Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) - French philosopher with a most inventive turn of mind, a thinker who addressed in unique ways an entire rage of subjects including literature, film and the fine arts.
I’ve been reading this challenging philosophy book on and off for the past several weeks. There’s no question Gilles Deleuze’s ideas about life, art and aesthetics require a reader to break an intellectual sweat. However author Simon O’Sullivan does an excellent job here in taking five case studies, that is, five different artistic thought experiments, one experiment for each chapter, and showing how Deleuze’s ideas link in meaningful ways to each experiment. To share a taste of what a reader will discover in this stimulating work, below are my comments coupled with several Simon O’Sullivan quotes from one essay preceding the actual case studies that really highlight the spirit of Gilles Deleuze:
“An object of an encounter is fundamentally different from an object of recognition. With the later our knowledges, beliefs and values are reconfirmed. We, and the world we inhabit, are reconfirmed as that which we already understood our world and ourselves to be.” ---------- According to Simon O’Sullivan, a key distinction Deleuze makes in the way one approaches life: we either repeat our humdrum, well-worn groves, those patterns and categories that limit us to simply recognize what we’ve seen many times before (one day resembles all the rest) or we encounter the world with fresh eyes, opening ourselves to the newness available at every moment. Such thinking is one prime reason why Deleuze is an artist’s philosopher, particularly a contemporary artist’s philosopher intent on pushing established boundaries.
“An object of recognition is precisely a representation of something always already in place. With such a non-encounter our habitual way of being and acting in the world is reaffirmed and reinforced, and as a consequence no thought takes place.” ---------- A perfect example of such mindlessness is a snapshot from the life of a jaded, middle-aged lawyer in Georges Simenon’s novel A Stranger in the House: “He was in the habit of taking a short walk at three o’clock every afternoon. It was the sort of walk you take to exercise a small dog, in fact he almost gave the impression of holding himself on a leash. The walk consisted of going around four blocks of houses, never more, never less.”
“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
― Gilles Deleuze
“Indeed, we might say representation precisely stymies thought. With a genuine encounter, however, contrary is the case.” ---------- For Deleuze, any human endeavor, even metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics or other areas of philosophic inquiry can be stymied by turning the subject at hand into “objects of recognition,” thus sealing off the possibility of lively, fresh encounters. This is what makes Deleuze such a radical thinker – questioning frameworks of any stripe, even the traditional ways philosophy has been conceived and taught from the time of Plato and Aristotle. Case in point: he really didn’t see a great advantage for a person to engage in dialogue since other people can impose their own limitations and habits on us. A famous Deleuze quote: “If you are trapped in the dream of the other, you’re fucked.”
“Our typical ways of being in the world are challenged, our systems of knowledge disrupted. We are forced to thought. The encounter then operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack.” ---------- A person can follow a set routine for years and then suddenly, wham, something unexpected happens, a crisis, tragedy, vivid dream, hallucination, epiphany, vision, profound realization, and their world is forever changed. Leo Tolstoy captures such a rupture in his story The Death of Ivan Ilych – a simple accident at home and subsequent terminal illness propels Ivan, a high court judge, into a richer, deeper understanding and appreciation of life.
“However, this is not the end of the story. For the rupture encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, in fact, a way of seeing and thinking the world differently. This is the creative movement of the encounter that obliges us to think otherwise.” ---------- For Deleuze, the encounter not only cuts away past modes and methods of thinking but affirms and supports new modes. Of the many examples, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant reports how reading David Hume forced him to rethink all his previous philosophic notions and formulate a completely new system.
“Life, when it truly is lived, is a history of these encounters, which will always necessarily occur beyond representation.” ---------- How much growth have we experienced in our own lives? For Deleuze, the answer lies in the number of our fresh encounters, cuts and cracks. Again, this is why Deleuze is an artist’s philosopher. A true artist is always expanding boundaries, refusing to repeat, refusing to accept more of the same. As Deleuze himself said: “The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.”
“Rupture and affirmation are then two moments of the same encounter, two moments that only seem opposed if considered in the abstract, outside of actual experience. Art, in breaking one world and creating another brings these two moments into conjunction.” ---------- Thus the importance of the arts: we are given an opportunity to leap into distant, unexplored worlds. As booklovers, we can take the leap each and every time we sit down to read. An obvious example would be the crazy science fiction of Philip K. Dick but really any book can shake us out of fixed perceptions and launch us into uncharted realms of imagination.
“Art then is the name of the object of an encounter but also the name of the encounter itself, and, indeed, of that which is produced by the encounter. Art is this complex event that brings about the possibility of something new.” ---------- Back in the 1980s art critic Robert Hughes authored a book and PBS series about 20th century art entitled The Shock of the New, a title I’m sure Deleuze would find most appropriate. I’ll let Gilles Deleuze have the last word: “An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.”
Kader Attia's The Endless Rhizomes of Revolution
Simon O'Sullivan's first case study is Rhizomes, Machines, Multiplicites and Maps: Notes Toward an Expanded Art Practice (Beyond Representation).
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