Summary
Maurice Merleau Ponty: Cézanne's Doubt
The Eye and the Spirit and Other Essays on Art
Devoting attention to different artistic forms (visual, plastic, literary), Merleau Ponty does not consider the concept of beauty or elaborate the normative criteria of art. He does not theorize, but analyzes the structures that are the basis of expressiveness and create a work and that reveal unchanging elements. At the same time, these essays enrich our considerations about language, which is the basis of the work of writers and artists.
The book ends with Merleau-Ponty's last writing, which he wrote at the end of his life. Eye and Spirit is as much an examination of seeing as it is of painting. The author is searching, as Claude Lefort says, for words from the primeval times to name what constitutes the miracle of the human body, its inexplicable vitality with which it conducts a silent dialogue with others, with the world and with itself, and the author is precisely concerned with the fragility of that miracle.
Biblos Newsletter
New titles, special copies and quiet recommendations from the antiquarian bookshop.