Thoughts of Deleuze, Spinoza and the cinema (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser)

In this paper I will analyse a sequence from Werner Herzog’s film The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser. In this sequence the film’s protagonist, Kaspar, has what appears to be a profound vision. Such a moment will be explored as the instance of a certain mode of thinking, and what I hope to put forward in this paper, from a semiotic point of view, is the possibility of the passage, revealed by this particular sequence, towards the highest kind of thought in the cinema. In other words, I am hoping to use Herzog’s film as a way of tracing a modern image of thought in the cinema. As opposed to the classical mode of thought, a modern image would be the kind of thinking Gilles Deleuze describes as non-representational in nature. Bearing this opposition in mind, the vision sequence is particularly important because it testifies to the tension within thinking to go either way: for one either to be constrained within the doxa of representation or moved by the violence of the faculties. Narratively speaking, we will see that with the apparent ambiguity of the vision (in terms of its relation to the film as a whole), the sequence is all too easily written off according to some kind of ideological significance: the delirium of a madman, a hallucination, an epiphany, a spiritual awakening or a prophetic foreshadowing. What I want to suggest though, based on Deleuze, is that the vision is a process of meaning creation, an act of thinking in-itself where the absolute power of thought is motivated through the creation of Ideas rather than the recollection of concepts. Finally though, I want to cast these ideas within the context of what I see to be Benedict De Spinoza’s influence on Deleuze. This is because I have interpreted Spinoza’s philosophy of univocal substance to be the driving force behind Deleuze’s cinematic project. With this in mind then, and in terms of Deleuze’s equation of the image with matter, an idea of non-representation will be described in terms of a certain relation between images and the realization of what Spinoza would call essence or an “adequate” knowledge of substance. By posing a notion of thought in this way, I hope not only to suggest the potential of the cinema, but to explicate this potential by synthesising certain aspects of Deleuze’s cinema philosophy, therefore at the same time outlining an overarching theory of Deleuze’s semiotic project as a pragmatics of force.