June 18, 1985

Until now, since I have been at Paris 8, and it is very normal, I’ve changed the subject every year. And this really isn’t such a big deal since … I’ve always been teaching on the research I was developing. So, for me, the courses and the research were reconciled, reconciled wonderfully. … I had announced that we would go much further in Blanchot, in Blanchot and in Foucault. No, in fact, because next year, … could we not develop something like that? Or it would be for a year, but not a sequential course. … But I find that … there is something hard. I mean, there is something great in what we do there, in the aggregate that we form, but there is also something too hard … On the other hand, not giving classes, I don’t understand it; I mean doing sessions like today. … So maybe it would be a solution to proceed by request, maybe it would break [things] up… I would like those who intend to return next year to think a little about a solution, which would be more, in any case, for a year, which would be more than the courses as I’ve done until now.

Seminar Introduction

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

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

English Translation

Edited

 

Rouch Jean, Moi un noir
Jean Rouch, Moi un noir, 1958.

 

In another q&a session, the first question, on the concept of the “utterable” (l’énonçable) (see session 17) in relation to another concept, the act of fabulation. Deleuze’s 90-minute response returns him to discussing questions of linguistics (notably, Hjelmslev and Gustave Guillaume), then to consider, with Bergson, how the sign operates a “cut” or “point of view” within sense as a kind of pre-linguistic material. Cinema, Deleuze argues, is the representation of the utterable, either as movement-image or time-image, but particularly as process of temporalization, and experimental cinema, Deleuze says the enunciable is developed any-spaces-whatever, i.e., the pure potentiality of the event. This perspective shifts Deleuze’s focus to develop questions of the proposition and the event (cf. Logic of Sense), juxtaposing the Stoics’ concept of the “expressible”. Deleuze links the proposition and sense to cinema since, for him only through the cinema image – movement-image, time-image –, does the signified of power, or sense, or matter directly emerge as structure of movement or process of temporalization, via a shift from interior monologue to indirect free discourse. The session’s final part focuses loosely on possible topics for the 1985-86 seminar: first, “what is philosophy?”, but then, after hearing different suggestions, Deleuze mentions Blanchot and Foucault, even a return to Syberberg in relation to concepts from Blanchot. This process of speculation leads Deleuze to return finally to reflections on forms of political cinema (developed in The Time-Image, chapter 8), specifically on “acts of fabulation” in cinema and in art related to the notion of “the people are missing” and the concomitant need to fabulate as a process of self-invention as a “movement”.

 

 

Gilles Deleuze

Seminar on Cinema and Thought, 1984-1985

Lecture 26, 18 June 1985 (Cinema Course 92)

Transcription: La voix de Deleuze, M. Fossiez (Part 1), Laurène Praget (Part 2) and Stéphanie Mpoyo Llunga (Part 3); additional revisions to the transcription and time stamp, Charles J. Stivale

English Translation Forthcoming

Deleuze Notebook
Image from Deleuze’s Notebook.

Notes

For archival purpose, the augmented version of the complete transcription with time stamp was completed in October 2021. Additional revisions were added in February 2024.

Lectures in this Seminar

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