Downcast Eyes - The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought

by Jay, Martin

• ISBN13: 9780520088856
• ISBN10: 0520088859
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-09-01
• Publisher: Ingram Pub Services

Summary

Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences,Downcast Eyeswill consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction	p. 1
The Noblest of the Senses: Vision from Plato to Descartes	p. 21
Dialectic of EnLIGHTenment	p. 83
The Crisis of the Ancien Scopic Regime: From the Impressionists to Bergson	p. 149
The Disenchantment of the Eye: Bataille and the Surrealists	p. 211
Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the Search for a New Ontology of Sight	p. 263
Lacan, Althusser, and the Specular Subject of Ideology	p. 329
From the Empire of the Gaze to the Society of the Spectacle: Foucault and Debord	p. 381
The Camera as Memento Mori: Barthes, Metz, and the Cahiers du Cinema	p. 435
"Phallogocularcentrism": Derrida and Irigaray	p. 493
The Ethics of Blindness and the Postmodern Sublime: Levinas and Lyotard	p. 543
Conclusion	p. 587
Index	p. 595
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