While I'm partial to Foucault as a philosopher, I like this Las Meninas chapter. Right from the get-go when he uses the word "gaze" 3 times in the first paragraph, so already I felt as if I had a concrete example of what the heck Lacan was talking about last week.
The whole chapter is an elaborate discussion and dissection of Velasquez's Las Meninas painting. It is almost fun how Foucault delves into artwork like a scientist or an archaeologist, looking for clues as a detective at a crime scene. He breaks down, and in rather common and understandable language, what is going on in Las Meninas in terms of composition, space, and intent. I was already in the know of the mirror and it's contents, but it was interesting to see how it revolved in a greater role inside and outside the painting than when I first heard about it.
A phrase that I thought was interesting and pique my thoughts about this chapter was this one:
"It is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say." According to Foucault our language can never fully describe the beauty, horror, wonder, etc of what we see, that language is a poor describer of what we see. I can relate that to some of the other things we've read, that artist's trying to imitate nature are unable to because nature exists outside the artwork on its own, thus an imitative piece of work fails in its own doing. Anyway I thought the sentence was nice to ponder over.
What's funny to me is that this opening chapter to The Order of Things, I cannot fully relate to the rest of the book, which really questioned human history and the perspective of how it is written/remembered.
I found a similar "liking" to his article and found it much more digestible than some of his other works. The paragraph about saying what we see and not being able to imitate nature because it resides outside of the works reminds me of the Zeuxis and Parrhiaus story of the painted curtain. How it has always been the infinitely unattainable goal to fool the eye into believe what is painted is in fact nature. In regards to language as Foucault regards to as impossible to describe what we see, we can look at authors like Victor Hugo or Shakespeare in their relentless quest for reality through imagery in their works.
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