Repr�sentation et simulacre : essai sur l'�mergence du regard � l'�ge classique : regarde renvers�, perspective et poin de vue
Creators: name: PEREZ MARTINEZ, Ricardo
Publisher: name: Universit� degli studi di Bergamo
Year: 2014

description: In this study, we have demonstrated that the culture of Early Modernity has popularized three significant metaphors or optical instruments (the reversed view, the perspective and the point of view) to capture, to organize, to interpret and to represent the sensitive world. Each of these metaphors offers a characterization partially different from the world, but all of them address the most common intellectual quests or problems of the epoch, such as the disorder of the world and the mistake that the senses provoke in the judgment. The reversed view or the reversed world (topic inherited from the Middle Ages) can explain the problem of disorder but with the condition of breaking the unity of the world in two representations (the Being and the Appearance). The perspective (metaphor taken from the central perspective of the Renaissance) can explain also this problem but the condition of this perspective is always unique and central (monocular) that could give or guarantee coherence to everything. The metaphor of the point of view (metaphor inherited from the decentralized perspective or anamorphose of the Baroque) was managing to explain also this problem but with the condition of making the world a labyrinthine city of divergent points of view. Leaving out the first metaphor (that of the reversed view), which already began to lose its credibility, we have characterized the imaginary, between the 16th and the 17th century, by combining the metaphor of the perspective of the Renaissance and that of the point of view of the Baroque. That is, in the apparently disordered moral, political, linguistic and scientific world, there is a unique and infinite perspective that gives coherence to the entire fragmented points of view, subordinating them to a unique center. We have thus drawn the following conclusion: the point of view explains the visible plurality of the reality - the disorder, whereas the perspective explains, though invisible, its superior unity - the order. 
 We demonstrated also that during the period from the Renaissance to the Baroque, three important processes in visual imaginary of Europe emerged: the rationalization of the visual conscience (phenomenon related to the central perspective); the interioritation of the vision and its partial separation of the sense of tact (phenomenon related to the assimilation, done by Descartes, from the eye to the camera obscura and also to the perspective of the Renaissance); and the indissoluble unit between the modus spectandi and the representatio (phenomenon tied to the anamorphose and to the geometric perspective of the Early Modernity, done by Leibniz). These three processes arose in the middle of a tension between three different notions from representation. The first type of representation is based on the direct similarity between the object and its representation: the artist must copy the way in which the eye sees the things in the world - subjectivity of the vision. This type of representation can, as Foucault showed it well, generally characterize the Renaissance. The second type of representation is based on the resemblance (vraissemblances) and not on the direct similarities: the painter can represent better a circle with an oval (theory of the dissimilarity). This type of representation can characterize the Early Modernity, the Baroque. We have identified another type of representation that does not copy the similarities or that arises from the verisimilitudes (v�risimilitude), because it copies the objective order of the points, lines and figures. That is, it copies the objective verisimilitude, which was the project undertaken by the geometric perspective (Desargues, Bosse et Leibniz): there is a relation of invariable order between the circle, the oval, the parable and the hyperbole. In this evolution of the notion of representation we show that the theory of the dissimilarity of Descartes has played a very important role. 
 In this order of ideas, we have shown that the baroque poetical concept, as in the aesthetics of G�ngora's Solitudes, is a mental representation or an understanding act. The poetical concept is an instantaneous representation, which escapes the understanding. In The Tempest of Shakespeare the similarity ( theatre as a mirror of the world) is replaced by the theatrical resemblance (vraissemblances), the theatre as illusion). In M�nines de V�lasquez, this representation of the representation (Foucault), is also a procedure in which the view is closed partially to the similarity and opened to the resemblance-verisimilitude (vraissemblances). Nevertheless, already Maleau-Ponty said that every theory of painting is metaphysics. In Leibniz, the monade, this " active mirror " of the universe, is a point of view that, to different levels of his philosophical and scientific discourse, implies also a theory of the representation. Already Heidegger, evoking Leibniz and well before Foucault, observed the representative character of the philosophy in the modern epoch. The Early Modern is the time of the emergence of the modern notion of representation, and this emergence is contemporaneous with the emergence of the modern subjectivism: from then, being given as foundation of any clear and different certainty, the man would be defined as that who, by representing himself, represents the world (Descartes). These two notions, representation and subjectivism, have been supported and reinforced by optical metaphors such as the perspective, especially the point of view. It is true that in Leibniz, if we pursue the term point of view to the analysis situs, the metaphor of point of view does not have relation with the modern subjectivism (the point of view is independent of the subject that is placed). 
 In addition, we have demonstrated, as parerga and paralipomena of our research, that the significant metaphors of the reversed view, the perspective and the point of view reappear towards the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th. As inheritor of Leibniz, Nietzsche has at the heart of his philosophy the representation always illusory and the perspective always multiple. For Proust, who evokes the theory of the monade in his Recherche, the point of view is also one of the most important elements of his aesthetics of capture and representation. Unlike the Early Modernity that had a teleology of the representation, in Nietzsche and in Proust the representation turns into simulacra (Lucr�ce, Klossowski and Deleuze)