A Thousand Plateaus I, RAI-3 Recordings, Lecture 5, 13 January 1976 (Part 2)

<p><em>The Deleuze Seminars</em> is a collection of audio recordings, transcriptions, and English translations of, and supplemental materials from, the lectures French philosopher Gilles Deleuze gave during his career at the University of Paris 8.</p>

<p>Following the publication of <em>Anti-Oedipus</em> in 1972, Deleuze continues to develop the proliferation of concepts that his collaboration with Guattari had yielded. Throughout the 1970s, Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in expanding these concepts continues, eventually producing the sequel, <em>A Thousand Plateaus</em>.</p>

<p>The 1975-1976 seminar sessions were filmed by one of his students, Marielle Burkhalter, as part of her masters project, “Filming Philosophy as it Happens.” Enrico Ghezzi acquired the videos for broadcast on the RAI-3 cinema program “Fuori Orario,” after inviting Burkhalter to screen them at a festival he co-curated. Marielle Burkhalter, along with Stavroula Bellos, would eventually become the director of the L’Association Siècle Deleuzien and oversaw the French transcriptions of Deleuze’s seminars at the Paris 8 “Voix de Gilles Deleuze” website (http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/).</p>

<p>In this group of lectures, Deleuze offers the multi-faceted focus of the semester’s work, mainly to distinguish forms of faciality, encompassing black-holes/white-walls, faces and landscapes, facial power-relations, redundancy, molecular multiplicity, the rhizome, the refrain, and courtly love. As none of the films was marked chronologically, the order of the successive seminars was determined based on the content provided in the videos, notably Deleuze’s course organization that followed successive chapters from <em>A Thousand Plateaus. </em>Besides the content as one guidepost as well as the physical disposition of classroom details, the chronologically first video was the one titled “Deleuze su molteplicità molare e molteplicità molecolare” followed by the two successive four-hour segments, titled “Il Senso in meno”. Furthermore, despite no precise dates provided, a sequence of dates was extrapolated before and after session 7 based on comments by an Iranian student announcing during that session that a demonstration would occur later that day, 3 February 1976.</p>

<p>In session 5, the second part of the 13 January 1976 session (date approximate), the film corresponds to the fourth segment of the “Il Senso in Meno” I recording, on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emORIIs8esw&t=10347s, corresponding to time stamp 2:38:40 to 3:23:31. This segment continues the same class (in a new session break on the recording) and the previous discussion of white wall and black holes, with Deleuze contrasting a method of beginning in the middle with the habit of beginning at the end, for example, with the chivalric novel where a character is deterritorialized and wanders, a line of the novel that Deleuze see running from Chrétien de Troyes to Beckett. Deleuze contrasts this errant line to the epic or dramatic tale of a hero, then proposes “proof” of his argument with a facial representation (in a book he circulates) of a demon face from Ethiopia, with black holes for eyes, of the Negus. In contrast to these examples, Deleuze proposes Henry Miller’s works as an attempt to break through the wall through a becoming-masochist and becoming-animal, and Guattari intervenes, to discuss the contrast between deterritorializing movement provoked by the semiotic collapse with relation to the face and the need to reconstitute artificial points of reterritorialization (faces, couple relations, identities, among others). A recording interruption leads to Deleuze speaking very briefly of Kleist and the programmed life, and then taking one student’s comments as the session abruptly ends.</p>

<p>The French transcription and subsequent English translation were developed for the Deleuze Seminars directly from the RAI-3 recording, located at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emORIIs8esw&t=10347s. This dataset includes two files: a revised French transcription and new English translation in odt format.</p>

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<p>Les Séminaires de Deleuze sont une collection d'enregistrements audio, de transcriptions et de traductions en anglais et de documents complémentaires des conférences que le philosophe français Gilles Deleuze a donné lors de sa carrière à l'Université de Paris 8.</p>

<p>Dans la séance 5, partie 2 de la séance du 13 janvier 1976 (date approximative), avec l’aide des participants et Félix Guattari, Deleuze introduit des concepts différents produits avec Guattari dans leur travail qui résultera, en 1980, à la publication de <em>Mille plateaux, </em>notamment une discussion de la visagéïté à la lumière du roman courtois, puis en contraste, les écrits de Henry Miller. Guattari intervient aussi afin de mettre en contraste le mouvement déterritorialisante dû à l’effondrement sémiotique à cause du visage et le besoin de reconstituer des points artificiels de reterritorialisation.</p>