“Something Possible, Otherwise I Will Suffocate”: A Marginal Reading of Chapter 7, Section 2 of Deleuze’s The Time-Image

Abstract

This essay concentrates on a pivotal section in The Time-Image where Deleuze, through erratic and occasionally disjointed oscillations between philosophical concepts and cinematic fragments, reaches the striking conclusion that cinema as a modern art must film, not the world itself, but belief in the world—the last vestige of human connection in the wake of postwar disaster. Both curious and suspicious of Deleuze’s destabilizing hermeneutics, the author performs what he calls a “marginal reading” of the source text—an oblique or underground variation on the more traditional “close reading”—by tracking the various movements, tensions, and sparks of thought when faced with the unthinkability of belief in an age of post-traumatic nihilism. Facsimiles of the author’s coded marginalia in dialogue/conflict with Deleuze’s troubled text are the basis for analyses of films which Deleuze, it would appear, is compelled to leave in an embryonic state.