Skin Aesthetics as Incarnation: Gilles Deleuze’s Diagram of Francis Bacon

Abstract

FRANCIS BACON'S ABSTRACT STRATEGIES to represent the surface of the furies' skin in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) and the flayed bodies of Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962) can be intercepted by Gilles Deleuze's treatment of the painter's oeuvre according to notions of descent (fall) and flesh (meat)--two elements contained in his underused notion of incarnation. Incarnation brings to mind the idea of descent (the spirit coming down) and flesh (the spiritual clothed in skin). term is seldom used by Deleuze, a materialist philosopher, but when it comes up in his corpus it is concerned with the virtual and the actual and, most importantly, with the concept of the diagram, which has implications of systematic scale in his philosophy. Descent implies a movement in time and flesh, a destination. Between the two, skin filters the fall into sensation. Skin is the liminal membrane that articulates the dimension of time in the concept of incarnation. Adding time to incarnation provides a fuller picture of the complexity of the concept. Skin is not simply a receptacle but an elastic organ progressing through time, as Bacon shows with his figures shifting from one panel of his triptychs to the next, with the torsions that he puts his figures through, and with the oft-used circular zones endowed with arrows that illustrate movement and directionality in time. Also, Bacon's violent, sombre, and horror-laden aesthetics are an apt terrain onto which to bring Deleuze's particular refinement of time through the notion of morose time. Morose time deploys a dynamic dimension in a figure teeming with potential and adds to his already rich analysis of Bacon's oeuvre. juxtaposition of a modern British painter and his French poststructuralist commentator opens a strange space populated by religious imagery and mythical creatures, namely crucifixions and furies. To these are added a rhinoceros skin and incarnations into meat, cephalopods turning into quadrupeds, Bodies without Organs and masochists. There are also bones and skin and a head split in half by an ocean. Accordingly, to navigate this polymorphic crowd, the essay is divided into five parts. first section is a description of Bacon's work. second section explains incarnation through analogy, essence, and the virtual/actual duality. third section demonstrates the topological (diagrammatical) transformation of a fish into a crucified body according to the virtual mechanics of nineteenth-century biology. fourth section shows the morose time at work on the surface of the skin between the virtual and the actual. Finally, the last section proposes a diagrammatic duality of the surface of the skin. 1. Studies of Furies Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) is at the centre of all this. A triptych painted toward the end of the Second World War, it is based on the three furies whose screeches torment those racked by guilt. They were referred to as The Kindly Ones (Eumenides) because calling them The Angry Ones (Erinyes) would lead to insanity: The Kindly Ones--Les bienveillantes, as in the title of Jonathan Littell's novel depicting the brutality of the Holocaust from the perspective of a Nazi SS officer. Calmly recounting his actions as a man going through the banality of evil; dealing with the flesh in a detached manner, he is nevertheless caught by the titular furies as Soviet and Allied troops enter Berlin. appearance of the furies at the end of the novel coincides with Bacon's depiction of furies in the triptych at the end of war. novel's pages scream behind the print as the soft title on the cover appeases the copy of the book. euphemism designating the horrors of World War 11 resolutely underlines the unspeakable. What else is euphemistically designated not by some gradation on the original term that should not be spoken but by its absolute contrary? …