A Circle That Never Closes 161

In contrast with Chaplin’s interrelation with the film, I will now turn to Deleuze’s “law of the small form and burlesque” (Deleuze 2005:173-181), in

132 _{Chaplin Today: The Gold Rush, 2003. Directed by Le Péron, S. USA: Warner} Home Video.

which he describes how in slapstick comedy films, situation is deduced from the action. Deleuze applies a formula to the process of Chaplin comedies, “a very slight difference in the action or between two actions, which brings out an infinite distance between two situations, and which exists only to bring out that distance” (Deleuze 2005:173). I am interested in how Deleuze’s work on films traces to his work on the event such as in The Logic of Sense, where two series of events that have tiny differences are “regulated by a strange object” (Deleuze 2004:51). In Cinema 1: The Movement Image (Deleuze 2005:173), a tiny difference in two actions - or gestures - can create a huge distance in two situations. The result of this, he calls a “laughter-emotion circuit,” in which laughter refers to the slight difference, and the emotion refers to the great distance. “If a slight difference in the action induces very distant or opposable situations - S and S’ - and makes them alternate, one of these situations will be ‘really’ touching, horrific and tragic...” (Deleuze 2005:174-175). Deleuze writes that of the two elements in the laughter-emotion circuit, one refers to the slight difference, the other to the great distance, without the one diminishing the other, but as interchangeable elements, “triggering each other off again” (Deleuze 2005:175). Although he views these opposable situations as alternating, he also claims that the slight difference in action exists only to bring out infinite distance between two situations (Deleuze 2005:173).

Deleuze’s law seems to reductively take Chaplin’s gags to be a difference in the action. Deleuze is concerned with the relation of actions to situations, yet he treats the Chaplin gag as a rupture, an interruption. This is because Deleuze sees relation in interruption. S and S’ are related through the conjunction ‘and’. Writing on the power of ‘and’, Deleuze posits, ‘and’, being not one or the other,

is an unperceivable line between the one and the other; unperceivable like a vanishing border. For Deleuze, all relations follow from ‘and’, and through the multiple connections that ‘and’ creates. The multiple connections from which all relations follow are those that disconnect identity (Deleuze 1976:11). He surmises that audience reaction derives from Chaplin’s gestures, which are close to each other, but far apart from corresponding situations (Deleuze 2005:174). Each tiny difference is related to that which is other than itself. They are distinct entities that are at the same time connected.

For Zupančič, the chicken and Chaplin are connected. For Deleuze, the “and…and…and…” is “exactly the creative stutter” (Deleuze 1976:11) that occurs when language, under pressure, has reached its limit. Chaplin does not use the power of ‘and’ in the way that Deleuze does because the chicken and the Tramp are always already connected. This is why Zupančič says the chicken realises that it is really Chaplin (Zupančič 2008:20). The audience and the Tramp are always already connected. Chaplin is in the interrelated world of the film. Chaplin, by almost entirely bypassing language, creates his own brand of stuttering through movement that ‘speaks’ to the audience. What are connected for Chaplin are the audience, characters and the film.

Establishing a relationship with the audience is important for Chaplin because in identification with the Tramp, the audience becomes emotionally involved. Chaplin, writing about his technique in 1918, says that it is human nature to experience for oneself, the emotions of the figures on the screen. He goes on to describe the satisfaction and the humour that people find in seeing the rich get the brunt of the joke. “Nine tenths of people in the world are poor and resent the

wealth of the other tenth” (Chaplin 1918:134-137). Deleuze’s laughter-emotion circuit does not consider the formula that Chaplin divulges in 1918 and that can be found in most of his films and writings. This could be because Deleuze presupposes the audience, and does not recognise the relationship between Chaplin and audience. Laughter and emotion are part of the interconnected world of the film, which includes audience.

In presupposing the audience, Deleuze misconstrues Chaplin’s connection. In Deleuze’s laughter-emotion circuit, Chaplin’s gestures and their differences are connected through interruption. Chaplin, according to his own writings on his work, sees connection between his movements as the Tramp and the audience. Can Chaplin manage immediacy and interruption that is not a self-interrupting auto-affection? Such immediacy would interfere with the relation Deleuze sees in interruption. I will illustrate how Chaplin does carry out immediacy and interruption through listening and through touching.

While Derrida sees a metaphysics of presence and immediacy between touching and the touched, Chrétien identifies an aporia in the study of touch. Touch is an act of presence, but Chrétien believes it is a mistake to say that touching is immediate, because we do not know what touch is or what it means. (Chrétien 2004:85;88). Touch is immersed into what it perceives (Chrétien 2004:119). “We touch continuously, if nothing else at least the ground with our feet.” Chaplin makes contact with the ground in a form of “tactile exploration” (Chrétien 2004:90) that is his Tramp walk. His steps utter dialogue with each other, with Chaplin himself, and with the audience. He not only makes his feet listened to, but also touched.

This evokes the broader question of Le Toucher: can there be immediacy without a metaphysics of presence? Merleau-Ponty tries to avoid this problem, claiming self-touching is to be open to oneself, and not an object of oneself (Merleau- Ponty 1968:249). As Watkin explains, for Merleau-Ponty, touching is imminent, but “the circle never closes in self-presence” (Watkin 2009:21).

For Derrida, metaphysics always desires immediate presence and this question of immediate presence runs throughout Le Toucher. The text, however, offers no solution to the issue of metaphysics as a Eurocentric philosophical tradition. Robert Bernasconi and Lucius Outlaw, in their deconstructive critiques of Continental Philosophy, both deem the tradition to be ethnocentric (Bernasconi 1997, 2003) (Outlaw 1990, 1996). ‘Continental’ philosophers, Bernasconi asserts, fail “to see more than one continent” (Bernasconi 2003:2). As Simon Critchley points out, philosophy is not indigenous to Europe. Greek culture is “a hybrid ensemble,” Critchley asserts (Critchley 1999:126).133 In order to study the question of immediacy, I will turn next to African philosophy.