Abstract

In Deleuzeʼs studies on film, it is striking that the dismantled “essence” of metaphysics as an ontology is synthetically linked with a new approach not only to the movement of the concept, speaking in Hegelʼs language but also to the thinking as an event. That is even more true for the understanding of that which lasts in time and thus has the character of the thought-image. As the author points out in this article, Deleuze establishes this by turning the brain into a screen, and the film from the sphere of the so-called reality becomes the virtual code of the world as an image. The difference between concept and image eliminates the difference between the image no longer preceding the term and the term no longer preceding the image. How crucial this turn will be to Deleuzeʼs notion of the cinema can be seen in the derivation of the concept of an event. The image and term correspond to the singularity of the event. The problem with comprehending Deleuzeʼs “images-ontology” shows that film cannot be reduced to the autonomous production of a cinematic way of thinking unless we have previously clarified what movement is and how it is created. In this paradigmatic case, a cinema cannot be viewed simply as a “visual code” of contemporary art. Its “essence” is revealed in that it enables the image-movement and image-time to synthetically realize the possibilities of the technosphere as computation, planning and construction. Eventually, the cinematic thinking advocated by Deleuze becomes a question of the possibility of film as a meta-film reaching a new level of philosophical consideration of what becomes and emerges with a new set of relations between Being and event.