This talk presents some of the concepts of time and memory developed by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). Deleuze took Henri Bergson’s concept of duration to the study of the film text in two seminal books on cinema – The Movement-image (1983) and The Time-image (1985) – which have in turn encouraged philosophers to consider his work in terms of contemporary film and art practice, and for television studies. The talk uses two recent science fiction series – the BBC’s Doctor Who and ABC’s Lost – to explain Deleuze’s approach to time and memory using concepts such as duration and the Body without Organs, the latter which he developed with Félix Guattari in their monumental project, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972-1980).

Damian Sutton is Reader in Photography at Middlesex University. He is the author of Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and the co-author with David Martin-Jones of Deleuze Reframed (I. B. Tauris, 2008) upon which this talk is based.