Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought

Martin Jay

Published by University of California Press 1993

Downcast Eyes

The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought

Martin Jay

https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520915381

Overview
Contents

About this book

Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance.

Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty.

His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.

Author / Editor information

Jay Martin :

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Force Fields (1992), Marxism and Totality (California, 1984), Adorno (1984), and The Dialectical Imagination (1973).

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. The Noblest of the Senses: Vision from Plato to Descartes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	21
2.Dialectic of EnLIGHTenment Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	83
3. The Crisis of the Ancien Scopic Regime: From the Impressionists to Bergson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
4. The Disenchantment of the Eye: Bataille and the Surrealists Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211
5. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the Search for a New Ontology of Sight Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	263
6. Lacan, Althusser, and the Specular Subject of Ideology Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	329
7. From the Empire of the Gaze to the Society of the Spectacle: Foucault and Debord Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	381
8. The Camera as Memento Mori: Barthes, Metz, and the Cahiers du Cinema Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	435
"Phallogocularcentrism" : Derrida and Irigaray Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	493
10. The Ethics of Blindness and the Postmodern Sublime: Levinas and Lyotard Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	543
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	587
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	595

Language: English
Publisher: University of California Press
Pages
- Main content: 648

eBook

Published: October 1, 1993
ISBN: 9780520915381