The Treachery of Images and the Order of Discourse

Political Connotations of Aesthetic Experience

Abstract

Michel Foucault's outstanding essay This is not a Pipe scrutinizing no less remarkable painting The Treachery of Images by René Magritte, first of all, draws attention of scholars as an original commentary to a landmark piece of art. The article offers a slightly different perspective of consideration the philosopher's work, that can be conditionally called “proto-political”. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to demonstrate political senses of Foucault's aesthetic studies. The first part of the article attempts to reconstruct Magritte's ideas on the nature and purpose of painting, on the correlation between a thing, image and utterance, on resemblance and similitude, which the painter found akin to Foucault's considerations set forth in the book The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Focused on the analysis of Foucault's text on Magritte, the second part of the article reveals significant discrepancies between the intention of the artist and the explication of the philosopher, who, although based on the artist's ideas, interprets them in a very peculiar way. According to Foucault, the revolutionary nature of Magritte's painting consists in the confrontation between the spoken order and the visible order that already represents political consequences. The final part of the article formulates three basic principles of “emancipated” aesthetic judgment, which can be extracted from Foucault's innovative approach to the interpretation of Magritte's work. Thus, the appeal to the theory of Jacques Rancière allows us to demonstrate not only the political significance of these principles, but also their effectiveness and relevance in modern realities.