This article develops a new interpretation of Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the aesthetic. I argue that Deleuze’s aesthetics should be understood through the becoming autonomous of appearance, which is a conception of aesthetics that is simultaneously non-aesthetic. The becoming autonomous of appearance can be reformulated as the becoming autonomous of aesthetics from experience. This poses a challenge to the idea that Deleuze developed a transcendental empiricism based on the ontological primacy of aesthetic experience. The uncoupling of aesthetics from experience makes the ontological primacy of aesthetic experience impossible. Autonomous appearance is not the aesthetics of a transcendental empiricism, but of the pure connector between virtual and actual. It is the aesthetics of what Deleuze calls the third synthesis of time.
Brecht Govaerts (Fri,) studied this question.