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This Is Not a Pipe, with Illustrations and

Letters by Ren Magritte Michel Foucault
Translated and edited by James Harkness
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1983. Pp. x, 66, with 30 plates. \$14.95
Margaret van de Pitte
Dialogue / Volume 24 / Issue 04 / December 1985, pp 742 - 745
DOI: 10.1017/S0012217300016887, Published online: 13 April 2010

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Terror. After two "global" wars of quite a new kind, a dialectical resolution by
warfare ("the judgement of God") has become visibly impossiblewhich does
not, of course, guarantee that it will not be attempted. Because of the stalemate,
we live in a world in which Hegel's analysis of servitude and Stoicism is highly
relevant. But to call the international order of soulless economic corporations,
mindless unions, and "camps" of every kind (properly so-called because they all
house the homeless)to call all this "living in the universal homogeneous
state" whose advent Hegel proclaimed as an obvious travesty of his gospel of
spirit at home with itself in its own world.
Kojeve knows that "what is actual is rational". But Hegel was not the first to
lay that down, in the way that Kojeve takes it. Himself a homeless exile of the
1917 Revolution, he found in Hegel just the tools he needed to comprehend the
world that was coming to be. Like Hegel he was remarkably up to the moment.
But the only element in his "Hegelianism" that was not already in Hobbes is the
clear understanding that freedom is an absolute human value which is not
subordinate to prudence. Even in that connection, his existential ontology will
not allow him to see that, or to say u7?v, the freedom to die can become
rationalthe one transition that he understands depends on its obvious irrationality. Croce's "ethico-political history" contains no tools adequate to handle the
corporations, the unions, and the camps concretely. But he did have a justifiable
right to borrow Hegel's tag, and call his concept "History as the story of
liberty". In contrast, Kojeve's "wisdom" is pre-Hegelian, for it is only Hobbes
in Hegelian jargon, decked out in the very latest intellectual Paris fashions of the
1930s. It is another virtue of Cooper's book that he ignores those Paris modes
(themselves imported from Germany) and makes us see the link between 1649,
1793, and 1945 so clearly. But he thinks that this perennial truth is
"Hegelianism", and, although I am myself proud to acknowledge that I derived
my first real insight into Hegel's Phenomenology from Kojeve, I have to say
emphatically that this is not "the secret of Hegel". Croce was closer to it. If that
means that Hegel himself is not "modern" then so be it. But I think otherwise.
H.

s. HARRIS Gleiulon College, York University

This Is Not a Pipe, with Illustrations and Letters by Rene Magritte

MICHEL FOUCAULT

Translated and edited by JAMES HARKNESS

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983. Pp. x, 66, with 30 plates.
$14.95
Whatever doubts one might have about the possibility or utility of "deconstructing" the relation between language and reality, Foucault's views deserve
serious attention. (At worst attending to them will make one more content with
one's own ill-grounded language theory.) This book is a simple, lucid introduction to those views. It is also, for those interested in art, convincing criticism.
Foucault's reflections about the nature of the relation between art and language, and between language and reality, are rooted here in an analysis of the
Belgian surrealist, Rene Magritte. The two paintings in the Ceci n'est pas une
pipe series which are the subject of Foucault's first two chapters strike one at

Book ReviewslComptes rendus 743

once with their combination of extreme simplicity and seeming contradictoriness. In the first, titled Ceci n'est pas tine pipe, a super-realistic tobacco pipe
looms large in emptiness over the inscription of the title. In the second, the first
painting appears framed, on an easel ('?), standing in the corner of an empty
room. In the upper left quadrant floats an enormous pipe, identical to that in the
painting shown on the easel. This second painting is titled Les Deux mysteres.
Chapter one articulates the strangeness of these paintings. The first presents
image and statement in contradiction; the second systematically compounds its
ambiguity. We cannot be certain about the objects represented (pipes or drawings of pipes, sentences or drawing of sentences, easels or blackboards) nor
about the meaning of the inscription (is it about pipes, drawings of pipes, itself
qua sentence; is it merely a drawing of a sentence?), nor even about the relative
sizes and relations of the elements in the painting. By showing precisely the
grounds of our perplexity before the paintings, Foucault stimulates the philosopher to worry more energetically about the difficulties surrounding the concepts
of perception, art, and language.
In the second chapter, Foucault argues that the strangeness of Ceci n'est pas
line pipe consists in an explicable yet irreducible tension between the image (the
pipe) and the linguistic element (the statement, "Ceci n'est pas nne pipe").
(There is, of course, a parallel tension between the painting and its title.) We
cannot say of the inscription that it contradicts the image (sentences are contradictions of other sentences, not of images), that it is false (if the sentence
means that a drawing of a pipe is not a pipe) or that it is true (if the sentence
means that a drawing of a pipe is a pipe). We", therefore, cannot make anything
out of it on the level on which it is presented. We can, however, derive from it a
thesis about the relations between words, images, and objects. Foucault helps us
to this by applying a very clever analysis of the concept of a calligram to the case
at hand.
A calligram is visually shaped languagea poem fitted to the frame of a
physical object. Does it fill, or disappear into, the gap between language and
pictorial representation? Characteristically, Foucault replies "yes". A calligram plays with sets of oppositionsshowing and naming, imitating and signifying, looking and reading. But it can only sport in the space between words and
images, it cannot reconcile them. Foucault thinks of Magritte's paintings as
self-deconstructing calligrams. The message contained in their purposive unintelligibility is that "the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to
show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imiate
and to signify; to look and to read" (21) all miss the mark. We cannot both "be"
and "understand", "see" and "say" what we see. The tension in Magritte's
paintings between the representational and graphic elements minorsit is
ironical that one must use this wordthe seemingly unbridgable gap between
language and experience, between consciousness and reality.
A brief central chapter on Klee and Kandinsky provides a background for an
assessment of Magritte's contribution to the controversion of the fundamental
principles of traditional representational painting. Klee subverts the first principle, the principle of the separation of plastic representation and linguistic
referencethe former mirroring the real directly and the latter employing symbols with no real relation to what they symbolizeby painting linguistic elements (letters, words, figures, signs) into his pictures. He succeeds in represent-

744

Dialogue

ing both with (shapes of objects, etc.) and without (by using conventions of
writing, musical notation, etc.) having some things resemble others. We are to
understand by this that representation by resemblance is not only not superior
to. it is perhaps not even importantly different from, symbolic (non-resembling)
representation.
It is not clear to this point whether this is because real and symbolic representations are alike suited to, or are alike inappropriate to. subsuming reality under
understanding. Foucault's approbation of Kandinsky's overthrow of the second
principle of traditional painting implies an endorsement of the latter alternative.
This second principle "posits an equivalence between the fact of resemblance
and the affirmation of a representative bond" (33). In his painting, Kandinsky
disassociated the terms of the equivalence. The literal representationalism of
Magritte's work is theoretically opposed to Klee and Kandinsky while a factual
combination of their positions. Its contrived, self-conscious refusal or failure to
represent {"Ceci n'est pas une pipe") is worked out in a meticulously representational way (super-realistic painting of a pipe).
Thus far we have an interesting report by a philosopher on his efforts to
pinpoint whatever it is that makes Magritte's paintings arresting and puzzling.
The next three chapters make the philosophical point. However, as is usual
throughout this book, they do so more by way of suggestion than by sustained
argument.
Anyone unversed in recent French philosophy must be wondering about the
merits of disassociating resemblance and affirmation, reality and language,
which is Magritte's cardinal achievement. Is it to make us understand more
deeply those relations, or is it to encourage us to deny them? The title of the
fourth chapter, "Burrowing Words", only hints at Foucault's radically subversive intent. Magritte's transparently incongruous presentation of linguistic and
visual elements promotes reflection on the nature of naming, on the nature and
function of language. Foucault offers Heideggerian/Sartrean insights into the
constitutive function of language for human experience, into its capacity, by
means of simple naming, clarification, precision, affirmation, denial, for shaping
ontology. These insights suggest not only how the nature of experience has been
determined, but also how we can invent new determinations for objects and new
relations between them. Presumably with the right linguistic theory, we can play
a more active role in the generation of conceptual frameworks. There are also
interesting observations about the capacity that some objects have to play a role
in determining their own names, and about how certain of our expressions
("night falls", for example) can seem natural and appropriate despite the fact
that they are fundamentally absurd. This is grist for philosophical reflection.
The chapterfollowing offers only the barest outline of the results of Foucault's
own reflection. Magritte and his contemporaries substitute the (weak) principle
of similitude for the (strong) principle of representation in painting. Foucault
obviously finds this philosophically as well as artistically liberating: "Resemblance serves representation which rules over it, similitude serves repetition,
which ranges across it. Resemblance predicates itself upon a model it must
return to and reveal; similitude circulates the simulacrum as an indefinite and
reversible relation of the similar to the similar" (44). Or is it philosophically
licentious? Not at first glanceresemblance discloses what was in fact already
apparent, while similitude performs the much more useful function of revealing

Book Reviews/Comptes

rendus

745

the concealed aspects of things. But a problem arises if one supposes that
thought itself is basically representational. For Foucault, the relation between
thought and its objects is one of resemblance, with no trace of similitude,
whereas relations among objects are relations of similitude, with no trace of
resemblance: "Magritte's painting doubtless rests here, where thought in the
mode of resemblance and things in relations of similitude have just vertically
intersected" (47). Are we to conclude then that Magritte's paintings disclose a
real and radical disproportion between language, thought, and things? Are we
being urged to adopt a sort of game-theoretical account of experience
resemblance and affirmation go together; resembling thought is inadequate to its
task: affirmation is thus groundless; we can continue to delude ourselves about
this: or we can embrace with Nietzschean enthusiasm the inadeqtiatio rei et
intellect/is and invent reality, with all the seriousness or whimsy at our disposal,
providing we know what we are about? Foucault does not openly show his hand,
but his radical relativism can be handily inferred on the basis of what he says in
his final chapter summing up his analyses of Ceci n'est pas tine pipe. Magritte
"skirts the base of affirmative discourse on which resemblance calmly reposes,
and he brings pure similitude and non-affirmative verbal statements into play
within the instability of a disoriented volume and an unmapped space" (53-54).
Andy Warhol has already created the painting which is the logical extension (the
perfection, the redtictio ad absiirdmn, ... ?) of Magritte's achievement. Foucault concludes with obvious relish that "A day will come when, by means of
similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image itself, along
with the name it bears, will lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell,
Campbell" (54). One need not necessarily turn to Foucault's heavier works to
discover whether he anticipates with equal relish a correlative transformation in
epistemology.
MARGARET VAN DE PiTTE

University of Alberta

VernunftErkenntnis Sittlichkeit
PETER SCHRODER, Herausgeber
Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1979. x, 334 p.
Ce beau livre bien relie et dans une couverture bleue veloutee contient, ce que le
titre ne permet pas d'inferer, les actes d'un colloque tenu en 1977 a l'occasion du
cinquantieme anniversaire de la mort du philosophe allemand Leonard Nelson
(1882-1927). II faut dire qu'il n'y a pas beaucoup d'interet pour Nelson sur notre
continent. Des huit articles a son sujet releves parle Philosopher's Index depuis
1970, quatre proviennent du livre ici recense; deux autres, de philosophes
espagnolsecrivantdansle meme numero de la meme revue (Convivium) en 1974;
et les deux derniers, d'une eleve de Nelson, du reste l'auteure de l'article a son
sujet dans I" Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Collier-Macmillan).
Pourtant, la pensee de Nelson ne manque justement pas d'interet. Cette
pensee consiste en effet en un criticisme post-kantien d'une allure bien particuliere, a savoir que Nelson, a l'instar de Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843), sur
lequel il se modela, considerait le criticisme de Kant non pas comme un systeme
philosophique. mais comme une methode. En particulier. Nelson cherchait.