Deleuze, Gilles (1925–95)

3. Minor literature and nomad arts

Given Deleuze’s interest in the history of philosophy and in social and political philosophy, his careful attention to literature and the arts may be unexpected. Yet, his two books on cinema, books on Sacher-Masoch and Sade, Kafka, Proust and Francis Bacon, as well as articles and constant references to a host of literary, musical, and artistic works and persons all evidence the central role of literature and the arts to philosophical geography. Thus, there is Le Pli: Leibniz et la baroque (The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque) celebrating the pleat, the curve, the twisting surface of science and mathematics, but also of music, architecture, the line and the word; a sensuous view of the world that lives in the work of art. Nomad arts are blocs of sensations or a ‘fold’. Each is a compound of percepts and affects wrested from the subject and its states by means of the material of each art. By means of its material, words and syntax, affective writing is the becoming-multiple that deterritorializes a major language and produces minor writing, which is the composing and decomposing of saturated percepts, rather than a record of memories, fantasies or travels. Thus, everything that is written takes its place within the open whole which is the social world. Likewise, cinema is sensation conditioned by cinema’s plastic mass of visual material that puts into operation the open whole as both incessant flux and instantaneous disjunction. In place of language, art gives us percepts, affects and blocs of sensation put into motion. This is not philosophy, yet it makes philosophy happen by giving the event a body, a life, a universe.