January 22, 1985

All art, by definition, has always struggled against its subject. And here, perhaps for the first time, we encounter this theme, but which will take on importance for us, but which fits very well into its subject, that is, what [Godard] is considering. And no doubt, all art, I believe, feels the need to relate to something, whatever it is, and at the same time, in a certain way, to detach itself, or to prevent what it’s relating to from being his subject. We don’t write, we don’t paint, we don’t film on a subject. How to break with the subject? Take this seriously, literally: Godard was hired for a task — he specializes in incomplete tasks; his life, I believe, is filled with incomplete, not because he does not fulfill them, on the contrary he does fulfill them, but people don’t recognize what they ordered, which, obviously, brings Godard great joy, but a wicked joy. We ordered a film about Lausanne from Godard. … He tells me, I cannot make a film about something. So, what did he do? He didn’t make a film about Lausanne; that was too much for him. He reflected on Lausanne, in blue and green, in blue and green.

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 Vivre sa vie
Jean-Luc Godard, Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live), 1962

 

Pausing the seminar’s forward movement with an invited participant, musicologist Pascale Criton, Deleuze asks Criton to comment on three precise musicological perspectives. Criton confirms most of Deleuze’s analysis regarding pre- and post-World War II cinema developments, and with nearly an hour left in class, Deleuze comments on Godard’s cinema, with some assistance from Georges Comtesse, emphasizing the Godardian categories, reviewing Godard’s deployment of a serial method, and considering use of a particular interview with philosopher Brice Parain, in “Vivre sa vie”. He connects the serialization of daily life to Kantian distinctions of constitutive and reflective terms in judgment and offers an extended example from the domain of jurisprudence (his oft cited example of the taxi driver’s dispute regarding smokers), attempting to show how a series is derived from a sequence of images reflected within a genre. [Much of this development corresponds to The Time-Image, chapter 8.]

Gilles Deleuze

Seminar on Cinema and Thought, 1984-1985

Lecture 10, 22 January 1985 (Cinema Course 76)

Transcription: La voix de Deleuze, Charles J. Stivale (Part 1) and Nadia Ouis (Part 2 and Part 3); additional revisions to the transcription and time stamp, Charles J. Stivale

English Translation Forthcoming

Notes

For archival purposes, the French transcript of the first part of this session was prepared for the first time in June 2020 for this site, with time stamp for the entire session. Given the difficulty posed by the audio conditions for this session, the parts 2 & 3 transcriptions by Nadia Ouis for Paris 8 are remarkably rendered. The augmented version of the complete transcription was completed in August 2021. Additional revisions were added in February 2024.

Lectures in this Seminar

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Reading Date: October 30, 1984
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Reading Date: June 18, 1985
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