English Graduate Student Organization (GSO)

Professor Cesare Casarino from the Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Department will present 'Five Theses on the Life-Image (Deleuze, Cinema, Biopolitics)'

Monday February 25
135 Nicholson Hall
6pm

Inaugurating the establishments of the CSCL Graduate Student Film Collaborative, distinguished Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature scholar Cesare Casarino presents his current work on film. This event is a rare opportunity to introduce Prof. Casarino’s ongoing engagement with moving images and theory to the University community. All are invited and refreshments will be provided.

Abstract below. We hope to see many of you there.

About CGFC

The CSCL Graduate Film Collaborative is dedicated to fostering graduate-student led engagement with moving images through the coordination of public events, film screenings, and symposia. We represent a wide-ranging set of interests in film, video, and new media, in a variety of global, historical, and theoretical contexts. We are scholars, makers, and fans of moving images of all kinds. For further information on upcoming events, please contact Ben Stork at stork014@umn.edu or Cecilia Aldarondo at aldar002@umn.edu.

ABSTRACT
'Five Theses on The Life-Image (Deleuze, Cinema, Biopolitics)'

This paper attempts to produce the concept of the “life-image� by putting forth the following five theses: 1) The life-image is what the time-image becomes under a fully realized regime of bio-political production. 2) The life-image expresses labor-power. 3) The life-image is a simulacrum rather than a copy of life. 4) Gilles Deleuze anticipates the life-image when articulating the interference of “a cinema of the body� and “a cinema of the brain� in /Cinema 2/. 5) The life-image finds an exemplary instance within and against the spectacle of AIDS.

This paper begins with two distinct yet related critical engagements. The first concerns Gilles Deleuze’s main argument in his two-volume study of the cinema, which, for the present purposes, can be encapsulated in the following manner: the cinema developed from an indirect representation of time in the movement-image and its varieties, in the period before the Second World War, to a direct time-image and its varieties, namely, to a direct insertion of time in the cinematic image, in the period after the Second World War; whereas the movement-image subordinated time to movement, the time-image liberated time from the harness of movement and expressed time in its pure state, time as such—that is, time as the eternal, immobile, and unchanging form of all that passes, moves, and changes. The second consists of a critical engagement with contemporary philosophical discourses of biopolitics: in particular, I am concerned with the critical re-elaboration of Michel Foucault’s concept of bio-politics that ha been undertaken during the past two decades by a group of thinkers—such as, among others, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Paolo Virno—who in effect have brought to the foreground as well as pushed to its logical conclusions an insight that at best had remained implicit and latent in Foucault. This insight concerns the necessary and symbiotic relations between, on the one hand, biopolitics understood as a complex assemblage of modern technologies of power for the direct management, organization, and domination of life in all of its forms, and, on the other hand, capitalism understood as a complex assemblage of modern technologies of production for the management, organization, and exploitation of labor-power in all of its modalities.

After this beginning, the paper proceeds to put these two critical engagements in communication with one another by articulating the two following claims: the first is that the radical transformation in time, which in the cinema is materialized as the shift from the movement-image to the time-image, constitutes the most important—if not the most obvious—index of a regime of biopolitical production; while the second is that the life-image emerges from within the time-image—without, however, ever leaving it behind, and, on the contrary, by incorporating it—at the moment in which such a regime of biopolitical production comes to its full fruition and realization. Ultimately, these claims are supported and substantiated through a discussion of the new forms of aesthetic experimentation that were occasioned by the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as—in particular—through a close reading of a specific sequence in Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman’s 1993 documentary /Silverlake Life: The View from Here/, in which Tom Joslin pitilessly records the devastating impact of AIDS-related conditions on his life up until and including the moment of his death.