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Eugene B. Young, Cinematic Art and Reversals of Power. Deleuze via Blanchot, Bloomsbury, 2022

Description
Bringing together Deleuze, Blanchot, and Foucault, this book provides a detailed and original exploration of the ideas that influenced Deleuze’s thought leading up to and throughout his cinema volumes and, as a result, proposes a new definition of art.

Examining Blanchot’s suggestion that art and dream are “outside” of power, as imagination has neither reality nor truth, and Foucault’s theory that power forms knowledge by valuing life, Eugene Brent Young relates these to both Deleuze’s philosophy of time and his work with Guattari on art. In doing so, he uses case studies from literature and popular film, including Kafka’s Castle, Villeneuve’s Arrival, and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

Providing important new insights for those working in literary and cinematic studies, this book advances a new definition of art as that which reverses the realities and truths of power to express obscure ideas and values beyond both our exterior and interior worlds.

Table of Contents
Introduction: How the True World Finally Became a Bad Film

PART ONE: Power and the Outside
I. Power and the (In)Visible: Foucault and Deleuze
II: From Menace to Passion in Blanchot & Deleuze: ‘The Sovereignty of the Void’ & Experience of the Imaginary
III. Dreams: The Eclipse of the Day & its Incessant Return

PART TWO: Art, Literature, & Ideas
IV. The Conceptual Composition of the Work of Art: Chaos & the Outside
V. Literature’s Radical Reversal: from Absence of Origin to Deterritorialized Future
VI. Kafka’s Castle: A Case Study-Conceptual Inexistence & Obscure Value

PART THREE: Cinema
VII. Cinematic Worlds of Truth and Reality: Deleuze’s Movement Image via Foucault
VIII. Radical Reversals of Cinematic Art: The Dissociative Force of Blanchot’s Outside in Deleuze’s Time-Image
IX. “Is Anyone Seeing This?”

Conclusion: Artistic Fiction and the Thought of Eternal Return

Eugene B. Young is Professor of Practice in Philosophy and English at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, USA. He is the primary author and editor of The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 2013).