the reason why it must be radically distinguished from 
the Cartesian concept of innateness) consists in its manner of introducing 
time or the duration of time into thought as such. By this means, it 
establishes an opacity peculiar to thought, and testifies to the existence of 
both a bad nature and an ill will which must be shaken by signs from 
without. As we have seen, however, because time is introduced here only in 
the form of a physical cycle, and not in its pure or essential form, thought 
is still supposed to po~sess a good nature and a resplendent clarity which 
are merely obscured or waylaid amidst the misadventures of the natural 
cycle. Reminiscence is still a refuge for the recognition model, and Plato no 
less than Kant traces the operation of the transcendental memory from the 
outlines of its empirical exercise (we see this clearly in the account of the 
Phaedo). 
As for the third instance, that of pure thought or that which can only be 
thought, Plato determines this instance in terms of separated contraries. 
Thus, under the pressure of reminiscence, we are forced to think such 
things as Largeness which is nothing but large, Smallness which is nothing 
but small, Heaviness which is nothing but heavy, or Unity which is nothing 
but one. According to Plato, therefore, the essence is defined by the form of 
real Identity (the Same understood as auto kath' hauto). Everything 
culminates in the great principle: that there is - before all else, and despite 
everything - an affinity or a filiation - or perhaps it should be called a 
philiation - of thought with the true; in short, a good nature and a good 
desire, grounded in the last instance upon the form of analogy in the Good. 
As a result, the Plato who wrote the passage from The Republic cited 
above was also the first to erect the dogmatic and moralising image of 
thought which neutralises that text and allows it to function only as a 
'repentance'. Having discovered the superior or transcendent exercise of 
the faculties, Plato subordinated this to the forms of opposition in the 
sensible, similitude in reminiscence, identity in the essence and analogy in 
the Good. In this manner he prepared the way for the world of 
representation, carrying out a first distribution of its elements and already 
covering the exercise of thought with a dogmatic image which both 
presupposes and betrays it. 
The transcendental form of a faculty is indistinguishable from its 
disjointed, superior or transcendent exercise. Transcendent in no way 
means that the faculty addresses itself to objects outside the world but, on 
the contrary, that it grasps that in the world which concerns it exclusively 
and brings it into the world. The transcendent exercise must not be traced 
from the empirical exercise precisely because it apprehends that which 
cannot be grasped from the point of view of common sense, that which 
measures the empirical operation of all the faculties according to that 
which pertains to each, given the form of their collaboration. That is why 
the transcendental is answerable to a superior empiricism which alone is 
capable of exploring its domain and its regions. Contrary to Kant's belief, 
it cannot be induced from the ordinary empirical forms in the manner in 
which these appear under the determination of common sense. Despite the 
fact that it has become discredited today, the doctrine of the faculties is an 
entirely necessary component of the system of philosophy. Its discredit may 
be explained by the misrecognition of this properly transcendental 
empiricism, for which was substituted in vain a tracing of the 
transcendental from the empirical. Each faculty must be borne to the 
extreme point of its dissolution, at which it falls prey to triple violence: the 
violence of that which forces it to be exercised, of that which it is forced to 
grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, yet also that of the ungraspable 
(from the point of view of its empirical exercise). This is the threefold limit 
of the final power. Each faculty discovers at this point its own unique 
passion - in other words, its radical difference and its eternal repetition, its 
differential and repeating element along with the instantaneous 
engendering of its action and the eternal replay of its object, its manner of 
coming into the world already repeating. We ask, for example: What forces 
sensibility to sense? What is it that can only be sensed, yet is imperceptible 
at the same time? We must pose this question not only for memory and 
thought, but also for the imagination - is there an imaginandum, a 
phantasteon, which would also be the limit, that which is impossible to 
imagine?; for language - is there a loquendum, that which would be silence 
at the same time?; and for the other faculties which would find their place 
in a complete doctrine - vitality, the transcendent object of which would 
include monstrosity; and sociability, the transcendent object of which 
would include anarchy - and even for faculties yet to be discovered, whose 
.. 
eXIstence IS not yet suspecte. 
d 10 F 
h' 
b'd' d 
or not mg can e sal m a vance, one 
cannot prejudge the outcome of research: it may be that some well-known 
faculties - too well known - turn out to have no proper limit, no verbal 
adjective, because they are imposed and have an exercise only under the 
form of common sense. It may turn out, on the other hand, that new 
faculties arise, faculties which were repressed by that form of common 
sense. For a doctrine in general, there is nothing regrettable in this 
uncertainty about the outcome of research, this complexity in the study of 
the particular case of each faculty: on the contrary, transcendental 
empiricism is the only way to avoid tracing the transcendental from the 
outlines of the empirical. 
Our concern here is not to establish such a doctrine of the faculties. We 
seek only to determine the nature of its requirements. In this regard, the 
Platonic determinations cannot be satisfactory. For it is not figures already 
mediated and related to representation that are capable of carrying the 
faculties to their respective limits but, on the contrary, free or untamed 
states of difference in itself; not qualitative opposition within the sensible, 
but an element which is in itself difference, and creates at once both the 
quality in the sensible and the transcendent exercise within sensibility. This 
element is intensity, understood as pure difference in itself, as that which is 
at once both imperceptible for empirical sensibility which grasps intensity 
only already covered or mediated by the quality to which it gives rise, and 
at the same time that which can be perceived only from the point of view 
of a transcendental sensibility which apprehends it immediately in the 
encounter. Moreover, when sensibility transmits its constraint to the 
imagination, when the imagination in turn is raised to the level of 
transcendent exercise, it is the phantasm, the disparity within the 
phantasm, which constitutes the phantasteon, which is both that which can 
only be imagined and the empirically unimaginable. With regard to 
memory, it is not similitude in the reminiscence but, on the contrary, the 
dissimilar in the pure form of time which constitutes the immemorial of a 
transcendent memory. Finally, it is an I fractured by this form of time 
which finds itself constrained to think that which can only be thought; not 
the Same, but that transcendent 'aleatory point', always Other by nature, 
in which all the essences are enveloped like so many differentials of 
thought, and which signifies the highest power of thought only by virtue of 
also designating the unthinkable or the inability to think at the empirical 
level. We recall Heidegger's profound texts showing that as long as 
thought continues to presuppose its own good nature and good will, in the 
form of a common sense, a ratio, a Cogitatio natura universalis, it will 
think nothing at all but remain a prisoner to opinion, frozen in an abstract 
possibility ... : 'Man can think in the sense that he possesses the possibility 
to do so. This possibility alone, however, is no guarantee to us that we are 
capable of thinking.'l1 It is true that on the path which leads to that which 
is to be thought, all begins with sensibility. Between the intensive and 
thought, it is always by means of an intensity that thought comes to us. 
The privilege of sensibility as origin appears in the fact that, in an 
encounter, what forces sensation and that which can only be sensed are 
one and the same thing, whereas in other cases the two instances are 
distinct. In effect, the intensive or difference in intensity is at once both the 
object of the encounter and the object to which the encounter raises 
sensibility. It is not the gods which we encounter: even hidden, the gods are 
only the forms of recognition. What we encounter are the demons, the 
sign-bearers: powers of the leap, the interval, the intensive and the instant; 
powers which only cover difference with more difference. What is most 
important, however, is that - between sensibility and imagination, between 
imagination and memory, between memory and thought - when each 
disjointed faculty communicates to another the violence which carries it to 
its own limit, every time it is a free form of difference which awakens the 
faculty, and awakens it as the different within that difference. So it is with 
difference in intensity, disparity in the phantasm, dissemblance in the form 
of time, the differential in thought. Opposition, resemblance, identity and 
even analogy are only effects produced by these presentations of difference, 
rather than being conditions which subordinate difference and make it 
something represented. There is no philia which testifies to a desire, love, 
good nature or good will by virtue of which the faculties already possess or 
tend towards the object to which they are raised by violence, and by virtue 
of which they would enjoy an analogy with it or a homology among 
themselves. Each faculty, including thought, has only involuntary 
adventures: involuntary operation remains embedded in the empirical. The 
Logos breaks up into hieroglyphics, each one of which speaks the 
transcendent language of a faculty. Even the point of departure - namely, 
sensibility in the encounter with that which forces sensation - presupposes 
neither affinity nor predestination. On the contrary, it is the fortuitousness 
or the contingency of the encounter which guarantees the necessity of that 
which it forces to be thought. There is no amicability, such as that between 
the similar and the Same or even that which unites opposites, to link 
sensibility to a sentiendum. The dark precursor is sufficient to enable 
communication between difference as such, and to make the different 
communicate with difference: the dark precursor is not a friend. President 
Schreber reformulates Plato's three moments, in his own way and in 
restoring them to their original communicative violence: the nerves and the 
annexation of nerves, examined souls and the murder of souls, constrained 
thought and the constraint to think. 
The very principle of communication, even if this should be violence, 
seems to maintain the form of a common sense. However, it is nothing of 
the sort. There is indeed a serial connection between the faculties and an 
order in that series. But neither the order nor the series implies any 
collaboration with regard to the form of a supposed same object or to a 
subjective unity in the nature of an 'I think'. It is a forced and broken 
connection which traverses the fragments of a dissolved self as it does the 
borders of a fractured 1. The transcendental operation of the faculties is a 
properly paradoxical operation, opposed to their exercise under the rule of 
a common sense. In consequence, the harmony between the faculties can 
appear only in the form of a discordant harmony, since each communicates 
to the other only the violence which confronts it with its own difference 
and its divergence from the others.12 Kant was the first to provide the 
example of such a discordant harmony, the relation between imagination 
and thought which occurs in the case of the sublime. There is, therefore, 
something which is communicated from one faculty to another, but it is 
metamorphosed and does not form a common sense. We could just as well 
say that there are Ideas which traverse all the faculties, but are the object of 
none in particular. Perhaps in effect, as we shall see, it will be necessary to 
reserve the name of Ideas not for pure cogitanda but rather for those 
instances which go from sensibility to thought and from thought to 
sensibility, capable of engendering in each case, according to their own 
order, the limit- or transcendent-object of each faculty. Ideas are problems, 
but problems only furnish the conditions under which the faculties attain 
their superior exercise. Considered in this light, Ideas, far from having as 
their milieu a good sense or a common sense, refer to a para-sense which 
determines only the communication between disjointed faculties. Neither 
are they illuminated by a natural light: rather, they shine like differential 
flashes which leap and metamorphose. The very conception of a natural 
light is inseparable from a certain value supposedly attached to the Idea 
namely, 'clarity and distinctness'; and from a certain supposed origin 
namely, 'innateness'. Innateness, however, only represents the good nature 
of thought from the point of view of a Christian theology or, more 
generally, the requirements of creation (which is why Plato opposed 
reminiscence to innateness, criticising the latter for ignoring the role of a 
form of time in the soul as a consequence of pure thought, or the necessity 
of a formal distinction between a Before and an After capable of grounding 
forgetting in that which forces thought). The 'clear and distinct' itself is 
inseparable from the model of recognition which serves as the instrument 
of every orthodoxy, even when it is rational. Clarity and distinctness form 
the logic of recognition, just as innateness is the theology of common sense: 
both have already pushed the Idea over into representation. The restitution 
of the Idea in the doctrine of the faculties requires the explosion of the 
clear and distinct, and the discovery of a Dionysian value according to 
which the Idea is necessarily obscure in so far as it is distinct, all the more 
obscure the more it is distinct. Distinction-obscurity becomes here the true 
tone of philosophy, the symphony of the discordant Idea. 
Nothing is more exemplary in this respect than the exchange of letters 
between Jacques Riviere and Antonin Artaud. Riviere defended the image 
of an autonomous thinking function, endowed in principle with its own 
nature and will. In fact, we are confronted with great difficulties in 
thinking: lack of method, technique or application, and even lack of health. 
These, however, are fortunate difficulties: not only because they prevent 
the nature of thought from devouring our own nature, not only because 
they bring thought into relation with obstacles which are so many 'facts' 
without which it would not manage to orientate itself, but also because our 
efforts to overcome these obstacles allow us to maintain an ideal of the self 
as it exists in pure thought, like a 'superior degree of identity with 
ourselves', which persists through the factual variations, differences and 
inequalities which constantly affect us. The reader notes with astonishment 
that the more Riviere believes himself to be close to an understanding of 
Artaud, the further away he is, and the more he speaks of something 
altogether different. Rarely has there been such misunderstanding. Artaud 
does not simply talk about his own 'case', but already in his youthful 
letters shows an awareness that his case brings him into contact with a 
generalised thought process which can no longer be covered by the 
reassuring dogmatic image but which, on the contrary, amounts to the 
complete destruction of that image. The difficulties he describes himself as 
experiencing must therefore be understood as not merely in fact but as 
difficulties in principle, concerning and affecting the essence of what it 
means to think. Artaud said that the problem (for him) was not to 
orientate his thought, or to perfect the expression of what he thought, or to 
acquire application and method or to perfect his poems, but simply to 
manage to think something. For him, this was the only conceivable 'work': 
it presupposes an impulse, a compulsion to think which passes through all 
sorts of bifurcations, spreading from the nerves and being communicated 
to the soul in order to arrive at thought. Henceforth, thought is also forced 
to think its central collapse, its fracture, its own natural 'powerlessness' 
which is indistinguishable from the greatest power - in other words, from 
those unformulated forces, the cogitanda, as though from so many thefts or 
trespasses in thought. Artaud pursues in all this the terrible revelation of a 
thought without image, and the conquest of a new principle which does 
not allow itself to be represented. He knows that difficulty as such, along 
with its cortege of problems and questions, is not a de facto state of affairs 
but a de jure structure of thought; that there is an acephalism in thought 
just as there is an amnesia in memory, an aphasia in language and an 
agnosia in sensibility. He knows that thinking is not innate, but must be 
engendered in thought. He knows that the problem is not to direct or 
methodically apply a thought which pre-exists in principle and in nature, 
but to bring into being that which does not yet exist (there is no other 
work, all the rest is arbitrary, mere decoration). To think is to create 
there is no other creation - but to create is first of all to engender 'thinking' 
in thought. For this reason Artaud opposes genitality to innateness in 
thought, but equally to reminiscence, and thereby proposes the principle of 
a transcendental empiricism: 
I am innately genital. ... There are some fools who think of themselves 
as beings, as innately being. I am he who, in order to be, must whip his 
innateness. One who innately must be a being, that is always whipping 
this sort of non-existent kennel, 0 bitches of impossibility! ... Under
neath grammar there lies thought, an infamy harder to conquer, an infi
nitely more shrewd ish maid, rougher to overcome when taken as an 
innate fact. For thought is a matron who has not always existed. 13 
It is not a question of opposing to the dogmatic image of thought another 
image borrowed, for example, from schizophrenia, but rather of remembe
ring that schizophrenia is not only a human fact but also a possibility for 
thought - one, moreover, which can only be revealed as such can through 
the abolition of that image. It is noteworthy that the dogmatic image, for 
its part, recognises only error as a possible misadventure of thought, and 
reduces everything to the form of error. This, indeed, is the fifth postulate 
that we should take into account: taking error to be the sole 'negative' of 
thought. Without doubt this postulate belongs to the others as much as 
they belong to it: what can befall a Cogitatio natura universalis which pres
upposes a good will on the part of the thinker along with a good nature on 
the part of thought except that it be mistaken - in other words, that it take 
the false for the true (the false according to nature for the true according to 
the will)? Does not error itself testify to the form of a common sense, since 
one faculty alone cannot be mistaken but two faculties can be, at least 
from the point of view of their collaboration, when an object of one is con
fused with another object of the other? What is error if not always false 
recognition? Whence does it corne if not from a false distribution of the 
elements of representation, from a false evaluation of opposition, analogy, 
resemblance and identity? Error is only the reverse of a rational orthodoxy, 
still testifying on behalf of that from which it is distanced - in other words, 
on behalf of an honesty, a good nature and a good will on the part of the 
one who is said to be mistaken. Error, therefore, pays homage to the 'truth' 
to the extent that, lacking a form of its own, it gives the form of the true to 
the false. It is in this sense that in the Theaetetus, under the sway of an ap
parently quite different inspiration from that in The Republic, Plato pres
ents simultaneously both a positive model of recognition or common sense, 
and a negative model of error. Not only does thought appropriate the ideal 
of an 'orthodoxy', not only does common sense find its object in the ca
tegories of opposition, similitude, analogy and identity, but error itself im
plies this transcendence of a common sense with regard to sensations, and 
of a soul with regard to all the faculties whose collaboration [syllogism os] 
in relation to the form of the Same it determines. For if I cannot confuse 
two things that I perceive or conceive, I can always confuse something I see 
with something I conceive or remember - when, for example, I slip the 
present object of my sensation into the engram of another object of my 
memory - as in the case of 'Good morning Theodorus' when it is 
Theaetetus who passes by. Error in all its misery, therefore, still testifies to 
the transcendence of the Cogitatio natura. It is as though error were a kind 
of failure of good sense within the form of a common sense which remains 
integral and intact. It thereby confirms the preceding postulates of the dog
matic image as much as it derives from them, proving them by reductio ad 
absurdum. 
It is true that this proof is completely ineffectual, since it operates in the 
same element as the postulates themselves. Yet it is perhaps easier to 
reconcile the Theaetetus and the text from the Republic than it may at first 
seem. It is not by chance that the Theaetetus is an aporetic dialogue, and 
the aporia on which it closes is that of difference or diaphora (to the same 
extent that thought requires that difference transcend 'opinion', opinion 
requires for itself an immanence of difference). Theaetetus is the first great 
theory of common sense, of recognition, representation and error as their 
correlate. However, the aporia of difference exposes its failure from the 
outset, along with the need to search in a quite different direction for a 
doctrine of thought: perhaps the one indicated by Book VII of the 
Republic? ... Always with the reservation that the Theaetetus model 
continues to act in a subterranean manner, and that the persistent elements 
of representation still compromise the new vision of the Republic. 
According to the hypothesis of the Cogitatio natura universalis, error is 
the 'negative' which develops naturally. Nevertheless, the dogmatic image 
does not ignore the fact that thought has other misadventures besides error: 
humiliations more difficult to overcome, negatives much more difficult to 
unravel. It does not overlook the fact that the terrible Trinity of madness, 
stupidity and malevolence can no more be reduced to error than they can 
be reduced to any form of the same. Once again, however, these are no 
more than facts for the dogmatic image. Stupidity, malevolence and 
madness are regarded as facts occasioned by external causes, which bring 
into play external forces capable of subverting the honest character of 
thought from without - all this to the extent that we are not only thinkers. 
The sole effect of these forces in thought is then assimilated precisely to 
error, which is supposed in principle to include all the effects of factual 
external causes. The reduction of stupidity, malevolence and madness to 
the single figure of error must therefore be understood to occur in principle - whence the hybrid character of this weak concept which would not have 
a place within pure thought if thought were not diverted from without, and 
would not be occasioned by this outside if the outside were not within pure 
thought. For this reason, we cannot be content to invoke certain facts 
against the in-principle dogmatic image of thought. As in the case of 
recognition, we must pursue the discussion at the level of principle itself, 
by questioning the legitimacy of the distribution of the empirical and the 
transcendental carried out by the dogmatic image. For it rather seems to us 
that there are facts with regard to error, but which facts? Who says 'Good 
morning Theodorus' when Theaetetus passes, 'It is three o'clock' when it is 
three-thirty, and that 7 + 5 = 13? Answer: the myopic, the distracted and 
the young child at school. These are effective examples of errors, but 
examples which, like the majority of such 'facts', refer to thoroughly 
artificial or puerile situations, and offer a grotesque image of thought 
because they relate it to very simple questions to which one can and must 
respond by independent propositions. 14 Error acquires a sense only once 
the play of thought ceases to be speculative and becomes a kind of radio 
quiz. Everything must therefore be inverted: error is a fact which is then 
arbitrarily extrapolated and arbitrarily projected into the transcendental. 
As for the true transcendental structures of thought and the 'negative' in 
which these are enveloped, perhaps these must be sought elsewhere, and in 
figures other than those of error? 
In one way or another, philosophers have always had a lively awareness 
of this necessity. There are few who did not feel the need to enrich the 
concept of error by means of determinations of a quite different kind. (To 
cite some examples: the notion of superstition as this is elaborated by 
Lucretius, Spinoza and the eighteenth-century philosophes, in particular 
Fontanelle. It is clear that the 'absurdity' of a superstition cannot be 
reduced to its kernel of error. Similarly, Plato's ignorance or forgetting are 
distinguished from error as much as from innateness and reminiscence 
itself. The Stoic notion of stultitia involves at once both madness and 
stupidity. The Kantian idea of inner illusion, internal to reason, is radically 
different from the extrinsic mechanism of error. The Hegelian idea of 
alienation supposes a profound restructuring of the true-false relation. The 
Schopenhauerian notions of vulgarity and stupidity imply a complete 
reversal of the will-understanding relation.) What prevents these richer 
determinations from being developed on their own account, however, is 
the maintenance, despite everything, of the dogmatic image, along with the 
postulates of common sense, recognition and representation which 
comprise its cortege. The correctives can thus appear only as 'repentances' 
which complicate or inconvenience the image without overturning its 
implicit principle. 
Stupidity [betise] is not animality. The animal is protected by specific 
forms which prevent it from being 'stupid' [betel. Formal correspondences 
between the human face and the heads of animals have often been 
composed; in other words, correspondences between individual differences 
peculiar to humans and the specific differences of animals. Such 
correspondences, however, take no account of stupidity as a specifically 
human form of bestiality. When satirical poets proceed through the various 
degrees of insult, they do not stop with animal forms but continue on to 
more profound regressions, passing from carnivores to herbivores and 
ending with cloaca as though with a universal leguminous and digestive 
ground. The internal process of digestion is more profound than the 
external gesture of attack or voracious movement: stupidity with peristaltic 
movements. This is why tyrants have the heads not only of beasts but also 
of pears, cauliflowers or potatoes. One is neither superior nor external to 
that from which one benefits: a tyrant institutionalises stupidity, but he is 
the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it. 
Slaves are always commanded by another slave. Here too, how could the 
concept of error account for this unity of stupidity and cruelty, of the 
grotesque and the terrifying, which doubles the way of the world? 
Cowardice, cruelty, baseness and stupidity are not simply corporeal 
capacities or traits of character or society; they are structures of thought as 
such. The transcendental landscape comes to life: places for the tyrant, the 
slave and the imbecile must be found within it - without the place 
resembling the figure who occupies it, and without the transcendental ever 
being traced from the empirical figures which it makes possible. It is 
always our belief in the postulates of the Cogitatio which prevents us from 
making stupidity a transcendental problem. Stupidity can then be no more 
than an empirical determination, referring back to psychology or to the 
anecdotal - or worse, to polemic and insults - and to the especially 
atrocious pseudo-literary genre of the sottisier. But whose fault is this? 
Does not the fault lie first with philosophy, which has allowed itself to be 
convinced by the concept of error even though this concept is itself 
borrowed from facts, relatively insignificant and arbitrary facts? The worst 
literature produces sottisiers, while the best (Flaubert, Baudelaire, Bloy) 
was haunted by the problem of stupidity. By giving this problem all its 
cosmic, encyclopaedic and gnoseological dimensions, such literature was 
able to carry it as far as the entrance to philosophy itself. Philosophy could 
have taken up the problem with its own means and with the necessary 
modesty, by considering the fact that stupidity is never that of others but 
the object of a properly transcendental question: how is stupidity (not 
error) possible? 
It is possible by virtue of the link between thought and individuation. 
This link is much more profound than that which appears in the '1 think': it 
is established in a field of intensity which already constitutes the sensibility 
of the thinking subject. For the 1 and the Self are perhaps no more than 
indices of the species: of humanity as a species with divisions. The species 
has undoubtedly reached an implicit state in man. As a result, the form of 
the I can serve as a universal principle for recognition and representation, 
whereas the specific explicit forms are recognised only by means of this 1, 
and the determination of species is only the rule of one of the elements of 
representation. The I is therefore not a species; rather - since it implicitly 
contains what the species and kinds explicitly develop, in particular the 
represented becoming of the form - they have a common fate, Eudoxus 
and Epistemon. Individuation, by contrast, has nothing to do with even the 
continued process of determining species. Not only does it differ in kind 
from all determination of species but, as we shall see, it precedes and 
renders the latter possible. It involves fields of fluid intensive factors which 
no more take the form of an I than of a Self. Individuation as such, as it 
operates beneath all forms, is inseparable from a pure ground that it brings 
to the surface and trails with it. It is difficult to describe this ground, or the 
terror and attraction it excites. Turning over the ground is the most 
dangerous occupation, but also the most tempting in the stupefied 
moments of an obtuse will. For this ground, along with the individual, rises 
to the surface yet assumes neither form nor figure. It is there, staring at us, 
but without eyes. The individual distinguishes itself from it, but it does not 
distinguish itself, continuing rather to cohabit with that which divorces 
itself from it. It is the indeterminate, but the indeterminate in so far as it 
continues to embrace determination, as the ground does the shoe. Animals 
are in a sense forewarned against this ground, protected by their explicit 
forms. Not so for the I and the Self, undermined by the fields of 
individuation which work beneath them, defenceless against a rising of the 
ground which holds up to them a distorted or distorting mirror in which all 
presently thought forms dissolve. Stupidity is neither the ground nor the 
individual, but rather this relation in which individuation brings the 
ground to the surface without being able to give it form (this ground rises 
by means of the I, penetrating deeply into the possibility of thought and 
constituting the unrecognised in every recognition). All determinations 
become bad and cruel when they are grasped only by a thought which 
invents and contemplates them, flayed and separated from their living 
form, adrift upon this barren ground. Everything becomes violence on this 
passive ground. Everything becomes attack on this digestive ground. Here 
the Sabbath of stupidity and malevolence takes place. Perhaps this is the 
origin of that melancholy which weighs upon the most beautiful human 
faces: the presentiment of a hideousness peculiar to the human face, of a 
rising tide of stupidity, an evil deformity or a thought governed by 
madness. For from the point of view of a philosophy of nature, madness 
arises at the point at which the individual contemplates itself in this free 
ground - and, as a result, stupidity in stupidity and cruelty in cruelty - to 
the point that it can no longer stand itself. 'A pitiful faculty then emerges in 
their minds, that of being able to see stupidity and no longer tolerate 
it ... ,.15 It is true that this most pitiful faculty also becomes the royal faculty 
when it animates philosophy as a philosophy of mind - in other words, 
when it leads all the other faculties to that transcendent exercise which 
renders possible a violent reconciliation between the individual, the ground 
and thought. At this point, the intensive factors of individuation take 
themselves as objects in such a manner as to constitute the highest element 
of a transcendent sensibility, the sentiendum; and from faculty to faculty, 
the ground is borne within thought - still as the unthought and unthinking, 
but this unthought has become the necessary empirical form in which, in 
the fractured I {Bouvard and Pecuchet}, thought at last thinks the 
cogitandum; in other words, the transcendent element which can only be 
thought {'the fact that we do not yet think' or 'What is stupidity?'}. 
Teachers already know that errors or falsehoods are rarely found in home
work {except in those exercises where a fixed result must be produced, or 
propositions must be translated one by one}. Rather, what is more fre
quently found - and worse - are nonsensical sentences, remarks without 
interest or importance, banalities mistaken for profundities, ordinary 
'points' confused with singular points, badly posed or distorted problems 
all heavy with dangers, yet the fate of us all. We doubt whether, when 
mathematicians engage in polemic, they criticize one another for being mis
taken in the results of their calculations. Rather, they criticize one another 
for having produced an insignificant theorem or a problem devoid of sense. 
Philosophy must draw the conclusions which follow from this. The element 
of sense is well known to philosophy; it has even become very familiar to 
philosophers. Nevertheless, this is perhaps not enough. Sense is defined as 
the condition of the true, but since it is supposed that the condition must 
retain an extension larger than that which is conditioned, sense does not 
ground truth without also allowing the possibility of error. A false proposi
tion remains no less a proposition endowed with sense. Non-sense would 
then be the characteristic of that which can be neither true nor false. Two 
dimensions may be distinguished in a proposition: expression, in which a 
proposition says or expresses some idea; and designation, in which it indi
cates or designates the objects to which what is said or expressed applies. 
One of these would then be the dimension of sense, the other the dimen
sion of truth and falsity. However, in this manner sense would only found 
the truth of a proposition while remaining indifferent to what it founds. 
Truth and falsity would be matters of designation {as Russell says: 'The 
question of truth and falsehood has to do with what words and sentences 
indicate, not with what they express.'16}. We are then in a strange situ
ation: having discovered the domain of sense, we refer it only to a psycho
logical trait or a logical formalism. If need be, a new value, that of the 
nonsensical or the absurd, is added to the classical values of truth and fals
ity. However, the true and the false are supposed to continue in the same 
state as before - in other words, as if they were independent of the condi
tion assigned to them or of the new value which is added to them. Either 
too much is said, or not enough: too much, because the search for a 
ground forms the essential step of a 'critique' which should inspire in us 
new ways of thinking; not enough, because so long as the ground remains 
larger than the grounded, this critique serves only to justify traditional 
ways of thinking. The true and the false are supposed to remain unaffected 
by the condition which grounds the one only by rendering the other 
possible. By referring the true and the false back to the relation of designa
tion within the proposition, we acquire a sixth postulate: the postulate of 
designation or of the proposition itself, which both incorporates and fol
lows from the preceding postulates (the relation of designation is only the 
logical form of recognition). 
In fact, the condition must be a condition of real experience, not of 
possible experience. It forms an intrinsic genesis, not an extrinsic 
conditioning. In every respect, truth is a matter of production, not of 
adequation. It is a matter of genitality, not of innateness or reminiscence. 
We cannot accept that the grounded remains the same as it was before, the 
same as when it was not grounded, when it had not passed the test of 
grounding. If sufficient reason or the ground has a 'twist', this is because it 
relates what it grounds to that which is truly groundless. At this point, it 
must be said, there is no longer recognition. To ground is to 
metamorphose. Truth and falsity do not concern a simple designation, 
rendered possible by a sense which remains indifferent to it. The relation 
between a proposition and what it designates must be established within 
sense itself: the nature of ideal sense is to point beyond itself towards the 
object designated. Designation, in so far as it is achieved in the case of a 
true proposition, would never be grounded unless it were understood as the 
limit of the genetic series or the ideal connections which constitute sense. If 
sense points beyond itself towards the object, the latter can no longer be 
posited in reality exterior to sense, but only at the limit of its process. 
Moreover, the proposition's relation to what it designates, in so far as this 
relation is established, is constituted within the unity of sense, along with 
the object which realises this unity. There is only a single case where the 
designated stands alone and remains external to sense: precisely the case of 
those singular propositions arbitrarily detached from their context and 
employed as examples.17 Here too, however, how can we accept that such 
puerile and artificial textbook examples justify an image of thought? Every 
time a proposition is replaced in the context of living thought, it is 
apparent that it has exactly the truth it deserves according to its sense, and 
the falsity appropriate to the non-sense that it implies. We always have as 
much truth as we deserve in accordance with the sense of what we say. 
Sense is the genesis or the production of the true, and truth is only the 
empirical result of sense. We rediscover in all the postulates of the 
dogmatic image the same confusion: elevating a simple empirical figure to 
the status of a transcendental, at the risk of allowing the real structures of 
the transcendental to fall into the empirical. 
Sense is what is expressed by a proposition, but what is this expressed? 
It cannot be reduced either to the object designated or to the lived state of 
the speaker. Indeed, we must distinguish sense and signification in the 
following manner: signification refers only to concepts and the manner in 
which they relate to the objects conditioned by a given field of 
representation; whereas sense is like the Idea which is developed in the 
sub-representative determinations. It is not surprising that it should be 
easier to say what sense is not than to say what it is. In effect, we can never 
formulate simultaneously both a proposition and its sense; we can never 
say what is the sense of what we say. From this point of view, sense is the 
veritable loquendum, that which in its empirical operation cannot be said, 
even though it can be said only in its transcendental operation. The Idea 
which runs throughout all the faculties nevertheless cannot be reduced to 
sense, since in turn it is also non-sense. Nor is there any difficulty in 
reconciling this double aspect by means of which the Idea is constituted of 
structural elements which have no sense themselves, while it constitutes the 
sense of all that it produces (structure and genesis). There is only one kind 
of word which expresses both itself and its sense - precisely the nonsense 
word: abraxas, snark or blituri. If sense is necessarily a nonsense for the 
empirical function of the faculties, then conversely, the nonsenses so 
frequent in the empirical operation are like the secret of sense for the 
conscientious observer, all of whose faculties point towards a transcendent 
limit. As so many authors have recognised in diverse ways (Flaubert, Lewis 
Carroll), the mechanism of nonsense is the highest finality of sense, just as 
the mechanism of stupidity is the highest finality of thought. While it is 
true that we cannot express the sense of what we say, we can at least take 
the sense of a proposition - in other words, the expressed, as the 
designated of another proposition - of which in turn we cannot express the 
sense, and so on to infinity. As a result, if we call each proposition of 
consciousness a 'name', it is caught in an indefinite nominal regress, each 
name referring to another name which designates the sense of the 
preceding. However, the inability of empirical consciousness here 
corresponds to the 'nth' power of the language and its transcendent 
repetition to be able to speak infinitely of or about words themselves. In 
any case, thought is betrayed by the dogmatic image and by the postulate 
of propositions according to which philosophy would find a beginning in a 
first proposition of consciousness: Cogito. But perhaps Cogito is the name 
which has no sense and no object other than the power of reiteration in 
indefinite regress (I think that I think that I think ... ). Every proposition of 
consciousness implies an unconscious of pure thought which constitutes the 
sphere of sense in which there is infinite regress. 
The first paradox of sense, therefore, is that of proliferation, in which 
that which is expressed by one 'name' is designated by another name which 
doubles the first. No doubt this paradox may be avoided, but at the risk of 
falling into another: this time, the proposition is suspended, immobilised, 
just long enough to extract from it a double which retains only the ideal 
content, the immanent given. The paradoxical repetition essential to 
language then no longer consists in a redoubling but in a doubling; no 
longer in a precipitation but in a suspension. This double of the 
proposition appears distinct at once from the proposition itself, the 
formulator of the proposition and the object which it concerns. It is 
distinguished from the subject and the object because it does not exist 
outside of the proposition which expresses it. It is distinguished from the 
proposition itself because it relates to the object as though it were its 
logical attribute, its 'statable' or 'expressible'. It is the complex theme of 
the proposition and, as such, the first term of knowledge. In order to 
distinguish it at once both from the object (God or the sky, for example) 
and from the proposition (God is, the sky is blue), it is stated in infinitive 
or participial form: to-be-God or God-being, the being-blue of the sky. 
This complex is an ideal event. It is an objective entity, but one of which 
we cannot say that it exists in itself: it insists or subsists, possessing a 
quasi-being or an extra-being, that minimum of being common to real, 
possible and even impossible objects. In this way, however, we fall into a 
nest of secondary difficulties, for how are we to avoid the consequence that 
contradictory propositions have the same sense, given that affirmation and 
negation are only propositional modes? Or how are we to avoid the 
consequence that an impossible object, one which is self-contradictory, has 
a sense even though it has no 'signification' (the being-square of a circle)? 
Or again, how are we to reconcile the transience of an object with the 
eternity of its sense? Finally, how are we to avoid the following play of 
mirrors: a proposition must be true because its expressible is true, while the 
expressible is true only when the proposition itself is true? All these 
difficulties stem from a common source: in extracting a double from the 
proposition we have evoked a simple phantom. Sense so defined is only a 
vapour which plays at the limit of things and words. Sense appears here as 
the outcome of the most powerful logical effort, but as Ineffectual, a sterile 
incorporeal deprived of its generative power. 18 Lewis Carroll gave a 
marvellous account of all these paradoxes: that of the neutralising doubling 
appears in the form of the smile without a cat, while that of the 
proliferating redoubling appears in the form of the knight who always 
gives a new name to the name of the song - and between these two 
extremes lie all the secondary paradoxes which form Alice's adventures.19 
Is anything gained by expressing sense in the interrogative rather than 
the infinitive or participial form ('Is God?' rather than to-be-God or the 
being of God)? At first glance the gain is slight. It is slight because a 
question is always traced from givable, probable or possible responses. It is 
therefore itself the neutralised double of a supposedly pre-existent 
proposition which mayor must serve as response. All the orator's art goes 
into constructing questions in accordance with the responses he wishes to 
evoke or the propositions of which he wants to convince us. Even when we 
do not know the answer, we question only in supposing that in principle it 
is already given, or that it already exists in another consciousness. That is 
why - in accordance with its etymology - interrogation always takes place 
within the framework of a community: to interrogate implies not only a 
common sense but a good-sense, a distribution of knowledge and of the 
given with respect to empirical consciousnesses in accordance with their 
situations, their points of view, their positions and their skills, in such a 
way that a given consciousness is supposed to know already what the other 
does not (What time is it? - You who have a watch or are close to a clock. 
When was Caesar born? - You who know Roman history). Despite this 
weakness, the interrogative formula has at least one advantage: at the same 
time as it invites us to consider the corresponding proposition as a 
response, it opens up a new path for us. A proposition conceived as a 
response is always a particular solution, a case considered for itself, 
abstractly and apart from the superior synthesis which relates it, along with 
other cases, toa problem as problem. Therefore interrogation, in turn, 
expresses the manner in which a problem is dismembered, cashed out and 
revealed, in experience and for consciousness, according to its diversely 
apprehended cases of solution. Even though it gives us an insufficient idea, 
it thereby inspires in us the presentiment of that which it dismembers. 
Sense is located in the problem itself. Sense is constituted in the complex 
theme, but the complex theme is that set of problems and questions in 
relation to which the propositions serve as elements of response and cases 
of solution. This definition, however, requires us to rid ourselves of an 
is 
illusion which belongs to the dogmatic image of thought: problems and 
questions must no longer be traced from the corresponding propositions 
which serve, or can serve, as responses. We know the agent of this illusion: 
it 
interrogation which, within the framework of a community, 
dismembers problems and questions, and reconstitutes them in accordance 
with the propositions of the common empirical consciousness - in other 
words, according to the probable truths of a simple doxa. The great logical 
dream of a combinatory or calculus of problems is compromised as a 
result. It was believed that problems or questions were only the 
neutralisation of a corresponding proposition. Consequently, how could it 
not be believed that the theme or sense is only an ineffectual double, traced 
from the type of proposition that it subsumes or even from an element 
supposed to be common to all propositions (the indicative thesis)? The 
failure to see that sense or the problem is extra-propositional, that it differs 
in kind from every proposition, leads us to miss the essential: the genesis of 
the act of thought, the operation of the faculties. Dialectic is the art of 
problems and questions, the combinatory or calculus of problems as such. 
However, dialectic loses its peculiar power when it remains content to 
trace problems from propositions: thus begins the history of the long 
perversion which places it under the power of the negative. Aristotle 
writes: 
The difference between a problem and a proposition is a difference in 
the turn of phrase. For if it be put in this way, 'Is two-footed terrestrial 
animal the definition of man?' or 'Is animal the genus of man?' the re
sult is a proposition; but if thus, 'Is two-footed terrestrial animal the def
inition of man or not?' and 'Is animal the genus of man or not?' the 
result is a problem. Similarly too in other cases. Naturally, then, prob
lems and propositions are equal in number; for out of every proposition 
you will make a problem if you change the turn of phrase. 
(The illusion wends its way into contemporary logic where the calculus of 
problems is presented as extra-mathematical, which is true, since it is essen
tially logical or dialectical. It is still inferred, however, from a simple calcu
lus of propositions, copied or traced from the propositions themselves.)20 
We are led to believe that problems are given ready-made, and that they 
disappear in the responses or the solution. Already, under this double 
aspect, they can be no more than phantoms. We are led to believe that the 
activity of thinking, along with truth and falsehood in relation to that 
activity, begins only with the search for solutions, that both of these 
concern only solutions. This belief probably has the same origin as the 
other postulates of the dogmatic image: puerile examples taken out of 
context and arbitrarily erected into models. According to this infantile 
prejudice, the master sets a problem, our task is to solve it, and the result is 
accredited true or false by a powerful authority. It is also a social prejudice 
with the visible interest of maintaining us in an infantile state, which calls 
upon us to solve problems that come from elsewhere, consoling or 
distracting us by telling us that we have won simply by being able to 
respond: the problem as obstacle and the respondent as Hercules. Such is 
the origin of the grotesque image of culture that we find in examinations 
and government referenda as well as in newspaper competitions (where 
everyone is called upon to choose according to his or her taste, on 
condition that this taste coincides with that of everyone else). Be yourselves - it being understood that this self must be that of others. As if we would 
not remain slaves so long as we do not control the problems themselves, so 
long as we do not possess a right to the problems, to a participation in and 
management of the problems. The dogmatic image of thought supports 
itself with psychologically puerile and socially reactionary examples (cases 
of recognition, error, simple propositions and solutions or responses) in 
order to prejudge what should be the most valued in regard to thought 
namely, the genesis of the act of thinking and the sense of truth and 
falsehood. There is, therefore, a seventh postulate to add to the others: the 
postulate of responses and solutions according to which truth and 
falsehood only begin with solutions or only qualify responses. When, 
however, a false problem is 'set' in a science examination, this propitious 
scandal serves only to remind families that problems are not ready-made 
but must be constituted and invested in their proper symbolic fields; and 
that the master text necessarily requires a (necessarily fallible) master in 
order to be written. Pedagogic experiments are proposed in order to allow 
pupils, even very young pupils, to participate in the fabrication of 
problems, in their constitution and their being posed as problems. 
Moreover, everyone 'recognises' after a fashion that problems are the most 
important thing. Yet it is not enough to recognise this in fact, as though 
problems were only provisional and contingent movements destined to 
disappear in the formation of knowledge, which owed their importance 
only to the negative empirical conditions imposed upon the knowing 
subject. On the contrary, this discovery must be raised to the 
transcendental level, and problems must be considered not as 'givens' 
(data) but as ideal 'objecticities' possessing their own sufficiency and 
implying acts of constitution and investment in their respective symbolic 
fields. Far from being concerned with solutions, truth and falsehood 
primarily affect problems. A solution always has the truth it deserves 
according to the problem to which it is a response, and the problem always 
has the solution it deserves in proportion to its own truth or falsity - in 
other words, in proportion to its sense. This is what is meant by such 
famous formulae as: 'The really great problems are posed only once they 
are solved' or 'Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve' 
not because practical or speculative problems are only the shadow of 
pre-existing solutions but, on the contrary, because the solution necessarily 
follows from the complete conditions under which the problem is 
determined as a problem, from the means and the terms which are 
employed in order to pose it. The problem or sense is at once both the site 
of an originary truth and the genesis of a derived truth. The notions of 
nonsense, false sense and misconstrual [contresens] must be related to 
problems themselves (there are problems which are false through 
indetermination, others through over determination, while stupidity, finally, 
is the faculty for false problems; it is evidence of an inability to constitute, 
comprehend or determine a problem as such). Philosophers and savants 
dream of applying the test of truth and falsity to problems: this is the aim 
of dialectics as a superior calculus or combinatory. However, as long as the 
transcendental consequences are not explicitly drawn and the dogmatic 
image of thought subsists in principle, this dream also functions as no more 
than a 'repentance'. 
The natural illusion (which involves tracing problems from propositions) 
is in effect extended into a philosophical illusion. The critical requirement 
is recognised, and the attempt is made to apply the test of truth and falsity 
to problems themselves, but it is maintained that the truth of a problem 
consists only in the possibility that it receive a solution. The new form of 
the illusion and its technical character comes this time from the fact that 
the form of problems is modelled upon the form of possibility of 
propositions. This is already the case with Aristotle. Aristotle assigned the 
dialectic its real task, its only effective task: the art of problems and 
questions. Whereas Analytics gives us the means to solve a problem already 
given, or to respond to a question, Dialectics shows how to pose a question 
legitimately. Analytics studies the process by which the syllogism 
necessarily leads to a conclusion, while Dialectics invents the subjects of 
syllogisms (precisely what Aristotle calls 'problems') and engenders the 
elements of syllogisms concerning a given subject ('propositions'). 
However, in order to judge a problem, Aristotle invites us to consider 'the 
opinions accepted by all men or by the majority among them, or by the 
wise' in order to relate these to general (predicable) points of view, and 
thereby form the places which allow them to be established or refuted in 
discussion. The common places are thus the test of common sense itself: 
every problem the corresponding proposition of which contains a logical 
fault in regard to accident, genus, property or definition will be considered 
a false proposition. If the dialectic appears devalued in Aristotle, reduced 
to the simple probabilities of opinion or the doxa, this is not because he 
misunderstood the essential task but, on the contrary, because he conceived 
the realisation of that task badly. In the grip of the natural illusion, he 
traced problems from the propositions of common sense; in the grip of the 
philosophical illusion, he made the truth of problems depend upon the 
common places - in other words, upon the logical possibility of finding a 
solution (the propositions themselves designate cases of possible solutions). 
At most, the form of possibility varies throughout the history of 
philosophy. Thus, while the partisans of a mathematical method claim to 
be opposed to the dialectic, they nevertheless retain the essential - namely, 
the ideal of a combinatory or a calculus of problems. Instead of having 
recourse to the logical form of the possible, however, they separate out 
another, properly mathematical form of possibility - be it geometric or 
algebraic. Problems, therefore, continue to be traced from the corresponding 
propositions, and to be evaluated according to the possibility of their finding 
a solution. More precisely, from a geometric and synthetic point of view, 
problems are inferred from a particular type of proposition known as 
theorems. Greek geometry has a general tendency on the one hand to limit 
problems to the benefit of theorems, on the other to subordinate problems 
to theorems themselves. The reason is that theorems seem to express and to 
develop the properties of simple essences, whereas problems concern only 
events and affections which show evidence of a deterioration or projection 
of essences in the imagination. As a result, however, the genetic point of 
view is forcibly relegated to an inferior rank: proof is given that something 
cannot not be rather than that it is and why it is (hence the frequency in 
Euclid of negative, indirect and reductio arguments, which serve to keep 
geometry under the domination of the principle of identity and prevent it 
from becoming a geometry of sufficient reason). Nor do the essential 
aspects of the situation change with the shift to an algebraic and analytic 
point of view. Problems are now traced from algebraic equations and 
evaluated according to the possibility of carrying out a series of operations 
on the coefficients of the equation which provide the roots. However, just 
as in geometry we imagine the problem solved, so in algebra we operate 
upon unknown quantities as if they were known: this is how we pursue the 
hard work of reducing problems to the form of propositions capable of 
serving as cases of solution. We see this clearly in Descartes. The Cartesian 
method (the search for the clear and distinct) is a method for solving 
supposedly given problems, not a method of invention appropriate to the 
constitution of problems or the understanding of questions. The rules 
concerning problems and questions have only an expressly secondary and 
subordinate role. While combating the Aristotelian dialectic, Descartes has 
nevertheless a decisive point in common with it: the calculus of problems 
and questions remains inferred from a calculus of supposedlY:Brior 'simple 
propositions', once again the postulate of the dogmatic image. 1 
The variations succeed one another, but all within the same perspective. 
What do the empiricists do but invent a new form of possibility: 
probability or the physical possibility of finding a solution? And Kant 
himself? More than anyone, however, Kant wanted to apply the test of 
truth and falsehood to problems and questions: he even defined Critique in 
these terms. His profound theory of Ideas as problematising and 
problematic allowed him to rediscover the real source of the dialectic, and 
even to introduce problems into the geometrical exposition of Practical 
Reason. However, because the Kantian critique remains dominated by 
common sense or the dogmatic image, Kant still defines the truth of a 
problem in terms of the possibility of its finding a solution: this time it is a 
question of a transcendental form of possibility, in accordance with a 
legitimate use of the faculties as this is determined in each case by this or 
that organisation of common sense (to which the problem corresponds). 
We always find the two aspects of the illusion: the natural illusion which 
involves tracing problems from supposedly pre-existent propositions, 
logical opinions, geometrical theorems, algebraic equations, physical 
hypotheses or transcendental judgements; and the philosophical illusion 
which involves evaluating problems according to their 'solvability' - in 
other words, according to the extrinsic and variable form of the possibility 
of their finding a solution. It is then fatal that the ground should itself be 
no more than a simple external conditioning. A strange leap on the spot or 
vicious circle by which philosophy, claiming to extend the truth of 
solutions to problems themselves but remaining imprisoned by the 
dogmatic image, refers the truth of problems to the possibility of their 
solution. What is missed is the internal character of the problem as such, 
the imperative internal element which decides in the first place its truth or 
falsity and measures its intrinsic genetic power: that is, the very object of 
the dialectic or combinatory, the 'differential'. Problems are tests and 
selections. What is essential is that there occurs at the heart of problems a 
genesis of truth, a production of the true in thought. Problems are the 
differential elements in thought, the genetic elements in the true. We can 
therefore substitute for the simple point of view of conditioning a point of 
view of effective genesis. The true and the false do not suffer the 
indifference of the conditioned with regard to its condition, nor does the 
condition remain indifferent with regard to what it renders possible. The 
only way to take talk of 'true and false problems' seriously is in terms of a 
production of the true and the false by means of problems, and in 
proportion to their sense. To do so, it is sufficient to renounce copying 
problems from possible propositions, and defining the truth of problems in 
terms of the possibility of their finding a solution. On the contrary, 
'solvability' must depend upon an internal characteristic: it must be 
determined by the conditions of the problem, engendered in and by the 
problem along with the real solutions. Without this reversal, the famous 
Copernican Revolution amounts to nothing. Moreover, there is no 
revolution so long as we remain tied to Euclidean geometry: we must move 
to a geometry of sufficient reason, a Riemannian-type differential geometry 
which tends to give rise to discontinuity on the basis of continuity, or to 
ground solutions in the conditions of the problems. 
Not only is sense ideal, but problems are Ideas themselves. There is 
always a difference in kind between problems and propositions, an 
essential hiatus. A proposition by itself is particular, and represents a 
determinate response. A series of propositions can be distributed in such a 
way that the responses they represent constitute a general solution (as in 
the case of the values of an algebraic equation). But precisely, propositions, 
whether general or particular, find their sense only in the subjacent 
problem which inspires them. Only the Idea or problem is universal. It is 
not the solution which lends its generality to the problem, but the problem 
which lends its universality to the solution. It is never enough to solve a 
problem with the aid of a series of simple cases playing the role of analytic 
elements: the conditions under which the problem acquires a maximum of 
comprehension and extension must be determined, conditions capable of 
communicating to a given case of solution the ideal continuity appropriate 
to it. Even for a problem which has only a single case of solution, the 
proposition which designates this case would acquire its sense only within 
a complex capable of comprehending imaginary situations and integrating 
an ideal of continuity. To solve a problem is always to give rise to 
discontinuities on the basis of a continuity which functions as Idea. Once 
we 'forget' the problem, we have before us no more than an abstract 
general solution, and since there is no longer anything to support that 
generality, there is nothing to prevent the solution from fragmenting into 
the particular propositions which constitute its cases. Once separated from 
the problem, the propositions fall back into the status of particular 
propositions whose sole value is designatory. Consciousness then attempts 
to reconstitute the problem, but by way of the neutralised double of 
particular propositions (interrogations, doubts, likelihoods, hypotheses) 
and the empty form of general propositions (equations, theorems, theories 
... ).22 So begins the double confusion which assimilates problems to the 
series of hypotheticals and subordinates them to the series of categories. 
The nature of the universal is lost, but with it equally the nature of the 
singular, for the problem or the Idea is a concrete singularity no less than a 
true universal. Corresponding to the relations which constitute the 
universality of the problem is the distribution of singular points and 
distinctive points which determine the conditions of the problem. Proclus, 
even while maintaining the primacy of theorems over problems, rigorously 
defined the conditions of the problem in terms of an order of events and 
affections. 23 Leibniz, too, clearly stated what separates problems and 
propositions: all kinds of events, 'the how and the circumstances', from 
which propositions draw their sense. These events, however, are ideal 
events, more profound than and different in nature from the real events 
which they determine in the order of solutions. Underneath the large noisy 
events lie the small events of silence, just as underneath the natural light 
there are the little glimmers of the Idea. Singularity is beyond particular 
propositions no less than universality is beyond general propositions. 
Problematic Ideas are not simple essences, but multiplicities or complexes 
of relations and corresponding singularities. From the point of view of 
thought, the problematic distinction between the ordinary and the singular, 
and the nonsenses which result from a bad distribution among the 
conditions of the problem, are undoubtedly more important than the 
hypothetical or categorical duality of truth and falsehood along with the 
'errors' which only arise from their confusion in cases of solution. 
A problem does not exist, apart from its solutions. Far from 
disappearing in this overlay, however, it insists and persists in these 
solutions. A problem is determined at the same time as it is solved, but its 
determination is not the same as its solution: the two elements differ in 
kind, the determination amounting to the genesis of the concomitant 
solution. (In this manner the distribution of singularities belongs entirely to 
the conditions of the problem, while their specification already refers to 
solutions constructed under these conditions.) The problem is at once both 
transcendent and immanent in relation to its solutions. Transcendent, 
because it consists in a system of ideal liaisons or differential relations 
between genetic elements. Immanent, because these liaisons or relations are 
incarnated in the actual relations which do not resemble them and are 
defined by the field of solution. Nowhere better than in the admirable 
work of Albert Lautman has it been shown how problems are first Platonic 
Ideas or ideal liaisons between dialectical notions, relative to 'eventual 
situations of the existent'; but also how they are realised within the real 
relations constitutive of the desired solution within a mathematical, 
physical or other field. It is in this sense, according to Lautman, that 
science always participates in a dialectic which points beyond it - in other 
words, in a meta-mathematical and extra-propositional power - even 
though the liaisons of this dialectic are incarnated only in effective 
scientific propositions and theories. 24 Problems are always dialectical. This 
is why, whenever the dialectic 'forgets' its intimate relation with Ideas in 
the form of problems, whenever it is content to trace problems from 
propositions, it loses its true power and falls under the sway of the power 
of the negative, necessarily substituting for the ideal objecticity of the 
problematic a simple confrontation between opposing, contrary or 
contradictory, propositions. This long perversion begins with the dialectic 
itself, and attains its extreme form in Hegelianism. If it is true, however, 
that it is problems which are dialectical in principle, and their solutions 
which are scientific, we must distinguish completely between the following: 
the problem as transcendental instance; the symbolic field in which the 
immanent movement of the problem expresses its conditions; the field of 
scientific solvability in which the problem is incarnated, and in terms of 
which the preceding symbolism is defined. The relation between these 
elements will be specifiable by only a general theory of problems and the 
corresponding ideal synthesis. 
Problems and their symbolic fields stand in a relationship with signs. It is 
the signs which 'cause problems' and are developed in a symbolic field. The 
paradoxical functioning of the faculties - including, in the first instance, 
sensibility with respect to signs - thus refers to the Ideas which run 
throughout all the faculties and awaken them each in turn. Conversely, the 
Idea which itself offers sense to language refers each case to the paradoxi
cal functioning of the faculty. The exploration of Ideas and the elevation of 
each faculty to its transcendent exercise amounts to the same thing. These 
are two aspects of an essential apprenticeship or process of learning. For, 
on the one hand, an apprentice is someone who constitutes and occupies 
practical or speculative problems as such. Learning is the appropriate name 
for the subjective acts carried out when one is confronted with the objectic
ity of a problem (Idea), whereas knowledge designates only the generality 
of concepts or the calm possession of a rule enabling solutions. A well
known test in psychology involves a monkey who is supposed to find food 
in boxes of one particular colour amidst others of various colours: there 
comes a paradoxical period during which the number of 'errors' diminishes 
even though the monkey does not yet possess the 'knowledge' or 'truth' of 
a solution in each case: propitious moment in which the philosopher-mon
key opens up to truth, himself producing the true, but only to the extent 
that he begins to penetrate the coloured thickness of a problem. We see 
here how the discontinuity among answers is engendered on the basis of 
the continuity of an ideal apprenticeship; how truth and falsity are distrib
uted according to what one understands of a problem; and how the final 
truth, when it is obtained, emerges as though it were the limit of a problem 
completely determined and entirely understood, or the product of those ge
netic series which constitute the sense, or the outcome of a genesis which 
does not take place only in the head of a monkey . To learn is to enter into 
the universal of the relations which constitute the Idea, and into their cor
responding singularities. The idea of the sea, for example, as Leibniz 
showed, is a system of liaisons or differential relations between particulars 
and singularities corresponding to the degrees of variation among these re
lations - the totality of the system being incarnated in the real movement 
of the waves. To learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our 
bodies with the singular points of the objective Idea in order to form a 
problematic field. This conjugation determines for us a threshold of con
sciousness at which our real acts are adjusted to our perceptions of the real 
relations, thereby providing a solution to the problem. Moreover, problem
atic Ideas are precisely the ultimate elements of nature and the subliminal 
objects of little perceptions. As a result, 'learning' always takes place in and 
through the unconscious, thereby establishing the bond of a profound com
plicity between nature and mind. 
The apprentice, on the other hand, raises each faculty to the level of its 
transcendent exercise. With regard to sensibility, he attempts to give birth 
to that second power which grasps that which can only be sensed. This is 
the education of the senses. From one faculty to another is communicated a 
violence which nevertheless always understands the Other through the 
perfection of each. On the basis of which signs within sensibility, by which 
treasures of the memory, under torsions determined by the singularities of 
which Idea will thought be aroused? We never know in advance how 
someone will learn: by means of what loves someone becomes good at 
Latin, what encounters make them a philosopher, or in what dictionaries 
they learn to think. The limits of the faculties are encased one in the other 
in the broken shape of that which bears and transmits difference. There is 
no more a method for learning than there is a method for finding treasures, 
but a violent training, a culture or paidei"a which affects the entire 
individual (an albino in whom emerges the act of sensing in sensibility, an 
aphasic in whom emerges the act of speech in language, an acephalous 
being in whom emerges the act of thinking in thought). Method is the 
means of that knowledge which regulates the collaboration of all the 
faculties. It is therefore the manifestation of a common sense or the 
realisation of a Cogitatio natura, and presupposes a good will as though 
this were a 'premeditated decision' of the thinker. Culture, however, is an 
involuntary adventure, the movement of learning which links a sensibility, 
a memory and then a thought, with all the cruelties and violence necessary, 
as Nietzsche said, precisely in order to 'train a "nation of thinkers" , or to 
'provide a training for the mind'. 
Of course, the importance and dignity of learning are often recognised. 
However, this takes the form of a homage to the empirical conditions of 
knowledge: a nobility is discovered in this preparatory movement which 
must nevertheless disappear in the result. Moreover, even if we insist upon 
the specificity of learning and upon the time involved in apprenticeship, 
this is in order to appease the scruples of a psychological conscience which 
certainly does not allow itself to dispute the innate right of knowledge to 
represent the entire transcendental realm. Learning is only the intermediary 
between non-knowledge and knowledge, the living passage from one to the 
other. We may well say that learning is, after all, an infinite task: it is none 
the less cast with the circumstances and the acquisition of knowledge, 
outside the supposedly simple essence of knowledge in the form of an 
innate or a priori element, or even a regulative Idea. Finally, apprenticeship 
falls rather on the side of the rat in the maze, while the philosopher outside 
the cave carries off only the result - knowledge - in order to discover its 
transcendental principles. Even in Hegel, the extraordinary apprenticeship 
which we find in the Phenomenology remains subordinated, with regard to 
its result no less than its principle, to the ideal of knowledge in the form of 
absolute knowledge. It is true that, here again, Plato is the exception. For 
him, learning is truly the transcendental movement of the soul, irreducible 
as much to knowledge as to non-knowledge. It is from 'learning', not from 
knowledge, that the transcendental conditions of thought must be drawn. 
That is why Plato determines the conditions in the form of reminiscence, 
not innateness. In this manner, time is introduced into thought, - not in the 
form of the empirical time of the thinker subject to factual conditions, and 
for whom it takes time to think, but in the form of an in-principle 
condition or time of pure thought (time takes thought). Reminiscence then 
finds its proper object, its memorandum, in the specific material of 
apprenticeship - in other words, in questions and problems as such, in the 
urgency of problems independently of their solutions, in the realm of the 
Idea. Why should it be that so many fundamental principles concerning 
what it means to think are compromised by reminiscence itself? For as we 
have seen, Platonic time introduces difference, apprenticeship and 
heterogeneity into thought only in order to subject them again to the 
mythical form of resemblance and identity, and therefore to the image of 
thought itself. As a result, the whole Platonic theory of apprenticeship 
functions as a repentance, crushed by the emerging dogmatic image yet 
bringing forth a groundlessness that it remains incapable of exploring. A 
new Meno would say: it is knowledge that is nothing more than an 
empirical figure, a simple result which continually falls back into 
experience; whereas learning is the true transcendental structure which 
unites difference to difference, dissimilarity to dissimilarity, without 
mediating between them; and introduces time into thought - not in the 
form of a mythical past or former present, but in the pure form of an 
empty time in general. We always rediscover the necessity of reversing the 
supposed relations or divisions between the empirical and the 
transcendental. Moreover, we must regard the postulate of knowledge as 
the eighth postulate of the dogmatic image, one which incorporates and 
recapitulates all the others in a supposedly simple result. 
We have listed eight postulates, each in two forms: (1) the postulate of 
the principle, or the Cogitatio natura universalis (good will of the thinker 
and good nature of thought); (2) the postulate of the ideal, or common 
sense (common sense as the concordia facultatum and good sense as the 
distribution which guarantees this concord); (3) the postulate of the model, 
or of recognition (recognition inviting all the faculties to exercise 
themselves upon an object supposedly the same, and the consequent 
possibility of error in the distribution when one faculty confuses one of its 
objects with a different object of another faculty); (4) the postulate of the 
element, or of representation (when difference is subordinated to the 
complementary dimensions of the Same and the Similar, the Analogous 
and the Opposed); (5) the postulate of the negative, or of error (in which 
error expresses everything which can go wrong in thought, but only as the 
product of external mechanisms); (6) the postulate of logical function, or 
the proposition (designation is taken to be the locus of truth, sense being 
no more than the neutralised double or the infinite doubling of the 
proposition); (7) the postulate of modality, or solutions (problems being 
materially traced from propositions or, indeed, formally defined by the 
possibility of their being solved); (8) the postulate of the end, or result, the 
postulate of knowledge (the subordination of learning to knowledge, and 
of culture to method). Each postulate has two forms, because they are both 
natural and philosophical, appearing once in the arbitrariness of examples, 
once in the presuppositions of the essence. The postulates need not be 
spoken: they function all the more effectively in silence, in this 
presupposition with regard to the essence as well as in the choice of 
examples. Together they form the dogmatic image of thought. They crush 
thought under an image which is that of the Same and the Similar in 
representation, but profoundly betrays what it means to think and alienates 
the 
two powers of difference and repetition, of philosophical 
commencement and recommencement. The thought which is born in 
thought, the act of thinking which is neither given by innateness nor 
presupposed by reminiscence but engendered in its genitality, is a thought 
without image. But what is such a thought, and how does it operate in the 
world?