This Volume illuminates the notion of meaning in the arts-in literature, painting, music, and dance. Specific topics include theory in the arts; interpretations of meaning; objectivity in meaning; and the consumer as a participant in art. Brings together articles from prominent philosophers and practitioners of the arts, which illuminate the notion of meaning in the arts. Addresses meaning in literature, painting, music, and dance. Explores the relationship between authorial intentions and the viewer's interpretation of meaning; the possibility of objective meaning; (...) and the role of the consumer as a participant in the work of art. (shrink)

With this widely acclaimed work, Fried revised the way in which eighteenth-century French painting and criticism were viewed and understood. "A reinterpretation supported by immense learning and by a series of brilliantly perceptive readings of paintings and criticism alike.... An exhilarating book." John Barrell, "London Review of Books".

The historicist approach is rarely challenged by art historians, who draw a clear distinction between art history and the present-centred pursuit of art criticism. The notion of the 'period eye' offers a relevant methodology. Bearing this in mind, I examine the nineteenth-century phase in the development of history painting, when artists started to take trouble over the accuracy of historical detail, instead of repeating conventions for portraying classical and biblical subjects. This created an unprecedented situation at the Paris Salon, where (...) such representations of history could be experienced as a collective 'dream-work', in Freud's sense. In France, this new pictorial language dates back to the aftermath of the Revolution, and the activities of the 'Lyon School'. Two artists, Richard and Révoil, were its leading proponents. However their initial closeness has obscured the differences in their approach to the past. Substituting for Freud's 'condensation' and 'displacement' the concepts of 'Resurrection' and 'Restoration', I analyse the pictorial language of the two painters, taking two works as examples. The conclusion is that Révoil, also a collector, was a precursor of the historical museum, which convinces through accumulating objects. Richard, however, employs technical and rhetorical devices to evoke empathetic reactions, and anticipates the illusionism of cinema. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 399-424 [Access article in PDF] Representation and the Body of Power in French Academic Painting Amy M. Schmitter [Figures] Reputation of power, is Power... Hobbes, Leviathan, Bk. I, ch. x Introduction It seems natural, even obvious, to distinguish between representations and what they are representations of. A picture of a dog is no more a dog than the word "dog" (...) is a furry, tail-wagging mammal. Nor are properties belonging to the object of a representation necessarily properties of the representation: a picture of a big dog need not be big, a picture of a dog that resembles Fido need not resemble Fido; even a picture of brown Fido need not be brown. And no number of pictures of Fido will sympathetically induce changes in Fido or any other dog. But however clear-cut this distinction may be when what is in question are pictorial references to ordinary, middle-sized material particulars such as dogs, it is much less clear in other cases. It is no violation of common-sense to consider "representations" of such things as gender norms or national identities or selves as non-neutral in the face of what they represent. The representations of gender norms, for example, can extend and enforce them, can change or undermine them, and may well lend a hand in constituting them in the first place.My theme here is a form of pictorial representation, one found in the theory and practice of that strain of French Academic painting under Louis XIV associated with Charles LeBrun. LeBrun held the titles of First Painter to the King and Director of the French Royal Academy of Painting, and the works I will examine were devoted to the royal power. That one effect of royal power is the ability to command resources and to cause the proliferation of representations, especially flattering representations, is no surprise. But I intend to suggest something stronger: not only did these Academic representations present an expenditure [End Page 399] of royal power, they were meant to embody and therefore extend royal power—even to constitute royal power. The view under examination does not simply collapse the common-sense distinction between signifying properties and what is signified; indeed those relations play an important role in one concept of representation modeled on language and written texts. But to this the academicians added another, more robust concept, one that does not distinguish clearly between the representation and its object.Implausible as this view may seem at first blush, I think it can prove genuinely explanatory: explanatory for thinking about pictorial representation, about how it can operate (on both its object and its viewer), and about its relation to power. But to see its explanatory value demands considering the nature and needs of state power. For unlike middle-sized material particulars, state power requires recognition to exist. Although that recognition need not be explicit, conscious, or voluntary, it must be widespread, and pictorial representations can be a powerful device for eliciting such recognition. Yet state power in general— or at least the particular form in question here—may demand that the constitutive role of recognition be disguised. Indeed many of the views and concepts of pictorial representation developed by the Academy reverse the dependence of power on recognition; they function in an ideology of representation. Nonetheless, I think that certain "formal," or structural, features of LeBrun's works can be explained in terms of how they elicit recognition and constitute this particular form of royal power. I make no claim that LeBrun's works must be explained so: for one, the royal power represented by LeBrun's works is long gone, and his representations do not now have any miraculous power to raise the dead. For any representations actually to operate as I suggest requires the support of a whole complex of institutions and activities committed to the care and feeding of state power. It is only because such a complex did exist that LeBrun's representations could have a recognizable object, i... (shrink)

The work of the eminent French cultural critic Louis Marin (1931-92) is becoming increasingly important to English-speaking scholars concerned with issues of representation. To Destroy Painting, first published in France in 1977, marks a milestone in Marin's thought about the aims of painting in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A meditation on the work of Poussin and Caravaggio and on their milieux, the book explores a number of notions implied by theories of painting and offers insight into (...) the aims and effects of visual representaion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern ArtMatthew ZiffPainting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, by David W. Galenson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001, 272 pp., $29.95.The relationship between the market value of paintings and the chronological point in an artist's working life when the paintings were produced is the driving mechanism for exploring creativity and innovation in David W. Galenson's book "Painting (...) Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art. The working thesis of this book is that Modern artists have worked creatively and innovatively in one of two distinctly different manners. The terminology Galenson uses to describe these distinct ways of working are "finders" and "seekers." Finders are artists like Pablo Picasso, who at age 26, make startling and important innovations with little advance indication that such a burst is about to take place. Seekers are artists like Paul Cezanne, whospend their entire working lives engaged in the pursuit of a singular approach or achievement. The differences between these methodologies are carefully presented through the details of the working lives of a variety of Modern artists. French nineteenth century and early twentieth-century artists and mid-twentieth-century American artists are used as the source data for these comparisons.Early in the book Galenson presents lists of chronological events within the lives of artists and market valuation of their work within this chronology. The dramatic clarity of the relationships presented in this data sets the stage for the detailed information that follows. Factors that in some cases only partly, and in others nearly completely, explain an artist's way of working are offered through biographic information, information about the aesthetic and cultural milieu, and about the economic and educational structures that are predominant during the relevant time in the life of the artist.The relationship between the aesthetic and cultural milieu surrounding an artist and the capacity or inclination of an artist to be innovative is an important aspect of the book's analysis. The scope of the book is limited to Modern artists because of the shift that took place at the outset of Modern art, during the mid 1860s, that brought a strong emphasis on innovation and change for their own sake as an important characteristic within a work of art. This emphasis "created incentives for painters to produce new approaches to art" (p. 111). Prior to the time of Modern art, innovation and change were often unnecessary for an artist to be successful. Modern art introduced the demand that innovation and change be necessary ingredients in art, and therefore the search for innovation became a significant element within the work of many artists. The manner in which this search took place, as presented through the data at hand, reveals how individual artists viewed the need for innovation and change within their own [End Page 123] work. Paul Cezanne, for example, was aware of the impact that his painting was having on the art world, but he insisted that he was not yet finished with discoveries that would reveal the truest expression of his beliefs about aesthetic expression.In the American movement, "Abstract Expressionism," Galenson finds a useful counter example to the art scene in Paris. In the United States, especially during the 1940s and 1950s — the peak years of creative output by Abstract Expressionist artists — the demand for their work was quite low. There were few economically viable outlets for the work of de Kooning, Pollack, Rothko, and the others of this group. Consequently there is a shift in the chronological point at which these artists achieve market value success. Nearly all of these artists receivedrecognition at an older age than the French artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The thesis of the book, that there are two fundamentally different ways of working to produce works of art, is directly applicable to, and useful in, exploring issues of teaching and learning in design education. As a teacher of interior architecture I was interested to follow the details that Galenson presented in support of his analysis of the careers of numerous Modern artists. The methodological differences between seeking and... (shrink)

Analyzing Montaigne's triptych painting, “Of the Education of Children,” reveals a series of ever-morphing, Dorian Gray–like canvases that depict metaphor mutations through which Montaigne defined education by distinguishing between schooling a child into a learned man and educating him into an able, active, and gentle person. Montaigne used metaphor and metaphor clusters to image key points in his educational philosophy, advanced his argument by intertwining, transmuting, and inverting metaphors, and thereby drew and vividly painted his philosophy of how to educate (...) a person from cradle to coffin. Because the etymology and pronunciation of “essay” (from the French essai) support Montaigne's imaging and exploiting of this genre's creative potential, Virginia Worley begins by considering the term's etymology before positioning her analysis of Montaigne's work within metaphor research. She then examines the metaphors Montaigne used to paint the triptych word painting that embodies his philosophy of education: the meaning and value of educating in and for the art of living well. (shrink)

In this powerful new study Edward Baring sheds fresh light on Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential yet controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Reading Derrida from a historical perspective and drawing on new archival sources, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy shows how Derrida's thought arose in the closely contested space of post-war French intellectual life, developing in response to Sartrian existentialism, religious philosophy and the structuralism that found its base at the École Normale Supe;rieure. In (...) a history of the philosophical movements and academic institutions of post-war France, Baring paints a portrait of a community caught between humanism and anti-humanism, providing a radically new interpretation of the genesis of deconstruction and of one of the most vibrant intellectual moments of modern times. (shrink)

Adrian Stokes , long admired by a small, highly distinguished, mostly English circle, was the natural successor to Pater and Ruskin. But though his place in cultural history is important, what is of particular interest now to art historians is his theory of the presentness of painting, a theory which offers a challenging critique of the practice of artwriting. From Vasari to the present, the most familiar rhetorical strategy of the art historian is the narrative of “the form, prophet-saviour-apostles,” in (...) which the first artist poses some problem that his successors develop and their successors solve.1 Such very different books as Art and Illusion and Art and Culture deploy that plan. The three periods of naturalism in E. H. Gombrich’s narrative—antiquity, Renaissance religious narrative, nineteenth-century landscape—function like Clement Greenberg’s sequence—old master art, early French modernism, American abstract expressionism. Gombrich and Greenberg disagree about how to narrate art’s history and about which works to include in that narrative—Gombrich asserts that cubism closes the canon while for Greenberg analytical cubism anticipates Jackson Pollock—but in each case, the art historian aims, as the novelist does, to tell a satisfying story and achieve narrative closure, and so how we think of the artworks the historian discusses depends in part upon the structure of the narrative. In a certain mood, we may find this fact intolerable. Why should a mere text tell us how to see the painting we may stand before?Stokes’ attempt to respond to this mood belongs to a tradition of early twentieth-century antihistorical thinking. For Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin’s sculpture aimed to “refer to nothing that lay beyond it.” For Ezra Pound, an image “is real because we know it directly”; Henri Gaudier-Brzeska could read Chinese ideograms without knowing that language because those ideograms are transparently meaningful images. For Wyndham Lewis, a musical piece is inferior to a statue, “always there in its entirety before you.”2 Such an artwork need not be interpreted because it contains “within itself all that is relevant to itself.”3 All art is accessible to the gifted observer, and time is, in an interesting double sense, irrelevant. We see directly the meaning of works even from distant cultures; the visual artwork is experienced all at once, outside of time. If these claims are correct, what is the artwriter to do? Speaking of the Tempio Malatestiana, Hugh Kenner points to this issue:There is no description of the Tempio in accordance with good Vorticist logic: one art does not attempt what another can do better, and the meaning of the Tempio has been fully explicated on the spot by Agostino di Duccio with his chisel.4 1. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450 , p. 75.2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil , p. 19; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir , p. 86; Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man , p. 174.3. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image , p. 107.4. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era , p. 428. David Carrier, associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University, is coauthor, with Mark Roskill, of Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images and author of the forthcoming Artwriting, a study of recent American art criticism. He is working on a history of art history. (shrink)

This book explores how traditional relations among the arts have changed in our time, focusing on the radical transformation of Paul Cezanne.

In the pages that follow I looked closely at two major paintings by Gustave Courbet : the After Dinner at Ornans, perhaps begun in the small town of the title but certainly completed in Paris during the winter of 1848-49; and the Stonebreakers, painted wholly in Ornans just under a year later. The After Dinner and the Stonebreakers are the first in a series of large multifigure compositions--others are the Burial at Ornans and the Peasants of Flagey Returning from the (...) Fair —that mark not only Courbet's maturity as an artist but his emergence as a disruptive force, almost a one-man wrecking crew, in the cultural politics of his time. They are also those works in which his self-declared identity as a Realist first becomes manifest, and probably the chief concern of the most interesting recent scholarship on Courbet has been to try to decode that epithet in social-historical terms, or at any rate to situate his activity as a painter during the years 1848-55 in the context of the social and political struggles that accompanied the creation of the Second Republic and its subversion by Louis Bonaparte.2 At the core of that tradition, motivating and, as it were, mobilizing it, is the demand that the painter succeed in placing in abeyance the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld—that he contrive in one way or another to establish the fiction, the meta-illusion, that the beholder does not exist, that there is no one standing before the picture. From Greuze through Gèricault, this was chiefly to be accomplished in and through the medium of visual drama, that is, by representing figures so deeply absorbed in their actions, emotions, and states of mind and furthermore so efficaciously bound together in a single comprehensive dramatic situation that they would strike one as absolutely immured in the world of the painting and a fortiori as oblivious to the very possibility of being viewed. And one way of describing the crisis that I believe overtook French painting by the 1820s and '30s is to say that the dramatic as such came more and more to be revealed as inescapably theatrical—that the array of conventions that once had served to establish the meta-illusion of the beholder's nonexistence now seemed merely to attest to his controlling presence.1. The present essay is adapted from a book-length study, in progress, of Courbet's art. Recent books and articles emphasizing social and political considerations include Linda Nochlin, Gustave Courbet: A Study of Style and Society ; T.J. Clark, "A Bourgeois Dance of Death: Max Buchon on Courbet," Burlington Magazine 111 : 208-12, 282-89, and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-51 ; Jack LIndsay, Gustave Courbet: His Life and Art ; Klaus Herding, ed., Realismus als Widerspruch: Die Wirklichkeit in Courbets Malerei ; Herding, "Les Lutteurs 'détestables': Critique de style, critique sociale," Histoire et critique de l'art 4-5 : 94-122; and James Henry Rubin, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and Proudhon .2. For an account of the early evolution of that tradition, see my Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot , as well as the essays on Courbet cited in n. 3.Michael Fried, professor of humanities and the history of art at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Morris Louis and Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. He is currently at work on a book on Courbet. (shrink)

In this encounter between one of the twentieth century greatest philosophical minds and an artist fundamental to our understanding of the development of modern art, Michel Foucault explores Manet.s importance in the overthrow of traditional values in painting.

Resumen: El presente artículo analiza el problema de la afectividad en la concepción de la Fenomenología de la vida del filósofo francés Michel Henry, quien la concibe como fundamento de la subjetividad y esencia de la manifestación. Henry realiza un análisis de la obra del pintor Vasily Kandinsky, y muestra cómo la pintura abstracta, no figurativa, logra expresar en los colores y formas aquello invisible que es la esencia de la pintura y que coincide a su vez con la Vida. (...) La concepción de abstracción elaborada por Kandinsky refiere al contenido invisible e interior, que se expresa a través de colores y formas, pero que es la vida misma en su pathos subjetivo fundamental. De este modo, según Henry, el arte se transformaría en único lenguaje para expresar la radicalidad de la vida afectiva, porque no representa nada exterior o extraño, su contenido es la vida misma.: The present article analyzes the problem of affectivity in French philosopher Michel Henry's conception of Phenomenology of life, conceived of as the foundation of the subjectivity and the essence of the manifestation. Henry analyzes the work of the painter Vasily Kandinsky, showing how abstract and non-figurative painting expresses in colors and forms something invisible, which is the essence of the painting and coincides with the Life. Kandinsky's conception of abstraction refers to the invisible and the inner content, which expresses itself through colors and forms, being the life itself in its fundamental subjective pathos. In this way, the art becomes the only language capable to express the radicality of the affective life, because it does not represent anything exterior or foreign, being its content the life itself. (shrink)

SUMMARYEarly modern artists who did not have access to Roman Antiquity or needed quick access to it could refer to prints after monuments such as those issued by Antoine Lafréry. But Du Choul's Discours sur la castrametation et discipline militaire des Romains [ … ] De la Religion des anciens Romains was also successful among artists, particularly painters. It was in vernacular language and widely available in French, Spanish and Italian; it was affordable and compact in format ; it (...) had plenty of woodcuts; and it focused on the Roman military life, besides the monuments, for which information could also be found in travel guides. The present essay aims to study how Du Choul's volume circulated, with several examples from Spain and Italy. The Discours will be used as a case study of artists as readers, and I will study aspects previously overlooked such as the book's market price in the early modern period, examples of use of copies of the book by artists and, more broadly, the troubles and challenges encountered by these readers when representing subjects from ancient history. (shrink)

The article examines the French philosopher Jean Brun’s perception of the contemporary world, by analyzing the three pivotal components of Brun’s work, i.e., technology, language and sacredness. Modern people’s desperate attempts to escape their tragic destiny by trying to conceal the sacred lull human beings into an illusion of becoming creators of a technology-ruled space. In an attempt to escape the web of metaphysical anxiety associated with regrets, ontological Absence and separation, modern people hope to shelter behind the shield (...) of materialism, horizontality and relativism. The article shows that, according to Jean Brun, technology and science are nothing but a veil, a painted veil with a sophisticated image of human deification. In an attempt at self-transformation, human beings, enslaved by technology, become the measure of all things. In their pursuit of absolute and ultimate knowledge, people focus their self-transformation on being rather than on cognition. Technology nurtured by excessive knowledge inevitably provokes alienation and robs humankind of humanistic, philosophical and religious sense. Finding themselves in an artificial, virtual reality where consumption and greed prevail, people easily reject objective reality. The instrumentalization of language enables standards and programs to plan all human activity. However, asking the question “Who am I?” instead of “What am I?”, human beings can cease seeing themselves in the center of the universe, can stop the process of alienation, can assess the world’s reality and the appeal of Everything Else. (shrink)

Modern critics often regard Goya's etchings and black paintings as satirical observations on the social and political conditions of his times. In a study of Goya first published in 1950, which seldom receives the attention it merits, the French author and art theorist André Malraux contends that these works have a much deeper significance. The etchings and black paintings, Malraux argues, represent a fundamental challenge to the humanist artistic tradition that began with the Renaissance - a tradition founded on (...) the pursuit of a transcendent world of nobility, harmony and beauty. Following an illness that left him deaf for life, Goya developed an art of a fundamentally different kind - an art, Malraux writes, ruled by ‘the unity of the prison house’ which replaced transcendence with a pervasive feeling of dependence and from which all trace of humanism has been erased. Foreshadowing modern art's abandonment of the Renaissance ideal, the etchings and black paintings are the first announcement of the death of beauty in Western art. (shrink)

This article aims to elucidate the Chinese literatus Su Shi's painting theory using French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's concepts of “capturing forces” and “becoming.” In the relevant scholarship, Su Shi's esthetic thought has been illustrated as going beyond the truthful representation of forms, thereby capturing the underlying vitality of the targeted objects, which paved the way for what came to be known as “literati painting.” This artistic approach has been thought to express the artist's lofty and virtuous personality through the (...) liveliness of the objects. I fully embrace the “capturing vitality” part of the literature, further fleshing it out not just by closely analyzing some of Su Shi's extant writings on painting but also by assessing them side by side with such European painters as Paul Cézanne and Francis Bacon. However, I find the “expressing personality” counterpart to be rather limited for interpreting Su Shi's esthetic thought and instead suggest the artistic effect of “becoming” as central to his ultimate esthetic aims. (shrink)

From around the year 1900, the ideal of the equivalence of art (form) and nature (animated matter) was challenged when two concurring principles—homogeneous duration and heterogeneous moments—started to manifest themselves in the discrete attempts of artists to integrate being into art. As creative approaches to the perception and representation of nature, these diametrically opposed configurations find expression in the writings of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, mainly between 1889 and 1907. The notion of living forms in permanent transition, informed (...) by evolutionary theory, found its social expression in a growing urban dynamism. Subsequently, the obsolete epistemological Apollonian principle of a central perspective in painting, based on a timeless, static Newtonian space, gave way to the Dionysian ontological principle—radically questioning the unity of being and form in the creative process. Initially, this change was particularly evident in the paintings of Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne. While Monet envisions a homogeneous space of instantaneous time (the separate moment), Cézanne's distinctive Post-Impressionist dynamic representations of continuous becoming can be read as contemporary pictorial counterparts of the Bergsonian concepts of duration, memory, and vital force. Thus, Bergson's psycho-physiological principle of endurance, in which perceptions and memories of distinct physical phenomena interpenetrate multitudinously, gradually becomes a dominant feature in the works of numerous artists who inherit Monet's and, especially, Cézanne's aesthetic notions. (shrink)

In 2008, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon acquired a painting called The Flight into Egypt which was attributed to the French artist Nicolas Poussin. Thought to have been painted in 1657, the painting had gone missing for more than three centuries. Several versions were rediscovered in the 1980s and one was passed from hand to hand, from a family who had no idea of its value to gallery owners and eventually to the museum. A painting that had been (...) sold as a decorative object in 1986 for around 12,000 euros was acquired two decades later by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon for 17 million euros. What does this remarkable story tell us about the nature of art and the way that it is valued? How is it that what seemed to be just an ordinary canvas could be transformed into a masterpiece, that a decorative object could become a national treasure? This is a story permeated by social magic the social alchemy that transforms lead into gold, the ordinary into the extraordinary, the profane into the sacred. Focusing on this extraordinary case, Bernard Lahire lays bare the beliefs and social processes that underpin the creation of a masterpiece. Like a detective piecing together the clues in an unsolved mystery he carefully reconstructs the steps that led from the same material object being treated as a copy of insignificant value to being endowed with the status of a highly-prized painting commanding a record-breaking price. He thereby shows that a painting is never just a painting, and is always more than a piece of stretched canvass to which brush strokes of paint have been applied: this object, and the value we attach to it, is also the product of a complex array of social processes – with its distinctive institutions and experts – that lies behind it. And through the history of this painting, Lahire uncovers some of the fundamental structures of our social world. For the social magic that can transform a painting from a simple copy into a masterpiece is similar to the social magic that is present throughout our societies, in economics and politics as much as art and religion, a magic that results from the spell cast by power on those who tacitly recognize its authority. By following the trail of a single work of art, Lahire interrogates the foundations on which our perceptions of value and our belief in institutions rest and exposes the forms of domination which lie hidden behind our admiration of works of art. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century England saw the rise of a "peculiarly English" art form—landscape gardening—and a corresponding change in attitudes toward the antural world. While the French, who lived under tyranny, had a tightly organized, restrictive gardens, the "free" English enjoyed gardens where they were at liberty to wander. John Dixon Hunt examines eighteenth-century letters, literary and critical works, biographies, paintings, prints, and drawings to trace the gradual movement from formal regularity toward a carefully calculated naturalness.

At Pech Merle in 1952, André Breton provoked a controversial incident by damaging a Palaeolithic wall painting that he suspected to be a fake. This episode provides an insight into the contested status of prehistoric sites in post-war France and the theoretical and ideological implications of their cultural mobilization. Such sites allowed for a disavowal of wartime trauma and supported the reaffirmation of French national identity and its civilizing mission by locating the birthplace of human culture on French (...) soil. Yet their extreme age also threw into relief the relative fragility of the recently invented nation-state. Breton's vandalism cast doubt on the models of cultural progress and pre-eminence that sought to instrumentalize prehistoric art but failed to appreciate the subversiveness of its ‘deep’ history. Ironically, however, Breton's scepticism ultimately enhanced the subversive dimension of archaeology by allowing it to demonstrate the authenticity and age of cave art. (shrink)

This collection of 16 essays brings 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson's work on immanence together with the latest ideas in art theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, photography and film. It places Bergson's work and influence in a wide historical context and applies a rigorous conceptual framework to contemporary art theory and practice.

PART INTRODUCTIONS TO MERLEAU- PONTY'S PHI LOSOPH Y OF PAI NTI NG Galen A. Johnson ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789Patrick HenryCitizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789, by Daniel Gordon; viii & 270 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, $39.50.Under examination here is the early modern period in France from Louis XIV to the French Revolution when kings ruled absolutely and citizens were without sovereignty. Discarding the traditional image of the Enlightenment (...) as the absolute enemy of absolutism, Gordon, in this sense, follows Norbert Elias and Robert Darnton who treat the Enlightenment as part of an elitist and hierarchical establishment. More specifically, as his subtitle indicates, Gordon portrays the invention of a “nonpolitical polis” (p. 6), an ideological social space where, despite political inequality, citizens could practice social equality in a hierarchical régime. The rise of this “nondemocratic egalitarian ethos” (p. 7) brought with it a new cult of sociabilité, a term invented in the eighteenth century to describe the idealization of the private sphere and the practice of social equality.The first chapter, then, ties sociability not to democracy, as in the Habermasian model, but to the absolutism that stimulated it and coexisted with it. A series of five ideal types of sociability depict how men and women, members of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, came together—in commerce, public welfare, scientific academies, salons, cafés, public libraries, and various other social situations not protorevolutionary in character—to create a bond among equals [End Page 279] under the ancien régime. In this framework, progress and modernity are born during the absolute monarchy where sociability suggests conviviality rather than class warfare. Every major French novel of the eighteenth century supports Gordon’s refutation of De Toqueville’s surprising statement that “noblemen and bourgeois never met except by chance in private life “in prerevolutionary France” (p. 27).In chapters two and three, Gordon examines the nature of the rules of sociability found in courtesy literature and their functioning as the imagined basis of the newly invented idealized space called société. In addition to analyzing in great detail the nature and frequency of the vocabulary invented to define and describe sociabilité, Gordon discusses sociabilité in the context of natural law theory in Hobbes, Bossuet, and among others, Pufendorf, who wanted to refute Hobbes by showing that self-interest leads humans to establish stable social relations even before government orders them to do so. Holbach surfaces here too for having amalgamated the older language of politeness and the newer language of natural law. In Holbach, as in the Encyclopédie, sociability, based on egalitarian premises of natural law, is nonetheless fully compatible with the hierarchical regime. Among other things, this shows clearly that the philosophes never preached the French Revolution. Striving to eliminate the abuses of despotism and establish equality in private life was not tantamount to working for political equality and the abolition of all rank. In this same vein, Gordon paints the apolitical essence of the private sphere and, by a rigorous study of the seventeenth-century manuals of polite living, shows convincingly (this time against Elias who saw the court as a model of refined behavior) that the salon was indeed a world unto itself, independent of preexisting social hierarchies. Rejecting Paul Hazard’s conception of absolute rupture between seventeenth-century culture and eighteenth-century thought, Gordon destroys the facile dichotomy between seventeenth-century hierarchy and eighteenth-century equality and, once again, admirably depicts the compatibility of Enlightenment and absolutism.If chapters one to three underscore a certain continuity between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, chapters four and five explain important changes. It is not, for example, the mere preservation of the idea of sociable communication but rather its new use that is germane in understanding the Enlightenment. Now “conversation” and “civility” no longer had meaning only for an urban elite but had in fact become ideals in all philosophical endeavors including the writing of universal history. Sociable communication had become the defining characteristic of modern nations. In the fourth chapter, by analyzing in detail the works of Jean-Baptiste Suard, Gordon demonstrates the meaning that the writing of universal history in Scotland acquired within the French... (shrink)

English-language translation of a major work by French philosopher Eric Alliez, in which he offers a new perspective on critical problems in modern aesthetics.

This article reframes our understanding of French structural anthropology by considering the work of André Leroi-Gourhan alongside that of Claude Lévi-Strauss. These two anthropologists worked at opposite poles of the discipline, Lévi-Strauss studying cultural objects, like myths and kinship relations; Leroi-Gourhan looking at material artifacts, such as stone tools, bones, arrowheads, and cave paintings. In spite of their difference in focus, these thinkers shared a similar approach to the interpretation of their sources: Each individual object was meaningful only as (...) part of a larger whole. For Lévi-Strauss, structuralism was designed to unlock features of the human mind; for Leroi-Gourhan, to uncover the material processes that underlay human life. Again, in spite of their difference in orientation, both structuralisms produced similar theories of human society. Whether ‘primitive’ or ‘advanced’, all societies functioned the same way: Their institutions worked harmoniously, beyond the intentions of any individual actors, to preserve the stability of the group. This eliminated the basis for thinking one society was superior to another. Finally, the article argues that both Lévi-Strauss and Leroi-Gourhan believed that structural anthropology could found a ‘new humanism’, and thereby rescue modernity from moral degeneration. This ‘new humanism’ could not only produce a universal description of human nature, but also help rethink French colonialism, broker new geopolitical alliances, and prevent the erasure of world cultures. Structural anthropology thus imagined a tight relationship between its social-scientific work and its political-moral mission. (shrink)

The essays in this 1987 volume are concerned with ideas of contrarity and other kinds of polar opposition in French literature of the eighteenth century. Originally these ideas were merely part of an impulse to undermine the establishment, but as the century progressed the desire to invert social values and question accepted norms merged with the main groundswell of the age to form part of the movement of Revolution. Professor Rex considers some of the major writers of the period: (...) Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Beaumarchais. He also explores minor genres such as opéras comiques, theatrical parodies, and erotic or pornographic pieces; these have been largely forgotten, but in their time they imbued the creative life of the era with vitality. In treating the literature in relation to the other arts, especially painting and music, these essays will be of interest to scholars of all aspects of eighteenth-century French culture. (shrink)

English-language translation of a major work by French philosopher Eric Alliez, in which he offers a new perspective on critical problems in modern aesthetics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867-2000Carol S. GouldJapan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867-2000. By Jan Walsh Hokenson. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. Pp. 520. $80.00.Jan Walsh Hokenson's masterful work, Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867-2000, traces the migration of the Japanese aesthetic into French art, through French literature, and ultimately into Western modernism and (...) postmodernism. Despite the title, this book goes beyond French poetics, for it deals with some philosophical views about knowledge and art, and it offers an extended argument for the value of comparative studies, including comparative philosophy. The author moves easily among the areas of literature, art, and philosophy, all of which she discusses with authority.Her story begins with the birth of 'japonisme,' the term coined by critic Philippe Burty in 1876 to refer to the passion-artistic and commercial-for things Japanese. She identifies three waves of japonisme in French literature: pre-World War I, between the wars, and post-World War II. She leads the reader through each of these waves, detailing the cultural and artistic milieu in each and closely analyzing key figures.For the origins of japonisme, Hokenson takes us to the studio of Parisian engraver, printmaker, and designer Felix Bracquemond in 1856, which was just after the end of Sakoku. Bracquemond, according to the "most persistent legend," [End Page 699] opened a box of Asian ceramics and discovered that they were wrapped in extraordinary materials-layers of Hokusai woodcut prints the likes of which he had never seen. He summoned members of his circle, which included Manet, Degas, and Whistler (pp. 13-15). It is thus through an intriguing historical contingency that this relatively inexpensive, mass-produced art form would become the inspiration for some of the most personal and expensive art works today. More relevant to Hokenson's interest, however, is the fact that these woodcuts would be a seminal force in the direction of French letters.Had Bracquemond not had the vision to see the artistry of these prints or had the shipper used a different packing material, would Western painting and literature have taken a different turn? Would the West have seen impressionism, symbolism, or art nouveau? Would Proust, Claudel, Mallarmé, and others have written different works? From Hokenson's account one gleans that the French avant-garde eye was ready to see Hokusai and others, for artists felt that the mimetic view of art had led them to an impasse. Visual and literary artists were ready to abandon the Renaissance ideals of verisimilitude, perspective, the integrity of space, and the linearity of time. They were ready to accept the fragmentation of picture space, perspectivism, and suggestiveness that were all characteristic of the Japanese aesthetic.She explains how Henri Bergson, with his theories of intuition and subjective time, provided a philosophical foundation for the artistic commitments of the early japonistes. She documents the access many of the japonistes had to Bergson. Bergson, like the japoniste poets and painters themselves, emerged from a French tradition of using subjectivity as a starting point. The reader sees this respect for the subjective interact with various Japanese influences over the course of the twentieth century. The receptiveness to the haiku exemplifies this phenomenon, as it begins from a fleeting, intuitive, personal experience. She points out that "by 2000, the haiku was almost a commonplace in French poetry" (p. 407).Although she says little about what Bergson may have absorbed from the japonistes, she does tell of the little-known influence exerted by the Japanese phenomenologist Kuki Shūzō in 1928 on Jean-Paul Sartre. Both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir either forgot this relationship or forgot to mention it in their respective narratives about the development of existentialism. Indeed, this was not discovered, Hokenson reports, until the 1980s. She rightly points out that that this changes the usual story about French philosophy in the early twentieth century, for it means that Sartre became acquainted with German phenomenology before 1932 and from someone other than Raymond Aron (pp. 333-334, 343, 474 n. 10). In a fascinating discussion of Kuki's... (shrink)

Why is postmodernist discourse so biased against the Enlightenment? Indeed, postmodern theory challenges the validity of the rational basis of modern historical scholarship and the Enlightenment itself. Rather than avoiding this conflict, the contributors to this vibrant collection return to the philosophical roots of the Enlightenment, and do not hesitate to look at them through a postmodernist lens, engaging issues like anti-Semitism, Utopianism, colonial legal codes, and ideas of authorship. Dismissing the notion that the two camps are ideologically opposed and (...) thus incompatible, these essays demonstrate an exciting new scholarship that confidently mixes the empiricism of Enlightenment thought with a strong postmodernist skepticism, painting a subtler and richer historical canvas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789Patrick HenryCitizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789, by Daniel Gordon; viii & 270 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, $39.50.Under examination here is the early modern period in France from Louis XIV to the French Revolution when kings ruled absolutely and citizens were without sovereignty. Discarding the traditional image of the Enlightenment (...) as the absolute enemy of absolutism, Gordon, in this sense, follows Norbert Elias and Robert Darnton who treat the Enlightenment as part of an elitist and hierarchical establishment. More specifically, as his subtitle indicates, Gordon portrays the invention of a “nonpolitical polis” (p. 6), an ideological social space where, despite political inequality, citizens could practice social equality in a hierarchical régime. The rise of this “nondemocratic egalitarian ethos” (p. 7) brought with it a new cult of sociabilité, a term invented in the eighteenth century to describe the idealization of the private sphere and the practice of social equality.The first chapter, then, ties sociability not to democracy, as in the Habermasian model, but to the absolutism that stimulated it and coexisted with it. A series of five ideal types of sociability depict how men and women, members of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, came together—in commerce, public welfare, scientific academies, salons, cafés, public libraries, and various other social situations not protorevolutionary in character—to create a bond among equals [End Page 279] under the ancien régime. In this framework, progress and modernity are born during the absolute monarchy where sociability suggests conviviality rather than class warfare. Every major French novel of the eighteenth century supports Gordon’s refutation of De Toqueville’s surprising statement that “noblemen and bourgeois never met except by chance in private life “in prerevolutionary France” (p. 27).In chapters two and three, Gordon examines the nature of the rules of sociability found in courtesy literature and their functioning as the imagined basis of the newly invented idealized space called société. In addition to analyzing in great detail the nature and frequency of the vocabulary invented to define and describe sociabilité, Gordon discusses sociabilité in the context of natural law theory in Hobbes, Bossuet, and among others, Pufendorf, who wanted to refute Hobbes by showing that self-interest leads humans to establish stable social relations even before government orders them to do so. Holbach surfaces here too for having amalgamated the older language of politeness and the newer language of natural law. In Holbach, as in the Encyclopédie, sociability, based on egalitarian premises of natural law, is nonetheless fully compatible with the hierarchical regime. Among other things, this shows clearly that the philosophes never preached the French Revolution. Striving to eliminate the abuses of despotism and establish equality in private life was not tantamount to working for political equality and the abolition of all rank. In this same vein, Gordon paints the apolitical essence of the private sphere and, by a rigorous study of the seventeenth-century manuals of polite living, shows convincingly (this time against Elias who saw the court as a model of refined behavior) that the salon was indeed a world unto itself, independent of preexisting social hierarchies. Rejecting Paul Hazard’s conception of absolute rupture between seventeenth-century culture and eighteenth-century thought, Gordon destroys the facile dichotomy between seventeenth-century hierarchy and eighteenth-century equality and, once again, admirably depicts the compatibility of Enlightenment and absolutism.If chapters one to three underscore a certain continuity between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, chapters four and five explain important changes. It is not, for example, the mere preservation of the idea of sociable communication but rather its new use that is germane in understanding the Enlightenment. Now “conversation” and “civility” no longer had meaning only for an urban elite but had in fact become ideals in all philosophical endeavors including the writing of universal history. Sociable communication had become the defining characteristic of modern nations. In the fourth chapter, by analyzing in detail the works of Jean-Baptiste Suard, Gordon demonstrates the meaning that the writing of universal history in Scotland acquired within the French... (shrink)

The Body at the Limits of Representation. The Theory of the Body and Painting in Merleau-PontyIn Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty quotes a phrase from Valéry: “the painter brings his body with him.” He interprets the corporeal experience of the artist, not only as the center of a perceptual orientation or kinesthesis, but also as the inspiration for poets and for painters. In this sense, one can place his theory of body not only within the problematic of the phenomenological constitution of (...) the perceived object, but also in the context of the deconstruction of representation or in the genealogy of “de-representation” (Lyotard). By following Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the works of Cézanne and Klee, we are going to see how his theory of the experience of body and the formation of their works of art meet up in his consideration of the reversibility of the visible and the invisible. When Merleau-Ponty quotes Valéry’s phrase “the painter brings his body with him,” the body of the artist is no longer “subject-body” perceiving the world in a prosaic way; rather, the body is implicated in the anonymous vision at the source from which the painter’s expression emerges. Just as nature is recounted through the poet, it has the faculty of seeing itself through the painter. In the “Methods of Natural Research,” Klee says “the resonance surpasses all the optical foundations between myself and that which opposes me,” “the united anti-optic way of the root going out of the earth, which looks at me from down below all the way up to my eyes” and of the “united non-optic way of the universe come from above.” He demonstrates that this non-optic resonance, rather than a mirror and a black screen separating the light, allows the eye to be seen as a point of junction of non-optical things and thereby it constitutes a part of the circle created by the new nature of works (eine neue Natürlichkeit des Werkes). Following what is particular to Merleau-Ponty’s thought in which the body is conceived as a principle of de-representation, one sees, by means of his intention of assessing modern artistic creation as the deconstruction of classical ontology, the overcoming of the ontology of the object. In conclusion, we note that the theory of body and of painting in Merleau-Ponty brings to light the limit of the possibility of representation in modern art, by emphasizing especially the non-perception or the transcendence that one can discern in the perceptual field. By interrogating the body of the painter and the poet, that is, the poetic body or the body as symbolism, prior to its being diverted into being a result of the brain and of the libido where the body is no longer the body visible in the world, by doing this, Merleau-Ponty has found a way of placing the body beyond representation. Poièsis is no longer mimèsis in the banal sense of imitation, and the poetic body is not the representational body. But, he has found a way of placing it still in Visibility, as if there were a hinge in this border between the visible and the invisible, in this border between representation and de-representation, a border that one cannot definitively overcome by structuring it as a dichotomy. (De-representation, but the visible. Therefore the possibility of visible de-representation in the artistic creation, in poièsis.) This hinge, which denies us an alternation, is the body, the flesh, which is the condition of thought as ontological interrogation: an ontological interrogation in the age of ir-representation, in the age of the impossibility of representation (Vorstellung) and of poem (Dichtung), in the age of crowds where the image appears as one of my fellow creatures just like the shadow cast by existence.Il corpo ai limiti della rappresentazione. La teoria del corpo e della pittura di Merleau-PontyNe L’occhio e lo spirito Merleau-Ponty cita una frase di Valéry: “il pittore si dà con il suo corpo”. Egli interpreta l’esperienza corporea dell’artista non solo come il centro di un orientamento percettivo o cinestesico, ma anche come motivo d’ispirazione per poeti e per pittori. In questo senso, si può collocare la sua teoria del corpo non solo all’interno della problematica della costituzione fenomenologica dell’oggetto percepito, ma anche nel contesto della decostruzione della rappresentazione o nella genealogia della “derappresentazione” (Lyotard). Seguendo l’interpretazione merleaupontiana delle opere di Cézanne e di Klee, vedremo come la sua teoria dell’esperienza del corpo e la formazione delle loro opere d’arte convergano nella considerazione della reversibilità del visibilee dell’invisibile. Quando Merleau-Ponty cita la frase di Valéry “il pittore si dà con il suo corpo”, il corpo dell’artista non è più un corpo soggettivo che percepisce il mondo in modo prosaico; il corpo è piuttosto implicato nella visione anonima dell’origine dalla quale emerge l’espressione del pittore. In Wege des Naturstudiums, Klee afferma che “la risonanza sorpassa tutti i fondamenti ottici tra me e ciò che mi si oppone”. Egli dimostra che questa risonanza non-ottica, piuttosto che essere uno specchio o uno schermo nero che separa la luce, permette di vedere l’occhio come un punto di giunzione di cose non ottiche e ciò costituisce una parte del circolo creato dalla nuova natura delle opere (eine neue Natürlichkeit des Werkes). Seguendo la particolarità del pensiero merleaupontiano, secondo il quale il corpo è concepito come un principio di de-rappresentazione, si nota, in virtù della sua intenzione di interpretare la creazione nell’arte moderna come la decostruzione dell’ontologia classica, il superamento dell’ontologia oggettivistica. In conclusione, osserviamo come la teoria del corpo e della pittura di Merleau-Ponty chiarisca i limiti della possibilità della rappresentazione nell’arte moderna, enfatizzando l’impercezione o la trascendenza che si può distinguere nel campo percettivo. Interrogando il corpo del pittore e del poeta – il corpo poetico o il corpo come simbolismo, a monte del suo porsi come risultato della mente o della libido, là dove il corpo non è ancora corpo visibile nel mondo – Merleau-Ponty ha trovato il mondo di collocare il corpo al di là della rappresentazione. Poièsis non è più mimesis nel senso banale d’imitazione, e il corpo poetico non è il corpo rappresentativo. Egli ha trovato il modo di posizionare il corpo nella Visibilità, come se esistesse un punto di rovesciamento situato sul confi ne tra visibile ed invisibile, ovvero sul confine tra rappresentazione e de-rappresentazione: un confine che non si può definitivamente superare se lo si continua a strutturare come dicotomia. Questo punto, che ci nega un’alternativa, è il corpo, la carne, che è condizione del pensiero come interrogazione ontologica: un’interrogazione ontologica nell’era dell’ir-rappresentazione, nell’era dell’impossibilità di rappresentare (Vorstellung) o di creare poemi (Dichtung), nell’era delle masse, in cui l’immagine appare come uno dei miei simili, come l’ombra proiettata dall’esistenza. (shrink)

The Body at the Limits of Representation. The Theory of the Body and Painting in Merleau-PontyIn Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty quotes a phrase from Valéry: “the painter brings his body with him.” He interprets the corporeal experience of the artist, not only as the center of a perceptual orientation or kinesthesis, but also as the inspiration for poets and for painters. In this sense, one can place his theory of body not only within the problematic of the phenomenological constitution of (...) the perceived object, but also in the context of the deconstruction of representation or in the genealogy of “de-representation” (Lyotard). By following Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the works of Cézanne and Klee, we are going to see how his theory of the experience of body and the formation of their works of art meet up in his consideration of the reversibility of the visible and the invisible. When Merleau-Ponty quotes Valéry’s phrase “the painter brings his body with him,” the body of the artist is no longer “subject-body” perceiving the world in a prosaic way; rather, the body is implicated in the anonymous vision at the source from which the painter’s expression emerges. Just as nature is recounted through the poet, it has the faculty of seeing itself through the painter. In the “Methods of Natural Research,” Klee says “the resonance surpasses all the optical foundations between myself and that which opposes me,” “the united anti-optic way of the root going out of the earth, which looks at me from down below all the way up to my eyes” and of the “united non-optic way of the universe come from above.” He demonstrates that this non-optic resonance, rather than a mirror and a black screen separating the light, allows the eye to be seen as a point of junction of non-optical things and thereby it constitutes a part of the circle created by the new nature of works (eine neue Natürlichkeit des Werkes). Following what is particular to Merleau-Ponty’s thought in which the body is conceived as a principle of de-representation, one sees, by means of his intention of assessing modern artistic creation as the deconstruction of classical ontology, the overcoming of the ontology of the object. In conclusion, we note that the theory of body and of painting in Merleau-Ponty brings to light the limit of the possibility of representation in modern art, by emphasizing especially the non-perception or the transcendence that one can discern in the perceptual field. By interrogating the body of the painter and the poet, that is, the poetic body or the body as symbolism, prior to its being diverted into being a result of the brain and of the libido where the body is no longer the body visible in the world, by doing this, Merleau-Ponty has found a way of placing the body beyond representation. Poièsis is no longer mimèsis in the banal sense of imitation, and the poetic body is not the representational body. But, he has found a way of placing it still in Visibility, as if there were a hinge in this border between the visible and the invisible, in this border between representation and de-representation, a border that one cannot definitively overcome by structuring it as a dichotomy. (De-representation, but the visible. Therefore the possibility of visible de-representation in the artistic creation, in poièsis.) This hinge, which denies us an alternation, is the body, the flesh, which is the condition of thought as ontological interrogation: an ontological interrogation in the age of ir-representation, in the age of the impossibility of representation (Vorstellung) and of poem (Dichtung), in the age of crowds where the image appears as one of my fellow creatures just like the shadow cast by existence.Il corpo ai limiti della rappresentazione. La teoria del corpo e della pittura di Merleau-PontyNe L’occhio e lo spirito Merleau-Ponty cita una frase di Valéry: “il pittore si dà con il suo corpo”. Egli interpreta l’esperienza corporea dell’artista non solo come il centro di un orientamento percettivo o cinestesico, ma anche come motivo d’ispirazione per poeti e per pittori. In questo senso, si può collocare la sua teoria del corpo non solo all’interno della problematica della costituzione fenomenologica dell’oggetto percepito, ma anche nel contesto della decostruzione della rappresentazione o nella genealogia della “derappresentazione” (Lyotard). Seguendo l’interpretazione merleaupontiana delle opere di Cézanne e di Klee, vedremo come la sua teoria dell’esperienza del corpo e la formazione delle loro opere d’arte convergano nella considerazione della reversibilità del visibilee dell’invisibile. Quando Merleau-Ponty cita la frase di Valéry “il pittore si dà con il suo corpo”, il corpo dell’artista non è più un corpo soggettivo che percepisce il mondo in modo prosaico; il corpo è piuttosto implicato nella visione anonima dell’origine dalla quale emerge l’espressione del pittore. In Wege des Naturstudiums, Klee afferma che “la risonanza sorpassa tutti i fondamenti ottici tra me e ciò che mi si oppone”. Egli dimostra che questa risonanza non-ottica, piuttosto che essere uno specchio o uno schermo nero che separa la luce, permette di vedere l’occhio come un punto di giunzione di cose non ottiche e ciò costituisce una parte del circolo creato dalla nuova natura delle opere (eine neue Natürlichkeit des Werkes). Seguendo la particolarità del pensiero merleaupontiano, secondo il quale il corpo è concepito come un principio di de-rappresentazione, si nota, in virtù della sua intenzione di interpretare la creazione nell’arte moderna come la decostruzione dell’ontologia classica, il superamento dell’ontologia oggettivistica. In conclusione, osserviamo come la teoria del corpo e della pittura di Merleau-Ponty chiarisca i limiti della possibilità della rappresentazione nell’arte moderna, enfatizzando l’impercezione o la trascendenza che si può distinguere nel campo percettivo. Interrogando il corpo del pittore e del poeta – il corpo poetico o il corpo come simbolismo, a monte del suo porsi come risultato della mente o della libido, là dove il corpo non è ancora corpo visibile nel mondo – Merleau-Ponty ha trovato il mondo di collocare il corpo al di là della rappresentazione. Poièsis non è più mimesis nel senso banale d’imitazione, e il corpo poetico non è il corpo rappresentativo. Egli ha trovato il modo di posizionare il corpo nella Visibilità, come se esistesse un punto di rovesciamento situato sul confi ne tra visibile ed invisibile, ovvero sul confine tra rappresentazione e de-rappresentazione: un confine che non si può definitivamente superare se lo si continua a strutturare come dicotomia. Questo punto, che ci nega un’alternativa, è il corpo, la carne, che è condizione del pensiero come interrogazione ontologica: un’interrogazione ontologica nell’era dell’ir-rappresentazione, nell’era dell’impossibilità di rappresentare (Vorstellung) o di creare poemi (Dichtung), nell’era delle masse, in cui l’immagine appare come uno dei miei simili, come l’ombra proiettata dall’esistenza. (shrink)

From French miniature paintings to the work of Pope Pius II, this collection of essays explores the philosophical history behind medieval European art. The essays reveal how a visual vocabulary was established among French miniature painters to express the concepts of personal identity and alterity in their work and how Pope Pius II helped spread these metaphysical ideologies across the eastern Christian world. An exhaustive and articulate guide to European art in the Middle Ages, this book is essential (...) reading for art students and enthusiasts alike. (shrink)

The work of Gilles Deleuze has had an impact far beyond philosophy. He is among Foucault and Derrida as one of the most cited of all contemporary French thinkers. Never a student 'of' philosophy, Deleuze was always philosophical and many influential poststructuralist and postmodernist texts can be traced to his celebrated resurrection of Nietzsche against Hegel in his Nietzsche and Philosophy , from which this collection draws its title. This searching new collection considers Deleuze's relation to the philosophical tradition (...) and beyond to the future of philosophy, science and technology. In addition to considering Deleuze's imaginative readings of classic figures such as Spinoza and Kant, the essays also point to the meaning of Deleuze on 'monstrous' and machinic thinking, on philosophy and engineering, on philosophy and biology, on modern painting and literature. Deleuze and Philosophy continues the spirit of experimentation and invention that features in Deleuze's work and will appeal to those studying across philosophy, social theory, literature and cultural studies who themselves are seeking new paradigms of thought. (shrink)

Originally known for his groundbreaking work in literary studies, the Bulgarian-born French scholar Tzvetan Todorov (1939-2017) was one of the world's foremost cultural theorists. His interventions cover an astounding range of topics, from narratology to ethics, from painting to politics, and from the Enlightenment to current affairs. Written by an international team of experts, this volume - the first-ever comprehensive examination of Todorov as a cultural critic - discusses the crucial elements of his work as well as his place (...) in European thought. (shrink)