Instant Ebook Access, One Click Away – Begin at ebookgate.

com

Untimely Affects Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of

Cinema Nadine Boljkovac

https://ebookgate.com/product/untimely-affects-gilles-
deleuze-and-an-ethics-of-cinema-nadine-boljkovac/

OR CLICK BUTTON

DOWLOAD EBOOK

Get Instant Ebook Downloads – Browse at https://ebookgate.com

Click here to visit ebookgate.com and download ebook now
Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...

Empiricism and Subjectivity An Essay on Hume s Theory of

Human Nature Gilles Deleuze

https://ebookgate.com/product/empiricism-and-subjectivity-an-essay-on-
hume-s-theory-of-human-nature-gilles-deleuze/

ebookgate.com

Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema Ian Buchanan

https://ebookgate.com/product/deleuze-and-the-schizoanalysis-of-
cinema-ian-buchanan/

ebookgate.com

Gilles Deleuze Affirmation in Philosophy 1st Edition Jay

Conway

https://ebookgate.com/product/gilles-deleuze-affirmation-in-
philosophy-1st-edition-jay-conway/

ebookgate.com

Two Regimes of Madness Texts and Interviews 1975 1995 1st

Edition Gilles Deleuze

https://ebookgate.com/product/two-regimes-of-madness-texts-and-
interviews-1975-1995-1st-edition-gilles-deleuze/

ebookgate.com
Deleuze on Cinema Ronald Bogue

https://ebookgate.com/product/deleuze-on-cinema-ronald-bogue/

ebookgate.com

Pure Immanence Essays on A Life 2nd Edition Gilles Deleuze

https://ebookgate.com/product/pure-immanence-essays-on-a-life-2nd-
edition-gilles-deleuze/

ebookgate.com

Cinema of the Dark Side Atrocity and the Ethics of Film

Spectatorship 1st Edition Shohini Chaudhuri

https://ebookgate.com/product/cinema-of-the-dark-side-atrocity-and-
the-ethics-of-film-spectatorship-1st-edition-shohini-chaudhuri/

ebookgate.com

American Independent Cinema An Introduction Tzioumakis

https://ebookgate.com/product/american-independent-cinema-an-
introduction-tzioumakis/

ebookgate.com

An introduction to ethics Deigh

https://ebookgate.com/product/an-introduction-to-ethics-deigh/

ebookgate.com
Untimely Affects
 Plateaus – New Directions in Deleuze Studies
‘It’s not a matter of bringing all sorts of things together under a single concept
but rather of relating each concept to variables that explain its mutations.’
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations

Series Editors
Ian Buchanan, Cardiff University
Claire Colebrook, Penn State University

Editorial Advisory Board

Keith Ansell Pearson
Ronald Bogue
Constantin V. Boundas
Rosi Braidotti
Eugene Holland
Gregg Lambert
Dorothea Olkowski
Paul Patton
Daniel Smith
James Williams

Titles available in the series

Dorothea Olkowski, The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible): Beyond
Continental Philosophy
Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to
Deleuze
Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, translated by
Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton
Simone Bignall, Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism
Miguel de Beistegui, Immanence: Deleuze and Philosophy
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature
Ronald Bogue, Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History
Sean Bowden, The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense
Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity
Aidan Tynan, Deleuze’s Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms
Thomas Nail, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze Guattari and Zapatismo
François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event with The
Vocabulary of Deleuze edited by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith,
translated by Kieran Aarons
Frida Beckman, Between Desire and Pleasure: A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality
Nadine Boljkovac, Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema
Daniela Voss, Deleuze and the Transcendental Conditions of Thought

Forthcoming volumes:

LeRon Shults, Iconoclastic Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion

of Atheism
Janae Sholtz, The Invention of a People: Art and the Political in Heidegger
and Deleuze
Visit the Plateaus website at www.euppublishing.com/series/plat
 UNTIMELY AFFECTS
Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema

Nadine Boljkovac
© Nadine Boljkovac, 2013

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF

www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in Sabon by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire,
and printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 4644 9 (hardback)

ISBN 978 0 7486 6970 7 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 8360 4 (epub)

The right of Nadine Boljkovac

to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
 Contents

Acknowledgements vi
Abbreviations ix
Images xi

Introduction 1
1 Art’s Resistance 11
2 Figures of Life 31
3 From Depths and Ashes 61
4 Mad Love 91
5 Signs Without Name 113
6 Of Scars, Smiles and Past-Future Signs 145
Conclusion 172

References 178
Index 186
 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the publishers for permission to reprint mate-

rial from the following articles and chapters:

‘From depths and ashes, love’s eternal return’ in Open Letter: A

Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory, Fourteenth Series,
Number 6, ‘Remembering Barbara Godard’, ed. Ray Ellenwood,
Jennifer Henderson, Eva Karpinski and Ian Sowton (July
2011): 144–61. With Open Letter’s kind permission.

‘Mad Love’ in Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text, ed. Eugene W. Holland,
Daniel W. Smith and Charles J. Stivale (London: Continuum,
2009), 124–42. By kind permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

‘Signs without name’ in Deleuze Studies, Volume 5, Number 2,

Schizoanalysis and Visual Culture, ed. Phillip Roberts and Richard
Rushton (July 2011), 209–40. Reprinted with the kind permission
of Edinburgh University Press.

‘Intimacy and Prophecy: Marker and Resnais’s Memories’ in

Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French
Culture, ed. Peter Collier, Anna Magdalena Elsner and Olga Smith
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 257–69. Reproduced with the kind
permission of Peter Lang Ltd.

This book addresses a stammering and stuttering that discovers

new possibilities and styles of expression and becoming. Yet I
inevitably falter and fail in my attempts to thank all those who have
helped me.

I thank Emma Wilson (my PhD Supervisor, University of Cambridge)

for enabling this project in the first instance. For your wisdom,

vi
 Acknowledgements

g­enerosity, friendship, depth of heart, and breadth of support,

Emma, I will be forever grateful.

With gratitude always for years of wondrous inspiration and gener-

ous support, I deeply thank Tom Conley (Harvard University), James
Williams (my PhD External, University of Dundee), Ian James (my
PhD Advisor, University of Cambridge), and the entire Department
of French, University of Cambridge.

I am honoured to be the 2012–13 Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral

Fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on
Women at Brown University. I am grateful to Kay Warren, Deborah
Weinstein, Elizabeth Weed, Donna Goodnow, Denise Davis, Wendy
Korwin. I thank Timothy Bewes, Meredith Bak, Amber Musser and
fellow members of the 2012–13 Seminar. Special thanks also to
Ann Dill, Dana Gooley, Lynne Joyrich, Faith Wilding, as well as my
wonderful students of ‘Sensing Time: Affect and the Moving Image’.

I thank the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities,

University of Edinburgh, most especially Susan Manning (in memory,
and with gratitude always) and Pauline Phemister.

I thank the Graduate Program of Film, York University Canada,

most especially my MA Supervisor, Janine Marchessault (who
first encouraged my passion for Resnais’ cinema), MA Committee
Members, Michael Zryd, and Scott Forsyth, as well as Brenda
Longfellow, Philip Hoffman and Suzie Young. I remain profoundly
grateful to Barbara Godard, whose influence and memory will con-
tinue to inspire me.

I thank those with whom I worked at the University of Toronto,

most especially Kass Banning and Eric Cazdyn, who jointly and
thoroughly infused my love for Marker’s practice.

I thank Christopher Fynsk (University of Aberdeen) and the many

students with whom I worked in Aberdeen.

In addition to these people and institutions that have directly or

indirectly supported this project, I thank all who have also touched
me, and hence this project, by their encouragement, including
Adrian Martin, Anne Bottomley, collaborator Charlie Blake, Charles

vii
 acknowledgements

Stivale, Christian Schwarzbauer, Colin Gardner, Dan Smith, David

Martin-Jones, Debbie Spikins, Dennis Rothermel, Ed Keller, Eleanor
Kaufman, Felicity Colman, Fiona McCahey, Floridia Ferrara,
Frederick Young, Hanjo Berressem, Helen Imhoff, Joe Hughes,
Julia Hölzl, Karen Piippo, Katrin Berndt, Lennard Davis, Levi
Bryant, Leyla Haferkamp, Loreta Gandolfi, Malini Guha, Marcel
O’Gorman, Melanie Doherty, Nathan Moore, Nicholas Rombes,
Nigel Rothfels, Rachel White, Ronald Bogue, Ron Broglio, Sandra
Danilovic, Sha Xin Wei, Siobhán Carew, Susan McHugh – and all
friends from Cambridge, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Providence, Paris,
Toronto, and places in between.

I am incredibly grateful to Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook,

Co-Series Editors of the Plateaus – New Directions in Deleuze Studies
Series.

My heartfelt, most special thanks to Carol MacDonald, the loveliest

editor with whom one could work. I offer Carol all my thanks. My
gratitude also to James Dale for his assistance and patience.

I thank members of my family who have especially supported me.

I thank my grandmother. I thank my big brother, and my little
nephews for the joy of being their aunt.

For my parents.

viii
 Abbreviations

Abbreviations used throughout the text correspond with the key

below that refers to English versions, if available, of Marker and
Resnais’s respective films, and English editions of Deleuze and
Deleuze and Guattari’s texts. Please consult the References for distri-
bution and French and English publication details.

Works by Chris Marker

LJ La Jetée (1962)
SS Sans Soleil (1983)
LSA Le Souvenir d’un Avenir (2001, with Yannick Bellon)
CP Chats Perchés (2004)

Works by Alain Resnais

NB Nuit et Brouillard (1955)
HMA Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

Works by Gilles Deleuze

B Bergsonism (1991)
C2 Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989)
D Dialogues II (2002, with Claire Parnet)
DI Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974 (2004)
DR Difference and Repetition (1994)
ECC Essays Critical and Clinical (1997)
EPS Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1990)
FB Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003)
FLB The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993)
K Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986)
LS Logic of Sense (1990)
N Negotiations 1972–1990 (1995)
NP Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983)

ix
 abbreviations

PS Proust and Signs (2000)

PI Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life (2001)
SPP Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1988)
TR Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995
(2006)

Works by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

AO Anti-Oedipus (1983)
ATP A Thousand Plateaus (1987)
WIP What is Philosophy? (1994)

x
 Images

1. ‘A peaceful landscape’, Nuit et Brouillard (Resnais 1955) 32

2. ‘Endless, uninterrupted fear’, Nuit et Brouillard (Resnais
1955) 42
3. Puppets, Nuit et Brouillard (Resnais 1955) 54
4. Ashes, limbs, a haunting refrain, Hiroshima mon amour
(Resnais 1959) 62
5. They walk the streets, Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais
1959) 89
6. Ruins and requiem, La Jetée (Marker 1962) 95
7. Thisnesses that pass between two, La Jetée (Marker
1962)  110
8. ‘Fragments of war enshrined in everyday life’, Sans Soleil
(Marker 1983) 114
9. ‘Cat, wherever you are, peace be with you’, Sans Soleil
(Marker 1983) 116
10. Auto-perceptive doubling, Sans Soleil (Marker 1983) 134
11. ‘At arm’s length, at zoom’s length, until its last twenty-
fourth of a second’, Sans Soleil (Marker 1983) 142
12. ‘In the case of writer Joë Bousquet the wound is invisible’,
Le Souvenir d’un Avenir (Marker and Yannick Bellon
2001) 152
13. Chats Perchés (Marker 2004) 161
14. Depths and ashes, Chats Perchés (Marker 2004) 170

xi
 Love always Mom
In memory Dad
and immemory Chris Marker

A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach would be to con-

sider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. In every life,
we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated
territories and terrae incognitae. From this memory we can draw the
map, extract images with more ease (and truth) than do stories and
legends. That the subject of this memory is found to be a photogra-
pher or a filmmaker does not imply that his memory is more interest-
ing than that of any passing gentleman (or moreover, than that of the
lady), but simply that he has left traces with which one can work, and
contours to help draw up the map.

Chris Marker, Selected notes from the CD-ROM booklet,

Immemory, Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1998
 Introduction

To think is to reach a non-stratified material, somewhere between the

layers, in the interstices. Thinking has an essential relation to history, but
it is no more historical than it is eternal. It is closer to what Nietzsche
calls the Untimely: to think the past against the present – which would
be nothing more than a common place, pure nostalgia, some kind of
return, if he did not immediately add: ‘in favor, I hope, of a time to come’.
(TR: 241)
To identify and defend the argument, strategies and contributions of
this film-philosophy study, which emerge against the proliferating
field of ‘Deleuze studies’ and the works of French film artists Chris
Marker and Alain Resnais, it is crucial to first consider the actual
events that gave rise to this book’s selection of films and writings.
This book’s impetus derives from its cine-philosophical interroga-
tions of war, suffering, affliction and, significantly, humanity’s
complicity and shame in these means of its own ruin from which it
must yet become and survive. These actual experiences that History
has identified, compartmentalised and assessed – the Holocaust,
Hiroshima, the peril and prognostics of nuclear devastation, further
injustices of fascism, colonialism and capitalism – compel this explo-
ration of a select number of Marker and Resnais films in relation to
Gilles Deleuze’s writings, interviews and lectures.
Always in conjunction with these actual real expressions of events,
this book simultaneously strives to experience the virtual real events,
intensities, sensations, affects and becomings that coexist alongside
the actual. This book attempts, that is, to engage with the dual actual
and virtual, tangible and intangible depth and surface, expression
and sense series that comprise reality and life.1 Repeatedly Deleuze
declares that ‘if we want to grasp an event, we must not show it, we
must not pass along the event, but plunge into it, go through all the
geological layers that are its internal history’ (C2: 254–5); this is to
explain and consider an event, as James Williams writes, in relation
to its always two-sided virtual and actual structure, ‘the ways in
which actual events touch on virtual events’ (Williams 2003: 9).

1
 untimely affects

This book then delves within the historical events it confronts to

encounter and extract their past-future implications and persistence,
singularities and forces from which Marker and Resnais have forged
something new. The untimely singularity of Marker and Resnais’
cinematic responses to certain monumental events of twentieth- and
twenty-first-century history, the following chapters insist, counter
circular interpretations and limitations of various discourses of
traumatic commemoration. The performative engagements of these
chapters further maintain that – through their capacity to perceive
past and future at once, to embrace, that is, the ‘mobile instant’
between the ever yet to come and always already past – the films of
this study discover means to negotiate history, memory and death
through possibilities for difference, thought and life.
By way of this study, I thus propose a method of film-philosophy
that sensorily thinks through virtual experiential processes and
domains of memory and past in relation to actual bodies and states
of affairs. The select Marker and Resnais films of this book leap
among ages of the past to grasp and expose moments of a pure past,
the whole of the virtual past that was never present and that differs
eternally, impersonally. Through filmic realisations of a pure past,
‘we’ come to experience a past in our contracted present that exceeds
the individual via a reflexive doubling, or ‘counter-actualisation’.
This ‘splendour’ of the event, which is its impersonal perpetual
split or crack into past-future that shatters the limits of the individual
and time of Chronos, embraces the ‘ “they” of pre-individual singu-
larities’; which is why, as Deleuze claims:
there are no private or collective events, no more than there are individu-
als and universals . . . Everything is singular, and thus both collective and
private, particular and general, neither individual nor universal. Which
war . . . is not a private affair? Conversely, which wound is not inflicted
by war and derived from society as a whole? (LS: 152)

As Marker and Resnais’ films unleash the personal through the

universal and universal through personal by way of affects and sensa-
tions that persist through ever-new ‘differenciations’, the films’ ever-
new actualisations of the virtual past affirm the future. In this way,
the films of Marker and Resnais enable us to discern that exchange
between actual and virtual, present and past-future through dynamic,
novel actualisations of the real.
For as the cinema captures its ‘self’ and time’s duration through
its own lens it manifests a crystal-image. This auto-perceptibility or

2
 Introduction

reflexivity glimpses that ‘paradoxical instance’, ‘aleatory’ mobile

point, instant or crack upon the line of the Aion where every con-
centrated present splits and launches eternally into past-future.
These images, the following chapters contend, reveal and advance
the power and potential of the cinematic medium to confront, reac-
tivate and replay – and thus express, transform, sense, think and live
through or counter-actualise – certain catastrophic and delimiting
events of existence that have, in the face of life’s ceaseless series of
flux and variation, permanently scarred humanity’s constructions of
its ‘self’ and ‘other’. While they break open the double actual-virtual
structure of life to explore interactions and events that are both cor-
poreal and incorporeal, Marker and Resnais’ films most profoundly
glimpse that relation between mortal personal death and life’s imper-
sonal immanent becoming.
As seen through the cinemas of Marker and Resnais, humanity
continually discovers innovative means of repression and destruc-
tion that are counter-actualised and expressed by these filmmakers’
revelations of the same. Marker and Resnais’ productions of life
through their cinematic excursions, in other words, extrapolate the
emergences and becomings of systems that effectively subvert pro-
ductivity for despotic uses and end. Yet, how does humanity turn
against itself? In the face of mass sufferings and graves, what hope
has life for new becomings? The means through which we must, as
Williams suggests, ‘act in such a way as to allow the [“irresolvable”]
problem, and how we shall follow on from it, to appear or to become
expressed in us’ (Williams 2003: 156), the ways through which sur-
vival is yet possible, follow on in this book from the urgently ethical
principles of Deleuze (and Félix Guattari)’s philosophy, and Marker
and Resnais’ films.
Through our physical events, wounds and sufferings, that is, we
must discover new becomings, ideas and sensations if we are to
transform or redouble the events that have befallen us. To thereby
become ‘worthy of our events’ as Deleuze urges, to embrace the
event through an ethics of Amor fati, is to ‘tap into but never stand
independent of’, as Williams writes, the asymmetrical virtual-actual
series of life. ‘Freedom comes with the generation of sense within
determined actual and virtual circuits’; we can ‘select within events
that have nonetheless selected us’ (Williams 2008a: 157); we can
newly express the catastrophic through the generation and expres-
sion of ‘sense’, that ‘splendor and magnificence of the event’ that
Deleuze describes which is ‘inside what occurs, the purely expressed’

3
 untimely affects

(LS:  149), the forces, sensations, thisnesses that our, Marker and

Resnais’ experimental acts express and exude. We can, in other
words, live through and along the edge of that which at once empow-
ers and defeats us.
Destructive force or violence is thereby conceived in this book
as apocalyptic and affirmative, as fatal with respect to instances of
degradation and mortal death, and emancipative through creative
lines of film and philosophy. ‘The difference between the two poles
[of the “war machine”] is great’, assert Deleuze and Guattari, ‘even,
and especially, from the point of view of death: the line of flight that
creates, or turns into a line of destruction’ (ATP: 423). Inasmuch
as a ‘war machine’ can turn a ‘line of flight into a line of death’
(ATP: 229), it can also and must then become a creative line of flight.
While my analyses probe the provocative, poignant, graceful move-
ments and means through which their films reveal reality, Marker
and Resnais’ cinemas are, in this sense, conceived by this book as
‘machines’, as moving assemblages of interacting past-future images,
perceptions or ‘bodies’ and audio-visual relations that do not repli-
cate, reproduce or represent as they effect something new.

•
Now they have hit the bull’s-eye. (LJ)
Who among us keeps watch . . . to warn of the arrival of our new execu-
tioners? (NB)
It is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow,
and pierces me. (Barthes 1981: 26–7)
The conjunction of Marker and Resnais in this book parallels the
artists’ early associations2 and later instances of intertextual homage,
as through the affective replaying of Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour
by way of Marker’s Chats Perchés. Since the 1950s, both artists’
cinemas have profoundly contributed to a sociopolitical movement
of intellectual and artistic thought in modern cinema and art while
their works have singularly defied generic classification, incorpora-
tion or entrenchment. As Emma Wilson observes:
the directors whose work and whose cinematic trajectory . . . bear closest
comparison to Resnais are his early collaborators Chris Marker and
Agnès Varda, whose relation to the Nouvelle Vague was, like Resnais’,
tangential, and whose very different works over subsequent decades are
yet equally marked by attention to memory, virtuality and mourning on

4
 Introduction

the one hand, and to the textures, shapes and surfaces of the material
world on the other. (Wilson 2006: 195)

While Marker’s prolific multi-media practice pursues the hauntingly

intangible across faces, places and times, and as Resnais’ recent films
foray into more conventional narratives ever yet resonant with traces
of his earlier works, it is yet essential to assert, à propos Wilson’s
vital perception, that the trajectories of both artists’ careers will not
be charted by these pages.
This book is not committed to a comprehensive study of either
Marker or Resnais’ oeuvre as it seeks rather to experience and affec-
tively respond to dual virtual-actual relations actualised through the
films, relations and forces towards which Wilson intimates, and that
this Introduction has thus far attempted to evoke. With respect to
both Marker and Resnais’ careers, illuminating, thorough discus-
sions exist, to which the rapidly emergent ‘Marker field’ of study
bears witness through such significant texts on Marker’s practice as
Nora Alter, Sarah Cooper and Catherine Lupton’s. Against less con-
temporary, auteurist Resnais studies, Wilson’s 2006 Alain Resnais
powerfully reinvigorates Resnais scholarship. As it delicately dis-
cerns experiences and events across decades of Resnais’ career, from
his earliest to more recent films, Wilson’s writing offers nuanced,
sensory explorations of the ephemeral yet interminable via contem-
plations of fleetingness and permanence, pain and memory, death,
decay and loss.
These ever variable, fluctuating, oft seeming paradoxical sensa-
tions, mixtures and singular differences of image, sound, score and
affect in the films of both Marker and Resnais passionately inspire
this study of a select series of films. Each film, this book contends,
uniquely, creatively responds to certain historic, ‘traumatic’ events
of history through manifestations of living, lingering spectres of past
and their edifices, monuments, museums, graves and ruins of ‘present’
that also demand significance in time. Less premised then upon the
entirety of Marker and Resnais’ practices than upon select evocations
of ‘diverse degrees and levels’ of past that speak to circuits between
personal-impersonal, intimate-universal, present and past-future as
well as to viewer-character-film, this book expressly confronts limits
of linear time and its ‘upright’, dogmatic or transcendent image of
thought and life. As the films of this study challenge and expand the
cinema’s potential to directly reveal time’s perpetual duration, they
at once indelibly affect and are affected by variations between states

5
 untimely affects

and affective degrees of intensities including horror, shock, sadness,

peace, wonder or amusement that are aroused or diminished with
each collision of screen and viewer.
This book emerges from these encounters and is itself deeply
affected by its commitment and attention to ‘memory, virtuality and
mourning on the one hand, and to the textures, shapes and surfaces
of the material world on the other’, to repeat Wilson’s observations.
As it continuously unfolds and refolds questions of cinema and life,
thought, time and death, this book then layers various responses
and perceptions as expressed through Marker, Resnais, Deleuze,
Guattari, Barthes, Blanchot, Nietzsche, Spinoza, myself, among
others. As a performative enquiry that experiences and interacts with
the works of Marker, Resnais and Deleuze, it acknowledges certain
strategies and techniques, including Marker’s metatextual commen-
taries, Resnais’ tracking movements, and Deleuze’s novel repetitions,
while it searches to reveal the depths of its engagements with the
films and writings.
In other words, this book is a product of tangible affect, the
‘feeling’ of events as provoked via pure, impersonal affects that
pierce – pure sadness, joy, or love, if to love is to fully experience the
bliss of impersonal freedom. ‘Feelings are ages of the world’, writes
Deleuze, ‘thought is the non-chronological time which corresponds
to them’ (C2: 125). This is as much to say, with reference to Marker
and Resnais’ cinematic ‘membranes’, that the incorporeal intensi-
ties, the fluctuating sorrows, pains and loves, that are in continual
exchange, or perpetual duration, might find bodily release ‘around’,
‘behind’ and ‘even inside the image’ (C2: 125). For sensations resist
finite definition, possession, subjectification or periodisation, and any
film might exceed the limitations of its sensory-motor movement-
image schema through time-images that interrogate diverse, coexist-
ent ages and affects of an impersonal open whole or ‘univocal’ world.
This making perceptible of the imperceptible is a challenge that
obsesses this book. While these pages cannot claim to ‘do philoso-
phy’, they do ceaselessly question, through the ‘tools’ or concepts
of Deleuze’s philosophy, the visionary possibilities of Marker and
Resnais’ realisations as world- or life-creations that open to an indis-
cernibility of actual and virtual around, behind, inside and beyond
the screen. To experience the cinema as an intensive, living ‘body’
or series of images through which we might perceive actual and
virtual at its most minute point, or crystal-image, is to move towards
a ‘becoming-imperceptible’ through an immanent awareness of self

6
 Introduction

and other. Can Marker and Resnais’ cinemas extend towards or even
realise that mobile point? How to touch and express the ineffable?
Through the unknown, uncertain, infinitesimal and seemingly unat-
tainable, this book enacts, as a means of response, its own intermina-
ble pursuit of a becoming-imperceptible.

•
Here we catch a glimpse of a future in which all mysteries are resolved
. . . this will come about because these readers, each working on his slice
of universal memory, will lay the fragments of a single secret end to end,
a secret with a beautiful name, a secret called happiness. (Resnais with
‘Chris and Magic Marker’ et al. 1956)

If philosophy has abdicated the classical image of reason, then it can

only resort to other planes of expression in an effort to escape from its
impasse, which is somehow equal to the impasse of the ‘world’ itself after
the events of ‘Auschwitz’ and ‘Hiroshima’. Henceforth, philosophy itself
must become a philosophy of the ‘event’. (Lambert 2002: 18)
Why then a study of Marker and Resnais through Deleuze, and how?
The decision to limit this study to considerations of these filmmak-
ers’ works in relation to questions of affect, sensation and violence
through explorations of real time and pure difference affords a
unique association of the two artists. For despite several existent
studies of their respective works, as well as numerous texts devoted
to the Nouvelle Vague that include discussion of Marker and Resnais,
an extensive twofold examination of both artists’ practices remains
hitherto absent. Yet, in light of the intersections between their works,
the oft observed similarities of narrative theme and cinematic style,
as well as the artists’ own near lifelong friendship, an alliance of the
two filmmakers through a dedicated study seems a matter of course.
An association then of Marker and Resnais’ films through an
academic study may seem appropriate given these obvious linkages
throughout conventional filmic history, theory and textual analysis.
However, inasmuch as Marker and Resnais’ cinemas do not pursue a
predetermined course but rather open to re-production and a repeat-
ing of ‘difference in itself’; inasmuch as Marker and Resnais’ produc-
tions of difference defy reductive thematic appraisal as they challenge
the very notion of canonisation and their affixed ‘Art Cinema Classic’
status, this book strives not to review or recapitulate recognised
resemblances, either throughout each respective career or between
the two. Indeed, the select films of this book resist ­codification and

7
 untimely affects

formulisation as they endlessly reactivate and replay the untimeliness

of events, and by so doing transform filmic genre and practice.
This study seeks then to suggest techniques and means through
which Marker and Resnais’ films inventively repeat problems and
questions so that their works continually transform themselves. These
movements towards the new profoundly correspond with Deleuze’s
designation through Nietzsche of an eternal return of difference via
the third synthesis of time: ‘Repetition in the eternal return’, writes
Deleuze, ‘excludes both the becoming-equal or the becoming-similar’
(DR: 115). With each repetition, with each searching tracking move-
ment, multi-layered voiceover or evocative series of image superim-
positions, the films freshly layer new thoughts, affects and sensations
so that each film creatively replays interactions of virtual and actual.
The challenge of this book is not the obvious, expected, recognised
or historicised but its fascination with the untranslatable differ-
ing, affecting and becoming as expressed through Resnais’ Nuit et
Brouillard (1955) and Hiroshima mon amour (1959), and Marker’s
La Jetée (1962), Sans Soleil (1983), Le Souvenir d’un avenir (2001,
with Yannick Bellon) and Chats Perchés (2004).
Of all Marker and Resnais’ films, these particular films most affect
‘me’, hence their selection for this study and my endless encounters
with their image series and revelations of coexistences in time and
virtual memory by way of actual bodies, relics or fragments. Even
so, this book remains entirely aware of the effects of transcribing
affect to word, an act that inevitably arrests transitory movements of
increasing or decreasing, active or reactive affective forces, becom-
ings and variations that the process of this book aspires to touch
and reveal. The act of translating my processual experiences through
the films is thus processual itself and performative in that through
evocative quotation, close analysis and creative repetition of Marker,
Resnais and Deleuze’s thoughts, these pages attempt not to copy or
apply ‘Deleuzian philosophy’ to the films but rather to participate in
an open-ended process between book, film and text. Through this
method of film-philosophy that explores potentials for thought and
life via cinema and its provocations of sensation, this book discovers
Marker and Resnais’ works anew.
The following chapters embrace not only the intertextuality of
Marker, Resnais and Deleuze’s works as produced through serial
repetitions and layers within and across their own and each other’s
works,3 as well as the works of other thinkers and artists across disci-
plinary domains and temporal ages, but these chapters also generate

8
 Introduction

a series of repetitions themselves. These interact with the films and

texts to expose an irreducible difference between each repetition,
film, text and book chapter. Which is to say, this book provides as
much of a definitive Marker, Resnais or Deleuze interpretation or
reading as the works themselves offer with respect to the virtual-
actual events they explore.
‘There I was’, ruminates Barthes, ‘alone in the apartment where
she had died, . . . looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And
I found it’ (Barthes 1981: 67). The difference towards which each
chapter, film and text attempts to think, the pure difference or ‘dif-
ference in itself’ that strikes and pierces when we at last find it and
perceive the possibility of a virtual world and the pre-individual sin-
gularities that comprise us, is articulated throughout these pages as
thisness, haecceity, punctum, madness, love, happiness – indefinable
singularities and vibrations that shatter a self and ‘move the soul’.
Deleuze writes:
The more our daily life appears standardised, stereotyped and subject to
an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art must
be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which
plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition, and even in order
to make the two extremes resonate – namely, the habitual series of con-
sumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death. (DR: 293;
emphasis mine)

There is always, that is, the possibility of discerning and discover-

ing that little difference throughout each film of this book. Through
the banality of a ferry’s journey, a billboard’s advertisement, shop-
ping departments, city parks, museum exhibits, train stations, historic
sites and photo albums we might always sense a woman’s face, a cat,
a past, and the threat of an impending future that might also always
be made different. ‘Thrown at the right moment, he may stay there
and move without trouble’, La Jetée’s narrator explains. Perhaps, if
inexplicably ‘freed from the accidents of internal and external life . . .
from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens’ (PI: 28), we
too might obtain an imperceptibility through time.
As Marker and Resnais’ films glimpse this freedom, they gesture
towards that imperceptible crack between the two extremes of actual
and virtual, a crack whose shattering reverberates and resonates
through the bodies of the films, this book and my self. At the heart
of these chapters is then an open sensitivity to profound, intense
differences through film and through which we might counter the

9
 untimely affects

threats of cruelty, stupidity and the ‘most ignoble destructions of

war’ (DR: 293), and it to these chapters this book now turns.
It is never the beginning or the end which are interesting . . . What is
interesting is the middle. (D: 39)

Notes
1. ‘What is a series, then?’ writes James Williams. ‘It is a disjunctive syn-
thesis running in different ways across two interdependent but irreduc-
ible sides of reality.’ ‘They are processes to be observed, or better, lived
through’ (Williams 2008a: 27, 26).
2. Whether or not formally credited, for Marker’s extensive contributions
to Resnais’ films (among these their co-authored 1953 Les Statues
meurent aussi), the films of others, and even his own works are often
credited to playful Marker personas. The opening credits of Resnais’
1956 Toute la mémoire du monde, for example, identify collaborator
Marker as ‘Chris and Magic Marker’, while Marker’s 1983 Sans Soleil
credits its photography to ‘Sandor Krasna’, Marker’s fictional double
throughout the film, the never-seen traveller whose letters the film’s
narrator reads. These are glimpses of the ever resistant, differing, multi-
plying ‘Marker’ persona. Moreover, Marker’s cartoon cat, Guillaume-
en-Egypte, also appeared repeatedly as a stand-in for elusive Marker on
DVD sleeves, throughout online blogs, installation communiqués, and
wherever else Marker and Cat prowled.
3. As Chapter 4 notes, Marker’s works interestingly do not figure in
Deleuze’s cinematic analyses despite this book’s contention that remark-
able reverberations exist between Marker and Deleuze’s expressions and
creations via film and philosophy.

10
 1

Art’s Resistance

André Malraux develops a beautiful concept; he says something very

simple about art; he says it is the only thing that resists death. (Deleuze
1998b: 18)

Deleuze and Art: An Introduction

As scarred by horrors that shame the notion of humanity, the
twentieth century and first moments of the twenty-first encompass
years and decades during which, as Giorgio Agamben argues, death
becomes inaccessible and ‘men do not die, but are instead produced
as corpses’ (Agamben 1999: 75). Art’s relation, and more specifi-
cally photographic and cinematographic relations to such violence,
suffering and its survival remain enigmatic as proliferating debates
persist pertaining to the possibilities and effects of art in the duration
and aftermath of devastating events. Of the competing discourses,
contemporary literary trauma theory has become a foremost perspec-
tive; such theorists address a ‘crisis’ that paradoxically ‘defies and
demands’ verbalisation and witness (Caruth 1996: 5). However, the
resultant fetishisation of traumatic event and subject through circular
considerations of wars, destruction and traumas both private and
universal arguably stupefies thought, pre-empting opportunities for
productive life practices.
In contrast to the ‘absolutely accurate and precise’ traumatic
flashback or re-enactment as sustained by theories of identity and
representation (Caruth 1995: 151–3), the philosophy of Deleuze
promotes difference and its affirmation in thought. Whereas the
notion of an experiencing human subject and her traumatic repeti-
tions fortify several theoretical discourses as spawned from Freudian
psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari propose a schizoanalysis. Such
an active, inherently ethical and affirmative approach counters death
with life and art as it discovers possibilities for survival and creation
beyond inertia’s threat via victimisation and its potential propensity
towards infectious impotence.

11
 untimely affects

Through Nietzsche and Spinoza, Deleuze insists that thought and

art must do violence to reactive forces that beget violence through
a power of ressentiment, what Deleuze and Guattari describe as
‘double suicide’ and ‘a way out that turns the line of flight into a line
of death’, a line of pure destruction and abolition (ATP: 229–30).
When questioned in interview regarding the violence of which he
writes, Deleuze responded:
You say there’s a certain tragic or melancholic tone in all this. I think I
can see why. I was very struck by all the passages in Primo Levi where
he explains that Nazi camps have given us ‘a shame at being human.’
Not, he says, that we’re all responsible for Nazism, as some would have
us believe, but that we’ve all been tainted by it: even the survivors of the
camps had to make compromises with it, if only to survive. There’s the
shame of there being men who became Nazis; the shame of being unable,
not seeing how, to stop it; the shame of having compromised with it;
there’s the whole of what Primo Levi call this ‘gray area.’ . . . This is one
of the most powerful incentives toward philosophy, and it’s what makes
all philosophy political . . . There’s no democratic state that’s not com-
promised to the very core by its part in generating human misery. What’s
so shameful is that we’ve no sure way of maintaining becomings, or still
more of arousing them, even within ourselves. (N: 171–2)
The ability to unsettle the preconceived and overcoded, to discover
life through direct images of time and affect that expose the matter-
movement flow of perceptions and images of which Deleuze and
Bergson write, is to create anew. This is, as Deleuze claims, ‘the power
of modern cinema (when it stops being bad)’ (C2: 172). Elsewhere
Deleuze writes, ‘the less human the world is, the more it is the artist’s
duty to believe and produce belief in a relation between man and the
world’ (C2: 171). If damage has been done to our illusionary world
of eternal truths, what remains? Deleuze responds: ‘bodies, which
are forces, nothing but forces . . . Power (what Nietzsche calls “will
to power” . . .) is this power to affect and be affected, this relation
between one force and others . . . the shock of forces, in the image or
of the images between themselves’ (C2: 139).
In War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, Paul Virilio sug-
gests that ‘in cinema there is no longer such a thing as an “accurate”
reflection’. He continues:
‘Everything’, [actor Paul] Wegener said in 1916, ‘depends on a certain
flow in which the fantastic world of the past rejoins the world of the
present’ . . . Cinema is war because, as Dr Gustave Le Bon wrote in 1916,
‘War touches not only the material life but also the thinking of nations . . .

12
 Art’s Resistance

it is not the rational which manages the world but forces of affective, mys-
tical or collective origin which guide men . . . immaterial forces are the
true steerers of combat.’ (Virilio 1989: 30; citing Le Bon, Enseignements
psychologiques de la guerre européenne)

By this, Virilio acknowledges the ‘immaterial’ forces that constitute

thought and life. Of these forces both active and reactive, it is from
the latter, those negative, resentful and destructive, that the violence
of war emerges. It is this line of destruction, as Deleuze and Guattari
write, that produces the ‘most catastrophic charge’ (ATP: 230). They
continue:
Paul Virilio’s analysis strikes us as entirely correct in defining fascism not
by the notion of the totalitarian State but by the notion of the suicidal
State: so-called total war seems less a State undertaking than an under-
taking of a war machine that appropriates the State and channels into it
a flow of absolute war whose only possible outcome is the suicide of the
State itself. (ATP: 231)

Indeed, the ‘war machine’ Deleuze and Guattari identify has ‘nothing
to do with war’ but with ‘revolutionary movements’: a war-machine,
Deleuze contends, refers even to ‘artistic movements’ and ways of
‘inventing new space-times’ (N: 172). Such creative becoming vitally
contrasts the ever-ominous threat of a line of flight’s suicidal reter-
ritorialisation, which finds illustration through the example Deleuze
and Guattari provide of the State incited by Hitler wherein the ‘war
machine . . . no longer had anything but war as its object’. As thus
appropriated, a war machine ‘would rather annihilate its own serv-
ants than stop the destruction’; all other dangers to life, Deleuze and
Guattari admit, ‘pale by comparison’ (ATP: 231).
These pages encounter dangers of their own as the notion of a
derivative ‘Deleuzian approach’ cancels the primacy of difference
with sameness and inertia – any attempt to explicate or replicate
dynamic layers of thought and ‘lines of flight’ would prove imposs­ible
and paradoxical. Yet, given their challenge to prevalent representa-
tional means of rational expression and comprehension, entirely new
sensory practices and ‘styles’ of thinking may seem equally as difficult
to communicate or grasp. Such creative ways of mutation and further
difference – as through cinema, art, music or l­iterature – evoke the
associative processes of Deleuze’s geo-philosophy. How then to
read art and its signs through the tools of Deleuze’s creative prac-
tice? How to discern a work’s signs, its movements, worlds and
affects without reverting to quests for meaning, ­reproduction and

13
 untimely affects

a­ uthenticity that would eradicate potentials for new experience and

creation? In response, Deleuze advocates a method of experimenta-
tion and creative ‘stuttering’ free from the constraints of our selves,
order words and dogmas, a stuttering to which this book will return,
and that Deleuze describes as he writes:
To make one’s language stutter . . . it is a matter of digging under the
stories, cracking open the opinions, and reaching regions without memo-
ries, when the self must be destroyed . . . Style becomes nonstyle, and
one’s language lets an unknown foreign language escape from it [Proust],
so that one can reach the limits of language itself and become something
other than a writer, conquering fragmented visions that pass through
the words of a poet, the colors of a painter, or the sounds of a musician.
(ECC: 113–14)

To communicate or grasp accepted interpretation or established

‘knowledge’ is to participate in what Deleuze terms a ‘society of
control’ and its integration of the same. For thought’s regulation
according to dictates of authorised information and ‘public knowl-
edge’ negates the power of difference as it arrests life and creation
through definitive meanings and subtle control. Of such delimita-
tions of thought Bergson suggests that:
millions of phenomena succeed each other while we hardly succeed in
counting a few . . . To conceive of durations of different tensions [e.g.,
animal, plant life, etc.] is perhaps both difficult and strange to our mind,
because we have acquired the useful habit of substituting for the true
duration, lived by consciousness, an homogenous and independent Time
. . . In short, . . . to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of
an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of
an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very long history. To perceive
means to immobilize. (Bergson 1991: 207–8; emphasis mine)

By this, Bergson proposes that there is not a single rhythm of dura-

tion but several different rhythms whose various speeds or flows
comprise life’s eternal virtual-actual series of coexisting circuits while
their multiple speeds attest to their respective places in the scale of
being (Bergson 1991: 207). The contraction and dilation of these
diverse flows, their different speeds, indicate a body or organism’s
complexity; as Bergson states, the ‘greater or lesser tension of their
duration . . . their greater or lesser intensity of life’ (1991: 210).
Human perception, as derived from life’s flow of matter-move-
ment, delays this flow of difference and becoming through its con-
sciousness of alternative durations. By way of such perception via

14
 Art’s Resistance

cinema’s virtual domains, the actualised ‘present’ gives way to what

Bergson defines as a coexistence of disparate layers, sheets, continu-
ums, planes or ages of past, ‘a continuum with fragments of different
ages’, as writes Deleuze (C2: 123), through which time becomes
both past and always to come.1 As will be explored throughout the
following chapters, Deleuze discerns potentials within post-Second
World War cinema to reveal durations beyond that of any character,
family or group as certain films open to a virtual world-memory. An
eternal ‘sort of immediate, consecutive or even simultaneous double’
of the actual through its virtual counterpart in ‘perpetual exchange’
persists whereby the virtual eternally coexists alongside the actual so
that time, as Deleuze claims following Bergson, is always a ‘passing
of the present’ and ‘preservation of the past’ (Deleuze 2002: 150–1).
Deleuze often terms the virtual-actual, actual-virtual exchange
a crystal, and the ‘tightest’ or most indiscernible moment of
the v­irtual-actual oscillation a crystallisation. Significantly, while
Deleuze regards the practices of science, art and philosophy as fun-
damentally creative and correlated through a limit common to all the
disciplines, which communicate together ‘on the level of . . . the con-
stitution of space-times’ (1998b: 16), he underscores a ‘fundamental
affinity between the work of art and the act of resistance’ (1998b: 18)
and focuses earnestly in this respect upon the cinema. Through the
cinema’s revelation of space-times and crystalline virtual-actual
coalescences ‘between the immediate past which is already no longer
and the immediate future which is not yet’ (C2: 81), cinematic time-
images open to non-hierarchical, virtual becomings, affects and
percepts of worlds other than those that can be recognised, a time
of difference in-itself, an untimely time that brings only the new, the
eternal repetition of the different. Whereas the movement-image of
pre-Second World War cinema finds narrative cohesion and chrono-
logical organisation through the sensory-motor schema that Bergson
identifies of habitual movement and response, the postwar time-
image that Deleuze discerns encounters the very splitting or crack
of time towards past and future. ‘Time consists of this split, and it
is this, it is time’, Deleuze via Bergson contends ‘that we see in the
crystal . . . the perpetual foundation of time, non-chronological time,
Cronos and not Chronos . . . The visionary, the seer, is the one who
sees in the crystal, and what he sees is the gushing of time as dividing
in two, as splitting’ (C2: 81).
The contemporaneous virtual past actualises in the present; this
actualisation of pure memory or recollection, the paramnesia or

15
 untimely affects

déjà-vu to which Deleuze and Bergson refer, gives way to a cinematic

autonomous consciousness of time. Such consciousness corresponds
to the apprehension of a self’s instantaneous, paradoxical dissolution
as a subject, a fracturing the following chapters will further examine
through film, and the pure memory of a world directly exploring
time, sensation and the remnants of regimes that have sought to
regulate, control and ‘cleanse’ difference and its flows. Deleuze para-
phrases Bergson as he explains:
Every moment of our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual,
perception on the one side and recollection on the other . . . Whoever
becomes conscious of the continual duplication of his present into per-
ception and recollection . . . will compare himself to an actor playing his
part automatically, listening to himself and beholding himself playing.
(C2: 79)
As the cinema discovers non-communicable means to think and
create through the freeing of affect and time from the foundations
of identity, representation and redundancy, it affirms the resist-
ance of which Deleuze writes that radically counters conventional
interpretations of freedom. Through virtual worlds, that is, the
cinema manifests a ‘veritable transformation’ or ‘great circulation
of elements’ (Deleuze 1998b: 16) that, via disjunctions of image,
sound, score, speed, light and intensity, affect the sensory body of
the spectator, a subjectivity produced by the doubling of crystalline
time, a becoming of consciousness enabled through virtual memory.
The emergence of the cinematic time-image in the post-Second World
War period fundamentally derives not only from ‘the most ordinary
states of sleep, dream, or a disturbance of attention’ but also from
limit-situations that break with the mundane quotidian as a ‘cinema
of seeing’ replaces that of action (C2: 55; 9). Deleuze distinguishes
the time-image then as a means
of reaching a mystery of time, of uniting image, thought and camera
in a single ‘automatic subjectivity’ . . . a character finds himself prey to
visual and sound sensations (or tactile ones, cutaneous or coenaesthetic)
which have lost their motor extension. This may be a limit-situation, the
imminent arrival or consequence of an accident, the nearness of death.
(C2: 55)
Freedom or resistance surfaces from the interstices and disparate
audio-visual layers of modern cinema’s time-images that affect, via
a virtual perception or intervention, a violence or ‘inhuman’ power
that overwhelms habitual response as might a traumatic experience.

16
 Art’s Resistance

Urged to impossibly think life’s immanent flow of becoming, time

or immanence itself, the processes and connections of this thought
rupture the screen. What remains in the place of any authoritative
authentic or accurate cinematic representation2 are forces that frac-
ture character and viewer through affective singular experiences.
While writing on the ‘adaptation of the real to the interests of
practice’ through empiricism and dogmatism, Bergson proposes
an alternative method that would ‘seek experience at its source, or
rather above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direc-
tion of our utility, it becomes properly human experience’ (Bergson
1991: 183–4). This third course through ‘pure intuition’ would place
us in
pure duration, of which the flow is continuous and in which we pass
insensibly from one state to another: a continuity which is really lived,
but artificially decomposed for the greater convenience of customary
knowledge . . . The duration wherein we see ourselves acting, and in
which it is useful that we should see ourselves, is duration whose elements
are dissociated and juxtaposed. The duration wherein we act is a duration
wherein our states melt into each other. (1991: 186)

Deleuze identifies the signs of the cinematic movement- and time-

images through Bergson’s distinction between extensive and inten-
sive duration, or ‘automatic subjectivity’ and grounded duration
on the one hand and, on the other, imperceptible fluid duration or
pure difference, whose subordination to human homogenised time
again begets extensive disjointed spatialised duration. While linear
quotidian time indirectly experiences and perceives time, crystal
time-images directly expose time in its pure intensive state as they
make perceptible the imperceptible.
The question always remains: how to free ourselves, to think
difference itself, attain absolute deterritorialisation, the plane of
immanence? In other words, the challenge is always to become
imperceptible, to attain the line or flight of greatest creativity and
speed through the elimination of despair, death and ressentiment.
This liberating possibility surfaces through time-images that release
a free flow of images or creative becomings. One may wonder,
as Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge, ‘what are they all rushing
toward’, these becoming-others or lines of flight. ‘Without a doubt’,
Deleuze and Guattari insist once more, they rush ‘toward becoming-
imperceptible. The imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming,
its cosmic formula’ (ATP: 279).

17
 untimely affects

The time-image’s revelation of time’s virtual-actual doubling cor-

responds then to the formation of subjectivity. As Deleuze suggests,
‘subjectification is about . . . bringing a curve into the line, making
it turn back on itself, or making force impinge on itself. So we get
ways of living with what would otherwise be unendurable’ (N: 113).
Through Bergson, Deleuze espouses a method of intuition whereby
the reflexive awareness described, the ‘duration wherein we see
ourselves acting’, would simultaneously coincide with the ‘duration
wherein we act’ so that our actions and actualisations would be
discerned at each moment within their context of interactions and
connections.
This difficult act or counter-actualisation is also a becoming-
other, a becoming-imperceptible. Memory makes possible the image
of a self, as Deleuze argues. Which is to say, as it opens to a realm of
the virtual, perception perceives itself and time’s duality with its two
heterogeneous directions launched towards both future and past.
The actualisation of this consciousness ‘always still in the future and
already in the past’ suggests again ‘an actor’s paradox’ and the actor
or self’s possible redoubling or enactment of counter-actualisation
(LS: 150). In relation to a self’s emergence or actualisation through
the intuition of time, memory, pure past and its consequent frag-
mentation through the same process of recollection, the violence of
which Deleuze writes with and without Guattari in Cinema 2: The
Time-Image, Difference and Repetition, What is Philosophy?, A
Thousand Plateaus, Logic of Sense and elsewhere suggests that this
dissolution of a unified self becomes ‘traumatic’ in itself. Deleuze and
Guattari muse:
what violence must be exerted on thought for us to become capable of
thinking; what violence of an infinite movement that, at the same time,
takes from us our power to say ‘I’? . . . a set of ambiguous signs arise . . .
thought as such begins to exhibit snarls, squeals, stammers; it talks in
tongues and screams, which leads it to create, or to try to. (WIP: 55)

Among factors that give rise to the time-image, an image that

reveals the cinema’s perception of itself as it experiments at the limits
of what it can do, Deleuze cites the Second World War as a violent
encounter to thought. This shattering of stable constructions by force
enables intensive perception and new approaches to life, seeing and
being. Such affective experience generates the spectator/character
and its reflexivity, a reflexivity embodied within the crystal time-
image and that generates new becomings, relations and engagements

18
 Art’s Resistance

with the world. From this ‘cinema of the seer’ and these visionary
sleepwalkers who lose themselves to the violence and intensity they
witness, who have ‘learnt to see’ because they have been ‘struck
to the core by the simple unfolding of images . . . [and] something
unbearable, beyond the limit’, Deleuze evokes a character who has
become viewer himself, whose situation ‘outstrips his motor capaci-
ties on all sides’ (C2: 2–3).
From this rarely perceived virtual image of time that ceaselessly
splits and persists, Virilio suggests that cinema and war have devel-
oped their inhuman, machinic perception in tandem, through which
militaristic surveillance doubles the all-seeing cinematic world while
societies of control come into dominance (Virilio 1989: 2). This
perpetuation of information and communication at the ‘speed of
electronic circuitry’ and light provokes Deleuze’s intervention: ‘let
us at least say that there is counterinformation’ (Deleuze 1998b: 18).
People may move ‘ “freely” without being at all confined yet while
still being perfectly controlled’ through communication and informa-
tion (1998b: 18). Communication, Deleuze continues, is the ‘trans-
mission and the propagation of a piece of information’ which ‘we are
supposed to be ready or able to . . . believe’. Ominously he claims,
‘this is our future’ (1998b: 18).
But counterinformation, which may be produced through the
time-image’s act of creative resistance, counters the subtle control
enforced through instruments of communication and information.
Cinema, Deleuze argues, possesses the potential to free thought and
life from confinement, if only temporarily, through the liberation
of affects and the ‘creation of a people’. ‘The people, who “are still
missing” and yet already there’ (C2: 255), as Deleuze repeats Paul
Klee, are the bodies who will experience a becoming with the screen.
In the wake of the collapse of the sensory-motor schema and its
action-image, this paradoxical reflexivity of nonhuman subjectivity
or identity in cinema thus enables resistance through dissociations,
layerings and series of visual and sound that generate creativity via
difference. Such folding of the world into the self then distinguishes
human duration as a flow of greater complexity or perceptual inten-
sity among other flows. As Deleuze suggests, art does not represent
the world; rather, the world becomes, worlds become, through the
foldings and unfoldings of diverse subjectivities and flows so that
these folds of the world reshape and rethink the present for future
possibilities.
Yet, as Deleuze also observes, ‘wherever we turn, everything

19
 untimely affects

seems dismal’ (LS: 158), for dangers which threaten new b ­ ecomings
and life remain pervasive. Deleuze’s examinations of beliefs and
structures that diminish life and give way to catastrophic horror
and war for war’s sake, where death in and of itself becomes a goal,
open to discussions of a fold, an effect that shatters and counteracts
‘healthy’ faith in moral, eternal categories as it creates ‘revolution-
ary means of exploration’ (LS: 189). ‘Is there some other health’,
Deleuze asks, ‘like a body surviving as long as possible its scar, . . .
and never giving up the idea of a new vital conquest’? (LS: 160–1).
By way of response, Deleuze again insists upon an act of replaying or
redoubling, upon foldings, unfoldings and refoldings that expose not
only the actual events of our lives but also their underlying virtual
intensities and affective significances.
To counter-actualise, then, is to refold, break open and recombine
thought, not to sense a totalising, homogeneous world but to strive
to explore fragmentary, imperceptible relationships, to become
imperceptible, neither actual nor virtual, this nor that, but always
becoming, differing. In this way, an individual forsakes determined
classification for an active individuation. To truly ‘have faith in this
world’ is to believe in the world at hand rather than an illusion-
ary transcendence, and to discover a new ‘health’, one that might
explode and refold damaging illusions that inhibit creativity, life and
thought.
The persisting actual-virtual, virtual-actual exchange then also
corresponds to the double structure of every event. Following
Maurice Blanchot, Deleuze negotiates the disintegration of the self in
relation to life’s creative flow and the painful incarnation of destruc-
tion and death at the level of the corporeal body. One might ask
how we are to think life’s immanent flow in relation to death itself,
that most personal mortal event. Yet if death exists in all feeling, if
life, that is, is always a series of affective increases or decreases in
power, the means to thinking life through empowering repetition
and the eternal return lies through art or, more specifically, modern
cinema’s production of sensation and singular essences. For through
its potential to expose virtual essences, affects, percepts and time’s
flow as becoming and pure duration itself, through its revelations
of impersonal singularities that negate one’s personal present death
with an impersonal dying that opens to past-future becomings,
modern cinema responds anew to forces both active and reactive at
play in the modern world.

20
 Art’s Resistance

Towards Marker and Resnais

Ever at risk of the hazard hitherto described, of attempting to specify
the always indefinite and thereby ‘inevitably reintroducing tran-
scendence’, this exploration will strive to suggest new connections
and lines of flight that emerge from within and between the films of
Marker and Resnais. The movements to be traced are paradoxical: at
the same time as creations come into existence and being, they simul-
taneously open and connect further in becoming-other. ‘Becoming
[like time and movement] is always double, that which one becomes
becomes no less than the one that becomes – block is formed, essen-
tially mobile, never in equilibrium’, Deleuze and Guattari insist
(ATP: 305). Hence, the power of modern cinema to perceive the
individual-universal/universal-individual as it reveals the makings
and unmakings of a devastated world ever at mend and at war. The
‘sheets of internal life and the layers of external world plunge, extend
and intersect with increasing speed’ writes Deleuze. ‘Death does not
fix an actual present, so numerous are the dead who haunt the sheets
of past’ (C2: 209, 116).
While the perceiving mind may attune itself to the ‘needs of
practical life’ so that our memory, as Bergson argues, ‘solidifies the
continuous flow of things’ (Bergson 1991: 210), that which exceeds
human perception, that flow whose qualities travel in every direction
‘like shivers (through an immense body)’ (1991: 208), is of particular
importance to this book. The following chapters will therefore ‘seek
experience at its source’ (1991: 184) as they negotiate collective and
personal singular experiences of war and violence. In other words,
despite the immobilising effects of this very chapter, subsequent
pages of this book will interrogate sensation through filmic encoun-
ters that defy reductive recognition and rationalisation and that
shatter common notions of experience, subjectivity, time, memory,
art and the cinema itself.
As Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly insist, destructive forces
double each possibility for flight; caution must be taken to pursue the
line of greatest resistance and creativity. If again, as Deleuze writes,
‘every event is like death, double and impersonal in its double’, then
potentials for new life emerge from each event; life, which is becom-
ing, ceaselessly continues through pre-individual singularities that
comprise the ‘I’. ‘In it I do not die’ (LS: 152), Deleuze maintains after
Blanchot. By its mortal end, the actual present and a human body
gives way to ‘the impersonality of dying’ that no longer ‘indicates

21
 untimely affects

only the moment when I disappear outside my self, but rather the
moment when death loses itself in itself, and also the figure which
the most singular life takes on in order to substitute itself for me’
(LS: 153). Should we attain a duration wherein we both act and per-
ceive the very duration from which we derive, we would thus achieve
the freedom Deleuze describes.
Yet, and even as Gregg Lambert writes that the ‘very existence of a
book that claims to clarify and explain another writer already makes
the first (so-called “primary”) writer redundant to his or her own
efforts’ (Lambert 2002: ix), the act of replacing networks of audio-
visual images and the possibilities they afford with prosaic analysis
seems a most perilous threat, especially if the intent is to engage with
experience at its most unique and deeply affective. In fact, Deleuze
and Guattari suggest two planes, a transcendent and an immanent,
the plane of composition. Inevitably, these chapters develop from
the former, ‘a teleological plan(e), a design, a mental principle . . .
a plan(e) of transcendence’, a sort of ‘metalanguage’ that ‘exists
alongside’ the films and plane of composition as these words remain
unable to present the films’ flows themselves. But as Deleuze and
Guattari question, ‘is not Stockhausen also obliged to describe the
structure of his sound forms as existing “alongside” them since he is
unable to make it audible?’ (ATP: 265–6).
And so, while these pages certainly fragment the speeds and
movements of the films they consider, they variously ally cinema’s
vital, floating time and affects that move and reveal movement, that
affect and are affected, with difference, desire, ecstasy, epiphany,
love, pathos – the indelible effect, a madness, that becomes the very
ineluctable yet contingent essence, charm, thisness of an encounter
with art, which also constitutes a friendship and the condition for
thought. Art in this vital and virtual sense is, again, an act of resist-
ance inasmuch as the cinematic medium, which possesses the poten-
tial to directly expose time as difference as it forever produces new
differences and other worlds, is ‘capable of restoring our belief in the
world’ (C2: 181). Deleuze writes:
Resnais’ [and Marker’s?] characters do not just return from Auschwitz or
Hiroshima, they are philosophers, thinkers, beings of thought in another
way too. For philosophers are beings who have passed through a death,
who are born from it, and go towards another death, perhaps the same
one . . . The great post-war philosophers and writers demonstrated that
thought has something to do with Auschwitz, with Hiroshima, but this
was also demonstrated by the great cinema authors . . . this time in the

22
 Art’s Resistance

most serious way. This is the opposite of a cult of death . . . The sheets
of past come down and the layers of reality go up, in mutual embraces
which are flashes of life: what Resnais calls ‘feeling’ or ‘love’, as mental
function. (C2: 208–9)

When ‘carried to its nth power’, cinema directly manifests time,

from which human duration abstracts itself in a solidification of
time’s eternal flow and ‘simultaneity of fluxes’ (B: 81). However,
through its multiple discordant sonic and visual layers, what Deleuze
terms a ‘free indirect discourse’ whereby the ‘marks of an indirect
origin’, ‘the power of the free indirect’, cannot be affixed to any
subjectivity (C2: 242), the cinema further overturns transcend-
ent thought and any single authorial perspective. Deleuze further
clarifies:
Whenever we write, we speak as someone else . . . we are uncovering a
world of pre-individual, impersonal singularities. They are not reducible
to individuals or persons, nor to a sea without difference. These singu-
larities are mobile, they break in, thieving and stealing away, alternating
back and forth, like anarchy crowned, inhabiting a nomad space . . .
The poet Ferlinghetti3 talks about the fourth person singular; it is that to
which we try to give voice. (DI: 143)

Beyond predetermined identity constructions and formulaic thought,

Marker and Resnais’ cinemas effect this creative, open space of the
fourth person singular that breaks from classic convention and emu-
lations of religious, moral and judgemental values that threaten even-
tual nihilism. The something thought and cinema ‘have to do with’
Auschwitz, Hiroshima, prior, subsequent and future horrors is, once
more, resistance through creative lines that diverge from socially
determined binaries of good/evil, true/false. As it reveals virtual pro-
cesses free from tendencies and beliefs that delimit and solidify life
and its edicts, ‘art alone’, Deleuze claims, ‘succeeds entirely in what
life has merely sketched out’ (PS: 55).
As the following chapters seek to creatively and productively
encounter cinema, to become sensitive to its signs through Marker
and Resnais, this book will attempt to avoid film criticism’s ‘twin
dangers’ of simple description and forced interpretation based upon
concepts ‘taken from outside film’, from psychoanalysis or linguis-
tics, for example (N: 57; see also C2: 280). If ‘what is enveloped in
the sign is more profound than all the explicit significations’ (PS: 30),
the signs of Marker and Resnais’ films and the affective, sensory vio-
lence they do are integral to the following investigations.

23
 untimely affects

Deleuze and Guattari state that art is ‘a bloc of sensations’ com-

prised of percepts and affects (WIP: 164), while the cinema, according
to Deleuze, is an art of ‘auto-temporalization’ and ‘self-movement’
(N: 58), a phenomenon more radically revelatory of time and space
than any other art. In lieu of conventional accounts of cinema
based upon textual analysis, mimesis and representation, Deleuze
then proposes that cinema is an intensive, creative system of signs
that discovers a non-hierarchical means of ‘stammering’ through a
‘method of BETWEEN, “between two images”, which does away
with all cinema of the One’ (C2: 180). To engage with cinema in this
way is to create concepts, to practice philosophy not as an applica-
tion of existent terms or as a reflection upon notions of authenticity
and truth but as a practice enabled and engendered by cinema itself.
This is a working cinematic philosophy that experiences the affects
and signs emitted by cinema. The question, as Deleuze concludes, is
no longer ‘ “What is cinema?” but indeed “What is philosophy?” ’
(C2: 280). For as the cinema becomes eternally new through experi-
mental means, the practices of philosophy and film ever converge and
interpenetrate; through images, signs and concepts, film and philoso-
phy encounter limits of thought that effectively open to affirmative
new means of life and production.
Yet again, is it possible to commit to discourse what cannot be
restricted? How can this investigation evade its inherent danger of
stabilising and diminishing an art’s intensities and singularities?
Deleuze repeats Nietzsche when he urges that language, cinema
and thought be pushed to their limits where thought might ‘take
flight’ and ‘free life from what imprisons it’. If ‘creating isn’t com-
municating but resisting’ (N: 143), then the translation of Marker
and Resnais’ films to prose risks, once more, repressing their resist-
ances to hegemonic structure through the very same. If the works
of Marker and Resnais attain pure visions through sensory signs
that defy concretion and reduction, this exploration seeks means to
translate their untranslatable modes as it questions what it means to
think their cinemas through the signs of difference and repetition that
Deleuze discerns.
But what possibilities exist when disintegration and violence
surface in the world we recognise, when destruction and death
disrupt the reality we extract and synthesise from duration’s flow,
when thought’s violation through horror disables automatic mecha-
nisms? As when, from ‘the second day, certain species of animals
crawled again from the depths of the earth, and from the ashes’

24
 Art’s Resistance

of a Hiroshima Resnais and Marguerite Duras affectively preserve

(HMA), life must persist in discovering new becomings through
violent encounters of thought and experience both affirmative and
destructive. The always new fragments the human, shattering her
subjective haven to expose time for itself in its pure state, a duration
that always already eludes human perception.
Forced into thinking, thought perceives the ‘unthought’, unknown
and untimely, duration and perception’s flow, the ‘outside’ beyond
the self, so that the world becomes and becomes cinematic through
an immanent perception of time and movement. Images, each a
system of temporal relations among elements, reveal thought itself as
a power born from the furthest outside and deepest inside so that the
process of imaging or perception returns the concept of becoming-
imperceptible. This power of becoming everybody or everything
makes of the world a becoming where ‘to reduce oneself to an
abstract line, a trait, in order to find one’s zone of indiscernibility’ is
to thus to be present ‘at the dawn of the world’ (ATP: 280).
Such is also to attain the photographic or cinematic threshold.
The significant distinction Deleuze and Guattari proceed to identify
between photography and cinema becomes vital in what follows to
a consideration of cinematic affect in relation to Roland Barthes’
punctum. The photograph’s halting of time, what Barthes consid-
ers to be ‘the very essence, the noeme’, the ‘That-has-been’ or
‘Intractable’ of photography (Barthes 1981: 76–7), disables a pho-
tograph from exposing the flow of duration and time, a potential
embodied by modern cinema’s time-images. To this Barthes refers
when he writes of the photograph as that which is ‘without future’,
hence ‘its pathos’ and ‘melancholy’. In photography, Barthes finds
‘no protensity, whereas the cinema is protensive, hence in no way
melancholic (what is it, then? – It is, then, simply “normal,” like life)’
(1981: 89–90).
As Deleuze suggests, the cinema indeed launches towards a future
as it liberates movement and directly reveals time. But as it also
delves beneath ashes, ‘geological sections’ and ‘archaeological layers’
to unearth regions and stratums of harrowing pasts (C2: 254), the
cinema’s images and character-spectators or spectres also ‘return
from the dead’ to live in full consciousness of the whole past and
the deaths buried among its layers. The chapters to follow will
argue that Marker and Resnais’ time-images enter within ages of the
past as their assemblages of voice, sound and visual image become
percepts of nonhuman vision, of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Paris and

25
 untimely affects

‘­any-space-whatever’, fractured, haunting, unknown places with

names at once familiar. ‘Deserted ground is the only thing that can
be seen’, Deleuze observes, ‘but this deserted ground is heavy with
what lies beneath . . . the voice speaks to us of corpses, of the whole
lineage of corpses that come to reside underground’ (Deleuze 1998b:
16–17).
Barthes’ assertion of cinema’s ‘normalcy’ and lack of the melan-
cholic will then be countered with possibilities of piercing singular
intensities or punctum that empower the motionless photograph but
that realise exceptional force in the affective experiences and becom-
ings of the cinematic screen-spectator-character. Barthes describes
‘a blind field’ which, he argues, the cinema creates by right: ‘the
cinema has a power which at first glance the Photograph does not
have: the screen (as Bazin has remarked) is not a frame but a hideout;
the man or woman who emerges from it continues living: a “blind
field” constantly doubles our partial vision’ (Barthes 1981: 55–7).
While tracing this duration of life through limits of life and death,
Barthes’ remarks in ‘The Photographic Message’ regarding the ‘trau-
matic photograph’ prefigure his later Camera Lucida. In the former,
Barthes writes:
trauma is just what suspends language and blocks signification . . . the
traumatic photograph . . . is the one about which there is nothing to
say: the shock photo is by structure non-signifying: no value, no knowl-
edge, at the limit no verbal categorisation can have any hold over the
process instituting its signification. (Barthes 1977: 19)

However, as this book will maintain, while punctum is indeed

that which defies signification and meaning, its virtual value or sense
seems a corollary of the pure affect Deleuze and Guattari describe.
As an intensive power that affects the viewer’s receptive body, which
in turn affects the photo or screen beyond the limits of the frame,
punctum, like the affects of which Deleuze and Guattari write that
‘transpierce the body like arrows’ (ATP: 356), rises freely from
the work itself. As ‘we’ are drawn into the work through a pure
impersonal awareness, the affective violent encounter, the punctum,
launches us towards immanent becoming.
This production of sensation does not extend to redundant main-
stream spectacles and re-presentations of ‘arbitrary violence’ (N: 60).4
As Deleuze and Guattari insist, we search in vain for sensation ‘if we
go no farther than reactions and the excitations that they prolong,
than actions and the perceptions that they reflect’ (WIP: 211–12). In

26
 Art’s Resistance

lieu of that which preserves as it strives for authenticity and replica-

tion, art and cinema might free the affects created within a work that
‘draw us into its compound’ and make us become with it (WIP: 175).
To discover true experience through art, to seek an imperceptible
becoming in the affective spaces between the work and its percep-
tion, is to create artistic events which renew the past. Certain historic
events then, as encountered through cinema, are not re-presentations
but ever-new events of becoming that surface once more through the
release of the event’s singular affects, percepts and emotions. In this
respect, Deleuze writes of a ‘pure element’ of emotion which precedes
all representation, ‘itself generating new ideas’ (B: 110–11).
To think, will or grasp the event is to pass through it, beyond the
finite realm of our beings towards the infinite; through its ‘finite’,
actual forms, art seeks the same. As Deleuze and Guattari write,
‘art wants to create the finite that restores the infinite’ (WIP: 197).
The notion of a finite traumatic event might, in this sense, relate to
Deleuze’s concept of event as a momentary effect of an encounter
of forces without beginning or end that never returns the same. For
when confronted by tragedy, horror and death, grounding human
perspective and a static interpretation of time’s flow become lost
as experience opens to ‘true experience’. Through such violent
encounters, life and an apprehension of its eternal return may be met
without illusion. Perhaps we may then become ‘worthy of events’ as
we act on and against our present. Of this endless process that may
discover a freer future through negotiations of past-present sufferings
and ordeals, Deleuze remarks:
The eternal return is indeed the category of the ordeal, and we must
understand, as such, of events, of everything that happens. Misfortune,
sickness, madness, even the approach of death have two aspects: in one
sense, they separate me from my power, in another sense, they endow
me with a strange power, as though I possessed a dangerous means of
exploration, which is also a terrifying realm to explore. The function
of the eternal return, in every case, is to separate the superior from
the moderate means . . . The words ‘separate’ or ‘extract’ are not even
adequate, since the eternal return creates the superior forms. It is in this
sense that the eternal return is the instrument of the expression of the will
to power: it raises each thing to its superior form, that is, its nth power.
(DI: 125)
The implications of Marker and Resnais’ immanent ethics
for creative resistance and life, for thinking ‘what moves us’ in
terms of the ‘three virtues’ of ‘imperceptibility, indiscernibility,

27
 untimely affects

and ­ impersonality’, re-conceptualise resistance as an affirmative

process (ATP: 280). If life persists through becomings, its survival
lies through difference and creation inasmuch as modern cinema’s
time-images discover new life beneath the ruins of the Second World
War so that the ‘creation of a new people’ is no less than the task of
modern cinematic resistance. The following pages will explore the
creative folds and new assemblages of Marker and Resnais’ cinemas,
as well as the seeming paradox of affectivity without subjectivity in
relation to a micropolitics at the level of the molecular.
Like memory itself, the films’ dimensions expand or shrink as does
the plane of composition from which they give rise; each viewing
produces differences; each assemblage and composition of affects,
colours, movements, sounds, textures, tones and lights circulates and
exchanges newly. Again, Bergson’s principle of reality as a coexist-
ence of different ‘ “durations,” superior or inferior to “ours,” all of
them in communication’, informs becoming that ‘lacks a subject
distinct from itself’ (ATP: 238). The non-personal feeling released
through Marker and Resnais’ films is a ceaselessly changing assem-
blage of affects and durations. But what is it then to ‘be moved’? If
Deleuze’s is a philosophy of joy, its most profound expression may
be discovered in passages wherein some being is moved, saddened or
shamed. Can feeling and emotion thus be reconciled with a philos­
ophy of non-subjectivity?
As their thoughts circulate about children, friendship and the pure
sensations of affects both active and passive, Deleuze and Guattari
consider haecceities, or relations of speeds and slownesses, in lieu
of subjective emotion. Yet, as they often repeat, much caution is
needed to prevent the plane of consistency, composition or creation
from becoming a pure plane of death. As this introductory chapter
suggests, in its defiance of dogmatic, habitual ways of thought, trau-
matic experience assails the senses so that sensations and affects of
shock and violence pass between cinema’s time-images. However,
whereas the shock necessarily encounters new experience, its con-
temporary psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic treatments deny
progressive courses.
In response to an immanent ethics such as Deleuze’s, psychoanaly-
sis and other forms of self-therapy might wonder what alternatives
remain for survival and life if they are to reject strategies of healing
that commence with a subject’s memories and feelings. But could
a state of circular victimisation, as engendered through ideologies
of God(s) and self that long for resurrection and salvation, infect

28
 Art’s Resistance

as would a contagion with inescapable suffering and loss? If life

through sorrowful human experience begets moral and religious
rationalisations, is life yet alive? What can an immanent ethics do
through cinema, what can a cinema of resistance impart to a grieving
world, whose grief is all too real and inevitable? By way of response,
the chapters to come turn towards Marker and Resnais’ films that
ever explore a body’s affective power and perceptions, responses and
interactions.
As it extracts from life that which exceeds semantic or semiotic
meaning, art endures through affects and percepts, through that
something that can only be specified as sensation, speeds, rhythms,
‘blocs’ of sensations, all that does visceral violence to thought and
convention. That ‘most mysterious’ empowering relation between
resistance and art to which Deleuze refers (1998b: 19) thereby
haunts the succeeding pages which seek to discover the emergence of
a people yet to come in the encounter between human struggle and
the work of art.

Notes
1. Deleuze refers to Bergson’s famous cone whereby the actual present and
its past, the virtual image that always doubles the actual, exist at the
cone’s point. Virtual sections or circuits comprise the cone as it widens,
‘each of which contains all our past as this is preserved in itself (pure
recollection)’ (C2: 294, n. 22). For further reading see, among others,
Rodowick 1997.
2. With respect to any ‘representation of reality’ and André Bazin’s con-
tributions to film theory, Deleuze’s thought moves beyond binaries of
real/false, world/copy or source/representation to consider how idealised
illusions of accuracy and resemblance, reality and truth emerge. Yet,
as Dudley Andrew discerns, both Bazin and Deleuze ‘track the crucial
shift’ from classic to modern cinema by their regard for the cinema as
an evolutionary becoming whose ‘power lies in the extremes of life and
death’ (see Andrew 1997: 88, 89, 84).
3. Excerpt from ‘To the Oracle at Delphi’, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(2001: 79):
the voice of the fourth person singular
the voice of the inscrutable future
the voice of the people mixed
with a wild soft laughter –
And give us new dreams to dream,
Give us new myths to live by!

29
 untimely affects

4. Deleuze speaks freely with regard to ‘most cinematic production, with

its arbitrary violence and feeble eroticism’ that ‘reflects’, in his view,
‘mental deficiency rather than any invention of new cerebral circuits’
(N: 60).

30
 2

Figures of Life

The artist is a seer, a becomer. (WIP: 171)

War nods off to sleep, but keeps one eye always open. (NB)
Consciousness is only a dream with one’s eyes open. (SPP: 20)
First sight of the camp: it is another planet. (NB)

‘NACHT, “nuit”, disaient-ils, c’est l’oubli. NEBEL, “brouillard”,

c’est la fumée dans laquelle vous vous volatiserez tous – ihr werdet
krepieren, “vous crèverez tous!” ’ (Raskin 1987: 16). Against ‘night’
and ‘fog’, against the threat of forgetting humanity’s capacity for
mass extermination and dehumanisation, Resnais’ 1955 Nuit et
Brouillard forges. In search of life through the imperceptible, impos-
sible sight of ‘another planet’ bent on shame and annihilation, Nuit
et Brouillard confronts actual and virtual remains of the Holocaust
as the film’s audio-visual assemblages of relentless, painstaking
movements, plaintive score and dispassionate voiceover profoundly
violate our sight and means for sensory release from the affective vio-
lence, the ‘endless, uninterrupted fear . . .’ (NB). If, as Deleuze con-
tends, ‘Resnais succeeds in showing, by means of things and victims,
not only the functioning of the camp but also the mental functions,
which are cold, diabolical, almost impossible to understand which
preside over its organization’ (C2: 121), Nuit et Brouillard also
undercuts these efficient murderous operations through piercing
revelations of horrors that at once resist and disavow their very expo-
sure: ‘no description, no image can reveal their true dimension’ (NB).
Even ‘a peaceful landscape’, ‘a meadow in harvest’, ‘a road where
cars and peasants and couples pass’, ‘even a resort village with a
steeple and country fair’ can all ‘lead to a concentration camp’, the
film’s voiceover persists. As it reveals the horrifically surreal through
these actual forms and beings of a rational world, Nuit et Brouillard
effectively exposes and confronts forces of death and self-­immolation.
This ‘ethics of self-creation’ and resistance through art strives to
initiate life-affirming movement even and especially in the face of

31
 untimely affects

1 ‘A peaceful landscape’, Nuit et Brouillard (Resnais 1955)

death for, as in ‘all creative activities’, writes Ronald Bogue, ‘the

goal is to instigate movement, to make something happen’ (Bogue
2004: 6).
As this chapter will argue, Nuit et Brouillard creates and even
profoundly affirms life and movement, it makes something happen,
through series of audio-visual images that testify not only to the
Event of the Holocaust and its crumbling camp remains in pastoral
countrysides but also to the virtual remains, the lingering affects and
events of fear, sadness and hope that pervade each image, archive,
stone and artefact.1 ‘Whether it be a philosophy, an artwork, or a
self’, Bogue concludes, ‘that which is shaped engages a passage from
chaos to chaosmos,2 a mutative form-in-formation that inaugurates
something new’ (Bogue 2004: 6; emphasis mine).
If the actual, present, personal death of a self may result from its
destructive encounters with other bodies that decompose its powers
and capacities for entering into more empowering, affirming rela-
tions, as Deleuze contends following Spinoza, it is perhaps this aspect
of actual-virtual existence, this fragility and intimate susceptibility to
the ‘illnesses of the lived’ (WIP: 173), that the ‘Lazarean’ artist goes

32
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
común en las serpientes; algunas especies inofensivas mimetizan a
otras muy temibles, como el Elaps de la América tropical. Ocurre lo
mismo con algunos Callophis. Entre los pájaros se mencionan
algunos casos de mimetismo imperfecto y solamente dos, muy
completos, de mimetismo verdadero.
Wallace, que ha estudiado el mimetismo de las especies entre sí, ha
determinado las cinco condiciones constantes del mimetismo
selectivo.
1.º. La especie mimetizante se presenta en la misma región y ocupa
los mismos sitios que la especie mimetizada.
2.º. La especie mimetizante es siempre más pobre en medios de
defensa.
3.º. La especie mimetizante cuenta menos individuos.
4.º. Difiere del conjunto de sus aliados.
5.º. La simulación, por detallada que sea, es exterior y visible
solamente, no extendiéndose jamás a los caracteres internos, ni a
aquéllos que no modifican la apariencia exterior.
Posee mayor interés psicológico el mimetismo movible. Al hablar de
la homocromía hicimos ya notar que la había movible, recordando el
clásico ejemplo del camaleón; señalamos también que en ciertos
fenómenos de simulación de plantas u objetos por animales,
intervenía la voluntad de éstos. Aquí mencionaremos algunos
fenómenos activos de mimetismo voluntario entre las especies
animales; su síntesis, como significación en la lucha por la vida, nos
la da el lobo disfrazado con piel de cordero o el grajo con plumas de
pavo real, de las fábulas bien conocidas. Ello comprueba, una vez
más, el principio general de que el arte, en sus manifestaciones más
geniales y clásicas, puede anticiparse a señalar ciertos hechos que
en épocas posteriores estudia la ciencia a la luz de sus métodos
menos inexactos.
El Proctotretus multimaculatus, cuando está atemorizado por la
presencia del enemigo, achata su cuerpo y cierra los ojos: de esa
manera se confunde con la tierra que le rodea y difícilmente es visto.
La larva joven del Pterogon Oeneterae está perfectamente adaptada,
por su forma y color, con las hojas del Epilobium, entre las cuales
vive; cuando pasa al estado adulto, su color y forma cambian, pues
pasa entonces a vivir entre ramitas y hojas secas. La Arachnura
Scorpionoides, parecida al escorpión, cuando es atacada, mueve su
abdomen, estirado como una cola, de igual manera que los
escorpiónidos, engañando fácilmente a sus enemigos. La Coronella
Austríaca, semejante a la víbora, al ser agredida achata y dilata la
cabeza análogamente a las víboras, manteniendo alejados a sus
rivales. Los casos de simulación activa entre especie y especie
podrían multiplicarse; los expuestos son suficientes para que
afirmemos su existencia.

VI.—SIMULACIÓN EN FUNCIÓN INDIVIDUAL

Las simulaciones activas y voluntarias, además de referirse a otras
especies animales, pueden ser relativas a estados especiales del
animal mismo. Son las llamadas "ficciones"; en realidad no son más
que simulaciones, usadas, como siempre, en calidad de medios de
lucha por la vida.
Llegada es la oportunidad de hacer notar que cuanto mayor es el
desenvolvimiento mental de una especie, mayor es su posibilidad de
fingir y engañar a sus enemigos. La conciencia del acto que realiza
aumenta progresivamente, así como la noción de su utilidad; en
cierto grado de la escala biológica encontramos animales que
simulan tan hábilmente como el hombre mismo.
Numerosos son los insectos que en presencia de sus enemigos
simulan estar muertos o se inmovilizan para aprovechar sus
semejanzas con cosas inanimadas: algunas Cucullia se dejan caer al
ser tocadas y su aspecto inmóvil es idéntico al de un fragmentillo de
madera. Otros animales simulan estar dormidos mientras acechan
sus presas; el ratón suele fingirse muerto para escapar del gato; el
zorro es memorable y ha inspirado el libro clásico de Goethe.
Muchos animales cubren su cuerpo con hojas, flores, lodo, etc.,
siendo perfectamente disimulados bajo el disfraz; para evitar los
ataques de sus adversarios, caminan con el objeto a cuestas. (Un
fenómeno de este grupo nos sugirió, por asociaciones de ideas, la
filogenia de los fenómenos de simulación). Algunos se cubren con
otro animal, no comestible para sus enemigos: es característico el
caso de la Dromia, que coloca sobre su dorso una esponja,
manteniéndola fijada por medio de dos patas posteriores,
convenientemente transformadas para su objeto. Este caso es
análogo al de algunos indios de las pampas americanas, que suelen
ocultarse bajo el vientre de los caballos para no ser vistos por los
enemigos, llevando sus ataques por sorpresa; y es sabido que
usando de un ardid semejante logró Ulises escapar con sus
compañeros de la caverna de Polifemo, después de haber reventado
el ojo del cíclope.

VII.—UTILIDAD DE ESTOS FENÓMENOS EN LA

LUCHA POR LA VIDA
Los fines a que responde la simulación en los animales son un
sencillo corolario de los fenómenos que acabamos de revistar. Lo
mismo da que se trate de fenómenos involuntarios, reflejos o
conscientes; nada importa que se imite el color del medio, la forma
de un objeto, los caracteres visibles de otra especie, o una
manifestación de la conducta. En todos los grados y en todos los
casos, sea o no inteligente, llámese homocromía, mimetismo o
simulación intencional, converge siempre a este único fin utilitario:
mejorar la situación del simulador en la lucha por la vida,
adaptándolo favorablemente a las condiciones especiales en que ella
se presenta.
Hemos visto que en algunos casos la simulación es ofensiva:
adaptación del color del león o del oso polar al de su ambiente, de la
araña que acecha al insecto simulando el aspecto de una orquídea,
del animal que simula estar dormido para inspirar confianza a su
presa.
En otros casos es defensiva: las mariposas comestibles que
mimetizan a las no comestibles, los huevos parecidos al color del
suelo en que son depositados, el ratón que se finge muerto para
librarse del gato.
Tan es esa su finalidad esencial, y ninguna otra, que Giard ha
considerado que estos fenómenos deben reunirse simplemente en
dos grupos, sin atender a nada más que su carácter ofensivo o
defensivo. Y dice, en definitiva: "así como un hombre se disfraza
para evitar un peligro o para cometer un crimen, las especies
simuladoras o disimuladoras tienen por objeto no ser agredidas o
agredir". No hay, pues, exageración ninguna en afirmar que la
simulación en el mundo biológico se nos presenta como un medio de
mejor adaptación a las condiciones de la lucha por la vida.

VIII.—TEORÍAS PROPUESTAS PARA EXPLICARLOS

Para terminar, digamos breves palabras sobre las diversas teorías
expuestas para la explicación de los fenómenos de mimetismo: tres
merecen recordarse principalmente. La de Darwin y Wallace,
puramente selectiva; la de Wagner y De Lanessan, emigratoria; la de
Wood, Poulton y otros, fotográfica.
Para los primeros, las homogeneidades de color y de forma son
simple resultado de la selección de los mejor adaptados: los
individuos que por cualquiera circunstancia encontráronse revestidos
de un aspecto semejante a su medio, han escapado a sus enemigos
y al reproducirse transmitieron ese carácter a sus descendientes,
mientras los otros desaparecieron, vencidos en la lucha. En el polo,
el oso, gracias a su blancura, tiene probabilidades de llegar hasta su
presa; lo mismo ocurre al león que pasea dominador sobre la arena
del desierto. La oruga no es descubierta por los pájaros gracias a su
color análogo al de las hojas de vid. La semejanza con objetos u
otros animales respondería al mismo fin protectivo y sería también
un simple resultado de la selección natural. Esta teoría no explica
todos los fenómenos de simulación observados en los animales, sino
puramente los de índole selectiva; y para estos mismos no resulta
muy satisfactorio atribuir al azar las variaciones favorables que han
sido conservadas por la selección.
Moritz Wagner, a cuyas ideas se inclina De Lanessan, cree que los
animales provistos de una coloración homocroma con su medio, han
buscado voluntariamente los sitios u objetos donde dominan su
propio color o sus propias formas, con el fin de escapar más
fácilmente a la vista de sus enemigos o de sus presas. Esta teoría
explica muchos fenómenos no encuadrables en la anterior, pero no
basta por sí sola para explicarlos todos.
Para otros casos, la explicación más razonable consistiría en admitir
una influencia refleja o fotoquímica de la coloración del medio sobre
la del animal, cuyo mecanismo no se conoce; las experiencias de
Wood, de Poulton y otros, parecen muy probantes en favor de esta
teoría parcial, que algunos autores llaman "fotográfica". Es de
advertir que, de todas, ésta es la que encuadra mejor en la
concepción lamarckiana.
Las tres teorías son parcialmente exactas; sólo resultan falsas
cuando se pretende aplicarlas con exclusión de las otras. El error de
cada una está en la pretensión de excluir a las demás. Esta serie de
fenómenos es producto de un determinismo complejo; creemos que
además de las causas apuntadas deben existir otras secundarias, no
estudiadas todavía por los naturalistas. En sus formas propiamente
psicológicas—es decir, voluntarias y conscientes—los fenómenos de
simulación observados en los animales no son ya un resultado de
esas causas que actúan sobre la especie, sino manifestaciones de la
conducta individual adaptada a cada circunstancia: son la expresión,
transitoria o permanente, de la conciencia que tiene el animal de la
utilidad de simular (VI).
 IX.—CONCLUSIÓN
En el mundo biológico la simulación y la disimulación están
representadas por los fenómenos de homocromía y de mimetismo.
Son generalmente ajenos a la voluntad del animal mimetizante, y
resultan de la selección natural o de la acción del medio; en ciertos
casos, sin embargo, son activos y voluntarios. A medida que
progresa el desenvolvimiento mental de las especies, aumenta la
posibilidad de las simulaciones individuales y es mayor la conciencia
que de ellas tiene el simulador. Sean activos o pasivos, conscientes o
inconscientes, voluntarios o accidentales, los fenómenos de
simulación son útiles al animal en que se observan y le sirven para la
mejor adaptación a las condiciones de lucha por la vida.
 NOTAS:
[3] En su recientísimo "Tratado de Biología", (Junio, 1903, París),
dice Le Dantec, concordando con nuestras ideas:
"Parmi les phénomènes de variation observés sur les diverses
espèces, quelques-uns sont particulièrement favorables á la
discussion des théories darwiniennes et lamarckiennes; ce sont
les faits de mimétisme, c'est-á-dire de ressemblance entre les
animaux et d'autres objets.
"Donc, dans tous ces cas si différents, le caractère d'utilité est
manifeste, et par conséquent l'explication darwinienne du
mimétisme est admissible. Il n'y a pas de doute que les individus,
doués d'un mimétisme très parfait, sont avantagés par rapport
aux autres, et que par conséquent la sélection naturelle doit
conserver les ressemblances si elles sont acquises une première
fois par hasard". En esos párrafos sintetiza Le Dantec las
interesantes observaciones que formulara, sobre esta cuestión, en
su libro anterior, "Lamarckiens et Darwiniens", París, 1899. (Nota
de la 3.ª edición).
 Cap. III.—La simulación en las
sociedades
I. La lucha por la vida y la simulación entre los hombres.—
II. Formas colectivas de lucha y de simulación (humanas,
étnicas, nacionales, de clase, de sexo, de grupos,
profesionales, etc.).—III. Formas individuales de lucha y
de simulación (niños, burócratas, escritores, periodistas,
propagandistas, mujeres, sablistas, comerciantes,
delincuentes, parásitos sociales, etc.).—IV. Utilidad de la
simulación en la lucha por la vida.—V. Conclusiones.

I.—LA LUCHA POR LA VIDA Y LA SIMULACIÓN

ENTRE LOS HOMBRES
Cuando se intenta abarcar, en una mirada de conjunto, las diversas
actividades desarrolladas por el hombre que vive en sociedad, salta
a la vista que la lucha por la vida rige en el mundo social, lo mismo
que en el propiamente biológico, aunque sufre modificaciones
importantes que estudiaremos al examinar la evolución de la
simulación. Habiendo "lucha por la vida", según lo enunciamos en el
capítulo precedente, encontraremos fenómenos de simulación
adaptados a sus distintas modalidades.
La Humanidad, como especie biológica, lucha por la vida contra el
reino vegetal y contra las demás especies animales. Eso es evidente.
Además, como animal susceptible de asociarse en agregados o
colonias, el hombre está sometido a nuevas formas de lucha: sea
como miembro de un agregado social, sea como individuo.
Tres formas de lucha por la vida son posibles entre los individuos de
la especie humana: 1.º. Entre agregados sociales; 2.º. Entre
agregados e individuos; 3.º. Entre individuos aislados. Dos naciones
que se arruinan recíprocamente en una guerra de supremacía
económica, encuéntranse en el primer caso. Un delincuente que
cometa acciones antisociales, representa el segundo. Dos salvajes
que se disputan una raíz alimenticia, se encuentran en el tercero.
Recorriendo la escala biológica, a medida que se asciende,
muéstrase más compleja la vida de los organismos, tocando su
máximum en la especie humana. Como consecuencia de ello, cuanto
más complejas son las manifestaciones de la vida, tanto más arduas
son las condiciones en que la lucha por la vida se plantea. Y, como
corolario, obsérvase que esas formas complejas de lucha producen
un perfeccionamiento progresivo de los medios de lucha, superando
en el hombre a todas las demás especies vivas. En sentido figurado,
podríamos decir que, también en este caso, la función desarrolla el
órgano, es decir, que la necesidad estimula el desenvolvimiento de la
aptitud.
Encarando ampliamente la cuestión, puede afirmarse que la
civilización humana ha implicado un continuo aumento de la lucha
por la vida y de los medios de lucha, ora dirigidos contra la
naturaleza, ora esgrimidos entre los agregados sociales o entre los
individuos; pero en todos los casos tiende a la selección de las razas
y de los individuos más aptos en su medio. Para ello, o como su
resultado, la especie humana posee un elevado desarrollo mental
que le permite organizar conscientemente sus medios de lucha,
buscando una progresiva adaptación a las condiciones de la lucha
por la vida. En una palabra, para resumir: donde la vida es más
compleja la lucha es múltiple y los medios son más complicados.
Hemos visto ya que las manifestaciones de la lucha evolucionan de
formas violentas a formas fraudulentas; los medios se adaptan a la
lucha y sufren, también ellos, una progresiva evolución, tendiendo
hacia el predominio de los fundados en la fraudulencia. Entre éstos
encuéntrase la simulación, uno de los más frecuentemente
observados.
Es fácil encontrarla en todas las manifestaciones de la actividad
humana, reemplazando a la violencia como medio ofensivo y
defensivo. Más aún: el espíritu humano tiende a adaptar una manera
especial de simulación a cada una de las modalidades que reviste la
lucha por la vida en el ambiente, estableciéndose entre ellas cierto
paralelismo. De ella, en sus innumerables facetas, trataremos en el
presente capítulo, demostrando que a las diversas formas colectivas
e individuales de lucha por la vida, corresponden formas colectivas e
individuales de simulación.
Las formas de lucha por la vida entre los agregados sociales, así
como entre los grupos colectivos que viven dentro de cada
agregado, varían al infinito; sus relaciones recíprocas son
constantemente diversas, debido a la persistente heterogeneidad de
intereses. Una primera causa de antagonismo nace de las
desigualdades étnicas; hay luchas entre las razas, estudiadas por
Gumplowicz, Ammond, Lapouge, Winiarsky; en la evolución histórica
se atenúan sus conflictos, tendiendo a unificarse bajo la hegemonía
de las mejor adaptadas para la lucha por la vida, como demostraron
Colaianni, Finot, Nordau y otros. Dentro de una misma raza, la
diversidad de condiciones económicas, debida a la influencia del
ambiente natural, determina la formación de diversos agregados
políticos; se constituyen estados distintos, apareciendo entre ellos
antagonismos e intereses que son causa de las luchas entre las
naciones; basta recordar los estudios de Novicow. La diversa función
social de cada sexo y las necesidades de la conservación de la
especie, determinan la lucha entre los sexos, analizada por Viazzi,
procurando cada uno ejercer mayor autoridad sobre el otro y
conquistando el derecho al amor al precio del menor esfuerzo
posible. Dentro de cada agregado social, la división del trabajo
determina la aparición de clases sociales que pueden tener intereses
antagónicos o divergentes: aparecen así las luchas de clases,
estudiadas por los marxistas. Desde otro punto de vista más
estrecho, la solidaridad de intereses entre los que ejercitan una
función particular engendra una lucha entre ellos y el resto de la
sociedad, en formas que oscilan desde el espíritu de cuerpo
profesional hasta la solidaridad económica de capitalistas o
proletarios, y desde el politiquismo profesional hasta la explotación
de las supersticiones. Podrían señalarse cien formas de lucha por la
vida especiales de colectividades: siempre que existe una solidaridad
de intereses, permanente o transitoria, hay lucha colectiva contra el
resto de la especie o contra algunas de sus partes. El principio
darwiniano se repite, bajo mil formas, en el mundo social.
De conformidad con nuestra teoría general, encontraremos que a
cada una de esas formas de lucha, la actividad humana ha adaptado
fenómenos especiales de simulación.
Al mismo tiempo, cada individuo, independientemente de la raza,
clase o grupo a que pertenece, está obligado a luchar por la vida
adaptándose lo mejor que pueda al medio social. Muy pocos
hombres de personalidad firme resisten a la presión colectiva y
pueden hacerlo conservando algunos de sus rasgos característicos;
los más están obligados a imitar las ideas, los sentimientos, las
costumbres colectivas, y su éxito en la vida consiste en alcanzar la
más perfecta adaptación al medio. Para ello no es necesario ser
como los demás; basta con parecer. Eso es lo útil; para ello se
simula.
Debería definirse la "educación" como el arte de formar en los
hombres una personalidad; vemos, en cambio, que el uso corriente
da a esa palabra el sentido contrario, diciendo que son mejor
"educados" los individuos que por su refinada aptitud para fingir
consiguen disimular completamente su personalidad propia, no
haciéndola gravitar nunca sobre los demás. Esta pretendida
educación tiende a establecer una verdadera "homocromía social"
entre el individuo y las ideas de la sociedad, y un riguroso
"mimetismo personal" con las costumbres corrientes en ella. En el
traje, en la mímica, en las opiniones, en las maneras, se va hacia la
uniformidad; para ello cada hombre está obligado a disimular todo lo
que le es individual y a simular todo lo que es común a la sociedad y
no posee él mismo. No importa que esa costumbre de parecer
destruya en el hombre toda capacidad para ser; la sociedad no
vacila en sacrificar los individuos al interés de la especie, lo mismo
que las demás colonias animales. Todo lo que exige del niño que
entra a la vida es que se esfuerce por imitar lo que hacen los demás;
y el niño, cada vez que no puede hacerlo, se decide a simularlo. Así,
simulando, se aventaja en la lucha por la vida, y para conservar las
ventajas adquiridas sigue simulando, después, hasta la muerte.

II.—FORMAS COLECTIVAS DE LUCHA Y DE

SIMULACIÓN
Hay condiciones de lucha por la vida comunes a todos los hombres
que viven en sociedad; a ellas se han adaptado medios de lucha y
formas de simulación igualmente generales, comprendidas en el
arsenal de las hipocresías y mentiras corrientes en todo agregado
social. Muchas de ellas, que conocían tan bien Montaigne y La
Bruyère, han sido recientemente señaladas por Stirner, Lombroso,
Tarde y otros, estudiándolas Nordau en sus "Mentiras
Convencionales"; éstas, en muchos casos, son verdaderas
simulaciones convencionales, consentidas y toleradas por la
frecuencia con que se producen. Mediante ellas los hombres
civilizados consiguen vivir bajo un disfraz permanente, ocultando las
íntimas modulaciones de su sentimiento o las originales
concepciones de su inteligencia.
El fraude tiene la sanción del uso en las costumbres sociales, y tanto
más cuanto mayor es la decadencia moral de una sociedad. La
mentira, el engaño, la hipocresía, la ficción, se han desarrollado
naturalmente por la imposibilidad de armonizar todos los intereses
individuales con el interés colectivo. El fraude es empleado para
captar la simpatía ajena o para abusar de la ajena confianza;
aumentando la intensidad de la lucha por la vida, se acrecienta entre
los hombres la necesidad de engañarse recíprocamente, en la justa
medida en que cada uno advierte su propia debilidad para
desenvolverse en medio de la hostilidad general. Cada sociedad
establece una tabla convencional de valores morales que llama
"virtudes" y "vicios", sin otro objeto que fijar límites a la lucha entre
los hombres; esas tablas suelen convertirse en verdaderas ficciones,
pues casi todos los hombres tratan de violarlas, simulando las
virtudes y disimulando los vicios. El fraude llega a ser un
instrumento de provecho para cuantos lo usan, mientras la
sinceridad obra en desmedro y ruina de quienes la practican.
Razones tendría Homero para llamar al más grande y afortunado de
los simuladores el "divino" Ulises.
Conviene no confundir las creencias sociales, que pueden ser
erróneas aunque se crea en ellas de buena fe, con las mentiras
convencionales, que no son creídas sino simuladas con fines
utilitarios. Tal es el caso de los demagogos que declaman loas al
pueblo soberano con el propósito de dirigirlo, sustituyéndose de
hecho a la soberanía que le mienten; a diario lo hacen los políticos.
Encuéntranse en igual caso los políticos que no tienen creencias
religiosas, pero las simulan, considerando que ellas son necesarias
para que el pueblo se conserve manso y obediente. Y son perpetuos
simuladores todos los que exageran la urbanidad y los buenos
modales hasta la tolerancia del vicio, de la indignidad, de la tontería
ajenas, poniendo cara de pascuas a todo lo que en su interior
reputan repulsivo. Los hipócritas viven simulando; no hay un solo
gesto de Tartufo que lleve impreso el sello de la verdad.
Esas formas de simulación son tan universales como la misma lucha
por la vida. Pero esta última suele tomar especiales caracteres
colectivos por la existencia de grupos que luchan contra el resto de
la humanidad en defensa de intereses que les son particulares:
luchas de razas, de naciones, de clases, de sexos, de partidos, de
profesiones, etc. A cada forma de lucha encontramos adaptadas
formas especiales de simulación.
Para el sociólogo que observa la evolución de las razas a través de
los siglos, analizando la sobreposición sucesiva de civilizaciones
diferentes, estudiando las leyes del engrandecimiento y decadencia
de los pueblos,—colosal cinematógrafo en que desfilan la India y
Babilonia, Egipto y Cartago, Grecia y Roma, España y las Repúblicas
Italianas, Francia e Inglaterra, y tal vez, mañana, Estados Unidos y
el Japón, probables cunas de la grandeza futura en las civilizaciones
oriental y occidental,—para el sociólogo las luchas entre las razas
son un fenómeno que se atenúa progresivamente en las zonas
templadas del planeta. Las razas de color desaparecen; sus
elementos más vitales procuran adaptarse a la vida civilizada de las
superiores, o siguen vegetando en las zonas tropicales inaccesibles a
la civilización de las razas blancas. De estas últimas sobreviven los
grupos más selectos, entrecruzándose de manera lenta pero
inevitable; no hay uno solo, entre los pueblos civilizados, que pueda
ostentar títulos de pureza étnica.
Por eso muchas cuestiones de raza, cuando no son sinceramente
falsas, son fingidas; involucran una simulación de sentimientos. El
sentido en que se puede hablar de razas, refiriéndose a naciones
civilizadas, es el sociológico, fundado en la homogeneidad de
intereses y de sentimientos que surge de la adaptación común a un
medio determinado.
Podría considerarse como simulaciones—conscientes o inconscientes
—muchas propagandas que tienden a presentar como luchas de
razas entre los pueblos civilizados a ciertos conflictos entre naciones
que luchan por notorios intereses económicos. En los últimos años
se ha visto, con frecuencia, políticos que declamaron sobre la
pretendida pureza de las razas, para apuntalar tambaleantes
organismos políticos. Típico es el caso de España durante la guerra
con los Estados Unidos; los partidarios de España mentaron la
solidaridad entre los pueblos de raza latina, amenazados todos por la
preponderancia de la raza sajona, no ignorando que la pureza étnica
de los llamados pueblos latinos es una fantasía, pues en cada uno
de ellos se han operado innumerables cruzas e injertos extraños:
semejante solidaridad de raza fué una simple simulación para captar
simpatías. El antisemitismo es otro fenómeno curioso de simulación
en la lucha de razas; como el tiempo demostró, el pretendido
antisemitismo francés fué una máscara de la reacción clérico-militar,
que en Francia se disfrazaba con la indumentaria de una guerra al
judaísmo para arrastrar en ese engaño a las masas populares,
explotando el sentimiento de odio al rico. Bien se dijo, de esa
simulación adaptada a la lucha de razas, que era "el socialismo de
los imbéciles".
Junto a la lucha de razas encontramos la lucha entre las naciones.
Lo mismo que en el caso anterior, puede aquí advertirse una
evolución regresiva de la lucha entre los pueblos civilizados; las
ciencias, la producción, los intercambios comerciales, la facilidad de
las comunicaciones, tienden a establecer vínculos de solidaridad
entre las diversas naciones; la utilidad recíproca tiende puentes por
sobre las fronteras; la civilización acrece las relaciones
internacionales; a expensas de los feudos se han unificado las
naciones y por encima de las naciones se unificará la humanidad. En
el grado presente de la evolución social, la lucha para constituir
unidades nacionales determina numerosas formas de simulaciones
correlativas, subordinadas al principio de la adaptación utilitaria. No
hablaremos de un hecho común en las luchas entre las naciones: su
causa aparente suele ser diversa de la causa verdadera; este
fenómeno es inconsciente y débese a que esta última queda oculta
tras intrincada red de causas secundarias, más fácilmente
apreciables; las cruzadas o el descubrimiento de América,
aparentemente debidas al enfermizo sentimiento religioso de la Edad
Media y a la tenacidad exaltada de Colón, fueron determinadas por
la necesidad de grandes expansiones económicas inherentes a la
evolución de la economía feudal. En los pueblos pobres, y por tanto,
rapaces, depredadores, la necesidad de ejercer sus rapiñas sobre los
vecinos disimúlase tras un exagerado desarrollo del sentimiento de
nacionalidad; en ellos el "honor nacional" suele ocultar simples
empresas económicas, mientras que en los pueblos agredidos es una
sugestión útil para la defensa. Otra forma de simulación, nacida del
sentimiento patriótico, es la ejercida a menudo por las clases
dirigentes sobre la masa popular, haciéndole creer que el propio país
es el mejor del mundo, su historia la más gloriosa, sus sabios los
más profundos, sus poetas los más inspirados, etc.; la sugestión
entra aquí por partes iguales con la simulación, pues acaba por
enseñarse de buena fe una mentira que tiene un simple fin utilitario.
Otras veces, las naciones pretenden simular superioridad ante los
demás pueblos con que están en más inmediata relación,
proveyéndose de ejércitos y armadas muy superiores a su
potencialidad económica real y encaminándose por la vía del
militarismo hacia la bancarrota. Hay simulación en ostentar un poder
desproporcionado a la riqueza nacional, gastando lo que no se tiene
para aparentar una superioridad ficticia: porque la grandeza de un
pueblo no se mide solamente por la capacidad militar, y menos
cuando ella es desproporcionada a las otras fuerzas morales y
sociales.
En la historia contemporánea es frecuente la conquista de un pueblo
débil por otro, con fines exclusivos de engrandecimiento económico;
estas conquistas, que a menudo degeneran en formas colectivas de
delincuencia brutal, suelen disimularse como empresas civilizadoras
en beneficio de las víctimas. Los latino-americanos, explotados por
España en otro tiempo, y los boers, depredados hoy de sus minas de
oro por Inglaterra, podrían decir al mundo entero que la pretendida
misión civilizadora fué una simple disimulación de la avaricia
nacional. El "nacionalismo", esa forma mórbida colectiva del
patriotismo, es en muchos casos una simulación de politiqueros
hábiles y ambiciosos, que saben encontrar los resortes de la
popularidad en la excitación de las más atrasadas pasiones de las
turbas. Doctores no menos audaces saben que, en política
internacional, la astucia, una de cuyas formas es la simulación, suele
ser la clave de éxitos lisonjeros; por algo es tan admirado
Maquiavelo; Nordau, en sus "Paradojas psicológicas", demostró que
las virtudes esenciales de la diplomacia son el engaño y la mentira,
que suelen involucrar la simulación o la disimulación.
En las sociedades evolucionadas, la primitiva división del trabajo
llega a revestir tales formas y caracteres que el agregado social se
divide en clases, caracterizadas por intereses heterogéneos, cuando
no netamente antagonistas. La lucha entre las clases, que Marx y su
escuela miran como la causa íntima de las transformaciones sociales,
determina numerosos fenómenos de adaptación para la lucha, entre
los cuales es fácil encontrar diversas formas de simulación.
Comenzando por las leyes fundamentales de los Estados, la
simulación aparece dominando el vasto escenario de la lucha de
clases. Constituciones, Códigos, Ordenanzas, etc., todo el engranaje
jurídico de cada país, suele estar destinado a apuntalar y defender el
privilegio de las clases gobernantes; sin embargo, simula propender
al beneficio de todo el pueblo, cuya mayoría suele ser perjudicada
por esas mismas instituciones. Como casos especiales podrían
citarse las leyes contra los obreros que existen en muchos países,
disfrazadas de leyes bienhechoras y dictadas simulando el propósito
de favorecer a las mismas víctimas. Es también una simulación de
clase todo el sistema tributario indirecto, que hace recaer sobre las
masas menesterosas el peso de los servicios públicos aunque se
simula haberlo establecido en bien de quien sufre sus efectos.
Mil veces en la historia las clases privilegiadas han simulado
encontrarse en la pobreza para no ceder a las exigencias del pueblo
hambriento; no podrían contarse las veces que el pueblo ha
saqueado graneros disimulados por las autoridades. La institución
del trabajo a destajo, inventada por la astucia capitalista para
aprovecharse de la avaricia obrera, arruina a los obreros simulando
serles ventajosa. Esa medalla tiene, naturalmente, su reverso, pues
no hemos de creer que la simulación es un privilegio de los
poderosos. El obrero que finge trabajar apresurado, sin terminar
jamás la tarea confiada a su actividad, es un simulador vulgarísimo,
parásito de todos los talleres. Y en muchos casos, las Ligas de
Resistencia que los obreros organizan para la lucha de clases son
simples simulaciones colectivas, destinadas a atemorizar a los
patrones; conocimos una que mantuvo en jaque a los de un gremio
importante, hasta descubrirse que, en realidad, sólo la constituían
dos o tres sujetos, que actuaban como si representasen un poderoso
sindicato.
La lucha entre los sexos presenta fecundísima cosecha de
fenómenos de simulación. No hablamos aquí de la tendencia general
de la mujer a la simulación, como una de tantas manifestaciones del
fraude y de la astucia; nos ocupamos de las simulaciones
relacionadas con la lucha entre los sexos. De su tendencia al fraude,
sólo diremos que estando la mujer excluida por la naturaleza del uso
de algunos medios violentos de lucha, encuéntrase obligada a
perfeccionarse en los medios fraudulentos. El hombre dispone de la
fuerza; la mujer de la astucia.
No falta quien afirme que el amor femenino, en todas sus
manifestaciones, es una persistente simulación, fundándose en la
teoría de la pretendida insensibilidad amorosa de la mujer, muy
repetida, antes y después de Schopenhauer, por los galanes
inexpertos; es seguramente inaceptable, no siendo común el hecho
y debiéndose con frecuencia a ineptitud del hombre para despertar
la sensibilidad femenina. Esto no importa desconocer que la
sensibilidad amorosa es, en muchas mujeres, una condescendiente
simulación. Su moralidad también lo es, en gran parte, y tiende a
hacer deseables ciertas partes del cuerpo femenino, más
directamente relacionadas con la satisfacción amorosa; el mismo
pudor—como escribimos hace varios años, criticando un interesante
libro de Viazzi,—ha sido, primitivamente, una simulación selectiva
voluntaria que mediante la herencia psicológica se ha convertido en
un reflejo instintivo. La simulación femenina aparece convertida en
un verdadero arte para luchar contra el hombre, en la coquetería.
Consiste, propiamente, en fingir todo lo que interesa o apasiona al
hombre, estimulando sus deseos. Su eficacia depende de un uso
discreto; las grandes coquetas no encienden nunca pasiones
intensas, porque su juego es demasiado visible; solamente los
tontos suelen enamorarse de ellas y lo son generalmente los maridos
que al fin conquistan.
Igualmente difundida está otra simulación. No se trata ya de
actitudes, como en el gato que se agazapa acechando la presa, sino
de apariencias exteriores, como en el verdadero mimetismo. Existen
caracteres de superioridad femenina consagrados por los cánones
artísticos y que en su conjunto constituyen la belleza; las mujeres
privadas de esos caracteres, suplen su natural inferioridad
simulándolos. La estatura, el firme busto, la cadera torneada, el
frescor juvenil, la mejilla rosada, la dentadura armoniosa, el labio
vivo, la pupila brillante, son verdaderos índices de ingenuidad
femenina y de aptitud para la maternidad. Cuando la naturaleza ha
sido avara de esos atributos, o cuando la edad empieza a borrarlos,
todos ellos son simulados por las mujeres, con el vestido, el calzado,
las pelucas, los mil afeites y composiciones que disimulan la
imperfección y la vejez; en las grandes ciudades prosperan
establecimientos especiales para la simulación de la belleza
fisionómica, verdaderos purgatorios donde las mujeres feas compran
las indulgencias necesarias para ser amadas. No es menos frecuente
la simulación de los sentimientos; cientos de mujeres están
dispuestas a simular cariño intenso por cualquier desconocido que
les haga vislumbrar la esperanza de un matrimonio ventajoso. Esta
simulación, justo es decirlo, no es patrimonio exclusivo de la mujer;
se la encuentra con frecuencia en muchos hombres que, careciendo
de otras aptitudes en la lucha por la vida, explotan sus condiciones
físicas para la lucha sexual. La vida común entre cónyuges que se
engañan es una sucesión de astucias, que constituyen el estado
habitual de las relaciones domésticas; baste leer la "fisiología del
matrimonio" o "la mujer de treinta años", de Balzac. Lo mismo
ocurre en los matrimonios de conveniencia, donde los cónyuges
viven simulando sentimientos que no sienten. El hombre incurre en
muchas otras simulaciones; son innumerables y cualquiera podría
encontrar más de una en sus recuerdos. Un joven singularmente
favorecido en el amor, veíase con frecuencia obligado a simular
enfermedades diversas para eludir compromisos contraídos con sus
amigas; otro solicitó con ese objeto un certificado médico y simuló
haber contraído una enfermedad vergonzosa para privar de su
amistad a una Dulcinea insaciable. En su pertinaz obsesión de
conquista, el hombre y la mujer simulan sin cesar, a todo propósito,
en todo momento. La mirada, la palabra, la voz, el gesto, son los
instrumentos sutiles del dulce engaño recíproco; nadie los ignora y
todos los creen. Es la forma de engaño a que todos recurren y de
que nadie intenta defenderse. En que la víctima sea siempre Doña
Inés debe verse un buen error para hilvanar novelas; ella es más
artista, casi siempre, que Don Juan. Los engaños de amor no son
pecados.
En la lucha por la vida dentro de la sociedad tienen funciones
importantes los grupos profesionales; la solidaridad de intereses
comunes manifiéstase generalmente por el espíritu de cuerpo: una
de las formas del "espíritu gregario", señalado por Nietzsche y
recientemente criticado por Palante. Esa lucha de cada grupo
profesional contra el resto de la sociedad presenta caracteres bien
definidos; los medios fraudulentos y la simulación, tienen allí lugar
de preferencia. En cada profesión existen simulaciones específicas.
Recuérdese el precioso cuadro, trazado por Quevedo, de las cosas
que debe fingir un médico que aspire a la estimación pública y a la
riqueza; y, por lógica asociación de ideas, recordemos a tal eximio
profesor de clínica médica que terminaba sus lecciones dando
consejos sobre lo que conviene simular cuando la vida del enfermo
es independiente de la intervención del médico, debiendo la
sanación esperarse de la simple vis medicatrix naturae. Otra
simulación, general entre los médicos delicados, nace del espíritu de
cuerpo; mil veces, ante un enfermo cuyo mal agravóse por la
impericia del médico a quien confiara su salud, simúlase estar
plenamente conformes con el tratamiento seguido, reemplazándolo,
sin embargo, por otro, elogiando al mismo tiempo ante el enfermo al
colega ignorante. En todos los oficios la lucha profesional involucra
fenómenos de simulación. Los joyeros han inventado sucesivamente
el enchapado, el dorado, y otros progresivos refinamientos de
simulación, que en el impreciso lenguaje usual son llamados
imitaciones; las esferitas de cristal simulando perlas son ya
indistinguibles de la preciosa enfermedad de la concha. El
carpintero, para aumentar sus utilidades, reviste de una tenue capa
de maderas finas sus malos muebles de tabla ordinaria. El tejedor
mezcla pocas hebras de seda a sus toscos tejidos de algodón, para
simular que ellos son de la primera substancia. El abogado simula en
vastos escritos apasionarse por los intereses de sus clientes, sea
éste el ladrón o la víctima, mientras sólo preocúpale asegurarse más
lautos honorarios. El pupilo simula estudiar sus lecciones, cuando en
realidad lee libros de Boccacio o de Brantôme, que ha disfrazado
previamente con tapas de aritmética o de geografía. Los tenores y
las tiples simulan estar resfriados cuando se les invita a cantar, para
aumentar el éxito o atenuar el fracaso de su ejecución. En cada
actividad u oficio, como se ve, las condiciones especiales de lucha
por la vida han engendrado formas apropiadas de simulación,
confirmándose el paralelismo que venimos observando.
Si se encara la cuestión desde otro punto de vista, es fácil reconocer
que todos los miembros de cada profesión, y más especialmente los
funcionarios públicos que no gustan del mucho trabajar, viven en
tácito acuerdo simulando la excesiva importancia y fatiga de sus
tareas; algunos llegan, por autosugestión, a engañarse a sí mismos.
A esto no escapan algunos hombres de ciencia que miran el universo
a través del lente opaco de su especialidad; quizás sea ésta una
forma de disimular su ignorancia crasa en materias ajenas a sus
respectivas cartillas. En todas esas simulaciones debemos ver
medios útiles de lucha por la vida; simulando una gran importancia
de la profesión o especialidad que se practica, gánase en mérito
individual.
Simuladores por excelencia son todos los políticos de profesión. Es
fácil verlos, en todo momento, fingiendo preocuparse del bien de su
patria y de sus conciudadanos, mientras en realidad su única
preocupación es obtener ventajas personales en la lucha por la vida.
Cualquier mandatario simula sacrificarse por su país al aceptar el
nombramiento, pero guárdase de confesar que espera sacar de su
sacrificio honra y provecho. En una escala subalterna encontramos al
falso elector, que simula ser la encarnación de un difunto o de un
ausente; al orador de club que finge entusiasmarse para adular
pasiones que no siente; al esclavo de la popularidad, forzado a
seguir las variaciones sentimentales de la multitud cuyo aplauso
busca. Es en la política, por fin, donde florece el hombre-camaleón,
el arquetipo de los simuladores, el cortesano adulador que sirve con
igual celo a todos los que pueden colmarle de favores, lacayo de
todos los amos, unidad de todas las mayorías, instrumento de todos
los despotismos.
Sólo una casta disputa a los políticos el cetro de la simulación: los
sacerdotes de todos los cultos, antiguos y modernos. Es necesario
leer la "historia de los oráculos", de Fontenelle, pues nunca ha visto
la humanidad farsantes más empedernidos que los explotadores del
sentimiento religioso; no exageraba Eusebio, el biógrafo de
Constantino, diciendo que al derribar el templo de Esculapio no
había expulsado de él a un dios ni a un demonio, sino al pícaro
simulador que por tanto tiempo había vivido de la credulidad de los
ignorantes. Cuéntase que los augures no podían encontrarse sin
soltar la risa; sabemos que los obispos medioevales invocaban el
nombre de la divinidad para atesorar bienes temporales; en tiempos
modernos los inquisidores católicos quemaban herejes para
heredarlos, en nombre de Cristo; en nuestra América colonial la
pretendida evangelización fué una formidable industria cuyos
beneficios el brazo espiritual disputó a cuchillo con el brazo
temporal. No diremos por esto que no hay sacerdotes creyentes, ya
que los de cada religión son educados para creer en los dogmas que
le son propios y es verosímil que se entreguen de buena fe al
servicio de su culto. Pero es indudable que muchos de ellos, por el
amor al estudio y por su amplitud de miras intelectuales, han
conseguido comprender la falacia de los dogmas inherentes a su
doctrina, viéndose obligados a luchar por la vida simulando creer lo
que ya no creen. Innumerables simulaciones de castidad, de
continencia, de frugalidad, son reglamentarias en esta profesión. Las
ceremonias de ciertos cultos, destinadas a mantener el celo de los
creyentes, consisten por lo general en simulaciones más o menos
simbólicas, cuya práctica convierte a los sacerdotes en consumados
actores de pantomima.
A este propósito merece recordarse la obra de Spencer sobre las
"Instituciones Ceremoniales", donde se encuentra un cuadro
interesante del origen y evolución de las simulaciones sociales, cuya
sorprendente complejidad sugiere una idea aproximada del
refinamiento a que el hombre puede llevar sus simulaciones, en su
afán de adaptarse a las costumbres del medio en que lucha por la
vida.
La necesidad de limitar este ensayo general, escrito como simple
introducción al estudio de la simulación de la locura, nos detiene en
el examen de las formas colectivas de la simulación. Pero antes de
pasar a las formas individuales, debemos advertir que podrían
analizarse cientos de formas distintas, enriqueciendo con infinitas
observaciones estas breves notas, suficientes para nuestro objeto:
establecer que a toda forma colectiva de lucha los hombres han
adaptado formas comunes de simulación.

III.—FORMAS INDIVIDUALES DE LUCHA Y DE

SIMULACIÓN
En la breve reseña precedente hemos visto que cuando existen
formas colectivas de lucha por la vida, o condiciones de lucha
comunes a varios individuos, se observan formas de simulación que
les son correlativas. Pero, aparte de esas formas o condiciones
comunes de lucha, cada individuo, por su particular constitución
fisiopsíquica y por sus relaciones especiales con el ambiente,
encuéntrase en circunstancias distintas; por ese motivo los modos
de lucha revisten caracteres personales, inclusive los fraudulentos.
Siempre, sin embargo, vemos persistir el paralelismo entre cada una
de aquéllas y una forma de simulación empleada como medio
ofensivo y defensivo. Podría, pues, formularse esta premisa general:
todos los hombres son más o menos simuladores, aunque sólo en
algunos la simulación es el medio habitual y preferente de lucha por
la vida.
Equivocado sería considerar las formas individuales de fraudulencia
como producto puramente instintivo, como si el hombre fuese
naturalmente perverso o mentiroso, egoísta o hipócrita. La
organización social presente impone al individuo esas cualidades, en
mayor o menor grado, si quiere atenuar la ruda lucha a que el medio
Welcome to Our Bookstore - The Ultimate Destination for Book Lovers
Are you passionate about books and eager to explore new worlds of
knowledge? At our website, we offer a vast collection of books that
cater to every interest and age group. From classic literature to
specialized publications, self-help books, and children’s stories, we
have it all! Each book is a gateway to new adventures, helping you
expand your knowledge and nourish your soul
Experience Convenient and Enjoyable Book Shopping Our website is more
than just an online bookstore—it’s a bridge connecting readers to the
timeless values of culture and wisdom. With a sleek and user-friendly
interface and a smart search system, you can find your favorite books
quickly and easily. Enjoy special promotions, fast home delivery, and
a seamless shopping experience that saves you time and enhances your
love for reading.
Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and
personal growth!

ebookgate.com