Table Of ContentDeleuze and Cinema:
The Aesthetics of
Sensation
Barbara M. Kennedy
Edinburgh University Press
Deleuze and Cinema
Dedications . . . to my loving parents
Dorothy Victoria (d. 1993) and William Charles (d. 2000)
and, finally, of course . . . to the beautiful stranger . . .
Deleuze and Cinema
The Aesthetics of Sensation
Barbara M. Kennedy
Edinburgh University Press
# Barbara M. Kennedy, 2000, 2002
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh
First published in hardback in 2000.
Typeset in 10.5 on 13 Sabon
by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin
A CIP record for this book is
available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7486 1726 4 (paperback)
The right of Barbara M. Kennedy
to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Discovering the Beautiful Stranger . . . 1
Part One
1 From Micro-politics to Aesthetics 9
2 From Oedipal Myths . . . to New Interventions 38
Part Two
3 From Abstract Machines to Deleuzian Becomings 67
4 Constituting Bodies – from Subjectivity and
Affect to the Becoming-woman of the Cinematic 84
5 Towards an Aesthetics of Sensation 108
Part Three
6 Orlando – Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 125
7 The English Patient – Deleuzian Landscapes of Immanence 147
8 Romeo and Juliet – Deleuzian Sensations 163
9 Strange Days – Deleuzian Sensations 180
10 Reconfiguring Love . . . A Deleuzian Travesty?
Leon and a Molecular Politics via the Girl and the Child 193
Bibliography 215
Filmography 223
Index 225
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Acknowledgements
I should like to thank the many friends and colleagues from different
Deleuzian persuasions, from universities both here, in America and
Australia, who have read versions of several chapters in the book. In
particular I should like to thank both Helen (Chapman) and Christine
(Gledhill) at Staffordshire University, who have both suffered the trials
andtribulationsofmywriting,andmypersonae,andofferedadviceand
supportat all times. I also want to thank especially David (Bell) and Ian
(Buchanan), both of whom saved me from ‘myself’ in times of sheer
exasperation and at times even worse, and offered both timely and
welcome words in more ways than one. Thanks too must go to Jackie
JonesatEdinburghUniversityPress,whorecognisedthepotential,andto
Jackie Clewlow, who gave time and energy with secretarial support. Of
course I should like to acknowledge the Arts and Humanities Research
Board and Staffordshire University for funding and support. And, of
course, to those whom I love is a heartfelt thanks for continued support
through difficult times.
Art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or
sensation, so that it constitutes, as Joyce says, a chaosmos, a composed
chaos – neither forseen nor preconceived. Art transforms chaotic varia-
bility into chaoid variety, as in El Greco’s black and green-gray confla-
gration, for example, or Turner’s golden conflagration, or de Stael’s red
conflagration.Artstruggleswithchaosbutitdoessoinordertorenderit
sensory, even through the most charming character, the most enchanted
landscape.
(Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari, What is Philosophy? p. 204)
Introduction
Discovering the Beautiful Stranger . . .
This book has emerged out of a deliciously dangerous, but delectable
journey through the spaces of Deleuzian deterritorialisations. But there
are many faces of Deleuze, and I can only engage with a selection: faces
from A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensa-
tion (1981), Dialogues (1987), What is Philosophy? (1994) and his
cinema books1 provide the main lines of flight. I have not used his
cinema books as a model for theorising cinema, but have creatively
meldedwithawebofDeleuze’swork.Myownlineofflighttookmeona
journey into the unknown, where dangers lurked, forced their way into
the threshold of my ‘self’ – one already fractured, fragile, faltering and
disembodiedfromtoomuchpost-structuralistdestratification. . .thena
return to too much phallic and Oedipal anxiety. Film had always been
important to my life, my pleasures, my desires. When I encountered the
philosopher of difference, new thinking and outside thought enabled
creative lines of flight I had never experienced before. This book traces
that processual flight; it explores the energies and intensities of ‘flying’
with Deleuzian thoughts and transgressing boundaries of established
feminist theory . . . out of bounds! The danger is . . . can I fly forever
throughthepathsofindifferenceandinsouciance?Whynot?Orwillthe
phallicpaths of culture and academiabring me back to thecontainment
of ‘academic theory and the rational mind . . .!’
Deleuze is afigure ofmanycolours, tones,manyintensitiesand many
variations, his texts providing vast plateaus and canvases, presenting
themselves as screenic events, lines and landscapes of volitional and
dynamic concepts, brushstrokes, notes, refrains, digital configurations.
Hismultipletexts,andmultiplepersonae,whoarealsonotpersonae,act
like heteronyms, puppets or mannequins in the theatre of philosophy,
each text contradicting or aligning with others in machinic assemblage,
more like a factory, some have said, than a theatre.
Description:Film theory has for so long focused on sociological, empirical, and psychoanalytic approaches that aesthetic sensibilities seem to have been forgotten. This book puts the emphasis back on film as an art form. Through discussions of Orlando, The English Patient, Romeo and Juliet, Strange Days, and Le
