Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 1995 by Douglas Fogle

In the end, Jay gives Bataille the almost singular honor of providing an entire postwar generation of critics with vital inspiration toward their "counter-Enlightenment" thought. This consideration of a generation of French thinkers betrays the problematic nature of weaving a singular narrative throughout over 100 years of philosophical thought. A sampling of Jay's reconstruction of this ocularphobic history suggests the far-reaching implications of his argument. Lacan is called to task for his indictment of the "mirror stage" as an illusory ego-construct. The structuralist Marxist Althusser was faulted for drawing on Lacan to suggest that there is no "outside" to ideology. Foucault's work is perhaps most unfairly criticized for its alleged equivalence of vision with domination tout court in the use of the metaphor of the panopticon and is also singled out for his reticence to provide any redemptive alternatives to the panoptic society he describes in Discipline and Punish (1975). Barthes is seen to equate photography with an unrecuperable loss. Metz and the Cahiers du Cinema group too readily associate the cinematic apparatus with ideological domination. Derrida challenges the Cartesian and Platonic visual foundation of Western metaphysics while Irigaray rejects the visual as a male mode and valorizes touch as a "female" sense. Such examples are completely operative in these works, and Jay is correct in pointing out the strange consistency of the visual throughout such writings.

Given this acknowledgment, it is also clear that what comes to the surface almost symptomatically in Jay's narrative are the signposts of an intense ambivalence towards the visual that in some ways undercuts his argument. Nearly all of the philosophers under consideration manifest an ambivalence regarding their purported ocularphobic tendencies. For example, although Jay points to Lacan's widely read 1949 essay "The Mirror State as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," as instrumental in the formulation of a number of thinkers' ocularphobic tendencies (notably those of Althusser and Metz), he also points appreciatively in more than one passage to Lacan's complex discussion of the gaze and the overlapping fields of reciprocal vision in Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1979). Similarly, Derrida's carefully constructed and finely textured cartography of the metaphysical economy of Western philosophy is rendered mute by the overpowering metaphors of ocularphobia and, in Jay's view it becomes clear that the arguments made are not unimportant. Ambivalence is a key concept of psychoanalysis, suggesting a simultaneous maintenance of contradictory tendencies. Jay's earlier formulation of his argument in "Scopic Regimes of Modernity" suggested the operative character of the structure of ambivalence for confronting a singular and monolithic view of the modern scopic regime. The power of his narrative in Downcast Eyes, and his adoption of the Icarian position of ascendancy over the labyrinthine field of the visual, has revealed a blind spot in his thinking in which the multivalent and ambivalent presence of the visual in modern French philosophy is overshadowed by a totalizing construct of philosophical ocularphobia that erases all differences in the glaring light of modernist rationality.