Foucault always made clear his debt to Kant, whose project of a critical description of the world and history he felt close to. In the playful biography of himself he signed ‘Maurice Florence’ in the Dictionnaire des philosophes he writes:

‘To the extent that Foucault fits into the philosophical tradition, it is the critical tradition of Kant, and his project could be called a Critical History of Thought.’ 15

Elsewhere, he said that modern thought begins with Kant and with the Kantian question reiterated in the Prologemena, ‘what is the science, of what does it consist?’ 16 The ideal is a way of thinking that strives towards a total shape. Even though that ‘total’ is out of reach, even if reason can never try all of itself or the composition of all of history’s deformations be described, still the project persists, just out of reach but seductive. Only Heidegger and Freud tried to say more in the last century. And the search for the total critical history comes from an act of creation- the analysis of Las Meninas is saturated with its mark, which is the negative act which preserves the infinite relation of words and images.

The elision of the source of light which encompasses viewer, painterly self-representation, with the royalty viewed, is a false relation of suggested equality, which Foucault’s text keenly subverts, but to keep up it’s act it needs to play a game. The game does away with proper names:

‘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.’ 17

Foucault’s genesis begins with a game where everyone ‘must therefore pretend not to know who is to be reflected in the depths of that mirror’ 18. Pretending not to know is the creative act of the new existential state which he sees for us, in which generation takes place from a giving up of the reading of the world as an index of names already designated and countersigned by those who hold the power of naming- kings and queens, presidents, leaders- to be replaced by a system of feints and masquerades. The house rules change. The masquerader’s genesis makes words and sights come not from language or perception, but from a movement of thought always trying to turn things inside-out, finding reality in a man at the back of a picture and civilisation in madness. If this extends exactly to the complaints first raised in Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space all those years ago 19, then its counterpart in film-art of the last thirty years must also be taken into consideration. Foucault’s genesis, making pretend the vehicle of bearing a new knowledge, ties to Rivettes Céline and Julie Go Boating and to Kubrick’s The Shining. Both concern houses that take over the orientation of story’s ontology, defining the performance and roles played by any who enter in, Céline, Julie or Nicholson’s Jack Torrance. It is that which we must accept to read the analysis of Las Meninas- entering its house, the cage in which we are included and bound, a sacrifice of naming and seeing takes place, and the part we play is directed towards an inevitable conclusion: things must be changed. The polemical necessity, ‘things must be changed’ that lies beneath every word that Foucault wrote is a guarantee of the direction of every creative act of pretence he ever instigated. The struggle towards it was worthwhile; its bastardisation, as Badiou said, has been overwhelming. But there are places it cannot go.

:: interactive :: <<back | next>>