\n\tHow do you like your philosophers on art? Suspicious? (See Plato\u2019s condemnation of the painter as mere \u201ccreator of appearances,\u201d little better than the poets he has banished from his ideal city.) Solemn and evaluative? (There\u2019s Kant for that, on the universal grounds for aesthetic judgments.) Deliciously specific? (Enjoy Hegel\u2019s 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\u2019s shoes; Derrida called the tone \u201cridiculous and lamentable.\u201d) Provocative? (Baudrillard on the \u201cend of art\u201d will get you there.)<\/p>\n
\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n
\n\tRegardless, one must keep in mind Schlegel\u2019s 1797 warning:\u201cOne of two things is usually lacking in the so-called Philosophy of Art: either philosophy or art.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tGilles 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe eight lectures turn on a central question\u2014though 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, C\u00e9zanne, van Gogh, Klee, Mondrian, Pollock, and Bacon. The result is slightly chaotic and utterly magnificent.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe 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\u2019s the book for you. These lectures offer something else, something\u2014there is no better way to word it\u2014more wonderful than the tidied-up monograph. This is how one should encounter Deleuze: speaking, animated, thinking as he goes.<\/p>\n
\n\tDeleuze\u2019s 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\u2014published in French in 1983\/1985, translated to English in 1986\/1989\u2014invented 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tMichel Foucault once predicted that this century would ultimately be known as \u201cDeleuzian\u201d\u2014an utterance that Deleuze insisted was a joke. That hasn\u2019t stopped it from also being true.<\/p>\n
\n\tIt can seem as if there is a Deleuze for everyone\u2014the 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 F\u00e9lix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. But despite the heterogeneity of his oeuvre, there is a throughline to Deleuze\u2019s thinking and it turns on his definition of philosophy.<\/p>\n
\n\tPhilosophy, for Deleuze, is an act of creation: \u201cthe art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts,\u201d 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 \u201cLetter to a Harsh Critic,\u201d he wrote, \u201cI saw myself taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous.\u201d) Art, for Deleuze, likewise involved the generation of specific percepts and affects\u2014modes of sensation that exceed individual experience. As generative practices, philosophy and art were not so different.<\/p>\n
\n\tPut simply, Deleuze asked of anything\u2014a philosophical treatise, a drug, a political logic, a work of art\u2014How does it work? In the spring of 1981, at the new campus of Vincennes-St. Denis, the question was: How does painting work?<\/p>\n
\n\tDeleuze 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 H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cixous, Michel Foucault, Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard, Luce Irigaray.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis context matters. In an interview with Claire Parnet (part of the eight-hour television program L\u2019ab\u00e9c\u00e9daire de Gilles Deleuze, which remains one of the finest entry points into Deleuze\u2019s thought), Deleuze said of a Vincennes seminar that it was \u201cfully philosophy in its own right\u201d in that it was \u201caddressed 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.\u201d Accordingly, he didn\u2019t regard courses as occasions to deliver a complete thought to a passive audience. Rather, he practiced \u201ca musical conception of a course.\u201d He elaborated to Parnet: \u201cIt occurs frequently that someone doesn\u2019t understand at a particular moment, and then there is something like a delayed effect, a bit like in music. At one moment, you don\u2019t understand a movement, and then three minutes later, it becomes clear, or ten minutes later: something happened in the meantime. [\u2026] 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 [\u2026] in which each person, each group, or each student at the limit takes from it what suits him\/her.\u201d The student will not follow or understand\u2014or be interested in\u2014everything. (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\u2014a mathematician, an artist, a patient, an activist\u2014might then go and do (think, make, build) something new.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tHere goes nothing. In response to the desire to explore \u201cthe possibility that painting has something to offer philosophy,\u201d Deleuze tells a story. In the beginning, there is chaos: this is the pre-pictorial condition of the painting. The painting doesn\u2019t exist yet; anything could happen. Then, some \u201ccatastrophe\u201d occurs: a generative chaos from which a \u201cdiagram\u201d emerges, which will lead to the painting itself, or the \u201cpictorial fact.\u201d Why does painting require a catastrophe? It is due to \u201cthe struggle with ghosts that precedes painting\u201d: struggle, thy name is clich\u00e9. There is no such thing as a blank canvas; they are already too full of the ready-made, received wisdom. The diagram is like \u201ca kind of cleanup zone that creates catastrophe on the painting, erasing all the previous clich\u00e9s,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tContinuing: The diagram is a navigation of \u201chand-eye dynamics.\u201d That is: whether it is a stroke, the Impressionist comma, C\u00e9zanne\u2019s dabs, or baster drips, painting is fundamentally \u201cmanual,\u201d referring to \u201ca hand sick of taking orders from the eye.\u201d Painting thereby \u201cmodulates\u201d light and color. \u201cPainting itself,\u201d Deleuze insists, \u201cis not decomposing and recomposing an effect, but, rather, capturing a force.\u201d (This assertion enables him to casually advance the wild claim that \u201cthe pictorial fact is fundamentally and essentially Mannerist.\u201d) There are different historical regimes of modulation (pulling from Riegl, Worringer, W\u00f6lfflin) that distinguish Egyptian from Greek, 16th-century from 17th-.<\/p>\n
\n\tHis thoughts on color, which govern the final three sessions, could be the subject of a whole other course. Passing through Goethe\u2019s color triangle and chromatic circle, Deleuze ends the course with a luminous account of four regimes of color\u2014pale, bright, muted, and deep\u2014themselves 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, \u201ccolor begins to exist for itself,\u201d light and line now derived from color, ground becoming less important. Modern color\u2014this is where the last seminar ends\u2014leaves out figuration and works through color-structure and color-force, creating a new set of possibilities for painting. Fin.<\/p>\n
\n\tDid that leave you somewhat cold? Philosophy doesn\u2019t work as TL;DR. Consider what such summaries omit: the asides, for one. True to the seminar\u2019s improvisatory form\u2014Deleuze brought few notes, no slides, just a few books from which to quote\u2014it is the spontaneous questions that bring everything to a halt. \u201cWhat does it mean when a painter hates a color?\u201d 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 \u201cbelieve in a philosophy of art\u201d at all. Nor will any pr\u00e9cis capture how brilliant Deleuze is at naming the risks of art, including the danger of \u201cswampy colors,\u201d gray metonymizing the lure of a muddled diagram. \u201cIf you don\u2019t 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.\u201d There are constant lines of delight: of C\u00e9zanne\u2019s insistence that, after a lifetime, he understood the apple, Deleuze says, \u201cIt\u2019s like everything else: a writer, a philosopher, he or she doesn\u2019t understand much, there\u2019s no point in exaggerating\u2026 What did Michelangelo understand? He understood, for instance a wide male back. Not a woman\u2019s back\u2026 An entire life for a wide male back, okay.\u201d Perhaps you\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tThere 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\u2014like force, like love, like a parasite\u2014unnerving 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tHow 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\u2019t need either art or philosophy anymore. Keep lively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How do you like your philosophers on art? Suspicious? (See Plato\u2019s condemnation of the painter as mere \u201ccreator…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":133530,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,1033,171,80806,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-133529","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-reframed","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115002712145673596","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}