Tracing the Infinite: Deleuze, Art, and the Blue Flower

Art has the power to transcend boundaries, offering us new ways to see the world. For both Deleuze and Novalis, art becomes a journey—an endless search for the "Blue Flower,"

Here are some ideas expressed by Deleuze (1925-95) that echo blue flower thinking and capture the essence of this view of philosophy as a creative act.

1. Art is creation, not imitation

Odilon Redon – Mystery (c. 1910)

"Art is not about reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces." (Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation)

Take-away: Art reveals what’s beneath the surface.

2. Art is not information

"Information is a snapshot; art is a tracing of the real." (Negotiations)

Take-away: Information tells us what was, but art shows us what could be.

3. Art evokes sensations, not logic

"The work of art is a bloc of sensations, a compound of percepts and affects." (What Is Philosophy?)

Takeaway: Art is about feeling something new.

Arnold Böcklin – Isle of the Dead (1883)

4. Art resists control

"Art is the language of sensations, rather than the language of signs or representations."(Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation)

Takeaway: Art is freedom.

5. Art preserves

"Art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved."

Takeaway: Creativity is timeless .

Novalis and the Romantic Parallel

Like Deleuze, Novalis believed in the power of imagination to break through the veil of ordinary life. The Blue Flower he chased wasn’t a real thing—it was a symbol of what art (and philosophy) is really for: the pursuit of meaning beyond the material, the finite.

Both thinkers ask the same thing of us: Don’t just interpret the world—reimagine it.

Théodore Rousseau – The Forest in Winter at Sunset 1846

What does all this mean practically?

Stephen West puts it like this:

"Philosophy is about the creation of a new tracing of concepts that can understand reality in a totally different way... [a]ny activity that truly has as its goal to not sit around and repeat the traditions and the way that things have been done in the past, but one that actually genuinely aims to find new lines of escape from these traditions or new forms of what life can look like, that is an activity that [Deleuze] is deeply interested in finding better ways to facilitate, no matter what the context is. And if you had to give a name to that sort of activity, whether it's in philosophy, science, painting, music, the only name that makes sense that we have really is art. "

True art... is not a form of information or communication. It inspires people to see life in a new way... It's fundamentally different from the snapshots of the past we're fed daily. It helps us think and feel outside the prescribed limitations.”—  (Quote derived from Stephen West, Philosphize This! - episode 213)

In that sense, Deleuze isn’t just a philosopher. He’s an artist’s philosopher—or maybe even a Blue Flower philosopher.