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"Downward Eyes: The Devaluation of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought" Author: [US] Martin Jay Translator: Kong Ruicai Publisher: Baideya | Chongqing University Press
"Downward Eyes: The Devaluation of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought" Author: [US] Martin Jay Translator: Kong Ruicai Publisher: Baideya | Chongqing University Press
Description
Introduction · · · · · ·
-Editor's Recommendation-
★ The first French intellectual history centered on "vision", a comprehensive study of the rise and fall of French "visual centrism"
☆ Interdisciplinary research with great academic imagination, encyclopedic "visual" discourse
★ Understand the history of "visual-centrism" and gain insight into the 21st century filled with images and surveillance
☆ Recommended by author Martin Jay
-Content Introduction-
The admiration for vision has long been deeply rooted in Western culture. From Plato and Descartes to the Enlightenment, vision is often associated with clarity, order and rationality. With the emergence of photography and film, vision has become the lord of the modern sensory kingdom. However, modern thinkers from France - Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida - have also questioned the hegemony of vision in various ways: from impressionism to surrealism, from phenomenology to psychoanalysis, from structuralism to postmodern analysis...
This book shows readers the history of how "visual centrism" was shaken. With his outstanding ability to integrate materials, the author integrates dazzling criticism into the grand topic of intellectual history, presenting the history of French thought from a completely new perspective.
-Media Recommendation-
A valuable book… Jay's authoritative history is a must-read for anyone who wants to focus on 20th-century intellectual life.
——Artforum
Jay's exploration of visual attitudes in 20th-century France results in an impressive and rigorous work... Much of Jay's material comes from the classics, which he synthesizes persuasively.
——The Times Literary Supplement
The scholarship presented in this book is dazzling...its publication is an intellectual event of enormous importance.
--"October"
Anyone who wants to teach a course on 20th century thought should own this book.
——Modern History Magazine
In its coolly observant tone, this astonishing book is a sentimental journey through the history of ideas.
——"Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism"
About the Author
-About the Author-
Martin Jay (1944- ) is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His research areas include visual culture, modern European intellectual history, and critical theory. His representative works include The Dialectical Imagination (1973/1996), Marxism and Totality (1984), Adorno (1984), The Eternal Exile (1985), Socialism at the End of the Century (1988), Field of Force (1993), Downcast Eyes: The Devaluation of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993), Cultural Semantics (1998), Violent Refractions (2003), Songs of Experience (2004), The Virtue of Lying (2010), Marginal Anthology (2011), Kracauer: Exile (2014), After the Decline of Reason (2016), and Fragments in the Eye (2020).
-Translator Profile-
Kong Ruicai (1984- ) is from Nanhai County, Guangdong Province. He holds a bachelor's degree in Chinese language and literature from Jinan University (2008), a master's degree in comparative literature from Renmin University of China (2011), and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Auckland, New Zealand (2016). He is a freelance translator and critic. He has published articles in Chinese and foreign journals such as Reading. His translations include "Introduction to Lyotard", "Introduction to De Man", "Genealogy of Madness: From Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Van Gogh to Artaud" (co-translation), "Deep Thinking: Continuously Approaching the Essence of the Problem", and "Introduction to Derrida's On Grammatology".