The Philosopher as a Line A Deleuzian Perspective on Drawing and the Mobile Image of Thought (original) (raw)

2019, ABERRANT NUPTIALS Deleuze and Artistic Research

What is important for Deleuze about the image, whether a painting, drawing, or any other form of artwork, is not that they are visual representations, but instead that they make visible. The question is, what is it that they make visible? To address it, I will follow a rather circuitous path, taking my own line of thought for a walk, through a rumination on the figure of the philosopher, or rather the philosopher as conceptual personae (as figure). In doing so one must also speak of the incessant glissement that Deleuze indicates between the image and the concept, which one could interpret as a relation of double-capture where art and philosophy enter into a zone of indeterminacy. A conceptual persona is an image of a philosophical system, a way of thinking, an overlaying which provides clarification to what Deleuze thinks philosophy itself is, the creation of concepts, and what he is particularly doing, providing a new image of thought. What is interesting is how he describes his own concept creation as a process of perpetual drawing and revision: je ferais beaucoup de petits dessins, de faire des schémas, alors vous vous pourrez corriger les schémas, alors vous vous pourrez corriger les schémas, ce sera épatant, vous viendrez du fond et o corrigera mes schémas. The description of thought as drawing gives insight into Deleuze as conceptual persona – that is, what preoccupies Deleuze and characterizes his layering upon layering of images in his own philosophy is the struggle to present an image of thought in motion, an image that captures thought as a spatio-temporal fluidity, and addresses the paradox of providing a concept that does not hypostasize itself – the point of a becoming predicated on aberrant nuptials: continuous variation. The necessity of the double-capture of concept and image is as follows: language as the method of expressing concepts captures thought within its wordy husks. Of course, this is explains the need to move beyond mere logos towards the affectivity of the image. Bridging the space between thinking and seeing is fundamentally important to this paradox, as is, I will argue, the particular mode of the visible as sketch or drawing. This essay develops an account of a new conceptual personae -bringing together concept and image, being and practice, human and artifice, to conceive philosopher as line. In Deleuze’s work, the line represents the priority of passage over stasis. The line is moving, and always escaping; it is nomadic. The pouissance of the line, its frenetic movement is retained in a certain kind of image – that of the diagram, which is made most apparent in certain kinds of images, the sketch or the drawing. Drawing becomes the proper image or form of the philosopher, and not just a drawing, but the act of drawing – the philosopher becomes an activity, a line of flight. Deleuze privileges the sketch or diagram, in order to illuminate the unfinished, even incessant process of drawing – movement. The diagram is in-formed by cosmic forces, thus there is a living breathing relationship between Deleuzian image/philosophy making and the immanent, material conditions from which they arise. Thus, engaging with the diagrammic image is a matter of provoking a kind of affective, palpable thought, one that eludes the traditional form of the concept – an affect-event, thought in motion.