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  • The Theater of History: Carnivàle, Deleuze, and the Possibility of New Beginnings 1
  • Frida Beckman (bio)

Introduction

"what is life such that the present is possible?"

(Colebrook 8)

Time and history have come to play a particularly important role in the understanding of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. While his conception of time—built among other things on the Bergson's radical understanding of time, and developed perhaps most famously in Deleuze's work on cinema—has been seen as one of his major preoccupations, he is frequently accused of disregarding the importance of history. As Claire Colebrook points out in her introduction to the recently edited Deleuze and History, the skepticism toward Deleuze in this respect may be based on the fact that he and Guattari seem to dispute the explanatory capacity of historicism. At the same time, Colebrook notes, Deleuze's understanding of time opens up other ways of reading history. Deleuze and Guattari aim to rethink the relationship, or maybe the balance, between man and history. Part of their historiographic method is to read man as an event of history rather than as an a priori from which to interpret it. This would yield a non-linear history that could not be narrated according to a chronological, causal narrative. Rather, it would be based on time in its pure state—that is, time not tied to a specific object, but shifting with the different speeds of different events.

The potential to read a different and highly political kind of history through Deleuze is picked up by Christian Kerslake in his recent article "Repetition and Revolution: Primary Historicization in Deleuze, Regnault and Harrington" where he connects Deleuze with Marx as well as Regnault and Harrington, with the aim of proposing an important relationship between history, repetition, and agency. Deleuze, Kerslake suggests, sees interventions into history as enabled by a kind of theater of identification and repetition. This understanding of repetition as a necessary element of historical agency, Kerslake argues, is at least partly built on Deleuze's recovery of a misinterpretation of Marx. This misinterpretation suggests that Marx's idea of historical agency through repetition is reserved for [End Page 3] bourgeois revolutions and that a proletarian revolution (to come) would abandon such a theater of repetition. Deleuze, however, suggests that such theatrical processes may be part also of proletarian revolutions (Kerslake 49). The repetitions of the bourgeoisie and those of the revolutionary proletarians are of two different kinds, the first being a histrionic repetition, while the second kind of revolution functions according to internal repetition. Rather than the direct repetition of, for example, the Old Testament by Cromwell in the English Revolution, a proletarian revolution would build on a virtual accumulation "of unburied and improperly mourned dead, as well as the accumulation of lives wasted and chewed up by the machinery of the capitalist system." The questions that arise with this Deleuzean understanding of history and repetition, Kerslake suggests, include the extent to which the multiple repetitions of a proletarian revolution have been considered, and whether the conditions of such historical agency have been thought through (Kerslake 52). Taking Kerslake's question to be rhetorical, and his article to be a partial response to it, I would argue that the answer to his question is still no. Therefore, this article continues the explorations of what time and history might mean in Deleuze, and how his philosophy may help thinking about the relationship between history and agency. Acknowledging Colebrook's project of emphasizing the importance of history in Deleuze in general, and Kerslake's ambition to bring out the relationship between history, repetition, and agency in particular, this essay locates a testing ground on which the problems and possibilities that Kerslake recovers through Marx and Deleuze can be staged and developed. Employing a contemporary television series to explore relationships between time, agency, and history, the radical potential of repetition in Deleuze can be visualized and thought through.

Daniel Knauf's HBO series Carnivàle (2003-2005) comprises two seasons and 24 episodes. The projected four seasons to follow the first two were cancelled after the second season as audience interest faltered. The confusing nature of the show...

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