La Chair du visible: Paul Cézanne et Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Ouverture Philosophique) (French Edition)

No curvaceous flourishes detract from the calm and stillness of the figure. This image takes the building of form out of superimposed, curved lines to the extreme. The body amasses convexities which imply an impossible musculature. The eighteenth-century term sensationniste referred to a connoisseur of sensation—one whose senses had been refined to a high degree through many sensory experiences.

The body was constantly in danger of being pushed by external stimuli over to the sinister side. Adorable springtime has lost its fragrance! And time devours me minute by minute as a rigid body is enveloped by immense snows; I contemplate from on high the Earth in all its roundness, and there I no longer seek the shelter of a hut.

The odd tilt of the table pushes the Cupid forward against the front of the painting, but the depicted space remains shallow.

The limited palette allows us to identify some of the same characteristics of line evident in the drawings discussed earlier. The lines delineating his inner thighs repeat this rhythm to a lesser degree. And while, in the Dying Slave , these lines suggested that the generation of movement was occurring from within the figure, in this Cupid, the energy lines erupt in the paint outside the figure. Marks suggesting lines of force—of current or waves—are affecting the fabric of the drape adjacent to the thigh and ghosting the undulations of the outer thigh.

In that painting, the body seems to push out against, and sometimes beyond, the lines desiring to contain it. I invoked a central trope of sculptural practice in my discussion of the Courtauld Cupid—the idea that the true artist has the ability to liberate a captive figure from brute matter. The writer recounts how the artist was able. This method is as follows: In the same way the figures must be carved out of marble by the chisel; the parts in highest relief must be revealed first and then, little by little, the lower parts. Yet, even if seen as rising from the blue shimmer of background, the Cupid as a whole appears as a sculptural experiment gone awry.

We are face-to-face with a series of castrations. The malformed and muted features of the face do not promise to become more than they are now, as if too much matter has been chiseled away. While my reading of the figure through the metaphor of sculpture tells the story of a process taken too far, and allegorizes the disintegration of the sensitive body in response to the bombardment of the senses by harsh, unforgiving stimuli, other readers address the painting as painting—pointing to its unfinished nature: If sensory experiences were believed to be aligned along a continuum—one pole terminating at a point wherein no sensible matter will ever conspire to activate the inert matter of being, and the other pole terminating at a point where sensible matter overwhelms the body, grinding it into an effervescence of disintegrating particles—then this painting manages to evoke both poles at once.

Foundational in the energetic encounter between sensitive and sensible matter, motion is, if not a first cause, at least a sufficient one. By means of heat. The Courtauld Cupid pictures the transference of heat as energy, swirling in the external space as modulations of color in the atmosphere. His whiteness is dappled with pinks and oranges and golden tones. Thus, the cold blues and cool greens composing the upper register of the Stockholm painting suggest the absence of heat and by inference, motion itself.

The hard edges of this pyramid participates in a decidedly non-organic geometry. And then there is the curtain. The interior folds of this form undulate in and out of light and shadow and hint at a hollow interior. Both forms end in a conical point on the right. While both the shell and fabric share the soft curves and undulations of an expressive animate body they are, nonetheless, cold, lifeless objects which only uncannily mirror the forms of living things. The shell, however, like the body and like the painting, comes into being through a process of accretion. Scalloped folds are rendered dry as dust, cooled by the blues and made discontinuous by the priming and canvas showing through.

The heat of the reds and pinks lining the conch has dissipated. The form of the curtain also puts a compelling isometry of forces into play. There is a force toward the viewer as if the fabric is sluggishly pushing the figure forward. This force toward the viewer, and the instability of our own footing proposed to us by the vertiginous slanting of the table, helps make the image disquieting.

This force, however is countered by an even stronger, opposite force. The interior folds of the fabric, which echo those of the conch shell, evoke a sucking void—picture a portal to an abyss to which Being is ultimately returned. What else but an unseen suction from the rear of the painting could hold the Cupid and those fruits in stasis on that impossibly pitched surface?

Nature is always the same, but nothing we see endures. Our art must convey a glimmer of her endurance with the elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a sense of her eternity. Eat, digest, distill in a closed vessel, and you have the whole art of making a man. The green stem of the round yellow and ochre pear on the left is a frail homage to the willful tendrils of the onions in the Courtauld version.

Perhaps even plants are endowed with active consciousness. The effacing of distinctions between interior and exterior spaces, illustrated by the sameness of the sky outside the window and the back wall inside the studio, are repeated metaphorically in the juxtaposition of the fruit with the statue. The fruit are what the statue is becoming, as matter endlessly recycles itself around and through things.

In time, either might become organic animated matter again, or under great pressure, either might become solid like limestone or marble. Another story, perhaps apocryphal, reports that Michelangelo would search for blocks of marble in which he could detect that the veins of color running through the otherwise white stone might trace the veins of the figure imprisoned within. The Cupid is depicted in violets and aubergines evoking the livid flesh of bodies at the morgue. It is shown from an angle that emphasizes the absent arm. The Cupid is shown striding to the left, facing into a wall or block.

The head of the Cupid actually carves into this block, as though it were trying to gain entrance, and between his face and the block itself are dark brownish-purple marks that signify absence, as did those darker marks around the Courtauld Cupid. Then, as if in a mirror, similarly colored lines echo them, positioned directly in front of the Cupid on the block or wall.

That the richly colored marks occur on the penis of the figure points back to the earliest formulations of irritability. The male member was considered the preeminent site of involuntary physiological movements. Both Haller and Diderot described the penis as an organ which could not be coerced by human will. In this, it represented a part of the body that retained a more primitive, primordial form of animation, and became the focus of early treatises on irritability and contractility. In The Black Clock , the backdrop on the right side is, in fact, a mirror in which the vase on top of the timeless clock is doubled.

His stride counters ours as we step up to the painting in the museum space. The frosted blues shimmer like a glass in which we view ourselves. This essay began as a seminar paper for Timothy J. I am ever grateful to Professor Clark for all his generous support and sage advice. Davis and Anne M. Wagner read subsequent versions of this work, and provided their deeply-appreciated insights and suggestions.

I thank them all. Finally, my warmest gratitude to Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, the anonymous reader, and Robert Alvin Adler, at Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide , for giving this essay their attention and the benefit of their editorial expertise. Menard Press, , 11— A subsequent version appeared as Etudes philosophiques in Der Sandmann was available in French sometime before They have made these figures gesticulate and walk.

By means of an ingenious mechanism, they walk happily along or flee terrified…They function like real beings…Really, you can believe that they possess an intelligence, a will, a soul—that they are alive! It is an exquisite sensation to imagine you are going to kill things that move, suffer and implore! A Memoir with Conversations , trans.

Joni Spigler on Cézanne’s Still Lifes with Plaster Cupid

Thames and Hudson Ltd. For an excellent discussion of the enthusiasm for the tropes of Pygmalion and Prometheus in the eighteenth century, see Mary D. University of Chicago Press, , — Sheriff, Moved by Love , University of California Press, , He was so moved by this feeling that tears filled his eyes.

Someone had been prophetical and had divined him. Hence, against all striving and desire, the project is indeed, as these writers suggest, always to fail: Hatje Cantz Publishers, Bernard Grasset, , I wonder who made it the sign of any such thing: It would require some proofs to persuade one of it.

• .
• .
• .

No figure that I know speaks any such language. For it may as rationally be concluded, that the dead body of a man, wherein there is to be found no more appearance or action of life than there is in a statue, has yet nevertheless a living soul in it, because of its shape; as that there is a rational soul in a changeling, because he has the outside of a rational creature, when his actions carry far less marks of reason with them, in the whole course of his life, than what are to be found in many a beast.

Alexander Campbell Fraser New York: Dover, , Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, , New Directions, , Some eight years later, in —13, Gasquet set to work on the memoir which remained unpublished until after WWI in , perhaps reworked. Thames and Hudson, , 15— The Painter in His Culture Chicago: Abrams, , Caproni and Brother, Inc. Still Life in Watercolors Los Angeles: Getty Publications, , Phillips Collection in association with Harry N.

Abrams, , 34— Similarly, critics such as Pierre Georgel have interpreted the painting as a meditation on the paragone , in La Peinture dans la Peinture Dijon: Musee des Beaux-Arts, , It is notable that there is here no suggestion of the incongruity which has been inseparable from the device of the picture within a picture, as used by other artists from the fifteenth century to [de] Chirico.

A Catalogue Raisonne , vol. As will become clear, I see the relationship between these two models as something other than strict binaries. In the next paragraph Rewald reproduces a review by the New York Times critic who had encountered the painting at the Montross Gallery in But it looks like living clay. And all around it are angles, also strangely suggesting the movement and stress of life. Even the blue drapery, flung in innocent folds on the chair, is a strange contradiction of terms.

His composition is always coherent, always balanced and rhythmic, but the planes that crash together with a violent line of contact invariably imply a deep agitation stirring the mind with a sense of drama. They become three-dimensional and two-dimensional at once, sitting on tables while simultaneously filling canvases. In saying this I recognize that my reading is in contrast to that proposed by Armstrong in Cezanne in the Studio , wherein she claims that Still Life with Plaster Cast the title she uses for this same painting charts the transformation, not so much of two-dimensional surface into three-dimensional space as the reverse: Both works are in the Louvre.

Philadelphia Museum of Art, , , Thus, in this painting, the contagious nature of extension into space draws together unlike things and unites them towards the common goal of becoming. The Folio Society, , My argument is about emergence—from two dimensions into three; from insensible matter into sensible and sensitive human being ; emergence into the world both of reason and of sensible erotic pleasures from a place of unknowing. Hence, to see the Cupid so seamlessly fit into the progression outlined figs.

The towel acts as the veil.

Finally, in the Philadelphia version fig. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics privileged the idea that such marks directly referenced idiosyncratic sensations as filtered and interpreted through the sensorium of the artist, and furthermore, used this pronouncement to ascribe value to artistic productions.

BOLSAS E CALLS

Yet, Shiff also describes the marks as iconically standing for the sensations themselves, as a materialization of sense data communicable between creator and public. Molyneux asked Locke whether a man who had been born blind and had learned to distinguish and name a sphere and a cube by touch, would be able to distinguish and name these objects simply by sight, once he had been enabled to see. University of Chicago Press, Spring Books, , 5.

In the argument developed in this paper, in which I address eighteenth century notions of space as a plenum in which particles, corpuscles, sensible fibers, etc. A Comprehensive Anthology New York: University of Chicago Press, , Martin's Press, , recognizes that the French etymology of the word [Fr.: Victor Cousin popularized the inaccurate word sensualist e around , and it came to be aligned with those feelings deemed improper, or stimulated by improper acts as defined by bourgeois society.

The original term, sensationniste , implied a sort of connoisseur of sensation. Pennsylvania State University Press, , 1—6. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: The John Hopkins University Press, , 2. Gender in the Making of Modern Science Boston: Georges Le Roy, vol. Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility , See also, Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: October Books, , Crary, Techinques of the Observer: Philosophie, politique et science aujourd'hui, Paris: CFUL, , pp.

Eduardo Pellejero e Golgona Anghel Eds. Qu'est-ce-que l'Objectivation en Psychanalyse?

• Soigner par lhypnose (French Edition).
• The ABC’s of Beverages;
• Publicações.

L'Harmattan, , pp. Le Printemps du Politique. Morelia Editorial, , pp. Apenas Livros, , 23 pp. O Valor Moral da Natureza. Apenas Livros, , 40 pp. Apenas Livros, , 36 pp.

Reuniões Científicas

Estudo de um caso. Apenas Livros, , 24pp. Apenas Livros, , 40pp. Propriedade do Organismo ou Atributo do Planeta Terra? Apenas Livros, , 20 pp. O Feminismo no Questionamento Actual.

La chair du visible : Paul Cézanne et Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Ela Por Ela, Campo das Letras, O "fora" em Jacques Derrida", G. Mais pourquoi donc la guerre? Lecture de Freud et Einstein, In: Soraya Nour et Olivier Remaud Ed. Merleau-Ponty lecteur de Freud: Afinal, o que significa o inconsciente? Michel Henry leitor de Freud, in Nuno M. Lecture de Freud sur le transfert et sa liquidation: Paris, Presses Universitaires de Paris-Ouest, pp.

Homenagem a Fernando Gil, Lisboa: O segredo sem segredo: Con los ojos abiertos. Hannah Arendt perante Eichmann em Jerusalem. Luz e Sombra, Lisboa: Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa. Temas e Debates, Os Antigos, Kant e Baudelaire. The Individual and Individuality in Nietzsche, in K.