Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought

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Summary: If you're interested in this theme...
Review: ...you should read John Macmurray's book, Self as Agent, where he argues that touch is the primary sense, not sight... Sight is about distance, and fosters a Cartesian split in how we experience the world. Fascinating

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Summary: Excellent survey, stylistically conservative
Review: Martin Jay provides us with an encyclopedic survey of the role of vision in western thought, particularly France. Jay, who is strangely not dissimilar to Greil Marcus in this respect, has the knack for picking out lesser known texts and facts and integrating them into his analysis. If youre a foucault scholar, it's worth it just for the account of Roussel's role in Foucault's epistemic development. That is just one example. It is chock full of these fascinating details. Alas, it remains a literature review with an interesting focus. If this were a lecture, I'd bring a tape recorder, knowing that I'd collapse into slumber on the one hand while being aware that what was being said was critical to my growth as an intellectual. Unlike Marcus, who works creatively with obscure texts, Jay suffers from an academic conservatism that ends up reading like a well-done second chapter to a conventional dissertation. If that is your need or if you like that sort of thing, by all means go buy it. Go buy it anyway, it is indispensable as a survey but read it with a triple espresso at hand.

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Summary: Academic Jargon at its Finest
Review: The text is meticulously researched and Jay is knowledgeable, but his writing style,sadly,is so turgid as to be unreadable. There is hardly a sentence that isn't footnoted and cached with trendy academic jargon, so that to be properly understood one would have to have the book reproduced with hypertext and the reader spend most of his time in the references. Art history isn't exactly General Relativity or is it.