Deleuze et le cinéma: l’armature philosophique des livres sur le cinéma by Jean-Michel Pamart (review)

As its subtitle pointedly suggests, Jean-Michel Pamart’s book provides a genealogical investigation of the multiple philosophical layers underpinning Deleuze’s Cinema books, known for their elaborate conceptual constructivism. Unlike similar exegetic studies on the subject, Pamart goes far beyond the descriptive exposition of Deleuze’s taxonomy of film images and delves into the very logic behind its dynamic composition, which is that of the genesis of faculties through active and passive syntheses elaborated in Chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition. It is this chapter of Deleuze’s magnum opus, Pamart emphasizes, rather than Bergson’s Matter and Memory, that serves as a ‘veritable matrix’ (p. 112) for his Cinema books. Part I examines Deleuze’s creative appropriation of concepts from a number of philosophers on whom he gave his seminars at the Université de Paris VIII in the early 1980s, such as image (Bergson), sign (C. S. Peirce), time (Kant), and body and thought (Spinoza). Pamart skilfully demonstrates how Bergson’s trinity of images (perception-image, affection-image, action-image) resonates with Peirce’s semiotic categories (zeroness, firstness, secondness), as does Kant’s notion of time as the affection of self by self with Spinoza’s understanding of thought as auto-affection, or active passion. Part II traces the unfolding of Deleuze’s idiosyncratic history of cinema in parallel with the successive movement of passive and active syntheses governing the ascendance of sensibility via memory to thought. Whereas the movement-image, Pamart argues, employs the Kantian model of cognition that presents the genesis of faculties according to the active syntheses of imagination, reproduction, and understanding, the time-image transforms this model into that of transcendental empiricism and thus pushes human faculties to their inhuman limit according to passive (or unconscious) syntheses, thanks to which the faculties evolve into powers, or active forces. The Deleuzean passage from the movement-image to the time-image is therefore that from the empirical use of faculties to their transcendent exercise disengaged from their anchors in reality. As a result of such conversion, film images in modern cinema are equally pushed to their transgressive limit of representation: for example, perception-images turn into op-signs, flashbacks into crystal-images and sheets of past, reflection-images into thought-images or cuts, movements into the body’s attitudes and postures, monologues and dialogues into the autonomous use of speech, etc. In the Cinema books, Spinoza’s question of what a body can do is thus restated as that of what an image can do: for Deleuze, both body and image should be exercised to the limit of their capacities. In a final chapter, a similar parallel is drawn between the passage from classic to modern cinema and the ascendance of the first kind of knowledge (imagination) to the second one (common notions) in Spinoza’s Ethics, where the knowledge of common cause between bodies liberates our power to act. Pamart’s unifying genetic approach, grounded in Deleuze’s reworking of Kant and Spinoza, not only resolves the old debate over the problematic relation of Cinema 1 and 2 to chronological film history by showing that they are primarily philosophical books, but it also demonstrates systematically that they are, fundamentally, the studies of visual ethics and politics.