L’expérience de Persona et la création du concept d’image-affection par Gilles Deleuze

ABSTRACT: This article aims to show that Ingmar Bergman’s Persona has played an important role in the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze. On the one hand, the article emphasizes that experiencing this film allowed Deleuze to construct the concept of « image-affection, » thereby helping him to reconnect with a problematic specific to Henri Bergson, in spite of the latter’s virulent condemnation of cinema. On the other hand, this article establishes a necessary connection between the creation of this concept and the film by foregrounding the inadequacies of phenomenological and Sartrian existentialist approaches which restricted themselves to locating in Persona an illustration of their key concepts, concepts which finally proved impossible to maintain in view of the film’s culminating scene in which the faces, in close-up, of the two protagonists are superimposed.