Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying

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University of Chicago Press, May 15, 2003 - Art - 437 pages
While many acknowledge that Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault have redefined our notions of time and history, few recognize the crucial role that "the infinite relation" between seeing and saying (as Foucault put it) plays in their work. Gary Shapiro reveals, for the first time, the full extent of Nietzsche and Foucault's concern with the visual.

Shapiro explores the whole range of Foucault's writings on visual art, including the theory of visual resistance, the concept of the phantasm or simulacrum, and his interrogation of the relation of painting, language, and power in artists from Bosch to Warhol. Shapiro also shows through an excavation of little-known writings that the visual is a major theme in Nietzsche's thought. In addition to explaining the significance of Nietzsche's analysis of Raphael, Dürer, and Claude Lorrain, he examines the philosopher's understanding of the visual dimension of Greek theater and Wagnerian opera and offers a powerful new reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Archaeologies of Vision will be a landmark work for all scholars of visual culture as well as for those engaged with continental philosophy.

From inside the book

Contents

Denigrating or Analyzing Vision?
6
The Case of Frans Hals
12
Reading from Left to Right
26
Nietzsche and Heidegger on Visual History
36
The Silence of Saint Cecilia
77
The Birth of The Birth of Tragedy
82
Art in The Birth of Tragedy 19 Transfiguring the Transfiguration
87
Floating and Shining
101
Dream Vision
201
Bosch and Other Visionaries
207
The Birth of Literature out of the Spirit of Painting
213
Misreading Malraux
217
What Is an Artist?
225
The Painter as Phenomenologist
230
The Visible and the Invisible
234
The Mirror of the Sovereign
237

DoubleCoding the Sistine Madonna
106
The Death of Metaphysical Art
112
The Knight Death and the Devil
118
All the Costumes of History
124
Architecture and Excess in the Theater of Dionysus 25 Optical Illusions
127
Aesthetics of Presence
130
Seeing like an Athenian
135
The Theatrical Dispositif
140
Perspectivism and Cyclops Vision
143
Postclassical Framing
148
Nietzsche in Bayreuth
150
Zarathustra on the Gaze and the Glance 32 The Optics of Value
157
The Question of the Augenblick
160
The Evil Eye and Its Radiant Other
163
Zarathustras Interpretation of Dreams
171
Vertigo
174
The Nausea of Vision
181
Recurrence as Medusas Head
184
87
187
Madness Dreams Literature 193 40 Painting and Pleasure What Do Philosophers Dream Of?
193
The Difficulty of Silence
195
Batailles Deconstruction of the Eye
199
Enslaved Sovereign Observed Spectator
241
Foucaults Ekphrasis of Las Meninas 245 52 Whats in a Name?
245
Ekphrasis
247
Construction of the We
250
The Vanishing Subject of Vision
256
nine ten Toward an Archaeology of Painting 265 56 Archaeology and Genealogy of the Visible
265
From Renaissance Similitude to Postmodern Simulacrum
270
Klee Kandinsky Magritte
275
Archaeology without the Episteme?
279
From the Panopticon to Manets Bar 60 Nietzsche and the Theater of Cruelty
285
Foucaults Scenarios
291
Bentham and Plato as PhilosopherArchitects
293
Panopticon
294
The Visual State
301
Manet Closes the Panopticon Window
302
Wanderers and Shadows
317
The Prison of the Gallery and the Force of Flight
320
eleven
325
twelve
347
285
431
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About the author (2003)

Gary Shapiro is the Tucker-Boatwright Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Richmond. He is the author of many books, including Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel and Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying.

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