IS THERE A DELEUZIAN AESTHETICS?

Jacques Ranciere

The present article will not seek to situate a Deleuzian aesthetics

within a general framework that would be Deleuze's thought. The
reason for this is simple: I do not quite know what Deleuze's thought
is; I am still looking for it. His so-called aesthetic texts are, for me,
a means of approaching it. Approaching, however, is an improper
term. Understanding a thinker does not amount to coinciding with
his center. On the contrary, to understand a thinker is to displace
him, to lead him on a trajectory where his articulations come
undone and leave room for play. Only then is it possible to de-fig­
ure [de-figurerj1 his thought in order to refigure it differently, to step
outside of the constraints of his words and express his thought in
that foreign language that Deleuze, after Proust, made the task of the
writer. Here, aesthetics will be a means of loosening that Deleuzian
tangle, which leaves so little room for the irruption of another lan­
guage, in order to take him on the trajectory of a question.
The present article will not seek to situate Deleuze's dis­
course on art within the framework of aesthetics understood as a
discipline having its own objects, methods and schools. For me, the
term aesthetics does not refer to a discipline. It does not designate
a branch of philosophy or a knowledge of works of art. Aesthetics
is an idea of thought, a mode of thought that unfolds about works
of art, taking them as witnesses to a question: a question that bears

Qui Parle, Vol. 14, No.2 Spring/Summer 2004

2 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

of Bacon's painting may be described as the simple combination of

two forms, both identified by the historians and theoreticians of art.
First and foremost, the coexistence on the surface of the canvas of
the figure, the field of color that functions as background, and the
rounded form or contour that at once unites and separates them, is
the reestablishment of a haptic space: a space connecting sight and
touch in a single plane. According to Riegl, it is this space that
characterizes the Egyptian bas-relief. In that space, however, the
contour has the function of essentializing the figure that it encir­
cles. The problem faced is thus one of defining a space that would
have haptic planarity, but that would be freed from this essentializ­
ing function.
This problem is formally resolved by an operation focusing
on the contour. In Bacon's work, Deleuze identifies the contour
with another line that adheres to the logic of another form:
Worringer's northern Gothic line, the line that curves in, breaks,
fades, changes direction. This inorganic line disorganizes the
essentializing contour; it plunges it into the world of the acciden­
tal by rendering it a space of tension, confrontation, and deforma­
tion of other elements. The surface of Bacon's painting is thus
defined as a specific combination of the following forms: Riegl's
haptic Egyptian space disorganized by the identification of its con­
tour with Worringer's northern line.
A formula for the painting can thereby be defined in a gener­
al grammar of forms. Yet, why would this arrangement of planes
and lines defined by stylistiC criteria take the name of a mental ill­
ness: hysteria? I say "mental illness," but there is an entire tradition
of thought that does not consider hysteria to be just any illness.
Hysteria is precisely the illness that opposes itself to the process of
creating the work of art, that prevents the work of art from existing
as an autonomous entity, while retaining imprisoned within the
artist's body the powers that should objectify the work of art and
make it autonomous. Here I am thinking of what Flaubert said of
his Saint Antoine: the power that should have shaped the work of
art like a block of marble reversed its direction. Instead of acting
outward, it acted inward, and while moving inward, it deliquesced.
4 JACQUES RANCIERE

It flowed within Flaubert like a nervous malady. It is in this way that

hysteria is precisely the anti-work. It is the nervous effusion or pas­
sion that opposes the athletic and sculptural power of muscles.
How then can the artistic maxim according to which the work
of art must "stand up on its own" [lise tenir en soi"] be identified
with hysteria? let's return to the first lines of Francis Bacon: The
Logic of Sensation for our answer. The rounded form, the oval, the
parallelepiped have, in fact, a well-defined function. They isolate
the figure, not in order to essentialize it like an Egyptian contour,
not in order to spiritualize it like the Byzantine mandrel, but in
order to prevent it from coming into contact with the other figures,
from becoming an element in a story. And there are two ways of
becoming an element in a story. There is the external relationship
of resemblance, the relationship of the figure represented to what it
represents. There are also the connections maintained by the figure
to other figures on the very surface of the painting.
The two ways of becoming an element in a story actually
define two different aspects of a single model: Aristotle's represen­
tative model as it was established in his Poetics. Representation, in
fact, means two things. First, it means that the work of·art is the imi­
tation of an action. By its resemblance it makes recognizable some­
thing that exists outside of it. Second, the work of art is the action
of representing. It is the system or linked sequence of actions, the
arrangement of parts that order themselves according to a well­
defined model: the functional arrangement of the parts of an organ­
ism. The work of art, in so far as it is an organism, is alive. That is
to say that the work's techne is in the image of nature, in the image
of the power that finds its fulfillment in the living organism in gen­
eral, and in the human organism in particular.
The classical model of the autonomous work of art consists in
dissociating the Aristotelian model in order to play the work's
organic consistence against its mimetic dependence, nature as the
power of the work against nature as the model of figuration. A ver­
itable liberation of the work thus presupposes the destruction of
this organicity that is the second principle of representation. "To
hystericize" the work of art, or make it out of hysteria, means undo-
 IS THERE A DELEUZIAN AESTHETICS? 5

ing that organicity that is latent in the very definition of the

"autonomous" work of art. It means rendering ill that nature which
has organic autonomy as its telos. The pictorial work will conse­
quently have to be thought as an illness of organic nature and of
the figuration that imitates its power. The elements of the previous­
ly evoked formal grammar in fact constitute the sickness of a
nature, and lead to its disintegration. They designate the scene of
combat or crisis. Bacon's contour is thus a ring, a track, a gymnast's
floor. It is the place of combat between painting and figuration.
Deleuze just as well carefully twists the elements of the "formal
code" in order to organize this ring. Consider the manner in which
he changes the meaning ofWorringer's analysis, where the line was
ideality, the power of order. Even the Gothic line had a twofold
function. It conveyed an anguish and a disorder, but it also cor­
rected them by manifesting an ideal vital power. In Deleuze's work,
on the contrary, the line becomes the power of chaos that carries
away all form, the power of becoming-animal that undoes the
human figure, the catastrophe of the figurative space. The contour
thereby encircles a closed field in the center of a twofold pressure:
around it, the background field of color advances the powers of
chaos against the figure, the non-human, non-organic forces, the
non-organic life of things that come to lash out at the figure. Within
the field's interior, the figure seeks to escape itself, to disorganize
itself, to empty itself through its head so as to become a body with­
out organs and thereby return to non-organic life. The Apollonian
maxim "stand up on its own" is, rather, Dionysian hysteria: it is not
the flow of the work's forces in the body of the artist, but the flow
within the work of the figurative givens that the work must undo.
The "hysteria" of the work of art defines the task of de-figura­
tion particular to the work within a twofold opposition. It explicit­
ly opposes an organic aesthetics of the beautiful. However, the
point is not to replace this organic aesthetics with a negative aes­
thetics of the sublime or the inferiority of the sensible to the Idea.
What this combat engages, via the description of the work of art, is
the status of thought in general. It engages what is shown by the
other name Deleuze gives to the "hysterical" combat of de-figura-
6 JACQUESRANCrnRE

tion: justice. To justice itself, he gives a new name: he calls it

desert. The fifth chapter of Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
accordingly describes the end of the movement by which the fig­
ure escapes toward the molecular structure of matter: "It is this
extreme point that will have to be reached, in order to give reign to
a justice that will no longer be anything but Color or Light, a space
that will no longer be anything but the Sahara" (FB, 25). The work
of art administers justice, and justice originates in a specific place.
Even if the association between justice and the desert evokes first
of all Holderlin's Antigone, it seems to me impossible not to hear
here the echo of another discourse on justice and its locus. I am
referring to Plato and Book VII of The Republic. What does admin­
istering justice amount to in Deleuze as well as in Plato? One may
answer: to the sensible as such. It amounts to telling its true mea­
sure. In Plato's work, the true measure is called the Idea, and the
idea has an enemy: doxai. Doxa is the justice that the sensible
administers to itself in the present order of things. It is therefore
necessary to leave the cave, doxa, the sensible, in order to reach
the place from which the sensible receives its measure, even if the
sensible will vanish into it. Now, in Deleuze, justice also has ene­
mies: doxa, opinion, figuration. No more than the soul in Plato, a
painter's canvas is not a blank slate waiting for something to fill it.
The canvas is overpopulated, covered by the "figurative givens"
["donnees figuratives"]; that is to say, not simply covered by the
pictorial figurative codes, but by cliches, doxai, the world of shad­
ows on the wall. What are "figurative givens" or doxai? They are the
meaningful sensory-motor delimitation of the perceptual world as
the human animal organizes it when it makes itself the center of the
world, when it transforms its position of image among images into
cogito, into the center from which it delimits images of the world.
The "figurative givens" are also the delimitation of the visible, of
the meaningful, of the credible, such as empires organize them,
empires considered as collective actualizations of the subject's
imperialism. The task of art is to undo the world of figuration or of
doxa, to depopulate that world, to clear off the terrain, sweep away
all that is already on the canvas, on every screen; to decapitate
 IS TIIERE A DELEUZIAN AESTIIETICS? 7

those images in order to put in their place a Sahara.

To go toward justice is to go toward that which gives the true
measure of the sensible, the world of the Idea. And, of course, for
Deleuze, truth is not an idea behind or above the sensible. Truth is
the pure sensible, the unconditioned sensible that opposes the
"ideas" of doxa. It is the unconditioned sensible that is called jus­
tice or desert. The work of art is a march into the desert. However,
once the desert, qua dispenser of justice, is reached, the end of the
work of art becomes the absence of the work of art, madness. "This
extreme point will have to be reached," says Deleuze. Yet, in truth,
what presents itself when the justice-administering desert, the end
of the work of art, is reached, is the absence of the work of art,
madness. "This extreme point will have to be reached," but the
work of art would only be able to reach that point at the expense
of annulling itself. The theater of the work of art is consequently
one of a movement restrained in its place, of a tension and a sta­
tion - in the sense as well in which one speaks of the Stations of
the Cross. The work of art is the Way of the Cross of figuration that
manifests the lashed figure as a dishonored Christ. Yet, the work
precisely retains in place the lashed figure that wants to slip away.
The work of art is a station on the way to a conversion. Its hysteria
is schizophrenia kept within the framework where it creates again
and again the work of art and the allegory for the task of produc­
ing the work of art.
In a sense, the book on Bacon is precisely a vast allegory for
the task of producing the work of art. The privilege granted to
Bacon, the privileging of expressionism in a broad sense in
Deleuzian pictorial aesthetics, serves to show and to allegorize the
moment of metamorphosis, to show art in the midst of making itself
- hysterically - in its combat with the figurative givens. For
Deleuze, the work of art is first and foremost allegory of the work
of art. It presents its telos, its movement, and its restraint. The fig­
ure, for him, is at once the formula for a transformation and its alle­
gory. And his judgment on the figure is linked to the figure's capac­
ity to become formula and effigy that simultaneously operates and
allegorizes the movement of restrained flight.
8 JACQUES RANCIERE

Deleuze's books on cinema may be evoked here, specifically

the way in which the limit of the movement-image and the genesis
of the time-image are emblematized in two effigies, two female
faces, two "madwomen": the face of the woman in Hitchcock's The
Wrong Man, played by Vera Miles, and the face of Irene in
Rossellini's Europa 51, played by Ingrid Bergman. Both faces testi­
fy to the transition from doxa to desert: the wife of the wrong man
who sinks into schizophrenia following the unjust inculpation of
her husband; and the grande bourgeoise in Europa 51, who
becomes mad in the eyes of the world that she deserts for the work­
ers and prostitutes. Both faces withdraw from the universe of doxa
and justice. They go toward the other justice, the justice of the
desert, of Antigone, of petrifaction and interment. Only Hitchcock,
the Aristotelian, evades this crossing to the other side that engulfs
the beautiful edifice of the movement-image and the well-con­
structed fable. Rossellini takes the leap and makes the kind of cin­
ema that this face calls for.
Yet, how does Deleuze mark this transition? By making Irene
an allegorical effigy. The whole power of the effigy rests in the words
that Irene pronounces while returning from the factory: "I thought I
saw the condemned." She thereby becomes the allegory of the
artist: the one who has gone to the desert, the one who has seen the
too strong, unbearable vision, and who will henceforth never be in
harmony with the world of representation. Deleuze does not show
us the time-image, he draws for us a face that allegorizes what it sig­
nifies: the disjunction, the disaccord of the sensible givens.
Everything happens as if the more art approaches its own truth, the
more it becomes an allegory of itself, and the more the interpreta­
tion of it becomes allegorical. Everything happens as if the specific
purpose of art is to allegorize the crossing toward the true in the sen­
sible, toward the pure spiritual: the landscape that sees, the land­
scape before man, precisely that which man cannot describe.
At this point it is possible to situate Deleuze's thought within
the destiny of aesthetics as a figure of thought. It is possible to bring
back his critique of figuration and of organicity to the meaning of
aesthetics. Yet, what does "aesthetics" mean, in the sudden appear-
 IS THERE A DELEUZIAN AESTHETICS? 9

ance of that notion, as it was effectuated between the end of the

eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century? Nega­
tively, it indicates first and foremost the collapse of poetics. Poetics
was the mode of truth governing works of art in the universe of rep­
resentation. The universe of representation is governed by the dual
impulse of the mimetic principle evoked earlier: the work of art
produces a resemblance, but also, the work of art is itself a dynam­
ic resemblance in so far as it constitutes an organism, a logos, a
"living beauty" ["un beau vivant"]. The work's techne extends
nature, the phusis, the movement that brings about life in an organ­
ism. The techne is a production regulated by that other production
that is the phusis, the common power of life, organism, and work
of art. In contrast to poetics, aesthetics no longer places the work
of art at the center, but the aistheton, subjective feelings. Whence
the paradox that seems originally to mark aesthetics. While the col­
lapse of the norms of representation opens in principle the reign of
the work of art and its power, aesthetics, even by its very name,
drowns the work of art in a thought about the sensible, privileging
the affect, and an affect that belongs to the receiver or spectator. It
is known how Hegel settles it at the beginning of his Lectures on
Aesthetics. He declares the word clearly incorrect, bearing the
mark of a past epoch: the time of Burke and Hume in which works
of art were explained by an empirical psychology of sensation.
Still, regardless of its origin, the word entered into use, and is used
without problem to designate the theory of fine arts.
Yet, this is not the point at stake here. The word is not an
anachronism or an impropriety. What aesthetics indicates is a
change in perspective: a change occurring when thought about the
work of art no longer refers to an idea of the rules of its production,
but is subsumed under other things: the idea of a particular sensi­
ble form, the presence within the sensible of a power that exceeds
its normal regime, that is and is not thought, that is a thought
become other than itself, a product that equates itself with the non­
product, consciousness that equates itself with the unconscious.
Aesthetics makes the work of art into the intermittent manifestation
of the power of a contradictory spirit. Kant's theory of genius
10 JACQUES RANCIERE

defines it as a power that cannot account for what it produces.

Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism fixes the paradigm of
the product that renders the conscious and unconscious equiva­
lent. Hegel makes the work of art a station of the spirit outside of
itself, where the spirit is presented as the vitality of the canvas, or
the smile of the God of stone. The work of art is a sensible form sep­
arated from the ordinary connections of the sensible that hence­
forth has value as a manifestation of the spirit, but the spirit in so
far as it does not know itself. Aesthetics is born as a mode of
thought when the work of art is subsumed under the category of a
greater, heterogeneous form of the sensible, or the idea that there is
a zone of the sensible that distinguishes itself from the ordinary
laws of the sensible universe, and testifies to the presence of anoth­
er power. It is this other power - the power of that which, coex­
tensive with the sensible, knows without knowing - that may be
named the spirit, or as Deleuze named it, the "spiritual." It is
impossible to give it determin ations more precise than the follow­
ing: the idea of a zone of the sensible qualified by the action of a
heterogeneous power that changes its regime, that makes it so that
the sensible is more than the sensible, so that it belongs to thought,
but thought in a singular regime: a thought other than itself, a
pathos that belongs to logos, consciousness that equates itself with
the unconscious, a product that equates itself with the non-product.
Aesthetics is the mode of thought that submits the consideration of
works of art to the idea of this heterogeneous power, the power of
the spirit as a flame that equally illuminates and burns everything.
From what has been seen, this power in the sensible of a form
of thought that does not think may be understood according to two
alternative schemas. The first highlights the immanence of logos in
pathos, of thought within that which does not think. Thought is
embodied, lets itself be read in the sensible. It is the Romantic
model of thought that goes from stone and desert to the spirit, from
thought already present within the very texture of things, inscribed
in the strata of rock or shell, and rising toward even more explicit
forms of manifestation. The second schema on the other hand
seizes the spirit at that point of arrest where the image becomes
 IS THERE A DELEUZlAN AESTHETICS? 11

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

Proust's book presents this exemplary form that includes Schopen­

hauer's undertaking - the shattering of the world of representation
- in an Aristotelico-Hegelian plot of truth as error evolved.
Deleuze's analysis is thus inscribed in the destiny of aesthet­
ics as a mode of thought, in the destiny of the modern work of art
tied to that pure sensible, exceeding the schemas of the represen­
tative doxa. It establishes itself in the zones where pity, that is to say
sympathy with non-individual life, borders on folly, on the loss of
the entire world. Deleuze is faced with the modern work as the
contradictory work where the pathic element, the thought-tree or
the thought-pebble, has undone the order of doxa, but where this
pathic element is itself included, recuperated in a new type of
organicity and logos. He denounces this compromise; he attempts
to annul it, to reconstruct the modern work of art so that it obeys a
single logic or anti-logic. His engagement with the Proustian cor­
pus is exemplary in this regard, because it gives his book a contin­
uation, and a continuation of the continuation, as if it were neces­
sary to incessantly bring Proust back to the purity of an anti-organ­
ic model. "We search Proust's work in vain for platitudes on the
work of art as an organic totality,"4 Deleuze tells us. We may search
for them in vain but we will surely find them. Deleuze wanted to
know nothing of the insistent organicity of the Proustian schema.
He wanted to know nothing of the evolution of error, of the final
reunion of sides and the equilibrium of arcs. He returns a second
time to Proust as if to destroy what he left to subsist, to construct the
model of the Proustian anti-logos: the work of art made of assem­
bled pieces, of non-communicating boxes and sides. In sum, it suf­
ficed for Deleuze to render the Proustian work coherent, to render
the modern work of art, the work of the age of aesthetics, coherent
with itself. From there stems the combat with the work of art, which
is emblematized in the representation of the work of art as combat.
Deleuze fulfilled the destiny of aesthetics by suspending the entire
power of the work of art to the "pure" sensible. He achieves the
coherence of his anti-logical turn. Yet, there remains one question:
achieving the destiny of aesthetics, rendering coherent the inco­
herent modern work, is this not destroying its very substance? Is it
14 JACQUES RANCIERE

not making it into a simple station on the way to a conversion, a

simple allegory for the destiny of aesthetics? And wouldn't the para­
dox of this militant thought of immanence consist in incessantly
bringing the substance of blocks of percepts and affects back to the
interminable task of depicting the image of thought?

Translated by Radmila Djordjevic

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.