Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

OriginaltitleFrancis Bacon: Logique de la sensation

TranslatorDaniel W. Smith

LanguageFrench

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
Cover of the first edition
Author	Gilles Deleuze
Original title	Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation
Translator	Daniel W. Smith
Language	French
Subject	Francis Bacon
Published	1981 (Editions de la Difference, in French) 2003 (Continuum, in English)
Publication place	France
Media type	Print
Pages	209 pages (Continuum edition, 2003)
ISBN	978-0816643424

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (French: Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation) is a 1981 book by philosopher Gilles Deleuze, analyzing the work of twentieth-century British figurative painter Francis Bacon. In this biography, Deleuze discusses aesthetics, objects of perception ('percepts'), and sensation.^[1]

While The Logic of Sensation is sometimes viewed as a work of art history, Deleuze's wrote that the primary motivation for creating the work was to explore the philosophy of art. He also sought to explore the conceptualization of art beyond the representation of an image. The text was translated into English by Daniel W. Smith in 2003.^[2]

Deleuze states that Bacon's art, with its bodies as figures, and spaces as "round areas," exists in the zone of indiscernibility, a parallel to the plane of immanence that artistically follows lines of flight in "the act of fleeing or eluding."^[3] However, the book is intended to be built on a slow intensification of its titular viewpoint, "a general logic of sensation," which progresses gradually in complexity.^[4] Deleuze's concept of becoming, which he had explored in detail a year earlier with Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), is the theoretical foundation for his interpretation of Francis Bacon's art.

Deleuze's concept of art goes beyond the representation of an image. According to Ronald Bogue in "Gilles Deleuze: The Aesthetics of Force", Deleuze emphasizes a common problem across various art forms. He focuses not on reproducing or inventing different forms of representation in art, but on "harnessing forces."^[5]

In an earlier work, The Logic of Sense (1969), Deleuze explored a comprehensive logic of sensation in response to Bacon's provocative use of smearing, detachment, and the destruction of signifiers about bodies, contemporary myths, and portraiture. Here, Deleuze remarks in the final preface of Francis Bacon that Bacon's art is "of a very special violence."^[4]^: x In saying this, he analyses the content of Bacon's paintings set on fields of color with little visual depth that make "use of spectacles of horror, crucifixions, prostheses and mutilations, monsters."^[6]

Deleuze attempts to understand the wider literary and semiotic context of Bacon's art through employing the rhizomatic, or nonlinear mode of analysis, which he and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari had popularized in their work A Thousand Plateaus published one year before. This form of analysis seeks to disentangle the socio-cultural roots of a given subject, through the use of a dialectical comparison. For Bacon's art, Deleuze makes prominent use of Samuel Beckett's novella "The Lost Ones" (1966–1970) as one of his main literary examples.^[7]

v t e Gilles Deleuze – Félix Guattari
Concepts and theories	Affect Arborescent Assemblage Body without organs Desiring-production Deterritorialization Difference Erewhon Event Haecceity Immanent evaluation Individuation Line of flight Minority Molar configuration Multiplicity Plane of immanence Reterritorialization Rhizome Schizoanalysis Societies of control Socius Subjectification Transcendental empiricism Univocity of being Virtual
Works by Deleuze and Guattari	Capitalism and Schizophrenia Anti-Oedipus A Thousand Plateaus Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature Rhizome Nomadology: The War Machine What Is Philosophy?
Works by Deleuze	Empiricism and Subjectivity Nietzsche and Philosophy Kant's Critical Philosophy Proust and Signs Nietzsche Bergsonism Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty Difference and Repetition Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza The Logic of Sense Spinoza: Practical Philosophy The Intellectuals and Power: A Discussion Between Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault Dialogues Superpositions Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation Cinema 1: The Movement Image Cinema 2: The Time-Image Foucault The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque Périclès et Verdi: La philosophie de Francois Châtelet Negotiations Essays Critical and Clinical Bartleby, la formula della creazione Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 Two Regimes of Madness
Works by Guattari	Psychanalyse et transversalité Molecular Revolution Desire and Revolution L'inconscient machinique. Essais de Schizoanalyse L’intervention institutionnelle Les années d'hiver Pratique de l'institutionnel et politique Communists Like Us Molecular Revolution in Brazil The Three Ecologies Cartographies schizoanalytiques Chaosmose Chaosophy Soft Subversions The Guattari Reader The Anti-Oedipus Papers Chaos and Complexity
Related topics	L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze La Borde Clinic Deleuze and Guattari A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity

v t e Francis Bacon (artist)
List of paintings
Crucifixions	Crucifixion (1933) Wound for a Crucifixion (1933) Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950)
Figures	Figure in a Landscape (1945) Painting 1946 (1946) Study for Crouching Nude (1952) Two Figures (1953) Three Studies from the Human Head (1953) Study for Portrait II (After the Life Mask of William Blake) (1955) Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1968) Study for a Bullfight, Number 2 (1969) Three Studies of the Male Back (1970) Blood on the Floor (1986)
Head series	Head I (1949) Head II (1949) Head III (1949) Head IV (1949) Head V (1949) Head VI (1949)
Popes	Study after Velázquez (1950) Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) Figure with Meat (1954) Untitled (Pope) (c. 1954) Study from Innocent X (1962) Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd version 1971 (1971)
Triptychs	Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962) Three Figures in a Room (1964) Crucifixion (1965) Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliot's Poem "Sweeney Agonistes" (1967) Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants (1968) Triptych, 1976 (1976) Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981) Second Version of Triptych 1944 (1988)
Black Triptychs	In Memory of George Dyer (1971) Triptych–August 1972 (1972) Triptych, May–June 1973 (1973)
Male portraits	Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (1964) Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1966) Three Studies for George Dyer (1967) Portrait of George Dyer and Lucian Freud (1967) Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) Portrait of Michel Leiris (1976)
Female portraits	Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1963) Three Studies for a Portrait of Muriel Belcher (1966) Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho (1967)
Self-portraits	Three Studies for Self Portrait (1973) Self-Portrait (1973) Three Studies for Self-Portrait (1979) Study for a Self-Portrait—Triptych, 1985–86 (1985–86)
Summary articles	List of large triptychs by Francis Bacon Triptychs by Francis Bacon The Black Triptychs Influences on Francis Bacon
Related	Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981 book) Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998 film)

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

References

Further reading

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