Les existences moindres by David Lapoujade (review)

In this beautiful and concise invitation to the philosophy of Étienne Souriau (1892–1979), the third chapter seems to me the most important. Titled "Comment voir" ("How to See"), the chapter starts with an example of Souriau's. A child takes the time carefully to arrange some kitchen utensils on a table in such a way as to form an image; in some sense, the child thereby "inaugurates" a work of art (Souriau uses the French verb instaurer). A bit later, the child's mother enters and takes some of the utensils for cooking. The child begins to cry. It is only after hearing his explanation that his mother understands her mistake. She excuses herself by saying that she had not noticed that the arrangement on the table was "something." Lapoujade underscores that she had indeed seen the objects on the table; after all, she had wanted to use them. What, then, had she missed seeing? The point of view of the child: it was his singular perspective that made the objects that she saw exist as well in another mode—the mode of an artwork ("une œuvre"). The child is both witness and advocate of this oeuvre: he does not simply see the piece that he inaugurates, he also (by crying and explaining) defends its right to exist as such. In turn, the artwork confers a further degree of reality on the child. Without it, the child would exist, but a part of his world would be erased. The child's reality would be diminished.

For Souriau, as Lapoujade explains in the opening chapter, reality is not merely existence but involves as well the claim or right to exist. The right to exist is conferred on those that confer it on others. Thus, the child augments his own reality as he defends his artwork's right to exist, and the artwork attains some degree of reality as it supplies the child with one more reason to exist. In another example, Lapoujade writes of Constantin Brancusi's sculpture Bird in Space, to which customs officers at the port of New York refused to grant the status of an artwork. They imposed duty on the bronze of which it was made, although the law exempted bronze art works from that tax. Like the child in the previous example, the sculptor in this one defends his work and wins his case in court. Lapoujade then asks a question that haunts any perspectivist philosophy: "Comment faire voir ces perspectives?" The author's answer is that we must "conceive an optical device that renders perspectives perceptible—that affords them a more obvious reality." In the case of Brancusi, the testimony for and against the appellant, along with the mutually contradictory opinions of the judges, offers rich material for study of how such "perspectivist devices" may be fashioned concretely. Lapoujade might also have considered the work of biologists who sometimes are induced to construct perspectivist devices that take into account the point of view of the organisms that they study. In an article of 2012, "Involutionary Momentum," Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers describe the perspectivism of Charles Darwin as he conducted research on bees and orchids. Darwin's is a case that, had Lapoujade considered it, could have led him to think about perspectives not formulated in terms of vision. After all, orchids do not see.