Abstract
When pious critics criticized Millet for painting peasants who were carrying an offertory like a sack of potatoes, Millet responded by saying that the weight common to the two objects was more profound than their figurative distinction. As a painter, he was striving to paint the force or that weight, and not the offertory or the sack of potatoes.(Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) Gilles Deleuze sought an ontology that did not, according to Todd May, ‘reduce being to the knowable’. Instead he sought a widening of thought that would allow one ‘to palpate the unknowable’. Key to this expanded field of thought is an ability to think the ‘material synthetic unity’ of ‘sensation’. Deleuze drew upon art in general, and painting in particular, to describe both the nuances of sensation and how to think sensation.