The The Death-Image:

Fifth Commentary on Bergson

Resumen

Following Deleuze’s gesture, in his Cinema project, where he introduces his “film-philosophizing” with commentaries on Bergson’s philosophy (in order to think the movement and time-image), I propose a new commentary on Bergson, this time having in view a new category, not mentioned at least explicitly by Deleuze, the “death-image". This is my way of responding to Susana Viegas’s inspiring article on “Death as Film-Philosophy’s Muse", which sparks the call for papers, set on revisiting, in the sense of expanding creatively, also for historical reasons, Deleuze’s Cinema project. Added to the four commentaries Deleuze includes, this fifth one turns to Bergson’s remarks on the “panoramic vision of the dead", to the situation where, brought back to life again, after dying, or going through a death experience, the dying person states they saw, in a very short time, all the forgotten events of their lives passing before them with great rapidity, with their smallest circumstances, and in the very order they occurred. Demonstrating this “moving panorama” of our lives is virtually present every time the past is remembered, whether in recollections or even dreams, I relate this “vision” not only to Bergson’s metaphysics of time (which he himself does not), but also to what Deleuze defines in The Time-Image as “sheets of past", being it in terms of this panorama that I conceive the convergence between death and these sheets, or the death-image and the time-image. My point is that the panoramic vision carves a lacuna between the “pure past", or how the past preserves itself in time, independently of us, and how it is remembered, or even dreamed of, where the dead not only survive, but can have their existences prolonged, even if only virtually, in a past which is no longer theirs, but ours (and which cinema, as a practice of images and signs, is especially suited to actualize, this time, as death-images). This fifth commentary on Bergson’s philosophy is preceded by more general considerations on the ontological status of the death-image, at least when framed within Deleuze’s philosophy.