Philosophy after Deleuze by Hughes Joe;

Author:Hughes, Joe;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Cinema, subjectivity, and life

My central aim in the preceding section was to show that the theory of subjectivity around which the cinema books are structured is not exactly Bergsonian—or that it is so only to the extent that the structure of subjectivity underlying all of Deleuze’s texts is Bergsonian. The conceptual backbone of Cinema I and Cinema II is firmly based on the theory of subjectivity developed in texts like Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. This structural monotony does not carry over only to questions of movement and time or chronos and aion. It works its way into the very details of the passage from chronos to aion and back again. We ascend from movement to time by means of an apprehension, a reproduction and a failure of recognition. We return to an individuated matter by virtue of an actualization which puts the forms of time, Ideas, back into the body.

How are we to understand the presence of this subjectivity at the heart of Deleuze’s major texts on art? This question has multiple senses. I have already argued above, for example, that subjectivity “explains” cinema at the same time that cinema reveals the structures of subjectivity. But we might also ask whether this subjectivity belongs to the artist or whether it belongs to the spectator? Francis Bacon would seem to decide the matter in favor of the former. By following Bacon’s battle with the cliché and his construction of the diagram, Deleuze seems to be explaining the creative process and thus articulating the aesthetics of creation he called for in Nietzsche and Philosophy.19 But in Cinema I, the question is answered in the other direction. It seems to be the spectator who is accosted by images (if the images on the plane of immanence have anything to do with the images on a screen20): cinema’s images both organize and are organized by the brain’s screen. Proust and Signs, though, presents a third option. The subject in question is neither the artist nor the spectator, but a fictional character. In other words, this question seems to be a false one. If the theory of subjectivity which Deleuze outlined in his formative texts is really ontological in scope, its structures must be general enough to apply to creators, spectators, and imagined subjects which strike us as plausible constructions (though, obviously, the processes and emphases will be different depending on which point of view we adopt).

The best way to understand this relationship between aesthetics and the structures of subjectivity is to see it as a flattening and pluralization of Kant’s aesthetics. In the same way Deleuze’s ontology reconfigured the Critique of Pure Reason, and in the same way his ethics inverted the moral law of the Critique of Practical Reason, Deleuze’s aesthetics significantly rework the basic concepts of the Critique of Judgment. Because Deleuze’s reading of the Critique of Judgment ties together his reading of the other two Critiques—Deleuze claimed that it revealed the hidden ground of the first two21—I spend considerably more time on it here.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.