A Thousand Plateaus I, RAI-3 Recordings, Lecture 10, 2 March 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 10, 2 March 1976, part 2 (date approximate), the film corresponds to the fourth segment of the “Il Senso in Meno” II recording (the ninth segment of both parts), on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Po2tIgeD4, corresponding to time stamp 3:45:48 to the end of the fourth segment at 4:21:40. </p>

<p>In session 10, 2 March 1976, the successive segment of this same session shows the previous discussion regarding modes of signifying as related to faciality with Deleuze in the process of creating a multidimensional multiplicity, currently the fifth dimension. Then, shifting to a sixth dimension, Deleuze asserts that the paranoid or despotic system needs to block lines of flight from escaping the circular system, the sixth dimension being the presence of a line of flight with negative value, and hence everything that threatens this system’s signifiance is cast out. With the six dimensions of the paranoid or despotic system in place (two dimensions during this session), Deleuze proposes to link this schema to the second figure, the passional which functions entirely differently, with a packet of signs fleeing along the segmented line. To Georges Comtesse’s challenge to Deleuze’s model of the face-substance center, Deleuze reacts with considerable scorn since Comtesse has simply changed the terms, all the more evident when he agrees with each of Deleuze’s points. The film ends with Comtesse holding forth alone at the back of the classroom with Deleuze listening calmly and smiling.</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 10, toujours le 2 mars 1976, le segment suivant de la séance précédente montre la discussion sur les modes de signification en rapport avec la visagéïté, avec Deleuze en train de créer une multiplicité multidimensionnelle, actuellement la cinquième dimension. Puis, passant à une sixième dimension, Deleuze affirme que le système paranoïaque ou despotique doit bloquer les lignes de fuite pour qu’elles ne s’échappent pas du système circulaire, la sixième dimension étant la présence d’une ligne de fuite à valeur négative, et donc tout ce qui menace la signification de ce système est rejeté. Avec les six dimensions du système paranoïaque ou despotique en place (deux dimensions lors de cette séance), Deleuze propose de relier ce schéma à la deuxième figure, la figure passionnelle qui fonctionne de manière entièrement différente, avec un paquet de signes fuyant le long de la ligne segmentée. Lorsque Georges Comtesse remet en cause le modèle de Deleuze du centre visage-substance, Deleuze réagit avec un mépris considérable, car Comtesse n’a fait que changer les termes, ce qui est d’autant plus évident lorsqu’il est d’accord avec chacun des points qu’exprime Deleuze. Le film se termine avec Comtesse parlant seule au fond de la classe, Deleuze l’écoutant calmement et souriant.</p>