How do you like your philosophers on art? Suspicious? (See Plato’s condemnation of the painter as mere “creator of appearances,” little better than the poets he has banished from his ideal city.) Solemn and evaluative? (There’s Kant for that, on the universal grounds for aesthetic judgments.) Deliciously specific? (Enjoy Hegel’s praise of oils over tempera for the effect their prolonged drying time has on the translucency of layers.) Almost parodically high-minded? (Go read Heidegger on van Gogh’s shoes; Derrida called the tone “ridiculous and lamentable.”) Provocative? (Baudrillard on the “end of art” will get you there.)
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Regardless, one must keep in mind Schlegel’s 1797 warning:“One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art.”
Gilles Deleuze had very particular views of both, and no better introduction to them could be found than his seminars on painting, delivered in 1981 at the Experimental University of Vincennes, edited and published in French in 2023 as Sur la peinture, and newly translated into English by Charles J. Stivale for the University of Minnesota Press.
The eight lectures turn on a central question—though not the expected one. Instead of asking what philosophy can reveal about painting, Deleuze wonders what concepts painting can offer to philosophy. In pursuit of an answer, he conjures a list of provocative terms including catastrophe, the diagram, figure, blurring, code, modulation, color-structure, and color-weight. He meditates at length on slaked plaster; changes his mind about Balthus; alternately cites and denigrates art historians; makes controversial historical generalizations; and focuses on a handful of his favorite painters, including Titian, Turner, Cézanne, van Gogh, Klee, Mondrian, Pollock, and Bacon. The result is slightly chaotic and utterly magnificent.
The same year he gave this seminar, Deleuze published Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, a more systematic, precise, quotable meditation on many of these concepts. If you want your philosophy to go down easy, that’s the book for you. These lectures offer something else, something—there is no better way to word it—more wonderful than the tidied-up monograph. This is how one should encounter Deleuze: speaking, animated, thinking as he goes.
Deleuze’s philosophical impact cannot be overstated. His work between the 1950s and 1990s indelibly shaped the major conceptual upheavals of the last half of the 20th century: poststructuralism and postmodernism. His influence reverberated well after his death in 1995: key movements like the affective turn and new materialism would not have happened without Deleuze. Each new publication set fields off in unprecedented directions. His two books on cinema—published in French in 1983/1985, translated to English in 1986/1989—invented analytic terms (the movement-image, the time-image, the any-space-whatever) that remain central to the discipline of film and media studies. It is the rare graduate student in the humanities today who would not have some familiarity with Deleuzian concepts like the virtual, the rhizome, multiplicity, nomadism, schizoanalysis, war-machines, becoming, or deterritorialization.
Michel Foucault once predicted that this century would ultimately be known as “Deleuzian”—an utterance that Deleuze insisted was a joke. That hasn’t stopped it from also being true.
It can seem as if there is a Deleuze for everyone—the philosophers have his 1968 Difference and Repetition and virtuosic re-readings of the history of philosophy (with books on Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Leibniz); the literary scholars have meditations on Kafka and Beckett; visual studies has The Logic of Sensation and the two Cinema books; and the Left has his co-authored works with the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. But despite the heterogeneity of his oeuvre, there is a throughline to Deleuze’s thinking and it turns on his definition of philosophy.
Philosophy, for Deleuze, is an act of creation: “the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts,” as he words it. When he contended with Bergson, Spinoza, or Leibniz, it was to extract what concepts each thinker had generated. (Reading this way is no chaste, cerebral habit: in his 1973 “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” he wrote, “I saw myself taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous.”) Art, for Deleuze, likewise involved the generation of specific percepts and affects—modes of sensation that exceed individual experience. As generative practices, philosophy and art were not so different.
Put simply, Deleuze asked of anything—a philosophical treatise, a drug, a political logic, a work of art—How does it work? In the spring of 1981, at the new campus of Vincennes-St. Denis, the question was: How does painting work?
Deleuze had been teaching at Vincennes since 1970 and would do so until his retirement in 1987. Founded in response to the student protests of May 1968, the place was an unprecedented effort to radically reform education, making it a site of freedom, less hierarchical, more accessible (enrolled students included workers, activists, psychiatric patients, artists, the unemployed, the merely curious). Now known as Paris VIII, its list of former faculty reads like a history of 20th-century radical thought: along with Deleuze, there was Hélène Cixous, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Luce Irigaray.
This context matters. In an interview with Claire Parnet (part of the eight-hour television program L’abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, which remains one of the finest entry points into Deleuze’s thought), Deleuze said of a Vincennes seminar that it was “fully philosophy in its own right” in that it was “addressed equally to philosophers and to non-philosophers, exactly like painting is addressed to painters and non-painters, or music not being limited to music specialists.” Accordingly, he didn’t regard courses as occasions to deliver a complete thought to a passive audience. Rather, he practiced “a musical conception of a course.” He elaborated to Parnet: “It occurs frequently that someone doesn’t understand at a particular moment, and then there is something like a delayed effect, a bit like in music. At one moment, you don’t understand a movement, and then three minutes later, it becomes clear, or ten minutes later: something happened in the meantime. […] So, for me, a course was always something that was not destined to be understood in its totality. A course is a kind of matter in movement […] in which each person, each group, or each student at the limit takes from it what suits him/her.” The student will not follow or understand—or be interested in—everything. (This is clear in the idiosyncratic questions from students left in the transcriptions.) But if she keeps watch, she may find something in which to take a particular interest. Thoughts are treated like bricks, fabrics, tools with which anyone—a mathematician, an artist, a patient, an activist—might then go and do (think, make, build) something new.
The thinking is the point, and accordingly these seminars repeat, meander, worry a concept or an example until it is encountered in different, unexpected ways. So I can summarize Deleuze’s substantive claims about painting in, oh, about 400 words below. But are you sure you want me to? Such an account will lose the slow unfolding, the digressions and fluctuations, the feeling of the rhythm of the seminar. You might want to skip the next two paragraphs. I would.
Here goes nothing. In response to the desire to explore “the possibility that painting has something to offer philosophy,” Deleuze tells a story. In the beginning, there is chaos: this is the pre-pictorial condition of the painting. The painting doesn’t exist yet; anything could happen. Then, some “catastrophe” occurs: a generative chaos from which a “diagram” emerges, which will lead to the painting itself, or the “pictorial fact.” Why does painting require a catastrophe? It is due to “the struggle with ghosts that precedes painting”: struggle, thy name is cliché. There is no such thing as a blank canvas; they are already too full of the ready-made, received wisdom. The diagram is like “a kind of cleanup zone that creates catastrophe on the painting, erasing all the previous clichés,” blasting away what must be subtracted for the painting to come into being. This diagram is a properly philosophical concept (perhaps the central concept painting offers), and it takes various positions, from which abstract, Expressionist, and figurative possibilities will (or might) emerge.
Continuing: The diagram is a navigation of “hand-eye dynamics.” That is: whether it is a stroke, the Impressionist comma, Cézanne’s dabs, or baster drips, painting is fundamentally “manual,” referring to “a hand sick of taking orders from the eye.” Painting thereby “modulates” light and color. “Painting itself,” Deleuze insists, “is not decomposing and recomposing an effect, but, rather, capturing a force.” (This assertion enables him to casually advance the wild claim that “the pictorial fact is fundamentally and essentially Mannerist.”) There are different historical regimes of modulation (pulling from Riegl, Worringer, Wölfflin) that distinguish Egyptian from Greek, 16th-century from 17th-.
His thoughts on color, which govern the final three sessions, could be the subject of a whole other course. Passing through Goethe’s color triangle and chromatic circle, Deleuze ends the course with a luminous account of four regimes of color—pale, bright, muted, and deep—themselves determined by different approaches to ground, modulation, saturation, and means of reproduction. Caravaggio invents dark ground; Vermeer works a bright regime. In the 19th century, “color begins to exist for itself,” light and line now derived from color, ground becoming less important. Modern color—this is where the last seminar ends—leaves out figuration and works through color-structure and color-force, creating a new set of possibilities for painting. Fin.
Did that leave you somewhat cold? Philosophy doesn’t work as TL;DR. Consider what such summaries omit: the asides, for one. True to the seminar’s improvisatory form—Deleuze brought few notes, no slides, just a few books from which to quote—it is the spontaneous questions that bring everything to a halt. “What does it mean when a painter hates a color?” he wonders in session six. Having been posed, it must be considered. Session three threatens to shut the entire enterprise down when he muses on whether we ought to “believe in a philosophy of art” at all. Nor will any précis capture how brilliant Deleuze is at naming the risks of art, including the danger of “swampy colors,” gray metonymizing the lure of a muddled diagram. “If you don’t see in a painting how close it came to turning into a mess, how it almost failed, you cannot have enough admiration for the painter.” There are constant lines of delight: of Cézanne’s insistence that, after a lifetime, he understood the apple, Deleuze says, “It’s like everything else: a writer, a philosopher, he or she doesn’t understand much, there’s no point in exaggerating… What did Michelangelo understand? He understood, for instance a wide male back. Not a woman’s back… An entire life for a wide male back, okay.” Perhaps you’d never mark this line, but it might also make you pause, look up from the book, test it against your mental catalog of impressions. Perhaps it makes you think about your own work differently now.
There are two ways of reading anything: pen scalpel in hand, extracting thoughts you imagine to be locked in a book like amber. Or, you can read to encounter a spark thrown off in the moment of reading, entering your flesh—like force, like love, like a parasite—unnerving and undoing one. An idea moves you, surprises you, makes you regard something differently. This demands patience and generosity. It requires a willingness to take the seminar.
How do you like your philosophers on art? I like mine jolted, delighted, curious, furious, thinking. I like them brash with the insistence that philosophy and art will not remain unscathed by their encounter. Deleuze, paraphrasing Spinoza, famously wrote that we do not know all it is a body can do. We also do not know all it is that painting can do. If we did, we wouldn’t need either art or philosophy anymore. Keep lively.