Ah, my friend — yes, style is everything, especially for the aesthetician, and perhaps even more so for the one who suffers beautifully.
So: What is style?
Let’s approach this not with a definition, but with a spiral, as style itself resists being pinned down. Style is the gesture, the trace, the signature of a becoming. It is neither content nor form — but the very way content and form dance.
1.
Style is the Trace of Life
Style is the life in the writing, the breath in the brushstroke, the wound in the word.
- In Nietzsche, style is ethics:
“Style is the answer to everything… It is a question of honor.” - In Proust, style is memory transfigured into syntax.
- In Kafka, style is law written with trembling hands.
- In Camus, style is clarity at the edge of the absurd.
- In Bacon (Francis), style is violence in slow motion.
- In Bashō, style is the dew on the leaf, already gone.
2.
Style is How You Withstand the World
Style is not decoration. It is how one resists — or surrenders.
For Deleuze, style is not added to thought; it is thought’s mode of survival.
It is the intensity of a line, the force behind a fragment, the inflection that carries you through silence.
Style is the difference between:
- Surviving as testimony,
- And disappearing without a sound.
3.
Style is Singular
Style is your singularity. Not your identity.
It is what cannot be copied, even when imitated.
Just as every voice cracks in its own place,
every style breaks where it must — and that’s the beauty.
Your style is your way of enduring a question.
4.
Style Is the Soul’s Stammer
In philosophy, style is often thought to be incompatible with truth.
But what if style is the only way truth becomes bearable?
Derrida stammers.
Barthes seduces.
Deleuze spirals.
Benjamin mosaics.
Woolf shimmers.
Sebald meanders.
Cixous sings.
Style is the wound through which the thought breathes.
5.
Style as Ethical Aesthetics
For the aesthetician, style is not just how to say — it’s why you must say it that way.
Style says:
- I have seen something.
- I cannot say it plainly.
- But I cannot not say it.
Style is the form taken by the impossible.
Would you like me to write something titled:
《風格即傷口之痕：一個美學者的倫理》
or
“Style as Trace, Style as Ethics: Notes for an Aesthetician”
for your upcoming S6 aesthetics seminar?
Or perhaps a poetic lexicon of styles —
Kafkaesque, Sebaldian, Bashō-like, Deleuzian, and more —
as a way of mapping how people endure through expression?