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Bestseller
BestsellerE-book
Author Jay, Martin, 1944-

Title Downcast eyes : the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought / Martin Jay.

Publication Info. Berkeley : University of California Press, [1993]
©1993

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xi, 632 pages).
text file
Series A centennial book
Centennial book.
Note "A Centennial book"--P. [ii].
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents The noblest of the senses : vision from Plato to Descartes -- Dialectic of enlightenment -- The crisis of the ancien scopic régime : from the impressionists to Bergson -- The disenchantment of the eye : Bataille and the surrealists -- Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the search for a new ontology of sight -- Lacan, Althusser, and the specular subject of ideology -- From the empire of the gaze to the society of the spectacle : Foucault and Debord -- The camera as memento mori : Barthes, Metz, and the cahiers du cinéma -- "Phallogocularcentrism" : Derrida and Irigaray -- The ethics of blindness and the postmodern sublime : Levinas and Lyotard.
Summary 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, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged vision's 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 antiocularcentric discourse 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 vision's role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From French Impressionism to Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded analyses 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
Reproduction Electronic reproduction. [Place of publication not identified]: HathiTrust Digital Library. 2021. MiAaHDL
System Details Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
Processing Action digitized 2021. HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve MiAaHDL
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Access Use copy Restrictions unspecified MiAaHDL
Subject Vision.
Vision.
Cognition and culture.
Cognition and culture.
Philosophy, French -- 20th century.
Philosophy, French.
Chronological Term 20th century
Subject France -- Civilization -- 20th century.
France.
Civilization.
France -- Intellectual life -- 20th century.
Intellectual life.
sight (sense)
philosophy.
culture note.
PHILOSOPHY -- History & Surveys -- Modern.
PHILOSOPHY -- Political.
Filosofia contemporanea.
Vision.
Cognition and culture.
Philosophy, French -- 20th century.
France -- Intellectual life -- 20th century.
Chronological Term 1900-1999
Indexed Term Philosophy
France
Other Form: Print version: Downcast eyes Berkeley : University of California Press, c1993. 0520081544 (alk. paper) (DLC) 93000347
ISBN 9780520915381 ebook
0520915380
0520081544 alkaline paper
0585200467 (electronic book)
9780585200460 (electronic book)
9780520088856 (paperback ; alkaline paper)
9780520081543
0520088859
Standard No. ebc223794