On Representation

by Marin, Louis

• ISBN13: 9780804741514
• ISBN10: 0804741514
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-11-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

At his death in 1992, the eminent philosopher, critic, and theorist Louis Marin left, in addition to a dozen influential books (including Sublime Poussin, Stanford, 1999), a corpus of some three hundred articles and essays published in journals and anthologies. A collection of twenty-two essays that appeared between 1971 and 1992, this book interrogates the theory and practice of representation as it is carried out by both linguistic and graphic signs, and thus the complex relation between language and image, between perception and conception. The essays are grouped in four parts that reflect the continuity and coherence of Marin's interests in semiology, narrative, visuality, and painting. The interdisciplinary horizon of the book draws on multiple scholarly resourcesthe cultural history of the seventeenth century, the philosophy of language, the tools of discourse analysis, the history of art and aesthetics, the analysis of receptionto address a stunning diversity of subjects ranging from historical painting through cartography to the processes of deciphering texts, interpreting stories, and reading images. Throughout the essays, Marin's reflection on representation is supported and deepened by his brilliant exegesis of graphic art. His analysis of works by Caravaggio, Philippe de Champaigne, Le Brun, and Poussin, among others, provides the armature that allows him to describe both the structural logic of representation and the intricate processes of production and reception that make it dynamic and unstable. Marin demonstrates with consummate rigor why the pursuit of a general theory of representation is experienced by artists and critics alike as an inevitable, yet unattainable objective.

Author Biography

The late Louis Marin was Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	ix
PART I. SEMIOLOGY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
The Dissolution of Man in the Human Sciences: The Linguistic Model and the Signifying Subject	3	(11)
Theoretical Field and Symbolic Practice	14	(24)
Establishing a Signification for Social Space: Demonstration, Cortege, Parade, Procession	38	(16)
The Concept of Figurability, or the Encounter Between Art History and Psychoanalysis	54	(10)
Mimesis and Description: From Curiosity to Method, from the Age of Montaigne to the Age of Descartes	64	(23)
PART II. NARATIVES
Utopian Discourse and Narrative of Origins from More's Utopia to Cassiodorus-Jordanes's Scandza	87	(28)
From Body to Text: Metaphysical Propositions on the Origin of Narrative	115	(15)
Critical Remarks on Enunciation: The Question of the Present in Discourse	130	(13)
On the Religious	143	(10)
The Pleasures of Narration	153	(20)
PART III. VISIBILITY
The Ends of Interpretation, or the Itineraries of a Gaze in the Sublimity of a Storm	173	(29)
The City in Its Map and Portrait	202	(17)
History Made Visible and Readable: On Drawings of Trajan's Column	219	(17)
In Praise of Appearance	236	(16)
Mimesis and Description	252	(17)
The Tomb of the Subject in Painting	269	(16)
Depositing Time in Painted Representations	285	(24)
PART IV. THE LIMITS OF PAINTING
Representation and Simulacrum	309	(11)
Figures of Reception in Modern Representation in Painting	320	(17)
On the Margins of Painting: Seeing Voices	337	(15)
The Frame of Representation and Some of Its Figures	352	(21)
Ruptures, Interruptions, Syncopes in Representation in Painting	373	(18)
Notes	391	(40)
Works Cited	431	(20)
Index	451