Date: Mon, 17 Apr 1995 14:59:54 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mani Salem-Haghighi <msalemha-AT-uoguelph.ca>
Subject: Malgosia's Camera



In a recent post which I can't seem to be able to find, Malgosia worried 
about the distinction (or the lack thereof) between "film" and "the 
camera" in chapter 2. This worried me too, and then I bumped into the 
following passage from the book on Francis Bacon, which I now transmit 
so that you can all worry along:

[from the seventh paragraph of Ch. seven on Hysteria]:

"Bacon explains rather testily that the hysterical smile he painted on the 
1953 portrait, on the human head of 1953, and on the 1955 Pope, came from 
a 'model' who was 'very neurotic and almost hysterical.' But in fact it is 
the whole painting that is hystericized. Bacon himself hystericizes when, 
beforehand, he abandones himself completely to the image, abandones his 
entire head to the camera of a photobooth, or rather, sees himself in a 
head that belongs to the camera, that has disappeared into the camera. 
What is this hysterical smile? Where is the abomination or abjection of 
this smile? Presence or insistence. Interminable presence."

Deleuze does seem to be using "the image" and "the camera" interchangably 
(even though this is not a movie camera, just a photobooth camera.) But 
this is not like him. What is the camera? Is it an apparatus, or is it a 
concept he is creating? 

(By the way, just in passing, all the talk about presence at the end of 
this paragraph and everything else Deleuze says in this chapter about 
hysteria and the presence that is "too-present" does seem to have something 
to add to our recent "Is Deleuze Derrida?" carnival. Bacon is praised for 
presenting a hysterical presence that is not narrative, semiotic, or 
illustrative, and therefore not "cerebral", but sensational and haptic. 
So there.) 

love

mani




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