Modern French Visual Theory: A Critical Reader ed. by Nigel Saint and Andy Stafford (review)

From Hubert Damisch’s iconography of dreams to Régis Debray’s mediology, this book takes us on a dizzying tour of French-language theoretical thinking about the visual from the 1940s up to the present day. It does not present itself as a limpid synthesis but rather as a series of sensitive explorations of the often very complex work of individual thinkers. The contributors are academics drawn from French, English, and art history departments; most are based in the UK, but others work in Ireland, Belgium, France, and the USA. They offer specialist insights into the intellectual background and trajectory of their chosen figures, as well as, in several cases, some very well-informed critique. The majority of the thirteen essays are accessible to the non-specialist, and some are particularly well written and crafted (including those by Shirley Jordan, Agnès Guiderdoni, and Nigel Saint). As they explain in their very useful and impressively expert Introduction, Nigel Saint and Andy Stafford have chosen to respond to an existing cross-disciplinary interest in French theoretical writing about the visual not by offering authoritative accounts of theorists whom anglophone scholars have already widely studied and discussed — Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, Irigaray, for example — but by focusing on a number of thinkers whose work is less well known outside France (although the Introduction does engage with some of these more familiar figures). Exceptions are made for Merleau-Ponty and Baudrillard, on the stated basis that their work is too important not to be included in a book about visual theory. The same case could be made, of course, for the other very well-known philosophers, as the editors themselves come close to admitting; but any selection is, by definition, partial. The virtual absence from the volume of non-metropolitan French-speaking thinkers is explicitly problematized both in the Introduction and in the concluding pages, although the relative absence of women is, perhaps unfortunately, not discussed; only two of the chapters focus on female thinkers. The essays, which regularly cross-reference each other in a way that militates against any sense that the individual thinkers operate in a vacuum, are divided into five thematically differentiated sections, and are followed by a wide-ranging and interesting interview with Bernard Vouilloux, a Sorbonne professor and specialist in literature and the visual arts. As the latter notes, the editors do not take the easy option of defining the visual in any easily manageable way. Instead, they allocate chapters to thinkers who might roughly be described as art historians/aestheticians (Daniel Arasse, Georges Didi-Huberman, Damisch), philosophers (Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Nancy, Louis Marin, Debray, Baudrillard, Bernard Stiegler, Christine Buci-Glucksmann), a semiologist of film (Christian Metz), and a sociologist of art (Nathalie Heinich), as well as to a visual thinker as unclassifiable as Jean-Louis Schefer. This is, in sum, a hugely ambitious and intricately conceived book that achieves the impressive feat of capturing and communicating some of the richness and complexity of French-language thinking in the field of the visual.