Menace à Olympie (FLAMMARION JEUN) (French Edition)

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She has a twin sister, Suzie Villeneuve, who also had a singing career until She has covered many popular songs by Canadian singers such as Celine Dion. She was one of three female finalists. Villeneuve did not win; however, the experience brought her exposure and popularity among the Quebec public. She released her firs Since her death in , several biographies and films have studied her life, including 's Academy Award-winning La Vie en rose — and Piaf has become one of the most celebrated performers of the 20th century.

Legend has it that she was born on the pavement of Rue de Belleville The tour was organized to support the highly successful French language album Sans attendre, which has sold more than 1. With only ten concerts performed, it was also the shortest tour of Dion's career. However, due to the postponement of the English album, the Anglophone section of the tour was cancelled.

The Francophone part of the tour went ahead as planned, celebrating the highly successful album Sans attendre in Belgium This is an alphabetical list of all the songs known to have been recorded by Dalida, between and , and posthumously released since There are songs in 11 different languages listed below, organised by language and listed by type, and then by alphabetical order. This list doesn't include remix songs released after her death. By creating several scenes abroad, Dalida classified singles in Wallonia, 22 in Italy, 11 in Spain, 10 in Flanders, 4 in Germany, in the Netherlands and in Austria, 1 in French-speaking Switzerland as well as in Portugal, 10 in Latin America, 16 in Asia and more than 60 in Quebec.

Raymond Berthiaume born May 9, and died June 23, was a jazz singer, musician, producer and composer from Quebec, Canada. He studied piano and saxophone at College Laval. In , he created an instrumental group named The Three Bars. The owner of the bar in which they performed suggested they select a vocalist, knowing that a singer would make the group more popular. Berthiaume was chosen, and became the group's vocalist. This became a hit for the group, selling nearly 40, copies[3] Despite the fame Canadian singer Celine Dion has released singles.

In , when the singer changed distributive firm into Italy,[3] a dozen titles were recorded until but no album published if it is not a compilation half in French half in Italian where five Italian titles appeared. The title is very idiomatic, but it in English its general meaning is 'My youth is slipping away'.

This album was the first produced by Hardy's own production company, Asparagus Productions. Manufacturing and distribution were still handled by Disques Vogue. Guy BontempelliFirst performed by: Pierre Jean-Baptiste Rousseau 11 February — was a French essayist, epistemologist, astronomer and journalist who authored numerous popular science essays and articles. He helped promote hard science to the general public and advocated the development of fundamental scientific research in a "post-war disenchantment". A gifted student in mathematics who received departmental and national bursaries in and , Rousseau built his first telescope at the age of 13 and published his first scientific paper at With the help of Jean Becquerel, he was appointed Assi Her father died when she was 13 years old.

She then went on to take the bar in Paris, becoming a barrister in While she specialized in copyrights for writers and artists, she also taught The same brush strokes serve for a primitive composition or for a mural of Renaissance inspiration. Like Goethe, he seeks the integration between classicism and modernity. Harem is the eighth studio album by English singer and songwriter Sarah Brightman, released in the United States on 10 June through Angel Records. Although it has an inclination towards her signature operatic performance, the album encompasses dance-oriented and uptempo styles in keeping with a celebratory motif.

In contrast to the classical crossover music style that framed her previous releases, Harem showcases a wider range of genres, exploring World music-related styles, such as Arabic and Indian music. Harem received generally positive reviews. The Arabian-flavoured album was commercially well received in certain territories. It became Brightman's first top 10 album ever in Japan and debuted in Canada at No. Relaxed pronunciation also called condensed pronunciation or word slurs is a phenomenon that happens when the syllables of common words are slurred together.

It is almost always present in normal speech, in all natural languages but not in some constructed languages, such as Loglan or Lojban, which are designed so that all words are parsable. Some shortened forms of words and phrases, such as contractions or weak forms can be considered to derive from relaxed pronunciations, but a phrase with a relaxed pronunciation is not the same as a contraction.

This is also sometimes reflected in writing: Certain relaxed pronunciations occur only in specific grammat The box set brings for the first time together 18 albums remastered from the original records. Live albums and lyrics are not included. He is the editor-in-chief at French dictionary publisher Dictionnaires Le Robert. After studying political science, humanities and art history at the Sorbonne, Rey served in the 4th Regiment of the Tunisian Troops. While stationed in Algeria in , he replied to an advertisement placed by Paul Robert, who was compiling a new French dictionary and looking for linguists.

Robert's network of lexicographers grew and Rey married his colleague Josette Debove in In the very first Le Robert dictionary was published, followed by an abridged Le Petit Robert in Rey went on to supervise the publication of many more dictionaries under the Le Robert trademark: He is Albino and chooses to wear a balaclava to hide his true identity. S 22 29 Track listing "Famas" 2: Linguists tend to eschew this term, but historically some have reserved the term joual for the variant of Quebec French spoken in Montreal.

This is a list of notable events in music that took place in the year The business move is widely criticized in the media as "payola", but the controversy serves to further increase publicity for the band.

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At the same time, he grows out his hair and shaves off his moustache, radically changing his signature look. They would reunite in February February 5 Carnatic vocalist M. Subbulakshmi becomes the first m Christine Boutin French pronunciation: She was a candidate in the French presidential election, in which she scored 1. She is best known for her very vocal opposition to civil unions in and same-sex marriage later on. In a judgement dated December 18, the correctional court of Paris condemned Boutin to a fine of euros and euros for legal damages for having said that homosexuality was an abomination.

The verdict is being appealed. Allmusic review Ce que je sais, track listing Allmusic. Retrieved November 26, Member feedback about Ce que je sais: French novelists Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. Member feedback about Beatrice Hammer: Johnny Hallyday discography topic This is the discography of French rock and roll singer Johnny Hallyday.

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French literary awards Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. Salut les copains album series topic Salut les copains is a series of albums released through Universal Music France to commemorate the best of music featured in French scene as sponsored by "salut les copain" radio program in France and the French Salut les copains magazine.

Member feedback about Salut les copains album series: Compilation album series Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. Member feedback about Lys Gauty: Member feedback about Marc Lavoine: Christophe singer topic Daniel Bevilacqua, better known by the stage name Christophe, is a French singer and songwriter. Member feedback about Christophe singer: Member feedback about Annie Villeneuve: List of songs recorded by Dalida topic This is an alphabetical list of all the songs known to have been recorded by Dalida, between and , and posthumously released since Member feedback about List of songs recorded by Dalida: Lists of songs by recording artists Revolvy Brain revolvybrain.

Raymond Berthiaume topic Raymond Berthiaume born May 9, and died June 23, was a jazz singer, musician, producer and composer from Quebec, Canada. Member feedback about Raymond Berthiaume: Canadian male singers Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. Celine Dion singles discography topic Canadian singer Celine Dion has released singles. Member feedback about Celine Dion singles discography: Ma jeunesse fout le camp Member feedback about Ma jeunesse fout le camp Pierre Rousseau topic Pierre Jean-Baptiste Rousseau 11 February — was a French essayist, epistemologist, astronomer and journalist who authored numerous popular science essays and articles.

Member feedback about Pierre Rousseau: French astronomers Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. French lawyers Revolvy Brain revolvybrain. One popular form of entertainment was the masked ball or masquerade, in which masked participants could indulge their sexual proclivities at will, with little respect for the social conventions of marriage. The external value of appearance was now dependent on our actions. The face itself became a mask, no guide to what might transpire. In this performative sense of identity, the body was not a natural, changeless resource but a malleable tool, which responded to individual desires for self-fashioning.

The historian Michel de Certeau has described one strategy for the resistance of governmental power in similar terms. He uses the term la perruque, the French for wig or masquerade, to refer to the everyday resistance of individuals behind a screen of conformity. The fragmented body, assembled from various modes of identity and completed with a range of prosthetic devices, has been a staple component of Western modernity.

The current sense of the fragmented body as new and different is not simply mistaken, however, but a response to the collapse of the nineteenth-century discourse of the ideal body in representation. In his emerging trilogy Black Athena, the Classical scholar Martin Bernal has painted a very different history of the reception of Antiquity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to that which is usually presented by art historians. Strongly influenced by the work of the African historian Cheik Anta Diop, Bernal argues that the ancient Greeks themselves believed that the most significant portions of their culture were derived from Egypt and the Near East.

First, he describes the creation of what he terms the Aryan model of Greek history in late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Europe. Until this time, historians had accepted the version of Greek history given by Herodotus in the sixth century BC —referred to as the Ancient Model by Bernal—which held that Greece owed much of its culture and civilization to ancient Egypt and Phoenicia.

But in the modern period, the Ancient Model was replaced with the thesis that a Dark Age intervened in Greece between the Mycenean civilization, which flourished on Crete in the third millenium BC, and the Classical civilization of Greece from BC. This Dark Age was ended, according to what Bernal calls the Aryan Model, by the arrival of white peoples from the North, known as the Dorians, who colonized Greece, introducing Indo-European language and the other qualities necessary for the flowering of Greek culture.

This version denied any Egyptian or Phoenician influence whatsoever on the Greeks, and thus overthrew the received wisdom of two thousand years. Bernal departs from the now traditional reading of the history of Classical scholarship by seeking motivations other than the pursuit of disinterested knowledge behind this change.

He amasses a convincing array of evidence to suggest that the development of race science in nineteenth-century Europe, which held whites to be superior and blacks to be inferior, made it impossible to conceive of the glory that was Greece being derived from the ideas of black Africans and semitic Phoenicians. Using his formidable linguistic skills, Bernal claims to have traced large numbers of Egyptian and Phoenician words in the ancient Greek vocabulary, which had previously resisted the efforts of etymologists.

Furthermore, in a recently published second volume, Bernal deploys a range of archaeological evidence in claiming that Greece was colonized by Egyptians and Phoenicians in the late eighteenth century BC and that there was no Dark Age Bernal Thus ancient Greek culture and civilization developed from the culture of Egypt and Phoenicia brought by the successful colonizers.

Bernal and his supporters reply that what is important is not so much the facts that these scholars emphasized, but those they distorted or suppressed. Nor is this a simple question of Classical historiography. As Bernal writes, if he is right it will be necessary to recognize the penetration of racism and continental chauvinism into all our historiography, or philosophy of writing history.

It was overthrown for external reasons. For 18th and 19th-century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood, to have been the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites. Therefore the Ancient Model had to be overthrown and replaced by something more acceptable.

If Greek art has achieved the prominence it enjoys in Western culture not because of its inherent merit, or embodiment of the spirit of democracy, but as an illustration of race science, then it is obviously invalidated as a universal measure of quality. Both the work itself and its reception will need to be looked at again. Winckelmann believed that Greek art, inspired by the love of liberty and dedicated to the pursuit of the beautiful, could not have any connection with the Egyptians, whose art he found repulsive: How can one find even a hint of beauty in their figures, when all or almost allof the originals on which they were based had the form of the African?

That isthey had, like them, pouting lips, receding and small chins, sunken andflattened profiles. And not only like the Africans but also like the Ethiopians,they often had flattened noses and a dark cast of skin. In his History of Jamaica, written to justify the practice of colonial slavery, Edward Long made an explicit parallel between eighteenth-century enslaved Africans and the ancient Egyptians, who were: II The inadequacies of the Egyptians explained and justified the bondage of slavery.

Perry accepted a similarity between Egyptian sculpture and early Greek work, but was dismissive of any possibility that Greek art was derived from Egypt: There is no future in the Egyptian statue; the artisan who produced it is not working by his own lights, and striving to do his very best in his own way, but the skilful bondman working in fetters for a task-master, and producing eternal repetitions of an unchanging type—the lifeless monsters of hieractic prescription.

During the earlier part of their history, both Greeks andRomans looked with mingled contempt and dread on the gloomy superstitions of Egypt and Assyria, as only fitted for barbarians and slaves. Far from being divorced from the particular predilections of its day, Classical art had scientific status as evidence of white superiority. Of course, such readings are not the fault of the works themselves, but it makes any revival of such criticism unpalatable, to say the least. Today this question is more likely to be posed in psychological fashion, as to what psychic or primal need is requited by art, than by historical inquiry, but in the Enlightenment an entirely serious debate was held as to the historical origin of painting and sculpture.

By the end of the eighteenth century the legend of Dibutade, or the Corinthian Maid, had become accepted as the most convincing response to this question. By placing the origin of art in ancient Greece, the new discipline of art history downgraded all earlier art, especially Egyptian art. In tracking the rise of Dibutade, we can thus observe the change in Classical history described by Bernal. This confluence of modernism and race was not a coincidence but a constituent part of the uneasy relationship between the perfect and fragmented body in the modern period, which could not be Universal but was both historically and culturally situated.

Furthermore, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida has recently made use of the legend of the Corinthian Maid to examine the relationship between blindness, insight and visual representations of the body. Blindness, Derrida argues, is not a metaphor but is actually inherent in the process of representation as mythically enshrined by the Corinthian Maid. In what follows, I examine the central paradox of blindness and insight to illuminate the impossibility of creating an image of the perfect body. The seemingly neutral physiological condition of blindness became gendered in the nineteenth century so as to contrast masculine insight with feminine blindness.

In order to understand the power of the relationship between blindness and insight, it is essential to understand how both sighted and blind people have represented the condition in medical, psychical and intellectual terms. Modern figure drawing in its broadest sense cannot be abstracted from the complex and fissured processes by which modern individuals vest their individual corporal experience with meanings and identity. Her father filled in the outline with clay and made a model; this he dried and baked with the rest of his pottery.

Seeking to prove his story, Pliny also claimed that the figure was preserved at Corinth for many years. At this time, the anonymous translator did not even perceive the story as referring to Dibutade. Bell made no mention of the Dibutade story, and described the history of Egyptian art at considerable length. He was respectful towards the Greeks, but not overly so. He recorded that the famous painter Apelles, who was believed to have painted Alexander the Great, used only white, yellow, red and black paint.

But he questioned how he could have been truly the greatest artist without blue, which would have prevented him from depicting the sky and sea, as well as denying him the use of all colours created by blending with blue Bell When Joshua Reynolds came to give his famous lectures at the newly founded Royal Academy in London from , he also made no reference to the myth of Dibutade. He did make a series of distinctions as to the nature of art, which opened a wide gap between the civilized West and its Others. In describing the task of painting, he opined in Perhaps it ought to be as far removed from the vulgar idea of imitation, as the refined civilised state in which we live, is removed from a gross state of nature; and those who have not cultivated their imaginations, which the majority of mankind certainly have not, may be said, in regard to arts, to continue in this state of nature.

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Such men will always prefer imitation to that excellence which is addressed to another faculty that they do not possess; but these are not the persons to whom a Painter is to look, any more than a judge of morals and manners ought to refer to controverted points upon those subjects to the opinions of people taken from the banks of the Ohio, or from New Holland. Reynolds dressed Omai in elegant Classical robes and painted him full-length, the highest quality of portraiture. Difference in the modern era does not just exist, it has to be visible. By , Henry Fuseli could say in the Royal Academy, where Reynolds had ignored the entire story only thirty years before, that: If ever legend deserved our belief, the amourous tale of the Corinthian maid, who traced the shade of her departing lover by the secret lamp deserves our sympathy, to grant it; and leads us at the same time to some observations on the first mechanical essays of painting, and that linear method which, though passed nearly unnoticed by Winckelmann, seems to have continued as the basis of execution, even when the instrument for which it was chiefly adapted had long been laid aside.

Dibutade retained a prominent place in academic discourse throughout the nineteenth century, remaining a subject for painters until the difference and superiority of the Greeks was plain to all. In , Shelley exclaimed: We are all Greeks.

But for Greece we might still have been savages and idolators. The human form and the human mind attained to a perfection in Greece which has impressed its images on those faultless productions whose very fragments are the despair of modern art, and has propagated impulses which can never cease, through a thousand channels of manifest or imperceptible operation, to enable and delight mankind until the extinction of the race. The surviving fragments contributed to a myth of the previous, perfect whole to which Western art must again aspire. The Dibutade story played its part in constructing a Neo- Classical theory of art which was Western, the work of genius not merely imitation, and based upon the depiction of the perfect, Greek body.

In an exhibition he curated at the Louvre in , the philosopher Jacques Derrida, best known for his concept of deconstruction, turned his attention to the question of blindness in art. In so doing, he considered the representations of Dibutade and made an important observation.

In many of the images of Dibutade, she is in fact not looking at her lover at all but only at his shadow, rather than copying directly from nature as the NeoClassical theorists asserted. He is absolutely indifferent to her activity and looks directly out of the frame at the viewer. The question of who looks at whom, and who is seen by whom is thus central to this picture. Given the mythological importance of the subject, Derrida argues that this shadow-writing in each case inaugurates an art of blindness.

From the outset, perception belongs to recollection, Butades writes, and thus already loves in nostalgia. In other words, Derrida continues, there is a relationship between the visible and the invisible that is always threatening to break down. This argument is indebted to the earlier work of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, quoted here by Derrida: So too, insists Derrida, is a blind-Spot essential to visual representation, not as its opposite, but as an integral and constitutive feature of representation as a process of memory. As long as Dibutade has her lover with her, she has no need to draw him.

As long as she looks directly at him, she cannot draw him, for she cannot see the outline to trace. But the cavedwellers neither can nor wish to leave. In the full light, they can see nothing at all. The staring eye always resembles an eye of the blind, sometimes the eye of the dead, at that precise moment when mourning begins…. Looking at itself seeing, it also sees itself disappear right at the moment when the drawing desparately tries to recapture it. For this cyclops eye sees nothing, nothing but an eye that it thus prevents from seeing anything at all.

Seeing the seeing and not the visible, it sees nothing. Here it now seems to suggest that visual representation is the outcome of an interplay between the metaphor of insight and the physiological structures of sight. Given the force attached by Merleau-Ponty and Derrida to the physiology of seeing, I shall consider blindness not just as a metaphor but as a condition.

For Derrida himself stands within a historical construction of blindness as insight, which is not natural but is less than two hundred years old. How did depictions of blindness change in accord with changing notions of sight and blindness? In what ways is the metaphor of blindness affected by these changes? And what becomes of the Classical body that is known not through insight metaphorized as blindness but through insight enabled by blindness?

For art history, this period marks the foundation of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture and the beginnings of public debate over the nature and accomplishments of art. One central moment in this history came in when Louis ordered that the Academy should hold conferences on works of art for the edification of an audience composed of their peers, students and, occasionally, government ministers.

Bourdon elaborated upon the advantages of such morning light, which later became so conventional that only the angled fall of light from the left was retained.

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For though all the Parts retain their true Teints, yet the Shade which passes above them, is as it were a Veil to extinguish their Vivacity, and hinder their having so much strength as to fill the View, and thrust out other Objects more considerable, and on which the Painter has laid greater Stress. But in return, he has not failed to fill those Places with Light where he saw it would not hurt the beauty of the Figures.

Bourdon replied that We cannot suppose that all the Multitude who followed Christ could be about him at once, and being some steps from him, they were concealed by the Buildings. That there are Witnesses enough of the Action, since by that person cloathed in Red, who appears surprised, the Painter has representedthe Astonishment of the Jews; and by him who is looking very near, he shewsthe desire that Nation had to see Miracles wrought. A greater Number of Figures would only have occasioned Confusion, and hindered those of Christand the blind Men from being seen so distinctly.

Just as the king could heal by his touch, one might argue, so could artists bring vision into being by their brushstrokes. In this view, the royal artists of the Academy could then claim connection to the sacred person of the king and imbibe something of his divine essence from his aura. Bourdon, however, also insisted on a literal interpretation of blindness: By the Action of the first blind Man, his Faith and Confidence in him who istouching him is expressed; in the second, the Favour he is asking is likewiseshown.

It is common for Persons who are deprived of any one of the fiveSenses to have the rest better and more subtle; because the Spirits whichmove in them, to make them known what they want, move with greater forcehaving fewer Offices to perform; thus they who have lost their Sight, have amore acute Hearing, and a more sensible Touch.

For by his Face and his Arms one may know he is all Attention tothe Voice of the Saviour, and endeavouring to find him out. This attentiveHearkening appears in his Forehead, which is not quite smooth; the Skin and all the other Parts of which are drawn up. He likewise discovers it, bysuspending all the Motions of his Countenance, which continue in thatPosture to give time to his Ear to listen more attentively, and that he maynot be diverted. He envisaged blindness as a means of intensifying the tactile and auditory response to the painting, rather than as a signifier of incapacity.

For just as there is a moment of blindness inherent in the act of visual representation, the resulting image was inevitably silent. Throughout the ancien regime, artists turned to the gestural sign language of the deaf as a means of overcoming this deficiency for, as the French writer du Fresnoy put it: For in the early modern period, the simple binary opposition between the able-bodied and the disabled did not exist.

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Instead, the human body was perceived as inevitably imperfect, each person having certain skills that others might not possess. Even Louis XIV had regular bleedings and purgatives before any unusual or tiring activity to purify his body. If the sacred body of the Sun King could be considered imperfect, then his subjects were even more vulnerable. The artists of the period were quick to figure blindness and deafness as complex metaphors in their work, in ways which have been insufficiently recognized.

In the eighteenth century, the sensualist philosophy of the Enlightenment continued this relativist concept of the body, but gave it a moral connotation. Sensualism held that the mind was formed directly from sensory experience and that those with differing senses had different minds. In his Letter on the Blind, the philosopher and critic Denis Diderot — reflected at length on the distinctions between the blind and the sighted, pursuing his conviction that: He first mused on the morality of the blind, which he found wanting: I suspect them of inhumanity.

What difference would there be for a blind manbetween a man who urinates and a man who, without complaining, wasspilling blood? Madame, how different themorality of the blind is from our own. How that of a deaf man would differagain from that of the blind, and how a being which had one sense more thanus would find our morality imperfect, to say the least. Indeed, he went on to reflect on ways in which the lack of sight could even be an advantage.

He argued that the blind have a tactile memory in the same way that the sighted have a visual memory. The sensation of a mouth on the hand of a blind man and the drawing of it amounted to the same thing, as both were secondary representations of the original. But the blind person had an advantage when it came to abstract thought: Those who have written about his life say that he was prolific in fortunateexpressions…But what do you mean by fortunate expressions, you mayperhaps ask? I would reply, Madame, that they are those which are proper toa sense, to touch for example, and which are metaphorical at the same time toanother sense, like sight; there was thus a double light for those who spoke tohim, the true and direct light of the expression, and the reflected light of themetaphor.

Discussing the actress Mlle Clairon, he observed: If you were with her while she studied her part, how many times would you cry out: The true blindness was not that of the visually impaired but of those who believed they could see like the artist but could not. In the process, actors step outside their characters: For actors to accurately represent the widest range of emotions, it was essential that they themselves have no emotions. Actors constantly observed their work in order to make it appear natural and unforced. For this reason, the British artist John Opie — refused to paint actors at all.

Acting was to be no one in order to be everyone, just as it is the blind spot which permits seeing. Belisarius was a Roman general who, after many successes, lost the confidence of the Emperor Justinian and was blinded by him. David — showed the now blind general begging for alms, at a moment when he is recognized by one of his former soldiers. Fried in effect proposes that the picture itself postulates a certain blindness in that it is constructed without the needs of a spectator in mind.

Fried discerns a central distinction between such absorption, which is praised, and vulgar theatricality, which is to be condemned. He argues that David constructed an image which refused theatricality, and instead opted to create a pictorial space in which the characters are wholly absorbed and unaware of the possibility of spectatorship. Such analyses run counter to the notion of the paradox, developed above, and indeed Fried noted that the late publication of the Paradox renders it less relevant for eighteenth-century art history.

However, this argument cannot apply to the central example of the Belisarius, which was exhibited in the Salon of If, when one makes a painting, one supposes beholders, everything is lost.

The painter leaves his canvas, just as the actor who speaks to the audience [parterre] steps down from the stage. Diderot was not afraid that the actor might communicate with the audience in general but that he might speak to the parterre, the popular audience standing in front of the stage. In itself, it requires a beholder, for only a spectator of the image would be in a position to read it. Furthermore, only an outside beholder would need such an inscription for all the figures painted by David are only too aware of the identity of the general.

It would be stretching credulity to suggest that the wandering, blind general carved the sign himself to attract alms. The inscription is an interpellation by David which addresses the outside spectator and calls attention to the political message of the painting. In English political satire, Belisarius had been a symbol of government ingratitude and incompetence since , when a pamphlet compared the then disgraced Duke of Marlborough to the Roman general.

The Political Register was well known in Paris and ties between British and French radicals were sufficiently close in the period for Jean-Paul Marat, the future revolutionary leader, to campaign in Newcastle and publish his first book—The Chains of Slavery —in English translation. Her presence allows the soldier to drop back and recognize his former leader from a safe distance, but more importantly it gives a gendered dynamic to the painting.

The paradox of the Belisarius is precisely this opposition of gender roles. They are miles beyond us in sensibility; there is no sort of comparison between their passion and ours. The unknown woman who acts out of pity for the fallen general is the counterpoint to the masculine sensibility of the soldier. It is what gives a work its force and enthusiasm. But that moment must be contained and controlled in conscious reflection, the masculine quality which women are held to lack.

This paradox is contained in the epigram Diderot wrote for the Belisarius: Only the spectator outside, whether it was the artist observing himself, the Salon spectator or the critic, could fully appreciate and meditate upon these different reactions and insights. Blindness in ancien regime art, then, called attention to the relativism and vulnerability of human sensory perception, and the paradoxical nature of artistic creation. The blind were not used as metaphors beyond the specific limitations of their condition, but constituted an important point of reference for sensualist philosophy, as it strove to understand understanding itself.

However, not long after these words were written, philosophy took a turn away from sensualism to the more abstracted pursuit of epistemology, and medicine became inseparable from morality. In the second half of the eighteenth century, medical science began to rely on a distinction between the normal states of the body and its pathology, that is, its diseases and abnormalities. Disease, abnormality and immorality became linked in a powerful trinity which is still in force today. Georges Canguilhem has analyzed the spread of a distinction between the normal and the pathological from the first appearance of the terms in the mid-eighteenth century to their widespread acceptance in the nineteenth century: Blindness was at once categorized as a pathological state of the body, in distinction to the normal condition of sight.

During the French Revolution the state appropriated the wealth of the Quinze-Vingts, the charitable hospital for the blind in Paris, due to the tradition that patients said prayers for the Church and the King. Moreover, those blind persons who had formerly been in the nobility or clergy received a higher pension than others and there were suspicions of immoral conduct in the hospital.

In place of royal charity, the Revolution hoped to construct a national, moral and egalitarian system of assistance for the blind, which did not entail any change in the medical care of the blind. Although there was a seemingly absolute distinction between the pathological blind and the normal sighted, it was soon blurred by further classification among the ranks of the pathological.

As the nineteenth century progessed, it became clear that, despite the physical limitations of blindness, it was regarded as less morally debilitating than other sensory loss. In particular, the blind came to be seen as superior to the deaf—in the minds of the hearing and seeing—and to be endowed with special moral qualities. The blind and deaf pupils of the state were initially housed together during the French Revolution, until political discord among their educators forced a separation in At this time, both the deaf and the blind were seen as pre-civilized beings who required the assistance of the state to render them human.

In a pamphlet published in , Perier, a deputy administrator at the Institute for the Deaf, adamantly insisted on the need for such an institution: The language used to describe the deaf was also applied to the blind, as here by one administrator of the blind school in The moral world does not exist for this child of nature; most of our ideas are without reality for him: As discussions of the old chestnut regarding the preferability of blindness or deafness continued, the issue was decisively resolved by those who could see and hear in favour of blindness.

When the blind read Braille, they converted the dots into the pure medium of sound, which more than compensated for its non-alphabetic character, whereas the deaf used sign language, and thought without sound. Thomas Arnold — , who founded a small school for the deaf in Northampton in , believed that the blind: In , Braille was considered arbitrary and deaf sign language had won a certain acceptance, but by it was Braille that had become acceptable and the deaf were considered pre-civilized. Nothing essential had changed in the nature of sign language and Braille in the intervening fifty years.

By way of contrast, French officials considered that deafness rendered even the sense of sight pathological: Medico-psychology thus considered the loss of sight to be far less grievous a blow than deafness. The rise of this perceived morality of blindness from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century can also be traced in the cultural representation of blindness. Insight could only be gained because the critics were in the grip of this peculiar blindness: The insight exists only for a reader in the privileged position of being able to observe the blindness as a phenomenon in its own right— the question of his own blindness being one which he is by definition incompetent to ask—and so being able to distinguish between statement and meaning.

In the pursuit of clarity, insight and self-expression, successive modernist artists have deployed blindness as a key figure for their work. De Man does not, however, clarify that this relationship of blindness and insight is both historically specific—as opposed to a universal truth about criticism—and gendered. In both Romantic and Neo-Classical painting, blindness was used as a figure for insight and morality. Ingres created a series of painted manifestos, setting out the influences and beliefs of a Neo-Classicism which sought to reclaim the French Classical tradition, stemming from Poussin, while bypassing the images of the French Revolution.

As a leading student of David, Ingres was well placed to carry out this artistic revision of history painting, in accord with the wider rewriting of history during the Restoration — This painting, installed in the Louvre in , literally put the lid on what can be called the French cultural revolution Bianchi It is a history painting, the most important genre of painting in the period, which became the precondition of all French history painting, depicting the appropriate sources and inspirations for this art. At the centre of the painting is the figure of Homer being crowned by the Muses, surrounded by those who have followed in his wake.

Ingres depicted an artistic lineage which passed from the ancient Greek artists Apelles and Zeuxis, via the Renaissance masters Raphael and Poussin, ending by inference with Ingres himself. At the heart of this artistic pedigree sits the blind poet Homer, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Blindness was thus for Ingres quite literally the origin of representation.

His blindness, symbolized by his closed eyes, is metaphorical and suggests instead that, in order to achieve the degree of insight attained by Homer, some sacrifice is necessary. Despite his success, Ingres believed that he too had suffered in his artistic career. His Jupiter and Thetis had been a dramatic failure at the Salon of and after his Saint Symphorien suffered a similar fate in , Ingres refused to show his work at the Salon. It is hard not to take the metaphor of blindness a little farther. Ingres was haunted by the symbolism of blindness. His successful response ensured that the second part of his oracle would be enacted, for having already unwittingly killed his father, Oedipus was now to marry his mother.

Oedipus is finally the agent of his own destruction, when he seeks to uncover the causes of a plague and discovers the truth of his own actions. By way of self-punishment, Oedipus blinds himself. The Freudian overtones of this story are only too apparent. It is in fact arguable that without the nineteenth century construct of blindness as moral sacrifice, Freud would not have been able to use the Oedipus myth as he did. The meanings conveyed by blindness as metaphor were, however, complex and irreducible to a single message.

His Homer is a homosocial world in which women appear only in non-human form as Muses. The transmission and reproduction of cultural value was envisaged as a purely masculine affair, eliminating the fear of castration and the blind ed gaze. History and genre painting had sought to construct an authoritative father figure in a society widely believed to be unusually susceptible to feminine influence.

Rather than return to this charged political controversy, Ingres elided it by creating an idea of culture as the exclusive province of the white male. From its foundation in , the French Academy of Painting had permitted women to become members in theory, although few in practice were able to gain the necessary training. But in , it was felt to be necessary to limit the number of potential women members to four. The reformed nineteenth-century Academy excluded women altogether.

For the Romantics, the blind poet Milton occupied the same position of authority as Homer for the Neo-Classicists. Delacroix represented the scene in quieter but altogether more effective fashion. Just as David used the woman giving alms to give meaning to his Belisarius, so did Delacroix highlight the contrast between the active women and their passive father. Milton retains his patriarchal authority, despite having suffered the loss of his sight, and his potency is doubly attested to by the presence of his daughters. While the Neo-Classical Ingres saw blindness as both the origin and the potential annihilation of representation, the modern Romantics bestowed creativity on the individual male and were unconcerned to construct secure artistic genealogies.

Indeed the Oedipal gesture of revolt became de rigueur for any aspiring young artist. The photograph has long been hailed as a modernist masterpiece: The portrait conveys qualities: Although he excluded bystanders from the picture, Strand included everyone who sees it. This extraordinary device gives the photograph its particular edge, adding new meaning to a simple portrait. The weapon of blindness belonged not to the blind woman but to the photographer. It was no coincidence that Strand photographed a blind woman. In so doing, he collapsed the moral exchange created by David and Delacroix between the blind man and the sighted woman into one figure.

In his quest to deny the woman any specificity, Strand erased her name and any details about her in order to make blindness a more effective symbol. If blindness is to be fully effective as a moral lesson, it cannot be dogged by such trivial details. None the less, the history of the blind, as opposed to the abstract idea of blindness, is present in this photograph. As a meditation on representation, the photograph takes blindness to be the origin of representation, but denies the woman any participation in this process, except as its object.

This interpretation of the role of blindness in representation received ironic confirmation when the American Minimalist artist Robert Morris b. Now, seeking to move on from his site-specific earth pieces of the early s, Morris undertook a series of works in which he was unable to see. He assigned himself a specific task and a length of time in which to complete it, drawing on paper with his fingers.

By so doing, Morris sought to disrupt the modernist obsession with sight and its representation, as Maurice Berger has noted: By undoing the compositional claims of the artist over his work, the Blind Time series distanced the artist from the modernist conceits of ego and temperament. The woman, known only as A. The experience was not a success. Here, for example, Morris commented: She had no idea of illusionistic drawing. I described perspective to her and she thought that was absolutely ridiculous, that things got smaller in the distance.

She had no conception of that. She kept asking me about criteria, got very involved in what is the right kind of criteria for a thing. And there was no way that she could find any and finally that sort of conflict became very dramatic. And at the same time she was aghast that she was not able to. Whereas Paul Strand had used blindness as a weapon, Morris went one further and used the blind woman as a form of tool. He denied her the chance to formulate her own concepts of art practice and refused to let her establish any rules in her work. The artist must search for his alphabet in the visible world, which supplies him with conventional signs…; but if the idea of the beautiful pre-exists within us, would it pre-exist in a man born blind, for example?

What image of the beautiful in art could a pensioner of the Quinze Vingts make for himself? Sight was essential not just for art, as might seem obvious, but for the very notions of art and beauty. The very initials A. Morris withdrew all 52 works created in the Blind Time II series from circulation. When he resumed Blind Time in , Morris undertook the works himself.

In this version of the project, he added philosophical commentaries on the images produced and the ideas that lay behind them. For example, in one piece, Morris set about constructing a grid in a sevenminute experiment. As Rosalind Krauss has argued, the grid has been one of the defining motifs of modernism and Morris attached considerable weight to the procedure in his inscription: Although Blind Time III makes considerable reference to contemporary physics, citing such figures as Einstein, Bohr and Feynman, this passage seems closer to Marcel Proust and his search for lost time.

These literary and philosophical comments could hardly be further removed from the excerpts of conversation between the artist and A. While this exclusion might seem natural, it did not seem so to early modern blind sculptors or indeed to A. Within this metaphor-ical framework, blindness-as-lack-of- sight affects only women, whereas blindness-as-insight is a peculiarly male phenomenon. But the nexus of race, gender and disability created by the triumph of the Dibutade myth of the origin of painting in the mideighteenth century forms a crucial point of investigation for the modern representation of the body, which was caught between two difficult alternatives.

The Dibutade myth was itself determined by a wider revision of European intellectual history which excluded African and Semitic influences in favour of a pure Aryan model of ancient Greek history. However, the alternative modernist reading of the body, which privileges the fragmentary and dispersed body and argues that culture oscillates between the poles of blindness and insight, is constructed around a notion of originary gender difference.

Both readings of the body thus depend upon essential differences of race or gender, which are both necessarily exclusive and ahistorical. It would be equally disingenuous simply to call for an end to the metaphorization of the body, still more so for an end to the representation of the body—even a Minimalist sculpture can be read as a denial of the body. For it is not enough to reveal yet again that cultural products are social constructions, as Michael Taussig has recently argued: If life is constructed, how come it appears so immutable? How come culture appears so natural?

However, this constructed understanding of the modern body does not make it any less real, nor does it allow the modern subject to bypass the limits of body in a quest for identity. The body cannot be known or understood without visual representation, yet both the body itself and its image seem inevitably flawed.

An indication of this problem is that there is no way to describe the body as imperfect disabled, incomplete, virtual, etc. In order to extend our understanding, it is therefore necessary to examine the persistence and cultural function of notions of the perfect body, the task of the next two chapters.

Woodward, , dedicated to General Webb, reprinted in Many thanks to Kathleen Wilson for these references. Focusing on the transition between the personalized body politic of the monarchy and the allegorical figure of the Republic proposed by the Revolution, I shall explore the vicissitudes of the body politic in this crucial formative period.

The abolition of the monarchy in inevitably entailed a transformation in the representation of the state, which was now depicted by an allegorical figure. This figure was sometimes male and sometimes female, as recent studies have shown Hunt ; Agulhon However, it has also been argued that the gender and sexuality of these allegorical figures is beside the point and that they are simply to be considered as neutral, non-sexualized representations of the state.

In fact, the body politic during and after the Revolution invoked sexual reproduction as the key to its signification in the new era. Radical forces in the French Revolution believed that the regeneration of the body politic had to be accompanied by a regeneration of the individual body. Central to this dissemination of meaning was the incorporation of the audience in radical constructions of the state as participants in the body politic, rather than as passive spectators. Throughout the modern era, state monuments have required only the passivity of fetishism, whereas radical notions of participatory democracy have demanded engagement.

Just as the French Revolution found it difficult to detach the new notion of the body politic from the individual body of the king, which returned when Napoleon declared himself emperor in , so later reformers have found this gendered construction hard to escape. The monarchies and prin-cedoms of the period none the less relied upon a stable continuity of powerful and imposing individuals to sustain the autocratic political struc-tures of feudalism.

In order to compensate for the weaknesses of indivi-dual kings, political theorists developed the notion that the king had two bodies. The other was a mystical notion of the king who never dies, held to be eternal and beyond the reach of mortal weakness and failings. This quasi-divine Body politic was symbolized by the ritual anointing of the monarch during the coronation ceremony, which separated the king from all other lay persons.

Alone of all people, the king wielded divine and secular power in his own right. He demonstrated that the thesis outlived even the absolute monarchies and was used as late as in English law Kantorowicz The principle upon which the Victor-ians acted was identical to that proposed in the sixteenth century: The King has in him two Bodies, viz. His Body natural if it be considered in itself is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility of Infancy or old Age, and to the like Defects that happen to the natural Bodies of other People. But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People and the Management of the public weal, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to, and for this Cause, what the King does in his Body politic, cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body.

During the English Revolution —9 , the rebel Parliamentarians were thus able to claim that they were loyal to the Body politic of the king, rebelling only against the natural body of Charles I. In its denial of the natural body, the Body politic became entirely dependent upon visual representation. Central to the question of the body politic is the justification and rationalization of violence. On a scaffold…the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds.

The body of the king was damaged by the crime, which entailed that the body of the criminal must both confess and be punished for the offence in order to restore the Body politic to perfection. The standard example of the sublime was a shipwreck, which would be terrifying to experience, but could make a pleasurable subject in representation. A more sophisticated example is offered by the exercise of state power derived from the body of the king, The violence of war or royal authority was the most sublime exercise of power in practice and thus amongst the most aesthetically pleasing in representation.

The anthropologist Michael Taussig has argued that modern societies are still organized around the fetishism of the state: If the state is figured organically, its corporal representation is central to maintaining the central illusion of modern state fetishism, that the state is a really existing and palpable body. In the transformation of the body politic from the absolute king to the nation state, the question of violence has become reversed.

He was punished for that act and not for being a French citizen of a certain age at a time when the state perceived itself to be threatened. Later generations of conscripts did not have that luxury but, despite certain moments of resistance, they have on the whole consented to being placed in danger.

The new visual embodiments of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century state need to be considered in the light of this shift in emphasis. Secondly, Anderson indicates that state violence was closely connected to the ideal of fraternity, that elusive third leg of the French Revolutionary tripod. Just as fraternity gendered equality as masculine, so did war and the identity of the state become masculine, despite the obvious involvement of women in both ventures. How, then, does the representation of the state address all its citizens?

There then followed five years of civil war, known as the Fronde, during which Louis was forced to abandon Paris, and the traditional monarchical system was almost overthrown. Louis never forgot this experience and, as soon as he became king in his own right in , he set about eradicating any possibility that such a revolt could ever occur again. Louis was still preoccupied with the issue in and compelled the city of Paris to apologize formally for its errors during the Fronde.

Louis curtailed the powers of the nobility by diverting their attention from military conflict to the power struggles at his new court of Versailles. Courtiers competed against each other for precedence in twin pyramids of ascendancy, one noble and one bourgeois. They were as concerned to prevent the success of one of their rivals as to promote their own cause and Versailles thus served not only to domesticate the French elite, but to control them.

By , one Jurieu complained that: The King has taken the place of the State, the King is everything, the State is no longer anything. He is an idol to which are sacrificed the provinces, the towns, finance, the great, the small, everything!

French novelists

These representations were not hollow images of the king, but in certain important senses they were the king. Unlike his natural body, the portrait of the king never slept, fell ill, or aged. The representation of the king was coextensive with his natural body, according to the savant Lazare Meysonnier: To damage or assault a representation of the king was to attack the Body politic itself, the most essential element of the absolutist monarchy.

While this was true for any king: Louis himself recognized the newly dual nature of state power. For the portrait of the king was not a representation of Louis de Bourbon, fourteenth king of that name, but the depiction of the Body politic which never died. It was therefore appropriate for Louis to hail and name the portrait as such. In —6 alone, close to twenty major statues of the king were erected in public squares around France.

These statues were as close to the king as most French people were likely to get, and each statue was inaugurated with pomp and circumstance. In the Place des Victoires in Paris, a 13 foot-high statue of Louis by Martin Desjardins was erected, showing the king in a contraposto stance, wearing his coronation robes, When it was unveiled, the celebrations included speeches, parades, fireworks and music Burke The statue was so vast that twenty men had lunch inside it while it was being installed Burke Complementing the majestic scope of the work, Girardon had depicted Louis as a Roman emperor, deriving his composition from the equestrian statue of the Emperor Augustus.

What Charles Perrault declaimed in the elegant language of the Academy, Girardon made available for all to see. The Paris municipality reinforced the lesson of this sermon in stone with a grand opening ceremony, including traditional representations of the king such as Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Clovis and Charlemagne, as well as legendary heroes such as Jason, Hercules and Theseus, and finally the popular French king Henri IV.

The message was clear: Louis XIV represented in his one person the greatest of the French monarchy and Classical antiquity, together with the strength and capacity of the demi-gods of legend. This was not a straightforward, binary opposition but was only made possible by the intercession of the sign, that is to say, the physical object of the painting or sculpture.

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Only the visual sign enabled the transition between imperfect natural body and perfect Body politic. While the Body politic formed a distinct and palpable entity, it was not an individual body, but an entity whose superiority was derived precisely from its capacity for multiple and unending representation. It was partly in response to this changed public mood that art critics in the latter half of the eighteenth century began to demand that artists should concentrate on renewing the preeminence of history painting for, as one critic put it in This public and moralistic agenda for art was envisaged as a return to the ideals of Classical antiquity and has hence become known as Neo- Classicism.

The Neo-Classical body, far from being a monolithic individual, was imagined as being capable of radical change, being substituted for other bodies, and as being able to represent many bodies. In his novel Justine, M. If you only knew the charm of this fantasy, if you could only understand what one feels in the pleasant illusion of becoming nothing but a woman!

What an incredible sensation! One abhors the sex, and yet one wants to imitate it! We would like to fuse into a single being. In the period, as Lynn Hunt has argued:

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