Those who flee and those who see : Poussin’s drawing and withdrawing

Louis Marin sees the aesthetic realm as engendering power through its effects. The chiasmic intersplicing of allegorical text and image on a medal divides and arrests the spectator in the king-effect. It is real in the sense you can touch it and it is imaginary in that it reveals ‘baroque’ desire, the fantastic desire of absolute power. This paper explores the other side -- fragile, material, and gendered -- of Marin’s world to examine not so much the institution of power’s potential in the operation of grand ‘finished’ art works or art as ‘representation’, but a drawing by Poussin, which stages violent force (‘power in the most vulgar and general sense’) in relation to powerlessness, specifically the vulnerability of infants and women, their mothers. Rather than focus on the operation of power in relation to the great unleashers of absolutism and European wars, it inquires into a particular depiction of their victims, those caught up, against their will, in historical convulsion and into the strange precipitates of these forces in which the viewer is implicated. In light of recent work by Jean-Luc Nancy, Andrew Benjamin and other scholars, it considers what the drawing brings to its subject materially beyond representation.