A Nonhuman Eye: Deleuze on Cinema

Sartre’s Imagination and The Psychology of Imagination play an important role in philosophy’s renewed attempts to go beyond the human, to annihilate subjectivity, to return to pure perception in which objects vary for one another rather than for one privileged image or center of reference (consciousness). Before Sartre, Bergson was already interested in pure (inhuman) experience “above that decisive turn, where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience’” (Deleuze, Bergsonism 27). Deleuze confirms that human intelligence is bound to reduce differences in kind to differences in degree and that the former are rediscovered only “above the turn” in the examination of the conditions of experience by intuition:

To open us up to the inhuman and the superhuman (durations which are inferior or superior to our own), to go beyond the human condition: This is the meaning of philosophy, in so far as our condition condemns us to live among badly analyzed composites and to be badly analyzed composites ourselves.

(ibid., 28)

Deleuze’s task in the two volumes of Cinema is to demonstrate how modern cinema in particular has made it possible to surpass the human condition by abolishing subjectivity as a privileged image in what Bergson calls “the aggregate of images” (the material world).