Garin Dowd

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.

If Beckett’s study of Proust has belatedly received the criticisms its author no doubt anticipated, another influential study published a little over thirty years later has, like its predecessor, elicited, among others, the critical response that the author of the Recherche finds himself recruited to the self-serving project of the critic. Gilles Deleuze’s Proust is cast not as the pessimistic Schopenhauerian which Beckett makes of him, but rather, as a force of affirmation in the quasi-Nietzschean register of the ‘powers of the false’. Deleuze would studiously augment his 1964 study with two additions in an effort to improve it. The consequence of this is to render its textual genesis a testament to one of the themes, and for Deleuze the theme of the Recherche, namely, apprenticeship. Moreover, the ‘pedagogy’ to which Proust’s novel subjects the philosopher becomes itself an example of the ‘untimely’ operations of art upon what Deleuze calls the upright or dogmatic image of thought.

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.

Paper presented at Philippe Garrel, le temps incorporé/Embodied Time Université Paris 8 Nanterre 29 & 30 novembre 2018 This paper proposes a loose typology of space and place in Garrel’s cinema. Its point of departure is the 1969 round table organised by Jacques Rivette which was a supplement to a series of film screenings chosen to illustrate the theme of space in cinema. Among the films chosen was Garrel’s Le lit de la vierge, which, for Rivette, is of interest in the way it exemplifies the cinema of an ‘adventure of place’ rather than an ‘adventure occurring in a place’. The film for Rivette escapes from the “dénoté géographique, topographique”. Although the round table represents a particular juncture it offers a potential line of enquiry regarding the spatialities of Garrel’s subsequent work. Given the crucial role played by memory linked to place, temporality must also be considered. I propose to explore certain examples from Garrel’s body of work through the idea, borrowed from Michael Tawa in his book of this title, of agencies of the frame. Through the possibilities in this conception, a rethinking of the link between character and place/space emerges. Linking the idea of agencies of the frame – which Tawa himself adapts from Simondon – back to Rivette’s early insights, I propose a survey and typology featuring, inter alia, the generic spaces of urban encounter and circulation, specific places of significance to Garrel, types of urban space, screen spaces, abstraction and spatiality and Parisian topographies.