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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...Artworks win life only when they renounce likeness to the human...Actually, only what does not fit into this world is true."

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

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

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

Francis Bacon, Remarks from an Interview with Peter Beard, MOMA, New York 1975.

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

"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.

"I think that only time tells about painting....I think that the potency of the image is created partly by the possibility of its enduring. And, of course, images accumulate sensation around themselves the longer they endure."

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

"To sensation is to confine yourself to a single sensation that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky. We never come to sensations. They come to us. The splendour of the sensation. Being the sensation."

"Can sensation be assimilated to an original opinion, to Urdoxa as the world's foundation or immutable basis? Phenomenology finds sensation in perceptual and affective 'a priori materials' that transcend the perceptions and affections of the lived."

"The artist is only a receptacle for sensations, a brain, a recording device...I paint as I see, as I feel - and I have very strong sensations...As sensations form the foundation of my business, I believe myself invulnerable."

Paul Cézanne, Conversations with Cézanne, University of California Press, 2001.

"Bacon's aim is to record sensation as directly as possible because sensation is an essential part of the experience of reality which he wants to re-invent. 'It may be,' he has said, 'that realism is always subjective.' This rests on the phenomenalist tenet that we experience reality indirectly, via the evidence of our senses, and consequently that perception constitutes our sense of reality."

Paul Moorhouse, The Crucifixion in Bacon's Art, Art International, No. 8, Autumn 1989..

"A purely sensory being, Rousseau demonstrated, could not possibly comprehend the identity of an object simultaneously seen and touched. Rousseau went further. He compared the 'sensation of self' and the 'perception' of the external world, and arrived at the conclusion that an individual could 'have' a sensation only if he entered into the sensation of self; and since perceptions brought home what existed outside, while at the same time existing only in the medium of the sensation of the self, it followed that without a sensation of self there was no existence. Or the other way about: the sensation of self produced existence."

Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989.

"We only know our own sensations, not those of the other...The sensations of the sexual act themselves have a provocative agreement with figures. The sensation exhibits the true object of desire (but the object of desire is itself an exhibit of the sensation). The tepidness of rain in the [brambles? rosebushes?], the dull fulguration of the storm, evoke both the figure and the inner sensation of eroticism. 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. But it is human to search, from lure to lure, for a life that is at last autonomous and authentic."

Georges Bataille, The Object of Desire and the Totality of the Real, Zone Books, 1993.

"There are no feelings in Bacon: there are nothing but affects; that is, 'sensations' and 'instincts,' according to the formula of naturalism. Sensation is what determines instinct at a particular moment, just as instinct is the passage from one sensation to another, the search for the 'best' sensation (not the most agreeable sensation, but the one that fills the flesh at a particular moment of its descent, contraction, or dilation)... Cézanne, it is said, is the painter who put a vital rhythm into the visual sensation...Could it be that Bacon's closed and artificial world reveals the same vital movement as Cézanne's Nature?...What is ultimate is thus the relation between sensation and rhythm, which places in each sensation the levels and domains through which it passes. This rhythm runs through a painting just as it runs through a piece of music."

Gilles Deleuze, Painting & Sensation; Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Continuum, 2003.

"Bacon’s 'middle way' is not figuration. It is not a synthetic unity of empirical objects represented to subjects. The figure is not a representation. The figure is sensation itself. It renders visible the forces that are invisible. Sensation is the expression of sub-representative forces that do not resemble it. It is not representational figuration that provokes sensation. Rather, sensation produces a new resemblance from real difference. Sensation is the non-resembling means that provokes the figure. Bacon paints the sensation itself. Horror is inferred from the scream, not the reverse. If the scream is inferred from a subjective sensation of horror or a horrifying object, then narration and representation are re-introduced. Sensation - the figure - the scream is botched. "

Beth Metcalf, Deleuze's Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, January 2006.

"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."

"The Kevin Dean cock will take you to new depths of pleasure. 12" long (10" insertable), and 2.2" thick (7" around), this toy is soft and flexible, with a slight curve to the shaft for some unique sensations."

"The mixed sensations, which transform unpleasant objects and sensations into sources of aesthetic pleasure, are superior to 'purest enjoyment' because they provide an enlivening solicitation of our sensitivity to a heightened degree by means of changing sides - of performing a trajectory with a considerable amplitude of tension."

Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation; The Beautiful as Vomitive, State University of New York Press, 2003.

"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."

"In what the senses of sight, hearing, and touch covey, in the sensations of colour, sound, roughness, and hardness, things move us bodily, in the literal meaning of the word. The thing is the aistheton..."

"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.

"As Levinas writes: 'A painting, a statue, a book are objects of our world, but through them the things represented are extracted from our world.' The artwork effects thus an alienation of the world. The privilege of sensation over cognition in the experience of an artwork does not suggest that sensation is a precondition of perception and cognition; rather it indicates a fundamental foreignness with respect to cognition and to perception which, Levinas argues is always perception of and within a world."

Alain P. Toumayan, Encountering the Other: The Artwork and the Problem of Difference in Blanchot & Levinas, Duquesne, 2004.

"there is no sensation without a somatic moment. To this extent the concept of sensation, in comparison with that which it allegedly subsumes, is twisted so as to satisfy the demand for an autarkic connection of all cognitive steps. While senastion is a part of consciousness, according to the cognitive principle of styling, its phenomenology - unbiased, under the rules of cognition - would have to describe it equally as that which consciousness does not exhaust. Every sensation is a physical feeling also."

Theodor W. Adorno, Concept and Categories; Negative Dialectics, Routledge, 1973.

"All sensations have appellations of their own, e.g. for sight red, green, yellow, for taste sweet, sour, etc., but smell cannot have proper appellations; rather, we borrow the appellations from other sensations, e.g. it smells sour, or has a smell of roses or carnations, it smells like moschus. These are all appellations from other sensations. Hence we cannot describe smell."

"Only a memory can recognize this differential 'stamp,' this mark or signature, this patent or trademark that 'time prints on our sensations.' Neither time nor memory is anything other than the figure of these marks. And this 'memory of the present' only marks itself, and this mark arrives only to efface the anteriority of the past."

"Everything indicates that it was impossible for man to live without the 'sensation of time' that opened his world like a movement of breathtaking speed - but what he lived in the past as fear he can only now as pride and glory...A feeling of explosion and a vertiginous weightlessness surround an imperious and heavy obelisk...In each place where the massive destiny of man is formed, the rhythm of life and death accelerates and attains a speed so great that it results only in the vertigo of the fall...What makes this movement difficult to represent is the fact that it is accelerated by increases in the sensation of rest."

Georges Bataille, The Obelisk; Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

"In the Critique of Pure Reason, sensation, as 'something,' occupies the place of the inextinguishably ontical. But sensation holds no higher cognitive rank than any other real entity.... Sensations - the Kantian matter, without which forms would not even be imaginable, so that the forms also qualify the possibility of cognition - sensations have the character of transiency. Nonconceptuality, inalienable from the concept, disavows the the concept's being-in-itself. It changes the concept."

Theodor W. Adorno, Compulsory Substantiveness; Negative Dialectics, Routledge, 1973.

"It is a characteristic of sensation to pass through different levels owing to the action forces. But two sensations, each having their own level or zone, can also confront each other and make their respective levels communicate. Here we are no longer in the domain of simple vibration, but that of resonance. There are thus two Figures couples together. Or rather, what is decisive is the coupling of sensations: there is one and the same matter of fact for two figures, or even a single coupled Figure for two bodies. From the start, we have seen that, according to Bacon, the painter could not give up the idea of painting several Figures in the painting at the same time, although there was always the danger of reintroducing a 'story' or falling back into narrative painting. The question thus concerns the possibility that there may exist relations between simultaneous Figures that are nonillustrative and nonnarrative (and not even logical), and which could be called, precisely, 'matters of fact'. Such indeed is indeed the case here, where the coupling of sensations from different levels creates the coupled figure (and not the reverse). What is painted is the sensation. There is a beauty to these entangled Figures."

Gilles Deleuze, Couples and Triptychs; Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Continuum, 2003.

"The critique of philosophical intellectualism enters into Jean Wahl's exposition wherever life turns into ideas that transcend it, shedding the keen immediacy and sensation of being. 'We must communicate substantially with what is substantial in things.' This conception of sensation concurs, on many essential points, with Bergson's intuition...The aspect of sensations that Wahl is interested in is less their affective warmth than a certain violence and intensity. Sensation is something savage, dense, opaque, dark, 'blind, bare contact.' It is described as a jolt, a shiver, a spasm. As if the intensity of the sensation constituted its content rather than its degree, as if the essence of the sensation could be reduced to that tension, that contraction in which we could catch in the act of movement of being toward its interiority, its descent into self. A movement radically opposed to transcendence: instead of losing or finding itself in the universal, sensation, tensed on itself, affirms the inner substance of man, or the personal structure of being. As philosophy of sensation opposed to Heidegger's. Sensation does not mark our presence in the world, overcome by its own nothingness, but marks the way in which we descend into, and concentrate on, ourselves."

Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Wahl and Sensation, Proper Names, The Athlone Press, 1996.

"Sensations of feeling or sensual feelings are inseparable from their founding sensations. The pleasantness of a savoury dish, the agony of a sensual pain, the comfort of a soft garment are noticed where the food is tasted, where the pain pierces, where the garment clings to the body's surface. However, sensual feelings not only are there but at the same time also in me; they issue from my 'I'...A 'withered' limb without sensations is not part of my living body...For the living body is essentially constituted through sensations: sensations are real constituents of consciousness and, as such, belong to the 'I'....Whether a sensing 'I' is conceivable without a living body is another question. This is the question of whether there could be sensations in which no living body is constituted. The answer can be given with further ado because, as already stated, the sensations of the various sensory provinces do not share in the structure of the living body in the same manner."

Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, 1989, ICS Publications, Washington DC.

"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."

"In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality."

"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.

"In reality, what you experience in your hand remains the same, but the sensation which was thought you were dealing with a single state of consciousness which changed in magnitude. When you press your lips more and more tightly against one another, you believe that you are experiencing in your lips one and the same sensation which is continually increasing in strength: here again further reflection will show you that this sensation remains identical, but that certain muscles of the face and the head and then of all the rest of the body have taken part in the operation."

Henri Louis Bergson, Muscular Effort; Time & Free Will, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910.

"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.

"To reiterate Kant, sensation is thought without purposiveness. It is thought that is not taken up by a concept into some telos, some definite finality beyond itself. Just a present, not a future or a plan. It is an impression, but not that of the Impressionists. An impression expressed, but not that of Expressionism. Always outwards facing to the world, but with an entirely internal character of its own. Already a complex assemblage of interactions across the many planes of the mind, planes that anticipate perception, but singular as these complex registers resonate at the same time. This singularity frames the sensation, but not in any discursive context, only as a repetition of affects. In his rejection of narrative in favour of the triptych, the attendant figure and repetition, Bacon is the most Kantian of painters yet. His approach is always to address the sensation with a diagram (as Deleuze calls a painterly technique applied to thought). The diagram immediately diverts the path of the sensation onto the canvas and back out into sensation. Diverts it away from assimilation to concepts and narrative. It establishes, frames, a second register like that of the anticipations of perception, this time on the canvas. The painting becomes a focus for the repetition of the sensation, to the painter and others. It is as Kant says, a sensus communis."

Robert O'Toole, Kant, painting unlocking sensation in senus communis; Warwick Blogs, University of Warwick, August 18 2004.

"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.

"...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.

"Sensation is intentional because I find that in the sensible a certain rhythm of existence is put forward - abduction or adduction - and that, following up this hint, and stealing into the form of existence which is thus suggested to me, I am brought into relation with an external being, whether it be in order to open myself to it or to shut myself off from it... As for the subject of sensation, he need not be a pure nothingness with no terrestrial weight... Between my sensation and myself there stands always the thickness of some primal acquisition which prevents my experience from being clear of itself... Sensation can be anonymous only because it is incomplete."

"To begin with, we can divide the senses of corporeal feeling into those of the vital sensation (sensus vagus) and those of organic sensation (sensus fixus); and, since they are met with only where there are nerves, into those affecting the whole system of nerves, and those which affect only those nerves belonging to a certain member of the body. The sensations of warmth and cold, even those aroused by the mind (for example, through quickly rising hope or fear), belong to the vital sensation. The shudder seizing people even at the idea of something sublime, and the terror with which nurses' tales drive children to bed late at night, belong to the later type. they penetrate the body, so far as it is alive...disgust, a stimulus to discharge something that has been consumed through the shortest path of the gullet (to vomit), is given to the human being as such a strong vital sensation, since such an inner intake...can be dangerous."

"Can it be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his Goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be, O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is 'a Vision in the form of Youth,' a shadow of reality to come--and this consideration has further convinced me,--for it has come as auxiliary to another favourite speculation of mine,--that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in Sensation, rather than hunger as you do after Truth. Adam's dream will do here, and seems to be a Conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflexion, is the same as human life and its spiritual repetition. But, as I was saying, the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent Working coming continually on the Spirit with a fine Suddenness."

"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.

"In order to establish sensation we must proceed on the basis of a certain realism; thus we take as valid our perception of the Other, the Other's senses, and inductive instruments. But on the level of sensation all this realism disappears, sensation, a modification which one suffers, gives us information only about ourselves; it belongs with the 'lived.' Nevertheless it is sensation which I give as the basis of my knowledge of the external world... My perception of the Other's senses serves me as a foundation for an explanation of sensations and in particular of my sensations, but reciprocally my sensations thus conceived constitute the only reality of my perception of the Other's senses... in fact if I start with the Other's body, I apprehend it as an instrument and in so far as I myself make use of it as an instrument...Therefore if I conceive of my body in the image of the Other's body, it is an instrument in the world which I must handle delicately and which is like a key to the handling of other tools....my body always extends across the tool which it utilizes:...it is at the end of the telescope which shows me the stars... The body is an instrument which I am..."

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Body; Being & Nothingness, University Paperback 1969.

"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.

"There are in fact no illusions of the senses, but only mistakes in interpreting sensational data as signs of things other than themselves. Or to speak more exactly, there is no evidence that there are illusions of the senses. Every sensation which is of a familiar kind brings with it various associated beliefs and expectations. When, say, we see and hear an airplane, we do not merely have the visual sensation and the auditory sensation of a whirring noise; spontaneously and without conscious thought we interpret what we see and hear and fill it out with customary adjuncts. To what extent we do this becomes obvious when we make a mistake - for example, when what we thought was an airplane turns out to be a bird. "

Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, Simon & Schuster, New York. 1948.

"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, 1953.

"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). As Valéry put it, sensation is that which is transmitted directly, and avoids the detours and boredom of conveying a story. And positively, Bacon constantly says that sensation is what passes from one 'order' to another, from one 'level' to another, from one 'area' to another. This is why sensation is the master of deformations, the agent of bodily deformations....Each sensation exists a different levels, in different orders and multiple domains...This means that there are not sensations of different orders, but different orders of one and the same sensation. It is the nature of sensation to envelop a constitutive difference of level, a plurality of constituting domains....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."

Gilles Deleuze, Painting & Sensation; Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Continuum, 2003.

"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, 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, Corinth, Nolde, Jawlensky, Bacon, Hambling 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 slop sensationism.

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

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.**