Question of Painting Rethinking Thought with Merleau-Ponty
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Jorella Andrews is Head of the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.Andrews' book -- like a compelling piece of music or a film -- demands repeated encounters; it demands to be read again so that the details of each individual argument can be savored anew, appreciated within the context of a fully-expanded expression (one that could be realized only at the end) … An ambitious, erudite undertaking.
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
This meticulously researched book highlights the questioning mode of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, outlining the philosopher’s interrogations in the realms of the perceptual world and language. Taking a chronological but non-linear approach to Merleau-Ponty’s writings, Jorella Andrews elegantly brings the philosopher’s non-dualistic, inter-corporeal and open understanding of reality into conversation with modern and contemporary art. <i>The Question of Painting </i>shows that Merleau-Ponty’s aim to ‘rethink thought’ is still relevant to painting today and to the ways in which art itself can change the world in which we live.
Ariane Mildenberg, Senior Lecturer in Modernism, University of Kent, UK
This important study offers a compelling rethinking of how and why art matters. Andrews develops her case by way of an exceptionally fine exposition of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological understanding of painting as the deeply engaged apprehending of the world and the fabric of our shared existence within it. The refreshingly generous analysis makes newly apparent the value of such an approach for illuminating the ongoing ethical and intellectual significance of sustained artistic commitment to the visual broadly understood.
Alex Potts, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor, Department of History of Art, University of Michigan, USA
With an agile multidisciplinary method, Jorella Andrews navigates the classic paintings of art history and the worlds of cutting edge, inter-cultural contemporary painting. Her deep scholarship articulates the intricacies of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic thinking and nondualistic ontology, with breathtaking range and freshness, forwarding it into our times. <i>The Question of Painting </i>is a <i>tour de force </i>of unanticipated juxtapositions of texts and images that show the power of painting, visual art, and philosophy to arrest and re-shape the social and political landscape. I have enjoyed it and learned very much from it.
Galen A. Johnson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Rhode Island, USA
Since the latter half of the 20th century, committed art has been associated with conceptual, critical and activist practices. Painting, by contrast—despite its significance as a site for continued artistic experimentation—has all too often been dismissed as an outmoded, reactionary, market-led venture; an ineffectual medium from the perspective of social and political engagement. How can painting change the world today?
The question of painting, in particular, fuelled the investigations of a major 20th-century philosopher: the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61). Merleau-Ponty was at the forefront of attempts to place philosophy on a new footing by contravening the authority of Cartesian dualism and objectivist thought—an authority that continues to limit present-day intellectual, imaginative, ethical, and indeed scientific possibilities. Taking an approach that moves between the fields of philosophical and visual culture research, The Question of Painting is organized around a closely focused, chronological account of Merleau-Ponty’s unfolding project and its relationship with art, clarifying how painting, as a paradigmatically embodied and situated mode of investigation, helped him to access the fundamentally “intercorporeal” basis of reality as he saw it, and articulate its lived implications—implications that have a, productive bearing on the personal, ethical and political challenges facing us today.
The Question of Painting brings today’s much debated concerns about the socio-cultural and political potential of painting into contact with the question of painting in philosophy.
Acknowledgements
List of Images
INTRODUCTION: Painting as Thought
Questions
Rethinking thought
Merleau-Ponty’s trans-dimensional investigations
An incarnational logic
‘Digging in the same place’ — Merleau-Ponty’s broad project
PART ONE: Painting — Re-thinking Thought beyond Dualism and Positivism
1 ‘Nature’ and ‘Consciousness’— Merleau-Ponty’s Critical Encounter with Dualism
Broken?
The problems of rationalism and empiricism
The naïve consciousness and its reconstructive powers
The significance of Gestalt
Describing behaviour — its limitations and scope
2 The Symbolic Forms and the Question of Integrated Being
Obstacles
The three forms of behaviour
Beyond inherited structures
PART TWO: Painting — Re-Thinking Thought as Perceptual and Embodied
3 Description and the Re-education of Sight
How to start again
Embodied perception — our only access to the real?
Description: the first philosophical act
Into the base of ‘inhuman’ nature
4 Embodied Thought
How do bodies think?
Peculiar permanence
The body in its intentional being
Intersubjectivity, intercorporeality and otherness — foundational hospitality
PART THREE: Painting — Re-Thinking Thought as ‘Silence’ and ‘Speech’
5 The Being of Language, Reconceived
A new index of curvature
Merleau-Ponty and the priority of expression
Syntax
Language, truth and ‘universality’
6 Visual Language and the ‘Unity’ of Painting
Modern painting and the paradoxes of communication
Cultures of display and debate — renegotiating particularity-generality
PART FOUR: Painting — Re-Thinking Thought as ‘Secret Science’
7 Visibility, the ‘Flesh’ of the World
The ‘common stuff … is the visible’
The visible and the invisible
Indirect ontology and anonymous visibility
Chiasm, illusion, dis-illusion
Immersive thought and ‘having at a distance’
8 Visual Treatises and the Search for Depth
Painterly thought as secret science
Intermundane space
Depth of being and body
The painter’s effort and the fragility of the real
Visual treatises
Bibliography
Index