The Brain-Eye: New Histories of Modern Painting - Softcover

Eric Alliez

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783480688 ISBN 13: 9781783480685

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015

Synopsis

English-language translation of a major work by French philosopher Eric Alliez, in which he offers a new perspective on critical problems in modern aesthetics.

About this title

About the Author

Éric Alliez is Professor of Contemporary French Philosophy at Kingston University, London, and Professor of Aesthetics at Paris 8. His many publications in both English and French include The Signature of the World (2004), La Pensee-Matisse (2005) and Défaire l'image (2013).

Jean-Clet Martin is former programme director at the College International de Philosophie, Paris.

Robin Mackay, the translator, is director of Urbanomic and editor of its journal, Collapse. He has translated a number of works of French philosophy, including Alain Badiou’s Number and Numbers, Francois Laruelle’s The Concept of Non-Photography and Anti-Badiou and Quentin Meillasoux’s The Number and the Siren.

Review

This amazingly erudite, visually sensitive, and philosophically innovative, post-phenomenological study offers multiple, rich perspectives on thinking in and through painting, as it interrogates five paradigmatic pathbreaking artists from Delacroix to Cezanne. Deploying innovative concepts of hallucination and the brain-eye, Alliez convincingly revises our thinking about color, atmosphere, diagram, seriality, and artists' ways of working. (Gary Shapiro, Tucker-Boatwright Professor in the Humanities-Philosophy, University of Richmond)

Eric Alliez proposes a consummately erudite journey through modern painting, asking at each step of the way one crucial question: how does painting think? Not: how can we think the painting as a visual object? But rather: what force of thought moves through painting itself to constitute the visual, anterior to the objectivity of the painting as to the subjectivity of the viewer? The answer is kaleidoscopic: an adventure in philosophy through the vicissitudes of color. A major contribution to philosophy in its relation to art history and visual studies. (Brian Massumi, Professor of Communication, University of Montreal)

In my view, this is art history at its best: close to the sources and empirical in the sense of transformative encounters whose implications are at once explained and experienced. Robin Mackay’s translation from the French is impressive in its effort to convey both dimensions, all the better to support what is perhaps the key lesson of the book: That the modern event work far exceeds the self-consciously performative art practices of the late twentieth century. (Critical Inquiry)

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1783480688
• ISBN 13: 9781783480685
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 472