Life Drawing: A Deleuzean Aesthetics of Existence

352 Pages·2013·13.78 MB·English

by  Gordon C. F. Bearn

Life Drawing

Life Drawing
A Deleuzean Aesthetics of Existence
Gordon C. F. Bearn
Fordham University Press
New York 2013
Copyright © 2013 Fordham University Press
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from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
C on t e n t s
Quite a Crowd vii
Overture 1
1. Yes and No 18
2. Learning to Swim 68
3. Andante Vivace 75
4. Again and Again 99
5. Keep Everything in Sight at the Same Time 159
6. Desire without Desires 161
7. Becoming Becoming 205
8. Refusing Beauty; or, The Bruise 242
9. An Ethics of Affection 256
Cadenza 296
Notes 301
Works Cited 315
Index 333
A special word for careless is caress.
—Gertrude Stein
qu i t e a c row d
The two of us wrote Anti- Oedipus together. Since each of us was
several, that was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of
everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest
away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition.
Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit.
To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible,
not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it’s
nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody
knows it’s only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where
one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any impor-
tance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know
his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.
—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizo phre nia
I did not write this book alone. I couldn’t have. True enough, my fi ngers
wrote or typed its various chapters in various drafts, but I didn’t write
or type alone. I couldn’t have. Nothing is written alone. Writing is folding
heterogeneous materials together, egg whites into pancake batter. True
enough, it may be your fi ngers around the wooden spoon, but your fi ngers
are not alone; with them always there is the family recipe and the irreplace-
able Sunday breakfasts still alive in your affections. Nothing is written
alone. Writing is writing together.
Often the roman- numeraled pages of a book are the only place we can
feel the heterogeneity of the materials folded into its pages. I still remember
when my student hands anxiously opened a very large and heavy book on
vii
viii Quite a Crowd
Frege to fi nd myself suddenly put at ease by the opening words of Dum-
mett’s preface.
I am always disappointed when a book lacks a preface: it is like arriving at
someone’s h ouse for dinner, and being conducted straight into the dining-r oom.
A preface is personal, the body of the book is impersonal: the preface tells you
the author’s feelings about his book, or some of them. A reader who wishes
to remain aloof can skip the preface without loss; but one who wants to be
personally introduced has, I feel, the right to be. (Dummett [1973] 1981, ix)
In prefaces we learn of the heterogeneous materials buffeting the author’s
writing. In Dummett’s case, among other buffetings, we learn of the impor-
tance of his working against racism, of his gratitude to his favorite conversa-
tional partners, and of his shock at discovering Frege’s anti-S emitism. My
skepticism about the category of the personal, the concept of the person,
also moves me to be skeptical of the distinction between the personal pref-
ace and the impersonal body of the book. The body of the book is traversed
by many material energies. Some of these will be connected to everything;
some will be as nearly discrete as the gift of a quotation from Ecce Homo.
But only nearly. The most discrete of gifts harbors connections in all direc-
tions, and it is no indiscretion to enjoy them.
I do not, therefore, think it unusual that I wrote this book in the exciting
winds of places, friends, and conversations enjoyed. But I have not tried to
hide that fact, and that may take some readers by surprise. Even if every
author writes with the voices of others echoing on the accumulating pages,
still one mostly conceals this fact from one’s readers, thus maintaining the
pretense of org a nized personal authorship. But part of the joy of writing
this book has been the space it provided for enjoying, once again, so much
of the past almost ten years. The joys of continuing conversations other-
wise. As I have not tried to hide this fact from my readers, you will fi nd ir-
regular references to persons and places the winds of whose philosophical
energies drew my writing on. I think of this as a way of making manifest
the dispersed origins of thinking which are disguised by the usual practice
of pretending the author’s voice and the voices of others can be kept sepa-
rate. Separated by the convention of numbering the voices of others in
roman numerals and of the author’s own in arabic. But the separation is
only pretense. Writing is writing together.
Quite a Crowd ix
Some of the material energy of this book, which it has drawn from
the togetherness of others, appears in the text to follow explicitly in its
continuing lines, and some of it appears more quietly in footnotes ap-
pended to stretches that owe their excitement to what becomes of think-
ing together. For a while there w ere so many footnotes expressing our
writing together that it almost got in the way of the onward energy of the
text itself. Sometimes I heard that there was no almost about it; it did. So
succumbing to tradition, I fi nd myself listing the names of those with
whom this writing was written together, and allowing the more or less
sequential writing of these chapters to order these names, I provide the
traditional list.
Michael Mendelson
Alison Freeman, now Alison Valish
Norman Melchert
Roslyn Weiss
Michael Raposa
Paul Standish
Tony and Renzo Viscardi
Maria Gandolfo
Joe Lucia
Michelle De Mooy
Chris Hagel
Jessica Glomb
Mark Bickhard
Joe Volpe
Barbara Flanagan
Adriana Novoa
Alex Levine
Yossi Berlow
Kristen Todeschini
Bobby George
Seth Moglen
Simten Gurac
Flore Chevalier
Johan Thomas
x Quite a Crowd
Steve Goldman
Don Jackson
Roy Miller
Sarah Zurat
John Pettegrew
Richard Matthews
David Eck
Hannah Behrman
Colin Gore
Tony Ferrizzi
At the very end of this project the generosity of a Faculty Research
Grant from Lehigh University and the administrative fi nesse of Jessica
Morgan made it possible to include the images scattered among the follow-
ing chapters.
Throughout there have been voices and places shared with my family,
Ellen and Cary and Alice, and these three, and school, college, fi eld hockey,
Japan, Islay Pod, and more are affectionately woven into the text as a w hole.
But there are two others without whom this writing would never have
become the becoming it became. Without the friendship and prodding of
Russel Wiebe, I would never have read A Thousand Plateaus and so this writ-
ing would never have begun. And without the friendship and affectionate
editorial attention of Erin Seeba, this writing would never have found its
way to print. I dedicate this book, therefore, to the living memory of Russel
Wiebe, whose life is over (June 19, 1953– May 30, 2009), and to the open
future of Erin Seeba, whose academic life is now enjoying its brilliant spring.
Thank you all, for allofi t.