Luminous Philosophy

The photonic plane is the most comprehensive of Deleuze’s planes of immanence. The chapter first explains the photon’s complementarity, and the luminous framework from within which Deleuze develops his notion of a universal concrete. It then shifts to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s folding of the logic of light onto the logic of affects, and to Foucault’s luminism, in which statements and visibilities emerge from the sonorous and luminous planes of immanence respectively. After contrasting the actual colour that defines luminism in painting with the virtual light that defines cinematic luminism, it explicates the philosophical complementarity of Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, which embody, both in terms of content and of form, Deleuze’s luminous and projective philosophy. In the crystal image, as the real projective plane’s point-at-infinity, the actual and the virtual become identical. This unthinkable, intensely luminous point marks the vertigo of Deleuze’s philosophy and is its ultimate conceptual koan.