The Question of Painting: Rethinking Thought with Merleau-Ponty

Description

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. With an exclusive and extended conversation about the contemporary virtues of painting with New York based artist Leah Durner, for whom the work of Merleau-Ponty is an important source of inspiration, 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. Title page Copyright page Contents 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 1: Painting – Rethinking thought beyond dualism and positivism Chapter 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 Chapter 2: The symbolic forms and the question of integrated being Obstacles The three forms of behaviour Beyond inherited structures Part 2: Painting – Rethinking thought as perceptual and embodied Chapter 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 Chapter 4: Embodied thought How do bodies think? Peculiar permanence The body in its intentional being Intersubjectivity, inter-corporeality and otherness – Foundational hospitality Part 3: Painting – Rethinking thought as ‘silence’ and ‘speech’ Chapter 5: The being of language, reconceived A new index of curvature Merleau-Ponty and the priority of expression Syntax Language, truth and ‘universality’ Chapter 6: Visual language and the ‘unity’ of painting Modern painting and the paradoxes of communication Cultures of display and debate – Renegotiating particularity-generality Part 4: Painting – Rethinking thought as ‘secret science’ Chapter 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’ Chapter 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 Notes Introduction Chapter one Chapter two Chapter three Chapter four Chapter five Chapter six Chapter seven Chapter eight Bibliography Index