Spinoza’s Climatology of Affects and the Diagram of Painting

Abstract

In his lectures from November 1980 to March 1981, Deleuze describes the immanent and compositional nature of Spinoza’s philosophy expressed in the content, the method, and the form of his writings. Spinoza himself uses in the Ethics and the TP the images of the climatologist studying the weather and the geometric drawing of lines and surfaces for his technical, artisanal, and neutral approach to the affects and political life. His ontology is characterized by the absence of hierarchical order and by nature as the principle and source of diversity. This approach is reminiscent of art, which also orders the chaos of human existence and makes it productive in a free and immeasurable way. Deleuze conceives of Spinoza’s ontology as a practical philosophy, leading him to the examples and the analysis of paintings (and, vice versa, from the art of painting to Spinoza’s philosophy), to which he dedicates his subsequent lectures from March to June 1981. In this article I reflect on the link between Deleuze’s lectures on Spinoza and on painting, and therefore also between Spinoza’s compositional thought itself and painting.

1. Introduction

In his lectures held from November 1980 to March 1981 in the new buildings of Saint-Denis after the closure of the university of Vincennes, Gilles Deleuze focuses on Spinoza’s immanent and compositional philosophy. David Lapoujade has now faithfully edited the texts in Sur Spinoza (2024) [1], and we can finally leave behind us the audio files and transcriptions on the internet to which we had been resigned for many years. Deleuze shows how Spinoza in his Ethics elaborated a philosophy based entirely on an ontology of nature that responds to absolute laws but at the same time contains no hierarchical plan or order, and that is, in this sense, morally neutral and void. However, it is precisely the absence of an order established by a transcendent first principle that makes nature the basis, the ‘substance’ so to say, of a practical philosophy, which is expressed in the search for ‘effective truth’, in the method applied and in the form of his writings1. All theoretical propositions apply to themselves, which sets thinking subjects—that is, human beings—and their thought and bodies in motion and reinforces the ideas they propose. For the neutral, technical, and artisanal approach to affects, moods, and political life, Spinoza himself uses in the Ethics and the Political Treatise the images of the climatologist who studies the weather and the geometric drawing of lines and surfaces2 (TP I, 4, [3], p. 505; E III, Pref., [2], p. 492).

The ontology Spinoza develops is based on an idea of nature as neutral and as the source of diversity. This ontology forms the basis of his ethics and politics, in which virtue is understood as natural power, that is, as will, appetite, desire (E III, 9, Schol., [2], p. 500; [7], pp. 147–163). The neutrality of nature and the resulting absence of hierarchy lead to the establishment of the concepts of conatus and multitudo, of productive and strategic thinking centered on the strength of the mind, which is inseparable from (or coincides with) the power of the body. And this goes hand in hand with diversity as specificity, individuality, and heterogeneity, as Deleuze says in his text ‘Lucretius and the simulacrum’ in The Logic of Sense ([8], pp. 307–310).

The artisanal, technical, neutral, and non-hierarchical character of Spinoza’s thought accompanies a striking and intense expression of ideas and emotions that has a similar effect on his readers; reading Spinoza touches us, moves us, overwhelms us, and activates us. This is reminiscent of art, which also orders the chaos of human existence and makes it productive in an organized, intrinsically logical, even objective, but also free and immeasurable way. Spinoza’s structurally systematic–logical and at the same time free approach is comparable with what happens in works of art. It is a deliberate and intentional thought (which I like to express with the Italian phrase ad arte) that exists on the surface of expression and matter, which is the result of hard work and struggle, which focuses on the whole and the partial aspects, on the coherence and the contrasts, and which deals with the singular us and me of the experience on the one hand and the multitude as a totality on the other. It is a deliberately subjective thought, starting from the subject that creates and forms itself in relation to the objects in which it exists and to which it is oriented. It is an active thought in the sense that it is the grammatical actor of the movement it provokes. It is a productive thought because it changes what already exists, it composes and begins something new, it constructs a world and adds ideas, affects, and reality. I shall attempt to demonstrate this, following the line of thought and the writing style of Spinoza and of Deleuze as a teacher of Spinoza’s thought and style.

Spinoza himself sometimes refers to art when discussing human practices and the production of things that make a political society necessary:

For if men were not willing to give mutual assistance to one another, they would lack both skill and time [ars et tempus] to sustain and preserve themselves as far as possible. Not all men are equally capable of all things, and no one would be able to provide the things which a man alone needs most. Everyone, I say, would lack both the strength [vis] and the time, if he alone had to plow, to sow, to reap, to grind, to cook, to weave, to sew, and to do many other things necessary to support life—not to mention now the arts and sciences [artes et scientias] which are also supremely necessary for the perfection of human nature and for its blessedness (TTP V, [3], p. 143).

Artisan activities, in which technique and manual labor play a central role, belong to the same category as sciences and as art in the artistic sense, all of which are essential to a true, full, and vital life. In examples such as painting and poetry (EIII, 2, Schol., [2], p. 496; EIV, 39, Schol., [2], p. 569), he also emphasizes the craftsmanship and social aspect. As Vinciguerra says, art is what the body can do, independently of the mind, which very often does not know at all what the body is capable of and how it does the things it does ([9], pp. 203–204). In the referred fragments of the Theological-political Treatise and Ethics, art is mentioned in relation to virtue and time. From Spinoza’s perspective, medicine and politics are just as much an art as music, poetry, or painting are. These human practices, although specific to human nature and thus natural, are not given by nature, but are desired and created in response to our powerlessness when we are alone and lost in the chaos, desolation, and emptiness of time.

Generally speaking, Spinoza’s shift towards the immanent plane is accompanied by a vision of politics as art and virtue as capacity, strength, or power. This change is part of a Lucretian materialist vision that already appears in Machiavelli, a shift from a vision of politics as individual and idealistic action (which can be heroic or consist in prudence) to a vision of politics as a making, a creating (of a new reality) based on virtue understood as natural power, potency, or capacity ([10], pp. 11–13). This shift moves the focus to knowledge derived from experience and, consequently, to historical and current events, to the diverse perspectives and moods of all the actors in the game, as well as to conflict and struggle.

In his essays and lessons on Spinoza, Deleuze too is inspired by active, collective, and intentional (ad arte) subjectivity. He focuses on mathematical neutrality, variations, and transformations, as well as the (re)construction of Spinoza’s architectonic edifice. He highlights the asymmetrical interaction—a network structure—between philosophy and practice, between the individual and the context in which they appear and live, and towards which they orient themselves, and this leads to a reflection on Spinoza’s different kinds of knowledge and different styles of writing. As Bove notes, regardless of his consideration of works of art, Deleuze ‘has traced the essential stages in the history of the theory of expression. It is a history in which immanence takes on increasing and, ultimately, exclusive importance at the expense of emanation.’ ([11], p. 133). However, the history of the radicalization of immanence, culminating in Spinoza’s philosophy, is in fact inseparable from an equivalent movement in the history of painting. It is no coincidence that Deleuze, in his lectures on Spinoza, constantly shifts between the Ethics and examples drawn from painting, and that he ultimately focuses his immediately following lectures from March to June 1981 on painting, also edited by David Lapoujade in Sur la peinture (2023) [12]. Let us see what we can learn from this.

2. Deleuze’s Lectures on Spinoza (And Art)

In L’œil écoute [13], Paul Claudel suggests an analogy between Spinozism and seventeenth-century Dutch painting, particularly regarding light. The work of art is no longer related to the essence, but to the contingent, the small event—for example, the way a glass wobbles slightly, a partially crumpled tablecloth, or an overripe fruit: ‘something subject to duration’ ([12], p. 48; [13], p. 20). In Egyptian painting, the figure was, in accordance with the plan, surrounded by its context and associated with its immutable essence. Dutch painters, on the other hand, consider that, given the chaos of the world, the figure or form cannot be reduced to eternal essence, but rather to the changing, the eventful, the accidental, the detail that deviates ([1], pp. 182–183; [12], pp. 19–20; 263–264). This illuminating interlude occurs in Deleuze’s reflection on the debate between Blyenbergh and Spinoza on evil and nature in chaos3. Every time one body encounters another body, certain relationships are composed and others are decomposed, sometimes to the advantage of one, at other times to the advantage of the other. However, there is not always at the same time both composition and decomposition, because in the overall picture of nature, there are only compositions of relationships ([1], p. 188). It is from a subjective, particular, and determinable perspective that we isolate a part, a profile, of nature: this or that relationship is formed at the expense of another connection that must be broken so that the other two relationships can be formed. Spinoza contrasts the targeted perspective, charged with will and desire—both composing and decomposing—with the (neutral) consideration of nature as a whole—solely composing. There is neither good nor evil in nature seen as a whole, for the simple reason that in nature there are only compositions of relations ([1], p. 220). From our point of view, there is only one question: is the image of the thing with which our action is associated such that this thing is directly decomposed by this action, or is it such that its connection is composed with our action? In the first case, it is a vice; in the second, a virtue. What makes an action virtuous or not is its relationship of association with an image of the thing (that we always perceive in profile), and to the extent that it is associated with an action ([1], p. 222). Spinoza calls this image ‘affectio’.

The affectio is ‘an instantaneous cut’, strictly distinct from the affectus, and to clarify this, Deleuze links the question to Husserl’s analysis of the three spheres of belonging of essence in relation to the experience of time ([1], p. 229; [15], pp. 143–147; [16], pp. 74–129). There is essence itself, which is eternal; there are the affections of essence here and now, which are like moments, that is, what affects me at this moment; ‘and then there is what?’ ([1], p. 229). Each affection envelops the passage through which we arrive at it and from which we emerge towards another affection. Deleuze presents the question as a timeline with three aspects: A′, A, A″. The A in the middle is the immediate affection of the present moment. The chronologically prior A′ is the affection—gone but not quite—of the past moment (retention in Husserlian terms) ([17], pp. 63–71). The chronologically later A″ is the affection that arrives immediately after and is already anticipated (protention). There is always something that separates these different A′s, however close they may be to each other, namely the phenomenon of transition or passage, which is experienced as duration4. Duration is the third characteristic of essence. In the footsteps of Spinoza, Deleuze thus arrives at the definition of affect, namely that which envelops each affection while being of a different nature. Affect is the experienced transition from the previous state to the current state or from the current state to the next state. Essence belongs to itself in the form of eternity. Affection belongs to essence in the form of the momentary. Affect belongs to essence in the form of duration ([1], p. 232). Obviously, this raises the question: What exactly is this transition? We must abandon the spatial conception of passage, which leads Deleuze to the different kinds of knowledge, to intensity as a criterion of quantity, and to the degrees of (natural) power.

In the lesson of January 27, Deleuze asks whether Spinoza can be useful to semiology5. The motivation is, of course, whether we can better understand Spinoza’s perspective on the kinds of knowledge and the different styles of writing he uses if we approach them with semiotic tools that correspond well with the immanent approach.

By way of reminder, we human beings know many things, and we form common concepts in three different ways. The first is based on individual things that we perceive in a disorderly manner and through signs; Spinoza calls it ‘opinion’ or ‘imagination’ and considers both variants inadequate because they do not take into account the whole. The second consists of the formation of common concepts and adequate ideas about the properties of things. The third, also adequate, which he describes as intuitive, penetrates to the essence of things. Opinions or imagination are part of the human condition and are in this sense common, but they remain stuck in the individual, the arbitrary, and passivity. We allow ourselves to be guided by habit, tradition, authority, or our impulsive, uncontrolled, highly changeable, and therefore unstable individual feelings. To overcome passivity, individuality, and arbitrariness, we need the critical filter of the second kind of knowledge. Our ideas become adequate when we test them, actively subject them to investigation, and when they stand the test of time and can be shared with others. This kind of knowledge is necessary, but insufficient in practice—only intuitive knowledge that penetrates the essence of things is sufficient. Intuitive knowledge is immediate, evident ‘at a glance’, and part of a living interaction with individual and unique experience, affect, and imagination (E II, 40, Schol. 2, [2], pp. 477–478; E IV, App., [2], p. 588; E V, 26–28, [2], pp. 608–609).

The different styles of writing correspond to the adequate knowledge of the second and third kinds. In several of his works, Deleuze commented on the different styles in relation to velocity and slowness or the rhythm6. The analytical parts, constructed slowly and presented geometrically, which the reader must go through step by step, are suited to adequate critical knowledge. The scholia and appendixes, which appear as clearings (as Desanti puts it), bringing together elements from different parts and beyond particular details, breaking out of the slow mechanical structure and realizing ‘at a glance’, with a contrapuntal imagination, are suited to intuitive knowledge (EIV, App., [2], p. 588; [20], p. 143). The clearings in parts I and II lead us to parts III and IV of the Ethics, where the affects are analyzed in detail in terms of activity and passivity, and to part V, where intuitive knowledge is applied. The clearings look forward or backward, do not advance in measurable terms, but they break the slow rhythm of geometric step-by-step progress and ensure accelerated, propulsive movement and change.

The transition is linked, through productive imagination, to the limited and subjective perspective of a profile of reality as we perceive it. Spinoza’s questions are about how to bring about change and to move from the first to the second kind of knowledge, and then from the second to the third. We are born into circumstances from which we cannot escape. We are subject to encounters with external bodies that are not suited to us. The question facing every human being is how to escape our blind ignorance—how to attain knowledge—and how to live, which, for Spinoza, amounts to the same question, for ‘knowledge is a way of life’ ([1], pp. 259–260). Spinoza insists on the fundamental variability of the sign, as is the case with the imagination (which holds the first kind of knowledge captive), unlike the laws of nature, which do not vary for everyone. Signs have a self-affirming character and trigger an infinite chain of associations; this is where Spinoza situates language. Variability and associativity are the characteristics of the sign, and therefore also of equivocity. A process that lends itself to these characteristics is analogy. Deleuze then focuses on the analogies between Spinoza, the philosopher of light, and the changes that took place in seventeenth-century painting. There the dreaming character makes his appearance, the purely optical perspective is discovered, as is light and its independence from forms, both in the philosophy of Spinoza and Descartes and in the paintings of Rembrandt. The luminosity of these philosophers breaks with Aristotle’s formal concept: it is forms that depend on light, not light that follows forms.

In the lesson of February 3, Deleuze distinguishes three types of signs: indications, imperatives, and interpretations, each characterized by variability, associativity, and ambiguity. Spinoza is interested in how things can function, in how signs that are by nature signs, i.e., variable, infinitely associative and ambiguous, can, through their function, enable us to escape the world of signs and lead us to a full life. Deleuze translates Spinoza with this semiotic tripartition. Indicative signs are effects; they are the impressions of an external body on my body, in other words, ‘affections’. For example, I perceive the sun according to the effect it has on my body. I do not know the causes of this effect, I do not know how this impression is produced. I feel the impression: it is a sign imprint or ‘indicative sign’ ([1], p. 294; [25], p. 173). The nature of the sun is the cause of what is happening, but what I feel, the impression I have, tells me nothing about the nature of the sun, but rather about the nature of the effect, that is, of my body (E II, 16, Cor. 2, [2], p. 463). The second type of signs that Deleuze/Spinoza distinguish are imperatives, final causes, which belong to the imagination, they are illusions or fictions ([1], p. 296). The third type consists of interpretations, which are abstractions. Deleuze applies his characteristic tripartite division here as well. Affection is the idea of the impression of a body external to me on my body, always in the present moment, which triggers the process and realizes a power. This can go in different directions. My

power is effected by affections, as perfectly as it can be, but in such a way that this power is at one time diminished and at another increased in relation to the previous state. What Spinoza calls affect, as opposed to affection, is the increase or decrease, that is, the transition. Affect is the transition from one affection to another affection ([1], pp. 304–305).

Spinoza/Deleuze thus arrive at a fourth type of sign, the vectorial sign. Affection is an indicative sign that to some degree designates the nature of the body outside me, and that refers, above all, to the nature of my affected body. Its perfection is defined by a quantity of reality. Affect, on the other hand, the transition, is a vector quantity, and the rules that govern it are different from those of scale quantities. This is why joy and sadness are vector signs. There is a vector that brings us back to the world of signs, as well as a vector that offers us a chance to escape the world of signs. Joy is in this sense a good vector, sadness is not. And whenever Deleuze hears someone say that there is something good in sadness, he sees them not only as an enemy of himself, but also as an enemy of the human beings; they are like a tyrant or an ally of the tyrant, for only the tyrant needs sadness to establish his power. Epicurus had already denounced the tyrant and for the same reason he denounced religion, Lucretius continued in this tradition with his poem on the nature of things.

The ideas of compositions of relations differ from the ideas of effects, because they go back to the cause of the effects. The cause of the effects of a body on my body is the nature of the composition of relations between two bodies or the act by which the external body breaks down my relations. Spinoza calls the composition of relations ‘common notions’, and Deleuze’s examples concern art and everyday practice, which, like science, belong to ‘the realm of knowledge, albeit a knowledge that is one with life.’ ([1], p. 318) Common notions are introduced in propositions 37 to 50 of the second part of the Ethics, but in proposition 10 of part V, we notice that Spinoza no longer follows the deductive order. Common notions provide access to knowledge of essences. It is in its individuality and singularity that each thing has an essence, and essence is the degree of natural power in itself. From there, Deleuze reformulates the three kinds of knowledge: the first kind is the entirety of affections and passions that arise from them, the world of signs; the second kind is called reason, or the entirety of univocal common notions and active affects that arise from them; the third kind, or intuition, is the knowledge of essences ([1], p. 326). As we have said, the question is always the same: how to move from the first kind to the second, and from the second kind to the third.

Deleuze ends his lecture with a cliffhanger, to which he will return two weeks later, in the lecture of February 17. The individual is composed of three levels: (1) it is a degree of natural power—we can only speak of this or that human being, there is no abstract idea of human beings; (2) the individual is characterized by the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness; and (3) it corresponds to singular essence. Spinoza therefore presents the individual, on the one hand, as a relation that refers to its composition, and, on the other hand, as a conatus or desire that refers to its natural power, and finally as an intrinsic mode that refers to a degree. If the individual is relation, power, and degree, it is not a substance7. It is a body, which Deleuze explains using examples taken from art, as this is the only way to understand it in a concrete way. A red circle does not extend in space in the same way as a blue circle, ‘as all painters know well’ ([1], 389–90). He again cites the example of the changes that painting underwent between Egyptian, Greek, Byzantine, and seventeenth-century modern art. In Egyptian art, the foreground and background are on the same plane, while in Greek art, the foreground takes precedence, linked to the form that has a contour, an outline. In Byzantine art, there is no depth and the background takes precedence, there are no longer any contours to the figures and there is an extension of light-color, which amounts to a kind of inversion of the Greek world. This gives rise to a reflection on boundaries and contexts or animal territories, until Deleuze returns to Spinoza’s famous formula in Letter 50 to Jelles: ‘shape is nothing but a determination, and a determination is a negation’ (Letter 50, [3], p. 407). Deleuze explains how this formula should be understood, namely: ‘the outline determines the figure, but at the same time the outline tells us what the figure is not, because it designates the place where the figure is no longer.’ ([1], p. 398) The outline is a negative determination and a determination ‘can’t be anything but a negation’ (Letter 50, [3], p. 407).

But a problem remains. Spinoza clearly states that figures are reasoning, i.e., abstractions. Deleuze sees this as a criticism of geometric figures, but Spinoza himself uses a geometric method. Is there anything other than figures and outlines in geometry? According to Deleuze, there is. As long as I consider the figure and the outline, I am in pure abstraction. There is indeed nothing in nature that is produced by a figure or a contour; there are no molds. ‘We have never seen a circle in nature being formed geometrically.’ ([1], p. 399). Of course, there are many round things in nature, but they are not made round by a compass. Spinoza gives us two definitions of the circle, the first by its circular contour—the circle ‘is the figure in which the lines drawn from the center to the circumference are equal’: this definition does not take us forward with regard to the transitions aimed by Spinoza/Deleuze (TIE §95, [27], p. 78; [2], p. 39)8. In the second definition, the circle is a produced figure, ‘a definition by the reason of production’, or what is called in geometry ‘a genetic definition’: the circle ‘is the figure that is described by any line of which one end is fixed and the other movable’ ([1], p. 399; TIE §95, [27], p. 78; [2], p. 40). It does not matter that circles are not generated in this way in nature, because from now on, the circle is associated with a power (virtue or capacity) that is not automatically given by nature, but that is conquered and realized through an intervention of the human mind and hand. The second definition allows us to form a circle, while the first gives us no means of doing so. The second definition gives us a rule of production, ‘a genetic reason for the circle’ ([1], p. 399). The circle is no longer defined as a form, but as a power (capacity, know-how, art).

‘The genetic rule is the power to produce the circle, and the circle will go as far as this power goes. The circle will be defined by an internal power, no longer by an external contour. At that moment, and under that condition, the genetic method can tell us something real.’ ([1], p. 400)

Deleuze establishes a link between genetic reason and differential calculus, which gives us an idea of a limit, not in the sense of a contour, but in the sense of what x and y tend towards when they disappear. At the level of the senses, this concerns the relationship between light and spatialization, and in the seventeenth century, we see a new attempt to create a purely optical space—‘there, light and power have […] become identified’ ([1], p. 400). Seventeenth-century infinitesimal analysis is to mathematicians what seventeenth-century painting means to painting: it becomes a painting of light in which the contour is no longer present as the virtual tactile, fixed, and unequivocal outline. In Rembrandt, the limit becomes a question of shadow and light, no longer a contour, but an area that tends towards a limit.

3. Deleuze’s Lectures on the Art of Painting

What can philosophy expect from the art of painting? To talk about painting means forming concepts directly related to painting and nothing else. Consequently, Deleuze looks at paintings by Turner, Cézanne, Klee, Bacon, and others, he reads their texts, and nothing else; he puts himself in the place and perspective of the artist. Many of the reflections drawn from the lectures on Spinoza recur here: in painting, all is about the plane of composition as opposed to the chaos that precedes painting, but which at the same time continues to be part of it and belongs to the act of painting. Painting is a matter of sensation; its language belongs to the logic of sensation. The plane of composition is associated with a reflection on light and colors. The painter ‘places himself as if in the situation […] of the beginning of the world. What else could this mean if not that he is going through this chaos-catastrophe?’ ([12], p. 51). Following Bacon, Deleuze distinguishes three moments in a painting: First, there is the pre-pictorial, which belongs to the material canvas, to the painter’s intention, always clichéd—the act of painting begins with the struggle against intentional form—and to the existing forms and figures—when Mondrian paints a square, there are all the squares that have already been made and already exist. Second comes the diagram, which constitutes the logic of the canvas, ‘the operative set of lines and areas, strokes and stains, that in themselves are meaningless and non-representational’ ([28], p. 95). Deleuze insists on the non-representational character of painting, be it allegedly figurative or abstract, in tune with his view on what philosophy is, not a matter of questioning what a concept represents, but what its place is in the whole of other concepts ([12], p. 24). The strokes are not representative, neither illustrative nor narrative. ‘They are lines of sensation […] and above all, they are manual lines.’ ([28], p. 94). The operation of the diagram is to suggest a ‘possibility of fact’ ([12], p. 52). Third and finally, there is the pictorial fact that transcends the diagram by reconnecting with the pre-pictorial and creating a new work in a ‘synthesis of time’ ([12], p. 52). These three phases intertwine, because the pre-pictorial does not disappear with and through the act of painting. In this description, we find an echo of the process of individuation as it is described by Gilbert Simondon, which starts from a pre-individual reality that continues to fuel the movement of individuation throughout the process as long as life lasts [29]. Of course, the three phases also recall the three kinds of knowledge. Analogies appear constantly—Deleuze speaks, for example, of the ‘chromatic circle’, a structural approach, and the ‘genetic triangle of colors’ ([12], p. 232). Finally, the three phases recall the durational and rhythmic concept of time, the present moment that always embraces the passing away of the before and the attended coming after.

‘The diagram […] is violent chaos in relation to figurative data, but it is a seed of rhythm in relation to the new order of painting,’ as Bacon puts it ([28], pp. 95–96). Deleuze combines reflections by Cézanne and Klee and arrives at the concepts of ‘seed-catastrophe’ and ‘seed-chaos’ ([12], p. 98). For light and color to emerge, the painter must pass through the chaos that serves as the seed of the work. He finds an illustration of these dynamics in the work of Turner, who experimented with the essence of color and reduced his palette to the three primary colors, with which he pursued his quest in an increasingly radical manner. Not only did he study Goethe’s theory of colors intensively—Deleuze in turn also does so in the lecture of 19 May ([12], pp. 228–264)—but he also demonstrated and realized it in his 1843 work, Light and Color (Goethe’s Theory), The Morning After the Deluge, Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, in which he links his quest for light and color to the birth of life from chaos ([12], pp. 240–241). Figuration and the world of objects are completely absent. What more can we say about this experiment, except that Turner went through the catastrophe–chaos, and that he establishes a world on the canvas, not the world of objects, but a new world of light and color?

4. Experience of Painting and Perspective

It would be interesting to link these considerations to a reflection on practices of painting (through texts of painters such as the above referred to Turner, Klee, Cézanne and Kandinsky) and on my own experience as a painter, but this will be the subject of a future work. In conclusion, I would nevertheless like to mention that Deleuze’s research on Spinoza and painting (like Spinoza’s own work altogether) is full of analogies with the challenges we face when we paint. These analogies teach us how to read and interpret Spinoza, as does Deleuze with his work on Spinoza and on painting. There is the struggle with the material, with representation, with the intentions and the cliché. Painting contains and presupposes (systematic and deep) thought that nevertheless should be left behind. There is the search for the right composition amid chaos, the place of the non-representational and preferably geometric spots and figures in the whole and their mutual relationships. There is the wild work-like activity, not step by step, but on every part of the composition at once. There is the light and the colors; the thickness and transparency; the coherence of spots and figures in changing, varied, and contrasting patterns through the play of contours that are never drawn outlines—lines are abstract, they are ideal, imperceptible things in the reality. On the other hand, there are indeed lines, or rather invisible rays (diagonal, horizontal, vertical rays), and painting means making visible what is invisible: rays that suggest movement and its direction. In short, there is everything related to perspective as we read about it in the ancient treatises of Leon Battista Alberti, Piero della Francesca, and Leonardo da Vinci [30]. Painting is a search for perspective. ‘A painting consists of a sketch, a composition, and a luminosity,’ says Alberti, who speaks not like mathematicians who measure figures and things only in the mind, but like an ordinary man, a craftsman and painter, who wants to ‘make things visible’ with his hands ([31], pp. 77; 51). The definitions Alberti proposes are genetic reasons.

In the practice of painting, the three phases are intertwined. Pre-pictorial reflection belongs to painting, but it is the hands that do the work, that make and create the diagram; the mind does not know how or what. What emerges from this difficult manual labor, the pictorial work or the painting itself, transcends the diagram and rejoins the pre-pictorial as a living and changing image, which is why it can move us and sets us in motion.