In Difference and Repetition, Proust and Signs and (with Félix Guattari) A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?, Deleuze develops the concept of ‘the image of thought’. This idea seeks to express how the notion of what it is to think is envisaged or pictured at a given time or place. Such ways of thinking form the basis of implicit presuppositions which underlie ideas and conceptual systems. An ‘image of thought’, then, is a kind of canvas of underlying assumptions upon which the works of a given period are sketched. Deleuze sums up the idea in Negotiations:

In Difference and Repetition Deleuze describes a ‘dogmatic’ image of thought which has been dominant throughout the history of philosophy, but in A Thousand Plateaus, What is Philosophy? and Negotiations he emphasises how the image is subject to change over time. He asks, ‘Do we, for instance, have the same image of thought that Plato, or even Descartes or Kant, had?’ In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari discuss such shifts in some detail in their descriptions of ‘the plane of immanence’.