20th Century Spinozist : Rancière on Deleuze

I would post a quick (=possibly flawed) translation of the short interview

with Rancière which appeared in Magazine Littéraire's 2002 issue
dedicated to Deleuze.

Rancière takes a unique and fascinating approach to Deleuze as aesthetician,

focusing here on a characteristic tendency in Deleuze's aesthetic writing to
apparently collapse the regime of representation whilst simultaneously using
figures drawn from specific representations, or certain fictional traits, as abstract
models for his analysis.

I remember being struck on first reading of this interview by how well this
describes an aspect of Deleuze's book on Bacon that had bothered me vaguely:
the way in which 'abstract machines' such as that of the triptych, or the
observer, are said to organise the paintings whilst not corresponding to their
figural equivalents (the 'actual' observers, the 'actual' panels of the tryptych.)
This can be hugely puzzling, in that one asks (and the question is the same in
many other eccentric instances in A Thousand Plateaus) how it is that these
machines, supposedly operating on a level anterior to any figuration,
nevertheless seem to be modelled after certain figurations, or "fictions"?

Rancière suggests (but very schematically, given the brief compass of this
interview) that this movement and its tension, is a symptom of a sort of
inevitably falling back onto the plane of radical immanence of the figuration, and
a necessary symptom of Deleuze's attempt to consummate the end of
representation and simultaneously 'fulfil the destiny' of the aesthetic.

Now this simultaneous disavowal of representation and inveterate dependence

on allegory or metaphor can be read as nothing more than a dissembling,
whether conscious or not - and this is arguably the position Badiou takes on
Deleuze in his Clamour of Being (ie. that Deleuze claims to have 'done away
with' metaphor whilst constantly using metaphor to back up his ideas). Although
Badiou recognises as constitutive of Deleuze's thought the movement from the
'simulacra' to radical immanence, and the peripatetic narrative Deleuze makes
of this movement, he apparently fails to see anything in this movement but a
failure of philosophical probity...
A problematisation of this approach is consequent upon Ranciere's more general
complication of the definition of the post-representative regime of art: it is
defined not by the autonomy of the art object, a "freedom" which would be
cognate to that of the radically free-floating sign of postmodernity (the very
blithely-assumed unconstrained 'freedom' that is Badiou's nemesis), but a mixed
regime in which the artistic will is bound to a certain automatism. In which, we
can assume, the escape from representation is never achieved, but is expressed
in a constant becoming.
(One last brief comment; this recourse to a falling back into representation, to a
constant movement between absolute and relative immanence also connects
with a very difficult chapter on Derrida I am currently trying to read, from
Laruelle's Philosophies de la Difference. Laruelle argues that a philosophical
decision is always made to set up such tensions, which in the absence of an
interrogation into this founding decision can constitutively never be 'resolved'
but rather act as the 'paradoxal motor' that drives the interminable philosophical
peripitaeia.)

"Deleuze Fulfils the Destiny of the Aesthetic"

an Interview with Jacques Ranciere
from Magazine Littéraire: L'effet Deleuze (February 2002)

Deleuze's studies on art, whether of literature (Proust, Melville, Lawrence,

Beckett), of painting (Bacon, Fromanger) or cinema (The Movement-Image
and The Time-Image), distinguished certain artists and philosophers by
the ways in which they opened up one to the other. But it is rarely asked
whether there is such a thing as a "Deleuzian aesthetics". It fell to Jacques
Rancière to pose this question in all clarity ("Existe-t-il une esthétique
deleuzienne?" in E.Alliez, ed, Gilles Deleuze. Un vie philosophique,
Synthelabo, 1998). Maybe because the idea of the "aesthetic" was itself a
problem for him, an object of his genealogical quest. In his work, he
brought out the fact that the aesthetic is the name of a specific regime of
art, a rather recent one (dating from the 19th Century), and, more
interesting still for us: that Deleuze "fulfilled its destiny". This is something
we cannot ignore: above all if this destiny carries with it ontology as
politics-of-philosophy (see the chaptre of La Chair des mots, Galilee, 1998:
"Deleuze, Bartleby et la formule littéraire"). In his most recent book (La
Fable cinemotagraphique, Galilée, 2001), a collection of his articles on
cinema, Rancière returns to Deleuze's singular position and the tensions
that it conceals ("From one image to another. Deleuze and the ages of
cinema"). Deleuze as latter-day Flaubert? Why not...

David Rabouin: How did you come to be interested in Deleuze's work?

Jacques Ranciere: Through others, in fact. I was a colleague of Deleuze's

for a long time, but without feeling any particular affinity with his writings.
After his death, there were a certain number of organised events where
people wanted to include points of view that were a little bit "external".
That is to say that there are many of his texts that I came to read very
late -- although of course I knew certain of them for various reasons. I had
for example read the Nietzsche for my agrégatif, the Proust because it
interested me, Anti-Oedipus because of its polemical and political
currency at the time; but many texts, I had only viewed from afar and I
became interested through the agency of two things: firstly the request
that was made of me to speak about Deleuze as a "non-Deleuzian", and
secondly my own preoccupations, as a function of which I have privileged
the texts in his oeuvre that one might call aesthetic.

DR: This aesthetic bias produces some interesting effects. When one
reads the different studies that you have dedicated to Deleuze, whether
on literature, painting or cinema, one is struck to see that he takes up
quite a constant position despite the difference of his objects. Is there, to
take up one of your questions, is there something like a "Deleuzian
aesthetics"?

JR: I am struck, whether it's a matter of painting, literature or cinema, by

the same fundamental approach of Deleuze. It operates in two moments:
always, the affirmation of a sort of radical materiality, immanent to
pictorial expression, literary language – for the cinema it's a little more
complicated – the affirmation then, of a sort of characteristic of the
pictorial or literary object; but, in a second moment, he produces a sort of
return. For example, what seems to be a definition of painting starting
from a formal grid is revealed as a description of a sort of history. I've said
in speaking of Bacon that it is almost a manner of transforming each
canvas into an allegory of the picture, then into an allegory of painting
itself. Deleuze shows us in each picture a working on the Figure where it
appears as assailed by the forces of the Outside, trying to evacuate itself
but ultimately held in place. Each picture becomes a sort of crucifixion or
a "Figure of violations" which is an allegory of all of painting. The same
thing happens with literature. For example, Deleuze literalises Proust's
formula according to which the writer creates another language within
language; he shows us the language of Kafka torn apart by the moaning
of Gregory in Metamorphosis or that of Melville by the whispers of Isabelle
in Pierre. But the langauge of Kafka or Melville remains the common
language, unaffected by the sounds that it describes. Deleuze must
therefore allegorise this unlocatable other language in transforming the
fictional traits assumed in the description of the characters into imaginary
traits of language. I've shown the same thing for cinema, in regard to this
rupture of the sensory-motor schema which, according to him, divides
cinema into two ages: that of the movement-image and that of the time-
image. Here again the rupture is actually illustrated through fictional
traits: there is for example James Stewart's leg in plaster in Rear Window
or his vertigo in Vertigo which act as figuration of the sensory-motor
paralysis and thus of the passage to another age of the image and of
cinema. The same device appears several times. As if Deleuze makes of
art a radical critique of representation, addressed to a sort of total
immanence; and at the same time, as if this immanence must always be
transformed at once into something like an allegory or a scenario, which is
properly speaking a metaphysical scenario – and which, it every case,
supposes that one must reintegrate or reinvest in a massive fashion all
that depends on the fictional or historial aspect of the picture, the film or
the novel.

DR: And this provokes a certain tension: as if the only way to exit from the
regime of representation was to bring representative traits to the fore.
You say that in this tension Deleuze "fulfils the destiny of the aesthetic".

JR: Yes, he fulfils the destiny of what I call the "aesthetic regime" of art, a
regime that wants to break with the representative tradition. Now,
breaking with this tradition cannot be done in a simple way. It cannot be
done, as one sometimes thinks, in favour of a simple autonomy of the
artwork, where the work subtracted from representation would be
consigned to a liberty or a sort of radical immanence. This vision is
extraordinarily simplistic. The aesthetic regime of art is not a simple
autonomy of the work of art, but always an autonomy blended with
heteronomy. It is not a simple regime of free artistic will, but a regime in
which this free will is always bound to something like the weight of the
unconscious, of the passive, the involuntary. It is an immanence, if you
like, but not a simple immanence. This is why it must always be
represented in its turn, allegorised, made into a scene. Deleuze is
representative of this tension because he wants to push the idea of an
absolute immanence to the extreme. Now he must constantly reintroduce
representational traits in order to picture [figure] it. For example he must
borrow the idea of a minor language within a language in Kafka, Proust, or
Melville from purely fictional traits. The problem comes from his will to
reduce them all to a single plane. That which one traditionally separates
under the names of content ad form must be for him on one plane and
this plane must be that of the pure processes of expressive matter itself.
But this imanence also means that everything is blended together and
that, in consequence, any fictional trait whatsoever can be taken as a trait
of material expression. Deleuze would supress all the representative traits
in favour of material traits of expression; but in reality, it is ultimately the
former which give their principle to the latter. This takes us back in fact to
the fact that the radical immanence that Deleuze claims for art is for him
not the definition of an autonomous sphere of art, but on the contrary the
identification of the processes of art with quasi-physiological or
ethological processes.

DR: Your reflections lead in two directions: one direction where you study
Deleuze's aesthetics insofar as they are inscribed in a certain regime, one
that you have arising with the end of the 19th Century – with all the
tensions that traverse it and the difficulties that Deleuze experiences in
getting out of it; another direction, very intriguing, which concerns
metaphysics, since it also emerges from your studies that Deleuze could
well provide the metaphysics of this regime. Do you think that there is an
"aesthetic" direction in Deleuzian metaphysics?

JR: Yes, I do think so. What I try to say is that the destruction of the
representational regime supposes that one opposes to the Nature which
supports it – Nature governed by the model of the form working on matter
– something like another Nature or an "anti-Nature". When I speak of the
"metaphysics of literature", it is in this sense. In The Temptation of Saint
Anthony, Flaubert brings in his Spinozist devil – Spinozist in the 19th-
Century style! He offers a temptation to the Saint which, as with all
temptation, is properly speaking metaphysical: he makes the context of
representation, of which the story of his God is an integral part, disappear,
to make him feel in its place a molecular world, a world that is made of
pure percepts, pure identities of perceived and perceiver; a world, above
all, of pre-individual or non-individual realities. It is this, the "metaphysics
of literature": a world before the chaining together of causes and effects,
a molecular world which consists of the mixing of atoms, in an agitiation
of matter that one might call immaterial. All the 19th century had
fantasised on the idea of basing art on an "immaterial matter". Think of all
that has was dreamed of with regard to energy, electricity, etc. All of this
passed into Bergson, and through Bergson, to Deleuze. What did Deleuze
create? A 20th Century Spinozism. What did Flaubert do, even if he was
no metaphysician? A 19th Century Spinozism. It is this Spinozism which
the romantic young turks, Schelling and Schlegel, claim at the dawn of
that century in their Conversations on Poesy. Deleuze is like a
continuation of this – except that this continuation supposes that the
domain of art should be entirely turned over to the domain of a nature or
contra-nature, the "chaosmos" which Guattari speaks of. Which is to say
also that Deleuze approaches the domain of art from a perspective where
the one who speaks is properly a metaphysician – but a metaphysician
who would at the same be something like a physician.

posted from:
http://blog.urbanomic.com/dread/archives/2005/02/20th_century_sp.html