Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power: Deleuze via Blanchot

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Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze's thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art. Examining Blanchot's suggestion that art and dream are “outside” of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault's theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze's philosophy of time and his work with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka's Castle, Villeneuve's Arrival, and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses the realities and truths of power to express obscure ideas and values beyond both our exterior and interior worlds. 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