Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power: Deleuze via Blanchot

by Eugene B. Young

Overview

Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze's thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art.

Examining Blanchot's suggestion that art and dream are “outside” of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault's theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze's philosophy of time and his work with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka's Castle, Villeneuve's Arrival, and Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses the realities and truths of power to express obscure ideas and values beyond both our exterior and interior worlds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350176096
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/10/2022
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Eugene B. Young is Professor of Practice in Philosophy and English at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, USA. He is the primary author and editor of The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Table of Contents

Introduction: How the True World Finally Became a Bad Film

PART ONE: Power and the Outside
I. Power and the (In)Visible: Foucault and Deleuze
II: From Menace to Passion in Blanchot & Deleuze: 'The Sovereignty of the Void' & Experience of the Imaginary
III. Dreams: The Eclipse of the Day & its Incessant Returban

PART TWO: Art, Literature, & Ideas
IV. The Conceptual Composition of the Work of Art: Chaos & the Outside
V. Literature's Radical Reversal: from Absence of Origin to Deterritorialized Future
VI. Kafka's Castle: A Case Study-Conceptual Inexistence & Obscure Value

PART THREE: Cinema
VII. Cinematic Worlds of Truth and Reality: Deleuze's Movement Image via Foucault
VIII. Radical Reversals of Cinematic Art: The Dissociative Force of Blanchot's Outside in Deleuze's Time-Image
IX. “Is Anyone Seeing This?”

Conclusion: Artistic Fiction and the Thought of Eternal Returban

Editorial Reviews

Young uses the work of Deleuze and Blanchot to offer a new theory of literature and cinema, one that removes us from the political snares of our current situation to an outside that is not just another trap. His book is a deep read and an original contribution.” —Todd May, Class of 1941 Memorial Professor of the Humanities, Clemson University, USA

“If you have thought, as I have, that Blanchot is the key to understanding Deleuze, then you must read this book. There is no other that better explains the importance of Blanchot to appreciate Deleuze's interpretation of art, literature, and cinema, whose aim is to make us believe in the world again beyond the limited possibilities given to us by power.” —William Large, Associate Professor in Continental Philosophy, University of Gloucestershire, UK

From the Publisher