Pertseva_summary (Видимость как характеристика субъекта в современной французской философии)

National Research University “Higher School of Economics”in Cotutelle withThe University of Paris VIII or University of Vincennes in Saint-Denisas a manuscriptPertseva AlinaSUBJECT’S VISIBILITY IN CONTEMPORARY FRENCH PHILOSOPHYSummary of the PhD thesisAcademic supervisors:Nina Sosna, PhD (‘candidate of science’)Patrick Vauday, PhD (‘docteur’)Moscow, Paris – 20182GENERAL DESCRIPTIONThe relevance of the studyThe ever-growing interest in the visibility is a distinctive feature of theFrench philosophy of the second half of the 20th century. Its approaches tovisibility are extremely diverse: the visibility in the French philosophy can besensual, intelligible or even metaphorical; imaginative or non-visual; optical orhaptic; illuminating or blinding; phantom, deceptive, illusory or evident;repressive, objectifying and subjugating or emancipating; social, public ortheatrical, aesthetic; virtual, simulant and baroque, just semblance or pertaining tothe conditions of visibility and invisibility in general, etc.

The revaluation and theproliferation of the visible couldn’t help but be compliant with rethinking of thesubject, who became hence not commensurate with its traditional understanding.The subjects of the French philosophy are thus no less varied.

In the secondhalf of the 20th century this concept, extremely multivalent in French (logicalsubject, grammatical subject, subject of power, subject of submission, subject forintellectual consideration, subject of a work of art, subjectivity, subject as a person,a live being, Subject of metaphysics, subject of action, etc.) was brought in thefocus of the fierce disputes polarizing the philosophical community. But thesubjects of contemporary French philosophy are not only diverse, but alsomultiple: since the middle of the 20th century up to our days we can witness atendency of abandonment of the single solipsistic subject as the theoreticalreference point in favor of the inherent multiplicity of the subjects.

It is thistendency that makes the topic of their visibility especially relevant. Visibility ofthe subject ceases to be exclusively marginal and colored with narcissisticpathology where mutual appearance of subjects to each other becomes a not less(and at times and more) important motive than the direct contact of egoconsciousness with itself.

The rethinking of the subject of vision involve thus anecessity to include her/him in the visible too.The problem at stake here is not that of reducing this variety of approaches3to the uniform concepts of “visibility” and “subject”, but that of analyzing theconditions under which the philosophical articulation of these two polysemanticconcepts becomes possible. Their definition thus is not a starting point, but an openquestion. How should we conceive of the subject to make his/her visibilitythinkable? How should we conceive of the visible to make the subject pertaining toit? However, the problem is not reducible to a simple combinatory analysis. For,despite the increasing relevance of the topic of visibility of subjects in thecontemporary French context, its introduction into the philosophical field meetswith certain resistance.

This resistance characterizes first of all a theoretical fieldand may be ignored among the practicians or art critics unfamiliar with thephilosophical theory1: the problem is that of theorizing visibility of the subjectconsistently, uncontroversially. After all, it’s not having been theorized before is tobe explained not only by its being marginal or stigmatized status, but, apparently,also by the impossibility to theorize it.The resistance in question has to do with a stable negative correlationbetween visibility and subject that is characteristic not only of the Frenchphilosophy.

In the Modern philosophy in general, the subject has traditionallyremained invisible. But s/he was invisible not in the same way as s/he wasinaudible, intangible or, in principle, immaterial, but due to the specific reasons.According to the widespread interpretation, in the Modern metaphysics, despite acertain mistrust in the sensual vision, it is the vision that served traditionally as themodel of intellectual activity (contemplation, intuition, etc.) and the paradigm ofperception in general.

The “ocularcentric” model, in terms which of the Modernphilosophy is often characterized, defines the subject as the one who sees withoutbeing seen, the vision - as directed from the subject to the object, and the visibility- as the visibility of the object. Apparently, the subject has traditionally remained a1For instance, the art critics who don’t use the word ‘subject’ as a specific philosophical concept, convenientlyreason about the subject’s image (Costantini M. L’image du Sujet.

Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), facing the subject(Portraiture. Facing the Subject / ed. by J. Woodall. Manchester, N.Y.: Manchester University Press, 1997) or thenecessary link between the bourgeois subject and the classical portrait (Buchloh B.H.D. Residual Resemblance:Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture // Face-off. The Portrait in Recent Art / ed. by M.E.

Feldman. Philadelphia:Institute of contemporary art, 1994. P. 53-69).4“blind zone” of philosophy, having been structurally invisible. Despite the varietyof explanations and interpretations of this structural invisibility (imperceivable 2,unimaginable3, irrepresentable as the subject4, etc.) and the difference inunderstanding who/what the subject is, the split into an invisible subject andvisible objects is recurrent in the Modern philosophy.

Everything or everyone thatbecomes visible (be it even metaphorical non-sensual vision), automatically falsinto the category of objects contrasted to the subject as the “source” of vision even the subject her/himself as the object of self-contemplation. And all this isdespite the importance of the topic of reflexivity (another visual metaphor that willbe analyzed in detail, the mirror topos used as an example) for the Modern subject.The presupposed reflexivity allows only to bypass the topic of structuralinvisibility of the subject, not resolving it: as transparent, the reflexive subjectcan’t catch the eye of the others.One may even assume, as, for instance, Hans Jonas5 did, that it is exactly theadoption of vision as the model of thinking and perception in general that formsthe basis of a sharp opposition between the subject and the object, characteristic ofthe Modern philosophy (it is commonly assumed that the other senses are muchmore predisposed to the transfusion of the sensing with the sensed, whereas vision,on the contrary, increases the distance between them).

The contemporary Frenchphilosophy has both contributed to the critics of the ocularcentric traditions (as, forexample, in the case of a kind of “iconoclasm” of Emmanuel Levinas stating that“It is incontestable that objectification operates in the gaze in a privileged way”6)2See for instance in Berkeley whose “esse est percipi” is supposed to be one of the most vivid examples of theModern philosophy ocularcentrism: “Such is the Nature of Spirit or that which acts, that it cannot be of it selfperceived, but only by the Effects which it produceth” (Berkeley G.

A Treatise concerning the Principles of HumanKnowledge/ ed. by D.R. Wilkins. Dublin: David Wilkins, 2002. P. 19).3See for instance in Descartes whose cogito will be further firmly associate with the subject’s birth: “the corporealthings of which images are formed in my thought, and which the senses investigate, are known with much moredistinctness than this puzzling ‘I’ which cannot be pictured in imagination” (Descartes R.

Meditations on FirstPhilosophy // Oeuvres de Descartes. Vol. VII / ed. Ch. Adam, P. Tannery. Paris : Vrin, 1904. P. 29.)4See for instance in Kant whose subject in the “Critique of Pure Reason” can contemplate itself only as aphenomenon and never as the subject.5Jonas H. The Nobility of sight // The Phenomenon of life.

Toward a philosophical biology. N.Y.: Harper & RowPublishers, 1966. P. 146-147.66Levinas E. Totality and Infinity. An essay on exteriority / trans. by A. Lingis. The Hague, Boston, London:Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979, p. 189.5and reproduced it on the own grounds - for example, by calling into question theopposition between touch and sight. In this latter instance the vision could reallyhave lost the link with objectiveness, but this usually happened together with thedisposal of the subject, that is in the subjectless philosophies.

This only confirmed,albeit on a different material, the existence of a negative correlation betweenvisibility and the subject. Thus, in the French philosophy, it amounted to both thecriticism of the privilege of the vision (forming, according to this approach, thebasis for the opposition of the subject to the object), and the criticism of the subject(to which we, in this case, are believed to owe the objectifying concept of vision).Against this background, the reserved and careful attempts to introduce thetopic of visibility of the subject into the philosophical discourse of some Frenchphilosophers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom we tend to associate theinauguration of the visible into serious philosophical consideration, MauriceMerleau-Ponty, the philosopher of the visible par excellence, Jacques Rancière, atheorist of the public visibility, and Jean-Luc Nancy, a “philosopher of the portrait”(according to the characterization of Jérôme Lèbre7), attract particular attention.

Atfirst sight, these philosophers do not have much in common, they extremelyseldom refer to the works of each other and, sure enough, to the common results inthe field of visibility of the subject. They all belong to different philosophicaltraditions and use different intellectual strategies to theorize visibility, the subjectand their articulation. The topic of visibility of the subject in such general wordingcan hardly be specified as central for their work of really consolidating them.Nevertheless, the theoretical strategies of these philosophers share the effort toresolutely overcome the thinking habits of their intellectual context, and even morewidely – the intellectual epoch, to theorize one of the manifestations of thesubject's visibility.