Gilles Deleuze: Beyond Peirce’s Semiotics

This paper studies the role of the semiotic discussions of Charles Sanders Peirce, the American philosopher and mathematician, in the formation of Deleuze’s first leading book on cinema, Cinema 1: the Movement-Image, in which the author surpasses Peirce’s semiotics. We will show how Deleuze creates a new form of signs in his second leading book on cinema, Cinema 2: the Time-Image. Deleuze had tried to couple the patterns of Peirce’s semiotics in his first book with the philosophical discussions on different epochs of the classical cinema. In his second book, he tried to surpass Peirce’s semiotics, proposing patterns of new semiotics concerning modern cinema by modeling on Peirce’s semiotics. This paper attempts to propose the Peircian signs in Cinema 1: the Movement-Image and Deleuze’s modeling on the signs in Cinema 2: the Time-Image, showing that such a surpassing for Deleuze is the key point of under-standing philosophy. It helps him to reach his particular semiotics based on both Peirce semiotics and Bergson’s philosophy of time, while being completely different from them: noosign.