Leviathan or Las Meninas? Towards a new political gaze

Abstract

Among the many interpretations of Velázquez’s work, and of Las Meninas in particular, there are hardly any political readings. This is surprising, given that the mere presence of the Infanta Margarita in the painting makes them obligatory and that, as we will argue here, the very structure of Las Meninas can be contrasted with that of the image that constitutes the quintessential political expression of Western modernity: Hobbes’s Leviathan.

In fact, in Las Meninas, not only do the three elements that political theory attributes to the state - territory, population and power - appear, and which to this day find their paradigmatic expression in Leviathan, but, as we will also try to demonstrate, they do so in a way that would solve the problems that Hobbesian representation faces today, rendering it useless and obsolete.