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Jacques Ranciere
on the sensible and on the power that inhabits the sensible prior to
thought, as the unthought in thought. I will therefore attempt to
show how the objects and modes of Deleuze's descriptions and
conceptualizations lead us toward the center of what remains to be
thought under this name, already bicentennial and still so obscure,
of aesthetics.
I will take as my point of departure two Deleuzian formula
tions whose distance from one another seems to amply fix the
apparently antagonistic poles of Deleuze's thought on the work of
art. The first statement is found in What is Philosophy?: "The work
of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself. . . .
The artist creates blocks of percepts and affects, but the only law of
creation is that the compound must stand up on its own."2 The sec
ond appears in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation: "With paint
ing, hysteria becomes art. Or rather, with the painter, hysteria
becomes painting."3
At first glance, the first statement expresses what seems to be
the requisite of any aesthetics understood as discourse on art: the
work of art has a specific mode of being. The work of art is such
that it stands up on its own. It is the object that is before us, that
does not need us, but persists by virtue of its own unifying law of
form and matter, of parts and their assemblage. The work of art can
therefore be tragedy as Aristotle defines it; the calm ideal of the
Greek statue in Hegel's work; Flaubert's novel about nothing that
rests on the sheer force of style; or the flat surface of colored
blotches, as Maurice Denis defines painting, etc. Accordingly,
Deleuze seems to bring us face to face with the work of art in the
form of a "here is what there is" ["voila ce qu'il y a"]. The exem
plary description of what one of Bacon's paintings presents to the
spectator begins in this way: "A round area often delimits the place
where the person - that is to say, the Figure - is seated" (FB, 5).
A round area, an oval area, circles, plastic procedures, a well
delimited and characterized space, this is how Deleuze describes
"what there is" [lice qu'il ya"] in front of us, on the flat and
autonomous surface of the work of art. And "what there is" may be
explained in the terms of a certain grammar of forms. The surface
IS THERE A DELEUZIAN AESTHETICS? 3
petrified and returns the spirit to its desert. It emphasizes the imma
nence of pathos in logos, the immanence in thought of an element
that does not think: Schopenhauer's "thing in itself," the bottom
lessness, the undifferentiated or the obscure in pre-individual life.
As much as Hegelian aesthetics tried to mark its distance
from the Romantic geology of the spirit, it did not fail to illustrate
the older movement in an exemplary manner: there the work of art
is a station of the spirit outside of itself; the spirit that loses itself in
exteriority, but that in losing itself makes the success of the work;
from the pyramid that seeks vainly to contain it, to the poem that
takes it to the limit of all sensible presentation, meanwhile passing
by the acme of Greek art, where it acquires its adequate sensible
figure. Aesthetics is the history of the various forms in which the
space of artistic representation has coincided with the space of the
spirit's presentation of itself to itself in the sensible. The death of art
marks the moment when the spirit no longer needs to present itself
to itself in external forms of representation. What does it become
then? It becomes an image of the world, Plato's doxa or Flaubert's
stupidity [betisej. The question of an aesthetic modernity, that of art
after the death of art, is thus formulated in terms of an affirmation
of the power of artistic presentation against representative doxa,
the power of the spirit that equates itself with its other - nature,
the unconscious, mutism - under the conditions of a race against
those doxa machines, those machines in the image of the world,
which made Apollo, already in the time of Holderlin, the god of
journalists; those machines called media or television. The aesthet
ic program of art will thus mean: reverse the direction of the spirit
that goes from art to doxa, make the work of art the reconquest of
the spiritual lost in this movement, render the spiritual the inverse
of the classical power of incarnation and individualization. The
destiny of the work of art is then suspended from the other figure
of the "spiritual": the immanence in thought of an element that
does not think, the bottomlessness of the undifferentiated, non
individual life, the dust of atoms or grains of sand; the pathic
beneath the logical; the pathic at its point of rest, of a-pathy
[d'a-pathie].
12 JACQUES RANCrERE
The project of equating the power of the work of art with the
power of a pure, a-signifying sensible, thus emerges in the form of
a task or a combat. The process of de-figuration analyzed by
Deleuze in Bacon's painting is identical to Flaubert's clearing of the
terrain, which undoes, line after line, the grammatical conjunctions
and semantic inferences that make up the ordinary substance of a
story, thought or sentiment. This clearing of the terrain has the pre
cise purpose of equating the power of the phrase with the power of
a sensibility that is no longer the sensibility of the man of represen
tation, but the sensibility of the contemplator become object of his
own contemplation: foam, pebble or grain of sand. This clearing of
the terrain replaces one stupidity (the oversignification of doxa that
adds up to nothing) with another stupidity: the a-signification of the
void, of the infinite, the great indifferent tide that displaces and
mixes atoms. In the same way, Proust links the power of the work
of art to the experience of a sensible removed from its conditions,
to that moment when two worlds reunite and all reference points
shatter; the world of the pure sensible, of the sensible sensed by
stones, trees, landscapes or the moment of the day. The ideal book
dreamed of by the young Proust is familiar: the book made of the
substance of a few instants arranged in time, the book made of
"tastes of light," of the substance of our most beautiful moments.
The problem is that a book is not written with this pathic sub
stance. A book must be composed with the construction of an ana
logic fable, a fable constructed to elicit the same affect as the affect
of the pure sensible, which may think, but certainly does not write.
Flaubert's novel is the intentional construction of a nature that is
identical to the uncreated nature that does not arise from any inten
tion. The Proustian book is the construction of an organic plot that
encloses moments of epiphany : a fable of the discovery of truth -
of truth thought according to the modern model of truth fixed once
and for all by H6lderlin, truth as the evolution of error. The modern
work of art takes the figure of a paradoxical object. It is the inclu
sion of an aesthetic truth, of a truth of the pure sensible, of the het
erogeneous sensible in an Aristotelian poetics: the plot of change in
knowledge and fortune that passes by peripeteia and recognition.
IS THERE A DELEUZIAN AESTHETICS? 13
Translator's note: de-figurer and de-figuration are translated as de-figure and de-fig
uration (as opposed to disfigure and disfiguration) in order to preserve Ranciere's
own hyphenation as well as his reference to the practice of figuration or figurative
representation.
2 Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 164.
3 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2(03), 45. Hereafter cited as FB.
4 Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971),
138.