Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (review)

The non-philosopher's attempt to take hold of philosophy is besieged by "isms": "Bergson was a vitalist"; "Spinoza was a pantheist"; "Nietzsche was a nihilist, Deleuze a Platonist." Deleuze's response to these "isms" is neither the faithful taxonomy of the amateur nor the corrective discipline of the professional philosopher who will point out far too many difficulties in calling any thinker a rationalist, a modernist, a romanticist, or realist. On the contrary Deleuze does not want to destroy the gesture that finds in an author a problematic that is given form or inaugurated in, but goes beyond, their work. "Bergsonism" was for Deleuze a singular point in the history of philosophy. "Bergsonism" is not a generality—an extensive set that includes all those thinkers who agree with Bergson—but an intensity: to "do" Bergson is to make the same style of connections, the same type of movements, and to feel the force of his problems.

In The Logic of Sensation Deleuze identifies Francis Bacon as a "Cézannist," and behind this "ism," as it is spelled out by Deleuze, there are three other "isms" lurking in the background: vitalism, the organism, and modernism. For Deleuze, the problem that Cézanne posed in his work was the problem of western painting, the problem of the figure and its relation to figuration, for which there had been other solutions but to which Cézanne responds with "analogical language" (113). For Deleuze this is the same problem that Bacon tackles. Deleuze's book on Bacon is therefore also a book on the history of painting and, above and beyond that, a theory regarding that history's relation to life.

Figuration is what populates the canvas and the brain of the artist before a paintbrush is touched. We all know how to draw a face: a circle with two dots for eyes, and a smile below. And we all know how to talk about "man": his morality, his history, his language, and his culture. If we had to see the world anew with each perception, invent a concept for each encounter, relate to each living body as singular, then life would never move forward. But art, and certainly modern art, is not about the equilibrium and ease of the sensory motor apparatus; nor must it simply parody such clichés. Instead, for the sake of a life that is not that of a man of action, the artist must destroy figuration.

Cézanne's "analogical language" needs to be understood as neither the purely optical code of abstraction nor the material violence of expressionism, but as a different way of responding to the problem of painting and life. Deleuze answers this by taking up some of Worringer and Wölfflin's observations. Bacon, who like Cézanne worked with the figure rather than the purely optical or the manual, was sympathetic to Egyptian art, where essence was achieved through form, bodies drawn with lines so that the eye could feel the delineation. The next singular point in art history comes with Chrisitianity where, because of the concept of the incarnation, the accident rather than the form becomes crucial, art embracing the event. The essence is given not in clear geometric outlines, but in shades, modulations, variations, and subtleties: we see, for example, the essence of humanity beneath its accidental variations, despite its differences. What makes Christianity important then is its introduction of a formal atheism, for it is not the essence beyond the world that is sanctified, but this world in its accidental variation.

The genius of both Cézanne and Bacon is neither the purely optical space of the brain nor the chaotic forces of matter, but an art that relates directly to the nervous system: that is, to the body not as an acting organized system but as a convulsive, spasmodic "body without organs," a body in which the eye is no longer already related to a hand that masters the world. Cézanne's response...