On Painting: Courses, March-June 1981

by Gilles Deleuze, David Lapoujade (editor), Charles J. Stivale (translator)

Available for the first time in the complete and annotated transcripts of Deleuze’s 1981 seminars on painting

From 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 How does a painter ward off greyness 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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Genres: Art, Philosophy

360 pages, Paperback

Published August 12, 2025

About the author

Deleuze is a key figure in poststructuralist French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence. He argued, then, that there is no good and evil, but rather only relationships which are beneficial or harmful to the particular individuals. This ethics influences his approach to society and politics, especially as he was so politically active in struggles for rights and freedoms. Later in his career he wrote some of the more infamous texts of the period, in particular, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These texts are collaborative works with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and they exhibit Deleuze’s social and political commitment.

Gilles Deleuze began his career with a number of idiosyncratic yet rigorous historical studies of figures outside of the Continental tradition in vogue at the time. His first book, Empirisism and Subjectivity, is a study of Hume, interpreted by Deleuze to be a radical subjectivist. Deleuze became known for writing about other philosophers with new insights and different readings, interested as he was in liberating philosophical history from the hegemony of one perspective. He wrote on Spinoza, Nietzche, Kant, Leibniz and others, including literary authors and works, cinema, and art. Deleuze claimed that he did not write “about” art, literature, or cinema, but, rather, undertook philosophical “encounters” that led him to new concepts. As a constructivist, he was adamant that philosophers are creators, and that each reading of philosophy, or each philosophical encounter, ought to inspire new concepts. Additionally, according to Deleuze and his concepts of difference, there is no identity, and in repetition, nothing is ever the same. Rather, there is only difference: copies are something new, everything is constantly changing, and reality is a becoming, not a being.

He often collaborated with philosophers and artists as Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, René Schérer, Carmelo Bene, François Châtelet, Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, Jean-François Lyotard, Georges Lapassade, Kateb Yacine and many others.

Reviews

[Charles]

With the Aug, 2025, publication date looming, I now have my advance copies, and it looks great, if I do say so. My translation was only possible with help from the Deleuze Seminars Translation Collective. Of course, I give this 5 stars, but I will await readers' responses. Here's an excerpt from my preface: Deleuze’s seminar on painting unfolded during the springtime of his first year (1980-1981) on the new campus of Vincennes-St. Denis, following a long seminar on Spinoza that began the preceding fall and ended as the first segment in the same session with which the Painting seminar begins, 31 March 1981. Readers of Deleuze will no doubt be aware that this seminar coincided with Deleuze’s publication of Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation in the same year, and while aspects of the concise book ostensibly on Bacon overlap with Deleuze’s course, he tends to be muxh more expansive in the seminar. ... In session 1, Deleuze immediately asks if one of the concerns of painting might be concepts, suggesting that if he takes up such a broad topic as painting, it’s so that painting might delight him with new insights, that is, with glimmers of philosophical concepts. ... Three of these, diagram, modulation, and color, help to conceptualize a broad organization of the eight sessions.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

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