Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty (review)

Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. By Cathryn Vasseleu. New York: Routledge, 1998.

In her book Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty (1998), Cathryn Vasseleu takes issue with Martin Jay's thesis in his expansive volume Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (1994). Vasseleu persuasively argues that rather than denigrate vision, French theorists--Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Irigaray--are trying to reconceive of vision in more productive terms. Vasseleu argues that Irigaray goes further than either Merleau-Ponty or Levinas towards developing an alternative theory of vision by developing an alternative vision of light. Primarily working with Irigaray's engagement with Merleau-Ponty and with Levinas in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993), Vasseleu shows how Irigaray develops a theory of what she calls the texture of light. Rather than reduce vision to touch, which is one of her (debatable) criticisms of Merleau-Ponty, on Vasseleu's reading, Irigaray emphasizes the touch of light on the eye. It is not, then, that vision and touch are not separate senses; but rather that vision is dependent upon the sense of touch.

Vasseleu describes a texture as

a disposition or characteristic of anything which is woven into a fabric, and comprises a combination of parts or qualities which is neither simply unveiled or made up. Texture is at once the cloth, threads, knots, weave, detailed surface, material, matrix and frame. Regarded in this way, light is not a transparent medium linking sight and visibility. It is not appropriate to think of light as a texture either perspectivally as a thing, or as a medium that is separable from things. In its texture, light is fabrication, a surface of depth that also spills over and passes through the interstices of the fabric. The dichotomy between visible and invisible is itself a framing of photology that gives light its texture. As a texture, the naturalness of light cannot be divorced from its historical and embodied circumstances. It is neither visible nor invisible, neither metaphoric nor metaphysical. It is both the language and material of visual practices, or the invisible interweaving of differences which form the fabric of the visible. (1998, 12)

Vasseleu argues that conceiving of light's texture challenges the traditional separation of the senses that serves the separation of sensible and intelligible. She explains that the separation between sensible and intelligible, between body and mind or soul, has been constructed around the notion of the mind's eye and an immaterial seeing cut off from the body and sensation, a more accurate seeing. The split between the mind's eye and the body's eye is interlaced with the split between objective theoretical knowledge and subjective personal feeling. Objective theoretical knowledge requires a notion of vision as a distancing sense that separates the mind's eye from the body and gives it a privileged perspective devoid of contaminating sentiment. Information gathered through touch and more proximal senses is thought to provide only subjective feeling and cannot be the grounds for knowledge. Martin Jay's analysis of the nobility and then denigration of vision in philosophy substantiates this analysis (1994).

Vasseleu maintains that if vision is founded on touch, then the split between mind and body, between objective and subjective, can no longer be sustained: "The distance and space for reflection and insight that comes with vision through the mediation of light is lost as the sense of sight passes to the sense of touch" (1998, 12). She finds in Irigaray a theory of vision in which "tactility is an essential aspect of light's texture, where texture refers not only to the feeling of a fabric to the touch, or the grasping of its qualities, but also to the hinges or points of contact which constitute the interweaving of the material and ideal strands of the field of vision. An...