Thought without an image. Deleuzian philosophy as an ethics of the event (original) (raw)
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Images of the Intolerable: Deleuze on Ethical Images
This paper calls into question the privilege granted to creativity by most commentators on Deleuze by demonstrating the priority of ethics over creation in relation to the concept of the image. It takes up Jacque Derrida’s “grumble” about the central place of creativity in Deleuze, showing how this grumble is applicable to influential readers of Deleuze including Anne Sauvagnargues, Ronald Bogue and John Protevi. Another reading of Deleuze will be given which calls the priority of creation into question, rescuing Deleuze from Derrida’s grumble. Deleuze’s notion of the image will be put into a tradition of thinking the relationship between light and appearance which runs from Plato through Bergson, Heidegger and Derrida. The notion of the image as the basic material of existence is then explained to be a passive fusion of external elements and shown to be made more consistent from Difference and Repetition to Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. The paper will then show how the “good” image in Plato is fundamentally constructed based on a moral motivation, on Deleuze’s reading in Difference and Repetition. The “good” image is one which resembles the Idea which remains identical to itself over time. A Thousand Plateaus will then be called upon to demonstrate how this self-same Idea is in fact the universalization of that which remains the identical to itself in the world, that is, the Idea universalizes a purely conservative social organization which eliminates all that differs from itself. In this way, Plato institutes the moral interpretation of the world which forms a moral image of thought. Deleuze’s ethical images will be precisely those which force thought to see the intolerability of the exclusionary social organizations it universalizes. After outlining Deleuze’s notion of the splitting of time in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, we will show how the body links humanity to this splitting of time because it causes the present to collapse when it is exhausted. The bodies which are fatigued and wiped out in the present organization of social space must be given voice in a speech-act which forces thought to see the impossibility of living in the present for certain bodies. Ultimately, thought must be made to see its own embodiment, in the brain, and thus see how the boundaries it imposes upon bodies prevent its own operation outside of the strict boundaries of the dominant reality. However, it will be shown that the vision thought has of its own impossibility is constantly being buried in the past, whilst new intolerable worlds are continually arising anew. In this light, we will end with Derrida’s sensitive insight that, for Deleuze, the best thought, the best philosophy, the best writing is not concerned with the creation of the new in itself, but rather is continually haunted by the impossibility of thought and the ethical horrors of stupidity.
Encounters with the Virtual: The Experience of Art In Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy
2010
The topic of my thesis is the notion of existence as an encounter, as developed in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). What this denotes is a critical stance towards a major current in Western philosophical tradition which Deleuze nominates as representational thinking. Such thinking strives to provide a stable ground for identities by appealing to transcendent structures "behind" the apparent reality and explaining the manifest diversity of the given by such notions as essence, idea, God, or totality of the world. In contrast to this, Deleuze states that abstractions such as these do not explain anything, but rather that they need to be explained. Yet, Deleuze does not appeal merely to the given. He sees that one must posit a genetic element that accounts for experience, and this element must not be "naïvely" traced from the empirical. Deleuze nominates his philosophy as "transcendental empiricism" and he seeks to bring together the approaches of both empiricism and transcendental philosophy. In chapter one I look into the motivations of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and analyse it as an encounter between Deleuze's readings of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. This encounter regards, first of all, the question of subjectivity. Deleuze takes from Hume an orientation towards the specificity of empirical sensibility, while Kant provides Deleuze a basic framework for an account of the emergence of the empirical. The conditions of experience must be situated within the immanence of the world and, accordingly, understood as changing. What this amounts to is a conception of identity as nonessential process. A pre-given concept of identity does not explain the nature of things, but the concept itself must be explained. From this point of view, the process of individualization must become the central concern. In chapter two I discuss Deleuze's concept of the affect as the basis of identity and his affiliation with the theories of Gilbert Simondon and Jakob von Uexküll. From this basis develops a morphogenetic theory of individuation-as-process. In analysing such a process of individuation, the modal category of the virtual becomes of great value, being an open, indeterminate "charge" of potentiality. As the virtual concerns becoming or the continuous process of actualisation, then time, rather than space, will be the privileged field of consideration. Chapter three is devoted to the discussion of the temporal aspect of the virtual and difference-without-identity. The work of Bergson regarding the nature of time is especially important to Deleuze. As "pure" time is heterogeneous, the essentially temporal process of subjectification results in a conception of the subject as composition: an assemblage of heterogeneous elements. Therefore art and aesthetic experience is valued by Deleuze because they disclose the construct-like nature of subjectivity in the sensations they produce. Through the domain of the aesthetic the subject is immersed in the network of affectivity that is the material diversity of the world. Chapter four addresses a phenomenon displaying this diversified indentity: the simulacrum. Both Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard use the concept in order to emphasise an identity that is not grounded in an essence. However, I see a decisive difference between them. Developed on the basis of the simulacrum, a theory of identity as assemblage emerges in chapter five. As the problematic of simulacra concerns perhaps foremost the artistic presentation, I shall look into the identity of a work of art as assemblage. To take an example of a concrete artistic practice and to remain within the problematic of the simulacrum, I shall finally address the question of reproductionparticularly in the case recorded music-and its identity regarding the work of art. In conclusion, I propose that by overturning its initial representational schema, phonographic music addresses its own medium and turns it into an inscription of difference, exposing the listener to an encounter with the virtual.
The Philosopher as a Line A Deleuzian Perspective on Drawing and the Mobile Image of Thought
ABERRANT NUPTIALS Deleuze and Artistic Research, 2019
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.
In Search of a New Image of Thought: Gilles Deleuze and Philosophical Expressionism
"Gregg Lambert demonstrates that since the publication of Proust and Signs in 1964 Gilles Deleuze’s search for a new means of philosophical expression became a central theme of all his oeuvre, including those written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Lambert, like Deleuze, calls this “the image of thought.” Lambert’s exploration begins with Deleuze’s earliest exposition of the Proustian image of thought and then follows the “tangled history” of the image that runs through subsequent works, such as Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, The Rhizome (which serves as an introduction to Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus), and several later writings from the 1980s collected in Essays Critical and Clinical. Lambert shows how this topic underlies Deleuze’s studies of modern cinema, where the image of thought is predominant in the analysis of the cinematic image—particularly in The Time-Image. Lambert finds it to be the fundamental concern of the brain proposed by Deleuze in the conclusion of What Is Philosophy? By connecting the various appearances of the image of thought that permeate Deleuze’s entire corpus, Lambert reveals how thinking first assumes an image, how the images of thought become identified with the problem of expression early in the works, and how this issue turns into a primary motive for the more experimental works of philosophy written with Guattari. The study traces a distinctly modern relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy (literature and cinema especially) that has developed into a hallmark of the term “Deleuzian.” However, Lambert argues, this aspect of the philosopher’s vision has not been fully appreciated in terms of its significance for philosophy: “not only ‘for today’ but, to quote Nietzsche, meaning also ‘for tomorrow, and for the day after tomorrow.’”"
International Journal of Applied Arts Studies, 2022
The philosophy of art work in postmodernist view is structuralist, and based on this issue, art cannot be considered as narrator because art as narrator based on structure, is dead art. According to structuralist view, Gilles Deleuze violates any representation in the visual arts. Therefore, by examining Deleuze's point of view, while identifying its lack of representation and explanation in photomontage, also explains the function of concepts in this field. The function of concepts in non-representation is only in the failure of the organizational structure and the creation of non-narrative works. The main question is what role does the concepts play in the lack of philosophical representation in photomontage? It has been assumed that concepts have a movement-oriented and creative role with the principle of being in photomontage. In conclusion, Deleuze, by violating narrative and being in the art of photography, considers photomontage to be a creative movement in fluidity that takes up time and space. The research method is done through library.
Deleuze, Phenomenology and the Real (Deleuze Studies, Rome, 2016)
Deleuze is an enigma (and that’s not to mention Guattari). Even the most basic questions of fundamental philosophical doctrine remain unsettled. Is their project essentially continuous with the natural sciences? Is their work by contrast a description of the structures of experience, in other words a phenomenology? Or are they speculative metaphysicians of the early modern tradition? No one seems quite sure. I think their position can be made clear by seeing them in the intellectual framework of post-Kantian idealism. The central thought of Kant’s mature philosophy is the distinction between things as they appear to us, and things as they are in themselves. And a correlate of this distinction is that we cannot know what things in themselves are like, since our access to them is only by way of how they appear. German idealists responded to the inaccessibility of things in themselves in two different ways. The dominant mainstream of idealist thought dismissed the idea of things in themselves as paradoxical and unnecessary. But a counter-tradition, including Maimon, Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, took the idea as a challenge and responded by attempting to give a positive characterization of things in themselves that is maximally abstracted from the contribution of human cognitive structures. I argue that Deleuze and Guattari can best be seen as operating in this German counter-tradition. On this way of understanding Deleuze and Guattari, there is a phenomenological component to their thought: they sometimes start from descriptions of experience. But Deleuze and Guattari are not interested in establishing invariant structural features or genetic conditions of experience. Rather they are interested in ‘peak’ experiences, for example experiences of art works that break everyday experience apart and allow us to see something else. Equally, they are metaphysical thinkers. But their metaphysics is not of a traditional type; rather it is filtered through Kant’s notion of the thing in itself: a ‘realism’ that goes beyond the real of everyday experience, and hence beyond the invariant structures that classical phenomenology identifies as its conditions of possibility. Equally, there is a scientific component to their thought. But precisely because it is metaphysical their project cannot be identified with a merely scientific ontology.