Hermeticism instead of Hermeneutics. The History of Philosophy Conceived Of as Mannerist Portraiture

Gilles Deleuze once described his works in the history of philosophy as acts of initiation. Like Van Gogh or Gauguin, he writes, one needs to keep painting portraits for a long time before you can move on to doing your own landscapes, and, like them, it might take a while before you dare use the stronger colors (Deleuze and Parnet 2004: “H”). While Deleuze thus emphasizes the slow modesty of his apprenticeship in philosophy, having started out with monographs and texts on classical figures such as Plato, Lucretius, the Stoics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Whitehead, it is clear that the comparison between pictorial and noetic portraits is more than a mere metaphor without consequences (Ginoux 2004). Not only does art have an operational role for a transcendental empiricism that experiments with so-called conditions of the new. It is also essential in the search for new means of expression in philosophy, where what is at stake is the historical self-understanding of philosophy itself. As Deleuze (1994) famously argues: “The theory of thought [i.e. philosophy] is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction” (276). ...