Gilles Deleuze's works are among the most wide-ranging and innovative of the late twentieth century. Despite this breadth, the individual books themselves can be roughly categorised: first, the works on the history of philosophy, most famously the monographs on individual thinkers such as Nietzsche or Hume; second, Deleuze's own philosophically creative works, undertaken individually or in tandem with Felix Guattari; and third, works on forms of art or individual artists. However, these are only rough divisions. Deleuze's Nietzsche is unlike anything you're likely to find in any of Nietzsche's own works, because in reading philosophers Deleuze implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, produces philosophical concepts of his own. His works on individual thinkers, whether they are artists or philosophers, blur the line between interpretation and creation. The present work, Francis Bacon, the logic of sensation, is evidence of this tendency. It is a work on Bacon, but it is also a work about the author himself.

Deleuze's great synthetic work, the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, was complete when he came to write this essay for a monograph of Bacon's paintings. Unsurprisingly then, the construction of that huge work is mirrored in this tiny one. As in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze constructs a concept in each of the seventeen chapters of the present work. The relationships between these concepts increase in complexity as the book goes on. Nonetheless, a broad outline is possible. The first discussion focuses on the form of Bacon's paintings. This is followed by a more strictly philosophical discussion about painting. Third, Deleuze describes the process of painting itself and, finally, there is a discussion of the history of art.

Because this is Deleuze, however, the situation is never so simple. The four sections I have outlined bleed into each other. Claims made early on become clearer as the book progresses (this is probably not a structural flaw, but rather a deliberate gambit on Deleuze's part to 'perform' his philosophy.) This means that only a loose and general summary is possible. I have already outlined the four basic sections; in the following paragraphs I will attempt to give more detail. Unfortunately for my review, the book is very dense and my explanation of it will be necessarily incomplete. Due to a lack of context, some claims may appear faintly ridiculous. Such is the state of contemporary philosophy.

First, Deleuze provides a general formal analysis of Bacon's paintings, claiming that they consist of a figure, a contour (an area which functions to isolate the figure from the background) and the field or structure. More precisely, the paintings consist of the relationship between these three elements. The figure, always a human body or two in various states of disrepair, is enclosed by the contour; it in turn attempts to escape from itself into the structure. This concept of attempted self abjection leads to various comments relating to faces, flesh, bone and meat which are theoretically interesting and, as a special bonus they are gruesome enough to produce legions of vegetarians.

In the second section, Deleuze provides an alternative account of sensation. He argues that the phenomenological theory (that the unification of sensations is made visible through rhythm) is flawed, and that "we can seek the unity of rhythm only at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos." The lived body is insufficient, and we must discover the Body without Organs (see A Thousand Plateaus). The definition of painting, then, is that it allows us to move past the eye (the organ), and "brings before us the reality of a body, of lines and colors freed from organic representation." The task of painting is to make the insensible chaos of the Body without Organs sensible, to paint forces. Bacon achieves this by painting in triptychs, even in his easel paintings: using this method he produces rhythms and relationships between the panels

This leads naturally to a discussion of the process of painting, in which Deleuze argues against the notion of any blank canvas. The canvas is already filled with clichés, which must neither be reproduced nor rejected, but deformed. Finally, he provides an idiosyncratic discussion of the history of painting, in which Bacon is seen as reasserting the hapticity of the work of art, which has been essentially lost since Egyptian bas-reliefs.

The supposedly paratactic quality of the book is particularly noticeable in the shift between the two central sections of the book and the chapters on art history. Unlike the prior chapters which flow naturally from each other (even if this flow is not immediately apparent), the final four are disjointed, and seem to relate to previous chapters only slightly.

It is very difficult to write about Deleuze without resorting to jargon, in part because to expand on each term- Body without Organs, becoming, force, rhythm and so on- would produce not a book review, but an encyclopaedia. It is thus to the credit of Daniel Smith that his introduction is comprehensible, probably even to the uninitiated. I disagree with his claims that Deleuze provides three 'trajectories' in this work; as I have described the book it is far less performative than Smith suggests. But his reading of "Francis Bacon" in the light of Deleuze's lectures on Kant is instructive and clarifying, and this will be particularly the case for philosophy students seeking to find a grab-handle in the somewhat bewildering Deleuzian corpus. These excellent lectures can be found at http://www.political-theory.org/books/reviews/www.webdeleuze.com. Tom Conley's after-word similarly situates Francis Bacon with regards to other works, Conley favouring Cinema 1 and 2 and The Fold, Deleuze's Leibniz book, as well as Foucault. Unfortunately, it lacks Smith's clarity or sense of purpose. Smith summarises the present work as he sees it, and the reader is aware of that fact. Conley's after-word is the kind of essay on Deleuze that blocks people off from his thought, making him appear far more difficult than he is.

Like most of Deleuze's works, Francis Bacon is a hypnotic, amusing, sometimes staggering display. Like all of his work, it has a surface difficulty that hides the beautifully simple ideas underlying it. But perhaps those ideas can't be described without recourse to difficult, new language, since Deleuze's thought is essentially new. For my part, I'm convinced that someone could declare one perfect sentence to summarise not only this book, but the innumerable concepts that Deleuze produced throughout his life. I regret that I am not the man for that job.

 

Justin Evans, The University of Chicago

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