Deleuze's Tensive Notion of Painting in the Light of Riegl, Wölfflin and Worringer

Abstract

Deleuze's Logique de la sensation is not a canonical art historical interpretation of Francis Bacon's painting and even less an illustration of Deleuze's philosophy. It is better read as a prolegomena to a semiotics of plastic art in which the visual image is related to the dialectics of touch and vision. These issues feature strongly in the art theories of Aloïs Riegl, Wilhelm Worringer and Heinrich Wölfflin. This article presents a comparative approach to the relation between Deleuze's and these writers’ conception of the image and attempts to answer the following questions: does a painting appeal strictly to the sense of vision? Does its structure point to a virtual haptic function of vision and if so, does painting overturn the stable hierarchy of senses with vision at the top? Is there a gradual relation between touch and vision? Reading Deleuze reading Riegl, Worringer and Wölfflin offers an occasion to reconsider the image as a tensive surface grasped with a touching eye and seeing hand.