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Deleuze Fulfills the Destiny of the Aesthetic.An Interview with JacquesRancire. From Magazine Littraire: L'effet Deleuze (February 2002)

Deleuzes 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 theyopened up one to the other. But it is rarely asked whether there is such a thing as aDeleuzian aesthetics. It fell to Jacques Rancire to pose this question in all clarity(Existe-t-il une esthtique deleuzienne? in E. Alliez, ed, Gilles Deleuze. Un viephilosophique, Synthelabo, 1998). Maybe because the idea of the aesthetic wasitself a problem for him, an object of his genealogical quest. In his work, he broughtout the fact that the aesthetic is the name of a specific regime of art, a rather recentone (dating from the 19th Century), and, more interesting still for us: that Deleuzefulfilled its destiny. This is something we cannot ignore: above all if this destinycarries with it ontology as politics-of-philosophy (see the chapter of La Chair desmots, Galile, 1998: Deleuze, Bartleby et la formule littraire). In his most recent

book (La Fable cinematographique, Galile, 2001), a collection of his articles oncinema, Rancire returns to Deleuzes singular position and the tensions that itconceals (From one image to another. Deleuze and the ages of cinema). Deleuzeas latter-day Flaubert? Why not...

David Rabouin: How did you come to be interested in Deleuzes work?

Jacques Rancire: Through others, in fact. I was a colleague of Deleuzes for a longtime, but without feeling any particular affinity with his writings. After his death, therewere a certain number of organised events where people wanted to include points ofview that were a little bit external. That is to say that there are many of his texts thatI 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 agrgatif, the Proust because itinterested me, Anti-Oedipus because of its polemical and political currency at thetime; but many texts, I had only viewed from afar and I became interested throughthe agency of two things: firstly the request that was made of me to speak aboutDeleuze as a non-Deleuzian, and secondly my own preoccupations, as a functionof 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 thedifferent studies that you have dedicated to Deleuze, whether on literature, paintingor cinema, one is struck to see that he takes up quite a constant position despite thedifference of his objects. Is there, to take up one of your questions, is theresomething like a Deleuzian aesthetics?

JR: I am struck, whether its a matter of painting, literature or cinema, by the samefundamental approach of Deleuze. It operates in two moments: always, theaffirmation of a sort of radical materiality, immanent to pictorial expression, literarylanguage for the cinema its a little more complicated the affirmation then, of a sortof characteristic of the pictorial or literary object; but, in a second moment, heproduces a sort of return. For example, what seems to be a definition of paintingstarting from a formal grid is revealed as a description of a sort of history. Ive said inspeaking of Bacon that it is almost a manner of transforming each canvas into anallegory of the picture, then into an allegory of painting itself. Deleuze shows us ineach 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 picturebecomes a sort of crucifixion or a Figure of violations which is an allegory of all ofpainting. The same with happens with literature. For example, Deleuze literalizes

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Prousts formula according to which the writer creates another language withinlanguage; he shows us the language of Kafka torn apart by the moaning of Gregoryin Metamorphosis or that of Melville by the whispers of Isabelle in /Pierre/. But thelanguage of Kafka or Melville remains the common language, unaffected by thesounds that it describes. Deleuze must therefore allegorize this unlocatable otherlanguage in transforming the fictional traits assumed in the description of thecharacters into imaginary traits of language. Ive shown the same thing for cinema, inregard to this rupture of the sensory-motor scheme which, according to him, dividescinema into two ages: that of the movement-image and that of the time-image. Hereagain the rupture is actually illustrated through fictional traits: there is for exampleJames Stewarts leg in plaster in Rear Window or his vertigo in Vertigo which act asfiguration of the sensory-motor paralysis and thus of the passage to another age ofthe image and of cinema. The same device appears several times. As if Deleuzemakes of art a radical critique of representation, addressed to a sort of totalimmanence; and at the same time, as if this immanence must always be transformedat once into something like an allegory or a scenario, which is properly speaking ametaphysical scenario and which, it every case, supposes that one must

reintegrate or reinvest in a massive fashion all that depends on the fictional orhistorical 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 ofrepresentation was to bring representative traits to the fore. You say that in thistension Deleuze fulfills the destiny of the aesthetic.

JR: Yes, he fulfills the destiny of what I call the aesthetic regime of art, a regimethat wants to break with the representative tradition. Now, breaking with this traditioncannot be done in a simple way. It cannot be done, as one sometimes thinks, in favorof a simple autonomy of the artwork, where the work subtracted from representationwould 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 thework of art, but always an autonomy blended with heteronomy. It is not a simpleregime of free artistic will, but a regime in which this free will is always bound tosomething like the weight of the unconscious, of the passive, the involuntary. It is animmanence, if you like, but not a simple immanence. This is why it must always berepresented in its turn, allegorized, made into a scene. Deleuze is representative ofthis tension because he wants to push the idea of an absolute immanence to theextreme. Now he must constantly reintroduce representational traits in order topicture [figure] it. For example he must borrow the idea of a minor language within alanguage in Kafka, Proust, or Melville from purely fictional traits. The problem comesfrom his will to reduce them all to a single plane. That which one traditionallyseparates 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 thisimmanence also means that everything is blended together and that, inconsequence, any fictional trait whatsoever can be taken as a trait of materialexpression. Deleuze would supress all the representative traits in favour of materialtraits of expression; but in reality, it is ultimately the former which give their principleto the latter. This takes us back in fact to the fact that the radical immanence thatDeleuze claims for art is for him not the definition of an autonomous sphere of art, buton the contrary the identification of the processes of art with quasi-physiological orethological processes.

DR: Your reflections lead in two directions: one direction where you study Deleuzes

aesthetics insofar as they are inscribed in a certain regime, one that you have arisingwith the end of the 19 th Century with all the tensions that traverse it and thedifficulties that Deleuze experiences in getting out of it; another direction, very

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intriguing, which concerns metaphysics, since it also emerges from your studies thatDeleuze could well provide the metaphysics of this regime. Do you think that there isan aesthetic direction in Deleuzian metaphysics?

JR: Yes, I do think so. What I try to say is that the destruction of the representationalregime supposes that one opposes to the Nature which supports it Naturegoverned by the model of the form working on matter something like another Natureor 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 Spinozistin the 19th-Century style! He offers a temptation to the Saint which, as with alltemptation, is properly speaking metaphysical: he makes the context ofrepresentation, of which the story of his God is an integral part, disappear, to makehim feel in its place a molecular world, a world that is made of pure percepts, pureidentities 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 thechaining together of causes and effects, a molecular world which consists of themixing of atoms, in an agitiation of matter that one might call immaterial. All the 19 th

century had fantasised on the idea of basing art on an immaterial matter. Think ofall that has was dreamed of with regard to energy, electricity, etc. All of this passedinto Bergson, and through Bergson, to Deleuze. What did Deleuze create? A 20thCentury Spinozism. What did Flaubert do, even if he was no metaphysician? A 19 th

Century Spinozism. It is this Spinozism which the romantic young turks, Schellingand 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 thedomain 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 Deleuzeapproaches the domain of art from a perspective where the one who speaks isproperly a metaphysician but a metaphysician who would at the same besomething like a physician.