The crossing of the visible

Painting, according to Jean-Luc Marion, is a topic of central concern for philosophy, particularly phenomenology.

For the question of painting is, at its heart, a question of visibility - of appearance.

As such, the painting is a privileged case of the phenomenon; the painting becomes an index for investigating the conditions of appearance - or what Marion describes as "phenomenality" in general.

In this book, Marion takes up just such a subject. The natural outgrowth of his earlier reflections on icons, these four studies carefully consider the history of painting - from classical to contemporary - as a fund for phenomenological reflection on the conditions of (in)visibility.

Ranging across artists from Raphael to Rothko, Caravaggio to Pollock, this work offers both a critique of contemporary accounts of the visual and a constructive alternative.

According to Marion, the proper response to the "nihilism" of postmodernity is not iconoclasm, but rather a radically iconic account of the visual and the arts which opens them to the invisible.