Why is it difficult to read philosophical texts?
Prima facie, this question may seem irrelevant as a means of beginning a response paper for a course such as Film & Genre, but while I was reading the texts taken from Cinema 2: The Time Image by Deleuze, the question above – which is an unceasing one for me – rises up again.
Everyone with a piece good luck of meeting a philosophical text can experience the congested feeling in his/her chest. If the experience is intense enough, it is inevitable to be confronted with such a question and when the question is once asked, it will be very difficult to act as if it is not. So it is expected quite easily that being plausible or implausible, everyone that undergoes the process above has his/her own set of answers.
At this point, I will not list all the answers in my own set, but I want to emphasize one of them. Take the first 13-line of Deleuze’s text with the title Cinema, body ad brain, thought as an illustration. Although I acknowledge – because of their distinctive linguistic styles, vocabularies, and metaphors as a part of their philosophies – the fact that it is more difficult to make sense of texts by 20th century French philosophers such as Baudrillard, Derrida and Deleuze, present text of Deleuze seems to be a plausible illustration for my points.
In that 13-line part of Deleuze’s text, Deleuze does not use any term which is specific to philosophy. If we skim the recurrent words in the text, we see words such as body, thought, life and category with which everyone is familiar in his/her daily life. Although this familiarity with this vocabulary seems to assist the reader in appreciating the text, I argue that this familiarity with these words is a transparent obstacle between the reader and the text. This familiarity is the origin of illusion that makes the reader to think that s/he can easily permeate into the text.
Since – apart from neologism – philosophers do not have distinctive words, they have to make use of the same words that the readers also use, but with different connotations. These different connotations are the building blocks of the obstacles separating the reader from the text, because the readers also have their own sets of connotations stemming from their own history with these words. If the readers do not – at least partially – put their own sets of meanings into brackets before approaching the text – because of the mismatch between different connotations originating from the same words – they would face the transparent obstacle. Since the connotations which a philosopher attributes to a word are the means of embodying his/her abstract thoughts and of conveying his/her vast readings of it, if the reader can manage to uncover connotations some of which are explicit and some of which are immanent in the text, s/he can make the transparent obstacle visible, though s/he cannot completely get rid of it.
In our daily lives, body is not a subject-matter about which we think so much. Perhaps the reason for this lack is the fact that we often think through body. Body along with its extension to life provides the medium that we think through and this close relationship with our bodies may conceal its importance in the manners we think. Anyway almost everybody has own sets of meanings which are related with the words body and life. But Deleuze’s usage of these words may not be match with what others think about them and this situation stands as an obstacle in front of one who wants to understand him. With his/her meanings sticked to a concept, it is not easy for someone to grasp what Deleuze says via this word in his own understanding. So before trying to grasp what Deleuze wants to mean via words such as body and life, I think, beginning from what body and life mean for Deleuze is a more proper way.
Deleuze does not see the body as an obstacle separating thought from itself. What does ‘itself’ mean at this context? Is it thought or thinking or both? What about the body?
The story of body as an obstacle can be traced back to Descartes, even Plato. But the term body is also reminiscent of Spinoza as well as categories of thought being reminiscent of Kant, and life which is of Bergson. I think that Deleuze’s reading of body is immersed in at least Spinoza, Kant and Bergson. So such a sentence as ‘Give me a body then’ can become a formula of philosophical reversal. Reading the body not as an obstacle separating us from thinking but as a force enforcing us to think is the source of the reversal in philosophy.
Life is unthought in the sense that it is what is concealed from thought, argues Deleuze. And the body, I think, is the intersection between one that thinks and life, through which categories of thought will be thrown into categories of life. What are the categories of life then? They are the attitudes of body. Attitudes or postures of body are tiredness and waiting which are related with the before and the after, respectively. I think this relation enables the attitudes of body to become also the categories of life. Although Deleuze talks about three attitudes, namely tiredness, waiting, and despair, later on he states that tiredness is both the first and the last one, because it is tiredness that contains the before and the after simultaneously. A thinking-thing learns what a non-thinking thing is capable of and this is called thinking by Deleuze.
M. Kemal İz
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