Question of Painting

Jorella Andrews is Head of the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.

• AcknowledgementsList of ImagesINTRODUCTION: Painting as ThoughtQuestionsRethinking thoughtMerleau-Ponty’s trans-dimensional investigations An incarnational logic‘Digging in the same place’ — Merleau-Ponty’s broad project PART ONE: Painting — Re-thinking Thought beyond Dualism and Positivism1 ‘Nature’ and ‘Consciousness’— Merleau-Ponty’s Critical Encounter with DualismBroken?The problems of rationalism and empiricismThe naïve consciousness and its reconstructive powersThe significance of Gestalt Describing behaviour ­— its limitations and scope2 The Symbolic Forms and the Question of Integrated BeingObstaclesThe three forms of behaviourBeyond inherited structuresPART TWO: Painting — Re-Thinking Thought as Perceptual and Embodied3 Description and the Re-education of SightHow to start againEmbodied perception — our only access to the real?Description: the first philosophical actInto the base of ‘inhuman’ nature4 Embodied ThoughtHow do bodies think?Peculiar permanence The body in its intentional beingIntersubjectivity, intercorporeality and otherness — foundational hospitalityPART THREE: Painting — Re-Thinking Thought as ‘Silence’ and ‘Speech’5 The Being of Language, ReconceivedA new index of curvatureMerleau-Ponty and the priority of expression SyntaxLanguage, truth and ‘universality’6 Visual Language and the ‘Unity’ of PaintingModern painting and the paradoxes of communicationCultures of display and debate — renegotiating particularity-generalityPART FOUR: Painting — Re-Thinking Thought as ‘Secret Science’7 Visibility, the ‘Flesh’ of the WorldThe ‘common stuff … is the visible’The visible and the invisibleIndirect ontology and anonymous visibilityChiasm, illusion, dis-illusionImmersive thought and ‘having at a distance’ 8 Visual Treatises and the Search for DepthPainterly thought as secret scienceIntermundane spaceDepth of being and bodyThe painter’s effort and the fragility of the real Visual treatisesBibliographyIndex

Andrews' book -- like a compelling piece of music or a film -- demands repeated encounters; it demands to be read again so that the details of each individual argument can be savored anew, appreciated within the context of a fully-expanded expression (one that could be realized only at the end) … An ambitious, erudite undertaking.