Releasing the Image by Khalip Jacques; Agamben Giorgio; Casarino Cesare

Author:Khalip, Jacques; Agamben, Giorgio; Casarino, Cesare
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2011-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Three Theses on the Life-Image (Deleuze, Cinema, Bio-politics)

CESARE CASARINO

I. The life-image is what the time-image becomes under a fully realized regime of bio-political production.

In his two-volume study of the cinema, Gilles Deleuze produces what is at once a synchronic and a diachronic account of cinema. Such an account is synchronic to the extent to which it consists of “a taxonomy, an attempt at a classification of images and signs.”1 It is diachronic to the extent to which—Deleuze’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—it also consists of a bipartite periodization of the history of cinema, which pivots around the break of the Second World War. These two aspects of Deleuze’s account share and interfere with one another in what constitutes the principal argument of this study: the cinema developed from an indirect representation of time in the movement-image and its varieties, in the period before the Second World War, to a direct time-image and its varieties, that is, to a direct insertion of time in the cinematic image, in the period after the Second World War. Whereas the movement-image subordinated time to movement, the time-image liberated time from the harness of movement and expressed time in its pure state, time as such—that is, time as the eternal, immobile, and unchanging form of all that passes, moves, and changes. Deleuze thus is able, on the one hand, to declare in the first sentence of his two-volume study, “This study is not a history of the cinema,” and, on the other hand, to follow this declaration immediately with a series of historical periodizations (xiv). There is no contradiction here: the point is that the prime object of Deleuze’s historicization is not cinema per se but the condition of possibility of all historicization and, indeed, of historicity itself, namely, time. Deleuze’s study constitutes an attempt to think a momentous event in the historical experience of time through the cinema: Deleuze’s study is a history of time that needs the cinema in order to think a radical transformation in the way in which time is produced, embodied, and lived in historical forms. This is a transformation that Deleuze identifies in the paradigmatic shift from the movement-image to the time-image, from the indirect representation of time to the direct expression of time in the cinematic image.2

It is the claim of this essay that the radical transformation in time, which in the cinema is materialized as the shift from the movement-image to the time-image, constitutes the most important—if not the most obvious—index of a regime of bio-political production. It is the further claim of this essay that the life-image emerges from within the time-image—without, however, ever leaving it behind, and, on the contrary, by incorporating it—at the moment in which such a regime of bio-political production comes to its full fruition and realization.

This is not the place to retrace the complex intellectual genealogies of the term as well as of the concept of “bio-politics”—a term that was coined famously by Michel Foucault in 1974 and a concept whose origins arguably hark back to the early-modern era.

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