Opening by Abstract

My title gives right away the end toward which I am heading but which for lack of space will not be reaching in any satisfactory fashion: the cinema at once constitutes and performs or actualises a ‘fourth’ repetition. The ordinal designation is with reference to Deleuze, who as we know in Difference and Repetition distinguishes three modalities (‘habit’, ‘memory’, and a third ‘royal repetition’) whose articulated and simultaneous replay by a conceptual apparatus (or the text Difference and Repetition) is constitutive of Time itself, in all its complex, mutating and discontinuous dimensions (Deleuze 1994). The analysis that follows borrows from Deleuze with regard to two aspects of his concept of repetition: as a site of an (infinite) productivity that is implicated in its own future as undetermined and imprévisible; and in a more restricted sense, a schema of temporalising that brings time in relation with itself, makes it pass, or rather, makes time by making it pass. The hypothesis that guides the movement of passage in the text is that the cinematic apparatus (camera, projector and the archive) is a temporalising assemblage: a machine made not for representation but for making new temporal relations. A repetition therefore would be ‘fourth’ if it engendered a purely cinematic time: one that arrives (also in the sense of happens or takes place in time) for the first time with the cinema, and therefore necessarily intervenes both in history (the concept, the narrative and its time) and in the history of time.