introduction
Note
Abbreviation table

1. The concept of criticism
From Critique to Critique? The Origins of Art Criticism

2 Literary Criticism
The Practice of Symptomatology and the Power of Minority Literature? Proust and Kafka

3 Art Criticism
The logic of sense? Beyond abstraction to form

4 Music Criticism
A Musical History of the Ritornello? Classical, Romantic, and Contemporary Music

5 Film Criticism
The Art of Encounter? Film Criticism as Practice

6 boron
Michel Foucault's Art Criticism? The Status of Art and Criticism in Foucault's Thought

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The Concept of Criticism: Criticism and Critique

The key link that connects Deleuze to art is, above all, ‘criticism.’
It is not only because Deleuze advances his thinking by focusing on concrete works of art rather than dealing with art in an abstract dimension.
This is because he awakens the concept of criticism that is at the root of the concept of criticism and tests the power of criticism.
Chapter 1, which examines Deleuze's concept of criticism from its origins, examines the history of the concept of criticism, starting from Kant, passing through Nietzsche, and ending with Deleuze himself and Foucault.


“Criticism” and “criticism” are fruits of the same nature, growing from the same root, and are both called by the same word, Kritik or critique.
'Art criticism' might be said to be a magnificent portrait engraved on the other side of the coin of 'criticism', which philosophy has long pondered.
What does Deleuze elevate from this concept of criticism, which has long cultivated thick layers of meaning within itself? It is criticism as an act of questioning and discarding the existing laws and values ​​that have attempted to maintain themselves despite their indefensibility.
Criticism is the face of Deleuze's art criticism itself.
Deleuze's criticism awakens the revolutionary power hidden within the arts themselves, such as literature, fine art, music, and film, and destroys the existing laws and values ​​that have fallen asleep within the sterile world of clichés.
Along with this destruction, words are created to capture that revolutionary force: the language of criticism.
Finding a language that will guide your thinking while avoiding clichés is truly 'creation.'
Deleuze equated the very creation of this concept with philosophy.”? In the “Preface”

Deleuze's criticism is different from Kant's.
If Kant's critique ends up in the autonomous obedience of finite reason, it is nothing more than reason justifying commonly accepted values, that is, it corresponds to 're-recognition', which is Deleuze's main concept.
Deleuze's critique is to cut into these existing values ​​themselves.
Criticism that does not limit reasoning, the name it takes when it enters the world of art, "criticism," begins by identifying unknown signs that must be deciphered, transcending existing laws and clichés, that is, the objects of re-recognition.
The decipherment of symbols reveals the creativity of thought in that it leads us not to a truth that is already given, but to a truth that has never existed before.
'The veins of artistic criticism have a philosophical critique that has been cultivated from its origins.' Deleuze maintained this concept of critique throughout his life.

Literary Criticism: Proust, Kafka, and Deleuze

“Deleuze’s ‘literary criticism’ is centered around the most important modern writers, Proust and Kafka.
By critically engaging with these writers at the heart of modern literature, Deleuze argues for the position that criticism should have in modern literature.
The starting point of this critique is the 'critique' of re-examining, that is, re-recognizing, the laws and values ​​that are already in common use, that is, the clichés.


For example, along with these suspicions.
Just because the world encourages us to communicate as a valuable act, should we believe that the words of communication, which can be objectified, contain meaning that leads us to the truth? (Critique of Objectivism) Just because there is family in the world, should we believe that our desires have been poured into the mold of father and mother and obtained an inevitable identity (a desire that carries guilt according to the paternal law)? (Critique of Oedipus) Just because we have the habit of saying "I", should we believe that there is a subjectivity that is the origin of speech? (Critique of the concept of the subject) In short, should we believe that literature is there just to trap us in clichés or to confirm clichés? Of course not, but literature is surprisingly often obscured by clichés.
This is what happens when a critic, too dull and too risk-averse, unfortunately comfortably follows clichés as the 'theory' he must follow.
Thus, both the reader and the work die.
True criticism shatters the dusty glass of clichés that obscure literature and removes the concepts that arbitrarily limit us.
If so, the final level of creating a work or the level that continues to create a work would be criticism.
Criticism is the final word that completes and concludes art.
Of course, the bearer of this criticism should not be any person or organization distinct from the reader, but the reader himself.
“The reader’s freedom creates criticism and completes the work.”

Art Criticism: Mondrian, Kandinsky, Pollock, Baroque Painting, Bacon, and Deleuze

Deleuze's representative work of art criticism is The Logic of Sense, published in 1981, in which Deleuze speaks 'together' with a total of ninety-seven works by Francis Bacon.
The unique aspect of Deleuze as a critic, or the originality of Deleuze's criticism, is revealed in the fact that Deleuze speaks 'with' the work, rather than 'about' the work.
If conventional art criticism presupposes a dualistic notion of the subject of criticism and the work of art as the object interpreted by the subject, or a philosophical theory as the a priori condition of criticism and the work of art as its instance, Deleuze's criticism, in contrast, begins by dismantling the boundary between the critic as the subject of interpretation and the work of art as the object—in other words, philosophy and art—that conventional criticism presupposes.


Deleuze defines the task of art as revealing invisible forces beyond the given form of representation in a stereotypical way.
It liberates art from the old prejudice that the essence of art is imitation (mimesis).
As Plato said long ago while drawing a line, if sensible objects are formed by imitating ideas and works of art are merely secondary reproductions of these, then works of art cannot escape the stigma of being inferior entities that are the furthest from the truth.
However, Deleuze destroys the very preconception of art as representation by saying that 'no art is figurative'.
If art is not about reproducing what is visible, but about capturing and depicting invisible forces, then the nature of art should now be defined as creation, not imitation.
But how can art reveal invisible forces?

Attempts to move beyond figurative painting, toward art that contemplates the senses rather than mere reproduction and imitation, explored the possibilities through abstract painting represented by Mondrian and Kandinsky and abstract expressionism such as Pollock, but according to Deleuze, these ended up falling into the trap of codification and disorder.
And the third way of thinking about the senses finally reaches a new aesthetic phase through Bacon.
Bacon's paintings do not move towards either figuration or abstraction.
Rather, Bacon's work operates by blurring the boundaries between representation and non-representation.
Bacon presents us with a scene of 'sense in process' before the senses are conceptualized or before they are reduced to clichés.
Deleuze calls the image, which captures the immediacy of the senses while destroying the reproducible similarity by breaking down the cliché, 'figure'.

Music Criticism: Mozart, Wagner, Mahler, Varèse, Boulez, and Deleuze

Deleuze's interest is in how newness comes to all writers and works of art that did not exist in previous generations and eras.
And he says that the research on this newness was the 'ritournelle' research he did with Guattari.
Since A Thousand Plateaus, music has been analyzed as a major art form along with literature and painting in works such as Folds and What is Philosophy?, and ritornello, the most important concept in Deleuze's philosophy of music, appears throughout his works and plays a key role in understanding the concepts of territoriality (territorialit), territorialization (territorialisation), and deterritorialization (d'territorialisation).

To understand the concept of ritornello, it is necessary to approach it as an element that makes music possible through the ‘history of music’ depicted by Deleuze.
Depending on how the ritornello departs from territoriality, the music of each era unfolds: classicism, romanticism, and modernity.
First, when the ritornello comes under the dominion of form while retaining the power of chaos, classical music appears.
Deleuze calls this the 'ritornello of the environment'.
Also, when the environment where the power of each sound is gathered is revealed as it is, rather than the environment that places it under the form, this is called 'earth' to distinguish it from the environment, and when the power of this earth is revealed, it corresponds to romantic music ('ritornello of the earth').
Finally, there is the ritornello, which is not about having an environment or a land, but rather about being deterritorialized, and this is what makes up modern music.
Contemporary music releases the atomized sounds into the cosmos as a plan, without placing them under form or returning them to the earth.
At this time, this cosmos does not mean unifying the sounds into a single order, but rather allowing the powers of the sounds that cannot be given order to coexist together.

Just as painting does not reproduce what is visible, so music does not deal with what is heard, but makes the inaudible power audible.
It can be said that Deleuze is depicting the forces that territorialize and deterritorialize through the concept of ritornello.
This is also a way of thinking about music that makes the inaudible audible.
And this reasoning should not be considered as simply making music an object of philosophy, but as another musical creation.

Film Criticism: Dreyer, Griffith, Eisenstein, Buñuel, Hitchcock, and Deleuze

Deleuze's Cinema (1983, 1985) is a systematic theoretical book on film, which no philosopher has attempted before.
Philosophers' reflections on film may not be as extensive as those on other arts, but before Deleuze, there had never been such a rich discussion encompassing the entire history of film.


Deleuze says that a theory is something that is formed by itself, just like the object it deals with.
That is, when Deleuze thinks about art, the theory of art is formed by itself just as the art itself is formed by itself.
Therefore, Deleuze's treatment of philosophy and film should be approached not as a process of discovering existing philosophical or artistic truths, but as theories in themselves being formed.
Deleuze presents his theory as a practice, just as film and other arts do.
“Film itself is a new practice of images and signs, and philosophy must create a theory as a conceptual practice for it.” In this sense, this chapter examines how Deleuze approaches film as a practice and creates his own theory as another practice that does not have any privileges over it.


『Cinema』is also a theory of images.
Reading the two volumes of 『Cinema』, which transition from 'movement-image' to 'time-image', together with the development of the 'synthesis of time' in 『Difference and Repetition』, also allows for a richer understanding of thoughts on time and film.
In examining images, Deleuze deals with practical and theoretical terms of film, such as frame and shot-to, framing and de-framing, and montage, and then examines movement-image in earnest by dividing it into image-perception, image-affection, image-pulsion, and image-action, and finally arrives at time-image.


All the hopes placed on film as a collective art and a new way of thinking, the expectation that a qualitative leap would allow for a new way of thinking, have become old relics that have lost their luster amidst the countless representations of violence that are no longer unfamiliar. However, Deleuze believes that such expectations still shine in the films of time-images.
But that method is not the capacity to think, but the incompetent capacity to think, the incompetent capacity to think.
“What the film asserts is not the capacity of thought, but its ‘impouvoir’, and thought has no other problems than this.

Foucault's Art Criticism: Diderot, Proust, Manet, Magritte, Velázquez, and Foucault

Foucault explored knowledge in the 1960s, power in the 1970s, and subjectivation in the 1980s, and the status of art and criticism changed significantly as Foucault's thought developed.
Depending on whether the critical work, which ultimately aims at self-transformation, is carried out in the realm of knowledge, power, or subjectivation, the way criticism is connected to criticism changes, and the status of art also changes.
However, the fact that Foucault always considered the status of art in relation to criticism does not mean that art is unilaterally interpreted by philosophy or that criticism is reduced to a simple application of theory.

As with Deleuze, Foucault proposes criticism as writing that forms a network on the same level as the work.
When a work of art attempts to repeat itself in its own unique space through criticism, Foucault is thinking about the possibility of criticism that is created anew together by being connected to the work and repeating each other.

The two also share the same views on the functions of criticism and critique.
Deleuze did not re-recognize the existing order to justify it, but rather carried out a Nietzschean critique that dismantled it.
Deleuze created concepts to interpret the signs found where existing perceptions have collapsed.
Signs, expressions, and minor literature suggest new possibilities of perception for literature; ritornello, environment, earth, and cosmos for music; frames, shots, and montages for cinema; and sense and form for painting.
Foucault also draws out and proposes concepts for new perception from his works.
In 『Words and Things』, Foucault learns from Magritte the distinction between resemblance and similitude, which were used indiscriminately.
And based on this concept, Magritte's work, "This is not a pipe" (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which is analyzed, can be said to be a representative example showing the creation of the concept.
Moreover, through the concepts of 'literature' and 'painting', which are defined as unique to the modern era, we can understand art in a different way than before.
Criticism is not an interpretation of a work, but a practice that transforms thinking about art.