Rancière, Deleuze and contemporary film aesthetics

Abstract

A groundbreaking work in the theorization of cinema, Gilles Deleuze's Cinema project embraces an original conceptual terminology in order to express the complexity of the world of moving images. A philosopher and cinephile, but avowedly not a film scholar, Deleuze offers an innovative philosophical approach to cinema's ability to reflect on our world as well as its ability to transform human modes of thought and expression. The film books (1983, 1985; trans. 1986, 1989) are an extraordinary attempt to see the cinema differently, through a Bergsonian–Nietzschean lens, and thus to learn from the cinema what it does and has done for twentieth-century thought – for philosophy, but also for art and political thought. From a similar passion for cinema and a devotion to the philosophy of art, Jacques Rancière works from Deleuze's general premise, taking the French philosophy of cinema in a direction founded upon a different set of theoretical principles. Engaging directly with Deleuze's work, Rancière seeks to historicize and to understand both the cinema in general, and Deleuze's work on the cinema. Although Deleuze did not live to engage in turn with Rancière's criticism, a critical dialogue between the two thinkers' works around the cinema would be a fertile example of the French philosophy of cinema, not only touching on philosophy's relationship to or use of the cinema, but also revealing, through the cinema, an ongoing debate in philosophy (admittedly, as old as Parmenides and the original questioning of the unity or multiplicity of substance).