Schematizations, or How to Draw a Thought

This article sketches the emergence of visual schematisms from Immanuel Kant to Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard. It demonstrates the centrality of differentiation in these visual representations, as underscored by the “bar” or so-called vinculum (a mathematical term). It ultimately concludes that the weakness or dialectical contradiction of the thus differentiated entities lies in their tendency to fold back into each other, returning to the One which it was the purpose of the schematization to exclude in the first place.