From Abstraction to Zooparasites by way of Muybridge and Nietzsche, In Extremis – the A to Z of Francis Bacon – a decade in the conception and writing – begins with a rejection of the 'bio-graphy' – the writing of a life. The hyphen acts as a scar. For Francis Bacon, the life was merely the armature on which the meat was hung. To attempt a linear excavation of this subject, moving from his mother’s womb in Dublin to the stainless-steel body-rack in the morgue in Madrid, constitutes an act of literary reassurance, but In Extremis operates as a taxonomy of ruins, a torn ace of spades in the gutter next to a used prophylactic filled with glittering haemospermia. As Virginia Woolf noted, “Biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand”.
 
By Steve Finbow
Illustrated by Martin Bladh