May 3, 1983

The real reason for existence is the negation of the negation. Hence, understand what I mean … It’s idiotic to say [that] Hegel thinks that things contradict each other, or that Hegel thinks that the contradiction is within things. Hegel thinks that non-contradiction puts identity into things. Hegel is the first to tell us: things don’t contradict each other. Because what were the others doing? They were telling us: the essences are identical, and the sensitive world is contradictory. For Hegel, it’s the opposite, it is obviously the opposite; he’s the first to tell us: the world is not contradictory. Why? Because the law of the world is “A is not non-A”, so, it’s the others who believe that things contradict each other. Hegel is really the first to say: no, they don’t contradict each other. The principle that governs existence is the principle of non-contradiction, the principle of non-contradiction taking the form of the negation of the negation.

Seminar Introduction

In the second year of Deleuze’s consideration of cinema and philosophy, he commences the year by explaining that whereas he usually changes topics from one year to the next, he feels compelled to continue with the current topic and, in fact, to undertake a process of “philosophy in the manner of cows, rumination… I want entirely and truly to repeat myself, to start over by repeating myself.” Hence, the 82-83 Seminar consists in once again taking up Bergson’s theses on perception, but now with greater emphasis on the aspects of classification of images and signs drawn from C.S. Peirce. This allows Deleuze to continue the shift from considering the movement-image, that dominated early 20th century cinema, toward a greater understanding of the post-World War II emphasis on the time-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

Marcel Proust’s Time Regained from Raoul Ruiz’s film

After Georges Comtesse provides a counter-perspective on “lost time,” Deleuze responds by developing the interiority of time, reflecting supporting perspectives drawn from Leibniz, Péguy, and Bergson. Moreover, to another Comtesse question, Deleuze contrasts narrative point of view in Balzac and Proust, returning after 90 minutes of such responses to the dual aspects of the indirect image of time. Deleuze designates a first type of the image’s chronosigns as the “dynamic sublime”, i.e. the interval as variable present, the qualitative leap between instants; then, a second type as the interior of time or mathematical sublime, i.e. the Whole of time. Beyond these chronosigns, Deleuze outlines the corresponding indirect figures of thought, or “noosigns”, asking what does a “manner of thinking” mean? Thinking is then conceived as a battle with shadows preventing thought, having the figure for perpetual recommencement of the thought battle in the “counterbrand” (contremarque). Given the dialectic nature of the thought-battle, Deleuze broaches Hegel in some detail, to whom Deleuze opposes the “heads or tails” noosign, the alternative espoused by Pascal, with both Hegel’s and Pascal’s views to be developed in the next session.

Gilles Deleuze

Seminar on Cinema: Classification of Signs and Time, 1982-1983

Lecture 19, 3 May 1983 (Cinema Course 40)

Transcription: La voix de Deleuze, Anna Kraszewska (Part 1) and Jean-Charles Jarrell (Part 2); additional revisions to the transcription and time stamp, Charles J. Stivale

Translated, Billy Dean Goehring

 

Part 1

[It seems as though the recording cuts in right after an unrecorded question or comment]

… You’ve just laid out—you’ve given us a lot to chew on. You asked whether this lines up with Bergson. There’s no reason to bring Bergson into this. The only part of what you said where I start to get nervous is when you try to work in Spinoza. There’s even less reason to tie it back to Spinoza. There’s no need. I mean, it’s not a question worth asking. I think what you said at the end about the idea of time as such in Bergson wasn’t entirely accurate, but that’s neither here nor there. At any rate, what you’re talking about—you’re getting at something really interesting, and it has nothing to do with Bergson. Nothing to do with Spinoza, either.

But on the other hand, at one point you said something about red in Matisse [1:00], which reminded me of Goethe: red as “ideal satisfaction”—as opposed to green, which he calls “real satisfaction.” So, I’m on board for linking red to difference, but see, at that point, difference—even from your perspective; I’m putting this in your terms—isn’t enough. I mean that difference, as a concept, is still too general because it could mean a lot of things. Is it qualitative difference? Quantitative difference? Intensive difference? Goethe offers a definitive answer; I think that your whole schema is a lot closer to Goethe than to Bergson or Spinoza. Especially when you say that there’s something that has to be awakened in red, that we have to awaken something in red. Hence its being ideal satisfaction [2:00], an ideal satisfaction that needs to be realized, according to Goethe. You’re really onto something—not because it’s similar to Goethe, but because you’ve gotten there on your own.

But when it comes to the relationship between red and difference, between time and difference—if we grant that red is difference, which difference is it? What kind of difference? Then you have to develop a concept of difference that accounts for everything you said, right? But I really liked your… I’d have to disagree, that being said—I’d have to disagree because I have a lot at stake in there being an absolute difference between time and what we might call the plane of consistency.[1] For one simple reason: a plane is a perspective, a temporal [3:00] perspective even, as we saw. It’s a perspective on time, but it isn’t time. It’s not the end of the world—we can disagree—but I think you’ve brought us something great.

However, Comtesse wanted to revisit a particular aspect of his approach, regarding what we discussed last time about Proust, [Pause] I believe.

Georges Comtesse: I just wanted to touch on the question of how regained time is constituted in The Search, in light of what you proposed the other day about the inside of time. [Pause] [4:00] It has something to do with how Proust theorizes the relationship between time, timelessness, and eternity—which pervades not only The Search, but also what he wrote on desire before The Search, in Desires and Regrets and Jean Santeuil. Proust invokes or depicts a “certain moment,” a moment of repetition or a moment of desire which acts as a gap, a gap between two movements, between the movement of desire and that of its satisfaction. What he calls the movement of possession [5:00]. The moment of repetition is no more than the agony of desire—in Jean Santeuil, Proust says that desire is a pit of despair, the domain of hopeless love, since love, he says, is the dereliction of boundless death. Proust describes it as, “a dereliction as deep as solitude, as silence, and as the night,” and this dereliction suggests—it leads us to think of Jean Santeuil as driven…

Deleuze: He uses the word “dereliction”?

Comtesse: Of course. It’s in… it’s in…

Deleuze: No, no don’t say, “of course.” Just say “yes.” [Laughter] It’s in… ?

Comtesse: Jean Santeuil. “A dereliction as deep as solitude…” [6:00] “as silence and as the night.”

Deleuze: You have the page number?

Comtesse: Not the specific page number, but I can find it.

Deleuze: Do you remember what chapter?

Comtesse: It’s in the middle of the book. I’ll figure out which page…[2]

Deleuze: Please find the page number for me, will you?

Comtesse: Yes, of course. It indicates that Jean Santeuil is inherently driven, writes Proust, by a conversation with some god within him, in the depths of his mind. In other words, the moment of repetition is dumbfounding, removing the object, cutting off any movement toward it, blocking any relation to it—hence its being a gap. Desire, says Proust, follows a sort of enchanting logic [7:00], an enchanting desire subject to a fatal deception, [desire that] produces the Idea, as Proust puts it, i.e., the melancholic specter of a perfect body—in other words, the specter of the perfect body as prime mover; Proust also says it’s the body immobilized by desires, haunted by the gap. Via this specter, we are haunted by the dream of another life, by the real life that’s vanished, by the fading smile of our missing life, and by the intensity, the shining [8:00] brilliance whereby bodies or objects of desire become nothing but a brief flash or faint glimmer of something perfect, untouchable, inaccessible, laid bare, absent. This gap, or this moment of repetition, as it appears in Jean Santeuil, this moment of escape or of paralysis, will be exceeded, overcome, sublated, nullified, emptied out in the hollow center of a variable present—not a variable present described as the interval between two extensive movements, because the problem no longer applies at that level, but on the contrary, an [9:00] invariable or stagnant present, i.e., the rupturing or abolishing present, the present of repetition’s temporalization. For Proust, this stagnant, invariable, immobile present is the symptomatic present, the present symptomatic of the hollow center of the moment of repetition or of present desire, a reservoir of symptoms or of suffering. It’s the present that Proust calls deep slumber, restless torment, frustration, fear, nervous breakdowns, fatigue—what he also calls “strange and physiological modesty.” This stagnant present is what, in a 1906 letter to [10:00] Princess Bibesco, he also calls “the present of life’s nothingness,” or again in Jean Santeuil, the present of “the rupture whence stems life.” In other words, in order to understand how Proust conceives of time before Time Regained, one necessarily has to understand how the moment of repetition is related to the invariable present, since the moment of repetition is the past, the a priori past of an enduring symptomatic present threatened by the former’s future return. The invariable present is the interval between a necessarily nullified moment—[11:00] because it is this cancelling-out—and a moment to be prevented, as the threat of the future perfect. In other words, it stagnates between a moment retained and a moment anticipated.

On the other hand, you could say that the specter of the perfect body persists in the stagnant present of centered, empty, immobile time, which for Proust means that memory has nothing to do with commemorating the past, linking [to it] or infusing [us with it], but with recalling, recalling a former life, an extinct life, a truth which Proust defines—since he’s talking about truth—as neither matter, nor as an ideal form, but as matter in the luminous sense, or as the developmental principle thereof.  [12:00] That is why Proust thinks that the stagnant present, symptomatic time, is just one figure of time—in other words, that it’s a matter of exiting time, leaping out of time, out of the centered present, in order to grasp even a fraction what’s beyond life’s nothingness, life’s eternity. Hence Proust’s famous line: “Art rearranges life around its own truths.” Regaining lost time thus means stepping out of a time beset by repetition. Whereby Proust simply speaks of what he calls “atemporal moments,” atemporal [13:00] moments, and he writes “they’re moments freed from the order of time” and that they alone recover what he calls “unfixed time”—in other words, a time different from centered time, empty time, empty, immobile, stagnant time, under the threat of repetition’s return. The timeless moment, Proust says, is extracted from the invariable, symptomatic according to the specter persisting within, stemming from extinct or nullified life, the timeless moment of joy draws out the eternal essence where the reigning law of signs carries out the transmutation of centered time, as if, Proust writes, our life were “outside of [14:00] time,” eager to taste eternity and dissatisfied with the present, sorrowful over the past. Extracting, generating the eternal essence of signs, [word unclear] therefore via what Proust calls divine imagination, defined as the organ serving eternity.

In other words, these timeless moments generating eternal essences or the laws for signs lead to the emergence of what Proust calls “the true self,” i.e., it brings the soul back to life, the deadened soul, beyond the false self associated with symptomatic time. The “true self” comprises the timeless moments outside of time, sustained by the celestial nourishment, Proust says, of eternal essences. In other words, “the true self,” as the span [15:00] of timeless moments, is where Proust’s “eternal being” comes back, the place where extinct life is resurrected. In effect, you could say that the composition of timeless moments reconstitutes the eternity of life as the eternity of essences, recovering the time of eternal being that’s incorporated into the eternity of life—the time, in other words, of immortal desire, unbothered [16:00] by fathomless death, as opposed to Jean Santeuil—an immortal desire which, as Proust puts it, makes death a matter of indifferences, turning death into nothing more than a meaningless word, with no chance of happening, turning things into mere images of immortal desire—no longer, Proust says, as sensations enclosing a past, definitively nullifying the moment of repetition. At which point, the eternal being of time regained plays on the eternity of life, or the pure joy of immortal desire, whose satisfaction or happiness transforms the optical gaze, since it is contemplation [17:00] fascinated or enchanted by beauty. For Proust, beauty is the invisible substance of man’s eternal being, controlled by divine imagination as the organ for said eternal being, an organ that allows us to see the invisible.

Which brings me to my question. What is the relationship… [Laughter] What is the relationship between the invisible substance of eternal being—which incorporates the eternity of life, or feeds on eternal, celestial essences—and the Whole which you’ve referred to as time’s interior, as a terrifying monster rising up and threatening to land at any moment [18:00]? What is the relationship between this Whole and what Proust says about metaphor in what he writes on Flaubert? Metaphor, he says, can only… only imbue… imbue style with a sort of eternity. [Pause]

Deleuze: That’s fine, but I think it’s a clever bit of rhetoric that you pretend to ask me a question that, really, only you know how to answer. Yeah, I think I understood, but maybe I was wrong to put it so simply. How many [19:00] times are you distinguishing, overall? It seems to me that in your approach has two different times. There’s the time you’ve colored as rather tragic, using the word you picked up from Proust, “dereliction,” and then you mentioned time as living eternity. Now my question—but it’s a silly question, really—is just to make sure whether… whether I’ve been following everything you’ve said. Are there actually two? I mean, are there two levels, or two of whatever they are?

Comtesse: Yes, which means there’s a time defined by a symptomatic, stagnant, invariable moment or present, defined by a moment of repetition [20:00] [Deleuze: Okay, I see now] and this moment is precisely what happens in the search, in regained time, the time to be regained—time is what gets expressed.

Deleuze: There, see, you’ve split it in two.  Yes, of course. I thought there were differences, but we’re not going to circle back to that, because… Personally, I think there are three [times]. That’s why I ask. Since I wouldn’t divide it… that’s interesting—because I wouldn’t divide it up like you have, and it highlights a sticking point between you and me. You tend to isolate the—how to put this—you tend to isolate what I call the tragic; you single out despair, dereliction. So you’ve turned it into—you might be right [21:00]—you’ve turned it into a modality, one of the fundamental modalities of time in Proust.

I’d divide it quite differently. In Proust’s work, the way I see it, there is lost time—lost time. With lost time alone… I’m a lot more sensitive than you are—but to your credit, you have other strengths—I’m much more tuned into comedy. Lost time is about our low moments of despair, our heartbreaks, etc., as well as our small joys. It’s all lost time, as in “Oh! Where has the time gone?” I bring up my concern—I’m not going to challenge you on anything—as a segue into what we’re going to cover: Pascal. Proust’s lost time, [22:00] I claim, is his way of grappling with what Pascal called “diversion”—I may have been broken-hearted and suffered, really suffered, been absolutely gutted and, as Comtesse puts it, fallen into being, gripped with pure dereliction—well, that’s just one way of distracting myself. In that sense, there’s no meaningful difference between dereliction and diversion. They’re ways of fidgeting, of being restless. Alright, I fall in love with Albertine, okay, then, bam—disaster strikes: there’s jealousy, the terror of jealousy, the anguish of waiting, and so on. But [Pause; Deleuze coughs] [23:00] these moments are a flash in the pan. Not that he hasn’t suffered. Proust had his fair share of suffering, but that was his way of losing time, and we know that all of us have lost time in life; and generally speaking, we do so in tears—we have every reason to cry, but crying is only one form of restlessness.

So, for me, there is lost time, which could include what Comtesse put under the header of dereliction, but it would cover any sort of distraction, which might be happy, might be enjoyable, might be moments of happiness, tender moments. What makes it lost time? Obviously, it isn’t lost time. It isn’t lost for him, seeing as how it’s a whole section of his work. Everything has a part to play. It has a part in these monsters, [24:00] where everything has a part to play; at any rate, it isn’t lost. He’s distracted while having tea with the Duchess, but it isn’t lost. Still, it appears to be, it appears as lost time.

And then there’s another time, the very one that Comtesse described as what binds moments outside of their sequence in time, which he associated with the idea of “life’s eternity,” “essential” [time]. However, there’s the matter—and he and I may or may not agree on this point—the particular way in which Proust understands essences. [25:00] Because that’s not—because that’s not what he thinks matters, right? To a certain extent, I don’t think it’s true of everything you said, what you were saying sounded a lot more like Plato than Proust. Obviously everything you said—“essences” and “eternity,” etc.—ought to be understood in the extremely narrow sense in which Proust understood them.

For my part—what a perfect transition—what he says about what he calls “essence,” when he relates that to something other than eternity—because something that really stood out to me in your spiel was that it’s outside time, outside of time. He himself brings up eternity. That, I… he also mentions immortality, interestingly enough—what’s going on there [26:00]? And yet… how is this different from Plato? The difference is… It’s that, for Proust, I think, what he calls “essence”—and this is why essences aren’t outside of time—essence is a point of view; it’s not something in view. An essence is a perspective. That’s what makes an essence the object of creation. What is art? For Proust, it’s not about making something to view; it’s about creating a new point of view. For Proust, that’s ultimately what comes out of an artist’s work: an unprecedented point of view. In that sense, I’d argue that he’s Leibnizian. [27:00] He’s Leibnizian insofar as they both—stay with me—he and Leibniz both understand the world as inseparable. In Leibniz, you have the creation of predetermined points of view, arranged by God with a divine understanding. But in Proust’s case, that’s clearly no longer what it means to create a point of view.

Take a painter—say, Elstir—what does he do? Of course, he paints, but the essence doesn’t reside in the painting itself. The essence is in the perspective, and obviously, a painting involves all sorts of points of view. What does it mean for the essence to reside in the perspective? [28:00] Well, allow me to draw an immediate parallel—especially pertinent for when we eventually get around to Pascal—you just brought up Michel Serres, in his book on Leibniz[3], devoted a chapter to Pascal, which I think is the finest piece ever written on Pascal, about whom quite a lot has been written, you know? He basically says—I’m paraphrasing Serres’s point—he says: in the 17th century, around the turn of the 16th-17th century, something very important happens: the discovery of infinity—in every field: mathematics, astronomy, and so on. But infinity is rather frustrating because [pause] [29:00] it’s no longer even a question of whether the world is finite or infinite.

What they discovered in the 16th and 17th century was infinity as such. It is so fundamentally significant because it threw everything out of whack; everything lost its balance. I might even call it a turning point where man is deterritorialized, one of mankind’s major deterritorializations: there is no more center. Where is the center? Where do we find our center? At a fundamental level, everything was off kilter—for physical systems, for mathematics, etc. Right [30:00] and so, the problem pervades the 17th century. Then Serres goes on to say something really interesting. He says, well, their ultimate goal is to find a new center, but where are they going to find it? Finding a new center in an uncentered world doesn’t mean getting a brand new one; that’s not an option. It means changing our concept of what the center means.

Which brings us back to our running theme: what is philosophy? Philosophy is the creation of concepts. We’ve reached a point where our previous concepts no longer work. You have to figure out what sort of what sort of situation you’re dealing with, etc. Well, it’s up to the philosopher to come up with new concepts. There’s no way around it: either thought descends into an inevitable crisis or else… But the answer was right in front of them [31:00]—doesn’t it always work out? They’ll figure it out. These are some brilliant minds; we ought to have some faith in them. There are geniuses in philosophy, just as there are geniuses in art or science—next year, I’d like to explore that further, because Kant has a really great theory of genius… right, yeah, anyway—You see, they have no choice but to alter their understanding of the center.

How do they change their understanding of the center? This is where Serres’s analysis really shines, I think. He says that it involves all kinds of ruptures since, in broad terms, very broadly speaking, what was a “center” before that point? It was the center of a configuration. [Pause] It was the center of a configuration. What was the simplest configuration? The sphere, right. [Pause] [32:00] The center was characterized by equidistance. It implies a certain form of geometry—let’s call it geometry. Let’s say that “the center” meant the point of equilibrium. [pause] I’m really paraphrasing, but the more I paraphrase—that way you’ll have to do your own work—the more you have… In order to indicate the original idea, we have to pin down the very basics. Whether the “center” is the center of balance, or the [pause] center of configuration, it makes no difference.

So, when does the bomb drop? Well, it won’t… it isn’t—more than one person manages [33:00] to pull it off; it happens all over, completely independently, with very different authors: the concept of perspective. A perspective—in other words, say we’re told that the center isn’t the center of a shape [pause]—keep in mind that a shape’s center, the center of a configuration, more or less stands in for essence. I’d argue that essences are balanced configurations; it refers to a configuration in a state of equilibrium, a centered configuration. That’s what form is—it’s the same word in Greek, form or essence. [34:00]

Whereas now, they claim that isn’t what the center is, and for good reason: there isn’t one. It’s gone. There’s no more center of balance; things have lost their center of balance. At best, they think, that works for finite systems, but what would it mean to be the center of an infinite set? That sort of question came up as early as the Renaissance, right, and it marks an interesting shift: the center is no longer the center of a configuration, i.e., an essence; it is only a perspective. What does that mean? Well, it means [35:00] that the only way of putting things in order is to find their point of view. Before, the order of things depended on their center, on their point of equilibrium. They’ve lost their center of balance; the world has lost its center of balance. The world has no equilibrium. [Pause]

What happens when the idea of the center is replaced by that of a perspective? It’s still a point, but the center-point has become a perspective. Alright. Perspective is where we’ll find the world’s lost unity, where we’ll find the order, the order and the unity that the world has lost. That’s what Serres does such a good job of demonstrating [36:00], and as different as they may be, both Pascal and Leibniz gravitated down this path, and, both being scholars—that is, both concerned with science—both being great mathematicians, they each independently contributed to the development of a new branch of mathematics called “analysis situs”, [Pause] and another branch of mathematics later known as “projective geometry,” [Pause] obviously. You see, when it comes to scientific revolutions, [37:00], it’s about more than the scientific developments themselves; once again we see how science and philosophy are related, I think. Because, take projective geometry: as Serres demonstrates, it covers a wonderful chapter from the history of thought.[4]

In simplest terms, what is projective geometry? Well, it’s a way of dealing with cones—Oh, wow! It’s noon! No, I still have 15 minutes [Laughter]—It addresses the problem with cones. What problem with cones? It’s not difficult. [Deleuze moves toward the board] You’re given the following situation: [38:00] the apex of the cone, let’s call it A, stands in for an [pause, he’s drawing]—you might already guess—an eye. The apex of the cone isn’t a shape’s center of balance; the apex of the cone is a perspective. Right, a perspective. There must be an eye there, defined as A. That’s an eye. Revolutionary. We’ve gone from—see, we’ve gone from… I believe I’m borrowing, I think [39:00] I’m borrowing a specific phrase from Serres here: we’ve jumped from a geometry of the sphere to a geometry of the cone. Yet the jump from sphere to cone isn’t simply a matter of moving from one shape to another in a homogeneous space; we’re hit with a completely new space. What hits us? You can already guess: a so-called projective space, instead of Euclidean space, which is out the window. Euclidean space is the domain of balanced configurations.

Still, this is a funny sort of space, isn’t it? We don’t need to talk about actual space around us. Right away, imagine, then, the immediate consequences of the cone’s apex being an eye. If the cone is intersected by a plane [40:00] passing through the apex A, what is the projection? The cone’s projection becomes a point, is a point. If the intersecting plane is parallel to the base, [Pause] the projection of the cone is a circle. [pause] If it’s cut along an oblique, transversal plane, the cone’s projected as an ellipse. [pause] [41:00] If it’s cut along a—what do you call it… [Pause] a non-tangent plane? Like this. It doesn’t matter, you see what I mean, right?—if it’s cut along this plane, right, like so, you have… [A student suggests a term] generatrix, that’s it, generatrix. If you slice it along a generatrix, you get… [Deleuze writes on the board], like so… [Deleuze continues writing on the board] like so. And what is that? It’s called a hyperbola. [42:00] And if—I’m simplifying things; actually, there’s nothing stopping your cone, in fact there are two opposite cones—If you follow a plane that cuts through both cones, which didn’t happen early with the generatrix, [Pause] you get your perspective, see—I mixed up parabola and hyperbola, and always forget…

What’s going on? We’ve defined a set of shapes that, in the old days—“old days” meaning back when a shape [43:00] was defined by a center of configuration or by a center of balance—would have had nothing to do with each other, strictly speaking. These are infinite, the others are finite, as Pascal puts it; these are open, the others are closed. Parabolas and hyperbolas are open and infinite, cycles and ellipses are closed and finite. Yet what is it that unifies them? Here, with perspective, we’ve come to a new way of ordering things where there hadn’t been any [order]. So, it’s a fundamental transformation. [Deleuze returns to his seat] So, you find this in Leibniz as well as in Pascal, [44:00] and what follows as a result? We’ll see later on. Conveniently enough, what we’re going to cover…

But I bring it up now in part just to elaborate on what Comtesse said. He felt that with Proust, for completely different reasons, Proust… brings us back to this question of time. As far as I can tell, he—I think he really enjoyed… I’ve never done the sort of in-depth research I ought to have—I think he was aware, he knew what he was doing, he was an excellent philosophy student at the high school level; the baccalaureate was pretty intense in those days. [laughs] Proust must have had a professor—at some point in Proust’s many lives—someone who, I’m sure, must have gone over Leibniz, so he ought to have been exposed to Leibniz’s theory of perspective, [45:00] and that must have inspired him, I think. —Well, anyway, as I’ve said before, if you take anything away [from class], it’s up to you to take something away and do something with it… right? It doesn’t have to be groundbreaking for something to speak to you. Anyway, there you have Proust. Imagine that he had taken coursework on Leibniz, and let’s say it resonated with him, eh? I’m speculating. It resonated with him, and he starts to wonder what’s happening with these points of view, these perspectives on the city, this whole business with perspective. And what’s more, it’s an idea of perspective rooted in mathematics, since it formed the basis of projective geometry, and it forms a new kind of space.

With Euclidean space, there are no points of view. If you create a space fundamentally based on perspective, you get projective space, a new [46:00] type of space. Right, well, say that this piques his interest, and suddenly he realizes: this is exactly what happens in art.

In what way? Points of view do not exist; they don’t exist beforehand. Points of view do not exist beforehand. It’s not even the same as what the Germans will understand as a worldview [Weltanshauung]; this is different. See, it’s as though… if I climb a mountain, there are preexisting points of view out there in nature. At most, I can discover a new perspective, as a panorama. Oh, I’ve found a new vantage point, have you seen it from this angle? Etc. [Interruption of the recording]

… For example, the little patch of yellow wall, Vermeer’s little patch of yellow wall. But Vermeer’s little patch of yellow wall [47:00] is a perspective. It’s a perspective. In Van Gogh, for example, the idea of color as a point of view, rather than as something in view, where he’ll say: I pushed yellow a bit further, I took yellow a bit higher. What does he mean, he took it higher? What is he trying to say? He’s really saying that he’s taken up a higher perspective where yellow becomes, as he puts it, an arbitrary yellow, that is, something very closely associated with creation, you know? How Van Gogh calls himself an “arbitrary colorist.” But all great painters are arbitrary colorists, by definition. But anyway, moving on.

I just wanted to give you a sense for… As I was saying, when it comes to… What I meant was that [48:00] everything Comtesse said about life’s eternity, etc., doesn’t change the fact that, see, I wouldn’t call it history because Proust plays fast and loose with history. But it’s linked to time, in a way that’s almost… I wouldn’t call it… but it’s dated, it’s dated. There is someone who… there is someone who… it’s another writer we’ll cover later on, because he was a big deal at the time, and what’s more, he’s a disciple—or he claims to be a disciple—of Bergson: [Charles] Péguy. So from now until the end of the year, there’s going to be a lot of talk about Jesus. We’ll talk about Jesus with Pascal, we’ll talk about Jesus with Péguy, etc. But it’s no accident that, see, why it is that, on the… Not for Proust, I mean, that’s not what he’s worried about. Why are there so many Christians among these…? [49:00] Ultimately, perspective, point of view, the idea of the point, you could almost say—it’s almost a pagan idea to describe the point as the center of configuration. Defining the point as point of view affords us a new way of arranging things, allows us to organize the finite and the infinite—you can sense how, if you look for it, things can start to take on a very Christian hue, though it’s not fundamentally bound to Christianity.

Now I recall that at some point this year, in another context, I briefly brought up Péguy.[5] See, what fascinates me about Péguy is that [50:00], while today the major trend is to revisit writers from the 19th and 20th centuries with some of the strangest, most unusual styles of writing… Foucault highlighted [Raymond] Roussel, and there’s a lot of research on that front. Péguy has been overlooked because either his work is taken to be something for priests or pious souls… or else he’s talking about a major impulse to… [Deleuze doesn’t finish his sentence]

But what’s fascinating about him, about Péguy, is that Péguy invented a language. He was the first, the first one to invent a language of pure repetition, a language rhythmically inspired by pure repetition; [51:00] Péguy’s style is wild. Open to any page in Péguy and you’ll think, what the hell is this mad scientist talking about? While he needed this kind of language, what did he gain by it? His language is really… That’s why I’d like for you to read a little bit of it, it doesn’t matter what part of Péguy’s work—what’s going on with this litany, why exactly is he caught up in such a repetitive process? You’ve never heard anything like it. And what’s more, he pulled it off so well that no one else has even dared imitate it. I mean, Celine has imitators; you can find them in every trashcan—I’m not talking about Celine; I mean his imitators, the folks imitating him, as if… as if there were really something that… where was I going with this? I was… yes, as I was saying. Péguy coined a word [52:00] to indicate the intersection between time and eternity. It’s a wonderful word—“internal”—I’d call it a philosophical concept. Internal.[6] Yes, go ahead [Deleuze is probably responding to a question].

Well, I’d argue that this process of substituting the perspective for the center of configuration, which happens with Pascal, which happens with… etc., the perspective is an intersection. Because—I won’t belabor the point—but anyone who’s done the least bit of projective geometry can tell: if the cone is the finite perspective, there’s also an infinite perspective. Leibniz says as much in a few sublime passages: what is the infinite perspective? There’s an isomorphism for both sides, or at least something that [53:00] perfectly lines up with them. The infinite perspective is the cylinder. God is a cylinder. Whereas we are cones. [Laughs] The infinite perspective is the cylinder, right. Well, that’s, so that’s… with the concept of perspective, there’s the possibility, if you will, of there being an intersection between human temporality and God’s eternity. The relationship between eternity and time no longer has the same bearing, and that’s why I’m so drawn to this word, which I think will be useful. Péguy’s “internal” is such an intersection, and one name for this intersection, [54:00] this new way of understanding eternity and this new way of experiencing time, might be “perspective.”

See, so the idea of essence undergoes an absolutely fundamental transformation once essence ceases to be a stable configuration and becomes—the stable configuration structuring appearances becomes… Yeah, I’ll back up: essence ceases to be a stable configuration or the stable form that structures appearance and becomes a perspective that structures “apparitions.” [Pause] [55:00] The point of view is the apex of the cone; the apparitions are the circle, hyperbola, parabola, ellipse—these aren’t appearances. That’s what I was trying to say.

In my opinion, this might ultimately be—but we don’t really have time—this is where I’d ask Comtesse, but think about it for next time. Personally, see, I don’t believe that what… See, I’m on board for saying that death isn’t what Proust is worried about when it comes to what I’m calling his third aspect of time. But I do believe that it’s something related to death, the fact… either the fact of—in a way, it amounts to the same thing—getting older or dying early. Once again, it feels like [56:00] I have my thumb on the scale—don’t take it from me; Péguy has the same problem. One of Péguy’s main concerns is that some die young, while others die very old. That might not strike you as all that ground-breaking, but go see what he does with that—it all depends on where he takes it. He notes that Joan of Arc died young… she died young, but other saints were 90 when they died. Alright, so what? Whether you die young or you die old, what does it matter?

At the end of the day, what bothers him is this—and I claim that this comes up again in Proust—dying prematurely, dying without having finished one’s work, comes up time and time again in Proust. Even when he’s no longer a young man, he thinks it would be a premature death if he hasn’t yet finished his work or if—[57:00] even more so—if he doesn’t yet know what he wants to do. Okay. And on the other hand, he’s surrounded by people who… [Deleuze doesn’t finish his sentence] And here’s where he discovers something incredible, and at this point I want to tie in the two interventions I found so interesting. See, I’m emphasizing the importance of this discovery—which didn’t happen with any one person, but covers a span of history—time has an interior. Here again, you’ll say, sure, fine, but there’s only one way to test an idea; we need proof. I claim that time has an interior.

Well, alright, once again, that seems straightforward and yet we have to wade through a tidal wave of possible misinterpretations. [58:00] The most immediate misleading interpretation would be to think that time is within us—the idea of lived time. But that’s not what this is. Saying that time has an inside isn’t the same as saying that time is inside us. Or, at minimum, that would be a way to help us understand—this is my response to what you were saying about Bergsonian duration—could be that in order to wrap our heads around the seemingly simple formula, “time has an inside,” to explain what that means, we might have to get there by passing through the concept of lived time, the time within each of us, because that does help us distinguish… The time inside each of us—that’s our first way of delineating [59:00] external time, clock time.

Which is the route Bergson himself takes, so that wouldn’t be off base. On countless occasions, Bergson writes—what is duration? It’s our internal time. So I can’t say that you’re wrong, and yet, it’s worse than if you were wrong. I mean that, obviously, if you reduce Bergson down to that, then Bergson deserves the way he’s been treated. He doesn’t have a leg to… know what I mean? Again, when you have an idea, what do you when it’s something new? You have to go through a ton of degrees; you really have to… you have to take language, you can’t… you have to find openings, you have to make your own tunnels.

Thus, he offers us internal time—he discusses it a lot [60:00]; as early as his first book, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, it was the most important point. But the further he delves into it, the more he recognizes that something else is going on: obviously, it’s fine to talk about our internal sense of time, since that allows us to distinguish clock time [pause], but it only roughly gestures at something much deeper—it isn’t that time is inside us; it’s that we are inside of time. In other words, time is an interiority, but it isn’t ours—it isn’t our interiority. Certainly, at a superficial level, we have an internal sense of time. Bergson is a psychologist—which isn’t a mark against him; he’s a great psychologist. [61:00] He could have very easily stopped there, and many Bergsonians do, eh? Because they haven’t taken it far enough. Oh, well. But…

There’s something inside time. It almost sounds like a horror film—what is inside time? It sounds like it’s swallowing up us, like it’s game over. It isn’t that time dwells inside of us. It’s we who live insofar as we are inside of time. Which seems to put Bergson at odds with Kant. And there is some conflict, something fundamentally anti-Kantian about Bergson: [62:00] that much is true. At the same time, there’s something no less fundamental which he owes to Kant. Besides, opposition can only exist between those who have at least a little in common—otherwise there is no opposition, since there’s no chance of them running into each other.

Because again, let’s go back in history, back to Pascal. He was the first to demonstrate it, even if he himself never, ever said it—apart from a few outstanding later texts, in what’s taken to be Kant’s last unpublished work, Opus postumum, but the issue never gets resolved. In The Critique of Pure Reason, he offers a fantastic definition of time: “the form of interiority.” “The form of interiority.” Yet if you know anything about Kant, you know that he doesn’t [63:00] mean by that “my interiority,” since Kant’s definition comes from a so-called transcendental perspective. “Transcendental”—even if you aren’t familiar, you can already tell what that means, that it’s different from the empirical self, the psychological self. The transcendental subject is a non-psychological subject.

The form of interiority. Form of interiority. Never has anything been so revolutionary. How so? You can see his line of reasoning; Kant points out that time cannot be defined by succession since… he’s already off to a strong start. Simultaneity [64:00]—this is also similar to Bergson, another parallel, another little bit that Bergson owes to Kant. Simultaneity is no less temporal than succession. There’s a tendency to think about simultaneity as if it were spatial because things occur at the same time, but “at the same time” is a reference to time; “meanwhile” is a mode of time. Succession is one after the other, not at the same time. Alright, that’s one of time’s modes, but simultaneity is a mode of time just as much as succession is. So you can’t define time as succession; succession is one mode of time among others. It’s back to the drawing board. You can’t characterize space in terms of simultaneity on the one hand and time in terms of succession on the other. Right. [65:00] Kant defines space as the form of exteriority and time as the form of interiority.

That being said, the form of exteriority is inside the subject just as much as the form of interiority. So, is a form of interiority. Perhaps Bergson doesn’t want the inside of time to be a form. So he has to deal with Kant. Maybe he doesn’t want the inside to be a form. But that doesn’t change what he owes to Kant; through Kant, he discovered that time only exists in and through [66:00] time’s “interiority,” and if we’ve gone beyond psychology, it’s because it’s not time which is inside us, but we who are inside time.

What is time’s interiority? Inside of time—this is basically where I’m headed with Proust, but we should not… I know I’m jumping around, but what I’m trying to explore is this notion that has an inside because—imagine, we’re being taken into a gaping maw, time’s interior. You’re inside of time as if you were in its bowels, where you couldn’t find—you can’t tell where it begins or ends. And what is this interior? Bergson devotes his entire career to describing it, and he never describes it as something tragic or ominous because, ultimately, [this interior] is fundamentally musical; [67:00] fundamentally, it will be the flow of music, or however you want to put it.

But it couldn’t be any more tragic—at any rate, this is how I approached it last time with Proust, for whom there is also an “inside of time,” and now we get to another aspect of Proust. Not regarding “point of view,” the way he contributes to the broader attempt to assimilate essence into perspective, the revolution surrounding the perspective of essence. Now we come to something else, another revolutionary aspect to Proust’s approach to time: the way he approaches the idea of time’s interiority, such that one lives within time—within this interior, you don’t have the same shape as you do in space and in time. [68:00] Do you see why I added “in time”?—Yes, one second, you can chime in as soon as I’ve finished, and then I really have to run over to admin. They’re going to close, so we’ll save your comment for when we get back after our break, alright? — Anyway.

And that’s what I was saying, his response is: you occupy time’s interior in a position of excess, excessive with regard to your internal time, the time within you. Inside time’s interior, within time, you occupy an excessive position, i.e., one incommensurate, first of all, with your position in space, then with clock time, [69:00] [and] thirdly, with your inner time. Within time’s interior, you are sublime, in a way. If you’re stupid, you’re sublimely stupid, [laughs] if you’re ugly, you’re sublimely ugly. Why? Because it’s as if you were distended, you are distended, as if you were infinitely stretched out so that the interior of time spans hundreds and hundreds of years. And you stride across these hundreds and hundreds of years spanning time’s interior, spanning the sublime, as if you were on stilts, [70:00] striding atop stilts from which you could fall at any moment.

You know what that means? “Falling at any moment”—that’s death! Ultimately, that’s why death is fundamentally bound up with time’s interiority, since death is like falling. If we say that you dwell within time’s interior, an immense domain—Proust calls it an immensity—that you climb on stilts, death is the ever-present possibility of you suddenly tumbling into… [Deleuze doesn’t finish his sentence]. Then, this immensity is what, for Proust, I’m calling the Whole of time—time’s interior. But it’s not to be privileged over and above other dimensions [71:00]. That’s why I’d argue that there are three dimensions of time in Proust. [First] there’s the dimension of lost time, the dimension of time regained—what Comtesse referred to as the eternities of life—and then there’s the inside of time, which is not privileged and is defined by this excess.

Comtesse: And yet in the eternity—in Time Regained—in the eternity of life, Proust explicitly says in Time Regained that, through experiencing the eternity of life, such eternity itself renders death indifferent, [Deleuze: Sure, sure] that is, it makes death like… Since he distinguishes the indistinct names of the fantastic and the colossal from words and things, [72:00] from signs. And so he says it’s just a word. Death is a word. [Deleuze: Of course, of course] What I’d like to know is: what then is the relationship between regained time and what you’re directly calling a monster, rearing its head—the Whole?

Deleuze: Well, I guess I like monsters. I understand your question, but it starts to get rather complicated, because otherwise… I’d say you’re absolutely right: death does not matter at all—death as such is unimportant. However, what is incredibly important is what triggers it, this infinite tumble into time’s interior, where I fall [73:00] off my stilts. What’s important, then, what matters is this fall, this fall—which you could depict pictorially, etc. That’s why I add a third moment, because… a third moment in Proust’s work. What I’m concerned with, where you and I differ, is that ultimately there is lost time, and then there is what he calls time in its pure state. [Interruption of the recording]

Part 2

… But when it comes to time in its pure state, I’d say it can take two forms. There are two forms of it. In one form, it is the infinite swell of time’s interior, and in the other it’s the form of, of, of… of life’s eternity such as you’ve defined it. Is that fair to say? I’m sure that works, right?

A student: It seems to me that [74:00] the insistence on time regained…

Deleuze: Hold on, we have to… I’m afraid that I have to leave, or else…

The student: I just want to say that it’s a problem in Pascal… they have to be isomorphic… [comments hard to make out]

Deleuze: [Deleuze answers as he makes his way to the door] In Pascal’s case, but not when it comes to what we’re talking about, not when it comes to Proust… Alright. Behave yourselves. I’ll be right back. [Interruption of the recording]

… Uh, still, that’s interesting because it brings us to our next point. You’ll have to—you’ll have to remind me that I’ve already talked about Pascal regarding the concept of perspective, eh? Because otherwise, I’ll forget what I already covered, and so, tell me if I repeat something we went over the week before—[75:00] remind me, okay, because… yes, yes, yes, real quick—keep it brief, right, because we don’t have a lot of time.

Student: [Comment is hard to make out—he mentions Deleuze’s use of “psychic cores” vis à vis time’s interior; other students are talking next to Deleuze while he’s trying to understand what this student is telling him] [76:00]

Deleuze: I don’t know. [Laughter] I don’t know. You’re asking me a question… I don’t have an answer for you. No, I’m not ashamed to say it; I don’t claim to know everything or have an answer for everything. I don’t know. I’ll remind you, I’ll go over the basic principle, because it’s so… generally speaking, the one asking the question is responsible for the answer, because they’re the only ones who know what they mean. If you’re asking, “Come on, what are you trying to get at with the interiority of time?” Well, among other things, my defense would be that it’s a complicated idea; we’re slowly working it out. I can’t simply pull out a definition for something so monstrous, [77:00] so awful; I cannot… so, I cannot give you an answer, because that’s what we’re doing. We’re trying, we’re trying to get a rough sense for what the inside of time might be. It’s not as easy as just saying, well, there’s the outside of time and then there’s the inside, right?

As for what you threw in about, I don’t know, psychic explosions? Psychic cores? I’m not exactly sure what a “psychic core” is; I don’t really know. I don’t have an answer for you. Besides, see, if that’s what we’re doing, if that brings you… You’re thinking of it as a “psychic core”; I’m calling it the “inside of time.” In place of what I’m calling time’s interiority, you’re calling it a “psychic core.” But I don’t know what to do with that. Yeah, I don’t know what to tell you, because I really don’t know. I don’t know. [78:00]

The student: Excuse me [remarks hard to make out] for my culture… [remarks hard to make out]

Deleuze: Ah, I see, in the context of your culture…

The student: … when you talk about meditation from a western perspective… meditation, elevation, psychologists [remarks hard to make out] they say that before meditation, there’s a mathematical process… for explosion…

Deleuze: For what?

The student: In any case, for explosion… there is…

Deleuze: For…? [Someone repeats: for explosion] For explosion? But I didn’t mention explosion; you’re the one that brought it up! [Laughter] What?

The student: What are we, if not an explosion? [Laughter]

Deleuze: If not an explosion? Plenty of things, I’d say! [Laughter] I mean, you say explosion, [79:00] but I could just as well say that we are, that we are… it reminds me of something I saw saying we were blades of grass. Why are we explosions rather than something else? It seems fine. I don’t have a problem with it, but it doesn’t seem necessary. When I look at us, the idea that we are explosions, sure, we might be black holes, who knows. There are so, so many things we could be.

Which means that it isn’t about your culture; it’s that you’re interested in explosion. As far as that goes, I don’t know. Well, my hope is that you’ll find what we’re doing helpful when it comes to your own problem, eh? Yes, you’re obsessed, an exploding core, yeah, that’s fine. It’s tricky because that’s actually pretty metaphorical, no? I mean, I guess it means something in physics—an exploding [80:00] core—but outside of physics, of course, a black hole is also a concept in astronomy, but we can’t do anything with that. Again, there’s a lot going on; we have to proceed very carefully. Personally, I’ve never experienced myself as an explosion, you know?

A student: It makes a lot of noise…

Deleuze: That’s interesting, yes, it’s too loud. [Laughter] No, it’s actually interesting, because it… it really is interesting…

The first student: Pardon me—if we start from [the idea that]… everything is possible, if everything has a chance of happening in space and on earth…

Deleuze: Everything is possible… sure.

The student: The sun is always exploding…

Deleuze: Yes, the sun—there’s a connection to be drawn between the sun and explosions, sure, but…

The student: … and then, what Pascal says, he saw explosions… [81:00]

Deleuze: Ah, you’ve already gone too far. Pascal according to you; to my knowledge, Pascal isn’t all that interested in explosions. [Laughs] I mean, even when it comes to physics—what he’s worried about in physics is something completely different from explosions. Explosions present certain problems for physics, but it’s not what Pascal is worried about.

The student: If we say that… [some word ending in -sion], I don’t agree.

Deleuze: You don’t agree with…? [Laughter]

The student: (…) -sion.

Deleuze: With what?

Several people (around Deleuze): Fission, fusion… fission?

Deleuze: He must mean fission. Uh… you don’t agree with it? Well, okay. [Laughter] No, that’s tricky… no, no… yes, I… well, I don’t know, I think that’s… you see… again, you’re back to disagreeing with… It’s hard to not agree with someone. That’s what’s difficult, right, [82:00] really, I don’t know.

Comtesse: Does… does—based on the notion of perspective you talked about earlier—doesn’t maintaining this idea of perspective, as Marcel Proust does, amount to the same thing as a narrator with the author’s point of view with classical novels, the author in a Balzacian novel?

Deleuze: No… Yes, yes, I see what you’re saying…

Comtesse: In other words, Proust’s criticism of Balzac is precisely that… the allegedly fake life of the author in novels, in classic fiction—he uses the expression to specifically counter… against… “point of view,” the idea that the author had a perspective on the world and [83:00] the idea that, the idea that literature was, according to that point of view, the expression of a real person, with a social role expressed through the character as an archetype, and that’s what a perspective is. But isn’t the narrator precisely what ruptures this understanding of point of view, that is, ruptures the author’s artificial life, that is, the illusory life he’s created, assuming that literature expresses life in the world, but as Proust puts it, the author only ever raises the undead, or corpses? Put another way, the question concerns the relationship between the creator’s perspective in classic novels, which had already begun to crack with Flaubert—and especially with Balzac—and what Proust calls, [84:00] when it comes to the narrator, what he calls the reflective power of the optical gaze, which captures something other than a point of view.

Deleuze: Yeah. I feel like—sorry—I still feel like, “what he calls” it—what was… tell me again what he called it because it struck me as an odd thing for Proust to say. It might be true; you said Proust called what kind of power…? Tell me again what you said. It was pretty strange—yeah.

Comtesse: I think it was a passage from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower…

Deleuze: No, just repeat what you said…

Comtesse: … he calls it the reflective power of the optical gaze, which he distinguishes from…

Deleuze: That’s so strange…

Comtesse: … from a perspective still rooted in the reflected spectacle, as he puts it…

Deleuze: Yeah… Do me a favor and get me the reference for that. It’s not that I doubt you. It’s just that [85:00] when I hear that, I think, wow, that wording is bizarre. True, everyone holds onto different details; every reader picks up on… It sounds weird to me. Find it for me… Hold on, I’ll make a note, right, because… you said he called it power…

Comtesse: So, there are two pieces on this, his critique of Balzac…

Deleuze: No, no, what I need—do me a kindness and find me the page numbers, okay? “The reflective power…”?

Comtesse: Reflective power as opposed to the reflected spectacle, which would imply…

Deleuze: No, the line from your quote… “the reflective power of the gaze…”

Comtesse: “… of the optical gaze.”[7]

Deleuze: “… of the optical gaze.” That’s so intriguing… I’ll give you my two cents, but I don’t want us to get caught up on it. Yeah, I can see what you’re getting at. Yes, you could say that. Only, I’m not sure if I… so that we don’t lose touch with the text … whether I have [86:00] a passage where he says something like—this isn’t a direct quote—essences are points of view? To answer you, I’d have to find it. I don’t have one on hand, but I’ll look. You make me want to… anyway. But obviously, you could say… as I see it, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch because… we’d have to say that there are two… In a Balzacian novel, even if you can talk about the novelist’s perspective, that’s very different from what I was getting at, that is, the transformation of essence into a point of view… except that, again it’s so complicated; your question is too complicated for us to get into right now… because, I’m wondering, alright, he breaks with the classical novel. Which classical novel? Does he give homage to Balzac? Where did he think [87:00] Balzac was right on the money… or where did he think Balzac was ahead of his time? Regardless, his project is related to Balzac and doesn’t come down to a simple objection to Balzac; he holds on to certain aspects of Balzac’s work.

All I’d say is that clearly these two ways of understanding points of view, I think, if… My response to what you’ve just said is that they’d be two completely different understandings of perspective. There’s the ordinary sort of perspective when I say: there’s a point of view that exists in Euclidean space; that’s how one might define perspective. A point of view in Euclidean space, right? But it’s totally… and that’s not to say there isn’t a world of essences, essences understood here as persistent characters. In that sense, I’d argue, Proust would have every right to say, I don’t know if he [88:00] says as much with regard to Balzacian novels, you can see how characters are treated like essences. Moreover, Balzac himself uses the term, “[social] species.” They’re species, which doesn’t mean that they’re general. They’re species of the same branch; Vautrin is a species, right?

Well, so I’d claim, alright, what Proust takes issue with might be—might be, tentatively since I’ll have to go look over his work to see if there are passages I’ve missed—on the one hand, the insistence upon characters as essences and, second, the concept of point of view as a kind of perspective in Euclidean space. Right. That wouldn’t prevent Proust [89:00]—and at the same time some unrelated authors, because I haven’t gotten into… at the same time, I’m playing fast and loose, you might think I like this pairing, but I find it repulsive—seeing as Henry James and Proust have absolutely, positively nothing to do with each other. Nonetheless, they do pursue a similar theme: a post-Balzacian form of novel, distinguished with regard to perspective—the 20th century novel, right? So it’s… I’d argue that we’re dealing with a completely different understanding of perspective.

In my view, it’s because Proust’s characters are no longer essences. What are they, then? They’re… I think they’re precisely… they’re temporal perspectives, and that’s what completely disqualifies them from being essences. [90:00] This has nothing to do with Henry James, but in Henry James there’s just as much of a revolution regarding the status of the character. No, they’re like temporal perspectives; Charlus is a temporal perspective. Everything we said about excess… Characters no longer are, or correspond to, essences, and on the other hand, essence turns into perspective, but in a totally new sense of the term: perspective in the sense of projective geometry, or “analysis situs.” But this all might not be… I’d have to… we’ll come back to it later… if that’s alright…

Well, listen… Well, we won’t have… I just want to back up for a minute or two; it’s—once again—in order to set the stage for the problem at hand, these two figures will come in handy later [91:00]. Well, not figures of time, rather, but two indirect images of time. Everything leading up to this point—now I’m combining everything we’ve said about time, and it leads in two different directions. Again, what I’m calling an indirect image of time, is an image of time that isn’t quite a time-image because it isn’t direct, and because—it isn’t direct because it’s folded into (or stems from—either way) because it’s folded into the composition of movement-images—Thus, whether it’s a part of the composition of movement-images or stems from their composition, it’s an image… it’s not a time-image. And yet, it already reveals a great deal about… you can see how it still forces us to think about time. [92:00]

Because what are these two images of indirect time? Well, in order to keep—I’m back to what I’ve been worried about all year—my classification of signs, I’d argue that these indirect images of time describe veritable chronosigns. Alright, we have two chronosigns. I don’t have good words for them. The first, we saw, is the interval, or the variable present. I’m holding onto this concept since—even if Comtesse chimes in to complain that it doesn’t say all there is to say about the present since there are instances of an invariable present—I either don’t think such instances are fit for the job, or else we’re going to run into them later; maybe they’ll show up as a part of direct time, who knows? All I can say is that I’m holding onto it: the interval as a variable present, the interval of time. [93:00] How is it linked to movement? The interval, as variable present, gives us this or that unit of movement. Thus, it’s derived from units of movement; it maps onto periods of movement. That’s how it’s related to movement. The interval, or the variable present, the interval, or the variable present—I’m just getting my terms together—has an endpoint. [Interruption of the recording]

… we didn’t do it, we can’t do everything. But generally speaking, it’s sped up by its vectorization. It’s an accel-… it’s a… it’s an interval, an accelerated variable present. What occupies it? Well… what does it comprise? Well, this isn’t necessarily the case, right, remember—I’m just putting things in groups—it doesn’t have to, but it might consist in a so-called [94:00] jump, or qualitative leap. [Pause] Alright. The accelerated variable present, then, would be the production of a new quality. It’s the passage from one quality to another, the emergence of new qualities. Here, if it makes you happy—this one’s for you—as Eisenstein puts it: compression and explosion. Ahhhh.

I claim that the endpoint [of the interval/variable present] is the moment—which is rather ambiguous. See, at a certain point in our analysis, I could initially say, yes, the interval lies between two moments. [95:00] The variable present is the interval between two moments. In that case, the variable present or interval implies the notion of the moment, because it’s an interval between two moments, but only in an abstract way, in abstracto, and not concretely. How so? It doesn’t presuppose that there are actually two moments; it presupposes the concept of the moment, the dual concept of the moment, the binary concept of the moment. While, concretely, it’s the other way around: the variable present leads us to the moment via its acceleration [96:00].

As a result, concretely, the present isn’t an interval between two moments; it’s the qualitative leap characterizing one of the moments in a new capacity, i.e., which makes one and only one of the moments concrete. I’d like to go back over the whole problem of the moment, because I feel like I’m onto something here. Which is that the qualitative leap… see, there’s no contradiction, since you might object, “if you treat the qualitative leap as an interval, you already posit two moments, since it’s the interval between two moments.” I’d agree, that’s true, if you’re thinking of “moment” in abstract terms. But in concrete terms—as it should be—in concrete terms, the variable present is what [97:00] moves toward the moment as a limit, toward the second moment, a moment raised to the second power, or we might as well say, to the n-th power. And as a moment raised to the n-th power, it becomes concrete. In other words, the accelerated variable present is the production of the moment, the production of the concrete moment, if you treat the moment as m2 or mn.

What does that mean? It’s that—again I’m paraphrasing, going back over things to refresh your memory—Eisenstein knew what he was doing, really knew what he was doing when it came to his images. We might consider the famous scene—as quickly as I can—of the cream separator, [98:00], right, in The General Line. There is a present: the empty pipe of the separator.[8] The whole village is waiting, and what is produced? A new quality, the first drop, the first drop coming out of the separator. I’d argue that the present moment is the separator’s transition, with its empty pipe, and we’ve put, we’ve put the material… What I’m trying to get across is that the variable present is made up of all sorts of presents. I’d argue, for example, that we aren’t explosions, but a multiplicity of variable presents. So, there’s that. And then… alright. The production of new qualities.

So, we have a variable present, which you experience [99:00] in the gap, [e.g.] between two heartbeats, if you think, when you are… if you think, “Oh… what if the next one doesn’t happen?” Ha! That’s pretty dark! It’d be funny if I collapsed as if… mine stopped beating. [Pause] Well, now I’ve forgotten where I was going with that, because… [Laughter] see, well, I’m waiting, I’m waiting for the first drop of milk. I’m waiting for it to come back: the variable present. It speeds up, it accelerates; after I run, my heart beats really quickly—that’s a variable present. That’s what the variable present is—in this case, the variable present is your pulse. C’mon, is this separator going to start? A variable present. The first drop forms: the interval appears here as the qualitative jump [100:00], a qualitative leap. The emergence of a new quality. [Pause]

Thus, it’s the transition from one moment to the next. I’d describe it as the secret behind the qualitative leap. The transition from one moment to the next, the transition from one quality to another, necessarily takes the new quality [pause] to the next degree, raises the moment to a higher power. And when its power is raised, the moment is actualized as a moment [101:00], otherwise it never manifests as a moment. In other words, the moment is like speed—moments are always m2, or mn. I think Eisenstein was well aware of this given how the milk is depicted, the moment it’s formed by the selector is such that it isn’t merely drawn out but also raised to a higher level. What I mean is that the passage between qualities is never simply a material change; it’s also a formal change. The formal transition is what raises the moment [102:00] to a higher power.

Indeed, with Eisenstein’s images, the second power is when the running milk is replaced by water fountains, and the moment is elevated to a new power. What power this time? The power of luminescence, according to Eisenstein’s commentary, is replaced by—it happens as a sequence, but bear in mind that it’s about the moment; these are the powers of the moment—then replaced by fire, by fireworks. At which point, Eisenstein claims, it’s about color, it reaches the power of color, then by words flashing across the screen, [103:00] flashing numbers and letters, another formal transition: the image moves from the visible to the legible. We can’t see the milk any longer; we don’t even see the water; even the fireworks are gone—now we’re reading figures. The passage from the visible to the legible is a qualitative leap, but a formal qualitative leap. I’m saying that the variable present—which is the only thing I’m worried about—with the variable present, there is necessarily a qualitative leap, but in this qualitative leap, moments are always successively raised to higher and higher powers [104:00]. We could express it mathematically: m2, m3, m4, a series of potentializations. This is what I’d describe as the first aspect of time, and I’d call our first sign of time “the leap.” [Pause] I’m not too thrilled with that, because a “leap” isn’t a sign… a jump, a leap… but for the time being, I don’t have a better alternative. I’d like to find a word that more specifically refers to a type of sign, but oh well…

Our second aspect—the next chronosign was, you’ll recall, not the interval but the Whole of time. Or time’s Whole, since “Whole of time” could be time in general, which is off the mark. Time’s Whole was related to the movement as a whole, [105:00] and we described it not as a variable present but as the immensity of the future and the past. What does that mean? Well, as we discussed, it’s… Again, it could be a lot of things, just like in the first category, there were a lot of things on the table, but to summarize… we’ll keep it tight—I could go into more detail, but we’ve already covered it. With so many things going on and all; you can’t cover everything at once. There are different ways of understanding time’s Whole, just as there are different ways of describing the variable present.

In brief, just so that we can understand what time’s Whole is, I’ll just say that, well, it’s the great organic spiral. Again, I’m referring to Eisenstein since I have cinema in mind, but it’s the great spiral whereby… a logarithmic spiral open at both ends, [Pause] Eisenstein takes it up, [106:00] but all he does with it is return to well-worn conventions. [Pause] Either it’s [a spiral] or… one of you sent me a wonderful text by Delaunay, a contemporary… not our contemporary, but Eisenstein’s—right, Delaunay’s well-known helix. Time’s Whole, see, is related to the circle. But the circle is a closed shape. The circle… it’s never a circle… it’s never a circle; time isn’t a stable configuration, [so] it’s never a circle, it’s a semi-circle. What? See, you might say that since… it’s a question of personal preference—it’s up to you, right… there are a lot of moving parts here, you included—you might call it a spiral, time’s spiral, the spiral of time. [107:00]

You could call it the great helix, Delaunay’s helix, and between the helix and the spiral… You see… People who look at Delaunay’s paintings, there’s a moment where he discovers… when he discovers the helix, Delaunay is thrilled to pieces, and in the writing of his that I’ve seen, he says, finally! He had two main projects: to elevate painting, he countered cubism for being ill-equipped for the monumental. Leger makes the same argument; both make a huge leap towards restoring painting’s… if you like, here I, I, I’m moving rather quickly—cubism broke with easel painting, but what does it mean to break with easel painting, [108:00] if not to attaining the monumental, right? Well, according to the cubists, neither Delaunay nor Leger were able to capture the monumental. Interesting, so what’s going on? Painting has to reclaim the monumental in order to restore its contact with architecture. Delaunay’s first major triumph is when he uncovers possibilities for monumental painting, and it’s through what look like circles—only you have to introduce time into the monumental. Now, I promise, I’m not exaggerating… believe me. But like I asked Comtesse, right, you might respond: “show me a passage.” Maybe I’ll bring them in next time, if I remember to.

He uses the helix to introduce time into painting. [109:00] As if… you get a very fine example of a helix in Delaunay, where you have half-circles on either side of a vertical line, with all of these color effects, reaching the point where there’s an identity between light and color and time. Alright, but none of that matters. Look, I can call it a spiral, I can call it a helix, but why bring up Delaunay? Specifically because of what’s at stake in one of his terms, a term his friends coined to describe his work: simultanism.

And simultanism, far from overcoming time, [110:00] is the discovery of time’s Whole. Simultaneity—the simultaneity of what? The simultaneity of light and color, the simultaneity between different colors, etc., which injects time into the painting, following the helix. The helix is the immensity of the future and the past, and I might define simultaneity as the immensity of the future and the past. Above all, simultaneity is not the variable present. It’s the spiral, the helix, time’s Whole which gives us an idea of simultaneity. Time’s Whole is simultaneity, and that’s what, coincidently, Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars try to achieve in literature, with simultaneous poetry. [111:00] As I see it, this simultanism refers specifically to the immensity of the future and the past, that is, the spiral of time, time’s Whole; it’s exactly what I’ve been referring to as the inside of time.

The inside of time is the spiral, the helix of colors, [Pause] simultanism, the [112:00] simultaneity of the future and past, and it’s within the interiority of time that we take on incommensurable proportions, incommensurable dimensions, etc. Moreover, in the writing of Delaunay’s that was shared with me, [at one point] he says, where he opposes the light of the sun and the light of the moon. And it’s great, it’s a lovely text, and it’s lovely because he says: ah, well, see, the sun is the Whole. The Whole is the light of the sun.

That’s simultanism. Whereas the moon—this is great, because it’s what ensures transitions. [113:00] The word comes back again and again. The moon deals with transition. Moonlight is about transition. As a result, the moon would be the variable present, while the sun would be simultanism… [Deleuze doesn’t finish this sentence]

So, obviously, at the same time, it gets complicated, you understand. These periods, they’re wonderful, you have to… and then, for us, our task, when we think about something… it’s, that’s where it gets complicated… Delaunay was furious when he was compared to the Futurists, and you can see why: it’s plain to see why. It’s because even though the Futurists are also striving towards simultanism, even though they also value simultaneity, the Futurists understand simultaneity as maximum speed. Nonsense! Awful nonsense, as far as [114:00] Delaunay is concerned! For them, it’s the height of kinetic movement; simultaneity is what results from a movement occurring at an infinite speed. Thus, it’s maximum kinetic movement. In other words, for [Futurists], simultaneity is the limit of the variable present, [Pause] whereas for Delaunay, it’s totally different: it isn’t maximum kinetic movement but the totality of the movement of color, or of light. [Pause] It’s the totality of movement-light, or of light-movement, [Pause] and so, it’s… [115:00] folks never hate each other as much as when they use the same terminology. Yeah, well, anyway.

Here’s the payoff. It all comes together quite nicely. See, I’m putting a lot of emphasis on the idea that the inside of time is really the same thing as the immensity of simultanism. Why is it the same thing? Well, that’s why I needed to bring in Proust, because it’s within the inside of time that we can take on these absolutely incommensurable proportions, that we can become giants, that is… anyway. And, I’d argue that time’s Whole affords a glimpse at both figures—there are a million ways in which you can understand it—both figures of the sublime such as we’ve distinguished them. There’s the figure of the mathematic sublime, [116:00] which I think is rather close to Delaunay’s style of simultanism. But there’s also dynamic sublime, [Pause] which I’d argue is a lot closer to something radically different from Delaunay: expressionism. [Pause] Well, anyway, all that is so much to say that… we should be able to lay everything out.

So, moving forward just a bit… I’ll stop here before I get into it, fine. We find ourselves with another problem: movement-images [117:00] don’t only come from chronosigns, i.e., from indirect images of time. Crucially, they also come from different shapes of thought. Indirect forms, not thought-images. They aren’t images; they aren’t thought-hyphen-images; they’re images—indirect images—of thought.

It’s no surprise that there’s a fundamental relationship between figures of time, images of time, and figures of thought. Well, it’s… so, we’ll need to do the same thing for thought. The composition of movement-images ought to give us figures of thought. We’ve only accomplished half of our task, that is, we’ve covered figures of… [118:00] images of time. But figures of thought… my two chronosigns… here, let’s find a word, we’ll call them—for the sake, for the sake of being technical and in order to fill out our table of signs—we’ll call them, following the Greek, noosigns, noosigns, n-o-o-signs. Thus we have chronosigns and noosigns.

Chronosigns—obviously I’m not satisfied with these terms, we’ll have to find other words for them—include jumps or leaps on the one hand, and on the other hand, the great spiral or helix. That’s a good one, because it isn’t like any other shape [119:00]. When you… when you come across a big spiral or helix, there’s no mistaking it—it’s a monumental sign. It’s the sign of the monumental, the sign of the sublime.

Then when it comes to noosigns—we’ll also need to figure out the noosigns. I’m thinking, okay, the shape of thought—what does that mean? Well, it means the way things are represented, as someone put it: that’s what it means to think. [Pause] We aren’t trying to figure out what it means to think, or what thinking signifies. We’re asking what shape or guise does thought take? [Pause] [120:00]

Still, you might think that’s an infinite subject… no, we’re not going to go there; we’ll tether it to our running preoccupation with cinema. Let’s come at it from the point of view of aesthetics. By necessity, we aren’t going to look to philosophers for help. They aren’t… they have… they might have… no, they don’t have any privileged insight here, you know? No more so than anyone else. We think as best we can. By that I mean that each of us thinks, not only using a particular method, but our way of thinking has a certain shape, and you can’t think without thereby engendering… this shape of thought, which I’ll call a “way of thinking,” isn’t at all the same thing as a method. Each of us has a way of thinking or not thinking.

A way of thinking—what exactly is a way of [121:00] thinking? So, there are different ways of thinking? You might have thought that thinking was… Yes! There are different ways of thinking! Hence why I believe there’s no possible common language between people who have different ways of thinking. Yet, what’s funny is that: maybe they’re different ways of thinking from different cultures, maybe they’re different ways of thinking within the same culture—nope, nothing in common. What I mean is that they don’t line up; what I’m calling a way of thinking doesn’t hinge on differences in civilization, culture, class, society. What does it depend on, then? Well, perhaps we’ll make some progress if we can manage to answer that question, but we still have to figure out what a way of thinking is. Ways of thinking, ways of thinking… [122:00] I’d claim, okay, [Pause] we’re relying on… ways of thinking, I need to draw them movement-images. Or else it’s cheating, right? We got to this point via our discussion earlier, on account of our two images of time, in particular.

I see ways of thinking—I see people whose way of thinking, right, is… —this is rather vague—is labor. Nothing wrong with that; everything has its pros and cons, you know? There are some brilliant people for whom thought is hard work, and there are idiots for whom thought is hard work—that’s not the point. Meanwhile, there are also people for whom—they might not be the same ones—thought is a battle, [123:00] a struggle. It’s fighting in the dark. Ah, but it’s more than just semantics, right, whether it’s labor or whether it’s fighting in the dark. Anyway.

But then what is the darkness? It doesn’t make sense for thought to fight in the dark if there isn’t anything dark about thought. [Pause] It’s complicated. This way of thinking implies that something about thought is capable of preventing us from thinking. People often say: “Well, I can’t think straight because of something outside.” But now we can’t think because of something in thought… well, hey… That’s very possible. In that case, thought would really be a fight, but a [124:00] fight against what? A fight with itself. Hmm, now the plot thickens. It would be a fight with itself. Thus, I couldn’t call it a duel, because a duel is something else. No, thinking would be such a particular aspect of a duel that “duel” wouldn’t capture it. Its fight in the dark—thought would ultimately be a battle. Why does it need to be a battle? Why would it need to be labor?

Well, I’ll tell you the secret: it’s because it starts over. It restarts. What’s the restart? It’s destined toto start over, [Pause] [125:00] forced to repeat what has already been thought. [Pause] Wow, this is getting more and more obscure. I mean, at least I know what to call it, to indicate where thought circles back to something that’s already been thought, and emerges as thought because… Thought perpetually referring to presuppositions, characterized by its circling back to what it’s presupposed—hence the struggle, the battle—thank goodness [I have the word]; I’ll call it a “countermark.” The countermark would be our first noosign. Check the dictionary to see what a countermark [126:00] refers to. I won’t go over it; I’ll get into it next time, okay? You’ll see right away. An obvious example of this way of thinking is that of dialectics. What I’ve been describing is the dialectic.

And why… [Pause] Obviously, we all know that the dialectic is labor insofar as it’s the labor of the negative in thought, and we know that the dialectic is, uh, [pause] combat qua opposition—the struggle between opposites and the labor of the negative, right. But actually, actually, I’d argue that the countermark is the true sign of the dialectic. How so? Because look [127:00]— I could almost leave it at that. I’m just scratching the surface so that we can get into it next time—Thought has always dealt with an already; an already what? The “already” that thought has already thought is known as the principle of identity, [Pause] and this presupposition of thought is expressed—it’s really the presupposition of thought—it’s famously expressed as “A is A.” A is A. [Pause] What does dialectics say? Only a moron—I mean no one; no one would even consider—you’d have to be a special kind of moron [128:00] to expect dialectics to say that “A is not-A.” Why? Lewis Carroll might say A is not-A in order to be funny; that’s even what we call non-sense. But Lewis Carroll’s genius does not reside in his being dialectical.

When it comes to philosophers, unless they’re trying to be funny, no one will argue that A is not-A; it never occurs to Hegel or to Marx to say that “A is not-A.” What they do say is infinitely more profound, albeit less surprising. What Hegel says is that “A is not not-A.” [Pause] [129:00] You might think, so what, Hegel, what’s the big deal? [Laughs] This claim, that “A is not not-A,” is proof of Hegel’s genius. [Pause] Alright, that is Hegel’s brilliant move? Indeed! What makes it such a stroke of genius? Because before Hegel, everyone knew that A was not not-A, and no one attached any importance to that fact. What people cared about was that A was A. When Hegel says, “A is not not-A,” he becomes the first to take [130:00] this well-known principle seriously, giving it a logical and ontological significance. Before Hegel, the principle of identity was logically and ontologically significant, but not so with the principle with non-contradiction.

If you hope to understand anything about dialectics, above all you can’t say that dialectics suspends the principle of non-contradiction. On the contrary, it was the first to respect it. It was the first to make the proposition, “A is not not-A,” logically and ontologically meaningful. Because if A is not not-A, it necessarily follows that A contains in its being [Pause] its relationship with what it is [131:00] not. If A is not not-A, it must be that A’s being contains the non-being of not-A. [Pause] Do you understand the reversal? You can’t define identity. You can’t make it a presupposition; you can only produce it through the principle of non-contradiction, understood as the negation of negation: it “is not not-A.” A is not not-A.

And that’s all that Hegel needs. He certainly doesn’t need to show that A is not-A, [132:00] for one simple reason: he wasn’t an idiot. He needed for A to not be not-A. And then, on that basis, he took all of philosophy by the throat, claiming: you fail to realize that you were distracted by the principle of identity, when what you needed to do was produce the principle of identity, to reproduce it in things. Yet you didn’t have the resources for doing so; you took it as a presupposition, so you weren’t able to reproduce it. Only the principle of non-contradiction lets you uncover the principle of identity in things. [Pause] If A is A, it’s because A is not not-A, and it is A insofar as it is not not-A [133:00], which results in A qua A. In other words, the principle of non-contradiction is the “countermark” of the principle of identity. It makes identity real, where philosophy before Hegel had been abstract; it never got to the concrete—according to Hegel—because philosophy didn’t know how to uncover identity, the identity it centered itself around; it didn’t know how to produce it in things. Thus, it was pure abstraction. It was metaphysical, and Hegel is the first, besides the empiricists, to propose—claiming to have finished Kant’s project—the transformation of metaphysics into logic, [pause] or into ontology. [134:00]

Well, it’s complicated; it sounds so simple, but it’s really, it’s really quite—it’s funny. See, that’s, that’s what dialectics is—backing up—that’s what makes it labor. It’s the labor of manifesting presupposed identity out in the world of things. It’s the labor of reproducing abstract identity in the world of concrete things. That implies the negation of negation. It’s the principle of… Then Hegel goes further, saying: you’ve never recognized how the principle of non-contradiction was [Pause] was more than merely another way of talking about the principle of identity. You never understood it; you never took it [135:00] seriously. The real difference, for Hegel, is between the principle of identity and the principle of non-contradiction. Whereas before Hegel, the difference was between the principle… take Leibniz—for Leibniz, the true difference was between the principle of identity, which reined over essences, and the principle of sufficient reason, or the principle of causality, which reined over existences. But, to reiterate, his genius was having taken… and this, see, this is a huge act of creation in philosophy—having taken that to its limit. The real, definitive boundary for existence is no longer the principle… —and for existing things [136:00] —is no longer the principle of causality. The principle of causality is, is, we’ll see, will be something dialectical, right. But it should have started higher up. The real logic governing existence is that of the negation of negation. [Pause]

So, you can see what I’m getting at, I’ll try to clarify next time, but you see what I’m getting at. It’s idiotic to say: Hegel thinks that things are contradictory, or Hegel thinks that contradiction exists within things. Hegel thinks that non-contradiction makes it so that things have identity. Hegel is the first to say—I mean literally—Hegel is the first thinker to argue that things are not contradictory. Because, what did other thinkers do? [137:00] They claimed that essences were what was identical, while the world of appearances was contradictory. Hegel does the opposite; it’s obviously the other way around. He’s the first to claim that the world isn’t contradictory. Why? Because the law of the world is “A is not not-A.” [Pause] It’s the others, then, who believe that things contradict themselves. Hegel is really the first to say no, they aren’t contradictory. The principle governing existence is that of non-contradiction—the principle of non-contradiction in the form of the negation of negation. [Pause] If you understand that, you understand [138:00] Hegel and the genius that makes him a great philosopher. Right, then, that’s all I’ll say. I’ll call—now that I’ve more or less explained it—I’ll use “countermark” to indicate such an image of thought.

And then there are folks who are completely different. —Oh, wow. You all have about had enough, well, I’ll speed through—We might confuse them with the first lot, but they’re completely different. Some folks—and here too, there are good and bad examples, because God, have these metaphors led to some mediocre work—there are those for whom thought is labor.. it’s not, no, it’s not, it isn’t a battle, it isn’t a struggle. [Rather] it… and they hate each other, they seem to hate each other… it is—I’ll just throw something out there—light doesn’t fight [139:00] the darkness. What the hell does that mean? There are those who think, what is that supposed to mean? Light battling dark—where? How do you figure? Have you actually experienced that? Is that what you think? Does light fight against the dark? They’ll say, well, I’ve never seen it. I’d argue—they might continue—that the clear and the obscure, or light and dark, alternate. Why is it a battle? It’s an alternation, right, it’s either/or. Either it’s day, or it’s night—it alternates. So why call it a battle? You, you, there’s something wrong with you. You see battles everywhere. [Laughter] I mean? Look. It’s an alternation. Note that Hegel [140:00] despises this. [Laughter] When he criticizes one of his rivals, or one of his masters, he’ll say, “They’ve reduced the labor of the negative to a simple alternation.” [Interruption of the recording]

… the alternation between light and dark. It’s a totally different understanding of light, a totally different understanding of color, a totally different understand of everything about so on and so forth. And then the same people say, well, then I’ll bet, heads or tails. Night or day. Heads or tails. As one of the greatest of these sorts put it: heads or tails? Heads or tails?[9] Let’s point out that it’s not really alternation; it’s an “alternative.” [Pause] [141:00] And so thought, for them, is forming alternatives, it’s posing the alternative, posing the “either… or…”, posing “either… or…” in whatever situation they find themselves in. The whole thing gets pretty funny, then.

We’ll call this—this is how I’ll refer to this type of thought—I’d call it the “heads or tails.” It’s one sign: heads-or-tails. Famously, these sorts of thinkers—using alternation or alternatives—come across as playful. They conceive of thought as a game. Often the, the, the player… with playful thoughts [142:00] there have been things that, well, there’s good and bad with everything, eh? Thought as a game, as has oft been repeated. What’s unusual is that you sometimes hear it from dialecticians. In which case I don’t know what they mean, because dialectics is not a game; it really isn’t a game. It’s, it’s, it’s the opposite, it’s the opposite, like I said before, it’s labor. It’s… it’s the countermark; it isn’t heads-or-tails.

It does get a little more serious when, with Nietzsche or [Stéphane] Mallarmé, we start to think of thought as a roll of the dice. Thought makes a roll of the dice. Then we’re no longer dealing with a metaphorical game. We don’t seem to be dealing with a dialectic. Some have made a tradition around this heads-or-tails; it’s formed a tradition. They sometimes get mistaken for dialecticians—you hear talk, for example, of dialectical thought in Pascal. Pascal has nothing to do with… for ages… for example, the way [Georg] Lukacs and [Lucien] Goldmann have interpreted Pascal as a proto-dialectician, a dialectical thinker par excellence. Once again, it’s to Serres’s credit—he says, you must not know the first thing about mathematics if you think Pascal’s thought is dialectical; it is anything but… Why would you have to not know the least bit of mathematics? Because every passage that’s cited as proof that Pascal is a dialectician or that he anticipates dialectics is explained from [144:00] a completely different perspective through the lens of these passages’ explicit mathematical references. So, Pascal’s thought is certainly extraordinary, but it’s absurd to call it dialectical. We ought to congratulate Serres on such a wonderful takedown, eh?

You see, based on what I’ve just said, dialectics is not for or against. For or against is a totally different mode of thought—that’s alternation-alternative. So then where would I claim we find this heads-or-tails form of thought, our second noosign? Well, you find it, let’s say, in Pascal. You find it in Kierkegaard. [Pause] [145:00] You find it especially in Sartre. [Pause] A catholic—if we’re pushing it—a reformist, and an atheist. How peculiar…we’ll have to see… well… Foundational, for our purposes, is the wager. Pascal’s wager: what does that mean, what’s it all about? You’ll see why we need it.

So, that’s where we are, to sum up. We’ll have to go into a bit more detail with Hegel and thought as countermark, as things stand, and [146:00] elaborate on the other aspect of thought as alternation-alternative. Those would be our two figures, our two fundamental figures of thought. [End of recording] [2:26:14]

 

Notes

[1] Plan.

[2] Transcript: It’s unlikely that Comtesse was able to provide Deleuze this information given that there is no line in Jean Santeuil such as Comtesse has presented it—especially not in the context of desire. A similar passage appears near the beginning, in a scene where a young Jean is being put to bed (much like the scene in Swann’s Way), but the passage in Jean Santeuil only contains the last few words of Comtesse’s quote, without “dereliction.” The (abridged) passage is as follows: “But when the moment of going to bed arrived […] no longer could he put off the saying of good nights […] he lie there, without moving, so that sleep might come while he lay abandoned […] to the horrible, shapeless suffering which, little by little, would grow as vast as solitude, as silence and as night”—translation is by Gerard Hopkins (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955), p. 28. Part of what makes this dispute so impressive is the fact that Deleuze is so intimately familiar with Proust’s work that a single word strikes him as unusual.

[3] Leibniz’s System and His Mathematical Models (Paris: PUF, 1968).

[4] On perspective and conic theory, see session 3 of the seminar on Leibniz and the Baroque, Nov 18, 1987.

[5] See sessions 2 and 4 of this seminar, November 23 and December 7, 1982.

[6] On “the internal,” see What Is Philosophy?, pp. 111-113

[7] This sentence is not present in Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (volume 2 of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time).

[8] For more on this scene, see sessions 11 and 12 of this seminar: February 22 and March 1, 1983.

[9] Likely Pascal, especially in Pensées II.3.

Notes

For archival purposes, the augmented and new time stamped version of the transcription was completed in May 2021. The translation was completed in May 2022. Additional revisions were also made in February 2024. [NB: The transcript time stamp is in synch with the SocioPhilosophy recording link provided here.]

Lectures in this Seminar

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