The Crossing of the Visible

By Jean-Luc Marion

Book Overview

Painting, according to Jean-Luc Marion, is a central topic of concern for philosophy, particularly phenomenology. For the question of painting is, at its heart, a question of visibility--of appearance. As such, the painting is a privileged case of the phenomenon; the painting becomes an index for investigating the conditions of appearance--or what Marion describes as "phenomenality" in general.

In The Crossing of the Visible, Marion takes up just such a project. The natural outgrowth of his earlier reflections on icons, these four studies carefully consider the history of painting--from classical to contemporary--as a fund for phenomenological reflection on the conditions of (in)visibility. Ranging across artists from Raphael to Rothko, Caravaggio to Pollock, The Crossing of the Visible offers both a critique of contemporary accounts of the visual and a constructive alternative. According to Marion, the proper response to the "nihilism" of postmodernity is not iconoclasm, but rather a radically iconic account of the visual and the arts that opens them to the invisible.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804733929
• ISBN13: 9780804733922
• Release Date: December 2003
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.2" x 9.4"