On September 18-19, the Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia will host the event "Attraverso il cristallo. Rileggere “L’immagine-tempo” di Deleuze a 40 anni dalla pubblicazione", a celebration of the 40th anniversary of Deleuze's The Time-Image.
Marco Grosoli will be present with a talk titled "On connait Lazarus. History, Death and Brain through Deleuze and Malabou".
Here is the abstract for his presentation:
One of the most valuable and topical lessons of Deleuze’s Time-Image is how, after the demise of such theoretical/philosophical ideas as “God” or “the [Hegelian] negative” (in other words: after the demise of representation), such concepts as “History”, “death” and “brain” must be regarded as strictly interdependent.
It is easy to see that, in his two-tomes cinema taxonomy, not all filmmakers have the same structural weight. Upon closer inspection, Deleuze’s diptych seemingly revolves around a relatively small number of key filmmakers engaging in a quasi-symbiotic relationship with Deleuzian thought. Alain Resnais is certainly one of them. In addition to dealing very clearly with “History”, “death” and “brain”, his films just as clearly postulate their inseparability: whenever one or two of these terms are eclipsed behind the other one(s), they turn out to be even more present in the remaining term(s). L’amour à mort (1984), arguably the film on whose basis Deleuze retrospectively re-thought all of Resnais’s previous filmography, is regarded as the ultimate brain-film precisely because, for the first time, Resnais does not deal with History nor with the brain, but just with death.
Resnais’s last films (Vous n’avez encore rien vu, 2012; Aimer, boire et chanter, 2014) share an intricate geometry of relationships between characters, under the shadow of a never-to-be-seen character dying off screen. Thereby, Resnais profoundly revises his early works’ Lazarean character (discussed by Deleuze in his Time-Image), and acknowledges that it has become something different: no longer somebody returning from the land of the dead qua image, but rather somebody who, heading to that land unseen, brings about outside of it the image of a relational network. The same “History”, “death” and “brain” elements are then reshuffled in a different way: while showing this, my paper will establish a parallel between late Resnais and Catherine Malabou’s recent philosophical framing of Artificial Intelligence as outlined in her 2013 book Morphing Intelligence, itself an outright abjuration of her earlier philosophical (Deleuze-, Hegel- and Derrida-informed) framing of neurosciences, as outlined in her book What Should We Do With Our Brain?
Malabou’s and Resnais’s 2010s works will thus be extensively referred to in order to show how at least part of Time-Image’s legacy consists in the formalization of the inseparability between “History”, “death” and “brain”. It will be argued that such topical issues as AI can be framed philosophically in a more effective way by taking that inseparability into account, i.e. by keeping in mind that when one or two elements in the “History”, “death” and “brain” series seemingly disappear(s), we must learn to recognize this absence as a different kind of presence.
The full program is available here.
