A Differential Theory of Cinematic Affect

Lisa Åkervall University of Gothenburg

Abstract
This essay offers a critical rejoinder to affect theories prevalent in the
humanities since the 1990s. In film and media studies, affect theories
display an opposition to ‘screen’ and apparatus theory of the 1970s
and 1980s alleged to have marginalised the spectator’s body and affects
and privileged cognition over affection. Yet film and media studies’
turn to affect came with its own set of problems: in emphasising the
affective over the cognitive aspects of cinematic experience, theories of
the affective turn invert and reproduce the dichotomies (e.g. body/mind,
affect/thought) they seek to contest. Critically reconsidering the turn to
affect and its place within film and media studies, this article challenges
the relation of affect theories to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of affect,
highlighting these theories’ failure to account for Deleuze’s indebtedness
to Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics and his theory of the faculties. Suggesting
a conception of cinematic affect beyond dichotomies of body and mind,
affect and thought, this essay instead shows how cinematic experience
instigates transformations in spectators that are simultaneously affective
and cognitive.

Keywords: Deleuze, cinematic experience, affect theory, film philosophy,

film theory, affective turn

Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror film Get Out tells the story of Chris
Washington, a young African American photographer who finds himself
caught in a tale of racialised body snatching. While spending the
weekend at the country home of his white girlfriend Rose Armitage’s

Deleuze and Guattari Studies 15.4 (2021): 571–592

DOI: 10.3366/dlgs.2021.0458
© Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dlgs
572 Lisa Åkervall

liberal parents, Chris endures a series of increasingly unsettling

encounters that culminate in his escape from their efforts to implant
the consciousness of one of their ageing white friends in his body. An
allegory for racial ideologies in the age of Obama, the film’s storyline
stages white liberals’ overly effusive embrace of blackness as a new
variety of exoticisation that, in welcoming blackness, also endeavours
to possess it. For example, in an effort to ingratiate himself with Chris,
Rose’s father adopts elements of black vernacular speech, addressing
Chris as ‘my man’ and referring to Chris’s relationship with Rose as ‘this
thang’. He likewise brags about voting for Obama twice. Small details
like this foreshadow the father’s menacing determination to appropriate
blackness. Although a gifted photographer whose visual perceptiveness
and social adeptness serve him well in documenting the world around
him, Chris at first appears wilfully blind to the malignant racial desire
harboured by his girlfriend and her family. He is unable to see how
Rose, her family and their circle of friends see him and brushes off their
insistent efforts to shower appreciation on him as the awkward gestures
of well-intentioned white liberals overly eager to display their openness
to racial difference.1
Chris’s slow discovery of the truth is mediated through a series of
encounters with visual media, as though learning to see his situation
requires a moment of becoming-spectator (Figures 1 and 2). For
instance, his session of hypnosis with Rose’s mother reveals his buried
memories of watching television during his own mother’s death, as if his
fixation on one scene blinds him to another, more crucial scene of death
and destruction. Yet, it is as an inert spectator to the hypnosis that Chris
sees the truth of his own past and present. Indeed, as Chris descends into
the ‘sunken place’ of hypnosis, he is depicted as the helpless spectator of
his own life displayed on a floating TV-like screen. Here, visual media
forces a transformative encounter of the viewer (i.e. Chris) with his own
subjection as viewing and viewed subject – an encounter at once painful
and liberating. This culminates in another scene when Chris, bound to a
chair, becomes the unwilling spectator of a video screening that explains
the family’s body-snatching plans to instal the consciousness of one of
their ageing white friends in his body. In this moment of compelled
spectatorship, the metaphorical scales fall from Chris’s eyes, revealing
that the celebration of blackness practised by Rose’s family is part of a
pernicious fantasy of post-racial harmony that preserves the black body
only to contain black identity. Through these encounters, Chris does
more than see empirical facts: he becomes visionary, he learns to see
the truth of racism (and body snatching) he has ignored. Chris acts as
 A Differential Theory of Cinematic Affect 573

Figure 1. Get Out (Jordan Peele, USA 2017), screenshot.

Figure 2. Get Out (Jordan Peele, USA 2017), screenshot.

the stand-in for the viewers, who collectively learn to see what has been
there all along.
In Get Out, visual media are tools for learning to see. The coordinates
of affect, thought and vision sketched out in this process elaborate a
frame of analysis discerned by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time-
Image as ‘becoming-visionary’. Rejecting the at-the-time popular view
of cinema as a mere apparatus of ideological capture, holding the body
in place to seduce the mind with images, Deleuze suggested an account of
574 Lisa Åkervall

the cinematic spectator as undergoing transformations in her encounters

with moving images. The sights staged by cinema rearrange affect,
thought and vision, submitting them to a new set of dispositions by
means that are not strictly bodily or intellectual, affective or cognitive,
constraining or liberating, but rather hybrid compositions of these. The
process of becoming-visionary involves a rearrangement of the faculties
through a series of encounters with one’s affective and cognitive limits.
While enriching our analysis of Get Out, revisiting Deleuze’s account
of becoming-visionary also offers an occasion to reconsider his concept
of affect – particularly after the much-vaunted affective turn that, while
paradoxically invoking Deleuze’s concept of affect, has often submitted
to reductive dichotomies of body and mind, affect and thought, that
Deleuze’s own account of affect contests.
This reconsideration of Deleuze’s concept of affect contributes in a
broader and more general way towards rethinking the stakes of new
materialisms. The latter offered an effort to overcome a preoccupation
with the processes of subjectification that characterised much of 1990s
and early 2000s film and media studies. New materialisms promised
a move away from an undue subjectivism tied to human perspectives
alongside a repositioning of human actors among non-human ones, and
granted analytical power and critical space to instruments, objects and
matter, in service of ‘object-oriented analysis’ or ‘thing theory’ (Brown
2001; Barad 2003, 2007; Bennett 2004; Harman 2005, 2018; Latour
2005; Braidotti 2006; Meillassoux 2008; Bryant et al. 2011; Campbell
et al. 2019).
In the wake of the affective turn underway in the humanities since
the 1990s, characterised by a distanciation from the linguistic turn
and the post-structural fixation on subjectivity, it has almost become
a cliché to challenge Fredric Jameson’s claim about the waning of
affect he made in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Jameson 1991). Far from a want of affect, we continue to
be confronted by its excess (Hardt 2007; Gregg and Seigworth 2010;
Leys 2011, 2012; Altieri 2012; Frank and Wilson 2012; Papacharissi
2014). Part of this excess is a proliferation of indistinctions among
affect, experience and feeling. Theorists bring variant frames of analysis
to this problematic, leading from conceptions of affect and affect
theory in a Deleuzian framework, via offhanded invocations of affect
such as Jameson’s, to wider phenomenological concerns with feeling
and experience. While there are well-founded critical and conceptual
grounds for these distinctions, they tend to obscure a broader body of
thought grappling with a common problematic, albeit with fractured and
 A Differential Theory of Cinematic Affect 575

(sometimes more, sometimes less) precise conceptual framing. As we see

hints of in Get Out, the lines relating body and mind, affect and thought,
realism and idealism, prove more complex and hybrid than both new
materialisms and affect theory have acknowledged.
The waxing interest in affect has often been complemented by a
renewed interest in the body, particularly as it is marked by various
forms of difference (race, class, gender, sex, etc.). For example, affect
theory’s foregrounding of the bodily aspects of experience clearly
intermingles with new materialisms’ turn to matter, as in the work
of Jane Bennett or in some of Mark Hansen’s shifting treatments of
affect and media (Bennett 2010; Hansen 2000, 2004, 2015). The cluster
of interests surrounding media, affect and the body has a distinct
iteration within film and media studies, marked by specific theoretical
implications. The growth of research on social media, alternative
spaces of reception, and viral networks of contemporary digital media
has renewed these interests in affect by offering new objects for its
investigation (Sobchack 1992; Shaviro 1993, 2010; Bruno 2002; del Río
2008; Barker 2009; Laine 2011; Ivakhiv 2013; Voss 2013; Brinkema
2014; Duncan 2015).
This essay offers a critical rejoinder to theories of the affective turn
and their concept of affect. Critically reconsidering this turn and its place
within film and media studies, I challenge the relation of theories of the
affective turn to Deleuze’s work, arguing that their failure to account
for Deleuze’s indebtedness to Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics and his theory
of the faculties leads to a reductive account of affect. This oversight
results in a redoubling of the mind/body dichotomy proponents of
the affective turn propose to challenge. Following both Deleuze and
Peele’s Get Out, I offer a concept of affect beyond the dichotomies of
mind and body, as well as thought and affect, showing instead how
media experience instigates transformations in spectators that have both
affective and cognitive dimensions. In so doing, this paper contributes to
a wider reassessment of new materialisms and their efforts at overcoming
Kantianism.

I. Film and Media Studies’ Affective Turn

It is worthwhile looking at film and media studies’ affective turn through
the lens of the field’s history of theory and, in particular, the history of
theories of cinematic experience. Film and media theories of the affective
turn challenged so-called ‘screen’ and apparatus theory approaches
of the 1970s and 1980s, which they charged with marginalising the
576 Lisa Åkervall

spectator’s body and affects, on the one hand, and privileging cognition,
on the other. Proponents of affective theory criticised screen theory’s
conception of an active and controlling spectator-subject, as well as
screen theory’s fear that the cinematic apparatus induced an artificial
state of regression in the audience. Affect theorists also rejected screen
theory’s marginalisation of the spectator’s body. Within this conceptual
framework, affect served as the neglected flipside of screen theory,
leading affect theorists to foreground and emphasise the affective and
bodily dimensions over and against cognitive aspects of cinematic
experience. As a result, affect theorists tended to duplicate and invert
the dichotomies (e.g. body/mind, affect/thought) they set out to contest
in screen and apparatus theory. These theorists ended up insisting on
the immediacy and purity of an affect divided from thought and thereby
maintaining a one-sided conception of affect that failed to account for
the nuances of Deleuze’s philosophy, which many invoked in support of
their analysis.
In the turn towards affect in film and media studies, Deleuzian and
phenomenological approaches constituted the two major theoretical
camps.2 As an influential example of the former, Steven Shaviro
polemically criticised screen theory in his book The Cinematic Body,
outlining a theory of cinematic experience that foregrounds its affective
dimensions and the spectator’s body, in particular. In this context, he
speaks of a ‘visceral immediacy of cinematic experience’ and ‘primordial
forms of raw sensation’ (Shaviro 1993: 37, 26). Shaviro insists on a
psychophysiology of cinematic experience, by which he means ‘the ways
in which film . . . short-circuits reflection and directly stimulates the
nervous system’ (Shaviro 1993: 53). The Cinematic Body has become
one of the key references for thinking about affect in film theory and
shares a number of assumptions with Brian Massumi’s Parables for the
Virtual. In this book, Massumi distinguishes affect from emotion and
insists on what he calls the ‘autonomy of affect’ (Massumi 2002). The
expression ‘autonomy of affect’ stands in for a concept of affect that
exists independent of thought and thus stands on its own. Massumi’s
differentiation between affect and emotion has led to a number of
misunderstandings in film and media studies concerning the Deleuzian
notion of affect, stemming from the conflation of the relation between
affect and emotion with the relation between body and mind. While
emotions are conceived of as something that we reflect upon and that
we experience consciously, affects are conceived of as ‘prior’ to our
consciousness or even as mere bodily reactions or sensations. Many of
these misunderstandings can be related to rather idiosyncratic readings
 A Differential Theory of Cinematic Affect 577

of the Deleuzian concept of affect (Shaviro 1993; Bruno 2002; Massumi

2002). By dividing affect from thought, these analyses effectively repeat
and invert screen theory’s dichotomy of body and mind, of affect and
thought, instead of offering a true alternative.3 Furthermore, the move
away from questions of the subject and thought often leads to an
essentialisation of the spectator as body. In such an essentialisation
and reontologisation of the body, questions of subject formation and
thought processes are largely dismissed. The notion of affect these
approaches entail conceives of affect mainly as a bodily sensation, up
to its simplification as a stimulus-response. Particularly problematic is
its adaptation of the notion of immediacy according to which the body
and its affects become stand-ins for authenticity.
As to the other major camp of film and media studies’ turn
towards affect, phenomenological film theory focuses on the spectator’s
body in a similar fashion when insisting on the embodiment of
cinematic experience. While sharing a general interest in questions
of embodiment and experience, phenomenological approaches such as
Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye or Jennifer Barker’s The
Tactile Eye (2009) largely avoid the problem of a dichotomy between
body and mind as they conceptualise body and mind together, as if in
harmony. However, here another problem arises: because their implicit
conception of subjectivity and the spectator is relatively fixed and
hardened, and the emphasis is largely on feelings and emotions rather
than on affects per se, phenomenological film theory does not provide
us with a satisfying concept of affect either. For Sobchack and Barker,
the spectator is an intentional subject, whose (bodily) existence is merely
reaffirmed in cinema. In this context, cinema is in the end a means for
stabilising the spectator; there is no space for a transformation of the
spectator here.
These two exemplary accounts provide outlines of a more general
inadequacy in the theorisation of cinematic affect. They both sketch
either a one-sided body–mind dichotomy (both screen theory and the
theories of Shaviro, Massumi and others), or an overly static conception
of subjectivity that hardly leaves any space for the transformation of the
spectator (as in Sobchack, Barker and other phenomenological film and
media theories).
Contrary to these accounts of affect, I demonstrate that affects should
neither be misunderstood as bodily reactions, nor are they ‘feelings’ or
‘emotions’ in the ordinary sense of the term. Affects exceed ordinary
experience and precipitate thought, taking part in a hybrid configuration
of thought and the body. However, this does not mean in reverse that
578 Lisa Åkervall

affects are not bodily or have nothing to do with subjectivity. On

the contrary, affects are complex and involve aspects of affection and
cognition. Affects cannot be divided from thought and are not just
the flipside of the cognitive aspects of cinematic experience. While I
agree with Massumi that affects can be differentiated from emotions or
feelings, I reject his definition of affect and his notes on the ‘autonomy
of affect’ (Massumi 2002). More concretely, I hold that affects can be
distinguished from feelings in the following two ways. First, following
Deleuze and Guattari I define affect as the non-actualised part of
experience that insists in a state of virtuality (Deleuze and Guattari
[1991] 1994). This distinguishes affects from feelings as the actualised
part of experience. In brief, affects are virtual, whereas feelings are
actual. Second, in opposition to feelings’ modality of existence, affects’
modality can be described as ‘insistence’ (Deleuze [1969] 1990: 53).
Feelings exist, whereas affects insist.
The virtuality of affect and its mode of ‘insistence’ can be elucidated by
reference to Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Here, he writes about
affect and processes of affection, describing what he calls the sentiendum
or the being of the sensible (Deleuze [1968] 1994: 140). This sentiendum
has seemingly incompatible qualities: on the one hand, it is that which
can only be felt, while, simultaneously, it is also that which cannot
be felt, because it exceeds experience and precipitates thought. In that
way, it is not the same as an emotion or a feeling, which we can fully
experience. As that which cannot be fully experienced – since it is virtual
rather than actual – the sentiendum insists in its virtuality. In a second
step, the sentiendum undergoes a series of transformations and becomes
the cogitandum, which can only be thought, while, simultaneously,
it cannot be thought as it exceeds the thinkable. As cogitandum, the
transformed sentiendum forces us to think (Deleuze [1968] 1994: 183;
Balke and Vogl 1996: 5–28). Regarding the notion of affect, these
reflections on the sentiendum and the cogitandum show that in the
process of affection a series of transformations takes place that lead from
the sentiendum to the cogitandum, that is, from affect to thought. These
transformations are closely linked to Deleuze’s revision and recuperation
of Kant’s doctrine of the faculties in Difference and Repetition, which
he conceptualises as a differential theory of the faculties. In light of
a differential theory of the faculties, it becomes evident that Deleuze’s
concept of affect has nothing to do with immediacy or the automatic.
Affects are never merely bodily reactions, but always the starting points
of transformations that lead from affect to thought (upsetting the clear
opposition of mind and body in the process).
 A Differential Theory of Cinematic Affect 579

II. Cinematic Affect

The virtuality of affect is also apparent in the context of moving images.
In his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The
Time-Image, Deleuze conceptualises what he calls ‘affection-images’,
instances in which affects appear in audio-visual media. In his first
chapter on affection in Cinema 1, he lists the close-up of the human face
as the most typical affection-image: ‘The affection-image is the close-
up, and the close-up is the face’ (Deleuze [1983] 1986: 87). However,
his account of affection-images is in no way limited to close-ups of the
human face. In his second chapter on affection, for instance, he adds
what he calls ‘any-spaces-whatevers’: ‘[I]f the affect obtains a space
for itself in this way, why could it not do so even without the face,
and independently of the close-up, independently of all reference to the
close-up?’ Any-space-whatevers radicalise the qualities of the face as
affection-image. We find any-space-whatevers in images of spaces or
rooms that have lost their spatial coordinates; the spaces they depict
are abstract, and it is unclear where they begin and end. But the reach
of affection-images even goes beyond these two types of images, as
becomes evident in Deleuze’s subsequent remark that ‘[t]he affection-
image . . . is both a type of image and a component of all images’
(ibid. 87). In Cinema 2, we encounter another variant of affection in
cinema that, taking this remark seriously, I propose describing as a third
affection-image (although Deleuze does not explicitly label it as such).
Deleuze terms this third type of affection-image ‘becoming-visionary’,
which he defines as a type of seeing that emerges when ordinary vision
reaches and transcends its limits (Deleuze [1985] 1989: 18–24). Of the
different affection-images discussed here, becoming-visionary is the most
explicit in showcasing the transformative character of Deleuze’s concept
of affect. Becoming-visionary is a process of affection that relies on
the transformations taking place from affect to thought (or from the
sentiendum to the cogitandum), just as was discussed above in terms of
a differential theory of the faculties. Analogously, I discuss the processes
of becoming-visionary we encounter in cinema in terms of a differential
theory of cinematic affect. This differential theory of cinematic affect
showcases a new connection between affect and thought, highlighting
the transformative character of cinematic affect. By underlining that
Deleuze’s concept of affect and, more specifically, the notion of a
differential theory of cinematic affect are deeply indebted to Kant’s
aesthetic theory, I seek to evade the unfortunate misconceptions of affect
in many recent interpretations of Deleuze.
580 Lisa Åkervall

Deleuze introduces the concept of becoming-visionary when writing

about films of Italian neo-realism, such as Roberto Rossellini’s Europe
’51 (Italy 1951) and Germany Year Zero (Italy 1948), or Vittorio
De Sica’s Umberto B. (Italy 1952). Rather than being agents, the
characters of the films he analyses – he calls them ‘visionaries’ – have
become viewers. Instead of actively trying to change the course of
action or even participating in the situation they find themselves in, they
become observers of their own quasi-actions. As was the case with Chris
in Get Out, their incapacity to act makes them develop their visionary
vision. The less they act, the more they see. And in place of a reaction,
which has become impossible, a new sensitivity emerges. As Deleuze
writes:

It is because what happens to them does not belong to them and only half
concerns them, because they know how to extract from the event the part
that cannot be reduced to what happens: that part of inexhaustible possibility
that constitutes the unbearable, the intolerable, the visionary’s part. (Deleuze
[1985] 1989: 19–20)

Take, for instance, Rossellini’s Europe ’51. The film opens with the
traumatic suicide of a 10-year-old boy, Irene Girard’s son Michael. As
was the case with Chris in Get Out, this event seems at first to render our
protagonist incapable of action, until it gives rise to a new set of agencies
hybridising the affective and the cognitive. From that inaugural event,
the film traces the protagonist Irene’s transformation from a bourgeois
American housewife and member of Rome’s upper-class society to
what Deleuze calls a ‘visionary’ (Deleuze [1985] 1989: 21). Irene is
exemplary of all the other visionaries that populate the cinema books,
and her process of becoming-visionary is paradigmatic of how Deleuze
conceptualises cinematic affect. It thus also exemplifies the concept of
affect sketched out in this article, including the new connection between
affect and thought introduced here.4 Irene’s mutation is at first closely
linked to her personal life: After her son’s suicide her relation to the
world of the Roman bourgeoisie breaks down successively.5
Inspired by her cousin Andrea, a communist journalist, Irene starts to
explore a world hitherto foreign to her: the world of the proletarian
inhabitants of Rome’s suburbs. The inhumanity of these suburbs
overwhelms her. Shocked by what she has seen, Irene decides to take care
of a sick prostitute and to help a single mother with six children get a job
at a newspaper factory.6 As a female version of Francis of Assisi, she is
completely immersed in her helping role.7 At the same time, she becomes
more and more displaced from her role as upper class housewife, from
 A Differential Theory of Cinematic Affect 581

her everyday reality and environment. Her outsider vision instigates

a change of perspective that leads to the successive transformation of
Irene, the bourgeois housewife, into Irene, the visionary.
The most intense moment of that transformation occurs as Irene
is taking over a shift in the factory for a single mother. The loud
noises and the droning of the machines overwhelm her. Once again,
however, the result is a rearrangement of affect and thought. In an
acceleration montage that reminds us of the films of Sergei Eisenstein,
we see alternating close-ups of her face and the printing press (Figures 3
and 4). Irene’s perception has lost its pragmatic function and has become
visionary: she has reached a new type of vision, where she sees more
than in ordinary vision. She no longer recognises the factory as a place
where people work and newspapers are produced; she is unable to see it
in a context of sense and purpose. In her gaze, the factory transforms
from a place of the production of newspapers into an inhuman and
senseless prison. As Deleuze writes about Irene’s process of becoming-
visionary: ‘The heroine of Europe ’51 sees certain features of the factory,
and thinks she is seeing prisoners: She says “I thought I saw convicts.”
(It should be noted here that she does not evoke a simple recollection,
the factory does not remind her of a prison, the heroine calls up a mental
vision, almost a hallucination)’ (Deleuze [1985] 1989: 46). She sees the
factory even better as she ceases to recognise it as a factory, but sees it
as a prison. ‘[S]he sees, she has learned to see’ (ibid. 2). Through this
overwhelming experience Irene becomes visionary and sees the truth of
the factory.
This recalls another moment of transformation, one in which Chris
is bound to a chair in a room in the Armitage family’s basement,
helpless and captive, tied to the chair by his arms and legs. In this
position, Chris is forced to watch a video in which Roman Armitage,
Rose’s grandfather, explains the body-snatching technique, or what he
also calls the ‘coagula procedure’, practised by the Armitage family
and their sinister secret society. Immediately afterwards, the screen
confronts Chris with another hypnotic vision, this time in the recording
close-ups of a teaspoon stirring a teacup. In a remarkable fashion, this
scene fuses moving-image experience with hypnosis, evoking a process
of becoming-visionary (which connotes a variety of visions unbound)
and its relationship to hypnosis that incarnates cinema as the threat of
mental bondage.8 These facets of cinematic experience interpenetrate
and perhaps mutually constitute one another. In a rapid montage, the
images alternate between Chris in TV-induced hypnosis catapulting him
into the sunken place and onscreen revelations from the art dealer who
582 Lisa Åkervall

Figure 3. Europe ’51 (Roberto Rossellini, Italy 1952), screenshot.

Figure 4. Europe ’51 (Roberto Rossellini, Italy 1952), screenshot.

tells Chris that race was never his concern; instead, he declares, ‘I want
your eyes, man, I want these things you see through’. He wants to see
with Chris’s eyes, to possess Chris’s vision, which in this case is nearly
the same as dispossessing Chris of his vision, rendering him a prisoner in
his own body. In this overwhelming moment, Chris becomes visionary.
He sees the truth of his present, the truth of a contemporary American
racism embodied in educated liberal envy to occupy the position of
 A Differential Theory of Cinematic Affect 583

the black body without being subject to its constraints; to inhabit its
eye while still commanding white privilege. Becoming-visionary involves
a confrontation with the varieties of forms of bondage, physical and
psychic, that afflict the characters in these films, from the truth of
capitalism in Europe ’51 to that of racism in Get Out, including
carceral capitalism, and its preoccupation with the dispossession of
bodily liberties, and contemporary neoliberal dreams rooted in self-
posing individualism. However, Get Out takes the visionary experience
a step further in making it the reality of its narrative. Whereas Irene in
Europe ’51 is admitted to a closed mental institution for her visions, in
Get Out Chris’s visions entirely coincide with reality itself: the reality of
contemporary America inescapably possessed with the desire to imprison
and inhabit the black body.

III. A Differential Theory of Cinematic Affect

Placing becoming-visionary in the context of a differential theory
of the faculties as a differential theory of cinematic affect situates
Deleuze’s intervention in the cinema books in a broader frame
of his philosophy.9 What is particularly relevant here is Deleuze’s
‘transcendental empiricism’ and the important role of Kant’s philosophy.
Deleuze uses the term ‘transcendental empiricism’ to describe his
philosophical method that aims for the reconciliation of two seemingly
incompatible positions, that of empiricism and that of transcendental
philosophy. With this method, his goal is to undertake, on the one
hand, an empirical critique of transcendental philosophy by relating it
more closely to experience, and, on the other hand, a transcendental
critique of empiricism, by pointing out its preconditions in a philosophy
of consciousness.10 Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism is defined as a
reworking of a transcendental critique that is freed from its conformism.
According to Deleuze, transcendental empiricism is the only method
that thinks the transcendental as its own category – and not simply in
opposition to the empirical.
Deleuze famously had an ambiguous relationship to Kant. While
rejecting certain aspects of Kantian philosophy, he had great admiration
for others.11 This becomes particularly evident when he speaks of an
ambiguity of Kant’s critique. With that formulation, he referred both
to his own complex relationship to Kant and to the tensions he saw at
work within Kant’s project: Kant’s method of an immanent critique is
at odds with the actual uses (and failures) of Kant’s critical method. On
the one hand, Deleuze praised Kant’s turn away from an attention to
584 Lisa Åkervall

the object towards an attention to the subject. Rather than presupposing

harmony between subject and object, Kant assumes a ‘submission of
the object to the “finite” subject’ (Deleuze [1963] 1984: 69). With his
transcendental method, his emphasis on the subject and his insistence on
a difference between the faculties, Kant covered new ground. Deleuze
even called the idea of assuming a difference between the faculties,
rather than presupposing a common sense, one of the most original
points of Kantianism (ibid.). On the other hand, as much as Deleuze
lauded Kant’s approach, he was equally disappointed by its concrete
implementations. He criticised Kant for merely deferring the problem
of harmony onto the subject: as harmony of the subjective faculties.
Harmony among the faculties is always dependent on common sense
as a form of unity of the faculties in the subject (Kant [1781] 199;
Kant 1997 [1788] 1999). Inevitably, one faculty must dominate all the
others in order to secure harmony among them. Therefore, the use of
the faculties ends up betraying his critical approach. Deleuze writes: ‘For
Kant as for Descartes, it is the identity of the self in the “I think” which
grounds the harmony of all the faculties and their agreement on the form
of a supposed same object’ (Deleuze [1968] 1994: 133). Here, Deleuze
detects the limits of Kant’s programme: it cannot escape common sense,
but multiplies it. Furthermore, in suturing the faculties together into
one common sense, Kant merely copies the transcendental onto the
empirical. He cannot perform a truly immanent critique and therefore
fails to recognise the potential of his own critical method (Smith 2010:
132–54).12 According to Deleuze, to be true to his critical method, Kant
would have needed a principle for the internal genesis of the faculties
not dependent on common sense. Yet, Deleuze does not discard Kant’s
doctrine of the faculties altogether. He instead insists on the importance
of such a doctrine and attempts to push it a step further, aiming at both
a critique and a recuperation of Kant’s project in order to satisfy the
demands of a transcendental empiricism (Sauvagnargues 2009).
In Kant’s Critical Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, Deleuze
develops his differential theory of the faculties in critical evaluation and
opposition to Kant’s doctrine of the faculties, which he subsequently
elaborates in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and even more so
in Cinema 2: The Time-Image in a more implicit fashion (Deleuze
[1968] 1994). A closer look at Kant’s aesthetic theory is worthwhile
to fully understand the Deleuzian programme and its innovations and
implications: in his writings on aesthetics, Kant detects a collaboration
among the faculties that is not subject to common sense. Whereas
in the first two critiques, The Critique of Pure Reason and The
 A Differential Theory of Cinematic Affect 585

Critique of Practical Reason, there is always one faculty dominating

the others, in his third critique, The Critique of the Power of
Judgement, in analytics of the beautiful, the collaboration among the
faculties – between imagination and reason – is no longer regulated a
priori (Kant [1781] 1999, Kant [1788] 1997, Kant 2001 [1790/1793]
1997; Deleuze [1963] 1984). As Deleuze writes:

We explain the universality of aesthetic pleasure or the communicability of

higher feeling by the free accord of the faculties. But is it sufficient to assume
this free accord, to suppose it a priori? Must it not be, on the contrary,
produced in us? That is to say: should aesthetic common sense not be the
object of a genesis, of a properly transcendental genesis? (Deleuze [1963]
1984: 50)

Such a free collaboration of the faculties, which cannot be assumed but

has to be produced, is key for Deleuze’s reflections. Because no faculty
is dominant, this is not an objective, but a subjective harmony of the
faculties. Deleuze inverts Kant’s argument and defines the subjective
harmony of the faculties not as an exception but rather as the rule and
makes it the condition of possibility of any collaboration among the
faculties. As he puts it, a ‘faculty would never take on a determining
and dominating role were not all the faculties together in the first place
capable of this free subjective harmony’ (ibid. 50). What is central here
is Deleuze’s claim that this harmonic collaboration among the faculties
cannot be presupposed, but has to be produced: It has to be the object
of a transcendental genesis (51).
While in Kant’s analytics of the beautiful the collaboration among
the faculties is a harmonic one, in the analytics of the sublime the
collaboration among the faculties leads to a relation of disharmony.
In his analytic of the sublime, Kant describes this disharmony as a
‘feeling of inadequacy of imagination’; the imagination is overwhelmed.
In a passage in Difference and Repetition on Kant’s doctrine of the
faculties that crucially elucidates the significance of his later remarks on
becoming-visionary, Deleuze writes that:

the imagination is forced or constrained to confront its own limit, . . . its

maximum, which is equally the unimaginable, the unformed or the deformed
in nature . . . Moreover, it transmits this constraint to thought itself, which
in turn is forced to think the supra-sensible as foundation of both nature and
the faculty of thought: thought and imagination here enter into an essential
discordance, a reciprocal violence which conditions a new type of accord.
(Deleuze [1968] 1994: 321)
586 Lisa Åkervall

As in the case of the beautiful, in the sublime we’re dealing with a

free collaboration among the faculties, only this one is disharmonic
(Kant [1790/1793] 2001).13 This disharmony results from the fact that
imagination is overwhelmed, reaches the limits of its empirical use,
does not collaborate with the other faculties anymore, and instead
communicates with them in a different way. From this overwhelming
encounter results a disharmony of the faculties in which each faculty
reaches its limit and communicates this violent experience. The faculties
quit their empirical use and reach their transcendental use.
The genetic dimension of aesthetic experience and the disharmony
among the faculties proves essential for rethinking Deleuze’s relation to
Kant and with it his account of affect and cinema. Deleuze criticises
Kant for not having explained the conditions of such disharmony, but
he nevertheless sticks to the concept of a doctrine of the faculties in
general. He therefore departs from Kant to lay out his own differential
theory of the faculties, starting with Kant’s concept of the sublime,
where he detects the possibility of said disharmony of the faculties.
Whereas in Kant’s analysis of the sublime the faculties remain in a
state of being overwhelmed, Deleuze takes the Kantian analysis a step
further: In Deleuze’s differential theory of the faculties, the encounter
that overwhelms the faculties also triggers a transformation, leading the
faculties to assume their higher use. Instead of following the Kantian
path of looking at the conditions of possible experience, Deleuze
investigates the conditions of actual experience, asking under which
conditions a faculty reaches its higher use. What leads a faculty to reach
that use are these kinds of encounters that overwhelm the faculties. Such
destabilisation results in a disharmony in which every faculty is driven
to its limit and undergoes a radical genesis.
The innovation of Deleuze’s differential theory of the faculties thus
lies in this genetic model, which is a model of becoming-other through
limit encounters with experiences that overwhelm both cognition and
affection, challenging the lines drawn between them. Each faculty is
pushed to its limit, transforms itself and reaches its transcendental
use. The transcendental use of a faculty is always triggered by what
Deleuze calls an encounter – an experience that cannot be subsumed
to a common sense and forces us to think. An encounter forces us to
think in that it exceeds our ordinary experience, is outside of the order
of recognisability, and initiates an internal genesis of the faculties. It
can only be felt, because it cannot be recognised. A disharmony of the
faculties is unleashed in which each faculty is driven to its limit, reaches
its transcendental use, and becomes other. This is a genetic model of
 A Differential Theory of Cinematic Affect 587

experience that always leads from affect to thought, from the sentiendum
to the cogitandum.
As discussed above, the disharmony of the faculties and the encounter
reappear in the processes of becoming-visionary in the cinema of the
time-image (Deleuze [1985] 1989). There are, however, key differences
in how Deleuze presents this differential theory of the faculties in
the context of cinema. More precisely, the confrontation with cinema
inspires Deleuze to develop his differential theory of the faculties into a
differential theory of cinematic affect. Deleuze’s analysis in the cinema
books rests on a distinction between two different uses of vision: the
empirical use of ordinary vision and its transcendental use as visionary
vision. Becoming-visionary means that ordinary vision reaches its limits
and vision assumes its transcendental use. Whereas in a differential
theory of the faculties the encounter unleashes the transcendental
use of the faculties, in a differential theory of cinematic affect the
encounter leads its characters to see differently, to become visionary. The
visionaries encounter situations to which they cannot adequately react.
For example, Irene’s encounter with the factory in Europe ’51 is such a
situation that unleashes a process of becoming-visionary. The encounter
with the reality of the factory has a double function, as it makes it
impossible for Irene to see the factory in a context of sense and purpose.
Instead, in Irene’s gaze the factory transforms into a prison. In this way,
Irene is led to a visionary vision that implies a change of perspective.
The same could be said for Chris’s encounter with the truth of racism
in Get Out. Chris is led to a visionary vision that implies a change of
perspective, showing him the truth about his girlfriend Rose and the
Armitage family as body snatchers, who seek to occupy and possess
his black body. In the concepts of a differential theory of cinematic
affect, we could say that such encounters force to think. They lead to
a disharmony of the faculties and a breakdown of their empirical use.
Vision is forced to assume its transcendental use and becomes visionary.
In that way, the encounter is a starting point for a new, ‘visionary’
kind of vision, as when Irene sees the factory as prison and the
factory workers as convicts, or when Chris sees the white liberals as
body snatchers. Irene and Chris at once grasp the concrete empirical
circumstances and are overwhelmed by them. This confrontation with
perceptual limits triggers a series of affective transformations that
rearrange perceptions. In this account, affect and thought collaborate
in a mode irreducible to either, depending on the constant affective
dislocation of any boundary between them. Ultimately, this triggering
also dislocates the line between character and spectator: the viewers of
588 Lisa Åkervall

Europe ’51 and Get Out undergo parallel redistributions of affect and
thought, none of which may be reduced to affect or cognition alone.

IV. Visionary Viewers and New Materialisms

A differential theory of cinematic affect facilitates a new outlook on
the affective turn and film and media studies’ relation to it. Most
importantly, it discerns a relation among media, thought and affect that
is far more complex than the one acknowledged by many theorists of the
affective turn. A differential theory of cinematic affect entails a genetic
model of affection, on the basis of which each faculty is confronted with
its own incapacity and is transformed as part of the transition from its
empirical to its transcendental use. Such a theory of cinematic affect has
multiple effects: it refers to transformations of a given film’s characters,
which are triggered by encounters with unbearable situations. But a
differential theory of cinematic affect can also clarify the processes of
transformation, and of becoming-visionary, that affect the cinematic
spectator.
The transformations of becoming-visionary affect both the film’s
characters and its viewers as they link them together in a strange kind
of transfer. As Deleuze writes: ‘The important thing is always that
the character or the viewer, and the two together, become visionaries’
(Deleuze [1985] 1989: 19). In this parallelism of characters and
spectators, becoming visionary involves a certain becoming-spectator (to
oneself, to one’s conditions) and can therefore only be understood in this
double form: as characters learn to see, the friction among the faculties
that allows them to transcend the limits of ordinary vision spreads
to the spectator who enters into her own differential transformation.
A differential theory of cinematic affect traces the transformations
unleashed on the screen and discloses a new link between affect
and thought, wherein the processes of becoming-visionary permit the
spectators to discover new ways of seeing and perceiving. These
encounters confront viewers with their perceptual limits and thus trigger
genetic processes of becoming-visionary that imply a higher (‘visionary’)
exercise of their faculties.
This article’s reflections on a differential theory of cinematic affect
thus not only entail an explanation of how cinematic images can trigger
processes of learning to see and becoming-visionary, but they also
outline an alternative way of thinking the relationship between affect
and thought in cinema. The conceptual ideas behind Deleuze’s revision
and recuperation of Kant’s aesthetics, in turn, offer suggestions to
 A Differential Theory of Cinematic Affect 589

both the affective turn and the new materialism. Canonical expressions
of affect theory and the new materialism agree in their effort to
revise a disproportionate emphasis on the subject and cognition in
the work of Kant and the thinking that comes after it. This has
often led both affect theorists and new materialists to adapt blinkered
conceptual positions based on the premise that overcoming Kant
involves rejecting his philosophy altogether. Yet, the case of becoming-
visionary suggests something different: rather than simply overturning or
rejecting Kant, Deleuze’s intervention offers a possibility of resituating
him – an endeavour that also involves a reconceptualisation of affect.
Deleuze turns Kant’s doctrine of the faculties against itself, resulting
in a differential theory of cinematic affect: a theory of affective
transformation that elides the limits of the traditionally imposed
boundaries between body and mind, affect and thought.

Notes
1. It is notable, in this regard, that his seemingly more working-class African
American friend Rod, who seems less steeped in the gestures of white political
correctness, insistently cautions Chris against the peculiarities of white people,
and Rose’s family in particular, explaining, ‘look bruh, all I’m doin’ is connectin’
the dots, I’m taking what you presented to me’ – admonishments Chris ignores.
2. The affective turn can be discerned not only in Deleuzian film and media
theories, but also in other areas of inquiry, such as feminist or queer film and
media theories.
3. See also del Río’s more satisfactory account of these issues in del Río 2008.
4. For a broader concept of becoming-visionary, see Peretz 2008; an earlier version
of these ideas may be found in Åkervall 2008. See also Åkervall 2018.
5. In his analysis of Europe ’51, Jacques Rancière has shown that Irene’s role
as an outsider is central for the transformations that take place on the level
of the film’s images (Rancière [1990] 2003: 105–34). Gilberto Perez has also
emphasised the way the outsider position is important in Rossellini’s films (Perez
1998: 367–416).
6. This is the context in which we can understand the commentary Angelo Restivo
makes regarding Viaggio in Italia (Roberto Rossellini, Italy 1954) and in relation
to Europe ’51: ‘It is as if the very form of the film is itself exhibiting a breakdown’
(Restivo 2002: 98).
7. Rossellini points out that he conceptualised Europe ’51 – which he made right
after Francesco, Giullare di Dio (Italy 1950) – as a story of a female Francis of
Assisi.
8. On the fear of the hypnotic power of film, see Andriopoulus 2008; for an
affirmative theory of film and hypnosis, see Bellour 2009.
9. For an important work on the presence of Kant’s philosophy in Deleuze’s cinema
books, see Zabunyan 2008.
10. For a more detailed account of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism and its
indebtedness to Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, see Rölli 2018.
In this context, Rölli also mentions the presence of David Hume’s empiricist
philosophy in Deleuze’s writings. Rölli sees Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism
590 Lisa Åkervall

as a response to Michel Foucault’s analysis of the transcendental-empirical

doublet (Rölli 2018: 3).
11. This has largely been ignored by proponents of the new materialisms in whose
account Deleuze’s indebtedness to Kant has been falsely presented as non-
existent.
12. With this critique, Deleuze expanded the critiques of the post-Kantians Johann
Gottlieb Fichte and Salomon Maïmon, who also reproached Kant for ignoring
the demands of his own critical method.
13. On the role of the concept of the sublime in Deleuze’s philosophy, see Schaub
2003: 60–97.

References
Åkervall, Lisa (2008) ‘Cinema, Affect, Vision’, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in
Emerging Knowledge, no. 16, available at http://www.rhizomes.net/issue16/
akervall.html (accessed 28 February 2020).
Åkervall, Lisa (2018) Kinematographische Affekte: Die Transformation der
Kinoerfahrung, Paderborn: Fink.
Altieri, Charles (2012) ‘Affect, Intentionality, and Cognition’, Critical Inquiry, 38:4,
pp. 878–81.
Andriopoulus, Stefan ([2000] 2008) Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction,
and the Invention of Cinema, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Balke, Friedrich and Joseph Vogl (1996) ‘Einleitung: Fluchtlinien der Philosophie’,
in Friedrich Balke and Joseph Vogl, Gilles Deleuze: Fluchtlinien der Philosophie,
Munich: Fink, pp. 5–28.
Barad, Karen (2003) ‘Agential Realism’, Signs, 28:3, pp. 803–31.
Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, NC and London: Duke University
Press.
Barker, Jennifer (2009) The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience,
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bellour, Raymond (2009) Le Corps du Cinéma: Hypnoses, Émotions, Animalités,
Paris: POL.
Bennett, Jane (2004) ‘The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter’,
Political Theory, 32:3, pp. 347–72, doi: 10.1177/0090591703260853.
Bennett, Jane (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Braidotti, Rosi (2006) ‘Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New
Process Ontology’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23:7–8, pp. 197–208, doi:
10.1177/0263276406069232.
Brinkema, Eugenie (2014) The Forms of the Affects, Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Brown, Bill (2001) ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28:1, pp. 1–16.
Bruno, Giuliana (2002) Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film,
London: Verso.
Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds) (2011) The Speculative Turn:
Continental Materialism and Realism, Melbourne: re.press.
Campbell, Norah, Stephen Dunne and Paul Ennis (2019) ‘Graham Harman,
Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory’, Theory, Culture & Society, 36:3,
pp. 121–37, doi: 10.1177/0263276418824638.
Deleuze, Gilles ([1963] 1984) Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the
Faculties, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: Athlone
Press.
 A Differential Theory of Cinematic Affect 591

Deleuze, Gilles ([1968] 1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New
York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles ([1969] 1990) Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin Boundas, trans. Mark
Lester with Charles Stivale, London: Athlone Press.
Deleuze, Gilles ([1983] 1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: Athlone Press.
Deleuze, Gilles ([1985] 1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Robert Galeta, London: Athlone Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari ([1991] 1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, London: Blackwell.
del Río, Elena (2008) Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Duncan, Pansy (2015) The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film: Affect Theory’s
Other, London: Routledge.
Frank, Adam and Elisabeth A. Wilson (2012) ‘Like Minded’, Critical Inquiry, 38:4,
pp. 870–7.
Gregg, Melissa and Gregory Seigworth (eds) (2010) The Affect Theory Reader,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hansen, Mark B. N. (2000) Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing, Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hansen, Mark B. N. (2004) New Philosophy for New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Hansen, Mark B. N. (2015) Feed Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century
Media, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hardt, Michael (2007) ‘Foreword: What Affects Are Good For’, in Patricia Ticineto
Clough and Jean Halley (eds), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, pp. ix–xiii.
Harman, Graham (2005) ‘Heidegger on Objects and Things’, in Bruno Latour
and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 268–71.
Harman, Graham (2018) Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything,
London: Pelican.
Ivakhiv, Adrian J. (2013) Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature,
Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kant, Immanuel ([1781 (A), 1787 (B)] 1999) Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kant, Immanuel ([1785 and 1786] 1997) Critique of Practical Reason, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kant, Immanuel ([1790 and 1793] 2001) Critique of the Power of Judgement,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Laine, Tarja (2011) Feeling Cinema: Emotional Dynamics in Film Studies, London:
Continuum.
Latour, Bruno (2005) ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things
Public’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public:
Atmospheres of Democracy, pp. 4–31. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Leys, Ruth (2011) ‘The Turn to Affect’, Critical Inquiry, 37:3, pp. 434–72.
Leys, Ruth (2012) ‘Facts and Moods: Reply to my Critics’, Critical Inquiry, 38:4,
pp. 882–91.
Massumi, Brian (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
592 Lisa Åkervall

Meillassoux, Quentin (2008) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of

Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier, London: Continuum.
Papacharissi, Zizi (2014) Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peretz, Eyal (2008) Becoming Visionary: Brian DePalma’s Cinematic Education of
the Senses, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Perez, Gilberto (1998) ‘The Point of View of a Stranger’, in Gilberto Perez, The
Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, pp. 367–416.
Rancière, Jacques [1990] (2003) ‘A Child Kills Himself’, in Jacques Rancière, Short
Voyages to the Land of the People, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp.
105–34.
Restivo, Angelo (2002) The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and
Modernization in the Italian Art Film, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rölli, Marc ([2012] 2018) Gilles Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism: From
Tradition to Difference, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Sauvagnargues, Anne (2009) Deleuze: L’empirisme transcendental, Paris: Presses
universitaires de France.
Schaub, Mirjam (2003) ‘Zeit als innere Grenze des Subjekts’, in Mirjam Schaub,
Gilles Deleuze im Wunderland: Zeit- als Ereignisphilosophie, Munich: Fink.
Shaviro, Steven (1993) The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Shaviro, Steven (2010) Post-Cinematic Affect, Washington: Zero Books.
Smith, Daniel W. (2010) ‘Genesis and Difference: Deleuze, Maïmon, and the Post-
Kantian Reading of Leibniz’, in Sjoerd van Tuinen and Niamh McDonnell (eds),
Deleuze and the Fold: A Critical Reader, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
pp. 132–54.
Sobchack, Vivian (1992) The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film
Experience, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Voss, Christiane (2013) Der Leihkörper: Erkenntnis und Ästhetik der Illusion,
Munich: Fink.
Zabunyan, Dork (2008) Gilles Deleuze: Voir, parler, penser au risqué du cinema,
Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle.