Returning the Gaze

Let me ask you to accept on faith what I lack time to demonstrate now, but have tried to spell out in a recent book entitled Downcast Eyes: ¹ that a wide variety of French thinkers and artists in this century have been conducting, often with little or no explicit acknowledgment of each other’s work, a ruthless critique of the domination of vision in Western culture. Their challenge to what can be called the ocularcentrism of that tradition has taken many different forms, ranging from Bergson’s analysis of the spatialization of time to Bataille’s celebration of the blinding sun and the acephalic body, from Sartre’s depiction of the sadomasochism of “the look” to Lacan’s disparagement of the ego produced by the “mirror stage,” from Foucault’s strictures against panoptic surveillance to Debord’s critique of the society of the spectacle, from Barthes’ linkage of photography and death to Metz’s excoriation of the scopic regime of the cinema, and from Irigaray’s outrage at the privileging of the visual in patriarchy to Levinas’s claim that ethics is thwarted by a visually grounded ontology. Even an early defender of the figural as opposed to the discursive like Lyotard could finally identify the postmodernism that he came to champion with the sublime foreclosure of the visual.