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Just Looking/Looking Just: The Eye's Reign
"[I]t associates scopic attention with respect, with deference, with the attention of a gaze or look that also knows how to look after, with the contemplative gathering of a memory that conserves or keeps in reserve."- Jacques Derrida
"He who sees little, always sees less; he who hears poorly, always hears something more."- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Song writers say that pleasure restores the soul and softens the heart. For me that evening, the song was right. Not only was I softened by that family of eyes, but I felt a bit ashamed of our glasses and carafes, bigger than our thirst. I turned my face to yours, sweetheart, to read my thoughts in them; I plunged into your eyes, so beautiful, so strangely soft, your green eyes, inhabited by Caprice and prompted by the Moon, as you told me: 'I cannot stand those people with their eyes open wide as a porte cochere. Please ask the manager to get them out of here!"- Charles Baudelaire
"I might have basked in the sunbeam of all your eyes."- Henry Fuseli
"The supersession of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it is this emancipation because these senses and attributes have become human, subjectively as well as objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object, made by man for man. The senses have therefore become theoreticians in their immediate praxis. They relate to the thing for its own sake, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice-versa. Need or enjoyment have therefore lost their egoist nature, and nature has lost its mere utility in the sense that its use has become human use."- Karl Marx
"Those who have been duped by the culture industry and are eager for its commodities were never familiar with art: they are therefore able to perceive art's inadequacy to the present life process on society- though not society's own untruth- more unobstructedly than do those who still remember what an artwork once was."- Theodor Adorno
"Seeing implies distance, the decision that causes separation, the power not to be in contact and to avoid the confusion of contact. Seeing means that this separation has nevertheless become an encounter. But what happens when what you see, even though from a distance, seems to touch you with a grasping contact, when the manner of seeing is a sort of touch, when seeing is a contact at a distance? What happens when what is seen imposes itself on your gaze, as though the gaze had been seized, touched, put in contact with appearance? Not an active contact, not the initiative and action that might still remain in a true touch; rather, the gaze is drawn, absorbed into an immobile movement and a depth without depth. What is given to us by contact at a distance is the image, and fascination is passion for the image."- Maurice Blanchot
"The spectacle of the world, in this sense, appears to us as all-seeing. This is the phantasy to be found in the Platonic perspective of an absolute being to whom is transferred the quality of being all-seeing. At the very level of the phenomenal experience of contemplation, this all-seeing aspect is to be found in the satisfaction of a woman who knows that she is being looked at, on condition that one does not show her that one knows that she knows."- Jacques Lacan
"Within this logic, the predominance of the visual, and of the discrimination and individualization of form, is particularly foreign to female eroticism. Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking, and her entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity."- Luce Irigaray
"This remains of the point, even effaced, that it has given the optical form to experience. As soon as it admits the existence of the point, the mind is an eye (it become it in experience as it had become it in action)."- Georges Bataille
"The staring eye always resembles an eye of the blind, sometimes the eye of the dead, at that precise moment when mourning begins: it is still open, a pious hand should soon come to close it; it would recall a portrait of the dying."- Jacques Derrida
"Evil Eye.- The eye, be it strange, vague, or simply beautiful, has always been, and still is, among the civilised as among the primitives, the doorway for evil influences. Hypnotism is the culminating point of a phenomenon which has lesser degrees, such as the gaze of desire, the curious gaze, or simply the vague gaze that settles on nothing."- Marcel Griaule
"The mind gazes with a certain melancholy savor through the depth of years gone by, audaciously plunging into infinite horizons."- Charles Baudelaire
"And so, for Baudelaire, it is the order of memory that precipitates, beyond present perception, the absolute speed of the instant (the time of the clin d'œil that buries the gaze in the batting of an eyelid, the instant called the Augenblick, the wink or blink, and what drops out of sight in the twinkling of an eye), but also the 'synthesis,' the 'phantom,' the 'fear,' the fear of seeing and of not seeing what one must not see, hence the very thing that one must see, the fear of seeing without seeing the eclipse between the two, the 'unconscious execution,' and especially the figures that substitute one are for another, the analogical or economic (i.e., the familial) rhetoric of which we were just speaking- the trait-for-a-trait."- Jacques Derrida
"The inner eye transforms all it sees and complements each object, raising it to perfect beauty, so that is might truly be worthy of pleasing."- Charles Baudelaire
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