Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying

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University of Chicago Press, Apr 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.
 

Contents

The Abyss of Vision
1
Nietzsche at the Dresden Gallery
39
Crossings of Painting and Poetry
69
Art in The Birth of Tragedy
87
Architecture and Excess in the Theater of Dionysus
127
Zarathustra on the Gaze and the Glance
157
Madness Dreams Literature
193
SEVEN Critique of Impure Phenomenology
217
Foucaults Ekphrasis of Las Meninas
245
NINE Toward an Archaeology of Painting
265
From the Panopticon to Manets Bar
285
Recurrence of the Simulacrum in Klossowski Deleuze and Magritte
325
TWELVE The Phantasm in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
347
Notes
395
Index
429
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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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