Podcast Summary: New Books Network — Gilles Deleuze, "On Painting" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)

Episode Theme:
A deep dive into the first English translation of Gilles Deleuze's 1981 seminar series On Painting, exploring the philosophical intersections of painting, pedagogy, translation, and collaborative creation, along with reflections on the process of making Deleuze’s seminars available for Anglophone scholars.

Guests:

• Charles Stavall (Translator; Wayne State University, Emeritus Professor)
• Dan Smith (Deleuze Seminar Translator Collective; Purdue University; translator of Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation)

Episode Overview

The episode centers on the newly published translation of Deleuze's 1981 seminar On Painting, its role in the broader project of translating and annotating the Deleuze seminars, and the significance of these seminars for understanding Deleuze’s philosophical style and method. The discussion situates the On Painting seminar within Deleuze’s oeuvre, reflects on the collaborative efforts required to bring such translations to light, and explores the philosophical stakes and difficulties inherent in both Deleuze’s work and its translation.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Deleuze Seminars Project: Origins and Motivation

[06:34, Dan Smith]

• The seminars were transcribed from recordings made by a Japanese student, Suzuki, during Deleuze's tenure at Paris 8.
• Recordings are archived by the National Library of France and have formed the basis for transcription and translation projects.
• The seminars offer an expansive laboratory for Deleuze’s ideas—containing much richer and freer material than what ends up in the books.
• Translation efforts are collaborative and involve constant reference back to the audio to correct earlier transcriptions or fill gaps.

“There’s an enormous amount of material in the seminars that are not contained in the books. The books wind up being very small, abridged pricy of what went on in the seminars. So I was really excited…to have access to all that material that is hidden away in the seminar.”
—Dan Smith [06:55]

2. Pedagogy and Collaboration

[09:26, Dan Smith & Charles Stavall]

• Deleuze’s seminars were interactive and experimental but always filtered through his guiding direction; student interventions could shift but not ultimately dictate the trajectory.
• The collaboration between Deleuze and Guattari is characterized by an intense exchange of notes and ideas, often with Deleuze acting as a compiler and refiner of Guattari’s more diffuse, expansive contributions.

“Guattari himself was completely flabbergasted and frustrated in certain ways, outraged by the way that Deleuze would take his copious notes... Deleuze seemed to be a master compiler of material..."
—Charles Stavall [11:25]

3. Seminar to Book: Material, Distillation, and Style

[11:25, Charles Stavall]

• Deleuze distilled unstructured, wide-ranging conversations and copious notes into tightly organized books—often reducing pages of discussion to single, stylish sentences.
• Example: a 30-page seminar on Leibniz’s “tavern” thought experiment is collapsed into three sentences in the published book.
• Deleuze saw this condensation as a stylistic virtue, likening himself to Kerouac’s progressive sobriety and refinement.

4. The Recent Publication Push and “Definitive” Editions

[23:03, Charles Stavall]

• For years, copyright and Deleuze's own will complicated print publication of the seminars; digital (online) versions were permitted by the estate.
• French publisher Editions de Minuit, led by editor David Lapoujade, has started releasing print editions, with extensive annotation.
• The English translation project (University of Minnesota Press) benefits from this new openness, concurrent with the Deleuze centenary.

5. Translational Fidelity & Annotation

[34:05, Charles Stavall]

• New print editions are distinguished by their scholarly apparatus—rich footnotes, cross-references, identification of allusion, and bibliographic context—making them valuable teaching resources.

6. Interdisciplinary and Intermedial Dimensions

[39:10, Charles Stavall]

• Seminar transitions (e.g., from Spinoza to Painting) are pedagogically and conceptually rich, connecting ideas like “beatitude” to “catastrophe,” “lines of life to lines of death,” highlighting Deleuze’s third-term logic and his refusal of simple binaries.
• Importance of tracking seemingly minor references (e.g., to Peirce, Messiaen, Blanche) that are keys to Deleuze’s conceptual shifts.

“He’s constantly bringing in a third choice. When he sets up binaries, he seems to always slide in a third choice.”
—Charles Stavall [45:08]

7. The Seminar vs. The Book: On Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

[49:22, Dan Smith]

• The On Painting seminar only occasionally mentions Bacon; the book foregrounds him as a central case.
• Deleuze treats Bacon not historically, but in terms of what his painting achieves as a logic of sensation—privileging “becoming” over “history.”
• Philosophical creativity (concept-creation) is paralleled by artistic creativity; Bacon’s thought is expressed in color and line, not concepts.
• Deleuze’s “logic of sensation” is not about explaining the meaning of art, but about tracing the conceptual powers at work within the art itself.

“Philosophers create concepts, and in that sense, they're like artists...But artists...are thinkers. They just don’t think in concepts.”
—Dan Smith [49:59]

8. Media Specificity and Cross-Media Analogy

[92:08, Charles Stavall]

• Deleuze moves from “diagram” to “modulator” to “color” in “On Painting”—a trajectory that, while starting in painting, involves borrowing terminology and theoretical frameworks from music, information theory, etc.
• The transition from the digital to the analog, and the dialogue with students on technological concepts (e.g., “packet switching”), unfolds as Deleuze navigates the modern context of painting.

9. Logic of Sensation & the Role of Affect

[70:43, Dan Smith]

• Deleuze’s use of the term “logic” (in both Logic of Sense and Logic of Sensation) reflects a challenge to restrict logic to the domain of language or pure reason—sensation, too, has a “logic.”
• Sensation and concept are intertwined; philosophical concepts must provoke affects and percepts, or they “aren’t working.”
• Affect precedes—or at least is inseparable from—understanding; good philosophy or art makes you see or feel the world differently.

“For him, a concept is not an icy analytic thing out there because he ties them to affects and percepts. He says if you hear concept, if it doesn't produce affects and percepts as well in you, then, you know, leave it alone and go look for another concept.”
—Dan Smith [79:43]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the Seminar-to-Book Transformation

• Dan Smith [09:26]:
  "There's no way I could reconstitute from the book what went on in the seminar. But once you read the seminar, it says an enormous amount..."

On Deleuze’s Pedagogy

• Charles Stavall [11:25]:
  "Guattari singed, his tendency, was to go off in all directions at all horizons. Deleuze was the kind of person, okay, in order to get this out in the text, we kind of gotta rein this in."

On the Translator’s Dilemma

• Charles Stavall [23:03]:
  "...we had to go ahead and retranscribe everything...there tended to be, in certain spots, a lot of slippage. And so we worked really hard on that..."

On Cross-Referencing in the Annotated Editions

• Charles Stavall [34:05]:
  "La Pujad has turned these books not just into the seminars, but also cross referencing...That makes these sessions and that text a very, very powerful text. Probably quite a teaching tool for, you know, for classes."

On Affect and Concept-Creation

• Dan Smith [79:43]:
  “He says if you hear concept, if it doesn't produce affects and percepts as well in you, then, you know, leave it alone and go look for another concept, not your concept..."

Important Timestamps and Segments

• [06:30-11:25]: Introduction to the translation project and the collaborative process; why the seminars matter.
• [19:26-23:03]: Analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s working relationship and Deleuze’s editorial style.
• [23:03-34:05]: The changing legal and institutional landscape for publishing the seminars; unauthorized translations; the emergence of annotated French and English editions.
• [39:10-45:08]: Pedagogical style, seminar transitions, and connecting concepts across years.
• [49:22-53:14]: Relation between On Painting seminar and Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation; on the specificity of Deleuze’s method.
• [70:43-73:30]: Defining “logic” in Deleuze’s titles, logic of sensation vs. logic of sense.
• [79:43-84:39]: On the function of concepts, affect, and perception in philosophy and art.
• [92:08-97:05]: How Deleuze uses and reconfigures different media; digital/analog, modulation, strategic uses of analogy.
• [98:04-99:26]: Future publications, plugs for the projects and resources for listeners.

Episode Takeaways

• On Painting is emblematic of Deleuze’s rhizomatic, experimental, and openly collaborative philosophical method.
• The ongoing project of translating and annotating Deleuze’s seminars is a major scholarly effort, opening up further research on Deleuze’s pedagogical and conceptual practices.
• Collaborative translation requires immense labor—listening, retranscribing, cross-referencing—that results in new, more reliable editions.
• Deleuze’s “logic of sensation” and approach to art presuppose that artists are thinkers and that concepts are not confined to language but appear in color, line, and other media.
• Affection—the feeling produced by an idea, a concept, or a work of art—is central, often preceding and even motivating conceptual understanding.
• The On Painting seminars, as now published and translated, are not only crucial for Deleuze scholars but promise to become essential teaching tools for the philosophy of art and aesthetics.

Recommended Resources:

• The Deleuze Seminar Translation Project: deleuze.cla.purdue.edu
• University of Minnesota Press: English editions and series
• Upcoming English translations: On Spinoza, Lines of Life, and On the State Apparatus/War Machine
• Charles Stavall, Unfolding the Deleuze Seminars (Edinburgh University Press)

Final Thoughts:
This episode uniquely foregrounds the collective, cross-generational labor of philosophical translation and the unique texture of Deleuze’s thought-in-action, as seen in his seminars and their afterlives in print. Through Deleuze, philosophy, art, and pedagogy emerge as sites for the invention of new concepts, affects, and percepts—always against the dangers of chaos and cliché, and always open to new becomings.