RESEARCH CHAPTER 10
How unnamed, unreturned, and unaccounted-for deaths organize the present
The dead continue to organize the living’s time; a corpse, funeral, or ghost does not automatically make a death-image.
Central question
How do deaths that remain unnamed, unreturned, unaccounted for, or unmourned continue to organise the institutional time of the living?
Questions still open
- Which institutional incompletion does each film keep sensible, and how does each avoid supplying an omniscient voice for the dead?
Argument and analysis
The dead continue to organize the living’s time; a corpse, funeral, or ghost does not automatically make a death-image.
When name, body, responsibility, law, or mourning remains incomplete, the past returns as time debt. Cemetery of Splendour, Vitalina Varela, Viet and Nam, and Meeting with Pol Pot keep institutional absence sensible without speaking for the dead.
Record who is placed, omitted, or exposed to a second death; treat mourning as an institutional relation, not a mood.
Scope
Hypothesis: the death-image has a contemporary scholarly discussion; 'time debt' and its institutional criteria are the atlas's further analytical framework.
- Chinese manuscript locator
- Bearing Time Chinese DOCX, paragraphs 879–950.
References
- 01
CHINESE RESEARCH MANUSCRIPT
Bearing time: the expanded thirteen chapters
The complete Chinese chapter and its bibliography.
- Locator
- DOCX paragraphs 879–950
- 02
SCHOLARSHIP
Deleuze time-image: global research review
Connects Susana Viegas's research on the death-image with the Death-Images special issue.
- Locator
- Death-image route in the review, corresponding to Susana Viegas's article and the 2025 Death-Images issue.
- Note
- Atlas literature review; the listed articles and monographs are the sources for individual arguments.
- 03
ATLAS ANALYSIS
Deleuze time-image film catalogue
Compares action, memory, sound, and media material across films.
- Locator
- The corresponding film entries in the Deleuze time-image film catalogue.
Films and concepts
Concepts and terms · 1
- 01
Films and viewing entries · 4
- 01
- 02
- 03
- 04
Counterexamples and limits
If a corpse, funeral, or ghost merely solves a mystery, triggers revenge, or closes grief without leaving name, law, responsibility, or communal relations unfinished, death as subject matter does not by itself make a death-image.
Further reading
Sheets and peaks are two different chronosigns: recollection searches a virtually preserved past for a sheet, while peaks let incompossible presents each persist in its own right.
06Archives preserve materials while later history changes their evidentiary meaningAn archive’s temporality comes from the institutional chain of filming, naming, classifying, storing, accessing, and reusing.
09Why must intimacy share one future?Intimacy need not follow the normative sequence of meeting, marriage, reproduction, and inheritance; relations have temporal rights of their own.
13When heterogeneous times rewrite one another rather than merely coexist on screenThe final chapter turns the time-image into a testable relation: at least two heterogeneous times rewrite one another, shot, sound, editing, or apparatus carries the change, and a replayable consequence remains.