Beyond the ‘Last Phenomenology’: Rhythmic Modulations in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sensation

Abstract

This article reconstructs Gilles Deleuze’s engagement with phenomenology, and with the phenomenological problematic of sensation, in his Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Considering Deleuze’s adoption, from the phenomenology of art, of notions of sensation and rhythm, it examines how Deleuze complexifies these phenomenological notions by aligning them with his profoundly non-phenomenological notion of the body without organs, as well as with the concepts of modulation and the diagram. In mapping Deleuze’s complexification of rhythm and his development of a logic of rhythmic modulation, this article shows how Deleuze immanently refines an approach to working beyond phenomenology, through phenomenology.