November 20, 1984

To believe in this world is to believe in the possibility of life in this world. It’s to believe in life here, that is, to believe in the body. In other words, the reason for believing in this world is the body: “So give me reasons to believe in this world”, it’s “give me a body”.

Seminar Introduction

As he starts the fourth year of his reflections on relations between cinema and philosophy, Deleuze explains that the method of thought has two aspects, temporal and spatial, presupposing an implicit image of thought, one that is variable, with history. He proposes the chronotope, as space-time, as the implicit image of thought, one riddled with philosophical cries, and that the problematic of this fourth seminar on cinema will be precisely the theme of “what is philosophy?’, undertaken from the perspective of this encounter between the image of thought and the cinematographic image.

For archival purposes, the English translations are based on the original transcripts from Paris 8, all of which have been revised with reference to the BNF recordings available thanks to Hidenobu Suzuki, and with the generous assistance of Marc Haas.

English Translation

Edited
Godard, Ici et ailleurs
Jean-Luc Godard, Ici et ailleurs, 1976.

 

Continuing to ask what reasons might exist for believing in this world, Deleuze answers that this means believing in life in this world, that is, in the body itself, even in its fragility and fatigue, that is, a body of and in time. Then, he proceeds to the third mutation, thought that comes from the outside (cf. Blanchot and Foucault), i.e. thinkers who share the belief that thinking’s purpose is an exercise of the outside. After tracing the classical model of knowledge, Deleuze considers Blanchot’s attraction to Jaspers’s concept of “processes”, explaining a type of schizophrenia, that Deleuze says is the force of the outside insofar as it causes a return from the dead, and a mode of thought that conforms both to Blanchot and Foucault, a “thought of the outside”. Considering successive traits of this “thought”, Deleuze studies Blanchot’s Infinite Conversation in which types of interstices emerge: first, the gap over which two images must leap to close the gap; second, the interstice manifesting itself in itself and subordinating any association; and third, the interstice between “speaking” and “seeing”. The interstice leads Deleuze to link this mutation to cinema through “montage” which, pre-World War II, assured associations, whereas after World War II, something explodes, images varying within different sorts of interstices, liberating the interstices (cf. Garrel, Resnais, Godard, Bresson, Godard), with the importance of sound as well as image within not just montage, but “mixage”. Moreover, the interstices between frames come to eliminate out-of-field as a function of association of images. Finally, referring again to Blanchot’s Infinite Conversation, Deleuze considers the book’s opening dialogue between two fatigued interlocutors developing an “incommunicable” between them, the interstice, the force of the outside itself (cf. Antonioni). Concluding the third mutation, thought of the Outside, with its linkage of four notions (the idea of “process”; of essential rapport of thought with an unthought; of a primary interstice; and of bodily fatigue and power of the Outside which is also the direct presentation of time), Deleuze sees force passing through the body and through its fatigue which, as the next session reveals, links directly to mathematics. [Much of this development corresponds to The Time-Image, chapters 7 & 8.]

 

Gilles Deleuze

Seminar on Cinema and Thought, 1984-1985

Lecture 04, 20 November 1984 (Cinema Course 70)

Transcription: La voix de Deleuze, Mathilde Lequin (Part 1), Eriola Alcani (Part 2), and John Stetter; revised by Laura Moscarelli (Part 3); additional revisions to the transcription and time stamp, Charles J. Stivale

English Translation Forthcoming

Notes

For archival purposes, the augmented and new time stamped version of the complete transcription was completed in August 2021. Additional revisions were added in February 2024 and, thanks to the translators’ corrections, in December 2024.

Lectures in this Seminar

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Reading Date: October 30, 1984
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