13 January 2024. Published by Benoît Labourdette.

2 min

Time stands still. And then life returns. Pain is life. Sweetness is life. Replications. Messages. Double helix. Heal.

Extensions

When we live through borderline or traumatic experiences, we may find ourselves experiencing time in a way that goes completely beyond the normally accepted framework. Perhaps this brings us into contact with a deeper philosophical reality of what time is. To extend this film, in which I superimposed a time onto itself, the concept of synthesis of time by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who has worked so much on cinema, seems to me to be able to shed light on, or complexify - which is basically more of the same thing - the understanding of what a truer nature of time might be.

Gilles Deleuze challenges the traditional conception of time as a simple succession of instants. He proposes a more complex, non-linear vision of temporality. In his book “Difference and Repetition” (1968), he draws on a thesis by the 18^th-century philosopher David Hume: Repetition changes nothing in the object that repeats itself, but it changes something in the mind that contemplates it. Deleuze is interested in the real as it is created in our consciousness, which is undoubtedly its deepest reality, and ultimately opens onto his general philosophical thought of the world. For him, time is simply the present, woven from an extremely complex network of superimpositions in all directions and on multiple planes.

Time is only constituted in the original synthesis that concerns the repetition of instants. This synthesis contracts successive independent instants into one another. It thus constitutes the lived present, the living present. And it is in this present that time unfolds. Past and future belong to it: past, insofar as previous instants are retained in the contraction; future, because expectation is anticipation in this same contraction. Past and future do not designate instants, distinct from a supposedly present instant, but the dimensions of the present itself insofar as it contracts instants.

[...]

One and the same voice for all the many ways, one and the same Ocean for all the drops, one clamor of Being for all the beings. Provided that each being, each drop and each path has reached the state of excess, i.e. the difference that displaces and disguises them, and makes them return, turning on its mobile point.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and repetition, PUF, Épiméthée collection, Paris, 1968.