Foucault, Art, and Radical Theology by Petra Carlsson Redell

Author:Petra Carlsson Redell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

Magritte to Foucault

Having read The Order of Things, Magritte wrote a letter to Foucault. Without wasting ink on polite small talk, Magritte throws himself right into Foucault’s use of the words resemblance and similitude in his historical exposé.7 In Magritte’s regard, the distinction between these notions is too seldom noted—in Foucault’s book as well, one must assume—which is why Magritte himself raises the issue. Similitude, Magritte suggests, is something that belongs to things. It is something that things can have in relation to each other: “It seems to me that, for example, green peas have between them relations of similitude, at once visible (their color, form, size) and invisible (their nature, taste, weight).” To Magritte, similitude is the visible and invisible similarities between things (TN 57/57–58). Resemblance, on the other hand, belongs to thought and to the thinking subject, Magritte argues. “Only thought resembles,” Magritte states. Thought becomes what it perceives; hence, it is nothing but resemblance to what it takes in. Thought, he writes, “resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it.” In consequence, resemblance is never visible but always invisible, like pleasure or pain. Resemblance is a subject’s experience of the world: a perception that renders the world somehow cohesive and coherent.

Painting offers a problem with respect to the difference between resemblance and similitude thus understood, Magritte continues, because in painting an artist’s thoughts become visible and thus resemblance becomes visible. What the artist’s thought “sees, hears, or knows” becomes visible through his or her painting since this is where she expresses her ideas. To that extent a painted image hides nothing, Magritte argues, while visible objects, in comparison, always hide other things. In Magritte’s view, the similitude between tangible objects includes levels of invisibility, whereas the plain resemblance given in works of art does not. Art as visible resemblance is overt, while the similitude of ordinary things is mysteriously obscure. In other words, abstract thoughts and ideas are never as mysterious and multileveled as the sensuous world that surrounds us: “a painted image—intangible by its very nature—hides nothing, while the tangibly visible object hides another visible thing” (TN 57/58).

Painting portrays resemblance as such; thus, painting renders the invisible presuppositions of the artist’s thought visible, which to Magritte is crucial and exactly as it should be. In another context Magritte even makes this account into an artistic imperative: “What one must paint is the image of resemblance—if thought is to become visible in the world.”8 Because to Magritte thought must become visible in order for the limitations of the human mind to stand forth and, subsequently, to make room for the mysteries of things. The mysteries of things are hidden and restrained by human thought—by resemblance—why we must depict human thought to throw light on these absurd limitations. The “problem” that painting offers in relation to resemblance versus similitude is thus a crucial opening in Magritte’s own account of art. The distinction between what is similar and what we think

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