Film, Untamed Thought and Expanded Theory: Gilles Deleuze Meets Paul Sharits

Contemporary philosophy has only sporadically recognised the radical conceptual potentials of experimental cinema and its various traditions. Lyotard, but foremost
Deleuze in his reading of Beckett’s Film, are two constitutive exceptions which can lead us to envision a more conceptually rigorous and fruitful relationship between
the two. A question is proposed: what might happen if Deleuze encountered the work of the American structuralist author Paul Sharits, a corpus consisting not only
of films, but also writings and cinematic programmes, a complementary theory and praxis which are not insular, but frequently intervene to reflect on their own methodologies and possibilities. An anatomy of Sharits’ formal inventions introduces a cinema that is not grounded in the conventions of mimesis, linearity and narrativity but in an exigency of constantly exploring the parameters of cinematic material as well as its somatic and ethical potentials.

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