There is much to recommend about Gary Shapiro’s latest book to readers of these reviews. It is well written, liberally illustrated, and thoroughly researched, and it clarifies insights that have not yet come to the attention of most authors. In short, this book is original and compelling, warranting the attention of those seeking a philosophical basis for their art-critical perspectives.

Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying is, above all, a philosophy book. It sets out to correct the professional myopia that regards Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault—and the whole field of aesthetics—as only marginally interesting for the history and discipline of philosophy. By taking Nietzsche and Foucault seriously, as he has in two books on the former and several essays on the latter, Shapiro once again seeks to rehabilitate figures routinely dismissed as outside the main interests of philosophers. For those already convinced of the importance of Nietzsche and Foucault, Shapiro draws attention to their underappreciated writings on aesthetics, specifically to the relation between seeing and saying in those writings that tracks the “positive unconscious” of vision in art from Hieronymus Bosch and Raphael to Édouard Manet and Andy Warhol. On these terms, Shapiro makes an important contribution to philosophy, skillfully analyzing notoriously difficult texts and drawing an especially nuanced survey of a generally overlooked aspect of them.

Archaeologies of Vision is also an art book and makes important contributions to the discipline of art history and criticism. In the course of his commentaries on Nietzsche and Foucault, Shapiro pays closer attention to the paintings, and to drawings, photographs and objects inspired by the history and art of painting, than philosophers typically do. The author’s main purpose may be to elucidate Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s interpretations of these works of art and to show how these interpretations figure in the wider perspectives of those two philosophers, but his attention to works of art and to major critical works by Giorgio Vasari, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Joachim Winkelmann, Erwin Panofsky, Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Hans Belting demonstrate that Shapiro is well grounded in both the art and the history of art that Nietzsche and Foucault interpret. Belting’s observations, for example, about how icons came to be regarded as artifacts and absorbed into art history figures prominently in Shapiro’s account of Nietzsche’s special appreciation of Raphael’s Transfiguration in the Dresden Gallery, as well as in the general archaeology of vision that is the subject of his book as a whole.

Shapiro draws his notion of archaeology from Foucault’s reflections in The Order of Things, This is Not a Pipe, and The Archaeology of Knowledge (270).¹ In the last of these books, Foucault describes archaeology as a general aspiration of history and his own histories to the conditions of “a discipline devoted to silent monuments, inert traces, objects without contexts, and things left by the past.”² Foucault says that history, apart from this mutation, is one way a society “develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked” by making the fragile but decipherable voice that is reduced to silence in the monument utter its hidden truth.³ Archaeology exposes how much of what is “true” for such a history is just what serves the formation and function of the discourses, institutions, and practices with which a society identifies. In The Order of Things, such truths or “epistemes” are drawn from and enact the rules of formation that archaeology shows are common to a whole series of scientific representations or products dispersed throughout the specific history, economics, and philosophy of the Renaissance, the classical, and the modern periods. They are “true,” that is, only insofar as they are common to a group of practices, including discursive practices, related because they share those rules. This is Not a Pipe excavates the institutions that govern such truths and the resistance to them that can be seen in the paintings of René Magritte, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Warhol.

Armed with this sketch of archaeology, we can grasp more clearly the central point of Shapiro’s book, namely that the vision supposedly denigrated in contemporary French thought—the “downcast eyes” of Martin Jay’s exhaustive tome—is completely and implausibly static, a way of seeing the world from Plato to René Descartes to Jeremy Bentham and Edmund Husserl that is impervious both to the practical and structural differences of vision across cultures and to the different ways of seeing formed by and constitutive of the same culture. Viewed archaeologically, the forms of knowledge, techniques, and procedures articulated by the variety of visual practices instituted at different times or to accomplish different goals within the same time demonstrate conclusively, on Shapiro’s argument, that the Renaissance Italians, the still-life Dutch, and the revolutionary and fin de siècle French did not just see different things; they also saw differently based on the rules of formation and discursive practices of the culture in which they had their visions. What Shapiro hopes to uncover in Foucault’s analyses of Magritte, Warhol, Gérard Fromanger, and Duane Michals is a vision of “the kind of art that might be drawn in the sand after the figure of man has been washed away” (272). Whether such a speculation was ever Foucault’s aim Shapiro does not say.

Shapiro’s treatment of Nietzsche focuses on the Augenblick, the “twinkling of an eye” that occasions Nietzsche’s most difficult thought, the eternal return of the same. Shapiro claims that English translations of Augenblick in this context as “moment” miss the important visual associations of this concept. These associations ought to be signaled clearly enough in the title for the chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On the Vision and the Riddle,” where the idea of the eternal return is introduced. Those associations are also indicated by the visual description of the scene in which Zarathustra comes to this thought: “Not long ago I walked through the deadly pallor of dusk,” Nietzsche writes, “gloomy and hard, with lips pressed together. Not only one sun had set for me.”⁴ And then there is the question that frames Nietzsche’s reflections here: “Is not seeing itself—seeing abysses?”⁵ The eternal return, the collision of two paths, the one leading indefinitely into the past, the other leading indefinitely into the future, meeting under the doorway entitled “Augenblick,” Shapiro says, is such an abyss. “If Zarathustra’s most abysmal thought includes the notion that every Augenblick is abyssal,” he writes, “then the multiplicity of this vision, the one that is marked or inscribed Augenblick, makes it an exemplary instance of what it purports to illustrate” (178). The eternal return, on this reading, is one vision of how Nietzsche saw vision in general. The more we look, in Shapiro’s view of Nietzsche, the more we see. The more perspectives are open to us, the less we see one thing rather than many other things; the more we see abysses. And in seeing abysses, Shapiro seems to suggest, we see a certain truth.

Shapiro’s treatment of Foucault is framed by interpretations of specific images, notably, Bosch’s Temptation of Saint Anthony, Diego Velàzquez’s Las Meninas, Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe, Warhol’s Lavender Disaster, Fromanger’s En révolte à la prison de Toul, and Michals’s Alice’s Mirror. The focus here is on painting as a discipline or as a disciplined practice “which can be articulated in terms of a variety of techniques, procedures, and forms of savoir” (276), Foucault’s term for the conditions necessary in a particular period for this or that type of object to be given or appear. On Shapiro’s reading, then, Foucault offers a unique way of linking painting and photography and so the art of Michals and Manet. The one does not follow the other as the historical continuation and completion of an attempt to represent the real world. Instead, painting and photography are linked archaeologically by the shared techniques, procedures, and forms of knowledge (savoir) realized in their respective images. What, specifically, is realized in Manet’s Bar is a resistance to the generally panoptic regime. In Michals, the savoir of art is deployed photographically to release phantasms of the real, the specter of life after death, the aura of love and sex and dreams invisible to panoptic surveillance.

It could be said that this focus on Foucault’s attention to the potential of art to resist ocularcentrism validates the argument Shapiro wants so much to disprove. If vision were not such a denigrating force in Foucault’s analytics of power, what reason would there be for resistance? And how better to marginalize that resistance than by locating it in a minor share of the visual arts? But it can also be said that Shapiro illustrates a facility in Nietzsche and Foucault for thinking with images, putting the visual ahead or, at least, alongside of the verbal, saving a productive place for vision in philosophy and art. We can appreciate this place better on the basis of his book.