Abstract

The painter Francis Bacon and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze agree with Heraclitus: any phenomenon is constituted of movement or becoming and no appearance endures. I read Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation from the perspective of the Heraclitean flux. This allows me to show the eminent role of forces in the work of Deleuze, which he inherits from the Greek philosopher. I point at sensation as Deleuze's re-thinking of the notion of becoming. ‘How can an artist make an object endure?’ The artistic product, for Deleuze, embodies the force to recreate itself, and thus to endure in the universe. This phenomenon is a bloc of sensation.