The Theatre of Identity, ACT, and the Power over Life and Death: On Las Meninas

A critical essay on Velázquez's Las Meninas. Drawing on writings on Las Meninas by John Searle, Snyder & Cohen, Foucault, Leo Steinberg, Byron E. Hamann, and others, the essay recasts the space of painting as representation-as-theatre (or what is generally taken to be so) as a question: “How is it open to bodily indeterminacy, the non-identity of the spectator, and a reversal between the painting and the world on this side of it—that is, the possibility of power over life and death?” To pursue this reformulation, the essay focuses on and reconsiders formal analysis, the act of “painting,” the reversal of viewpoints and the opening and closing of the field of vision, and so on.

Moreover, this is not simply a “new interpretation within the history of Western art.” Drawing on Byron E. Hamann’s essay from a postcolonial perspective, the essay also concerns the products from the colonies (South America) depicted in the painting, as well as an empire in the process of collapse. It is also about speaking from the Japanese archipelago, at the eastern end of the Eurasian continent, toward Europe at its western end.