Painting

chapter 27

phenomenological and aesthetic epoché :

painting the in visible things themselves

r udolf b ernet

The present volume demonstrates well enough that phenomenology is not only concerned with the visual perception of ‘things’. In addition to things, empirical or ideal states of aff airs and mental states of all sorts show themselves from themselves. And all that shows, appears, manifests, discloses, gives, intimates, or announces itself does not rely for this on ‘visual perception’. Other kinds of sensuous perceptions involving touch, hearing, smell, and taste have been widely explored by phenomenologists. Such non-visual perceptions also make one realize that not all that is perceived needs to be a thing or an ‘object’ of some kind and that even perceived things and objects are of diff erent sorts, can be given in a manifold of ways and present themselves on the basis of non-thingly experiential dimensions. Accordingly, and without transcending the limits of sensuous experience, phenomenologists have investigated supra-thingly and infra-thingly phenomena and their relation to things. Th ey have exposed how space, without being a property of things, still needs things to become manifest. Similarly they have been led to admit that sensuously experienced feelings, despite their diff erence from things perceived, can be perceived under the form of an emotional ‘colouration’ of things.

It is also necessary to do away with the prejudice that a phenomenology of perception necessarily involves some kind of ‘intuitionism’ or ‘metaphysics of presence’. One must emphasize, instead, that not all that shows itself to a perceiver lends itself to an explicit perception and that all that appears intuitively is surrounded by the shadow of unappar-ent and absent moments. Th ere is, indeed, no such thing as an adequate visual percep-tion of a thing because all things appear through partial ‘adumbrations’ ( Abschattungen )

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and within a ‘horizon’ that extends far beyond what is actually perceived. Th is well-known Husserlian insight can be further articulated in terms of a ‘lack’ and an ‘excess’ that characterize all intuitive givenness of perceptual things. Such a lack and excess make that the relation between a perceiving subject and a perceived thing is never ‘quite right’. Despite their intentional ‘correlation’, perceiver and perceived never per-fectly match or mirror one another. Th is non-coincidence or diff erence is what Husserl means by the ‘inadequate intuitive fulfi lment’ of all thing-perception. Th is is to say, on the one hand, that the perceiver always intends more than what she really sees. She intends the entire thing and not just fl eeting and partial adumbrations of it. According to this fi rst scenario, the lack is entirely on the side of the givenness of the thing per-ceived and the excess on the side of the intentions of the perceiver. On the other hand, however, what shows itself to the perceiver is always more than what she can grasp. Th e thing shows qualities and meanings the perceiver did not expect and its shining appear-ance carries a ‘comet tail’ of other possible appearances and other things possibly appear-ing. In this second scenario, the lack is thus on the side of the perceiver and the excessive richness on the side of the appearing phenomena.

According to Husserl, both kinds of interplay between lack and excess in visual per-ception are usually overlooked and are thus in need of a phenomenological eye in order to be properly noticed and attended to. Ordinary perception serves our orientation in a familiar world, and it does so most effi ciently when the handling of useful things and tools is not held up by our wondering about their way of appearing. In order to be noticed or to appear as such, ways of appearing are in need of what Husserl calls a phe-nomenological epoché —that is, a suspension of the normal course of perceptual life. Th us, the ‘things themselves’ attended to by phenomenology are not ordinary things, but things in their mode of givenness, the ‘pure phenomena’ disclosed by the phenome-nological epoché . Th e suspension of natural life allows for a new form of perceiving and, more generally, of experiencing. Instead of being drawn, like the ordinary perceiver, from one thing to the next by the needs and concerns of practical life, the phenomeno-logical perceiver takes advantage of an (actively produced or passively undergone) inter-ruption of this life to pay attention to the intentional correlation between the things in their way (or their ‘how’) of appearing to her and her way of apprehending these appear-ances of things.

It is thus only a phenomenological epoché of natural life that makes the phenome-nologist aware of the interplay between lack and excess that characterizes the inten-tional correlation between a perceiver and a thing perceived. Depending on her specifi c interests, the phenomenologist will then behave according to the fi rst or sec-ond scenario described. A phenomenologist, whose main concern is to critically measure her perception and understanding of things against the extent and mode of their intuitive appearing, will emphasize that she perceives more than what is actually given to her. Localizing the lack on the side of givenness of the thing, she will require further thingly givenness to confi rm her views and to make certain that her perception is correct. Th is fi rst phenomenologist will, like Husserl himself, consider perception to


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be a kind of knowledge , the truthfulness of which is in need of being critically exam-ined. Phenomenology of perception thus becomes a branch of a ‘theory of knowledge’ ( Erkenntnistheorie ). Another phenomenologist, more interested in the things them-selves and the wealth of their modes of appearing, will be inclined, instead, to pay careful attention to the excess in thingly givenness and to her own lack of preparation for it.

A paper dealing with the possibility and nature of a phenomenology of artistic painting need only be concerned with this second phenomenologist. Th e fi rst and most obvious question to be asked is then whether performing or submitting oneself to a kind of phenomenological epoché is necessary (and suffi cient?) to become an amateur of paintings or a painter. Linked to this is then the further question of whether a phenomenology of painting provides a mere illustration for a phenomenological mode of perception or whether a phenomenologist can also learn something new from closely studying paintings. More insidiously, one must ask whether Merleau-Ponty’s account of Cézanne is more than an application of his phenomenology of bod-ily perception and whether Henry’s account of Kandinsky is more than an application of his phenomenology of pure self-aff ection. Needless to say, however, neither Merleau-Ponty nor Henry would go so far as to claim that Cézanne and Kandinsky were basically just good phenomenologists. Hence our second question: what is it that makes the ways of perceiving of these painters unique and how is this mode of percep-tion related to what and how they paint? What is needed to transpose a pictorial mode of perception into a painted image on a framed canvas? Did Cézanne and Kandinsky just paint what they had already seen or did their paintings make something visible (for themselves and others) that otherwise can never be seen? If the latter were the case, then we could not avoid asking also what this invisible that only painting can make visible is like and how it relates to what we normally see, to what phenomenolo-gists see, and to what painters see. Asking this third question properly means that one does not presuppose that the invisible made visible in paintings is of the same nature as the visible in which it is made to appear.

In his book on Bacon, Deleuze agrees with Henry that the main object of the art of painting is the action and expression of invisible ‘forces’ and not the ‘enigma of the visible world’ (Merleau-Ponty). Even if their understanding of the nature of the invisible forces active in the paintings of Bacon and Kandinsky differs substan-tially—just as does their account of the possibility or impossibility to make them visible in a painting—Deleuze and Henry also agree that the art of painting is as much a matter of affectivity as of visibility. More precisely, the art of painting becomes for them a matter of perceived visible figures and felt affects that are com-manded by invisible forces rather than mundane or psychological laws. But if the act of painting does not have its ultimate origin in the enigma of the visible world, and if painted images operate a de-formation of the visible world rather than its exquisite trans-formation, then paintings become a very peculiar kind of phenome-non. Consequently, both the task and method of a phenomenology of painting need to be carefully reconsidered.


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1 The phenomenological and pictorial epoché of visual perception

It was Husserl himself who, in a now famous letter to the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Husserl 1994 : 133–6), fi rst compared the attitude of the phenomenolo-gist to the attitude of an artist. Both the phenomenologist and the artist consider things, persons, events, and the entire world from a distance and with wonder. Compared to ordinary people (or with themselves in ordinary life), phenomenologists and artists have both lost and gained something at the same time. What they have lost is their famil-iarity with the surrounding world, their spontaneous understanding of the meanings of things, and their capacity to immediately see what needs to be done in all circumstances of practical life. What they have gained is a perception of the world freed from the need of orientation, a non-instrumental relation to things, and a consideration of worldly events and situations for their own sake. Phenomenological and artistic perceivers have thus exchanged their own know-how about things and their knowledge of the world for the discovery of the coming forth or ‘birth’ of both things and the world out of a mani-fold of ever changing appearances. It would be wrong, however, to view this transforma-tion that is brought about by the suspension or epoché of natural life as a turning away from objectivism or naturalism in favor of a mere subjectivism. It is true that appear-ances always appear to someone. However, it is no less true that artists and phenomenol-ogists wish to overcome their personal opinions, presuppositions, and preferences in order to open themselves as much as possible to the beauty and lessons of the phenom-ena as mere phenomena.

It goes without saying that attending to the shining beauty of appearances and attend-ing to what they can teach us about the true nature of things is not the same. But no painter would deny that the contemplation of the beauty of the fugitive formations of clouds in a late aft ernoon light enriches her knowledge of a landscape. And it is possible that no phenomenologist would deny that describing the multiple ‘adumbrations’ of an ashtray for the sake of making correct perceptual statements fi rst made her aware of the beauty of this thing. It also goes without saying that a pictorial epoché and a phenomeno-logical epoché suspend diff erent sorts of prejudices. Th e painter will have to overcome a schematic seeing of familiar shapes and their distribution in a geometrical space in order to perceive colours just as colours, light and shadows, or empty spaces. Th e phenomenol-ogist will have to forget all scientifi c theories about the nature of perception and the phys-ical world in order to see a web of interrelated appearances where others can only see solid things existing in and by themselves. But it is equally true that the painter and the phenomenologist both turn towards a world that is still in the making and to a making of the world that owes nothing to familiar concepts, scientifi c theories, and logical laws.

Doubting whether this realm of a primitive experience under epoché could still be called a ‘world’, Merleau-Ponty has referred to it as ‘brute Being’ and has untiringly explored the ‘dimensions’ of its ‘sensible logos ’. Characteristically, Merleau-Ponty’s


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account of the pictorial epoché always has both a negative and a positive side. On the negative side we fi nd his lengthy critical discussion of Descartes’s theory of visual per-ception as a spiritual inspection of coloured shapes that are localized in an homogene-ous extended space. Descartes’ philosophy of mind and the Renaissance doctrine of drawing according to the rules of perspective are shown to be equally guilty of an intel-lectual reconstruction that overlooks the simplest phenomena of bodily perception. On the positive side of the pictorial epoché we fi nd Merleau-Ponty’s stress on the ‘ambiguity’ in the appearing of things, on ‘the gaze of things’, on the sensible logic of a ‘seeing accord-ing to’ ( voir selon ), and on a perceiving and painting that is in tune with ‘the invisible’ in the visible things and landscapes. Let us look at these elements of a phenomenology of pictorial perception one by one.

Ambiguity in visual appearances can be illustrated by the fact that we can see both the foliage of a tree and an infi nite variety of leaves, both apples with round volumes detached from a table and the same apples with uncertain contours mixing with the fl at surface of the table, both a mountain far away and the same mountain as part of the surrounding things we can grasp with our hands. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, Cézanne, like no other painter, has been able to render these perceptual ambiguities in his paintings. Th is is not only to say that his painted apples, trees, and Montagnes Sainte-Victoire appear in a way that is as ambiguous as the actual things and landscape. It also means that, as a ‘visible of the second power’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004 : 296), his paintings make us aware of the uncer-tain and changing modes of appearing belonging to the ordinary things of our percep-tion. We can now see the real mountain as Cézanne has painted it and we are led to see things that are unknown to him as he would have painted them. When we leave the museum, people and even streets and cars can look ambiguously Cézanne-like to us.

Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception is also known for having emphasized that see-ing is a matter of bodily movements, that our seeing body is simultaneously a body seen (by us and by others), and that—far from perceiving things as objects in front of us—we perceive things from a place ‘among things’ ( du milieu des choses ) (Merleau-Ponty 2004 : 295) and ‘from the inside’ ( du dedans ) (Merleau-Ponty 2004 : 309, 317) of a mundane connection of things. Since we are also seen bodies, no things seen by us can be com-pletely foreign to us. Whether we perceive our own body or the things around us, per-ceiver and perceived are always ‘cut from the same cloth’ ( taillés dans la même étoff e ). Th ey are not diff erent by nature but become diff erent only by the very process of percep-tion that introduces a ‘distance’ ( écart ) in what naturally hangs together. Th ere is thus, in principle, no good reason why ‘the reversibility’ that characterizes the relation between my touching hand and my hand touched (which can, in turn, touch the fi rst hand) would not also apply to the relation between my perceiving body and the things perceived by me (and others). Th is is to say that what I see can also be experienced (by me and not by itself) as seeing me and as making me feel seen by what I see. Between the perceiver ‘and the visible the roles are reversed’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004 : 299).

But is such an experience of feeling seen or even gazed at by a perceived table or knife not a pathological—that is, schizophrenic—experience? Th is would be the case only if the things that see me were to look at me as other human persons do. Clearly, this cannot


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be what Merleau-Ponty has in mind. By quoting painters such as Cézanne and Klee at length, he rather wants to make us understand that things, in their ambiguous gazes or looks, invite the painter to have a closer look at them. He also wants to stress that the invitation into this dialectical exchange of looks comes from the things and not from the painter. It is thus a dialogue that begins with a question, and where the fi rst question is put to the painter by the things. For us all to share this experience, it suffi ces to submit our ordinary perception to a pictorial epoché : to let all recognition, understanding, and seeing-as of things go, and to allow ourselves to feel puzzled, irritated, or interrogated by the things we see. Th ings then begin to look at us by ‘letting themselves be seen’ in a way that invites us to have a second, third, fourth . . . look at them.

Time and again, while looking for hours at the mountain with which he had been familiar since early childhood, Cézanne was struck by the ‘enigma of its visibility’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004 : 297). He felt there was a ‘lack’ ( manque ) (Merleau-Ponty 2004 : 297) of coherence in the improbable juxtaposition of patches of colour and a lack of unity binding the ‘incompossible’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004 : 298) elements of stone, sky, trees, and houses together. But he also felt that there must be some hidden sensible logic in the composition of the whole landscape. According to Merleau-Ponty, there was no other way for Cézanne to fi nd out if this was the case than by using his hand, brush, and paint. It was like the mountain had taken hold of his hand and that the painter and motif were forming one body breathing together in one rhythmic movement of ‘inspiration’ and ‘expiration’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004 : 299). Painting the ‘internal equivalent’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004 : 296) of the interrogative gaze of the landscape, Cézanne’s reply to its mys-tery was little more than a handing over of the enigma of the invisible in the visible to the spectator of his paintings. We need to return to how he managed to do this.

Merleau-Ponty tries to get a better hold on the ‘sensible logic’ of the visible, the appear-ance of which is both ambiguous and enigmatic, through his notion of a ‘ seeing accord-ing to ’ ( voir selon ) (Merleau-Ponty 2004 : 296). In Eye and Mind he describes how one can see not only the bottom of a swimming pool but also the cypresses in the garden, the surrounding landscape, and the sky ‘according to’ the element of the water, or better, according to appearance of the sunlight refl ected by the water (Merleau-Ponty 2004 : 313). Such a seeing ‘according to’ replaces the ordinary seeing ‘as’ where what is seen is subsumed under some kind of schema, concept, or category and thereby immediately recognized and understood in the common way. On the contrary, when one sees trees according to the mode of appearance in which the water presents or shows itself, one exchanges the common understanding of the nature of trees and of their diff erence from water for a new aesthetic experience of a ‘radiation of the visible’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004 : 313)—that is, the resonance between diff erent fl uid colours vibrating in the hot summer light. Just imagine what Monet could have made of this. Expressed in philosophical lan-guage, the aesthetic seeing ‘according to’ means that every thing—or better, every kind of appearance of something that is not a thing any longer—can inaugurate a new mode of seeing related to the entire visible world.

Most importantly, a perceiving of the world under epoché completely changes the meaning of the relation between what we call ‘ visible ’ and ‘ invisible ’. We have seen that a


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phenomenological epoché already makes us aware of the fact that the perception of a vis-ible thing necessarily includes an awareness of invisible aspects of the same thing. More precisely, the awareness of visible ‘adumbrations’ of a thing is inseparable from the awareness of the sides of the thing that are merely ‘co-intended’, but not intuitively given. In other words, without the awareness of the invisible sides, there are no adumbrations at all. Th e visible and the invisible are so interwoven that it makes perfect sense to speak, with Husserl, of an ‘improper appearing ’ ( uneigentliche Erscheinung ) of the invisible. Th us, the not yet visible sides of the thing are not just perceived as possibly becoming visible in the further course of experience, they have a visibility of their own from the beginning.

An aesthetic and especially a pictorial epoché considerably enriches the range of appearances that make visible the invisible of the visible. Painters not only see and paint perceptual ambiguities, the interrogative gaze or look of things, the rhythmic resonances between diff erent colours and material elements, the unity of a composition in juxta-posed appearances, and so on. Th ey also see and paint the ordinarily overlooked condi-tions of these appearances: light and shadows, refl ections, empty spaces, what is behind and masked by the visible things, how things seen feel when they are touched, the sound they make when they are hurt by another thing . . . Th ere is something ‘magical’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004 : 298) about the art of painting and, like magicians, painters make everything out of almost nothing. But unlike magicians pulling rabbits out of their hats, painters do not just make absent, ‘ghostlike’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004 : 298), and non-existent things present; painters assemble, distribute, and paint invisible no-things such as the density of a particular material, the trembling of the light, and the ever-receding dimension of ‘depth’. Th e magic art of painting thus suspends the common diff erence between things and the non-thingly conditions of their visibility, between the visible and the invisible. As the invisible shines through the visible and as visible things give way to the refl ections of light, the diff erence between the visible and the invisible becomes ‘undecidable’. Or, as Merleau-Ponty’s image of the ‘chiasm’ or of a Moebius strip suggests, the diff erence between the visible and the invisible results from a torsion of the same fabric or ‘fl esh’.

For the ordinary perceiver, this amounts to no less than a complete revolution of her way of seeing and of the ontological nature of what is seen by her. For what is seen, the ontological diff erence between things and their mode of being becomes just as uncertain as the diff erence between the visible and the invisible. And in her new see-ing of visible things through the medium of ordinarily invisible conditions of their visibility, forms will dissolve in shapes, shapes will become patches of colour, patches of colour will assemble and separate in a ballet dance to a yet unheard musical rhythm. Th us, transformed in her way of seeing the world by her seeing of art, she also sees painted works of art diff erently. Sensitive to an overall proximity between the visible and the invisible, when visiting an art museum she will pass from the contemplation of fi gurative paintings to the contemplation of abstract paintings without noticing the diff erence.

However, and despite what all painted works of art have in common and what philos-ophers too hastily call ‘the essence of painting’, each painting is a small world of its own


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with its own rules of perception, its own sensible logic, and its own ontological catego-ries. Just think of a painting by Klee. It is thus about time that we address the issue of the singularity of works of art and also of what it takes to turn a perception under aesthetic epoché into a painting. Th is will also sharpen our awareness of what distinguishes a per-ception of the world under a phenomenological epoché from the way in which a painter perceives his ‘motif ’ under a pictorial epoché .

2 Perceiving and painting the invisible of the visible

In order to understand what it means to paint, we need not only account for how the painter transforms her perception into a work of art, we must also return to the diff er-ence between the mode of perceiving belonging to the painter and to the phenomenolo-gist. Th is is necessary to avoid confusing a phenomenological description of the nature of (particular) painted works of art with a (general) account of a phenomenological per-ception of the world. Actually, there are good reasons to think that what distinguishes the perception of the painter from the perception of the phenomenologist is precisely the fact that the painter wants to paint (and not to describe) what she sees. Th e painting must somehow already be present in the painter’s seeing of the brute and savage Being of the things and of the world even before she starts painting.

But how ‘somehow’? It certainly cannot mean that the painter sees the landscape she wants to paint already as an image or even that she sees in the landscape what her paint-ing will look like when it is fi nished. Everything that we have learned from Merleau-Ponty about the ‘interrogative gaze’ of the Montagne Sainte Victoire, its ‘lack’ of coherence and need for ‘restitution’, its taking hold of Cézanne’s ‘hand’ and ‘inspiring’ the ‘expressive’ dance of his brush on diff erent parts of the canvas simultaneously, explic-itly contradicts such a view. If the painting to be painted announces itself in the way the painter perceives his motif, it can thus never be as a visual anticipation but only as the stimulation to begin painting. Actually, Cézanne and Bacon both emphasize that the origin of their paintings lies in a ruin of the harmonious order of the perceived world, in a kind of ‘catastrophe’, in their exposure to ‘inhuman’ and ‘chaotic’ forces. Th us, compared to the perception of the phenomenologist, there is less image-like coherence in the perception of the painter, not more.

It is thus not entirely unproblematic to ascribe an image- or work-like and bodiless seeing to the painter and to account for the content of her perception as a ‘texture’ wait-ing to be ‘translated’ into the ‘work’ of a painted image (Figal 2010 : 206–30). Even if it seems reasonable to think that painters see diff erently and see ‘more’ and than other people, such acuity of perception (they actually share with connoisseurs) is insuffi cient to turn them into painters. Painters must also see ‘less’ than other people in order to feel the need or desire to paint. And if there is, indeed, a close relation between their way of


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seeing and of painting, this is more a matter of a sense lacking than a pre-given image-like sense to be translated and further articulated. Rather than realizing a possible work or painting a pre-given perceptual motif, the painter lends her hand to chance and to its distortion of all subjective intentions and perceptual phenomena preceding the act of painting. Th e very act of painting can bring about a new and unforeseen way of perceiv-ing, which Deleuze calls ‘ haptique ’. He quotes Bacon saying that as soon as he begins painting, his perceptual ‘clichés’ and projected images undergo a complete alteration (Deleuze 2003 : chap. 11 ). As a consequence, the painter is the fi rst one to be surprised by her work and to like or dislike it. Giving room to ‘chance’ ( hasard ) and manipulating ‘probabilities’ until they give birth to ‘improbable Figures’, the act of painting is taking the ‘risk’ that the hand produces works of which the eye of the artist disapproves.

Admittedly, the amount of room given to chance and to a painting hand that is out of subjective control changes from artist to artist and even from work to work. In his book on Bacon, Deleuze provides a helpful classifi cation that goes from absolute chance in ‘abstract expressionism’ or ‘Action Painting’ (Pollock) to a seemingly absolute control in ‘abstract painting’ (Kandinsky, Mondrian). In this scale, Bacon and Cézanne with their manipulated chance or ‘ chaos germe ’ hold the middle (Deleuze 2003 : chap. 12 ). Bacon’s manual ‘diagrams’ and arbitrary strokes, his erasing and blurring what he had already painted never cover the entire surface of his paintings. Th ey thus become regions of the canvas invested with particularly intensive ‘forces’. Diagrams destroy recognizable humane forms and change them into ‘fi gures’ expressing invisible ‘sensations’ and ‘forces’. Controlled abstract painting in Kandinsky or Mondrian is just another way to do this. It is more radical by departing even further from perception—natural, phenom-enological, and pictorial. It is less radical by leaving no room for chance. Th e geometri-cal forms and ‘compositions’ of abstract painting are governed, instead, by the ‘necessity’ of a ‘digital’ code and the logic of binary oppositions. Pollock’s ‘abstract expressionism’ represents, on the contrary, an extreme form of celebrating mere chance in the expres-sion of completely chaotic forces. Underlying the diff erence between necessity and chance and between degrees of abstraction from the perceptual world, there is, however, a common emphasis on the expression of forces shared by these three kinds of painting. For Deleuze, they are all ‘non-fi gurative’ because they do not ‘represent’ the visible world, but rather make visible the invisible forces active in the world, in the universe, or in ourselves. It is thus tempting to view the diff erence of the forces expressed as the true reason for all the other diff erences between the three sorts of contemporary painting. Th is is what we shall attempt to show in our next section.

Cézanne’s and Bacon’s, Kandinsky’s and Pollock’s turning away from the still ‘fi gura-tive’ painting of the impressionists was thus less motivated by their will to further explore the new possibilities off ered by a pictorial abstraction from ordinary perception than by their decisive experience of invisible forces that do not lend themselves to an expression under the form of some sort of ‘fi gurative’ painting. Th eir new way of painting was thus

‘Finally, we will speak of the haptic . . . when sight discovers in itself a specifi c function of touch that is uniquely its own, distinct from its optical function’ (Deleuze 2003 : 155).


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forced on them by these forces and it is the diff erence between the forces experienced that explains the diff erence between their painting—and not the other way around.

However, even so-called ‘fi gurative’ paintings actually owe much less to a mere per-ception of the world than one is oft en inclined to think. A perception—even under pic-torial epoché —is at best a necessary but never a suffi cient condition for producing a painting (of whatever sort). In addition to perceiving light and shadows, refl ections and colour, empty space and depth in the real world, even a fi gurative painter creates an imaginary world on her canvas. It suffi ces to think of a painter like Ingres to realize that, strictly speaking, there can be no such thing as a ‘realistic’ art of painting. Th e painter’s turning way from reality begins already with her choice of a motif . A motif is something cut out and isolated from its perceptual context in the real world. Even if the choice of her motif may be forced on the painter by the interrogative gaze of what she perceives, and even if the chosen motif oft en changes or disappears in the process of painting, the painter nevertheless starts painting something that is more in her mind than in outer reality. Better still, the motif is neither in her mind nor in the external world. Being an ‘inner equivalent’ of reality, as Cézanne aptly calls it, the motif to be painted is both out-side of the mind and buried inside the depth of the world. Unlike what is inside the mind, it can be visually perceived, and unlike what belongs to the external world, not everybody but only the painter can see it.

A second step in the painter’s turning away from reality is accomplished by her con-cern for the composition of an artistic image. Th e composition of a painted image—whether fi gurative or abstract—has constraints that are completely foreign to the context of real things in the perceptual world. Composition is about the construction of the totality of a unique image that has its own artifi cial coherence and visual unity. Th e total-ity of a particular painted image is thus essentially diff erent from the natural and general evidence belonging to visual ‘forms’ or ‘ Gestalt ’ and their spontaneous organization through the perceptual schema of the contrast between fi gure and background. A paint-ing can thus have many centres of interest or none, it can disclose itself immediately in one global gaze or require a long wandering exploration.

Finally, paintings are also unlike the real things of the perceptual world because of the imaginary or fi ctional character that separates them immediately from the realm of real things. It is the frame of a painted image that marks the line of separation or transition between its unreal inside and its real outside. All paintings must have some kind of frame and frames realize the phenomenological miracle of making the ontological diff erence between an imaginary world and the real world appear as a visual phenomenon. It seems, however, that those phenomenologists who have described the frame of a painted image as some kind of ‘window’ leading out to the real world were wrong. Indeed, unlike what one sees through an ordinary window, all one sees through the frame of a painting is unreal and not real. Th e painted image as well as its motif or ‘image subject’ ( Bildsujet ) (as Husserl would call it (Husserl 2005 : no. 1, ch. 2 ff )) are essentially and irremediably aff ected by the frame and therefore remain purely fi ctional. Th e fact that some paintings suggest that what is in the painting continues in the real world outside of its frame or that the frame itself is something painted and therefore unreal does not make these


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paintings more realistic; quite to the contrary, it makes them surrealistic. Just think of Magritte. Similar techniques of an en-framing as well as of a de-framing of the painted image have been part of the art of painting for centuries, and they certainly do not make images more real. Rather, they make reality look more unreal or fi ctional.

Th e same can actually be said of the techniques—already practiced with great virtu-osity by the Greeks—of painting a trompe-l’oeil . A painted trompe-l’oeil never quite deceives an aesthetic eye to the extent that one would take the painted image for some-thing real. Th e grapes painted by Zeuxis only deceive the eyes of birds, and they are really meant to be a source of admiration for his colleague and rival Parrhasius. Parrhasius’s way of painting a veil on the wall that makes Zeuxis wonder what other painting might be behind this veil is even more impressive and certainly more subtle. Because what Parrhasius paints is an image that evokes the presence of another even more unreal image. And what his painting eventually suggests is not that something real can be included in a painted image, but rather that all we take to be real is actually mediated in its appearance by imaginary constructions. Pictorial illusions that undo the ontological diff erence between what is real and what is unreal always work, in the end, to the disad-vantage of reality. Th ey also always involve some kind of manipulation of the frame of the image, which constitutes the visual guarantee of the non-coincidence between the imaginary and the real.

Instead of coinciding with the perceived world or ‘representing’ it ‘realistically’, paint-ings, as framed images, rather interact or resonate with both the outer reality and the reality of its ‘inner equivalent’. Paintings change our way of perceiving real things, and they make us aware of unknown dimensions of our mind. Unreal and merely imaginary in the ordinary sense, paintings have, however, a reality of their own. Th ey are fi ctions we can perceive—that is ‘ perceptual fi ctions ’—as Husserl most appropriately names them (Husserl 2005 : no. 18). As perceived images, paintings are not mere dreams or pro-jections of mental images. As perceived fi ctions , however, paintings and their motifs are separated from all ordinary perceptual reality. Th is is to say, that they require a specifi c mode of perception one must learn and develop by means of a long practice of artistic contemplation. What one cannot learn, however, is what the contemplation of a particu-lar painting does to each of us and what these emotions or sensations can teach us about its pictorial signifi cation.

Th e limits of what one can and cannot learn about a proper way of looking at paint-ings also weigh on the achievements of a philosophical phenomenology of painting . One oft en has the impression that phenomenologists are much more successful in their accounting for the ‘essence of painting’ than in their description and interpretation of concrete painted artworks. At the same time, their account of this essence of painting is oft en little more than a mere application of their general phenomenological doctrine. It thus falls painfully short of the close attention particular artworks require and deserve. Every act and kind of painting is, indeed, a singular fact and all paintings are somehow, as Bacon claims, about particular ‘matters of fact’. A phenomenology of painting thus cannot limit itself to an exploration of the necessary conditions of the act of painting or of the essential constituents (‘elements’) of a painting: point, line, colour, pictorial space,


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frame, imaginary existence, and so on. It must also remain attentive to the singularity of the work of art and the particular matter of fact it is about.

It is true that a familiarity with the essential elements or necessary constituents com-mon to all paintings is of great help when describing a particular painted work of art. It opens one’s eyes for its composition and doesn’t need to make one blind for the ways in which the general pictorial elements are handled and modifi ed by each particular paint-ing. At the same time, such an a priori knowledge implies, however, a true danger of a merely schematic and technical contemplation of paintings. In such an approach, unfor-tunately common among professionals, identifying the artist and recognizing the style of a particular period of his creative work can become prominent and get in the way of the possibility of losing oneself in the contemplation of a singular painting just of its own sake. Th e interest in some kind of general knowledge about painting and the interest in what makes each painting unique must rather go hand in hand. And it is eventually always a particular painting in its uniqueness that determines what general knowledge and how much of this knowledge is helpful and compatible with the grasp of its singular signifi cation. Th us, whether in addition to the pictorial elements of point, line, colour, space, composition, and so on, ‘meaning’ is something to be looked for in the interpreta-tion of a particular painting needs to be decided by the work under consideration itself. And if notions such as ‘sensation’ or ‘force’ seem to have a more general relevance for the description especially of non-fi gurative modern paintings, these notions are still in need of further qualifi cation and specifi cation to match what diff erent painters and diff erent paintings by the same artist let one see.

Building further on Kant’s distinction between determinative and refl ective judge-ments, one can say that the interpretation of a painting requires a refl ective judgement that works with a very small amount of familiar a priori categories and a very large amount of new categories directly derived from the empirical contemplation of singular works of art. In addition to the priority of the empirical or descriptive categories over the a priori (but equally ‘sensuous’) categories, the use of the latter must also always be measured against the phenomenon of the particular work of art under consideration.

3 Painting invisible forces as an invisible reality

Th e more a painting moves away from a re-presentation of the perceived reality of things and the world, the more prominent its task of presenting the hidden ‘forces’ that inhabit and govern painted things and the world becomes. It should come as no surprise that philosophers who take the real world to be a battlefi eld of antagonistic forces are also particularly sensitive to the forces that manifest themselves in paintings and other artworks. Schopenhauer, but also Hegel and especially Nietzsche, immediately come to mind as possible examples. Th ey all take for granted that the essence of art is


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metaphysical and that art has the privilege of making visible the same metaphysical forces operating in the phenomenal or objective world that philosophy tries to think conceptually . As Hegel’s philosophy of art shows with particular clarity, such a view involves the risk of turning art into some kind of ‘representation’ again. Instead of repre-senting outer reality by means of a resembling imitation of its external appearance, painting now becomes a representation of the hidden metaphysical forces and true essence of reality. Th e art of painting runs the risk of appearing as a mere servant to a metaphysics that only philosophical thought and refl ection can properly comprehend. If one wishes to avoid this consequence, and if one also wishes to preserve the meta-physical relevance of painting, then a new kind of phenomenological or empirical phi-losophy of painting is required. We shall limit ourselves here to a short presentation of two examples of such a strategy: Henry’s book on Kandinsky (Henry 2009 ) and Deleuze’s book on Bacon (Deleuze 2003 ).

Making extensive use of Kandinsky’s theoretical writings, Henry aims to show that for Kandinsky the metaphysical forces presiding over reality and the ‘spiritual’ forces expressed in his paintings are identical. Well aware of how close this brings him to Hegel’s position, Henry also puts great emphasis on the fact that the forces experienced and their mode of experience are identical in reality and in painting. Th us, paintings do not just illustrate or represent metaphysical forces that could be more directly experi-enced in another symbolic medium and also better understood by conceptual thought. Paintings rather contain the metaphysical forces they express, and there is only one way to experience these forces—namely, by feeling them in a ‘pathetic’ form of aff ectivity. Actually, according to Henry’s ‘radical phenomenology’, the being of these metaphysical forces coincides with their self-manifestation or phenomenalization. Kandinsky and Henry both call what manifests itself to itself and to us in our pathetic feelings, the forces of ‘life’. We can feel these spiritual forces of life in our ordinary lives, but even better by contemplating artworks that are made especially to express them. For Henry, all human forms of experience of the forces of life must, however, be understood as participating in the archi-experience that archi-life has of itself. Being a movement of aff ective self-manifestation, life is the (immanent and self-aff ective) archi-phenomenon we can aff ec-tively experience both in art and in our lives.

Henry’s phenomenological–metaphysical system can thus aptly be rendered and summarized through the following series of relations of identity: (1) life is identical with its manifestation , the metaphysical reality of life coincides with the way it manifests itself to itself. Th e metaphysical essence of life consists in being a phenomenon for itself. Life is therefore always aware of itself; life is the ‘archi-subject’. (2) Th is self-manifestation of life consists in an aff ective and passive experience of itself , an intimate joyful or painful feeling itself and having to bear itself with no possible escape. (3) All living beings partici-pate in this original life ; their individual lives are in essence not diff erent from the archi-life. Th ere is only one life in all lives. (4) From this identity between life and lives follows the further identity of their experience . Just as archi-life experiences itself and its own dynamic forces through the pathos of a self-aff ection, living beings experience their own life in feeling alive—that is, in the pathos of undergoing the dynamic forces governing


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their lives. It is through the force of their ‘drives and aff ects’ that humans experience their own life as an expression of the forces of the archi-life. Th ey feel the life in their lives and they feel the forces of life in the force of their passions. (5) Just as the forces of archi-life express themselves in human lives, they express themselves and can be aff ec-tively felt in the paintings of Kandinsky . Th e forces that govern all the pictorial elements and their composition must therefore be identical with the forces that govern the human passions of love and hate, the human aff ects of joy and sorrow. Being identical means that Kandinsky’s paintings do not just represent or illustrate human feelings; they are these same feelings. ‘Colours’ do not imitate an ‘aff ective tonality’ (Henry 2009 : 35 et passim ); they are ‘cold and warm, bright and obscure’. When painting ‘our drives, our aff ects, our force’, Kandinsky makes us actually feel them.

In the present context it is only the two last relations of identity that are of interest to us: the identity between the experience of aff ective forces in our lives and in Kandinsky’s paintings, and also how both experiences identically derive from the metaphysical real-ity of a self-aff ection of the forces of archi-life. What is diffi cult to understand in this double identity is not that Kandinsky (like most other contemporary painters and espe-cially Bacon) wants to paint (‘spiritual’) forces, but that the forces contained in his paint-ings are said to be identical with the force of our aff ects and that they both must be understood as an expression of the pathetic self-manifestation of archi-life itself. What makes the diffi culty look insurmountable is especially Henry’s (and not Kandinsky’s) claim that the art of painting is in its very essence nothing else than a mode of this self-aff ection or intimate self-manifestation of archi-life that is said to owe absolutely noth-ing to visibility, to the conditions of visibility, or to anything visible such as the appearance of things in perceptual adumbrations. Aft er having tried to make good sense of the claim that painters attempt to make the invisible visible, we now fi nd ourselves confronted with the most implausible claim that Kandinsky’s paintings are about an invisible expression of the forces of an invisible life.

Th is is, indeed, the claim that Henry makes. For him, true painting must be ‘abstract painting’ because it belongs to the ‘essence of painting’ to paint what is, in essence, ‘invis-ible’. Th us, the essence of a painted colour is said to consist in what it makes us feel like and not in something we perceive or in what it makes us see beyond itself. Th e same holds for all the other pictorial ‘elements’ such as point, line, ‘ plan ’ or space, and so on. Th e less fi gurative their use is, the better, because their true essence consists in nothing else than an ‘aff ective tonality’ to be felt and never to be seen. If painting is essentially about the invisible in the sense of something that never lends itself to visual perception, then everything that we have called ‘conditions of visibility’ also disappears from the art of painting. Painters painting light and shadow are thus unfaithful to the essence of their art. Th ey are guilty of fi xing our attention on the visible rather than helping us to abstract from it. Th e paintings by true painters make us forget about things and the world, they

‘Kandinsky’s genius is not only to have taken this capacity to paint the invisible—our drives, our aff ects, our force—to a hitherto unattained level, but also to have provided an explanation of this extraordinary capacity’ (Henry 2009 : 26).


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concentrate on our pathetic feeling of the forces of life. Th e forms and colours we see on their canvases become mere occasions for us to feel the ‘aff ective tonality’ belonging to the ‘dynamic forces’ of life. As such, they are, however, not mere visible signs or symbols representing these forces, they really and invisibly contain them in themselves. Th e pres-ence and aff ective experience of the invisible forces of life is so strong in the pictorial elements used by Kandinsky that we completely forget about their visibility. Th e mean-ing of Kandinsky’s paintings is thus not only ‘spiritual’ for Henry; it must be called reli-gious. Th e way in which these paintings make the invisible really present as invisible can best be compared to the ‘ presentia realis ’ of God and his saints in religious icons, or to the invisible real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

But if what the art of painting is about owes nothing to the visible and can be equally felt in the way we are aware of our own life or of the life in us, then what are paintings still good for? We can break down Henry’s answer to this intriguing question into two parts. First , painting does not just express an inner experience we already had of our own life and of archi-life, it is such an experience in its own right. Also, the two experi-ences are not only equiprimordial, they are essentially experiences of the same and therefore only accidentally diff erent. Just as our experience of archi-life through the pathetic-aff ective experience of our own life is not psychological, so the presence of archi-life in the aff ective tonalities of colours is not empirical but spiritual. Second , painting and the other arts add , however, something substantial both to the self-mani-festation of archi-life and to our pathetic-aff ective experience of life in our lives. Henry never falls short of qualifi cations for what art adds to life and to its modes of self-mani-festation and pathetic experience: ‘fulfi lment’ ( accomplissement ), ‘exaltation’, ‘endless renewal’, ‘expansion’, ‘intensifi cation’, ‘growth’ ( accroissement ) of its forces, ‘creation of new forces’, and so on (Henry 2009 : 19 f., 121 ff .) Paintings thus come from life, paint-ings remain in life, and paintings return to life while contributing to its renewal, rein-forcement, and enrichment.

Th e price Henry’s phenomenology of art pays for making painting a matter of a real presence and of a creation of the invisible forces of life is extremely high. First , this view estranges painting completely from the realm of the perception of something visible . For Henry, far from making visible the wild being of the fl esh of the world that remains invisible for common perception, far from expressing and refi guring the new phenom-ena disclosed by a phenomenological and pictorial epoché , the phenomena of painting have nothing in common with any kind of perception of any kind of mundane phe-nomenon. Second , for Henry, the forces expressed in paintings are and remain invisi-ble —also in the paintings themselves! If painting means making something somehow visible, then strictly speaking Kandinsky does not paint the spiritual forces his paint-ings are about. Th ird , the identifi cation of these spiritual forces with the forces of a life that we also feel in ourselves entails that all paintings are about forces we humans can possibly feel either by ourselves or by empathy. Henry thus excludes from painting all concern for infra- or inhuman animal and material forces . If paintings can contain some sort of non-human spiritual forces, then these must be supra-human or ‘cosmic’ for Henry (Henry 2009 : 125).


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Although published seven years before Henry’s book on Kandinsky, Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon—despite agreeing with Henry that painting is about ‘sensations’ and ‘forces’ —can actually be read as a successful endeavour to avoid the three inconven-iences of Henry’s view on the ‘essence of painting’ we have just mentioned. We must limit here our presentation of Deleuze’s philosophy of painting to these issues—well aware that we are thus far from doing justice to the rich content of his book, and espe-cially to his careful interpretation of many paintings by Bacon. Th ere is also no need for us to return to what we already said about Bacon’s way of painting with ‘diagrams’ and by means of a ‘manipulation of chance’, or on how his ‘modulation’ of the relation between ‘eye’ and ‘hand’ results in a ‘haptic’ dimension that make his works essentially diff erent from the ‘abstract’ paintings by Kandinsky.

In Deleuze’s view, rather than transcending all visual perception (as Henry would have it for Kandinsky), Bacon’s paintings introduce a new way of seeing and feeling related to new sorts of bodies. What we see in Bacon’s paintings is essentially a ‘deforma-tion’ (‘not transformation’!) of human bodies by invisible forces. Th ese forces of de-formation ‘dissolve’ all visible ‘forms’ ( Deleuze and Guattari 1994 : 173). Th ey annihilate all resemblance of the painted bodies with the perceptual forms of human bodies and turn them into mere ‘fi gures’. Th ese fi gures are a purely pictorial element in an art of painting that is not ‘fi gurative’ any longer and that has left behind all concern for a ‘resembling representation’ of outer reality. As non-fi gurative fi gures, Bacon’s painted human bodies are in essence not diff erent from the ‘round area, the ring’ ( le rond, la piste ) that rotates around them and from the uni-form and neutral background or ‘ aplat ’ behind them. Th e ‘athletically’ or ‘diagrammatically’ deformed human bodies we see in Bacon’s paintings are bodies that express and make visible nothing else than the invisible forces that act on them. Th ey show the process of ‘becoming animal’ of human bodies that are exposed to inhuman forces. Th e ‘meat’ ( viande ) falling off the ‘bones’ makes vis-ible how physical forces of gravity or acceleration work on human bodies, the animal shadows of deformed human bodies show the beastly suff ering caused by injuring forces, the widely open mouth of a pope is a head screaming under the torture of unbear-able moral forces.

Strictly speaking, Bacon does not actually paint deformed bodies or invisible forces, but what Deleuze calls ‘sensations’. Are we then back to Henry’s account of non-fi gura-tive paintings expressing how we human beings feel the invisible forces of life in the mode of a pathetic aff ection that has nothing in common with the perception of mun-dane manifestations? Not at all. Deleuze’s ‘forces’ and ‘sensations’ are very diff erent from what Henry calls by these names. Bacons ‘ forces ’ are not spiritual forces of life and har-mony, but material forces of destruction and dissonance. Th ey also do not remain invis-ible and merely felt, but they become visible through visible sensations. Bacon’s works thus consist of visible ‘blocs of sensations’ that invisible forces create in the very ‘mate-rial’ ( matériau ) of painting: ‘canvas support, paint-brush or equivalent agent, colour in

See also Deleuze and Guattari 1994 : 181ff : ‘And this, fi rst of all, is what makes painting abstract . . . making the invisible forces visible in themselves.’


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Rudolf Bernet

Doorhalen

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the tube’ ( Deleuze and Guattari 1994 : 166). Artworks ‘are’ such ‘blocs of sensations’: they ‘create’ them and they ‘preserve’ them forever; they make them ‘stand by themselves’ ( tenir debout tout seul ) by means of the pictorial material and the ‘composition’ by the artist. Needless to say, then, that such ‘sensations’ existing ‘in and by themselves exceed any lived experience [ vécu ] of them’ ( Deleuze and Guattari 1994 : 164 (modifi ed transla-tion)). ‘Sensations’ made visible and becoming a pictorial element, refer to other, diff er-ent sensations and to other, diff erent pictorial elements, but they never refer to absent invisible forces nor to an invisible ‘ sense ’ or meaning behind them.

To better explain the nature of these ‘blocs of sensations’ and the way we experience them in Bacon’s paintings, Deleuze divides them into what he calls ‘percepts’ and ‘aff ects’. Percepts are the sensations as we perceive them in the material of the paintings. Neither perceived bodies nor felt sensations, they are materialized sensations and matter made sensible. Percepts are what remains of perception when neither an object perceived nor a perceiving subject is left over. Bacon’s way of painting ‘attendants’ ( témoins ) (Deleuze 2003 : ch. 10 )—that is, deformed bodies watching the deformation of other bodies—illus-trates well what happens also to the spectator of his paintings. Aff ects , on the other hand, are the sensations as they aff ect material bodies—not in how they look, but in how they feel and are changed in their nature by these feelings. Unlike internally felt aff ections, these aff ects are about how invisible forces aff ect painted fi gures and how these forces make ‘humans become non-human’ suff ering animals ( Deleuze and Guattari 1994 : 173). Bacon’s paintings are thus about a de-objectivation of perception and a de-subjectivation of aff ec-tion: ‘By means of the material, the aim of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the aff ect from aff ections as the tran-sition from one state to another’ ( Deleuze and Guattari 1994 : 167). Th is is precisely what happens to the ‘hysteric’ bodies painted by Bacon (Deleuze 2003 : chap. 7 ). Such hysteric bodies or ‘bodies without organs’ are bodies that have lost not only their human form but also all their natural organic capacities. Th ey are blocs of excessive sensations, pure expres-sions of the overwhelming presence of the invisible forces to which they are subjected. Th e pope’s mouth is the scream—not made ‘fl esh’, but ‘meat’ and bone/teeth.

Put in a very schematic way, one can say that Deleuze and Henry agree in their disa-greement with Merleau-Ponty but that they completely disagree about the proper way to depart from philosophy of painting based on a phenomenology of perception. Th ey agree that the ‘invisible forces’ a non-fi gurative art of painting is about do not belong to ‘the fl esh of the world’. But they totally disagree about what and where they are instead. For Henry the invisible forces belong to life and not to the world, they can only be felt in us and not seen in paintings, they are spiritually human or supra-human. Deleuze, on the contrary, thinks that paintings can make visible invisible forces, but that this requires a complete transfi guration of perception, of the perceiver, and of the perceived. To per-ceive how invisible forces act on bodies, the bodies must be subjected to a violent defor-mation of their recognizable forms and to a blurring of their human signifi cation. Merleau-Ponty’s ‘fl esh is too tender’ ( Deleuze and Guattari 1994 : 179); it lacks the ‘bones’, the physical resistance and the structural stability to express and preserve the sensations caused by a traumatic exposure to the violence of inhuman forces.


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What Bacon paints instead of the abstract forms painted by Kandinsky or of the invisible texture of the visible world painted by Cézanne, are ‘aff ects’ and ‘percepts’—that is, materialized ‘sensations’ of bodily ‘fi gures’ exposed to chaotic and destructive forces. He paints their ‘spasms’, their ‘contraction’ on themselves or their ‘escape’ from themselves—that is, visible forces caused by invisible forces. What we see and what aff ects us in Bacon’s paintings is animal meat suff ering from forces that are physical instead of spiritual, that belong to matter instead of life, that come from a ‘chaosmos’ instead of a cosmic harmony. Th is ‘chaosmos’ is a chaotic reality in which humans have no proper place. What Bacon’s paintings are thus about is what happens to humans in an inhuman and cruel reality—a reality without spiritual meaning and without transcendence or escape.

Th is is not the place to further develop the diff erences between Deleuze’s and Henry’s philosophies of radical immanence (and their reading of Spinoza). And there is no need to return to their common insistence on ‘forces’ that do not constitute the invisible of a visible world and to how this makes them both reluctant to embrace the underlying met-aphysics of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the art of painting. Deleuze’s account of painting diff ers radically, however, from Henry’s through its eff ort to reduce all reference to sub-jectivity to an absolute minimum. More precisely, Deleuze denies the creative painter and the spectator of her work any form of transcendence and turns them both into immanent moments of the painting. He also considers the painted work to be a singular and therefore empirical metaphysical event. Such a pictorial event is not given to an external perceiver; just as Bacon’s ‘attendants’ ( témoins ), the spectator is involved in the painting and intimately concerned by it. Her ‘aff ects’ are, however, inseparable from her ‘percepts’, and they belong to the painted work and its invisible forces as much as they belong to her. For Deleuze, the abolition of the work of art as an externally transcendent object necessarily also entails the abolition of the artist and the spectator as an internally (or intimately) transcendent subject. A painting of invisible forces can thus retain its natural relation to perception on the condition that this perception is not ascribed to an autonomous or even ‘absolute’ subject. Similarly, paintings can retain their composition of visible fi gures, rings, and aplats if these are not treated as (representations of) mun-dane objects but as pictorial elements created by the action of invisible forces. For Deleuze, the phenomenon of painting thus requires a new kind of phenomenology that takes phenomena just as phenomena—without a thing-in-itself behind them, and with-out a subject for whom they are how they appear to it.

References

Deleuze, G. (2003), Francis Bacon: Th e Logic of Sensation (London: Continuum). ——– and Guattari, F. (1994), What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press). Figal, G. (2010), Erscheinungsdinge. Ästhetik als Phänomenologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck).

‘Pity the meat!’ (Deleuze 2003 : 23).


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Henry, M. (2009), Seeing the Invisible on Kandinsky (London: Continuum). Husserl, E. (1994), Briefwechsel, Band VII (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers). ——– (2005), Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory (1898–1925) (Dordrecht: Springer). Merleau-Ponty, M. (2004), ‘Eye and mind’, in Merleau-Ponty, M. , Basic Writings (London:

Routledge), pp. 290–324.


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