Customer Reviews

Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Centennial Book)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Martin Jay provides us with an encyclopedic survey of the role of vision in western thought, particularly France. Jay, who is strangely not dissimilar to Greil Marcus in this respect, has the knack for picking out lesser known texts and facts and integrating them into his analysis. If youre a foucault scholar, it's worth it just for the account of Roussel's role in Foucault's epistemic development. That is just one example. It is chock full of these fascinating details. Alas, it remains a literature review with an interesting focus. If this were a lecture, I'd bring a tape recorder, knowing that I'd collapse into slumber on the one hand while being aware that what was being said was critical to my growth as an intellectual. Unlike Marcus, who works creatively with obscure texts, Jay suffers from an academic conservatism that ends up reading like a well-done second chapter to a conventional dissertation. If that is your need or if you like that sort of thing, by all means go buy it. Go buy it anyway, it is indispensable as a survey but read it with a triple espresso at hand.

Says Ivan Illich in a marvelous paper - Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show - available from the Pudel site in Bremen:

"Historians of scopic regimes are people who concentrate their attention on the ethology of sense
activities in different cultures and epochs. If I had to choose a name for their discipline, I would call
it "historical opsis" to distinguish it from the history of optics. It is this focus on the image that
interests me here."

And here, he offers this footnote:

"I know of no better introduction to this field than Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of
Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). The main
theme of the book is the French critique of ocularcentrisme, from Bergson, Bataille, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty
to Lacan, Foucault, Barth, Derrida and Irigaray. However, the three introductory chapters to the body of the
book, which deal with the gaze from Plato to Descartes, and the large bibliography - usually critically
evaluated in the footnotes which refer to English and German twentieth-century authors - make this volume
a reference tool of a new kind."

For those who have struggled to grasp the big picture of French
philosophy, historian Martin Jay has created a solution. His book,
eschewing the complex textual strategies of the French thinkers
he discusses, offers up a clear narrative for his readers centered
around Western philosophy's seminal concept: vision.

Not only is this book entertaining, funny, and sharply focused, but
it is also a "Guide to the Perplexed" when it comes to the arcane
world of French theory. Highly recommended not only for its
intellectual rigor, but also for its entertainment value. Thank
you Dr. Jay!

Already a classic, much quoted book, that all students in philosophy, cultural studies or modern art history should read.

...you should read John Macmurray's book, Self as Agent, where he argues that touch is the primary sense, not sight... Sight is about distance, and fosters a Cartesian split in how we experience the world. Fascinating

The text is meticulously researched and Jay is knowledgeable, but his writing style,sadly,is so turgid as to be unreadable. There is hardly a sentence that isn't footnoted and cached with trendy academic jargon, so that to be properly understood one would have to have the book reproduced with hypertext and the reader spend most of his time in the references. Art history isn't exactly General Relativity or is it.