The Brain-Eye

Reviews / Votes

This amazingly erudite, visually sensitive, and philosophically innovative, post-phenomenological study offers multiple, rich perspectives on thinking in and through painting, as it interrogates five paradigmatic pathbreaking artists from Delacroix to Cezanne. Deploying innovative concepts of hallucination and the brain-eye, Alliez convincingly revises our thinking about color, atmosphere, diagram, seriality, and artists' ways of working. -- Gary Shapiro, Tucker-Boatwright Professor in the Humanities-Philosophy, University of Richmond Eric Alliez proposes a consummately erudite journey through modern painting, asking at each step of the way one crucial question: how does painting think? Not: how can we think the painting as a visual object? But rather: what force of thought moves through painting itself to constitute the visual, anterior to the objectivity of the painting as to the subjectivity of the viewer? The answer is kaleidoscopic: an adventure in philosophy through the vicissitudes of color. A major contribution to philosophy in its relation to art history and visual studies. -- Brian Massumi, Professor of Communication, University of Montreal In my view, this is art history at its best: close to the sources and empirical in the sense of transformative encounters whose implications are at once explained and experienced. Robin Mackay's translation from the French is impressive in its effort to convey both dimensions, all the better to support what is perhaps the key lesson of the book: That the modern event work far exceeds the self-consciously performative art practices of the late twentieth century. * Critical Inquiry *