Thursday, August 14, 2008



"it is as if a Sahara, a zone of the Sahara, were suddenly inserted into the head; it is as if a piece of rhinoceros skin, viewed under a microscope, were stretched over it; it is as if the two halves of the head were split open by an ocean; it is as if the unit of measure were changed, and micrometric, or even cosmic, units were substituted for the figurative unit ..." (71)

and 

"we witness the revelation of the body beneath the organism, which makes organisms and their elements crack or swell, imposes a spasm on them, and puts them into relation with forces - sometimes with an inner force that arouses them, sometimes with external forces that traverse them, sometimes with the eternal force of an unchanging time, sometimes with the variable forces of a flowing time ..." (112)

these and other passages make this - 'Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation' by Gilles Deleuze - absolutely compelling. It arrived this morning and I read it straight through.

Chapter 11 - The Painting Before Painting - is especially interesting and I'm amazed Deleuze can get through it without once name-checking Nietzsche and The Eternal Return. It seems implicit in everything he says. 

Of all the Deleuze texts I've read this is the most 'comprehensible' - in some ways, maybe, a key text? (Where the more abstract formulations of the other books are fleshed out?). 

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