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Deleuze as Logician of the Virtual: Reading theCinema Books off Hegel’s ‘Logic’

(crossposted at Orbis Mediologicus)Deleuze’s Cinema I and II as BwO for Hegel’s Logic?!?

At the end of Cinema II: The Time-Image, Deleuze states

At the end of Cinema II: The Time-Image, Deleuze statesthat these books are “books of logic.” Honestly, I didn’tnotice this quote until I recently was reading a secondarysource on the text (by Deleuze on Cinema, by RonaldBogue) to refresh myself for teaching it to students. But itreally his me as somewhat of a revelation: Deleuze’s bookof logic, his ‘Grand Logic’, so to speak, is present in hisbooks Cinema I: The Movement-Image, and Cinema II: TheTime-Image. And as I’ve immersed myself in these bookslately so as to teach them, it really has me thinking aboutthe implicaitons of this.

In many senses, the Cinema books are Deleuze’s mostsystematic and grand undertaking, and represent, in manysenses, the most complete formulation of his latephilosophy. Certainly the book on Leibniz has much to sayfor it, as does his last work with Felix Guattari, What isPhilosophy?, but neither of these encompass anywherenear the terrain as we see in the Cinema books. And yet,many readers of Deleuze see these books as of secondaryinterest if they are not themselves interested in film.

And yet, it seems to me that these works really do give usDeleuze’s Logic. And in fact, his attempt to take on, andoutdo, one of the most famous works of logic ever written,namely, the famed Science of Logic written by Deleuze’sarch-nemesis, Hegel, in the early nineteenth century.

Much has been made of Deleuze’s anti-Hegelianism, andthere was a time in which if you even suggested thatDeleuze was influenced by Hegelian, you’d be laughed outof any philosophical conversation. Yet, withincontemporary scholarship, it seems increasingly sayablein today’s climate to see the hidden influence of Hegel. Assome have pointed out, Deleuze even wrote a book on oneof his other rivals, namely, Kant, but there is no book on

of his other rivals, namely, Kant, but there is no book onHegel. Which is curious, it would seem. This is, it wouldseem to me, because Hegel is EVERYWHERE in Deleuze.Even if in reverse. For just as Marx said he wanted tostand Hegel’s Deleuze on his head, perhaps it is Deleuzewho doesn’t so much stand Hegel on his head, but matehim with what complexity theorists have called a ‘strangeattractor.’

Trying to Read Deleuze’s ‘Gest’

It seems to me that understanding a thinker, isn’t merelyabout reading all their works, for doing so focuses on whatthe philosopher says, on the surface. But what about allthose points of what Bakhtin calls ‘hidden polemic’, inwhich a thinker is sparring with an unnamed enemy,producing what seems like odd diversions within theirtexts for those who don’t know the context? Withoutknowing when Deleuze is sparring with Lacan, Hegel’sheir, for example, is to miss half of Deleuze. Nearly asmuch as missing when he’s sparring with Hegel.

Rather, when studying a philosopher, we need tounderstand their relation to their times, how they sawtheir own influences. We need to recreate a thinker’smilieu, we need to read all their sources. Only doing sogive us more than the gesture of a given thinker, but theirgest. According to Bertolt Brecht, a gest is a gest information, suspended, so to speak. To understand athinker, we need to know how they formed their gesture,and why. What were the conditions of possibility for theirgesture? For Deleuze, Hegelianism was crucial, for it wasprecisely the paradigm of Kojeve, of Lacan. It was whatneeded to be displaced. Of course, Hegelianism isn’t Hegel.

According to Harold Bloom (in A Map of Misreading), each

According to Harold Bloom (in A Map of Misreading), eachauthor has a primary influence that they need to kill off inorder to be born, one whose influence they fear showingin their work lest they appear derivative, but whose nameis evident in its symptomatic absence throughout theirwork. While Bloom was writing about literary authors,this ‘anxiety of influence,’ which Bloom gets from readinginfluence through the Freudo-Lacanian nothing of theOedpus complex (each other ‘kills their father’, so tospeak), haunts the corpus of philosophers as well. ForDeleuze, I feel, that missing yet ever present father isHegel. Which is why, it seems to me, that Deleuze’s facilehatred of Hegel (see his discussion of Hegel in Dialogues,for example) is a red herring, meant to throw us off thetrail. As Bruce Baugh has argued, Hegel is nevermentioned by Deleuze except for if to slander or impugn,and seems to not even deserve the treatment of arespected enemy, one that Deleuze famously said hewanted to ‘understand how [he] works’, as with the case ofKant (see Baugh’s essay in the Graham Jones anthologyDeleuze’s Philosophical Lineage).

Deleuze’s Deductions?

But what is the Cinema project but Deleuze’s take onHegel’s massive Logic, or, how could we make thatargument? The point here is not to simply notice Deleuze’sincessant use of threes, which is more the influence ofPeirce (who himself was influenced by Hegel). No, it is thestructure of the books themselves. For in fact, the bookshave an inner movement, and in the second book, Deleuzein fact says that these various images he is describing (ie:perception-image, affection-image, etc.) are DEDUCEDfrom one another (for more, see Section 2 of the Chapter

“The Recapitulation of Images and Signs” in Cinema II).

“The Recapitulation of Images and Signs” in Cinema II).That is, all in the universe is movement-image, but somemovement-image is also perception-image, and someperception-images are also affection-images, on down thechain till we reach direct time-images such as hyalosigns,chronosigns, etc. What is fascinating about all this is thatDeleuze argues that the relation between these is one ofdeduction. Each can be derived from came before, andeach that comes before virtually contains what comesafter.

For in fact, the book is structured, like Hegel’s Logic,backwards. Hegel eventually must get us to the logic of theconcept, such that the logic of the concept must contain allthat came before as parts thereof. He starts with the logicof being, then essence, and each can be used to understandthe world as a whole, but from a particular limited pointof view. What comes after then contains what comesbefore, so that climax comes with the subject-object ofuniversal history, namely, the Concept in the process ofcoming to know itself as Spirit.

This would seem to be in contrast, however, to Deleuze’swork. which goes from the most general form of all that is,namely, the movement-image, and it is true, themovement image, which contains its many parts and sub-steps, acts in a manner similar to the logic of being inHegel’s work. For we eventually see its limitations, andmove to the logic of the time-image, which contains thelogic of the movement-image within it, and yet goesfurther. Just like the logic of essence in Hegel, the sectionson the time-image describe subjectivity, and we then see,retrospectively, the limitations of what comes before, suchthat the time-image sections seem to contain, as it were,

the movement-image at a higher level of development.

Deleuze's Logical "Crystal in Formation": Federico Fellini filming on the set of 'Otto eMezzo'

the movement-image at a higher level of development.Perception, affection, and action are reworked withinrecognition, recollection, dreams, etc.

What Are ‘The Powers of the False’, Exactly?

But what of the final third of the book? If we keep ourcomparison going, we would expect to get the climax here,the Deleuzian equivalent of the Hegelian logic of theConcept, the point at which we see the subject-object

the Deleuzian equivalent of the Hegelian logic of theConcept, the point at which we see the subject-objectwhich retroactively encompasses the interrelation of thetwo parts which come before.

And yet, Deleuze’s text seems to take a swerve when it getsto the section on the ‘powers of the false’. Up until thispoint, Deleuze describes the images and signs related tothe sensori-motor schema, and then the time-image whichdisplaces this, which gives us internal life, pure time as itexists inside subjectivity. But as he describes thebreakdown of even the time-image in postwar cinema, inthe dissociation of ‘sheets of the past’ and ‘peaks of thepresent’, he then moves to what seems, at least at first, likea set of random investigations of the various aspects offilm in the postwar period not covered in the earlierchapters: sound, reading, conceptual thoughts, etc.

At least, this is how some have conceptualized the finalthird of the book (see Rodowick, for example). And I agreewith one thing – this section, which contains some ofDeleuze’s most powerful sections of writing, in these booksor his others, linking abstract philosophy to politics insome fantastic prose – seems to have tired a bit oforganizing things so rigidly. The final third is MUCH lesssystematic than the preceding parts. But after reading theBogue text, some of the structure became a bit clearer tome: in a sometimes non-linear way, Deleuze goes aboutinvestigating a cinema of the body, then mind, thenmeaning. But to what end?

What interests me here is that it seems that Deleuze hasalready done these things earlier in the text – but in thecontext of the pre-war use of the movement-image (body),post-war use of time-image (mind), and his thorough

critique of any attempt to read films from a linguistic

critique of any attempt to read films from a linguisticand/or Saussurian point of view (basically, everywhere inthe text). Why then the seeming recapitulation?

The key, it seems to me, is the point of transition, thesection in which Deleuze talks about the ‘powers of thefalse’, what is in many ways the turning point of the work.Up until this section in the book, cinema’s image seeks togive a more truthful account of the world, either viamotion and the body, or of the inner world humansexperience via time-images. But once we get to the powersof the false, we begin to see that the point of cinema isn’tto give the truth, but to produce new worlds, new ways ofbeing. And the whole book has been leading up to this,working us up to see that the whole of what preceded inthese works, and the crisis it seeks to describe in westerncinema and philosophy, leads us to this key, Nietzschianinsight.

Everything that follows after his investigation of the‘powers of the false’ is thus a recapitulation of what hasalready been done, but liberated from the need for truth.Just as he works hard to shed the sensori-motor schema ofthe body in moving from the movement-image to the time-image, what he must shed in the transition from the time-image to the powers of the false is the very notion thatsubjectivity is necessarily human. If the time image showsus anything, it is that embodiment, thinking, and meaningare producable through forms of subjectivity which arenot necessarily bound to the hollow gourd of the cartesiancogito. For in fact, just as cinema has worked hard to shedthe sensori-motor-schema, now it must shed the cogito. Itmust become inhuman, posthuman. It must teach us how

to give rise to a subject-object of history which is beyond

to give rise to a subject-object of history which is beyondthe individual human and its atomized and reified notionof body, mind, and meaning.

The ‘Song of the Virtual’ as Subject-Object of History ButBeyond Subjects or Objects . . .

And this brings us back to Hegel. Deleuze’s goal is to giveus the subject-object of history, but to make it post-human.And of course, Hegel does this, for his concept istranspersonal, even beyond the human. But how Deleuze’s‘subject-object’ different?

In everything, it would seem. For the goal is not, as withHegel, to show that the “real is rational”, but rather, thatthe “real is virtual”. That is, Hegel works to show that allmust have been the way it is, and that had not one set ofaccidents shown up, Spirit would have found others thatcould play a similar role. The contingent contents thathelped Spirit to reach its goals are part of its universalplan. Hence, as Zizek always argues, “the Spirit is a Bone.”But the coming to consciousness of the subject-object ofhistory does not give rise to the new, the power to producethe new, for the Concept for Hegel is always nothing morethan an unfolding of what it always already was. And ofcourse, for Deleuze, this is also the case, the coming toconsciousness of the subject-object of history, to useHegelian language here, is simply the unfolding of what italways was, but what this always was is pure difference,the virtual. The whole point of history, and his logicalenterprise, is to allow the virtual to come to consciousness,so to speak, in and through the limited humans who tapinto it. And rather than simply give rise to the same, itgives rise to pure difference.

This is, of course, where the left and right Hegelians back

This is, of course, where the left and right Hegelians backin the mid-nineteenth century disagreed: is Hegel aphilosopher of radical freedom, or simply the freedom tounderstand constraint? Deleuze’s project is profoundlyHegelian, yet with a crucial difference, and that isdifference itself. Unlike the ‘sage’ which Hegel described,Deleuze’s artist does not know, but does, creates, createsworlds. And this artist is not necessarily human, but flowsin and through and beyond and within humans. Deleuzedesires to give birth to the artist of which humans aremerely a part.

And this is why he says, ‘give me a body’, for we need anew body for this artist, and it needs to be created out ofparts it carves out of the stuff of the universe. And it needsa mind, with which it can bring ‘the innermost andouttermost into contact’ by its ‘folds’. For just as for Hegel“the Spirit is a Bone”, for Deleuze, “the Brain is theScreen.” Film has taught us how to think, and how to thinkbeyond the human. It has given us a Brain-screen, throughwhich we see that beyond the fact that the subject is theobject and object the subject, here we see that mind isworld, and world is mind, and neither are necessarilyhuman and tied to the cogito and its tiny gourd. Andbeyond this, we need collectivity, a politics, a ‘people yet tocome’, composed of these supra-human artists brain-bodies, and this people then needs to learn to reread theworld, to tell its story, to give birth to itself by giving birthto its language and story.

These are the powers of the false: the new body, the newmind and its brain, the new people and its language. Thepowers of the false give rise to these. And it is here we seethat while Deleuze perhaps lost some of his organizational

prowess towards the end of this work (wouldn’t you, after

Deleuze's moving image

prowess towards the end of this work (wouldn’t you, afterwriting that much brilliant stuff?!), that he is in fact givingus a literal double of Hegel’s logic. He mirrors Hegel atevery step, and yet explodes him from within. Deleuzegives us a mirror-double of Hegel’s logic, but one which isitself a direct image of time, in which actual and virtualinterpenetrate. Deleuze’s logical work is a crystal-image,yet unlike Hegel’s, it is not self-contained (as Deleuzefamously describes the films of Ophuls as giving us aperfect ‘time-crystal’). No, Deleuze is the Fellini ofphilosophy. He give us the crystal perpectually in theprocess of formation, the seed-crystal which is always everdifferent.

Beyond the Human, Beyond the Cogito, Beyond the Subject

And in the process, we have adisplacement of the human centered-ness of the Hegelian project. For whileHegel’s project is transpersonal in somesenses, it is supremely human, all toohuman, in others. For the very terms ofhis investigation are those of ‘subject’and ‘object’, ‘in-itself’ and ‘for-itself’.

These terms are not merely the content of his project, butthey describe also its form. On the contrary, Deleuze’sstructures are actual and virtual, and the difference is allthe difference in the world. For at the end, we start wherewe began, not with the image of the human subject-objectprojected on to the size of the cosmos coming toconsciousness, but of the virtual-actual coming to developitself.

And this allows us to look back at how Deleuze does

And this allows us to look back at how Deleuze doesstructure the ‘deductions’ between the images in theearlier parts of the book. For on the one hand, we see anabstract evolution from firstness to secondness tothirdness, recapitulating Peirce’s triad of triads which forhim gave rise to what he called a process of ‘evolutionarylove’. Peirce himself was taking on Hegel’s logic, this isbeyond question. And it is in fact this structure, beyondperception, affection, action, etc., which structures thesemovements. We see a purely LOGICAL movement fromone end to the other of the Cinema books, and perception,affection, action, etc., are merely the potentialpermutations whereby the virtual has been incarnated onour world. There is no ‘for-itself’/’in-itself’, with itsunderlying ‘subject/object’ here structuring thedeductions. The deductions are logical, beyond Hegel. Fordespite Hegel’s attempt to get beyond his ownanthropomorphism, the terms of his deduction are humanfrom one side to the other. But Deleuze, via the influenceof Peirce, managed to complete what Hegel could not.

But from a Hegelian perspective, is not Deleuze’s book infact the history of the coming to, what can we call it but‘consciousness’ (?), of the universe by means of humans,but moving beyond? For evolution seems to have startedfrom movement in matter, then movement to the ability toperceive, then to process on a basic level, then to react,then to remember, but then to give birth to culture,language, and eventually, self-liberation. Deleuze’s cinemabooks are in fact also the universal history of the universe,given to us in books on film. They are also his doublingand displacing of Hegel’s Logic. Even down to its details(Deleuze has odd seeming asides where he takes on thingslike tropes, figures, even syllogism!), Deleuze keeps hisreal sparring partner in sight. It may seem on the surface

real sparring partner in sight. It may seem on the surfaceto be Lacan, but the stakes are much deeper than this.Deleuze needs to kill off the father so as to give birth tohimself, and that father, conscious or not on Deleuze’spart, seems to go by the name of Hegel.

Logic for Liberation

Deleuze’s Cinema books: a logic for our times. Ataxonomical logic for the virtual as it unfolds, from thepersepctive of our current life on earth, learning from howcinema teaches us to see the world. For what is cinema,but the ‘bone’ that allowed this spirit to give birth to itself,the contingent which allowed the necessary of the new toshine forth at every instant? For just as with Hegel’s text,all is contained within the end, for the virtual is both timeand that from which time emerges. It is, in this sense, thepower of the false itself, both motion and stasis in eternalreturn of the differing unsame.

Despite being a logic, however, this logic is far from stuffy,or static, two charges often leveled against logic. No, thislogic is also a handbook for liberation. For Deleuze is aSpinozist, through and through. And in fact, Spinoza washimself a large influence on Hegel, and through him,Marx, and many have argued for a ‘left’ reading of Spinozaas of late, certainly since Deleuze. In an excellent recentwork (Suplus: Spinoza, Lacan), A. Kiarina Kordela arguesthat Marx was himself a true disciple of Spinoza, even ifinadvertantly.

To understand the Cinema books, it seems to me, can helpus understand the quesiton, posed by Nietzsche: how doesone give birth to a dancing star? Let us hope that we havelearned something from Deleuze on how to do so, while

also learned his fear of dissolution, of the various ways

also learned his fear of dissolution, of the various waysyou can ‘botch’ giving birth to a BwO. Which is preciselywhat Deleuze does to Hegel’s Logic.

And in the process, Deleuze teaches us how to liberateourselves, even from the constraints of necessity, from theconstraints of logic, the body, the cogito, and language. Butits not enough to simply say, one must also show . . .

~ by chris on April 28, 2010.

Posted in Uncategorized Tags: deleuze, fellini, film, hegel

8 Responses to “Deleuze as Logician of the Virtual:Reading the Cinema Books off Hegel’s ‘Logic’”

1. Nice words, definitely jives with certain intuitions of myown regarding the Cinema texts. I read them in reverse,however, and got somewhat of a different perspectiveon how the overall project fits into the context of phil.history at large and I have inverted formulations ofcertain of the ideas you express here:

1) The demand for truth or the will to truth is

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1) The demand for truth or the will to truth issystematically described by Deleuze as the large formand the small form, the SAS and ASA. These could beviewed as logics (as you use the term) showing thecircuit of the demand for the true, or rather, for realism.

2) Yes, “the real is virtual” and the “logic” of the virtual,which isn’t logic at all, is montage. Reversing this, logic isjust a centric, maybe a Keplerian, manifestation ofmontage; it manages its cuts in a way which runs themthrough a plan(e) of organization. It is the plan(e) oforganization that gets jettisoned after the Powers of theFalse chapter.

PS have you ever seen the Cronenberg film‘Videodrome’? Presents a kind of dystopian version ofbrain as screen with interesting resonances.

Ron said this on May 11, 2010 at 2:13 am | Reply

2. […] Firstly, I think its important to keep in mind thatDeleuze’s insistence that relations are external to theirterms is a classic example of what Bakhtin calls ‘hiddenpolemic.’ He’s arguing against Lacan as the proximateenemy, Hegel as the shadowy figure behind him, and avariety of other ghost-like figures lurking in the wings,including deconstructionists, certain redeployments ofmedieval philosophy in France at the time, etc. As I’veargued elsewhere, I think Deleuze’s famous hatred of allthings Hegel is because of his own anxiety of influence –to me, Deleuze often out-Hegel’s Hegel why saying thatthe one thing he is not is Hegelian. A controversialargument to make, but for more see my post on this inregard to Hegel’s Logic and Deleuze’s ‘Logic’, or theCinema… […]

Relations or Terms? Yes Please!, Or, Fuzzy Set Theory and

Relations or Terms? Yes Please!, Or, Fuzzy Set Theory andDeLanda’s NPS « Networkologies said this on September9, 2010 at 1:41 am | Reply

3. […] Firstly, I think its important to keep in mind thatDeleuze’s insistence that relations are external to theirterms is a classic example of what Bakhtin calls ‘hiddenpolemic.’ He’s arguing against Lacan as the proximateenemy, Hegel as the shadowy figure behind him, and avariety of other ghost-like figures lurking in the wings,including deconstructionists, certain redeployments ofmedieval philosophy in France at the time, etc. As I’veargued elsewhere, I think Deleuze’s famous hatred of allthings Hegel is because of his own anxiety of influence –to me, Deleuze often out-Hegel’s Hegel why saying thatthe one thing he is not is Hegelian. A controversialargument to make, but for more see my post on this inregard to Hegel’s Logic and Deleuze’s ‘Logic’, or theCinema… […]

Relations or Terms? Yes Please!, Or, Fuzzy Set Theory andManuel DeLanda’s NPS « orbis mediologicus said this onSeptember 9, 2010 at 1:45 am | Reply

4. […] Deleuze as Logician of the Virtual: Reading theCinema Books off Hegel’s ‘Logic’ […]

New ‘Mini-Essays’ Tab on the Blog « Networkologies saidthis on October 16, 2010 at 7:52 am | Reply

5. […] and with all potential meanings!). It’s a text I’vewritten about before, including here and […]

The Deleuzian Notion of the Image: A Slice of the World,Or Cinema Beyond the Human « Networkologies said thison April 4, 2011 at 9:50 pm | Reply

6. […] written about this section of the Cinema books

6. […] written about this section of the Cinema booksbefore, if in slightly different contexts, and I’mconvinced the transition to the powers of the […]

More Tips on Reading Deleuze’s Cinema II: From Crystalsto the Powers of the False « Networkologies said this onApril 30, 2011 at 10:02 pm | Reply

7. […] my first post on the strange similarities betweenDeleuze and Hegel that were becoming clear to me isthat […]

Deleuzo-Hegelianism: Why We Need It, Part I «Networkologies said this on August 8, 2011 at 6:56 pm |Reply

8. […] is nicely reworked in his late texts through cinema,as I’ve worked to show in other posts, in Deleuze’scinema books, which are, in their way, extended theseon precisely what is […]

Deleuzo-Hegelianism, Part III: On Deleuze’s Critique ofHegel and Hyppolite, Or, on ‘the Concept’ «Networkologies said this on August 10, 2011 at 8:16 pm |Reply

 

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