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French Aesthetics: Contemporary Painting Theory, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

One peculiar feature of the Anglo-American reception of French thought since about 1970 is the view that the variety of thinkers and tendencies involved reduces everything to language. One crucial place to test such a reading is with regard to a set of texts devoted to painting and the visual arts, for the latter would seem to be situated at or beyond the boundaries of language, a place that Julia Kristeva calls the semiotic. The alleged reductionism of the French is usually construed as the claim that language is a seamless whole in which all meanings are defined in terms …