Film, Death (the ‘Reverse Proof’)

A key point that the arguments of the previous chapter imply, but do not state directly, is that there are not two conceptions of the whole at work in the Cinema books (one for each volume), but three: not only the whole as the open and the whole as the outside, but ‘between’ them, the whole as a closed totality. The addition of this totalised conception of the whole provides us with the key to understanding the transition from Bergson to Blanchot, and thus from the Open to the outside: it is the totalised whole that provides us with the terms in which to understand how cinematographic thought gives rise to the conditions of its own collapse, in its confrontation with its own limits. As such, it seems worth offering a summary account of the articulation of these concepts and their relation to each other, precisely because in this form they offer an outline or sketch of how Deleuze is able to move from Bergson to Blanchot on the basis of strictly Bergsonian principles.

The whole as the open is a Bergsonian characterisation of the fundamental proposition of Deleuzian thought: that being is that which differs from itself first of all. The cinematographic character of human thought is such that it can only grasp the whole in this sense to the extent that the human condition itself is overcome. However, by characterising the cinematographic illusion in terms derived from Matter and Memory, rather than those of Creative Evolution, Deleuze is able to deduce the cinematographic genesis of the human from and on the basis of this open whole, rather than presenting it as a given (as Bergson does). He is able to bring the formal resources of the cinema to bear on the analysis of this illusion and its consequences because this deduction of the material moments of human subjectivity is also and on the same basis the deduction of the primary divisions of his taxonomy of cinematic signs. Thus in so far as the cinema offers a correction to the cinematographic illusion, this correction is not a function of movement-images (on their own they remain strictly cinematographic), but rather of the disjunction of projector and camera effected by montage and the mobile camera, and the aberration of movement this disjunction produces.