PENSER À TRAVERS LES YEUX. ÉCRITURE ET PEINTURE

Catalog description

This course will explore how philosophers and writers have viewed painting. The work of the painter, as Gilles Deleuze writes, consists in destroying and standing up to the catastrophe (“the painter must go through a moment when he sees nothing, a collapse of visual coordinates”). We will then reflect upon the challenges that such a catastrophe also poses to the gesture of writing. From Diderot’s Salons to Francis Bacon according to Deleuze, from Velázquez analyzed by Foucault to Vermeer as seen by Proust, we will seek to understand what Jean-François Lyotard calls “thinking through the eyes.” Taught in French. Prerequisite: a course at the 0600- or 0700-level or equivalent proficiency. Contact the instructor to verify your proficiency if you have not taken French at Brown.