Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance.

Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty.

His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.

Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Force Fields (1992), Marxism and Totality (California, 1984), Adorno (1984), and The Dialectical Imagination (1973).

"A valuable book. . . . The most powerful effect of Jay's study is to convey how beliefs about the eye and 'the gaze' (as Sartre called the objectifying vision of strangers) found coherent views about human self-understanding and political analysis. . . . Jay's magisterial history is essential reading for any-one trying to bring the intellectual life of the 20th century into focus."—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Review

"Jay's exploration of twentieth-century French attitudes to the visual is an impressive and scrupulously documented work. . . . Many of Jay's sources are canonical texts, and th ese he works into a persuasive synthesis."—Edward Hughes, Times Literary Supplement

"Martin Jay's Downcast Eyes is surely destined to be one of the basic books in the new history of visuality. Offering a 'synoptic survey' of what he calls 'ocularcentric discourse' from the Greeks to the present day, and focusing with special care on the intricate elaboration of visual problematics in modern French philosophy, Downcast Eyes is the most comprehensive treatment of Western visuality now available. . . . An indispensable tool for students of the history or theory of visual culture."—W. J. T. Mitchell, Artforum

"The scholarship displayed in this book is dazzling. . . . [Its publication] is an extremely important intellectual event."—Rosalind Krauss, Founding Editor, October