Alchemies of Thought in Godard’s Cinema: Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty

Notwithstanding Deleuze’s indictment of phenomenology for its alleged failure to meet the challenges of immanence and difference, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze’s philosophies and their implications for a theory of cinema remain close in many important respects. Both Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism dismantle epistemological systems that are grounded in non-corporeal acts of signification or cognition. The drive to determine a clear dividing line between subject and world, perceiver and perceived, objective reality and subjective experience, is equally suspected and accordingly undermined by both thinkers. In the continuity of human body and world that both these philosophies propose, a sensational and affective approximation to the world replaces the purely mental and visual methods of the disembodied cogito. As made apparent in his book on Francis Bacon, Deleuze shares Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the world-body of sensation as a continuum between viewer/artist and art work: “sensation has no [objective and subjective] sides at all; it is both things, indissolubly; it is being-in-the-world, as the phenomenologists say: at the same time I become in sensation and something arrives through sensation, one through the other, one in the other” (Francis Bacon, 27).