Switching Bodies

Quick notes on the self and longing

The art of Francis Bacon expresses the violence of sensation. The forces that model the flesh and large fields of color feed off of each other, producing the impenetrable horror of having a body that pervades his art. 

“In the end, Bacon’s figures are not racked bodies, at all, but ordinary bodies in ordinary situations of constraint and discomfort. A man ordered to sit still for hours on a narrow stool is bound to assume contorted postures. The violence of a hiccup, of the urge to vomit, but also of a hysterical, involuntary smile.” ¹

Bacon’s work makes the invisible forces and their effects on the flesh visible; the emphasis lies less on movement, but on the effect of movement and interior forces on the immobile body. Large fields of color with shallow depth, rather than any 3-dimensional rendering, delineate the Figures. These large domains of color are divided into sections, forming a sort of flattened bone structure. Both of these pictorial elements play off of one another, the fields of color shrouding the Figure as the Figure presses outward trying to dissolve these oppressive colored domains. 

“These two aspects are strict correlates in Bacon: a brilliant, pure tone for the large fields, coupled with a program of intensification; broken tones for the flesh, coupled with a procedure of rupturing or ‘fireblasting,’ a critical mixture of complementaries. It is as though painting were able to conquer time in two ways: through color - as eternity and light in the infinity of a field, where bodies fall or go through their paces; and in another way as passage, as metabolic variability in the enactment of these bodies, in their flesh and on their skin.” 

The Figure confronts the fields of color, struggling for differentiation amid the imminent threat of total dissolution. Narrativization and symbolization dissipate, leaving nothing but sensation and lost time. Bacon’s triptychs, exhibiting this narrative dissolution through their distinct and separate sections, link themselves in a way to remove any symbolic connotations; the painting is never about the figures or objects themselves, but rather the essence of rhythm. 

Jean-Luc Nancy’s meditation on his heart transplant in “L’intrus,” questions what constitutes I. He describes the strangeness and fragmentation that occurs when receiving a foreign object - a stranger’s heart - needed to survive. 

“I have -Who?- this ‘I’ is precisely the question, the old question: what is this enunciating subject? Always foreign to the subject of its own utterance; necessarily intruding upon it, yet ineluctably its motor, shifter, or heart- I, therefore, received the heart of another, now nearly ten years ago. It was a transplant, grafted on. My own heart (as you’ve gathered, it is entirely a matter of the ‘proper,’ of being one, or one’s ‘own’- or else it is not in the least and, properly speaking, there is nothing to understand, no mystery, not even a question: rather, as the doctors prefer to say, there is the simple necessity of a transplantation.” ²

A sort of fragmentation occurs when I become an intrusion, something else, or someone else. Is my heart me, or is it a piece of me, or maybe it represents a fractured I? His defective heart became a stranger to himself through its defection, separating itself from him, or separating him from himself. A single faulty organ drew attention to itself, to himself, to his body; he became a montage, an assembly of functions, reducible to the functions of immunity. Where does my body end and I become, for if the mind and body are truly one, a heart transplant equals death?

“This half-hearted heart can be only half mine. I was already no longer in me. I already come from elsewhere, or I come no more. A strangeness reveals itself ‘at the heart’ of what is most familiar - but familiar says too little: a strangeness at the heart of what never used to signal itself as ‘heart.’ Until now it was foreign by virtue of its being insensible, not even present. But now it falters, and this very strangeness refers me back to myself: ‘I’ am, because I am ill.”

There are many instances of hosts of organ transplants reporting the sudden onset of memories and affects from the deceased. The four categories of personality changes recorded include changes in preferences, alterations in emotions and temperament, modifications of identity, and memories from the donor’s life.³ My mother’s long-time friend told me herself that after her liver transplant she noticed the sudden onset of a specific food craving, only to find out this was the favorite food of her organ donor. 

The archaic heart vs mind debacle seems asinine, the soul encrypts itself through every fiber, every tendril of the body. You throw out your hand in desperation, and your soul, your essence, your being — which has existed forever in the chain of causal events and unity of time — transmits itself through this gesture. The air already knows the exact speed and direction of your hand, your motion is seamless and natural; this has already happened before.  

I have told my boyfriend I wish we could switch organs, I want a piece of him inside of my body forever. I tell him to not propose to me with a ring, but to lie out on an operating table, ready to ceremoniously and sacrificially hand over each other's livers. And if elements of his love or memories of early infatuation are encoded in the very organ I receive, would this be the ultimate act of recognition: experiencing firsthand, physiologically, someone’s desire for me? I want to experience phantom leg syndrome for the desire directed towards myself. Would this be the apex of horror or transcendental bliss? Is this not the ultimate unreachable goal, a true lover’s union? Would knowing who I am in relation to you illuminate who I am in relation to myself, maybe even to God? 

“The human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation’s relating to itself A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. In short a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two terms. Looked at it in this way a human being is not yet a self.” ⁴

Kierkegaard attests the Self only exists through the concept of relationship, specifically the relationship with God, and when these relations are unbalanced despair is the result. This conception of the Self exhibits similarities to Hegelian recognition. Hegel maintains that absolute knowledge is possible through a consciousness, or spirit recognizing itself as a spirit through the process of mutual recognition with others, acknowledging each other’s existence. Every individual, finite mind must recognize God within others to recognize God in oneself. For Kierkegaard, God is wholly other and exists regardless of finite minds. After the individual has achieved this mutual recognition, they must isolate themselves because self-consciousness is not simply actualized through the recognition by others but through one’s relationship with God. 

For Kierkegaard, despair is an expression of anxiety in which one does not want to be oneself, a misrelation arising from a misbalancing with the eternal, or God. However, the more one tries to become a Self, the more independent one becomes of God, therefore, leading one to become an imitation. Kierkegaard explains the three kinds of despair in relation to the Self: being unconscious in despair of having a Self, not wanting in despair to be oneself, and wanting in despair to be oneself. In being unconscious in despair of having a Self, one is unaware that one has a self separate from its finite reality. Not wanting in despair to be oneself puts one in a state of awareness of the Self, but that which is only in finite terms. When one wants in despair to be oneself, they accept the eternal but refuse the notion that the eternal extends to the Self. 

The general despair of having a Self is the root of the lover’s despair. Where do I end and where do I begin, for if you have my heart, is my heart in you, or do you hold my heart inside of you? When we copulate, are you inside of me, or am I holding you inside of me? The second phrase, indicates trepidation, are you afraid I will swallow you up, that your erection is nothing more than a blind man’s cane? You exist for me to swallow you up and for you to fear this swallowing. A soul cannot fragment, but rather percolate, I do not want to take you away, I want to bring you closer. I need to exist for you to love me, but I want you to engulf me completely. I want you to love me because I want to dissolve, I want you to love me because I need to become. Holding the person you love feels like barely holding yourself above water, you feel yourself peacefully swaying and painstakingly treading, you expect to dissolve, you squeeze me, but not enough, I am still breathing, still solitary. We are obsessed with grounding, delineating, and becoming the Self, terribly afraid that if we are not properly acknowledged we will disappear, yet our secretions and gesticulations, reminding us of our vitality, disgust and horrify us. Switching organs with my boyfriend, this ultimate recognition, fractures me, reminds me of all my churning, grinding organs, drawing attention to my stomach ache and my body’s constant struggle of removing waste, of its interminable effort towards purity. Or maybe I will be reminded of my infallibility, my skin sloughing right off my bones, freeing me from the discomfort and horrors of sitting inside of my own flesh. I have phantasmic visions of oceanic, enveloping experiences, I scream and scream like Bacon’s screaming popes until I evaporate. If I was the last person on Earth I would not even care to scream, my primordial self takes over, reducing me to motion and rhythm, foregoing language. I am left to fester and languish in the wet dirt. 

1. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

2. Jean-Luc Nancy, L’intrus

3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/

4. Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death