Vision's Invisibles

Philosophical Explorations

Publication Year: 2003

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.

Published by: State University of New York Press

Contents
Search Inside This Book
Book Details

Since its inception, Western philosophy has not only elaborated metaphoric as well as analytic discourses of vision and configured its own history, as what David Michael Levin calls “a history of visions”;¹ but it also has traced, and variously marked and re-marked, the delicate border that separates and con- joins the visible and the invisible. ...

Part I: Greek Philosophy

pdf icon Download PDF (21.6 KB)
pp. 11-

1. Glimpsing Alterity and Differentiation Vision and the Heraclitean Logos

pdf icon Download PDF (101.2 KB)
pp. 13-23

Vision, construed throughout much of the history of Western philosophy as the analogue of an intellectual apprehension characterized by full (self-)presence and lucidity, is thought otherwise by Heraclitus of Ephesus. Heraclitus did not, to be sure, just come up with a different understanding of vision and visuality, ...

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

pdf icon Download PDF (106.9 KB)
pp. 25-37

According to Plato’s Parable of the Cave in Republic VII,¹ the conversion and education of sight, leading it from acquiescence in shadowy illusions to a quest for radiant truth, is violative, painful, and accomplished in utter solitude. ...

Part II: The Legacy of Descartes

pdf icon Download PDF (21.9 KB)
pp. 39-

3. Mechanism, Reasoning, and the Institution of Nature Questioning Descartes’s Reconstruction of Vision

pdf icon Download PDF (93.4 KB)
pp. 41-52

Descartes’s Optics (La Dioptrique) is, for Merleau-Ponty, the exemplary effort, within Western philosophy, to exorcize the “spectres” of vision—spectres that haunt painting throughout its history—by reconstructing vision as essentially an operation of thought.¹ ...

4. The Specularity of Representation Foucault, Vel�zquez, Descartes

pdf icon Download PDF (99.0 KB)
pp. 53-66

In The Order of Things, Foucault casts Descartes—the early Descartes of the Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii—as the privileged exponent of the Classical epistēmē of representation, as it initially defines itself over against the Renaissance episteme of similitude.¹ ...

Part III: Post-Phenomenological Perspectives

pdf icon Download PDF (21.2 KB)
pp. 67-

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

pdf icon Download PDF (99.0 KB)
pp. 69-80

In his late fragmentary work, The Visible and the Invisible,¹ Merleau-Ponty, having offered penetrating critiques of reflection, dialectics, and intuition as modalities of philosophical interrogation, undertakes to outline an ontology of flesh, noting that what he calls “flesh” has not, so far, received a name in any philosophy.² ...

6. Imaging Invisibles Heidegger’s Meditation

pdf icon Download PDF (124.1 KB)
pp. 81-98

In his 1938 essay, “The Time of the World Picture” (“Die Zeit des Weltbildes”),¹ Heidegger singles out the emergence of a world picture as the mark of modernity. The world picture, as he understands it, is not a spontaneous, or culturally specific, symbolic image that one might form of the world (such as, for instance, a mandala)...

Retrospect

pdf icon Download PDF (177.2 KB)
pp. 99-104

Retrospect enjoys, in a special way, the freedom of the glance, for it can alight upon configurations of thought and text without a concern for argumentative or narrative continuity or closure, and it can examine them from novel vantage points to bring to the fore aspects that may have remained implicit and unexplored. ...

Notes

pdf icon Download PDF (115.3 KB)
pp. 105-120

Selected Bibliography

pdf icon Download PDF (64.4 KB)
pp. 121-130

Index of Persons

pdf icon Download PDF (39.5 KB)
pp. 131-132

Index of Topics

pdf icon Download PDF (58.4 KB)
pp. 133-134

E-ISBN-13: 9780791486801
Print-ISBN-13: 9780791457337
Print-ISBN-10: 0791457338

Page Count: 144
Illustrations: 2 b/w photographs
Publication Year: 2003

Series Title: SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy
Series Editor Byline: Dennis J. Schmidt