Deleuze and Kierkegaard on the Paradox of Belief: Strange Encounters at the Cinema

In Gilles Deleuze’s important seventh chapter of Cinema 2 , the neo-Nietzschean philosopher makes some tantalizing and surprisingly sympathetic remarks about the Christian existentialist thinker, Soren Kierkegaard. In that chapter, Kierkegaard is mentioned – along with a group of other Christian philosophers and filmmakers, including, Pascal, Dreyer, Bresson, Rohmer, and Rossellini – in a context in which Deleuze turns his attention to what he takes to be the critical issue of the modern world, namely, the “[broken] link between man and the world.” Deleuze characterizes this disconnection as a crisis in belief: “we no longer believe in this world.” No doubt, some of Deleuze’s comments about Kierkegaard – especially, in the first volume – betray Jean-Paul Sartre’s influential, but, one-sided reading of the Danish philosopher. Nevertheless, Deleuze’s invocation of Kierkegaard in relation to the crisis of belief does suggest – even if this was nothing more than an undeveloped intuition on Deleuze’s part – that Kierkegaard is potentially an important resource for coming to grips with what Deleuze enigmatically dubs the “paradox” of belief. Indeed, I contend that Kierkegaard can help to shed important light on the kind of belief that Deleuze feels must replace the untenable belief system that subtends the modern age and that also informs the normalizing perceptual gaze of the movement-image of classical cinema. An encounter with Kierkegaard’s own views on the paradox of faith will help us to better understand Deleuze’s otherwise startling claim that the “return of Christian belief” in a filmmaker like Rossellini represents an expression of the “highest paradox” for a much-needed transformative belief in our time. Much hinges, of course, on what Deleuze has in mind with this “return.” To that end, as I will show, his decision to reference Kierkegaard will prove remarkably fertile.