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Pipe Dreams: Eternal Recurrence And Simulacrum And Foucault's Ekphrasis Of Magritte, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Michel Foucault invokes Andy Warhol at the conclusion of This is Not a Pipe; this comes at the end of a chapter entitled 'Seven Seals of Affirmation,' so that the words must be read with a Nietzschean resonance (recalling Zarathustra's 'The Seven Seals'):

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.

I propose to explore the approach to the visual here which proceeds by deploying or presupposing conceptions of similitude, simulacrum, eternal recurrence and …