Louis Marin

Frontiers of Utopia: Past and Present

Visitors to the observation deck of the Sears Tower-the highest tower in the world-can buy, when back on the ground, some slides that commemorate their visit and keep it in their memory. One of them (fig. 1) recalls the prospect they have discovered from the top floor of the building, from its western side, the plain stretching away as far as the eye can see, the others (fig. 2, for example), the views of the tower from the ground at a distance. Two prospects, two visions of the world confront each other: the one from above, the highest viewpoint possible on earth from a building, opens up space to the stupefied gaze led to its visual limit and to the spatial frontier of the horizon where gaze and earth seem to coincide. In the slide, taken at dusk, space up to its ultimate background is crisscrossed by a linear network of light spots that imperatively, in the coming night invading the image, leads the gaze if not toward a vanishing point at least to a plane where sky and earth fade and vanish into each other. The spectators eye, in the position of a bold birds-eye view,2 is located in a dominating position and at such an alti-

Classical, Baroque: Versailles, or the Architecture of the Prince

There is no doubt something paradoxical about making Versailles out to be one of the high places of baroque architecture. The huge faqade by Louis LeVau and Jules Hardouin Mansart, which spreads out onto the gardens, has passed, and continues to pass,-perhaps rightly so-for the classical model of the royal palace: each element of the construction, although perfectly defined in itself, is subordinated to a center where, at the level of the principal floor-the royal floor-an independent portico of six columns interrupts with its powerful relief the repetitive rhythm of the faqade in favor of a stable and firmly determined foyer. Whatever Versailless legitimate right in laying claim to classicism, it is nonetheless true that, in Anglo-Saxon countries in particular, classicism in art and notably in architecture is often considered a French peripeteia of a great baroque period which is born of international mannerism in the sixteenth century and ends in the precious and spiraled graces of rococo, while awaiting the so-called neo-classic resurrection around 1750. It is not a matter here of resolving (either by a combination of formal and stylistic features, or by an even finer diachrony of historical developments particularized according to cultural and geographic areas) the problems, indeed the aporias in method and theory, in periodization and chronology, raised when a work of art, a construction plan or form of reception is designated as baroque or classical. I will therefore set aside this endless query to evoke only in its broadest

Topic and Figures of Enunciation: It is Myself that I Paint

[A] It is here a book of good faith, reader. It warns you, right from the outset, that I here envisaged no end other than a domestic and private one. Here I in no way considered your interests, nor did I look to my own glory. Such a project lies beyond my powers. I have destined my book to serve as a certain comfort to my parents and friends: having lost me (which, indeed, they soon will) they will find here not a trace of my condition or humors, and thus will cherish more wholeheartedly and vividly the knowledge that they have had of me. Had it been a matter of seeking the world’s favor, I would have adorned myself better, just as I would have presented myself in a more studied manner. I wish to be seen here in all of my simplicity, quite natural and ordinary, without effort nor artifice: for it is myself that I paint. Insofar as respect for the public will allow, my flaws will be readily legible here as will be my artless shape. For had I found myself amidst those nations that are said yet to live under the gentle freedom of the first laws of nature, I assure you that I would more than gladly have painted myself here in my entirety, and completely naked at that. Thus, dear reader, I am myself the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should squander your leisure on a subject so frivolous and vain. Adieu, then, say I, Montaigne, on this first day in March 1580.

Mimésis et description

En guise de preambule a cet expose sur Mimesis et description, je voudrais vous proposer une peti te fable esthethique sur les origines de 1 a peinture que je trouve dans le Songe de Philomathe de Felibien. Cest Peinture qui parle, apres quelle ait peint le monde cree par son Pere, le Dieu des Dieux: “Les Divinites des eaux considerant aussi mes peintures avec plaisir en ont voulu fai re des copies et elles y ont si bien reussi que vous voyez avec quelle facilite elles savent faire un tableau en un moment. Les grands Fleuves meme et les Torrents quoique prompts et impetueux, tâchent souvent de les imiter, mais ils nont pas assez de patience pour achever tout ce quils commencent. Il ny a que les Nymphes des rivieres, des lacs et des fontaines dont lhumeur est plus douce et plus tranquil le qui ont pris un si grand plaisir dans cette occupation, quelles ne font autre chose que representer continueilement ce qui soffre a elles ... mais (...) elles sont si capricieuses quon ne peut bien voir leurs ta...

The narrative trap: the conquest of power

‘Deep down and for the first time, Wilson had doubts about the powers of his brilliant colleague. Why was he talkinǵ so much and doing so little? Why? Sholmes exclaimd in response to Wilson innermost thoughts; because with this damned Lupin fellow, one is working in the dark, at random, and because, instead of extracting the truth from precise facts, one has to obtain it from one own brain, in order to check afterwards if it fits in with the events’ Maurice Leblanc Arsene Lupin versus Herlock sholmes (Live de poche, Paris, 1963, p. 127).

The gesture of looking in classical history painting

In this paper, possible functions of the gesture of indicating, either with hands or postures, or with looks or facial expressions, portrayed on the figures found in the history painting of the XVIIth century are studied. Two examples from the paintings of Le Brun and Poussin are analyzed in detail to show how these gestures are signifying elements of the story represented through the dispositio of its figures as well as operative parts of a representational apparatus historically and esthetically defined. The gesture of indicating, intended to articulate and regulate the viewers reception of the painting, is supposed to constrain how he adheres to the religious, social or political values — that is the ideological background of the scene represented in the painting.

Puss-in Boots: Power of Signs. Signs of Power

The essay which follows can be considered in several ways: as a contribution to the long and respectable intellectual tradition of the history of ideas and ideologies in their expression by literary texts; as a possible element of comparison in the field of mythological studies between myths and tales belonging to different cultures; as an approach, through an example, to a theory of the text, reading and their effects-an approach roughly characterized by the use of some procedures of structural analysis; as an attempt to define a kind of logic which is not the logic of truth as representation, as adequatio rei et intellectus but the logic of will and desire, or to be more precise, a logic of the weak, of the marginal, of minorities that is a logic of deceit, trick, simulation, lie, a cunning logic that serves as a weapon against the powerful and a way of capturing their power while subverting it. Moreover, this essay is a kind of byproduct of my book La critique du discours, Ctudes sur la Logique de Port-Royal et les Pensdes de Pascal, an application of some hypotheses I articulated therein to an unexpected set of texts: the seventeenthcentury tales. I propose to read a tale which is not actually a folk-tale since it was written by an author whom I consider one of the greatest writers of the seventeenth-century. To be sure, my reading will not be a very serious one: it just deals with a tale, a childrens tale from which I shall extract only what seems to me the most pleasurable, the most delightful features of the story. But at the same time, I have imagined my essay as bearing some very pedantic subtitles: Power of signs or Signs of power, or how to do things with words, or language as representation and power, the latter being a kind of Schopenhauerian parody. Subtitles I might rephrase to be more explicit and more pedantic if possible in the manner of the historian of ideas and in the wake of my previous work on the Port-Royal Logic and Pascal: Deception words-powerful speech: a mythical Eucharist in a French seventeenth-century tale. The tale is the Master-Cat or Puss-in-Boots by Charles Perrault. It was published in Perraults Mother Gooses Tales, Histories or Tales of Past Time with Morals, in 1697. I shall read Le Chat-Bott& in an English translation made in 1729 by Robert Samber. As it may now be evident, my first task is to explain the various subtitles of the essay, to justify my pedantry and in so doing, to reveal my secrets, my tricks, I mean the reading hypotheses I have and that I shall attempt to prove. When I read the tale, I am struck by the important role played by a certain use of language. The main character of the tale, the Cat, appears to be the Master of words in this particular sense that he is always speak-

Narrative Theory and Piero as History Painter

The title of my paper, Narrative Theory and Piero as History Painter, requires some justification in the context of a colloquium devoted to Piero teorico dellarte. For in the process of underscoring the two sides of Pieros oeuvre, Vasaris Life of Piero already deals explicitly with this theme as a leitmotif that traverses it: he was a great mathematician, a consummate geometrician and perspectivist, but conjointly with this excellence of learning, Pieros oeuvre also displays a painterly excellence. To discuss Piero the theoretician of art therefore involves discussing Piero the writer, author of geometrical treatises such as the De perspectiva pingendi. But since Piero was also a painter, we are faced with the question of the relation between the work of the savant and that of the painter: in what sense is the painters practice theoretical? In what sense can the products of this practice, the frescoes and the paintings, be seen as theoretical objects, if not as applications of the theory of perspective? In what sense is a fresco or a painting, both products of a painterly practice, also the product of an applied theory? It seems to me that, from this point of view, two working hypotheses can be advanced in order to sketch out a problematic of Pieros painted work, in particular his work as a painter of history. Recounting the story of the discovery and veneration of the cross in his fresco at San Francesco dArezzo, in his capacity as a painter, Piero presents a theory of narrative, a theory that should not immediately be conflated with a philosophy and theology of history. Just as

Picasso: Image Writing in Process

The oeuvre of Picasso-poet, now somewhat better known thanks to a recent exhibition and some magnificent accompanying work, constitutes an excellent opportunity to join in modern and contemporary discussions of the ancient Horatian formula ut pictura poesis. Over the last thirty years these discussions have assumed various forms, ranging from certain great studies in structuralist poetics-such as Roman Jakobsons article on Blake, Rousseau, and Klee2-to more recent work in the history of rhetoric, in some cases simply as a reaction to structural analysis, in others as a deliberate regression.3 We are told, for example, to expect a French translation of Rensselaer W. Lees study Ut pictura poesis, which appeared in the Art Bulletin in 1942(!).4 This is less a sign of the

Rhetorics of truth, justice and secrecy in Pascal's text

Beginning from a definition of philosophical discourse which states the necessity of rhetoric meant as the whole of the linguistic devices aiming to persuade the interlocutor of truth and justice, the author points out that Pascals text would be an outstanding example of such a discourse, while showing, nevertheless, the specificity of the rhetoric he employs. Such a specificity would aim to carry out a complex logic of the secret, concerning chiefly the ackowledgement and identification procedures of the subject of the discourse-enunciation, and its pronominal and nominal markers.The author studies this logic on one hand by starting from the pragmatic patterns developed by the linguistics of enunciation, and on the other taking into account the philosophical, ethical and religious themes of the Jansenist thought in the XVIIth century. The distinction between concealment and secret leads the author to set up the forms of political rhetoric against the actual Pascalian aspects of philosophical rhetoric. Such a logic of the secret, which is the projection of the hidden God teologema into the field of philosophical discourse, would enable us to position as “absent” the subject producing this discourse and thus to transform what he states into a discourse of truth and justice. The very careful examination of the anonymity strategies and mostly of the writing tactics concerning the authors real name (anagram) would seem to confirm this conception of the rhetoric of Pascals philosophical discourse.