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  • The Picture as Spectre in Diderot, Proust, and Deleuze
  • Margaret Topping
The Picture as Spectre in Diderot, Proust, and Deleuze. By Thomas Baldwin. Oxford: Legenda, 2011. x + 134 pp.

Current critical debates on both spectrality (see Colin Davis, ‘Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms’, French Studies, 59 (2005), 373–79) and ekphrastic poetics (see French Studies, special issue edited by Susan Harrow, 64.3 (2010)) are greatly enriched by Thomas Baldwin’s tightly woven and theoretically intricate study. Baldwin seeks to replace conventional paradigms of ekphrasis — based either on the quest for transparency (that is, the identification of a source image) or on a hierarchical displacement of image by text — with what he suggestively terms a ‘spectre laboratory’ (p. 121). Here, the spectre is to be conceived of as a ‘smudge or blur, a zone of indiscernibility or “brouillage”, either in a painting (real or virtual) that is or contains one, or in a text that writes one’ (p. 121); its presence creates a space of experimentation for writers and of challenge for readers’ expectations of unitary meaning. Chapter 1 creates the foundation for the study, leading the reader on a closely argued journey through key theories of ekphrasis and exchanging the stable referentiality at the heart of many of them for oscillation and shadow play. Baldwin argues for a duality of perception in which one accepts the ekphrastic illusion while also maintaining a critical awareness of the illusion’s constructedness, namely, an awareness that it is both object and surface, presence and absence. This duality — the slippage between ‘opacity and transparency’ (p. 18) — is what allows for the possibility of spectrality. The following chapters, on Diderot, Proust, and Deleuze respectively, explore the multiple forms and effects of this spectral instability, interweaving the three writers through transversal links. In the analysis of Diderot, lesser-known passages from his Salons are deployed as illustrations of an ekphrastic practice that denies and belies the promise of transparency — through, for instance, a textual correction or modification of the visual image. Baldwin’s critical re-evaluation of Diderot’s later Salons as being of value for their shadowy intertexts as much as or more than for their art criticism is also accompanied by a particularly fruitful discussion of the Chardinesque qualities of Diderot’s own ekphrasis. Proust is similarly shown to perform a refusal of conventional ekphrasis, not only through his tantalizing play of real and fictional paintings, but also, as Baldwin subtly analyses, in the referential uncertainties written into many of Proust’s ekphrastic portraits. The reader is unsure what is being referred to. Is it the object, the representation, or the object in its likeness to a representation? Is it mimesis or ekphrasis? A minute genetic analysis of the progressive drafts of the ‘célèbre jet d’eau d’Hubert Robert’ description also casts fresh light on Proust’s cubism. The final, briefer chapter on Deleuze, which charts his engagement with both the “zones de voisinage, d’indiscernabilité” (p. 113) in the work of Bacon, Beckett, and Proust, would, arguably, have benefited from a more extensive unravelling of these various threads. Nonetheless, the Conclusion deftly draws the study together by positing the Deleuzian figure of the rhizome as a means of conceptualizing the spectres that haunt Diderot’s, Proust’s, and Deleuze’s works to ekphrastic, and more broadly experimental, effect.

Margaret Topping
Queen’s University Belfast
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