Abstract

Deleuze (1925–1995), in the early 1980s, adopts Peirce’s (1839–1914) semiotics in order to classify the signs that the images of the cinema display. Aiming at insufflating the Peircean principles with the movement that animates the images of cinema, he provides Peirce’s triadic logic with a new category – Zeroness – which stands for the semiotic movement of cinematic images. Deleuze’s new category has impacts on the main domains of Peirce’s philosophy. Accordingly, our inquiry will focus on the irradiation of Zeroness over the (a) system of categories, the (b) Peircean phenomenology (phaneroscopy), the (c) generative categorial role, the (d) semiotic effectiveness, the (e) doctrine of continuity, and the (f) logic of relatives. This article will show that for Deleuze nearly like more recent Peircean scholarship: (a) zeroth state holds a categorial status, (b) some phenomenon instantiates zeroth state, (c) zeroth state plays a generative role regarding Peirce's categories, (d) zeroth state as a phenomenological category is semiotically effective, (e) zeroth state and the doctrine of continuity, and (f) zeroth state is a “medad.” In order to assess these topics, we recover Deleuze’s advances on Peirce’s philosophy and confront them with the Peircean studies on the zeroth state. Finally, we will see that Deleuze, far from being a Peircean scholar, developed the importance of the zeroth state for Peirce’s semiotics in advance to the subsequent Peircean scholarship. Reciprocally, most of Deleuzian scholars understimate the importance of Peirce for Deleuze’s semiotics.