I’d like to talk about a strange state of vision: the vision of thought. What is it to see a thought? To see a thought coming? To be present at its emergence, at the moment when it is still no more than a promise, a plan, or sketch, but is already strong enough to live? What is it to see before writing, when a brandnew thought can already be apprehended sensibly, sensually, like a body? How should we approach that strange state of half-carnal, half-intelligible vision that oversees the torments of the text even as it establishes the suspended spatial presence of the text?

I am interested in the schema of discourse, where schema is understood in terms of the famous meaning Kant gives it as ‘a general procedure of the imagination for providing a concept with its image’ (1998: 273). What I want to explore first of all are the processes by which a thought, an idea or an intellectual motive allows itself to be figured before adhering to a definitive form. The second objective of this analysis is to explore these processes in the light of a philosophical fracture prevalent throughout the twentieth century among thinkers who questioned a particular conception of the connection between the idea and the sensible, between idealisation and writing, or between concept and text.

French philosophers such as Lyotard, Deleuze, Derrida and Levinas, as well as writers such as Blanchot, to cite only a few, consider the question of the space and time of thought, as well as the sensibility of the idea, as central to their work, even as they redefine the notion of intellectual visibility. In the philosophical tradition, to see thought designates the actual act of contemplation.