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Chapter 6 charts Didi-Huberman’s final update in his ongoing critique of representation that commenced in his earliest writings. This chapter contends that Didi-Huberman advances a slippage in the subject–object relationship, with the image being understood as capable of engineering its own forms of knowledge. This chapter demonstrates that Didi-Huberman’s work must be situated in a long philosophical arc from Descartes through Foucault and Deleuze that seeks to decouple the subject from thought. Didi-Huberman extends Deleuze’s critique of the philosophical assumptions of what thinking is, the so-called ‘image of thought’ outlined in Difference and Repetition. This completes Didi-Huberman’s critique of mimetic representation as his commitment to immanence becomes explicit. Didi-Huberman reactivates some of the great avant-garde montage projects of the early twentieth century to explore a mode of representation capable of generating its own theoretical and intellectual undertaking.

Prior to Foucault’s articulation of anti-fascism as the Deleuzo-Guattarian ethical project, Deleuze described his work as a contestation of the “dogmatic” or “moral” image of thought. For this contestation, Deleuze turned in Difference and Repetition to a Kantian notion of critique as the examination of the limits and powers of the faculties. Deleuze’s theory of faculties is a theory of how the subject is produced as an identity through active syntheses that are themselves the produce of passive syntheses. The critical analysis Deleuze undertakes in Difference and Repetition builds on the analysis of habit formation in the process of subjectivation insofar as it offers a method of analysis that is itself disruptive of habits and identities. Deleuze’s “immanent critique” describes in facultative passive synthesis not only the genesis of experience from sensibility, but the breakdown of experience in the violence of encounter. Critique reveals that the movement from the empirical to the transcendental or “heautonomous” forms of the faculties, which happens via an internalization of the violence of encounters that rupture ordinary experience, can be cultivated toward the ends of moving beyond the constraints of rule-governed, limited ways of thinking through the practice of critique itself.

The introduction defines the “image of thought” as a presupposition in philosophy—the initial image occurring before thought takes form. The image poses a fundamental problem in philosophy, as before the very act of thinking itself there precedes some idea of how that thought will generate itself. This circularity is a fundamental issue that has yet to be addressed in modern philosophy. Deleuze identifies this circularity as “Repetition In-Itself,” referring to the repetition of predetermined images—which are thoughts in and of themselves. Repetitions make it difficult to see the beginning of thought—the very foundations of philosophy—and because of this Deleuze has to conclude that “there is no true beginning in philosophy, or rather that the true philosophical beginning, Difference, is in-itself already Repetition”.

This chapter discusses the “image of thought” in modern cinema, especially what Deleuze calls “the cinema of the brain.” Within the “machine” of cinema is a means of transcending the mechanisms of perception, opinion (common ideas, or views), and cliché in order to invent newer and finer articulations of the linkages between the human and the world (linkages that Deleuze would later call the creation “percepts and affects”). Modern cinema does this precisely by making use of stock conventions and habitual determinations“to pass through the net of determinations that have spread out” into a world (determinations of perception, opinion, character, etc.); however, it fashions its own conventions, which become doxa (opinion) as well—and there is always a danger that these forms will become too rigid and dominant.

While commentators regularly underappreciate or outright dismiss it, the doctrine of faculties in Difference and Repetition is indispensable to Deleuze’s philosophy of difference because, according to Deleuze, the philosopher must grasp difference through the faculties. On the one hand, Deleuze privileges sensibility as the first faculty to grasp difference; the remaining faculties (imagination, memory, thinking) grasp difference only after and thanks to sensibility. On the other hand, sensibility is essentially unreliable because it also tends to cancel or nullify (annuler) the difference it grasps. Because philosophy doesn’t rigorously begin until we think difference, sensibility jeopardises philosophy as a whole before it ever begins. I call the sensible a hitch because, accordingly, it both anchors philosophy and hobbles philosophy, which leads Deleuze to treat sensibility with ambivalence from the very moment he begins ‘to do’ it.

This chapter discusses the concept of the rhizome as set forth by Deleuze and Guattari. The rhizome is essentially another metaphor of the “image of thought”—it is similar to the Proustian spider, in that the rhizome is partly animal and partly herbal. What is subtracted from the totality is a vertical dimension that allows its form to be grasped from another perspective that is posed as its higher unity. Again, it is a flat surface composed horizontally that remains perfectly abstract in that it is drawn in relation to a plane of immanence that, in turn, it does not seek to represent as an image of the world. It is purely immanent to the plane on which it appears as a plateau or partial region of the plane, like the manner in which weeds appear like patchwork on a meadow.

By what right do we speak of ‘Deleuzian philosophy’? If, encountering his monographs on other thinkers and artists we cannot help the sense that we are privy there to elements of Deleuze’s own philosophy, this is because ‘reading’ is Deleuze’s veritable philosophical method. Taking its cue from Badiou, this chapter will analyse Deleuze’s frequent use of ‘free indirect discourse’, a mode of speech as it were ‘in between’ the direct and indirect discourses, very seldom found in philosophical writing. Far more prevalent in literature, this discourse has traditionally been employed in order to write as if from inside the minds of the characters; in much the same way, through free indirect discourse Deleuze attains the underlying question compelling an author to think; and it is in the critique of this question that Deleuze sets forth his own philosophy.

The chapter draws upon schizoanalytic cartography to concentrate on the perception which occurs not on the level at which actions are decided but on the level at which the very capacity for action forms. If representation is a means to an end (tracing), cartography is a means to a means (intervention). The goal-oriented human action cannot be used as the design criterion, because the freedom of action is never a de facto established condition; it is always virtuality.