Constructing the Non-Judgmental Event: Bruno Ganz’s Affective Ethics in Knife in the Head and in The White City

Abstract

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”).

The system of cruelty is everywhere opposed to the doctrine of judgment.

(Deleuze 1997a, 128)