Vision's Invisibles

Véronique M. Fóti

Description

Although philosophy today has abandoned its former fascination with transcendent invisibles, it has left largely unexamined historical articulations of the divide between 'the visible' and 'the invisible.' Vision's Invisibles argues that such a self-examination is necessary for the sensitization of philosophical sight, as well as for engagements with visuality in other domains. To this end, it investigates a range of challenging understandings of visuality in its relation to invisibles, as articulated in the texts of key historical thinkers—Heraclitus, Plato, and Descartes—and of twentieth-century philosophers, including Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Derrida, and Heidegger.

Acknowledgments

Prospect

PART I. GREEK PHILOSOPHY

1. Glimpsing Alterity and Differentiation: Vision and the Heraclitean Logos

2. Beauty, Eros, and Blindness in the Platonic Education of Vision

PART II. THE LEGACY OF DESCARTES

3. Mechanism, Reasoning, and the Institution of Nature

4. The Specularity of Representation: Foucault, Velázquez, Descartes

PART III. POST-PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

5. The Gravity and (In)Visibility of Flesh: Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Derrida

6. Imaging Invisibles: Heidegger's Meditation

Retrospect

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index of Persons

Index of Topics

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Métaphysique
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Éthique et morale
• Esthétique et philosophie de l'art
• Ethique et morale
• Metaphysics
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie
• Epistémologie

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780791486801
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Vision’s
InvisiblesSUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy
Dennis J. Schmidt, editorVision’s
Invisibles
Philosophical Explorations
Véronique M. Fóti
State University of New York PressPublished by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2003 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fóti, Véronique Marion.
Vision’s invisibles : philosophical explorations / Véronique M. Fóti.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-5733-8 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5734-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Vision—History. 2. Philosophy—History. I. Title. II. Series.
B105.V54F68 2003
121'.35—dc21
2002045255
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1In memory of my father, Lajos Fóti,
my grandmother, Róza Fóti, née Rubinstein,
and other members of the Fóti family
who were victims of the Shoah, and
whom it was not my privilege to know.Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Prospect 1
PART I
GREEK PHILOSOPHY
1 Glimpsing Alterity and Differentiation:
Vision and the Heraclitean Logos 13
2 Beauty, Eros, and Blindness in the Platonic Education of Vision 25
PART II
THE LEGACY OF DESCARTES
3 Mechanism, Reasoning, and the Institution of Nature 41
4 The Specularity of Representation:
Foucault, Velázquez, Descartes 53
PART III
POST-PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES
5 The Gravity and (In)Visibility of Flesh:
Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Derrida 69
6 Imaging Invisibles:Heidegger’s Meditation 81
Retrospect 99
viiviii Contents
Notes 105
Selected Bibliography 121
Index of Persons 131
Index of Topics 133Acknowledgments
Although the writing of this book has been a solitary labor, I want to thank
my sons and daughters, Sunil Sharma, Leila Sharma, Ravi K. Sharma, and
Amina Sharma, for their inspiring presence and conversation. To Ravi, trained
in ancient philosophy, I also am indebted for philosophical discussions.
Among persons whose friendship has been meaningful, I want to thank, in
particular, Ed Casey, Alphonso Lingis, and Piet Hut. David Michael Levin,
himself the author and editor of major books on the philosophy of vision, has
offered much collegial support.
This book originally was under contract with the University of California
Press but was withdrawn when it decided to cease publishing in the field of
philosophy. I want to thank the former philosophy editor, Eric Smoodin, for
his commitment to the book (as well as for an enjoyable e-mail
correspondence about a shared passion for beautiful plants). I owe special thanks to
Dennis J. Schmidt, the series editor, and Jane Bunker, the acquisitions editor,
at State University of New York Press, for generously renewing their offer of
publication. I am deeply appreciative of Adrian Johnston’s expert assistance,
which enabled me to resolve difficulties regarding permissions; his help was
essential to getting the book into print without delay. Finally, I wish to thank
Joicy Koothur, not only for her personal and artistic friendship but for taking
much trouble to produce a presentable black-and-white photograph of me. I
would have been quite happy to submit a photo showing more of my cat than
of myself.
I also wish to acknowledge the permission given by the Prado to repro-
duce Veláquez's Las Meninas and to Alinari/Art Resource, NY for the re-
production of daVinci's The Virgin On The Rocks.
ixProspect
And the simple beauty of color comes about by shape and the mastery of
the darkness of matter by the presence of light, which is incorporeal and
formative power and form. This is why fire itself is more beautiful than all
the other bodies, because it has the rank of form in relation to the other
elements, being close to the incorporeal. It alone does not admit the
others; but the others admit it.
—Plotinus, Enneads
Let him who can follow and come within, and leave outside the sight of
his eyes, and not turn back to the bodily splendours which he saw before.
When he sees the beauty in bodies, he must not run after them; we must
know that they are images, traces, shadows. ...Let all these things go, and
do not look. Shut your eyes and change to and wake another way of seeing,
which everyone has but few use.
—Plotinus, Enneads
Every visual something, wholly individual though it is, functions also as a
dimension, because it gives itself as the result of a dehiscence of being.
This means, in the end, that what is proper to the visible is to have a
lining of the invisible in the strict sense, which it renders present as a
certain absence.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind”
Hsü (Wei) Wên-ch’ang . . . liked paintings in which ink had been used
freely, yet with control, in which mists and vapor filled the picture, so that
their emptiness pervaded the whole sky, and their occupying the space
that was earth made the earth a void....All the elements in his
compositions served to emphasize the emptiness, that is, the works were filled
with the spirit.
—Unattibuted, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting
12 Prospect
Since its inception, Western philosophy has not only elaborated metaphoric
as well as analytic discourses of vision and configured its own history, as what
1David Michael Levin calls “a history of visions”; but it also has traced, and
variously marked and re-marked, the delicate border that separates and
conjoins the visible and the invisible. Given that its historical impetus has been
a quest for the invisible, understood as the “pure splendor” of transcendent
reality, or as truth envisaged in the light of reason (granting a tacit and
gender-bound privilege to form over color, intellect over body, or active
imparting over passive reception), it has tended to forget that to trace a border also
is to articulate a topology of interconnections. Furthermore, the autonomy,
substantiality, and unitary character of the invisible have generally been taken
for granted and have informed its idealization, as contrasted to the
heteronomy, shadowlike insubstantiality, and multifariousness attributed to the
visible. If philosophy today has veered away from a fascination with the
transcendent invisible toward critical examinations of social reality and linguistic
practices, or toward searching dialogues with its own history, it has
nonetheless left the historical articulations of the divide between the visible and
invisible largely unexamined. To that extent, it has refused, as it were, to look
itself in the eye—a reflective looking that appears to be a necessary
propadeutic to the sensitization, if not the profound transformation, of
philosophical sight, as well as to a thoughtful engagement with visuality in other
domains, ranging from the theory and practice of the visual arts to a
consideration of the ways in which visual encounter informs ethical relationship,
including practices of caregiving.
The studies comprised in this book are contributions to this
propadeutic. They explore certain key historical and contemporary articulations of the
demarcations and interrelations between visibility and the invisible, from the
hermeneutical vantage point afforded by the late-twentieth-century
philosophical problematic of difference. In keeping with this vantage point, one
needs to note that, although linguistic convention (at least in Indo-European
languages) insinuates the unitary character, as well as the singularity, of “the
invisible,” and even “the visible,” these purported entities are linguistic
fictions. As concerns the visible, the linguistic convention of singularizing it
probably has encouraged philosophers to treat it in a summary fashion
instead of attentively exploring its complexities, while the heterogeneity of
the invisible generally has remained unacknowledged and, therefore, almost
entirely uninvestigated.
The interest of this book is not, however, to trace such suppressive moves
and their motivations but rather to address certain challenging understandings
of visuality and the invisible that have articulated themselves in the texts of
key historical thinkers, such as Heraclitus, Plato, and Descartes, and that also
respond to the concerns of twentieth-century thinkers, such as Merleau-PontyProspect 3
and Heidegger. Whereas poetic (or poietic) language is, for Heidegger, the
originary site of the happening of manifestation, Merleau-Ponty privileges the
interrogation of “wild being” through the visual exegesis of vision (itself an
interrogation), which he takes to be the painter’s quest. Although there are
reasons to be critical of his characterization of painting as a “silent science” or
a sort of proto-phenomenology (that would resolve the ambivalent casting of
2vision in classical phenomenology, as being both exemplary and inadequate ),
one must appreciate his utterly innovative move of situating painting, and its
entrancement with vision, at the very heart of philosophy. This move still
reverberates in certain facets of the thought of Foucault, Nancy, and Derrida.
3Except for some research on the visual theory of Democritus, the
preSocratic philosophers largely have been neglected as thinkers who questioned
vision and the invisible. This neglect is surprising, given not only the
importance of the issue to the philosophical tradition that they inaugurated but also
the prominence of visual tropes, or figures of radiance and darkness, in the
fragments of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Furthermore, the