Abstract
In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze & Guattari consider art as a bloc of sensations, composed of percepts, affects and images. Such notions are also crucial to the understanding of Deleuze's idea of cinema, as elaborated by the philosopher in his two books Cinema 1. The Movement-Image and Cinema; 2. The Time-Image, and further investigated in other essays and interviews. In Deleuze's theory, concepts and sensations are forms of intensity, and they are flows, rather than firm configurations. And cinema is, in an exemplary way, a flow of images, a continuous variation of intensity. For Deleuze, intensity may finally be defined as one of the fundamental features of cinema and art. Intensity is dynamism, it is a flow of variable strength and of differential processes, chiefly tied to sensation, but also to forms and concepts, and connected to becoming. And intensity is an essential concept to comprehend Deleuze and his thought.
Highlights
Introduction and MethodologyIn What Is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari assert the centrality of concept and sensation to the work of art (1), and to cinema
In order to better understand the weaving of Deleuze’s thinking about cinema, its hidden watermark, it is much more interesting, in my opinion, to investigate his theorization about concept and sensation, rather than limit oneself to the two – excellent – books he wrote about cinema (2)
The connection between intensity and thinking is crucial to Deleuze and Guattari, who reaffirm it in What Is Philosophy?: “the concept (...) has no energy, only intensities” (43)
Summary
In What Is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari assert the centrality of concept and sensation to the work of art (1), and to cinema. In order to better understand the weaving of Deleuze’s thinking about cinema, its hidden watermark, it is much more interesting, in my opinion, to investigate his theorization about concept and sensation, rather than limit oneself to the two – excellent – books he wrote about cinema (2). Deleuze’s method is more richly articulated, it goes beyond film and branches out to several different horizons In his books dedicated to Bacon and to Proust, to Sacher Masoch and to Carmelo Bene (3), Deleuze produces a conceptual philosophical dynamics starting from the analysis of certain texts and certain images. The path to the creation of concepts is not limited for Deleuze, to the approaches of traditional philosophy – on the contrary, it involves an attempt to invent unique routes and trajectories, because such an experimental, non-hierarchical and deductive movement may be able to create new ideas
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