Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization

Deleuze and the Diagram charts Deleuze's corpus according to aesthetic concepts such as the map, the sketch and the drawing to bring out a comprehensive concept of the diagram. In his interrogation of Deleuze's visual aesthetic theory, Jakub Zdebik focuses on artists that hold an important place in Deleuze's system. The art of Paul Klee and Francis Bacon is presented as the visual manifestation of Deleuze's philosophy and yields novel ways of assessing visual culture. Zdebik goes on to compare Deleuze's philosophy with the visual theories of Foucault, Lyotard and Simondon, as well as the aesthetic philosophy of Heidegger and Kant. He shows how the visual and aesthetic elements of the diagram shed new light on Deleuze's writings.
Deleuze conceptualized his theory as a form of painting, saying that, like art, it needed to shift from figuration to abstraction. This book focuses on the visual devices in Deleuze's work and uses the concept of the diagram to describe the relationship between philosophy and art and to formulate a way to think about philosophy through art.

An examination of Deleuze's notion of the diagram from philosophical and aesthetic perspectives that develops the concept into a critical touchstone for contemporary multidisciplinary art.

Jakub Zdebik teaches at the University of Ottawa, Canada.He received his PhD from The Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at The University of Western Ontario.

Preface \ Introduction: What is a Diagram? \ 1. Constraint
and System as Vegetation: Diagram and Visual Organization \ 2. Black Line White
Surface \ 3. Gilles Deleuze's Diagram (Complicated by a Comparison to Immanuel
Kant's Schema) \ 4. The Extraordinary Contraction \ 5. Skin, Aesthetics,
Incarnation: Deleuze's Diagram of Francis Bacon—An Epilogue \ Notes \ Bibliography \ Index