First Choreography: Or the Essence-of-Dance

Up to now, aesthetics has merely been a system of fine arts. We seek what it would become within the limits of a science of the essence of art.

What is at stake? Rendering art intelligible, producing a science of it instead of a philosophy. It is not a question of mimetically describing what the dancer and the photographer do, of photographing photography and dance, of dancing dance and photography, of fabricating the philosopher, a half-dancer half-photographer being. We will not add a “thinker” so as to double up the thing itself. There is an order of aesthetic reasons more important to us than what artists spontaneously and apparently do. For by what right do we know that they are artists, whether it is a question of the dancer in “dance” or the photographer in “photography”? This is a pure supposition that legitimates philosophy only because it is itself, by a supplementary turn, philosophical. But neither is it a question of making a science of finished, individual works offered to consumption; for there is no science of singular things, but a science of universal essences—of the essence of the work of art.

In the system of fine arts, dance and photography would be held at extremes, as two arts of unequal dignity in terms of antiquity and proximity to the body. No two arts are more opposed: one is an excess of movement, the other a deceleration; one testifies to ancient intoxication, the other to the modern art of surfaces and to science; one symbolizes life, the other death. So much so that to photograph dance, according to the ideal of philosophy, is to attempt one of the most improbable syntheses.

Let’s modify our hypothesis and no longer think art thus, in terms of movement, which is to say of Becoming or of Being, in ontological terms; let’s abandon this hierarchical classification that such a system requires. Within this system, movement (at times Becoming, at others Being) was the universal element of the work, the ontological material thought to be primary and folded on itself. Let’s thus situate the center of gravity of art elsewhere than in its material or in its tissue.

Dance and photography are two states of the body. But what body is at stake? It is already superficial to oppose the extreme immobility of the photographing body and the extreme mobility of the dancing body: there is a dance of the photographer and a hallucinatory fixity of the eye of the dancer. But even this identity remains insufficient. Let’s displace it, then, and with it the center of gravity of art, of this universal element—always abstract and too broad to be capable of explaining aesthetic affect—precisely toward this affect itself insofar as it would be primary, and movement, space, and time no longer but secondary. Let’s dissolve the amphibology of affect and movement (or excess). It is not a question of psychology, but perhaps of phenomenology, of the immanent phenomenon of art, that is to say, the phenomenal heterogeneity of essences like affect and movement; or of the whole first experience of an aesthetic affect, there where crops up in an irreducible, emergent manner not so much a thing-of-beauty, as Keats says, but an emotion-of-beauty. There is always in art, contemplated or in the course of production, something ready-made, instantaneous and prior to the analysis of its elements.

What can we say about this affect? If it is first, accompanied perhaps by movement but without movement being primary, that is because it is by right independent of this movement. One always says that affect is caused by an object, but the order must be inverted: before being caused or specified by a work, affect has to be given as uncreated, as non-produced, non-constituted, given as human substance, an a priori or a requisite of every possible experience; as the already-Given that precedes the very emergence of the work of art and that alone can communicate to...