The Deleuzian Brain

Deleuze is perhaps the most important philosopher on aesthetics of the XXth century. His books on Proust, Kafka, Francis Bacon or on Cinema, are milestones in our understanding of the aesthetic experience. In his work, mostly after A Thousand Plateaus, we can see a certain radicalization of the artistic experience. He describes the work of art as self-expressive movements of the sensible whose mode of existence is an epiphany of way of life. Recovering the tradition of romantism, Deleuze thinks aesthetics as a philosophy of Nature, as a philosophy of the self-expressive properties of the natural forms. Art starts with territorial marks. These do not refer back neither to a subject or a sensation which capture them and present them as marks, nor to an object which would just be nothing more than an expression of marks. The deleuzian theory of art is then an affirmation of "a self-movement of the expressive qualities" 1. From the point of view of this philosophy of Nature, art is the primordial event of natural forms. Art must then be thought from territorial marks created by territorial animals. "Art is fundamentally poster, placard. As Lorenz says, coral fish are posters" 2. These marks are artistic events because they are expressive, because they draw new territories which belong to the animal that created them. But these territories are artistic precisely because they are originally expressions, signatures. Only after they become determinations, qualities of the animal that produces them 3. 1 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus, London: Continuum, 2007, (TP), p. 349. 2 TP, p. 348. 3 "The expressive is primary in relation to the possessive, expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being. Not in the sense that these qualities belong to a subject, but in the sense that they delineate a territory that will belong to the subject that carries or produces them. These qualities are signatures, but the signature, the proper name, is not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode. The signature is not the indication of a person; it is the chancy formation of a domain" (TP, pp. 348-9).

Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2016

Abstract Deleuze’s philosophy of painting can be seen to pose certain challenges to a phenomenological approach to philosophy. While a phenomenological response to Deleuze’s philosophy is clearly needed, I show in this article how an approach taken in a recent paper by Christian Lotz proves inadequate. Lotz argues that through Deleuze’s refusal to accept the place of representation in art, he is unable to distinguish art from decoration, or to give a coherent account of how the (non-representational) content of art can be represented. I show that this criticism emerges from a misreading of the place of representation in Deleuze’s philosophy. I will argue that by failing to take account of some of the key features of Deleuze’s wider ontology, such as the importance of both the virtual and the actual for his analysis of objects, Lotz’s critique proves unsuccessful. In particular, I want to show that Lotz’s criticisms rest on a failure to attend to the systematic nature of Deleuze’s philosophy, and in particular, the place of Deleuze’s analysis of Bacon within the system as a whole. I will further show that Lotz’s phenomenological defence commits the fallacy of petitio principii, assuming the validity of the phenomenological method in order to justify the phenomenological approach.

In this paper I shall present an argument against Deleuze’s philosophy of painting. Deleuze’s main thesis in Logic of Sensation is twofold: [1] he claims that painting is based on a non-representational level; and [2] he claims that this level comes out of the materiality of painting. I shall claim that Deleuze’s theses should be rejected for the following reasons: first, the difference between non-intentional life and the representational world is too strict. I submit that the non-intentional relation that painting opens up is itself part of and emerges out of the representational force of painting. If this would not be the case, then the criterion for differentiating between paintings and other objects cannot be developed. Indeed, Deleuze fails to give us a criterion. Second, Deleuze’s way of dealing with materiality in painting remains unsatisfactory, insofar as he is unable to take into account how materiality is charged with an “attitude towards the world.” In sum, materiality can only be painting’s materiality if we understand it as being formed and disclosed in representation.

Given that many of the more prominent members of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) were contributors to David Bordwell and Noël Carroll's edited collection, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, 1 it might seem strange to put a conference report of its 2010 meeting alongside a report of the 2010 Deleuze Studies Conference.

1997

The distinction between the mind and body, their relatedness and respective properties is perhaps the single most persistent problem that faces philosophical contemplation. Various models have been proposed in order to overcome this gaping duality: idealism, occasionalism, epiphenomenalism, behaviourism, etc.. The model proposed within this thesis corresponds to psychophysical parallelism - a parallelism judged purely phenomenological - wherein mind and body are conceived in terms of two aspects of an unconscious transcendental reality. Historically, philosophy has tended to prioritise one of the aspects over the other: Hegel and Marx serve to illustrate this point. As I will argue throughout this thesis, this transcendental reality - within which we will situate spontaneous creativity - is essentially double and subsists between the two extremes. The consequence of this duplicity is to negate the possibility of any reconciliation into an originary Being, but through which the extre...

Gilles Deleuze belongs to that group of philosophers, often taken to typify the continental approach to philosophy, for whom the difficulty we encounter in reading them is not simply one of the content of their claims and arguments, but also one of penetrating their style of writing itself. This difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that Deleuze not only seemingly employs language in order to destabilize and obfuscate his philosophical arguments, but also revises his basic philosophical terminology between his numerous writings, from the early work of intensive depth, virtuality, and preindividual singularities, to the body without organs, machinic phylum, and plane of immanence of his collaborations with Guattari. 1 This leads us to the problem of how we read Deleuze. Do we see the obfuscation of language, the various appropriations of the sciences, and the experiments in philosophical writing as attempts to cover over a paucity of argumentation? Do we take up this rejection of traditional metaphysical language, seeing it as a rejection of the tradition of metaphysics itself, or do we strip the language away in the hope of finding underneath it a philosophical position that can be distinctly expressed in another, more palatable language? Similarly, we might ask what the reason is for the proliferation of philosophical systems developed by Deleuze, both in his historical monographs and his own philosophical writings. The continual reinvention of basic philosophical concepts might be taken to signal a failure of Deleuze's philosophical enterprise, an inability to formulate a definitive yet consistent philosophical outlook. Finally, Deleuze presents us with the problem of understanding the relation of these various projects. Deleuze's engagements with the history of philosophy, science, aesthetics, and ethics seem reminiscent of the

"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.’”"

The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research, 2017

"Preface" to the two volumes publication The Dark Precursor: Deleuze and Artistic Research