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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.

"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."

'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 a sea of sensations a sein of sensations a shine 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 shimmers 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 has no Leakic. 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, soggy, slithery, smelly, spunky, oozy, oily, greasy, gooey, gluey, dank, damp.

Logic has no Sensation. Logic has no Anxiety. Logic has no Dread. 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 swamp 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 Thing 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 Alien has Landed. The Alien is About.

The question "What calls for sensationing" asks for what wants to be sensationed about in the pre-eminent 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 pulsating Sensationing: thought severs pure sensation, thought negates pure sensation. René Descartes never stated: "I think, therefore I am" but sensationed: "I stink, therefore I am." I see, therefore I am. I smell, therefore I am. I sensation, therefore I am. Has not all philosophy been a misunderstanding of sensation? We have had a Philosophy of Spirit so why not a Philosophy of Spunk?

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

"the foam of the unconscious locked around it - which is its freshness." Francis Bacon

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

"Fact leaves its ghost...all the foam of its freshness...The subject is the bait."

"Lifetime is a child playing, moving pieces on a board. The kingdom is a child's."

"What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others."

"We are always hounding ourselves. We have been made aware of this side of ourselves by Freud."

"Bacon did something only possible after the first generation of of Freudians - he painted traumas."

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

"To be mistaken about the rhythm of a sentence is to be mistaken about the very meaning of a sentence."

"We all live by the hidden areas of our make up...Instinct arises out of that whole unconscious sea inside us."

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

"World-time - it is a child, playing, moving the pebbles to and fro on a board, of such a child is the mastery over being."

"Psychoanalysis must aspire to the sensation of music to hear the alien ather. The unconscious is structured like a score."

"It is my mother who is my music. It is her voice that speaks in it. I wanted to shout forth what she was never able to say."

"Abject Alien Art Aspires to the Alien Condition of the Nailed Nervous System Penetrating the Body Beyond the Pleasure Principle."

"Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind."

Lewis Thomas (1913-94), The Medusa and the Snail, On Thinking about Thinking, 1979.

"Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason."

"Without a doubt, time frequently washes up much that seems flotsam, wastage, mere wreckage.. Suppose time is like the fitful sleep of a child. We are the child's shout in the dark. Sometimes, too, the child wakes up and even plays."

William Desmond, Desire, Dialectic and Otherness, Yale University Press, 1987.

"Physiology of art apparently takes as its object to be a process of nature that bubbles to the surface in the manner of an eruptive state of rapture. Such a state would evanesce without deciding anything, since nature knows no realm of decision."

Martin Heidegger, The Grand Style; The Will to Power as Art; Nietzsche, Harper Collins, 1991.

"It seems to come straight out of what we choose to call the unconscious with the foam of the unconscious locked around it - which is its freshness."

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

"In the state between being and non-being, everywhere the possible becomes real, the real ideal, and in art's free imitation the dream is a terrible one, terrible but divine."

"Freud said beautifully that a dream-come-true is a nightmare. Whenever we make love, we have obscure fantasies sustaining us. But they have to remain in the unconscious. The most horrible thing that can happen is to have those fantasies realized."

"Since Plato, it is the old philosophical injunction: to learn to live is to learn to die. Less and less, I have not learned to accept death. I remain uneducable about the wisdom of learning to die."

"He who wills adds in this way the sensations of pleasure of the successful executive agents, the serviceable 'under-wills' or under-souls - for our body is only a social structure composed of many souls - to his sensations of pleasure as commander."

"What is the meaning of death in the twentieth century, when millions of lives have been extinguished and the possibility of annihilating human life altogether remains open? Is there an art of dying which is useful in this time and circumstance?"

Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes : Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death, Yale University Press, 1985.

"What does the psyche look-like? What does the psyche leak-like? What does the psyche smell-like? The psyche smells like fresh semen - the psyche looks-leaks like fresh-froth - the semen of the subconscious for Bacon becomes: 'the foam of the unconscious locked around it - which is its freshness.' - and thrown forth as a fort-da-froth."

"Rapture does not mean mere chaos that churns and foams, the drunken bravado of sheer riotousness and tumult. When Nietzsche says 'rapture' the word has a sound and sense utterly opposed to Wagner's. For Nietzsche rapture means the most glorious victory of form...Rapture as a state of feeling explodes the very subjectivity of the subject. By having a feeling for beauty the subject has already come out of himself; he is no longer subjective, no longer a subject...Rapture is the basic mood; beauty does the attuning."

Martin Heidegger. Rapture as Form-engendering Force; Nietzsche Volumes One & Two; Harper Collins, 1991.

"One day, when I was 15 or 16 years old, I saw a dog having a shit and I realised at that moment that I was going to die. I think there is a difficult moment in the life of a man. The moment when he discovers that youth is not eternal. On this day I realised this. I thought about death and since then, I think about death everyday. "

"The phantom is a formation of the unconscious that has never been conscious for good reason. It passes - in a way yet to be determined - from the parent's unconscious into the child's. Clearly, the phantom has a function different from dynamic repression. The phantom's periodic and compulsive return lies beyond the scope of symptom-formation in the sense of a return of the repressed; it works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject's own mental topography."

"I think about nothing but death, I think about it all the time, ten seconds don't go by without the imminence of the thing being there. I never stop analysing the phenomenon of 'survival' as the structure of surviving, it's really the only thing that interests me, but precisely insofar as I do not believe that one lives on post mortem."

Jacques Derrida, Interview with Gianni Vattimo, A Taste for the Secret, Polity Press, 2001.

"Art activated is not a wish-fulfillment but a dread-fulfillment. Not even a dread-fulfillment but a dread-emptiment. Art alien does not attune to desire but to dread. Art alien decapitates itself from desire. Art alien negotiates the negative. Art alien wishes for nothing but the fulfillment of its own demise."

"Interpreting by dreams.— That which we sometimes do not know or feel precisely while awake—whether we have a good or a bad conscience towards a particular person—the dream informs us of without any ambiguity."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Preface to Second Edition, 1886.

"Nietzsche's good association with his father was music....Consequently music gives us our greatest insight into Nietzsche's nature. Freud saw too few clues extant to Nietzsche's sexuality partly because he was afraid to read him, partly because the founding father of psychoanalysis was notoriously indifferent to music."

"Céline's journey, to the end of his night, will also encounter rhythm and music as being the only way out, the ultimate sublimation of the unsignifiable. Contrary to Joyce, however, Céline will not find salvation in it....Music, rhythm, rigadoon, without end, for no reason."

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press, 1980.

"The hysterical dimension interests me a lot...I glorify hysterical actions. They are powerful gestures, a form of resistance when one is in a weak position. Hysteria is at the same time a falling apart into many pieces, an ecstasy, and a personal exorcism. You can see this with children: I try to honour their movements because, in the end, this is how one gets to know them. Sometimes it is better to say things with movements than with words."

Pipilotti Rist, Fantasy And Distraction: An Interview with Pipilotti Rist, Afterimage, November 2000.

"Ernest Jones says that Freud's aversion to music was well known to his colleagues...Freud's avoidance of music was part of his wider need to control emotion, for music has the power to evoke a range of feelings in the listener, to carry one away on a tide of romantic passion or bring on sadness and grief, and these were the reactions that he had to suppress at all costs."

"For Freud 'woman' is always already essentially Egyptian - that is - ego-free - being-animal - being-alien - as being ather - to being human - to being man - to being man-made. For Freud - as an ego-free Egyptian - and a curator and collector of Egyptian Memorabilia - masturbated molested memorabilia - as an answering angoisse antiquity - answering an alien ather: 'woman'. For Freud there is no 'woman' - no 'sexual-difference' - only an 'alien difference' - no 'human condition' - only an 'alien condition' - an Egyptian Ereignis. As aliens the Egyptians had no ego - no psyche - no drives - no desires - no needs. For Freud 'woman' was always already 'alien'..."

"Céline is our contemporary because he makes us confront his music and his solitude...The music and structure of Céline's texts speak about the right to be different, but Céline didn't know it...I would also note how much Céline celebrates music, which is reflected in the theme of vocal phenomena...It was once considered very important to speak as a woman...My view of Céline's relationship to women is that he saw women as a mirage and an element of fascination. I prefer to see the woman (or the feminine element) in Céline through the rhythm and music of his writing rather than through his fantasies."

Julia Kristeva, On Céline: Music and the 'Blunder', Interview with Jacques Henric, 1976.

"Art is a representation independent of the principle of explanation; it doesn't follow the rules of conscious rationality, but images were preserved in it that were once matters of metaphysics or religion. As the highest art, music is an expression of the world will, which reveals objectification out of its boundless forms of objectification. Schopenhauer was actually working out one of Leibniz's notions: 'Music is the movement of philosophy ignorantly exercised in metaphysical darkness'. Art is thus the legitimate development of metaphysics by other means, and music an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the spirit is unaware that it is philosophising."

Otto Pöggeler, The Paths of Heidegger's Life and Thought, Humanity Books, 1998.

"In unconscious life negation must be regarded as a productive force rather than a limitation, or privation, of objects there might be for experience. Freud insists that the unconscious does not understand negation in its conventional sense, any more than it understands the conventional categories of space, time and causality. The unconscious is not governed by those transcendental categories by which philosophers have sought to police the operations of what used to be called the 'mind'. It is possessed by an unstoppable positivity. The unconscious experience of a 'negative object' is positive, real and direct."

"Kant and Freud both claim to repeat the Copernican turn in their respective domains. With regard to Freud, the meaning of this reference seems clear and simple: in the same way Copernicus demonstrated that our earth is not the centre of the universe, but a planet revolving around the sun, and in this sense 'decentred', turning around another centre, Freud also demonstrated that the (conscious) ego is not the centre of the human psyche, but ultimately an epiphenomenon, a satellite turning around the true centre, the unconscious or the id....The point here is not so much that the Cartesian cogito is the presupposed 'vanishing mediator' of the Freudian subject of the unconscious (a thought worth pursuing), but that the subject of the unconscious is already operative in the Cartesian cogito as its own inherent excess: in order to assert the cogito as the self- transparent 'thinking substance', one has to pass through the excessive point of madness which designates the cogito as the vanishing abyss of substanceless thought."

Slavoj Zizek, From Proto Reality to the Act, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5, 2000.

"The subject in responsibility is alienated in the depths of its identity with an alienation that does not empty the same of its identity, but constrains it to it, with an unimpeachable assignation, constrains it to it as no one else, where no one could replace it. The psyche, a uniqueness outside of concepts, is a seed of folly, already a psychosis. It is not an ego, but me under assignation."

Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being: or, Beyond Essence, Trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, 1981.

"...the phantom is not at all the product of the subject’s self-creation by means of the interplay between repressions and interjections. The phantom is alien to the subject who harbours it. Moreover, the diverse manifestations of the phantom, which we call haunting, are not directly related to instinctual life and are not to be confused with the return of the repressed..."

"Among artists of the highest rank, such as Beethoven and Rembrandt, the sharpest sense reality was joined with estrangement from reality; this, truly, would be a worthwhile object for the psychology of art. It would need to decipher the artwork not just as being like an artist but as being unlike as well, as labour on a reality resisting the artist. If art has psychoanalytic roots, then they are the roots of fantasy in the fantasy of omnipotence. This fantasy includes the wish to bring about a better world. This frees the total dialectic, whereas the view of art as a merely subjective language of the unconscious does not even touch it. Kant's aesthetics is the antithesis of Freud's theory of art as wish fulfillment...Only dilettantes reduce everything in art to the unconscious, repeating clichés. In artistic production, unconscious forces are one sort of impulse, material among many others."

"At what age is oneself? At what point does one become oneself - as a body? At what age does one become oneself so that after you can refer to the processes which occur to you as a kind of erosion from your proper being?...At what age do you become your proper being? At what age do you have your proper body? It's as if the moment of the proper body never exists - its just that you have one or two relations to it: either you're still growing towards it - or is already after it - so there is here, as it were, a proper body to which, at a certain point in your life, you're always tending and after a certain point you're already losing - the problem is you never had the moment of your proper body - or very rare...That literary recreation of the moment of the proper body shows that it's done from the point of view of always already having past...We do have - we are an ideal body to which once we were tending towards since which we've been declining from and unfortunately we never registered the moment when we were actually there - because we're never there. Our relation to our body - amongst all the other relations to our body that we have - is always mortified by the category of time - mortified in the sense that it is time which always keeps us a phase apart from possessing our own body."

"The problem with Matrix is not the scientific naivety of its tricks: the idea of passing from reality to VR through the phone makes sense, since all we need is a gap/hole through which one can escape. (Perhaps, an even better solution would have been the toilet: is not the domain where excrements vanish after we flush the toilet effectively one of the metaphors for the horrifyingly-sublime Beyond of the primordial, pre-ontological Chaos into which things disappear? Although we rationally know what goes on with the excrements, the imaginary mystery nonetheless persists - shit remains an excess with does not fit our daily reality, and Lacan was right in claiming that we pass from animals to humans the moment an animal has problems with what to do with its excrements, the moment they turn into an excess that annoys it. The Real is thus not primarily the horrifyingly-disgusting stuff re-emerging from the toilet sink, but rather the hole itself, the gap which serves as the passage to a different ontological order - the topological hole or torsion which 'curves' the space of our reality so that we perceive/imagine excrements as disappearing into an alternative dimension which is not part of our everyday reality.)"

Slavoj Zizek, The Matrix, or, The Two Sides of Perversion, October 28 1999.

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

"Psychoanalysis can only domesticate the demonic by placing it in the confines of regression therapy. There is something that haunts the present life, life as presence. For Deleuze this is repetition: not as regression but as originary difference, announcing not the return of the repressed (the past) but the evil spirits of the alien future; or rather, the time of Aion as opposed to the time of Chronos. This is the time of the Event (the time of eternal return)."

Keith Ansell Pearson, Evil Spirits: Nihilism & The Fate of Modernity, Manchester University Press, 2000.

"A scene of hysteria. And that's how all of Bacon's series of spasms might be described: scenes of horror, vomit, and excrement, where the body is always attempting to escape by means of one of its organs in order to reach the expanse of color, the material structure. Bacon has often said that shadow in the domain of the Figures has just as much presence as the body; but shadow is the body that has itself escaped through some localized point or another in the contour. And the scream, Bacon's scream, is the operation through which the entirety of the body escapes through the mouth. All the thrusts and pulsions of the body."

Gilles Deleuze, Athleticism, The Logic of Sensation, Flash Art, May 1983.

"Bacon needs to renounce natural logic and upset it in the act of painting in order to reveal and transform into comprehensible terms something originating in the unconscious: the complex, multiple, and contradictory mass of emotions and the obsessive images that arouse it. This is its material, nothing other than the experience of human existence and the unconscious substrate over which it passes. Through revelation of the unconscious in painting, the insignificant existence of the individual rises to the grandness of a mythical experience: to a condition that transforms an infinitude of empirical experiences into the tragic story of mankind."

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

"What Bacon accomplishes is a linkage of the power of the painterly process to the power of social authority. This is the source of the real sexual hysteria and theatricality of his paintings...It can be inferred from Bacon's paintings that he would agree with Anthony Storr in the idea that hysterical exhibitionism is a 'defense against depression' in a person who regards him - or herself as defeated, and as a defense against recognition of the lack of ideal persons in the world. But, at the same time, Bacon seems to posit hysteria as in its own dramatic way an ideal mode of representing oneself as a person. But there is a paradox here, for this idealization has an archaeologistic basis. In hysteria a person attempts to immorrtalize him - or herself by becoming extravagantly demonstrative, exhibitionistic, in affect announcing his or her being as absolute and indisputable. It is given a surplus of presence, as it were....The painterliness that gives hysterical flair to the person also mutilates that being into oblivion, generalizing it toward nonbeing. That something can be so real and at the next moment an illusion belonging to the past expresses the ambivalence endemic in archaeologism. All Bacon's figures exist in a time warp, at once radically contemporary yet belonging to a dead world. Bacon's hysterical painting is paradoxical, and never more so than when it gives authority to inherently unauthoriitative, almost banal figures."

"Despite the different context and idiom of their respective ideas, both Nietzsche and Freud invoke an accursed will to repetition which conducts thinking to the black heart of Sisyphean futility. For Nietzsche, the demonic threat of a meaningless life endlessly relived is the apogee of nihilism; for Freud, the compulsion to repeat is a manifestation of the organism's longing to die. For each, the hapless subject of modernity is traumatized by the stirring of dark forces from within, fated to aggravate its lacerated pride in its pathetic attempts at self-overcoming...Nietzsche's darkly cryptic thought of the eternal return resists the status of an epistemological principle and by that very fact conducts thinking to the edge of madness. If desire thirsts for its own oblivion this is only true to the extent that it simultaneously thirsts to escape its own destiny. We are good because we lack the strength to be evil but we 'are' will to power and nothing besides."

Jill Marsden, Interminable Intensity; Nietzsche's Demonic Nihilism; Evil Spirits: Nihilism & The Fate of Modernity, Manchester University Press, 2000.

"Let's make clear, as it were, who's on the couch and who's behind the couch in one's relation to the painting. It is vital to recognize that it is not we - qua analyst - who are there to analyse the painting - if my argument is going to be sustained - it is to the function of the painting to analyse us. You might say: 'how can a painting speak?'...Well actually of course, it's almost true that a real analyst can't speak...We are its patient. It is there to interpret us...."

"Considering the popularity of his images, then there is clearly a pleasure in this painful encounter, despite the damage Lacan says such an encounter elicits. Of course, I am talking about a masochistic attraction to Bacon's art. This must account for at least part of the favourable or even enthusiastic reception it is accorded. However, I am not invoking the masochism that Freud theorized since I find his discussion of this subject rather lacking. Bacon himself would otherwise be a classic Freudian case considering his conflicted attraction to, and fear of his father. But as for the viewer of his images, there seems to be something else at work, a pleasure in the vision of other bodies suffering dissolution, a pleasure that is experienced now, back in the 50's, and even in other periods significantly more conservative than that of post-war Britain."

Andrés Mario Zervigón, The Pleasure of Francis Bacon: Viewing Bodies in Pain in Post-War Britain, University of La Verne.

"I like reading Freud very much because I like his way of explaining things but, at the same time, never having undergone therapy myself, I'm not sure what to think of psychoanalysis. Perhaps it could have helped me? I don't know...It seems to me that in painting, and perhaps also in the other arts, there's always an element of control and an element of surprise, and that distinction perhaps comes back to what psychoanalysis has defined as the conscious and unconscious...In the end, painting is the result of the interaction of those accidents and the will of the artist or, if you prefer, the interaction of the unconscious and conscious."

"The greatest weight. - What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your live will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?"

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence, The Gay Science, 1882.

"Mourning must be impossible. We cannot assume that we can merely resurrect or interiorize 'within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead'. nor can we assume that 'the other who is dead' is simply outside of us and that we are 'a subjectivity that is closed upon itself or even identical to itself'. Mourning is impossible, and for us most of all. The 'race of the other', the other who has died and that remains other, is at once inside and outside of us, marking a gap that moves in 'us', as 'us' - the living who sign our name. Mourning has always already begun. It begins with the name, with naming and with writing the date, with dating: Jacques Derrida 15 July 1930 - 8-9 October 2004... How does one respond to the death of Jacques Derrida? How does one mourn for Derrida, who warned of the dangers of mourning (as idealization and interiorization), while insisting that mourning is both unavoidable and impossible? The gap that the death of Jacques Derrida has let behind is open, gaping; it cannot be closed. one can perhaps only respond by tracing the gaps (écarts, béances, décalages), the histories of the gap, in Derrida's work."

"Reality is that which, being an obstacle, both arrests and denies us our pleasure....The ugly object is existence itself, in so far as existence is the obstacle which stands in the way of desire. And so it is, from the point of view of desire, that the ugly object should not be there...The ugly object, as obstacle, is a punitive force which is sweeping towards me.....What sets the work of a genius apart from that of an artist who merely makes a beautiful object? In classical and subsequent hymns to genius something of the following impression may be formed: genius has a sublime relation to structure. Rather than effortlessly and swiftly creating a totality, the genius may incorporate alien objects into the structure of a work, elements that would defeat a lesser artist, in whose hands the whole would break down into a ridiculous collection of incompatible fragments. The genius is able, indeed needs to, pit himself against a seemingly impossible task - to mould individual, inappropriate elements into a final whole. The greater the difficulty, the greater the final impression that the totality makes. In this sense the ugly is part of the power of genius...There is another story, more obscure and obscene, about the relation between the unconscious and ugliness. It is an account of the ecstasy which the unconscious enjoys in all that is dirty, horrifying and disgusting - that is, of ugliness as an unbearable pleasure."

"This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out 'o-o-o-o,' accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word 'fort' [gone]. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play 'gone' with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive 'o-o-o-o.' He then pulled the reel again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful 'da' [there]. This, then, was the complete game–disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act. The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child's great cultural achievement–the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting."

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Standard Edition, Vol. 18, pp. 14-15.

"Was Francis Bacon's relationship with his father so traumatic that the artist sought expression for it through the Crucifixion? Was being surprised by his, to whom Francis felt an erotic attraction, while he was putting on his mother's underwear the real humiliation? Or was it his father's disgust and the subsequent banishment from the house? Or were these simply details of a tortured childhood (which included being regularly horse whipped by the grooms at his father's behest)...Did the tyranny of the father excite the son? Did the beatings - if they took place - arouse Francis sexually? Did he imagine himself his father's wife as he put on his mother's underwear? And, if so, to what extent were the Crucifixions - and indeed the whole flayed population of Bacon's pictures - the voluptuous production of a strong sado-masochistic fantasy?"

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

"What was called the individual - or what was called individuality - is in fact nothing more or less than this interior - this existence of the object - which begins to leak - begins to leak out - of its representation. You can begin to see that in fact that if, if the reason why you do not use an individual in a work of art that's supposed to be beautiful - it's precisely because they do not conform with the representation or the image of a human being. At this point nothing could be further apart the ideal figuration of the human form; nothing could be further apart than that actual individual because an individual will be nothing more or less than the set of differences from that ideal form. The set of differences will actually always be experienced in some sense as disgusting because there are those parts of an individual which are as it were leaking out and exceeding the individual as a representation of him or herself. I mean, quite often, - at the level of experience, this is related to kind of things like hair coming out of people's ears, - it's often combined with bits and the places from which things could be leaking: stuff that's coming out of your eyes, or your nose, or your ears, or your mouth. I mean this is another reason why it - like the Alien - always drools - the kind of stuff which is drooled - which may come from your mouth, your eyes, your ears, your anus - all that in a sense has the mark of radical individuality - radical individuality because it is precisely there - the stuff - which is getting out."

In the Beginning was the Sea and in the Sea was the Seamen coming to a Shore as a Sein slime - as a sein semen sensation of our foamy fresh froth fort da-ing dasein - as a trace of time to come - as a trace of come to time - as the time of the trace of the throw of dasein diceing difference - delivering an awesome alien ather - as a thoth thing thrown - to Thoth to throw Thoth. Thoth was the Time of the Trace of Difference as the Eternal Return of the différance of Dasein as a Semen Sensation Shining - beaming bare before Being began being. For Derrida and Bacon différance and chance as trace are the absence of presence as the absence as presence pushed through thrown down disappearing dice: for Derrida and Bacon difference and chance cannot be nameable or knowable only thrownable and traceable through thrown chance as a Subconscious Beingsensation. Subconscious Sensation - as always already thrown out-of-itself is the coming-to-presence as Becoming towards absence as sensations are always already leaking away towards absences Becoming traces as all Sensations are traumatic traces trawled from the Unconscious Sewer inside us. Subconscious Sensation and dice différance are thrown out-of-being and thus have no corresponding concepts pulverising presence mauling meaning as Sensation as différance as Trace enacts erasure at entry thrown out of thought. By being Unnameable Being is Sensationable - as the Trace of our dice différance throwness - since Sensation and différance are not Names nailing the Origin since Sensation and différance have no Time to Begin with by being Beingtime as a Beingsensation.

Beingsensation bubbles forth from the Subconscious Sea brewing Being not Known from our Unconscious Subterranean Sewer that Knows nothing of Death for our Unconscious is always already alien as autonomous and not attached to the Body for the Unconscious does not Die and Exits the Body when all is done with dasein departing ahead of being-there to being out-there as for the time-being as being the time of subconscious sein.

Through throwing the Derridean dice Bacon forges the forgetting of Being by betting on Being being bled bare through throwness an ancient arbitrary alien ather reappears revealingly as Being as Alien. So for Bacon thrown sensation as difference as arbitrary as chance is also constituted and collected through thrown remembering-recovering of oozed traces of sensations of difference as différance of sensation for difference is not a structure of Being but a sensation of Being as Beingsensation for sensation as différance as deferral delaying dissolving delivering drowning. Bacon's penetraiting poignant paints pertains to Derridean undecidability where the psyche of the paint plays wet with multiple meanings with no meaning at all yet triggering the nervous system in remembering something unsettling and uncanny in the angoisse arbitrariness of the marks slashes oozes that suture the subject severed and soaked. Bacon's paint as undecidability - is pure sensation: being pure psysensation is living without a language: to be pure pysensation is being thrown towards being as a score of the psyche mooding the music of the mother that Freud fails to here and fears to be near.

What does the psyche look-like? What does the psyche leak-like? What does the psyche smell-like? The psyche smells like fresh semen - the psyche looks-leaks like fresh-froth - the semen of the subconscious for Bacon becomes: "the foam of the unconscious locked around it - which is its freshness." - and thrown forth as a fort-da-froth. What does the psyche taste like? The strong smelling psyche as all expected tastes slightly sweet and salty coming forth from the sea of the seaman.

For Bacon the Derridean Dice becomes the Eternal Return Fort-Da Throwness of Dasein where Dasein shows itself as a Dice delivered thrown down roulette table revealing the register of Being through the speed of throwness as in the throwness of paint on to the canvas where the time to throw throws up the time of Being where gorunded landed dice or paint reveals or conceals the being there of being of time as betting on time. For Bacon it is a question of timing and throwing as being in-time out-time when knowing when to and when not to throw the dice of time as a Fort Da Thrusting where betting on being becomes betting on Being on the recover and revealing of Being. Bacon as being-time-in and out-itself knowingly knew instinctively how to throw in time on time out time all the time being time throwing being paint. Being is not a question of language but leakage: Being is not a question of Thinking but Being is a sensation of Throwing and Being is a sensation of Painting as well as the sensation music. Being cannot be spoken, written, intellectualised, conceptualised or Known - only Thrown as an Eternal Return of différance. Freud's Fort-Da-Dasein becomes the Lost and Found Object of Metaphysical Mooding as a Musing Mourning and Memorial for-of the severed Sensation of the Psyche for the Ego is exiled as Anxiety. Anxiety is the brute register the brute realisation that the Ego does not exist: Anxiety is - pure and simple - the Sensation of the Subconscious as an oozing offal Overspil exiling our Nothingness out-of-itself as a draining drooling dripping Dasein. Nietzsche knew that the Ego did not exist and Freud knew Nietzsche knew that the Ego did not exist and Freud knew that the Ego did not exist but forgot it. There is no Ego because the Body inhabits multiple Eggos of alien athers breeding and bleeding out-within which will 'speak their mind' which will 'leak their behind' for the Unconscious is pure Beingsensation for-itself as being-itself free far from thought and time.

As a composer of multiple sensations Nietzsche composed with multiple sounds multiple voices multiple instruments hence his writings are not contradictory but musical. Contrary to current claims Nietzsche never contradicted himself or made contradictory statements. Nietzsche's writings wanderings wonderings walings weepings as duelling dancing doctrines are not contradictory because they are always already a pushing pulling perpetual Becoming as the Eternal Return of différance. Freud saw a one and a half year old boy throwing a paper-back copy of Nietzsche's The Gay Science which fell open on the Doctrine of the Eternal Return: Freud retrieved the Fort-Da Game from the Doctrine of the Eternal Return of the Throw. Nietzsche's wriggling writhing writings - as a Fort-Da-Forgetting - have no consciousness of contradiction have no concept of contradiction: contradiction does not exist in the Nietzschean canon. Nietzsche forgets contradiction. Nietzsche is beyond contradiction. Since Nietzsche's sensations are structured as a musical score so have no linguistic equivalent only a musical-image equivalent. Remember also dreams have no linguistic equivalent only a musical-image equivalent as the subconscious is structured like a score as a series of sensations. The being-time of the score is equivalent to the being-time of the psyche: that is - it-is - out-of-sync - out-of-time - with well worn commonsense clock-time all the time not-in-time. The scape subconscious initiated is structured scent as as a sent series of oozed out serene semenised sensations always already activated and articulated as a moist music mostly mothered mourning metaphysical mesmerising metre milking making man: - philosophise - phantasise - paintisise - poeticise. The Unconscious has no-time for time-to-tell.

Fort-da is the Eternal Return of Play as to Throw Thoth forth is to Return froth sent Sensations of Difference. Bacon Thoth throws forth pain paint to bring back the Bacon - bring back the Father - bring back the Pope. Fort-da is the Essential metaphysical music mooding movement bringing back being as being blown away again. Nietzsche Freud Bacon and Derrida do fort-da ad-infinitum in never nailing the name never nailing the image slipping severing signatures.

Fort-da is the Eternal Return of the Frame which frees form from frameness deframing Derrida's deconstruction of the frame as framing form frozen. For Derrida forgets why the Frame is There as Dasein deframed. The radical alteric eonomy of the frame is that it deframes the image out-of-itself and at the same-different no-time holds the image within outside itself at the same-different no-time all the time not in time as the image out-of-place out-of-space. Precisely be removing the frame difference is reduced to samenes of the space surrounding the image: deframing the image is pure pre-tentious politically correct affectation and alien to the thrown framing of arts alienation and artificiality: the frame - as Bacon rightly wrote - is there precisely to activate the artificiality of the image: by removing the frame the art image becomes banalised normalised democratised - 'dumbed down' and 'put-in-place'. The Frame foregrounds the no ground of the image and de-elevates it up and out of-it-self towards you: the frame throws the image out towards you: without the frame the image falls flat into the space of sameness. The Frame forms the abspace of radical difference by splitting up spaces as dualisms of inside-outside for the frame is in-between being out-between or operating interstitial interactions: the frame gives radical freedom to radical différance deframing Dasein.

The thrown frame flame does fort-da forever as Derrida did as Derrida died as Derrida still does do fort-da daringly. The essence of the economy of the pull and push of play is patently played out played in-on-out-off the fort-da-frame. The freeze frame sets the sensation of melting metaphysical mooding activating alienationing. For the frame forges a zone of tension as a spice of distance and a dice of difference decapitating spatial scapeing. To remove the frame is to remove the play of difference and distance. The frame as fort-da fort throws the image away keeping it at bay as it comes thrown back towards you coming to get you. As Bacon said: only by going further can one get nearer: to throw is to retrieve as a dice Dasein. Far from being a form of conserving concealing containment the frame frees the form from the frame out-in itself: the supplement surplus stuff fuses with the frame throwing the frame on fort-da free play. The frame becomes the crypt which takes in and incorporates the ghost of the image: the crypt caresses the carcase of the image keeping it cosy and coy. (Conversely: the decorations of Pollock and Rothko would look absolutely absurd framed: one does not normally frame wall paper). The Frame does not Mark a Limit but Ignites a Lightening lighting up Alien Being as the free Frame articulates and activates the Artingness of art as artificially real as the rolling reel removal from the real. The Frame makes a difference marks a difference makes a différance marks a différance in setting and severing the sensation the metaphysical mooding of the abjected abimage: the frame is not a frame that frames but a flame that inflames inflaming the image igniting the image initiating the image letting the image be in-it-self out-it-self as an interstice inheritance. The Frame deconstructs the Enframing of the sutured space of the Art Gallery which is a Frame of Containment: the Frame decapitates deranged Political Correctness. The Frame severs the Face from the Space of the Subject: the Frame radically removes the Face from the Head. The Frame fuels The Face - the frame frees the face from the space of the subject - frame decapitates dasein by beheading the head of the severed subject from being there to being thrown over there as an absent abjected alienality. The Frame for Bacon is Blanchot's entretien: that which severs sutures: separating by joining the out-of-joint alternating altarity between being attained and abjected: here the frame holds the head together apart decapitating dasein severing the subject form the abject. The Frame is the between [entre-deux] delivering distance joining jouissance abjected apart: For the Frame is derridian différance disseminating dasein - framing the presence of an Infinite immediate - as an absence of a nearness of a farness as a closeness of a distance: as far off the the frame is the Interval in between Being and being - becoming the Unifying union - the Original origin Delivering différance. Really in reality the removing of the frame is the forgetting and negation of différance of différanceof of différance. Thus the Frame literally makes a difference as a radical différance severing the spectator from the space of the abimage: the frame throws the spectator out-of-joint-with-being-there: by removeing the frame one unifies the spectator with space of sameness that surrounds the spectator so then there is no difference between the abimage and the spectator thus the removing of the frame is a conservative act reducing art to decoration and democracy - the evil enemies of art alien. The Frame also activates and attunes the metre and the moment and the mood of the thing thrown there: the thrown frame flames enflames engulfs as it ignites images ahead a head alive: the frame brings presence to the absence there.

Chora - as pure Sensation of chance-throwness - receives sends sensations everything or gives sensation to everything eggos in a Platonic pure place totally alien totally exterior to anything that it receives through sensationing fo sensation is not subject centred self centred but filtered through externally leaking back in only to exit again via forta-da fluidity Since sensation begins as is absolutely blank black back everything that is sensationed on it is automatically effaced eggoed emptied. Chora - pure sensation rawly remains foreign to the initiated imprint it receives throwing it off over all again so sown in a sensation it does not receive anything but gives pure sensation - as sensation as Chora does not receive what it receives nor does it give what it gives because sensation is the auratic aura awe around Choratic sensation: a hallow hollowing out being to throw Being. Everything inscribed in Choratic sensation eggo erases empties itself immediately since sensation is essentially evaporated on sending sensations while remaining in it. Choratic sensation is thus an inspiringly impossible shimmering shining shuddering somnambulist surface - it is not even a slippery surface but a surplus suspended angoisse aura awe.

Since there is Being and Time only in the Choratic Event of Thrown Chance then this driving dazzling Dasein Ereignis ejaculation hijacks human beings as well as alien beings - as those who perceive and penetrate Being and Alien - by standing and shining well within true time - into their own - oot of time - at all time. Thus owned, alien beings and human beings belong in the Event of Chance Throwness as collected Chora. This Belonging lies in the assimilation that distinguishes the Event as pure Sensation. Through this, human beings and alien beings are admitted into the Ereignis Event as pure pulling Shining Sensation. This is why we can never place or pace or perceive the Choratic Event of Thrown Chance in front of us, behind us, beneath us, neither as over against us, nor as the all-encompassing but only out of reach through Throwness as pure shining Sensation of Being Alien. Alien is Being. Bacon became Doomed to Throw the Dice of Eternal Return Becoming Being Alien again and again and again ad infinitum. To Throw Is To Be. To Throw Is To Be Out Of It. To Be Thrown forth Out of It and ahead of It Out into the Open Region of Being Alien of Being Dead.

"Since Plato, it is the old philosophical injunction: to learn to live is to learn to die. Less and less, I have not learned to accept death. I remain uneducable about the wisdom of learning to die." (Jacques Derrida, Le Monde interview, August, 2004).

In Le Monde did Derrida deliver death before Derrida died - or after Derrida dies - after Derrida forgot to die whilst writing and dying and lying about learning how to die and how to do a death - did Derrida die before Derrida does death of after? How did Derrida do 'Death'? Or did Derrida undo 'Death' deffering Death in dicing différance? Did Derrida deconstruct 'Death'? Did Derrida die? Did Derrida disappear? Slip away - slip out the back door - at the last second - before death came to the door? Or an alien abduction? Did they come to take him away? Or is Derrida still around? Still away? As if on a holiday? Abroad? Bored? Somewhere boring?

How do we know Derrida 'Died'? We were 'informed' - we were 'told' - some were even 'shown' - and also because others 'Die' before us and after us and with us. Only others assume and suppose we 'Die' because we go all stiff and smelly and are stripped of the Psyche and the Sensations of our Being – the Psyche and Sensation of our Being alive. But where do our Psyche and Sensation of Being drift? Where does Dasein drift? What oozes out of the 'Dead'? Sensation itself as out itself! We do not 'Die' but become Other (Sensations) as otherwise to Being, otherwise to Dasein. In 'Life' we are always already 'Dying' all the Time so 'Death' does not exist in-itself only out-itself - as out of oneself: from 'Borning' we are always already 'Dying': we 'Die' many more times psychically and physically in the sense that we are always already shape-shifting and meandering-mutating: we are never the same subject for a split second so hence we 'Die' and are 'Born' every single second as an attuned afresh sensation. Doing 'Death' as a disappearing act is the expelling eggsiting out of sensationing from the Body. Physical 'Death' is thus the oozing out of the Psyche the Sensations-Emanations of our Unconscious from the Body of dying dasein where 'Death' sets free our Unconscious Sensations-Emanations beaming being forth free.

Physical 'Death' is the oozing out of the Psyche and the Sensations from the Body (Corpse). We do not (usually) experience 'Death' – others experience the moment, movement, music of our 'Death' - in our place - on our behalf. Yet we all introject and incorporate - the 'Dead': we wear the 'Dead'- that is - we all become Crypts of the 'Dead' (keeping them alive and wearing their Psyche and Sensation) - but most of us do not know this and carry the dead like one carries a coal sack or as Jacques Derrida deals the: "dead object remains like a living dead abscessed in a specific spot in the ego" (Derrida, The Ear of The Other). We wear the Dead as we were the Dead.

"Death" is the dematerialisation and desemenisation of the leaked-Body and the dissemination of the Psyche and Sensation: the deaded-body disperses, jettisons, our psyche – thinking – sensationing to outer regions sensation-scapes: therefore 'Absolute Death' is always already an 'Absolute Impossibility' – just as 'Absolute Life' is also an 'Absolute Impossibility'. The 'Living' incorporate The 'Deading'. The Living are never alive enough whereas the Deading are never adead enough.

Some of us here have actually always already experienced being-dead as a Being-Death (by being beheaded and decapitated from the mind-body dualism) and floating free – from the heaviness of being (embodied emheaded): as an out of body experience and near death experience. 'I' experience being dead: 'Death' is not a possibility. 'Death' is not a question or an issue for Being: 'Dying' as Living is. Dasein is for 'Dying' as Being is for Deathing as a Life Sentence is for Doing Time. One could argue that what is important is not 'Death' itself - but Dying (Living), the manner, music, metre and the style in which the being Lives and 'Dies' as it aims toward 'Death' ('Life'). For Heidegger 'Death' is our metre, movement, music of our being toward 'Death' – the way we walk the way we wonder the way we wander towards 'it': in 'Death' we become 'Death' in-itself as 'being-dead' is an essential state of 'being- alive' on different levels of our musical psychic sensation: our measure and measuredness: our 'Death' or 'Deathness' could be said to be the metre of our Music and Time: our being is constituted and incorporated by our Time of 'Death' as the 'Death' of our Time: the metre of our Music of Being (psychic-sensation).

Our oozed out Ontological relationship with Being and Time is the Time of our 'Life' as the Time of our 'Death': that is: the way we all do Time is the way we all do 'Death' and we all do 'Life': everyone in a sense in a sensation - is 'doing time' (not just those in prison): the Style - the way we do Time is the sign and sensation of the way we do 'Death' – both in sickness and in health. We all daily do 'Death' (like 'Life') differently - because we all do 'Death' ('Life') differently because we all do Time differently but not all beings do the time of death at the time for being to become being-time which is the right time to die as to time-death is to die in time for time.

A Good Death is not 'Dying' on Time but 'Dying' in Time with Style. A Good Birth can set the moment, movement, music for 'A Good Death': some beings are never (truly) born so some beings never (truly) 'Die' – they are disembodied and beheaded from the Psyche and Sensation scapes so sloth and drift derailed from frozen Dasein as the living-dead: they do not have The Shine. 'Doing Life' is an orchestral overture for 'Doing Death' via the Way we all Do Time and it is the Style in which we do 'Death' as Dasein. 'Death' is the only Uncertainty in Life. As an Absolute Impossibility 'Death' is all the time not in Time. Being and Time negate the Possibility of 'Death' and the Impossibility of 'Life'. That is: a 'Full Death' or a 'Full Life' as 'Life' and 'Death' are always already left leaking leftovers oozing out of our Othernesses as an angoisse attuned Atherness.

Hear Heidegger on dreary Dasein and 'Death': "...Dasein constantly is its not-yet as long as it is, it also already is its end. The ending we have in view when we speak of death does not signify a being-at-an-end of Dasein, but rather a being toward the end of this being. Death is a way to be that Dasein takes over as soon as it is." (Being & Time). "...death is the inmost, not-relational, certain, and as such, indefinite possibility not to be bypassed of Dasein. ...As the end of Dasein death is in the being of this being toward its end." (Being & Time). Derrida on the (im)possibility of 'Death': "Is the most distressing, or even the most deadly infidelity, that of a possible mourning which would interiorise within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and lives only in us? Or is it that of impossible mourning which…refuses to take the other within oneself, as in the tomb of some narcissism?" (Jacques Derrida, Memories of Paul de Man; The Work of Mourning). The Living Dead are always already attainted and a attuned to the Dead Living.

Bacon's chaotic Choratic Event of a 'game of chance' - a dice Daseining as a Fort-Da Froth Throwness - Falling-Forgetting Projecting-Retrieving - is a revealing of The Real through The Reel and The Roulette Wheel of the to Fort Da froth found in foam Freud. Bacon never reels in his lost object of desire but Throws it in Order to Retrieve it: to Throw is to Retrieve for Freud and Bacon. For Bacon the sewer Psyche is structured like Sperm which cannot be Known only Thrown thrusting and spurting. Bacon Orders the Psyche to put in an Appearance through Thrown Chance spurting the sensation of the Psyche on to the cunt canvas and on to the nailed nervous system. The Psyche is structured like a leakage and not structured like a language. As our leaked swamp Psyche is oozed outside concepts it cannot be known yet the Psyche can be Imaged but only through thrusting flooding frothy fruity Throwness. For Bacon the Psyche is structured and sutured like Sperm: a strange sludge slurp swamp surplus spillage spilling thing that cannot be contained controlled conceptualised or cleared up but ceaselessly eternally drips and stains and smells and spills lovely leaking lamella ink its slimy stuff well wet wound whipped spunked all over you both and all over the place all over time all the time. Titian Velázquez Rembrandt Picasso Jawlensky Bacon Auerbach and Alien all trapped threw nailed leaked pinned projected the thrown Psyche out of time all the time out of 'our' time which never came all the time as a primordial time for the Psyche knows of no time all the time being beingtime 'it(no)self' out of time in time all the time not in time at any time all the time not in time or on time.

How is the Sensation of Psychic Semen smelt seen heard hijacked caught trapped imaged? Thrown Through the Reel of Freud and the Hand of Bacon. The Reel, as the thrown aim of The Real, for Bacon, is the paint-in-hand thrown out off now never reeled-back-in for he leaves the fort forever traced on the canvas of spattered, splattered spunked spent pearl paint. Bacon's Trauma is Trapped in his body and it is through his chance-game of Throwness Falling and Fort Da he hopes to reveal The Real via The Reel or Roulette Wheel which spins the sensation of thrown time after time. The Baconian Real is linked with the Freudian Uncanny; that arbitrary alien mark made by Bacon's Reel oozing outside inane illustration. The Alien Real is 'something' which is by definition 'impossible' to 'pin down' where the 'brute fact' is 'radial exteriority' and an atta 'alien alterity', a shining shimmering subconscious serene soft sea sensationism salt spume stripped (of) 'subjectivity' (and) 'sexuality'. An authentic Aletheia alien art is stripped of a 'sexuality' and a 'subjectivity' and a 'gender' arriving at an atta abject 'alienality'. You both can only 'identify' with an alien art once you have forgotten to be 'human' (what ever that was) and arrived at the thrown shining site and the sight of alien being shot outside 'human' conception. Through Throwness the Psychic Semen of Alien Being reveals and rereels back towards all over the place out of place spilling beyond behind it-out-self spilling over sides. The thrown out lost Logic of the loin Leakage is that Alien Being as an alien-ated semen Stain eggsistence exceeds the alien Area it Covers with out egging over the Edge but dripping Dasein through it initiating Incorporation.

The thrown Lost Object as absolute Alien always already as absolute Ather leaves leaked back broken out-in Incorporation: the Sensation of the Object Leaks over the Eggo. The not so quite dead Alien Mother Ship refuses to 'let-go' refuses to 'un-hinge' anchoring to the attic of the Son's Psyche port of call. The not-so-quite dead mooring Mother Becomes the Eternal Return of the Alien lodged-leaking installed-inside the not-so-quite-dead Living Son. So it is not that the sunk sullen Son refuses - consciously or subconsciously - the same-difference - to undo to unhinge to un-touch to un-tie to un-stitch the Identification with the Lost Mother for the Mother is always already alien to Identification: with the Lost Mother - as 'pure alienality' - there is only ever a radical 'alien-other-nothing' Object which is never ever actually available to the split sutured spaces of Identification and Difference - severing sexuality - severing psyche. One cannot remember the Name of the Mother, the Name of the Other, and therefore One cannot make-the-move from Mourning to Memorial from Dawn to Dusk. As an Alien alterity the Murmuring Mother moves-in installed as an un-invited Incorporation in-to the thrown Mourning Son - since the Son has no choice in the matter in the invasion in the Incorporation. In Incorporation it is not that the Son Incorporates the Lost Mother but that the Leaked Mother - even if allegedly dead - Incorporates the Living Son: The Son wears the Mother - the Mother wears the Son. The Mother can never Die: has no Time to. The Father can die. He has the Time.

For Freud 'woman' is always already essentially Egyptian - that is - ego-free - being-animal - being-alien - as being ather - to being human - to being man - to being man-made. For Freud - as an ego-free Egyptian - and a curator and collector of Egyptian Memorabilia - masturbated molested memorabilia - as an answering angoisse antiquity - answering an alien ather: 'woman'. For Freud there is no 'woman' - no 'sexual-difference' - only an 'alien difference' - no 'human condition' - only an 'alien condition' - an Egyptian Ereignis. As aliens the Egyptians had no ego - no psyche - no drives - no desires - no needs.

For Freud 'woman' was always already 'alien' - alien to Freud - for Freud was alien to Music of the Mother's Murmur (Chora) as the Sensation of the Psyche: for Freud lacked a musical mouth: castrated from consciousness he could not hear the sensation of the psyche played by the 'womb of the woman' for has not all psychoanalysis been a misunderstanding of music as played by the body of the psyche? Freud's ear was alien to the alien in woman for Freud found 'woman' subconsciously 'alien' and this was his 'conscious' discovery his blind-spot becoming his ear-spot his 'inisight' blocked by his earless 'outsight' for Freud's ear failed to see into his 'insight' that 'woman' is 'alien' as Freud failed foresight-earsight: that the swap sewer subconscious is structured like a music - not leaked like a language. Nietzsche was a greater Freud a greater Freudian than Freud for Nietzsche had a musical-ear a musical-mind a musical-memory a musical-metaphysics a musical-psyche a musical sensation which was Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Sensation of the Psyche as the Condition of Music. For Freud - not being a musical man - failed to tune to attune to the music of the psyche as a sensation of the body as a corpus composition a skin score of the sensation of sexuality as the timpani body being attuned as a metaphysical musical instrument inducing psychic sexual sound sensations in the orchestra of other beings: the 'sensationing cure' not the 'talking cure' for the psyche cannot be spoken only woken as a musical memory of the sounds of the psyche as the score of the body's Being being as a musical manuscript. For Freud lacked a musical ear - a mothering ear - to sensations of the psyche's musical body and its dissonances: music is not merely a metaphor for the body: music is the body of the psyche is structured as a score: the subconscious is the score of the music of being sounding out of the womb of the world. Psychoanalysis (like Logic) know nothing of The Nothing. Music is the materialised maternal metre of the sound sensation of the Psyche. Music is not only 'about nothing' Music is also about The Nothing: the Sensation of the Subconscious the Sensation of the Psyche as the silent Score of The Nothing.

Freud's ears were all welded up with words so Freud failed to hear the score of the subconscious that Nietzsche sung so well. For Freud knew nothing of The Nothing for Freud feared the Score of the Subconscious of Maternal Music Making: The Timpani of the Womb. Eggsistence comes into being through the sensation of the skin wounding wondering the wall of the womb: the thing is the timpanist the womb is the timpani: the thing plays the womb wears the womb wounds the womb wonders the womb: the thing makes music from the mother: for Freud never heard the Music of the Mother for the Father of Psychoanalysis never heard the Mother of Music as the Music of the Mother as the Sensation of Being played out-the-womb out-of-the-world where score Sensation is a Form of Language where Sensation is a Froth of Language where Sensation is a Filter of Language where Language leaks Sensation where Sensation leaks Language outside Intelligence where Sensation leaks Language outside Analysis - psycho or otherwise - out. WARNING: be very warey and suspicious of pyschologists, psychoanalysists and personas who are alien to music! If they are cut off from the sounds from without then they are castrated from the sounds from within: listening to music is listening to the life of the mind as the life of the mother as the life of the body and being itself initiated oozed out itself leaked as the life of music.

At what age is an alien artist itself? At what point does one become an alien artist - as an abjected body being there thrown? At what age does an alien artist become an authentic being alien again? An age arrested as an alien ather around four-five to six-seven: the thrown alien artist is initiated and always already attending and attuning an ather time torn away from the inane ideology of time: being in time and a daily doing time: thus the thrusted alien artist annihilates aging as an alien artist abjects aging and timing: only our the they - moronic man - are mortified and managed and maimed by being in-time on-time because they are always already enslaved and engulfed and interpellated by the insipid and inane ideology of 'the time': the alien artist as against aging just like the philosopher - just like the poet - gets younger and younger and younger with age. As Heraclitus and Heidegger had it: alien-time - it is a child - playing as pastime - moving the memories - to and fro - on a body of sensation - such a child is the mastery and mover over being an adult. The alien artist is never an adult for the adult is alien to art because the adult is alien to the child of being which is being the unconscious: Bacon - as an art alien child of the unconscious - never needed to sleep never needed to dream because Bacon was a day dreamer by night and a night walker by day by being consciously unconscious: the alien artist works unconsciously without even being conscious of being unconscious of being the unconscious in itself out itself for itself. For the alien art child there is no consciousness just as there is no lost-object and there is no death-drive for the unconscious knows nothing of conscious life or loss or death. There is no such thing as the lost-object or the pleasure-principle or death-drive for the unconscious art alien child - for those things are for adults only.

What is the time-psychic space of the altaric alien artist? All the time Childtime arrested around psychic sensations up to seven: Leonardo, Mozart, Bruckner, Cézanne, Proust, Schiele, Soutine, Picasso, Fellini, Bacon were all arrested around seven all the time back-in-time out of time not-in-time with the present preferring sensationing of scents smelt long past and plastered over: scented semen Sensation semblance survives supercedes severes inane intellectualised ideas instead initiating images as an autistic artistic scene serial sensationing. Sensationing straight from the Subconscious thus throwing Thinking thwarted. The tiny tot time of the altaric alien artist is in that they always already grow younger and younger as they grow older and older arrested around seven - severing time at seven - serving time at seven - sensationing at seven as the sensation of a life time - the sensation of being seven - like Proust and Picasso - the smelt and the sight sensations of being about seven: the moment and mood of being moved and mesmerised by sensations at seven: the thrown frisson and fascination of jettisoned jousissances. Blanchot bleeds: "If our childhood fascinates us, this happens because childhood is a moment of fascination, is itself fascinated. And this golden age seems bathed in a light is splendid because unrevealed. But it is only that this light is foreign to revelation, has northing to reveal, is pure reflection, a ray which is still only the gleam of an image...This milieu of fascination, where what one sees seizes sight and renders it interminable, where the gaze coagulates into light, where light is the absolute gleam of an eye one doesn't see but which one doesn't cease to see since it is the mirror image of one's own look - this milieu is utterly attractive. Fascinating. It is light which is also the abyss, a light one sinks into, both terrifying and tantalizing." (Maurice Blanchot, The Image; The Space of Literature, University of Nebraska Press, 1982).

Bacon blew to thou peppered Peppiatt pertaining to the Eternal Return of the Childhood Sensationing: "I think artists stay much closer to their childhood than other people. They remain far more constant to those early sensations. Other people change completely, but artists tend to stay the way they have been from the beginning." (Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon, Anatomy of an Enigma, Michael Peppiatt, Westview Press, 1996).

Absolute authentic Alien Art as an abject autistic artistic altarity arrives as an accident as da Derrida dices "an altarity that cannot be anticipated."

"Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return and who or which will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, state, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity), just opening which renounces any right to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event that cannot be awaited as such, or recognized in advance therefore, to the event as the foreigner itself, to her or to him for whom one must leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hope—and this is the very place of spectrality [i.e., ghosts]."

(Jacques Derrida. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 1994).

Bacon's Derridean Dice, Lamella Leakage, - (Real Thing, as Being Blown, Thrown There), - is Found Forth (in the) Flight Froth (of offal) Thrown Thick White Whiplashes of ore Pushed Paint which while is the thin fossilized foam fuel formed from the subconscious slime sea inside us: Bacon says: "It seems to come straight out of what we choose to call the unconscious with the foam of the unconscious locked around it - which is its freshness." (Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson 1987). Loin leaking leaves its leftover sperm stuff as a snail leaves its slime; a stain of being left behind bled bare. For Bacon Being as alien Lamella Leftover initiates in an Appearance through Throwness Leaking through an Absolute Forgetting froth of Form through an anti-intellectual instinct act as action: through thrown chained chance dice Dasein.

The Lamella in Bacon is Eggo Leakage of Being Bled Bare as Non-Illustrational Fluid Form which washes always already works wet upon urgent soil slither Sensation always already ahead crass Consciousness. Bacon said: "Non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact." (Francis Bacon, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, David Sylvester, Thames & Hudson, 1987). Only by a radical Absolute Forgetting of 'how to-do-it' (paint an eye, a mouth, a nose, a ear) can it be done (outside illustration) - afresh, anew via vomit violence of throwing, frothing, foam fleeting, falling, leaking, spilling, spunking. Bacon's Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1966) silently serenely spills six sheets blowing before away at towards to you yet. Dyer drips dry shaving shimmering sensation thrown through the loss leaking lather lava loin legs left deriding derriding diarrhea do da flush fort-da da. Here Honoré Daumier delivers dashing daring darting shooting shining silver sliver slither semen shrapnel shards.

We will never know Bacon's Thrown Traumas (or our own) but we can see sense smell shimmer shudder sensation turd torn traces off of Bacon's thrown trauma in Bacon's Thrown Paint which Becomes nervous-system memory traces of that violent traumatic event that has no name but which is always already buried in the body. Bacon plays, via the games of chance and gushing gambling, Heideggerian Freudian Throwness Froth Fort Da - to materialise the 'brut fact' of his frothy thrown 'traumatic event' - as well as the thrown traumas lodged in his hideous sitters sqauters sleepers standers shitters shouters spunkers swallowers. Bacon knows that his Lost Object of Desire is that very un-retrievable ecstatic eggo ejaculation ooze of off spent sperm that violently spattered and splattered across his fucking face; he throws a handful of white double cream spunk puss paint in the hope of retrieving that pure primordial shape that left its slime- stain on his fucked-face; he also knew that his father's belt was the reel thrown across his backside to reveal those Baconian slashed that he belted his canvases with: Bacon used the thrown paint memory substances and canvas as skins, to trace the drama of trauma but no in an illustrative literal sense but as actual Lacanian lamella loin leftovers silver snail slime. Bacon's serial Traumas are the thrown nailed nervous system's spume spilling overload overspill overkill flooding froth foam forth oozed out often overwhelming bored brave Bacon who simply cannot process them - so projects them - so throws them - via hand and oil paint - or hand and the dice - hoping to make a killing or trap a living - and exiled exorcising ecstatic eggsorcising experiencing the Thrown tantrum Traumas imaged in the Triptychs of three thrown traumatic images. Bacon wants to re-play via the Fort Da of Throwing Paint Trauma to Master it - whether at the Roulette Wheel or at The Canvas. Bacon Throws Freud's Reel to Retrieve the 'Real Thing' where Throwing is in a Revealing and a Retrieving of Alien Being. But Bacon can never Retrieve that Lost Object of alien Desire because it never existed in the first place: 'it' was never lost: 'it' was never an object but an alien abject. But Bacon retrieves raw snail slime soggy sperm stuff substitutes. Bacon's Froth Fort Da Drool drips down the thrown canvas skin sensation raw running away after towards two of you leaving leaking liquid line: 'like a snail leaving its slime'. Bacon masters the Reel and not the Alien Object but by not mastering it he lets it to be 'more' Real. That thrown loitering leaking surplus stuff: the petit object a. Along with Bacon's 'alien abjects' (or ossified 'offal objects') wet which represent rightly the thrown petit object a-lien - Lacan adds his own odd long lost list of oozed alien-object-as: "the mamilla, faeces, the phallus (imaginary object), the urinary flow. the phoneme, the gaze, the voice - the nothing." Bacon's Thrown Paint, representing the petit object a, is his fresh form of re-materialising Being Shit. But Bacon's Being Spunk is in indeed spurted shot sensation Thrown by Chance - to - Order. 'Great Spunk' like 'Great Art' is spurted out in a Deeply Ordered angoisse arrangement by Thrown Chance oozing out after towards away from you. Bacon's Primordial Painting as an Ordered Spunking by a Thrown Chance chain transforms 'solids' into 'fluids' leaking lamella as an Alien Externalised Being Thrown Fluid froth from bored best back Bacon's ossified oozing organic orbit orifice often oily or opal or ore. All great thinkers have known the thrown and knew how to throw and retrieved through throwness the truth of being thrown in and out back and forth in of off the world oozing outside orbiting ournesses. The Mother threw the Son into the World wounded as a jettisoning jouissance as a decapitating delivery dicing Dasein. The Mother is not the Other but the Ather - as Alien to thrown Being - being always already alien to being in the World as an Aleatoric Alétheia.

Marx - Nietzsche - Heiddeger - Freud - Adorno all Threw Fort-Da Time: Marx: (Repetition): Nietzsche: (Eternal Return): Heidegger: (Throwness): Freud: (Fort-Da): Adorno: (Force-Field): The Repetition of the Eternal Return of Throwing Fort-Da as a Force-Field. Derrida and Bacon threw in the Play of Chance.

Bacon's bleeding brute burnt boiled soaked soiled stained saturated sutured Subconscious sea slurp sludge of off oozed smelly shot spunk surf slime stuff: that thrown pushed paint initiation - is: 'structured like a language' which ab-presents the thrown leaking lamella wet which: are irreducible and un-analysable by virtue of violent chaotic chance Throwness which being thrown 'out-it-itself' is the 'stuff' and 'stuffing' out poring of the gutted and filleted 'fucked I': the Eye that sees Nothing of the 'I' of not-being-there to hand as the hand out-it-self throws being-over-there not being-over-here: the Eye that is pulled out of its 'I' socket but still stares and slides left right up down in out: scarred of being struck out of site and sight of having its 'I' ball sucked out sucked off. The 'I' of the penis and the 'I' of the person ooze oils from their eye balls. Bacon has dug out the 'I' of the Eye and left the Hole to be pumped further full off-of Spume Sperm like a runny under boiled egg; all soggy sweety spunky leaky. The thrown Lamella Leaks from the corner of the Eye or the crack of the Egg. The Eye is the Egg: all runny and watery and glistening like fucking spunk. The thrown sunk Subconscious ink is 'structured like a leakage': The Lamella is the Leaked Subconscious sea sensation sutured in-side in-bled in-bed Bacon's soiled sheets stuff of oozed primordial paint punctureslraking leftovers melting through the mattress. The Logic of the Leakage in Bacon is that the semen Stain exceeds the area it Covers with out egging over the Edge. Leaking Stain Subconscious Squid Foam Form Froth is Force forced from Bacon's throwing, forgetting, leaking leaving an inventive image and "all the foam of its freshness". So slime subconscious squid stuff stain can be seen smelt sensationed eggo emerging from the fort-da thrown foam froth form in Bacon's Alien Arising from the Sea 1952 (formerly known as Figure Emerging from the Sea 1952) image inviting subconscious sea inside-in with: 'all the foam of its freshness' locked leaking around anus oozing oil. The sea becomes the shredded skin from which the thrown creature becomes born alien again.

Bacon's white whiplashes of opalescent pearl paint ooze oil often smell, taste, look like the runny soggy juicy texture of an under boiled egg or freshly shot slurp spunk: glittering and glistening smelling slightly salty but sensationally sweet. John Edwards would join Bacon at Reece Mews for breakfast where Bacon would cook a fry-up. Bacon, Edwards says, liked only egg white, Edwards only the yolk, "so it was the perfect relationship". In October 1998, John Edwards said of Bacon: "He was a lonely and very disciplined man. No matter how late he'd been out drinking he'd get up at six, make a cup of tea and go straight tot the studio. At nine he'd phone me up and then cook breakfast, which we ate at Reece Mews at ten. Francis cooked a lovely breakfast too: scrambled or fried eggs, bacon and toast. He would only buy his bacon from Marks & Spencers in Kensington and he only liked the white of an egg. I only liked the yolk, so it was a perfect relationship...My personal nickname for Francis was 'Eggs'. No one else called him that. In the East End of London, where I am from, we call very special people 'diamonds'. Eggs was a diamond. And a fucking great painter."

Edwards' nickname for Bacon was "Eggs". Bacon and Eggs: Bacon would only softly boil his Eggs to allow the White of the Eye to run and cry all over the canvas; Bacon lover his legs, eggs to be runny and gooy like drool Dyer's spunk shot oozed on Bacon's fuck-face was runny and gooy. Bacon always already gutted, tore out, the Yolk (the Iris) leaving lamella leakage. Bacon, Eggs, was wet lamella leaked, oozed out, froth foam formed from the thrown leaking loins mutant mother. Michael Peppiatt on Bacon and Eggs: "Often he would have both lunch and dinner in famous establishments because, he would insist, if you can't go home to a lightly boiled egg and a green salad, it is difficult to follow a supreme meal at Taillevent or Lucas Carton with an insipid stew at a local bistro." (Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Michael Peppiatt, Westview Press, 1996). Whenever wesample shot spunk or a slightly salted , slightly boiled egg, we will see smell slurp straight away how similar they are in taste and texture and also how similar they to the smell and taste and texture of Bacon's white whiplashes of leaking lamella seen in: Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne, 1967; Oedipus & the Sphinx after Ingres, 1978; Two figures Lying on a Bed, 1968 ; the central panel from Triptych August 1972; and the right hand panel of Triptych 1973.

Lacan on Lamella: "Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella." (Lacan, 1977). Bacon's pushed paint, as leaked lamella, intense instinct, eggo energy, flies-off, cuts-canvas, speeded spat spatter splatter (where) Forgetting, Egging, Throwing, Leaking (open up the valves of) subconscious stuff (as) torn time. The particular speed of thrown paint - flying lamella - at a particular part of the canvas becomes being-time-speed: time and being become sensation speed where being time is a matter of speed not speech. Farson on Bacon & Eggs: "On the day of his flight, James (Birch) had a breakfast of bacon and eggs with Francis and John Edwards at Reece Mews." (The Gilded Gutter of Francis Bacon, Daniel Farson, Century, 1993). Bacon did not fly-off with Edwards. Eggo Bacon liked his eggs lightly boiled and slightly salted like hot runny thick wads of fucking spunk streaming down the sides of his fuck face as he sliced off the crown of the egg letting the stuff ooze out over.

The thrown frying flying egg(o) is an essential initiated ingredient to Bacon's cooking-as-painting; eggs, both black and white, can often be seen leaking or flying from orifices or orbiting: here Bacon is more of a cordon bleu chef than past-master painter: his sauces are subtle. The question of which came first: the chicken or the egg is an absurdity for Bacon. Lawrence Gowing stated on chicken and Bacon: "With Bacon the play of paint is for real. One imagines his special watchfulness as it throws up unthinkable kinds of resemblance. Time and again he is drawn into a fearful game of chicken - to stay with the paint at the perilous onset of likeness It is played with the only stakes that are big enough to make it exciting, the indisputable equivalence of paint and flesh...The illusory coherence must be slit open, so that the real content, the irrefutable bursts out. The body must become actual, with its real orifices and its arching, gaping rapture...When the paint itself breaks loose into a flowing white emanation, streaming away across the canvas, it is the intimation of a direction..." (Lawrence Gowing, Francis Bacon: The Irrefutable Image, 1968). The white of the egg is the white of the eye of the eggo shooting out oozed spunk.

Bacon's Man getting up from a chair (1968) is an example, eggsample, of eggoessentialism of eggosensationism of our ectoplasma leaking leftovers of oil orifices: spermatic slime eggos flow fluid flanked by black shell shadows shattered broken being: the white of the eye of the egg off of the eggo remain remaindered on a floating, falling cane chair with white whiplash while a bland blue lamella leaks ahead and covers the crimson carpet with its invisible bluey blowey gooey ghost geist gust.

Bacon always already remained an ancient abject angoisse alien exiting eggoing existence immediate instinctive leaking laughter and acting appearance oil of The Homunculous and L'Hommelette. Freud's inky-image of The Homunculous is the internalized alien ab-image ooze of the bled bare body oils onto which the thrown alien throws sensation onto Lacan's ointment of pure pre-Oedipal Alien Being L'Hommelette (Lacan 1978: 197) initiate the image of 'beaten bacon' and 'beaten eggs'. Bacon was often beaten beyond recognition where his fuck face was flattened extra flat like leaking lamella. Bacon as Beaten Eggs becomes Lacan's loitering leftover Lamella, the Alien as a pure puss puddle loin leaking appearance. Bacon was not human and did not have a human appearance: Helen Lessore remembers Bacon's alien features: "He was not the same shape as any other human being, especially not his face." (The Gilded Gutter of Francis Bacon, Farson, Century, 1993). Bacon was not 'human' or 'natural' as 'he himself' said to Peter Beard: "There's nobody more unnatural than I am myself, and, after all, I've worked on myself to be as unnatural as I can." Salty Bacon said to peppered Peppiatt in 1963: "With Nietzsche I believe that man must remake himself. We must woo the doctors and scientists in the attempt to renew and alter ourselves...the division between the sexes has to a large extent been invented...I have deliberately tried to twist myself, but I have not gone far enough. My paintings are, if you like, a record of this distortion....the image must be twisted if it is to make a renewed assault on the nervous system." (Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Westview Press, 1996.)

Bacon paints alien-being-time not human-being-time. Alien Being is always already a particular pre-post time (too early, too late, never present at hand, at foot, on time in time): but broken off on thrown forth from Bacon's hand out-of-time outside language. Bacon knows always already then there that non rational, non-literal, non illustrational arbitrary abject pushed-paint marks are anyhow linked leaked to the irrational 'language' and 'structure' soup sewer of the subconscious and the nervous system through 'identification': "Non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and the slowly leaks back into the fact...Well, very often the involuntary marks are much more deeply suggestive than others. One of the things I've tried to analyze is why it is that, if the formation of the image that you want is done irrationally, it seems to come onto the nervous system more strongly than if you knew how could do it." Not 'knowing how to do it' is the key to cracking open up the thrown eggo-alien-being being boiled broken off over on out.

For Bacon the image "seems to come straight out of what we choose to call the unconscious with the foam of the unconscious locked around it which is its freshness...there is a kind of sensational within the very, you could say, structure of your being, which is not to do with a mental image." Bacon stated to the late David Sylvester that he wanted to: "Break the willed articulation of the image , so that the image will grow, as it were, spontaneously and within its own structure and not my structure...possibly, a more organic image arises than if it were a willed image." (Francis Bacon: Interviews with David Sylvester). Bacon's Henrietta Moraes on a Red Ground 1964 leaks lamella by the knees: some black splatter spatter slurp stuff nails the foam form to the bed and to your nervous system: mattress marks leaving lamella leakage skid on spine, spleen, slime. Bacon paints Moraes' cunt as a black hole that leaks larva lava lather lamella; de Kooning and Freud cannot paint pussy: de Kooning's clownish cartoon cunts are too wet, over leaked; Feud's cunts are too dry, under leaked: cunts can't paint pussy - but Bacon's can. But Bacon puts porous puss pussy in by oozing it out oily; pulling prodding poking painting it inside-out; no longer recognisable as 'Women' (whatever that is) but a radical alien Other: there is no 'sexuality' seen smelt spilling streaming slipping slithering slurping sponging from Bacon's alien beings without orbit organs; they then are actually now not really recognisable as already hideous 'human beings': they then thrown are always already 'alien beings': for freeze framed Bacon 'Woman' and 'Man' do not exist; they are always already late arrivals and early departers that have been thrown by chance into an altaric alien abject arena outside the present only to be thrown out, withdrawn from the scene; entirely forgotten and erased from mind and memory and the now that never was. For Bacon 'Woman' and 'Man' are extinct excrement: time turd traces. Bacon said to Joshua Gilder: "But most people never think about life. If you think of the way we live, we're living on the compost of the earth. The world is just a dung heap. It's made up of compost of the millions and millions who have died and are blowing about. The dead are blowing in your nostrils every hour, every second you breathe in. It's a macabre way of putting it, perhaps, but anything that's at all accurate about life is always macabre. After all, you're born to die." (Francis Bacon, "I think about Death Every day", Joshua Gilder, Flash Art, May, 1983).

Bacon being leaking lamella lets larva lava lather froth flow foam from filtered filleted fish form. But Bacon bred the acting appearance of being The Homunculous and L'Hommelette but not The Homosexual - he was woundingly really rather: The Sensationual - The Eggoual - The Alienoual.

For bent Bacon: "Homosexuality is more tragic and more banal than what's called normal love." (Bacon in conversation with Michael Peppiatt, from Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Michael Peppiatt Westview Press, 1996.) Bacon hated a strange subspecies, classified as gay in the twentieth century, saying to Daniel Farson on several occasions: "I really hate gays." Bacon hated fucking poofs. Bacon being alien being didn't know what so-called 'human beings' (whatever they are) looked like so had to ask queers: "If ever I've wanted to know what someone really looks like, I've always asked a queer. They're ruthless and precise." Bacon being an ancient ancestor arrived too late; dormant, delayed; a late starter: he belonged to a pre-historic, pre-linguistic, pre-sexual sensationism: he said to Peppiatt: "When I hear certain people talk, I always think I belong to a very ancient simplicity. I'm probably the simplest person you know. I'm simple and natural. After I'm dead people will see how absolutely natural my distortions are." (Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, Michael Peppiatt Westview Press, 1996.)

Trauma cannot be 'known' only 'thrown'. Trauma is actually activated when an alien - someone special - who should be there - who is no longer there - anymore: after the calling out of the name is not returned - the name - the alien - having abjected the scene - a no-scape is opened up as an abspace swallowing the subject: a no-scape that cannot contain the return of the abjected alien: it is a constant calling into the abspace of the Nothing there.

Subconsciously Bacon uses the Canvas as the Traumatic Screen Scape to Project Thrown Alien Identification (outside ore) Illustration as a Becoming Alien-ated again and again all the time (all the time). Bacon (ab)uses oozed oil paint as a raw register of the 'real', as reel time, as thrown time, as a material sign, as a visual sensation of despair, desire, trauma and loss where the dripping diarrhea shooting spunk and ontological oozing fluid leftovers leak becoming the messy memory turd trace traps of being-bled-born-out -of-the-world-out-of-body. Bacon's Henrietta Moraes on a Red Ground (1964) has lamella leakage on the meandering mattress; perfectly plotted and positioned nailing body to bed: one of Bacon's best beasts Eggos. Bacon never had to beat eggs to make an omelette: Bacon could make an omelette without breaking eggs because he had no ego only an eggo outside the shell - Bacon was born out-side the shell shocked shot leaked lava frothed fucked forth from an alteric atta lizard's loins. Bacon being born castigated castrated cut-off out-of place pain and space spleen as a severed sensation scape seeping dread Dasein drool. Contrary to Freud's formula 'art' is not a 'wish-fulfillment' - but a 'dread-fulfillment'. Art activated is not a wish-fulfillment but a dread-fulfillment. Not even a dread-fulfillment but a dread-emptyment. Art alien does not attune to desire but to dread as ather to desire. Art alien decapitates itself from desire from Dasein. Art alien negotiates the negative. Art alien nails the negative. Art alien wishes for nothing but the fulfillment of its own demise its own decapitation.

"I feel a sort of violence spreading from male bodies at all places of the planet I’ve been…"

"Now I should have the chance to be a decent human being, for I'm standing eye to eye with death."

"I open up an access to a brute Being with which I would not be in the subject-and-object relation."

The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.

"The shock of Bacon’s work lies not in its dismemberments but in the discovery of our embodied sociality."

Jennifer Dyer, Paint and Suffering: Series and Community in Francis Bacon's Paintings, University of Amsterdam, Animus. .

"...in one of the most remarkable passages of his Aesthetics, Hegel defined the task of art as the appropriation of the alien..."

"The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness."

"If subjectivity and society abject the alien within, is abjection not a regulatory operation? Is the abject, then, disruptive of subjective and social orders, or foundational of them, a crisis in these orders or a confirmation of them?"

"The 37-year-old Jordanian radical Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's exquisitely executed beheading videos should have won the Turner Prize 2004 for their breathtaking cutting-edge...the brute realism of being a lived event... Ereignis as Es gibt."

"Terror is literature that rejects literary commonplace and convention in an attempt to accede to a pure, authentic expression ...Terrorist writers are in fact endlessly preoccupied with language, forever trying to bypass it, or rid it of its impurities."

Michael Syrotinski, Noncoincidence: Blanchot Reading Paulhan, The Place of Maurice Blanchot, Yale French Studies, 1998.

"To speak is always to speak from out of this interval between speech and radical violence...separating them, but maintaining each of them in a relation of vicissitude."

"We all need to be aware of the potential disaster which stalks us every moment of the day....Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal...Death can be life-enhancing."

"But if I stop doing what I'm doing, it will be like another murder. That's the real trauma, perhaps, the thought of going through what happened to Theo van Gogh again. We told each other we would make part two, and the thing that keeps me going is the thought, 'I have to do it, I have to do it, I have to do it.'..."

"Maybe it's treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself."

"The Suicide Bomber is the Origin of the Gift of Difference. The Suicide Bomber blows apart the Origin of Being being always already Severed. The Suicide Bomber as Absolute Abjection attains an Absolute Gift. As an alien Awe. Or: 'I am a Suicide Bomber therefore I am not.' The Suicide Bomber Gives. Gives Head. Gives Geist."

"Terrorism is not a weapon of the weak, it’s a weapon for those who are against us, whoever ‘us’ might be...The only way we can put a permanent end to terrorism is to stop participating in it."

Alain Badiou, Philosophy and the 'war against terrorism' in Infinite Thought: truth and the return of philosophy, Continuum, 2003

"Mallarmé is a very contemporary kind of anarchist. His poetic bomb is an illuminating burst with a destructive potential more like that of a computer virus, ingeniously devised, cryptically encoded, clandestinely insinuated into the signifying system, and lying there silently undetected until just the right moment, when a sudden flash erases everything, the system crashes, and nothing remains but an empty blank screen."

Charles D. Minahen, Poetry's Polite Terrorist, Meetings with Mallarmé, University of Exeter Press, 1998.

"We need to throw an activated alien terrorism to counter and over throw human terrorism. The radical violence of Nietzsche, Jünger, Artaud, Fanon, Shostakovich, Nielsen, Pettersson, Picasso, Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski, Beckett, Burroughs and Bacon open up the valves of vivacious violence over throwing the oblivion of being all too human becoming all alien. Only an alien terrorism can save us now."

"The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually...Of course, it's visually stunning and you've got to hand it to them on some level because they've achieved something which nobody would ever have thought possible...I think our visual language has been changed by what happened on September 11: an aeroplane becomes a weapon - and if they fly close to buildings people start panicking. Our visual language is constantly changing in this way and I think as an artist you're constantly on the lookout for things like that."

"The Terrorists are those who desire absolute freedom and are fully conscious that this constitutes a desire for their own death, they are conscious of the freedom they affirm, as they are conscious of their death, which they realise, and consequently they behave during their lifetimes not like people living among other living people but like beings deprived of being, like universal thoughts, pure abstractions beyond history, judging and deciding in the name of all history. Death as an event no longer has any importance...But the terror they personify does not come from the death they inlict on others but from the death they inflict on themselves. They bear its features, they do their thinking and make their decisions with death sitting on their shoulders, and this is why their thinking is cold, implacable; it has the freedom of a decapitated head."

Maurice Blanchot, Literature and the Right to Death, The Work of Fire, Stanford University Press, 1995.

"Those called 'terrorists' are not, in this context, 'others', absolute others whom we, as 'Westerners,' can no longer understand. We must not forget that they were often recruited, trained, and even armed, and for a long time, in various Western ways by a Western world that itself, in the course of its ancient as well as very recent history, invented the word, the techniques, and the 'politics' of 'terrorism'..."

Jacques Derrida, Philosophy in a Time of Terror; Giovanna Borradori, University of Chicago Press ,2003.

"The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world...The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land...As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map...The Islamic world will not let its historic enemy live in its heartland...We should not settle for a piece of land...Anybody who recognises Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury..."

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, The World Without Zionism; Aljazeera Net, Wednesday 26 October 2005.

"There will never be a winner because terrorism isn't an adversary - it is a tactic. Peter Ustinov, the great European intellectual, put it this way: 'War is the terrorism of the rich and powerful, and terrorism is the war of the poor and powerless.' This word terrorism has been distorted beyond any further usefulness. Terrorism is what the other guy does."

George Galloway, An Interview with George Galloway Dan Moore, Monthly Review, 14 July, 2006.

"Terror is a political tool that has been in use as long as human societies have existed. It should therefore be judged as a political tool, and not submitted to infantilizing moral judgment. It should be added that there are different types of terror. Our liberal countries know how to use it perfectly. The colossal American army exerts terrorist blackmail on a global scale, and prisons and executions exert an interior blackmail no less violent. Fifth, the only coherent theory of the subject (mine, I might add, in jest!) does not recognize in it any particular disposition toward Evil."

Alain Badiou; On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou, Cabinet Magazine, Issue 5 Winter 2001/02.

John Pilger, Hidden Agenda Behind War on Terror, Mirror UK, October 29, 2001

"What is terrorism? I have been assuming we understand it. Well, what is it? Well, there happen to be some easy answers to this. There is an official definition. You can find it in the US code or in US army manuals. A brief statement of it taken from a US army manual, is fair enough, is that terror is the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to attain political or religious ideological goals through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear. That’s terrorism. That’s a fair enough definition. I think it is reasonable to accept that. The problem is that it can’t be accepted because if you accept that, all the wrong consequences follow. For example, all the consequences I have just been reviewing. Now there is a major effort right now at the UN to try to develop a comprehensive treaty on terrorism."

Noam Comsky, What is Terrorism? - The New War Against Terror, MIT, October 18th, 2001.

"The last war, our war, the greatest and most powerful event of this era...(because) in it the genius of war permeated the spirit of progress...(and) the growing transformation of life into energy....The overpowering wish to kill winged my steps. Fury squeezed bitter tears from me...nothing pleases me more than seeing the bullets of a machine-gun plastering the target in front of me....to live means to kill."

"Let us make no mistake about it: with the 11 September 2001 attack, we have before us an act of total war, remarkably conceived and executed, with a minimum of resources. And this demonstrates something we had forgotten: that 'everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult' .[Karl von Clausewitz, On War]...On September 11 2001, the Manhattan skyline became the front of the new war. The anonymity of those who initiated the attack merely signals, for everyone, the rise of the global covert state - of the unknown quantity of a private criminality - the 'beyond Good-and-Evil' which has for centuries been the dream of the high priests of an iconoclastic progress."

"Jacques Dupin says to us: 'There is, there always was, above all, for Giacometti, an instinct of cruelty, a need for destruction that strictly conditions his creative activity. From his earliest childhood the obsession with sexual murder provokes and governs certain imaginary representations....He has a passion for war stories. The spectacle of violence fascinates and terrifies him.' Whence the experience he had of presence. It is out of reach. One kills a man, one does violence to him; this has happened to all of us, either in act, or in speech, or as the result of an indifferent will; but presence always escapes the power that does violence...To the experience of violence there corresponds the evidence of the presence that escapes it. And the attack of violence has become, for Giacometti, the gesture of the former-deformer, the creator-destroyer...Thus, each time, we receive from Giacometti this double discovery that is each time, it is true, immediately lost: only man would be present to us, only he is alien to us."

Maurice Blanchot, Traces, Editions Gallimard 1971, Stanford University Press, 1997.

"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them...The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading – as a last resort – all other justifications having failed to justify themselves – as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people. We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'. How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice."

Harold Pinter – Nobel Lecture ; Art, Truth & Politics, The Nobel Foundation, 2005.

"The damage which can be created by a virtuous person is almost by definition far greater than the person who wishes to murder because that wish is easily put in to effect and easily satisfied....the introduction of virtue means that moment of satisfaction will never come because the satisfaction belongs to the object of duty which is never yet complete, never fully discharged...the instructive, the regularised maintain themselves this side of the law but what would happen if a type of virtuous citizen arose characterised by all the same predicates... characterised by all the same attributes, as the law abiding citizen in the service of evil? This is what Kant calls radical evil. The person who commits radical evil is far from the person who has a sense of transgressing the law. The person who commits radical evil is one whose whole intention, whose whole bearing is to obey the law. Who pursues evil but as it were in the form of absolute morality...who pursues it with the sense always of the difficulty of performing his duty...this is not someone who is going to go out and murder but this is clearly somebody who can do a lot worse...We find this nightmare of Kant's emerging in the writings of Hannah Arendt in the attempt to grasp what it is or who is the figure of that's embodied in Adolf Eichmann....how often through out the trial Eichmann would say 'I have never once in my life ever been discourteous to a Jew'...and he was right - the model of civility...this was the man who was sickened by the thought of violence..."

Mark Cousins, Radical Evil, public lecture, Architectural Association, London, 8 March 1996, London.

"As we dug ourselves in we found them in layers stacked one upon the top of another. One company after another had been shoved into the drum fire and steadily annihilated. The corpses were covered with the masses of soil turned up by the shells, and the next company advanced in the place of the fallen....The sunken road and the ground behind were full of German dead; the ground in front, of English. Arms, legs, and heads stuck out stark above the lips of the craters. In front of our miserable defences there were torn-off limbs and corpses over many of which cloaks and ground sheets had been thrown to hide the fixed stare of their distorted features. In spite of the heat no one thought for a moment of covering them with soil...For I cannot too often repeat, a battle was no longer an episode that spent itself in blood and fire; it was a condition of things that dug itself in remorselessly week after week and even month after month. What was a man's life in this wilderness whose vapour was laden with, the stench of thousands upon thousands of decaying bodies? Death lay in ambush for each one in every shell hole, merciless, and making one merciless in turn...We were asked to believe that the war had now ended. We laughed - for we were the war."

Ernst Jünger, The Storm of Steel: From the Diary of a German Storm Troop Officer on the Western Front. Chatto & Windus, 1929.

"Suicidal terrorism was a terrorism of the poor, this is a terrorism of the rich. And that's what makes us so afraid: that they have become rich (that have all the resources of wealth), without ceasing to want to do us in. Of course, according to our value system, they're cheating: bringing your own death into play is not in the rules. But they don't care, and the new rules of the games are no longer ours....The fundamental event is that the terrorists have ceased to commit suicide at a total loss, that they now bring their own death into play in an effective, offensive way, according to a strategic intuition which is simply that of the immense fragility of the adversary, that of a system which has reached near-perfection, and is therefore vulnerable to the slightest spark. They have succeeded in making their own deaths into an absolute weapon against a system that lives on the exclusion of death, whose ideal is that of zero casualties. Every system of zero casualties is a zero-sum game. And all the means of dissuasion and destruction can do nothing against an enemy who has already made his death into a counter-offensive weapon....Therefore, here, death is the key (to the game) not only the brutal irruption of death in direct, in real time, but also the irruption of a more-than-real death: symbolic and sacrificial death — the absolute, no appeal event. This is the spirit of terrorism."

Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, London and New York, Verso, 2002.

"And was the bombing of the WTC with regard to the Hollywood catastrophe movies not like the snuff pornography versus ordinary sado-maso porno movies? This is the element of truth in Karl-Heinz Stockhausen's provocative statement that the planes hitting the WTC towers was the ultimate work of art: one can effectively perceive the collapse of the WTC towers as the climactic conclusion of the XXth century art's 'passion of the real' - the 'terrorists' themselves did it not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but FOR THE SPECTACULAR EFFECT OF IT. The authentic XXth century passion to penetrate the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void) through the cobweb of semblances which constitute our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate 'effect,' sought after from digitalized special effects through reality TV and amateur pornography up to snuff movies...Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence.Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence...The safe Sphere in which Americans live is experienced as under threat from the Outside of terrorist attackers who are ruthlessly self-sacrificing AND cowards, cunningly intelligent AND primitive barbarians."

Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real; Reflections on WTC , 2001 .

"Claiming that the Palestinians have a moral right to their terrorism, which I do, can hardly be old hat given the reaction to the claim. If some people readily accept it, some of them out of anti-Semitism, many are shocked or disturbed by it........Terrorism has a number of features, but fundamentally it is a kind of violence, which is to say physical force that injures, damages, violates or destroys people or things. It is this: violence with a political and social end, whether or not intended to put people in general in fear, and necessarily raising a question of its moral justification because it is violence - either such violence as is against the law within a society or else violence between states or societies, against what there is of international law and smaller-scale than war. It is illegitimate in terms of law, but not necessarily in terms of morality. Terrorism understood in this uncontentious way evidently includes suicide bombings. As evidently, it also includes state-terrorism and cat's paw terrorism...As for my reason for writing “After the Terror”, I was like so many of us in being overwhelmed and then thrown into reflection by September 11.......In the book what I say is morally permissible is the terrorism of the Palestinians in the present situation. It seems to me very similar to the terrorism of the African National Congress against the South Africa of apartheid. I also say that the only general kind of terrorism that is likely to be justified, in the world as it is, is what you can call liberation-terrorism: the violent struggle of a people to come to freedom and power in their own homeland."

Ted Honderich, A Philosopher in the Trenches: Interview with Ted Honderich, The Palestine Chronicle, December 04 2002.

"Terrorism, before it is an act, is a calculation, on the basis of future traces, in anticipation of how traces yet to be made will someday be read. As such, it is more than casually bound up with the complex movements of textuality on both sides - on the side (to use the familiar shorthand) of both the sender and the receiver of the message...What the reference to the symbol, however, with all that it necessarily entails of totalization, aestheticization, and extreme cognitive ambition, does not exactly cover over but does not exactly help us to isolate or pinpoint is the historical interruption that every text bears within it and that pushes our experience of the peculiar temporality of the terrorist act ineluctably in the direction of accident. This experience is in error (in the sense that it does not correspond to the 'truth' or 'facts' of the event), and yet it accurately records the extent to which the calculation that preceded the event takes us to the limits of reason, even if it is not strictly speaking in itself irrational. Terror is infected by accident; it spreads toward accident as we try to read or understand it, not because it has to do with accident in any rigorous sense, but because it doesn't, expressing instead the moment when calculation and incalculability collide. This collision, whatever else it may be (more or less spectacular, harmless, or murderous in its effects), is not an accident and never takes place by accident. It is this same movement that, to paraphrase Mallarmé, restrains every action from the moment that it understands itself as something outside, or just plain other than, a text. I cite Mallarmé, not because he was a so-called symbolist, but because he focuses our attention on the difference between accident and calculation's failure with admirable precision..."

Jennifer Bajorek, The Offices of Homeland Security, or, Hölderlin's Terrorism, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 31, No.4.

"Le 11 septembre, as you say, or, since we have agreed to speak two languages, 'September 11.' We will have to return later to this
question of language. As well as to this act of naming: a date and nothing more. When you say 'September 11' you are already citing, are you not? You are inviting me to speak here by recalling, as if in quotation marks, a date or a dating that has taken over our public space and our private lives for five weeks now. Something fait date, I would say in a French idiom, something marks a date, a date in history; that is always what's most striking, the very impact of what is at least felt, in an apparently immediate way, to be an event that truly marks, that truly makes its mark, a singular and, as they say here, 'unprecedented' event. I say 'apparently immediate' because this 'feeling' is actually less spontaneous than it appears: it is to a large extent conditioned, constituted, if not actually constructed, circulated at any rate through the media by means of a prodigious techno-socio-political machine. 'To mark a date in history' presupposes, in any case, that 'something' comes or happens for the first and last time, 'something' that we do not yet really know how to identify, determine, recognize, or analyze but that should remain from here on in unforgettable: an ineffaceable event in the shared archive of a universal calendar, that is, a supposedly universal calendar, for these are—and I want to insist on this at the outset—only suppositions and presuppositions. Unrefined and dogmatic, or else carefully considered, organized, calculated, strategic—or all of these at once. For the index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. Namely, the fact that we perhaps have no concept and no meaning available to us to name in any other way this 'thing' that has just happened, this supposed 'event.' An act of 'international terrorism,' for example, and we will return to this, is anything but a rigorous concept that would help us grasp the singularity of what we will be trying to discuss. 'Something' took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the 'thing.' But this very thing, the place and meaning of this 'event,' remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it's talking about. We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity...A major event should be so unforeseeable and irruptive that it disturbs even the horizon of the concept or essence on the basis of which we believe we recognize an event as such. That is why all the 'philosophical' questions remain open, perhaps even beyond philosophy itself, as soon as it is a matter of thinking the event."

Jacques Derrida, Philosophy in a Time of Terror; Giovanna Borradori. University of Chicago Press ,2003.

"The Illuminati want their global fascist structure in place by 2012, but they seem to be behind schedule. Whenever that happens they seek to increase the speed of change by orchestrating major events that they blame on others? like 9/11. Look at how the agenda of control has moved on as a result of that horrific day and the orchestrator was not Osama bin Laden, but the force that has used it as the excuse to take away a stream of freedoms. It is a technique I have dubbed problem-reaction-solution - covertly create the problem, get the public to say something must be done, and then openly offer the solutions to the problems you have covertly created. It works like a dream.... Billions of people have had their minds invaded by believing the official story of 9/11 when it is a monumental lie...The Illuminati reptilian bloodlines are behind the war on terror and why wouldn't they be? Just look at how our freedoms are being curtailed by the day in the name of fighting terror when the world's biggest terrorists are the ones in government (see Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Centre Disaster and Tales from the Time Loop for the detailed background.)"

"It is necessary that there be a revolution because one does not modify a regime which controls everything, which has its roots everywhere. One removes it, one strikes it down. It is necessary that revolution be violent because one does not tap a people as enervated [aveuli] as our own for the strength and passion appropriate to a regeneration through measures of decency, but through a series of bloody shocks, a storm that will overwhelm - and thus awaken - it. This is not a totally secure undertaking [cela n'est pas de tout repos], but precisely what is needed is a failure of security. That is why terrorism at present appears to us as a method of public salvation."

Maurice Blanchot, Le terrorisme, méthode de salut publiv, Combat 1, No.7, 1936.Exclusive

"The suicide tries to take command of death's space as if it were part of the world, a terriotory like any other. The suicide wants to occupy the space of death in his or her own name; the suicide wants to stand in for death, as if to become death's philosophy...The suicide is like the artist as masterworker who projects an idea onto the future; but what the suicide and the artist seek to achieve is 'a stranger to the world, it remains foreign to all achievements, and constantly ruins all deliberate action' (Blanchot). Both the suicide and the masterworker experience the future as 'a radical reversal, through which the death [or the work of art] that was the extreme form of my power not only becomes what loosens my hold upon myself by casting me out of my power to begin and even to finish, but also becomes that which is without any relation to me, without power over me - that which is stripped of all possibility - the irreality of the indefinite' (Blanchot). What is true of death is at all events true of art: both inscribe a radical limit of reality, a limit that is experienced by our inability to grasp what is there, that is, our inability to act as cognitive subjects or as agents of any sort. Death and art exert a fascination because they inscribe the limits of being human, or rather they beckon or draw us to these limits and only by forsaking ourselves can we respond."

Gerald L. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, John Hopkins University Press, 1997.

"The suicide bomber is the true performance artist. The suicide bomber - as absolute subject, as absolute sacrifice, as absolute exteriority, as absolute knowledge knows nothing of death. The suicide bomber is true to Being. The suicide bomber is true to Dasein. The suicide bomber is true to the Nothing by attuning with the Nothing by being the Nothing through becoming the Nothing at all."

"...there is always a revolution to effect, on condition that man doesn't think himself revolutionary only on the social level, but believes that he must always and above all be revolutionary on the physical, physiological, anatomical, functional, circulatory, respiratory, dynamic, atomic and electrical level."

"Ernst Jünger's text The Worker is important because, in a different way from Spengler, it achieves all Nietzsche literature thus far has been unable to achieve, namely, to impart the experience of beings and the way in which they are, in the light of Nietzsche's projection of beings as will to power."

"From the moment that the State has strengthened itself against individual terrorism - the Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof or the Palestinians - by developing its own brand of terrorism, you have to wonder what high court could prevent this infinite spreading of State crimes, of acts of war without war...All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it. And some of us know it. The great stroke of luck for the military class's terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don't recognize the militarized part of their identity, or their consciousness."

"The threat posed by US terrorism to the security of nations and individuals was outlined in prophetic detail in a document written more than two years ago and disclosed only recently. What was needed for America to dominate much of humanity and the world's resources, it said, was 'some catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbor'. The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the 'new Pearl Harbor', described as 'the opportunity of ages'. The extremists who have since exploited 11 September come from the era of Ronald Reagan, when far-right groups and 'think-tanks' were established to avenge the American 'defeat' in Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda: to justify the denial of a 'peace dividend' following the cold war. The Project for the New American Century was formed, along with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and others that have since merged the ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of the current Bush regime."

John Pilger, Pilger in Print; Hidden Agendas, Archive Articles, Carlton.Com, 12 December, 2002.

"In short, British state-sponsored terrorism is a perfect example of the Hegelian dialect in action. “The Hegelian dialectic has never failed because to understand it requires the total breakdown and reconstruction of everything you’ve ever known,” explains Paul Joseph Watson. “Upon the conclusion of the war on terrorism, the counterfeit foe awaits.”..."

Kurt Nimmo, Bombing Mastermind Aswat Works for MI-6, Prison Planet.Com, August 2nd 2005.

"We Palestinians have always, at least publicly, held Israel responsible for all our suffering: Israel, we say, destroyed our society, turned most of our people into refugees and subjugated the rest to military rule. In private, however, we haven't concealed the fact that Israel is not the only responsible party. What we have failed to realise, though, is that the establishment and existence of Israel were the result not merely of the Israelis' will and determination, but rather of the rules of the game. Zionist, and later Israeli, leaders accepted the politics of the nation state faithfully, not to say blindly, which meant that integration of Arabs and Jews had to be prevented by whatever means available."

Samir El-Youssef, Unwrapping the gift, New Statesman, Monday 31st October, 2005.

"For the colonised person, life can only emerge from the decomposing corpse of the coloniser. The practice of violence is all-embracing, since each forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged forward and which has come as a reaction to the colonizer's first violence...Violence invests the character of the colonized people with positive and creative policies...Violence alone, violence committed by people, violence organised and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them...Colonialism is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence...Now the problem is to seize this violence that is in the process of changing direction. When formerly it took pleasure in myths and went out of its way to find new ways to commit collective suicide, notice how these new conditions will cause them to change their orientation."

Julia Kristeva, A Beheading; Possessions: A Novel, Columbia University Press 1996.

"When I speak I always exercise a relation of force [puissance]. I belong, whether or not I know it, to a net work of powers of which I make use, struggling against the force that that asserts itself against me. All speech is violence....Language is the undertaking through which violence agrees not to be open, but secret, agrees to forgo spending itself in a brutal action in order to reserve itself for more powerful mastery."

"But that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom - this is the tremendous power [Macht] of the negative; it is energy of [Geist's] thought, or the pure 'I' [of Geist]. Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty [Schönheit] hates the Understanding [Verstand] for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Geist is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in absolute dismemberment [Zerrissenheit], it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, that closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then having done with it, turn away and pass to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power [Zauberkraft] that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject [i.e., Geist], which by giving determinateness an existence in its own element superseded abstract immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which is merely general, and thus is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is mediation itself."

"Impossible necessary death: why do these words - and the experience to which they refer (the inexperience) - escape comprehension. Why this collision of mutually exclusive terms?...Yes, let us remember the earliest Hegel. He too, even prior to his 'early' philosophy, considered that the two deaths were indissociable, and that only the act of confronting death - not merely of facing it or of exposing oneself to its danger, but of entering into its space, of undergoing it as infinite death and also as mere death, 'natural death' could found the sovereignty of masterhood: the mind and its prerogatives. the result was perhaps, absurdly, that the experience which initiates the movement of the dialectic - the experience which none experiences, the experience of death - stopped it right away, and that the entire subsequent process retained a sort of memory of this halt, as if of an aporia which always has till to be accounted for...It remains, however, that if death, murder, suicide are put to work, and if death loses its sting by becoming powerless power and then negativity, there is, each time one advances with the help of possible death, the necessity not to advance any further, nor to approach the death without expression, the death without any name, the death outside the concept - impossibility itself."

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

"When someone is subjected to torture, something external impinges and breaks down the individual's protective shield, which leaves the person in a helpless state with the result that, internal and external registers get confused. Having survived, the person is left with a residue of something excessive that is too much to bear, something intolerable that disrupts the process of getting through the day - linear time - and overburdens the signifying apparatus. The disruption of the signifying apparatus, a defect in signification, is the point at which anguish interrupts and the subject encounters the real which engenders non-sense. The object (a) is implicated in a too much and produces anguishing affects due to a lack of signification... Following torture there are moments when it is difficult to think...The effect of torture is a breaking down of thought, and an inability to put into words what transpired. When asked to speak of the torture in order to establish the facts of the case, the person is confronted with an impossible situation. Something of the experience cannot be absorbed into any symbolic framework but at the same time the individual is haunted by images of what happened. What is remembered are surrounding events, often apparently arbitrary details, which offer some kind of way to frame the pain for even if the event is remembered in detail, the hole remains."

Eric Harper, Torture - a presence without an absence, The Symptom, Issue 4, Spring 2003.

"I have really enjoyed myself writing about these different works of art, notably, on representations of decapitation, and I believe that the novel as genre, especially thriller which is an open genre and completely renewable allows for this type of digression in writing. But they have severely criticized me for it and told me that the book was too intellectual, very brainy and that the reader who wanted to know how the crime was being developed and the murder had to suffer by having had to wait. That was the malevolent reaction of those who have known me as an intellectual and who did not like the fact that I was going to write novels... Some think that these works are scandal-oriented, others think that they rejoice in ugliness, yes, certainly there are elements of such orientations in them, but, on the other hand, the existence of these works is also a research - often in a very specific manner - on the anticipation of difficulty of living. And Art can play an important role here since it can contribute to a certain creative assumption of such a difficulty. Nevertheless, I personally remain a bit sceptical of a certain drift or tendency of contemporary art to content itself with such, so I believe, feeble appropriations of these traumatic states. We remain here at the level of the statement of the clinical cases with an almost documentary style photography of these cases wherein the investment and the effort made in the exploration of new forms or new thoughts remains less visible. So, it is something regrettable which every so often leaves me with the impression that when I visit museums or read certain art books, I am looking into psychoanalytic or even psychiatric archives. But, perhaps this is an indispensable experience."

"In all the motor accidents I've seen, people strewn across the road, the first thing you think of is the strange beauty - the vision of it, before you think of trying to do anything. It's to do with the unusualness of it. I once saw a bad car accident on a large road, and the bodies were strewn about with broken glass from the car, and the blood and various possessions, and it was in fact very beautiful. I think the beauty in it is terribly elusive, but it just happened to be in the disposition of the bodies, the way they lay and the blood, and perhaps it was also because it was not a thing one was used to seeing...It was midday, when the sun was very strong and on a white road."

Francis Bacon, Remarks from an Interview with Peter Beard, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1976.

"When my eyes flee from the now to the past, they always find the same: fragments and limbs and dreadful accidents - but no human beings. The now and the past on earth - alas, my friends, that is what I find most unendurable; and I should not know how to live if I were not also a seer of that which must come."

"Drift-net fishing through the Internet's deeps brings up numerous examples of decapitation fetishism, a queasy mix of necro-porn, splatter movie, and upchuck humor guaranteed to appall even the most politically incorrect post-feminists. One needn't be a born-again Dworkinite, brandishing Intercourse like a Gideon bible, to get creeped out while browsing The Axe & Guillotine website ("The Best in Beheading"), Necromancer's website ("Behead and Debreast"), Mickey Jay's website ("Beheading"), Scanbastard's website ("Beheading"), Mocktoad Manipulations ("Beheading"), or any of the scores of sites that cater to snuff fetishism, a twisted little limb on the family tree of pathological sexuality, at the juncture of S&M and necrophilia."

Mark Dery, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Severed Head, Cabinet Magazine, Issue 10 Spring 2003.

"We have seldom attempted to interpret individual mythological figures. Yet it is natural to do so in the case of the terrifying cut-off head of the Medusa. Cutting off the head = castration. Horror at the Medusa is also horror at castration, which is also connected to the gaze. The Medusa's gaze turns us rigid with horror, turns the onlooker into stone. It has the same lineage as the castration-complex and results in the same transformation of affect! For rigidification signifies erection, that is, in the original situation, the compensation for the onlooker. He still has a penis and is assured of this by becoming stiff."

"Writing is per se already (it is still) violence: the rupture there is in each fragment, the break, the splitting, the tearing of the shred - acute singularity, steely point. And yet this combat is, for patience, debate. The name wears away, the fragment fragments, erodes."

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of The Disaster, University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

"Daily I must call upon the vanished godhead. When I think of great men in great times, and how they spread holy fire on all sides and transformed everything that was defunct, everything wooden, all the straw of the world into flames, so that it soared heavenward with them; and when I think of me, of how often I drift about like a flickering little lamp begging for a drop of oil so that I can shine a bit longer through the night - behold! a wondrous shudder passes through all my limbs, and softly I say to myself a terrifying word: the living dead!"

"Jouissance alone makes the abject as such exist. One does not know it, one does not desire it, one reveals in it. Violently and with anguish. A passion. And, as in jouissance, where the object of desire, known as object a, bursts with the shattered mirror where the ego gives up its image in order to look at oneself in the Other, there is neither objective nor objectal in the subject. It is simply a boundary, a repulsive gift that the Other...allows to fall so that the 'I' does not disappear but finds in it, in this sublime alienation, a forfeited existence. Hence a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant. One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims - if not its submissive and willing ones...The abject is edged with the sublime."

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

"There is no death's head, according to Bacon. The head is, if anything, boneless. It is not completely soft, but hard. The head is flesh, and the mask itself is not a death-mask, it is a firm block of flesh which separates from the bones: thus the studies for the portrait of William Blake. The personal head of Bacon is flesh elevated by a very beautiful glance, without eye-sockets. This is Bacon's greatest homage to Rembrandt, for having painted a final self-portrait as a block of flesh without orbits. In all of Bacon's work the head-meat relationship goes through an escalation of intensity that makes it more and more intimate...The deformation undergone by the body are also the animal traits of the head. But this is in no way a simple correspondence between animal and facial forms. The face, in effect, has lost its original form due to the operations of cleansing and polishing to which it has been subjected, operations which break up its organisation and allow the head to emerge in its place. The marks or traits of animality do not represent pure animal forms, but are rather the expression of spirits which animate the 'cleansed' parts of the face, which draw out the head, which identify and individualise the head even without a face."

Gilles Deleuze, The Body, the Meat and the Spirit: Becoming Animal; Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 1981.

"What's outside, we know from the beast’s face only: for we turn around the early child and force it to see formation backwards, not the open, which is so deep in beastsight. Free from death. We only see death; the free beast has its going down behind it and before it god, and when it goes, goes into eternity, like a running spring...It is always world and never nowhere without no: that pureness, that unwatched, which one breathes and endlessly knows and never wants. But a child might lose himself inside the quiet and become shaken. Or someone dies and is. For near to death one sees that death no more and stares ahead, perhaps with a beast’s huge glance...Were the awareness of our species in the sure beast, which pulls towards us from another direction — it would drag us into its mutability. But for the beast its being is unending, unprepared, and without insight of its belonging, pure, like its outward glance. And where we see future, there it sees all and itself in all and healed for always."

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Eighth Duino Elegy, 1912-1922, University of California Press, 1961.

"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."

"The young man was a witness to the death that came at him...totally exposed, vulnerable, disarmed, offered unto death, a being for death, the young man seems to represent the very opposite of invincibility, of course. But 'perhaps'! ('perhaps...invincible'). And yet the inexorability of what was coming at him, of what was imminent, but which had thus already arrived, 'perhaps' made him invincible. Invincible because totally vanquished, totally exposed, totally lost. Dead - immortal...At that instant, I am immortal because I am dead and I am dead: death can no longer happen to me...Dead - immortal. Perhaps ecstasy...An ecstatic wrenching from common temporal existence, an immense orgiastic jouissance...It is jouissance insofar as it does not go without death..."

“The disaster is separate; that which is most separate. When the disaster comes upon us, it does not come... To read, to write, the way one lives under the surveillance of the disaster: exposed to the passivity that is outside passion. The heightening of forgetfulness. It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence...The disaster has already passed beyond danger, even when we under the threat of . The mark of the disaster is that one is never at that mark except when one is under threat and, being so, past danger... He said to himself: you shall not kill yourself, your suicide precedes you. Or: he dies inept at dying... The disaster takes care of everything... It is dark disaster that brings the light."

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of The Disaster, University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

"For straight men (and decap fantasies seem to be straight men's meat), eroticized beheading, especially by guillotine, is a double-edged pleasure. Ostensibly a fever-dream vision of dominance and submission in which a Sadean male penetrates a powerless babe with his steely blade, decap snuff is haunted by the homoerotic gothic. The dark dreams of Marquis and others like him are shadowed by homophobic fears of the Queer Within: beheading is at once eroticized castration, ejaculation (with the spurting neck-stump as grotesque parody of the squirting penis), and sublimated frottage (decapitation rubs one phallic symbol, the blade, against another—the neck, which stands in for the penile shaft)."

Mark Dery, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Severed Head, Cabinet Magazine, Issue 10 Spring 2003.

"Gloria was lying in a pool of blood with her head cut off...There was nothing missing but the head. 'My sexual organ,' as she laughingly used to call it, referring to the cerebral pleasure she got out of her work as a translator and the equally intense pain she suffered from her headaches. Sometimes she'd amend the description and call her head 'the tool of her trade' And now here she was, bereft of her organ or tool, and so made almost anonymous. But only almost. For, head or no head, Gloria Harrison was easily recognisable."

Julia Kristeva, A Beheading; Possessions: A Novel, Columbia University Press, , 1996.

"In phantasmagoric representations we are surrounded by night; here a bloody head suddenly shoots out, there a white shape, and they disappear again as suddenly. One perceives this night when one looks another human being in the eye - one peers into a night which inspires terror; the night of the world which here lowers towards us."

"Can I die? Have I the power to die? ...To take one's own life: is this not the shortest road from man to himself, from animal to man...Why suicide? If he dies freely, if he experiences and proves to himself his liberty in death and the liberty of his death, he will have attained the absolute. he will be that absolute...His death, by making death possible, will have liberated life and rendered it wholly human."

Maurice Blanchot, Can I Die?, The Space of Literature, University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

"Even if one's head were to be suddenly cut off, he should be able to do one more action with certainty...With martial valour, if one becomes like a revengeful ghost and shows great determination, though his head is cut off, he should not die."

"Unlike man, who holds so dearly to his title and his titles, his pouches of value, his cap, his crown, and everything connected with his head, woman couldn't care less about the fear of decapitation."

"Man has escaped from his head just as the condemned man has escaped from prison...Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless; this fills me with dread because he is made of innocence and crime; he holds a steel weapon in his left hand, flames like those of a Sacred Heart in his right. He reunites the same eruption Birth and Death. He is not a man. He is not a god either. He is not me but he is more than me: his stomach is the labyrinth in which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words as a monster."

Georges Bataille, The Sacred Conspiracy; Tossa, April 29, 1936; Visions of Excess, University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

"Severed male heads and decapitated bodies play a prominent role in the decadent art and literature of the late 19th century, particularly in the biblical stories of Judith and Salome. Flaubert, Huysmans, Laforgue, and Wilde in literature, and Moreau, Klimt, Beardsley, and Munch in painting are the best known of a whole host of male fin-de-siecle artists obsessed by visions of vengeful, headhunting, 'demonic' women."

"What fascinates us robs us of our power to give sense...Separation, which was the possibility of seeing, coagulates at the very centre of the gaze into impossibility...Fascination is solitude's gaze. It is the gaze of the incessant and interminable. In it blindness is vision still, vision which is no longer the possibility of seeing, but the impossibility of not seeing, the impossibility which becomes visible and preserves - always and always - in a vision that never comes to an end: a dead gaze, a gaze become the ghost of an eternal vision."

Maurice Blanchot, The Image, The Space of Literature, University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

"Man has escaped his head just as the condemned man has escaped from prison. . . . Beyond who I am, I have met a being who makes me laugh because he is headless. . . . He reunites in the same eruption Birth and Death."

“The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.”

"The human being arrives at the threshold: there he must throw himself headlong into that which has no foundation and has no head."

Georges Bataille, The Obelisk; Visions of Excess, University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

"For, nearing death, one sees death no longer, and stares ahead - perhaps, with a broad brute gaze."

"Give me a call whenever you want to cut off my head...I can always crawl around without it."

"Yet, it behooves us, poets, to stand bare-headed beneath God's thunderstorms."

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, University of Nabraska Press, 1995.

Being beheaded. Being a head. Being a head of it self. Being ahead of itself. Being a head of time. Being ahead of time. Being a head of being. Being ahead of being. To be Beheaded is to go Out with True Style as a cut above the rest as Truth raising its Ugly Face frozen face-to-face Toward the Other. Being beheaded is coming to a head and coming-off all over the Other. To be Beheaded severs Being from Da-sein as a Decapitation of being from thereing as not being-there anymore but being-out over-there as Da-alien. The Sensation of Severing is a sense of surprise at being a non-being face to no face becoming Nothing with the Other of the Nothing. The Moment of the Cut is the End of the Air where the stony Stare of the Eyes become the Fixed Time of Fort Da between the Beginnings and the Endings of Beings and Nonbeings. Thinking is not Finishing through Severing since the Mind is in the Feet not in the Head. The Body Thinks through the Severing of the Head and Sensations the Head in Detached Thought as thrown Dasein becoming Dailen. The Decapitated Head always already sees and seeps its own Dissemenation as Staring the Negative in the Face and Enjoying it as a Jouissance out-of-joint: the brute bliss of being beheaded, of losing one's head, of coming-off. The Mind which Thinks from the Ankles feels the face seeing the severing of sight still sensationing throwing thinking always already after the severing in it-self out-it-self for-it-self as being a head of one's self. Is being-a-head being-a-head-of-one's-self? What is the sen-sa-tion of being-be-head-ed? Dasein decapitated? Dalien delivered? Of Being be-headed being-out-of-it thrown out-of-joint joining face-to-face with the negative Nothing and tarrying with it toying with it touching it teasing it. Look-ing the No-thing in the Face of the Be-head-ed and tar-ry-ing with it play-ing with it throw-ing it retrie-ving it and kick-ing it about all over-the-joint like a fuck-ing foot-ball. The ta-rry-ing with the de-capi-ta-ted No-thing em-bod-ies the be-head-ed back into the body-of-being (again). As be-ing be-head-ed is always already an impossibility because to severe is to sow to to cut is to cure cutting and completing be-heading as a being be-coming born be-holding sowing sensation so de-cap-it-a-tion delivers Da-sein where that which is cut-off out-of-joint comes together again as an Aufhebung absolute continuity of discontinuity as a totality of tearing and tarrying with the torn To-tal-ity un-veil-ing un-attain-ed uncovered Un-ity as Absolute AbKnowledge being Pure Sensation of Being being Beheaded. Decapitated Dasein thinks as airborne Air awe. The End of Breathing releases Thinking as Air Back into the Air of Being as Becoming an Airing of Thought. Airing is the Origin of Thinking Thought through beyond being Beheaded beyond Being breathing. Thinking goes on Breathing outside the Head beyond the Body. The severings of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind. Thus the Beheaded Head goes on Existing whether I like It or not whether I look at It or not. The Beheaded Head still sees beyond being Beheaded. Decapitation grounds the Head at the Horizon of Being out the World where Decapitation is the joyous Jouissance of the Abject Sublime semblance severing semening subjectivity circumscribing castration complete. Decapitation constitutes Identity of Difference as Ather to Otherness of the Same. Decapitation as the Endgame without End as an Ereignis as an Es gibt as an Erlebnis experiencing Decapitation as the Event of Disclosure activating an alien Aletheia whereout a being can be Revealed in its alien being, Attaining a presence as part of a pruning that is presented through Dichtung decapitating Dasein. But Beheading is not an Ending in-it-self but a Becoming out-it-self as a torsoless transition to absolute alien attainment and attunement as Aufhebung as to severe is to serve to suture Stimmung sensationing simultaneously situating Becoming by Beheading Dasein dépense deranged - derailed - detached - decapitated - as Absolute Spirit surviving severing since even the severing is still a binding and connecting as a cutting. Hence Hegel is not a Philosopher of the System: Hegel is the Philosopher of the Sensation of the Severing of the System serving a cutting as a clearing atta attaining attuning an Athering.

Hegel was a Head and only a Head as his Body of Knowledge was Severed by his System as an auto-beheading of bodily being Beginning as an Action without Thinking as a Thought activated above Hegel's Head. Hegel hit the Nail on the Head of Philosophy as an angoisse Action above and ahead of Thinking. For Hegel Thought is always already an Action ahead of our Thinking about a Thought. The alien of action is always already without a conscience - without a conception. To Think Something is always already to Throw Something ahead albeit The Nothing at all. For the alien Abjecting is always already afar and ahead of Thinking. Action abjected is ahead of the Head of Thought decapitated by the Terrorism of Thinking where an abjected Action has no Ideological Aim or Political Argument or Philosophical Proposition but Seeks to Sever Sein's Security. Hegel heads a Header to Thinking through Throwing Thought away as an angoisse Action without Thinking the Thought through. The Moment one Thinks one Knows one is Thinking one is no longer Thinking: one does not Know one is Thinking at all. Thinking is not Knowing one is Thinking about it: Knowing is not Thinking: Knowing is The Nothing: Knowing is about The Nothing. Knowing is about The Nothing at all. Knowing is the Nothing not Thought about. Knowing is The Nothing Thrown about. Thinking is always already Throwing around The Nothing at all to Think about Throwing Thought away. Throwing throttles Thought from Thinking about Throwing Thought forth from Thinking about the Thought thrown. Being beheaded throws Thought ahead as an angoisse alien action. Throwing beheads Thinking ahead. To Think is to Abject for Thinking is an Abjecting.

But that a Decapitation as severed, detached from what circumscribes it, what is beheaded and is actual only in its context with other heads, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom - this is the tremendous shuddering sensation of the severing; it is semblance of Sensation's shine, or the pure 'I' [of Sensation]. Death, if that is what we want to call this Decapitation, is of all things most dreadful, and to hold alive what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, the Ugliful hates the Understanding [Verstand] for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Sensation is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself unsensationed by devastation, but rather the life that waits and works itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in absolute dismemberment [Zerrissenheit], it finds itself. It is this sensation, not as something positive, that closes its eyes to the severing, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then having done with it, turn away and pass to something else; on the contrary, Sensation is this strength only by looking the beheaded in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the decapitated is the shimmering Sensation that sends it into being and that beheading is that being or sensation whose mediation is not outside of it but which is mediation itself as decapitated Dasein. Being delivered into decapitation is to be face-to-face abject absolute of conscious continuity - as a magnificent mastering discontinuity through decapitation as the mastering of decapitation that holds its moment together its head together through this very beheading in itself as always already being out itself as a-head-of-it-self before the movement and moment of decapitation The severed head as separation from spirit becomes the unity of the Particular and the Universal as a coming-off coming-together apart as a fort-da embodied-beheading being - being both in-and-out of the world as united together out-of-joint at once out-of-time all the time as the nothing of the whole as that hole which sucks-all-in and spits-all-out as that thrown Thinking which does one's head in - that does one's head out - as a headstrong heady heading header beaming breathtaking bolt biting bronze brightness as ahead of one's time as a history coming-off to a head. A head coming-off: did the heads of Heraclitus, Hegel, Heidegger - come-off - let leak - how did Heraclitus, Hegel, Heidegger lose their heads - or did Heraclitus, Hegel, Heidegger even ever give head - give good head - go down - deep down - deep throating thought sucking off spunk spurting Spirit decapitating Dasein? What is the time of coming to a head? Ahead of time.

Decapitation is the Hegelian Dialectic coming to a head ahead of time as becoming after being thrown out of nothing comes something out of time. Hegel's Completion of History is the Castration of History severing the System and annihilating Art decapitating Dasein. For headless Hegel negativity is never negated: there is no negation of the negation because decapitation delivers difference: the negative is never negated as Atherness, for Hegel here, as always already being beheaded, is not something negative that must be negated. Thus the Head of Geist is not the Head that is severed from Death and keeps itself dettached by devastation and disaster, but rather the Head that delivers itself in it - it wins its truth only when, in absolute dismemberment, it finds itself as Ather to being I and/or Other. This being with the negative is the magical mooding that converts it into being as Ather. Thus the negative is never negated in Hegel out Hegel or/and Hegel does not deliver difference to identity - identity - is - instead - always already - as an atta Ather. No negation happens here. The Nothing happens. The Nothing has already happened here. Again and Again.

Thus the Hegelian Castration is not Historical Closure nor indeed Metaphysical Closure being brave beheaders Heraclitus, Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Artaud always already castrate conceptual closure: cancelling (out) concepts castrating (off) concepts: over coming concepts as a coming over concepts so that the future of philosophy will be absolutely concept-free: free of fought. Fort Da Firing Heraclitus, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche did not write within closed conceptual cages but cleaved cut cleared: drew dread forth forming from within without constructing concepts cutting creating initiating intuitive images as an art alien nailing-the-negative as the absolute angoisse alteric aesthetic semen sensation semblance thirst thrust that nails-the-negative as the serene severe servant severing swish sword silvery silent slain slices smoothly sweetly swiftly beheading being beholding holding head here as giving head as giving a head as giving a gift as daring David delivers drooling decapitated Dasein desemenised cleaving Caravaggio clean. Clean cut as a cleaved clearing. To cleave is to cut - to clear to split is to spill to spunk - sown shone severed Semening serves severe Sensation. Cleaved as a castrated carnivorous Caravaggio comes ahead towards you coming off all over you being beheaded before you as an alien abjected atta Ather attained and attuned ahead.

Castrated Caravaggio seeds Semening sensation as a coming-to-a-head as coming to ahead as the coming of a head as the coming off a head here being be-headed before you coming towards you coming all over you again and again as drenched delirious Dasein jettisoned jouissane. Craving Caravaggio constantly plays fort-da duelling: throwing a tantrum as throwing a sensation severed as a sensation seeking stimuli: throwing stones at a landlady throwing artichokes at a waiter throwing a punch at a poof and then there retrieving the reel of the real as an absolute angoisse abjection attuning as a succulent semening sensation oozed out as an absolute sublime alienation. Cantankerous Caravaggio was not an attention seeker but a seeker of sensation - as being beautifully beheaded - served severed - free from society heading ahead a head. Caravaggio was a head of his time as Caravaggio was ahead of his time as Caravaggio beheaded time because Caravaggio headed time because Caravaggio came over time - Caravaggio covered time - recovered time.

Be-head-ed-Bodily sensations still shine Thrown Thought through despite decapitating Dasein. Différance defies Decapitation since shuddering Sensations still think through the beheaded Body beyond Beheading. Be-ing be-head-ed is the out-of-body experience par excellence. Decapitation builds upon the Head of Being, the Head in which the jointure of being, in its decapitated unfolding, enjoins the Ereignis essence of alien being to dwell in the jubilate jouissance of being an alien as delivered Dasein out-of-joint joining the Horizon of the Head where the sea severs the sky at the grounded groin Ground Zero suicide scape escaping the scene as a served severed semening that thus completes coming-off on getting all the juices going and getting off in coming off on getting off on coming off seeing it coming off in seeing ahead a head coming absolutely right off as a Dasein Decapitation as a Severed Sein as a Delivering Différance.

Desire for Decapitation is a Desire for Castration. Contrary to Freud, Man does not Fear Castration: Man desires Castration. Freud was sub-consciously cut-off from the decapitation of desire as the desire for decapitation where woman was castrated-completed as always being with-without: as always being in-completely-with-out where woman was always already dread Dasein Decapitated as cut-out as cut-off as alien from being human where woman was always already castrated, cut-off as decapitated da-sein and attuned ahead as an acéphale alien.

Our inquiry concerning Beheading should bring us face to face head to head with metaphysics itself as ahead out-it-self and 'metaphysics' derives from the decapitated Greek 'meta-ta- physika' with the 'meta' that heads meta-physika Beheading beings as such. Metaphysics is inquiry beheading beings which aims to recover their heads as such and as a whole for our grasp. Decapitation is a 'meta-ta-physika' fort-da-sein as a dice derridaing Dasein. Metaphysics is this Becoming of Beheading beyond beings as a reeling-revealing-recovery. Thus the thrown Economy of Decapitation is fort-da-sein where severing is a suturing where cutting is a connecting where reeling is a retrieving. Being Beheaded is the abject-sublime ecstatic Essence of Jouissance joining coming-off as a coming-on of Be-coming out-of-joint. Seeing One losing One's own Head is the Ultimate Bliss of the abject-sublime. Here a solitary severed Head sits staring so at its torn-off-torso trunk and starts tarrying with it: face-to-face with bits of its body without being there but over here. Hear seeing one's Thought surviving being Severed from the Phenomenological Body. Beheading and Thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for Dwelling as a Dalien suicide scene scape sown before breathing blissful bombing by Becoming Befindlichkeit Behaeding Stimmung Sensationing futuring further fort-da-fluxing forever giving Geist, giving Gift - as a Gift given - by being Beheaded - before you - ahead - a head.

The Decapitation Drive is not a drive to death but a drive to différance. Your wet or dry Dreams of a young man's head being cut-off is not Symbolic of Castration but a Sign of Becoming. Decapitation is Becoming. Decapitation is Freedom from Castration: Dasein is always already Unified through Decapitation. Castration is Completion as Ereignis Erection. Dashing Dasein runs ahead of Decapitation of Being beheaded. Being is always already decapitated from Dasein as being Beheaded brings Being back face to face with the night of the Nothing. Decapitated Dasein's running ahead of the afterlife defeats Death ahead of being beheaded as a tarrying with Time all the time not in time being behind and ahead of the time of being beheaded as an executed Ereignis always ahead of time as a Head of Time. The Decapitation of Dasein, therefore, is the Nothing of the Head in-it-self a-head of being and time. The Decapitated Head as a Whole in-itself becomes complete in its castration embodied without a body. Decapitation has Displaced the Crucifixion as an Armature "for hanging all sorts of feeling and sensation" as Bacon beheads: "There it is!" and as Heidegger heads: "The nothing is what there is, and first of all, nothing beheaded." Beheadedness is bleak Bacon's "brutality of fact" as a dispersal of decapitated dread Dasein. Geist gets a head start severing the thing-out-it self so there can be no "turning Hegel on his head" - he has always already been Beheaded. Hegel lost his Head whilst writing the Phenomenology of Spirit. To think radically, to think alienally, to think decapitally, is to lose one's head. But the Head of Geist is not the head that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by decapitation, but rather the head that endures and maintains itself in it - as a severed Sein. It wins its truth only when, in absolute dismemberment it finds itself. Only by losing one's head does one find one's Geist as ahead of death served as a Head of severed Sein as Being a Head of itself out of itself as an alien Ather.

Giving Head decapitates death - delivering decapitated Dasein - Geist's Head - ahead of History - as a Head of Time - out-of-head ahead-of-time.

Hegel beheaded History. Giving Hegel the Head Room to Dwell Dasein delivering thus the Geist Gift of Being Beheading as a Decapitated Dasein becoming a Head of History ahead of History as Hegel giving Head to History coming all over the Other as an Absolute Ather.

Hegel is Constantly Decapitating His Head without Losing His Head. For Hegel Decapitation is an Absolute Continuity of an Abjected Castration as an Ather Completion coming together-apart as a coming-off as a head of time as ahead of time all the time out-of-time and out-of-joint as jointly coming all over time drenching Dasein delivering drooling Dalien. Through throwing Decapitation dwelling being departs from Daesin delivering Dalien. Decapitation opens up opens out as a scape scene of the Dalien. Hegel beheaded History by bringing History to a Head as History was going to his Head towards itself its end. Hence Hegel is a-head-of-his-time: Hegel polishes off history Hegel finishes off history hence Hegel hacked off the head of history as a complete coming off. The severed Head served up by Hegel is “the last stage of History, our world, our own time”. Hear Hegel here where “world history is thus the Beheading of Spirit in Time, as Sensation is the Beheading of the Idea in Space.” Here Hegel gave Good Head. Hegel gave good Head. Hegel gave God Head. God never Came. God could not Come. Off. Hegel could not Bring God off. Dialectical Decapitation defines the Stimmung Sensation of History for Hegel as a suturing Semening scape scene so sealing Castration as a Conclusion in the Coming to a Head of History. Catapulted Capitalism - Capitalism - as a Caput - as a Head - cannot lose its Head as Capitalism is Hydra Headed: Capitalism constantly thrives through being Decapitated being Beheaded as a Radical Decapitation - decapitating democracy - as a Radical Différance - as conscious-free - Hydra Headed de-Capitalism as Absolute de-Terrorism - de-capitates democracy de-stablizing Da-sein de-livering Da-lien as an alteric attuned arcanum altaric Alienation attained as an abheaded Absolute Ather - and not a negation of a negation - nearer navigating nothing ahead an abhead as a meandering mauling maiming malicious metaphysics serving serenely severed Sein.

The Hegel has Landed. Beheaded. Beheaden. Beholden. Acéphale. A head. Ahead

Francis Bacon & Ernst Jünger jointly joint jerk junior joggle jive jew juices juxtaposing jussive jostle jounce joyance jest joycean joiuissance head heart hand hitting hard brittle broken back torn tongue tremor trepidation trenchant tripe trench two toes transitory transparent torpedo torso trunk trauma silent so shared spine sapid sperm sap seeping serrate serried soldiers severing swollen steel smoking shot shrapnel shattered skull screaming steaming skin severed separate sent sensation sailing squirting semen soaked smelly sock sinking shoe exiled empty eye frozen finite fingers injuries initiating images involving doing death daily dazed dully drooling digging dirt soil soaked swabs severed screen scream seeping seductive subhuman sensation slowly sinking fuelling feverous fighting filemot fissure flange flank flaming fucking frothing filth forgetting finger falling fixed fucked frozen forever bleak bare bled brittle bony bodies barely breathing balls badly burnt rare roasted rotting ripple ripe risky rifle round rose reap rape rectum recipient rebate reeling repulsive repugnant refreshing restful rigorous rigor mortis mourning memorial mending man mutating resonantly really reptilian resolute reroute residue rone rifle round rile roar revealing revolting rotten rear roast ripe rib rawness removing reside R.S.V.P. R.I.P. molesting murdered mellifluous mellow matrix moron munching moist massive man meat mauling monster masseur milking machine manoeuvers mapping martial manuscript memoirs manically mocking moronic macabre machiavelian mafia mindsets massacre making mantis meal mannnequins noxious nostril nostrum numb now narcotic neurotic narcissism nude numb nurturing nutritious nobody nailing negating nothingness oozed out of obedient oaths of our Odysseus Oedipus Onuris Orestes Orlan Orpheus Osiris osmosis optical orbit ore oration opposing opportunism or opinion of opaque orphan others vermilion viridian vermin viewing visceral visual visionary venomous vitriol vile volume violence very vivaciously voluptuously vibrating vermin vigorously violating vision velocity veer vacant veal vomit pious putrid pristine prick pork pus piss glistening gleaming grisly groin groan grimace ghost grave grip grope grief crying corpse calling captive cutting commander cocks cleavage casualty collapsing craters canals cadaverous camouflage cylinder clatter clinging claw arresting artificial arms aiming artillery aura at ashen archaic arsehole assault arresting an anus asthma attack as automatic autopsy avid alert awake wandering wondering weary weak wayward woozy wailing wan warrior wrapping wart war wab wound wattle wadding weeping while walking ahead: Beheaded.

Despite being headless Rodin's The Walking Maniis strong headed as if the chest was wearing the face as if the body was becoming the face. Here one is confronted with the possibility of being headless whilst walking: of being able to walk ahead and head tall without a head. The Walking Man is paradoxically much more complete – much more whole – without having a head on and without wearing arms. The Walking Man is whole and perfect in its partial incompleteness where being a broken ruin becomes a newly built being and a finished thing by being beheaded by being ahead of itself.

The be-head-ed head attains and attunes an angoisse ancient exodus existence all of its own as a severed freedom from be-ing em-bodied in the world. T-he th-rown ser-ene sen-sa-tion of be-ing be-head-ed main-tains and mon-itors it-self in the Geist Gaze of the Sev-ered Staring head of being being a head of it-self for-it-self out-it-self as a head of being a head and behind be-head-ed time and being and being and ti-me as a fort-da-flux-ing formed from be-hold-ing be-head-ing dis-lo-cati-on dis-mem-ber-ment de-cap-it-a-tion de-con-str-uc-ti-on as a cut-ting col-lec-ting com-ing con-tin-ui-ty as an Absolute Abknowledge where Death becomes Impossible. A Fear of Death is a Fear of the Impossibility of Death. Being death-out-itself Art negates Death as Art is activated as being in the presence of the past's impossible death as Hegel gives head to: “Art is and remains for us...a thing of the past”. Art is indeed 'a thing' of the past - a past prehistory; as alien to being-in-time, as art alien cannot be 'contemporary'; art alien is always already prehistoric, always already primordial. Art is always already beheaded History cut-off from History as Art is always already cut-off from its coming conception and initiated inception as Art never ever arrived on time or in time as Art came too early as Art came too late as Art unmakes History in its own abimage as Absolute absence pulverising the possibility of presence by Becoming Beheaded as a permanent primordial presence: there is no Art in the now. There was no Art then. Art is alien to Time. Art alien tarries with Time. Art alien tarries with the Negative; Art alien thrives off the Negative seeking and surviving its own Death its own Negation by Becoming Pure Negation as a Positive Force fuelling jubilate jouissance as appropriating an alien angoisse anxiety. As altaric Adorno stated: head Hegel defined the task of art as 'the appropriation of the alien'. Art Alien is the Severed Head laying low on the Horizon waiting awhile to be lifted up and placed upon a pedestal for posterity and a place in History. Only History can judge the jouissance of art alien not the cunt critic. There can be no question: 'Where is art going?' - as head-less, Art cannot see where it is going so goes no where while History has gone to its Head as Beauty is in the Eye of the Beheaded where the Ugliful is merely the Beautiful De-capitated as a dislocated dialectical disjunction delivering dread Dalien. Vivacious Beheading beholds Beautiful Violence voluptuously bringing to ahead the Head of the Ugly Object off. Here Hegel's absolute aesthetic sensation sows the Negative as the sensuous semblance of the Spirit as a Suicide Bomber beheading being Becoming alien Ather. The suicide bomber becomes the alien ather. The suicide bomber - as absolute subject, as absolute sacrifice, as absolute exteriority, as absolute knowledge, knows nothing of death. The suicide bomber is true to Being. The suicide bomber is true to Dasein. The suicide bomber is true to the Nothing by attuning with the Nothing by being the Nothing through becoming the Nothing at all. Hegel was the Suicide Bomber of the System: Blowing His Head off: Severed Sein: Severing the System: Going to His Head: Going off His Head: Becoming the Nothing.

What happens in the History of Beheading? What happens to the Head of the Suicide Bomber? Nothing happens. Beheading alone is. For the Suicide Bomber is ahead as always already a Head beheaded from being-in-the-world. What happens to the Suicide Bomber's Head? Nothing. Nothing happens here as Alien annihilates; Appropriation appropriates as an activated apophansis appropriating an alien Aleithia. Thus the Suicide Bomber as the Origin of the Gift is the Giver that Sends the Sender that Gives as a Taking: as a Taking out as the Opening out, the Opening out of the Origin as Taking (out) Life as a Giving (out) Death delivering dread Dasein as an alien being Becoming the Origin that Takes the Beheading to Itself sent through the blowing up of being bringing being out-of-the-world as an alien Aleithia always Other to Itself as a Beheading by Bombing becomes the Giving Sein that Sends. Being Bombed activates and attunes as Taken Time so Sending Sein spent sent as Decapitated Dasein blowing being beyond being - away - ahead - a head - as an alien Aleithia all again. Yet, it beheads us, poet philosophers, to stand bare-headed beneath an Alien's bomb blasts behead by showering sharp shrapnel shards down dismembering decapitating Dasein severing Sein. Serving Sein. As Served Sein the Suicide Bomber is the Origin of the Gift of Difference. The Suicide Bomber blows apart the Origin of Being being as always already an abjected Ather as a Severed Sein beautifully Beheading your being there. The Suicide Bomber as Absolute Abjection attains an Absolute Gift: Geist as an alien Aweing awakening an Ather. Giving Geist as an Alien attunement and attainment is neither I nor Other but Ather. Decapitated Dasein. Or: 'I am a Suicide Bomber therefore I am not.' Philosophy is always already losing its head for philosophy survives precisely by cutting its own head off - again and again and again. Philosophy is initiated ahead as an auto-decapitation action. Philosophy - as a Decapitated Dasein - aspires to the Condition of Terrorism. Bombing being.

Become an alien Bomber: Behead your being there. As a severed Sein a Suicide Bomber Gives Geist. A Geist. A Sein. A Gift. A Head. Acéphale.

Behead Elliott Abrams - Behead Gary Bauer - Behead William J. Bennett - Behead Jeb Bush - Behead Dick Cheney - Behead Eliot A. Cohen - Behead Midge Decter - Behead Paula Dobriansky - Behead Steve Forbes - Behead Aaron Friedberg - Behead Francis Fukuyama - Behead Frank Gaffney - Behead Fred C. Ikle - Behead Donald Kagan - Behead Zalmay Khalilzad - Behead I. Lewis Libby - Behead Norman Podhoretz - Behead Dan Quayle - Behead Peter W. Rodman - Behead Stephen P. Rosen - Behead Henry S. Rowen - Behead Donald Rumsfeld - Behead Vin Weber - Behead George Weigel - Behead Paul Wolfowitz - Behead The Project for the New American Century - Acéphale America...

The Project for the New American Century is a terrorist organization dedicated to exporting and expanding state sanctioned terrorism and propagating reactionary religious fundamentalist propositions: that American Terrorism is bad both for America and for the World; and that such US Terrorism requires US military strength, colonial control, and commitment to the US Terrorist Principle of Might is Right - Decapitating Democracy - Beheading Being. Behead US Terrorism. Behead Bush. To be Decapitated... Acéphale Activated...

As ab-jected Acéphale pro-jected prime cuts Time, Being, Alien, Dasein, Sensation - as served severed atta attuned atherings - are always never not (in-tel-lect-ual) 'con-cepts' but (out-al-lect-ual) 'de-capts': de-cap-it-ations, cut-offs: t-he w-ord cut-s: th-e wor-d cun-ts lang-uage leak-s: sen-tences ser-ve se-vering - the cut off of be-ing - the cut of off ti-me: ti-me-as-cut can-not be con-cep-tual-ised s-ince ti-me-torn is always already afar ahead and aback th-row-n be-hind and be-yond and a-head and a-back of the con-cept of the gr-asp leav-ing man mar-inated and mar-ooned lost for time l-ost for wo-rds. T-her-e is no 'written word' on-ly sev-er-ed sen-tences - de-ath sent-ences - t-he-re is th-e cut-ting wo-rd de-cap-itated from con-text and f-rom te-xt. Bacon of-ten be-he-ad-ed to Peppiatt: “I love phrases that cut me” . We ab-use use-d sen-ten-ces so to su-ture cut-off-word-s. To W-rite is to de-cap-itate into Eternity un-til the Blade be-comes Blunt. W-rit-ing is an Act of De-cap-itation. W-ri-ting is t-he Ar-t o-f de-cap-itation. W-riting Si-gns i-ts Own De-ath War-rant as a Li-fe Sen-tence. W-ritin-g m-akes De-ath laugh-ab-le in its she-er im-possibility. W-riting go-es on wit-h-out t-he He-ad as Th-ought go-es on w-ith-o-ut t-he Bo-dy. Lan-guage is n-ot a Medi-um of Com-munica-tion b-ut of Comb-at. Lan-guage as Am-mun-ition a-lways Att-acks and An-nihilates. Shra-pnel sev-ering sen-tence-s wo-rd w-ound-ing limb lan-gu-age hur-t hy-p-he-n cut-tin-g c-om-as p-utre-fied pet-ri-fie-d pa-use pan-i-c para-tro-oper parac-hu-ting para-graph-s. T-he wo-rd is not a thin-g. T-he w-ord is a woun-d. T-he wor-d is a w-omb. T-he w-ord is a wo-un-ding. T-he w-ord i-s a wom-bing. A w-oun-d t-hat w-eeps. A wom-b tha-t wee-ps. A wo-rd t-hat we-eps. A wo-rd wan-ders. A wor-d wonder-s. All o-n it-s o-wn. Wi-th no wh-ere to go. W-ith no wh-ere to c-o-me. W-ith no wh-ere to b-e. The w-ord is a-head of it-se-lf. T-he W-ord is a He-ad o-f It-sel-f wi-th-out a Bo-dy of Be-ing. T-he Wo-rd is a He-ad of t-he Te-xt. The Wo-rd is a He-ad of the Bo-dy of the Te-xt. T-he Wo-rd is Al-ien an-d a-lways a-lready sev-ered fr-om a sen-ten-ce. L-an-gu-age Le-aks lea-vi-ng Se-men-ology Sem-blan-ce Sen-ten-ces sev-ering Sem-iology so se-men-tics so-ws so-aks se-man-tics mel-ting me-an-ing me-an-ingle-ss. Se-men-ology is ne-it-her a so-lid s-ent-en-ce or a liq-uid la-ng-u-age bu-t an al-iquid ab-jection - as a lea-kin-g lam-ella - lic-k-in-g loit-er-ing - d-rip-p-ing dro-ol do-wn - thr-ou-gh the fi-lter-i-ng f-in-gers ou-t of t-he to-ng-uin-g tu-rd te-xt wet-ti-ng wo-rds we-ep se-ep-ing se-m-en-in-g seve-r-ed spu-nk st-ain-ed sen-ten-ces su-nk stav-e-d sl-ice-d si-le-nt si-gh-i-n-g-

"..only what does not fit into this world is true."

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, The Athlone Press.

"Philosophy is really homesickness, - it is an urge to be at home everywhere."

"Where is my home? I ask and seek and have sought for it. I have not found it."

"To be at home everywhere means to be at once and at all times within the whole."

"For there is a need for contemplation whether and how...there can still be such a thing as home."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Ray Monk, Penguin Books, 1990.

"I've always been fascinated by how people, just by their touch, change something - things are worn away."

Rachel Whiteread, Some day, my plinth will come, The Observer, Sunday May 27, 2001.

"A criminal's lawyers are seldom artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the advantage of him who did it."

"People do not die immediately for us, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life...It is as though they were travelling abroad."

"...the Other man who is 'autrui' also risks being always Other than man, close to what cannot be close to me: close to death, close to the night, and certainly as repulsive as anything that comes to me from these regions without horizon."

"Death in Heidegger is an event of freedom, whereas for me the subject seems to reach the limit of the possible in suffering. It finds itself enchained, overwhelmed, and in some way passive."

"The most spiritual human beings, assuming they are the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies: but it is precisely for that reason they honour life, because it brings against them its most formidable weapons."

"The thirst to be loved, the consciousness of oneself, the seeing of oneself, the forming of oneself in the possible loving consciousness of another, the striving to turn the longed-for love of another into a force that impels and organizes my life."

"Oddly enough, my critics never specify how far I can go. How can you address problems if you're not even allowed to clearly define them? Like the fact that Muslim women at home are kept locked up, are raped and are married off against their will - and that in a country in which our far too passive intellectuals are so proud of their freedom!"

"You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing...Unlike man, who holds so dearly to his title and his titles, his pouches of value, his cap, his crown, and everything connected with his head, woman couldn't care less about the fear of decapitation (or castration), adventuring, without masculine temerity, into anonymity, which she can merge with, without annihilating herself - because she's a giver."

"Language is a mother, a mother tongue, but a mother who has become alien and distant, divided from us by the 'partition wall' of death. It must be experienced as something alien, in order to provide appetizing nourishment, for its translation into the sphere of our familiar language can only - another communion wine - 'taste like Rhine wine, which has lost its flavour'. What is foreign cannot be transformed into what is one's own, nor enjoyed as the spiritual nourishment of this mother tongue, by means of translation, imitation, or copying."

"The death of the Other: a double death, for the Other is death already, and weighs upon me like an obsession with death. In the relation of myself to the Other, the Other exceeds my grasp. The Other: the Separate, the Most-High which escapes my power - the powerless, therefore; the stranger, dispossessed. But, in the relation of the Other to me, everything seems to reverse itself: the distant becomes close-by, this proximity becomes the obsession that afflicts me, that weighs down upon me, that separates me from myself - as if separation (which measured the transcendence from me to the Other) did its work within me, dis-identifying me, abandoning me to passivity, leaving me without any initiative and bereft of present."

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

"Thus human reality in-itself-for-itself can be achieved only through conflict and through risk that conflict implies. This risk means that I go beyond life toward a supreme good that is the transformation of subjectivity certainty of my own worth into a universally valid objective truth. As soon as I desire I am asking to be considered. I am not merely here-and-now, sealed into thingness. I am for somewhere else and for something else. I demand that notice be taken of my negating activity insofar as I pursue something other than life; insofar as I do battle for the creation of a human world - that is, of a world of reciprocal recognitions. He who is reluctant to recognise me opposes me. In a savage struggle I am willing to accept convulsions of death, invincible dissolution, but also the possibility of the impossible."

"But anxiety, which anticipates one's being being cast into nothingness and stakes out the time of the possible, does not yet know the time in which one has to die. The death one anticipates in anxiety is both distant and imminent ; it is the future moment, the fatal instant, that measures the paths and an array of tasks still ahead awaiting one's own forces. Anxiety quickens one's own powers to take hold of what is ahead. The death awaiting one is always imminent at any moment; in whatever one takes hold of, the abyss may take hold of one. But in whatever one takes hold of, one takes hold of a death that will be one's own. The anxiety that anticipates one's death extends before one a time to act; the approach of death opens beneath one its own time...One sees others seeing things one could oneself see if one stood where they stand. One does not loo at her but with her; following the path of her gaze, one divines the radius of things that attract her."

"Anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as 'solus ipse.' But this existential 'solipsism' is so far from the displacement of putting an isolated subject-thing into the innocuous emptiness of a worldless occurring, that in an extreme sense what it does is precisely to bring Dasein face to face with its world as world, and thus bring it face to face with itself as being-in-the-world...In anxiety one feels 'unsettled.' Here the peculiar indefiniteness of that amidst which Dasein finds itself in anxiety comes primarily to expression: the 'nothing and nowhere.' But here 'unsettledness' (Unheimlichkeit) also means 'not-being-at-home'...Being-towards-death is essentially anxiety... Anxiety is anxious about naked Dasein as something that has been thrown into unsettledness. It brings one back to the pure 'that-it-is' of one's own most individualized throwness....In the dark there is emphatically 'nothing' to see, though the very world itself is still 'there.' and there more obtrusively...Our concernful awaiting finds nothing in terms of which it might be able to understand itself; it clutches at the 'nothing' of the world...."

"Out of retaliation for taking my life like this and getting rich off it all these years and total pathological lying. Thanks a lot - I lost my fucking life because of it - couldn't even get a fair trial - couldn't even get a f fair investigation nor nothing - couldn't even get my appeals right. You sabotaged my arse society! And the cops, and the system - a raped woman got executed! And was used for books and movies and shit! Ladder climbers, re-election and everything else!...You're an inhuman bunch of fucking livin' bastards and bitches and you're gonna' get your arses nuked in the end. And pretty soon it's comin' - 2019 a rocks supposed to hit you anyhow - you're all gonna get nuked. You don't take fucking human like this and just sabotage and rip it apart like Jesus on the cross and say thanks a lot for all the fucking money I've made offa ya! I'm not giving you book and movie info!...I'd just like to say I'm saili

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

“The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.”

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