Triptychs, Eternity and the Spirituality of the Body

D. C. Ambrose
Abstract

Canterbury Christ Church University

This paper develops a detailed reading of Deleuzes philosophical study of Bacons triptychs in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. It examines his claims regarding their apparent non-narrative status, and explores the capacity of the triptychs to embody and express a spiritual sensation of the eternity of time. Keywords: Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, triptychs, eternity, spiritual realism, rhythm One of Deleuzes ambitions in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is to outline an experimental conceptual analogue of Bacons paintings that demonstrates a genuine delity to the specicity of his work. His book produces a philosophy of painting where Bacon is conceived as one of the great painters of immanence, a painter of the body without organs. His gural paintings are understood to repeatedly explore the vital intensities and sensations associated with the dynamisms of becoming, processes of individuation and the destratication of the organism, subject and individual. Deleuze suggests that a brutal form of realism is manifested by Bacons art, but it is not a realism associated with the violence of appearance but a violence of sensation associated with a spiritual realism of the body. Bacons paintings depict, he claims, a visceral topography of embodied sensation that is profoundly nonrepresentational and spiritual. One of the most complex and creative sections of the book is his philosophical analysis of the triptychs. In just a few dense pages he arguably provides one of the most powerful accounts yet written about triptychs in relation to the questions of what they are, how they function, and what operative principles govern their production. In this paper I wish to develop a reading of Deleuzes philosophical understanding of the triptychs that incorporates his arguments regarding their

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non-narrative status within the claims he makes about their capacity to express a spiritual sensation of the eternity of time.1 I will briey demonstrate that the notion of eternity being elicited from Bacons triptychs is largely derived from Spinozas Ethics, namely, the eternity of substance and the eternal cycles of becoming. However, in order to fully grasp the signicance of Deleuzes claims regarding the eternal time of triptychs it is necessary to re-examine his initial analysis of classic religious painting which forms much of the context for his argument. Despite the fact that religious art labours under the auspices of obvious narrative content, Deleuze will claim that it is still capable of conveying intense spiritual sensations associated with the celestial and abstract realm. Once we develop an understanding of how this was achieved in the past, the signicance Bacons liberation from the constraints of narrative has for his ability to embody a Spinozistic sense of eternity within the mechanism of triptychs can be explored. In an interview from 1981 Deleuze talked explicitly about the role intuition played in developing his own understanding of the triptychs when writing: I was looking at the triptychs and had the feeling that there was a certain internal law, forcing me to jump from one reproduction to the other to compare them (Deleuze 2006: 184). Some initial remarks on the triptychs are also contained in the preface to the English translation of the book,2 where he clearly identies the broad shape of his subsequent, more detailed reading. From the very beginning Deleuze aligns himself closely with Bacons own remarks on triptychs, which were made in an interview from 1962 with David Sylvester (Sylvester 1987). Deleuze recognises an inherent quality in Bacons triptychs, which he terms their internal law. Triptychs are composed of three distinct sections, with the separation between panels serving to effectively negate any imposed narrative meaning across the different parts. However, for Deleuze it is precisely this separation which provides the means for linking the three panels in new and unique ways. He argues that there has to be some kind of relationship between the separated parts of each triptych, but that this relationship cannot be narrative or logical in any straightforward way. As he identies in his subsequent analysis, there is a denite logic but it is of a profoundly irrational order it is a logic of sensation. The triptychs establish a common unifying fact for the diverse and separated gures within each of the three panels, but it is a unity radically removed from narrative meaning. Figures present in triptychs become reconceived as rhythmic characters rather than agents or subjects operating within a narrative. Triptychs exhibit a brutal unity where an array of complex forces and sensations,

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rather than stories, are distributed across the separated panels. Each triptych operates like an infernal machine producing novel circulations and rhythmic interplays of these characters, forces and sensations. Somewhat enigmatically, Deleuze identies a mysterious, unifying force, which is captured by the arrangement of the triptychs but which is also, simultaneously, the force operating to structure and unite the triptychs. This force acts to separate gures, both within and across the panels, and the panels themselves. Deleuze suggests that this unifying and separating force is the force of eternal time. Before progressing with an analysis of Deleuzes complex reading of the triptychs, I think it is necessary to question the legitimacy of his emphasis on the non-narrative status of Bacons triptychs. One might take the view that Bacons insistence, when in conversation with Sylvester, on there being no explicit straightforward narrative is in fact mendacious, that it is part of his effort to control and conceal inconvenient biographical truths and sources in favour of constructing an elaborate mythological artistic persona. Whilst this is probably the case, it remains possible that his broader non-narrative ambitions indicate a more signicant philosophical and artistic ambition that is indeed worth taking seriously. For Deleuze, Bacons work instantiates a profoundly anti-narrative spiritual dynamic of matter. Nevertheless, by focusing on the non-narrative element I do not believe that Deleuze is altogether denying residues of narrative content that might be clearly present and form an important factor in fully understanding a specic composition. Bacons deeply personal obsessions, experiences and inspirations form and shape the voluntaristic intentions that guide his hand at a primary pre-pictorial level and at the rst level of guration on the canvas.3 Deleuze is not necessarily denying the existence of this type of intentionality, rather he is bracketing it off, suspending explicit consideration of it, in order to concentrate upon the involuntaristic aspect of Bacons practice or the second order of guration. It is here, within what he calls the diagram, that Bacons particular range of visual motifs are injected into a metamorphic, transformative and liberating realm (or experimental amphitheatre) of paint on the canvas. A signicant clue to understanding Deleuzes attitude towards specic narrative residue emerges from his treatment of religious painters whose gurative innovations are linked to Bacons own. When discussing the structural and historical underpinnings of Bacons practice, Deleuze discusses one of Bacons operative propositions (a proposition derived from Andr Malraux) that is almost a truism within modern art, and would seemingly necessitate a move within painting towards a form

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of total or absolute abstraction. This is the supposed conditioning of painting by religious possibilities or imperatives which simply no longer apply, given that we arguably exist within an atheistic milieu. Deleuze contests whether this historical proposition is really adequate. Such contestation is only the rst of a series of critical contestations of Bacons ideas as outlined in the Sylvester interviews, many of which go some way towards countering the idea that Deleuze is guilty of the most crude and nave intentional fallacy, and of slavishly adhering to Bacons point of view. I want to argue that Deleuzes remarks on religious painting are critically incisive and do genuinely illuminate an important aspect of Bacons work. More importantly, for my purposes, they provide useful insight into Deleuzes concentration on the non-narrative character of Bacons triptychs. When writing of Bacons proposition regarding the way paintings representational function was largely conned by religious or theological sentiment, Deleuze responds by arguing that the link between the pictorial element and religious sentiment . . . seems poorly dened by the hypothesis of a gurative function that was simply sanctied by faith (Deleuze 2003: 9). To support his argument Deleuze analyses El Grecos The Burial of Count Orgaz. He notes the presence of a horizontal division separating the painting into two distinct sections the terrestrial and the celestial. In the lower section of the painting there is gurative and narrative content (albeit unorthodox and already displaying a degree of gural distortion) as the Counts terrestrial dead body is laid to rest in the Earth. However, in the upper section where the counts living spirit is being received by Christ, there is an astonishing gural liberation the Figures are lifted up and elongated, rened without measure, outside all constraint (Deleuze 2003: 9). The gures in this section of the canvas are relieved of their representative (earthly and bodily) role, and are placed upon an entirely different, spiritual register (they are being put into relation with an order of celestial sensations [Deleuze 2003: 9]). Deleuze uses this particular work to demonstrate how a Christian painting, ostensibly governed by the historical task of representing and communicating a sacred narrative, discovered startlingly aberrant painterly means for expressing non-representational and sensational affects. Here lines, colours and movements are freed from the demands of representation and narration, and express celestial, infernal, immaterial and spiritual sensations. This is particularly true if one spends any time at all looking at the different ways Christs body is depicted within the history of Christian painting as a means of expressing the broadest range of intense and extreme sensations, ranging from Cimabue to Grnewald.4

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Deleuzes argument suggests that great religious narrative paintings, marked by representational imperatives, provide the conditions of possibility for an essential liberation of gures, i.e. the emergence of Figures5 freed from gurative constraints and able to become the vehicles of sensation. He notes that Christianity contains a germ of tranquil atheism that will nurture painting; the painter can easily be indifferent to the religious subject he is asked to represent (Deleuze 2003: 124). In Christian painting representational and narrative space is placed into a direct relation with not only accidents but also an aberrant nonrepresentational space (an any-space-whatsoever), a spiritual space, the realm of the immaterial and the invisible. Intriguingly, Deleuze returns to the theme of Christian painting at the end of the book with a discussion of pictorial fact (as opposed to representation, thematisation and narration) in Michelangelos work. With Michelangelo pictorial fact emerges in its purest state from Christian art where the forms may still be gurative, and there may still be narrative relations between the characters but these constitute the residues of the primary act of gural painting which are supplanted by the properly pictorial fact (Deleuze 2003: 160). With Michelangelo Christian painting achieves an extraordinary level of pictorial facticity which no longer tells a story and no longer represents anything but its own movement, and which makes these apparently arbitrary elements coagulate in a single continuous ow (Deleuze 2003: 160). His gures realise, within the realm of Christian art, a form of proto-Baconian pictorial fact where organic guration provides a painterly vehicle for the revelation of the body beneath the organism (i.e. the body without organs).6 This body beneath the organic gure causes it to crack or swell and imposes a spasm on it forcing it into a relation with forces sometimes with an inner force that arouses them, sometimes with external forces that traverse them, sometimes with the eternal force of an unchanging time, sometimes with the variable forces of a owing time (Deleuze 2003: 1601).7 If the extraordinary manifestation of bizarre gural metamorphoses in classical religious art (Cimabue, El Greco, Tintoretto) are functions of a religious sentiment being explicitly narrated, gured and represented in the paintings of this time, then one cannot legitimately abstract the religious sentiment from them, despite recognising within modernity that such truths no longer hold. Religious sentiment and narration (for example, Christs passion, the Creation, the Apocalyptic visions of Hell) animate and inform not only the efforts within painting to represent them as events in space and time, but also the efforts to express them

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as intensities, sensations, and extreme modes of affectivity (a divine realm seen and a divine realm felt). The affective register of religious painting remains locked into a causal relationship with the narrative content of the Christian religion. Such art might aim to represent a particular event in Christs life (e.g. the crucixion) as a type of religious or spiritual portrait, however to do this it is not enough merely to illustrate it as a discrete event in time. Rather, it is important to utilise the depiction of such events to communicate the affective force of the spiritual depth associated with them. This affective quality, informed by religious sentiment, operates as a disruptive modulator to good stable representational form and the earthly body becomes subject to deformation by invisible celestial forces. Bacons own practice inherits much of this dynamic structure in so far as his work displays repeated motifs seemingly borrowed from (or almost certainly analogous to) traditional religious art i.e. crucixions, death and physical dissolution, bodies in the process of becoming immaterial (a process of becomingindiscernible), bodies confronting spirits, and bodies placed in relation to animals (a process of becoming-animal). However, the religious sentiment and concrete theological concerns have been extracted and are no longer being represented or narrated. For Deleuze, Bacons paintings operate like great religious paintings evacuated of their religious narrative and representation. Such content is simply of no relevance to Bacon his work signies an accelerated form of pictorial atheism, the very roots of which Deleuze identies as being present in great Christian art itself. This explains the insistence upon the nonnarrative quality of Bacons triptychs rst and foremost Figures become the vehicles of sensation (rhythmic characters) and survive to serve as representative characters in a depicted narrative only in a residual and secondary manner, as in Michelangelos work. Deleuzes account is not incompatible with the idea that certain residues of narration remain as inevitable, irreducible or deliberate traces. Indeed, his account allows for the insistence that the primary narrative content (in so far as any can be adequately and accurately established) forms an important framework in the overall germination, negotiation and sculpting of forms in space and time on the canvas. What Deleuze does insist upon, and in this he is absolutely aligned with Bacons own statements, is the subsidiary status of such content. Bacons paintings involve an evacuation of religious content, theological narrative and spiritual drama, and the effort to replace it with an elaborate and audacious attempt to translate elements and events drawn from his own physical existence and lter them through his

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particular nervous system onto the canvases as gured sensation. The historical specicity of Bacons life becomes recongured through art into the grandeur of elemental eternity. This clearly ts with Deleuzes recognition of how the eternity of art remains a constant reference for Bacons practice: Like Rodin, he [Bacon] thinks that durability, essence, or eternity are the primary characteristics of the work of art (Deleuze 2003: 123) In my reading of Deleuze an understanding of Bacon emerges as a spiritual painter (a mystical atheist). He enacts a similar dialogue between the actual and the virtual as El Greco had explored between the material and the spiritual, or the terrestrial and the celestial. Following the pictorial facticity of Michelangelo, Bacons paintings pursue a hyperbolic form of pictorial hysteria where he is directly attempting, again and again, to release the presences beneath representation, beyond representation. His paintings repeatedly attempt to make such overwhelming and intense presence immediately visible. When discussing Bacons renunciation of represented violent spectacles in favour of excavating the invisible forces beneath or beyond appearance as sensation, Deleuze comes close to identifying Bacons spiritual thematic, his spiritual conviction, as a kind of declaration of faith in life (Deleuze 2003: 61). He considers statements from the interviews with Sylvester (particularly the remarks about cerebral pessimism and nervous optimism), and asks why choosing to paint the scream more than the horror, the violence of sensation, more than the violence of the spectacle, is an act of vital faith. In his clearest and most unambiguous passage Deleuze writes of Bacons indomitable and visceral spirituality which has supplanted hoary old religious truisms and transcendental myths:
But why is it an act of vital faith to choose the scream more than the horror, the violence of sensation more than the violence of the spectacle? The invisible forces, the powers of the future are they not already upon us, and much more insurmountable than the worst spectacle and even the worst pain? Yes, in a certain sense every piece of meat testies to this. But in another sense, no. When, like a wrestler, the visible body confronts the powers of the invisible, it gives them no other visibility than its own. It is within this visibility that the body actively struggles, afrming the possibility of triumphing, which was beyond its reach as long as these powers remained invisible, hidden in a spectacle that sapped our strength and diverted us. It is as if combat had now become possible. The struggle with the shadow is the only real struggle. When the visual sensation confronts the invisible force that conditions it, it releases a force that is capable of vanquishing the invisible

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force, or even befriending it. Life screams at death, but death is no longer this all-too-visible thing that makes us faint; it is this invisible force that life detects, ushes out, and makes visible through the scream. Death is judged from the point of view, and not the reverse, as we like to believe. Bacon, no less than Beckett, is one of those artists who, in the name of a very intense life, can call for an even more intense life. He is not a painter who believes in death. His is indeed a gurative misrabilisme, but one that serves an increasingly powerful Figure of life. . . In the very act of representing horror, mutilation, prosthesis, fall, or failure, they have erected indomitable Figures, indomitable through both their insistence and their presence. They have given life a new and extremely direct power of laughter. (Deleuze 2003: 612)

This ethos is clearly linked to Bacons efforts, following Michelangelo, to render life and time visible through the material of the body. For Bacon there is the chronomatic force of changing time which he depicts through the allotropic variation of bodies, and which involves a degree of gural deformation; and then there is the force of eternal time, the eternity of time, which is established through the unitingseparating that reigns in the triptychs, a pure light. One can begin to discern the reason for Deleuzes insistence upon the complete evacuation of represented narrative from Bacons work (as he insists is evident within Michelangelos work too), or at least its relegation to secondary traces or residues. What Bacons work ultimately tries to gure is an expression of something fundamentally inexpressible, what it brings to visibility is something which is usually invisible, what it attempts to gure is the un-gurable. His work cannot be simply reduced to a matter of what is straightforwardly representational or narrative, since these imply the prior existence of things, events and ideas to be merely represented as such. It presupposes that all the things in Bacons paintings exist prior to the work as something to be represented or narrated. For Deleuze, Bacons ultimate theme lies outside all such coordinates, in much the same way as the divine celestial realm had for the classic Christian painters. There, a sensation (an affective element) of these realms could be allied to the familiar representational coordinates of the religious or theological dogmas of the time. With Bacon no such scripture exists apart from his own lived reality in time, his own nervous system, which he transmutes into gures resonating and hystericised by the invisible forces and intensities of the virtual in matter and the eternity of time. Having established the spiritual dynamics and thematics of Bacons work, this paper will now proceed with an analysis of how that work specically functions to encapsulate a certain sensation of time, namely of eternity. Deleuze initially establishes the key elements in their

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structural mechanics. Underpinning their mechanics is the principle of rhythm. In the triptychs, he argues, rhythms become characters and objects. By initially focusing on their rhythmic characteristics, Deleuze identies three basic rhythms being circulated across the separated panels of many triptychs. 1. A steady or attendant rhythm 2. Crescendo or simplication 3. A diminuendo or elimination Referring to Bacons triptychs, Deleuze attempts to uncover each of their rhythmic elements and demonstrate the full complexity of their actual interplay across the panels. The attendant rhythmic character does not necessarily always signify a straightforward visible observer or spectator/voyeur despite their frequent appearance in triptychs (for example, the presence of a voyeuristic gure in the right panel of Triptych Inspired by T.S. Eliots Poem Sweeney Agonistes, 1967; a sinister cameraman in the right panel of Triptych Studies from the Human Body, 1970, and the spectators in both the left and right panel of the Crucixion Triptych, 1965). Rather the attendant refers to a constant function, a steady measure or cadence in relation to which spectators are able to discern or distinguish rhythmic variation. This function can have multiple objects which might include, but not be restricted to, the circular arena, photographic apparatus, photographs of gures, faces or objects which are attened out onto two dimensional mirror-like surfaces, or it can be presented in several gures. Deleuze claims that it can be gured through at hysterical smiles, the prone bodies of sleepers, and/or coupled or copulating bodies. These are dened as attendants because of their steady and almost constant horizontality. This horizontal quality denes a rhythm without increase or decrease, augmentation of diminution. However, the attendant function is anything but simple, and Deleuze goes some considerable way to further developing an account of its apparent complexity. Whilst the attendant function can initially be seen as something deliberately imposed upon certain visible characters in the paintings, it actually abandons them to become an autonomous rhythmic character which emerges into existence at different points throughout the three panels of a triptych. It does this by being assigned as that character by the active rhythmic characters in other parts of the painting. This dynamic, autonomous and self-generating character of the work is clearly something that resonates deeply with Bacons own understanding of the process of auto-composition and auto-guration. In an interview

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with Sylvester from 1979, Bacon said: I dont really think my pictures out, you know; I think of the disposition of the forms and then I watch the forms form themselves (Sylvester 1987: 136). This auto-formation of forms explains the type of emergence of the attendant rhythmic character in triptychs that Deleuze indicates. Attendant function might subsequently emerge from gures in full context which, if isolated from the entire composition, might actually appear to have either active or passive rhythms. For Deleuze this is why some of the prone sleeping characters in the triptychs have an odd trace of activity or passivity so although explicitly situated across the horizontal they retain a certain heaviness or vivacity, relaxation or contraction, that comes from elsewhere. Equally, attendants can be seen as assuming other functions as on the brink of turning to an active rhythm or passive rhythm thus linking themselves to one or the other and ceasing to be an attendant.8 This uid autonomy creates not only great tension and instability but is also indicative of an extraordinary mobility within triptychs, what Deleuze terms their great circulation. It is as if the triptychs function like musical machines possessing a range of different rhythmic permutations. Having introduced the attendant rhythmic character, Deleuze proceeds with an explanation of the two vertical directions of active and passive rhythms. The simplest variation consists of descending or rising opposition (for example, Triptych Three Studies for a Crucixion, 1962) or perhaps a diastolic/systolic opposition. Occasionally the opposition at play is between being naked or clothed, or an augmentation/diminution of the esh. Throughout different triptychs there exists an extraordinarily subtle and diverse process of additions and subtractions. The example which Deleuze talks about in most detail is Bacons Triptych August, 1972 depicting George Dyer, which he claims is Bacons most profoundly musical painting. Across this triptych Bacon uses gural mutilation and prostheses in a game of added and subtracted values (Deleuze 2003: 79). The triptych is like an assemblage of hysterical sleepings and wakings affecting diverse parts of the body. Here, the attendant couple in the centre panel are accompanied by organic elongations and a clear and well dened mauve oval. On the left panel the gure has a diminished torso, having had a signicant portion of its body subtracted; while on the right the gure is in the process of being built up or added to. However, everything changes if one looks at the legs. In the left panel one leg is completed while the other is being subject to further addition and denition, while in the right panel, it is just the opposite one leg has been amputated

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and the other is apparently owing away. Correlatively the dened mauve oval in the centre panel changes its status within the other two panels on the left panel it is transformed into a pink liquid pool lying next to the chair, and then becomes a red liquid discharge owing out from the gures leg in the right panel. For Deleuze this profoundly musical triptych is emblematic of the degree of rhythmic complexity and variation achieved by triptychs. The diverse oppositions across different panels are never logically equivalent in any normal sense and their different terms never quite coincide. What triptychs represent is a radical combinatorial freedom where multiple permutations can be produced. Each and every element can coexist in a unied way share a simple matter-of-fact yet the different oppositions set up can vary in diverse ways or even be reversed depending on the perspective or viewpoint that one adopts as a viewer. One cannot assign a single univocal role to the centre panel, since the constancy they seemingly imply can change depending on the case at hand. Hence, the horizontal of the constants govern extremely variable terms from the viewpoint of both their nature and their relation. The dynamic circulation is always composed of variable, opposable rhythms (where each operates as the retro-gradation of the other) offset against a common and constant value in the attendant rhythm. At this point, in developing his understanding of the active rhythm, Deleuze insists upon the primacy of the fall in Bacons triptychs. However, it is not a sense of descent which should be identied with any straightforward spatial notion. The active is a fall in the sense of it being a descending passage of sensation, a passage identifying variation and difference of level within sensation. He claims that differences of intensity in sensation are often experienced and gured in Bacons work as a fall. Flesh descends from bones, the body descends from arms and thighs. Sensation develops though this fall by falling from one level to another. The fall thus exists to afrm a variation in level. Whilst Deleuze reiterates Bacons view that one shouldnt confuse the violence of sensation with the violent spectacle, he also indicates that the socalled fall of a sensation should not be confused with a fall through spatial extension. Rather the fall records variation and change and is simply what is most vital and alive in sensation. The fall is that which is experienced as the sensation of living. This does not of course preclude the possibility that it could coincide with a spatial descent. But equally it could coincide with a rise. It could also be expressed through a variety of different movements in the paintings diastolic or systolic, dilation or dissipation, diminution or augmentation. In this sense, the fall as

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the measure of variation in sensation is precisely what is meant by the active rhythm in the triptychs. Again, this active rhythm is uid and variable, and the degree to which it is assigned to a particular gure or object within the painting rests upon which viewpoint or perspective one chooses to adopt. It thus exchanges its function with the passive rhythm. Having analysed the different rhythmic characters associated with the triptychs, Deleuze establishes what he describes as the laws of the triptychs. 1. There are three distinguishable, rhythmic gures. 2. There is the existence of an attendant rhythm which circulates uidly through the panels as both visible attendant and rhythmic attendant. 3. There is a determination of an active and passive rhythm with all of the variations that depend on the character chosen to represent the active rhythm by the spectator. Having set out these formal laws, Deleuze concludes by claiming that they broadly embody a profoundly irrational logic, a logic of sensation, that constitutes the art of painting in general. By stressing the power and vitality of this non-normative logic and non-voluntaristic means of composition, Deleuze instinctively aligns his own account again and again with Bacon. In 1979 Bacon told Sylvester:
One of the things Ive always tried to analyse is why it is that, if the formation of the image that you want is done irrationally, it seems to come on to the nervous system much more strongly than if you knew how you could do it. Why is it possible to make the reality of an appearance more violently in this way than by doing it rationally? Perhaps its that, if the making is more instinctive, the image is more immediate. (Sylvester 1987: 121)

The full complexity of the formal elements now established, Deleuze crucially shifts his attention to the question of what forces correspond to the triptychs. What precisely is this complex machinic apparatus a means of capture for? And in what way does this force impact upon the structure of the triptychs? In the triptychs the question of the relation between the different Figures becomes extremely signicant. Figures are violently projected onto the eld and are often governed by the simplicity and clarity of uniform colour or naked light. In many cases, the gures look like trapeze artists whose milieu is nothing but light or colour. The particular methodology identied by Deleuze within triptychs is again something Bacon talks about with Sylvester. Particularly in relation to the question of precision and clarity: Ive increasingly wanted to make

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the images simpler and more complicated. And for this to work it can work more starkly if the background is very united and clear. I think that probably is why I have used a very clear background against which the image can articulate itself (Sylvester 1987: 121). Deleuze observes that if this unity and clarity of light or colour immediately incorporates and unies the relationship between Figures and the Field, the result is that Figures also attain their maximum separation in light and colour. A force of separation or division sweeps over them, placing them within an almost spiritual milieu of eternity. This separation is therefore the unique principle of the triptychs (their pictorial fact) maximum unity of light and colour for the maximum division of Figures. It is the force of this separating light and colour that engenders the distinct yet interrelated, rhythmic characters. The separation of bodies in universal light and colour becomes the common fact of the Figures their overall rhythmic being a disjunctive synthesis a union that separates. A joining-together acts to separate the Figures and colours. Such, Deleuze claims, is the quality of light. Figures separate while falling into black light; colour elds separate while falling into white light. In the triptychs everything becomes aerial the separation itself is in the air. Here time is no longer simply expressed in the apparent chromatism of bodies via the broken tones across esh it has become a monochromatic eternity. In the triptychs an immense space-time unites all things as if in a fourth temporal dimension. Deleuze writes of how triptychs, evacuated of any straightforward narrative linkage, unite things only by introducing between them
the distances of a Sahara, the centuries of an aeon. Within the triptychs there resides the mysterious force of the eternity of time. The three canvases remain separated, gures within them remain separated, yet they are no longer isolated. They are united within the eternity of time. The frames or borders of each panel and the outlines of each gure no longer refer to the limited unity of each but represent and gure the distributive unity of all. (Deleuze 2003: 85)

In Bacons triptychs a profound sensation of eternal time is being gured, producing brilliant aberrant gural spaces which resonate historically with the greatest achievements in religious art to gure the divine celestial realm. Bacons rhythmic characters ow with an extraordinary dynamism across the vast spaces of the monochromatic eternity presented within the triptychs, each expressing a new spiritualism of matter, a new spiritualism of the body, as they perform their small embodied feats upon the grand amphitheatre of nowhere,

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all playing their different roles in the musicality of becoming. Deleuzes most complex and controversial claim about Francis Bacon in The Logic of Sensation is thus to recongure him as a Spinozistic mystic, engaged in the profoundest of spiritual revaluations of existence through art. In the Ethics Spinoza denes eternity as that which stands outside all duration or time Eternity can neither be dened by time nor have any relation to time (Spinoza 1992: 214). True eternity stands outside of all temporal categories whatsoever. Before, after, now, later and all such ascriptions are completely inapplicable to what is eternal. According to Spinoza God and Substance are both eternal, and even individuated and singular things as instances of substance are eternal. Despite the fact that we have no recollection of our own bodily emergence from eternity we feel and experience that we are eternal (Spinoza 1992: 214). For individuated bodies to be seen as eternal they must be considered not in their temporally and spatially bound state, where they are in relation to other nite things in their normal durational existence, but from a more abstract perspective as atemporal essences what Spinoza terms sub specie aeternitatis. Thus, according to Deleuzes reading of Bacons triptychs, what Bacon ultimately manages to elaborate is a profound spiritual mechanics for displaying Figures under the aspect of eternity.

Notes
1. It is the revelation of the spirit immanent to the body which Deleuze suggests as the entire spiritual thematic of Bacons work. This point is claried in the chapter on Hysteria where Deleuze links the spiritualism of Wilhelm Worringers Gothic Line to Artauds Body-Without-Organs: It [the Gothic Line] attests to a high spirituality, since what leads it to seek the elementary forces beyond the organic is a spiritual will. But this spirituality is a spirituality of the body; the spirit is the body itself, the body without organs (Deleuze 2003: 467). 2. This text rst appeared in Artforum in January 1984, and is republished (with minor emendations) as a preface to the English translation of The Logic of Sensation. 3. See Deleuzes remarks in The Logic of Sensation (Deleuze 2003: 978) regarding rst and second order guration in Bacons work. 4. This would seem to call for a rigorous study of Hegels remarks on the history and development of Christian painting in the second volume of his Aesthetics. When writing of how certain painters had depicted Christs suffering on the cross, he notes how some masters discovered an entirely peculiar tone of colour which is not found in the human face. They had to disclose the night of the spirit, and for this purpose fashioned a type of colour which corresponds in the most splendid way to this storm, to these black clouds of the spirit that at the same time are rmly controlled and kept in place by the brazen brow of the divine nature (Hegel 1975: 824). Hegel writes at length about how painters had to betray the verisimilitude of representation in order to express spiritual depths

Triptychs, Eternity and the Spirituality of the Body 273

and sensations. Deleuzes own remarks on what he calls the accident and the depiction of Christs body in the history of Christian painting recall Hegels remarks. Deleuze notes how Christ is besieged, and even replaced by accidents (Deleuze 2003: 124). This differentiation is marked in Deleuzes text with the capitalised form of Figure. Note Deleuzes use of the specically religious notion of revelation. In a footnote to this passage Deleuze cites Luciano Bellosis work on Michelangelo, which has shown how Michelangelo destroyed the narrative religious fact in favour of a properly pictorial or sculptural fact (Deleuze 2003: 196). Of particular note here are the two spectral gures in the left panel of Triptych Three Studies for a Crucixion, 1962. These two gures hover and resonate with an ambiguous rhythmic character that is extremely disturbing and affective.

5. 6. 7.

8.

References
Deleuze, Gilles (2003) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles (2006) Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 19751995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, New York: Semiotexte. Hegel, G. W. F. (1975) Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume II, trans. Malcolm Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spinoza, Baruch (1992) Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Sylvester, David (1987) The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, third revised edition, London: Thames and Hudson.

DOI: 10.3366/E1750224109000634