Labyrinth of the Present: Reflection on Gilles Deleuze’s Notion of Time-Image

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze’s notion of time-image presents two different aspects in terms of the indiscernible relationship between the present and the past, between perception and recollection, or between the actual and the virtual. As Deleuze elaborates in the second volume of Cinema, when perception can no longer link to the motor extension in the form of linear succession, time can no longer proceed in a chronological succession, and thus, it splits the present into two separate directions. In this situation, the past coexists with the present on the same plane(plan), and thereby, it constitutes “purely virtual circuits”(TI 294) at each present moment. Deleuze classifies this non-chronological relation of the present and the past by two possible forms: the layers of the past and the peaks of the present. Citizen Kane exemplifies how the lack of a central subjectivity leads to the question of indiscernibility in all different layers of the past. Last Year At Marienbad exemplifies “de-actualized” points of the present, where the time of a single event can be seized as three simultaneous and non-chronological “points” of the present. The analysis of these two exemplary films clarifies that the non-linear relations of time are made “sensible and visible”(Flaxman 371) in two forms of time-image.