Painting

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chapter 27

ph enom enol ogica l a n d
a e sth etic epoché :
pa i n ti ng th e i n v isibl e
thi ngs themselv es
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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 affairs 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 nonvisual 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 different
sorts, can be given in a manifold of ways and present themselves on the basis of nonthingly experiential dimensions. Accordingly, and without transcending the limits of
sensuous experience, phenomenologists have investigated supra-thingly and infrathingly phenomena and their relation to things. They 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 difference 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 unapparent and absent moments. There is, indeed, no such thing as an adequate visual perception 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. This
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 perfectly match or mirror one another. This non-coincidence or difference is what Husserl
means by the ‘inadequate intuitive fulfilment’ of all thing-perception. This 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 fleeting and partial adumbrations of it. According
to this first scenario, the lack is entirely on the side of the givenness of the thing perceived 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. The
thing shows qualities and meanings the perceiver did not expect and its shining appearance carries a ‘comet tail’ of other possible appearances and other things possibly appearing. 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 perception 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 efficiently 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 phenomenological epoché—that is, a suspension of the normal course of perceptual life.
Thus, the ‘things themselves’ attended to by phenomenology are not ordinary things,
but things in their mode of givenness, the ‘pure phenomena’ disclosed by the phenomenological epoché. The 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 phenomenological perceiver takes advantage of an (actively produced or passively undergone) interruption 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 appearances of things.
It is thus only a phenomenological epoché of natural life that makes the phenomenologist aware of the interplay between lack and excess that characterizes the intentional correlation between a perceiver and a thing perceived. Depending on her
specific interests, the phenomenologist will then behave according to the first or second 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 confirm her views and to make certain that her perception
is correct. This first 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 examined. Phenomenology of perception thus becomes a branch of a ‘theory of knowledge’
(Erkenntnistheorie). Another phenomenologist, more interested in the things themselves 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. The first and
most obvious question to be asked is then whether performing or submitting oneself
to a kind of phenomenological epoché is necessary (and sufficient?) 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 MerleauPonty’s account of Cézanne is more than an application of his phenomenology of bodily perception and whether Henry’s account of Kandinsky is more than an application
of his phenomenology of pure self-affection. 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 perception 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 phenomenologists 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 substantially—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 commanded 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 phenomenon. 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), first compared the attitude of the phenomenologist 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 familiarity 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 manifold of ever changing appearances. It would be wrong, however, to view this transformation 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 appearances always appear to someone. However, it is no less true that artists and phenomenologists 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 phenomena as mere phenomena.
It goes without saying that attending to the shining beauty of appearances and attending 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 afternoon 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 first made her aware of the
beauty of this thing. It also goes without saying that a pictorial epoché and a phenomenological epoché suspend different sorts of prejudices. The 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. The phenomenologist will have to forget all scientific theories about the nature of perception and the physical 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, scientific 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 find his lengthy critical discussion of Descartes’s theory of visual perception as a spiritual inspection of coloured shapes that are localized in an homogeneous 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 intellectual reconstruction that overlooks the simplest phenomena of bodily perception. On
the positive side of the pictorial epoché we find Merleau-Ponty’s stress on the ‘ambiguity’
in the appearing of things, on ‘the gaze of things’, on the sensible logic of a ‘seeing according 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 infinite variety of leaves, both apples with round volumes detached
from a table and the same apples with uncertain contours mixing with the flat 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. This 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 uncertain and changing modes of appearing belonging to the ordinary things of our perception. 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 seeing 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 completely foreign to us. Whether we perceive our own body or the things around us, perceiver and perceived are always ‘cut from the same cloth’ (taillés dans la même étoffe).
They are not different by nature but become different only by the very process of perception that introduces a ‘distance’ (écart) in what naturally hangs together. There 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 first hand) would
not also apply to the relation between my perceiving body and the things perceived by
me (and others). This 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? This 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 first question is
put to the painter by the things. For us all to share this experience, it suffices 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. Things 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 find 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’ (MerleauPonty 2004: 296) of the interrogative gaze of the landscape, Cézanne’s reply to its mystery 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 appearance of which is both ambiguous and enigmatic, through his notion of a ‘seeing according 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 reflected 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 difference from
water for a new aesthetic experience of a ‘radiation of the visible’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004:
313)—that is, the resonance between different fluid colours vibrating in the hot summer
light. Just imagine what Monet could have made of this. Expressed in philosophical language, 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 visible 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. The 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.
Thus, 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 different colours and material elements, the unity of a composition in juxtaposed appearances, and so on. They also see and paint the ordinarily overlooked conditions of these appearances: light and shadows, reflections, 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 . . . There is something ‘magical’ (MerleauPonty 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’. The magic art of painting thus suspends the common difference 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 reflections
of light, the difference between the visible and the invisible becomes ‘undecidable’. Or, as
Merleau-Ponty’s image of the ‘chiasm’ or of a Moebius strip suggests, the difference
between the visible and the invisible results from a torsion of the same fabric or ‘flesh’.
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 difference between things and their mode of being becomes just as
uncertain as the difference between the visible and the invisible. And in her new seeing 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.
Thus, transformed in her way of seeing the world by her seeing of art, she also sees
painted works of art differently. Sensitive to an overall proximity between the visible
and the invisible, when visiting an art museum she will pass from the contemplation
of figurative paintings to the contemplation of abstract paintings without noticing the
difference.
However, and despite what all painted works of art have in common and what philosophers 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 categories. 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. This will also sharpen our awareness of what distinguishes a perception 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 difference between the mode of perceiving belonging to the painter and to the phenomenologist. This is necessary to avoid confusing a phenomenological description of the nature
of (particular) painted works of art with a (general) account of a phenomenological perception 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. The 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 painting will look like when it is finished. Everything that we have learned from MerleauPonty 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 different parts of the canvas simultaneously, explicitly 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. Thus,
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’ waiting to be ‘translated’ into the ‘work’ of a painted image (Figal 2010: 206–30). Even if it
seems reasonable to think that painters see differently and see ‘more’ and than other
people, such acuity of perception (they actually share with connoisseurs) is insufficient
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 imagelike 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. The very act of painting can bring about a new and unforeseen way of perceiving, 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 first 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 classification 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. They thus become regions of the
canvas invested with particularly intensive ‘forces’. Diagrams destroy recognizable
humane forms and change them into ‘figures’ 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, phenomenological, and pictorial. It is less radical by leaving no room for chance. The geometrical 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 expression of completely chaotic forces. Underlying the difference 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-figurative’ 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 difference of the forces expressed as the true
reason for all the other differences between the three sorts of contemporary painting.
This 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 ‘figurative’ painting of the impressionists was thus less motivated by their will to further explore
the new possibilities offered 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 ‘figurative’ painting. Their new way of painting was thus


‘Finally, we will speak of the haptic . . . when sight discovers in itself a specific 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 difference between the forces experienced
that explains the difference between their painting—and not the other way around.
However, even so-called ‘figurative’ paintings actually owe much less to a mere perception of the world than one is often inclined to think. A perception—even under pictorial epoché—is at best a necessary but never a sufficient condition for producing a
painting (of whatever sort). In addition to perceiving light and shadows, reflections and
colour, empty space and depth in the real world, even a figurative painter creates an
imaginary world on her canvas. It suffices to think of a painter like Ingres to realize that,
strictly speaking, there can be no such thing as a ‘realistic’ art of painting. The 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 often 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 outside 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 concern for the composition of an artistic image. The composition of a painted image—
whether figurative 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 artificial coherence and visual unity. The totality of a particular painted image is thus essentially different from the natural and general
evidence belonging to visual ‘forms’ or ‘Gestalt’ and their spontaneous organization
through the perceptual schema of the contrast between figure and background. A painting 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 fictional 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 difference
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. The painted image as well as its motif or ‘image subject’ (Bildsujet)
(as Husserl would call it (Husserl 2005: no. 1, ch. 2ff )) are essentially and irremediably
affected by the frame and therefore remain purely fictional. The 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 fictional.
The same can actually be said of the techniques—already practiced with great virtuosity 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 something real. The 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
difference between what is real and what is unreal always work, in the end, to the disadvantage of reality. They 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’, paintings, 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. They are fictions
we can perceive—that is ‘perceptual fictions’—as Husserl most appropriately names
them (Husserl 2005: no. 18). As perceived images, paintings are not mere dreams or projections of mental images. As perceived fictions, however, paintings and their motifs are
separated from all ordinary perceptual reality. This is to say, that they require a specific
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 particular painting does to each of us and what these emotions or sensations can teach us about
its pictorial signification.
The limits of what one can and cannot learn about a proper way of looking at paintings also weigh on the achievements of a philosophical phenomenology of painting. One
often 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
often 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 common 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 modified by each particular painting. 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, unfortunately 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. The 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
signification. Thus, 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 interpretation 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-figurative modern paintings, these notions are still in need
of further qualification and specification to match what different painters and different
paintings by the same artist let one see.
Building further on Kant’s distinction between determinative and reflective judgements, one can say that the interpretation of a painting requires a reflective 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
The 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 battlefield 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. They 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 representing 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. The art of painting runs the risk of appearing as a mere servant to a
metaphysics that only philosophical thought and reflection can properly comprehend.
If one wishes to avoid this consequence, and if one also wishes to preserve the metaphysical relevance of painting, then a new kind of phenomenological or empirical philosophy 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. Thus, paintings do
not just illustrate or represent metaphysical forces that could be more directly experienced 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 affectivity.
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 affective selfmanifestation, life is the (immanent and self-affective) archi-phenomenon we can affectively 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. The metaphysical essence of life consists in being a phenomenon for itself. Life
is therefore always aware of itself; life is the ‘archi-subject’. (2) This self-manifestation of
life consists in an affective 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 participate in this original life; their individual lives are in essence not different from the archilife. There 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-affection, 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 affects’ that humans experience
their own life as an expression of the forces of the archi-life. They 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 affectively felt in the paintings of Kandinsky. The 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 affects 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 ‘affective tonality’ (Henry 2009: 35 et
passim); they are ‘cold and warm, bright and obscure’. When painting ‘our drives, our
affects, 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 affective forces in our lives and in Kandinsky’s
paintings, and also how both experiences identically derive from the metaphysical reality of a self-affection of the forces of archi-life. What is difficult to understand in this
double identity is not that Kandinsky (like most other contemporary painters and especially Bacon) wants to paint (‘spiritual’) forces, but that the forces contained in his paintings are said to be identical with the force of our affects and that they both must be
understood as an expression of the pathetic self-manifestation of archi-life itself. What
makes the difficulty 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 selfaffection or intimate self-manifestation of archi-life that is said to owe absolutely nothing to visibility, to the conditions of visibility, or to anything visible such as the
appearance of things in perceptual adumbrations. After having tried to make good sense
of the claim that painters attempt to make the invisible visible, we now find ourselves
confronted with the most implausible claim that Kandinsky’s paintings are about an
invisible expression of the forces of an invisible life.
This 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, ‘invisible’. Thus, 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. The same
holds for all the other pictorial ‘elements’ such as point, line, ‘plan’ or space, and so on.
The less figurative their use is, the better, because their true essence consists in nothing
else than an ‘affective 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. They are guilty of fixing our attention on the visible rather than helping us to abstract
from it. The 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
affects, 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. The forms and colours we see on
their canvases become mere occasions for us to feel the ‘affective 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. The presence and affective experience of the invisible forces of life is so strong in the pictorial
elements used by Kandinsky that we completely forget about their visibility. The meaning of Kandinsky’s paintings is thus not only ‘spiritual’ for Henry; it must be called religious. The 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 experiences are not only equiprimordial, they are essentially experiences of the same and
therefore only accidentally different. Just as our experience of archi-life through the
pathetic-affective experience of our own life is not psychological, so the presence of
archi-life in the affective tonalities of colours is not empirical but spiritual. Second,
painting and the other arts add, however, something substantial both to the self-manifestation of archi-life and to our pathetic-affective experience of life in our lives. Henry
never falls short of qualifications for what art adds to life and to its modes of self-manifestation and pathetic experience: ‘fulfilment’ (accomplissement), ‘exaltation’, ‘endless
renewal’, ‘expansion’, ‘intensification’, ‘growth’ (accroissement) of its forces, ‘creation of
new forces’, and so on (Henry 2009: 19 f., 121 ff.) Paintings thus come from life, paintings remain in life, and paintings return to life while contributing to its renewal, reinforcement, and enrichment.
The 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 flesh of the world that remains
invisible for common perception, far from expressing and refiguring the new phenomena 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 phenomenon. Second, for Henry, the forces expressed in paintings are and remain invisible—also in the paintings themselves! If painting means making something somehow
visible, then strictly speaking Kandinsky does not paint the spiritual forces his paintings are about. Third, the identification 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 inconveniences 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 especially to his careful interpretation of many paintings by Bacon. There 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 different
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 ‘deformation’ (‘not transformation’!) of human bodies by invisible forces. These forces of deformation ‘dissolve’ all visible ‘forms’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 173). They annihilate
all resemblance of the painted bodies with the perceptual forms of human bodies and
turn them into mere ‘figures’. These figures are a purely pictorial element in an art of
painting that is not ‘figurative’ any longer and that has left behind all concern for a
‘resembling representation’ of outer reality. As non-figurative figures, Bacon’s painted
human bodies are in essence not different 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. The ‘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. They show the process of ‘becoming animal’ of human bodies
that are exposed to inhuman forces. The ‘meat’ (viande) falling off the ‘bones’ makes visible how physical forces of gravity or acceleration work on human bodies, the animal
shadows of deformed human bodies show the beastly suffering caused by injuring
forces, the widely open mouth of a pope is a head screaming under the torture of unbearable 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-figurative paintings expressing how we human beings feel the invisible forces of life in the
mode of a pathetic affection that has nothing in common with the perception of mundane manifestations? Not at all. Deleuze’s ‘forces’ and ‘sensations’ are very different from
what Henry calls by these names. Bacons ‘forces’ are not spiritual forces of life and harmony, but material forces of destruction and dissonance. They also do not remain invisible 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 ‘material’ (matériau) of painting: ‘canvas support, paint-brush or equivalent agent, colour in


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

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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 (modified translation)). ‘Sensations’ made visible and becoming a pictorial element, refer to other, different sensations and to other, different 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 ‘affects’.
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—illustrates well what happens also to the spectator of his paintings. Affects, on the other hand,
are the sensations as they affect material bodies—not in how they look, but in how they
feel and are changed in their nature by these feelings. Unlike internally felt affections, these
affects are about how invisible forces affect painted figures and how these forces make
‘humans become non-human’ suffering animals (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 173). Bacon’s
paintings are thus about a de-objectivation of perception and a de-subjectivation of affection: ‘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 affect from affections as the transition from one state to another’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 167). This 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. They are blocs of excessive sensations, pure expressions of the overwhelming presence of the invisible forces to which they are subjected. The
pope’s mouth is the scream—not made ‘flesh’, but ‘meat’ and bone/teeth.
Put in a very schematic way, one can say that Deleuze and Henry agree in their disagreement with Merleau-Ponty but that they completely disagree about the proper way to
depart from philosophy of painting based on a phenomenology of perception. They
agree that the ‘invisible forces’ a non-figurative art of painting is about do not belong to
‘the flesh 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 transfiguration of perception, of the perceiver, and of the perceived. To perceive how invisible forces act on bodies, the bodies must be subjected to a violent deformation of their recognizable forms and to a blurring of their human signification.
Merleau-Ponty’s ‘flesh 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 ‘affects’ and ‘percepts’—
that is, materialized ‘sensations’ of bodily ‘figures’ 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
affects us in Bacon’s paintings is animal meat suffering 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. This ‘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.
This is not the place to further develop the differences 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 metaphysics of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the art of painting. Deleuze’s account of painting
differs radically, however, from Henry’s through its effort to reduce all reference to subjectivity 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 ‘affects’ 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 figures, rings, and aplats if these are not treated as (representations of) mundane 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 without a subject for whom they are how they appear to it.

References
Deleuze, G. (2003), Francis Bacon: The 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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