Life Drawing: A Deleuzean Aesthetics of Existence (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780823244805)

Deleuze's publications have attracted enormous attention, but scant attention has been paid to the existential relevance of Deleuze's writings. In the lineage of Nietzsche, Life Drawing develops a fully affirmative Deleuzean aesthetics of existence.

For Foucault and Nehamas, the challenge of an aesthetics of existence is to make your life, in one way or another, a work of art. In contrast, Bearn argues that art is too narrow a concept to guide this kind of existential project. He turns instead to the more generous notion of beauty, but he argues that the philosophical tradition has mostly misconceived beauty in terms of perfection. Heraclitus and Kant are well-known exceptions to this mistake, and Bearn suggests that because Heraclitean becoming is beyond conceptual characterization, it promises a sensualized experience akin to what Kant called free beauty. In this new aesthetics of existence, the challenge
is to become beautiful by releasing a Deleuzean becoming: becoming becoming.

Bearn's readings of philosophical texts--by Wittgenstein, Derrida, Plato, and others--will be of interest in their own right.

Author: Gordon C. F. Bearn
ISBN-10: 0823244806
ISBN-13: 9780823244805
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Language: English
Published: 05/01/2013
Pages: 352
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.50lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 03/01/2014