20th century
5 senses
A01=Martin Jay
academic
Author_Martin Jay
Category=QDHR
criticism
cultural history
cultural studies
culture
descartes
disability studies
emmanuel levinas
enlightenment
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
five senses
france
french enlightenment
global
guy debord
jacques derrida
jacques lacan
jean paul sartre
louis althusser
luce irigaray
maurice merleau ponty
michel foucault
modernity
oppression
plato
political
politics
scholarly
seeing
sight
social history
social studies
surveillance
theory
vision
vision impaired
western culture
western world
Product details
- ISBN 9780520088856
- Weight: 1043g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 1993
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 twentieth-century 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 Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 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' writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded 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 counter-enlightenment 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.
Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Force Fields (1992), Marxism and Totality (California, 1984), Adorno (1984), and The Dialectical Imagination (1973).
