Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (review)

Often, a philosopher's body of work can become tied down to a set of shorthand references. Plato's cave, Descartes's cogito, Kant's sublime, Hegel's dialectic and so on. Familiarity asks for clarity, and clarity delivers what in 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 emerged 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 work on the painter Francis Bacon is one such book. First published in 1981, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is a book that marks a move towards the later Deleuze, in which the philosopher 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. He 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 17 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 finds Deleuze developing new concepts and new ways of thinking about aesthetics, ways that are never far from thinking about the body, or violence, or politics. Deleuze not only meditates on Bacon's paintings, but also draws upon art history. His concepts emerge from a strange sort of immersed stoicism in his consideration of the affective capacity of Bacon's paintings (and hence the subtitle, "The Logic of Sensation").

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" (p. 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" (p. 20-21). In this way, "the bones are like a trapeze apparatus (the carcass) upon which the flesh is the acrobat" (p. 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...