It is not in Foucault that these constraints are felt painfully, but in Hegel and in Adorno; Adorno whose thinking is often so close to Foucault’s, and who often went so much further.

Through those elements of meaning where it must ‘point beyond itself’2 does art verify the necessity for an Aesthetics to explain it- a tourniquet for the bleeding arteries of its drained relation to the spirit and communication of which ordinary men are capable. That premise is everywhere in Hegel’s various lectures on aesthetics, and Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is inconceivable without it. The dialectics of incompletion transmits the artwork into a purgatory of waiting, parasitically dependant upon the thought that purposively embodies it. Adorno, in the section on ‘The Ugly, The Beautiful and Technique’ speaks of the concept that cannot be completed, and the aporia that philosophy fills:

‘Art cannot fulfil its concept. This strikes each and every one of its works, even the highest, with an ineluctable imperfectness that repudiates the idea of perfection toward which artworks must aspire. Unreflected, perfectly logical enlightenment would have to discard art just as the prosaic pragmatist in fact does. The aporia of art, pulled between regression to literal magic or surrender of the mimetic impulse to thinglike rationality, dictates its law of motion; the aporia cannot be eliminated.’3

The Triumph of Death gives up its rights of passage, and that means quite simply that it gives up our rights and capabilities of thinking it, and thus enabling its completion, as situated between and dialectically produced by magic and mimesis. The difference between our inability to step into its localised space, without the projected foreground that encages us as does Las Meninas, as representation itself should do, and the human figures being slain within the picture, who have no horizon line over which to flee, is beyond that compound of the myth behind us and the representation in front. Exactly: it is that graduated series of steps that is discarded - from magic to mimesis to the new magic engendered by the modern world’s catastrophe; from, in Foucault’s terms, the hierarchy of sacred to profane that leads down through man from god above to Lucifer below, man and his replicants passed through somewhere in between. Giving up the rights of passage means that we have no right to say that we’re like the figures on Breughel’s violent surface, or that they’re like us, and that only the truth that there’s no way in and no way out can be enforced as the meaning of The Triumph of Death.

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