This article uses Deleuze's three-part theory of the movement-image as a way to investigate the potential importance of his unexplored claim about the casting of Beckett's Film. In “The Greatest Irish Film” Deleuze writes that the starring role in Film “could only have been played by Buster Keaton” 23), but he does not explain why. Here, I return to the Bergsonian basis of Deleuze's film theory, as well as to early responses to Beckett's Film, in order to complicate our understanding (...) of Deleuze's perception-image, action-image, and especially his affection-image. (shrink)

Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism explores the multi-faceted and formative impact of Gilles Deleuze on the development and our understanding of modernist thought in its philosophical, literary, and more broadly cultural manifestations. Gilles Deleuze himself rethought philosophical history with a series of books and essays on individual philosophers such as Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, and Bergson and authors such as Proust, Kafka, Beckett and Woolf, on the one hand, and Bacon, Messiaen, and Pollock, among others, in other arts. This volume acknowledges (...) Deleuze's profound impact on a century of art and thought and the origin of that impact in his own understanding of modernism. Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism begins by "conceptualizing" Deleuze by offering close readings of some of his most important works. The contributors offer new readings that illuminate the context of Deleuze's work, either by reading one of Deleuze's texts against or in the context of his entire body of work or by challenging Deleuze's readings of other philosophers. A central section on Deleuze and his aesthetics maps the relationships between Deleuze's thought and modernist literature. The volume's final section features an extended glossary of Deleuze's key terms, with each definition having its own expert contributor. (shrink)