Foucault, Velazquez and the non-place of theology

Michel Foucaults The Order of Things is a history of Western human science that depicts
how the journey of the human sciences leads Western thought from God to the Subject, yet
foreshadows a third step.i It is an historical journey that famously ends with a vision of the
erasure of man: one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in the
sand at the edge of the sea. This visionary ending is preceded by a discussion of Nietzsches
aphorism of the death of God which, Foucault argues, shows how God and man are dependent
upon each other. It shows that the death of the first inevitably also means the disappearance of
the secondthe subject needs God, why Gods death means the disappearance of both and
new spaces for thought opening up. But what are these new spaces? And what space, if any,
might they provide for theology?
In this article, I will discuss the possibility of such a theological space through
Foucaults essay on Diego Velazquezs Las Meninas. After briefly introducing the academic
field of Foucault and art, I aspire to show how the idea of a radically new space beyond God
and the subject is present in Foucaults analysis of Las Meninas in the beginning of The Order
of Things. Secondly, the article discusses possible theological implications of this space
beyond man and God and suggests that Foucaults art analysis does in fact indicate a place for
contemporary radical theology. It is a place that eventuates out of Foucaults notion of the
invisible in Velazquezs painting. I will describe it as a non-place with consequences for the
account of knowledge and for the limitations of the God/Subject dualism of early modern
thought. As a possible theological space, I will argue, the non-place that Foucaults essay
grounds humility and mystery not in man nor in God, but in the asymmetrical relation
between words and things.

Foucault on art
Foucaults work on art include four longer essays along with less extensive writings and
interviews. The essays are; the analysis of Diego Velzquezs Las Meninas (1656) first
published in Mercure de France in 1965 and republished in a longer version as a foreword in
Les mots et les choses (1966); an essay on Ren Magritte (1898-1967) first published in 1968
in Les cahiers du chemin, and reworked and republished as a book of its own in 1983;
Lectures on Edouard Manet (1832-1883) originally delivered in Tunis in 1971 and recently
translated and published in English; an essay titled La Peinture Photognique on French
artist Grard Fromanger (b. 1939), 1975. Other artists discussed by Foucault in writing and/or
interviews include: Paul Rebeyrolle (1926-2005), Paul Klee (1879-1940), Vasily Kandinsky

(1866-1944), Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Grard Fromanger (b. 1939), Werner Schroeter (b.
1945), and Duane Michals (b. 1932).
There is reason to believe that Foucaults encounter with the art world was
important for the further development of his philosophy. Both American art historian Joseph J.
Tanke and British theologian Jeremy Carrette underline the importance of Foucaults relation
to art and even though their conclusions differdue to the difference in focus in their
respective studyboth agree that the encounter moved Foucaults thought closer to the
material world.
Carrette shows how Foucault, in his early work, rethinks Christianity and
especially Christian ideas of the body in order to create a new space for thought through
surrealism and the avant-garde writers of his own time. Thus, when the early Foucault
discusses spirituality (with quotation marks in order to underline his rejection of traditional
religious categories) inspired by these artistic movements, he seeks to open a space for
thought that valorises the body.ii Carrette calls the renegotiated spirituality in Foucaults
earlier work a spiritual corporality.
In Tankes presentation, the implications for the account of the body receives
less attention. Instead, Tanke illuminates how Foucaults encounter with art influenced his
understanding of the material world in a wider sense and in a next step also helped him
develop his archaeology of knowledge.iii The meeting with the transgressive art scene brought
Foucault away from abstract criticism and into a different, and much more hands on, way of
approaching what he regarded as dogmatic remains in Western culture of his time, Tanke says.
The new approach was eventually given its concrete form in the archaeological method.
Rather than simply contesting a disturbing statement with another, Foucaults archaeology
went back in time through the archives of our shared historical reality in order to tell the story
behind the emergence of the statement he wanted to challenge. Once the history was told, the
statement that initially had seemed both timeless and certain suddenly appeared relative.
Tankewhose Foucaults Philosophy of Art is one of the most comprehensive
studies on Foucaults work on artdescribes Foucaults thought on art as postrepresentational. In modern art, Tanke says, Foucault encounters attempts to turn away from
the logic of representation and towards the power of expression. In other words, in his art
analyses Foucault replaces the question What does this work mean? with the question
What does this work do?.iv In Tankes view, Foucault brought the foundation for this critical
approach in from the post-representational art. The post-representational account of art helped
Foucault to distance himself from forms of criticism that attempt to capture a works essence

through speculation about the meaning of its contentan approach that, to Foucault, was
applicable on history and in art alike.v
Like Tanke, American philosopher Gary Shapiro underlines the openings for
post-representational thought that Foucault finds through his art analyses. To Shapiro,
Foucaults work on art is part of a broader theoretical interest in Foucaults work, an interest
in the meaning of words versus things, language versus visual representations, or seeing
versus saying. In other words yet, Foucaults work on art may be read as part of his wider
philosophical critique of representation and its implications for his understanding of the
relationship between words and things. Shapiros entry into Foucaults early work is, I
believe, coloured by his close reading of Gilles Deleuze and Foucault. In this regard, the same
can be said about my own perspective. For good or bad, my understanding of Foucault is
inevitably influenced by Deleuzes understanding, and like Shapiro, I see close connections
between Foucaults studies of art and his wider discussion on representation as well as on the
relation between what Deleuze also names visabilities and statements.vi But more on this
below.
American philosopher Michael Kelly similarly suggests that art inspired
Foucaults methodology. The aspiration to make invisible norms and assumptions visible is an
important key to Foucaults oeuvre as a whole why, Kelly argues, it comes as no surprise that
Foucault opens Les mots et les choses with an art analysis arguing that Velazquezs Las
Meninas manages to render visible the invisible rules of Classical thought. Painting is crucial
to Foucault, Kelly holds, precisely because of Foucaults critical approach of rendering visible
normative conditions that would otherwise be invisible.vii
Foucaults work on art has been discussed in relation to theology by for instance
Jonathan Tran, Carrette and William Carl Placher. But although theological discourse on
Foucault is growing as an academic field in its own right, with introductions to the specific
topic of Foucault and theology appearing around the beginning of the twenty-first century, his
work on art has not yet received a theological focus of its own.viii The present article aspires to
contribute to further study in the field of Foucault, art and theology by throwing light upon the
radical theological consequences that may come out of this part of Foucaults work.

Las Meninas
In Foucaults early version of the manuscript to his groundbreaking The Order of Things, the
reader was thrown right into Foucaults historical expos. The book opened with an historical
statement: Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in
the knowledge of Western culture.ix Convinced by his editor, however, Foucault agreed to let

his analysis of Velzquez Las Meninas (1656)earlier published in a shorter version in

Mercure de France in 1965open the book instead.x
As a result, the book starts in a moment of suspension. Foucault describes the
gesture of the painter in Velzquez masterpiece as caught in an in-between. The painters
hand is found motionless between the paint and the canvas. The painter has just stepped back
from his work and is standing still, studying his object. He seems to be looking straight at us
are we his object, or is he ours?
Velazquezs Las Meninas is said to be one of the most important and mostly
discussed paintings of Western art history. The painting shows a large hall in the Royal Castle
of Madrid, during the reign of King Philip IV. Several of the figures represented in the
painting are identifiable from the Spanish court at the time. The young Infanta Margaret
Theresa (the only surviving child of King Philip IV and his second wife Mariana of Austria) is
surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour (Isabel de Velasco and Maria Augustina
Sarmiento de Sotomayor) who are looking at her, two dwarfs (Maria Barbola and Nicolo
Pertusato) and a dog in front of her and her chaperone (Marcela de Ulloa) and a bodyguard
standing behind her. Just behind them, Velzquez portrays a painter, probably himself,
working at a large canvas. The back of the canvas fills the left of the painting. The painter
looks outwards, beyond the pictorial space to where a viewer of the painting would stand and
where, one would assume, his object is positioned. In the background there appears to be a
mirror that reflects the upper bodies of a couple, barely identifiable as the king and queen:
Philiph IV and Mariana. If it is in fact a mirror, which most scholars think, then the couple
seems to be placed outside the picture space in a position similar to that of the viewer,
although some scholars have speculated that their image is a reflection from the painting
Velzquez is shown working on.xi In the doorway at the back of the large room, carrying a
large square object, is in fact a relative of Velazquezs, Don Jos Nieto Velazquez, the Queens
chamberlain and keeper of the royal tapestries.
According to, among others, Spanish philosopher and aestetician Jos Ortega y
Gasset, one of the major paradigm changes in European painting occurred in the art of
Velazquez. With Velazquez, the step was taken towards what Ortega calls distant vision
painting. It is a way of painting that begins with the eye, with the very pupil of the artist.
According to Ortega, Velazquz invents a new way of painting simply by holding his eye still,
and this Ortega describes as a Copernican revolution in the European art of painting. In earlier
art, paintings could include details of symbolic or simply representational value that would
invite the viewer to study the entire canvas, section by section. In distant vision painting, on
the other hand, the whole canvas is born of a single act of vision, why the viewer also is

expected to hold her eye still and to view the painting all at once from one single viewpoint
the artists viewpoint. In consequence, the artist assigns the viewer with a certain way of
viewing the painting. Or, in Ortegas words: Velazquez decides to fix despotically the point
of view.xii
In Foucaults analysis, however, the key value of Velazquezs painting lies in the
fact that it introduces uncertainties in visual representation at a time when paintings were
generally looked upon as windows to the world and representations of reality. Foucault
regards Las Meninas as an early critique of the Classical and representational paradigm.

Who are we?

Las Meninas, Foucault states, catches the painter in the middle of his oscillation between
canvas and paint and thus also between the visible and the invisible. He is currently seen but
will soon move closer to the canvas, disappear behind it and become invisible to us. The
painter cannot simultaneously be seen by us and see that which he is representing on the
canvas.xiii He is, in Foucaults words, at the threshold of those two incompatible
visibilities.xiv
The entire left of the painting is filled with the reversed side of the canvas. As a
consequence, what the painter sees, and has represented on the canvas, is invisible to us as
spectators. It is invisible to us since the painter is looking straight at us and we can neither
look back at ourselves nor glance at his canvas; all we can see of that canvas is its texture,
the horizontal and the vertical bars of the stretcher, and the obliquely rising foot of the
easel.xv
The Infanta figure is clearly important in Velazquezs painting since her
attendants are looking at her. However, the painting also indicates that someone even more
important is sitting in front of the entire scene, because she herself and many other figures in
the painting are looking at this someone.xvi The viewers of Las Meninas, are thereby doing
two kinds of looking: They are looking at the scene, but also identifying with the people on
the scene and thereby looking out of the picture and back at themselves. In order to make
sense of the image, we are forced not only to view the scene, but to identify with the figures in
the image and to look back at our own position.
According to Stuart Hall in 1997, as viewers of Las Meninas we subject
ourselves to the paintings meaning and become its subjects.xvii In this manner, Hall argues,
Foucaults analysis of Las Meninas, shows how images have a way of assigning their viewers
with subject positions: a certain point of view needed in order for the image to make sense.
The spectator completes the meaning of the painting, Hall says. Without the subject position,

the painting has no completed meaning. Meaning is, instead, constructed in the dialogue
between the painting and the spectator.
However, one may rightly ask if there actually is room for usthe viewers
Velazquez painting. Are we able to complete the meaning of the painting? Because it is not,
in fact, completely true that we cannot see the painters models. The mirror at the back of the
room appears to vaguely reveal the painters objecta royal couple who seem to be looking
back at us. Yet again, if they are the painters objects, and if he is looking at them, then who
are we, the viewers? According to American theologian William Carl Placher, the presence of
the reflection of the paintings actual objects finally pushes us, the viewers, out of the world
Velazquez creates.xviii Placher underlines that the subjective perspective of Velazquezs Las
Meninasthe distant vision perspectiveasks the viewer to take the artists perspective. It
asks the viewer to take a stand yet, in Plachers view, it finally pushes the viewer out by
revealing the artists actual models in the mirror. Velazquez uses all his artistry to bring us
into the painting with vivid realism, and then he reminds us, with figures in a mirror, that
there is literally no place for us in this world.xix
In Plachers view, the Gospel writers, in comparison, accomplish the complete
opposite effect. Like Velazquz, they clearly take subjective viewpoints to enhance the
realism of their storiesjust as Erich Auerbach has shown in Mimesis, his study of the
realism of the Biblical storiesbut unlike Velazquz the gospel writers finally ask their
readers to do the same. The gospel writers expect their readers to either enter the story and
surrender to its truth, or to say no thank you and close the book. Unlike Las Meninas, Placher
argues, there is room for the reader if she accepts the single truth presented in the Bible
stories. No one who submits to the truth presented in the gospels is pushed out, Placher holds.
Foucault, however, draws completely different conclusions from the fact that
we, the viewers, are somehow reflected in the painting while we at the same time are
definitely not reflected in the painting. Foucaults conclusions oppose both Plachers and
those of Ortega who generally describes Velazquez introduction of the distant vision painting
as despotic. In my view, it also goes further than Stuart Halls sociological conclusion as
regards discursive powers. Hall underlines that if the mirror in the image would have been a
real mirror, it would of course be reflecting us, the present viewers. But instead of mirroring
us it reflects, in our place, the King and Queen of Spain. In the image, we are therefore turned
into the very rulers of the country. Somehow, the discourse of the painting positions us in the
place of the Sovereign!, Hall remarks.xx Thus, the sovereign are we, the viewers as both
subjects of and in the painting. We, as masters of the paintings discourse, are assigned our
place, a place from which we may make sense of what we see and thus master the knowledge

produced. We are in the hands of the discourse, but the discourse does not make sense without
us. Just as any ruler of this world, our power is simultaneously one that we can execute and
one that owns and controls us. In Halls regard, the reflection in the mirror underlines the
power of the subject position within the discourse. It points out the subject positions power to
create meaning as well as the discourses demands on the individuals who fill it: One reason
why this image is so strikingand so puzzling philosophicallyis that it effectively exploits
the conceits of Baroque painting to dramatic effect: it places the king and queen (visible in the
mirror at the back of the painting), the painter (the actual painter Velzquez as he worked
away on his composition), and the viewer (the visitors to the Prado) in the same position.xxi

The non-place
In my view, however, Foucaults account of the place for the subject created by Velazquez is
slightly more complex than Hall suggests. In my regard, the place for man, for the subject
which Foucault, of course, will continue to discuss throughout The Order of Thingsis
already here in the beginning of his historical expos described as an ambiguous place. It is a
place that we are assigned, yet one that does not quite seem to exist. It is, in short, a kind of
non-place.
Why so? To Foucault, Velazquezs painting creates a space out of the several
gazes depicted in the painting. All of these gazes are directed towards a point outside of the
canvas. The painting, he says, creates a point outside the painting where the paintings gazes
meet the gazes of the spectators. Our gaze, the painters gaze and the models gazes in the
mirror all come together in a spot exterior to the painting. Foucault writes: These three
observing functions come together in a point exterior to the picture: that is, an ideal point in
relation to what is represented, but a perfectly real one too, since it is also the starting-point
that makes the representation possible.xxii
The place for the viewing subject, then, is described as a concrete place. Still,
however, this place, which is the very starting point for representation, for knowledge
production, is not there. It is indicated in the picture, but it remains invisiblea non-place
where the many gazes come together. The entire picture is looking out at a scene for which it
is itself a scene, Foucault later concludes.xxiii In this manner, Las Meninas creates, in
Foucaults words, a neutral space.xxiv The entire painting, Foucault argues, makes out a
reciprocal visibility. It is a reciprocality that embraces a whole complex network of
uncertainties, exchanges, and feints.xxv. Since we, the spectators, are in the place of the
painters model, we are also placed in a void of neither model nor viewer, in a space of
endless exchange where subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to

infinity.xxvi The picture opens for a multiplicity of models and spectators.xxvii In consequence,
to Foucault, the painting offers an efficient identity play, and even a play with the idea of
identity as such. The plain fact that we can only see the reverse side of the canvas in
Velzquez painting causes us as spectators to question our own identity: Because we can
only see that reverse side, we do not know who we are or what we are doing. Seen or
seeing?xxviii Stuart Hall suggested that the relation between the painting and its viewers could
complete the meaning of the painting. In my account of Foucaults analysis, however, the
meaning of the painting remains incomplete. The painting, rather, points at the subject
position as an illusive non-place at the very centre of being meaningful and making sense.
This non-place of the subject in Foucaults Velazquez analysis forestalls, as I
see it, his ongoing negotiation with the subject notion throughout The Order of Things. In
Kellys view, the multiple invisibilities in Velazquezs painting help Foucault to make his
point on the entire production of knowledge and its circling within representation. The
multiple invisibilities in the painting serves to show that no one is in charge of the process of
representation, of knowledge production. The entire process is in the hands of what is finally
invisible; the boundaries for thought and expression in the Classical age itself.xxix The
presentation of Western thought that follows render visible, similarly, the boundaries and
openings for thought in each time. Foucault depicts how the journey of the human sciences
leads Western thought from God to the Subject, yet anticipates a third step, an opening that
Gilles Deleuze has described: But if we can imagine a third draw, the forces of man will
enter into a relation with other forces again in such a way as to make up something else that
will no longer be either God or man: we could say that the death of man links up with the
death of God, to create new compounds.xxx
I believe this third draw, the move beyond man, is present already in the books
initial art analysis where it appears as a non-place of representation, a place in which neither
God nor Subject resides.

The invisible and the names

Still, however, though vaguely, the models are represented in the mirror in the back of the
room, and the painter, who is fully visible in the painting, could very well be Velazquez
himself. Is not Placher, to some extent right in saying that we are somehow pushed out of the
internal play of the painting? How much of an identity play is really taking place in this
painting? As mentioned initially, each and every person who is represented in this painting
may be named and pointed out. Is not the talk of the scattered subject and the non-place an
exaggeration in relation to Las Meninas?

Foucault, who has not used the names of the figures represented in the painting,
takes up the question himself in the second half of his analysis: But perhaps it is time,
Foucault rhetorically suggests, to use the proper names of those represented in the painting.xxxi
Perhaps it is time, he proposes, to use the actual names of those depicted instead of the
endless abstract repetitions of spectator, painter and models. Because, we do in fact
know who they were, we know who Velzquez was painting; King Philip IV and his wife
Mariana.xxxii
Foucault, however, rejects his own suggestion saying; no, we should not use the
proper names even if we happen to know them because it is in vain that we say what we
see; what we see never resides in what we say.xxxiii It is not that language is insufficient, nor
that we must strive for more exact words to capture what we see, Foucault argues, but that the
very aspiration to say what we see is futile. Thus, Foucault introduces the thought that we
shall encounter later in Foucaults essay on Magritte and as we shall come across, in a slightly
different version, in his What is an author?. It is the idea which later will be picked up by
Gilles Deleuze as a key element in Foucaults thinking: The asymmetrical relation between
what we say and what we see, the asymmetry between words and things, statements and
visabilities.xxxiv To Foucault, the asymmetrical relation between words and things holds a
transformative force. We should, in fact, nurse the asymmetry rather than try to harmonize the
relation; we ought to treat the asymmetry between what we see and what we say as a startingpoint and an opening for thought rather than as an obstacle.
Because, if we restrain our urge to name, define and label what we see with
words, as if words and things were equivalents, we may provide a space for that which will
never be captured when a name too soon is given to a thingalso as regards the figures in
Las Meninas. Foucault explains: 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. It is perhaps through the medium of this
grey, anonymous language, always over-meticulous and repetitive because too broad, that the
painting may, little by little, release its illuminations.xxxv
Thus, in Foucaults view Las Meninas depicts Classical representation and its
boundaries, but also its inherent leeway, its elasticity or in Foucaults words: the space it
opens up to us. To Foucault, there is a space in the midst of these reciprocal gazes. It is a
void created by, and presupposed in, the painting yet placed exterior to it. Foucault describes
it as an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation of the
person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance. This very subject

which is the same has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation that
was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.xxxvi
At the end of his opening chapter in The Order of Things, Foucault offers a
visionary notion of a liberated representation. It is an account of representation where the
reciprocal structure of representationwith its inherent non-place offering an endless
exchange of identityhas taken the place of dualist representation of language versus vision,
or words versus things. In the fundamental relation between the objects, the words and
techniques we use to describe and classify thembetween what we see, how we see it, and
how we represent it to othershe locates a non-place where the relation as such is not set.
The number of possible perspectives is infinite and the possible names and words to classify
people and things are endless. In-between our representations, our objects and the material we
use to represent them, there is a space of multiplicity.
In this manner, the end of the analysis relates to the beginning where Foucault
introduced the artist as caught in suspension between paint and canvas, between seeing and
being seen. The painter, in other words, is situated in the non-place of representation. It is a
place where neither the object nor the subject are fixed. After the introductory chapter on Las
Meninas, The Order of Things, as well known, continues to depict not only the birth of
man, but also the elasticity and asymmetry between words and things through the history of
Western knowledge.
Luca Giordanos often repeated description of Las Meninas as the theology of
painting most probably regards to the way in which the painting simultaneously shows the
art of painting at its height and, through its object, discusses the fundamental circumstances in
which the art of painting is set. Gary Shapiro, however, consciously stretches Giordanos
description and suggests that just like Classical theology, Las Meninas works within a space
of representation in which both the last word and the originating word are reserved for a
speaker who is necessarily outside that space. There is an absence at the heart of the painting
and this makes it comparable to Classical theology, Shapiro argues. Theology, he continues,
may be closer than any other Classical discourse to acknowledging its own limits.xxxvii
But what about contemporary theology? In what sense might theology after the
death of God and man alike acknowledge its limits and, more importantly, find a space in
which to act?

The non-place of contemporary theology

In the following, I will relate Foucaults discussion on Las Meninas to the place of
contemporary theology. I will discuss the notion of the invisible and the non-place beyond

God and man that it suggests, and I will explore the non-place as a space for words and things
in an asymmetrical relation that opens for humility and immanent mysteries.
Jeremy Carrettes examination Foucault and Religion arranges Foucaults work
out of its search for religion or spirituality in relation to the idea of the said and the
unsaid that recurs in Foucaults work.xxxviii Following Carrettes track of thought, I want to
suggest that the said and the unsaidor speech versus silencein Foucault, has a
materialist parallel in Foucaults work and that is the binary couple of the visible and the
invisible.xxxix Whereas the couple of the said versus the unsaid, as Carrette describes, is
present in Foucaults analyses of literature, the visible and the invisible isfor obvious
reasonsmore present in his analyses of art.
Let me briefly introduce Carrettes view of the said and the unsaid in order to
paint a background in relation to which my account of the visible and the invisible is more
easily understood. Carrette notes that Foucault often uses the notions of the said and the
unsaid, or speech versus silence, to describe the mechanisms of discursive exclusion. The
discourse is always, in Foucaults view, regulated by unspoken rules about what we say and
what we keep silent: Some things may be said and some may notsome statements are
spoken out loud while some are silenced (as is evident e.g. in his examinations of madness
and the prison.)
There is also, however, another, and almost opposite, aspect of the silence, or the
unsaid, in Foucaults work, Carrette argues.xl At times, silence is seen as an escape from the
domination of the discourse. For example, in Foucaults analysis of the Christian confession,
silence is a way to escape oppression. Or, as articulated by Carrette: To confess is to be
controlled and to be silent is to remain free.xli This liberating aspect of silence is also present,
and even more enhanced, in Foucaults earlier work. Carrette notes that in Foucaults work on
the avant-garde and surrealisma period that coincides with his work on Velazquezthere is
a more positive and enigmatic silence.xlii Silence is here used as a way to subvert dominant
regimes and cause enigmas, Carrette states.
In these texts, silence ruptures dominant categories of reason, it questions
languages very capability to express, and to represent, and thus it evokes a kind of esoteric
arena.xliii Silence functions as a concept that opens for negotiations of the discourse, it opens
an enigmatic yet creative space in the midst of the discourse. Just like Foucaults notion of
power, silence and speech operate in numerous force relations, holding no essential quality
and constantly changing and shifting positions, Carrette argues.xliv It is, in short, an immanent
place for change, for the unexpected.

I believe that an examination could show that the visible and the invisible are
used in a similar fashion in Foucaults work at large, but I will leave it at that since I am not
performing such an examination here. What I will argue, however, is that in Foucaults
analysis of Velazquez, the invisible is not, as we have seen, used to describe what is excluded
from our vision by discursive regulations of what could be portrayed and what could not.
Rather, it is used to describe a space for the unseen as a space for identity play, for change of
perspective and for an enigmatic unknown in the very process of representation. It is an
erratic space that Foucault himself, as above, at times describes as a void. Nonetheless, this
void, this erratic space, should not be understood as a transcendent or mystical notion, but
as a plain reality in the midst of the construction of representation.xlv The non-place in
Foucaults analysis of Velazquez is concretely situated in close proximity to the canvas, and
this makes the invisible differ from the silence discussed by Carrette. The invisible non-place
in Foucaults reasoning on Las Meninas is not only an abstract starting point knowledge
production but is also a material spacea concrete place that we could point out when
standing in front of the painting. To Foucault, the painter himself is, as mentioned, standing at
the edge of the visible, in between the visible and the invisible; of being seen and seeing. At
the same time, the invisible place of the model is created by the many gazes that are looking
at it. That concrete spot, so central to the entire composition, is an invisible place created by
being seen.
Subsequently, the non-place of the invisible in Foucaults reasoning has
implications for knowledge production in a sense that relates to both the material objects and
to the abstract words we use to describe them.xlvi The fact that the only spot in Velazquezs
masterpiece where signification and meaning could be createdwhere the world of the
painting finally could become meaningful and coherentis invisible indicates, to Foucault, at
once the force of concrete things and the void on which our idea of meaning and
significations is built. Things are hidden from us, which paradoxically but also pragmatically
is why we see the invisible in our concrete world: We see what we do not see but that other
gazes indicate must nevertheless be there. When I look out my window, I see the windows on
the other houses indicating views and perspectives on the world that are invisible to me. There
are, in a very plain sense, always things going on of which I know nothingthings that are
mysteries to me.
In a less concrete sense, however, we also encounter invisible subject positions
in the same manner. Not only, that our encounters with other peoples life stories at times let
us glimpse perspectives from which the world would look different than it does from where

we ourselves are standing. Moreover, Foucaults analysis of Velazquez points to the fact that
our (still post-classical) habitual way of thinking, of understanding the world, tells us that
there are vantage points and perspectives that actually could render the world consistent. We
often (still in our time as well as in 1966) live as if there is a position from which all is visible.
According to Foucault through Velazquez, however, the ideal vantage point does not finally
exist, at least not in the way we usually assume. While it does exist as an idea and chimera
that affect our ways of acting and thinking, it does not exist detached from the concreteness of
this world. The spaces from which we finally could make sense of the world are part of this
world, concrete spaces in the midst of thingsplaces where some things are visible while
other things are invisible. They are places inhabited by different individuals in different times.
To that extent, neither an outer eternal truth nor the human mind is what finally possesses the
power of truth making, but an assorted blend of tangible things and minds situated in relation
to them.
To Shapiro as well as to Catherine Soussloff, a key aspect of Foucaults essay on
Velazquez is that it relates to the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau Ponty. In Shapiros view,
the essay is directed precisely against the theme of the visible versus the invisible as it is
discussed by Merleau Ponty. In Merleau Pontys analysis of Czanne, the artist as such plays
an important part, Shapiro notes. The play with visibility and invisibility in Czanne is part of
a process of doubt where identity is questioned in an attempt to establish and reveal the
artists identity. To Merleau Ponty, Shapiro argues, Czanne attempts to depict how the
subject is both origin and end, subject and object of meaning, revealing both the triumph of
revelation and the necessary limitations that call for further exploration.xlvii To Foucault Las
Meninas, in comparison, points out the fact that the artist is only one element among many in
the representational discourse. His essay on Velazquez begins by describing the artist in a
pausethe painter standing back from the canvas. The artist is inactive, and to Shapiro, this
indicates an implicit critique to what Foucault regards as Merleau Pontys elevation of the
artistic subject.xlviii
Interestingly, however, the fact that neither a transcendently nor an immanently
situated force possesses the power of making the world meaningful does not necessarily make
Foucaults analysis into a theological dead end. In fact, I find that it does quite the opposite.
Relating the non-place for the viewing subject in Las Meninas to the theological sphere, I
believe it could be said that something similar has happened to the position for the theologian
in contemporary Western Christian theology. God, the theological object, is in many ways an
invisibility whose presence is merely indicated by the gazes looking in its direction: a non-

place in relation to which we must place ourselves without quite knowing where to look or
what to see. And without, in consequence, quite knowing who we are in this process, since the
space we inhabit is far too erratic to provide us with a proper grounds for identity. Thus, I
believe the erratic space of invisible visibility in Foucault on Velazquez could hold theological
potential. It may, simply, describe our new theological object, and our erratic space as
viewers, theologians or believers, in the midst of matter.
The concrete non-place in Foucaults account of Velazquez may rob the world of
a higher truth, but it also points out the infinity of possible perspectives of what we see, on the
visible, as well as the presence of innumerable yet unseen (in)visibilities. And these aspects, I
believe, even approaches what could perhaps be described as a new materialist account of
radical theology. The very canvas, the cloth and paint, is presented as the concrete space for
representation. It is limited, and through Foucault and Velazquez these limitations are revealed
and displayed, but so are the possibilities inherent to its limitations. If the very place for
representationthe human space for depicting what is realhas confessed its lack of depth
and its lack of relation to an outer truth, it suddenly makes room for multiple perspectives,
competing truths and innumerable invisibilities. The authority of the viewing subject is
shattered. Reality is neither there merely to be revealed and commented, nor is it simply in the
hands of man. Rather, in the midst of the process of representation, there is a non-place, a
void, an empty place where things are possible. The new space for the viewing subject in Las
Meninas indicates a creative reality that is neither the subject nor anything like a transcendent
divinity, but a kind of flexibility in the tangible world of words and things itself. It is a nonplace created by the asymmetrical relation between words and things, and out of this
asymmetry comes a new kind of humilitya humbleness deriving from the fact that neither
the word of man nor the word of God can fully capture the tangible world.
And here we arrive again at the notion of the said versus the unsaid, or silence in
relation to speech as discussed by Carrette. Or, rather, the enigmatic silence that Foucault
encounters in the avant-garde and the surrealism. Like the silence of the avant-garde writers,
the invisible of the art of Velazquez is perplexing, but may as such also question the very
basics of knowledge making in a world of words and things. To Carrette, the silence was used
by the avant-garde authors to subvert dominant regimes just as much as to cause
enigmas.xlix A radical theology that would take seriously the fact that meaning and knowledge
are created in the midst of actual things, while also realizing the emptiness of ideal vantage
points could possibly do the same. It could be theological enough to keep pointing out the

enigmas and mysteries of the tangible world, yet political enough to critique any dominant
regime claiming access to a higher truth.

i Rather than subordinating the being of language to a new object that is transcendental or absolute, like the
subject, writers like Stphane Mallarm, for instance, manage to free language from any point of view, from
the transcendental subject, and thus present language in its own being: Mallarm was constantly effacing
himself from his own language, to the point of not wishing to figure in it except as an executant in a pure
ceremony of the Book in which the discourse would compose itself Mallarm, as it happens, was one of
Manets closest friends. Foucault, Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Vintage books,
1994) p 306.

ii Carrette, Jeremy, Foucault and Religion: Spiritual Corporality and Political Spirituality (Routledge, 2000)
p 60-61. See also Rudi Viskers study of Foucaults use of quotation marks.

iii Tanke, Joseph J, Foucaults philosophy of art: A Genealogy of Modernity, (Continuum International
Publishing Group, 2009) p 61.

iv Tanke, Foucaults philosophy of art, p 92.

v Tanke, Foucaults philosophy of art, p 92.

vi Shapiro, Gary, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying, (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2003).

vii Kelly, Michael, Foucault on Critical Agency in Painting and the Aesthetics of Existence in A
Companion to Foucault, ed. Christopher Falzon, Timothy OLeary and Jana Sawicki (Blackwell publishing,
2013) p 248.

viii Jeremy R Carrette edited a groundbreaking anthology in 1999titled Religion and Culture: Michel
Foucaultthat brought together Foucaults articles of spiritual relevance. Carrettes own analysis of
Foucaults work in relation to religion or spirituality introduced the notions of spiritual corporeality and
political spirituality where the former denotes the spiritual discussions of Foucaults early work, and the
latter captures the religious negotiations of his later work. Then came Carrettes and James Bernauers
Michel Foucault and Theology: The Politics of Religious Experience. The book was the first of its kind in
that it brought together essays that used Foucaults thought theologically. The essays examined, for instance,
power and sexuality in the church in late antiquity, the relationship between theology and politics from a
Foucauldian perspective, new challenges to the nature of theological knowledge in terms of Foucaults
critical project as well as theology in relation to Foucaults work on the history of sexuality. David Galstons
Archives and the Event of God: The Impact of Michel Foucault on Philosophical Theology (McGill-Queens
University Press, 2011) depicted, in turn, the effects that Foucaults Archaeology of Knowledge and
Discipline and Punish have had on the study of theology and religion. Despite a growing interest in
Foucaults thinking on the part of theology, however, the connection is still often questioned. In fact, the
story behind the title of Jonathan Trans Foucault and Theology (2011) is illustrative of the relationship
between the large part of theology and Foucauldian thought. According to Tran, the books working title was
Power, Resistance and Christianity. A title that, in my view, captures the core of Trans book very well.
(The book discusses Foucault as a resource for Christianity and the church in relation to capitalism as
analysed by for instance Antoni Negri and Michael Hardt and locates Christian opportunities for resistance.)

However, in the introduction, Tran describes how a friend of his reminded him that the word resistance
may be misunderstood. It could, the friend said, bring to mind an account of the world where there is a
position for resistance superior to God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. As a Christian, Tran did not want to
support such interpretations why he asserts, instead: Foucault thinks the world belongs to power. Christians
think the world belongs to God. Thus, while Tran definitely takes Foucault seriously and draws crucial
implications for Christian life and thought from his philosophy, he makes sure not to fall into Foucaults
atheistic immanence. Tran explicitly underlines that if the Church can put Foucaults politics to use while
remaining cautious of its atheistic immanence she will discover in Foucault a friend in her struggle against
certain common enemies (...) Bernauers remarkable Michel Foucaults Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics
for Thought (Humanity Books, 1990) is different in this regard. The book is an in-depth study of Foucaults
published as well as unpublished work, and runs the thesisat odds with readings of Foucault at the time
that Foucault offers much more than an account of a closed-in world of prisons and discursive practices.
Through Bernauers reading, Foucault strives for an ethics for thought, bordering on a mystical ethics, that
advocates a constant transgression of knowledge as well as of the self. However, in my view, Bernauer tends
to exaggerate the theological aspects of Foucaults thought by, for example, repeating the claim that
Foucaults philosophy makes out a contemporary form of negative theology, both in the book mentioned and
elsewhere. I have expressed this critiqueand discussed the consequences of Bernauers claimfurther in
the article Magritte, Foucault and negative theology beyond representation. I find Arthur Bradley more
balanced when he indirectly discusses the spiritual aspect of Foucault by examining Foucaults thought
from the outside in relation to negative theology. Bradleys Negative Theology in Modern French
Philosophy (Routledge, 2004) examines the relationship between, among others, Derrida, Foucault and
negative theology. Bradley does not use this outset to introduce a theological account of Foucault, nor of
Derrida, but discusses and reflects insightfully on the theological parallels and implications of their thought
from outside. Stephen Carrs article, Foucault amongst the Theologians engages with some of the ways in
which Foucault has been handled theologically. Like the work of Arthur Bradley, Carrs outset parallels that
of the present study in that he notes the importance of spirituality in Foucaults work without using the
spiritual aspects for apologetic purposes. For instance, Carr critiques the Radical Orthodox theologian John
Milbanks Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason for claiming that Foucaults thinking is
nihilistic, and underlines instead Foucaults thought as a vital source for theological self-critique. Naturally,
the article format limits Carrs constructive contribution. Sophie Fuggle has explored such a theological
perspective on Foucault more extensively. In Foucault/Paul she follows the notion of power through the
writings of Foucault and Paul. She discusses differences and similarities, and explicitly tracks the notion of
power outside of the existing categories of religious and secular.

ix Foucault, The Order of Things, p 17.

x Macey, David, The Lives of Michel Foucault (Vintage Books, 1993) p 164.

xi According to Matthew Ancell in The Theology of Painting: Picturing Philosophy in Velazquezs Las
Meninas, the mirror at the back of Las Meninas has been the subject of many art historical discussions. Joel
Snyder and Ted Cohen, for instance, have argued that with the vantage point of the painting being the open
door at the back, the mirror cannot, in fact, reflect the king and queen but only the canvas. In consequence,
the paradox on which Foucault builds his argumentthe idea that the viewers identity is questioned by the
reflection in the mirroris in fact a misapprehension on Foucaults part. Moreover, while it appears likely
that the object in the back is a mirror, due to the way that it reflects light in a way that the paintings hanging
next to it are not, it does not seem to work as an actual mirror would. Why, asks Ancell, does it not reflect
any other objects in the room apart from the king and queen? Leo Steinberg has opposed to Snyders and
Leons conclusion and argued that in accordance with the perspective, the mirror could in fact reflect both
the canvas and the painters models. If Steinberg is right, Foucaults argument would still stand, yet why is
the mirror not true to the internal reality of the painting? American art historian Svetlana Alpers offers an

outlook that could explain some of the paintings inconsistencies discussed thus far. Alper argues that
Velazquezs very ambition in Las Meninas is to embrace two different and even conflicting modes of
representation. The two modes he aims to combine into one single painting is, first, the distant vision
perspective and, secondly, what Alpers describes as the northern or descriptive mode of painting. In this
manner, Velazquez, according to Alpers, plays with the conventions of perspectives. This play, Ancell argues,
suits his Spanish context in a time of scepticism just fine (Don Quijote was written fifty years earlier and its
ideas were well spread in Spanish intellectual circles). Through the conflicting modes in his painting,
Velazquez manages to paint the conflict of his time: On the one hand, the individuals desire to apprehend the
world, to make the world coherent, and to find a stable place for the subject in relation to the world. On the
other hand; the growing insight that there is no fixed point of reference, that the self is in fact enveloped in a
world that shifts kaleidoscopically with any change in position. In consequence, whatever aspect of Las
Meninas one starts to discuss, Ancell concludes, the discussion ends up dealing with ambiguity. The
discussions cover the ambiguities of Las Meninas itself, but also of painting as such, of perspective and point
of view, of seeing, being seen and being invisible, of knowing and not knowing. It is, thus, a painting that
inevitably seems to be about ambiguity. To that extent, Ancell holds, Foucaults analysis touches upon crucial
elements regardless of whether he is actually right in claiming that the mirror offers a crucial paradox of
perspectives or not. The painting inevitably directs the viewer to reconsider her own position before the
painting and as part of the painting. Ancell, Matthew, The Theology of Painting: Picturing Philosophy in
Velazquezs Las Meninas, pp 159-163.

xii Richard Viladesau makes use of Ortegas account of Velazquz in Theology and The Arts and notes,
consequentially, how Velazquz technique makes the pupil of the artists eye the centre of the visual cosmos.
The whole painting can be seen in its totality all at once, because a point of view is introduced that is
subjective: individual and relative to the viewer. Viladesau, Theology and The Arts: Encountering God
Through Music, Art and Rhetoric, (Paulist press, 2000) p 90.

xiii Foucault, The Order of Things, p 3.

xiv Foucault, The Order of Things, p 4.

xv Foucault, The Order of Things, p 4.

xvi Hall, Stuart, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, (Sage Publications,
1997) p 60.

xvii Hall, Representation, p 60. In 1997, Jamaican-British sociologist and cultural theoretician Stuart Hall
published Representation; a book that was to become a minor classic within media and culture academics.
Halls argumentation includes a lucid discussion of Foucaults analysis of Las Meninas, which in Halls view,
illustrates his point on subject positions. Hall, Representation, p 56.

xviii In Narratives of a Vulnerable God, American theologian William Carl Placherrelated to the
narrative theology or postliberal theology movementdiscusses the consequences of Velazquez singular

point of view further. Placher, Carl William, Narratives of a Vulnerable God: Christ, Theology, and
Scripture, (Westminster John Knox Press, 1994) p 100.

xix Placher, Narratives of a Vulnerable God, p 100-101.

xx This internal play of the painting can also be understood as a metacommentary on classical painting, as
Tanke remarks: One reason why this image is so strikingand so puzzling philosophicallyis that it
effectively exploits the conceits of Baroque painting to dramatic effect: it places the king and queen (visible
in the mirror at the back of the painting), the painter (the actual painter Velzquez as he worked away on his
composition), and the viewer (the visitors to the Prado) in the same position. (Tanke, Joseph J., On the
Powers of the False: Foucaults Engagements with the Arts in A Companion to Foucault, ed. Christopher
Falzon, Timothy OLeary and Jana Sawicki (Blackwell publishing, 2013) p 124.

xxi Hall, Representation, p 124.

xxii Foucault, The Order of Things, p 15.

xxiii Foucault, The Order of Things, p 14.

xxiv Foucault, The Order of Things, p 4.

xxv Foucault, The Order of Things, p 4.

xxvi Foucault, The Order of Things, p 5.

xxvii The picture accepts as many models as there are spectators. Foucault, The Order of Things, p 4.

xxviii Foucault, The Order of Things, p 5.

xxix In Kellys regard, however, this does not mean that there is no room for agency in this part of
Foucaults thought: the painter (e.g., Velsquez) is constituted by external conditions invisible to him, so he
cannot be considered an autonomous agent (i.e., one who acts independently of external conditions). Since
the painter creates this space, he is an agent who contributes to the arrival of man, though he is an agent
There are possibilities to act, but only in a collective and heterononomous rather than an individual and
autonomous sense. (p 249.) Since the act of rendering visible normative conditions that would otherwise
be invisible is a key capacity of critical agency, painting is crucial for Foucaults emerging conception of
critical agency, just as it was in his earlier accounts of madness and the clinic. Kelly, Foucault on Critical

Agency in Painting and the Aesthetics of Existence, p 248.

xxx Deleuze, Foucault, [1986], trans. Sen Hand (Continuum, 1999), pp 8889; French edition, Foucault
(Les ditions de minuit, 1986), pp 94-95.

xxxi Foucault, The Order of Things, p 9. According to Shapiro, Foucaults text also plays with its own voice
at this point. Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, p 257.

xxxii Foucault, The Order of Things, p 9.

xxxiii Foucault, The Order of Things, p 9.

xxxiv Catherine Soussloff underlines Foucaults influence of Merleau-Ponty when it comes to the relation
between painting and the verbal and the visual, and especially Merleau-Pontys essay Indirect language and
the voices of silence from 1952. Soussloff, Catherine M., Michel Foucault and the Point of Painting, Art
History (Vol. 32 No. 4, Sept 2009 pp 734-754), Blackwell Publishing, p 737.

xxxv Foucault, The Order of Things, p 9f.

xxxvi Foucault, The Order of Things, p 16.

xxxvii Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, p 261.

xxxviii For a discussion on Foucaults use of these terms, see Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 5-6.

xxxix Carrette underlines that the notions are not finally opposites but even approach interchangeability.
Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 30.

xl It is an aspect that, I would argue, is captured in Foucaults notion of the murmur; the barely articulate
that may slowly erode the basis of the current regime.

xli Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 34.

xlii Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 34.

xliii Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 35.

xliv Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 35.

xlv In his analysis of Foucaults relationship to the avant-garde and surrealism, Carrette similarly underlines
that the void in Foucault always remains within the play of meaning and significance rather than to enter a
consideration of spirituality or occultism. it never shades off into a serious consideration of the occult or the
spiritual. Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 59.

xlvi While it is true that Foucault does not introduce a notion of a void or a non-space in theological or
spiritual terms, it is neither completely true to say that he excludes the spiritual aspects of this notion. The
theme of religion in Foucaults writing is intricate why truly deserves the study of its own that it got in
Carrettes Foucault and Religion. Carrette states that the term spirituality, however, often is used in
Foucaults work as a way to avoid the word religion, and as a way to strategically disrupt traditional
religious meaning. (p 6) Carrette also notes how Foucault takes a certain interest in writers and artists that
treat spiritual themes in a way that is both critical of any established or institutionalized for of religion yet, at
the same time, open to the aspects of spiritual thought and practice that may serve to liberate the body and
the corporeal. (p 52) In Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud, for
instance, Foucault encounters this combination of theology critique and a search for a reconsideration of the
body in spiritual terms. Surrealism and the avant-garde, Carrette argues, provided Foucault with a platform
to reorder religious discourse and to create religious subversions. (p 61) The two-fold relation to religion and
spirituality relates to his discussions of speech versus silence.

xlvii Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, p 237

xlviii Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision, p 235. Soussloff, Catherine M., Michel Foucault and the Point of
Painting, Art History, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 32 No. 4, Sept 2009, pp 734-754, Blackwell Publishing, p 737.

xlix Carrette, Foucault and Religion, p 34