180217 KU Deleuze/Peirce/Bergson (2020W)

This course serves as an introduction to the two very influential books Cinéma 1: L’Image-Mouvement [1983] and Cinéma 2: L’Image-Temps [1985] by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925 to 1995).

Deleuze understood his work in these books as a conceptual practice classifying ideas that are embodied in the medium of film, the “ideas of cinema”. The aim of this taxonomy is to make image-types and cinematic signs accessible to theoretical thinking. For us, Deleuze’s taxonomy of film raises questions such as: How do we perceive the world? How can the phenomenon of time be represented? What is memory and how can the experience of memory be translated into film? - Is e. g. a flashback a genuinely cinematic means of narration or a mere convention copied from literary texts?

Reading Deleuze is not easy: Among other things, because Deleuze refers to the works of Charles S. Peirce and Henri Bergson, but uses these works in a rather unconventional way. Deleuze sees philosophy as a creative activity, comparable to art, only that philosophy creates concepts instead of producing paintings, novels, musical compositions or films. The course will therefore focus on relevant differences (e.g., that between Peirce’s theory of signs and Deleuze’s use of signs).

For the most part, Deleuze deals with films that fall under the label of “art house cinema”. Can his concepts and taxonomies also be of use for a discussion of contemporary genre films?

Goal: Introduction to the terminology of Deleuze and discussion of his creative approach to the history of philosophy based on his works on cinema.