Transcendental Empiricism and the ‘Cahiers Axiom’

Gilles Deleuze's two-volume work on the cinema poses its would-be reader a formidable task. Its proliferation of cinematic references and analyses would stretch the capacities of all but the most dedicated cinephile (of Deleuze's love for cinema there can be no doubt). Furthermore, to engage fully with the historical currents of film theory therein calls for a familiarity with the development of cinema studies as a critical discipline worthy of a dedicated film theorist. Perhaps most challenging of all, it asks that these threads be grasped in relation to Deleuze's own uniquely demanding engagement with the history of philosophy itself, and, more specifically, his own appropriation and transformation of that history and the problems that subtend it as developed across a philosophical career spanning the 1940s to the 1990s. The astonishing scope and ambition of the project are announced in its very title: a work of philosophy (for that is what it surely is) titled simply Cinema, as if within its pages Deleuze seeks in some sense to address or draw on the cinema in its entirety and as a whole. The extraordinary nature of this project invites a very simple question: why does Deleuze write about the cinema as a philosopher? This is the question the present book seeks to explore.

One path to accounting for this startling fusion might be to locate its origins in Deleuze's own biographical history. His famous antipathy to travel was such that his philosophical career was firmly located within the intellectual and aesthetic life of Paris from the 1950s onwards. By the same token, his cinema-going was embedded in an upswelling of critical, creative and intellectual activity around the cinema that gave rise to one of the great historical and cultural focal points of cinephilia and cinematic exploration, in which the love of cinema took on the form of a critical exploration of the powers of the cinema itself.

As such, one can easily point towards a range of developments located within that specific film culture that had an impact on Deleuze's engagement with and knowledge of film history, theory and criticism, and ultimately on the Cinema books themselves.