#60
 
 

A NOTE ON DELEUZE

by Marcus Steinweg

The most general of Gilles Deleuze’s projects is to introduce into art as well as philosophy the concept of the infinite. Deleuze appears to follow an equally classical as well as hypothetical evidence by connoting art with the bringing-forth of something new, with an act of creation. Art is defined as a becoming which is equally impersonal as it is creative. It is always a matter of putting oneself into a relationship with chaos or the exterior, “of defying chaos” by cutting it and drawing a plane on it. Only contact with the chaotic exterior allows a zone of indistinguishability, the zone of becoming to arise. This is the domain of the Untimely and New which resists its reduction to established registers. Here we find an essential characteristic of the artwork: its irreducibility to the order of what is timely, contemporary or to the historical dimension, the old. That is the dimension of social, political, cultural, biological, etc. finitude, the dimension also of reigning doxa as well as of traditional ‘truths’. And perhaps, say Deleuze and Guattari, “the peculiarity of art is to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite.” Art is defined as an objection to historical reduction. “What defines thought in its three great forms – art, science, and philosophy – is always confronting chaos, laying out a plane, throwing a plane over chaos. But philosophy wants to save the infinite by giving it consistency: it lays out a plane of immanence that, through the action of conceptual personae, takes events or consistent concepts to infinity. Science, on the other hand, relinquishes the infinite in order to gain reference: it lays out a plane of simply undefined coordinates that each time, through the action of partial observers, defines states of affairs, functions, or referential propositions. Art wants to create the finite that restores the infinite: it lays out a plane of composition that, in turn, through the action of aesthetic figures, bears monuments or composite sensations”. Thus, three great forms of thinking: the thinking of art which thinks through “sensations” and erects “monuments”; the thinking of science which thinks “functions” in order to construct “states of affairs”; the thinking of philosophy which thinks “concepts” and brings “events” to appearance. All three forms are equally immediate ways of touching chaos. Therefore, art, philosophy and science are called the three “chaoids”.

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