Leonardo Digital Reviews

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

by Gilles Deleuze; Translated by Daniel W. Smith
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2003
264 pp. Trade, $29.95
ISBN: 0-8166-4341-5.

Reviewed by Eugene Thacker
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology

eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu

Often, a philosopher’s body of work can become tied down to a set of short- hand references. Plato’s cave, Descartes’ cogito, Kant’s sublime, Hegel’s dialectic, and so on. Familiarity asks for clarity, and clarity delivers what is some cases is a philosophical sound-bite. Arguably, this sort of shorthand has been happening to more modern philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze. For many, Deleuze’s name has been tied to a set of concepts that emerge out of A Thousand Plateaus (co-authored with Félix Guattari): the rhizome, deterritorialization, multiplicity, the body without organs, and a host of other concepts.

With this in mind, it is a welcome event to see many of Deleuze’s neglected other writings being translated for the first time. Deleuze’s book on the painter Francis Bacon is one such book. First published in 1981, Francis Bacon The Logic of Sense is a book that marks a move towards the later Deleuze, in which he explored aesthetics and culture in a more focused vein. Deleuze’s cinema books have had a decisive impact on film studies, and his writings on literature and music promise to do the same for their respective areas. Deleuze’s book on Bacon——like the cinema books——is as much a book of philosophy as it is a book on painting. Those familiar with Deleuze’s work will encounter familiar concepts——the diagram, faciality, difference and repetition, and haptic space. However these and other concepts are placed within the affective space, or the "logic of sensation" of Bacon’s paintings. Likewise, those familiar with Bacon’s twisted, distorted, mangled faces and figures will find here a complementary conceptual voice in Deleuze. Deleuze’s book is not art criticism, nor does it ever claim to be. Deleuze works as a philosopher, but one who always begins from Bacon’s paintings, and his concepts emerge from the paintings——not as interpretations, but as a kind of resonance between "concept" and "affect."

The book is divided into seventeen chapters, and the Minnesota edition includes an excellent Introduction by Daniel Smith (also the translator), as well as an afterward by Tom Conley. In each chapter of the book, Deleuze begins from a particular aspect of Bacon’s paintings: arena and ring, body and figure, athleticism, the triptych, the face and the head, and the tactile and haptic qualities of paint itself. In each chapter one will find Deleuze developing new concepts, and new ways of thinking about aesthetics, ways that are never far from thinking about the body, or about violence, or about politics. Deleuze not only meditates on Bacon’s paintings, but draws upon art history as well. Deleuze’s concepts emerge from strange sort of immersed stoicism in his consideration of the affective capacity of Bacon’s paintings (and hence the title, "the logic of sense").

Take, for instance, the chapter on "Body, Meat, and Spirit," a chapter that highlights some of the best aspects of both Bacon’s painting and Deleuze’s thought. As Deleuze notes, meat is both horrific in its implications and yet beautiful in its raw materiality: "Meat is not dead flesh——It manifests such convulsive pain and vulnerability, but also such delightful invention, color, and acrobatics" (21). Deleuze effectively rethinks Cartesianism through the "athleticism" of meat; "meat" for Deleuze, is a concept that describes a zone of indiscernibility between flesh and bone. Speaking of Bacon’s 1975 Three Figures and a Portrait, he notes that "[m]eat is the state of the body in which flesh and bone confront each other locally rather than being composed structurally" (20-21). In this way, "the bones are like a trapeze apparatus (the carcass) upon which the flesh is the acrobat" (21). For Deleuze, the real tension is not between body and mind (or even body and soul), but rather between flesh and bone. "Meat" is the name for that tension. "Meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernbility" (21). Chapters such as this one evoke the affective role of "meat" in contemporary art. For instance, one thinks of Diane Gromala’s piece MeatBook, in which a time-based (that is, decaying) slab of meat is embedded with proximity sensors in silicone, causing the meat to react and quiver as the viewer approaches it.

Deleuze’s study is fascinating, whether or not you are a fan of Francis Bacon’s painting. Deleuze’s book is really about sensation itself, or rather, a notion of sensation that is not a kind of procedural, Kantian container-sensation. For Deleuze, sensation is always a verb, not a noun, and this book is an attempt to make this movement and logic of sensation apparent——but not necessarily visible.