This is Not a Play: Visual Heterotopias in René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame

Abstract

This article projects to comparatively study the construction of antirepresentational visual ‘other spaces’ in René Magritte’s The Treachery of Im ages, a painting that destabilizes and mocks rep resentationalism on canvas, and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, a play that performs a similar gesture on stage. Magritte and Beckett play on the bound aries that have traditionally separated the visible and the invisible in the visual arts and the theatre and construct some heterogenous spaces that de stabilize the viewers’/spectators’ linear perspec tival search for meaning. This is to be done by means of a critical re-appropriation of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia that he coined to refer to language’s ability to construct and juxtapose a multiplicity of spaces that both diverge and con verge. It is to be noted that the term was devised by the French thinker to refer, exclusively, to lin guistic spaces. The article seeks to transpose het erotopia from the purely linguistic to the visual. The aim is to show that there is in Magritte and Beckett a self-reflexive gaming with artistic crea tivity as a process through the creation of visual heterotopias. The focus is accordingly put on the twofold use of aesthetics in art/ theatre to decen tralize knowledge and the real, on the one hand, and put into doubt the very means through which they have historically operated, on the other.