Philosophy-Cinema / Philosophy-Screens

A program, not a theory. The phrase philosophy-cinema is Deleuze's: "Together we would like to be the Humpty-Dumpty of philosophy, or its Laurel and Hardy. A philosophy-cinema" (Note to the Italian Edition of The Logic of Sense, 1974). Carbone reads this as a task that has never been performed — including by Deleuze himself, who in the 1983–85 Cinema diptych reverts to "philosophy as practice of concepts" with cinema as object. Philosophy-screens is Carbone's proposed today-scale version: a philosophy that takes the logic of the image (variational, relational, imminent-reversible, making-seen) as its own operating logic, instead of letting cinema/screens remain the "object" of a concept-based philosophy. The doctrine is in the hyphen.

Key Points

  • The hyphen is the doctrine. Deleuze 1974: "a philosophy-cinema" (not "of cinema"). Carbone: "What happened to the 'philosophy-cinema'? How about this hyphen? If we leave behind the theoretical stake expressed by this hyphen... do we not risk writing, once again, books of philosophy 'as it has been done for so long'?" (carbone-2019-philosophy-screens, ch. 2 p. 52)
  • Two models distinguished: (a) philosophy applied to cinema, staying in its pre-cinematic form — young Sartre 1924 drafting cinema as "Bergsonian art," Deleuze in Cinema 1/2 making "concepts of cinema" its object. (b) philosophy listening to cinema as a site of "fundamental thought" from which philosophy rebuilds itself — late Merleau-Ponty's "a-philosophy" (1960–61 course notes). Only (b) is a genuine philosophy-cinema.
  • Deleuze's failure to keep the hyphen: The 1968 Difference and Repetition Preface demanded "a new means of philosophical expression" pursued "in relation to the renewal of certain other arts, such as the theatre or the cinema." The 1969 Logic of Sense "Note to the Italian Edition" coined philosophy-cinema. But by the 1983–85 Cinema diptych, "the theory of cinema is not about the cinema, but about the concepts of cinema" and "philosophy must make the theory" of cinema as "a new practice of images and of signs." Carbone's verdict: "Ah! the old style ..." (ch. 2 p. 52)
  • Žižek's complaint as symptom: Žižek's charge that Deleuze "does not fully understand the philosophical importance of Alfred Hitchcock" — that Vertigo is "in a sense, the ultimate anti-Platonic film, a systematic materialist undermining of the Platonic project, akin to what Deleuze does in the appendix to The Logic of Sense" — reads as a symptom of Deleuze's drift away from his own earlier program of reversing Platonism (the 1967 text "Reversing Platonism").
  • Merleau-Ponty's alternative: the 1960–61 unfinished course "Cartesian Ontology and the Ontology of Today" (La possibilité de la philosophie) names Bazin's "ontology of cinema" as a spontaneous philosophy — a fundamental thought or a-philosophy — that philosophy must learn to articulate without reducing. MP's attitude in the last period differs decisively from his 1945 convergence-thesis: no longer "philosophy and cinema share an epoch" but "philosophy must become according to what cinema and other 'a-philosophical' domains think."
  • Philosophy-screens at today's scale: "questioning our present experiences of the screens will allow us to create a fundamental crosspoint for the philosophy we shall elaborate. In other words, we need to question such experiences in the effort to make a philosophy-cinema at today's scale — that is, a philosophy-screens" (ch. 4 p. 91)
  • Against the concept: a philosophy-screens cannot operate by concepts alone. The concept (Begriff = "grasping") belongs to the Albertian-window posture of a substantialized subject facing a stranger world. The logic of images exceeds the concept. "In the gaps between the fingers of our hand, squeezing in the gesture of seizing — the gesture on which the modern action of conceptualizing was shaped — we increasingly feel that sense is slipping away. Without falling into a rhetoric of the ineffable, the philosophy to be made is called upon to account for this" (ch. 6 close, p. 111).
  • Continuity with "a-philosophy": Carbone's program is the Carbone-translation of the late MP's a-philosophie — the "conceptless" thought operating in painting, music, literature, cinema that MP called "fundamental thought." Philosophy-cinema/screens is a-philosophy directed at media.

Details

The Genealogy

  • 1924–25: Young Sartre, in Apologie pour le cinéma, uses cinema to dethrone Platonism of the immutable and proclaims cinema "a Bergsonian art." The move assimilates cinema to a prior philosophy (Bergson).
  • 1945: Merleau-Ponty, IDHEC lecture "The Film and the New Psychology" — silently polemic against Bergson; reads cinema as temporal Gestalt convergent with phenomenology. Still in the convergence model.
  • 1948: Merleau-Ponty, radio causerie "Art and the Perceived World" — speaks of films being "works of art from start to finish, provided they are entirely filmic"; anticipates a "stylistics of the cinema."
  • 1952–53: Merleau-Ponty, Collège de France course "The Sensible World and the World of Expression" — cinema as explicit rebuttal of Bergson via Wertheimer's stroboscopic movement; Zéro de conduite sequence. "Here movement = revelation of Being."
  • 1960–61: Merleau-Ponty, preparatory notes for "Cartesian Ontology and the Ontology of Today" (unfinished): "André Bazin ontologie du cinéma"; "Cinéma ontologie du cinéma — Ex. la question du mouvement au cinéma." This is the a-philosophy model: cinema is where contemporary ontology is being worked out, non-philosophically.
  • 1968: Deleuze, Difference and Repetition Preface — "the search for a new means of philosophical expression ... must be pursued today in relation to the renewal of certain other arts, such as the theatre or the cinema."
  • 1974: Deleuze, Note to Italian Edition of The Logic of Sense — "A philosophy-cinema."
  • 1983–85: Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image + Cinema 2. The Time-Image — drift back toward "philosophy as practice of concepts" about "the concepts of cinema." Loss of the hyphen.
  • 2016 / 2019: Carbone, Philosophy-Screens — explicit program of recovering the hyphen at digital-era scale.

Why Deleuze Drifted

Carbone's diagnosis (ch. 2 pp. 50–52): Deleuze's Cinema books reactivate a traditional program of philosophy about its objects. "Cinema itself is a new practice of images and of signs, of which philosophy must make the theory" (Deleuze, end of Time-Image). But this is exactly the pre-critical posture Deleuze himself had condemned in 1968. Why the drift? Because Deleuze left unfinished the program of "reversing Platonism" he had announced in 1967 (appendix to Logic of Sense). Taking "concepts of cinema" as object is the Platonic posture's stealthy return. The modern conception of concept (Begriff = "grasping") is the product of (a) abstraction from the Platonic Idea and (b) reification into an "ideal object." Philosophy-cinema requires reversing this process.

Why Merleau-Ponty Succeeded

MP's late a-philosophy — the thought operating in art and literature without concepts — rearticulates the relation between philosophy and cinema as a listening, not a construction. MP's own words (quoted in carbone-2019-philosophy-screens): "The words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that enclose what they say, but rather those that most energetically open upon Being, because they more closely convey the life of the whole and make our habitual evidences vibrate until they disjoin." Translated to cinema: the images most charged with philosophical significance are not those that illustrate a thesis but those that make seen — the logic of cinematic expression that MP's reflection on sensible-ideas anticipates, with the medium (music, painting, film) functioning as a screen or veil that allows truth to be seen.

Philosophy-Screens (the Present Version)

The program has two parts:

  1. Diagnostic: map the arche-screenic apparatus of our epoch (the digital display; the interactive urban screen; the smartphone; social media; the augmented-reality interface; the predictive-media premediation apparatus) and its transformations of perception, desire, and thought.
  2. Constructive: let the logic of these apparatuses — imminent reversibility, quasi-subject/quasi-image, mythical present, dividuation, techno-aesthetic mediation — reshape philosophy's own operating logic.

The book Philosophy-Screens is itself a performed attempt. It does not argue for a "philosophy of screens"; it writes a philosophy-screens.

Positions

  • carbone-2019-philosophy-screens holds that the two Cinema books of Deleuze are a retreat from the philosophy-cinema program — that Deleuze is better read via his own 1967–74 formulations and via the late Merleau-Ponty's a-philosophy. A Deleuzian reader could contest this, arguing that the Cinema books in fact perform what their prose suggests they merely describe — that Deleuze's "concept" is not the Platonic-reified concept Carbone attacks, and that the discontinuity Carbone diagnoses between 1974 and 1983 is overstated.
  • Whether the late Merleau-Ponty's a-philosophy is philosophy-cinema avant la lettre (Carbone's claim) or is something structurally different — a theory of art as "fundamental thought" — is contestable. MP himself never used the phrase.

Connections

  • is programmatically grounded in arche-screen — philosophy-screens takes the arche-screen as its operating figure, not its object
  • extends fundamental-thought-in-art / nonphilosophy to cinema and media — cinema is where contemporary ontology is being worked out a-philosophically
  • is guided by mutual precession — philosophy-screens thinks vision (and by extension, mediation) as mutual precession
  • critiques Deleuze's Cinema 1 / Cinema 2 — as losing the hyphen they were supposed to execute
  • contrasts with "philosophy of cinema" / film studies as a concept-based discipline — philosophy-cinema refuses the object-subject structure this presupposes
  • applies sensible-ideas and visible-invisible outside aesthetics narrowly — the "conceptless" thought MP traced in Proust and music is the thought of screens

Open Questions

  • Does Carbone's "mutation of desire" thesis for today's screens really require a new philosophy, or does it require an ethnographic attention MP's a-philosophy already licensed?
  • Can philosophy-screens be practiced without becoming film/media criticism? Where is the line between philosophy-cinema and a rich cinematic hermeneutics?
  • Is Carbone's self-description of Philosophy-Screens as itself a philosophy-screens (rather than a philosophy about philosophy-screens) credible? The book uses concepts throughout.
  • See also: How does MP read cinema via Gestalt?

Sources

  • carbone-2015-flesh-of-images — ch. 4 "The Philosopher and the Moviemaker: Merleau-Ponty and Cinematic Thinking," pp. 41–62. Where Carbone assembles the exegetical core of the philosophy-cinema program: (a) the 1945 IDHEC lecture as silent Bergson polemic; (b) the 1952–53 course on The Sensible World and the World of Expression as explicit polemic (Wertheimer + Zéro de conduite); (c) the 1960–61 course notes on Bazin's "ontology of cinema"; (d) Godard's 1966 citation of MP in Masculin Féminin and the co-signed "Testament de Balthazar." The groundwork on which Philosophy-Screens (2019) builds.
  • carbone-2019-philosophy-screens — ch. 1 (Sartre & Deleuze); ch. 2 especially "All This Being Said" (pp. 48–52) — the key argument about Deleuze's drift; ch. 4 p. 91 (philosophy-screens); ch. 6 p. 111 (closing). Preface on the program. Philosophy-Screens is the programmatic today-scale version; Flesh of Images is the exegetical-historical ground.
  • merleau-ponty-2022-possibility-of-philosophy — the 1960–61 course "Cartesian Ontology and the Ontology of Today" (left unfinished by MP's death) contains the reference to "André Bazin ontologie du cinéma" that Carbone treats as the philosophical germ of philosophy-cinema.
  • merleau-ponty-1961-eye-and-mind — the "mutual precession" passage; MP's a-philosophical treatment of painting as model for philosophy's own "conceptless" becoming.