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ABSTRACT
In his late essay “To Have Done With Judgment” Gilles Deleuze puts forward an alternative aesthetics to those based within the doctrine of judgment. He argues that to do justice to the work of art, one must recognise the creation of the new modes of existence in the work to come. This essay aims to deepen the understanding of Deleuze’s concept of the “work to come” by going against the grain of contemporary scholarship’s focus on the essay’s ethical programme in order to explore its possible aesthetic, ontological and phenomenological interpretations. To do justice to the work to come is as much a question of the affective relationship with the work and what this relationship might mean ethically speaking, as it is of the ontological difficulty of establishing ground, or indeed, of the phenomenological problem of genetic constitution. Adopting a phenomenological perspective, the essay argues that to forsake judgment in favour of justice is to approach the artwork in terms of genesis, to appreciate existence within the field of experience as being in a continual process of development. Central to this approach is Deleuze’s definition of combat as a productive interaction of forces, which results in new modes of existence being created.
Notes
1. Deleuze, “Judgment,” 135.
2. For a brief overview see the “Ethics” entry by Marks in the Deleuze Dictionary, 87-9, chapters by Bryant “Ethics of the Event,” 21-43, Cull, “Artaud,” 44-62, Smith, “Questions of Desire,” 123-41 in the complication of essays Deleuze and Ethics, or Sauvagnargues, Deleuze and Art, 34- 5, 52-3.
3. Marks, “Ethics,” 88.
4. “Prejudicative” is the term used in the English translation of the essay, referring to that which comes before the doctrine of judgment, the “pre” - “judicatory.” I will keep to the translation throughout.
5. Marks, “Ethics,” 88.
6. Zepke, Art as Abstract Machine, 41-76.
7. I am thinking of Deleuze’s early essay, “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Esthetics,” 65-71, where Deleuze uses Kant’s definition of the aesthetic judgment of taste to produce a genetic account of Kant’s doctrine of the faculties. How Deleuze defines “combat” in “To Have Done with Judgment” seems to echo his earlier exploration of Kantian “free play.”
8. Hughes, Genesis of Representation, 13.
9. Ibid.
10. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 41.
11. Ibid., 44-5.
12. Ibid.
13.. Hughes, Genesis of Representation, 13.
14. Ibid., 3-19.
15. Deleuze, “Judgment,” 126-35.
16. Ibid., 127.
17. Ibid
18. Ibid., 127-8.
19. Ibid., 134.
20. Ibid., 128.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 128-9.
23. Ibid., 129.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 130.
27. Ibid., 130-1.
28. Ibid., 132-4.
29. Ibid., 132-3.
30. Ibid., 133.
31. Ibid., 134-5.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 135.
34. Ibid., 128, 133.
35. Ibid., 128, 129.
36. Marks, “Ethics,” 88.
37. Ibid., 89.
38. Ibid., 88.
39. A very clear summary of this distinction between morality and ethics can be found in Deleuze’s discussion of Foucault in Negotiations, 100-1. See also Smith “Questions of Desire,” 124-5, for an evaluation of this distinction as well as Cull “Artaud,” 47, for a summary of the version found in Deleuze’s “Judgment.”
40. Deleuze, What is Philosophy?, 74. See also Smith, “Questions of Desire,” 125.
41. Deleuze, “Judgment,” 135.
42. Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, 292-389.
43. Ibid., 292.
44. Ibid., 302-25. Discussion of grounding can be found on pages 313-4.
45. Ibid., 329.
46. Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, 322-323.
47. See a more detailed assessment of Heidegger’s critique of the Cartesian metaphysics of presence in ibid., 326-9.
48. Ibid., 329.
49. Again more detail on Deleuze’s critique of the possible in ibid., 333-89.
50. Ibid., 342-52.
51. Ibid., 384-6.
52. Ibid., 389.
53. Ibid.
54. Zepke continues his investigations into judgment in Sublime Art: Towards an Aesthetics of the Future, where he offers a far more in-depth reading of Deleuze’s early work on genesis, “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Esthetics.” However, in this work Zepke does not discuss the essay “To Have Done with Judgment” or indeed a Spinozian ethical aesthetic idea of justice. My argument will therefore focus on the argument presented in Art as Abstract Machine only.
55. Zepke, Art as Abstract Machine, 48-52. Smith, “Question of Desire,” 124-5.
56. Zepke, Art as Abstract Machine, 51.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 52.
59. Ibid., 62-6.
60. Ibid., 57.63.
61. Ibid., 64.
62. Ibid., 72-4.
63. It is important to note that Zepke does not see Spinoza’s God as participating in the doctrine of judgment. He describes this God, in contrast to a Christian God, as being “atheist” in character. See ibid. 6-7, 46-8.
64. Zepke, Art as Abstract Machine, 73-5.
65. Ibid., 74. As Zepke writes, Spinoza‘s ethics, considered as an aesthetics, can be seen as an affirmative creative process constructing affectual assemblages as expressions of intense essence, and whose ideas, properly understood, culminate in a mystical love ofGod/Nature.
66. See Deleuze and Guattari What is Philosophy, 197.
67. Deleuze, “Judgment,” 127.
68. Ibid., 132.
69. Ibid., 134.
70. Ibid., 134-5.
71. Zepke, Art as Abstract Machine, 74.
72. Ibid.
73. Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, 296-7.
74. Ibid., 297. See also the Nietzschean version of this argument in Deleuze, Philosophy and Nietzsche, 83-5 and also Bryant, “Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism,” 32-4 for a brief summary.
75. See for instance Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 68-9, 154, 285.
76. Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, 318-20.
77. For more detail on the role of attributes in Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, see ibid., 322-32.
78. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 21-7. See also Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, 322-3.
79. Deleuze, “Judgment,” 127.
80. See the introductory chapter by Hughes in Genesis of Representation, 3.
81. Ibid., 4-6.
82. Mentioned briefly in Genesis of Representation, 6. See also Brassier, Alien Theory: the Decline of Materialism in Name of Matter, 61.
83. Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, 333.
84. Ibid., 335.
85. Ibid. 386.
86. Deleuze, What is Philosophy, 15-35.
87. Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, 357.
88. Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus, 112.
89. Deleuze, “Judgment,” 129.
90. Hughes, Genesis of Representation, 5.
91. Deleuze, “Judgment,” 128.
92. Hughes, Genesis of Representation, 8.
93. Deleuze, “Judgment,” 127.
94. Ibid., 127.
95. Hughes, Genesis of Representation, 7. See also Deleuze’s critique of the dogmatic image in Difference and Repetition, 154.
96. Husserl distinguishes between two kinds of phenomenology: static which approaches the problem of genesis regressively, starting from logical judgments and lived experience, and genetic, which is explanatory, see Active and Passive Synthesis, 624-45. See also Hughes, Genesis of Representation, 8-16.
97. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 41.
98. Hughes, Genesis of Representation, 13.
99. Ibid., 7-8.
100. See discussion of how the empirical is raised to its transcendental exercise in Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 135, 140-4.
101. Genesis is a reoccurring feature in a great many of Deleuze’s writings, appearing under a variety of guises. In the early Empiricism and Subjectivity, the question is of the subject and how this is constituted within the given flux of perception - a little later, in Proust and Signs the apprentice has to discover the sense responsible for the constitution of signs and their meaning. Hughes shows how the genesis of the Logic of Sense appears in Difference and Repetition as individuation and in Anti-Oedipus, the process of production. See Hughes, Genesis of Representation, 16.
102. Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 77. See also Hughes, Genesis of Representation, 13.
103. Deleuze, “Judgment,” 128.
104. Ibid. As Deleuze writes, The debt had to be owed to the gods; it had to be related, no longer to the forces of which we were the guardians, but to the gods who were supposed to have given us these forces.
105. Ibid., 132.
106. Ibid., 133.
107. Ibid., 134.
108. In Husserl’s account of active genesis, decisions are either practical or logical and reached only in the act of judging objectivities. It is a question of the ego appropriating itself to the acquisition of knowledge. See Hughes, Genesis of Representation, 15.
109. Deleuze, “Judgment,” 134.
110. Zepke, Art as Abstract Machine, 57, 74-5.
111. Deleuze, “Judgment,” 135.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Magdalena Wisniowska
Magdalena Wisniowska is an independent researcher based in Munich, Germany. She received her PhD in visual cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2010. Her essays on aesthetics have been published in Deleuze Studies, SubStance and Speculative Aesthetics. Since 2015 she is also the director of the art project space, GiG Munich.