Deleuze on Francis Bacon’s Paintings: A Performative Witnessing of Coloring Sensation Among Schoolchildren

Abstract

Inspired by the work of the Irish-born British figurative painter, Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze, one of the most influential French philosophers of the 20th century, wrote a book titled, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. In this book, Deleuze creates novel concepts of coloring sensation that rely on relations between colors or the juxtaposition of tints and hues in relation to feelings or perceptions, resulting from something that happens to or comes into contact with the body. Deleuze illuminates how Bacon uses the figure, colors, contours, and broken tones to show raw and dark motifs such as horror, vulnerability, and brutality. Using loosely connected scenes, narrative interruptions, storyline turns, recitations, and pedagogical moments, I show a tissue of coloring sensations among children in a primary school that will not be stilled, calmed, or dimmed. In this way, I pursue a desiring, political aesthetics of pedagogical, scholarly, and life-wide meanings.