Foucault, Art, and Radical Theology: The Mystery of Things (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) [1 ed.] 9781138334717, 9780429445170, 1138334715

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Foucault, Art, and Radical Theology gives us not only a compelling interpretation of Foucault, but also a vital conception of a materialist and non-representational theology. Petra Carlsson Redell engages Foucault’s reflections on painting, from Velasquez and Manet to Magritte, Rebeyrolle, and Fromanger, to grasp the complex interaction of bodies and things on a surface of infinite appearances. However, unlike the a/theology of Mark C. Taylor, Carlsson Redell emphasizes the political significance of Foucault’s aesthetics, and how it contributes to a materialist theology that refuses transcendence while still infusing transformative political activism. This is a wonderful book that imagines a new future for theology! —Clayton Crockett, University of Central Arkansas. Author of  Radical Political Theology In this riotously refreshing theopolitics of material performativity, art, ritual and protest generate an entrancing mystery. With her beautiful writing and her companionable theorizing, Petra Carlsson Redell paints a surface—a brilliantly luminous surface—of theology’s radical and ironic potential for political action. —Catherine Keller, George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology, The Theological School, Drew University. Author of Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement In Foucault, Art, and Radical Theology Petra Carlsson Redell deftly articulates Foucault’s renewal of painting’s engagement with surfaces, suggesting that it is time to rethink theology in material terms. “Mysteries” can now be understood as carnal and performative liturgies, not simply as secrets of transcendent realities. Carlsson Redell argues forcefully that contemporary interruptions of conventional religion—like the Russian group Pussy Riot— are not anti-religious but embody new forms of sacramentality. —Gary Shapiro, University of Richmond. Author of Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying Petra Carlsson Redell’s study provokes us to realize—some of us for the first time—how often Michel Foucault employed fine-art painting as a vehicle for creative philosophizing. He reflected with profound attention to specific painters’ unique sensibilities as manifested in the purposive

quests and obsessions of their works: Velázquez, Manet, Magritte, Rebeyrolle, Fromanger. For him, paintings provide the “erratic space” in which the creative play between words and things, images and ideas, turns self-ironizing and maximally paradoxical. The author traces through the later decades of Foucault’s career, documenting how the philosopher took stock of paintings as implicit philosophies, harbingers of epochal modes of vision in the making. She then demonstrates how this “live” philosophizing via artistic sensibility can potentially inspire new modes of theological reflection that are wholly immanent within worldly life and duly sensitive to the mysteries—visible and invisible, named and unnamable—that abound in our midst. As she puts it in her own words: “Rather than pursuing a theology against the grain of the surrealist play with nonsense and meaninglessness, I have endeavored to infuse theology with the challenges of avant-garde and surrealist thought.” —Lissa McCullough, Adjunct professor of Philosophy, California State University. Author of The Call to Radical Theology Petra Carlsson Redell’s Foucault, Art, and Radical Theology offers an enlightening review of Michel Foucault’s aesthetic writings in order to draw out the significance of his thought on the whole for radical theological reflection. As each chapter draws richly from the works of various artists, and Foucault’s timely responses to them, we see a narrative unfold on the mystery of surface appearances that actually speaks to the profound depths of human experience. No theologically-minded individual can read this work and walk away unchanged. —Colby Dickinson, Loyola University Chicago

Foucault, Art, and Radical Theology

Michel Foucault wrote prolifically on many topics including, art, religion, and politics. He also eloquently articulated how power structures are formed and how they also might assist resistance and emancipation. This book uses the hermeneutical lens of Foucault’s writings on art to examine the performative, material, and political aspects of contemporary theology. The borderland between philosophy, theology, and art is explored through Foucault’s analyses of artists such as Diego Velázquez, Édouard Manet, René Magritte, Paul Rebeyrolle, and Gerard Fromanger. Here special focus is placed on performativity and materiality—or what the book terms the mystery of things. At successive junctures, the book discovers a postrepresentational critique of transcendence, an enigmatic material sacramentality, playful theopolitical accounts of the transformative force of stupidity and nonsense, and political imagery in motion enabling theological interpretations of contemporary collectives such as Pussy Riot and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. In conversation with contemporary thinkers including Catherine Keller, Louise-Marie Chauvet, John Caputo, Daniel Barber, Mark C. Taylor, Jeffrey W. Robbins, and Mattias Martinson, the book outlines this source of inspiration for contemporary radical theology. This is a book with a fresh and original take on Foucault, art, and theology. As such, it will have great appeal to scholars and academics in theology, religion, and the arts; the philosophy of religion; political philosophy; and aesthetics. Petra Carlsson Redell is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Stockholm School of Theology, Sweden. She has published multiple times on religion, philosophy, and art in journals, such as Studia Theologica and The Oxford Journal of Literature & Theology, and in books, including Mysticism as Revolt (The Davies Group, Publishers, 2014).

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic, and research readers. This open-ended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. Pacifism and Pentecostals in South Africa A new hermeneutic for nonviolence Marius Nel Faith and Freedom Contexts, Choices, and Crises in Religious Commitments Donald A. Crosby Eschatology as Imagining the End Faith between Hope and Despair Edited by Sigurd Bergmann Foucault, Art, and Radical Theology The Mystery of Things Petra Carlsson Redell For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ religion/series/RCRITREL

Foucault, Art, and Radical Theology The Mystery of Things Petra Carlsson Redell

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Petra Carlsson Redell The right of Petra Carlsson Redell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Redell, Petra Carlsson, author. Title: Foucault, art, and radical theology : the mystery of things / Petra Carlsson Redell. Description: New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge new critical thinking in religion, theology, and biblical studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018020298 | ISBN 9781138334717 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780429445170 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. | Art—Philosophy. | Philosophical theology. | Postmodernism—Religious aspects. Classification: LCC B2430.F724 R434 2018 | DDC 194—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020298 ISBN: 978-1-138-33471-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44517-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Nora and Mira

Contents

Preface

xi

Introduction

1

Shifting relations between art and faith  4 Foucault, theology, and spirituality  6 Foucault on art and the ruin of representation  9 Scope and terminology  12 Overview of the argument  14 1 The surface of appearances: a mystery of things

20

Language to infinity  21 The surface and the death of man  23 Thingness 26 Materiality and spirituality  30 2 Velázquez: the place of theology

36

Las Meninas 37 Incompatible visibilities  41 The invisible and the names  43 The place of theology  46 3 Manet: material sacramentality Bataille on Manet  54 Foucault on Manet  57 Space 58 Light 59 Place 60 Material theology  62 Radical liturgical theology  65

53

x  Contents 4 Magritte: the betrayal of images

71

Postrepresentational inspiration  72 Magritte to Foucault  73 Foucault: resemblance versus similitude  74 Thinking in series  75 From art to thought  78 The freedom of thought to be thought  82 The mystery of things and the apophatic  85 5 Rebeyrolle: theory as activism

92

Political reawakening  92 The BPP and the power of prison  94 From archaeology to genealogy  98 From power to the force of flight  99 Theological indulgence  104 6 Fromanger: imagery in motion

109

Narrative Figuration movement  110 Representation revisited  111 Series of photos and paint  113 From subjectivity to imagery  117 Pussy Riot: entangled theology  119

Conclusion: marvels and actions

124

Surface thingness as mystery  124 The additive gesture  128 Theology, art, and the mystery of things  131 Pussy Riot and the postsecular  133 Art and theopolitical activism  136 Bibliography139 Index145

Preface

In February 2012, five members of the Russian feminist art collective Pussy Riot approached the high altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, took off their winter coats, pulled on colorful balaclava caps, then kneeled and crossed themselves before commencing a punk-style dance with jumps, kicks, and punches in the air. The entire performance, which lasted approximately 30 seconds, was filmed by other members of the network. The film clips were edited together with shots from a vocal performance in a nearby church to form what was called “a punk prayer” bearing the title “Mother of God, Put Putin Away,” and a video soon spread worldwide through YouTube. The performance aimed to critique the close alliance between the Putin regime and the Russian Orthodox Church, as later explained by members of the group. On political, philosophical, and theological grounds Pussy Riot wanted to criticize a church that, in its members’ regard, supports an oppressive power. The art collective sought to conjure an image of alternate trajectory within Russian Orthodox faith in the cathedral. They wanted to create a visual image of the counterculture that, in their view, is a vital aspect of Russian Orthodoxy and its ancient traditions. In their activist artistry, Pussy Riot regarded themselves as standing in a Russian artistic tradition stemming from artist Kazimir Malevitch and the OBERIU, a Russian artistic protest group of the 1920s. At the same time, however, they regarded their prayer as an actual prayer. And yet traditional believers were hurt by their action. How are we to understand this merging of the performative, the theological, and the political? What does playful activist art and theology with a political edge have in common? Moreover, what becomes of Christian liturgy, theology, and faith if an offensive and possibly even ironic performance is regarded as a serious Christian prayer? If liturgy is a performance, what about God? What becomes of God if Christian truth lies on the surface—in its performances or even in the very material of representation? Near the end of the journey traced out in this book, in the last section of Chapter 6, we shall revisit this Pussy Riot demonstration, and on the basis of Foucault’s account of art and reality as expressive surfaces, the group’s seriously superficial action will be regarded as a performance of Christianity

xii  Preface today—and as such as a political theology. This book’s purpose is to lay the groundwork for a theological hermeneutic able to interpret this sort of complex event in light of Foucault’s thinking on postrepresentational art, giving special attention to the applicability of this line of thinking to the postsecular theological complexities of our time. Our journey through the artistic mysteries of things will make us mindful, as well, of the humbling materiality and relationality in which every human intention—whether artistic, political, or theological—is set and to the theological activism it encourages. I would like to thank, first, the Swedish Research Council for the generous funding of this project, which was executed at the University of Nottingham, Britain, and at Uppsala University, Sweden. I am also thankful for the equality of the Swedish parental-leave system without which I would not have been able to write this book at this time of my life. But once the formal and practical foundation was laid, invaluable help and inspiration have come from many colleagues and friends, of which I mention only a few: Clemena Antonova, Ian Bacher, Malin Bergner, Mårten Björk, Jeremy Carrette, John Carvalho, Elisabeth Davies, Keith Davies (may every god bless your vivid soul), Thomas Ekstrand, Maria Essunger, Mark Godin, Philip Goodchild, Josef Gustafsson, Simon Henriksson, King Ho-Leung, Jonas Ideström, Tim Ihssen, Anna Ilchenko, Eddy Kehls, Boris Klushnikov, Sabina Koij, Bengt Kristensson Uggla, Joel Kuhlin, Mattias Martinson, Lissa McCullough, Ola Redell, Ida Simonsson, Kamilla Skarström Hinojosa, Joseph Sverker, Ulrika Svalfors, Alana Vincent, Joshua Wells, Katarina Westerlund, and Susanne Wigorts Yngvesson.

Introduction

In this study, Michel Foucault’s art analyses are employed to explore a notion of theology as material and performative. The reason for doing so is not to proclaim a new theological truth but to broaden our sense of what theology can be. Taking a postrepresentational perspective on theology means that expressions quite different from those we usually regard as theological are able to stand forth: expressions such as a dissident order of nuns from San Francisco, a Russian punk collective, a distracted churchgoer receiving communion while her mind is somewhere else, and the at-times-nonsensical repetition of words, thoughts, and gestures in established theological traditions. Through Foucault’s work on art, we shall commence a journey away from the transcendent God and the human subject toward the world as a surface of appearances. This is a move toward an account of reality where the mysteries of this world are not to be found in the abstract as opposed to tangible reality but, rather, on the surface, in the very materiality of words and things. This study rests on an assumption—or at least a hunch—that Foucault’s writings on art might be more apt to bring novel ideas into contemporary theological debates than his work on Christianity per se. While Foucault’s work on Christianity has rightly received attention from the world of theology and religious studies, his writings on literature have attracted the interest of most contemporary theologians. Hence, my own contribution to this field of research consists of throwing light on the performative account of reality in his work on art and of showing how such an account may contribute to contemporary theological debates. I do not aspire to scrutinize to what extent the art encounters affected Foucault’s philosophy and to what extent they merely affirmed what he was already endeavoring philosophically. The aim is, rather, to discuss possible theological implications of his art analyses and their postrepresentational presuppositions. Because, as we shall see in the first chapter, it is precisely in the move beyond representation that one encounters what can be described as aspects of materiality and performativity in Foucault’s thinking, and these are facets in his work that I find at once challenging and stimulating for contemporary theology.

2  Introduction While I argue that such a postrepresentational approach to theology opens new perspectives—theologically as well as politically—it is not without problems. One may wonder: Is this an apt source of inspiration for contemporary theology? Does not the transformative force of Christianity lie precisely in its faith in a transcendent reality beyond the imperfection of this world? Is this not what several trajectories within recent theology have reminded us of? Jeremy Carrette raised similar questions when Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France from 1979–80 were published in English in 2014.1 The publication was something of a theological event because the lectures cover elements of Foucault’s final contribution before his death, and thus provide a foundation for what he intended to be his most extensive work on Christianity. When reviewing the English translation, however, Carrette critiqued precisely Foucault’s surface perspective on Christianity. Carrette described it as an “expressionistic logic” that assumes that the external act is more crucial in, for instance, Christian confession than is the inner reality that is confessed—or, for that matter, the transcendent God to whom the confession is directed. To Foucault, the externalization of the inner truth creates the inner truth of the self: there is no inner truth before it becomes external. Carrette acknowledges that Foucault’s focus on expression illumines vital aspects of the relation between Christianity and subjectivity, but he finds that Foucault misses out on crucial Christian elements when he does not appreciate the inescapability of the belief–practice binary in the early Christian texts and practices to which he refers. Foucault’s expressionistic or performative perspective, which is also a methodological presupposition, affects his reading of the early Christian writings so that a similar pattern stands forth in the early Christian traditions. “But,” Carrette states, “it is wrong to assume that Christianity valued the ‘external act’ above the ‘inner word.’ ”2 The fact that Christians actually believed that there was an inner and an outer reality, Carrette asserts, affected the external act and its implications. The faith shared by the novice and the priest, for instance, positioned them both in relation to a reality to which they both were inferior. Although it did not always work in practice, their shared relation to the outer reality opened possibilities for the novice to discredit pastoral power based on his or her inner faith, and it required of the priest to be open to correction. To that extent, Carrette argues, Foucault misses out on a crucial dimension of Christian faith that is open to counter-conduct and critique. Christianity is neither only performative and action-based, nor only based on internal convictions and truth assumptions, he contends, but both and neither: Christianity has both expressionist “truth-act” dimensions of “obligation” and inner counter-discourses of “resistance” (due to the inner connection with God); it is not one or the other because Christianity is not a single tradition, but a wide array of different forms, expressions, and inner explorations.

Introduction 3 What Carrette suggests, then, is that the actual faith in there being something beneath the surface or beyond the present—whether illusory or not—has helped Christianity to think differently. Faith in transcendence or in humanistic worldviews are not necessarily obstacles for defiance and noncompliance (which, naturally, is stating the obvious in many other contexts than the present). In Carrette’s words, “Christianity can be resistance against the ‘obligations’ and outer acts.”3 Just as Foucault shows in his 1980s’ exposé of early Christianity, however, the Christian tradition is an archaeological field of multiple expressions, practices, and institutions. Christian faith is not confessional in the purely cognitive sense, but Christianity is also constituted by practices and performances. In church history, the liturgical practice even precedes the formation of the scripture—practice predates theory.4 In other words, Christianity is already material in its worship, its traditions, and even in its incarnational dogma. Hence, in this book, while not denying the subversive aspects of Christian faith as described by Carrette, I undertake to highlight instead the creative and transformative force of the materiality and performativity of Christianity. In 1964, long before his lectures on Christianity, Foucault wrote an essay on Pierre Klossowski, suggesting an enigmatic rediscovery of Christianity in his notion of language. “[F]rom the bottom of the Christian experience,” Foucault wrote, Klossowski “has rediscovered the marvels and depth of the simulacrum.” What Klossowski had rediscovered, Foucault proposed, was language beyond the distinctions of sense versus nonsense, signifier versus signified, and symbol versus sign.5 Hence, in Klossowski, Foucault encountered the notion of Christianity as appearance and as such affective and real in its presence without pertaining to neither absolutes nor essences. A related account of Christianity, and related accounts of materiality and performativity, will appear via the encounters between Foucault’s art analyses and theology in the chapters to come. Theology will stand forth as an affective presence—politically as well as artistically—bereft of, or freed from, higher representation. Thus, centering on Foucault’s writings on art and in conversation with contemporary theology, I discuss the aspects of performativity and materiality with their political as well as spiritual implications—what I will term the mystery of things. Foucault was deeply inspired by art history, especially the history of painting, and despite being a minor part of his oeuvre there is reason to believe that this inspiration was important to his philosophy at large. Art historian Catherine Soussloff argues that “the operations and history specific to painting are of primary importance to understanding Foucault’s philosophy.”6 Whether a key entrance to his thought or a fascinating aspect of it, his discussions and expressions of historical and contemporary art left indisputable traces in his philosophy. It is my thesis, moreover, that his lifelong interest in painting opens avenues for new understandings of theology and spirituality today. What such a suggestion entails will be laid out in the chapters to come, but before we move on, an outline of the artistic

4  Introduction atmosphere in Europe during the appearance of Foucault’s thought, with special attention paid to the spiritual facets of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century art world, offers an indication of the theological relevance of these sources of inspiration.

Shifting relations between art and faith The mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century was a phase of a spiritualization of art. European and Russian artists, while remaining skeptical of religion in its institutionalized forms, approached different accounts of spirituality in their writing as well as in their artistry.7 By the time Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art appeared in 1910, the book was an expression of an ongoing movement within the art world. These were times before, between, and after the wars in Europe, and the need to renegotiate religion and spirituality was more multifaceted than what could be fulfilled by theological discussions on the rationality of faith, which was a frequently debated topic in academic theology at the time. Hence, far from the European theology seminars a very different kind of “theological” activity was taking place, an exploration of other forms of spirituality than those of the Orthodox Christian traditions. New spaces for dealing with spirituality, materiality, corporeality, and politics were created by artists, writers, and thinkers—spaces that were neither given within the framework of contemporary theology or church life nor within traditional academic philosophy. The dominant schools of theology in Europe dealt primarily with the rationality of faith; rationality as enlightenment stood against rationality as revelation and faith. Liberal theologians explored ways for Christians of the twentieth century to embrace rather than reject modern presumptions like Darwinism and skepticism toward the wonders and miracles of the Bible. They emphasized ethics over doctrine and experience over scriptural authority. On the other side of the divide were the neoorthodox theologians who wanted to make room within modern-day rationality for the uniqueness of Christian thought and the revelatory Word of God. Karl Barth’s The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928) stood against Rudolf Bultmann’s Jesus and the Word (1934), and confessional dogmatics stood against historical-critical exegesis. It was, in short, a dogmatic God against a man of reason. The theological debate between Barth and Bultmann exposed a divide within Christian thought and faith and instigated different Christian approaches to ethics, politics, and culture. Nonetheless, as Eberhard Jüngel has noted, the two shared the greater intellectual paradigm according to which God was in one way or another primarily about thought and reason.8 The God of academic theology in the early twentieth century had more to do with words and ideas than with practices and things, more Apollonian reason than Dionysian creativity. For Barth and Bultmann, theology definitely had direct implications for political reality, but experiences of the

Introduction 5 sacred were more about the mind than about the body, and the mind was, in one way or another, sensible. In 1928, the same year Karl Barth published The Word of God and the Word of Man, Georges Bataille’s blasphemous Story of the Eye emerged as an antitheological yet deeply spiritual showdown with Christian practice and faith. In Bataille’s account of the sacred versus the profane, the categories of liberalism and neoorthodoxy within contemporary theology did not apply whatsoever. To Bataille, the profane world was, in fact, characterized by much of what both the established theology at the time and the institutionalized forms of faith stood for and what capitalist society in a wider sense represented. The profane, to Bataille, was the sphere of instrumental reason, of useful activity and goal-oriented thought where bodies, things, words, and thoughts were valued based on their rationality and utility. The sacred, in comparison, was sharply distinct from capitalist logic, orthodox dogmatics, and liberal systematic thinking. Bataille’s idea of the sacred included moods, moments, and operations that invalidated—always and only for a fleeting time—utility, the pretenses of accomplishment, and the claims of our future-oriented projects, as well as the limits of reason.9 “The issue is not that of attainment of a goal, but rather of escape from those traps which goals represent,” Bataille explained. In consequence, through intellectual and practical experiments of transgression, he sought to overcome “the profane” and enter “the sacred.” In 1936, together with Pierre Klossowski and Georges Ambrosino, Bataille formed a “ferociously religious” group that set out to reactivate a chthonic form of the sacred through a “rapturous escape from the self.”10 In the Russian art scene, related but different confrontations with what was regarded as traditional theological presuppositions were enacted. As already mentioned, Kandinsky had written Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1910, and Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935) had founded Suprematism in 1913. Like Bataille’s publication of Story of the Eye, both events were theologically relevant in a way that the established theology of the time was not ready to embrace. Kandinsky introduced a vision for artistry in which the artist was to resist contemporary ideas as well as transcendent systems and structures. Painting, Kandinsky stated, had nothing to do with conforming to the world or to its ideas of what painting should be but with setting out on a spiritual journey. The artist’s mission was to follow his or her inner necessity: not only the true and spiritual nucleus of the artist but also the inner necessity of each form and each color. The inner truth of every form and color was what should be expressed on the canvas, and their truth subsisted not in what they represented, what transcendent reality they pointed toward, but in their own being.11 To that extent, his ideal for painting was deeply spiritual, yet it was at odds with contemporary ideals for Christian religious art, according to which art was all about representing an absent reality. Kazimir Malevich made a similar antitheological mystic move within the art sphere by founding the Suprematist art movement.

6  Introduction Leaving behind the representational ideal of painting, Malevich introduced instead “a supremacy of forms,” a painting that would release form from the constraints of representation. Suprematist art was nonobjective and nonrepresentational: a spiritual liberation of shapes and colors. The Suprematists turned away from the long-established ideal of art as representing a transcendently situated truth and instead elevated the flat canvas and its immanent reality of forms.12 Supported by Malevich, the younger members of the artistic OBERIU movement explored creative and nonsensical forms of performance similar to those of the Russian feminist collective Pussy Riot today. While these artistic initiatives did not affect theology to any great extent at the time, they were soon to become important to continental philosophy. The artistic experiments of the Surrealists and the avant-garde influenced a wide range of philosophers searching for ways of thinking beyond premodern dogmatism and modern rationalism. The encounter with the experimental art scene of the early and mid-twentieth century made an indelible impression on thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Marion—and intriguingly, through these thinkers, the spiritualization of art has now entered contemporary theology. Ever since the 1980s, continental thought has been at the heart of the theological debate. Yet despite its essentially theological content, vital aspects of this artistic impact on philosophy remain unexplored by theology, which is why I conduct such an investigation in this book.

Foucault, theology, and spirituality In Foucault’s view, Klossowski’s language-play unveiled a deeply Christian mysticism, a spirituality that differed from traditional Christian orthodoxy.13 More importantly for Foucault, it was a spirituality with philosophical as well as political potential. What Foucault found in Klossowski was a Christian experience that moved away from simplifying, dualistic ways of thinking. It turned away from a binary thought-structure in which the sensible is put in simplistic opposition to the nonsensible, God is the opposite of Satan, and what is true is seen in opposition to the untrue. In Foucault’s view, it moved away from confining and limiting structures for thought and prompted a different account of what we regard as reality, a way of thinking that opened itself to yet unknown views of political and societal life. Foucault’s admiration of Klossowski resembles his fascination with Maurice Blanchot, Jorge Luis Borges, and Georges Bataille, whose influence have frequently been discussed in the borderland of theology and Foucauldian philosophy. His texts on these writers and thinkers do evoke notions of mysticism and spirituality and to that extent are alluring to theological thought. Nevertheless, the fact that Foucault was inspired by the dissident spiritual discourse of avant-garde writers should not lead one to believe that he also adopted a theological epistemology—at least not a theological epistemology as commonly understood.

Introduction 7 In Foucault and Religion, Carrette analyzes Foucault’s relation to spirituality with regard to its openness toward the spiritual in certain limited ways and with regard to his departure from it. He rightly underlines that Foucault is not a theologian: Foucault was an atheist and his “religious question” was principally a critique of religious “transcendence.” His “religious question” sought to bring religious discourse into this world, into the world of the body and of politics.14 When Foucault dealt with religion, it was not in order to depart from this world but in order to bring religion down to earth. John Caputo, mainly known for his theological writings on Derrida, has contributed to the field of Foucault and theology with On Not Knowing Who We Are, discussing the theological implications of the aspects of silence and absence in Foucault’s work on literature. Like Carrette, Caputo stresses that a Foucauldian theology is necessarily “a Foucault without Foucault.”15 Hence, despite growing interest in Foucault’s thinking on theology, the theological approach is at times hesitant. Illustrative in this regard is the story behind the title of Jonathan Tran’s book, Foucault and Theology (2011). According to Tran, the book’s working title was Power, Resistance, and Christianity—a title that I find captures the core of Tran’s book very well—but a friend of his warned him that the word resistance may be misunderstood. It could, the friend noted, 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, which is why he asserts instead, “Foucault thinks the world belongs to power. Christians think the world belongs to God.”16 Consequently, while Tran draws crucial implications for Christian life and thought from Foucault’s philosophy, he makes sure not to fall into his “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.”17 I find it fair of Tran not to bring Foucault into a theological sphere that does not accord with his thinking. Still, my own aim differs, as I intend to suggest that Foucault’s “atheistic immanence” may very well be construed as a theological approach today. While Tran’s demarcation illustrates well the skepticism toward Foucault in some theological circles, James W. Bernauer’s Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight (1990) in stark contrast was one of the first to fully embrace Foucault’s thinking theologically.18 Bernauer’s book (without which the current never would have been written) is an in-depth study of Foucault’s published, as well as unpublished, work and proposes the thesis—at odds with common readings of Foucault at the time—that Foucault offers much more than an account of a closed-in world of prisons and discursive practices. From Bernauer’s viewpoint, Foucault strives for an ethics for thought bordering

8  Introduction on a mystical ethics that advocates a constant transgression of knowledge as well as of the self. If Foucault and theology was still a new field in 2000, by 2013 it was established enough for Carrette to be invited to contribute to Blackwell’s A Companion to Foucault, and by 2014 Mark D. Jordan’s Convulsing Bodies—beautifully personal and creative, yet scholarly and meticulous— convincingly placed the theme of religion at the very heart of Foucault’s work. Jordan suggested that Foucault’s critique of religion is, in fact, partly inspired by the performative force of the religion it critiques.19 The present study is limited to Christian theology, but given Foucault’s “political spirituality” it could have been otherwise. During Foucault’s short and controversial assignment as a journalist during the 1978 Iranian revolution, he was captivated by what he witnessed and described the Islamist’s appropriation of Shi’ite rituals—including movements, clothing, and chants—as a “political spirituality.” Interestingly, his description of the performative force of the religious appearances in Iranian revolutionary practices resembles his later descriptions of the practices of early Christianity, and both capture the performative account of spirituality that will be discussed in relation to his work on art in the current investigation.20 In an article explicitly discussing the term political spirituality, Ladelle McWhorter puts it succinctly: “Indeed, Foucault’s is a strange ‘spirituality,’ one without finality, a heaven or an immortal soul. His is a strange politics too, one with nothing absolute to be won or secured.”21 McWhorter’s formulation captures well parts of the theological consequences to be extracted from Foucault’s works on art in the present study. The art writings contribute, however, with an enhancement of the material reality—not only of bodily practices but also of concrete things—in which such a political spirituality is set. My reason for not using “political spirituality” further is precisely because it would involve charging Foucault’s concept with a Christian theological ring that jars with its initial use.22 The present study does not aspire to argue that Foucault was less of an atheist than he thought he was or, however, that the far-reaching critique of religion in his work makes it unsuitable as a source for theological inspiration. On the contrary, I suggest that there are strands within contemporary theology that may, in fact, meet Foucault’s work in its superficial and nontranscendent mysteriousness. Because, just as Carrette underlines, if there is a spirituality in Foucault it is a spirituality of the discourse—a spirituality of that which appears. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault himself underlines that his discursive approach rejects ideas common to Christian mysticism, such as notions of a concealed origin or absolute truths: It is a discourse about discourses: But it is not trying to find in them a hidden law, a concealed origin that it only remains to free; nor is it trying to establish itself as a starting point, the general theory of which they would be the concrete models. It is trying to deploy a dispersion

Introduction 9 that can never be reduced to a single system of differences, a scattering that is not related to absolute axes of reference; it is trying to operate a decentering that leaves no privilege to any center.23 My notion of the mystery of things is an attempt to capture the various aspects of dispersion, scattering, and decentering appearances in Foucault’s work on art without relating to “absolute axes of reference.” I realize that the notion runs the risk of being too easily related to traditional Christian mysticism, yet I find it pertinent in its allusion to the Foucauldian irony of “the order of things,” namely, the ways in which our account of things enigmatically change beyond control through the course of history. The use of the notion of mystery is also influenced by Grace Janzten’s Foucault-inspired analysis of Christian mysticism, in which she shows how mysticism—just like the knowledge structures of Western science— changes over time and is gendered and driven by wills to power.24 Today, while the major trends in Christianity worldwide are running in the opposite direction, and even because such trends dominate, the time may be right to explore openings within theology for a notion of mystery that is inner-worldly, not only material but also performative, hence political, yet humble toward the mysteriousness of reality. If mysticism is set in constant transformation, why not experiment with such an opening for thought and let the mystery be infused with enigmatic yet superficial notions of materiality, creativity, and activism? In my regard, Foucault’s account of the surface of appearances and the force of tangible things is nowhere as clearly spelled out as in his work on art. The surface of the canvas, the color and form, and the tangibility of paint and cloth seem to provide Foucault with appropriate philosophical, as well as political, tools for thought.

Foucault on art and the ruin of representation Foucault’s work on art includes four essays and a lecture series, all of which are discussed in the chapters of this book along with less extensive writings and interviews. These writings include an 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 Édouard Manet (1832–83) originally delivered in Tunis in 1971; a shorter essay on Paul Rebeyrolle (1926–2005) published in the exhibition catalog for Rebeyrolle’s exhibition in 1973; and, finally, a 1975 essay titled “La Peinture Photogénique” on French artist Gérard Fromanger (b. 1939). Hence, the materials discussed in this book differ in length, depth, and even in genre. The essay on Las Meninas was, as just noted, first published as an academic article and then rewritten to serve as a foreword. The essay

10  Introduction on Magritte was, likewise, an academic piece of writing later turned into a book of its own. The texts on Manet, on the other hand, were transcribed from recorded lectures held in Tunis (one may bear this in mind, as the colloquial language is evident in the quotations in Chapter 3). The essays on Rebeyrolle and Fromanger are both written for exhibition catalogs and thus are intended primarily for the gallery audience. Foucault had personal relationships with both these artists and was asked by the artists themselves to write the introductory texts to their respective exhibitions. When I discuss their relationships in the analyses in the following, the discussions are affected by the status of the text analyzed. At this stage, however, I mention the discrepancies of the material in order to address the question whether it is reasonable to treat such a varied body of work as a whole. Is it justifiable to extract these pieces of work from Foucault’s oeuvre and discuss them on their own? By addressing these texts as a continuum through the chapters of this book, I do not mean to argue that they constituted a coherent whole for the author. I do not argue that they form a unity in any other sense than that they are all about paintings and written by the same author. I am interested, however, in noting what may come out of reading these imprints of different times and stages of Foucault’s thought as, to some extent, a narrative that tells the story of a philosophical development. Hence, when I do discuss the texts together I consciously construct the continuum and coherency by letting the different texts serve as vantage points into different stages of Foucault’s thinking. Incidentally, Foucault’s writings on art follow the chronology of art history, which is why the arrangement of this book is in accordance with the history of art as well as with the order in which Foucault produced the works discussed. Hence, through Foucault’s art analyses we shall set out on a journey through art history—a journey that is in no sense unique as an art-historical voyage. In a general sense, a similar depiction of the artistic development from Velázquez to the Narrative Figuration movement that emerges through the chapters of this book could be found in any introduction to art history. What is unique, however, is the way in which Foucault turns the artistic insights and experiments into philosophy, which, in turn, affects not only the interpretations of art history and of painting but even the very notion of the art historical practice.25 Moreover, and more important for the current investigation, the encounter between thought and creative practice in this part of his work poses challenges to theology today. Moving through Foucault’s work on art and thus ten years of scholarly development, we shall soon get a sense of the theologically challenging ideas that Foucault brought with him from his art encounters. While the theological implications of this dimension of his work have not been previously explored, his art analyses have been thoroughly discussed by scholars such as Claude Gandelman, Catherine Soussloff, Martin Jay, Joseph J. Tanke, and Gary Shapiro.26 In relation to the theme of surveillance in Foucault’s work—but also because of Gilles Deleuze’s description of Foucault as a seer,

Introduction 11 a voyant—the notions of vision and visibility have received ample scholarly attention and his work on art has played an important part in some of these investigations.27 Tanke illuminates a more far-reaching impact on Foucault’s oeuvre by the experimental art scene of his time. The encounter with the art world, Tanke argues, moved Foucault’s thought away from representation and closer to the material world. The meeting with the transgressive art scene brought Foucault away from abstract criticism and into a more hands-on way of approaching what he regarded as dogmatic remains in the Western culture of his time, Tanke suggests. The new approach was eventually given its concrete form in the archeological method, and the foundation for this critical approach was, Tanke holds, brought in from postrepresentational art. Postrepresentational art helped Foucault distance himself “from forms of criticism that attempt to capture a work’s essence through speculation about the meaning of its content.” In postrepresentational art, Foucault encountered instead attempts to turn away from the logic of representation and toward the power of expression. In other words, through his art analysis Foucault replaced the representational and abstract question “What does this work mean?” with a question that approached the more concrete “What does this work do?”28 To that extent Tanke describes Foucault’s thought on art as postrepresentational: rather than asking what outer truth a painting strives to capture or what deeper meaning it holds, he set out to describe what it expresses, what it creates. In postrepresentational art movements Foucault discovered a surface thinking that by its very materiality suspended the distinction between the signifier and the signified, between words and things. These artistic apprehensions thus assisted Foucault on his way to a new approach to history. Instead of searching for the true meaning behind an explanation of a certain historical event, he turned his focus onto what truths history creates. Rather than simply contesting one disturbing statement with another, Foucault’s archaeology went back in time through the archives of our shared historical reality 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 timeless and certain suddenly appeared relative. In retrospect, ten years after he introduced his archaeology of knowledge, Foucault himself explained: “experience has taught me that the history of various forms of rationality is sometimes more effective in unsettling our certitudes and dogmatism than is abstract criticism.”29 Like Tanke, Gary Shapiro underlines the openings for postrepresentational thought in Foucault’s art analyses. In Shapiro’s view, 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.” Hence, like Tanke, Shapiro argues that Foucault’s work on art may be read as part of his wider philosophical critique of representation. In Archaeologies of Vision, Shapiro sees close connections

12  Introduction between Foucault’s studies of art and his wider discussion of representation, as well as of the relation between what Deleuze referred to as “visibilities” and “statements”; this relation is explored further in Chapter 1. According to the American philosopher Michael Kelly, it comes as no surprise that Foucault opens The Order of Things with an analysis of Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas. Painting is crucial to Foucault, Kelly holds, precisely because Foucault’s critical approach renders visible normative conditions that would otherwise be invisible. The notion of invisibility, Kelly argues, is vital to Foucault in The Order of Things, not as a metaphysical concept but as a way to speak of a kind of “positive unconscious” that eludes the scientist but nonetheless is part of the scientific discourse. Already in the opening analysis of Las Meninas, there are several invisibilities that serve to render visible the invisible rules of classical thought.30 The multiple invisibilities in Las Meninas help Foucault to make his point on the entire process of knowledge and its circling within representation, Kelly argues. The invisibilities show that no one is in charge of the process of representation: neither man nor God ultimately controls the surface of knowledge.31 Kelly’s reasoning touches on the critique of transcendence in Foucault’s writing on art, and thus on its spiritual implications; we return to the notion of the invisible in Foucault’s essay on Las Meninas in Chapter 2. Catherine M. Soussloff’s Foucault on Painting takes an art-historical and historiographical approach tracing the intellectual roots—in French art history and in the wider intellectual debate—of Foucault’s art analyses. To Soussloff, Foucault’s contribution to art history, or, more specifically, to the history and theory of painting, has often been underestimated, as has his uniqueness as an art historian. Foucault, she writes, did not work as a traditional or “liberal” art historian. Rather, the aspects he explored of painting understood as a historical system of visual knowledge with the artist-creator at the center of it allowed him to see the potential of the incongruities in what is depicted and what may be seen.32 What Soussloff notes as insights pivotal to the very notion of painting, and partly to the notion of ethics, the present investigation instead turns into a radical theological account of the material and performative dimensions of reality.

Scope and terminology As already indicated, this study focuses primarily on Foucault’s analyses of Velázquez, Manet, Magritte, Rebeyrolle, and Fromanger and discusses facets of performativity and materiality in these art analyses that are of theological, philosophical, and political relevance. Moving through these five major writings on art by Foucault, we will note a movement from a scattered

Introduction 13 subject to a political force of appearances. In his earlier art analyses, material objects are seen to question the stability of the subject through notions of vision and visibility. Later, the notion of meaning as such, of signification and representation, is discussed through the materiality of things and words alike, while later still the very artistic materiality, as tangible imagery in motion, turns into a political force. In these discussions, conversation partners will be brought in from different domains of contemporary theology: Catherine Keller, Louise-Marie Chauvet, John Caputo, Daniel Barber, Mark C. Taylor, Jeffrey Robbins, and Mattias Martinson, to name a few. As a theological contribution, the investigation places itself broadly within the radical theology trajectory, hoping to contribute by exploring the theological implications of an account of the world as a surface of appearances—a mystery of things—thus introducing novel concepts and figures of thought. Radical theology is, by definition, a hard-to-define phenomenon, with roots in the American “death-of-God” movement of the 1960s but subsequently developing in several directions, with branches in church-related theology, philosophical theology, and political theology. Writers and thinkers such as Katharine Sarah Moody, Trevor Greenfield, Ulf U. Dalferth, Jeffrey Robbins, Clayton Crockett and Lissa McCullough all use the term in different senses while podcasts like Homebrewed Christianity and The Catacombic Machine also continuously contribute to the delineating and development of the concept. My encounter with Thomas Altizer’s work was an essential starting point, and although the current project runs in a slightly different direction by following the Foucauldian rather than Derridean path of continental thought, I find that his description from 2012 captures the movement’s enigmatic core: “[A] genuinely radical theology,” he states, “is a theological thinking that truly rethinks the deepest ground of theology, a rethinking that is initially an unthinking of every established theological ground.”33 The aspiration to add to the notion of radical theology and to explore new sources of inspiration affects also the choice of theological conversation partners. These are consciously chosen from different, though related, theological trajectories to enable theological discussions that, in the conclusion, come together in an opening toward a radical theology of marvels and actions: a theology that understands the world as a mystery of things; an inner-worldly nonsensical mystery that incites marvel, even awe, and accordingly encourages action; a theology that impels creative activist additions to the multiplicity of reality in order to oppose every oppressive attempt at deterring the expressions of the world. As for terminology, I define art in this book (shaped by the five Foucault texts analyzed) as simply painting by established artists.34 In the last chapters, however, the art concept is broadened to include other techniques and activist art and performance art. Postrepresentation and postrepresentational signify philosophical and artistic expressions that aim to critique and problematize the logic and process of representation. In other words, I use the term postrepresentation in relation to endeavors that strive to question

14  Introduction or throw light on the predicaments of signification, classification, and visual illustration. As artistic expressions, the postrepresentational may be figurative or not, but it shares an awareness of and an interest in problems related to the very idea of representing objects or ideas by way of explanation or illustration. In this study, then, nonobjective art is postrepresentational, but postrepresentational art need not be nonobjective. I use the terms nonobjective art, nonrepresentational art, and occasionally nonfigurative art synonymously to designate art that is not figurative. The notion of spirituality is used in this book to evoke something broadly “religious” that is not easily captured as confessional belonging, experience, or expression. In relation to the notion of materiality, however, I use spirituality to denote an elusive experience in relation to the world of things. The spiritual, then, signifies rather ordinary yet nonetheless puzzling experiences of things hiding other things and of concrete things affecting our vision, perception, thought, and actions in ways that appear to reach beyond our comprehension. And indeed, this connects closely with a related terminological problem, that is, to discuss materiality in relation to Foucault in a time when materiality is referenced ubiquitously in contemporary critical theory requires terminological distinctions; the term brings with it innumerable connotations, only a few of which lead toward the notions that are discussed in this book. Hence, Chapter 1 provides a background to the discussions of Foucauldian materiality and performativity, the mystery of things that follow. It introduces the development from language to discourse in Foucault’s early thinking and thus explicates how materiality is understood in the chapters that follow as they explore the borderland between art, theology, and Foucauldian thinking. When I employ the term postsecular I use it primarily to designate societal changes in church–state relationships. The postsecular then captures the development of renewed connections between church and state in formerly more strictly secular countries. The notion is also used, however, to describe a wider reorientation in relation to religion; the term is then consciously and explicitly broadened to include expressions that are not usually put forward as examples of renewed interest in religion. For example, Pussy Riot’s provocative performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior discussed in Chapter 6 has been regarded as a sign of ongoing secularization. Through the perspectives introduced in this book, however, it may be seen instead as one example of the multitude of theological expressions in the postsecular era.

Overview of the argument The main reason this book discusses the work of Foucault chronologically is that doing so illumines the temporal development in Foucault’s thinking as it is reflected in his reflections on art. The analyses here vary in style and spirit from chapter to chapter, as they are affected by differences in the texts discussed and by the character of the artists whom Foucault brings in as

Introduction 15 conversation partners. The most striking difference comparatively is that between Chapter 4 on Magritte and Chapter 5 on Rebeyrolle. My aspiration is that the variance in style—rather than confusing the reader—will serve to enhance the complexity and richness of the Foucauldian work on art by accenting different aspects and angles through literary style. In the particular example of Magritte versus Rebeyrolle, I hope that the change in style also illumines the transition from the archeological to the genealogical approach occurring in Foucault’s work between those two texts. Chapter 1 describes Foucault’s discursive account of reality as a surface of appearances, what the book terms the mystery of things. I depict how the move from language to discourse in Foucault’s early thinking involves negotiation of the relation between words and things. Hence, after The Order of Things, knowledge to Foucault no longer belongs to language alone but is transmitted, or performed, by words, things, statements, and paintings alike. I further argue that Foucault’s notion of knowledge as an expression of the surface of reality remains open to a peculiar, immanent form of spirituality, a material and performative spirituality as the one described in Foucault’s essay on Flaubert. The chapter moves through Foucault’s inspirational sources—Borges, Blanchot, and Bataille—and shows how he combines the fascination with these writers with an interest in the structural ethnography of Georges Dúmezil and Claude Lévi-Strauss and thus forms his surface account of knowledge. Chapter 2 discusses Foucault’s analysis of Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Contrary to Mark C. Taylor’s earlier interpretation of Foucault’s essay, I underline the material aspects of Foucault’s analysis. In relation to Velázquez’s material play with perspectives and representation, the epistemological viewpoint of contemporary theology is here described as a physical yet erratic place. Such a notion of theological knowledge as nonplace is then brought into conversation with the postmetaphysical theologian LouisMarie Chauvet. If in painting, the materials used for representation—or for moving beyond the logic of representation—is the color, canvas, and brush, then in the Christian service it is the liturgy and the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Departing from the subject–object negotiation that Chauvet brings from Maurice Merleau-Ponty yet keeping Chauvet’s account of the Eucharist as a material and ambiguous mystery, I suggest a Foucauldian, performative, and material rather than a symbolic notion of sacramentality. Chapter 3 begins in Bataille’s and Artaud’s reactions against Christianity’s relegating of human corporeality, only to let Foucault begin meeting the challenges they pose. The chapter describes Foucault’s account of Manet’s art in relation to Bataille’s earlier book on Manet. Toward the background of Bataille’s appraisal of what he calls Manet’s pictorial “blasphemy,” which, in Bataille’s regard, effects a “sacrificial economy of negation,” Foucault’s analysis of Manet is seen as taking Bataille’s account even closer to a truly material spirituality. Thus, in conversation with Bataille and Artaud, I finally experiment with the idea of a material and performative understanding of sacramentality, what I tentatively speak of as a radical liturgical theology.

16  Introduction Chapter 4 argues that Foucault, through Magritte, introduces an account of thought as thing and that he uses a negative figure of thought when forming his argument. Foucault’s analysis of Magritte, I suggest, was influenced by his reading of Gilles Deleuze. The influence is detectable in the differences between the first and the second version of his Magritte essay, and the influence from Deleuze is here used to describe Foucault’s account of thinking in series rather than in original versus copy-relations. Foucault’s reasoning on Magritte is subsequently put in relation to the critique of the apophatic in John Caputo and to Catherine Keller’s notion of entanglement. I finally suggest that Keller’s entangled knowing-together comes closer to the Foucauldian account than does Caputo’s apophatic not-knowing. Chapter 5 describes Foucault’s political reawakening and argues, with Brady Thomas Heiner, for the importance of the inspiration from the American prison movement and the Black Panther Party in this part of Foucault’s work. I contend that such an influence is palpable in Foucault’s analysis of French artist Paul Rebeyrolle and depict how it prompts a transgression of the border between theory and practice and even between theory and activism in Foucault’s thought. This move is finally put in relation to the American queer movement calling themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. From a postrepresentational theological perspective, I suggest, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence may be seen as a group of theopolitical activists adding to the expressions of Christianity on the surface of appearances, adding to the mystery of things. Chapter 6 discusses Foucault’s analysis of Fromanger and denotes Foucault’s explicit return to representation with the aim of reclaiming imagery from mass media and advertising, in line with the Narrative Figuration movement’s artistic vision. In the essay on Fromanger, Foucault, I argue, further develops the philosophical negotiations behind the aim to deal with, affect, and pass on images convinced of their entanglement and their autonomous transhumance in the world of matter and politics. Finally, the Pussy Riot, with their 2012 action at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, is brought in to exemplify the materialization of an imagery in motion, with YouTube images of young women bodies punk-praying in front of the iconostasis, spreading rapidly on the surface of appearances thus adding to the expressions of Russian Orthodox faith. In the conclusion, finally, I critically discuss the import of the previous chapters and outline the theological implications of the mystery of things, suggesting that it all comes together in a radical theology of marvels and actions. The chapter illuminates different aspects of a radical theology of the mystery of things, including implications on the relation between theology and modern art as discussed by James Elkin and on the relation between radical theology and political artistic activism. One of my theological conversation partners in these concluding reflections is American theologian Jeffrey W. Robbins and his political theology inspired by the democratic notion of power. To Robbins, the sovereign in democratic thought is no longer a transcendent authority, or a powerful subject, but is, in fact, one

Introduction 17 with the multitude of wills and desires in this world. Through such an account of the sovereign, Robbins argues, God becomes similarly diffused, and a new political theology appears: a radically democratized theology that may contribute to the resistance of all forms of hegemony, whether political or religious. With Antonio Negri, Robbins suggests that such theopolitical resistance is best performed through acts of creative disobedience.35 To be a theopolitical activist in Robbins’s sense is to take leave of domination, of state and church power and its transcendental illusions, in order to create new common temporalities, spaces, and images, hence it could be to perform a provocative yet nonsensical punk prayer in a cathedral. While Foucault’s later work will have instigated accounts of activism, his earlier works will have depicted the way in which matter challenges human rationality and creativity. Its lack of intentionality, stability, and meaning obstructs every attempt at presenting an artistry, a philosophy, or a theology from above. Through conversations with Catherine Keller, Mattias Martinson, Daniel Barber, and Robbins, we finally arrive at a radical theology that, on one hand, marvels at life as it appears and, on the other hand, turns its marvels into political action.

Notes 1 Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France 1979–1980, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 2 Jeremy R. Carrette, “Spiritual Gymnastics: Reflections on Michel Foucault’s On the Government of the Living 1980 Collège de France Lectures,” in Foucault Studies 20 (December 2015), 277–90, quote on 285. 3 Ibid., 286. 4 For a contemporary discussion on the relation between Christian practice and the written word see, for example, Gordon W. Lathrop, Saving Images: The Presence of the Bible in Christian Liturgy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017). 5 Michel Foucault, “Prose of Actaeon,” in Religion and Culture: Michel Foucault, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 79; French ed., “La prose d’Actéon,” in Dits et écrits 1954–1988, vol. 1: 1954–1969 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 326. 6 Catherine M. Soussloff, Foucault on Painting, electronic book (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 7 David Morgan, “Art and Religion in the Modern Age,” in James Elkins and David Morgan, eds., Re-Enchantment (New York: Routledge, 2009), 30. 8 Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 2. 9 Quoted by Jeremy Biles, Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion, ed. Jeremy Biles and Kent L. Brintnall (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 7. 10 It is not completely true that they did not influence theology positively—as opposed to only negatively—at the time. For instance, in Sweden there was a group of women writers and thinkers called Fogelstadgruppen who brought the spirituality of Bataille and Kandinsky into the center of the women’s movement. In the course of time, these influences were to help establish Sweden as a pioneering country with regard to equality between men and women in church life as well as in society. One of the group’s key voices, theologian and writer Emilia

18  Introduction Fogelklou, was explicitly guided by Bataille toward a new account of Christian theology and spirituality and of ethics and societal formation. See for instance Petra Carlsson Redell, Mysticism as Revolt: Foucault, Deleuze and Theology Beyond Representation (Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 2014), Chapter. 7. 11 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Brooklyn: Sheba Blake, 2015). Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s pivotal contribution to the spiritually inspired movement of nonobjective art preceded Kandinsky’s but was not made public until years later. When her work was exhibited in Los Angeles in 1986 the exhibition title, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, alluded to Kandinsky’s book. 12 Alexei Kurbanovsky, “Malevich’s Mystic Signs: From Iconoclasm to New Theology,” in Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, ed. Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 358. 13 In Foucault’s words, Klossowski had “rediscovered a profound Christian experience” (Foucault, “Prose of Actaeon,” 79; French ed., “La prose d’Actéon,” 326). 14 Jeremy R. Carrette, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (London: Routledge, 2000), 86. 15 John Caputo, On Not Knowing Who We Are (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). Caputo’s contribution is discussed further in Chapter 5. 16 Jonathan Tran, Foucault and Theology (London: T & T Clark, 2011), 3. 17 Ibid., 50. 18 James W. Bernauer, Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought (Westminster: Humanity, 1990). 19 Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki eds., A Companion to Foucault (Chichester: Blackwell, 2013); Mark Jordan, Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). 20 Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 38–9. 21 Ladelle McWhorter, “Foucault’s Political Spirituality,” in Philosophy Faculty Publications 33 (Richmond: University of Richmond, 2003), 1–13, 10. 22 The insight into Foucault’s complex relation to the religion in which he was brought up has been deepened by several studies. In 2011, Philippe Chevallier published an in-depth study of Foucault’s work on Christianity, arguing that the image of Christianity that Foucault paints is more nuanced than is often noted (Philip Chevallier, Foucault et le Christianisme [Paris: ENS Éditions, 2011]). Arthur Bradley’s Negative Theology in Modern French Philosophy (2004) examined the relationship between, among others, Derrida, Foucault, and negative theology (Arthur Bradley, Negative Theology in Modern French Philosophy [New York: Routledge, 2004]). Bradley discussed the spiritual aspect of Foucault indirectly by examining Foucault’s “thought from the outside” in relation to negative theology. Stephen Carr’s article “Foucault amongst the Theologians” engaged some of the ways in which Foucault has been handled theologically (Stephen Carr, “Foucault Amongst the Theologians,” in Sophia 40, no. 2 [2001], 31–45). Like the work of Arthur Bradley, Carr’s approach 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. Carr critiqued the Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank’s claim, in Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1991), that Foucault’s thinking is nihilistic and underlined instead Foucault’s thought as a vital source for theological self-critique. Sophie Fuggle explored such a theological perspective on Foucault more extensively. In Foucault/Paul she followed the notion of power through the writings of Foucault and Paul, discussed differences and similarities, and explicitly tracked the notion of power “outside of the existing categories of

Introduction 19 religious and secular” (Sophie Fuggle, Foucault/Paul: Subjects of Power [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013]). David Galston depicted, in turn, the effects that Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish have had on the study of theology and religion; see Galston, Archives and the Event of God: The Impact of Michel Foucault on Philosophical Theology (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). 23 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 205; L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 267–8. 24 Grace M. Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 25 See, for instance, Catherine M. Soussloff, Foucault on Painting, electronic book (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 182/4656. 26 Joseph J. Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity (Chichester: Continuum, 2009), and Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Roy Boyne discusses Foucault’s art analyses rather briefly, only to spend the greater share of his essay treating the way in which Foucault’s wider historical and philosophical contribution has influenced art and art theory; see Roy Boyne, “Foucault and Art,” in A Companion to Art Theory, ed. Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde (Hong Kong: Blackwell, 2002), 337–48. 27 See, for example, Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). John Rajchman’s “Foucault’s Art of Seeing,” in October 44 (Spring 1988), 88–117, manages to depict the notion of visibility as it runs through Foucault’s work without, however, turning to his work on art. 28 Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art, 92. 29 Foucault, The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3: Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New Press, 1997), 323. 30 Michael Kelly, “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 (Chichester: Blackwell, 2013), 248. 31 Kelly writes, “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” (ibid., 248–9). 32 Soussloff, Foucault on Painting, 2443/4656. 33 Thomas J.J. Altizer, The Call to Radical Theology, ed. Lissa McCullough (New York: SUNY Press, 2012), 1. 34 See Soussloff, Foucault on Painting, chapter 5, for an analysis of the relevance of Foucault’s discussion on painting to the art historical death-of-painting notion. 35 Jeffrey W. Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 191.

1 The surface of appearances A mystery of things

There is a key figure of thought in Foucault that I find particularly thoughtprovoking in relation to theology. It is the Foucauldian discursive account of knowledge as a surface of appearances—what I denote in this book as a mystery of things. This challenges theology since it leaves no room for transcendence, yet it lets the world stand forth as a rather mysterious place, pointing toward the tangibility of this world without avoiding or diminishing the complexity of life or the enigmas of knowledge. Before entering into Foucault’s art analyses and their theological and political dimensions, there is need to outline this notion, which lies at the core of this study. This chapter seeks to show, if only briefly, how Foucault’s notion of the world as an enigmatic, discursive surface grows out of his earlier account of language and how it comes to involve also notions of materiality that, paradoxically, remain open to material accounts of spirituality. This aspect of Foucault’s work is palpable in his writings on art for several reasons that are explored in the following chapters but also for one very simple reason: paintings are all about visible surfaces. Not long before Foucault wrote his essay on Fromanger, he was asked about his relationship to painting. “What I like in painting is precisely that one is really obliged to look. And that is my repose. It is one of the few things I write about with pleasure and without fighting against anything at all.”1 It is the obligation to look that is Foucault’s repose in relation to art. Naturally, this could mean a number of things. The reason for him feeling at ease when writing about art could simply be the liberating experience of visiting an academic arena that is not one’s own. In line with Foucault’s philosophical endeavor, however, it could also be linked to painting being all about appearances, all about the visible, and thus already about an experience of the surface. The obligation to pay close attention simply to what appears could legitimize a surface approach to analysis; hence, his discursive perspective would require no methodological struggle or legitimization. For a philosopher who explores the world as appearance, the obligation only to look could well be experienced as a repose. Foucault never developed an extensive book-length account of painting, but at the end of The Archaeology of Knowledge he sketched ideas for

The surface of appearances 21 future archeological projects, one of those being an archeological analysis of painting. There he writes that painting in such an analysis would not be understood as a language, that is, as a means to describe and explain the world or the artist’s intentions; it would not be seen as materialized ideas. Nor, however, would painting in such an analysis be regarded as a pure and independent expression in itself, a pure visibility that cannot be interpreted or that is unrelated to the discourse of which it is a part. In other words, in an imaginary Foucauldian analysis, painting would be seen neither as “words” to translate nor as “things” to classify; it would be neither pure ideas nor pure materiality but both and neither because painting, Foucault writes, is a “discursive practice that is embodied in techniques and effects.”2 The techniques, practices, and gestures of the painters do themselves embody discursive knowledge, as do the color, space, distance, light, and proportions on the canvas, Foucault argues (AK 193/253). The things and movements themselves embody knowledge in a way that cannot be fully translated or nailed down by other forms of expression. But before we delve deeper into the superficiality of the canvas, let us see how this approach to painting relates to the emergence of the notion of discourse in Foucault’s earlier writings.

Language to infinity Early on, Foucault established a fascination for a certain account of language. It is a notion of language as it appears as opposed to ideas of what language ought to be. In Maurice Blanchot he encountered the notion of language as outside and void, in Georges Bataille he found language understood through transgression rather than dialectics, and in Jorge Luis Borges he found the image of language as an infinity in which anything can be expressed. Borges’s work indicated to Foucault the idea that language ought to be used in one way or another does not have much say when it comes to the ways that language actually appears. Borges’s account of language remained with Foucault for a long time through his academic work.3 In his 1963 essay “Language to Infinity” Foucault uses Borges to separate the account of language as infinite from the notion of language in what he calls “classical rhetoric.” Foucault describes the language of infinity by way of Borges’s visionary tale “The Library of Babel,” in which Borges depicts the knowledge of the world in a metaphorical image of an all-encompassing, yet therefore also necessarily enigmatic library. In this library, Foucault writes, everything that can possibly be said has already been said: it contains all conceived and imagined languages, and even those which might be conceived and imagined; everything has been pronounced, even those things without meaning, so that the odds of discovering even the smallest formal coherence are extremely slight.4

22  The surface of appearances For Foucault, Borges’s library depicts the surface of language as it appears, language as it emerges when we let it stand forth in its fully chaotic state, without tidying up, without categorizing in order to separate the true uses from the false, the successful ideas from the mishaps, or even made-up languages from actual languages. The language to infinity is, to that extent, language in its actual and living state. Foucault’s notion of a language to infinity is, in other words, an attempt to capture language not as it should be, or as it functions when it actually helps communication and accurately describes reality but as it appears.5 In Borges’s library, every book ever been written—whether it should exist or not—as well as every book that ever wanted to be written is present. The expressions of language are endless, the said and the unsaid, the meaning-less and the meaning-full, all lay on the surface of the library shelves (LI 66/260). This account of language is contrasted with the notion of language as representational or, in Foucault’s words, language as “classical rhetoric.” The classical-rhetorical is language in its tidy state in which distinctions and measurements are still valid. Language as classical-rhetoric involves a notion of what language should be and therefore is. Such an account of language has established the relationship between two forms of speech, one mute and one vocal. The first, the unspoken, is what the vocal speech of classicalrhetoric is to articulate. The unspoken, Foucault says, is always absolute and infinite, whereas vocal speech struggles with its own contingency when aspiring to reveal its mute other (LI 66/260). Put differently, since the classical-rhetorical account of language assumes that preciseness is significant when it comes to language, it must also assume that there is something that can and should be precisely articulated. What language strives to give voice to, “its mute other,” is presumed to be absolute and infinite, and the linguistic task is to be sufficiently meticulous to articulate it. However, Foucault argued in 1963, the representational language of classical-rhetoric has given way to “the language of the library.” Language today is “a language fated to be infinite because it can no longer support itself upon the speech of infinity” (LI 67/261). In other words, in a time when both absolutes of which language was thought to speak—namely, first God and then the subject—are questioned, the mute other is no longer necessarily there. There is no longer an undisputed level of the absolute and infinite below or above language, which is why language can be nothing but its own surface. For Foucault this is not as enigmatic as it may sound, it is simply a stage in the development of Western knowledge. For the purposes of this book, however, this is a stage in which language and things come together. To leave behind the notion of language as that which articulates the unspoken and “mute” reality not only affects language but also breaks down the distinction between signifier and signified, abstraction and reality: it dissolves the separation between words and things. A language no longer striving toward transcendental representation leaves behind the reigning idea of language as such; hence, language is no longer limited to the function of wording the wordless.

The surface of appearances 23 Also in 1963, Foucault indicated such a ruin of representational language in his homage to Bataille, “A Preface to Transgression.” In this essay Foucault argues that an Aristotelian account of language as ruled by the laws of contradiction was replaced in the history of Western thought by a Hegelian notion of language as dialectical. With Bataille, however, Foucault suggests that the concept of transgression as an ideal for life and thought alike disintegrates language as we have known it. In Bataille’s notion of transgression, every law and every limit, be it linguistic or moralistic, points beyond itself toward the “forbidden” field it opens up. For Foucault, this has fundamental consequences for philosophy. After Bataille, the philosopher has to accept that language is not her possession, and it will not abide by her rules but will exceed the limits of her definitions and grammar infinitely. “Language is stripped of dialectics,” Foucault writes, “at the heart of what it says but also at the roots of its possibilities.”6 The philosopher realizes therefore Foucault argues, that she does not inhabit the whole of her language “like a secret and perfectly fluent god” (PT 65/242): Next to himself, [the philosopher] discovers the existence of another language that also speaks and that he is unable to dominate, one that strives, fails, and falls silent and that he cannot manipulate, the language he spoke at one time and that now has separated itself from him, now gravitating in a space increasingly silent. (PT 65/242) And yet, Foucault is a historian and an archivist with a passionate interest in actual life, in bodies and how we treat them, in things and how we define them. His key works consist not of fantastic visions of language but of historical analyses of life in the world. So how did this dual interest affect his account of language?

The surface and the death of man When P. Caruso asked Foucault in an interview in 1967 about his “spiritual masters,” Foucault answered that for a long time, there was an unresolved conflict in him. There was a tension between “a passion for Bataille and Blanchot,” on one hand, and an interest in what Foucault describes as “certain positive studies, like those of Dumézil and Lévi-Strauss,” on the other hand.7 The structural ethnography of George Dumézil and Claude Levi-Strauss stood against the avant-garde writing of Bataille and Blanchot.8 Foucault goes on to note that the common denominator between these areas of interest was the “religious question” and that they both led him to “the theme of the disappearance of the subject” (W 98/614). That is to say, the writers and the ethnographic scholars were united in their critique of transcendence and, hence, their critique of the subject. Foucault found a way to combine the two.

24  The surface of appearances The initial conflict eventually turned into a methodological and philosophical approach guided by these disparate interests. The dissolution of the subject in Blanchot’s notion of a language of the outside (to which we shall return), and Bataille’s transgressive eroticism similarly questioning the subject, were brought together with the structural and functional analyses of Dumézil and Lévi-Strauss. The result, as described by Foucault in the interview, “simplifying things a bit,” was a rigorous discourse on structure that led to a negative discourse on the subject. It was a discursive analysis of knowledge instigating a notion of knowledge no longer dependent on the subject but instead, “in short,” Foucault says, “a discourse similar to Bataille’s and Blanchot’s” (W 98/614). Earlier in the interview, Foucault had already indicated the way in which the death of the subject in Blanchot and Bataille is supported by his structurally inspired approach. His own studies have suggested, he says, that knowledge can in fact be described without reference to the subject. The cogito is not inevitable for analysis of knowledge: It is surely significant that I have been able to describe structures of knowledge as a whole without ever referring to the cogito, even though people were for several centuries convinced of the impossibility of analyzing knowledge without starting from the cogito. (W 95/610) The connection between the dissolution of the subject in Blanchot and Bataille and the structuralism in Lévi-Strauss and Dumézil suggests an approach to the study of knowledge in which the depth of the cogito is replaced by the surface of knowledge. The approach is put to work and made concrete in The Order of Things, published a year before Caruso’s interview.9 The book famously depicts how the journey of the human sciences is a journey that begins with God and ends with the disappearance of the subject. Until the end of the sixteenth century, words and their meanings belonged to God, Foucault argues, while in modern thought they belong to man. The notion of God controlling the words, possessing the knowledge of their meanings (hidden to man), was replaced by man, the knowing subject, who in modernity was seen to hide the meanings of words from himself, in accordance with psychoanalytic thought. Just as divine knowledge was partly hidden from man in premodern thought, so was human knowledge in the twentieth century. Accordingly, Foucault suggests that the role of the priest guiding man in his search for knowledge about God is replaced by the therapist guiding man in his search for the hidden truth about himself. In order for this substitution of man for God to be possible, however, there had to be a change in the account of language. There had to be an alteration in the way language was understood to relate to the world of things and experiences. Words and things had to be separated from their

The surface of appearances 25 initial mystical bond of divine and transcendent meaning and then reconnected in the subject through an immanent account of meaning, that is, in a logic of signification. And such changes at the very foundation of language continue. The story does not end with modern thinking substituting God for man. Foucault argues that a next step, a step beyond the subject, is expressed, for instance, in modern literature by writers, like Stéphane Mallarmé, who manage to free language from any point of view and thus from the transcendental subject.10 Still, as suggested in the interview, Foucault’s investigation itself could equally well serve to exemplify the move beyond the subject. The plain fact that Foucault’s story of the history of Western science can be told indicates that neither God nor man is required for knowledge. Foucault’s study itself shows not only that representation has changed from being guided by the divine to being led by, and finally reach beyond, the human but also that knowledge can be described without final reference to neither of the two. Just as the space for man as the center of knowledge appeared during a certain historical time, it is likely that other spaces will open beyond the humanistic paradigm (and that the subject will reappear in different forms, as in Foucault’s later work).11 Knowledge changes; language changes; thus, likewise do the roles and functions of God and man alike. Since this history as such may be written, moreover, is not the era of Man already passé? And if so, on what basis is the story told? What is the surface on which we stand together with Foucault, watching the course of history and the appearance of “all the mutations of the same”? Well, to Foucault at this stage the surface is still—as in the 1963 essay—described as language. Language provides the ground for Foucault’s study as well as for his object: the history of Western knowledge. Language is the surface, the neutral plane, on which the drama of Western knowledge is enacted. Language provides the ground on which these differences may appear. But just what is language? If language is not representational in the ways that we have known—a tool for describing and discovering reality in relation to an exterior viewpoint—then what is it? We have already noted the notion of a language to infinity, but in The Order of Things, as well as in his essay on Blanchot written the same year, Foucault, turning again to Borges, also introduces the notion of language as a “nonplace.”12 In the introduction to The Order of Things, Foucault quotes Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia in which the animals are divided into categories: (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) those included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. (OT xv/7)

26  The surface of appearances Borges’s list destroys the common ground, the implicit sense of logic that, were it still operating, would ensure that this could never be a coherent enumeration. Yet, it exists: there is such a list in Borges’s short story. But where could the listed things ever meet, Foucault asks, except on the page transcribing the list or through the voice reading it—where else but in this strange “nonplace” that we call language, and that we trust with representing the world? (OT xvi—xvii/8). The entire Western history of knowledge has entrusted language with the precarious task of describing, arranging, and even unveiling what we see and experience. In other words, while the history of knowledge goes through enormous transformation, a fundamental faith in language and its possibility of capturing what we see with what we say remains basically intact until the end of the twentieth century. The nonplace of language is, up until then, the space in which we aspire to find Knowledge. As long as a representational account of language is presupposed, moreover, a similar assumption must be made regarding the order of nature, the actual order of things, Foucault explains. The things are still language’s mute other, and the objects that language attempts to represent must be structured accordingly, or language will fail; representation will be erroneous (OT 146/159). While Foucault notes this predicament, he himself still describes the surface of knowledge as language, as we have seen. But this is soon to change.

Thingness Gary Gutting has wittily noted that Foucault’s more substantial works share a certain dramaturgy that partly explains their force and attraction. Gutting, himself a devoted Foucault scholar, argues that the power of Foucault’s writing derives not only from the boldly rewritten histories and theories but also from something possibly less consciously developed, namely, a mythic structure that shapes many of his books. Foucault’s histories are, to a large extent, fashioned on rather traditional dramatic features of struggles between monsters and heroes. In The History of Madness, Gutting states, there is an ongoing drama, a struggle between the terrors imposed on the mad by moralistic psychiatrists and the amazing transgressions of mad artists such as Nietzsche, van Gogh, and Artaud.13 Apart from simply telling the story, Foucault’s prose enhances the horrors of the “monster psychiatrists” and the innocence of the misunderstood “hero artists,” turning the history of madness into a page-turner.14 A similar dramatic dynamic drives The Order of Things, I find, making this history of science into a captivating read. But who is the oppressed and who is the oppressor in the history of Western science? Whose is the voice that is silenced in this story of Western scientific development? What is it that exists but always through the words of another, first through the word of God and then through the word of man? I will not imply that it is the things in themselves, but I will suggest that it is things in their superficial

The surface of appearances 27 complexity—the surface of appearances. In Foucault’s investigation there is nothing beneath history; the ever-changing knowledge surface, our horizon, is all there is. What we regard as interior, as situated in the depths, is always already exterior to us (OT 239/252). On the other hand, however, to our knowledge there is still something beneath knowledge, and to that extent the surface is nothing but a landscape of appearances with enigmatic things-inthemselves and things-for-us side by side. Foucault describes it in relation to the paradigmatic Kantian change in knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century and the new space it opens. This space, in Foucault’s view, still influences thought; it “still forms the immediate space of our reflection. We think in that area” (OT 384/396). Within this area of thought there is an existence, a mysterious presence of another reality that is not knowledge, neither man nor God, but reality as materiality—what Foucault describes in relation to late eighteenth-century thought as a “metaphysics of the object, or more exactly, metaphysics of that never objectifiable depth from which objects rise up toward our superficial knowledge” (OT 245/258). W. J. T. Mitchell draws on Foucault’s description of the Kantian paradigm in order to make a distinction between object and thing. This distinction helps to illustrate the enigmatic aspects ascribed to things in this account: “Objects,” Mitchell writes, are the way things appear to a subject—that is, with a name, an identity, a gestalt or stereotypical template, a description, a use or function, a history, a science. Things, on the other hand, are simultaneously nebulous and obdurate, sensuously concrete and vague. A thing appears as a stand-in when you have forgotten the name of an object. (Mitchell 2005, 156) When we have forgotten the name of an object, for example, we say, “Hand me that thing over there, the one next to that green thing.” In this sense, Mitchell argues, “things play the role of a raw material, an amorphous, shapeless, brute materiality awaiting organization by a system of objects.”15 Mitchell’s distinction touches on one element of what I will describe as a mystery of things in Foucault’s work on art, namely, an account of materiality that neither involves magical, enchanted, or sacred ideas nor understands materiality as objectified or merely instrumentalized matter. Things, to Foucault, are not the Kantian things in-themselves; things and objects are merely two kinds of appearances to human knowledge in his analysis. Foucault’s aim in his archaeological work is not, as Carrette rightly underlines, to grasp the “object” or “thing” presented: “What he seeks is not the object outside discourse, but ‘the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse.’ ”16 Foucault strives merely to describe the way things appear on the discursive surface, and he says this himself in The Archaeology of Knowledge: “What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with ‘things.’ To ‘depresentify’ them” (AK 47/65). He is not interested in the

28  The surface of appearances things themselves. They have no place in his study, he claims, at least not in the sense we understand them through our still-Kantian habits of thought. He is not interested in what things really are, as if this muteness could be given a voice. On the other hand, however, he goes on to underline that “to suppress the stage of ‘things in themselves’ is not necessarily to return to the linguistic analysis of meaning” (AK 48/65). To refrain from speaking about the things in themselves does not have to instigate a purely linguistic account of knowledge. His endeavor is not about presenting an abstract, systematic, and structural account of reality by way of words but to let the surface of appearances, including words, things, and objects stand forth in its complexity: What we are concerned with here is not to neutralize discourse, to make it the sign of something else, and to pierce through its density in order to reach what remains silently anterior to it, but on the contrary to maintain it in its consistency, to make it emerge in its own complexity. (AK 47/65) He does not wish to make the surface the sign of something else, to pierce through it in order to reach a muteness that precedes it. Rather, he wishes to preserve its texture and let its complexity stand forth. By the end of The Order of Things a clear distinction between words and things is hard to maintain, and in the subsequent The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault leaves the notion of language behind and substitutes it for discourse. On the plane on which the drama of Western knowledge is enacted there were appearances of undefined thingies next to objects and statements; hence, this plane could not be accurately described as language.17 The notion of language was simply no longer adequate to capture what he was after. His interest in paintings remained, however, and this appears to concur with the development just described. Throughout his career Foucault returned to writing about painting as an expression of intention and materiality, as a tangible integration of words and things on a visible surface of appearance. The surface of the canvas appears as embodied discursive knowledge combining techniques, plain material, and creative ideas. To Gilles Deleuze, it is precisely this merging of words and things—which also includes a separation—that is the key to understanding Foucault. Foucault is as much “the eyes and the voice,” Deleuze argues, “he never stopped being a voyant.” Foucault brought together a linguistic and a phenomenological interest to an epistemology that, in Deleuze’s view, also may be seen as a kind of neo-Kantianism.18 For Foucault, reality appears always— though in different ways in different times—as the visible and the sayable, as visibilities and statements. Those are the “a priori conditions under which all ideas are formulated and behavior displayed,” Deleuze states. He goes on to underline the distinction between Foucault and Kant, noting that for

The surface of appearances 29 the former there is no surface versus depth, but rather, it is all about the exterior, the surface, and the conditions of actual experiences, again on the surface—but these conditions describe the appearances of the object rather than the conditions of a universal subject (F 60/68). The discursive element, whether word or thing, directly constitutes knowledge: “the lesson of things and the lesson of grammar,” Deleuze concludes (F 50/57). In that sense, Deleuze writes, “being” to Foucault is what appears as words and things, as statements and visibilities; while they are related, the relation is infinitely asymmetrical. Appearance—or what Deleuze also names the language-being and the light-being—conveys the epistemological rules and regulations that shape our knowledge and thus reality as we know it, but the one cannot simply be translated into or described by the other (F 109/117). Hence, in Deleuze’s account, the words and things, the language-being and the lightbeing in Foucault, express far more than what is commonly given when one translates a thing into a word as an answer to the question, “What is that?” A word expresses more than the thing it is said to represent, and the thing expresses more than the word describing it. Therefore, viewing appearance as being might make the world more superficial but hardly less complex. To view the world as surface does not entail viewing the appearances of this world as smooth or evened out, but to see the complexity of reality arising from the face of the earth as it comes to us. This allows us to view reality in the way in which Borges views language: as the chaotic expression of the library shelves of Babel. Deleuze’s description of the roles played by language-being and lightbeing in Foucault illuminates the return to words and things as performative materiality after the representational separation that I have attempted to sketch above. It is a notion of materiality and performativity that is enabled by the detachment of words and things from God and man, respectively. In such a postrepresentational account, words and things are considered realities that affect our world and thought in ways we can neither overlook nor control. They do not represent a particular truth—they cannot be described through definitions or illustrations—since their effect, the multiplicity of their meaning and function, exceeds our definitions and illustrations. They simply do not fit the pattern of thought that is structured through representational regulations such as those of classical rhetoric. Nor, however, does this account of words and things as realities in their own right necessarily express a vitalistic account of reality because reality is for Foucault what is present on the surface of human knowledge. His surface of appearance is about knowledge, not about ontology. In order to allay possible misconceptions of Foucault arising from Deleuze’s reading, John S. Ransom published a 1997 article titled “Forget Vitalism” in which he argued against confusing Foucault’s thinking with that of vitalists like Deleuze. Foucault’s notion of the world does not imply that the vitalism of life is repressed by dominating power structures, Ransom holds; rather, power is as creative and productive as it is repressive, and

30  The surface of appearances there is nothing beneath this dynamic to repress.19 In my view, an additional reason not to follow a vitalist track of thought is that Foucault’s surface thinking is more of a methodological than an ontological approach to reality. His account of knowledge as an infinite surface is not merely a discovery by Foucault as philosopher but also by Foucault as archivist and historian. The appearances of language-being and light-being are not ontological revelations, or anything strange, and in that sense are nothing mysterious but are simply a consequence of the human search for knowledge and its development through the course of time. Although Foucault is not reducible to vitalistic trajectories of thought, his thinking does incite what today could be regarded as a spiritual sense of materiality and performativity: a mystery of things. If we approach the world as it appears rather than as it ought to be, common categorizations and borders—such as the clear distinction between things and words—are soon blurred. To some extent, words and things have a force of their own, in their materiality as hard-to-define thingies, as a mystery of things. In a postrepresentational account of reality, words tend to become things, and things tend to become words. Both express knowledge, but neither can be captured by the other. Words as things and things as words are in part mysteries to us. Their force is outside of our control in the way in which Foucault, through Bataille, described the philosopher’s loss of power over language. The force of the materiality and performativity of words and things is thus, in short, a mystery. But what are the implications of considering it a mystery? Is this discourse now sanctified? Have things as words and words as things now reopened unto the divine dimension? Thus far, we have seen how Foucault found a shared critique of transcendence in his disparate sources of inspiration. Avant-garde literature and structuralist studies shared a rejection of religion that opened the way to a new historical method. That method, in turn, led him from language to discourse and to an account of knowledge according to which words and things have partly overlapping functions. This transition triggered a destabilization of knowledge through a distortion of the descriptive function of language and of the objectifiability of things. In closing this chapter, we shall now glimpse the possible theological implications of this philosophical development. Through Foucault’s analysis of Flaubert, the account of knowledge that emerged as the result of the death of God and man alike returns to and inverts the transcendences it once left behind.

Materiality and spirituality In “Fantasia of the Library” (1967), Foucault famously states that “Flaubert is to the library what Manet is to the museum.”20 We shall return to this suggestion when we explore Foucault on Manet, but at this stage we can note that Foucault suggests Manet and Flaubert alike help turn the notion of literature and painting around, so that neither is expected to

The surface of appearances 31 reveal a mute, absent reality but are put forward as expressions of discursive knowledge in themselves. Flaubert’s writing, Foucault argues, managed to throw light on the book as book and on writing as writing. Instead of viewing the novel as an entry to another world that denies the materiality of the present, the “black and white surface of printed signs,” Flaubert did the opposite. Instead of pointing away from the book as thing, Flaubert directed the reader’s awareness toward it (FL 90–91/9). Likewise, Foucault holds, Manet manages to direct his viewers away from the idea of paintings as windows into an absent world and toward paintings as tangible, rectangular painted canvases as well as to the activity of painting as painting. After Manet and Flaubert, Foucault holds, neither the museum nor the library is regarded as an entrance to other worlds. Instead, these things—books and paintings—have become important in their own materiality as a crucial part of what they are and of what they do. Books and canvases now exist as things within works of art, Foucault states, and this is thanks to Flaubert and Manet, respectively (FL 93/11). Paintings and books exist on the surface of knowledge—on the very library shelves and museum walls—multiplying words and images endlessly. To Foucault at this stage, the appearance of objects becomes as vital as language in constructing reality as we know it; hence, the materiality of painted canvas surfaces may be regarded as embodied knowledge. In the same essay, Foucault discusses this interrelation between knowledge and materiality, words and things, through Flaubert’s books The Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pécuchet. Here, as we shall see, the spiritual implications of the knowledge surface stand forth. In his analysis of Flaubert, sacred as well as secular knowledge is presented as the material reality of words and things in their discursive appearances. In Foucault’s reading of Flaubert, moreover, to become one with this surface of knowledge turns into a spiritual ideal. To merge with the surface of appearances is to be blessed and released. The traditional ideal of transcending the surface—whether through spiritual practice or academic practice, whether through God or through the subject—is substituted for a new ideal: becoming one with the world as it appears. To reach the “highest” knowledge is now to bend down and to marinate oneself in the surface of appearances— in accordance with a reasoning wherein the very idea of a higher knowledge is but one expression of many upon the surface of knowledge. In his analysis of Flaubert, Foucault expresses what could be described—using the parlance of Nietzsche—as an ideal of amor fati: to love the world as it stands forth. And as we shall see this is also about becoming one with matter. Let us take a short glimpse into how Foucault argues for such an understanding through Flaubert. First, Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet are two copy clerks who meet and become inseparable friends. The two are more or less identical to each other in temperament and character, and together they search for knowledge, not within any particular field but across every possible scientific and academic branch. Their search merely leads to disappointments; they become for the

32  The surface of appearances author ciphers depicting the weakness of human knowledge. In Foucault’s description, Bouvard and Pécuchet are “indefatigable pilgrims,” and as such they are not merely an image of the infinity of the modern surface of knowledge but are, in fact, this surface materialized. Their eager search for knowledge makes them “try everything, they touch and are drawn to everything.” Whatever they read or hear immediately turns into things for them to do, to try, and to explore. In Foucault’s account, they are modern pilgrims searching for the higher truth of modernity. But like Job of the Hebrew Bible, they are abandoned by their God—science. Yet they do not give up; their fidelity is strong, and their desire for knowledge makes them persist. “They are saints,” Foucault concludes; “Bouvard and Pécuchet are directly tempted by books, by their endless multiplicity, by the frothing of works in the gray expanse of the library” (FL 106–7/28–29). In Foucault’s description, this inseparable couple—one but two—becomes an expression of the infinity of the modern plane of knowledge. Their pilgrimage is a quest for knowledge, but because it is inevitably infused with the infinity of knowledge endlessly multiplying itself, it can lead nowhere but to nonsense and stupidity.21 This is not altogether bad because, for Flaubert, the connection between sanctity and stupidity is, in fact, crucial, Foucault avers. Bouvard and Pécuchet’s unfaltering search for truth transforms them into the very surface of knowledge that in its totality can be described as nothing but stupidity simply due to its infinity. When constantly doing what they read, they themselves become what they read; they turn into the infinity of knowledge or, in Foucault’s words, “into the continuous movement of the book” (FL 109/31). For Foucault, this is the copy clerks’ great achievement. The way in which they marinate themselves in knowledge merely to turn into the surface of knowledge themselves and thus into nothing but nonsense is, in fact, the final achievement of knowledge as it actually appears beyond our illusions and delusions of higher truths. Hence, their goal of encompassing modern knowledge is achieved. Saint Anthony, on the other hand, is on a quest for sanctity but encounters a number of temptations on his journey. In Foucault’s description, Anthony’s faith, like that of Bouvard and Pecuchét, exposes Flaubert’s fascination with the connection between stupidity and sanctity. Saint Anthony is finally at a stage where he has given up his former desire to transcend the material world, and now he wishes to be nothing but matter: “He wishes to be a dumb creature—an animal, a plant, a cell. He wishes to be pure matter” (FL 108/30). But just when he is about to accomplish this final desire, when he has given up any will to transcend reality, he is faced with Christ: “He kneels down and returns to his prayers.” But what does this mean, Foucault wonders; is he perhaps purely back where he started? Or has he nevertheless become one with matter, one with his actions, like Bouvard and Pécuchet? In Foucault’s words, “is he now able to perform, through his prayers, prostrations, and readings, this mindless sanctity he has become?” Per Foucault’s reading, Anthony’s prayers have finally become mindless and meaningless,

The surface of appearances 33 in the sense that they have become what they are; actions, movements, matter, and thus sanctified. Foucault concludes: “Saint Anthony was able to triumph over the Eternal Book in becoming the languageless movement of pure matter” (FL 109/31). Saint Anthony has succeeded in his striving for sanctification by discovering Christian practice freed from transcendence. To Foucault, this is spiritual and material all at once.22 When Anthony becomes one with his actions, he is liberated from the delusions of the spirituality of transcendence and has reached the insights of the world of appearances. In 1967, while the death-of-God movement within theology was at its height, the purely material spirituality elevated by Foucault on Flaubert might nevertheless have been too heterodox for the larger theological discussion. Today, however, I believe that such an account of liturgical materiality may very well serve as theological inspiration, and I aspire to pave that road in the coming discussions. There is an aspect in Foucault’s essay on Flaubert, moreover, that foreshadows ideas developed in the very last pieces of writing that we shall discuss in the following. The move from thought to action that takes place in both these Flaubertian stories—with the copy clerks’ scientific activity and Saint Anthony’s spiritual activity—anticipates the political implications of Foucault’s merging of action and thinking in his later writings. In Foucault’s oeuvre a distinct political turn occurs around 1970. After 1970, his basic ideas of the mystery of things—understood as the surface of appearances, the infinity of language, the complexity of discourse—remains vital, but the surface turns more political in his writing and thinking. The amor fati approach to the knowledge surface in Flaubert, as portrayed earlier, steps back and gives way to a slightly different ideal. While still accepting knowledge as a surface of words and things, our presence on the surface of appearances now involves also the power of creating knowledge, as well as of being created by the knowledge that precedes us. Knowledge for Foucault is now always also about power, which, in turn, affects the notion of the surface of appearances. In the last two Foucault essays discussed in the succeeding chapters, the painted surfaces do not merely convey discursive knowledge but may also transmit political forces. The surface of appearance, the mystery of things, is not only a source for knowledge but also for political motivation. We shall see how the mystery of things, and Foucault’s notion of art, turn political and how this affects his thinking as well as the implications for the radical theology explored in this book. The Foucauldian mystery of things will be brought into theological thought as a challenge and a source of inspiration, instigating marvel and urging action. In relation to contemporary theology, we shall experiment with different aspects and angles of the material and performative account that regards appearance as being: what appears is what is. Let us turn, then, to the first of the canvas surfaces to be explored, Velázquez’s Las Meninas.

34  The surface of appearances

Notes 1 Foucault, “À quoi rêvent les philosophes?” in Dits et écrits 1954–1988, vol. 2: 1970–1975 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 706. 2 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 194; L’archéologie du savoir, 253. Hereafter this text is cited as AK followed by page numbers in the English and French editions, respectively, separated by a slash (e.g., AK 194/253). 3 On the relationship between Borges and Foucault, see for instance Gerry O’Sullivan, “The Library Is on Fire: Intertextuality in Borges and Foucault,” in Borges and His Successors: The Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts, ed. Edna Alzenberg (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 109–21. 4 Foucault, “Language to Infinity,” in Carrette, ed., Religion and Culture, 66; “Le langage à l’infini,” in Dits et écrits 1954–1988, vol. 1: 1954–1969 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 260. Hereafter this text is cited as LI followed by page numbers in the English and French editions. 5 Read today I can only admire Borges’s prophetic ability; the library of Babel, is that not a rather spot-on description of the surface of the screen, the infinity of language on the internet? 6 Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Carrette, ed., Religion and Culture, 65; “Préface à la transgression,” in Dits et écrits, 1:242. Hereafter this text is cited as PT followed by page numbers in the English and French editions. 7 Foucault, “Who Are You, Professor Foucault?” in Carrette, ed., Religion and Culture, 98; “Qui êtes-vous, professeur Foucault?” in Dits et écrits, 1:614. Hereafter this text is cited as W followed by page numbers in the English and French editions. 8 Or as Jones Irwin concludes, “One source is the ethnography of Claude LéviStrauss and Georges Dumézil, while the other source is the avant-garde writing of Bataille, Klossowski and Maurice Blanchot” (Jones Irwin, “Heterodox Religion and Post-Atheism: Bataille/Klossowski/Foucault,” in Minerva: An Internet Journal of Philosophy 10 [2006]: 215–44, quote on 218). 9 Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966; New York: Vintage, 1990); Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). Hereafter this text is cited as OT followed by page numbers in the English and French editions. 10 “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” (OT 306/317). 11 “In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words—in short, in all the episodes of that profound history of the Same—only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear” (OT 386/398). 12 “Language, in its attentive and forgetful being, with its power of dissimulation that effaces every determinate meaning and even the existence of the speaker, in the grey neutrality that constitutes the essential hiding place of all being and thereby frees the space of the image—is neither truth nor time, neither eternity nor man; it is instead the always undone form of the outside” (Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot: Thought from the Outside,” Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Brian Massumi [Cambridge, MA: Zone, 1990], 57; “La pensée du dehors,” in Dits et écrits, 1:539). 13 Gary Gutting, “Introduction: Michel Foucault; A User’s Manual,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd ed., ed. Gary Gutting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–28, quote on 21.

The surface of appearances 35 14 To Gutting, this is just one example of many: “Although Foucault’s monsters take different forms from book to book, all are manifestations of the grand bogeyman of French intellectuals since Flaubert: bourgeois society. Hatred of the institutions of this society—particularly the family and conventional morality—gives power and intensity to Foucault’s prose. But it also renders him uncharacteristically insensitive to the complexities and nuances of the despised phenomena. They remain little more than scarecrows on his historical landscapes, and their logical function is, appropriately, that of straw men” (Gutting, “Introduction,” 21). 15 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 156. 16 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 102. 17 David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Vintage, 1993), 200. 18 Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (London: Continuum, 2004), 60, 109; Foucault (Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1986), 68, 117. Hereafter this text is cited as F followed by page numbers in the English and French editions. 19 John S. Ransom, “Forget Vitalism: Foucault and Lebensphilosophie,” in Philosophy and Social Criticism 23, no. 1 (January 1997): 33–47, quote on 36. 20 Foucault, “Fantasia of the Library,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Prac tice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 93; “La bibliothèque fantastique,” http://issuu.com, 11. Hereafter this text is cited as FL followed by page numbers in the English and French editions. 21 Again, we encounter a prophetic vision since we may easily translate Bouvard and Pécuchet’s search on the surface of knowledge to surfing the internet. 22 Carrette, drawing on Kitty Mrosovsky, relates Foucault’s admiration for Flaubert to his interest in silence (Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 35). While not disagreeing, I hope the current investigation will suggest that Foucault’s discussions on speech versus silence should not conceal the aspect of an appearance of matter that, silent or not, take part in forming and deforming the surface of knowledge.

2 Velázquez The place of theology

Foucault’s The Order of Things depicts the historical journey of Western scientific thought from God to the subject yet foreshadows a third step.1 This epic journey 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” (OT 387/398). Before Foucault sets out on his historical expedition, however, The Order of Things opens with an analysis of Spanish painter Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas. Already at the opening of the book, Foucault’s art analysis indicates simultaneously the coming of man and the disruption of the subject with new spaces for thought opening after the death of God and man alike. In 1984, Mark C. Taylor noted the theological force of these new spaces in his groundbreaking Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology. For Taylor, Foucault’s analysis of the vague mirror image at the center of Velázquez’s painting held a theological promise. The void, the identity lacking at the core of Velázquez’s composition, implies the distortion of the subject, Taylor argued, and for Taylor this distortion had direct theological implications: “First the transcendent God, then the incarnate Christ, and finally the self itself disappear—die.”2 In one enigmatic image, the mirror in Velázquez’s Las Meninas depicted the entire narrative of the death of God leading up to the death of man, which, in turn, questioned what we used to know as human knowledge. This dual death, in other words, provided a space for the poststructural theology that Taylor was one of the first to pursue. In Taylor’s view, the humanistic atheists did not go far enough. If God is dead, then the death of man necessarily follows, he argued; hence, there can be no position left from which to declare an atheist position. Atheism is stuck in a humanistic worldview that has not yet embraced the death of man. In order to fully inhabit the space opened by this dual death, he contended, atheism has to negate itself; hence, Taylor introduced his posthumanistic a/theology, which, in turn, shed new light on the Christian narrative.3 In his view, the death of God and man “eternally appears in the infinite play of the scripture, a death that spreads the incarnate word through a process of unending dissemination.”4 God’s death is not a once-and-for-all event in time but an eternal recurrence of diffusion present in the biblical narrative. The deaths

Velázquez 37 of God and man disclosed, for Taylor, the space of theology’s constant selfdestruction: a/theology as an incessant dispersion of knowledge. In this chapter I would like to continue the theological discussion initiated by Taylor thirty years ago by suggesting that we examine further just how this space after God and man appears in Foucault’s analysis. In the previous chapter we briefly discussed Foucault’s contribution in The Order of Things. I argued that thingness—the presence of things as a surface of appearances— played an important role in his historical depiction of Western knowledge. In line with this suggestion, my reasoning in the following points out the significance of materiality in Foucault’s analysis of Velázquez while at the same time suggesting the theological implications of the role assigned to materiality in Foucault’s thinking at this stage. If we follow Foucault, I argue, perhaps the move beyond God and man does not end in an infinite dissemination in a purely abstract sense but in a diffusion that also involves a rather concrete space where knowledge is created and re-created. In my view, the space for knowledge after God and the subject, as it appears in Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas, is the invisible yet also physical place of representation, a tangible and concrete albeit erratic place before the canvas, a place over which neither God nor the subject rules. In the final section of this chapter, I tentatively explore possible theological consequences of the concrete yet erratic space for human knowledge in Foucault’s essay on Velázquez. To do so, I will invite another theological voice to accompany Taylor, namely, the postmetaphysical theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet, who has explored the ambiguousness of theological knowledge in relation to the very materiality of Christian faith, especially with respect to liturgical practice and sacramentality.

Las Meninas In Foucault’s early version of The Order of Things, the reader was thrown right into his historical exposé. The book opened with a historical statement: “Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture” (OT 17/32). Convinced by his editor, however, Foucault agreed to let his already-published analysis of Velázquez’s Las Meninas open the book instead.5 As a result, the book starts in a moment of suspension. Foucault describes the gesture of the painter in Velázquez’s masterpiece as caught in an in-between. The painter’s hand is found motionless between the paint and the canvas.6 The painter has just stepped back from his work and is standing still, studying his object. He seems to be looking straight at us, “our bodies, our faces, our eyes”—are we his object, or is he ours? (OT 4/20). Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656; Figure 2.1) is considered one of the most important and often discussed paintings in 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

38  Velázquez

Figure 2.1  Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, oil on canvas, 1656 Source: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

(the only surviving child of King Philip IV and his second wife Mariana of Austria) is surrounded by her entourage of maids of honor (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 outward beyond the pictorial space to where a viewer of the painting would be standing and where, one would assume, his object is positioned. In the background there appears to be a mirror that reflects the

Velázquez 39 upper bodies of a couple barely identifiable as King Philip IV and Queen Mariana. If it is, in fact, a mirror, as 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.7 In the doorway at the back of the large room, carrying a large square object, is Don José Nieto Velázquez, who was the queen’s chamberlain, keeper of the royal tapestries, and Velázquez’s relative. According to Spanish philosopher and aesthetician José Ortega y Gasset, one of the major paradigm changes in European painting occurred in the art of Velázquez. With Velázquez, the step was taken toward what Ortega calls “distant vision” painting, a way of painting that begins with the eye, with the very pupil of the artist. Velázquez 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. Earlier, 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, wherein the viewer is likewise expected to hold her eye still and to view the painting all at once from one single viewpoint—the artist’s viewpoint. Or, in Ortega’s words, “Velázquez decides to fix despotically the point of view.”8 According to American theologian William Carl Placher, Velázquez’s use of the distant-vision perspective in Las Meninas has theological implications. The subjective perspective of Velázquez’s painting, the “distant vision” perspective, asks the viewer to take a stand and yet, Placher argues, the playful composition of Las Meninas finally pushes the viewer out by revealing the artist’s actual models in the mirror: “Velázquez 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.”9 In Placher’s view, the Gospel writers, in comparison, accomplish the complete opposite effect. Like Velázquez, they clearly take subjective viewpoints to enhance the realism of their stories—as Erich Auerbach has shown in Mimesis, his study of the realism of the biblical stories—but unlike Velázquez, the Gospel writers finally ask their readers to do the same. The Gospel writers expect their readers either to enter the story and surrender to its truth or to say, “No thank you,” and close the book. To that extent, using art terminology, the Gospel writers can be said to write in a “distant vision” perspective, while the Greek authors of the same time, with whose work Auerbach compares the Gospels, use a more descriptive mode of writing. The latter mode would then be comparable to the artistic expressions that Velázquez reacted against by introducing the fixed point of view. Yet the use of perspective in Las Meninas still differs from that of the Gospel writers, Placher argues, because in the Gospels 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 excluded, he holds.

40  Velázquez Taylor draws completely different theological conclusions from the fact that we, the viewers, are somehow reflected—and definitely not reflected— in the painting at the same time. The place for “man,” for the subject, which Foucault will continue to discuss throughout The Order of Things, he already here in the beginning of his historical exposé describes as an ambiguous place. And it is in this very ambiguity that Taylor, contrary to Placher, sees a theological opening. Or rather, he sees an opening for a theology that has negated the humanistic starting point of theological thought. But let us take a closer look at Foucault’s analysis before returning to the theological considerations, given that for Foucault Las Meninas is not about theology but serves as an entrance into an exploration of the relation between words and things in the history of Western knowledge. For Foucault, Velázquez’s painting introduces uncertainties in visual representation at a time when paintings were generally looked on as windows onto the world and as representations of reality. Foucault regards Las Meninas as an early critique of the classical and representational paradigm, which to Foucault is the era in Western knowledge characterized by faith in a rather plain logic of representation. It is the era that followed the medieval period, in which words were still seen as carrying a divine truth that needed to be revealed and laid bare for knowledge to be achieved. Like things, words, in this period needed to be examined in order for their inner truth to stand forth. The classical era precedes, on the other hand, the modern era, in which words once again became the object of scrutiny for their true meaning to stand forth. In the modern era, the truth of a word does not denote a divine reality, however, but may indicate a hidden truth about the speaking subject. The classical paradigm, in comparison, is a time in-between the divine and the humanistic foci of Western knowledge. It is for Foucault a discourse in which representation shapes the knowledge produced, in the sense that words and images have clearly distinct yet interrelated functions. Images were employed to tell the truth about reality, about the world; they were expected to represent reality. Words, on the other hand, were employed to explain reality. A word was not a thing that needed to be scrutinized, but merely a means to explain, to categorize, and to label the world. An image, similarly, was not in itself a reality to be explored but a depiction of reality. In Velázquez’s composition, though, representation is anything but plain, Foucault notes. We view someone who appears to be representing something, but what reality is he, in fact, representing? There could be several different answers to that question, as we have already seen: Does the mirror reflect us, the viewers, or the painter’s models, or the painting he is working on? The answers depend not merely on the representing subject, nor on the viewing subject, but also on things, Foucault demonstrates—on the plain fact that a canvas has two surfaces, a front and a back side. It depends on angles and perspectives, on color and form, but also on light: on which surfaces are lit up and which remain obscure. Indeed, Foucault’s entire analysis is completely caught up in the internal reality of this painting as painting.

Velázquez 41 He meticulously discusses the composition as a work of color and form, paint and brush, as a reality set on the surface of a rectangular canvas. He enters the history of knowledge not by way of abstractions concerning paradigms of thought, or about the role of the thinking subject, but through the material reality in which this history is set. Foucault shows how the painting’s material reality is linked to the inevitable asymmetry between what we see and what we show and between to be seen and to see. The question of what reality Velázquez’s painter represents remains unanswered since what appears to our vision and what we show to others are two different expressions on the surface of knowledge.

Incompatible visibilities Las Meninas catches the painter in the middle of his oscillation between canvas and paint and thus also between the visible and the invisible, according to Foucault. 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. “He rules,” in Foucault’s words, “at the threshold of those two incompatible visibilities” (OT 3–4/19–20). This suggests that to see is distinct from being seen and, moreover, that to show, to represent something for another, is something different from being represented: the one cannot be translated into the other without an alteration of expression. The entire left side of the painting is filled with the reverse side of the canvas, Foucault underlines. As a consequence, what the painter sees and has represented on the canvas is invisible to us as spectators. This composition suggests once again that to see and to represent are two distinct activities enacting different accounts of the world. The canvas, to that extent, is unavoidably—or even “absolutely”—invisible to us. As viewers, however, we are still drawn into this drama. We are drawn in by the simple fact that the painter in the image is looking at us while working on a canvas that we cannot see. 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” (OT 4/20). We are drawn into the painting’s drama, but who are we? The Infanta figure is important in Velázquez’s painting as indicated by his use of the distant vision perspective; also, her significance is enhanced by an older painting technique: one of her attendants is kneeling and looking straight at her (OT 12/28). Nevertheless, the painting indicates that someone even more important is sitting in front of the entire scene because the Infanta herself and several other figures in the painting are looking at this someone. Is that someone me? As viewers of Las Meninas we are forced to do two kinds of looking: in order to make sense of the image as viewers we are forced not only to view the scene but to identify with the figures in the image and to reverse our gaze back at our own position. To Foucault,

42  Velázquez Velázquez’s painting thus creates a space outside the canvas by way of the several gazes depicted in the painting: it creates a point outside the painting where the painting’s gazes meet the gazes of the viewers. The spectator’s gaze, the painter’s gaze (the painter as he is composing the piece we are currently discussing) 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. (OT 15/30) The place of the viewer/model in the very spot before the canvas stands forth as a concrete place on which the composition rests. Still, while this place is indicated by the picture, it remains invisible. Therefore, the place from which the painting could start to make sense remains invisible. Las Meninas creates, in Foucault’s words, “a neutral space,” a reciprocal visibility. Since we, the spectators, are in the place of the painter’s model, we are also placed in a void of neither/nor or both/and—model nor/and viewer—in a space of endless exchange where “subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to infinity.” The picture opens to a multiplicity of models and spectators.10 Why? Because to view the spot where viewing takes place is never the same as to view from that spot. The nonplace before the canvas is, to that extent, unavoidably invisible. It is an invisibility that does not merely imply that the subject is also object—that the seer is also seen—but an invisibility that diffracts in at least three different directions, toward three different “observing functions.” The nonrelation between seeing and being seen thus opens to multiplicity beyond the subject–object relation, the nonplace before the canvas multiplies the possible gazes.11 Consequently, the painting instigates for Foucault not only a problematization of the distinction between the representation, the represented, and the representing artist but also an effective identity-play and even a play with the notion of identity as such. The tangible fact that we can only see the reverse side of the canvas in Velázquez’s painting causes us as spectators to question our own role: “Because we can only see that reverse side, we do not know who we are or what we are doing. Seen or seeing?” (OT 5/21). Accordingly, the painting shows how a flat surface may create a space that questions human presuppositions to knowledge. The painting points out the position of the viewing subject as an elusive yet concrete place at the very center of being meaningful and making sense. The place clearly exists, as the entire composition is reliant on it; yet although it is a place for vision, it holds no specifiable viewing identity. While there is a place for viewing, the painting does not rely on the viewing subject but rather on the location and activity of viewing as such. To

Velázquez 43 that extent, the painting does not indicate the presence of an actual identity, which is why there is no subject to exclude. Identity is replaced with space and the activity of viewing from that space. When directing our attention to our place before the canvas, Velázquez inverts a word of advice he received from his teacher and father-in-law Francisco Pacheco (1564–1644), Foucault notes. “The image should stand out from the frame,” Pacheco said.12 The image, in Pacheco’s view, should make the viewer forget the frame, the material limitations of painting, and forget her erratic position as viewer and enter into the world of the image. Velázquez, however, did the opposite. The frame, the setting, and the place of the painting as canvas surface are instead allowed to stand out from the image, and hence, the subject position is questioned. Accordingly, the painting enacts the death of man: the dissolution of the subject and of stable identity. The erratic yet concrete place of the knowing subject in Foucault’s analysis of Velázquez grounds his ongoing negotiation with the subject notion throughout The Order of Things. The spectator is merely one part of the larger process of representation; the viewer is not in charge but only “a follower,” un suiveur, as Leonard Lawlor brilliantly points out.13 Foucault underlines that there are at least two stories told in Velazquez’s masterpiece: one runs beginning from the artist at the far left, working in his studio; then moves over the finished paintings hanging on the walls to the right of him; then passes to the opposite wall with merely the foreshortened frames of the paintings visible; and finally arrives at the light flooding in from outside, the indicated window at the far right that lights up the entire scene and makes representation visible. In fact, it makes representation stand forth to the extent that the representational process itself—the painter at work along with the framed, finished representations—is lit up rather than the reality it is assumed to reveal. The story told from left to right depicts human knowledge as at once an illuminated process and as a process of illumination. The other story, however, is told by the lines running from the depth of the painting, with the couple in the mirror, to the invisible point before it where we are situated and thus including, in a triangular shape, the obscure side of the canvas. These lines, by contrast, end not in the possibility of a lit-up process of knowledge but in an ambiguity of angles, reflections, absences, and presences. The second story, consequentially, leaves representation anything but plain (OT 15/30). Human knowledge, the second story suggests, remains obscured by the very materiality in which it is set.

The invisible and the names The models are represented in the mirror in the back of the room, though vaguely, and the painter, who is fully visible in the painting, could very well be Velázquez himself. Is not Placher to some extent right in saying that we are 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,

44  Velázquez each historical personage represented in this composition can be named and pointed out. Is speaking of the dissipated subject and critique of representation exaggerations in relation to Las Meninas? Foucault, who has not yet 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.14 He means, that is, perhaps it is time 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 Velázquez was painting the king and queen of Spain (OT 9/24). Foucault then rejects his own suggestion, saying no, we should not use the “proper” names, even if we happen to know them, because “neither can be reduced to each other’s terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say” (OT 9/25). It is not that language is insufficient, or that we must strive for more exact words to capture what we see, but that the very aspiration to say what we see is futile. Thus, Foucault introduces again the thought that we encountered in Chapter 1, which reappears in his essay on Magritte and which one may come across in a slightly different version in his essay “What Is an Author?”15 The idea was picked up by 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 visibilities.16 Even when we do name something, when we categorize and label what we see, this does not hinder the visible from showing at the very same time something unarticulated, something unexpected, and even to multiply it. The asymmetrical relation between words and things holds a transformative force for Foucault. We should, in fact, attend to the asymmetry rather than try to reconcile or harmonize the relation; we ought to appreciate the asymmetry between what we see and what we say as a starting point and an opening for thought rather than as an obstacle. If we restrain our urge to name, define, and label what we see with words—as if words and things were equivalent—we may provide a space for that which will never be captured when a name is too soon given to a thing. 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 gray, anonymous language, always over-meticulous and repetitive because too broad, that the painting may, little by little, release its illuminations. (OT 9/25) We may, in other words, see more of the world if we refrain from naming. As we have noted, this is what the painter in Velázquez’s composition indicates when the viewer oscillates between viewing and representing: what

Velázquez 45 we see is not the same as what we represent. In Foucault’s view, Las Meninas depicts classical representation and its boundaries as well as its inherent leeway, its elasticity or, in Foucault’s words, “the space it opens up to us.”17 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 and the very things we use when doing so—he locates a place where the relation as such is not fixed or static. The possible perspectives are multiple as are the possible names and words to classify people and things. Certain scholars rightly argue that a key theme in Foucault’s essay on Velázquez is the critique of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and readers with an interest in Merleau-Ponty’s work will already have made the connection. Merleau-Ponty’s attempts to overcome the subject–object distinction through the notion of the human body as at once seeing and seen, visible and yet invisible for the self who sees, echoes in Foucault’s essay. Since the relationship between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty has been thoroughly discussed by many I do not explore it further here.18 Still, a few reflections are of relevance for the theological discussion that culminates this chapter. Gary Shapiro maintains that Foucault’s essay is directed precisely against the theme of the visible versus the invisible as discussed by Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Paul Cézanne, in which the artist as such plays an important part. The play with visibility and invisibility in Cézanne is part of a process of doubt in which identity is questioned in an attempt to establish and reveal the artist’s identity. To Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne attempts to depict how the subject is both origin and end, subject and object, thus at once revealing meaning and concealing it.19 By showing the situatedness of the subject, Cézanne questions the subject—object dichotomy, Merleau-Ponty suggests. In Foucault’s view, however—whether rightful or not—Merleau-Ponty’s focus is still on the subject as the place for overcoming the subject–object logic. The subject is necessarily also object, at once seen and seeing, yet invisible (or almost invisible) to herself as seer, which is why the distinction between subject and object no longer stands. To Foucault, this reasoning is too narrowed down to the experiencing of a singular account of the subject; it does not remain open to the wider world of appearances or to the multitude of gazes. Through Las Meninas he posits that the artist is only one element among many (the object, the cloth, the room, the paint, and so on) in the representational process. In the same vein, Foucault mentions Velázquez by name only three times in the entire essay and only in the second half. Foucault’s essay begins by describing the artist depicted in the painting as taking a pause—standing back from the canvas. The artist is inactive, and to Shapiro this indicates an implicit critique of what Foucault regards as Merleau-Ponty’s elevation of the artistic subject’s role.20 Las Meninas shows, according to Foucault, that the discourse of representation can be described so that the subject–object constellation plays only one part in what Foucault calls the “cycle of representation.” This cycle

46  Velázquez includes, then, “the material tools of representation” (the palette, the brush, the canvas), the finished paintings, the people represented in them as well as the very painting we are discussing, “the rectangular fragment of lines and colors” (OT 8/24). And precisely among these things, and “in that material reality which the lines and colors have laid out upon the canvas,” there are also the things and places that we never see, that necessarily remain invisible to us. Foucault thus underlines the asymmetry rather than the resemblance between being seen and seeing because, to him, it is when the two are understood as unrelated that reality opens up beyond the human; the invisible is not something hidden, not something visible, but precisely invisible because of the way things appear: because of the mystery of things.21 To that extent, Foucault’s Velázquez interpretation makes out yet another introduction of his surface approach as a non/merging of the visible and the sayable, as described in Chapter 1.22

The place of theology Unlike Placher, Mark C. Taylor, found a starting point for his theological position precisely in the distorted subject of Las Meninas. The death of God and man alike exposed, for Taylor, theology’s constant self-destruction and thus the a/theological presupposition he was looking for. I believe, however, that a similar yet developed account of theology’s self-destructive potential may be detected by way of Foucault. In this chapter I have suggested that, for Foucault, Velázquez’s composition does not merely point toward a void of unending deconstruction but also toward how our position in the physical world simultaneously limits our knowledge and opens thought beyond the humanistic paradigm. The mystery of things, the surface of appearance, leads us, as Taylor suggests, beyond both God and the modern subject. Still, in accordance with my reading of Foucault on Velázquez, these enigmas are created by way of the very materiality of vision. Or, as postmetaphysical theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet argues, knowledge is never purely immaterial. Here again we approach the legacy of Merleau-Ponty—only to take leave of it once more. Luca Giordano’s often repeated description of Las Meninas as “the theology of painting” likely alludes 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 consciously expands and extends Giordano’s description, suggesting that, 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 “may be closer than any other Classical discourse to acknowledging its own limits.”23 Catholic theologian LouisMarie Chauvet might well agree. In fact, he develops a similar idea into a

Velázquez 47 contemporary account of sacramentality. Chauvet has introduced a postmetaphysical account of liturgy and sacramentality based on the philosophical trajectory running from Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty and Derrida.24 In his sacramentality, Chauvet questions not only Christian metaphysics but also the Christian habit of degrading the corporeal and the material that, in Chauvet’s view, is an inescapable aspect of Christian faith. Because of this philosophical point of departure, elements of Chauvet’s sacramentality relate to the ideas that Foucault introduces through the erratic viewing place in his analysis of Las Meninas, yet finally a Foucauldian sacramentality would tend in another direction. In Symbol and Sacrament, Chauvet underlines the materiality and corporeality of Christian faith.25 To Chauvet, faith is always situated and always corporeal. Faith does not exist, he argues, except as inscribed somewhere, which is why there are no timeless, immaterial, or purely spiritual aspects of faith. This fact is often the hardest part of Christian faith to consent to, Chauvet holds, since it sets up a barrier before our desire to intellectually attain the things around us and to dominate reality as it comes to us. Chauvet even argues that the desire to arrive at a final understanding of the world and of Christian faith is what leads to idolatry in the biblical sense. Idolatry, he writes, “is the reduction of God to the conditions of what we think, say or experience about God.” Thus, idolatry can appear in many different forms and shapes, but always related to our “ardent desire to know and to control through knowledge” (402–3). By way of Merleau-Ponty, Chauvet finds the possibility to leave behind metaphysics and the classical subject– object dichotomy and to enter into a postmetaphysical sacramentality. Metaphysics, Chauvet argues, is a discourse that conceals the original moment of its knowledge; it conceals the fact that our corporeal expressions and our thoughts are always interrelated, which is why there is finally no such thing as meta-physical knowledge. Knowledge is always already physical, Chauvet argues with Merleau-Ponty, because there is no thinking that exists for itself before its expression. The subject who speaks is never completely separate from the linguistic subject of its statements; hence, humans never utter their judgments from a distant height and with a sovereign neutrality, but rather start with a concrete language in which a universe is already structured into a “world,” that is, from a place that is socially arranged and culturally organized. (36) To Chauvet, the situatedness of the postmetaphysics that he finds in MerleauPonty has direct theological implications. Just as language is never separate from statements, likewise is faith never separate from its physical practice, he argues. And just as the situatedness of language and thus of human thought may be hard to accept, likewise does our urge to control faith tend to make us reject its materiality and its place in the physical world. A faith that is

48  Velázquez never detached from concrete reality does not allow abstractions of God or faith to rule over the material expressions of faith, and in consequence, the Eucharist is to Chauvet the most radical expression of the unattainable materiality of faith. Paradoxically, he writes, precisely because it is the most material expression of faith, it resists reduction of God by pointing to the fact that our ideas about God are always too abstract to capture the reality of faith.26 To Chauvet, Eucharistic practice preserves “Christ’s absolute difference” through “its own material consistency and spatial exteriority, against which the faith stumbles.” The very materiality of the Eucharist safeguards the alterity of God and Christ.27 This is where a Foucault-inspired radical theology, or even sacramentality, would differ, however, not necessarily about the materiality of thought or the asymmetrical relation between words/ideas and things but in relation to the preservation of the one divine alterity. In Foucault’s analysis, the very canvas, the cloth and the paint, were presented as the concrete space for representation and as a place that multiplies representation. The space is limited, and through Velázquez these limitations were revealed and displayed. The very place for representation—the human space for depicting what is real—had confessed its lack of depth and its lack of relation to an outer truth. Reality is neither there as a transcendence that may or may not be revealed and commented on, nor is it in the hands of the viewing subject/ viewed object. Rather, the process of representation is a place of complex and dynamic relations between things and words, visibilities and invisibilities, bodies and minds and the asymmetrical relations between them. A flat canvas—not a divine alterity or an erratic subject—directs the viewer toward the possibilities inherent in the limitations of the material world. A flat canvas, Foucault shows, makes room for multiple perspectives, competing truths, and innumerable invisibilities. The new space for the viewing subject in Las Meninas indicates a creative reality that is neither merely the subject nor anything like a transcendent divinity but a kind of flexibility in the tangible world of words and things. This liminal space is 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 mystery of things. The invisible in Velázquez is not there to save God from idolatry and misuse but to indicate instead that even the most mysterious invisibility is a material and corporeal presence in reality as it appears. With Chauvet, the material aspects of faith and knowledge are introduced into theological discourse, yet the material serves to point at a safe place for God beyond human constructions and idols. With Taylor, on the other hand, neither God nor man secures a safe place, yet the physical world appears less central to his a/theology than the unending deconstruction as such: the immaterial diffusion. In Foucault’s analysis of Velázquez, the notion of the invisible is used to describe this space for the unseen as a space for identityplay, for a change of perspective, and for an enigmatic unknown in the

Velázquez 49 very process of representation. It is an erratic space that Foucault himself, as previously discussed, at times describes as a void. Yet this “void,” this erratic space, is a plain reality in the midst of the construction of representation and never empty.28 The nonplace in Foucault’s analysis of Velázquez is concretely situated in close proximity to the canvas.29 The invisible nonplace in Foucault’s reasoning on Las Meninas is not merely an abstract starting point for knowledge-production but is also a material space—a concrete place that we could point out when standing in front of the painting. That concrete spot, so central to the entire composition, is an invisible place created by being seen, one that, in turn, creates a multitude of visions. The place of the invisible in Foucault’s reasoning has subsequent implications for knowledge-production in a sense that relates to both the material objects and to the immaterial words we use to describe them.30 The fact that the only spot in Velázquez’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 ideas of meaning and signification are built. Things are hidden from us, which paradoxically as well as pragmatically is why we see the invisible in our concrete world: we can come to see what we did not see initially when other gazes indicate that which must nevertheless be there. When I look out my window, I see the windows of the other houses indicating multiple views and perspectives on the world that are invisible to me. Plainly, there are 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. Our encounters with other people’s life stories at times let us glimpse perspectives from which the world appears different than it does where we ourselves are standing. But Foucault’s analysis of Velázquez also shows that our postclassical, habitual way of understanding the world tells us that there are vantage points and perspectives that could actually render the world consistent. Still today, just as in 1966, we often live as if there is a position from which all things are visible. According to Foucault, interpreting Velázquez, such an ideal vantage point does not exist, at least not in the way we usually assume. The spaces from which we make sense of the world are part of this world, concrete spaces in the midst of the appearance of things—places where some things are visible and other things invisible. They are places inhabited by different individuals at different times. To that extent, neither a transcendent 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: in short, a mystery of things. Accordingly, Taylor’s account of the void in Foucault’s analysis may be complemented by the physicality of that void. If one were to experiment with the idea of a Foucauldian account of sacramentality, moreover, it would differ from the postmetaphysical sacramentality that we find in Chauvet. Instead of safeguarding the radical difference of Christ, a

50  Velázquez Foucauldian sacramentality would bring the Christian God into the very materiality of the Eucharist. The Eucharist would no longer indicate a presence/absence, an ever-different divinity indirectly detectable through the situatedness of faith. The Eucharist would not point toward an unattainable divinity but would provide a concrete yet erratic place for theological knowledge-production: a place where we would not be sure of what we are doing, whether seeing or being seen, nor would we know who we are, since the very notion of identity would diffract through the concreteness of the place in which we are standing. The very material of Christian representation would point toward itself and toward the ambiguity of the representational process. When trying to make sense of the sacrament, one would not turn primarily toward theological abstractions but toward the physical place before the bread and wine and toward the bread and wine as “the paint and cloth” of Christian representation. The purpose would not be to see beyond them toward a higher truth but in order to let their physicality question what we think we know. In the next chapter, we explore this idea further through Foucault on Manet.

Notes 1 Foucault finds this third step emerging in, for instance, the literature of his time with writers like Stéphane Mallarmé. (OT 306/317). Mallarmé, as it happens, was one of Manet’s closest friends. 2 Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 129. 3 Ibid., 20. 4 Ibid., 129–30. 5 Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 164. 6 See Soussloff, Foucault and Painting, 855/4656, for a discussion on the French wordplay’s implications for the account of painting. 7 Matthew Ancell, “The Theology of Painting: Picturing Philosophy in Velázquez’s Las Meninas,” The Comparatist 37 (May 2013): 159–63. 8 Richard Viladesau makes use of Ortega’s account of Velázquez and notes, consequentially, how Velázquez’s technique makes the pupil of the artist’s eye the center 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”; see Richard Viladesau, Theology and the Arts: Encountering God Through Music, Art and Rhetoric (New York: Paulist, 2000), 90. 9 American theologian William C. Placher, who is related to the narrative theology or postliberal theology movement, discusses the consequences of Velázquez singular point of view further; see William C. Placher, Narratives of a Vulnerable God (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 100–1. 10 OT 4–5/20–21. “The picture accepts as many models as there are spectators” (ibid., 4). 11 The diffraction notion is excellently discussed by Leonard Lawlor, “Un Ecart Infime (Part III): The Blind Spot in Foucault,” in Philosophical and Social Criticism 31, nos. 5–6 (London: Sage, 2005), 665–85, quote on 676. 12 In the version of the essay referred to here, Pacheco is mistakenly named “the old Pachero,” 8. 13 Lawlor, “Un Ecart Infime,” 680.

Velázquez 51 14 OT 9/24. According to Shapiro, Foucault’s text also plays with its own voice at this point (Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, 257). 15 Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38, 138; “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” in Dits et écrits, 1: 820–1. 16 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” of 1952 (Soussloff, “Michel Foucault and the Point of Painting,” in Art History 32, no. 4 [2009]: 734–54, 737; see also Lawlor, “Un Ecart Infime,” 668). 17 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” (OT 16/31). 18 Including John Carvalho, Martin Jay, Leonard Lawlor, Gary Shapiro, Catherine Sousslof, and Nick Crossley, to name a few. Jay underlines, for example, the proximity between the approaches of Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, whereas Shapiro, as we shall see, underlines the difference (Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes, 387). 19 Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, 237. Soussloff here underlines also the relation to Lacan’s related notion of the privilege of the subject, “I see myself seeing” (je me vois me voir), and thus the rethinking of the subject taking place in Foucault’s analysis. Soussloff, Foucault on Painting, 1096/4656. 20 Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, 235; Soussloff, “Michel Foucault and the Point of Painting,” 737. 21 Lawlor, “Un Ecart Infime,” 660. 22 Deleuze, Foucault, 50; French ed., 58. 23 Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, 261. 24 Glenn P. Ambrose, The Theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet: Overcoming OntoTheology with the Sacramental Tradition (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012); Brannon Hancock, The Scandal of Sacramentality: The Eucharist in Literary and Theological Perspectives (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2014). 25 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Experience, trans. Patrick Madigan, S.J. and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994). 26 Chauvet writes, “With this mystery of faith, we thus find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, of all the affirmations of the faith, the Eucharistic presence of the Lord is probably, precisely because of the anteriority, exteriority, and materiality of the sacrament where it gives itself, the one most threatened with idolatrous—even fetishistic—perversions. On the other hand, however, and for the same reasons of anteriority, exteriority and materiality, it is perhaps the most radical figure of the prohibition against idolatry given to the believer” (ibid., 402). 27 Ibid., 404. In Chauvet’s words, “Christ’s resistance to every reduction by our ‘faith’ finds in the Eucharist its radical expression” (402). 28 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; “it never shades off into a serious consideration of the occult or the ‘spiritual’ ” (Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 59). 29 Lawlor uses the notion of the empty square rather than the nonplace, drawing on Deleuze’s explicit reference to Foucault’s reasoning as precisely la case vide; see Deleuze, “A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?” in L’Île déserte et autre textes (Paris: Minuit, 2002), and Lawlor, “Un Ecarte Infime,” 670.

52  Velázquez 30 While it is true that Foucault does not introduce a notion of a void or a nonspace 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, which is why it truly deserves the study of its own performed by Carrette in 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” (Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 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 form 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 (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 (61).

3 Manet Material sacramentality

French playwright Antonin Artaud once vehemently rejected a priest’s offer to support the broadcast of one of Artaud’s radio plays. The reason for Artaud’s rejection was that the Eucharist opposed everything that Artaud strove for in his artistry. In the Christian mass, Artaud argued, the body is only celebrated once it has been consecrated and elevated to the flesh of God. In his view, the church pointed to heaven when Artaud wanted to direct his audience’s attention to the earth, the flesh, and the blood of tangible reality. For that reason, Artaud preferred to do without the priest’s support.1 Around the same time, Georges Bataille confronted the Christian mass in a different though related manner. Instead of claiming that the Eucharist rejects the materiality of human life, Bataille suggested that there is more flesh and blood present in the Eucharist than the church chooses to acknowledge. In Story of the Eye (1928), Bataille pushed the symbol of the Eucharist to its carnal extreme.2 His narrative culminates with a blasphemous parody of the Catholic mass involving desecration of the bread and wine using urine and semen before a man is strangled to death during an orgasm. American theologian Brannon Hancock notes how Bataille’s sacrilegious treatment of the Eucharist elevates carnal pleasure to the level of liturgy and sacrament while at the same time degrading the Eucharist to the level of carnality. “And yet,” Hancock wonders, “is the former truly an elevation? Is the latter a degradation?”3 Bataille’s Story of the Eye evokes the question indirectly present in Artaud’s rejection: Does the sacrament necessarily entail elevation, and does carnality and materiality necessarily entail degradation? Yet if the material is already sacramental, what is then sacramentality? In this chapter we continue the discussion initiated in relation to Velázquez, Taylor, and Chauvet by letting Foucault begin meeting the challenge posed by Bataille and Artaud. Through Foucault’s account of Edouard Manet’s art, we experiment with the idea of a material and performative understanding of sacramentality, what I will tentatively speak of as a radical liturgical theology. In his book on Edouard Manet in 1955, Bataille discussed again the question that he so shockingly treated in 1928. In 1955 he dealt with the

54  Manet assessment of sensuous reality in less shocking terms, in relation to not only the body but also the wider material world. Bataille’s analysis of Manet influenced Foucault, who found in Manet’s art both a critique of the representational logic and an elevation of tangible reality that preserved a space for the unexpected in the material world. Here I discuss aspects in Foucault’s analysis of Manet that are of theological significance, involving a critique of and even movement away from earlier theological presumptions. For instance, in his Manet lectures, Foucault describes Manet as a rupture in art history; I argue this rupture entails a reaction against former theological presuppositions. Another aspect develops from the former and regards Manet’s artistry, which, according to Foucault, instigates a move beyond the dualistic choice between the subject and transcendent truth—beyond the simplistic choice between man and God of representational art and thought—and toward the very activity and tangibility of painting. These two aspects instigate a move not only away from earlier forms of art or earlier forms of thought but also away from an overarching idea of Christian thinking and toward a material and immanent approach to art and thought as spiritual practices.4 This approach highlights invisibilities, or what I call nonplaces, in the tangible and material processes of artistic representation in Manet’s work and possibly points toward new ways of thinking theologically. After first introducing Bataille’s account of Manet and his reaction against religious or spiritual presuppositions of his time, I then present Foucault’s description of Manet’s contribution as an art-historical event and how his art evokes a nonplace of invisibility. Finally, I discuss the theological elements of Foucault’s account of Manet and their possible implications for contemporary theology and sacramentality by suggesting the notion of a radical liturgical theology.

Bataille on Manet When the young Manet decided not to fulfill his father’s dream that he study law, he was enrolled in the studio of Thomas Couture, an artist and teacher whom Bataille describes as “an academic painter of the dreariest kind.”5 Manet did not appreciate Couture’s teaching methods or his approach to painting; Manet’s fellow student Antonin Proust has left an illustrative account of Manet’s reaction to Couture’s teaching. Every Monday, a new pose was set for the week by an undressed model standing in a heroic posture, or as Proust describes, “It was customary for them, as soon as they stood up on the table, to strike some ridiculous pose.” Every Monday, when this happened, Proust says, Manet got into an argument with the model: “Why the devil can’t you be natural? Is that the way you stand when you go to the grocers to buy a bunch of radishes?” (M 35–36). One day when Manet, in an act of rebellion, managed to get a model named Gilbert to pose more naturally and at least partly clothed, Couture was furious. “Poor dear boy!” he exclaimed. “If you go on like this you’ll

Manet 55 never be anything but the Daumier of your time.” Painting in Manet’s time, Bataille argues, was expected to represent. It should not simply represent what the artist saw but a higher truth. It should, in Bataille’s words, “represent a truth transcending the earthbound, transcending what we see” (M 71). Bataille explains that art, as well as poetry at the time, was shaped by a certain convention, modeled on the idea of a higher organization of the world, the idea of a truth transcending—merely mirrored in—the materiality of the world. Manet, instead, wanted to paint the ordinary. He wanted to paint what he saw without filling his scenes with sentiments, deeper meaning, or signification (M 52, 81). When Manet insisted on painting what he saw, however, his artistry not only went against aesthetic conventions of his time, in Bataille’s words, but even amounted to blasphemy. Why blasphemy? The answer is hidden in the conflict between Manet and Couture. In order to grasp the conflict between Manet and his teacher we must try to assimilate a time when convention was not a mediocre space for the dull and diffident but an actual entrance to a closer encounter with the real as well as the spiritual. Representation of the higher reality was seen as the pathway to a life more fully lived, to a deeper connection with reality. To reject this entrance, this conventional pathway—as Manet did when he asked the models to remain as natural as when shopping for radishes—was from Couture’s perspective stunting artistic growth and spiritual development, preferring mediocrity over inspiration. In Couture’s words, as retold by Bataille, Manet would be nothing but the Honoré Daumier (1808–79) of his time—an artist who never had an actual breakthrough but had to keep drawing caricatures for newspapers to make a living. Later, alone with Proust, Manet responded to Couture’s comment, saying that he could do worse, that he would rather be the Daumier than the Coypel of his time. Antonine Coypel (1661–1722), by comparison, was a typical representational painter—a rhetorical painter, in Bataille’s words. He was talented and was even invited to paint the ceilings of the Versailles chapel, but he never managed to lift his artistry above his own time (M 36). A contemporary encyclopedia even stated sadly about Coypel that “the graceful imagination displayed by his pictures is marred by the fact that he was not superior to the artificial taste of his age.”6 In sum, Manet preferred to be associated with a caricaturist stuck in the political reality of his time than with an artist painting artificial images of another world on a chapel ceiling.7 According to Bataille, Manet painted the ordinary, the haphazard, and the disordered and did so in a way that did not aim to represent feelings, sentiments, or deeper meaning. To that extent, Manet sought not only to paint the ordinary rather than the heroic but to also let painting be painting rather than a channel for deeper meanings or truths. The meaning of the subject portrayed was not important to Manet. For him, the focus lies not on what the image represented but on the very canvas itself: not on representation but on creation, in a material and negative way (M 71). By

56  Manet negating expected conventions and even destroying painting’s capacity for signification, Bataille argues, Manet created a new artistic expression, an expression for art itself—art for its own sake (M 37). In this manner, Manet turned his back not only on the painting tradition that surrounded him but also on the theological presuppositions of his time. To Bataille, Manet ventures into a sacrificial economy of negation (M 66); with Manet, art aims to “draw its magic from within itself” and not from a higher divine organization. What Bataille calls a magic from within was, of course, no magic at all to Manet’s time; rather, it represented the negation of the entire world with which painting had tried to connect its earthbound viewers. By replacing a goddess with a prostitute, as Manet did in his scandalous painting Olympia (1863; Figure 3.1), and placing the light source in the viewer’s gaze in order to remind us of our place in the material world, he not only rejected the expectations laid on him but also the higher world that he as an artist was expected to represent. “Olympia,” Bataille writes, “is the negation of that world. It is the negation of mythological Olympus and everything it stood for” (M 71). According to Bataille, Manet’s theological negotiation, even his blasphemy, consisted of refusing to represent an idea of another world than the world of painting itself. When Foucault lectures on Manet in Tunis sixteen years after the publication of Bataille’s book he accepts Bataille’s overall reasoning and develops it further in this material direction, closer to the very utensils of art. In doing so, Foucault imports an

Figure 3.1  Édouard Manet, Olympia, oil on canvas, 1863 Source: PAINTING/Alamy Stock Photo

Manet 57 aspect of theological negotiation that relates closely to contemporary material accounts of theology.

Foucault on Manet With his usual sense of rhetoric and drama Foucault starts his lecture series—after making excuses for speaking of the subject from his layman’s position—by suggesting a radically new account of Manet. Foucault clearly aims in these lectures to introduce Manet as an event in art history.8 To Foucault, Manet is the painter who invented “the picture-object,” or “the painting-object” or, what Soussloff suggests is a better translation, “object painting.”9 In other words, Manet is the first painter who aimed to make his paintings stand forth as paintings, and thus, he opened the door to modern art as we know it.10 Foucault maintains Manet is not only a forerunner to the Impressionist art movement, as is commonly understood, but he also made possible all painting after Impressionism, that is, “all the painting of the twentieth century . . . all the painting from which, in fact, contemporary art developed.”11 Foucault’s lectures in Tunis are preceded by a lifelong interest in Manet’s work. When Foucault left Paris for the Swedish university town Uppsala in 1955 (the same year Bataille published his book on Manet), he arranged discussions on Manet in his home.12 Foucault had also signed a contract for a book on Manet with the working title Le noir et la surface.13 The book was never finished, but the lectures in Tunis likely reveal some of its possible content. Ever since the fifteenth century, Foucault argues, the painting tradition in Europe was characterized by attempts to make the viewer forget the limitations of painting. It aimed to distract from the fact that paintings are twodimensional, that they are limited in space and often limited in shape to a rectangular canvas space. Techniques for painting were developed to imitate depth and “to mask and negate the fact that the painting was still inscribed inside a square or a rectangle of straight lines cut at right angles” (MOP 29/23). Artists did what they could to obscure and not throw light on the limitations of their materials: the canvas and paint. They created depth and contours, along with an internal lighting and corresponding internal consequence of perspectives that would invite the viewer into the painting rather than remind her of the brute fact that she was standing in a well-lighted room gazing at a rectangular object mounted on a wall. Manet did the opposite, Foucault argues. Instead of trying to mask the realities of painting and of the picture-object, he made them stand forth: The rectangular surface, the large vertical and horizontal axes, the real lighting of the canvas, the possibility for the viewer of looking in one way or another, all of this is present in Manet’s pictures, and given back, restored in Manet’s pictures.

58  Manet Thus, Foucault holds, Manet invents the picture-object, the painting as actuality and materiality, “the picture as something colored which clarifies an external light and in front of which, or about which, the viewer revolves” (MOP 31/24). In Foucault’s regard, Velázquez’s Las Meninas contained an attempt at letting “the frame stand out of the picture,” but in the work of Manet such an artistic move was fully enacted.14 The playful use of depth in Las Meninas is replaced by toying with the very idea of depth in Manet.

Space Foucault analyzes several paintings to illustrate the way in which Manet brings the viewer’s attention to the actual and limited space of the canvas. In his view, Music in the Tuileries (1862) and The Masked Ball at the Opera (1873–74) show how Manet plays with the illusion of depth or, rather, how he refuses to play along with expectations of creating an illusion of depth; instead, Manet lets a crowd create a wall hindering the viewer’s encounter with the back of the room and the forest represented.15 The Masked Ball at the Opera—as well as The Execution of Maximilian (1868) and The Balcony (1868–69)—feature objects that reiterate and echo the rectangular shape of the canvas. The images contain internal frames created by the objects represented. In The Execution of Maximilian, for example, the rectangular shape of the canvas is evoked by the shape of the wall in the background of the picture. In this painting, the indication of the rectangular shape is combined with an obvious hint at the limitations of space on the canvas. Although the painting depicts an execution, the soldiers shooting are painted as if they were holding their rifles so close to the three men being shot that the barrels seem to touch their chests. One rifle even seems to shoot between and behind their shoulders. The only signal indicating a distance between the rifles and the three men is the latter are painted proportionally smaller than the soldiers. Manet thus deliberately avoids using common techniques for creating the illusion of distance.16 Foucault moves on to discuss, canvas by canvas, The Port of Bordeaux (1871), Argenteuil (1874), and In the Greenhouse (1879), in which the focus is not on depth or a lack of depth but on the rectangular shape: the horizontals and verticals. Foucault draws our attention to the many lines (masts, ribs, folds, stripes) and fingers pointing out the painted canvas’s inevitable vertical and horizontal boundaries. In The Waitress (1879) and in Saint-Lazare Station (1872–73), not only is depth hindered by objects, and the horizontal and vertical limitations illustrated by bars and wallpaper, Foucault claims, but the recto and the verso of the canvas are also pointed out by the gazes represented in the pictures. There are gazes directed at what we as viewers cannot see in front of the canvas and behind the canvas. We, as viewers, are not privy to what the personages in the picture are looking at, and this is crucial to Foucault. Manet makes the viewer desire to move

Manet 59 around, to change position, and even to turn the canvas around to see what the image indicates must be there but that nonetheless is not there, according to Foucault (MOP 54/34). Or, as Joseph J. Tanke describes the effects of A Bar at the Folies-Bergère: “Manet, in a sense, forces his viewer to dance with this image.”17 In Foucault’s regard, this dance, the motion that Manet’s paintings ask of their viewers, is launched by an inevitable search for the invisible, a search for that which is not there. “The gazes are there to indicate to us that there is something to see, something that is by definition, and by the very nature of the canvas, necessarily invisible.” And to Foucault, this is the first time that painting in this manner depicts the invisible or, rather, the first time that painting presents itself as something invisible that we, nonetheless, come to see. Foucault describes it as “a game of invisibility assured by the surface of the canvas” (MOP 54–55/35).

Light In an idea that has implications for the notion of the subject, Foucault shows how Manet plays with the fact that paintings are not only images with an internal lighting but also simultaneously illuminated canvas spaces. In The Luncheon on the Grass (1863), the light comes from two directions simultaneously. In an obvious inconsequence, the light hits the persons represented from behind and from the front at the same time. In Foucault’s interpretation, the light from up front, the external light, illustrates the light that hits the canvas and effects the image. The same external light, Foucault argues, is represented in Olympia and in The Balcony, in which the light that hits the models in the paintings seems to come from that which actually illuminates them as paintings: the viewer’s gaze. In the latter, Foucault notes again how “invisibility is almost signaled by the fact that the three figures look in three different directions.” The figures on the balcony look intensely toward something we do not see, and as before Manet works with hands and fingers pointing in different directions, creating a picture that, in Foucault’s words, “is nothing other than the brilliance of invisibility itself.”18 The aforementioned Olympia caused quite a scandal when it was first exhibited in The Salon in 1865—scandalous enough, in fact, to make the artist travel to Spain to get away from the strong critical reactions. Foucault merely mentions the moral scandal in order to point at what he finds more crucial, namely, an aesthetic scandal caused by Manet’s use of lighting. Olympia is often understood to be a variation of Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), in which a nude Venus is lying on a divan. The goddess’s body is exposed by a soft yet revealing light coming from the left. She appears accidentally exposed by the light while looking down with her head humbly bowed. In Manet’s painting, however, Venus is replaced by a courtesan who gazes steadily, if distractedly, into the viewer’s eyes.19 The light that makes her body stand forth is not soft but bright, almost glaring, nor does it come

60  Manet from a place within the painting but from an exterior point, namely, from the very place of the viewer. If the exposure of female nudity in Titian could pass as an accidental display of a goddess’s perfection, then Manet’s variation points straight at the very gazes that inspect the nude body. As Foucault points out, it is the viewers who render Olympia’s nudity visible: “our gaze upon the Olympia is a lantern, it is that which carries the light; we are responsible for the visibility and for the nudity of Olympia” (MOP 66/40). In other words, Manet has replaced the accidental nudity of a goddess with that of a courtesan, and he has turned the light on. Moreover, he has placed the light in our very gaze: the gaze of the viewer. Tanke points out how this replacement not only raises questions about the role of female nudity in art until the nineteenth century; it also raises questions about visibility and viewing—about being visible and being seen in a wider sense. In Titian’s painting, being visible is not necessarily related to being seen. In Venus of Urbino, the artist just happens to catch the image of the lit-up body and puts it on display for the viewer. In Manet’s painting, on the other hand, the very distinction between being visible and being seen collapses.20 The viewer is responsible for the display, for the visibility of the prostitute as well as for the almost invisibility of the black maid standing beside the bed. Seeing creates visibility, thus the seeing subject creates the object, whether the object is a nude prostitute, an “invisible” black maid, or a painting for sale in an exhibition. In this manner, Foucault argues, Manet’s art points out the significance of the subject function, which is neither stable nor singular but erratic, in motion, and multiple. The place of the viewer is indicated in the painting, but the subjects inhabiting this external and therefore invisible space are neither singular nor eternal precisely because they—and we—remain invisible. All we know about this invisible space, this nonplace, is that it is there: at times empty, at times filled by ever different viewers. Thus, Foucault shows how Manet uses the very limitations of the material reality of painting to open a new subject space, an invisibility created by color and cloth. It is an account of the viewing subject that relates closely to that of Foucault’s account of Velázquez, yet in Manet the lantern of the subjective viewpoint is made more explicit and thus explicitly problematized.

Place Foucault’s argument is finally developed in relation to his last painting analysis, that of A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881–82; Figure 3.2), in which all elements discussed thus far in the Manet lectures are present at the same time and enhanced: the lack of depth, the horizontal and vertical lines, the lighting of the actual canvas indicating the viewer’s place, the recto and verso gaze, and an obvious play with multiple perspectives. The painting shows a barmaid looking directly at the viewer while the mirror behind her reflects the large hall of the popular Folies-Bergère. Manet seems to have painted the

Manet 61

Figure 3.2  Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, oil on canvas, 1882 Source: Archivart/Alamy Stock Photo

image from a viewpoint directly opposite the barmaid, yet this viewpoint is contradicted by the reflection of the objects on the bar, the barmaid’s back, and a man off to the right. The barmaid, reflected in the mirror behind her, must be seen by the artist from two perspectives at the same time in order to make the image as it stands possible. She is seen upfront, from slightly below, yet at the same time she is seen in the mirror behind her as standing directly in front of a man slightly taller than her. He cannot be the artist viewing her since he sees her from a different angle than we do. Yet if the artist sees her from the vantage point that the main image of the painting depicts, the man cannot be there. Still, he is there in the picture. The artist, then, must be standing in front of her and to the left at the same time. Foucault explains: “You have, therefore, three systems of incompatibility: the painter must be here and there; he must have someone here and he must have no-one there; there is a descending gaze and there is an ascending gaze.” Foucault calls it a “triple impossibility,” an impossibility of space that finally indicates a kind of nonplace since it renders every stable and defined place where we could locate the viewer impossible. And this incompatibility that excludes the possibility of a stable place, Foucault remarks, “is evidently one of the fundamental properties of the picture” (MOP 78/46).

62  Manet The consequences of this play of incompatibility in Tanke’s view, as mentioned earlier, is that the viewer is invited to “dance with” the painting. This dance, instigated by a series of incompatibilities, force the viewer to grapple with his or her position before the canvas. Not only does his painting deny us an ideal vantage point, or question the place of our viewpoint, as in front of Las Meninas, but it also forces the viewer to choose between a number of different and competing positions. Manet’s invention of the painting-object thus not only directs the viewer to encounter painting as painting but also highlights the activity of viewing a painting as actively constructive rather than a means to detect and uncover an inherent preexisting meaning in a piece of art. With the birth of the painting-object, the idea of art as representational is no longer innocent. After the birth of painting as painting, the entire body of ideas embedded in the notion of representation can no longer be viewed as innocent, self-evident, or independent of matter in Western art. The very logic of representation, on which European painting had so long rested, is put on display and cast into question through a new account of the very materiality of art. Or, in Foucault’s regard, Manet’s invention of the painting-object “was the fundamental condition so that finally one day we can get rid of representation itself and allow space to play with its pure and simple properties, its material properties” (MOP 79/47). With these words, Foucault leaves his audience a visionary suggestion of a future without representation—a vision of the freedom of things to be things.

Material theology Manet, as we have seen, refuses to play along with the idea that art should aim to represent a truer reality beyond the canvas. With Manet, art does not aim to transcend its material limitations, but merges with them in order to break free from the restraining expectations of representation and thus allow itself to “play with its material properties.” In this regard, we hear in Foucault’s analysis an echo of Bataille’s reasoning. According to Bataille, Manet replaces artificial gods with real humans in his work and refuses to paint anything but the ordinary, everyday objects and realities. To Bataille, this is how Manet invents a way of painting that draws its magic from within itself. Foucault takes this one step further by directing us, as readers and viewers of Manet’s art, even closer to the very materiality of artistic representation. This, in turn, brings us to an aspect of theological significance in Foucault’s analysis of Manet. Manet’s paintings point out how the act of seeing, the viewer’s gaze, relates to visibility and how visibility may be inevitably dependent on seeing: Am I seen if no one sees me? This raises an implicit theological question: Is existence a human category, is the human gaze itself the creator of the reality we see? Or, is there a distant perspective, independent of the human gaze from which all is visible? If Manet’s art points to the former, this does not necessarily make his art into a theological dead-end.

Manet 63 On the contrary, in today’s theological landscape it could do the opposite, in my view. The rectangular surface may endorse a pictorial superficiality, but this not only points out the infinity of possible perspectives on what we see, the visible, but it also indicates the presence of innumerable as-yet-unseen (in)visibilities. The very canvas, the cloth and paint, is presented as the concrete space for representation, a space that is inherently limited. Through Foucault and Manet these spatial limitations are revealed and displayed, but so are the possibilities inherent to its limitations. If in modern art the place of representation—the human space for depicting what is real—has confronted and confessed its lack of depth and its lack of relation to a higher truth, it nonetheless 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 represented, revealed, and articulated, nor is it simply in the hands of man. Rather, in the midst of the process of representation there is a nonplace, a space where things are possible. In order to illuminate the theological aspects of the “nonplace,” let me view this part of Foucault’s analysis through a related discussion in The Order of Things, since the Manet lectures of 1971 recall aspects of Foucault’s reasoning in 1966. In The Order of Things Foucault argues that there are two trajectories for thought that reach back to the early modern period and that have been in opposition ever since: the commentary tradition and the tradition of criticism. The commentary tradition stems from biblical exegesis, while the tradition of critique emerges with the desacralization of language, which makes it possible to question and critique inherited texts and truth claims. The commentary does not aim to judge or criticize the text commented on but, rather, to lay bare its inherent truth and wisdom. The critic, on the other hand, approaches a text whose relevance is not yet decided, intent to scrutinize and judge it regarding its truth or falsehood, its quality, and so forth. While Foucault introduces this binary couple—commentary and critique—in The Order of Things, he does not settle with these options as final. He suggests ways to move beyond the choice between commentary and criticism—between “God” (the true meaning of a painting, what it represents) and “Man” (the singular viewing subject, the art critic)—as both these traditions rest on the same representational logic. In other words, both traditions assume a certain relation between a text or painting and reality; either the painting or the text carries an inherent “sacred” meaning through what it represents or that it may be judged in relation to the mind of the critical thinker or viewer. Neither of these positions pays attention to the force, the gaps, and the fissures in the very materiality of painting or in texts and words as such. Both are focused on the reality that the words represent and thus miss out on the realities they present, the realities that the words and texts create. Again, we hear Bataille in Foucault’s opposition between art that represents and art that creates. The dispersion of the viewing subject in his Manet analysis recalls Foucault’s negotiation with these two trajectories in

64  Manet modern thought. Manet does not offer the viewer a final meaning to detect in a painting, in Foucault’s view, nor does he offer a stable position, a secure subject identity. Instead, meaning and identity are conveyed in the impact of Manet’s flat rectangles of cloth and paint. Foucault’s history of the human sciences depicts how the journey of the human sciences leads from God to the subject, yet indicates a third step, as we noted in the former chapter.21 Near the ending of The Order of Things Foucault discusses Nietzsche’s aphorism of the death of God. Nietzsche shows how God and man are dependent on each other: that the death of the first is as inevitable as the disappearance of the second. The subject needs God as the transcendent guarantor of its knowledge, which is why God’s death means the disappearance of both, opening new spaces for thought. In the lectures on Manet we see how Foucault locates a similar transformation in the history of art: the viewing subject is given an erratic space, a nonplace. Manet shows his viewers something invisible that they, nonetheless, come to see. It is a nonplace created by the paradoxically visible invisibilities in his paintings, and it is a space of multiple consequences: because of this nonplace, the subject’s place is no longer stable. The possible perspectives that subjects can take are infinite, yet the subject’s vision is limited to the presently seen. The place of the subject with its current visibilities inevitably indicates a nonplace of the yet unseen, the currently invisible. Moreover, the viewing subject is another present invisibility in Manet’s art. The viewer’s position is indicated in his paintings, but all we know about this invisible presence is that it exists since it is present in the painting through Manet’s lighting as a nonplace external to the canvas. At times we must imagine it is filled with one or many viewers or passersby, while at other times it is empty. Thus, the subject’s space becomes a kind of nonplace only negatively visible as a reflection of light, and the visible invisibilities indicate another nonplace in the space of the as-yet-unseen as well; that is, what others see and I do not—in the smoke at Lazare station or underneath Manet’s balcony—or what is necessarily invisible since I cannot look behind and at a canvas at the same time. The nonplaces in Manet thus indicate a third step: a tangible reality that is neither the subject nor anything like a transcendent divinity but is, rather, the many different aspects of the invisibility of materiality. Nicolas Bourriaud underlines the notion of the mirror that unites Foucault on Manet with Bataille, and both with the notion of heterotopia.22 Bourriaud argues that the break that Foucault saw in Manet’s art may be described as a transformation of the place of the viewer from a utopia to a heterotopia—a kind of nonlocation—a material and actual yet ambiguous and fleeting place, like the subject’s position simultaneously in and in front of a mirror.23 Or like the reflection of light from up front in a Manet painting, indicating the presence of a viewer who might or might not be there. Before Manet, painting was a normative space that allocated the viewer her place as well as her assignment, Bourriaud contends: it pointed out where to

Manet 65 look and what to see. While Velázquez played with the viewing position in Las Meninas, the distant-viewer perspective was nonetheless coherent and consistent. With Manet, however, painting becomes a kind of heterotopia, Bourriaud argues; it becomes a nonplace, a space in relation to which the viewer must place herself, “reminded of [her] mobility and [her] ontological disinclination before a flat object, deprived of depth, which the light strikes in full shot.”24

Radical liturgical theology At the beginning of this chapter I alluded to Artaud’s rage at the unfortunate priest who wanted to support his work. Artaud could not bear the thought of receiving help from the church since he had devoutly worked against Christianity’s focus on the transcendent and immaterial rather than on the immanent and material world; the Christian Eucharist was for Artaud the rejection of the material world par excellence. I also touched on Bataille’s sacrilegious treatment of the Christian mass in Story of the Eye, and the way Brannon Hancock has questioned how sacrilegious it really is. Bataille’s narrative merely throws new light on elements that are already present in Eucharistic practice, Hancock argues: the intermingling of the sacred and the profane, of sensual presence and sacrament, and the coincidence of life and death. The scandalous elements of the Eucharist have been discussed overtly since the era of Tertullian, Hancock writes.25 Has Christian theology ever explored the idea, though, of a radically material and carnal account of liturgy, a radical liturgical theology? I do not think so, but there is an interest in notions of materiality not only in relation to sacramentality as above but also in contemporary theology in a wider sense. Like Foucault in 1971, certain contemporary theologians search for ways to think theologically beyond the dichotomy of the sacred versus the profane, God and man, in relation to the very materiality of our world. American theologians Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins, for instance, call themselves radical political theologians and introduce their theological endeavor as “a new materialism” beyond the opposition between immanent and transcendent, profane, and sacred. The focus for Crockett and Robbins is on the urgent state of our shared material world, not on any idealist or Christian notion of another world.26 Their focus is on what happens in the physical reality of this polluted city—not on what may go on in a heavenly Jerusalem. Although Jeremy Carrette does not explicitly couch his reading of Foucault and religion in relation to materiality, his analysis of the negotiations of religion or spirituality taking place in Foucault’s work persistently points to the corporality, the tangible embodiment of spirituality. His analysis in Foucault and Religion introduces 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

66  Manet his later work. In Mysticism as Revolt, I suggested an account of a postrepresentational theology in which theological words and texts could be allowed to function as creative realities rather than representations of a higher truth. Through the critique of representation in Foucault and Deleuze, I explored a theological perspective that aimed to throw light on the creative materiality of liturgical words and theological texts. I tried to direct the theological focus onto materiality and effect—rather than on deeper meaning, purpose, or intentionality—and thus to open an account of the world that would not limit the theological perspective to the immaterial and hegemonic duality of man and God.27 I believe Foucault on Manet offers openings to an even more hands-on way of approaching theology: the material perspectives that inspire these dimensions of contemporary theology is a way of thinking after representationalism. It is a return to matter, to material expressions of reality after the language-oriented quest for an immanently situated account of signification.28 Once critical theory opened an account of language as creative and performative rather than reactive and depicting—as nonrepresentational or postrepresentational rather than representational—the step was also taken toward the creative force of the very materiality of which we are made.29 Consciously stretching and respectfully toying with the notions of sacramentality and liturgy in the field of liturgical theology, an imaginary radical liturgical theology could extract or extend the material dimensions of that thought tradition. The concept of primary liturgical theology, as introduced by Aidan Kavanaugh, captures the level of liturgical experience that precedes theorization and explanation, a level that, in Kavanaugh’s view, grounds the academic practice of theology. Simon Chan describes the primary liturgical theology as a tacit form of knowledge, a concrete and wordless experience that makes out the basis for liturgical theology. “We know more than we can tell,” he states, “and in trying to tell it we often tell it badly.”30 Or, as simply stated by David Fagerberg, “[b]efore there were universities with theology faculty, there were theologians.”31 Naturally, within the liturgical theology trajectory the step away from representation and towards the surface of appearances is not taken, but in an imaginary radical liturgical theology, it could be. The primary liturgical theology in a radical theology of the mystery of things could be even more tacit, depending on how words are understood, and even more material. As noted earlier, Foucault compares Manet and Flaubert. Flaubert’s writing managed to throw light on the book as book and on writing as writing. Instead of viewing the novel as an entry to another world that denies the materiality of the present, the materiality of the “black and white surface of printed signs,” Flaubert did the opposite, according to Foucault: “The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book . . . It is a phenomenon of the library” (FL 90–91/9). Likewise, Manet manages to direct our vision away from the idea of paintings as mirroring an absent world toward paintings as material painted canvases and to the activity of

Manet 67 painting as painting. After Manet and Flaubert, as Foucault shows, neither the museum nor the library is regarded as a collection of windows that open onto other worlds. Instead, their materiality is taken as a crucial aspect of what paintings or books are, and of what they do. Actual books and actual painted canvases now exist within works of art, Foucault states, and this is thanks to Flaubert and Manet, respectively (FL 93/11). What if we were to imagine a similar move within theology, capturing the analogy between the library or the museum and the church building and its holy things and gestures? The church building, the chalice, and the paten would no longer direct our vision toward an absent reality but to their own materiality. The service would not to any extent be formed in opposition to immanent reality, but as an actual phenomenon of the church room, of the present with the narratives, memories, and interpretations along with the sensations, smells, tastes. Let us imagine a radical liturgical theology that takes us one step further than Chauvet’s postmetaphysical position: a liturgical theology that is not focused on symbolic content, on what the liturgical act or the holy things “mean,” but in their performance, their material behavior, their effects and what they evoke, what they create. In such an account, the Eucharist would—in a radical sense—have no meaning. The Eucharist would not mean anything but would do something—something slightly different every time, way out of our control: the meeting of hands, lips, and a cold chalice, of bread and skin; the chalice and the wine, the paten and the bread, as well as our bodies gathered, our dreams, hopes, despairs, are all things that hide other things—a mystery of things that affect us in their materiality as well as in the stories they tell or hide from us. Foucault noted in Discipline and Punish (1975) how the focus on and faith in meaning and final understanding had influenced even techniques for surveillance. It had resulted in a certain way of seeing as seeing through in order to reveal an inner truth. To Shapiro, Foucault’s analysis of Manet parallels his analysis of the panopticon since both analyses examine the deceptive idea of being able to view an interior depth from looking at a surface. While the panopticon still rests on the conviction of a revelatory vision, Manet introduces an alternative vision liberated from the illusion of depth. His is a different way of seeing, accepting the fact that all one can see is the surface, and that there is no given position from which to look.32 “In a society that has instituted so many windows and guard towers of surveillance,” Shapiro writes, “the closed structure of the museum turns our eyes toward another kind of activity.”33 Through his focus on Manet, Foucault let the very canvas and the limitations of the tangible reality of painting lead the way to new ways of thinking and a new space for the invisibilities of reality: it points to another kind of activity than seeing in order to see through and reveal. From a theological perspective, I believe this trajectory of thought—from Manet through Bataille and Foucault to contemporary theory—can become an ongoing theological negotiation of and through Western thought. It is a theological journey that until now has mainly taken

68  Manet place outside of theological seminaries—ever since Manet expressed frustration at the unnatural poses of Couture’s models. Today, however, it can be seen in the realm of self-critical and radical theology, suggesting the place of academic theology as a tangible yet fleeting nonplace—a nonplace where radical reconsiderations of our shared reality are possible. These ideas may also enter Christian worship where Christianity, as Bataille shows in Story of the Eye, is at its most carnal and sensual. Through the course of liturgical history, some Christian traditions have come closer to such an approach than others. The Lutheran traditions have generally been less attentive to bodily and material aspects of worship than have the Orthodox and Catholic traditions, yet I believe the materiality of faith can challenge theology to move into new domains of experience and experiment. In the actual meeting between bodies and things in sacramental acts, a humility in relation to the mysteries of things may open unexpected encounters. Rather than focusing on the inner self or the transcendent or the experience one supposedly longs to have or thinks one ought to have during the liturgical service, a material approach could open a space for wordless encounters between things and bodies: my hands, my lips, other bodies, the pews, the wine, the narrative, the bread, the smells, the desire, the pain, and the relief. Just as Artaud aspired to open theater to the present and the actual rather than the transcendent and the ideal, Christian liturgy may now, roughly a century later, be ready to do the same.

Notes 1 Catherine Dale, “Knowing One’s Enemy: Deleuze, Artaud, and the Problem of Judgement,” in Deleuze and Religion, ed. Mary Bryden (New York: Routledge, 2001). 2 Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschal (New York: Penguin, 2001). 3 Brannon Hancock, The Scandal of Sacramentality: The Eucharist in Literary and Theological Perspectives (London: James Clarke, 2014), 172. 4 Or what Jeremy Carrette has described in Foucault and Religion as a spiritual corporality that, toward Foucault’s last works, turns into a political spirituality. 5 Georges Bataille, Manet: Biographical and Critical Study, trans. Austryn Wainhouse and James Emmons (New York: Skira, 1955), 35. Hereafter this text is cited as M followed by the page number. 6 The Encyclopaedia Brittanica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and General Literature, vol. 6 (London: Scribner’s, 1878). 7 In Bataille’s view, however, these rebellious actions by the young Manet is not only telling of Manet’s individual attitude but also “the first sign of a fundamental change soon to come over all European painting.” What Manet, and soon the entirety of European painting aimed toward, was to leave what Bataille terms the rhetoric in painting, or painting’s representational service, and to move toward its own autonomy. Bataille writes, “What Manet insisted upon, uncompromisingly, was an end to rhetoric in painting. What he insisted upon was painting that should rise in utter freedom, in natural silence, painting for its own sake, a song for the eyes of interwoven forms and colors” (M 37). Manet, Bataille argues, “had a passion for silencing that which is naturally moved to speak, and for stripping that which convention clothes” (M 86).

Manet 69 8 Tanke reads Foucault on Manet as a part of Foucault’s development of his archeological method and thus underlines Foucault’s account of Manet as a discontinuity or event in the history of art (Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art, 67). 9 The modified translation is motivated by Soussloff’s attempt to highlight that the materiality of painting to Foucault is not a “traditional materiality,” one that renders matter representable but (as I argue in Chapter 1) a materiality that is inevitably entangled with what we habitually regard as abstract knowledge. Soussloff, Foucault on Painting, 1200/4656. 10 Foucault is not alone in his understanding of Manet. See, for instance, T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 11 Note that the lectures were transcribed from a recording and later translated into English as Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, trans. Matthew Barr (London: Tate, 2013), 28; French ed., La peinture de Manet: Suivi de Michel Foucault, un regard, ed. Maryvonne Saison (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 23. Hereafter this text is cited as MOP followed by the page numbers in the English and French editions. 12 Macey, Lives of Michel Foucault, 76. 13 Macey, Lives of Michel Foucault, 189. “Flaubert est à la bibliothèque ce que Manet est au musée” (Foucault, “La bibliothèque fantastique,” 11). 14 Soussloff points out how the development of the ideas presented in the Las Meninas analysis also stands forth by the placement of the artist who, in Velázquez’s painting, is at the center but in Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens is placed firmly to the side. Soussloff, Foucault on Painting, 1175/4656. 15 As in, for example, In the Greenhouse, Saint-Lazare Station, and The Fifer. 16 In Bataille’s presentation, this painting serves as a key to understanding Manet’s art as indifferent. According to Bataille, Manet saw Goya’s The Shootings of May Third in 1865, and in 1867 he painted his own execution painting, and the difference is striking. Of Goya’s execution painting, Bataille writes, “The eloquence, the rhetoric of painting has never been carried further, but here its effect is that of a definitive silence, an outcry smothered before it can rise” (M 51). Of Manet’s execution painting, in contrast, Bataille asserts, “Manet deliberately rendered the condemned man’s death with the same indifference as if he had chosen a fish or a flower as his subject.” The represented situation is not important to Manet, only the event on the canvas. To Bataille, Manet’s painting “is the negation of that kind of painting which, like language, expresses sentiments and relates anecdotes” (M 52). 17 Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art, 131. 18 MOP 71/43. Swedish literature scholar Sara Danius describes how the Impressionist painters treat light as a main character in its own right. In Manet’s The Balcony, she writes, the flatness of the image, with the compact darkness in the background, makes the three figures stand forth as paper dolls (Sara Danius, Den blå tvålen: Romanen och konsten att göra saker och ting synliga [Stockholm: Bonniers, 2013], 375). 19 The model is the painter Victorine Meurent, who also models in Saint-Lazare Station and Luncheon on the Grass. Meurent is vividly and wonderfully described by art historian Eunice Lipton in Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her Own Desire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). 20 Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art, 130–1. 21 Rather than subordinating the being of language to a new object that is transcendental or absolute, like the subject, writers like 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

70  Manet executant in a pure ceremony of the Book in which the discourse would compose itself” (Foucault, Order of Things, 306; Les mots et les choses, 317). 22 Nicolas Bourriaud, “Michel Foucault: Manet and the Birth of the Viewer,” in Michel Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting (London: Tate, 2013), 19. 23 See Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” in The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2001), 229–36; and Nicolas Bourriaud, “Introduction,” MOP 17. 24 Bourriaud, “Michel Foucault: Manet and the Birth of the Viewer,” 16. 25 Hancock, The Scandal of Sacramentality, 124. 26 “The urgency,” Crockett explains, “is the awareness that overpopulation, resource exploitation, and global climate change may bring an end to human civilization within the next century. Our contemporary form of life is unsustainable, and our forms of thought are not nourishing or sustaining either” (Clayton Crockett, Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism [New York: Columbia University Press, 2011], 165). 27 Petra Carlsson Redell, Mysticism as Revolt: Foucault, Deleuze and Theology Beyond Representation (Aurora, CO: Davies Group, 2014), Chapter. 8. 28 Soussloff suggests that Foucault’s notion of the object painting in Manet is, in fact, modeled on, thus taking one step further than the notion of object language in Alfred Tarski’s language theory. Soussloff, Foucault on Painting, 1238/4656. 29 Thinkers like Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze inform contemporary new materialists like Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Quentin Meillassoux, and others. Braidotti describes the “movement” in Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin’s collection of interviews and essays titled New Materialisms (Open Humanities, 2012), 21, in the New Metaphysics series. 30 Simon Chan, Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshipping Community (Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 2006), 50. 31 Fagerberg, David, “What is the subject matter of liturgical theology?” in Roczniki liturgiczno-homiletyczne, Tom 1 (57) (2010): 49. 32 Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, 315. 33 Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, 312.

4 Magritte The betrayal of images

In the Introduction, we noted how the transgressive art scene paralleled Foucault’s move away from abstract criticism toward a more hands-on and immanent approach to the history of modern Western culture.1 Foucault’s archaeology went through the archives of our historical reality to tell the story behind the emergence of any purportedly universal or timeless statement that he wanted to challenge. Once the history was told, the statement that had initially seemed timeless suddenly appeared relative and contingent. To that extent, Foucault’s approach also turned away from a direct form of critique to an indirect form. Rather than positively or cataphatically stating a new truth, he let the retold history indicate what had been left unsaid. To that extent, his indirect critique was also an apophatic or negative approach, suggesting the presence of an unseen and unarticulated reality in the midst of our shared history. Negative theology was one of the few styles with which Foucault explicitly compared his own thought, though he emphasized that the comparison should not be misunderstood.2 His connections with theology did not by any means invoke or accept the higher transcendence of Christian orthodoxy, as has also been discussed in recent scholarship on Foucault and theology.3 The present chapter elaborates on two often neglected aspects of Foucault’s use of the negative. First, I argue that several theological accounts of Foucault’s notion of the negative bring it into a realm of abstraction, which I find misses out on crucial elements of his negative motion. The material aim of Foucault’s use of the negative stands forth in his analysis of René Magritte (1898–1967), I argue, thanks to Magritte’s focus on the mysteries of tangible things. Second, through Magritte’s use of the negative, Foucault finds an opening for the liberation of thought to be thought. Paradoxically, there is a move in Foucault’s reasoning on Magritte that turns thinking into thing; places thought on the surface of appearances, in the midst of the mystery of things. Foucault uses the negative to liberate thought from God and man alike. I discuss this move in relation to theologians John Caputo and Catherine Keller and suggest an additive rather than a subtractive apophatic gesture for contemporary radical theology.

72  Magritte

Postrepresentational inspiration As noted in the Introduction, Kazimir Malevich managed to turn the art world around when founding the Suprematist movement in 1913. Malevich left behind the representational ideal of painting in order to let painting be painting: nonobjective and nonrepresentational, related to the spirituality of its own forms and colors. Suprematists turned away from the longestablished ideal of art as representing a transcendently situated truth and elevated, instead, the flat canvas and its intrinsic and deeply mystic reality of forms. In consequence, Malevich’s artistic revolt was also a provocation to the dominant theology of his time.4 If art no longer strove to capture a higher, transcendent truth, would it not finally encourage people to search for the truths of life in this world rather than in heaven? When exhibiting Black Square (1915), which had the square shape of traditional acheiropoietos icons, Malevich provocatively hung it in an upper corner at The Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10—a place where icons are traditionally hung in Russian Orthodox homes. It was, in other words, a clear step away from earlier religious art and, for Malevich, the beginning of a new spiritual era.5 While not affiliated with the movement, Wassily Kandinsky was influenced by Malevich’s Suprematism. After 1920, Kandinsky’s art approached a geometrization of forms, and with Kandinsky this trajectory of Russian painting was to become important to Foucault. In Kandinsky and the wider nonrepresentational art scene, Foucault encountered one expression of the critique of representation and the critique of transcendence that he was striving to articulate philosophically. He found support not only for his archaeological method—as Tanke has well argued—but also for his critique of Christian representational thinking and of the Christian notion of a transcendently situated truth.6 With the postrepresentational artists, the idea of art as representing reality was questioned once and for all. These artists pointed instead to the event on the canvas itself, suggesting that reality, truth, and meaning were created just as much there as elsewhere. To that extent, postrepresentational accounts of art paralleled Foucault’s endeavor to distance himself from forms of criticism that critiqued through counterstatements. In other words, in postrepresentational art Foucault encountered a disinclination to affirmatively state what a work of art was all about, what a word finally means, and for that matter what the “truth” regarding a certain historical event was. His work in the history of Western science had taught him that very idea that our words may fully capture and mediate a physical event or a material thing is a premodern presupposition and is contingent. Just as avant-garde artists of the twentieth century refused to answer questions about the meaning of their work—claiming that the very idea of “meaning” involves imposing a transcendent notion onto an immanent object—Foucault began creating philosophy from below: that is, out of the archives, the material events, rather than out of abstract, “transcendent” critique being applied to immanent reality. In short, Foucault did to

Magritte 73 philosophy what the Russian and European postrepresentational artists had done to art, and when Magritte became acquainted with his work he recognized their shared endeavor. Though not fully agreeing with Magritte, as we shall see, Foucault nevertheless found Magrittian Surrealism even closer to his own endeavor than the nonobjective art of Kandinsky.

Magritte to Foucault Having read The Order of Things, Magritte wrote a letter to Foucault. Without wasting ink on polite small talk, Magritte throws himself right into Foucault’s use of the words resemblance and similitude in his historical exposé.7 In Magritte’s regard, the distinction between these notions is too seldom noted—in Foucault’s book as well, one must assume—which is why Magritte himself raises the issue. Similitude, Magritte suggests, is something that belongs to things. It is something that things can have in relation to each other: “It seems to me that, for example, green peas have between them relations of similitude, at once visible (their color, form, size) and invisible (their nature, taste, weight).” To Magritte, similitude is the visible and invisible similarities between things (TN 57/57–58). Resemblance, on the other hand, belongs to thought and to the thinking subject, Magritte argues. “Only thought resembles,” Magritte states. Thought becomes what it perceives; hence, it is nothing but resemblance to what it takes in. Thought, he writes, “resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it.” In consequence, resemblance is never visible but always invisible, like pleasure or pain. Resemblance is a subject’s experience of the world: a perception that renders the world somehow cohesive and coherent. Painting offers a problem with respect to the difference between resemblance and similitude thus understood, Magritte continues, because in painting an artist’s thoughts become visible and thus resemblance becomes visible. What the artist’s thought “sees, hears, or knows” becomes visible through his or her painting since this is where she expresses her ideas. To that extent a painted image hides nothing, Magritte argues, while visible objects, in comparison, always hide other things. In Magritte’s view, the similitude between tangible objects includes levels of invisibility, whereas the plain resemblance given in works of art does not. Art as visible resemblance is overt, while the similitude of ordinary things is mysteriously obscure. In other words, abstract thoughts and ideas are never as mysterious and multileveled as the sensuous world that surrounds us: “a painted image—intangible by its very nature—hides nothing, while the tangibly visible object hides another visible thing” (TN 57/58). Painting portrays resemblance as such; thus, painting renders the invisible presuppositions of the artist’s thought visible, which to Magritte is crucial and exactly as it should be. In another context Magritte even makes this account into an artistic imperative: “What one must paint is the image of resemblance—if thought is to become visible in the world.”8 Because to

74  Magritte Magritte thought must become visible in order for the limitations of the human mind to stand forth and, subsequently, to make room for the mysteries of things. The mysteries of things are hidden and restrained by human thought—by resemblance—why we must depict human thought to throw light on these absurd limitations. The “problem” that painting offers in relation to resemblance versus similitude is thus a crucial opening in Magritte’s own account of art. The distinction between what is similar and what we think of as similar, related, or resembling does not stand in painting; this enables him to make a philosophical statement through his artistry. It enables him to play with identity and with the way in which resemblance shapes and regulates our perception of the world. In Le Condition humaine (1933 and 1935; there are two by the same title) Magritte lets the painting and its object become so similar so that they appear interchangeable.9 The two paintings are paintings of paintings and their objects—which, of course, are also paintings as parts of the painted composition. The composition thus indicates that a painting is always stuck in a representational universe of resemblance, yet the fact that his paintings play with this claustrophobic circumstance indicates the possibility of a reality that always and necessarily escapes the world of representation. The world of human perception is not all there is. Indirectly, Magritte’s play with representation lets the viewer glimpse the mysteries of the things themselves. Magritte died the year after their correspondence. A few years later, in 1968, Foucault published an essay on Magritte titled “This Is not a Pipe” (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”) in Les cahiers du chemin, which was reworked and republished as a book of its own in 1973.10 In the essay Foucault continues the discussion on similitude versus resemblance, not simply sticking to Magritte’s distinction as introduced in his letter but developing the difference between the two concepts further.11 In my view, the account correlates more closely with Foucault’s understanding of Deleuze’s discussion of these matters in Difference and Repetition (Différence et repetition) than with Magritte’s distinction in his letter to Foucault.12 Nonetheless, it is clear that Foucault finds his ideas reflected in Magritte’s art and, to some extent, in his letter. Being a philosopher of his time, however, Foucault is not quite satisfied with Magritte’s suggestion that thought is nothing but resemblance. In his aim to push the boundaries of representational thought, Foucault does not settle with the idea that thought is representational or resemblance by its very nature. Instead, he uses Magritte’s ideas to free tangible things from the limitations put on them by thought and to free thought from the limiting idea of thought as resemblance.

Foucault: resemblance versus similitude Foucault’s essay on Magritte describes resemblance in Magritte’s art as having a model or an original in relation to which things differ. Resemblance, in Foucault’s account, presupposes a primary reference in relation to which

Magritte 75 copies are hierarchized in accordance with their likeness/unlikeness to the original (TN 44/42). The similar, by contrast, is characterized by the repetition of likeness in a series without beginning or end—series that can be traced or tracked in either direction. A row of green peas, for example, are similar to each other, and the similarity can be tracked from left to right or from right to left. If instead we imagine a row of green peas ordered in accordance with the logic of resemblance, the most pealike, say, the greenest and roundest, would be placed at the far left, and the other peas would be ordered in relation to their likeness/unlikeness to first green pea. In this latter example, we will have (apart from a sense of time wasted on a useless task) a hierarchical ranking of resemblance that originates in the green pea to the left. Whereas the similar obeys no hierarchy, Foucault claims, resemblance does. In consequence, resemblance belongs to representational logic while similitude refuses to play by the rules of representation and merely repeats. “Resemblance serves representation, which rules over it; similitude serves repetition which ranges across it” (TN 44/42). And Magritte’s art manages to play resemblance against similitude, Foucault argues, so that the former gives way to the latter. By playing with resemblance and representation, Magritte’s work questions the very basics of reason, the fundamentals of how we experience and explain the world. Before we turn to Magritte’s art to see how this is done, let us have a closer look at Foucault’s idea of playing resemblance against similitude. Here a short detour to Gilles Deleuze will help us understand the idea of this play, how it gives way to the unknown, and how Foucault develops Magritte’s ideas.

Thinking in series Foucault wrote the first version of his essay on Magritte in 1968 and then rewrote it slightly for publication as a book in 1973. In the meantime, in 1970 he had written an essay on Deleuze’s Logic of Sense (Logique du sens) and Difference and Repetition. The essay, which was to become a minor classic, was titled “Theatrum Philosophicum” and revealed Foucault’s admiration for Deleuze as well as his own account of Deleuze’s notion of difference and repetition. It also included a discussion of the repetitive art of Andy Warhol, which, in turn, instigated a new ending to the Magritte essay. The 1973 version of the essay ends with a prophetic vision of a future of endless series of similitude: “Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell.” In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze introduces—like Foucault on Magritte—two kinds of rationality of difference relating to two kinds of likeness. He distinguishes between likeness as in the relation between a model and a copy, and likeness as simulacra or repetition. The two different accounts are also described as the relation between the particular and the general versus the relation between the singular and the universal. The former corresponds to the kind of pattern Foucault describes as resemblance,

76  Magritte while the latter captures the ideas given through Foucault’s definition of similitude.13 Deleuze first lays out the dialectical kind of difference that is displayed in the relationship between the particular and the general—or, to speak with Foucault, that which resembles and the original that it resembles. According to this account of difference, the particular differs from the general in a negative sense. The particular is an imperfect variety of the general. The relation between the general and the particular presupposes a Same, a prior identity, since the particularity indicates the existence of something to which the particular is an individual and subordinate expression. To offer a more critical example than green peas, let us consider the idea of a female norm: “a woman in general” from which particular women differ. In relation to such an idea, women who are, say, aggressive and unwilling to compromise may be said to be farther away from the female norm than women who never raise their voices. Particularity is, then, representational since it implicitly refers to an absent identity. In consequence, the particular is not finally open to difference and change of identity as such—quite the contrary. The existence of the particular depends on and presupposes the general. The particular forms its identity as differing from the general, which reinforces the identity of the general and subsequently reinforces identity as such. The particular expression represents the general, which is why, according to Deleuze, difference is always negative when understood in terms of particularity.14 In other words, in such an account of difference, one can only differ negatively from the norm, or contradict the norm if one nevertheless assumes the norm—the notion of the one identity as such. Deleuze’s second understanding of difference is described as the relationship between the singular and the universal—or, to speak with Foucault on Magritte, the similar and the series of which it is a part. Here the singular indicates not the norm but the unavoidability of variation.15 A singular identity does not indicate a general law or a stable identity from which it deviates but a multiplicity that it affirms and constitutes. For instance, the repetition of “a woman” instigates a variety of expressions in the name of “a woman.” The very repetition of one woman after another transforms the very notion of “women in general,” of a female norm. Each woman appears as an expression of the universal “woman” so that, for instance, one is a woman who cries, one is a woman who lacks control, one is a woman who wears skirt, one is a woman with a beard, and so on—all expressions that indicate the multiplicity of woman. When Foucault wrote “Theatrum Philosophicum,” his essay on Deleuze, he was inspired by Deleuze’s ideas on difference and repetition. Foucault describes the representational pattern as a pattern of resemblance that structures and organizes differences in relation to an original. To that extent, it does not give way to a more radical form of difference because for something to be different in accordance with representational logic, it must relate in a measurable way to the already known. It is a table of measurable differences that allows difference only within the set parameters of the already

Magritte 77 familiar, Foucault states. Differences are only understood as deviations from the norm; hence, differences understood in this manner reinforce the norm. But what, Foucault wonders, recognizes this hierarchy of resemblance, “the exactly alike and the least similar—the greatest and the smallest, the brightest and the darkest—if not good sense?” “Good sense,” Foucault argues, is the most efficient agent for deciding what goes together and what does not, what creates gaps and fissures and just how wide they are, since the very function of good sense is to incorporate or reject, to include or to exclude.16 The power of good sense rules over the philosophy of representation, Foucault concludes. Yet it is time to leave good sense behind, he writes, and break free of the limitations of representation: Let us pervert good sense and allow thought to play outside the ordered table of resemblances; then it will appear as the vertical dimension of intensities, because intensity, well before its gradation by representation, is in itself pure difference: difference that displaces and repeats itself, contracts and expands; a singular point that constricts and slackens the indefinite repetitions in an acute event. One must give rise to thought as intensive irregularity. (TH 183/89) Foucault advocates, with Deleuze, a perversion of good sense, and he appears to have found such perversion in Magritte as well as in Warhol. It is a notion of repetition and similitude that does not support representation but that enables difference to be more fully different. What he has found in these artists is repetition as similitude rather than representation as resemblance. In the Magritte essay, this idea is introduced as a similitude formed in series without beginning or end, with neither original nor copy. Difference in relation to similitude is not negatively constructed as deviation from a norm; rather, difference as repetitive similitude is affirmation; it is “the same yes twice,” parodying a nonexistent original form.17 In Foucault’s vision, repetition of that which appears to be the same but never is becomes a play that subverts the notion of the Same: Repetition betrays the weakness of the same at the moment when it can no longer negate itself in the other, when it can no longer recapture itself in the other. Repetition, at one time pure exteriority and a pure figure of the origin, has been transformed into an internal weakness, a deficiency of finitude, a sort of stuttering of the negative—the neurosis of dialectics. (TH 184/90) A parodic play converts the power of the same into an internal weakness within the notion of the same, within the pattern of resemblance and representation itself.

78  Magritte In sum, what Foucault discusses through the notions of representation and repetition in “Theatrum Philosophicum,” he introduces through the notions of resemblance and similitude in the Magritte essay. In both essays, the former serves the idea of an original that insists on being treated as such, while the latter instigates a way of thinking and a way of depicting the world in which appearance has replaced the entire logic of originals and copies. “Resemblance,” Foucault writes in the Magritte essay, “predicates itself upon a model it must return to and reveal; similitude circulates the simulacrum as an indefinite and reversible relation of the similar to the similar” (TN 44/42). Magritte, in La Condition humaine and in La Cascade (1961), lets paintings within the paintings enact a play with the idea of painting versus what it represents, as Foucault shows. In these compositions, there is a continuity from what would formerly be considered the model/original to what would be considered the copy/representation, but it is hard to tell which is which. The one appears no more original than the other or, as in La Cascade, the one invades the other so that finally the very distinction between them will vanish (TN 50–51/50). The distance and duality between representation and object are about to be erased. In Magritte’s painting Représentation (1962), a ball game seen from a terrace is neatly and carefully represented. To the left of the larger representation there is an exact copy about half the size of the larger image, and these two ballgames side by side are enough, Foucault asserts, to disturb the idea of exterior reference. “What ‘represents’ what?” he asks. The exact resemblance of the image functions as a finger pointing to a model, to a sovereign reality being represented, but the series of two exactly similar images abolishes the idea of the sovereign. “Henceforth the simulacrum, in a sense always reversible, ranges across the surface” (TN 44/43). It is impossible to know which image represents which, and this uncertainty is enough, in turn, to make it possible to follow the series of two in both directions, Foucault argues. Thus, the hierarchy of copy and model is displaced with series of difference, at least as far as images are concerned. What if we apply this way of ordering the world to the difference between words and things? What if we do not accept a hierarchy in which the one explains the other in the relation between words and things but, instead, view words and things as series that one can follow in either direction?

From art to thought Addressing the influence of representational thought in our way of viewing the world, Foucault enhances another crucial theme in Magritte. It is the theme to which Foucault dedicated an entire book: the relation between words and things. The idea of a hierarchy of truth becomes even more challenging when it is not just a matter of comparing images. When the question is whether a word can describe a thing or vice versa or even if there is no hierarchy between words and things, the discussion is no longer limited to

Magritte 79 art but is inevitably about knowledge itself. I discussed the very first step of this reasoning in Mysticism as Revolt, but let me recapture it in order to illuminate how Foucault here approaches, first, a liberation of words and things and, in a next step, a liberation of thought. In the Magritte essay, Foucault argues that two principles have ruled the world of painting in the classical era, that is, from the fifteenth until the twentieth century, and that Magritte was one of the first artists to violate them. According to the first of these two principles, words, and images have different functions. Words and images are clearly separated so that words are not used for illustration (Guillaume Apollinaire famously violates this principle in his figurative poems), and images are not used for explanation (TN 32/27, 53/53). The first principle ensures that words do not resemble reality but represent it, while images cannot represent but merely resemble. Accordingly, the first rule safeguards a separation between words and images; one is either reading or viewing. If there were words in a painting before this rule was violated, they would be part of the image, as, for instance, a letter or a book being read. The words had the function of an image. The second principle, on the other hand, safeguards the bond between words and images presupposing a connection between a word describing a thing and a thing/image illustrating a word. The second principle, Foucault holds, affirms that there is a representational connection between words and images so that a word may capture an image, and images may illustrate the meaning of a word.18 If a painting resembles a pipe, there is a presupposed connection to the representational statement: “that is a pipe” (TN 34/29). Such a connection is simply good and common sense when the rule is respected, Foucault observes, but the connection is famously ruptured by the nonrepresentational art of Kandinsky. Kandinsky maintains instead that the colors and lines of his work are “things” in the same sense as, say, a building or a tree. To that extent his painting negates representation by affirming the present: Kandinsky’s is a naked affirmation clutching at no resemblance, and which, when asked “what it is,” can reply only by referring itself to the gesture that formed it: an “improvisation,” a “composition”; or to what is found there: “a red shape,” “triangles,” “purple orange”; or tensions or internal relations: “a determinant pink,” “upwards,” “a yellow milieu,” “a rosy balance.” (TN 34/30) In his 1911 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky articulated his view of the core of the art of painting, later presented in a deepened version in Point and Line to Plane.19 Reacting against what he named “the materialist era,” he introduced instead a spiritual ideal for painting. What he wanted to capture by the term materialist should not be misunderstood,

80  Magritte however. The materialist era is, to Kandinsky, the era of systems, structures, and explanations from above as opposed to the inner spirituality—also repeatedly referred to as the inner necessity—of every human being and everything, every color and form. The artist’s mission is not to adapt to contemporary ideas of art, of the world, or of what painting should be all about, but to follow his or her inner necessity. Inner necessity is regarded as the true and spiritual nucleus not only of the artist but also of form and color. The truth of every form and color is their spirit, their inner truth, which is to be expressed on the canvas. Their truth subsists not in what they represent, what outer reality they evoke or convey, but in their own being, which is an inner abstraction. When color and form are allowed to speak with their own expressions of their inner selves, they may also speak to the inner soul of any viewer who is open and artistically mature enough to take them in. Kandinsky’s reaction against what he described as a materialism could in fact, with contemporary allusions of the concept, be explained as a form of materiality. It is about staying true to the very being of matter rather than letting matter conform to our perceptions of what matter should be. The artist’s calling is not to limit expression to common perception, to our momentary ideas or ideals, or to systems or measurements created by the distanced intellect, but to let the world express itself—not its representations—in color and form.20 To Kandinsky, to paint is to set out on a spiritual journey, and the artist is to settle for nothing less than becoming the Nietzschean superman or the philosopher of Plato’s cave, who may come back into the darkness and enlighten the shackled humans with the true light of the world of form and color. Consequentially, when Kandinsky writes that he has painted “a red shape,” he means that he has painted the very essence and inner necessity of the red shape—he has painted its very being. The inner spiritual reality of the red shape is right there on the canvas, so what else can he say than “it is a red shape”? He has painted the red shape par excellence, and if he has not succeeded, it is simply not a good piece of art.21 This is not quite what Foucault takes with him after experiencing Kandinsky, however. Kandinsky’s art does assist his rethinking of representation, the relation between image and words, and inspires him to experiment philosophically with letting things be things, form be form, and color be color. Kandinsky’s endeavor parallels Foucault’s attempt to experiment with the idea of a creative philosophy without meaning: an immanent philosophy without reference to eternal truths. Yet Foucault does not turn to immanence in order to replace transcendent truths with the timeless inner truths of the things themselves. Kandinsky’s description of “inner necessity” recalls, in fact, the Platonic and traditionally theological account of representation that Foucault set out to undermine in The Order of Things. Instead, in the essay, Foucault turns to Magritte. Comparing Kandinsky’s work to Magritte’s with regard to the representation of reality, Magritte, at first glance seems devoted to exact resemblance. According to Foucault, however, this exactness is precisely how Magritte

Magritte 81 plays similitude against resemblance. Foucault explains his point through Magritte’s two famous pipe paintings: La Trahison des images (1928–29) and Les Deux mystères (1966).22 Magritte painted Les Deux mystères in the same year Foucault published Les mots et les choses, which was the same year that he and Foucault had their written correspondence.23 These paintings have a way of rendering affirmative speech impossible, Foucault observes. To that extent, the destruction of representation and meaning, which was an artistic presupposition for Kandinsky—and one that he repeatedly defended when asked about his work—was decisively acted out by Magritte on his canvases. These paintings have a way of making contradictory statements, or of making room for different voices. The sentence below the image of the pipe may be read in seven different ways, none more correct than the other, and all true at once. According to Shapiro, these seven voices display the influence of Nietzsche on Foucault. Not only is the title of the chapter in which the second painting is discussed, “The Seven Seals of Affirmation,” borrowed from Nietzsche, but so is the question that Foucault poses to the painting. Whereas Nietzsche asked, “Now that God is dead, who is speaking?” Foucault wonders concerning the sentence below the image, “Who speaks in the statement?” And despite—or even because of—the deaths of God and man, there are no fewer than seven possible voices in these compositions: the lower pipe, the higher pipe, the text, the text and the lower pipe together, the two pipes together, the text and the higher pipe together, or finally, a voice speaking of all the elements together.24 Depending on which voice is speaking, the implications of the statement change, which is why the composition as it stands has a way of simultaneously asserting contradictory statements: that the image of the pipe is not a pipe but, rather, an image and therefore not a pipe or that “this”—the words written below the pipe—is not a pipe (TN 26–27/21–22). This second statement is underlined, Foucault suggests, by the fact that the image of the pipe is so clear; the image is so obviously a pipe that it would be ridiculous to try to make it any clearer by using words to say, “This is a pipe.” This, in consequence, would explain why the words must state that they are not, in any way, a pipe (TN 25/19–20). Rather than making the pipe(s) any clearer, the clearness of the image makes the words stand forth as words since their function in this case is not nearly as efficient as the image or the object they are said to represent. Words are not their object, statements are not visibilities, and visibilities are not statements, as we underlined in relation to Las Meninas. The painting says “this”—the combination of words and image(s)—is, of course, not a pipe (TN 27–28/23). Foucault calls Magritte’s combination of image and text an unraveled calligram. The text becomes an image of text, and the image becomes an image of an image. Moreover, the pipe and the text below it are morphologically similar: there is a congruence of shape and line between them. The textual figures appear to simulate the shape of the

82  Magritte pipe, or perhaps the pipe simulates the image of the text written below.25 In that manner, the images of the words and the pipe question the opposition between reading and viewing; or in Foucault’s words, “the calligram aspires to playfully efface the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read” (TN 21/16). In an ordinary calligram, the viewer would be allowed to alternate between the two activities of looking and reading in order to let them intermingle but still remain themselves, still remain opposites. Either one looks at the shape of an Apollinaire poem, in which case one is not reading, or one reads the poem, in which case one is not looking at the shape. Magritte’s pipe calligram, however, erases all reference points.26 It is impossible to determine what should be read and what should be viewed in this painting. The composition is converted from resemblance to similitude, from representation to repetition. And why is that? What is it in this painting that makes the simultaneous stating of the seven mutually contradictory statements possible, questioning the hierarchy between words and image so that cataphatic speech fails? For Foucault, it is the empty space between the words and the image, like the white space between image and text in an illustrated book (TN 28/23). In an illustrated book, the pictorial illustrations are translated into words, so to speak, in the text that is correlated with the image, while the images give substance and meaning to the correlated text. The white space between image and words is thus the space of resemblance—the space through which the true signification is unveiled—and as such, it is the space of the positive and the cataphatic. In a representational logic of resemblance, this is where the original would be distinguished from the copy: the image from what it represents, the description from its illustration, the word from the image. In Magritte’s painting, however, the white space between image and text has recognized its own power, and it uses this power to question the very idea of such classifications. The white space refuses to play by the two principles of representational painting, which are also the very basic principles for making sense of the world around us.27 The painting violates the two principles, replacing them with a serial relation between words and things, and with this seriality disappears the very foundation for positive statements. It does not matter how clear an image; if the white space refuses to play by the rules there will be no pipe. “Under the empty weight of similitude, painting finally stops speaking,” as Tanke puts it.28 There are no positive statements to be drawn out of these paintings, which is why they are left to be paintings—no more, no less. The distinction between words and things is dissolved, leaving only their presence as appearance, their performative materiality.

The freedom of thought to be thought In Tanke’s regard, Foucault misinterprets, finds insufficient, or simply forgets Magritte’s distinction between resemblance and similitude proposed in

Magritte 83 his letter to Foucault.29 Yet Foucault’s interpretation is best understood as a development of Magritte’s tentative distinction, as I have claimed earlier. Indeed, Foucault quotes Magritte’s distinction in his essay, although he adds an explanation right after Magritte’s definition: “Thought resembles without similitude, becoming those things whose mutual similitude excludes resemblance.” The meaning of this clarification might seem obvious at a first glance given the reasoning earlier, but Foucault continues: “Magritte’s painting doubtless rests here, where thought in the mode of resemblance and things in relations of similitude have just vertically intersected.” Does he mean that through Magritte’s art thought becomes, in a sense, material; it becomes a thing, and thus, as in the essay on Deleuze, thought is freed from resemblance? Thought is no longer, as in Magritte’s account, a mirror of the world; it is no longer human perception merely representing the world because thoughts and things have intersected on the surface of appearances. Foucault is, in my view, suggesting a reversal of Magritte’s own ideas by way of Magritte’s work. For Magritte, thought is stuck in representation and resemblance whereas things are not, the world is not. But Foucault seems to wonder, “Why so?” Are thoughts really as structured in relation to the outside world as representational logic suggests? Are thoughts not also irrational, haphazard, and creative? In other words, are thoughts not also expressions on a surface of infinite appearances, an expression of the mystery of things? Foucault views Magritte as making painting possible as painting and through the same motion he opens a space wherein thought becomes possible as thought. Not as the structured ideal of what we like to think of as clear thinking but thought as it actually appears: creative and chaotic. In Foucault’s essay on Deleuze one finds Foucault’s famous and multilayered suggestion: “perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian” (TH 165/75). It is a multilayered suggestion since “Deleuzian” in this proposition does not seem to signify a new master thinker but rather to indicate that “thought is again possible,” as Foucault himself puts it at the end of his essay (TH 196/98). Having read Deleuze, Foucault has encountered a world in which every master concept indicates a multiplicity rather than an original. It is a thinking in series rather than hierarchies, and Foucault is overwhelmed by it, as the following passage attests: We must avoid thinking that the return is the form of a content which is difference; rather, from an always nomadic and anarchical difference to the unavoidably excessive and displaced sign of recurrence, a lightning storm was produced which will, one day, be given the name of Deleuze: new thought is possible; thought is again possible. (TH 196/98) Deleuze introduces a way of thinking difference that does not indicate a model but rather multiplies potentialities. Thought is practice, creative

84  Magritte practice, not a more or less accurate application of theory in relation to an original idea. (We shall see this notion turning political for Foucault in succeeding chapters.) Moreover, theory is not a translation—not practice put into words, not what applies to practice—but is itself a practice among others; thus, totalization disperses, and thought becomes possible as practice, as thinking. Thought no longer needs to resemble but may act as thought in series without beginning or end—just like postrepresentational art. When painting is liberated from the limiting idea of paintings having a determinate meaning to be detected and possibly even inscribed in words on a plaque next to the painting at the gallery, painting may finally be let to be what it is—painting, an activity—and the painting that results as a thing that cannot be translated into words but that affects us, our world, and our thinking, in their materiality. Magritte’s play with representation throws light on the mysteries of our concrete reality—invisible presences that are neither imaginary nor supernatural but that nonetheless challenge our habitual ideas of experience and reason—precisely because he does not let them be translated from one into another.30 When the representational bond between words and things is broken, things cannot be made meaningful through words but are permitted to function on a wordless and immediate level. It is a level at which the mystery and absurdity of things are allowed to stand forth because naming and classification are suspended, as are all the tools we have for rendering things less mysterious, less absurd, less different than they appear. What Foucault sees in Magritte, is thus an artist who plays by the rules to the point of absurdity and beyond; who uses disobedient repetition to undermine the very principles behind resemblance. He repeats the familiar until it becomes absurd and thus depicts the absurdity of things and, in Foucault’s regard, the absurdity of thought. For Foucault on Deleuze, this is precisely how thought may approach the absurd. As long as thought stays within the representational structure, with its familiar categories, thought can be right or wrong; it can do well or make mistakes. Outside the familiar categories, however, one is simply stupid, he maintains. And so we hear echoes of both Borges and Flaubert, and we recall that stupidity is not a mere a laziness of thought for Foucault; rather, the realm that lies open to stupidity is also the realm open to new ideas. “The philosopher must be sufficiently perverse to play the game of truth and error badly: this perversity, which operates in paradoxes, allows him to escape the grasp of categories” (TH 190/94). This, Foucault writes, is the greatness of Andy Warhol’s canned foods or his series of advertising smiles. His repetitious art invites reactions of plain stupidity, claiming that it is all the same, without meaning or emotion, an endless series of the same with minor variations of darkness or color. When reflecting on this monotony, however, one may reach an account of singularity that is also multiplicity: there is no beginning or end but an infinite series of new iterations. Like Magritte, Warhol uses the space between what we used to know

Magritte 85 as the space between model and copy in a manner that disturbs classifications and established hierarchies. In Foucault’s vision, the same may happen to thought itself. The philosophical vision that Foucault develops in relation to these artists finally renders thought hard to categorize and a new space for thought opens: one in which thought is liberated as a thing to the extent that it creates and affects regardless of whether it is “right” or “wrong” in accordance with common classifications or rationalities. Words, images, and thoughts are all things among things that affect us—like a pipe, or a can, or a concept.

The mystery of things and the apophatic While representation evokes both philosophical and artistic debates, it is also theologically significant. It is fair to say that idea behind the kind of destruction of representation that Foucault encountered in Magritte reaches far back in the history of Christian theology and early discussions on whether God should or could at all be represented. The notions of apophatic speech and apophatic theology emerged in scholastic debates and were established through the writings of mystics such as Meister Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and Maximus the Confessor. Negative or apophatic theology is characterized by attempts to describe God by way of negation rather than affirmation. By speaking only in terms of what may not be said about God, these theological voices have aimed to indicate that God’s reality exceeds human expression. We can never gain direct access to God or attain divine truths per se, which is why the Christian cannot claim dominance over others as a consequence of revelation; hence, the apophatic trajectories in Christian thinking have mounted an effective critique of authoritative dogmatic interpretations of God through history. They have opened critical and subversive approaches to what the world has all too often experienced as oppressive and even destructive Christian claims.31 Can we describe the twentieth-century critique of representation in terms of negative theology? Does Foucault’s endeavor resemble negative theology? According to James W. Bernauer, Foucault’s proclamation of the death of man makes his thought “a contemporary form of negative theology” since Foucault’s critique of the subject is a critique of the modern God concept.32 Foucault’s move away from man is a move away from a modern conceptualization of God, Bernauer argues, and is thus a negative theology. Likewise, the deconstructive theologian John Caputo notes the liberating force of transferring apophatic god-talk to the talk of human beings—as a kind of negative anthropology—in the Foucauldian manner: “you cannot say what human beings are, only what they are not.” In The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, Caputo depicts how such an account of human beings opens a readiness for the unexpected beyond fixed identities and true selves.33 A few years later, in a book tellingly titled On Not Knowing Who We Are (2000), Caputo lets the

86  Magritte negative approach to knowledge in Foucault serve as a starting point for continued reflection on a negative form of confession. Caputo declares from the start that he will finally push beyond Foucault to “a Foucault without Foucault” while bringing with him Foucault’s “logic of the sans.” In other words, what Caputo will bring from Foucault into his theological endeavors is the logic of “the without,” of not knowing who we are, the logic of never finally being sure of what we know or if we know at all. Or, as Caputo concludes, “sans voir, sans avoir, sans savoir, without sight, without savvy, and without seizing hold of what we love.”34 The aspect of a negative account of knowledge, in general, and of the subject, in particular, is a key element in Foucault’s thinking, as Bernauer and Caputo depict. Still, to associate Foucault with negative theology in this manner—explicitly in Bernauer and more implicitly in Caputo—runs the risk of bringing Foucault’s thinking to a level of abstraction that disregards other essential aspects of his contribution, I would caution, and vitalizing challenges to theological thinking might be lost along the way. The difference between the negative movement in Foucault versus the negative movement in apophatic theology has been treated by Jeremy Carrette and myself, independently.35 According to Carrette, there is an essential difference between the negativity in Foucault and the negativity in PseudoDionysius, and it is a difference that goes beyond the fact that the former speaks of man and the latter of God. Carrette argues as follows: Foucault’s negation in The Archaeology of Knowledge is to clear human thought of secondary constructions in order to reveal the primacy of discursive practice, whereas Dionysius sought to move beyond all thought and discourse to ascend to the primacy of God.36 In other words, Foucault aims to develop a methodological approach that removes our structured and formal expectations of the world and makes visible instead the world’s discursive surface: the world as it appears. PseudoDionysius, on the other hand, aims for the absoluteness of divinity beyond precisely every earthly and discursively contingent appearance of “God.” While Foucault aims for the ground as a surface of appearance, PseudoDionysius aims for heaven. Hence, as stated in the Introduction, if there is a spirituality in Foucault, it is a spirituality of the discourse, of the mystery of things; or as Carrette expresses this: “In Foucault’s work there are no ‘hidden images’ to be discovered, rather continually shifting sands which form different patterns.”37 Foucault addresses the issue himself in his essay “Maurice Blanchot: Thought from the Outside,” already discussed in Chapter 1. When explicating his notion of “the thought from the outside” Foucault acknowledges the connections with Pseudo-Dionysius’s negative theology: “One might

Magritte 87 assume that it was born of the mystical thinking that has prowled the borders of Christianity since the texts of Pseudo-Dionysus,” but he continues: Yet nothing is less certain: although this experience involves going “outside of oneself,” this is done ultimately in order to find oneself, to wrap and gather oneself in the dazzling interiority of a thought that is rightfully Being and Speech, in other words, Discourse, even if it is the silence beyond all language and the nothingness beyond all being.38 For Foucault, the thought of the outside is not about doing without the expressions of discourse but of entering into their “dazzling interiority.” The “not knowing” in Foucault is another kind of not-knowing than what is commonly described as apophatic theology. In his last lecture series, Foucault addressed the issue again, saying, “After all, there are quite a few negative theologies; let’s say that I am a negative theorist.” 39 American theologian Catherine Keller introduces the notion of entanglement to signify what I see as a related account of knowledge. Inspired by American process theology, and thinkers including Renaissance thinker Nicolas Cusa and Gilles Deleuze, Keller’s notion of entanglement is an account of the world of matter and the world of subjects as entangled, interrelated, and inseparable. The insight that there is no such thing as an objective position, a place from which to study the world or the word, does not lead Keller toward an apophatic place of not-knowing but toward a place of “knowing-together.” It is an account of knowledge in which knowing is always that of knowing knowledge itself as entangled: We “know” what we know only with the irony of apophasis, of a language open to its own undoing. It would put scare quotes all over this text if it could. The relations are always too many, too much, dreamy or traumatic, enigmatic or incalculable, impossible to encompass. Knowledge is always entangled in the material as well as the immaterial realities of this world, she argues, and so are we. Knowledge is entangled in “the complicated histories, bodies, indeterminate collectives, human and otherwise, that enfold us.”40 Keller’s notion of entanglement as including the corporeal and the incorporeal expressions of the world evokes an aspect that, I find, has gone missing in Caputo’s theological development of Foucault’s thinking. When Foucault explicates his thoughts on Blanchot, he does suggest that a nothingness or silence replaces Speech, Language, and Being, but the silence and the nothingness are merely silent and empty as opposed to the speech and fullness of fixed knowledge. The discourse of which Foucault speaks is murmur and buzz, the materiality and the movement of the world as it appears: a world of things, thoughts, words, and images all situated on a

88  Magritte plane. Caputo’s Foucault-inspired theology of not-knowing aims explicitly for the ground, yet his reiteration of the sans makes this ground stand forth rather empty, voided out, or wiped clean. Keller’s notion of entanglement, on the other hand, is not explicitly inspired by Foucault, yet it appears to capture his discursive un/knowing more closely. What makes her approach different, though, is the fact that she is theologically exploring a twisted or even inverted account of ontology. To Keller, our entanglement in the world is a way of describing our relationship to reality as such—or at least as it inevitably comes to us—while to Foucault it is at least primarily concerned with methodology, or a certain way of approaching the world in order to find answers to certain questions. He is, as discussed earlier, a “negative theorist,” not a negative theologian. Foucault’s endeavor is, as noted in Chapter 1, not a vitalism but first and foremost a methodology. In The Archaeology of Knowledge he repeatedly states that he does not regard studies impossible or irrelevant that aim to, for instance, find out whether witches were, in fact, unrecognized madwomen or whether mystical experiences in other times might have been unduly medicalized, but he has set himself a different task. His task is not to find out what was actually the case but to make reality “emerge in its complexity” (AK 47/65). In order to make that happen, however, he needed to move beyond the distinction between the affirmative and the negative. Partly because of his encounters with the nonobjective and surrealist artists, Foucault entered an account of the negative that may also be described as a way beyond the cataphatic—apophatic distinction. It involves, as we have seen above, both positive and negative moments: it is an affirmation of the present rather than the absent, and of creation rather than intention, but it is also a negation of meaning and representation and thus a negation of the one higher God as well as of the subject–object relation it presupposes. Through Kandinsky and Magritte, Foucault affirms the humbling openendedness of affect and negates the confident power of intent; he points toward the infinity of expression in words and images alike, while simultaneously throwing light on the fact that we cannot control their effects. Thus, he contends, we may just as well restrain our urge to organize the world through a logic of representation, the logic where this relates to that until everything makes sense. Instead, we can follow Kandinsky and refuse to be drawn into the logic of representation by stubbornly affirming the present and renouncing the absent. And yet, Foucault is not completely naïve. He understands that even the work of Kandinsky will be brought into the logic of representation over and over again: “What is that?” We might always have to deal with the idea of “the Same,” in Foucault’s words, since such ideas also appear and are influential on the surface of appearances. The idea of representation, the possibility of reproducing a higher truth—whether in art, theology, or politics—will possibly always be with us. This is where Magritte comes in, however, with his horizontal series as a disobedient repetition of the Same, of the ideal. His series of similitude serves as a distorting mirror of hierarchical resemblance. Thus, Magritte’s paintings also reflect

Magritte 89 Foucault’s archaeological work by showing that a dissident repetition of that which we take for granted might actually and profoundly rupture the world we think we know. In consequence, a theology inspired by Foucault’s account of Magritte would not endorse silent contemplation on the limits of knowledge. Rather, it would mean to embrace the mystery of things, to note that every repetition of Christian dogma, of liturgy as well as altarpieces and church buildings are—like the pipe on the wall in Magritte’s painting—real, actual, present, affecting our world, our bodies, and our minds but therefore not in any way final or plain. The surface of appearances is richer than what applies to distinctions such as those between existence and nonexistence, sense and nonsense, or words and images. If we are to follow Foucault on Magritte theologically, we would have to let go of God and man understood through vertical structures for meaning-making but keep them as horizontal phenomena for playful repetition. We would have to turn away from the power of intent and toward the humbling open-endedness of affect, entangled as we are in the mystery of things. As entangled, however, our thoughts and actions are always also practices. It is not primarily a place of the sans, of not-knowing, but a place among things, words, and thoughts, in the midst of a constant and everchanging production of knowledge. To discover the world in a Foucauldian sense is more about adding than about withdrawing. While moving away from the vertical explanations of the coherence of the world, Foucault’s gesture is still additive rather than subtractive. He wants the complexity of the discourse, the mystery of things, to stand forth. As we proceed, we shall see how the idea of thinking as practice and even thinking as activism developed as Foucault’s political awareness grew strong.

Notes 1 Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art, 61. 2 Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot,” 16; “La pensée du dehors,” 521. 3 Most exhaustively in Carrette, Foucault and Religion, Chapter 5. 4 Fabian Heffermehl discusses Malevich’s theological provocation and what he regards as its aggressive tendency; see Heffermehl, Bildet sett fra innsiden: Ikonoklastiske og matematiske konsepter i Florenskijs omvendte perspektiv (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2015), 116. 5 Heffermehl, Bildet sett fra innsiden, 114–15. For a discussion of the avant-garde as iconoclasm, see also Willem van Asselt et al., ed., Iconoclasm and Iconoclash: Struggle for Religious Identity (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 6 This influence on Foucault can be traced through his work from The Archaeology of Knowledge onward, and this theme has been treated, in part, by Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art; Carrette, Foucault and Religion; Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision; and Carlsson, Mysticism as Revolt. 7 Magritte, “To Michel Foucault,” in Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, ed. James Harkness, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 57; “Deux lettres de René Magritte,” in Foucault, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (Paris: Fata Morgana, 2010). Hereafter this book is cited as TN followed by page numbers in the English and French editions.

90  Magritte 8 Magritte, “Exhibition of paintings by René Magritte” at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City, closing date December 31, 1977. 9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Condition_%28painting%29 10 Soussloff points out the play with repetition and difference that Foucault continues by his choice of title. Soussloff, Foucault on Painting, 1550/4656. 11 Foucault here also develops Magritte’s ideas as introduced in his picture-essay. See Soussloff, Foucault on Painting, 1662/4656. 12 The close connections to Deleuze’s work in this part of Foucault’s thought is also noted by Shapiro in Archaeologies of Vision. 13 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 2008), 8. 14 Ibid., 91, xviii, 294. 15 Ibid., 20. 16 Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Cornell University Press, 1980), 183; French edition, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Critique: Revue générale des publications françaises et étrangères 26, no. 282 (November 1970), 89. Hereafter this essay is cited as TH followed by page numbers in the English and French editions. 17 The repetitive, Foucault argues, “is produced precisely at the point where the barely launched mediation falls back on itself; when, instead of saying no, it twice pronounces the same yes, and when, instead of distributing oppositions into a system of definitions, it turns back indefinitely to the same position” (TH 184/90). 18 There is, in Foucault’s words, an “equivalence between the fact of resemblance and the affirmation of a representative bond” (TN 34/29). 19 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, xxvi. 20 To that extent, Kandinsky does not approve of the idea of elevating the canvas as the limits of painting, as in Edouard Manet, because painting has no such limits (ibid., 4). 21 Ibid., 63. 22 Foucault describes La trahison des images: “a carefully drawn pipe, and underneath it (handwritten in a steady, painstaking, artificial script, a script from the convent, like that found heading the notebooks of schoolboys, or on the blackboard after an object lesson), this note: ‘This is not a pipe’ ” (TN 15/9). 23 In this second pipe painting the same pipe and the same handwriting appears again. Foucault writes, “But instead of being juxtaposed in a neutral, limitless unspecified space, the text and the figure are set within a frame. The frame itself is placed upon an easel, and the latter in turn upon the clearly visible slats of the floor. Above everything, a pipe exactly like the one in the picture, but much larger” (TN 15/9). 24 Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, 344–5. 25 Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art, 117. 26 Ibid., 118. 27 TN 28/23. Or, as Tanke beautifully explains, “[t]he calligram, once undone, cannot capture its referent with either of its usual means, by describing it with words or designing it in visual form. Magritte’s calligram instead disguises the fact that this painting, strictly speaking, means nothing. All its energy, all the interweaving of text and image, conceals the fact that nowhere is there a pipe. In being founded upon this fundamental silence, the linguistic and plastic elements take on a conspiratorial air: painting no longer refers to anything external to itself, and it conceals this by conjuring false presences. All is similitude—the represented pipe, the words below it, and the pedagogical arrangement between the two. There is no model, and representation is this impossible” (Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art, 118).

Magritte 91 28 Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art, 119. 29 Ibid., 100. 30 In a corresponding letter to Magritte, Foucault has commented on an affinity between Magritte’s art and the writing of Raymond Roussel (which Foucault analyzes at length in Death and the Labyrinth). Magritte seems pleased with the comparison since he regards them both to locate mysteries in the actual world, in the midst of real things. About Roussel, Magritte writes, “What he imagines evokes nothing imaginary, it evokes the reality of the world that experience and reason treat in a confused manner” (TN 58/58). 31 For example, Nicholas Cusa let his negative mysticism on knowing influence his political engagements. See, for instance, Lawrence H. Bond, “Mystical Theology,” in Introducing Nicholas of Cusa: A Guide to a Renaissance Man, ed. Christopher M. Bellitto, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Gerald Christianson (New York: Paulist, 2004), 205–31. See also Catherine Keller, “Heliga komplikationer: från korsfararkorset till kristen pluralism,” and Carlsson, Petra, “Hur öppna är vi egentligen? Mystik politik från Cusanus till Fogelklou,” both in Religionens offentlighet: Om religionens plats i samhället, ed. Hanna Stenström (Totem: Artos, 2013), 269–86 and 307–20. 32 Bernauer writes, “In its negation of those positive attributes which risk reducing the mystery or the Transcendent, negative theology forced theologians to distance themselves from their own intellectual creations. Foucault’s negative theology is a critique not of the conceptualizations employed for God but of that modern figure of finite man whose identity was put forward as capturing the essence of human being” (James Bernauer, “Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life,” in Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience, ed. James Bernauer and Jeremy Carrette (New York: Routledge, 2004), 88). 33 John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 56. 34 Caputo, On Not Knowing Who We Are, 17. 35 Carrette, Foucault and Religion; Carlsson, “Foucault, Magritte and Negative Theology Beyond Representation,” in Studia Theologica 67, no. 1 (2013): 63–79. 36 Carrette, Foucault and Religion, 86. 37 Ibid., 100. 38 Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot,” 16; “La pensée du dehors,” 521. 39 Foucault, On the Government of the Living, 76. 40 Catherine Keller, Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 3–4.

5 Rebeyrolle Theory as activism

The Introduction to this book noted that there was a gap in Europe before, during, and after the two world wars between theological thinking, and the thinking and artistry of the avant-garde that influenced continental philosophy. Theologically, it was a period of confrontation between a dogmatic God and a man of reason. Barth and Bultmann might have held opposite positions in the Protestant theological debates of the time, but as Eberhard Jüngel noted, the two nevertheless shared the basic assumption that God was about thought and rationality (albeit transformed kinds of Christian rationalities).1 In short, their God had more to do with words than with things. In the preceding chapters, we have encountered Foucault’s inspiration from the artistic rather than the theological negotiations and reflections over notions of transcendence. We have followed him from the emerging critique of representation in Velázquez, through the developed play with representational notions of vision and visibility in Manet, then to the play not only with the representational status of images but also with words and thoughts as postrepresentational in Magritte. What we have called the mystery of things—as opposed to a mystery of transcendence, and as the opaque side of the order of things—has appeared as a tangible yet invisible place in front of Las Meninas, as the very cloth and paint in Manet, and as the enigmatic nebulousness of things, words, and thoughts in Magritte. So far the focus has been on relating differently to tangible objects in art as well as in church practice, on understanding and thinking about things. What about action, actually doing things, though, and what about affecting the world? In this chapter, we follow Foucault through the political turn in his work in the early 1970s, and we see how this transition affects his notion of the relationship between theory and activism and is reflected in his work on art. Finally, I connect Foucault’s artistic and activist account of theory with a theologically dissident queer movement originating in the San Francisco area in the United States, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Political reawakening The years between 1971 and 1973 were the most intensely political in Foucault’s life, and his many engagements and activities left little time for

Rebeyrolle 93 writing. Between The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and Discipline and Punish (1975) he published no major work despite the fact that he was appointed the position at the Collège de France in 1971 and thus would have had every opportunity to write. As well as being a time of political activism, the early 1970s was the time Foucault turned away from his archeological approach and toward his genealogical approach introduced in Discipline and Punish. During the transition period he wrote minor works, of which a few are discussed, in particular, “The Force of Flight,” an essay written for the catalog of French painter Paul Rebeyrolle’s exhibition Dogs in March 1973, an essay that in Macey’s view “is perhaps the most dramatic piece of writing produced in this period.”2 Bernauer goes even further in stressing the importance of the piece and borrows the title of Foucault’s Rebeyrolle essay for his own book on Foucault: Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight. Foucault’s written portrait of Rebeyrolle “captures both his [Foucault’s] spirit and his experience of thought,” Bernauer writes, which is why Bernauer finds the title suitable also for his own study.3 Before entering Foucault’s text on Rebeyrolle, however, let us linger on the political intensity in Foucault’s life at this period. As we shall see, his political engagement spilled over into his art analysis and even prompted a renewed understanding of the force of art. The transformation will be further discussed in relation to Fromanger in the next chapter, as our investigation moves slightly away from the philosophical sphere and closer to the sphere of action and activism. On Foucault’s first trip to the United States in 1970 he was interviewed by John K. Simon. Foucault gave a hint of a political reawakening that preceded the years of intense political activity in Macey’s description, cited above. Foucault recalled, Having lived in Europe for years, I had lost a sense of this contrast [between misery and wealth] and had ended up believing that there had been a general rise in the standard of living of the whole population; I wasn’t far from imagining that the proletariat was becoming middle class, that there were really no more poor people, that the social struggle, the struggle between classes, consequently, was coming to an end. Well, seeing New York, perceiving again suddenly this vivid contrast that exists everywhere but which was blotted out of my eyes by familiar forms of it, that was for me a kind of second revelation; the class struggle still exists, it exists more intensely.4 On February 8, 1971, a few months after this “second revelation,” before which he described himself as being “not far from imagining that the proletariat was becoming middle class,” Foucault took part in forming the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP).5 GIP was a group investigating and spreading information about the reality of French prisons. At a press conference during which the new organization was introduced and announced to the public at the Chapelle Saint-Bernard, Foucault stated,

94  Rebeyrolle None of us can be sure of avoiding prison. Less so than ever, today. Police control over our day-to-day lives is becoming tighter: in the streets and on the roads; over foreigners and young people; it is once more an offense to express an opinion; anti-drug measures are leading to increasingly arbitrary arrests. We are living under the sign of la garde à vue.6 Foucault’s critical nerve remained the same during this transition, as did the foundation of his methodology, as we shall see, but there is a palpable change of focus between the publication of The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969 and his work with GIP in 1971. What happened in between, one may wonder, that caused such a transition of interest? Brady Thomas Heiner convincingly argues that the aforementioned trip to America holds a key to the answer.7 Heiner suggests that an often-neglected source of inspiration, not only for the interest in the prison movement but also for the development of Foucault’s genealogy, was his encounter with the American Black Panther Party (BBP). After the formation of GIP in 1971, Foucault met frequently with Jean Genet—a French writer, political activist, and homosexual who had worked as a prison guard and who also served time in prison himself during his youth.8 When Genet and Foucault met for the first time in the summer of 1970, not long before Foucault’s trip to New York, Genet had recently returned home to France after three months spent with the BBP in the United States. Although there is no documentation supporting the fact that Genet told Foucault about his experiences, Heiner suggests that “it would not be unreasonable to assume that some mention of Genet’s recent trip was made, given that Foucault himself was scheduled to visit the United States for the first time just a few months later.”9 Regardless of whether Genet told Foucault about his experiences on this occasion or not, the ideas and writings of the BBP began to appear in Foucault’s work shortly after this meeting.

The BPP and the power of prison The BPP—originally named the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, referring to self-defense against the violence directed at the African American population by the US police—was a revolutionary black nationalist organization active mainly in the United States from 1966 until 1982. The party’s basic assumption was that the African American population in the United States lived in a warlike state as a suppressed colony within the borders of a country that claimed to be the defender of every person’s right to freedom.10 The regarded the US police force as an occupying army. The statistics for African American citizens as objects of police violence and social suffering served as the party’s grounds for motivating not only the vocabulary of war but also its core practice: armed citizens’ patrols in black neighborhoods in order to protect the inhabitants from the police. The party also organized

Rebeyrolle 95 several social programs such as the Free Breakfast for Children program, Free Health Clinics, Free Clothing Program, Liberation Schools, and the Free Busing to Prisons program so that members of the black community could maintain relations with the numerous loved ones in prison. By 1970, the year of Foucault’s trip to the United States, the party had expanded nationally, with offices in 68 cities and thousands of members. When the organization was at its peak, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover supervised a program, COINTELPRO, for undermining the leadership and power of the BPP because, in his words at the time, the party “without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”11 The arrest of key figures such as George Jackson, Huey Newton, and Angela Y. Davis increased support for the party and intensified the antagonism of the FBI, at least initially. Through these arrests, the prisons became more central to the party organization, as well as to its ideology and philosophy. Imprisoned party members wrote and studied significantly, and among the works produced during imprisonment were George Jackson’s Soledad Brothers: Prison Letters of George Jackson, for which Genet wrote the introduction.12 Gradually, the American prison system played a more vital role in what the party regarded as the war against the black community, and so it did in several respects. First, the American prison system motivated their struggle. Not only did the American legal system imprison the party’s activists, but, more important for party ideology, the prison system also served as a surrogate solution for the social problems, such as poverty and racism, from which the black communities suffered.13 Second, in an attempt to reclaim black power of initiative, the imprisoned party members transformed their prison environment from a locus of marginalization and disempowerment into an intellectual greenhouse for reading, reflection, ideological clarification, and writing. In an interview of March 29, 1971—which GIP translated and published in France in November 1971—George Jackson proclaimed that he aimed to transform the prison by giving it a key role in the decolonization of the black community: I feel that the building of revolutionary consciousness of the prisoner class is paramount in the overall development of a hard left revolutionary cadre. And I repeat—cadre. Of course, the revolution has to be carried out by the masses. But we need a cadre; we need a bodyguard; a political worker needs a bodyguard. We [the prisoner class] see ourselves as performing that function.14 Jackson saw himself as part of the “prisoner class” whose political program was couched in an aggressively militant vocabulary, here exemplified by the notion of the “revolutionary cadre.” Later that same year, in August 1971, two days before his trial was to convene, Jackson was shot to death by

96  Rebeyrolle guards inside San Quentin prison.15 The official but heavily questioned version of the event was that Jackson was shot during an escape attempt. Two weeks after Jackson’s death, in September 1971, unarmed prisoners at the Attica prison revolted. The well-known, four-day uprising, spurred by the prisoners’ demand for political rights and better living conditions, caused the death of twenty-eight prisoners and nine hostages.16 We shall soon return to the French reactions to Jackson’s death, but let us first look at GIP’s activities during the spring of 1971. In June 1971 GIP published its first two pamphlets presenting the results of their investigations into the Parisian prison system. In the investigation as well as in the presentation—just as in the BPP rhetoric—the words and formulations by the prisoners themselves describing their own reality played an important role.17 This aspect of Foucault’s GIP work is also hallowed by Deleuze in a frequently cited conversation between the two. Deleuze articulates the philosophical implications of the prison movement’s inspiration, suggesting that GIP’s method of investigation denotes a move beyond a representational logic and toward a new relationship between theory and practice. The application of a theory can no longer have the totalizing aspirations it used to have because the relationships between theory and practice are “far more partial and fragmentary,” Deleuze argues. On the basis of this fragmentation of theoretical application to reality, Foucault became aware of “the necessity for confined individuals to speak for themselves, to create a relay,” Deleuze proposes, and he found this group “in prisons and the imprisoned individuals.”18 Deleuze goes on to suggest on Foucault’s behalf the theoretical or philosophical implication of this insight—one that Foucault later agreed to— that with the GIP investigation, Foucault turned theory into action. Deleuze argues that since theoretical action and practical action here become one and the same, there is no longer representation in relation to academic inquiry. The aim of letting the prisoners speak for themselves in that very concrete manner (if also naïve manner, as Spivak, Fuggle, and Birch have rightly pointed out)19 transforms the ends of theoretical activity. The very aim of academic inquiry is transformed from that of describing a reality “out there” into serving the dissemination of information, the formation of networks, and thereby the promotion of societal change.20 In Foucault’s introduction to the first GIP pamphlet, the notion of an activist approach to theory or even an activist understanding of theory as such, in line with Deleuze’s suggestion, is palpable: 1. These investigations are not designed to improve or soften an oppressive power, or make it tolerable. They are designed to attack it at those points where it is exercised under a different name—that of justice, technology, knowledge or objectivity. Each investigation must therefore be a political act.

Rebeyrolle 97 2. They are aimed at specific targets, at institutions which have names and places, people in charge and governors—and which claim victims and inspire revolts, even among those in charge of them. Each investigation must therefore be the first episode in a struggle.21 The investigations of GIP, in other words, were strategic and served as actions through which the oppressive power could give way to the force of the oppressed. Each investigation was a political act and the first step in a struggle. In creating a front, “an offensive front,” the coupling of violence and politics in the BPP rhetoric rings, as Foucault continues: 3. They bring together, around these specific targets, different social strata which the ruling class has kept apart thanks to the interplay of social hierarchies and divergent economic interests. They must bring down barriers which are indispensable to power by uniting prisoners, lawyers, and magistrates, or even doctors, patients, and hospital personnel. Each investigation must constitute a front—an offensive front—at each important strategic point.22 The fourth stated aim was to let the prisoners themselves speak, or to paraphrase Jackson, to let the prisoners themselves be the revolutionary cadre in GIP’s theoretical activism. The investigations of GIP did not take the position of the objective, external observer but aimed, as Deleuze noted, to serve as a relay. Foucault wrote, 4. These investigations are not being made by a group of technicians working from the outside; the investigators are those who are being investigated. It is up to them to take the word, to bring down the barriers, to express what is intolerable, and to tolerate it no longer. It is up to them to take responsibility for the struggle which will prevent oppression from being exercised.23 We see here how Jackson’s vision for a transformation of the prison from within echoes in Foucault’s introduction to GIP’s pamphlet in several respects: Foucault’s introduction rings of Jackson’s vision to move the prison from the margins of political consciousness to the heart of politic, to displace the account of the prison as an object of external vision by giving voice to the interns themselves, and to place the political initiative inside the prison by presenting political visions from within. GIP published four pamphlets altogether. The third issue, L’Assassinat de George Jackson, appeared in November 1971. It covered Jackson’s life and assassination, including the previously mentioned interview.24 The last issue, titled Suicides de prison, published in December 1972, analyzed and made public the thirty-two suicides that had occurred in French prisons during

98  Rebeyrolle 1972. The pamphlet included personal letters written before their deaths by the prisoners who committed suicide, along with their life stories, and thus strove to “let them speak for themselves.” The pamphlet also stated that a quarter of those who had taken their own lives in French prisons that year were immigrants, and the majority were in their twenties.25

From archaeology to genealogy Regardless of which events had the most impact on Foucault during this period, we know that it was a time of transition for him intellectually. During the first years of the 1970s, his notion of power changed from a more traditional understanding of power as that which suppresses (the powerlessness of the mad versus the power of the psychiatrists, for example, or restrictions forced on individuals by laws and confinements) to a notion of power as technology and strategy. The exercise of power is for him no longer merely the privilege of the dominating group. Power does not belong only to the laws, the confinements or restrictions, but can also equally arise from below, from the margins or from the imprisoned. In an interview, Foucault explicitly associates this insight with his prison experiences in 1971–72: Prisons convinced me that power should not be considered in terms of law but in terms of technology, in terms of tactics and strategy, and it was this substitution of a technical and strategical grid for a legal and negative grid that I tried to set up in Discipline and Punish, and then use in History of Sexuality.26 While his methodology in many respects remained the same in the transition from his archeological period to his genealogical period (as these are commonly described), there is nevertheless a palpable change with regard to the aim of his work, which also affects his methodology. The discursive approach in which history is viewed as a surface of appearance rather than as a well of truth remains the same, but the aim to change our account of reality merely through describing history is complemented by an account according to which theory and scholarship are no longer easily separated from activism. Sophie Fuggle enhances this aspect when comparing Foucault’s work with GIP with his Discipline and Punish: “If anything, both work together as a call to be done with irrelevant binaries which divide up theory and practice, activist and writer as well as cause and history.”27 The activist contribution in scholarly work is, in other words, assumed and presupposed from this period onward. This is not to say that his earlier works were not driven by a passion for a transformation of the current givens but that the notion of “theory as action” is closer at hand in his later work than in the earlier. The fact that GIP’s work was part of a process of intellectual transition is evident in the wobbliness of the group’s theoretical activism. Fuggle points out that the

Rebeyrolle 99 group’s urge to move beyond the binary of theory versus practice led them to make several rather inept mistakes. In their aim to let the prisoners speak for themselves, for instance, they formulated questionnaires that, as Cecile Brich has argued, were produced in a manner palpably bereft of scholarly acumen. The group did not problematize their method, the small number of responses, or the fact that their questions appeared to assume a level of literacy and linguistic capability among the prisoners equal to their own.28 When in Discipline and Punish Foucault develops ideas on the borderland between theory and activism, the reasoning is more nuanced; in a Jacksonlike manner, he argues that there is no longer an opposition between violence and ideology, between power and knowledge. Power, to the Foucault of Discipline and Punish, is exercised rather than possessed. It does not belong to the dominating class, or to anyone, and there are no simple ways in which to sketch the power structures of this world. Foucault urges his readers to admit that power produces knowledge, “that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”29 Thus, Foucault suggests we should leave behind the idea that knowledge would exist without power and the notion that there is something like a pure knowledge once we remove aspects of power. In consequence, the idea that “power makes mad” becomes nonsensical; there is no rationality without the will to knowledge. While Foucault echoes Nietzsche in his reasoning at this point, he also invokes the BPP’s marriage of ideology, violence, and action, as Heiner has shown.30 With this approach to knowledge, Foucault then enters his study of the “micro-physics” of the actual bodies and the way power as knowledge and knowledge as power have affected tangible bodies through history—“the bodies themselves with their materiality and their forces.”31 It is an approach that has coupled knowledge with power, and that turns his investigation into politics about actual bodies. These transitions in Foucault’s work also have an impact on his writings on art.

From power to the force of flight In the context of the previous discussion, it is not surprising that Foucault took on the task to compose a text for the exhibition catalog for Paul Rebeyrolle’s Dogs in 1973. Rebeyrolle’s exhibit consisted of ten paintings of dogs in captivity, in cages, or other closed in areas, sometimes with a glimpse of a window revealing a white interior/exterior or surface. The paintings were hung without frames against an unpainted brick wall in a square room without windows. The beginning of Foucault’s essay underlined that no one can be sure of avoiding imprisonment, recalling the statement he made in the initial GIP press conference. Foucault writes, “Are you not, in turn, in prison, like the dogs you see priming themselves and pushing up against the bars?”32

100  Rebeyrolle The first seven paintings of Rebeyrolle’s exhibition depicted dogs in different stages of struggle, suffering, or defeat, while the last three indicated a kind of escape. The possibility of an escape is suggested already in the second paragraph of Foucault’s essay, where he lets in a glint of the force of the Black Panthers. Rebeyrolle’s Dogs is about prison, but prison today is not what it used to be, Foucault argues. The prison is not merely a marginalized space for the disempowered but also a place of force and resistance: “But prison—Jackson has given testimony to this—is today a political place, which is to say a place where forces are born or become manifest, a place where history is formed and where time surges up.”33 The group of paintings form a series—“an irreversible series,” Foucault writes, in the sense that it is not equally a story of imprisonment and of liberation. Yet it is not a narrative story running from the first dog to the last. It is, in Foucault’s view, a series that in its totality expresses liberation from within: “The series of paintings, instead of recounting what has happened, gives rise to a force whose history can be recounted as the ripple of its flight and its freedom” (FF 169/401). In other words, the series does not tell a story with an origin, a middle, and an end but gives rise to or transmits (fait passer) a force whose “origin” is nothing other than its very force of flight, its ability to escape. The surface of painting and the surface of discourse have the ability to transmit a political force that creates history. And the surface is crucial, again, as are the windows in Rebeyrolle’s dog paintings. The windows depict no interior reality but merely a neutral, white, formless, and inaccessible surface, or “pure outside,” as Foucault describes them, alluding to his own text on Blanchot: “These white squares do not indicate a sky and an earth that one could see from afar, they denote that one is here and nowhere else” (169/401). Unlike the windows of classical painting, Foucault argues, the windows in Rebeyrolle’s dog paintings show nothing but their own “impotence,” their inability to offer an actual escape. In the chapter on Velázquez, we noted that the window played a dual role in his composition. On one hand, and in accordance with the established ideals for painting in the classical paradigm, the window had the function of the exterior that lit up the interior so that its reality and truth became visible to us. In Las Meninas, the indicated window shed light over the entire process of representation and thus indicated that the path to knowledge and truth was made visible. On the other hand, the internal play of the painting suggested that this illumination was perhaps not as efficient as it first appeared. The representation of the canvas with its back toward the viewer remained obscure, and the presupposed perspective of the viewer or model remained invisible. Perhaps, this second perspective suggested, the window merely tells the story of one contingent notion of illumination and truth in the history of knowledge. In the essay on Rebeyrolle, once again the window is not functioning in the way one might hope. It does not depict the opening toward a truer world of liberation that it implies. Moreover, the ineffectiveness of the windows

Rebeyrolle 101 is, Foucault contends, paired with the wood elements that are glued onto Rebeyrolle’s canvases. The artist has used a technique of incorporating pieces of wood so as to make elements that indicate bars or batons stand out from his images. While the windows are powerless, the wood pieces are “the obstinate and immobile power, rigid power”—sometimes bars, sometimes a baton (FF 170/401). When the dogs are at rest, the batons hang straight; when the dog resists, the baton becomes a horizontal bar. The wood pieces glued onto the canvas surface are, in Foucault’s view, outside the surface, hence the interrelation between the powerlessness of the windows and the suppressive power of the rigid wood: neither serves the force of flight, but both take part in shaping the enclosure. Like the lectures on Manet of 1971, Foucault’s essay on Rebeyrolle focuses on the verticals and horizontals. Now, in 1973, however, space is directly and explicitly related to power. The vertical in Rebeyrolle, Foucault argues, is about power: “In the world of prisons, as in the world of dogs (‘lying down’ and ‘upright’), the vertical is not one of the dimensions of space, it is the dimension of power” (FF 170/402). The vertical power dominates: it is the dimension of oppression, and Foucault uses images of the prison to stress his point. When explaining the power of the vertical, Foucault alludes to the results presented by the GIP investigations, and the suicide stories of the young imprisoned immigrants: [The vertical] dominates, rises up, threatens and flattens; . . . orders barked out from up high and down low; you are forbidden to sleep by day, to be up at night, stood up straight in front of the guards, to attention in front of the governor; crumpled by blows in the dungeon, or strapped to the restraining bed for having not wanted to go to sleep in front of the warders; and, finally, hanging oneself with a clear conscience, the only means of escaping the full length of one’s enclosure, the only way of dying upright. (FF 170/402) To hang oneself with a clear conscience, Foucault writes, is the only way to die upright. These lines inevitably recall a letter from H.M. published in GIP’s fourth pamphlet. H.M. was an inmate who had been imprisoned for minor offenses and who hanged himself after having been sent to solitary for “homosexuality.”34 Compared to the analysis of Velázquez, the difference in focus in the Rebeyrolle analysis is palpable. In his essay on Velázquez, first published in a shorter version in 1965, Foucault focused on the tangible process of representation, on vision and visibility, and on the place/nonplace of the subject in relation to knowledge.35 In his analysis of Rebeyrolle in 1973, the focus is on imprisonment, power, and the force of escape. What does remain the same, however, is the surface perspective. The stability of representational knowledge was questioned by the force of the surface in Velázquez—simply,

102  Rebeyrolle what could be seen and what could not. Likewise, the force of flight is produced by the surface itself, not by the power of the extra-superficial wood or the illusory notion of a reality beyond the window surface. The vanity of the window as escape recalls Magritte’s claustrophobic illustrations of the human condition: the window is just another human representation. Hence, the transcendent power from outside still holds no solution, since such a power is paired with the wood of the bars and baton, and thus stands forth in its futility. The baton suppresses by human might while the window suppresses and inactivates through its illusory promise of escape. Still, in the last painting, tellingly titled Dedans (Within), as in the last paragraph of Foucault’s essay, the dog does escape. The dog leaps “to a flight without end,” in Foucault’s words, and leaves the viewer imprisoned with the force of the dog’s flight circling around her. The dog escapes not through a window that opens onto another world, nor through the imposed power of man, but as a force of the surface, the force of a painted dog. And this is where we approach what will be our last step on this journey: a return to representation motivated by Foucault’s political urge during these years. The dog’s flight is there; it is visible on the surface of the canvas; it is plain and present here and nowhere else. At this stage in his oeuvre, Foucault takes the liberty to assume that we have already agreed on the futility of transcendent power as well as subject power. We have, in short, moved on from the idea of the dominating power of representation. We no longer need to grapple with the figurative as such, with disfiguration, nonrepresentation, signifier and signified, with playful calligrams, nor with the idea of “painting in itself.” The presence is there, and it transmits a force of flight to us. Or, rather, Rebeyrolle has found a way to merge force and form. He has found an artistic technique in which figurative form no longer restricts the force of painting but is united with it. The silhouettes of the dogs are carved out with precision, yet the contours are obtained by thousands of perpendicular brush strokes, thus the figurative form and the energetic force become one and the same: “Form is no longer charged with representing force in its distortions; the latter no longer has to jostle with form to realize itself” (FF 171/402). Power is present and effective in reality via images, words, and thoughts. Hence, the liberating force need not come from the outside or from the postrepresentational perspective of an intellectual elite: “an exchange starts and the within, despite itself, begins to open on to the birth of a space.” The oppressive power of the prison can, in fact, turn into the liberating force of the escape. “The vertical, which showed power . . . now opens up a liberty.” The border between thought and world, word and thing, has already been transgressed, and thus, a clear division between theory and practice can no longer be made. Still, is it really that simple? I suggested above that Foucault’s work at this stage might be slightly naïve. In his analysis of Rebeyrolle, the viewer and the viewing position, which we have seen problematized in different ways in the three preceding chapters, are hardly mentioned. Rebeyrolle’s dogs make out an image of animals that are able

Rebeyrolle 103 to break loose from their imprisonment without help from the outside, and at this stage, this appears to be enough for Foucault. But what about the limitations of representation? What about the risks of being dragged back into a logic where this is narrowed down to that in a plain, representational logic according to which this is simply a dog in a cage and that is a dog breaking free of a cage? Have we, in other words, lost a sense of complexity and philosophical awareness on the way from theory to activism—on our way from Magritte to Rebeyrolle? We noted earlier that Fuggle and Brich critiqued GIP for its lack of selfreflection in the prison inquiries. Gayatri Shakravorty Spivak raises a similar critique in relation to the conversation between Deleuze and Foucault quoted earlier. She notes that the two revolutionary intellectuals, whose postrepresentation has inspired her greatly, reveal a dubious tendency when speaking out.36 Or rather, something happens, she argues, when “signifiers are left to look after themselves.” If one assumes, she argues, that the move beyond representation has already been made and that reality and oppressed individuals thus are free to speak for themselves, then the risks soon exceed the gains. To Spivak, there is an ingenuousness detectable in the conversation with Deleuze when Foucault states that the masses no longer need [the intellectual] to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without the illusion; they know far better than [the intellectual] and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves.37 This is an ingenuousness, she contends, that prompts at least two dubious assumptions. First, Foucault’s statement seems to suggest that there are free subjects hidden in prisons or veiled under layers of oppression. The Foucauldian insight that subjectivity is a production of discursive knowledge appears forgotten. Second, in accordance with Brich and Fuggle, Spivak notes that Foucault seems to believe that the actual and concrete reality of “the masses” is accessible to him as an established, white, male intellectual.38 In other words, does not Foucault’s move beyond representation ultimately instigate a return to representation? I argue that it does, but it is a return with a difference. In the next chapter, we shall see how Foucault develops this step in his analysis of Gerard Fromanger and the narrative figuration movement. In order to take part in shaping, forming, and transforming society, Foucault suggests, the intellectual might have to get down and dirty with imagery again. We might have to return to representation in a way that risks being dragged back into a representational logic in order to open representation and the imagery that surrounds us to realities other than the already-embraced. The intellectual must take this risk in order not to end up closed in and politically disarmed, as the late followers of the notion of “art for art’s sake” found themselves at the peak of the Abstract Expressionist movement. If this is so, however, does it go for theology as well? What would it mean theologically to play politically with superficial imagery? Before moving on to Foucault’s return

104  Rebeyrolle to representation, let us have a look at a political yet superficial play with Christian imagery that has moved a marginalized queer group into the heart of American charity work.

Theological indulgence In Chapter 1 we encountered Foucault’s analysis of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet and Saint Anthony. In Foucault’s view, Bouvard and Pécuchet were pilgrims. They were not static subjects relating to the infinity of knowledge at the surface of modernity but were, in fact, this surface materialized and, in effect, stupid. Theory always immediately turned into practice for them, and this made them sanctified for Foucault: they had truly found knowledge, the only knowledge there is, the mystery of things, or in Foucault’s words in the essay, “the continuous movement of the book” (FL 109/31). Saint Anthony, by contrast, was on a search for sanctity but was tempted and hindered on his journey. In the end he was at a stage of capitulation: he had completely given up his desire to transcend the material world and asked for nothing other than to be materialized through and through: “He wishes to be pure matter” (FL 108/30). Right then and there, however, he was faced with Christ—he kneeled and returned to his prayers. And yet, Foucault suggests, had he not, in fact, become materialized in accordance with his last wish? Had he not become his actions, his performance, his kneeling and his prostrating? In Foucault’s reading, Anthony’s prayers, like Pécuchet’s and Bouvard’s knowledge, finally became what they are—actions on the surface of things, movements, things to do, to try, and to explore, and with this unification with the surface, the three finally became sanctified and free. With Bouvard and Pécuchet, the search for knowledge was liberated from the subject; with Anthony, Christianity was liberated from God. What was left was only action. In Foucault’s analysis of Flaubert in 1963, however, action was about accepting the surface of appearances, the mystery of things, in an amor fati kind of way. In the early 1970s, by comparison, action for Foucault is paired with power; uniting with the surface of appearances also means taking part in political action. In his 1973 essay, moreover, Foucault presumes that the transgression of representation has already been effected, which is why he can embrace Rebeyrolle’s figurative dog series as a group of paintings that, quite plainly, transmits a liberating force. Suppressive power, as well as liberating force, is effective in the tangible reality of images, thoughts, and things, and neither need be conveyed by God or by the rational subject. In fact, the force of liberation can emerge from the confining structures themselves. While this may sound ingenuous, I believe that the force of such an approach can be made clearer if we turn to the theological sphere. A postrepresentational queer movement of today might throw light on the force of the kind of superficial representation— with a twist—that Foucault appears to be after in his activist-theory phase. In a theological reflection on the blog and podcast Freestyle Christianity/The

Rebeyrolle 105 Catacombic Machine, Swedish theologian Jonatan Bäckelie describes the San Francisco–based queer movement, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Bäckelie interprets the queer movement as a postrepresentational theological expression that uses the imagery of its oppressor for its own representational liberation, and his interpretation exemplifies the theological opening I see in Foucault’s return to representation through Rebeyrolle. Let me briefly introduce the movement and Bäckelie’s theological line of thought. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is a US-based movement with affiliated groups in France, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Colombia, Australia, Uruguay, Scotland, and England, working for charity and for building consciousness of LGBTQ issues. The entire organization and the aesthetics of the movement are borrowed from stereotypes of Catholic orders of nuns, with the role of the sisters being performed by gay men in transfigured nun habits under names like “Sister T’aint A Virgin” and “Sister Sybil Libertease.”39 The originally Bay Area–based movement was provocatively founded on Easter Sunday in 1979 in an obvious attempt to conquer precisely those Christian symbols and expressions that had long been used to oppress and confine the gay community. Critical reactions from Christian congregations were massive at the time, as conveyed in an interview with Amos C. Brown, theologian, social activist, and preacher, once one of Martin Luther King’s protégés. Brown himself was one of few Christian leaders who supported the movement from their first appearance, and he has remained an active defender of the rights of women and LGBTQ people ever since. “I think it is a matter of moral consistency,” he writes, “of treating people fairly and justly, and of not doing any violence or damage to the worth and dignity of all human personalities.”40 Nevertheless, the interview conducted in 1991 depicts the tension at the time of the movement’s foundation. Brown’s support of the Sisters was incomprehensible to many, and he himself found their caricatures and derision of Catholic symbols unnecessarily disrespectful, that is, the choice of Easter day for their first appearance, the “vile and vicious” names, and the substitution of the condom for the wafer: As justified as they may be in their pain and disenchantment with the Catholic Church, you can’t generalize on all Christian churches, not even the whole Catholic Church, just as you can’t generalize on me, a Black Baptist preacher, and say we’ve all been guilty of homophobia. That’s not true.41 What if, however, in accordance with the reasoning above, we let the theological border between theory and activism be distorted precisely by way of a disrespectful play with signs, signifiers, and the idea of an original signified? In a postrepresentational era, the Sisters could, as Bäckelie suggests, be seen as a vital expression of Christianity. What Brown regards as a provocation directed at the Catholic Church may equally well be understood as a theological reaction from within the Christian imagery: a liberating

106  Rebeyrolle force appearing at the Christian surface of appearances. Such an account of Christianity—Christianity as a performative surface—also parallels Foucault’s later descriptions of the performativity in early Christianity. In his late lectures, mentioned in the Introduction, Foucault depicts the development from the nonverbal, purely performative ritual aspects of Christian faith—where the truth of faith is expressed on the surface of the believer— to the enhanced importance of the inner self, of truth-telling and confession.42 Let us experiment with returning, not to the demanding rites of the second penance but to the notion of faith, the truth of Christianity, being played out on the surface, having its transformative force not in the inner or transcendent truth but in the ongoing creation of the Christianity. In this light, the ongoing play in the perpetual celebration of the Eucharist in the Protestant Church, as discussed earlier in relation to Manet, is merely a less explicitly postrepresentational and political version of the playful transgender performances of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The mystery of things may stand forth as a playful activism inspiring contemporary theology to reach beyond the borders of representational truth claims, within and beyond the church premises. We have seen how the BPP aspired to turn the very heart of the system that oppressed its members, the US prisons, into a center for their own political liberation—a struggle that continues today, as shown for instance by the work of Michelle Alexander43—and how this inspired Foucault to transgress the border between theory and practice. In a similar manner, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence turned what they had long experienced as the very essence of oppression, namely, the Catholic Church, into a source for their political liberation. Accordingly, a theological consequence of their initiative could be that we are called to embrace their activism as an expression of political theology, a tangible performative theology dealing as much with the body as with the mind. Theology of the early twenty-first century could thus affirm their playfully serious political engagement beyond representational logic. If we follow Foucault to the space that opens beyond, and possibly before, representation—if we let go of divine as well as human intention—we note how the Christian imagery itself takes part in changing the world as we know it. The playful nun order and the images it spreads take part in shaping not only the way the LGBTQ community is regarded but also the way Christianity is perceived. To some extent, Christianity is changed by its very imagery. These notions are developed further in the next chapter as Foucault’s political engagement shapes his account of art more profoundly in his encounter with Fromanger.

Notes 1 See, for example, Barthian theology and the Dadaist manifesto as discussed in Mattias Martinson, “Silence, Rupture, Theology: Towards a Post-Christian Interdisciplinarity,” in Literature and Theology: New Interdisciplinary Spaces, ed. Heather Walton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 67–80. 2 Macey, Lives of Michel Foucault, 323.

Rebeyrolle 107 3 Bernauer, Michel Foucault’s Force of Flight, 2. 4 Foucault, “Rituals of Exclusion,” in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961– 1984, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 7. 5 Sophie Fuggle, “Beyond Slogans and Snapshots: The Story of the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons,” in Foucault and the History of Our Present, ed. S. Fuggle, Y. Lanci, and M. Tazzioli (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 142–58, 144. 6 Foucault, in Macey, Lives of Michel Foucault, 258; “Manifeste du G.I.P.,” in Dits et écrits, 2: 174. 7 Brady Thomas Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” in City 11, no. 3 (London: Routledge, December 2007): 313–56. See also Brenda Gayle Plummer’s “Peace Was the Glue: Europe and African American Freedom,” in The New Black History: Revisiting the Second Reconstruction, ed. Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kai Hinton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 114. 8 Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” 317. 9 Ibid., 318. 10 Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 2. 11 Ibid., 184, 3, 211. 12 George Jackson, Jean Genet, and Jonathan Jackson Jr., Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1994). 13 Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” 331. 14 Ibid. 15 Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, 374. 16 Ibid., 378. 17 Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” 320. 18 Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977): 201–217; The quote is from Deleuze and on page 205–6. The same conversation is published in French in Michel Foucault, Dits et ecrits 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 302. 19 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 254; Sophie Fuggle, “Beyond Slogans and Snapshots”; Cecile Brich, “The Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons: The Voice of Prisoners? Or Foucault’s?” Foucault Studies 5 (January 2008): 26–47. 20 “Representation no longer exists; there’s only action—theoretical action and practical action which serve as relays and form networks” (Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” 206–7; “Les intellectuels et le pouvoir,” 308). 21 English translation quoted from Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, 268–9; French ed., Foucault, “Préface à Enquête dans vingt prisons,” in Dits et écrits, 2:195. 22 Macey, 269; “Préface” 196. 23 Ibid. 24 Fuggle, “Beyond Slogans and Snapshots,” 150. 25 Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” 320. 26 Michel Foucault, “Power Affects the Body,” in Foucault Live, ed. Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 207. 27 Fuggle, “Beyond Slogans and Snapshots,” 148. 28 Ibid., 151. 29 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 27; Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 35. 30 Heiner, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” 337.

108  Rebeyrolle 31 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 26; Surveiller et punir, 35. 32 Foucault, “The Force of Flight,” trans. Gerald Moore, in Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, ed. Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden (Dorchester: Ashgate, 2007), 169; “La force de fuir,” in Dits et écrits, 2:401. Hereafter this text is cited as FF followed by page numbers in the English and French editions. 33 Gerald Moore suggests in a note that the Jackson to whom Foucault refers is Bruce Jackson, for whose book he is planning to write a foreword in 1975 (FF 169n2). Shapiro, on the other hand, argues that “Foucault’s readers would have needed no explanation that it was George Jackson’s Prison Letters to which he referred, and the atrocities at Attica in New York state were fresh enough that there was no need to mention them” (Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, 321). On basis of the larger picture regarding Foucault’s engagement at this time of his life, I find myself agreeing with Shapiro’s argumentation. 34 Fuggle, “Beyond Slogans and Snapshots,” 150. 35 Macey, Lives of Michel Foucault, 164. 36 Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 249. This critique is also expressed in Spivak’s contribution to Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988) and Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993). 37 Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 255. Foucault, “Intellectuals and power,” 206–7; “Les intellectuels et le pouvoir,” 308. 38 Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 257. 39 www.thesisters.org/. 40 Amos C. Brown, “Rev. Dr. Amos C. Brown,” in A Whosever Church: Welcoming Lesbian and Gay Men into African American Congregations, ed. Gary David Comstock (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 36. 41 Ibid. 42 I discuss the notion of performativity in relation to early Christianity in Foucault’s lectures in Petra Carlsson, “Cassian and Foucault: Performativity in Early Christianity” (unpublished paper). 43 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).

6 Fromanger Imagery in motion

In 1975, the year of the publication of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Gerard Fromanger’s exhibition Le Désir est partout (Desire Is Everywhere) opened at Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris. Fromanger was an established artist at the time but also a longtime acquaintance of Foucault. The two had worked together in the prison movement and, in what appears to have been a gesture of mutual friendship, Fromanger invited Foucault to write a preface to the exhibition catalog, which Foucault was happy to accept. His text was presented at the gallery in a slim red-covered, richly illustrated pamphlet.1 If Foucault appeared inspired by parts of the nonfigurative art scene in his Magritte essay, writing on Fromanger, Foucault scorns the nonrepresentational and complains about the tediousness of nonobjective art: Gloomy discourses have taught us that one must prefer the slash of the sign to the round-dance of resemblance, the order of the syntagm to the race of simulacra, the grey regime of the symbolic to the wild flight of the imaginary. They have tried to convince us that the image, the spectacle, resemblance and dissimulation, are all bad, both theoretically and aesthetically, and that it would be beneath us not to despise all such folderols.2 In short, Foucault is praising the image and the imaginary in opposition to the straitjacket that nonrepresentational art has become. His argument is only ostensibly different from his previous position, but nevertheless, with the essay on Fromanger, I find that Foucault takes a step further. The political turn discussed in the previous chapter instigates a substitution of the notion of painting as painting for a more politically motivated idea of imagery in motion. The focus on materiality as the tangibility of painting in Manet now turns toward action, toward technique and the very act of producing art, of producing and reproducing images in order to pass them on. We see how the mystery of things here stands forth as the movement of things and the political force always present in the movement of objects. Toward the end of this chapter these ideas will be put in relation to the theologically motivated artistic activism of the Russian feminist

110  Fromanger collective Pussy Riot. But let us follow Foucault’s line of thought in reflecting on the art of Fromanger.

Narrative Figuration movement French artist Gérard Fromanger (b. 1939) was an influential voice in French intellectual circles of the 1970s and was associated with the French artistic movement known as New Figurative Representation or Narrative Figuration (or Figuration Narrative), a movement of the 1960s and 1970s often described as a continental European pendant to the American Pop Art movement. Foucault’s interest in him was most likely, in part, due to their friendship. Nonetheless, Fromanger and the return to the image and to representation within the wider Narrative Figuration movement corresponded to Foucault’s own thinking, helping him clarify how his critique of representation reaches beyond a mere rejection of resemblance and imagery. This was an open movement that first arose with the Paris exhibition titled Everyday Mythologies (Mythologies quotidiennes) of 1964. Earlier that same year, Pop Art could rightly claim to be the leading figurative tendency as it had its major breakthrough at the Biennale in Venice. In France, artists Bernard Rancillac (b. 1931) and Hervé Télémaque (b. 1937) organized Mythologies quotidiennes together with the art critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabot. Some thirty-four artists participated, their figurative art— like Pop Art—turned against the predominant abstract style of painting by way of imagery referencing contemporary society and its objects. Compared to Pop Art, however, Narrative Figuration was driven by a more explicit political and anticapitalist motivation, which is why elements of English and American Pop Art were mixed with tendencies of Critical Realism.3 Images from advertising, comics, film, photography, and often news photography were used as motifs but so were images from earlier art history. When art historical paintings were taken on and integrated into new and surprising contexts, they often turned out as politicized narrations. Around the time of Fromanger’s Desire Is Everywhere exhibition, the artist had been exploring a technique in which photos were used as a base on which paintings were created. The technique included several steps in which a photo, either taken by Fromanger himself or simply found and recycled, was projected upon the canvas on which Fromanger then painted the image, adding splashes of paint or features of color and form. Once the projector was turned off and the painting was left to stand by itself, the process was complete. All the paintings in the Desire Is Everywhere exhibit were created by this technique, displaying random Parisian street scenes and mass media images of the prison revolt at the Toul, along with snapshots from Fromanger’s tour of China.4 In Foucault’s view, Fromanger appears when nonobjective painting has turned into a dead-end as a consequence of its own influence and might. If painting as painting was liberating in Manet, and possibly even in Kandinsky,

Fromanger 111 by 1973 it had become a shelter for fine art and a refuge from political reality. After modern art’s move away from the transcendent object—away from Coypel’s angels in the ceiling at Versailles—by the 1960s it had ended in a widespread rejection of figurative art in general, and this was when Foucault encountered Fromanger. By this time, abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko had long dominated the art world with their nonfigurative art, along with a shared conviction of the coarseness of imagery. Foucault’s essay on Fromanger states that this rejection of representation has led to a situation in which painting has handed the power of the image over to the market, to mass media, and to advertisers. He had found that the “theoretical obligation to disqualify” images, or to merely read them as conceptual statements, had created a situation in which “we could be handed over, bound hand and foot, to the power of other images, political and commercial, over which we had no power.” What was a freedom in Manet, in other words, had turned into a straitjacket and, worse, had made art step out of the political arena. Although discussions regarding the political versus apolitical character of abstract expressionism are too complex to go into here, en passant one may recall that this movement was cited by the Central Intelligence Agency during the cold war to prove the breadth of artistic, creative space of American culture as opposed to the imagery of Russian Socialist Realism. In a free society, the McCarthy-era reasoning went, art no longer needed to represent social or political reality: it could focus purely on itself, on its own being. Abstract expressionism therefore, they argued, demonstrated the superiority of American culture.5 Still, regardless of one’s position in such debates, it appears that Foucault saw Fromanger’s paintings as reclaiming imagery in a sense that he thought indicated a political reawakening in modern art—a political reawakening that mirrored his own. More important, Foucault’s essay moves beyond the oppositional paradigm of figuration and its abstract other. His earlier conviction of the force of the postrepresentational, which, of course, is not necessarily nonrepresentational, is developed rather than destroyed in his encounter with Fromanger.6

Representation revisited In his artistry, Fromanger returned to the image: the photograph and news photography seized on by mass media. His technique of projecting photographs on the canvas, then painting and painting again before the projector was turned off and the original image disappeared in itself carried for Foucault a dual subversivity. It was a critique pointing in two directions at once: Fromanger’s painted photos played with—or even vandalized—the kind of images that invade our modern-day lives: mass-distributed photos that, in Foucault’s view, oppress us with their shallow truth claims. And at the same time, such painted photos were a reaction against the dominating ideals of nonobjective art. To create art on and by manipulating ready-made

112  Fromanger representations of reality questioned the purity of painting and to that extent questioned painting’s very identity (PP 93). To Foucault, the painted photos of Fromanger ruptured the shelter for fine arts that modern art had become. Perhaps there was no such thing as painting as painting? Perhaps painting was inevitably intermingled with other forms of expression, and maybe it was time to acknowledge this—time to get down and dirty with representation again?7 To Foucault in 1973, these openings toward a return to representation were, despite his earlier critique of representational art, cause for celebration. Foucault writes, We are now coming out of the long period during which painting always minimized itself as painting in order to “purify” itself, to sharpen and intensify itself as art. Perhaps with this new photogenic painting it is at last coming to laugh at that part of itself which sought the intransitive gesture, the pure sign, the “trace.” (PP 102) The purifying impulse to let painting be painting that Foucault had found liberating in Manet is here presented as the reappearance of the idea of an origin, of a pure first.8 In other words, painting has now turned into precisely the kind of artistic presupposition that Manet reacted against as a young student of Thomas Couture. In fact, if we return to Bataille on Manet with the later historical development in mind, we can see this happening. To Bataille, the rebellion of the young Manet was “the first sign of a fundamental change soon to come over all European painting.” Beginning with Manet, the entirety of European painting was soon to leave what Bataille terms the rhetoric in painting, or painting’s representational service, and move toward its own autonomy. Bataille asserted, What Manet insisted upon, uncompromisingly, was an end to rhetoric in painting. What he insisted upon was painting that should rise in utter freedom, in natural silence, painting for its own sake, a song for the eyes of interwoven forms and colors. (M 37) The idea of letting art be art, for itself and by itself, was surely one way of renouncing ideals for painting modeled on the demand that it represents a higher truth: that it points beyond itself, beyond the present, toward the absent, an absence to which it was always inferior. Once the new ideal was established and artists like Manet had become the norm rather than the exception, however, it created a logic similar to the one it aspired to leave behind.9 Painting itself, nonobjective and nonrepresentational, appeared as the new original, the new ideal. Furthermore, it introduced an artistic ideal that within a few decades served to separate art from the world and from

Fromanger 113 political reality. Bataille’s admiring description of Manet’s art as indifferent is telling in this regard: Manet refuses to let painting represent an outer reality, a deeper meaning or sentiment, Bataille holds, and he sticks so strongly to his rejection of representation that even an execution is represented without feeling. Bataille describes how Manet saw Goya’s The Shootings of May Third in 1865 and two years later painted his own execution painting—one with the striking difference of the removal of emotion.10 Bataille describes Goya’s execution painting as representational painting at its height, filled to the brim with feeling: “an outcry smothered before it can rise” (M 51). On Manet’s The Execution of Maximilien, Bataille comments, “Manet deliberately rendered the condemned man’s death with the same indifference as if he had chosen a fish or a flower as his subject.” Bataille notes enthusiastically that nothing but the event on the canvas is important to Manet, not even the killing of a man. Manet’s painting “is the negation of that kind of painting which, like language, expresses sentiments and relates anecdotes” (M 52). Thus, we see how the liberation from external reality also may entail a rejection of our connectedness and compassionate relation to the outer world, to political reality, including the assassination of a man. Through Fromanger’s art, however, Foucault detects another pathway to lead art back into the political domain, one without a simple return to representational logic.

Series of photos and paint In the opening of Foucault’s Fromanger essay we find allusions to his earlier reasoning on Magritte’s Surrealism, Warhol’s Popism, and Rebeyrolle’s Dogs, discussed in the previous chapter. We encounter again the idea of understanding the world not through vertical hierarchies but through horizontal series that can be followed in both directions. Foucault quotes a denigrating remark on photography by the painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867)—only to oppose it immediately. Photography was a new medium when Ingres questioned its artistic quality by remarking that “photography is no more than a series of manual operations.”11 Foucault turns this denigration on its head in the argumentation that follows: he leaves behind Ingres’s “no more than” while retaining Ingres’s emphasis on photography as “a series of manual operations” to support his own account of Fromanger, ironically elevating the art of photography belittled by Ingres. Like photography, Foucault remarks, painting is an activity—a physical activity—made up of a series of manual operations. And “what,” Foucault asks, “if one were to follow the one with the other?” What if one were to “combine them, alternate them, superimpose them, intertwine them?” (PP 83). The first paragraph of the essay throws us back into ideas that are familiar to us by now, yet here they return with a novel twist. Through Magritte and Warhol, Foucault experimented with the idea of following series in different directions; now he explores the idea again in relation to the divide

114  Fromanger that has appeared between painting and photography. Let us recall Foucault’s reasoning, already discussed: in relation to Magritte and Warhol, Foucault experimented with the idea of following series in different directions. First, from image to image, from ball game to ball game, from can to can, and then, in a next step, from word to image and image to word with Magritte’s pipes. If we take Deleuze seriously in viewing the world through series rather than hierarchies, Foucault’s reasoning went, why let the words below the image in an illustrated book preside over the image above them? What, instead, if we were to follow the one with the other until we could say nothing affirmative about the image by way of words or words by way of the image? What if all we could do was murmur out of a deep humility deriving from the fact that the power of intent and meaning has had to give way to the force of creation? The expressivity of words and things as matter, as material entities, would demand our silence—like the books in Flaubert’s library and the paintings at Manet’s exhibitions—simply because words are not things. As already suggested, Foucault let Deleuze’s idea travel beyond words and things to thinking itself. He saw an opening for thought expressed in Magritte’s art where thought was not, unlike Magritte’s explicit account of human perception in his letter, a mirror of the world. Thought need no longer be limited to the subject–object-based notion of human perception merely representing the world, representing reality. Instead, thought could be regarded as a “thing” that takes part in creating the world. Through the very same motion by which Magritte made painting possible as painting, he also opened a space in which Foucault could recognize the possibility for thought to be thought. In short, thought is not transcendent to the world; thought need not be understood as “theory” that can be applied to “reality.” Instead, thought is practice, creative practice: it is a physical activity involving a series of operations that can be followed in one way and/ or another, in this way and/or in that. Or, as Deleuze described Foucault’s methodological step in the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP), the prison group in which Fromanger had also been active, “[r]epresentation no longer exists; there’s only action—theoretical action and practical action.”12 Deleuze had explored the idea of thinking difference not in accordance with the logic of models and copies but as a repetition that multiplies potentialities, which, as we have seen, influenced Foucault. With Fromanger, yet another angle is added to this way of thinking in series. The strict separation of painting from its objects had brought about a separation of painting in itself from painting as resemblance and figuration, but it had also caused a clear-cut line between painting and photography. The latter belonged to the world of commerce and representation, while the former belonged to itself, to creativity, and to the world of the critical and intellectual elite—and the two did not meet. But with Foucault’s by-now established concern for a political intellectual force, and by way of Fromanger’s art, Foucault invites his readers to create a new series.13 Here again he proposes leaving vertical

Fromanger 115 hierarchy behind, replacing it with horizontal repetition: it is a series in which painting and photography both as series of manual operations are placed next to each other on a plane. Photos are not simply mirrors of the world, nor are paintings mirrors of themselves only. It is not a question of the one or the other—not the abstract expressionists against the hyperrealists—but both and neither.14 In the essay, Foucault lets us travel to a time in the early history of photography before it had become professionalized and structured into an order in which the one taking the photo was different from the professional who delivered it (PP 85–86). Before the protective distinction between photo and art, photos were painted on, and the representations of reality thus created and re-created through a liberating disrespect for photographic representation.15 Painting and photography were, in short, combined, superimposed, and intertwined (PP 83). Read afresh today, the situation he describes is one that we are re-experiencing now—one that Foucault never lived long enough to see: a time when we seldom leave our negatives to be delivered by a professional but find ourselves in a time similar to what Foucault describes as a free, amateurish state of photography. It is a state of photos being distributed, painted over, changed, improved, and colored—today, of course, Photoshopped and Instagrammed—by anyone, anywhere, who happens to have a camera. Foucault notes that the results of the homemade photo manipulations were often poor, but he also discovers in it a liberating force, which he sees returning in Fromanger’s painted photos. “How might we recover this madness, this insolent freedom that accompanied the birth of photography?” (PP 84). It is about reclaiming the image. It is a revolt from inside the image and from the “down below” of artistic hierarchies—not in order to control the image or to make it speak of an origin or a true representation of reality but in order to put it in motion. Foucault discussed a series of paintings made on the basis of the same photograph in Fromanger’s Desire Is Everywhere exhibition. It is a photo of a black streetcleaner at the door of his truck. Originally, it was itself part of a larger image in which the streetcleaner only filled a marginal space in the corner (PP 98). Fromanger enlarged and multiplied this minor image in a series in which each painting, based on the same photo yet unlike every other, is given a different name. Fields of color are used to enhance, cover up, hide, and reveal different features of the image, and at the same time they are used to create entirely new images: a new man, a new space, altering foregrounds and backgrounds. Only the broom handle and the light beam—with their internal, asymmetrical dynamic—remain almost unaltered, thus creating a space in which difference takes place. “Is there some depth in the photograph from which the painter wrests unknown secrets?” Foucault asks rhetorically. “No,” he answers. “This is rather the opening up of the photography by painting, which itself communicates these unlimited images.” The multiplicity is already there on the surface of the image itself, in the event constituted by the man and his broom. “Multiple streets,

116  Fromanger innumerable events, different images which burst out from the same photograph” (PP 98–99). The movement and the multiple are in the image, and so is the series. Fromanger merely passes the image on, Foucault states (PP 95). It is, again, an art of the same, liberated from the as-if. Foucault connects this multiplicity to Fromanger’s technique as in itself a series of manual operations. The technique as such is a movement, a street of several different procedures: In the movement by which the painter removes the photographic substrate from the painting, the event slips through his hand, spreads out in a sheaf, gaining infinite speed, instantaneously joining and multiplying points and times, generating a population of gestures and looks, tracing a thousand possible paths between them—and ensures indeed that the painting, emerging from the night will never again be “all alone.” (PP 94–95) Here the “night” from which the painting emerges most likely refers to Fromanger’s penchant for painting in the dark, guided only by the light of his projector. Once the projector is turned off and the image has left its original, it can express a series of possible realities, “a thousand present and future exteriors” (PP 95). Thus, Fromanger manages to reclaim the image and return to the figurative, Foucault argues, without simultaneously returning to the illusory security of a first referent, a constant outer reality—neither in the past, nor the future, nor in some transcendent dimension of eternity.16 He presents images as spaces in the present and thus spaces that are in motion through time. Fromanger’s paintings on the press photographs of the revolt at Toul prison enhance this aspect, Foucault notes (PP 94). The photograph of the rebellious prisoners on the roof was widely reproduced right after the event. Implicitly, the photograph itself claimed representational authority: “Look, this is what happened.” The photo was distributed widely, and through contemporary eyes, several comparable examples of images gaining power in recent world politics may come to mind. But what lies in a moment, in an event? When does it happen, and what happens in it? Whose is the gaze and the perspective that can capture its truth? What happens in this very representation of the event, in that which is thought of as the photographic evidence of its actuality? Fromanger plays with colors on the canvas surface, a surface thus created by way of the mass-distributed photo. His reproductions are all similitudes yet all different, all referring to the same event yet all enhancing different aspects, hiding these, revealing those, thus letting it stand forth as a “multiple event” (PP 93). Fromanger’s series manages to pose wider questions about the accessibility of the past, of historical events, and the accessibility of the realities of others. He manages to show how all we have is a present with images moving through (PP 94). Furthermore, Fromanger’s work on the Toul series,

Fromanger 117 along with Foucault’s interpretation of it, may also be read as a commentary on GIP’s work, discussed in the former chapter.17 In their aim to let the prisoners “speak for themselves,” GIP had prisoners answer questionnaires modeled on a certain idea of literacy and linguistic ability that might not have stimulated the prisoners to express themselves on their own terms. Foucault points to the multiplicity of an event, in this case, of a photographic representation: “What commentary has ever articulated the unique and multiple event which circulates in it?” (PP 93–94). Rather than trying to give voice to or reveal and lay bare the event itself, Foucault praises Fromanger for highlighting the multiplicity of the photographic image and passing the image on.

From subjectivity to imagery Because of his chosen technique in this series, Fromanger himself is no longer central to the entire artistic process from photo to canvas, nor is he central to his images. As an artist, Fromanger enters the process of the image at a certain stage, then follows it a few steps further before leaving it again (PP 93). As recently as 1972, a common feature of Fromanger’s paintings was a dark, shadowy silhouette of the painter himself. Like the painter in Las Meninas, whom we can assume was Velázquez himself, Fromanger placed a character similar to himself central to his paintings. This character was not looking back at us, the viewers, but at different street scenes in the contemporary capitalist society such as storefronts, display windows, advertisements, or markets on which we, the viewers, were looking along with him. But Foucault notes that this self-referencing feature is absent from the images in 1974. One possible interpretation of this change, and one that goes along with Foucault’s account of Fromanger’s Desire Is Everywhere paintings, is that the subject is not in focus in this part of his oeuvre or in Foucault’s discussion of it. In the essay on Las Meninas, and developed in the lectures on Manet, the viewing subject was made erratic or replaced with an ambiguous space. Nevertheless, through these renegotiations, subjectivity was still crucial to the analysis. Foucault was actively wrestling with the subject position. Here, so it seems, subjectivity in the classical sense is not pivotal either to art or to thought. In 1974, the viewing artist-figure so frequently present in Fromanger’s earlier work is absent, and the images are left on their own. Foucault calls it an autonomous transhumance of the image. With the return to figuration, we are plugged into the endless circulation of images, Foucault states (PP 90, 102). “Fromanger’s paintings do not capture images: they do not fix them, they pass them on” (PP 95). It is another account yet of the mystery of things coming to the fore. With Rebeyrolle, the painted surfaces of the exhibition transmitted a force of escape through the very plainness of figuration. With Fromanger, the art as art, the painting as painting, gives way to matter in motion. It is not just the canvas and the paint asking us to

118  Fromanger step down from our elevated subject position and to feel the world through their materiality. The materiality of the image is not that around which we move or dance in search of a forever-lost transcendent point of view. No, rather, we as well as the images are set in motion, like the rest of matter. Autonomously though not singularly, images move, take leave of whatever was their beginning, and move on in transhumance. Just like other living beings—nomads, Sami, bees—images are in motion, moving to where they can re-create, start off anew. The primary reference is not needed, and thus, images can once again take part in critiquing the oppressive aspects of representation. Because power and politics have entered the canvas surface, imagery is no longer to be left to the dominating professionals, whether they are news photographers, television stations, advertisers, or professional photo-delivery personnel. The immaterial diffusion that we encountered in Taylor’s reading of Foucault on Velázquez is, again, replaced by a material diffusion; a movement of the matter that constitutes us, as well as the thoughts, images, or words that surround and shape us. Unending dissemination has turned into an autonomous transhumance. A critique of Derrida’s écriture—the idea that infused Taylor’s a/theology in the 1980s—rings in Foucault’s admiration of Fromanger’s way forward. Fromanger shows a way “not just to decipher or to appropriate the images imposed upon us,” Foucault states, “but to create new images of every kind.” It offers a way not merely to rediscover the figurative in painting, but to put images into circulation, to convey them, disguise them, deform them . . . To banish the boredom of Writing, to suspend the privileges of the signifier, give notice to the formalism of the non-image, to unfreeze content, and to play, scientifically and pleasurably, in, with, and against the powers of the image. (PP 89) Tellingly, Adrian Rifkin describes how Foucault’s essay itself turns into such an image, one stage in an ongoing flow, being passed on. Foucault’s essay is not the first philosophical comment on Fromanger but is merely one voice in an ongoing conversation, he states. In 1973, Deleuze published “Fromanger: Le peintre et le modèle”; in 1971, Jacques Prévert wrote about him in the introduction to the exhibition Boulevard des Italiens; and with these old acquaintances deceased, the Fromanger conversation continues with new partners and friends. At an APART festival forum in St.-Rémy-de-Provence in 2011, the visitors were invited to overhear a conversation between Fromanger and the philosopher Michel Onfray. “You are the warrior among us,” said Onfray, “a modest and necessary combat against the powerful.” So the conversation continues in an autonomous transhumance of images, words, and ideas, recalling the opening of Foucault’s first lecture at Collège de France in which he, in one suitably humbling opening passage, managed to introduce his entire account of the discursive reality.18 One can never be anything

Fromanger 119 but an entangled voice, passing images and ideas on. Thus, imagery is in motion, and the political force of the play with imagery inevitably continues. To exemplify this, in closing, I would like to consider a theological-artistic action aiming to set imagery in motion that took place in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow in 2012.

Pussy Riot: entangled theology In late August 2012, two young women, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, members of the Russian feminist art collective Pussy Riot, were sentenced to two years of imprisonment for their “hooliganism” in performing a “punk prayer” in front of the iconostasis in Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Yekaterina Samutsevich was also sentenced but finally freed without serving time. Shortly after the event, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, condemned Pussy Riot’s performance as “blasphemous” and “sacrilegious,” and his statement appears to have affected the final sentencing by the court. The judge explicitly stated that the women had been “motivated by religious enmity and hatred” and that their performance had been “blasphemous and insulting to believers.”19 According to their own explanations, however, the young women’s concern was another.20 They aimed to protest Patriarch Kirill’s endorsement of Vladimir Putin’s presidency, as well as Putin’s strong support for the Orthodox Church—Putin was re-elected a few weeks after the trial. But their critique of the close church–state alliance was not only a political criticism; it was also theologically grounded. During the trial, all three women described their theological motivation and underlined that it had nothing to do with “religious enmity and hatred,” but that their protest was an attempt to emphasize alternative interpretations of, and traditions within, Russian Orthodox faith. Yekaterina Samutsevich said that Pussy Riot was aspiring to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture with that of protest culture, thus suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the patriarch, and Putin, but that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.21 The cathedral had been frequently used as a backdrop for national-television broadcasts in which the regime was presented in a favorable light. The close alliance between state and church in Russia was thus used to reinforce the image of the current regime as natural, constant, and necessary, they argued. Pussy Riot wanted to spread a different image, and through massive international support and sharing on social media its thirty-second performance did, in fact, manage to balance the imagery of the cathedral in precisely the way the group intended. From that day forward, many associated the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with their activist performance rather than with Putin and the patriarch. It was not merely a political statement they

120  Fromanger were after but also a problematization of interpretative prerogative with respect to Christian faith. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said that for her, Christianity is about a search for truth understood as “a constant overcoming of . . . what you were earlier.” Christian faith is about a humble and open search for a truth that can never finally be nailed down, not about power and truth dictated from above. In her closing statement, Tolokonnikova said that the group had been searching for a form through which to express true sincerity and simplicity and had found it in the “holy folly” of the punk concert. They used the punkstyle performance because, she said, passion, openness, and naïveté beat hypocrisy and the artificial decency that conceals crime.22 She also referred to the Russian OBERIU movement and its “search for a thought at the far end of meaning and making sense” through its nonsensical performances in various public places.23 Pussy Riot had similarly performed in a number of public locations since 2011, including a bus roof, a fashion show, the subway, clothing stores, and others.24 When Pussy Riot reclaimed the Christian imagery in the cathedral by adding to the images that spread across the contemporary media landscape of the Russian Orthodox Church, its action was thus a theological yet political action—in line with Foucault’s reasoning discussed earlier. In the members’ view, the performance was an innocent and nonsensical form of protest and performance that aimed to open contemporary imagery to yet another vision of what faith can be. In that regard, their performance may very well be understood as an expression of a political theology reclaiming and renewing Christian imagery. Regardless of the group’s own intentions, however, the images of the young women kneeling and crossing themselves before the Orthodox altar, a space in which women are not allowed, continue to spread across the world today and are living a life of their own. They have turned into an imagery in motion, a mystery of things adding to the surface of appearances, just like the images of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. During her time in prison, Tolokonnikova corresponded with the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who had supported the group throughout the juridical process. The two discussed the themes of imprisonment, capitalism, and openings for resistance, and thus prison once again became a locus of political theory. Žižek conveys his own sense of hope brought about by the imprisoned movement: “The very existence of Pussy Riot tells thousands that opportunist cynicism is not the only option, that we are not totally disoriented, that there still is a common cause worth fighting for.”25 When asked about the situation for the women in prison, Tolokonnikova’s husband, Petr Verzilov, said that Tolokonnikova had been reading Foucault, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, the Bible, and the late essays of Tolstoy. “One good thing about Russian prisons is that they have a halfway decent library,” Verzilov said. “No Foucault—she gets that from outside— but good Russian classics!” And so Foucault was back in prison, back at the center of political activity. Thinking is practice, and images are thoughts, actions are art, theology

Fromanger 121 is politics, and politics is corporeal. In the chapter on Velázquez, the search for a lost vision turned into an erratic place for knowledge and thus an erratic place for the subject. The theme of vision and visibility was developed in relation to Manet and then complemented with the focus on words and things in Magritte. By the time we reached Rebeyrolle and Fromanger, the subject was no longer the explicit focus of investigation. The subject had been scrutinized through the archeological period to become a thing among other things on a surface of appearances, a thing that may take part in the constant transformation of the world, and it was later to reappear as explicit in its altered form in the work on sexuality. From an entangled position, knowing-together, doing-together, thinking-together, as bodies and things on a surface of infinite appearances, the task as depicted in the texts on Rebeyrolle and Fromanger was to add to the appearances, to the mystery of things. To be material is to be political; it is to play a part in world politics. The focus on the individual’s approach to the materiality of the Eucharist in the former chapters is now complemented with a notion of theology as political action; if theory is practice, in philosophy as well as in liturgy, then theology is also political activism.

Notes 1 According to David Macey, the preface was written in a gesture of friendship mainly on Foucault’s part. Macey also argues that it helped Fromanger’s career significantly, which is why Fromanger was grateful to Foucault for it (Macey, Lives of Michel Foucault, 337). In Adrian Rifkin’s view, however, Macey’s description of the relationship between Fromanger and Foucault is “patronizing and erroneous.” “We should not,” Rifkin writes, “allow a mistaken sense of proportion or an untoward awe of theory to conceal from us how it was also important for Foucault.” Rifkin underlines that Fromanger was a crucial voice among leftist French intellectuals long before Foucault turned into the substantial public authority he became after the election to the Collège de France in 1971. See Adrian Rifkin, “A Space Between: On Gérard Fromanger, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Some Others,” in Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Photogenic Painting / La Peinture Photogénique: Gérard Fromanger, bilingual ed., ed. Sarah Wilson (London: Black Dog, 1999), 21–59, quotes on 37–39. My own description of their relationship is simply that the two knew each other and had worked together in the prison movement and that both appear to have been happy with the preface agreement. 2 Foucault, “Photogenic Painting,” in Photogenic Painting / La Peinture Photogénique, 88–9. Hereafter this essay is cited as PP followed by the page number. 3 Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory (London: Yale University Press, 2010), 16. 4 In the spring of 1974, the Tel Quel intellectuals with Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, and others traveled to China. Filmmaker Joris Ivens was invited back in June, and Fromanger went with him (Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory, 149–50). 5 See, for instance, Francis Frascina, ed., After Pollock: The Critical Debate (London: Routledge, 2000). The anthology includes Eva Cockcroft’s pioneering article “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War,” first published in Artforum 12 (1974): 39–41.

122  Fromanger 6 Adrian Rifkin writes, “Elegantly, the essay goes beyond the dominant and by then already outdated oppositional paradigm of figuration and its abstract other. Read afresh today, it evokes as much the present and future world of electronic communication as the aporias of modernism in the 1970s” (Rifkin, “A Space Between,” 41). 7 Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, 370. 8 Although he appears to ascribe it to the Levinas–Derrida (the trace) trajectory rather than his own. 9 See also Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, 369. 10 Manet did, in fact, paint several different versions of this composition, influenced by the political circumstances around the event; Bataille’s interpretation— though enough for the purposes of the current discussion—might not tell the entire story. See, for instance, John Elderfield, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006). 11 PP 83. See the connections here with Walter Benjamin’s publication of “Malerei und Photographie,” which was translated into French around the same time (Wilson, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Photogenic Painting / La Peinture Photogénique, 18). 12 Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” 207; “Les intellectuels et le pouvoir,” 308. 13 Soussloff also notes the stylistic parallels to Foucault’s 1973 preface to a book by Serge Livrozet (member of the Comité d’action des prisonniers) indicating that Foucault finds a kinship between the works of Livrozet and Fromanger. Soussloff, Foucault on Painting, 2019/4656. 14 Adrian Rifkin notes the same contradiction, or move beyond the contradiction, in an interview where Foucault is asked about his personal relationship to contemporary art. Foucault answers that he made a life’s dream come true when he bought a painting by Mark Tobey (1890–1976) with the money he earned from Madness and Civilization: “And I found myself inside it, convinced that I should never get out. . . . And then came the hyperrealists.” Rifkin notes how Foucault elevates what might be described as the abstract expressionism (although Tobey is seen as a precursor) only to find himself liberated from his admiration by the hyperrealism that, in a sense, makes out its artistic other. In Rifkin’s words, “any painting by Fromanger or Tobey could not be more dissimilar to each other” (Rifkin, “A Space Between,” 43–4). 15 Foucault’s argument about the history of photography in this passage, Soussloff shows, is a concentrate of Gisèle Freund’s book Photography and Society, published in French in 1974. Soussloff, Foucault on Painting, 2114/4656. 16 See also Rifkin, “A Space Between,” 40. 17 Fuggle, “Beyond Slogans and Snapshots,” 146. 18 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, 215; L’Ordre du discours, 7. 19 Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture (Baker Publishing, 2013), 172. 20 Uzlaner shows how their own explanations changed gradually from a more theological viewpoint towards a more political one as the support from political theorists worldwide grew stronger; see Dmitry Uzlaner, “The Pussy Riot Case and the Peculiarities of Russian Post-Secularism,” in State, Religion and Church, ed. Christopher Stroop and Dmitry Uzlaner (Moscow: Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, 2014), 39. 21 Moberly, Old Testament Theology, 172. 22 Nadhezda Tolokonnikova, Slutplädering av Nadezjda Tolokonnikova i Pussy Riot, trans. Johan Öberg (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2012), 13. Incidentally, in the aftermath of the protest and rising worldwide support for Pussy Riot, the

Fromanger 123 patriarch was critiqued for wearing a gold Berguet watch worth about 20,000 euros. In a photo on the church’s official website of Patriarch Kirill and Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov in 2009, the watch is clearly visible on Kirill’s arm. In April 2012 the watch was airbrushed out of the photo but remained visible in the reflection on the table. See www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9188342/ Russian-Orthodox-Church-admits-doctoring-Patriarch-photograph.html. 23 Tolokonnikova, Slutplädering, 25. 4 Pussy Riot, Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom (New York: Feminist Press 2 at CUNY, 2012). 25 www.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/15/pussy-riot-nadezhda-tolokonnikovaslavoj-zizek.

Conclusion Marvels and actions

The preceding chapters explored Foucault’s reflections on art with a view to the theological openings they offer. Material and performative aspects of Foucault’s writings are highlighted and reformulated here in terms of the mystery of things. This concept is employed to signify a range of meanings and expressions: it depicts a concrete yet erratic place for knowledge, the very flatness of the canvas that questions our ability to know, the thingness of words, things, and thought. The notion further describes how thought turns to action—even to activism—as a force of the image and imagery itself. The later chapters discussed how symbolic imagery can be used to change the world. In different ways, the notion of the mystery of things instigates a surface perspective that harbors theological potency precisely when traditional symbolic referents have lost their vitality. We noted, for instance, how the ironic use of Christian imagery by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence could be understood as an expression of political theology if viewed in postrepresentational terms. Through Foucault on Fromanger, we encountered a play with images that seeks to reclaim them, not in order to possess them, redefine them, and say positively what they are truly all about but in order to pass them on, to add to the multiplicity of images. We saw how the Pussy Riot movement did so by adding to the mass-media images associated with the cathedral in Moscow. Similar theological surface approaches were also discussed as material accounts of sacramentality and as entanglement—as knowing-with rather than the negative not-knowing.

Surface thingness as mystery Toward the end of our journey, tracing the steps we have taken, how are we to understand the mystery of things? The notion has been used in relation to a number of expressions and thoughts, but taken together, what is the message? In the following, the theological implications of the mystery of things are discussed in relation to theological conversation partners, as well as the relationship between modern art and theology. The theological position introduced here is, in essence, neither unambiguous nor plain, yet the voices brought in will assist in delineating its contours and depicting its

Conclusion 125 different aspects. But first, an outline of the key ideas encountered in the preceding analyses. In the preceding discussions, the mystery of things is used more or less synonymously with the surface of appearances, yet I have consequently shifted between these notions when moving from a philosophical to a theological sphere of thought. The mystery of things has been used only in relation to theology, or when I have wanted to open the philosophical reasoning toward the theological. That is to say, in the preceding analyses, the mystery of things is quite simply the Foucauldian notion of reality as a surface of appearances—or as discourse—brought into theology. Foucault’s attempt to let the world stand forth in its complexity and richness without the aid of an enigmatic transcendent God or a mysterious subject is brought into theology as a lens through which to view contemporary theology, faith, and religious practice. Yet how is this notion affecting the theological approach? As we have seen, to approach the world as it appears blurs common categorizations and borders, like the distinctions between things and words, and things and thoughts. With a postrepresentational approach to knowledge, words are also things, and things are also words. Both express knowledge but neither can be fully captured by the other. There is a gap in our abstract knowledge; hence, words and things to some degree remain mysteries to us. Their force is beyond our control. And it is this materiality and performativity of words, things, thoughts, gestures, and images that make up the mystery of things. This attempt to acknowledge the complexity of the surface of the world, when brought into theology, bereft of traditional notions of man and God, dissolves the distinction between theological thinking and Christian practice, and it affects both.1 It questions our ability to know, and it questions the distinction between knowing and doing. It is about notknowing, and yet a theology inspired by such an account of reality would not primarily commend silent contemplation of what we cannot know. To embrace the mystery of things theologically would mean, instead, to note that each repetition of Christian dogma, narrative, and liturgy—not to mention altarpieces and church buildings—are real, actual, present, and affecting our world, our bodies, and our minds and thus constantly building and rebuilding reality as we know it. Through the account of reality as at once material and performative, Christian artifacts are seen as creative and transformative. They will not guide us toward an absolute knowledge but toward a humbling appreciation of the richness of expressions. We will have to let go of the perspective where God is understood purely as the vertical force through which the world finally makes sense and keep her/him/it/them as actualities, appearances—at times of transcendence, at times of immanence—a word, a thought, a thing for unending, playful repetition that takes part in the ongoing creation and re-creation of our world. In effect, God as the powerful and intentional One will be but one of innumerable god appearances, one in a multiplicity indicating the humbling, enigmatic creativity of reality. We would become open to the mystery of

126  Conclusion things, a mystery in which we are entangled and inseparable; similarly, our thoughts, words, and actions are always also mysterious “thingies.” While it is about never knowing for certain, yet as a spiritual approach it is not primarily about the sans, the not-knowing, but about acknowledging our life among things, words, and thoughts, where reality is constantly changed, constantly reborn. A theology of the mystery of things is more about adding—even superadding—than about subtracting. It is a theology that aims for complexity to stand forth, and in doing so we may very well take part in adding to and renewing Christian imagery, not in order to suggest a perfect representation but in order to pass images on. Thus, the preceding discussions all come together in a radical theology of marvels and actions. The world, understood as a mystery of things, incites marvel, even awe, and that encourages action—creative, activist additions to the surface of appearance to oppose every oppressive attempt at deterring the expressions of the world. From the pre-1970 Foucault, a radical theology of the mystery of things would bring the marvels: the humility and the fascination with the surface of appearances. From the post-1970 Foucault, it would bring the actions: the activism motivated by the appreciation of the possibility to take part in creatively transforming the surface. One consequence of theologically viewing the world as a surface of appearances could involve discovering Christian practice freed from habitual expectations of encounters with transcendence—just as Saint Anthony did, in Foucault’s reading, again, not in order to even out the differences, the folds and unevenness of the surface, but in order to let them be shown—not with the aim of subtracting but of adding. Light would be thrown on the very material of the service; hence, the ambiguity of the representational process would stand forth in the church. When experiencing the sacrament, one would not primarily reach for theological abstractions or dogma, but for the actual bread and the actual wine in order to let their materiality question what we think we know. The tangible encounter between bodies and things in sacramental acts would evoke a humility in relation to that which surrounds us, and by which we are made, and open us to other experiences than the expected. The attention would transgress the habitual border-notions—such as the inner self or the transcendent someone—as well as ideas of what “should” be felt, “should” be thought or experienced in the service. A radical liturgical theology understood as a material approach to liturgy could open us to wordless—at least in the abstract sense of words— encounters between things and bodies, hands, lips, dreams, desires, demons, memories, pews, wine, narratives, anger, love, bread, smells. A slight twist on liturgical habits, and the repetition of that which we take for granted, might rupture what we think we know. Accordingly, however, the performative holy acts in the perpetual celebration of the Eucharist would only be a less explicitly postrepresentational and less explicitly political version of, for example, the playful transgender performances of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Conclusion 127 In an aim to reverse Carl Schmitt’s political theology, Jeffrey W. Robbins lets the notion of democracy pave the way for a renewed account of theology: an account that is both affiliated and different from a radical theology of the mystery of things. Robbins proposes a theological as well as political transformation of the very idea of authority and power. That is to say, for Robbins, theopolitical resistance is not legitimized through faith in a loving God beyond the oppressive powers of this world. Instead, the very notion of a divine authority is transformed through the notion of democracy so that sovereignty itself becomes inseparable from the multiplicity of the world. Robbins suggests an alternative political theology that understands the sovereign as the multitude rather than the One, as a supplement to radical philosophy’s project at rethinking the conceptual basis of democracy itself. Accordingly, Robbins’s theological account is similar to the one I am exploring here in the sense that the transformative force is placed on the ever-multiplying face of the earth. What we used to know as authority and truth appears not in the sky but is expressed from below, on the surface of appearances, in the multiplicity of expressions. Yet the mystery of things differs from the sovereign as multitude in that it understands the multifaceted surface not predominantly as the multiplicity of voices but as complex materiality in a wider sense. In consequence, it finds its sources for theological renewal not primarily in political theory but in the artistic, hands-on challenges to theological and theopolitical debate. Although Robbins’s main focus is on critical and political theory, his reasoning is not closed to such artistic inspiration; with Antonio Negri, Robbins does, in fact, suggest that the theopolitical resistance he advocates is best performed through creative acts of disobedience. “Exodus is a creative event,” he writes.2 Theopolitical activism, he continues, means taking leave of domination, of the transcendental illusions of state and church power in order to create new spaces and images. Thus understood, the artistries discussed earlier—including Pussy Riot’s church performance and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’s play with Christian imagery—may all serve as examples of renegotiations of transcendental illusions. Yet again, the theological and political resistance I have extracted from these artistic contributions lie not primarily in the weight of their theoretical reasoning but in the force of their nonsensical playfulness, their performativity and materiality. In other words, it is not always about outsmarting but at times out-sillying—or consillying, doing silly things together—like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, Pussy Riot, or the artists before them—who by now have left the “sillying” far behind by entering fine-art collections. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence turned what they experienced as the very essence of oppression, namely, the Catholic Church—its rituals and dress codes—into a birthplace for their own liberation. They began to pass images on by playing with the expressions of their own bodies, by placing their transgender identities in the midst of Christian liturgy. In doing so, they depicted the transformative force of Christian imagery. Theologically

128  Conclusion following Foucault to the playground beyond representation, letting go of divine and human intention understood in a lasting and stable sense, we thus note how Christian imagery itself may take part in transforming reality. The dissident order of nuns and the images it broadcast took part in changing the image not only of the LGBTQ community but also of Christianity. Christianity may be changed from within its very imagery. Christian expressions are, to some extent, beyond our control. They are part of the mystery of things.

The additive gesture At this point we might well ask, “How new to Christian worship is the material perspective explored here? When Flaubert’s Saint Anthony becomes fully materialized through his prayers, for example, is he not really fulfilling a Christian ideal—though Foucault failed to recognize it as such?” Reading early Christianity through Foucault’s lens in his late lectures would support such a claim.3 In a conversation between philosophical theologian Daniel Colucciello Barber and artist-thinker Antonia Hirsch, Barber enhances the aspect of immanent, material presence in Christian thought.4 He suggests that Meister Eckhart’s mysticism is precisely about doing away with the binaries of present versus absent, God versus man, me versus you, and, in consequence, theory versus practice. For Barber, the final surrender to pure materiality in Flaubert’s story of Saint Anthony would be, in fact, in perfect congruence with Eckhart’s teaching. The very notion of God’s existence, Barber holds, is produced by the notion of a subject needing an “outside” in order for the subject to stand forth as fixed and existent. But in an actual presence in reality, we are not in need of those identities or fixed positions. This is precisely Eckhart’s point, according to Barber, in making the “subtractive gesture” by which he tries to break the world free from the notion of “world.” Eckhart, in Barber’s view, urges us to leave behind our outsider perspective on the world as something we “do not yet access” but might under exceptional circumstances; instead, we should come to see “there is nothing to get to.” Barber further explicates his point, borrowing terms from François Laruelle’s nonphilosophy: We are in the Real, in other words, we do not need access to it. The problem is that we keep looking for access to it and when we look for access, we cannot get that access. Instead we create a whole world. The world is created by seeking access to the Real, and it is this seeking, or this world, that divides us from the Real.5 Barber’s account of Eckhart is merely one indication of the fact that a material perspective beyond binaries is not new to Christian thinking, and many more could be put forward from Christian thought and liturgical practice.

Conclusion 129 The Foucauldian mystery of things adds dimensions, I find, to the Christian tradition of thought to which Barber alludes. What unites Barber’s reasoning on breaking with the world—letting go of the notion “the world”—with Caputo’s not-knowing and the apophatic traditions to which they both refer is precisely the negative enactment it effects. It is a removal, a subtractive gesture that enhances the not-knowing. Through Foucault’s encounters with the Surrealists, the Narrative Figuration movement, and their return to representation with a twist, we have encountered an approach that is additive rather than subtractive. It is not about withdrawing from the representations of the world but about adding to them in order to throw light on their inevitable multiplicity. Foucault’s political turn is a return to representation with a transformed outlook on its uses, acknowledging that we do know—or think we know—we do represent, we do categorize, we do label the world, each other, and God. We judge and measure each other based on notions of origin and inner truth, whether we intend to or not. When we see an image of a pipe we do not hesitate to state: “That is a pipe.” When the inflow of immigrants started draining the assets of the European welfare states, even the most liberal countries began to scrutinize origin, identity, and truth at the borders: “Who are you? Where did you come from? Why are you here?” The neoliberal ideals of an open international flow of labor and goods thus revealed their opaque side of fixed representational ideas regarding what is what—who is in and who is out. The additive response is not to withdraw from the flow of images and ideas but to add to them, not to state what is finally true—neither in church nor at the borders—but in order to pass the images of truth on. The additive response talks back, adding truths: “Who are you? Where did you come from? Why are you here?” As a theological project, the radical theology of the mystery of things does, in fact, resume Taylor’s a/theology according to which ideas are never fixed but always in transition, hence “irrepressibly transitory.” The consequence of such an insight, Taylor argues in line with Deleuze, is that a/ theology is “nomad thought”: “The erring nomad neither looks back to an absolute beginning nor ahead to an ultimate end.”6 Taylor’s deconstructive theology is primarily about ideas, words, and texts and in 1984, it lacked materiality. In 1992, Taylor published Disfiguring, an ambitious study on the borderland between art, architecture, and religion, and thus drew closer to the material world. In that work he discusses the materiality of a/theology explicitly in relation to the gospel of death-of God theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer’s Christian atheism. Altizer, in Taylor’s view, declares the death of the “Barthian God” in order to affirm God as “radical immanence.” When God truly has become one with the world, the appearances of this world no longer point beyond themselves. “Appearances are the appearances of nothing other than themselves,” Taylor explains.7 “According to Altizer,” Taylor continues, “the incarnation reveals that truth is embodied in the everchanging currents of the material and historical world.” At the end of his exposé, however, Taylor does not follow Altizer into the thingness of the

130  Conclusion world. In his final chapter he pursues rather the Derridean path of deconstruction and lets his journey end in the desert of erring and not-knowing, with “the bleeding trace of the wounded word” suffering a “disfiguring for which there is no cure.”8 The mystery of things affects a kind of a/theology with a material and performative focus: a radical theology with a political edge for an already postsecular society carrying a deconstructed, reconstructed, and restructured Christian inheritance. Swedish theologian Mattias Martinson touches on such an account of a material, political a/theology when bringing together ideas from Friedrich Nietzsche and Gianni Vattimo with Philip Blond’s theological materialism. Martinson aims not to introduce a new ontology as a theology grounded in nature but to approach what he calls a “post-Christian political atheology of culture.” Culture, conceived as the intentional, objectified, classified, and meaningful face of reality, is inevitably positioned by the intentionless materiality of nature, Martinson argues. Despite its tendency to hide its contingent origin, human culture as creativity, rationality, and action—whether artistic, philosophical, theological, or liturgical—is always inescapably set in the inconsistency of the material world.9 Still, a materialist theological position would not, in Martinson’s view, be reductive in the sense of reducing theology to “nothing-but-nature.” Rather it would suggest what Martinson describes as a “theology from below”: a theology attentive to the material grounding and limits of the spiritual. Because, like Magritte, Martinson underlines the challenges posed to culture by nature. Nature in a post-Darwin and post-Bohr world is never as stable as human perception habitually makes it out to be. Matter challenges human rationality by its lack of intentionality, stability, and meaning, and as such it is an infinite obstacle to every attempt at presenting an eternal theology from above. Consequentially, Martinson also discusses the ability of a created cultural object—like a painting—to offer an actual experience of a theology from below. Can intentionally painted objects serve as grounds for introducing a material and performative theology? Most certainly, he argues. While human creativity at times endeavors to hide its material derivation, it is precisely in the borderland between nature and culture that the contingency of both stands forth: on one hand, a turn to “pure matter” would imply a return to nature as a Kantian thing-in-itself or as a pre-Bohr stability and constancy, which, in turn, would mean letting go of important scientific as well as philosophical insights acquired through history. On the other hand, an elevation of the created object with no regard paid to its materiality would risk a return to a Christian or Platonic representational logic of a world of eternal ideas. In accordance with Martinson’s reasoning, the present study has explored materiality through and in relation to creativity and created objects. I have endorsed neither creativity nor materiality per se, in isolation, but the reciprocity between the two as present in the actual culture and politics that shape the world as we know it. My method for enacting such a study has been to explore, through the eyes of Foucault, radical theological

Conclusion 131 implications of the artistic negotiations of transcendence. The theological perspective has thrown light on religious presuppositions that are challenged by the artistic move beyond representation and the surrealist play with representation. Instead of talking back from a theological standpoint, arguing that the Christian representational logic should be defended, I have instead endeavored to play along and let theology become a postrepresentational canvas surface. I have also suggested that such a radical theological approach carries political potential. In doing so, I do not mean to argue against the critique put forward by Carrette discussed in the Introduction— that the performative perspective on Christianity may miss out on Christian sources of resistance—but to show that a theological force of resistance may also be present in performative and material accounts of theology. The mystery of things may infuse theological activism or, more plainly, an awareness of the multiplicity of reality—reality as serious nonsense and stupidity. Reality, in such a perspective, is nonsensical simply because all things taken together do not mean anything. It is ultimately just mysterious. A radical theology that sets out to explore and express such a vision of God and the world would continue to explore its material inheritance of words, thoughts, and things, but when doing so it might end up in a place quite similar to Magritte’s Surrealist position: My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, “What does that mean?” It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing, it is unknowable.10 Rather than pursuing a theology against the grain of the Surrealist play with nonsense and meaninglessness, I have endeavored to infuse theology with the challenges of avant-garde and Surrealist thought. Such a radical theological approach to modern art could, however, inspire also today’s often fumbling attempts at analyzing the theological or religious aspects of modern and contemporary art. That is to say, the theological insights acquired through the art encounters may return to the art scene, enabling new approaches to art and theology. In other words, the theological eyes on art history may assist the history of art to note its rich theological inheritance.

Theology, art, and the mystery of things Before Taylor set out on his voyage through the borderland of contemporary art and postmodern theology in Disfiguring, his book opened with a drastic statement: “Religion and the visual arts currently are at war.”11 Fifteen years later, James Elkins’s On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art similarly discussed the disconnection among spirituality, religion, and contemporary art.12 While there is no war metaphor in Elkins in 2004, the gulf between religion and contemporary art is also the starting point for his investigation, so the chasm remains. This gulf between religion and

132  Conclusion theology, on one hand, and modern and contemporary art, on the other, is generated by habitual accounts of theology, of thought, art, and mystical experiences. The mystery of things, as extracted from artistic transgressions through history, sheds new light on the predicament of addressing religion in the contemporary art world. Elkins’s book opened a Pandora’s box when it comes to dealing with religion and theology in the art faculties. Elkins noted the difficulty of approaching religious themes for artists and art institutions, as well as for academia, and acknowledged that the lack of interest in and even hostility toward religion limits the debate in contemporary art. Nevertheless, Elkins himself does not endorse an artistic return to religion. Religious sincerity and confessionality do not belong in the galleries, he states. While artistic sincerity and piety beyond irony and skepticism can be intriguing, “as Jeff Koons shows,” this is just not the case when it comes to an awe of transcendence. The reason, simply, is that to embrace such religious expressions would mean to throw out the artistic insights achieved from modernism onward and to return, naively, to a premodern worldview. To bring an uncomplicated notion of transcendence back into the visual arts, Elkins states, would be to undo the very foundation of modern and postmodern artistry and the thought on which contemporary art rests. Quite simply, such religious art would not be discussed, exhibited, or analyzed, neither bought nor sold within the realm of contemporary fine art—and rightly so—Elkins maintains (OS 48). In consequence, instead of advocating a return to the ideals of former religious art, Elkins explores ways of talking about spirituality and religion in what he defines as fine art or high art without leaving its historical insights or the characteristics of its debate (OS 2). He searches for ways of dealing with religion and spirituality in the contemporary art world without losing what has been gained via artistic journeys through modernism and postmodernism, and his suggestions run from using the notion of the postmodern sublime to the numinous in Rudolf Otto to mysticism and halts primarily at the notion of apophatic or negative theology. Negative theology, he writes, while never stating what transcendence is, nonetheless “refuses to remain silent about what is transcendent.” Negative theology avoids simplistic accounts of transcendence by “refusing to accept any division between what can be said (for example, God is in heaven) and what cannot be said (that God has such-and-such an appearance)” (OS 107). Thus, for Elkins, negative theology may open ways of talking about transcendent dimensions in contemporary art without taking leave of its postmodern presuppositions. In that regard, one would imagine that Taylor’s Derrida- and Levinas-inspired Disfiguring could serve as an entrance into the spiritual in contemporary art that Elkins is after. But for Elkins, Disfiguring appears too smooth and to that extent, as I understand him, too pious since it shows too little awareness—despite its difficult reasoning through Derrida, Levinas, Blanchot, and others—of the importance of complexity and even ugliness in postmodern accounts of art. Elkins acknowledges that there are other Derrida-inspired postmodern theologians who could

Conclusion 133 possibly serve as conversation partners, and here he mentions John Caputo. The reason he does not discuss these theological possibilities more extensively, he notes, is “because none has so far had much effect on contemporary discourse on art” (OS 112). Elkins is balancing on a thin line when speaking about spirituality in the contemporary art world. Might this balancing act be made easier if he did not so strongly connect spirituality with transcendence—in accordance with the earlier artistic and theological explorations? Elkins’s discussion of ways forward for talking about spirituality in the art world presupposes this to be “an intimate and incommunicable experience of transcendence” or a “private connection with something transcendental” (OS 106). Despite the fact that Elkins locates the problem precisely with awe of transcendence, he does not move beyond that notion. There are no openings in Elkins’s reasoning for a spirituality that, in line with modern and postmodern artistic endeavors, strives away from transcendence and toward the present and the inner-worldly. It may be that Elkins cannot follow Taylor’s track of thought because in the end Taylor draws closer to a deconstructive sublime than to a nonsensical concretion. In Chapter 2 we saw how Taylor’s analysis of Velázquez’s Las Meninas differed somewhat from that of Foucault. While Taylor’s deconstructive theology underlined the contingency and even vanity of knowledge, his wandering in the desert of human knowledge paid little attention to the dirt and mud of its very location. When Foucault pointed out the physicality of the nonplace for knowledge, Taylor had eyes mainly for the void and thus reintroduced an empty space for a transcendent something. Choosing theological conversation partners from other theoretical schools than the Derridean (in which Taylor and Caputo both matriculate) could be one way to approach the problem so well delineated by Elkins. Consequently, as we near the end of our journey, instead of moving out into the desert—whether as geologists or as spiritual seekers—let us turn again to the event in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, the place we set off from in the Preface, in order to note the possible effects of the radical theological position I am suggesting. Philosopher and cultural studies scholar Dmitry Uzlaner lets the Pussy Riot case serve as a vantage point into the theological peculiarities of Russia as a contemporary postsecular society. The incident in 2012, Uzlaner holds, threw light on the multitude of aspects and competing interpretations of Christianity circulating in a society that has left its secular identity behind and is experiencing renewed relations between religion and the state.

Pussy Riot and the postsecular On the day after the performance of the “punk prayer” on February 22, 2012, the Orthodox movement known as the World Russian People’s Council filed a lawsuit demanding criminal prosecution of the activists. Before the court could decide on a sentence on August 17, 2012, several questions had

134  Conclusion to be answered, many of which were of a theological nature. The episode with the young activist women in court was paradoxical, in Uzlaner’s view, because it instigated a situation in which the secular court had to function ironically as a realm of theological interpretation, one in which sacred theological disputes needed to eventuate in concrete and decisive resolutions. Was their punk prayer an activist performance, a liturgical prayer, or a theological statement? Was it a critique of Christian culture, an insult to Orthodox faith, a performative creation of Christianity, a theopolitical action—or perhaps all these at once—or none of the above? Interestingly, the Russian court was placed in the position of having to rule decisively on questions of this kind. First, what is a prayer? Was the performance a religious action, or was it secular and political? The answer was pivotal since, depending on how the action was interpreted, the women could either appeal to the right to freedom of religion or—which finally happened—be sentenced for hooliganism. While the official representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church argued for the action to be interpreted as purely secular, many other Christian voices, including the young women themselves, argued for a theological interpretation of the event. Yakov Krotov, priest of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, for instance, held that despite the fact that the “methods and forms of this prayer are untraditional for central Russia,” the performance was technically a prayer and “not even blasphemy,” but his argument was not recognized.13 To Uzlaner, the reason for rejecting the argument was obvious: the representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church had to characterize the event as secular or else the entire notion of orthodox religiosity would have been renegotiated in exactly the way members of the group requested.14 If the punk prayer was regarded as an actual prayer, other expressions of faith than those embraced by orthodox traditions would have been approved, and the sovereignty of the church would not stand. In an instant, divine authority would be transferred from one stream of religious tradition to many, and thus the power of the patriarch so closely tied to the regime would be negotiable. With their secular-political interpretation of the performance, however, church representatives found unexpected backing in the worldwide support for Pussy Riot, which mainly came from intellectuals and radicals who underlined—and primarily had eyes for—the political rather than theological implications of the event. The second question that had to be solved was whether the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was a religious or a secular space: What is a church? The question might seem odd, but the circumstances around ownership, use, and function of the cathedral brought about a lengthy discussion regarding the status of the building. If the space was, in fact, secular, one could not claim that Orthodox believers had been offended by the women’s presence. Thus, the second question related to the third, concerned with the group of believers being insulted and disrespected by the performance. The secular court had to answer the question: Who is a Christian? Who were the Orthodox believers who could claim protection by Russian law? As stated earlier, the

Conclusion 135 women were sentenced for hooliganism based on hatred of religion, which indicates that the answers given by the Russian court were as follows: First, a “punk prayer” cannot be regarded an actual expression of faith. Here it is interesting to consider the original Russian song title: “Pank-moleben.” The word prayer does not quite capture the Russian moleben, which refers to a special kind of prayer or service in the Russian Orthodox tradition that may be conducted by laypeople or priests. In Russian history, according to Uzlaner, the moleben service has been used in times of national crisis when turning to Christ or the Virgin Mary for protection.15 When using this term, the young women alluded to a rather specific form of religious service within the Russian Orthodox tradition, one that may be used by laypeople when the political situation requires it. The choice of term thus could have indicated that the performance was theologically as well as politically motivated, but the court decided otherwise. The court’s final decision stated that the cathedral was, in fact, a church, which is why the group’s performance— as secular and disrespectful—was an insult to the sacred space. Orthodox believers, finally, according to the verdict, were those who were offended by the Pussy Riot prayer. Uzlaner convincingly argues that the group of “believers” was, in fact, created negatively in relation to the performance since those who were invited to witness as believers were chosen on the basis of their negative reactions. An Orthodox believer, in consequence, is, according to the Russian legal system, someone who finds a punk prayer in front of the iconosotasis insulting, Uzlaner concludes. The court’s final decision, however, was merely one voice among many. The court made their theological position clear, but the entire event along with the discussions it brought about inevitably transformed the image of postsecular Russia. True, the Putin regime’s close alliance with the Orthodox Church is one expression of a postsecular development in Russia, in the sense that it is no longer vital for the regime to show its independence from the church. But the Pussy Riot case inescapably generated more images of the postsecular. The group’s material presence in the cathedral as a creative and artistic event changed the image of Russian Orthodox reality. Alongside the authorities’ interpretation of Christianity’s role in society appeared an oppositional model of postsecularism and the alternative model spread worldwide (though not all commentators noticed its postsecular implications). The punk group’s claim for the right to pray politically—to be activists and believers at once—expressed the presence of another version of postsecularism alongside the authoritative alliance between the church patriarch and state president. Regardless of the court’s final sentence, the boundaries between the secular and the religious had been moved. The new imagery spread across the world and, for Uzlaner, this also meant that the accounts of prayer, church, and believers were no longer singular but multiple: “In the subsequent public reaction, the ‘Punk Prayer’ rendered things that had previously seemed fully defined and immovable—prayer, church, and believers—ambiguous and flexible.”16 Thus, returning to the questions above, the Pussy Riot performance may be regarded as a theopolitical action

136  Conclusion adding to the mystery of things, it may be regarded as a liturgical prayer and a theological statement, it may be regarded as a critique of aspects of Christian culture (at the very least, an insult to elements of Orthodox faith), and yet, simultaneously, it may be regarded as a performative creation of Christian truth. There are many theopolitical activists in the world today, and unlike the Pussy Riot many have done actual harm. People are massacred in God’s name, with alarming frequency in fact, and though God oftentimes turns out to be more an excuse than an actual reason for the aggressive political acts, extreme religious beliefs often surface as an explanation for the horrors performed. Yet if reality is viewed as a surface of appearances, have we not lost the grounds for making distinctions between, say, the initial statements of Omar Mateen after the shootings in Orlando in June 2016 and the relatively harmless Pussy Riot performance in 2012? If the mystery of things is permitted to infuse theology and theopolitical thought, does it not finally inactivate critique of any religious action—if the actions are all held to be equal as appearances on the surface of the world, part of the multitudinous expressions of reality? Accordingly, does Carrette not have a point when reminding Foucault readers (as discussed in the Introduction) that actual faith in there being something beneath the surface or beyond the present has assisted Christian resistance in times of oppression, misuse of power, and as a means to explain even horrific, evil, singular acts? Certainly, there are many good examples of Christian faith serving as a force of resistance in precisely the way Carrette proposes; there are also, however, many examples of firm religious beliefs serving completely different forces. What differentiates Pussy Riot and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence from other disruptive and innovative forms of expression, I would argue, is the way their theopolitical actions employ the imagery with a twist, engaging in playful performances that provoke and entertain. They contribute to changing the way the world appears and thus to changing political reality merely by twisting the way we perceive the world. A radical theology of the mystery of things would not support itself on any higher authority; out of a humility toward the world of words, things, bodies, and imagery, it would reject theopolitical actions that harm and oppress while claiming access to a higher and final truth. Based on its account of the world as a surface of appearances, it would not recognize, but oppose, any claim that would place one representation of reality above all others. Hence, the theological activism it urges is one that uses creativity—that plays with and adds to the surface of appearances—with the aim of encouraging humility towards, and preventing oppression of, the enigmatic multiplicity of life.

Art and theopolitical activism Through the course of this book we have seen how images are added to the surface of appearances—sometimes quite consciously, as by the Pussy Riot activists, but also constantly and unconsciously as expressions of the

Conclusion 137 surface itself. Through Foucault’s work on art we have encountered two main aspects of the mystery of things. On one hand, as on the shelves of the Borgesian library, the mystery of things grows with every utterance, whether coherent, willful, or completely nonsensical. The expressions of words, things, and thoughts multiply, and thus reality as a mystery of things is in itself grounds for marveling—the surface of appearances is a surface of infinite expression that in itself incites awe. On the other hand, to take active part in adding to the mystery of things becomes a way of political activism, or at times of theopolitical activism: first of all, it is to marvel at that which becomes, and second, it is to take an active part in the surface of appearances as a form of political action. The former may lead thought in the direction of the contemporary vitalist and new materialist thought tradition. It could recall, for instance, Jane Bennett’s vitality of matter and her enchantment over matter itself as vibrant, alive, and effective, which, like the Foucauldian mystery of things, does have a political edge. The motivation for formulating her vitality of matter, Bennett says, is that she has a hunch that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies.17 For Bennett, the separation between humans and things contributes to a lack of sensation and bodily presence in the world that, in turn, feeds human fantasies of conquest and consumption. To observe the vitality of matter may instead open our eyes and senses to our material selves and the material world of which we are a part and thus open us to a humbling insight of being a thing amongst other things, she argues. Still, Foucault differs from Bennett in that his surface of appearance is not a vitalism and it does not derive from a fascination with nature and matter, nor does it stem from an ecopolitical despair. His attentiveness to the surface of appearances derives instead from a search for a historical method that manages to bring unseen and unarticulated knowledge to light. When we choose not to see the multiplicity of the mystery of things, we simply miss out on alternative images of reality. For Foucault, this has more to do with knowledge than with matter, though as we have seen, to his broadened discursive knowledge, matter also belongs. Words, thoughts, bodies, images, and things are all part of our surface of knowledge. In consequence, the thingness of knowledge, of thought, is as present on the Foucauldian surface of appearances as are the tangible things. That is also why paintings—rather than stones and plants—attract his attention. Paintings are embodied discourse and as such are pertinent artifacts for discussing knowledge as it appears and materializes itself. Thoughts, words, and things alike take part in forming reality as we know it, and to embrace such an insight—which in Foucault’s view is well expressed through modern and postmodern art—means to enrich and intensify our sense of reality.

138  Conclusion

Notes 1 Several contemporary theological trajectories carry similar convictions. There are affinities between the distortion of thought and practice in the present approach and in, for instance, the liturgical theology tradition as well as in the school of theological action research; on the latter, see, for instance, Jonas Ideström, “Mediators of Tradition: Embodiments of Doctrine in Rural Swedish Parish Life,” in Ecclesial Practices 3 (2016): 53–69. 2 Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology, 191. 3 Carlsson, “Cassian and Foucault: Performativity in Early Christianity.” 4 Antonia Hirsch, “Breaking the World: A Conversation with Daniel Colucciello Barber,” in Negative Space: Orbiting Inner and Outer Experience, ed. Antonia Hirsch (Burnaby: SFU Galleries, 2016), 49. 5 Hirsch, “Breaking the World,” 49. 6 Taylor, Erring, 13. 7 Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 156. 8 Ibid., 319. 9 Mattias Martinson, “Cultural Materiality and Spiritual Alienation: Blond, Nietzsche and Political Theological Materialism,” in Political Theology 14, no. 2 (2013): 219–34, quote on 231. 10 Quoted by Nicholas Wade, Art and Illusionists (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 184. 11 Taylor, Disfiguring, 156. 12 James Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (New York: Routledge, 2004). Hereafter this book is cited as OS followed by the page number. 13 Dmitry Uzlaner, “The Pussy Riot Case and the Peculiarities of Russian PostSecularism,” in State, Religion and Church 1, no. 1 (2014): 23–58, quote on 31. 14 Ibid., 30. 15 Ibid., 24. 16 Ibid., 37. 17 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), ix.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italic indicate figures. Abstract Expressionist movement 103 – 4 activism, theory as 92 – 106 Alexander, Michelle 106 Altizer, Thomas J. J. 13, 129 – 30 Alyokhina, Maria 119 – 20 Ambrosino, Georges 5 amor fati 31, 33, 104 APART festival forum 118 Apollinaire, Guillaume 79, 82 apophatic, mystery of things and 85 – 9 archaeology, from genealogy to 98 – 9 Argenteuil (Manet) 58 Artaud, Antonin 15, 26, 53, 65, 68 atheism 7, 8, 36, 129 a/theology, Taylor and 36 – 7, 48, 118, 129 – 30 Attica prison revolt 96 Auerbach, Erich 39 autonomous transhumance 16, 117 – 18 avant-garde 6, 23, 30, 72, 92, 131 Balcony, The (Manet) 58, 59 Bar at the Folies-Bergère, A (Manet) 60 – 1, 61 Barber, Daniel 13, 17, 128 – 9 Barbola, Maria 38, 38 Barth, Karl 4 – 5, 92 Bataille, Georges 5 – 6, 15, 21, 23, 24, 53, 54 – 7, 65, 68, 112 – 13 Bennett, Jane 137 Bernauer, James W. 7 – 8, 85 – 6, 93 Black Panther Party (BPP) 94 – 8 Black Square (Malevich) 72 Blanchot, Maurice 6, 15, 21, 23, 24, 25, 86 – 7, 100, 132 Blond, Philip 130

Borges, Jorge Luis 6, 15, 21 – 2, 25 – 6, 29, 84, 137 Boulevard des Italiens (exhibition) 118 Bourriaud, Nicolas 64 – 5 Bouvard and Pécuchet (Flaubert) 31 – 3, 104 Brich, Cecile 99, 103 Brown, Amos C. 105 – 6 Bultmann, Rudolf 4 – 5, 92 Butler, Judith 120 Caputo, John 7, 13, 16, 71, 85 – 8, 129, 133 Carrette, Jeremy 2, 3, 7, 8, 27, 65 – 6, 86, 131, 136 Caruso, P. 23 – 4 Catacombic Machine, The (podcast) 13, 104 – 5 Cathedral of Christ the Savior 14, 16, 119 – 20, 133, 134 Central Intelligence Agency 111 Cézanne, Paul 45 Chan, Simon 66 Chauvet, Louis-Marie 13, 15, 37, 46 – 50, 53, 67 Christianity 13, 15, 65, 87, 131, 133, 135; art and, shifting relations between 4 – 6; Carrette on 2 – 3; Catholic Church 53, 68, 105 – 6, 127; Foucault’s work on, introduction to 1 – 4; imagery 104 – 6, 120, 124, 126, 127 – 8; mysticism 6, 8, 9, 66, 79, 128, 132; notion of 3; Protestant Church 92, 106; Russian Orthodox Church 16, 72, 119 – 20, 134; Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church 134

146 Index Collège de France lectures 2, 93, 118 Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky) 4, 5, 79 corporeality 4, 15, 47, 65 Couture, Thomas 54 – 5, 68, 112 Coypel, Antonine 55, 111 Critical Realism 110 Crockett, Clayton 13, 65 Cusa, Nicolas 87 Dalferth, Ulf U. 13 Davis, Angela Y. 95 death-of-God movement 13, 33 death of man, surface and 23 – 6 Deleuze, Gilles 6, 10 – 12, 16, 28 – 9, 44, 66, 74 – 7, 83 – 4, 87, 96 – 7, 103, 114, 118, 129 democracy 127 Derrida, Jacques 6, 7, 13, 47, 85, 118, 130, 132 – 3 Desire Is Everywhere (Fromanger) 109, 110, 115, 117 dialectics 21, 23, 77 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze) 74 – 6 disobedient repetition 84, 88 distant-vision painting 39, 41 Dogs (Rebeyrolle) 93, 99, 100, 113 Dúmezil, Georges 15, 23 – 4 Eckhart, Meister 85, 128 écriture 118 Elkins, James 131 – 3 entangled theology, Pussy Riot and 119 – 21 entanglement 16, 87 – 8, 124 Eucharist 15, 48, 50, 53, 65, 67, 106, 121, 126 Everyday Mythologies (exhibition) 110 Execution of Maximilian, The (Manet) 58, 113 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 95 Figuration Narrative 10, 16, 110 – 11, 129 Flaubert, Gustave 15, 30 – 3, 66 – 7, 84, 104, 114, 128 Folies-Bergère 60 – 1 force of flight and power 99 – 104 Freestyle Christianity (podcast) 104 – 5 Fromanger, Gérard 9 – 10, 12, 16, 20, 93, 103, 106, 109 – 21, 124; Narrative Figuration movement

110 – 11; Pussy Riot and entangled theology 119 – 21; representation revisited 111 – 13; series of photos and paint 113 – 17; from subjectivity to imagery 117 – 19 Fuggle, Sophie 96, 98 – 9, 103 Gandelman, Claude 10 Gassiot-Talabot, Gérald 110 gaze 41 – 2, 56, 59 – 1, 62, 116 genealogy, from archaeology to 98 – 9 Genet, Jean 94, 95 Giordano, Luca 46 Goya, Francisco 113 Greenfield, Trevor 13 Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP) 93 – 4, 95 – 9, 101, 103, 114, 117 Gutting, Gary 26 Hancock, Brannon 53, 65 Heiner, Brady Thomas 16, 94, 99 heterotopia 64 Hirsch, Antonia 128 Homebrewed Christianity (podcast) 13 homosexuality: Genet and 94; H. M. and 101; LGBTQ community and 105, 106, 128; queer movement 16, 92, 104 – 5; Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence 16, 92, 105 – 6, 120, 124, 126, 127 – 8, 136 Hoover, J. Edgar 95 hyperrealists 115 identity 42, 50, 76 imagery: betrayal of 71 – 89; Christian 104 – 6, 120, 124, 126, 127 – 8; in motion 109 – 21; from subjectivity to 117 – 19 incompatible visibilities 41 – 3 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique 113 inner necessity 5, 80 In the Greenhouse (Manet) 58 invisibility 12, 42, 48, 54, 59 – 60, 64, 73 Jackson, George 95 – 100 Janzten, Grace 9 Jay, Martin 10 Jordan, Mark D. 8 Jüngel, Eberhard 4, 92 Kandinsky, Wassily 4, 5, 72, 73, 79 – 81, 88, 110 – 11 Kant, Immanuel 27 – 9, 130

Index  147 Kavanaugh, Aidan 66 Keller, Catherine 13, 16, 17, 71, 87 – 8 Kelly, Michael 12 King, Martin Luther 105 Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow 119 Klossowski, Pierre 3, 5, 6 knowing-together 16, 87, 121 Koons, Jeff 132 Krotov, Yakov 134 language: to infinity 22 – 3; notion of 3, 21 – 3, 25, 28 language-being 29 – 30 Las Meninas (Velázquez) 9 – 10, 12, 15, 33, 36 – 50, 58, 62, 65, 81, 92, 100, 117, 133; incompatible visibilities 41 – 3; invisibles and names 43 – 6; place of theology 46 – 50 L’Assassinat de George Jackson (GIP) 97 Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10, The 72 Lawlor, Leonard 43 Les cahiers du chemin (magazine) 9, 74 Les Deux mystères (Magritte) 81 Levinas, Emmanuel 132 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 15, 23 – 4 LGBTQ community 105, 106, 128 “Library of Babel, The” (Borges) 21 light 59 – 60 light-being 29, 30 Luncheon on the Grass, The (Manet) 59 Macey, David 93 Magritte, René 9 – 10, 12, 15 – 16, 44, 71 – 89, 92, 102, 103, 109, 113 – 14, 121, 130, 131; from art to thought 78 – 82; on Foucault 73 – 4; freedom of thought to be thought 82 – 5; mystery of things and the apophatic 85 – 9; postrepresentational inspiration 72 – 3; resemblance versus similitude 74 – 5; thinking in series 75 – 8 Malevich, Kazimir 5 – 6, 72 Mallarmé, Stéphane 25 Manet, Édouard 9, 10, 12, 30 – 1, 50, 53 – 68, 92, 101, 106, 109, 110 – 13, 114, 117, 121; Bataille on 15, 54 – 7, 112 – 13; Foucault on 57 – 65; light 59 – 60; material theology 62 – 5; place 60 – 2; radical liturgical theology 65 – 8; space 58 – 9 Mariana of Austria 38, 38

Marion, Jean-Luc 6 Martin, Jay 10 Martinson, Mattias 13, 17, 130 Masked Ball at the Opera, The (Manet) 58 Mateen, Omar 136 material theology 62 – 5 Maximus the Confessor 85 McCullough, Lissa 13 McWhorter, Ladelle 8 Mercure de France (magazine) 9 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 6, 15, 45, 46, 47 – 8 Mimesis (Auerbach) 39 Mitchell, William John Thomas 27 – 8 Moody, Katharine Sarah 13 Music in the Tuileries (Manet) 58 mystery of things 9 – 17; apophatic and 85 – 9; surface thingness 124 – 8; theology, art and 131 – 3 mysticism 6, 8, 9, 66, 79, 128, 132 Mythologies quotidiennes (exhibition) 110 Narrative Figuration movement 110 – 11 negative theology 71, 132 Negri, Antonio 17, 127 New Figurative Representation 10, 16, 110 – 11, 129 Newton, Huey 95 Nietzsche, Friedrich 26, 31, 64, 80, 81, 99, 130 nonplaces 15, 25 – 6, 42, 49, 54, 60, 61, 63, 64 – 5, 68, 101, 133 not-knowing 16, 87 – 8, 89, 124, 126, 129, 130 numinous 132 OBERIU movement 6, 120 object and thing, distinction between 27 Olympia (Manet) 56, 56, 59 – 60 Onfray, Michel 118 Orlando shootings, in June 2016 136 Ortega y Gasset, José 39 Otto, Rudolf 132 Pacheco, Francisco 43 painting as painting 12, 30 – 1, 109 performativity 1, 3, 12, 14, 29, 30, 106, 125, 127 Pertusato, Nicolo 38, 38 Philip IV, King 37 – 8, 38 pipe calligram 81 – 2

148 Index Placher, William Carl 39, 40, 43, 46 political activism 93, 121, 127, 136 – 7 political spirituality 8, 65 – 6 political theology 13, 16 – 17, 106, 120, 124, 127 Pollock, Jackson 111 Pop Art movement 110 Popism 113 Port of Bordeaux, The (Manet) 58 postmodern sublime 132 postrepresentational inspiration 72 – 3 postsecular, Pussy Riot and 134 – 6 power: force of flight and 99 – 104; of prison, BPP and 94 – 8 Prévert, Jacques 118 primary liturgical theology 66 prison, power of 94 – 8 Protestant Church 92, 106 Proust, Antonin 54 – 5 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 85, 86 – 7 Punk Prayer 135 Pussy Riot 6, 14, 16, 110, 124, 127; entangled theology and 119 – 21; postsecular and 134 – 6 Putin, Vladimir 119, 135 radical liturgical theology 65 – 8 Rancillac, Bernard 110 Ransom, John S. 29 – 30 Rebeyrolle, Paul 9 – 10, 12, 15, 16, 92 – 106; from archaeology to genealogy 98 – 9; BPP and power of prison 94 – 8; political reawakening 92 – 4; from power to force of flight 99 – 104; theological indulgence 104 – 6 repetition 1, 74 – 8, 82, 84, 88 – 9, 114, 115, 125, 126 representation: cycle of 45 – 6; Foucault on art and ruin of 9 – 12; postrepresentational inspiration 72 – 3; revisited 111 – 13 Représentation (Magritte) 78 resemblance versus similitude 74 – 5 Rifkin, Adrian 118 Robbins, Jeffrey W. 13, 16 – 17, 65, 127 Rothko, Mark 111 Russian Orthodox Church 16, 72, 119 – 20, 134 Russian Socialist Realism 111 sacramentality 15 – 16, 37, 47 – 50, 53 – 68, 124 Saint Anthony (Flaubert) 31, 32 – 3, 104, 126, 128

Saint-Lazare Station (Manet) 58 Samutsevich, Yekaterina 119 San Quentin prison 95 – 6 Schmitt, Carl 127 series: of photos and paint 113 – 17; thinking in 75 – 8 “Seven Seals of Affirmation, The” (Foucault) 81 Shapiro, Gary 10 – 12, 45, 46, 67, 81 Shi’ite rituals 8 Shootings of May Third, The (Goya) 113 signifier and the signified, distinction between 11, 22 similitude 73 – 84, 88 – 9, 116 Simon, John K. 93 Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence 16, 92, 105 –  6, 120, 124, 126, 127 –  8, 136 Soledad Brothers: Prison Letters of George Jackson (Jackson) 95 Sotomayor, Maria Augustina Sarmiento de 38, 38 Soussloff, Catherine 3, 10, 12, 57 space 58 – 9 spiritual corporeality 65 – 6 spirituality: Foucault and 6 – 8; surface of appearances and 30 – 3 Spivak, Gayatri Shakravorty 103 Story of the Eye (Bataille) 5, 53, 65, 68 subtractive gesture 128 – 31 Suicides de prison (GIP) 97 – 8 Suprematist art movement 5 – 6, 72 surface of appearances 20 – 33; and the death of man 23 – 6; language to infinity 21 – 3; materiality and spirituality 30 – 3; thingness 26 – 30 surface thingness as mystery 124 – 8 surrealism 6, 73, 88, 113, 129, 131 Tanke, Joseph J. 10 – 11, 59, 60, 62, 72, 82 – 3 Taylor, Mark C. 13, 15, 36 – 7, 40, 46, 48, 49, 53, 118, 129 – 33 Télémaque, Hervé 110 Temptation of Saint Anthony, The (Flaubert) 31, 32 – 3, 104, 126, 128 theological indulgence 104 – 6 theopolitical activism, art and 136 – 7 theory and practice, relationship between 16, 96, 98, 102, 106 theory as activism 92 – 106

Index  149 thingness 26 – 30 thought: from art to 78 – 82; freedom of thought to be thought 82 – 5; things and, distinction between 125; thinking in series 75 – 8 Titian 59 – 60 Tolokonnikova, Nadezhda 119 – 20 Toul series 110, 116 – 17 Tran, Jonathan 7 transcendence 7, 12, 20, 23, 30, 33, 48, 71, 72, 92, 125 – 6, 131, 132, 133 transgression 5, 8, 11, 16, 21, 23, 24, 71, 102, 104, 106, 126, 132

Vattimo, Gianni 130 Velasco, Isabel de 38, 38 Velázquez, Diego 9 – 10, 12, 15, 33, 36 – 50, 38, 53, 58, 60, 62, 65, 81, 92, 100, 101 – 2, 117, 118, 121, 133; see also Las Meninas (Velázquez) Venus of Urbino (Titian) 59 – 60 Verzilov, Petr 120 visibility and vision 11, 13, 21, 41 – 3, 45, 60, 62, 92, 101, 121 vitalism 29 – 30, 137 vitality of matter, Bennett and 137 voyant 10 – 11, 28

Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church 134 Ulloa, Marcela de 38, 38 unraveled calligram 81 – 2 Uzlaner, Dmitry 133, 134, 135

Waitress, The (Manet) 58 Warhol, Andy 75, 77, 84 – 5, 113 – 14 World Russian People’s Council 133 – 4 Žižek, Slavoj 120