A Thought that Moves: The Iterability of Language in Our Minds
Let’s start with a naïve set of questions: what is the difference between hating yourself and thinking the thought “I hate myself”? Or, what is the difference between liking a video game and thinking “I like this video game”? Or, alternatively, what is the difference between believing that X is true and thinking the thought “I think that X is true”?
Does the act of thought imply a certain detached distance from the very act itself that the thought describes, or is it in fact a reinforcement of that very act?
The question gets even more complicated when we realize that a thought referring to an act (of hate, of belief, or enjoyment, etc. like in the three examples above) is always expressed in language, in words, and not in images or other imaginary sense-perceptions like sounds. That is, the thought “I hate myself” is not the same as the image evoked by the words “I hate myself” written on a paper or the sound of a voice saying “I hate myself”, since the latter two are simply signifieds: a signified as in a static final destination, an end point that refers to nothing other than itself, an identity that is equal to itself. The thought itself expressed in language is a signifier however, it is not strictly equal to itself, it has a sense, it can be interpreted. When we think a thought such as “I hate myself” or “I like this video game”, we are not simply imagining words, instead we are working-through the act of sense-making, we are shaking up the imaginary order of signifieds and infusing them with sense. Sense which, like Deleuze says, does not exist but rather ‘insists or inheres’ in a proposition. When we think, we invoke the dimension of language and the symbolic order, and it is as if we are ‘breathing life’ into the words that compose our thought.
My notion is then that thought ultimately has a dual nature, as a signifier and as a signified (or what Whitehead would’ve called ‘symbol’ and ‘meaning’, respectively). As a signified, as a meaning, it is devoid of sense, we are in a way dealing with a ‘meaning devoid of meaning’, it is a thought constituted as the object of a different thought: in this particular case the thought “I hate myself” is nothing but the mere image of the words “I hate myself” or the sound of a voice saying “I hate myself” in our imagination. In this case, our thought does not express anything, it does not mean or refer to anything else, it is static and fixed.
The other side of the coin is thought as a signifier. Here we can conceive of a person being able to think a thought like “I like this video game” without having an imaginary-internal voice saying those words out loud, nor by visualizing those words written on a screen or piece of paper somewhere. Derrida’s notion that writing must not be subordinated to speech must be radicalized here: this is communication (to oneself) without either speech or writing. The question lingers — is such a thing even possible?
When I think to myself “I like trains”, I can start off with the imaginary representation of such a thought, the former instead of the latter particular case before-mentioned. But I can just as easily invoke memory and repetition here: I can think of my previous imaginary representation of the respective thought, and it is here that thinking beings for real. Because me thinking that I like cars is a longer process than the mere imaginary representation of such a thought. I can, for example, use my imaginary sense of sound to hear my inner voice say the words “I like trains” in my imagination, something that would last about 2–3 seconds, and after that stop and reflect on the imaginary representation of this thought for a longer period of time. Here, I do not need to tell any words to myself, and it is only in this second part of the process that I truly start to think, in the real sense of the word, that I like trains. The only sound that echoes in the second part of this process is the sound of silence.
If what I just said seems paradoxical is because you are wrongly starting from the wrong assumption that thought is a whole composed of multiple discrete parts that we can divide in the same way you can divide an object in space. But what we are dividing here is not a division through space but a division through time, and thus the differences between thoughts are not extensive but intensive, or what Deleuze would’ve called intensities (short for ‘intensive differences’). Thoughts are not numbers, nor mathematical sets, instead we not dealing with multiple “thoughts” at all. The idea that you can count the number of your thoughts is nonsense, strictly speaking. What we are dealing here with is more like a movie or a GIF. What I am suggesting is part of the larger current of process philosophy, the philosophy that holds that there is no static being, but only perpetual becoming, and that reality is a flux in constant change and movement. Why don’t we apply process philosophy to language, sense and thought as well? My thinking is not a whole composed of multiple, discrete ‘thoughts’, instead my thought-process is, like the name suggests, a process, a process that does not exist but that happens. We can thus visualize our thought-process like a movie or a GIF that we can temporarily ‘pause’. These pauses in our thought process are meditations upon the moment of the pause.
From this perspective, we can revisit our earlier problem. When I think “I like trains”, multiple things are going through my mind, which include, most likely, an inner voice saying those words out loud for about two seconds. But I can take five more seconds of my time to temporarily pause this train of thought. When I pause my thought, I am not thinking of nothing, instead I am thinking of the last thing I thought before pausing my thought. This is why meditation requires a mantra: to think of nothing is to think of one-thing. My thought-process is then like an object that is either in movement or at rest. When it is in movement, the symbolic order is operating unconsciously and the imaginary order is operating consciously, the potential for chain-of-meanings is prepared and thus, unconscious, operating without our awareness, but what we can perceive with our imaginary five senses are sense-hallucinations such as an inner voice saying “I like trains”. Then, when my thought-process is at rest, it is like a Youtube video which has been paused. The moment you pause an Youtube video, you do not see blackness, instead you see the last frame before you paused the video. At that moment in this analogy, our thought is at rest, and thus we are not merely thinking something but we are thinking about that something. This is the difference between thinking ‘I like cars’ and thinking about the fact that ‘I like cars’: my inner voice echoes through my head only in the former case. In the latter case, it is the symbolic order that shapes our conscious awareness, with the imaginary order repressed or ‘in the background’: what is effectively shaping the conditions of the possibility of our experience is the imaginary order now, since we are dealing with a fixed and static content, but it’s precisely because of that that this last frame that we paused on is inaccessible, somewhat like Kant’s thing-in-itself, and what we can consciously perceive is the referent, the movement or sense piercing through our thought-process and connecting the dots together (hence, the symbolic).
What I indirectly just touched upon is Jacques Derrida’s notion of the iterability of language. Derrida coined this term to refer to how an act of communication can always be repeated in a different context such that it can confer a different meaning. For instance, if I say “it is raining outside”, someone else can quote me by saying “Stefan said it is raining outside” and I can just as easily reply with “She said that I said that it is raining outside”, and so on ad infinitum. Since language is part of thought, we can apply the same concept to revisit our initial questions. To hate yourself is definitely not the same thing as simply thinking “I hate myself”, since just as I can think that I’m hating myself, I can just as easily think about the fact that I thought about hating myself, and I can also think about the fact that I thought about the fact that I thought that I hate myself, and so on ad infinitum. In fact, the inner voice of you, the reader, in your own imagination, said out loud in your head the words “I hate myself” when you read this paragraph. That is not the same thing as actually hating yourself, since the object of your thought here was not hate, but this paragraph. The thought “I hate myself” in your head was approached from a detached, ‘meta’ perspective, it was quoted. You did not think “I hate myself”, instead you thought “Lastrevio wrote ‘I hate myself’ in this paragraph”.
But what does it exactly mean to think “Lastrevio wrote ‘I hate myself’ in this paragraph”? Again, we must revisit my earlier analogy: thought is like a movie or GIF that when paused, it shows the last frame. To hate yourself means here to pause right after the thought ‘I hate myself’ in a particular context. But when you read my article, the pause is not on that thought but on the larger context. Absence is thus a constitutive feature of thought: to think anything is to also not think it fully. Thought inherently involves a kind of displacement, where what is immediately present to us (a paused frame, an articulated idea, or an inner voice) is never the whole of what we are engaging with. The symbolic order, as Lacan would have it, operates precisely in this realm of absence — what is said or thought always points beyond itself, leaving something unsaid, unthought, or unreachable.
This absence is not a flaw or shortcoming of thought; rather, it is its very condition of possibility. In other words, it is only because thought cannot be fully present to itself that it can move, iterate, and generate meaning. To borrow from Derrida, the iterability of thought means that no act of thinking is ever entirely self-contained; it is always haunted by the possibility of repetition, reinterpretation, or recontextualization.
This brings us back to the initial question: what is the difference between the act of hating oneself and the thought “I hate myself”? The difference lies in the fact that the act itself — hating oneself — is an unreflected process, a kind of raw immediacy in which thought as such is not yet at work. The thought “I hate myself,” by contrast, introduces a layer of mediation. It captures the act within the symbolic order, allowing for the possibility of interpretation, reflection, or even distance from the act itself. To think “I hate myself” is to simultaneously enact and observe the hate; it is to bring the act into the realm of signification, where it can be understood, questioned, or transformed.
This dual nature of thought — as both immediate and mediated — also sheds light on the structure of self-awareness. When I think about myself, I am not simply “there,” present to myself in some pure, unmediated way. Rather, I am split between the one who thinks and the one who is thought about (the enunciated subject and the subject of enunciation, as Lacan would say). This splitting is not a failure of self-knowledge but its precondition. I can only know myself as a self because I can step back and think about myself as an object of thought. Yet, this stepping back is never complete; I can never fully capture myself in thought, just as I can never fully pause a movie without losing the sense of its movement.
In this sense, thought is always a process of becoming, never a static state of being. It is not a collection of discrete ideas but a dynamic flow of signification, constantly shifting and reconfiguring itself. This is why thought, even when paused, never truly rests — it is always vibrating with latent intensities, always on the verge of becoming something else. And here, the notion of absence becomes crucial once again. To think is to be oriented toward what is not yet thought, to be drawn by the gaps, silences, and ambiguities that structure our mental life. This is why thought, as Deleuze might say, is always creative: it does not merely reproduce what is already there but generates new connections, new meanings, and new ways of understanding.
To conclude, the difference between the act (e.g., hating oneself) and the thought (“I hate myself”) is not merely a difference of content but of structure. The act is immediate and unmediated, while the thought introduces a gap, a distance, a space for interpretation and transformation. Thought, in its dual nature as signifier and signified, is the site where absence becomes presence and where the static becomes dynamic. It is a process of perpetual movement and becoming, always pointing beyond itself to what is not yet thought. And it is in this very movement that we find the essence of what it means to think.
