Why does Deleuze write about the cinema, as a philosopher? What are the properly philosophical problems to which the cinema offers him the means to respond in a way that philosophy itself cannot? Put simply, these problems concern the relation of man and world, world and man. The problem here turns on the adequacy or otherwise of thought to the task of thinking the world in its own terms. For Deleuze these terms are those of difference itself, of movement in so far as it is an expression of duration, or time as the form of change. This problem is figured in the cinematographic illusion in so far as that illusion is a consequence of the genesis of the human as a centred perspective on the acentred universal variation of being. Since the cinematographic condition of the human is such that we grasp the world in relation to our own needs, and not as it is for itself, the natural metaphysics of human thought is thereby oriented towards totalisation and a grasp of being as a closed totality, even if the genesis of that thought is deduced on the basis of difference and the openness of the whole. To think the world in its own terms thus requires the overcoming of the human, and of the cinematographic limits of human thought.

Deleuzian philosophy offers a direct response to this demand in terms of a montage thought that seeks to enter into the real movement of being. By fragmenting and recomposing the elements given cinematographically in experience, it seeks to enter into their movement of actualisation in ‘reverse’, and so counter-actualise them in order to reascend towards the differing from itself of the virtual. But although this ‘cinematic’ method offers philosophy the means by which it might overcome the human and so approach being in its own terms, in doing so it leaves the human ‘behind’ and positions it simply as a barrier to thought that thought must seek to surpass. As such, it leaves Deleuzian philosophy open to the criticisms that Hallward directs at it: that the human has no place there, such that it offers nothing to the human, or to properly human concerns.