Deleuze's Painting Lectures Published in Italian

The centenary of Gilles Deleuze's birth and the thirtieth anniversary of his death have prompted the publication of his 1981 lectures on painting, first released in French by Minuit in 2023 and translated into Italian by Einaudi in 2024. Deleuze taught at the legendary Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes from 1970 until 1980, when courses moved to a modest technical institute in Saint-Denis. Video recordings of his later lectures at Vincennes are available on YouTube, showing him thinking aloud with a cigarette, surrounded by a diverse audience of students, workers, and creatives in an atmosphere more like a squatted house than a university classroom. Deleuze's analysis of painters from Turner and Cézanne to Klee and Bacon remains original, weaving concepts like noumenon with phenomena such as color in Cézanne, referencing Kant, Spinoza, photography, and the diagram. Without visual aids, he navigates between Kupka and Bacon to describe the relationship between body and force, arguing that the body undergoes a creative deformation by force that renders invisible forces visible. The lectures demonstrate that teaching is a creative act requiring inspiration, as Deleuze states: "a lesson means having moments of inspiration; otherwise it means nothing."