거울과 창문 - 벨라스케스의 『궁정의 시녀들』에 대한 푸코와 라캉의 주체와 재현 이론

The Mirror and the Window: Foucault and Lacan on the Subject and Representation in Velazquez’s Las Meninas

&nbsp;&nbsp;An indisputable masterpiece of Western art, Vel？zquez&quot;s Las Meninas has triggered a plethora of critical interpretations and debates on its meaning and artistic appeal. The critical debate mainly concerns the question of the subject and representation. Art historians acclaimed the painting as an accurate and even photographic representation of reality while explaining its meaning as an expression of the artist’s aspirations for personal nobility and his desire to ennoble the social status of painting from a manual craft to one of the liberal arts. They make a seemingly contradictory claim that the painting is at once a realistic representation of the outer world and a manifestation of the painter’s inner desire, paying little attention to the relationship between the two.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Michel Foucault’s provocative analysis of the painting in The Order of Things has the virtue of teasing out and elaborating upon the question of the subject and representation on a theoretical level. Foucault, however, privileges representation over the subject. He singles out Las Meninas as a pictorial exemplification of the Classical episteme that elided the subject and its representing act in the world of representation. Las Meninas only represents the three functions of representation―the painter, the model, and the spectator―in the dispersed figures in the painting, without representing the subject who remains invisible outside the picture plane. Las Meninas is a representation of representation, and its central focus is the mirror because it is a medium of pure representation without the subject, making visible what is invisible.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Jacques Lacan argues against Foucault that a picture involves the subject out of the structural necessity of the scopic drive. Drawing upon projective geometry that posits a vanishing point and a distance point, Lacan translates these two points respectively into the eye as the viewing subject and the gaze as the object a, the lost object of the subject. A picture contains these two points, doubly inscribing the split subject. In Las Meninas, the gaze or the gazing subject appears in Vel？zquez the painter while the eye appears in Nieto Vel？zquez, the painter’s namesake and duplication. The gaze or object a also appears in the interval between the painter and the canvas, and in the princess Margarita, whose skirt hides that sign of castration which betokens the primary loss of the subject. Las Meninas does not display a mirror of representation, but stages a window of fantasy in which the subject of the drive makes a circular movement around the object a. It is a Vorstellungsrepr？sentanz, a representative of representation that represents the lost-and thus unrepresentable-subject of the real.