NDPR Gilles Deleuze On Painting: Courses, March-June 1981

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2025.11.3 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Gilles Deleuze, On Painting: Courses, March-June 1981, edited by David Lapoujade and translated by Charles J. Stivale with Deleuze Seminars Translation Collective, University of Minnesota Press, 2025, 360 pp., $34.95 (pbk) ISBN 9781517918408.

Reviewed by Claire Colebrook, Penn State University

Chaos, chaos-abyss, catastrophe, geological strata, germinal chaos, geological failure, cosmogenesis, collapse, and ‘the birth of the world itself’: these are some of the key terms in Gilles Deleuze’s On Painting, a transcription and translation of seminars delivered in 1981. Despite these orienting concepts that would seem to resonate with the environmental or cosmological orientations of Anthropocene studies, these seminars are highly formalist, focused on the painter’s struggle with paint, canvas, color, wash, brush, hand, eye, planes, frames, line and light. The seminars begin with a stipulative definition that ties painting to catastrophe, a catastrophe that quickly shifts from content (such...