Cesare Casarino (Minnesota) ‘The Expression of Time: Deleuze, Spinoza, Cinema’
This essay will argue that Baruch Spinoza’s thought constitutes the conceptual foundation of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 (thereby diverging from existing scholarship that identifies Henri Bergson’s thought as foundational for Deleuze’s understanding of the cinema). In particular, this essay argues that in these two works Deleuze deploys and re-elaborates his earlier interpretations of Spinoza and especially of the concept of “expression” (in Expressionism in Philosophy as well as in Logic of Sense), so as to produce at once a non-representational theory of the cinema as well as a Spinozian theory of time.
