Garin Dowd

Which modernism or modernisms circulate in Deleuze’s two-volume work on cinema? Can one meaningfully claim that both or either The Movement-Image and The Time-Image maintain connections with literary modernism? What relationship if any may be forged between theoretical debates in the areas of literary and film studies as these have been influenced by engagement with Deleuze’s work on cinema? The first obstacle to any successful negotiation of these questions lies in the absence in the books of any reference to the category of modernism – a fact which is after all hardly surprising in a French author of Deleuze’s generation. A second consideration is summed up well by Joost Raessens when he argues that “For Deleuze the term ‘modernity’ is not a neutral category. In effect modern cinema is a representation of differential thought which is determined [...] as a fundamental critique of the classic thought of Plato and Hegel.” Scholars often assert that Deleuze’s modernity owes much to Nietzsche, in the shape of the latter’s demand for a new approach to questions of truth and knowledge. Once life is no longer judged in the name of a higher authority such as the good or the true, the stage is set for Nietzschean transvaluation. This is a process which subjects “every being, every action and passion, even every value, in relation to the life which they involve” to evaluation. This normative model of a cinema which has the capacity to carry out a Nietzschean total critique by means other than philosophy presides over The Time-Image in particular. In terms of the trajectory of Deleuze’s thought, total critique is opposed, in Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, to Kantian critique as well as to Hegelian sublation. The thinking images of modern cinema, more specifically of its preeminent auteurs in Deleuze’s pantheon such as Welles, Resnais, Godard, and others, can effectuate this new image of thought. Thus is rendered tangible Deleuze’s claim that films think, that cinema thinks. Thus are linked a modernism of cinema and a project which dates back to Difference and Repetition, namely the challenge to a certain image of thought. In this challenge the allies include the two philosophers who dominate the film books – Bergson and Nietzsche. This chapter assumes the position that it is impossible to consider Deleuze’s modernism as being in any way other than intrinsically linked to his overall philosophical system and therefore that it is only in this context that connections with literary modernism can be explored.

While positioning and contextualising the short story ‘Green Tea’ by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu in relation to existing Le Fanu scholarship, this article seeks to explore further the textual reflexivity for which it is renowned. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of regimes in the audio and the visual, in particular, through an attention to the interrelationship of the scopic, auditory and textual regimes of ‘Green Tea’, and to the manner in which writing is explicitly figured as both the source of disjunction and the site of interpenetration of the regimes, it is suggested, in conclusion, that a specific understanding of allegory can provide a fresh perspective on ‘Green Tea’ as an archive of the regimes of language and light of its time.

Samuel Beckett’s choice of the title Ohio Impromptu to name the play first performed to an audience of academics and scholars at Columbus Ohio in 1981 is one manifestation of its author’s interest in the question of literary genre; more generally, in Beckett’s dramatic works one encounters a meticulous attention to the activity of categorisation, even if the energy is often directed toward the creation of phantom genres for spectral exemplars. This essay concerns itself with Ohio Impromptu in particular because by means of elements specific to this play (including the context in which it was first performed) it comments upon its own very failure to occupy its designated genre co-ordinates (these include its identity both as a play and as an ‘impromptu’). This play, which is so apt to incorporate other genres, however, is presided over by a stage direction which locates it firmly in the theatrical context. It is in its deliberate failure to attend to this stage direction that the Beckett on Film version of the play goes beyond the mere treacherous fidelity that is inevitably a feature of any adaptation. In arguing this, the essay analyses the foregrounding in the play of questions that can be said to pertain to genre (in several senses). Its more specific intention is to suggest that, via a combination of casting and special effects, the adaptation succeeds not only in cancelling the critical reflection on the ‘genre gesture’ that is lodged in Ohio Impromptu, but also in eradicating the very disjunction between Reader and Listener upon which the play depends.

This is a version of a paper delivered at the Beckett centenary conference held at University College Cork, May 26-27, 2006. It was subsequently published under the title ‘Stellar Separation orMachine? Badiou and Deleuze and Guattari on Beckett’ in Beckett Re-Membered: After the Centenary, edited by James Carney,Mi chael O’Sullivan, Leonard Madden and Karl White, pp. 92-107, ISBN 1443835005. This is a pre-publication version of the paper as it appeared in the latter publication. OPENING PARAGRAPH: In the most important study to date of the respective use of Beckett’s writings in the work of Deleuze and Badiou, Jean-Jacques Lecercle concludes by surmising that “Perhaps the close proximity, in the French edition, of Deleuze’s essay, ‘The Exhausted’, to Beckett’s own text, is indeed more than a fortunate coincidence: perhaps it is a symptom”.1 For, Lecercle, despite his long-term support for Deleuze and indeed despite his misgivings concerning Badiou’s characteristically strong reading of Beckett, decides that there may be, after all, something more compelling in the Badiou than in the less consistent Deleuze. This may also be, he suggests, attributable to Deleuze’s own modernism as a writer, which, though it gives him greater access to, and understanding of, the materiality of Beckett’s writing, also in the final analysis, renders his reading of Beckett somewhat orthodox. By contrast, the defiantly declarative and unhesitatingly dogmatic reading advanced by Badiou, is able to disclose strikingly original insights, not least because of the co-implication and reversibility of the readings of Badiou-Beckett and Beckett-Badiou. This essay seeks to examine the symptomatology of one text in particular as it operates and produces or is indicative of symptoms in the work of Badiou and Deleuze respectively.

This essay examines Gilles Deleuze’s employment of the concept of the ‘pedagogy of the image’ which was first developed by the film critic Serge Daney in two seminal essays in the mid 1970s in Cahiers du cinéma. It will seek to foreground the ‘Daney effect’ (Bellour 2004) in the second half of Cinema 2: The Time-Image where the influence of Daney, along with Bonitzer, Bergala and other film theorists is most pronounced. It will examine the ‘traffic’ of the image and of ideas of the image between Deleuze and Daney as each, in the course of the 1980s, sought to address mutations in the scopic regime. Thus the essay proposes the trope ‘pedagogies of the image between Daney and Deleuze’

There are many points of contact between Deleuze’s spatial concepts, in their variegated forms, and the prose work of Samuel Beckett. With particular emphasis on the concept of any-space-whatever, it is shown that Beckett’s interrogation of spatiality in the work immediately following the Second World War can be seen to anticipate the very qualities of his late work which would lead Deleuze to make such extensive use of the concept in ‘The Exhausted’. For the purposes of this chapter Beckett’s novella ‘The Expelled’ is explored. In addition to the direct links between the any-space-whatever and Beckett in ‘The Exhausted’, reference is made to the two distinct but related formulations of the concept in the Cinema books.

What can philosophy bring to the reading of Beckett? Combining intertextual analysis with a ‘schizoanalytic genealogy’ derived from the authors of L’Anti-Œdipe, Garin Dowd’s Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari offers an innovative response to this much debated question. The author focuses on zones of encounter and thresholds of engagement between Beckett’s writing and a range of philosophers (among them Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant) and philosophical concepts. Beckett’s writing impacts in a variety of ways on Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, and, in particular, resonates with Deleuze’s contributions to the history of philosophy (in books such as Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque), and his ‘critical and clinical’ approach to literature. Furthermore, the books co-written with Guattari, concerned as they are with the ‘molecularization’ of the discipline of philosophy in the name of ‘thinking otherwise’, reveal themselves in a new light when explored in conjunction with Beckett’s œuvre. With its arresting perspectives on a wide range of Beckett’s works, Abstract Machines will appeal to academics and postgraduate students interested in the philosophical aspects of his writing. Its engagement with alternative contributions to the question of Beckett and philosophy, including that of Alain Badiou, renders it a timely and provocative intervention in contemporary debates on the relationship between literature and philosophy, both within the field of Beckett studies and beyond.

Serge Daney is widely recognised in his homeland as the most important French film critic after André Bazin. In a career devoted to criticism for Cahiers du cinéma and later Libération, including a key period as editor during the transition from the journal’s PCF and then Maoist phase beginning in 1973, Daney also held a lecturing position for a spell at the University of Paris, Paris III, La Censure. He was a significant public intellectual and featured in several documentaries, including Claire Denis’ film Jacques Rivette – Le veilleur. From 1985 to 1990 Daney presented a programme on cinema on the radio station France Culture. Following the publication of a book on Haitian politics in 1973 under the assumed name Raymond Sapène, Daney’s journalism was collected in several volumes. He left Libération in 1981 to establish Trafic, a journal which, since his death from Aids in 1992, has continued his legacy. The only book-length English translation of Daney’s writings to date – Postcards from the Cinema – is of the posthumously published Persévérances.

This essay sets out from the premise that the films of Jacques Rivette merit sustained reconsideration in the framework provided by Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image. In particular it explores the concepts of ‘the powers of the false’ and ‘fabulation’ as ways of engaging with Rivette's cinematic oeuvre, with a particular focus on his Paris-set films. On this basis the article seeks to add to the readings undertaken by Deleuze himself and, in the light of Rivette's cine-thinking, to examine in tandem both films to which Deleuze directly responded, such as Le Pont du nord, and later post-Deleuze renegotiations of the city such as Secret défense.

This chapter takes as its point of departure the frequent injunction in Beckett’s late prose works to build or construct an environment for a character to inhabit. It is proposed that this instruction is central to the textual operations of the late prose. Making use of the work of Philippe Hamon on text and architecture, and through a close reading of Beckett’s short prose piece (originally written as a libretto for Morton Feldman), it is argued that, despite its sparse nature, ‘Neither’ can, in large part, still be read as exemplifying Hamon’s insights into the operations of the textual and the architectural as these were manifest in the classic realist novel. The specific challenges which Beckett’s late prose present, however, require a supplementary critical vocabulary in order to account for the manner in which the textual and the architectural interpenetrate and expose each other in the twentieth century.

Extract: [...] Badiou himself seems however, by turns, relatively modest and occasionally self-congratulatory as regards any claim to make a major intervention in the field. His entertaining and informative account of his largely solitary cinéphilia of the 1950s and 1960s, as a ‘young provincial’ frequenting the Cinémathèque (a few doors away at that time from the École Normale Supérieure on the rue d’Ulm), through to his work as a ‘heathen’ iniltrating the Catholic journal Vin nouveau, and on to his engagement with cinema through politics, contains both moments of self-regarding comedy as well as statements which identify several of the key tropes that will recur throughout the volume [...]

This chapter explores the rather striking manner in which at key moments in the history of philosophy, in the discipline’s attempts at self-definition, the genre or literary form of poetry plays a key role. Philosophy, at these moments, has been defined, inter alia, as the enemy of poetry, the guiding light for the philosopher who can only try and inevitably fail to emulate its brilliance, or as the anomalous guest at the philosophical table with whom the host discipline has relations which result in either generative or degenerative effects. Insofar as it lays claim to or liaises with philosophy – as we have come to know it today – poetry has thus played a part in the self-definition of genre theory. The aim of this chapter is to capture a very specific set of transfers, transpositions, metonymies and other modes of reversible relations of substitution and surrogacy between philosophy and poetry, and along the way between genre-theory-as-philosophy and poetry.

This paper explores the framing qualities of architecture in conjunction with the framing operations of cinema. In doing so it refers to philosophical inquiry into architecture and to architectural philosophy as well as to attempts to think film and the architectural together. In what sense or senses can architecture be considered 'primary' in relation to cinema? This first question will be explored by considering the inscription or encompassment of the architectural as a foundational gesture in cinema. Even if film does not necessarily figure the built environment, even if it need not be dependent on the presence or generative force of buildings, film will always participate in its own version of architecture's modelling into a form of territory.