Question of painting : re-thinking thought with Merleau-Ponty / Jorella Andrews.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Andrews, Jorella, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961.

Painting.

Art--Philosophy.

Art.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961--Criticism and interpretation.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

xvi, 344 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

London, UK ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Summary:

Since the latter half of the 20th century, committed art has been associated with conceptual, critical and activist practices. Painting, by contrast, is all too often defined as an outmoded, reactionary, market-led venture; an ineffectual medium from the perspective of social and political engagement. How can paintings 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 (1907-61). 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, and ethical possibilities. A central aim of The Question of Painting is to provide a closely focused, chronological account of his 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. 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 criticality of painting into contact with the question of painting in philosophy.

Contents:

Part 1 Painting - Rethinking thought beyond dualism and positivism p. 55

1 'Nature' and 'consciousness' - Merleau-Ponty's critical encounter with dualism p. 59

Broken? p. 59

The problems of rationalism and empiricism p. 68

The naive consciousness and its reconstructive powers p. 74

The significance of Gestalt p. 81

Describing behaviour - Its limitations and scope p. 84

2 The symbolic forms and the question of integrated being p. 88

Obstacles p. 88

The three forms of behaviour p. 90

Beyond inherited structures p. 94

Part 2 Painting - Rethinking thought as perceptual and embodied p. 103

3 Description and the re-education of sight p. 107

How to start again p. 107

Embodied perception - Our only access to the real? p. 112

Description - The first philosophical act p. 121

Into the base of 'inhuman' nature p. 129

4 Embodied thought p. 135

How do bodies think? p. 135

Peculiar permanence p. 136

The body in its intentional being p. 143

Inter subjectivity, inter-corporeality and otherness - Foundational hospitality p. 149

Part 3 Painting - Rethinking thought as 'silence' and 'speech' p. 155

5 The being of language, reconceived p. 159

A new index of curvature p. 159

Merleau-Ponty and the priority of expression p. 173

Syntax p. 177

Language, truth and 'universality' p. 183

6 Visual language and the 'unity' of painting p. 188

Modern painting and the paradoxes of communication p. 188

Cultures of display and debate - Renegotiating particularity-generality p. 197

Part 4 Painting - Rethinking thought as 'secret science' p. 203

7 Visibility, the 'flesh' of the world p. 207

'The common stuff ... is the visible' p. 207

The visible and the invisible p. 210

Indirect ontology and anonymous visibility p. 212

Chiasm, illusion, dis-illusion p. 217

Immersive thought and 'having at a distance' p. 223

8 Visual treatises and the search for depth p. 232

Painterly thought as secret science p. 232

Intermundane space p. 233

Depth of being and body p. 238

The painter's effort and the fragility of the real p. 242

Visual treatises p. 246.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1472574281

9781472574282

OCLC:

959038794