PETER OSBORNE & ERIC ALLIEZ

Philosophy and Contemporary Art After Adorno and Deleuze: An Exchange

Peter Osborne: I cannot begin without saying something about these two cartoons. Eric and I are confronted here with visual parodies of our assumed masters, so it seems as if it is incumbent upon us to dene ourselves in relation to them. Adorno is looking decidedly anxious, and one wonders whats going on beneath the table. Whereas Deleuze is very relaxed, he hasnt a care in the world. This puts me at an immediate disadvantage being associated with this anxious, rather guilty gure. What is he so anxious about? Perhaps it is the fate of his tradition. It would be misleading to reduce the kinds of things that Eric and I are currently writing about art to representations of these two dead cartoon gures. Nor should it be assumed that the ways in which we understand these two philosophers are necessarily very close to the standard pictures of them, particularly in the Anglo-American literature, which has a tendency to import French and German philosophers, academic-industrially, as brand names, to identify them with one or two key thoughts, and then to market them in that way, endlessly repeating the same few formulae, until their untruth is transparent. Nonetheless, my thinking about art has certainly been formed in the context of the British reception of the Frankfurt School in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so I will begin by saying something about that, and Adorno in particular. When people talk about the Frankfurt School nowadays theres a tendency for them to be thinking of Habermas, as if he still has something to do with it. However, the historical presuppositions about critical theory which underlie most of what I write are, rst, that the BenjaminAdorno line of thought is critically primary, and second, that this tradition ends in or around 1968. Habermas belonged to it when he was young, but from 1968 onwards Habermas can no longer be associated with critical theory in its classical sense. This is for both philosophical and political reasons, but its primarily politically determined: Adorno was unable to come to terms with student radicalism and Habermas famously denounced the left of the German student movement as fascist. So 1968 is a very important moment for both of the traditions we are going to talk about today. Obviously, it is vital to the way that Eric understands Deleuze 1968 is very much the beginning of something in the French tradition. But for me, 1968 is the end of the indigenous form of the German critical tradition, because it was a tradition that could not deal with the radicalism of 1968, it could not incorporate it into its thought with the notable exception of Marcuse, perhaps, but there are complications even there. (By 1968
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Marcuse was no longer exactly indigenous to the German tradition; nor was 1968 a new beginning in thought even for Marcuse. It was rather the occasion for an engagement the positive engagement of an existing structure of thought with a new socio-political reality which, however admirable and productive in the short term, did not give rise to a new theoretical or practical project.) So, the immediate problem for anybody coming out of the tradition of German critical theory today, philosophically, in relation to politics or to art theory, is: how can one extend it, develop it and rethink it after 1968 especially if, like me, you believe that Habermas after 1968 is essentially a philosophical version of the Marshall Plan? (It has been Habermass historical role to introduce American pragmatism into German philosophy, and thereby to domesticate or accommodate its critical tradition to the post-war consensus of US hegemony.) There are two things to note about Adornos later work in this context. The rst is that it is largely an attempt to think the post-war signicance of Walter Benjamins thought. In many ways, Adorno is a rewriting and a rethinking of Benjamin for the post-war period. What that means in relation to art is that it involves the mediation of Benjamins thought with the subsequent history of Modernism. For me, the best way to read Aesthetic Theory (which I take to be the most important philosophical work about art written in the twentieth century) is basically as a massive mediation of Benjamins philosophy with the history of (a musically inected) Modernism. Adornos Modernism is also literary, of course, and by the 1960s hes beginning to think about visual art, particularly in the essays about the convergence and collapse of distinctions between the arts. In those late essays, his thought begins to resonate with some of the distinctive issues of the post-medium condition of contemporary art. But its only very late, in the mid-1960s, that he picks up on a sense that medium is no longer a basic category in the philosophy of art, or rather that medium is no longer of ontological signicance (although he would never have put it like that of course, given his anti-Heideggerian aversion to the term ontology). For me, Adorno represents the project of mediating the transdisciplinary post-Kantianism of Benjamins thought with the history of Modernism, where Modernism is meant in a very broad temporal sense not in a periodising sense, but in the more basic sense of the tradition of the new. Modernism is a certain temporal logic of negation. As such, Modernism carries on. From this point of view, Postmodernism
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was but a passing fad within the self-misrecognition of this Modernism a reied hypertrophy of one of its historical specications, like all individual Modernisms, to which this kind of misrecognition has hitherto been endemic. Now, if the broader coordinates of this tradition (dialectical reason) enter into crisis in 1968, for essentially political reasons, that is the time at which the great canon of early-twentieth-century Modernism is running into the ground as well. Its not the end of Modernism, at least not for me, but it is the end of a certain Modernism, a certain hegemonic Modernism, of which Greenbergian Modernism is the paradigmatic representative in the visual arts. This was also the period of the collapse of the plausibility of writing about art on the basis of the historical importance of just a few great artists (Schnberg, Beckett). So there is a multiple break here, in the artistic eld, coeval with the political break of 1968. This is the second thing of importance about Adorno, I think: he recognised this break although he was not able to understand it other than negatively. This is perhaps one of the things that Eric and I are going to disagree about: the artistic signicance of this break. I think that there is a break in the mid-1960s that is artistic as well as political. At the end of the 1980s, my project became to mediate Aesthetic Theory with the history of contemporary art since the 1960s. This involves rethinking this break dialectically, in positive as well as negative terms in terms of the production of new critical concepts and new forms of art. How does the framework of Aesthetic Theory have to change in order to be able to think art since the 1960s, on the assumption that there is some kind of a rupture or a break in the 1960s? In some way in the course of the 1960s, however one is going describe it, something happens to the ontology of art, to what art is, that makes it different from then onwards. This has something to do with the generic character of art, post-medium the fact that medium is no longer an ontological category. You can no longer be an artist by just being a painter. You can struggle with the question of how to make art using painting, which is a difcult and productive enterprise, but just being a painter isnt enough any more to make an artist. In the course of trying to think this eld, I came to the conclusion that of all the complex and overlapping movements within the art of the 1960s, there is a critical privilege to Conceptual Art, by virtue of the fact that its the art through which one is most clearly able to articulate this ontological break in the character of art. It is in this is the sense that tI argue that contemporary art is constitutively Post-Conceptual.
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The problem and well come on to this in more detail later on, and Im sure well have different views about it is that the historical difculty for criticism about conceptual art, and the critical difculty in articulating and imposing the idea that contemporary art is constitutively Post-Conceptual, is that as a historical movement Conceptual Art was constituted by a philosophical misunderstanding of itself. It was constituted through an absolutisation of an opposition between concept and aesthetic, and it pursued the programme of the absolutisation of the anti-aesthetic. There are a variety of forms of this, the best-known being the Kosuthian version of the reduction of art to propositional form. But there are a number of different versions of that. One of the critical tasks Ive been trying to undertake in different contexts is to articulate how and in what way it is that Conceptual Art is this critically privileged moment. But to disengage the critical understanding of Conceptual Art from its self-understanding in the writings of people like Kosuth is actually quite a difcult thing to do, and its because of that that I think it clearer to call contemporary art Post-Conceptual. The problem with this, however, is that it might lead people to think that I mean Conceptual Art was indeed what it thought it was, but now theres something else, which simply comes after it. I dont mean that. Its a philosophically difcult thing to say, but ontologically theres a sense in which Conceptual Art is itself Post-Conceptual. Ontologically, what Conceptual Art did was inaugurate contemporary art as Post-Conceptual art. But if it did that, the question is, well then, where is the Conceptual Art, proper? The properly (or as I would say, strong) Conceptual Art was the philosophical illusion carried by the self-understanding of the movement of Conceptual Art. So Conceptual Art is a fantasy of the critical discourse of a Conceptual Art that was always already Post-Conceptual, relative to this fantasy. Maybe this is a good time to let Eric in. * * *

Eric Alliez: Deleuze oblige, philosophically, I dont really believe in discussion. This is because the natural dialectics of discussion rarely give birth to dialogues. And I dont say a dialogue, but rather dialogues, accentuating a plural that could free a play of non-identied multiplicities un jeu de et entre multiplicits insofar as the two supposed interlocutors are able to project new interventions only from and through a hyper-problematisation of their respective positions in a constitutive relation to the present. From
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this problematic point of view then, I want immediately to pay homage to Peter Osborne for his sharp and open re-presentation of his trajectory, and to express my real pleasure at being part of this exchange with him. But I have to add straight away that the disadvantage here is obviously and paradoxically mine on two levels. First, because I essentially share the historico-philosophical diagnosis he proposes regarding the Frankfurt Schools end in 1968, as well as the critical distance he introduces, apropos the 1968 break, in relation to the historical and philosophical forms under which Conceptual Art proper dened itself. (But, it might be asked, is it possible properly to divorce the latter from an ontological interrogation of the specic inaesthetics / anaesthetics it pretended to develop? I appreciate the improper character of Peters post-conceptual afrmation despite a certain souvenir of the Lyotardian operation, the motto of which became the Rewriting of Modernity / Postmodernity: the Post-Modern as always already implied in the Modern, as its excessive truth, etc.). Consequently, Peter has already appropriated for himself criticisms I could have developed with regards to the double tradition he is supposed to belong to. And indeed he does even better, since his thinking begins from this self-critical axis, focusing his analysis on the contemporary art that opened up after the 1968 break. This is my second disadvantage and a highly paradoxical one, if we think about the contrast between the anxious Adorno, the fate of whose tradition is to end in 1968, and the relaxed Deleuze, whose philosophy starts over again from 1968 and the subsequent works with Guattari. A paradox perhaps hinted at by Peter with his mischievous remark: Deleuze hasnt a care in the world. The issue here is not at all concerned with the refutation of the re-presentation of Deleuzian thought as leading us Out of this World (such counter-argumentation would anyway fall outside the context of the present exchange, since this is not, I think, exactly Peters position); it is rather how to confront the paradox determined by the suggestion that the 1968 philosophy par excellence (the Deleuzian translation of a biophilosophy into a biopolitics, as assembled [agence] between Deleuze and Guattari) hasnt a care in the (contemporary) art world. Indeed, from Anti-dipus to A Thousand Plateaus, from Francis Bacon (the very next book published by Deleuze alone after A Thousand Plateaus) to the chapter on art in What is Philosophy? (co-signed with Guattari), there is no immediate trace of a direct investigation into so-called contemporary art. When the question does emerge explicitly, despite everything, at the very end of that chapter where art is analysed qua
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a pragmatic experiment with blocs of sensation which seeks to rediscover, to restore the innite it is in terms uncompromisingly critical of the dematerialisation proposed by Conceptual Art and its doxic rematerialisation in judgements about what is to count as art (a formal game au nom de lart ). In a way, beyond my agreement with this critique, Im tempted to deduce my whole research programme of the last ten years from a confrontation with this apparently wholly anachronistic position in which Romanticism would be taken (quite logically) to be the last (strong) condition to redeem Modernism. After Deleuze and Guattari, my hypothesis reads on the contrary: neither (Romanticism) nor (Modernism), precisely because the question is how to extend intensively and experimentally the afrmation of a politics of sensation that would undo the most common conceptual representations of contemporary art. As we know, contemporary art is 1) in general, exclusively focused on the Duchampian legacy, and 2) radically cut off from the long duration of Modernity because the latter has been de facto abandoned to the modernist / mediumnic teleology of aesthetic form (with so-called Postmodernism as the most banal version of this reduction of Modernity to Modernism). Before pursuing this last point, a methodological remark that may approximate Peters own: with regard to Deleuze, Deleuze & Guattari, or Guattari, my approach is not exegetic but constructive and pro-spective, meaning that this corpus is not itself the object of my investigation but rather its modulable instrument and horizon a horizon which does not exclude air pockets and hijackings. It is then precisely not my intention here to play the role of superior Deleuzian, the one who would follow for real the lessons of the Master (never writing about but always in between and with, giving primacy to the use or practice of thought rather than to describing its exercise, etc.). The aim is rather to enact constructively a constructivist philosophy that does not cease to think in terms of forces and not of forms (this, in parenthesis, is the very rst principle of the Deleuzian diversion of the history of philosophy), which intends to reinvent the knot (nouage) between philosophy and art starting from the constitutive relationship between force and sensation, and which thus gures art as an experimental assemblage of force and sensation whose deforming logic (a logic of sensation) is vitally aisthesic rather than aesthetic. (In the visual arts, to put it briey, I understand by aesthetics, by the aesthetic image of art, the celebration of the art-form under the pure form of an image which is ideally reexive with regard to its own medium.)
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I proposed, as an interesting provocation, to submit to this question of sensation (Every / any sensation is a question, say Deleuze and Guattari) the supposedly classical sequence of modern art (from Delacroix to Czanne) in order to show how it has been historically (un-)determined by a new concept of sensation whose reality condition in terms of new percepts and affects as well as in terms of percepts and affects of the new itself is commonly named hallucination. The hallucination identies itself with the productive differential force that constructs those operations without which there would be no expression of the excess of the visible in a logic of sensation. What I called the Eye-Brain refers to this construction of the sensible that depends strictly on a denaturalisation and cerebralisation of the gaze, and which already signies, through a critical and clinical problematisation of the very notion of the art-image, a kind of multi-media confrontation and de-naturation of the painting-form (Manet and Seurat are the major vectors of this process). In relation to Deleuze, it has been stimulating to practice in the eld of the history of modern art the kind of operations and mise-envariations he undertook in relation to the history of philosophy. My goal was a radicalisation of Deleuzes anti-phenomenological standards (which makes him say that Presence is an all too pious category), through an examination of the conceptual components of a plastic thought which, despite coming from outside the concept, captures some of its discursive and non-discursive forces By introducing Matisse a new Matisse, with and against Duchamp into the game, I attempted, as a necessary provocation in relation to contemporary art, to complexify its archaeology while aiming for the most radical critique of the aesthetic frame of the painting-imageform. The question was how to project the vitalist constructivism at stake in the Deleuzo-Guattarian aisthesic into a historical becoming (Peter would say a mediation) that could incorporate a critical alternative to the Duchampian dematerialisation of the art-form reduced to language games about art in a constructivism of the signier (the historical nominalist Duchamp). This was what I called, following the Nietzscheo-Bergsonism which (historically and ontologically) gave birth to Fauvism, MatisseThought: an energetic constructivism experimenting with an environmental decorativity which, in its expansion beyond the site of architecture qua the rst of the arts (Dewey, Deleuze & Guattari), invests the life-space. Now, one doesnt pass from the last of Matisses installations to, for example, Gordon Matta-Clarks anarchitecture by an intensication of the problematics of art and life at the exclusive level of an immanent
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becoming of art. To invest the powers of sensation politically in a totally new practical and theoretical sense of this word requires a direct and general social expansion of all the matters of expression of art. This 1968 motto, politics of sensation which perhaps expresses 1968 tout court, its force as event pro-poses art as a sensational problematisation of the relationships between construction and expression whose rst ontological effect is to disorganise the whole system of sensible evidence and discursive recognition in relation to the new forces of subjectivation it mobilises This is where Deleuze does not proceed without Guattari. * * *

PO Let me say a couple of things in response to that: rst, about Deleuze, Deleuzianism and the aesthetic, and second, about some of the more general philosophical issues. There is a problem in the current AngloAmerican reception of Deleuze into art theory, which is not reducible to, but which is nonetheless not unrelated to, the structure of Deleuzes thought. This is that the distinction between Deleuzes notions of affect and force, on the one hand, and something like aesthetic, on the other hand, is subordinated to their mutual opposition to the realm of the conceptual at least with regards to the way in which that opposition is constructed in What is Philosophy? This homology makes Deleuzes affect/ force appear as (because it takes the structural place of) a recoding of aesthetic. And this appearance is no mere appearance, since it is precisely sensation that is at issue. It is reinforced by the fact that the other main text at issue here, the text on art, is the text on Bacon: lets not forget that the logic of sensation is the logic of paintings by Francis Bacon. As a result, Deleuzianism in contemporary Anglo-American art theory ts perfectly into the current trend towards a restitution of aesthetics philosophically, art-historically and art-critically. Indeed, it is the perfect medium for a disavowed restitution of aesthetics, which presents itself as its opposite, namely something radically new, something contemporary at least theoretically (in the domain of theory). It has greater difculty doing this in relation to art practice itself, but then theory functions here, increasingly, as a terminological mask for practices to which it has very little actual relations. Deleuzianism offers another way of not having to talk about the things people have been nding difculty talking about for the last ten or twenty years: criticality in art, in particular, but also the artistic specicity and peculiarity of the development of the art / non-art relation not within a generalised eld of
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sensation, but as a constellation of determinate, institutionalised oppositions, of conceptual as well as affective signicance. In Britain, art-theoretical Deleuzianism offers a retrospective (intellectual) legitimation of a period of anti-intellectualism in British art since the late 1980s, and a re-legitimation of certain existential notions of the artist (Bacon is a really unfortunate paradigm here), via afrmative categories of affect and force, which are obviously also not unconnected to the booming market in contemporary art. This is not a comfortable conjunction and it is unquestionably connected to the valoration of painting. It is certainly dialectically witty to invest a rethought painting with the force of life, against what Eric calls art-Form, but I am not sure it is convincing; not only in practice because one cannot nd paintings that exhibit such force, today, in the context of our cultural present but also theoretically, because the manoeuvre looks too much like an inverted version of precisely that kind of play with the signier painting which you nd, and oppose so strongly, in the historical Duchamp. For me all of this is connected to a more general phenomenon, which goes well beyond Deleuze: a certain cultural conservatism that is the other side of the philosophical and political radicalism of contemporary French philosophy, or French philosophy after 1968 which would be a better way of putting it. This is partly to do with philosophy as an institutionalised eld (which is a trans-national phenomenon), but it is also something specic to French intellectual life, something to do with the way its wedded to its national narrative. In art, the moment that mattered was that moment in the history of painting from the post-revolutionary period at the beginning of the nineteenth century through to late Matisse. One can see Deleuze, and in a different way, Erics work, as an attempt to extend and rewrite rather than destroy that tradition. The dilemma for that tradition was: where was the French painter of the 1950s who could continue the tradition? That was the moment of Existentialism, so where is the French Existential painter? There is no French Existential painter (Giaccometis sculpture is a weak stand-in), so Bacon is given naturalisation papers. Bacon becomes the great missing French Existential painter. This ts, but its a narrowly national narrative, extended in competition with another national narrative: the US narrative, the Greenbergian narrative, which said art could be French (art could be painting and painting could be French), but only until World War II, and then it was going to be American. Theres a sense in which French critical discourse has accepted this narrative by continuing to xate on its own great moment, through the nineteenth century to World War II.
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In this respect, Erics work on Matisse is best read as counter to Greenberg and what Greenbergianism became (with Greenberg no longer on board) in Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Its a brilliant, perverse provocation, in all kinds of ways it says that Matisse was already proto-Alan Kaprow, for example, the inventor of the environmental; and also, more surprisingly, a Constructivist but it is still a recoding, a wild recoding, of a body of work and a critical paradigm that belong to the past. Maybe I am over-playing this point, but personally I think that all these discourses and practices were destroyed in the 1960s by a multiplicity of different practices and the different, determinate forms of negation of existing practices embodied in the new practices. We need to think the eld of contemporary art established during that period in a different and much more complex way, which can in no way be reduced to Erics attribution of a general exclusive focus on the Duchampian legacy. The Duchampian dematerialisation of the art-form reduced to language games about art in the constructivism of the signier is by no means the only non-Deleuzian game in town. Contemporary art is a complex but critically determinate eld, a constellation of negations, which do not submit to philosophical positions that ignore its history since the beginning of the 1960s. So there are multiple problems for a proto-Deleuzian art theory, I think: theres the problem that affect as opposed to concept restores as much as it rewrites the eld of the aesthetic; theres the traditionalism of the privileging of painting; and because it is France, painting in France, theres the privileging not just of the past, but a past that has long taken the form of a national heritage. All this is a long way from the culturalpolitical eld (not just politics of sensation but also of course sexual politics and anti-imperialist politics!) established in the wake of 1968. But perhaps my discourse here is itself too immediately culturalpolitical, too forced. There are some basic philosophical issues at stake here, determining the way we think differently about the ontology of contemporary art: crudely, post-Hegelian versus post-Nietzschean thought; dialectical negation versus afrmation, or historical ontology and judgement versus afrmation/becoming. The opposition is not as straightforward as it looks those posts carry a complex history of engagements but it is still a decisive one. One can condense it into a difference, or a set of differences, about history. For me, history in the collective singular is the speculative horizon and transcendental condition of intelligibility of historical events and practices. Ontology is always historical ontology, dialectical ontology, the production of the new
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through processes of opposition, conict and struggle that can be conceptually represented, summarised, in terms of the idea of constitutive negation. So, if we take your own example of the environmental dimension of Matisses later painting practice: for me, its initial or rst critical meaning derives from its negation of the canvas, its negation of the limits of the canvas in your terms, the limits of the prevailing painting-form. And it is hard for you to avoid presenting it like that yourself. As soon as you question something historically, you set up the question of its meaning and value in terms of temporal relations, and you understand it relationally principally via negation. But the determinacy of such negations does not derive wholly from what is negated, the determinacy is in the relations, and hence in the relational aspect of its positive, material which also means its aesthetic / sensational features. To understand it in purely positive ontological terms as a becoming opposed to (rather than constitutive of) history, insulates it from its own relationality, and mysties its becoming, cutting off its construction from any existing relations between its elements, including its negation of them. I understand modernism as the collective afrmation of the historical culture of temporal negation. So there is afrmation here for me too afrmation of and via negation. In my view, such a culture is pretty much irresistible; it is just a question of how conceptually self-conscious, and how collective, it is and what its collectives are, of course. I nd a lot to agree with and admire in your critical art-historical revisionism, but it seems at odds with the parallel post-Nietzschean discourse of a pure afrmation of forces, afrmation of life. Could there really be a truly vitalist art history beyond a pure positivism, of course? Does a vitalist really need a sense of history? * * *

EA Lets see if I can cut a long story or, more exactly, a counterhistory short, without falling into the usual trap of the discussion-model: objections, replies to the objections, new objections, etc. In this case, the rst attack is somehow always the good one because it has been launched from within a totally different problematic which re-codies and necessarily dis-gures the rst position from a superior level. The situation is, if possible, worse when the difference at stake has been conceived through a constitutive opposition (and contradiction): the discussion then conforms to a dialectical reformatting that forbids from the very beginning
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the afrmation of a non-dialectical difference, a difference it denatures by integration into an aufhebung. To get to the heart of the matter in discussion, the issue is not at all one of denying the very notion of opposition but of afrming, with and after Deleuze, that it is not difference which supposes opposition, but opposition, or negation, which supposes constitutive difference. And constitutive difference or constitutive negation means, ontologically and politically, becoming before and beyond History (and in no case without History, and not even opposed to History) or History versus becoming in a more or less sophisticated historicism wherein History becomes the inner form of the Concept in its dialectical development. To come back, as simply as possible, to my example of the environmental dimension in Matisse and the reinterpretation you suggest: despite being a critical threshold, it is not the negation of the canvas which is rigorously determinant; it is rather the Matissean energetics which displays the quantication of the forces it invests beyond the limits of the canvas. And it is from this afrmative expansion that there follows not only the negation of the canvas-frame, but, after all, a quantitative and processual alternative to the historical framing through which the painting-form maintained its aesthetic identity: that museal optics of quality whose common name is pictorialism. This is not at all Matisse-en-France; this is the American Matisse already celebrated by Dewey in the 1930s (as an alternative to the art-form qua Beauty Parlour of Civilisation) and rediscovered still in America and not in France (because of Existentialism plus Stalinism) some 2030 years later by the artists themselves. (It was via America that, historically, Matisses new environmental paradigm came back to France, with Viallat, Buren, etc.). It may be pertinent to emphasise at this point the Deweyan inspiration of Deleuze and Guattari in those crucial passages of What is Philosophy? where we read that architecture is the rst of the arts because (contrary to the phenomenology of art) art does not begin with the esh but with the house; because life becomes constructive with the house which architectures the sensation while de-territorialising it. What emerges in this non-Modernist / anti-phenomenological context is the enigmatic formula of a sensation-house a pure non-sense with regards to the frenchy-existentialist perspective within which you pretend to include the very notion of sensation, the better to integrate it into a (disavowed ) restoration of aesthetics. (It would be interesting here to investigate the American and anti-French alterity afrmed by Deleuze for himself: it goes further than an appeal to the superiority of Anglo-American literature and it could turn your so-called national narrative into a very
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British over-play between Art and Language.) A few words, some formulas, about this complex notion of sensation which depends precisely, ontologically, on the concept of intensive difference as genesis of the sensible, through which a differential, a difference of potential, can be extracted from the genesis of the sensation. The denition of art as a bloc of sensations signies nothing other than the construction of an alterity in a matter of expression (Hjemslev). It happens, following Deleuze and Guattari, that art will be more and more invested in a (trans-media, following Guattari) power of deframing because the material passes into sensation (rather than sensation being realised in the material). In this process, as I understand it, the question of the problematisation of the concept of sensation becomes so determinant that the sensation may appear operatively for what it is ontologically and nonaesthetically in relation to contemporary art: as its reality condition in the constitutive relationship with the becoming-other of an intensive body which can no longer recognise itself in any kind of corps propre, as well as the post-philosophical projection in the eld of art of a kind of sensuous heterogenesis of the concept itself in its non-propositional condition. For sure, this last statement is less Post-Conceptual than Post-Structuralist. Or, better, Anti-Structuralist in the way it afrms the negation of the linguistic turn in its strong (Neo-Positivist) or weak version (the conversational community democratising the name of art). As for my wild recoding of a body of work and a critical paradigm that belongs to the past, a recoding allegedly designed to maintain a Deleuzian-conservative valorisation of painting. First, I think that, essentially, Deleuze did with painting what he did with literature: an absolute deformation of its modernist-formalist motto. Secondly, I dont think that painting (or Bacon, i.e. Deleuzes Bacon, who is the pretext for a forced representation of the history of painting) has in itself an exclusive and paradigmatic function of exemplifying Deleuzian philosophy (constitutively, such a function would more naturally belong to his work on cinema, conceived as an Anti-Structuralist and machinic war machine that distributes itself in the historico-ontological caesura between movement-image and timeimage, after World War II). Thirdly, apart from the fact that a post- or trans-media use of painting is currently practised in many interesting ways, painting, far from being necessarily regressive, can form part of strategic dispositifs which tend to hystericise the all too uncritical and fashionable stateof-affairs in contemporary art (see, for example, Mhls return to painting in the 1970s against the Happenings he denounces as bourgeois theatre, and
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his elaboration of an actionist painting radicalised by the prison). Finally, regarding my own perversion of the history of modern and contemporary art, beyond the 1968 break Peter and I afrm differently, I would say that my own post-aesthetic motivation has perhaps been to reintroduce some kind of untimely becoming and conict into an all-too teleologico-dialecticallyordered Contemporary History of Art / Non-Art * * *

PO Yes, I agree with these nal four points, at this level of description. This is why I nd your project so interesting. I especially agree with the last two, more general points. But we think them through in rather different ways, which have decisively different implications and consequences. Let me quickly go back to the question of afrmation, negation and criticism, because there is more common ground here than has appeared so far, and it is on this common ground that we differ we inhabit it in different ways, but in certain respects we are addressing the same problems. Its the development and transformation of the problems that matter; the positions are successful to the extent to which they do that: generate new problems, or recongure the existing problematic. The thing about Frankfurt critical theory after 1968 was that it stopped doing that. It became reactive. It retreated to defending / repeating positions in a way that didnt develop its problematic sufciently, in relation to new forms of social experience. That is its fundamental weakness. Nonetheless, in my view, it has the conceptual resources to do it. To prove this, one has to get on and actually do it. Let me start with the dialectical reformatting that forbids from the very beginning the afrmation of non-dialectical difference, the difference it denatures by integration into an aufhebung Of course, this is the standard criticism of Hegelian dialectic: ultimate regression to identity, identity thinking. Adorno would agree, completely. The question is: what of the various post-Hegelian dialectical forms, developed on the basis of this criticism Marx, Benjamin and Adorno, in particular? These are precisely dialectical forms that do not forbid from the very beginning the afrmation of non-dialectical difference. Rather, they acknowledge non-dialectical difference as both the basis and limit of the dialectic of concepts (they call this materialism), and reect upon its consequences for the status and uses of dialectical thought in diverse ways. It is interesting, in this respect, that in continuing with the example of the environAn Exchange

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mental dimension of Matisse, you accept that its negation of the canvas is a critical threshold. This is a considerable concession insofar as, for the post-Hegelian tradition, it is precisely critical meaning (which is always historico-critical meaning) that is at stake. In apparent contrast, you locate the basis / determination of this negation / critical threshold in an afrmative expansion of forces beyond the limits of the canvas. Furthermore, and this is the crucial bit, you afrm this afrmation in its non-dialectical difference from the negation to which it is presented as giving rise. However, for me, the afrmative expansion beyond and the negation of are different aspects of what is actually a single process. There are no grounds for down-grading the negation to a secondary status, ontologically, when we are discussing a practice that is, something that is constituted, at least in part, by social relations; social relations that are themselves constituted, in part, by recognition, and hence by certain cognitive (that is, conceptually mediated) relations. What is at stake here is the ontological status of thinking (and re-cognition), in its most extended sense, in human existence: the role of thinking in mediating the relations between being and doing, or to put it another way, the role of concepts in constituting the various, innite ways of being human. What is at issue between us here is thus not, I think, nondialectical difference, but rather its ontological absolutisation as afrmation: your philosophical afrmation of afrmation itself as an exhaustive ontology of the human. But what reasons are there for this philosophical afrmation of an ontology of afrmation, other than its negation of the dialectical tradition! This might seem to have taken us a long way away from Matisse and the dialectical order versus the non-dialectical disorder of contemporary art (and what of vice versa?: its dialectical disorder and non-dialectical order!), but it is at the heart of how we think them differently. Yet, at soon as we talk about the eld of art (in distinction from something called painting), we converge onto a kind of sensuous heterogenesis of the concept itself in its non-propositional condition afrm[ing] the negation of the linguistic turn in its strong (Neo-Positivist) or weak version (the conversational community democratising the name of art). For me, philosophically, this sentence is completely legible within the terms of a Marxian materialism. Furthermore, art-theoretically (if I have understood it correctly) it acknowledges the (non-propositional) conceptual aspect of art albeit, for me confusingly, only in the form of a post-philosophical projection into the eld of art, which thus appears once again as funda54
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mentally (ontologically?) non-conceptual. This is what I contest. For me, fundamentally and in increasingly complex ways, art has both conceptual and non-conceptual aspects; and its conceptual aspects cannot be linguistically reduced. It is the critical virtue of the episode called Conceptual Art to have claried this and reafrmed it, despite its own initial intentions. At one level, this is a fairly minimal (and to art historians, entirely unsurprising) claim. It gains its leverage from the peculiar rush to deny it. The best way to discuss our differences that is, the differences between a (broadly, post-)Adornian and a (broadly, post-)Deleuzian perspective over how to understand arts sensuous heterogenesis of the concept in its non-propositional condition is probably via the idea of construction. Construction is a common term between these two traditions. Construction is also what, for me, decisively distinguishes Erics thinking from pop Deleuzianism and its crudely naturalistic vitalism: a constant insistence on construction the construction of assemblages, the construction of forces, and the relation of construction to expression. The relation of construction to expression is also the central moment, the central dialectic of twentieth-century art in Adornos oxymoronically entitled Aesthetic Theory. (Unfortunately, Adorno did not progress far beyond an acute self-consciousness of this oxymoron; he struggled unsuccessfully and often unconsciously with the distinction between art and aesthetic.) So, what does construction mean in these two different traditions? What is associated with construction, and what are the problems that construction brings? Returning to our role as representatives of cartoons, I will answer for Adorno. For Adorno, construction is understood, rst, as the generalisation of the principle of montage and second, and consequently, as the main principle, the dominant of the two principles, which govern the production of art the other one being a mimetic-expressive one. Furthermore, for Adorno, who was following Schnberg here, the goal of modern art was to bring construction to the point of expression. Thats a formulation with which Deleuze might well have been happy, I think, to bring construction to the point of expression. (Perhaps someone has just said this to him in that cartoon.) It is the principle of construction (as the generalisation of the principle of montage) that grounds the distinction between the organic (classical) and the non-organic (early German Romantic / Modern) work, as a distinction between works with different structural relations between part and whole. In the organic work, there is resolution of part or detail into the whole. Classical concepts of beauty are about different discursive articulations of that resolution of
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part into whole: a unity of the one and the many, which is resolved into harmony. The point about the non-organic work, on the other hand, is that the elements of the work are taken from life. They are cut out of life and put into art (readymade). They have a relative self-sufciency, which derives from their origin. The principle of construction is the principle according to which you make a whole out of elements that are not organically or harmoniously related, but which have their own independence. So the principle of construction is a particular principle of unity, a principle of wholeness. In the non-organic work, problematically, unity has to be imposed on elements that have an inevitable resistance to one another, and hence to unity itself. Unity here has a quasi-conceptual character; it is the result of an imposition of a concept of unity. There is a tension between the self-sufciency of the element and the construction of unity. Modern art, as non-organic, is governed by a problematic dominance of the whole over the parts. This is problematic, for Adorno, ultimately, because it reects the social domination of instrumental rationality: the principle of construction is the appearance of the social principle of instrumental rationality, immanently, within the work of art. Nonetheless, in order to be critical, the work of art has to be constructive, since for Adorno the organic work functions afrmatively (in Marcuses bad sense meaning as an afrmation of existing society). The practical artistic problem is thus: how to negate the bad instrumentality of the unity of the work, immanently, without regressing to an organic unity? Adornos theorisation of the solution (found practically in Schnberg) is: via the dialectic of construction and expression by converting construction itself into expression, and vice versa. But this dialectic has to be constantly reinvented, constantly constructed anew, as transformations in social experience render the once non-organic work organic (in much the same way as they destroy Duchamps aesthetic indifference). A particular period of Modernism becomes classical. The constructive-expressive dialectic of the part and the whole thus appears today in ways quite different to those in which it appeared fty years ago. The main change is that construction has been free from the constraints of medium (from which it derived much of its expressive potential) and returned to the more nominalistic radicalism of its origins in collage. As you will no doubt have anticipated, I associate this problematic liberation from medium which is an innite expansion of the possible elements of construction critically, and therefore ontologically, with Conceptual Art. For me, Conceptual Art was not about dematerialisation or the
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introduction of linguistically reductive forms of signication; it was about installing an innite plurality and multiplication of materialisations. Dematerialisation is a mis-description of the multiplication of materialisations. Because the work can no longer be identied with a single instantiation, people thought it might not need instantiating at all (at one point, LeWitt). This was a confused thought. Within the Post-Conceptual eld, there is a necessary materiality and a necessary plurality a proliferating plurality of materialisations for any one work of art. There is not a proliferating multiplicity of materialities for any one painting, of course, because a painting is materially associated with a single instantiation. That means that painting is not a possible form to explore the further development of this constructive-expressive dialectic of the non-organic work. This has to do with the fact that art is a social form. The socio-spatial experience that corresponds to the painting of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the room, the bourgeois interior. The public gallery was an attempt to render public this private space. The people who inhabit that space have certain forms of delimited social experience; they dont travel very much, they dont travel very often, the number of their social interactions is restricted by their place of residence the countryside or the city. Today, the spatial form of communicative experiences is completely different: its not limited by buildings and objects; its a non-place. An art of objects in buildings is an art that belongs to a world in which people live in places and are dened by the places in which they lived. The subjects of contemporary capitalist societies are not these kinds of subjects. And the spatialisation of their experience, if its to be rearticulated and constructed and represented by contemporary art, has to draw on the spatial forms of social experience. Now, you know, we still go into rooms and we still have relations to objects and, to the extent that thats the case, then painting and sculpture continue to relate to those aspects of our social experience, but theyre not the most critically important or dominant aspects of our social experience. My question to you is how, from a Deleuzian point of view, a Deleuzian concept of construction, does one think the problems of construction and the unity of the work? What is the principle of the unity of a contemporary work of art, conceived under the general-ontological conditions of intensive differentiation and multiplication? * * *

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EA I conrm: we agree and disagree on the essentials when both of us tend to generate new problems which recongure the existing problematic. This is quite a rare and precious relationship because in general there is usually either the former or the latter and the former is not in itself necessarily more interesting than the latter. Now, if you agree, or / and if you dont disagree, Id like to start by picking on up some crucial points in your highly articulated development, and to react to them quite spontaneously, to restitute for the audience and for our future readers the noise that exists between our respective (post-Adornian and post-Deleuzian) philosophies on the Expression / Construction topic. My answer to your nal questions will perhaps then be all-too indirect and direct (i.e. without mediation) but I cant see any other way to express the difculty of the dialogue when it is for real. First then, a crucial point of agreement / disagreement, concerning your critical deconstruction of the Frankfurt Theory after 1968: You say that it retreated to defending / repeating positions in a way that didnt develop its problematic sufciently, in relation to new forms of social experience, and you add: Nonetheless, in my view, it has the conceptual resources to do it. The rst thing that occurs to me is that you are somehow repeating here the Adornian criticism of Hegel, when Adorno explains, after Marx, that the lack of clart (the word appears in French, in his extraordinary text Skoteinos, Or How to Read ) of the Hegelian philosophy would have been determined by the irruption of the historical dimension, whose ontological truth will call for a negative dialectic. Now, the question redoubles in intensity here since we are talking about 1968, whose character as event (absolutely misunderstood by Adorno) provoked Deleuze into re-starting his whole philosophy (in collaboration with Guattari). To put it differently, and taking a step further: Deleuze needed very precisely to problematise the philosophical identity of his conceptual resources in relation to practice (the rst traces of the political emergency of this question lurgence pressante dun besoin, wrote Artaud appear in Logic of Sense). It will signify a total reorientation of his thought away from the notion of (constructive) expression and towards the notion of (expressive) construction, which will immediately identify the coextension of the social with the assemblages (I hate this English translation of agencement!) of desire (with a subsequent practical redenition of expression, explicated in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy). But this also implied going radically beyond Structuralism as the dominant model of an a-historical contemporary constructivist philosophy (Foucault was fundamental at this
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point), criticising its abstract formalism and reversing its a-historicity into the afrmation of an ontology of becoming that would totally renew the social experience of history as well as the self-understanding of philosophy itself. (The Deleuzian provocation concerning Pop-philosophy was one result of this process.) My question is: what is happening on your side, as Deleuze afrms that his philosophy was starting again for real, after 1968, with Guattari? How, after all, do you understand and analyse the historical failure of negative dialectic in relation to 1968, if its post-Hegelian and Marxian identity depended on its focus on the historical dimension of the determined negation? Apparently, the reiterated Adornian afrmation that difference remains in (a negatively determined) mediation did not help. Coming back, next, to my admission of a critical threshold in relation to the Matissean negation (your term; in my book it reads destruction) of the canvas-form which I understand to follow from the expansive afrmation of an energetics, and which de-territorialises absolutely the aesthetic framing. I maintain that I am not down-grading supercially, articially, or ideologically this negation: despite the dynamic of a single process there is the creative power (potentia) of the always singular becoming of the forces effectively mobilised, a becoming which precedes, ontologically and diagrammatically, the history of forms including those it negates historically in the eld of so-called history of art. (With its Duchampian resonance, the Adornian formula according to which the unity of the history of art is the dialectic gure of the determined negation is for me simply perfect insofar as it expresses the necessity of an excess with regards to its dialectic recoding!) If it is effectively in the name of the forces imprisoned in and by the canvas that the (environmental) liberation happens with all its social implications (a new type of physical and mental reality) and the constitutive (and destitutive) relationship of Art with the Outside this liberation depends in itself on the self-expansion of a combination of forces that can no longer be reected through the relationship between matter and form (or in the synthesis between form and content). Therefore, the Matissean question is effectively not how to think a new kind of totalisation from within the historicity of the existing material which would complexify mimetically and constructively the very notion of form (Adorno), but rather how to re-start art from an absolute de-territorialisation of aesthetic values in an abstract-vital machine acting directly in sensation through physically non-formed matters and semiotically non-formal functions which is to propose a kind of heterogenesis of sensation itself. Processually, this
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physiology of art (Nietzsches locution) is the afrmation of the quantitative expression of the relation of forces as reality condition for a non-compositional construction that Matisse calls Fauvism. It must be emphasised here that I am not proposing a retrospective over-interpretation of Matisses energetics: Matisse himself understood his whole trajectory in this vitalist, constructivist and non-aesthetic way. At this point, I dont really know if thinking is existentially aimed at the mediation between being and doing, but I do know that modern thinking has always started and re-started when it has been able to take into theoretical and practical consideration the effects of transversality produced by a new combination of forces, which rarely obeys the recognition of (social) mediations to become political (i.e. to recover politics as a causal effect of universality). There is for me a politics of Being which involves in its process of subjectivation Becoming versus Recognition. What Deleuze attempted to do, beyond the biophilosophical articulation between Bergson and Nietzsche, but in a radical Nietzschean acceleration, was to evaluate thinking in terms of its capacity to do the multiple (the DeleuzoGuattarian formula for Construction) in non-imaginary but machinic connections with the composing forces of the Outside forces that cant be expressed without assembling and constructing them as a resistant act to the composed power formations it dis-organises from the very primacy of the former. (Before / beyond Foucault and the exclusive-constitutive function of the relations of power, the agencement qua desire is the collective reality condition of this rhizomatic expressive-construction.) Far from being any kind of phenomenological regression there is no longer an outside in a non-articial naturalistic sense the Thinking of the Outside means socially and politically that Power is essentially an apparatus of Capture. We can now perhaps see the main difference between Adorno and Deleuze, despite a common non-organic ambition arising from (an unequal) information from / deformation of life. Driven by a principle of consistent connections between heterogeneities, following a circulation of intensities which drives the de-territorialisation always further, the Multiplicity exceeds the Whole that maintains the principle of unity as its problem (and I really do understand its fully-conceptual character!), and consequently maintains the problem of Construction itself in the dialectic of Spiritualisation, while Expression is fundamentally conceived as the intuitive mimesis of the non-organic and a-signifying natural through which the rationality of the art-work will aesthetically afrm itself in its diametrically contrary. I cant deny that I am here describing the worst
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(romantically outdated) and lowest prole of the Adornian aesthetic theory (where the post-Hegelian is still Hegelian), the highest being perfectly formulated by Peter: to bring construction to the point of expression. But are they absolutely incompatible? Or, better, if the latter formula makes sense only through the will to dis-integrate the rst one after the triumph of instrumental rationality, who could seriously deny that the correction in Aesthetic Theory of Adornos earlier anti-avant-gardism still betrays the tribute paid by the very notions of Construction and Expression to Adornos earlier position? The aesthetic experience may become a process integrating the ruins of empirical reality into the art-work by montage, but the montage itself does not contradict (but, insists Adorno, goes thoroughly into) the aesthetic principle of the objectivity of the form, etc. All this may have caused Deleuze some amusement when he heard for the rst time the latter Adornian formula And he may even have anticipated the kind of confusions were trying to disentangle in our discussion! What Peter calls Adornos theorisation of the solution i.e. converting construction itself into expression, and vice versa is, for me, a superior aporetic answer to the fact that the appearance of the social principle of instrumental rationality immanently registered by Construction has been art-historically expressed (in the Modernist tradition) in its formal denition (as such accepted by Adorno) as the cut off from life. On the one hand I think that the revindicated dematerialising conceptuality of strong Conceptual Art inscribes itself as the akm of this tradition, a tradition it attempted to consolidate analytically in order to overcome it dialectically in the propositional form of the art-concept as a kind of trutheffect of the nascent post-industrial / Postmodern society. On the other hand, I dont think that the liberation of construction from the (Modernist) constraints of medium is the exclusive concern of a nominalistic radicalism there has been, there is, the energetic alternative to it that I call Matisse-Thought: a beyond painting, or, beyond the mediumnic instantiated painting-form (the Modernist reduction of painting you systematically identify with painting as such). The key to its future, crossing the 1968 border, is that what is at stake is less as is currently said a spatial expansion of painting than an active investment and problematisation of space itself. Or, to put it in another way: it is because (extensive) expansion means (intensively) that spatiality is no longer treated as a (constructed) given that architecture may be and will be (expressively) interrogated and attacked in its prevalent structures of economic and social power (anarchitecture). As I understand it, the whole process is supported by the sensa62
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tion of a becoming-concept of space in contemporary art because it cant be confused with the objects it distributes but will rather be the real non-thing to be embodied paroxistically in potentialities actualisable in new situations. Under our de-territorialised condition, directly related by contemporary art to space (Peter says non-place), art transmaterialises the sensuous heterogenesis of the concept of space in the socially charged time of a (performative) construction (and of a sensational de-construction: Gordon Matta-Clark), to produce a local event from a-signifying interstices which reintroduce life at the very level of the most de-territorialised space. A space contemporary art unblocks intensively and reopens accidentally (accidere: what happens). Therefore, it is only through the non-propositional alterity of the concept it constructs a passage from the relative deterritorialisation of capital to an absolute deterritorialisation upon a plane of immanence expressing the non-philosophical at / as the heart of philosophy that (contemporary) art can meet (contemporary) philosophy. In this contemporary meeting, what contemporary means politically is the expression (i.e. experience) of the ontological excess of (the desiring-machinic-becoming of) productive forces with regard to (historically sedimented) productive relationships, and the construction of (and experimentation with) its creative effects of the new (a non-traditional new) once this excess has been brought back to the sensation of the forces of the Outside which un-determines the state-of-affairs socially imposed upon a brain-body in the distribution of the sensible (creation versus enlarged re-production of the administered world). Coming back after this long detour to Peters key afrmation art has both conceptual and non-conceptual aspects; and its conceptual aspects cannot be linguistically reduced though I concur with this assertion as he develops it post-conceptually against the initial intentions of Conceptual Art (its analytic programme), I am still confronted by the problem of art being dened by a concept which is not dened clearly enough in itself and in relation to its artistic use to totally eliminate the impression of an ideational recoding of art qua a dialectical philosophy of art that at its best simply reasserts conceptually the aesthetic as a necessary element of the art-work (which would be what shows the failure of the linguistic turn of Conceptual Art). To argue that the concept of art is at stake in the reective mediation between aesthetic affects and critical concepts would fall short from my point of view, since, starting from a post-Deleuzian intensication of the question of sensation, I propose an alternative answer to a common contemporary necessity: how to go beyond the aesthetic framing
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of art through traditional sensibility to an essentially visual experience. I attempt to do it in such a way that aesthetics need not return in sensation, in a sensation that would consequently invite conceptual mediation negatively determined as to quote Peter the principle of the unity of a contemporary work of art. With regard to what Adorno called the art-works content of truth, namely that (I quote Adorno from memory) the true aesthetic experience must become philosophy, or it simply does not exist wasnt it precisely this post-Romantic identication that Deleuze wanted to resist with the caesura between sensation and concept? I recognise for my own part that I am perhaps forcing this dualism but isnt it Deleuze himself (with Guattari) who proposes (in What is Philosophy?) an extraordinary energetics of the concept that follows and capitalises on the ontological problematisation of the very notion of sensation, launching it towards an intuition of the sensuous heterogenesis of the concept itself? And isnt it Deleuze and Guattari who consider all dualisms as the enemy, but an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging? * * *

PO We must conclude, so my response will be brief. First, I must confess that the Deleuzian concept of sensation remains obscure to me, theoretically that is to say, it is insufciently developed (I would say determined, in a Hegelian logical sense) to bear the burden placed on it in your discourse. This lack of determinacy is, of course, part of its point a marker of its fundamentally ontological character but it prohibits its productive application to historical material in anything but a positivistic manner. It is indifferent to the material. I might thrill to the idea of an absolute de-territorialisation of aesthetic values in an abstract-vital machine acting directly in sensation through physically non-formed matters and semiotically non-formal functions, but when I see this proposed as a description of Mattise, it becomes a reductio ad absurdum for me. Its philosophical radicalism loses all credibility when confronted with the experience of the art in question, which, for me, requires some mediating terms between itself and so general a monist ontology. This ontological conception of philosophy leads to a dual misunderstanding of the status and structure of philosophical interpretation in Adornos work which is as inuenced by Benjamins version of early Romanticism as it is by Hegel. In the rst place, it misses the (histori64
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cal) presumption of a temporal disjunction between theory and practice. Dialectical logic expands the conceptual conditions of intelligibility, but intelligibility is always retrospective ; hence its inevitable non-identical remainder. All thinking contains a necessary element of ideational recoding, but practice is prospective and has elements of openness, in principle. Experimentation (in art, life and politics) works on the space of that openness. So when you speak of the effects of transversality produced by a new combination of forces rarely obey[ing] social mediations, you conate the ontological question of the possibility of the production of the new with the epistemological question of the intelligibility of the novelty. In order to be intelligible, once produced, the effects must be thought in the totality of their relations (i.e. as mediated). They produce these new relations, comprehended as mediations; they dont obey them. Furthermore, these new productions subsequently enter into additional sets of relations, not possible at the time of their production, which effects what they are. In Benjaimins terms, the afterlife [Nachleben] of a work of art is retroactively ontologically constitutive. This means that there are things about it that an understanding of its production cannot grasp, in principle. Secondly, your memory lets you down on Adornos articulation of the relationship of the experience of the work of art to philosophy. Aesthetic experience, as you put it (for me, never the same thing as the experience of the work of art but thats another matter), should precisely NOT become philosophy. Rather, in conventional early Romantic fashion, philosophical criticism completes the work. That is to say, the experience of art is transformed, immanently, by the philosophical dimension of a second reection. For Adorno (as for both Hegel and Benjamin), and I follow them all here, philosophy is a mode, aspect or structure of experience, which requires the non-philosophical as its material. It has an inherently transdisciplinary productivity. For me, this relates directly to your transversality, which Deleuzes own late classicism about philosophy effectively negates. Finally: the meaning of 1968 (something about which Adorno did not live long enough to have more than immediate views he died in 1969). The problem for me is that the current historical meaning of 1968, as a cultural-political radicalism, appears primarily as a transformation of various of the internal dynamics of capitalist societies, rather than as a set of oppositional potentialities. Its ongoing consumption as a gure or token of oppositionality itself bears witness to that. For me, Deleuze seems to have had a practicist or afrmitivist misconception of the practical meaning of his own ontology precisely because of his identication with
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the moment of 1968 as a new beginning. So 1968 is a problem for both traditions, I think. It was too complex a moment simply to be afrmed. * * *

EA Before and beyond the insufciencies of my exposition there is the inevitablethe inevitable obscurity (skoteinos) of the Deleuzean concept of sensation whose last philosophical function is to say how concepts refer to a differential non-conceptual understanding, without which there is no creation of concepts at all, and whose rst artistic function is to show that there would be no creation tout court without a sensation embodying the intensive physical reality of the forces which take hold of thought itself. Once again, I recognise that this double statement is formally open to an Adornian transformative reading such as Peter has already put to me as a critical dialectical truth without which Deleuzean speculative indetermination would fuel the misunderstanding of philosophy qua conception of the world (it prepares, a step further on, the idealist gap between the philosophy of art and art-works). This is the Adornian critique of Spinoza and Nietzsche: the projection into the Absolute of a purely expressive concept makes a reied thought return in an arbitrary subjective act which denies the intention to truth of philosophy itself. Art exists to prevent us dying of truth this Nietzschean proposition afrms at the highest possible level the difference between Deleuze and Adorno, because, for Adorno, it is truth, and the dialectical essence of truth, which determines, in a very classically romantic path, the completion of art by philosophy. Art, explains Adorno, is the non-intentional manifestation of truth, while philosophy is the medium of expression whose proper intention is truth, but there is of course no real truth outside of the truth of the nonphilosophical as it determines itself in the superior dialectical movement between (prospective-expressive) practice and (retrospective-constructive) theory. Hence, the centrality of the aesthetic theory for Adornian philosophy, its aesthetic hard-core as an open totalisation in movement which informs and transforms the truth-value of philosophy in a paradoxical process, recognised as such and invested as the dialectical becoming of truth. At this point, the Deleuzean shift afrms from art the afrmative truth of the becoming that puts the very notion of truth into crisis, instead of the negative becoming of truth that tries to save it dialectically. In this sense, any aesthetic narration will be falsifying with regards to the pretention to totalisation of the truth and the relationships between art and philosophy will be openly
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problematic (a non-dialectical relationship involving and exercising the inseparability between concept, percept and affect) and anachronic, because the crisis of the notion of truth means the crisis of the notion of time (the untimely character of becoming) when the former attacks the distribution of the unity of the real between being and thought. To put it in other terms: if art hystericises philosophy, it does not do so without a becominghysteresis of (the artistic) hysteria which exerts its forces in theory and in practice in a delayed / afterlife of play. But this all too general proposition actualises itself in (rare and determinant) cases where the heterogeneous temporality of the becoming at stake in the work of art (in its excess to the product of art) and the historical short-circuits it provokes (with regards to the teleochronology of the art-form) manifest the heterogeneous spatiality expanded by these cases. It is through this kind of intensive confrontation of history / becoming that I congured what I call MatisseThought as a paradigmatic case. It required, dear Peter, many mediating terms (your term, not mine), upstream (modern art) and downstream (contemporary art), to preserve (and not to neutralise) its challenge to philosophy to use a key expression of Deweys in his over-Matissean book, Art as Experience, omnipresent in the studios of American artists in the 1940s and 1950s. (This point did not escape the young Harold Rosenberg, who will go on to develop reections in direct resonance with the anti-museal Deweyean aesthetics; nor did it escape Kaprow, refusing as he did the Dada identication of anti-art to accentuate the importance of an earlier vitalist-experimental mood.) Coming back, nally and very briey, to the 1968 break Peter and I recognise quite differently, beyond Adornos misunderstandings and to his death in 1969. I have to say that I dont see any contradiction between the internal dynamics of capitalist societies that 1968 would embody and the oppositional potentialities it would empower. In fact, Deleuze refers to 1968 as a threshold that crystallises the mutations of late capitalism (which, for him, have to be investigated from the Marxist analysis) and as an event perceived as intrusion of the pure Real, when the biopolitical reality-conditions of Communism manifest themselves as this immanent potential that haunts, and emerges in and through, capitalism. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. But 1968, for Deleuze, is also a time of aesthetic overcoming because of the present insufciency of a mere description of the new image of thought coming from modern art: despite a declared antiHegelianism, the percepts and affects of art tend to be reduced to the moments of a concept working at the indeterminate extension of philosophy.
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