Time-Traveling Image: Gilles Deleuze on Science-Fiction Film

Deleuze claims in the Preface to Difference and Repetition that “[a] book of philosophy ought to be in part . . . a kind of science fiction.” And in regard to Deleuze’s relationship to film, Jean-Luc Nancy observes that “Deleuze’s interest in the cinema is not just appended to his work: it is at the centre, in the projective principle of his thought. It is a cinema-thought.” Within the larger domain of science-fiction cinema in general, the present article focuses primarily on the subgenre of science fiction known as time-travel cinema, primarily inspired by the shared insight of science-fiction film theorists (from a variety of traditions and disciplines) that cinema, in its very structure, engages in and facilitates a kind of time travel. In this way, this article ties directly into educational concerns, insofar as education in general can be productively understood as students’ metaphorical time travel into the past, thereby to retrieve and reanimate historical truths, with which to project themselves more effectively into their futures.