Thisisnotapipe

The ascendancy of poetry over painting

The relationship between words and things was pre­ cisely the theme so many of Magritte's canvases

Magritte and Foucault must have recognized in one another a common fas cination with what I earlier gave the inadequate label of visual non sequiturs, and which Foucault himself has dubbed heterotopias. From a passage in Borges, Foucault explains in Les Mots et les choses, he was led to a strange suspicion that there is a worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inap­ propriate; I mean the disorder in which a large number of possible orders glitter separately, in the lawless and un­ charted dimension of the heteroclite

Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, be­ cause they make it impossible to name this and that

heterotopias ... dessicate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of lan­ guage at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences