Book Section
Arianna Sforzini
The Reenacted Double
Repetition as a Creative Paradox
The essay engages with a screenplay by Michel Foucault, written in 1970 for a film, not realized during Foucault’s lifetime, about Pablo Picasso’s Las Meninas, a series of 58 paintings that the artist made in 1957, taking up, updating, reinterpreting the famous painting with the same title by Diego Velázquez (1656). This screenplay is at the same time an example of critical reflection on reenactment in art history and itself a reenactment practice of sorts: the filmic repetition of an artistic repetition. It invites a reflection on the role of repetition as a critical operation: how doubles, reenacted images, and ‘counter-mimesis’ can become creative gestures and opening movements of transformation through plays of refraction, duplication, and multiplication of the realities and subjectivities at stake in them.
Keywords: double; repetition; representation; mimesis; Foucault, Michel; Velázquez, Diego; Picasso, Pablo; criticism
| Title |
The Reenacted Double
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| Subtitle |
Repetition as a Creative Paradox
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| Author(s) |
Arianna Sforzini
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| Identifier | |
| Description |
The essay engages with a screenplay by Michel Foucault, written in 1970 for a film, not realized during Foucault’s lifetime, about Pablo Picasso’s Las Meninas, a series of 58 paintings that the artist made in 1957, taking up, updating, reinterpreting the famous painting with the same title by Diego Velázquez (1656). This screenplay is at the same time an example of critical reflection on reenactment in art history and itself a reenactment practice of sorts: the filmic repetition of an artistic repetition. It invites a reflection on the role of repetition as a critical operation: how doubles, reenacted images, and ‘counter-mimesis’ can become creative gestures and opening movements of transformation through plays of refraction, duplication, and multiplication of the realities and subjectivities at stake in them.
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| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Berlin
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| Publisher |
ICI Berlin Press
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| Date |
4 January 2022
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| Subject |
double
repetition
representation
mimesis
Foucault, Michel
Velázquez, Diego
Picasso, Pablo
criticism
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| Rights |
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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| Language |
en-GB
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| page start |
19
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| page end |
27
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| Source |
Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 19–27
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References
- Bataille, Georges, La Part maudite (Paris: Minuit, 1949)
- Bataille, Georges, La Notion de dépense (Paris: Lignes, 2011)
- Blanchot, Maurice, Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, transl. by Brian Massumi and Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Zone Books, 1990)
- Deleuze, Gilles, The Logic of Sense, trans. by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990)
- Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)
- Foucault, Michel, ‘Ariane s’est pendue’, in Dits et écrits, I: 1954–1975, text no. 64, pp. 798–99
- Foucault, Michel, ‘Le Langage à l'infini’, in Dits et écrits, I, text no. 14, pp. 287–88
- Foucault, Michel, ‘What is Enlightenment’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 32–50
- Foucault, Michel, ‘Theatrum philosophicum’, in Dits et écrits, I, text no. 80, pp. 885–908, English as ‘Theatrum philosophicum’, trans. by Donald F. Brouchard and Sherry Simon, in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. by Paul Rabinow, 3 vols (New York: New Press, 1998–2001), II: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. by James D. Faubion (1998), pp. 343–68
- Foucault, Michel, Dits et écrits, ed. by Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 2001)
- Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. by Matthew Chrulew and Jeffrey Bussolini (London: Routledge, 2002)
- Foucault, Michel, ‘Les Ménines de Picasso’, in Michel Foucault, ed. by Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Frédéric Gros, and Judith Revel, Cahiers de l’Herne, 95 (Paris: L’Herne, 2011), pp. 14–32
- Foucault, Michel, Boîte 53, Foucault Archives, Bibliothèque nationale de France (NAF 28730)
- Le Subtil Oiseleur, Foucault de Velázquez à Picasso, dir. by Alain Jaubert (Éditions Montparnasse, 2020)
Cite as:
Arianna Sforzini, ‘The Reenacted Double: Repetition as a Creative Paradox’, in Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 19-27 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-21_03>