Foucault, Velazquez and the non-place of theologyMichel Foucault’s The Order of Things is a history of Western human science that depicts

how the journey of the human sciences leads Western thought from God to the Subject, yet

foreshadows a third step.i It is an historical journey that famously ends with a vision of the

erasure of man: “one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in the

sand at the edge of the sea.” This visionary ending is preceded by a discussion of Nietzsche’s

aphorism of the death of God which, Foucault argues, shows how God and man are dependent

upon each other. It shows that the death of the first inevitably also means the disappearance of

the second—the subject needs God, why God’s death means the disappearance of both and

new spaces for thought opening up. But what are these new spaces? And what space, if any,

might they provide for theology?

In this article, I will discuss the possibility of such a theological space through

Foucault’s essay on Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas. After briefly introducing the academic

field of Foucault and art, I aspire to show how the idea of a radically new space beyond God

and the subject is present in Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas in the beginning of The Order

of Things. Secondly, the article discusses possible theological implications of this space

beyond man and God and suggests that Foucault’s art analysis does in fact indicate a place for

contemporary radical theology. It is a place that eventuates out of Foucault’s notion of the

invisible in Velazquez’s painting. I will describe it as a non-place with consequences for the

account of knowledge and for the limitations of the God/Subject dualism of early modern

thought. As a possible theological space, I will argue, the non-place that Foucault’s essay

grounds humility and mystery not in man nor in God, but in the asymmetrical relation

between words and things.

Foucault on artFoucault’s work on art include four longer essays along with less extensive writings and

interviews. The essays are; the analysis of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) first

published in Mercure de France in 1965 and republished in a longer version as a foreword in

Les mots et les choses (1966); an essay on René Magritte (1898-1967) first published in 1968

in Les cahiers du chemin, and reworked and republished as a book of its own in 1983;

Lectures on Edouard Manet (1832-1883) originally delivered in Tunis in 1971 and recently

translated and published in English; an essay titled “La Peinture Photogénique” on French

artist Gérard Fromanger (b. 1939), 1975. Other artists discussed by Foucault in writing and/or

interviews include: Paul Rebeyrolle (1926-2005), Paul Klee (1879-1940), Vasily Kandinsky

(1866-1944), Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Gérard Fromanger (b. 1939), Werner Schroeter (b.

1945), and Duane Michals (b. 1932).

There is reason to believe that Foucault’s encounter with the art world was

important for the further development of his philosophy. Both American art historian Joseph

J. Tanke and British theologian Jeremy Carrette underline the importance of Foucault’s

relation to art and even though their conclusions differ—due to the difference in focus in their

respective study—both agree that the encounter moved Foucault’s thought closer to the

material world.

Carrette shows how Foucault, in his early work, rethinks Christianity and

especially Christian ideas of the body in order to create a new space for thought through

surrealism and the avant-garde writers of his own time. Thus, when the early Foucault

discusses ‘spirituality’ (with quotation marks in order to underline his rejection of traditional

religious categories) inspired by these artistic movements, he seeks to open a space for

thought that valorises the body.ii Carrette calls the renegotiated spirituality in Foucault’s

earlier work a spiritual corporality.

In Tanke’s presentation, the implications for the account of the body receives

less attention. Instead, Tanke illuminates how Foucault’s encounter with art influenced his

understanding of the material world in a wider sense and in a next step also helped him

develop his archaeology of knowledge.iii The meeting with the transgressive art scene brought

Foucault away from abstract criticism and into a different, and much more hands on, way of

approaching what he regarded as dogmatic remains in Western culture of his time, Tanke

says. The new approach was eventually given its concrete form in the archaeological method.

Rather than simply contesting a disturbing statement with another, Foucault’s archaeology

went back in time through the archives of our shared historical reality in order to tell the story

behind the emergence of the statement he wanted to challenge. Once the history was told, the

statement that initially had seemed both timeless and certain suddenly appeared relative.

Tanke—whose Foucault’s Philosophy of Art is one of the most comprehensive

studies on Foucault’s work on art—describes Foucault’s thought on art as post-

representational. In modern art, Tanke says, Foucault encounters attempts to turn away from

the logic of representation and towards the power of expression. In other words, in his art

analyses Foucault replaces the question “What does this work mean?” with the question

“What does this work do?”.iv In Tanke’s view, Foucault brought the foundation for this

critical approach in from the post-representational art. The post-representational account of art

helped Foucault to distance himself “from forms of criticism that attempt to capture a work’s

essence through speculation about the meaning of its content”—an approach that, to Foucault,

was applicable on history and in art alike.v

Like Tanke, American philosopher Gary Shapiro underlines the openings for

post-representational thought that Foucault finds through his art analyses. To Shapiro,

Foucault’s work on art is part of a broader theoretical interest in Foucault’s work, an interest

in the meaning of words versus things, language versus visual representations, or “seeing”

versus “saying”. In other words yet, Foucault’s work on art may be read as part of his wider

philosophical critique of representation and its implications for his understanding of the

relationship between words and things. Shapiro’s entry into Foucault’s early work is, I

believe, coloured by his close reading of Gilles Deleuze and Foucault. In this regard, the same

can be said about my own perspective. For good or bad, my understanding of Foucault is

inevitably influenced by Deleuze’s understanding, and like Shapiro, I see close connections

between Foucault’s studies of art and his wider discussion on representation as well as on the

relation between what Deleuze also names “visabilities” and “statements”.vi But more on this

below.

American philosopher Michael Kelly similarly suggests that art inspired

Foucault’s methodology. The aspiration to make invisible norms and assumptions visible is an

important key to Foucault’s oeuvre as a whole why, Kelly argues, it comes as no surprise that

Foucault opens Les mots et les choses with an art analysis arguing that Velazquez’s Las

Meninas manages to render visible the invisible rules of Classical thought. Painting is crucial

to Foucault, Kelly holds, precisely because of Foucault’s critical approach of rendering visible

normative conditions that would otherwise be invisible.vii

Foucault’s work on art has been discussed in relation to theology by for instance

Jonathan Tran, Carrette and William Carl Placher. But although theological discourse on

Foucault is growing as an academic field in its own right, with introductions to the specific

topic of Foucault and theology appearing around the beginning of the twenty-first century, his

work on art has not yet received a theological focus of its own.viii The present article aspires to

contribute to further study in the field of Foucault, art and theology by throwing light upon the

radical theological consequences that may come out of this part of Foucault’s work.

Las Meninas

In Foucault’s early version of the manuscript to his groundbreaking The Order of Things, the

reader was thrown right into Foucault’s historical exposé. The book opened with an historical

statement: “Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in

the knowledge of Western culture.”ix Convinced by his editor, however, Foucault agreed to let

his analysis of Velázquez “Las Meninas” (1656)—earlier published in a shorter version in

Mercure de France in 1965—open the book instead.x

As a result, the book starts in a moment of suspension. Foucault describes the

gesture of the painter in Velàzquez’ masterpiece as caught in an in-between. The painter’s

hand is found motionless between the paint and the canvas. The painter has just stepped back

from his work and is standing still, studying his object. He seems to be looking straight at us

—are we his object, or is he ours?

Velazquez’s Las Meninas is said to be one of the most important and mostly

discussed paintings of Western art history. The painting shows a large hall in the Royal Castle

of Madrid, during the reign of King Philip IV. Several of the figures represented in the

painting are identifiable from the Spanish court at the time. The young Infanta Margaret

Theresa (the only surviving child of King Philip IV and his second wife Mariana of Austria)

is surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour (Isabel de Velasco and Maria Augustina

Sarmiento de Sotomayor) who are looking at her, two dwarfs (Maria Barbola and Nicolo

Pertusato) and a dog in front of her and her chaperone (Marcela de Ulloa) and a bodyguard

standing behind her. Just behind them, Velázquez portrays a painter, probably himself,

working at a large canvas. The back of the canvas fills the left of the painting. The painter

looks outwards, beyond the pictorial space to where a viewer of the painting would stand and

where, one would assume, his object is positioned. In the background there appears to be a

mirror that reflects the upper bodies of a couple, barely identifiable as the king and queen:

Philiph IV and Mariana. If it is in fact a mirror, which most scholars think, then the couple

seems to be placed outside the picture space in a position similar to that of the viewer,

although some scholars have speculated that their image is a reflection from the painting

Velázquez is shown working on.xi In the doorway at the back of the large room, carrying a

large square object, is in fact a relative of Velazquez’s, Don José Nieto Velazquez, the

Queen’s chamberlain and keeper of the royal tapestries.

According to, among others, Spanish philosopher and aestetician José Ortega y

Gasset, one of the major paradigm changes in European painting occurred in the art of

Velazquez. With Velazquez, the step was taken towards what Ortega calls ”distant vision”

painting. It is a way of painting that begins with the eye, with the very pupil of the artist.

According to Ortega, Velazquéz invents a new way of painting simply by holding his eye still,

and this Ortega describes as a Copernican revolution in the European art of painting. In earlier

art, paintings could include details of symbolic or simply representational value that would

invite the viewer to study the entire canvas, section by section. In “distant vision” painting, on

the other hand, the whole canvas is born of a single act of vision, why the viewer also is

expected to hold her eye still and to view the painting all at once from one single viewpoint—

the artist’s viewpoint. In consequence, the artist assigns the viewer with a certain way of

viewing the painting. Or, in Ortega’s words: “Velazquez decides to fix despotically the point

of view”.xii

In Foucault’s analysis, however, the key value of Velazquez’s painting lies in

the fact that it introduces uncertainties in visual representation at a time when paintings were

generally looked upon as windows to the world and representations of reality. Foucault

regards Las Meninas as an early critique of the Classical and representational paradigm.

Who are we?Las Meninas, Foucault states, catches the painter in the middle of his oscillation between

canvas and paint and thus also between the visible and the invisible. He is currently seen but

will soon move closer to the canvas, disappear behind it and become invisible to us. The

painter cannot simultaneously be seen by us and see that which he is representing on the

canvas.xiii He is, in Foucault’s words, “at the threshold of those two incompatible

visibilities.”xiv

The entire left of the painting is filled with the reversed side of the canvas. As a

consequence, what the painter sees, and has represented on the canvas, is invisible to us as

spectators. It is invisible to us since the painter is looking straight at us and we can neither

look back at ourselves nor glance at his canvas; “all we can see of that canvas is its texture,

the horizontal and the vertical bars of the stretcher, and the obliquely rising foot of the

easel.”xv

The Infanta figure is clearly important in Velazquez’s painting since her

attendants are looking at her. However, the painting also indicates that someone even more

important is sitting in front of the entire scene, because she herself and many other figures in

the painting are looking at this someone.xvi The viewers of Las Meninas, are thereby doing

two kinds of looking: They are looking at the scene, but also identifying with the people on

the scene and thereby looking out of the picture and back at themselves. In order to make

sense of the image, we are forced not only to view the scene, but to identify with the figures in

the image and to look back at our own position.

According to Stuart Hall in 1997, as viewers of Las Meninas we subject

ourselves to the painting’s meaning and become its subjects.xvii In this manner, Hall argues,

Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas, shows how images have a way of assigning their viewers

with subject positions: a certain point of view needed in order for the image to make sense.

The spectator completes the meaning of the painting, Hall says. Without the subject position,

the painting has no completed meaning. Meaning is, instead, constructed in the dialogue

between the painting and the spectator.

However, one may rightly ask if there actually is room for us—the viewers—

Velazquez painting. Are we able to “complete the meaning” of the painting? Because it is not,

in fact, completely true that we cannot see the painter’s models. The mirror at the back of the

room appears to vaguely reveal the painters object—a royal couple who seem to be looking

back at us. Yet again, if they are the painter’s objects, and if he is looking at them, then who

are we, the viewers? According to American theologian William Carl Placher, the presence of

the reflection of the painting’s “actual” objects finally pushes us, the viewers, out of the world

Velazquez creates.xviii Placher underlines that the subjective perspective of Velazquez’s Las

Meninas—the “distant vision” perspective—asks the viewer to take the artist’s perspective. It

asks the viewer to take a stand yet, in Placher’s view, it finally pushes the viewer out by

revealing the artist’s actual models in the mirror. “Velazquez uses all his artistry to bring us

into the painting with vivid realism, and then he reminds us, with figures in a mirror, that

there is literally no place for us in this world.”xix

In Placher’s view, the Gospel writers, in comparison, accomplish the complete

opposite effect. Like Velazquéz, they clearly take subjective viewpoints to enhance the

realism of their stories—just as Erich Auerbach has shown in Mimesis, his study of the

realism of the Biblical stories—but unlike Velazquéz the gospel writers finally ask their

readers to do the same. The gospel writers expect their readers to either enter the story and

surrender to its truth, or to say no thank you and close the book. Unlike Las Meninas, Placher

argues, there is room for the reader if she accepts the single truth presented in the Bible

stories. No one who submits to the truth presented in the gospels is pushed out, Placher holds.

Foucault, however, draws completely different conclusions from the fact that

we, the viewer’s, are somehow reflected in the painting while we at the same time are

definitely not reflected in the painting. Foucault’s conclusions oppose both Placher’s and

those of Ortega who generally describes Velazquez introduction of the distant vision painting

as despotic. In my view, it also goes further than Stuart Hall’s sociological conclusion as

regards discursive powers. Hall underlines that if the mirror in the image would have been a

real mirror, it would of course be reflecting us, the present viewers. But instead of mirroring

us it reflects, in our place, the King and Queen of Spain. In the image, we are therefore turned

into the very rulers of the country. “Somehow, the discourse of the painting positions us in the

place of the Sovereign!”, Hall remarks.xx Thus, the sovereign are we, the viewer’s as both

subjects of and in the painting. We, as masters of the painting’s discourse, are assigned our

place, a place from which we may make sense of what we see and thus master the knowledge

produced. We are in the hands of the discourse, but the discourse does not make sense without

us. Just as any ruler of this world, our power is simultaneously one that we can execute and

one that owns and controls us. In Hall’s regard, the reflection in the mirror underlines the

power of the subject position within the discourse. It points out the subject position’s power to

create meaning as well as the discourse’s demands on the individuals who fill it: “One reason

why this image is so striking—and so puzzling philosophically—is that it effectively exploits

the conceits of Baroque painting to dramatic effect: it places the king and queen (visible in the

mirror at the back of the painting), the painter (the actual painter Velázquez as he worked

away on his composition), and the viewer (the visitors to the Prado) in the same position.”xxi

The non-placeIn my view, however, Foucault’s account of the place for the subject created by Velazquez is

slightly more complex than Hall suggests. In my regard, the place for “man”, for the subject

—which Foucault, of course, will continue to discuss throughout The Order of Things—is

already here in the beginning of his historical exposé described as an ambiguous place. It is a

place that we are assigned, yet one that does not quite seem to exist. It is, in short, a kind of

non-place.

Why so? To Foucault, Velazquez’s painting creates a space out of the several

gazes depicted in the painting. All of these gazes are directed towards a point outside of the

canvas. The painting, he says, creates a point outside the painting where the painting’s gazes

meet the gazes of the spectators. Our gaze, the painter’s gaze and the models’ gazes in the

mirror all come together in a spot exterior to the painting. Foucault writes: “These three

‘observing’ functions come together in a point exterior to the picture: that is, an ideal point in

relation to what is represented, but a perfectly real one too, since it is also the starting-point

that makes the representation possible.”xxii

The place for the viewing subject, then, is described as a concrete place. Still,

however, this place, which is the very starting point for representation, for knowledge

production, is not there. It is indicated in the picture, but it remains invisible—a non-place

where the many gazes come together. “The entire picture is looking out at a scene for which it

is itself a scene”, Foucault later concludes.xxiii In this manner, “Las Meninas” creates, in

Foucault’s words, “a neutral space”.xxiv The entire painting, Foucault argues, makes out a

reciprocal visibility. It is a reciprocality that “embraces a whole complex network of

uncertainties, exchanges, and feints.”xxv. Since we, the spectators, are in the place of the

painter’s model, we are also placed in a void of neither model nor viewer, in a space of

endless exchange where “subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to

infinity.”xxvi The picture opens for a multiplicity of models and spectators.xxvii In consequence,

to Foucault, the painting offers an efficient identity play, and even a play with the idea of

identity as such. The plain fact that we can only see the reverse side of the canvas in

Velàzquez painting causes us as spectators to question our own identity: “Because we can

only see that reverse side, we do not know who we are or what we are doing. Seen or

seeing?”xxviii Stuart Hall suggested that the relation between the painting and its viewers could

complete the meaning of the painting. In my account of Foucault’s analysis, however, the

meaning of the painting remains incomplete. The painting, rather, points at the subject

position as an illusive non-place at the very centre of being meaningful and making sense.

This non-place of the subject in Foucault’s Velazquez analysis forestalls, as I

see it, his ongoing negotiation with the subject notion throughout The Order of Things. In

Kelly’s view, the multiple invisibilities in Velazquez’s painting help Foucault to make his

point on the entire production of knowledge and its circling within representation. The

multiple invisibilities in the painting serves to show that no one is in charge of the process of

representation, of knowledge production. The entire process is in the hands of what is finally

invisible; the boundaries for thought and expression in the Classical age itself.xxix The

presentation of Western thought that follows render visible, similarly, the boundaries and

openings for thought in each time. Foucault depicts how the journey of the human sciences

leads Western thought from God to the Subject, yet anticipates a third step, an opening that

Gilles Deleuze has described: “But if we can imagine a third draw, the forces of man will

enter into a relation with other forces again in such a way as to make up something else that

will no longer be either God or man: we could say that the death of man links up with the

death of God, to create new compounds.”xxx

I believe this third draw, the move beyond man, is present already in the book’s

initial art analysis where it appears as a non-place of representation, a place in which neither

God nor Subject resides.

The invisible and the namesStill, however, though vaguely, the models are represented in the mirror in the back of the

room, and the painter, who is fully visible in the painting, could very well be Velazquez

himself. Is not Placher, to some extent right in saying that we are somehow pushed out of the

internal play of the painting? How much of an identity play is really taking place in this

painting? As mentioned initially, each and every person who is represented in this painting

may be named and pointed out. Is not the talk of the scattered subject and the non-place an

exaggeration in relation to Las Meninas?

Foucault, who has not used the names of the figures represented in the painting,

takes up the question himself in the second half of his analysis: “But perhaps it is time”,

Foucault rhetorically suggests, to use the proper names of those represented in the painting.xxxi

Perhaps it is time, he proposes, to use the actual names of those depicted instead of the

endless abstract repetitions of “spectator”, “painter” and “models”. Because, we do in fact

know who they were, we know who Velàzquez was painting; King Philip IV and his wife

Mariana.xxxii

Foucault, however, rejects his own suggestion saying; no, we should not use the

“proper” names even if we happen to know them because “it is in vain that we say what we

see; what we see never resides in what we say.”xxxiii It is not that language is insufficient, nor

that we must strive for more exact words to capture what we see, Foucault argues, but that the

very aspiration to say what we see is futile. Thus, Foucault introduces the thought that we

shall encounter later in Foucault’s essay on Magritte and as we shall come across, in a slightly

different version, in his “What is an author?”. It is the idea which later will be picked up by

Gilles Deleuze as a key element in Foucault’s thinking: The asymmetrical relation between

what we say and what we see, the asymmetry between words and things, statements and

visabilities.xxxiv To Foucault, the asymmetrical relation between words and things holds a

transformative force. We should, in fact, nurse the asymmetry rather than try to harmonize the

relation; we ought to treat the asymmetry between what we see and what we say as a starting-

point and an opening for thought rather than as an obstacle.

Because, if we restrain our urge to name, define and label what we see with

words, as if words and things were equivalents, we may provide a space for that which will

never be captured when a name too soon is given to a thing—also as regards the figures in

Las Meninas. Foucault explains: “if one wishes to keep the relation of language to vision

open, if one wishes to treat their incompatibility as a starting-point for speech instead of as an

obstacle to be avoided, so as to stay as close as possible to both, then one must erase those

proper names and preserve the infinity of the task. It is perhaps through the medium of this

grey, anonymous language, always over-meticulous and repetitive because too broad, that the

painting may, little by little, release its illuminations.”xxxv

Thus, in Foucault’s view Las Meninas depicts Classical representation and its

boundaries, but also its inherent leeway, its elasticity or in Foucault’s words: “the space it

opens up to us”. To Foucault, there is a space in the midst of these reciprocal gazes. It is a

void created by, and presupposed in, the painting yet placed exterior to it. Foucault describes

it as “an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation – of the

person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance. This very subject –

which is the same – has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation that

was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.”xxxvi

At the end of his opening chapter in The Order of Things, Foucault offers a

visionary notion of a liberated representation. It is an account of representation where the

reciprocal structure of representation—with its inherent non-place offering an endless

exchange of identity—has taken the place of dualist representation of language versus vision,

or words versus things. In the fundamental relation between the objects, the words and

techniques we use to describe and classify them—between what we see, how we see it, and

how we represent it to others—he locates a non-place where the relation as such is not set.

The number of possible perspectives is infinite and the possible names and words to classify

people and things are endless. In-between our representations, our objects and the material we

use to represent them, there is a space of multiplicity.

In this manner, the end of the analysis relates to the beginning where Foucault

introduced the artist as caught in suspension between paint and canvas, between seeing and

being seen. The painter, in other words, is situated in the non-place of representation. It is a

place where neither the object nor the subject are fixed. After the introductory chapter on “Las

Meninas”, The Order of Things, as well known, continues to depict not only the birth of

“man”, but also the elasticity and asymmetry between words and things through the history of

Western knowledge.

Luca Giordano’s often repeated description of Las Meninas as “the theology of

painting” most probably regards to the way in which the painting simultaneously shows the

art of painting at its height and, through its object, discusses the fundamental circumstances in

which the art of painting is set. Gary Shapiro, however, consciously stretches Giordano’s

description and suggests that just like Classical theology, Las Meninas “works within a space

of representation in which both the last word and the originating word are reserved for a

speaker who is necessarily outside that space.” There is an absence at the heart of the painting

and this makes it comparable to Classical theology, Shapiro argues. Theology, he continues,

“may be closer than any other Classical discourse to acknowledging its own limits.”xxxvii

But what about contemporary theology? In what sense might theology after the

death of God and man alike acknowledge its limits and, more importantly, find a space in

which to act?

The non-place of contemporary theologyIn the following, I will relate Foucault’s discussion on Las Meninas to the place of

contemporary theology. I will discuss the notion of the invisible and the non-place beyond

God and man that it suggests, and I will explore the non-place as a space for words and things

in an asymmetrical relation that opens for humility and immanent mysteries.

Jeremy Carrette’s examination Foucault and Religion arranges Foucault’s work

out of its search for “religion” or “spirituality” in relation to the idea of “the said and the

unsaid” that recurs in Foucault’s work.xxxviii Following Carrette’s track of thought, I want to

suggest that the said and the unsaid—or speech versus silence—in Foucault, has a

“materialist” parallel in Foucault’s work and that is the binary couple of “the visible and the

invisible”.xxxix Whereas the couple of the said versus the unsaid, as Carrette describes, is

present in Foucault’s analyses of literature, the visible and the invisible is—for obvious

reasons—more present in his analyses of art.

Let me briefly introduce Carrette’s view of the said and the unsaid in order to

paint a background in relation to which my account of the visible and the invisible is more

easily understood. Carrette notes that Foucault often uses the notions of the said and the

unsaid, or speech versus silence, to describe the mechanisms of discursive exclusion. The

discourse is always, in Foucault’s view, regulated by unspoken rules about what we say and

what we keep silent: Some things may be said and some may not—some statements are

spoken out loud while some are silenced (as is evident e.g. in his examinations of madness

and the prison.)

There is also, however, another, and almost opposite, aspect of the silence, or

the unsaid, in Foucault’s work, Carrette argues.xl At times, silence is seen as an escape from

the domination of the discourse. For example, in Foucault’s analysis of the Christian

confession, silence is a way to escape oppression. Or, as articulated by Carrette: “To confess

is to be controlled and to be silent is to remain free”.xli This liberating aspect of silence is also

present, and even more enhanced, in Foucault’s earlier work. Carrette notes that in Foucault’s

work on the avant-garde and surrealism—a period that coincides with his work on Velazquez

—there is a “more positive and enigmatic silence”.xlii Silence is here used as a way to “subvert

dominant regimes” and “cause enigmas”, Carrette states.

In these texts, silence ruptures dominant categories of reason, it questions

language’s very capability to express, and to represent, and thus it evokes a kind of esoteric

arena.xliii Silence functions as a concept that opens for negotiations of the discourse, it opens

an enigmatic yet creative space in the midst of the discourse. Just like Foucault’s notion of

power, silence and speech operate in numerous force relations, holding no essential quality

and constantly changing and shifting positions, Carrette argues.xliv It is, in short, an immanent

place for change, for the unexpected.

I believe that an examination could show that the visible and the invisible are

used in a similar fashion in Foucault’s work at large, but I will leave it at that since I am not

performing such an examination here. What I will argue, however, is that in Foucault’s

analysis of Velazquez, the invisible is not, as we have seen, used to describe what is excluded

from our vision by discursive regulations of what could be portrayed and what could not.

Rather, it is used to describe a space for the unseen as a space for identity play, for change of

perspective and for an enigmatic unknown in the very process of representation. It is an

erratic space that Foucault himself, as above, at times describes as a void. Nonetheless, this

“void”, this erratic space, should not be understood as a transcendent or mystical notion, but

as a plain reality in the midst of the construction of representation.xlv The non-place in

Foucault’s analysis of Velazquez is concretely situated in close proximity to the canvas, and

this makes the invisible differ from the silence discussed by Carrette. The invisible non-place

in Foucault’s reasoning on Las Meninas is not only an abstract starting point knowledge

production but is also a material space—a concrete place that we could point out when

standing in front of the painting. To Foucault, the painter himself is, as mentioned, standing at

the edge of the visible, in between the visible and the invisible; of being seen and seeing. At

the same time, the invisible place of the model is created by the many gazes that are looking

at it. That concrete spot, so central to the entire composition, is an invisible place created by

being seen.

Subsequently, the non-place of the invisible in Foucault’s reasoning has

implications for knowledge production in a sense that relates to both the material objects and

to the abstract words we use to describe them.xlvi The fact that the only spot in Velazquez’s

masterpiece where signification and meaning could be created—where the world of the

painting finally could become meaningful and coherent—is invisible indicates, to Foucault, at

once the force of concrete things and the void on which our idea of meaning and

significations is built. Things are hidden from us, which paradoxically but also pragmatically

is why we see the invisible in our concrete world: We see what we do not see but that other

gazes indicate must nevertheless be there. When I look out my window, I see the windows on

the other houses indicating views and perspectives on the world that are invisible to me. There

are, in a very plain sense, always things going on of which I know nothing—things that are

mysteries to me.

In a less concrete sense, however, we also encounter invisible subject positions

in the same manner. Not only, that our encounters with other people’s life stories at times let

us glimpse perspectives from which the world would look different than it does from where

we ourselves are standing. Moreover, Foucault’s analysis of Velazquez points to the fact that

our (still post-classical) habitual way of thinking, of understanding the world, tells us that

there are vantage points and perspectives that actually could render the world consistent. We

often (still in our time as well as in 1966) live as if there is a position from which all is visible.

According to Foucault through Velazquez, however, the ideal vantage point does not finally

exist, at least not in the way we usually assume. While it does exist as an idea and chimera

that affect our ways of acting and thinking, it does not exist detached from the concreteness of

this world. The spaces from which we finally could make sense of the world are part of this

world, concrete spaces in the midst of things—places where some things are visible while

other things are invisible. They are places inhabited by different individuals in different times.

To that extent, neither an outer eternal truth nor the human mind is what finally possesses the

power of truth making, but an assorted blend of tangible things and minds situated in relation

to them.

To Shapiro as well as to Catherine Soussloff, a key aspect of Foucault’s essay

on Velazquez is that it relates to the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau Ponty. In Shapiro’s

view, the essay is directed precisely against the theme of the visible versus the invisible as it

is discussed by Merleau Ponty. In Merleau Ponty’s analysis of Cézanne, the artist as such

plays an important part, Shapiro notes. The play with visibility and invisibility in Cézanne is

part of a process of doubt where identity is questioned in an attempt to establish and reveal the

artist’s identity. To Merleau Ponty, Shapiro argues, Cézanne attempts to depict how “the

subject is both origin and end, subject and object of meaning, revealing both the triumph of

revelation and the necessary limitations that call for further exploration.”xlvii To Foucault Las

Meninas, in comparison, points out the fact that the artist is only one element among many in

the representational discourse. His essay on Velazquez begins by describing the artist in a

pause—the painter standing back from the canvas. The artist is inactive, and to Shapiro, this

indicates an implicit critique to what Foucault regards as Merleau Ponty’s elevation of the

artistic subject.xlviii

Interestingly, however, the fact that neither a transcendently nor an immanently

situated force possesses the power of making the world meaningful does not necessarily make

Foucault’s analysis into a theological dead end. In fact, I find that it does quite the opposite.

Relating the non-place for the viewing subject in Las Meninas to the theological sphere, I

believe it could be said that something similar has happened to the position for the theologian

in contemporary Western Christian theology. God, the theological object, is in many ways an

invisibility whose presence is merely indicated by the gazes looking in its direction: a non-

place in relation to which we must place ourselves without quite knowing where to look or

what to see. And without, in consequence, quite knowing who we are in this process, since the

space we inhabit is far too erratic to provide us with a proper grounds for identity. Thus, I

believe the erratic space of invisible visibility in Foucault on Velazquez could hold

theological potential. It may, simply, describe our new theological object, and our erratic

space as “viewers”, theologians or believers, in the midst of matter.

The concrete non-place in Foucault’s account of Velazquez may rob the world

of a higher truth, but it also points out the infinity of possible perspectives of what we see, on

the visible, as well as the presence of innumerable yet unseen (in)visibilities. And these

aspects, I believe, even approaches what could perhaps be described as a new materialist

account of radical theology. The very canvas, the cloth and paint, is presented as the concrete

space for representation. It is limited, and through Foucault and Velazquez these limitations

are revealed and displayed, but so are the possibilities inherent to its limitations. If the very

place for representation—the human space for depicting what is real—has confessed its lack

of depth and its lack of relation to an outer truth, it suddenly makes room for multiple

perspectives, competing truths and innumerable invisibilities. The authority of the viewing

subject is shattered. Reality is neither there merely to be revealed and commented, nor is it

simply in the hands of man. Rather, in the midst of the process of representation, there is a

non-place, a void, an empty place where things are possible. The new space for the viewing

subject in Las Meninas indicates a creative reality that is neither the subject nor anything like

a transcendent divinity, but a kind of flexibility in the tangible world of words and things

itself. It is a non-place created by the asymmetrical relation between words and things, and

out of this asymmetry comes a new kind of humility—a humbleness deriving from the fact

that neither the word of man nor the word of God can fully capture the tangible world.

And here we arrive again at the notion of the said versus the unsaid, or silence in

relation to speech as discussed by Carrette. Or, rather, the enigmatic silence that Foucault

encounters in the avant-garde and the surrealism. Like the silence of the avant-garde writers,

the invisible of the art of Velazquez is perplexing, but may as such also question the very

basics of knowledge making in a world of words and things. To Carrette, the silence was used

by the avant-garde authors to “subvert dominant regimes” just as much as to “cause

enigmas”.xlix A radical theology that would take seriously the fact that meaning and

knowledge are created in the midst of actual things, while also realizing the emptiness of ideal

vantage points could possibly do the same. It could be theological enough to keep pointing

out the enigmas and mysteries of the tangible world, yet political enough to critique any

dominant regime claiming access to a higher truth.

i Rather than subordinating the being of language to a new object that is transcendental or absolute, like the subject, writers like Stéphane Mallarmé, for instance, manage to free language from any point of view, from the transcendental subject, and thus present language in its own being: “Mallarmé was constantly effacing himself from his own language, to the point of not wishing to figure in it except as an executant in a pure ceremony of the Book in which the discourse would compose itself” Mallarmé, as it happens, was one of Manet’s closest friends. Foucault, Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Vintage books, 1994) p 306.ii Carrette, Jeremy, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (Routledge, 2000) p 60-61. See also Rudi Visker’s study of Foucault’s use of quotation marks.iii Tanke, Joseph J, Foucault’s philosophy of art: A Genealogy of Modernity, (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009) p 61.iv Tanke, Foucault’s philosophy of art, p 92.v Tanke, Foucault’s philosophy of art, p 92.vi Shapiro, Gary, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003).vii Kelly, Michael, “Foucault on Critical Agency in Painting and the Aesthetics of Existence” in A Companion to Foucault, ed. Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary and Jana Sawicki (Blackwell publishing, 2013) p 248.viii Jeremy R Carrette edited a groundbreaking anthology in 1999—titled Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault—that brought together Foucault’s articles of spiritual relevance. Carrette’s own analysis of Foucault’s work in relation to religion or spirituality introduced the notions of spiritual corporeality and political spirituality where the former denotes the spiritual discussions of Foucault’s early work, and the latter captures the religious negotiations of his later work. Then came Carrette’s and James Bernauer’s Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience. The book was the first of its kind in that it brought together essays that used Foucault’s thought theologically. The essays examined, for instance, power and sexuality in the church in late antiquity, the relationship between theology and politics from a Foucauldian perspective, new challenges to the nature of theological knowledge in terms of Foucault’s critical project as well as theology in relation to Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality. David Galston’s Archives and the Event of God: The Impact of Michel Foucault on Philosophical Theology (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011) depicted, in turn, the effects that Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish have had on the study of theology and religion. Despite a growing interest in Foucault’s thinking on the part of theology, however, the connection is still often questioned. In fact, the story behind the title of Jonathan Tran’s Foucault and Theology (2011) is illustrative of the relationship between the large part of theology and Foucauldian thought. According to Tran, the book’s working title was “Power, Resistance and Christianity”. A title that, in my view, captures the core of Tran’s book very well. (The book discusses Foucault as a resource for Christianity and the church in relation to capitalism as analysed by for instance Antoni Negri and Michael Hardt and locates Christian opportunities for resistance.) However, in the introduction, Tran describes how a friend of his reminded him that the word “resistance” may be misunderstood. It could, the friend said, bring to mind an account of the world where there is a position for resistance “superior to God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” As a Christian, Tran did not want to support such interpretations why he asserts, instead: “Foucault thinks the world belongs to power. Christians think the world belongs to God.” Thus, while Tran definitely takes Foucault seriously and draws crucial implications for Christian life and thought from his philosophy, he makes sure not to fall into Foucault’s “atheistic immanence”. Tran explicitly underlines that “if the Church can put Foucault’s politics to use while remaining cautious of its atheistic immanence she will discover in Foucault a friend in her struggle against certain common enemies (...)” Bernauer’s remarkable Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (Humanity Books, 1990) is different in this regard. The book is an in-depth study of Foucault’s published as well as unpublished work, and runs the thesis—at odds with readings of Foucault at the time—that Foucault offers much more than an account of a closed-in world of prisons and discursive practices. Through Bernauer’s reading, Foucault strives for an ethics for thought, bordering on a mystical ethics, that advocates a constant transgression of knowledge as well as of the self. However, in my view, Bernauer tends to exaggerate the theological aspects of Foucault’s thought by, for example, repeating the claim that Foucault’s philosophy makes out a contemporary form of negative theology, both in the book mentioned and elsewhere. I have expressed this critique—and discussed the consequences of Bernauer’s claim—further in the article “Magritte, Foucault and negative theology beyond representation“. I find Arthur Bradley more balanced when he indirectly discusses the spiritual aspect of Foucault by examining Foucault’s “thought

from the outside” in relation to negative theology. Bradley’s Negative Theology in Modern French Philosophy (Routledge, 2004) examines the relationship between, among others, Derrida, Foucault and negative theology. Bradley does not use this outset to introduce a theological account of Foucault, nor of Derrida, but discusses and reflects insightfully on the theological parallels and implications of their “thought from outside”. Stephen Carr’s article, “Foucault amongst the Theologians” engages with some of the ways in which Foucault has been handled theologically. Like the work of Arthur Bradley, Carr’s outset parallels that of the present study in that he notes the importance of spirituality in Foucault’s work without using the spiritual aspects for apologetic purposes. For instance, Carr critiques the Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason for claiming that Foucault’s thinking is nihilistic, and underlines instead Foucault’s thought as a vital source for theological self-critique. Naturally, the article format limits Carr’s constructive contribution. Sophie Fuggle has explored such a theological perspective on Foucault more extensively. In Foucault/Paul she follows the notion of power through the writings of Foucault and Paul. She discusses differences and similarities, and explicitly tracks the notion of power “outside of the existing categories of religious and secular”.

ix Foucault, The Order of Things, p 17.x Macey, David, The Lives of Michel Foucault (Vintage Books, 1993) p 164.xi According to Matthew Ancell in “The Theology of Painting: Picturing Philosophy in Velazquez’s Las Meninas”, the mirror at the back of Las Meninas has been the subject of many art historical discussions. Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen, for instance, have argued that with the vantage point of the painting being the open door at the back, the mirror cannot, in fact, reflect the king and queen but only the canvas. In consequence, the paradox on which Foucault builds his argument—the idea that the viewer’s identity is questioned by the reflection in the mirror—is in fact a misapprehension on Foucault’s part. Moreover, while it appears likely that the object in the back is a mirror, due to the way that it reflects light in a way that the paintings hanging next to it are not, it does not seem to work as an actual mirror would. Why, asks Ancell, does it not reflect any other objects in the room apart from the king and queen? Leo Steinberg has opposed to Snyder’s and Leon’s conclusion and argued that in accordance with the perspective, the mirror could in fact reflect both the canvas and the painter’s models. If Steinberg is right, Foucault’s argument would still stand, yet why is the mirror not true to the internal reality of the painting? American art historian Svetlana Alpers offers an outlook that could explain some of the painting’s inconsistencies discussed thus far. Alper argues that Velazquez’s very ambition in Las Meninas is to embrace two different and even conflicting modes of representation. The two modes he aims to combine into one single painting is, first, the “distant vision” perspective and, secondly, what Alpers describes as the “northern or descriptive mode” of painting. In this manner, Velazquez, according to Alpers, plays with the conventions of perspectives. This play, Ancell argues, suits his Spanish context in a time of scepticism just fine (Don Quijote was written fifty years earlier and its ideas were well spread in Spanish intellectual circles). Through the conflicting modes in his painting, Velazquez manages to paint the conflict of his time: On the one hand, the individual’s desire to apprehend the world, to make the world coherent, and to find a stable place for the subject in relation to the world. On the other hand; the growing insight that there is no fixed point of reference, that the self is in fact “enveloped in a world that shifts kaleidoscopically with any change in position.” In consequence, whatever aspect of Las Meninas one starts to discuss, Ancell concludes, the discussion ends up dealing with ambiguity. The discussions cover the ambiguities of Las Meninas itself, but also of painting as such, of perspective and point of view, of seeing, being seen and being invisible, of knowing and not knowing. It is, thus, a painting that inevitably seems to be about ambiguity. To that extent, Ancell holds, Foucault’s analysis touches upon crucial elements regardless of whether he is actually right in claiming that the mirror offers a crucial paradox of perspectives or not. The painting inevitably directs the viewer to reconsider her own position before the painting and as part of the painting. Ancell, Matthew, “The Theology of Painting: Picturing Philosophy in Velazquez’s Las Meninas”, pp 159-163.

xii Richard Viladesau makes use of Ortega’s account of Velazquéz in Theology and The Arts and notes, consequentially, how Velazquéz technique makes the pupil of the artist’s eye the centre of the visual cosmos. ”The whole painting can be seen in its totality all at once, because a point of view is introduced that is subjective: individual and relative to the viewer.” Viladesau, Theology and The Arts: Encountering God Through Music, Art and Rhetoric, (Paulist press, 2000) p 90.xiii Foucault, The Order of Things, p 3.xiv Foucault, The Order of Things, p 4.xv Foucault, The Order of Things, p 4.

xvi Hall, Stuart, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, (Sage Publications, 1997) p 60. xvii Hall, Representation, p 60. In 1997, Jamaican-British sociologist and cultural theoretician Stuart Hall published Representation; a book that was to become a minor classic within media and culture academics. Hall’s argumentation includes a lucid discussion of Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas, which in Hall’s view, illustrates his point on subject positions. Hall, Representation, p 56.xviii

In Narratives of a Vulnerable God, American theologian William Carl Placher—related to the narrative theology or postliberal theology movement—discusses the consequences of Velazquez singular point of view further. Placher, Carl William, Narratives of a Vulnerable God: Christ, Theology, and Scripture, (Westminster John Knox Press, 1994) p 100.xix Placher, Narratives of a Vulnerable God, p 100-101.xx This internal play of the painting can also be understood as a metacommentary on classical painting, as Tanke remarks: “One reason why this image is so striking—and so puzzling philosophically—is that it effectively exploits the conceits of Baroque painting to dramatic effect: it places the king and queen (visible in the mirror at the back of the painting), the painter (the actual painter Velázquez as he worked away on his composition), and the viewer (the visitors to the Prado) in the same position.” (Tanke, Joseph J., “On the Powers of the False: Foucault’s Engagements with the Arts” in A Companion to Foucault, ed. Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary and Jana Sawicki (Blackwell publishing, 2013) p 124. xxi Hall, Representation, p 124.xxii Foucault, The Order of Things, p 15.xxiii Foucault, The Order of Things, p 14.xxiv Foucault, The Order of Things, p 4.xxv Foucault, The Order of Things, p 4.xxvi Foucault, The Order of Things, p 5.xxvii “The picture accepts as many models as there are spectators.” Foucault, The Order of Things, p 4. xxviii Foucault, The Order of Things, p 5.xxix In Kelly’s regard, however, this does not mean that there is no room for agency in this part of Foucault’s thought: “the painter (e.g., Velásquez) is constituted by external conditions invisible to him, so he cannot be considered an autonomous agent (i.e., one who acts independently of external conditions). “Since the painter creates this space, he is an agent who contributes to the arrival of “man”, though he is an agent There are possibilities to act, but “only in a collective and heterononomous rather than an individual and autonomous sense”. (p 249.) “Since the act of rendering visible normative conditions that would otherwise be invisible is a key capacity of critical agency, painting is crucial for Foucault’s emerging conception of critical agency, just as it was in his earlier accounts of madness and the clinic.” Kelly, “Foucault on Critical Agency in Painting and the Aesthetics of Existence”, p 248.xxx Deleuze, Foucault, [1986], trans. Seán Hand (Continuum, 1999), pp 88–89; French edition, Foucault (Les éditions de minuit, 1986), pp 94-95.xxxi Foucault, The Order of Things, p 9. According to Shapiro, Foucault’s text also plays with its own voice at this point. Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, p 257.xxxii Foucault, The Order of Things, p 9.xxxiii Foucault, The Order of Things, p 9.xxxiv Catherine Soussloff underlines Foucault’s influence of Merleau-Ponty when it comes to the relation between painting and the verbal and the visual, and especially Merleau-Ponty’s essay ”Indirect language and the voices of silence” from 1952. Soussloff, Catherine M., ”Michel Foucault and the Point of Painting”, Art History (Vol. 32 No. 4, Sept 2009 pp 734-754), Blackwell Publishing, p 737.xxxv Foucault, The Order of Things, p 9f.xxxvi Foucault, The Order of Things, p 16.xxxvii Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, p 261.xxxviii For a discussion on Foucault’s use of these terms, see Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 5-6.xxxix Carrette underlines that the notions are not finally opposites but even approach interchangeability. Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 30.xl It is an aspect that, I would argue, is captured in Foucault’s notion of the murmur; the barely articulate that may slowly erode the basis of the current regime.

xli Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 34.xlii Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 34.xliii Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 35.xliv Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 35.xlv In his analysis of Foucault’s relationship to the avant-garde and surrealism, Carrette similarly underlines that “the void” in Foucault always remains within the play of meaning and significance rather than to enter a consideration of spirituality or occultism. “it never shades off into a serious consideration of the occult or the ‘spiritual’.” Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 59.xlvi While it is true that Foucault does not introduce a notion of a void or a non-space in theological or spiritual terms, it is neither completely true to say that he excludes the spiritual aspects of this notion. The theme of religion in Foucault’s writing is intricate why truly deserves the study of its own that it got in Carrette’s Foucault and Religion. Carrette states that the term “spirituality”, however, often is used in Foucault’s work as a way to avoid the word “religion”, and as a way to “strategically disrupt traditional religious meaning”. (p 6) Carrette also notes how Foucault takes a certain interest in writers and artists that treat spiritual themes in a way that is both critical of any established or institutionalized for of religion yet, at the same time, open to the aspects of spiritual thought and practice that may serve to liberate the body and the corporeal. (p 52) In Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud, for instance, Foucault encounters this combination of theology critique and a search for a reconsideration of the body in spiritual terms. Surrealism and the avant-garde, Carrette argues, provided Foucault with a platform to reorder religious discourse and to create religious subversions. (p 61) The two-fold relation to religion and spirituality relates to his discussions of speech versus silence.xlvii Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, p 237xlviii Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, p 235. Soussloff, Catherine M., ”Michel Foucault and the Point of Painting”, Art History, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 32 No. 4, Sept 2009, pp 734-754, Blackwell Publishing, p 737.xlix Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 34