How Does a Thought Scream? The Possibility of the New as a Condition of Political Ontology in Gilles Deleuze’s The Time-Image

Abstract

The paper deals with Gilles Deleuze’s The Time-Image not as an essay on the philosophy of cinema but as a theory of political ontology. The meaning of the concept of “scream” must first be clarified. This concept appears in Deleuze’s lectures from 1980 in the context of the sequence of cinema, thought and shock from the second volume of his book Cinema. To indicate the immanent political significance of Deleuze’s cinema studies, the article clarifies the conceptual difference between two types of cinema. The distinction between “the movement-image” and “the time-image” is examined as ontological rather than aesthetic. In particular, the paper shows the conservative effects of “classic” cinema in the context of Henri Bergson’s ontology. The critical potential of modern cinema, which Deleuze considers in The Time-Image, is a condition for undermining the logic of “habit,” which is reproduced by the cinema of “the movement-image.” The condition for a break with this logic is the effect of shock, which is produced by the distinctive characteristics of modern cinema. Deleuze finds the political significance of modern cinema in the context of the possibility of the New which is not predetermined by previous conditions. The rupture with the status quo is ensured by contrasting two concepts of the Whole viewed either as the Open or as the Outside. The difference between them is examined in connection with the critical distance from the ontology of Henri Bergson, which is an imaginary solution of the problem of the New and therefore the problem of conservatism in the universe of “classic” cinema. In order to identify the political significance of “the image-time,” it is necessary to indicate the constitutive role of temporal rupture in modern cinema. It is this logic that provides the effect of shock for thought and allows it to break away from permanent repetition.