The intent of Veronique Foti’s book
is expressed in at least two ways by its title. Most importantly, the title
enacts an intertwining between vision and invisibility which Foti considers
philosophy to have neglected, both in its traditional quest for the invisible
transcendence of reality and truth and in its modern scepticism with regard to
such transcendence. In both cases, a certain rigid difference is marked between
the visible and the invisible, and what goes unthought is the very differentiation
of this difference, in other words, the way in which visibility and
invisibility originate from a common point and are thus originally intertwined.
It is this intertwinement that is expressed in the title of Foti’s book.

Secondly, the title is meant to
oppose the ‘idealizing’ tendency of philosophy to reduce the invisible to a
unitary and autonomous field, by rendering the invisible plural. Thus,
the intention of Foti’s book is to rehabilitate the much-depreciated sense of
sight by demonstrating it not to enclose what it sees within a horizon of
intelligibility and, by way of a metaphorical transference to the mind’s eye,
to perform the same reduction upon transcendent reality, but rather to be
capable of differentiating the visible from the ‘invisibles’ which inhabit and
condition it. It therefore intends to promote an understanding of invisibility
that will not depreciate vision, nor the immanent world of presence that is its
subject. Thus, the book understands itself to be ‘a necessary propadeutic to
the sensitization, if not the profound transformation, of philosophical sight’
(p.2), a transformation which will affect our relation to the visual arts and
our understanding of ethics.

The way in which Foti articulates
this understanding of the intertwinement of visibility with its invisibles is
explained by the book’s subtitle: Philosophical Explorations. Thus, it
is through an exposure of certain moments within the history of philosophy that
the intimacy of the visible and the invisible comes to be questioned. The
subtitle is therefore polemical in the sense that it opposes those epigonal
thoughts of philosophy that would totalize it as a simple privileging of sight
over other senses so as to reduce the world to ‘sameness’ or human
intelligibility, without room for non-human, and indeed non-male, ‘otherness’.
As Foti puts it, "the time has come to abandon [this] caricature of
vision", since "[i]t is altogether too facile to criticize the visual
metaphorics and discourse of Western philosophy as a discourse of light"
(p.102). For this reason Foti’s explorations are explorations within philosophy,
of certain moments at which the relation between the invisible (being) and the
visible (beings) is in fact addressed, contrary to the thought of
Heidegger and others who understand the difference between essence and
appearance or ‘being’ and ‘beings’ to go unthought in this tradition.

These moments comprise a
multifarious array of thinkers from the history of philosophy, who number Heraclitus,
Plato, Descartes, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Derrida, and Heidegger, each
of whom is subjected to detailed and original readings which strike a fine
balance between the charitable and the critical, as all readings must. Let us
briefly describe these moments in turn.

In Chapter One, Foti begins at the
very beginning with a close reading of certain fragments of Heraclitus, whose
work she understands, following Heidegger, to amount to a profound meditation
on the interrelation between darkness and light, gloom and radiance, or simply,
the invisible and the visible. She identifies in, in other words, at the very
inception of philosophy which has been repeatedly accused of a fixation upon
light, an understanding of vision which bestows upon it the ability to
differentiate between the familiar beings of everyday experience and the
uncanny shadows which haunt these things: one recalls the gods at Heraclitus’s
stove.

In Chapter Two, Foti asserts the
need to supplement the usual reading of Plato based upon Book VII of the Republic
in which there is no common ground between the blazing illumination provided by
the ‘ideas’ and the shadow-world of the inhabitants of the cave. Thus, the
chasm of essence and appearance is asserted without fully being thought. Foti
demonstrates that this division between the invisible and the visible is
in fact thought by Plato, and must be according to Plato’s understanding of the
relation between essence and appearance as mimēsis. This thinking
of the difference takes place primarily in the Phaedrus, where Plato
considers the love that is inspired by the beauty of the other. To supplement
the rather brutal dragging of the unwilling prisoner from the cave, to be
hurled across the abyss of the ontological chasm, beauty motivates the desire
to cross this chasm, through the love which inspires the lover to bridge the
gap and stretch out for the invisible essence.

In love, the lover makes of his
beloved an image of the divinity, an agalma or statuette of the god, who
thereby comes to represent a visible figure of invisibility. As Foti has
it, "the Platonic philosopher cannot turn his back on visuality [due to]
the dependence of recollection (anamnēsis) on the mimetic
relationship of participation (methexis) that interlinks the orders of
visible presencing and invisible truth" (p.4).

In Chapter Three, Foti provides an
important and detailed reading of Descartes’ little-read Optics, in
which sight is understood purely mechanistically and the connection between the
stimulated motions of the body and the qualified world of subjective experience
is consigned to the impenetrable mystery of the pineal gland. In other words,
the gulf between the essence of things and the way in which they appear to us
is not given an intermediary image as it was in Plato. For Descartes, the means
whereby such a bridging might take place are not available to the finite human
mind. But for Foti, to reduce sight to such a mechanism, unable to provide the
soul with an access to suffering and to remain itself without inherent
cognitive possibilities is to remain untrue to the nature of sight. In other
words, Descartes, as has long been said, fails to engage with the intertwining
of understanding and sense (‘soul’ and ‘body’) and thus refuses to think the
way in which vision itself -and not just the pure ‘vision’ of the mind- has
access to ‘invisibles’ of its own, which would not be identical with the ideal
fictions of transcendent being.

In Chapter Four, Foti provides a
marvelous critique of Foucault’s reading of the Velásquez painting, Las Meninas,
indicating this reading to rest on an understanding of the painting’s use of
perspective, which has been discredited in its specifics by recent research and
shows Foucault to understand representation and painting in a fundamentally
Cartesian way, which is to say a geometrical one.

It is in the final part of the
book, comprising Chapters Five and Six, where Foti engages with those
contemporary thinkers whose projects she herself is developing. These begin
with Merleau-Ponty, who clearly remains the prime inspiration of her book (cf.
p.80), and his attempt to restore vision to its ability to relate to the
original upsurge of presence, particularly through the medium of paintings,
which -as Heidegger has already pointed out- bring us before the emergence of phenomenality
as such in its always singular sites. It is only with these thinkers that
vision approaches the status that Foti wishes for it, "as an irreducible
and inexhaustible modality of manifestation" (p.52). Refinements are made
to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the way in which ‘untamed being’ comes to
assume the form of the world of the individuated beings that surround us, using
the work of Nancy and Derrida, and finally, in Chapter Six, the work of
Heidegger, a placement which may be taken to indicate the immense contemporary
power which Foti has perceptively attributed to Heidegger.

The only question which might
remain to be posed to this short and beautifully written book is precisely how Foti
intends to differentiate her own project from that of Nancy and
Heidegger (to whom she seems closest) in their refinements of the Merleau-Pontian
project of demonstrating the invisibility that conditions visibility. Perhaps
to answer this question we must turn to her previous book, Heidegger and the
Poets and examine certain hints contained within the present book which
suggest that Foti’s originality is in her translation of these thoughts of
manifestation as a process of differentiation or diversification into an ethics
of otherness (cf. pp.103-4).

© 2004 Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis, Department of Philosophy,
University of Warwick, UK

Categories: Philosophical