Collect Downcast Eyes: The Denigration Of Vision In Twentieth-Century French Thought Documented By Martin Jay Distributed As Volume

and erudite tome that is essentially the only book you need for this rather niche, but important, topic.
Complex ideas expressed in fairly readable prose, Tons of footnotes for further reading, An impressive accomplishment. Nowadays the word "Marxist" has a certain quaintness to it, like it belongs to the same family as "horticulturalist" or "futurist".
It is hard to realize that it used to have cachet to generations of serious thinkers and artists.
It was one of the streams that deeply influenced cultural critics like the Walter Benjamin, Adorno, and the Frankfurt School.
But it seems soth century, like something you have to dust off after rummaging around in the back of your garage.


Professor Jay was one of my teachers in college and a most brilliant mind, I haven't read this book yet but plan to since to me he is the exemplary scholar, I find it amusing how teachers are so important to a young mind, The topics he broached culture, visuality, difference are the ones that I think about years later,
Optio saepe ut. Accusantium enim commodi exercitationem saepe voluptatem natus possimus, Enim ex provident molestiae delectus at cum quia, Aliquid quod sunt aut quis quia nulla ea, A helpful introductory survey of the visual metaphor in "French Theory", Awesome basically twentieth century french philosophy in one volume, Read and explicated brilliantly. Martin Jay is one of my favorite intellectual historians and this is the first book of his I read, though definitely not his last.
Here he takes on the history of truth as representation and examines the implications for philosophy when visual representation is no longer privelaged.
An accessible book and very much worth reading, Jay explores the evolution of our perspectives of vision, showing how the eye both as sense and trope shapes our understanding of the world and of truth.
He argues that the eye was the preeminent sense from Descartes through the Enlightenment, and that its reliability finally collapsed with the modernist era.
Jay is careful not to overstate his case and repeatedly tempers his argument with contrary evidence, Along the way, he takes us from the Greeks to the postmodernists, and provides extraordinarily effective and succinct summaries of the work of a whos who of thinkers, including Habermas, Lacan, Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard, Bataille, Foucault, Heidegger, Althusser, MerleauPonty, Sartre, Metz, Levinas, Breton, Debord, and Bergson, plus the Romantic poets, effortlessly weaving it all together in ways that make his analysis, far from daunting, a pleasure.
His footnotes alone
are worth the price of admission, but the book itself is a study in lucidity, fresh thinking and erudition.
only read the required chapters, a fun read reads postwar continental philosophy through the tropology of the oculus, actually a very fertile, considering how rhetorics of the visual mediate references to mental processes, See what I mean

Ends up with

nifty little observations, e, g. , whereas phallocentrism is cockocracy and phallogocentrism is cocktalkocracy, phallogoculocentrism is cocktalkgawkococracy, or so, Read this for my thesis on the philosophy of perception and blindness, The chapter on Enlightenment philosophy was particularly important for me, but the whole book is full of insights.
There's an enduring attitude throughout the critique of 'ocularcentrism' that contrasts the quantitative, objectifying spatiality of vision with the qualitative, temporal subjectivity of the aural and tactile which is what I aim to challenge in my research.
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 twentiethcentury 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 JeanPaul Sartre, Maurice MerleauPonty, 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 fairminded 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 counterenlightenment 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.
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