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ACTUAL VIRTUAL - #06
ISSN 1752-5624
To make war: Deleuze’s metaphysical principles of the cinematographic event
This paper will look at war on screen as an Apollonian-aesthetic event which becomes its own image; productive of its own Dionysiac existence. War is an event that our society maintains for various needs and interests. On screen, the registration of the scales of physical repetition of war telescopes the dispersed dimensions of its explicit and latent powers. Being is splayed into all of its affective glory; we are often spellbound by this mutable life, organic and legally constituted. In terms of expressing the ground of being, Deleuze calls us to see the metaphysical axis of events in terms of their bi-polar movements, generative of infinite aesthetic utility. Wars are drawn from the active production of collective forms through the affective perception of encounters; the political sway of gathered, implicated, but unrelated formations of life. And what of life in the war event? The topologies of the wars of mankind are productive of certain types of activities, which affect the movement of thought. As Deleuze describes in his two Cinema books, after perception, we fill, or the perceptive conjunction is filled by, a constitutive affect, which propels perception into activity; this perceptual activity is an action which perpetuates an event. Events are subject to the metaphysical systems of differentiated and compounded temporal modes. In the cinema’s artistic and commercial forms of expression, we see the actualization of unnatural formations and connections, false borders and changes of the coordinates of the geographical and historical milieux. The notion of war is qualified on a daily basis, with different types of events reconfiguring the infinitives of war; to engage munitions, to destroy, to maim, to rape, to kill. The sorrowful meanings of the war event are found in its various compounded axes. The paper will conclude that in this examination of the nomos of being, produced in conjunctions of the war event on screen, an arbitration of consciousness occurs - wherein we are propelled into a Nietzschean ‘metaphysical solace’ which in turn binds us further into its polar provocation – non-recuperative death and violent and nihilistic existence.
Felicity J. Colman, University of Melbourne, Australia
To make war: Deleuze’s metaphysical principles of the cinematographic event
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