Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation
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Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation GILLES DELEUZE Translated from the French by Daniel W. Smith Acontinuum • % •LONDON • NEW YORK This work is published with the support of the French Ministry of Culture Centre National du Livre. Contents Liberli • Egalilt • Fraternite REPUBLIQUE FRANQAISE This book is supported by the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, i pari of the Burgess programme headed for the French Embassy in Translator's Preface, by Daniel W. Smith London by the Insiitm Francais du Royaume-Uni. Preface to the French Edition, by Alain Badiou Continuum and Barbara Cassin The Tower Building 15 East 26th Street Author's Foreword I I York Road New York Author's Preface to the English Edition London, SE1 7NX NY looio 1. The Round Area, the Ring www.conlimiumbooks.com The round area and its analogues Distinction First published in France, 1!)8L by Editions de la Difference between the Figure and the figurative The fact - r Editions du Seuil. 2002, Francis Bacon: Ijgique de la Sensation The question of "matters of fact" The three This English translation (' Continuum 2003 elements of painting: structure, Figure, and This paperback edition published 2001 by Continuum contour Role of the fields All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or 2. Note on Figuration in Past Fainting transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any information storage or Painting, religion, and photography On two retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the misconceptions publishers. 3. Athleticism British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data First movement: from the structure to the Figure A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library Isolation Athleticism Second movement: from the Figure to the structure The body escapes ISBN0 8264 6647 8 (Hardback I) 8264 71518 0 (Paperback from itself: abjection Contraction, dissipation: washbasins, umbrellas, and mirrors Typeset by BookF.ns Ltd.. Royslon. Herts. 1. Body, Meat, and Spirit, Becoming-Animal Printed by Ml'C Books Ltd.. Bodmin, Cornwall Man and animal The zone of indiscernibility * iii Contents Contents Flesh and bone: the meat descends from the bone 11. The Painting before Painting ... 86 Pity Head. face, and meat Cezanne and the light against the cliche Bacon and photographs Bacon and probabilities 5. Recapitulative Note: Bacon's Periods 27 Theory of chance: accidental marks The visual and Aspects and the manual The status of the figurative From the scream to the smile: dissipation Bacon's three successive periods The coexistence of all 12. The Diagram 99 the movements The functions of the contour The diagram in Bacon (traits and color-patches) Its manual character Painting and the experience 6. Painting and Sensation 34 of catastrophe Abstract painting, code, and optical Cezanne and sensation The levels of sensation space Action Painting, diagram, and manual Figuration and violence The movement of space What Bacon dislikes about both these ways translation, the stroll The phcnomenological unity of the senses: sensation and rhythm 13. Analogy 111 Cezanne: the motif as diagram The analogical 7. Hysteria 44 and the digital Painting and analogy The The bod)1 without organs: Artaud Worringcr's paradoxical status of abstract painting The Gothic line What the "difference of level" in analogical language of Cezanne and of Bacon: sensation means Vibration Hysteria and presence plane, color, and mass Modulation Resemblance Bacon's doubt Hysteria, painting, and the eye recovered 8. Painting Forces 56 14. Every Painter Recapitulates the History of 122 Rendering the invisible: the problem of painting Painting in His or Her Own Way ... Deformation: neither transformation nor Egypt and haptic presentation Essence and decomposition The scream Bacon's love of life accident Organic representation and the tactile Enumeration of forces optical world Byzantine art: a pure optical world? Gothic art and the manual Light and color, 9. Couples and Triptychs 65 the optic and the haptic Coupled Figures The battle and the coupling of sensation Resonance Rhythmic Figures 15. Bacon's Path 135 Amplitude and the three rhythms Two types of The haptic world and iis avatars Colorism "matters of fact" A new modulation From Van Gogh and Gauguin to Bacon The two aspects of color: 10. Note: What Is a Triptych? 74 bright tone and broken tone, field and Figure, The attendant The active and the passive shores and Hows ... The fall: the active reality of the difference in level Light, union and separation v Contents 16. Note on Color 144 Color and the three elements of painting Color-structure: the Gelds and their divisions The role of black Color-force: Figures, (lows, and broken tones Heads and shadows Translator's Preface Color contour Painting and taste: good and bad taste 17. The Eye and the Hand 154 Digital, tactile, manual, and haptic The practice The original French version of Francis Bacon: The Logic of of the diagram - On "completely different" Sensation was published in 1981 by Editions de la relations Michelangelo: the pictorial fact Difference as a two-volume set in their series La Vuc le Index of Paintings 162 Texte, edited by Harry Jancovici. The first volume Notes 173 contained Dcleuze's essay, while the second volume Index 197 consisted exclusively of full-page reproductions of Bacon's paintings, allowing readers to view and study the reproductions directly alongside Dcleuze's text. Regret tably, it was not possible to include reproductions in the present edition. Images of Bacon's paintings, however. are widely available both online and in catalogs, and it goes without saying that Dcleuze's book is best read with such images on hand for viewing. The paintings cited by Deleuze are designated by a number in brackets, which refer to the chronological list of Bacon's paintings at the end of the volume. This translation might never have seen the light of day were it not for the tireless efforts of Tristan Palmer, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. I would also like to thank Philippa Hudson for her careful reading of the manuscript. vi VII Preface to the French Edition Author's Foreword Gilles Deleuze's book on Francis Bacon is something other than a study of a painter by a philosopher. Moreover, is this even a book "on" Bacon? Who is the philosopher, and Each of the following rubrics considers one aspect of who is the painter? We mean: Who is thinking, and who Bacon's paintings, in an order that moves from the looking at thought? One can certainly think painting, but simplest to the most complex. But this order is relative, one can also paint thought, including the exhilarating and and is valid only from the viewpoint of a general logic of violent form of thought that is painting. sensation. We said to ourselves: "No doubt it will be impossible to All these aspects, of course, coexist in reality. They match the splendor of the lirst edition. Too many things converge in color, in the "coloring sensation," which is will be missing in the register of the visible. But is this a the summit of this logic. Each aspect could serve as the reason for us to forgo our duty, which is to ensure the theme of a particular sequence in the history of painting. continued circulation of this great book, and to prevent at any price its disappearance from the circulation to which it is destined and which has made it pass from hand to hand among lovers of philopainting or pictophilosophy, and among the perspicacious lovers of the equivalence, in the form of a fold, between the visible and its nominal inverse?" We have therefore decided to republish this book in the collection "L'Ordrc philosophic) uc," in which the func tion of every book is to create disorder. And this book in particular. For the disorder that makes up one of the most beautiful books of our "Ordre," we would like to express our profound gratitude to those who have made this re publication possible, and who have thereby allowed us to clo our duty. Alain Bacliou and Barbara Cassin viii ix Author's Preface to the English Edition however linn, descends from the bones; ii (ails or tends i<> fail away from them (hence those flattened sleepers who keep one arm raised, or the raised thighs from which the Author's Preface to the flesh seems to cascade). What fascinates Bacon is not movement, but its effect on an immobile body: heads English Edition' whipped by the wind or deformed by an aspiration, but also all the interior forces that climb through the flesh. To make the spasm visible. The entire body becomes plexus. If there is feeling in Bacon, it is not a taste for horror, it is pity, an intense pity: pity lor the flesh, including the flesh of dead Francis Bacon's painting is of a very special violence. Bacon, animals to be sure, often traffics in the violence of a depicted scene: There is another clement in Bacon's painting: the large spectacles of horror, crucifixions, prostheses and mutilations, fields of color on which the Figure detaches itself - fields monsters. But these are overly facile detours, detours that without depth, or with only the kind (A' shallow depth that the artist himself judges severely and condemns in his work. characterizes post-cubism. These large shores arc them What directly interests him is a violence that is involved selves divided into sections, or crossed by tubes or very thin only with color and line: the violence of a sensation (and not rails, or sliced by a band or largish stripe. They form an of a representation), a static or potential violence, a violence armature, a bone structure.