Stop

David Appelbaum is Professor of Philosophy at The College at New Paltz.

• Introduction Part One: What the Eye Sees Blindness and LightThe Ceaseless Agony of the BlindThe Vanishing Eye Part Two: What the Blind See Blindness and the SignThe Organism of TextSight and Movement Part Three: What Seeing Sees The Light of the StopThe Sight of the BlindThe Story of Oedipus Notes Bibliography Index

"This is one of the most brilliant, interesting, and utterly original books I have read. Its almost mystical conception of embodied perception is solidly founded in reason and evidence. It replaces Derrida's despairing notion of absence with a full and potent foundation of presence, but does so without ignoring any of the difficulties Derrida presents. It says brilliant things about the nature of signification—there is concrete relation between signifier and signified, composed of effort and resistance—and about the ethics of perception. By implication it reanimates the fields of literary criticism, psychological philosophy, epistemology, phenomenology, semiotics, and even—dare one say it?—theology." — Frederick Turner, University of Texas at Dallas"This is a brilliant and important book, both for what it says about Descartes and his time, and, more important, as a model for a new way of conceiving the role of philosophy." — Jacob Needleman, San Francisco State University