Abstract

This dissertation examines the principles of anamorphic perspective and their relation to current theories of illusion and vision from E. H. Gombrich to Jacques Lacan. In particular this study focuses on the philosophical disputes concerning the ontological and epistemological significance of linear perspective and pictorial realism. Examining the often posited relationship between the perspectival viewpoint and the Cartesian subject, I argue that this relationship must be reconsidered. ;Cartesian ontology's association with perspective has been based on the assumption that the perspectival viewpoint is the quintessential illustration of the rational, punctiform, Cartesian subject. I believe that this is a misconception and argue instead that perspective does set up the conditions for conceptualizing the Cartesian subject, but not because it posits a rational, punctiform viewer. Rather, the cogito might be better described as a defense against the disseminating threat posed by perspective, particularly in its anamorphic form. ;In its technical aspects, as described by Jean Francois Niceron in his 1638 treatise La perspective curieuse ..., anamorphosis reveals how perspective contains within it the possibility of its own derationalization. In anamorphosis, the distance point, principal point and viewing point are nearly overlapped, resulting in a picture which can be visually resolved only from an oblique vantage point and in which the viewpoint is strangely made almost synonymous with the pictorial surface. Thus anamorphic perspective throws into question the subject's spatial position and visual acuity. Anamorphosis is therefore related to Descartes' cogito, but only in the sense that it enacts a moment of fundamental ontological and epistemological doubt by reversing the subjective viewpoint with the object in view. ;Ultimately I argue that Lacan posits a similar interpretation of anamorphosis when he uses it to re-figure the Cartesian cogito in terms of the gaze. In his use of anamorphosis, Lacan provocatively redefines what could be meant by the phrase "pictorial realism" and re-interprets perspective as the figurative distance that forms the core of subjective identity as split or lack