John Rajchman

Columbia University, Art History and Archaeology, Faculty Member

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John Rajchman works in the areas of art history, architecture, and continental philosophy. Professor Rajchman is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He has previously taught at Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, and The Cooper Union, among others. He is a Contributing Editor for Artforum and is on the board of Critical Space.

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Asli Odman

Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University

Rachel E Smith

University of Aberdeen

Michal Biran

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Erhan Aydın

Dokuz Eylül University

Marion Brepohl

Universidade Federal do Paraná

Armin Selbitschka

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Fabian Fechner

Fernuniversität in Hagen

Antonio Santamaria

CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas-Spanish National Research Council)

Lina Galvez

Universidad Pablo de Olavide

Christopher J . Ward

Clayton State University

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The Identity in Question

Foucault's Art of Seeing

October, 1988

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Deleuze`s Time: How the Cinematic Changes Our Idea of Art

1-iow <loes the cinemacic cl1ange our idea o f art? Citing Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin begins hi... more 1-iow <loes the cinemacic cl1ange our idea o f art? Citing Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin begins his great 1934 essay on mechanical reproduccio11 witl1 tl1is question.1 Tl1e problem was not so much whether cinema is an art, the so-called seventh 01 1e, but ho\.v, starcing in the nit1eteenth century, it helped transform what \ve think art is, and in particular how one thinks in the arts or with tl1e arts. Fo r Benjamin, ilie pro blem o f the cinematic was already inseparable from the whole question, at once aesthetic and policical, of how one thinks with the 11ew mass industrial audio-visual means of film and pro jection. We might think o f G illes Deleuze as taking up cl1is questio n again after World War I l, when there arose not simply a new cinem a in Fran ce but also new styles of thinking -a new 'image of thought'. The 'upheaval in general sensibility' that followed tl1e War wo uld lead 'to new dispositions o f tho ught'. 2 Filmmakers invented new ways of thinking with film and pro jec tío n, at ilie same time as those in other domains started to invent related ideas, creating a whole new zone o f interference and exchange. Deleuze's two volumes o n cinema are a monumental attempt to see the new European cinema in terms o f this constellation, to isolate 1 W. Benjamin, 'The Wo rk o f Art in the Age o f Mechanical Reproduction', in [// 11minalions (trans. Harry Zohn), New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 2 Such are the words that struck Deleuze in 'Correspondence with Dionys Mascolo', in Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and fnlerviews 1975-1995 (ed. D avid Lapoujade, trans. Ames H odges and Mike T~'"> rmi na) , Ne w Yo rk: Semiotext(e), 2006, p.327. They ace also suggestive fo r his larger encounte r with Maurice Blanchot and Margue rite Duras. 240 JOHN RAJCHMAN 090 the notions of image, space and time they involved, and so show the distinctive ways filmmakers took part in tl1is larger mutation in thought Even though D eleuze wrote l1is study of cinema in the 1980s, the basic philosophical notio ns he uses go back to his 1956 essay on the p roblem of differen ce in H enri Bergson, written ata time when Alain Resnais was making docum entaries like Var1 Gog/1 (1948), liis great study of the art:ist's suicide, as well as, of course, Night a11d Fog (1955). These ftlms "vould play a key role in Deleuze's analysis o f cinema, in particu lar by dem onstrating the princip ie that ' the cinematographic image is never in the present'. 3 D eleuze thought Resnais had perhaps gone the furthest with tl1is principie for, in his documentaries as well as in the fiction films he would go on to make, we find not only new kinds of images but also a new function for them : that of rendering a past, at once indeterminate and violent, irreducible to anyone's memory, any prise de conscie11ce. The War is thus a dividing point not only for Deleuze's inventory of new signs and images in cinematic t11inking, but also for his sense of a particular problem in post-War philosophy and in his philosophy: the problem of the peculiar 'time that takes thought'. 4 In effect, cinema m akes visible the problem philosophy developed at the same time, for which Deleuze liimself would try to work out a new logic of 'events' and their sense. If, especially in France, p ost-War cinem a developed in tandem with post-War phi.losophy, following its pec11liar twists and tums through p syc hoanalysis and Structuralism, it was because, Deleuze sugges ts, post-War cinema was itself an original audio-visual way of thinking -a peculiar relation o f thought to aisthesis, a wl1ole aesthetics. That is why the great filmmakers needed to b e confronted not simply with writers or painters but also with thinkers an d questions of thought The signs and images they invented involved a new sense of what a creative image is ai1d what it means to tl1ink Even tl1e crisis in cinema brought on by television, and later by digital images, had to be posed on this aesthetic level -as a problem of images that don't force us to think or which keep us from thinking, as with the 'presentifying' tendencies 3 Deleuze explicares this principie of the cinematographic image introduced in G11e111a 2, chapter 5, section 2, in G. Deleuze, T wo Rtgimes of Madness, op. cit. pp. 290-91. See Gilles D eleuze, , 0 11i111a 2: L ímage-temps, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985; or Cinema 2: The Time-Image.

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Truth and eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the question of ethics

... Register and you can start organising your references online. Tags. Truth and eros:Foucault, ... more

Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity

Representations, 1986

... Lacan's theory of the subject is thus intended to distance us, or to formulate what dist... more

The Identity in Question

Foucault's Art of Seeing

October, 1988

Download

Deleuze`s Time: How the Cinematic Changes Our Idea of Art

Download

Truth and eros: Foucault, Lacan, and the question of ethics

... Register and you can start organising your references online. Tags. Truth and eros:Foucault, ... more

Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity

Representations, 1986

... Lacan's theory of the subject is thus intended to distance us, or to formulate what dist... more

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