David's Death of Marat as anti-totalitarian painting
example · painting: Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat ·
retold in 6 talks
Jacques-Louis David's painting shows Marat in the lower third and two-thirds darkness/void, a totalitarian regime would have filled the void with kitsch images of happy liberated people; the void proves the Jacobins were not totalitarian.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 5
“the lower half, you know, a bathtub, the dying Marat, blah blah, and you know what's the upper half? Nothing, just darkness.”
“You blow into this and you get Malevich, no? ...revolutionary activity is seen as something which has a terrifying anxiety dimension. Against the background of some dark abyss.”
“all the upper half of the painting, even more, is just black... The void remains.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
contents · one story, 3 jobsuses
pre-ontological reality
×1
ontological incompleteness
×1
geistige / spiritualization of form
×1
Its cast and sources
populated by
Jacques-Louis David5T. J. Clark4Kazimir Malevich3Eric Hobsbawm2Huey Long1Siegfried Jerusalem1Benno Fürmann1Kristanna Loken1
alongside works
Every retelling 6
Jacques-Louis David's painting shows Marat in the lower third and two-thirds darkness/void, a totalitarian regime would have filled the void with kitsch images of happy liberated people; the void proves the Jacobins were not totalitarian., illustrating Jacobin Terror vs Stalinist totalitarianism,art as political evidence
T.J. Clark argues David's painting is the first modernist painting because its upper half is pure darkness rather than a vision of the bright future, Žižek uses this to argue the Jacobins were not totalitarians, since they did not cover over the abyss with utopian fantasy., illustrating Jacobins and totalitarianism,Left and utopianism,modernism
T. J. Clark's reading of Jacques-Louis David's painting is used: the dark, empty upper half is not mere realistic wall but a pre-ontological void that makes it the first modernist painting, anticipating Malevich's black square., illustrating pre-ontological chaos,ontological incompleteness of reality,modernism
Jacques-Louis David's painting of the murdered Marat leaves the top half pure black, refusing the expected vision of future liberation that socialist realism would have inserted, marking the birth of modernist abstraction., illustrating spiritual mediation of form,abstract art,ideology and form
Žižek notes that the upper two-thirds of Jacques-Louis David's painting are simply darkness, unlike a totalitarian version, which would fill that space with a utopian dream of the revolutionary future. This refusal of easy justification makes it the first step toward Malevich's Black Square., illustrating revolutionary violence,ideology,art and politics
More than half of David's Death of Marat is just black; a Stalinist painting would fill it with happy future people, so the void proves the Jacobins were not totalitarians, a Malevich-like space above a dead fragment., illustrating Malevich up there just the space,Jacobins not totalitarian