Deleuzes Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus:

The Logic of Sensation

Filippo Carraro
Abstract
The painter Francis Bacon and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze agree with
Heraclitus: any phenomenon is constituted of movement or becoming
and no appearance endures. I read Francis Bacon, The Logic of
Sensation from the perspective of the Heraclitean flux. This allows me to
show the eminent role of forces (movement beneath the soil of visibility)
in the work of Deleuze, which he inherits from the Greek philosopher.
I point at sensation as Deleuzes re-thinking of the notion of becoming.
How can an artist make an object endure? The artistic product, for
Deleuze, embodies the force to recreate itself, and thus to endure in the
universe. This phenomenon is a bloc of sensation.
Keywords: creation, Deleuze, Francis Bacon, Heraclitus, movement,
real, sensation

I. The Figure is an Instance of Becoming

The work by Bacon, Czanne and other painters represents a dynamic
field of interpretation of the images it presents, rather than a static copy
of them. In Logic of Sensation, Deleuze outlines his comprehension of
art as an aesthetic experience (which, thus, includes time and motion).
Deleuzes logic of sensation, in fact, assumes that modern painting
produces musical and rhythmic effects, rather than resting on the
unvarying opposition of copy and model (see Deleuze [2003] 2004:
71ff., 82ff.). However, although the artists interest is greatly kindled
Deleuze Studies 8.1 (2014): 4569
DOI: 10.3366/dls.2014.0133
Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dls

46 Filippo Carraro
by the task of rendering movement, it is Deleuzes idea that in any
creative process becoming is affirmed together with being as in rhythm,
subsequent beats are musical when they are thought of as part of a
simultaneous silent duration.
In Bacons experience the primary pictorial subject, the Figure, is not
just a compound of colour and form. The artist is never satisfied with
rendering the visible. Deleuze believes Bacons aim is to render visible,
that is, to discover the hidden pieces of a fact and to manifest them on
the canvas. Common objects, as we see them, are images that can be
separated into their two components: form (contour) and matter (which
in painting is a question of colour). To render the visible would be to
paint what one sees: contour and colour. In order to achieve his aim of
rendering visible, however, Bacon has to paint what seeing means for
him. This is to paint sensation; otherwise he would be painting what
he senses. Therefore, to paint sensation is to re-create or re-interpret
the perspective of the subject seeing, in addition to reproducing the
object seen. Subject and object are indissoluble (Deleuze [2003] 2004:
34). For Deleuze, art does not associate a content to a correct formula
which expresses it. Instead, art is interested in decomposing (sensed
object, on the one hand, and viewing subject, on the other hand) and
recomposing (sensation). The painter shares the musicians attentiveness
for the harmony of the two moments: his aim is composition in the
sense of a melody. Better put: his art consists in a resonance between
visible and invisible, or heard and unheard. It is rhythm itself that would
constitute the Figure (71).
Bacon never paints one Figure, he rather paints coupled figures, under
the influence of a single force (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 65). Painting,
being a matter of combining the dynamic and the static aspects,
utterly prepares the audible aesthetic experience. More than melody,
thus, canvases are places of resonance (69). A Figure is sensation, but
sensation is difference of level (65). Art aims not at reproducing the
sensed model, but at reproducing sensation. (Bacons Platonism appears
rather weak when he says that his series of Popes is meant to reproduce
Velzquezs work.1 ) Bacon, in an interview (easily accessible online),
reveals to Melvyn Bragg his ambition as a painter: I want to be able
to re-make in another medium the reality of an image that excites
me, he insists. Inevitably, Bacons Figure is not one figure. It only
achieves the task of enveloping sensation by presenting not simply the
superficial level of images or clichs, but also the level beneath. Deleuze
repeats that painting is not so much about representing images as it is
about metaphysical forces. Everything is force (Deleuze [2003] 2004:

Deleuzes Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus

47

59). For him, we can go behind the [apparent] movements to these

forces; in fact, the visible movements of the Figures are subordinated
to the invisible forces exerted upon them (623). In Bacons work,
Deleuze suggests separating three things: a Figure, its levels (a system of
subordination) and the re-composition of its levels in one sensation. We
have Pope Innocent X; we have the visible mouth and the invisible forces
that make it; and we have the re-making of the aesthetic experience of
the scream as such. From one representation Bacon leads the philosopher
to an event (a movement, a becoming), that is, the moment in which a
sensation passes from the level of an impetus to that where it becomes
visible.
The question of sensation (that is, the essence of the artists creativity)
follows, for Deleuze, the stages of a thought that considers becoming
together with being (or the river of chance together with the circular
power of time). At first Deleuze acknowledges that any affirmation
of being entails an affirmation of becoming. In order to recapitulate
Deleuzes Francis Bacon, I found it necessary to compare this work
with what the tradition attributes to Heraclitus. Heraclitus writes that
by stepping in the same river one can only be flown upon by different
water (Krik [1954] 2010: 367). Similarly, he writes that the sun rises
every day and is ever changing (264). Everything is transformed, for the
Obscure; for, if it were not, then it would not be. Even the barely-drink
disintegrates if it is not moved (255). In this affirmation of becoming,
Deleuze is similar to Heraclitus and, with respect to the Obscures
convictions, he states:
[Heraclitus] made an affirmation of becoming. We have to reflect for a long
time to understand what it means to make an affirmation of becoming. In the
first place it is doubtless to say that there is only becoming. No doubt it is
also to affirm becoming. But we also affirm the being of becoming, we say
that becoming affirms being or that being is affirmed in becoming. (Deleuze
[1983] 2002: 23)

At first, thus, it is clear that Deleuze absorbs both notions. A second

stage concerns their relation. If a Figure affirms becoming and being,
what possibly admits their link? Logic allows to say that becoming
just becomes, and thus to conclude that only being is. In aesthetics,
however, Deleuze shows that an eye is not simply limited to contemplate
what is. An eye is already a philosophical subject; it can always ask the
question, what sustains that which I see? There is a difference between
a logical and crystallised screaming before or about, and an aesthetical
screaming at the forces it is going to become (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 61).

48 Filippo Carraro
We are presented here with a figurative notion of image and a figural one.
We could say that, with Bacon, Deleuze works on a separation of levels,
and, by repeating the question what sustains?, a difference returns. The
logic of sensation can bind being and becoming together for it works
on a difference of level. Thus, we get a glimpse of a second element
of similarity between Deleuze and Heraclitus, who also considers the
confrontation of stable beings (the day as opposed to the night) to be a
function of a divine Logos (Krik [1954] 2010: 33), that is, the visible
determinations to be a product of grounding forces.
We get to a last stage, the threat of Platonism. Difference of level is
not new in philosophy, and Deleuze has to face Platos philosophical
reasons, if he wants the Heraclitean becoming to support his point
of view on art (that the pictorial subject is not a copy, but embodies
sensation and, even, a sensation that moves). To put it differently,
Deleuze has to show that there is no model, in the height of the sky;
that the grounding forces also collapse under the strokes of becoming;
that the reality of becoming is not contradicted as an unchanging
reality. A third question arises: how can becoming be preserved? The
Heraclitean answer to this question would be that there is no mistake
in thinking becoming as a superficial effect of a stable divine ground,
precisely because, apart from metamorphoses, becoming is an immanent
principle with no depth, or a cause with no substance different than
its pure effect. War is the father of all and king of all (Krik [1954]
2010: 245). Similarly, Deleuze describes the Figure. A Figure is already
many entangled figurative moments; they fight like wrestlers, or they
re-compose the rhythmic meter. It is a war of bodies that affirm one
fact (one battle) (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 66). Our third question is
answered as follows: becoming is not contradicted because only its
surface returns only the river of succession.
Bacon never stopped admiring those static images of movement he
never abandoned the question of how to render movement (Deleuze
[2003] 2004: 58). Time marks the passage from image to image;
therefore images are present from time to time. The issue of a present
that flows (the Baconian Figure, which descends the stairs see Portrait
of a Man walking down Steps, 1972) encounters one of the most
beautiful answers in the wonder of the Obscure: one is the way up
and the way down (Krik [1954] 2010: 105). As if we were before a
paradoxical image or a geometrical improbability, the Figure is not
more the isolation of the bodies that wrestle (before up, afterwards
down), than it is the dynamic zones of the painting where the two bodies
are indiscernible a third possible body which is at once up and down.

Deleuzes Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus

49

In the same manner rhythm is not more a separation of two distinguished

beats, than it is a re-composition of undistinguished intensity between
them (resonance).
Heraclitus, like Deleuze, distinguishes between the level of the visible
succession and that of an invisible co-existence. Heraclitus admires and
praises the unrecognised and unseen connections. The real constitution
of things he says [. . . ] is accustomed to hide itself (Krik [1954]
2010: 227). We also know that the distribution of distinguished and
distinguishing (of image and of force) in Deleuze corresponds to the
relation of subordination of visible to invisible. In other words, on the
one hand, the philosopher isolates the metamorphoses or oppositions
visible to the naked eye, and, on the other hand, he points at forces
which minister their becoming. Heraclitus, in a very similar manner,
subordinates objects of succession (earth, water, soul) to forces of
creation/destruction (life/death): For soul it is death to become water,
for water it is death to become earth; out of earth water comes-to-be,
out of water, soul (339).
To the third issue we add that both Deleuze and Heraclitus say
that the face of the invisible is that of war, but to war they assign
a special meaning. The face of the ground is never collapsed to an
identity: Heraclitus never says that all things, being at war, face the same
(death). War is rather a principle of affirmation of becoming, for it is
the generative concept of a philosophy that, within the field of battle,
separates and recomposes forces (hunger satiety, life death). Deleuze
also signals that war is not the cause of the coupling sensations; it is a
surface effect. War, thus, should not motivate a figurative pessimism, for
it is only one face of a figural optimism:
What produces the struggle or confrontation is the coupling of diverse
sensations in two bodies, and not the reverse, so that the struggle is also
the variable Figure of two bodies sleeping intertwined, or which desire mixes
together, or which painting makes resonate. (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 69)

There is something in the Deleuzian thought on art, which, without

replacing endurance with temporariness, the figural with the figurative,
or, even, the circle with the river, turns to the moment of birth as the clue
of the whole business of becoming. What matters in art, for Deleuze, is
the creative process of the artist, and not a static model of beauty,
re-interpreted and copied to the best of the artists abilities. The artist
does not repeat the model, nor does his work represent a different
copy. If the artist re-makes something real, all of Deleuzes effort is
directed at arguing that any experience is an entirely creative experience.

50 Filippo Carraro
In any experience (for instance, the aesthetic experience I have watching
a painting) a new I is created (an I that has contracted the power of
seeing the scream). It is a phenomenon of difference, or a habituation
and repetition of ones I.
Becoming is creative because, as rhythm, it has the same force of
time to accumulate, to pass, to coagulate sensation or to destroy
it. Deleuzes forces account for a becoming that becomes something;
for Deleuze, an image truly endures on condition that it reveals the
forces that sustain it. In the creation of a body, or in the re-creation
of a Figure, a spirit becomes independent from every now and every
before. It simply appears; it simply becomes and comes into being. If
in Difference and Repetition, by creation, a body faces its destiny, in
Francis Bacon, a Figure unshackles itself from the artist, as if the creator
were able to bestow on it the strength that allows it to reproduce its
own pictorial life (see Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 1635). This is the
reality of becoming.
If Bacon represented a figure opposed to the embodiment of its fears,
he would have involved a segment of temporality in his representation.
He would have painted the scream and the horror, as if they were
two objects interacting through a spatiotemporal opposition (here is
the feared and there is the scream; horror is the future and the squeal
anticipates it). However, Deleuze notices that the artist avoids by all
means presenting a given opposition of subject and object. This supports
the Deleuzian intuition that art must rule out narration and temporal
succession. At the core of this accord between the artist and the
philosopher it is worth quoting the words by the philosopher himself:
difference remains not the given itself but that by which the given is
given (Deleuze 1994: 226). Difference is never the product more than
it is the producer. We must affirm the creative power of difference,
for it makes itself, as in the expression make the difference (28).
The challenge in painting time is that of registering the difference in
its making the individuation of a spatiotemporal opposition in its
source.
As to the destructive power of becoming, or the negative power of
difference, the Deleuzian must understand that they are moments of
a creative difference and repetition. End is just a face of becoming;
its correlate death is only its negative representation. There is no
end. (Aesthetic) experiences are products of a mechanism of difference
and repetition. In Deleuzes writings there is a connection between
becoming and Difference, different and negation. In fact, becoming
and Difference represent the positive head of a negative facial expression,

Deleuzes Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus

51

or partial difference per negation. The excitement we sense for life is

a creative source from where both different lives and a succession of
deaths take place; life affirms both different lives and possible deaths
(see Deleuze [2003] 2004: 62). Indeed, difference, for Deleuze, is no less
generative than permanence and preservation are devitalising moments
of an experiencing spirit.

II. Painting a Living Fact Alive, Painting Sensation

According to Deleuze, Bacon focused on the static as well as on the
dynamic component of the aesthetic experience (in accordance with
his philosophy of becoming and with the ancient image of the river).
How then is a body real beyond a sequence of representations? In other
words, how, despite the violence of an images deformation (I used
to be one metre tall, now I am one metre and eighty) can the body
survive? Understanding the Deleuzian appreciation of the painter in
Francis Bacon, therefore, means to be able to adopt the following point
of view: we can sense something real beyond and besides the constant
brutality with which facts are exposed to change.
An image can change and yet keep hold in the realm of the visible; it
can assume much-distorted contours and colours; it can even change its
mode of activity. The artists aim is precisely to record how things are,
and how they can become in the future. This is why Bacon puts so much
stress on the notion of free marks or chance: I want a very ordered
image he says but I want it to come about by chance (Sylvester 2008:
56). Bacons basic idea is to introduce a dose of chance or chaos into a
pre-given image (like in a photograph), and thereby to trap the figure in
its most natural movement, that is, in its most factual, intense appearing.
Precisely this power of re-creating the real is what Bacon sought in his
work (172), and clearly this is what makes art difficult and the life of the
artist a struggle.
Merleau-Ponty had done something similar with Czanne as Deleuze
attempts to do with Bacon in Logic of Sensation. Merleau-Ponty writes
that the artist discovers the geological foundation of the landscape
(Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 17); that the artist looks at germination, at
birth, and puts all his effort into capturing the continual rebirth of
existence. As with Bacon, Czanne was plagued by self-criticism and
doubt. Merleau-Ponty gives a name to his struggle: he considered
himself powerless because he was not omnipotent, because he was not
God and wanted nevertheless to portray the world (Merleau-Ponty
1964a: 19). Though Bacons life was probably very different from

52 Filippo Carraro
Czannes, it is safe to say that they were both struggling for the same
task: to paint the real, to paint the world, to avoid second-hand images,
photography and clichs. In a word, their desire was to re-create reality.
As with Heraclitus, the real constitution of things is thought of as
hidden. The artist, who wants to capture a fact in its innocence, or in
the moment of its pure presence, has to select its representations, clean
its surface and reach what is beyond visibility. Painting is about creating
forces, not about imitating skills.
Deleuzes focus on forces rather than on the represented images
shifts the idea of art as imitation to that of art as creativity. Deleuze,
by the notion of force, might be denoting a face of becoming, and
contrasting the artists creativity with the subjects static dependence
from an object-model. Creativity, however, must not be interpreted as
an inversion of such a dependence relation; in fact, Deleuze would not
simply expect Bacon to populate the world by generating unknown
images. Creativity is rather a complex process where the artist bestows
on his creature the spirit of an independent struggler for survival, not
without gaining for himself a renovated organ of sensation. For Deleuze,
the aesthetic experience is always a double creation of a Figure and of
a viewer that is, a mutually dependent process of sensation.2 Firstly,
sensation coagulates on the side of the canvas; that is, a painter moulds
a new Figure. Secondly, sensation coagulates on the side of the viewer;
that is a spectator is educated to see (I learn from Bacon to appreciate
the untold effort required to open a door). An artistic experience is a
complex moment when a bloc of sensation produces the independence of
the work from the subject, and measures their distance. This is creation
proper; that is, to render durable a moment of the world, or to make it
exist in its own right (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 172).
Bacon, as Czanne, was aware he had the mission to germinate, to
implant on canvas the seed of the unseen perception; but Bacon also
knew that he was not God. He could not create ex nihilo, for to create
is always situated in a possible creation (Deleuze [2003] 2004: ch. 11).
However creative the act of painting appears, the artist is limited to what
is already on the blank canvas. The artist starts with decomposition, deorganisation (some say reduction). He compresses what is under his sight
until it explodes. Only then will a new creation be possible: the artist
moves reality or deforms it (making any object pulsate: compressing a
head, letting a face come under explosive forces see Deleuze [2003]
2004: ch. 8; Sylvester 2008: 818). In Bacons portraits, he painted
heads, not faces. Why heads? Because the head is the de-humanised
human face. The head reminds one of a known person, but it is violently

Deleuzes Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus

53

manipulated under the hands of the artist. (Bacons interest in that which
is impersonal or purely de-subjectified recurs in Interviews; see Sylvester
2008: 40, 51, 194ff.) The body is also mere body, just matter under
the pulsation of cosmic forces, the same that moves dust and planets
in the universe. Perhaps this is even the same that actually makes the
universe itself expand. The artist applies this merciless rhythm on heads
and on other human bodies. Up and down, inhalation and exhalation,
compression and expansion, the painter paints the forces that strike and
inhabit the body. Bacon lets invisible forces strike the head from very
different angles (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 58).
The movement that distorts Bacons Figures is not the spatiotemporal
movement that drags creatures around (from place to place) until they
meet their end. Rather, it is the same sacred source that creates them.3
What I want to do says Bacon is to distort the thing far beyond
the appearance, but in the distortion to bring back to a recording of
the appearance (Sylvester 2008: 40). Pope Innocent X, for example,
is moving in place when he makes his appearance first in the work
by Velzquez (1650) and then in the work of Bacon (1953). Change
is of two types: a change in place and a change of place. The latter is
supported by the framework of narration: firstly there is the here, and
then comes the elsewhere. The former type of change, in contrast, is
not as clear and straightforward: it is the exploration a subject makes
of its own space, of the space where the subject takes place. Change is
essentially movement, but of two types: a change in place is analogous
to a movement of creation, while a change of place is analogous to a
movement of narration. In his book on Bacon, Deleuze develops an
ontology of artistic creation, that is, a study of movement that allows
a fact to occur. The first and only rule of this ontology is to exorcise
the figurative or illustrational, of which narration is the correlate. What
Deleuze was struck by in Bacons work, and what he attempted to
provide a philosophical account for, was the way Bacon was able to
preserve the likeness between what he painted and the living object, all
the while allowing the artistic product to move in place. Bacon attempts
to preserve the likeness between the thing painted and the living thing,
but not without allowing the artistic product itself to move in place. In
so doing, Deleuze absorbs into his philosophy Bacons task of reporting
or recording sensation (Sylvester 2008: 60). Sensation is precisely what
survives change.
Painting, in Deleuzes Francis Bacon, ministers the liberation of what
is beneath representation (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 49, 52) it captures a
presence that survives change. Though faithful to a vision of flux, what

54 Filippo Carraro
Deleuze is looking for is that element in flux which does not change, die
or vanish. He looks into the way Bacon speaks about and understands
his own work, and works out the philosophical implications of an
artistic movement that tries to trap a living fact alive. The resulting
Logic of Sensation constitutes the philosophers attempt to extrapolate
from the work of Bacon the kind of movement that allows sensation to
endure, that is, to persist in its rhythm.
What Deleuze wants to rule out is the type of movement that would
never allow a fact to endure (namely, the movement of narration, the
chain of which merely displaces sensation rather than allowing it to
accumulate around the image). Bacon must exorcise figuration. The
sole movement that inhabits his Figures must not be a movement that
takes place in time; instead, time collapses on the original moment
of the Figures appearance. It is the Figures movement of creation.
Figures are not to tend to any model outside of time or to a narrative
completion in time. They have to endure in the portion of time that
allowed them to come to be and to reproduce that movement this
is why Deleuze insists on Bacons capacity of painting time as such.
They must stand up on their own, allowing a moment of the world
to exist by itself (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 164, 172). In much the
same way, Merleau-Ponty was sensitive to Czannes wish to render
the type of movement that sustains itself, is preserved in the object,
and does not pass away. This is the issue of a creating original-time.
Merleau-Ponty writes about Czanne: an emerging order, of an object
in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes (MerleauPonty 1964a: 14). In Deleuzes words: the artist concentrates a bloc of
sensation from the whirlwind of time and makes this bloc imperishable,
or at least it tends toward this direction as much as possible.
Art must endure; the subject painted on the canvas must be capable to
stay where he is, to do what he is doing, to scream his scream, forever.4
The study of appearances (as it is understood by Merleau-Ponty)
allows Deleuze to conceive of becoming as subject to the laws of
aesthetics. Aesthetics, in this sense, means simply that I see, or that
which allows me to see. In Deleuzes hands, the philosophical problem
of sensuous determination may point at a series of artistic solutions.
Among these Deleuze selects Bacons paintings and interviews. It is here,
with the converging of becoming and Bacons Figures, that Deleuzes
notion of difference is illuminated by Bacons notion of sensation (that
which hits upon ones nervous system). The action of a force on a body
creates sensation: here an organ might temporarily take place. An eye
sees and allows the body to see; it moves. From a sensation localised

Deleuzes Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus

55

on the head it transits to other parts of the body. Other parts of the body
become visible:
Painting gives us eyes all over: in the ear, in the stomach, in the lungs [. . . ]
This is the double definition of painting: subjectively, it invests the eye, which
ceases to be organic in order to become a polyvalent and transitory organ;
objectively, it brings before us the reality of a body, of lines and colors freed
from organic representation. And each is produced by the other: the pure
presence of the body becomes visible at the same time that the eye becomes
the destined organ of this presence. (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 52)

It is as if the river became coagulated sensation with the body leaning

towards new sensations. We can therefore see how for Deleuze and for
Bacon perception of the real is not a matter of sight, but a matter of
creation. Their central problem is to capture and explore those forces
that sustain the visible. Deleuzes insight into art is that capturing forces,
which is the same as painting sensation, pushes a bloc of sensation
outside of the circle of narration. The artistic Figure enters durability
precisely within this movement.
Deleuze radicalises the question of germination that troubled
Czanne: art not only reveals to us how things appear, but also the
process through which they appear. In this way, art shows us how
the real is created. For art creates in the same way undoubtedly,
Deleuze refers to a materialist creation. Deleuze goes further than
Heraclitus: metamorphosis is always already exposed to novelty, that
is, to indetermination. For him, to the sequence earth water soul
there follows nothing like its circular inversion (soul water earth). The
three-layered Figure is the living present opened to creative zones of
affirmation:
Life alone creates such zones where living beings whirl around, and only
art can reach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creation. This is
because from the moment that the material passes into sensation, as in a
Rodin sculpture, art itself lives on these zones of indetermination. They are
blocs. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 173)

Logic is the realm of the ordered surfaces of meaning, and the sight
that seizes upon such layers captures something of the reality that logic
organises. It is as if the terms of some logic had the same creative power
upon reality that the divine Verbum has on the shaping of being. Deleuze
discovers some of those terms, and these are in line with Heraclituss
obscure but divinised reality.

56 Filippo Carraro

III. Becoming and Sensation, Save the Contour

In The Logic of Sensation chapters 111 everything is in movement.
Movement is the key to the interpretation of the book, because
movement is taken as the true character of sensation as such. A perennial
exchange between opposites occurs a perennial coupling of sensed
and sensing. Just as physicists increasingly tend to conceive of matter
as intensity, so Deleuze believes that whatever is in being is nothing but
high-speed motion. An example will help us further understand. Let us
take a worldly object and reveal its nature of pure motion. A mouth: the
compound of teeth, lips and a hole. What is a mouth? How do cosmic
forces relate to it? How does a mouth become a mouth?
Do I need to escape? We can assume that, in order for us to conceive
of an organ, we also need a function for it.5 What is the function of
the mouth, for instance? Bacon might have suggested that the mouths
function is to let it out, or to let it in: a man wants to free himself
through his own mouth (or through the washbasin which amounts
to the same thing). Bacon then has some solid, undetermined material
which is the body, but the body does not have any organs yet. It is rather
an indeterminate organ. Furthermore, this unformed body is traversed
by an intense wave which, in Deleuzes words,
traces zones and levels on this body according to the variations of its
amplitude. When the wave encounters external forces at a particular level,
a sensation appears. An organ will be determined by this encounter, but it
is a provisional organ that endures only as long as the passage of the wave
and the action of the force, and which will be displaced in order to be posited
elsewhere. (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 47)

Then a mouth comes to being as a result of the unapparent intense

movements under the radar of visibility.
It has been mentioned how the primacy of invisible movements over
the representation of the appearing object brings Deleuzes ontology
closer to that of Heraclitus. Deleuze considers the example of how two
rather differentiated images reveal their invisible becoming, that is, how
they lead to a region of being that allows no differentiability itself. Man
and beast are not only similar; they are the same thing in the realm of
becoming:
This is not an arrangement of man and beast, not a resemblance; it is a
deep identity, a zone of indiscernibility more profound than any sentimental
identification: the man who suffers is a beast, the beast that suffers is a man.
This is the reality of becoming. (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 25)

Deleuzes Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus

57

But the experience of movement and becoming in Deleuzes work on

aesthetics recapitulates the flux of Heraclitus, and adds two notions to
it: creation and sensation. Becoming rests on the aesthetical encounter
of a movement that creates and a movement that coagulates sensation;
we have already seen above: painting gives us eyes all over. For
Bacon, these two are spontaneously related in the work of art: art
creates sensation and it accumulates sensation around its creatures. But
it is only with Deleuze that Bacons intuition assumes an ontological
import. Painting creates sensation (on the canvas and on the viewer),
and sensation accumulates around creatures (around the I and around
the Figure). Music, for instance the crossing of a number of waves in a
complex topography of vertical and horizontal distances has the power
of generating and dissolving bodies. Different speeds, different timbres
and musics crucial power of emanating sensation make this possible.
The same is also true of Nature: there is first the tension that makes the
appearance of different species of animals vibrate, and also a rhythm of
several coordinates of sensation: food chain, or suffering. The concept
is that the artist faces and manipulates chaos, or the flux. He filters the
reality of becoming through the levelling of sensation (suffering, the need
to escape, and so on); and finally he creates, that is, he allows an image
to differentiate itself from those movements that make any image vanish
into something else (flux). The Figures of Bacon, for instance, are objects
which are able to sustain their own appearing; they do not undergo the
movement that resembles first man, then beast; first soul, then water,
then earth. They already are that movement indiscernibility; they are
closer to a pure bloc of sensation.
Deleuze discusses how the artist deals with movements that nest
themselves in any possible appearance. In addition, although it is the
task of the artist to break up the sovereign optical organisation, to
face the chaos and reproduce its movement, he admits that the artist
is never to let the catastrophe proliferate and shadow the Figure-ness.
The hands of the artist touch the chaotic movements, his brushes and
sponges recreate some of them on a canvas then, the fight to limit and
control the catastrophe begins (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 111). The artist
faces the chaos or flux the graph of the waves of a musical instrument,
the several forces making the planets rotate and strives to trap a fact
alive, without allowing it to vanish. Save the contour (110).
One might want to ask whether the mouth painted by Bacon (or the
mouth of the figures which take shape on any topos of his canvas)
is indeed a coming to rest of the flux. Is the activity of the artist a
production of those differences that stop the flowing of differences?

58 Filippo Carraro
Deleuze describes the artistic experience of creation as follows. In the
first place the artist has to face the chaos by means of introducing on his
canvas a-pictorial marks. This destroys the emerging figuration. It is as if
the dominion of our daily sight is destabilised by measured doses of the
unseen it is in this pre-pictorial moment that the invisible chaotic reality
of flux shows its face. However, the experience of this latent catastrophe
can be dealt with in very different ways; every great painter has to find
his way in it. Where painters differ is in their manner of embracing this
non figurative chaos, and in their evaluation of the pictorial order to
come, and the relation of this order with this chaos (Deleuze [2003]
2004: 103). Deleuze designates the different manners with a technical
term: the notion of diagram. Van Goghs diagram, for example, is the
set of straight and curved hatch marks that raise and lower the ground,
twist the trees, make the sky palpitate (102). A diagram is called an
operative set, and it is a possibility of fact not the fact itself (110).
Firstly, the question above receives a negative answer. Deleuze does
not see the artistic product as an arresting of the flux which characterises
any appearance whatsoever; instead, Deleuze is addressing art in general,
though of course he focuses on the work of Bacon in particular. In
the work of different artists, the flux finds virtually compossible resting
points (Bacon and Kandinsky, Kandinsky and Pollock, and so on). In this
sense it is not only Bacons Figures that are an answer to the Heraclitean
flux; it is also Deleuzes Figure-ness (the fact established by a bloc of
sensation).
There is still another reason for giving a negative answer to the
question above. If the work of the artist tries, at any price, to limit
the chaos which precedes the becoming of the object, it does not do
so by collapsing movement onto rest or difference onto the model. The
fact that a bloc of sensation is able to endure does not mean that a
bloc of sensation receives a fixed shape; to endure means not to be
so to be lips, to be teeth, to be tongue. What enduring requires
at the very least is to be able to re-create the movement that first
allowed the appearance of a mouth. The Figure traps movement as a
fact the fact that a mouth moves. A mouth becomes a scream a mouth
screams. And a scream becomes an ear the ear that listens to the scream.
Deleuze speaks of a metamorphosis that does not dissolve the mouth
into a sound, and the sound into its listener: sensory becoming is the
action by which something or someone is ceaselessly becoming-other
(while continuing to be what they are), sunflower or Ahab (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994: 117). Thus, Deleuzes idea is not that the artistic
product is a visible portion of an invisible chain in metamorphosis.

Deleuzes Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus

59

Art does not need an object as we commonly see it (like what happens
with photography), because art can deal with its invisible becoming
and produce the schema of a new possible appearance of it. With the
notion of diagram, Deleuze reformulates the concept of flux in terms
of what allows invisible movements to make an object appear. The
diagram, being an operative set, balances itself between probability and
obscurity; it gives access to new areas of sensation. It is true that art
needs contours (just as appearance needs something to be seen), thus
it necessarily stops movement, as Deleuze acknowledges and above
all, a new figuration, that of the Figure, should emerge from the diagram
and make the sensation clear and precise (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 110).

IV. The Logic of Sensation

How does a mouth become this mouth? This is an ontological question.
A similar question, posed along aesthetic lines, seems to be the one
Deleuze is after: how does a painter paint a mouth with his brushes, and
how does that mouth on the canvas create the painters actual mouth,
out of the brushes reach?
We shall hereafter read Deleuzes Francis Bacon, The Logic of
Sensation, in particular chapters 111, starting from the last ones: we
shall read it as a phenomenology of sensation. Indeed, our aim is to
understand how in each chapter movement inhalation and exhalation,
compression and expansion gives rise to a lasting figure of Bacons art.
We have to go through several levels of complexity of motion: every
chapter develops one or more phenomenological steps that describe
the artistic co-creation of the real. One instance of the levels or steps
might work as an example. In Francis Bacon terms like human meat
and animal meat (dog), are terms of a perpetual becoming opposite
of the opposite. A dog easily becomes a man in Bacon, and vice
versa. However and here is the idea of an aesthetical answer to
Heraclitus the incessant flux between the two poles of the movement
is the starting point, both for Bacon and for Deleuze, for the search of
the being of the flux, that is, for something stable in the flux its measure
and source. In the context of this example, there is something invisibly at
work: the Figure-spirit. The spirit is neither human nor animal: it is their
zone of indiscernibility. It is the unapparent that sustains the apparent,
an approximation to the notion of a bloc of sensation. Hence, in the
Deleuzian lexicon there are not only terms for the flux, but, prior to
those, there are terms for a durable entity, Figure-ness, that is, a fact of
nature.

60 Filippo Carraro
Most of the chapters from 111 in Francis Bacon reproduce the
schema of the Heraclitean flux-movement whilst offering the aesthetical
answer Bacon put forward a fact, or stable reality. Thus, we now
read the work by Deleuze aiming at grasping both the terms of the
metamorphoses, and a stable fact that sustains those opposites. That is,
those terms of a logic of sensation that, underneath the range of visibility
of the naked eye, grants our worldly sensation.

Preliminary Movement: The Painter Jumps into the Canvas and the
Canvas Offers Him a Chance to Escape Chapter 11
A canvas is never blank, not even before the artist paints on it. It is
an imposition: our sight is dominated by historical clichs, and the less
visible they are, the more powerful they are. Bacons cleaning woman
would not see these clichs; she would think that the canvas was empty.
On the contrary, Bacon knows in advance that that which is in his
head or around him in his studio represents the most probable, that
is, the image which is already given on the canvas. The blank canvas
is not a mirror, but it contains virtually with high probability what
is usually seen around. There is already a flowing of appearances that
reaches the canvas from the head of the painter, or from his room. In
addition, a response of the canvas is already there, and this is a less
probable mirroring of that which is around a distortion. An artist sees
those invisible movements that support both probable figuration and its
distortion. He apprehends Bacon says the presence of pre-pictorial
connections between the movements of his brushes and the emergence of
an actual object. A Figure emerges: the Heraclitean flux (the movement
that takes the man and the canvas closer) has found the first measure of
its own motion. Between figuration and chaos an artist makes an object
again, a pictorial Figure.

Invisible Movements of the Figure An Acrobat Balanced between

Fame and Death Chapter 6
The Figure in Bacon is the result of movements of invisible forces, and
indeed it is itself in constant movement: how can it be durable, then? Its
movement, insofar as the artistic work has achieved its task, is itself
invisible, internal and external to time and space. The movement of
the Figure is not spatiotemporal (Deleuze often states that the Figure
is time). The Figure in Bacon actually seems to have honoured the first
and only rule of Deleuzes ontology of creation, because it excludes

Deleuzes Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus

61

figuration and avoids narration. There is no narration in Bacon: Deleuze

insists on the capability of the artist to leave historical time out of his
paintings. But the lack of narration is not the stillness of a heavy stone,
but the equilibrium of an acrobat, suspended between probable death
and fame. He vibrates internally, he wants to live but his life is consigned
to immobility, balancing between the forces of gravity and death. The
portraits, the Figures, the acrobats, every object of Baconian creation
moves in-place, a spasm towards life facing the forces of fear (see
Deleuze [2003] 2004: 612). All of this movement, which is actually the
will of an object to emerge over chaos, is not for nothing, but in fact
approaches eternity. The Figure exists, so to speak, more than ordinary
objects themselves.

What Comes to Pass at the Heart of a Figure: Both Force and

Sensation Chapter 8, or the Rebirth of Existence in Pure Sensation
One unsettled issue in Deleuzes Logic of Sensation is the relation
between force and sensation. Is the Figure the result of unapparent
chaotic forces or is it the artificial bloc of sensation? Definitions do not
help. Consider for instance the confrontation of the two expressions
that Deleuze uses: paint the sensation and painting forces. What is
painting, the capturing of forces or the rendering of pure sensation? The
following hint provides some guidance: sensation remains at the basis
of perception, perception in turn being what brings about the creation
of events (Conley 2005: 244). Perhaps the Figure is not everything in
the Deleuzian aesthetic universe, but there is still room (and there must
be) for a perceiver. The perceiver distinguishes forces that constitute, in
their play of visible and invisible, organic Figures and definite shapes.
The Figure reciprocates by emanating sensations, so that the perceiver is
once again hit by forces which have now acquired the artistic nature of
a bloc of sensation: some paint comes across directly onto the nervous
system (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 35). This outcome has eternally already
gone back from the perceiver onto the body of the Figure, and it makes
its reality (as if the cosmic forces could in fact subtract from the perceiver
some of its reality with the scope of increasing the reality of the object
on the canvas). A sensation, through the organs, strikes a body, then
organs dissolve again, but the wave is the real as such. It immediately
hits the perceiver (there is no time in-between its production and its
effect) and when sensation is linked to a body in this way it ceases to
be representative and becomes real. The perceiver hit by the sensation
develops another organ, the organ that was dissolved in figuration by

62 Filippo Carraro
the intensity of the sensation (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 45). The exchange
occurring between the Figure and the Figures perceiver is the becoming
real of the sensation itself, its bypassing of the perceivers subjectivity
and its formation as a bloc of sensation. This is the Figure then: defined
by the income of directed forces while emanating filtered sensations. This
is its equilibrium, this is the flux of which the Figure is the filter; this is the
eternal pulsation of opposites and the emergence of the acrobat. Bacon
has obtained the subject of what Merleau-Ponty calls the continual
rebirth of existence: the Figure.
In the remaining part of the book that we will focus on (chapters
111, excluding those already analysed, namely 6, 8 and 11), Deleuze
explores the logic of the Figures movements; that is, its logic of
sensation. From now on the terms of these movements will be eminently
Baconian: animal, hysteria, and so on. These terms introduce
levels of complexity of the Figures movement within Bacons work
alone, therefore they cannot really be used to refer to the work of
any other artist. The Logic of Sensation is an aesthetical answer
to the problem of the Heraclitean flux: everything is in motion,
yet some reality makes its way towards being, passing from the
realm of invisible forces towards the surface of a canvas. What
follows is precisely the exemplification of this rule of motion in
Deleuzes Logic of Sensation. Deleuzes work is the analysis of
the levels of complexity through which the artistic object passes.
Every chapter corresponds to a certain level of complexity. In order
for the birth of the artistic object to take place this is where Deleuze
responds to the problem of the Heraclitean chaos we must read through
Deleuzes presentation in reverse order. The reason for this is that
Deleuzes presentation proceeds by unfolding the logic of sensation,
while another task is pursued: the concentration of all movements onto
one single coagulation of reality.

From the Fall to the Figure Chapter 10, Considering the Case
of a Triptych
A sensation, being defined by different levels of intensity, circulates
throughout the painting (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 76). This is already
Deleuze says a third level of complexity, with the third level
corresponding to a movement that, step by step, will eventually lead to
an artistic answer a real permanence on the canvas. Different objects
stand for active and passive rhythms (no doubt activity and passivity
represent relational notions, as the definition of rhythm suggests), and

Deleuzes Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus

63

their difference is produced by random spurts of paint, which Bacon

likes to utilise. The active and the passive interact with each other and
correspond to a restless, invisible movement, like the water in a river,
which is relatively still and inexplicably ever changing. Let us take a step
back to what Deleuze calls a second level of complexity: the passive and
the active rhythms form a body or a materiality on the canvas. These
are attendants of the movement.6 They become the visible attendant and
the rhythmic attendant. A last step back (to the first level): before, the
two attendants were standing only for an attendant-function, depending
on the moment of the viewers perception. The mere function now
indeed receives a body of its own, and in fact it is painted: an explicit
attendant really observes another attendant, the rhythmic one, who is
not observing, but is being observed. The co-presence of two opposite,
yet complementary, functions is the cause of the multiplication of the
three levels analysed above.

From Resonance to the Figure/Fact Chapter 9, on Bacons Bodies

The two attendants (it can also be just one) are in fact the outcome of
a more superficial movement: the movement of sensation that involves
a subject of sensation, the Figure, and a perceiver of it (the attendant
or attendants). Rhythm itself would become the Figure. The vibration
between Figure and attendant(s) is a rhythm without narration: this
is Bacons challenge to paint time without narration. The two must
be one fact, immediately connected, coupled together like wrestlers
(Deleuze [2003] 2004: 68) in a single body struggling within itself
because of the presence of deeper energies, and never telling a story.
From the multiple rhythms dealt with in chapter 10 Bacon obtains a
concentration of rhythms, united in a single fact, and led by the Figure:
rhythms constitute the Figure (71). Art produces a new reality as the
emergence of dark movements under its surface: the Figures body, or
body-vibration.

From the Discovery of the material reality of bodies7 to the Body

without Organs Chapter 7, the Hysteric Body
The body previously created is mainly the body of a Figure, or, so to
speak, the leader of the painting a human body. The human body is
an organism, but the living body is not (for the organism is not life;
it is what imprisons life, as Deleuze states). The living body (what we
are going to discover on top of the invisible movements which any

64 Filippo Carraro
materiality is subjected to) is the body of those forces that escape the
organised-body and can do without it. The real body is the body without
organs, that is, a hysteric body that makes present. Within any body
there are the intensities of a sensation, which, when encountered, create
an organ: that is our body, or what one easily claims to be a fixed, or
given, state. The organ is nothing but a hysteric adjustment (Deleuze
[2003] 2004: 47) for a provisional liberation of tension. In that point,
at that time, painting discovers the pure presence of which it is made:
movement, the hysterical movement of a body. Hysteria is the new
figure, the new aesthetic discovery that derives from the vibration of
a body without organs and the organism through which to escape.

From a Hysteric Body to the Real Body Chapter 4,

the Corporeal Spirit
The body without organs is a potential body, or a molecular body, that
contains every relation of movement and rest required for the creation
of a molar entity. This woman, that girl, this dog, that Christ: these
all have an indiscernible basic nature of meat. Meat is true. It is that
in which Bacon finds his faith (Sylvester 2008: 23, 46) though he was
not a believer and what compels him to paint a becoming-animal not
without the animal becoming spirit at the same time (Deleuze [2003]
2004: 21). Meat is true because it is the ground of indiscernibility of
the ever-becoming (of the hysteric body): there is not a mere analogical
correspondence between man and dog, they are not simply alike.
However, if the painter is religious enough, then he can see a spirit
struggling between mans metamorphosis into a beast, suffering, and
at the same time see a beasts metamorphosis into a man, suffering.
This is the reality of becoming: an animal spirit, or a Christ, whose
vital breath tends to resurrection, but which is concealed by a corporeal
nature (20) its destiny is to remain part of this movement, and never to
ascend.

From the Spirit, through the Material Structure, and to the

Fact Chapters 3 and 1, the Last Shape
The spirit is not the conclusion, because Bacon believes that there is
no longer religious possibility, but just game (Sylvester 2008: 29).
According to Bacon, Christ and other religious subjects are incapable of
transcendence. The only movement they undergo is the same movement
every piece of meat undergoes. Chapter 10 deals with the flow of
active and passive; chapter 9 discusses the vibration of the attendants.

Deleuzes Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus

65

Every chapter points to a certain level of the Heraclitean flux, and names
two opposite constituents; chapter 7, for instance, names the body as
given, and the hysteric body without organs. Every chapter represents
a level of complexity of the flow. However, there is never mere flow,
but Figure-ness too: the perceiver of the flow, its measure and its filter.
After all, the human body, is in a sense a filter (Sylvester 2008: 199).
For instance, in chapter 4, the flow is represented by the coupling of
Bacons human and animal body. They become, restlessly turning into
their opposite, man into dog, dog into man. Yet the canvas grasps
hold of these forces of chaos, which, without this grasping hold, would
lead to a vanishing of humanity and animality in their meaningless
narration. In this way, Bacon paints the Figure-spirit. This is precisely
what both emerges from and resists the flux. Heraclitus is challenged
by the presence of attendants: they experience the flux and measure the
sensation it emanates, upon their body. The spirit is not the end. The
flow leads back towards its opposite. The Figure-spirit is then the subject
of a renewed motion, more superficial than the others: athleticism. At the
same time the Figure wants to pass to a vanishing point to the contour in
order to dissipate into the material structure (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 17);
and the material structure curls around the contour in order to imprison
the Figure (14). Eventually, the pulsation between the Figure and the
material structure allows the last shape of the Baconian universe to
emerge: the matter of fact. This is precisely the event occurring between
the Figure and the material structure, via the round contour. The fact, or
the matter of fact, rules out figuration because its movement is capable
of being without distance and duration. The fact is the bloc of sensation.

V. The Aesthetical Answer to Heraclitus

It remains true: Cold things warm themselves, warm cools, moist dries,
parched is made wet (Krik [1954] 2010: 149). It is as if the Heraclitean
universe is reshaped. The Obscure used a naturalistic vocabulary the
wet and the dry, the day and the night, the rivers, the fire, and so on. But
Deleuze, still maintaining the logic of the Heraclitean movement, pushes
Heraclituss naturalism towards an aesthetical understanding. The dry
and the wet become the Figure and the Material structure, or the Figure
and the Attendant, or even the Human and the Animal, which forever
face off against each other, becoming each other, and vanishing in a
moment of indiscernibility.
Bacon wanted to paint something real, but lived in chaos his studios,
too, were extremely chaotic. The real emerges from chaos from the

66 Filippo Carraro
game of an incessant movement from the invisible to the visible and
again into the invisible and not from nothing and into nothing. The
aesthetical creation does not proceed ex nihilo (like Gods creation). It
requires an unformed material. Indeed, art co-creates the real and cocreation is a form of re-creation.8 In chaos there is matter (the meat
that Bacon has to shape); while in the void there is nothing, not even
the invisible. The chaos that the artist starts from is unintelligible,
mysterious, yet it can be grasped in a schema: the becoming opposite
of each opposite. The Obscure confronted the problem of becoming:
everything is just what it is as long as it becomes its opposite. He called
this river and flux. Thus, flux is not simply pure chaos, for pure
chaos is beyond representation how can the pure metamorphosis be
painted, or described? Heraclitus gave the schema of chaos, the river,
and described it as the hidden flowing of every piece of meat into its
opposite.
What does not emerge in Ancient Greece, however, is an account
of how something becomes something, for Heraclitus seems to have
stopped before this problem. For him, indeed, things simply become. In
Heraclituss notion of becoming we also find the problem of endangering
its nature, that is, providing a proof that a multitude is not simply
one as in the example of the wise man, who fails to distinguish the
day and the night, for they are one (Krik [1954] 2010: 155). But how,
then, does something become that something? The original intuition
of an aesthetics that creates, like Deleuzes, is precisely this: unity is
multiplicity (Deleuze [1983] 2002: 24), the opposites never melt into
one. A man becomes an animal, but not even the deepest sorrow can fuse
together man and dog. We can still sense the difference. To sense is to
affirm a difference. For difference, rather than being the static opposition
of a double identity (subject and object) is the dynamic instance at the
origin of individuation (the self individualises and the indeterminate
assumes contours). The affirmation of a difference is the superficial effect
of a spirits becoming something.
It is here that Deleuze intervenes. His idea is that art has something to
say to chaos. Deleuze shares with Heraclitus the view that the cosmos is
a compound of terrific invisible forces (chaos). However, the case is not
true that chaos is pure darkness, because darkness, like void, allows no
flesh: something rises towards the surface and becomes visible. Thus, if
there is chaos, there is flesh, hence there is something; and whatever it
is (dust, apples or heads), it is able to endure in the life of the universe.
Deleuze is still in agreement with Heraclitus when he claims that what
endures is unseen by most. The colour changes, the object changes, the

Deleuzes Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus

67

apple changes . . . but art has something to say to the river of becoming
because there are apples that render themselves independent from the
flow of becoming-something-else. They exit the circle of the model,
stand up on their own, and become themselves the forces that allow
any material to express its sense (and the sensation turns colouring see
Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 167). There are things which move faster
than the movements of the cosmos, and these things are artistic products,
blocs of sensations. The Verbum creates reality, but does not refer to
anything; it just makes things come into being by naming them. Thus,
it does not express any opinion, contrary to what most think. Ordinary
language, perhaps, expresses opinion, but not the Verbum. Art co-creates
reality; it compels its object to run faster than any possible referent,
and to germinate in time even without a perceiver. All art needs is a
support or material; aside from that it is autonomous or sufficient it is
a sacred source (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 172). Apples and smiles
are preserved untouched, and so are organs and mouths. These are terms
of an aesthetic language that, without giving opinions, re-makes the real.
(Not only different affirmations, but also affirmations of differences.)

Notes
1. I refer to Bacons Study after Velzquezs Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953.
Every molecular region of the Figures model (by Velzquez) is faithfully remade, just with the exception of the irrational and hysteric presences of his
body which are liberated (Sylvester 2008: 26).
2. To be at once at various levels to be force and to be effect, like the motive power
that takes the form of the displaced foot on the path is to be the artistic Figure.
Aesthetics, for Deleuze, can let this possibility become real; that is, art can create
a Figure. The artist and the spectator belong to the movement of creation: they
are one of the aspects of becoming. The other aspect of becoming is the work of
art. If, on the one hand, there are the creator-artist and the creature-work, on
the other hand, there is the one who sees and that which is seen. In the aesthetic
experience sensation depends on creation. But here, where the creativity of the
artist shapes a bloc of sensation, a turn occurs. The dominion of the objective
images of the artists world gains life, the Figure senses. We have the impression
that it is the work of art that watches the spectator, as in the case of the forest
and Paul Klee (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 167). Becoming undergoes an inversion
of dependence of viewer and viewed. Creation occurs not more on the canvas
than on the organs of the spectator. Sensation creates (the artist paints what he
sees) because creatures sense (the Figure is like the organ of sight through which
the spectator sees a new world). To be at various levels means to be already
inside the painting, almost be the Figure. It means to be not more sensation or
creation, than it means to be their becoming.
3. The words by Bacon are: an illustrational form tells you through the intelligence
immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works
first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact. Now why this
should be, we dont know. This may have to do with how facts themselves

68 Filippo Carraro

4.

5.

6.

7.
8.

are ambiguous, how appearances are ambiguous, and therefore this way of
recording form is nearer to the fact by its ambiguity of recording (Sylvester
2008: 567).
Understanding what the artistic work is about is to take into account its power
as an artistic product: rendering visible (according to Klees remark) is more
than merely rendering the visible. And this, far from simply being the artists
concern, also has philosophical implications. Two different kinds of notions
of visibility are contrasted at present: Deleuzes and Merleau-Pontys. While
the latter believes that visibility concerns a question of vision (appearances),
Deleuze transforms visibility into an ontological issue. For Deleuze, the artist
does not only contribute to the education of our natural vision (see MerleauPonty 1964a: 14), but also presides over the coming into being of the thing as
such. While Merleau-Ponty believes that art reinforces the capability of vision
that lies beyond what is seen, Deleuze puts forward the idea that art reproduces
the materialisation of the thing as such. Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, is concerned
with the exact study of appearances (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 11).
Bacon ascribes to every organ a certain function, and actually he seems to make
the creation of an organ dependent on its function (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 48,
512). But one has to contrast between an organic function and an inorganic
one. An organic function, such as eating for survival, is ascribed to the mouth
by someone that takes the existence of a mouth (and the life of an organism)
for granted (a biologist). An inorganic function, in contrast, has nothing to do
with the vital activity of an organism. In Bacon, for instance, the mouth takes on
another function entirely: it becomes a hole through which an affect escapes.
With Bacon and Deleuze, then, one has the chance to question the organic
being of the mouth itself (rather than its biological use), both its emergence
into the realm of being and its disappearance. While in biology, for example, a
vital function serves as the teleological aim of an organs existence, in Bacons
painting, and in Deleuzes ontology, the function sustains the being of the
organ as such, giving it a consistency, or a shape, independent of an organic,
teleological aim. Deleuzes notion of function is found prior to the one of organic
function: it is the organ-isation of the (organic) function.
How can anything create and be created? An object painted on a canvas
is created: apples. However, Czannes apples are illuminated from within
(Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 12). Bacons heads are similar to Czannes apples: they
are solid bodies with a solidity that is self-creating; or again, they are sensations
that are thickened into meat. Thus apples and heads can create: they create
themselves. But not ex nihilo because then it is a matter of belief; they create
themselves for a viewer. Bacons attendants are signs of viewers. In front of an
attendant a head, or a Figure, or an apple, deploys its meat. An attendant is
a constant or point of reference in relation to which a variation is assessed
(Deleuze [2003] 2004: 13). In Bacon there is not only the function-Figure but
the function-Perceiver, too (but they can be united into one).
Deleuze [2003] 2004: 55.
Bacon seems to maintain that art does not make the real in the same way that a
god creates things. For when God produces something, his creature is nature.
Bacon, however, thinks that the product of men, and of the artist himself, is
artificial. Every production, in other words, is a form of re-production; thus even
art, while co-producing the real, is actually re-producing something real. This,
nevertheless, should not be confused with the fact that the artificial reproduction
of the real is a second-hand reproduction. On the contrary, he believes that
reality in art is something profoundly artificial and that it has to be recreated
(Sylvester 2008: 172).

Deleuzes Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus

69

References
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Deleuze, Gilles [1983] (2002) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson,
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Deleuze, Gilles [2003] (2004) Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel
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Sylvester, David (2008) Interviews with Francis Bacon, London: Thames and
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