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    Michelle Foucault

    You can find here the latest iteration of quotes from a philosopher cleverly juxtaposed with incongruous pictures.

    I think maybe that philosophers divide into those whose prose works well for this kind of thing and those for whom it doesn't. Anything even slightly portentous works, and if you are skilfull in choice of images, I think that anything with technical vocabulary would probably be ripe, but the result would be funny for different reasons.

    Some philosophers' work can be illustrated in a non-ironic way. Peter Singer once said that the pictures in his animal cruelty book convinced a lot more people than the actual arguments. Probably any non-trivial work of ethics could benefit from this kind of illustration. And, finally, visual artists have been appropriating philosophical sentences for decades. I forget the guy who put a sentence from Davidson next to all of his paintings (I can't find this because there is a guy who does watercolors of flowers also named Donald Davidson). It was cool stuff. More recently (due in part to the labors of the Rays, Negerestani and Brassier, as well as Armen Avinessian and Graham Harman) lots of artists are doing things with respect to Speculative Realism.

    I wonder what it is about philosophy such that our sentences work so well in conjunction with pictures, both in ironic contraposition and non-ironically. In any case, we should probably be happy to provide the service.

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    4 responses to “Michelle Foucault”

    1. Jon Shaheen Avatar
      Jon Shaheen

      This may be what you were thinking of, though the artist includes what looks like much more than a sentence from Davidson in the example shown here: http://www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/resource/cBKKLke/r9Kd6R Unfortunately the image isn’t clear enough for me to read the text. Morris’s retrospective article is here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343899

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    2. Interested Grad Student Avatar
      Interested Grad Student

      Surely it’s not the case that any non-trivial work in ethics could benefit from non-ironic photographic illustration. I’m not even sure how one would go about non-ironically illustrating Being For or The Nature of Normativity or Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Or even Principia Ethica or The Right and the Good.

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    3. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Jon,
      Awesome, thanks. That was it. I remember about twenty years ago that a book of Morris’ work was on sale at the book store for the Wexner Center at OSU. If I remember right, when Davidson visited campus William Taschek took him over there and showed it to him and maybe purchased the book.

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    4. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      I don’t know. Would Guernica work for all of them?
      Seriously, I should have restricted that to practical ethics. This being said, it would be a blast to set groups of artists to work with respect to the texts you pick. If they were good, they would probably come up with something cool. But I think you are almost certainly right that it’s not very likely that the pictures would benefit the the philosophical works would benefit.
      I’m not one hundred percent sure though. Berlin philosopher and theorist Armen Avenessian (mentioned above) has a really interesting project called Speculative Poetics that involves having artists illustrate various philosophical concepts, and the result is pretty cool, aesthetically and philosophically engaging. You can see some of this at http://www.spekulative-poetik.de/programmatik-der-reihe/english.html .

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