The Disease of Images

The most pressing question for Deleuze studies today relates to how it constitutes its object: the question of how to read him must give way to questions of why. Deleuze was, arguably, unique among the philosophers of his generation in that he left us with a comprehensive guide on how to live, but this has, paradoxically, made the question of what to do with his work all the more urgent. For this reason, perhaps, Claire Colebrook's contribution to Continuum's "Guide to the Perplexed" series attempts to steer clear of Deleuze the vitalist philosopher or metaphysician of becoming, instead figuring his importance largely through his contribution to cultural studies. This introduction, then, foregoes any chronological explication of Deleuze's career, allowing the author to recast what she sees as the central, properly transcendental, Deleuzean problem, "what is life such that thinking became possible?", in terms of his cinema books (2).

Colebrook opens with an attack on the vitalist interpretation, mentioning Badiou in particular, in which some metaphysical entity is said to pre-exist life's actual and virtual reality as the power to differ and produce itself as difference. It is this differing power that Deleuze discovered in Bergson's concept of duration, in which the collapse of the Aristotelian division of a body's proprioceptive image of movement and the physical distance covered led to a diagnosis of a psychological crisis. While Bergson himself considered the cinematographic illusion as the very essence of this crisis, Deleuze sees cinema as the discovery of types of potentiality in life, the invention of different styles of duration through the inhuman apparatus of the camera. Hence, Eisenstein can be said to have opened life up to a negative presentation of time through the revolutionary duration of the montage, while postwar French cinema amounted to a direct presentation of time as the "fissure" between the virtual and the actual through an opposition of what Deleuze calls the affection image and the action image. It is at this latter point in history that thought can be said to confront its own power via cinema in that it grasps the fissure or crack that separates thought from unthought and which prevents life from being that metaphysical unity postulated by vitalism. Thus, the eye freed from the limitations of the central nervous system and the Aristotelian space thereby imposed on it allows the image itself to become an agent of philosophy.

The most interesting aspect of these chapters, which cover the first two thirds of the book, is the idea that Deleuze's cinema studies could constitute a radical, materialist historicism. Modern cinema, by thinking the genesis of relations, gives a presentation of what Massumi has called the autonomy of affect. The eye-brain-body is decoupled from the narrative or temporal order of relations involved in acting. There is, then, a primacy of affection within the experience of time beyond the order of temporal successions. Affect, like the concept, travels at infinite speed. This autonomy of affect prior to any temporal or sociolinguistic order of succession is, as Colebrook rightly points out, the central political idea in Deleuze. Relations are thought in terms of their potential to relate, and therefore are external to the empirical terms of their actualization. Colebrook indicates that this is how we might consider Deleuze as a historicist. The past is the virtuality of a present it is coeval with. Art, by releasing the power of the virtual, is how history is given. But history in this sense is indistinguishable from an ethics of reading, which Colebrook demonstrates on Wordsworth's "The Prelude" (82). Reading here must be seen in terms of a historicism not usually associated with Deleuze. It is to Colebrook's credit then that she foregrounds the concept of counter-actualization, the means through which aesthetic experience both renders the actuality of some object—a pair of peasant's shoes—while relating it to the virtualities of which it is composed and which has "the value of what could have happened" as Deleuze puts it. Counter-actualization liberates the virtual from the actual which imprisoned it while...