by Darren Ambrose
Published in Deleuze Studies, Vol 3:1, October 2009
One of Deleuze’s ambitions in 'Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation' is to outline an experimental conceptual... more
One of Deleuze’s ambitions in 'Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation' is to outline an experimental conceptual analogue of Bacon's paintings that demonstrates a genuine fidelity to the specificity of his work. His book represents an attempt to produce a philosophy of painting where Bacon is conceived as one of the great painters of immanence, a painter of the body-without-organs. His figural paintings are understood to repeatedly explore the vital intensities and sensations associated with the dynamisms of becoming, processes of individuation and the destratification of the organism, subject and individual. Deleuze suggests that a brutal form of realism is manifested by Bacon’s art, but it is not a realism associated with the violence of appearance but a violence of sensation associated with a spiritual realism of the body. Bacon’s paintings depict, he claims, a visceral topography of embodied sensation that is profoundly non-representational and spiritual.
One of the most complex and creative sections of the book is his philosophical analysis of the triptychs. In just a few dense pages he arguably provides one of the most powerful accounts yet written about triptychs in relation to the questions of what they are, how they function, and what the operative principles governing their production are. In this paper I develop a reading of Deleuze’s philosophical understanding of the triptychs that incorporates his arguments regarding their non-narrative status within the claims he makes about their capacity to express a spiritual sensation of the eternity of time. I demonstrate that the notion of eternity being elicited from Bacon’s triptychs is largely derived from Spinoza’s Ethics, namely, the eternity of substance and the eternal cycles of becoming. However, in order to fully grasp the significance of Deleuze’s claims regarding the eternal time of triptychs it is necessary to re-examine his initial analysis of classic religious painting which forms much of the context for his argument. Despite the fact that religious art still labours under the auspices of obvious narrative content, Deleuze will claim that it is still capable of conveying intense spiritual sensations associated with the celestial and abstract realm. Once we develop an understanding of how this was achieved in the past, the significance of Bacon’s liberation from the constraints of narrative has upon his ability to embody a Spinozistic sense of eternity within the mechanism of triptychs can be explored.
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