Mannerist Portraiture: Deleuze and the Art of Philosophical Invention

This Deep Dive examines Sjoerd van Tuinen's explorations of Gilles Deleuze’s unique approach to the history of philosophy, characterizing it as a mannerist art of portraiture rather than a traditional academic study. Instead of merely repeating a thinker's words, Deleuze creates noetic portraits that use difference and repetition to produce a resemblance based on creative expression rather than literal mimicry. This method involves a "buggery" or "immaculate conception" of the past, where the commentator enters a philosopher’s work from behind to generate a "monstrous" but faithful offspring. Van Tuinen illustrates how this dramatization of concepts functions like a cinema of thought, blending historical figures with new problems to achieve a zone of indiscernibility between the author and the interpreter. By moving from hermeneutics to hermeticism, Deleuze treats philosophical systems as machinic assemblages and folds, seeking to extract the vital movement of thought from stagnant academic clichés. Ultimately, this minor mode of thinking demonstrates that true philosophy is found not in stable identities, but in the continuous variation of manners and the creative betrayal of the canon.