The Thought of Immanence: A Reflection Beyond Cinema
by Spyridon St. Kogkas
François Laruelle’s early dissertation “The Absence of Being” shaped by the intensity of postwar European thought was, by his own admission, marked by the impression Antonioni’s La Notte left on him. The film seemed to him less a representation of alienation than a lived demonstration of the absence of ontological grounding, of a world persisting without the guarantee of Being. It offered a cinema where presences are fragile, spaces autonomous, and relations unresolved, a cinema that suggested how thought might proceed without recourse to the philosophical decision. To return to La Notte today through this lens is to revisit not only Antonioni’s images but also the possibility of a thinking beyond ontology, a meditation on immanence opened up by cinema itself.
Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961) has often been interpreted as a modern parable of alienation, an elegy for a society unable to sustain intimacy in the face of technological and social change. While such readings remain valuable, they tend to bind the film to external categories: sociology, existentialism, psychoanalysis. Yet Antonioni’s images do not simply illustrate these frameworks. They resist closure, turning away from the desire to elevate experience into a transcendent order. What La Notte offers is a meditation on immanence, life as it unfolds without the promise of resolution, without appeal to a higher meaning. To reflect on the film is to practice a kind of thinking inseparable from the textures of its images, sounds, and silences.
Classical cinema is structured by decision: a rupture occurs, characters respond, conflicts mount, and resolution arrives. This structure reflects a deeply philosophical impulse, to split reality into problem and solution, lack and fulfillment. Antonioni interrupts this decisional logic. La Notte unfolds not as a movement toward resolution but as a dispersal of situations, fragile and incomplete. Giovanni and Lidia’s visit to Tommaso’s deathbed does not transform them; their drift through Milan yields no revelation; their participation in the party leaves them untouched by catharsis. Instead, Antonioni gives us a cinema of suspension, where moments accumulate without convergence.
This refusal of decision has consequences for how we perceive the film. The spectator feels a kind of unmooring. We wait for the turn, the gesture that explains everything, the climactic rupture but Antonioni offers none. What takes its place is a different temporality, one aligned with Gilles Deleuze’s “time-image” (Cinema 2, 1985), where time is no longer subordinated to action. Duration becomes palpable; waiting becomes an experience in its own right. This is not absence of meaning but presence without hierarchy, the film insists that the unfinished is not inferior to the completed, that suspension is a mode of life.
Antonioni’s images ask us to rethink what it means to see. Jeanne Moreau’s extended walk through Milan exemplifies this. The camera follows her as she passes storefronts, looks into courtyards, pauses, listens. Nothing happens in the narrative sense, but everything happens in the phenomenological sense: perception itself is foregrounded. The city reveals itself not as allegory but as sheer presence, as a network of surfaces, textures, and temporalities coexisting without subordination.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945) provides a resonance here. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is not a window onto an abstract essence but the ground of existence itself, an intertwining of body and world. Antonioni’s camera embodies this philosophy: it does not look through the world but dwells with it. The walk is not about alienation but about dwelling in a space where meaning arises directly from contact with the world’s surfaces. This is why Antonioni has been described by Seymour Chatman (Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World, 1985) as the director who makes cinema about “the fact of not being about” the image is its own justification, its own thought.
The opening hospital sequence reinforces this immanent logic. The camera does not monumentalize death, nor does it transform Tommaso’s illness into an existential metaphor. Instead, it shows us fragility, quiet endurance, the muted presence of the dying. The silence of the scene is not emptiness but density. As Robert Kolker notes (The Altering Eye, 1983), Antonioni’s demand is not interpretation but attention: to see what is, without forcing it into allegory.Giovanni and Lidia are frequently cast as archetypes of modern alienation, but Antonioni resists turning them into symbols. They are fragile, inconsistent, subject to drift. Giovanni’s distracted pursuit of Valentina (Monica Vitti) is not the sign of a general truth about masculinity or fidelity; it is a moment in its own right, lived and unresolvable. Lidia’s melancholy is not an existential condition but a mode of being that resists codification. These figures are not allegories but singularities.
The final sequence in the field illustrates this most powerfully. Their declaration of love is strained, even hollow, yet it is not reducible to falsehood. It is lived, sincere in its insufficiency. They neither reconcile nor decisively separate. They remain suspended, caught in a relation without resolution. This is the radical gesture of the film: to affirm that suspension is not a lack but a way of existing. Existence does not always resolve into clarity. Sometimes it persists in hesitation.This recalls Emmanuel Levinas, for whom ethics arises in the encounter with the irreducible alterity of the Other. Yet here alterity appears not only in another person but in the gap between words and gestures, between presence and absence. Ethics lies in staying with that gap rather than overcoming it.
Time and Space without Teleology
Time in La Notte is not a vector aiming toward resolution. It is duration, open and unclosed. Hours pass in drift; sequences stretch without necessity. The film embodies what Giorgio Agamben calls “messianic time” (The Time That Remains, 2000) a time of the interval, where the end is suspended indefinitely. But whereas Agamben ties this suspension to redemption, Antonioni refuses transcendence. There is no messianic horizon here, only the immanence of passing time.
This temporal mode produces a particular kind of reflection. In ordinary life, we measure time in terms of projects and goals. In Antonioni’s cinema, time appears without such ends, stripped of purpose. It is a revelation of temporality as such, time lived without utility. We are asked not to anticipate resolution but to remain with the flow of duration, even when it leads nowhere. This is perhaps Antonioni’s most radical demand: to accept time without teleology, to live with what is incomplete.The consequence of this temporal experience is ethical as much as aesthetic. To live without teleology is to resist the temptation of judgment that measures life against an end. Time in La Notte does not allow for the clear division of success and failure, redemption and condemnation. It dissolves those categories in the flux of passing hours. In this sense, Antonioni reeducates us in temporality, teaching us patience, attention, and a willingness to live with indeterminacy.
Space in La Notte structures behavior. The walls and windows of the hospital corridors frame gestures of fragility; the glittering yet sterile party spaces orchestrate a choreography of distraction and superficial connection; the open field at the end releases the couple into a space of suspension, stripped of social frames. These spaces are not background they shape and carry the meaning of the events within them.
Martin Heidegger’s reflections in Building Dwelling Thinking (1951) are instructive here. To dwell is not merely to occupy a pre-given space but to enter into relation with a world that already exceeds us. Antonioni’s characters inhabit spaces that do not reflect their psychology but stand alongside them as autonomous entities. The spaces themselves think, exerting pressures and resonances. When Lidia wanders through empty streets, when Giovanni drifts through the sterile party rooms, they are not merely acting in space they are being acted upon by space. Human and non-human are flattened onto the same plane.This autonomy of space links directly with the experience of time. The modernist city and the vast estate both elongate duration: their expanses make time slow, stretch, even stall. Space folds into temporality, producing the weight of suspension. To acknowledge architecture, landscape, and environment as presences in their own right is to reconfigure ethics as attentiveness not only to human others but to the world itself.
What emerges from these reflections is a rethinking of ethics. La Notte does not instruct or condemn; it does not hold Giovanni and Lidia accountable before a transcendent standard of meaning. Instead, it shows existence in its density: unfinished, unresolved, resistant to codification. The ethical gesture of the film is its refusal to moralize, its invitation to remain with the complexity of what is.
This non-judgmental ethics is inseparable from Antonioni’s treatment of time and space. By releasing us from teleology, he suspends the moral categories of success and failure. By granting space autonomy, he insists that the world itself is ethically demanding: not just people but environments, silences, and temporalities call for attention. In this sense, ethics becomes attentiveness to immanence itself.
Levinas located ethics in the infinite demand of the Other’s face. Antonioni extends this by showing us how ethics is diffused across the entire field of existence: in the other person, in the cityscape, in the intervals of waiting, in the quiet persistence of silence. Ethics here is not a law or a commandment but a form of receptivity, a capacity to let the world present itself without forcing it into meaning.Furthermore, this ethics without judgment allows us to recognize the dignity of fragility. Giovanni and Lidia’s inability to love fully is not treated as failure, but as a human truth that deserves attention. Their drifting does not need redemption to be worthy of reflection. Ethics here is not about prescribing the right way to live but about opening ourselves to the ways life unfolds even when it falters, hesitates, or remains unresolved. The ethical challenge Antonioni poses is not to decide or to correct but to endure with patience and to remain attentive.
No Spectacle but the Night wandering Democracy of Cinema thought
In many debates on cinema after the 1960s, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) looms large. For Debord, cinema becomes complicit with the logic of the spectacle: the reduction of life to representation, the mediation of experience through images that alienate us from reality. For him, the radical gesture was not to affirm cinema but to destroy it, to liberate life from its capture by the image. This position“against cinema” remains influential in certain strands of critical thought.
Antonioni, however, offers another possibility. His cinema does not fall into the dialectic of spectacle and anti-spectacle. La Notte shows that images are not necessarily alienating representations, but presences in themselves, forms of life that resist absorption into transcendence. The image is not a veil that separates us from the real but a surface that participates in the real. This is why Antonioni’s images are often described as “flat”: they do not conceal depths but offer presence as such. In this sense, cinema does not need to be destroyed to escape the spectacle; it needs to be rethought as immanent.
This perspective allows us to conceive of what might be called the “non-philosophical One of cinema.” Instead of opposing cinema to life (as Debord often does), Antonioni shows us how cinema is life, how it unfolds on the same plane as the world. His images do not mediate or alienate but coexist with reality as another modality of presence. Cinema, then, is not an ideological trap but an immanent practice of attention. It thinks, but not by subordinating the image to a concept. It thinks by remaining at the level of surfaces, durations, and encounters.In this way, Antonioni helps us imagine a path beyond the dialectic of affirmation and destruction that has haunted so much theory of the moving image. Rather than choosing between cinema as false spectacle or the end of cinema, he reveals a third possibility: cinema as a form of non-philosophy, a thought of the One that resists division, mediation, and transcendence. La Notte is thus not only a reflection on modern existence but also a proposal for what cinema itself can be: not spectacle, not anti-spectacle, but immanent thought.
Night is the suspension of order. It levels hierarchies, dissolves distinctions, and opens the possibility of encounters without precondition. In this sense, night is a figure of democracy, not the institutional democracy of states, but a democracy of wandering, where all presences coexist without hierarchy. The city at night is open to anyone, without the stratifications of daytime roles. In night, every step is equal; every figure is exposed to uncertainty.
Antonioni captures this nocturnal democracy in the very form of his film. The drifting camera, the long silences, the suspension of decisions all mirror the condition of night, where meaning is not imposed but arises provisionally, in passing encounters. The party scenes, though socially stratified, also reveal moments of suspension: spaces where the boundaries of class and role blur under the sway of nocturnal dispersal. Night thus emerges as a political as well as aesthetic figure: it is the condition for a democracy of immanence, where every fragment of existence can appear without subordination.This democracy of night is fragile, precarious, easily foreclosed by the return of day and its demands. But in its fragility lies its force. Night shows us that another relation to existence is possible: one without hierarchy, without teleology, without transcendence. The wandering of Giovanni and Lidia is not only personal but emblematic of this nocturnal democracy, where even faltering, unresolved relations are allowed to exist without judgment. To affirm night is to affirm the equality of all appearances, all presences, however fleeting.
Time, space, and ethics converge in this vision. Time becomes duration without end, lived in suspension; space becomes presence, acting with equal weight as the human; ethics becomes attentiveness to immanence without judgment. These three dimensions are not separate but woven together: the temporality of suspension opens onto an ethics of patience; the autonomy of space demands receptivity; together they form a cinematic meditation on existence that resists transcendence.Thus, Antonioni offers us not despair but a new sensibility: one that lives without guarantees, without final closure, yet with profound attentiveness to life as it is. His cinema asks us to see not what lies beyond the image, but what the image itself gives. In doing so, La Notte becomes not merely a film about estrangement but a practice of dwelling with immanence, an invitation to experience the world as inexhaustibly present, fragile, and worthy of care.
In Deleuze’s words, cinema “speaks in images.” Antonioni’s images speak immanence itself. They refuse transcendence, decision, closure. They give us life as it is lived: fragmented, unresolved, yet profoundly real. La Notte teaches us that philosophy does not have a monopoly on thought. Cinema, too, thinks. And in Antonioni, it thinks with extraordinary patience, attention, and openness revealing life as immanent, fragile, nocturnal, and infinitely worthy of reflection.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford University Press, 2005.
Chatman, Seymour. Antonioni, or, The Surface of the World. University of California Press, 1985.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Zone Books, 1994 (orig. 1967).
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Harper & Row, 1971.
Kolker, Robert. The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema. Oxford University Press, 1983.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, 1962 (orig. 1945).
