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In:Dimensions of Iconicity
Edited by Angelika Zirker, Matthias Bauer, Olga Fischer and Christina Ljungberg
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 15] 2017
► pp. 153–166

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Deleuze and the Baroque diagram

 | Harvard University
Published online: 8 September 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.15.09con
In Gilles Deleuze’s writings the diagram is protean form, at once a compositional principle, a philosophical operative, and a creative process. Mixing writing and drawing, the diagram is an intermediary shape between an object conceived and an object realized. A composition of abstract traits, lines, zones, and even patches of color, its generative character is the object of Deleuze’s readings of Francis Bacon’s paintings (in Logique de la sensation), while its poetic, political and philosophical virtue is studied in his work on Michel Foucault (especially Foucault, published in 1986), for whom the diagram is a map of possibility, of a devenir exceeding an “archive” or historical repository of forms. Diagrams inhere in the very texture of Deleuze’s writing, notably where he appeals to his mentor-poets, Henri Michaux and Herman Melville. For this end a study of the cartographic “diagram” of the Galapagos in Melville’s “Encantadas” (of the Piazza Tales) caps this short essay.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A graphic relation set between thinking and its physical shape
  • 3.Unlocking areas of sensation
  • 4.The intermediate character of the painterly diagram
  • 5.The melvillian diagram
  • 6.Cartographic writing
  • Notes
  • References
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