Gilles Deleuze, "On Painting" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Oct 26, 2025

Charles J. Stivale, a distinguished professor emeritus, and Dan Smith, a philosophy professor at Purdue, dive into Gilles Deleuze's "On Painting," illuminating pivotal moments from his 1981 seminars. They discuss the richer, experimental nature of the seminars compared to his published works and the collaborative dynamics between Deleuze and Guattari. The conversation highlights Deleuze's philosophy of painting, the significance of Francis Bacon, and the interplay of sensation and perception in artistic creation. They also address how thematic threads connect diverse philosophical concepts.

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INSIGHT

Seminars Contain Hidden Philosophical Riches

Deleuze's seminars reveal far more experimental, expansive material than his published books.
The books often condense long seminar explorations into brief summaries, losing richness and detours.

ANECDOTE

A Single Recorder Made The Archive Possible

A student named Suzuki recorded Deleuze's seminars for years, enabling later transcription and preservation.
Those recordings became the basis for the Paris 8 archive and subsequent translation projects.

INSIGHT

Guattari's Flow Versus Deleuze's Refinement

Guattari produced copious, divergent notes while Deleuze acted as the master compiler who refined and reworked them.
Their collaboration's dynamic explains why published texts feel more 'reined in' than seminar discussions.

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Charles J. Stivale (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Wayne State University) and Dan Smith (Professor of Philosophy, Purdue University) join me to discuss:

Deleuze, Gilles. 2025. On Painting. Edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Charles J. Stivale. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Although Charles is the translator of this New Book, he has been working with Dan for years on The Deleuze Seminars (website here). Dan is also the translator of Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, which Deleuze published shortly after giving this seminar. I thank Charles for bringing him in to contribute to our discussion!

From the inside flap:

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Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University

nathan.smith@yale.edu

Available for the first time in English: the complete and annotated transcripts of Deleuze’s 1981 seminars on paintingFrom 1970 until 1987, Gilles Deleuze held a weekly seminar at the Experimental University of Vincennes and, starting in 1980, at Saint-Denis. In the spring of 1981, he began a series of eight seminars on painting and its intersections with philosophy. The recorded sessions, newly transcribed and translated into English, are now available in their entirety for the first time. Extensively annotated by philosopher David Lapoujade, On Painting illuminates Deleuze’s thinking on artistic creation, significantly extending the lines of thought in his book Francis Bacon.Through paintings and writing by Rembrandt, Delacroix, Turner, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Klee, Pollock, and Bacon, Deleuze explores the creative process, from chaos to the pictorial fact. The introduction and use of color feature prominently as Deleuze elaborates on artistic and philosophical concepts such as the diagram, modulation, code, and the digital and the analogical. Through this scrutiny, he raises a series of profound and stimulating questions for his students: How does a painter ward off grayness and attain color? What is a line without contour? Why paint at all?Written and thought in a rhizomatic manner that is thoroughly Deleuzian—strange, powerful, and novel—On Painting traverses both the conception of art history and the possibility of color as a philosophical concept.

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