Professor Elizabeth Grosz addresses the complex relationship between Francis Bacon and Gilles Deleuze, who wrote one of the most perceptive and sympathetic books on Bacon’s painting, Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation (1981). Deleuze did not exactly write on Bacon so much as with him, on a question that intrigued them equally. Both artist and philosopher attempted to explore the imperceptible: the forces of magnetism and gravity, notions of causality and chance, and forces of aging and disintegration.

Elizabeth Grosz is Jean Fox O’Barr Women’s Studies Professor in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Duke University. She has written and lectured in the fields of philosophy, gender studies and critical theory for many years and is the author several books, including Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth (Columbia University Press, 2008) and most recently, Becoming undone: Darwinian reflections on life, politics and art (Duke University Press, 2011).

This lecture is co-presented with Sydney Ideas and the Power Institute for Art and Visual Culture.

Listen on YouTube