Images of Time in Deleuze; Naked Life, Dumb Life, A Life; How to Live Alone

Abstract

Deleuze’s major theses on time reappear in a dramatised manner in his books on cinema, where they conquer an aesthetic operationality that illuminates them as a whole. Take the most enigmatic idea that organises these books, the emancipation of time. Time is out of joint, exclaims Hamlet. Time is off its hinges! What does it mean for time to have left its axes, returned to itself, pure time? Deleuze alludes to a time freed from the tyranny of the present that previously it bent, and available, henceforth, to the most eccentric adventures. Bruno Schulz says, in another context, that time is a disordered element that is only kept in check thanks to an incessant cultivation, a care, a control, a correction of its excesses. ‘Free of this vigilance, it immediately begins to do tricks, run wild, play irresponsible practical jokes, and indulge in crazy clowning’ (Schulz 1980: 283). Schulz recalls that we carry a supernumerary load that does not fit on the train of events nor on the two-track time that supports it. For this precious contraband that he calls Event, there are those lateral tracks of time, blind detours, which stay ‘suspended in the air, errant, homeless’, in a multilinear streak, no ‘before’ nor ‘after’, neither ‘simultaneously’ nor ‘consequently’, the most remote murmur and the furthest future communicating at a virginal beginning. Thus, in the continuous time of linked presents (Chronos) the time of the Event (Aeon) is constantly insinuated, in its non-dialectical, impersonal, impassable, incorporeal logic: ‘the pure reserve’, pure virtuality that never stops supervening. To this, Deleuze stresses a cinematographic procedure that consists of unlinking the peaks of present from their very actuality, subordinating