Gilles Deleuze – La durée: A Multimedia Poem

Sometimes there’s an inexplicable match between a state-of-mind and a sensory input.
This is what happened to me while listening to this fragment by Gilles Deleuze about the Duration – La durée (Click the player to listen).

What happened is that I processed the whole piece as a potential DJ Spooky track: a musical intro; Deleuze’s voice full with fluctuations, insistence, repetitions; a chaotic background noise; and finally phrases that can be cut from the entire piece and still survive – this entire Spooky complex placed me in a different emotional state.

The Deleuze piece is in French, I hope, though, that non-French speakers can enjoy it too. You can listen to the following piece several times, and each time get something else out of it. What I heard was a poem, much like the following:

Gilles Deleuze – La durée

La durée c’est ce qui se
décompose
Ha!
La durée c’est une
défection . La durée c’est,
tomber en poussierrrrrrrrrrr.
Oui, oui.
C’est Flaubert. C’est Flaubert.
Et. Et.
Si ça dure, ça se décompose.
[silence]
Ce n’est pas du tout Bergsonien.

“Un jour, peut-être, le siècle sera Deleuzien”, Michel Foucault