A Thousand Plateaus I, RAI-3 Recordings, Lecture 4, 13 January 1976 (Part I)

<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 4, the first part of the 13 January 1976 session (date approximate), the film corresponds to the third 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 1:42:05 to 2:38:37. After responding to several students’ questions about faciality and becomings, he returns to faciality, considering the gaze and subjectivity as developed, first, by Lacan, and then by Sartre, then shifts to Guattari’s previous discussion of relations between faciality and power, specifically the role and function of the face in power apparatuses. Deleuze then shifts briefly to passional power and its form of faciality, then to the topic of the maternal face, then to the celebrity face, and then proposes to consider how these different forms of faciality might pertain to apparatuses of power, all with different functions. After some student discussion, Deleuze develops several types of faces, the despot’s face as frontal face projected on a white wall, then the second figure of two faces facing each other, which Deleuze relates to his previous discussion of Tristan-Isolde and plunging into the black hole (of passion). Moving beyond these, Deleuze considers a third phase, the face turning away, invented by God in the history of the Jewish people, the tale of the double turning away, and concluding with a third image seen while falling asleep: whereas the earlier ones organized traits of faciality, the third frees up these traits which transform into other traits and even escape into landscapity.</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 4, la première partie 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 et des formes successives de ce concept : le visage frontal du despote, les visages de la passion qui se regardent face à face, et le visage qui se détourne, le visage de Dieu.</p>