Deleuze’s reflections on aesthetics are profound, radical, and unlike traditional aesthetics rooted in beauty, representation, or taste. For Deleuze, aesthetics is not about “what is beautiful” but about “what forces us to feel and think” — in other words, aesthetics is a matter of sensation, affect, and becoming.
Here are some of the central threads of what Deleuze said about aesthetics, drawing from his key works (especially with Guattari):
1.
Aesthetics as Sensation: Not Representation, but Force
In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze defines painting (and art more broadly) not as a medium of representation but as a capture of sensation:
“Sensation is what is painted. Sensation is what is lived.”
— Francis Bacon, p. 34
Aesthetic experience, for Deleuze, is not the contemplation of form, but an encounter with forces — painting captures the invisible forces that deform the figure, music mobilizes rhythmic intensities, and cinema brings forth movement-images and time-images.
2.
Art as the Creation of Percepts and Affects
(What is Philosophy?, 1991)
Deleuze and Guattari make a powerful distinction between different disciplines:
- Science creates functions.
- Philosophy creates concepts.
- Art creates percepts and affects.
“The work of art is a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects.”
— What is Philosophy?, p. 164
Art doesn’t communicate a message or represent a world — it preserves sensations that outlive the artist and reach the future. These sensations are non-personal, transindividual.
3.
Aesthetics as Becoming
In works like Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze speaks of aesthetics as a kind of becoming — not mimicking or symbolizing, but entering into a zone of proximity, like:
- becoming-animal
- becoming-molecular
- becoming-imperceptible
“Art is not about reproducing forms but about producing a line of flight.”
— Dialogues, with Claire Parnet
This is why a haiku, a glitch, or a trembling voice can be more aesthetic — more forceful — than a classical sculpture. It is what escapes the frame that carries aesthetic power.
4.
Art as Resistance
Deleuze’s later philosophy increasingly saw art as a kind of resistance — against stupidity, against cliché, against death:
“A work of art is an act of resistance.”
— What is Philosophy?, p. 110
Art resists the suffocation of the present. It does not merely critique, it opens time, creates futures, hollows out new perceptions.
5.
Cinema and the Time-Image
In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze rethinks cinema not as storytelling but as philosophy in images.
He distinguishes:
- Movement-image (classical, action-based cinema)
- Time-image (modern cinema, post-WWII), where time is no longer subordinated to movement — instead, time appears directly.
The time-image is aesthetic because it confronts us with the unthinkable, the disjointed, the irrational — in other words, it forces thought.
In Short:
For Deleuze, aesthetics is not about taste, but about survival, creation, and becoming.
Aesthetic experience is not consumption, but an encounter with something that disrupts our habits of feeling and forces a new thought into existence.
Or as he once beautifully put it:
“A great artist is someone who creates a foreign language in their own language.”
— Essays Critical and Clinical
Would you like a Deleuzean aesthetics lexicon — listing terms like sensation, affect, percept, becoming, minor art, haecceity, etc.? Or a comparison with thinkers like Kant, Adorno, or Rancière?
