Paris and its Doubles: Deleuze/Rivette Garin Dowd Thames Valley University Abstract This essay sets out from the premise that the films of Jacques Rivette merit sustained reconsideration in the framework provided by Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image. In particular it explores the concepts of ‘the powers of the false’ and ‘fabulation’ as ways of engaging with Rivette’s cinematic oeuvre, with a particular focus on his Paris-set films. On this basis the article seeks to add to the readings undertaken by Deleuze himself and, in the light of Rivette’s cine-thinking, to examine in tandem both films to which Deleuze directly responded, such as Le Pont du nord, and later post-Deleuze renegotiations of the city such as Secret défense. Keywords: Powers of the false, fabulation, the virtual, bifurcation, urban space, the time-image In his early study of Nietzsche Deleuze asserts: ‘our highest thoughts take falsehood into account; moreover, they never stop turning falsehood into a higher power, an affirmative and artistic power that is brought into effect, verified and becomes true in the work of art’ (Deleuze 1983: 105). The second of Deleuze’s two volumes devoted to cinema returns to the theme of the ‘powers of the false’ first introduced in Nietzsche and Philosophy. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image the emergence of the powers of the false is seen as symptomatic of the broader transformation which Deleuze associates with the break with the movement-image – that is with the precepts and modus operandi, not to mention the conceptual support-structure, of ‘sensory-motor’-driven or organic cinematographic presentation. What this emergence seeks to displace is a cinematographic model dependent on a certain stance vis-à-vis representation, verisimilitude and realism. ‘The space of a sensory-motor situation’, Cinema 2 informs us, ‘is a setting which is already specified and presupposes an action which discloses it, or prompts a reaction which adapts to or modifies it’ (Deleuze 1989: 7). Organised as it is by a vector of transcendence guaranteed to consolidate ‘good form’, organic