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  • L'Œil de Platon et le regard romantique
  • Peter Dayan
L'Œil de Platon et le regard romantique. By Paolo Tortonese. Paris, Kimé, 2006. 242 pp. Pb €24.00.

This book is about the evolution, from Plato to Hugo and Balzac, of a metaphor and its connotations: the metaphor of the internal eye (as distinct from the physical eye), able to see what the physical eye cannot. Paolo Tortonese is peculiarly adept at keeping his reader aware of the metaphor's extraordinary illogicality, the sheer depth, range and elementary nature of the questions it covers up, at the same time as he situates carefully the world views of the authors he analyses, in their differences as well as in their continuities; and therein lies the strength of the book. It is in four parts. The first concerns itself with Plato, then with Plotinus, and his exploitation of Plato's ambiguities in order to rehabilitate art. The second part describes the continuity and development of neoplatonism from Saint Augustine to Ficinus and Nicholas of Cusa. The third shows how the neoplatonic internal eye continues to be indispensible to the Romantics, from Schelling to Coleridge and Joubert, as a [End Page 527] means of maintaining the existence of a reality inaccessible to the physical senses; but here already, one can see trouble brewing, as the radical alterity of that inaccessible reality is threatened by the Romantics' conviction that the metaphor must be something more than a metaphor: there must be some real similarity or continuity between the internal and the external eye, and what they see. The final part, after rehearsing the differences between Wordsworth and Coleridge, concludes with Balzac, who, unable to separate the material from the spiritual, takes the metaphor into a crisis destined to remain 'fatale, irrémédiable'. In presenting intelligence as a physical organ, and thought as a fluid with a physical reality, Balzac ruins the metaphorical status of the analogy between body and soul, rendering them part of a continuum. This takes him out of the Platonic tradition: once the internal and external eyes share the same substance, the same body, physiology and psychology threaten to supplant metaphysics, and the Platonic ideal realm withers. One could criticize Tortonese's lack of engagement with others who have written on the inheritance of the Platonic tradition in French literature of the period; Derrida would have been a fascinating interlocutor (the internal eye as supplement?), and there are many points of intersection with Michel Brix's Romantisme français: esthétique platonicienne et modernité littéraire (see FS, LIV (2000), 522-23). However, this is none the less an interesting story, well told, worth reading for the clarity of the insight into the fault lines of Balzac's philosophy that the Platonic perspective provides, and because, in its careful distinctions between users of the Platonic metaphor, it de-familiarizes a trope so widespread that we tend to miss its bizarre implications.

Peter Dayan
University of Edinburgh
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