From the sensation to the concept and back: Philo-aesthetic encounters between Pierre Boulez and Gilles Deleuze

Abstract

It is known that Deleuze and Guattari took the famous concepts of the smooth (lisse) and striated (strié) from the last chapter of A Thousand Plateaus from Boulez, who used them to describe the morphology of sound spaces, while Deleuze and Guattari used those concepts in an ontopolitical way - in order to invent an ontology abstract enough to describe the constitution of space and time within the conditions of the capitalist axiomatic and find the corresponding lines of flight. Another important point in the encounter between Boulez and Deleuze is the concept of difference. In Deleuze, difference is the key ontological concept, which (un)grounds the image of thought based on representation and leads to becoming the basic form of thinking the world. According to Campbell, in Boulez, difference appears in a number of ways - from heterophony as a virtual line, through an accumulative development to athematism as a virtual form. It should be mentioned that virtual (virtuel) is another important concept of Deleuze's philosophy, (un)grounded precisely through difference. Furthermore, there is a certain similarity between Boulez's concept of diagonal and Deleuze's and Guattari's concepts of deterritorialization and transversality in the sense that all three of these designate the creation of the new in movement between the already known coordinates. In the end, Deleuze translates Boulez's concepts of temps pulsée and temps non pulsée into the concepts of Chronos and Aion, where Aion designates the qualitative time of becoming, while Chronos the quantitative time of representative thought. The goal of this paper is to research these complex philosophical-aesthetic encounters between Boulez and Deleuze in order to shed light on the ways in which philosophical concepts are created based on art practices, and art practices on the basis of philosophy.