The "Thought of the Outside" in The Time-Image (Deleuze and Blanchot)

This article examines the peculiarities of Gilles Deleuze's reading of the concepts of the outside and the powerlessness of thought in the work of Blanchot. Deleuze subverts these concepts, in a sense-his use of Blanchot is not particularly Blanchot-like-by basing his reading on that of Michel Foucault and then by referring here and there to Henri Bergson and Saint Augustine, whose idea of the multiplicity of presents (past presents, present presents and future presents) he takes up. We will also see, as a result, how the role played by the "strange attractor" that Maurice Blanchot represents in Deleuze's thinking in The TimeImage serves to block a line of flight which runs through the entire time-image system and unsettles the possibility of inscribing the image in time. By contrasting outside and inside, visible and non-visible, present and becoming, we arrive at the following conclusions: the cinema does not make time visible-rather, it makes perceptible the movement through which time eludes the image; the attraction of the outside makes the paradox of movement (visible and non-visible, continuous and continually discontinuous) the very principle of the cinematic image; and the time-image, finally, is run through with the movement of a becoming which, in taking the name "thought from the outside", puts thought itself into play. With the help of Jean-Luc Godard's film loge de l'amour, whose organizing principle can be seen as an illustration of Deleuze's conception of time, we will see, finally, how the logic of becoming, which makes any present impossible, determines the relation of all images to time and how the outside, following this idea of a time of a broken linearity in the process of becoming, prevents time from happening and, at the same time, announces its possible advent.