Life Drawing A Deleuzean Aesthetics of Existence [Hardcover]

Deleuzes publications have attracted enormous attention, but scant attention has been paid to the existential relevance of Deleuzes writings. In the lineage of Nietzsche, Life Drawing develops a fully affirmative Deleuzean aesthetics of existence.

For Foucault and Nehamas, the challenge of an aesthetics of existence is to make your life, in one way or another, a work of art. In contrast, Bearn argues that art is too narrow a concept to guide this kind of existential project. He turns instead to the more generous notion of beauty, but he argues that the philosophical tradition has mostly misconceived beauty in terms of perfection. Heraclitus and Kant are well-known exceptions to this mistake, and Bearn suggests that because Heraclitean becoming is beyond conceptual characterization, it promises a sensualized experience akin to what Kant called free beauty. In this new aesthetics of existence, the challenge is to become beautiful by releasing a Deleuzean becoming: becoming becoming.

Bearns readings of philosophical textsby Wittgenstein, Derrida, Plato, and otherswill be of interest in their own right.

With Life Drawing: A Deleuzean Aesthetics of Existence we finally have the book on aesthetics that Gilles Deleuze, notwithstanding his frequent engagements with the arts, never wrote himself. The first sustained attempt not only to systematically explain Deleuzes views on aesthetics but also to put them into action, Bearns book will surely become a major addition to the ever-growing scholarly library on Deleuzes seminal philosophy. Making a forcefuland surprisingcase for considering Deleuzes work primarily in terms of existence, Bearn ingeniously deterritorializes the language of existence away from the trappings of existentialist philosophy, and its obsession with authenticity, and instead proposes to consider the problem of existencethe threat of lifes pointlessnessas one that is best understood as an aesthetic rather than moral probló+