The time-image and Deleuze's transcendental experience

Continental Philosophy Review

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 325-345

  Moulard, Valentine ^a  

^a University of Memphis   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 52649098034     PISSN: 13872842     EISSN: 15731103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1022687422795     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. Gilles Deleuze, Différence et Repetition (Paris: PUF, 1ère éd. 1968 / 8 éme éd. 1996);
2. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), hereafter DR.
3. As I hope to make clear, Deleuze's philosophy of difference does not - in a Bergsonian fashion - aim at simply eliminating such traditional dichotomies as idealism vs. empiricism, and such apparent oppositions informing both schools as thought/experience, Being/ non-being, or continuity/discontinuity. On the contrary, Superior Empiricism proceeds by first radicalizing those distinctions, so as to put into question, and eventually displace profoundly, the very principle of their distinction. The traditional principle of non-contradiction, which establishes external (hence spatial and quantitative) differences, makes way in Deleuze for a principle of internal (hence temporal or qualitative) difference. For a detailed and luminous account of the fundamental shift in the conception of difference that Deleuze articulates, see his 1956 "La conception de la différence chez Bergson", in Les Etudes Bergsoniennes IV (Paris: PUF, 1956);
4. trans. Melissa McMahon in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999). For instance, Deleuze writes, "If philosophy is to have a positive and direct relation with things, it is only to the extent that it claims to grasp the thing itself in what it is, in its difference from all that it is not, which is to say, in its internal difference. . . we must effectively recognise that that difference itself is not simply spatio-temporal, that it is not generic or specific either, in short that it is not exterior or superior to the thing" (80/43). Henceforth, the first page numbers will refer to the French, and the second ones to the English translation.
5. It is important to insist on this fundamental difference between the Bergsonian-Deleuzian conception of the necessity informing the transcendental realm on the one hand, and the Kantian account on the other. The Kantian transcendental "conditions of possibility" are negative conditions of necessity in the sense that in his view, we would not be able to perceive, or, for that matter, to have any experience at all, if it were not for the positing of such conditions. In short, Kant claims that the forms of space and time are necessary conditions without which phenomenological experience would not be possible. However, as Bergson clearly suggests, Kant's transcendentalism fails to establish what I would call "the necessity of the necessity". For instance, Bergson writes, "[The Kantian Critique] gives itself space as a ready-made form of our perceptive faculty - a veritable deus ex machina, of which we see neither how it arises, nor why it is what it is rather than anything else" [L'évolution créatrice (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1988), p. 206;
6. Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1944), p. 224, hereafter CE]. In contrast, Bergson and Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism searches for "conditions of reality" instead of "conditions of possibility" - that is, it aims at "generating the positive categories of thought" rather than determining them through analysis (CE 208/226). In this sense, I want to say that Bergson and Deleuze are looking for a deeper kind of necessity (e.g., how and why the form of space is what it is rather than anything else). Beneath or beyond the negative necessity invoked by the Kantian Critique, Superior Empiricism thus points to the fundamental positivity of the real and its conditions: in this consists both their internal necessity, and the virtually illimited field of their transformative and creative actualization.
7. Against the famous Husserlian proposition that "consciousness is of something", Deleuze insists that Consciousness is something, in La Logique du Sens (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969), p. 362;
8. The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 311, hereafter LS.
9. Deleuze and Guattari, L'Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972), p. 62;
10. Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 53.
11. Matière et Mémoire (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1997), p. 1;
12. Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 9, hereafter MM.
13. In his lectures on Bergson (internet).
14. Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 58, hereafter N.
15. A similar idea is present in Bergson's Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1997);
16. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books), hereafter 2S. Bergson writes, "Thus mountains may, since the beginning of time, have had the faculty of rousing in those who look upon them certain feelings comparable with sensations, and indeed inseparable from mountains. But Rousseau created with them a new and original emotion. This emotion has become current coin, Rousseau having put it in circulation. And even to-day, it is Rousseau who makes us feel it, as much and more than the mountains" (my emphasis, 38/41).
17. It is important to note that the criticisms directed at Kant's conception of time in this paper only take into account his thinking as it is expressed in the Critique of Pure Reason. As the reference to the sublime below suggests, Kant's thinking about time in its relation to the subject and experience is elaborated further in the Third Critique, as a result of which it arguably escapes a lot of these criticisms - as Deleuze suggests in both his Kant lectures (internet) and in the second chapter of DR. But to address this new aspect of Kant's transcendentalism would lead us into a different project, of a much wider scope than that of this paper.
18. Cinéma 2: L'image-Temps, (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1985);
19. Cinema 2, The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), hereafter C II.
20. Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), hereafter B.
21. See esp. the "Analogies of Experience" in "The Analytic of Principles," Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), e.g., p. 296, hereafter CPR.
22. Here, Deleuze is not only echoing but also radicalizing the fundamental distinguishing feature between Transcendental Idealism (Kantianism) and Idealistic Realism (Platonism). Unlike Plato, Kant is not making any metaphysical claims as to the existence of things-in-themselves. Because his project in CPR focuses on the epistemological issue of finding a ground for scientific knowledge, he is content with leaving the issue of the ontological status of things-in-themselves aside, since according to him, they precisely elude absolutely possible experience, hence the domain of knowledge as well. To say that time is transcendental is to affirm that it is a necessary condition of all possible experience, that it has to be assumed for any knowledge to be possible. It does not necessarily imply that it exists objectively in some other inaccessible realm; on the contrary, Kant's transcendental move here aims at demonstrating the subjectivity of time. We will see that for Deleuze, this is not quite enough.
23. In The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), p. 424
24. [quoted by Keith Ansell Pearson in Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 184, hereafter PAV].
25. See what Bergson calls the phenomenon of déja-vu (or rather, "déja-vécu") in "Le souvenir du présent et la fausse reconnaissance" in L'énergie spirituelle (Paris: Quadrige/ PUF, 1996);
26. Mind-Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (London: MacMillan and Co., 1920), hereafter ES.
27. This is what Deleuze calls "Bergson's third diagram, which, Deleuze points out, "Bergson does not feel the need to draw" (109 note 22/294-295 note 23).
28. See Bergson's famous diagram of the cone, MM 169/152. (Figure Presented)
29. As Ansell Pearson points out, "psychological consciousness is born and emerges into being only when it has found its proper ontological conditions". And "it is only once the leap has been made into the being of the past that recollections [hence representations as well] are able to gradually assume a psychological existence. The past can never be recomposed with presents since this would be to negate its specific mode of being" (PAV, 180).
30. This, says Deleuze, is "Bergson's first great diagram". It is crucial to note that the "narrowest circuit" (AO) is also a point (of indiscernibility) because it is precisely not an AA circuit. As Deleuze, quoting Bergson, points out, '"it contains only the object O itself with the consecutive image which returns to cover it' (memory immediately consecutive to perception)" (CII 65 note 4/45 note 4). (Figure Presented)
31. We must bear in mind, as Peter Pál Pelbart notes, that although there is in Deleuze, as in Heidegger, a certain privilege of the future, it does not, for Deleuze, coincide with the problematic of finitude. Rather, it has to do with infinite possibilities for the creation of the new, signified by Deleuze's reference to the Outside. As Pál Pelbart says, "le futur n'est pas, pour l'homme, une anticipation de sa propre mort, la possibilité extrême de son être; il n'est rien qui ressemblerait a un être-pour-la-mort, car ce n' est pas àpartir de l'ipséité qu'il est pensé, mais d'un flux proto-ontique. Si, dans l'élaboration de ce futur par Deleuze, l'Ouvert est une référence importante, elle renvoie au Dehors plutôt qu'a l'Être" ("Le temps non-réconcilié," in Gilles Deleuze, une vie philosophique, ed. Eric Alliez (Le Plessis Robinson: Institut Synthelabo, 1998), p. 99).
32. In "Cinema and the Outside" in The Brain Is the Screen, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), hereafter BS, Gregg Lambert explains that Eisenstein had announced as early as 1929 "the discovery of a 'fourth dimension' of cinematographic duration - spatially inexpressible, 'time added to three-dimensional space' - the appearance of which is the result of 'overtonal conflicts' between visual and sound images" (p. 253). Now, Lambert continues, "because visual and aural overtones are [for Eisenstein] 'a totally physiological sensation' . . . they function as 'conductors' that introduce new effects within the spectator's perception-consciousness system and engender the possibility of newer and ever finer affective capabilities" (p. 254). Lambert judiciously points out that "this discovery concerns what Eisenstein (and later Deleuze) would discuss almost in terms of a new synthesis of the sensible, the 'being' of the sensible, a body that exists before discourses, before words, clichés, and ready-to-order representations - the 'I FEEL' of the cinematographic subject" (ibid.). Although I find Lambert's reading illuminating in many respects, I contend that it is a mistake to identify Deleuze's take with Eisenstein's in this instance - even though Deleuze obviously found some inspiration in Eisenstein's discovery. Ultimately, however, Deleuze thinks that Eisenstein's cinematography and montage remain hostage to the system of the movement-image, that is, that it remains caught up in a system of re-presentation, as opposed to the direct presentation of time that the crystal-image generates. I am trying to argue that for Deleuze, with the crystal (or time-image), time is not merely "a fourth dimension OF space" (which would still make time dependent on space); rather, to say that time is "the nth dimension of space" is to insist that it has become its ultimate power (puissance). Time thereby exceeds space absolutely, which means that time has become independent of space (or movement). Indeed, I believe that this independence - which Bergson expressed in terms of the difference in kind between duration and simultaneity - is precisely one of the central imports of Deleuze's third synthesis.
33. Introduction to BS, p. 6.
34. The famous phrase from Hamlet, "The time is out of joint," is the opening sentence of Deleuze's Kant's Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. vii.
35. Borrowed from Foucault's "archeological" works (both The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge), this term is picked up on by Deleuze in his Foucault book as signifying the heart of the archeological method, which precisely consists in inventing those transversal sheets, independently of any resemblance or analogy, that is, of any common structure between the elements thereby put into relation.
36. For a detailed account of this passive synthesis, see in particular the last 20 pages of the second chapter of DR, as well as all of Chapter 4 of DR, entitled "Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible."
37. "Cinema and the Outside," in BS, p. 258.
38. The Eisenstein quote, from "The Filmic Fourth Dimension," in Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949), is also mentioned by Lambert.
39. Len Lawlor, "The End of Phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty," Continental Philosophy Review 31/1 (1998) pp. 15-34.
40. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze writes, "The brain is the junction - not the unity - of three planes [of philosophy, art and science]."
41. And he continues, "If the mental objects of philosophy, art and science (that is to say, vital ideas) have a place, it will be in the deepest of the synaptic fissures, in the hiatuses, intervals, and meantimes of a non-objectifiable brain, in a place where to go in search of them will be to create," in Deleuze and Guattari, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1991), p. 196;
42. What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchnell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 208, hereafter WP.
43. The "little cerebral deaths" Deleuze is here referring to are the death of the synapses themselves, i.e., the death of the material basis for neuronal transmissions and connections. This leads, according to Steven Rose (quoted by Deleuze), to "the ever greater importance of the factor of uncertainty, or rather half-uncertainty, in the neuronal transmission."