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The Body, the Meat and theSpirit: Becoming Animal
by Gilles Deleuze
 The body is the Figure, or rather the material of the Figure. Above allthe material of the Figure is not to be confused with the materialstructure in space which is separate from this. The body is a Figure,not structure. Conversely, the Figure being a body, is not a face anddoes not even have a face. It has a head, because the head is anintegral part of the body. It can even be reduced to its head. As aportraitist, Francis Bacon is a painter of heads and not of faces. There is a big difference between the two. For the face is astructured spatial organization which covers the head, while thehead is an adjunct of the body, even though it is its top. It is not thatit lacks a spirit, but it is a spirit which is body, corporeal and vitalbreath, an animal spirit; it is the animal spirit of man: a pig-spirit, abuffalo-spirit, a dog-spirit, a bat-spirit... This means that Bacon ispursuing a very special project as a portraitist: unmaking the face,rediscovering or pulling up the head beneath the face. The deformations which bodies undergo are also
the animal features
of the head. There is in no way a correspondence between animalforms and forms of the face. In fact, the face has lost its form in theprocess of being subjected to operations of cleaning and brushingwhich disorganize it and make a head burgeon in its place. And themarks or features of animality are moreover not animal forms, butrather spirits which haunt the cleaned parts, which draw out thehead, individualizing and qualifying the head without a face.
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Asprocedures used by Bacon, cleaning and features here assume aspecific meaning. What happens is that the man's head is replacedby an animal; but this is not the animal as form, it is the animal as
outline
, for example the trembling outline of a bird which spiralsover the cleaned area, while the simulacra of face portraits, besideit, serve only as 'witness' (as in the 1976 triptych). What happens isthat an animal, a real dog for example, is outlined as the shadow of its master; or conversely the shadow of the man assumes anautonomous and unspecified animal existence. The shadow escapesfrom the body like an animal to which we give shelter. Instead of formal correspondences, what Bacon's painting constitutes is a
 zoneof the indiscernible, of the undecidable,
between man and animal.Man becomes animal, but he does not become so without theanimal simultaneously becoming spirit, the spirit of man, thephysical spirit of man presented in the mirror as Eumenides or fate. This is never a combination of forms, it is rather a common fact: thecommon fact of man and animal. To the point that Bacon's mostisolated Figure is to begin with a coupled figure, man coupled withhis animal in an underlying act of bullfighting. This objective zone of the indiscernible was to start with the wholebody, but the body in terms of flesh or meat. Without any doubt the
 
body also has bones, but bones are only spatial structure.Distinctions have often been made between flesh and bones, andeven between relationships of flesh and bone. The body only revealsitself when it ceases to be supported by the bones, when the fleshceases to cover the bones, when they exist in a mutual relation, buteach independently, the bones as the material structure of the body,the flesh as the corporeal material of the Figure. Bacon admiresEdgar Degas' young woman,
 After the Bath
(1885-86), whosebroken-up spinal column seems to emerge from the flesh, while theflesh is made the more vulnerable and agile, more acrobatic.
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Inquite a different composition, Bacon painted a similar spinal columnfor a Figure contorted upside-down. This pictorial tension betweenflesh and bones is something which has to be achieved. Now to bespecific it is meat which brings about this tension in the painting,not least through the splendor of the colours. Meat is that state of the body where the flesh and the bones confront one anotherlocally, instead of entering into composition structurally. Likewisethe mouth and the teeth, which are little bones. In meat, it is as if the flesh
drops
from the bones, while the bones rise above the flesh. This is what is specific to bacon, as opposed to Rembrandt orSoutine. If there is some kind of 'interpretation' of the body in Baconwe find it in his fondness for painting lying figures whose raised armor thigh stands in for a bone, in such a way that the lulled fleshseems to descend or fall from it. Thus in the central panel of the1968 triptych, the two sleeping twins flanked by witnesses to theanimal spirits; but also the series of the sleeping man with his armsup, of the sleeping woman with the vertical leg, and the sleeping ordrugged woman with the raised thighs. Far beyond any apparentsadism, the bones are like gymnastic apparatus (a skeleton-likeframe) whose flesh is the acrobat. The athleticism of the body isnaturally prolonged in this acrobatics of the flesh. We shall see theimportance of falling in Bacon's works. But already in the crucifixionswhat interests him is the droop, and the sinking head which revealsthe flesh. And in those of 1962 and 1965, in the context of anarmchair-cross or a trail of bones, we can literally see the fleshdropping from the bones. For Bacon as for Franz Kafka, the spinalcolumn becomes nothing but the sword under the skin which atorturer has slid inside the body of an innocent sleeper.
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Itsometimes even happens that there is a bone just added on in arandom spray of paint as an afterthought[...]But is it possible to say the same thing, exactly the same thing,about meat and the head, namely that it is the objective zone of indecision of mean and of animals? Can one say objectively that thehead is meat (as much as the meat is spirit)? Of all the parts of thebody, is not the head the one closest to the bones? look at El Greco,and once more at Chaim Soutine. Now it looks as if Bacon does notexperience the head like that. The bone belongs to the face, not tothe head. For Bacon there is no death's head. The head is debonedrather than bony. Yet it is not at all soft, but firm. The head is flesh,and the mask itself is not mortuary, it is a firm block of flesh whichseparates itself from the bones; these are the studies of a portrait of William Blake. Bacon's own head is flesh haunted by a very beautifulgaze without an orbit. And this is how he honours Rembrandt, for
 
having been able to paint a last self-portrait like such a block of fleshwithout orbits.
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Throughout Bacon's
oeuvre
, the head-meat relationgoes through intensive shifts of scale which make it more and moreintimate. At first the meat (flesh on one side, bone on the other) isset on the edge of the track or the balustrade where the figure-headstands; but it is also the thick, fleshly rain surrounding the headwhich unmakes its face beneath the umbrella. The scream whichissues from the Pope's mouth, the pity which issues from his eyeshas meat as its object. Then the meat has a head whereby it fleesand descends from the cross, as in the two earlier crucifixions. Lateron all of Bacon's series of heads will also declare their identificationwith meat, and among the finest are those which are painted in thecolours of meat, red and blue. Finally, the meat is itself a head, andthe head has become the de-localized force of meat, as in the
Fragment of a crucifixion
of 1950,j where all the meat is screaming,with a dog spirit looking down from the top of the cross. How weknow that Bacon does not like this painting is the simplicity of themanifest procedure; all he had to do was dig out a mouth in themiddle of the meat. The affinity of the mouth, and of the mouth'sinterior, with meat still has to be made plain, and it has to reach thatpoint where it has become strictly the section of a cut artery, oreven of a jacket sleeve which stands in as an artery, as in the blood-soaked packages of the
Sweeney Agonistes
triptych. Then themouth acquires that power of de-localization which turns all of themeat into a head without a face. It is no longer a specific organ, butthe hole through which the entire body escapes, and through whichthe flesh drops (what is required for this procedure of looseinvoluntary marks). What Bacon calls 'the scream' is theimmeasurable pity which extends to the meat.
Notes
 1.Felix Guattari has analysed these phenomena of facialdisorganization: the 'features of faceness' are released andbecome equally well the features of the head's animality. SeeFelix Guattari,
L'Inconscient machinique
(Paris: EditionsRecherches, 1979) p. 75.2.David Sylvester,
L'art de l'impossible: entretiens avecFrancis Bacon
trans. Michel Leiris and Michael Pappiatt(Geneva: editions d'Art Albert Skira, 1976) p. 92-94.3.Franz Kafka, "Das Schwert" (The Sword) in Max Brod (ed.)
The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-23
trans. Martin Greenbergand H Ardent Schacken (New York: Schoken Books, 1949) p.109-1104.David Sylvester,
L'art de l'impossible
op.cit., p. 114From Tracy Warr (ed.)
The Artist's Body 
, Translated by LizHeron, Phaidon Press, London 2000, p. 197. Originallypublished as "Le corps, la viande et l'espirit, le devenir-animal"
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