The Expression of Time (Spinoza, Deleuze, Cinema)

Abstract

The concept of expression appears in Gilles Deleuze’s two-volume study of the cinema as early as the second page of Cinema 1: “We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristics of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge. . . . Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us.”1 These, however, are not Deleuze’s words. Deleuze is quoting a passage from Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, a passage in which becoming—substance considered in its aspect of incessant metamorphosis—is understood as