Picture perception and ordinary perception of real objects differ in several respects. Two of their main differences are: Depicted objects are not perceived as present and We cannot perceive significant spatial shifts as we move with respect to them. Some special illusory pictures escape these visual effects obtained in usual picture perception. First, trompe l'oeil paintings violate : the depicted object looks, even momentarily, like a present object. Second, anamorphic paintings violate : they lead to appreciate spatial shifts (...) resulting from movement. However, anamorphic paintings do not violate : they are still perceived as clearly pictorial, that is, nonpresent. What about the relation between trompe l'oeil paintings and? Do trompe l'oeils allow us to perceive spatial shifts? Nobody has ever focused on this aspect of trompe l'oeil perception. I offer the first speculation about this question. I suggest that, if we follow our most recent theories in philosophy and vision science about the mechanisms of picture perception, then, the only plausible answer, in line with phenomenological intuitions, is that, differently from nonillusory, usual picture perception, and similarly to ordinary perception, trompe l'oeil perception does allow us to perceive spatial shifts resulting from movement. I also discuss the philosophical implications of this claim. (shrink)

While there has been a lot of discussion of picture perception both in perceptual psychology and in philosophy, these discussions are driven by very different background assumptions. Nonetheless, it would be mutually beneficial to arrive at an understanding of picture perception that is informed by both the philosophers’ and the psychologists’ story. The aim of this paper is exactly this: to give an account of picture perception that is valid both as a philosophical and as a psychological account. I argue (...) that seeing trompe l’oeil paintings is, just as some philosophers suggested, different from other cases of picture perception. Further, the way our perceptual system functions when seeing trompe l’oeil paintings could be an important piece of the psychological explanation of perceiving pictures. (shrink)

Im Rahmen der interdisziplinären DFG-Forschungsgruppe Medien und Mimesis wird die Kulturtechnik der Mimesis vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen Medienforschung untersucht. In diesem Band sind die Ergebnisse zum Thema Metamorphosen der Fläche versammelt. Es geht darum, Trompe-l'OEils im Rahmen eines Prozesses der medialen Ausdifferenzierung als Figuren zu entziffern, durch die die zweidimensionale Buchseite (z. B. der mittelalterlichen Stundenbücher ) selbstreferentiell ihre Flächigkeit thematisiert, und die - indem sie zwischen Zwei- und Dreidimensionalität changieren - medial hybride Räume erzeugen. Damit wird die (...) Beziehung von Zeichen und Dingen, Bildraum und Bildträger ambivalent und dadurch gerade hochinteressant für medientheoretische Reflexionen. (shrink)

This book aims to present trompe-l'oeil painting as an ambigous aesthetic ideal offered by early modern theory of art. It embodies the idea of an image identical to what it represents. It is interpreted in terms of perceptual and aesthetic illusion, mimesis, diegesis, play, irony and scientific illustration.

Philosophers suggested that usual picture perception requires the simultaneous occurrence of the perception of the surface and of the depicted object. However, there are special cases of picture perception, such as trompe l'oeil perception, in which, unlike in usual picture perception, the object looks like a real, present object we can interact with, of the kind we are usually acquainted with in face-to-face perception. While philosophers suggested that usual picture perception and trompe l'oeil perception must differ (...) with respect to the perception of the surface, nobody has ever proposed a final explanatory account for such a difference. Here, I propose such an account. I consider the two possible options as candidates for the explanation of the illusory power of trompe l'oeil perception. The first is that, with trompe l'oeils, we perceive the surface unconsciously. The second is that, with trompe l'oeils, we cannot perceive the surface at all, that is, we cannot perceive it either consciously or unconsciously. I show that the second option is the unique plausible option, as it is in line with vision science, and with our received view about the nature of usual picture perception. (shrink)

During World War I, in response to substantial advancements in wartime surveillance, it became a common practice to rely on “vision specialists” to devise effective methods of fooling the enemy. These methods, collectively referred to now as camouflage, were designed by so-called camoufleurs, men who in civilian life had been trained as artists, graphic designers, architects, and theatre scenographers. Among the techniques they employed were perspective-based spatial distortions, of the sort that are also frequently used in theatrical set design, (...) class='Hi'>trompe l’oeil paintings, and wildlife displays. This paper describes these methods, explains how they were intended to work, and discusses their effectiveness. (shrink)

The complexity of these terms and their relationship with truth and truthfulness are put on display by the contributors to this volume.

When we watch movies, or are tricked by a trompe-l'oeil painting, we seem to be visually representing possible worlds; often non-actual possible worlds. This suggests that we really can visually represent possible worlds. The suggested claim is refined and developed here into a theory of visual experience that holds that all visual experiences, both veridical and non-veridical, represent possible worlds, many of which are non-actual.

My basic supposition is that the destruction of the little Jew's face and hands in Vandover and the Brute images the irruption of mere materiality within the scene of writing-that instead of Crane's double process of eliciting and repressing that materiality, what is figured in the shipwreck scene is a single, unstoppable process of materialization, involving both the act of representation and the marking tool and actual page , the result of which can only be the defeat of the very (...) possibility of writing .Here it might be objected that such a reading derives whatever plausibility it has from the comparison with Crane, and in a sense this is true: my claim is precisely that it's only against the background of Crane's seemingly bizarre but, in this regard, normative or centric enterprise that the wider problematic of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary "impressionism" can be made out. In another sense, however, the comparison with Crane involves an appeal to issues—notably that of materialism—which have long been basic to Norris criticism and which the recent work of Walter Benn Michaels has brought to a new level of conceptual sophistication and historical refinement. Specifically, the title essay in Michaels's book, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, interprets both McTeague and Vandover and the Brute in terms of a conflict between materiality and representation that found contemporary expression both in the debates over the gold and silver standards versus paper money and in the vogue for trompe l'oeil painting ." In this regard a crucial moment in Vandover's regression from man to beast is his discovery that, as a painter, he has lost the ability to represent nature three-dimensionally; Michaels treats this development as equivalent to "replac[ing] the painting with nature itself" , and goes on to remark: "But this ... is ultimately a distinction without a difference. Vandover the artist can so easily devolve into Vandover the brute precisely because both artist and brute are already committed to a naturalist ontology—in money, to precious metals; in art, to three-dimensionality. The moral of Vandover's regression, from this standpoint, is that it can only take place because . . . it has already taken place. Discovering that man is a brute, Norris repeats the discovery that paper money is just paper and that a painting of paper money is just paint" . My reading of the shipwreck passage would thus be consistent with what Michaels calls Norris's "trompe l'oeil materialism" , though the nearly sadomasochistic violence of that passage may be taken to imply that materialism's consequences for writing threaten to be even more disastrous than they are for painting. But rather than analyze the role of writing as such in Vandover, which would involve an intricate discussion not just of that novel and McTeague but also of Michaels's essay, I want to turn to another, lesser-known book by Norris, in which a thematic of writing plays a conspicuous and more nearly univocal role: A Man's Woman . Michael Fried is J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Courbet's Realism . He is currently at work on a book to be titled Manet's Modernism. (shrink)

This book is a defence of perspectivism in the age of post-truth. At the crossroads of science, art and philosophy, it unearths a tradition that we must rediscover: the point of view is not only what divides, it is also what is shared. The book makes a case why perspectivism alone can avoid us falling back into epistemological naivetés. It presents a series of case studies ranging from innovative interpretations of classical authors and key moments in the history of art—from (...) ancient painting, trompe l’oeil, and Brunelleschi’s experiment in Renaissance Florence—to the issue of perspective in the work of contemporary artists such as Robert Smithson. (shrink)

In this brilliant and baffling essay, Merleau-Ponty reaps a harvest of insights upon the basis of his previous penetrating studies of perception and language. Again we find massively argued denials of neat Cartesian distinctions, such as those supposed to hold between space, depth and color. Inspired by the author's intimate acquaintance with the modern art movement, and quoting frequently from its masters, the essay gives back to painting its own voice and autonomy. Much like the body itself, painting is held (...) to be our most direct and revealing access to the lived world—that is, to Being itself.—E. S. C. (shrink)

Over the last fifteen years, communication has become pictorial in a manner that it never was before. Billions of people have smart phones that enable them to take, edit, and share pictures easily whenever they choose to do so. This has created expressive niches within which new activities, with their own norms, continue to develop. Ready availability of these pictorial modes of communication, we claim, not only constitutes a change in the range of our communicative practices, but also changes the (...) world about which we communicate. Increasingly, we are making a world that’s worth depicting, using the tools we now possess. This paper will unpack one example of this phenomenon, trompe l’oeil street art. More and more of this seems to be produced with the intention that it is seen primarily in pictures. It makes sense that anything someone makes, and wants to be seen, would be made with decent photography potential in mind. You want photos to be able to, as they say, do justice to your work no matter what kind of visual work you make. In these cases, however, the pictures of the work are reliably more interesting than the pieces seen in the flesh. (shrink)

Le projet dont cet ouvrage est l'aboutissement n'a pas été d'établir une théorie du droit, mais d'en rechercher la signification au plus près de la pratique quotidienne des juristes. Chaque fois que l'un d'eux emploie le mot droit, il le fait sans s'expliquer comme s'il s'agissait là d'une chose commune qu'il suffirait de désigner pour être compris. Pourtant, dans sa brièveté même, il renvoie à des contenus divers qui ne font sens qu'à un haut degré d'élaboration. C'est à la recherche (...) de ces significations que l'on a voulu partir, en examinant le réseau complexe de représentations que les juristes mobilisent quand ils parlent de droit. On doute qu'il y ait une essence du droit, intemporelle et transcendante, qui en figerait la définition par-delà les époques et les climats. Mais il y a des constantes que l'on a voulu explorer. Un lieu, qui rend possible le développement d'un système de droit : l'ordre juridique, qui en réunit les conditions institutionnelles. Une matière commune à tous ses énoncés : la norme, règle ou décision, qui est au droit ce que l'atome est à la matière, la cellule au vivant. Enfin, par-delà l'unicité de l'énoncé des normes, il y a la diversité des pratiques d'application, qui en bouleversent la signification sociale et la compréhension. Tout cela permet, par des approches successives, de découvrir la texture du droit et d'examiner le singulier discours que tient l'ordre juridique. En première approximation, on appelle droit tout ce qui circule dans un ordre juridique. Plus profondément, le discours tenu par cet ordre permet à une société de décliner ses valeurs : l'exposé de son fonctionnement de principe doit permettre aux individus de s'y insérer sans la troubler. S'agit-il d'un discours qui dirait la vérité de la collectivité? Pas forcément : par son droit, toute société propose un miroir qui la reflète, mais seulement telle qu'elle se voit. On le constate, certains miroirs se révèlent déformants. Il en va ainsi pour la France, dont le droit présente à la fois un modèle de construction rationnelle et un véritable trompe-l'oeil ménagé par l'Etat, pour égarer sur la régulation véritable de la société. (shrink)

La désignation de " paroles rapportées " peut masquer, sous le trompe-l'oeil d'une fidélité plus ou moins revendiquée, la réduction inévitable qu'opère toute représentation par rapport à la totalité de l'acte d'énonciation représenté. L'autonymie, et par conséquent le discours direct, sont au coeur de cette tension entre fidélité et facticité. Rapporter le discours d'autrui, même au style direct, n'est-ce pas toujours déjà se l'approprier? Ce livre rassemble les travaux de chercheurs antiquisants, littéraires, linguistes et stylisticiens sur cet aspect (...) de l'hétérogénéité énonciative que sont les illusions attachées à l'autonymie dans la représentation du discours de l'Autre. Outre les modalités de transcription du discours de l'Autre et leurs effets sémantiques, poétiques et pragmatiques, a été abordée dans cet ouvrage collectif la question des illusions de la fidélité littérale. (shrink)

In “Trompe L'Oeil”, the seventh episode of Westworld, Bernard Lowe discovers the plans for his own body. Bernard's are ready‐made by someone else and uploaded into his brain, apparently unrelated to any real events. Bernard has memories of his son Charlie, which he thought referred to a real boy with whom he had a real relationship, and whose real death is the cause of his inescapable grief. Bernard might respond that lifelong grief is an excessive response to the (...) death of a fictional character. He realizes that the memories of that trauma have been fabricated by Robert Ford. Whether Charlie is a lie, a fiction, or a stranger, by grieving for him Bernard is sharing in a very human kind of experience. As malicious as Ford's motives were, maybe he was right about the need for a “cornerstone” of suffering to make Bernard human. (shrink)

When we see something in a picture, do we enjoy visual experience as of the depicted object? Gombrichians say yes: when viewing ordinary pictures we simultaneously see the picture and seem to see its object. But why, then, isn’t seeing-in contradictory, and how are these two elements somehow integrated into a single experience? Gombrichians’ attempts to answer appeal either to our awareness of the picture’s design, or to the idea that picture and object are not given as in the same (...) place. I argue that neither answer is successful, and thus that Gombrichianism is false. (shrink)

Este artículo estudia la contribución de las primeras vanguardias artísticas del siglo XX a la ideación y puesta en práctica de técnicas de camuflaje militar durante la I Guerra Mundial. Se analizan así el origen cubista de los diseños de camuflaje mimético (o Disruptive pattern Material), el papel desempeñado por los artistas en la ideación de numerosos trompe l’oeil con fines bélicos y la condición del camoufleur como artista-soldado, un sujeto repartido entre lo funcional y lo estético. Todo ello (...) sirve de fundamento para sustentar la tesis de que el contexto bélico sirvió como campo de pruebas de las técnicas, anhelos y formas del arte de las vanguardias históricas. (shrink)

Seul, saint, fou, idiot -- Des deux inanités : de dieu et de l'histoire -- Ou bien Dieu... ou bien l'histoire (Hegel, Dostoïevski, Chestov, Kojève & Bataille) -- Des trois religions des années trente (communisme, fascisme et surréalisme) et d'une quatrième (Acéphale) -- Penser le fascisme (Freud, Reich & Bataille) -- La folie Acéphale (Ou la religion antichrétienne, antifasciste, anticommuniste) -- In-signifiances d'Acéphale (Blanchot & Bataille) -- Le surréalisme au service de la religion (Artaud, Breton & Bataille) -- Felix Culpa (...) -- Éloge du péché (Sartre & Bataille, entre autres) -- Sainteté du mal (Charlotte d'Ingerville & Sainte) -- Vies & livres -- Correspondances coïncidences -- Une amitié intenable (Leiris & Bataille) -- Histoire d'un trompe-l'oeil -- L'idiotie de Bataille -- Une passion paradoxale de la raison. (shrink)

Augmented Reality is itself a technology in which two ways of seeing are crossed. Our field of vision is thereby superimposed with digital information and images. But before this, the real environment is already perceived by machine seeing, it is redoubled by a 3D-model, scanned, located and linked. In this brief investigation, I will face the way of seeing in AR with traditional procedures, like ‘trompe-l'œil’ and the so-called ‘velo’, to distinguish between what remains classic and what has changed. (...) It is important to examine this as layering, because it is a very thin stack of techniques, technology, materials and media, we seek to watch through. Subsequently, I shall analyze a painting of the contemporary artist Laura Owens in which both ways are crossed, the traditional one and the one concerning AR. (shrink)

Visualizing and mental imagery are thought to be cognitive states by all sides of the imagery debate. Yet the phenomenology of those states has distinctly visual ingredients. This has potential consequences for the hypothesis that vision is cognitively impenetrable, the ability of visual processes to ground perceptual warrant and justification, and the distinction between cognitive and perceptual phenomenology. I explore those consequences by describing two forms of visual ambiguity that involve visualizing: the ability to visually experience a picture surface as (...) flat after it has caused volumetric nonconceptual contents, and the ability to use a surface initially perceived as flat to visualize three-dimensional scenes. In both cases, the visual processes which extract viewer-centered volumetric shapes have to rely solely on monocular depth cues in the absence of parallax and stereopsis. Those processes can be cognitively penetrated by acts of visualizing, including ones that draw on conceptual information about kinds. However, the penetrability of the visual processes does not weaken their ability to provide perceptual warrant and justification for beliefs. The reason is that picture perceptions—whether they are stimulus -driven or based on acts of visualizing—are different to object perceptions both phenomenologically and in terms of their functional roles as states. Thus, although the penetrability of the visual processes does mean that subjects can have visual experiences with contradictory contents, perceptual belief is adopted at most towards one set of contents, and questions of warrant and justification are raised only for those contents. A rule-proving exception is provided by trompe-l’oeils. (shrink)

The administrative practices of officials who process the admission of immigrants show severe variations in the ways in which migration policy is enforced on the ground. For the author, inequality of treatment lies in the very hierarchy of tasks and services of what he dubs, following Pierre Bourdieu, the immigration "field". According to the author, the governments’ securitizing priorities favour the sort of suspicion towards foreigners that the media then reproduces, thus authorizing so-called street-level bureaucrats to act with great leeway (...) with regard to immigrants. Under pressure, governments implement what the author calls a "trompe-l’oeil policy" that explores the ambivalence between international and domestic law: while the state enforces repressive laws that apparently comply with fundamental human rights, it leaves to low-ranking civil servants enough discretion to make those rights ineffective. This point is the author’s central contention. The arbitrariness of these officials is neither contingent nor accidental: it actually constitutes a purposive "front-line policy" to enlarge the discretionary power of street-level bureaucrats in charge of regulating admissions. Unequal treatment comes in three flavours in this context. First, officials are asked to ensure that each right granted to a foreigner will not threaten the national order, which means the economic, social and political order. They are therefore in a position to judge the suitability of each application in view of their own arbitrary interpretation of what such "threats" consist of. The question of discretionary power is in this way intimately linked to the problem of equality before the law. Second, the scarcity of material and human resources allocated to services in charge of welcoming migrants starkly contrasts with the expenditure incurred to deport foreigners. Inequality also arises from how agents perceive users and the leeway they have to implement the law. Third, inequality is related to foreigners’ abilities and means to challenge discretionary power, especially through the legal tools they use or through legal intermediaries. The author thus concludes that such "front-line policy" has increasingly been used as a weapon against migrants, especially since the early 2000s, when immigration and detention policies were generalized in France. More broadly, in Europe as well as in United States, immigration reforms have made greater use of detention and focused on enforcement rather than on hosting programs and services for asylum seekers. But they have also strengthened the role of legal intermediaries. Hence the need to investigate how discretionary power is challenged as it sheds light on the power relations between states and migrants. Keywords: foreigners, discretion, sociology, participant observation, front-line policy, illegalism, jobs, insecurity, legal intermediaries. (shrink)

Si les maux qui frappent l'ensemble de la biosphère ne font que s'aggraver, ce n'est pas que l'effet de l'empire de la marchandise et de l'avidité du capitalisme. La volonté de toute-puissance - et le cortège de destructions qu'elle engendre - est plus ancienne et plus tenace : elle commence avec les monuments géants que conçurent des civilisations au Ille millénaire avant notre ère, pour y loger des dieux inventés pour justifier leurs ambitions. Si nous voulons faire exister un humanisme (...) écologique, au lieu de nous leurrer avec la croissance verte et autres trompe-l'oeil, nous devons combattre les idéologies de "l'exception humaine" - spiritualistes ou matérialistes - et la rage de posséder et de spolier qui se répand comme une épidémie mondiale. Si nous voulons protéger et mettre en valeur notre bien commun - la Terre et tous ses habitants -, nous devons engager une profonde réforme de nos croyances, de nos institutions et de nos modes de vie, en commençant par trouver notre véritable place au sein de la Nature. (shrink)

Quand point l'année nouvelle, chacun se soumet au cérémonial des voeux, interminables et impersonnels (la sacro-sainte triade santé-bonheur-réussite!), auquel se greffe la tragi-comédie des grandes résolutions dans une cascade déprimante de ne plus dont rien ou presque ne subsiste quelques jours après. S'y ajoutent les rituels et les folklores qui, sous toutes les latitudes et dans toutes les cultures humaines, leur font écho. Chacun s'y prête à chaque fois (cette répétition donne le vertige) avec un enthousiasme qui décroît en général (...) au fil des ans. Et si, à l'heure d'entrebâiller la porte de Janvier, qui restera close un an encore, il devenait urgent et même vital de lever les yeux du compte à rebours universel pour passer du trompe-l'oeil de la carte de voeux et de la vraie-fausse résolution au rendez-vous enfin pris avec soi-même? Et si dire oui, faire oui à la manière nietzschéenne, c'était simple comme le Nouvel An? Telle est l'invitation philosophique que ce livre, écrit dans une langue volontairement accessible au plus grand nombre sans rien céder sur le fond de la pensée, adresse à toutes celles et à tous ceux qui souhaitent ne pas laisser filer indéfiniment, année après année, l'occasion de devenir ce qu'ils sont. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Writing of Space:On French Critical Theory in 1973 and its AftermathTom Conley (bio)Je rempliz d'un beau nom ce grand espace vide(I fill with a handsome name this great empty space)—Joachim Du Bellay, Les regrets[...] l'unique mot ESPACE, indéfiniment répété, isolé, d'une ligne à l'autre; clos sur lui-même par la recurrence du e (espace), brisé pourtant par l'adjonction interne du s (espace), qui se réfléchit en trompe (...) class='Hi'>l'oeil phonétique (espace); avec un centre immuable—espace—, où peut se lire l'amorce de la paix ou du tombeau—mais susceptible de faire cap de tout côté, comme on fait eau. L'espace est « découvert », « brisé » ou « vécu »—à droite, où poussent les épithètes ; l'espace est objet de « découverte », de « promenade » ou d' « odyssée », à gauche où s'alignent les substantifs qui commandent les clichés dont l'espace serait le complément obligé. Génitif d'un côté, ou pour le moin complétif, générateur de l'autre, ou en tout cas substance à qualités variables. Dans l'arbre à syntagmes ainsi érigé, l'espace est inventé par l'écriture qui fait alterner, sans jamais les combiner sur une même ligne, un espace donné comme objet stable d'exploration. [...]([...] the unique word ESPACE can be placed, indefinitely repeated, isolated, from one line to another ; closed upon itself by the recurrence of the e (espace), yet broken by the inner adjunction of the s (espace) reflected in a phonetic trompe-l'œil (espace) ; with an immutable center—espace—, in which can be read the first letters of peace or of tomb—but liable to go everywhere, like water in the sea. Space is « discovered, » « broken, » or « lived »—on the right where epithets come forward; space is the object of « discovery », of a « walk » or an « odyssey », on the left where are aligned the substantives that order the clichés for [End Page 189] which space would be the required object. Genitive on one side, or at least objective, generative of the other, or in every event a substance with variable traits. In the tree of syntagms erected above space is invented by writing that causes to alternate—without ever combining them on the same line—a given space as a stable object of exploration. [...]—Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Écrire l'espaceIn 1974 Henri Lefebvre published La production de l'espace (The Production of Space), a study said to have changed the course of critical reflection on the world around us. In his copious work Lefebvre locates the gaps and rifts between spatial practices or representational spaces and representations of space in order to mark the brute nature of social contradiction. Over history, he shows, those individuals who practice and represent space generally own control over those who do not or cannot. The very history of the reception of Lefebvre's work has been so rich that it cannot be disentangled from debates concerning the nature of the postmodern condition. It has brought forward an element, something akin to Lacan's "real," that cannot be contained or discerned by language, the arena of life itself. The impact of La production de l'espace cannot be underestimated.1 Yet, at the same time, the work remains a legacy or a point of reference for a concurrent labor born at the same moment and of a different texture than Lefebvre's: an activity that I would like to call a writing of space, a labor by which authors of different formation engage and invent alternative or other spaces within the texture of their own reflections on space. Like Lefebvre, they respond to a anxiety about the condition of space in which they live, but unlike him, they embody, in the gist of their own writing, spaces alternative to those in which they live. What follows is thus aimed at discerning why and how space emerged in the field of critical theory when it did and, in turn, at showing how the reflections remain crucial for critical practice here and now.The first of the two epigraphs above is... (shrink)

In this paper, I want to argue for two main and related points. First, I want to defend Richard Wollheim’s well-known thesis that the twofold mental state of seeing-in is the distinctive pictorial experience that marks figurativity. Figurativity is what makes a representation pictorial, a depiction of its subject. Moreover, I want to show that insofar as it is a mark of figurativity, all seeing-in is inflected. That is to say, every mental state of seeing-in is such that the characterisation (...) of the properties by which a certain subject is seen in a given picture as having refers to the design properties of the picture’s vehicle, i.e., to the visible surface properties of that vehicle that are responsible for the fact that one such subject is seen in it, precisely taken in such a design role. Finally, I will try to show that seeing-in is qualified by inflection independently of whether it is conscious or unconscious seeing-in. (shrink)

Dans Folioplus philosophie, le texte philosophique, associé une oeuvre d'art qui l'éclaire et le questionne, est suivi d'un dossier organisé en six points :Les mots du texte : Corps, entrelacs (chiasme), chair ; L'œuvre dans l'histoire des idées ; La figure du philosophe ; Trois questions posées au texte : Y a-t-il une chair de l'image? L'accès à l'être implique-t-il la neutralisation du sensible? Y a-t-il une chair de l'histoire? ; Groupement de textes : L'écriture et l'image: l'existence, la mort (...) ; Prolongements. (shrink)

Stefanie Buchenau | : Johann Georg Sulzer participe d’une tradition allemande et wolffienne qui conjugue réflexion épistémologique et esthétique. L’originalité de Sulzer au sein de cette tradition consiste à développer un nouveau modèle de la connaissance comme contemplation. Selon ce modèle spéculatif qui emprunte des éléments à l’esthétique de Du Bos, la distance et l’extériorité du spectateur par rapport à son objet est loin d’être le réquisit d’une bonne vision. Celle-ci dépend tout au contraire de l’appartenance du spectateur au monde (...) qu’il contemple, de sa réceptivité, de sa sensibilité et de son humanité. Car l’âme ne peut déployer son activité de pensée qu’à condition de s’attacher d’abord à son objet : un tel attachement est la condition de son détachement. La mise en place de ce nouveau modèle spéculatif répond à l’injonction de Mérian qui est de repenser la conscience ou l’aperception à partir d’un sentiment a posteriori. Car « l’oeil ne se voit pas voir », et l’aperception primitive, cet acte par lequel l’esprit se pense, lui échappe. Il éprouve néanmoins des sentiments — de plaisir et de déplaisir — qui le contraignent à faire retour sur lui-même et sur son état d’être affecté ; des sentiments dont Sulzer considère qu’ils ancrent sa connaissance dans la réalité et lui permettent de la rapporter à soi-même. C’est ainsi qu’au fil des mémoires académiques des années 1750 à 1770, Sulzer élabore une nouvelle conception tripartite des facultés, et une distinction entre domaines théorique et pratique qui marquera la philosophie de Kant. Ce débat au sein de l’Académie berlinoise au sujet de la connaissance de soi donne une nouvelle orientation anthropologique à la philosophie allemande de la seconde moitié du xviiie siècle. | : Johann Georg Sulzer belongs to a German and Wolffian tradition that closely associates theory of knowledge and aesthetics. Sulzer’s originality within this tradition consists in introducing a new model of contemplation. This model borrows elements from Du Bos and leads him to revise the traditional paradigms of cognition and self-cognition : more than the spectator’s distance and exteriority to her object, good vision requires her involvement and inclusion into the world she contemplates, that is her receptivity, sensibility and humanity. For her soul cannot unfold its activity unless it is attached to its object. Such attachment is the condition of its detachment. Sulzer elaborates his model of speculation in response to issues recently raised by his colleague Merian within the Berlin academy. Merian had emphasized the necessity to rethink consciousness or apperception on the basis of some posteriori feeling. For “the eye does not see itself seeing” and the primitive apperception, the act of thinking itself, necessarily escapes the soul’s aperception : it nonetheless has feelings — of pleasure and displeasure — which make the soul reflect on itself and its state of affection ; For Sulzer, these feelings are what grounds knowledge in reality and establishes a relation to the self. In his writings from the 1750’ies to the 1770’ies Sulzer develops these insights and elaborates a new division of faculties and of the theoretical vs. practical that will shape Kant’s psychology and philosophy. This debate within the Berlin academy confers a new anthropological orientation to the German philosophy of the second 18th century. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 136-140. In early 2011, Cow Heavy Books published The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature , a compendium of catalog 'blurbs' for non-existent desired or ideal texts. Along with Erinrose Mager, I edited the project, in a process that was more like curation as it mainly entailed asking a range of contemporary writers, theorists, and text-makers to send us an entry. What resulted was a creative/critical hybrid anthology, a small book in which each page opens (...) to a new iteration of textual desire. These texts explore the material possibilities of the book. Somewhat parallel to the call of N. Katherine Hayles who, in her book Writing Machines , urges literary theorists to take up the practice of Medium Specific Analysis (to account for the way the medium in which it is presented conditions or at least bears on a literary text). I see in the imagined works of The Official Catalog a call for the innovative writers of today to become Medium-Responsive. This would mean thinking through the specific (materially constrained) possibilities offered by the media in which texts are presented, and in thinking of the literary text as a kind of art in the greater context of other arts and the book as a medium situated within the context of many other media. In doing so, the contemporary writer refutes the chorus of critics who lament the death of the book by consistently reinvigorating literary innovation. The following are selections from The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature that show possible paths for (thinking about) new writing that engages with its medium. —Ben Segal, Editor THE CUBE Even the most radical non-linear texts have tended to exploit or subvert only the sequential possibilities of print—from the continuous loop of Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the shuffled cards of Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 —but The Cube takes such multiplicities to an entirely new level. Set in a grid, the book's words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column—with either route making complete grammatical sense. But they can also be read as stacked strata and mined like lexical core samples through the layered pages of the book. Each path tells the same story from a different perspective (the narrative, naturally, hinges on the potential outcomes of a throw of cubed dice). By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space. Taking its lead from Armand Schwerner's (If Personal) and Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes , The Cube reads like a experiment by Christian Bök precision printed by Emily McVarish. Craig Dworkin is the editor, most recently, of The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (Roof Books, 2008), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound , with Marjorie Perloff (U. Chicago Press, 2009), and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing , with Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern UP, 2010). He teaches at the University of Utah. HE GOES In He Goes , we read notes, letters and e-mails from a scholar father to his novelist daughter. We read of the father's musings on Beckett, on Pinter, on Anne Frank; his description of a woman hanging laundry from a line. We read about his journey toward dying, followed by a brief, third person account of his death, and his obituary. Then a long series of blank pages that demand to be read in real time, non-sentence by non-sentence, blank page by blank page. Finally—and it is here that this peculiar little book begins to soar—the dead father writes to his as-of-yet-still-living daughter. He does not write from death. He does not write from life. The words unprint, unstamp, unkindle. Still, they require no translation. The father "writes" (for lack of a better word) about the serendipitous, the commonplace; he recommends another book. He jokes. He asks his daughter how her stomach is. He says forget about presence in absence, darling; screw words as memorial and the guys in garbage cans and loss as redemption and I can't go on I must go on. He goes, "Love, Fodder." He goes, "incidentally." He goes, "I thought you might like to know." Elizabeth Graver is the author of a story collection, Have You Seen Me? , and three novels: Unravelling ; The Honey Thief ; and Awake . Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories , Best American Essays , and Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards . She teaches at Boston College. THE PAPER ARCHIVIST A stunning package and a triumph of imagination, The Paper Archivist at times looks to be less a book than an abstract expressionist painting. Softly bound, its contents unfold to a single sheet of uneven thickness and texture—a canvas splattered with colored lines, stickers, broken sentences, and nonsense pictographs. But by following the directions to fold, dip, smell, rub, scratch, and tear the sheet according to the contingencies of the weather and using only the objects at hand, the reader slowly brings the forces hidden in the noise into a glorious sculptural convergence, processing a different story and shape each time. This is the rare book that continues to stir, whirl, and pop on every new reading. Sean Higgins blogs at BOMBlog where he is responsible for the column Volumes and Territories, as well as Ghost Island , a fledgling collaborative intellectual collective. THE SLOW BOOK The Slow Book , written by an anonymous author at the dawn of literacy, on a minor planet (otherwise notable only as the source of that exceptionally hardy, not very tasty grain called “shef” sowed on hostile planets as an early step to colonization), and encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper coiled inside a clever device, something between a player piano and an old-fashioned film projector, is being released into print, as was the author’s intention, at a rate of one word per century (local time). Each word is, across the Forty Galaxies, agreed to be uncannily apt for the century in which it appears—even “of,” in a century during which the highest value was attached to fidelity, whether to ideals, worlds, or romantic love; even “the,” which governed two centuries, one extraordinarily materialistic, during which advances in propulsion and navigation accelerated the exchange of exceptional objects between the remotest planets of the Forty, and one in which the central concern, both of philosophers and the common man, was whether, in an age of rapidly proliferating hypothetical worlds, anyone or anything concretely existed at all. Even those words published long before interstellar contact can be seen in retrospect to have transgalactic pertinence. As a result, attempts to abstract the machine from its publishers, Hobson & Hui, in order to “predict the future” for insight or gain by “fast- forwarding” the copper strip have been many and ingenious. While, in centuries of skepticism (“maybe”), or of unrest (“go”) the book has been nearly forgotten, in others it seems to haunt every thought, every deed, despite the fact that the subject of The Slow Book is still unclear. So far only a few sentences exist in print; everyone knows them, can quote them, offer the standard exegeses and assorted heresies; yet certainties are the stuff of adolescence; mature readers are forced to acknowledge that these sentences are probably only a preamble to the main argument. They contain no proper nouns, nor can we identify any definite theme. There is even disagreement about their tone, whether coolly ironic, as some insist, or ardent. The appearance of an unusual grammatical case, sometimes called the future pluperfect continuous, used to describe events that at some future point will have always been true (but are not yet)—hitherto known to appear only in the synthetic dogmas of the Thanatographical Society, and in certain highly circumscribed religious contexts—has suggested to some scholars that the Slow Book was originally intended for ritual use, but the proximity of the usage to a term designating a small hand plow that, as Pott and Mielcke have convincingly shown, would have borne a distinctly obscene double meaning in its culture of origin in the author’s time, argues otherwise. It is likewise unclear whether the situation that seems to be—with teasing incompleteness—sketched out in these few lines is intended as an illustration of general principles, a case study, a dramatic scene, or an extended metaphor. In short, we have no idea what The Slow Book is about. In our own time, we believe that it is almost certainly a work of fiction, but that may be because we live in the century of “if”. In each age, perhaps, we see the book we most need to read. Some have dared to suggest that the metal strip is blank until, with millennial fanfare, it advances into its new position, that no ur-text exists, that the book itself is brought into being—written—by our need. But that is exactly the sort of thing we would believe, in 7645. Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy , the novel Half Life , and hypertexts including Patchwork Girl . The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2006 James Tiptree Jr Award, she has also written and illustrated several children's books, including The Old Woman and the Wave ; Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog ; and Mimi's Dada Catifesto . Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions , McSweeney's , The Paris Review , and Cabinet Magazine . In 2004 she launched her project SKIN , a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers. THE BOOK OF SOUNDS The Book of Sounds is just that: a book of sounds made when letters are construed in new ways to bring forth out of the alphabet new forms of speech. A book meant to be read out loud, The Book of Sounds is not unlike Laurie Anderson's O Superman or Brian Eno's Music for Airports in its attempt to make music out of the most primary and simplest of methods. It breaks language down to its barest bones and makes out of the page a drum that has never before been beaten upon. Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat (Dzanc Books) as well as two books of short fiction, Good, Brother and The Singing Fish , both of which were published by Calamari Press. A new collection of stories, We Make Mud , is now available from Dzanc Books. PARADISE OF THE BLIND by Celan Solen Although the reclusive Celan Solen published his first and only book in 1963—paying out-of-pocket for a limited edition of the slim collection No One May Have the Same Knowledge Again —he remained in American obscurity for almost three decades. In 1992 a micro-press in Istanbul brought out No One in Turkish. A German translation followed in 1995. Soon it became clear in literary circles Solen was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist—lyrical, dense, enigmatic—who could undo the conventional short story in 397 words by inventing impossible worlds housed in impossible whirls (in “Small Sadnesses,” a single chartreuse tree frog in Borneo unknowingly holds time together by its very presence in the universe, while each letter of its tale refers, not to itself, but to the one preceding it in the alphabet). By his disappearance last year, Solen was considered master by a generation of writers and critics (except, alas, for those gentlemen in the Swedish Academy). Imagine, then, that generation’s delight at the discovery, locked away in the author’s safe-deposit box, of his second and final composition. Had Lynch’s Lost Highway been book instead of film, and had it been penned by Beckett at his least certain, revised by Barthelme at his most formally deranged, and typeset by Derrida at his most semiotically catastrophic, the result might have been something like Paradise of the Blind : interlacing narratives of a man composed of borrowed organs (whose most cheerless and difficult to locate, god, could only have been invented by an empty heart), a nonexistent medieval painting blamed for the ruin of future hope, and the spread of a philosophy that holds earth a mistake constantly recurring in the dream of a fish lying on the floor of the Atlantic (if the fish wakes, our world winks off)—all contained in a text packed with typed-over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-l'œil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible. Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novels Calendar of Regrets (2010) and Head in Flames (2009). He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. SUPERSTRUCTURE! by Barbara D'Albi As soon as I opened the third drawer of Barbara D'Albi's wooden novel, everything became hopeless. Now in Ithaca, there was no going back. And it wasn't just the intricate series of shelves, hinged doors and locked drawers which D'Albi layered into the book, no, lo, I was constructed anew by the story. Who else but D'Albi to imagine a God who becomes a carpenter and gets killed?! And makes it good! You want stories? D'Albi is a skyscraper, built with planes and levers. Momentarily I wondered where I could shelve this book, and then I thought: no matter; I couldn't put it down. Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he runs Publishing Genius. He is the author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem. (shrink)

" Pourquoi inventa Poppaea de masquer les beautés de son visage, que pour les renchérir à ses amants? " demande Montaigne. Le caché fascine. Voir, regarder, c'est désirer saisir, pénétrer, posséder. Devenir " œil vivant " : tel est le vœu formulé par Rousseau. Interrogeant quelques grandes œuvres - Corneille, Racine, La Bruyère, Rousseau, Stendhal, Jean Starobinski montre comment, dans la création littéraire, l'exigence du regard, dépassant et détruisant la réalité visible, entraîne dans le monde de l'imaginaire ; comment aussi, (...) aiguisée par l'obstacle et la déception, elle incite à toutes les perversions : exhibitionnisme, voyeurisme, sadisme, refus de la réflexion. (shrink)

Desires matter. How are we to understand their intentionality? According to the main dogma, a desire is a disposition to act. In this article, I propose an alternative to this functionalist picture, which is inspired by the phenomenological tradition. On this approach, desire involves a specific manner of representing the world: deontic mode. Desiring a state of affairs, I propose, is representing it as what ought to be or, if one prefers, as what should be. Firstly, I present three principles (...) of the semantics of desires that pertain to their satisfaction conditions, their world-to-mind direction of fit, and the idea that we desire what, we think, is not actual. Secondly, I examine the functionalist view in light of these features. Finally, I argue for the deontic mode conception: desire and ought-to-be fit like hand in glove. Consequently, desire’s intentionality is irreducible to desire’s functional role and calls for a first-person perspective taking modes seriously. (shrink)

Richard Wollheim was hardly alone in supposing that his account of pictorial depiction implies that a trompe-l’œil is not a depiction. I recommend removing this apparent implication by inserting a Kant-style version of aspect-perception into his account. I characterize the result as Neo-Wollheimian and retain the centrality of Wollheim’s notion of twofoldedness in the theory of depiction, but I demote it to a contingent feature of depictions and I criticize his employment of it for determining the category of both (...) the trompe-l’œil and depictions in general. (shrink)