Alchemies of Thought in Godard's Cinema
Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5339573 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Elena Del Río (0000-0001-7997-4139, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 62-78 |
| Publication date | 2005-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | SubStance (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/sub.2005.0047 |
| OpenAlex | W2011535754 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 4 |
Alchemies of Thought in Godard’s Cinema:Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Elena del Rio (bio) Notwithstanding Deleuze's indictment of phenomenology for its alleged failure to meet the challenges of immanence and difference, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze's philosophies and their implications for a theory of cinema remain close in many important respects. Both Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and Deleuze's transcendental empiricism dismantle epistemological systems that are grounded in non-corporeal acts of signification or cognition. The drive to determine a clear dividing line between subject and world, perceiver and perceived, objective reality and subjective experience, is equally suspected and accordingly undermined by both thinkers. In the continuity of human body and world that both these philosophies propose, a sensational and affective approximation to the world replaces the purely mental and visual methods of the disembodied cogito. As made apparent in his book on Francis Bacon, Deleuze shares Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the world-body of sensation as a continuum between viewer/artist and art work: "sensation has no [objective and subjective] sides at all; it is both things, indissolubly; it is being-in-the-world, as the phenomenologists say: at the same time I become in sensation and something arrives through sensation, one through the other, one in the other" (Francis Bacon, 27). But despite the many ideas Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze share, it is also important to acknowledge the difference that separates them—a difference that renders their respective modes of thinking unique and therefore equally necessary. As many commentators have noted, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze part ways at the juncture where sensation and affect are variously theorized as either belonging to the realm of subjectivity or as operating in a desubjectified field of forces. Thus, while for Merleau-Ponty sensation and affect are subjective phenomena arising out of an intentional and individuated rapport with the world, Deleuze regards the sensational and the affective as material flows whose individuation and exchange does not rest upon subjectified intentions, but rather upon the workings of a non-organic, anonymous force or life. [End Page 62] I would like to use the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard as a testing ground for the potential reversibility, as well as the tensions, that arise when one applies Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze's diverse modes of thinking to a kind of cinema that seems equally suited to both. In many notable ways, the examples of Godard's 1980s cinema that I will discuss—Passion (1981), Scenario of Passion (1982), and Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1989)—can be seen as film performances of paramount philosophical concerns in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze's writings. The micropolitics of perception exemplified in Godard's cinema counters the ideology of the visible at work in Western forms of representation by restoring the materiality and physicality and the sense of duration to acts of (technological) perception. Godard strips the image of its representational properties, while foregrounding the incantatory qualities that turn the image into a disclosing event or gesture. Godard is not interested in the visible as a static aesthetic form or fixed ideological construct; rather, his attention to bodily gesture and movement acts out an involvement with the visible as a mode of constant becoming, where figures come into being from a latent ground of visibility and virtuality. Furthermore, the body figures so prominently in these films by Godard as to transform what initially might be construed a proliferation of individuated bodies into a corporeal continuum of sensation and affect. But besides using the image to interrogate the material and sensory continuity between body and world, Godard's cinema explicitly addresses the very point of contention between Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze: the subjective versus the non-subjective perspectives. Godard's tendency to include his own body in these works does not answer the question by either privileging the subjective or the non-subjective. Instead, as I will try to show, Godard's ambiguous stance between a potentially narcissistic self-presentation, and the dissolution of identity into anonymous material sensation affirms the continuity of subjective and non-subjective as overlapping, coexistent planes. In this way, Godard's films unwittingly reveal the philosophical impossibility of keeping
Aesthetics · Art · Cogito ergo sum · Cognitive psychology · Empiricism · Epistemology · Immanence · Literature · Movie theater · Perception · Phenomenology (philosophy) · Psychoanalysis · Sensation · Transcendental number · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cinema and Media Studies · Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.21 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2012 - 2022 (11) |
| Highly cited | No |