Deleuze and History
Eds. Jeffrey A. Bell and Claire Colebrook
Edinburgh University Press, 2009

This chapter explores the two theses Deleuze puts forward for the transformation between movement-images and time-image in his Cinema books: the taxonomic and the historical.

Giving in-depth overviews and accounts of each – the claim is made that both are valid if approached from different perspectives, from the perspective of the movement-image and the perspective of the time-image.

Accordingly, not only does such an explanation destroy the hierarchy between these two domains of cinema (which many Deleuzians either explicitly or implicitly seem to endorse) but it also creates an impasse to the way in whcih cinema captures up history as an event.

Focusing upon the conceptual couplet of ‘chronos’ and ‘cronos’ in Cinema 2 (the latter concept more commonly explored by Deleuze as ‘aion’ in his other works, such as Logic of Sense), the essay explores history, the event, time and thought through the Stoics, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Artuad.

Essay available to read for free on Academia.edu >>>

Also available at Edinburgh University Press