[...]... ship of state but “all the things that are there,” or the whole of presencing, considered (to speak anachronistically) in its historicity The governance of the lightning flash is not that of cosmic law but of an enigmatic granting (well expressed by the German es gibt) and withdrawal of entire constellations of presencing To resort to a Heideggerian term, one can speak here of the epochal character of. .. that the articulation of his thought is indissociable from the linguistic articulation of his discourse—a logos of incomparable refinement that does not situate itself on a meta-level but participates in what it speaks of The Heraclitean fragments do not offer one, so to speak, a vision of vision, in the sense of a definitive and suitably distant treatment of the subject This refusal of a “bird’s-eye view”... with Caravaggio’s painting, The Death of the Virgin,9 but a concern for the attestation of tears to flesh must look beyond human relationships or the imploration of divinity to consider an actively compassionate realization of the integration of one’s flesh with the flesh of nature This mandate requires other modalities of seeing than the dispassionate lucidity of the philosophical gaze cultivated by the... character of presencing, it is vision, rather than intellection, that first of all offers an intimation of it Vision can reveal the lightning flash as an emblem of the happening of manifestation, because it is already sensitized (as hearing, in the end, is not, since it does not seek to delimit and define entities) to the play of differences and the incursions of alterity on the microcosmic level of the... casting of it as a “silent science” exploring the upsurge and spontaneous configuration of the perceptual world, or of “wild being.” Nonetheless, it is Merleau-Ponty—enamored as he was of painting— who grapples intimately with both the Cartesian reconstruction of vision and with the ocularcentrism of Husserlian phenomenology, particularly with its exaltation of a transcendental viewpoint and of eidetic... phenomenological ontology of flesh that Merleau-Ponty strives to articulate in his late thought, in an intimate engagement with visual presencing, is an ontology of openness, of originary differentiation, of a pervasive interinvolvement of sentience, sensibility, and ideality, and ultimately of the co-emergence or the fundamental sameness of emptiness and form The invisible of the visible is, on his... neglect is surprising, given not only the importance of the issue to the philosophical tradition that they inaugurated but also the prominence of visual tropes, or figures of radiance and darkness, in the fragments of Heraclitus and Parmenides Furthermore, the testimony of sense-perception is questioned pervasively in pre-Socratic thought Heidegger’s philosophical engagement with certain pre-Socratics,... interlinks the orders of visible presencing and invisible truth Plato’s censure of writing in the Phaedrus may, at least in part, reflect the dissociation of phonetic (in contrast to ideographic) writing from any sort of resemblance; its system of abstract symbols approximates neither the visual nor the eidetic aspect of things In contrast, Descartes, who models vision on the mechanics of touch, strictly... unaware of the demands that the banal 16 Greek Philosophy delousing scenario makes on the street urchins’ eyesight and eye-hand coordination Instead, he probably follows out the thought of the invisible on an exalted and a theoretical level—if not on the philosophical level of the transcendent invisible, at least on that of a (quasi-Rilkean) invisible distillate of experience that the poet is in quest of. .. tears originate from the vapors that issue from the eyes more than from other parts of the body Liquefaction of these vapors results from a narrowing of the pores of the eye which, in sadness, is accompanied by a rush of blood to the heart (ascribed by Descartes to the agitation of love), which increases the output of vapors Only for children does Descartes attach any significance to the propensity . York Press Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2003 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used. Vision’s Invisibles SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy Dennis J. Schmidt, editor Vision’s Invisibles Philosophical Explorations Véronique M. Fóti State University of New York Press Published. Jane Bunker, the acquisitions editor, at State University of New York Press, for generously renewing their offer of publication. I am deeply appreciative of Adrian Johnston’s expert assistance, which