In proposing to think of the table of categories as a table of montage, Deleuze demonstrates the degree to which the invention of cinema, as an industrial technology and as a new form of art, transforms the problem of thought for philosophy. The table of montage makes a completely new image of the table of categories possible, and this surprising alignment transforms our view of both thought and cinema.
It may seem risky to compare the technique of cinematic montage to the activity of thought itself. But in proposing this equivalence between the two tables, Deleuze is not simply indulging in a poetic distraction, engendering a hybrid monster or chimera, imitating the surrealist grafting of the sewing machine of the mind to the dissection table of the editing room. In reality, this operation transforms the status of the image, including the verbal and poetic image, because it overturns the habitual boundaries between thought and creation. This explains the role that cinema assumes as a technique for Deleuze: the points of view of the camera, and especially the montage of shots – their sometimes homogeneous, sometimes heterogeneous connections, as in false continuity editing – indicate the decisive role of framing, cutting and montage in achieving the linking of shots that compose the film.
In proposing to think of the table of categories as a table of montage, Deleuze is not trying to weaken thought by reducing it to a technological scheme, any more than he is trying to conjure away the effective, technical constraints of montage by linking them, by analogy, to the virtual cut of thought. The proposition here is much more radical: thought proceeds by means of cutting and collage, and cinema makes possible a new logical figure of thought, which corresponds to a new philosophy of the image.
In philosophy, the table of categories classically answers to the question of how thought functions, what operations it requires, and what logical structure it brings into play. Deleuze names this problem – how to think thought, how to describe its inventiveness? – ‘the image of thought’ in the first phase of his work. From the first appearance of this expression in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962) and in Difference and Repetition (1968), the term ‘image’ is used in a relatively pejorative sense. Because it establishes a suspect reflexivity or reflection, the image, in providing a representation to thought, deforms thought and indicates the faulty and distorting manner in which thought reflects upon its own activity. The ‘image of thought’, in the works that lead to the definition of transcendental empiricism at the time of Difference and Repetition, always signals the way thought implicitly represents its own activity. The image and representative thought are thereby in solidarity.
This is why Deleuze concluded the first version of Proust and Signs (1964) with a chapter entitled ‘The Image of Thought’, revealing the degree to which philosophy needs art and literature. Proust introduced an image of thought that rivals that presented by philosophy, proposing that thought erupts involuntarily in response to the violent appearance of the sign. ‘Thought is nothing without something that forces and does violence to it’ (PS 95).
Proust transforms the very way we represent thought to ourselves: thought is no longer docile, humble and submissive, and is not deployed in the diligent or complacent mode of the student endowed with good will, careful when necessary to make use of a method to arrive at the truth. Thought is rather contrary and turbulent and responds abruptly to the impulse of the sign, harnessing all of its resources, despite its urgency and lack of preparation, in an attempt to respond to an intrusive event that takes us by surprise. The act of thinking seems neither natural nor serene, but rather proceeds in relation to a shock, a secret torsion, or a violent experience: we think due to the harrowing contingency of an experience that resists our capacity to know. It is in this sense that thinking may be considered creation.
Proust makes it possible for us to understand the genesis of thought because he is a novelist, and so brings precise, microscopic attention to the sensorial modes of creation. Logical thought is preoccupied more with the validity of its judgement than with the contingent circumstances of its conception. Emphasising the a priori less, the novelist describes the adventures of thought and opposes the image of thought proposed by rationalist philosophy. ‘The act of thinking does not proceed from a simple natural possibility; on the contrary, it is the only true creation’ (PS 97).
This new image of thought, transmitted by art, transforms the givens of the problem. Deleuze no longer proposes to obtain a thought without images, or to purge thought of its tendency to imagine thought: thought makes an image of itself, in a mode that is much more troubling and decisive.
THE TABLE OF CATEGORIES
Of what does a table of categories consist? Since Kant, the logical grid of categories structures our possible judgements and distributes our concepts according to closed, completed and static determinations. These unified, objective connections allow us to classify our concepts and organise our experiences by referring them to the constituting activity of the subject. The form of thought is patterned on the nature of the thinking subject, defined in advance. This is why Deleuze turns out to be hesitant toward categories and proposes, in Difference and Repetition, that it would be better to replace them with empirical and nomad notions. However, once the status of thought has been transformed, a new conception of categories becomes possible. It is in this second sense that the table of categories becomes a table of montage.
In effect, a table must not be understood as something static, a surface upon which the operations of thought are distributed, an inert support for logical interventions, the erection of a plane for the attribution of judgements and distributing different, possible mental activities among the faculties in relation to their proper use. It must be understood in terms of its dynamic operativity, not as an outline of a frozen architecture, but rather as a plane of action, a plane of montage, a list of pragmatic instructions, or as an ephemeral and transitory succession of mental acts staging a guerrilla operation within thought.
The table of categories thus operates in the two modes that characterise a table of cinematographic montage: cutting and connecting. In cutting between shots, it introduces a supplementary movement between points of view, and reintroduces continuity in proposing an inventive assembling of shots. These two activities of cutting and connecting are strictly complementary. It is impossible to cut without connecting, and even more impossible to connect without cutting: cutting is the decisive act of montage. Cutting selects and identifies the unities that it reclassifies according to the specific ordering of the montage. In combining shots in a series, it aligns them in a succession that is truly creative, which in turn transforms each shot that has been thereby combined.
In his first article on Bergson, in 1956, Deleuze defined thought in the following way: ‘A great philosopher creates new concepts: these concepts simultaneously surpass the dualities of ordinary thought and give things a new truth, a new distribution, [an extraordinary] way of dividing up the world’ (DI 22, with modification).
Thinking proceeds through cutting or division (découpage), and when it is creative, the lines of articulation of these ‘extraordinary’ divisions no longer pass through the ordinary coordinates of everyday thought. A creator invents new categories, new ways of laying out lines of thought, and in so doing, changes the world. It is the categories themselves that assure the creativity of thought, plotting new pathways of circulation for concepts. Thinking thus consists in opening new pathways for thought, which in turn transform both the tissue of the world and our neural pathways. In making new cuts in the tissue of reality, new properties of reality are set down that, in turn, affect us.
With this new definition of philosophical thought as creation, we obtain an equally new definition of the image. Now, in order to transform our image of thought, Deleuze needs cinema just as he previously relied upon Proust. But, at the same time, the definition of the image has changed: it is no longer the passive and appropriate (convenu) reflection of a representation that thought creates of its own power, but the acts of cutting, framing and montage by which thought insinuates itself in matter. The image is no longer a representation of consciousness, but, in a manner that is much more decisive and dangerous, is the movement of matter. It is in this third sense that the table of categories becomes a table of montage. Thought is produced by a framing of shots and by montage, that is, by the reassembling of framings (ré-enchaînement de cadrages).
MOVEMENT-IMAGE
By defining thought as an inventive means of carving out (découper) our relation to reality, Deleuze is in actuality proposing a new philosophy of the image. This constitutes the programme of the two volumes on cinema, The Movement-Image (1983) and The Time-Image (1985): the transformation of our conception of thought and of our conventional notion of cinema, and the operation of these two transformations in relation to each other.
The image is no longer an exclusively mental experience, a psychic phenomenon, or a point of view (visée) of consciousness, instead becoming a relation of forces, an image in itself, a movement-image, as Bergson sought in Matter and Memory. The table of categories no longer appears as a table of montage only because the categories divide and cut (sectionnent and découpent) reality differently; more profoundly, it is necessary to recognise that the categories, in their operative mode, are the conditions of framing and cutting that allow thought to be creative. When we think, we actually cut and reframe relations in reality that are effectively new, except when we use the clichés of conventional cuts. Thought thus functions as a table of montage, but only when we think in new terms. If not, thought is content to use the framing provided by tradition. Deleuze develops this new conception thanks to the movement-image: with the movement-image, we obtain a much more intense definition of the subject as an image, and of thought as framing and cinematographic montage. The cinema as an experience of thought radically transforms philosophy.
This is why Deleuze determined that it was necessary to set Bergson’s Matter and Memory in relation to the invention of cinema, the industrial creation that has transformed our modern experience of art. Cinema implies a definition of the image in movement, each framing effectuating a mobile cut such that we no longer oppose the movement of bodies to the image in consciousness. The image effectively appears as a change, a transformation of constituent parts and the affection of the whole. For his part, Bergson proposes a definition of the subjective image as a cut, an interval between other images or a framing. Thus, we can understand the very creation of subjective thought as an act of subtractive cutting, as an act that emerges in the interval between other images by proposing its singular framing of reality.
In these terms, the consideration of the table of categories as a table of montage assumes a new and fourth sense. When we think, we operate a cut that causes us to emerge as a subject, in the operations of cutting and framing that characterises the image. Our subjective perception inserts itself into the flow of other images. This is why Deleuze relies upon Bergson, and why he had to encounter cinema as a philosophical problem.
In Matter and Memory, Bergson starts from the infinite variation of matter in the sense of the actions and reactions of material images in movement. We must first situate the image on this plane of forces of matter, wherein no centre yet puts forth a preferential point of view. This acentred definition of images in movement explains the complex notion of the ‘plane of immanence’ in Deleuze’s thought: the set of all images is determined on this plane, which he calls the plane of immanence because it is composed of the flux and reflux of material forces, without being traversed by any transcendent point (pic). On this plane, the actions and reactions of material images link up in a state that is too animated to allow us to distinguish bodies, unities or sets. The image is absolute movement, a field of forces, and strictly speaking, nothing exists other than this immanent field of forces. Matter is not hidden behind the image and the image does not reflect matter for a consciousness: the image is directly temporal fabric, energetic matter and blocks of space-time.
Movement-images must initially be defined this way, on the plane of immanence, in terms of the universal reactivity of images, matter in movement, and actions and reactions that link up and react to each other instantaneously, without any privileged point of view allowing for the definition of new unities or subjective framings.
FROM THE MOVEMENT-IMAGE TO SUBJECTIVE OPENING
In order for a subject to emerge on the acentred plane of images, a framing is sufficient, one that introduces a new system and permits other images to vary mainly as a function of one image, which has contact with them on one of its surfaces and reacts to them on another of its surfaces. This is how subjective images are created – as provisional centres and especially as zones of indetermination that introduce into the world of movement-images a gap or an interval between a movement received (perception) and a movement executed (action). These subject-images are thus ‘separated’ (écartelées) images that reflect the actions that interest them in the form of perception, and respond in the form of action. Between the sensory surface of perception and the motor reaction, the sensitive surface of affection is carved out. All of these secondary images, whether they are perceptive, mechanical or living, are defined by this simple gap, this elongation, the insertion of a temporal slackening or interval that separates the actions and reactions of matter. The subject is nothing other than this gap, and this gap consists in a cinematographic framing. In this case, all images are referred to one image; in other words, they are framed. When we think, when we produce ourselves as subjectivity, we act like cinematographic images: we frame other images.
We needed cinema to be in a position to understand what anthropological analysis or even the phenomenology of human perception were incapable of explaining to us, because their starting point is not the acentred plane of matter. Perception does not consist of an image in which matter is reflected for an attentive consciousness; an image is not a representation of matter, but is rather matter itself, minus all that does not interest us. Photography is already in things. Deleuze borrows this startling definition from Bergson: perception is equal to matter itself, but neglects in matter all that does not interest our action, all that we come across but which we do not pay attention to. The living thing and the perceiving subjective image are nothing more than the slackening between action and reaction, owing to which certain movements are reflected as perceptions experienced, while the movement received is refracted by this sensitive prism to become a motor response. To perceive is to act or trace a fluctuating, murky zone of possible action within the totality of matter. The objects that our perception cuts out, the surfaces that we select, thereby reflect our capacity to take hold (notre capacité de prise) of the world.
For Deleuze, as for Bergson, perception draws its myopic diagonal, its zone of possible action, across matter. In these conditions, we see that Deleuze gives perception a cinematographic twist: to perceive is to frame and to cut between images. Perception consists of this mobile and living cut, ‘an operation which consists exactly of a framing’ (C1 62, with modification). On the one hand, perception extends its sensory, subtractive and myopic diagonal across matter, while on the other, its selection corresponds exactly to the gap that its sensory-motor arc introduces within matter. This is how subjects are produced, through framing and cutting.
We must draw the consequences of this extraordinary vision very carefully. The perceiving image corresponds to a centre of indetermination. Subjects are thus constituted on the immanent plane of matter by means of a simple distension (étirement) that expands the interval between images and allows the sensitive range (éventail) of a sensory-motor arc to be inserted between action and reaction. In these terms, all perception is characterised by a vital framing and cutting, and the cinematographic framing through which we enact our categorical cutting also corresponds to this sensory-motor power, whose vital affect fluctuates as a function of encounters, states and hours. Our thought responds to the sensory-motor mode by which we insert ourselves among the other images.
Here, Deleuze rejoins Spinoza: our thought corresponds to the cutting our body performs among images. In this way, our table of categories responds to the framing and mobile insertion of our body. The philosophical subject and the cinematographic image unfold their sensory range of perception and action, of perception-image and action-image. The sensory interval of affection, by which the subject experiences the movement traversing it, is carved out between perception and action. With the affection-image, the movement experienced, intercepted and extended between perception-image and action-image shifts from the motor to the perceptual: movement stops performing a translation to instead express a transformation, becoming a quality. During this shift from the perception-image to action-image, movement becomes absorbed in affection. All of the categories Deleuze uses to elaborate the relation between Bergson and cinema, all of the sensory categories that constitute the semiotics of cinema, are contained in this formulation.
With the three determinations of perception-image, action-image and affection-image, Deleuze explains how one cinematographic image, an immanent singularity, ‘a life’ – which is nothing other than this minute subjective interval – is carved out, expands (gonflent) and unfolds in the acentred plane of immanence. With this, we bear witness to the cinematographic genesis of the subject. This subject, a fold between images, befits a human or living image as much as an artificial one, a percept of a camera. The operations that select and frame at the level of living matter perform an active and subtractive collecting (recueil), not always in the same way, but with the same capacity for framing. The artificial perceptions of our instruments of capture frame, like the biological eye situated at the level of matter itself (monté à même la matière). Deleuze also follows the lessons of Bergson and Spinoza in this instance. Consciousness is modal. There is no reason to privilege the human eye as if it were a spiritual seed piercing matter with its psychic ray: the eye is composed of the same substance as the rest of the universe, and the human, a material mode among others, is distinguished neither by its strangeness, its extra-material essence, nor by its divine purity.
In this universe, there is no predominance of spirit over matter, of man over animal, or of the living over the inert. Subjective images are technological, biological or human, and do not include any differences of essence, only differences of modes, bodies or organisations of parts. But whether we are dealing with a technological image or a living image, the eye of the camera or that of the living human operating the cut unfolds, in a sensorial manner, a sensitive arc among the images that constitute the rest of the world. In all of these cases, the difference between subjective images and the non-sensory images has to do with framing: in the case of the subjective image, all of the other images are referred to this centre of reference; in the case of inert matter, this framing does not take place because no centre is proposed as an instance of cutting and selection. The only real difference between images hinges upon the operation of framing by which certain images are selected amidst other images by subtractive perception. The subject is indeed a centre of reference, but this centre is a centre of indetermination, one that is provisional and fluctuating and in no way a transcendent nucleus.
Thus the table of categories turns out to be a table of montage, because thought enacts its corporeal situation. This allows us to define subjectivity in a perfectly immanent way. Philosophy derived this definition, one that radically transforms thought, from cinema.
CINEMATOGRAPHIC MONTAGE
Only cinema could give this vision to philosophy. The experience of cinema was necessary to open access to the acentred production of subjectivity because, when we consider the problem of the image on the scale of the human, we begin with perception rather than deducing it. Our thought, embedded in our bodies, gives us the immediate security of the human experience, and we thereby assume an already-constituted subjectivity as our point of departure. Cinema, the last born of the arts, in its machinic actuality – with its technological prowess but also its lowly status as an industrial curiosity or side-show attraction – was not directly in commerce with the great Ideas of culture. Cinema offered its animated shadows, its slapstick, and its naïve plots with a perceptual signaletics still unequalled in the art world. It allowed us to feel a technical convulsive jolt and a perceptive shimmering (une lueur perceptive) vibrating in foreign matter. Cinema presents a theatre of shadows on the material plane of the screen, a shimmering that cannot be absorbed in the consciousness of the cameraman or of the spectator because it is spread out indiscriminately on the screen, bathing faces in its watery light.
Given its status as a minor art and its burlesque productions, cinema introduced the following fact into the consciousness of the twentieth century: between the perception of consciousness and the reality of matter, many intermediary stages become illuminated, many stages of perception develop and become sensible. The perception of the camera gives us access to such stages, as do the percepts of videos, digital pulses, acoustic echoes, telescopic waves, or any other aspirator of visibilities that sweeps through our universe and produces images that are completely perceptual, deprived of bodies. Cinema, as an artistic technique, furnishes thought with a mode of perception that is non-human but nevertheless perfectly operative, and which is also capable of provoking our deepest emotional response. Cinema projects us onto the plane of matter and allows us to deduce the existence of images that are, if not acentred, at least weakly centred or clearly extra-human: water dripping from our hands, clouds racing across the sky, a beauty mark. In sum, cinema allows us to experiment in the acentred plane of immanence, no longer restricting perception to human intelligence or to animal life separated from matter. Thanks to the experience of machinic framing and of technological perception, cinema put its own capacity for conceptual invention, through framing and montage, at the disposition of philosophical thought. Just as in 1964 Deleuze needed Proust to elucidate the affects of thought, in 1983 he called upon cinema to transform philosophy. The sensorial power of the novelist made possible a more accurate grasp of the affects associated with thought and of the nature of its operation. The perception of cinema makes thought capable of discovering its own responsibility to invent and its framing of the forces of matter. Cinematographic montage consists of nothing else.
What is cinematographic montage if not the composition of a plurality of framings? Of what do all of our perceptions consist? With framing, a shot (plan) – cinematographic, in this case – is constituted and is restricted by cutting, and the montage consists of the inventive linking of a succession of shots, causing the sequences and shots to vary.
Thus, the shot causes movement to intervene in two aspects: as movement in the ordinary sense, that is, as sensory-motor translation and displacement in space, the action of characters and the movement of the camera. But movement is also introduced much more decisively in another way, one that concerns montage and no longer framing. Each shot affects the totality of the film; each framing makes the whole vary in a state of becoming. Movement does not concern only the relation between parts in space; it also affects the change of a whole that is transformed in duration: it is not only displacement, but becoming. Thus, the displacement of forces gives way to the affect of the image, effecting the transition from the movement-image to the time-image.
This duality of movement – motor displacement, sensory affection – allows us to comprehend the duality between movement-image and time-image, a duality that in reality concerns all movement since movement involves not only the translation of an object in inert space, but also temporal affection, that is, the vibration of qualities in a state of becoming in a whole that is transformed. In reality, any perception already combines these two aspects. A perception – all perceptions – for example, that of your eyes in the process of reading this sentence, consists of a sensorial movement, the displacement of the retina that follows the line on the paper. Any perception includes its individual movement, but something else as well: every perception consists in an individuation of movement.
Perception does not necessarily engage the individual movement of a body, taken between the sensorial and the motor, an individuated unity of matter that bears the sensitive plate (la plaque sensible) of a perceptive face. It is necessary to go further and say that all movement already individuates a perception, whether or not there is a body designated to serve as the vector of it. Cinema has shown us that this body can be reduced to a minimum, to the apparatus of an eye, and even, at the limit, to movement itself, which we should describe less as ‘individual’ (the movement of a defined body) than as ‘individuated’, or the beginning of an individuation. The frame in itself is such a movement, always implying the affective assumption of a relation with duration, with the transformation or affect of the whole.
The double power of movement is expressed with framing and montage: the displacement of parts in a set and the affect of the whole. Movements – the beginnings of individuations of framings – imply this vibration, this initiation of individuation that we should understand as much on the scale of the cinematographic shot as on the scale of perceptual affect by which we humans explore reality. The stylistic power of cinema, the technological affect of a surveillance camera, or the vision of an animal’s eye: all raise the same problem. The affective expression of framing is not an anthropomorphic theory that is exclusive and applicable only to humans or to living beings to the exclusion of the technological and the material. In reality, it becomes applicable as soon as a framing is initiated, as soon as an image is enlarged on a screen. A sensory-motor arc draws a curve, one that individuates and thus reflects its sensitive surface between the perceived movement and the executed movement: the temporal affect of its force as an image.
THE ACTUALITY OF MOVEMENT, THE POWER OF TIME
This is how we should understand the shift from The Movement-Image to The Time-Image. Everything is given with one framed image, which unfolds starting with the plane of acentred images. Such subjective images – cinematographic or living – require only a gap, a fan tapering to a point (cet éventail en pointe) that separates actions and reactions, and which prevents them from vanishing instantly, one inside the other. Instead of actions immediately becoming dissipated in reactions, an action that has been slowed down by the vibrating interval of a sensibility is reflected in a movement experienced, and reverberates in perception. Between the sensitive surface of a movement transmitted perceptively and the motor reaction of a corporeal response, the sensory surface of affection develops. This is the critical apparatus of signs, the typology of categories that Deleuze proposes to apply to cinema.
The physics of movement serves as the frame for the inventive cutting of these categories of cinema, which Deleuze considers to be neither closed nor finished, but which he offers as a toolbox to accompany cinematic pleasure and to enhance our perception. This typology of images, whose elaboration begins with an inventive reading of Bergson, enchants the cinephile: the movement-image, unfolding its range of perception-image, action-image and affection-image, the time-image hollowing out and fracturing the movement-image at its core. This material typology of the image simultaneously provides a theory of the constitution of the subject and a material semiotics of cinema, as well as making its critical resources accessible for filmic analysis.
The divisions of filmic analysis thus correspond to a philosophy of invention and of the creation of thought, concerning the encounter between thought, movement and time. The relation between movement and time is the following: as long as you are preoccupied with the sensory-motor, or as long as cinema is preoccupied with action, individual perception, the affection of characters, and characters and heroes, then the movement-image has individuation as its aim and is interested in narration and in a plot that deploys characters and actualises them in reality. By contrast, when the affection-image makes its power felt and when relations of forces no longer concern a body as a sensory-motor individual, instead actualising their own power – or, to adopt the categories that Deleuze used in 1980, in collaboration with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, at the point where a haecceity (a body seized as a relation of forces) experiences its latitude (that is, when a force, instead of consisting simply in the actualisation of a movement, experiences its own variation of power) – we shift from the movement-image to the time-image. The screenplay no longer consists of the individuation of a story, placing the hero in a defined situation that he transforms, rather, as in the films of Nicholas Ray, a power dissolves the characters and the action, and the character, enchanted or surprised, becomes the vector of a sensation and no longer serves as the instrument of the transformation of reality. In this way, the movement-image cedes to the time-image.
This shift is of concern not only to the becoming of cinema, defining the succession from the movement-image of pre-war cinema to the neorealist time-image usually associated with post-war cinema. It concerns the vibration between movement and time, which does not orchestrate the succession of two epochs or provide a reason for a stylistic mutation. In reality, the time-image exists from the first indication of movement because it emerges at the point where the sensory-motor arc ruptures. It affects the cinematographic image from the beginnings of cinema. But it only begins to prevail with the desolate framings and the wanderings of characters in the any-space-whatevers of post-war Italian cinema, just as it glimmers, in Ozu’s films, in the interval between a bowl and a bottle in equilibrium on a table, or in the pure framing of a window isolating a factory chimney. There is nothing historical about the tension between these two kinds of images: rather, they concern gestures (amorces) and directions orienting the stylistic description. The contemporaneity of these two images demonstrates how, in Deleuze’s thought, actual movement and virtual becoming – the constituted, solid, individuated individual and the gaseous, dreaming, vaporous subject – are implicated with each other.
In effect, for Deleuze, individuation and subjectivity are not the same. The sensory-motor arc individuates in an organised body assuming form, becoming defined, structuring its provisional identity, becoming actualised. But any actuality is surrounded by a virtual cloud of intensity, which involves the becoming of forces, the dissolution of forms, transformations that agitate structures and trouble constituted organisations. The virtual troubles the actual and revives it. The time-image is created with the rupture of the sensory-motor arc, in the layer of affection (flaque d’affection) that signals the sensitive zone of the individuated arc. The movement of displacement is transformed into expression and action is transformed into quality. The rupturing of the sensory-motor arc permits the time-image to appear. At this point, we exit the regime of the individual and of individuation, that of the actual and of the movement-image. We enter the informal and intense zone of a subjectivity that surpasses any personal individuation and that undoes any constituted form. For Deleuze, the virtual vibrates within the actual. From his early encounter with Proust, Deleuze has always thought of art as that which allows us to experience a bit of time in a pure state. The virtual pulsates beneath the actual, and philosophy – creative thought – seeks to theorise becoming. Thought is effectively defined as an encounter, an intense collision with an image upon which we cannot act, but that asserts itself as affection. Thought becomes creative through the penetrative violence of the sign. This is how thought creates the new and how it transforms the table of categories into a table of montage.