Complicity, Affect, and Non-Representation – Reading Deleuze in Japanese Aesthetics

Abstract

This thesis is a toolbox of concepts to play with, drawn from traditional Japanese aesthetics and Deleuze’s philosophy of complicity. The thesis has a twofold purpose: to articulate artistic processes from an insider’s point of view and to unfold traditional Japanese aesthetic concepts relating to sensibilities and intuitions. Through artistic processes a practical-theoretical investigation of a series of Japanese aesthetic concepts takes place—namely, yūgen (profound cosmic beauty), iki (dualistic parallelism, a haptic structure of detachment), wabi (asymmetry and imperfection), sabi (decay and lonesomeness), ma (spatial and temporal in-betweenness), ki (vital generative force), mu (nothingness), ku (emptiness), kotodama (the power of words), and kokoro (the mindful heart). Departing from the contemporary interdisciplinary fields of art, design, philosophy, and literature, we go back in time to archaic thinking, from both the West and the East, in order to reassess ways of thinking-feeling otherwise. By unfolding artistic processes in Japanese arts of self-cultivation—Noh (a traditional Japanese theatrical form), chado (the art of tea), ikebana (the art of flower arranging), and kodo (the art of scent)—the research identifies ways of thinking that are coherent between Japanese aesthetics and deleuzian philosophy. these include immanence, rhizomatic thinking, flow, change, in-betweenness, intuition, body-mind, multisensibility, conceptual aliveness, the differentiation of matter, the notion of beauty, symbolism, cosmic interconnectedness, and holographism. The research explores different methodologies and tools drawn from the realm of the non-discursive; Deleuze’s affect theory, Spinoza’s expressionism, and Bergson’s ‘intuition as a method’. With my main theories deriving from Deleuze’s The Fold and Logic of Sense, we are immersed in an immanent, animated philosophy of matter. Through artistic processes, the force of matter is explored. My findings expose: a non-discursive methodology of analysing artistic processes, which I name ‘complicity’; Deleuze’s concealed concept of mathesis universalis, or ‘a unity of life itself’; and the realisation that emerges from inside a living being––in tandem with Kūkai’s (774-835 AD) ‘three intimacies’ (speech, mind, and body), which are taken from esoteric Buddhism, which I find to be coherent with Deleuze’s mathesis. The speculations that follow and to which I invite you demand an engaged reader.