Constructing the non-judgmental event
Bruno Ganz's affective ethics in Knife in the head and in The white city
pp. 221-233
in: Silke Panse, Dennis Rothermel (eds), A critique of judgment in film and television, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstract
In his essay, "To Have Done with Judgment," Gilles Deleuze makes a clear and deliberate break with Kant on the question of judgment as a temporally infinite and unpayable debt to the universal and unseen deity — in effect, indebtedness as an incessant postponement and deferral, thereby guaranteeing the impossibility of its redress. Instead, he reconfigures it as a finite justice relating to the body and its affects. "Kant did not invent a true critique of judgment," argues Deleuze; "on the contrary, what the book of this title established was a fantastic subjective tribunal. Breaking with the Judeo-Christian tradition, it was Spinoza who carried out the critique, and he had four great disciples to take it up again and push it further: Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud" (Deleuze 1997a, 126). Spinoza's seminal role lay in his ability to organize the infinite — Kant's predetermined basis for judgment — in terms of the dystopic (or disutopia), in the affirmative sense of what he called conatus (roughly translated as the condition of "enduring in your own becoming").
