The Crossing of the Visible (Cultural Memory in the Present)

by Jean-Luc Marion

James K. A. Smith (Translator)

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Book cover for The Crossing of the Visible

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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.

  • ISBN10 0804733910
  • ISBN13 9780804733915
  • Publish Date 18 December 2003 (first published 11 December 2003)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint Stanford University Press
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 120
  • Language English