Such an act of distinction gives the painting a specific kind of conceptual completion, in which thought is seen as a series without graduation of the catastrophic state called the worst. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play which at points would understand completely the spread of tortures of Breughel’s painting, the fugitive son Edgar, disguised, leading his blind and suicidal father to death’s freedom, comes to a horrific understanding:

‘Who is’t can say "I am at the worst’?
I am worse than e’er I was …
… And worse I may be yet; the worst is not
So long as we can say "This is the worst".’ 4

Nothing changes when the worst has come about, and the only respite possible is to be able to say again, ‘this is the worst’, a Damoclean statement under whose sword expression, change, possibility are sublimated into a chronology going nowhere but to repetition. Look around the surface of The Triumph of Death, at every stage of looking upon it, with each body fallen, dying, the only statement possible is that same one: ‘this is the worst’, and the only statement to replace it with is with the vision of another murder, another for whom the worst has come. For the figures of the painting the moment of annihilation has come, no more will they be able to say that, but the painting’s conceptual completion is assured by what it does to us, to our capacity to speak of it. It is only the worst, which has no additive, no redemption to be thought of, and makes no surrender to philosophy.

The Triumph of Death pronounces a reach of thought beyond the conceptual excavations of philosophy, and it does not speak alone. Fictions are the provision of a way of speaking, and their way is the way towards a speech of everything. The rupturing of thought in Foucault, and likewise in Deleuze 5 ; even in Adorno’s directives towards silence as the real speech of art 6 - modern thought has found dislocation as the vector of escaping and constraining the History spoken of by art. Breughel’s painting, not an eschatological proposal as is much art of this kind 7, but an articulation of the precise and bestilled moment of universal annihilation, creates an alternative version of the infinite relation between language and image of which Foucault speaks in his analysis of Las Meninas. The procession of skeletons that moves across The Triumph of Death move in a choric party that is symbiotic with everything that surrounds it. Like soldiers or like migrating animals, like the laws of perspective themselves, of which this line is the painting’s only demonstration – a line in a place without dimension except death – and its only reminder of an illusory distinction between the ‘real’ world and that of fiction, the skeletons, no matter the range of their possible resemblances and the order of disjunctions from which they can set themselves apart, will not ‘make the difference’ that liberates us from the total death held on that burnished surface of ambers and browns.

No painting has ever been more aptly named than The Triumph of Death, its name speaks from every part of its surface, setting no incomplete conditions but capturing the moment when death speaks everything. This is fiction’s terrain, and as much as it can be, as here, death that speaks, so everything, everyone, everywhere, can speak through fiction’s voice. In one recent novel this is decisively apparent. The Triumph of Death reappears in Don Delillo’s Underworld, but here a new way of speaking, a new voice for everything is created, and fiction can mark again a triumph over the end of existence that is its own secret history.

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