Last year I came across a thing that did not believe. I talked a lot of movies, but what I had in mind was not the film ... (...) What I had in mind was a classification of signs, signs of ALL the world!
So Deleuze presents this course given between late 1982 and early 1983, published here for the first time in Castilian, in which the film shall be subject to the titanic task of a general classification of images and signs.
But the reader should not forget that the signs are images, and Bergson images are not subjective or psychological, are indistinguishable from the thing, so that these classes will become a gigantic philosophy course on the material universe and time. Philosophy of movement, perception, action, affections, relationship, time and thought. Reading Bergson and an extensive commentary on aspects of Peirce's philosophy generally despised by the linguistic act as organizers. But the course will cross classic places of philosophy: time in antiquity, the problem of the relationship between thought and reality in Descartes, Leibniz, in the post-Kantian and Hegel, the theory of the sublime in Kant, the relationship between light and soul, existential philosophy of Pascal, Kierkegaard and Sartre.
Movies, directors, film schools and currents will mostly to confirm the hypothesis and sometimes-as Deleuze says of himself as "short breaks".
Deleuze does not explain the purpose of this monumental undertaking. Suggests a mere taste, almost a megalomaniac whim racing Peirce. But at least explicit communication with a sensitivity of time:
I'm talking about a world without shaft, without right or left, without solid body. I speak of this plane of immanence of images that act and react on each other. (...) What thinking can be applied, in which art can be practiced but in a certain way to create the world prior to man? Or what is the same, to create the post-man world. What is the philosophy, art, etc.? Surely they have to tell the man, but also of the non-human. (...) What about today? I would say that in some way today are usually chasing the plane of immanence without shaft, without solid body, without right or left, the world of images-movement in its purest form. Why do we pursue? It would be a topic to know why. It is that perhaps we feel that we would understand many things if alcanzáramos. And who they spend many things that go in that direction.