Of the metaphysics of the sensible

Abstract

Deleuze initiates his courses on painting without worrying about what philosophy has contributed to painting, but, in a characteristic antiplatonic gesture, the other way around: what painting has contributed to philosophy. He thus begins from a limit-concept: catastrophe. Using Turner and Cézanne, he proposes a first metaphysical notion: painting is rooted in a world before the world. There is a whole pre-pictorial work, a moment before the paint drains. A chaos or catastrophe where the “frame” of the painting comes from. It gives rise to the emergence of color, which occurs in an element more aerial than geological. Painting makes a spatial synthesis because it first makes a synthesis in time.