ABSTRACT
Medical rationality plunges into the marvelous density of perception, offering the grain of things as the first face of truth, with their colors, their spots, their hardness, their adherence. The breadth of the experiment seems to be identified with the domain of the careful gaze, and of an empirical vigilance receptive only to the evidence of visible contents. The eye becomes the depository and source of clarity; it has the power to bring a truth to light that it receives only to the extent that it has brought it to light; as it opens, the eye first opens the truth: a flexion that marks the transition from the world of classical clarity – from the “enlightenment” – to the nineteenth century.
