In director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, Julianne Moore plays a repentant adulterous wife collecting massive quantities of painkillers for her dying husband. As the chemist looks at her quizzically, suspecting the liquid morphine, the prozac and the Dexedrine might be just another junkie’s afternoon pastime she breaks out in a rage that scratches the limits of filmic achievement- has he seen death in his bed, in his house; can he look at it as she must? 20 The same question is worth asking of Foucault: is the catastrophe presentable to his way of dispersing vision and existence; can his poly-nodal viewer look upon a totality composed only of the worst of things?

Both Deleuze and Foucault have been the prophets of disjunction, Difference and Repetition and The Archaeology of Knowledge are both inconceivable without it. The legacy of Maurice Blanchot’s work in the thought of both is well known, but as a response to the simple proposition of The Writing of the Disaster the new genetic ideal of The Order of Things is insufficient- seeing through the eyes of a dead man cannot answer this:

‘I will not say that the disaster is absolute; on the contrary, it disorients the absolute… Detachment is not sufficient, unless it senses that it is, in advance, a sign of the disaster. The disaster alone holds mastery at a distance. I wish (for example) for a psychoanalyst to whom a sign would come, from the disaster.’ 21

The disaster, history’s catastrophe and the limit point of existence, constitutes a special kind of disjunction, and when death is total, everything saturated, and the catastrophe is complete. What Foucault makes of Velasquez’s Las Meninas is a departure point from man; in another, earlier painting, just as marked by radical questioning as that, but venturing into different territories, where only death is present, a vision of the disaster is laid out that offers no possibility of triumphant alterity. Breughel’s The Triumph of Death marks a point where disjunction and a new creation does not work, and has nothing of which it can speak.

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