2. 326 VALENTINE MOULARD
from the conditions that, in Kant’s view, confine it to contingency and par-
ticularity. On the one hand, if Empiricism traditionally deduces the intelligi-
ble from the sensible, Superior Empiricism wants to resist validating a dogma
about the essence of the mind, or of reality; yet its concern does lie primarily
in the concrete diversity of the sensible. Indeed, as I will try to show, philo-
sophical thinking for Deleuze aims directly at the very Being of the sensible
(Sentiendum) in its immanence – as opposed to desperately wanting to reach
sensible beings through a series of intellectual reductions. On the other hand,
Superior Empiricism is properly transcendental because it searches for the
“necessary conditions” that ground this richness of the real, and in fact pro-
duce it. But for Deleuze, these conditions are not Kantian conditions of pos-
sible experience abstracted from the immanent incommensurabilities of the
real that they try to mediate, or copied off of what they are supposed to con-
dition and then projected back retroactively. They are, following Bergson,
transcendental conditions of real experience: different in kind from what they
condition, yet fitting the conditioned tightly enough that they immediately
contain their own necessity.3 The method of Transcendental Empiricism thus
consists in systematically unhooking familiar identifications (e.g., experience
and contingency) and displacing traditional conceptual assumptions (e.g., the
unity of the transcendental subject) – for the sake of freeing experience from
the negative requirements of a consciousness-centered science of knowledge.
Beyond the epistemological foundations of possible, hence contingent expe-
rience which remains hostage to the idiosyncrasies of human consciousness,
Deleuze searches for the differential ontological ground of an experience that
is properly metaphysical in the Bergsonian sense, in that it goes beyond hu-
man experience, beyond the sensory-motor schemes and intellectual con-
sciousness qua consciousness of the world.4 In contrast with the intentional
model that subtends “possible experience,” the fundamental concept inform-
ing what I want to call the Transcendental Experience generated by Transcen-
dental Empiricism is the unconscious – an unconscious that is not merely
psychological but also ontological, not simply actual but also fundamentally
virtual: an unconscious which, in Deleuze’s words, produces the “impossible
real.”5
1. Breakdown of the sensory-motor situation: the time-image
In accordance with his project of overcoming the unbridgeable gap between
body and mind, or matter and memory, Bergson starts out by defining matter
in terms of images. An image is “a certain existence which is more than what
3. THE TIME-IMAGE AND DELEUZE’S TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE 327
the idealist calls representation, but less than what the realist calls a thing –
an existence situated half-way between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation’ ”
(MM 1).6 Insofar as we perceive them, objects and their qualities are there-
fore images, but images that exist in themselves (MM 2). The image is that
which appears, it is the phenomenon. As Bergson tells us, everything that
appears is in motion; everything, then, is a movement-image. For the image
acts and reacts. It is not merely a basis for action and reaction, but the image
in itself, in all its parts, is indeed action and reaction, immediately. Deleuze
summarizes Bergson’s original point of view as claiming that the universe
consists neither in things, nor in consciousnesses, but in movement-images –
a “machinic universe of movement-images.”7
If the distinction between matter and mind does not come first, how do we
get to the differentiation of things and thought? Bergson’s first answer lies
with pure perception. At the level of some images, the input does not prolong
itself immediately into a reaction. All it is is a slight interval of movement, a
little slice of time between two movements. So on the one hand, we have a
type of image that undergo actions and react immediately – let us call it mat-
ter. And on the other hand we have another kind of images that simply present
a delay (écart) between input and output – let us reserve the term sensory-
motor situation for the latter type of image. This delay is none other than the
brain; as a “center of indetermination” allowing for choice between several
possibilities, it generates the difference between reflex-movement and cer-
ebral activity. Although we are not, as yet, in the domain of consciousness
per se, this tiny delay is the fulcrum we are going to need to account for the
ultimately very complex experiences of perception, thought and memory that
the Bergsonian notions of duration and virtuality aim at capturing.
Now obviously, what cinema essentially does is produce images. This
means, Deleuze points out, that it produces reality.8 Indeed, cinema generates
a living and lived reality to the extent that it produces self-movement in im-
ages and as such, it produces its own autotemporalization. In other words, as
Deleuze shows in his Cinema books, the cinematic image generates new cir-
cuits, and “creating new circuits in art means creating them in the brain, too”
(N 60).9 By following through Deleuze’s attempt at introducing concepts which
relate specifically to cinema as a privileged mode of production of the real, I
hope to bring out more clearly the new kind of experience that he is opening
up for us, as well as the transcendental conditions for the generation of this
experience – a direct experience of time qua the very Being of the sensible;
an experience which is all the more real in that it is transcendental.
Traversed through and through by the empty form of time, the Deleuzian
subject opens up to a kind of experience that necessarily exceeds the sensory-
4. 328 VALENTINE MOULARD
motor and intellectual boundaries of the Kantian conditioning of experience.10 In
fact, the whole first chapter of Deleuze’s Time–Image (Cinema 2) – operat-
ing a transition from, hence a recapitulation of the prior volume titled The
Movement-Image – focuses on describing the breakdown of the action-
image.11 Put very simply, Deleuze’s point is that when we are confronted with
an excess of beauty or horror in images, with the sublime or the unbearable,
our sensory-motor mechanisms jam. The movement-image that combines
action and reaction is interrupted. This radical interruption of the movement-
image throws it into a system different from that of the sensory-motor situa-
tion, and consequently transforms the movement-image into a qualitatively
different kind of image. Deleuze calls this the time-image, which arises out
of the pure optical and aural situation. As we will see, when the actual sen-
sory-motor schemata break down, we get “dragged down” into the delay,
or into the temporal dimension of the image – the very interval which, for
Bergson, constitutes the point of contact between matter and memory, on which
the virtual cone of memory with all its layers constantly weighs so as to in-
sert itself into the actual plane of immanence. When we encounter the sub-
lime, then, we cannot but dive into the crack in which the pure form of time
flashes.
Inscribed in and defined by a system of sensory-motor situations directed
toward action, the action-image belongs fundamentally to space and its lin-
ear chain of input-output succession. This linearity presents the unfolding of
a story. It gives us a narrative in the form of a succession of presents. Accord-
ing to Kant, this succession is the kind of content that we must ascribe to the
form of time in order to have any empirical experience, hence any knowledge.
It appears, then, that although Kant saw the necessity of positing a transcen-
dental form of time as conditioning the possibility of experience, he could not
conceive of time itself in any other way than as mediated through space (a
linear succession of presents), that is, in Bergson’s view, as de-temporalized.
But against Kant the question arises, as it does in Bergson’s Matter and
Memory and as it is echoed in Deleuze’s famous second synthesis of time in
Difference and Repetition, “What makes the present pass?”
In Bergsonism, Deleuze echoes the argument from Bergson’s Matter and
Memory that the failure to distinguish properly between time and space
amounts to a metaphysical confusion between what is and what acts, and the
concomitant confusion between past and present.12 As pure becoming, the
present cannot be said to be. It is not, yet it acts. The past, on the other hand,
does not act (since it has ceased to be useful), which means that it does not
pass; but precisely, it has not ceased to be. Deleuze writes, “Useless and inac-
tive . . . it IS, in the full sense of the word: it is identical with being itself” (B
5. THE TIME-IMAGE AND DELEUZE’S TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE 329
55). This means that in addition to the empirical past, constituted by old presents
which have become past in relation to the new present, there must be, at the
very same time, a pure past. This virtual “past that has never been present” is
thus of necessity presupposed by the actual present as the condition without
which the latter would not pass (i.e., no empirical experience would be pos-
sible); the virtual must both preexist the present and coexist with it. In
Deleuze’s words, “It is the in-itself of time as the ultimate ground of passage.
It is in this sense that it forms a pure, general, a priori element of all time”
(DR 111/82). But Kant failed to conceive of the pure form of time as a pure
past. In fact there is a sense, Deleuze would argue, in which Kant is too em-
pirical – that is, not transcendental enough. By copying the conditions of
possibility (i.e., time and space) from that which they condition (empirical
experience as caught up in the sensory-motor situation), it looks as if Kant
could only think time as an eternal present.
A radically new thinking of time hence lies at the heart of Deleuze’s dis-
placement of the transcendental. Beyond the psychological present of percep-
tion and conditioning it transcendentally, the pure past points to the ontological
unconscious and virtual memory as the ultimate basis for sensibility. This “past
that has never been present” obviously escapes empirical experience. It is not
given. In fact, this is one of Kant’s precious basic tenets; as he ceaselessly
reminds us throughout the Critique of Pure Reason, “Time itself cannot
be perceived,” although it is a transcendental condition of all possible
intuitions.13 Deleuze’s direct answer to this, as is suggested in Cinema 2, would
run as follows: You are right, Kant, time itself as an empty form can certainly
not be perceived; but it can be thought; this is indeed the most crucial im-
port of your transcendental turn. Precisely, however, once run through the
Bergsonian “method of intuition,” and thereby liberated from its traditional
spatialization, time itself qua thought itself can be made sensible (CII, 29/
18). In other words, while time remains properly transcendental (though not
transcendent),14 it is also, at the very same time, necessarily immanent. Indeed,
this precisely constitutes the core of Deleuze’s affirmation of “transcenden-
tal experience” – which, in accordance with his refutation of the transcendental
unity of apperception, hence of the phenomenological accounts of subjectiv-
ity, is to be clearly distinguished from an experience of the transcendental.
2. The crystal-image and the fissured ego
In Deleuze’s view, it is not the case, as Kant would have it, that the transcen-
dental subject grounds space-time. On the contrary, it is absolute time as the
6. 330 VALENTINE MOULARD
Being of memory that grounds the subject – and indeed, ultimately ungrounds
it. Schopenhauer pointed out that “before Kant we were in time; now time is
in us”.15 But as Keith Ansell Pearson argues, although this is not a mistaken
reading of Kant, Deleuze radically reconfigures its sense by bringing Bergsonism
to bear on Kant’s thinking of time. Following Bergson, says Ansell Pearson,
“there is for Deleuze a being of time, and it is we who exist and become in
time, not time that exists in us, even though time is subjectivity” (PAV 184).
And he continues, quoting Deleuze: “That we are in time looks like a com-
monplace, yet it is the highest paradox. Time is not the interior in us, but just
the opposite, the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live, change
. . . Subjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul, or the spirit, the vir-
tual” (CII 111/82–3).
With the transition to the time-image we have a direct presentation of time,
or of the Being of the sensible, as opposed to the mere indirect representation
we get in the movement-image. The passage from movement to time indeed
consists in a reversal/overthrowing (renversement) of the Aristotelian relation
between time and movement. Whereas in the sensory-motor situation time is
still subordinated to movement insofar as time is relegated to being the mere
measure of movement, in the pure optical situation it is movement that be-
comes subordinated, hence relative to time: the pure past necessarily preex-
ists the moving present. Put otherwise, while the time-image is virtual, the
movement-image remains actual. What, then, does this transition consist in?
We know that its precondition is the radical breakdown of the sensory-motor
situation, which necessarily fails to tear us away from habit and clichés, as a
result of which it cannot generate a new kind of image. Deleuze says,
We have schemata for turning away when it is too unpleasant, for prompt-
ing resignation when it is terrible and for assimilating when it is too beau-
tiful . . . even metaphors are sensory-motor evasions, and furnish us with
something to say when we no longer know what to do . . . Now this is what
a cliché is. A cliché is a sensory-motor image of the thing . . . We therefore
normally perceive only clichés. But if our sensory-motor schemata jam or
break [cf. the sublime] then a different type of image can appear: a pure
optical-sound image, the whole image without metaphor, brings out the
thing in itself literally, in its excess of horror or beauty, in its radical or
unjustifiable character (CII 32/20, trans. modified).
This transition thus implies the excess, the violence of the unbearable as that
which cannot be accommodated, thereby forcing us into a different, deeper
dimension of experience. Knowledge, utility, morality – all those practical in-
terests which in Bergson’s view normally preside over the work of the intel-
ligence insofar as it is essentially directed toward action – are no longer a factor
7. THE TIME-IMAGE AND DELEUZE’S TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE 331
in the constitution of experience. The act that defines the passage from the
field of actual movement to the domain of virtual time, then, is the tearing of
a real image from clichés.
Now what is it that the movement-image gets connected to, if not to an ac-
tion-image? What can play the role of a virtual image? The first answer that
comes to mind is the memory-image, a recollection or a dream. Associationist
psychology and psychoanalysis explain the phenomenon of dreaming or day-
dreaming (and even, in some extreme cases, of certain neuroses) as a turning
away from the immediate interests of the present, provoking a rerouting of
energy away from motor discharge. Cinematographically, the relation between
action-image and memory-image appears in the use of the flashback. But the
flash-back, Deleuze points out, is always only a conventional and extrinsic
device which still indicates a causality analogous to sensory-motor determin-
ism. It receives its own necessity from elsewhere, just as memory-images must
receive the internal mark of the past from elsewhere (CII 67/48); the past or
the imaginary thus remain relative to the present, or actuality. In contrast, the
pure past must be past in itself, absolutely. The virtual informing superior
empiricism consists precisely in its own internal necessity, which points to
its transcendental status, as opposed to the external and contingent relations
informing traditional empiricism.
It appears that we must fill in a bit further the picture of the second synthe-
sis we proposed earlier, and point to the birth of what Deleuze calls “memory
as a function of the future”, in addition to memory as a function of the past.
Mankiewicz had clearly understood that “memory could never evoke and
report the past if it had not already been constituted at the moment when the
past was still present, hence in an aim to come. It is this memory of the present
which makes the two elements communicate from the inside . . .” (CII 72/52,
my emphasis). Indeed, Bergson insisted that this “memory of the present” is
the regular and necessary way in which the present is both constituted as an
actual experience, and able to pass, hence to become past,16 for, as Bergson
says, underlying our actual conscious perception, there is a doubling of the
present. Coinciding with the twofold manifestation of the self (as both spon-
taneous actor and automatic spectator, acting and acted), this doubling is de-
fined as a scission between the conscious action that the perception calls for
on the one hand, and the virtual recollection that intertwines with it on the
other. This recollection is virtual, Bergson writes, insofar as “[it] is suspended
in the air,” and it “does not correspond to any prior experience” (ES 141). The
interval between actual and virtual images is thus the site of a branching off
of time.17 Time forks in and from itself, thereby allowing, in some exceptional
cases, for a radical interruption of movement by hindering the compensation
8. 332 VALENTINE MOULARD
for the lack of motor discharge through linkage with memory and dream-im-
ages. For in fact, a dream-image is still conditioned by its attributability to a
dreamer. The conception of subjectivity only gets truly renewed – through its
own splitting, which indeed consists in a transformation in kind – when de-
fined in terms of the pure optical situation, divorced from the possibility of
representation by a unified consciousness.
For Bergson, the memory of the present is the hinge that articulates the
relationship of the actual and the virtual. It is the point of contact between
(empirical) psychology and (metaphysical) ontology, the point at which the
virtual cone of memory inserts itself into the actual plane of the psychologi-
cal present.18 Clearly, the virtual image has no psychological existence for it
lives outside of consciousness, in time.19 The point, or narrowest circuit, thus
functions as an internal limit presupposed by all others – from the increas-
ingly wider circuits of memory and dream to the cosmic circuit of the pure
past as the open totality at the basis of the inverted cone. I believe that it is,
essentially, what Deleuze calls the crystal image.
The narrowest circuit forms a crystal-image insofar as it contains only the
actual image (or the object itself) together with its own virtual double which
returns to cover it.20 “[T]he real object is reflected in a mirror-image as in the
virtual object which, from its side and simultaneously, envelops or reflects the
real: there is ‘coalescence’ between the two” (CII 92/68). The formation of this
image with two sides, actual and virtual, constitutes the point of indiscernability
between the real and the imaginary. Although the actual and the virtual remain
distinct in principle, as Bergson’s diagram shows, they become indistinguish-
able in fact – which means that the habitual work of intelligence, namely dis-
cernment, cannot be performed. The pure optical situation is no longer relative
to a supposed intelligent subject; in fact, “the distinction between subjective
and objective . . . tends to lose its importance” as “we run . . . into a principle
of indeterminability, of indiscernibility: we no longer know what is imaginary
or real, physical or mental in the situation, not because they are confused but
because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which
to ask” (CII, 15/7, my emphasis), i.e., the optical situation is no longer related
to some Kantian transcendental unity of apperception. Beyond the movement-
image, the crystal-image points to the reciprocal presupposition of the actual
and the virtual; this reciprocity allows for the constant exchange between the
two sides, “the mutual search – blinding and halting – of matter and spirit”
(CII 101/75).
Indeed, Deleuze points out, the scission between past and present as open-
ing the future conveyed by the crystal-image coincides with the most funda-
mental operation of time (CII 109/80).21 Over and above the ground (fond)
9. THE TIME-IMAGE AND DELEUZE’S TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE 333
provided by the second synthesis and its inherent paradoxes (cf., the paradoxes
of contemporaneity past/present, coexistence and preexistence, as described
in DR 108/79), we are now encountering the third synthesis as the ultimate
ungrounding (effondement) of time. Far from replacing the ground, the third
synthesis provides its profound reason. In fact, says Deleuze, it is the pure
empty form of time; as such, it is the transcendental condition of the Bergsonian
metaphysics of the virtual as expressed in the notion of ontological duration.
The crystal-image thus corresponds to a new, specifically Deleuzian
conception of presence. While the present is usually defined as the given, the
crystal-image does not give us the present – no more than it gives us time;
“the crystal-image was not time, but we see time in the crystal. We see in the
crystal the perpetual foundation of time, non-chronological time. . . . This is
the powerful, non-organic life which grips the world” (CII 109/81). Beyond
the empirical experience of vision, the crystal provides a visionary, properly
transcendental experience. In the crystal we see presence qua splitting into
past and present, into past and future even. For, “[t]he crystal always lives at
the limit, it is itself the ‘vanishing limit between the immediate past which is
already no longer and the immediate future which is not yet. . .’” (CII 109/81).
The crystal thus signifies the depth of the present itself, its very virtualization.
From this point of view, we can say that just as the pure past – distinguished
from its own actualization in the recollection or dream-image – stands for the
whole of time at the level of the second synthesis, the present itself, as an
encroachment onto the future, can now, in turn and at the same time, stand
for the whole of time too – that is, insofar as we manage to separate it from its
own actual quality, namely succession.
In the motor situation, we simply pass horizontally along an event, thereby
confounding it with space. But in the purely optical situation, we introduce a
vertical vision, in depth. The Cartesian coordinates of time and space are
overthrown: depth is no longer a third dimension of space, but as the nth
dimension of time which envelops all others, it becomes the very basis of
space.22 Once unchained from actual succession and its concomitant continu-
ous replacement of events one after the other, the new experience of the present
is established inside one single event. Once virtualized, the present becomes
the time of the event, a time internal to the event. “ ‘The time of the event
comes to an end before the event does, so the event will start again at another
time. . . the whole event is at it were in the time where nothing happens’, and
it is in empty time that we anticipate recollection, break up with what is ac-
tual and locate the recollection once it is formed” (CII 131–2/100, my em-
phasis). Now, Deleuze argues, it is indeed great cinema’s specificity to seize
this Proustian dimension where people and things occupy a place in time which
10. 334 VALENTINE MOULARD
is incommensurable with the one they have in space. In Resnais’s Je t’aime,
je t’aime, the main character remains locked up into a space that looks like
something halfway between a padded cell and a womb, all the while traveling
again and again through the numerous layers of a certain minute of his past,
with all its rhizomatic and flickering paths of association, its loops and
potentials. This Proustian experience is thus fundamentally grounded in a
paradoxical element, in which not only do time and space fail to coincide, but
also, consequently and more radically, in which we must posit a pure past irre-
ducible to both “the present that it has been (perception) and to the present in
which it might reappear or be reconstituted (voluntary memory)” (DR 160/122).
To recapitulate, the kind of experience that great cinema opens up for us
reveals involuntary memory, or the unconscious, as the site of the empty form
of time. Whether we sense it as the abyss of the pure past and the coexistence
of its sheets or as the violence of the event and the simultaneity of its peaks is
not what matters most. In either case we have a true time-image, a direct pres-
entation of time qua depth; in either case, we must extract from the feeling of
the sublime a very concrete ‘cerebral game’. In the revelation of non-chrono-
logical time,
[W]e constitute a sheet of transformation which invents a kind of transverse
continuity or communication between several sheets, and weaves a network
of non-localizable relations between them. . . . [W]e draw out a sheet which,
across all the rest, catches and extends the trajectory of points, the evolu-
tion of regions. This is evidently a task which runs the risk of failure: some-
times we only form generalities which retain mere resemblances. . . . But
it is possible for the work of art to succeed in inventing these paradoxical
hypnotic and hallucinatory sheets whose property is to be at once a past
and always to come (CII 162/123).
In other words, as Deleuze puts it in What is Philosophy? “Art struggles ef-
fectively with chaos, but it does so in order to generate from it a vision that
illuminates it for an instant, a Sensation” (WP 192/204, trans. modified). If
the work of art has the power to invent such diagonal sheets of past, it is be-
cause it calls up all mental functions simultaneously, from recollection to for-
getting through imagination and judgment. Now, Deleuze continues, “what
is loaded with all these functions, each time, is feeling (sentiment)” (CII 163/
124). What Deleuze finds in Resnais, for instance, is that his interest does not
rest with characters themselves, but the feelings that they can extract from
themselves. While “characters are of the present, feelings plunge into the past.”
In Je t’aime, je t’aime, the character stays where he is; it is his desperate love
for /guilt over the woman he killed that takes him back through the numerous
layers of the past. If Resnais does any psychology, it is a psychology of pure
11. THE TIME-IMAGE AND DELEUZE’S TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE 335
feelings, and not a psychology of characters. Defined by transformation, re-
distribution, and circulation from one level of the past to another, feelings
become characters. “But when transformations themselves form a sheet which
traverses all the others it is as if feelings set free the consciousness or thought
with which they are loaded” (CII 163/125). Following Bergson, then, the
Deleuzian time-image “prolongs itself naturally into a language-image and a
thought-image. What the past is to time, sense is to language and idea to
thought” (CII 131/99). If there is a certain continuity between feelings and
thought, this continuity is not given, but virtual. It has to be created from the
very being of the sensible qua the ungrounding from which time, as the source
of experience, springs. For Deleuze, the time-image is the genetic condition
of such creation because, as Gregory Flaxman puts it, “No longer linked
by the sensory-motor schema, the relation between images becomes non-
commensurable: between one image and another a gap opens, an “interstice”
in which thought experiences its own duration.”23
3. The fissure radicalized: time out of joint
The inauguration of the time-image in great modern cinema coincides with
the core of the transformation to which Deleuze subjects transcendentalism:
time is fundamentally “out of joint” and its constitutive ceasura cannot be
mended by an all-powerful synthesizing human subject.24 Time is no longer
the measure of movement; instead, movement becomes one among many po-
tential perspectives of time. The movement-image does not disappear, but now
exists merely as one dimension (or power, puissance), i.e., the surface of an
image that keeps growing and deepening exponentially, to finally exceed both
actual spatialization and representability absolutely.
One major consequence of this transformation is that sensibility can no
longer be equated with perception; essentially defined in excess of the “I”,
the faculty, or capacity of sensibility has been stretched to its own limit, thereby
transcending itself. Forced to confront the other faculties and struggle with
them instead of obediently furnishing them some raw material to be organ-
ized, virtual sensibility generates a new order of time. Articulated around
either non-superimposable sides of the ceasura, this new order is revealed
through a passive, static synthesis – necessarily static as time is no longer sub-
ordinated to movement. While the ceasura constitutes the form of the most
radical change, it is a form which itself does not change. As the “point of
heresy”25 of time itself in the midst of a passive synthesis, the ceasura marks
the birth of the cracked “I” (DR 120/89). For indeed, the receptivity inherent
12. 336 VALENTINE MOULARD
in this passive synthesis signifies the necessarily genetic force of thought’s
transcendental experience – the experience of its own duration. The “dogmatic
image of thought” and subjectivity that Deleuze’s time-image aims at disrupt-
ing is, as Flaxman writes, “conceived in advance of empirical vicissitudes and
thereby projects itself into the future as an anticipative matrix that turns any
encounter into one of recognition” (BS 11), which is to say that thought re-
mains hostage to common sense and generality. In contrast, the split I that is
born out of the passive synthesis can no longer provide a basis for the harmo-
nious accord of the faculties; the I turns out to be an effect, produced by the
discord of sensibility, memory and thought. In this struggle, its organs have
become metaphysical.26 Sensibility no longer has to be based in a mediating
and synthesizing consciousness; it now refers immediately to the unconscious
Sentiendum qua the very being of the sensible, i.e., to images in the Bergsonian
sense. Says Deleuze,
. . . [a]t the same time as the eye takes up a clairvoyant function, the sound
as well as the visual elements of the image enter into internal relations which
means that the whole image has to be ‘read’, no less than seen, readable as
well as visible. For the eye of the seer as of the soothsayer, it is the ‘liter-
alness’ of the sensible world which constitutes it as a book (CII 34/22, trans.
modified).
If “I” is originally another, who is it, then, that draws the transverse continu-
ity between the levels of the virtual cone, allowing for the elements of the
image to enter into non-localizable, internal relations, so that the image be-
comes readable? We have seen that the passage from movement to time-image
fundamentally involves a reversal of the relation between time and movement;
this in turn implies a depersonalization, first of movement, then of sensibil-
ity. Deleuze says, “It is the brain that says I, but I is another. . . . And this I is
not only the “I conceive” of the brain as philosophy, it is also the “I feel” of
the brain as art. Sensation is no less brain than the concept” (WP 199/211).
Insofar as the time-image does not depend on a mobile or an object for its
execution, or even on a mind for its constitution, what cinema is able to attain
to, just like the brain, is automatic movement; it is the image which moves
itself in itself, which means that it is neither figurative nor abstract. Now,
Deleuze continues,
It is only when movement becomes automatic that the artistic essence of
the image is realized: producing a shock on thought, communicating vi-
brations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly.
Because the cinematographic image itself ‘makes’ movement, because it
makes what the other arts are restricted to demanding (or to saying) . . . it
13. THE TIME-IMAGE AND DELEUZE’S TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE 337
converts into power (puissance) what was only possibility. Automatic
movement gives rise to a spiritual automaton in us, which reacts in turn on
movement. The spiritual automaton no longer designates – as it does in tra-
ditional philosophy – the logical or abstract possibility of formally deduc-
ing thoughts from each other, but the circuit into which they enter with the
movement-image, the shared power of what forces thinking and what thinks
under the shock (tans. modified. CII 204/156).
Beyond Kantianism, the great pioneers of cinema lay claim to the immediate
necessity of real experience as thinking. They pretend to force us irresistibly
into the transcendental experience of the ultimate power at which sensibility,
liberated from its formal conditioning in terms of possibility, becomes think-
ing. The event of what Deleuze also calls the “nooshock” marks, in principle,
the displacement of the cause of thinking and perceiving; it is because this
cause, as Gregg Lambert points out, can no longer be situated on the side of
the subject, that “thinking is no longer a logical possibility that one can ei-
ther take up or not, but rather becomes a physiological imperative” or, in
Eisenstein’s words, “a total provocation of the brain.”27 But this purely sensi-
tive, hence un-representable violence of a movement-image immediately in-
serting its vibrations within us would soon get confused, in bad cinema, with
the figurative violence of the represented. The power of cinema would turn
out to be a mere logical possibility, even though it does allow for the possible
(or mediation) to be conceived in terms of the sublime (or violence). Its ef-
fect on the mind is to force it to think, and to think itself: to think the whole,
as that which can only be as thought (or Cogitandum). For, Bergson insists
throughout his writings, “the whole is not given”; it is not given, Deleuze adds,
because it is the result of the indirect representation of time ensuing from
movement.
With the time-image, however, the relation between sensibility – or the
Sentiendum, that which can only be as sensed – and thought (or the Cogitandum,
that which can only be as thought) takes on a radically new form. In other
words, with modern cinema the circuit or totality of cinema-thought relations
is overturned. Deleuze argues that against Eisenstein, Artaud maintains that
“if it is true that thought depends on a shock which gives birth to it (the nerve,
the brain-matter), it can only think one thing, the fact that we are not yet think-
ing, the powerlessness (impuissance) to think the whole and to think oneself,
thought which is always fossilized, dislocated, collapsed” (CII 218/ 167). As
Blanchot diagnoses, then, what forces us to think is the very non-existence of
a whole which could be thought. The limit to which sensibility is carried in
its encounter with the sublime is insensibility as well; similarly, the limit to
which thought is pushed within the circuit constituted by the open totality is
14. 338 VALENTINE MOULARD
an absolute Outside of thought, or the unthinkable. The logically postulated
whole of dialectics cannot but be shattered, for it turns out that there is, “on
the one hand, the presence of an unthinkable in thought, which would be both
its source and barrier; on the other hand the presence to infinity of another
thinker, who shatters every monologue of a thinking self” (CII 219/168).
Necessarily encountered within thought itself, the unthinkable thus constitutes
the very positivity of thought, its vitality, in the form of an irreducible Out-
side. And if this experience of thought concerns specifically, though not ex-
clusively modern cinema, it is primarily a function of the change which affects
the image, which has ceased to be sensory-motor (CII 220/169).
This break with sensory-motor actualization implies, in a sense, a break be-
tween thought and world – that is, a break with the Phenomenological accounts
of subjectivity. Lambert justifiably writes, in obvious reference to Heidegger,
that this break “reveals precisely the shock that ‘I am not yet thinking’ or that
‘what is called thinking’ is a power that belongs to a subject who ‘I am not’”
(BS 279). However, I wish to suggest that more radically, the break between
thought and world also signifies the radical breakdown of the phenomen-
ological structure of Dasein’s “being-in-the-world”, hence of Dasein’s privi-
leged access to the question of Being, and its consequent hope for a closing
of the circle. I mentioned above that the time-image profoundly disrupts, or
ungrounds, common sense, hence the generality of thought as mitsein. Indeed,
as Len Lawlor points out in response to Merleau-Ponty, “The decisive ques-
tion is this: can Phenomenology be anything other than a phenomenology of
subjectivity (as the general form of all subjects)? According to Deleuze, as
soon as a philosopher turns immanence into immanence to consciousness, the
difference between ground and grounded collapses.”28 Deleuze explains that
in contrast with Phenomenology (and for him, Kant is the first phenomen-
ological thinker) and its desperate attempts at establishing the basis of a
common cultural world over and above a natural world, “we want to think
transcendence within the immanent, and it is from transcendence that a breach
is expected” (WP 48/47). Faced with the unbearable,
[t]he spiritual automaton is in the psychic situation of the seer, who sees
better and further to the extent that he cannot react, that is, think. Which,
then, is the subtle way out? To believe, not in a different world, but in the
link between man and the world, in love or life, to believe in this as in the
impossible, the unthinkable, which nonetheless cannot be but as thought.
. . . Artaud never understood powerlessness to think as a simple inferiority
which would strike us in relation to thought. It is part of thought, so that
we should make it our very way of thinking, without claiming to be restor-
ing an all-powerful thought. (CII 221/171, trans. modified).
15. THE TIME-IMAGE AND DELEUZE’S TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE 339
The status of the whole is modified. The whole is no longer a kind of Hegelian,
open yet integrating and reconciling totality; rather, it has become the Out-
side qua “force of dispersion.” This means that the interstice, the fissure (the
impersonal brain), has become primary with regard to continuity. The brain
is here operating a junction which is to be distinguished from a unity.29 Not
only does the brain constitute the non-unifying joint between thought and
world, but it is also itself a non-unity, a “center of indetermination” traversed
by “little cerebral deaths.”30 Henceforth, the relation between thought and
world has to be conceived as an operation of differentiation rather than in terms
of association. Therein lies perhaps Deleuze’s most profound argument against
phenomenology; for him, “it is the brain that thinks, and not man, man being
a mere cerebral crystallization” (WP 198/209), a residual creation of the crea-
tive process of evolution. As I suggested before, for Deleuze the brain is no
less sensation than concept, no less feeling than thought. Once again, it ap-
pears that its faculties do not coordinate their efforts in accordance with some
magical pre-established harmony – such as, for instance, the concept of “man”
itself; rather, the primacy of the fissures, intervals, or little deaths informing
the very structure of the brain point to its fundamentally pathological dura-
tion. The anomalous experiences that particularly interest Deleuze in the cin-
ema books – such as the traumatic sensations generated by the sublime, or
the hallucinations stemming from “the powers of the false” – those delirious
experiences, Ansell Pearson points out, are for Bergson “‘positive facts’ that
consist in the presence, not in the absence, of something. “They seem to in-
troduce into the mind certain new ways of feeling and thinking” (PAV 182).
In contrast with common sense and the usual opinion, including such Urdoxa
as “the Cogito” or “the mind,” genuine thought for Deleuze thus proceeds by
creation, production, differentiation, rather than recognition and representa-
tion.
Through his analysis of cinema’s ability to reveal a pure optical and aural
situation, Deleuze is here radicalizing the Bergsonian conception of the brain
as delay or distance (écart) between excitation and response, as well as the
distinction between virtuality and possibility so central to Bergson’s work.
But as Deleuze points out, there is a sense in which in Bergson, “this interval
remained subject to an integrating whole which was embodied in it, and to
associations which traversed it” (CII 274/211). Indeed, in Matter and Memory
the virtual unconscious is constantly weighing on the plane of actuality, push-
ing to insert itself, thereby at once transforming itself, into the psychological
present. According to Bergson, what keeps us from sympathizing with the
whole and intuit the entirety of the past is the mechanism of our practice and
interest oriented intelligence, whose essential function consists in discerning,
16. 340 VALENTINE MOULARD
i.e., literally cutting up the real. Although for Bergson, the whole is not given
in fact, it could be in principle, if we were able to liberate the infinite powers
of intuition. At the same time, however, this whole remains open to unfore-
seeable creations. But Bergson nevertheless insists on defining it in terms of
simplicity. I believe that from a Deleuzian point of view, it looks as if the
Bergsonian whole could still be accounted for in relation to the simple act of
intuition of a consciousness. Even though Bergsonian intuition is clearly rooted
in the concrete, immanent and fundamentally incommensurable being of the
sensible, the metaphysical experience it yields does not escape psychological
determination. Although it is informed by the virtual (hence non-psychologi-
cal) dimension of the pure past, the Bergsonian experience of duration only
becomes an experience through its process of actualization. It may be argued,
then, that although Bergson allowed for cracking open the Kantian account
of time and experience, Deleuze had to impregnate Bergson with his own
monstrous child in order to tear away transcendental experience from psycho-
logical experience. Finally, to contrast it with Bergson’s approach, Deleuze’s
conclusion could be summarized as follows:
We no longer believe in a whole as interiority of thought – even an open
one; we believe in a force from the outside which hollows itself out, grabs
us and attracts the inside. We no longer believe in an association of images
– even crossing voids; we believe in breaks which take on an absolute value
and subordinate all association. It is not abstraction, it is those two aspects
that define the new “intellectual cinema”. . . The brain cuts or puts to flight
all internal associations, it summons an outside beyond any external world
(CII 276/212).
As usual, Deleuze means what he says, and he means it literally. “There is no
abstraction” because he does not shy away from the radicality of his thinking
through metaphors, however inspiring or poetic they might be. This radicality
of philosophy, he points out in What is Philosophy? is demanded by the con-
stant necessity for thought’s struggle with opinion and its schemata, as well
as with thought’s degeneration within opinion itself (WP 195/207). He finally
argues that on the basis of the recent progresses in our scientific knowledge
of the brain, our lived relationship with the brain or, as he puts it, our ‘lived-
brain’ “is becoming more and more fragile, less and less ‘Euclidean’ and goes
through little cerebral deaths” (CII 275/211). As Steven Rose puts it, “the
nervous system is uncertain, probabilistic, hence interesting” (WP 203/216).
In radicalizing Bergson’s interval, that is, the “center of indetermination” that
constitutes the fundamental fissure of the “I”, Deleuze is affirming the real
necessity – not simply the mere logical possibility – of the form of an expe-
rience based in the unconscious that he thinks great modern cinema reveals
17. THE TIME-IMAGE AND DELEUZE’S TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE 341
as transcendental experience. It is an experience insofar as it produces feel-
ings and thoughts, yet it remains transcendental insofar as those feelings and
thoughts are not of that which appears on the screen; they are, rather, the di-
rect presentation of time as thought experiencing its own mad duration. These
radically “new circuits in the brain” constitute real and necessary conditions
for the immediate revelation of the empty form of time. Beyond the ultimate
rationalizations of both classical cinema and traditional philosophy conveyed
in the movement-image and its concomitant positing of the possibility of a
harmonious knowledge over and above the incommensurability of man and
world, Deleuze wants to isolate a deeper level of absolute heresy rooted in
the original splitting of time. The interaction between man and world ultimately
obeys a new order, independent of any common structure between the two.
If, as he clearly advocates throughout his writings but more specifically in
Difference and Repetition, one has to start with difference, if “one has to put
difference in the origin,” it means that the “source of experience” cannot be
abstracted from its immanent existence, that is, from its internal necessity qua
transcendental experience.
Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze, Différence et Répetition (Paris: PUF, 1ére éd. 1968 / 8 éme éd. 1996);
Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), hereafter DR.
2. As I hope to make clear, Deleuze’s philosophy of difference does not – in a Bergsonian
fashion – aim at simply eliminating such traditional dichotomies as idealism vs. empiri-
cism, and such apparent oppositions informing both schools as thought/experience, Being/
non-being, or continuity/discontinuity. On the contrary, Superior Empiricism proceeds
by first radicalizing those distinctions, so as to put into question, and eventually displace
profoundly, the very principle of their distinction. The traditional principle of non-con-
tradiction, which establishes external (hence spatial and quantitative) differences, makes
way in Deleuze for a principle of internal (hence temporal or qualitative) difference. For
a detailed and luminous account of the fundamental shift in the conception of difference
that Deleuze articulates, see his 1956 “La conception de la différence chez Bergson”, in
Les Études Bergsoniennes IV (Paris: PUF, 1956); trans. Melissa McMahon in The New
Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press,
1999). For instance, Deleuze writes, “If philosophy is to have a positive and direct rela-
tion with things, it is only to the extent that it claims to grasp the thing itself in what it
is, in its difference from all that it is not, which is to say, in its internal difference . . . we
must effectively recognise that that difference itself is not simply spatio-temporal, that
it is not generic or specific either, in short that it is not exterior or superior to the thing”
(80/43). Henceforth, the first page numbers will refer to the French, and the second ones
to the English translation.
18. 342 VALENTINE MOULARD
3. It is important to insist on this fundamental difference between the Bergsonian-Deleuzian
conception of the necessity informing the transcendental realm on the one hand, and the
Kantian account on the other. The Kantian transcendental “conditions of possibility” are
negative conditions of necessity in the sense that in his view, we would not be able to
perceive, or, for that matter, to have any experience at all, if it were not for the positing
of such conditions. In short, Kant claims that the forms of space and time are necessary
conditions without which phenomenological experience would not be possible. How-
ever, as Bergson clearly suggests, Kant’s transcendentalism fails to establish what I would
call “the necessity of the necessity”. For instance, Bergson writes, “[The Kantian Cri-
tique] gives itself space as a ready-made form of our perceptive faculty – a veritable deus
ex machina, of which we see neither how it arises, nor why it is what it is rather than
anything else” [L’évolution créatrice (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1988), p. 206; Creative Evo-
lution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1944), p. 224, hereafter CE].
In contrast, Bergson and Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism searches for “conditions
of reality” instead of “conditions of possibility” – that is, it aims at “generating the posi-
tive categories of thought” rather than determining them through analysis (CE 208/226).
In this sense, I want to say that Bergson and Deleuze are looking for a deeper kind of
necessity (e.g., how and why the form of space is what it is rather than anything else).
Beneath or beyond the negative necessity invoked by the Kantian Critique, Superior Em-
piricism thus points to the fundamental positivity of the real and its conditions: in this
consists both their internal necessity, and the virtually illimited field of their trans-
formative and creative actualization.
4. Against the famous Husserlian proposition that “consciousness is of something”, Deleuze
insists that Consciousness is something, in La Logique du Sens (Paris: Les Éditions de
Minuit, 1969), p. 362; The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990), p. 311, hereafter LS.
5. Deleuze and Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1972), p. 62; Anti-
Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: The Athlone
Press, 1994), p. 53.
6. Matière et Mémoire (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1997), p. 1; Matter and Memory, trans. N.M.
Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 9, hereafter MM.
7. In his lectures on Bergson (internet).
8. Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p.
58, hereafter N.
9. A similar idea is present in Bergson’s Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion
(Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1997); The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley
Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books), hereafter 2S.
Bergson writes, “Thus mountains may, since the beginning of time, have had the faculty
of rousing in those who look upon them certain feelings comparable with sensations,
and indeed inseparable from mountains. But Rousseau created with them a new and origi-
nal emotion. This emotion has become current coin, Rousseau having put it in circula-
tion. And even to-day, it is Rousseau who makes us feel it, as much and more than the
mountains” (my emphasis, 38/41).
10. It is important to note that the criticisms directed at Kant’s conception of time in this
paper only take into account his thinking as it is expressed in the Critique of Pure Rea-
son. As the reference to the sublime below suggests, Kant’s thinking about time in its
relation to the subject and experience is elaborated further in the Third Critique, as a
19. THE TIME-IMAGE AND DELEUZE’S TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE 343
result of which it arguably escapes a lot of these criticisms – as Deleuze suggests in both
his Kant lectures (internet) and in the second chapter of DR. But to address this new
aspect of Kant’s transcendentalism would lead us into a different project, of a much wider
scope than that of this paper.
11. Cinéma 2: L’image-Temps, (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985); Cinema 2, The Time-
Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1989), hereafter C II.
12. Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books,
1988), hereafter B.
13. See esp. the “Analogies of Experience” in “The Analytic of Principles,” Critique of Pure
Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), e.g., p. 296, hereafter CPR.
14. Here, Deleuze is not only echoing but also radicalizing the fundamental distinguish-
ing feature between Transcendental Idealism (Kantianism) and Idealistic Realism
(Platonism). Unlike Plato, Kant is not making any metaphysical claims as to the exist-
ence of things-in-themselves. Because his project in CPR focuses on the epistemologi-
cal issue of finding a ground for scientific knowledge, he is content with leaving the issue
of the ontological status of things-in-themselves aside, since according to him, they
precisely elude absolutely possible experience, hence the domain of knowledge as well.
To say that time is transcendental is to affirm that it is a necessary condition of all pos-
sible experience, that it has to be assumed for any knowledge to be possible. It does not
necessarily imply that it exists objectively in some other inaccessible realm; on the con-
trary, Kant’s transcendental move here aims at demonstrating the subjectivity of time.
We will see that for Deleuze, this is not quite enough.
15. In The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover,
1969), p. 424 [quoted by Keith Ansell Pearson in Philosophy and the Adventure of the
Virtual (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 184, hereafter PAV].
16. See what Bergson calls the phenomenon of déja-vu (or rather, “déja-vécu”) in “Le sou-
venir du présent et la fausse reconnaissance” in L’énergie spirituelle (Paris: Quadrige/
PUF, 1996); Mind-Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (London: MacMillan and Co., 1920),
hereafter ES.
17. This is what Deleuze calls “Bergson’s third diagram, which, Deleuze points out, “Bergson
does not feel the need to draw” (109 note 22/294–295 note 23).
18. See Bergson’s famous diagram of the cone, MM 169/152.
20. 344 VALENTINE MOULARD
19. As Ansell Pearson points out, “psychological consciousness is born and emerges into
being only when it has found its proper ontological conditions”. And “it is only once the
leap has been made into the being of the past that recollections [hence representations
as well] are able to gradually assume a psychological existence. The past can never be
recomposed with presents since this would be to negate its specific mode of being” (PAV,
180).
20. This, says Deleuze, is “Bergson’s first great diagram”. It is crucial to note that the “nar-
rowest circuit” (AO) is also a point (of indiscernibility) because it is precisely not an
AA circuit. As Deleuze, quoting Bergson, points out, “‘it contains only the object O it-
self with the consecutive image which returns to cover it’ (memory immediately con-
secutive to perception)” (CII 65 note 4/45 note 4).
21. We must bear in mind, as Peter Pál Pelbart notes, that although there is in Deleuze, as in
Heidegger, a certain privilege of the future, it does not, for Deleuze, coincide with the
problematic of finitude. Rather, it has to do with infinite possibilities for the creation of
the new, signified by Deleuze’s reference to the Outside. As Pál Pelbart says, “le futur
n’est pas, pour l’homme, une anticipation de sa propre mort, la possibilité extrême de
son être; il n’est rien qui ressemblerait a un être-pour-la-mort, car ce n’est pas à partir de
l’ipséité qu’il est pensé, mais d’un flux proto-ontique. Si, dans l’élaboration de ce futur
par Deleuze, l’Ouvert est une référence importante, elle renvoie au Dehors plutôt qu’a
l’Être” (“Le temps non-réconcilié,” in Gilles Deleuze, une vie philosophique, ed. Eric
Alliez (Le Plessis Robinson: Institut Synthélabo, 1998), p. 99).
22. In “Cinema and the Outside” in The Brain Is the Screen, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), hereafter BS, Gregg Lambert ex-
plains that Eisenstein had announced as early as 1929 “the discovery of a ‘fourth dimen-
sion’ of cinematographic duration – spatially inexpressible, ‘time added to three-dimensional
space’ – the appearance of which is the result of ‘overtonal conflicts’ between visual
and sound images” (p. 253). Now, Lambert continues, “because visual and aural over-
tones are [for Eisenstein] ‘a totally physiological sensation’. . . they function as ‘con-
ductors’ that introduce new effects within the spectator’s perception-consciousness system
and engender the possibility of newer and ever finer affective capabilities” (p. 254).
Lambert judiciously points out that “this discovery concerns what Eisenstein (and later
Deleuze) would discuss almost in terms of a new synthesis of the sensible, the ‘being’ of
the sensible, a body that exists before discourses, before words, clichés, and ready-to-
order representations – the ‘I FEEL’ of the cinematographic subject” (ibid.). Although I
find Lambert’s reading illuminating in many respects, I contend that it is a mistake to
identify Deleuze’s take with Eisenstein’s in this instance – even though Deleuze obvi-
ously found some inspiration in Eisenstein’s discovery. Ultimately, however, Deleuze
21. THE TIME-IMAGE AND DELEUZE’S TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE 345
thinks that Eisenstein’s cinematography and montage remain hostage to the system of
the movement-image, that is, that it remains caught up in a system of re-presentation, as
opposed to the direct presentation of time that the crystal-image generates. I am trying
to argue that for Deleuze, with the crystal (or time-image), time is not merely “a fourth
dimension OF space” (which would still make time dependent on space); rather, to say
that time is “the nth dimension of space” is to insist that it has become its ultimate power
(puissance). Time thereby exceeds space absolutely, which means that time has become
independent of space (or movement). Indeed, I believe that this independence – which
Bergson expressed in terms of the difference in kind between duration and simultaneity
– is precisely one of the central imports of Deleuze’s third synthesis.
23. Introduction to BS, p. 6.
24. The famous phrase from Hamlet, “The time is out of joint,” is the opening sentence of
Deleuze’s Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. vii.
25. Borrowed from Foucault’s “archeological” works (both The Order of Things and The
Archeology of Knowledge), this term is picked up on by Deleuze in his Foucault book
as signifying the heart of the archeological method, which precisely consists in invent-
ing those transversal sheets, independently of any resemblance or analogy, that is, of any
common structure between the elements thereby put into relation.
26. For a detailed account of this passive synthesis, see in particular the last 20 pages of the
second chapter of DR, as well as all of Chapter 4 of DR, entitled “Asymmetrical Syn-
thesis of the Sensible.”
27. “Cinema and the Outside,” in BS, p. 258. The Eisenstein quote, from “The Filmic Fourth
Dimension,” in Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1949), is also mentioned by Lambert.
28. Len Lawlor, “The End of Phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-
Ponty,” Continental Philosophy Review 31/1 (1998) pp. 15–34.
29. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze writes, “The brain is the junction – not the unity – of
three planes [of philosophy, art and science].” And he continues, “If the mental objects
of philosophy, art and science (that is to say, vital ideas) have a place, it will be in the
deepest of the synaptic fissures, in the hiatuses, intervals, and meantimes of a non-
objectifiable brain, in a place where to go in search of them will be to create,” in Deleuze
and Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1991), p. 196;
What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchnell (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), p. 208, hereafter WP.
30. The “little cerebral deaths” Deleuze is here referring to are the death of the synapses
themselves, i.e., the death of the material basis for neuronal transmissions and connec-
tions. This leads, according to Steven Rose (quoted by Deleuze), to “the ever greater
importance of the factor of uncertainty, or rather half-uncertainty, in the neuronal trans-
mission.”
