Gilles Deleuze by Frida Beckman

Author:Frida Beckman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: REAKTION BOOKS

The mirror scene in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947).

the just ideas are always those that conform to accepted meanings or established precepts, they’re always ideas that confirm something, even if it’s something in the future, even if it’s the future of the revolution. While ‘just ideas’ is a becoming-present, a stammering of ideas, and can only be expressed in the form of questions that tend to confound any answers.18

Various historical circumstances also enabled Deleuze to pursue his belief that cinema is important to philosophy on an institutional level. When the experimental University of Paris VIII at which he worked was relocated from Vincennes to Saint-Denis in 1980, the philosophy department and the film department ended up in close proximity, and possibilities to combine philosophy and cinema on a concrete level emerged. In 1981, Deleuze wrote to Guattari about how inspired he was by Bergson and that they needed to take part in the theorizing of cinema. What existed so far, he felt, was greatly mediocre.19 In 1981, he also begun lecturing on cinema and his Tuesday morning film lectures were to continue until 1985. And although this never became the joint project with Guattari that he at that moment seemed to envision, and although the teaching of cinema put more pressure on his already poor health than he had estimated and also kept him from the writing that he was longing to do,20 he did deliver this alternative theorization himself, with the publication of his first cinema book in 1983 and the second in 1985. These were clearly years of thinking through cinema for Deleuze.

Where Deleuze’s work on cinema can thus be linked to a particular period in his life, his work on literature is scattered across his entire oeuvre. The studies devoted more directly to literary texts include the early essay on Sacher-Masoch published in 1961; his book on Proust, Proust et les signes (expanded and republished in 1970 as well as 1976 and translated as Proust and Signs in 1972 and Proust and Signs: The Complete Text in 2000); the development of his early, briefer study of Sacher-Masoch into the longer Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty in 1967; the book on Kafka, co-written with Guattari, from 1975; long essays on the playwrights Carmelo Bene in 1979 and Samuel Beckett in 1992; and the compilation of essays called Critique et clinique (Essays Critical and Clinical, 1997) from 1993. In addition, literature is used and referenced in various ways and sometimes to considerable extent in many of his other works, notably in The Logic of Sense, which gives Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland an important role in the philosophical theatre and which also includes readings of other writers such as Klossowski, Tournier and Antonin Artaud.21

Although Deleuze employs the work of these authors in many different ways, they, in each instance, relate to the question of life. Deleuze’s conception of life is profoundly vitalist, which, simply put, means that for him, life is a force of difference. Life cannot

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