‘Cinematic Semiotic Excess: A Deleuzian Final Cut of All the Signs in the World’ (2025)
The Deleuzian Mind
Eds. Henry Somers-Hall, Jeffrey A. Bell
Routledge, 2025
This essay explores Gilles Deleuze’s practise of signs in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). The main sections cover the fundamental co-ordinates of a semiotic developed through cinema from Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896), then expanded as movement-images with Charles Sanders Peirce’s Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903) and time-images with Deleuze’s own Difference and Repetition (1968). Together, the movement-image and the time-image constitute a vast two-fold semiosis where the signs of the former cohere as continuity and the latter explode in discordance.
The argument is that this vast semiotic allowed Deleuze to conceive of what he called a classification of all the signs in the world; and consequently, the cineosis can be seen as one of Deleuze’s greatest philosophical achievements, an achievement only possible because of his encounter with the movies.