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"The School of Francis Bacon opens up the valves of Sensationism. In the Beginning there was always already only Sensation which was always always already before the construction of the conceptual, meaning and narrative - (which are always already added after the event of Sensation). Abstract Art does not exist. Conceptual Art does not exist. Contemporary Art does not exist. Sensation of the Image exists. Sensation is Image. Sensation is Being. Being is Sensation. Truth is Sensation. Being Sensation. Truth Sensation."

"Art negates the conceptualization foisted on the real world...The truth of works of art hinges on whether or not they succeed, in accordance with their inner necessity, to absorb the non-conceptual and the contingent. For their purposefulness requires the purposelessness, which is illusion...Aesthetics cannot hope to grasp works of art if it treats them as hermeneutical objects. What at present needs to be grasped is their unintelligibility...By its mere existence, every artwork, as alien artwork to what is alienated, conjures up the circus and yet is lost as soon as it emulates it. Art becomes an image not directly by becoming an apparition but only through the counter-tendency to it...The subject only becomes the essence of the artwork when it confronts it foreignly, externally, and compensates for the foreigness by substituting itself for the work...Actually, only what does not fit into this world is true."

Edgar Degas, Degas by himself, Edited by Richard Kendall, Macdonald & Co., 1987.

"It is not the strength but the duration of exalted sensations which makes exalted men."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Maxims and Interludes, Beyond Good and Evil, Penguin Classics, 1973.

"Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness."

"Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations - always darker, emptier, simpler than these."

"I'll tell you how I think of my own work: it unlocks the valves of sensation at different levels."

Francis Bacon from Remarks from an Interview with Peter Beard, Edited by Henry Geldzahler.

"Clear out the inner world! There are still many false beings in it! Sensation and thought are enough for me."

"Art can cease to be a report on sensations and become a direct organisation of higher sensations. It is a matter of producing ourselves, and not things that enslave us."

Guy Debord, These on Cultural Revolution, Guy Debord and the Situationist International, The MIT Press, 2002.

"We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose."

"What I am trying to convey to you is more mysterious; it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the impalpable source of sensations."

"Colette found a language to express a strange osmosis between her sensations, her desires, her anxieties – ‘those pleasures thoughtlessly called physical’ – and the infiniteness of the world, the blossoming of flowers, the rippling of beast, sublime apparitions, contagious monsters."

"Baudelaire's obsession, his 'speciality' (indeed, his trademark), was the 'sensation of the new'. Benjamin speaks of 'the inestimable value for Baudelaire of nouveauté. The new cannot be interpreted, or compared. It becomes the ultimate retrenchment of art.' Making novelty 'the highest value' was the strategy of l'art pour l'art, the aesthetic position Baudelaire adopted in 1852."

Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectic of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, MIT Press, 1991.

"Art challenges commonsense experiences by composing sensations which are a composite of percepts and affects from the perspective of aesthetic theories."

Tamsin Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments In Visceral Philosophy, Cornell University Press, 1999.

"...the notion of sense data or sensation itself is really a part of a scientific theory of perception, not a philosophical theory. . . Philosophers often have to rush in where behaviourists fear to tread."

"One might have thought that a philosophy of 'absolute knowledge' would have to renounce sensation. On the contrary, we see that absolute knowledge can only be effected through beings who are essentially sensing, that is, essentially constituted by an immediate relation to an apparent other, which is equally to say that we must be embodied."

John Russon, The Systematics of Hegel's Visual Imagery, Sites of Vision, Edited by David Michael Levin, The MIT Press, 1997.

"Let us turn briefly to the philosophical debate that asks whether a sensation is a thought. This debate has important ramifications for contemporary philosophical inquiry, but its origins date back to antiquity....Sensation, which cannot be reduced to ideas even though it is intrinsically dependent on them, can never be equivalent to Intelligence...Nevertheless, sensation can only exist if it makes itself intelligible...The difficulty of defining sensation prompts us to shift our discussion to a disorder that has attracted the attention of psychotherapists, psychiatrists, neurologists, and contemporary psychoanalysis: autism...I refer to this ailment because its specialists have offered a useful theoretical understanding of sensation and of the relationship between sensation and language."

Julia Kristeva, Is Sensation a Form of Language? ; Time and Sense, New York : Columbia University Press, 1996.

"Proust thus uncovered a form of memory, beyond the control of our consciousness. Recollection is suggested by some unexpected physical sensation (perhaps unimportant in itself) such as a faint scent, taste, or sound. But that sensation has in the past been associated with a number of definite impressions, and when by chance the identical sensation recurs years afterwards, all the impressions (associated with it) also rush back, en masse. 'It is a complete fragment of the past, with its original perfume, that is for a moment given back to us.' Resurrection of the past as the aftermath of an accidental, involuntary physical sensation is the keystone of Proust's conception of life and art. It combines past and present."

Jeannette Lowen, Doing Time with Marcel Proust, Humanism & the Arts, Council for Secular Humanism.

''Disgust uses images of sensation or suggests the sensory merely by describing the disgusting thing so as to capture what makes it disgusting...For one thing, it is easy to come up with words to describe disgusting sensations when these are moist, viscid, pliable, than when they are dry, free flowing, or hard. For every disgusting scabby or crusty thing there are tens of disgusting oozy, mucky, gooey, slimy, clammy, sticky, tacky, dank, squishy, or filmy things...We thus talk of how our senses are offended, of stenches that make us retch, of tactile sensations of slime, ooze, and wriggly, slithering, creepy things that make us cringe and recoil...because the threatening thing is disgusting, one does not want to strike it, touch it, or grapple with it. Because it is frequently something that has already gotten inside of you or takes you over and possesses you, there is often no distinct other to fight anyway."

William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, Harvard University Press, 1997.

"The primordial manifestation, the 'will' with its scale of sensations of pleasure and displeasure, gains an ever more adequate symbolic expression in the development of music, and this historical process is accompanied by the perpetual striving of lyrical poetry to circumscribe music in images. This dual phenomenon can be found performed in language from its first beginnings, as has just been shown."

"What can the philosophizing person stake? Answer: his own anxiety and boredom, his own listening to the call of conscience. Any philosophizing that does not take its beginning from the moments of true sensation is devoid of roots and relevance...In short, existential analytics, to be understood at all, requires existential engagement. Heidegger therefore must find a way to conjure up in his students those moments of true sensation. He must, in a sense, stage manage them...The moments of true sensation - anxiety, boredom, call to conscience - have to be aroused in his students so that the 'mystery off Dasein' that inhabits them may show itself."

Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, Harvard University Press, 1998.

"The difference between the impressionistic sensation, which is rapid, ephemeral and fleeting, and that of Cézanne is that his sensations result logically in the full knowledge of the subject in the classical sense. Cézanne often said that he wished to 'become classical again through nature, that is to say, through sensation.'..."

"Whenever something caught Francis Bacon's attention, his normally genial gaze took on a cold, piercing intensity - like a bird suddenly sporting its prey...If you were unfortunate enough to have that look returned on you (and if you spent much time with Bacon, at some point it became inevitable), you had the sensation of being taken apart, swiftly and mercilessly...Vision was where all the senses and all experience converged in their most complete and potent form..."

Michael Peppiatt, Bacon's Eyes, Francis Bacon & the Tradition of Art, Skira, 2004.

"Either you see a picture immediately or you never see it at all. Explanations don't help a bit. What good does it do to comment on it?...Listen, a writer like you expresses himself in abstractions, while the painter renders his sensations, his perceptions concrete through drawing and colour. If his sensations and perceptions are not on the canvas, visible to the eyes of others, then nothing you can say about them will make them comprehensible. I don't like literary painting."

Paul Cézanne, Conversation with Joachim Gasquet; Conversations with Cézanne, University of California Press, 2001.

"For Sellars, sensations are non-cognitive, because having a sensation is distinct from knowing about it. They are also non-linguistic, because thinking 'there is a pink ice cube' is phenomenologically different from sensing a pink ice cube. Sensations are described as 'self-presenting; even though they must be accompanied by a cognitive mental event for us to be aware that they are presenting themselves. And once we do know about them that knowing is considered to be 'non-inferential'. Unfortunately all of these descriptions are largely negative, and although there are many attempts by Sellars to describe this kind of knowing in positive terms, they are considered by many to be 'one of the most difficult and controversial aspects of his philosophy.'..."

Teed Rockwell, Experience and Sensation, Education and Culture: the Journal of the John Dewey Society, Winter, 2001.

"Beings will have to be thought of as sensations that are no longer based on something devoid of sensation. In motion, no new content is given to sensation. That which IS, cannot contain motion: therefore it is a form of being."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Book Three: Principles of a New Evaluation.

"I am becoming more lucid before nature, but always with me the realization of my sensations is always painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses....ma petite sensation..."

"How can we release sensations, affections, emotions from the tyranny of the 'I feel'? How can we reach the impersonal 'it feels'? How can we manage to find a land that is different from and extraneous to conventional feeling, in which personal experience founded on subjectivity at last collapses? Western philosophy has known the answer since the times of the ancient Greeks..."

Mario Perniola, Feeling the Difference, Extreme Beauty, Continuum: New York & London, 2002.

"Sensations were the root of everything for Cézanne. From the beginning to the end of his career, they were his pride and justification. ...The sensations for which he continued to seek an expression to the end of his life, as he explained to Henri Gasquet, the friend of his youth, were 'the confused sensations which we bring with us when we are born'. the word had, in fact, a double meaning - contact with nature 'revived within us the instincts, the artistic sensations that reside within us'. The double meaning of the word corresponds to the dual significance attaching to the paint marks themselves in the late work. It is in the last two years of Cézanne's life that the sensations are identified precisely as colour sensations, the sensations of colour that give light."

Lawrence Gowing, Cézanne: The Logic of Organised Sensations, Conversations with Cézanne, University of California Press, 2001.

"Deleuze, in his book on the painter Francis Bacon. and Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy?, characterize three elements of an artistic monument, citing the paintings of van Gogh, Gauguin, and Bacon as examples, which together render imperceptible sensory becomings perceptible. These elements are the flesh, the house, and the universe-cosmos. Deleuze says that the new problem of painting after Cézanne for all three painters was that of creating vast homogenous fields 'that carry toward infinity' as the ground for a figure/flesh which preserves the 'specificity or singularity of a form in perceptual variation. One might say that the 'flesh,' as the element of the painting most closely associated with an embodied subject, represents a perspective on sensory becoming. Although flesh is involved in revealing sensation, however, Deleuze and Guattari say it is no more than a thermometer of sensory becoming. The portraits of van Gogh, Gauguin, and Bacon depict flesh in unnatural colors and broken tones. This conveys some of the variability of a passage of sensory becoming in relationship to the universe-cosmos - the monochrome fields that ground the flesh....The relationship between the first element of flesh and the third element of the field or universe-cosmos is mediated by the second element, the house, or what, in reference to Bacon's paintings, Deleuze calls the contour. In Bacon's paintings, Deleuze claims that the contour - the circle or oval, chair or bed, on which the flesh or figure is placed - acts as the membrane through which a double exchange between the figure and the background field flows. It is in this second element of the house or contour that the body blossoms. It is he house or contour that gives sensation the power to stand on its own by acting as a kind of filter for cosmic forces. The painting creates a being of sensation that stands on its own. The being of sensation is not located in the figure of the painting; that is, it is not the flesh but rather the relationship among figure, house or contour, and universe-cosmos or field."

Tamsin Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments In Visceral Philosophy, Cornell University Press, 1999.

"Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion manifests a terrible, expressive violence. It does not represent any violent act. But some undefined and inhuman violence that occurred in an unseen space beyond the limits of the painting has impressed its horror on the forms and the coloured areas surrounding them...The human and bestial elements composing the figures, all rendered ambiguous by their respective deformation, are so impenetrable and enigmatic as to thwart comprehension of any explicit meaning. Any attempt to deduce prior intention in the morphology of these bodies by means of logic will fail, collapsing in admission that this painting leads into an unknown area, at whose boundaries conventional logic must halt. In Bacon, painting is not a field for the imitation of apparent reality, but an independent and artificial act emerging from the innermost and most instinctive needs of the individual, dominated exclusively by the profound, wild force of expression...More animal than human, so excessive as to become unaware of its own expressive implications: it is no longer capable of communicating anything intelligible. The very obscurity of the origin of this sensation and the likely identity of the visible subject allows the image to avoid any particular illustrative signification and penetrate instead to the quicker and more intuitive level of the mind: where sensations act, such as the modes of awareness that precede logic and run deeper than it...The profound, pre-rational faculty that emerges when a nearly superhuman force subverts the conventional order of knowledge is called sensation. And it is this that Bacon arouses and elaborates in the act of painting: it is a blind condition, because neither its nature, orientation, nor outcome are defined. It is a condition that transcends the normal state of the human condition, driving existence into a state of hypersensitivity, where it too is unaware of the outcome."

Luigi Ficacci, Bacon, 'Obsessed by Life', The Expression of Horror, Taschen, 2003.

"Philosophers are given to speaking of the will as if it were the best-known thing in the world...Let us therefore be more cautious for once, let us be 'unphilosophical' - let us say: in all willing there is, first of all, a plurality of sensations, namely the sensation of the condition we leave, the sensation of the condition towards which we go, the sensation of this 'leaving' and 'going' itself, and then also an accompanying muscular sensation which, even without our putting 'arms and legs' in motion, comes into play through a kind of habit as soon as we 'will'. As sensations, and indeed many varieties of sensation, can therefore be recognised as an ingredient of will, so, in the second place, can thinking: in every act of will there is a commanding thought - and do not imagine that this thought can be separated from 'willing', as though will would then remain over! Thirdly, will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an affect: and in fact the affect of command."

"In what the senses of sight, hearing, and touch convey, in the sensations o colour, sound, rough, roughness, hardness, things move us bodily, in the literal meaning of the word. The thing is the aistheton, that which is perceptible by sensations in the senses belonging to sensibility.. Hence the concept later becomes a commonplace according to which a thing is nothing but the unity of a manifold of what is given in the senses. Whether this unity is conceived as sum or as totality or as Gestalt alters nothing in the standard character of this thing-concept...We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and noises, in the appearance of things - as this thing-concept alleges, after we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen. Much closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves. We hear the door shut in the house and never hear acoustical sensations or even mere sounds. In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them, i.e., listen abstractly."

"In giving up the outline Cézanne was abandoning himself to chaos of sensation, which would upset the objects and constantly suggest illusions, as, for example, the illusion we have when we move our heads that objects themselves are moving if our judgment did not constantly set these appearances straight. According to Bernard, Cézanne 'submerged his painting in ignorance and his mind in shadows.' But one cannot really judge his painting in this way except by closing one's mind to half of what he said and one's eyes to what he painted. It is clear from his conversations with Emile Bernard that Cézanne was always seeking to avoid the ready-made alternatives suggested to him: sensation versus judgment; the painter who sees against the painter who thinks; nature versus composition; primitivism as opposed to tradition. 'We have to develop an optics,' Cézanne said, 'by which I mean a logical vision', that is, 'one with no element of the absurd.' 'Are you speaking of our nature?' asked Bernard. Cézanne: 'It has to do with both.' 'But aren't nature and art different?' 'I want to make them the same. Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting.'..."

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne's Doubt, Sense and Non-Sense, Northwestern University Press, 1964.

"To paint from nature is not to copy an object; it is to represent its sensations...The painter must become classical again through nature, or, in other words, through sensation. It all comes down to this: to have sensations and to read nature."

Paul Cézanne, Conversation with Emile Bernard, Conversation with Cézanne, University of California Press, 2001.

"The series of Rembrandt's self-portraits, for example, leads us into different domains of sensation. And it is true that painting - and this is especially so with Bacon - proceeds through series. The series of Crucifixions, the series of Popes, the series of portraits, of the mouth that smiles."

Gilles Deleuze, Painting and Sensation, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Flash Art, May 1983.

"...this sensation to be possessed by a sensation of dispossession and the answer I gave, this fight to conquer what nowhere can be found."

"The smoothness, the tumescence, the milky flow of feminine nudity anticipate a sensation of liquid outpour, which itself opens onto death like a window onto a courtyard."

"The things do not enter into consciousness, but rather the way that we stand towards the pithanon (sense data). The full essence of the thing is never grasped...Instead of the thing sensation perceives only a characteristic."

"Artuad appears to have been afflicted with an extraordinary inner life, in which the intricacy and clamorous pitch of his physical sensations and the convulsive intuitions of his nervous system seemed permanently at odds with his ability to give them verbal form."

Susan Sontag, Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, University of California Press, 1988.

"Thus, perceptions, presentations, volitions, and emotions, in short the whole inner and outer world, are put together, in combinations of varying evanescence and permanence, out of a small number of homogeneous elements. Usually, these elements are called sensations. But as vestiges of a one-sided theory inhere in that term, we prefer to speak simply of elements, as we have already done. The aim of all research is to ascertain the mode of connexion of these elements. If it proves impossible to solve the problem by assuming one set of such elements, then more than one will have to be assumed. But for the questions under discussion it would be improper to begin by making complicated assumptions in advance. The primary fact is not the ego, but the elements (sensations). What was said on p. 21 as to the term 'sensation' must be borne in mind. The elements constitute the I. s have the sensation green, signifies that the element green occurs in a given complex of other elements (sensations, memories). When I cease to have the sensation green, when I die, then the elements no longer occur in the ordinary, familiar association. That is all."

"If we try to seize ‘sensation’ within the perspective of the bodily phenomena which pave the way to it, we find […] a formation already […] endowed with a meaning...the sensor and the sensible do not stand in relation to each other as two mutually external terms, and sensation is not an invasion of the sensor by the sensible. It is my gaze which subtends colour, and the movement of my hand which subtends the object’s form, or rather my gaze pairs off with colour, and my hand with hardness and softness, and in this transaction between the subject of the sensation and the sensible it cannot be said that one acts while the other suffers the action, or that one confers significance on the other. Apart from the probing of my eye or my hand, and before my body synchronises with it, the sensible is nothing but a vague beckoning."

"Sensation is an extremity of perception. It is the limit at which perception is eclipsed by the sheerness of experience, unreasoned-out, yet unextended into analytically ordered, predictably reproducible, possible action."

Brian Massumi, The Evolutionary Alchemy of Reason, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998.

"I feel more and more that nothing matters or will happen until someone makes a new technical synthesis that can carry over from the sensation to our nervous system. The thing I was very shocked by when I saw our things at Unesco, your three and mine, was the boring lack of reality, the lack of immediacy which we have so often talked about."

Francis Bacon in a letter to Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Michael Peppiatt, Westview Press, 1996.

"Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting...We perceive things, we agree about them, they are deep-rooted in us and it is on the basis of this "nature" that we erect knowledge. It is this primeval world that Cézanne wanted to paint, and that is why his pictures give the impression of nature at its source, whereas photographs of the same landscapes suggest the works of humanity...when one looks at (his pictures) as a whole, (they give) the impression, as in normal vision, of a new order being born, of an object in the act of appearing, in the act of coming together in front of our eyes... In primeval perception, distinctions between touch and sight are unknown. It is the knowledge of the human body which teaches us in the end to distinguish between our senses. The actual experience is not found or made from sense data themselves, but directly presents itself as the center from which sense data radiate."

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne's Doubt, Sense and Non-Sense, Northwestern University Press, 1964.

"Suppose that power resides solely in the feeling of power, that, as Nietzsche says, 'It is not the works, it is the faith [or 'belief', der Glaube] that is decisive here, that determines the order of rank'. How in that case could the distinction between a rightful and a false claim be adjudicated, between 'active' willing and 'reactive' ressentiment? How could one tell (say) Zarathustra and Wagner apart if and insofar as both had the same feeling, the same pleasurable sensation of power (the same Gefuhl)? Power is inseparable from the sensation one has of power, because power depends upon a pleasurable feeling, upon a sensation of difference, 'a feeling of more power ('ein Plus-Gefuhl von Macht,'), or as he writes in Beyond Good and Evil, 'the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power.' This is the only criterion of power. How, then, can Nietzsche coherently deny to anyone who possesses the sensation a rightful claim to power? And how certifiable is the sensation? Does feeling certify power, or is it the other way round?...The will to power, so viewed, is now vulnerable to Nietzsche's critique of decadence and ressentiment (a term whose root meaning, in the sentiment of sensation, brings us back again to the problem of power as the sensation of power."

James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Seduction of Metaphysics, 2000, Department of Classical Studies, University of Michigan.

"How do words refer to sensations? - there doesn't seem to be any problem here; don't we talk about sensations every day, and give them names? But how is the connection between the name and the sensation set up? This question is the same as: how does a human being learn the names of sensations? - of the word pain, for example. Words are connected with the primitive, the natural, expressions of the sensation and used in their place...But suppose I didn't have any natural expression for the sensation, but only had the sensation? And now I simply associate names with sensations and use these names in descriptions."

Ludwig, Wittgenstein, The Private Langauge Argument, Philosophical Investigations.

"The self-realisation of the idea means that it negates itself and ceases to be a mere idea. What is then this not-thinking, that which is differentiated from thinking? It is the sensuous. The self-realisation of the idea means, accordingly, that it makes itself into an object of the senses. The reality of the idea is thus sensation. But reality is the truth of the idea; thus, sensation is the truth of the idea. Precisely so we managed to make sensation a predicate and the idea or thought a subject. But why, then, does the idea represent itself in sensation? Why is it not true when it is not real, that is, sensuous? Is not its truth made, therefore, dependent on sensation? Is not meaning and worth granted to the sensuous for itself, disregarding the fact that it is the reality of the idea? If sensation for itself is nothing, of what need is it to the idea? If only the idea gives value and content to sensation, then sensation is a pure luxury and a trifle; it is only an illusion that the idea presents to itself. But it is not so. The idea is required to realise itself and represent itself in sensation only because, unknowing to the idea, reality and sensation, independent of the idea, are presupposed as the truth. The idea proves its worth through sensation; how would this be possible if sensation were not unconsciously accepted as the truth? Because, however, one starts consciously with the truth of the idea, the truth of sensation is expressed only afterward, and sensation is made only into an attribute of the idea."

"Sensation, which is at the basis of sensible experience and intuition, is not reducible to the clarity or the idea derived out of it. Not because it would involve an opaque element resistant to the luminousness of the intelligible, but still defined in terms of light and sight. It is vulnerability, enjoyment and suffering, whose status is not reducible to the fact of being put before a spectator subject. The intentionality involved in disclosure, and the symbolization of a totality which the openness of being aimed at by intentionality involved, would not constitute the sole or even the dominant signification of the sensible. The dominant meaning of sensibility should indeed enable us to account for its secondary signification as a sensation, the element of cognition. We have already said that the fact that sensibility can become 'sensible intuition' and enter into the adventure of cognition is not a contingency. The dominant signification of sensibility is already caught sight of in vulnerability."

"Levinas's main aim in 'Sensibility and the Face' is to show that although the notion of sensation has been 'somewhat rehabbillitated,' it must always fall short of naming the relation to the face, the ethical relation. Sensation must always participate in the discourse of light which has defined it since Plato. Vision always discerns and receives beings in and from an illuminated space and against the backdrop of a horizon, a horizon which rules out the thought of beings as coming from elsewhere. They come as if from nowhere, as if from out of nothingness."

Paul Davies, The Face and the Caress, Levinas's Ethical Alterations of Sensibility, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, University of California Press, 1993.

"Philosophy teaches the eyelids to close tighter and tighter to bar anything still presented by the senses, teaches the gaze to turn inward to the soul, that screen for the projection of ideal images. The horror of nature is magicked away: it will be seen only through the blind of intelligible categories, and the weaknesses that ultimately will lay man low will be laid at the door of an insufficiently lofty point of view."

Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, Columbia University Press, 1991.

"As opposed to the violence of representation (the sensational, the cliché), Bacon proposes the violence of sensation.....When Bacon speaks of sensation, he means two things, both very close to the notion of Cézanne. Negatively, he says that the form as related to the sensation (Figure) is the opposite of the form related to an object which it is to represent (figuration). In the words of Valéry, sensation is that which is directly transmitted, avoiding the detours and ennui of the narrative. Positively, Bacon never tired of saying that sensation is that which passes from one 'order' to another, from one 'level' to another, one 'domain' to another. Thus sensation is the master of deformations, the agent of deformation of the body....Each sensation exists a different levels, in different orders and multiple domains. So one does not have different sensations of different orders, but different orders for one single sensation...The sensation is that which is paint. And the paint, in the painting, is the body, not inasmuch as it is represented as an object, but because it is capable of evoking that particular sensation...to paint sensation, which is essentially rhythm...But in simple sensation, rhythm still depends on the Figure, it presents itself as a vibration that traverses the body without organs, it is the vector of sensation, it is that which makes sensation pass from one level to another. In contrast, in the coupling of sensation, rhythm liberates itself already, since it confronts reunites diverse levels of different sensations: it is now resonance, but it is still confused with the melodic lines, the points and counterpoints of a coupled Figure; it is the diagram of the coupled Figure...Sensation is what is painted in painting. It is the body, but not in the same sense that the body is represented as an object: rather in the sense that the body is experienced as experiencing such sensations."

"However, even as he grants special privilege to painting, Deleuze acknowledges that all the modern arts can share in the quest for a logic of sensation...Deleuze notes, modern music often employs the aural as a way to capture the chromatic, and painting often uses the visual to grab at the invisible...we might say that Logique de la sensation is Deleuze's own 'pedagogy of the image' , constructing for us the representation of a painterly practice that deforms the world to make us see anew...Deleuze notes how the primacy of blue and red in Bacon's face's serves as a reminder of the fleshy, meaty aspect of the face, but in this way the colours open up the figure to temporality, becoming flesh in mutation. As Deleuze puts it, 'colour-structure gives was to colour-force; because each dominant, each broken tone indicates the immediate exercise of a force upon a corresponding zone of the body or the head, it renders force immediately visible.'..."

Dana Polan, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy (1994).

"In pursuit of the logic of sensation, where the philosopher, Deleuze, might be said to greet and conjoin briefly with the artist, Bacon, the former posits the notion of figure against that of figuration. Where figure is conceived as the direct relation of form to sensation, figuration is the stultification of form, the operation whereby form merely stands in place of the absent object that it is supposed to represent. Bacon's bullfights display the movement of bodily deformation and fleshy zones of indiscernibility that escape the facticity of experiencing flesh....That which Deleuze wants to celebrate, alongside the creation of concepts or the production of sense, is sensation, which he gives as the meeting place between things and thought, where difference continues to shimmer. Sensation, which sets the form into motion, participates in the surging forth of all the differential elements of life despite the persistent proximity of death."

Hélène Frichot, Bullfighting, Sex and Sensation , Colloquy Issue Five.

"He rejects illustration and narration and seeks to replace them with what he calls 'matters of fact'. These turn out to be nothing less than sensations that act directly on the nervous system...I am saying that it is the lamella that is the outcome of Bacon's efforts to avoid narrative and representation and to act directly on the nervous system. Bacon's matter of fact' turns out to be the lamella. Within Bacon's paintings there are, attached to bodies, flat bounded shapes. Usually they are called shadows by commentators. I want to think of them as the lamella...Not all the shadows are 'extra flat' but we can easily take the pink and mauve oozing matter to be the lamella...The violence of sensation has squeezed out a literal essence of being, the lamella, a puddle of being. To claim that the lamella appears in Bacon's work is to claim that he has taken the detachment of the gaze to its limit."

Parveen Adams, The Violence of Paint; The Emptiness of the Image, Routledge 1996.

"The opposition between intelligence and sensation is crucial for Bacon. Sensation may include intelligence but the intellect can bypass sensation. Bacon wants his painting to operate primarily through sensation, otherwise it becomes a mere vehicle: 'I want very, very much to do the thing that Valéry said - to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom comes upon you'...."

"The ways to avoid narrative or illustrative painting were by the abstract or the sensation, as Cézanne did. The Hegelian idea of sensing and feeling was translated by Cézanne into how to paint, how to use spontaneity and temperament and instinct and the nervous system and the vital moment to create a picture. He taught the Impressionists that sensations did not lie in the play of light and colour, but in the feeling for the form of an apple. Sensation was what was painted, not what as represented. It was what was lived while the sensation was experienced. Painting that sensation linked Cézanne to Bacon, and sensation was also the mistress of distortion. Every series of triptych by Bacon showed variants of sensation, which occasionally accumulated or coagulated....He sought the sensation that would best occupy the flesh....Above all, he tried to capture a vital rhythm in his visual sensation, as Cézanne had...He followed Cézanne in creating a sensation of endurance and clarity...The sensations of his life were the sensations of his painting."

Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life & Violent Times, 1993, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York.

"The narrative is not the content of perception, but defines the structure of perception itself. Deleuze's study can help us to develop this hypothesis. It pursues the question of what the implications are of certain key expressions that Bacon has often used in interviews: 'orders of sensation' , 'levels of sensation' , 'domains of sensation' and 'moving sequences'...When we see the levels of sensation as a plurality of senses, however, we lose sight of movement in Bacon's paintings. Precisely this movement was central to Deleuze's third reading of Bacon's expression 'the levels of sensation'. Moreover, although the notions of 'sense' and 'sense organ' seem to be important for an understanding of Bacon's paintings, the differentiation of sensation according to levels does not seem to be very relevant to these paintings."

Ernst Van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self, Reaktion Books, 1992.

"The idea of making a sensation was always bound up with the effort of épater le bourgeois and was adapted to the bourgeois interest of turning everything to a profit."

"Deleuze offers a systematic distinction between painting as art (the figural) and illustration (the figurative) by seeing Bacon's work as essentially painterly sensation."

Andrew Brighton, Francis Bacon, British Artists, Tate Publishing, 2001.

"Each picture draws attention away from the narrative to the physical, to sensation, to flesh, death, dreams, the drastic rush of violent haemorrhaging, the frenetic tangents of dizziness on a fast rotating planet."

"Total abandonment to instinct, above all sexual instinct, was an ideal which Bacon maintained with astonishing vigour to the end of his days...And when he said that he 'painted to excite himself', he surely meant: to re-create certain extreme sexual sensations."

Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Westview Press, 1996.

"The paint acquires a wonderful plenitude in becoming flesh. This kind of paint surface is part of the work of delivering sensations not propositions, and it is neither idly sumptuous nor 'ironically' sexy."

Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical, Selected Essays on Art and Artists, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1990.

"Like everything else in Bacon's pictures each element contributes not towards the creation of beauty, but to achieve the most vivid possible communication of a sensation."

Nigel Gosling, Report from The Underworld, The Observer Weekend Review, 27th May, 1962.

"Can you make of a head an image? An image which unlocks the valves of sensation deeper than the appearance? Of course, I'm drunk today and I don't really talk very clearly."

Francis Bacon interviewed by Hugh M. Davies on August 13 1973, from Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953.

"Fascism was the absolute sensation: in a statement at the time of the first pogroms, Goebbels boasted that at least the National Socialists were not boring. In the Third Reich the abstract horror of news and rumour was enjoyed as the only stimulus sufficient to incite a momentary glow in the weekend sensorium of the masses...Concepts like sadism and masochism no longer suffice. In the mass-society of technical dissemination they are mediated by sensationalism, by comet-like, remote, ultimate newness."

"Since, in his case, sensation takes precedence over ideation, and since his chief driving force is a vehement desire to grasp reality, we can say that Bacon has a frenzied, as well as effusive, approach to that reality which, above all other, he is endeavouring to translate, and that this frantic, almost panic, urge produces an emotional breaching of boundaries which introduces, into the texture of the canvas, the disturbance felt by the artist himself, so that it is less through deliberate than through what might be called affective, distancing that he achieves the sensation of presence, unobtainable otherwise either by a copy or an intellectual transcription."

Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon: Full face and in profile. Translated by John Weightman Rizzoli, New York, 1983.

"...ethics for Levinas depends upon a notion of alterity which is arrived at by way of a prior interrogation of ‘the instant’ and the subsequent attempt to articulate the breaching of temporal continuity. One consequence of this is that when considering art Levinas is drawn to the sensation of rhythm within an aesthetic experience, claiming that ‘participation’ within the discontinuous pulse both strips the I of its pre-eminence and instates the Other as primordial. As Otherness is here understood as occupying the fissures upon which rhythm depends, it is of interest to note Levinas’s subsequent denial of the aesthetic in the name of an ethics which, while purporting to take responsibility for the otherness of the Other, refuses to allow the aesthetic its own alterity or rhythm, its own irresponsibility."

Gary Peters, The Rhythm of Alterity, Levinas and Aesthetics, Radical Philosophy 82, March/April 1997.

"Concerning the simple ideas of Sensation, it is to be considered, - that whatsoever is so constituted in nature as to be able, by affecting out senses, to cause any perception in the mind, doth thereby produce in the understanding a simple idea; which, whatever be the external cause of it, when it comes to be taken notice of by our discerning faculty, it is by the mind looked on and considered there to be a real positive idea in the understanding, as such as any other whatsoever; though, perhaps, the cause of it be but a privation of the subject."

John Locke, Some further considerations concerning our Simple Ideas of Sensation, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690.

"The anus has had a peculiarly bad press in the history of philosophy. It wouldn't surprise me if, as it were, there's never been a philosophical treatise on the anus as such. What's peculiar is that even for those philosophies which since the eighteenth century have insisted on the correspondence of knowledge and sense experience, the sense experience which is admitted is quite extraordinarily restricted. I mean you could carry out the following experiment: if you were to read John Locke - on the relationship between the growth of sensation and its representation in and as philosophy - if you just read the book and you'd never seen a human being and then you were asked to draw the human being in question - like you read about this strange thing in Locke - now draw it - you' have a sort of strange thing. You'd have like an enormous head, almost no nose. It would have a huge mouth organ but you'd have to represent it that it's only for speaking - it's never eaten. It doesn't kind of need a lower half of the body at all. And as for the anus you could search its pages. Without anyone ever thinking the anus has ever played a role in developing human knowledge."

Mark Cousins, Damage & Object, public lecture, Architectural Association, 3rd November, 1995.

"...the bombardment of new sensations is continuous when a model is present...but usually it is a new sensation of proportion or connection, often revealed by the light...I have always had a predilection for economy, where one mark will stand for twenty sensations rather than where twenty marks stand for one sensation."

Frank Auerbach interview with Michael Peppiatt, Tate, Issue 14, Spring 1998.

"Not illustration of reality but to catch images which are a concentration of reality and a shorthand of sensation."

Francis Bacon to Melvyn Bragg, The South Bank Show, 1985.

"But in the dialectic between sensations of reality and the making of a picture, what mattered most in the picture was paint, the inherent eloquence of paint, paint handled so that it 'comes across directly onto the nervous system'..."

David Sylvester, Figurabile: Francis Bacon, Electa, Museo Correr, Venice, 1993.

"How can I draw one more veil away from life and present what is called the living sensation more nearly on the nervous system and more violently...There was a very interesting thing that Valéry said about modern art, and it's very true. He said that modern artists want the grin without the cat and by that he meant that they want the sensation without the boredom of conveyance."

"I have nothing but sensation (Empfindung) and representation (Vorstellung). Therefore I cannot think these as having arisen from the contents of representation. All those cosmogonies etc. are deduced from the data received by the senses. We cannot think anything that is not sensation and representation. Therefore no pure existence of time, space, world, if without that which senses and represents. I cannot represent non-being (Nichtsein). That which is (Das Seiende), is sensation and representation."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Time-Atom Theory: Nachgelassene Fragmente, Early 1873.

"Isn't it that one wants a thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than simple illustration of the object that you set out to do? A non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact....I work in a kind of haze of sensations and feelings and ideas that come to me and that I try to crystallize..."

Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987.

"The essence of sensation would then consist in gradually sensing and measuring such temporal figures with more and more refinement; representation constructs them as something coexistent and then establishes the development of the world on the basis of this coexistence: pure translation into another language, into the language of becoming."

"For me realism is an attempt to capture appearance with all the sensations which that particular appearance has suggested to me."

"If I focus my eyes on an open area, allowing the image I wish to record to steal in through the corner of my eye, I have the sensation of seeing in depth."

"Modern man conceives of reality as the series of sensations and ideas that occur in the consciousness of each individual."

Francis Bacon was described by a crass cunt critic as: "...a cheap sensationalist..." Bacon was not a 'sensationalist' but a Sensationist. Bacon said he wanted to: "...open up the valves of sensation." Bacon was not an Expressionist. Bacon had nothing to express only something to sensation. Bacon, like Degas, Monet, Cezanne, Jawlensky, Nolde was a Sensationist. Bacon let leak splattering spunked Sensationism. Authentic Sensationist art is not to be confused with the spin Sensationalist stuff of our spiv Saatchi shit.

Sensationism stems from the subconscious sea slick oil of auto-alien primordial intense instincts dug directly from the rhythms of the body's musical memory traces, from the nervous system. Sensationism seeks sow serve sever the nailed nervous system sensation via violet visceral vivacious violence aiming alterity at an agnoisse acidic abject alien arbitrary primal paint punctures.

Sensationist art grates on the nerves, sends shivers down the spine, through the nailing of tense and intense images on to the nervous system. Why is it that 'irrational' or 'arbitrary' brush marks of anti-illustrational paint have such a psychic-physically nailing visceral assault on the spine, body, nervous system - while illustrational painting (Freud) and pattern making (Pollock) remains weak, watery without real body? Michel Conil Lacoste, art critic of Le Monde, reported as he walked around Bacon's show at the Grand Palais: "It's like a punch in the face." Sensationism sews skews slithers slivers slurps seeps seeks soaks swells skin sight sighing.

Titian, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Fragonard, Turner, Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Degas, Cassatt, Nolde, Jawlensky, Bacon, Auerbach, Alien serve sperm Sensationism. Abstract Art does not exist. Conceptual Art does not exist. Contemporary Art does not exist.

The School of Francis Bacon initiates anti-illustrational alien artists seduced by subconscious Sensationism to open up the visceral valves of sensation and to make a direct assault upon the nailed nervous system. Abject Agnoisse Alien Art Froths Form From Body Being Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Beyond the Death Drive to The Dripping Drool of The Leaking Lamella slurp sensationism.

Art is Alien. Alien Art aspires to the agnoisse Abject-Sublime sludge sensation of the acidic Alien Condition cracked open oozed out.

"I love Degas. I think his pastels are among the greatest things ever made. I think they're far greater than his paintings. Some of the paintings are nothing in comparison, it's very curious...The sensation doesn't come straight out at you; it slides slowly and gently through the gaps...Another thing is, when you talk of Degas, the very great Degas are the pastels, and don't forget that in his pastels he always striates the form with these lines which are drawn through the image and in a certain sense both intensify and diversify its reality. I always think that the interesting thing about Degas is the way he made lines through the body: you could say that he shuttered the body, in a way, shuttered the image and then he put an enormous amount of colour through these lines. And having shuttered the form, he created intensity by putting this colour through the flesh."

"Degas used the charcoal and the pastel as though they were abrasive tools, their rough hatching creating at atmosphere of friction around the body which is twisted into an unlikely, if not ungraceful position, caught between agony and ecstasy."

"As early as 1949, an English critic, Neville Wallis, commented on the relationship between Bacon and Duchamp: 'Brooding over these pictures', he wrote, I became aware of the affinity with Marcel Duchamp's sensational paintings on glass...In Bacon's canvases, the indication of a glass screen enclosing his silently shrieking figures seems to symbolise the frustration of the individual who can see, but cannot reach or affect the awful prospect before him.' (The Observer, 20 November, 1949)..."

Andrea Rose, XLV Venice Biennale, Figurabile, Francis Bacon, Electa, Museo Correr, 1993.

"Most of Duchamp is figurative, but I think he made sort of symbols of the figurative. And he made, in a sense, a sort of myth of the twentieth century, but in terms of making a shorthand of figuration."

Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987.

"The dream (or daydream) of painting sensation is not exclusive to Bacon and underpins the work of numerous modern artists. Empiricism, that particularly British phenomenon, also has a part to play here, for sensation, surely, is a link with the reality that is both in things and in the self? Artists are engaged not only in experiencing sensations, like anyone else, but in evaluating them, in knowing and recognizing them, and refining them as to give them new form. Cézanne and Bacon share an idea of the continuity between the object viewed and the sensation this produces in the viewer, a continuity that is almost physical. The artist's job is to record this sensation. In Bacon's case the sensation passes directly to the nervous system, without the intermediary of the brain or intellect, less still of knowledge and speech. Listening to Bacon, it is easy to understand how little this sensation has to do with the sensational, with facile effects, or with feelings of repulsion or passions of any kind."

"The levels of sensation are like a series of freeze-frames, snapshots of movement, which together synthetically recompose the movement in all its continuity, velocity and violence: as in synthetic Cubism, in Futurism, in Duchamp's Nude. And it is true that Bacon was fascinated by Muybridge's decompositions of movement, and used them as material."

"As in his comments on Duchamp's famous 'Nude Descending a Staircase', Bacon tried to make his beings more dramatic in their stepping out, while Duchamp wanted to keep movement central. He did not want to make something mechanistic, a mere motor moving downstairs. He tried to cancel out all implications. 'He was the first of this century to attempt that. Seurat did the same thing - as they in America, to keep it cool.'... Bacon thought that Duchamp had successfully changed the technique of art by not being avant-garde and trying to create a new art. He made symbols of the figurative, 'a sort of myth of the twentieth century'. Although Bacon preferred Duchamp's philosophy to his individual works, I saw him at that retrospective exhibition studying each picture with the intensity of a kestrel hovering hovering over a field mouse."

Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life & Violent Times, Crown Publishers, 1993.

MP: "But I mean that there is the person's appearance, and then there are all sorts of sensations about that particular person."

FB: "I don't know how much it's a question of sensation about the other person. It's the sensation within yourself. It's to do with the shock of two completely unillustrational things which come together and make an appearance...One needs the specific images to unlock the deeper sensations, and the mystery of accident and intuition to create the particular. Now I want to do portraits more than anything else, because they can be done in a way outside illustration."

"I work in a kind of haze of sensations and feelings and ideas that come to me and I try to crystallize...it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which returns me to life more violently....Certainly one is more relaxed when the image that one has within one's sensations - you see, there is a kind of sensational image within the very, you could say, structure of your being, which is not to do with a mental image - when that image, through accident, begins to form.....In working you are really following this kind of cloud of sensation in your- self....Isn't it that one wants a thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than simple illustration of the object that you set out to do?... An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact."

"I believe that realism has to be re-invented. It has to be continuously re-invented. In one of his letters Van Gogh speaks of the need to make changes in reality, which become lies that are truer than the literal truth. This is the only possible way the painter can bring back the intensity of the reality which he is trying to capture. I believe that reality in art is something profoundly artificial and that it has to be recreated. Otherwise it will be just an illustration of something - which will be very second-hand......Of course one does put in such things as ears and eyes. But then one would like to put them in as irrationally as possible. And the only reason for this irrationality is that, if it does come about, it brings the force of the image over very much more strongly than if one just sat down and illustrated the appearance.....We can't go on and on reproducing the Renaissance, or nineteenth century art, or anything else. You want something new. Not an illustrative realism but a realism that comes about through a real invention of a new way to lock reality into something completely arbitrary".

The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames and Hudson.

"When Kitaj first coined 'School of London', he meant no single orthodoxy, and certainly not simply these six or seven planets clustered about Bacon's black sun."

Timothy Hyman, Mapping London's Other Landscape, Art International, Autumn, 1987.

"Bacon has been a model of intellectual freedom and stylistic audacity to the whole School of London."

Michael Peppiatt, Could There Be a School of London?, Art International, Autumn, 1987.

"To me it's not a 'school' at all. I mean, I think perhaps the Americans had a school of Abstract Expressionism, but the last real school was the Impressionists, when there were a number of people attempting to do, not the same thing, but who were interested in the same aspects of colour and way of conveying things...I think the people in the School of London would have always been figurative. I don't think I had any influence at all."

Francis Bacon on The School of London, Francis Bacon: Reality Conveyed by a lie, Art International, Autumn, 1987.

"When it comes down to it, I' m not sure that that the word 'school' means anything more than artists with a very general similar interest."

Michael Peppiatt on The School of London, Francis Bacon: Reality Conveyed by a lie, Art International, Autumn, 1987.

"Nor did Bacon have successors. There was no school of Bacon. He fomented no fashion, suffered no disciples, occasioned no print other than his own, went against the grain. He was a figurative dissenter at the height of his powers during the hegemony of abstraction (which he regarded, scornfully, as mere pattern-making). He was just about inimitable."

"Originality must involve more than breaking rules; its deformations must allow the possibility of reformation. The litmus test of exemplarity, namely succession, is not as unified or simple a Kant's presentation of it makes it appear. Roughly, on the one hand, Kant equates exemplarity, and hence succession, with providing new ways of making sense: Succession which relates itself to a precedent, not imitation, is the correct expression for the influence which is the product of an exemplary originator can have on others; which means the same as this: to create from the same sources out of which the former himself created, and to learn from one's predecessor only the way to produce in such creation oneself. (CJ, 32, 283) An example of succession in this sense would be the founding of a new 'school' of painting or poetry. The exemplary work would provide possibilities, in the plural, that were not previously available; and while succeeding works may alter what what we conceive those possibilities to be, it would remain the case that the 'original' exemplary work was the 'origin' with respect to which succeeding works had their sense."

J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, Polity Press, 1992.

"I know that teaching is one of the methods by which many artists survive, but how can you teach? In a period where there is no tradition, there is nothing to teach. You can teach your own attitude. The only thing I can understand for art schools would be for them to have a few extremely intelligent people whom the people who are striving to be artists of some kind can come and discuss their problems with. Otherwise there is nothing to teach at all."

Francis Bacon to David Sylvester, 1975, Looking Back at Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 2000.

"My idea would be that one might finally establish a studio and then bequeath it to posterity for a successor to live in. I do not know if I am expressing myself clearly enough, but in other words, we are engaged in work on art, on projects that are not for our own times alone but can be continued by others."

"I think it would be more exciting to be one of a number of artists working together, and to be able to exchange...I think it would be terrible nice to have someone to talk to. Today there is absolutely nobody to talk to...But I think artists can in fact help one another. They can clarify the situation to one another....I've always hoped to find another painter I could really talk to - somebody whose qualities and sensibility I'd really believe in - who really tore my things to bits and whose judgement I could actually believe in."

Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987.

"Now both Edwards and Bacon are dead, and Bacon's studio is buried in Dublin, 7 Reece Mews could be converted back into a studio for the School of Francis Bacon with the aid of grant from the John Edwards Charitable Foundation."

"The realist movement no longer needs to fight with the others; it already exists, it must show itself as something distinct, there must be a salon of realists."

Oil 1999 Patrick Cuenot Figure with Two Owls 1965 Francis Bacon Oil 2003 Patrick Cuenot

'Abstract Art', 'Conceptual Art', 'Contemporary Art' do not exist because such conscious constructs are always already obnoxious oxymorons propagated as political programmes, puerile products of 'political correctness' and are always already alien to thrown authentic alien art: The School of Francis Bacon invites initiates intense anarchic angoisse awe atta alien artists as sew serving sublime Sensationism so sowing an abject Aletheia authentic alien aesthetics orbiting outside conscious conceptual constructs.

The thrown shot Sensationist art of vivacious Velázquez, Rembrandt, Titian, Fragonard, Turner, Goya, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Manet, Degas, Cassatt, Monet, Corinth, Soutine, Picasso, Nolde, Jawlensky, Gaudier-Brzeska, Bacon, Gormely, Alien is intestine instinctual Sensationism activating arbitrary accidents: non-narrative, non-conceptual, non-contemporary created via voluptuous violent intensity inking instinctual subconscious slime slurp sensation seeping froth form from the thrown nailed nervous system and also nailing the thrown nervous system: Sensationist art activates intense instinctual images of oozed agnoisse Alien alteric aroma.

Bacon said to Michael Peppiatt: "What I do feel is that figuration - painting - will take on tremendous vitality once again, now that we've been through that very depressing , decorative period of abstraction. Not only in England, but anywhere. I think it will come about." (Francis Bacon: Reality Conveyed by a lie, Art International, Autumn 1987).

Hearing Heidegger sedately says Sensationing - unlike Thinking - seeps spilt sowing:

So seeping shuddering shimmering Sensationing swallows up under the Ground for Sensationing is never Grounded floating free from Foundation free from Logic free from Concept free from Thinking thrown through thrusted Thingness opening out Otherness.

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote Tractatus Logico Philosophicus as a Non-Sense of Lie-Logic. Wittgenstein wrote wittingly: “The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said." Except that nothing can be said only sensationed and nothing is said in the Tractatus. Wittgenstein wriggles: "My propositions are elucidatory in this way he who understands me finally recognises them as senseless...Where one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

The trash Tractatus silences Sensationism and does not Speak or Sensation seeing Logic as Nonsensical for Wittgenstein's sentences seep no known Sensationism so sowing language without leakage, sentences without spillages words without waste. Where one cannot speak, thereof one must be sensation. The Tractatus touts totalising positivistic propositions so sensationing nothing negating surplus spillage slurp slime stuff such as an alluring angoisse luminous leaked lamella. The world is not 'the totality of facts', but of sensations.

Wittgenstein shows us that the puerile propositions of the turgid Tractatus are as pure non-sensationist where welded leaden Logic is inert left locked-in-its-nothingness negating the thrown stagnant smelliness sown seeping sensational slipping slime states. For filtered locked Logic does not leak, linger, shimmer, shudder, slip, spill, slush, sludge, soak, stink, sow, so left lacking a Shining as a Sensationism scent so lost lie 'Logic' cannot have a 'Logic of Sensationism' for Sensation splatters spurts shines shudders oozed outside locked 'Logic' which without wetness cannot Leak as an alien Anxiety. Heidegger hears: "From ancient times the theory of thought has been called 'logic.' But if, now, thinking is ambiguous in its relation to being - as offering both a horizon and an organon - does not what we call 'logic' also remain ambiguous, according to the view under discussion? Does not 'logic,' then, as organon and as an interpretative horizon of being, become completely questionable?" (Pathmarks).

Logic does not Smell, Logic does not Smaze, Logic does not Sweat, Logic does not Spunk, Logic does not Sponge, Logic does not Squelch, Logic does not Shit, Logic does not Shine, Logic does not Curdle, Logic does not Coagulate, Logic does not Glisten, Logic does not Drool, Logic does not Drip, Logic does not Leak: Logic does not Exist. Logic knows nothing of The Nothing. The Sensation of The Nothing leaks outside the nothing of Logic. Nietzsche on Nihilism contra Logic: "Nihilism doe snot only contemplate the 'in vain!' nor is it merely the belief that everything deserves to perish: one helps to destroy. - This is, if you will, illogical; but the nihilist does not believe that one needs to be logical." (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power). Nihilism negates Logic. Sensation severs Logic. Logic is not: slimy, sticky, scabby, slithery, oozy, oily, greasy, gooey, dank, damp.

Logic has no Sensation. Logic has no Anxiety. Logic has no Boredom. Logic has no Nothing. Being has no Logic.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thin thesis that a sensation must form some sort of 'picture' in order to have 'significance', - and that a 'pure sensation' correspondence to 'nothing in our experience' - is insane and absolutely absurd and utterly untrue and non-sense since sown sensation slits sight splits seeing punctures perception. Sensation is pure experience: 'signification' is always already added after the Event of pure Sensation: only social and psychic conditioning sutures significance to sensation but robs it of its brute and pure sensationistic impact: when an infant smells, sees and even eats its own excrement none of its seven senses tell 'it' that it is supposedly repellent and repugnant. Through cultural signification and suturing, the smell sensation of Chanel No.5 is smelt as 'acceptable' and 'aesthetic' and the smell sensation of shit is smelt as 'unacceptable' and 'unaesthetic': our social-psychic conditioning could also reverse these two smell sensations where scent becomes shit and shit becomes scent but the sensations still remain the same. What if a Rose smelt like a Shit; would we still sniff it? What if a Shit smelt like a Rose; would we then sniff it? What is the sight of smell the smell of sight?

While sensations are necessarily non-cognitive on the conscious plane - and cannot be 'known' - spilt sown sensations can be shown thrown flown forth from the thirsty subconscious stratum and the thrown seventh sense which will always already shine shimmer oozed outside consciousness and alien body of being being bled both from within and without outside thought: sensations cannot be know only thrown for Being is in fact floating flooding bled Beingsensation: one does not 'know' sensation one 'throws' and 'retrieves' sensation through fort-da-fluxing. There is no 'Question of the Meaning of Being' but only the 'Sensationing of Being as Beingsensation' where the sewer subconscious 'alien body' has a direct drooling atta access to a 'pure realm' of sensation free from conceptual consciousness.

Being has Sensation not Meaning. Being is not a product of Thought but a Sensation of Throwness. Being has no Intellect. Being has no Consciousness. Being is Alien to Thought. Being is Sensation. Being is Alien. Beingaliensensation: The Life of the Alien.

The question "What calls for sensationing" asks for what wants to be sensationed about in the preeminent sense: it does not just give us sensationing to sensation about, nor only itself, but it first gives sensation and sensationing to us, it entrusts sensation to us as our essential destiny, and thus first joins and appropriates us to sensation as a clearing to being towards sensataion as Beingsensation.

Our Thinking blocks the brute experiences of pure sensationing: thought enframes pure sensation, thought negates pure sensation. Rene Descartes never stated: "I think, therefore I am" but sensationed: "I stink, therefore I am." I sensation, therefore I am. Has not all philosophy been a misunderstanding of sensation?

The School of Francis Bacon invites, initiates, alien artists to throw sow Sensationist awe awakening an alien atta attack alteric art.

Jeannette Lowen, Doing Time with Marcel Proust, Humanism & the Arts, Council for Secular Humanism.

**Jeannette Lowen, Doing Time with Marcel Proust, Humanism & the Arts, Council for Secular Humanism.**