Aesthetic Experience And Body Image

Deleuze is one of the most famous contemporary French philosophers,and during his life as a creative and deep thinker, his original thinking hastouched various areas. So, it will be wise for us commentators to choose aproper startpoint before trying to find a guiding line in this colorful and in asense complicated "crystal"of ideas. And this startpoint is "aesthetic experience"and "body". Why do we havechosen these two concepts? The reason is that we need to follow the innerdevelopment of Deleuze's own thoughts as well as the history of aesthetics.First, as to "aesthetic experience", putting great emphasis on the "livingexperince"of body and life processes, and bringing concept into direct contactwith life and bodily experience so as to explain clearly and thoroughly the inner"logic"of "experience"and "sensation", is for Deleuze the internal startpoint oforiginal philosophy thinking. Among all these concerns, one of the mostimportant is to explicate "aesthetic experience". To make this point clearer, wecould turn to one of his key concepts, "idea-image", which is supposed toemphasize that philosophy thinking should not be transcendental, abstract,and universal, but "concrete", nonlinear and open to "outside"multiplicities. Toachieve this, a essential way is to bring philosophy into living relationship andinteraction with art creation. As to the concept "body", our main reason is thatkeeping concepts unstable and transformable is characteristic of Deleuze'sown philosphy, so it is also necessary to find a "pivot"to put this abundance ofconcepts into comparatively "stable""diagram"so as not to let them fall into atotal "chaos". In my mind, "body"can serve as this pivot perfectly, because onthe one hand, it has a internal relationship with almost all the other basicconcepts of Deleuze; and on the other, from this pivot and startpoint, we canalso creat new relations between these concepts. In addition, from the angle ofdevelopment of history of aesthetics, the origin and the most essential topic ofaesthetics is to discover a new way to reflect upon the domain of body andsensation which is supposed to be different from the traditional philosophythinking. Besides, aesthetics is the intermedia that can bring different areasinto active communications. So, our writing schedule is: in the Preface, we want to explicate themeaning of "aesthetic experience", and since our topic is mainly about theinner "logic"of Deleuze's philosophy, we choose to focus on one of the mostimportant thinkers in the history of philosophy who had given a deep reflectionconcerning the problem of "body": Nietzsche. We want to introduce briefly hisideas such as belief in "body", the art creation as the expression of the"multiplicities"of bodily experience, etc. Also, these aspects have served asthe threading line which has gone through the whole of our research. After that, we go on to the first chapter where we are concentrated onLogique du sens of Deleuze. In this book, "sense"is not dealt with in thetraditional "sense", but as the "surface"between different areas, degrees,levels, etc. As "surface", sense can not be attributed completely to the level of"depth"(of body) which is the operating zone of mechanical andphysical(physiological, etc) movement, so the law of causality dominating thetraditional philosophy thinking is far from adequate; at the same time, "sense"can't be identified to the "high"level of spirit and intelligence, either, so in thissense, Plato's idea of "animated body"is not enough to explain the "surface"ofbody. What happens on this "surface"is nothing else but "quasi-cause"(againstcausality) and "event"(against the "fact"and "ideas"). In the following chapter, we intend to give a full-length discussion to thekey concept "expression"which is quite important to understand Deleuze'sbody thinking. First, we've discussed the history bac...