Life Drawing : : A Deleuzean Aesthetics of Existence / / Gordon C. F. Bearn.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
• VerfasserIn: Bearn, Gordon C. F.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2022]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (352 p.) :; 21 Illustrations, black and white

Deleuze’s publications have attracted enormous attention, but scant attention has been paid to the existential relevance of Deleuze’s 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. Bearn’s readings of philosophical texts—by Wittgenstein, Derrida, Plato, and others—will be of interest in their own right.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Quite a Crowd -- Overture -- 1. Yes and No -- 2. Learning to Swim -- 3. Andante Vivace -- 4. Again and Again -- 5. Keep Everything in Sight at the Same Time -- 6. Desire without Desires -- 7. Becoming Becoming -- 8. Refusing Beauty; or, The Bruise -- 9. An Ethics of Affection -- Cadenza -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index