Gilles Deleuze

Plato may have used literary metaphors but he did so in order to establish a philosophical truth above and beyond this world; scientists may use fictions or narra- tives, such as the ‘big bang’ but they do so in order to make the world we live in functional and manageable. Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imag- ination of a possible world. Art is not about representation, concepts or judgement; art is the power to think in terms that are not so much cognitive and intellectual as affective (to do with feeling and sensible experience).

In opinion, then, we move from a particular experience and use it to form some whole that reduces difference and complexity.

The formation of a language responds to a way of approaching the world, so that language is an action, or a constant question and creation in response to experience. So words are dependent upon tasks or paths (dif- ferentiations) through which we approach what is other than ourselves; a word gives order to a sense which pre-exists it.

.The actual words ‘happiness’ or ‘bonheur’ are different but evoke the same sense or meaning. Sense is virtual and is activated whenever such words are used, meant or thought.

Of course, we can never have a concept that does not occur through some sort of materiality or sensibility. We always have to have a word or sound from which we think the movement of concepts. Similarly, art does always have some sort of order, synthesis or meaning. (Deleuze was not arguing that art was just meaningless affect.) Indeed, art works by taking us back from composites of experience to the affects from which those synthesised wholes emerge. In cinema this is done in two ways, through the movement-image and the time-image.