This concept is odd for several reasons. First, Deleuze regularly claims that thinking can only begin in a radical atheism and that the condi-tion of philosophy is a tranquil atheism.15 But, at a pivotal moment in Cinema 2, Deleuze is not only calling on the concept of faith, he is calling on an explicitly Catholic conception of faith: ‘It is clear from the outset that cinema had a special relationship with belief. There is a Catholic quality to cinema’ (1989: 173). We can explain this away with relative ease if we note the context in which he makes these claims. Not only are the fi lm-makers under discussion here either are forthrightly Catholic or deal with specifi cally Catholic themes – Bresson, Rossellini, Rohmer, Dreyer – but he is also drawing on Élie Faure’s comments on the cult of Catholicism in Fonction du cinéma.16 We could thus say Deleuze’s claims regarding cinema’s Catholic quality are an effect of his free-indirect philosophizing and the Catholicism at work here is at the level of the fi lms themselves – that is to say, at the level of historical fact – but not at the level of Deleuze’s theory.
This still does not explain the concept of faith itself, Catholic or not. Deleuze himself returns here to the Pascal–Kierkegaard motif that resurfaces across his œuvre (1989: 177).17 Belief here bears on the way of life of the believer; belief determines a certain mode of existence. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example, Deleuze explains that Pascal’s wager is not a theological principle, but an anthropological one. It
‘merely concerns two modes of existence of man, the existence of the man who says that God exists and the existence of the man who says that God does not exist’ (2006: 37). To believe or not to believe says nothing about the existence or non-existence of God, then (1989: 177).
It does not imply a hidden, secret, or (un)known relation with the divine or a channel to transcendence. It is strictly anthropological. The idea of God’s existence results in one possibility of life; the idea of his non-existence results in another. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in What is Philosophy?, even if the writings of Pascal and Kierkegaard embody a
constant striving for the divine, they remain immured in immanence.
Pascal and Kierkegaard
are men of a transcendence or a faith. But they constantly recharge imma-nence: they are philosophers [. . .] who are concerned no longer with the transcendent existence of God but only with the infi nite immanent possi-bilities brought by one who believes that God exists. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 74)
The concept of faith, then, seems to signify the way in which an Idea – in this case, that of God – determines a mode of existence and might even open up ‘infi nite immanent possibilities’ of life. To give the concept of faith its broadest possible extension, we could say that it describes our
‘relationship to truth’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 53).
If we follow this structural defi nition of faith, two questions then arise: (1) can we only use the word ‘faith’ to designate our relationship to the idea of God (God = truth), or does belief express our relation to ideas in general? (2) What does Deleuze mean by ‘mode of existence’?
Deleuze insists in all of these discussions that Kierkegaard and Pascal do not go far enough. As he puts it in What is Philosophy?, the concept of faith needs to undergo an ‘empiricist conversion’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 75). This was Hume’s ‘accomplishment’, and through this empiricist conversion the notion of belief begins to express our relationship not only to God but also to ideas in general.
When I see the sun rise, I say that it will rise tomorrow; having seen water boil at 100 degrees, I say that it necessarily boils at 100 degrees. Yet expressions such as ‘tomorrow’, ‘always’, ‘necessarily’, convey something that cannot be give in experience: tomorrow isn’t given without becoming today, without ceasing to be tomorrow, and all experience is experience of a contingent particular. (2001: 40)
To know that the sun will rise or to know that water will boil at 100 degrees, is to believe or infer that these things will happen. In Empiricism and Subjectivity, Deleuze explains that in Hume belief ‘posits the past as a rule for the future’ (1991b: 94; original emphasis). This is exactly the empiricist conversion in the concept of faith that Deleuze and Guattari were looking for in What is Philosophy?: in Hume belief ‘is no longer a matter of turning toward [truth] but rather of following tracks, of infer-ring rather than grasping or being grasped’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:
53). While this clearly picks up the terms of the faith/knowledge debate as it played out in post-Kantianism, Deleuze is shifting the opposition.
It is not a question here of whether some things can be known, while
others (e.g. the absolute) can only become the object of faith as in Jacobi and Hegel. For Deleuze’s Hume, knowledge is belief. Hume ‘puts belief at the basis and the origin of knowledge’ (2001: 40). Hume has shifted the problem: it is not whether belief can function as knowledge. At its foundation all knowledge is belief. The problem is knowing whether or not belief is legitimate or illegitimate.
We can therefore free up the notion of faith from its ties to tran-scendence in general and to the idea of God in particular. In Pascal and Kierkegaard faith expressed the way in which an idea determined a mode of existence. The idea in this case was always God. With Hume the idea can be water boiling or the sun rising or knowledge in general.
What, then, about the second question? If, by means of faith, our mode of existence is determined or formed in some way or another, we need to have some clarity about this expression.
I want to suggest, following Deleuze (1995: 100), that this concept is explicitly Spinozist. We saw above that in Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza
‘the different kinds of knowledge are also different ways of living, differ-ent modes of existing’ (1992: 289). This is because a mode of existence in Expressionism in Philosophy is defi ned as a certain relation among the parts of the body (212). The body’s confi guration at any given time is its mode of existence. If the different kinds of knowledge are also dif-ferent ways of living or difdif-ferent modes of existing, it is because in each kind of knowledge I become capable of organizing the parts of my body in different ways (285).
In the context of an empiricist and immanent conception of faith, then, the concept begins to mean something like: the ideas I have directly determine the confi guration of my body. After the ‘empiricist conver-sion’, faith expresses the unity of thought and the body. Speaking of technical innovations in sports, Deleuze gives several clear examples of what this might mean:
Sports do of course have their quantitative scale of records that depend on improvement in equipment, shoes, vaulting-poles . . . But there are also qualitative transformations, ideas, which are to do with style: how we went from the scissors jump to the belly roll and the Fosbury fl op, how hurdles stopped being obstacles, coming to correspond simply to a longer stride.
[. . .] Each new style amounts not so much to a new ‘trick’ as to a linked sequence of postures [. . .]. (1995: 131; my emphases)
Here the idea to which the body relates is no longer God or boiling water, but the Fosbury fl op. In so far as this Idea determines a linked series of postures, it determines a mode of existence. Each new idea is
actualized in a linked sequence of postures. The concept of faith thus takes on an extraordinarily broad extension, and perhaps it is better to call what we are talking about here ‘style’ or ‘syntax’, as Deleuze does in this interview. Whatever we call it, we are dealing with the ethical question: to what extent is the body determined by an idea?
I think it is possible on the basis of these comments scattered across Deleuze’s texts to rethink the concept of faith in a way that makes sense within the context of Cinema 2. First, we can see that faith does not appear here as a conduit to another world nor is it allied to a specifi c doctrine (e.g. Catholicism). What is at issue, as Deleuze says in What is Philosophy?, is the possibility of a ‘secular belief’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 53). Second, thanks to Pascal and Kierkegaard, despite all of the theological baggage the term carries it does have one virtue; like the concept ‘power of action’ in Spinoza, it creates a link between ‘truth’
and the ‘mode of existence’ of the one who believes in that truth. To secularize belief fully, however, we need to submit this link between
‘truth’ and ‘mode of existence’ to an empiricist conversion. God is no longer the truth. Truth is knowledge understood as the production of a rule for the future. This rule can govern whether we are in church on Sunday mornings or how we jump over hurdles.