Outside the mirrored realm of the all-knowing light and the all-displacing royal gaze are three ways of resisting that come to rest on the figure of a vampiric man whose status is death. Behind the bathing light of the front of Las Meninas is a different order, whose light is coming in from a different place; which is sequenced as a multiplicitous series of points of vision in the many other paintings held upon the walls, and which has as its existential figure the man who stands in the doorway, not in, not out of the room, but merely at its threshold and watches.

Foucault asks that we become this light, these paintings, this man, as a way past the ‘cage’ that holds us in the gaze at the front, where we can only fail to be the painter’s true subject. The light that’s cast through the doorway at the back of the room does not form a ‘common locus’ of representation as does that at the front – it makes instead a place ‘adjacent’ to the mirror, ‘whose soft light does not shine through into the room’ 8. That’s vital. What will not come in is what we must become. It was all too easy for 16th century man to join the chain of representation which bound everything into the links of semblance and difference, into the realm of an infinite mirroring – that world of Shakespeare, Don Quixote, and madness whose sensations are still so apparent, and evermore painful. The subcurrent of Foucault states: the only thing that does not join is what is not human, and the man at the back, who stands in the doorway is Las Meninas’ extraordinary emblem of that. He stands,

‘Like the mirror, his eyes are directed towards the other side of the scene; nor is anyone paying any more attention to him.’ 9

His likeness to the mirror is not an entry into the network of similarities but a challenge and a resistance to it. This man is no ‘probable reflection but an irruption … He repeats on the spot’ 10 . Vampires never show up in mirrors, and a vampiric version of man could not take part in our system of mirroring and infinite multiplications. Somehow we have to step across and out of the cage of illumination that is the painting’s front and extends into the real world that looks on, and into the ‘soft light’ that will not participate in which the man waits, the cipher to another way of being. It is a being in the realm of the dead man, who cannot have things that join with him in the mirrors of the world look back. We simply have to find the way out of the cage.

Not so simple a task, perhaps, and only an art that waits and watches and will not join can point the way. Around the walls of the scene of Las Meninas are other pictures, neither crowding in on nor performing on its staging of Classical Representation in which the King and Queen have disappeared but are forever there:

‘an essential void: the necessary disappearance of … its foundation – of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance … has been elided.’ 11

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