Depth and Time in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze

Abstract

In a footnote in his second book on cinema, The Time-Image, Deleuze admits that his understanding of depth - one of the central notions in the book and thus in his theory on time and its presentation in cinema - can be traced back to Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. The reference to Bergson is not surprising as Deleuze made no secret of the Bergsonian inspiration of his philosophy and especially of his theory on time. However, with respect to Merleau-Ponty this does not speak for itself. After all, throughout Deleuze's oeuvre, references to Merleau-Ponty are rather rare and mostly negative. Deleuze considers Merleau-Ponty to be one of the representatives of those philosophies who seem to defend an immanentism but actually reinstall a transcendent layer. Deleuze's acknowledgement is thus quite remarkable, all the more because of the centrality of the notion of depth in this book and, in a way, also in his whole philosophy. A second reason why this acknowledgement is striking is that Merleau-Ponty's notion of depth is sometimes presented as the notion that indicates the divergence between the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Bergson. According to Fabrice Colonna, Merleau-Ponty deploys this notion in order to turn the extrinsic relation between present and virtual past that he discovers in Bergson, into an intrinsic one. This point of view does not only contradict the continuity between both authors proposed by Deleuze in the footnote, it also implies a divergence between the Bergsonian theory of depth by Deleuze and the one by Merleau-Ponty. In this article I will examine the range of this Deleuzian reference to Merleau-Ponty. How do both authors understand depth? Is there a common vector in both accounts? How far does this vector reach or where does it split up to take different directions? The specificity of each approach will be illustrated with a comparison between the movie Citizen Kane by Orson Welles and Muriel ou le temps d'un retour by Alain Resnais.