Deleuze, Leibniz, Proust and Beckett : thinking in literature

The problem of the image of thought occurs at important moments within Deleuze’s works, yet it is not always at the forefront of his ideas. In Negotiations, Deleuze indicates that Difference and Repetition ‘is really about the nature of the postulates of the image of thought’, and that he ‘comes back to it in Proust and Signs, because Proust confronts the Greek image with all the power of signs’. The chronology is somewhat distorted in these comments: the concept, in fact, is first mentioned in Nietzsche et la Philosophie (1962), then again in the shorter first edition of Proust and Signs, Proust et les Signes (1964), before appearing in Différence et Répétition (1968). Yet the concept is more fully developed in Difference and Repetition and Proust and Signs, which both have chapters entitled ‘The Image of Thought’