Deleuze’s Kinematic Philosophy

Abstract

It would not be an exaggeration to say, that of all the philosophers this study tackles, it is Gilles Deleuze who suffers most from film-envy. Though it is perhaps insensitive to attribute such a Freudian cliché to Deleuze of all people — for we will see that the Freudian approach to film is all too ‘puerile’ for his taste — it is nonetheless striking how closely Deleuze watches the films of his choice with an eye to recreating his own philosophy in their image. The magnanimity he shows to film’s conceptual power is seen most clearly at the very end of his two-volume work on film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, when he writes that ‘cinema’s concepts are not given in cinema. And yet they are cinema’s concepts, not theories about cinema’. Yet, at every point and turn of the preceding 500 pages of text, films and their makers are continually compared with philosophical thinkers, only ones that ‘think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts’.²

The relationship which holds in the application of a theory is never one of resemblance … Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another.¹