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