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7651Seeing-in, seeing-as, seeing-with: Looking through picturesIn Elisabeth Nemeth, Richard Heinrich, Wolfram Pichler & Wagner David (eds.), Image and Imaging in Philosophy, Science, and the Arts. Volume I. Proceedings of the 33rd International Wittgenstein Symposium [extended version 2021], Ontos: 179-190. pp. 179-190. 2011.In the constitution of contemporary image theory, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy has undoubtedly become a major conceptual reference. Rather than trying to establish what Wittgenstein’s own image theory could possibly look like, this paper would like to critically assess some of the advantages as well as some of the quandaries that arise when using Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘seeing-as’ for addressing the plural realities of images. While putting into evidence the tensions that come into play w…Read more
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1052The madness of sightIn Karin Leonhard & Silke Horstkotte (eds.), Seeing Perception, Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 40-59. pp. 40--59. 2007.Viewing Vermeer with Merleau-Ponty's eyes.
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894Bare exteriority. Philosophy of the Image and the Image of Philosophy in Martin Heidegger and Maurice BlanchotColloquy (10): 69-82. 2005.The article explores the striking coincidences in Heidegger's and Blanchot's account of the image as death mask. The analysis of the respective theories of the image brings forth two radically divergent conceptions of thinking as "laying patent" (Heidegger) and of thinking as "laying bare" (Blanchot).
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170Visual Studies in Byzantium. A pictorial turn avant la lettreJournal of Visual Culture 12 (1): 3-29. 2013.As Hegel once said, in Byzantium, between homoousis and homoiousis, the difference of one letter could decide the life and death of thousands. As this article seeks to argue, Byzantine thinking was not only attentive to conceptual differences, but also to iconic ones. The iconoclastic controversy (726-842 AD) arose from two different interpretations of the nature of images: whereas iconoclastic philosophy is based on the assumption of a fundamental 'iconic identity', iconophile philosophy defend…Read more
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137The Diacritical Nature of Meaning. Merleau-Ponty with SaussureChiasmi International 15 167-181. 2013.“What we have learned from Saussure” affirms Merleau-Ponty “is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs.” While it has often been stressed that Merleau-Ponty was arguably among the earliest philosophical readers of Saussure, the real impact of this reading on Merleau-Ponty’s thinking has rarely been assessed in detail. By focusing on the middle period – the years …Read more
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123Could Perspective ever be a Symbolic Form? Revisiting Panofsky with CassirerJournal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 2 (1): 51-72. 2015.Erwin Panofsky’s essay “Perspective as Symbolic Form” from 1924 is among the most widely commented essays in twentieth-century aesthetics and was discussed with regard to art theory, Renaissance painting, Western codes of depiction, history of optical devices, psychology of perception, or even ophthalmology. Strangely enough, however, almost nothing has been written about the philosophical claim implicit in the title, i.e. that perspective is a symbolic form among others. The article situates th…Read more
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113Differences in Becoming. Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze on IndividuationPhilosophy Today. 2017.For a long time, Gilbert Simondon’s work was known only as either a philosophy restricted to the problem of technology or as an inspirational source for Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. As Simondon’s thinking is now finally in the process of being recognized in its own right as one of the most original philosophies of the twentieth century, this also entails that some critical work needs to be done to disentangle it from an all too hasty identification with Deleuzian categories. While …Read more
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89The Most Sublime of All Laws: The Strange Resurgence of a Kantian Motif in Contemporary Image PoliticsCritical Inquiry 41 (2): 367-389. 2014.In recent years, the claim of the unrepresentability of the Shoah has stirred vivid debates, especially following the strong positions taken by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann and author of Shoah (1986). This claim of unrepresentability, it can be shown, draws part of its attraction from the fact that it oscillates undecidedly between a claim of logical impossibility (“the Shoah can’t be represented”) and a normative demand (“the Shoah shouldn’t be represented”). This essay analyzes the arg…Read more
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86Writing, Embodiment, Deferral: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on The Origin of GeometryPhilosophy Today 58 (2): 219-239. 2014.A simplistic image of twentieth century French philosophy sees Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961 as the line that divides two irreconcilable moments in its history: existentialism and phenomenology, on the one hand, and structuralism on the other. The structuralist generation claimed to recapture the dimension of objectivity and impersonality, which the previous generation was supposedly incapable of. As a matter of fact, in 1962, Derrida’s edition of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry was taken to be…Read more
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83Prégnances du devenir. Simondon et les imagesCritique 816 356-371. 2015.Problématisation, individuation, (dés)adaptation L’inventivité du vivant : la « disparation » Mouvements à vide. La spontanéité selon Simondon La prégnance des images Ontogenèse, phylogenèse, eikogenèse. L’image comme médiation
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78Produktiver Schein. Phänomenotechnik zwischen Wissenschaft und ÄsthetikZeitschrift für Ästhetik Und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 60 (2): 169-182. 2015.The notion of ‘phenomenotechnique’ which Gaston Bachelard introduced in the 1930’s has enjoyed popularity among historians of science who used it in order to insist upon the technical and social mediateness of scientific facts. In the wake of the current triumphal return to epistemological ‘realism,’ the idea of phenomenotechnique has been dismissed as an alleged relic of ‘constructivism.’ The article advocates for a different reading of ‘phenomenotechnique,’ which, rather than insisting on the …Read more
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68Iconic Turn: A Plea for Three Turns of the ScrewCulture, Theory, and Critique 56 (3). 2015.In the early 1990s, W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm independently proclaimed that the humanities were witnessing a ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic turn’. Twenty years later, we may wonder whether this announcement was describing an event that had already taken place or whether it was rather calling forth for it to happen. The contemporary world is, more than ever, determined by visual artefacts. Still, our conceptual arsenal, forged during centuries of logocentrism, still falls behind the complexity …Read more
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68La chair comme diacritique incarnéChiasmi International 11 249-262. 2009.In 20th century thinking, few concepts have provoked as many misunderstandings as Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘Flesh’. Such misunderstandings (of which the article sketches the outline of an archaeology) rest on the initial assumption that the Flesh has to be derived from the body. The article suggests that the dominant readings of the Flesh can be organized along what could respectively be called the scenario of propriety and the scenario of expansion, beyond which a third way comes into view whi…Read more
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65La phénoménologie comme science de l’homme sans l’hommeTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 72 (1): 79-100. 2010.Husserlian phenomenology sets off as a fundamental rejection of those psychologisms and anthropologisms that deduce the structures of appearance from some preexisting essence of man. However, despite a clear rejection of all anthropological foundations of phenomenology, the examples of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty show that the question of man continues to haunt the phenomenological project and constitutes something like a ‘blind spot’. Relating these unspoken tensions to another histori…Read more
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65The Theatre of the Virtual. How to Stage Potentialities with Merleau-PontyIn Laura Cull & Alice Lagaay (eds.), Encounters in Performance Philosophy, Palgravemacmillan. pp. 147-170. 2014.
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63The Inorganic Community. Hypotheses on Literary Communism in Novalis, Benjamin and BlanchotBoundary2. An International Journal of Literature and Culture 39 (3): 75-95. 2012.If literary avant-garde journals and their communities have been, in the twentieth century, a space for creating, if not sustaining, major political utopias, it should help explain why this “literary communism,” as Jean-Luc Nancy called it, is not a weakened or substitutional form of politics. No myth without narration, no implementation without an instrumentation, no organic unity without a political organ voicing its claim, in short: no organicity without an organon. But can there be a (litera…Read more
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60Das durchscheinende Bild. Konturen einer medialen Phänomenologiediaphanes. 2018.Dass Bilder zwischen dem Regime der Dinge und dem Regime der Zeichen niemals einen angestammten Platz erhielten und nicht Gegenstand einer eigenen Wissenschaft wurden, ist keinem wiedergutzumachenden Vergessen geschuldet, sondern Ausdruck eines anfänglichen Skandalons, das historisch auch die Geburtsstunde der Philosophie einläutete. Bilder lassen sich nicht einmal als reine Erscheinungen absondern, weil in ihnen als Wasserzeichen stets durchscheint, was sie sichtbar werden ließ. An Husserls Gru…Read more
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60Phantasia. Aristoteles' Theorie der SichtbarmachungIn Gottfried Boehm, Emmanuel Alloa, Orlando Budelacci & Gerald Wildgruber (eds.), Imagination. Suchen und Finden, W. Fink. pp. 91--111. 2014.
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57Escritura, encarnação, temporização: Merleau-Ponty e Derrida acerca de A origem da GeometriaDois Pontos 9 (1). 2012.A história intelectual do século XX tem sido escrita ao longo de um cenário que vê, na morte de Merleau-Ponty em 1961, a linha de divisória entre uma geração existencial e fenomenológica e o evento do estruturalismo imediatamente subsequente. A publicação das notas de leitura de Merleau-Ponty sobre o texto A origem da geometria, de Edmund Husserl, tem mostrado quão frágeis são os alicerces desta leitura simplificadora. Na verdade, enquanto a tradução e introdução de Derrida ao texto de Husserl, …Read more
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53Reflexiones del cuerpo: sobre la relación entre cuerpo y lenguajeEidos: Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad Del Norte 21 200-220. 2014.Aunque fueron muchos los intentos en la modernidad de superar el dualismo cuerpo y mente, las teorías filosóficas del lenguaje en muchos casos lo reintrodujeron de manera sutil pero no menos eficaz. El artículo discute varios teoremas para pensar la materialidad del signo y muestra la preponderancia, desde Kierkegaard hasta el estructuralismo post-Saussuriano, de pensar la materialización como algo necesario, pero arbitrario en su modalidad. En esta concepción, el cuerpo del lenguaje no es solam…Read more
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52Metaxu. Figures de la médialité chez AristoteRevue de Métaphysique et de Morale 62 (2): 247. 2009.Depuis la renaissance des études aristotéliciennes avec Werner Jaeger, on a souvent observé la fréquence lexicographique des termes dénotant la médiété et la médiation dans le corpus aristotélicien. Cette récurrence a cependant généralement été traitée comme un effet homonymique, rien ne permettant de relier a priori la médiété éthique, le terme intermédiaire en logique ou encore le milieu perceptif. Et pourtant, le fait qu'Aristote s'interroge lui-même sur cette « plurivocité » du médium peut ê…Read more
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50Redeemable Savings, or How to Become Ascetic through ConsumptionSubstance 46 (3): 3-15. 2017.During World War II, both the US and Canadian governments issued a series of propaganda posters aimed at reducing spending and redirecting private households’ financial expenditures into the general war effort. Many of those posters, developed by some of the cleverest advertisers of the time, drew on Puritanism’s most deeply rooted principle: self-restraint. One propaganda poster succinctly exemplifies the underlying logic: as an elegant couple looks up at a gigantic elephant for sale, the capti…Read more
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47Flected Bodies: on the relationship between body and languageEidos: Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad Del Norte 21 200-220. 2014.Although in the modern age there were plenty of attempts to overcome the mind-body dualism, its philosophical theories of language reintroduced it in a subtle but not less effective way.In this article several theorems to think on the materiality of the sign are discussed, and, from Kierkegaard to the post-Saussurean structuralism, the prominent role of thinking the materialization as something necessary but arbitrary in its modality is shown. The body of language under this understanding is not…Read more
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47Du Sensible À L’Oeuvre : Esthétiques de Merleau-Ponty (edited book)La lettre volée. 2012.Plusieurs générations de chercheurs internationaux interrogent l’esthétique de Merleau-Ponty suivant deux axes : d’une part, le dialogue constant et passionné avec des arts (peinture, littérature, cinéma) et ses protagonistes (Cézanne, Proust, Claude Simon) qui est à l’origine de l’esthétique de Merleau-Ponty, et dans d’autre part, l’impact de la pensée merleau-pontienne sur les arts, depuis le Minimal Art américain en passant par le Body Art et la danse contemporaine. Tandis que certaines contr…Read more
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46Leib und Sprache. Zur Reflexivität verkörperter Ausdrucksformen (edited book)Velbrück. 2013.Die elf Beiträge dieses Bandes gehen aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln dem Problem der Verkörperung von Sinn nach: phänomenologische, psychoanalytische und sprachwissenschaftliche Ansätze bilden dabei den Schwerpunkt; sie werden aber durch Studien aus der Literaturtheorie, der politischen Theorie und der Filmwissenschaft ergänzt. Was heißt es – das ist die zentrale Frage –, den Körper als leibliches Medium aufzufassen, welches Sinn nicht nur verkörpert, sondern überhaupt erst entstehen lässt? Gibt …Read more
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45Lisibilité / Lesbarkeit (edited book)MSH Paris - Trivium. Revue franco-allemande de sciences humaines et sociales. 2012.Seit über 30 Jahren gibt es in den deutschen wie französischen Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaften das Bestreben, den Begriff der »Lesbarkeit« von seiner engen Bindung an den geschriebenen Text zu emanzipieren. Die vorliegende Ausgabe von Trivium lässt einige der maßgeblichen Stimmen in dieser Debatte zu Wort kommen. Auf der gemeinsamen Schnittfläche von Mikrohistorie, Semiologie, Psychoanalyse, Kulturgeschichte, Physiognomie und Mantik zeichnet sich ein neues und zugleich altes Verständnis des Le…Read more
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42Bildwissenschaft in Byzanz. Ein iconic turn avant la lettre?Studia Philosophica: Jahrbuch Der Schweizerischen Philosoph Ischen Gesellschaft, Annuaire de la Société Suisse de Philosphie 69 11-36. 2010.As Hegel once said, in Byzantium, between homoousis and homoiousis, the difference of one letter could decide over the life and death of thousands. As the present essay would like to argue, Byzantine thinking was not only attentive to conceptual, but also to iconic differences. The iconoclastic controversy arose from two different interpretations of the nature of images: whereas iconoclastic philosophy is based on the assumption of a fundamental ‘iconic identity’, iconophile philosophy defends t…Read more
University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
PhD, 2009
Fribourg, Canton of Fribourg, Switzerland
Areas of Specialization
Aesthetics |
Social and Political Philosophy |