Un iconismo senza somiglianza. Deleuze e la catastrofe del segno

For Deleuze, there is no world to represent behind images. Images are not faded copies of reality. The Deleuzian images have definitively broken free from their imprisonment in the psychic tabernacle to become the flux of reality. Deleuze’s writings on cinema are first and foremost books on cosmology and only secondarily studies on cinema. For Deleuze, it is the universe that produces images, that is “a cinema in itself”. What happens when an image does not statically photograph reality but contributes to setting it in motion and creating it? Deleuze leads us towards a problematisation of this issue, venturing into a theoretical project with a paradoxical (and as such, heuristic) force, that of an iconism without resemblance. Or rather, an iconism that never ceases to produce resemblance through the disparity of the simulacrum. Ultimately, the aim of this article is to highlight how signs are small catastrophes, or, literally, reversals of resemblance in their conceptual double: the simulacrum.