A Thousand Plateaus I, RAI-3 Recordings, Lecture 3, 16 December 1975

<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, 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 3, the 16 December 1975 session (date approximate), the film corresponds to the second 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 1:05 to 1:42:02. At the start, Guattari, discussing the scene in Proust’s <em>Swann’s Way</em> with Swann deepening his understanding of the composition by the fictional composer, Vinteuil (cf. <em>A Thousand Plateaus</em>, pp. 185-187), emphasizes how certain elements of the musical phrase stand out with certain musical signs becoming deterritorialized, and how the musical phrase reorganizes the subjectivity of the people around Swann in the salon. Deleuze discusses the black hole into which Swann’s life collapses, the love-passion black hole, linked to Swann’s interest in painting and to the redundancy of faces, shifts linked to the musical line inspired by Vinteuil’s phrase. The session is disrupted by disagreements between different students, and despite an attempt by Georges Comtesse to bring the discussion back to Proust and faciality, another student (tentatively identified as Éric Alliez) completely disrupts the session by introducing a scattershot political tirade, which eventually evolves into a shouting match between him and other students.</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>

<p>--</p>

<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 3, le 16 décembre 1975 (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 par Guattari, puis par Deleuze d’un segment dans <em>Du côté de chez Swann,</em> lorsque Swann écoute une composition du compositeur fictif Vinteuil et la phrase musicale qui réorganise toute sa vie et la subjectivité des gens qui l’entourent. Deleuze continue en parlant du trou noir de l’amour-passion dans lequel Swann tombe, mais la séance est interrompue par des étudiants qui soulève des questions politiques.</p>