Being and Immanence: Deleuze, Authorship and the Practice of Modern Cinema

This dissertation is concerned with what we might call the "paradox of authorship" in the writing of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. On the one hand, Deleuze argues that all works of art and philosophy consist of signs and that all signs imply a signature (hence, an author); on the other hand, his philosophical project is grounded in a process ontology, which privileges difference and becoming over identity and being, which privileges immanence over transcendence. Hence, the paradox—and one that, in film studies, has resulted in the elision of any direct or extended engagement with the topic of authorship. Yet, this paradox is less contradictory than it initially appears. As I will show, and through an engagement with the work of three modern filmmakers (Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roberto Rossellini), there is no reason why these two positions can't be reconciled or be made to reverberate through one another. This requires us to modify both the meaning of signs and of authorship (as they relate to the practice of art in general and the cinema in particular), but far from distorting their meaning it actually allows us to understand something important about artistic practice, and the transformed notion of artistic practice, in modern cinema. It also allows us to comprehend the "interior alliance" that Deleuze claims between art and philosophy: each to be understood as an ascetic practice of thought.