Life Drawing: A Deleuzean Aesthetics of Existence

Eight Refusing Beauty; or, The Bruise

242 Barthes tells us that one of the surprising things about speech is that there is no erasing. There is only going forward. There is only Yes (Barthes 1984, 93). This is a feature of speech that derives from speech’s being in time. Not its being in space. We can move back and forth in space but not in time (Bergson [1889] 1960, 154–55). In time, that is in concrete becoming as opposed to mathematical abstract time, in concrete becoming, we can only go forward; we can only build on the past which is never lost. Ever (Bergson [1889] 1960, chap. 2). We think of our moving through time as if we were a boat moving across a lake leaving the past behind us like the wake of a boat. But the universe leaves no wake. The past is not left behind us. There is no place for the past to be but here. Now. It is not lost. It is here with us. There are ghosts everywhere. We think the past is preserved because we can remember it. But it is otherwise. We can remember the past only because the past is never lost. Our mistake is of a piece with the illusion that we can explain how memory E i g h t Refusing Beauty; or, The Bruise Caution seldom goes far enough. —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass Refusing Beauty; or, The Bruise 243 is possible because representations of the past are stored in the brain. But this will never do. In order for the brain to explain the preservation of the past and the possibility of memory, the past of the brain itself needs to be preserved . And how are we to explain that? Does the brain have a tinier brain in which the brain’s past is preserved? No. It will never work. The brain can’t solve the problem of the preservation of the past because the brain has that problem (Bergson [1896] 1991, 151). Memory doesn’t explain the preservation of the past; the preservation of the past explains memory. Concrete becoming preserves everything subrepresentationally, and this, not some organ in your skull, is the condition of the possibility of memory. Becoming never erases, never goes back. In becoming there is only Yes. So let’s keep on thinking about a disturbing bit you might have noticed on a recent page. The battered bruise. A cheek bruised in a battering. Here is the passage, once again. We can be surprised to discover beauty where we didn’t expect to find it. The stain on a tablecloth. A cheek bruised in a battering. Laundry heaped on the basement floor. The beautiful bruise on a battered cheek raises the question, which I have been skirting since beginning: Are there or should there be moral limitations to our enjoyment of everything’s irregularity, everything’s beauty? In particular, the beautiful bruise raises a question like this: How can you say that the bruise on her cheek is beautiful when she received it in the midst of a fight with her alcoholic lover? The objection to enjoying the bruise or even to describing it as beautiful seems to be that our moral characterization of the cause of some effect must also apply to effect of that cause. Thus, if we are required to say that battering is bad, then we are also required to say that the bruises that result from that battering are bad. And then it seems impossible for the bruises to be beautiful because while the beautiful is good, the battering and the bruises that result from the battering are bad. So the cheek bruised in a battering could not possibly be beautiful. But this series of thoughts starts off on the wrong foot. The fundamental prejudice of philosophers: How could anything originate out of its opposite? (Nietzsche [1886] 1966, §2). It is not in general true that the properties of whatever causes an effect must also be properties of the effect of that cause. In the eighteenth century 244 Refusing Beauty; or, The Bruise Dr. Johnson mocked this principle by saying that it amounted to the ridiculous claim that whoever “drives fat oxen should himself be fat.”1 In any case it is obvious enough that there are properties of boiling water that are not properties of hard-boiled eggs even though the boiling of the one is the cause...