Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power: Deleuze via Blanchot 9781350176096, 9781350176126, 9781350176102

Table of contents :
Cover
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
How to Use this Book
Abbreviations
Introduction: How the True World Finally Became a Bad Film
Power: the work of fiction in the world of judgment
The work of fiction beyond our exterior and interior worlds: critique and interpretation
Toward a philosophy of cinematic art: reversals of power in mortality, dream, and fiction
Part One Power and the Outside
1 Power and the (In)Visible: Foucault and Deleuze
Introduction
Part 1: Foucault on power
Part 2: A Deleuzian approach to power
Conclusion: passivity, mortality, and the outside of power
II From Menace to Passion in Blanchot and Deleuze: “The Sovereignty of the Void” and Experience of the Imaginary
1. Foucault and Blanchot on death
2. Blanchot: death and the imaginary—the unreal and ungraspable
3. Ambiguity beyond menace: the sovereign grip of fascination
4. Foucault on Blanchot: the hollowing out of interiority
5. What is “the outside”? Blanchot on the experience of the impossible
6. Deleuze’s vision of passivity, Part 1: habit and imagination
7. Deleuze’s vision of passivity, Part 2: memory and time
8. The final synthesis of time: Deleuze and Blanchot on eternal return
9. Conclusion: life on the outside of the livable
III Dreams: The Eclipse of the Day and its Incessant Return
Introduction
1. Displacement and disguise: Freud, Deleuze, and Blanchot
2. Percept and disguise, affect and displacement
3.a. From lived experience (contraction) to dream experience (expansion): Deleuze and Bergson
3.b. Dreams are not illusions, but experiences: from Bergson to Blanchot
4. The dream as the “pure approach” of the day (to sleep, perchance to dream ...)
5. Blanchot’s incessant movement and Deleuze’s event
6. The nightmare as the menacing echo of the day’s presence
7. Insouciance, inspiration, and “forgetting forgotten”
8. All dreaming is lucid, but fissured between sleeper and dreamer
9. Recognition without cognition: unlocatable displacements and unrevealable disguises
10. Darkness shining: the dream as the unthinkable and immediate urgency of problems and questions
Part Two Art, Literature, and Ideas
IV The Conceptual Composition of the Work of Art: Chaos and the Outside
1. Between art and thought
2.a. Milieus and habit: the dissolution and disconnection of chaos
2.b. From dream to art: the plane of composition, movement, and speed
3.a. The plane of immanence, incessant movement, and Blanchot’s outside: the “unthinkable” of thought
3.b. Chaos and the intersection of the planes of immanence and composition
3.c. The implication of ideas and development of sensation: the difference of repetition; the repetition of difference
4.a. The affects and percepts of art: “framing” chaos in Blanchot’s “radical reversal”
4.b. Art: literature, painting, music
5.a. Thought and chaos: immanence and composition revisited
5.b. From percepts/affects to concepts: key distinctions
5.c. Concepts: fragmentary, iterative, self-referential, and intensive
6.a. Foucault: the concept of power, the immanent problem of truth and reality
6.b. From the outside of the external world to the internal world
6.c. Values of truth in a world of power; obscure values in artistic fiction
V Literature’s Radical Reversal: From Absence of Origin to Deterritorialized Future
Introduction
1. Literature is not important (Blanchot)
2. What is literature? (Blanchot and Deleuze)
3.a. Obscure values in fiction: belief, sensibility, literality, and the “as if”
3.b. Beyond metaphor: likeness, difference, mediation, and the immediate
4. Real become fictional through hyperbole: Kafka’s letters and diaries
5. Coexistences of human and subhuman: Kafka’s short stories
6. Unlimited displacement and disguise: Kafka’s novels
7. Kafk a’s deterritorialized assemblages of the future
8. The “dismantling” of representation in Kafka’s novels—a critique of power?
9. The literary protagonist dispossessed of action: why Kafka is not his characters
10. The reversal of power and concepts that compose Kafka’s inexplicable worlds
VI Kafka’s Castle: A Case Study—Conceptual Inexistence and Obscure Value
Introduction
1. The castle and the village: perception of the imperceptible
2. The affect: figures that “befit” K’s impatience
3. Desire: K as neglected and negligent mirror
4. Error: saying unleashed from seeing
5. The castle as conceptual: why it does not exist, but “consists” and “insists” everywhere
6. Hope: the obscure value and movement that divests hope in The Castle
7. Conclusion: the bind of figuration
Part Three Cinema
VII Cinematic Worlds of Truth and Reality: Deleuze’s Movement-Image via Foucault
Introduction
1. Is cinematic movement an illusion?
2.a. The cinematic plane of composition: framing and cutting
2.b. The cinematic plane of immanence: movement is not totality
3. Assemblages of movement-images: large forms of reality, small forms of truth
4. The interval and affection-image: beginnings, endings, and quality
5.a. Sound and voice: correspondence or deception of the visual
5.b. Cohesive worlds of truth and reality: explanation, expectation, and genre
6. The Foucauldian provocation of film: judgment and affect
7.a. A Deleuzo-Foucauldian movement-image: perception, affection, action
7.b. The panoptic large form of the movement-image
7.c. The small form of the action-image: discovering, uncovering, and the medical gaze
8.a. Enclosures of the outside: the interval, dream, and the event
8.b. Real worlds and originary worlds: the impression
8.c. The impression and otherworldly in large and small form
8.d. The abnormal: sex and violence
9. Conclusion: the critical limit of truth and reality
VIII Radical Reversals of Cinematic Art: The Dissociative Force of Blanchot’s Outside in Deleuze’s Time-Image
Introduction
1.a. Beyond cinematic illusion: spiritual automatism and waking dreams
1.b. Cinematic time
2.a. The crystallization of the real and imaginary: the indiscernibility of what is happening
2.b. Peaks and aspects of the event: the inexplicability of what happened
2.c. The smallest and largest movements at the limit of cinematic perception
3.a. The final synthesis of time in cinema: beyond reversals of power
3.b. Crystalline narration: false continuity
3.c. Serialized chronosigns: reflection and complication of categories
4. Limits of the imaginary and the false: new relations of the audible and visible
5.a. From affect and interval to thought and interstice: movement subordinate to time
5.b. The dissociative force of movement, the “hole in appearances” of thought: immanence and composition
6. Conclusion: obscure values and belief in the impossible
IX “Is Anyone Seeing This?”
Introduction
1. Take Shelter: mutual trust amidst the outrageousness of latent, impossible danger
2.a. Arrival: communication of death’s impossibility —alliance through mortalism
2.b. From Villeneuve’s Arrival to Enemy: comparing crystalline narration and serialized chronosigns
3.a. Eyes Wide Shut
3.b. Deleuze, Kubrick and the inward journey of the outside
3.c. Eyes Wide Shut: the untrue fantasy of another’s fantasy
3.d. Blue light—the unreal meets the untrue
3.e. The obscure value of love within the sordid and scandalous
Conclusion: Artistic Fiction and the Thought of Eternal Return
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power

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Also Available from Bloomsbury The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary, Eugene Brent Young Deleuze and the Gynesis of Horror: From Monstrous Births to the Birth of the Monster, Sunny Hawkins Deleuze, Guattari, and the Problem of Transdisciplinarity, ed. Guillaume Collett Deleuze and Ethology: A Philosophy of Entangled Life, Jason Cullen Blanchot and the Outside of Literature, William S. Allen Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism, ed. Christopher Langlois

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Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power Deleuze via Blanchot Eugene Brent Young

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Eugene Brent Young, 2022 Eugene Brent Young has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. viii–ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: © Jon Contino Cover image: © Eugene Brent Young Cover photography: © Laura Rose All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-7609-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-7610-2 eBook: 978-1-3501-7611-9 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents Preface Acknowledgments How to Use this Book List of Abbreviations Introduction: How the True World Finally Became a Bad Film

vi viii x xii 1

Part One Power and the Outside I II III

Power and the (In)Visible: Foucault and Deleuze From Menace to Passion in Blanchot and Deleuze: “The Sovereignty of the Void” and Experience of the Imaginary Dreams: The Eclipse of the Day and its Incessant Return

27 47 79

Part Two Art, Literature, and Ideas IV V VI

The Conceptual Composition of the Work of Art: Chaos and the Outside Literature’s Radical Reversal: From Absence of Origin to Deterritorialized Future Kafka’s Castle: A Case Study—Conceptual Inexistence and Obscure Value

107 139 165

Part Three Cinema VII Cinematic Worlds of Truth and Reality: Deleuze’s Movement-Image via Foucault VIII Radical Reversals of Cinematic Art: The Dissociative Force of Blanchot’s Outside in Deleuze’s Time-Image IX “Is Anyone Seeing This?”

187 211 243

Conclusion: Artistic Fiction and the Thought of Eternal Return

265

Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

277 287 313 321 v

Preface One of the most satisfying cultural experiences is perhaps to view a moving and thought-provoking film and then to encounter an equally thought-provoking interpretation of it. It is a cliché that art transforms how we perceive, feel, and think— and interpretation is also, for many of us, a key component that solidifies such a transformation. But what films we choose to interpret as “art” is a contentious question for a medium that seems to be “mass produced,” an empty projection of ghostly images. My own discovery of Deleuze as a teenager was precisely around this question: I wanted to love art and cinema, and while Benjamin’s argument about the loss of “aura and presence” made a good point (expressing what made it so difficult), it didn’t get me to where I wanted to be. I soon discovered the music of Steve Reich, whose work I thought created its own aura and presence, its own experience, through its musical phasing and forms of repetition—precisely by virtue of its mechanical reproduction. And, after searching and searching, it was Deleuze whose philosophy of repetition and difference allowed me to consider what artistic experience, in the complex forms of its movement and change, and in relation to ideas, might look like. This opened up the question of all artistic media around repetition and difference, and the more difficult problem of the imagination and artistic inspiration. It was then Blanchot who spoke to me directly of “inspiration” itself, and whose voice always seemed to be at the core of pivotal moments in Deleuze’s thinking about encounters with genuine novelty (eternal return, the highest forms of the time image, the event, etc.). My interest in Blanchot was also probably born of tragic experiences and loss in my personal life: he offered a view of mortality and a “spiritualism” that did not seem naïve or dogmatic, where art can draw us outside of ourselves and be fascinating without being idolatrous; added to this, his stylistic use of paradox forced thought beyond words. In short, if Deleuze taught me how to think, Blanchot taught me how to believe. From their perspectives, though, the role of art is central—both thinkers somehow express ideas that are felt, and somehow offer something to feel, something to believe, that is unthinkable (Deleuze calls it a belief in “this world” as unknowable; Blanchot calls it a necessarily “forgotten truth”). Then of course Foucault allows the two thinkers to relate to the “world” (and allowed me to return, intellectually and practically, to the world), even if it is a world where truth and reality are products of power: Foucault forced me to confront the question of how Blanchot’s outside—this experience of artistic inspiration—could be genuinely untouched by the pernicious forces of capitalism or, deeper than that, offer an obscure yet intuitive alternative to our everyday values around what is normal, regular, and related to life (in many ways precisely because Foucault provides an especially Foucauldian reading of Blanchot that “encloses” the outside as an “exception”). As my career designing college courses evolved, it was Foucault who served as a gateway and vi

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impetus to engage students in their everyday lives but then challenge their normal and usual perceptions and feelings by placing Foucault into conversation with Deleuze and Blanchot (I have taught an evolving, interdisciplinary seminar almost every year since 2014 based on the structure of this book called “Knowledge, Power, and the Obscure” that places these thinkers in conversation directly). This book therefore constitutes the culmination of an intense interest in Deleuze and Blanchot that has shaped my entire adult life. My years-long apprenticeship to Deleuze as primary author and editor of The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 2013) in fact allowed me to draw new conclusions for this study about his syntheses of time and approach to eternal return (discussed in Chapter II and the Conclusion) as they relate to his work on Foucault (discussed in Chapter I) and his work on Cinema (Chapters VII–IX); it also allowed me to relate his syntheses of time and approach to eternal return to his work with Guattari on (de)territorialization and Kafka (Chapter V), as well as to their work on chaos in relation to the percepts and affects of art (Chapter IV). But beyond that, having internalized Deleuze’s references to Blanchot throughout his oeuvre and having read between the figures for decades, with Foucault as a key interlocutor, it has become apparent to me that a new perspective can be born that is greater than “the sum of the parts”—or in this case, greater than all the individual perspectives of each thinker. In particular, the thorough and exhaustive conversation between Deleuze and Blanchot has revealed to me a distinctive perspective on the relation between art and ideas, between the displacement and disguise of incessant movement on the one hand and the groundlessness of Deleuzian becoming and Blanchot’s “diverging of difference” on the other hand, which might just be a lens into thought-provoking critiques and interpretations of cinema. In fact, as I hope this book demonstrates, bringing Foucault into this conversation has allowed me to refine a relatively new definition of art that entails a reversal of the effects of power, leading to a unique dynamic between unreality and untruth, between repetition and difference, between implication and explication—a unique dynamic that is the ultimate and most radical Blanchotian “reversal”: the inseparability of the inaccessible interior of the imaginary from that which is beyond the exteriority of the world. But getting there is a long journey, which I wrote this book to take us through.

Acknowledgments There are so many to whom I owe enormous gratitude, and whose advice, friendship, support, and feedback furthered and transformed this book. I have been fortunate over the last decade to have the support of wonderful colleagues and friends at Le Moyne College, where I have held a dual position in the English and Philosophy departments, and I thank everyone at Le Moyne who discussed this book project with me, especially Julie Grossman and Bill Day. I am grateful for my interdepartmental position there as well, which provided the essential flexibility to design interdisciplinary courses on the topic of this book; I especially thank all of the patient and open-minded seniors who took my “Knowledge, Power, and the Obscure” seminar on Foucault, Deleuze, and Blanchot over the years (as well as students in my Kafka classes and my “What it Means to Dream” seminar), all of which provided the circumstances to simplify and further explore this material with non-experts. I also thank the R&D Committee at Le Moyne and the Boudreau family for their generous financial support, which created some breathing room to focus on this project. I would also like to thank the community of Deleuze scholars, especially Ron Bogue, whose thoughtful conversations over the years at conferences and during visits are ever stimulating (as well as all the other wonderful scholars with whom I’ve shared this work at various conferences, who are far too numerous to list). I want to offer a very special thanks to Todd May for his endless patience with me as we co-taught a seminar together on Foucault and Deleuze in 2017. Working with him allowed me to refine my approach to Foucault by leaps and bounds; our conversations are ever inspiring, and his clarifying approach to philosophy is ever energizing. Ron and Todd both have inspired me to strive for clarity and precision in my writing when approaching the obscurity and complexity of figures like Deleuze. This project began before my time at Le Moyne, and I also owe a great debt of gratitude to my advisor from graduate school at Emory University, Jill Robbins, for shepherding me through my years-long study of Blanchot, as I painfully tried to place him in conversation with Deleuze (and Kafka) during my time there. Portions of Chapter V and ideas from Chapter VI were revised and reconsidered from my dissertation at Emory, which explored literary paradox via Deleuze and Blanchot. I also extend a special thanks to faculty and friends from the Comparative Literature and French departments at Emory for their encouragement and conversation over the years. I also extend a generous thanks to Liza Thompson at Bloomsbury for her support with this project over the last few years, especially for creating an incredibly useful review process at various stages of this project. Also thanks to Lucy Russell at Bloomsbury for all of her invaluable support and guidance, and to all of the thoughtful and supportive peer reviewers of the proposal and manuscript. Additionally, I’m grateful to Ronnie Hanna for his diligence with copy edits. viii

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I want to offer a special thanks to Jon Contino for his work on the cover design. Jon’s artistic intuition was invaluable, and seeing the title of this book rendered through his vision brought the book’s key ideas to life better than I could have imagined. Jon sensed exactly what I was trying to do with my cover image and how to complement it with his work (more on the cover image itself in the “How to Use This Book” section). Then, his overall design—giving the title a subtly cutting and gothic flair, and providing the cover and back cover with a cinematic and otherworldly feel—set the perfect tone for the book. It was a genuine pleasure to collaborate with an artist of Jon’s caliber and to learn from his insights about visualizing themes from this book. Also, photo credit goes to Laura Rose for the human background image on the cover; thanks to Laura for that. Thanks also to Ben Anslow at Bloomsbury for his help and his contributions to the back cover. I also thank my family and friends for all of their encouragement surrounding this project. I’m particularly grateful to anthropologists Jon Carter and Christina Carter for their friendship and enthusiasm, as well as their distinctive approaches to poststructuralism, which lent a very special ear. I’d also especially like to thank Teresa and Dan, my father Gene, Amit Shilo, Erin Contino, Rob and Dessi, and Ken Skarka. Most importantly, I want to thank my wife Jamey, whose constant moral support and practical editing help made this book possible: what you are reading simply would not have come to fruition as it is if not for her. Her unending patience with and interest in this project, which withstood both a pregnancy and a pandemic, has been an indescribable source of joy. She hasn’t merely “put up” with my eccentricities that were exacerbated by completing this project, but has loved me for them. And I couldn’t imagine a better companion and interlocutor. As I write these acknowledgments, with our two-week-old son on my lap (our first child), I’m hoping that one day I’ll take him to the movies.

How to Use this Book This book is structured more as a tapestry of interwoven parts than as a theme with variations. That is, the thesis of this book unfolds gradually, and every chapter is dependent somehow on other chapters. If Chapter I offers a view on the role of power in determining our truth and reality, in Chapter II, the pendulum swings assertively in the other direction to offer a Deleuzo-Blanchotian perspective on untruth and unreality that reverses such effects of power (this also provides the Blanchotian framework for the remainder of the book). Chapter III offers the relatable example of dreaming to illustrate such an experience outside of power, where affection and perception are displaced and disguised by that which has no truth or reality. Chapter IV, in considering the unthinkable and insensible outside of power, builds on the dynamic between Deleuze and Blanchot in Chapter II and the role of affect and percept in Chapter III to lay out the philosophical foundation for this book: the relation between thought and art as a radical reversal beyond power that draws from Deleuze’s early works such as Difference and Repetition and continues in his later work with Guattari, all via Blanchot. Chapter V expands the conversation between Deleuze and Blanchot by shifting specifically into fiction’s reversals of power, and Chapter VI presents their approaches to Kafka’s Castle as a key case study (both chapters on fiction crucially build on the role of displacement and disguise in Chapter III and the dynamic of art and thought in Chapter IV, while Chapter VI also returns to key distinctions from Chapter I). Chapter VII finally returns to the problem of truth and reality from Chapter I to ask how we normally experience cinema, for example, through our panoptic or etiological ways of seeing (while also considering the relevance to cinema of the event from Chapter III, of the planes of immanence and composition from Chapter IV, and of the literary medium or milieu in its deterritorialization from Chapter V), in order to ultimately articulate an approach to cinematic art in Chapter VIII. Chapter VIII both serves as a counterpoint to our normal experience of cinema in Chapter VII (as Chapter II served as a counterpoint to Chapter I) and also builds on the approach to “vigilant” dreaming and the Blanchotian “fissure” in Chapter III, the Deleuzo-Blanchotian foundation of Chapter IV on thought and art, and the approach to novelty in fiction in Chapter V. Chapter IX then offers case studies of cinema for Chapter VIII just as Chapter VI offered a case study illustrating Chapter V. While the introduction lays out the stakes of developing this approach to art as a reversal of power and as composed by genuine thought, the concluding chapter reconsiders the thought of eternal return in Chapters II, III, IV, V and VIII. The book’s thesis is articulated on pages 11–12 of the Introduction (in the section “Toward a philosophy of cinematic art”), followed by a detailed chapterby-chapter synopsis. There are also several voices in this book: it is primarily an exchange between Deleuze and Blanchot (establishing Blanchot’s influence on Deleuze), but there is also x

How to Use this Book

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Deleuze/Guattari, Foucault, and Kafka (note that Deleuze and Guattari is abbreviated as D&G). The result of the exchange, however, is greater than the sum of those voices: as I believe, the encounter between Deleuze, Blanchot, Foucault, and others generates a new thesis involving what I call the reversal of power. I argue this thesis in my own voice using my own philosophical approach, though I continue to summon the support of these key thinkers. Thus while I invoke proper names when appropriate, I leave them out when considering the ideas about reversals of power that constitute the primary assertion of this book. (Even so, I do not use the pronoun “I” in the pages that follow, as this is a journey that we take.) For further interpretations of cinematic art, in all its reversals of and beyond power, as well as critiques of cinematic worlds, in all their productions of reality and truth, visit my website, filminterpretation.com (though if you are reading this book substantially after its publication, visit my faculty webpage for updates on the URL, etc.). A word on the cover art: the cover image depicts an urban landscape superimposed over a face, where the eyes of the figure look downward toward the fade into darkness, while the mind’s eye is drawn into the urban world and down a road (pictured in color) that takes us to the imperceptible, vanishing point of the horizon, and toward a moon that may also be a sun. This return to the world through the darkness or the “absence of origin” of night is the experience of the Blanchotian dream (III; 5). I superimposed the images this way to invoke the notion that, in art’s radical reversal beyond power, when we are drawn further from the reality that we can experience or the truth that we can discover—that is, beyond the external world—we are also drawn beyond what we can perceive and feel—that is, further inward than we have access to: a radical reversal of interior and exterior. Thus if “a journey in the world is also a journey in the brain,” as Deleuze says of Kubrick (IX; 3b), for Blanchot, such a journey would also be incessant, which is why the road draws us to a vanishing point and to a moon that may also be a sun—just as dreams, for Blanchot, involve the “incessance of the day.” Because this book’s chapters are all mutually interdependent, and because this book considers Deleuze’s and Blanchot’s complex and idiosyncratic terminology—not to mention the terminology that I introduce or refine surrounding the book’s thesis about art’s reversals of power—there is a detailed glossary in the back of this book. There is also a cross-reference system that I use when I’m building on a specific point from a previous chapter or foreshadowing a point that will be made in a future chapter. The reference system offers the chapter number as a roman numeral, followed by a semicolon, followed by the section number of the chapter—e.g., “IV; 3c” (if there is more than one cross-reference, the chapter references are separated by commas, and multiple references within the same chapters are separated by semicolons). The glossary also utilizes this cross-reference system extensively.

Abbreviations Works by Deleuze: B = Bergsonism C1 = Cinema I: The Movement Image C2 = Cinema II: The Time Image CC = Coldness and Cruelty D = Dialogues II (with Claire Parnet) DR = Difference and Repetition ECC = Essays Critical and Clinical ES = Empiricism and Subjectivity F = Foucault FB = Francis Bacon: logic of sensation LS = The Logic of Sense N = Nietzsche and Philosophy NG = Negotiations PS = Proust and Signs SEP = Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza SPP = Spinoza: Practical Philosophy

Works by Deleuze and Guattari: AO = Anti-Oedipus K = Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature TP = A Thousand Plateaus WP = What is Philosophy?

Works by Blanchot: AwO = Awaiting Oblivion BtC = The Book to Come FS = Friendship

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IC = The Infinite Conversation ND = Nights as Days, Days as Nights (foreword) SL = The Space of Literature SnB = The Step (Not) Beyond UC = The Unavowable Community WD = The Writing of the Disaster WF = The Work of Fire

Works by Foucault: BC = The Birth of the Clinic DP = Discipline and Punish HS = The History of Sexuality, Vol. I SD = Society Must be Defended

Works by Foucault and Blanchot: F/B = Foucault/Blanchot

Works by Kafka: BN = The Blue Octavo Notebooks C = The Castle CS = Collected Stories D1 = Diaries, 1910–1923 T = The Trial

Introduction: How the True World Finally Became a Bad Film

Our cultural paradigm seems to offer us two ways of consuming fiction. The first is impulsive: filmgoers and readers may seek out what is suited to their taste and share personal opinions. This is reflected, for instance, in the industry of film criticism, which offers spoiler-free promotions and praises for directors, actors, or writers. The second is informative: when a film is interpreted, an awareness of genre or the history of fiction is demonstrated, and detached observations are made of a work’s form and technique. In this second case, there is less focus on our opinions, enthusiasms, or disapprovals: theoretical or academic approaches often deemphasize the very same content and judgment on which film critics focus almost exclusively. The issue here is that this false dichotomy encourages not only a pervasive right to judgment (everyone is entitled to their taste) but, by compartmentalizing interpretation or theory focused on form or technique rather than meaning and value, the discussion of what makes a work of fiction a work of art—which compels us to passionately interpret it—becomes moot. The work of art—as a distinction—is no longer sacred. Art is either whatever we make of it individually, or, with some notable exceptions, it is set aside in favor of analysis in the archives of fiction and theory. We are left at an impasse in determining and appreciating the qualities and features that make a work of fiction a work of art. The impulse to judge according to taste means that filmgoers and readers may not often casually discuss the transformative power of a work, or search for insights that the work has into thinking otherwise about our culture, history, or human condition. But where does the impulse to judge a work of fiction come from? It is likely a practical consideration: filmgoers and readers want to know the type of fiction they are going to enjoy, if it’s well crafted, and if the characters are interesting, and they don’t want to waste their time with a book or movie that doesn’t “pay off.” Perhaps they want characters who make choices we may not, and walk away with a moral lesson based on those choices. Perhaps they want an immersive world. Whether thinking in terms of type or “genre” (some like horror, others do not), of what defines craft (some like CGI action, others simply like good dialogue), and what makes a book or movie “pay off ” (some like ambiguous endings, others do not), what pleases us may seem highly subjective, and is perhaps as mysterious and unpredictable as the products of a Kafkaesque world: it “depend[s] on the mood of the observer,” where “the reflections it gives rise to are endless, and only chance determines where one stops.”1 1

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Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power

Lines are always drawn between the escapist diversions of popular taste and works that deserve critical acclaim. Let the masses enjoy a world of distraction, while the elite, with their “good taste,” enjoy some other, relatively esoteric or inaccessible level of appreciation. Duchamp famously challenged this when he claimed that “taste is the enemy of art,” but his alternative of l’art pour l’art does not get us beyond this impasse: the notion that anything can be art remains a solipsistic view that still produces a hierarchy of taste. In other words, even if “art” claims criteria like emotional transformation or content that transcends the personal—which may correspond to our expectations (our “good taste”)—such criteria are still subjectively defined. Art is art because someone says so, or through consensus. And if we reject Duchamp’s assertion in order to celebrate “original” works in privileged genres that challenge our formulaic expectations, we then resort back to generic judgments (some sort of hierarchy of classifications, à la Aristotle). In this case, art is art because it is generally inexplicable, while non-art is easily explained. So, there remains no legitimate, objective foundation for taste or for art. To get some bearings to define works of fiction as works of art, we could refer to back to David Hume, who used the metaphor of taste to compare art to food, noting that some of us have more cultivated taste than others. Refined taste, in this sense, involves a habituation that we share: some may be better suited to judge art because they are attuned to notice things that others do not. This still implies, however, that art is fodder: mass produced to meet a constant demand, even if the expectations are more refined. Kant extended this insight in an effort to find not just cultivated (and thus contingent) but universal criteria for taste such as “beauty,” settling on ideas involving the “disinterested” reflection that art provokes, which suspends our desire and, by doing so, is morally good. Judgments of the work of art, in that sense, are inevitable insofar as they incite some kind of critical distance. Kant’s case, however, can be described as “purely formal” in that the content of reflection is less relevant than the fact that we suspend our desire by reflecting on artistic forms. With both Hume’s suggestion that we can cultivate our taste and Kant’s suggestion about the disinterested reflection that is universal, it remains entirely feasible that there are no criteria to justify the qualities or features that make certain works artistic and others not. We can cultivate our taste all we want, but what we cultivate is made up and arbitrary. And if we like whatever we want, and if art is in the eye of the beholder, then even cultivating what we like socially (when habits become “culture”) is arguably nothing more than tradition, with no other justification. Likewise, the “something” we make of art upon disinterested reflection is entirely up to the person doing the reflecting. Therefore, if the content that provokes disinterested reflection is entirely subjective, then the art object has no autonomy and its formal qualities are only distinctive by virtue of the subject. Here we return to where we started: we don’t have to justify our taste or opinions because there is no universal truth in which to anchor them. Whether speaking of refined taste or disinterested reflection, we have not yet moved beyond our dichotomy of taste, enthusiasm, or disapproval of the content of fiction on the one hand and informational, disinterested analysis of its form on the other hand. If there are no universal criteria to distinguish art from non-art in fiction, then it may seem that “art” is not based in anything—it is simply not real. Here we encounter

Introduction

3

Sartre’s existentialist position on fiction, which reflects his views on the real world, where, he claimed, we “exist” as conscious beings but don’t have an essence or purpose, and yet are still bound to the “freedom” to make choices. What essentially makes us human is nothing—but nothingness then becomes a universal principle that gives us something in common: if nothing is true, then we have the freedom to be whatever we want, and are also responsible for enhancing that freedom for others. And yet, when we read a novel, for instance, he claims that what we perceive is also what we “imagine,” such that there is no tension between our consciousness and our world.2 So, art may be based in “nothing,” but that nothingness is what opens up possibilities to perceive and imagine simultaneously. In this sense, the escape from the real world afforded by fictional worlds absolves us of the responsibility of choice that we must make in the world. This absolution of responsibility is not Kant’s disinterested reflection per se— but is what makes art pleasing. Fiction absorbs our attention because it is not we who suffer the consequences of choice, and the situations presented are not ours: they belong to the characters. For Sartre, the judgment that makes a work of fiction “art” therefore turns on whether the choices the characters make open up possibilities rather than close them down: the work must not “authorize an injustice” but bring about “a world to be impregnated always with more freedom”: “at the heart of the aesthetic imperative we discern the moral imperative.”3 In short, the work must show us how the world could be: “a promise to change” or “a promise to imitate”, that is, a moral template for action rather than a moral act itself (disinterested reflection). In an entirely classical fashion, he considers the aesthetic to be analogous to the moral. Sartre’s premise, however, is that if this world has no real essence, then it can be anything, and the worlds in art serve as a blueprint for how this world could be. This approach thus considers art and reality to have a parallel and reciprocal relationship: despite fictional art having no essence, it still reflects our world by offering possibilities. In this sense, Sartre’s approach reduces and limits the scope of art and the imaginary to a moral imperative tied to possible action. If fictional worlds genuinely have no reality, though, then their relationship to the actual world can simply become overdetermined; this is reflected in philosophies of “world” as well as in theories of world-building. For instance, Heidegger argued that an artwork discloses a world while simultaneously concealing the earth; more recently, literary-critical conceptions of “world making”—such as those of Nelson Goodman (and other narratologists)—emphasize the way that narratives “invoke” worlds, so that there can be as many worlds as there are stories (though all the worlds will still be “comprehensive systems which comprise all elements that fit together,” and are not in conflict in terms of their coherence).4 This of course explodes today with film franchises and TV series, which are less dependent on specific characters, themes, or plots than they are on the worlds in which that those characters, themes and plots can be found. In this sense, we escape into fiction to discover worlds—and are less interested in the characters than in imagining what is possible in those worlds: sometimes there may be mysterious situations or supernatural worlds that lie underneath a cinematic world; sometimes the worlds may present wide-ranging flights of fancy and action; sometimes they may take us to unusual historical or geographical locations. But in any case, the worlds we are drawn to reflect the object of our judgment and taste.

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Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power

When we focus on the possibilities within fictional worlds, or even the possibilities that it opens up into ours, the actual world that we inhabit, the true world, to paraphrase Nietzsche, becomes not just a fable, but a bad fable, a bad novel, or better yet, a bad film. Still believing in better worlds, not realizing that our own world remains unredeemed, we lose the sense of Nietzsche’s final maxim that if the “true world” is “unattainable,” then so too is the “apparent” world. In this sense, our very perception of reality is influenced by fiction. As Gilles Deleuze says of film, everything becomes cliché, where nothing is original, everything has been said, been done, and our life is meaningless: it is all in a movie somewhere (or better yet, in Borges’ great library). It’s been seen before. You can’t say “I love you”: it has been said a million times already. Only better, probably. As Deleuze wrote: [W]e no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make [faisons] cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film.5

If our own apparent lives seem boring in comparison to film, the lure to escapism and novelty in film becomes strong. Interesting people are making important or brash decisions in secret worlds suddenly opened up to us, the otherworldly becomes available, or altered worlds appear where we can witness what we normally would not. But this can become confusing: when our exciting movies play like video games, or we are otherwise saturated with characters who seem exceedingly powerful or compelling, we no longer care about this world. We then begin to believe in reality-TV icons as real people, and we elect them as president (as in the 2016 US election), demanding more excitement in politics. The boredom of our lives leads Deleuze to conclude that we ought to find reasons to “believe” in this world again. The catch, however, is that what “this world” is cannot be considered to be something that we can know or take for granted. It is not “representable” as a fictional world—if it were, we would be right back to where we started. The fiction would always be better than the reality. And this may be a cliché, too, but the more we obsess over our opinions about fictional worlds, the less invested we are in reality. The temptation here may be to sink into a malaise or to disparage and discredit fictional works: if Sartre’s existentialist approach advocates a philosophy of freedom and the absolution of choice and responsibility through immersion in fiction, other approaches detach themselves from fiction and remain suspicious about its escapist tendencies by offering interpretations that question its apparent meaning—leaving behind the question of art. It is less about fictional worlds being distinct from our world than it is about seeing fiction as a disguised extension of our world. As Paul Ricoeur famously claimed, this involves exposing “the lies and illusions of consciousness”:6 for instance, psychoanalytic theory considers works of fiction in terms of “wish-fulfilments” (we want to experience what we cannot every day). Marxist theory, by contrast, considers how fictional works reinforce or refine the ways of perceiving and thinking—often covertly—that correspond to the values (or “ideologies”) of a social class. Even a complete rejection of television and film as a “Huxleyan warning,” where we become addicted to the thoughtless pleasure of

Introduction

5

entertainment, is a form of suspicion that offers no affirmative alternative.7 On the one hand, then, these theoretical and critical trends emerged differently in literature and in film, leading to various theories of semiotics and subjectivity, and can be very compelling; on the other hand, the goal of such approaches, by and large, is not necessarily to distinguish entertainment from art: Shakespeare is as much a target as the Twilight series. As a consequence, the enthusiasm of the filmgoer or reader is often less for the work itself than for the relevance and insights of the theoretical apparatus to its objects of study. Thus while it may be compelling to diagnose works of fiction using such methods, in those cases it is generally not the work of fiction that compels us to perceive, feel, and think in new ways. Rather, it is the critical apparatus that demonstrates how we already perceive, feel, and think. The work of fiction becomes a shadow of the critic’s assumptions about what makes us human.

Power: the work of fiction in the world of judgment Whether we are suspicious of the work of fiction, whether we think it reflects the possibilities of our own world, whether we think it ought to provoke disinterested reflection, or whether we think it is simply a matter of entitlement to our taste (cultivated or not), in every case the work of fiction itself is subjected to demands that belong to actual people in the real world. A theoretical approach may uncover hidden beliefs or wishes which are reflected in the audience or author, an existential approach may demand that fictional worlds show us how our world might be, a Kantian approach may value the manner in which some works provoke us to suspend our interest or desire in the world, and a Humean approach may highlight the manner in which we form expectations about fiction, culturally and socially. In every case, we are somehow tied to the world—and even if the value of art as a category of fiction involves suspending our desire in the world, this defines art’s value as a moral imperative within the world. This tension between the compulsion to judge a work of fiction and at the same time to experience it privately can be expressed as follows: on the one hand, what we value in fictional worlds is up to us and seems beyond reproach. If fiction is not real and the events in it have no consequence, why should our judgments of it matter? On the other hand, our judgments of fictional works are inherently social and bound to this world in that they work as a normalizing force. Readers and filmgoers may judge those who do not share their opinions rather than judge the works themselves. Films or books may be circulated based on reputation and recommendation. Rating systems (often one out of four or five stars) offered on personalized platforms to customize our taste, algorithms to create more recommendations, and websites that aggregate reviews, may all unintentionally influence how works of fiction can or should be created or experienced. Judgment implicitly or explicitly saturates our cultural experience of fiction. When considering the normalizing effects of judgment, we can look beyond the philosophies of aesthetics and existence to consult Michel Foucault, who demonstrated, on a practical and historical level, the ways in which power relations implicate us in

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Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power

constant judgment. These are not necessarily moral judgments, but judgments involving what is normal or abnormal, regular or unusual. As Foucault explains it, “power is . . . a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult”;8 in every case, such possibilities are informed by practical knowledge of what would make us secure, prosperous, and healthy. We want our society to have regulations that protect our health or stimulate our economy, and we want ourselves and others to be disciplined so we can be productive and safe. As Deleuze claims, Foucault’s “exercise of power shows up as an affect, since force defines itself by its very power to affect other forces,” which he also designates in terms of being “incited or provoked, to be induced.”9 Thus in all of our modern practices, the forces of capitalism (whether industrial, correctional, or neoliberal), along with the forces of biological science (whether for medicine, psychology, control, or warfare), on both individual and social levels, interact and reinforce one another. This is how we know our world, and who we are in it: namely, through our own biological existence and our insertion into practices of efficiency or of returns on our investments (of time, energy, money, etc.). From Foucault’s perspective, then, if we ask what our world is, we can say that it is what we know in a practical sense: the product of power and knowledge. For the purpose of considering fictional art in the Foucauldian age of biopolitics, this book will consider what the world is—not in terms of coherent expectations or comprehensive systems (Goodman), or other philosophical understandings, but in the practical sense of a world where we know who we are by virtue of the values tied to life (e.g., health, prosperity) and the normative judgments which surround such values. Such knowledge of the world and who we are in it depends on what we can observe and what we can articulate about it, where truth and reality cohere. Foucault claims that what we articulate socially is “binary” in the sense that it captures what we can observe—quite literally what we can “see” about our milieus and one another—and places it along a spectrum of positive or negative judgment. All practices, Foucault says, are “dividing”: “the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the ‘good boys’,”10 and we are constantly provoked, “incited,” or “induced” to act to avoid negative judgment, which reflects whether our actions in fact improve our health, security, and prosperity or not (individually or collectively). This knowledge may be created or “fictional,” but as Deleuze says of Foucault, “never has fiction produced such truth and reality.”11 Thus even if this is a post-Nietzschean world without truth per se, power “produces” truth in the world. And as we will see, it is arguably the case that we carry over our values into fiction, even and especially if the situations presented are fantastic or otherworldly. As much as we may wish to escape our everyday world into imaginary worlds to experience fiction on its own terms, if we are implicated in a world of power, what we cannot escape—even in our most escapist diversion—is judgment. This is what Foucault’s perspective allows us to consider: the inevitability of judgment insofar as fictional art is an object in the world. If filmgoers and readers want the experience to “pay off,” they essentially want a return on their investment (which confirms their own “bias”). In some sense, they want their works of fiction to be as regulated and predictable as their lives: as we will see (VII; 4), the very movement of cinematic images wherein we expect things to happen, or await an event that already happened to be revealed,

Introduction

7

supplants a genuine encounter with art that “forces us to think.” This experience of judging such fiction orients us toward common questions. How elaborately designed or conceived was the fictional world? How vital (interesting, talented, witty, attractive, etc.) were the characters? In every case, we still subordinate the work to the very same regulated and disciplinary processes that force conformity in our daily lives: characters are treated as real people with psychology and feelings (with whom we can “identify”), fiction is assumed to be expressive of—or tied to—the ideology of a social class (even “low brow” distinctions operate this way), and fiction is expected to offer a moral lesson to expand the possibilities in our actual worlds. In other words, insofar as the importance of fiction is tied to possibilities in the world, it is dissolved into, normalized, and assimilated by power—whether the homogenizing and normalizing effects of psychology, the disciplinary and (anti-)regulatory effects of capitalism and neoliberalism, or simply that which can be institutionalized and judged socially. Our judgment thus operates in the real world of power, rather than itself being transformed through the unreal worlds of art. Foucault’s own famous work on the function of the “author” or artist emphasizes that art’s importance can be seen in its creation of discourses—new ways of seeing and saying, and thus new forms of knowledge. The problem with discourses around authors is that such discourses tend to isolate an author’s fictional worlds from our own world, because “fiction threatens our world” of regularity.12 Foucault’s own solution, however, still makes fictional worlds dependent upon a potential “mode of [real] existence,” or subjective “positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals.”13 In other words, as with Sartre, for Foucault fiction is not a unique experience which truly differs from real experience; rather, it is a possible experience of reality that is judged (as obscene, for example) by linking it with an author’s mind. Power creates knowledge by equating the imaginary with an author. At best, art creates new ways of seeing and saying—new “discourses” which are descriptive or perceptive—but such discourses can be quickly institutionalized and normalized (e.g., imitated, taught, etc.). Artists may temporarily tap into a creative domain which is outside of power, but are immediately thrown back into it. While Foucault offers an account of this problem, and it is surely the case that fiction cannot be separated from its impact on the world, the unrestrained nature of the imagination continues to loom large.

The work of fiction beyond our exterior and interior worlds: critique and interpretation If, even in the most escapist pursuit, we cannot escape our own subjective judgment— lest we succumb to detached critical analyses—it is because our perceptions and affections are inevitably oriented toward life in a world of knowledge and power. We can question this impulse, and criticize the failure of our practices that facilitate life, but this does not take us beyond such limits. The question becomes: if, in a Foucauldian world, our perception and affection are continuously bound up in provocations or incitements to act, how might art, as an experience, provoke or incite us beyond the

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Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power

judgments and knowledge that require action in the world? To experience fiction is to withdraw from the world, and even the existentialist view, which claims that there is no “essence” to art, sidesteps the fact that fictional experience, by its very nature, neglects the world. Likewise, any link between Foucault’s “subjective position” of an imaginary character and our actual world of power would be tenuous at best. In this sense, judging the imaginary is an effort to wield power by forming our own personal knowledge about a domain that can never judge us back, and any compulsion to judge such a domain is all the more addictive and unsatisfying because we are grappling with an intractable element. If fiction truly has a “relation” to this world, it is one best characterized as ignorant, unconcerned, and indifferent. Why? Because fiction has no rules, no laws, no reality, and no truth: how on earth can we assume it therefore has some role in our world of law and of truth? Does this not forever tie it to a judgment that is, if not dogmatic and unreflective, then at the very least grounded in some assumption that is forever foreign to the work of fiction? And even if fiction can be judged on its own terms, how can it be apart from an empty formalism, which would offer a detached or “formulaic” analysis of its internal relations and craft? The answer to these questions is that it is not art that is the object of judgment, it is our own judgments that are the object of art: if art can reverse the effects of power, it is by seizing us or drawing us in precisely by virtue of our judgments and knowledge, our perceptions and affections oriented toward life. Just as power, then, produces truth and reality, as well as our normative judgments, of which we can be critical, so too do most films and fictional works. But fiction can, artistically, make reality impossible to discern and truth impossible to discover. We are now beyond the dichotomy outlined at the beginning of this Introduction. Drawn in precisely by our judgments, we are immersed in an experience that cannot be explained as true or discerned as real, which not only “distances” us from the coherence that fictional worlds offer, but beyond that, creates what Maurice Blanchot (an interlocutor of Foucault) calls an “intimacy” with that distance. We thus “escape” or withdraw from the world into the imaginary, but, like the dream (III), we cannot escape the imaginary once it truly fascinates and touches us: it “escapes [us] by the very fact that there is no escaping it.”14 Here, fiction expresses such distance in more or less profound ways, as a feature of art. To interpret works of art, in these terms, is to conceive their relations without “capturing” their material in the form of judgment (since art’s distance cannot be captured)—but, impassioned, it also expresses the value inherent to a sensibility reshaped by this withdrawal beyond reality and truth. As Deleuze states in an oft-cited remark, “what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?”15 In other words, it is the defiance of normative judgment by the work of art that makes it worthy of interpretation in the first place; if art is actually expressing the new and different (rather than values tied to life), then it could never be anticipated by “expert judgment.” To return to the choices we are often faced with (from the opening of this Introduction)— namely, film criticism that offers opinions without much interpretation, or film theory that offers contextual interpretations without the passion that comes with judgment— it is perhaps feasible to consider our sensibilities and “unthinkable” experience of a work of fiction as provocations to think through it and even “believe” its values (V; 3a):

Introduction

9

this is the effect of an immersion in its milieus and worlds. The role of criticism, in this context, finally diverges from the spuriousness of taste and the priority of subjective responses over the features of the artwork itself, while interpretation diverges from the dispassionate and technical approach. Interpretation, in short, retains a mannerism and style, a mode of conveying ideas and values that arise from fascination with the artwork. But what does critique and interpretation become, in this context? There is, as Deleuze insists, an “art of interpreting” and an “art of evaluating” that develop the differential elements of sense and value, respectively.16 Such evaluation and interpretation determine whether a work’s differential elements pass Nietzsche’s “test of the eternal return” (II; 8)17—in this book’s reversals of power, whether they produce or hollow out realities and truths on the one hand, or whether (through eternal return) they express genuine novelty through the “same”—which is to say, through displacements and disguises of reality and truth, on the other hand. Thus interpretation is not the application of a theory, since the dissolution of reality and truth in fictional art has no predetermined content to uncover (such as “repressed wishes”). Any given work of fictional art determines the very realities and truths it reverses and the inexplicable differences that remain. Deleuze provides a useful way to conceive of such a role when commenting on Blanchotian fissures between Foucault’s seeing and speaking, where “there are only milieus and whatever lies between them” such that “thinking addresses itself to an outside that has no form.”18 That is, interpretation asks what remains of truth when it is displaced, of reality when it is disguised, and more radically, when the imaginary and false enter a new dynamic. To interpret the work of fictional art that reverses such effects of power, in short, is to conceive of its unlocatable forces of displacement and unrevealable relations of disguise. This goal of such interpretation, however, is not to distinguish art from non-art. The interpretive question is inclusive, concerning artistic features or characteristics; it does not exclude entire works as “nonart” (e.g., judging films as worth seeing or not). Fictional works may contain features that do not reverse the effects of power (that is, the truths and realities produced in individual works), but can be critiqued; however, those same works may contain features that do reverse the effects of power, demanding interpretation (and evaluation): in either case, we are never finished with truth and reality. Criticism draws us beyond the exterior world of normative judgment to ask how truth and reality are produced in the first place (whether in our world or in fictional worlds), while interpretation considers the manner in which fiction’s truths and realties are reversed within perception and emotion, ultimately expressive of obscure ideas and values beyond both its exterior and interior worlds. The approach of this book, in these terms, concerns both critique and interpretation: fiction that passes and does not pass “the test of eternal return.” Foucault often gestures to this space of thought that is beyond knowledge and power—especially to Blanchot’s “outside.” Blanchot overtly characterizes this space of the outside as a “non-power,” and literature as a space divorced from action:19 the “unimportant” (V; 1–2). And while Foucault acknowledges the space of thought and experience of the imaginary that is outside of power, he does not articulate a philosophy of art outside of power as such. He in fact characterizes Blanchot’s outside as an experience of “negligent attraction” which creates a “discourse . . . that is always outside what it says,”20 setting him apart from the likes of Sartre and Kant by gesturing toward

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Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power

the metaphysical limits of his concept of power. However, he also “encloses” Blanchot’s outside as a space of exclusion that “culture rejects” (II; 4). Foucault in fact claims that Blanchot’s outside “hollows out” our interiority (which, for him, is also a product of power), so no sense or value remains. Granted, in initial reversals of power in this book, truth and reality are hollowed out, but in more radical reversals of art, sense and value do return, even if they do not produce a “discourse” (Foucault) or a “promise to imitate” (Sartre). It is only through Blanchot’s insistence on the “unimportance” and “inessential” nature of art that we can consider how it draws us into another experience that is both outside of the world and yet not strictly meaningless. The same thing that makes art excessively vulnerable to judgment—it cannot judge us back—is what makes it a force of obscurity, one that we cannot ignore (insofar as it fascinates us) but also cannot comprehend (and thus cannot imitate). So how does Blanchot describe this? By emphasizing the obscurity of perception, attention, memory, and thought as we experience it, Blanchot shifts emphasis from unknowable relations of power in the external world to that which is inaccessible within each of us—what we cannot know about our own imagination, perception, and experience. Thus it is no longer a conversation about discourses of art or subjects of power, or even just about how reality and truth are produced, but about the features of another kind of experience, beyond power, depicted in “the opaque and empty opening on what is when there is no more world, when there is no world yet.”21 We are now plunged, as Blanchot would say, “further inward” (plus intérieure) such that the obscurities of our own perceptions and emotions form a “single continuous space”22 that “flows” or “glistens”23 within the obscurities beyond our exterior world. This is “a profounder intimacy, toward the most interior and the most invisible, where we are no longer anxious to do and act.”24 He continues, citing Novalis, “We dream of voyaging across the universe. Isn’t the universe, then, in us? We do not know the depths of our mind.”25 But this Blanchotian inaccessibility of interiority is not a philosophy of fictional art as a reversal of the effects of power—and it is here that this book turns to Deleuze. If Blanchot’s outside—as an experience of art—represents a blind spot for Foucault, so too does the insidious and pervasive nature of power and its influence on fictional worlds represent a blind spot for Blanchot. The excess of each thinker’s singular contribution carries its own limitation. It is a goal of this book to bridge this divide by incorporating Deleuze’s perspective, which places the thinkers in conversation. This will take us from Blanchotian mortalism, dream, and literary space to Deleuze’s exploration of imagination, movement, memory, time, and ultimately cinema. Deleuze’s perspective, as this book will explore, will allow us to consider an approach to literary and cinematic art that is greater than the conversation among these thinkers: that is, Deleuze’s philosophy of movement and time (in experience, literature, and cinema), via this clash between Blanchot and Foucault, will lead us to reconsider the Foucauldian role of truth and reality within Blanchotian domains (of experience, dream, and fiction) that are utterly foreign to them. In short, we will see that we do not lose the world when it is reversed or eclipsed, nor does it strictly disappear in our encounter with—and experience of—fictional art. Yet, we do not regain it, either. What happens instead requires careful consideration.

Introduction

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As Deleuze demonstrates by drawing on Blanchot, the “absolute relation” or “nonrelation” of the outside is not only beyond the external world—that is, our reality and truth—but is closer than our internal worlds of dreams, memory, emotion, and perception. There is “an inside that lies deeper than any internal world, just as the outside is farther away than any external world,” and this inside is “not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.”26 It may sound easy or flippant to say that the inside is “the inside of the outside,” but this means that what we thought was beyond our reach because it was “out there”—in Foucauldian terms, a diffuse and unstable set of power relations (what Deleuze calls the “diagram”)—is suddenly “coextensive” with that which inexplicably informs our own experience. Instead of perceptions and affections bound up by the constant provocations of power (which promise to improve our lives, prosperity, etc.), we perceive and are affected passively, drawn toward what is not possible, beyond reality and truth. This leads us to what Blanchot calls a “profounder intimacy” and more “radical reversal” where, as this book contends, unreality and untruth, the incessant and the ungraspable, repetition and difference, enter into their own unique dynamic. This dynamic is not simply a space of “exclusion” from, or “exception” to, our world of truth and reality (II; 4–8); it is integral to human experience. But how does the obscure or impossible lie at the very heart of our perception and affection, our imagination and memory? What does an experience that cannot be explained by our truths or discerned as real actually look and feel like? In short, what is beyond reversals of power?

Toward a philosophy of cinematic art: reversals of power in mortality, dream, and fiction Beginning with Foucault’s insight that power creates truth and reality through values placed on life, this book then turns to a study of experiences that reverse and escape such effects of power. Consequently, this book explores, firstly, how mortality, imagination, memory, dream, chaos, and art—particularly literature and cinema— hollow out the life-centric values of the world as we know it. Moreover, beyond that hollowing out and initial reversal, this study considers how artistic fiction can involve what Blanchot would perhaps call a “radical reversal” through a dynamic between unreality and untruth that is expressive of obscure value and composed by ideas (which concern Deleuzian difference, novelty, and becoming). That is, in such fictional art, the unrevealable disguises of perception and the unlocatable displacements of affection may be composed by genuine ideas that, like the oblivion of Blanchot’s night where we dream, are never given, but unlike the dream, in Deleuze’s terms, “consist” and “insist” within the artwork. In this manner, art’s unrealities and unresolvable problems, or its “indiscernible” (Deleuze) and “incessant” (Blanchot) percepts, radically become its very untruths and unanswerable questions, that is, its “inexplicable” (Deleuze) and “ungraspable” (Blanchot) affects—or vice versa, where the untruth of art’s inexplicable affects becomes the unreality of the indiscernible. It is this dynamic, based in a Blanchotian approach to Deleuze’s syntheses of time (where the third synthesis

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Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power

conceivably entails a dynamic between the first two), that ultimately leads to the novelty and becoming of genuine thought untouched by the pernicious forces of normalization and judgment in a world of power. This book culminates with a study of cinematic art, which incorporates features of every aforementioned reversal: Blanchot’s uncertainty of mortality (II) becomes the impossibility of reality’s cinematic unfolding and truth’s disclosures; the indiscernibility of the imagination’s “contractions” in Deleuze’s first synthesis of time (II) refract and reflect Deleuze’s “crystal” cinematic images of the real within the imaginary; the inexplicability of difference in Deleuze’s second synthesis of time (II) likewise becomes Deleuze’s cinematic “chronosign” of multiple truths, perspectives, or worlds; the highest paradox of time, eternal return (II; IV), becomes cinema’s “false continuity” of the imaginary, or the “serialization” of time’s untruths within the imaginary; the dream’s unrevealable disguises and unlocatable displacements (III) become cinema’s creation of movements that are apparently real or true but actually problematize and question; what D&G call the speed of differential thought that conceivably makes connections independently of the perceptual and affective movements of dream, imagination, and memory (IV) become “vertiginous” Blanchotian relational spaces of cinematic framing and cutting that no longer cut or link us to the next image rationally; and finally, the dismantling of truths and realities in D&G’s “assemblages” of fiction that instead draw us toward difference and novelty (V; VI) become the very dismantling of cinematic montages or “assemblages” that make illusory realities and truths cohere. In fact, we will see that the chaotic material of thought—that is, D&G’s plane of immanence, which they call the Blanchotian “unthinkable of thought” (IV; V)—remains thought’s “absolute milieu” in cinema, where Deleuze’s plane of immanence becomes the materiality of cinematic light and movement. Cinematic movement, and the realities and truths it produces, are therefore inextricable from both its percepts and unrealities as well as its affects and untruths. It is in this sense that the movement we experience in the exteriority of a Foucauldian world wherein we are provoked or seduced to know what is true or real continues in cinematic art and Deleuzian “time-images”: it is just that, in cinema’s initial reversals of power, instead of discovering what is real or revealing what is true, reality refracts, twists, and divides; truth bifurcates, becomes perspectival, and multiplies; and ultimately, in the most radical reversal beyond power, the imaginary and false are indiscernible from and coexistent with each other, displaced and disguised by that which has no truth or reality (thought). The beyond of such worlds also takes us not only further than the exteriority of truth and reality, but “closer than” the interiority of our own perception and affection explored in this Introduction, where Deleuze’s cinematic movement is “subordinated to” time (VIII; 5a). However, to consider how cinema creates truth and reality, our initial foray into cinema (VII) will involve aligning the organic totalities of Deleuze’s movement image with our study from the first chapter of power’s production of truth and reality. That is, just as power produces truth and reality, so too can cinema. In the case of the cinematic movement-image, which subordinates time to itself, this book’s approach to cinematic worlds is that the disciplinary and regulated aims of territorial assemblages become the behavioralism of Deleuze’s large form of the action-image and the etiology of the small form: in these

Introduction

13

cases, reality is always discovered (actions are predicted and judged) and truth is always revealed (situations are disclosed). But to explain how power makes us know what is real and what is true in the first place, and what reversals are involved outside of power that leads us to cinema (VII–IX), our journey takes us from Foucault’s world (I) to Blanchot’s outside and Deleuze’s syntheses of time (II), dream (III), and chaos (IV), toward a Deleuzo-Blanchotian approach to artistic fiction—with a focus on Kafka, who both Blanchot and D&G treat at length—as a radical reversal beyond power (V–VI). The first chapter of this book, entitled “Power and the (In)Visible: Foucault and Deleuze,” explores Foucault’s approach to power, and Deleuze’s analysis of it, to consider how we are constantly “provoked,” “incited,” and “seduced” to act: as an affectivelydriven phenomenon, modern power no longer operates by sovereign “deduction” and fear, but purports to facilitate and foster life and prosperity. We therefore always want something from it. But this continuously ensnares us in disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms that normalize how we speak (label, classify) about what we see (observe, experience)—such that language “captures” the visible in a binary fashion (healthy/ sick, etc.). In fact, the “resistant” features of power are necessarily co-opted by it (such that there is no evading power’s capture; nothing is unintelligible to power): for example, sanity is only intelligible through insanity, health through illness, and so on. These mechanisms normalize our behavior through direct intervention (the discipline of the panopticon), and through indirect intervention in “milieus” (both neoliberalism and medicine). Added to that, sexuality marks a strange intersection between discipline and regulation that produces truth both through its normalization and expression (but never its “repression”). This capture or knowledge, as this Introduction has discussed, compels us toward constant judgment and produces our very truth and reality. The Foucauldian approach to power thus critiques how we perceive—whether predicting behavior in the panoptic model or uncovering causes with the “medical gaze.” Here, Deleuze, alongside Foucault, allows us to consider that the milieus within which we are disciplined, and that are regulated, are conceivably territorialized by the abstract conceptual functions of practices (e.g., “reform” for prison). Milieus in fact lie beneath any given assemblage or “dispositif,” and conceivably are created by and create our habits. In fact, our habitual expectation “that ‘it’ will continue,”27 along with our idealizations of memory—which, as Deleuze’s first two active syntheses of time, establish reality and truth, respectively—value what is, reinforcing our obsession with preserving and extending life. The second chapter, entitled “From Menace to Passion in Blanchot and Deleuze: ‘The Sovereignty of the Void’ and Experience of the Imaginary,” considers how Blanchot’s “outside” problematizes the Foucauldian obsession with life: for Blanchot, mortality cannot be “carefully evaded,” but is a sovereign, disembodied force, exerting a menacing pull that “seizes” us with “the empty intimacy of ignorance” (hence the “sovereignty of the void,” over which we can have no power, and which appears through dissimulation). Beyond mortality, obscure “fascination” by the imaginary is further away than our exterior worlds, like power, but also closer than our most interior, intimate worlds. In fact, such obscure fascination as an experience beyond menace is elided by many interlocutors and critics of Blanchot, including Foucault himself, who claims that Blanchot’s outside involves a “hollowing out” of interiority in a “placeless

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place” and “infinite void.” It is here that Deleuze’s work on Foucault that incorporates Blanchot offers insight: as Deleuze claims, while Foucault speaks at length of intractable power relations that are beyond our exterior world, he is nevertheless “haunted” by a relation to an interior world that is closer than our perception and self-knowledge. At this point in Chapter II, the book shifts from engaging with Foucault’s world of power to characterizing Deleuzian reversals of power via Blanchot. We begin with Blanchot’s outside that is more than just an “exception” to our world: for Blanchot, the outside involves passionate experiences of impossibility characterized by three features: incessance, obstinate ungraspability, and becoming. By “hold[ing] these traits together,” we see an “affirmation” of “non-power that would not be the simple negation of power,”28 and arguably a direct contrast to Foucault, who claims that the resistance to power is its very “target, handle, or support” (I). That is, this outside does not actively resist power, nor is it devoid of all features (i.e., it is not “nothingness”): it is, in Blanchot’s terms, the passivity of passion. This chapter contends that Blanchot’s three features of impossibility correspond, respectively, to Deleuze’s own passive syntheses of repetition (the simultaneity of contraction in the imagination), difference (the coexistence of memory), and eternal return. In fact, Deleuze’s third synthesis of eternal return—which draws overtly on Blanchot’s approach to death, incessance, ungraspability, and impossibility— as this book contends, combines the paradoxes of difference and repetition in the first two syntheses, just as Blanchot’s features of impossibility are “held together” to affirm the groundlessness of renewed presence: the Nietzschean refusal of nothingness and the alliance of estrangement with the “strangely familiar.” This approach to eternal return and becoming—as a combination of repetition and incessance alongside difference and obstinate ungraspability—will concern the ultimate, radical reversals beyond power in fiction (V–VI, VIII–Conclusion). The third chapter, entitled “Dreams: The Eclipse of the Day and its Incessant Return,” considers how dreams epitomize experience outside of power which we all undergo. On the one hand, the Freudian dream that displaces and disguises repressed wishes or fears must “mean” something psychologically (subordinating dreams to what Blanchot could call the “day’s truth and laws,” or a Foucauldian, normalizing world). On the other hand, Deleuze’s vision of displacement and disguise involves the unconscious posing of problems without solutions and asking questions without answers. While Deleuze does not write at length about dreams, it is conceivable that the force of the Deleuzian dream is precisely the urgency and scope of such positing: this chapter contends that reality’s problematizing takes the disguised form of percepts and truth’s questioning takes the displaced form of affects (this will inform the approach to art in the subsequent chapters). This leads to a reconsideration of Bergson’s dream “illusions” that distort sensation and expand memory, leading us to move beyond the Bergsonian perception and “expanded” memory towards Blanchotian oblivion: in Deleuze’s Bergsonian terms, contrary to the indiscernible connection between one moment and the last beneath lived repetition and habit (that disappears in appearing), in dreams, connections are “so relaxed that the preceding moment has disappeared when the following appears.”29 Thus within and beyond these “relaxed” connections we discover Blanchot’s inspiring movement of oblivion that is “baseless and without depth,” from which we insouciantly turn away and “forget to forget.” That is, dreams

Introduction

15

are not mere “illusions”: they do not just create illusory realities or truths, they unravel them. Dreams, as this chapter ultimately contends, involve Blanchot’s paradox of forgetting, whereby, like eternal return, day does not end in night but returns incessantly and ungraspably: we may be relaxed or inattentive to the day but are “vigilant” towards a night (or “nothingness”) that can never be located or revealed (such a movement thus does not represent “repressed wishes”). This movement engenders “recognition without cognition,” a “fissure” between dreamer and sleeper (which is considered later as the cinematic “interstice”: VIII; 5a). From this perspective, all dreaming is “lucid,” illuminating a “pure semblance” to reality; furthermore, beyond the menacing “harassment” by reality in nightmares (which conceivably “hollows out” our personal truths), the Deleuzo-Blanchotian dream is a forgotten, “pure approach” of questions without answers and problems without solutions that is unthinkable. The fourth chapter, entitled “The Conceptual Composition of the Work of Art: Chaos and the Outside,” begins by considering the difference between experience, art, and dream. While the everyday experience of habit (imagination) and memory, bound as they are to the world, often resort to expectations to reinforce reality and idealizations to reinforce truth (respectively), the oblivion of the dream is lost in a sea of imagination and memory-images that lack any medium or milieu. However, it is the milieus and mediums of art that have both the traction to produce semblances of truth and reality, but also, in their “absolute separation” from the world, to reverse their effects and to be composed by thought. That is, unlike the indeterminate milieus and immensity of oblivion that separate or “fissure” us from cognition in absolute slowness, the speed of thought within determined milieus is beyond movement altogether. For Deleuze, such movements of the imaginary, in their displacements and disguises, however “unthinkable,” “force us to think.” Ideas, in this sense, are answers to questions and solutions to problems—but they are connective rather than representative; that is, ideas do not explain anything. Rather, being inexplicable, they only imply or “implicate.” But what they implicate depends on whether thought critiques the production of our realities and truths (e.g., Foucault’s vast historical and actual milieus of power), or whether it composes percepts and affects (the stuff of art). Indeed, if Foucault’s concept of power problematizes and questions reality and truth, the ideas of fictional art can express values within unreality and untruth. But how? It is here, in Chapter IV, that the book begins to assert the thesis that will bridge the reversals of power in mortality and dream from chapters II and III to reversals in fictional art (in the chapters that follow) by asking the question: how do ideas compose a work of art? Not “concept art,” or fiction where characters discuss ideas, but genuine, unrepresentable ideas that are responsible for the very composition of images and stories, of affects and percepts, in their movements of displacement and disguise? That is, how does art “think,” or as Deleuze likes to say, “force us to think”? These questions require a revaluation of the materiality of art and the immateriality of thought—but more specifically, how the two are related, which brings us to another key feature of the outside of power: chaos. Chaos is considered via D&G’s planes of immanence and composition (each incorporating distinct chaotic features), where they reference Blanchot to depict the former moving with incessantly amorphous form (i.e., the event, the “soil” of repetition), and the latter as a formless, absent totality (i.e., the “cosmos,” the

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“sky” of difference); concurrently, affects and percepts are, conceivably, transforming forms, and concepts are formless, fragmentary intensities. Considering D&G’s claim that entities of one plane can occupy the other, this chapter contends that concepts, occupying the plane of composition, can unleash affections and perceptions from their finite movements. That is, rather than affects and percepts displacing and disguising Blanchot’s nocturnal oblivion of dream (in a “pure approach”), they displace and disguise that which cannot be located or revealed: the inexistent idea. Like Blanchot’s night, and death, such ideas are not the “non-being of the negative”; rather, concepts survey milieus with “an order without distance” (D&G), and hold forces “at a distance” (Blanchot on Deleuze). They traverse the “inexistence of a whole which could be thought”30 and are thereby naturally suited to compose the affects and percepts of art that do not (re)produce truth and reality: if affects and percepts pose questions and problems (respectively), concepts are the fragmentary and unrepresentable solutions that implicate them. Illustrations of affects and percepts as the “entities” of art are provided in literature (Moby Dick), painting (Francis Bacon), and music (Oliver Messiaen). If ideas implicate the material of art (affects and percepts), then that material develops art’s ideas. In order to explore this relation between thought and art, between implication and explication, Chapter IV further bridges chapters II and III to the chapters that follow by drawing key parallels between Deleuze’s philosophy of difference and repetition in his three syntheses of time to his work with Guattari on percepts, affects, concepts, chaos, and the planes of immanence and composition. This through line remains essential both for the following chapter that explores the indiscernibilities (repetitions) and inexplicabilities (differences) that culminate in becomings (repetition + difference) in both Kafka’s fiction and in cinematic timeimages in Chapter VIII. Here, the language of implication and explication (and complication) becomes essential: if the plane of immanence, as this chapter contends, is the incessantly amorphous form of repetition as difference, the plane of composition is the absolute dissolution or formlessness of difference as repetition—while chaos complicates the two planes and their entities (where difference is repetition and repetition is difference, which is especially crucial in art’s radical reversals when percepts complicate affects, or vice versa). The plane of immanence thus involves infinite or perpetual movement, while the plane of composition involves infinite speed (disappearing in appearing); the former develops concepts but complicates the unlocatable place of affects within the unrevealable disguises of percepts (drawing perceptions and affections away from subjects and objects, creating the repetition of difference, or variety), while the latter implicates affects and percepts but complicates concepts (that is, draws concepts away from any totality, creating the difference of repetition, or variation). Crucial to this dynamic is that only difference implicates repetition, while only repetition explicates difference, and not the other way around. That is, immanence in its amorphous form or affects and percepts in their changing forms—as forms of repetition—explicate or develop, and artistic composition in its absolute form or concepts in their fragmentary, iterative form—the formless forms of difference—implicate. In fact, insofar as ideas implicate the affects and percepts of fictional art, those affects and percepts also develop those ideas and thereby reform our

Introduction

17

sensibility around value. It is at this point in the book that the notion of obscure value is introduced, wherein what we perceive and feel is rooted in the impossible. The remaining chapters explore the indiscernibilities of repetition and the coexistence of difference in fictional art (both in isolation and as a dynamic) as manifestations of the syntheses of time—in all of their initial reversals of power and “radical reversals” beyond power—composed by ideas and expressive of obscure value. As the fifth chapter of this book, entitled “Literature’s Radical Reversal: From Absence of Origin to Deterritorialized Future,” explores, fiction entails a special reversal of power, but not before we make a scandalous pact with it: as this Introduction has discussed, we neglect the world in fiction, and are drawn to impossible, painful or fantastic experiences, but nevertheless carry over our life-centric values in doing so. But fiction need not be content with such a pact: in Blanchot’s terms, it becomes art only when it is genuinely unimportant, and “art’s milieu” ultimately has “a pact contracted with death.”31 The distinction here between such literature and a Foucauldian world centered on life, from Blanchot’s mortalist perspective, then, is that if fiction “knows nothing of life” then its unimportance is precisely its strength: it does not form an “unreal whole”; rather, its origin and coherence is absent. Thus, if Deleuze’s imagination is a vital organ of contraction (II and III), in fictional art, the imagination is drawn into a lifeless, Blanchotian “absolute milieu” of difference. Deleuze’s claim that “only differences are alike” supports this and is in contrast to theories which purport that literature creates metaphorical tensions that can be resolved in an “organic unity” reminiscent of Hegelian dialectics. Here the life-centric values of our world become not only the content but the form of the very vitalist coherence we expect in works of fiction. However, if the work of art is genuinely lifeless, and likeness is the condition of difference, then fiction’s percepts and affects explicate the non-being of lifeless differences. That is, there is no metaphorical similarity that unites difference; similarity itself becomes displaced and disguised (or for Blanchot, “dissimulated”) by differences that can “only be thought.” In Blanchotian terms, however, this is no “mystical fusion” with ideas: it is only via the milieu of the imaginary and medium of literature (where “words are things”) that we are attracted to its absence of origin: not McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” and not Hegel’s “mediation of the immediate”—instead, a new formula: the medium attracts the immediate. Both D&G and Blanchot draw on Franz Kafka to define what literature is, and this leads us toward a distinct post-structural approach away from symbolism and toward the literality, ideas, and obscure value of fictional art—which sets the stage to explore cinematic art via Deleuze and Blanchot later in the book. For D&G, Kafka is a “hybrid genius” that could make art think, installing concepts within affects and percepts, and opening his milieus or “segments” onto an “unlimited field of immanence.” For Blanchot, Kafka’s art goes further than religion: by creating presences “as if ” true, they do not “forbid” us from moving forward (e.g., no one will worship the giant vermin of “The Metamorphosis”). Both non-symbolic approaches to Kafka indicate that in its literality, rather than the illusory vitality of its metaphorical unity, fiction conceivably reshapes our sensibility, “beliefs,” and values around the obscure. In fact, as this book contends, the transformation of perception and affection—in all their unreal disguises and untrue displacements—by genuine ideas reshapes our attitude toward, and belief

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in, the impossible; here, as Blanchot claims, when “the notion of value [as we know it] ceases to apply,” the obscurity of values that “know nothing of life” but are nevertheless essential to our human experience take effect. Comparing D&G’s and Blanchot’s nonsymbolic approaches to literature leads to a consideration of Deleuze’s provocative claim that “What Blanchot diagnoses everywhere in literature is particularly clear in cinema”32—namely, that within the Blanchotian “fissure” (of Chapter III) that hollows out our truth and reality we can still “believe in [the world] as in the impossible, the unthinkable, which none the less cannot but be thought.”33 In other words, even within the absence of life-centric values, in this “unthinkable” reversal of power, fictional art “forces us to think” and expresses genuine value—however inexplicable and indiscernible that value is. But such fiction is not limited to literature, and considering that Blanchot was conspicuously mute on the topic of cinema (having lived throughout the entire twentieth century), Chapters V and VI culminate the study of Blanchot’s broader influence on Deleuze with a careful consideration of Kafka’s literature, which creates conditions to consider a Deleuzo-Blanchotian cinematic art in Chapters VIII– IX (following a detour and return to Foucault in Chapter VII). How does Kafka’s work uniquely, and radically, reverse the effects of power? If, in his novels, everyone seems corrupt and everything seems “false,” it is because he is faithful to a domain that has no truth and reality, wherein the aim of assemblages (from Chapter I) undergo what D&G call “dismantling” (démontage) to express the new and different by way of such dismantled familiarity. Kafka’s various genres, in fact, reflect both initial and radical reversals beyond power in fictional art: first, hyperbolic projections and distortions in his letters and diaries that “dispossesses” him of his own perceptions, rendering them indistinguishable from the imaginary (as in II; 6). Then, human and subhuman protagonists in his short stories make inexplicable how affective differences coexist, but the stories “break down” because of their abstractions (as in II; 7). Finally, in the radical reversals beyond power of Kafka’s novels, what was in the letters and short stories a displacement and disguise of affects and percepts onto other affects and percepts (what D&G call “doubling” and “reterritorialization,” and what Blanchot calls a “trap”) becomes the displacement and disguise of affects and percepts onto that which is never given: difference or becoming. The chapter therefore contends that D&G’s emphasis on the “novelty” of what Kafka’s “assemblages” are demands that we not take for granted what his novels are “about.” That is, Kafka’s “deterritorialized” assemblages of the future are unrecognizable—if they were recognizable, they would not be new and different—and yet, such difference only appears paradoxically through a given assemblage’s “dismantled” familiarity. Here fiction’s radical reversal beyond power is in full effect: the aims (or “logical concepts”) of territorial “assemblages” from Chapter I are deterritorialized such that the genuine function of Kafka’s literature is to, firstly, dispossess his protagonists of any “transitive action” and interiority—where they are indistinguishable from, and coexistent with, all of the agents of their “corrupt” world (hence his novels are not social critiques). Secondly, it draws us into an interminable movement where affects and percepts (e.g., of vengeance, claustrophobia, persecution, and secrecy in The Trial) are composed conceptually as differential relations (e.g. (in)justice as inexplicable, unrepresentable, and reversible): Blanchot’s “pure approach” of the unreal and untrue.

Introduction

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The sixth chapter, entitled “Kafka’s Castle: A Case Study—Conceptual Inexistence and Obscure Value,” provides a close interpretation of Kafka’s novel The Castle to illustrate a startling and unrelenting reversal of the effects of a modern power oriented towards life: seduced by a promise of a better life, our protagonist, K., instead only encounters a vast bureaucratic system that will not admit that his summons was a mistake. But they also won’t throw him out: instead, they will only ignore him, while the castle he must confront incessantly recedes into the distance and darkness, forever out of reach. Through this radical reversal beyond power, we encounter topographical perceptions disguised by their imperceptible dissolution (a place that literally has no “signs of life”) complicated by affections of impatience displaced as the insensibility of the “ordinary and ugly”—where a “castle,” which can only be thought (insofar as it can be neither perceived nor felt), composes the incessant, ungraspable movements of K.’s journey. In fact, the protagonist also is beyond the Foucauldian categories of knowledge: when the village “mayor” admits that his official summons had been an error or fault (Fehler), he also categorically denies the possibility of error; here, what is “said” about K.—that he is a castle official— is fissured from what can be observed, since K has no practical relation to the castle. Nevertheless, lacking any “psychology” or motive, K. conceivably becomes a sponge and mirror that absorbs and reflects the desires of his “assemblages”: both victim and victimizer, as negligent as the castle officials he wishes to confront (Kafka himself is thus not a stand-in for his protagonist). Everyone, in fact, has some relation to the castle, included or excluded by it—while the castle itself, as a “deterritorialized assemblage” and an idea, does not exist, but only “consists” and “insists” immanently to experiences of the characters. A close reading of the novel reveals that the castle is unlocatable, “up there,” somewhere above or beyond the village, but also within it: an ever-changing, fragmented place sometimes in hills surrounding the village (extending outward indefinitely) but also traversing the village, forever in what D&G call “the room next door.” The castle “is” the movements of its activity, “forcing us to think” differential relations and becomings that are properly “bureaucratic”: delegation, (failed) paperwork, (mis)communication, etc.—a paradox of negligent aptitude. But this concept leads to an obscure value—an incessant hope for “what is,” where K. is relentlessly returned back to opaque images that “renounce their immediacy” (Blanchot) in their strange but insipid familiarity. Such movements of displacement and disguise form the sensibility of an impossible hope—perceptions of a goal that cannot be reached, impatient affection that can only be disappointed— within the untruth and unreality of a fragmented castle as an absent totality that can only be thought. The seventh chapter, entitled “Cinematic Worlds of Truth and Reality: Deleuze’s Movement Image via Foucault,” shifts from literature to cinema not by interpreting cinema’s obscure and artistic features, but, in a return to Chapter I, critiquing its manner of producing truth and reality. The chapter contends that such cinema is uniquely Foucauldian in its manner of making the visual correspond with the sayable, and assembling our perception with movements of our affection around values related to life, even and especially when it presents dangerous or otherworldly situations. But this does not make cinema illusory (like the Bergsonian dream of Chapter III): for Deleuze, movement is immanent to images, not added to them; only their truth or

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reality is illusory. In fact, Deleuze’s plane of immanence—the light and “matter” of movement (IV; 5a)—does not form an illusory totality, but conceivably remains the unlimited milieu or “moving soil” of cinema. Even framing and cutting, the most basic of cinematic devices, are “deterritorializing” in that they arise from a vertical, compositional axis—images are only reterritorialized through linkages that continually reveal the out-of-frame (via cuts within cinematic milieus, or a moving frame) and expand the open totality of a given cinematic world. Through basic editing and “montage”—that is, Deleuze’s assemblage—ensembles of cinematic movement-images create an interval (occupied by affection-images) between our initial perception and the resulting action. Such an assemblage of images operates metaphorically by juxtaposing differences rendered “alike” in the viewer’s mind, akin to the organic unity in Chapter V; 3b (this chapter explores both Deleuze’s “large” and “small” form of such assemblages). While cinema may produce reality and truth that supplant genuine thinking, we can think the relations within movement-images; indeed, even if such films do not problematize their realities or question their truths by “forcing us to think” beyond the interiority of perception and affection (as in Chapter VIII), we can still thoughtfully critique those worlds by looking beyond their exteriority to consider how their realities and truths are produced (not as “illusions”, but through movement centered on lifecentric values). In these terms, Chapter VII contends that Deleuze’s distinctions between the large and small forms of the “action image” parallel, respectively, Foucauldian panoptic or “englobing” ways of seeing that focus on behavior, and medical or etiological ways of seeing that “make images speak” (I; 8). We are either immersed in a reality (“what’s going to happen?”) or provoked to discover the truth (“what happened?”); in both cases, the interval which the affection-image occupies mediates us to reality or truth, expressing qualities or creating anticipation. Added to this, sound and voice make visible, or create anticipation around, that which is not given in cinematic images, as the condition for deception (i.e., revealing truths or realities unexpectedly). In every case, reality and truth are explained and organized around expectations for resolution or disclosure within genres, creating a “system of judgement.” But insofar as movement-images created expectation through their intervals, montages, or assemblages of realities and truth, they always gestured toward that which is not given (the totality itself) in order to establish the coherence of their worlds. It is through that which is never given that we can attain distance from such films and critique their truths and realities (as we can critique power relations in our world). Furthermore, films themselves, through their creation of truths and realities, may offer implicit critiques of ours. For instance, cinematic impulse images that “fill” gaps between perception and action (similar to affection-images, which “occupy” them) arise from “formless” originary worlds full of monstrous impressions, exposing the superficialities of the “derived milieus” that reflect our own. However, even when undermining or exposing such superficialities, they always explain their realities and disclose their truths. Thus, any production of fictional truths and realities requiring critique alone encloses Blanchot’s outside just as Foucault’s world does: as exceptions to or interruptions of the movement-image. Pivoting from the production and critiques of truth and reality in cinematic worlds, in the eighth chapter, entitled “Radical Reversals of Cinematic Art: The Dissociative

Introduction

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Force of Blanchot’s Outside in Deleuze’s Time-Image,” we again confront the issue of cinematographic illusion, asking whether film zombifies the viewer to sleepwalk through it (holding them hostage to a parade of images), but this time consider the “automatism” of Deleuze’s “spiritual” cinematic-machine that generates the speed of thinking within oneiric images given a “diurnal treatment.” Here cinematic framing and cutting finally unleash the percepts and affects of Deleuze’s plane of immanence, which, like the deterritorialized assemblages or “abstract machines” of Kafka’s novels (V–VI), conceivably function through the dismantling (démontage) of the cinematic assemblages or montages from Chapter VII. As with Blanchot’s brief allusion to cinematic experience, where phantasmagoric imagery emerges from obscurity and darkness, Deleuze’s approach to cinematic time draws on Blanchot’s “vertigo of spacing,” where time’s absence of origin is revealed through incessant, ungraspable imagery. But this is not “the absence of time”: for Deleuze, it is time’s expression through movement—that is, through something happening, however indiscernible and unresolvable on the one hand, or inexplicable and ungraspable on the other hand. This chapter considers how these indiscernibilities and inexplicabilities, in their initial reversals of power, concern Deleuze’s first two syntheses of time, respectively, from Chapters II, VI, and V (in their alignment with Blanchot’s features of obscurity). We are first drawn into a “crystallizing” cinematic movement that “repeats,” splits, and refracts real and imaginary percepts within Blanchot’s lifeless, “absolute milieu” (VIII; 2a). Secondly, our effort to explain events is complicated affectively by “chronosigns” that multiply points of view, where truth and falsity are undecidable (VIII; 2b). Each of these reversals confront “limits”—that is, “inner circuits” where real and imaginary are perpetually exchanged and outer limits that, despite their simultaneity, expand into coexisting layers of the past (similar to Kafka’s genres in V; 4–5). Beyond these limits, in the radical reversal outside of power, the indiscernibility of real and imaginary becomes the “false continuity” of time when real and imaginary no longer oscillate but inexplicably coexist—that is, the unreal becomes untrue; likewise, the undecidability of true and false becomes the “serialization” of chronosigns when truths or falsities no longer oscillate; rather, the false repeats through various “categories”—that is, the untrue becomes unreal. As with Deleuze’s third synthesis of time, which combines paradoxes of repetition and difference in the first two syntheses (II; 8)—and as with Kafka’s novels, which compose deterritorialized assemblages by combining the unreality of distortion (found in the diaries and letters) and the falsity of coexisting differences (found in the short stories) (V; 6–7)—here, the highest forms of time-images are composed by ideas when their unrealities and untruths interact. In cinema’s radical reversal beyond power, when affects are complicated within percepts (IV; 3b–4a), dissolving the interval in favor of an interstice and “incommensurable relation” between and within movement-images—and also between the audible and visible—percepts and affects work in tandem as displacements and disguises not of more displacements and more disguises, but of that which is unlocatable and unrevealable, and can “only be thought.” To consider this, Chapter VIII culminates with an exploration of Deleuze’s cinema discussions that directly reference Blanchot, beginning with an overlooked commentary on Blanchot’s insistence that “speaking is not seeing.” Here, Deleuze asks why Blanchot does not say

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“and vice-versa,” such that “seeing is not speaking.” In such a case, rather than language expressing the ineffable, cinematic images express the invisible—and beyond that, where one is the limit of the other, the ineffable can be made visible and the invisible can be made audible, through a Blanchotian “incommensurable relation” or “fissure.” But this fissure does not only concern the visible and audible: it also concerns the dissolution of the “interval” of movement. This chapter thereby reconsiders Deleuze’s cinematic plane of immanence (VII; 2b) via his insistence that movement—however false or aberrant—is not absent from time-images but “subordinate” to time. As such, the affect is “absorbed” into, or complicated by, the milieus and bodies of percepts: no longer mediating us to movement, the space of affection becomes the “force of time which puts truth into crisis.” This occurs especially in the highest forms of the timeimage, where, firstly, problematic forces that crystallize real and imaginary become the questioning potentiality of affects, and secondly, questioning, bifurcating forces of affective untruth become problematic “categories.” Such fissures between audible and visual—and within the dissolution of intervals of movement—concern Artaud’s “hole in appearances” (trou dans les apparences), referenced but not cited by Deleuze, which brings him from Artaud to Blanchot’s “dispersal of the Outside” and the vertiginous spacing within cinematic time (i.e., time’s absence). But Deleuze’s insistence that such spacing is a “dissociative force” returns us to Blanchot’s comments on Deleuze’s distinction between force and relation (IV; 5c); here, cinematic affects, complicated within percepts, no longer supplant thinking by occupying the interval between perception and action—the interval that had focused attention on what is happening or what happened (VII). Rather, in this reversal, the affect—complicated by the percept—is an unthinkable “force” of the outside that compels us to think relations of movement, however untrue and unreal; this is due to the affect’s differential states that are nonetheless bound by movement and bodies (IV; 4a), which thereby “seize” us (Blanchot) in the differential, intensive process of thought. That is, if the affect supplanted thinking by subsuming differential relations of movement when producing truth and reality, it now forces us to think that very difference when absorbed by percepts, in their composition of untruths and unrealities. The chapter concludes by considering Deleuze’s insistence that by filming the impossible, time-images restore “belief ” in the world “as it is” (chaotic): hence the sensibility of obscure values. The following chapter (IX), entitled “ ‘Is Anyone Seeing This?,’ ” provides three case studies to illustrate the cinematic art of films which reverse the effects of power and are both implicated by ideas and expressive of obscure values. In Take Shelter, the first case study, a man has apocalyptic dreams and visions, developing paranoia and believing he is schizophrenic (asking at one point, “Is Anyone Seeing This?”). However, his family ultimately experiences key aspects of his visions: here, the vision becomes a percept, rendering the real and imaginary indistinguishable, but also retroactively crystallizes a false narrative, rendering normative judgments of him as schizophrenic untrue. Thus, an untrue affect of paranoia is complicated within the unreality of apocalyptic percepts—forcing us to think an inexistent “storm”—and expressing the obscure value of trust (between the protagonist and his family) that refuses complacency and believes in unpredictability. In Arrival, the second case study, monolith-esque alien ships provoke geopolitical conflict, and, in learning an inexistent alien language, the

Introduction

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protagonist experiences the future nonlinearly, where her daughter’s death is “coextensive with life” (II; 9)—that is, where she experiences her daughter’s birth, childhood, and ultimately her death before the events happen. These chronosigns become serial when the geopolitical conflict is rendered unreal in the protagonist’s actual reflection through time: here, the science-fiction, geopolitical genre becomes complicated as a “category” within the genre of tragic joy, where such experience of loss is shared (the protagonist shares the dying words of a general’s wife, averting global war), resulting in the obscure value of alliance through mortalism. This process of the untrue becoming unreal is contrasted with Villeneuve’s other film, Enemy, where the unreality of the double is complicated within the untruth of jealousy. The third case study involves Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, which first requires a detour through Deleuze’s own comments on Kubrick; here, he insists that for Kubrick, every worldly journey is in the brain, where the inside is “an operation of [Blanchot’s] outside.” Eyes Wide Shut, like Kafka, is quite literal in such Blanchotian reversals, and Kubrick himself acknowledges Kafka’s influence on his films like The Shining, where “fantasy” is realistic. In Eyes Wide Shut, the protagonist has an untrue sexual fantasy of his wife’s fantasy, drawing him into unreal erotic encounters—all of which are very realistic—where the unlocatable affect of jealousy and lust becomes the percept of unrevealable desire: thus if the displaced question or disguised problem is one of finding intimacy in the inaccessible fantasies of others, and the insensible answer or imperceptible solution is in the untruth and unreality of sex, then sex is the idea that—like Kafka’s castle—will never be genuinely located or revealed. Kubrick’s blue lighting—a serialized chronosign—also frames such untruth and unreality, rendering the inaccessible interiority of the protagonist’s fantasy of his wife’s fantasy coextensive with the inaccessible exteriority of the protagonist’s journey. Here, the obscure value of love rooted in the lust of the sordid and scandalous, Blanchot’s experience of the “indecisive and uncertain,” is where, as Kafka may put it, the spiritual world is encountered only through the unavoidable “evil” of the sensual world. The book’s concluding chapter reconsiders its key through line of eternal return: whether considered a paradoxical experience of transformation without apparent change or a thought of such becoming, eternal return constitutes the highest point of ambiguity in experience and the ultimate paradox of art where the world “returns” in all its untruth and unreality (e.g., Kafka’s castle as the force of an unrealizable future). It is such a paradox of time, in its reversible relations, that is ultimately outside of our world of knowledge and power—and that, like mortality, has no determined “existence.” Rather, its inherent difference, its “eternal return,” merely consists and insists within that which exists (that is, within movements of perception and affection). But this inexistence may or may not be a “thought”: this book began by exploring how mortality—as well as forces of eternal return in habit, memory, and dream—define such an unthinkable experience of becoming; whether this experience is also thought in transformations of habit and memory, or whether it composes a work of art, is another story. But in every case, as Deleuze says of Blanchot, death is the ultimate or “final [dernière] form of the problematic,” the very “source of problems and questions,” which become the displacements and disguises of habit, memory, and dream, but also crucially of fictional art. In the case of fictional art, we are forced to think the

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uncertain—difference and change—specifically in the register of a future that, like death, we cannot foresee. But this future is also the formless difference of forms of repetition in past and present, when chaos meets the cosmos in “an eternally decentred circle”—that is, where such “chaosmos” is eternal return. Chaos—which is also untouched by the world of knowledge and power—is the “ocean of dissemblance” that thought confronts in its indeterminacy and disconnection, but is also the very indiscernible and determinate “stuff ” that art composes. The thought and experience of eternal return does not mean that we are ever finished with our world, as though we could transcend it: whether in cinema, in literature, or in dream, we always attempt to discern what is happening or discover what has happened (e.g., even dreams seem normal and we are in them, and K. in The Castle obstinately believes he is still in the world). Rather, the world “returns” eternally to us precisely by way of the reality and truth that it reverses and dissociates with the force of the new, in all of its unpredictability and unrecognizability. It is in this sense that art reverses the effects of power—drawing us out of our realities and truths but to “return” us to them differently. And it is such a process that this book testifies to: a more complete human experience—one that is not so predictable, one that is open to change—demands that, simply put, new ideas and values may be provoked by new perceptions and feelings. Such new ideas “know nothing of life” or of the values we attach to it: our human experience, defined by the uncertainty of mortality and therefore implicated by its own inexistence, demands that we think the inexistent forces that influence our lives—that is, our experience, our imagination, and our memories—however unknowable, insensible, and imperceptible those forces are. Otherwise, our lives will be utterly predictable, and we will be unable to affirm, internalize, and appreciate the novelties and changes that will occur in it. And insofar as art, as Blanchot puts it, is “useless to the world where only effectiveness counts,” it develops thought as “unpower” (impouvoir) that affirms such inexistence along with the unthinkable existence of what we perceive and feel: ceaselessly reversing the effects of power, drawing us out of our realities and truths (which cinematic time is especially capable of). But rather than abandoning us to a senseless void, art returns us to “what is” with all the “radical reversals” and dynamics of thinking that this book will explore.

Part One

Power and the Outside

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I

Power and the (In)Visible: Foucault and Deleuze

Introduction How we know, and how we express, what is really important to us is an emotionally or “affectively” driven phenomenon. To be more precise, it is a question of value: what is important to us, and what we want, is tied to the history of our beliefs, our culture, our institutions, our experiences, our language, and of course our desire. And perhaps no one better than Michel Foucault has shown that in our contemporary, “biopolitical” era, what we want, and what we value, is life. We want to extend it, improve it, and make it prosper. But we do not value all life indiscriminately; rather, we value human lives, and more specifically, those in our society over others: hence the start of a problem. And yet, this is only part of the problem. To place value on life above all other things is to value what is. It means that we want to exist, and to continue and extend our existence. This value placed on life creates the reality and truth of our world, which is perhaps the most fundamental problem for us in Foucault’s work. And Foucault’s solution to this problem—his philosophical approach—is not to debate the merits or demerits of human life; instead, he puts forward a concept of power that produces truth and reality by fostering and enabling (or neglecting) life. In other words, there is no truth or reality that is not the effect of power. What you think you know, what you think you want, and what you value are all the effects of power. As such, Foucault looks beyond our external worlds and our practices to a metaphysical domain of power that has no truth or reality in and for itself, even though it produces both. As we will see, how it came to be this way has everything to do with the way we observe, or see, and the way we judge—which will be important in considering reversals of such power (II–IV) and ultimately crucial in terms of the values we carry over when we enter into works of fiction (V–VI), especially in the visible milieus of cinema (VII–IX). But what is this tenuous relation between visibility and power? How did it come to be this way?

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Part 1: Foucault on power 1. The negativity and visibility of sovereign power In order to understand how power works, Foucault famously considers its historical transformation from a largely negative to a largely positive phenomenon. Our values, as a society, were not always so heavily focused on life: in fact, for a long time, they were focused on death, insofar as the threat of death was the means by which power operated. As he argues, our practices in the West have an increasing tendency to “make live or let die,” in distinction from practices that preceded them, which had a tendency to “take life or let live.”1 Such “sovereign” power was primarily “deductive”—it took (and needed no justification); it could take your time, money, property, and ultimately your life. If the active role of sovereign power was negative (taking, subtracting), the passive role involved the neutrality of “letting live”: “From the point of view of life and death, the subject is neutral, and it is thanks to the sovereign that the subject has the right to be alive.”2 Thus Foucault’s emphasis on sovereign power as a form of “taking life” or making die (“de faire mourir”) as its ultimate force, which was otherwise a “subtraction mechanism” and a “right of seizure” (“droit de prise”), constitutes such power negatively, by what it is capable of extorting or appropriating from subjects.3 Sovereign power also concerns the way we perceive: it did not seek to make subjects visible (save as public demonstrations of torture or death)—it had little to no interest in “surveillance”—as much as it sought to make itself visible. In Foucault’s terms, “power was what was seen, what was shown and what was manifested . . . Those on whom it was exercised could remain in the shade.”4 But it was not only those subjected to sovereign power who remained in the dark. Another example of this phenomena concerned the “ostentation of palaces,” which were “built simply to be seen,” in contrast to the dungeon, which hid the prisoner in the dark, only to use their bodies for the purpose of the “gloomy spectacle” of torture.5 There was no interest in reform. Another related distinguishing feature of sovereign power is that possessing it involved “the legitimacy that has to be respected,”6 but by virtue of the need to be seen and not to see: the need to make itself emanate or be visible in a form that is feared, respected, or in any case central to the attention of those subjected to it. This effort to be seen concerns the general way society was structured according to an extreme and binary relation between the dominant and the dominated, who were not seen, such that “The history of some is not the history of others.”7

2. How our attitudes toward life and death have changed Before elaborating on his concept of modern or “bio”-power, Foucault provides three major examples to characterize how our attitudes towards life and death have changed: war, the death penalty, and suicide. His first example concerns war and why we fight: in modern times, war is no longer waged in defense of a ruler’s right; rather “one has to be capable of killing in order to go on living.”8 But of course, this, as Deleuze puts it, may concern “the survival of a population that believes itself to be better than its enemy,”9 which can lead to genocides when a population is considered a toxic threat. The second

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example concerns the death penalty, and dovetails into Foucault’s general comments about punishment. Punishment used to be a demonstration of sovereign authority, but “By the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the gloomy festival of punishment . . . had gradually ceased to be a spectacle.”10 In a society that values life, it is a contradiction to promote, ensure, and extend life and at the same time put its citizens to death—thus the death penalty is reserved only for those who pose a major threat to the lives of others. It is, as Foucault notes, no longer about punishment for the crime but the “monstrosity of the criminal.”11 The third example concerns suicide. While the sovereign had the right to take your life—insofar as you are subject— taking your life meant taking their property. In modern societies, by contrast, your life is supposedly in your possession, so it is confusing and “astonishing” that someone would want to take their life. This became “one of the first conducts to enter into the sphere of sociological analysis” and “one of the first astonishments of a society in which political power had assigned itself the task of administering life.”12 Suicide is to be studied and prevented (i.e., identifying “at risk” groups or populations) while remaining “strange” and disturbing.

3. Modern power: affect, force, and the fostering of life In contrast to sovereign power, modern power works as a supposedly positive force to manage bodies and facilitate life as well as prosperity (though this may also lead to pernicious forms of neglect). To achieve this, society makes every effort to avoid death. As Foucault notes, “That death is so carefully evaded is linked less to a new anxiety which makes death unbearable for our societies than to the fact that the procedures of power have not ceased to turn away from death.”13 In other words, it is not so much that we live in a continual state of the fear of death from a sovereign power than that we simply make every effort to evade or ignore it. Insofar as the focus is on life and the body, modern, or “bio”-power works as a positive force: we want something from any mechanism (institution, practice, or “dispositif”) that “enables” or “facilitates” us to be prosperous, efficient, secure, healthy, and so on. If the active role of sovereign power was subtractive, and the passive role involved “letting live,” the active role of modern power involves enabling us or making something possible, while the passive and negative role involves negligence, indifference, incompetence, and so on; as Foucault puts it, “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”14 Or, perhaps more succinctly, modern power makes live or lets die. In other words, “disallowing” need not involve actively “taking,” or any action, but it can involve policies that provide some opportunities over others (discrimination); the indifference or incompetence of those who administer practices; and the economic or medical neglect of groups or populations, and so on. In its positive sense, it is “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow”; to use Foucault’s verbs, power works to manage, facilitate, optimize, organize, monitor, reinforce (rather than to dominate or destroy).15 Power, from this perspective, is not possessed, nor does it strictly “exist”: it is determined through relations and is supported by those who are subjected to it insofar as they want something from it and value the life-centric support that it purports to

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offer. In this sense, “there is no . . . opposition between rulers and ruled,”16 no “nexus” of rulers, no conspiracy or smoke-filled room from which power operates, because no one “possesses” power. Instead, we implicitly legitimatize the structures that attempt to facilitate our needs and desires. Power thus is not “acquired, seized, or shared,” but involves “the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations.”17 Power thus requires a relation between those who want something and those who provide it. It is not a “what,” but a “how”—and “to begin the analysis with a ‘how’ is to suggest that power as such does not exist.”18 That is, “something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is put into action.”19 In short, power concerns “strategy”: it attempts to predict what others will do, and it adjusts its mechanisms and actions based on the possible actions of others. From this perspective, it was never “possessed” by sovereign rulers—this was only an illusion that Western society has largely outgrown. In this context, Deleuze allows us to consider the key role of affect in power relations: we are driven to act in a biopolitical world by virtue of mechanisms of “incitement” and “provocation.” As he points out, “An exercise of power shows up as an affect, since force defines itself by its very power to affect other forces.”20 In this sense, “power is not essentially repressive (since it ‘incites, it induces, it seduces’).”21 While Foucault certainly emphasizes the “manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions,”22 Deleuze emphasizes the effect of power that produces an affect: to be incited, provoked, seduced, or induced to act is to feel or believe—through various levels of anxiety, paranoia, hope, enthusiasm, despair, pain, or pleasure—that mechanisms of power will improve our lives. It is this affective dimension of power, often underemphasized in Deleuze scholarship on Foucault at the expense of “seeing and saying,” that can provide insight into how we act in a biopolitical world. But this raises an important question: if we are constantly provoked affectively by power, then what is the role of resistance? In a biopolitical world, affects concern forces of resistance that are co-opted by power to serve as its very target: in these terms, the function of power is to affect, and to be subjected to it means being affected. Here, Deleuze offers a specific vision of biopower that ultimately characterizes Foucault’s paradox of resistance: “The power to be affected is like a matter of force, and the power to affect is like a function of force.”23 In other words, the function of power is to affect, but there is also a power, or a “capacity,” to be affected, which is the very matter or material of force. The forces themselves are what Foucault would call the “resistant” features of power that are co-opted by it—for example, sickness is a vital force that resists “good” health, poverty or idleness is a force that resists employment and discipline, but neither of these forces actually “resist” power because they play “the role of . . . target, support, or handle.”24 In a binary fashion, there can be no such thing as health without illness, reform without deviancy, and so on. But again, there is no center from which power conspires or functions to co-opt such forces: the functions of power always concern a vast multiplicity of relations of force, which are too complex and chaotic to comprehend completely—at best, they can only be “diagrammed” in a provisional and partial state. “Power” as a totality would be a constantly changing and infinitely complex network of relations between people, groups, and the mechanisms that they respond to in order to act.

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This paradox of the resistance to power as its target goes further still: in a biopolitical world, there effectively is no resistance to power. Foucault not only claims that “the forms of resistance against power [are] a starting point”25 in an analysis of power (e.g., to define sanity you must study insanity) but that “resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” because power “depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance.”26 If we want to be healthy, we must understand ourselves as unhealthy in some respect in order to be provoked or seduced by mechanisms of power: in Deleuzian terms, these affective forces that would resist power are already co-opted by its mechanisms. From this perspective, there is thus no “exteriority” of power: to attempt to directly resist power would either get swallowed up by its mechanisms (those who refuse to work end up in jail, the military, etc.), result in death (refusing medical treatment), or simply create new power relations (e.g., when the uninstitutionalized, taboo, or counter-cultural becomes “mainstream” or profitable, such as “alternative medicine”) and assemblages that provoke or seduce others. But before it is feasible to grasp Deleuze’s distinctions between matter and function around affect, it is crucial to consider precisely what these mechanisms of biopower are.

4. Seeing and saying as the metaphysical violence of judgment It is not simply the case that we want something from power, and go after what we want. In order to do this, we have to know what we want, and we have to know who we are with regard to what we want. Such knowledge is inherently practical even if, as we will see, it appropriates aspects of science. This practical knowledge is, nevertheless, somewhat empirical, and, as Foucault famously argues, involves a relationship between what we can see (observe) and what we can say (articulate, classify, brand, measure, or, ultimately, judge). This concerns both what we say about ourselves—for example, in Foucault’s genealogy which goes from the confessional to contemporary practices of “truth telling”—and primarily, what others say about us (i.e., branding or judging us as sick or healthy, normal or abnormal, etc.). Whether we believe that what is said about us or what we say is “true” is beside the point: what matters is whether it induces or provokes action. If a politician, for example, makes false statements, he or she is still “producing truth” insofar as that knowledge provokes action: as Deleuze insists, power “passes in itself through categories that express the relation between two forces (inciting, inducing, producing a useful effect, etc.) [and] in relation to knowledge, it produces truth, in so far as it makes us see and speak.”27 In a biopolitical world, the visible or observable is determined by the articulable. Foucault in fact uses a metaphor of “capture” to explain how what we say captures what we can see: he calls it a metaphysical “violence” because insofar as we are judged, branded, and labelled a certain way, the “truth” about who we are is determined (according to some binary linguistic structure where we are judged). We can be critical of such knowledge not only because it is not neutral, but because it is not “natural,” even though we assume a natural correspondence between words and things (what we see and say). As Foucault explains it in his analysis of Magritte’s painting This is not a pipe, “there is between the figure and the text a whole series of intersections—or rather attacks launched by one against the other . . . lance blows and wounds, a battle.”28 Thus

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despite that we have left violence behind as an organizing principle of society, there is still a “metaphysical” violence exerted on us. Deleuze picks up on this, emphasizing that “statements and visibilities . . . grapple like fighters, force one another to do something or capture one another”29 but, in this schema, it ultimately is the visible that is a “receptive” dimension and the linguistic that is a “spontaneous” dimension retaining primacy and determining the visible.30 What is observed is captured by language, not the other way around. But what of “facts”? Are there not some things that are actually true? Is reality not objective? While reality and truth are products of power in a biopolitical world, there are indeed facts; however, as soon as a fact is articulated “ritualistically” it is for the purpose of provoking or inciting action (and is therefore no longer just a fact). In these terms, truth is tied to affection and statements while reality is tied to perception and the rituals, practices, and milieus in which knowledge is produced. Thus, what Foucault calls the production of truth and reality aligns with our own affective provocation by power, as well as knowledge as the relation of the visible and articulable. As he says: If . . . a proposition is true, it is because reality is such. It is because the sky is blue that it is true to say: the sky is blue. But, on the other hand, when one poses the question of how it comes about that there was a discourse of truth, the fact that the sky is blue will never be able to account for the fact that I say that the sky is blue.31

In other words, there is no reason to say the sky is blue in the abstract—the statement of any “fact” is to incite or provoke action (even if it is simply “believe science” or “use proper denotation”). That is, while there are “facts,” the statement (or as Nietzsche would say, the “interpretation”) of any fact concerns the affective provocation to establish it as a “truth” that is believed: truth is thus tied to the affect (and, as we will explore, to memory: I; 13, II; 7, IV; 4a). It is in fact such “statements” that produce our perception of reality: the sky is blue because “everything is real in the statement”:32 it is only through the capture of language that we come to discern what is real. Thus, Foucault can say that: We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it “excludes”, it “represses”, it “censors”, it “abstracts”, it “masks”, it “conceals”. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.33

That is, insofar as power is positive and provokes action, especially when that action promotes or enables life, it is the milieus within which action takes place that are real, and it is the truths we can “ritualistically” say and affectively purport in such realities— that we are healthy and not sick, normal and not abnormal—that precede any apparent “repression” or “exclusion.” It is only by operating in a field of action, and wanting something from mechanisms of power in the first place, that power could ever seem to conceal truths or censor reality.

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5. Two forms of modern power: discipline and regulation In its manner of fostering life, Foucault argues, biopower takes shape in the two major forms of discipline and regulation, both of which produce knowledge and provoke us to act in their own peculiar way. As Foucault writes, “One technique is disciplinary; it centers on the body, produces individualizing effects.”34 Disciplinary practices involve interventions that are made on your own behavior, hygiene or health maintenance, performance, efficiency, productivity, and so on. They ensure an effective relationship with capitalism by altering or ensuring some type of personal and/or professional habit. In Foucault’s terms, this involves treating “the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls.”35 In this case, we tend to see ourselves in relation to some “standard” or ideal that is particular to a given practice, which we are provoked to pursue. The second form that biopower takes is regulatory; as Foucault writes, “we also have a second technology which . . . brings together the mass effects characteristic of a population, which tries to control the series of random events that can occur in a living mass.”36 Regulated practices involve rules or laws, as well as norms or customs that apply to everyone but affect what you do in any given practice. They ensure the wellbeing, security, prosperity, health, and longevity of groups or populations (and knowledge is formed at such a statistical level). In this case, we tend to see ourselves in terms of what is usual (statistically) or perhaps as what Todd May calls a “regularity . . . of behavior.”37 Regulation concerns “propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary”38 as well as “the economic [which] must be considered as a set of regulated activities from the very beginning.”39 In these terms, our actions are indirectly provoked around incentivizing or disincentivizing factors that would result in some benefit to our health or prosperity. Regulation and discipline reinforce and intersect with each other, and can be ultimately distinguished around methods of intervention: while discipline intervenes directly on individuals to alter behavior, regulation does not. As Foucault points out, “these forms were not antithetical”—in fact, virtually every modern practice involves aspects of discipline and is regulated—and some practices may involve more or less emphasis on discipline (for example, the military is primarily disciplinary). However, the difference between discipline and regulation largely lies in the way in which discipline sees, or observes, in order to intervene on individuals (training, skill acquisition, behavior reform, education, efficiency, etc.); here “A first adjustment was made to take care of the details. Discipline had meant adjusting power mechanisms to the individual body by using surveillance and training.”40 The focus is on altering or predicting behavior. Consider the way training works: someone observes you (more or less), and then intervenes (“do it this way, not that way”). By contrast, regulation observes not to intervene or “to modify a given individual” but to use “forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures”41 to create norms or rules, or to change the milieu, which may incentivize or disincentive people to act, or increase the level of health, wellbeing, prosperity, or flourishing of a group or population (this can be done

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via economics—using cost as an incentive, locating trends to market products—or via social medicine, which separates groups and populations). For instance, with regard to health, “regulatory mechanisms must be established,” if, for example, “[t]he mortality rate has to be modified or lowered; life expectancy has to be increased; the birth rate has to be stimulated.”42 For example, if we study the “major causes of death” and conclude that heart disease and cancer are important, the government may ban things like trans fats from food, and carcinogens (e.g. lead from paint). This is not the same as the direct intervention on an individual (or “body”) to alter our behavior; it is an indirect intervention into either natural or artificial givens in our milieus. As individuals we may avoid carcinogens, which can be considered a disincentivizing factor, but not a disciplinary mode of intervention.

6. Discipline, panopticism, and direct intervention Both discipline and regulation inform how we see and thus how power works differently in space. To take discipline first, perhaps Foucault’s most famous example of the way disciplined subjects are observed in space concerns panopticism. Foucault notes that this type of “segmentation” involving the constant supervision and inspection of individuals can be found in Bentham’s Panopticon, which involves a circular prison with a guard tower at the center and cells surrounding it: the guard can see into every cell, but the prisoners in every cell cannot tell whether the guard is watching them or even there at all: the source of surveillance is thus “visible” but “unverifiable.”43 As he notes, “The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon”44 by illuminating and exposing subjects rather than hiding the prisoner in the dark (only to be brought into the light for punishment). If the goal of discipline is to manage individuals by altering their behavior, observation and reform replaces punishment. To see without being seen allows such a mechanism to be “abstracted” from “resistance or friction”:45 the sovereign threat of violence is no longer necessary. The panopticon’s abstraction from violence or resistance thus makes it, as Deleuze insists, an “abstract machine.” In Foucault’s terms, this means that it is capable of “sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.”46 But the abstraction of the panoptic model makes it applicable not just to prisons but to all disciplinary institutions. As Foucault writes, “[the panopticon] serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work.”47 Discipline may even become self-discipline when the goals of the subjected align with the goals of the practice in which they participate: we may act as our own observers and intervene on ourselves; we are in such cases perhaps like dancers practicing in front of a mirror, internalizing how we are being seen. Another manner of abstraction, however, that releases the panopticon from any resistance or friction is that it functions automatically, without the need for any specific observer. As Foucault states, “An inspector arriving unexpectedly at the centre of the Panopticon will be able to judge at a glance, without anything being concealed from

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him, how the entire establishment is functioning”:48 a prison where all the prisoners were acting violently, a hospital where the sick were not being treated or were infecting each other, or a factory where inefficiencies abounded and production was stalled would be immediately obvious to anyone looking on from the metaphorical guard tower: “Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine,”49 and “any member of society will have the right to come and see with his own eyes how the schools, hospitals, factories, prisons function.”50 The “center” of the panopticon, in this sense, conceptually becomes society writ large: it is the gaze of anyone, and everyone, all of the time (insofar as we all supposedly want the same things: an ordered, discipline society, free of crime and risks). Here we can consider that the role of observation within space results in affective forces of provocation undergoing a mutation of normalization into conformity. As Foucault insists, “The more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater the risk for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed . . . which . . . produces homogeneous effects of power.”51 Normalization conceivably becomes conformity: we do not act in a way that would make us seem abnormal, dangerous, and most crucially, we judge those who act abnormal. What is valued in this case involves things like success, hard work, achievement, skill, efficiency, and productivity, and we become anxious of being judged as incompetent or dangerous (picture the worker in a cubicle, not knowing who is watching, or acting in such a way as to “not arouse suspicion”). The principal, in any case, is seeing without being seen, and judging or predicting behavior. By focusing on the criminal rather than the crime, for example, the prison model is one of reform. When the model is applied to other disciplinary institutions, indexes of observed behaviors change, like poor hygiene in a hospital: “reform” thereby becomes mutable.

7. Regulation, neoliberalism, social medicine, and indirect intervention in the “milieu” Regulation, relative to discipline, is a complex, indirect mode of intervention and observation that intervenes on the “milieu.” Now, Foucault defines the milieu as “a set of natural and artificial givens” and a “number of combined, overall effects bearing on all who live in it.”52 Thus, on the one hand, “discipline structures a space and addresses the essential problem of a hierarchical and functional distribution of elements”;53 on the other hand, regulation “plan[s] a milieu in terms of events or a series of events or possible elements.”54 In other words, discipline works within a milieu in order to distribute individuals (“bodies capable of performances”), dictate how they interact, and the methods or manner of their action and behavior. Regulations alter (“regulate”) natural or artificial features of a milieu: “one tries to affect, precisely, a population” by virtue of “the conjunction of a series of events . . . which occur around them.”55 In this sense, the two forms of power have crucially distinct ways of constructing and utilizing spaces. Regulations may alter any naturally or artificially recurring aspect of the milieu in order to shift the actions of or produce some effect on a population: “their purpose is not to modify any given phenomenon as such, or to modify a given individual . . . but, essentially, to intervene at the level at which these general phenomena are determined.”56

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Often these may focus on health: on the one hand, banning trans fats in fast food would mean altering artificial givens (affecting the health of the population); on the other hand, removing contaminants from the drinking water would mean altering a natural given. However, regulation is not always about health: the most basic conceivable example of the regulation of an artificial given is cost—hence the neoliberal view that supply and demand “self-regulates” markets. From this view, human beings are consumers and their milieus are represented by market trends. From this perspective, our actions would be regulated in an indirect way, in that we would be incited or provoked to act based on a cost–benefit analysis that we can do for virtually any activity, even “in noneconomic processes, relations, and behavior.”57 This of course extends to the neoliberal view of human nature which assumes that we are “economic” beings who hope or expect to get returns on our investments (not just of money, but of time, energy, etc.)— for example, the neoliberal view of education that investing in college should result in immediate, well-paying jobs. Such a person, as Todd May puts it, “seeks to maximize his welfare by means of making the best use of his resources and his environment. He is, in short, a capitalist in all aspects of his life.”58 What is crucial here, in any case, is that “observation” is no longer of the individual and their behavior, it is of the milieu or environment and the manner in which its “givens” may be altered to produce different outcomes.

8. The medical gaze Assuming our values are centered on life, perhaps the greatest investment that we can make is in our health—an area that Foucault focuses on a great deal. From the perspective of the society that seeks to promote both life and prosperity, there is of course a conflict between the “welfare state,” which would seek to assist citizens to achieve prosperity and to limit extreme inequality, and a neoliberal model, where “health becomes a consumer object,” which “is a need for some and a luxury for others.”59 But perhaps what is most interesting about medicine is that it not only concerns the regulation of populations, milieus, and cost, but the regulation of the individual. In other words, medicine is also a matter of perception, and one that is not only “disciplinary.” We may judge and discipline those who seem sick or contagious, but medicine also concerns the “medical gaze,” which perceives the body as regulations “plan a milieu.” How this works requires a closer look at Foucault’s characterization of this peculiar way of seeing. For Foucault, the medical gaze “refrains from all possible intervention” in order to perceive what “is anterior to that of the visible”:60 namely, the cause of the symptoms or disease—the diagnosis. In this sense, “The clinical gaze has the paradoxical ability to hear a language as soon as it perceives a spectacle,”61 and it is this language which places individuals in the group or category of their diagnosis (perhaps not much differently than the entrepreneur places individuals within “target markets” through ever expansive data-mining today). Granted, the diagnosis will likely lead to direct intervention on the individual, but that is a second step. Its ideal milieu is free of any factors or treatments which would mislead the diagnosis. This gaze is thus very much unlike the panoptic

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gaze which seeks to modify behavior. If the panoptic gaze seeks to observe in order to intervene—to reform, instruct, treat, confine, supervise, and so on—the medical gaze “refrains” from intervention in order to uncover symptoms and discover causes. Such “givens” of the body and the milieu can perhaps be compared to the “set of natural and artificial givens” of milieus that are regulated: in both cases, the concern is with the element or factor that alters regularities. The biological, regulated subject is not observed with regard to their behavior within a milieu; rather, they are observed with regard to how they construct and are constructed by their milieus, and how they may be classified or fit in a mass or population. If the disciplined subject inhabits what Deleuze calls a “luminous milieu” (un milieu lumineux)62 where their bodies and behavior are constantly visible, the regulated subject is illuminated on both a microscopic and a macroscopic level: the rash on a patient’s skin can place them in any group labeled “infected,” or they may be included in a broader mass or population based on any criteria (economic, medical, etc.), which may affect what milieus they have access to in the first place. As Deleuze points out, “at the beginning of the nineteenth century masses and populations become visible, and emerge into the light of day at the same time as medical statements manage to articulate new objects.”63 As these populations emerge as “visible,” the goal of regulation is to change the givens in a milieu which will then alter the health, or the actions, of individuals in it (in contrast to discipline, which would involve treatment or the alteration of individual behavior to prevent illness or its spread).

9. Control societies: the unlimited milieu of normalization Deleuze’s extension of Foucault’s ideas about discipline to what he calls “control” extends the panoptic enclosure into society as a whole. Deleuze argues that with discipline, when you achieve the goals of the practice, you can leave the enclosure (i.e., if you are reformed, you can leave prison, or if you are healthy, you can leave the hospital), and there are even “endings” to such practices: you graduate from school, you serve your prison time, you retire from your job, you are released from the hospital. But with control societies, there is a continuous state of the function of power (e.g., you are always being educated, you are always undergoing training, you are always tracking your health or fitness). Thus, with control, nothing really begins or ends: we are never “within” a practice and then “outside” of it; for example, there is a sense of always being connected to health care, or to the law, or to our profession. In that sense, we don’t know that we are sick or healthy when we “leave” the enclosure of the hospital; rather, we are always connected to the practice of health through outpatient therapies, home health care, and so on (in other words, we are never done with “being healthy”—we always monitor and track our health). Control societies, of course, still involve pervasive judgment and branding; however, here we can consider that control is divisive by virtue of comparisons. The difference concerns the model that emphasizes the “corporation” or “business” in distinction from the panoptic “factory”:64 we no longer produce anything; rather, we service products and those who purchase those products (and we transform their value, invest, etc.). Here, cooperation and competition become a larger factor, where we are judged

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by new normalizing standards: we service consumers and products, and we market products. The information about us arguably involves anything that would allow us to compare ourselves to others: the “divisive” nature of the practice no longer works by distinguishing normal or abnormal, but better than or worse than (in terms of status, salary, etc.). The group or population creates the conditions for judgment, only indirectly. In many ways, Deleuze’s emphasis on control conceivably broadens the Foucauldian notion of discipline by integrating it within the milieus of regulation that concern populations: in this case, there is no longer a visible but “unverifiable” source to provoke anxiety (i.e., the metaphorical panoptic guard tower); instead, there is an invisible and intractable source to provoke paranoia. The reason for this is that the source of judgment follows us from milieu to milieu, such that the “givens” are in constant flux or alteration which would determine our state. This open-ended effect of power, which retains the aspect of the medical gaze in that it is affected by what is “anterior to the visible,” places the subject in a group which is always relative in terms of its status or value (e.g., how sick or healthy, successful or unsuccessful I am is in constant flux relative to however I’m perceived in a group or population).

10. Sexuality: the “truth” we are compelled to reveal Deleuze’s theory of control is not the only way to understand the intersection between discipline and regulation surrounding life-centric values: sexuality also marks a strange and paradoxical intersection that produces truth both through its normalization and expression (but not its “repression”). Foucault’s claim that we have substituted the symbolics of blood in a sovereign society for the symbolics of sex in a biopolitical society leads to his treatment of sex as the “truth” of who we are. As he claims, “Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species. It was employed as a standard for the disciplines and as a basis for regulations.”65 On the one hand, then, there are procedures of disciplining the body which would, if not repress, at least normalize and control sexual expression; this is also an issue of public safety, insofar as sexuality may be a source of disease (hence the endless debates between “abstinence” and “safe sex”). On the other hand, there is an entire economy that exploits sexuality, encouraging its expression—through advertising, consumer culture, social media, and so on; furthermore, if the medical doctor replaces the priest as the source of the confessional (since we are oriented towards salvation in this life rather than the next life), we tell our sexual secrets to our doctor to ensure our “sexual health.” Thus, sexual expression is regulated or controlled in a different sense. In both cases, sex is not necessarily “repressed,” since normalizing or regulating sexuality is an issue of managing rather than silencing it; as Foucault famously insists, “mechanisms of power were in fact used more to arouse and ‘excite’ sexuality than to repress it.”66 The “seduction” of power, in this case, can be quite literal. In our approach to biopolitical worlds, we can consider that according to this paradox of sexuality, sex, like power, as Foucault insists, does not—properly speaking— “exist,” even though we do not even know who we are without the “deployment” of our sexuality. Indeed, whatever we can observe about “sex” becomes articulated or revealed,

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while the paradox is that sex seems to conceal truths about who we are—a secret that can never be revealed. Like power, sex can never be known or “possessed” because it is “an ideal point made necessary by the deployment of sexuality.”67 In our lives, there is therefore a constant push and pull between concealing and revealing (through speaking, judging, or “knowing”) in a society that “dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.”68 Thus we effectively have a cultural obsession with sexuality which determines both the real world of power and, as we will see, the unreal worlds of fiction (VII; 8d, IX; 3c). That is, sex is a “secret which seems to underlie all that we are, that point which enthralls us through the power it manifests and the meaning it conceals.”69 In other words, we do not know who we are in a biopolitical world unless we “deploy,” reveal, or express our sexuality (which nevertheless remains concealed). As Foucault insists, it “is through sex—in fact, an imaginary point determined by the deployment of sexuality—that each individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibility.”70 It is this imaginary, ideal point, “sex”—something that has gone far beyond mere biological or anatomical functions in its significance—that makes us believe we know who we are. In other words, we believe that we (all) have some secret about us that is waiting to be revealed, not only through others, but through the provocations of power and knowledge— whether behavioral, biological, neoliberal, controlled—that “incite” or “seduce” us to deploy our sexuality. As we have now considered the major forms of biopower, as well as their points of intersection, we can turn to Deleuze to more carefully consider the role of perception and affection, as well as logical thinking, in assembling our truths and realities.

Part 2: A Deleuzian approach to power 11. Deleuze on Foucault: milieus, forces, and assemblages of power If Deleuze’s reading of Foucault emphasizes not only the interplay of the visible and articulable, but the role of affect in our provocation and seduction by such knowledge and power, it is now feasible to ask precisely how we are incited, provoked, and seduced to act. Here we can return to Deleuze’s distinction between the force or function of affecting and the matter or capacity of being affected (what Foucault called the “resistance” that is co-opted by power: I; 3). Here, what Deleuze calls matter can be inflected with force such that it forms a body. In his study of Foucault, he in fact invokes Nietzsche’s definition of force on this point:71 bodies, in this Nietzschean sense, are composed of relations of force—they are not “fought over” within a “milieu,” because reality itself is already a “quantity of force”72 (as we will see, this will also be crucial in a Deleuzo-Blanchotian view of obscure thought). What of resistance, then, as a force? The resistance to power, as Deleuze insists in his work on Foucault, is not exterior to power (“against” it, as though it were the powerless against the powerful) but is technically “primary” to it; as he insists, “the final word on power is that resistance comes first, to the extent that power relations operate completely within the diagram, while resistances necessarily operate in a direct relation with the outside from which the

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diagrams emerge.”73 While we will see how Blanchot’s outside factors into Deleuze’s understanding of power in the next chapter (in that forces concern what is outside of power relations), here it is crucial to note that while Foucault claims that resistance is the “target, support, or handle”74 (e.g., sickness as the resistance to health) of what Deleuze would call diagrammable power relations (e.g., demonstrating who is provoked or provoking via relations of affects and forces), “points of resistance . . . are in some way primary”75 to power rather than derived from or engendered by it. For instance, the power relations involving health care do not invent disease; it is disease and the vital, albeit obscure functions surrounding it that are already resistant to power. Such points of resistance concern the matter or capacity of bodies and milieus to be affected—which do not yet have what Deleuze would call a “function”—while they themselves are anterior to the origin of power relations. But how we know milieus, and who we are in them, requires a return to distinctions between regulation and discipline, as well as seeing and saying. Milieus, in a Foucauldian sense, are only illuminated by virtue of the bodies that are disciplined or the “givens” that are regulated: in Deleuze’s terms, Foucault’s “world is thus knowledge,” composed of “milieus of light and language.”76 Thus—reading Foucault via Deleuze on this point—the “matter of force” that is affected is either the body that is disciplined, or the larger milieus and masses (populations) which are regulated: “applied to both a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize.”77 The body or milieu is receptive to the spontaneous and “affective” force of capture by language, which “stratifies” such bodies and milieus. Such milieus become what Deleuze calls “forms of exteriority” which are captured or illuminated by the statements that recur in them with regularity, contributing to or dictating their regularity. Again, the two forms intersect and reinforce each other. But it is in regard to the manner in which light and language interact that Deleuze will take Foucault beyond structuralism. In his work on Foucault, Deleuze imports his own terminology from his work with Guattari on Hjelmslev to describe how statements and visible milieus are “formed,” such that there is a “content” being “expressed”78 when the visible is captured by the articulable, locked in a “system of . . . redundancy.”79 For example, Deleuze notes that the formation of the milieu (the space of a prison) is expressed (in terms of delinquency) by its content (the prisoners).80 This general approach—an alternative to structuralism, which focuses on a signifier and signified—opens up a way of thinking about, on the one hand, milieus and bodies as content, and on the other hand, language as “unformed” expression until content is “captured” or formed in its expression—or, in Foucauldian terms, until we become subjects locked in predictable patterns of normalization, regulation, and control. In an unformed state, such milieus simply involve forces— states, as we will see (III; 3a), of repetition, “vibration,” movement, or momentum— that have not been redirected or guided by the possibilities which mechanisms of power offer (whether those mechanisms arrange human lives, other forms of life, or “matter” in general). In this sense, the locking in of our subjectivity around such possibilities takes place when milieus are—in Deleuze’s terms—assembled. We are no longer behaving chaotically but are doing so with regularity and discipline: our milieus and bodies become parts of “assemblages.” To grasp this dynamic, it is crucial to explore Deleuze’s approach to milieus, assemblages, and territories.

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On a fundamental level—beyond our discipline within their broader regulation— our habits create stable milieus, and habits are also created by such milieus. For D&G, if “[e]very milieu is vibratory, in other words, a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component,”81 the sense of repetition is also the sense, or creation, of “order” from chaos. As we will see (IV; 2a), they insist that order is not opposed to chaos: chaos is the infinitely complex network of unrecognizable patterns, the “milieu of all milieus,”82 which we contract, sense, and habituate ourselves to in a very limited, passive, and precarious manner. As they explain it in their essay “Of the Refrain,” milieus are limited environments that are really “blocks of space time,”83 both at the exterior level of our territories and the interior level of our own body and mind. We thus form a sense of stability by virtue of “milieus.” As translators and scholars point out,84 the “milieu” is a term in French which not only means environment and medium (this becomes crucial in Chapter V), but also “middle.” Milieus constitute and are constituted by our habits; they are the mediums through which we move and are affected. Milieus and assemblages, however, are not the only ordering factor in relation to chaos; the territory, in D&G’s terms, would create the function of the assemblage or “dispositif”—that is, the disciplinary or regulatory aim. Indeed, the territory is the “first assemblage,” which arranges milieu components in a way that makes them all expressive of, or functions of, the territory, and “[w]hat defines the territory is the emergence of matters of expression (qualities).”85 In a Foucauldian sense, such expression can be understood as a visibility that is captured or capturable by language (knowledge). Insofar as the assemblage is an arrangement (agencer) or disposition of milieu components toward a function that is outside of that milieu,86 which begins simply as a function of the territory, there is an “expressive mark” made by the alteration, transformation, or reorientation of any milieu components: “a territory has two notable effects: a reorganization of functions and a regrouping of forces.”87 It is here that Deleuze’s work on Foucault and his work with Guattari intersect: in Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, the “dispositif” (translated as “mechanisms”) is what he calls with Guattari the “concrete assemblage.” The assemblage is basically an institution or practice (“school, workshops, army, etc.”) that integrates bodies (“children, workers, soldiers”) and functions (“education, etc.”). But the territorializing function involves a regrouping of forces such that the manner in which I am incited or provoked to act centers on the functions performed within it. Affects are “caught” in milieus: hence our expression in a territorialized milieu of discipline or regulation. There is in fact a cinematic quality to the way we perceive or observe bodies and milieus in a “reality”: in both cinematic and biopolitical worlds, the affect is caught up in a movement (VII; 4). These themes perhaps resonate in that Deleuze wrote his Foucault book immediately following his cinema studies; in his Foucault study, he claimed that milieus are made of light and matter, so it is no coincidence that it is always “scenes” that unfold in Foucault’s milieus—and that Foucault’s work relating statements to visibilities, as Deleuze claims, “is uniquely akin to contemporary film.”88 But when describing the milieus of realism that are created in the cinematic movement image, Deleuze explains the relation between force and the milieu:

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Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power The milieu always actualises several qualities and potentialities [puissances]. It carries out a global synthesis of them, it is itself the Ambiance or the Englober [Englobant],89 whilst the qualities and the potentialities have become forces in the milieu. The milieu and its forces incurve on themselves, they act on the character . . . The character reacts in his turn (action properly speaking) so as to respond to the situation, to modify the milieu, or his relation with the milieu, with the situation, with other characters. He must acquire a new mode of being (habitus) or raise his mode of being to the demands of the milieu and of the situation.90

Deleuze continues to explain that qualities and potentialities are always revealed by virtue of the affect, which circulates within an “englobing” milieu, so that there are forces creating situations or realities, and acting on characters or subjects (e.g., a natural disaster looms, and the character boards their house or strives to protect their family). What are forces in this context? Forces concern the modification of milieus that provoke us to act insofar as we value life. We want success, health, returns on our investments—most of all we want to exist in the mode or manner in which we have existed. Our milieus and bodies, in such instances (VII; 3), are territorialized by our habitus, or modes of being. Here we can again consider that what it means to extend our existence and our “mode of being (habitus)” has everything to do with the value we place on life. In Deleuze’s terms, we are immersed in “our habit of living, our expectation that ‘it’ will continue, that one of the two elements will appear after the other, thereby assuring the perpetuation of our case.”91 And what better way to extend our case than to secure the milieus in which we operate, ward off health risks and chaos, and conform ourselves and others to the expectations, behaviors, and norms that those milieus entail? And what better way to know that we are secure than to see this extended in the behavior of others and in the visible regularity of our milieus? Hence the unavoidability of a power bent on fostering life.

12. The function of practices as conceptual aims of the territory If the “assemblage” or territorialized milieu is precisely the institution, practice, or broader “mechanism”—such as advertising or social media—that provokes or incites us to act, then this is why Deleuze can say that it is the territory which is the pure function of force. In this sense, the territory is the active or “spontaneous” side of power. We are subjectified within milieus by virtue of their “territorialized functions,” whether disciplinary or regulated. If the function or aim of a given assemblage takes form as “education,” then the student will be disciplined according to what is normal: good study habits, properly posed and answered questions, satisfactory performances and examinations. The student will also be regularized according to what is usual: do they attend social or academic events on campus? Use the library? How often? Are they “engaged”? A Foucauldian critique could question whether such norms or regularities actually foster the aim of learning. Or, take the assemblage of the medical–industrial complex, whose aim is health. Here, the patient would be normalized according to whether they comply with treatment or practice healthy “lifestyle habits,” while they

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would be regularized by virtue of their diagnoses and pre-existing conditions (not to mention their very access to health care). Once again, Foucauldian critique could question whether the processes around diagnosis and treatment actually facilitate health, or even question whether the aims of one practice were deleteriously infiltrating the aims of another: profit into medicine, for example. The conceptual aim of any disciplinary or regulated practice, in this sense, conceivably materializes in what D&G call “perceptions and affections, and in this sense it is a function of the lived”92 (e.g., we say, “John is an alcoholic,” then we encounter or recall John drunk). In Deleuze’s terms, as we saw (I; 11), perceptions are linked to formalized milieus, and affections are linked to the manner of provocation or incitement to act in a given assemblage: such sensibility allows for judgment. But the logical concept works scientifically, in that it “determine[s] the conditions of reference that provide the limits or intervals into which a variable enters in a true proposition: x is a man, John is a man, because he did this, because he appears in this way.”93 Using terms from Deleuze’s Foucault, the logical concept establishes the visible “milieu formation”94 (e.g., the hospital or educational milieu) in coordination with the formed substance (patient, student) on the one hand, and “the field of sayability” (e.g., “penal law”) in coordination with “statements” (branding a particular subject as “delinquent”) on the other hand. The “abstract machine” of power (which, Deleuze argues, has no form, only general milieus such as education or health care on the one hand, and general statements on the other hand) is thus formalized and transformed by the concrete assemblage of the logical concept whenever power relations are formed—that is, whenever power is exercised. Here, Deleuze allows us to consider the manner in which milieus are themselves segmented when they are enclosed by the binary structures of language—and, added to that, how affective provocation results in what segmented milieus can be inhabited (D&G’s notion of segmentation will be crucial in their approach to Kafka: V; 6–8, 10). Such segmented milieus are territorialized by aims of practices and assembled divisions within them: confined spaces for the sick or the criminal; spaces for work distinct from non-work, and so on. Here’s how it works: I see an advertisement for a new cholesterol medication. I believe I need the medicine because of something called “high cholesterol” (a questionable condition), which is the affective force that provokes me to seek it out (as in the ad that says, “Ask your doctor . . .”). When seeing my doctor, she runs some tests, and the statement “I have ‘high cholesterol’” becomes true. The power relations here are between the advertising agency, the medical corporation, myself, my doctor and her medical milieu (staff, resources, etc.). But the knowledge concerns my belief that I am sick, or at risk of being sick, coinciding with my diagnosis as eligible for the medication. This relation is occupied by an affect around the value placed on life: heart disease, which the medication provokes me to prevent. Deleuze would say that this relation is supple in its segmentation: it involves “a field of forces, marking inflections, resistances, twists and turns,” but the formation of knowledge within concrete assemblages is “rigid” in its segmentation—whether I get my cholesterol medicine or not is a binary operation, as is whether I no longer “have” high cholesterol, as are the concrete spaces and timesegments that I move between and inhabit (the advertising block, the doctor’s office, the pharmacy). But as D&G insist, “binary relations between their respective segments”

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involve both rigid and supple segmentations—whether conceived at the level of expression (i.e., binary statements—either you are sick or you aren’t, or you are seeking treatment, getting better, getting worse, etc.), or at the level of content (you are in this segment or that, or moving between segments, en route or pursuing your goal in or between assemblages). Now, the aim of any disciplinary or regulated assemblage is abstract, and in that sense its aims or functions are logical and conceptual, rendering normative judgment possible. Such logical concepts attempt to capture the things that they conceptualize: as D&G claim, “[t]he concept is not object but territory” in the sense that “[c]oncepts are concrete assemblages”95—which is to say, if the first assemblage is always territorial, then the logical concept is an effort to relate an attribute to a subject, experience, or milieu. As we will see (IV; 6a), this can be contrasted to Foucault’s actual concept of power, which is not “logical.” When logical concepts, however, territorialize or “arrange” (agencer), what they connect is conceivably the relation of one proposition to another, or to “states of affairs”—that is, to “lived” or actual milieus. Such concepts are, in D&G’s terms, given as “communicative” ideas that are “consensus” driven, “reflections” of things that can be universally contemplated96—serving as opinions or normalizing judgments. In this sense, how individuals are judged or branded is not given in any milieu, but captures subjects and givens and arranges them around an aim. None of this involves genuine thinking, and such logical and superficial thought, or judgment, is undermined by its effort to attribute qualities to that which must be regularized or recur with regularity. How is this so? Power relations, in forming what can be seen and said, combine to produce a truth or what D&G call a “truth value.” Much in the manner that Foucault argues that the postulates of science are appropriated by mechanisms of power to produce the truth of the subject—as in his study of scientia sexualis—logical concepts are not interested in obscurity or the imaginary, but in coordinating its meaning with “states of affairs” or real milieus that are verifiable—that is, regular and repeatable. If health is the concept of the practice or mechanism of medicine, then it may be attributed to subjects (“John is healthy because . . .”) or milieus that are sanitary, safe, or otherwise facilitate “heathy living.” Such concepts are in fact dependent on “statements,” which Deleuze insists have the “primitive function” of regularity itself, and they circulate with a “regularity” that refers to subjects who are normalized and milieus that are organized (hence another link between the normal and the regular). The major problem with such logic is that it conflates predicates (events that are not sensible) and attributes (qualities “of ” something). As Eugene Holland points out: Attributes express qualities and designate essences. I am a thinking being, I am a rational animal are examples of attribution. Predicates are relations and events, designated by verbs expressing actions or passions. “The tree greens” is a case of predication; “the tree is green” is a case of attribution.97

Here, qualities as attributes involve judgment rather than genuine thought, striving for attribution and a logical relation of opposition (someone or something possesses or doesn’t possess a quality) amidst relations and events that defy regularity, rather

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than conceptual connection and complexity (IV; 5a–c). This is the Deleuzian version of the seizure of the visible by the articulable: the territorializing function of the logical concept, the normalization of the quality, the regularity of the statement, the formalization of forces.

13. Deleuze: habits, behaviorism, and discipline; memory, idealism, and regulation Our obsession with life, especially human life—in preserving it, extending it, “extorting its forces,”98 propagating it, sexualizing it, medicalizing it, managing and controlling it—is fundamentally an obsession with what is. Insofar as we want to extend and preserve what exists, it is within what Deleuze would call “our habit of living” that our expectations—that is, our realities and perceptions—lie (and it is through those expectations that we are provoked to act). Here we can consider Deleuze’s approach to the active and reflective side of habit: if such expectation involves a generalization that is represented “to become the reflexive future of prediction, the reflected generality of the understanding,”99 then we have a future-oriented focus that generalizes what will be based on what has been. Such orientation is the source of our partialities and prejudices: as we will see, a generalized or generic affection gets locked into the perception of “reality” through habit (II; 6). In these terms, the judgment that provokes the capture of the visible is predetermined by the aim or concept of a practice, and most of all by the values attached to life. This conceivably translates into the panoptic, behaviorist model that focuses on discipline—the predictability of security, efficiency, and reform. In other words, the standards imposed on individuals and bodies to perform a task or behave a certain way is meant to curtail the offenses which are commonly associated with certain behaviors or methods. Crucial here is that all of the unformed “force” of repetition within a milieu—all of the varieties and nuances of what habits could be—is, to use Deleuze’s term, “collapsed” onto what he would perhaps call the generic or “general form of difference” that conforms to a disciplinary standard. If discipline is a form of generating, molding, and repeating habits within a sphere of difference or variety, it is the general or amorphously formed “difference” that can be expected to continue based on those habits (e.g., there is variety in how a good schoolchild can behave, and it is within that general domain that they are expected to do so). It is not just the habit or expectation of continuation, however, that provokes action in a Foucauldian world: it is also our memory that “embeds” instants with respect to a generic or generalized past—and here we shift from the prejudice of expectation to the idealization of truth. Here, in Deleuze’s terms, the expectation is not in the repeatability of the present toward a generic future; rather, it is in the generic “repetition” in an idealized form of a past that it “never was” that is actively reproduced, recognized, and reflected upon. In other words, its patterns and its milieus are “mythologized” in a “never lived reality.”100 As we will see, such a generalized or generic perception gets locked into the affective search for the “truth” of events or the observable (II; 7). It is here that Deleuze’s active synthesis of memory corresponds to the nature of regulation: whether it is the refrain of the medical gaze that “makes images speak” to reveal the “diagnosis,” the entrepreneurial gaze that seeks trends and target markets (the idealized

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“consumer”), or the regulation of populations around some standard (e.g., an ideal “birth rate”), regulation gathers information or phenomena from multiple milieus and integrates their variables in order to grasp what is “usually” the case and what can be regularized. This can be compared to the way that “memory, as a derived active synthesis, depended upon habit”101 and the milieus that it embeds, insofar as memory “contracts” all of the variations of thousands of old or current habits into a generic form: so too does regulation aggregate phenomena into a whole. And regulatory power does not intervene unless there is a desire to change those variables: in this case, the milieus of the “past” become those of a future that is not the expected generality of habit but an imposed idealization of what could be based on the totalization of generalities or instances of the past. If regularity is a form of repetition, it is the “repetition” that regulations would wish to impose (i.e., of some variable), a repetition which is reflected and reproduced at the expense of unpredictable difference and change.

Conclusion: passivity, mortality, and the outside of power While we cannot escape power relations so long as we live in the world of truth and reality—and while grasping diagrams and mechanisms of power provides us some critical distance to critique its methods—such experience in the world and critical distance from it is only one side of our human condition. Indeed, Foucault’s paradoxical resistances that are the “target, support, or handle” of power—which Deleuze calls the “content” (bodies, milieus) that is conceivably affected by the “functions” of discipline and regulation—are also only one side of the picture. Likewise, the generalities, expectations, and idealizations involved in Deleuze’s vision of the active syntheses of habit and memory are only one side of the picture. While the milieus and bodies of a Foucauldian world are “territorialized” by the aims or concepts of practices that produce the truth and reality of power, those milieus and bodies were, all along, composed of forces of genuine resistance that, as Deleuze points out, are chaotic in and for themselves, and never completely merge with any diagram of power (I; 11), no matter how much the mechanisms of power attempt to co-opt those forces (e.g., utilize the knowledge of illness to provoke action in pursuit of health). In this other side of the picture, then, beneath the capturing of our affections, the judgment of our behavior, the regulation of bodies and milieus, and most of all the constant provocation of action, there is something more passive at work—something that may not be invulnerable to power, but that, at the same time, is the very “outside” of power relations. This outside has always, in Deleuze’s terms, “haunted” Foucault’s conception of power.102 In short, leaving the sovereignty of negativity and death behind in our obsession with life, death—as the ultimate, obscure force of resistance—never actually went away, no matter how much, in Foucault’s words, “the procedures of power have . . . turn[ed] away from death”:103 it just became depersonalized and obscure.

II

From Menace to Passion in Blanchot and Deleuze: “The Sovereignty of the Void” and Experience of the Imaginary

When considering what is outside of the world of truth and reality, where, above all else, we value life and prosperity, it may seem that what is unreal, untrue, or unrelated to life has no value. From the perspective of power, it would simply be abnormal or unusual: sick, demented, or worthless. What purpose could it possibly serve? What good is our suffering or mortality, or a domain defined not by action but by the inability to know and to act? Is this not simply a futile, negative image of the world, which holds no knowledge and no value? This is, in fact, not the only way to frame the question. What is outside of power and knowledge may expose the artifice of our identities and biopolitical aims, but that is only from the perspective of power and knowledge. It was Blanchot, and Deleuze along with him (albeit in a distinct way), who postulated another perspective—an “outside” of power by way of a paradoxical and ambiguous relation with the “negative.” Deleuze and Blanchot provide us with a means not to consider reversals of power and experiences outside of power, but to characterize the experience of passivity that, to use Deleuze’s phrase, “cannot be reduced to the non-being of the negative”:1 For Blanchot, it involves the experience of passion, non-power, and impossibility, and for Deleuze, it involves the experience of passive synthesis and of time. We can, however, juxtapose this passion to the action and provocation in a Foucauldian world: if Foucault is right that power produces knowledge, truth, and “reality” itself, then the experience of passivity would reverse, “resist,” or operate outside of such knowledge. And what there will be in the absence of such reality is not an empty void, but a void of reality—an “unreality” with unique qualities and distinctive features.

1. Foucault and Blanchot on death How can we begin to frame an approach to sovereignty outside of the world of action and power? While Foucault argues that sovereignty has faded into the background, there are certainly famous and convincing analyses of forms of sovereignty still at work in our political and social lives. These are discussed by Agamben in terms of states of exception and by Bataille in terms of the “the product of the others’ labor.”2 However, 47

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Blanchot’s ultimate interest in the experience of the work of the imaginary that withdraws us from the world will give him a distinctive focus on the more obscure role of sovereignty. For Blanchot, sovereignty is less about the forgotten political subject or the intentionally useless activity of Bataillian effervescence than it is an impersonal force that has nothing to do with subjectivity or action. Death remains a sovereign force in our lives, but no longer by virtue of the political phenomenon of violence (or the threat thereof). In other words, in creating a society that values life, as much as we try to regulate our lives to live healthier and longer, and to discipline ourselves to facilitate this, we have not overcome or defeated death. Blanchot allows us to consider the sovereignty of death as a “negligent,” “anonymous,” invisible, and disembodied force; death is that “over which I have no power—which has none over me either, for it has nothing to do with me, and if I know nothing of it, it knows no more of me; it is the empty intimacy of this ignorance.”3 It is that with which we have an unavoidable and inaccessible relation, or rather a “non-relation”; such a death is distinct from “voluntary death” in that it is “the death one cannot grasp, which one never reaches. It is a kind of sovereign negligence.”4 Thus in considering sovereignty now as a counterpoint to Foucault, Blanchot allows us to ask the following question: what if the death that biopower has never “ceased to turn away from” (I; 3)5 is not the result of violence (or the threat thereof) but simply expresses that life is not really the “source of our activity and mastery”6? On the one hand, then, death is normally an experience that we anticipate, but on the other hand, in a “radical reversal,” it is an experience that we cannot anticipate at all. We can grasp the fact of a living thing being dead, but as a living thing, we do not know what the experience of dying holds in store for us. In this sense, the most counterintuitive move that Blanchot makes in depicting death is to posit its impossibility as an event that we foresee only through a “non-relation.” This Blanchotian ambiguity is often referred to, for example by Deleuze, as the “one dies” (on meurt) that has nothing to do with the dissipation of our ego, but more to do with a passive experience that has no relation to “me.” The non-relation that death has to us is also referred to by Blanchot as “neutral” (technically, it makes the “I” into a “He,” or the neuter il): “the monumental, gazeless, faceless, nameless statue: the He of Sovereign Death.”7 The sovereignty of this death is what reigns in the absence of the self. Death, in Blanchot’s estimation, is beyond our power to conceive of as definitive or certain; it is not something we can be “sure of ”: It is the fact of dying that includes a radical reversal, through which the death that was the extreme form of my power not only becomes what loosens my hold upon myself by casting me out of my power to begin and even to finish, but also becomes that which is without any relation to me, without power over me—that which is stripped of all possibility—the unreality of the indefinite. I cannot represent this reversal to myself, I cannot even conceive of it as definitive . . . It is . . . time without a present [moment], with which I have no relationships; it is that toward which I cannot go forth.8

In Blanchot’s “radical reversal,” we reach a reversal more essential than what we will see as a “hollowing out” of truth and reality (II; 4, IV; 3c): we are already approaching

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the point where the incessant “unreality of the indefinite” and the untruth of the ungraspable meet. This casts us out of our power not only to act in a world that fosters life, but to “begin and to finish.” If death, however, is no longer a “definitive” event, then does this in fact imply an afterlife—and if not, does this just not make death into nothingness? Nothingness is something we know, something we can comprehend, just as easily as we can comprehend things in the world: nothing is, quite simply, the opposite of something. Nothing is disappearance, it is absence: darkness is the absence of light, death is the negation of life, and so on. Nothingness exists; but in Blanchot’s account, death is not a state of existence. Following Nietzsche, it has no more actual existence than God. Here we can consider that while Blanchot’s conception of the outside, “stripped of all possibility,” may have resonance with some conceptions of an afterlife, his project, like Foucault’s, is heavily influenced by Nietzsche’s riddles and aphorisms about the death of God. If we can no longer rationalize or justify our death in an ascetic ideal, death, as Blanchot says, is “an event without concrete reality.”9 It is, however, not nothing: nothingness has the concrete reality of darkness, silence, and emptiness. In fact, to suggest that death is the “deprivation” of life would be to locate it not as something obscure but as something clear: nothing. In Nietzschean terms, as a “negation,” even God’s “death” is therefore not something “possible”: if God does not exist this does not mean we are done with the question or problem of the afterlife. God’s death signifies that death itself no longer has any meaning or possibility— even that of finitude; thus the paradox is that this impossible death sends us back to the meaning of things we already have. Blanchot explores the highest level of ambiguity around death when he claims that: The ambiguity of the negation [of the world] is linked to the ambiguity of death. God is dead, which may signify this harder truth: death is not possible . . . This disaster is the impossibility of death, it is the mockery thrown on all humankind’s great subterfuges, night, nothingness, silence. There is no end, there is no possibility of being done with the day, with the meaning of things, with hope: such is the truth that Western man has . . . tried to make bearable by focusing on its positive side, that of immortality, of an afterlife that would compensate for life. But this afterlife is our actual life.10

Thus dying is not some sort of Heideggerian and unsurpassable “possibility of impossibility,” but something always so “uncertain” and “unrealized”11 that we cannot have a definitive or possible relation to it. It is not an end; it is not our “nothingness” or “silence”; and it is not the absence of possibility. An atheism that presumes that “nothing” happens when we die is just a naïve reflection of theism. What God’s “death” or disappearance means instead is that there is no longer any spiritual authority to define death:12 the assertion that death is not possible means that it is an event that does not, properly speaking, “occur.” It is a non-occurrence: “What makes me disappear from the world cannot find its guarantee there; and thus, in a way, having no guarantee, it is not certain.”13 We cannot be “sure” of death, since we have nothing to compare, judge, or measure it by.

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Death’s impossibility reigns over and “mocks” our “subterfuges” by virtue of its uncertainty and incessance: the brute fact that everything will end not in nothing, and that nothing ever ends. It does not simply, in a Foucauldian sense, expose the assurance we take in regulating our lives and disciplining ourselves and one another as “hollow”—undermined by “nothingness,” the limitations of our action, or malicious or even negligent forces that “disallow” life. Rather, death is a sovereign force, but not one that emerges from reality—it is a force without reality. This “sovereignty of the void,” which does not await us after our life but already implicates the incessance of life by virtue of its uncertainty, is the first way to frame that which cannot be co-opted, managed, appropriated, contained, or overcome by the mechanisms of a power that obsessively fosters life.

2. Blanchot: death and the imaginary—the unreal and ungraspable If the impossibility of death—the passive, non-relation that we have with it—serves as a counterpoint to action in a world of knowledge and power, then Blanchot’s use of death as an analogy for obscure experience more broadly also expands the scope of experience outside of power. The first, most essential way to define such an experience is simply as imaginary. Blanchot’s oft-cited discussion of the image of the cadaver in comparison with the image of a painting brings the experience of the imaginary as one of mortality into focus, where the imaginary resembles nothing. In both cases, “The image becomes the object’s aftermath . . . when there is nothing left of it.”14 In other words, in both cases, we are presented with a lifeless image, which no longer resembles anything having to do with the real object it represents. This is a paradox of art that has a long history: “What could be more striking than Pascal’s strong distrust of resemblance, which he suspects delivers things to the sovereignty of the void and to the vainest persistence.”15 What Blanchot is channeling Pascal to say here is that there is always something about the artistic image that exceeds our comprehension and that does not resemble what it depicts. As he says, the artwork is maintained in an “immobility of a resemblance which has nothing to resemble.”16 This non-resemblance or dissemblance is an excess— that is, something which exceeds what is necessary in order to depict the thing, as a result of the style or form of the depiction. The image, or in this case, the painting, both resembles and does not resemble what it depicts, and its non-resemblance, this negation (the “void” of space and time), is a sort of sovereign force of its own. The notion of images that resemble nothing is comparable to Blanchot’s portrayal of the image of the cadaver. While the cadaver does resemble the person who once lived, there is also always something a little off about them. It may for example look like the person from a certain angle, but not from others, for instance. In short, it resembles the person but also does not—much like a dream (III; 9). It is here that the discussion of the cadaver could get grotesque, but Blanchot is not trying to scare us with some kind of morbid obsession or preoccupation. In fact, the image of the cadaver serves to highlight the manner in which persons appear both in fiction and in the dream: “the

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similitude of an image is not likeness to anyone or anything: the image characteristically resembles nothing.”17 Art, however, does not simply draw us into an unreality that threatens us; it also draws us into all of reality that is presented to us. That is, it may seem that the nonresemblance or negativity of the imaginary and the cadaver is drawing us toward a space of nothingness, or emptiness. But this is not entirely the case: it is only the initial experience or encounter with the imaginary. In this initial encounter, we attempt to “grasp things ideally,” where the absence that is the foundation of such images “threatens” or “drags” us into another experience that has no reality.18 Thus what is “behind” the image which has nothing to resemble, or which “resembles nothing,” seems menacing in its ungraspability. However, what we are being drawn into is not a space of nothingness, but what Blanchot calls the “unreality” that is not opposed to reality. As he states: Unreality begins with the whole. The realm of the imaginary is not a strange region situated beyond the world, it is the world itself, but the world as entire, manifold, the world as a whole. That is why it is not in the world, because it is the world, grasped and realized in its entirety by the global negation of all the individual realities contained in it.19

The imaginary here is not “beyond” the world, and thus does not exist in a separate space of absence per se. The paradox is that insofar as we are capable of imagining by withdrawing from what we perceive in the world (i.e., we are not living in the world or perceiving; hence the negation), at the same time we imagine anything and everything conceivable; the writer thus “makes all of reality available to us.”20 The imagination as the negation of the world is thus simultaneously the world “as a whole” because it is any and all reality at once: to resemble “nothing” is also the potential to resemble or be anything. Deleuze will call this space “virtual” (III; 3a, and 5; IV; 2a and 3a). It is inclusive in that it includes all permutations of reality independently of space and time, and thus cannot be captured by the language and judgment to form reality and truth in a world of power. Unreality is not some purely detached or inconsequential space: Blanchot allows us to consider that it is, more precisely, a space that “grasps” or “seizes” us (prendre) in the same way that Foucault’s sovereign power is a “subtraction mechanism” that takes (I; 1). However, this seizure draws us into a transformative and fascinating space of the imaginary. As Blanchot puts it, “In the world things are transformed into objects in order to be grasped, utilized, made more certain in the distinct rigor of their limits and the affirmation of a homogeneous and divisible space. But in imaginary space things are transformed into that which cannot be grasped.”21 In this “second version” of the imaginary, then: To live an event as an image is not to remain uninvolved, to regard the event disinterestedly in the way that the esthetic version of the image and the serene ideal of classical art propose. But neither is it to take part freely and decisively. It is to be taken: to pass from the region of the real where we hold ourselves at a distance

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Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power from things the better to order and use them into that other region where the distance holds us—the distance which then is the lifeless deep, an unmanageable, inappreciable remoteness which has become something like the sovereign power behind all things.22

This notion that we are held, seized, or grasped by that which we cannot hold, seize, or grasp is, as we will see, a feature of obscurity that Blanchot often emphasizes: “the ungraspable that one cannot let go of ”—that is, the stubborn refusal of the obscure to be ignored (II; 5). It is not voluntary, but neither is it decisive or active. Death, ultimately, is not a choice or a decision because it undermines our very capacity for action; suicide perhaps best exemplifies the absurdity of attempting to grasp the ungraspable, since in suicide we would be met with something that instead grasps us. It is in Blanchot’s discussion of the ungraspability of death where we can finally examine death as a passive experience: Even when, with an ideal and heroic resolve, I decide to meet death, isn’t it still death that comes to meet me, and when I think I grasp it, does it not grasp me? Does it not loosen all hold upon me, deliver me to the ungraspable?

In this case, Blanchot describes the human inclination to proudly “meet our maker”— to control how we die, or to die with “resolve”—with intention. He similarly mocks suicide this way, claiming that it involves an “illogical optimism” and a “confidence that one will always be able to triumph in the end by disposing sovereignly of nothingness, by being the creator of one’s own nothingness.”23 Suicide thus only demonstrates a hypocritical and delusional contradiction in “choosing” to die, because the “immense passivity of death . . . disorients every project, remains foreign to all decisions—the indecisive and uncertain.”24 In this sense, choosing to die or meeting death with heroic resolve only exposes our incapacity for resolve or decisions. To put it most succinctly, as Blanchot says, “You cannot want to die”25—that is, it is not possible to want or plan to die because death is not something realizable or certain. We can only have a passive relation that is beyond even the choice to “be” passive. We are now far beyond the study of suicide as a “mysterious phenomenon” in a society that attempts to manage and control life: suicide is no longer strange and fascinating (I; 2). Contrary to the values attached to life, suicide is actually delusional from the perspective of the obscure, where we have no power to act. To be grasped or seized by death obviously does not sound like a pleasant experience. Why would Blanchot use this as a correlate for the imaginary? It is perhaps not to demonstrate that death is something to be feared per se, but rather the reverse: that the experience of the imaginary may, in one sense, be haunting. Thus, in the case of our everyday lives, “The image . . . is secondary to the object. It is what follows. We see, then we imagine.”26 This “first version of the imaginary” is not threatening. But in his second “version of the imaginary,” This appearance of the object is that of resemblance and reflection: the object’s double, if you will . . . The category of art is linked to this possibility for objects to

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“appear,” to surrender, that is, to the pure and simple resemblance behind which there is nothing—but being. Only that which is abandoned to the image appears, and everything that appears is, in this sense, imaginary. The cadaverous resemblance haunts us. But its haunting presence is not the unreal visitation of the ideal. What haunts us is something inaccessible from which we cannot extricate ourselves.27

Here, Blanchot describes the way in which images become primary to our experience rather than secondary: as with the corpse, there is no longer a worldly attachment to the image of the person; rather, there is only that image, and behind that image there is nothing “but being.” This is to say that rather than the imagination that would be like a corollary to the image, what we encounter is the imaginary itself, removed from the world of possibility. This is haunting because it is inaccessible but also because, as Blanchot says, we cannot “extricate” ourselves from it: it “makes of our intimacy an exterior power which we suffer passively.”28 Not only is it exterior, but it is beyond our grasp and comprehension, and at the same time it constitutes a passive experience— provoking “the utmost depth of our passions.”29 This is what Blanchot calls “the menacing proximity of a vague and vacant outside . . . a sordid absence, a suffocating condensation where being ceaselessly perpetuates itself as nothingness . . . the unbearable image and figure of the unique becoming nothing in particular, no matter what.”30 It is here that the sovereign nature to grip or seize us is at play. It may seem counterintuitive at this point that Blanchot will ultimately build on this notion to claim that we can become fascinated, tantalized, and attracted to the imaginary. If it really is a “sordid absence”—if it menaces and haunts us by revealing (and concealing) the limitless world which has nothing to do with us—how do we get to the fascination of art or the inspiration of dreams?

3. Ambiguity beyond menace: the sovereign grip of fascination There is an outside beyond power that shifts beyond menace, and—in all its radical unfamiliarity and ambiguity—becomes fascinating. It is here that Blanchot’s notion of being seized by the outside can be explored further, since this second version of the imaginary that pulls us out of the real and familiar world is not the end of the story. In this regard, Blanchot identifies three levels of ambiguity: the first level involves common misunderstandings and the second involves the oscillation of two versions of the imaginary. The third level of ambiguity, however, is no longer about the oscillation or dichotomy between the two versions of the imaginary, but a paradoxical combination of the two versions that dissipates the very the menacing quality of the outside. As Blanchot writes of the second level of ambiguity: [T]here are three levels at which ambiguity is perceptible. On the worldly plane . . . meaning always escapes into another meaning; thus misunderstandings serve comprehension by expressing the truth of intelligibility . . . Another level is expressed by the two versions of the imaginary . . . Here what speaks in the name of the image “sometimes” still speaks of the world, and “sometimes” introduces us

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Thus, on the one hand, we have a (“second”) level of ambiguity where empty images seem meaningful and tied to the world—the image of the corpse seems to resemble the person they once were; the image of the painted object resembles what it depicts. And on the other hand, those images “sometimes” slip into their absent foundation, where they resemble nothing, and where we are drawn into a passive and menacing experience. But this oscillation only represents the second level of ambiguity. The highest level of ambiguity draws out the full potential of fascination and goes beyond the suffocating, menacing nature of images which encroach upon our identity and dissolve the reality of our world by returning unreality to images. This third level of ambiguity, which, as we will see, is underemphasized by Foucault as well as some Blanchot critics (II; 4), instead involves the two versions of the imaginary interpenetrating paradoxically, where the world is absent but subsists in its resemblance, propelled by both a lack and an excess of meaningfulness (but never settling on a given, comprehensible meaning). Blanchot continues: However, what we distinguish by saying “sometimes, sometimes,” ambiguity introduces by “always,” at least to a certain extent, saying both one and the other. It still proposes the significant image from the center of fascination, but it already fascinates us with the clarity of the purest, the most formal image . . . Meaning is no longer anything but semblance; semblance makes meaning become infinitely rich . . . Ambiguity . . . is always reserved and preserved by dissimulation, but also removed from it.32

Blanchot’s characterization of this third level of ambiguity as including both versions of the imaginary is subtle but crucial. If the second version of the imaginary pulls us away from the “image” that we thought depicted something real (a corpse of a person we once knew, a painting “of ” something), but we terrifyingly realize does not, this third version does something else: it reunites the unreality of the image with what it resembles. It therefore fascinates not by terrifying us in a sublime encounter, drawing us away from images, but by virtue of the “clarity” and form of the image. It is here that obscurity expresses something else. By simultaneously resembling and not resembling our world, in this third level of ambiguity we are drawn toward images in a way that is “infinitely rich” with meaning because meaning is no longer defined by simulation and comprehension but by the dissimulation that “preserves” images. Or, as we may say of a Foucauldian world of knowledge and power, we can no longer “speak” about what we “see”: no longer can knowledge of our milieu or who we are be formed by capturing what we can observe with what we can judge about it. Instead, meaning must be explicated insofar as it is always concealed in features of what we observe. This is far beyond the first level of

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ambiguity where we are bogged down by everyday “misunderstandings,” and it is also beyond the second level that intrudes upon the idealized way that we link images to the world (especially when the things those images depict are absent). Fascination, in the highest level of ambiguity, is where sight becomes a kind of touch, and where we lose our grip as much as we are gripped by the unreality of the imaginary. While fascination was present in the second level of ambiguity, in that case, it was ensnared in the negation or pull into a “a vague and vacant outside.” In this case, however, ambiguity involves a different experience of fascination that is no longer only “terrifying” but also “tantalizing”—no longer only “haunting” but “attractive” (V; 3b). It is therefore crucial to return to Blanchot’s comments on the “sovereignty of the void,” where the space of obscurity as a “sovereign power” makes it seem to have agency in that it grasps or seizes us: [W]hat happens when what you see, although at a distance, seems to touch you with a gripping contact, when the manner of seeing is a kind of touch . . .? What happens when what is seen imposes itself upon the gaze, as if the gaze were seized . . .? What happens is not an active contact, not the initiative and action which there still is in real touching. Rather, the gaze gets taken in, absorbed by an immobile movement and a depthless deep . . . [F]ascination is passion for the image . . . It . . . abandons the world . . . and draws us along. It no longer reveals itself to us, and yet it affirms itself in a presence foreign to the temporal present and to presence in space. Separation, which was the possibility of seeing, coagulates at the very center of the gaze into impossibility.33

When depicting fascination, Blanchot provides his own version of synesthesia, where touch becomes the analogy for seeing. When he says that images can “touch” us and dissipate the comfortable separation we normally have when looking at something, he means that it feels “immediate”—that there is no separation between us and whatever is inspiring or fascinating. In a sense, images have become “imaginary.” But whether this pull is menacing in that it pulls us away from the image or whether “it affirms itself in a presence” concerns the distinction between the second and third levels of ambiguity. In one case, what fascinates us also menaces us—we lose our grip inasmuch as we are “gripped.” In another case, our loss (of orientation, of worldliness, etc.) is the imagination’s gain: it is not possible to be menaced by a ubiquitous presence because menace requires absence—the terror and anticipation of the unknown. In this other case, there is only presence—there are only worlds to see and experience, in their difference and becoming (as we will see in II; 5 and 8), despite that what is seen is “impossible.” Like death, we cannot have a conceivable, “realizable,” or “certain” relation with it. And yet, we are nevertheless drawn by it—this is the paradox of fascination. Blanchot’s notion of the “passion for the image” concerns our relation, or nonrelation, with the imaginary, much like our relation to death, which is not only passive rather than active, but involves “a passion more passive than any passivity . . . as if the passage of dying had always already passed.”34 As Leslie Hill points out in her astute explication of the French construction of this passage, “Blanchot plays insistently on the paronomastic or homophonic doubling of pas (as step together with the negative

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not) with the words passe (past time), passif or passive (passive), passivite (passivity), passage (passage), and passion (passion).”35 Crucial here is the pas—the negativity of passion which is also at the same time a “step,” a “passage,” a movement, or experience. Passivity draws us out of our ability to act and to know: truth and reality dissolve before becoming something different. However, by situating the imaginary as a place, or a non-place—as an actual absence rather than also always as a simultaneous presence—we see how Blanchot’s outside looks from the perspective of knowledge, power, clarity, and truth, and how the outside can appear menacing. It is here that misreadings of Blanchot which focus almost exclusively on this oscillation between the two versions of the imaginary—and the suffocating pull away from our world—are instructive in their ontological focus on an “outside” that is enclosed by power.

4. Foucault on Blanchot: the hollowing out of interiority In Foucault’s own work on Blanchot, The Thought of the Outside (La pensée du dehors), Blanchot’s space of the outside is, perhaps unsurprisingly, characterized as a “nonplace” that lacks the truth and reality produced by knowledge and power. Foucault’s descriptions of the outside are always negations (the outside “deprives,” “denies,” “empties”):36 it is devoid of being, lacking space and time, an experience of “emptiness and destitution,”37 drawing us away from reality. Thus, when Foucault claims that “The outside cannot offer itself as a positive presence . . . but only as an absence that pulls as far away from itself as possible,”38 he arguably portrays Blanchot’s outside as an actual non-space or a non-thing, thereby ignoring Blanchot’s emphasis on the imaginary as “being” or a presence—not an indeterminate experience of nothing (an “amorphous” form) but a determined, actual experience of impossibility. The outside may not be a “positive” presence in the sense of the positivity of bio-power that fosters and enables our lives, but it is a presence that Blanchot argues is “affirmative” in that it may be attractive, tantalizing, and fascinating. In Deleuzian terms, both cases involve affect, but in the latter case is an affect that “resists” power passively, without being co-opted by it. However, we have not yet gone beyond Foucault: if the outside “has nothing to offer but the infinite void that opens”39—if it “it unfolds a placeless place” and reveals itself only by its “indifference” and “negligence,” as the Blanchot scholar Kevin Hart notes of Foucault’s characterization of the outside—“could anything be less attractive?”40 Foucault’s approach to Blanchot’s outside also revolves around the question of interiority—if there are no longer real milieus or truths, what we can “know” about who we are is radically “hollowed out.” In this case, Foucault provides a language to describe the intrusive and accosting effect of Blanchot’s outside on our sense of certainty when it draws us away from reality and from ourselves. He suggests that the double of Blanchot’s outside “intrudes,” “hollows . . . out,” or “divests” our interiority— which is to say, our self-certainty: The instant interiority is lured out of itself, an outside empties the place into which interiority customarily retreats and deprives it of the possibility of retreat: a form arises—less than a form, a kind of stubborn, amorphous anonymity—that divests

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interiority of its identity, hollows it out, divides it into non-coincident twin figures, divests it of its unmediated right to say I, and pits against its discourse a speech that is indissociably echo and denial.41

In this passage the outside is characterized as a space of reflection—implying it can either involve Cartesian certainty, or can be exposed as an empty, anonymous echo. From a Blanchotian perspective, by contrast, there is interiority, but it does not belong to us: it is the imaginary. It is that which we encounter in the corpse, but also in solitude, dreams, and in the space of fiction. It is not the absence of meaning, but the “infinitely rich” space of meaning—where our interiority is unhinged and distended. But there still is experience, there still is a world, there still is “the meaning of things,”42 just no term on or limit to meaning’s interminability. The outside certainly menaces us, it haunts us, and it suffocates us—but not physically, vitally, or viscerally. What it threatens is our lack of self-certainty and our conscious ability to reflect. Doubling or echoing is not an exteriorization of an empty interior that haunts us; rather, it is an interiorization of the imaginary as an obscure echo of the world. Thus while Foucault claims that Blanchot’s outside is devoid of interiority, and that the outside doubles who we are by virtue of anonymous others exterior to us, Deleuze claims in Foucault that “the double is never a projection of the interior; on the contrary, it is an interiorization of the outside.”43 Foucault in fact claims that Blanchot’s outside involves “the nameless limit language reaches” in “the echo of a different discourse that says the same thing,”44 while for Deleuze, the “inside”—which is to say, our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and imagination—is actually “animated” by the outside. Here we can return to the closing theme of the Introduction to this book: the limits or impossibilities of our internal world are coextensive with the limits of the external world; it is the same “outside.” As Deleuze puts it, “Foucault continually submits interiority to a radical critique. But is there an inside that lies deeper than any internal world, just as the outside is farther away than any external world?”45 In other words, the mechanisms by which we know who we are can be critiqued as effects of power. But “who we are” goes deeper than critique: in thinking what cannot be thought, that which is “further inward” than our interior reflections and imagination is made up of “a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements”;46 this movement, in Blanchotian terms, draws us closer than Foucauldian realities or truths that can be critiqued. Deleuze juxtaposes Foucault’s power and Blanchot’s outside as follows: on the one hand, the ever-changing relation between forces—which is to say, the affective “matter” and “functions” of provoking and being provoked to act—concern power relations; on the other hand, there is “the relation with the outside, that absolute relation, as Blanchot says, which is also a non-relation (Thought).”47 If this relation, or non-relation with the outside—which we have seen in terms of the relation with death and the imaginary (II; 1–2)—does not involve a “power relation,” Deleuze can ask, “if thought comes from outside . . . how come the outside does not flood into the inside, as the element that thought does not and cannot think of? . . . Foucault seems haunted by this theme of an inside which is merely the fold of the outside.”48 Here Deleuze is asking why the thought of the outside cannot be the fullness of a “flood” rather than what Foucault calls a “hollow,” since it involves a fold, in a relationship of envelopment. For Deleuze, the

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“unthought is therefore not external to thought but lies at its very heart, as that impossibility of thinking which doubles or hollows out the outside”49: the outside is no longer simply beyond the unthinkable, exterior world as relations of power; the outside now “hollows out,” doubles, or burrows itself to become closer than our own unthinkable perceptions, affections, and imagination. This is perhaps the most essential reversal beyond power. Thought, in other words, is “provoked” not by the possibilities of improving our lives and prosperity, but by an experience that is unthinkable insofar as it is grounded in Blanchot’s “unreality,” which concerns the “whole of reality” and the imaginary: a movement that never ends. Such “interior” thoughts, feelings, and perceptions do not have an origin—their origin is absent (which is not the same thing as saying they have an “absent origin,” since this would imply that absence is an origin). In this sense, Blanchot’s “unreality” to which the outside ultimately draws us—one involving what Blanchot calls impossibility and what Deleuze calls “chaos” or “time”— is inconceivable from a Foucauldian framework in which all “relations,” even resistances, are caught up in a power relation (as Deleuze asks, had Foucault not “trapped himself within the concept of power relations?”).50 In his most direct critique of Foucault, from his reading of Madness and Civilization, Blanchot claims that Foucault’s focus on the manner in which the insane have been institutionalized does not affirm an experience of a thought that is outside the norm. Both in his histories and conceptualizations, Foucault “encloses,” shuts up, excludes, or brackets (enfermer) the outside—“constitut[ing] it as an interiority of anticipation or exception”—both as an actual “structure of internment” and as a space of “obscure gestures” which “culture rejects.”51 Of course, without Foucault we would not be so keenly aware of the devastating and pernicious effect of such enclosures, the methods of branding and judging the “insane,” nor of the ubiquitous world of knowledge and power. But, as Deleuze points out in his citation of Blanchot’s critique, the notion of “The inside as an operation of the outside” has always “haunted” Foucault.52 To consider such an outside as an exception rather than as a doubling of the inside, in turn, fails to consider the “unthinkability” and passivity of thought: “what forces us to think is ‘the inpower [impouvoir] of thought’, the figure of nothingness.”53 Deleuze is emphasizing here that thought is not a power, and that nothingness, or absence, emerges in the image not as nothing (an existential void or “lake of non-being”),54 but as a figure. As such, the “force” of Blanchot’s outside can be read here as a movement, but one that does not function as the “affect” that provokes action or judgment in a world of power; rather, it is a movement that incites us with fascination toward what we cannot know, unworking the normal and regular. If power concerns how we are provoked to act, the correlative dimension of knowledge, concerning how we see and speak, also becomes unhinged when language can no longer “capture” the visible—the visible has become imaginary. In these terms, while Foucault will emphasize the way in which the visible is conditioned by the articulable (even if, as Deleuze insists, “the condition [ultimately] does not ‘contain’ the conditioned element”),55 Blanchot demonstrates that there is always something irreducible about the visible that exceeds its determination by the articulable. As Deleuze points out, “Blanchot insisted on the primacy of speaking as a determining element,” in contrast to Foucault, who “upholds the specificity of seeing.”56 While

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Foucault acknowledged and spoke about the “fissure” between seeing and saying—that there is no “natural or inevitable”57 relation between what we see and what we say about it (e.g., observing someone’s behavior and labelling them immoral or corrupt is culturally contingent and subjective)—it was Blanchot who characterized the obscurity of this dimension itself. Blanchot explored what happens to language when it no longer captures the visible, or when its purpose is no longer “comprehension, an essential mode of possibly.”58 As we will see, this “interstice” between seeing and saying, often cited in Deleuzian cinema scholarship, plays an important role in the reversal of power (VIII; 3a–5b). Blanchot’s perspective allows us to consider the outside as an experience of an actual world without what Foucault calls the “production” of truth and reality by power: it is a world where “interiority” is not just hollowed out, but is also carried along by a ceaseless process of discovering obscurities and impossibilities. This “discovery” of obscurity is a process undergone in our experience of mortality but, as we will see (IV; 2), also of solitude, dreams, and fiction. Here again, Foucault characterizes fiction in terms of negativity and reflection alone, where “fiction consists not in showing the invisible, but in showing the extent to which the invisibility of the visible is invisible. Thus, it bears a profound relation to space; understood in this way, space is to fiction what the negative is to reflection.”59 The assumption behind this correlation is that fiction and reflection are symmetrical operations, and that, like the mirror that reflects, fiction’s operation is negative—a tabula rasa to fill with imagery, but containing none of its own. The claim that fiction reveals the “extent” of invisibility within the visible inverts Blanchot’s logic: the outside does not reveal the invisibility of the visible; rather, it reveals the visibility of the invisible. The difference is that in the first case, we are seeing a nothingness behind, within, or between images, whereas in the second case, we are seeing that which does not reveal itself in the clarity of an apprehensible and comprehensible form: we are drawn, affectively, into another experience of words and images, where what is seen cannot be judged or captured by what can be said (this will become important in our study of cinema—VIII; 4). It is perhaps unsurprising that Foucault, as well as many of Blanchot’s own commentators, tend to focus on the “sordid” and menacing aspect of nothingness in his work. Some thinkers do so while overtly dismissing Deleuze’s approach to Blanchot: Marie Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, for example, dismisses Deleuze’s reading of Blanchot as “hardly Blanchotian”60 because, as she claims, the outside is “the force of an attraction whose particularity is due to the fact that it strips the subject of all reference to being. Consequently, the outside obstructs the interiority of the inside . . . provoking fear and vertigo, . . . a deficiency of time, a lacking of the present that makes presence impossible.”61 While Ropars-Wuilleumier places apt and intriguing emphasis on Blanchot’s force of attraction in this regard, the emphasis again is on the negativity of language—the outside “strips” and “obstructs”; it is a “deficiency” and a “lack.” In her terms, the outside is the impossibility of “presence” that “that places ontology into question”;62 in Blanchot’s terms, however, the outside “yields to no ontology.”63 The placing-into-question is menacing, as he articulates in his second version of the imaginary, but beyond the ontological, where the imaginary draws us in a movement that is not visible in the image, we may be inspired and fascinated. As another scholar,

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Calum Watt,64 similarly claims, Blanchot advances “a groundless ontology, [where] the image is present at the base of being”65—that is, where the world is “preceded by its image,” or that the outside “draws us towards a point of absence or the void.”66 In his reading of the second version of the imaginary (an overt “a through-line” of his study) the absence of the world constantly “horrifies” or disrupts our interiority, or “abandons” our relation to the world. In overt contrast to Deleuze and in alignment with RoparsWuilleumier, Watt claims that Blanchot’s approach involves “the paradox by which the image takes on all the qualities of the invisible and yet can only be called an image on account of its visibility.”67 This of course echoes Foucault’s claim that we just saw, where the visible is revealed as invisible. The issue here is that the invisible is treated as a nonentity, existing only by virtue of not being within the domain of light, clarity, comprehension, and illumination. It is not that Blanchot’s void is, in Watt’s terms, an “infinitely anterior moment”;68 rather, it is a lack of anteriority. It does not concern an “absent origin,” but the absence of an origin: this is, in Blanchot’s terms, “a movement . . . by the fact that we experience it, it escapes our power to undergo it.”69 The question remains: how are we drawn into Blanchot’s highest level of ambiguity? How can such a movement that takes us beyond the “sordid absence” of the dissemblance of the image, and beyond our interior and exterior worlds, take place?

5. What is “the outside”? Blanchot on the experience of the impossible In order to juxtapose a view of possibility in a world of power to an experience genuinely outside of power, we turn to Blanchot’s seminal essay “How to Discover the Obscure?” where he outlines such an experience of the highest level of ambiguity, or what he calls the outside (le dehors). Here, Blanchot characterizes possibility itself as a form of power, where the possible should not be thought of simply as what is “not yet real,” but is what makes reality what it is. In such a case, we exert power by means of comprehension and being towards the future. As we have seen (Intro, I; 3), Foucault’s view of the possible involves a “positive” and generative conception of power, which is “a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces”:70 for example, to be induced to self-awareness in a panoptic or control society (to be more safe or efficient), or to be provoked to undergo expensive medical treatment (to be healthier). The possibilities of power are the opportunities, investments, and improvements that disciplinary or regulated assemblages afford. This is sharply distinct from the seizure and means of deduction of sovereign power that does not generate or enable but “takes” (from) life. But it is here that Blanchot not only complicates the distinction between sovereign coercion and our modern “possibilities,” but creates the conditions for a different perspective on time itself. Blanchot’s views on sovereign power are elaborated counterintuitively around his concept of the outside. It is worth noting that “How to Discover the Obscure?” was originally published in 1959,71 so it certainly was not a reply to Foucault’s theses on sovereign and biopower decades later, especially those referenced here (e.g., the famous thesis articulated at the end of The History of Sexuality, his comments in “Le sujet et le

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pouvoir,” etc.); however, we can see that it offers a pre-emptive criticism of Foucault’s thesis through a characterization of the negativity of sovereign power not around politics, but around our experience of time. Here, Blanchot portrays the way that “sovereignty” works as a negative force (a force of “negation,” of not-being or not existing), where we withdraw ourselves from the present moment by “fixing” ourselves toward or fixating on the future. As he states, we find “in possibility the sovereign power to negate being: man, each time that he is on the basis of possibility, is the being without being. The struggle for possibility is this struggle against being.”72 This can be reframed as a critique of Foucault’s distinction: it is not the negativity of sovereign power against the positivity of biopower; rather, sovereignty is still at work in ways that we act with regard to “possibilities” (being provoked, incited, etc.). For instance, if we are always fixed or fixated toward the future, we are “negating” the present moment; we are not “in” the present, and our “being” has no presence. This leads Blanchot to articulate his concept of the outside by virtue of the experience not of possibility, but of impossibility, which, he insists, is not simply the “negative” side of possibility. In many ways, he is wresting the term from its pejorative connotations: futility, hopelessness, despair, frustration, anxiety, pointlessness, and incapacity. If we always think of impossibility in this way, the impossible will perhaps be forever “enclosed” within the world of knowledge and power, as its exception or exclusion (as we saw in II; 4). Instead, Blanchot wants to know how to characterize a “non-power that would not be the simple negation of power.”73 Here we can ask, from a Foucauldian perspective, presuming Blanchot is right that our relation to the world “escapes the realm of the possible,” whether we are suddenly not so vulnerable to such mechanisms of power. That is, on the one hand, we may be “incited” or “provoked” to act by means of the “possibility” of getting returns on our investments of time, energy, and money, or by the fear of possible intervention in a panoptic environment; on the other hand, we are still provoked, or in Blanchot’s words we are grasped or seized, caught up in a peculiar sort of movement outside of possibility. Blanchot begins to ask what such “impossibility” might be, emphasizing that “we would see ourselves drawn by it away from the space in which we exercise power” and that it cannot be “in the mode of appropriative comprehension”:74 if we can no longer “act,” in Foucauldian terms, we can no longer know (or capture the visible). But the question, as Blanchot puts it, remains, “What would this experience of the obscure be, whereby the obscure would give itself in its obscurity?”75 Suffering, for instance, makes us “dispossessed of any future,” because we cannot think about our “possibilities” and plans, only the pain in the present moment, it also renders the present “indefinitely hollowed out and in this hollowing indefinitely distended.”76 In this sense, it is not drawing us to a non-place or nothingness, but makes us “incapable of permanence” in that the past and present become indistinguishable: even in its menacing form, the impossible, as an experience, draws us into a new relationship with time. Such suffering, however, which seems to hollow us out, is not strictly synonymous with the inspiration and fascination of Blanchot’s highest level of ambiguity. To get there, the outside must be considered not as some null, amorphous space deprived of any features, but as an experience with unexpectedly precise features.

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Here, Blanchot identifies three features that characterize the outside as an experience of impossibility and conceivably reverse the effects of power: incessance, a kind of obstinate ungraspability, and becoming as the “diverging of difference.” As we will see, it is this third feature of becoming, in the most radical reversal beyond power, that conceivably draws together the first two. Firstly, incessance concerns our experience of the present moment in time that has no origin or destination, no beginning or ending. As Blanchot writes, “in impossibility time changes direction, no longer offering itself out of the future as what gathers by going beyond; time, here, is rather the dispersion of a present that, even while being only passage does not pass, never fixes itself in a present, refers to no past and goes toward no future: the incessant.”77 The feeling of a moment that has no beginning or end is difficult to pinpoint in everyday experience, but examples might include the ceaseless flow of traffic in a large city, at all hours of the day, the unending crashing of waves on the shore, or even the tedium of the everyday that we repeat to the immersion in some activity that draws out our “passion.” In incessance, each moment is indistinguishable from the last, where we are pulled out of the presence of one moment and lose a sense of a future that would be distinct from the “murmur” of all of the moments that have come before. As contemplative as this may sound, though, Blanchot takes care to distinguish such incessance from “quietism,” noting that “there is the passivity which is beyond disquietude, but which nevertheless retains the passiveness of the incessant, feverish, even-uneven movement of error which has no purpose, no end, no starting principle.”78 This is reflected in oxymoronic formulations that Blanchot often articulates such as “furious peace” and “tranquil anxiety,”79 which all denote a kind of restlessness or ceaselessness that, at the same time, flows or glistens with consistency or focus. Here the change in direction of time is a first reversal of power wherein we cannot act toward any goal or initiative in reality. We are entirely passive, but, as with Blanchot’s description of the second version of the imaginary, we are not inattentive or disinterested. This experience of the impossible in fact culminates in a “passion that does not allow itself to be mastered through patience.”80 Thus while Blanchot does not use the term “passivity” in this context, the “passion” of the outside— his emphasis on the “passage” of incessance that does not pass—and the impossibility of “patience” all begin with incessance. This leads to the second feature of the outside, which could be called obstinate ungraspability, where Blanchot identifies the obstinate or unignorable nature of an “ungraspable” and unseizable presence. As he writes, “in impossibility, the immediate is a presence to which one cannot be present, but from which one cannot separate; again, it is what escapes by the very fact that there is no escaping it: the ungraspable that one cannot let go of”81 (“insaisissable dont on ne se dessaisit pas”). The reversal of closeness and distance here is crucial: as with fascination which involves “contact at a distance,” and as with the “the sovereign power” which pulls us away from everyday images toward the imaginary, here, too, Blanchot characterizes the way in which presence is not mediated82 to us (i.e., not by abstract thought, not by “distance” that “avoids confusion,” etc.); rather, presence is “immediate,” and we cannot have a “possible” relation to it. We cannot anticipate what it may mean for us or what effect it may have. It may “provoke” us, but not in the sense that we can act in relation to it; it is passive in

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that it absolves us of choice: in short, in this second reversal of power, what can be grasped is ungraspable but nevertheless grasps us. However, in Blanchot’s words, “passivity is not simple receptivity”:83 to imagine or to dream, for example, is to be drawn along, but insofar as there is an “inappreciable remoteness” within that which draws us along, we are still in the “throes” of living, “a seizure like a cut in time,”84 and we are especially still thinking. The third feature of the outside involves the paradox or “secret of becoming . . . that gives itself as the diverging of difference.”85 Here, “what reigns in the experience of impossibility is not the unique’s immobile collecting unto itself, but the infinite shifting of dispersal, a non-dialectical movement where contrariety has nothing to do with opposition or with reconciliation, and where the other never comes back to the same.”86 This is, of course, an old philosophical notion: when something changes into something else, when we change into someone else, what is “other” or different cannot be “reconciled” with what is or has been. What Blanchot adds is that such difference is not a retroactive comparison, but occurs in the present moment: a “shifting of dispersal.” In other words, this third feature, which builds on the first two, supports Blanchot’s third level of ambiguity that goes beyond menace. If, on the one hand, we are caught up in a “passage” through incessance, and on the other hand we are in immediate contact with a presence that is also separate, then that which seemed to be repeating—and that which seems to be present—are actually also changing. If difference thus “diverges” from itself, it can only appear as a “dispersal” of the similar. Here, as we will see, Blanchot’s approach resonates with Deleuze: the paradox of becoming and novelty is that they appear in the form of the unrecognizable—which is not different, but similar or repeated. In terms of time, change, too, occurs in an interval that is indistinguishable from the past and future. In other words, if you take incessance together with the immediacy of a presence that is also distant (which is also past and future, but felt as present), you have “a non-dialectical movement” where what is present is also somewhere else (toward which it draws us), having already happened and not yet happened. These three features of Blanchot’s outside, then, are not independent, but work together in tandem; in fact, it is the radical reversal of becoming that requires both the first reversal of time’s direction in incessance and the second reversal of being grasped by the ungraspable: a dispersal or diverging of difference that is ungraspable within the flow or presence of the incessant. Blanchot insists that “If we hold these traits together . . . we perceive that in impossibility it is not only the negative character of the experience that would make it perilous, but also ‘the excess of its affirmation’.”87 In other words, these traits together reveal that the outside is not a “nothingness” underneath our experience, pulling us out of space and time to send us through an infinite void, and we have come full circle to see that the outside of power is not its “exception of exclusion,” but involves affirmation (and as we will see, also involves inspiration and fascination—II; 11). Like the third level of ambiguity, the outside combines the two versions of the imaginary such that images resemble our world only by dissembling and estranging us from the world, but to the extent that the dissemblance continues to become familiar again.88 This is Blanchot’s “radical reversal” outside of possibility (II; 1), described in this context as a “reversal of both” the “intimacy of

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instancy” and the “dispersal of the Outside”;89 here, there is a “vertigo of spacing” such that what is beyond the dispersions of the external world is reversed to become closer than the instantaneousness and intimacy in our internal world: the becoming of incessance combined with obstinate ungraspability operating both closer than our interiority and further than our exteriority. Thus, as Blanchot concludes in the essay, “what is obscure in this movement is what it discloses,” having “reduced all movement of concealing or self-concealing to a mode of the manifest.”90 We may have been estranged from the intimacy and comfort of knowing who we are in our world, but now that strangeness somehow “manifests” its own concealment. To consider how the unfamiliar, or different, can paradoxically repeat itself in our actual, passive, lived experience, it is useful to turn to Deleuze’s reading of Blanchot, and ultimately to their comparable understanding of the eternal “return” of difference.

6. Deleuze’s vision of passivity, Part 1: habit and imagination While the imagination may involve an experience that is divorced from the everyday— and perhaps from life itself—this still leaves us with the question of the everyday and the “living” features of our sensation and of the mind. It is here that Deleuze’s and Blanchot’s distinct emphases regarding the imagination allow consideration of the lived or living forces of obscurity in our lives alongside those that may, as Blanchot would say, “know nothing of life.” Deleuze’s investigation into passivity—specifically, the three well-known “syntheses of time” from Difference and Repetition—like Blanchot’s features of obscurity, describes an experience outside of power that also privileges the imagination. As we will see, Deleuze’s vision of repetition and difference culminating in the third synthesis of time is comparable to Blanchot’s features that culminate in a “becoming” as a diverging of difference (II; 8). Unlike Blanchot, however, Deleuze begins by locating our “obscure” experience of time first on the practical level of habit—what Blanchot might call the incessant “banality” of the everyday. But if Blanchot’s first feature of obscurity involves the incessance or repetition of “passage [that] does not pass,” Deleuze’s vision of repetition involves the manner in which we can be unconscious when we carry out actions by virtue of forming the “passive self ” which “contracts” habits. This involves, on a fundamental level, two distinct approaches to the imaginary. It seems that we are confronted, for the time being, with distinctive approaches to the imaginary. For Blanchot, the imagination involves “the unreality” of the “whole,” the “unmalleable, lifeless profundity”91 with which poetry comes in contact, and, as we will see (V; 3b), the “absolute milieu” behind images. By contrast, Deleuze depicts the imagination not as lifeless or absolute but as a living organ of contraction (what Blanchot calls the imagination and what Deleuze, as we will see in the following section, would call memory or the virtual). For Deleuze, this experience of the imaginary occurs on a crucial, visceral level that is intentionally elided by Blanchot (in his focus on the experience of the work of art).92 In Deleuze’s case, the mysterious and creative function of the imagination is to “contract what it contemplates” or perceives, which is to say, it allows the living thing to experience instants simultaneously, or to live

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“the contemporaneity of the past with the present that it was.”93 While we may normally say that we immediately “recognize” certain images, sounds, or sensations, Deleuze, channeling Bergson, would not use such a term to describe the manner in which what we perceive or sense is encountered repeatedly: as he claims, “The imagination is defined here as a contractile power: like a sensitive plate, it retains one case when the other appears . . . This is by no means a memory, nor indeed an operation of the understanding: contraction is not a matter of reflection.”94 In other words, we do not consciously reflect, nor are we necessarily aware of having recognized something, considering that we undergo this process thousands of times every day. Thus, the word retention is more apt to describe this process of perception and sensation: we retain the past—not just visually, but “viscerally,” via all five senses (a smell perception-memory, an audible perception-memory, etc.)—in the present insofar as the imagination has retained the impressions from previous encounters (this will be crucial for Blanchot’s “recognition without cognition” in III; 10). In his later work with Guattari, Deleuze will emphasize that such contraction and retention involves “the mystery of passive creation, sensation”95—a feature that “qualifies” the varieties of living things, from plants to ecosystems to human beings, and is “monumentalized” in art (IV; 4a). Our Deleuzian and Blanchotian approaches to the imaginary—whether considered as visceral or as lifeless—actually converge around the passive experience of repetition in time that is neither a groundless void nor the constitution of reality. The essence of repetition lies not in “the first” after which everything is redundant; rather, in a Deleuzian sense, it concerns the middle (the milieu), which, in a Blanchotian vein, itself has no origin and is indeterminate. Here we can consider the milieu as that which constitutes “reality” (in distinction from the reality produced by power):96 insofar as the imagination and reality are not opposed, it is such (un)reality that pervades the sense of what “is” and “has been” (which is why Deleuze insists that the “virtual” is real).97 While reality is normally represented actively, as we saw, by panoptic or “englobing” milieus (I; 11), such (un)reality, at its foundation, has levels that involve the indiscernible: at an unconscious level, it is perhaps the case that there is an experience of what Blanchot would call incessance at work: you will not remember the 538th time out of 2,357 times that you did something. In other words, it is an unconscious state of forgetfulness, lost in the murmur98 of the indistinguishable. This is why the experience and movement of repetition is passive: it passes through us (it is “a present which passes”).99 In a Deleuzian sense, Blanchot’s incessant repetition that forms habits is visceral; habits are carried out all day, every day, on a practical and pragmatic level. Repetition is thus not about beginnings and endings, originals and copies—if it is “incessant,” or always within the middle or milieu, then its actual origin is also absent. The experience of repetition is not only unconcerned with its origin, immersed as it is in the indiscernible and unresolvable processes beneath or within the “reality” which constitute it, but the now of the present moment is conceivably a void in movement. Such movement is only created by virtue of the sense or sensation of continuity between now and the past, which Deleuze, via Bergson, calls contraction. This void in movement, of which we are unconscious when we carry out actions by forming the “passive self ” which “contracts” habits, then, in Deleuze’s terms, “does not constitute time any more than it causes it to disappear; it indicates only its constantly

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aborted moment of birth.”100 This is Deleuze’s “first passive synthesis” of time: “this synthesis must be given a name: passive synthesis. Although it is constitutive it is not, for all that, active. It is not carried out by the mind, but occurs in the mind which contemplates, prior to all memory and all reflection.”101 The fundamental paradox of such repetition is that it “disappears even as it occurs . . . It has no in-itself.”102 Repetition thus may be groundless (sans fond) in itself (having nothing “between” instances), but “for itself ”—that is, through the “matter” or content that it contracts, creates a “ground” (fondement) or “moving soil.” In other words, repetition may be a form of negation, but since it “is” nothing in itself, it affirms the content of whatever is repeated insofar as it carries or preserves the qualities of that which it contracts, “thereby constituting the lived, or living, present.”103 Such a present moment in time does not, properly speaking, exist; as Deleuze puts it in his commentary on Bergson, “the present is not; rather, it is pure becoming, always outside itself.”104 The present is the past and future; it is not a dimension of time but is “perpetual.”105 It is in this sense that we can move again another step further from an existentialist notion that the outside is a space or a nonspace: the force of absence concerns only the present moment in time that never actually “is”—or rather, if it is, it is only change and becoming. But if this present moment takes us from the past to the future, how is such a future not one of the “possibilities” afforded by power? Are habits, then, not constantly “provoked” by the mechanisms of power? Our habits, based in an obscure experience of repetition, may become ensnared in our world of reality and power, but they operate below that level—within the indiscernible, incessant void of the present moment. Deleuze insists that it is only by actively reflecting on the expectations we develop based on our habits—“our expectation that ‘it’ will continue”106—that we develop principles, partialities or prejudices. It is this perception of reality within a milieu that engenders the generic, reflective affection of expectation. In distinction from action in a Foucauldian world, however, habits occur at a level below that of recognition and therefore can evade capture of the visible by the articulable required to “act” toward outcomes: the repetition of contraction and sensation surrounding perception does not necessarily lead to generic or generalized expectation. In this sense, the passive side of habits, as opposed to the “active” side that we saw (1; 3), is conceivably a resistant feature of power that is outside of it: the immersion in our habits does not require a “relation” to the possibilities of improving our life or prosperity per se. The skill of the violinist, for example, who practices every day, sweats and creates new varieties of playing the instrument, is distinct from their identity or status as a musician, from their regularization by financial incentives or disincentives to play the violin, and even from the “discipline” of technical competence and hours spent practicing (whether as internalized self-awareness or as intervention by an instructor). Their perception is immanent to the milieus of making music, and their affection is likewise not necessarily manipulated by expectation. In this sense, we “are” our habits before we “have” an identity and can speak about “who we are”: the innumerable movements of the violinist that are not “thought” but “contracted.” In Deleuze’s terms, these “primary habits that we are; the thousands of passive syntheses of which we are organically composed”107 (in that the imagination contracts as does a visceral organ like the heart, or even like cells fuse) perhaps characterize this vital, but

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mortal, resistant feature of life’s incessance that cannot be co-opted by power. In Blanchot’s terms, such passive syntheses would perhaps “seem [to be] the beating of an empty heart,”108 in the sense that they have a “lifeless profundity” that reverberates in an infinite movement.

7. Deleuze’s vision of passivity, Part 2: memory and time Habits, of course, do not define the scope of a human experience outside of power and knowledge. If the principle of repetition is that identical cases are indistinguishable from each other, Deleuze can say, “Does not the paradox of repetition lie in the fact that one can speak of repetition only by virtue of the change or difference that it introduces into the mind?”109 That is to say, without difference or change, we would not even be able to conceive of repetition because we would not be able to make distinctions between one thing and another in space or time (as in the case with chaos: IV; 3b). In repetition, there is always variety, whether we realize it or not. It is in this sense that Deleuze defines the first synthesis as the foundation (fondation) of time: The first synthesis, that of habit, is [genuinely] the foundation (fondation) of time; but we must distinguish the foundation (fondation) from the ground (fondement). The foundation concerns the soil: it shows how something is established upon this soil, how it occupies and possesses it . . . Habit is the foundation of time, the moving soil occupied by the passing present.110

In other words, habit may create a foundation (fondation), but that foundation never had a ground (fondement). And it is memory that establishes a vertical relation to what it grounds in the soil of the passing present—that counterintuitively comes from the “sky”: “the ground comes rather from the sky, it goes from the summit to the foundations”; by contrast, habit establishes a foundation of time and “constitutes the life of the present that passes; Memory is the fundamental synthesis of time, which constitutes the being of the past.”111 What we “synthesize” are not successive instances, but whole regions of the past, in all of their complexity. Unlike the paradoxical simultaneity of repetition, here we have the paradoxical coexistence of layers or levels of such repetitions (which are habits, but also “worlds”),112 making difference into specific and unconscious “variant[s]” instead of a generalized and reflected future. The question that memory raises concerns time—which is not a totality, but an absent totality that is revealed in the fragmented recollections of the past. In other words, the “void” of the present—the absent foundation of habit within the passing present—is also the very consistence and insistence of time, insofar as all repetition within the past alongside the contraction of the present is implicated by the differences and relations that time incarnates—differences and relations that never “were” but always “are.” Just as habit had no “in-itself,” then, since it disappears as it appears, the ground (fondement) of memory is Deleuze’s “pre-existence” of the past that is undermined by the groundlessness of incessant movement itself—always “contemporaneous with itself as present” and “already-there, presupposed by the

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passing present and causing it to pass.”113 In this case, what memory lacks is the very foundation (fondation) or “for-itself ” of habit: a different type of groundlessness (sansfond) that lacks a determined presence. This is perhaps why Deleuze claims that the past—and time itself—always exerts an influence on the present: the past “does not exist, but it insists, it consists, it is.”114 Despite that the absent totality of time does not exist but only consists, Deleuze will claim that “all of the past coexists with the new present in relation to which it is now past”115 when we remember: the coexistence of the past as a whole is grounded on the pre-existence of a past that effectively never was— that is, which we search through with an affective coloring wherein we question it. Reminiscence, in short, conjures up the past in a “splendour which was never lived.”116 Memory, in these terms, searches for nothing in particular: the way that we suddenly and involuntarily remember does not involve remembering “facts.” If the paradoxical origin of habit involves the incessance that lacks beginning or end, and a “constantly aborted moment of birth” (or what Blanchot might call the “incessant labor of the day”), memories are “immemorial” in that we find ourselves thrown into them, going from one layer of our past to another, without trying to recall a particular occurrence, but driven by a questioning force which does not operate in our actual world of solutions or accomplishments. The paradox of negativity is fully at work here, too: it is only by remembering entire, manifold regions of the past that we begin to see variations of something. But that whole is inexplicable and lacks a foundation: unlike habit, it has no soil or traction. And while this may lead to the idealization that corresponds to the standards used to normalize behavior (I; 13), the imperative to search our past does not come from the world of power and knowledge—the fact that the questions we ask of the past have no answer and no origin already precludes them from operating with the positivity of a power that fosters and enables life. Here we can consider that what Deleuze, channeling Bergson and Proust, calls the “involuntary” or “spontaneous” invocation of memory which “violently” catapults us into an experience of difference in time, in all of its affective questioning and coloring, corresponds to Blanchot’s menacing seizure or grip of the imaginary, which Blanchot also bases in a reading of Proust. In fact, this seizure conceivably corresponds also to the “menacing” nature of Blanchot’s outside and his second feature of impossibility: the obstinately ungraspable (II; 5). In Deleuze’s Proust and Signs, this stems from an encounter that demands deciphering, leading to simultaneous “memory and creation . . . [that] starts from the impression . . ., a violence that it obliges us to undergo . . . and supposes the depth and darkness of the involuntary.”117 As Blanchot similarly notes, “for Proust the essential point [is] . . . this revelation by which . . . in this seizure of another time . . . [where] he can arrange the imaginary as a space.”118 And yet, this “ability to enter into a decisive contact with the essence of literature” is always “menaced” by “destructive time” and “seeing himself, moment by moment” losing time.119 As Blanchot insists, Proust is torn within the “unreal movement” and the “ungraspable relationship” between the “nothingness that calls him” to arrange the imaginary and his inevitable death that will put an end to the timelessness he experiences when imagining.120 Here, triggered by “the irregularity of chance,” Proust cannot let go of these ungraspable memories and imaginings, compelled by the search that defines his “calling” or vocation. He has accessed the “moving absence” involving

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“that remoteness and distance that make up the milieu” that is “absolute” and withdrawn from the world, “without signification, but summoning the profundity of every possible meaning.”121 Like Blanchot, Deleuze is emphasizing the unavoidable nature of impressions, the grip they have on us—despite that they deliver us only to imagination “generated by desire.”122 In Deleuze’s terms, Proust becomes implicated in a search that leads beyond the worldly and sensual, through memory, but ultimately beyond the “material signs” of life toward art. The language of seizure and violence here is on full display: it is not with a whimsical levity that we search our past—it is with a shock that compels us to explore and imagine it wildly, provoked by chance encounters that are overshadowed by Proust’s “contradiction of survival and of nothingness”,123 which is required to leave the passing present (the repetition of habit) behind to experience the “pure past.” Like Blanchot’s first version of the imaginary, the impression conceivably resembles life and comes from the world (or “envelops” our past—IV; 3c), and like the second version, it is betrayed by the “sordid absence” and nothingness which is its very condition and foundation. Just as habits, through active reflection, may engender an illusion of reality, memory likewise may provoke us to mistakenly believe in truths. In fact, the manner in which memory, Deleuze’s second passive synthesis of time, lacks the foundation of habit and therefore must ground itself in—and be haunted by—what Deleuze calls the “unlivable” and what Blanchot calls a “sordid absence” testifies to the manner in which this experience can be become generalized and active in its search for truth, hence incitable by power. As Deleuze insists, for Proust,“Combray appears as it could not be experienced: not in reality, but in its truth,” and the Proustian seeker of such truth is always one who feels deceived, like the jealous lover (hence, as Deleuze insists,“the truth betrays itself”).124 As he claims, “jealousy is deeper than love, it contains love’s truth” insofar as the signs of the beloved (and of the past) are necessarily “revealed as deceptive” because they “express worlds that exclude us and that the beloved will not and cannot make us know.”125 Indeed, to seek the truth only uncovers the lie insofar as such a search is affectively driven, as in the search for love by jealousy (other cases that reveal truth’s differential state could be considered, such as a search for perfection that only uncovers incompletion). As we will see, the genuine differences contained in worlds or in the past cannot be “explicated” as true without revealing a difference as contradictory; they are thus ultimately inexplicable and can only be thought rather than perceived (IV; 4a, VIII; 2b). Like the Foucauldian phenomenon of “speaking” a truth as a form of affective provocation (I; 4 and 10), it is by virtue of this affective search for the truth that the perception of such worlds is rendered generic: mythologized, romanticized, or idealized. Thus, worlds like “Combray reappear . . . in the form of a past which was never present.”126 Deleuze has thus allowed us to consider how the provocation to reminisce and seek the truth, while more of an intellectual operation than habit, is pulled back down to reality by way of its affective provocation: the experience of the past is always founded by a “universal mobility and universal ubiquity,” a relative movement and repetition, even if it “perpetually differs from itself.”127 The double-edged sword of memory, in this sense, parallels the double-edged sword of habit: here, while the coexistence of layers or levels of contraction prevents the imagination from projecting generic differences onto the future (so that real differences of the past can

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be conceived), thus avoiding the pitfalls of active reflection in habit, it nevertheless suffers from the generalization of its forms of repeating the past in the present. The past is “preserved” through its mythologization and idealization (rather than its future anticipation and generic affection, as with habit); while we may feel a genuine sense of provocation by difference and questions without answers, our perception becomes generic and grounded in such ideals. In this sense, the involuntary or spontaneous nature of such reminiscence can surely be co-opted by mechanisms of power: advertising which appeals to our cultural nostalgias, or the strategic deployment of perceptual triggers to manipulate voters. But like habit, memory also operates independently of our practices; it is distinct from the first passive synthesis of habit in that it cuts across the regions of our past. As a searching or problematizing force I may ask about my very “destiny,” considering the way that various regions or milieus of my past, composed of all my previous habits, involve “non-localisable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes”128—the way who I was as a child coexists with who I was an adolescent, and as an adult in one career or practice, then in another, and so on. Because there is no “answer” to such questions, they are irreducible to our actions in a world of power and knowledge. The affective force of memory that allows us to experience coexistences is thus another resistant, passive Blanchotian force outside of power.

8. The final synthesis of time: Deleuze and Blanchot on eternal return The “ultimate” paradox of the future—beyond the present of habit and the past of memory—is, perhaps counterintuitively, not entirely distinct from those paradoxes of repetition and difference (in habit and memory, respectively) that it builds on. This can be conceived not only by closely examining Deleuze’s characterization of it, but also by Deleuze’s own reliance on Blanchot to do so. And if Blanchot’s own approach to the “being of becoming” that is the future—that is, the eternal return—involves “holding together” his traits of incessance and obstinate ungraspability, we discover here an extraordinary parallelism between Deleuze and Blanchot: in both cases, the highest paradox of time and becoming is not distinct from the paradoxes that get us there. In Deleuze’s characterization of the third synthesis of time, we thus see the language not only of Blanchot’s incessance, and of being grasped by the ungraspable, but also something new, built on both difference and repetition. Not just the contraction of repetition, but the actual paradoxical change within such repetition. Not just a questioning or problematizing force, as with memory and habit (respectively), but the paradoxical source of questions and problems. There was of course always difference (novelty, change, etc.) within Deleuze’s paradox of repetition—underneath or “enveloped” by it—and an underlying passion of repetition and difference—so to speak—insofar as such passion draws us to perceive, imagine, immerse, and absorb ourselves within a present moment that is simultaneously tied to the past and future. In this third synthesis, which builds on the passive features of the first two while avoiding their active and generic pitfalls, the ground of memory finally implicates the foundation of habit, just as the foundation of habit finally develops

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the ground of memory. Using Blanchotian language, Deleuze argues that “there is more profoundly a passion of repetition, from which emerges a new difference,” where imagination and memory “discovers at this point its own unique passion—in other words, its radical difference and its eternal repetition . . . when it is forced to grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, yet also that of the ungraspable”129—that is, when it discovers its own impossibility. This is perhaps the insensible within the sensation and perception of habit, the immemorial repetition within the affect and difference of memory, where we are “forced” to sense the insensible, forced to remember the immemorial, and ultimately forced to think the unthinkable. In this sense, Deleuze’s third synthesis of time culminates his approach to repetition and difference. If eternal return is a synthesis of time that combines the paradox of simultaneity, which focuses on the present in time, with the paradox of coexistence, which focuses on the past in time, it does not involve a new paradox distinct from those first two syntheses. Rather, this ultimate synthesis emphasizes a paradox of serialization which focuses on the future in time, and is distinct only in how it combines the two paradoxes: it synthesizes both the indistinguishable repetitions of habit (the magical, mysterious nature of unconscious repetition) and the coexistent nature of difference (the nuances and chaotic complexities of past) (II; 8, IV; 3c, V; 7, VIII; 3a–c), as an affirmation of the future as a repetition of difference. While, according to Deleuze, habit does form a series, and memory creates a “resonance,” it is the third synthesis that expresses a “forced movement which exceeds”130 the series and resonances. In fact, building on the first two passive syntheses of time, then, “beyond the ground of Eros [reminiscence] and the foundation of Habitus” Deleuze finds the “groundlessness” of Thanatos or death as the third synthesis.131 But why death? To characterize his third synthesis, Deleuze draws on Blanchot’s vision of death in that it is not definitive, but is the source of the “uncertain” and “unrealized,” or “that which is not accomplished.”132 In Deleuze’s terms, Blanchot’s death is that which is “impersonal, with no relation to ‘me,’ neither present nor past but always coming, the source of an incessant multiple adventure in a persistent question.”133 By this Deleuzian logic, insofar as the indistinguishability of repetition appears “different,” the preservation of the past in the present dissolves and, under the foundation of habit, the groundlessness of repetition displaces and disguises itself as an incessantly different and ungraspable question. As Deleuze writes of Blanchot’s account, “Death is, rather, the last form of the problematic, the source of problems and questions.”134 It is this obscure notion of death that allows Deleuze to portray the third synthesis as a focus on the future (in distinction from the focus on the past with memory and on the present with habit): it is death that is ultimately in our future, and thus the ultimate model to conceive of the unsure. Here, however, we again encounter the problem of nothingness: if, as Deleuze claims, Blanchot’s account of “death cannot be reduced to negation, neither to the negative of opposition nor to the negative of limitation,”135 then it is Nietzsche’s paradox of eternal return that allows us to characterize an experience of the uncertain and unrealized that is “groundless” but is also not nothing. This metaphysical and even cosmic question about eternal return is a rejection of the existence of nothingness—insofar as nothingness is an implicit denial of the existence of change and difference (or as Deleuze might say, the “consistence” or

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“insistence” of difference). Why this rejection? If two instances of anything were really the same, that would mean nothing is different, nothing has changed, and that nothingness can essentially persist or insist over time. It would, in other words, mean that, as Blanchot puts it, “nothing is what there is”136—that nothing exists when things don’t change or differ. In these terms, sameness and nothingness are synonyms when considering sameness over time (where things would be self-identical over time). But, as Blanchot points out, this cannot be “said in a calm and simple negation”:137 to say that nothing returns or that “nothingness does not exist,” as tautological as that sounds, is not the same as saying that “everything exists,” because, as we saw (II; 4), the “whole of reality” is nothingness—there is thus no vantage point from which to see everything as the same as what it was. Sameness is nothingness if it does not include difference, variety, variation, change, novelty, and so on. Something that does not differ or change makes time into nothing—but time is not nothing, it is difference (especially when it seems to “repeat”). Just as Blanchot’s vision of death is not simply an absence, but is unrealizable, so too is the nothingness, or sameness, of “time” or eternity impossible— thus, always differing. In this sense, as much as the “sovereignty of void” may have its stealthy grip on reality, the affirmation and experience of difference within time, however concealed it is within sameness, expresses a higher level of ambiguity and of human experience. The phrase “eternal return,” of course, is oxymoronic: eternal things don’t change or involve time, and “recurrence” involves time. It is here that Blanchot’s paradoxical logic of negation (is there a present moment?) and affirmation (of the present moment) comes into play. This third time of the present continually transforms the apparent sameness of the past and future into the impossibility of sameness (that is, into difference). In other words, the same presumes what Deleuze calls a “natural or physical circle” that revolves around something coherently true (i.e., a cause that explains the beginning/origin of time), but the eternal return revolves around an “eternally decentred circle” (with no origin): it is a spiral that is also a straight line.138 Now, the notion of an infinitely repeating past may seem to imply that our lives are meaningless because they have already played out, and will happen again (basically, that everything that could happen has already happened and will again). However, this is not the case. This is reflected in one of Nietzsche’s most famous parables on eternal recurrence: What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again” . . . Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or . . . how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?139

The first trick of reading this parable is that the demon cannot be trusted (it is, after all, a demon). The demon claims that we would live this life “innumerable times again,” but this does not necessarily imply that it would be “the same,” no matter how much it seems to be so. The speaker of the parable, rather than the demon, asks the reader if eternal return would not be a “divine” blessing rather than a curse—whether it would

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not be the “heaviest weight” upon our actions but something to “long for . . . fervently.” The answer to the demon’s riddle is thus that there is no moment we could wish to live innumerable times again, but we can wish for the whole of life innumerable times again—just not coherently. That is, insofar as we will or want “all” of life, we will the unpredictability, becoming, and novelty of the present moment that would make it “return.” This is feasible because the present moment, no matter how seemingly similar to the past, always differs. Sameness (which is to say, nothingness) throughout time is not empirically provable: “Nietzsche says that if the universe had an equilibrium position, if becoming had an end or final state, it would already have been attained. But the present moment, as the passing moment, proves that it is not attained.”140 The present moment is precisely the relentless and enduring proof of chaotic change and novelty around which time is centered. Insofar as we will or want “all” of life, then we will the unpredictability, becoming, and novelty of the present moment. Considering the nature of “being”—along with the refusal of negation and nothingness—brings our exploration of eternal return back to our experience of it in the present moment. The present moment “is not,” as we have seen (II; 6), but that does not make the difference that now consists within it “nothing”; this refusal of negation, for Deleuze, is thereby an “affirmation” of such difference. As he puts it, “The eternal return is a force of affirmation, but it affirms everything of the multiple, everything of the different, everything of chance except what subordinates them to the One, to the Same, to necessity.”141 In other words, this paradox of an eternal return “repeats” the past in the future in a way where they are not identical as a refusal of sameness and identity. As he states, “negation as a consequence, as the result of full affirmation, consumes all that is negative, and consumes itself at the mobile centre of eternal return.”142 But how does it do so? The only “action” is a negation or refusal of nothingness (hence Nietzsche as an archetype who aggressively, and often comically, negates or refuses only such negative perspectives): perspectives that believe that things don’t change (that the repetition of the past is “repetitious”). In fact, to will any outcome denies the totality of chance and, despite that it is “positive” in that it acts toward a possible future, it is also negative in its denial of other futures (it is a “yes” that comes from a “no”). Thus, Deleuze will insist that “All that is negative and all that denies . . . all those pale and unwelcome ‘Yeses’ which come from ‘Nos’, everything which cannot pass the test of eternal return—all these must be denied.”143 This is ultimately how the cosmic dimension comes back to the ethical dimension: to deny negativity is a practical concern about how to live. When writing on this, Blanchot notes that “Nihilism thus tells us its final and rather grim truth: it tells of the impossibility of nihilism. This has the air of a joke.”144 But as he points out, it is far from a joke: at stake is our effort to continuously negate and transform our world, “to make of this power to negate the infinite movement of human mastery.”145 Or, as we have seen with Foucault, at stake is the crushing homogenization that we impose upon ourselves by virtue of a power that seeks to enhance and extend life—a power that is negative in its denial of change despite its apparent positivity (its “fostering”) and distancing from sovereign violence. This affirmative experience of time called eternal return, while passive in that it embraces the unpredictability of change in the dimension of the future, is active and negative in its refusal of any perspectives, outlooks, dispositions, or attitudes that do

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not embrace change—especially the generic sides of habit and memory. No longer “creatures of habit,” no longer lost in nostalgia or idealism, this perspective negates nothingness and refuses the “possible,” with the result being an affirmation of what there is: the passing present of our habits in all their immersive force, and the variations of our past in all their rich complexity, both of which catapult us toward an unrecognizable future. It combines them in a way that “rejects” or “expels” the generic, superficial expectations of habit (whether we are fully aware of such expectations or not) and the ideals of memory (whether we place people or events of our past on a pedestal, or whether we blame someone or something for harming us). As Deleuze states, the third synthesis involves . . . refusing the content of a repetition which is more or less able to “draw off ” difference (Habitus); refusing the form of a repetition which includes difference, but in order once again to subordinate it to the Same and the Similar (Mnemosyne) . . . making it the thought and the production of the “absolutely different”; making it so that repetition is, for itself, difference in itself.146

In other words, real repetition does not yet develop real difference, and real difference does not imply real repetition, until the generic expectations resulting from habit and the generic repetition of itself in the present from reminiscence are left behind or “expelled.” It rejects such expectations while retaining the repetition of lived experience in the present, and affirms the “never-lived,” chaotic difference of the past as it moves in the present to the future. The perspectives that are expelled, refused, and reversed in eternal return coincide with prejudices and ideals (the pitfalls of both habit and memory when actively reflected upon)—perspectives we have seen supporting and reinforcing the normal and regular in a world of knowledge and power. On a very practical level, this means reversing values which do not embrace chance and novelty. In our everyday world, insofar as we are oriented towards preserving and improving our lives, this is impossible. But of course, it is precisely in impossibility where obscure ideas and values lie (and as we will see, it is in dreams and fiction that we can find such perspectives reversed and such impossibilities expressed: III; 8 and 11, V; 10). For Deleuze, this involves the refusal of the reflected particularities of habit and the idealization of memory to embrace change in the paradoxical form of return. For Blanchot, this likewise involves going beyond the “sovereign negligence” of removal from the world and somehow embracing its obscure return. Here we can return to Deleuze’s characterization of the third synthesis in terms of serialization: if the present feels or seems the same as the past—based on cosmic assumptions or just the experience of habit—this is only what Deleuze calls the “external envelope” of difference; it is superficial. This is why we can say that the present, as the “mobile center,” differs, while the past and future “repeat” such difference as a series. Or put another way, the infinite complexity of the past and future “repeat” themselves in the present unpredictably. On the one hand, Deleuze’s account of eternal return involves the “refusal” of the generic features of the first two passive syntheses of time, and on the other hand, so too does Blanchot’s account of eternal return, in combining features of incessance and

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ungraspability, go beyond the menace and even the “madness” of the second version of the imaginary that dissolves our relation to images of the world. In other words, the “sovereignty of the void” may haunt the imaginary as its point of dissolution, hollowing out our truth and reality, but with the higher level of ambiguity and the eternal return, “the Same would be sovereign,” and “the past and the future” cannot be “summoned to change places according to the circulation of the Same since, between them, the interruption, the lack of presence, would prevent any communication.”147 In other words, the notion that the future resembles the past is undermined by the “interruption” of the present moment that incessantly dissimulates such semblance. In this account, unlike the case where Proust is menaced by lost time, Nietzsche’s “demand to live and to think” becomes “impossible” and “takes away any foundation . . . and exposes it to the menace [l’expose à la menace] of madness.”148 However, at the same time, it “take[s] a step outside of madness, within a slipping that grazes the outside [dans le glissement qui frôle le dehors].”149 In other words, to experience the outside of possibility— incessance together with obstinate ungraspability as well as the diverging of difference— is to be outside of madness. This is because madness requires that the outside be enclosed by Foucault’s structures of power that, as Blanchot says in his critique of Foucault, “make madness exist, that is, . . . make it possible.”150 However, to experience the impossible—to encounter the outside—is also to be “outside of madness”: Nietzsche’s “surplus of affirmation that is foreign to possibility” and to “positivity” is always “slipping outside itself by a sliding that leads it back toward itself.”151 Here the ungraspable, where “what presents itself but cannot be seized: what slips away from every grasp,”152 involves a different kind of slippage—one that returns to itself differently. Nietzsche’s eternal return is thus a “lighthearted movement that tears itself from the origin . . . when being-unity, the identity of being—has withdrawn without giving way to nothingness . . . An affirmation of difference, but nonetheless never differing.”153 In other words, the “sovereignty of the void”—the menacing “law of the Same” that would withdraw us into nothingness—instead withdraws into an experience of the “divergence of difference” that is also incessant—that does not appear to differ, but is also impossible to both ignore and to grasp. Blanchot’s account of the highest level of ambiguity that we have seen (II; 3), where everything is continuously revealed only through “concealment”—rather than simply dissimulating and drawing us toward the “void”—corresponds to his reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return. As such, it resonates with his experience of impossibility and third feature of obscurity (becoming as otherness never returning to the same). As Blanchot notes of eternal return, “All that would remain of time, then, would be this line to cross, always already crossed, although not crossable . . . Perhaps what we would call the ‘present’ is only the impossibility of situating this line.”154 Here Blanchot’s experience of the impossible is reframed as an unapproachable limit or uncrossable line, while at the same time a limit “always already” surpassed or line already crossed. In this manner, it is impossible to expect or hope for a future if it has already occurred in the past, and if it is indistinguishable from the present. And yet, the present moment is this line that, to read Blanchot via Deleuze, seems to split, refract, bifurcate, and fragment cohesion (of ourselves and our world) continuously and unpredictably. As Deleuze would say, it is time that is experienced “directly” (III; 9, VIII; 2a). We feel the

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incessance of the past in the present, and we cannot ignore the moment that we are in, but we also cannot grasp it when it continually diverges outside of possibility and cannot, in a Blanchotian vein, “be thought in the mode of appropriative comprehension.”155 While this experience may sound utterly abstract, it effectively extends and reverses the famous notion of “defamiliarization”: it is no longer only a matter of the familiar being made strange, or of images drawing us towards the “nothingness” beneath them, but of the strange being made familiar. As Blanchot puts it, “the eternal lapping of return” involves “everything evoked by experiences where estrangement is allied with the strangely familiar.”156 In other words, if the menacing proximity of the outside estranges us from the normalcy and regularity of the world of knowledge and power, the eternal return—to read Blanchot via Foucault—makes those exclusions or exceptions intimate, and even “normal.” Furthermore, their novelty only appears in the form of the unrecognizable that is not different, but similar. That is, there may be a moment of strangeness, of “hollowing out” what we know and who we think we are, but it always returns to the familiar in its appearance (though not in its essence). If it is sublime or otherworldly, it then it also appears as “a banality”—an everyday, unimportant, practically unnoticeable and insignificant occurrence—but one we cannot ignore. We will see that it will ultimately be crucial whether eternal return produces genuine thought (IV; Conclusion), but eternal return will first be explored in the experience of dreams in the following chapter.

9. Conclusion: life on the outside of the livable The passion and passivity of Blanchot’s outside and the passive nature of Deleuze’s syntheses offer us a vision of resistance to power that is not reducible to its provocations and possibilities—that power cannot co-opt (in fact, the only active role is the “refusal” of such provocation itself). Not only that, it offers a vision of life that is not the same “life” that power attempts to foster, enable, manage, and control. Rather, Deleuze draws on Blanchot (as well as others such as Bichat and Artaud) to characterize a “new vitalism” rooted in “mortalism.” Life and death are in fact not dialectical oppositions in Deleuze’s third synthesis, nor are they opposed in Blanchot’s characterization of the uncertain and of the outside. As Blanchot says of this, “Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours.”157 It is a future that is thus both “uncertain” and “anterior,” “impossible” and “necessary.”158 Deleuze, for his part, will call this a death “coextensive with life,”159 where the process of living is simultaneously a process of dying. Living, though, is not simply “entropy,” since the most profound growth would paradoxically be a form of breaking apart (“to live the unlivable”), as in the case of the embryo that “sustains” profound “torsions and drifts,” or “forced movement[s] . . . experienced only at the borders of the livable.”160 If dying cannot be separated from living, there is an experience of impossibility, which can never be assimilated by power, and which always—by its nature—resists it. In Deleuze’s words, “we must attain a life that is the force [puissance] of the outside,” where “this outside is not [just] a terrifying void.”161 Dying is thus not an abstract point

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or “void” of experience, but is, like living, a movement. In these terms, the discovery of the obscure and outside is an exterror world, but it is also the unthinkable object of thought: in confronting what is both “further away” and “closer to” the exteriority and interiority of life and the world (that is, the exterior world of assemblages that facilitate life, and the affective and perceptual interiorization of self-awareness and of “knowledge” of who we are in binary systems that separate the sick from the healthy, the sane from the insane, etc.), as Deleuze claims in his work on Foucault, we can think of the outside of power not as a void but as an impossible, unavoidable relation. That is, the outside is that with which we can have no relation but nevertheless do—it is a relation that is both unsustainable and inevitable. We will see that this Blanchotian “non”-relation can be expressed not only in dreams but ultimately in fiction, as it is the visible that cannot be captured by the articulable, and the experience of impossibility that is not simply “the negation of power,” but the expression of obscure values that resist it.

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III

Dreams: The Eclipse of the Day and its Incessant Return

Introduction To begin to approach human experience outside of knowledge and power, it is useful to consider a universal, nightly experience which has been overshadowed by its subservience to what Blanchot calls “day’s truth” and “day’s laws”: dreams. But as a reversal of power, dreaming precludes itself from being a metaphor for the transience of life (as with Prospero’s claim that “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on”),1 or as a Cartesian realm of doubt which leads to the certainty of the existence of the dreamer. Rather, the dream, in Blanchot’s terms, is “always other. Only in the day does it seem comprehensible, ascertainable.”2 Before we can begin this excursion into the outside, however, we must contend with Freud’s influential understanding of dreams and the unconscious, which, in terms of power, appropriates or “domesticates” them in order to normalize our daily behavior. From this Freudo-Foucauldian perspective, we take for granted what the unconscious is: for Deleuze and Blanchot it is an “unpower,” or in Deleuze’s terms, “the element that thought does not and cannot think of ” that “lies at [the] very heart” of thinking.3 What this means is that we do not necessarily know why we dream—but not because such knowledge is “repressed.” To grasp the genuine intractability of dreams and the absurdity of judging them as a repressed wish in a world of power, consider this scenario: in some potential science-fiction future, the government—or a corporation—is not only spying on the actions of its citizens in Foucault’s “panopticon” (I; 6) or gathering information about its citizens as a form of “control” (I; 9), but is also recording and conducting both surveillance and dataveillance on our dreams. The more you dream of a thing, the more you are marketed a product; the more abnormal your dream, the sooner you are classified as deviant. Your dreams can go viral on the internet. Your dreams would become a source of shame or of expression: perhaps you could discipline yourself to lucid dream, but that would only impart more culpability to the dreamer (or could create conditions for our dream content to be regulated or controlled). Dreams become yet another panoptic enclosure, and your unconscious experience would be subjected to moral correction and economic appropriation. The reason why this is disturbing is precisely because dreams are a passive power: we don’t choose what we dream about, and even in lucidity, as we will see in this chapter, we have no power over the movement of dreams. And yet, the psychological assumption is that you dream about what 79

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you really want, fear, or think—even if in displaced and disguised form. In psychoanalysis, as in the world of power, we are already compelled to “speak” about our dreams, much like sexuality is a “truth” that we are compelled to reveal (I; 10). So why shouldn’t dreams be tied to individual desires—and why shouldn’t we judge them, if we could? In Blanchotian terms, dreams draw us beyond the totality of our memory and imagination in a relentless movement of dissemblance and oblivion, a movement of which we are, paradoxically, fully aware. We are immersed within a movement of forgetting that incessantly “gets forgotten,” and drawn toward what Blanchot calls an immobile point that can never be reached. In these terms, we should no sooner judge dreams as abnormal, or search for disguised wishes in them, than we ought to search for reality or truth in the impossible. But dreaming of the impossible does not mean to wish or fantasize (as the idiomatic use of “dreaming big” would have it); rather, it means experiencing what is not actually possible: a death where you do not die, for example. To dream that you’re floating or flying is only to dream of the impossibility of walking or of gravity. To dream of the fantastic is to dream of what is impossible in everyday life. Even, as Blanchot points out, the awareness of being in a dream only “plunges” us “back into the dream”4—the impossibility of not dreaming. And although it is impossible to die in dreams, it is also impossible to live: in dreams we cannot build relationships, careers, or nurture our health, because everything in that space of oblivion always starts over, like a sandcastle relentlessly washed away to sea. Nothing lasts. In this sense, if dreams do not mean anything “ascertainable” in the realm of the day, then what do they do? How do they work?

1. Displacement and disguise: Freud, Deleuze, and Blanchot Freud’s influence on how we understand dreams cannot be underestimated. If you ever really try to “interpret” a dream, you have already probably fallen into the vicious cycle of trying to make a dream mean something about who you are or what you want. But if, like death (II; 1–2), dreams occur in a domain over which we can have no power, they too seize us as a sovereign force that we cannot ignore but cannot explain. How, then, do we ascertain the content of dreams, their imagery and movement? Here, we begin by juxtaposing Deleuze’s portrayal of displacements and disguises of the unconscious with Freud’s portrayal from The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s approach to dreams is that “they are not meaningless, they are not absurd”; rather, “they are constructed by a highly complicated activity of the mind” that displaces and disguises the “fulfillment of wishes.”5 For Freud, we forget our dreams precisely because we have an internal, preconscious “censor” that does not allow our unconscious to tell us directly what our wishes are, because they may be disturbing, unpleasant, or disruptive. While some dreams may be “undisguised,” (e.g., we may be thirsty, and dream about having a glass of water), or involve “convenience” (e.g., dreaming of waking up and doing what we usually do), many are also “uncensored” by the unconscious that nevertheless “forcibly brings about a distortion in the expression of the wish.”6 It is thus the preconscious censor that both disguises by representing an entirely different latent thought through a memory-image, and displaces by allowing

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something innocuous and trivial to escape. Disguise, then, for Freud, is the most basic manner of “distorting” our latent fears and wishes into “manifest” dream images; displacement, conversely, can shift an important thought to an unimportant dream image, or vice versa. The Freudian unconscious is thus a theatre of hidden wishes and fears that our preconscious mind displaces and disguises in our dreams; hence the need to reveal what the unconscious wants to tell us. Deleuze famously rejected the principles of Freud’s unconscious mind; his approach to displacement and disguise is instead tied to his third synthesis of time in his reading of Blanchot. Deleuze’s unconscious involves the “problems and questions” beneath the ground of memory (II; 7): the manner in which difference shocks us out of our habits, introducing disparities, fragments, and layers or levels to what was, before, repeated and continuous. Despite that Deleuze does not offer an extended treatment of dreams per se, in contrast to Freud, Deleuze’s unconscious problems and questions lack hidden meaning—they do not conceal meaning but endlessly desire and search for it. This would, then, be the function of the unconscious in dream. Such an unconscious process makes any meaning that dreams do have, from the perspective of “day’s truth (Blanchot),” contrary to Freud, meaningless or “inessential.” But that does not mean it does not problematize or question what is meaningful or essential. Here Deleuze’s reference to Blanchot’s conception of death as “the last form of the problematic, the source of problems and questions” (II; 8),7 involving the unreality of the uncertain rather than something definitive and final, becomes acute. The “ground” of Deleuze’s problematizing and searching force of memory gives way to the groundlessness or oblivion of a repetition that incessantly shifts the question and ungraspably poses the problem. While the unconscious for Deleuze and Blanchot may lack hidden meaning, its questions and problems, the stuff of difference, “cannot be reduced to the non-being of the negative.”8 Deleuze’s approach to displacement and disguise, contrary to Freud’s, is therefore that “the structure of the unconscious is not conflictual, oppositional or contradictory, but questioning and problematising.”9 If the ultimate fear is death, and the ultimate wish is to escape it, this does not make the ultimate desire to return to “indifferent inanimate matter,” as Freud postulates, since, in Deleuze’s terms, “death cannot be reduced to negation, neither to the negative of opposition nor to the negative of limitation.”10 Instead, “The problems concern the eternal disguise; questions, the eternal displacement.”11 If problems relate to eternal disguise (“eternal” in its incessant movement), and questions relate to eternal displacement, they express the groundlessness of time in the third synthesis of eternal return. This model involves Blanchot’s impossible death (II; 1), where problems and questions, for Deleuze, “consist” or “insist” in reality. Unconscious problems and questions are, in short, never solved or answered. But their effect on reality and truth, in experiences that reverse the effects of power, is what matters for now.

2. Percept and disguise, affect and displacement Dreams reverse the realities and truths produced by power through displacing affection and disguising perception. Here we consider D&G’s definition of affects and percepts

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around the depersonalizing effect of perceiving what is imperceptible and of feeling what is “insensible.” Firstly, normal perception involves a perceiving subject and reality perceived, while affections usually belong to subjects and are about something or someone (e.g., hope to, hatred for . . .). Here, perceptions initially concern the interiority of realities discerned through habit and affections concern truths discovered through memory (I; 13, II; 6–7). Outside of reality and truth, however, “[p]ercepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them.”12 Percepts and affects thus go beyond perceptions and affections by “exceed[ing] any lived,”13 habitual reality—unleashing them from the personal state of those who experience or undergo them. D&G thus characterize both the landscapes we perceive and our affective states as “nonhuman.” While D&G explain affects and percepts in the context of art (IV; 1–5b), affects also apply to a Deleuzo-Blanchotian vision of dreams, where, as we will see, the dreamer is “fissured” from the sleeper in Blanchot’s absolute milieu of the imaginary. In these terms, we are drawn by the reversals of truth and reality into a Blanchotian “relation without relation” with objects of affection and perception, perception therefore disguising what cannot be revealed and affection displacing what cannot be located. In initial reversals of power, perceptions and affections are initially hollowed out of their interiority (where Blanchot’s outside “intrudes”: II; 4)—divested of their reality and truth—to become radical sources of problems (percepts) and questions (affects). In these terms, perceptions and affections are no longer yours or mine: in becoming depersonalized—that is, in no longer belonging to or being expressive of the subject who feels—affections especially are hollowed out of their imaginative content. The Spinozist insight here is that emotions attached to images lead to “inadequate ideas.” For example, hatred for someone or hope about something is an emotion attached to an imaginary or perceptual object (and thus to “causes,” or as we could say, actions in a world of power). Such emotions (affectio), in D&G’s terms, are affections still attached to subjects. While we will explore the Spinozist affect with regard to existence and imagination further (III; 2 and 3a, IV; 4a), for now we can consider that affections hollowed out of their “true” relation to subjects and objects, and perceptions hollowed out of their real situations, lead us to an experience that is more than just an “exception” to our truth and reality. It is not simply that truth and reality are revealed to be a product of power in the external world; with the effects of power reversed, we reach the anonymity, impossibility, and impersonality of Blanchot’s outside, where percepts lack origin and destination, and where affects are felt “obstinately” but cannot be grasped in a way that explains (or “explicates”) what they are feelings “about.” Beyond this initial reversal, then, we encounter a more radical reversal where affects and percepts are closer than our “internal world” of perceptions linked to reality and of affections linked to truth. Like Blanchot’s vision of mortality (II; 2), as Deleuze considers it, affects and percepts become “strangely impersonal, with no relation to ‘me’”14: the very source of problems and questions about reality and truth (on a level closer than our interior world and further than our exterior world), not, as we saw, a terrifying void that simply hollows out our reality and truth (II). In experiences such as dreaming that reverse the effects of power, disguise is, fundamentally, a feature of perception, while displacement is a feature of affection. In

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perception, one image, one “visibility,” one sound that is perceived as one thing is really another. Such perception, as we have seen, primarily concerns the imaginary and real in the present (I; 13, II; 6), where we initially attempt to discern what is happening; reality is a matter of perception before it becomes imaginary. Displacement is, in comparison, a feature of affection: insofar as affects of being provoked or incited initially involve relations between situations and actions, we seek to reveal truths or discover possibilities, shifting our place (I; 3). Such affection, as we have also seen, primarily seeks to uncover what has happened, or explain the true and the false (I; 13, II; 7): truth is felt (or “believed”) before rendered false. But as a differential state that moves us, affects are bound to their reality but always shifting within it (IV; 4a) and may not be able to locate their “truth.” It is in these senses that perceptions are problematized and affections put into question when they become the obscure affects and percepts not only of dream but, as we will see, of art (IV; 4a–b), literature, (V; 6–8, VI), and cinema (VIII, IX). In such cases, neither are problems solved in reality nor is the questioning of truth answered. Rather, the questions of affection do not have answers, and the problems of perception do not have solutions. Here, as we have seen (II; 8), Deleuze draws on Blanchot to insist that the “passion of repetition” also discovers its own impossibility, which is, in this case, the insensible of affection and the imperceptible of perception. The distinction can be broken down as follows: Perception → Disguise → Problem (Percept) Affection → Displacement → Question (Affect) What, then, is displaced and disguised by the percepts and affects of dreams, if it is not our repressed wishes and fears? Taking a Deleuzo-Blanchotian approach to death, dreams concern not the experience of repression but instead the experience of the impossible, where what we perceive and feel is an effect of the dream’s absence of origin and the endless renewal or diverging of difference by virtue of the familiarity of habits and memories. In Blanchotian terms, the percept involves the incessance of a passage that is never fixed “in a present,” while the affect involves the feverish grip or seizure of the ungraspable. But to arrive beyond the interior world of our memory and imagination in this incessant, ungraspable movement, we must first take a detour from Blanchot and consider a non-Freudian approach to memory itself—an approach that corresponds to Deleuze’s second synthesis of time in his reading of Bergson.

3.a. From lived experience (contraction) to dream experience (expansion): Deleuze and Bergson When we shift from the daily activity of our habits to the nocturnal inactivity of dreaming, we shift from an experience of the imagination—the visceral immersion in our practices—to an experience of memory and time that transforms it. As we have seen (II; 6), the foundation of repetition in habit is based within the void of the present moment, of which appearance and disappearance is indiscernible.15 Indeed, insofar as

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this indiscernibility lies beneath the imagination’s retention of appearances before they disappear (“like a sensitive plate, it retains one case when the other appears”),16 the living presence and “contractions” of habit are implicated by that “constantly aborted moment of birth.”17 This indistinguishability is the guarantor of difference, becoming, or change within such repetition; however, insofar as repetitions are retained—whether projected toward a future or expanded in memory—what appears “has not yet disappeared,”18 creating a sense of the “passing present” and movement. This is the paradox of habit: there would not be an experience of repetition if two instants were genuinely indistinguishable. The imagination retains the appearance of one impression and associates it with the new impression, “contracting” or fusing them with a weight and creating a subjective sense of movement through time. Without such retention and association, all encounters would be chaotic, with no movement or continuity. It is precisely through the movement of “contraction” and “expansion” relative to various levels of repetition (as in the levels of memory) that there is a sense of orientation and distinction: the loss of contraction altogether—that is, the most expanded movement— is the movement of dream. The “visceral” organ of contraction that is Deleuze’s imagination is crucial to consider in our transition to the expansive, “lifeless profundity”19 of dream. If habits are formed by this organ of contraction (II; 6), we do not “have” habits, but are habits; here, “organic syntheses . . . are like the sensibility of the senses [that] refer back to a primary sensibility that we are. We are made of contracted water, earth, light and air— not merely prior to the recognition or representation of these, but prior to their being sensed.”20 Thus the experience of sensation involves contracting qualities and their differences: “sensation . . . is the operation of contracting trillions of vibrations onto a receptive surface. Quality emerges from this, quality that is nothing other than contracted quantity.”21 Furthermore, “perception itself is extensity, sensation is extensive insofar as what it contracts is precisely the extended, the expanded (detendu).”22 Sensation, in other words, extends or explicates qualitative difference as variety. Sensation, then, whether in dream or reality, develops what it fuses or binds together, and this development constitutes its movement, along with the differences and affective potentials that lie within and between the distances such movement covers. We sense difference and change by “endow[ing] qualitative impressions with a certain weight,”23 formed through the contraction of elements or cases of repetition. For example, I can perceive a sunset by virtue of contracting the quality of all the other sunsets that I have ever seen, and I can endow the quality of a given sunset with a quantitative weight—more or less interesting, beautiful, unique, and so on. This qualitative impression is implicated affectively by the difference and variety of all potential or “virtual” sunsets. These impressions resonate, or “vibrate,” so to speak, with the “receptive surfaces” of our viscera: “Sensation is the contracted vibration that has become quality, variety” because, as Deleuze insists, “what comes before has not yet disappeared when what follows appears.”24 The sense of movement we experience is, here, in the sun setting—retaining this moment with the last, and with previous sunsets. In fact, sensation involves “quality that is nothing other than contracted quantity”:25 in other words, there is no quality without difference, no perception

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without affection, only the indiscernibility of disappearance in appearance. This indiscernibility brings us back to experiences outside of power: what happens to sensation—or more specifically, to affects and percepts—when all of this sensory variety loses its reality? D&G indicate that percepts and affects can combine as “blocs of sensation”;26 as experiences that reverse the effects of power, their interdependence is crucial to their full force of questioning and problematizing. While D&G explore this relationship in art, we can consider it in dreams by first re-examining affect and percept via Deleuze’s syntheses of time. Firstly, the percept draws “landscapes,” figures, qualities, and milieus into the imperceptible, absent totality of Blanchot’s “unreality” (II; 2): devoid of possibility, percepts are perceived as an unresolvable problem, as a body or environment without origin or purpose, perpetual disguises that draw vision further into the visible—hence sensation conceived as contraction or expansion. Affects, by contrast, involve the difference or change in bodily states and in milieus—the passage and movement within and between them (the qualitative difference within contraction and expansion). To return to Spinoza, while affects involve a passage or change in potentiality—that is, a capacity to be affected as power (potentia et potestas)27—affects themselves have no perceptual or imaginative determination. That is, a genuine affect (affectus), while still related to the imaginary, is independent of it as a differential state. Shifting from a Spinozist approach, then, in dream, memory, and obscure experience, affects are more specifically a questioning force that inevitably entails the “coexistent totality” of its inexplicably differential states: as we saw, the question of love immediately leads to betrayal (II; 7). Here, no longer a Spinozist potentiality tied to existence per se, affect involves differential, inexplicable, and coexistent states of love and betrayal, in its varieties (affects, as we will see, can also involve events and milieus: VII; 8a). If percepts involve the contraction (and sensation) inherent to Deleuze’s first synthesis of time (II; 6), here we encounter the peculiar force of affect in Deleuze’s second synthesis of time. As the questioning force of memory, the affect is what drives the search within or between the various layers or levels of the past (or, in fiction, between perspectives and worlds: IV; 2b). The affect is the force of such difference: the difference between our past loves, for instance, driven by a question of love without an answer. Likewise, Blanchotian incessance parallels the unreality of the percept (as it is aligned with paradoxes of the imaginary in Deleuze’s first synthesis), and affect parallels the grip or seizure by the ungraspable (as in paradoxes of Deleuze’s second synthesis). It is this grip that draws us into an affective movement toward the insensible (or ungraspable). When affects and percepts work in tandem, then, perception is drawn not to the next disguise but to the unlocatable place of the affect, and the affect is likewise drawn to the unrevealable in the percept; we only feel the difference between levels of the past by virtue of the percept, “figure,” “landscape,” or milieu. Here we finally ask: how are percepts and affects, these blocs of sensations, tied to our body or to the world, if at all? Obviously, our memories affect our dreams. But how we remember and perceive in the world differs from the dream, which returns us to “contraction” and “expansion.” From a Deleuzo-Bergsonian viewpoint, dreaming involves not the “innermost circuit” of contraction in habit, but expansion: in dreams, present sensations are disconnected from any “psycho-organic” memory in particular, but nevertheless reach the “outermost

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circuits” of the mind so as to connect to one. As Deleuze explains it, we normally “perceive the thing, minus that which does not interest us as a function of our needs.”28 Habitual perception is “subtractive,” ignoring aspects of images or qualities that are not relevant. In Bergson’s own terms, “every minute you have to choose and every minute exclude.”29 But those details are not lost on our perception entirely. As Bergson continues, when dreaming “our senses continue to be active,” but we no longer distinguish the significant or insignificant. In fact, we no longer recognize anything. Instead, we distort, deform, and expand sensations such that they become “vague,” “indistinct,” or “indecisive.” Thus, we do not “contract” what we sense but “expand” it. Added to this, it is the affect of memory that expands and distorts such sensations based not only on what might have been important, but also based on the very things we have ignored throughout the day (since the details have not been lost). Bergson’s examples about dreaming allow us to consider the visceral way that our memory distorts the wide variety of bodily sensations through the imaginary. To use Bergson’s own example: he dreamt he was giving a lecture but that a heckler in the audience was shouting at him; upon awakening, the heckler’s shout was in fact a dog barking outside the window. The sensation of hearing the dog barking was recognized “inattentively” and distorted to become a heckler shouting (a previously ignored memory). In Bergson’s other well-known example, he argues that the reason we often dream that we are flying or floating is that the sensation that our feet are not touching the ground gets inattentively recognized as a feeling of levitation. Shifting from these strict Bergsonian examples, however, we can in fact consider that fantasy (e.g. that of flying) also technically belongs to the domain of images called memory: memories themselves are perhaps enmeshed within our “memories” of stories. That is, the dream-memory is also the literary and cinematic imaginary, where any story that could be told can be visualized, felt, and experienced in dreams. This is why we can dream about not just that which we remember from our experience, but that which we encounter in fiction. In any case, Bergson’s approach is an elaboration of the Aristotelian notion that dreams are an effect of the body’s own processes, akin to digestion: “From the perspective of a certain reading of Aristotle, then, sleep emerges as a corporeal solution to the problem of how ‘sense-perception’ might perpetuate itself . . . without ever relinquishing its [influence].”30 Bergson likewise claims that “dreams are connected with affections of the digestive, respiratory, and circulatory apparatus” and “deepseated sensations emanating from all points of the organism and, more particularly, from the viscera”31—hence the feeling of “bad dreams” after a literal bout of night-time indigestion. But Bergson’s approach is perhaps unique in that he insists that we are still perceiving while we are asleep, when the mind “expands” in its distortion of sensation, in distinction from contraction which requires contemplation through sensation. We may thus, from this perspective, experience a genuine affect through the transformation of memory, but our perception is still tied to sensation in the world, oscillating between what is imaginary and what is real. We therefore still must leave this perspective behind to consider what dreams do in their radical reversals and intertwinement of affects and percepts: just as Deleuze shifts from Bergson and the second synthesis of time to Blanchot in the third synthesis (II; 8), here we also shift from expansions of memory to the experience of the impossible.

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3.b. Dreams are not illusions, but experiences: from Bergson to Blanchot The importance of Bergson’s approach to dreaming lies in the notion that we are still perceiving while asleep, but he presumes that such distortions of perception are illusions which affect the dreamer. For instance, obviously the person shouting in the aforementioned dream is not really the dog barking, and we are not really floating or flying in dreams. In Bergson’s terms, “This sensation of pressure, dissociated from its cause . . . and, joined to the illusion of floating in space, is sufficient to produce the dream.”32 In another context, he ties such illusions even more to the dreamer when he claims that . . . the dreamer . . . makes use of what he perceives to give substance to the particular recollection he favours: thus, according to the mood of the dreamer and the idea that fills his imagination at the time, a gust of wind blowing down the chimney becomes the howl of a wild beast or a tuneful melody. Such is the ordinary mechanism of illusion in dreams.33

Bergson’s presumption here is not far removed from the famous Cartesian impasse wherein being deceived in the dream can nevertheless restore the identity and certainty of the dreamer’s ability to doubt such deception. Deleuze in fact characterizes Bergson’s schema of dreaming in his second cinema volume as subordinating or “attributing the dream to a dreamer,”34 relegating the status of the dream to its delusory and thus inferior relation to the world (subject to the capricious “moods” or affects of the dreamer). Here we turn to Blanchot, who radicalizes this notion of “attention” in dreams, which he calls vigilance. Blanchot’s own comments on Bergson argue that we are not in fact “disinterested” in dreams. When discussing sleep and dreams, Blanchot notes that “Bergson saw behind sleep the totality of conscious life minus the effort of concentration. On the contrary, sleep is intimacy . . . concentrated in the narrowness of this place where the world recollects itself, which I affirm and which affirms me. Here the place is present in me and I absent in it through an essentially ecstatic union.”35 By affirming the world as we sleep, we “concentrate” on the world’s return in its imaginary form (whether conceived as “realistic” memories or utterly fantastic imaginings), but by virtue of the world’s absence. In Blanchot’s terms, we are fixed in place, but nevertheless displaced and fixated on absence insofar as we are not acting as we do in the world: “Sleep signifies that at a certain moment, in order to act it is necessary to cease acting . . . Vigilant existence does not dissipate in the sleeping body near which things remain; it withdraws from the remove which is its temptation.”36 In other words, we remain vigilant, and in Bergson’s terms, can still process sensation—we are simply no longer “tempted” to act in response to such sensation, at a “remove” from our possibilities. As we will see, the condition for sleep, in Blanchot’s terms, is to become insouciant, or negligent, toward the world. From this perspective, we are engaged in an entirely other experience and movement—one that, as we will see, is not an “illusion,” if by illusion we mean something that deceives the self, since there is no “self ” in the dream to be deceived. We are not disinterested, but passionately engaged. But engaged by what?

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Who or—more precisely—what are we when we dream, if we cannot attribute dreams to the “dreamer”? Blanchot perhaps teaches us that Bergson’s emphasis on the role of memory (and the totality of what can be imagined) in dreams neglects the crucial role of forgetting, which, in Deleuzo-Blanchotian terms, involves the groundlessness of time. Here, the affect, interacting with the percept, is drawn toward the insensible and imperceptible future, or Deleuze’s third synthesis. In fact, Deleuze’s critique of Bergsonian illusion can first be distinguished from mechanism by virtue of Blanchot’s absolute milieu of the imaginary. On the one hand, the machine is pure contraction, without any difference. The machine repeats, and does not “forget”; hence machines that can “automate tasks” replacing human labor. A creature of Bergsonian sensory-motor habit is perhaps less like an animal and more like an automaton. On the other hand, we have the peculiar status of the “dreamer”—we still perceive “habitually” and feel mnemonically in dreams (just picture the somnambulist who, like a zombie, gets out of bed and sets the table for dinner when there is no meal to serve), but we are wholly disconnected from the movement of our habits. The dream, then, unlike the machine, displaces and disguises our memories and habits by virtue of Blanchot’s absolute milieu of the imaginary and the absent point (and pure presence) of oblivion. In Blanchotian terms, dream lacks any real milieu or medium. It is the materiality or viscerality of the imagination without any determined milieu, the distorted memory of Bergson’s “inattentive recognition.” However, unlike Bergson’s vision, for Blanchot, we are drawn beyond such a milieu in an incessant movement. In Deleuzo-Blanchotian terms, the dream is not preserved as in habit; it is forgotten: the oblivion of its reality is the non-presence of its continuous presence. This is perhaps why all oneiric relations—between people, between situations—seem “random.” They are likewise subject to the contingency of what Deleuze calls the “sky,” the absence of ground that lies underneath memory (II; 7), and the impossibility of remembering, the “memorandum.” Here, however, it is crucial to reconsider Deleuze’s approach to Bergson via Blanchot (since Bergson’s vitalism and Blanchot’s mortalism result in distinct approaches to the dream). In the radical reversal of dream, then, we are continually drawn beyond memory (and fantasy) to an absent point that is impossible to reach. If there are illusions in dreams, the only illusions are the truths and realities, or worlds, that are immediately unraveled: the dream incessantly draws us to the absent point beyond imagination and memory, and beyond all illusion. Here we can consider that Deleuze’s portrayal of Blanchot’s outside as the beyond of the exterior world, which is also closer than our interior world, is precisely the Blanchotian point of oblivion beyond the Bergsonian “expansion” of memory that propels us into an incessant movement in dreams. In Deleuze’s terms, the Bergsonian past not only expands, but does so absolutely, “like an infinitely dilated or relaxed (détendu) past,” one that is “so relaxed that the preceding moment has disappeared when the following appears.”37 Here we are far removed from the paradox of indistinguishability at the heart of repetition, which is closer than the interiority of contraction, and would be its “aborted moment of birth” in a pure present that “is not”; instead, we are at the other end of the spectrum, within the paradox of coexistence at the heart of difference, beyond the exteriority of expansion, drawn in a movement toward that which, in Blanchot’s terms, has no reality. This lifeless,

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“impossible” movement of forgetting radically reverses the effects of power, placing affects and percepts—untruth and unreality—into impossible relations. In this sense, D&G’s affects and percepts are rooted in the imperceptible of perception and the insensible of affection that together render both the realities and varieties of habit indiscernible from the imaginary and the differences and variations of memory or “fantasy” inexplicable (or untrue). Here we shift again from Deleuze’s first and second syntheses to the third Blanchotian synthesis of forgetting and death: as we have seen (II; 6), the groundlessness of habit (the “sans-fond” beneath the foundation) always concerned the paradox of repetition: the “constantly aborted moment of birth”38 that disappears in appearing. But now we are dealing with the groundlessness of difference (beneath the fondement or ground), where the “outermost circuit” is also the most expanded movement of repetition. In this sense, it is not the totality of the imaginary that is actually experienced, but that which is beyond the most expanded form of expansion, beyond any memories or fantasies that the oneiric imagination may conjure, beyond any such “expanded” world: the absence of totality. But what is this movement, and how does its incessance or unrealizable “accomplishment” make it especially dream-like?

4. The dream as the “pure approach” of the day (to sleep, perchance to dream . . .) Our experience of movement normally involves beginnings and endings. In such a movement, we perceive the future “generically,” by virtue of the affective difference drawn off from the repetition that creates the movement (as we have seen with habit: II; 6): this is the source of all expectation and even prejudice. We may, in a Nietzschean sense, attribute causes to what we perceive and feel by virtue of such movement. But at a more fundamental level, movement can simply be considered that which, dialectically, begins and ends by virtue of its cessation, or in Blanchot’s terms, its “accomplishment.” Hence we can speak of natural rhythms and cycles, around which all of our daily habits, routines, and expectations revolve. It is here that Blanchot’s distinction between the day and night is seemingly obvious but subtly complex: Day is linked to night because it would not be day if it did not begin and come to an end. That is the rule it goes by: it is beginning and end. Day arises, day is done . . . When we oppose night and day and the movements accomplished in each, it is still to the night of day that we allude, to the night that is day’s night, the night of which we say that it is the true night, for it has day’s truth just as it has day’s laws, those which, precisely, assign it the duty of opposing itself to the day.39

Here it is night that gives us a sense of the ending of one day in the beginning of another; however, this is precisely our manner of making night “serve” the day. Here we come full circle in a pivot from Freud insisting that dreams “mean” something psychologically and Bergson insisting that dreams are “illusions”: in both cases, the reality and truth of the day subjugates and encloses the night, in the way that our world

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of knowledge and power encloses Blanchot’s outside and makes death itself into something which is “carefully evaded.” But we also project a sort of sovereignty over the night, as though we possess our dreams; in Blanchot’s terms, “sleep will become domesticated and serve as the instrument of our power to act.”40 Blanchot goes so far as to say that “[t]he sovereignty of the ‘I’ dominates this absence . . . Our capacity to withdraw from everyday bustle, from daily concerns, from everything, from ourselves and even from the void is the sign of our mastery.”41 The night, in short, is the night that belongs to us and to the day—it is “ours” just as our dreams are. But to speak of a dream as if it were “my dream” is perhaps, in Blanchot’s terms, the only “illusion” about dreaming. Here is where the night as a space of nothingness—the deceptively simple “opposite” of day’s law and truth and the absent, immobile point that we incessantly approach in dreams—is transformed into an experience of the obscure. Blanchot claims that as we lay to rest in the night— a tranquil, peaceful place, but also a space of absence, silence, and darkness (much like Blanchot’s vision of death that is “not definitive,” or is “indecisive and uncertain”)—we are entering into a space which does not, properly speaking, exist (since “nothingness,” for Blanchot, cannot be). That is, negation or the negative cannot be its own certain or definitive reality that is the inverse of this one (which would, incidentally, presume it can be captured by seeing and saying as an object of knowledge). “Nothingness” is, rather, a sieve or a filter through which the obscure appears, or through which we have an experience which resembles reality, but is not real. The question can be put more succinctly: do dreams exist? In Deleuzian terms, like Blanchot’s outside, the dream does not exist but “consists” or “insists”—it is not “nothing,” but exists only via difference and relation. In this sense, when we go to sleep in the first night, we essentially wake back up in the “other night”—the “nothingness” that paradoxically mediates us to dreams within sleep engenders obscure experience. Like our non-relation with death (II; 2), here we have an animated, non-relation to the night. This association of dreaming with death sidesteps the tradition of simply associating night, or sleep, with death—though this dream–death association is prefigured in, for example, Hamlet’s famous line, “To die, to sleep— / To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.”42 Shakespeare’s words demonstrate here that just as we paradoxically have a new experience in the silence and nothingness of the night in the form of a dream, Hamlet does not know what awaits him after death: it may not, in fact, be “nothing,” but, with Blanchotian verve, an experience of some kind (such as Hell, which gives Hamlet “pause” as he questions whether to kill himself). In Blanchot’s own commentary on this passage, the dream after Hamlet’s death is the “transparent eternity of the unreal,”43 the “subsistence” in the “dissolution” of the image of the corpse (II; 3). But the point here is that despite that we withdraw from the world in the night and “everything disappears,” something still happens in that disappearance, and that something is the dream. The dream, in short, is that which ceaselessly approaches us and cannot be evaded: like death, we are drawn into a movement with it. Dreams are the very return of the day but without reality or truth: the force of dreams, indeed, is their very inseparability from the day. Blanchot, in this sense,

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enables us to explore dreams neither as a manifestation of repressed wishes or fears, nor as a “distortion” of sensation that we inattentively recognize: rather, they are an “interminable” day. As he states: If day survives itself in the night, if it exceeds its term, if it becomes that which cannot be interrupted, then already it is no longer the day. It is the uninterrupted and the incessant . . . [T]his interminable “day” is the approach of time’s absence, the threat of the outside where the world lacks. The dream is the reawakening of the interminable.44

Here it is crucial to point out that time’s absence is not the absence of time; it is instead the absence that belongs to time, the absence that is time, since time has no presence— it does not, strictly speaking, “exist” (VIII; 1b). As Blanchot puts it, “The time of time’s absence has no present, no presence. This ‘no present’ does not, however, refer back to a past”; unlike memory that “says of the event: it once was and now it will never be again,” time’s absence says “it never happened, never for a first time, and yet it starts over, again, again, infinitely. It is without end, without beginning.”45 Time’s absence is its lack of presence—but this inexistence or absence nevertheless consists and insists.46 The link between time’s absence and an incessant experience without beginning or ending is where something that “never happened” precludes any notion that nothing is happening (it is not what some Blanchot critics call “the absence of time,” as we saw— II; 4). That is, we may be drawn toward the absence of night, but this ungraspable point can never be reached—not because it looms over us like a horrifying shadow, but because it does not exist—and we are instead focused on the dream’s incessant, unresolvable movements. In this sense, it is something obscure that is happening, and like Blanchot’s quintessential example of death, it is our mortal experience that is “happening”: “this empty, dead time is a real time in which death is present—in which death happens but doesn’t stop happening, as if, by happening, it rendered sterile the time in which it could happen.”47 Thus Blanchot can say that “the fascination of time’s absence . . . is not a purely negative mode. It is the time when nothing begins, when initiative is not possible.”48 That is, nothing can be “accomplished” in time because whatever happens is subject to an unending endurance which never started and will never finish. But this is not a “negative mode”: we do not wallow in an empty void. Here we turn to Deleuze, who will offer perspective on such an experience in his own appropriation of Blanchot’s notion of the incessance of such a movement involving his notion of the “event.”

5. Blanchot’s incessant movement and Deleuze’s event If we are having an experience that precludes any finitude, any sense of beginning or ending, whatever that experience entails will both estrange us from the present moment and draw us forward (but without allowing us to arrive at a resolution). In this context, Deleuze’s reading of Blanchot becomes even more acute. As we have seen, Blanchot’s portrayal of “immobile movement” applies particularly to dreaming: unlike

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Bergsonian expansion, as Blanchot says of Bergson, “becoming is not the fluidity of an infinite (Bergsonian) durée, nor the mobility of an interminable movement” but “that obscure experience wherein becoming is disclosed in relation with the discontinuous.”49 That is, we cannot enjoy the coherence of a continuous, uninterrupted movement that begins and ends, but only the paradoxical “inertia” of the incessant as a permanent interruption—a relentless, unresolvable movement toward the immobile that has no duration. Thus dreaming involves what Blanchot calls the “present devoid of duration,”50 an unlimited and coexistent expansion of a memory that can be neither remembered nor forgotten, since it is not “repressed” but involves the “night in its unapproachable profundity.”51 But what does it mean to experience things “incessantly”? So what if they have no beginning or end? How does this draw the perceiver away from perceptions and the affections away from the person who feels them? In Deleuze’s hands, the interminability of an “immobile movement” testifies to the depersonalizing effect of death for Blanchot (the “on meurt” in II; 1) and enables Deleuze to portray the event as what he calls a “counter-actualization.” This is where, instead of experiencing something linearly and personally, we are sent back toward its inconceivable potential (in distinction from realizable possibilities)—Deleuze’s “virtual”—in a way that takes us out of a personal relation to what is happening, as if we were an actor playing a role or part in a play that is our life. We become strangely removed from it, or what is happening seems to have no relation to “us”—“No one has shown better than Maurice Blanchot that this ambiguity” relates to the duality of mortal experience: “On one side, there is the part of the event which is realized and accomplished; on the other, there is that ‘part of the event which cannot realize its accomplishment.’ There are thus two accomplishments, which are like actualization and counter-actualization.”52 Here Deleuze is referencing Blanchot’s “double death” which is “not accomplished, yet which is there,” and “only expresses the doubleness within which such an event withdraws as if to preserve the void of its secret. Inevitable, but inaccessible; certain, but ungraspable.”53 It is in this manner that we are in a relation with events that are certain and determinate, such as our own mortality, but which “withdraw” from our ability to grasp them or relate to them at all. It is this withdrawal, this receding and constant concealment of the “void,” that makes the event not only impersonal but “incessant”; we cannot “realize” our “accomplishments” because we are not drawn into relations of possibility. The double structure of the event, considering these Deleuzo-Blanchotian insights, applies particularly to dream experience: death may be the ultimate “source of problems and questions” (II; 8), but dreaming makes every situation, perception, and affection into a problem or question. Thus Deleuze can say that “The event by itself is problematic and problematizing.”54 This concerns our experience of movement towards the “void” of the dream’s secret, where events are counter to their “actual” reality, lacking the ability to “be present” to their reality, as Blanchot might say. In Deleuze’s terms, the event “has no other present than that of the mobile instant which represents it.”55 That is to say, the dream only represents, it does not “present” because it has no medium or milieu to establish its presence. If we encounter a person we know in a dream, it is that person as a problem—“certain, but ungraspable”; if we are drawn to try to escape from a place or arrive at a destination, we do so with the urgency of a question but not with the

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accessibility of knowing why we are doing so. What Bergson calls illusion becomes Blanchot’s movement where we have no relation to the present, even though memoryimages in dreams may seem identical to the present (“incessantly” returning). The “event” is thus lived outside of itself, as though each figure or situation poses itself as an unresolvable problem rather than a lived experience in the world where we can “accomplish” tasks and improve our lives. Of course, as Deleuze insists, “One must not say that there are problematic events, but that events bear exclusively upon problems and define their conditions.”56 In every case, the experience is of the “event” or the “reserve” of the virtual; the experience is present only through “insistence.” We can now return to Blanchot’s three features of obscurity (II; 5) and ask how they apply to dream. If the event indeed involves both the “certain, but ungraspable” (the obstinately ungraspable) as well as the incessant, this will enable us to ask how the Blanchotian dream expresses the novelty and difference of Deleuze’s third synthesis and of Blanchotian “diverging of difference” (II; 8); first, we consider Blanchot’s first two features of impossibility in dream: ●

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Incessance: the experience of the impossible involves the incessance of the day, which is to say, the absence of origin and therefore very purpose and finality of the day that would endow it with truth and reality. In other words, the day’s “industriousness,” “comprehensibility,” and “ascertainability” is rendered “uncertain,” “immense,” and incessant. The absence of origin in dreams thus involves the activity of the day as “repetition that will not leave off, satiety that has nothing, the sparkle of something baseless and without depth.”57 The “ungraspable” that we cannot “let go of.” Here, “the other night” is where “this perfectly closed intimacy” of the first night where we “build after day’s fashion” seems “seems solidly closed to the outside,” but where instead “you [can] be closed in with the outside . . . then it is intimacy that becomes menacing foreignness.”58 In this manner, we are grasped or seized by that which we cannot grasp. Perhaps no better example than dreaming involves the inexplicable that cannot be ignored.

Before arriving at Blanchot’s third feature of obscurity (becoming), we take a detour through that which goes awry when the first and second features make themselves felt without combining with each other and becoming. Like Deleuze’s first two passive syntheses of time, vulnerable to “generic” expectations (II; 6) or idealizations (II; 7), Blanchot’s first two features of impossibility are arguably vulnerable to the “sordid absence” of time’s menacing threat, which we now consider via the nightmare.

6. The nightmare as the menacing echo of the day’s presence Dreams do not simply draw us into movements that have no origin, posing problems and asking questions. They can also haunt and menace us: they can make us emerge from the night unsettled or even terrified. In these terms, nightmares are perhaps a resistance to sleep itself and to letting go of the day in the first night—where “it is necessary to cease acting.”59 That is, while the nothingness of the night which sparks a dream is unavoidable, we may still wish to avoid it, insofar as it forces us into an

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encounter with obscurity; as Blanchot states, “Those who think they see ghosts are those who do not want to see the night. They crowd it with the terror of little images, they occupy and distract it by immobilizing it—stopping the oscillation of eternal starting over.”60 In this sense, the ghost or haunting presence in dream is the first night “immobilized”—as though the night itself had a presence, or as though the other night appeared through that nothingness as a presence which still held itself in relation to the day. It is as though the very echo of the day could menace our experience in the night. Here we refuse to affirm, however unconsciously, the eternal return of the day in the other night, clinging to the day’s truth and reality in its lambent reverberations (just as we must “expel” the same: II; 8). The recurring dream, the anxiety dream—these are perhaps all manifestations of the refusal to affirm the inspiring difference that dreaming offers in favor of the day’s realities and truths. Blanchot relates the menacing foreignness that emerges from our perfectly sheltered and enclosed intimacy in the first night to a literary figure found in Kafka’s story “The Burrow.” In this story, a creature of unidentified origin creates a labyrinthine underground maze, which provides him with a “stillness” and “silence” that is “beautiful,”61 and where he can sink into the deepest of slumbers. The creature speculates at times whether his burrow is real, since he has never found anyone “investigating” the “door to my house.”62 In any event, his obsession with security and comfort is undermined when the creature, after awaking from uneasy dreams, begins to hear ubiquitous noises that seem to grow loud and soft;63 he concludes that these must signal the approach of another burrowing creature like him. Blanchot analyzes this scene as follows: What the beast senses in the distance—that monstrous thing which eternally approaches it and works eternally at coming closer—is itself. And if the beast could ever come into this thing’s presence, what it would encounter would be its own absence: itself, but itself become the other, which it would not recognize, which it would not meet. The other night is always the other, and he who senses it becomes the other.64

It is in this sense that the haunting final line of the story—“everything remained unchanged”65—does not indicate that the story is unfinished, but rather that there is an inevitable, impossible confrontation between the creature and its own absence. The creature only hears the “eternally reverberating echo of his own step, a step toward silence, toward the void. But the echo sends this step back to him . . . and the void is now a presence coming toward him.”66 That is, the “other night” appears in the phantasmagoric form of the figure, a ghost or monster, when intimacy itself becomes menacing: the creature could never confront what is behind the images that it thinks it recognizes, since what is behind them is the “void” of the night. It is the person who cannot “shake” the realities of the day, or who perceives and feels the imaginary figures of dreams as though they had reality and presence, who perhaps has the nightmare—as the nightmare has no reality. The insight that Blanchot’s reading of “The Burrow” offers us is that such phantasmagoric emergence of the unreal as if it were real would take the form of the “vicissitudes of an always more threatening

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threat,”67 what he calls “the terror of little images” that are empty but “dress[ed] up” as “a kind of being.”68 Like the interminable movement of dreaming itself, confronting such a threat would amount to confronting absence itself: an impossible pursuit. Thus if there is any “illusion” in nightmares it is, from this Blanchotian perspective, in maintaining a relation to the day and to reality when there is none, even if the relation is an unconscious one where the dream poses the “problem.” When considering nightmares in this manner, the double that “haunts” our world of power (II; 4), in which we refuse to consider the obscure forces in our lives, is akin to the phantasmagoric double and the image of absence in Kafka’s “Burrow”: in both cases, we are menaced by an unreality that undermines our world. We have seen that the “double death” of the event involves both the certainty of what is happening and its ungraspability; in Kafka’s story, we have the menacing figure of such a double, which is always “intruding” on and “hollowing out” our interiority. In Foucault’s own analysis of Blanchot that we saw, the double “divests interiority of its identity, . . . divides it into non-coincident twin figures . . . that is indissociably echo and denial.”69 This theme of the double that haunted Foucault can, in this context, be read into the phantasmagoric form of the other night as the creature in the distance from Kafka’s “Burrow,” insofar as that creature is also an “echo” and a double which personifies the night or nothingness that, in Foucault’s terms, we “deny,” or that in Blanchot’s terms we “do not want to see.” This is really about the threat of losing our foothold in the world, our self and identity: what we can “know” about who we are is radically “hollowed out” by the accosting effect of an outside that still maintains its connection to the day. The nightmare is thus only a threat to who we are in the world. To move beyond this threat, we consider the role of forgetting.

7. Insouciance, inspiration, and “forgetting forgotten” Dreams are not beholden to the reality of the day; nor are they beholden to the truth of who we are. Here we finally move away entirely from both Freud and Bergson, who, in different ways (the former around repression and the latter around illusion) emphasize the dream’s relation to the dreamer’s memories and the world. This forces us to consider the Blanchotian role of forgetting in the incessant, ungraspable movement of dreaming. We have, in fact, not yet fully explored the implications of the Blanchotian experience of forgetting as one of “impossibility” in accordance with the “diverging of difference” (II; 5), or what Deleuze would call becoming in the third synthesis of time (II; 8). In this case of becoming, forgetting takes us beyond memory and also beyond the “day’s truth” and “day’s laws.” Here, the movement of forgetting that we are caught up in involves situations and actions that reflect our world, but the movement itself does not tend towards the aims or goals in the world (as with disciplinary or regulated practices). Such a movement conceivably goes beyond the incessant and menacing qualities of impossibility and, in the case of dreaming, towards its inspiring qualities. Here, Blanchot’s reading of the myth of Orpheus and, as we will see, his characterization of forgetting in terms of “insouciance” and its “baseless depth” become crucial, as does a Nietzschean conception of forgetting that can be contrasted to Freud’s.

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That dreams are forgotten, and that they are drawn into a movement of forgetting, does not mean this is a movement of repression; rather, we forget by virtue of what Blanchot calls insouciance. For Freud, we forget our dreams because in dreams, our preconscious censor is turned off and we experience that which we would normally “repress”: our unconscious wishes and fears. For Blanchot, by contrast, we forget dreams because we must be “unconcerned” (insouciant) in order to fall asleep in the first place (and those who cannot let go of wishes and fears are perhaps “harassed” by the day). Blanchot’s most acute formulation of “insouciance” in the dream involves the myth of Orpheus. Blanchot reads Orpheus’s glance back at Eurydice, away from the “day’s truth,” as inevitable, since Orpheus may worship Apollo, but his inspiration comes from his love of Eurydice in her “nocturnal obscurity.”70 It is inevitable, then, that he would violate the command not to turn back to see her—right at the moment where he was about to ascend from the underworld and see daylight. This moment of “insouciance” is a moment of inspiration. Just as Orpheus is unconcerned when he looks at Eurydice, we too are careless, unconcerned, neglectful, graceful, innocent, and sinful (towards rules, consequences, and even dying itself) when we go to sleep and dream. Most crucially, Orpheus is forgetful of the taboo not to look at Eurydice, which is analogous to our own insouciance towards the day itself when we sleep and dream. In short, we sleep—and ultimately find inspiration in dreams—because we don’t care about truth or reality, not because we do. Blanchot teaches us that this inspiring movement of forgetting does not entail forgetting anything (just like it would not entail repressing anything): it means to forget forgetting itself. It is a movement that turns on itself, that is unconcerned with itself, drawn into oblivion. Blanchot’s Orphic movement of “turning away,” then, is not only analogous to the entrance into the first night, it also informs his approach to the dream itself—“this other night [that is] is the death no one dies, the forgetfulness which gets forgotten.”71 Here we encounter Blanchot’s paradox of forgetting: in the case of the dream—what he calls the “other night”—it is no longer simply the day that is forgotten, reversed, or eclipsed; instead, it is the very movement of forgetting that, in itself, forgets itself or is forgotten. In other words, forgetting is no longer the “repression” of forgetting something, it is forgetting “everything”: To forget everything would perhaps be to forget forgetting.—Forgetting forgotten: each time I forget, I do nothing but forget that I am forgetting. To enter into this movement of redoubling, however, is not to forget twice; it is to forget in forgetting the depth of forgetting, to forget more profoundly by turning away (en se détournant) from this depth that lacks any possibility of being gotten to the bottom of.72

Here, both the Orphic movement of turning away and this movement in the depths of forgetting involve that which cannot be “gotten to the bottom of.” It is a profound reversal and neglect not only of a world in which things can be accomplished in their definitive reality or certain truth, but also of the very notion of accomplishment. It is noteworthy here that Blanchot’s acute explanation of forgetfulness which gets forgotten is actually developed in his essay critiquing Foucault’s approach to madness. There, he

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frames forgetfulness as an alternative to the enclosure (II; 4) of the outside, and as irreducible to madness. Here the reversal of power through dreaming can be explored. This experience of dreaming is utterly foreign and unintelligible to our world of knowledge and power; from the perspective of the world, the forgotten dream would be an experience that is an “exception” to the day, one that that hollows out our identity or harasses us. Thus when Blanchot claims that, in Foucault’s conception of madness, “The relation of desire to forgetting as . . . a relation to that of which there can be no memory, . . . this movement that excludes itself . . . nonetheless seems to offer itself in the most closed of structures . . . as an interiority of anticipation or exception”73 that “encloses the outside” (II; 4), we can see how the dream, likewise, could be considered from Foucault’s perspective as an “exception” or exclusion to the day. The dream is bracketed in the “opposite” space of the day, enclosed in the private structures and darkness where we sleep. But what if forgetting was something sacred? What if, in its inspiration, the dream is not the exception to our normal human experience, but a fundamental feature that insists on its own? If it is not an exception, then it is the link between inspiration and forgetting—that which forever slips away, beyond the foundation of our habits and the ground of memory—that dreaming presents. This is both the excessive and unrelenting strength of dreams, but also what makes them so fleeting: we forget our dreams because they consist within an inspiring moment that, like Deleuze’s indiscernible present moment which disappears in appearing, takes place beyond the Bergsonian expansion of memory, where that which disappears has faded in the memory before the next appearance. This infinite slowness of forgetting— where all seems like a non sequitur, “fissured” not just from who we are but from one moment to the next in this unconcern with the day—endows us with an experience that cannot be explained as meaningful or meaningless: it is the source of meaning. Why, then, is forgetting privileged? And are we not also aware in dreams? When Freud claimed that forgetting involved repression, he wanted to have his cake and eat it, too: to claim that it is our unconscious that both forgets and remembers via repression elides the fact that it is our conscious perception that is fluid and capable of forgetting. Forgetting, in other words, can be “active”: unlike the faculty of the unconscious, the faculty of consciousness avoids the invasion of mnemonic traces by its “freshness, fluidity and mobile, agile chemistry at every moment.”74 While Deleuze discusses this in the context of an active and positive role for repression—in the sense that we must remain open to new experiences—Blanchot’s Orphic moment of turning away, however negligent and careless it must be to sleep, is nevertheless an active refusal of memories and the day, a useless action that neglects life (even if it is one brought on passively, by natural exhaustion). Deleuze in fact juxtaposes a Nietzschean conception of conscious forgetting that emphasizes novelty to the Freudian model of unconscious forgetting. This allows us to begin to see the highest paradox of the Blanchotian dream: the link between “vigilance” and forgetting. But first it is necessary to dissociate forgetting one step further from its deficient status as an inability in our world of knowledge and power. In our everyday world, we forget because we are disorganized, lazy, or somehow irresponsible. The Nietzschean question, however, would be why such a forgetful state is associated with our unconscious—where forgetting entails a loss of our capacity. Is it not the “conscious” faculties of perception

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and affection that allow for new experiences? As Deleuze puts it, “Nietzsche defines the faculty of forgetting” as “that constantly renewed skin surrounding an ever fresh receptivity, a milieu ‘where there is always room for new things’.”75 And if the highest paradox of the dream is in fact that we are conscious and perceiving in it, and this consciousness and our ability to forget are not mutually exclusive, then would dreams not be the site of this inspiring movement? Would we not be “active” in the sense of our vigilance in the dream? We can now explore Blanchot’s highest paradox of dreaming: if we “wake back up” when we sleep, conscious but forgetful at the same time, then what manner of consciousness is it?

8. All dreaming is lucid, but fissured between sleeper and dreamer In dreams, we have the ability to perceive and feel, and more than that, to fully recognize persons, places, and situations and be entirely aware of what is happening— even and especially of dreaming itself. From such a Blanchotian perspective, there is perhaps no distinction between the “lucid” dream and the non-lucid dream. In both cases, we are “aware” of the resemblance of dreams to reality: if they had no semblance, there would be no recognition or experience at all. Blanchot’s own comments on lucidity center on what he calls “vigilance” in dreams—which, as we have seen, he posits as an alternative to Bergsonian “inattention” (II; 4). However, he also posits it as a refutation of the Cartesian logic that we can arrive at self-certainty even if everything around us is a deception or dream. Here we must take a detour through Blanchot’s insightful critique of Descartes. Descartes’s famous reference to dreaming in his Meditations entails its own version of awareness while asleep. In Descartes’ case, by doubting everything, the thinker finds that dreams or illusions counterintuitively become a road to certainty. As Simon Wortham notes in The Poetics of Sleep, “the very fact that Descartes is able to doubt proves to him that there is something or someone there doing the doubting”; therefore “the images of Descartes with which we are presented—of a figure unsure whether he is awake or asleep, mistrustful of his senses, uncertain of the dimensions or existence of his body”76—does not in any way disprove the existence of the sleeper. The fact that we can doubt our reality and existence, whether we are dreaming or awake, only makes us all the more certain that we exist to do the doubting and that we exist to do the “thinking”: hence Descartes’s famous maxim “cogito, ergo sum.” Descartes’ logic of finding self-certainty in dreams can be critiqued insofar as the dreamer cannot be identified with the sleeper: we cannot “trust” that they know who they are, where they are, or what they are doing. As Blanchot notes, we would not “dare transfer” to the dreamer the “prerogative” of certainty.77 In fact, he insists that there is a fissure, an interstice, or an uncrossable line between dreamer and sleeper: “Between the one who sleeps and the one who is the subject of the dream’s plot, there is a fissure, the hint of an interval, a difference of structure”78 (this notion of the fissure is crucial in Deleuze’s approach to Blanchot, which concerns “non-relation” that is still relation, as in the cinematic interstice—VIII; 3a–5b). Blanchot then insists:

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In the depth of dreams . . . lies an allusion to . . . anonymous being . . . a selfless self, unable to recognize itself as such since it cannot be its own subject. Who (even upon the invitation of the evil genius) would dare transfer to the dreamer the prerogative of the Cogito? Who would allow him to state with utter assurance: “I dream, therefore I am”? One might at most suggest that he say: “Where I dream, it is awake,” a vigilance that takes dream by surprise and that indeed comprises, within a present devoid of duration, the waking state of a presence devoid of persons, a non-presence in which no being ever occurs.79

Blanchot’s rewriting of Descartes, “Where I dream, it is awake,” references this notion of the vigilance required of the dreamer, who is utterly detached from their cognizant knowledge of who they are as the person asleep. The “it” is Blanchot’s “neutral” or “anonymous” person who replaces the self; as he states, “He who dreams sleeps, but already he who dreams is he who sleeps no longer. He is not another, some other person, but the premonition of the other, of that which cannot say ‘I’ any more, which recognizes itself neither in itself nor in others.”80 Conversely, his allusion to the Cartesian dreamer, who is the sleeper, is a way of stating that, if we can be “certain” through thought, recognizing ourselves and others, then we must, on some level, be able to trust the dreamer and thus the sleeper. But we cannot approve of those who “sleep with open eyes,” for example, and the “sleepwalker is suspect”:81 ask anyone about the danger of sleep disorders, where the limbic system of the brain is shut down (turning off all impulse control), to see the alarm and fear that it raises. Imagine trying to reason with a violent sleepwalker. The sleepwalker in fact resembles the zombie: setting the dinner table when there is no food to be served, a child standing over their parents’ bed and staring at them while they sleep. But the zombie can also act: the sleepwalker can get into their car and drive away, but without any impulse control. They may be “aware” of what they are doing, but we cannot be certain that they are cognizant of “possibilities” since they are experiencing only the impossible that has no consequence. Waking, untrustworthy dreamers aside, then, what of the lucid experience within the dream? What of our broader ability to realize that we are in a dream—to, in the Cartesian sense, question its reality? Does not the “lucid dream” demonstrate that we can have full control over it? That it can be “mastered” or controlled, like we would control anything else in our everyday world? Here we turn again to Blanchot, whose comments reveal that lucid dreaming does not provide us with sovereign mastery over the dream, but conceivably only immerses us further in the unavoidability of the ungraspable: The dreamer believes he knows that he dreams and sleeps, precisely at the moment when the fissure between [the sleeper and their double, the dreamer] affirms itself. He dreams that he is dreaming. And this flight from the dream which plunges him back into the dream, . . . whereby personal truth wanting to rescue itself loses itself more and more, . . . is like the return of the . . . unspeakable harassment of a reality which always escapes and which one cannot escape—all this is like a dream of the night, . . . where the form of the dream becomes its sole content.82

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In this passage, Blanchot insists that the recognition of being in the dream does not imply a recognition of the “sleeper,” only of the “dreamer”: the fissure “affirms itself,” or makes itself felt, in the very moment when our awareness leads us on an impossible quest to rescue our “personal truth”—attempting to find Cartesian certainty when dreaming of dreaming. But here we only find ourselves submitted to the inaccessibility of the dream, much like Blanchot’s example of suicide, which does not master death, but reveals its ability to grasp us when we attempt to grasp it (II; 2). We have the ability not to think the truth in the dream, then, but only to perceive and to feel, where dreaming draws both towards their absolute limits. Like the nightmare, lucid dreaming only ties dreams to a reality that we want to believe is true (a reality that ends up “harassing” us, as the double “haunts” Foucault’s world). In other words, if dreams involve illusions, it is only the illusion of believing a dream can be tied to a sleeper or to the day; any resemblance of the world to dream is no more than resemblance. Looking past this delusion, we are forced to ask: of what does the experience of dreaming, in all of its vigilance, consist? Here we come full circle from Freud and Deleuze to Blanchot’s own vision of displacement and disguise, which shifts us away from the search for truth and certainty to the actual movement and experience of dream.

9. Recognition without cognition: unlocatable displacements and unrevealable disguises The dream has shown us that perception is problematized by disguises while affection is questioned by displacements, and that their disguises cannot be revealed, nor can their displacements be located, because they emerge from the night’s absence of origin. However, we can now refine our understanding of displacement and disguise by considering our very lack of “cognition” in dream via the dream’s impossibilities, which align with the Deleuzo-Blanchotian approach to “time’s absence.” Here, just as we shift from Deleuze’s first and second syntheses to the groundlessness of the third, so too in Blanchot’s vision do we shift from incessance and obstinate ungraspability to the diverging of difference, where death is not “possible” (II; 8). In the space of “time’s absence,” in which nothing has the possibility of happening, but happens nevertheless (III; 4), time “comes already and forever past, so that my relation to it is not one of cognition, but of recognition, and this recognition ruins in me the power of knowing, the right to grasp. It makes what is ungraspable inescapable; it never lets me cease reaching what I cannot attain.”83 In these terms, we necessarily “recognize” situations and persons in dreams, even in full awareness or reflection of ourselves as a dreamer, but cannot recognize ourselves as a sleeper, and all recognition is undermined by a lack of cognition—trying to find, to confront, to discern—insofar as we are incessantly “reaching” toward a point without origin or end that is incessantly displaced and disguised. Blanchot formulates eternal return similarly, where it is with “time’s absence [that] what is new renews nothing . . . what is present presents nothing, but represents itself and belongs henceforth and always to return.”84 Whether the dream is considered as recognition without cognition, as resemblance without the original thing, or as the

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day without the day’s truth and laws, displacement and disguise make such images emerge or “return” in dreams differently. Here we reconsider oneiric displacement and disguise, and percept and affect, with Blanchot’s insights about impossibility and recognition without cognition in mind. First, we reconsider dream perception: the dream is a revelation of that which remains disguised because the incomprehensibility of what we perceive, in all its resemblance, is impossible to reveal and endlessly familiar, having “always in advance reduced all movement of concealing or self-concealing to a mode of the manifest.”85 Instead, the dream only “scintillates with pure resemblance”:86 here, disguise operates not through the unfamiliar but through the familiar, disguising nothing. We recognize reality as disguised, as unreal or other than what it is, but we cannot ascertain or uncover it. Dream perceptions are thus not disguises of repressed wishes or fantasies because there is no “original model,” no buried memory or reality to disguise; as Blanchot puts it, “The dream touches the region where pure resemblance reigns. Everything there is similar; each figure is another one, is similar to another and to yet another . . . One seeks the original model, wanting to be referred to a point of departure, an initial revelation, but there is none. The dream is the likeness that refers eternally to likeness.”87 Elsewhere he notes that “Resemblances abound in dreams, for everyone in them tends to be extremely, wondrously similar: in fact, this is their only identity, they resemble.”88 As with Blanchot’s reading of eternal return (II; 8), where “estrangement is allied with the strangely familiar,”89 the dream presents familiar scenarios, or people who we think we recognize (like “a chance passerby . . . familiar and distant”),90 but whose familiarity becomes a problem that draws us toward the absolutely foreign. In a dream scenario, we may be working at our familiar desk, but what we are working on or writing is absolutely unintelligible; we may be striving go home but home is unreachable. Beyond this identity, then, this eternal repetition or recurrence of the day, there is only difference and dissemblance—only Deleuze’s groundlessness beyond the ground of memory. These incessant, impossible movements of uncovering that which a dream resembles paradoxically testify to its lucidity and its oblivion. Second, we reconsider affection in dreams: in this case, the questioning that affectively shifts us from one place to another to find an answer is entangled in our perception—a disorientation wherein we are immersed in an interval or “fissure” that, because it is “nowhere” and cannot find its place, saturates dreams as a questioning, searching force. In Blanchotian terms this impossible movement discloses “without having had to disclose itself ”91 because it does not occupy space, and is thus always “missing,” “all the while marking itself there, or by provoking a displacement that is without place, or else by distributing itself in a multiple manner in a supplement of place.”92 Such “provocation” is arguably the alternative to the affective provocation in a world of knowledge and power: here, it involves a movement that provokes us to approach Blanchot’s oblivion that is “baseless and without depth.” But its “multiple manner” means it is not a monolithic movement: Blanchotian displacement is also what he calls “[a] mobile-immobile relation, untold and without number, not indeterminate but indetermining, always in displacement, being without a place, . . . an abyssal space of resonance and condensation.”93 This characterization of displacement as the resonance of the absence of a place involves a figure that is identical to that

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which was formerly included in the day or world. In this sense, Blanchot’s figures initially “unify” everything by gathering or relating everything back to the “day’s truth,” and, when the day becomes unleashed and untrue in the other night, it displaces that which is always excluded, dispersed, and is essentially nowhere. Here we are compelled to “the region we are trying to approach, [where] here has collapsed into nowhere, but nowhere is nonetheless here”94: the feeling of dreaming is this constant displacement. Consider here how, upon waking, the dreamer may forget specific dream-images or situations but may remember the feeling from the dream. What is this feeling? In a dream, we may know we want to protect someone or something, to flee, to find something lost—and the feelings become affects, for instance, of defensiveness, of claustrophobia, or of being adrift. Such affects lack objects as they dissipate into the very semblance of dream-perception, which resembles “nothing.” We thus may not have the luxury of remembering why we feel a certain way, since the feeling undergoes constant displacements as dream events unfold, persisting in fluctuating states through the disconnected situations beyond the coherence of their worlds.

10. Darkness shining: the dream as the unthinkable and immediate urgency of problems and questions While we have moved beyond Descartes and acknowledged that there is no cognition in dreams, we must go further: if dreams do not “illuminate” or clarify, if they do not reveal or disclose, then we can reconsider whether, or how, they “illuminate” or enable thinking at all. Here we can distinguish perception from thinking with respect to the tradition that associates light with “illumination,” clarity, or revelation: because nothingness does not exist without presence, it is darkness that forces images to emerge in their reverberating, impossible forms. That is, if Blanchot’s “first night” is a space of silence, darkness, and emptiness that makes the day “return” (with all of its incessance, ungraspability, and difference), then our oneiric vigilance or “lucidity” toward the disguises of perception (through semblance) and displacements of affection (without place) is directed at this very darkness. In short, dreams do not clarify—they obscure. On the one hand, Blanchot will emphasize that dreams are “suffused with an impersonal light whose source escapes us . . . as if they retained their clarity—diffuse, lambent, latent—in the absence of any precise center of light or of vision.”95 Dreams, in this sense, are not only “pure resemblance,” as we have seen, but there is quite literally no origin of perception or illumination; this is because dreams clarify the immensity of the night, a place with no cohesive center. In dreams, if images illuminate anything, they only illuminate the darkness that is Deleuze’s “(non-)being of the question” and problem.96 On the other hand, Blanchot similarly describes illumination in terms of literary language, where it withdraws from the world and emerges from language’s absence, and so is a “fire without light, that part of the fire that burns life without illuminating it,”97 concluding that “art is not light, it is a form darkening.”98 Here we broach our upcoming exploration of art (IV) and literature (V, VI): if dreams entail a space of absolute forgetting, its sister space of art remains equally elusive. The image may be imagined via language, but dream’s imagination does not have a medium to

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monumentalize its images or language. Instead, dream images exist in a forgotten movement, something to which we have only vague or spurious access. The dream, in contrast to the artwork, draws us toward the imaginary immediately, in the absolute milieu of the imaginary, while the artwork’s defining feature is its tangible medium or milieu. In other words, in dreams, we lack mediation to the image: as Blanchot claims, when we are seized or grasped by the ungraspable, the image “makes of our intimacy an exterior power which we suffer passively.”99 Blanchot echoes this when he claims that “the dream . . . implies a reversal of the possibility of seeing. To see in a dream is to be fascinated, and fascination arises when, far from apprehending from a distance, we are apprehended by this distance.”100 Here we see without possibility, which means “to apprehend immediately from a distance.”101 Such fascination becomes acute in the medium of the artwork, whose immediacy “excludes itself —renounces its own immediacy”102 by virtue of its medium. That is, if dreams inspire through the space of absolute forgetting (III; 7), art fascinates by virtue of a medium that “renounces” its immediacy (V; 3b). It is the dream that is immediacy for itself, insofar as it repeats the day through the night within the space of the imaginary. Such an imaginary, absolute milieu has no artistic “media” or material to capture its images; even the hypothetical scenario of recording dreams from this chapter’s introduction highlights the incomprehensibility of what could be captured. So what, then, of thought? If dreams are immediate, is there nothing at all to “think” in dreams? Are thought and forgetting in dreams mutually exclusive? What does it take to think? If dreams involve the absolute urgency and unlimited development of the problem and question, immersing us in an experience of impossibility, then dreams also do not answer those questions or solve those problems. That is because in order to answer questions and solve problems, as we will see, we must be able to think (IV; 2b). But this is not a weakness of dreams; it is precisely its strength: dreams develop the urgency of questions and problems. We may not “think,” strictly speaking, in dreams, but we are forever inspired in our severance from truth and reality. In other words, while we may be “vigilant” in our dreams, and aware of being in a dream to varying degrees, none of this means that we genuinely think in dreams; dreaming is a passive experience similar to mortality, habit, and memory (II; 2, 6–7). We will see that in fact the awareness of ourselves as dreamers in the absolute milieu of the dream does not enable us to think with the speed required of thought (IV; 2a–3a and 5a–c). That is, the fissure within dreams, which draws us outside of ourselves, and beyond the Bergsonian world of our memory toward a disconnected space of absolute forgetting, precludes our ability to think because the connections between one moment or situation and the next constantly dissolve into the night. This is a space of infinite slowness, in contrast to the “infinite speed” of thought’s connections, as we will explore (IV; 2b and 3b). If dreams question and problematize, reversing and unworking our relation to reality as we know it, our exploration of art in the next chapter demands that we go one step further: art implies solutions to those problems in what is impossible to sense, namely, thought (IV–VI, VIII–XI). There is a difference, however, between cognizant thought and what Deleuze calls the very “unthinkable” origin of thought—and here we will see how thought implicates this very unthinkable origin (rather than operating through clarity or reference). For Deleuze, there is no “image” or perception that

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corresponds to thought; rather, thought is provoked by images, which are themselves unthinkable because they are bound up in a movement of perception and affection. As he claims with Guattari, “If the concept is a solution, the conditions of the philosophical problem are found on the plane of immanence presupposed by the concept (to what infinite movement does it refer in the image of thought?).”103 As we will see, this plane of immanence is arguably the infinite movement not only of dream, but of fiction (V– IX). In other words, insofar as dreaming takes us beyond the Bergsonian “expansion” of memory toward the third synthesis of time, displacing and disguising nothing, it is dominated by the force of its own “insouciance.” The expanded and disconnected space of the dream can thus be distinguished from the connections and intensity inherent to thinking (IV; 5c). Between Deleuze and Blanchot, then, we will discover that art creates movements composed by ideas, beyond but nevertheless propelled by the nothingness of the night. Thought is what inhabits this non-space—like Blanchot’s first night, thought may not “exist,” but, in a Deleuzian vein, it “persists” or remains implicated in the answers and solutions to questions and problems. Thus it is the aim of this book’s remaining chapters to consider how art forces us to think by displacing the question and disguising the problem, utilizing the strict devices of artistic media. Such media are unavailable to the dreamer, who is in immediate contact with the imaginary but who nevertheless experiences the most inspiring, unrelenting, and radical posing of problems and shifting of questions.

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IV

The Conceptual Composition of the Work of Art: Chaos and the Outside

1. Between art and thought Close your eyes and consider how quickly your mind really works. Note that the suggestion is not to imagine how quickly it works. The quickness of the mind is not the same as the movement of the imagination: consider how quickly you can allow your mind to be reminded of something or associate whatever you were thinking about with something else, and something else. How fast you can make connections. How frustrating it might be when your computer works too slowly, or when your hand cramps up when trying to write, or even when the loss of the right words in conversation prevents you from expressing your thoughts. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “We constantly lose our ideas. That is why we want to hang on to fixed opinions so much.”1 Thinking itself is so rapid as to be uncontrollable. Connections can be between anything. In some cases, of course, this is the source of madness. Or of inspiration. This is what D&G call the “infinite” speed of thought: thought is, by nature, uninhibited in its quickness. If relative or regular speed involves the relation between distances covered in measurable time, where we think logically around what is regular and normal, absolute speed involves the traversal of any and all distance immediately or instantaneously (as we will see, across a “plane” which has no form), where thought is obscure. It is in this case that thought is unconstrained by distance. If thought concerns speed, the imagination concerns movement. We move through our imagination, as we move through a dream, a story, our memories, or ranges of emotions. We cannot necessarily snap ourselves out of what we are feeling unless we can actually feel something new.2 As D&G insist, a sensation lasts as long as it “resonates,” exerts pressure, or acts as a force. Perception lasts as long as we are in the milieu where we are perceiving. And yet, the imagination, too, is unconstrained, but not by its speed, since its movements have a speed relative to the milieus they traverse, even in the “immobile mobility” of dreaming (III; 4 and 9). Rather, the imagination is unlimited due to its movement that is “preserved” in a virtual domain which outlasts its livable or lived moments. That is, if relative or normal movement in the world involves the relation between reference points, or becoming “something” insofar as we are moving away from what we were toward something else, then absolute movement in the imagination involves a loss of reference points and a becoming that is unknowable, 107

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obscure, or unpredictable. Such absolute movement is, in Blanchot’s terms, “incessant,” where we experience or encounter difference and change in the form of an event which seems to never begin or end (that is, which does not appear to “differ:” III; 5). In any case, this movement of perceiving and feeling, bound up with our imagination and our memory, is essential for characterizing the features of art, which, as Deleuze (and Guattari) constantly insist, involve “monumentalized” and preserved sensations. This, however, is not all there is to it, because the movement of the imaginary and the speed of thought are not independent of each other. We can therefore posit here that it is not only the case that the speed of thought is uncontrollably fast and the movement of the imagination is indefinite; it is also the case that thought is carried out within or between those indefinite movements, and that those indefinite movements may in turn force thought into action. We will see, then (IV; 4a–b), that our perceptions become problematic and our feelings are put into question through works of art that, in Deleuze’s terms, “force us to think.” We will also see that reality becomes indiscernible and truth becomes inexplicable when ideas (or “concepts”) are connected within milieus that are imaginary or indeterminate (or in Deleuze’s terms, “virtual”). However, these distinctions are not oppositions; they involve a dynamic: it will ultimately be the case that genuine ideas (as distinct from logical or representative ideas) serve as the very impetus that problematizes our perceptions and puts our feelings into question, just as it is our problematic perceptions and questionable feelings in art that displace and disguise those very ideas in the experience of the artwork. Insofar as those ideas are developed or explicated by the movements of our problematic perceptions and questionable feelings, they are also “implicated” or wrapped up within them: the writer or artist “thinks” no less than the reader is “forced to think.” Whether we name these thoughts ideas or concepts, both designate the thought of difference: while D&G insist that concepts “must not be confused with general or abstract ideas,” Deleuze himself defines genuine ideas (that are not generic or abstract) as D&G define concepts: difference that consists or insists (but does not exist) within problems and questions. This paradox of implication and explication—of “folding”—is crucial to the dynamic of Deleuze’s thought; it appears in his work on Spinoza, on Proust, on Leibniz, crucially in Difference and Repetition, in The Logic of Sense, and on Foucault. As the Deleuze scholar Francois Zourabichvili points out, “Implication is the fundamental logical movement of Deleuze’s philosophy. In nearly every one of his books, it is only ever a question of ‘things’ that are rolled up and unrolled, enveloped and are developed, folded and unfolded, implicated and explicated, as well as complicated.”3 But it is not just Deleuze’s own work that involves the paradox of implication and explication, as well as the crucial feature of “chaos” which “complicates” everything. Even if it is not overt, the paradox of implication and explication is at play in the dynamic, to be explored in this chapter, between thought and art—which Deleuze discusses around chaos and Blanchot’s outside in his work with Guattari. As we will see (IV; 3a), the Blanchotian dynamic between thought and art specifically involves the incessance of events (where a thing happens but is not actually happening) alongside the intimacy and foreignness of thinking. In this sense, Blanchot’s outside is explicated incessantly, where our innermost thoughts are in turn implicated by the ungraspable. This “beyond” of the outer and inner world concerns what Blanchot calls the impossible and what

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Deleuze calls the limits of the faculties. Here we can see the highest paradox of Deleuze’s work via Blanchot. In art’s radical reversal beyond power, there is a reversal not only of closeness and distance, or interiority and exteriority, but, insofar as art can be composed by ideas, that which is closer than the interiority or intimacy of our perception and affection enters into a dynamic with that which is outside of both reality and truth. To develop this paradox— our radical reversal beyond power—we can again consider how Deleuze consistently draws on the dynamic he locates in Blanchot where the outside is “further . . . than any external world, and thereby closer than any inner world.”4 We have seen this radical reversal in Blanchot’s third feature of impossibility (II; 5), but we now begin our exploration with the interiority of perception and affection drawn further inward to become percepts and affects, and the exteriority of reality and truth drawn further outward to become unreal and false. Thinking, as we will see, is closer than the interior and beyond the exterior insofar as it is insensible and imperceptible, and also has no reality or truth, even if it is compelled or developed by art’s affects and percepts in all their untruth and unreality. When Deleuze appropriates Blanchot’s notion of impossibility and expands it to the limits of the faculties of sensation, memory, and thought—paralleling his three syntheses of time, respectively—we can consider the dynamic between those faculties confronting their own limits (where the limit of one is the very object of the other) in terms of this dynamic of implication and explication: our Blanchotian radical reversal outside of power. As Deleuze puts it, this is how sensibility, forced by the encounter to sense the sentiendum, forces memory in its turn to remember the memorandum, that which can only be recalled. Finally, the third characteristic of transcendental memory is that, in turn, it forces thought to grasp that which can only be thought, . . . as though this [cogitandum] were both the final power of thought and the unthinkable.5

In other words, the impetus or confrontation with each limit—the sentiendum as the insensible of sensation, the memorandum as the immemorial of memory, and the cogitandum as the unthinkable of thought—is what triggers each other faculty. The Deleuze scholar Joe Hughes (among others)6 insists that that the impossibility or limit of each faculty (the “sentiendum,” “memorandum,” and “cogitandum”) begins with a shock to sensibility that moves “from imagination to memory to thought, and not the reverse”7; while this chapter specifically considers ideas that implicate sensation and memory—perception and affection—in a work of art, the point is that there is a progression that parallels Deleuze’s synthesis of time which goes first from the paradox of repetition (habit and sensation), then to difference (memory and dream), and then to a final synthesis of repetition and difference (thought). This is how our “experience”— of a work of art or otherwise—may “force us to think” (even if thought—as in the case of the dream, and in daily encounters—may be absent from the initial encounter, it is not necessarily absent in the artwork). “[W]hat forces us to think” is what Deleuze calls Blanchot’s “inpower [impouvoir] of thought” (II; 4),8 which can “only be sensed,” but when the imagination encounters the unimaginable, we discover that which can “only be recalled” and ultimately which can “only be thought.”9 The insensible of sensation

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and the unthinkable of thought thus enter into a more profound, radical reversal and dynamic beyond just the reversal of the effects of power. It is of course easy to say that art makes us think differently: but in order to truly conceive of art as a transformative experience that is outside the truth and reality produced by power (that is, not subject to the “positive” values of discipline and regulation bent on fostering life), it is crucial to consider that art not only engages the senses but forms and is formed by ideas. For Deleuze, however, perceiving, feeling, and thinking are not always creative, interesting, or intense; they may be carried out in ways that are habitual, opinionated, or clichéd. As we have seen (I; 11–13), perception may be determined by milieus of discipline or regulation, while feelings may involve the constant incitement and provocation to improve our lives (hence fictional works becoming clichéd or formulaic: Introduction). However, as we have also seen (II; 6–8), our habits can involve unpredictable processes of change just as the complexity of memory can affirm potentialities of unknowable futures. Precisely how sensibility places thought into motion, and how thought may in turn animate the movement of an artwork (in terms of the way it “forces us to think”), depends on this dynamic of implication and explication: as we will see in our explorations of artistic fiction, insofar as habit is drawn away from its generic expectation and memories are drawn away from their generic idealizations, habitual reality becomes indiscernible from the imaginary and truth becomes inexplicable or “false.” It is then only the unlimited movement of affects and percepts, in combining Deleuze’s first two passive syntheses, that develop or explicate thought (which itself no longer explicates or represents truth and reality). This chapter will define art and thought by virtue of D&G’s distinction between composition and immanence (percept, affect, and concepts) and their approach to Blanchot’s imagination and the outside. D&G in fact draw on Blanchot in defining the “unthinkable” milieu of thought as the plane of immanence; added to this, the Blanchotian absent totality can be found in the manner in which their plane of composition actually “dissolves” the sensory world in the experience of art. In this sense, the forgotten movement of perception and affection in dream will be contrasted to art, in order to consider how the artistic medium can be composed by ideas. But to fully grasp the dynamic of implication and explication at work in D&G’s planes of composition and immanence, as well as the Blanchotian influence on Deleuzian notions of speed and time, this chapter ultimately returns to the dynamic between difference and repetition in Deleuze’s syntheses of time and to Blanchot’s features of obscurity (II; 5–8).

2.a. Milieus and habit: the dissolution and disconnection of chaos Chaos is not an exception to reality; rather, it essentially makes reality what it is. It is our genuine starting point. When we think of chaos, we usually think of social disorder, lawlessness, violence, natural disasters, or disease—or maybe in different senses, overstimulation, spuriousness, or entropy. However, for D&G, we are not seething Hobbesian creatures of violence underneath our laws; rather, we are confused, Humean creatures of habit beneath the refinements of our culture: à la Spinoza, nature is not war, but contingency. In this case, our most “natural” experiences—thrown into any situation

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or world—involve sameness, similarity, “contraction,” and repetition before we are capable of making distinctions. This is always our initial status: the infant, the dreamer, the disoriented—whose first experience of “reality,” at a fundamental, chaotic level, involves an inability to distinguish one person, thing, or moment in time from another. Everything is enmeshed and scrambled. A baby must learn to distinguish one hand from the other as a step toward discerning reality. It is not the case that what exists, in fiction or reality, involves the divisive judgments characteristic of structures of language or Foucauldian knowledge—in fact, the formation of reality and fiction through chaos does not proceed by a logic of negation at all (where one thing is not another thing, and so on); rather, by means of our imagination, we form habits wherein our present encounters resemble the past—and when they don’t, we are “forced to think” or to change (or we can refuse and so become dogmatic). Thus Deleuze does not think that reality is structured, but does operate under the assumption that we confront difference, chaos, and complexity by virtue of likeness or similarity. How does this work? If the notion of indistinguishability or indiscernibility is taken to its logical conclusion—encompassing everything—then the world (or the “universe”) is not something we can know (i.e., observe and capture in language), but is a chaos of repetition—of patterns happening at differential speeds that are “shorter than the shortest continuous period”10 that we can grasp, and at an unascertainable scale. If we were omnipotent and omniscient, then maybe we could grasp everything happening at once (making it necessity rather than chance), but we are not, so we can’t. Rather, in our imagination, repetition “does not constitute time any more than it causes it to disappear; it indicates only its constantly aborted moment of birth.”11 In this sense, the dissolution of chaos is “an infinite speed of birth and disappearance”12—such dissolution is the condition and paradox of repetition insofar as two things must first be indistinguishable in order to repeat. But it is this repetition and preservation that we do sense. On the other end of the spectrum, as we saw with the dream (III; 3b), chaos can involve an “infinitely dilated” movement, “so relaxed that the preceding moment has disappeared when the following appears”13—hence the uncompromising and forgotten experience of difference where oneiric situations are incoherent and disconnected. The distinction between order and chaos thus rests in gauging some periodicity to repetition or some coherence to what differs: dreams are chaotic, and the “world” is chaotic, until we have periodicity in our perception and affection, or connection in our thought. Chaos, therefore, is not a dark, malevolent force of nothingness that surrounds and waits for us. We do not need to be overwhelmed with the feeling of existential dread when considering what is “out there” if “chaos is not disorder” or the “absence of determination,” but is instead the absence of “connection between determinations,”14 as D&G claim. As they insist, chaos is “a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual . . . drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference.”15 We would thus be more appropriately confused, frustrated, or exhausted by chaos than terrified. Chaos is not nothing, and it is not “everything”— it is the absence only of connection and of distinction as all determinations incessantly move, disappear, and reappear. It is what Deleuze calls the virtual: a reflection or latent state of the world, containing all potential permutations or manifestations. It is unpredictable not because it involves fire and fury in its malevolence, but because of its infinite speed, movement, and complexity.

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How, then, do we avoid being overwhelmed by chaos? As we saw in Deleuze’s reading of Foucault (I; 11), and as he claims with Guattari, we form a sense of stability, reality, or a “middle” by virtue of milieus; habits arguably form and are formed by milieus (II; 6). We have also seen that Blanchot’s milieu of the imaginary is absolute, and that the dream lacks any milieu or medium (III; 10). Habit, in this new sense, is our first response to chaos: habits make “our case” last, engendering a “living present” that moves from the past, retaining the continuity of one thing in the next. In short, habit stabilizes through repetition. But the paradox of habit is that its repetitions are built on chaos: in both repetition’s aborted moment of birth and chaos’s disappearance in appearance, there is a void of dissolution with infinite speed in the present moment (hence Deleuze’s claim that “the present is not” but is “outside itself ”: II; 6). In this regard, D&G claim that “Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes.”16 Such infinite speed has nothing to do with movement: “This is not a movement from one determination to the other but, on the contrary, the impossibility of a connection between them, since one does not appear without the other having already disappeared,”17 which, as Deleuze notes in another study, “occur[s] in a period of time shorter than the shortest continuous period imaginable.”18 In short, such speed concerns not movement, but time that, as we will see in our study of cinema (VIII; 1b), is not bound by cycles, measurement, or linearity. Habits, insofar as they occupy the living present, are also implicated by time that ceaselessly “becomes” or never “is.” Milieus are also stable insofar as they are, as we have seen (I; 12), “territorialized” or arranged to form an assemblage with a function or aim external to it. But this assemblage is a differential state that operates on repetition within milieus much like Deleuze’s second synthesis of time idealizes the past by repeating it. D&G’s notion of “deterritorialization” thus operates much like the third synthesis of time: by ungrounding repetition, or in this case, carrying off the features of milieus and assemblages that were territorialized toward chaos (losing their function). While deterritorialization will be explored in the following chapter on Kafka, here we consider that the milieu was never simply a real environment that could be regulated and in which we could be disciplined; rather it is order as a form of chaos. As Deleuze says of the milieu in Dialogues, “The middle [milieu] has nothing to do with an average, it is not . . . a form of moderation. On the contrary, it’s a matter of absolute speed.”19 In other words, the manner in which a milieu is in the midst of or “between” its repetitions remains complicated and enveloped by the absolute speed beneath its repetitions which, seen from the perspective of chaos, has no form or retention (appearing in disappearance); this is perhaps why D&G can say that chaos is “the milieu of all milieus.”20 Thus if habits—from perception to affection—are formed by and within the periodicity of milieus (I; 13), Deleuze’s oft-cited statement that “The essence of a thing never appears at the outset, but in the middle [au milieu], in the course of its development, when its strength is assured”21 garners new significance. It is the milieu or “middle” that develops the speed of difference through concrete repetition: this is its force or strength. Habits, then—aside from their exhaustion—are also open to the speed of change and difference, to “deterritorialization,” to which, as we will see, art provides deliberate and careful access.

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2.b. From dream to art: the plane of composition, movement, and speed The milieu as middle and medium, as repetition and movement, returns us to Blanchot’s notion of incessance: such a movement is, in the dream, immobilized in that it has no orientation or reference in itself. In D&G’s terms, for all intent and purpose, we are “immobile” if we approach a horizon that only shifts as we approach it: there is no “speed” in such a movement, because we cannot tell how fast we are going without reference points. The space is one where movement is infinite because it is not possible despite that something is always happening. The immobile point may be absent, but it is also always present in our unending movement toward it, provoking an experience where absence unleashes the normal coordinates of experience. It is what Blanchot calls a “desert without ruins”22—the proximity of interminable events. The immobile mobility of the dream, however, lacks the determined milieus or media of art and fiction. This is why, as we saw, the dream poses problems without solutions and questions without answers: we do not think in the dream (III; 10). However, art goes one step further: it implies answers to questions and solutions to problems in what is impossible to sense—thought. The dream is thus chaotic insofar as it lacks the connection of thought: the dream is the scattered, unstructured space unthinkable to thought—perhaps the most radical and “urgent” domain of problems and questions that would force us to think (were it not forgotten). The movements in a dream may be determined and different, but they are perhaps “indifferent to each other,” an “ocean of dissemblance,” to use a phrase of Deleuze’s.23 In fact, absolute expansion, where “duration that is infinitely slackened and relaxed places its moments outside one another [such that] one must have disappeared when the other appears,”24 is precisely the infinite movement and lack of speed required for thinking. As we will see, artistic fiction also draws us into an unthinkable space (V–VI)—but by displacing and disguising ideas rather than the absence of Blanchot’s “first night” (neither of which can be located or revealed). Thus, if the dream is a sort of chaos, then it is only chaotic from the perspective of thought: both are fully grounded in sensation. What, then, is the role of chaos in art? In our everyday world, power, through regularity and discipline, avoids or eliminates chaos. However, as D&G insist, chaos is an ally of art. Thus, if everyday habits involve perceptions and affections tied to life, art, like the dream, draws those sensations into unlivable milieus that “frame” forces of chaos. Unlike the dream, however, art confronts chaos by “composing” it in order “to produce a sensation that defies every opinion and cliché.”25 This leads to D&G’s “plane of composition of art” that preserves (or “monumentalizes”) sensations (affects and percepts) within some artistic medium. But this is not all there is to it, since, as we have seen, affects and percepts involve the imperceptible and insensible (III; 2). In this sense, “composition is the sole definition of art” 26 insofar as its materials are drawn, composed, or deterritorialized onto a “cosmos” or chaos. Like the infinite speed or void of the present moment that disappears in appearing, the plane of composition “dissolve[s] the identity of the place”:27 it is not reality that art mediates us to, nor is it Blanchot’s “first night”; rather, it is Blanchot’s “unreality” that paradoxically involves “all of reality.” Therefore, we can now make a

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crucial connection between D&G and Blanchot: D&G’s plane of composition parallels the absent totality of Blanchot’s outside. Here, however, the absolute slowness or immobility beyond the movement of the world in the dream, which incessantly draws affection to the insensible and perception to the imperceptible, becomes the absolute speed of the present moment that disappears in appearing, or that, in Deleuze’s language, “comes undone as it occurs” (II; 6). Repetition, in art, is thus undone not by going beyond its expansion towards oblivion, but by going towards the imperceptible and insensible conditions under which it repeats, which are the very indeterminate connections of thought. And yet, as we will see, thought is entirely immanent to the repetitions and milieus of its development (IV; 5a–c).

3.a. The plane of immanence, incessant movement, and Blanchot’s outside: the “unthinkable” of thought The perceptive and affective encounter with a work of art may be unthinkable, but the work of art may nevertheless be implicated by ideas: it is that very unthinkable encounter that provokes genuine thinking. In this sense, it is just as important that thought is liberated from its exercise of judgment in a world of knowledge and power as it is that the way we normally perceive and feel is liberated from that world. In this case, rather than the “sentiendum” which involves the “insensible of sensation” in the material of art, “the ground is borne within thought—still as the unthought and unthinking . . . the transcendent element which can only be thought”28 within, but, never itself given as, the milieus or the mediums of art, imagination, and memory. In short, the thought that envelops the work of art does not take as its object what can be recognized or logically explained. Rather, it takes as its object what cannot, because it can “only be sensed”: it pushes beyond its limits and its proper, “logical” exercise. That is, we do not “think” what we can attribute to actual things or possibilities; rather, thought takes as its object a movement which appears as the differential varieties of repetition but is actually in differential relations with the movement or force of affect and percept: thought occurs on what D&G call a “plane of immanence.” But what is the plane of immanence? D&G, with reference to Blanchot, define the plane of immanence as the unthinkable movement of thought. In these terms, if the plane of composition concerns Blanchot’s space of divergence and difference, the plane of immanence concerns Blanchotian incessance and repetition. It is here that D&G’s reference to Blanchot to define the plane of immanence becomes crucial: infinite movement takes place in what they call an “absolute milieu” and what Blanchot calls an “indeterminate milieu”; here, D&G cite his characterization of the outside from The Space of Literature as the intrusive intimacy “which has no location and affords no rest” where “fascination reigns”:29 We will say that THE plane of immanence is, at the same time, that which must be thought and that which cannot be thought. It is the nonthought within thought . . .

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It is the most intimate within thought and yet the absolute outside—an outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside deeper that any internal world: it is immanence, [in Blanchot’s terms,] “intimacy as the Outside, the exterior become the intrusion that stifles, and the reversal of both the one and the other”—the incessant to-ing and fro-ing of the plane, infinite movement.30

In these terms, the plane of immanence is not thought itself, but the unthinkable object of thought which draws us into an incessant movement: Deleuze’s “immanence” becomes Blanchot’s incessance in that both concern the experience of what Blanchot, as in the dream, calls a “pure approach”31 (III; 4) which lacks origin and destination (or in Deleuze’s terms, which is interminably divided into past and future). Furthermore, in D&G’s words, the “speed [of thought] requires a milieu that moves infinitely in itself—the plane, the void, the horizon.”32 How is this beyond the internal and external world? Whenever we attribute truth or reality to our habits, imagination, memory, perception, affection, or even dreams, an internal or external world is formed; however, when we are drawn towards the limits and impossibilities of the internal and external world, where the movement of imagination, perception, and so on becomes incessant, we are “forced to think” their relations. Being drawn towards these limits returns us to Blanchot’s “radical reversal” outside of possibility (II; 1 and 5, III; 11): in D&G’s terms, there is a reversal of that which is more distant than the exterior and closer than the interior. The plane involves incessant movement (closer than the interior) drawing us towards ungraspable difference (beyond the exterior). If thought, however, occurs within relations formed on the plane of immanence, this does not mean that it moves infinitely as well: thought may have infinite speed, but “concepts are the infinite speeds of finite movements”33 because they concern the relation of milieus (and, as we will see in section 4, of affects and percepts). Here the status of the event in relation to the dream can be revisited: the incessant movement within the dream’s indeterminate milieu—that is, Deleuze’s virtual which may be actual but has no presence—is also thought’s “unthinkable” domain which draws it forward. In their characterization of the event specifically in terms of movement on the plane of immanence, D&G note that “Blanchot says that it is necessary to distinguish between” that which can be accomplished and that which “reality cannot bring to completion, the interminable that neither stops nor begins.”34 It is reality, but reality without coherence. D&G call this a “reserve” of becoming: “it neither begins nor ends but has gained or kept the infinite movement to which it gives consistency.”35 This is Deleuze’s (un)reality of the virtual: indeterminate, and for Blanchot, interminable and “without relation to myself,”36 where accomplishments are not actualized (e.g., growing older, suffering, falling in love, witnessing injustice, etc.). Here, thought replaces action (i.e., possibility in a Foucauldian world of truth and reality) insofar as we think relations between past and future, as though all potential events criss-crossed and intersected. We are, in short, in a Blanchotian “(non-)relation” to reality (in a Deleuzian sense, real but not actual), an impossible relation, rather than one wherein we can realize our actions. Movement on the plane of immanence is not immaterial, however, but concerns matter, milieu, and material: Blanchot’s outside, in this respect, is not an absent totality

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but, as Deleuze claims, is “a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements.”37 In his work on cinema, Deleuze will emphasize that the “infinite set of all images constitutes a kind of plane of immanence. The image exists in itself, on this plane. This in-itself of the image is matter.”38 He also insists that the plane of immanence is “the material universe,” where “movement-image and matter are identical.”39 In these terms, the plane of immanence is not formed matter, but it also is not the total absence of form: it is, to return to the virtual, the state of matter in movement; the potentiality of matter; the incessant transformation of form—“the flux of the sensible, . . . movement and change without identity or law.”40 It is the chaos of impressions prior to their discernment. In Blanchot’s terms, if we are fascinated by the unreality of the image (as with the cadaver’s dissimulation: II; 2), then the absence underlying the image and providing it with a semblance of reality does not make images “absent” or without form; rather, they are always and only present, albeit obscure, and their dissemblance or changing form (and in D&G’s terms, changing affect) has no origin or limitation. In a space where receding and arrival coincide, the “movement” of anything—of loving and falling in love, of the body in pain, of witnessing an injustice, and so on—does not have a proper ending or beginning. In this sense, Blanchot’s imaginary is not the “cosmic” or immaterial universe of the plane of composition; it is Deleuze’s foundation or earth, the matter or material of movement: “it is a plane of immanence that constitutes the absolute soil [le sol] of philosophy, its earth . . . its foundation [fondation].”41 But what is this absolute soil, this “infinite movement”? It is Deleuze’s first passive synthesis of time (II; 6) which provides a lens into the infinite movement of the plane of immanence. Here, such unlimited movement, like the repetition of habit, “concerns the soil, and shows how something is established on this soil . . . the moving soil occupied by the passing present.”42 In other words, such movement preserves or establishes what repeats, but like Blanchot’s dream, it is “an immobile movement” that cannot be “gotten to the bottom of ”43 (it is without a beginning and an ending). As D&G note, this soil (sol), terrain, or milieu is precisely the infinite movement of “the earth inasmuch as it neither moves nor is at rest . . . [it] constantly carries out a movement of deterritorialization on the spot”:44 for itself it lacks the Foucauldian territorialization of actions around aims. This moving soil or matter, which is the repetition of this absolute milieu, however, was always implicated by difference: as Deleuze insists, the immateriality of such contraction “is what causes the present to pass, that to which the present and habit belong, which must be considered the ground [fondement] of time . . . At the moment when it grounds itself [within] habit, memory must be grounded by another passive synthesis distinct from that of habit.”45 As we have seen, the repetition of contraction always belonged to the difference that implicated and “pre-existed” it. It is for this reason that Deleuze can say, “the ground [of difference] comes rather from the sky, it goes from the summit to the foundations.”46 In other words, the living soil of the earth is implicated not by what is “underneath” it, but beyond it: the sky, the cosmos—which is how D&G depict the plane of composition—always above or beyond the soil and the earth (e.g., the cosmos), while still implicating it. This is the absent totality of the cosmos that deframes or holds together all movements within it.

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3.b. Chaos and the intersection of the planes of immanence and composition A movement without beginning or end is an inconceivable chaotic force or pressure that can only be sensed, while something that chaotically disappears in appearing cannot be experienced or grasped by the senses but can only be thought. The very exercise of one faculty is chaos precisely to the other. But what of chaos itself? Like Blanchot’s indeterminate milieu of fascination, chaos includes or envelops all movements; it also absolutely develops all forms, all qualities, all sensations, all milieus within an indiscernible totality: it is the complicated state of infinite speed and infinite movement. It is not, in this sense, the role of sensations to traverse the insensible and cosmic dimension of chaos; rather, it is the role of thought to connect determinations and the sensory with a speed that can become cognizant of their relations (instead of forgotten, as in the infinite slowness of the dream). From the perspective of thinking, then, the simultaneous “[a] ppearance in disappearance” of the plane of composition is not just sensation’s insensible origin, but the very power or condition of connections that can “only be thought.” Like the cosmos of composition, concepts that are genuine ideas of difference, as we will see, have no reality: they are indeterminate (IV; 5c). In this sense, the intractable, nonexistent nature of the present moment, the “now” that never really is, parallels the intractable, nonexistent totality or glue that holds together the past and the future. Technically speaking, if the plane of composition involved the insensible origin of sensation, where all repetition and qualities were indistinguishable (different in themselves), appearing and disappearing with an infinite speed, that indistinguishability also implied the ground (fondement) of memory and the groundlessness of time itself. The plane of immanence is the development or explication of thought—thought’s (unthinkable) material, its milieu, its “examples.” The plane of composition, by contrast, is the insensible of sensation—its sentiendum, insofar as sensation (affects and percepts) cannot “think” the relations or differences within its contractions in the process of sensing them, but can only experience their impressions. The plane of composition implicates sensation, insofar as we cannot sense the dissolution—which is also the difference—within or between the qualities that the imagination contracts (and arguably, insofar as such sensations can be composed conceptually, those concepts, as we will see shortly, “solve” the “problem” that sensations pose). The type of becoming that takes place here is distinct from dream, enveloped by the speed of chaos and of thought, paralleling the shift from Deleuze’s first to the second and third syntheses of time. Just as the difference beneath the repetition of habit served as the “final ground” or groundlessness of time (where “pre-existence” was “playing the role of the ground” when “contemporaneous with itself as present,” in terms of the “the in-itself of time as the final ground of the passage of time”),47 so too does the absent totality of the aesthetic universe (and the connections made in each moment in the mind of those experiencing the artwork) unground the sensations of a given work of art, as its “becoming” or difference. How, then, these planes intersect concerns precisely what D&G claim “occupies” or “populates” them, and ultimately their respective “deterritorializations.” As they state, “The plane of composition of art and the plane of immanence of philosophy can slip

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into each other to the degree that parts of one may be occupied by entities of the other.”48 Technically speaking, concepts “occupy” or “populate” the plane of immanence just as affects and percepts occupy or populate the plane of composition: they are their respective “entities.” However, when the two planes “slip into each other,” it is perhaps because they both have a “deterritorializing” effect on sensations and concepts, respectively. The distinction is as follows: on the one hand, “the plane of composition involves sensation in a higher deterritorialization,”49 coupling or dispersing affects and percepts in a cosmic field, sky, or immaterial “universe” that exceeds their livability. On the other hand, when D&G claim that the plane of immanence is the “absolute soil [le sol] of philosophy,”50 they note that it is its “deterritorialization” in that the genetical element of thinking is precisely the affects and percepts themselves that are not thinkable. Crucial here is that if the entities of the plane of composition develop ideas, it is likewise the case that the entities of the plane of immanence implicate affects and percepts (each “deterritorializes” the other). If the plane of immanence is the unthinkable of thought, and the plane of composition is the insensible of sensation, then each plane is also the complicated or chaotic state of the very entities that are deterritorialized by the plane of its counterpart. The infinite speed of thought corresponds to the transformational or differential state beneath “matter” on the plane of composition: both thought and the plane occupy a space absent of form, and of the present moment without past or future (pure becoming). Likewise, the infinite movement of the plane of immanence corresponds to the incessant state of affects and percepts that have lost their relative movements or bearings (as affections and perceptions) to become absolute or infinite in their movement. Unlike the dream, where affects and percepts are displaced and disguised by the absent totality of the night, here they are composed by the absent totality of their composition—which may be “occupied” by concepts. But why do percepts, affects, and concepts need to be “deterritorialized” in the first place? It is because both lived sensations (affections and perceptions) and representational concepts constitute territorial assemblages; for affects and percepts to “exceed the lived” in their becoming, and for concepts to involve difference or becoming, they must be “deterritorialized.” Exploring such becomings within the plane of immanence as the soil of philosophy and the plane of composition as the sky or universe, however, ultimately requires a detour through the paradoxes of implication and explication in Deleuze’s syntheses of time.

3.c. The implication of ideas and development of sensation: the difference of repetition; the repetition of difference We are now at a turning point, where we must reconsider the fundamental paradoxes of repetition and difference, and of explication and implication, with regard to sensation and thought. We have seen that affections and perceptions involve the contraction and sensation that make and are made by stable milieus—warding off chaos. As we will see, these affections and perceptions become the “blocs of sensation”— the affects and percepts—peculiar to art when they are carried off by the chaos of the plane of composition (IV; 4a–b). Repetition, in this case, is implicated by, and develops,

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difference. We have also seen how thought may at first concern attribution (logical or representational concepts), much like the second passive synthesis of time can become generic by idealizing the past (I; 12). This will lead us ultimately to the genuine concept (IV; 5c), which concerns “copresent” differences, and the rhythm of the “between” or relation of milieus, just as the second passive synthesis of time concerned the paradox of pre-existence in the past and ground that never “was,” which gives way to the groundless consistence or insistence of differences underneath that ground in the third synthesis. Concepts, in this case, are carried off by the chaos of the plane of immanence—the coexistence of all repetition. Difference, here, implicates and is developed by repetition. But what does it mean to be “carried off ”? What is this deterritorializing effect of chaos? And perhaps most crucially, if both the domain of art and sensation on the one hand and the domain of memory and thinking on the other hand involve their own ways of differing and repeating, what is the difference that is repetition and the repetition that is difference in the chaos of eternal return? And how can this chaotic effect of each plane be understood in terms of their respective “entities” of sensation (affects and percepts) and concepts—that is, their relative movements and speeds, forces and intensities, and most of all, their repetition and difference? Chaos complicates both the planes of immanence and of composition, and constitutes both planes—the soil and the sky: it is both absolute movement and its dissolution. Here we can consider each plane separately in the relation of its entities to chaos (that is, how each plane makes thought and sensation chaotic). As D&G note, if “the plane of immanence [is] a movable and moving [soil],”51 the absolute milieu, it fractures or fragments the concept because concepts cannot “think” the plane’s continuous and uninterrupted movements of fusion and contraction (nor do those movements form a totality, since their chaotic relations are not conceivable as a whole). Likewise, if the plane of composition is the immaterial sky, the rhythm of the “universe” or “cosmos” that “dissolve[s] the identity of the place,”52 then, as we will see shortly, our affections and perceptions cannot sense the speed of this dissolution because such chaotic dissolution is beyond all movement, making affections and perceptions affects and percepts. But the affect and percept exposed to the absolute speed of thought is distinct from the absolute slowness of the dream that we saw in the previous chapter: in this case, it is within the space of composition that can only be thought as eternal return or the third synthesis of time. As Deleuze says of Nietzsche’s eternal return, “A broken Earth corresponds to a fractured sky”: if concepts are the fractured conceptions of relations from the sky within the earth (“between milieus”), affects and percepts are the dissolved (coupled, dissipated, deformed) and “broken” movements that are carried from the earth toward the sky. We will see that concepts are the intensive, fractured “ordinates” that find a position with the infinitely moving (“unthinkable”) matter of the plane of immanence (IV; 5a–c); affects and percepts are likewise, as we will see (IV; 4a–b), vital forces that are broken by “exceeding the lived”—exposed to “inhuman” or “cosmic” forces that are unlivable (insensible). But the plane of composition is the formlessness of absolute dissolution, the “black nothingness” of difference that does not cease to differ. By contrast, plane of immanence is the incessant play of forces, the “white nothingness” or movement of the “soil” underneath all movements, like our movement toward the immobile point of the rotation of the earth.

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We can now precisely define the form of and relationship between each plane and the entities that may occupy them surrounding the paradoxes of difference and repetition. While sensations occupy the plane of composition, they also are formed by the plane of immanence (but are nevertheless distinct from the plane of immanence); likewise, while thought occupies the plane of immanence, it is formed by the plane of composition (but is also distinct from the plane of composition). The way this works concerns the dynamic between difference and repetition that we found in Deleuze’s syntheses of time (II; 6–8). Indeed, the plane of immanence involves the very same infinite movement that is unthinkable to thought precisely because it is formed by sensations which express the repetition of difference (variety)—the duration or force of that which we apprehend. But the plane of immanence itself, insofar as it is the incessant movement that continually reforms percepts and affects, drawing them toward or away from perceivable and sensible milieus or bodies, is repetition as difference—an amorphous state of continually changing form (hence its perpetual movement), an absolute horizon or “soil”; in fact, with these considerations in mind, affects and percepts involve forms—in all their variety—and the plane of immanence involves amorphous and incessantly changing form (formless form) (V; 10, VII; 2b; VIII; 1a, 4, and 5b). The plane of immanence can thus be contrasted to the plane of composition, insofar as the plane of composition is the state of difference as repetition (formlessness); concepts occupy that space as the difference of repetition (variation), conceiving how relations change from one movement to another. It is only the complicated state of chaos, or eternal return, where repetition is difference and difference is repetition. In this sense, it is not as if we experience the sensation founded in immanence as change and difference (even if it is obviously transformational), nor is the thought grounded in composition actually similarity and sameness (even if it “repeats” through iteration or variation). The distinctions that can be broken down as follows: ●

●

●

●

Concepts (speed of thought) → difference of repetition (variation); implicates affects and percepts, developed by the plane of immanence; complicated by the plane of composition in art. Plane of immanence → repetition as difference (absolute horizon); infinite movement; develops concepts; complicates and intertwines affects/percepts and complicated throughout the plane of composition. Affect/percept (in art) → repetition of difference (variety); implicated by the plane of composition in art; develops concepts; complicated by the plane of immanence. Plane of composition → difference as repetition (absolute dissolution); disappearance in appearance, formlessness of the present; implicates affects and percepts of art; complicates concepts and complicated within the plane of immanence.

One must not mistake the directionality of implication or explication with regard to the difference and repetition of the two planes: only difference implicates repetition, while only repetition explicates difference, and not the other way around. Thus, on the one hand, only difference implicates: the difference of repetition, incarnated by the variations of the concept that traverse “an order without distance,”53 involves the

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infinite speed that envelops distances, allowing for conceptions of relations and connections between the disparate. Likewise, the plane of composition, the absolute relation or non-relation—whether considered as the present moment without past or future (difference as pure becoming), a now that constantly disappears and appears, or as Blanchot’s absence of origin of the work of art or oblivion of dreams—implicates all of the movements that pass through it. On the other hand, then, just as difference implicates, only repetition explicates or develops: it is only through the “similitude” of repetition—the fusion or contraction through the imagination where indistinguishability reigns—that affects and percepts can displace or disguise themselves through their unleashed movement (losing their bearings on objects or relations to subjects, beginnings or endings). Likewise, the plane of immanence develops because it is an unending transformation of form and matter, the virtual potential of all reality, that allows everything to pass; it is the horizon which recedes as we advance toward it, and which therefore always must be crossed even if it cannot be crossed— making it incessant in its obstinate ungraspability (testifying to its affinity with Blanchot’s outside). Hence the plane of immanence is the matter or material of art, and the affects and percepts are composed by this material, but the composition itself—the thought or spirit of the work—is what draws the affects and percepts beyond their material limits. Art therefore may work through the movements of the imaginary, but art thinks and ideas are capable of “composing” a work of art. As D&G claim, “Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts.”54 Even if thought is impossible to sense—that is, impossible to think within and throughout the experience of the work of art—it occupies the same space as the plane of composition, just as the plane of composition is the deterritorializing, insensible element of sensation. This is because insofar as concepts are implicated at the very heart of affects and percepts, as the differential element “between” the contractions or repetitions that make sensation what it is, they also serve as the insensible element of sensation which may be the very force that composes the events, or that places the movements of a fictional work or artistic experience—however “incessant” and “ungraspable” it may be (in Blanchotian terms)—in relation to one another. In other words, the plane of immanence is the virtual domain, the “unreality” or world of the work of fiction, which makes us move through the Blanchotian indeterminate milieu; meanwhile, the plane of composition is the absence or void which creates the very conditions for such a fictional world (V; 2 and 10)—just as Blanchot’s first night created the conditions for the other night of the dream. This void, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, is the immaterial “universe” or “cosmos” that, from Blanchot’s vantage point, would “have no reality.” As we will see (V; 4–5, VIII; 2a–c), this composition may be achieved initially by virtue of the artistic medium’s doublings, refractions, or bifurcations, where real and imaginary, or true and false, oscillate (where affects and percepts are thus displaced and disguised by more affects and percepts); or, in a higher sense, where the unreal and untrue are only displaced and disguised by ideas, drawing the medium to the immediate (V; 3b). Thus the affects and percepts of art that, in their materiality, populate such an unreality and absent totality are displacements and disguises of the problems and questions which are developed—or that “move”—along a plane of immanence; however, such affects

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and percepts are at the same time implicated by concepts that are the inexplicable solutions to the problems and answers to the questions. Instead of the first night of the dream, we have the conceptual space of the cosmos (which is immaterial, but nevertheless “persists” and “consists” in the artistic media). It is in this manner that art may “force us to think”: the movements, percepts, and affects that art expresses and develops are unthinkable to thought, but like Blanchotian fascination, impossible to ignore insofar as they grip our imagination.

4.a. The affects and percepts of art: “framing” chaos in Blanchot’s “radical reversal” In order to shift to the affects and percepts of art, we now revisit the relationship between affection and perception in a world of truth and reality, as well as reversals of affect and percept via the syntheses of time from Chapter II and the displacements and disguises of Chapter III. Now, if our habits are formed by virtue of the provocations and seductions attached to life and prosperity, our perception is formed habitually, by and within “real” panoptic and regulated milieus, while our affections are provoked by the possibilities, norms, aims, and “truths” of various practices. But what is perception for itself, outside of reality? Perception alone, in its formation of milieus and by milieus, is established as the materiality of repetition and sensation—whether “real” or imaginary. Indeed, perception establishes itself by virtue of a given milieu, medium, and surrounding: it is “within”; hence the link we have considered between perception and reality (I; 13, II; 6). Likewise, in everyday experience affects are trapped as generic affections whenever the first synthesis of repetition falls back onto expectation (II; 6) and is not drawn into genuine difference (II; 8): such expectations are generic affections that color and distort perception and repetition (hence expectation becomes partiality or prejudice). But, outside of reality, the affect itself is a special kind of sensation. It is the intensity or change in a bodily state (à la Spinoza), and thus has a more tenuous relation to form and milieus in its differential state. Affects can also trigger memory, searching for truth, as in the case of Deleuze’s Proustian jealous lover who begins a search that leads to endless displacements (II; 7). Affects thus occupy the “in betweens” of, but are completely bound to, the movements of sensation and percepts (of habitual “stimulation and response”), as well as layers of memory or within milieus, but can involve paradoxically coexistent totalities. Like concepts, affects involve difference and are indeterminate, as they resonate from past to present,55 but unlike ideas, they are “unthinkable” (even if they “force us to think”), entirely bound to percepts and movement as what D&G call a “compound of sensation”: the very truths which affects seek are inexplicable (always displaced, never found) without becoming generic (concepts, as we will see, are also inexplicable: IV; 5c). However, when the second synthesis of genuine difference and affect falls back onto mythologizing and idealizing their repetitions, this can lead to a generic or generalized “repetition” and perception of the past; here, percepts are likewise trapped as generic perceptions: such idealizations are generic perceptions that color and distort affection and difference (II; 7). In sum, if reality is only problematized through

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percepts, its foundation (fondation) is a movement and differential state of affections; likewise, if truth is only questioned through affects, its ground (fondement) is the milieus of perception. It takes the intertwinement of both questions and problems, of affects and percepts, to be drawn into the “radical reversal” beyond truths and realities of power. But the affect, an entirely determined movement, does not “implicate” as the indeterminacy of pure becoming does (or as concepts do). Thus, despite that affect involves a differential state, bound as it is to percepts in a compound of sensation, it concerns the explicating force of movement, and it, like percepts, in its determination, is implicated by difference as indeterminate (concepts). When percepts and affects are intertwined, they more precisely complicate each other on a plane of immanence (as a chaotic interplay of determination, immanent to each other), where the unlocatable displacement of the affect becomes the unrevealable disguise of the percept (and where the unlocatable and unrevealable is the very intensity of pure difference that implicates the movement of affect and percept). There are three states of either affection–perception or affect–percept at play, which begin in our world of truth and reality, then reverse those truths and realities, before finally creating their own dynamic. First we have the generic intertwinement of affections and perceptions whose realities and truths are a function of power relations that purport to foster life (I, VII); second, the initial reversal of power wherein the perceptual is hollowed out (becoming unreal) while nevertheless distorting a generic affect, or vice versa, wherein the affective is hollowed out (becoming untrue) while nevertheless mythologizing the imaginary or perceptual (V; 4 and 5, VIII; 2a–b); third, the ultimate reversal of power where the percept and affect disguise and displace an idea, in which case they function as a “compound of sensation . . . that . . . deterritorializes the system of opinion that brought together dominant perceptions and affections within a natural, historical, and social milieu.”56 Here we have to pause, as this initial reversal of power (the second state), as a segue to the “radical reversal,” itself entails two scenarios: first, while it is perception that is drawn to the imperceptible in the first synthesis of time (through the indiscernibility or repetition of the real and the imaginary), affection, as a differential state, maintains a generic relation to the past and future, and thus to truth (as a form of partiality or prejudice)—in dream or art, truth thereby haunts a hollowed out reality.57 Second, while it is affection that is drawn into the insensible in the second synthesis of time (through the coexisting layers of the past and differing states of truth and falsity), perception maintains a generic relation to the present, and thus to reality, insofar as it “repeats” (in a form of mythologizing or idealizing)—in dream or art, reality haunts a hollowed out truth. However, in the radical reversal beyond power, and the final scenario of affect–percept at play, the interior becomes coextensive with the exterior (Intro, II; 4, IV; 1) as a “compound of sensation.” This entails the mutual displacement of affects and disguise of percepts by a genuine transformation or, in art, by ideas; that is, the first synthesis (of the unreal and imaginary) is drawn by the second (of the untrue and false) toward that which has no truth and no reality: becoming. How affects and percepts undergo such a distinctive transformation in art, however, requires another detour through Blanchot. Our affective states may or may not be tied to the existence of truth (and reality)— tied to existence, as Spinoza would have it, they may make us active or may make us

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servile. But tied to inexistence, we encounter Blanchot’s “radical reversal” of art, which builds on his characterization of death as impossible (and its incessance and ungraspability: II; 5). Here we can juxtapose a Blanchotian affect to a Deleuzo-Spinozist affect; for this, we return to the negligent anonymity of Blanchot’s mortality (II; 2), now in its alignment with the work of art: The affirmation that in man all is possibility requires that death itself be possible . . . But what is art, and what can we say of literature? . . . If [man] has art, does this not mean that, contrary to his apparently authentic definition—the requirement which is in harmony with the law of the day—he entertains with death a relation which is not that of possibility, which does not lead to mastery . . . but exposes him to a radical reversal? . . . The end, in this perspective, would no longer be that which gives man the power to end—to limit, separate, and thus to grasp—but the infinite . . .58

Here we have Blanchot’s insistence that art, like death, exposes us to a “radical reversal”: the incessance of an experience that, in this case, is an affirmative movement that admits to no goal or “end,” while also fascinating us despite our inability to grasp it (II; 3 and 5). This radical reversal that occurs outside of “the law of the day,” like the dream that appears through the dissimulation of the night, admits to no possibility: there is no reality to give it a beginning and ending, and no truth through which to grasp it. Thus, if the Spinozist affect is tied to action and existence (as preservation, which is quite vulnerable to Foucauldian provocations of power), with the role of nonexistence relegated to affection within the imagination (as in his famous “Winged horse” example),59 then, by contrast, for Blanchot, this nonexistence is a source of affirmation in the domains of dream and art. Our passion, our affect, is no longer bound to truth, but also is not simply delusional or a source of superstition, because it has no relation to the “law of the day.” This theme of affect drawn into the impossible is perhaps best exemplified in Blanchot’s comments on Kafka’s diary writing (where Kafka enters into the imaginary: V; 4): from one perspective, my affective state of possibility—for example, the expression, “I am unhappy”—may signify “an exhaustion of my forces.” But from another perspective, my expression of impossibility—for example, my claiming that it is impossible to live, to be happy, and so on—may signify “an increase in my forces” where “fiction’s narrative shapes a distance, a gap” or fissure and a “strange substitution” where we can no longer “find” or “recognize” ourselves.60 Here, perception and affection have been unleashed from their realities and truths, respectively, and hollowed out of their interiority—at first belonging to us, they have ultimately become impersonal—drawn by something remote and intractable in artistic expression. But how? Sensations are experienced as art when they leave what D&G call the “natural, historical, and social milieu”61of knowledge and power behind, and even the infinite slowness or “immobile mobility” of the dream, in favor of the “plane of composition” that can only be thought. That is, just as our habitual realities and personal, affective truths can be carried off and transformed by the third synthesis of time, in what Deleuze calls a “dissolved self” and what Blanchot calls “anonymous passion,”62 so too, then, can perceptions and affections of art be caught in a “becoming”: unlike percept and affect in dream, here the “compound” of percepts and affects, D&G’s “bloc of sensation,” is “monumentalized” in some artistic

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form. Indeed, unlike dream, art composes by virtue of some expression: words on a page, paint on a canvas, moving images on a screen. In this manner, the reality that we perceive habitually and the truth that we believe intellectually—that is, the active generic expectations and idealizations of Deleuze’s first two syntheses of time—become indiscernible and inexplicable when composed artistically. Thus, sensation is made relative to some framework but is also “deframed”: whether a figure, a subverted expectation, an “interface,” or a system of “points and counterpoints,” it was always “the system of opinion that brought together dominant perceptions and affections within a natural, historical, and social milieu … At the same time the plane of composition involves sensation in a higher deterritorialization, making it pass through a sort of deframing which opens it up and breaks it open onto an infinite cosmos.”63 This cosmos, often referred to by D&G as a “chaosmos” (chaos + cosmos)64 is where deterritorialization takes a milieu’s qualities outside of the assemblage such that they are expressive of becoming rather than of the similarity, sameness, and stability inherent to stable, territorialized milieus. It is in this sense that perception and affection go beyond “those who experience” or “undergo” them (III; 2). Thus, if “[a]rt takes a bit of chaos in a frame in order to form a composed chaos that becomes sensory, or from which it extracts a chaoid sensation as variety,” then “the plane of composition involves sensation in a higher deterritorialization,”65 coupling or dispersing forces in a cosmic field that “exceeds any lived,” habitual reality (or even generic expectation, as with genre conventions: VIII; 3c). The percepts and affects of art “exceed the lived”—and the values related to life—by virtue of the Blanchotian imaginary that “knows nothing of life.” This vast, absent totality within Blanchot’s imaginary is in fact the groundlessness of the D&G’s cosmos or plane of composition. Indeed, affects and percepts change their form or transform in movement by virtue of the plane of immanence, but are drawn toward the formless and into time by virtue of the plane of composition. Like Deleuze’s living presence of contraction, the percepts and affects of art involve the “preservation” of a transformation or “becoming” within some material, but unlike Deleuze’s organic synthesis, such compounds of sensation occupy the absent totality of the plane of composition. In this sense, such affects and percepts are constituted by the milieus of the plane of immanence, and insofar as milieus are “a bloc of space-time, since the time of the movement which is at work within it is part of it every time,”66 sensation takes on a form of movement that may become more or less transformed in a variety of ways, ultimately in relations beyond form and movement (that is, in relation to time), depending on the “cosmic” forces at work. To paraphrase D&G, such milieus can be “open to chaos” but intentionally, in a region “created” by such milieus themselves.67 Within such an opening, the infinite speed of the cosmos, which is change or time in its pure state, dissolves relations of form without altering their movement (a change in “speed” is not necessarily a change in movement): “since time is no longer subordinated to movement; time is the most radical form of change, but the form of change does not change.”68 We are back to the paradox of eternal return: there is still movement (the “form of change”), but that movement “does not change” because it is subordinate to “time”—to difference. Here we finally go beyond the incessant state of the plane of immanence; affects and percepts are now composed by that which exceeds their movement and livability. In this sense, the plane of immanence remains the absolute

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domain of problems and questions, while affections and perceptions, along with their realities and truths, are that which is problematized or put into question. The plane of composition, however, involves hidden, “lifeless,” and inexplicable solutions and answers, and it is here that thought and this plane converge. A crucial caveat is that affections and perceptions can be unleashed from possibility and relative movement to become questioning and problematizing, not only by art or thinking, but by Blanchot’s impossibility, which we have studied (II; 5) in the obscurity of death (II; 2) and dream (II; 6–8). In those cases, our world of truth and reality becomes a problem or question, but affects and percepts would not, as D&G put it, “institute” a plane of immanence of philosophy. This does not mean that we cannot think the dream retroactively, or think death; it means that when the plane does belong to art and thought, it involves a very “irrational” kind of development. As D&G claim, “Precisely because the plane of immanence is pre-philosophical and does not immediately take effect with concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess.”69 In Blanchotian terms, this is a distinction between inspiration and fascination: dreams (or what D&G call esoteric or excessive experiences) may inspire us in their transience and forgetfulness, but the work of art fascinates us. And concepts can perhaps choose their planes of immanence, their unthinkable milieus (even if the choice is not rational), in which case affects and percepts are drawn toward thought rather than toward the obscure, irrational, or impossible more broadly. Precisely how works of art involve affects and percepts, and can ultimately be composed conceptually, requires some illustrations and some further consideration of the nature of concepts.

4.b. Art: literature, painting, music While the following chapters will explore the literary composition of affects and percepts in depth (V–VI), it is useful here to consider illustrations of affects and percepts in literature, painting, and music that provide insight into percepts, sensation, and milieus (respectively). First, it is instructive to explore a frequent reference of D&G’s, which dovetails with Blanchot’s own commentary: Moby Dick. In this case, perception is drawn into imperceptible “becoming,” since the seer is no longer, as Blanchot would say, in a relation of possibility to what he sees. As D&G put it, “Ahab really does have perceptions of the sea, but only because he has entered into a relationship with Moby Dick that makes him a becoming-whale and forms a compound of sensations that no longer needs anyone: ocean.”70 In Blanchotian terms, Ahab is “gripped” or “seized” by that which is beyond the limits of perception, insofar as his pursuit of Moby Dick requires him to perceive the ocean via the whale. Ahab is carried off by the whiteness of the whale: a quality that is perceived but is also imperceptible insofar as the whale draws him towards his insatiable revenge and annihilation. What Ahab “sees”—and what he cannot see—is the death that will be delivered in his search for vengeance; hence the whale within the ocean—often too far away to see, merely a

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color on the horizon—disguises the problem of self-annihilation and displaces the question of revenge and control. As Blanchot says of this process, Ahab travels the impossible “distance” of narrative, where “what moves [the narrative] is transformation, which the empty fullness of this space demands,” where the “encounter” with Moby Dick is “always yet to come, so that he never stops going toward it by a relentless and disorderly pursuit”:71 an absolute or incessant movement, “immobile” in its fixation and in an ocean without many reference points. Here again we have an infinite movement, an “event” that transforms affects and percepts, drawing and composing them by virtue of that which is without form and does not exist: the idea of satisfaction through vengeance. As an object of fascination, it is the imperceptibility of the whale, impossible to confront, in its ambiguity around the death it implies, that would cause Ahab to perceive the imperceptible (or Melville to describe it); the obscurity of the value in such an impossible movement involves the anomalous and solitary—the unique point toward which we cannot advance and cannot master without annihilation. Deleuze’s analysis of Francis Bacon illustrates the relation between sensation and the insensible, which involves the effect of chaos on cliché visibility: as Deleuze insists, “it would be a mistake to think that the painter works on a white and virgin surface. The entire surface is already invested virtually with all kinds of clichés, which the painter will have to break with.”72 In other words, there is no such thing for Deleuze as creation ex nihilo, or an empty, blank canvas which the artist must fill with their images. Rather, the canvas is already filled with clichés, opinions, “ready-made perceptions,” habitual expectations, or what we might call normal and regular ways of seeing truth and reality. In this context, Deleuze argues that it is not the emptiness of a virgin surface, but the chaos within sensation that the painter engages: “Sensation is the opposite of the facile and the ready-made, the cliché,”73 insofar as it passes through the ready-made forms that we recognize by virtue of some dramatic utilization of the material of the artwork. In Bacon’s case, it is the deforming and distorting line and color that sabotage our ability to see the visible as cliché, much like the Blanchotian dissemblance of the corpse. Here, deformation does not resemble the images it deforms, but draws us into an experience of perceiving those images by virtue of the sensations expressed through them: carried off toward what we cannot see in the image. Even if it is something as simple as the 1967 Portrait of George Dyer and Lucian Freud, where Dyer’s head is in two places at once, we are drawn along a line or movement that is “absolute” as Bacon will “embrace” this “nonfigurative chaos.”74 The movement of the head is like a directional force with no beginning or end which we experience in the midst of or in the “middle” of the image; moreover, what it is drawn to itself has no form. What is beneath the cliché and emerges in such painting, Deleuze argues, is the chaos of forces, and the movement of sensation, insofar as “movement, for example, is an effect that refers . . . to a unique force that produces it,” whether forces of “isolation,” “deformation,” or “dissipation.”75 While this may not express ideas or obscure values to the same extent as fiction, it nevertheless reverses the effects of power in sabotaging cliché visibility. Music also occupies a special place in D&G’s characterization of milieus, assemblages, and territories, which illustrate the artistic effect of deterritorialization around the atemporal (or the difference inherent to time and becoming). If milieus are dogmatic in

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their “meter,” “rhythm” is always between milieus themselves, and thus a-metrical, “passing from one milieu to another.”76 In other words, insofar as milieus are always communicating with other milieus, and can never exist in a pure and isolated state of stability, all milieus are implicated by rhythms which, in musical form, express genuine communication and passage. In this way, music can always draw us from its matter or milieus to time and difference, toward what we cannot expect and cannot hear. Thus the audible content—the milieus of sound—undergo transformation in their rhythms, which are themselves between milieus. Furthermore, in such a sonorous capacity, it is the case, as D&G like to say, that music is “a signifying.” It is the “vibration” of contraction uninhibited by the visual forms which provoke our habitual perception; the form and temporal signature of rhythm is mutable, as it directly transforms and deforms itself almost immediately, as in the case of Olivier Messiaen, who, as Ronald Bogue points out, utilizes the “added value” of birdsong, which constantly adds notes or rests of various speeds to a previous melody. Such added values “[u]ndermine all metrical regularity, and the bar lines, rather than marking fixed units of time, demarcate rhythmic cells of varying duration.”77 While it might seem that Messiaen is imitating birdsong in his musical work, and thus that his “aesthetic is purely mimetic,” it is rather the case that “each song develop[s] as one component of a network of interacting blocks of sound . . . a specific atmospheric configuration of interpenetrating elements in flux.”78 In other words, his music does not allow us to experience movement from point to point, but only the constant variation and becoming of a “sonorous block.” Thus if we are drawn into an affective “becoming,” from movement to time, it is not in the sense that we experience an imitation of birds through music, but rather that we internalize the “speed and slowness,” the rhythms, of a birdsong that is between and beyond musical or audible milieus.

5.a. Thought and chaos: immanence and composition revisited If, as we have seen, affections and perceptions are carried away by the infinite speed of the plane of composition to become the affects and percepts of art, then logical or representational concepts can likewise be carried away by an infinite movement which they require and implicate in order to become connective rather than “projective.”79 But why do concepts, specifically, need to be carried away or deterritorialized? It is because, in their logic, they project the very abstract or indeterminate space of thinking onto recognizable things so as to determine them, such that the visible is “captured” by the articulable, endowing it with an illusory reality and distorted truth. In the case of genuine concepts, by contrast, the indeterminate space of thinking is always determined by Deleuze’s “virtuality”—events that are interminable and incessant on the plane of immanence. Just as affects and percepts, then, are forms that are transformed by the incessantly moving and transformational material of the plane of immanence, concepts are the relations, iterations, and connections within the absent totality of the plane of composition. If the form or movement of percept and affect depends on repetition and preservation, it is threatened by the chaos of infinite speed (of disappearance in appearance). But

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thought revels in this very same void of dissolution: it requires the speed that would make affects and percepts lose all form and movement. Conversely, sensation itself, the chaos of infinite movement, can actually confuse and disperse our thoughts, effectively “slowing” and even muddling thought’s connections. Thought thus operates in and “confronts”80 a chaotic plane of composition that works like Deleuze’s “undifferenciated abyss, the black nothingness, the indeterminate animal in which everything is dissolved,”81 where it is within the void of the pure becoming of a present moment that lacks repetition or contraction (which would make it “sensible”). By contrast, thought is ultimately provoked by the unthinkable chaos of what Deleuze calls “the white nothingness, the once more calm surface upon which float unconnected determinations like scattered members . . . which are indifferent to each other”:82 here, chaos is the impossibility of cognizant connection. That is, the “unthinkable” movements or milieus may be thought’s object, but the repetition and sensation of those movements actually dissipate the speed of thought. It is perhaps for this reason that Deleuze, in his first cinema book, can finally say that the plane of immanence “is entirely made up of Light. The set of movements, of actions and reactions is light which diffuses, which is propagated ‘without resistance and without loss.’”83 That is, the plane is “light” or visibility as the amorphous or pure formless form of matter, before it takes on the contours, colors, and shadows of the projected image. In this sense, it is the “white nothingness” of determined movements that lack connection but which thought seeks to relate, and is itself a determined milieu—while the “black nothingness” of thought’s domain is the present moment that disappears in appearing and is indeterminate. Thus when Deleuze, with Parnet, insists that “[m]ovement always happens behind the thinker’s back, or in the moment when he blinks,” it is the indeterminate movements or milieus that are disconnected that thought seeks to conceive. The plane of composition is indeterminate, where the outside of thought engenders new relations. It is essentially the fissure of the universe, its inconceivable and inexistent totality—the space of (non)relation, or of no particular relation. It concerns Blanchot’s third feature of the outside (“becoming”), what Deleuze calls the “interstice” or inbetween, “the relation with the outside, that absolute relation, as Blanchot says, which is also a non-relation (Thought).”84 This general Blanchotian notion of absence which can never be present but which always reveals obscure presence conceivably corresponds to the plane of composition which paradoxically transforms it while keeping it intact by relating it to the formless—where its incessant movement is drawn toward or composed by the indeterminate space in which thinking itself occurs. The plane, in Deleuze’s terms, allows forces to “enter into other relations and compositions” because in “the outside . . . everything is transformed”:85 a permanent state of becoming, much like the present moment which disappears in appearing, the ceaseless “now” which never truly “is” (hence the infinite speed of thought).

5.b. From percepts/affects to concepts: key distinctions Affects and percepts can finally be distinguished from concepts around chaos, movement, speed, force, intensity, repetition, difference, and the syntheses of time. If

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affects and percepts frame chaos in order to inject form or material with sensation, as D&G argue, genuine concepts locate and think through consistent and variable relations within chaos, which are in many ways formless and immaterial.86 If affects and percepts draw the past into the present through their movement, concepts draw on the speed of chaos to gain perspective on the past as an absent totality. If sensation preserves or retains the indistinguishability or indiscernibility of chaos’s infinite speed through contraction (endowing it with relative speed), concepts make connections with infinite speed between the infinite movements of the virtual. If affect and percept involve the forces at work in chaos, thought involves the relations of those forces. If affects and percepts express those very forces by virtue of variety, concepts find intensive variations within the relations of force. To frame this again in terms of Deleuze’s syntheses of time, just as the differences of the past or the “virtual” are developed by the indistinguishability of repetition or sensation in the first passive synthesis, when the repetition of such differences becomes “serial,” so too do does difference implicate repetition in the second and third syntheses. Such differential concepts form variations: they can instantly be found throughout the milieus they survey, complicated by the infinite speed of chaos in the plane of composition. In other words, truly connective concepts that do not explain or represent what they connect (they have no signifiable “content”) but instead express differences must also repeat, and in that sense, one instance of a concept is indistinguishable from the last. This is why concepts have infinite speed: the plane of composition wherein concepts repeat is the absolute state of dissolution of form. But what are the defining features of such concepts?

5.c. Concepts: fragmentary, iterative, self-referential, and intensive Genuine thought answers questions and solves problems posed by affects and percepts in the experience of sensation and imagination—by the milieus and events of the plane of immanence—but not by developing, explicating, or representing those solutions or answers. This is because concepts do not explain or explicate anything: Deleuze teaches us that they only connect or relate the “inexplicable” with a fragmentary, self-referential and iterative intensity. In this sense, the answers and solutions of thought are already “implied” in the problems and questions of the unconscious, or of experience, but to be cognizant of this, unlike Blanchot’s “recognition without cognition” in the dream, means to relate or connect that which is explicated or developed with an intensity that is foreign to the dream’s infinite slowness, expansion, and disconnection. In other words, if we do not think in dreams (III; 10, IV; 2b)—that is, if the dream involves percepts disguised by unsolvable problems, and affects displaced by unanswerable questions—then the connections it makes are dominated by the force of its own “insouciance” and forgetfulness rather than by the connections and intensity inherent to thinking. It is these features—fragmentation, self-referentiality, inexplicability, and intensity—that define thinking, and which will ultimately allow us to understand how ideas themselves may be implicated in the movement or experience of a work of art. The first question, though, is: what actually makes thinking distinct from sensation?

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Like affects and percepts (sensation), concepts (or ideas) are constituted by their repetition. However, the repetition of the concept, as a fragment of an absent totality, is distinct from the repetition (the movement or “vibration” in III; 3) of affects and percepts, since affects and percepts involve the fusion and resonance of a movement that never forms a totality to begin with—a repetition of difference (variety). Thinking, as Deleuze says of Blanchot, traverses the “inexistence of a whole which could be thought”87 (VIII; 5b, Conclusion). The genuine concept, then, is the difference of repetition (variation): insofar as we can think difference as a variant within the past, we are already approaching the groundlessness that grounded memory in the first place— the absence of an origin of time. Concepts, then, like the Proustian exploration that retrieves fragments of the past, involve repetition that is, in Deleuze’s words, “pure fragment and fragment of itself ”88—of which the fragments may regain time when developed by “a veritable eternity.”89 That is, any given expression of a concept is partial and incomplete—its survey (like the Proustian search) and variations are infinite or inexhaustible in principle; however, unlike lost time or reminiscence, the connections and consistency it forms do not ultimately generalize or idealize the past, but provide a new perspective—what Blanchot calls the “nonidentity of the same”90 that both varies and consists in-itself. The fragmentation of concepts, then, can be sharply distinguished from the repetition of contraction, which fuses or binds repetitions rather than fragmenting them; within such contraction, affects and percepts that are built on sensation do not initially form a whole which could fragment (difference can only be “drawn off ” (souterir) after the fact, but not in the moment of the present passing). Rather, sensation is premised on an ontology of sameness and similarity, of “resonance” and “vibration”—therefore there is nothing to fragment or break off (this becomes important with cinematic crystal images in VIII; 2a).91 Even if sensations “include[d] difference as a variant,”92 as in the case of their contraction within the whole of the past (coexistence), they are still constituted by movements the incessance of which does not form a whole, even an absent one—repetition as movement is not totalizing because it only operates locally, step by step. However, the pre-existence of a past that was “never present”—which grounds memory and the passing present—does create the conditions both for the fragmentary retrieval of memories and also for what Deleuze calls the “fractured” moment of the differing of the past that is carried away by a repetition of the future. This fractured moment, this ground that gives way to the groundlessness of difference, is the conceptual space of “non-relation.” If concepts do not, properly speaking, exist, then Blanchot’s approach to fragmentation and the being of becoming (in eternal return) allows us to more deeply consider the Deleuzian relation between fragmentation and the (non-)being of thought’s problems and questions that is not “the being of the negative.”93 If, for Deleuze, ideas are the state of difference that consists or insists within experience, for Blanchot, such “revelation” expresses the being of becoming: an asymmetrical and indeterminate “interruption” between past and future. Thus while Blanchotian thought is necessarily incomplete, D&G also insist that “[a]s fragmentary totalities, concepts are not even the pieces of a puzzle,” but hold “together only along diverging lines”;94 in Deleuze’s own terms, they eternally decenter and diverge by constantly affirming relations—such as those of past and future—differently. In fact, as Blanchot insists, the

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fragment “tends to dissolve the totality which it presupposes and which it carries off toward the dissolution from which it does not (properly speaking) form” through its “repetitive energy.”95 If concepts are indeed incomplete fragments of an absent totality, a groundless state of dissolution—with an infinite speed—that resides below the ground of time, this is where difference meets its repetition in the eternal return. In Blanchot’s terms: . . . fragmentation is bound up with the revelation of the Eternal Return . . . The eternal return says the being of becoming, and the repetition repeats it as the incessant ceasing of being. The eternal return says the eternal return of the Same, and the repetition says the detour wherein the other identifies itself with the same in order to become the nonidentity of the same and in order that the same become.96

What D&G call concepts are this very “detour” from self-identity, within incessant movements of displacement and disguise. If the sameness of such concepts express difference, what Blanchot calls their “lack of presence” creates an “interruption” that prevents any identity or communication between the past and future in eternal return; as he states, “Let there be a past, let there be a future, with nothing that would allow the passage from one to the other.”97 In other words, the present moment is the “relation” between the infinite movement of a past and a future, even if the past and future can have no determinable, symmetrical, concrete relation. This makes the Blanchotian present akin to Deleuze’s infinite speed of the present moment that is not but disappears in appearing. Insofar as concepts do not explicate or represent their answers or solutions, they are not dependent on points of reference external to them; this is why D&G can say that “[t] he concept is indeed a solution, but the problem to which it corresponds lies in its intensional conditions of consistency and not . . . in the conditions of reference of extensional propositions.”98 That is, problems are developed consistently on the plane of immanence, but not with reference to it. And yet, concepts do reference something: their other iterations. Both Blanchot and D&G insist on the self-referential nature of such fragmentary thinking: on the one hand, Blanchot insists that the fragment “refers to nothing and has no proper reference”;99 on the other hand, D&G claim that “the concept itself abandons all reference so as to retain only the conjugations and connections that constitute its consistency.”100 But if concepts are not referencing or representing anything, how do they work? According to D&G, concepts arrange, “territorialize,” and express relations with regard to what would otherwise be chaotic. They can do this because conceptual “reality does not depend upon” what can be referenced as “the case,” but on “consistencies” within an (un)reality that is both virtual and undergoing infinite movement.101 What would otherwise be the disconnected and scattered “white nothingness” of movement and matter, events and sensations is conceptualized in its variations that are immanent to each other. Here, the difference between, or within, forms of repetition involves its variations: to conceptualize love, for example, involves how it “repeats” differently (e.g., how is our “first love” different from our lasting love?), and involves connecting the differences of those movements to one another—to

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conceive them all with the “infinite speed” or simultaneity of “copresence.” If love is an event, and if “[i]t is a concept that apprehends the event, its becoming, its inseparable variations,”102 then what are the relations that constitute it (falling in or out of love, being in love, etc.)? Thus if D&G can say that “The concept . . . has no reference: it is selfreferential,” it is because the concept refers only to its own variations; while it may be territorializing at first, it is “deterritorialized” by a plane of immanence that “moves infinitely” and thus prohibits the relations within it to exist as a static reference point or abstract notion (but instead as the variations of difference or becoming).103 The concept that does not explain its solutions or answers, that is a fragment of a non-given totality, and that only refers to its own iterations, is inexplicable, both in the in the colloquial sense and also the Deleuzian sense. For Deleuze, conceptual difference is only explicated in forms of repetition which themselves do not differ from what they explicate (hence the notion of variation): “even if the production of difference is by definition ‘inexplicable’, how can we avoid implicating the inexplicable at the heart of thought itself?”104 This question involves Deleuze’s quasi-Spinozist perspective that whatever cannot be explained also cannot be developed because it remains “implicated” at the level of difference. This is why concepts do not explain anything: sensation is not explicable or thinkable from the perspective of difference. The affects and percepts of sensation, in their repetition and fusion, involve a movement that questions and problematizes truth and reality: the imaginary becomes indiscernible from reality and the truth becomes inexplicable. This movement is a genuine form of development or explication of problems: any explication of that movement would be an effort to create materiality out of thought that has none. Difference thus remains “implicated” in the intensive concept—it is never “explicated” or explained by any of its particular variations. Deleuze makes the distinction as follows: “Difference in the form of intensity remains implicated in itself, while it is cancelled by being explicated in extensity.”105 Conceptual thinking, therefore, can only consider the relations between problems and questions, asking what difference there is within their movement and incessant force. But how do concepts do this? Just because concepts have no reality does not mean that thinking is a dispassionate exercise: in D&G’s terms, concepts are intensive, traversing and implicating distance. If they operate by virtue of an unmeasurable speed, that is because they have a kinetics that passes through and between movements, far beyond even the affective and totalizing movement of memory, an “[a]bsolute survey” across milieus, “endlessly traversing them according to an order without distance.”106 This absolute distance or non-relation is precisely Blanchot’s outside: what is actually implicated is the distance covered. Here it is useful to picture the well-known science-fiction trope of someone explaining the “Einstein–Rosen Bridge” (a.k.a., wormholes) by folding a piece of paper in half and poking a pen through it, and then unfolding it, to demonstrate how you can traverse two distinct spaces at once. By traversing distance, difference is intensive and “copresent”; movements are conceived relatively and simultaneously. It is for this reason that D&G can claim that the concept is intense: “It does not have spatiotemporal coordinates, only intensive ordinates” and “remains copresent to all its determinations without proximity or distance, travers[ing] them at infinite speed.”107 In this sense it is the infinite speed of thought which can draw out relations

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or connections between vastly distinct milieus because thought works within the “rhythm”—that is, the difference between—everything that repeats, or that, in Blanchot’s terms, moves “incessantly.” If milieus concern the force of repetition (“rendered sensible” by contraction), the rhythm of concepts arguably concerns the intensity of difference. Considering this distinction between milieus and rhythms, if movement is defined by the force of repetition, the intensity of thought concerns the difference of repetition. By further distinguishing force and intensity in terms of milieus and relations, as well as repetition and difference, we encounter a rare comment from Blanchot on Deleuze that allows us to consider (non)relation in terms of the intensity of difference. When Deleuze reads Nietzsche, he succinctly insists that is a mistake to think that there is a “field of forces, a nutrient milieu fought over by a plurality of forces. For in fact there is no ‘milieu,’ [il n’y a pas de ‘milieu’] no field of forces or battle. There is no quantity of reality, all reality is already quantity of force.”108 In these terms, it is this very quantity of reality, as intensity, that thought thinks. Conversely, it is the indeterminacy within or between milieus, which are constituted by forces, that constitutes what Blanchot calls the “whole of their reality.” This distinction between force and intensity around their distance and reality is elaborated by Blanchot in his comment on this aspect of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche: To think force is to think it by way of difference . . . Deleuze expressed this with a decisive simplicity: “All force is in an essential relation with another force. The being of force is plural” . . . The plurality of forces means that forces are distant, relating to each other through the distance that makes them plural and inhabits each of them as the intensity of their difference . . . In other words, what holds them at a distance, the outside, constitutes their sole intimacy . . . “the differential element” that is the whole of their reality, they being real only inasmuch as they have no reality in and of themselves, but only relations: a relation without terms.109

Supporting Deleuze, here Blanchot emphasizes that the intensity which marks the differential relation of force constitutes the “reality” of forces. Furthermore, Blanchot’s “relation without terms” does not constitute a backdrop or an empty canvas upon which forces play out their relations. In a Deleuzian sense, it is difference, which is never given, which constitutes those relations: the “whole of reality,” in all its relations, composing Blanchot’s “unreality” of the imaginary (II; 2). Such difference does not exist but consists within forces—not as a blank canvas or tabula rasa, but as the infinite speed of appearance within disappearance (the present moment that “is not”). It is only when we believe in the presence of such a whole that we are deluded by the existence of truth and reality. Returning now to the distinction between concepts and sensation, the percept and affect take effect at the level of milieu and force: they are what force us to think. But the milieu is not a totality, background, or field in which forces relate; instead, milieus constitute forces in relation. Sensation is the “vibratory” that engenders and is engendered by D&G’s space-time of the milieu, especially considering Deleuze’s definition of sensation as the “contraction” of “vibrations” (III; 3a). Milieus thus

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encompass not just sight but all “viscera” and senses—but imaginatively, insofar as perception is filtered through the imagination. Affection, likewise, occupies the relational space of the concept (IV; 4a), but is bound to movement and the force of milieus. If the affect is the differential state of the body (in a Spinozist sense), “vibrating” or resonating in extension, the concept is a repeated state of thought, differing in implication.

6.a. Foucault: the concept of power, the immanent problem of truth and reality The ultimate problem of perception and the ultimate question of affection is that of truth and reality itself, and it is Foucault who poses this problem and this question in the vast historical and practical milieus that he surveys—his “plane of immanence”— in order to think relations of provocation and action. Here we see an illustration of the genuine “concept”: Foucault’s critical concept of power is an inexplicable answer to the question and solution to the problem of how truth and reality are produced. While the percepts and affects that we have previously illustrated involved the arts, we can see in Foucault’s case how the problem of panoptic anxiety—that is, how we see ourselves in binary identities of normal and abnormal in constant pressure to self-discipline— and the question of oppression— that is, how we are provoked to act without the threat of violence—“force us to think” about how our practices and discourses judge and subjectify us (Foucault himself identifies this as his real “question” as well).110 It is this judgment and subjectification that allows Deleuze to claim that power “produces truth, in so far as it makes us see and speak. It produces truth as a problem.”111 That is, power makes us perceive what reality and truth are, engendering the milieus we inhabit and the affects we experience. The events that Foucault is thus interested in would concern the types of statements that we make in our practices, in their ever-changing forms, and the way we see when we are geared toward fostering, managing, and enabling life (or disallowing it and neglecting it). It is because power is unavoidable that it is immanent to our experience of truth and reality, but its immanence means that it never explains what truth and reality are: conceptually, power implicates truth and reality, but does not explain or “reveal” it. Foucault’s critical concept of power is a fragment of an absent totality insofar as it does not presume a hidden world beneath ours, but instead posits how we come to “know” what the world is: conceptually speaking, power thinks through the relations within the world—within the “fissure” between seeing and speaking, between provocation and action. Thinking such relations means that the “world” of power does not form a totality, but is beyond the external world of our practices. Such relations concern difference and variation insofar as “power” can never be located in any one relation, decentering itself in its virtually infinite historical instantiations and applications, and yet every event that involves a power relation—every time a worker or a schoolchild self-disciplines, every time a politician produces provocative statements, every time an advertisement makes you believe something, every time we alter our behavior because we are being watched or tracked—allows for a conceptualization of

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power relations. Each time, there is a transformation of our perceptions, affections, and actions, the relations of which (between past and future, between forces) can be conceptualized. Such a concept of power does not refer to any particular instance of power, as though there were an original model or archetype. Rather, the concept of power involves the Blanchotian distance from our everyday situations and actions: it is by virtue of being able to conceptualize any relations—“sovereign,” professional, economic, medical, even amorous or sexual—at any point in history, that gives the concept its infinite speed. Our social experience exerts the force or pressure whereby we are provoked or seduced to act, but it is the intensity of thinking the relations of such forces in all of their variation that, from this Foucauldian perspective, forces us to think instead of act, traversing relations of power conceptually and critically.

6.b. From the outside of the external world to the internal world The Foucauldian concept of power, however, has its own blind spots. If power is behind reality and truth as their conceptual relations, then Blanchot’s unreality and untruth (of the imaginary and of mortality) “haunts” Foucault’s plane of immanence. While Foucault’s power relations are beyond our exterior worlds of reality and truth, then, Blanchot’s imaginary, experienced as the outside (II; 5), is closer than our interior world of perception and affection—the very forces that are required in order to be “provoked” or “incited” to act in the external world. From a Deleuzo-Blanchotian perspective, we only question power in the first place if the affects of provocation draw us into a relation “outside of power,” outside of the possibility of a longer, healthier life. Such an outside is that with which we can have no “relation,” but which installs itself in our most intimate perceptions and affections (dreams, imagination, memory): this non-relation is the condition of Blanchot’s “radical reversal” outside of possibility (II; 1 and 5, III; 11, IV; 3a and 6b; V; 10). As Deleuze puts it, “if the two formal elements of knowledge [seeing and speaking], external and heterogeneous, find historical accords which provide solutions for the ‘problem’ of truth, this is, as we have seen, because forces operate in a different space to that of forms, the space of the Outside, where the relation is precisely a ‘nonrelation’, the place a ‘non-place’.”112 In other words, the plane of immanence that renders events and practices incessant, or the fissuring of seeing and speaking, is distinct from the “solution” that power diagrams conceptually. As we have seen, this diagram or plane is posited external to subjects of practices, and it was Foucault’s refusal to interiorize this outside—as it would be developed by its own affects of provocation (Blanchotian fascination, insouciance, inspiration, etc.)—that resulted in Foucault’s plane of immanence being limited to an “absolute milieu” of historical practices which excludes the unreality of that milieu—its incessant and ungraspable return in dream and art. What, then, of untruth and unreality, of fiction? Here Deleuze claims that, with power, “never has fiction produced such truth and reality. How could we narrate Foucault’s great fiction? The world is made up of . . . vast milieus of exteriority where visibilities and statements are respectively deposited”;113 that is, where we take up “strategies” when provoked to act based on a knowledge that is already fictional.

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However, there is no Foucauldian concept of fiction that would relate to the concept of power: for Foucault, fiction is, as we saw (Intro), yet another problem of truth involving discourse and practice. This implies the limitation of the concept of power as it pertains to a philosophy of the arts. As D&G state, “A concept lacks meaning to the extent that it is not connected to other concepts and is not linked to a problem that it resolves or helps to resolve . . . A solution has no meaning independently of a problem to be determined in its conditions and unknowns.”114 In these terms, while Foucault’s concept of power is exemplary in the problematic milieus or plane of immanence that it surveys, insofar as that survey involves the practical, social, political, and historical nature of human experience, the concept of power does not connect to a concept of fiction as a counterweight. Unreality and untruth thus haunts the Foucauldian world.

6.c. Values of truth in a world of power; obscure values in artistic fiction By tracing the lineage of practices in their productions of truth, Foucault’s genealogical project identifies the value placed on life with the forces that constantly provoke and seduce us. Thus, Foucault’s problem or question concerns the lived and livable, and its social, historical, pragmatic, and political milieus. But when we shift beyond our interior world, we see that fiction too articulates values which overtly abandon the problem of reality and truth. That is, obscure values are not dependent on the world as we know it: from the perspective of that world, fiction is, in Blanchot’s words, unimportant and unrelated to life (as we will see in V; 1). But this does not mean the values of fiction do not transform our sensibility fundamentally. What, after all, is a value? Values concern what we find interesting, remarkable, or important. Values, therefore, are not conceptual: they are the effects of belief on our sensibility: how we imagine, perceive, and are affected in a given milieu (even if that milieu is “absolute” or imaginary). What Deleuze calls “the sensibility of the senses” or the “primary sensibility that we are”115 involves contraction at the level of sensation—perception as formed and forming milieus, affection as the passage within or between milieus. But the percept and affect, unleased by concepts, involves the feeling of value; it concerns beliefs that develop from sensations. Deleuze defines such belief via Hume as “a feeling or a particular way of sensing ideas. Belief is the idea—the vivid idea—which is ‘felt rather than conceived.’ ”116 Thus in our world of knowledge and power, our perception and affection that lead to the provocation and seduction to act are based on the values attached to life. We perceive and feel this value insofar as we want to live. But the concept that composes a work of art, which “knows nothing of life,” is never experienced as such (V; 3a): like Blanchot’s first night, it is a disguise that is never revealed, and a displacement that is never located (not only does it have no reality, but cannot be imagined). It is the imperceptible in perception and the insensible in affection that draws us forward. And yet, this is the movement of implication: on the one hand, concepts implicate percepts by drawing them to the imperceptible and affects by drawing them to the insensible; on the other hand, percepts and affects develop and

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explicate these concepts and thereby reform our sensibility around the obscure, inexistent becomings of thought. Our journey into fictional art will thus concern the ideas that compose it as well as the values it expresses—insofar as those values are obscure, irreducible to the value placed on life in our world. It is with reference to Nietzsche, in fact, that Deleuze suggests that poetry and art articulate values that are no longer concerned with the true world. As he insists, “art is the highest capacity [puissance] of falsehood, it magnifies the ‘world as error’ ”; that is, if art is the highest capacity of leaving the “true world” behind, poetry (and fiction) involves the “art of evaluating, it articulates values.”117 This can be distinguished from the direct expression of a concept as “an aphorism [that] is present as a fragment”; thus “the poem itself must be evaluated, the aphorism interpreted” for its sense.118 With this notion of value in mind, we will see how fictional art, insofar as it develops the poetic and aesthetic dimension of sensation, but also insofar as it is implicated by aphoristic, fragmented concepts, calls both for evaluation and for interpretation: what are the ideas in it, and what values do the affects and percepts implicated by those ideas express? We are beyond the Foucauldian question of reality and truth at this point; as Deleuze continues, “there is no truth that, before being a truth, is not the bringing into effect of a sense or the realization of a value. Truth, as a concept, is entirely undetermined. Everything depends on the value and sense of what we think.”119 If the sense of what we conceive and the value of what we believe is the very “condition” of truth, we can again distinguish the Foucauldian problem of truth and reality from art’s reversal of that problem, whereby art produces sense or concepts and values or beliefs irreducible to the contingencies of reality and truth. That is, art expresses obscure values that are prior to and outside of the production of any truth, and the believability—or rather unbelievability—of art involves us at the level of sensibility (imagination, perception, affection) and at the level of ideas within the plane of composition—what Blanchot (as we will see shortly) calls literature’s absence of origin.

V

Literature’s Radical Reversal: From Absence of Origin to Deterritorialized Future

Introduction There is a scandalous pact that we enter into when experiencing fiction. Like the insouciance of sleep and dreaming, we neglect the world—our personal, social, and professional responsibilities, even our own experience as a living being in a real milieu. But, like the dream, this does not stop the characters or their worlds from exerting the semblance of life, or from reinforcing the values attached to life, no matter how abnormal the characters or how fantastic the circumstances. Thus the process by which we become invested in a work of fiction is perhaps not that different from the process by which we become invested in events in our actual lives. In both cases, we are drawn in by virtue of affect: competing forces provoke, seduce, and incite us to act in a world of knowledge and power, just as we become provoked and seduced to care about imaginary characters, situations, and worlds. But in the case of fiction, we perceive only what is imaginary and that which has no consequence, and we may even become fascinated by the movement of the imaginary, which has nothing to do with life, characters, or coherent worlds. Thus we have a scandalous pact: we carry over values related to life into a domain which is indifferent to it. Why is this? The situations and characters that tend to pique the interest of fiction enthusiasts are not what we would normally want to experience in our lives: fiction focuses on the trepidatious or unpleasant, wondrous or fantastic, and in any case that which is outside of a healthy and secure life (Intro). This is not a simple matter of Freudian “wish fulfilment” (even if a fear is the reverse of a wish) (III; 1), nor is it an Aristotelian matter of pleasure derived from experiencing likenesses for the sake of learning (which allows for contemplation of the unpleasant).1 Rather, it is a fascination with characters who are often abnormal, and especially with situations that are otherworldly or impossible: it is a reversal of and asymmetry between the values placed on life in our world of knowledge and power. Fiction is dominated by characters who are dying, who are victims or perpetrators of an injustice, who appear insane—inhabiting worlds that are hostile or incomprehensible. Fiction, in short, often seems grounded on what would be intolerable or inexplicable in our everyday lives. But this is only half of the story. What both dreams and fictional worlds reveal is that not all human experiences that draw on our values can be reduced to life and flourishing: imaginary experiences, as 139

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Blanchot likes to say, “know nothing of life.” The other half of the story, then, is that some fictional experiences that we call art involve a discovery of the impossible: “art is experience because it is experimental: because it is a search—an investigation which is not undetermined but is, rather, determined by its indeterminacy, and involves the whole of life, even if it seems to know nothing of life.”2 Like dreams and death, in art it is not possible to regulate anything, because art is lifeless; furthermore, nothing is normal, because art has no inherent origin or purpose. Thus while we inevitably carry over our judgments from our world into fictional worlds, for Blanchot our experience is drawn “toward the point where it undergoes impossibility.”3 This “undergoing” (essai) is an experiment: art involves “testing a singular form of possibility [and] a power that wants to be power even in the region of the ungraspable, where the domain of goals ends.”4 If it is chaotic, it is also a region, as D&G claim, “without consequence.”5 Art, in other words, has an asymmetrical relationship with our experience of reality and truth. But what is this relationship? When fiction becomes art that reverses the effects of power, it neglects our scandalous inclination to find truth and reality in a domain without either: that is to say, if we neglect our world in fiction, fictional worlds of art, in turn, neglect us— refusing our complacency in carrying over into fiction our values attached to life in the world. That is, art utilizes the formal devices of fiction to sabotage our belief in the fictions of power that are the source of reality and truth. We approach such literary art in this chapter by considering D&G’s and Blanchot’s mutual interest in Franz Kafka. Kafka presents situations, characters, actions, and worlds that specifically reverse our realities and truths, our notions of what is normal and usual, initially by way of doubling, and ultimately by “dismantling” representation altogether in favor of genuine novelty (the unforeseeable and uncertain future). As an archetype of non-symbolic literature, his use of doubles—whether through fabulation or radical difference— renders journeys in his worlds “unlimited.” And if “the theme which has always haunted Foucault is that of the double”6 (II; 4), we will see how Kafka’s literary doubling initially hollows out truth and reality, and ultimately how his worlds “return” with the unrecognizable force of novelty. As Blanchot puts it, we become immersed in the “unworking” (désoeuvrement) of Kafka’s art—its existence (or “being”) apart from the world (making it seem “idle” or “useless”); whether realistic, speculative, or fantastic, it necessarily passes through reality and truth—making both initially appear hollow or corrupt. In The Trial, for example, Joseph K only sees what we would see in the world: persecution and death as an injustice, a court full of lies and deceit, where, as D&G claim, “[t]he lawyers are false lawyers, the judges are false judges, ‘oafish inspectors,’ ‘corrupt warders.’ ”7 But it is not just that reality and truth is hollowed out: “if this first view is not definitive, this is because there is [strength and potential] in the false [puissance du faux].”8 This reversal of perspective, so crucial in D&G’s approach to Kafka, is echoed by Blanchot, according to whom in Kafka’s “world of exclusion and radical separation, everything is false and inauthentic as soon as one examines it, everything lacks as soon as one seeks support from it, but nevertheless the depth of this absence is always given anew as an indubitable, absolute presence.”9 Thus Kafka’s dismantling of belief in fictions is just the initial reversal of power: if there is a “strength in the false,” and an “indubitable, absolute presence” at work, we are forced to consider

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that there is something that is not given that is composing his worlds—something insensible and imperceptible that can “only be thought.” We have, here, literary art composed by ideas and a radical reversal beyond power. It is not only the case that D&G and Blanchot share an intense interest in Kafka’s work; Blanchot’s approach to Kafka also provides us with a foundation to consider his approach when we shift our study to cinema. As an influential literary critic who meditated a great deal on the nature of images—whether in literature, dreams, or experience—and whose life and career spanned an overwhelming majority of the evolution of modern cinema (1907–2003), Blanchot’s utter silence on the cinematic image is almost deafening. However, studying why Blanchot asserts that Kafka “offers us a chance of catching a glimpse of what literature is” will ultimately provide insight into why Deleuze will say that “[w]hat Blanchot diagnoses everywhere in literature is particularly clear in cinema”10 (VIII, Intro and 5b). For D&G, Kafka offers an uncompromising portrait of assemblages that are “deterritorialized” through desire that “dismantles” their representations;11 Kafka is among the “hybrid geniuses” who are able to navigate between thought and art, that is, between the planes of composition and of immanence.12 At the same time, Blanchot argues that the “move outside truth” in Kafka’s fiction involves the reader in an uncompromising experience of impossibility within the world’s disappearance. Kafka’s novels, in short, involve the artistic movement that develops what Deleuze calls difference, novelty, and thought, and what Blanchot calls the Outside or “diverging of difference” (the literary mode of eternal return). But why Kafka? What is singular about Kafka’s literature that makes it a literary archetype, but, as we have been considering in this book, also entails a reversal of power?

1. Literature is not important (Blanchot) If literature is capable of reversing the effects of power and even engaging us in a more radical reversal beyond power, then it must affirm itself as unimportant, worthless, and pointless. Only here does it gain a strength wherein it cannot be manipulated by the interests of power or serve to reinforce values related to life. Blanchot allows us to consider this unimportance in his renowned essay “Literature and the Right to Death,” where he writes that “the essence of literature is precisely to escape any essential determination, any assertion that stabilizes it or even realizes it: it is never already there, it always has to be rediscovered or reinvented. It is not even certain that the word literature or the word art corresponds to anything real, anything possible or anything important.”13 Blanchot claims this in the context of his insistence that literature is not a call to action; thus, in many ways it has no relevance or value in a conventional sense, no importance in a world where only life and prosperity matter. This perspective avoids the traps of a “resistance” to power, which would be co-opted by power (I; 3): it is because literature has no real importance or truth value that it informs a way of thinking outside of our world; it is because it has no values related to life that it may offer a more obscure source of value. Of course, this dynamic reflects our general hypocrisy about art, which our society often rejects as a desirable occupation but preserves at all cost as our highest cultural achievement. However, Blanchot’s version of this hypocrisy is that

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it is not the objects of art that have cultural capital, but the experience of art that has “ineffable” value. In Deleuzian terms, this experience “is” nothing more than the (non-) being of problems and questions. But these questions are posed differently in art than in dreams. Blanchot likewise insists that “literature begins at the moment when literature becomes a question”:14 thus if dreams draw us toward oblivion, literature questions and problematizes its origin and the world amidst the absence of both. Despite ourselves, we often attempt to dominate this empty literary space of unimportance—like Blanchot’s absurd attempt to “dispos[e] sovereignly of nothingness” as a power through suicide (II; 2), or the lucid dreamer who wants to “rescue personal truth” and exert sovereign control over the imaginary (III; 8), what he calls the “first slope” of literature attempts to hold together a totality in a domain that has none. In fact, it is such “artistic activity” that “encloses itself in the affirmation of an inner sovereignty” and involves the “conquest of the world according to the aims of the realizing mind and the productive will.”15 Art, as such a sovereign power, would involve the delusional realization of worlds through the craft and intent of the artist. The disciplined artist, the cultivated artist, can believe that they produce “great works” of the imaginary. As Blanchot states, “A writer’s influence is linked to this privilege of being master of everything. But he is only master of everything, he possesses only the infinite; he lacks the finite, limit escapes him.”16 In other words, to be master of everything is to be master of nothing in particular; to master death or dreams, or to create a masterful literary world, masters nothing in the world. When a writer’s language initially “negates” what it names and becomes literary, then “it wants to grasp the movement [of negation] itself and it wants to comprehend the results in their totality.”17 In other words, literature, in what Blanchot calls its “first slope,” wants to imagine, in naming many things, that it also names and imagines an “unreal whole which they form together.”18 The mistake that Blanchot identifies is to imagine not only the movement of words, but the totality or world that literature invokes—the whole of its movement. This is a literature of delusion and of nihilism: it wants to attain the obscure power of the night in the domain of the day, as the lucid dreamer wants control over the imaginary, hypocritically enjoying the obscure power of the infinite end of fabulation within the everyday and finite relations of power and knowledge. In short, this is the impulse that wants literature to be important. But Blanchot insists there is another “slope” of literature, one which testifies to the heart of what literature is in all of its “unimportance.”

2. What is literature? (Blanchot and Deleuze) In Blanchot’s other slope of literature, the unimportance of art parallels the unimportance of dying: not only is it the case that “dying is unimportant and death has no depth,” since death is “pure insignificance, an event without concrete reality,”19 but the writer and artist go toward the imaginary like we go toward death, where they “plan something that eludes all plans, and if they do have a path, they have no goal.”20 Both death and art involve a movement that, “older than the beginning,” excludes anticipation and expectation. In “in art’s milieu there is a pact contracted with death,” where we experience “negligence—perpetual flight and inertia.”21 The experience of

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impossibility—that which grasps us but which we cannot grasp (hence its “flight” and negligence)—as an “unreality,” is not, however, beyond reality; unreality is not a domain to escape into. In this regard, the writer “ruins action, not because he deals with what is unreal but because he makes all of reality available to us:”:22 this “all” of reality is unreality (II; 2). Thus the mistake of the writer engaged in the first slope of literature is to create an image of the world or totality, where there are “no longer terms but the movement of terms,”23 for unreality already persists within the movement of words that have left behind their negative function in the day. The other “slope” of literature is where language attaches itself to an infinite movement that involves “the presence of things before the world exists, their perseverance after the world has disappeared”: it is existence as “the movement through which whatever disappears keeps appearing.”24 Such movement concerns Blanchotian incessance and D&G’s plane of immanence. But what does this make of language? Literary language actually exists. That is, just because the whole of (un)reality does not exist, this does not mean that nothing in literature exists. Likewise, literary language does not arise from an “absent origin,” even if its origin is absent. On the one hand, literature arises from what Blanchot calls an “infinitely anterior moment” which is actually a lack of anteriority. To mistake such a totality as something imaginary itself— within which we move—rather than an incessant movement outside of any totality, is to believe that unreal worlds actually exist: it is escapism (Intro). On the other hand, while Blanchot claims that the totality of fictional worlds may not exist, he claims that words actually do exist: they are the matter or material of literature. Added to that, they do more than just exist: in Blanchot’s terms, words “passionately summon” things where “the word acts not as an ideal force but as an obscure power, as an incantation that coerces things, makes them really present outside of themselves.”25 Words as such become “matter without contour, content without form”:26 not as the form of the content they signify, but as that content (their form is their combination, which may form a totality or be drawn by the “formless”). Words likewise do not “give presence” to things; rather, “words are things”:27 in their fusion of the thing they summon and the thing they are, what is important is not “what” they supposedly signify, but their movement, the way in which they combine to create an “experience” of the imaginary. As Blanchot claims, literature manifests “existence which remains below existence, like an inexorable affirmation, without beginning or end”:28 its images and words exist, but its composition, in Deleuze’s terms, only insists or consists. Literary language reverses the effects of power by immersing us in an activity that is “idle” and “inert”: as Blanchot puts it, reading and writing literature “is neither productive nor destructive but stagnant.”29 Fiction’s movement, then, draws us to “a region anterior to the beginning where nothing is made of being, and in which nothing is accomplished. It is the profound depth of being’s inertia.”30 Despite that the immobile movement in fiction is inert, however, we are not simply doing nothing: if the movement of images itself cannot recreate movement in reality, it is because, beyond the “sordid absence” of Blanchot’s second version of the imaginary (and second level of ambiguity: II; 3), there is an “unworking” (désoeuvrement), or a “dissimulation [that] is more ‘original’ than negation.”31 By perpetually concealing what cannot be revealed, what fictional works conceal and how they dissimulate what seemed to resemble life

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and reality will make each experience of fiction unique: this experience is only idle and inert in a world of truth and reality. Furthermore, by claiming that dissimulation is more original than negation, Blanchot insists that there is a movement that is infinite— which has no beginning or origin—that perpetually conceals what cannot be revealed; this “point anterior to all starting points, from which nothing ever begins” is “the endless search for its origin”32 in the artwork. But does this simply mean that there is “nothing” at the center of the artwork? Here we can consider the profound alignment of Deleuze’s and Blanchot’s approaches to negation that cannot sustain itself, but nevertheless constantly differs within what is. Here, Blanchot’s “incessant movement by which . . . nothingness refers back to being,”33 making negation only an illusion of being (since dissimulation precedes being), resonates with Deleuze’s approach to difference. In Deleuzian terms, Blanchot’s absence of origin is the groundlessness or “void” of difference that cannot sustain itself as a negation because it will always be immediately caught up in a material movement of repetition (II). As Deleuze himself insists, the ultimate illusion is “that groundlessness should lack differences, when in fact it swarms with them”:34 to be trite, where we think there is nothing, there is everything—all of the relations between words and images, all of the conceptual force that composes a fictional work, all of the difference, change, and novelty within and beneath matter and material. From this perspective, Blanchot’s unrevealable nothingness is the space of difference in itself. D&G do lay more emphasis on the sensory, technical, or material varieties of which art is composed, while Blanchot lays more emphasis on the unthinkable origin of thought in its divergent, oscillating, and vacillating manners. But we have considered such Blanchotian incessance in terms of percept, and ungraspability in terms of affect (III; 2); furthermore, if the plane of composition—what D&G often referred to as the “universe” or the groundlessness of the sky—is Blanchot’s “all of reality” or “diverging of difference”35that the artist makes available to us, then D&G’s plane of immanence, by contrast—the space of infinite movement of matter or material without beginning or end—is Blanchot’s movement of the material of literature (words). But for D&G (as we have seen), this immanent movement is composed of affects and percepts, of the determined and sensory quality and variety that makes art what it is, and that serves as an unthinkable origin of thought (IV; 4a–b). And if literature does involve thought that problematizes perception and questions our affections, then for Blanchot, this thought operates through the infinite oscillating reversals where art “tends toward its origin.”36 Key here is that, if obscure values are based in the sensibility of affects and percepts, we will now see that both thinkers will provide us with a lens to consider such reversals beyond power.

3.a. Obscure values in fiction: belief, sensibility, literality, and the “as if ” Values that are obscure do not simply resist the value placed on life in our world, but fall outside of everything that is knowable or known. We have seen that such obscure

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values of art draw us outside of the provocations and incitements in a Foucauldian world of knowledge and power (IV; 6c). In fact, to search for values related to life in fiction is already to demean and trivialize it. Here we broach the Nietzschean theme of rejecting all “established” values: in Blanchot’s words, “the more the values of this world impose themselves upon us by their natural appearance and their look of positivity, the more we mistrust them,” making “literature—foreign to culture, repugnant to the order of established values.”37 Hence the naturally abnormal quality of literature, its “false appearance” and seeming lack of value. Thus, however adamant Blanchot is at times about reaching the Nietzschean point where “the notion of value ceases to apply,” reading Blanchot via Deleuze we can also see that, in its “unworking” or inertia (désoeuvrement), art effortlessly rejects “[a]ll known and knowable values.”38 And yet, in the wake of that rejection, there remains a movement, an experience, and thus a sensibility and value, even if such value is utterly intractable. So, what is it? Value, whether obscure or not, is inextricably bound up with sensibility, the beliefs that develop from sensations (IV; 6c). In the everyday world, for example, if we genuinely value and believe in freedom, that will inform the way we perceive and feel (and act). We may value friendship or love, success or achievement, and so on: such values will then inform our perceptions and affections which, in turn, provoke and seduce us to seek out whichever assemblages of power best enable us to live those values. In every case, the ultimate value is life itself, in all of its variety. And while we enter into a work of fiction carrying over such values, when fiction becomes art, those values will be unworked and hollowed out, with only obscure values that “know nothing of life” in their place. But we therefore cannot believe in such values as we believe in the “fiction” of truth and reality (IV; 6c). As Deleuze claims of Nietzsche, “it is by means of fiction that one falsifies and depreciates, it is by means of fiction that something is opposed to life”39 (in Blanchot’s terms, it is by rejecting “chimerical fictions”40 that we can think outside of the possible, which pulls us from reality by being “more than real”). With Spinoza, Nietzsche “denounces all the falsifications of life, all the values in the name of which we disparage life.”41 But, as this chapter will explore, fiction can use its own fictional devices to undo the tendency to believe in fictions that degrade it, precisely when affect and percept involve sensibility rather than symbolism. Fiction may assert obscure value not metaphorically but literally, when figures are apprehended directly through percept and affect, as if they are “real” and “true”—but when they clearly cannot be; if this approach, resonant with both D&G and Blanchot, is “poststructuralist,” then the link between poststructuralism and literality (that is not “deconstructive”) has often been elided. But there is some acknowledgement of Deleuze’s literalism, for instance, in Deleuze scholarship, where François Zourabichvili claims that “belief refers to . . . a new and problematic relation, of a conjunction of terms as unforeseeable as they are unjustifiable”;42 if belief paradoxically replaces metaphor, it is because there is “no division of meaning allowing us to assign a literal usage and a figurative usage [that] precedes this shifting ground of transitory relations.”43 Zourabichvili in fact distinguishes between the redoublement of the figure, which would be what it is “not” because it is metaphorical, and the dédoublement of the figure,

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which involves two indistinguishable terms. Here we can return to Deleuze’s notion of contraction: as D&G insist, the giant vermin in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” must be taken “literally” (à la lettre)—Gregor has miraculously transformed into vermin, not to be interpreted symbolically but apprehended through percept and affect. Two disparate figures (Gregor and the vermin) are suddenly indistinguishable: Gregor is literally grotesque, eating rotten food, and climbing up the walls. Insofar as we apprehend reality at the level of perception and truth at the level of affection—that Gregor literally, really, and truthfully is a giant vermin is perceived and felt at these levels—Kafka’s art reverses the effects of power by rendering that reality imaginary and that truth false. Blanchot’s non-symbolic approach to Kafka emphasizes a paradoxical kind of belief within unreality, insisting that no other writer operates with such “rigor, scruple, exactitude . . . and cold mastery . . . when nothing subsists that one could hold onto.”44 Here, art is not religion, but it does fill a void left by the death of God: art, for instance, is incapable of presenting idols—no one is going to revere or worship Gregor Samsa the giant cockroach. While Deleuze’s version of belief cuts against atheist readings of Nietzsche’s “death of god” by embracing the role of belief in the false (i.e., belief has not disappeared, only its object), Blanchot offers some nuance to the well-known modernist claim (often associated with Woolf, Joyce, Proust, etc.) that art replaces religion. Blanchot in fact insists that . . . for Kafka, art went further than [religious] knowledge . . . art can succeed where knowledge fails: because it is and is not true enough to become the way [to salvation], and too unreal to change into an obstacle [to salvation]. Art is an as if. Everything happens as if we were in the presence of truth, but this presence is not one, that is why it does not forbid us from going forward.45

Kafka’s figures, in other words, are too unreal to enter into the world of possibility, but because of their unreal presence we are not forbidden from experiencing them as if they were real, where the word conjures or “summons” the thing (V; 2). This “as if ” of art, where the literary figure offers nothing to revere, makes it no vehicle to a higher truth, and incapable of affecting action in the world; Blanchot will in fact note that Kafka’s work presents characters who “engender” the very figuration and idolatry that his novels unwork. For Blanchot, such “art is justified” precisely because we live in “the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile.”46 That is, art conceivably reshapes our sensibility by virtue of offering belief, not in the ideals or supersensible world that Nietzsche critiques, but in the impossible (that with which we have no relation). What, then, is the figurative method of such literature that is not symbolic, operating only “as if ” true, and how can we approach it without succumbing to the traps of symbolic interpretation? If, in its literality, literary affects and percepts—in all of their materiality and even vitality—may paradoxically displace and disguise concepts, how is this distinct from metaphor as traditionally conceived as a form of literary paradox and ambiguity? If we are moving beyond metaphorical or representational accounts, in what ways are we still mediated to the work of fiction?

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3.b. Beyond metaphor: likeness, difference, mediation, and the immediate In a more traditional reading of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Gregor and the giant cockroach could be considered to be a metaphorical and poetic tension that is resolved by unifying themes: both Gregor and the cockroach are trapped or isolated (one in his job, the other in his bedroom), are unloved or neglected (one unappreciated by his family, the other rejected as vermin), are fastidious but negligent (one is bad at his job, the other scurries about with no purpose), and so on. With such an approach, emblematic of New Criticism, these themes of entrapment or neglect would be like an “organic totality” not given in the text but in the reader’s mind. For instance, for the New Critic William Empson, there is a subjective organic unity of metaphorical or dramatic tensions, where “one thing may be said to be like another, and they have several different properties in virtue of which they are alike”47 (e.g., why is my love like a red red rose? Let me count the ways . . .). This perspective echoes Hegel’s claim, for example, that “Likeness is an identity only of those things which are not the same, not identical with each other,”48 prioritizing contradiction as the ultimate form of difference from which likeness emerges. Both perspectives would consider the whole of a fictional work “organic,” in distinction from its dramatic or symbolic tensions. (Romantic theories echo this,49 as in Coleridge’s account, where a poem is, as M. H. Abrams explains, a “living organism” where, in Coleridge’s words, “the whole is everything, and the parts are nothing.”)50 In Hegel’s account, each particular part of a system implicitly contains or reflects the universal whole, just as, he states, in “organic life . . . the seed contains already the whole plant in itself.”51 Such an “indifferent” state of being “initself ” is what Hegel calls “the indeterminate immediate . . . This reflectionless being is being as it is immediately in its own self alone.”52 However, what makes it grow “foritself ”—or “determine” and differentiate itself as what it is (though from nothing else in particular)—makes it also what it is not, since it paradoxically requires tension with what it is not to be what it is. Regarding dramatic or metaphorical tensions, New Critics would insist that “contradiction must somehow form a larger unity if the final effect is to be satisfying”;53 contradictions would be resolved in a way that is not given on either side of an opposition. Such resolution, for the New Critics, involves organic unity—however “ambiguous”—as an immediate effect in the reader’s mind. For Hegel, dialectical accomplishment requires that all movement be subordinated to the whole toward which it strives, and a work be indeterminate and immediate as it evolves through the unfolding of tensions. Our less traditional reading of literature would emphasize neither the unity nor the vitalism of the work. In fact, our Deleuzian approach to likeness and difference offers a distinctive perspective on literature: for Deleuze, only likeness—not difference—is given, and difference does not emerge from likeness; instead, “only differences are alike.”54 There is no “likeness” that can be thought apart from difference, no unity that can subsequently reconcile difference. Furthermore, Deleuze’s notion of difference is partly influenced by Blanchot’s vision of death as impossible, which places the absent totality of an artwork in the domain of mortalism rather than vitalism: only the parts

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which already resemble each other can be considered vital. Both Hegel and Deleuze agree that the given state of being is deficient: while this leads Hegel to conclude that the negative sides of Being must be unified to be “in and for itself ” (resolving the paradox), Deleuze argues that difference is paradoxically in and for itself when it includes, and is developed by, likeness. Unlike Hegel’s account, however, which presumes that contradiction is the given or determined state of Being for-itself because the originary unity of Being in-itself is paradoxically indeterminate, Deleuze argues that likeness (contraction, repetition) is the given, “vital” state of Being for-itself and that difference is the mortal “in-itself ” of likeness that implicates it. But how does this involve literature? If likeness is the condition of difference, then the displacements and disguises of percepts and affects explicate the non-being of differences. Percepts and affects may be “vital” in our imagination, but the differences they engender, as Blanchot would say, “know nothing of life”: there is no organic unity that they form, and the text is not a living thing. That is, in fiction’s reversal of power, the life-centric values of our world may subsume neither the content nor especially the form of fiction that would endow it with an organic coherence. As a result, Gregor Samsa the traveling salesman does not “differ” from the vermin to engender “unifying,” coherent significance. Rather, Gregor the vermin expresses a variety of affects: pathetically trying to communicate but not being able to, being ashamed of his appearance and hiding under the couch or covering himself, provoking volatile emotional outbursts from those who loved him, and constantly losing control of his body. In every case, we apprehend affective states without metaphor, as the “same” thing, the same immanent event, repetitions of each other, which displace questions that render truth inexplicable. Losing control, being misunderstood, and so on involve multiple relations that are not unifying, explicable themes, but movements drawn by the inexplicable, fragmentary, and different (however much, in this case—as we will see shortly—such affects may be haunted by percepts). How, then, are such movements not “immediate” effects on the reader or unified in their mind? In what way does literary mediation and immediacy counter the New Critical or dialectical project? Is it just the case that “the medium is the message,” in its literality? Here we can turn again to Blanchot. It is only by virtue of the materiality and medium of literary images that our attention can be drawn incessantly beyond such images, toward what Blanchot would perhaps call their immediacy and absence of origin. Here we can distinguish Blanchot’s account of the literary medium not only from Hegel’s immediate totality, but from McLuhan’s famous formula,“the medium is the message,” to assert our own Blanchotian formula: the medium attracts the immediate. On the one hand, McLuhan argues that artistic media “constitut[e] a hidden environment”55 or milieu, such that “the medium is not the figure but the ground,”56 producing effects that evade our attention. On the other hand, for Blanchot, language already “attracts” the reader to its own “absolute milieu” which “has nothing to do with signification or meaningfulness as they are implied by the world’s existence.”57 Only the dream lacks any medium and is purely imaginary, but this is why it is forgotten. Art’s advantage is that it creates actual milieus by virtue of its medium (e.g., for Blanchot, language in literature, and for Deleuze, actual images, light, movement, framing, etc. in cinema). That is, literature creates something, but this creation is drawn or attracted towards that which cannot be

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created; as Blanchot insists, “Literature is perhaps creative, but what it creates is always . . . attracted to another measure: that of its unreality where in the play of infinite difference what is affirms itself.”58 Here we have Deleuzo-Blanchotian difference as the immediacy of a work of fiction and the inexistent point toward which literature is drawn. Our Blanchotian formula—that artistic media attract the immediate—can be refined by virtue of such an immediacy’s paradoxical dependency on mediation and refusal of immediacy itself, which entails what Blanchot calls “fascination.” As Blanchot puts it, the “immediate excludes everything immediate,” including “all mystical fusion”; it thereby “excludes itself—renounces its own immediacy” because it is always by virtue of “the mediation of an intermediary”—that is, language in literature, the framed, cut, and moving image in film—that it can “offer access.”59 The medium “conjures” the imaginary, but because the milieu of the imaginary is absolute—or in Hegelian terms, indeterminate—we are attracted toward a space beyond both. The medium thus only attracts us to the immediate by affirming its unreality, its falsity, its semblance, and its scandalous opacity: in our terms, it must engage with truth and reality, with the determination of affect and percept, as effects of power in order to reverse them. Blanchot in fact calls fascination the “attraction” towards figures which do “not belong to the world of reality, but to the indeterminate milieu” grounded in “the incessant and interminable.”60 Fascination is thus not a matter of a hidden milieu or totality that evades our attention or attraction; rather, fascination concerns the way in which our attention is drawn to a milieu (a medium and an environment) that has no reality but that always “reappears” as if it does, drawing us ever further. (In D&G’s terms, the artistic medium’s foundation is likewise a plane that is immanent to the imaginary, despite that it “moves infinitely.”) Not McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” and not Hegel’s “mediation of the immediate”; instead, the medium attracts the immediate. Turning to Deleuze and Blanchot on Kafka, we can now ask: whence does such a literary process emerge?

4. Real become fictional through hyperbole: Kafka’s letters and diaries The reversal of power in fiction initially presents itself through the hollowing out of reality. If the chaos of the indistinguishable constitutes our “natural” disposition (IV; 2a), then we only come to discern reality by virtue of the contractions or repetitions in the imagination that constitute our habits of perception (II; 6). And it is in this sense that reality is our first, practical foundation to provide a sense of a world, or stable milieu—and it is therefore the first to be challenged in the experience of fiction, whereby the real and imaginary reflect and refract as a reversal of the very same process of contraction in the imagination that gave it the sense of stability in the first place. In this case, figures of likeness that differ (rather than metaphors that are alike by virtue of being different) in Kafka’s works initially disguise themselves in other figures— doubles, projections, echoes. The double, of course, was the very figure which “haunted” Foucault’s world of knowledge and power (II; 4): here, it is no longer just an outside

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beyond the world of reality, but an outside that “doubles” itself closer than the most interior perception and imagination. But in this initial movement, such doubling is a form of distortion, hyperbole, and menace, taking place in the letters and diaries, which both D&G and Blanchot claim reflect Kafka’s entrance into literary space. The letters for D&G, and the diaries for Blanchot, are the hyperbolized caricature of Kafka’s own feelings, his own activity, or people in his life. Both D&G and Blanchot allow us to consider that Kafka’s method of writing about his own life attaches his own feelings about himself to another self that is entirely foreign to and removed from who he is. For D&G, if Kafka doubles himself in this nascent writing, he basically creates a fictionalized version of himself by “doubling” himself into a subject of enunciation (the real self, the writer, with renewed vigor through writing) and a subject of the statement (the fictionalized self, who struggles with his father, his work, his life as a bachelor, etc., who is forlorn and “unhappy”). In Blanchot’s terms, he has begun the shift from the “I” to the “He”: he “arrive[s] at this strange substitution where ‘I have become involved in another in whom, however I no longer find myself.’ ”61 Hence the “extraordinary” nature that goes far “beyond the plausible and the realistic”: the “impossibility of recognizing himself in” his characters, situations, and worlds.62 What do these approaches teach us? Kafka’s perception in these cases becomes a percept, dispossessed of the subject attached to reality, and through such hyperbole and distortion instead poses a problem wherein perception is drawn towards what it cannot see, rendering the real and imaginary indistinguishable. Despite that Kafka’s reality becomes indiscernible from the imaginary, there remains an affective attachment (whether conceived of as the generalization through repetition in the past or its projection onto a generic future: II; 6) to the truth of who or what these hyperboles and distortions refer to (his family, his lovers, his solitude, etc.). While reality has been “hollowed out” and rendered imaginary, then, it remains haunted by the affective truths that implicate it: disguises of perception refer to other disguises, revolving around such affective truth. Here we can more closely consider D&G’s and Blanchot’s readings of Kafka’s letters and diaries, respectively. In one case, D&G portray Kafka’s letters as a form of hyperbole, a sort of repetition or reflection unleashed from its lived or “real” target. For example, in Kafka’s famous “letter to the father,” he notoriously blames his father for everything: “Everything is the father’s fault: if I have sexual problems, if I don’t get married, if I cannot write, if I lower my head in public, if I have had to construct an alternate, infinitely more barren world.”63 But “Kafka knows quite well that” it is “a reproach that is so strong that it becomes unattributable” to the father. (Similarly, the love letters “enunciate” one thing and “express” another: Kafka says he is madly in love but only to deliver a letter that keeps the supposedly beloved faraway so that he can write.) Kafka takes an “image” of his father and “projects” it (doubles it, enlarges it, and maps it) onto the world: the father’s influence is mapped onto “[t]he judges, commissioners, bureaucrats, and so on,” which condenses “forces that he submits to and that he tries to get his son to submit to.”64 What Kafka is trying to do is find a way out of his father’s world: anyone who reflects his father’s values therefore becomes a distorted image of his father. But he also achieves the effect of an “exorcism of Oedipus and the family”;65 which is to say, by exaggerating and fictionalizing his father’s image, his father becomes

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a farce, a caricature in Kafka’s imagination that allows for creative imaginings of family dynamics, conjugality, and all the values his father represents. Blanchot’s portrayal of Kafka’s diaries also involves the effect of depersonalization, where Kafka’s own feelings are fictionalized through a transformative repetition (divesting them of reality). This may involve comical, deadpan hyperbole, not far removed from the letters (as when Kafka writes things like, “everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it . . . visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked”).66 But Blanchot explores the archetypal procedure for this, where I am unhappy, so I sit down at my table and write, “I am unhappy.” How is this possible? This possibility is strange and scandalous . . . as if the possibility that my writing represents essentially exists to express its own impossibility . . . The “I am unhappy” is unhappiness only when it becomes thicker in this new world of language, where it takes form, sinks down, is lost, is darkened, and survives.67

Here Kafka signifies his lived exhaustion while summoning a new vigor: he sees his own feelings repeated in writing, but this repetition, in Blanchot’s terms, “will not leave off ”68 and comes back to him such that he is estranged from ownership of his own feelings. For Blanchot, the feeling is not itself transformed; rather, there is a shift in perspective. From the side of living, everything feels impossible, but from the side of writing, everything is possible. Thus nothing has changed, but something has happened. Kafka thus becomes dispossessed of his own unhappiness, such that the “I” who felt unhappy becomes the “He” who is unhappy.69 In our terms, the affection still maintains its truth, but perception has lost its reality: there is no real person to possess the feeling, no real circumstance in which to feel it. By “surviving” and sinking in the absent world of language and the imaginary, the “I” repeats itself, resonating and percolating in a fictional form. Kafka’s diary thus, as D&G note in a Blanchotian vein, “communicates with all of the outside”70—it is the very condition for fabulation. The diaries and letters, while potentially fascinating or empowering, involve the harrowing effects of a repetition or doubling that has no purpose in a world of reality. Kafka has fictionalized himself, his world, and entered into literary space. Insofar as the “real” world and the fictional world are indiscernible in his imagination—for example, the father indistinguishable from all bureaucrats, and so on—the incessant and “restless” observations undergo a movement that, in Blanchotian terms, “disperses the present” and effaces the difference between real and imaginary: it is perhaps an “incessant, feverish, even–uneven movement of error which has no purpose, no end, no starting principle.”71 But self-fabulation may be harrowing, as evidenced by the emotional turmoil experienced in the letters (reliving unpleasant experiences with his father) and in his diary (his “job is unbearable,” he feels “Apathetic, witless, fearful,”72 etc.). For Blanchot, the diaries involve a “state of dissolution, associated with solitude”;73 here Blanchot cites Kafka’s lament that “It was not in these states that I wrote my best works,”74 as though the mystery of the transformation from “I” to “He” could be consuming. Considering Deleuze’s paradox of indiscernibility which inevitably falls back onto generic forms of expectation, here too we see the effects of hyperbole and

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depersonalization: Kafka’s life and imagined world become only a generic refraction, caricaturization, and distortion of itself. Fortunately, his writing process does not stop there: the diaries form a new habit, an abnormal, “unimportant” and useless writing habit that leaves behind the values attached to life: the family values, the professional values, the “productive” values. This is therefore only the first stage to get us to the obscure value in Kafka’s fictional art. Here we must look to the next genre that D&G and Blanchot focus on: the short stories.

5. Coexistences of human and subhuman: Kafka’s short stories The second stage of the reversal of power in fiction presents itself through the hollowing out of truth. Here we encounter the ideals to which we are attached affectively, which give our world a larger coherence beyond just our habitual perception, intruded upon by that which cannot possibly coexist with it (as the differential states of memory engender paradoxes of coexistence: II; 7). In this case, Kafka’s short stories imagine a space defined by inexplicable and radical differences that are, in Deleuzian terms, alike—where protagonists are humans and animals, where the ordinary and fantastic, the true and false, coexist. Unlike the diaries and letters as an echo of Kafka’s own experience, here, differences become menacing within the structure of the narratives themselves. For example, in “The Burrow,” where, as we saw, the phantasmagoric echo of the creature’s own activity makes Blanchot’s outside into a “trap” (III; 6), because the greater the effort put into the everyday task of creating security and shelter from “the outside,” “the greater the danger that you be closed in with the outside . . . it is intimacy that becomes menacing foreignness.”75 Here the creature is menaced and hollowed out by the coexistence of his world with that of his obstinately ungraspable “double” as a phantasmagoric creature coming toward him: difference takes on the form of “ever more threatening threat.”76 Rather than an actual reflection, the other creature is an ungraspable echo of foreignness, a mythologized perception-memory: just as we considered this as a nightmare “haunted” by the reality of the day, this other creature is the mythologized reality that remains trapped within the coexistent states of true and false—a reality that, as Blanchot insists “it would not recognize”77 and can never encounter (III; 6). Thus, while the trap of solitude with the diaries involved being consumed by the repetition of the indiscernible that retains its affective truth, here it is otherness that is felt as a genuinely differential state but perceived as an “always more threatening threat.”78 In this case, the creature’s affect that searches for solace only finds paranoia within the perception of a phantasmagoric image of otherness that haunts it. Blanchot’s reading, in these terms, corresponds with D&G’s assertion that the double always “blocks desire”: just as the Blanchotian nightmare obfuscates the inspiring experience of the other night, so too do the animal narrators become haunted, trapped, or hollowed out by the very world of reality from which an escape was sought. That is, what D&G call “becoming animal,” which can be defined here as a radical diverging into a state of difference and otherness, no more finds a way out of the problems and questions that Kafka’s works pose than do the letters and diaries. But how is this a distinct paradox from the letters and diaries?

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The coexisting, differential states of these short stories (e.g., animal–human, self– other) cannot reach a genuine transformation or becoming because the affect that drives such becomings is haunted by generic and mythologized perceptual-milieus within which it differed. Its displacements always defer onto other displacements insofar as they revolve around the mythologized perceptions of the fantastic or foreign (rather than intertwining with disguises of the percept and displacing onto that which is not given and can “only be thought”). Here we can reconsider Deleuze’s paradox of the coexistence of differential states (“becomings”) which ultimately and inevitably fall back onto the generic and reflected form of a ground (like the active synthesis of memory, never truly leaving behind identity: II; 7). Kafka’s shorts create what D&G call “abstract and reified” machines which break down,79 often comically (e.g., the burrow of “The Burrow,” the vermin-family structure of “The Metamorphosis,” the machine “In The Penal Colony”) because of a ground that has become “mythologized” (desire, law, escape, etc.). Such inexplicable differences cannot coexist. In other words, the “becoming” cannot involve itself in what Blanchot may call a real “diverging of difference” because, for instance in “The Metamorphosis,” its differing from the family remains dependent on the reality of the family. It is a reimagining of relations, and a coexistent state of the human-animal which cannot be true, hollowing out and deterritorializing Gregor’s human interiority, but re-establishing or reterritorializing it as a grotesque form onto the reality of the family: always the distorted, generic perception haunting the unmitigating affect (despite the variety of differential states expressed, as we saw in V; 3b). For example, the “becoming animal” achieves an escape from the obligations and indebtedness to the family (Gregor “was often haunted by the idea that next time the door opened he would have to take the family’s affairs in hand again”);80 but his escape leads to his annihilation, as “Gregor’s metamorphosis [is] the story of a re-Oedipalization that leads him into death, that turns his becoming-animal into a becoming-dead.”81 D&G allow us to consider here that the animal stories have a “mysterious” function akin to the mythologized perceptionmemory of Deleuze’s second synthesis of time, which cannot connect to “social fields”: there are in fact “abstract” functions or “dysfunctions” of other short stories (which leave the animal narrators out of it and focus more on social but “reified” machines), as in “The Great Wall of China,” where a wall is built to defend the mainland from intruders who do not exist, and with enormous gaps in it (thus involving differential, coexisting states that cannot reach a genuine becoming). But we turn now to the novels, where the indiscernibilities of the diaries and letters, and the coexistent differences of the short stories, combine to engender something new.

6. Unlimited displacement and disguise: Kafka’s novels In its ultimate, radical reversal beyond power, literature no longer hollows out reality by virtue of likenesses that become different while oscillating between their displacements or their disguises. That is, the percepts of literature are no longer bound by affection to some truth, nor are the affects of literature bound by a perception that is connected to some reality. Rather, the likenesses expressive of difference—no longer doubling or differing in coexistent states—as D&G would say, “proliferate” and “take

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flight.”82 That is, the problems and questions of percepts and affects become entangled, such that they displace and disguise that which has no truth or reality and cannot be sensed. If, as Blanchot insists, literature “is” in fact nothing other than its own question or problem, then Kafka’s question or problem, for D&G, is always one of “finding a way out.”83 This does not mean an escape from his personal problems, but a way of reimagining the world, with its social and political forms of oppression, beyond what we believe it already is. The other genres fall short of this, falling into caricature, distortion, depersonalization, menacing phantasmagoric threats, the failure of “becoming animal” or the breakdown of “abstract and reified” machines. In Kafka’s letters, diaries, and short stories, then, disguises only refer to other disguises, and displacements only defer onto other displacements; in D&G’s terms, there is always something “blocked” by the double: a “mystery,” where displacement and disguise only hollow out reality or truth by virtue of some caricaturized or subhuman figure. In Kafka’s novels, by contrast, he initially presents a mystery that could be revealed; a scandal or conspiracy that could be exposed; or desire mediated, estranged, or “hollowed out” by its unreal double. However, for D&G, the desire of his protagonists ultimately “takes flight” (fuite; that is, it flees or escapes) when it is no longer subject to the doubles that estrange it, but when those doubles “proliferate” such that they themselves become unlimited. Here, percepts disguise that which cannot be revealed, and affects displace that which cannot be located: becoming or difference. It is in this manner that the novels find a “way out” of the oppressive realities and truths that they present. The distinction between doubling and “proliferation” can be better understood by virtue of D&G’s notions of desire and segmentation in relation to our world of truth and reality. Here, D&G assert that when this Kafkaesque doubling first enters the scene, it fixes desire—“segmenting” it into milieus or into the binary divisions and branding of statements (I; 12): as in a Foucauldian world, here too, despite that the strangeness of Kafka’s literary space has been unleased, the aim of desire, and of the assemblage, is represented and thus “something remains blocked.”84 In the case of the double, it creates an “inertia” where one double defers to another (even if the protagonist defers to another, as in “The Burrow”). In the triangle, when doubles move simultaneously, they refer to a third term: as D&G note, this is the case of the two arresting officers in the opening of The Trial, who defer to the Inspector; as we will see, the assistants in The Castle are similar (VI; 2). In this initial movement of desire, percepts are disguised by other similar percepts, and affects are displaced onto other affects (e.g. K’s frustration with the assistants in The Castle becoming jealousy or suspicion). For instance, D&G claim that the messenger Barnabas in The Castle begins as “one of K’s doubles,” and that the student who “never stops misleading the official usher and takes his wife” is “one of K’s doubles in The Trial.”85 These characters either mediate K to his desire (Barnabas) or block K’s desire (the student), standing in for it and distorting it. But doubles ultimately “break” their form to proliferate by being presented as functionaries who no longer defer or refer K elsewhere but instead to nowhere, insofar as the world which they displace or disguise ceases to exist. The conceptual composition of difference and becoming can thus be found in D&G’s approach to the “proliferation” of series as what they call an “unlimited field of

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immanence.”86 An example they provide is the first interrogation in The Trial where K believes that he is speaking to two factions, one more liberal and one more conservative, but realizes that they are all functionaries of justice. That is, one side seems to be more sympathetic, but they not only wear identical badges, but all obsess over the same scandals, like the washerwoman’s screams in the back room. Added to that, their distinctions were always “false”: “the important thing is not what happens in the tribunal or the movements of the two parties together but the molecular agitations that put into motion the hallways, the wings, the back doors, and the side chambers.”87 The perception here loses its doubling or coexistent state: imagine leaders of a political party diametrically opposed in their values—for example, two candidates for president in a bitter partisan race—being exposed as the same, as interchangeable, insofar as they displace and disguise “agitations” that are always in “the office next door”88 to the office next door, ad infinitum. Here, the difference inherent to the second synthesis of time is drawn further by the third synthesis, which dissolves that difference into the indistinguishability of the movement of repetition: “justice” cannot be experienced but becomes a conceptual, differential, and inexplicable state that includes “injustice” (as D&G insist, authorities of justice do not seek offenders but are attracted to offense).89 Justice, as a conceptual relation rather than something true or real, thereby becomes the absent totality that propels the narrative—immanent to every percept, every affect (every “situation,” every milieu, every action, etc.). This process, whereby the indistinguishability of coexistent, differential states “proliferate” involves—in The Trial, for instance—distinct segments, perceptual and affective milieus, exposed as contiguous or in contact: for example, when K discovers that the lumber room in the back of the bank where he works has been transformed into a punishment room by the courts, or when he discovers that the painter’s studio connects directly to the law courts. But in many cases, distinct characters all begin to share traits that make them indistinguishable and unlimited; as we will see (V; 9), even the protagonist of The Trial himself desires justice.

7. Kafka’s deterritorialized assemblages of the future In Kafka’s novels, when the problems and questions of desire—that is, the imperceptible of perception and the insensible of affection—become indistinguishable from (contiguous with, inseparable from, coexistent with) its differential forms or states (e.g., the guilty or corrupt indistinguishable from the innocent in The Trial), then desire is no longer fixed. Importantly, the proliferation of doubles includes the protagonist himself, who undergoes a series of continuous changes or “becomings” that reveal the machinations and features of a world driven by functions or aims that are new and thus, however indiscernible, are unknowable. This paradoxical status of difference as repetition—the third synthesis of time which focuses on the future (eternal return)—is what propels Kafka’s novels: representational truth has dissolved, and there is no organic unity or metaphor that could unite what may seem different. But what remains? In our world of knowledge and power, territorial assemblages (practices, “dispositifs”) coordinate affects (provocations, expectations, anticipated actions), subjects and milieus

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around aims or goals related to fostering or enabling life and prosperity (I; 12). However, in this radical reversal beyond power, deterritorialized assemblages in Kafka’s novels express what is, as D&G like to say, “coming into view”; for Kafka, . . . literature is not a voyage through the past but one through our future. Two problems enthrall Kafka: when can one say that a statement is new? – for better or for worse – and when can one say that a new assemblage is coming into view? – diabolical or innocent, or both at the same time . . . It is that which Kafka listens to . . . the sound of a contiguous future, the murmur (rumeur) of new assemblages.90

Kafka, in other words, expels from assemblages any aim or territorializing factor that would give them truth or reality by harnessing their “capacity . . . for undoing their own segments, for pushing farther their points of deterritorialization, for taking flight on the line of escape, for filling the field [champ] of immanence.”91 An assemblage with no aim, no knowledge or value related to truth or reality, would result in, for example, the movement in The Trial where the protagonist incessantly seeks justice in a system that appears only to persecute and punish without cause—or, as we will see in The Castle (VI), where seeing is dissociated from saying such that the protagonist embodies error in a system that will not admit to it. But what justice is, for instance, will not be symbolized or represented in The Trial, just as those who may be oppressed by such a system are an invisible and unrecognizable minority that does not yet exist (hence the assemblages and statements that oppress them are only “coming into view” or “knocking at the door”).92 The statements and differential states (innocence, guilt, accusation, acquittal) are new in that they are dissociated from, and do not explain, the affects and percepts in the text. Kafka’s novels express a future that is as unforeseeable as it is unrecognizable—a future that paradoxically resembles the past and the world we think we know and take for granted (as we saw with eternal return: II; 8): the literal manifestation of an untrue and unreal world, the displacement or disguise of the future through the past and present. We are now in the domain of Deleuze’s third synthesis of time and Blanchot’s highest level of ambiguity, which unleash affects and percepts from their revolution around some mysterious function or center of the text; instead, affects and percepts are displaced and disguised by ideas, to become part of an unlimited movement. While we have considered the internal dynamics of the text, this approach to the future as eternal return can also be applied to the effect of a literary work on “what it could do”; as Claire Colebrook notes, genuine literature “transforms the very context of literature and expresses the power of difference that will open up new contexts.”93 Whether considering internal or external dynamics of the text, this very paradox of novelty, via Deleuze, would demand that we not be able to recognize novelty; if we could, it wouldn’t be new; novelty therefore appears via the familiar, and difference via likeness; Kafka’s worlds thus may appear like dysfunctional versions of our own world, but are in fact the expression of the unforeseeable and uncertain (as in Blanchot’s impossible death). But what, then, is the relation of novels like Kafka’s to the world? In reversing power as this book claims, do they critique power? If Kafka’s worlds are unrepresentable (the novelty of difference and becoming), it may seem as though his worlds lack meaning and value. So what can they do?

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8. The “dismantling” of representation in Kafka’s novels—a critique of power? If the social and political forces which remain in Kafka’s novels after truth and reality have been radically reversed resemble our world but have no cohesion, it may seem as though all that remains would be sordid and corrupt. And it is well known that Kafka’s novels present worlds that are “nightmarishly bizarre,” as the expression “Kafkaesque” designates. So it may seem that he is in fact simply a dark absurdist writer, presenting worlds of profoundly disturbing negligence, incompetence, and persecution. For example, Joseph K is arrested in The Trial with no charge, and forced to defend himself under these conditions. But this does not make Kafka’s texts critiques or parodies per se. Despite that, in a Foucauldian sense, the “assemblages” in Kafka’s novels blatantly and offensively disallow life through negligence and persecution, Kafka’s purpose, D&G claim, is not to demonstrate the dysfunctionality or scandalousness of social or political systems: his “method of active dismantling doesn’t make use of criticism.”94 His novels are therefore neither blueprints for how things could be otherwise nor calls to action. They are “not a politics of pessimism, nor a literary caricature or a form of science fiction.”95 They are not “dystopias” or what Margaret Atwood calls “speculative fictions.” But why not? Kafka’s novels are not social critiques because they do not present cohesive worlds: the assumption that the world “is” negligent or corrupt presumes that there is a world to critique, to be corrupt in the first place. In Blanchot’s terms, Kafka’s work is drawn genuinely to literature’s absence of origin which cannot grasp particular realities, since it has no reality (nor can it thereby critique any perceivable realities). This is why Blanchot’s writer “ruins action” in the world (V; 2). And while Kafka’s novels initially hollow out the interiority of affects and percepts, and seem to present a dysfunctional world, his novels ultimately, paradoxically, D&G claims, “actually function” by the dismantling (démontage) of representations or truths (of identity and of world) that enable the territorial capture of assemblages. In other words, Kafka’s novels operate by virtue of a movement that “already is traversing the social field,”96 a movement that D&G call interminable and infinite resulting from the continuous dismantling of representation—akin to Blanchot’s “movement by which the work tends toward its origin.”97 How the lack of a knowable aim of Kafka’s assemblages, however, compares to a Foucauldian critique of assemblages of power deserves elaboration. Kafka’s literary method, which deterritorializes social and political assemblages, is distinct from Foucault’s method, which critiques territorial assemblages of power. Thus the Foucauldian method would diagram relations of power in exterior worlds of truth and reality, perhaps questioning whether or how they are genuinely fostering life or “disallowing” it, while a Kafkaesque method would consider that which is also “closer than” the perception of milieus of power and the affection that provokes us to act in a power relation—this “closer than” being a “desire” that can only be thought. D&G explore this when they note that although Foucault’s “method is completely different [from Kafka’s], his analysis is not without a certain Kafkaesque resonance. Foucault insists on the segmentarity of power, its contiguity, its immanence in the social field.”98

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But by entering into the domain of fiction, we also enter into a domain of desire, of affect and percept—or in D&G’s words, of “creation” more broadly conceived—that precedes the territorialization of affects and percepts, whereby we are constantly provoked to discipline and regulate our lives. Along these lines, D&G insist elsewhere that their “points of disagreement with Foucault” are that “assemblages seem fundamentally to be assemblages not of power but of desire (desire is always assembled)” and that “the diagram and abstract machine have lines of flight that are primary, which are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage, but cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization.”99 Such a line of flight corresponds to the manner in which—in Deleuze’s critique of Foucault, which leans on Blanchot’s notion of the outside—“resistance comes first” (I; 11): the movement of desire, the displacement of affects and disguise of percepts, is not provoked by values related to life, but by Blanchot’s unreality and uncertainty of a death that is not “possible” (Deleuze’s ultimate problem and question). Despite that Kafka’s worlds are absent and unreal, his novels are not without a function or purpose (they are not simply “dysfunctional”): Kafka’s fiction sabotages our very tendency to believe in fictions, wresting this tendency from its metaphorical shackles through which there might have been any symbolic, dialectical, or “organic” unity bestowed upon the text (and instead forces us to think difference and becoming). But how is this a “function”? As we have seen (I; 11–12), assemblages are territorial insofar as they make all action within them a function of the territory; here, perhaps counterintuitively, the claim is that going beyond the territorial function—or the Foucauldian critique of their function—does not mean going without a function. It means that the actual function of Kafka’s work of fiction is to dismantle the representations that make assemblages cohere—representations that provide them, as Foucault would say, with their truth and reality. Thus we can reconsider our Nietzschean perspective that literature’s function is to prevent us from believing in fictions (V; 3a). In Kafka’s novels, the deterritorialized . . . assemblage no longer works as a machine in the process of assembling itself, with a mysterious function, or . . . that doesn’t function, or no longer functions [as in the short stories]. It works only through the dismantling that it brings about on . . . representation. And, actually functioning, it functions only through and because of its own dismantling . . . This method of active dismantling doesn’t make use of criticism . . . Rather, it consists in prolonging, in accelerating, a whole movement that already is traversing the social field.100

In “actually functioning” by dismantling the explanation or closure we would expect in the world, Kafka’s novels explore justice that has no justification and that only persecutes (The Trial) as well as, we will see (VI), a bureaucracy and social system that only neglects or excludes (The Castle). The inexplicability of what is happening thus seems absurd or meaningless, but is in fact an expression of change or difference. Kafka’s protagonists are changing into something: desire is swept up in an incessant “movement” that they reflect and refract, that they are outraged and appalled by (it is incredulous), but in Blanchot’s terms, that they cannot ignore (K’s fate depends on

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responding to the arrest in The Trial, and seeking employment in The Castle). What then, does this make of Kafka’s characters? How do we avoid fully inhabiting their points of view (that systems are corrupt or incompetent) to experience the genuine function of Kafka’s fiction?

9. The literary protagonist dispossessed of action: why Kafka is not his characters The minds who create the greatest characters and fictional works have the ability—as tradition has it—to inhabit diverse and conflicting sensibilities. Keats famously noted that any great writer, such as Shakespeare, “has no identity”101 because he or she must have the “negative capability” to “project oneself into the thoughts and feelings of others, and remain open to a variety of points of view [and of] uncertainties, Mysteries, [and] doubts.”102 When inhabiting multiple perspectives, the feelings of such authors cannot be readily identified with the feelings of their protagonists. Consider, for example, Joseph K’s immediate reaction to the Priest’s famous parable in The Trial: while K assumes it is about the law’s deception (that the doorkeeper lied), the priest emphasizes that the man gaining entrance to the law may be deceived, or that the deceiver is not capable of deception. Two distinct and incompatible sensibilities are on full display. Kafka certainly “holds out the bait” (as D&G say) for biographical interpretations that would presume he is channeling his own misgivings, but this is just the tip of the iceberg, insofar as the bewilderment and outrage of the protagonists become a mirror of the actions of those they are bewildered and outraged by. That is, Kafka presents us with a special case of “negative capability” because his protagonists become “proliferations” of their worlds, no longer entirely distinguishable from other characters insofar as they express a univocal—albeit inexplicable and indiscernible—desire. But how does Kafka achieve this? Here we return to his writing process: by first rendering his own feelings indistinguishable from those of fiction in his letters and diaries, he does not import his anxieties onto his fiction; rather, he divests himself of his personal relation to them. Thus he may empathize with his characters, but, as Kafka insists, while his characters may see things as “an injustice,” for him, “such descriptions are secretly a game. I calculatingly exploit the reader’s attention.”103 What we have now are characters whose motives stem from the very insensible of affection and imperceptible of perception that is coextensive with that which is inaccessible in their external worlds: internally different and therefore incapable of “negating” each other or representing “contradictory” points of view. The protagonists of Kafka’s novels are sponges that absorb—and mirrors which double, reflect, refract, and ultimately proliferate—the desires of those in the assemblages they encounter, while at the same time remaining absolutely excluded and different from those in their worlds. For example, Joseph K is arrested and “accused” in The Trial, so what is his response? He will berate and accuse the entire court of corruption. He desires justice and persecutes the court as he himself is persecuted. Supposedly unwittingly, he gets the warders who first arrested him whipped and

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punished. He is, in short, not simply a victim; he is also a victimizer. As D&G note, “The secret of The Trial is that K himself is also a lawyer, also a judge,” and “[e]veryone is in fact a functionary or an agent [auxiliaire] of justice . . . even the accused, . . . K himself.”104 As we will see, when K arrives in The Castle, he does not attempt to “get along” with those he meets (“K likes to menace . . . whenever he can”).105 He is neglected by the villagers and Castilians, so his actions betray profound neglect in return: he is the murmur of the outside of his world, caught in an interminable process. It is the loss of individuality, which in Kafka’s case is recreated by virtue of the assemblages that “sweep up” the protagonists: their desire is an echo and reverberation of the desire of their assemblages. They are figures of likeness expressive of difference: resembling the characters in their worlds, they also differ from them in their absolute exclusion and neglect from their worlds, thereby continuously encountering only the displacement and disguise of truth and reality—that is, Blanchot’s world of “radical separation” where “everything is false”106 and unreal. K, in fact, is no one: the ultimate “outsider”—anonymous and impersonal—formed by what D&G call the rumor or murmur (rumeur) of Kafka’s “new” assemblages (V; 7), and what Blanchot would perhaps call the “rumor surrounding us, this anonymous and continuous murmuring in us” where “the pure passage of a movement in which each one is always, already, in advance, exchanged for everyone else.”107 His efforts to believe in truth and reality only incessantly reveal the ungraspability of both. The subjective status of Kafka’s characters—their “motivation” and ability to act—is thus problematized and questioned as a result of the lack of reality and truth in their worlds. In Foucauldian terms, there is nothing that can be “said” about Kafka’s protagonists to judge them as subjects when they are cogs in a literary machine—a machine whose function is to dismantle the fictions of truth and reality that would subjectify them: if we were to try to explain who Kafka’s protagonists are, given the corruption or incompetence of their “worlds,” their actions are both justified and utterly irrational, placing us at a standstill of self-contradiction. But this presumes the K characters are subjects capable of action in a world of consequence. So we must move beyond that, and consider that in a world of impossibility, the K character is dispossessed of any action or consequence that we could attribute to his intent. Thus Blanchot can say that for Kafka, “the subjects of the action—those who once stood in the place of characters—fall into a relation of self-nonidentification.”108 Blanchot thereby insists that “What Kafka teaches us— even if this formulation cannot be directly attributed to him—is that storytelling . . . unseats every subject just as it disappropriates all transitive action and all objective possibility.”109 In D&G’s terms, such a subject disappropriated of the objective possibility of their own action and intent is instead formed by “desire [that] is always assembled; it is what the assemblage determines it to be”110: in other words, percepts and affects of desire are arranged around or “determined” by some aim or function that is beyond their exterior worlds or assemblages. The characters, in short, do not really know why they want what they want—but not because their desires are repressed (Kafka’s K and other characters have no background or Oedipal “baggage” to explain their motivations or “psychology”); rather, it is because the aim or function of their assemblages is obscure and absent.

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10. The reversal of power and concepts that compose Kafka’s inexplicable worlds The absent totality of Kafka’s worlds can only be thought. As assemblages that form how we perceive, feel, and speak, however, we cannot “think” them in terms of a logically cohesive aim. If their genuine function is the dismantling of truth and reality, this returns us to the distinction between logical concepts, which represent the function of some territorialized assemblage in the world of knowledge and power (I; 12), and genuine concepts, which involve connections through relations and through the difference of movements in milieus (IV; 5c). To explore such territorial capture (and its deterritorialization), we turn to a key notion from Deleuze’s work on Foucault that reappears in D&G’s Kafka, namely the formation (and dissolution) of “segments”—that is, milieus that have been territorialized by binary divisions of knowledge. On the one hand, the logical concept involves the aim or “function” of practices and assemblages (education, health care, etc.) in that it relates an attribute to a subject, experience, or milieu. In this case, concepts “segment” milieus (e.g., prison cells, cubicles, hospital rooms) and subjects (e.g. binary division and branding—sick/healthy, etc.) by virtue of reference. If you are sick, you cannot leave the hospital: “sick” is your attribution and determines your milieu. On the other hand, genuine concepts, which are connective rather than referential (IV; 5c), may still involve assemblages (insofar as “the concept is not object but territory,”111 and the territory is the first assemblage), but such conceptual assemblages are deterritorialized insofar as they take as their object forces, events, or movements that are “unthinkable.” The genuine concept, therefore, does not segment words or things because it does not proceed by negation but rather by difference: in connecting disparate movements (with “infinite speed”), it “consists” and “insists” within milieus or “segments”; it passes through them to discover relations. The consistence or insistence of difference in Kafka’s novels radically reverses the effects of power by rendering the “segmentation” of milieus non-binary, composing a literary field of immanence—that is, composing affects and percepts—in an unlimited or incessant movement. D&G’s distinction between the segmentation of assemblages and their deterritorialization on an unlimited field of immanence (champ d’immanence illimité) is reflected in the logic of Toward A Minor Literature, which can be broken down as follows: ●

●

Segmentation is prevalent in Kafka’s novels: “The segments are simultaneously powers and territories—they capture desire by territorializing it . . . each blocksegment was a concretization of power, of desire.”112 Furthermore, “segmentalization can be more or less rigid or supple”: for example, the rigid, low ceilings in the gallery of the courtroom of The Trial that forces onlookers to bend their heads; or as we will see (VI), the supple, “movable barriers” in The Castle which make Barnabas’s work seem “unbearable.” Desire in this sense can be “blocked” (in this case, blocks form segments). Alternatively, desire can itself “take flight” and “unblock” (débloqué) the segments that territorialize it.113 In this second case, the assemblage—which is to say, the “function,” aim, and concept of the literary machine—is unrepresentable. Here,

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the assemblage “extends over or penetrates an unlimited field of immanence [champ d’immanence illimité] that makes the segments melt and that liberates desire from all its concretizations and abstractions.”114 For segments to melt or dissolve (fait fondre) into each other means that the logical concept that represents their function and makes them binary is itself dismantled. We are thus not presented with D&G’s (pre-)philosophical plane (plan) of immanence, but a (pre-)literary “field” of immanence. What is the difference? According to D&G, a field of immanence is traced out by virtue of the problems and questions that are explored by desire. The plane of immanence, by contrast, is the absolute milieu of philosophy: its milieus are related conceptually, such as the practical and historical milieus that Foucault surveys (IV; 6a). The distinction here concerns what we have seen involving the formation or transformation of affects and percepts (IV; 4a–b) and the amorphous or formless form of the plane of immanence (IV; 3c); the contention here is that D&G’s field of immanence concerns affects and percepts, but not the direct philosophical plane of immanence per se. This is why art and fiction involve the plane of composition: this is the plane that concepts occupy in order to draw affects and percepts in an unlimited and incessant movement (IV; 3c). In Kafka’s case, this movement dissolves segments and symbolic abstractions of truth and reality. The displacement of affections and the disguise of perception by that which can “only be thought” in Kafka’s novels is a high-wire act, requiring the constant balance of descriptive, vivid rigor and literality with that which cannot be described or sensed at all. This is a feat of what D&G call Kafka’s “athleticism”: he is a “hybrid” artist-thinker who creates conditions for “[t]he plane of composition of art and the plane of immanence of philosophy” to “slip into each other”; by refusing to “cover over differences in kind,” D&G claim that such artists “use all the resources of their ‘athleticism’ to install themselves within this very difference.”115 Kafka, in short, walks the fine line between literary precision and the differences that lie within it. For example, in The Trial, “justice” is a differential state between the just and unjust, and is absent, inexplicable, and inaccessible in its truth or representation—but it is seen and felt through percepts and affects of vengeance, claustrophobia, persecution, and secrecy that are ubiquitous in their development throughout the novel. This notion of “athleticism” also appears in Deleuze’s work on Francis Bacon, which we have seen (IV; 4b) involves drawing sensation to the insensible. Bacon’s athleticism specifically involves “intense movement[s]”116 of line, color, light, contour, and so on that leave behind “represented objects” (that is, “relationship[s] of an image to an object that it is supposed to illustrate”)117 and constitute non-representational “Figures” that do not fit cognizant coordinates of vision (e.g. they appear deformed, elongated, dissipated). Justice in The Trial can be considered similarly to Bacon’s Figures: by “dismantling” the relation of perception to the reality of justice or injustice (e.g., of a courtroom or agent that would represent the law, and instead only works by rumor, or by sexual impulse) and the truth of affection (e.g., that the hot, stuffy air in the law court attics or their low ceilings literally, rather than figuratively, encroach upon or suffocate the protagonist), we are instead left with a “constellation” of affects and percepts. That is, Kafka presents

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a fictional milieu, the connections and relations of which we can think, but the appearances of which cannot be explained. The radical reversal outside of power in Kafka’s novels occurs when the interminable movement of unreality—its absence of origin and resolution—enters into a dynamic with the ungraspability of his dismantled, “untrue” assemblages of the future. No longer constrained by the conceptual aim of territorialized assemblages, the future can only be thought as a deterritorialized assemblage. Like the return of the day in the dream, we have only the imaginary material, the milieu of affects and percepts into which we are ceaselessly thrown back and which are immanent to the experience of the fictional work. Unlike the dream, there is a composition of problems and questions (what is justice?). But we, like Kafka’s protagonists, are separated from answers in the form of representation that would connect us to truth and reality: as Blanchot says of Kafka’s novels, it is “as if separation, experienced in all its rigor, could reverse itself [se renverser] and become the absolutely separated, the absolutely absolute.”118 This space of the “absolutely absolute” is where the separation from reality and truth radically “reverses itself” or overflows, is turned upside down or inside out, exceeding itself within the “rigor, scruple, exactitude”119 of the “determined and modest appearance” or literality of Kafka’s images. Thus, on the one hand, through Kafka’s “athleticism” we are as D&G put it “installed” or lodged (s’installer) within Blanchots’ ceaseless “diverging of difference,” a becoming, where we cannot extricate ourselves from the “idle” movement which removes us from truth, in all its scandalous and shocking detail, but also cannot grasp the unreality left in its wake. On the other hand, we can think this difference, since, as D&G claim, “becoming is the concept itself ”;120 thus when desire “takes flight,” it involves what Blanchot calls the “pure approach” towards innocence or guilt, acquittal or punishment (in The Trial), always in a vacillating state but never resolving it. Thought consists within implied answers to questions such as, what is just or unjust in this relation, and in that? What is the variation? In order to more carefully explore such conceptual composition in the radical reversal beyond power, and the formation of affects and percepts expressive of obscure values (that is, how an experience of fiction reshapes sensibility in its literality), we now turn to Kafka’s novel The Castle.

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Kafka’s Castle: A Case Study—Conceptual Inexistence and Obscure Value

Introduction If we unwittingly carry with us our desire to discern reality and believe in truth into fictional domains which know nothing of either, how can fiction reverse such effects of power and, beyond that, affirm something in its place? Kafka’s last, unfinished novel, The Castle (Das Schloss), directly thematizes this problematic—not only by creating an absent point of profound negligence towards life, but also one of an invisible sovereign force rather than a visible one (II; 1–3). It is as if Kafka takes us on a journey from sovereign to modern power, reversing our relation to both. That is, as Foucault demonstrates of sovereign societies, we are able to see power embodied in a force that draws attention to itself (I; 1)—however, in The Castle our protagonist only confronts a “castle” that incessantly recedes into the distance and darkness. Furthermore, that which he does find is only the disappointing, fumbling machinations of a vast bureaucratic assemblage of a biopolitical society. But if such an assemblage is meant to enable and foster life, in Kafka’s novel we have an assemblage that “lets die” in its absolute negligence—in which conspiracy and incompetence seem interchangeable. But this is only the first reversal. As Blanchot notes, The Castle testifies to the very bind of figuration where exile in the imaginary involves incessantly substituting images for the “immediate,” and where figures (whether characters or milieus) are only “bureaucratic phantasms” and the unreal “reflection[s] of an invisible whole.”1 We have a character taken on what one scholar calls an “inverted romance” (in that the goal of “the traditional quest motif ” is “unattainable”),2 who believes he is in a real world and can access truth, when, in fact, for Blanchot, “everything is false and inauthentic”:3 a raw and relentless encounter with the imaginary itself. And it is within that inauthenticity and unreality, that invisible whole, that we encounter that which “can only be thought.” But how does this work? This chapter provides a case study of The Castle in order to illustrate the movements of displacement and disguise through the affect and percept in fiction, the role of desire in its paradoxical “proliferations,” the work of art approaching its absence of origin, and the literary interstice of seeing (imagining, perceiving) and saying (narration, dialogue) wherein K’s summons has no empirical value, in order to ultimately consider the castle itself as a conceptual expression. That is, we will see that the castle is not a 165

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figure, but an idea: as the imperceptible object of perception and insensible object of affection, it can “only be thought” in its fragmented, absent totality. Since it is beyond the imaginary, it consists and insists in differential states of everyone and everything: constantly disguised as that which cannot be revealed and constantly displaced as that which has no location. By virtue of this conceptual composition, an obscure value will emerge: hope that incessantly loses its object. It is a hope the images of which “befit” what Blanchot calls the “impatience” of our protagonist, who only encounters the “ordinary and ugly,”4 the insipid machinations of bureaucracy, and the disappointment of unfulfilled promises.

1. The castle and the village: perception of the imperceptible We begin our exploration of Kafka’s novel as the protagonist, K, arrives at a village after a long and potentially irreversible journey in response to an offer of employment as a “land-surveyor” (Landvermesser, which has political connotations that could suggest imprudence).5 He first perceives the “apparent emptiness” of a castle, and looks towards what he thinks is the “castle hill,” but “there was [not] even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there.”6 He crosses a bridge that leads him to a village, and continues to gaze “into the illusory emptiness above him.”7 Deciding to end his journey for the night, he finds an inn, where he is confronted by a man who claims that the inn is in the village which “belongs to the castle.”8 The following morning, K is convinced that he does perceive a castle “in the glittering air, its outline made still more definite by the thin layer of snow covering everything.”9 And it “appeared from below” that “up on the hill everything soared light and free into the air.”10 He soon discovers, however, that the castle . . . was neither an old stronghold nor a new mansion, but a rambling pile consisting of innumerable small buildings closely packed together and of one or two stories; if K. had not known that it was a castle he might have taken it for a little town . . . on approaching it he was disappointed in the castle; it was after all only a wretched looking town, a huddle of village houses.11

In Foucauldian terms, the protagonist perhaps expects to see a visible, sovereign stronghold, but instead cannot see anything definitive (added to this, he is immediately met with a bureaucratic, administrative issue: he does not have “a permit” to stay in the castle precinct). Despite that the castle is immediately revealed as only a rambling pile of houses in a town, K must still assume that the issuing official of his letter of employment is there. Kafka’s novel begins, therefore, where the perception of the castle becomes a problem: if the castle is in fact just a “wretched looking little town,” K still needs to figure out where to go and whom to speak to. In fact, as K continues on his journey, the perception of the castle “hill” is again problematized when he realizes that . . . the street he was in, the main street of the village, did not lead up to the castle hill; it only made its way toward it and then, as if deliberately, turned aside, and

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though it did not lead away from the castle, it led no nearer to it either . . . he was also amazed at the length of the village, which seemed to have no end—again and again the same little houses and frost-bound windowpanes and snow.12

What K expects to see—in this case, a destination (even if a “dilapidated” one) on a hill, becomes unreachable: it is disguised by the irreducibly complicated (having a seemingly infinite length and labyrinth-like structure) and indifferent (displaying the same houses over and over), which do not refer to more disguises, but ultimately disguise nothing (a castle with no existence). There is in fact no evidence in Kafka’s novel that the castle is a single entity on a hill; it is only spoken of as “up there.” One man named Gerstäcker in fact offers him a ride in his carriage; saying to K, “you’re the land surveyor . . . and you belong to the castle. Where do you want to be taken?”13 Obviously, K says, he wants to go to the castle, as Gerstäcker acknowledged that K was standing on a road “leading to” it.14 And yet, “without hesitation” he says he won’t take him there, but only to a local inn, as though reaching the castle was impossible. Here we have the first instance of many where the percept, as Blanchot will say, befits “the impatience” of the protagonist in its topographical form: always dissolving in the distance in the snow, interchangeable only with insipid or unrevealing structures, if it is connected to any structures at all (this impatience will soon lead us to the affect). It is a milieu incessantly drawn toward the absolute. Soon we are introduced to a second similar perceptual problem, which will instigate K’s desire throughout the novel: the peasantry and the Castilians are perpetually interchangeable or indifferent. K first learns this when he encounters a modern establishment: the local schoolhouse, and a schoolteacher who asks whether he likes the castle, since, as he says, “strangers never do.”15 K relates his troubles with the peasantry at the inn, also confessing that he doesn’t imagine that he will fit in at the castle, which provokes the schoolteacher to say that “there is no difference between the peasantry and the castle.”16 Castilians here are figured as impossible to “perceive”: perception is disguised indefinitely by other disguises, and as we will see, ultimately by that which has no reality. This soon segues to K’s first encounter with real castle officials when, upon arriving at the inn, K meets his “assistants,” who also had just come directly “from the castle.” Added to this, they have been given no “apparatus” for land-surveying,17 and do not know anything about the profession. In looking more closely at them, K decides that they are indistinguishable, and that he will call them both by the same name: the first overt doubling effect that will later “proliferate.” In this manner, K’s perception becomes a problem insofar as the representatives who mediate K to his “desire” can only be perceived through a doubling or echoing of a space that is imperceptible, perpetually disguising that which cannot be revealed: the “whole” of the castle itself.

2. The affect: figures that “befit” K’s impatience If the perceptions of “Castilians” draw vision or the imaginary toward the imperceptible, then affections of impatience, first provoked by the castle messenger Barnabas, are drawn to the insensible by building on those percepts. That is, while K’s affection may have

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maintained a generic relation to the truth, that affection is quickly drawn to the insensible. This occurs when Barnabas first appears at the inn, as another castle official, who delivers a letter from K’s purported superior, Klamm, regarding his employment. Though Barnabas does not know the contents of the letter, K thinks that “the expression in his eyes, his smile, his bearing, seemed also to convey a message, however little one might know about it.”18 Upon believing this, K decides that he must follow Barnabas back to the castle, and insists on accompanying him under the pretense of giving him another reply message in private. However, K soon realizes that they had not done any “climbing” nor gone up an “imperceptibly mounting road,” but had arrived at Barnabas’s dilapidated house surrounded by his elderly, feeble parents and his sisters. K then states to Barnabas that . . . “you weren’t going to the castle, but only here”—the man’s smile was less brilliant, and his person more insignificant . . . he had been bewitched by Barnabas’s close fitting, silken-gleaming jacket, which, now that it was unbuttoned, displayed a coarse, dirty grey shirt patched over, and beneath that the huge muscular chest of a laborer. His surroundings not only corroborated all this, but even emphasized it, the old, gouty father . . . the mother . . . incapable of any but the smallest steps because of her stoutness . . . he had been persuaded that in this village everybody meant something to him . . . it was only for these people that he could feel not the slightest interest.19

As Blanchot writes of this scene, Barnabas is a “bureaucratic phantasm” that “merely befits our impatience”:20 K’s affect of impatience becomes a questioning force that continues to displace him in his journey. But these new affects are not based on an object; they have been displaced onto that which has no object—K admits it was “simply a . . . common, vulgar misunderstanding.”21 In D&G’s terms, affects here move beyond the initial reversals of Kafka’s diaries and short stories and are quickly intertwined with percepts: no longer just the disguise that cannot be revealed, but displacement that cannot be located—the “ordinary and ugly” surroundings make K feel nothing (not “the slightest interest”).22 That is, the affect is displaced onto that which manifests only in disappointment, frustration, or perhaps disgust: the insensible itself. It is in this manner that K’s impatience to confront the castle (or its authorities) in its displaced, insensible disinterest is complicated by the percept of the mysterious, disguised, and faraway castle itself in its imperceptible ordinariness and immediate proximity. The affect of K’s impatience not only draws us to the insensible, but, as Blanchot puts it, is K’s “essential fault” which creates the bind and “principle of figuration”—that is, it intertwines the affect’s insensibility with the imperceptibility of the percept. As Blanchot says, “K. always wants to reach the goal before having reached it. This demand for a premature dénouement is the principle of figuration: . . . Man wants unity right away; he wants it in separation itself. He represents it to himself, and this representation, the image of unity, immediately reconstitutes the element of dispersion where he loses himself more and more.”23 Impatience here is a question without answer that “reconstitutes” a percept or problem without solution in which K continues to lose himself—the insensibility and imperceptibility of the castle itself, and everything the castle promises. That is, what is made inexplicable and inaccessible here is an explanation

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for K’s summons to the castle, along with the promise of security and prosperity (acceptance in the castle, a place to sleep, a source of income, and a purpose). The figure stands in for this goal: it presents the goal through obstacles and mediation, which of course “befits” or naturally provokes the impatience to determine what the figures mean and what they stand in for (in many ways, like the position of the reader who wants “explanation”). Instead, such “obstacles” or mediation only attract us to an immediacy (V; 3b) that forces us to think these inexplicable and indiscernible bureaucratic relations. Perhaps the most essential figure in The Castle whose unlocatable displacements of affection are intertwined with unrevealable disguises is Klamm, K’s superior, whom K perceives clearly and unambiguously, and still yearns anxiously to confront or understand. Klamm first appears after K is escorted to another inn where he hopes to secure lodging. Here K meets Frieda, a bartender (with whom K later has an affair), who allows K to look through a peephole so that he can see Klamm, the man who signed the letter K received from Barnabas regarding his employment, in his office. Like K’s perception of Barnabas and his family as reproachable and uninteresting, K perceives Klamm not as a figure of perfection, but as “a middle-sized, plump, and ponderous man. His face was smooth, but his cheeks were flabby with age. . . . [H]is eyes were hidden behind glittering pince-nez that sat awry.”24 Not only is this perception mundane and unrevealing, but K later learns from Frieda that Klamm was in fact asleep. When learning this, he protests to Frieda: “ ‘but when I peeped in he was awake and sitting at the desk.’ ‘He always sits like that,’ said Frieda, ‘he was sleeping when you saw him. Would I have let you look at him if he hadn’t been asleep? That’s how he sleeps, . . . it’s hard to understand.’ ”25 As Blanchot says of this moment, “Klamm is by no means invisible. The land surveyor wants to see him, and he sees him . . . Naturally when you look at them closely, these figures are disappointing . . . Klamm [is only] a big heavy man seated in front of a desk. There is nothing here that isn’t very ordinary and ugly.”26 Such images, he says, “possess nothing to justify the fascinated interest people take in them” but nevertheless “are, all the same, images of the goal; they partake of its glow, of its ineffable value.”27 Once again, this is the “bind” that K finds himself in through the affect of impatience: it forces him to question and see in the image what he thinks he can know: a provocation toward a better life (or in Blanchot’s terms, a “superior world”). K cannot turn away from these images, despite that, affectively, they possess nothing that “justifies” the interest in them. Like a mirage, they conceal only the impossibility of his impatience for a satisfactory dénouement. Klamm, the highest castle official that K could dream of confronting, may be a mirage or illusion (Klamm in fact means “illusion” in Czech),28 but he is an unavoidable one which all of the characters, including our protagonist, feel compelled to believe in as a source of truth and reality. As the Mayor of the village tells him, “you haven’t once up to now come into real contact with our authorities. All those contacts of yours have been illusory, but because of your ignorance of the circumstances you take them to be real.”29 Klamm is, as K later learns from Barnabas’s sister Olga, a figure whose image perpetually changes: [O]ut of glimpses and rumors and through various distorting factors an image of Klamm has been constructed . . . he’s reported as having one appearance when he

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comes into the village and another on leaving it, after having his beer he looks different from what he does before it, when he’s awake he’s different from when he’s asleep, when he’s alone he’s different from when he’s talking to people, and . . . he’s almost another person up in the castle. And even within the village there are considerable differences in the accounts given of him, differences as to his height, his bearing, his size, and the cut of his beard . . . Now of course all these differences . . . can be easily explained; they depend on the mood of the observer, on the degree of his excitement, on the countless gradations of hope or despair which are possible for him when he sees Klamm.30

Here, not only the perception of Klamm but also something as simple as a name capturing its object (in this case, the person in charge) is problematized (as is “knowing” in terms of a relation of seeing and speaking: I; 4). Added to this, it is the affect, the “hope or despair,” that Klamm induces in those who come to depend on him that influences their perception. In this manner, the affect is perpetually displaced through phantasmagoric percepts and disguised by Klamm-like figures. But this alone does not explain why, as one character insists to K, Klamm “will never” and “can never” speak to him; indeed, “never yet has he spoken a word himself to anyone in the village.”31 In fact, when Barnabas goes to speak to Klamm, he does not know whether it really is Klamm but maybe some who “resembles Klamm a little and takes pains to increase the resemblance.”32 That contacts with Klamm, as the Mayor says, may be “illusory” only reinforces the point that Klamm could be anyone, “For instance, Klamm has a village secretary here called Momus . . . you’ll find people in the village who swear that Momus is Klamm.”33 Thus if Klamm is a source of truth and reality, he is one that is perpetually disguised in figures of resemblance, and whose affective significance reflects those who are seeking to confront him. K’s perception of Klamm through the peephole therefore involved his own perception being drawn toward what he cannot perceive: desire for the life promised by the castle, making Klamm a chimera or manifestation of that very desire. But it is not a repressed wish or fantasy; it is the displacement and disguise of the problem and question of the social and political promises of an entity without truth or reality. It is in this manner that the percepts and affects related to the Castilians are, as we will explore, ultimately displaced and disguised by the idea of the castle itself. The doubling effect of figures in The Castle draws the perception of them and affection towards them beyond the figurative or imaginary. For D&G, it is not only Klamm’s “proliferation” that renders him imperceptible and insensible; the indistinguishability of castle officials is perhaps most acutely illuminated in a moment when K perceives the same smile in his superior as he does in his subordinates. This reflecting or proliferation becomes especially acute when K learns that his assistants were permitted to access files that he was denied access to, reversing his supposed status over them: as the Mayor says, “ ‘Ask them to come in. Besides I know them. Old acquaintances.’ ‘But they’re in my way,’ K. replied bluntly, letting his gaze wander from the assistants to the Superintendent and back again, and finding on the faces of all three the same smile.”34 Here the assistants, in their “bustling idleness,” proceed to simply make a mess of the Mayor’s house, toppling over piles of paperwork and playing with them, making no effort to find paperwork related to K’s case: proliferations, displacements and

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disguises, of the Mayor’s own negligence with the same mischief, the same smile. Later, after K fires them, they return no longer as two figures, but as one, a singular castle “phantasm.” At this point we learn that they are not simply incompetent buffoons but were actually hired to “cheer K. up,” thus constituting another reversal wherein all characters are revealed as functionaries, no longer simply as doubles. Blanchot similarly describes as an “invisible whole” that of which these Castilians, as “doubles,” are functionaries: throughout much of the novel, the assistants are presented as doubles who merely watch K, follow him around, and are utterly incompetent. They embody, as Blanchot says, Kafka’s “bureaucratic phantasm, [with] all the bustling idleness which characterizes it, and those double beings who are its functionaries, guards, aides, messengers, who always go two by two as if to show clearly that they are only each other’s reflections and the reflection of an invisible whole.”35 In other words, the phantasm reflects the invisible because it has no origin, driving K only to observe what appears to be “bustling idleness” or attentive dysfunctionality. K’s unabashed obstinacy and impatience to confront Klamm and the castle culminates in an anticlimactic moment of waiting and abandon, after which the castle literally dissolves before his eyes, unambiguously asserting its inexistence while nevertheless demanding that it be seen and felt. This begins after K announces that that “he, K., he only and no one else, should attain to Klamm, and should attain to him not to rest with him, but to go on beyond him, farther yet, into the castle”36 when he lurks in a courtyard where he has learned that Klamm plans to get into his carriage. Klamm’s secretary and his driver soon inform K that Klamm will not be coming. At this point, K is abandoned in the courtyard, having lost the object of his impatience, and . . . the castle, whose contours were already beginning to dissolve, lay silent as ever; never yet had K. seen there the slightest sign of life, perhaps it was quite impossible to recognize anything at that distance, and yet the eye demanded it and could not endure the stillness [die Stille] . . . the longer he looked, the less he could make out and the deeper everything was lost in the twilight.37

Here, K is again seized by the ungraspable and imperceptible in perception: the castle “demanded” to be seen, since the castle must be real, but, the harder he tries to see it, the more it dissolves and becomes indistinguishable from the twilight. Such perception of “stillness,” silence (die Stille) and lifelessness is conceivably the very space of Blanchot’s absent totality of the work itself, for as we will see shortly, the lifeless castle can only be thought, but cannot be perceived or felt. This moment also supports Blanchot’s notion of the medium “renouncing its immediacy” (V; 3b): it does not provide access to the immediate, but only asserts its own status as mediation, so that the longer we contemplate its images, the more opaque they become. To return to the Blanchotian formula from the previous chapter, the medium (Kafka’s literary descriptions of the village) attracts the immediate (the castle). We can, finally, see how at this contextual moment, when K needs to see the castle precisely as his impatience to confront Klamm escalates, both perception and affection are unleashed from their objects. These affects and percepts of The Castle offer a profound and radical reversal beyond the effects of Foucauldian power focused on life. We are not only far from a sovereign

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world, which has been rendered entirely invisible and imaginary, but are clearly situated in the untruth and unreality of a biopolitical, bureaucratic assemblage. K is exiled in a strange land, where he is seduced by promises of a better life; his first seducer is a messenger whose “expression,” that is, “his eyes, his smile, his bearing, seemed also to convey a message,”38 makes K believe that he could take him to the castle; however, after seeing him up close, his “smile seemed less brilliant, and his person more insignificant,” to the point that K “could not feel the slightest interest.”39 Hence his obsession with Klamm: the signatory of the letters who remains at a distance. But “seeing” Klamm reveals nothing, and the castle itself only dissolves in the distance. The excitement and anxiety that accompanies K’s impatience are drawn into disgust and indifference insofar as both K’s goal and its messenger are revealed as false or negligent (in fact, we later learn that Barnabas does not deliver any of K’s replies to the castle; he is utterly incompetent). But beyond this “falsity,” in D&G’s terms, it is desire which draws such perception toward the imperceptible (the dissolution of the castle, Klamm’s inaccessibility) and affection toward the insensible (that toward which K is indifferent, where there is nothing to be impatient for). Here we have Blanchot’s fascination in full effect: K is seized or grasped by that which he cannot seize or grasp; he cannot ignore these figures, but they also cannot reveal anything to him. They conceal only the impossibility of his impatience being satisfied—and in Blanchotian terms, they conceal only the absence of the origin of the work, which makes K’s experience of impatience incessant. K, in these terms, is driven by an affect that lacks all truth and a percept that lacks all reality; he may continually seek to discover what happened or discern what is happening, but, “exiled in the imaginary without any dwelling place or subsistence,”40 only incessantly discovers and rediscovers the “intimacy of this distress.”41 It is in these terms, through K’s “desire,” that affects and percepts begin to displace and disguise a genuine idea. Before considering the nature of the imperceptible and insensible (the idea), however, it is crucial to consider the status of the protagonist himself: if his whole world is imaginary and “false” (corrupt, incompetent, etc.), then what does that make him?

3. Desire: K as neglected and negligent mirror Having no desire his own, K absorbs and reflects the desire to be included or validated by the castle—and to exert the very kind of negligent influence that the castle does. While we have considered Kafka’s version of “negative capability,” where his protagonists are not his stand-in, and also how his characters have no real “psychology” but express the differential states of desire in their worlds (V; 9), we can now see how the protagonist of The Castle exemplifies this. In these terms, K is not simply the victim of an incompetent system: despite being somewhat ignorant of it, K is a victimizing castle official who is just as constituted by power (or the lack thereof) as other castle officials. Furthermore, in assuming what power he does have, K will use it to neglect others. For example, though K is deprived of power insofar as he is unable to secure his promised employment, he is simultaneously endowed with power over his assistants, whom he admittedly abuses:42 he beats them, scolds them, and locks them out in the cold. K’s assistant Jeremiah later acknowledges K’s powerful role: “so long as my relationship to you was an official one,

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you were of course a very important person to me, not because of your own qualities but because of my official instructions [or duties, Dienstauftrages], and I would have done anything for you at the time.”43 Likewise, K continues to make constant demands of Barnabas. K finally demonstrates a different kind of negligence when he is given the opportunity to explain his case to a castle official named Bürgel who he meets by chance: after Bürgel explains the complexity of the bureaucratic machinations that created his problem but how he can also fix it, K simply falls asleep from indifference and exhaustion (this is arguably the “anticlimax” of the novel, in lieu of an ending). When met with a competent official, K displays the same incompetence that he detests. K’s desire to be included or validated by the castle also results in the eroticization of percepts and affects, compelling and fascinating him even as he is estranged and neglected by their utter lack of intimacy and interiority. When K meets Frieda, the bartender at the Herenhoff, he does not know what to perceive; it is something imperceptible about her that compels him, not her actual features: “it seemed to him that her look decided something concerning himself, something which he had not known to exist, but which her look assured him did exist.”44 K’s perception of Frieda becomes a problem when he learns that she is the mistress of Klamm, at which point he is “compelled by something in her”; though he admits to himself that her features may be “weak and characterless,” he cannot help but perceive them as “delicate” and attractive.45 He goes so far as to tell her directly that, because she knows Klamm intimately, she is a “very important person” to him.46 Likewise, Frieda is attracted to K because he was summoned to the castle in an important capacity. After the bar clears out, they soon find themselves amid the “puddles of beer” on the floor, where: . . . hours went past, hours in which they breathed as one, in which their hearts beat as one, hours in which K. was haunted by the feeling that he was losing himself or wandering into a strange country, farther than any man had wandered before, a country so strange that not even the air had anything in common with his native air, where one might die of strangeness, and yet whose enchantment was such that one could only go on and lose oneself further.47

Insofar as Frieda eroticizes the non-being of the problem (K does not know what is “in her” that compels him) and the non-being of the question (she will endlessly “befit his impatience” insofar as he will never reach his goal through her), K can only experience what Blanchot would perhaps call the “empty intimacy” and “menacing proximity” of a “vague and vacant outside.”48 Perhaps at no other point in the novel is K so explicitly and overtly “hollowed out” and haunted by the lack of the comfort of interior truth or welcoming intimacy, and then immediately and nevertheless compelled and “enchanted” to go on further. In Blanchotian terms, he goes from menace to fascination with the outside (II; 2–3). In Deleuzian terms, K goes from the doubling of the indistinguishable (“the same breath, the same heartbeat”) to the unlimited scope of desire and becoming (“one could only go on”). Just as the castle, in its unrevealability and unlocatability, neglects all who desire within it, so too do Frieda and K inevitably neglect each other. That is to say, to the extent that Klamm and the castle are inaccessible, yet at the same time ubiquitously

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perceived and felt, it is logical that there could literally be no place in their world in which K and Freida could love each other “undisturbed”—their seduction of each other is always by virtue of their apparent proximity to the castle. After cohabitating, Frieda’s own separation from Klamm and the castle in fact dissolves her attraction to K; as Frieda states to him after some time, “I won’t be able to stand this life here. If you want to keep me with you, we’ll have to go away somewhere or other . . . I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else.”49 At this point, despite that she sacrificed her job and her connections to the castle for him, K abandons Freida in an attempt to confront castle officials. K soon asks himself whether it was Frieda’s “separation from Klamm” that dissatisfied him, and goes on to think that “it was the nearness of Klamm that had made her so irrationally seductive; that was the seduction which had drawn K. to her, and now she was withering in his arms.”50 That which Kafka’s protagonists absorb like a sponge—and reflect like a mirror—is the desire of those in their worlds (V; 9); while the nature of this desire is consistent throughout The Castle, it is also distinctive: if The Trial expresses differential states of persecution (V; 8–9), The Castle expresses differential states of negligence. On the one hand, then, The Trial involves a desire to persecute and be persecuted, to punish and be punished—perhaps a vestige of sovereign authority in a law that persecutes and takes, albeit in the form of an expansive modern administrative apparatus that, like the castle, has no reality. On the other hand, The Castle involves a desire to neglect and be neglected, to include and to exclude, to shame and to elevate. In Foucauldian terms, where we expect to see a sovereign authority, a “castle” and a Count, there is only a modern bureaucratic assemblage that provokes and seduces with the promise of a better life, which it will never fulfill. But in its profound neglect of K, it never directly threatens or harms him; as K’s direct superior says, “The very uncertainty about your summons guarantees you the most courteous treatment . . . Nobody keeps you here, but that surely doesn’t amount to throwing you out.”51 Here we have a desire distinct from that in The Trial: no one is persecuting K; instead, they will simply shun him as he incessantly seeks refuge, answers, and validation in a place with no apparent location. D&G claim that the novel involves “breaking away from that which was too spatial in The Trial” to reveal a “cartography that is certainly not interior or subjective but that has definitely ceased to be spatial”:52 moving frontiers, shifting borders, and characters who connect only by “proliferating” (that is, by ceasing to be individuals, characters instead become mere “functionaries”).

4. Error: saying unleashed from seeing The Castle not only reverses the effects of power in its dismantling of truth and reality, it also reverses the effects of knowledge specifically by fissuring the capture of the visible or observable by the articulable. If in a Foucauldian world, statements capture visibilities by virtue of branding, classifying, and judgment (I; 4), in Kafka’s world, the visible (what can be imagined, described, and perceived) asserts its ambiguous force in its dissociation from what can be said about the visible and about those whose identities are formed by it. The letter that provoked K to seek out the castle for employment, and the letters from

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Klamm that follow, indicate that in this unreality, “official” castle statements are not promises or contracts, nor are they even applicable to what can be observed in K’s state of affairs. It is in this dissociation of seeing from saying, this dismantling of truth and reality, that we encounter the admittance of error along with its denial: the bind of what Blanchot calls Kafka’s “man of exile” in the imaginary. K is absolutely excluded from the castle: his existence will never be known or recognized by it (and he can thereby never know “himself ” as a subject). In fact, according to the village “Mayor,” the castle is flawless and beyond reproach: it does not make mistakes, except when it does, as in K’s case—but this is an exception since his case is utterly unimportant. K encounters this paradoxical negligence of the castle after his first letter from Klamm (delivered by Barnabas) tells him that he has “been engaged for the Count’s service,” and that his “immediate superior is the Mayor of the village.”53 In short order, K goes to meet with the “Mayor”—who could be considered a superintendent, or provost, of the village (der Vorsteher is an ambiguous term, but designates a position of chief administrator or chairperson, though not necessarily a democratically elected official. This authority is described conspicuously as not being a castle official, despite his apparently high-ranking administrative position.) The Mayor in fact informs K that there is no need for a land surveyor because “the boundaries of our small holdings [Wirtschaften]54 have been marked out, everything has been duly registered, the properties themselves rarely change hands, and whatever small boundary disputes arise, we settle ourselves.”55 Soon, however, the Mayor admits that his summons had been an error while categorically denying the possibility of error or fault (Fehler), in a story filled with unbelievably insipid detail: as he tells K, when he received word about the possibility of hiring a land surveyor, he wrote back saying that it was not necessary, but this letter did not reach the correct department. Then, the wrong department grew suspicious, essentially wondering why they received a letter that had said there was no need of a land surveyor when, to their knowledge, one had not been requested. Furthermore, the suggestion regarding a land surveyor that came from the original department had been lost, so there was no proof that a land surveyor had even been requested. This caused some debate in the community, since land surveying “appeals to peasants,” until finally some clerk, though they could never discover “which clerk had decided in this case and on what grounds,” settled the matter by summoning K. However, because the castle is perceived to be beyond reproach, the Mayor explains that “the very possibility of error must be ruled out of account.”56 In fact, castle authorities don’t even seek out error because, as the Mayor states, “errors don’t happen, and even when once in a while an error does happen, as in your case, who can say finally that it’s an error?”57 According to the Mayor’s hypocritical logic, only the castle authorities can officially call something an error, but rather than do this, instead they attempt to prove, retroactively and tautologically, that any supposed “errors” were intentional from the start and thus inconsequential. Despite that, as K says, his case “determines the life of a human being,” according to the Mayor, it is the “least important among the least important”58—and by insisting that the error (if it did happen) doesn’t matter, he further establishes that it does not exist. Here the fissure between seeing and saying becomes more pronounced, as K’s official documentation is rendered insignificant. K’s objection to the Mayor’s

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hypocritical logic is that, of course, he has a letter from Klamm stating that he has been taken on as a land surveyor. But after examining the letter, the Mayor claims that it “is in no sense an official communication, but only a private letter . . . the letter means nothing more than that Klamm intends to take a personal interest in you if you should be taken into the state service.”59 In short, according to the Mayor, the letter is not binding in any way. In this instance, the perception of the objective significance of an official contract is disguised by the ambiguity of personal interest, and K’s hopes are displaced by the infinitely faraway or unfulfillable. K’s reaction to this is befitting: “ ‘Mr. Mayor,’ said K, ‘you interpret the letter so well that nothing remains of it but a signature on a blank sheet of paper.’ ”60 That the letter could be interpreted to mean whatever a functionary of the castle wants it to mean, because it has no reality of its own, is consistent with Kafka’s vision. What can be observed about K’s status has no relation to what is said about it. Official decisions, as K also learns, in fact have nothing to do with any statements or communications that may issue from the castle. As the Mayor tells K: When an affair has been weighed for a very long time, it may happen, even before the matter has been fully considered, that suddenly in a flash a decision comes in some unforeseen place, which, moreover, can’t be found any longer later on—a decision that settles the matter, if in most cases justly, yet all the same arbitrarily. It’s as if the administrative apparatus were unable any longer to bear the tension.61

The Mayor’s description, now far from the aims of Foucauldian practices that promote life, overtly admits to aims that are contingent, “arbitrary,” and capricious. His description resonates with Olga’s explanation of the castle’s bureaucracy when she later tells K that . . . the castle moves slowly, and the worst of it is that one never knows what this slowness means; it can mean that the matter’s being considered, but it can also mean that it hasn’t yet been taken up, . . . and in the long run it can also mean that the whole thing has been settled, that for some reason or other the promise has been cancelled . . . One can never find out exactly what is happening, or only a long time afterwards. We have a saying here, perhaps you’ve heard it; “Official decisions are as shy as young girls.”62

These examples demonstrate that in a vast bureaucracy—an assemblage defined by the delegation of tasks, the discussion of affairs by committee, paperwork, and “official” legitimation of statuses and positions—decisions are ultimately disguised by the irreducibly complicated and displaced by the absolutely frivolous. Thus while the Mayor claims that “nothing [in the castle] is done without thought,”63 K is the embodiment of a thoughtless mistake in a system that will not admit to mistakes. These reversals continue when K receives another official letter informing him that he has been doing a great job land surveying, further fissuring what can be observed in his day-to-day life from what is articulated about him. This borders on comedy when K, after having done no “land surveying,” receives another letter from Klamm saying

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that “The surveying work which you have carried out thus far has been appreciated by me. The work of the assistants, too, deserves Praise . . . I shall not forget you.”64 Justifiably, K reacts as follows: “Look what Klamm has written! . . . He has been wrongly informed. I haven’t done any surveying at all, and you see yourself how much the assistants are worth.”65 Here we have perhaps the most direct example of statements unleashed from observable events. A letter that so comically and completely misunderstands K’s situation and predicament, while at the same time acknowledging and affirming his status—a validation he desperately seeks—only further dissimulates the perception of the castle and its authority, as well as the desires and affections connected to its promises, from their truth and reality, incessantly throwing K back into what Blanchot calls the “ordinary and ugly”66 predicament of the village and its inhabitants. Klamm’s letters are thus part of an assemblage that no longer is “territorialized” by an aim that can be associated with truth or reality, as what can be said about K—that he is an official castle employee—is now dissociated from what can be observed: he is “unimportant,” is not working as a land surveyor, and has no relation to the castle. From a Foucauldian perspective, it is impossible for K to judge the castle, but also for K to be judged by it, since neither can capture the two forms of knowledge. K now genuinely inhabits a space of non-knowledge or obscurity.

5. The castle as conceptual: why it does not exist, but “consists” and “insists” everywhere The castle is not a figure or a metaphor, but is an indiscernible and inexplicable idea, immanent to the village and everyone’s experience there. We have now seen that the castle is not visible, but draws perception to the imperceptible; likewise, its promises “befit” impatience, and their incessant lack of fulfillment draw affection to the insensible. These percepts and affects are fully dissociated from truth and reality by fissuring what the castle renders “official” about K from what the castle does. The castle, dissolving in the distance, utterly inaccessible, can no longer possibly stand in as a metaphor for the fulfillment of K’s desire, for repressed wishes or fears, or for anything else that could be read into the text. The castle has become indistinguishable from the village, itself a concept or differential state that does not exist, but consists and insists everywhere. In other words, the castle may not “exist,” but the real movement of the novel that its bureaucratic power composes does exist. Here we have the likeness or similarity of everyone to the castle as the disguises and displacements—the movements—implicated by difference. The village is a literal manifestation of the castle, from which it is indistinguishable and with which it coexists: everyone has some “connection” to the castle, and everything is done in relation to the castle, but it is in a Blanchotian “(non-) relation.” That which the villagers and officials “relate” to is thus not an organic unity that can be ambiguously felt in the reader’s mind (V; 3b); rather, it has no existence and can only be thought. It is in this sense that the affects and percepts of the castle—K’s incessant to-ings and fro-ings in relation to it—are composed by an idea. We can give this concept an oxymoronic name, such as negligent aptitude or incompetent control, but the more important questions are: if the castle does not exist, then to what are the

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characters in the novel referring when they say they are going to the castle? Must it not be “somewhere”? Just as concepts are fragmentary and intensive, disappearing with infinite speed (IV; 5c), the castle itself is fragmentary and invisible, while at the same time intensive in its operation: a close reading of the novel in fact reveals that it is literally “up there,” scattered on hills that extend indefinitely outward surrounding the village, which is itself in a valley. That is, castle business takes place, both in the village and “up there,” in fragmented and constantly changing places on hills surrounding the village. Here we can therefore return to K’s perception of the castle’s position relative to the village. While he encountered the labyrinth-like structure of the streets which never seemed to take him to the distant castle hill (VI; 1), the topography of the castle is described in more detail later in the novel by Olga, Barnabas’s sister. In her story, her family was neglected en masse by everyone in the village after her sister tore up an official letter from a Castilian (which, incidentally, only contained the most obscene and vile language about her, including an order that she have sex with him). Her father lost his business and his titles in the village, and began to try to find castle officials to whom he could plead his case. But he never knew where to go or where to find them. As she explains, since he was not permitted within the castle itself, he decided to “plant himself on the main road near the castle, where the officials pass in their carriages, and seize any opportunity of putting up his prayer for forgiveness.”67 However, as she states, [T]here are several roads to the castle. At one time one of them is in fashion, and most carriages go by that; then it’s another and everything drives pell-mell there. And what governs this change of fashion has never yet been found out. At eight o’clock one morning they’ll all be on another road, ten minutes later on a third, and a half an hour after that on the first road again, and then they may stick to that road all day, but every minute there’s the possibility of change. Of course all the roads join up near the village, but by that time all the carriages are racing like mad . . . and the amount of traffic varies just as widely and incomprehensibly as the choice of roads.68

Comparing this to the descriptions of the castle on a “hill”—somewhere “up there”—it arguably becomes apparent that the village is itself in a valley, surrounded by fragmentary hills and higher regions which contain various structures and places of business. The castle “up there” is not a metaphor for heaven: it is the literal manifestation of displacement without place and disguise that cannot be revealed. But this is not to say that there is no business conducted in the village: in fact, the village is perhaps the place where the most business is done, or at least where the most traveling of castle officials takes place (as we see in the later chapter when K wanders into the back of the Herenhoff Inn, where all the Castilians are lodging for the night, having traveled down “from the castle”). But because the place of castle business is always changing, there is no one road that leads to it. That the castle has no permanent physical locality means that, like genuine concepts, it only refers to itself but not to any particular place. That is, the castle’s fragmentary physical locality and intensive bureaucratic machinations may spread out indefinitely

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or be “infinitely faraway”—but the effects of those machinations are always in immediate proximity or “contiguous”69 to the lives of those in the village. Furthermore, a closer look at the novel reveals that there may be dozens or hundreds of small offices on hills surrounding the village, which spring up only to disappear when any business is concluded: the castle, like ideas, does not exist, but only consists and insists, implicating movement. The Foucauldian segments thus “melt” along D&G’s “line of flight” or within the real movement that traverses them. But because this line or genuine movement involves a Blanchotian pure approach toward the inaccessible, or toward official statuses or positions that can never be reached, we instead have the unknowable force of the future, where the characters do not know what they or their worlds are becoming, making the bureaucratic assemblage of Kafka’s novel one of “the future” rather than one that is territorialized and known (as we saw in V; 7). But this unknowability, or inexplicability, nevertheless “forces us to think.” Just as the concept is self-referential (IV; 5c), so too does the castle only refer to itself—it is the variation that implicates its displacements and disguises, which are thereby experienced in a “field of immanence” (V; 10) with an amorphous form that transforms K’s percepts and affects. We do not, in short, know what all this bureaucratic activity amounts to: all of what Blanchot calls the “bustling idleness which characterizes”70 the castle is perceived and felt where it is (and we are) becoming something else, something obscure. It is not only the exterior topography of the castle relative to the village that is conceptual; the castle is also conceptual in that the activity inside of it, its interior topography, is as unlocatable as it is unrevealable. Much like the “void” of the present moment that never “is,”71 the castle’s interiority disappears in appearing because it has no ground (II; 6), only a passing and incessant foundation or field of immanence. The groundless, incessant foundation of the castle is characterized by Olga when describing Barnabas’s interactions with the power or authorities within the castle: [Barnabas] is admitted into certain rooms, but they’re only a part of the whole, for there are barriers behind which there are more rooms . . . [Y]ou mustn’t imagine that these barriers are a definite dividing-line . . . there are barriers even at the entrance to the rooms where he’s admitted, so you see there are barriers he can pass and they’re just the same as the ones he’s never passed, which looks as if one ought not to suppose that behind the ultimate barriers the offices are any different from those Barnabas has already seen.72

What Kafka expresses here is a topographical and logical paradox: there are perpetually reversible contradictions between possessing and being denied the authority to be admitted to the same spaces (perhaps Barnabas in some cases being in the same spaces which he is unknowingly denied the authority to be in), making the dividing line imperceptible. Crucial here is that Barnabas could be in a room where the “most important of the most important” (to use a phrase anathema to the Mayor’s) official castle business is taking place and not know it. It is thus not the appearance of the castle that allows one to recognize it; it is the actions taking place that make it what it is: but these actions are unrevealable and unlocatable as a totality. That is, the dividing lines between castle and village, between official and unofficial places of business, are

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perpetually displaced and disguised. In this sense, the castle disappears at it appears: it is irreducibly complex, and its chaos of activity is as transient as it is spontaneous. It never “is” because it can only influence action: like the Deleuzo-Foucauldian diagram of power, it is beyond the external world, but like Blanchot’s outside, it is also interiorized as that which is closer than the interior world of perception and affection. The shifting boundaries and borders of the castle, incessantly disguising perception through the imperceptible and befitting or displacing impatience onto the insensible, demonstrate that, to paraphrase a famous saying, the castle is as the castle does: it defers promises, it delegates tasks, it deflects responsibility; as a concept, its differential states lie in becoming proximate, becoming official, becoming included—but these states cannot be known because they cannot be encountered in what D&G call its “ultimate instances.”73 In their terms, the castle’s topography perpetually places “ultimate instances” (which are political, social, or juridical) in “an office next door, always the contiguous room.”74 This contiguity is in fact “a local and indefinitely prolongable version of the continuous . . . with shifting limits that are always displaced.”75 It is thus the actual, inconsequential room which reveals no “relevant instances” or effects of power that is perceived as the displacement and disguise of the relevant instances which are always infinitely faraway, or in the “office next door.” In other words, what is ultimately perceived is without consequence, since the effects of the castle’s power are always in the office next door: if the office next door was entered and “power” in itself was actually perceived or felt, it would likewise be immediately disappointing and uninteresting, serving as a displacement and disguise of the effects of power in the office next door to that, ad infinitum. (This can be compared to the famous parable of the law from The Trial, where the law is always located in a room behind a room, to infinity.) If the castle does these things by virtue of an inexistent origin (where it involves all of reality but itself has none), then it “knows nothing of life” and therefore does not “foster” the life of its characters: the castle only disallows life, it only neglects, and it only “dismantles” the representation of its functions that expresses its concepts (“forcing us to think”)—it is in these terms that its operation is forever severed from any truth or reality. In short, its shifting borders displace and disguise that which has no place and cannot be revealed: the castle itself. What does it mean to say that the castle, in its inexistence, is an idea? It means that the thought of the castle involves becomings that are “bureaucratic” in their reversal of the relation we have to a power that fosters life. Thinking the castle means conceiving of differential relations that are, properly, bureaucratic: the delegation of tasks, the making-official of duties, the fastidious recording of meetings and events, and so on, but in forms that are incessant and ungraspable. K’s existence is not only a result of miscommunication, false paperwork, failed protocol, and lack of consensus; he is also swept up by the differential states of Blanchot’s inexistent totality: incessantly becoming more included by the castle as he is summoned and given validation from Klamm’s letters, but simultaneously becoming more excluded as he does no land surveying and is fissured from that status on an ever sliding scale. The deterritorialized assemblage of these bureaucratic relations of “the castle,” which are also non-relations insofar as deterritorialization fissures the observable from the articulable, is thus constituted only by those who are excluded, by the errors that are necessarily made, and by the

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procedures that inevitably fail. This may seem to be the Foucauldian sense in which power is built on its own resistance—but insofar as K is caught in the fissure or “inbetween” of the official and unofficial itself, he is the “functionary” of a literary bureaucracy that only functions by dismantling and fissuring its “binary” divisions, or its representations (V; 8). K is drawn beyond the exteriority of a castle that can never be reached and further inward than his own perception (of the village) and affection (impatience) will allow, by means of unanswerable questions about his status, and unsolvable problems about what the castle “is.” The castle, as a concept, consists and insists in the movements that draw perception and affection beyond their realities and truths; insofar as the castle has no determinate or actual “existence,” it occupies Blanchot’s absent, inexistent totality and D&G’s plane of composition. This is the most radical reversal beyond power: the intertwinement of affects and percepts that properly compose a movement displacing and disguising an inexistent idea. In D&G’s terms, the castle as a concept is an inexplicable answer to the problems and questions posed by the movement of K’s journey—an answer closer than K’s interiority while beyond his exterior world (where his desire is constituted by the assemblage). This journey and Deleuzo-Blanchotian “becoming” highlights that we do not know what new human relations such bureaucratic, social machines may create—marking the literary experience outside of, and untouchable by, the truth and reality by of our world.

6. Hope: the obscure value and movement that divests hope in The Castle That percepts and affects are disguised and displaced by the unrevealable and unlocatable idea of the castle is only one direction—specifically, of implication—that this radical reversal beyond power takes us in: in the other direction, the affects and percepts themselves develop this idea by reforming our sensibility (IV; 6c). That is, at the unthinkable but sensible and literal level, what we perceive and feel in all of its obscurity develops a value that “knows nothing of life”—in this case, it is the value of hope. This value of hope is not a concept or a metaphor, but rather the effect of art as a kind of belief in the literality of fiction (V; 3a): Blanchot’s “as if” in the absence of religion, where we neither idolize nor can ignore the impossible. That is, it is an impossible hope, or a hope for the impossible, that has been utterly “hollowed out”: hope that has incessantly lost its object, whose images, as Blanchot says, “befit” the “impatience” of our protagonist, and who constantly only encounters the “ordinary and ugly.”76 As Blanchot insists, “the landsurveyor’s good luck” involves “the deceptive honesty of these images” of literary space which are constantly “preventing us from recognizing in the intermediary the figure of the immediate.”77 As we saw (V; 3b), such images would “renounce their immediacy” by drawing us away from what we can perceive and feel about them: the medium of Kafka’s literary imaginary attracts us to the immediacy of the castle as an idea—but only by “renouncing its immediacy” and sending us back to the affects and percepts which actually develop it. It is here that we encounter this obscure value of impossible hope. The “deceptive honesty” and literal impact of K’s percepts and affects develop this value of impossible hope, or a hope for what is, as K incessantly loses the object of his

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perception—namely, the castle (which nevertheless only “demands” to be seen)—and loses the object of his affections—namely, his impatience (which then leads him to be completely indifferent, almost disgusted). His impatience is stretched out indefinitely and flattened to become a form of hope; however, it is an incessant movement of hope— the constant approach toward the castle, or toward the next functionary, with nothing to hope for. It is perhaps, in Blanchot’s terms, such “[h]ope [that] bespeaks the possibility of what escapes the realm of the possible; at the limit, it is relation recaptured where relation is lost. Hope is most profound when it withdraws from and deprives itself of all manifest hope.”78 This hope, then, is arguably not a positive value that can attach to a possible future: to again use Blanchot’s phrase, such hope “know[s] nothing nothing of life.”79 It is, rather, characteristic of Kafka’s literary project; as Blanchot writes: Kafka’s world is a world of hope and a world condemned, . . . an affirmation that it wants to gain by negation . . . The ambiguity of the negation is linked to the ambiguity of death. God is dead, which may signify this harder truth: death is not possible . . . This disaster . . . is the mockery thrown on all humankind’s great subterfuges, night, nothingness, silence. There is no end, there is no possibility of being done with the day, with the meaning of things, with hope: such is the truth that Western man has made . . . bearable by focusing on . . . an afterlife that would compensate for life. But this afterlife is our actual life.80

If the unreality and uncertainty of death is considered as its impossibility, we can see how hope would translate in this context: not the hope of a felicitous afterlife, and not the “nothingness” of subterfuge or night in which we take comfort. Rather, it is the incessance of hope itself, or what Blanchot elsewhere calls “the unhoped for of all hope . . . a wait for what is.”81 For this reason Blanchot can say that our afterlife is this life, since hope for “what is” means that what is “after” life is only hope, much like the incessant day that never stops appearing in the dream: the world of hope and the world condemned are the same world. This is Kafka’s reversal and the obscure value therein, where the perception of the castle that seems deprived of all “manifest” meaning becomes the very “meaning of things.” In Kafka’s obscure world there is thus nothing for K to hope for beyond the insipid and unrevealing images of “what is,” thereby offering no symbolic truth—only an absent object of hope that incessantly collapses onto the immanent and incessant experience of hope itself. Obscure values, then, unlike the concepts that compose and implicate them, are rooted in sensibility—in this case, the affect and percept as a hope for what is—insofar as we can perceive, imagine, and be affected by such hope. This sensibility that develops the inexistent idea is a belief (IV; 6c)—it is “as if ” we are in the presence of truth, but in Blanchot’s terms we are present toward that which “one cannot be present, but from which one cannot separate.”82 Insofar as this hope does not mediate us to presence, is it not a belief in anything, such as salvation or an afterlife—it does not locate meaning or hope elsewhere; rather, the elsewhere continually displaces itself to be “here,” disguising itself as that which cannot be revealed (or awaited). Such a movement of hope implied by the idea is discontinuous: it is the constantly approached but unapproachable castle with its decentering and divergent bureaucratic tentacles that reach into all parts of life

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and constitute the desires of everyone in the village. Hope in this sense is a “compound of sensation” (IV; 4a): it is both the affect of a continually changing and differential state, through all its displacements (disappointments, redirections, exhaustions), and the percept and disguise of that which never reveals itself (having lost its object). In Deleuzo-Nietzschean terms, without belief in an afterlife or a supersensual world, we restore belief in the world83—but not in the real or true world as we know it: reality is perpetually disguised and truth is perpetually displaced. This is the function of the eternal return: there are always more displacements and always more disguises even if they do not displace onto anything in particular or reveal more disguises.

7. Conclusion: the bind of figuration If we have made a scandalous pact with fiction by leaving our world behind—expecting felicitous imagery or life-affirming values in a domain indifferent to them, or a moral lesson in a world without rules or possibility (V; Intro)—that pact is broken by the artistic moment of directing the work back towards its absence of origin. This absence and this thought are expressed by the consistence and insistence of the castle itself: its places and figures visible but unreachable, beckoning with abandon. Here there is no conventionally moral lesson, since anything the protagonist learns must be articulated in the context of Blanchot’s bind of figuration. That is, The Castle presents us with an unlimited movement that is immobile because it never arrives anywhere: for example, a response to a summons that was never sent, or sent only in error, which we can contest and investigate, and which will only uncover the “turning away,” incompetence, and negligence that we have ourselves undertaken in order to experience the fictional artwork in the first place. As Blanchot notes, The Castle involves an “enlarging of the distance” of the “favorable and unfavorable nature of figuration—the bind in which the man of exile is caught, obliged as he is to make out of error a means of reaching truth.”84 Such a protagonist, “exiled” in the imaginary, searching for truth and reality in a domain without either, does not learn patience but feels a “tense patience, patience unto impatience.”85 That is, there is no moral lesson involving patience, since it cannot be acquired but only “lost,” as with Blanchot’s protagonist from his quasi-fictional work Awaiting Oblivion, who “thought that he had learned patience, but he had only lost impatience . . . abandoned without abandon, moving in immobility.”86 We can now further consider the manner in which power is reversed and this pact is broken, and in which the incessant movement of affects and percepts, as well as the becomings of time, become especially acute. To do this, we turn from literature to the artistic domain about which Blanchot, as we saw (V; Intro), was conspicuously silent: cinema.

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Cinema

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Cinematic Worlds of Truth and Reality: Deleuze’s Movement-Image via Foucault

Introduction We often take for granted that entering into a cinematic work means leaving behind our world and our values related to life. We are not, by default, open to new ways of perceiving, feeling, and thinking; added to this, perhaps unlike dreams and literature, cinema is uniquely capable of capturing the visible or observable and thus of creating worlds of truth and reality, thereby mirroring our normal, entrenched ways of seeing. As we have explored (Intro; V), we carry over our values, our genre expectations, and especially our inclination towards judgment in our experience of fiction, saturated in a culture of personal taste and ratings. And if art in fact reverses the effects of power, we necessarily experience fiction, initially, in the way we experience our lives (despite that films constantly depict the otherworldly or abnormal), where perception and affection are linked to objects and possibilities, and where events are explained. We want to know, in short, what is happening or what happened. And most fictional works, especially films, will let us know by establishing truth and reality. It is therefore crucial to consider a critical position on such film (in distinction from an interpretive position, which we will ultimately arrive at in exploring cinematic art in the following chapter). From this critical perspective, as we shall see, Deleuze’s movement-image can be read alongside his approach to experience in Foucault’s world of power and knowledge to demonstrate how cinema forms assemblages of perception, affection, and action-images through a correspondence of the visual and audible and through the coherence of its truth and reality. This allows us to further distinguish cinematic immersions in reality from cinematic discoveries of truth, which correspond, respectively, to perception and affection in a Foucauldian world. Such films in fact express the life-centric values that we carry over into them, while also challenging or complicating those values. Indeed, just because a movement-image film does not question its truth or problematize its realities does not mean that we cannot do so—precisely through the genuine thinking of critique. To consider the establishment of truth and reality in cinema, we must first consider that cinematic movement (as well as its compositional devices of framing and cutting) does not form an “illusion,” only its production of truth and reality does—and this production is, as in our actual world, a result of the value placed on life. We will see that the “living matter” of Deleuze’s movement-image, which, through its intervals, 187

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expresses the quality of the whole, parallels the “organic unity” of the literary work (V; 3b), but also the biopolitical and totalizing way of conceiving life (I). In fact we again encounter Foucauldian visibilities or “gazes” in cinema (both panoptic and medical or etiological), and can now reconsider how the visible is captured by the articulable— whether through affects that provoke us to see either what will happen in an englobing, panoptic “large-form” (where we discern reality) or what has happened in a piecemeal, etiological “small-form” (where we discover truth). If, as Deleuze claims, “Foucault is uniquely akin to contemporary film,”1 it is not only because Foucault demonstrates that the relation between the visual and articulable is not natural; it is also perhaps because the way we initially see and thus experience film parallels this seemingly (but not actually) natural relation. In this sense, Deleuze’s own cinema books can be read backwards from his reference to the Foucauldian (and Blanchotian) “disjunction” between seeing and saying in The Time-Image to an implicit conjunction that can be found in The Movement-Image. Thus, while the disjunction between the visual and the articulable has been a focus of much Deleuze scholarship,2 here we will consider how the movement from perception to affection in cinema initially creates a correspondence between the visual and the articulable by virtue of the affect of being “incited” or “provoked” towards action. In this case, images are captured by language to explain events, much like we brand, label, classify and judge what we can observe in the world. Thus, no matter how fantastic or otherworldly the situations or how abnormal the characters, we carry over the way we see, feel, and think from our world. So how, then, can Deleuze’s movement-image elucidate a cinema wherein the effects of power are established, before being reversed by the effects of time (as we will see in the following chapter)? And what is cinema in distinction from literature? To begin to answer these questions, it is crucial to consider what makes cinema distinctive as a medium—apart from and prior to its production of truth and reality.

1. Is cinematic movement an illusion? What makes cinema and even the modern novel distinct from artistic media such as theatre and painting is that films and novels assert or project worlds. However, the “presence” of such worlds varies: as Stanley Cavell has shown, theater relies on the physical co-presence of actors and audience, but requires the audience to imagine a fictional world.3 In a comparable way, painting “invokes a world.”4 By contrast, narrative fiction, such as the modernist novel, does not invoke a world but describes and “asserts” one.5 But only cinema projects an entire world—one, unlike theater, with actors who are absent, ghostly projections. Thus, unlike painting and theater, in the case of the novel, the world is given to the audience by means of narrative and description, and in cinema by its depiction in movement and time. The imaginary worlds of films and novels, in short, are supported by their media, while painting and theater invoke such worlds. And if cinema is a privileged medium for the expression of fictional worlds, it is conceivably because the moving image would seem to be the medium in which the resemblance to life has thus far met both its highest point and its ultimate limit (at least, until newer simulations come along).

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If cinema does not allow us to imagine a world, but instead depicts and projects it, then it may also seem to be a medium which offers only a passive experience that reigns over and supplants our imagination and our thought. After all, we have seen that Blanchot insists that literature “passionately summons” that which is uttered: language thus has a strange materiality in our imagination (V; 2). Would cinema not, then, capture our imagination much more aggressively? Would it not hold our perceptions and emotions hostage by their recognition within simulated actions, situations, and worlds? As one scholar, Steven Shaviro, notes, in such a case: I do not have power over what I see, I do not even have, strictly speaking, the power to see; it is more that I am powerless not to see. The darkness of the movie theatre isolates me from the rest of the audience . . . the unstable screen image holds my distracted attention captive; I do not have the ability to look away . . . as I watch, I have no presence of mind: sight and hearing, anticipation and memory, are no longer my own. My responses are not internally motivated and are not spontaneous; they are forced upon me from beyond.6

Such a description perhaps gives voice to the fear that cinema is idolatrous in its capture of our imagination and in its focus on what we can see rather than what we can think—which perhaps testifies to Blanchot’s own silence on cinema (V; Intro). Films would, in such cases, at worst normalize our thoughts or function as insidious propaganda, and at best serve as an escape that does not enrich our actual lives and that is more interesting in comparison—which, as Gilles Deleuze claims, would make our lives feel like a bad movie—the fate of the “true world” (Intro). But is the resemblance to reality really the defining feature of cinema? Cinema is no more an illusion of reality than dream—and it is here that we can begin to justify a Blanchotian approach to cinema. On the one hand, Bergson suggests that cinema resembles reality because it creates an illusion of real movement. In contemporary cinematic terminology, all the devices of continuity editing are simply duping us into perceiving movement when there isn’t any, like a great magic trick. Others, such as Christian Metz, similarly call cinematic depictions “utterances,” and suggest that the cinematic sign—unlike the literary sign—does not have to use a combination of meaningless elements (or “phonemes”) because they resemble the thing that they depict.7 Such resemblance would be nothing but a cheap simulacrum. On the other hand, we can return to the disagreement between Bergson and Blanchot on dreams (III; 3b): if dreams, as Bergson argues, hold us hostage in their imagery, Blanchot would say that dreams are not illusions because they draw us incessantly toward a point that has no reality, and that the movement of dissimulation is thus their defining feature. This movement on what we have defined as the plane of immanence—affects and percepts that are drawn toward the insensible and imperceptible (IV; 3a–b)—also applies to cinema: movement, as Deleuze claims, is prior to the images that move. But how? Cinematic movement is not illusion: what is illusory is only “what” moves or happens, while the movement of cinematic image itself is a genuine artistic force. Deleuze addresses the notion that cinema is a mere replica of reality early in his first

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cinema volume when he insists that cinema is not composed of “immobile cuts” (coupes), such as snapshots or slices that recompose movement (i.e., frames per second).8 Nor does cinema reconstruct an illusory movement by cutting distinct shots (each composed of many frames) together (e.g., a medium shot, a close-up, a long-shot) to make a scene. Rather, because perception is itself not static, what we perceive is movement itself within images, irreducible to any moving bodies or milieus (realistic spaces or “vehicles” that move) to which movement is seemingly attached or in which movement is perceived. In this sense, Deleuze rejects Bergson’s association of cinema with illusion at the same time that he appropriates Bergson’s logic of movement as most apt to describe cinema.9 This is why—as we will see—movement is immanent to the image: it is not added to the image; rather, movement is an absolute plane irreducible to “what” moves on it. Deleuze will insist that cinema is composed of mobile “cuts” or “sections” which, through the assemblage and juxtaposition of its shots or planes (plans), and the introduction of intervals and affects, create a “bloc of space-time” (milieus) that continually expands and changes the “quality” of its world, or the “whole” of its reality. Unlike the dream, in the common film or “movement-image,” we are not drawn toward the absent point of a Blanchotian unreality (nor are we experiencing a work of art), but are instead drawn toward an organic totality that is cohesive (akin to the organic unity in V; 3b). Here we are in the territory of a distinctive kind of illusion—a territory which would justify Blanchot’s silence on the cinematic image. In this case, the perception of movement leads to changes in relations between givens of a cinematic world, and thus of its intangible (but changing) quality. We are now far beyond a simple illusion of movement: rather, there is the creation of a qualitative change in truth or reality that is felt. A given scene composed of various shots, for example, forms changing relations between bodies, milieus, and forces that only the moving image makes possible—irrespective of its frames per second or the number of cuts. Changing these relations changes the very nature of a given reality itself, even if the totality of that reality—the cinematic world itself—is never itself given. And it is therefore that which is not given that is illusory—not that which is given. As we will see, whether such totality is explained or not concerns whether “time is subordinate to movement”10 (VIII). But now we must consider how Deleuze complicates Cavell’s framework as well as other theories of cinematic worlds. While world-building theorists tend to focus on the expansiveness or coherence of cinematic worlds—which may involve reference to our world, or to intentional phenomena and possibilities—Deleuze somewhat similarly focuses on the manner in which shots or milieus change relations with an open totality or world that is never given. For instance, in Cavell’s influential logic, cinematic images are in a world— rather than “of” a world, as in photography—such that there is always more to see outside of the frame.11 In terms of world-building, pop-culture theorists claim that a world must be “not adequately reducible to, or fully explicable in terms of, any set of intentional phenomena external to itself.”12 We are thus saturated with franchise films, which are less about specific characters or stories than about the worlds or universes themselves. Such worlds may “call on . . . our knowledge of its referent”13 or involve “distinctive” oscillations between the familiar and screen worlds,14 but in any case are cohesive in their qualities, which may involve expanding settings, atmospheres, or

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possibilities. What makes Deleuze’s notion of a cinematic world or “whole” unique is an ever-unfolding movement: “sets” (ensembles) which establish givens are not part of a closed totality, but always part of larger sets that are opened up by a changing totality. Cinematic worlds are therefore “open” in the sense that any “mobile section” (shot or milieu) can form vertical “relations” within a world, but every shot, at the same time, also undergoes a “horizontal” movement where it is assembled by framing our perception around situations (providing visual information, establishing coordinates within milieus). This horizontal movement then creates an interval occupied by affective images of burgeoning potentiality, and then of action which resolves the situation (or, as we will see, can do so in reverse). The horizontal movement within the “narrative” or story expands relations within, and thus of, the world itself. This raises a question: how are we to understand basic cinematic devices, such as framing and cutting, if they do not necessarily form an illusion or world, but simply compose a movement that precedes them?

2.a. The cinematic plane of composition: framing and cutting Framing and cutting operate from a different axis and a different plane than does cinematic movement. Framing in cinema usually concerns the window through which we see a world that always implies more that is “out of frame.” The frame, as Deleuze notes, also “gives a common standard of measurement to things which do not have one,”15 providing an angle or perspective which is neither natural nor bound to one subject position (since we do not usually see through a character’s eyes). Likewise, cutting from one image to another implies a world that is out of frame (such as a character being spoken to, whose reaction shot we then see). More broadly, the cinematic cut, the primary editing method, juxtaposes images for a wide variety of purposes: to show the effect of a cause, or the reaction to an action, to create a montage, to reframe in close-up or long-shot, and so on. But for Deleuze, the frame and the cut both concern a “vertical” axis which essentially cuts or slices from the infinite variety of movement and matter in the universe. Here we can consider such framing or cutting in terms of what Blanchot calls an absence of origin—meaning that framing and cutting have no presence but are immanent to moving images. That is to say, the frame and cut work within and through moving images, implicating them, just as the difference and absent totality inherent to the plane of composition implicates the movement of the plane of immanence (IV; 3c, 5a). Frames and cuts in fact compose, in the colloquial sense of an image (foreground, background, etc.): in Deleuze’s terms, “framing” is “the determination of . . . everything which is present in the image—décor, characters and props.”16 But the source of such composition is never present or given: cutting, like thought as well as the oblivion of the dream, has both a speed that is faster than the fastest movement of the image and is slower than its slowest movement (beyond movement altogether). Cinematic composition, through framing and cutting, does not necessarily create illusory worlds; in itself, it also deframes and cuts to a “more radical elsewhere.”17 Firstly, the cinematic plane of composition, technically speaking, does not frame, but

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involves a perpetual “deframing” (décadrage): in these terms, while both the frame and the cut imply a relative “out of field”—which enables the frame and camera to move, as well as to cut—Deleuze also insists that there is an “absolute out of field” which bears no relation to a cinematic “ensemble” of givens (donnés), but is itself a totality that “is neither given nor givable.”18 This absolute out of field creates the condition for the “cut” insofar as images can cut to other images within the same field or relatively out of field (beyond the given), but they can also cut to other images without forming a totality by virtue of a “more radical elsewhere.”19 In a sense, framing has the absolute speed of composition precisely because it can instantaneously reframe any image in relation to any other, which amounts to perpetually “deframing” it. This absolute out of field, the unframeable condition of the frame and cut, like the plane of composition, “cannot even be said to exist, but rather to ‘insist’ or ‘subsist’, a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogeneous space and time.”20 In other words, this elsewhere concerns the insistence of real time, of difference, which cannot and does not “exist,” but only insists through perpetual dissolution, or as Blanchot would say, as the “divergence of difference.”21 The plane of composition, in these terms, is the “groundlessness” of the frame, which preexists the image, and “consists” or “insists” within it. It is the screen, what Deleuze calls the “frame of frames.”22 As we saw (IV; 5a), the plane of composition is the black nothingness of indetermination “in which everything is dissolved”;23 in cinematic terms, this black, blank screen can take any image and give it a new context in the frame, deterritorializing it: the frame can capture the smallest atom or the widest panoramic scope of the universe, “long shots of countryside and close-ups of the face, an astronomical system and a single drop of water—parts which do not have the same denominator of distance, relief or light. In all these senses the frame ensures a deterritorialisation of the image.”24 This corresponds to the role of the plane of composition, which, for D&G, “involves sensation in a higher deterritorialization, making it pass through a sort of deframing which opens it up and breaks it open”:25 in both cases, the variety of the image is carried off or deframed by the imperceptible. If there is any cinematographic illusion, then, it is in the capacity of the cut and frame not to create an illusion of movement, but to assemble “mobile sections”—cinematic shots and milieus—into a cohesive relation and totality that territorializes them. In fact, as the Deleuze scholar Allan Thomas aptly points out, “Deleuze’s analysis of the relation between the movement-image and the cinematographic illusion is less a critique of the latter by means of the former than it is a reformulation of that illusion in terms of the movement-image.”26 While Thomas’s emphasis concerns “thinking the world” as new to get beyond illusion, this book focuses on Blanchot’s outside to approach thought and difference as a reversal of the truths and realities produced by power. That is, the illusion is not the image itself, but the sense of coherence to the images: their reality or truth. Cinematic cuts, in this sense, open up “closed ensembles” (sets) of “determinate . . . parts”27 or givens in space, and deframe as much as they reframe, reterritorializing the sets of images by assembling them cohesively, even if their cohesion is changing as a totality. As Deleuze insists, every “assemblage [agencement] of movement-images”28— which, as we will see (VII; 3, 5b), concerns the linking of perception to affection—is its own form of “montage” that establishes what happened or what will happen. Such assemblage, in this sense, concerns the totality of images, and their montage; it concerns

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the interval where movement is interrupted, so to speak, whether in its external composition (a succession of close-ups, for example), or its internal composition (a facial expression that changes). Likewise, the frame itself—what we perceive—requires a composition insofar as it slices into the material universe of movement-images, and especially insofar as perception is related to what Deluze calls a “center of indetermination,” or the interval and relation between givens of a set and movements. It is this territorializing mode of composition and framing that produces an illusory truth or reality in a coherent world. No longer artistic composition as a deterritorialized assemblage, but a territorialized one that centers around its totality, this coherence can be critiqued in terms of its value centered on life (or that inherently critiques the neglect of those values), insofar as we can look beyond its world (as we look beyond our own world to find power relations: I, IV; 6a) and its cohesion to consider its assemblages, “mobile sections,” relations, and “intervals.”

2.b. The cinematic plane of immanence: movement is not totality The framing and cutting by the cinematic plane of composition is not the only aspect of cinema that operates prior to its production of truth and reality: Deleuze’s cinematic movement-image itself constitutes a plane of immanence that is not illusory and that is always given. We saw that the plane of composition, with its infinite speed, is distinct from the plane of immanence with its unlimited movement (IV; 2a–3c). Indeed, Deleuze identifies the cinematic plane of immanence with image and matter: we can thus consider that if the plane of composition concerns the absent totality of the universe (creating conditions for framing and cutting), the plane of immanence concerns the materiality of sensation and movement (IV; 3a–c and 5a–c). In fact, Deleuze’s cinematic plane of immanence, the movement-image, is the “infinite set of all images” where the “identity of the image and movement stems from the identity of matter and light. The image is movement, just as matter is light.”29 By equating matter with light, and the image with the movement that results, Deleuze again demonstrates that movement is not added to images. Rather, movement is always “given,” and thus immanent to the images that move. Any movement-image, like the milieu, is a “bloc of space-time,” which “is part of every time”30 or incessant (IV; 4a)—the “moving soil” of the passing present (II; 6). When framed, the movement-image is infinite in principle (imagine time-lapse video here of a single shot), but can also “extend” infinitely (here imagine a sequence or tracking shot that does not end, wading through an infinite series of milieus). The plane of immanence does not, for itself, form a totality (even an “open one”) or a world, insofar as it is unlimited in its movement; and yet, its movement can be hijacked when the juxtaposition of its sets expresses a whole through montage, effectively engendering an unreal or illusory whole and unifying metaphor (as Blanchot argues in his “first slope” of literature). As Deleuze insists, “The set of all these [cinematic] sets forms a . . . plane [plan] of genuinely unlimited content. But the plane of immanence is certainly not a ‘whole’ although this plane or these larger and larger sets necessarily have

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an indirect relationship with the whole.”31 Now, we have considered a similar operation in Blanchot’s first slope of literature (V; 1); in that case, language may negate reality in what it names, but beyond that, in its movement of negation, we may imagine the “unreal whole which [words] form together”32 (rather than allow that movement to persist for itself). Furthermore, such movement forms an organic unity wherein the apparent differences between literary images are united metaphorically (rather than the images impacting us literally, as indistinct; V; 3b). Similarly, as Deleuze explains in cinema, the collision or juxtaposition of images—albeit a “montage” on a horizontal plane of the movement-image—also forms a metaphor on a vertical plane (as in Eisenstein’s “harmonics”), while metonymy concerns the totality that is formed by virtue of the juxtaposition of scenes or sequences (as in Griffith’s montage).33 As Deleuze explains it, [T]he movement-image . . . can just as easily diffuse movement by relating it to the whole that it expresses (metaphor which unites the images) as it can divide it by relating it to the objects between which it is established (metonymy which separates the images).34

In other words, with metaphor what matters is no longer movement, but the resultant collision from the images; with metonymy, images or sequences are ceaselessly separated to make comparison possible. In both cases, we have images or sequences that have, in the terms of the new critics, “different properties in virtue of which they are alike,”35 and where such likenesses render the totality growing and changing, determining and differentiating itself as something unifying but not given: an unreal, illusory whole that is apprehended as though it were real. How, then, does such a movement of “montage” alter perception and affection within a totality?

3. Assemblages of movement-images: large forms of reality, small forms of truth If cinematic images form an assemblage of reality or truth in their movement from image to image, it is because, to use Deleuze’s term, they become “specified,” or linked in a specific manner. In fact, Deleuze notes that “the assemblage [agencement] of movement-images . . . [concerns] the inter-assemblage of perception-images, affectionimages and action-images . . . the long shot would be primarily a perception-image; the medium shot an action-image; the close-up an affection-image.”36 These linked images begin with perception, where, firstly, we perceive the way we normally do; in this case, habitual perception is “subtractive” (III; 3a), ignoring aspects of the image when we “perceive the thing, minus that which does not interest us.”37 In the case of cinema, this means focusing our attention through framing and cutting around what is important, but also around what may happen next: movement becomes bound up with expectation (or discovery). In fact, it is “because we never perceive everything that is in the image” that “the image constantly sinks to the state of cliché”:38 as we will see, the expectations of what will happen concern genre. But Deleuze will insist that “classical [cinematic] narration derives directly from the organic composition of movement-images

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(montage), or from their specification as perception-images, affection-images and action-images.”39 Such perception establishes “situations” or discloses them: in “[o] rganic narration . . . characters react to situations or act in such a way as to disclose the situation. This is a truthful narration in the sense that it claims to be true, even in fiction.”40 This narration is organic in that it forms a montage via the “living matter” of perception-images that link to what Deleuze calls affection and action-images. Cinema can exert the power that centers our attention on the anticipation of realities or the discovery of truths: that is, we may be immersed in a reality (“what’s going to happen?”) or provoked to search for truth (“what happened?” or “what is really the case?”). The first case concerns what Deleuze calls the realism of the large form of the action-image (even if, as we will see, such realism is fantastic or otherworldly: VII; 3, 8a–d); as he states, “What constitutes realism is simply this: milieux and modes of behaviour, milieux which actualise and modes of behaviour which embody. The [large form of the] action-image is the relation between the two.”41 In other words, insofar as forces incurve within a milieu and act on a character (1; 11), such a milieu constitutes the reality of the film that we experience in the present tense: here, perception is of reality (I; 13). By contrast, what Deleuze calls the small form of the action-image involves the uncovering of events and discovering what is the case: truth as the empirically verifiable, the “situation” as it happened or that “becomes clear or retains its mystery”42: here, affection discovers the truth (I: 13). In this sense, Deleuze’s distinction between the “large” and “small” forms of the action-image illustrate the way in which images are assembled in the form of a “spiral” (large form) or “ellipsis” (small form). In both cases, to use D&G’s terms, we do not have genuine percepts, but perceptions are linked to “a state of those who experience them” (e.g., the husband reacts to a photo of his spouse having an affair); likewise, we do not have genuine affects, but affections are linked to “those who undergo them” (III; 2).43 We can now consider Deleuze’s large and small form of the “action image” in terms of the perception of realism in the former and the affective disclosure of truth in the latter. The large form of the action-image involves “englobing” milieus of realism, with perception and Deleuze’s syntheses of repetition in the imagination (II; 6) as its foundation. Here, all affects, caught within such milieus, are actually emotions (or “affections”) linked to objects or subjects that we can see (e.g., in a western milieu, the gunslinger scowls at the sheriff and cocks the trigger). Thus, both the reality of perception and the truth of affection operate generically, here with a focus on expectation. Insofar as affection-images—as we will see—occupy the interval between perception and action, they serve as a link between the two, like “inverse spirals” which focus “toward action” and expand “towards the new situation.”44 Affections are thereby linked to the persons or givens that are perceived and to the potential actions that may ensue: “Affects . . . appear as embodied in behaviour, in the form of emotions or passions which order and disorder it.”45 In the language of D&G, affections are lived by characters within seemingly real circumstances (which, in turn, are unified by the “organic” totality of truth, as in V; 3b). They are the source of impressions linked directly to givens (hence the way that actors rehearse with props). In these terms, characters react to givens in their milieus, embody affects and behavior, and react to circumstances which in turn create a new situation. As Deleuze states, “What constitutes realism

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is . . . milieux which actualise and modes of behaviour which embody”; as such, realism can “include the fantastic, the extraordinary,”46 because such modes can also constitute such milieus and behaviors. The small form of the action-image is the inverse, in the sense that affects which seek the truth (II; 7) and their corresponding action-images actually reconstitute a generalized or generic perception and situation: we perceive fragments of an undisclosed situation, or pieces of an event, which are unified by the connection and addition of those pieces into a whole—hence its elliptical construction. Affection-images function as signs or clues that point to as-yet unknown givens or conflicting situations; through their contiguity, they ultimately unify pieces of events by their addition into a whole. Large and small form are, however, no more strictly divided than truth and reality: insofar as they involve the same fundamental model, all cohering around a totality, they can intertwine, reinforce, and pass into each other (perception-images and affection-images are, likewise, interdependent, rendering each other generic). For instance, the montage of movement-images even coheres through the transformation of the large into the small form (much as the territorialization of force and function involves a transformation of form—I; 11–12). In this case, the givens of the situation are put into question, and the protagonist must form “a response to the question, or to the problem that the situation was not sufficient to disclose.”47 For example, a character questions who they can trust, or what truly happened, before they can act. This questioning may involve the insertion of fragments that point to new undisclosed situations, flashbacks that reveal a change in the relation of givens, or dreams that explore a question. Deleuze calls these “reflection images,” which will be relevant to the status of reflection in the following chapter. In any case, these fragments will ultimately converge around action after the situation is re-established. Likewise, the small form may extend into the large form of action whenever an obstacle presents itself to which the characters must respond—thus no matter how contiguous the fragments of milieus seem to be, they always have a reality or “social state” that serves as an impediment. For example, a detective must fight or chase the suspect before he can be arrested and questioned; a doctor solving a medical mystery must suddenly defend his credibility against a hostile administration. In every case, truth and reality reinforce one another.

4. The interval and affection-image: beginnings, endings, and quality Now, cinematic worlds of truth and reality appropriate the differential space of the affect (IV; 4a), in all of its deterritorializing force, in order to incite and provoke our attention towards what happened or what will happen—assembling perception and action through that affection—and thereby supplant the differential space of thought. In this sense, the screen behind the frame was not the only (de)territorializing component of movement: as Deleuze claims, there is “a very special deterritorialisation which is specific to the affection-image.”48 In this case, the “affection is what occupies the interval”49 between perception and action, like a vertical insertion that comes from nowhere and carries images off to a milieu with which they have no inherent relation

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(a special type of framing and cutting or “montage”). In fact, what makes cinematic movement perceptible qua movement is the manner in which it creates an interval between our initial perception and the resulting action: when “referred to an interval, distinct kinds of image appear . . . (thus the perception-image is at one end of the interval, the action-image at the other end and the affection-image in the interval itself).”50 Deleuze claims that such an interval (ecart) between perception and action is in fact “a void, nothing but a void, between a stimulation and a response.”51 As we have seen (IV; 4a), the affect is a special sensation, occupying the “in-betweens” of, but completely bound to, movements of sensation: in the case of the cinematic movement image, such an affection-image actually occupies and supplants the very inexistent space of genuine thinking (this is why only the time images in the following chapter which “absorb” such affects into cinematic milieus and bodies, creating a Blanchotian “fissure” in place of this interval, actually “force us to think”: VIII; 5a). In the movementimage, the affection-image frames or crops an image within the ensemble or milieu as a close-up, such that we see “the ‘feeling-thing’, the entity,” in its nuance and burgeoning potentiality: “The close-up is not an enlargement” but “a mutation of movement which ceases to be translation in order to become expression.”52 In other words, the affectionimage does not simply “enhance” images: it remains part of the movement-image, in the interval or “gap” between a situation and an action; in lieu of genuine thinking, as this chapter will explore, such affection images provoke us to anticipate action in a reality or await the discovery of truth. And yet, the affection-image is separate from the situations and actions themselves: it does not disclose any situation or involve any action; rather, it expresses the very quality or relation between the two. The affection-image, separate from but embedded within movement, is, like the totality, a “pure potentiality”—an expression of a situation or action that does not resemble givens of the situation or the resultant action. In other words, while the affection-image heightens attention, dramatizes and “forestalls” impending action, creates suspense or just general anticipation—like the whole—it expresses a quality. Such quality is often expressed by the “face,” which is a “complex entity” whose expressions shift as the shot lingers; affection is also expressed by entities which, in moving or changing in “quantity,” also change in quality—for example, consider the close-up of the glass of water that ripples when the dinosaurs approach in Jurassic Park: with each increasing undulation, the relations and qualities change, conveying impending danger. Added to this, the rippling water does not “resemble” the impending action that will ensue—it only “expresses” the potentiality of the threat. As we saw (I; 11), the milieu actualizes such qualities and potentialities, in which affects are “caught.” But affection-images are not limited to close-ups—they may involve whole sequences which “fill” (rather than “occupy”) the interval between perception and action; as we will explore further, this may involve dreams and flashbacks as well as “impressions” of “originary worlds” (VII; 8a–b). As Deleuze explains it, “recollection-images or dreamimages . . . still come within the framework of the sensory-motor situation, whose interval they are content to fill,” while, by contrast, “affection . . . occupies it, but without filling or fulfilling it.”53 As a quality and potentiality, the affection-image expresses relations between givens or parts of “ensembles” (e.g., it is between characters, between character and world, etc.). On the one hand, then, the affection-image is a

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compositional force, while on the other hand, it is bound to the movement from situation to action. Even in the least artistic of films, it remains an unavoidably artistic feature even as it supplants thinking and results in the production of truth and reality. It is in fact the interval, with its “mobile cuts” of movement, that is responsible for creating resolutions or disclosures which mark their ceaseless beginnings and endings— whether in the large form of reality or the small form that discloses truth. As Deleuze puts it, such “images were linked by rational cuts, and formed under this condition an extendable world: between two images or two sequences of images, the limit as interval is included as the end of the one or as the beginning of the other, as the last image of the first sequence or the first of the second.”54 According to Deleuze, the “limit” of the large form of the action-image is empty space, insofar as it cannot extend into action, while the limit of the small form, proceeding within the interval (affection-images, “morsels,” etc.) that creates or traces “skeleton” spaces, is disconnection, insofar as the affection-images cannot link to any perceptions or actions. In either case, the interval is the horizontal image of the totality that links images rationally, moving from shot to shot, scene to scene, sequence to sequence, changing the world of the film as it goes. Within Deleuze’s movement-image, then, both the affection-image and the open totality form an organic unity where all that is different seems unified in a living or vital sense (as with literature—V; 3b). The intervals affectively expressed constitute what Deleuze calls a “living matter” insofar as the totality of the movement-image also is a living totality that is more complex than just action–reaction. In his analysis of Bergson, Deleuze claims in this regard that, on the one hand, “the gap, the interval, will be sufficient to define one type of image among others, but a very special type—living images or matters [matieres],”55 while on the other hand, “the living being is a whole . . . because it is open upon a world, and the world, the universe, is itself the Open.”56 This connection of images and the open totality to life does not involve the lifelike nature of cinematic images; it is not an issue of verisimilitude per se (even if we carry over into cinema ways of perceiving from our world). Rather, it is a case of linkage: the manner in which our perception moves from one situation to the next operates in the same manner as the living organism moves and links perception to action, and thereby the way that the open totality changes in quality. While this will be contrasted to Blanchot’s mortalism in the following chapter, it is crucial to note for now that the “living matter” of cinema, when suppressing its own inorganic qualities which “know nothing of life,” also conceivably expresses the very value we place on life (in the assemblages of its large and small forms).

5.a. Sound and voice: correspondence or deception of the visual Having now established the role of affection in the cinematic production of truth and reality, we can turn to a more direct Foucauldian dimension of cinema: the capture of the visible by the articulable (or, in film, the “audible”). Here is where we read Deleuze’s cinema books backwards: if Deleuze’s time image involves a lack of correspondence or “disjunction” between seeing and saying (to be explored in VIII; 4–5b), then the movement-image conceivably implies a correspondence. As Deleuze does not point out

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until later in Cinema 2, it is language that “modifies the visual image: in so far as it is heard, it makes visible in itself something that did not freely appear in the silent film”57: that is to say, language and even sound (effects or music) focus our attention in ways that it otherwise may not have been focused, capturing the visible in a peculiar way. A somber soundtrack creates generic expectation differently from a tense soundtrack, and so on. If cinematic givens are being “questioned” (in a transformation from large to small form), it will be spoken language that questions what we see. It is in fact language which captures the visible most concretely, locking it into a correspondence: “the voice which evokes, comments, knows, endowed with an omnipotence or a strong power over the sequence of images.”58 This could be a character’s dialog played over a montage, or a voiceover at the end of the film that explains how to feel (even it is “poetic”), establishing what happened. If the voice establishes the real way to perceive or the true way to feel, however, it also allows for viewers to be “deceived” by what they see, thereby revealing different truths or realities: characters or narration can “lie” at the same time that images are presented, or they may reveal that they are not who they appear to be, or even that a situation is not what it seems. Shifting away from the “naturalness” of the purely visual moving image, what language “makes visible, interaction, may always be badly deciphered, read, seen: hence a whole rise in the lie, in deception, which takes place in the visual image.”59 That is to say, by virtue of language (dialog or voiceover), what we thought was the situation may be revealed to be or to have been otherwise: a sound off-screen in a horror film is revealed to be something, or in a mystery film, someone has lied. Language or sound can “de-naturalize” images and create an expectation that is revealed to be deceptive, just as it can reveal unexpected truths. In any case, it is language that “captures” the visible (I; 4), determining truth and reality even if we are initially deceived by what is real or true. For instance, our narrator in Fight Club speaks to us about his reality until we see that we were as deceived as he was by his hallucinated, idealized self in Tyler Durden. This arguably makes what we may have experienced as a large-form actionimage film into a small-form film, revealing a new situation that gave us hints or clues along the way—as with the clues from the child who “sees dead people” that the protagonist is really a ghost in The Sixth Sense. These specifically cinematic techniques have finally removed us decisively from the realm of literature: here we have a function of language—and of sound more broadly—that corresponds to the image as a supplementary dimension and that enhances the development of its world.

5.b. Cohesive worlds of truth and reality: explanation, expectation, and genre While we usually think of cinematic montage as an exceptional case of cutting and editing (i.e., to show the passage of time), all cinematic scenes and sequences involve numerous and constant cuts from one image to the next in an open totality; it is in this sense that the montage or assemblage of movement-images, like all assemblages (I; 11), is territorial—thereby provoking our attention in a manner parallel to its provocation in the world of power. While Deleuze does not use the term “territorialized” to describe the

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nature of such assemblages or montages of images, he does insist that “[m]ontage (in one of its aspects) is the assemblage [agencement] of movement-images” which take us from perception to affection to action.60 In this case, the vertical axis that both integrates and extends its territorial assemblage would be arranged according to a function external to those images. Hence, as we saw with the function of Foucauldian practices as conceptual aims of a territory that is external to its actual milieus (I; 12), here, too, the function of the territorial, cinematic assemblage or montage would be the explication of truth, reality, story, or plot. To be more specific: in a Foucauldian world, bodies, givens, or milieu components are arranged to make them functions of the territory, as in panoptic enclosures (functions of discipline) or neoliberal frameworks (functions of money as regulating force) (I; 5–9; 12). In both cases, the functions of the territory or the explication of truth and reality—that is, the disciplinary aims or capital itself—are not given in the milieu. Reading between Deleuze’s work with Guattari on territorialization and his work on Foucault, then, we can see that in a cinematic world of movement, images are arranged as a function of the advancement of the action, but also arranged to change the relations between the characters and their milieus, such that the “quality” of their world continues to open as its truth is expressed (in the end, we need to be able to explain “what happened” or “what is happening”). Here again we have an aim or function external to the milieus themselves. But how does such an assemblage work? The “horizontal” axis of cinematic movement—its assemblage of milieus of action and discovery (large and small form)—is intertwined with a “vertical” axis that territorializes the cohesion of its truth and reality: assemblage or montage thus works along these two axes. The horizontal side of cinematic movement involves the extension of “closed ensembles” or sets—that is, givens or parts that are repeatable (a setting, an object, a circumstance, a character, etc.), that pass from one milieu to another, and that make the sets “expand”—while the whole, which is vertical and is not composed of givens, sets, or parts (but of quality), is always “open” and is “that by virtue of which the set (ensemble) is never absolutely closed.”61 It is this horizontal “axis” where “images were linked or extended according to laws of association, of continuity, resemblance, contrast, or opposition.”62 It is perhaps this repeatability, defined as “mobile cuts” of association, continuity, and so on, that embodies genuine cinematic movement, which is “immediately given” in its passage from (and preservation between) one instant to the next, but always “by virtue” of the “intermediate image” and the quality—that is, the truth and reality—of the whole that territorializes them. Such relations determine what is possible, probable, interesting, or important by changing what can and can’t happen, the “story,” the relations between characters, and so on. It is with regard to this cinematic whole that the qualitative change being internalized or integrated as a logical concept (I; 12, IV; 5a–c) explains any given ensemble of images or circumstances in a film—which is, in parallel, externalized in “larger and larger ensemble[s]” of images.63 In other words, by understanding what happened, we integrate or unify the “whole” of the film: we grasp how all the events, characters, situations, and actions contributed to that world (picture filmgoers debating about whether cinematic events were “believable” or not, or the increasing tendency to base film and television on a “true story”). What this horizontal movement expresses, then, is the other vertical “axis,” where, as Deleuze puts it, “associated images were internalized in a whole as

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concept (integration), which was in turn continually externalized in associable or extendable images (differenciation).”64 This concept is a “model of truth”—hence also a “territory”—that “expressed a whole which changes,” but also “constituted for cinema . . . the model of the True as totalization.”65 Space with duration involves mobile cuts or milieus; the living concept is the “thinkable totality” of the cinematic world (i.e., the logical concept which can explain what is happening or what happened), and the spirit in matter is the “organic” animation or movement of framing and cutting. Within such a thinkable totality, the establishment of truth and the movement of reality by virtue of the openness of the whole is always “out of frame”—always in the moving frame, the next cut or shot, the next scene: this openness allows for “change which is expressed in movement, to the duration which is expressed in space, to the living concept which is expressed in the image, to the spirit which is expressed in matter.”66 The generic expectation we have for situations or dramatic tensions to be resolved (large form), and for actions to disclose situations, where pieces fit together, or mysteries are explained (small form), conform to what we call genre. Like the active syntheses and principles based off the “lived present”67 of our habits that we have considered (1; 13), here too, perception and affection or “living images will be ‘centres of indetermination’”:68 by “contracting” or fusing various elements together, those elements “resonate” and radiate outward toward a generic future of expectation. These expectations, which conform to genre, can make films become formulaic if they conform too much to such expectations. In these terms, we expect the givens of any ensemble—a character, a milieu, and the threads of a conflict or story—to develop, just as our habitual expectation is generally “that ‘it’ will continue”69—that elements will repeat in some form as they change and develop the open totality of the film. Hence notions of “character development,” “narrative arc,” and “world building.” How stories or characters “develop”—that is, how situations are resolved or mysteries are explained—contributes to the way our attention is focused around such indeterminate centers, but unexpected surprises or unformulaic structures alone do not get us beyond models of truth and reality. It is, finally, this problem or question of truth and reality itself that returns us to Foucault.

6. The Foucauldian provocation of film: judgment and affect The most pervasive remnant that we carry over from the everyday world into our experience of cinema, as we saw in the introduction to this book, is judgment: capturing the film we just observed with what we can say about it. But in order to judge, we must be able to explain what happened in a film (or at least relate the film to genre conventions) and comprehend the rationality of the linkage between shots or sequences. Thus we do not allow its realities or truths to act as problems or questions (in fact, if they are problematic or questionable, we will judge them as incoherent); the organic unity of the work supplants our ability to think or interpret it. As Deleuze claims, “Truthful narration is developed organically, according to [lawful] connections in space and chronological relations in time [and] does not call the relations and connections into question. They rather determine its terms or elements, so that . . . narration always refers to a system of judgement.”70 In other words, so long as the scenes and sequences

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develop a coherent story, where its parts fit together organically, and where characters can judge one another and their worlds, this coherence conceivably enables us to extend our judgment to the scenes (“I liked the part where . . .”) or integrate it into an all-encompassing opinion. We are presented with a development of characters which we may or may not appreciate, and atmospheres, stories, and themes which may or may not conform to our taste, within this coherent system. Now, it is only from cinema’s affective movement—the “interval” that affectionimages fill to create a “gap” between situation and action—that the visible is captured by the articulable in our pervasive judgments: in order to be provoked or believe that what has been captured by the articulable is the case, we must be provoked to do so based on values attached to life (judging characters as rational or likable, judging stories as interesting or believable, and so on). Within the “interval” of affect, then, the visible can capture the articulable, where, as Deleuze puts it, “statements [may] blossom and proliferate, [and] by virtue of their spontaneity, exert an infinite determination over the visible element . . . only statements are determining and revelatory, even though they reveal something other than what they say.”71 That is, in the small form, there is always a mystery to be revealed, or in the large form, always an action to complicate situations, and the audible element (dialogue, film score, etc.) can focus our expectation in that regard. Despite, then, that Deleuze insists in his Foucault study that “the most complete examples of the disjunction between seeing and speaking are to be found in the cinema,”72 he also claims of the conjunction of seeing and speaking around knowledge that, “[a]s long as we stick to things and words we can believe that we are speaking of what we see, that we see what we are speaking of, and that the two are linked.”73 In other words, the correspondence between what is seen and said must seem natural, creating the critical problems and questions of knowledge formed from power. Thus, whether it is language or sound that, as we have seen, “de-naturalizes” movement-images (VII; 5a), or whether it is the broader closure of the action-image—revealing truths or establishing realities— in an organic development, discernible reality or explicable truth creates the conditions for judgment (both of the characters and of the audience). Beyond judgment, however, we may also critique the realities and truths that films produce, just as we can critique the realities and truths produced by power in our world. That is, just as we can look beyond our world toward relations of power (IV; 6a), it is also possible to look beyond the worlds of the movement-image to consider how it produces reality and truth. In these terms, we can think through a movement image film, even if such films do not problematize their realities or question their truths (in contrast with cinematic art that draws its relations further inward so that its perception and affection images become genuine percepts and affects that “force us to think,” as we will see in the following chapter). We may not be drawn outside of the worlds of the movement-image in a given film, but we also do not have to be content with their truths and realities. Instead, we can consider how the affect, in this case the interval, constantly provokes us toward expecting real resolution of action or satisfying revelation of truths: what is the film provoking us to discern, believe, or discover, by virtue of its linkages, conjunctions, and assemblages? In these terms, Deleuze’s movement-image offers a Foucauldian vision of cinema that ensconces and immerses us in illusory truths and realities which are, perhaps counterintuitively, never given as

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such. This critical and conceptual thought of that which is never given is the method that we will adopt in the remainder of this chapter, but first we must more carefully consider precisely how the movements from perception to action, or vice versa, parallel the movements in the englobed panoptic environments of our world of power, and in our everyday etiological ways of seeing.

7.a. A Deleuzo-Foucauldian movement-image: perception, affection, action There is a parallelism between the affective movements of provocation in our world of power, in terms of both of Foucault’s axes of power (discipline and regulation) and the affective movements of Deleuze’s action-image in their large and small form. The way this works is as follows: our biopolitical focus on life and on what Deleuze calls the “living matter” of the movement-image (both in terms of the interval and the open totality) arguably work in tandem, focusing our perception and affection toward action (even if we only witness action rather than act ourselves). There is, therefore, a parallelism we can locate, respectively, among 1) the perception-image as Foucauldian visibility (as we will see, of englobing panoptic gazes or of small medical-esque gazes); 2) the “exercise of power [that] shows up as an affect . . . to incite, provoke,”74 and so on; and 3) the strategic “action upon action”75 in power relations, and 1) the perception-image (illuminating spaces of seeing and saying); 2) the interval of the affection-image (as the movement of provocation, seduction, etc.); and 3) the action-image (what Deleuze calls “behaviorism”). These parallels, however, also involve Deleuze’s two forms of the “actionimage”—“large” and “small”—which, as we will see now, correspond to Foucault’s two axes of power (discipline and regulation) and two ways of seeing. On the one hand, Foucault’s panoptic gaze parallels Deleuze’s large form of the movement-image—where “one moves from the situation, or the milieu, towards actions,”76 as in the western genre; on the other hand, the medical gaze arguably parallels the small form of the movementimage—which goes from action to the disclosure of a situation, as in the detective genre.

7.b. The panoptic large form of the movement-image Movement in a panoptic milieu, like the large form of the action image, focuses on behavior within discernible realities. As we saw, the panoptic gaze considers whole situations, general behaviors, and possible actions. Its perception is totalizing (hence “pan-optic”)—it attempts to see as much as possible in order to predict behavior (I; 6); likewise, the large form of the action-image, in considering situations and actions, “inspires a cinema of behaviour (behaviourism), since behaviour is an action which passes from one situation to another.”77 As with Deleuze’s active synthesis of habit (I; 13), the panoptic gaze establishes itself in a reality, and asks: what is happening, and what could happen? This focus on what is happening is also the case in the large form of the action-image (VII; 3), where the character constantly “must acquire a new mode of being (habitus) or raise his mode of being to the demands of the milieu and of the

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situation.”78 Unlike impulses, which will be explored shortly, and affect-images in the small form, affections are always directly linked to a character’s behavior—and like the direct intervention of discipline, the interval retains a direct relation to situation and action (as Deleuze insists, “any-space whatevers”—affection-images—become “actualized” in determinate milieus, and affects become “embodied in behaviour”).79 Dialogue and voiceover in this case function largely to coalesce around the anticipation of behavior in a realistic space (even if such space is fantastic). What we anticipate or expect is not a specific action, but some type of action which resolves the situation plausibly, such that milieus and characters undergo certain transformations that are possible within the ensemble of givens available. Through such possibilities, relations between characters and their worlds are transformed, and the quality that the world expresses attests to the value we place on life. In short, the quality expressed by the relations of the cinematic world involves some form of normalcy (behaviors or worlds that ultimately promote success, skill, talent, vitality, security, etc.), often despite any abnormal (criminal, amoral) behavior or aberrant (dangerous, disease-ridden, fantastic, negligent, or threatening) worlds.

7.c. The small form of the action-image: discovering, uncovering, and the medical gaze Etiological perception, like the small form of the action-image, focuses on symptoms, signs, or “clues” that reveal the truth. That is, unlike disciplinary perception, which focuses on individual behavior, a “regulating” perception and movement works like Foucault’s medical gaze, which “uncovers,” “discovers,” and refrains from intervention, or in cinematic terms, does not anticipate action. If the panoptic focus goes from present to future, the etiological focus goes from past to present (i.e., the past reveals something about the present to be true). As with Deleuze’s second active synthesis of memory (I; 13), the medical gaze asks: what happened? This focus on what happened also involves what Deleuze calls the small form of the action-image (VII; 3), where we begin with “an action, a mode of behaviour, or a ‘habitus’,” which then leads to “a partially disclosed situation.”80 The action is already established and in progress, and the space or milieu that is constructed is “no longer global but local,” all action- and affection-images serving as “indexes,” either of “lack” (where elements of the story are missing) or of “equivocity,” where two or more situations are “induced.”81 As viewers, we do not “anticipate” in the same exact way that the doctor “refrains,” but like the doctor, we do contemplate the world or milieu that such images may “uncover,” and in Foucault’s terms, we perhaps “hear a language”82 which corresponds to that discovery. Images speak as clues, hints, traces, or foreshadowings. Judgment centers on the plausibility of such discoveries, rather than on the behavior of characters (unless their completed actions are part of the discovery). Through the lens of such judgment, the small form thus emphasizes the role of truth more than the large form, which emphasizes the role of realism and reality. As with the medical gaze, in the small form of the action-image, images are made to speak: it is in fact often up to the dialogue or the voiceover to ultimately explain what happened—but even when it does not, visual clues are often provided or revealed.

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Sherlock Holmes will explain how the crime was committed, even if that explanation is accompanied by flashback-style images (in which case the flashback “fills” the interval between perception and action rather than merely “occupying” it as an affection image: VII; 4). House, M.D. will explain how the infection or disease took hold of the patient, with a succession of close-up recreations to establish what happened. Characters suffering from amnesia will likewise have to find clues to recreate the events of the past. Alternatively, mysterious events, such as those presented in science fiction, may offer images composed of close-ups as well as hints that certain characters may be lying: the hesitation, the glance, the paranormal sign. In either case, we are tied to the truth of fiction—no matter how unlikely or fantastic the premise of what happened—and thus to the function of judgment. However, whether affection occupies or fills the interval to foreshadow behavior or action within reality on the one hand, or whether it provides signs or clues to truth on the other hand, it operates in a strange space that remains beyond the strict movement of action–reaction—and it is in this sense that we can further explore exceptions to the movement image.

8.a. Enclosures of the outside: the interval, dream, and the event If our world of power “encloses” or excludes the outside as a space of exception (II; 4), then affection-images, dreams, and flashbacks are also exceptions to the realities and truths of the movement-image that are nevertheless enclosed by it: in fact, within this space of “exception,” we also find what Deleuze calls “impressions” and events. These cinematic exceptions, as Deleuze notes, like the deterritorializing affection-image (which “occupies” the gap between perception and action) work within—or, as flashbacks and dreams, fill—the interval between perception and action. But beyond affection-images, dreams, and flashbacks, there are “impressions” of “originary worlds.” Such exceptional imagery interrupts the movement of perception to action—but only temporarily, always restoring the model of truth and reality (unlike time images, where dreams are given a “diurnal treatment”: VIII; 1a). In fact, Deleuze points out that it is not just affective close-ups of the face that can expresses pure potentiality, but “events” that are disconnected from the logic of the ensemble with its perceivable givens, events which he calls “any space whatevers.”83 Like the affect, the event “unframes”; while the close-up may use illogical camera angles and quick-succession montages, its “any space whatever” also “deframes”84 by framing spaces that are disconnected from situation and action, or that are emptied—but which, for those same reasons, are full of affective “potential.” Here, we return to the Blanchotian event (III, 5), which perhaps most directly illustrates such an enclosure within relations of movement. While the event—even in cinematic worlds of the movement-image—is a relation that extends to infinity, like dreams that are, from the perspective of the world of power, only an exception to the truth and reality of the day (before we encounter their inspiring obscurity), the event ultimately is only an exception to the movement-image. Deleuze in fact acknowledges the presence of the Blanchotian event in Cinema 1, but also emphasizes that it only interrupts movement temporarily. For example, the event

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of rain may be filmed neither as “the concept of rain nor the state of a rainy time and place. It is a set of singularities which presents the rain as it is in itself, pure power or quality which . . . makes up the corresponding any-space-whatever. It is rain as affect.”85 Deleuze also aligns this impersonality of rain to Blanchot’s impersonality of death: “the ‘they’ of the pure event wherein it dies in the same way that it rains”:86 in these terms, the affect involves Blanchotian incessance, insofar as the event has no origin or finitude. In such a case, the cinematic event is “successively apprehended from continuity shots which make them a reality which is closed each time, but to infinity,” much like the way in which the plane of immanence involves “infinite sets” or blocks of space-time (VII; 2b). Such qualities express relation but only to occupy the space of disconnection or emptiness, such as the case of color, which as Deleuze says, “elevates space to the power of the void.”87 In any case, the qualities themselves remain tied to movement, which has become momentarily, in Blanchot’s terms, incessant. Here, events, as intervals, would involve interruptions between situations and actions, for purposes such as suspense or transition, in order to mark beginnings or endings to sequences (like Blanchot’s first night, which only serves the day to mark its beginning and ending: III; 5). And if the dream itself is a pure event (III; 5), dreams, when they are subordinated to the day’s movement, reality, or truth, even dreams can still be attributed to dreamers, and otherworldliness can be distinguished from real worlds. Thus dreams—as well as flashbacks (recollection-images)—involve what Deleuze calls a “movement of world”; as Deleuze insists, “the dream-image . . . does not, then, guarantee the indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary any more than the recollection-image does.”88 In this sense, while complicating the relation between perception and action, such qualitative expressions of the interval, or of movement, are still tied to truths and realities.

8.b. Real worlds and originary worlds: the impression While cinema that produces truth and reality creates a coherent world, it also has the capacity to create startling, otherworldly exceptions to its world that entertain a distinctive relation to the interval of movement. This special image outside of truth and reality is Deleuze’s “impulse image,” which involves “impressions” of an originary world (not “expressions,” as the affection-image “expresses” a relation between situation and action) as well as a derived milieu from which pieces or morsels (morceaux) are torn. The dynamic is thus between a real world and the impressions of an originary one, where affections have become raw, unhinged, and seemingly “degenerate,” or where actions are underdeveloped, subhuman, and “embryonic.”89 Such originary worlds lie underneath the “real” and “determined” cinematic milieus: for example, in a “situation of the rich and that of the poor, of the masters and of the servants,”90 another more violent or cruel world lies beneath. The originary world is exposed through “impulses” which “take possession” of characters, making subjects into “sketches” or vague forms that erase differences between human and animal, or in our terms, normal and abnormal. For example, reading this alongside Deleuze’s Coldness and Cruelty, the originary world of the masochist is conceivably one of suspense (permanent waiting) or suspension (of sensuality);91 such suspension results in “impressions” whereby the

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masochist desires pain and fetishizes the sensual or “animalistic” qualities of women (hence Venus “in furs”). In Cinema 1, Deleuze in fact notes that, like the masochist, the signs of “idols and fetishes” which are the object of the impulse are also signs of Cain92—perhaps because, like Cain, the character driven by impulse is exiled from his or her originary world, inhabiting what Deleuze calls a “derived milieu.”93 But like Deleuze’s approach to the virtual or partial object,94 the satisfaction of an impulse is not possible (instead, milieus are “exhausted” by the impulse), because in tearing away pieces or “fragments” from a derived milieu, “they are found only as lost.”95 Crucial here is the dissolution or destruction of milieus, often when a supernatural line “divides” and “dislocates” reality: for example, the degradation of characters to their worst instincts (as victims or victimizers), the horror of Dracula’s blood lust, and so on. The cliché that “things are not what they seem” is, then, particularly cinematic, and can be especially revealing insofar as the exposure of the milieu to the originary world alters affect and behavior, and radically (often terrifyingly) changes the relations between characters and their milieus. But what is this originary world itself? Originary worlds arise as an impulse from the undifferenciated “white nothingness” that we saw earlier on a plane of immanence (IV; 5a), where thought cannot think the undifferenciated. Deleuze in fact describes originary worlds as relatively “formless” and undifferenciated states, like a “virgin forest,” “desert,” or a “swamp.” They are “neither given nor givable”:96 we can only catch glimpses or hints of an originary world, such as the darkness, out of frame, or mirror in a horror film, or the forest in a supernatural film such as Eggers’ The Witch. Here we can consider how such an undifferenciated state in relation to the indifference of repetition to itself (as percept, affect, sensation) becomes the “monstrous” fusion of such sensation within a dark, “formless” world or totality, where dissolved forms emerge out of the undifferenciated: “It is as if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing to be ground”97—that is, without ceasing to be the pre-existent formlessness of difference. In what Deleuze calls the “groundlessness” of such repetition run wild, “when they are reflected in it, forms decompose, every model breaks down and all faces perish,” where “distinction [is] adequate to obscurity as a whole: monstrosity.”98 He goes on to insist that “[t]here is cruelty, even monstrosity, [when] the distinguished opposes something which cannot distinguish itself from it.”99 That is, the interval as expression of the whole has conceivably become an impression of a void by virtue of the dissolution of difference and the “rupturing” and “dislocating” of milieus. Affects become what Deleuze calls “symptoms” torn from that world—always seeking, in fetishes or signs from the milieu that draw it back. For it is the cracks within milieus, monstrous forms, and abnormal impulses that expose the superficiality, vulnerability, and otherwise oppressive or thoughtless nature of their derived milieus (as in the horror trope where careless teenagers don’t realize the monsters who stalk them). While Deleuze calls this world “naturalist,” since it offers impressions of subhuman or monstrous drives or instincts, it is only from the thinkable perspective of the derived milieu (i.e., the terrifyingly cruel) that a monster would seem monstrous. This is because a monster involves what Deleuze calls “its normal expression in the derived milieu”100 where it is perceived as deviant or cursed. It is in this sense that, so long as it is subjected to a truth and reality to which it is an exception, the emergence of monstrosity from formless states will be

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enclosed within the totality of cinematic worlds—but at the same time, such films actually problematize or question the superficiality of their realities and truths by virtue of impulses, however abnormal, that lie beneath them. This means that they have a built-in critical mechanism that, while it may not “force us to think,” does offer a unique lens through which to critique the realities and truths of their derived milieus.

8.c. The impression and otherworldly in large and small form The small form of the movement-image has a special relationship with impulse images and “originary worlds,” especially if we now reconsider the small form alongside our idealized perception of truth in a world of power (VII: 7c). Of course, in the large form of the action-image, this is straightforward: insofar as we grasp the “intentional phenomena” of the world, even if such phenomena are in conflict with an originary world, we observe global situations and anticipate conflict instigated by behaviors (some normal, others not). But in the small form, the impulse image is a special case. Here, Foucault’s emphasis on the transformation of symptoms into signs by means of the medical gaze is instructive, as it testifies to the dynamic between the “totality of the visible” and its “division” in a “conceptual configuration” and “ensemble” which can then be designated and described.101 In Foucault’s words, “It is description . . . that authorizes the transformation of symptom into sign,” which finds “the correlation between each symptom and its symptomatological value.”102 Considering such a transformation of symptom into sign alongside Deleuze’s notion of the impression, symptoms would not be of “disease” (as with the medical gaze) but of an indeterminate “originary world” that connects the impulse to a “morsel” or “fetish,” which corresponds to its sign and gives it structure. For example, a woman’s neck is a correlative sign of the impulse of Dracula’s blood lust, brains and flesh are the sign of the zombie’s hunger. And such symptoms and signs, in their referral to an originary world, thereby implicitly expose superficialities of, or parody, the derived milieus which are grounded in those worlds. Dracula stories, for example, often expose exclusive and exclusionary society as much zombie stories expose the ethos of the rugged individual (who will be overtaken by numbers). It is such exposures that thereby offer a lens to critique a given derived milieu, precisely by reconsidering the value we place on life with all of its normalizing and regulating forces.

8.d. The abnormal: sex and violence No matter how abnormal or otherworldly the characters and milieus are of a cinematic world, those abnormalities can be the very “target, support, or handle” (I; 3) that establish or sustain the reality and truth of films. This leads us to a final, distinct “exception” to reality and truth—spanning images of perception, affection, impulse, or action—that then can be broken down further into simple, commonplace categories: sex and violence. That is, sex and violence may offer escapism from our world (Intro), but they nevertheless reinforce the coherence of truth and reality. Taking violence as

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our first consideration, as a form of action, it concerns the divergent paths that we take from real perception and action (in a world that discourages it) to cinematic perception and action (in a world that often glorifies it). Our cinematic expectation shifts from action that facilitates life to genre expectations, which frequently portray what is abnormal or unusual, threatening and violent—hence the popularity of crime, action, and horror films. But this is more than a vicarious, regressive thrill that takes us back to a sovereign era. The very visibility of sovereign power always draws attention to its own ostentatious displays (I; 1); to assume such sovereign power by taking life or exerting violence through demonstration (in whatever time period) is thus especially amenable to cinema as a visual medium. In this sense, while violence remains the quintessential abnormality in a world that seeks to eliminate it, violent film genres are appealing for the same reasons: they provide situations, characters, and especially actions that deviate from what is normal and usual in the world. They involve, in short, what we would not normally or usually see. And yet, these dangerous or otherworldly situations and genres still create a truth and reality by involving us in the same functions of predicting behavior in the large form (discipline, the panoptic gaze) or discovering causes in the small form (regulation, the medical gaze), wherein violence serves its dual role of that which the characters may seek to avoid but that which filmgoers wish to see. Sex offers an exception that supports the world of truth and reality that is distinct from, but comparable to, violence. If violence involves action within a realistic milieu (the large form of the action-image), or—perhaps less commonly, but still significantly— signs of abnormality that threatens the life of the characters (the small form), then sexuality produces truths about characters and their worlds, while also operating within reality; that is, the deployment of their sexuality allows us to believe that we know who they are (or anticipate their “sexual” behavior or action). Why is this? If, as we have seen, “sex” is Foucault’s “ideal point” that produces truth (I; 10), then, like Deleuze’s cinematic totality, it is never “given or givable,” but only concealed and revealed by virtue of Foucault’s “deployment of sexuality.” Thus the affect of seduction, impulse-images of uncontrolled sexuality, or the perception of “sexualized” milieus (the “seedy,” the erotic, etc.) reveal the “truths” of the film, insofar as they allow the spectator to know the characters and situations, and support a sexual mystery in the small form whose truth will be revealed. Conversely, sexual behavior or sexual tension in the large form involves expectation that will turn into action (two characters will “fall in love,” or will part ways, etc.). In every case, the deployment of sexuality is, as Foucault insists, a means of access to the intelligibility of characters and their worlds.

9. Conclusion: the critical limit of truth and reality Movement-image films that produce reality and truth, cohering organically (expressing life-centric values) even as they expand their open totalities (via intervals, framing, and changing relations), do not inherently problematize their realities or question their truths. It makes no difference whether they recreate historical worlds or “true stories,” or whether they involve horror or fantasy. However, we can critically question

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or problematize their truths and realities by focusing their movements in both large and small form. But this is no easy task. Their immersive force which supplants thinking is not to be underestimated: it is as pernicious as Deleuze’s partialities and expectations of habit as well as the idealizations of memory (I; 13). In fact, the perception-image is largely panoptic in the large form through its establishment of ensembles of givens (as habitual modes of expectation and resolution), while in the small form perception concerns memory as the grounding and centralizing of such givens (around its idealized explanation). Thus to critically problematize the small form is less about being able to predict the discovery or “truth” of what happened than it is about considering how a film expresses a discovery which would explain what happened in the first place. In either case, problematizing or questioning the large or small form forces us to think what life-centric values—whether discerned or revealed in its situations, characters, or actions (in all their affections, impulses, and relations)— the film challenges, complicates, neglects, or promotes. It is the explanation or resolution, and especially the movement that brought us there, that presents a critical problem or question. Even the relatively unrevealable “originary worlds” of the impulse image explain or unify the slow revelations—the vague forms and “morsels” (or fragments) that drive the apparently disturbed impulses of characters or supernatural forces. By virtue of such explanation, fetishes or fragments of the impulse-image involve a quasi-small form that slowly reveals originary worlds through impulses, while impulses themselves, as Deleuze notes, move us from affection to action (they are almost actions in themselves). It is such impulses that also allow for a critique of life-centric values. Insofar as we carry over into the worlds of cinema our ways of seeing and speaking, our affective dispositions and expectations, as well as our values, the Foucauldian relations of power—with all of the varied qualities of the open and changing totalities of cinematic realities and truths—offer critical perspectives and ideas that are both within and beyond their cinematic worlds. This is feasible in the first place because insofar as the movement-image depends on its intervals and relations, via its montages or assemblages of realities and truth, it always gestures toward that which is not given (the totality itself) in order to establish the coherence of its world in the first place. Therefore it is always feasible to question and problematize those relations and think beyond the given. For Deleuze, such “critique . . . must be conducted on the basis of the . . . differential and problematic element, on the basis of the Idea,”103 and it is these relations that form the basis of problems and questions that provoke critical thought. This thinking takes us beyond cinematic realities and truths, in all their movements from perception to action (or vice versa), and beyond the coherence of their resolutions and explanations to critique the depicted values placed on life. In fact, it is often within the very exceptions and abnormalities—the intervals of affection, the violent characters or their situations of suffering or drama—that we find the Foucauldian exclusions which serve as the “target, support, or handle” not of reality and truth; rather, such exclusions allow for a critique of the relations between characters and their worlds that we encounter, as well as what is seen and said, what is discovered or revealed, the behaviors or actions we witness, and what takes place.

VIII

Radical Reversals of Cinematic Art: The Dissociative Force of Blanchot’s Outside in Deleuze’s Time-Image

Introduction In cinema’s reversal of truth and reality, we leave behind the “living matter” and organic unity of the movement image in order to consider a more genuine experience of art that “know[s] nothing of life.”1 But without the coherence of reality and truth, we are not simply thrown into an empty void: we have seen in obscure experiences that death, for instance, cannot be considered definitive if it is fundamentally uncertain, and the dream demonstrates that the day incessantly returns with all the force of displacement and disguise as well as all the variety of affect and percept. Even Kafka’s procedure of dismantling the assemblages of truth and reality does not leave us with nothing— rather, it leaves us with the unrecognizable force of novelty amidst all the descriptive rigor and cold exactitude of his indescernible and inexplicable social and political milieus. Such reversals of power have prepared us for cinema’s untruth and unreality: in this case, reality refracts, twists, and divides; truth bifurcates, becomes perspectival, and multiplies; and ultimately the imaginary and the false become indistinguishable from—and coexistent with—realities and truths that continually differ in their conceptual composition. Such untruths and unrealities express a direct relation not just with an outside irreducible to power relations, but are specifically expressive of time—or more precisely, time’s absence (III; 4). In order for us to consider how the medium of film accesses this Blanchotian absent and lifeless “absolute milieu,” it is necessary to reconsider Deleuze’s notion of time to draw out his first synthesis within cinematic reflection; his second synthesis within cinematic bifurcation; and his third synthesis within false continuities, serializations, and cinematic interstices. There we find the unrealities and untruths that Deleuze’s cinematic time-images produce, which reverse the effects of power and values associated with life, and, beyond that initial reversal, express the new dynamics of a more radical reversal and of obscure values that have no relation to the life-centric values we carry over from our world. Throughout this book, we have considered an outside of power that is irreducible to and untouched by it, and we now turn to cinema as our cumulative consideration of such an outside of artistic composition. Indeed, thinking through Deleuze’s paradoxes of time, chaos, and difference via Blanchot’s own paradoxes of incessance, ungraspability, 211

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and becoming—especially around their approaches to Kafka’s fiction—has created the conditions to consider a cinematic reversal of power through Deleuze’s Time-Image that is informed by such a Blanchotian outside. And despite Blanchot’s deafening silence on cinema (V; Intro), we now reconsider Deleuze’s provocative statement that “What Blanchot diagnoses everywhere in literature is particularly clear in cinema” (V; Intro)— namely, what Deleuze, in that context, calls the “inpower [impouvoir] of thought” instigated by “the force of [Blanchot’s] ‘dispersal of the Outside.’”2 To call Blanchot’s outside a force, as we will see in this chapter, brings us back to the dynamic between, respectively, force and relation, the incessance of return and the absence of totality, sensation and thought, and immanence and composition (IV 2a–5c). That is, we will explore the dynamic in cinema between Blanchot’s incessant movement on the one hand and obstinate ungraspability on the other hand—a dynamic that leads to his notion of becoming (II; 5)—alongside Deleuze’s philosophy. This dynamic of becoming that holds the traits of incessance and and ungraspability together—as Deleuze’s third synthesis combined the first two (II; 8)—will—will, in the context of cinema, involve the varieties of Deleuze’s movement-image (perception, affection, impulse, action, in large and small form) becoming “subordinated” to time, rather than the reverse (VII). But does such subordination of movement to time get us beyond the illusions of reality and truth (VII; 2a) that it creates (and critiques)? And if we do arrive beyond such illusion, what do we make of film’s mechanism that we encounter in its place—and how does cinematic time differ from dream, literature, and especially from Deleuze’s “movement-image”?

1.a. Beyond cinematic illusion: spiritual automatism and waking dreams If the illusion of cinema is not the spectacle of the moving image but the creation of realities and truths, this implies that, by embracing cinema’s capacity to produce “movement in the mind,”3 cinema’s movement, unleashed from its beginnings and endings in the large and small forms of the action-image, may instead “force us to think.” Also, liberated from the “living matter” and organic unity of the moving-image, cinema, in our Blanchotian, mortalist vein, may also affirm its own non-relation to life. In his chapter on “thought and cinema” in The Time-Image, when distinguishing Artaud from Eisenstein, Deleuze returns to this Blanchotian theme of the capacity of the lifelessness of art to dispel the cinematographic illusion: if Eisenstein uses cinematic cutting to create a collision of images that hypnotize the viewer into thinking or believing something (film as propaganda), Artaud is interested in cinematic cutting that would dispossess the viewer’s ability to think or believe—drawing us toward what both Deleuze and Blanchot, with reference to Artaud, call the unthinkable of thought. Artaud’s position on the cinematographic illusion is that “[t]he world of the cinema is dead, illusory and fragmented. Not only does it . . . fail to enter into the heart of life” but it “only retains the skin of forms.”4 Here Artaud is distinguishing between the fragmentary and decomposed form of the lifeless and superficial on the one hand, and the unified, undecomposable body of depth on the other hand—what Deleuze, in his early work, called the “glorious body,”5 and ultimately, with Guattari, the “body without

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organs” (BwO), which reflects the organization of parts into a coherent, organic unity or “organism,” “for the organism is not life, it is what imprisons life.”6 If this Artaudian perspective rejects metaphors of organic unity (V; 3b), then as Blanchot notes of Artaud’s general inclination to disparage that which separates him from the life of the body, “Artaud is here the victim of the illusion of the immediate is easy enough to say; that is easy; but everything begins with the way in which he is distanced from this immediacy that he calls ‘life.’ ”7 Artaud, in other words, wishes to access, through art’s distance, the immediacy and shock or “violence” of the unthinkable—“life” in itself. But in some ways he is also a victim of the belief in such immediacy, since, as we have seen, art is always the mediation, by virtue of its medium, to the immediate, which “know[s] nothing of life”8 (V; 3b). It is in this manner that we can reconsider our Blanchotian formula: the medium can only attract us to the immediate, but never access it; Artaud therefore points us in the right direction, by acknowledging the lifeless core of the cold mechanism of cinema, but because the immediate is inaccessible, it is no longer illusory. We are now beyond the notion of cinematographic illusion, but we are not beyond cinema’s “automatism.” We still must ask: how does cinema draw us beyond “automatic” or habitual ways of seeing and feeling? While pure habits are automatic or mechanical, we saw that dreams displace and disguise our habits within Blanchot’s absolute milieu (III; 2–3b). This is why the sleepwalker is like a zombie, who still automatically completes tasks but in a domain that is entirely unreal—drawn toward the absolute slowness of oblivion. But we then saw that, unlike the dream, the absolute speed of thought can compose our perceptions and affections beyond their mechanical or habitual defaults (IV–VI). It is here that Deleuze’s use of the counterintuitive phrase “spiritual automaton” to describe the effect of time-image films on the viewer’s mind becomes relevant: on the one hand, “If cinema is automatism become spiritual art—that is, initially movementimage—it confronts automata, not accidentally, but fundamentally”; that is, images of “clockwork Automata,” “machines with moving parts,” and “man-machine assemblage[s],”9 cyborgs and computers—not to mention, as Ronald Bogue puts it, “the various mummified, hypnotized, anesthetized, vacant, transfixed, distracted, or distant characters who wander through modern films”10—all indirectly reference the status of cinema as a mechanism that moves or has a “spirit.” On the other hand, it is only when this spiritual function becomes genuinely “abstract”—that is, when it shifts from its zombified and somnambulist states to what Deleuze calls a “vigilambulism,” which, like the vigilance in Blanchot’s vision of the dream, involves a nocturnal, waking state—that cinematic time draws the oneiric automatism of displacement and disguise into a state of thought. But what, then, happens to the cinematic “machine” and to its assemblage of movement-images (VII; 3 and 5b)? This notion of giving cinema a “vigilambulist” treatment wherein we seek not to make reality dreamlike, but to make the dream appear “real,” raises the question, perhaps overdetermined, of cinema: what if we could share and compose our dreams— but with all of the force of the thought of becoming? That is, the dream was always the nascent and unthinkable space of thought: the immediate experience of the imaginary and the unthinkable movement of its indeterminate milieu. But what if cinema were considered as a medium which composes the dream via thought? As Artaud claims,

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for example, “If the cinema is not . . . what pertains to the realm of dreams in conscious life, it does not exist”11—that is, a cinema that does not draw us into conscious dream states is, to say the least, not art. Deleuze calls such a cinematic, conscious state of dream “vigilambulism,” and while this state is explored by Artaud and Bresson, for our purposes it is crucial that, with Blanchotian verve, Deleuze distinguishes vigilambulism from expressionism: while surrealism and expressionism make “wakefulness pass through a nocturnal treatment,” vigilambulism “makes dream pass through a diurnal treatment.”12 If dreams thereby pass into the graspable form and apparent reality of the machinery of the cinematic image, then, “it is . . . the automaton, petrified in this way, that thought seizes from the outside, as the unthinkable in thought”; in other words, “there is a more profound outside which will animate” the machine of moving images by “petrifying” or “seizing” the spiritual movement that is in us;13 such an outside moves incessantly through images, drawing them towards that which can “only be thought” and which is utterly immobile (but has infinite speed). As Deleuze notes elsewhere, “Cinema not only puts movement in the image, it also puts movement in the mind. Spiritual life is the movement of the mind.”14 That is, to be beyond the movement in the image does not mean dispelling an illusion—since, as we saw, cinematic movement is not “illusory” (VII; 1); rather, our perceptions and affections are already in motion. This movement then gets attached to images, but the relations of such images, when subordinate to time, subsequently force us to think with an absolute speed which is within the very unthinkable plane of immanence, thought’s “absolute milieu” (IV; 3a). In their reversal of truth and reality, films expressive of cinematic time dismantle the montages or assemblages of cinematic movement. We have seen that assemblages or montages of movement-images are territorial insofar as they function to present an illusion of reality and truth external to the images themselves (VII; 2a)—despite having the deterritorializing components of frame, cut, and the interval at their disposal (and images which fill or occupy it). But we have also seen, in D&G’s reading of Kafka, that the disassembling or démontage of territorial assemblages goes beyond any “mysterious” function or “dysfunction” and “actually functions” by the dismantling of its assemblages15 (e.g., Kafka’s castle actually functions only when it recedes incessantly and when the mystery of K’s summons is undiscoverable: V; 8, 10). The contention here is that this mysterious function or dysfunction is the indirect expression of cinematic automatism, while the actual function is the breakdown of the cinematic assemblage or montage of movement-images (VII; 3). Technically speaking, D&G’s “abstract machine” then unleashes the movement of the plane of immanence to become what Blanchot would call incessant (akin to the “flight” unleashed in V; 10), rather than movement-images, through their assemblages, revolving around the beginnings and endings within a coherent reality. D&G in fact define machines in terms of their capacity to cut (coupres); it is the machine’s “cutting edges” (points) that effect and deterritorialize the “material flow” of assemblages to unleash them from beginnings and endings.16 A cinematic cut of such material flow therefore takes place within Deleuze’s plane of immanence of moving images. As we will see (VIII; 5b), the cinematic cut is thus redefined—via Blanchot’s notion of the fissure that, before, severed the dreamer and sleeper (III; 8)—as the interstice that interrupts the coherence of movement. As D&G insist, it is the

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abstract machine that operates in the field of unlimited immanence, and pushes assemblages toward “undoing their own segments, . . . pushing farther their points of deterritorialization.”17 The cinematic machine, in short, is beyond any mysterious function or dysfunction: the genuine breakdown and reversal of assemblages of truth and reality happen to film when “time,” or what this book has called thought, composes its images. The Blanchotian fissure which overtakes the space of the cinematic cut (subordinating cinematic movement to time) can be reconsidered as an immobile projection between bodies, and as “being there” invisibly, with regard to two rare and indirect comments Blanchot makes about cinema. First, in a deleted passage from Blanchot’s original edition of Thomas the Obscure, a spectator views a film in the “obscurity” (l’obscurité)18 of a darkened theatre. The film images “project” the spectator outside of herself (l’eût projetée en dehors d’elle même)19 toward the body of the man seated next to her, about whom she entertains fantasies mixed with memories of her former husband. The man’s skin is “inert” (La peau était inerte), his visage frozen in “rigid immobility” (immobilité rigide); his bone marrow “vibrates” (la moelle vibrait) in illness and pain.20 One by one, his diseased organs vanish and are replaced by “dream” versions (un estomac de rêve, une tête de rêve).21 In this episode, cinematic space opens a fissure between persons and bodies; it projects bodies and consciousness like images, mixing past and present. The thin, empty cinematic image is like the superficial skin theorized by Artaud, which papers over a deeper, invisible violence. In this instance, cinematic space thus seems to fissure persons from bodies, projecting and mixing past and future. In an overlooked comment on cinema in The Most High, Blanchot echoes this with his notion of “being there” in an invisible and anonymous way, where the “law” disperses crowds and “create[s] a void,” “like in a movie theatre”:22 here, the darkened, invisible space has a sovereignty that, like death, is impossible to transgress. In fact, the “obscurity” or void of the movie theater parallels the first night, from which emerges the “phantasmagoria” of the dream-image (III; 6): a new level of lucidity and vigilance which fissures us from who we are (III; 8). Blanchot’s focus here is less on cinema as an artistic medium—on the content of any given film—than on the spaces and experiences that it creates. These are, then, Blanchotian spaces of “mobile–immobile relation[s]” (III; 5 and 9), akin to the sleeper immobilized in their bed and the dreamer who moves incessantly and impossibly toward the immobile obscurity of the first night. Cinema, however, is not only the space of this fissure that generates phantasmagoric imagery; it is the machine that expresses reversals of power through time. Some scholarship on Blanchot’s relation to Deleuze in cinema, however, overtly dismisses Deleuze’s approach to time. For instance, Calum Watt interprets Blanchot’s immobility in cinema to mean that a cinematic shot “abstracts itself from normal presentations of time” where “[m]ovement and stillness are at a point of paradoxical equilibrium.”23 In such a case, our attention is forced onto framed spectacles for an excessive duration, which “effectively refers to a time in which ‘nothing’ happens,”24 and we are “fascinated” through “primal fears” or “terminal inertia.” However, Watt’s study is admittedly not “a Deleuzian account” in which cinematic images would be “ ‘expressive’ of time”; instead, Watt prioritizes “subjective and psychoanalytic factors”;25 such an approach conceivably imports Blanchot’s absent space into a cinema of absence, leaving behind Blanchot’s

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highest level of ambiguity (II; 3–4); a professed “through-line” of Watt’s study involves Blanchot’s two versions of the imaginary, which, as we saw (II; 2), were limited to Blanchot’s second level of ambiguity where we were only “hollowed out” by sordid absence. By contrast, we have considered Blanchot’s highest account of ambiguity and fascination as a lens into Deleuze’s account of fiction in their mutual approaches to becoming and difference; we now turn to cinema to reconsider time in this regard.

1.b. Cinematic time Time involves the relations between the movement of beginnings and endings, but is itself independent of such movement; that is, time only measures movement when subordinate to it. In fact, without such measurement, movement itself is incessant and ungraspable, without ascertainable beginning or end. If we want to define time in terms of its lived experience, we can refer back to Deleuze, where time may be preserved in the “living presence” of repetition and habit—this was its “foundation” (II; 6); however, beneath such foundation was the indiscernibility of the fusion of past and present, or what Blanchot calls incessance where “time changes direction.”26 Memory may also make time coexist as a totality; these differences were its “ground” (II; 7); however, this too involved what Blanchot calls the “seizure of another time,” a “destructive time”27 that menaces insofar as it grasps us but cannot itself be grasped. This left the “groundlessness” of time itself, beyond the foundation and the ground, that involves paradoxes of eternal return, where the movement of repetition is implicated by, and develops, difference and time itself is an “eternally decentered circle” (II; 8). In this respect, we also considered time as the unreal domain of absolute speed and difference, relations between movement that “consist” or “insist” but do not exist. Time can only be made real by representing it according to arbitrary measures: the calendar time when an event took place (which also marks a transpersonal memory), or the clock time that we assign to our activity based on the movement of the earth. As the Deleuze scholar Dan Smith aptly notes, the . . . conception of time as the measure of movement remains ensconced in our common chronological “clock” time: days, months, and years measure terrestrial, lunar, and solar movements, while weeks and hours are primarily religious determinations of the soul (God rested on the seventh day); and our watches and clocks remain dependent on movement, whether that of a pendulum or a quartz crystal. Modernity no less than antiquity remains engaged in a vast effort to render both time and movement homogeneous and uniform (timetables, time zones, the global positioning system).28

But what Deleuze calls “time” in the time-image is not real—it cannot be thought through movement but only as relations of movement that are themselves empty or devoid of all movement, or in Blanchot’s terms as what “refers to no past and goes toward no future.”29 Blanchot can thus conclude his commentary on “the fascination of time’s absence” (III; 4 and 9) by insisting that this “vertigo of spacing” is “intimacy with the outside which has

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no location and affords no rest,”30 occurring without chronological or cyclical beginnings or endings: in Deleuzo-Blanchotian terms, that which is without place is the ultimate displacement, and that which cannot be revealed is the ultimate disguise, both of which stem from time’s groundlessness (or absence of foundation and ground). Thus, time’s absence is not the absence of time (II; 4, III; 5)—time, as the force of difference and repetition, is not present in its difference but always present in its repetitions, displacements, and disguises. But in a medium that can uniquely express time, cinematic time is unleashed not only from its chronology but also from its lived or livable presence: we no longer experience time through the organic syntheses of the imagination, but through the very Artaudian and Blanchotian inorganic and lifeless quality of the cinematic medium. Time, in short, has a new kind of presence. But what kind? Just as time’s absence does not free us from the experience of time, the movements of cinematic art wherein we attempt to discern what is really happening or discover what is true do not disappear. When the representation of time no longer can explain, assemble, or measure the movements of or within images, those movements simply no longer conform to the linear or logical requirements of truth and reality. And when situations are no longer centered through affection, it is because the repetition in the image that gave time a sense of movement—that created and resolved situations and tensions through action, or that disclosed or uncovered situations—no longer has an origin and no longer has a resolution. As Deleuze claims, “The time-image does not imply the absence of movement”:31 the movement of the cinematic plane of immanance (VII; 2b) re-emerges in the time-image as the development and event of the percept and affect, now composed by the absent totality that is thought’s plane of composition. But unlike the incessant movement of the dream, with its problematizing and questioning, in this case the answers and solutions to such questions and problems are displaced and disguised only initially by more affects and percepts, but ultimately become the “intimacy” and familiarity of the repeated, composed by conceptual thought. Like Blanchot’s “inspiring” experience of dreaming, which pulls us away from the world and toward the imaginary, where “time’s absence” reigns (III; 4 and 9), and like the imaginary movement within fictional art which “tends toward” its absence of origin (V; 2), in Deleuze’s cinematic time-image, movement is unhinged from the milieus and spatial coordinates of the movement-image. Thus before fully exploring the thought and values inherent to a Deleuzo-Blanchotian cinema of immanence and composition, it is first crucial to consider how the lifeless medium of cinema engages us in a movement that develops time.

2.a. The crystallization of the real and imaginary: the indiscernibility of what is happening Insofar as the cinematic medium is made of light—whether thought of as classic projection or as a liquid crystal display (LCD)—through its recording and reproduction, it has the unique capacity to refract and reflect the movement of its images: to repeat or split them. This capacity can complicate our perception of reality—which is to say, the splitting and mirroring of (cinematic) movement images may render their (cinematic)

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reality indiscernible from the genuinely imaginary. We consider this further by comparing Deleuze’s “crystal” image to his cinematic plane of immanence, which, as we saw, is “made entirely of light” (IV; 5a, VII; 2b); now, in the context of the timeimage, the plane reflects the projected material of movement, where the cinematic medium radiates its images—but not as an expression of “living matter.” Here, with Blanchotian verve, we are drawn into art’s lifeless absence of origin (V; Intro–2)—a “crystallizing” process that has no organic growth. Indeed, the crystal is almost living in its style of “growth” or formation, but it only grows through a sort of splitting or mirroring (a crystal, like the cinematic medium, is non-organic). By naming these images “crystals,” Deleuze emphasizes the nature of actual crystalline processes which both reflect and—as Ronald Bogue explains—refract the light that forms the milieus and bodies that are then perceived (Deleuze also refers to crystal images as “hyalosigns,” further connoting their transparent structure).32 In fact, the crystal and the plane of immanence have everything to do with effects of surfaces on light; as Deleuze claims, “it is on the plane of immanence that crystals appear . . . continually retracing from one to the other,”33 that is, from their actual repetition to their virtual difference. This artistic division or splitting within time creates a “perpetual exchange” in our perception between what was, before, fused, contracted, or indistinguishable. Movement is thereby subordinated to this time which no longer assembles it but instead crystallizes it. Disguise thereby operates by virtue of an oscillation between real and imaginary, where one can never settle on the other. The paradox of indiscernibility in the crystal image is distinct from our habitual discernments in reality (however paradoxical the indiscernible contractions of habit are). In other words, unlike the contraction of Deleuze’s visceral organ of the imagination in lived experience, what the lifeless cinematic medium “contracts” is no longer the living matter or material within a real world; instead, the matter or material of the moving image is contracted within Blanchot’s absolute milieu of the imaginary. It was in fact the movement-image that created an illusory imitation of such a lived experience or process; that is, while Deleuze’s first passive synthesis of time involved “psycho-organic” contraction, the cinematic medium may attempt an “organic description” that unifies it (V; 3b, VII; 2–3)—through an interval around large forms of action—in order to produce reality. By contrast, Deleuze’s “crystalline description” projects only its own object without an interval that would draw it into action or resolution. The notion that the crystal-image makes what is happening into an unresolvable problem is perhaps most clearly articulated by Deleuze in his contrast of organic to crystalline description: In an organic description, the real that is assumed is recognizable . . . by the continuity shots which establish it and by the laws which determine successions, simultaneities and permanences. It is a regime of localizable relations, actual linkages, legal, causal and logical connections. It is clear that this system includes the unreal, the recollection, the dream and the imaginary but as contrast.34

In other words, the causal links and successions that establish reality are opposed to the unreal, the dream, and so on. But when “the real and the imaginary, the actual and

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the virtual, chase after each other, exchange their roles and become indiscernible,”35 images are “descriptive” in a new sense: in the terms of this study (as in the case we saw where perception becomes percept: III; 2), they draw perception toward other images from which those images are indiscernible (or ultimately, what we cannot see: VIII; 3b), thereby forcing the character and/or the viewer to experience, beyond movement, more than what there is in the image. Events in “crystalline” form seem perpetual and unresolvable because they have a bottomless foundation that reflects and refracts their repetitions in endless exchanges, no longer living or livable, real or possible, but experienced and thought. In this sense, with the crystal, the moving soil of repetition is drawn into an incessant, “perpetual,” and unlivable movement of time that cannot be anticipated. As Deleuze claims, “We see in the crystal the perpetual foundation [la perpétuelle fondation] of time, nonchronological time.”36 This is the link between Deleuze’s foundation (fondation) of the passing present which can be drawn to the crystal, where he claims that the crystalimage reveals the foundation (fondament) of time. The crystal, then, involves the foundation of time akin to the foundation that we saw in habit that involved “the moving soil occupied by the passing present,”37 where the viscerality of the imagination formed a living sense of expectation (II, 6). In this regard, percepts are drawn onto a plane of immanence that, as we have seen (IV; 3a–b), constitutes “the absolute soil [le sol] of ” thought, “its foundation [fondation].”38 Indeed, the light or matter of the plane of immanence is now subordinated to time which reflects and refracts it, constituting an unlivable movement that hollows out reality and, ultimately, forces us to think (VIII; 3b). We still attempt to discern what is happening, as we would with a living sense of expectation, but are drawn into unresolvable situations and a Blanchotian non-relation of uncertainty. The reflections of the crystal-image are not metaphorical but literal. If belief in the impossibility of what is happening replaces symbolism in literature (V; 3b), then in cinema, the crystal-image literally blurs the distinction between the real and the imaginary when it no longer refers to an open totality or changing world, but divides or splits that very world within itself (splitting bodies, milieus, and so on). It was movement on the plane of immanence that, all along, was given rather than illusory (VII; 2b): in addition, such movement does not require the illusory totality of metaphor (where images indirectly collide in a unity) to accomplish itself (nor does it require Artaud’s “shock” and violence to images to wrest us from an apparent illusion: VIII; 5b). Rather, in the crystal-image, it is impossible to know what precisely is real and what is not in this literal movement of disguise, making reality into a problem. In Deleuze’s terms, our perception no longer extends into action; so, as he asks, it must come into relation with something else: “when perception becomes purely optical and aural, with what does it come into relation, if not with action?”39 What it “comes into relation with” is a “mirror image . . . where real and imaginary become indistinguishable. The actual image and its virtual image crystallize.”40 In other words, what Blanchot would call the non-relation with an uncertain future here perhaps becomes the non-relation between real and imaginary: an impossible relation. Perception becomes percept, drawn toward the invisible (III; 2, IV; 4a). Two things—in Deleuze’s example that we will see shortly, a factory and a prison—are not alike by virtue of being different (to become a metaphor:

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V; 3b); they are different by virtue of being alike or the same. Their reality literally splits or divides: the percept is thereby disguised by its mirror image. In its literality, the crystal-image is not a dream-image or a hallucination; rather, insofar as its difference is premised on its reflected or refracted fusion, it can only be thought as both real and imaginary. As we saw, dreams and hallucinations within cinematic realities merely interrupt movement, feeling the interval between perception and action (VII; 8a). By contrast, the crystal-image as the first direct time-image actually depicts an image of something as something it cannot be, by virtue of reflecting, refracting, or distorting it, such that visual “descriptions replace objects . . . [and] not only does action and thus narrative break down, but the nature of perceptions and affections changes.”41 To return to Deleuze’s example, the crystal . . . image without metaphor, brings out the thing in itself, literally, in its excess of horror or beauty, in its radical or unjustifiable character . . . the factory is a prison, school is a prison, literally, not metaphorically. You do not have the image of a prison following one of a school: that would simply be pointing out a resemblance . . . On the contrary, it is necessary to discover the . . . relations that elude us . . . to show how and in what sense school is a prison . . . literally, without metaphor.42

If metaphorical interpretation of such a relation between one image and another that resembles or mirrors it is not possible, it is because it can only be encountered at the level of percept (V; 3a), and the two things can only be thought as “unthinkably” alike. The question then becomes, what difference is there between a factory and a prison, as shown (and not, what does this juxtaposition “represent” more abstractly)? We are forced to perceive such unreality when the imaginary projects and reflects itself within the “reality” of its cinematic world, dividing and fracturing that world: perception is thereby drawn to the imperceptible. This is what makes real and imaginary indiscernible. Now, terminological distinctions are important here: the crystal-image is not fragmentary, nor does it bifurcate; rather, through reflection it is still a fusion of the unreflectable or indiscernible, in the manner in which light itself is immanent to or inseparable from its projections, reflections, and refractions. We have seen that fragmentation is conceivably a feature of a groundless, Blanchotian “time without a present” or presence (II; 1), and, in Deleuzian terms, of both reminiscence and the time of eternal return—that is, of difference (II; 8). For example, the second passive synthesis involved the paradox of the coexistence of the whole of the past, and through the exploration of (or Proustian “search” through) the past, only retrieves fragments (II; 7). This makes it, in Deleuze’s words, “pure fragment and fragment of itself.”43 While the Deleuze scholar David Deamer also provides an astute and informative association of crystal-images with Deleuze’s first synthesis of time, we cannot follow his account of fragmentation in the crystal,44 as this book considers the Deleuzian fusion of repetition, founded on the indistinguishability of the present moment, as that which cannot fragment itself because such repetition concerns neither the past or figure of absent totality nor the function memory in Deleuze’s second synthesis of time (rather, it concerns the first synthesis).

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The crystal-image reverses the effects of power by virtue of the hollowing out of reality and interiority through reflection: to see one thing as another is to lose grasp of what is real but nevertheless to experience events that are haunted by affective truth. This indistinguishability or indiscernibility of the real and imaginary especially hollows out the reality of the large form of the action-image as well as the identity of characters (along with any such realistic and “englobing” milieu). We have seen this when obscure interiority menaced Foucault’s world (II; 4), when the day menaced us in the nightmare (III; 6), and when Kafka’s own projections and reflections were menaced by truth (V; 4). In a Foucauldian sense, the crystal-image renders our panoptic way of seeing impossible: if in the large form of the movement-image, forces incurve on subjects within milieus (VII; 3), and characters act in response to their milieus or alter them (always provoked by values attached to life—surviving, thriving, etc.), in the crystalimage, the perpetual exchange between real and imaginary actually “transforms” or “impregnates” cinematic milieus45 in addition to doubling or displacing the identity of characters (such that lived reality becomes an unresolvable problem). In such a crystallized movement, the milieu and actions within it are in contact with their virtual double or mirror—problematizing what is happening. Characters cannot act in response to, or alter, their milieus in any rational or predicable way—the present moment is a problem, an event on the plane of immanence (IV; 3a) like “an impersonal instant which is divided into still-future and already-past,” as Deleuze says of Blanchot, where we incessantly “never cease” to die but also “never succeed” in dying (or in this case, acting).46 While the affection involving such a movement loses Foucauldian strategies and also loses normal, anticipatable bearings (e.g. the moment of death), it nevertheless has not yet fully expressed its “untruth.” That is, while, in this first case, the percept is “hollowed” out of its reality, caught between or within such indiscernibilities of real and imaginary, it is nevertheless haunted by the affective truth that grounds it as a general, albeit ambiguous, expectation (IV; 4a). That is to say, the percept engendered by the crystal-image does not yet fully interact with the affect: it is still weighed down by affection-images. Such affection-images no longer occupy the interval between perception and action—since the large form is no longer operating— but menace the oscillating real–imaginary with a truth that crystal images cannot escape. However, affection-images, as we will see (in the case of crystalline narration: VIII; 3b), ultimately become “absorbed” as affects into the milieus and bodies that are refracted and split, such that the interval of potential becomes Blanchot’s fissure or “interstice” of thought. But to arrive at the full force of the plane of immanence, it is necessary to first consider the major emergence of untruth and affect in Deleuze’s time-images.

2.b. Peaks and aspects of the event: the inexplicability of what happened Beyond the indiscernibility of real and imaginary in cinematic time, we encounter the inexplicable affect that draws us into incompatible or undecidable versions of truth or falsity: here, different aspects of events have their own affective force. We have

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considered this shift before: from Blanchot’s incessance to obstinate ungraspability (II; 5), and more importantly, from Deleuze’s first synthesis of time to the second synthesis (II; 7); those considerations propelled us into fiction, where we considered the shift from the projections and distortions in Kafka’s letters and diaries to the inexplicable coexistences in his short stories (V; 4–5). In fact, Deleuze’s paradox of the “never-lived reality” of his second synthesis of time is naturally suited to fiction: this is where truth is made into a question, and where memory becomes an affective, searching force (“What is love? What is jealousy?”); here affection, as we saw, becomes affect (III; 2). Thus, the differences of memory “coexist” where “[e]ach present contracts a level of the whole,” and each level involves a field of (“virtual”) differences. When developing this paradox in Cinema 2, Deleuze emphasizes that each level or circle—or what he calls “regions” or “sheets”—has “its own characteristics, its ‘tones’, its ‘aspects’, its ‘singularities’, its ‘shining points’ and its ‘dominant’ themes.”47 Here we have the affective search, and all of its differential states, on full display, rendering each level distinctive or singular precisely in its tones, atmosphere, characteristics, and mood. In other words, a single event can play out in various ways, and can also be seen with a variety of undecidable emphases and perspectives—placing what happened into question and endowing each event with variations of its affective force. Thus, Deleuze can say that there are “two kinds of chronosigns: the first are aspects (regions, layers), the second accents (peaks of view [pointes de vue])”;48 that is, aspects of events can coexist or certain points or “peaks” can be simultaneous. Truth is felt here not in terms of the crystalline description (percept), but in terms of events that are impossible together, or “incompossible” in all their affective force: thus, we have shifted from the event’s Blanchotian incessance in split or divided presences of the crystal to its bifurcation or multiplication into Blanchot’s obstinately ungraspable “still-future and already-past.”49 We can now consider cinema’s capacity to express multiple conflicting truths, different perspectives on the truth (with no one perspective to anchor them), multiple versions or variations of the same event, the undecidability between truth and falsity, or the bifurcating of worlds themselves (“where one and the same event is played out in these different worlds, in incompatible versions”)50 in terms of the complex role of affect and difference. In this regard, what Deleuze calls “chronosigns,” crucially, do not refer to chronological time, but directly to time’s orders and series. On the one hand, if the crystal-image defined reality in the present moment, however refracted and imaginary, then the passing of the present developed or explicated time as a direct time-image (rather than being “subordinate” to it, as with the movement-image). On the other hand, chronosigns implicate the movement of the event, which is what allows for its experience from “incompossible” or incompatible perspectives. Here we again encounter the complex status of the affect, which concerns differential states (making it close to the concept) but which is still bound to its determination and movement (IV 3c–4a). The role of difference as an implicating force remains bound in this case to the events that both determine affects and are bifurcated into multiple, inexplicable, truths. Indeed, if the crystal-image transformed cinema’s material and reality through its repetition of difference, chronosigns repeat the difference of cinematic “truths” by virtue of entire sequences of events (rather than within figures or milieus). In Blanchotian terms, such an experience involves “a presence to which we

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cannot be present, but from which we cannot separate: the ungraspable that one cannot let go of,”51 in the sense that the experience is no longer about the repetition or incessance filtered through endless reflections, but rather ungraspable differences between what Deleuze calls aspects of events and “peaks” or points of view (pointes de vue). In short, we cannot decide what is true but we also cannot ignore the conflicting versions of truth. In cinematic chronosigns, the inexplicable ungrounds idealization: no longer can we know the truth of what happened, and no longer can the affect be explained or represented by a logical idea. Here we reconsider the affect’s intertwinement with the differential state of the idea: we have seen that the inexplicable both involves the ungrounding of the idealizations of memory (where truth cannot be found in the past) and also concerns the status of ideas that do not “explain” anything (instead, forming intensive connections: IV; 5c). Considering such inexplicable ideas that unground idealization, beyond Griffith-style montage, which makes relations of events metaphorical or metonymical (where one situation is “like” another), in this case, different situations are literally part of the same inexplicable or inseparable event. Indeed, insofar as we are forced to think the difference between points of view or aspects of events, those events cannot be explicated; rather, their differences are felt. That is, every version or every point or peak of the event that is “de-actualized” in impossibly simultaneous or coexistent relations is inexplicable because it cannot be developed, “explicated,” or revealed by the resolutions of the movement of the image. In Deleuze’s terms, the story unfolds “in such a way as to ‘complicate’ the inexplicable . . . These are not subjective (imaginary) points of view in one and the same world, but one and the same event in different objective worlds, all implicated in the event, inexplicable universe [univers inexplicable].”52 Thus the chaos of the Blanchotian absent totality (the “inexplicable universe”) does not make time disappear but complicates movement by drawing us from idealized versions of the past to experience different and irreconcilable aspects (“layers”) or viewpoints (“peaks of view”) of situations, characters, or worlds—thereby engendering perspectives impossible in a true world. To meet the person that you are going to marry after already having married them, for example, offers a viewpoint of that event that is not possible otherwise: you see them “differently,” appreciate their variations and complexity throughout time. Affects here are displaced by the coexistence of their irreducible differences. The cinematic inexplicability of the false reverses power by hollowing out truth, while remaining menaced by reality. If in the previous case of crystal-images, the realism of Deleuze’s large form of the action-image became indiscernible from the imaginary, in this case, the mystery of Deleuze’s small form becomes inexplicable and unresolvable. While the crystal-image arguably inverts the panoptic ways of seeing inherent to realism and the large form of the action image, chronosigns arguably invert the etiological ways of seeing inherent to the truth and to the small form of the action image (preventing us from solving the mystery, or discovering what took place: VII; 7c). As such, chronosigns “make time frightening and inexplicable”:53 reality haunts time’s untruth by making it impossible to decide or explain what really happened. The suspect both is and is not guilty, betrayal did and did not happen, and so on. Affection may have been drawn toward the insensible, in that we are presented with “feelings”

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detached from their idealizations or their subjects, but we nevertheless perceive reality within the “layers” in which those affects are complicated. In Blanchotian terms, such movement discloses itself as an opaque mystery—but any explanation of the mystery only presents a conflicting view of that mystery within yet another reality. Chronosigns thus present an inexplicable mystery, a question without answer, hollowing out our efforts to “know” the truth, but menaced by a reality that unfolds within them and serves as a general, albeit ambiguous, foundation (IV; 4a). Like percepts haunted by the truth, here affects also do not yet fully interact with percepts, as they are still weighed down by perception-images that engender generic, albeit ambiguous, realities.

2.c. The smallest and largest movements at the limit of cinematic perception Both perception and affection are drawn to their own points of impossibility—their own limits—when becoming percepts of the crystal-image or affects of chronosigns; however, each limit operates distinctively. On the one hand, in crystal-images, we no longer perceive what is real, and are drawn into indiscernibilities of real-time, in the present moment, or what Deleuze calls the “smallest circuit.” On the other hand, in chronosigns, we no longer feel what is true and are drawn out toward the coexistences of the past, when this “extreme limit” (where events are all simultaneous) also expands or “stretches” into its affective layers. Both cases, whether the sentiendum or memorandum, are drawn toward their points of impossibility (IV; 1). These distinctions can be broken down further. Firstly, the indiscernibility of crystal-images is engendered by the infinite speed of the present moment that “is not” (II; 6), the “smallest circuit” that is “shorter than the shortest continuous time thinkable [de temps continu pensable].”54 That is, beyond the continuity or movement that develops time, there is the speed of thought—but insofar as movement is placed into the mind, the shortest imaginable movement is unthinkable, and it is the smallest or shortest movement that can still “divide” and “reflect” (and be perceptible) which thus constitutes the crystal. Considering this smallest circuit, then, “[y]ou get to an inner circuit which links only the actual object and its virtual image,” such that “there is coalescence and division, or rather oscillation, a perpetual exchange between the actual object and its virtual image . . . This perpetual exchange . . . is what defines a crystal.”55 This is the internal limit of movement, where images “coalesce,”“exchange,” and “divide” to their furthest or smallest perceptibilities, and where “images are chasing one another round a point where real and imaginary become indistinguishable.”56 It is the limit of the sensible—the sentiendum taken to its point of impossibility. Secondly, the outer limit of movement concerns the degree to which events can coexist or peaks can be simultaneous (e.g., a friend appears through memory simultaneously as one from childhood or youth, and from college or the army, but in a way that is untrue). Here we also have the infinite speed or “simultaneity” of events: “we are simultaneously [in] childhood, adolescence, old age and maturity.”57 However, we also “have to choose between the regions”58 of the past, and as we search they dilate or stretch, no longer occurring in real-time but in an expanded limit that,

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like the dream, is drawn toward an unthinkable point of slowness or immobility (III; 10). And yet, the ultimate simultaneity and coexistence of the events ensures that they are composed by the speed of ideas (unlike the dream: IV; 2b); in Deleuze’s terms, “[t] he past appears . . . as the coexistence of circles . . . each one of which contains everything at the same time and the present of which is the extreme limit (the smallest circuit that contains all the past).”59 How many circles (regions or layers), or how many peaks (points of view), in other words, can implicate or enfold each other? How deep can we dig through such layers, to the limit of the immemorial (the memorandum), and how many coexisting variations can be discovered? What are their most forceful affective tones? This no longer concerns refraction and division of the smallest movement, but the broadening of multiplication and difference. These limits that reverse the effects of power by taking movement beyond its livability, however, are ultimately crossed by the highest forms of the time-image in the most radical reversal beyond power: no longer only bringing movement to its limit and lacerating or unleashing it, but actually providing it with a new dynamic that dissolves both limits through the interaction of affect and percept, and is composed by that which is beyond movement—D&G’s plane of composition and the diverging of difference in Blanchot’s outside.

3.a. The final synthesis of time in cinema: beyond reversals of power In cinematic art, the most radical reversal beyond power involves the intertwinement of the percepts of crystal-images within the affects of chronosigns; like Deleuze’s third synthesis of time that is conceivably a combination of the paradox of repetition and difference in the first two syntheses, and like Blanchot’s “diverging of difference” that holds together the traits of incessance and obstinate ungraspability (II; 8), in this case, the highest forms of the time-image involves combinations of chronosigns and crystalimages. Now, this approach effectively reads the third synthesis of time into Chapter 6 of Deleuze’s Time-Image, where he shifts abruptly and explicitly from a Bergsonian to a Nietzschean perspective. The approach in this book is therefore distinct from that of Deleuze scholars such as Pisters, who aligns Deleuze’s first synthesis of time with the movement-image and the second with the time-image,60 and Deamer, who confines the third synthesis to Deleuze’s “noosigns” of the brain and body.61 Instead, we consider the third synthesis as relevant to topics spanning the final five chapters of Deleuze’s second cinema volume and also explore such time-images by virtue of movement (with situation, affect, and action), but incessant movement “subordinate to time.” That is, this chapter considers Deleuze’s third synthesis of time in terms of the cinematic art of “crystal images” become false continuities and “chronosigns” become serial, just as his first two syntheses combine in the third. Considering such Deleuzo-Blanchotian becoming, these time-images also involve Blanchotian fissures or “interstices” that act as a dissociative force between the untrue and unreal. No longer simply reversing the effects of power by hollowing out truth and reality, but, in a more radical reversal, presenting the complexities of time’s direct expression in their highest artistic form,

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such time-images move beyond Blanchot’s second level of ambiguity and Deleuze’s first two syntheses of time in isolation to combine unreality with untruth in a unique dynamic. That is, beyond the reversals of power that complicate reality or throw truth into crisis, we find another experience beyond power that is most directly composed by ideas. This experience draws untruth and unreality into the “thought of becoming,” wherein perceptions and affections become closer than our interior world (as affects and percepts), and wherein this inaccessibly close interiority is also, at the same time, coextensive with that which is further than the exterior world of reality and truth (II; 1 and 5, III; 11, IV; 3a, V; 10). Insofar as affects and percepts are composed by the imperceptibility and insensibility of ideas rather than simply being hollowed out of their truth and reality, that which is closer than the perception of cinematic movement—and closer than affection within movement’s intervals—is reversed within an outside beyond the truth and reality of cinematic worlds. That is, beyond the dream, we are forced to think the unthinkable becomings and relations of affects and percepts, where cinematic movement continues, but incessantly and ungraspably, in all its displacement and disguise. The final, radical reversal wherein the indiscernibility of unreality and the inexplicability of untruth enter into a unique dynamic is at hand. We now transition from crystal-images and chronosigns in isolation, where we observed an oscillation between real and imaginary and between true and false; in these cases, reality was drawn into other reflected realities from which it was indiscernible, and the effort to decide or discover truth resulted only in the false and inexplicable. In the former case, unreality was haunted by truth, and in the latter, the false was menaced by reality. However, as with the third synthesis of time, there is a groundlessness beyond the foundation and ground of time, when the paradoxes of repetition and difference converge and are reversed: beyond the hollowing out of truth or reality, then, the indiscernible meets the inexplicable—that is, unreality and untruth coalesce in a new dynamic and “return” as strangely familiar (in a variety of ways we will explore). As we saw in the shift from Kafka’s letters and short stories to his novels (V; 6), it is here that percepts and affects are no longer displaced and disguised by other percepts and affects—whether more indiscernible imaginary realities, or inexplicable truths or worlds. Here, the démontage or dismantling of Kafka’s assemblages—the disassembling of the coherent aim or function of reality and truth— becomes the démontage or dismantling of cinematic montages (which Deleuze also called the very assemblage of the movement image: VII; 2a and 5b). The impossible no longer sabotages or frustrates the experience of movement or continuity in a work of fiction and the values that we carry into it from our world. Rather, percepts and affects are only displaced by that which is without place and disguised by that which cannot be revealed—the imperceptible and insensible idea.

3.b. Crystalline narration: false continuity When the limits that separate or divide real from imaginary in the crystal-image dissolve, such that its repetitions—in their variety—begin to differ affectively within themselves, crystalline relations of indiscernible or indistinguishable images,

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ensembles, and sets become untrue. Indeed, as with the indistinguishable repetitions of Deleuze’s first passive synthesis of time that are catapulted through the second synthesis into the third (that is, into the groundlessness of difference: II; 8), here, the percept of real and imaginary circuits in the crystal-image no longer oscillate back and forth via affective truths (which in turn haunt them), but are disguised by the unlocatable displacements of affect and difference itself. As Deleuze puts it: Crystalline description was already reaching the indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, but the falsifying narration which corresponds to it goes a step further and poses inexplicable differences to the present and alternatives which are undecidable between true and false to the past.62

Thus when the falsity of coexistent difference is introduced into crystal-images, it is no longer a question of which reflection is real (e.g., is it the protagonist or their double? Is it the reality of the world or its reflection?): they are both imaginary. The “truth” of affection—that someone or something affects or is affected by its relatively indiscernible counterpart—no longer incessantly menaces the real and imaginary; rather, reality and imaginary coexist in a “falsifying narration” because the affect cannot be tied definitvely to a subject. Each affect is repeated in the percept, differently: the paradox of contraction or fusion is now the external envelope of difference that “can only be thought.” The problem posed by unreality is thus disguised beyond the movement or circuit of the images, via the unlocatable place of the affect, drawn by the inexistent totality of the idea that forms their relations. In the radical reversal in which crystal-images become crystalline narration, the unreal becomes untrue: the indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary takes us into the falsity of coexistence that we saw in chronosigns, endowing the unreal with a new affective potentiality or “power” (puissance). As Deleuze insists, crystalline “[d]escription becomes its own object and narration becomes temporal and falsifying at exactly the same time. The formation of the crystal, the force of time and the power [puissance] of the false are strictly complementary, and constantly imply each other.”63 It is noteworthy here that in his initial description of the crystal, Deleuze did not yet bring up this power or potentiality of the false (supporting the contention in this chapter that the crystal-image has not yet become untrue); however, in crystalline narration, it is only by way of “de-actualized peaks of present [and . . .] virtual sheets of past . . . appear[ing] in the crystalline system”64 that the crystal tends toward its limits and impossibility in the highest form of the time-image. When the crystal-image becomes false in this way, the “limit” of the visible— the imperceptible in vision (within or outside of the frame)—or the affect between images (within the cut or interstice)— now no longer refers to another real or imaginary counterpart, but is relinked by virtue of the affective “potentiality” of the false: Blanchot’s absent totality and D&G’s plane of composition. But how? When crystal-images become “crystalline narration,” we no longer just attempt to discern what is happening; we also ask what happened. That is, what is happening may be unreal, but what happened is also untrue, such that there is what Deleuze calls a “false continuity” within cinematic movement: here, Blanchot’s outside disperses

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images through “irrational cuts” that propel us toward the thought of the future (becoming). This occurs when the movement of such crystalline narration, as in the dream, becomes incessant or, in Deleuze’s terms, “aberrant,” which, in distinction from “organic” narration, Deleuze insists “concerns the relation between the real and the imaginary. In an organic description, the real that is assumed is recognizable by its continuity—even if it is interrupted—by the continuity shots.”65 In “crystalline narration,” by contrast, . . . movement can tend to zero, the character, or the shot itself, remain immobile: rediscovery of the fixed shot. But this is not what is important, because movement may also be exaggerated, be incessant, . . . a trampling, a to-and-fro, a multiplicity of movements on different scales . . . What is important is that the anomalies of movement become the essential point instead of being accidental or contingent. This is the era of false continuity.66

Thus insofar as refracted and distorted crystal-images place the continuity of organic narration into question through the affect and become the false continuity of crystalline narration, the images become imaginary: we are forced to perceive more than what there is in it, because the affects that are a part of it likewise do not extend from it into action (as we will see, they are “absorbed”: VIII; 5a): “the cut has become the interstice,” where each set or ensemble of images “has no more an end than the other has a beginning: false continuity is such an irrational cut.”67 This is one side of what Blanchot calls “the force of ‘dispersal of the Outside,’ ” where, as Deleuze claims, “[f]alse continuity, then, takes on a new meaning”68 insofar as the indiscernibilities of crystalimages pass by way of the inexplicabilities of chronosigns, inverting large and then small forms of the action-image. Here, the indiscernibilities within reality are no longer only a problem within the present, but also of the future, where the conceptual composition of events are indiscernible solutions to their problems. Such a passage from indiscernible to inexplicable can be compared to K’s search in The Castle that begins in a large-form domain which becomes crystallized, where K is attempting to see more than what there is (the castle that dissolves into the distance); ultimately, K is drawn into an effort to discover a truth that will never be revealed: the indiscernibility of the castle meets the inexplicability of K’s raison d’être. We will see what makes such a Kafkaesque journey particularly cinematic (IX; 3c), but now it is crucial to consider the other side of this radical reversal, incessant movement and Blanchotian interstice: the layers of the past or the present (chronosigns), as untrue, differential affects that were initially haunted by reality, but ultimately drawn into the third synthesis by way of crystalline indiscernibilities.

3.c. Serialized chronosigns: reflection and complication of categories When limits of the perspectives, worlds, or truths multiplied in the chronosign dissolve, such that their variations of difference—their affective tones, singularities, and

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characteristics—repeat within each other, they become imaginary (that is, part of the same unreality). As with Deleuze’s second passive synthesis of time, which is catapulted through the first into the third (II; 8), here, “undecidable” truths and falsities of chronosigns no longer oscillate between distinct perceptual realities (which in turn haunt them), but are displaced by the unrevealable disguises of percept and repetition itself. That is, the oscillating and coexistent layers or “peaks” of the past are drawn into the incessant and indiscernible movement of the present toward the future. Indeed, the questioning nature of chronosigns, despite their lack of solutions and inversion of the small form (e.g., why was Kane’s last word “rosebud”?), directly access “time,” but never by themselves give way to the highest forms of time’s expression. With serialized chronosigns, by contrast, the inexplicable or undecidable alternatives of the true and the false become indistinguishable when the ground of the past gives way to the groundlessness of time, but not before passing through the foundation of movement. Within this indistinguishability, there is “another type of chronosign” that “does not appear in an order of coexistences or simultaneities, but in a becoming as potentialization [potentialisation], as ‘series of powers’ [série de puissances]” or a series of transformative “bursts.”69 Here, drawn into an incessant movement where “[t]he before and the after are then no longer successive,”70 but are “brought together” and not “separate,” the contradictory layers or truths of chronosigns—whether in the layering or peaks of events—are no longer the question. Instead, the entire search only reveals the false and unreal insofar as those layers, aspects, or peaks give way to a series of different scenes, shots, frames, cuts, milieus, and bodies (“sequences”) that implicate repetition—that are, in other words, different by virtue of their repetition. But what is this implicating force? In the radical reversal in which chronosigns become a series, the untrue becomes unreal: the implicating force of chronosigns becomes complicated by the repetition of the crystal, endowing the untrue with a new unreal and problematizing force: here, the untrue repeats itself as a series through “categories.” The question—as with chronosigns initially—is no longer “what happened?” Instead, in serialized chronosigns, milieus and bodies become what Deleuze calls “categories” that “are never final answers but categories of problems which introduce reflection into the image itself. They are problematic or propositional functions.”71 In this case, we are presented with a series of events which, through crystalline reflection, are problematizing in their categorial distinction. That is, this highest form of expression occurs when the layering of events is not just of past and present, but also of future, whereby events are composed conceptually in a way that “inexplicably” answers such questions (V; 7). Thus, unlike the false continuity of crystalline narration that complicates difference through repetition, where the same or similar is infinitely divided by—and ultimately coexists inexplicably with—the indiscernibility of the reflecting and refracting presence of movement, serialized chronosigns complicate the very force of such indiscernibility through the multiplicity of coexistent difference. Likewise, just as crystal-images are carried off by virtue of the falsity of chronosigns toward crystalline narration, within such a series of time, the layers or peaks of chronosigns are carried off by the reflection of the crystal to form a series, where the different or differing aspects of the past are drawn into the future. Categories or series approach limits—or impossibilities—of expectation by reflecting or repeating their features and components (through what was a layer of reality, but now

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has become unreal as a series); these features may range from genre conventions (become problematic) to psychic faculties, dialogue, bodies (in their attitude, posture, etc), milieus, or any givens within a set or ensemble. In other words, in its initial onset, chronosigns involved a limit of what could form variation through the layers or peaks of the past, asking: how much variation could coexist? But now, the limit or impossibility of expectation—specifically of types, of moods, and especially of genres—“which tends to return to coexistence or simultaneity”72—will be tested by virtue of their repetition or serialization. In this sense, “[t]he direct time-image here does not appear in an order of coexistences or simultaneities, but in a becoming as potentialization, as series of powers.”73 In this case, “[e]verything which functions as limit between two series . . . will also be called a category.”74 But these categories, now drawn into the unreality of the percept that is focused on what is happening (however impossible), form a series; such a “series is a sequence of images, which tend in themselves in the direction of a limit, which orients and inspires the first sequence (the before), and gives way to another sequence organized as series which tends in turn towards another limit (the after).”75 Insofar as chronosigns repeat as a series, then, they primarily concern the novelty of the present and future (and thus expectation) rather than simply the past: this is the limit or impossibility toward which each sequence tends—and the presence of each sequence’s unreality concerns a dissolved limit through which they relate. Such categories thus neither conform to genre or to habitual, generic expectations (like those described in the previous chapter), nor create new genres. Categories may, however, draw on genre conventions in addition to other generic devices, but only provisionally, to accentuate difference and never settle in a given genre—thus complicating the small form of Deleuze’s action-image within the large form. More specifically, such categories may involve “aesthetic genres” (“the epic, theatre, the novel, dance” that make cinema “reflect itself ”), “psychic faculties (imagination, memory, forgetting . . .),” or “words, things, acts, people,” since “a character, a gest, a word, a colour may be a category as easily as a genre.”76 Categories may also include the “attitudes,” “postures,” and “gestures” of bodies, milieus, or circumstances as vignettes. In fact, categories can conceivably be any givens framed within a set or ensemble—as Deleuze points out (and as we will see in IX; 3d), even light and color can become part of such a series. Serialized chronosigns conceived as categories are neither distributive nor hierarchical (à la Aristotle), nor do they push boundaries of movement; rather, they are reflective or reflexive in their disequilibrium, expressing the unlocalizability of their disguises. In the case of crystalline narration, we saw the incessant movement of reflection drawn into states of difference and becoming—where the imaginary expressed the false. In the case of serialized chronosigns, by contrast, we have coexistent difference implicating the reflective force of becoming—where the false expresses the imaginary. Such categories complicate what Deleuze calls the “generic or categorial difference [that] remains a difference in the Aristotelian sense,” which is not only “distributive” but “hierarchical,” where “every philosophy of categories takes judgement for its model.”77 This is because genre or category becomes a problem or question (instead of an expectation) when they communicate with each other, pass into one another, and become indiscernible or indistinguishable. They are reflective or “reflexive,” a process described aptly by Ronald Bogue as “two elements [that] mutually

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reflect and define one another, while also pushing the limit between the two toward disequilibrium.”78 Such a reflection image is distinct from the “reflection-images” of Deleuze’s movement-image. On the one hand, Deleuze’s “Reflection-image” from Cinema 1 pushes the boundaries of movement (having nascent artistic features) through the questioning of reality or responding to a problem: a character questions who they can trust, or what really happened, in order to act. On the other hand, the “reflection into the image itself ” of problems and questions involves the artistic “recreation of the interstice [that] does not necessarily mark a discontinuity between the series of images: we can pass without break from one series to another, at the same time as the relation of one category to the next becomes unlocalizable . . .”79 In this sense, the insertion of the disguises of the imaginary in its varieties into the layers, aspects, and peaks of the past instead draws those layers toward points of indistinguishability (a “future” that can only be thought): the Blanchotian relation, or non-relation, between each category thereby defines their passage (whether continuous or discontinuous).80

4. Limits of the imaginary and the false: new relations of the audible and visible The radical reversals of crystalline narration and serialized chronosigns also entail another dimension in which reality and truth are hollowed out and drawn further to their limits, into impossible relations. If the Foucauldian conjunction of seeing and saying, where language captures what can be observed, also forms a sense of cinematic truth or reality or creates the conditions for deception in cinema (VII; 5a), it is Deleuze’s “disjunction” between seeing and saying, which he elaborates with reference to Blanchot, and that involves what he calls “lectosigns,” that express this other dimension of cinematic time.” The lekton, he notes, is the expressible,81 independent of its object, which designates such an “incommensurable relation”82 between speech and sound. Within such a disjunction, language or the audible no longer allows us to discern or explain the visible (or to be deceived, since relations do not correspond in the first place). It is of course easy to imagine an absolute disjunction that could produce a special and obscure effect between seeing and saying: imagine yourself at a bar or restaurant with TVs playing on mute and at the same time hearing unrelated music and lyrics that do not “correspond” and suddenly seeing a combination of audible and visual that almost seems intentional or interesting, but is ultimately without the composition of thought. This is akin to what Deleuze calls “bad art,” where “there would be only a contingency and a gratuitousness, anything about anything else, as in the mass of bad arty films”:83 just because a film is modern, or that it expresses “time,” does not make it art that deserves interpretation (Intro). A well-done movementimage film may have more critical thought than a self-indulgent and capricious timeimage film (where “incommensurable relations” may not express ideas). The artistic features of a cinematic work, in this sense, stem from the manner in which the relations between images, scenes, sequences, and, especially here, the audible and visible are composed by ideas. But getting to that point requires a detour through Deleuze’s comments on Blanchot and Foucault.

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If speaking or language can be drawn toward the ineffable, then so too can the visual be drawn toward the invisible. Here we can in fact consider the point where Deleuze both appropriates and diverges from Blanchot, which may offer a final clue about why Blanchot basically never wrote about cinema. While Deleuze admires the privileged place that Blanchot assigns to language—its absolute freedom from any relation to the visible—he also claims that Blanchot’s perspective does not allow for an equal freedom of the visible from its determination by language. In a footnote to his comments about Foucault’s “encounter” with Blanchot, Deleuze expands on this point to say that Blanchot “retains a special status for ‘seeing’ or the visual image . . . But this status remains ambiguous, as Blanchot himself says, because it confirms that speaking is not seeing rather than states that seeing is not speaking.”84 Deleuze doubles down on this point in a lecture on cinema, when he asks, “What prevents Blanchot from saying: and vice versa? He cannot say it because . . . [t]he adventure of the visible only prepares the real adventure which must be that of the word.”85 In other words, for Blanchot, language can be determined without being captured by images (however much language “summons” images: V; 2), but images apparently cannot be determined without being immediately “forgotten” and undetermined, as in the immediacy of a dream (III; 10). In a Deleuzian sense, however, language essentially occupies the space of memory and images of the imaginary, whereby they both may disappear as they appear. Insofar as the limit or impossibility of one faculty may be the object of another, language may express what is impossible to see, just as cinematic images may express what is impossible to articulate. In this sense, Deleuze’s distinctive approach to images and language does not prevent him from applying Blanchot’s notion of impossibility to language as equally as to images: both vision and language involve the impossibility and artistic necessity of going beyond their limits. That is, for Blanchot, if poetry and literature consist of speaking about what is impossible for language to capture, Deleuze would say that it is also the case that images themselves—by virtue of the medium of light—can express or depict what is impossible to see. This is D&G’s “percept” (III; 2, IV; 3a). In this regard, Deleuze states that “if speaking is not seeing, insofar as one speaks of the limit at the limit of speech [dans la mesure ou parler c’est parler de la limite de la limite de la parole], speaking of what can only be spoken, it should be said: and vice versa . . . seeing is not speaking.”86 So, for Blanchot, if the “highest” form of speech is “what can only be spoken” but has no corresponding referent (e.g., “speaking” about the experience of death, or even the “imaginary,” an oneiric space of forgotten and dissimulating images), then there is what Deleuze calls the “undivided light”87 of the plane of immanence at the heart of images, which, by virtue of the image’s meticulous attention to form (an “extreme formality”),88 forces us to try to see what is always over the horizon, beyond our vision, or between images. But for Deleuze, as with the limits of sensation, memory, and thought (IV; 1 and 3a)—where the object of one is precisely the limit of the other—in the case of the cinematic plane of immanence, the invisible is sayable and the ineffable visible: no longer a capture of what can be seen by language, but an expression of what cannot be seen, and vice versa (of what cannot be said in the image). If images express the invisible, they cannot, in short, be captured by the articulable. In this sense, both light and language tending towards their limit (or in Blanchotian terms, their “absence of origin”) invert and dissociate the seeing and

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saying that would allow us to form knowledge in a Foucauldian sense. But what is such a Blanchotian “limit”? The paradox of limit as impossibility concerns a crossing or passage that cannot be crossed or related, but is nevertheless crossed and “relinked”—and it is here that we consider the “junction or . . . contact”89 between the ineffable (as the visible) and the invisible (as the audible). With Blanchotian verve, Deleuze calls this an “incommensurable relation.”90 Now, from Blanchot’s perspective, limits designate the impossibility of the present moment in eternal return (II; 8) where “there must be a crossing in order for there to be a limit, but only the limit, in as much as uncrossable, summons to cross.”91 Such a limit, paradoxically determined by its being crossed, even if its crossing is impossible, can be translated into Deleuze’s insistence that, in the interstice or Blanchotian “fissure” between audible and visible, there is a “relinkage” when relations between the two are “incommensurable.” As Deleuze states: Speech reaches its own limit which separates it from the visual; but the visual reaches its own limit which separates it from sound. So each one reaching its own limit which separates it from the other thus discovers the common limit which connects them to each other in the incommensurable relation of an irrational cut, the right side and its obverse, the outside and the inside. These new signs are lectosigns, which show the final aspect of the direct time-image.92

What we experience in this incommensurable relation is no longer “the whole rhythmic system and harmony of classical cinema”93 (as in Eisenstein), nor, in a Foucauldian sense, speech as voiceover or narration that could capture or even reference the visible (explaining the situation, focusing our attention, etc: VII; 3–5b). Rather, there is a new “complementarity,” “a junction or a contact” where “the limit or interstice, the irrational cut, pass especially between the visual image and the sound image.”94 Thus if ideas are invisible and ineffable connections that place the limits of the visible and audible in relation, it is the manner in which only the invisible is utterable and only the ineffable is visible that each component is alike before we think their difference (V; 3b): what cannot be spoken, is, after all, more “like” the visual than the visual is “like” language (and vice versa). Such parallelism between the ineffable and visible, and between the invisible and audible, however, does not make the visible and audible any less “unthinkable,” insofar as both occupy the plane of immanence of the movementimage—conceived as light and matter (VII; 2b)—as well as the unthinkability of sound (as a “deterritorializing” force).95 How these relations are chosen are not, however, random; as Deleuze states, “Given one potential, another one has to be chosen, not any whatever, but in such a way that a difference of potential is established between . . . the sound and the visual.”96 But how can we define this potential, and this interstice, with regard to crystalline narration and serialized chronosigns? If the interstice of the visible and audible can assume the absent space of indiscernibility between real and imaginary, or of the undecidability between the true and false, this is perhaps because their relation—which is to say their non-relation—is the very limit or point of impossibility that we are drawn into when the unreal meets the untrue or when the untrue meets the unreal. Indeed, interstices of the audible and

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visible occur in crystal-images or crystalline narration, or in chronosigns or series (categories), caught up as they are in initial reversals of power and also in the most obscure dynamics and radical reversals of the higher artistic forms of the time-image. In these terms, we can consider Deleuze’s “interstice” of cinematic thought, which he ties explicitly to Blanchot’s outside, as applicable to much more than visual and audible relations; it also occurs “[b]etween two actions, between two affections, between two perceptions, between two visual images, between two sound images.”97 That is, interstices abound between all types of movement-images that have now become subordinate to time. Deleuze in fact explicitly ties this Blanchotian “in-between” to false continuity and to irreducible difference—that is, to the force and movement of crystal-images and of chronosigns in their highest form and interaction (false narrative and series): “The visual and the talking [Le visuel et le parlant] may in each case take over the distinction between the real and the imaginary, sometimes one, sometimes the other, or the alternative of the true and the false; but a sequence of audio-visual images necessarily makes the distinct indiscernible, and the alternative undecidable.”98 In sum, as a sequence or movement, the visual may “repeat” itself in the audible, and vice versa, without a discernible relation between real and imaginary (crystallization) or without a decidable alternative between the true and false (chronosigns). Still, we have not yet broached what Deleuze calls the “potentiality” of the interstice and how Blanchot’s own work supports such a notion.

5.a. From affect and interval to thought and interstice: movement subordinate to time In cinema’s radical reversal beyond power, if time still implies movement, then thought is moved or forced by that unthinkability. This is where thought becomes a “passion” or where we are “forced to think.” Here we can reconsider Deleuze’s depiction of cinematic thought in terms of Blanchot’s “impouvoir” or passion of the outside (IV; 1), and where thought is, effectively, a force (that is, force concerns relation, but thought is also compelled by the forces in relation, as we saw in Blanchot’s commentary on Deleuze: IV; 5c). That is, such a thought, taking place within Blanchot’s absent totality, “knows nothing of life,” but this does not mean that movement, in all its unthinkable force— however false or aberrant—is absent from time; rather, movement is only “subordinate” to time. As Deleuze claims: The time-image does not imply the absence of movement . . . but it implies the reversal of the subordination; it is no longer time which is subordinate to movement; it is movement which subordinates itself to time. It is no longer time which derives from movement, from its norm and its corrected aberrations; it is movement as false movement, as aberrant movement which now depends on time.99

In other words, the “norm” of movement, wherein we complete small or large forms of the action-image, and which produces realities and truths, no longer isolates

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movement’s deterritorializing or incessant qualities—the affects, dreams, events, and impulses—which beforehand occupied or filled interstices between perception and action. Without the movement that resolves situations (large form) or explains mysteries (small form), the false movement of crystal-images or aberrant movement of series “depend on time” and may be composed by thought. Considering that such movement, firstly, involves force and affect (IV; 1), the effects of power and especially knowledge are reversed when, as Deleuze claims, “[t]he interval is set free, the interstice becomes irreducible,” and Blanchot’s “fissure has become primary.”100 For Deleuze, the interval was the space of the affection-image, and it is here that we must reconsider how thought was supplanted by this interval in the movement-image. If, in the cinematic movement from perception to action, affection occupied the interval and supplanted genuine thinking (VII; 4), in cinematic art, by contrast, the interval dissolves, creating the conditions for the affect—along with the percept—to force us to think. Now, Deleuze’s approach to affect has taken us from his reading of Foucault, where relations of force (e.g., the fear of mortality) constantly provoke and seduce us to act in a world of knowledge and power (I; 3), to an approach to dreams and art, where affects constitute the Blanchotian incessance or passion of events (III; 5, IV; 3a, VII; 8a). Added to that, we have distinguished affect from percept, in Deleuze’s work with Guattari, by considering that if the percept involves the perpetual problems and disguises of the unrevealable, the affect involves the perpetual questioning and displacement of the unlocatable (III; 2). While the percept radiated with sensation, the affect involves shifting from one place to another, occupying the “in betweens” of, but completely bound to, the movements of sensation, memory, and imagination (IV; 4a)—hence the Proustian, affective search through memory of the jealous lover. Like the concept, the affect concerns relation (and can be “intensive”), but unlike the concept, it is bound to movement and to force. The affect involves unthinkable forces that, in short, move us, or in terms of cinema, provoke us to want to see mysteries revealed or situations resolved. In Deleuze’s terms, affection-images occupy the “interval” between perception and action (or between action and perception) because affection-images express potentiality—the close-up, for example, overflows with burgeoning capacity: the face that scowls in a drama, the doorknob that turns in a horror film, the trigger that is cocked in a Western. But in these cases the affect is locked into a vicious cycle in an open totality, where it serves to mediate us to worlds of reality and truth; as we saw, in such cases, the affection-image actually supplants the space of thinking by occupying “the interval” between perception and action (VII; 4)— that is, focusing our attention on what is happening or what happened (rather than “[f] orcing us to think”). In other words, as part of the movement-image, “[t]he situation . . . extends into action through the intermediary of affections,”101 affection-images thereby mediating us to a change or becoming into something—a revealed situation or impending action that would change the situation. Such resolutions or revelations put a stop to movement only to start it up again within the unending ellipses and spirals of the large and small forms of the movement-image (VII; 3). The affection-image, in short, encloses Blanchot’s outside in the same manner that Foucault’s world of power does: by making affects into an “exception.” What, then, happens to the affect when the “intervals” it occupies are, as Deleuze claims, “set free”?

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When cinematic affects are set free, they are complicated within—or absorbed into—cinematic percepts; no longer occupying the interval of movement, affects reverse the very trajectory of movement by expressing their potentiality within the percept—within situations and actions, and within milieus, bodies, scenes, and sequences—that cannot extend into action or reveal situations. There is still movement, but the unlocatable displacement of affect—in this case, the dissolved place of the “interval”—becomes the very unrevealable disguise of percepts (or vice versa)—where thought is the very unlocatable and unrevealable “absent totality” or space of nonrelation that replaces the interval. But what was this interval within movement? In an artistic medium defined, in part, by movement, the cinematic affect assumes a distinctive role: this is why Deleuze can say, as we saw (VIII; 1a), that “Cinema not only puts movement in the image, it also puts movement in the mind.”102 That is, while cinema expresses images through movement (and not as an “illusion”: VII; 1), it also, beyond that movement and within time, forces us to think in terms of the unthinkability of such movement. In this sense, cinematic movement, engendering “perception” through its interval (VII; 4), can create illusory truths and realities, but when we can no longer be “moved” affectively from one image to the next, this is because affection-images no longer link us from situation to action, or vice versa.103 In this case, Deleuze insists that affects are “absorbed”: “The situation no longer extends into action through the intermediary of affections. It is cut off from all its extensions, it is now important only for itself, having absorbed all its affective intensities, all its active extensions.”104 In other words, at this point, the intensity or relationality of affects reside and are complicated within milieus and bodies, which likewise do not constantly reach out to the out-of-frame or open totality of the reality and truth of the movementimage (or have an “englobing” effect: I; 11). Rather, it is the milieu which now seems somehow devoid of possibility (hence Deleuze’s emphasis on “empty, disconnected, abandoned spaces”)105 and the “attitudes,” “postures,” and “gestures” of bodies that are now directly affective in their potentiality (puissance), which no longer is a potentiality of action that resolves a situation, or the potentiality of revealing an undisclosed situation. This is not to say there are no more close-ups (“affection-images”) with burgeoning potential, only that such images nor longer occupy an interval of movement, where they are surrounded by all the more possibility; that is, affects are unattributable to bodies or milieus because they pervade bodies and milieus—literally and without symbolism (V, 3a). As we saw, per Blanchot’s comment on Deleuze, forces relate to each other by virtue of their distance, and they constitute milieus and bodies, but do not relate within some pre-existing milieu or field (IV; 5c): the same logic of affective force applies here. In short, the perceptible material of cinema (audible and visual), is now also affective insofar as percepts and affects interact and are complicated within the same immanent movement (that is, on the same plane of immanence: IV; 4a). Cinematic affects, which reverse the provocative effects of power that would supplant thinking to produce truth and reality, in these terms, no longer mediate us to situations or actions because they are situations (milieus) and actions (bodies); however, because the affect was, and is, the force of movement, their absorption into milieus and bodies—that is, their complication within cinematic percepts—have

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diverse means of reversing the effects of power, in any of the four scenarios previously outlined. In sum: 1. The virtual of the crystal-image (VIII; 2a), in our first reversal of power, “divides itself in two as affector and affected,”106 where real and imaginary are indistinguishable—each image disguises the other; the affect, however, is only set free from occupying the interval, but remains an ambigious, affective image of truth (i.e., affector and affected) that haunts these disguises. 2. In chronosigns (VIII; 2b), and our second reversal of power, we go from “[f]rom affect to time: a time is revealed inside the event” that is “simultaneous and inexplicable,”107 where the events we saw previously are constantly bifurcating into pasts and futures, all at once, placing their difference into question. Set free from mediating situation to action, the affect here, in all of its untruth and difference, is nevertheless haunted by the realities that it resides within. 3. In crystalline narratives of false continuity (VIII; 3b), and our first radical reversal beyond power, “[i]f the ideal of truth crumbles . . . [w]hat remains? There remain bodies, which are forces, nothing but forces. But force no longer refers to a centre, any more than it confronts a milieu or obstacles. It only confronts other forces, it refers to other forces, that it affects or that affect it.”108 Here, the power (puissance) of the false renders the “aberrant” movements of the narrative full of potential in their own right; problematic milieus or “situations” become the force of questions, as do bodies or “characters,” whose relations can “only be thought.” That is, the indiscernible movements of percepts confront only other “forces” or potentialities that question those percepts rather than more disguises of the real and imaginary (scenario #1 above). Percepts, in short, are complicated within affects insofar as the unreal becomes untrue. 4. In serialized chronosigns or categories (VIII; 3c), and our second radical reversal beyond power, likewise, a “difference of potential is established between the two [potentials], which will be productive of a third or of something new”:109 that is, categories as “problems” are placed in relations whose solution only rebounds in their potential to question each other (rather than as an affection-image whose potential involves mediating situations and actions). In that sense the affective dimension, part of the burgeoning potential in each category, engenders a difference and, along with the percept which complicates it, forces us to think. This is not Eisenstein’s montage as the “power [puissance] of thought,” because, as we have seen (VIII; 1a), thought stems from its powerlessness or impossibility— what cannot be thought: the percept as problem, the affect as question, the incessant movement of events that do not begin or end per se, but are weaved together. Affects, in short, are complicated within percepts insofar as the untrue becomes unreal. It is worth emphasizing that these four cases may be distributed throughout a single film, or, as is often the case, could involve its climax or final shot, which retroactively renders what may have seemed to be movement-images into crystal-images or chronosigns, or which may have seemed to be crystal-images or chronosigns into false

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continuities or a series (IX). In any case, these four cases bring us bring us back to the our starting point: having been absorbed in various ways, how, then, is percept and affect involving milieus and bodies, events and categories, drawn to the imperceptible and insensible that is thought? That is, if the affect is complicated by the milieus and bodies of the percept (no longer occupying the interval, but creating a “fissure” or interstice), how are the movements of percepts and affects, the displacements and disguises of false continuities and serialized chronosigns, implicated by time and thought?

5.b. The dissociative force of movement, the “hole in appearances” of thought: immanence and composition Genuine ideas are never given or represented in cinematic art: they are literally an invisible and insensible void or gap within or between moving images—a “renounced” immediacy (V; 3b) within the unthinkable force of movement. Here we can reconsider Deleuze’s reference to Artaud alongside Blanchot, where it is in this lifelessness and negation of the world that thought can be affirmed: “As long as [Artaud] believes in cinema, he credits it, not with the power of making us think the whole, but on the contrary with a ‘dissociative force’ which would introduce a ‘figure of nothingness,’ a ‘hole in appearances.’ ”110 In this context, Deleuze further claims that Maurice Blanchot was able to give the fundamental question of what makes us think, what forces us to think, back to Artaud [from Heidegger, who “universalized” it]: what forces us to think is “the inpower [impouvoir] of thought,” the figure of nothingness, the inexistence of a whole which could be thought [ce qui force à penser, c’est “l’impouvoir de la pensée,” la figure de néant, l’inexistence d’un tout qui pourrait être pensé].111

The phrases, “la figure de néant,” and “au trou dans les apparences,” uncited by Deleuze, can be found in Artaud’s essay “la vieillesse précoce du cinéma,”112 where Artaud claims that “if by some miracle the objects this photographed, this stratified on the screen, could move, one dares not think of the figure of nothingness [la figure de néant], the gap [with]in appearances [au trou dans les apparences] which they would manage to create.”113 But as we have seen, Deleuze, via Blanchot, goes beyond the Artaudian insistence of an immediacy of “life” behind the skin of images (VIII; 1a)—beyond what Deleuze describes elsewhere as the schizophrenic conjuring of affect, suffering, and passion in the depths of the body;114 instead, it is only the metaphysical violence of thought that is forced when images, in a Blanchotian sense (as we have seen), “renounce” their “immediacy” (III; 10). Time’s absence in cinematic art entails a radical reversal wherein the dispersal of or interstice between images—whose association cannot be apprehended—nevertheless fascinates us. Here we can align the “radical reversal” of which Blanchot speaks with Deleuze’s own reference to Blanchot’s “dispersal of the outside,” where, firstly, Deleuze pivots from Artaud around his oft-cited passage on vertigo and spacing in the timeimage:

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When we say “the whole is the outside”, . . . the question is no longer that of the association or attraction of images. What counts is on the contrary the interstice between images . . . The whole thus merges with what Blanchot calls the force of “dispersal of the Outside”, or “the vertigo of spacing”: that void which is no longer a motor-part of the image, and which the image would cross in order to continue, but is the radical calling into question of the image.115

These phrases from Blanchot that Deleuze references come from his essay “Comment découvrir l’obscur?” (II; 5),116 where Blanchot defines the features of the outside (which we considered in their alignment with Deleuze’s obscure syntheses of time: II; 6–8). Blanchot’s phrase “dispersal of the outside” characterizes his “originary disjunction” of time and space where “ ‘presence’ is as much the intimacy of instancy as the dispersal of the Outside.”117 Likewise, the phrase “vertigo of spacing” (le vertige de l’espacement) involves his “radical reversal” of exteriority and intimacy, where Blanchot refers to an earlier work of his own (“The Essential Solitude”). There, he claims of “time’s absence” (which we saw in the dream: III; 4 and 9) that “dispersal” involves “the fissure where the exterior is . . . the enclosure that leaves one utterly exposed. Here the only space is its vertigo of spacing. Here fascination reigns.”118 As we have seen, for Blanchot, fascination concerns the grip or seizure that the ungraspable within the imaginary has on us (III; 10): we are taken—and in this case, “intruded” upon and “exposed.” But this need not be harrowing: it is ultimately fascinating, per Blanchot’s highest level of ambiguity, when there is a “reversal of the possibility”119 of apprehension (II; 3). We are now confronted with the oneiric treatment of fascination, mediated by cinematic movement, beyond the inspiration and immediacy of the dream (III; 7 and 10). If the radical reversal beyond truth and reality involves the beyond of the exterior world that becomes the very heart of our own intimacy—where our interior world of perception, dream, and memory is devoid of all reality and truth—then in cinematic space, such a reversal involves images that are dispersed and composed such that it is not only the beyond of their realities and truths that can be critiqued (VII; 9), but that which is closer than what we can see and feel by virtue of their movement that forces us to think. It is only this plane of composition, this absent totality in a relational space of infinite speed of the “order without distance”120 of ideas (IV; 3c), that is capable of such a radical reversal; the assemblages of cinematic frames and cuts have undergone dismantling (V; 8–10) and have been restored with all their deterritorializing force: no longer framing an open totality (or shifting “out of field”) or cutting to link us to the next image per se. Rather, such composition unleashes the immanent movement of milieus and bodies that have absorbed the affect, as well as the movement of percepts that have been refracted, multiplied, rendered false, and serialized. Thus, beyond the hollowing out of truth and reality, Blanchot’s fascination brings us to a higher level; this fascination thus parallels the originary disjunction of presence where the incessant, through such obstinate ungraspability, draws us toward the “diverging of difference” (II; 5). Within this fissure, we are “forced to think” and, beyond critique, to interpret. Vertiginous cinematic thought may seem disorienting and daunting—like falling through the groundless cracks between images—but it is always developed by the force of relations outside of power; that is, it is developed by the movement of the plane of

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immanence and the percepts and affects that are the objects of its composition (however incessant that movement or unthinkable its objects are). Indeed, if thought is beyond such movement—an infinite speed that composes images—and defines the very interstice that replaces the interval, this does not mean we have transcended the plane of immanence of movement-images, nor the forces that compose its relations. Here it is crucial to note that Deleuze always emphasizes that Blanchot’s outside is a force: he could have, for example, just called the interstice Blanchot’s “dispersal of the outside,” but he instead calls it the force of the dispersal. For Deleuze, it is the “force of time which puts truth into crisis,”121 and it is conceivably the force of the percept and affect, in their disguises and displacements of problems and questions, that draws us forward or “seizes” us by virtue of what cannot be perceived, felt, or grasped, resulting in the “aberrant movements” of the time-image. As Deleuze notes in his commentary on Foucault and Blanchot: It is still from the outside that a force affects, or is affected by, others. The power to affect or be affected is carried out in a variable way, depending on the forces involved in the relation. In this way the outside is always an opening on to a future: nothing ends, since nothing has begun, but everything is transformed. In this sense force displays potentiality . . . as . . . “resistance”.122

In this context Deleuze is referring to the manner in which force affects the relations constitutive of power. However, since relations of force are “irreducible” to power (II; 4), as the pure potentiality of resistance that precedes all power relations, this logic of force and relation from the outside would equally apply to fiction. If “nothing ends,” we are in the domain of Blanchot’s incessant movement (II; 5), or the plane of immanence that endlessly transforms (IV; 3c). Indeed, insofar as the interval has been set free, so too has the plane of immanence of movement-images as a Blanchotian force of incessance been set free, thereby unleashing affects and percepts from their objects and subjects. The dissociative force of cinematic art is precisely its manner of “distancing” us from the sensory-motor connections that make our escape into an illusory world of truth and reality possible (hence a colloquial sense of “dissociation”)—and it is the affect that, no longer occupying the differential space that supplants thinking, which is instead complicated within cinematic percepts, seizes us with the force of the outside wherein we think the relations of untruth and unreality that are thereby developed. That is, this distancing occurs with the force of a dispersal in which affects—as the differential state within movement that is nevertheless completely bound to it (IV; 4a)—having been “absorbed” into milieus and bodies, no longer mediate us to movement. Here, à la Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Spinoza, “there is the deepest relationship between concept and affect”:123 the Blanchotian “seizure” of the imaginary becomes the unthinkable affect (and percept) that forces us to think. That is, the interval, as the differential relations of movement, is no longer occupied by affection-images—nor, for that matter, by impulse-images, dreams, or flashbacks—that divert our attention and engender metaphorical associations. No longer mediating to revealed situations or discernible realities, instead, movement is “immediate[ly] given” within the

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“intermediate image” (VIII, 5b).124 We are no longer in the domain of beginnings and endings, but of difference and its repetition in crystalline reflection or serialization. Movement now having been subordinated to time, the “intermediary” of images— perception and affection—are drawn directly into the immediate given of movement (as percepts and affects) insofar as that incessant movement is implicated by time— that is, by the Blanchotian immediacy that “knows nothing of life.” Thus, as we saw with Blanchot’s approach to literature, the medium attracts the immediate (V; 3b): in cinema, we are mediated only by displacements and disguises—forever provoked to discern what is happening or discover what has happened, but, through the impossibility of such discernment or discovery, instead forced to think answers or solutions within the dynamics of unreality and untruth. This thought, to be exhaustively precise, is of the very differential, inexistent relations that are also the inexplicable answers to questions and indiscernible solutions to problems that those movements pose in their unlocatable displacements of affection that are incessantly complicated within the unrevealable disguises of perception. Here we finally reach the full force of cinematic art in its Deleuzo-Blanchotian obscurity and radical reversal beyond power.

6. Conclusion: obscure values and belief in the impossible In art, the impossible is not just a thought, it is also a belief—a sensibility and a value. But, divorced from reality and truth, from idolatrous representation, it is a belief based in the “non-being” of genuine ideas of the world as it is: chaotic, unknowable, and unthinkable. In this sense, the unthinkable movement of art brings us back to the question of sensibility and obscure value (IV; 6c): beyond critiques of truth and reality, in this case made feasible by movement-images, but, in Blanchot’s terms, images whose movement draw us “further inward, . . . outside all limits” of perception, dream, and imagination—where no “personal truth” can be rescued125—there lies a belief that is “felt rather than conceived”126 and that cannot be reduced to values related to life as we know it (or in Blanchot’s terms does not “correspond” to anything “important”: V; 1). To return to a theme from the introduction to this book, Deleuze’s insistence that our world has come to look “to us like a bad film,”127 where our own truth and reality seems empty, is a result of experiencing life as we experience the truth and reality of the movement-image. If we are to believe in this world “as it is”—where belief, in a Nietzschean sense, “replace[s] the model of knowledge”128 (and where the world in D&G’s mutual terms, is a force of chaos: IV; 3a–5b)—then this would mean “[t]o believe, not in a different world, but in a link between man and the world, in love or life, to believe in this as in the impossible, the unthinkable, which none the less cannot but be thought.”129 In these terms, Deleuze’s “link between man and the world” can only be achieved by virtue of Blanchot’s “impossibility”: the world is an object of fascination rather than of knowledge. The experience of such a world is cut off from the habitual expectations and the idealizations attached to life; as Deleuze insists, “this link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be restored within a faith,”130 and we are now in our world literally, as it is (V; 3a), but “as if ” in the “broken” links of art.

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Unlike the “believability” or plausibility, then, of real or true worlds in the movementimage (as in the oft-used phrase, “this film is based on a true story”), belief in the impossible is displaced by the unrevealable, disguised by the unlocatable, and is beyond the exterior worlds of a film’s reality and truth while also closer than our most intimate and immanent experience of its movement (that is, what we can perceive and feel). Within such “restored” belief, we can no longer escape into the truths or realities produced by fiction, whether those realities are overtly fictional or whether they are the Foucauldian fictions we live by every day (Intro). Only then do we arrive at obscure values that affirm the different and the new as the impossible—that is, as generated by the “inexistence” of that which can only be thought. The Deleuzo-Blanchotian plane of composition demonstrates that it is the absence of the world as a totality (i.e., an unforeseeable future: V; 7) that can only be thought—and that if we leave behind the truth and reality we attach to it (that is, the need that it be coherent and full of possibilities related to life), then it is feasible to experience and encounter it in a way that will forever engender new and distinctive values that can “only be sensed.” To believe “in love or life,” as Deleuze points out, is only to believe in them as impossible— and it is only by way of such impossibility that we can value them in a world outside of possibility, one defined by novelty and change in an uncertain future. We are all, in this sense, inhabitants of Blanchot’s first night (III; 4), his “obscure” and darkened movie theater from which the world, as the dream, returns without explanation (VIII: 1a), but, for Deleuze, in a way that still expresses novelties and values of our sensible human experience.

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“Is Anyone Seeing This?”

Introduction How a work of cinematic art “forces us to think,” how it grips or seizes us in a movement that draws us beyond what we can perceive or feel, how it reforms our sensibility toward the impossible, outside of all reality and truth—these are the exigencies and challenges of interpretation. We will now move past our literary example in Kafka’s Castle by focusing on the art of cinematic composition—Deleuze’s assemblage or montage of movement images that undergoes dismantling (démontage), the interstice between the audible and visual, the deterritorializing effect of cinematic cutting and framing, the crystallization or repetition of light, to name a few techniques—but we will not leave The Castle completely behind. If, as we saw, the castle itself is the archetypal fictional idea that has no truth or reality—engendering percepts and affects along an unlimited or incessant movement toward the ungraspable and impossible—The Castle serves as a paragon among fictional works of art. When interpreting cinematic works of art, it forces us to ask the following question: what is it that, like Kafka’s castle, has no truth or reality, but implicates the entire movement of a cinematic work, drawing perception toward the imperceptible and affection toward the insensible at every turn? In what way do time and thought thereby express themselves in film? And how does a film begin with large and small forms of movement-images, inevitably drawing on our own values related to life as well as our panoptic and etiological perceptions (e.g., our desire for action to be resolved or truth to be disclosed), only to reverse those values and draw us into an obscure movement that either crystallizes the real and imaginary (VIII; 2a) or makes truth and falsity inexplicable (VIII; 2b)—and that, ultimately, creates a more “radical reversal” and dynamic between the untrue and unreal through the false continuities of crystalline narration (VIII; 3b) or the reflection and complication of categories and serialized chronosigns (VIII; 3c)? How are its cinematic affects complicated within its percepts, as the dissociative, interstitial force of cinematic time? How is such a cinematic movement implicated by ideas and expressive of obscure values? How can we begin to interpret such ideas and values in specific films? To answer these questions, we turn to three cinematic case studies, which start with the elegant, minimalist artistic composition of Take Shelter, become more complex with Arrival (both films employ features of Foucauldian movement-images before radically reversing the effects of power), to the more complex artistic composition and sustained, radical reversals beyond power in Eyes Wide Shut. 243

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1. Take Shelter: mutual trust amidst the outrageousness of latent, impossible danger We begin with a study of the 2011 film Take Shelter, directed by Jeff Nichols. This film is ostensibly about socioeconomic anxiety and the potential early onset of paranoid schizophrenia. More precisely, from our Deleuzo-Foucauldian perspective on the large form of the movement-image (VII; 7b), the film seems to articulate a paradox wherein an excess of discipline—a desire for safety and security, the protection of the life of the family—rather than a lack thereof, may result in madness. However, we will soon see that it is more than that. The story involves Curtis LaForche, a construction worker, husband, and father to a hearing-impaired child in LaGrange, Ohio who begins to have what appear to be apocalyptic dreams and visions, most notably of rain like motor oil, strange bird formations, and other impending natural disasters or forms of social violence and persecution. For example, one day while driving he witnesses a series of lightning strikes that seem to defy nature, and pulls over to the side of the road; with his wife Samantha and daughter Hannah asleep in the back seat of the car, he asks, “Is anyone seeing this?” (hence the title of this chapter). Unable to shake these visions, he begins to believe that they are a warning: for example, after getting bitten by his dog in a dream, his arm hurt for the rest of the day, and he locks up the dog outside. These dreams and visions of the protagonist actually “provoke” him to do things in a Foucauldian world—namely, provide safety and security for his family by building an expensive storm shelter underground in their backyard. However, because his dreams have no apparent reality, or at least involve nothing provable or explainable, *acting* on them results in Curtis losing his job, losing his health insurance, being ostracized, and ultimately being declared schizophrenic. However, the final shots of the film not only render the imaginary visions of the protagonist indistinguishable from reality, but subordinate the actions and discoveries (i.e., the movements) that have taken place within such a world of truth and reality to the unreality and untruth of time, constituting the film’s reversals of power. Now, Curtis’s initial response to his visions takes the film in the direction of both our Deleuzo-Foucauldian large form of the action-image where he would be judged within global milieus and the small form of the action-image where he would discover a mystery to be revealed. In the case of the large form, Curtis places value on life by protecting his family. But his means of doing so are suspect, which results in the discipline of a control society (I; 9)—with panoptic verve (I; 6)—that intervenes, judges, and excludes him (for example, in a direct and invasive panoptic intervention, his boss from his construction site shows up in Curtis’s backyard suddenly, sees his project, and fires him from his job for borrowing work equipment), as well as the paranoia of such a control society that normalizes him at every turn (e.g., his co-worker and friend spreads rumors about him, prompting Curtis’s outburst at a local community gathering). But Michael Shannon, who plays Curtis, personifies the perfectly rational Foucauldian subject: calm, deliberate, ordinary, focused, and aware—not the hysterical soothsayer that we might expect of someone who believes they can “see the future.” That is, Curtis is very disciplined, building a shelter (figuring out how much food they will need, the plumbing, the gasmasks, etc.) and creating a space that will isolate him

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and his family from danger. But this discipline, like the burrow of Kafka’s underground creature (III; 6), provokes him to build “below ground,” so “what rises sinks”1—where the shelter, like the burrow, only makes the pressures of the day return with greater force and does not offer respite. Alongside the large form, the small form of Take Shelter’s action-image concerns Curtis’s investigation into a medical cause for his dreams and what appear to be hallucinations (though as we will see shortly, both the small and large form will be reversed in the film’s final scene). Now, Curtis’s investigation takes him to a visit with his local doctor, as well as to a therapist’s office. Ultimately the doctor can only provide a prescription that has no effect and the therapist leaves her job, halting all of their progress. But we get what appears to be a clue to revealing the mystery of Curtis’s hallucinations in a scene with his mother when she tells him about her schizophrenia, which she describes as a “panic” that “always took hold”: Curtis now believes that he has found the truth or explanation of his visions; like his mother, he must be inheriting mental disease. But these large and small forms of the action-image—a world of panoptic intervention in an englobed reality and an etiological need to discover the truth—are reversed in the final scene, which demonstrates that what we thought were dreams interrupting a movement-image circuit—or at most crystallizing dream and reality (e.g., the pain from the dog bite in a dream that lingers)—were in fact unrealities. From a Foucauldian perspective, we confront a critical moment where Curtis is both insane and correct—an irresolvable tension in a normal world, for how could someone be insane and correct? The answer is that we are no longer in a world of reality or truth, and we are also plunged further inward, where the affects and percepts of the film itself acquire a conceptual composition and express an obscure value. How does this work? The final scene of Take Shelter retroactively renders Curtis’s dreams and visions indistinguishable from the film’s reality through a careful composition of irrational cuts and the unreality of the frame. How this happens is as follows: after accepting his diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, Curtis and his family take a short vacation to try to get their bearings. We then cut to the final scene, in which Curtis is building a sandcastle by the ocean with Hannah, while Samantha is in the beach house behind them. The first indication that something is wrong is when we see the reaction shot of Hannah, who uses sign language to express impending clouds and a storm. We then see Curtis’s reaction shot, followed by Samantha’s, who comes out onto the porch. We first see what is happening in the reflection of the sliding glass doors as Samantha steps out: tornados forming over the water. Crucial here is that the “cut” to the characters’ reactions is irrational—forming an interstice (VIII; 5a)—insofar as they react to something unreal: while there may be a storm, in the context of the film, the storm’s unreality comes from its crystallization with Curtis’s dreams, such that the “real” storm is indiscernible from the unreality of the dream. Even the literal image of the storm, first framed in the reflection in the glass, is an image of the imperceptible: it is not a storm but the disguise of a reality that cannot have existed. At this point, Curtis and Samantha exchange glances, and we next see the oily water, also indiscernible from Curtis’s dreams, begin to rain onto her hand. In the second-to-last shot, the storm forms over Samantha’s shoulder: what looks like up to a half-dozen tornados over the water. Nichols goes to great lengths here to establish that all three family members are

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experiencing the same thing. Critics and fans often interpret this as a shared hallucination, or simply a final dream, but this only encloses its obscurity within a world of truth and reality. By contrast, if it is genuinely obscure, we have broached Blanchot’s outside both beyond Curtis’s exterior world and closer than his interior world of perception and affection: the real has not only crystallized with the imaginary, but, as we will explore, retroactively engendered a false continuity. By crystallizing real and imaginary, the final scene of Take Shelter renders the broader narrative of the film false, where judgments surrounding Curtis’s schizophrenia become untrue, complicating the unreal percept of the storm within the untrue affect of paranoia. Until this point in the film, Curtis was drawn perceptually and affectively toward that which had no reality, but the idea of an impending danger or chaos—whether natural or social—seemed to be a delusion. The final scene, however, changes everything: the visions can no longer be explained by mental illness. But Curtis did not predict the future. Nor have Curtis’s dreams become possible or real; rather, it is the reverse: reality and the possible have become unreal and impossible, coexisting with the broader narrative about Curtis’s apparent decline. As Curtis’s mental state is no longer menacing, Samantha’s reaction shot to the storm sends us back retroactively through the entire narrative of the film, coexisting with the judgment Curtis suffered for his visions, making the truth of who he was (a paranoid schizophrenic, an irresponsible husband and father) into a question without an explicable answer. In this sense, the narration we have seen becomes false, such that the untruth of Curtis’s condition—that is, his affects of paranoia—has crystallized with an impossible reality that his entire family experiences. That is, the percept of an unreal apocalypse is complicated within the affect of untrue, inexplicable paranoia, dissolving the coherence that would have enabled us to judge Curtis’s behavior as outrageous, deserving of ostracization, or even to sympathize with those in his world who still believe in truth and reality. We are instead drawn into his paranoia that cannot be grasped but cannot be ignored, insofar as it is entangled within unreal percepts that likewise recur incessantly, with no origin or explanation. The entire narrative, expressing the potentialities of the false, from this lens, requires reconsideration. The effects of the narrative of the film becoming false not only reverse the effects of power but involve a more radical reversal wherein the unlocatable place of the affect and the unrevealable disguise of the percept express an idea that has no reality or truth: a “storm” that does not, strictly speaking, exist as a coherent totality, and the absent, unreachable point of absolute safety. To get there, we first consider the initial reversals of power: Curtis’s visions always revolved around impending danger—and what had been affection-images (dreams and visions) merely interrupting the movement-image circuit are ultimately absorbed into Curtis’s milieu and his own demeanor as well as those in his world, especially Samantha. Curtis’s visions thus become a part of his milieus rather than an exception to them, which has the initial effect of exposing his community not as a rational and disciplinary one, but as a persecutory and oppressive one: Curtis’s friend, for example, is no longer protecting his community from a man suffering from schizophrenia, but preventing a man from trying to protect his family. But beyond this initial reversal, the affects and percepts of the film ultimately undergo an unthinkable, radical reversal when displaced and disguised by the very idea of

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impending natural and social chaos which has no truth or reality: for example, Curtis perceives unrevealable danger in the most complacent situations, and feels the unlocatable urge to build a shelter. That is, each dream and vision is another percept that disguises the storm by complicating itself within another affect of paranoia that is displaced within his complacent reality (a reality that turns out to be false). The idea of impending danger, in this sense, is that which incessantly draws the apocalyptic visions as well as Curtis’s own ungraspable behavior (building a shelter) toward an absent point that can never be reached (absolute safety). Thus, insofar as the storm is an idea that is both real and imaginary, it can never be confronted; there is no “ultimate storm,” and the storm at the ending of the film is only one partial manifestation of many of the visions that Curtis had (e.g., the outlandish, sideways lightning did not materialize, nor did strange bird formations and attacks, etc.). Curtis does not simply “react” to such unrealities, since he experiences them out of sequence (it is not possible to react); rather, the unreal becomes complicated within a world that is untrue (that is, where he is not “crazy”). That the milieu of the final scene is far from Curtis’s shelter emphasizes the fact that the idea of impending danger involves preparing for the unpredictable (the unreachable point of absolute safety)—the chaos that Curtis fears is precisely the chaos of the future itself. The obscure value of Take Shelter is entangled within Curtis’s relationship with Samantha, where there is a mutual refusal of complacency and a mutual belief in the unbelievability, the outrageousness, and the latency of the unpredictable. In the final moments of the film, the percept of the storm, the sensation of the oily water on Samantha’s hand, the untrue affect wherein she validates Curtis’s paranoia—all literally form a new sensibility which can be described as a mutual trust in one another in the face of chaos. Samantha’s last word in the film, “okay,” signals to Curtis that she actually sees what he sees and feels the impending danger he feels: they now share a value that is beyond the reality and truth of the world she had experienced up to that point. In fact, many pivotal moments of the film involve choices they make to trust each other: despite that Curtis has a dream about Samantha seeming to threaten him with a kitchen knife, he chooses not to estrange himself from her (unlike his co-workers and community, from whom he does estrange himself); he also chooses to trust her when she insists that they leave his storm shelter after a false alarm. Likewise, despite that Curtis spends their money on the storm shelter and loses his job (and the health insurance that would allow their daughter to be able to hear again), Samantha stays with him. But at the end of the film, this trust is transformed. Samantha has been taken beyond any begrudging or obligatory support for Curtis in her role as his wife, and Curtis’s trust in her is finally validated, when they are both thrown into the unreality and impossibility that Curtis had been experiencing. In this manner, she believes in his visions as she believes in the impossible, or in that which is simultaneously beyond their external world (impending disaster that the complacent ignore) and beyond their internal world (drawing Curtis to have dreams and visions). As this book has considered, obscure values are formed by a sensibility wherein we believe in the impossible, as Deleuze puts it, which is identical to the “world as it is”:2 incessant and ungraspable. And it is such a belief that is expressed, however impossibly, in Take Shelter.

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2.a. Arrival: communication of death’s impossibility —alliance through mortalism Like Take Shelter, Arrival (2016), directed by Denis Villeneuve (and based on “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang), involves a transformation late in the film that retroactively subordinates movement to time. In the film, à la Kubrick’s monolith in 2001, giant monolith-esque alien ships land throughout the world, with no explanation and taking no action; subsequently, Louise Banks, a linguist, is enlisted to communicate with the ships along with physicist Ian Donnelly. Concurrently, other countries also try to communicate with the ships, but eventually the open sharing of information about the aliens breaks down as China begins to distrust the aliens and misinterprets their symbol for tool to mean only “weapon.” Added to this, protests erupt across the world from the shock of alien visitors, and online instigators propound conspiracy theories about the aliens, which incites American soldiers to plant bombs on the alien ship. The American military then takes an aggressive posture, assuming that the aliens will retaliate. We begin in this film, as we must, in a world of knowledge and power, where we initially have a global society—embodied in both the Chinese and American military postures—geared towards protecting their own populations at all costs, projecting their own assumptions and values onto a literal alien culture that not only does not share them, but embodies an obscure reality that they cannot grasp. Additionally, this obsession with preserving the lives of populations also assumes that the aliens will pit us against each other, and that at the same time countries should use any alien technology in order to gain leverage against other human populations. And yet, the aliens themselves have no motives that can be grasped within the reality of a world based around such preservation of life or populations, so their presence merely exposes our own motives and values as we react to them. The film begins to interrupt what seems to be the large form movement of its sciencefiction action-image with impulse-images of an alien from an indeterminate originary world (VII; 8c) made of white fog, who, when trying to communicate, exposes the superficiality of the aggressive and protective impulses of those around it: the need for hazmat suits, for constant decontamination, and so on. The aliens are inhuman, subhuman, and engender the worst impulses of humanity: distrust, fear, suspicion— revealing the “derived” or superficial milieus that are actually teeming with violence (VII; 8b). But the impulse-images of the aliens soon give way to their inhabitation of an unreality of time. And it is here that we first encounter the reversals of power in the film. The subordination of the movement in the science-fiction side of the film to time unleashes a new cinematic structure where Louise experiences events out of sequence as chronosigns (VIII; 2b). Upon leaving the ship, after sharing physical contact with the aliens through their barrier, Louise experiences a moment with the child that we saw in the opening sequences of the film—who we assumed was the memory of her daughter that passed away some time ago. However, in a narrative sleight-of-hand, that sequence and all of those scenes are revealed to be “flash-forwards,” placing the entire story of the aliens itself in the past despite that it is “happening.” The scenes with Louse’s daughter Hannah are what Deleuze would call chronosigns, where we have the “present of the future, . . . all implicated in the event, . . . and thus simultaneous and inexplicable.”3 They

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evoke the highest joys of childbirth and the devastation of losing that child, all at once, wrapped up together. We also ultimately learn that Hannah’s father is Donnelly, as Louise and Donnelly fall in love during their time together trying to communicate with the aliens. But what is the significance of this vision of Hannah? The coexistent affective states involving Hannah in Arrival express a life coextensive with death that is outside of the truth of a world of knowledge and power, while remaining haunted by reality. Indeed, the scenes with Hannah express coexistent affects of joy and sorrow—of a child born and growing to adolescence, but also the tragedy of her early death: the affects are displaced by other affects of joys and sorrows, intermingling in their coexistent states. (The undulating string melody of Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” that plays during the final montage with Hannah also mixes such joy and sorrow as a complement.) But what is this state? We have seen (II; 9) that Deleuze draws on Blanchot to contend that there is a resistance to power—a vitalism rooted in mortalism—that cannot be co-opted by power or serve, as Foucault would say, as its “target, handle, or support” (e.g., an illness that becomes the target to provoke us to seek potentially unnecessary medical care). Instead, living is an experience that cannot be separated from Blanchot’s impossibility of dying, a future both “uncertain” and “anterior” (II; 4 and 9). Hannah, in this sense, personifies percepts and affects that draw us toward such a vitalism rooted in mortalism. As a future, Louise’s visions are images of mortality: the child, having not yet been born, is already dead; her death has been “experienced.” And yet, from a Blanchotian perspective, there can be no “image” of the future; like mortality, it is an impossible future and an “opening onto the unexpected.”4 These images of Hannah are thus images of a future that is “remembered”: they are a past. In this sense, the coexistent state of the affect remains haunted by the perception of Hannah as a reality (VIII; 2b). In Deleuze’s terms, she is the expression and embodiment of birth and death, a self-contained circle or “layer” of an event of Louise’s life. Here we encounter the peculiar narrative structure of the film. Louise’s non-linear experience of events becomes more complex as the film unfolds—where she can “remember” the future, but also where she may not have yet experienced the past. As Louise begins to see images of Hannah, she eventually realizes that this is her child; she is provoked, in a Proustian sense, to remember, not the past, but the future, where she experiences events as “incompossible.” Furthermore, she realizes that she is actually experiencing these events inexplicably out of sequence (where, in the future, she might not remember the past), as what Deleuze would call “peaks” or points that are complicated together, succeeding one another as a question, and not as any kind of unfolding or development of a linear event (VIII; 2b). This initial reversal sets the stage for the film’s more radical reversal, which we first see in a sequence that prepares us for the climax of the film. In this sequence, Louise experiences a “present of the future” (a “flash-forward”) to her daughter asking her what the word is when there is an agreement and both sides benefit, which Louise does not know, and then in Deleuze’s “present of the present,” within what seems to be a large-form actionimage of mounting tensions between the US and China, Louise hears Donnelly suggest that the United States share its information about the aliens in a “non-zero sum game,” so that all nations would benefit; then, in the next “present of the future,” Louise tells her daughter that the phrase she wants is “non-zero sum game.” Louise is thus in a state

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of not knowing the phrase “non-zero sum game” in the future, having also not yet learned it in the past, learning it in the future, and thereby knowing it in the past, all out of sequence. But this is not the final state of the time-image in the film. In Arrival’s radical reversal beyond power and beyond these chronosigns, Louise’s inexplicable experience of coexistent affective states ultimately complicates the very reality of the geopolitical turmoil over the alien miscommunications when her nonlinear experience creates an unreal double of herself (creating serialized chronosigns: VIII; 3c). Up until this point, Louise’s experience was somewhat menaced by its impossible relation to reality (that is, her visions of Hannah), where her contact with the alien race hollowed out her truth by opening it up to the inexplicable experience of time out of sequence. Soon, however, these chronosigns become serial and categorical. In the climax of the film, as part of her non-linear experience of time (though now no longer involving Hannah), Louise “remembers” a moment in the future when she meets the Chinese general, General Shang, at a UN event, and where he relays the last words of his dying wife (as well as his private, direct phone number). Then, in the past, after worldwide tensions have reached a breaking point, and the Chinese are about to attack the alien ships, she calls him and tells him those last words (“In war, there are no winners, only widows”), convincing him to stand down and share his information with the eleven other posts around the world who also received information from the aliens (as Donnelly discovered, the data the aliens gave them includes negative space that comes out to a fraction—one of twelve, implying that the other eleven outposts are meant to share their information). It is here that the expectations in the reality of the large form of the actionimage (will China attack the aliens? Will the aliens fight back?) become subordinate to the time-images that had been encroaching upon the protagonist’s experience, thereby rendering the film’s reality indistinguishable from the imaginary: in other words, Louise’s experience outside of truth and linear time (where Hannah both exists, does not yet exist, and has already died) renders the reality of her broader milieu into a problem. It is here that Louise’s untrue experience of asynchronous time also becomes unreal: inserting herself into the geopolitical conflict (the large form of action), but through a double of herself in time, her presence refracts and reflects what was, before, only an inward and incompossible experience of a layered past and future. In this sense, the science-fiction genre becomes complicated as a “category” within Louise’s own tragic (and joyful) genre of the birth and death of her child: the untrue (the story with Hannah) drawn into the unreal (Louise’s double in the geopolitical conflict). But how do the potentials of each category question and problematize each other, and what is the idea that is the implicit answer and solution that composes these questions? Arrival is artistically composed by an idea of communication and language that has no truth or reality—both mingling Louise’s affects in coexistent, untrue states of past, present, and future and doubling her unreal presence through time. What is this “alien” language? Louise, a linguist, is tasked with learning the alien language, and soon discovers it involves circular palindrome symbols that are “semasiographic” (having no utterable correlate). But unlike language in a Foucauldian world that captures what it sees in order to judge it by life-centric values, the language of the aliens has a different relationship with the visual: as Louise learns it, she has inexplicable visions of the future. It is, in this sense, the alien language itself that has no truth or reality, and that unleashes Louise’s percepts and affects

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onto those of the future, which displace and disguise the insensibility and imperceptibility of time itself—that with which Louise has no direct or possible relation. In other words, Hannah is an image of the future that can affect her in the present, but that Louise cannot directly grasp, and it is the alien palindromic language that allows her to experience this; the percepts of her own unreality are then mirrored between past, present, and future on the geopolitical stage. It is in this sense that the idea of communication within time that has no truth or reality in the film, but nevertheless composes the coexistent and indiscernible relations between Louise’s past and future, draws her beyond both the external world of her experience with geopolitics and the interior world of her memory. But this is not all there is to it, because these coexistent relations ultimately become a series when the unreality of communication allows Louise to speak to General Shang using his reflected and refracted words to her from the future: here reality itself becomes a problem. And yet, with Blanchotian verve, it only “communicates” the inevitable future of dying with which we have no relation. Louise, indistinguishable from past to future, thus complicates the untruth of death before birth (Hannah) within the unreality of an averted geopolitical conflict and reversed action-image. The communication of such an impossible future thus only “speaks” of one thing: death, and it is here we that begin to discover Arrival’s obscure value. In its radical reversal beyond power, the climactic exchange in Arrival between Louise and General Shang expresses an obscure value of alliance within and through mortality—which is to say, a relation that is based only on the “proximity” to that which offers no possibility, no means of facilitating life, no knowledge. It could be called the mutual validation of shared trauma or vulnerability, if such an encounter involved not the cause of such trauma, but the effect: the validation of that which cannot be validated, Blanchot’s inevitable but inaccessible death (II; 2). When General Shang embraces other nations, the whole of humanity, sharing the ideas that make the inaccessible communicable, they avoid the tragedy that would incur further trauma. We have what Blanchot might call a community that is “unavowable” insofar as it entertains a relation with death; as he puts it, “To remain present in the proximity of . . . another’s death as the only death that concerns me . . . is the only separation that can open me, in its very impossibility, to the Openness of a community.”5 In these terms, Louise, by reaching out to General Shang in the proximity of his wife’s death, creates a community that is “unavowable,” that cannot be acknowledged or validated because its most profound bond is based in this “open” separation, where “[m]ortal substitution is what replaces communion.”6 In this case, “the death of the other . . . clears the space of intimacy or interiority which is never . . . the space of a subject, but a gliding beyond limits”:7 that is, where the interiority that makes death personal is opened onto a space closer than this interiority, and further away than it, insofar as it concerns the other’s death. If Arrival concerns a shared future around an inevitable, “anterior,” and inaccessible death, this death can be thought of in a geopolitical sense, but it is also grounded in the serial structure of the film, where the affective displacement of non-linear time is disguised on a social and political level. Thus on the one hand, as the scholars Fleming and Brown aptly put it, a Deleuzian, cosmic thought of the future in Arrival means “to think not only one’s own death, but also the death of the human species and the planet on which it currently resides, together with the heat death of our sun”;8 while they

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consider that this would lead to “humility towards, rather than a desire to control, [the] planet,”9 our perspective on cinematic art as a radical reversal beyond power considers that if such death is unknowable and uncertain, then it is not something that we can resign ourselves to. Furthermore, this unknowable uncertainty is woven into the structure of the film, wherein Louise’s personal experience of non-linear time becomes a series that repeats itself in the geopolitical scene, subordinating the science-fiction genre to a serial structure. In other words, Louise’s tragic, affective embrace of Hannah, wherein she has the foresight to affirm a life that will be taken, is the displacement of the very same embrace that is disguised on a social and political level. Thus, through the blend of genres or categories, the inexplicable and untrue (Louise’s simultaneous experience of the future and past) no longer simply oscillates between Louse’s present and future, but renders her world, which has now affirmed this Blanchotian mortal substitution, unreal. The inaccessible interiority of personal death becomes coextensive with its inaccessible exteriority on a political level. While the film makes the real imaginary as global war is averted, it does not end with some grand utopia: it remains tragic, implicated by the idea of an impossible language that can communicate the inevitability and inaccessibility of death, and more crucially expressive of an obscure value of alliance around such mortalism that reverses the effects of a power centered on life. In short, the unreal and untrue world in which war was averted is a category of a community and shared tragedy based in impossibility. In these terms, Hannah’s “arrival” (a double meaning of the film’s title) and departure is thus as inexplicable as that of the aliens and as the onset and departure of the geopolitical turmoil (Louise’s life remains tragic as well, when Donnelly leaves her after she tells him that she knew their daughter Hannah would die). It is such experience of time “out of joint”—in its coexistent states—that is capable of revealing a mutual proximity to death that, in the real world, remains separate and private, exclusively belonging to individuals in the security of their subjectivity and independence. From the perspective of art that draws us into the outside, then, what better way is there to interrupt and reverse the blind violence of such a science-fiction action-image, which would hypocritically protect such independent lives by combating and destroying others, than to share the most intimate, fragile, and devastating encounter with death: the death of a child, the death of a life-partner? Insofar as the communication of this is grounded in a “language” that has no truth and has no foundation in reality, we are far removed from a Foucauldian framework that would take the facilitation of life and avoidance of death as the bond that provokes and seduces us to act. But death in Arrival does not facilitate action either, it only serves to remind us of the future and of a proximity that some tragically are closer to in life than others, but to which we all remain vulnerable.

2.b. From Villeneuve’s Arrival to Enemy: comparing crystalline narration and serialized chronosigns Here it is instructive to contrast Arrival, which begins with chronosigns but ultimately makes the untrue unreal (becoming serialized chronosigns), with another of Villeneuve’s films that begins with the crystal image but ultimately makes the unreal

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untrue (becoming crystalline narration or false continuity): Enemy (2013), based on Saramago’s novel The Double. In this film, the doubling of the protagonist into two separate people, in turn, complicates the relationships of each protagonist to their significant other. The protagonist—a history professor named Adam Bell and played by Jake Gyllenhaal—discovers his double, who is a married, aspiring actor named Anthony Claire (also played by Gyllenhaal) when Adam sees Anthony’s performance as an extra in a film: the phantasm of cinematic reflection and projection itself. When they meet, Adam immediately becomes cautious and meek while Anthony becomes aggressive. Perhaps most comically, in this hollowing out of reality, Anthony (who is married) immediately suspects Adam (who is unmarried, with a girlfriend) of sleeping with his wife Helen (the absurdity here is that it is the married man who “projects” his own desire for infidelity onto his unmarried double). Here the double menaces Adam as an affective force of truth: he may have lost reality, but Adam cannot escape the truth of who he believes he is. After Anthony rehearses his confrontation with Adam in front of a mirror (“did you fuck my wife?”), pointing to the absurdity of being jealous of yourself (in a manner that is already “counter-actual,” as though we are actors or estranged doubles of ourselves in our own lives: III; 6), Anthony coerces Adam into letting him sleep with his girlfriend Mary. This begins Adam’s transformation into Anthony, where the crystal-image finally becomes false. As Anthony and Mary die in a car crash, Adam has moved into the apartment with Helen, who, firstly, knows that he is not “really” Anthony (or at least, is not an actor but a professor), and, secondly, actually wants him to stay (perhaps because he is kinder than Anthony). Like Arrival and Take Shelter, the final scenes of Enemy, where Adam’s transformation into Anthony is complete (and the film ends where it begins, as Anthony finds a key to a grotesque and otherworldly sex cult) render the unreality of the film untrue. No longer oscillating between “affector and affected” (VIII; 5a)—that is, the “true” Adam and “false” Anthony—but complicated by the coexistent affect and having become both Adam and Anthony (as untruth), the unrevealable disguises of the double are displaced onto the unlocatable question of fidelity and jealousy itself. Here the idea that composes the percepts of the double and the affects of jealousy and devotion (as differential states) concerns the untruth and unreality of transgression, as an idea: if Anthony is not distinguishable from Adam, then the affects of aggression and kindness that the two men express (respectively) are untrue and radically reversed. Insofar as the film thus ends where it begins, with Adam now being Anthony, we see that transgression is inaccessible and impossible: Anthony cannot cheat on Helen without dying with Mary, and Adam cannot be with his wife Helen unless it is transgressive (insofar as he retroactively becomes Anthony)—and without the impossible death of his double or his “enemy.” In other words, Adam—in his kindness—becomes Anthony’s very adulterous side in the film’s second viewing, and when Anthony’s/Adam’s affair ends, he becomes cruel all over again. In this case, Anthony is no longer simply disguised through Adam, and vice versa, but, insofar as the doubling has been rendered false (such that Adam is Anthony), the idea of transgression is revealed only through the disguises of Anthony/Adam that are themselves located only through the displacements of kind adultery and adulterous rage. Here we have a crystal image become false: the percept, or refracted double, complicated within the differential state of the affect (VIII; 3b); this can be juxtaposed to the chronosign

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become serial in Arrival, where the affect of differential states (Hannah has died before she was born, in all her untruth) is complicated within the disguises of the percept (Louise is doubled in the future and present, making the geopolitical world unreal: VIII; 3c).

3.a. Eyes Wide Shut Unlike Take Shelter and Arrival, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, much like Kafka’s Castle, is deceptively straightforward and decidedly literal in its presentation. The film does not present us with anything overtly otherworldly—no birds that fly in impossible patterns, no alien Heptapods. And yet, to express time so profoundly by virtue of a seemingly realistic world that is actually defined by fantasy (in this case, sexual) is perhaps part of its attraction and achievement. In fact, Kubrick has noted inspiration from Kafka regarding the interplay of realism and fantasy: as he said of The Shining, “In fantasy you want things to have the appearance of being as realistic as possible,” and “this approach could be found in Kafka’s writing style. His stories are fantastic and allegorical, but his writing is simple and straightforward”—a fact, he notes, misunderstood by those who have adapted his work as “weird and dreamlike.”10 While Eyes Wide Shut—unlike The Shining—does not take the supernatural as the form of its fantasy, the sexual fantasies of Bill, played by Tom Cruise, and those of Alice, played by Nicole Kidman, are what hollow out the reality and truth of their marriage and their world, and draw Bill into an experience of the inaccessible and uncertain, though in a literal way that still looks and feels real and true. Also, unlike Take Shelter and Arrival, where false narratives or serialized chronosigns are more or less retroactive (that is, where the climax of the film changes what we saw up to that point), in Eyes Wide Shut, as we will see, the narrative crystallizes early in the film and then introduces chronosigns that build on that crystallization to quickly become serial or categorical. It is untrue affects that then constantly implicate unreal percepts, as a series of displacements and disguises, problems and questions, which are based in an idea of sex that itself has no truth or reality.

3.b. Deleuze, Kubrick and the inward journey of the outside Before considering Eyes Wide Shut in particular, Deleuze’s own commentary on Kubrick allows us to consider the manner in which his films especially reverse the effects of knowledge and power, and, subsequent to that initial reversal, radically reverse that which is further than the external world of our reality and truth with that which is closer than the interior world of our perception and affection (Intro, II; 4, IV; 1). (Deleuze, of course, did not write on Eyes Wide Shut, as the film was released four years after his death.) With reference to Kubrick, Deleuze describes this relation between inside and outside in terms of the limits (or impossibilities) that we saw (VIII; 2c): as he notes, “Kubrick is renewing the theme of the initiatory journey because every journey in the world is an exploration of the brain . . . The identity of world and brain . . . does not form a whole, but rather a limit . . . which puts an outside and an inside in contact.”11 The outside is defined here as “the cosmology of galaxies, the future,” the “supernatural” that

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“makes “the world explode,” while the inside is defined as “the past, involution,” the “depths which excavate the brain.”12 Thus such limits are not obstacles: they dissolve as points of impossibility insofar as they are exchanged or “in contact.” As Deleuze notes of The Shining, for example, the “extra-sensory perceptions or hallucinatory projections”13 come from the inaccessible interiority of Jack’s mind and the inaccessible exteriority of the supernatural past of the hotel—the two are interchangeable (as made clear in the final shot of the old photograph, which confirms that Jack had, as Grady earlier told him, “always been the caretaker” of the hotel). In The Shining, then, the protagonist goes so far inward that he discovers the ungraspability of an external milieu, while in Eyes Wide Shut, the protagonist is plunged into the unreality of an external world that makes him incessantly rediscover his own personal untruth.14 But Deleuze’s notion of the “brain” as a junction of inside and outside requires clarification. Deleuze in fact allows us to more carefully consider how Kubrick’s journeys in the world are also in the “brain”: Deleuze’s definitions of the brain involve both the topography of milieus, which are populated by the incessant force of affects and percepts, as well as the Blanchotian absent totality that draws those milieus beyond their limits. In Cinema 2, Deleuze defines the brain similarly as he does with Guattari, via Blanchot’s outside, which involves both absolute speed and infinite movement: cinematically, “our own relationship with the brain changed” in the modern era of the cinematic timeimage, pointing beyond “the organic process of integration and differentiation” towards . . . relative levels of interiority and exteriority and, through them, to an absolute outside and inside, in contact topologically: this was the discovery of a topological cerebral space, which passed through relative milieus to achieve the co-presence of an inside deeper than any internal milieu, and an outside more distant than any external milieu.15

While Deleuze’s emphasis on cinematic milieus involves cinematic reality, literality, or realism, when those milieus are in contact via “cerebral space” they no longer form the realism of the action-image, and no longer form the truth within an internal milieu where causes or motives can be discovered. The contact of such internal and external milieus occurs by virtue of the Blanchotian reversal of an outside more distant and an inside closer than those milieus, insofar as the limit or impossibly of truth and of reality are “in contact.” D&G’s depiction of the brain supports this, where they insist that the brain does not simply involve the “determinate function[s]” and “cerebral maps” of biology,16 but involves the contraction of sensation (affect and percept) along with the difference or “survey without distance” of thought.17 Thus, on the one hand, “concepts are not limited to just one and the same brain since each one of them constitutes a ‘domain of survey,’ ” and on the other hand, “[s]ensation is no less brain than the concept . . . That is why the brain-subject is here called soul or force, since only the soul preserves by contracting that which matter dissipates.”18 That is, the brain is defined both in terms of the Blanchotian absent totality in which the speed of thought occurs, and also in terms of the preservation of movement or material that is thought’s absolute milieu. In this sense, when Deleuze insists, after his discussion of Kubrick, that “[o]ur lived relationship with the brain” involves “a force from the outside which hollows itself out,

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grabs us and attracts the inside,”19 he is invoking our Blanchotian dynamic of attraction in fictional art, where the medium attracts the immediate (V; 3a): on the one hand, the outside involves force (IV; 5c, VIII; 5a–b), defined as incessant movement, percept, and affect of milieus and bodies, and on the other hand, the outside itself hollows out truth, as Blanchot’s “ungraspable that one cannot let go of ”20 (II; 5). This dynamic reverses the effects of power insofar as we consider Deleuze’s “inside as an operation of the outside,”21 a theme which “haunted” Foucault because it places the outside closer than our own interiority rather than exclusively beyond the exterior world of our practices (II; 4). In Kubrick’s work, this dynamic, defined by the “brain,” concerns the Deleuzian interplay between repetition and contraction with difference and coexistence ultimately in the third synthesis of time. In Eyes Wide Shut, Blanchot’s outside is that which is deeper than the milieus of memory or fantasy in which truth could be discovered, and beyond the world or external milieus of reality in which the future could be anticipated. On the one hand, the unreal becomes untrue (as a crystalline narration: VIII; 3b) when the protagonist’s encounters are inexplicably experienced through another’s inaccessible fantasy; on the other hand, the untrue becomes unreal (as a serialized chronosign: VIII; 3c) when, as we will see (IX; 3d) scenes of deception and intimacy are literally framed and illuminated by the categorical, formless repetition of blue light.

3.c. Eyes Wide Shut: the untrue fantasy of another’s fantasy Eyes Wide Shut begins when Bill, an upper-middle-class doctor, and his wife Alice attend a lavish Christmas party in New York City hosted by one of his ultra-rich patients. At the party, Bill flirts with two women who seem to proposition him, while Alice dances in the ballroom with a Hungarian man who directly propositions her. The first major break with movement arises after that party when Alice and Bill begin making love in front of a mirror: the camera pans from them to the mirror, where we see Alice and Bill look at each other’s reflections, and where Alice’s gaze lingers on Bill’s image even as they begin making love. In this moment, she may have several different things on her mind, when seeing herself with him: is she wondering if is he thinking of her or of the women with whom she thought he might have made love, or is she thinking of the man who propositioned her? Alice flinches as he continues to kiss her, perhaps because she sees an image of herself with someone she was not thinking about, or with someone who she suspects of not thinking about her: she then gives herself an emotionless stare, as though she is drawn beyond what she is perceiving—where her image has doubled or divided, crystallizing into the imaginary sexual fantasy of the other. In this scene, the reality of Bill and Alice’s lovemaking is problematized by virtue of their reflections, as if they were estranged from themselves and each other. The moment is exacerbated by an interstice between the visible and audible, where what would have been a tender lovemaking scene is a scene of suspicion. Here, Chris Isaac’s “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing,” the lyrics of which invoke the salacious, sordid, and even wicked side of sex around the denial of real intimacy, plays as they begin making love in front of the mirror—in fact, the ambient, fading cymbal sound occurring near the start of the song menacingly coincides with Bill entering the frame. In this moment, Alice is haunted by

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Eyes Wide Shut, directed by Stanley Kubrick. © Warner Bros. Entertainment 1999. All rights reserved.

the affective truth of Bill’s fidelity (or lack thereof). The audible music does not “correspond” to the image: we have a fissure of seeing and hearing (VIII; 4). This crystalline moment in Eyes Wide Shut, however, does not, as we will see, lead to a false narrative yet, but rather to a chronosign, exemplifying how Deleuze’s time-image varieties may appear in the same film. Soon the film shifts from an unreal moment to an untrue one, when Bill is drawn into an inaccessible fantasy of Alice’s fantasy that reverses and hollows out the “truth” of who he is (that is, his access to intelligibility) and he begins his “journey” through the world that is also in the brain. In a conversation the night after the Christmas party, as an example to pierce through Bill’s denial that he was behaving flirtatiously with the young women, and to demonstrate that women have sexual agency and desire, Alice confesses to him that she once fantasized about a naval officer she merely passed by (and who glanced at her) while they were on vacation. Here, in a Foucauldian sense, the “truth” about who Bill is, determined by the deployment of sexuality and validated by his marriage, is hollowed out by Alice’s desire. She confesses that she would have been willing to give up “everything” if the naval officer had wanted her. After their heated conversation, Bill gets in a cab to visit a patient whose father had just passed away, and while in the cab, Bill begins to fantasize about that encounter that never actually happened: we see his entire fantasy of Alice with the naval officer (doused in blue light, which will be important: IX; 3d). From our Deleuzo-Foucauldian perspective of movement, the film’s protagonist, a medical doctor, allows us to initially perceive by virtue of the critical distance of the medical gaze, which situates itself etiologically by uncovering and discovering causes in the small form of the action-image; however, such discovery or truth, from the Deleuzo-Blanchotian perspective of time, is based entirely in the untrue nature of this fantasy: an affect drawn to Alice’s insensible desire.

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As Bill no longer has “access to his own intelligibility” and subjective truth through sexuality, as Foucault might say (I; 10), the effects of power—and of the truth of the movement-image—are reversed: instigated by an untrue event that could have happened, did not happen, and may happen, all at once (his wife Alice’s confessed sexual fantasy about another man), Bill’s experience begins to be structured by the untrue. The first chronosign of Eyes Wide Shut is thus ripped from Alice’s fantasy to become Bill’s untrue fantasy of her fantasy: no longer the small form of a mystery to be revealed (i.e., subtle signs or clues of Alice’s unfaithfulness), but instead, a false affect of the insensible—a sort of betrayed lust—that will quickly become unreal. As Bill goes to visit his patient after his argument with Alice, he begins his odyssey of encounters that, built on the untrue fantasy, structure what is actually happening: the untrue becomes unreal, and the chronosign becomes serial, displacing and disguising the idea of sexual desire itself in a radical reversal beyond power. But the series of women he encounters and milieus he finds himself in do not all refer back to Alice; rather, we witness Deleuze’s notion of the Kubrickian “journey of the brain” in full effect: Bill’s encounters may be a journey of the external world, but only insofar as that external world is pulling him beyond what is real in a way that coincides with that which is inaccessible in his own mind: the untruth and unreality surrounding sex. In short, Bill’s inward journey and internalizing of Alice’s untrue infidelity becomes the very outward journey of unreal sexual encounters—displaced, unlocatable encounters that are also unreal insofar as they are disguised by percepts of unrevealable desire. In fact, it is the “inexplicable” idea of sex itself which can never be real because it was untrue to begin with (the fantasy of another’s fantasy) that is the very fragmented, self-referential, and intense answer to the questions and solution to the problems that are posed by Bill’s journey: if the problem or question is one of finding intimacy in the inaccessible fantasies of others, and the answer or solution is in sex, then the idea of sex is the untruth and unreality that will never be genuinely located or revealed. Bill’s journey takes him through New York at night and continues the following day. As Bill rides in cabs and walks through New York streets at night, he continues to visualize Alice’s affair. But those are only in between each encounter: at his first encounter, he visits his patient grieving for her recently deceased father, who proceeds to confess her love to Bill and who kisses him passionately, but their conversation is cut short by the arrival of her fiancé (who looks much like Bill, while she resembles Alice). Bill is next approached by a prostitute who he almost has sex with but is interrupted by Alice’s phone call checking in on him. Finally, after seeing his musician friend Nick Nightingale at a jazz club, he goes to get a cloak with a hood and mask to attend what Nick described to him as a very strange kind of party that he was playing at later that night. At the costume shop, he and the owner inadvertently discover the owner’s daughter about to have sex with two men, but not before she runs from her angry father, hugs Bill for protection, and then whispers something into his ear before stepping away and exhibiting her nearly naked body to him. Bill’s night ends after he sneaks into a lavish, ritualized orgy where everyone is cloaked and masked, and where he is soon discovered and robbed of his anonymity, but not before being saved by a masked woman. When he returns home, he again confronts Alice’s fantasy, where she

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confesses she was having a dream about the naval officer and even about Bill’s sexual humiliation. This sets the stage for the events of the next day, where the scenes are revisited: we learn that the prostitute was HIV-positive, and that the costume shop’s daughter is now herself being prostituted. Added to this, it seems that the masked woman from the party may have been murdered, and that Bill is being followed. Insofar as the idea of sex that composes Eyes Wide Shut does not exist, like the inexistence of the ideas in the films and literature we have considered, this idea implicates Bill’s encounters but can never be experienced as real or true. Indeed, the displacements and disguises of Bill’s adventure indicate that he cannot have a definitive or decisive relation to sex—it is subject to the dangers of disease, to the disturbing exploitation of the young and vulnerable, to the contingencies of the grieving and loss, and ultimately to the fragmented anonymity and danger of a “society” of sex that is indifferent, potentially malicious, and ultimately inaccessible. Each encounter repeats the same event differently, all made indiscernible within the proliferation of Alice’s inaccessible desire. In every instance where Bill could have been seduced or could have wielded power sexually, that power is eclipsed by virtue of the impossibility of sex itself. We now see another illustration of the conceptual composition of the work of art: like Kafka’s castle, constantly referenced but incessantly out of reach, like the impending doom of Take Shelter that happens in fragments and melds with the imaginary, and like the alien language of Arrival that induces the impossible effect of coexisting events, sex in Eyes Wide Shut is implied in every encounter but is based on the unreality and untruth of another’s inaccessible fantasy. Instead of a castle in Kafka’s landscape receding into the distance, but present and sordid at every turn, there is sex. And every encounter that implies sex—even when it “happens” in the orgy—radically reverses intimacy through anonymity within the inaccessible mystery of its exterior milieus. The oneiric structure of the film and hypnotic performance of the actors testify to the film’s title, where characters are sleepwalking through their lives, “awakened” by the force of inaccessible fantasy that draws them beyond the interiority of the dream and simultaneously beyond the exteriority of the world that becomes all the more dreamlike or unfamiliar, incessant and ungraspable, in its semblance to reality. Eyes Wide Shut is, of course, partly based on Traumnovelle, or “Dream Story,” by Arthur Schnitzler, and the oneiric structure of the story deserves commentary, along with the manner in which attitude, gest (VIII; 3c), and especially repeated dialogue constantly create spaces, silences, and echoes that seem mechanistic but that are, like the “spiritual” in the automaton (VIII; 1a), a form of Deleuzo-Blanchotian “vigilambulism.” It is well known that Kubrick shot each scene many times, and the effect on the performances is that the actors seem to be speaking their words as if they no longer believe them, or find them unbelievable, often repeating what they say to each other. Bill’s and Alice’s eyes are “wide shut”—that is, they are sleepwalking through their lives (hence the memorable use of “Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2” by Dmitri Shostakovich with the montage of their routines); the automaton that is “Doctor Bill” becomes “spiritual” upon realizing that the truth or intimacy of his marriage and the reality of his world have limits beyond which, as we will see, he can only believe in rather than take it for granted. To return to Kubrick’s reference to Kafka (IX; 3a), the dream is all the more dream-like or fantastic because of its semblance to reality. But on

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a wider level, Bill’s encounters—first with the woman grieving for her father, then with the prostitute, and then with the costume shopkeeper’s daughter—have a disconnected trajectory that evokes the incessant quality of the dream: each perception and affection is drawn towards the imperceptible and insensible, another displacement of a question and disguise of a problem. Even in the orgy, those in power—who see but are not seen—embody, beyond the effects of power, the empty anonymity of the indiscernible, crystallizing the entrenched, sordid recesses of an unrevealable mystery and inaccessible or absent society. In every case, the percept disguises the sexualized other, with whom Bill finds only unreal intimacy, and the affect displaces desiring and being desired. In each case, then, intimacy is not possible and desire cannot be satisfied—as in the dream that only incessantly draws us further toward its absence of origin. But unlike the dream, displacements and disguises in Eyes Wide Shut develop an idea that composes and frames Bill’s encounters: the sleepwalking becomes spiritual. Eyes Wide Shut also doubles or repeats its scenes within the untruth that draws Bill on his journey, drawing the inexplicable affect of betrayed lust (an untrue fantasy of another) within the unreality of consistently serialized events. Indeed, the serial structure of the film also initiates other peculiar categories (i.e., serialized chronosigns: VIII; 3c): many scenes complicate their differences through repetition, where they are similar enough that they force us to ask: what difference is there? The crucial repetitions concern, of course, the lavish Christmas party and the orgy: one of personal and intimate flirtation, another of impersonal sex; but Bill’s encounters again the next day repeat the problem and question: from an unrequited love (his patient) to her actual lover (her fiancé), from prostitute to morbid disease, from the shopkeeper’s rejection of scandalous exploitation to its validation. Even Alice’s confessions in the bedroom are repeated—first of a fantasy (her confession to Bill), then of a dream (of his sexual humiliation). But both her fantasy and dream are inaugurated by her derisive laugh. The difference is that in one case, Alice laughs at Bill’s assurance in her fidelity, and in another case, she laughs at his imagined sexual humiliation in her dream: it is the affect, then, of Alice’s cruel laugh that displaces Bill from Alice and toward the insensible (that is, the limits of the external world, his odyssey). Each case can be conceptualized, though not explained, by an idea of sex, as relations between persons and situations diverge.

3.d. Blue light—the unreal meets the untrue In its radical reversal beyond power, Eyes Wide Shut utilizes the formless form of blue light to draw perception to the imperceptible and to further problematize events that are already put into question. The journey-like structure of the film, then, is not the only manner in which series of differences are expressed, and it is here that we can delve deeper into the film’s composition. While the categories of serialized chronosigns may involve genre distinctions, they also may involve the repetition of anything that becomes a series, even something as straightforward as a gesture or a color (VIII; 3c). Here we can consider how Kubrick’s use of blue light constitutes such a category: it is blue light that ties the untruth of Bill’s interior world—his fantasy of Alice’s fantasy—to the unreality of his exterior world; however, it is through the formless form of light itself—perception

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drawn to the imperceptible—that the outside is immanent to the milieus and bodies of the narrative. While the blue light appears subtly in the opening shot in the bathroom window, its first real emphasis is when Alice confesses her fantasy about the naval officer to Bill, emanating from the window behind her, framing her face (as she sits on the floor in front of it). Bill’s subsequent fantasy about Alice’s fantasy is then saturated in blue light (in fact, it is the only color). In this sense, the blue light coincides with a hollowing out of the truth of who Bill believes he is (sexually). However, this is only the beginning of the expression of light in the film. If the blue light begins as a menace, where the untruth of the chronosign infuriates Bill and sends him wandering the New York City streets, it will soon frame or illuminate interior milieus, unleashing new unrealities that coexist with Bill’s initial fantasy. Throughout Bill’s journey, the blue light saturates, backlights, frames, or otherwise insinuates itself within the unreality of encounters instigated by others in the external world—but, through its formless form, nevertheless remains indiscernible from the interior world of Bill’s own fantasy about Alice’s infidelity, and thus points beyond the limits of interior and exterior. It is in this manner that the displacement and disguise of intimacy and desire is amplified and composed through affects and percepts. In the encounters with the grieving woman, the shopkeeper’s daughter, and the mystery woman at the orgy, blue light saturates every window or background, framing each milieu such that the exterior world literally reflects the interiority of Bill’s mind: beyond each room, outside, there is only blue. In the scene with the grieving woman, the blue light consumes the entire background when they kiss, occupying the space and thus the relation between their faces (“fissuring” them, in Blanchotian terms). In the scene with the shopkeeper’s daughter, the blue light illuminates the room where she is caught with two naked men, also coloring her father’s face as he scolds her (“little whore”). The blue light again emerges behind Bill and the mystery woman at the orgy, when she takes him aside to warn him, coloring their hands clasped together. Pivotally, when the mystery woman intervenes to “redeem” Bill, blue light entirely consumes the backlit area behind her, as though her sacrifice is the ultimate unreality and fantasy (curiously, the blue light is absent from the prostitute and the actual orgy scenes, perhaps indicating that the less sex has to do with fantasy the more the blue light recedes). In every case, perception is drawn to the imperceptible, or the indifference of the same color. What before menaced Bill as the intimacy of foreignness—his wife with the naval officer— now saturates the very exterior world which surrounds every interior scene, sometimes framing them, other times illuminating them. The blue light becomes complicated, however, on three occasions after the odyssey of Bill’s first night in New York. The first occasion is when, upon returning home at twilight, a lighter version of the blue light saturates his home, and when returning to the bedroom where Alice sleeps, an even deeper blue light again saturates the room. Here, Alice recounts her dream of the naval officer and of Bill’s sexual humiliation. The second occasion involves Bill’s visit to Ziegler’s house, where Ziegler explains, much like the Mayor of the village in The Castle, that the mystery woman’s warning and “redemption” of Bill were fake, that she was a “junkie,” and crucially that her death didn’t matter since “someone died, it happens all the time”—the light coloring his face and Bill’s as he stands behind him and pats him on the back, both reassuring him and

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threatening him with a potential lie (we don’t know who the mystery woman really was, or what really happened to her). Ziegler’s untrue explanations in fact parallel the Mayor’s from The Castle. Just as the Mayor claimed that K’s summons was an error (i.e., they couldn’t know why K’s summons took place), making K’s experience one of falsity and exclusion, so too does Ziegler render Bill’s experience false and a charade (e.g., the prostitute’s consequential sacrifice and redemption of Bill, he claims, was staged, and her death that night was just a mistake and a coincidence). Also like the Mayor, who claimed that K’s case was the “least important among the least important,”22 so too does Ziegler’s explanation that death “happens all the time” dissociate what can be said from what can be seen (VI; 4)—in this case, rendering the experience unknowable. The third occasion which complicates the blue light is when Bill returns home from Ziegler’s to find the mask he wore to the orgy inexplicably on his bedroom pillow, next to Alice asleep. In all three complications of the blue light, the untrue is refracted in the deception or neglect within Bill’s unreality—where the blue light only disguises what it illuminates while also, as a series, displacing the affects of betrayed lust. In the first case, Alice’s dream, filled with affect (where she was ashamed of being naked, and blamed Bill, but was then ecstatic when he left), the blue light saturates her as she confesses the exuberance of his humiliation. In the second case, the untrue is refracted in Ziegler’s explanations, which, whether out of malice or indifference, were lies at worst and suspicious at best. In the third case, Bill’s voyeuristic experience at the orgy, where real faces and bodies were indistinguishable, made itself felt through the mask’s reappearance next to Alice in bed as the very anonymity and foreignness of Bill’s own position and desire relative to Alice. The mask is in fact placed on what Blanchot may call his most intimate location, the pillow on which he sleeps. From this perspective, Bill is no longer able to bear the notion that their marriage is strange and impersonal, prompting him to break down and say to Alice “I’ll tell you everything.” In all three cases, the formless form of the blue light creates a series, acting as a mirror that affectively overturns the sordid terror of Bill’s fantasy of Alice into something that, in fantasy and danger, estrangement and surprise, ultimately draws Bill toward the ungraspable. The affect is thus absorbed by the milieus and bodies that are saturated and framed by blue light (VIII; 5a); as a percept, the blue light reveals only the disguises it illuminates, and as an affect, the insensible, absent origin of desire and sex (beyond both interior and exterior worlds) is this complicated, unrevealable disguise.

3.e. The obscure value of love within the sordid and scandalous In the final scene of the film, the insensible and inexplicable idea of sex finally expresses an obscure value of intimacy and love that is grounded in the anonymity and estrangement of the sordid and scandalous: Alice tells Bill that despite that the reality of their world will never reveal the whole truth, and in response to Bill’s insistence that dreams are real, she does love him, and they can, or must, reunite by having sex—that is, by making the unreality and untruth of sex into a reality and a truth. She essentially draws him into an experience of the impossible itself. Here it is worth a closer analysis of this scene: Alice tells Bill that they should be “grateful that we have survived all of our

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adventures,” and when Bill asks if she is “sure about that,” she responds that she is only “as sure as I am that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, can ever be the whole truth,” to which Bill replies, “and no dream is ever just a dream.” Alice’s affirmation here of the untrue nature of Bill’s experience, and Bill’s insistence that the imaginary (dream) is real, articulates the dynamic between unreality and untruth: when dreams or fantasies become real, that untruth (of jealousy, neglect, attraction) is complicated within such dream-reality. Alice then insists that the important thing is that they are “awake now,” that she does love Bill, and that the “there is something very important that we have to do as soon as possible: fuck.” Here Alice and Bill’s reunion is predicated on making the idea of sex into a reality. However, if Bill’s encounters throughout the film were displaced and disguised by an idea of sex that, like Blanchot’s vision of impossible death (II; 2), was “foreign to all decisions—the indecisive and uncertain”23 (since neither Bill nor Alice have control over their desire), then reuniting in love and intimacy through the danger and sordid scandal of lust (a lust that can only estrange) renders their love obscure. Their decision to reunite through sex, in other words, evades decisiveness, and establishes an intimacy grounded in the disorientation of strangeness and renewal. Such a union is composed, finally, by the perception of the imperceptible—a series of bluenesses that frame impossible encounters which neglect intimacy, and by an affect of lust that both repels Bill from Alice and draws him toward the sordid and scandalous, only to return to her saturated in blue. Love grounded in impossibility, which includes intimacy within strangeness, thus reunites Bill and Alice. If the obscurity of love is expressed through the untruth and unreality of sex, then we have a peculiar, inverted relation between the sensual world and the spiritual world, where our timeless differences or “evolution” would “repeat” or recur—as in the reunion of Bill and Alice—only by making estrangement incessantly familiar again. The paradox of such obscure love is perhaps encapsulated by a parable of Kafka’s that reads, “There is nothing other than a spiritual world; what we call a sensual world is the evil in the spiritual and what we call evil is but a necessity of an instant for our eternal evolution.”24 In these terms, if the love between Bill and Alice is a spiritual state, it can only be accessed by the sensuality of “evil” in their actual world (as in the danger and scandal of Bill’s encounters and Alice’s fantasies), which is a “necessary” instant within a change or evolution that is “eternal.” In Blanchotian and Deleuzian terms, Kafka’s instant recurs incessantly, with all the force of difference and repetition in the third synthesis of time—of the estrangement from the beloved who becomes ever familiar again. Such love, in short, is renewed almost as an inverted Kierkegaardian faith, requiring not a momentary “leap” that leads to belief but the Nietzschean return25 and incessant expression of the impossible in the sensual as a necessary, unavoidable gateway to the spiritual. In this chapter, we have considered radical reversals beyond power and illustrations of obscure values in cinema—from trust amidst the outlandish, to alliance through mortalism, to love based on the unthinkability of the sensual. All these values are rooted in Blanchot’s impossibility—in our final example of Eyes Wide Shut, values are rooted in an idea of sex that, like Kafka’s castle, can never actually exist, but that draws lovers incessantly to the sensual world in order to be “spiritually” in love in it. In our world of power defined only by possibility, action, and improving our lives, or even

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knowing who we are through the deployment of sexuality, Blanchot’s “unimportance” of art and literature (V; 2), completely foreign to the world as we know it, is in full effect. Such ideas are rooted in a domain without consequence, defined by the value of gripping estrangement and anonymity become intimately familiar again. But in Deleuze’s terms, it is only through believing in such values, as we believe in the impossible, that we can believe in the world again (VIII; 6). And yet, such belief does not return us to the world as we know it—otherwise, we would live our lives as if we were in a bad film (Intro). We cannot, in short, discover truth or uncover reality in such cinematic art: rather, the “world,” in the chaos of its very untruth and unreality, through its initial and radical reversals, expresses endlessly fascinating and indissoluble values.

Conclusion: Artistic Fiction and the Thought of Eternal Return

Unless we are forced to, we generally do not consider that one day we will cease to exist—and in a similar vein, we usually do not consider what is “outside” of our reality and truth. That is, the death that we so “carefully evade” in a society obsessed with fostering life and preventing death becomes, much like that which is obscure within life itself, excluded from our experiences: an “exception” to our perception, our feelings, and our thoughts. And when we do attempt to talk about these things, we resort to mysticism or superstition, or we simply give up and talk about death in the negative mode—“who knows?”—where it is meaningless or irrelevant. In other words, to assume that death is only something to fear, that it is only something to avoid thinking about, parallels our attitude toward all of that which is beyond our own truth and our own reality: that if something isn’t real or isn’t true then it has no value. Or further still, that which doesn’t exist is “impossible” to talk about. We thereby import our judgment into an intractable domain that exceeds our grasp: the unreal and untrue is unintelligible at best or downright awful at worst. Even if we still harbor a personal religious belief, in a biopolitical society where religious faith in an afterlife is no longer an organizing political principle, belief is no longer a shared discourse: sure, we are entitled to our beliefs but, once again, we can’t really share a discourse about them in a way that aligns with our biopolitical aims. Despite this, there remains plenty in our experience that does not strictly “exist,” which may better enable us to live a richer life, full of what Blanchot would call fascination and inspiration. The experience of dreaming that we undergo every single night, to say the least, epitomizes our efforts to exclude or bracket an experience as meaningless relative to our own truth and reality (or, in psychoanalytic terms, to appropriate that experience for a disciplinary, behavorial benefit), but is full of rich, inspiring, and inexplicable detail. This still leaves us with the question: after our explorations of dream, imagination, memory, art, literature, and cinema in this book, what is at the heart of these experiences or encounters that is genuinely outside of our truth and reality? What the explorations of reversals of power in this book testify to is that what is ultimately outside of power is the transformative, reversible relations of time, which involve paradoxes of novelty, chaos, and becoming. Whether in experience or in art, time may involve indiscernible and unresolvable movements of our imagination on the one hand (IV; 3b), or inexplicable and ungraspable differences of pasts or worlds on 265

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the other hand (IV; 3a and 4a). Such dissociative forces trigger our perception, affection, and memory in dreams, literature, and cinema. Thus, to be drawn outside of relations of power entails a relation with, in Deleuzian terms, the indiscernible and inexplicable, and in Blanchotian terms, the incessant and obstinately ungraspable, which Blanchot also calls a non-relation. But this is only half of the story: if what is outside of power is this experience of movement without beginning or end, and of time “in its pure state” (that is, non-linear time: VIII; 1b), then the most “radical reversal” outside of power involves the dynamic of, or interaction between, these two initial reversals (where time “implicates” such movement, and movement develops such time). This radical reversal, explored in every chapter of this book on the outside of power (II–VI, VIII–XI) is precisely the eternal return as Deleuze, via Blanchot, approaches it: what they both call (the being of) “becoming,” and what Blanchot calls the “diverging of difference,” where the strange is allied with the “strangely familiar” (II; 8). That is, in terms of radical reversals beyond power, it is no longer simply a case of the familiar appearing strange, nor is it an “exception” or “exclusion” or our world that “hollows out” truth and reality (e.g., the “menacing” approach of mortality, absence, or nightmare as presence: II; 2, III; 6), but the strange returning to us as itself familiar or “intimate.” In reversing its dependence on movement (i.e., measurable clock time), time thereby becomes the eternal force and “empty form”1 that “repeats” or returns events to us differently. That is to say, no longer dependent on what is discernable in reality or explicable as true—in terms of temporal structures of causality and possibility or of beginnings and endings that depend on movement—time becomes the very absence of coherence between events. Events, in short, still happen, just without the expectations or explanations we would wish to attach to them. And yet, the “eternity” of return—of time “in its pure state”—has no existence, and we are back to where we started: how can we talk about such inexistence? What does eternal return do? While eternal return—in its paradox of becoming—expels presumptuous expectations from habits, expels illusory idealizations from memories, and produces the “incessant return of the day” with the full force of novelty in the dream, in all three cases, we have not yet reached eternal return as a thought: in chapters II and III we explored such “unthinkable” movements that have not necessarily “forced us to think.” That is, just because we are drawn outside of relations of power, encountering that which is indiscernible or inexplicable, this does not necessarily mean we are able to think this experience or encounter (nor does it mean we have yet derived value from it, however obscure that value is). For instance, when drawn into the eternal return, our habits or practices undergo change, where we experience transformation rather than entrapment as “creatures of habit” (II; 6 and 8); likewise, memory may be a source of potentiality and transformation in the future rather than an explanation that is idealized nostalgically when drawn into eternal return (II; 7–8); as Deleuze insists,the “lived experience of eternal return . . . is opposed to both the ancient category of reminiscence and the modern category of habitus.”2 While such lived experience may be the result of what Deleuze, channeling Nietzsche, calls our “will” to select and expel negative or reactive forces, such lived experience and will can be distinguished from the case where difference as “repetition is the thought of the future,”3 and especially from artistic creation composed by ideas. The future, of course, cannot be genuinely

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anticipated or “remembered,” and is thus a dimension of Blanchotian oblivion: to embrace it appropriately and openly in refusing expectation and idealization, however, means to consciously forget (III; 7). Thus while we may think through our personal transformations, willfully overcoming the expectations ingrained in our habits or the idealizations of our memories to embrace novelty, that does not mean we interpret such transformations for others or create tangible works of art. Consider how this works in the dream: here, we are drawn into a world absolutely fissured from reality and truth, which nevertheless returns eternally with the full force of becoming, but that does not make it thinkable, as the connections are so fragmented and the imaginary milieu so intangible as to be grounded in oblivion (III; 10, IV; 2b): there is thus nothing to connect, compose, or create. What Blanchot calls vigilance in the dream (where we are “thinking” only in the sense of being aware) does not imply genuine thought or cognizance. And while forgetting may be an affirmative force of eternal return,4 in dreams such affirmation does not occur with the speed that implicates thought’s milieus (thought’s “plane of immanence”); in this book, we have gone from the absolute slowness of the dream, where oblivion reigns as a sovereign force of the imaginary, in all of the urgency and vast extensity of disguising its problems and displacing its questions (III), to the intensity of the absolute speed of thought that implicitly solves problems and answers questions within determined milieus (IV). But, like time or eternity (that is, “time’s absence”), this absolute speed has no “existence”: as a thought, it occurs in a space of relation itself. Returning, then, to the question of this book: what is such a thought of eternal return? If Deleuze and Blanchot can teach us anything, it is what it means to think—both in terms of provisional, partial, and unrepresentable answers to questions and solutions to problems (Deleuze), and also in terms of uncertainty itself (Blanchot). In fact, our disinclination to think about death as uncertain in a world where power is obsessed with fostering life is essentially a disinclination to think genuinely or rigorously at all. It is a denial that our inexistence is as much of who we are as our existence. This notion of death’s uncertainty is foregrounded when Deleuze claims that death is the ultimate or “final [dernière] form of the problematic,” the very “source of problems and questions”; here, he not only explicitly draws on Blanchot’s account of death as the “unreality of the indefinite,” but aligns its uncertainty and “empty form of time” to the third and final synthesis of time (eternal return).5 As we have seen (II; 8), if this third synthesis is that of the uncertainty of the future, rather than of the past (habit, repetition) or of the present (memory, difference), then the “ultimate” form that this future takes is death, insofar as we are all mortal. But it is more than that: Deleuze designates Blanchot’s impossible death as the very uncertain and indefinite source of all problems and questions, rendering it the ultimate “unthinkable” experience that nevertheless “forces us to think.” That is, insofar as genuine thinking—which, like death, has no existence but is not, to borrow Deleuze’s phrase, the “non-being of the negative”6— the “pure approach” or movement toward death is the ultimate problem and question posed to thought; however, what Blanchot calls the “absence of an origin” for this movement cannot itself, in Deleuze’s terms, be thought (since thoughts are implicit answers and solutions). Hence death becomes, in the Deleuzo-Blanchotian sense, the ultimate model of thinking the uncertain or “unthinkable.” It is this Blanchotian

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understanding of a death that “cannot be reduced to negation”7 (while it nevertheless “resembles nothing”: II, 2–3), as the interminable and unrealized, that informed this book’s approach to dreams, which we have also considered equally unthinkable. The dream constantly poses questions and problems in the form of perceptual disguises and affective displacements, but is itself the imaginative, vast terrain of the unthinkable that has no tangible conceptual connections. In fact, the dream is born of the empty, absence of an origin in which nothingness “appears”: it is “the incessant making itself seen”8 and the eternal return of the day’s activities or imaginings (whether fantastic or realistic) wherein the ungraspable becomes familiar and “intimate” (III; 3–5 and 9). Here, again, we pass through the Blanchotian impossibility of nothingness: nothingness, unable to “exist,” returns us to experience as obscure. But we have not yet reached the domain of thought of eternal return. In this book, we first encountered the thought of eternal return in experience by way of Deleuze’s paradoxes of habit alongside memory drawn toward the future, and Blanchot’s “experience of impossibility”;9 here, we saw Deleuze cite Blanchot to characterize this third synthesis that builds on his paradoxes of repetition and difference. Blanchot’s own formulation of becoming concerned the “diverging of difference,” which must be “held together” with incessance and obstinate ungraspability as key features of “impossibility” (II; 5). Reading Deleuze via Blanchot throughout this book has thus provided us with special insight into Deleuze’s third synthesis, which thereby informed our reading of Deleuze’s first two syntheses as incessant and obstinately ungraspable. While this did not necessarily make the eternal return a “thought,” since habits and memories inevitably change over time (without necessarily being “thought”), this third synthesis is both the “the thought and the production of the ‘absolutely different’; making it so that repetition is, for itself, difference in itself.”10 That is, we can both think and produce the new, and it is through the lens of time that we may think such repetition in difference. Indeed, we may think our destiny through the levels of our past as we move toward the future, or think the “involuted” progression of our habits in all their mystery and creativity. Such “thought of the eternal return goes beyond all the laws of our knowledge”;11 that is, “the thought of the eternal return eliminates from willing everything which falls outside the eternal return, it makes willing a creation.”12 By refusing to believe that things do not change over time— refusing any self-identical “sameness” that would fall outside eternal return—we are forced to think difference within repetition, a thought that, as Blanchot puts it, is “withdrawn without giving way to nothingness.”13 Affirming difference in this sense does not mean that we think things themselves; thoughts do not represent what they think. Thus despite having no inherent reality or truth, no set of ideals that ground it, eternal return was always an overt “refusal” of nothingness as a means of affirming such difference (II; 8). Instead of a thought of nothingness or sameness, we can think both throughout the changes within the repetitive forces in our lives or world as well as the complexities of their differences, with a speed that goes beyond their movements, but toward a future that we cannot foresee. The “thought of the future” in eternal return, like mortality, constitutes the formlessness of the uncertain, indefinite, and unrealizable; however, that which “returns” via the future and appears as the same or similar exists, while its change or difference—

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which can “only be thought”—does not exist, but consists or insists. As Deleuze puts it, “the circle of eternal return . . . is a tortuous circle in which Sameness is said only of that which differs.”14 That is, forms of sameness or repetition of past and present that become the future are only the displacement and disguise of difference: an incessant approach toward the formlessness of the imperceptible and insensible, they are no longer forms of sameness, but what Deleuze calls “that extreme ‘form’ in which its representation comes undone”15—or in other words, whose displacing and disguising forms refer and defer onto each other incessantly by virtue of their differing, rather than revolve redundantly around the self-identical that they represent. Such formless difference is not “nothingness” in the sense of simply being an exclusion or exception to what “is”: difference, as Deleuze likes to say, cannot be “reduced to the negative” even if it does not strictly “exist.”16 Change or novelty, in short, is imperceptible and insensible, which is why it can only be thought—hence Blanchot’s insistence on the “being of becoming” in eternal return, and Deleuze’s insistence on “the eternal formlessness of the eternal return itself, throughout its metamorphoses and transformations,” wherein “[r]epetition is the formless being of all differences.”17 That is, from the perspective of eternal return, the “[f]orms of repetition”18 or of sameness are themselves implicated by formless difference: a vertiginous Blanchotian space of the indistinguishable and incessant that is sensed via ungraspable displacements and disguises—each movement a displacement of a formless place, a disguise of the formless and unrevealable. As Deleuze insists, “Repetition in the eternal return appears under all these aspects as the peculiar power of difference, and the displacement and disguise of that which repeats only reproduce the divergence and the decentring of the different in a single movement . . .”19 The divergence and decentering of difference is, in this sense, the very thought of the fragmentary and intensive (IV; 5c) that thinks through such a “movement.” But this returns us to the question: how is this thought of eternal return, as the formlessness and inexistence of thinking, outside of knowledge and power? This thought of eternal return as inexistence—as formlessness or nothingness that consists rather than exists—extended from this book’s exploration of art through literature to cinema (IV–IX), where Deleuze, in The Time-Image, claims that “Maurice Blanchot[’s] . . . fundamental question of what makes us think, what forces us to think” is “ ‘the unpower [impouvoir] of thought’, the figure of nothingness, the inexistence of a whole which could be thought.”20 Thought, in other words, is not a power: it neither captures the observable such that it enables us to “know” (Foucault), nor can it harness “the mode of appropriative comprehension” (Blanchot).21 Rather, it concerns “the inexistence of the whole” within displacements and disguises, questions and problems: Blanchot’s uncertain, indefinite, absence of totality (IV; 5c, V; 3b)—thought is “impossible” because it has no object to grasp, represent, or “appropriate”; it only has relations. Blanchot in fact insists that “the impossible is not there in order to make thought capitulate, but in order to allow it to announce itself according to a measure other than that of power.”22 Thought as an “unpower,” then, does not resign itself to unknowable forces or to mysticism; for Blanchot, it is a responsive “passion” of the experience of impossibility and for Deleuze is made of “intensive” connections within passive syntheses of time. In the same context, Deleuze then specifies that a Blanchotian literary and cinematic vision must insist on “the presence of an unthinkable in thought,

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which would be both its source and barrier” as well as “another thinker in the thinker.”23 We saw this source as barrier—this absence of origin and destination—as the displacements and disguises of death and dream (II, III). While death and dream thus pose the problems and questions of the “sovereignty of the void,” where we are grasped by that which we cannot ourselves grasp, it is artistic fiction which, to use Deleuze’s words, engenders “another thinker in the thinker,” a fissure or “aberration of movement” that poses problems and questions wherein we can make the connections of thinking (unrepresentable “answers” and “solutions”) that we would not have made otherwise (hence the “spiritual automaton”: VIII; 1a). As Deleuze insists in Difference and Repetition, it is . . . the differentials of thought, at once that which cannot be thought and that which must be thought . . . signify our greatest powerlessness, but also that point of which Maurice Blanchot speaks endlessly: . . . “the impossibility of thinking that is thought”, that point at which “powerlessness” is transmuted into vigor [où “l’impouvoir” se transmue en puissance], that point which develops in the work [of art (l’oeuvre)] in the form of a problem.24

It is in these terms that the lack of power becomes a force or strength (puissance) precisely when reality becomes problematic and truth as we know it is put into question: it is the inability to know that gives the imaginary and false its force. And it is such a movement of the imaginary, which in D&G’s terms, is “monumentalized” in the work of fictional art (IV; 2b), that is capable of reversing such effects of power. The manner of fictional art composing such an “inexistent whole” that forces us to think through unthinkable affects and percepts was explored in Kafka’s Castle. Here, the castle itself is such a “figure of nothingness” that can only be thought—having no existence in Kafka’s work, neither sensible nor symbolic— but enveloping or implicating every scene, constituting the desire of every character. It is these scenes and characters that remain unthinkable—thought’s “source and barrier,” provoking an “unpower” of passion or passivity that sabotages power’s active productions of realities and truths. That is, the percepts and affects surrounding the castle, whether its contours dissolving in the distance or the impatience that leads to the “ordinary and ugly,” literally displace and disguise that which can “only be thought.” To borrow Deleuze’s Blanchotian phrase, we thereby “believe in this as the impossible”:25 the castle, impossible to reach, impossible to see, is nevertheless “real” in all its unreality. In fact, as we saw, such a bureaucratic assemblage is not simply “dysfunctional” but, lacking any discernibility and explication, it nevertheless expresses functions or aims of the future—it is an assemblage “coming into view,” which is thereby unrealizable (always in “the room next door,”26 displaced without place, disguised as the unrevealable). Its dysfunctionality, in other words, does not simply “hollow out” our realities and truths, but, in the dynamic of its unreality and untruth, expresses a world that can “only be thought.” In short, if we do not know what bureaucracy is—if it has no “existence”—that is because it draws its sensible world, its characters and their desires, toward an unforeseeable aim (V; 7). Hence Kafka’s castle, and its conceptual “aim,” like thoughts occupying the plane of composition itself, may be formless, but they compose and implicate the percepts and

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affects of art—forming the relations and forcing us to think such a future in its uncertainty and such a world in its absence of totality. And in its radical reversal beyond power, this inexistent space of thought is also an intensive space of absolute speed that “is not” (simultaneously disappearing in appearing) as well as the inexistent totality of the “universe”—the “fractured sky” that corresponds to the dissolved, “broken” earth or incessant movements that it surrounds (IV; 3c). D&G’s chaos of the cosmos here is the future of eternal return: the world returns in Kafka’s novel by virtue of the transformative force of time, and through the inexistence that withdraws reader and writer alike into Blanchot’s “absolute milieu” of the imaginary: hollowed out in its initial reversals through the strangeness of that which has no existence, transformed and also, in its radical reversal, returning (as the “same”) paradoxically as the “strangely familiar.” But what is this chaos of the future in eternal return? How is chaos, like mortality and thought, not simply an indeterminate void of nothingness? This book has explored how it is not just mortality and dream, or literary assemblages whose aims can “only be thought,” or the novelties of habit and memory drawn toward a future that are outside of power: it was also chaos itself, as D&G approach it, that is outside of power. Like Blanchot’s mortalism that has no reality but is not “nothing,” D&G describe chaos as “a void that is not a nothingness”; that is, “chaos is characterized less by the absence of determinations” than by “the impossibility of a connection between them”27 (IV; 2a). But chaos, as a force outside of power, is also a force of eternal return. As Deleuze insists, “chaos and eternal return are not two different things”:28 if the “inexistence of the whole” is the Blanchotian impossible absence through which the same returns “eternally” as different, as the determined displacements and disguises of that which can “only be thought,” revolving around the unpredictable oblivion of the future as its center, it is here that Blanchotian absence or nothingness that returns only as presence becomes Deleuzo-Guattarian chaos. On the one hand, the displacements and disguises of eternal return are formed on the plane of immanence—a chaotic, albeit determined, state of change or flux, developing repetition as all variety of form (in art, taking shape as affect and percept that are the repetitions of such differences: IV; 3c). On the other hand, the plane of composition is the equally chaotic, formlessness of the differences or changes implied by such form (in art, occupied by concepts that are the differences of such formless repetition: IV; 3c and 5c). That is, to think the “return” of the sensible means to conceive of (“eternal”) difference as repetition, and thereby to likewise sense the repetition of difference (the unthinkable) that draws it along. As Deleuze explains it, when “chaos [is] an object of affirmation . . . repetition in the eternal return is the highest thought . . . we are violently led from the limit of sense to the limit of thought, from what can only be sensed to what can only be thought.”29 As we have seen, it is the insensible in sensation that forces us to think, and likewise the unthinkable of thought in sensation that draws us into a work of artistic fiction (IV; 1). In this sense, it is the repetition or return of such sensation that both develops and is implicated by the difference or “eternity” of such thought. Chaos thus involves the “eternal” formlessness of the indeterminate “universe” of composition (which can only be thought) that implicates—or returns through—the determined, amorphous forms of immanence (as affects and percepts), together constituting what Deleuze may call “the immanent identity of chaos and cosmos, being in the eternal return, a thoroughly

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tortuous circle.”30 In these terms, if the cosmos is circular, it is not the Platonic circle “capable of imposing its likeness”31—where cycles return to the same. Rather, “eternal return . . . reconstitutes an eternally decentred circle”32 where the same “revolves” around the different (hence “forming a straight line”);33 thought therefore concerns the differential features that “return” by virtue of such a circle. Furthermore, if the circle is the milieu that repeats with a certain periodicity (I; 11)—that is, unthinkable milieus of sensation (imagination plus contraction)—thinking considers the differences, “rhythms,” and relations that constitute such apparent stability, movement, or sameness over time (IV; 5c). But how can such milieus be considered in terms of the truths and realities that are reversed by art? That is, what is the relation between chaos and the world? The chaos of absolute complication (i.e., the scrambling or enmeshment of all form with an infinite movement and speed), like the uncertainty of mortality, as well as the transformation of habit and memory, and the “recognition without cognition” of dream, cannot be excluded from our world of truth and reality: they are immanent to it. In fact, Deleuze considers eternal return itself to be chaotic in terms of the “return” of the world itself; as he insists, “The eternal return is not the effect of the Identical upon a world become similar, it is not an external order imposed upon the chaos of the world; on the contrary, the eternal return is the internal identity of the world and of chaos.”34 That is, the “world,” ungraspable as a totality, becomes Blanchot’s “unreality” through its incessant differing. As we saw, for Blanchot, “unreality” is “not a strange region situated beyond the world, it is the world itself . . . grasped and realized in its entirety by the global negation of all the individual realities contained in it”35 (II; 2). That is, art’s totalizing “negation” becomes a vehicle for the eternal return of such a world absent truth and reality by virtue of its very “aberration” and reversal of movement, this “infusion of chaos into the cosmos,”36 its conceptual transport through a DeleuzoGuattarian chaos. On the one hand, then, it is thought that “confronts,” as D&G say, “the chaos as undifferentiated abyss or ocean of dissemblance,”37 which, as we saw, can be considered the very “immaterial” universe or chaosmos—the Blanchotian absence of totality—that is art’s plane of composition. On the other hand, art’s affects and percepts do not confront such thinkable disconnection between determinations within such chaos; rather, art composes the sensible determination of chaos itself. As D&G insist, “Art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation”: art “brings back from the chaos varieties”38 of sensation in material, but, in our radical reversal beyond power, by drawing affections toward the insensible and perception towards the imperceptible (which can only be thought). Art, in short, is chaotic in its determination, rendering it unthinkable, while the connections and relations it forms are insensible, rendering it at the same time inexplicable. Here we have the inexistence of thought reborn through the “stuff ”—the material and milieus—of art. No longer immersed in stable, regulated milieus in which we are disciplined—wherein genuine thinking is supplanted by the constant provocation to discern reality or discover what happened— to think the world through artistic fiction means to allow thought to be not only selfreferential and intensive, but fragmented. Thus when “art thinks” (to borrow D&G’s phrase), it is the unthinkable affects and percepts, drawn by incessant movement and the absolute milieu of the imaginary (the plane of immanence), that it composes.

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The milieus of dream and art not only create the conditions for experience or thought beyond the normalcy and regularity of our truth and reality; whether in actual experience, dream, or artistic fiction, the eternal return also demonstrates that the world “returns” to us precisely by way of the reality and truth that it reverses and dissociates with the force of the new in all of its unpredictability and unrecognizability. In this sense, it has been just as necessary to study the imaginary and the false as it has been to study the production of truth and reality itself in a world of power: whether we are provoked or seduced to act in a “power relation,” or whether we are inspired or fascinated by the unreality or untruth of dream or fiction, in either case we always attempt to discern what is happening or discover what has happened. This is only natural. But no longer bound by life-centric values, outside of reality and truth thought’s aim is not to discern or “explain” but, in D&G’s terms, to hold “together only along diverging lines”;39 here, its fragmentation is the repetition of eternal return or “being of becoming,” wherein, to borrow Blanchot’s phrasing, “nothing . . . would allow the passage”40 from past to future, or from one movement to the next. Time, no longer the abstract measure or totality of movement, constitutes such an absence of totality insofar as percepts and affects draw us into an unending, reversible passage from past to future that forces us to think. That is, to “think” change or difference in itself means to be able to see and feel time’s reversibilities as they refract through the imaginary and multiply through the untrue. Time’s absence, and the absence of an origin41 of such “a passage [that] does not pass,”42 through which the same returns only as different, precedes the world as we know it; therefore this absence of chronological time or this uncertainty of the impossible does not “resist” power, and cannot be co-opted by it (I; 11). Instead, we ceaselessly discern or discover the imaginary and false within the real and true. The dream was a key test of such an impulse, demonstrating the Deleuzo-Blanchotian, antiFreudian notion that art’s displacements and disguises are not of anything hidden in the unconscious (like repressed wishes or fears), but are instead the incessant return of the day’s activities or imaginings in a form that not only tears them from any origin or purpose (dreams often feel that they have no beginning or end) and makes the false and imaginary obstinately ungraspable (since we cannot ignore them but cannot comprehend them), but ultimately that make the absolute foreignness of these experiences feel intimately familiar (III; 5 and 9). Dreams essentially accustom us to the absolutely foreign. This is why dreams often seem “normal” when we are in them: even in the most lucid of dreams, our levels of awareness merely internalize or reinforce the apparent familiarity of the experience (unless the day’s return “harasses” us, as in the nightmare: III; 6). It is in such a case that the experience of eternal return functions not to abandon us in a sordid field of unmitigated foreignness, but to “return” us to the familiar anew. The dream considered via its abscence of origin thus paved the way for an approach to fiction which likewise traverses this inexistent space or absence of totality—but unlike dream, fiction is not ceaselessly drawn toward the darkness and absence of the night; rather, it is composed by ideas by virtue of Blanchot’s withdrawn, inexistent totality of the imaginary. This book ultimately shifted from the deterritorialized literary assemblages in Kafka’s novels that make the social and political forces of our world “return” without

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their aims or functions (V–VI) to the deterritorialized cinematic assemblages that likewise make the world return through dissociative forces of fractured frames and fissured cuts (VIII–IX). But it was always necessary that the characters believe they are in a world, like K, who, as Blanchot puts it, believes “that things are always going to continue and that he is still in the world when, from the first sentence, he is cast out of it.”43 It is only by believing in what is normal and usual, in a world that operates by behaviorism (discipline) and etiology (regulation)—that is, where we believe reality can be discerned and truth can be discovered (VII)—that the effects of power can be effectively reversed. But in art’s reversal of power, such reality is perpetually disguised and truth perpetually displaced—and ultimately, in its most “radical reversal” of eternal return, the unlocatable disguises of affection are complicated within the unrevealable displacements of perception (or vice versa). The transition from such initial reversals of power to radical reversals beyond power can be broken down further between literature and cinema. On the one hand, in Kafka’s fiction, whether the distorted repetitions and reflections of the imaginary (as in the Diaries), or whether inexplicable and coexisting differential states (as in Kafka’s short stories), disguises cease to refer to other given disguises, and displacements cease to defer onto other given displacements in the third synthesis of time (as in Kafka’s novels), where such disguises and displacements are instead drawn into becomings by virtue of “returning” through all of the strange familiarity of that which is never given (namely, the inexistent totality). On the other hand, in cinematic art, whether the refracted and reflected crystal-images that make the real and imaginary indiscernible, or whether inexplicably bifurcating worlds or multiplying versions of truth, cinematic displacements and disguises also cease to defer onto other given displacements and disguises in the third synthesis of time, where the indiscernibility of real and imaginary instead becomes the “false continuity” of time (when their differences coexist inexplicably) or where the undecidability of true and false becomes the “serialization” of time (when they repeat through what Deleuze calls “categories”). These are the dynamics and radical reversals of fictional art: percepts, in their unreality, are drawn by the falsity of the affect (as the first synthesis of time is drawn into the third), or affects, in their falsity, are drawn by the unreality of the percept (as the second synthesis of time is drawn into the third); in both cases, this interaction of affects and percepts develops ideas, which, in all their inexistence, unlocatability and unrevealability—and in the most profound dynamic of art—ceaselessly implicate them. In the case of cinema, it is an idea that, like Kafka’s castle, has no existence in the film but implicates or saturates its movement, drawing forward its displacements and disguises (rather than deferring them onto each other): in Eyes Wide Shut, for instance, sex itself has no reality or truth while rendering percepts and affects of its protagonist’s experience both unreal and untrue (IX; 3c). Beyond just the “hollowing out” of what Foucault would perhaps call his “access to intelligibility” in a world obsessed with life, the inaccessible interiority of the protagonist’s own fantasy of his wife’s fantasy is drawn toward that which is indiscernible from, and inaccessible within, the external world (often framed in blue light, as a serialized category that further displaces and disguises the estranging familiarity of sex). The world thereby appears entirely familiar, as the return of the sensual world, but only via what Blanchot calls

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the “indecisive and uncertain.” After all this, however, what is the value of such uncertainty? Why so much attention paid in art to that which does not exist? In the end, is it not easier, and more beneficial, to focus on what does exist: our lives and our prosperity? To be content with what is? Why can’t art just mirror our real world and actual values? In a world focused on fostering and preserving life, we are complacent with what is predictable, manageable, and controllable: to preserve our existence means to expect and idealize what is (or what has been, or “should be,” which amounts to the same thing). At best, we may find the “pleasures” of entertainment or of the senses, but this still traps us in a vicious cycle of what is normal and usual (or perhaps it transgresses those norms, in a manner that does not escape the cycle but is entirely dependent on the norms transgressed). However, to have a more complete human experience—one that is not so predictable, one that is open to change—means that, simply put, new ideas and values may be provoked by new perceptions and feelings, and vice versa. But it also means that it is necessary to let go of the life-centric values that normalize our thinking and make us cling to our realities and truths. That is, our human experience, defined by mortality and therefore implicated by its own inexistence— which the presence of this inexistence reminds us of every night in dreams—is thus most full, most valuable, insofar as it affirms this inexistence alongside its existence. Such inexistence, irreducible to life-centric values, nevertheless affirms and explores the unrealities and untruths outside of power that are not incompatible with the habits and memories of our realities and truths. And, beyond dreams, it is art that is uniquely capable of exploring this inexistence in a way that does not fall back on the realities and truths that we take for granted, instead developing the untrue and unreal as literal, true, and real (V; 3a), as well as expressing obscure values and provoking us to think genuine difference. In this sense, we can transform our sensibility by virtue of experiences without truth or reality, as if we awoke from a dream feeling different— but in this case, a waking dream where we can actually think and interpret such difference. Beyond the critique of the realities and truths that imaginary worlds of entertainment engender (VII; 9), then, we find the interpretation of art that allows us to actually share experiences that, were they confined to dreams, would have been lost. As we saw in this book’s cinematic and literary case studies, we may be instilled with a sensibility of trust with no justification (IX; 1) or of love amidst estrangement (IX; 3a–e); we may feel a tragic joy in our suffering (IX; 2a), or find hope in the unattainability of presence (VI; 6). And while the absent points of these fictional works which have no reality or truth—for example, the castle of Kafka’s Castle—can “only be thought” and may compel us to think differently about their worlds (e.g., the inexplicable relations inherent to bureaucratic processes), they do so by virtue of such sensibility and value. In this sense, fictional art that radically reverses the effects of power involves a movement of affects and percepts that draws us along in an unthinkable experience first, before we are “forced to think.” In these terms, thinking differently can never be appropriated  by mechanisms of power once and for all, because art that “thinks” is forever untouched by the disciplinary and regulated mechanisms that preserve life—in a graceful state of insouciance and negligence toward such mechanisms. As Blanchot eloquently puts it:

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Art, useless to the world where only effectiveness counts, is also useless to itself. If it succeeds, either this happens outside the realm of measured undertakings and limited tasks, in the boundless movement of life, or else it happens inasmuch as art withdraws into the most invisible and the most interior—into the empty point of existence where it shelters its sovereignty in refusal and the superabundance of refusal.44

Here, Blanchot’s two manners of the “useless” success of art parallel, on the one hand, the incessant displacement and disguise of affect and percept on a plane of immanence alongside, on the other hand, the “empty point of existence” that “knows nothing of life” on a plane of composition. They are distinct, from a Deleuzian perspective, only insofar as they work in tandem: this is the emphasis Deleuze conceivably adds to Blanchot (II, IV). The first case, sensation drawn to the insensible—the “immeasurable” and “boundless” imaginary—is implicated by the second case: sovereign inexistence forever untouched by our realities and truths, and forever the thought of becoming residing at the absent center of art that radically reverses the effects of power.

Glossary This glossary does several things. It traces the evolution of key terms in this book—for example, the assemblage involves Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, and transforms in D&G’s reading of Kafka, but becomes Deleuze’s montage in cinema. It also contains crossreferences, signaling how terms complement each other—for example, how distinctions between truth and reality lead to relations between perception, reality, and disguise, and relations between affection, truth, and displacement. (Note that cross-references are in bold and *key* cross-references are in all-caps.) And, in many cases, it clarifies who given definitions come from—Deleuze, Blanchot, Foucault, myself—or some combination (my definitions are often signaled by variations on the phrase reversals of power). Note that an extended version of this glossary is available via Bloomsbury, which contains extra entries on cinema terms, and expands on nuanced terminology from Blanchot and Deleuze. AFFECT/AFFECTION (all chapters)—In a Foucauldian world, forces provoking action to extend or improve our lives (I; 3). In Deleuze’s syntheses of time, sensations between habitual stimuli and response, or the questioning force of memory (IV; 4a); in the movement-image, occupies intervals between received and executed movements (VII; 4). For D&G, affections are “feelings” of subjects (e.g., “your” emotions), and attached to objects (e.g., hope for something) in lived milieus. In reversals of power, hollowed out of interiority and truth (affection becoming affect) and menaced by reality (IV; 4a); in radical reversals beyond power, when interacting with PERCEPT as “blocs of sensation,” a force of becoming. For D&G, affect “exceed[s] the lived” by going beyond the capacity of those who experience them, drawing affection toward the insensible (III; 2–3a). In art and dream, the affect displaces questions of truth (e.g., jealousy that questions love, revealing betrayal: II; 7). In artistic fiction, such questions/displacements are ultimately complicated within unrevealable disguises of percepts and implicated by the insensibility of ideas (IV–VI; VIII–Conclusion); in cinematic time, the affect renders events undecidable (VIII: 2b), or are more radically “absorbed” into bodies and milieus, and like concepts, become intensive, while remaining bound to (fissures within) movement. (VIII; 5a). ART (Intro, II–VI, VIII–Conclusion)—The effect of reversals of power on reality and truth alongside the hollowing out of our perception and affection (II; 2–4, V; 4, VIII; 2a–b), especially in fiction. In radical reversals beyond power, entails a unique dynamic between the unreal/indiscernible and the untrue/inexplicable, paralleling the eternal return of Deleuze’s final synthesis of time (which builds on the first two syntheses of habit and memory) and Blanchot’s third feature of ambiguity (becoming) that both forces us to think and expresses obscure values, which thereby draw us beyond the limits of our interior and exterior worlds (II; 5–9, IV; 1, 2b, 4a–5a, and 6c, V; 6–10, VI, VIII; 3a–6, IX). Demands interpretation rather than critique (Intro).

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ASSEMBLAGE (I, IV–VIII)—For Deleuze, Foucault’s “dispositif ” (or “mechanism”): practices whose aims “make us see and speak,” provoking us to act normally and with regularity. The aim of assemblages is external to milieus and bodies they arrange: for example, “reform” is the aim of prison. Such a conceptual function is “territorial”—that is, abstract and logical (I; 11–12)—and deterritorialized when illogical (IV; 2a, V; 7); here, art reverses the effects of power. In Kafka’s literature, this involves the dismantling (démontage) of representation (V; 8–10, VI, 4). In cinema, the assemblage is montage, where shots compose movement to form cohesive totalities, both horizontally and vertically (VII; 1–2a, 3, 5b), and is deterritorialized by time-images of cinematic art (VIII, 1a). See also TERRITORY, MILIEU. BECOMING (II–VI; VIII, IX)—Blanchot’s third feature of impossibility: the “diverging of difference” (II; 5); Deleuze’s present moment that “is not” (II; 6, IV; 2a) and a defining feature of his third synthesis of time (II; 8). For Deleuze and Blanchot, the being of Nietzsche’s eternal return (II; 8). The incessance, for Blanchot, of dream (in distinction from Bergsonian duration: III; 6), and for D&G, of events on the plane of immanence (IV; 3a). Unleashes affections and perceptions from subjects/objects and concepts from logic (IV; 3b; 4a–b; 5c); a feature of Kafka’s novels that express novelty (V; 6 and 7); in fictional/cinematic art, the difference that implicates unreality and untruth (VIII 3b–c). CHAOS—see COMPLICATION COMPLICATION (IV)—The effect of chaos, which has both the infinite speed of the plane of composition and the infinite movement of the plane of immanence (IV; 3c). CONCEPT/IDEA (logical vs. genuine) (I, IV–IX)—In a world of power, the aims of practices (e.g., “health” in a medical assemblage: I; 12). In reversals of power, the genuine thought of the “unthinkable” that occurs not in dream (III; 10), but in art, especially fiction (IV; 2b); in this case, the “inexplicable” answers to questions and indiscernible solutions to problems posed by unconscious affects and percepts that are themselves “unthinkable” (III; 10, IV; 2b–3a; 5c). Rather than explain or represent, concepts implicate; they are selfreferential, fragmentary, divergent, rhythmic, and intensive (IV; 5c). In radical reversals beyond power, that which composes works of art, operating with infinite speed and within an “order without distance” (IV; 3b–3c, 5a–5b); alternatively, that which critiques truth and reality—for example, the concept of power (IV; 6a–6b). Note: Deleuze defines “ideas”1 (which are not logical, generic, or abstract) as D&G define concepts (IV; 1), in terms of the thought of difference. In this book, ideas lay emphasis on activities of thinking, while concepts emphasize states of thought. CRITIQUE (Intro–I, VII)—In this book, the thought of relations beyond the external world of truth and reality, whether in our world or in fiction, which thereby considers how truth and reality are produced. Compare to INTERPRETATION. CUT (VII, VIII)—In cinematic worlds, an “out of field” (or new set/ensemble) vertically inserted within totalities, or a mobile shifting between perspectives/givens within

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ensembles, according to rational/logical relations (cause/effect) (VII; 2a). In cinematic reversals of power, INTERSTICES that are not rational but dissociative and compositional (VIII; 1a; 4; 5b). Compare to FRAMING. DETERRITORIALIZATION (IV–IX)—The loss of representable/logical functions and aims of territories, as in Kafka’s novels (V; 7–8); the effect of the plane of immanence on concepts and of the plane of composition on affects and percepts (IV; 3b; 4a; 5c); the status of the cinematic affect or interval as movement prior to its enclosure between perception and action (VII; 4, VIII; 5a); the effect of framing images in cinema prior to their reframing and reterritorialization (VII; 2a). DIFFERENCE (all chapters)—Becoming/change that cannot be sensed or perceived, but only thought; does not exist, but “subsists” or “insists” as the groundlessness beneath the ground of memory, which “swarms” with difference (II; 8). Also can become generic through the expectations of habit (I; 13). Compare to REPETITION. DISGUISE (II–VI, VIII–Conclusion)—In initial reversals of power, the perceptual problematizing of reality (III; 2); the Blanchotian paradox of manifestation through concealment (II; 5, III; 9, V; 2). In art’s radical reversals beyond power, the imperceptible state of ideas that cannot be revealed, and are also DISPLACED (IV; 3c; 6c, VIII; 3a). DISMANTLING (démontage) (V–VI, VIII)—For D&G, Kafka’s disassembling of the representational truths that capture and territorialize functions of assemblages (V; 8–10). In cinematic reversals beyond power, the effect of the Blanchotian fissure on territorial montages/assemblages of truth and reality (VIII). DISPLACEMENT (II–VI, VIII–Conclusion)—In initial reversals of power, the affective dislocation and questioning of truth (III; 2); the Blanchotian paradox of mobile–immobile relations (III; 9). Entails differential relations and intensity, though bound to movement (IV; 4a). In art’s radical reversals beyond power, the insensible state of ideas which cannot be located and are also DISGUISED (IV; 3c; 6c, VIII; 3a). ETERNAL RETURN (II–V, VIII, Conclusion)— In Deleuze’s third synthesis of time, the expulsion of generic difference from habit and generic repetition from memory. In dreams, the incessant and ungraspable return of the day as “strangely familiar”. In radical reversals beyond power, the thought that composes a fictional work of art by combining the indistinguishable/incessant features of unreality with the inexplicable/obstinately ungraspable features of falsity, by way of that which “appears” real and feels true (III; 9, IV; 3c–4a, V; 7, VIII; 3a–6, Conclusion). EVENT (II–IV, VII–IX)—In D&G’s reading of Blanchot, indeterminate/interminable movement on the plane of immanence; a “reserve” of becoming. For Blanchot, the seizure of the imaginary (II; 2). That which occurs as an interruption of cinematic movement or

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is unleased when reality becomes imaginary and perpetual; that which multiplies when truths or perspectives bifurcate to become “incompossible” (VIII; 2b–c). EXPLICATION (Development) (IV–VI, VIII, IX)—The movement and relation of affects and percepts to concepts: their repetition/variety; the “absolute movement” of events on the plane of immanence (IV; 1; 3a–c). Compare to IMPLICATION. FASCINATION: (II–III, V, VIII)—The Blanchotian literary experience wherein our imagination is seized by that with which we have no relation (II; 3). In artistic media’s reversals described in this book, the Blanchotian attraction to the immediate (V; 3b); apprehension by distance (III; 10, VIII; 5b). Compare to INSPIRATION. FISSURE (Intro, III, V–VI, VIII–IX)—Gap between dreamer and sleeper, involving Blanchot’s recognition without cognition (III; 8). For Blanchot, the reversal of interiority and exteriority in time’s absence (III; 4) . The “interstice” of Deleuze’s cinematic time that subordinates movement and reverses truth/reality (VIII; 5a–b). Compare to INTERVAL. FORCE (all chapters)—For Deleuze, the function of power to affect, and the capacity of matter and bodies to be affected, forming relations of power (I; 11); that which provokes perception, affection, and thought, beyond their subjective and objective limits—hence Deleuze’s phrase (oft-cited in this book) where we are “forced to think” (II; 7–9, IV; 1). Feature of Blanchotian incessant repetition and movements drawn toward the impossible that, as Blanchot says of Deleuze, “have no reality . . . only relations”2 (IV: 5c). Movement of the plane of immanence (IV; 3c). In Deleuze’s cinematic time, that which “sets free” the interval of movements, fissuring their relations (VIII; 5a–b). Compare to INTENSITY. FRAMING (VII–IX)—Cinematic “deterritorialization” of matter/light (image) through coordinates and scales that they lack in reality (VII; 1–2a); has the “absolute speed” of the plane of composition (VII; 2a–b). When involving SHOTS alongside CUTS, the vertical reframing and territorial assemblage of movement-images (VII; 2a). HABIT (II–V, VII–VIII)—For Deleuze, the first synthesis of time that creates its foundation and “living present,” where repetition “causes the present to pass,”3 preserving past in present through movement in the imagination (wherein the future may become generic expectation). Underneath its foundation, fuses and contracts instances indistinguishably (II; 6). Compare to MEMORY. IDEA—See CONCEPT. IMAGINATION (II–VI, VIII–IX)—For Deleuze, the visceral organ that contracts sensations (II; 6); for Blanchot, the “indeterminate milieu” that words “summon”, entailing two versions (II; 2–4)—what Deleuze calls the virtual. The immediate and forgotten milieu of the dream (III; 10); along with memory, that which exhibits unlimited movement (IV;

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1; 3a); hollows out REALITY in literature (V; 3b–6) and crystallizes cinematic reality (VIII; 2a). IMPLICATION (IV–VI, VIII, IX)—The relation of genuine difference to forms of repetition. In radical reversals beyond power, concepts and the plane of composition implicate affects and percepts (IV; 1; 3a–c). Compare to EXPLICATION. IMPOSSIBILITY (II–IV, VIII–IX)—For Blanchot, not simply the opposite of possibility, but a “radical reversal” involving the experience of the outside, which has three features: incessance, obstinate ungraspability, and becoming (II; 5); in Deleuze’s reading of Blanchot, the limits of the faculties—for example, limits of perception entail impossibilities of seeing (IV; 1, VIII; 4). INCESSANCE (II–VI, VIII, IX)—In reversals of power, first feature of Blanchot’s impossibility that parallels Deleuze’s paradox of repetition; feature of events (IV; 3a) and of oneiric movement (III; 5 and 9); feature of movement in cinematic time (VIII; 5a). Compare to OBSTINATE UNGRASPABILITY. INDISCERNIBILITY (II–VI, VIII–Conclusion)—In initial reversals of power, the hollowing out of reality on an exterior level, and the disguise of perception on an interior level as the chaos of disappearance within appearance (IV; 1–2); the impossibility of habit to form expectation (II; 8, III; 3–4), as with crystal-images (VIII; 2a; 3b); in radical reversals beyond power, the unresolvable incessance/becoming of repetition where reality and imaginary cannot be distinguished (V; 4, VIII; 2a; 3a–c, XI; 1–2; 3c–d). INDISTIGUISHABILITY—see INDISCERNIBILITY. INEXPLICABILITY (II–VI, VIII–Conclusion)—In initial reversals of power, the hollowing out of truth on an exterior level, and the displacement of affection on an interior level; the impossibility of memory to idealize the past (II; 7–8, III; 3b), as with chronosigns (VIII; 2b; 3a–b). In radical reversals beyond power, the status of nonrepresentative ideas that solve problems posed by art and the unconscious (IV; 5c, V; 10, VI, 5, VIII; 3c; 5b). INSPIRATION (III)—The effect of dream experience, which lacks mediation, and is grounded in oblivion; direct contact with imagination (III; 7). Compare to FASCINATION. INTENSITY (IV, VIII)—For D&G, feature of difference and speed, as well as concepts whose “intensive ordinates” make connections irrespective of “proximity or distance.”4 For Deleuze, the effect of implication: “Within intensity, we call that which is really implicated and enveloping difference; and we call that which is really implicated or enveloped distance.”5 Intensity implicates distance covered or Blanchot’s space of non-relation (VI; 5c), and cinematic interstices (VIII; 5a).

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INTERPRETATION (Intro, V–VI, VIII–Conclusion)—In this book, the evaluation of ideas and obscure values that implicate works of fictional art and radically reverse the effects of power. Compare to CRITQUE. INTERSTICE—see FISSURE. INTERVAL (VII–VIII)—In cinematic worlds, that which, between situation/perception and action, engenders truth and reality, and, for Deleuze, expresses the changing quality and relations of such worlds (VIII; 4); occupied by expressions and impressions—for example, affection-images, dreams, flashbacks, and impulse-images (VII; 7a–8a). Compare to FISSURE. LIMIT (IV, VIII)—See IMPOSSIBILITY. LITERALITY (V–VI, VIII–IX)—In artistic fiction’s reversals of power, a DeleuzoBlanchotian post-structuralist refusal of metaphor in favor of novelty/becoming; belief as apprehension and the replacement of religion with art (V; 3a; 10). A feature of cinematic art (VIII; 2a–b; 5a), such as Kubrickian realism influenced by Kafka (IX; 3a–b). MEMORY (II–V, VII–VIII)—For Deleuze, the second synthesis of time that grounds it, drawing us into into a world of difference by a “problematising and searching force”6 (which may lead to the idealization of the past), akin to Blanchot’s imagination (II; 7). In dreams, fantastic or realistic totalities drawn toward oblivion through incessance (III; 3a–b). MENACE (II–III, V–VI, VIII–IX)—In initial reversals of power, harassment by reality or truth (such as the day’s menace in the nightmare: II; 2–4, III; 6); the effect of the obstinately ungraspable on reality, or of the incessant and indiscernible on truth, as Blanchot’s “menacing proximity of a vague and vacant outside,”7 prior to the combination of the incessant and obstinately ungraspable (as in the inspiration of dreams, Blanchot’s diverging of difference, etc.). (II; 7–8, V; 5–6, VIII; 2a–b, IX; 1–2b and 3d). MILIEU (all chapters)—In the world of power, spaces of visibility in which we are disciplined/controlled or which are regulated (I; 7–9; 13–14); objects of territorialization (I; 11–12). In absolute form, the plane of immanence and Blanchot’s imaginary space (IV; 2a–4b, V; 3b; 10); blocs of space-time that make and are made by habits (II; 6), in distinction from the ametrical nature of rhythm and difference (IV; 4b); Deleuze’s “mobile sections” which constitute cinematic realism, “englobing” or encompassing action (VII; 1; 2b; 8b); that which is “transformed” through crystal images (VIII; 2a), and which, along with bodies, absorbs affects in cinematic art (VIII; 5a). MONTAGE (VII–IX)—The cinematic assemblage of movement-images (both on horizontal levels of the SHOT and vertical levels of FRAME and CUT), creating cohesive worlds of truth and reality. MOVEMENT (relative, absolute) (III–V, VII–IX)—that which produces percept(ion)/ affect(ion) and resonating sensation in the imagination through contraction (III; 3a),

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becoming incessant in the “pure approach” of dreams (III; 4–5). Perception/affection have relative movement, while percepts/affects—and the plane of immanence that complicates them—have infinite movement. Compare to relative movement/infinite speed of CONCEPTS. In cinema, the status of perception prior to mobile cuts, montage, or reframings which engender cinematic worlds/totalities (VII; 1–4; 5b–6). Subordinate to time in cinematic art (VIII; 5a), whether through internal limits (incessance) or outer limits (coexistence) (VIII; 2c; 3b–c). OBSTINATE UNGRASPABILITY (II–III, V, VIII)—In reversals of power, Blanchot’s second feature of impossibility (II; 5) that parallels inexplicable coexistences and differences of Deleuze’s second passive synthesis of time (II; 7). That which can be neither ignored nor comprehended, as in dream (III; 5 and 9). Concerns MENACE until combined with incessance and becoming (II; 8). OUTSIDE, THE (II–VI, VIII–Conclusion)—An experience of impossibility which Foucault characterizes as a (non)space, but for Blanchot entails the passion and combination of incessance, obstinate ungraspability, and becoming (II; 4; 5); an origin that is absent, but not an “absent origin.” In Deleuze’s reading of Blanchot, that which is closer than our interior world and further than the exterior world (Intro, II–VI, VIII–IX). PERCEPT/PERCEPTION (all chapters)—In a Foucauldian world, visibilities within disciplinary milieus, images that speak etiologically, and the capture of the visible by the articulable (I). In Deleuze’s syntheses of time, the habitual (and cinematic) operation of ignoring the uninteresting (II; 3, VII; 3). For D&G, perceptions are attached to subjects who see real milieus. In reversals of power, when initially hollowed out of interiority and reality (perception becoming percept), percepts are menaced by truth. In art and dream, the percept disguises problems. For D&G, percepts “exceed any lived,” by going beyond “those who experience them”and drawing perception into the imperceptible8: for example, landscapes without possibility (III; 2–3a). In radical reversals beyond power, when interacting with AFFECT as a “compound of sensation,” percepts are a force of becoming. In artistic fiction, such problems are ultimately complicated within the unlocatable displacements of affects and implicated by the imperceptibility of ideas (IV–VI, VIII–Conclusion); in cinematic time, percepts split or divide reality (crystallize: VIII; 2a), or more radically become “false” (VIII; 3b). PLANE OF COMPOSITION (VI–Conclusion)—In art’s reversal of power, the insensible and imperceptible composition of affects/percepts, paralleling Blanchot’s absent totality with the infinite speed of dissolution; the universe/cosmos in distinction from soil/earth of the PLANE OF IMMANENCE (IV; 2b–5b); the complicated state of the concept (IV; 3b; 5a–b); in fictional art’s radical reversals beyond power, the idea’s absence of origin (V; 10, VI; 6–7) and cinema (VIII; 1; 3a; 5b, IX). PLANE OF IMMANENCE (VI–Conclusion)—In art’s reversal of power, D&G’s unthinkable movement and object of thought, “a milieu that moves infinitely,”9 paralleling the incessance of Blanchot’s outside, or the event, which “neither stops nor

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begins”10 (IV; 3a); the complicated state of affects/percepts in their perpetually changing, amorphous form/materiality, in distinction from the immateriality of the PLANE OF COMPOSITION. The material/light of cinematic movement (IV; 5a, VII; 2b); in cinematic reversals of power, unleashed from beginning/endings (intervals) of movement (VIII; 5b). POWER (all chapters)—For Foucault, the negative, sovereign force or “subtraction” mechanism that “takes life or lets live” (I; 1); alternatively, the “positive”, affective relations that provoke, incite, or seduce action through biopolitical assemblages that either foster or disallow life/prosperity (I; 3). The complement of practical knowledge (seeing and speaking) and the source of truth and reality as we know it, including, as this book contends, the truths/realities of cinema (Intro, I; 4, VII; 6). PROBLEM—see DISGUISE. QUESTION—see DISPLACEMENT. REALITY (all chapters)—a product of power (I; 4); in a Deleuzian sense, our discernment and perception of milieus rendering what “is” habitually and “has been” (making it also “virtual”) (II; 6). That which constitutes the coherence of the exterior world (alongside TRUTH); compare to the interiority of PERCEPTION. In cinematic worlds, discernable spatio-temporal coordinates within natural/artificial milieus, encompassing subjects (within which action takes place: VII; 7b), whose focus, conceivably, is on the present moment. Solves the problem (superficially), “what is happening”? REPETITION (all chapters)—In reversals of power, the source of indistinguishability which nevertheless constitutes the “living present” (as in habit), preserving qualities (II; 1, III; 3, IV; 2a); in art, the explication/variety of affects/percepts; the variation of concepts (IV; 3c); Blanchotian incessance in dream (III; 3a–b and 5) and art (V; 2); also can become generic by virtue of the idealizations of memory (I; 13). Compare to DIFFERENCE. REVERSAL (Intro, II–VI, VIII–IX)—There are two “reversals” in this book: one is an initial reversal of the effects of power; the other is a “radical reversal” beyond power. The initial reversal of power “hollows out” interior worlds of affection/perception and exterior worlds of truth/reality (II; 4, V; 4–5), as with the crystal-images and chronosigns of cinematic time (VIII; 2a–c). The radical reversal beyond—or outside of—power is not simply its “exception” (II; 4); rather, in fictional art, the outside of our interior and exterior worlds are themselves reversed, entering into a dynamic such that they are both incessant and obstinately ungraspable (Blanchot) and both indiscernible and inexplicable (Deleuze), in accordance with the becoming of eternal return (II; 8). Such a radical reversal is composed by ideas and expressive of obscure values (V; 10, VI; 5–6, VIII; 3a–6, IX). SEGMENTATION (I, V–VI)—In Deleuze’s reading of Foucault, the rigid, binary division of statements (branding/classification) and milieus (e.g., keeping the sick from the

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healthy); segments can also be “supple” in that you may be approaching or moving between/beyond segments (I; 12). In D&G’s reading of Kafka, that which initially territorializes desire but is ultimately distributed along an unlimited field (V; 10, VI; 5). SHOT (VII–IX)—In French, the plan (as in plan d’immanence), plane or horizon of cinematic images carried by their movement, whether within or of the frame, and determined by cuts while it determines movement between givens in an ensemble/set (VII; 1; 2a). The single (im)mobile camera’s perspective, whether returned to (shot/ reaction-shot/original shot), held (tracking shot), and whether medium, long, or close-up; the horizontal side of assemblages of movement-images (VII; 1–2a; 5b). SOVEREIGNTY (II–VII)—Politically, Foucault’s “right of seizure” (I; 1–3, VI; 1); in artistic reversals of power, Blanchot’s seizure or grip of the ungraspable (II: 2; 3; 5, III; 5; 9, V; 1). SPEED (relative, absolute) (IV–V, VIII)—temporal and differential relations between movements or milieus. Relative when measurable; absolute when conceptual and within art’s plane of composition (IV; 1–3c; 5a–c). In cinematic art, thought’s composition that is not subordinate to MOVEMENT (VII; 2a–b, VIII; 1a–b; 2c; 5b) TERRITORY, TERRITORIALIZATION (I, IV–IX)—In worlds of power, the assemblage that has logical/abstract aims—for example, “reform” in prison (I; 11); for D&G, an assemblage of functions and forces that are expressive. In cinematic worlds, the cohesion of truth and reality through assemblages of movement-images (VII; 5b). Compare to DETERRITORIALIZATION. THOUGHT—see CONCEPT. TIME (II–IV, VIII, IX)—In the world of power, the superficial measure of movement (VIII; 1b) or, in cinematic art’s reversals of power, that which splits or bifurcates movement (VIII; 1b–3a; 5a–b). For Deleuze, the groundlessness of becoming and force of eternal return, and for Blanchot, a pure approach of absence (II; 8, VIII; 5a, Conclusion)— however, in such reversals of power, time’s absence is not the absence of time (III; 4, n. 46). Compare to MOVEMENT. TRUTH (all chapters)—a product of power (I: 4); in a Deleuzian sense, that which is searched for via the affective operation of memory (II; 7). That which constitutes the coherence of the exterior world (alongside REALITY); compare to the interiority of AFFECTION. In cinematic worlds, the coalescence of givens or events around that which is not given, providing coherence (VII; 3); that which is discovered as situations are disclosed (VII; 7c). A condition of the past that is distinct from its fabrication or falsity (VII; 5a–6). Answers the question (superficially) “what happened?” VALUE (Intro, I, V–VI–Conclusion)—In the world of truth/reality, concerns human life—its facilitation, preservation, and prosperity, even, as this book contends, when carried over into fiction (Intro, V; chapter intro and 1, VII; Intro and 6–9).

286

Glossary

VALUE, OBSCURE (Intro, V–VI, VIII–Conclusion)—In art’s radical reversals beyond power, the effect of affects/percepts on our sensibility, reformed around the inexplicabilities and indiscernibilities of non-representative concepts (IV; 3c). Like Blanchot’s death that is “not important” (V; 2), irreducible to value placed on life—and through fictional art, involes the literal belief in the impossible and outside (IV; 6c, V; 3a, VI; 6, VIII; chapter intro; 3a; 6, IX; 1 and 2, 3e). WORLD (all chapters)—The exterior coherence of reality and truth in combination (Intro); as an interior world, the identification of affections and perceptions with subjects who undergo them (alongside imagination and memory: III; 2); in literature, a totality that may be imagined delusionally (Intro, V; 2), and in cinema, a qualitatively changing, illusory, open totality that is never given but expressed through intervals, cuts, and framing (VII; 1; 4–5b); in reversals of power, that which is “restored” (as unreal and false) through belief in the impossible and new via cinematic art (VIII; 6), literary art (V; 7–10), and dream (III; 3b).

Notes Introduction: How the True World Finally Became a Bad Film 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

C 177, 231. Jean Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Steven Ungar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 51–2. Sartre, What is Literature?, 47. Sartre, What is Literature?, 67. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 38. C2 171. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 32–6. Cf. Neil Postman, Amusing ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (London: Penguin, 2006), Chapter 11. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982): 4.789. F 71. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 778. F 120. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?,” in Textual Strategies, ed. Josué Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979). 158. Foucault, “What is an Author?,” 158, 153. IC 45. ECC 135. NP 31. NP 86. F 87 (translation modified). Cf. “Literature and the Right to Death” in WF. F/B 25. SL 33. Novalis, quoted in SL 138. Cf. Blanchot’s characterization of artistic experience as “the glistening flow of the eternal outside”; SL 83. SL 138. Novalis, quoted in SL 138. F 96–7. DR 74 IC 44. B 74. C2 168. SL 243. C2 168. C2 168.

287

288

Notes to pp. 28–34

Chapter I 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

HS SD 240. HS DP 187. DP “The means of correct training.” SD 44. SD 69. HS 137. F 92. DP DP HS 138–9. HS 138. HS 138. HS 136. HS 94. HS 94. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 786. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 788. F F. Cf. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 789. HS 94. F 71–2. HS 95. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 780. HS 95. F 83 Michel Foucault, This is not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 26. Foucault, This is not a Pipe, 67 Foucault, This is not a Pipe, 77. Michel Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 221–2. Foucault, Subjectivity and Truth, 18 DP 194. SD 249. HS 139. SD 249. Todd May, Our Practices, Our Selves (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 16. HS 139 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 163. SD 249–50. SD 246. SD 246. DP 201.

Notes to pp. 34–41 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

289

DP 200. DP 205. DP 201. My emphasis. DP 205. DP 204. DP 202. DP 207. DP 202. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 21. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 20. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 20 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 21. SD 246. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 243. Todd May, The Philosophy of Foucault (Trowbridge: Cromwell Press, 2006), 156. Michel Foucault, “The Crisis of Medicine or the Crisis of Antimedicine,” trans. Edgar Knowlton and Clare O’Farrell, Foucault Studies 1 (December 2004): 16. BC 108. BC 108. F 32. Translation modified. F 32. N 179. HS 146. Ibid. 151. HS 155. HS 35. HS 155. HS 155 F 71. N 39–40. F 89. HS 95. HS 94. F 86 SD 253. Cf TP 43 and F 32–3. TP 40. F 33. TP 313. TP 313. TP 313. Cf TP xvii, and Kenneth Surin, “Surroundings,” Canadian Journal of Communication 41 (2016): 403–10. Surin, “Surroundings,” 315. Cf my Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 36. TP 320 F 65

290

Notes to pp. 42–53

89 Translation modified from “Encompasser” to “englober,” which, as the translators of Cinema 1 note, means “the sense of ‘to include, embody, bring together into a whole’ ” (C1 xiii). 90 C1 141–2. 91 DR 74. 92 WP 144. 93 WP 136. 94 Cf F (translation modified). 95 WP 101, 36. 96 Cf WP 6, 146. 97 Gilles Deleuze, Image and Text, 235 98 Cf HS. 99 DR 71. 100 DR 85. 101 DR 79. 102 F 97. 103 HS 138.

Chapter II 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

DR 107. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vol III: Sovereignty, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 240–1. SL 104. SL 106–7. HS 138. SL 96. WF 255. SL 154–5. WF 320. WF 7–8. SnB 25. Cf. IC 253: “every negation of God . . . is still always a discourse that speaks of and to God.” SL 96. Cf. SnB: “Death is ‘[A]lways uncertain, [and] always unrealized.’ ” SL 260. SL 260. SL 260. WD 125. SL 262. WF 316. WF 316. SL 141. SL 261. SL 103 SL 104. SL 105. SL 255. SL 258–9.

Notes to pp. 53–60 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

291

SL 262. SL 262. SL 242–3. SL 263. SL italics added. SL 32. Here I use Leslie Hill’s translation of this passage in Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing (188). Hill, Leslie, Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 188. F/B 47–8. F/B 27. F/B 28. F/B 28. Kevin Hart, The Dark Gaze (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 144. F/B 47–8. WF 8. F 98. F/B 51. F 96. F 96. F 96. F 97. F 97. F 94. IC 196. F 97. C2 167. DR 64 on Sartrean nothingness. F 66. F 61. Todd May’s phrase to explain Foucault’s approach to contingency and history (The Philosophy of Foucault, 78). Blanchot, “How to Discover the Obscure?” in The Infinite Conversation F/B 24. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Image or Time?” in Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 19. Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Image or Time?” 19. Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Image or Time?” 19. IC 47. Watt’s work on Blanchot and cinema will be explored further (VIII; 1a). Calum Watt, Blanchot and the Moving Image (Oxford: Legenda, 2019), 163. Watt, Blanchot and the Moving Image, 40. Watt, Blanchot and the Moving Image, 97. Watt, Blanchot and the Moving Image, 151. IC 45. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 789. Originally published as “Comment décourvrir l’obscur?” Nouvelle Revue Française 83 (November 1959): 867–79.

292 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117

Notes to pp. 61–68 IC 47. IC 44. IC 43. IC 43. IC 43. IC 45. WD 16–17. Cf. AwO 30, 25. IC 46. IC 45. See V; 3b. WD 28. WD 28. IC 46. IC 45–6. IC 45–6. This process will be discussed at length in dreams and in literature in the following chapters. IC 46. IC 46. SL 32. Cf. my article, “The Determination of Sense via Deleuze and Blanchot,” Deleuze Studies 2, no. 2 (December 2008). DR 77, 81. DR 70. WP 212. I; 4 and VII 3–6 Cf. DR 211. Cf. Leibniz on incompossiblity. DR 79. DR 70. DR 71. DR 70. DR 70. B 55. DR 76. DR 74. DR 74. IC 313. DR 70. DR 79. Translation modified. DR 79–80. Cf. PS. PS 79, 82. (Cf. Le Livre à Venir, “II. L’expérience de Proust”, section entitled “Le temps d’écrire”). PS 82 PS 81–2. DR 85. DR 147.

Notes to pp. 68–76

293

118 BC 16. 119 BC 15. “Menace” is originally translated as “threat,” but menace—a key term of Blanchot’s—indicates a vaguer, atmospheric threat that lies behind the Proustian imaginary: “une menace bien plus constant” (Cf. Le Livre à Venir, “II. L’expérience de Proust”, section entitled “Le temps d’écrire”). 120 BC 16. 121 BC 14. 122 PS 86. 123 Proust, cited in PS 20. 124 PS 61, 98. 125 PS 9. 126 DR 85. 127 DR 102. 128 Cf. DR 85, 83. 129 DR 143. Italics added. 130 DR 118. 131 DR 114. 132 Blanchot, SL cited in DR 112. 133 DR 112. 134 DR 112. 135 DR 112. 136 WD 116. 137 WD 116. 138 DR 115. Note that this involves the concept of the cover art for this book. 139 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 140 N 47. 141 DR 115. 142 DR 55. 143 DR 55. 144 IC 149. 145 IC 149. 146 DR 94. 147 SnB 11, 14. 148 SnB 22. Translation modified. 149 SnB 60. Translation modified. 150 IC 196. 151 IC 154. 152 IC 61. 153 IC 156. 154 SnB 12. 155 IC 43. 156 SL 243. 157 WD 65. 158 WD 66–7. 159 N 111. 160 DR 118. 161 F 95.

294

Notes to pp. 79–90

Chapter III 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

William Shakespeare, The Tempest 4.1.156–7, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1680. SL 168. F 97. SL 267. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 1955), 147. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 168. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 112. DR 114. DR 112. DR 112. DR 107. WP 164. WP 164. DR 112. As we will see, Deleuze will also call this the chaos of infinite speed—IV; 2a–b. DR 70. DR 70. B 51. SL 32. DR 73. B 74. B 75. DR 70. WP 211. B 74. WP 164. Cf. SPP. C1 63. Henri Bergson, Dreams, trans. Edwin Slosson (Auckland: Floating Press, 1914), 47. Simon Morgan Wortham, The Poetics of Sleep (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 23. Bergson, Dreams, 26. Bergson, Dreams, 25. Henri Bergson, Laughter, trans. Cloudesley Brereton (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 186–7. C2 58. SL 266. SL 266. B 74. My emphasis. DR 70. SL 167-8 SL 264. SL 264–5. William Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.1.64–5, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1208.

Notes to pp. 91–101 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

295

SL 255. SL 267. SL 30. Time’s absence can be distinguished from the absence of origin, where there is no origin of the dream or of Blanchot’s outside—not even an “absent origin” that consists or insists. That is, Blanchot’s outside and the Blanchotian dream have no origin (or destination), but draw us in an incessant movement; they thus do not have an “absent origin,” like a void or nothingness that exists—rather, there is no origin (II; 4). SL 31. SL 30. IC 157. ND xxvii. SL 175. LS 151–2. SL 155. LS 54. LS 151. LS 54. SL 168. SL 168. SL 266. SL 163. CS 469. CS 477. CS 486. SL 169. CS 503. Translation modified. SL 169. SL 169. SL 163. F/B 47. SL 172. SL 164. IC 195. IC 196. IC 196. In Nietzschean terms, dreams are “intoxicating” (cf. NP 146—fictions which denigrate life and dreams which reflect reality). NP 113. Wortham, The Poetics of Sleep, 115 and 113. ND xvii. ND xxi. ND xvii. SL 267. SL 265. SL 267. Translation modified. SL 31. Italics added. SL 30. IC 46.

296 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

Notes to pp. 101–114 ND xxv. SL 268. ND xxv. SL 243. ND xxv. IC 46. IC 312. IC 67. SL 31. ND xxv. DR 107. FS 119. WF 18. SL 262. IC 30. IC 28. IC 38. WP 80–1.

Chapter IV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

WP 201. For background on this, refer to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s affectus. François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event, trans. Kieran Aarons (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 105. N 97. DR 141. Cf. Lisa Akervall, “Cinema, Affect and Vision,” rhizomes 16 (Summer 2008). Joe Hughes, Deleuze’s “Difference and Repetition”: A Reader’s Guide (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 78. C2 167. Cf. DR 243. D 148. DR 70. WP 118. B 74. WP 42. WP 118. WP 118. WP 42. D 148. D 30. TP 313. C1 2. IC 159 DR 262, 28 B 86. WP 204.

Notes to pp. 115–128 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

297

WP 191. WP 187. DR 153. SL 31. WP 59. Phrase from BtC 213 on Beckett. WP 36. WP 36. WP 156–7 WP 156. WP 157. F 96. C1 58–9. C1 58–9. Emphasis added. ES 87. WP 41. Translation modified. DR 79. IC 195. WP 85. DR 79. DR 79. DR 82. WP 66. WP 197. WP 41. Translation modified. WP 105 WP 187 WP 20. WP 66. In a Spinozist sense, affects last until they are determined by another affect that replaces them. We are always in some “affective” state. WP 197. For this notion of truth or reality “haunting” a “hollowed out” interiority, see II; 4. SL 240–1. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. G. Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Pt2P49S. 160. WF 19–21. WP 197. WD 20. WP 197. This connection of chaos to the cosmos is explored further in the conclusion to this book. WP 206, 197. C1 59. TP 311. DR 89. WP 41. WP 169. BtC 9.

298 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

Notes to pp. 128–139 FB 11. FB 34. FB 103. FB 58. TP 313. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2003), 26. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze in Music, Painting, and the Arts, 30. Cf. WP 91. WP 208. DR 28. See also WP 207. DR 28. Emphasis added. C1 60. F 99. F 89. WP 36. C2 168. DR 102. PS 87. IC 159. Cf. WP 211 and FB 45. DR 94. DR 202. WP 23. WD 60. IC 159. SnB 12. WP 136. SnB 49. WP 90. WP 56. WP 158. WP 22, 36. DR 227. DR 228. WP 20. WP 21, 210. NP 39–40. Translation modified. IC 161. Cf. Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 778. F 83 F 86–7. F 120. Translation modified. WP 79. DR 73. ES 94. NP 102 (translation modified), 31. NP 31. NP 104.

Notes to pp. 139–146

299

Chapter V 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Cf. Aristotle’s Poetics, 1448b, and Malcom Heath’s “Aristotle and the Pleasures of Tragedy,” in Making Sense of Aristotle: Essays in Poetics, ed. Øivind Andersen and Jon Haarberg (London: Duckworth, 2001), 7–24: “there is a distinction between deriving pleasure from something that causes distress and deriving pleasure from the distress it causes (‘from pity and fear’).” SL 89. Italics added. SL 163. SL 106. WP 118 (on chaos). F 97–8. K 49. K 49. Translation modified. SL 77. C2 168. Cf. K 48. Cf. WP 67. BtC 201. WF 300. SL 215. WF 316. WF 330. WF 330. WF 320. SL 106. SL 244, 243, 107. WF 316. WF 326. WF 328–9. WF 327–8. WF 330. WF 327. WF 328. SL 243. SL 46. SL 264. SL 44. SL 264n. DR 277. My emphasis. See II; 5. SL 81. Maurice Blanchot, Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 6. NP 172. NP 147. Cf IC 41. SPP 26.

300

Notes to pp. 147–156

42 François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event, trans. Kieran Aarons (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 40. 43 Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event, 40. 44 SL 82. 45 WF 18–9. 46 SL 83. 47 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), 2. 48 G. W. Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Book I, trans. Ernst Behler and Arnold V. Miller (New York: Continuum, 1990), no. 115. 49 See also Niklas Luhmann’s theory of art as a social system that engenders contradictory possibilities and “elicits astonishment,” thereby preserving itself and functioning like an “immune system.” 50 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1953), 171. 51 Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, no. 161Z. 52 G. W. Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. Walter Henry Johnston and L. G. Struthers (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 81. 53 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 193. 54 DR 116. 55 Peter Zhang, “Deleuze’s Relay and Extension of McLuhan,” Explorations in Media Ecology 10, no. 3–4 (2011): 209. 56 Marshall McLuhan, Essential McLuhan (London: Routledge, 1995), 266. 57 SL 260. 58 IC 403. 59 IC 38. 60 IC 32. 61 WF 22. 62 WF 22. 63 K 9. 64 K 12. 65 K 32. 66 D1 August 21, 1913. 67 WF 19–21. 68 SL 168. 69 WF 19–20. 70 K 96, n. 16. 71 WD 16. 72 D1 August 21, 1913; April 27, 1915. 73 WF 19. 74 WF 19. 75 SL 168. 76 SL 169. 77 SL 169. 78 SL 169. 79 K 72. 80 CS 113. 81 K 36. 82 Cf. K 60. 83 K 34–37, 59. 84 K 54.

Notes to pp. 156–166 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

K 60. K 51. K 50. K 51 (phrase used frequently by D&G). K 49. K 83 K 87. K 83. Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002), 122. K 48. K 58. K 48 SL 81. K 97. TP 531n. Emphasis added. K 48. John Keats, Selected Letters of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 195. Beth Lau, “Jane Austen and John Keats: Negative Capability, Romance and Reality,” Keats–Shelley Journal 55 (2006): 84. Cited in SL 90. K 53. Translation modified. K 46. SL 77. Quote discussed in the introduction to this chapter. BtC 202. IC 384. IC 384. TP 229. WP 101. K 86. K 53. K 86. WP 66–7. FB 19. FB 2. SL 77. SL 82. WP 110.

Chapter VI 1 2 3 4 5

301

SL 80. Eva-Marie Kröller, “Kafka’s ‘Castle’ as inverted romance,” Neohelicon 4 (September 1976): 3–4, 287. SL 77. SL 80. Vermessen, while connoting the act of measuring, is also an adjective meaning presumptuous or imprudent, which fits with K’s presumption that there are boundaries between the castle and village that can be observed, measured, or

302

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44

Notes to pp. 166–174 “surveyed.” Heinz Politzer astutely interprets this tension to mean that K is “perpetually overstepping his limits (sich vermessen)” in Franz Kafka (New York: Cornell University Press, 1962), 224. Similarly, Wilhelm Emrich claims that the land surveyor position is “revolutionary”: “land surveying . . . mean[s] examining and checking the land and ownership conditions . . . [I]n the nature of land surveying there exists a revolutionary element [because it . . .] signifies . . . change in ownership.” Franz Kafka (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1968), 368–9. C 3. C 3. C 4. C 11. C 11. C 11–12. C 14. C 20. C 20. C 13. C 14. C 24. C 35. C 40–1. SL 79. C 40 C 41. SL 79. C 48. C 51. SL 80 SL 80. Michelle Woods, Kafka Translated (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 169: “the Czech word ‘klam’ . . . means fraud, fake, illusion.” C 93. C 230. C 64. C 237. C 237. C 80. My emphasis. SL 80. C 145. SL 128. SL 35. SL 40–1. SL 82. SL 83. SL 306. Franz Kafka, The Castle: A New Translation, based on the Restored Text, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 237. Here, the Muir translation does not capture the legislative aspect of Jeremiah’s description. C 47.

Notes to pp. 174–188 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

303

C 49. C 49. C 54. SL 242–3. C 139, 141. C 138. C 96. K 78. C 30. This term could be also translated as economic/industrial activities, even as “farms.” Kafka, The Castle: A New Translation, 59. C 84. C 84. My emphasis. C 86. C 92. C 92. C 88. C 116–17. C 80. C 154. C 155. SL 80. C 278. C 280. Cf. K 77 on the “contiguous and faraway.” SL 80. Cf. B 55. C 228. K 50. K 50–1. K 51. SL 80. SL 80. IC 41. SL 89 WF 6–8. IC 42. IC 45. Cf. C2 171–2; VIII; 6. SL 80. WD 77. AwO 15.

Chapter VII 1 2

F 65. Cf. works by Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, such as L’idée d’image, Ecraniques: Le film du texte, and her article “Image or Time?” in Afterimages; Calum Watt, Blanchot

304

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Notes to pp. 188–196 and the Moving Image: Fascination and Spectatorship (Oxford: Legenda, 2019), and Tom Conley, Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Cf. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). See discussion of Sartre, Heidegger, and narratology in the Introduction. Seymour Chatman, “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (And Vice Versa),” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1980): 121–40. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 48–9. Cf. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). C1 59 (coupes translated here as “cuts,” not “sections”). Cf. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2003), Chapter 1, for a treatment of Deleuze’s appropriation of Bergson. Cf. C2 143, 271. Cf. Cavell, The World Viewed 24–5. Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 43. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 45. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), 20. C1 14. C1 12. Translation modified. C1 17. C1 7. C1 17. C1 17. IC 46. C1 14. DR 28. C1 15. My emphasis. WP 197. Allan Thomas, Deleuze, Cinema and the Thought of the World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 130. C1 10–11. C1 33. C1 58–60. C1 59. C1 16. WF 330. Cf. C2 26–7. Gilles Deleuze, L’image-temps (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985), 208. My translation. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), 2. C1 70. C1 63. C2 21. C2 26. C2 127. C1 141.

Notes to pp. 196–207 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

305

C1 160. WP 164. WP 142. WP 141. WP 141. WP 189. WP 96. WP 65. C2 29. C2 211. C1 96. C2 273, 47. C2 277. C2 61. C1 10. C2 227. C2 236. C2 229. C1 70. C1 10. C2 276. C1 16. C1 16. C2 277. C2 236. Cf. DR. C1 62. DR 74. C2 133. C2 67. F 64. My emphasis. F 65. F 71. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 789. C1 164. C1 155. C1 141. C1 141. C1 160. Cf. C1 Chapter 10. BC 108. C1 120–2. C1 109. C1 111. LS 152. Cf. “The Night, the Rain” in Thomas, Deleuze, Cinema, and the Thought of the World, who calls this encounter with Deleuze and Blanchot an “overcoming of the human” in an “exposure” to the suspension of the world. 87 LS 119. 88 C2 58.

306 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

Notes to pp. 207–217 C1 123. C1 129. CC 70–2. C1 134. Cf. C1 125. C1 128. DR 102. Cf. C1 7, VII; 2a. DR 28. DR 275. DR 28. C1 128. Cf. BC 113–14. BC 114, 113. DR 203.

Chapter VIII 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

SL 89 C2 168, 180. Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The Brain is the Screen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 366. Antonin Artaud, Collected Works, Volume Three, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Calder & Boyars, 1972), 77. Translation modified. Cf. LS. FB 45. BtC 38. SL 89. C2 263. Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, 178. Artaud, Collected Works, Volume Three, 66. C2 167. C2 246. Flaxman, The Brain is the Screen, 366. K 48. TP 333. Cf. AO 36: “a machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks (coupures).” K 86–7. Maurice Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur, 1st ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 175. Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur, 177. Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur, 179. Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur, 179. Maurice Blanchot, The Most High, trans. Allan Stoekl (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 65. Watt, Blanchot and the Moving Image, 125, 141. Watt, Blanchot and the Moving Image, 140. Watt, Blanchot and the Moving Image, 126. IC 45.

Notes to pp. 218–230 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

307

BtC 15–16. Daniel Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 131. IC 45. SL 31. C2 271. Cf. Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, 123. D 150. C2 126. C2 127. C2 81 DR 79. WP 41. N 52. N 52. N 51. C2 20–1. While Deleuze is speaking here of opsigns in general, the logic conceivably extends to the crystal insofar as it is the first direct image of time. DR 102. David Deamer, Deleuze’s Cinema Books (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 41–4, 54. C2 74. LS 151–2. C2 99. C2 101. LS 151. C2 102. IC 45. C2 103. C2 101. D 148. Translation modified. D 150. N 52. Fellini, cited in C2 99. C2 99. C2 99. Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). Deamer, Deleuze’s Cinema Books, 56. C2 131. C2 132. C2 130. C2 126. C2 128. C2 181. C2 180. C2 275. Deleuze does not use Foucault’s “pouvoir” to describe such powers, but “puissance.” C2 189. C2 186.

308 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

Notes to pp. 230–239 C2 276. C2 275. C2 276. C2 275. C2 186, 276. DR 33. Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, 159. C2 186, 185. Cf. C2 184. C2 284 n. 39. Cf. C2 279. C2 253. F 140n19. Deleuze, Leibniz (Foucault-Blanchot-Cinéma), November 30, 1986, https://www. webdeleuze.com/textes/77. My translation. Deleuze, Cours Vincennes. My translation. Deleuze, Cours Vincennes. My translation. DR 115. C2 279. C2 279. SnB 24. C2 279. C2 213. C2 279, 278. Cf. K 5. C2 179–80. C2 180. C2 250. My emphasis. C2 271. C2 277, 180. C2 272. Flaxman, The Brain is the Screen. 366. As in Eisenstein, where two images are different by virtue of being alike; hence the dialectical, organic unity in 5; 2b. C2 272. C2 272. C2 83. C2 100. C2 139. Translation modified (“setting” is originally “milieu”). C2 179–80. C2 167. C2 168. This is a citation of his from earlier in his chapter on thought and cinema, but is not cited in this context. Artaud, Collected Works, Volume Three, 77. Translation modified. Cf. LS 88. C2 180. Translation modified. Note that all major English editions of The Time-Image fail to include two translator’s footnotes in Chapter 7 (i.e., two asterisks which have no reference), which results in a

Notes to pp. 239–266

117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130

309

publication error wherein the footnotes are pushed back first by one and then by two relative to the original French edition (footnotes 2 and 20 are not in any English edition). Thus Deleuze’s reference to Blanchot in this citation is actually a reference to n. 44, not n. 46. IC 46. Translation modified IC 30; see III; 11. WP 20. C2 130. My emphasis. F 89. N, vii. C1 2. SL 267. See III; 9. ES 94. C2 171. C2 172. C2 170. C2 172.

Chapter IX 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

SL 168. C2 172. C2 100. AwO 21. UC 9. UC 11. UC 16. David Fleming and William Brown, “Through a (First) Contact Lens Darkly: Arrival, Unreal Time and Chthulucinema,” Film-Philosophy 22, no. 3 (2018): 340–63. Fleming and Brown, “Through a (First) Contact Lens Darkly,” 340–63. Michel Clement, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), 186. C2 206. C2 206. C2 206. For a similar comparison, Cf Clement, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, 259. C2 211. Translation modified. WP 208. WP 210. WP 210–11. C2 212. IC 45. F 97. C 86. SL 104. BN 29. My translation. Cf. DR 115.

310

Notes to pp. 266–280

Conclusion 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Cf. DR. DR 8–9. DR 7. Cf. DR and NP. DR 112. Phrase used frequently in DR: 114, 196, 202, etc. DR 122. SL 163. IC 45. DR 94. My emphasis. NP 173. NP 69. IC 156. DR 57. My emphasis. DR 57. DR 58. DR 57. Phrase from DR 72–3. See II; 6 on first passive syntheses. DR 300 C2 168. IC 43. IC 43. C2 168. DR 199. Translation modified. C2 170. Cf K (phrase used frequently). WP 118, 42. DR 68. DR 243. Italics added. DR 128. DR 128. DR 115. DR 115. DR 299. WF 316. Borges, cited in DR 116. WP 207. WP 204, 202. WP 23. IV; 5c. SnB 12. IV; 5c. See II; 4, III; 4 and glossary entry on TIME regarding time’s absence and the absence of origin (to be distinguished from the absence of time and an “absent origin”). 42 IC. II; 5. 43 SL 77–8. 44 SL 215.

Notes to pp. 280–283

Glossary 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Cf. DR. IC 161. DR 81, 79. WP 20–1, 210. DR 237. DR 106. SL 242–3. WP 164. WP 36. WP 157.

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Index How to use this index: This index will be most useful in conjunction with the glossary, where all major terms are defined (and which utilizes the cross-referencing system of this book, explained in the “how to use this book” section). Note that I intentionally excluded Deleuze’s name from this glossary since the overwhelming majority of the book deals with his work. Blanchot and Foucault are also largely excluded, except in rare cases where I felt it helpful to include them in sub-entries for certain terms. For any necessary clarification on from whom certain terms arise—whether Deleuze, Blanchot, Foucault, or myself—see the glossary (e.g., “reversal” is a term unique to the definition of art in this book). Note also that some key terms from this index do not appear in the glossary but are defined in an extended glossary available separately (e.g., desire, the double, ambiguity, dissimulation, the cinema terms, etc.). Finally, note that for key terms that have sub-entries and that are defined in the glossary, I exclude the page number for that glossary definition in the sub-entries themselves, as it would be redundant; any other references to the glossary (pages 277–286) in subentries means that both the term and sub-entry appear in the same definition (not simply in proximity on the same page), which is why those pages are listed one at a time. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick), 248 Abrams, M. H., 147 action-image large form (cinema), 12, 20, 194–6, 198–9, 203, 208–9, 212, 221, 223, 228, 230, 234, 244–5, 248–50 small form (cinema), 12, 20, 194–6, 198–9, 203–5, 212, 223, 228, 230, 234, 244–5, 257 affect, 277 (defined) absorbed by milieus (in cinematic time), 22, 197, 236–40, 262 vs. affection, 81–3, 85, 122–3, 152, 221–2 and becoming, 11–12, 17–18, 22, 82, 102, 118, 123–6, 128–9, 150–1, 153–6, 168, 183, 226, 228, 235–6, 282–3 in cinematic chronosigns, 21, 222–5, 227–8, 237–8, 243, 250, 253–4, 284 and displacement, 11, 14–19, 21, 23, 81–3, 100–1, 118, 121–3, 146, 148, 153–4, 156, 158, 162, 165, 168–70, 172, 180–1, 183, 211, 217, 223, 226–7, 235–6, 240–1, 246–7, 249, 251–4, 260–2, 274, 276, 279, 281

and falsity/untruth, 9, 11–12, 21–2, 83, 109–10, 121, 123, 221, 223, 227–8, 237–9, 246–7, 250, 253, 257–8, 260 and the fissure/interstice (of dreamer/ sleeper, of seeing/speaking, and of cinematic time), 21–2, 82, 177, 197, 221, 227–8, 234–8, 243 and force, see force, affect and and ideas/concepts/thought, 11–12, 15–18, 22–4, 58, 104, 108–11, 114, 118–23, 126–31, 133–8, 144, 146, 156, 162–3, 166, 170, 172, 177, 181–2, 213, 217, 222–4, 226–7, 235–40, 243, 245–6, 250, 253, 255, 271–2, 280, 281, 283, 286 and intensity, 16, 22, 119, 122–3, 129–30, 235–6 and the interval (of cinematic movement/affection-image), 20–2, 190–1, 195–8, 202–5, 210, 221, 226, 234–8, 240, 280 and memory/the second synthesis of time (active and passive), 14, 32, 45–6, 68–71, 82–3, 85–6, 89, 109, 122–3, 222, 225, 235, 266, 281, 285, 286

321

322

Index

and the plane of composition, 16, 113, 117–18, 120–1, 124–6, 128, 138, 144, 162, 181, 217, 225, 227, 270–2, 279, 281, 283 and the plane of immanence, 16, 21, 114, 118–21, 123, 125–6, 128, 162, 189, 221, 236, 239–40, 276, 278, 282–3 and power (incite, provoke, etc.), 13, 20, 30–2, 39–41, 43, 45–6, 57–8, 83, 101, 104, 122, 136, 139, 145, 157–8, 167, 188, 196–7, 202–3, 235, 280 and questions/as questioning, 11–12, 14–16, 20, 22–3, 68, 70, 82–3, 85, 92, 100–1, 121, 123, 126, 130, 133, 135, 144, 148, 154, 168–9, 181, 201–2, 217, 222, 228, 235, 237, 240–1, 254, 260, 268, 278, 279 and Spinoza, 82, 85, 122–4, 135, 240, 296–7 and truth (at the level of affection/ affective search for), 14, 32–3, 45, 69, 82, 109, 122–4, 126, 135, 146, 149–53, 162, 187, 195–8, 202, 221–3, 227, 237, 253 affection, see affect, affection vs. Agamben, Giorgio, 47 ambiguity, three levels of (Blanchot) first level of ambiguity, 53 second level of ambiguity, 54, 143, 216, 226; see also menace third level of ambiguity, 54–6, 63; see also dissimulation; fascination Aristotle, 2, 86, 139, 230, 299 n.1 Arrival (Villeneuve), 22, 248–54, 259 art, 277 (defined) and chaos, 16, 108, 113, 117–19, 125, 127, 140, 241, 264, 265, 271–2 and cinema, vi, 11–12, 18–19, 22, 188, 202, 211–14, 217–18, 225–6, 231, 234–5, 238, 240–2, 243, 252, 264, 274, 278, 282, 283, 285 and concepts (ideas/thought), vi-vii, 6–7, 9, 11, 15–17, 18–19, 23–4, 103–4, 108–10, 114, 118–22, 126, 128, 130, 137–8, 141, 144, 162, 181, 183, 202–3, 212, 217, 231, 235, 238–41, 243, 247, 250–1, 254, 259, 264, 265–7, 269–73, 283, 284, 285

and death, 17, 23, 50–3, 124–6, 140, 142, 212–13, 252, 270, 286 vs. dream, 15, 85, 102–4, 110, 113–14, 122, 124–6, 142, 148, 190, 213–14 (art as “vigilambulism”), 275, 278 as experience, vi, 7–12, 15, 17, 23–4, 64–5, 85, 108–10, 117, 121, 124, 126, 130, 139–42, 145–6, 187, 190, 211, 215, 217, 265, 273, 275, 277, 283, 287 and fascination, vi, 8–10, 53–4, 103, 122, 124, 126, 149, 238, 264, 280 and fiction, x, 1–6, 8–11, 13, 15–18, 110, 113, 126–7, 137–8, 140–6, 149, 161–3, 165, 181, 183, 187, 217, 256, 270–3, 275, 277, 282, 283, 284, 286 as initial reversal of power, 8–12, 24, 85, 122–3, 138, 140, 146, 187, 243, 265, 270–2, 274, 278, 279, 280, 282, 283, 285, 286 and interpretation, vi, xi, 1, 8–9, 138, 187, 231, 243, 275 and Kafka, 146, 161–3, 165, 181 and Kant, 2 and music, 127–8 and painting, 50, 54, 127 and the plane of composition, 110, 113–21, 125, 128, 141, 162–3, 271–2, 285 and power (distinct from its reversals), 5–12, 139–40, 273 and Proust, 69 as radical reversal beyond power, x-xi, 9–18, 22–4, 109–10, 122–4, 138, 141, 144, 225, 234, 238, 241, 243, 252, 264, 265, 272, 274–6, 278, 279, 281, 283, 284, 286 and religion, 146 and Sartre, 2–3 and sensation (affect, percept), vii, 11, 14–17, 65, 82, 85, 108–9, 113–14, 117–28, 137–8, 144, 162, 165, 202, 225, 235, 240–1, 271–2, 275–6, 283, 284 and the spiritual automaton, 213–14 vs. taste, 1–2 and time, 10, 12–13, 17, 24, 85, 109, 125, 127, 217–18, 225–6, 231, 265 as unimportant, 141–2 Artaud, 22, 212–15, 217, 219, 238–9

Index assemblage, 278 (defined) as conceptual and logical, 18, 42–5, 118, 200, 278, 285 deterritorialized, 12, 18, 21, 125, 127, 141, 156–63, 165, 172, 176–7, 179–81, 192, 211, 214–15, 226, 239, 243, 270–1, 273–4, 279, 280 as dispositif (assemblages of power), 13, 31, 40–4, 60, 77, 145, 154, 165, 172, 176, 200, 284 and Kafka, 18–19, 21, 156–63, 165, 172, 176–7, 179–81, 211, 214–15, 226, 270, 273–4 of movement-images/montage (cinematic reality and truth), 12, 20–1, 187, 190, 192–5, 198, 199–202, 210, 213–14, 282, 285 territorial, 12, 40–5, 112, 118, 187, 190, 193–5, 199–202, 280, 285 Bacon, Francis, 16, 127, 162 Bataille, Georges, 47–8 becoming, 278 (defined), 73 see also affect, becoming and; concept, becoming and; eternal return, becoming and; impossibility, becoming and; percept, becoming and; time, becoming and Bergson, 14, 19, 65–6, 68, 83–9, 92–3, 95, 97–8, 103–4, 189–90, 198, 225, 278 Bogue, Ronald, viii, 128, 213, 218, 230 Cain, 207 Cavell, Stanley, 188, 190 clichés, 4, 110, 113, 127, 194 concept (also idea, thought), 278 (defined) and affect/percept, 11–12, 15–18, 23–4, 58, 104, 108–11, 114, 118–23, 126–31, 133–8, 144, 146, 156, 162–3, 166, 170, 172, 177, 181–2, 213, 217, 226–7, 235–40, 243, 245–6, 253, 255, 258, 272, 275, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 284, 286 and becoming, vii, 11–12, 23, 117–18, 123, 129, 131–3, 138, 153–5, 163, 180, 213, 217, 226, 228, 266, 269, 276, 279, 284 as composing works of art (plane of composition), 11, 15–19, 21, 23–4,

323

104, 109–10, 113–14, 117–21, 124, 126–30, 137–8, 141, 144, 154, 161–3, 177, 181, 191, 211–13, 215, 217, 225–6, 228–9, 231, 235, 238–40, 242, 245, 250–1, 253, 259–60, 266, 270–1, 273, 279, 284, 285 as critical, see critique and difference, vi, 11–12, 16–18, 22, 57, 69, 74, 103, 108–9, 114–23, 129–35, 141, 144, 147, 153–5, 157, 161, 163, 166, 177, 180, 192, 196, 207, 210, 220, 222–3, 227, 241–2, 253, 255, 266, 268–72, 275, 279, 281 as fragmentary (and fragmentation), 16, 19, 119, 130–3, 135, 138, 166, 178, 212, 269, 272 and implication, 15–16, 22, 103–4, 108–10, 114, 118, 120–3, 128, 130, 133, 135, 137–8, 179, 181–2, 238, 243, 252, 254, 259, 267, 270–1, 274, 276, 277, 281, 282, 283 as inexplicable, 15, 18, 69, 108, 122, 126, 130, 133, 135, 155, 161–3, 177–81, 223, 228–9, 241, 258, 272, 275, 279, 286 and intensity, 16, 22, 104, 110, 119, 130, 132–4, 178, 223, 235, 267, 269, 271–2, 277, 279, 281 as interpretative, see interpretation as iterative (self-referential), 16, 132–4, 179 and the plane of immanence, 12, 104, 110, 114–20, 126, 129, 141, 207, 214, 219, 221, 267, 283 and obscure values, 11, 15–17, 19, 22–4, 137–8, 181, 241–3, 246–7, 252, 262–4, 282 and speed, 12, 15–16, 21, 103, 107–8, 113, 115, 117–21, 129–30, 132–3, 136, 178, 191, 213–14, 224–5, 239–40, 255, 267–8, 271, 281, 283, 285 and the third synthesis of time (eternal return), 23–4, 74, 76, 109, 119–20, 155, 266–76, 279 as unlocatable/unrevealable, 9, 11–12, 21, 23, 179, 181, 227, 235–6, 241, 242, 246–7, 253, 258, 274, 277, 283 chaos (complication), 278 (defined), vii, 11–13, 15–16, 22, 24, 30, 40–2, 46,

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58, 67, 71, 73–4, 84, 108, 110–13, 116–20, 122–30, 132, 140, 149, 180, 223, 241, 246–7, 264, 271–2, 281, 294 n.15, 297 n.64 see also art, chaos and; deterritorialization, chaos and; eternal return, chaos and chronosigns, cinematic (including serialized chronosigns), 21, 23, 222–31, 233–4, 237–8, 243, 248, 250, 252, 254, 260, 281, 284 see also affect, cinematic chronosigns in Coleridge, 147 critique, 278 (defined), 9, 13, 15, 18, 20, 42–3, 46, 57, 156–8, 187, 193, 202, 208, 210, 239, 241, 275, 277, 278 vs. interpretation, 9, 57 135–8, 239, 241, 275, 277 crystal images, cinematic (including crystalline narration), 12, 21–2, 131, 216–31, 233–5, 237, 241, 243, 245–6, 252–4, 256–7, 260, 274, 281, 282, 283, 284, 307 n.41 see also imagination, cinematic crystallization and; milieu, cinematic crystal-images and; percept, cinematic crystal-images in cut, cinematic, 278–9 (defined), 20–1, 190–4, 197–9, 201, 212, 214, 227–9, 233, 239, 243, 245, 258, 274, 280, 282, 283, 285, 286, 304 n.8 and plane of composition, 191–3 see also fissure, interstice of cinematic time as Deamer, David, 220, 225 death, 47–53 and biopower, 28–9, 31, 46 and the imaginary, 50–3, 55, 57, 68, 142–3, 232 as impossible, see impossibility, of death and Proust, 68 as reversal of power, see reversal, radical, death and and sovereign power, 28, 46, 52 and the third synthesis of time (eternal return), 14, 71, 76, 81, 89, 267

Descartes, 57, 87, 98–100, 102 desire, 19, 23, 30, 69, 80–1, 97, 141, 152–5, 157–63, 165, 167, 170, 172–4, 177, 181, 183, 243–4, 252–3, 257–63, 270, 285 deterritorialization, 279 (defined) and assemblages, 12, 18, 21, 125, 127, 141, 156–63, 165, 172, 176–7, 179–81, 192, 211, 214–15, 226, 239, 243, 270–1, 273–4, 279, 280 of concepts (on the plane of immanence), 118, 121, 128, 133, 161, 163, 278 and chaos, 112–13, 119, 125 and cinematic cutting, 20–1, 214, 239, 243, 274; see also fissure and cinematic framing (or “deframing”), 20–1, 125, 192, 196, 214, 239, 243, 274 difference, 279 (defined) vs. repetition, 11, 14, 16–17, 67–70, 84, 109, 122–3, 144, 152, 207, 218, 222–3 as repetition (eternal return), vii, 14, 16–17, 21, 24, 70–6, 84, 89, 101, 109, 111–12, 114, 116–21, 123, 130–4, 144, 148, 155, 216–17, 225–7, 229–30, 234, 241, 256, 260, 263, 266–71, 274, 279, 281 and memory, see memory, difference and and thought, see concept, difference and disguise, 279 (defined) see also concept, as unrevealable (disguising percepts); dreams, and displacement/disguise; percept, disguise and dismantling (démontage), 279 (defined), 12, 18, 21, 140–1, 157–9, 161–3, 174–5, 180, 211, 214, 226, 239, 243, 278 displacement, 279 (defined) see also affect, displacement and; concept, as unlocatable (displacing affects); dreams, and displacement/ disguise dissimulation, 13, 17, 54, 75, 116, 124, 143–4, 177, 189, 232

Index double, the/doubling, 18, 23, 52, 55–8, 92, 95–6, 99–100, 121, 140, 145, 149–55, 159, 167, 170–1, 173, 221, 227, 232, 250, 252–4, 256, 260 Dracula, 207–8 dreams, 79–104, 110–19, 212–16, 218, 220, 225 vs. art, see art, dreams vs. and Bergson, 14, 19, 83–9, 92–3, 95, 97–8, 103–4, 189, 278 and displacement/disguise, 11–12, 14, 16, 23, 80–3, 88, 100–2, 104, 113, 118, 130, 211, 213, 217, 247, 260, 262, 267–8, 270, 273 and forgetting, 14–15, 80, 88–9, 95–8, 102–3, 110, 113, 117, 126, 148, 232, 267, 280 in Freud 14, 79–81, 89, 95–7, 100, 273 vs. illusion, 14–15, 19, 87–90, 93, 95, 98, 100, 189, 212, 266 as lucid dreaming, 15, 79, 98–101, 142, 215, 273 and memory, see memory, dreams and as nightmares, 15, 93–5, 100, 152, 221, 266, 273, 282 Duchamp, Marcel, 2 Eisenstein, Sergei, 194, 212, 233, 237 Empson, William, 147 Enemy (Villeneuve), 252–4 ensemble/set (in cinema), 20, 191–3, 197, 200–1, 204–6, 208, 210, 227–8, 230, 278–9, 285 eternal return (also third synthesis of time), 279 (defined) and becoming 14, 23, 70, 75, 131–2, 266–9, 271–3, 284, 285 and Blanchot, 15, 64, 70–6, 81, 100–1, 131–2, 141, 233, 266–9, 271, 273, 278, 284, 285 and chaos, 24, 119–20, 271–2 and deterritorialization, 163 and difference, see difference, repetition as and dreams, 15, 23, 76, 81, 94, 100–1, 266–7, 273, 278 and forgetting, 15, 89, 95, 267 and the future, 70, 73–5, 132, 155, 156, 266–8, 271

325

and habit/repetition, 14, 23, 70–4, 101, 119–20, 132, 155, 216, 263, 266, 268–9, 271, 273, 277 and memory/difference 14, 23, 64, 71–5, 119–20, 132, 141, 155, 216, 220, 266, 268–9, 271–2, 277 and Nietzsche, 9, 71–3, 75, 119, 278 and plane of immanence, 267, 271 and repetition, see repetition, difference as as third synthesis of time, 14, 70–6, 81, 119, 155, 267–8, 277, 278 event, 279–80 (defined), 15, 21, 44–5, 48–9, 51, 91–3, 95, 108, 113, 115, 127–8, 130, 132–3, 136, 148, 196, 205–6, 221–5, 228–9, 235, 237, 248–50, 259–60, 266, 277, 278, 280, 281, 283, 285 explication/development, 280 (defined), 9, 16–17, 24, 38, 54, 69, 74, 82, 84, 103, 108–10, 112, 114, 117–22, 126, 130–3, 136–8, 141, 148, 181–2, 190, 199–202, 216–17, 222–4, 239, 246, 249, 260, 266, 270–1, 275, 284 Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick), 23, 254–64, 274 fascination, 280 (defined), vi, 8, 10, 13, 51–6, 58–9, 62–3, 91, 103, 114, 116–17, 122, 124, 126–7, 136, 139, 149, 151, 172–3, 215–16, 238–9, 241, 265, 273 vs. inspiration, 103, 126, 239 Fight Club (Fincher), 199 fissure, 280 (defined) affect and, see affect, the fissure/ interstice and between dreamer and sleeper, 15, 82, 97–101, 103, 214–15 and fiction, 124, 174–7, 180–1 as interstice of cinematic time, 214–15, 221, 225, 233–41, 261, 267, 270, 274 of seeing and speaking, 135–6, 174–7, 180–1, 231–4, 257 and thought, 129, 135, 197, 221, 238–41, 270 force, 280 (defined) and affect, 6, 22, 29–31, 35, 39–40, 42–3, 57–8, 70–1, 85, 113–15, 119, 123–4, 129–30, 134–6, 139, 168, 196,

326

Index

221–2, 235–7, 240–1, 243, 255–6, 280, 283 and incessance, 81, 115, 119–21, 133–4, 211–12, 222, 226, 240–1, 255–6, 263, 266 vs. intensity, 22, 104, 130, 133–4, 136, 235, 267 and movement, 22, 40–1, 58, 71, 76, 80, 101, 108, 110, 114–15, 117, 119–23, 125, 127, 130, 133–5, 189, 196–8, 221–2, 225, 229, 234–40, 243, 256, 266, 270, 277 and percept, 22, 107, 114–15, 119, 123, 130, 134, 136, 236–7, 240–1, 243, 255–6, 277, 280 and the plane of immanence, 114, 117, 119–20, 221, 240 and thought, 15–16, 23, 58, 108–10, 113–14, 120–2, 130, 134, 212–14, 221, 234–5, 237–41, 266–9, 271 forgetting, 96–8 see also dreams, forgetting and; eternal return, forgetting and; memory, oblivion/forgetting and frame, cinematic, 280 (defined), 20–1, 190–4, 196, 197, 201, 205, 207, 209, 214–15, 227, 229, 236, 239, 243, 245, 256, 260–3, 274, 279 and the plane of composition, 191–3 Freud, 14, 79–81, 83, 89, 95–7, 100, 127, 139, 273 Goodman, Nelson, 3, 6 Griffith, D. W., 194, 223 habit, 280 (defined) and eternal return, see eternal return, habit and and the first active synthesis of time, 13, 45–6, 125, 201, 203 and the first passive synthesis of time, 64–7, 70–1, 89, 109, 117, 125, 268, 277 and milieus, 13, 37, 41–2, 43, 45–6, 66, 70, 88, 103, 110, 112–13, 122, 135, 201, 203–4, 207, 213, 248, 283, 284 and reality, 13, 15, 45, 66, 69, 82, 110, 112, 124–5, 127, 149, 203, 272, 282, 283, 284 and repetition, see repetition, habit and

haunting (by truth/reality), see menace Hegel, 17, 147–9 Heidegger, 3, 49, 238 Hobbes, 110 Hughes, Joe, 109 Hume, 2, 5, 110, 137 idea, see concept illusion, see world, as illusion of; dreams, illusion vs. imagination, 280–1 (defined) and cinematic crystallization, 12, 21–2, 217–23, 226–8, 230–1, 233–4, 237, 243, 246, 256, 274, 281 and habit/the first synthesis of time, 12, 14–15, 64–7, 69, 84–5, 88–9, 110–12, 123, 149, 195, 217–19, 227, 229 as indeterminate/absolute milieu, 17, 21, 64, 82, 88, 103, 108, 112, 137, 148–9, 213, 218, 271–2, 280 and movement, 12, 15, 21, 57–9, 68, 80, 83–4, 88–9, 107–8, 110, 112, 115–16, 121–2, 125, 133, 135, 139, 143, 150–1, 188, 194, 213, 217–18, 220, 224, 230, 234–5, 237, 240–1, 243–4, 265, 270, 272, 279–80, 282 vs. reality, 3, 7, 10, 12, 15, 17, 21, 44, 47, 51, 53–4, 57–8, 62, 65, 69, 75, 83, 86–9, 94, 133–4, 136, 142, 146, 149–51, 165, 183, 211, 217–23, 226–7, 244, 246, 256, 273–4 as unreality, 9, 12, 15, 17, 21–2, 51, 53–5, 58, 64–5, 68, 82–3, 94, 123, 134, 136, 146, 150–1, 165, 172, 211, 224, 226–9, 233–4, 237, 244, 246–7, 252, 263, 270, 273–6, 279–81 implication, 218 (defined), 15–16, 22, 24, 50, 67, 84, 103–4, 108–10, 112, 114, 116–23, 128, 130, 133, 135, 137–8, 148, 150, 177, 179, 181–2, 191, 216, 222–3, 225, 229–30, 238, 241, 243, 248, 250, 252, 254, 259, 266–7, 269–71, 274–8, 281–3 see also concept, implication and; intensity, implication and; reversal, radical, as dynamic of implication/ explication

Index impossibility, 281 (defined) and becoming (novelty), 14, 55, 62–3, 75, 93, 95, 109, 115, 141, 150–1, 219, 224, 230, 226–7, 241–2, 268 as Blanchot’s outside, 14, 56–64, 75, 77, 82, 141, 242–3, 254–5, 271, 286 of death, 48–50, 55, 72, 76, 80–1, 83, 124, 126–7, 147, 156, 182, 215, 249, 251–3, 263, 267, 286 and incessance, 14, 50, 62–3, 75, 81, 88, 93, 95, 101, 115, 124, 21, 215, 222, 237, 243, 247, 259, 263, 268, 280, 283 as limit, 57, 75, 108–9, 115, 224, 227, 229–33, 254–5 and ungraspability, 14, 50, 62, 68, 71, 95, 108, 124, 243, 247, 268, 283 impulse-image/impulses (cinema), 20, 204, 206–10, 212, 235, 240, 248, 282 incessance, 281 (defined), xi, 11, 14–16, 19, 21, 49–50, 62–8, 70–1, 74–6, 79–104, 108, 111, 113–16, 118–21, 124–5, 128–9, 131–4, 136, 143–4, 148–9, 151, 156, 158, 160–2, 165–7, 172, 174, 177, 179–83, 189, 193, 206, 211–12, 214–17, 219, 221–3, 225–30, 235, 237, 239–41, 243, 246–7, 255–6, 259–60, 263, 266, 268–9, 271–3, 276, 278, 280–4, 295 n.46 see also force, incessance and; impossibility, incessance and indiscernibility, 281 (defined), 11–12, 14, 16–18, 21, 24, 65–6, 83–5, 89, 97, 108, 110–11, 117, 123, 130, 133, 150–3, 155, 159, 169, 177, 206, 216–21, 223–4, 226–30, 233–4, 237, 241, 245, 251, 259–61, 265–6, 274, 277–8, 282, 284, 286 see also percept, indiscernibility and; reversal, initial, of reality, hollowing out (indiscernibility); reversal, radical, as dynamic between the inexplicable/indiscernible indistinguishability, see indiscernibility inspiration, 281 (defined), vi, 63, 95–8, 126, 136, 239, 265, 282 vs. fascination, 103, 126, 239 intensity, 281 (defined) and affect, see affect, intensity and

327

and concepts, see concepts, intensity and and difference, 123, 133–4, 269, 279 vs. force, 22, 104, 130, 133–4, 136, 235, 267 and implication, 123, 130, 133, 267, 278 and speed, 133, 178, 267, 271, 278 interpretation, 282 (defined), vi-vii, xi, 1, 8–9, 19, 138, 187, 201, 231, 239, 243, 275, 277 vs. critique, 9, 57, 135–8, 239, 241, 275, 277 interstice (cinematic), see fissure judgment, 1–3, 5–10, 12–13, 22, 31–2, 37–8, 43–6, 51, 58, 111, 114, 135, 140, 174, 187, 201–2, 204–5, 246, 265 Jurassic Park (Spielberg), 197 Kant, 2–3, 5, 9 Kafka, vii-viii, 1, 13, 16–19, 21, 23, 43, 94–5, 112, 124, 140–1, 146–7, 149–83, 211–12, 214, 221–2, 226, 228, 243, 245, 254, 259, 263, 270–1, 273–4, 278, 279, 282, 285, 301–3 “the Burrow”, 94–5, 152–4, 245 Castle, The, 19, 23–4, 154, 156, 158–61, 165–83, 214, 228, 243, 254, 259, 261–3, 270, 274–5, 301–2 Diaries, The, 149–52 “The Great Wall of China”, 153 and Kubrick, 23, 254, 259, 282 “The Metamorphosis”, 17, 146–8, 153, 269 parables, 263 “In the Penal Colony”, 153 Trial, The, 18, 140, 154–63, 174, 180 Kubrick, xi, 23, 248, 254–63, 282 Leibniz, 108, 292 n.98 limits, see impossibility, as limit literalism (in fictional art), 282 (defined), 17, 19, 23, 144–6, 148, 162–3, 177–8, 181, 194, 219–20, 223, 236, 241, 245, 247, 254–6, 261, 270, 275, 286 literature first slope (Blanchot), 142–3, 193–4 second/other slope (Blanchot), 142–3

328

Index

McLuhan, Marshall, 17, 148–9 Marxism, 4 masochism, 206–7 May, Todd, viii, 33, 36 medical gaze, the, 13, 36–8, 45, 188, 203–5, 208–9, 257 Melville, Herman, 126–7 memory, 282 (defined) and difference, 14, 67–71, 80–1, 84–5, 89, 101, 108–9, 117, 119, 122, 131, 152, 216, 222–3, 267, 279 and dream, 11–12, 14–15, 80, 83, 85–6, 88, 92–3, 97, 101, 103–4, 109, 115, 232, 239, 271–2, 279, 280, 284 and falsity/untruth of coexistence, 85, 89, 92, 122, 152–3, 216, 221–4, 251 and oblivion/forgetting, 14–15, 65, 80–1, 88, 92, 95, 97, 101–3 and second active synthesis of time, 13, 45–6, 70, 153, 204 and second passive synthesis of time, 14, 67–71, 83, 85, 89, 109, 116, 153, 220, 222, 277 and truth, 11, 13, 15, 32, 45, 69, 82, 95, 115, 122, 204, 222–3, 272, 281 and the virtual, 64, 222 menace (by truth/reality), 282 (defined) in cinematic reversals of power, 216, 221, 223–4, 226–7, 246, 250, 253, 256, 261, 266 in death, 13, 51–3 in Foucault, 56–60 in literary reversals of power, 51, 53–4, 150, 152, 154 in nightmares, 15, 93–5, 221 as second level of ambiguity (Blanchot’s two versions of the imaginary), 54–6, 59, 68, 75–6, 173, 293 n.119 Messiaen, Olivier, 16, 128 Metz, Christian, 189 Moby Dick (Melville), 16, 126–7 Modernism (literature), 146 montage, 282 (defined) see also assemblage, of movement images/montage Most High, The (Le Trés-Haut) (Blanchot), 215

movement, 282–3 (defined) see also force, movement and; plane of immanence, movement and; time, vs. measured movement movement-image (cinema), 12, 20–1, 116, 187–210, 212–14, 217–18, 221–2, 231, 234–5, 237, 240–2, 243–6, 258, 277, 280, 282, 285 see also action image, large form; action image, small form; affect, the interval and; assemblage, of movement-images; impulse image; milieu, cinematic realism and; plane of immanence, cinematic movement-image as; world, originary; world, reality/truth and milieu, 282 (defined) and absorbed affects (cinema), 22, 197, 221, 236–40, 246, 262, 277 as “absolute” (Blanchot); see imagination, indeterminate/ absolute milieu as and cinematic crystal-images, 21, 218, 221, 256 and (cinematic) realism, 41–2, 195–6, 255 and deterritorialization, 20, 112, 123, 125, 127, 161, 163 and habit, see habit, milieus and and the plane of immanence, 12, 20, 110, 114–15, 117, 119, 121, 125–6, 130, 135–7, 162, 193, 214, 219, 221, 267, 272–3, 283 and territorialization, 13, 20, 40–4, 46, 112, 116, 123, 125, 127, 155, 161, 163, 192, 200, 278 New Criticism, 147–8 Nietzsche, 4, 6, 9, 14, 32, 39, 49, 71–3, 75, 89, 95, 97–8, 119, 134, 138–46, 158, 183, 240–1, 263, 266, 278 outside, the; see impossibility, as Blanchot’s outside panopticism, 13, 20, 34–8, 45, 60–1, 65, 79, 122, 135, 188, 200, 203–4, 209–10, 221, 223, 243–5 paranoia, 22, 38, 152, 244–7

Index percept, 283 (defined) and becoming, 11, 18, 82, 102, 118, 123–6, 128–9, 150–1, 153–4, 183, 224, 226, 277, 282–3 in cinematic crystal-images, 22, 217–21, 226–8, 235, 284 in cinematic perception-images, 194–7, 203, 210, 224 and disguise, 11, 14–19, 21, 23, 81–3, 85, 100–2, 108, 118, 121–3, 130, 146, 148, 150, 153–4, 156, 158, 162, 165, 167–8, 170, 172, 176, 180–1, 183, 211, 217, 219–20, 226, 229, 235–8, 240–1, 245–7, 251, 254, 258, 260–2, 268–9, 274, 276, 277, 279, 281 and force, see force, percept and and habit/habitual perception/the first synthesis of time (active and passive), 45, 66, 70–1, 82–3, 85–6, 89, 112–13, 122–3, 125, 127–8, 149, 152, 194, 201, 210, 213, 227, 284 and ideas/concepts/thought, 9, 11–12, 15–18, 23–4, 58, 104, 108–11, 114, 118–23, 126–31, 133–8, 144, 146, 156, 162–3, 166, 170, 172, 177, 181–2, 213, 217, 226–7, 235–40, 243, 245–6, 253, 255, 258, 272, 275, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 284, 286 vs. perception, 82–3, 85, 122–3, 150, 218–19 as perception-memory (imaginationcontraction), 64–5; see also imagination and the plane of composition, 16, 113, 117–18, 120–1, 124–6, 128, 138, 144, 162, 181, 217, 225, 227, 270–2, 279, 281, 283 and the plane of immanence, 16, 21, 114, 118–21, 123, 125–6, 128–9, 162, 189, 219, 236, 239–40, 276, 278, 282–3 as problematizing/problematic, 11–12, 14–16, 20, 23, 82–3, 85, 92, 100, 104, 108, 121–3, 126, 135, 144, 150, 154–5, 166–8, 181, 202, 210, 217, 219, 227, 235, 237, 240–1, 254, 260, 268, 279 and reality (discernment of/perception of), 4, 8, 14, 16, 32, 45, 66, 82–3, 122–3, 135, 145–6, 149, 171, 195

329

and unreality/the imaginary/ indiscernibility, 11–12, 17–18, 21–3, 58, 65, 83, 85–6, 89, 109, 115, 121–3, 148, 150, 155, 163, 167, 170, 219–21, 224, 226–7, 230, 237, 246, 251, 254, 258, 260, 268, 272, 282–3 perception, see percept, perception vs. Pisters, Patricia, 225 plane of composition, the, 283 (defined) as absent totality, 110, 114, 125, 128, 181, 191, 193, 217, 227, 239 and affects, see affects, plane of composition and and cinematic cutting, see cut, plane of composition and and cinematic framing, see frame, plane of composition and and concepts, see concepts, plane of composition and and (infinite) speed, 16, 110, 113, 118, 121, 128, 130, 193, 239, 278, 280 and percepts, see percepts, plane of composition and vs. the plane of immanence, 15–16, 110, 114, 116–21, 125, 128, 141, 162, 191, 193 plane of immanence, the, 283–4 (defined) and affects, see affect, the plane of immanence and as the cinematic movement-image, 116, 191, 193–4, 240 and (cinematic) time, 16, 22, 110, 116–17, 120, 125, 214, 219, 221 and concepts, see concept, the plane of immanence and and deterritorialization, see deterritorialization, of concepts and eternal return, see eternal return, plane of immanence and and the event, 115, 128, 130, 136, 206, 221, 278, 279, 280 and milieus, see milieu, plane of immanence and and movement, 12, 16, 20, 22, 104, 114–16, 118–21, 125, 129, 143–4, 189–91, 193, 214, 219, 233, 236, 240, 272, 278, 279, 280, 283 and percepts, see percept, plane of immanence and

330

Index

vs. the plane of composition, 15–16, 110, 114, 116–21, 125, 128, 141, 162, 191, 193 poststructuralism, 145 power, 284 (defined) and discipline, six, seven, 33–3, 37–8, 40–6, 113, 135, 203, 275, 282; see also panopticism and knowledge (the visible and articulable), 6–9, 23–4, 31–2, 39, 46–7, 50, 54, 56, 58, 61, 67–8, 70, 74, 76, 79, 90, 97, 101, 114, 124, 137, 139, 142, 145, 149, 155, 161, 174, 187, 202, 235, 248–9, 254 and regulation, 6–7, 33, 35–8, 40–6, 60, 113, 203, 282; see also the medical gaze reversals of, see reversal, initial; reversal, radical as sovereign, 13, 28, 29; see also sovereignty and truth/reality, see world, truth/ reality and problems, see percept, problems and Proust, Marcel, 68–9, 75, 108, 122, 131, 146, 220, 235, 249 questions, see affect, questions and reality, 284 (defined) discernment of/perception and, 3, 11, 13, 32, 41–2, 83, 125, 135, 146, 165, 172, 188, 202–3, 206, 217, 218–19, 224 266, 274 and milieus, 15, 20–1, 32, 39, 41–2, 44–6, 65–6, 112, 122, 134–6, 149, 154, 190, 195–6, 200, 203, 206–9, 221, 236, 255–6, 272, 283; see also milieu, (cinematic) realism and and power, see world, reality/truth and repetition, 284 (defined) and affect/percept (as explication/ variety), 16, 71, 83, 114, 118–23, 128, 131, 133, 195, 207, 241, 271, 280, 281 as an amorphous form (plane of immanence), 15–16, 120, 129, 271 vs. difference, 11, 14, 16–17, 67- 70, 84, 109, 122–3, 144, 152, 207, 218, 222–3

as difference (eternal return), vii, 14, 16–17, 21, 24, 70–6, 84, 89, 101, 109, 111–12, 114, 116–21, 123, 130–4, 144, 148, 155, 216–17, 225–7, 229–30, 234, 241, 256, 260, 263, 266–71, 274, 279, 281 as formless form (plane of composition), 16, 120, 125, 129, 271 and habit, 14, 45, 65–7, 69–71, 74, 81, 83–4, 89, 109–10, 112, 116–17, 149, 201, 216, 267, 279 as monstrosity, 207 reversal of power, initial, 284 (defined) and art, 8–12, 24, 85, 122–3, 138, 140, 146, 187, 243, 265, 270–2, 274, 278, 279, 280, 282, 283, 285, 286 of reality, hollowing out (indiscernibility), 9–12, 18, 21, 48, 62, 77, 82, 123, 140, 149–50, 153, 215, 221, 228, 226, 231, 237, 243, 265, 271, 281, 282, 283 of truth, hollowing out (inexplicability), 9–12, 18, 21, 48, 62–3, 77, 82, 123, 140, 152–3, 215, 223–4, 226, 231, 233, 237, 243, 257, 271, 277, 281, 283 see also menace reversal beyond power, radical, 284 (defined) and art, x-xi, 9–18, 22–4, 109–10, 122–4, 138, 141, 144, 225, 234, 238, 241, 243, 252, 264, 265, 272, 274–6, 278, 279, 281, 283, 284, 286 and death, 48, 124, 252 as dynamic between percept/affects and unreality/untruth, between the inexplicable/indiscernible, 122–9, 226–31, 235–8, 243, 250, 253–4, 260, 264, 266, 272, 274–6 as dynamic of implication/explication (also of time/movement, of composition/immanence), 108–10, 114–22, 129, 234–41, 271, 274–6; see also explication; implication and ideas (concepts/thought)/as unlocatable displacement/ unrevealable disguise, 9, 17–18, 21, 110, 118–22, 129–35, 141, 153–6, 161–3, 181, 227, 234, 239, 241, 246,

Index 251–2, 258–9, 263, 271–2, 274–6, 279, 281, 283, 286 of interior/exterior worlds (closer than interiority/further from exteriority), vii, xi, 9, 11–14, 23, 24, 58–9, 63–4, 82, 88, 109, 115, 123, 136, 140, 225–6, 239, 254–5 rhythm, 119, 128, 134, 272, 278, 282 Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie Claire, 59–60 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3–4, 7, 9–10 segmentation, 284–5 (defined), 17, 34, 43–4, 154, 156, 161–2, 179, 215 sexuality, 13, 38–9, 44–5, 80, 208–9, 254, 256–64 Shakespeare, 5, 90, 159 Shaviro, Steven, 189 shot, cinematic, 285 (defined), 190–4, 197–8, 201, 206, 215, 218, 228–9, 237, 244–6, 255, 259, 261, 278, 280, 282 Shining, The (Kubrick), 254–5 Sixth Sense, The (Shyamalan), 199 sovereignty, 285 (defined) of death, 46, 47–53, 215, 270 of dreams, 80, 90, 99, 142 as power, see power, sovereignty and speed, 285 (defined) see also concept, speed and; intensity, speed and; plane of composition, speed and Spinoza, 85, 108, 110, 122–3, 145, 240, 296 n.2 suicide, 52 Take Shelter (Nichols), 22, 244–7, 253–4, 259 territorialization, 285 (defined) and assemblages, 12, 40–5, 112, 118, 187, 190, 193–5, 199–202, 280, 285 and cinematic cutting, 20, 192, 201 and cinematic framing, 20, 192–3, 214, 239, 280 as conceptual, 13, 18, 42–6, 118, 132–3, 161, 163, 200–1 time, 285 (defined) as absence, 91, 216–17, 295 n.46 and becoming, 62–4, 66, 70, 73, 75, 93, 95, 127–8, 183, 225, 230, 265, 274, 277

331

first synthesis of, 12, 21, 64–7, 71, 85, 109, 116, 123, 130, 211, 218, 220, 222, 225, 227, 229, 277, 280 vs. measured movement, 216–17 second synthesis of, 12, 67–71, 74, 83, 85–6, 112, 119, 123, 153, 155, 211, 220, 222, 225, 227, 229, 282, 283 third synthesis of, see eternal return time-image (cinema), 12, 21–2, 188, 211–64, 278 see also affect, absorbed by milieus; affect, in cinematic chronosigns; art, cinema and; crystal images; chronosigns; deterritorialization, cinematic cutting and; deterritorialization, cinematic framing and; fissure, as interstice of cinematic time; imagination, cinematic crystallization and; interstice (cinematic); memory, cinematic reversals of power in; milieu, absorbed affects and; percept, cinematic crystal images in; milieu, cinematic crystal images and; plane of immanence, cinematic time and Thomas, Allan, 192 Thomas the Obscure (Thomas l’obscur) (Blanchot), 215 thought, see concept truth, 285 (defined) affective search for/memory and, 11, 13, 15, 32, 45, 69, 82, 115, 122–4, 150, 152, 195, 221–2, 227, 229, 237, 253, 256–7, 272, 281 events and, 21, 45, 148, 195–6, 205–6, 221–2 and power, see world, reality/truth and ungraspability (obstinate), 283 (defined), 11, 14–15, 19, 21, 49–52, 62–4, 68, 70–1, 75, 81, 83, 85, 91–3, 95, 99–100, 102–3, 108, 115, 121, 124, 136, 140, 144, 152, 160, 163, 171, 180, 211–12, 216, 222–3, 225–6, 239, 243, 247, 255–6, 259, 262, 265–6, 268–9, 272–3, 279, 281, 282, 284 see also impossibility, ungraspability and

332

Index

value, life-centric, 285 (defined), vi, 5–6, 8–11, 13, 17–20, 24, 27–9, 35–8, 42–3, 45, 47–8, 52, 54, 110, 125, 137–8, 139–41, 145, 148, 150–2, 156, 158, 182–3, 187, 193, 198, 202, 204, 208–11, 221, 226, 241–2, 244, 250, 265, 273–5 values, obscure, 286 (defined), vi, 9, 11, 17, 19, 22–3, 74, 77, 127, 137–8, 141, 144–6, 152, 163, 166, 181–3, 211, 241–3, 247–8, 251–2, 262, 266, 275, 277, 282, 284 see also concepts, obscure values and Venus in Furs, 207 Watt, Calum, 60, 215–16 Witch, The (Eggers), 207 world, 286 (defined) belief in (as unknowable), vi, 22, 140, 144–6, 183, 241–2, 247, 264 -building, theories of, 3, 190–1, 201

originary (in cinema), 20, 197, 205–8, 210, 248 as (oneiric or cinematic) illusion, 88–90, 95, 100, 187–92, 212 and reality/truth, vi, 6, 9, 11–12, 15, 18, 20, 23–4, 27, 32, 46–7, 51, 59, 82, 96, 115, 122–3, 126, 136, 137, 140, 144, 154, 157, 160, 181, 183, 187, 193, 196, 199–200, 202, 205–6, 208–9, 226, 227, 235, 239–42, 244–7, 249, 254–6, 259–60, 262, 264, 266–7, 270, 272–3, 278, 282, 285 as totality (and/or absence of totality), 20, 89, 135, 142–3, 161, 190–1, 193, 198, 201, 207–8, 210, 235, 242, 271–2 as unreal/untrue, 47, 156, 247, 252–3, 256, 274 Wortham, Simon, 98 Zourabichvili, François, 108, 145