The Goyesque Gaze

This work interprets a series of widely neglected interventions by the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya that are fundamental to understanding how we see history and violence in our contemporary world of techné and spectacle. Through a close reading of some of the etchings in his series The Disasters of War (1810–15) and by means of an anti-historicist reading of modern liberal Spain, Goya is revealed to be a counter-Enlightenment, counter-Romantic, and counter-modern, author not determined by the modern will to power or classical subjectifying humanism. Ultimately, Goya challenges neoclassical modes of figuration, criticizes the narrativization of history, and distances himself from Moratín and Jovellanos and their conceptions of the relationship between power and Enlightenment knowledge. The ethos of Goya’s gaze nullifies any defeatist and tremendista readings of his late works, and what I call the ‘disfigures’ that populate The Disasters demonstrate the limits of power in the name of a dignity-potency of the people that pre-exists and resists the complete appropriation of contemporary scattered violence

Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · Close reading · Dignity · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Ethos · Historicism · Humanism · Literature · Political science · Power (physics · Reading (process · Sociology · Spectacle · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Law · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture · Visual Culture and Art Theory