Michel Foucualt: Manet and the Birth of the Viewer

A specific object linking Manet, Bataille and Foucault is none other than the mirror, ‘place without place’, which the latter situates, very significantly between utopia and hererotopia, and defines as a composite of both: ‘It is from the mirror that I find myself absent from the place where I am,’ he writes, ‘as long as I see myself there.’ Such is the discrete yet decisive role of painting in the theoretical work of Foucault: absolute hererotopia, a one-way mirror in which the mastery of man is effaced in his real life, it constitutes a sufficiently deep rupture in western discourse to have inflected the theoretical elaboration of Michel Foucault on space and time, serving as a grid for our modes of thinking and behaviour. This rupture produces a long silence; it is from this silence that the archaeologist is made.

– Nicolas Bourriaud in ‘Michel Foucualt: Manet and the Birth of the Viewer’, Manet and the Object of Painting, Tate: London, p. 19

Another Russian Tale – Roberto Bolaño

The Russian who knew German asked him what he was doing there, what his job was and his rank. The Andalusian tried to explain, in German, but it was no use. The Russians opened his mouth, and with a pair of pincers, which the Germans had used on other body parts, they started pulling and squeezing his tongue. The pain made his eyes water, and he said, or rather shouted, the word coño, cunt. The pincers in his mouth distorted the expletive which came out, in his howling voice, as Kunst.

The Russian who knew German looked at him in puzzlement. The Andalusian was yelling Kunst, Kunst and crying with pain. In German, the word Kunst means art, and that was what the bilingual soldier was hearing, and he said, This son of a bitch must be an artist or something. The guys who were torturing the Andalusian removed the pincers along with a little piece of tongue and waited, momentarily hypnotized by the revelation. The word art. Art, which soothes the savage beast. And so, like soothed beasts, the Russians took a breather and waited for some kind of signal while the rookie bled from the mouth and swallowed his blood liberally mixed with saliva, and choked. The word coño transformed into the word Kunst, had saved his life. When he came out of the rectangular building, it was dusk, but the light stabbed at his eyes like midday sun.

(trans. Chris Andrew)

The Dialectic of Presence and Absence

To illustrate the dialectic of presence and absence, he [Zizek] recounts the story of a guide conducting some visitors round an East European art gallery nad halting before a painting entitled 'Lenin in Warsaw'. There is no sign of Lenin in the picture; instead, it depicts Lenin's wife in bed with a handsome young member of the Central Committee. 'But where is Lenin?' inquire the bemused visitors, to which the guide gravely replies: 'Lenin is in Warsaw.' Terry Eagleton on Zizek (Figures of Dissent, p. 204)

Hotdog - Eagleton parodying Zizek (Figures of Dissent, p. 204)

The following captures something of his [Zizek] characteristic intellectual style: 'At first glance it would seem that the sausage in the hot dog wedges apart the two pieces of roll. But the roll itself is nothing but a "space" which the sausage creates around it, the phantasmal "frame" or support of the sausage without which it would vanish to nothing. On the other hand, the sausage itself can be seen as no more than an embodied gap between two pieces of bread, the mere pretext or occasion which prevents them from ever uniting.