Abstract:

Whether classic or modern, the great philosophers are often inventive stylists. It takes only a slight direction of attention to recognize suddenly that Plato or Wittgenstein are poets of philosophy, no less than Emerson, Nietzsche, Cavell, Deleuze and indeed many others. How is it possible to separate their art of thinking from the writerly composition of concepts in a space and time whose weaving of voice, rhythm, polyphony, and counterpoint seem so close to musical creation? In fact, one cannot. Thinking and the expressive line are inextricably intertwined in the great philosophical stylists. Deleuze himself beautifully voiced this perspective in a lecture entitled, “What is the Creative Act?,” presented at la FEMIS in 1991, which opens with the question, “What does it mean to have an idea in cinema?” Deleuze notes an experience all too familiar to every creative mind—having an idea is an event worth celebrating because its occurrence is rare and unpredictable. To think, one must prepare a terrain and a context where an idea can germinate and unfold because, as Deleuze says, “No one has an idea in general. An idea─like the one who has the idea—is already dedicated to a particular field.... Ideas have to be treated like potentials already engaged in one mode of expression or another and inseparable from the mode of expression, such that I cannot say that I have an idea in general. Depending on the techniques I am familiar with, I can have an idea in a certain domain, an idea in cinema or an idea in philosophy.”i

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