Abstract

In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger remarks that "in a certain broad sense the Greeks looked on language from a visual point of view, that is, starting from the written language. It is in writing that the spoken language comes to stand. Language is, i.e. it stands in the written image of the word, in the written signs, the letters, grammata." The question broached here concerns a reading of Heidegger's claims for language--"the written image of the word"--in relation to received art historical notions of iconography . More specifically, the reading that is proposed repeats Merleau-Ponty's claim in his essay "Eye and Mind" that it might be possible to find "in paintings themselves a figured philosophy of vision and as its iconography." Situated in terms of a frontispiece for the Bible by Poussin and Rilke's Duino Elegies, the reading, in short, reposes the rapport between the visible and the invisible, reading and iconography, opened up in the writings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, a rapport that delimits the conditions of possibility of a phenomenological tradition in the history of art history