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FaVU-2DAAAcad. year: 2026/2027
This course explores Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of art through the artworks and artists he directly engaged with — from Francis Bacon and Marcel Proust to Refik Anadol. We move chronologically and conceptually through Proust and Signs, Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, The Fold, and What Is Philosophy?. Each week pairs a Deleuzian concept (sensation, sign, fold, diagram, simulacrum, becoming, etc.) with a concrete artwork. We ask how painting, literature, theatre, and digital media think — how they create concepts in the form of percepts and affects. The course follows Deleuze’s claim that “art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts.”
Language of instruction
Number of ECTS credits
Mode of study
Guarantor
Department
Entry knowledge
Rules for evaluation and completion of the course
Aims
Upon graduating the course, students will be able to:
Explain and contextualise Deleuze’s major aesthetic concepts.
Interpret concrete artworks through these concepts.
Articulate the continuity between Deleuze’s early and late writings on art.
Produce critical or creative work demonstrating how philosophy and art co-create meaning.
Study aids
Prerequisites and corequisites
Basic literature
Recommended reading
Classification of course in study plans
Lecture
Teacher / Lecturer
Syllabus
1. Introduction: Deleuze and the Thinking of Art — Art as thought; percept, affect, concept (What Is Philosophy?, ch. 7).
2. Francis Bacon: Painting Sensation — The Figure, rhythm, and diagram (Logic of Sensation, ch. 1).
3. Marcel Proust: The Apprenticeship of Signs — Signs, involuntary memory, essence of art (Proust and Signs).
4. Andy Warhol: Seriality and the Simulacrum — Repetition for itself; habit, memory, and death (Difference and Repetition, p. 294).
5. J. M. W. Turner: Light and Movement — Chaos and order; colour-force; sensation of matter (Logic of Sensation).
6. Paul Klee / Wassily Kandinsky: Lines, Rhythm, Colour — Rhythm, refrain, pure sensation (A Thousand Plateaus, “Of the Refrain”).
7. Diego Velázquez: The Diagram of Visibility — The gaze, representation versus sensation (Logic of Sensation, ch. 10).
8. Johannes Vermeer: The Revelation of Essence — Artistic sign, perception, truth through art (Proust and Signs, Part III).
9. Gian Lorenzo Bernini: The Baroque Fold — Fold, inflection, infinite movement (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque).
10. Hieronymus Bosch: Multiplicity and Becoming-Animal — Delirium, multiplicity, plane of immanence (A Thousand Plateaus).
11. Franz Kafka: Minor Literature and Collective Expression — Deterritorialisation, assemblage, minor use of language (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature).
12. Antonin Artaud: The Body without Organs — Cruelty, language breakdown, creation of the body (Difference and Repetition; Anti-Oedipus).
13. Lewis Carroll and Samuel Beckett: Surface and Exhaustion — Sense/nonsense, paradox, minimal event (Logic of Sense; Essays Critical and Clinical).
14. Refik Anadol: The Digital Diagram — Machinic perception, data-sensation, algorithmic fold (What Is Philosophy?; A Thousand Plateaus).
Seminar
Individual preparation - study of technical texts
Individual preparation - working on the assigned tasks