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7/30/2019 The Arc and the Zip -- Deleuze and Lyotard on Art
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MARTY SLAUGHTER
THE ARC AND THE ZIP: DELEUZE AND LYOTARD ON ART
ABSTRACT. Lyotard and Deleuze made extensive use of modern art to mount a
critique of representation as part of their attack on the enlightenment subject. Art
breaks out of received rules, conventions, forms, and cliches and is an instance of
ethical if not revolutionary activity. Lyotard first developed these ideas through
the concept of the Figure, which Deleuze later adopted. Figure is the desire or
force that transgresses and deforms the good form of mimetic representation.
Using Cezanne and Francis Bacon as paradigmatic examples, they argue that art
creates new feelings and desires (Lyotard) or intensities and sensations (Deleuze).
For Deleuze this is the model of ethical behavior the creation of new, pro-
ductive forms of life free from the negativity of judgment. While Lyotard and
Deleuze started from a common point, Lyotard changed his position in his later
work on the sublime. Rather than positing a subject of purely affirmative desire
and ideally free of the limitations of judgment, he posited a subject seized by and
limited by the law. The subject is by nature divided: always already seized by and
hostage to an Other, an unrepresentable excess or remainder. He is under an
obligation to recollect and respond to the Other by bearing witness to it. The
sublime experience of seizure by the law is exemplified in the paintings of Barnett
Newman. While Deleuze would have done with judgment, Lyotard can neverhave done with it.
KEY WORDS: aesthetics, art, Deleuze, ethics, Figure, judgment, Lyotard,
representation, sublime
INTRODUCTION
For many theorists, critique begins with representation. Critical
lawyers are, or should be, no less concerned with it. This critique
consists of a rejection of the platonic, mimetic view of representation.
It implies that there is a world and a cosmic order that defines the
good, and that that world and good are isomorphically represented.
This theory has its analogue in the rational, autonomous subject of
the enlightenment. Representation is an instrument of reason and
under the control of it.
If you no longer believe that the subject is defined by reason; or
if you no longer believe that there is an isomorphic relation be-
tween reality, thought and image, then the whole enlightenment
Law and Critique (2004) 15: 231257 Springer 2005
DOI 10.1007/s10978-004-5434-8
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edifice falls. Representation and the autonomous enlightenment
subject have been challenged on a number of fronts phenome-
nological, existential, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, Deleuzian
and, to the extent that these critiques have come into critical legal
thought, it has been mainly in terms of language. The critical basis
of representation, however, is wider than this and can extend into
the visual. Two theorists who have done so are Lyotard and
Deleuze.For Lyotard and Deleuze the crucial distinction is not between
language and the visual but rather between the discursive and art.
It is art that discovers the creation, deformation and/or limits ofrepresentation and they both delineated a critical category called
Figure that is before, beneath or beyond representation. This
means therefore that they were not primarily concerned with the
content or meaning of images but rather with the way in which
material or formal properties are the critical, if not fundamental
element of art. Since visual art, particularly modern painting, keeps
signification and representation to a minimum, it provides a par-
ticularly fertile ground to explore these formal properties and both
Lyotard and Deleuze discuss it extensively. In order to extend the
critique of representation beyond its narrow focus on language, I
focus here on visual art.1
For Lyotard and Deleuze art is not just a weekend activity.
For both, it gives access to dimensions of life that enlightenment
theory ignored: the sensate (Deleuze) or the unconscious (Lyotard).
It is a means of transformation and achieving change and some
degree of liberation, not least from the illusion of the rational
and autonomous subject and its theories of justice. Without art we
are trapped in old and inadequate forms, like being trapped in old
photos. Art creates its own kind of thought. As it turns out,
however, although Lyotard and Deleuze started from positions
that were sympathetic if not similar, they came to radically op-
posed visions of what that thought was. For Deleuze art flees from
law, for Lyotard art inscribes it.
1 Note: Lyotard and Deleuze try to express what exists beyond the representa-
tional content of language through their writing styles. As a result, discursive sum-
mary or paraphrase is not entirely adequate. To the extent that is possible in a
translation, I let them speak in their own words. It is ultimately these that will or will
not move.
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LYOTARD I
In all his works both philosophical and psychoanalytic Lyotard was
interested in the remainder what escapes thought, knowledge and
representation. There is something more than the rational subject and
its productions, and in his early work this is the energy of drive and
desire. For Lyotard, there is energy, drive and desire on the one hand,
and rationality, structure and signification on the other hand. These are
not resolved in representation; rather there is something that remains
after (below, beyond) it. In discourse, signifiers do not fully re-present
objects, be they from the external or internal world. Rather there isalways an irrational force that circulates and remains in excess. In his
early book, Discourse, Figure, Lyotard called this excess Figure.2
Discourse be it linguistic or visual is infected with Figure.
First some definitions. Lyotard defined discourse narrowly as a
structure of signification, more broadly as the informational use of
language, but it has its analogue in painting. The discourse of
painting would be rules of perspective, figuration or the well-formed
image, and narration. For Lyotard, in painting and literature, mod-
ern art revealed a dimension of language and the visual beyond the
significative and discursive. This excess he called Figure.
Lyotard introduced the concept of Figure in Discourse, Figure, along, complex, still untranslated book, written in a style meant to
capture the excess in language. It analyzes the discursive and Figural
elements in language and in painting but I will focus on the latter. To
be precise, Lyotard identifies three kinds of figure. The first, Figure
image, is what we normally call the figure (as in the distinction
between figure and ground), the representation that we see in the
picture of an object.3 It is a contour (an outline) and belongs to the
visible order.4 The second, Figure-form, is present in the visible, is
2 J.F. Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Editions Klinckseick, 1974). Parts have
been translated in M. Lydon, The Dream-Work Does Not Think, in A. Benjamin,
ed., The Lyotard Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 1955 (Lyotard, ibid., 239270);
M. Lydon, Fiscourse Digure: The Utopia behind the Scenes of Phantasy, Theater
Journal 35/3, (October 1983), 333357 (Lyotard, ibid., 327355); M. Lydon, Veduta
on Discours, figure, Yale French Studies 99 (2001), 1026; V. Constantinopoulous,
Discourse, Figure: Digression on the Lack of Reality, Architectural Design (March
1998), 3233 (Lyotard, ibid., 284286); M. Smith, From Discours, Figure, in H.
Pietersma, ed., Merleau Ponty: Critical Essays (Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 1989), 309322 (Lyotard, ibid., 1823; 5359).3 Lyotard, ibid., 71.4 Lydon, Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, at 333n.
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itself visible if need be, but generally is not seen.5 It is the regulating
line, the Gestalt of a configuration, the architecture of a painting. 6 It
is an invisible scheme that organizes, as in the scheme of Euclidian
space as seen in Renaissance perspective.7 This kind of pictorial
representation is good form or a kind of plastic writing.8
The third kind, figure-matrix, is the most important, is what
others mean when they refer to Lyotards concept of the Figure,
and is what I shall be discussing.9 It is invisible in principle but itis not a structure, which is an intelligible order.10 It comes from
neither plastic nor textual space. Rather, the Figural comes from
the other space, beyond the intelligible or rational, which is tosay, the unconscious. The Figure is called the matrix because it is
the source of disruption to discourse. It is not a thing but an
energy or a force, like the wind, that works on the discursive
elements of language and art by disturbing or disrupting or com-
plicating linguistic and visual representation. It blocks or brings
together two discontinuous orders, e.g., signification and affectiv-
ity, to produce what is logically incompatible.11 Thus Figure cre-
ates a radical rupture with the rules of structural opposition that
control signification, representation and rational discourse. Figure
produces difference itself, which cannot be subsumed in the
structure of oppositions in language, or into an image or a form in
plastic art.12 In visual art, Figure disrupts the well formed image
and transgresses the law of good form. It creates and/or is bad
form or the formless. It is the working or movement of desire
and is seen for example in Jackson Pollacks action painting, which
is likened to drooling or dribbling.13
Lyotards model for the Figure is Freuds Interpretation of
Dreams: just as desire works on the figures in dreams and phantasies,
5 Lyotard, supra n. 2, at 271.6 Lydon ,Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, at 333n.7 Lyotard, supra n. 2, 277.
8Ibid., 271.9 A word of caution: terminology here is confusing. A figure is a shape or form, as
for example the figure of a man or umbrella. A Figure, on the other hand, is a
theoretical construct created by Lyotard and then used by Deleuze. I have tried to
maintain a clear distinction between these two by the use of small and capital letters.10 Lydon, Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, at 333n.11 Y. Bois and R. Krauss, Formless: A Users Guide (New York: Zone Books,
1997), 107.12 Lyotard, supra n. 2, 278.13 Ibid., at 277.
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so Figure works in linguistic and visual discourse.14 One of the rea-
sons Lyotard was interested in Freuds model was that presentations
in the unconscious are visual.15 There the word-presentations of
waking thought are worked over and disguised through processes
such as condensation and displacement. The dream pushes language
into visual images and makes it spatial, somewhat like a newspaper
text that has been crumpled.16 As it does this, it creates something
different from waking thought. For Lyotard, therefore, the dream issomething that works; it is the effect on language of the force ex-
erted by the figural (as image or as form).17 The dream molds the
force of desire, and just as that libidinal force is exerted on thingpresentations in the dream, it is also exerted on linguistic and visual
discourse to produce an excess.
Two qualities of dreams (and phantasies) are significant for Ly-
otards analysis of art. First, the unconscious is a-temporal: things
that are sequential appear simultaneously and this transgresses the
laws of rational thought. Second, since there is no negation in the
unconscious contradictory things can appear together. Thus dreams
and phantasies have the logic of but also or but and. Desire
transforms everything into its opposite, holding both of these things
together at once.18 This transgresses the laws of good (discursive)
form.
The capacity of something to be two different things is caused by
the alteration or pulsation of the drives, Eros and the death drive. 19
While Eros binds energy and conserves order, the death drive moves
toward the external, toward a total discharge of energy, to return life
to its original state; as such it unbinds energy and disrupts. Since the
14 See also Lyotards critique of (early) Lacan in Lydon, Dream-work, supra n. 2,
1955.15 Freud makes a distinction between word presentations and thing presenta-
tions (which are visual). In conscious thought, thing-presentations are bound to
word-presentations. In the unconscious, however, only thing-presentations are
found. In dreams, word-presentations are treated as thing-presentations and undergothe primary processes (condensation, displacement, etc.) just as thing-presentations
do. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London:
Karnac Books, 1973).16 Lyotard, supra n. 2, 247.17 Lydon, Dream-work, in supra n. 2, 51.18 R. Krauss, The Optical Unconsciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993),
221. Krauss provides an excellent analysis of Lyotards interpretation of Freuds
fantasy, A Child is Being Beaten.19 See the discussion in Lydon, Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, 352 ff.
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drives work independently of one another, they produce rhythms of
pulsation. The drives do not form a complementary system, however,
but rather are blocked together to occupy an identical position in
(libidinal) space simultaneously.20 This is the analogue (and the
source) for the Figure, as it both forms and de-forms.
The charge and discharge of pulsation of the pleasure principle
is an on/off throb, a recurrence, guaranteeing that an on will
always follow an off . This creates good form or rhythm. Thepulsation associated with the death drive, however, is experienced
as an interruption; existence followed by total extinction, as an
absolute break, that discontinuity without end that is death. Thisis the formlessness of the death drive operating below the pleasure
principle.21 Figure therefore expresses the pulsation of pleasure,
but it is the pulse as well of death and attempts to say what
cannot be said in discourse. It is not good form, rather it is the
bad form: the vehicle of undoing form.22
The Figure as both form and its transgression confines or ar-
rests difference on the very brink of absolute difference (the dif-
ference between life and death), on the razors edge in the
state of tension between tension and discharge, life and death, life-
death.23 Thus it repeats itself in the scansion of desire.24 What
particularly interests Lyotard is the edge of the fracture or gap. In
the same way that Freud hesitates between these two in the Fort/
Da, figurality as difference is the opening up of a spacing. 25 Thus
it is not an interval separating two terms that belong to the same
order, but an utter disruption of the equilibrium between order
and non-order. Figure de-constructs discourse: underneath the
figural: difference the principle of disorder, the incitement to
jouissance.26
20 Ibid., 343. See also the discussion in G. Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event,
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 98 ff.21 Krauss, supra n. 18, 222; Lydon, Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, 355.22 Bois, supra n. 12, 108.23 Lydon, Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, 355; Bennington, supra n. 21, 99.24 Lydon, Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, 355.25 This is not the spacing of opposition in a structure, the separating terms that
belong on the same plane. Rather it is a fracture, or chasm, with two sides of
widely differing altitudes. Lydon, Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, 354.26 Ibid., 334335. See J. Williams, Lyotard and the Political (London: Routledge,
2000), 6671.
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CEZANNE
According to Lyotard, all great art bears some degree of the form-less
qualities of the Figure and he was interested in modern painting
because it is primarily based on the Figure rather than on mimesis or
the representation of nature. For Lyotard, art following Cezanne and
Klee is the trace of an energy [affect] that condenses, displaces, fig-
ures forth, elaborates, without regard for the recognizable.27 Paint-
ing does not live by what it says or communicates, but by what
affects it conducts.28 The paradigmatic example is Cezanne.
We tend to forget a painting is simply colored paint on a flatcanvas. Instead we see a figure, a story, a meaning and read it like a
text. Lyotard and Deleuze, however, are not interested in the semi-
ology or iconology of paintings and are not interested in reading and
interpreting figures like texts. Rather, they are interested in what lies
outside of representation in the intensities, affects and sensations.
Those are not found in the discourse of a painting but primarily in
its materiality, in particular in color. In several instances they deal
with painters who privileged color relations over form and contour.
Cezanne is one of the greatest of the colorists.
For Lyotard and Deleuze (and countless others) Cezanne is the
founder of modern art. Both see Cezanne as the artist who broke withthe regulative regime of good form, the resolved and closed forms of
representation. In painting, good form is found in the structure im-
posed by Albertian perspective, in the contours of figures (whether
ideal as in Leonardo or realistic as in Vermeer) and in narration
(whether it be the Nativity or Rape of the Sabine Women). In
painting, these elements are roughly the equivalent of words and
grammatical rules in language and each poses a problem for the artist
who would create something new. It is, for example, difficult to paint
more than a single figure without introducing a narrative between the
figures, a story indicated by the relation of the bodies or their ex-
change of gazes. Cezannes paintings of bathers were revolutionary
because there are a number of figures but they do not exchangeglances and this blocks any narrative relation. Or to take another
example, Cezannes paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire do not
27 Lydon, Veduta, supra n. 2, 21 (Lyotard, supra n. 2, 238).28 Williams, supra n. 26, 70. Lyotard is responding to M. Merleau-Ponty,
Cezannes Doubt, in Sense and Non-sense, H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus, trans.
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 11.
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establish space through Albertian perspective but rather through his
use of color.
Lyotard returned to painting and to Cezanne throughout his
works but it is sufficient here to locate his elementary point. Like
Deleuze, he argues that the artists task is to break out of discourse
received rules, forms, representations, and structures. This is the way
to change and the artist is an exemplary revolutionary in experi-
menting and working against structures and representations to createnew dispositions, i.e., new feelings, desires, intensities, transferences
and combinations of affect.29 And the prime artist-revolutionary is
Cezanne, who broke with the perspective, figuration and narrationthat has dominated art since the Quattrocento.
Cezanne accomplished his revolution by abandoning contour in
favor of the intensities and affects of color, in juxtapositions of single
patches of color that work against representation and unified space.
For Lyotard, Cezanne achieved a revolution similar to Freuds. Both
rejected a principle of unity Freud, the unity of consciousness;
Cezanne, the unity of image and perspective in favor of an un-
suppressible principle of dispersion.30
What Cezanne particularly disperses is the Renaissance canon
of perspective (the syntax of painting). As Lyotard points out, the
eye sees not only what the viewer focuses on frontally, but also
what is on the periphery. Thus the eye and its percepts are not
fixed but mobile. In focusing on an object, we repress the
peripheral. Any attempt to analyze or grasp the periphery however
reduces and falsifies it. There is therefore an irreconcilable differ-
ence between focal and lateral vision. For Lyotard, the periphery
is not merely blurred, it is other, and any attempt to grasp it loses
it. Here is difference within the visible. What the artist needs to
portray is the unbalanced configuration of space before any con-
struction. 31 The truth of painting therefore is not signification or
the straight lines of Albertian perspective but is posed otherwise
as plasticity and desire, curved extension32
29 Williams, supra n. 70 ff. See Lyotard, La peinture comme dispositif libidinal
[1972] and Freud selon Ce zanne [1971], in Des Dispositifs Pulsionnels (Paris:
Christian Bernard, 1980).30 Ibid., 75.31 Bennington, supra n. 20, 74.32 Lyotard, supra n. 2, 13. See B. Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics
(London: Routledge, 1991), 2426.
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This truth is revealed in Cezannes late paintings of Mont
Sainte-Victoire. There space is no longer in any way representa-
tional, it embodies, on the contrary, the deconstruction of the focal
zone by the peripheral curved range of the field of vision The
paintings do not present an image of the mountain out there,
represented according to the rules of Euclidian space or good
form. Rather they show the mountain in the process of giving
itself to be seen, so to speak, the landscape as it might be seenbefore looking at it 33 They present the density or thickness of
the visible which is lost once viewing is understood in term of
vision, of the transparency of an object for a subject. For [Ce-zanne] the image is divided from itself by its simultaneous par-
ticipation in radically different spaces, and the effect of this is to
testify to something that cannot be represented.34 It testifies to the
Figure, the unrepresentable excess of the image.
Cezanne insisted that the unrepresentable could not be accessed
by a grasping rationality but only through an active stillness or
immobility, through waiting for the mountain to give itself up. He
described this as waiting until little sensations arose, which sen-
sations he then registered on canvas in multiple planes and layered
patches of color. For Lyotard this welling up of sensation is the
event, the irruption of the figural into good form or a field of
knowledge.35 It permits the bodys own density to well up into the
field of perception and carry along with it an unconscious that
is the object of repression. The paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire
record the irruption of the Figural, which is to say, the irruption
of Cezannes desire.36
DELEUZE
Although this was to change, Lyotards formations and deformations
of the image through the pulsations of libidinal energy are not dis-similar to Deleuzes flows of energy. And indeed that part of
33 Lydon, Veduta, supra n. 2, 22.34 Readings, supra n. 32, 23.35 Bennington, supra n., 75; cf. Discours Figure, supra n. 2, 21.36 Krauss, supra n., 218; cf. Discours Figure, supra n. 2, 21.
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Lyotards project was praised by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-
Oedipus.37 They are like flows that imply the breaks effected by
points, just as the points imply the fluxion of the material they cause
to flow or leak: the sole unity without identity is that of the break-
flow. The pure figural element the figure-matrix Lyotard cor-
rectly names desire38 This comports with Deleuze and Guattaris
ideal of a positive energetics of the body bodies as desiring ma-
chines or Bodies Without Organs before they have been disciplined,socialized and brought to judgment. For Deleuze and Guattari, such
judgment is a form of negativity. It restrains or prevents the linking of
desire (force) to a fundamental yes of affirmation. For Deleuze more the philosopher than Lyotard attacking negativity required a
complete rethinking of representation and this required a complete
rethinking of the Western philosophical tradition beginning with
Plato. Negativity for Deleuze is founded on illusion. It is not some-
thing etched in nature but is simply a socially-induced restriction to
the intensity and positivity of force. Negative desire and the ethics it
generates is one of the problems to which Deleuzes philosophy and
aesthetics respond.
From his earliest work, Deleuze argues that the entire edifice of
philosophical conceptualization the method of determining con-
cepts, the concepts themselves and the representation of concepts is
faulty. The metaphysical foundations are based on illusions, as are
conceptualizations of the subject, the moral law, and ethics. Deleuze
will replace this with a philosophy of immanence derived from a
minority tradition including inter alia the Stoics, Leibniz, Spinoza,
37 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, R.
Hurley, et al. trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 243. There
is, however, another half to the story of Lyotards Freudianism (as there was for
Freud). Lyotard treats not only the deformation of images in the unconscious. He
also treats the way in which these are staged in scenarios that express the repressed
wish and it is clear that, implicitly at least, he adopted Freuds view of the law of
castration which means desire is grounded in lack. Thus the positive energy of the
Figure conflicts with the negative desire of the wish. In the second part of their review
of Discourse, Figure, Deleuze and Guattari criticize Lyotard precisely on this point
insofar as it prevented him from linking desire to a fundamental yes. Ibid. Lyotard
later claimed that Discourse, Figure was too bound up with Freud and too beholden
to the idea of the wish. Although he claimed that along with Levinas, Freud had been
his constant companion, he did not write anything overtly psychoanalytic until his
last and incomplete writings on the theme of infancy and nachtraglichkeit. He used
this, however, not as a psychoanalytic concept but rather as a philosophical one to
think a kind of knowledge that consciousness cannot access.38 Ibid., 244.
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Hume, Bergson and Nietzsche. His resultant logic of sensation finds
expression in modern art, beginning with Cezanne but seen most
explicitly in the work of Francis Bacon.
Deleuzes critique of representation is somewhat different from,
and more developed than Lyotards, in that it was tied to a more
general critique of the way in which concepts of the Western philo-
sophical tradition have come into being. His critique of philosophical
method can be seen in Bergsonism and then in Difference and Repe-
tition.39 He criticizes Platos abstraction of singularities into abstract
forms or essences, as well as Aristotelian method, which distributes
these into categories, i.e., a static structure of abstraction. In thistradition, concepts are copies of forms and representation follows the
concept; it is mimesis. For Deleuze, however, it is the other way
around. Representation determines and then reifies illusory concepts.
Representation therefore is not a vehicle for establishing truth or the
good. It is precisely the opposite representation simply embodies
and crystallizes illusory conceptions.
What holds for representations in philosophy holds for conven-
tions and cliches in every day life. In the Platonic tradition, actions
are measured by the transcendent criteria of a form (e.g., the Good),
as are the moral law and social conventions. But for Deleuze, these
criteria are representations and hence illusions. Furthermore, repre-
sentations have constituted various regimes of signs that have been
used to enforce social order (what kind of regime depends on the
social set-up of power).40 Regimes use representations to codify the
world in general and the body in particular and then regulate these
through the moral law as well as through social conventions and
orthodox beliefs. The point for Deleuze therefore is that it is not
enough to attack representation; it is just the tail of the dog. What is
necessary is to rethink the whole tradition of philosophical concepts
and this must start with a different method of thinking.
For Deleuze, the tradition of essences and their predications takes
an original multiplicity or heterogeneity of forces the infinite inter-
actions in which they occur and the infinite varieties they produce and suppresses their difference. Materials have their own singularities,
idiosyncrasies, and their own intensities or forces and traditional
39 G. Deleuze, Bergsonism, H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, trans. (New York:
Zone Books, 1988); G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, P. Patton, trans. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994).40 See R. Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (London: Routledge,
2003), 83.
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philosophy denies the reality of pure difference a sensible existence of
its own. Reality is constituted by forces and these continuously
interact to produce difference, i.e., the differential resulting from the
confrontation of forces. Since all phenomenon is in the final analysis
the action and interaction of force, life is becoming rather than being,
natura naturans rather than natura naturata. Thus he replaces tradi-
tional theories of form and matter with the forces of becoming and of
creating. For Deleuze beyond prepared [formed] matter lies anenergetic materiality in continuous variation, and beyond fixed form
lie qualitative processes of deformation and transformation in con-
tinuous development.41
Life is the endless and dynamic occurrence ofevents of germination, deformation, and recreation. At the most
fundamental level, life is the collision and interaction of forces and
affects rather than a static array of bodies, beings, or forms.
For Deleuze traditional philosophical concepts have ultimately
produced a vision of the world constituted by organic bodies
organized and hierarchically ordered and hence regulated, forms.
While Deleuzes theory of force applies to all bodies, his observations
apply most especially to the body we call human. For Deleuze a body
is not an organism a coordinated, unified, regulated whole, with
senses that operate together in their reports of the outside world.42
Rather it should be understood as a body without organs (BWO),
an intensive body of sensation, sensation being an interaction of
forces. The BWO is a membrane across or through which forces flow,
a mediator between one body and the world of other bodies. Thus
whatever organization is attributed to the body is provisional, always
in the course of becoming or deforming.
For Deleuze, the forces of sensation are immanent in all interac-
tions of and with material. This is a world of invisible forces and
visible bodies, the body of sensation rendering visible the invisible
forces that play through bodies.43 In Discourse, Figure, Lyotard re-
gards these forces as the unconscious workings of desire. For Deleuze,
however, there is no distinction between mind and other phenomena.
Not only is desire energy and force but all phenomena are assemblagesof force. While these differences are substantial, for both Lyotard and
Deleuze, art or the Figure is what makes the invisible force appear.
41 D. Smith , Deleuzes Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality, in
P. Patton ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 43.42 Supra n. 124.43 Ibid., 125.
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If for Deleuze the function of philosophy is to create new con-
cepts, the function of art is to create new sensations and this entails
releasing the sensation beneath and beyond representation. As for
Lyotard, the function of art is not to imitate but to appear. 44 Art
makes visible the invisible force for Lyotard the force of desire, for
Deleuze the force of sensation. For Deleuze, art creates the experi-
ence of sensation by bypassing the brain and showing on the nerves
the intensities and collisions of forces. Thus art is a matter ofexhibiting singularities and capturing intensities, just as for Lyotard it
is a matter of capturing the pulsations of drives. For both, this re-
quires artistic experimentation in order to break or loosen repressiveand oppressive structures. Deleuze, in particular, emphasizes the fact
that art is the creation of something new (although implicitly Lyotard
would agree). Art creates something that is not representation, cliche
or a conventional way of seeing things, nor is it the visual equivalent
of signification separated from bodies and their desires.
For Deleuze, the particular force of painting is that it shows the
reality of a body without organs, a body freed from organic represen-
tation. (Lyotards Figure, the formless or bad form produced by desire
is not dissimilar.) This is accomplished by forming and deforming
images through the use of color. For Deleuze, therefore, what Cezanne
paints is the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but
insofar as it is experienced as sustaining this sensation45 He shows
the sensation and the world of becoming, the folding force of moun-
tains, the germinative force of a seed, the thermic force of a landscape,
the applyness of apples.46 In Cezannes art, therefore, beyond figu-ration and representation there is sensation and that comes from a
power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all. This is a
power of rhythm, a power more profound than vision, hearing, etc..
As Cezanne said, this is a logic of the senses and is neither rational,
nor cerebral. 47
Deleuzes rhythm of sensation is somewhat similar to Lyotards
pulsations. It ultimately goes back to Klees theories of artistic
44 Ibid., 118, citing Henri Maldiney, Regard Parole Space (Lausanne: Editions
lAge dHomme, 1973).45 G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London: Continuum, 2003),
35.46 Ibid., 57, 87. See D.H. Lawrence, Introduction to These Paintings, Phoenix:
The Posthumous Papers (New York, 1936), 578579.47 Supra n. 45, 42.
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creation, but Deleuzes immediate source is the phenomenologist
and art historian, Henri Maldiney, who identifies three movements
in the creation of painting.48 First, there is a chaotic world of
sensation (Cezannes abyss), then an opening toward creation, a
point that leaps into the realm of order and begins to move.49
Then comes a systolic condensation of elements in which self and
world are separated from chaos and definite shapes are formed.
That is followed by a diastolic eruption of forces that dissolvesthose shapes and establishes a pathic communication among the
components of the whole (Cezannes ecstasy, the blues!).50 Then
the chaos returns and it starts again. The systolic-diastolic patternis a rhythm of formation and deformation, appearing and disap-
pearing. For Maldiney this was the rhythm of the lived body. For
Lyotard it was the dissonant rhythm of the pulsations of the
drives, of binding and unbinding, of transformation and defor-
mation in dreams and Figure. For Deleuze however it is the
rhythm of the affective forces immanent within the real. 51
Along with Lyotard, Deleuze saw Cezannes revolution devel-
oping in two different ways in 20th century art: into pure
abstraction, as in Mondrians geometrical paintings, and into ab-
stract expressionism and action painting, as in Pollacks dribbles of
paint. For Deleuze, however, the problem with abstract art is that
it minimizes the force of chaos and is too dependent on line. It is
cerebral and had become a new code and form of representation
or signified. Abstract expressionism goes to the other extreme and
is immersed in the chaos of materiality. It cannot stand on its
own (literally: Pollack worked on a horizontal canvas). Deleuze
finds his ideal in Francis Bacons art of figuralism, a third way
between the figurative and the abstract.52
48 Maldiney, supra n. 44.49 Bogue, supra n. 40, 119 quoting Paul Klee, J. Spiller, ed., Notebooks, Vol. 1, R.
Manheim, trans. (New York: Wittenborn Art Books 1961), 4.50 Ibid., 120.51 R. Bogue, Gilles Deleuze: The Aesthetics of Force, in P. Patton, ed, Deleuze: A
Critical Reader (London: Blackwell, 1996), 264.52 Images of Bacons paintings, arranged by year, can readily be found at
www.francis-bacon.cx
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Bacons work is exemplary for Deleuze. It is figurative, indeed al-
most exclusively focused on the human body but these figures are
neither idealized nor naturalistic and in some ways they are analogous
to Cezannes mountains. Furthermore, throughout his work Bacon
was interested in the tensions or forces experienced by the body a
cough, hiccup, spasm, the desire to sleep, to vomit, turn over53
While these may be ordinary tensions, they show the body rousing itself
in minor movements from one state to another, which is to say, showthe movement and collision of energies. Although Bacon claimed he
was interested in the inertia of bodies, for Deleuze the dominant
characteristic of Bacons paintings is movement, large or small. On agrander scale, therefore, it can be said that Bacons paintings move
between inertia and arousal, figuration and deformation, contour and
chaos to create Figure the rhythms of force that stand on their own.54
Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is a stunning combination
of the originality of Deleuze and the genius of Bacon, characteris-
tically including a minority tradition, in this case, of art historians.
It is a brilliant reading of Bacon (sometimes literally: it relies
heavily on Bacons interviews with David Sylvester).55 One can see
however the way in which Deleuze extends the idea of force and
with it Lyotards Figure (or the Figural). What Deleuze calls the
Figure emerges in Bacons paintings through the various combina-
tions and renditions of contour, form and structure (space). For
Deleuze the Figure in Bacon does not just show the forces that
operate under and destroy the figurative or representation. Rather it
goes beyond deformation to render sensation in itself. Where for
Lyotard the Figure is the energy and work of desire, for Deleuze it
is the rhythm of Life.
In approaching Bacons style, Deleuze first shows the various ways
in which Bacon presents sensation. He then deepens the analysis to
show how the forces of the sensations are composed through Bacons
material and techniques. Deleuze therefore identifies the three basic
elements of Bacons paintings: these are figure (bodies), contour
(rings, cubes, etc. which enclose bodies), and structure (the mono-chromatic ground of color). He further distinguishes the Figure or
53 Supra n. 45, 59.54 See J. Williams, Deleuze on J.M.W. Turner, in K. Ansell-Pearson, ed., Deleuze
and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer (London: Routledge, 1997), 233246.55 The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, 19621979, D. Sylvester,
ed., 3rd edn. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), 48.
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Figural from the figurative or representation. It implies the rela-
tionship of an image to an object that it is supposed to illustrate. 56
As had been the case with Cezanne, Bacons accomplishment was to
liberate the Figure from the figurative, i.e., from representation,
illustration and narrative.
Deleuze goes on to identify genres in Bacons paintings roughly
corresponding to periods in his work. In the first genre, Bacon iso-
lates single figures. In the second, he couples them. The third genre isrepresented by triptychs, which present multiple figures on separate
panels. Each of the genres combines the elements of figure, contour
and structure to produce three kinds of movements or collisions offorce. The three movements of isolation, deformation, and dissipa-
tion are analytic moments that illustrate more generally the logic of
sensation.
In the first movement of isolation, Bacon situates a single body in
a ring, box etc. The field (background color) envelops the contour
and presses in on the body to create vibrations between the two. This
is the systolic movement toward the condensation of a shape and the
vibration it creates characterizes simple sensation.
In the second and diastolic movement, the figure is deformed as
[a]n intense movement flows through the whole body, a deformed
and deforming movement57 Something inside it is happening and
exerting effort to free itself in order to become a Figure, become
being the operative word.58
For Deleuze the primary becoming of man is becoming-animal.
Roughly this means returning to un-organized and dis-organized
materiality, which for Deleuze is the common fact between man,
animal and nature. Bacon, for example, often treats the body or flesh
as meat.59 There is then a tension between the meat-flesh and the
more durable structure of bone, spine and teeth. For Deleuze [m]eat
is the state of the body in which flesh and bone confront each
other60 Flesh sinks into bone; it is drowsy, weighed down,
56 Supra n. 45, 2.57 Ibid., 19.58 Bogue, supra n. 40, 127.59 Bacon in supra n. 45, 24. (Bacon was fascinated by meat and carcasses in
butcher shops: Of course we are potential carcasses. Supra n. 55, 46). See e.g.,
Painting, 1946; Figure with Meat, 1954.60 Supra n. 45, 22.
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wounded, suffering. Bone on the other hand rises up through flesh as,
for example, the spine shows through a stretched back or teeth rise up
through the soft flesh of the mouth.61
One of Bacons most characteristic deformations is of the face.
For Deleuze the face is a structured, spatial organization that con-
ceals the head. The head is the more interesting organ since it is
dependent on the body and, as such, more integral to it.62 Rather
than the face being the locus of spirit (as in conventional portraits)the head is a spirit in bodily form It is the animal spirit of
man63 The head-meat is a becoming-animal of man.64 Bacon
captures this by undoing the face to reveal the head: in Bacons manyportraits, the face is rubbed out and distorted to reveal somewhat
animal-like features, like an animal we had been sheltering.65 In
these deformations, Bacon creates a zone of indiscernability or un-
decidability, which only art can penetrate.66 The zones of undecid-
ability here are between man and animal. Man becomes animal,
animal becomes spirit and most importantly, sensation is seen to pass
from one to another.
The third movement of force is dissipation, which completes the
diastolic. The body presses outward, trying to pass out of itself and its
contour to dissolve into the field of color. Bacon has several paintings
of a figure bending or vomiting over a washbasin, or sitting on a
toilet, or staring into a mirror. It is shown trying to escape or flow out
of itself, to disappear down or through a hole. The escape is into the
field of color and into materiality. The contour of the figure becomes
a membrane as the figure moves toward or into the field of color, the
material structure.67 In Figure at a Washbasin, 1976, for example, the
61 Ibid. See e.g., Head I, 1949; Three Figures and a Portrait, 1975. The difference
between meat/flesh and bone is evidenced in Bacons fascination with the crucifixion:
on the one hand, the sublime religiosity of the crucifixion shows an attempt to
redress the body upright toward the radiance of the heavens, but, on the other hand,
all transcendent uplift is countered by the weighty pulling of the flesh downward
toward its own animality. D. Polan, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, in C.Boundas and D. Olkowski, eds., Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy (London:
Routledge, 1994), 238. See Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion,
1944; Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962; Triptych Crucifixion, 1965.62 Supra n. 45, 20.63 Ibid.64 Ibid., 27.65 Ibid., 21. See e.g., Three Studies for Self Portrait, 1973.66 Ibid.67 Ibid., 15.
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body exerts an intense motionless effort upon itself to escape down
the blackness of the drain, to destiny.68 In escaping from itself, it
discovers the materiality of which it is composed.69
In a similar vein, the body can be shown in process of a full and
violent becoming, racked by spasms, wrenching cries, vibrant thrusts
of transmuting flesh.70 The most famous examples are Bacons
paintings after Velasquezs portrait of Pope Innocent X.71 Innocents
scream is the operation through which the entire body escapesthrough the mouth.72 It seems to flow into the field, as if the color
itself screams. This is what Deleuze means by painting the invisible
force, the sensation of the scream itself, not the horror beyond it,which would be a representation.73
Bacons final and most impressive genre is the triptych.74 These
are three panels with figures but without the traditional narrative
element. On each panel, single and/or double figures enter into
movements and produce sensations along the lines described above.
On top of those, however, further sensations are produced as the
sensations of the single panels interact. The sensations draw apart
from their individual panels and are released across the panels. This
produces multiple interactions and movements that explode across
the panels verticalhorizontal, descentrise, diastolesystole,
nakedclothed, augmentationdiminution.75 Sensations overlap. As
the figures move across the panels in all directions, they are sent into
accumulating and accelerating waves of transformation and undergo
endless change. The limits of sensation are broken, exceeded in all
directions.76 As color passes into the figure and the figure passes intocolor, the separation of force and material, sensation and body is
transcended. The intensive rhythm of force (systolicdiastolic) is no
longer dependent on figure but becomes the Figure.77
68 Ibid.69
Ibid., 5455.70 Polan, supra n. 61, 237.71 Among the many, see those painted in 1949 1951, 1953, 1960, 1961.72 Ibid., 16.73 Ibid., 60. See supra n. 55, 48.74 See e.g., Three Figures in a Room, 1964; Three Studies of the Human Body I &
II, 1970; Triptych In Memory of George Dyer, 1971; Triptych MayJune, 1973.75 Polan, supra n. 61, 244.76 Supra n. 45, 73.77 Ibid., 71, 73.
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If Deleuze describes what Bacon achieves, he is no less interested
in how he achieves it. The artist is someone who creates something
new, in this case sensation, but his manner of creation is no less a
lesson for all. According to Deleuze (and Bacon himself) there is no
blank canvas; one necessarily starts with representations, crystallized
images and cliches (Bacon often started his projects with reproduc-
tions, prints and photos). They form the initial image or plan that is
then disrupted by a catastrophe. This could be a line or patch ofcolor that goes off in a new direction, a random mark, a smudge, a
sponge thrown at the canvas; it becomes a manual diagram that
suggest new lines to develop. As the catastrophe scrambles or de-forms the initial image, the painting begins to take on a different
shape. It moves away from the original form and enters the world of
intuition and accident. (Deleuze quotes the Talking Heads: I am
changing my shape; I feel like an accident.)78
There is a zone of indiscernability between the catastrophe and the
new image. The one is no longer and the other is not yet. This is the
germinative chaos out of which the new form or rhythm emerges, the
self-forming, self-shaping activity of art. The essential point about
the diagram is that it is made in order for something [the Figure] to
emerge from it and if nothing emerges from it, it fails.79
The Figure emerges from the catastrophe through the force of
color. As Cezanne first demonstrated, you must pass through the
catastrophe for colors to arise80 Color provides a differential
relation of forces, the result of which is sensation. Thus the color
system itself is a system of direct action on the nervous system.81 It isthe differential relation upon which everything else depends. The
expansion of color generates Figural form but this is not represen-
tation, mimetic form or form imposed by contour. Rather it is a form
that is generated from within, that arises from within the field of
color, or the field of color forces. The formula of the colorists is: if
you push color to its pure internal relations then you have
everything.82 While structure, figure and contour can be thought in
78 See, e.g., Deleuzes discussion of Painting, 1946, supra n. 45, 156.79 Ibid., 159.80 Ibid., 111. See Conversations with Cezanne, M. Doran, ed., J. Cochran, trans.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 114115.81 Ibid., 52. Deleuze liked Godards formula, its not blood, its red. See G.
Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, trans.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 118.82 Supra n. 45, 139.
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terms of forces, they all converge in (the force of) color. They are
little more than pieces of a larger permutational or modulatory
assemblage governed by the vibratory powers of color83 It is color
that transforms reality.
In the section entitled Analogy, Deleuze discusses his problem
with structuralism, which is, as it was for Lyotard, the way in which it
is based on clear-cut units and rigorous oppositions. This he likens to
digital technology. Deleuzes model is more like the modulation andgradation of analogue technology.84 In painting color acts as the
modulatory assemblage. It is a force of permutation of the various
elements of structure and contour. It is an assemblage into whichfigurative forms are fed and out of which haptic color relations
emerge.85 Through the juxtapositions and modulations of hues there
is no longer an inside nor an outside, but only a continuous creation
of space, the spatializing energy of color.86 The interactions between
colors create continuous and variable movements oscillations,
perturbations, flows, twists, spasms, jolts and result in the forms of
the completed canvas, not as objects to be represented, but as
products of a self-forming process whereby color in its systolic and
diastolic unfolding spatializes space, spreads into monochrome
fields, fills out figures, communicates across contour membranes.87
The colors and the forms they create render visible the invisible forces
inherent in sensation working through the figure.88
In Bacons painting there is then first representation, crystallized
image and cliche. Subsequently, by virtue of the catastrophe and
diagram, it is deformed, reformed and subsumed within a field of
non-organic forces, i.e., color. At this point figures are hollowed out
and the Figure emerges from the catastrophe. Here we witness the
revelation of the body beneath the organism [the BWO], which makes
organisms and their elements crack or swell, imposes a spasm on
them, and puts them in relation with forces 89 The Figure here
takes on its particular Deleuzian twist: heterogeneous forms may be
caught up in the Figure. Bacon provides the final Deleuzian lesson in
83 Polan, supra n. 61, 251.84 See Bogue, supra n. 40, 132 ff.85 Ibid., 157.86 Supra n. 45, 134.87 Bogue, supra n. 40, 157.88 Supra n. 45, 151.89 Ibid., 160.
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the multiplicity, difference and possibility that comes before repre-
sentation. In this, the Figure is a matter of fact.
Not only the figures but also the painting itself must go from the
possibility of fact to fact itself where the whole is given at once.90 As
the hand executes the diagram the apparently arbitrary elements of
the painting coagulate in a single continuous flow that has its own
movement.91 This is where painting discovers how to pass from the
possibility of fact to the fact itself the pictorial fact.92 Themovement of force through the hand takes over from eye/mind to
achieve a new thing a new Figure arising through the material or
color. This is a way of seeing with the hand. With this the work of artquits the domain of representation to become experience.93
What we witness is an elaborate and continuous circulation of
force. It is not the imposition of form or concept seen by the eye and
the cognitive powers. Rather, as the painting takes on a life of its
own, the artist is as much led as leading. The painting develops, he
responds. He moves on a level of force that bypasses the brain and
works directly through the hand. For Deleuze this is where the
dichotomy between subject and object breaks down, where force and
formation in the artist and the Figure are one. For Deleuze, this
passage to haptic vision is the great moment in the act of painting.
This is where the artist seizes hold of life.94
If there is a definition of the ethical in Deleuze this is it: to effectuate
force and seize hold of life; to resist and liberate life from illusion,
opinion, dead ideas and representations. Art is and shows the way to
becoming-ethical, a process that necessarily defies law and judgment.
In an essay entitled To Have done with Judgment, Deleuze argues,
along with Nietzsche, that Christianity (including Kant) established a
new form of power: the power to judge.95 It organizes an organic
body, creates identifications and representations that constrain, and
judges any deviations. It puts man under an eternal debt or obligation
that can never be paid off. He is always before a judge (or the internal
judge of the superego) who applies the law of a transcendent good. This
90 Ibid., 159.91 Ibid., 160.92 Ibid.93 G.Deleuze Difference and Repetition, P. Patton, trans (London: Athlone, 1994),
56.94Supra n. 45, 161.95 G. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, D.W. Smith and M.A. Greco, trans.
(London: Verso, 1998).
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prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence.96 To be ethical,
one must create the new and to do that one must have done with
judgment: what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying
judgment.97 By understanding the bodys intensities, its becomings,
and its will to power, one affirms ones forces and wrestles with
antagonistic forces. The ethical is therefore a process, of resisting, of
loosening up rigid molar structures so that they become more molec-
ular and permeable, of creating situations for de-territorialization andof pursuing lines of flight.98 In all these cases it is a question of
beginning with difference, with the heterogeneous, multiplicitous
energies and relations that constitute vital force, of seizing hold of life.One must harness forces and join them to create new ensembles, to
expand them and to paraphrase D.H. Lawrence, to make them whirl
until they harness the maximum force in all directions. 99 Thus the
ethical is what is creative creating new forms be they individual, social
or political in order to bring forth the difference that has until now
only been possible, just as Bacon did in his paintings. This is the way to
a justice that is opposed to all judgment.100
LYOTARD II
While Deleuze followed these Neitzschean paths of the positive desireof affirmation, in Libidinal Economy Lyotard intensified the positive
desire that had been implicit in Discourse, Figure.101 He reports,
however, that in the process, he came up against the terror of
injustice, and this could not be solved without consideration of
law.102 That led him to Kant and Levinas and an extended engage-
ment with the concept of the sublime.
The sublime is the experience of something so immense and
overpowering that the rational faculties are dismantled and the
powers of representation come to their limit. For Lyotard the sublime
is the experience of the event, the shock of the absolute Other (aka
96 Ibid., 135.97 Ibid.98 See Williams, supra n. 54.99 Supra n. 95, 134.100 Ibid., 127.101 J.-F. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, I.H. Grant, trans. (London: Athlone Press,
1993) (1st published, 1974).102 J.-F. Lyotard, Just Gaming, W. Godzich, trans. (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1985).
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excess, lack, void, abyss). It is the experience of a differend that
reason cannot comprehend and it cannot be represented. It presents
the unpresentable.
For Lyotard, the essence of the sublime experience is its affects of
pleasure and pain (here he borrows from Burke). It is the threat of
privation (hunger, cold, dark and death) and the fear that nothing
more will take place followed by relief that, in the midst of the terror,
something is happening.103 (It is similar to the on/off pulsation ofdrives described in Discours, Figure and in his late works, he identified
it with primary affect which is only experienced later in apre`s coup.)104
Lyotard analogizes the experience of the sublime to Kants sei-zure by the moral law. (The content of that law is unknowable and
unrepresentable as are the criteria for judgments.) He combined this
with the Levinasian idea that the subject is always already hostage to
the Other. For Lyotard the sublime is the call or command of the
Other that places us under an obligation and judges us. We are taken
hostage by the sublime event and bound to an Other that cannot be
cognized or represented. The sublime event presents both the Other
as the excess of representation something that has no representa-
tion and the command that we bear witness to it. It is only through
the leveling of reason that we become receptive to this event. With
this turn to the law, against the unrestrained force of Bacon, Lyotard
juxtaposes the austerities of Barnett Newman.
NEWMAN
Barnett Newman was an abstract expressionist associated with
Rothko and Pollock and most known for his vast and rigorously
abstract color field paintings. They are distinguished by a flat, uni-
form field of color divided from top to bottom by two or three thin
lines of contrasting color called zips. Whos Afraid of Red, Yellowand Blue III for example is approximately one meter by two me-
ters.105 On the left edge there is a thin strip of bright yellow, on the
103 J.-F. Lyotard, Newman: The Instant, in The Lyotard Reader, supra n. 2, 240
49, 245. See also The Sublime and the Avant Garde, in The Lyotard Reader, supra
n. 2, 196211.104 See for example Heidegger and the jews, A. Michel and M. Roberts, trans.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990) and Emma: Between Philoso-
phy and Psychoanalysis, in H.J. Silverman, ed., Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and
the Sublime (London: Routledge, 2002).105 Excellent reproductions of Newmans paintings can be found in A. Temkin,
Barnett Newman (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002).
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right edge a somewhat wider strip of darkish blue. A vast expanse of
bright orange-red stretches between them. There is no figure, no
depth, nothing beyond the smooth, flat field of color. Newman
painted the zips having first applied masking tape to outline them.
When the zips were dry he tore off the tape and this leaves the
impression that the strip is incised into the field of color.
For Lyotard, the experience of a Newman painting is the experience
of the now of the sublime. It presents the occurrence, the momentwhich has arrived, the visual event in itself. There is no message; the
painting announces nothing; it is in itself an annunciation and
Newman allows it to present itself. The only purpose of Newmanspaintings is to present the presentation.106
As Simon Malpas points out, Lyotards selection of Newman is not
entirely fortuitous. Newman himself wrote extensively on the meta-
physics of painting, as well as on the sublime, and he insisted that the
subject matter of his paintings is artistic creation itself, a symbol of
Creation itself .107 This is why he called his strips of color zips, from
the Hebrew word tzimtzum, meaning the moment at which Yahweh
created the world by separating himself from the cosmos. In Onement
I, for example, a dark brownish-red field is bisected by a lighter
brownish-red zip. For Newman, creation comes out of chaos, its
beginning re-enacted by a line on empty canvas. Like a flash of
lightningin thedarkness or a line on an empty surface,in Creation, the
Word separates, divides, institutes a difference and therefore inau-
gurates a sensible world a world of color, of the painting.108 Without
the flash there would only be chaos but the flash of the tzimtzum,thezip
breaks light into colors and arranges them across the surface like a
universe.109 Creation (including artistic creation) is like the sublime
event: it is what happens (this) in the midst of the indeterminate.110
What happens is the sublime event of the painting before us.
Newmans most ambitious work is a series of fourteen black
and white paintings of the Stations of the Cross entitled Lema
Sabachthani (why hast thou forsaken me?). For Lyotard, We are still
106 Newman, supra n. 103, 241, 244.107 Ibid., 243. See S. Malpas, Sublime Ascesis: Lyotard, Art and the Event,
Angelaki 7 (2002) 199211, 201 and T. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1971).108 Newman, supra n., 243.109 Ibid., 246.110 Ibid., 243.
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waiting for the Messiah who will bring meaning to human suffering.111
Appended to the series is another painting, now entitled Be II. It is
white with a cadmium red zip on one side and ragged black one on the
other (perhaps signifying man and death, respectively). The painting
does not offer a resolution or solution to Christs question. Rather it
presents a command Be: the recurrence of a prescription emanating
from silence112 Be the relief that there is is the response to the
terror of forsaken man.113 This is the sublime event: in the instant, outof nothing, something is happening: light and color are happening.
This instant of Newmans paintings is the birth of the ethical. For
Lyotard Newmans paintings give colour, line or rhythm the force ofan obligation within a face-to-face relationship his model cannot
be Look at this (over there); it must be Look at me, or to be more
accurate, Listen to me.114 The painting (as otherness, difference)
creates an obligation to respond and we are judged accordingly. Thus
while Deleuze strips art down to find a self-originating, self-germi-
nating sensation in Figure, Lyotard strips art down to find the figure
incised and divided by law.
For Lyotard, just as Newmans zips divide his paintings, the law
divides man from himself. Lyotard comes down firmly on the side of
castration, lack and debt and there is no hope of moving into credit,
of force and the body being joined in affirmative desire. Force is
necessarily constrained; some things are not Neitzschean and cannot
be affirmed. Rather, Being announces itself in the imperative. 115 The
law and being are born in the same moment and we exist under a
constitutive obligation. Looking inward, we are wounded by a law
that constitutes our uncanny Other, obliges us to it, and excludes it
from representation. Looking outward, there are the silent and
invisible Others to whom we are hostage and obliged, those who call
but who are not and cannot be represented.
For Lyotard, art is an event that presents the unpresentable. In so
doing it bears witness to the remainder, what remains in excess of
representation, and commands us to do likewise. The virtue of art is
not that it unleashes unrestrained energy; the virtue of art is that itimposes an obligation: to respond, to recollect, to open ourselves to
see/hear the trace/voice of the unrepresentable, to bear witness. And
111 Ibid., 248.112 Ibid.; Malpas, supra n. 107, 208.113 Ibid.114 Ibid., 242.115 Ibid., 248.
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we are judged in terms of that obligation. Unlike, Deleuze, Lyotard
can never have done with judgment.
CONCLUSION: THE ARC AND THE ZIP
Neither Deleuze nor Lyotard happened to write about Bacon or
Newman. They chose their art carefully for its defining characteristics
in Bacon, the arc of the figure; in Newman, the zip through the field.
The arc and the zip are two paradigms for ethics and for justice. One
shows the confrontation, then expansion of forces until they leap
beyond the canvas into a rhythm of the future. The other sets force in
motion but also limits it with a kind of Kantian Achtung! If I were to
continue this study, it would be to interrogate the dynamics of these
two lines.
Deleuze (and Bacons) arcs are rhythmic. Each individual moment
is taken up into the whole. While they are energetic, they are also
recurrent and for all their deformation, the figures and paintings are
curiously whole and graceful. Even as sensation resonates and is
separated from bodies (as Deleuze would have it) it is reabsorbed into
the Figure. If this is an analogue for ethical action, it suggests a kind
of parthenogenesis. It would seem that the ethical actor never gets
beyond himself. To be sure, he absorbs what is external and then,transformed, projects his new energy back into the standardizations
of every day life. This is the spiral of the eternal return. But what he
takes back is himself. It is questionable how productive this is. For
Lyotard, on the other hand, the zip presents the law, the event that
interrupts just as for Newman, creation is the event in which God
separates from himself. It stands outside of and disrupts the arc of
self-generation. The shattering of unity guarantees there will be no
reabsorption. The division recognizes something other than self; the
ethical is produced by two rather than one.
For now, I offer no resolution: between Bacons movement and
Newmans austerity; Deleuzes affirmation, Lyotards reality princi-
ple; Deleuzes optimism, Lyotards responsibility; Deleuzes long,
detached horizon of revolution, Lyotards more urgent view of the
least intolerable. The Deleuzian subject hovers on the edge of
romantic heroism and risks solipsism,116 Lyotards subject teeters on
116 His examples do not always inspire confidence, cf. General Cipriano as the god
of war, Huitzilopochtli, in D.H. Lawrences ed., The Plumed Serpent: Quetzalcoatl
(London: Martin Secker, 1926).
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the brink of cynicism and risks paralysis. Each has its force as well
as its shadow.
If there is no resolution, there is a modest observation. Art (in
both senses of the word) gives the lie to an illusory and oppressive
idea of representation. Law and its order are based on representation
and as such might be considered beautiful. Behind representation
however is art, just as behind the beauty of the law is the sublimity of
justice.
Kent Law School
University of KentCanterbury, Kent CT2 7NZ
UK
E-mail: m.slaughter@Kent.ac.uk
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