MEAT AND SAND: De-worldization of the Image and the Affective Logic of the Body in the Painting of Francis Bacon – Deleuze’s Insight

Abstract

In his analysis of Francis Bacon’s painting, the author seeks to examine how Gilles Deleuze’s “canonical” book is still sufficient for a possible insight into what this painting wants – to reach the extreme limits in the de-worldization of the image and the affective logic of the body. At the same time, in opposition to both the art-historical path of interpretation and the philosophical one, it is shown that not every exclusivity contributes to the desired result. In a critical review of this controversy, mediated by the recent literature on the viability of Deleuze’s view of Bacon as an “anti-narrative” and “anti-representational” painter of violence and hysteria in the contemporary spectacle of consumer capitalism, the author argues that the issue of Bacon’s image must be clarified based on understanding what arises from the early and late oeuvre of this paradigmatic painter of the corporeal turn in terms of opposition between “meat” and “sand”. This primarily refers to the fact that the analysis of Figure and the “logic of sensation” in Deleuze’s interpretation raises the question to what extent Francis Bacon enclosed painting in his own space of the “hypnotic effect” of creation, trying to embrace the subject of painting with his own “diagram” that, instead of the sketch, takes on the function of intuitive thinking in the moment, unrepeatable and singular like a flash of sunshine in a mirror.