The transformative potential of art: Creating a people in Heidegger and Deleuze

Both Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze write extensively about art as a means to transform thought. This dissertation addresses the differences between Heidegger and Deleuze's approach to the relationship between art, philosophy and the notion of a people within the context of their overarching ontological commitments. I present Deleuze's work as both an extension and radicalization of the Heideggerian themes of immanence, ontological difference, and the disclosive character of art. For Heidegger, the work of art discloses the essence of truth and offers insight into what it means to become a historical people. For Deleuze, art exemplifies the being of the sensible or the genetic conditions of experience. As such, works of art reveal a movement of becoming that underlies all static notions of Being as substance or essence and make visible the molecular forces that comprise reality. Deleuze takes up the relationship between art and the founding of a people proposed by Heidegger, extending the implications of this thought beyond Heidegger's historical account. Deleuze articulates a micropolitics that offers the possibility of "minor peoples" based on intersecting interests and activities rather than national boundaries or shared history. I ultimately maintain that Deleuze's conception of a people to come is more adequate to the shifting social relations that comprise our modern world. From the encounter between Heidegger and Deleuze, I construct a model for shifting social formations that highlights particularity and radical difference within the very notion of identity.