In the hive of interrelations between Deleuze and Foucault, complications arise at every stage when making the monstrous and the death of man interface one with the other- a history of the patterns of their thought, and of the patterns of thought’s larger systems needs somehow to be invoked. This cannot be the place for that, but it can be the place to describe one simple action in answer to this question: how did Foucault make us see through the eyes of a dead man, and what does that mean to our orientation towards thinking?

He may have come to regret having said it at all, but the familiarity and the excess of the passage that raises the spectre of a death of man should not cloud the alterations it makes:

‘It is comforting … and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.’ 2

In the analysis of Velasquez’s painting Las Meninas which makes the famed beginning of The Order of Things, a pattern of displacements is secreted, marking the ways in which we- peoples, masses, bodies- must change in order to foresee the end of our current epistemic form. To make that change, to learn to see knowledge close and break and remould, we have to become the death of man. This can be done by thinking through the multiple dislocated points of vision that are required by the analysis if its task is to be rendered tangible, an existentiale.

The beginning of a new age, as Benjamin said, comes about in the retraction of aura, when nothing seems natural anymore. The retraction takes place by an act of substitution, one state of consideration replacing another in the scheme of a thought that shrouds beings. Speaking of the camera’s role in the loss of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin states it simply:

‘The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.’ 3

Substitution takes man from his self-assumed place in the middle of Order and recasts him as grouped and dispersed lines of vision, each looking upon Las Meninas, as if it were the infinite viewers around Leibniz’s monadic town.

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