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45 c h a p t e r 3 Visual Parrhesia?: Foucault and the Truth of the Gaze Martin Jay The task of telling the truth is an endless labor: to respect it in all its complexity is an obligation which no power can do without—except by imposing the silence of slavery.1   Cezanne’s famous assertion in a letter to a friend in 1905, “I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you,” was first brought into prominence by the French art historian Hubert Damisch in his 1978 Huit thèses pour (ou contre?) une sémiologie de la peinture and then made into the occasion for a widely discussed book by Jacques Derrida, La verité en peinture later the same year.2 In that work, Derrida challenged the distinction between work and frame, ergon and parergon, that had allowed philosophers like Kant to establish an autonomous, disinterested realm for art, distinct from all surrounding discourses and institutions. Instead, Derrida insisted, the frame was always permeable, allowing the external world to invade the artwork. Apparent ornamental excrescences like columns in front of buildings or clothing on a statue cannot be fully detached from the object itself. In fact, the founding notions of artistic value—beauty or sublimity or form—came themselves, as it were, from the outside. So the truth of a painting could never be established by looking within the painting itself. Similarly, the debate over the actual model for Vincent Van Gogh’s Old Shoes with Laces between Meyer Schapiro and Martin Heidegger, a debate that saw the American critic accuse Heidegger of projecting his own philosophical investments onto the work by calling them a pair of peasant shoes rather than those of the artist himself, could not be easily decided one way 46 Visual Parrhesia? Foucault and the Truth of the Gaze or another. Derrida sought to undermine Schapiro’s claim to having corrected Heidegger’s attribution by showing that his own argument was not disinterested, that it was impossible to know for sure what the painting depicted. In other words, the truth of painting could not be established outside it either. A third example Derrida explored concerned the status of writing in the paintings of Valerio Adami, which incorporated literal examples of writing in his canvases, signatures, letters, even texts from Derrida’s own book Glas, but which were hard to read exclusively in formal, semiotic , or mimetic terms. Here the implication was that Cezanne’s promise of telling the truth was very hard to keep because radical undecidability undermined any clear-cut search for veracity in painting either inside or outside the frame. There is no reason to go further into Derrida’s complicated argument now. I have introduced it only as a prolegomenon to the question I want to address in this paper, which concerns the relationship between truth and not merely painting, but visual experience itself, in the work of Michel Foucault. Was there in Foucault as well as Derrida a deep suspicion of the ability of the eye to verify truth claims or produce warranted assertions about the truth? What was his tacit response to Cezanne’s assertion of the painter’s obligation to tell the truth on his canvas? What would it mean for visual truth to be “told?” There has, of course, been a long-standing, often vexed, relationship between visuality and veracity. In juridical settings, eyewitness testimony often prevails over mere hearsay, and the very word “evidence,” as has often been noted, is derived from the Latin “videre,” to see. Whether metaphorically or literally, many philosophies, idealist as well as empiricist, have privileged illumination, enlightenment, transparency, clarity, and distinctness in their search for truth. Theory, rooted in the Greek word theoria, has often been related to the visual experience of looking at a theatrical performance. Of all the senses, vision has seemed the most disinterested because most distanced from what it perceives. And yet, as we know, the hegemony of the eye has become a topic of persistent suspicion in many different discursive contexts. In a book published a dozen years ago called Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought,3 I attempted to trace a variety of criticisms of what can be called the ocularcentric bias of much of Western thought. In that narrative, Michel Foucault played a central role, paired in a chapter with Guy Debord on the contrasting modalities of social control called the spectacle...

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