A detailed and inventive study of the thinking at work in modern painting, drawing on a formidable body of scholarly evidence to challenge modernist and phenomenological readings of art history,The Brain-Eyepresents a series of interlinked case studies in which philosophical thought encounters the hallucinatory sensations unleashed by painter-researchers.
Rather than outlining a new philosophy of art,The Brain-Eye details the singular problems pursued by each of its protagonists. Striking readings of the oeuvres of Delacroix, Seurat, Manet, Gauguin, and Cézanne recount the plural histories of artists who worked to free the differential forces of colour, discovered by Goethe in hisColour Theory, in the name of a true hallucination and of a logic proper to the Visual.
A rigorous renewal of the philosophical thinking of visual art,The Brain-Eye explores the complex relations between concept and sensation, theory and practice, the discursive and the visual, and draws out the political and philosophical stakes of the aesthetic revolution in modern painting.

Éric Alliez is Professor of Contemporary French Philosophy at Kingston University, London, and Professor of Aesthetics at Paris 8. His many publications in both English and French includeThe Signature of the World (2004),La Pensee-Matisse (2005) andDéfaire l'image (2013).


Jean-Clet Martin is former programme director at the College International de Philosophie, Paris.

Robin Mackay, the translator, is director of Urbanomic and editor of its journal,Collapse. He has translated a number of works of French philosophy, including Alain BadiousNumber and Numbers, Francois LaruellesThe Concept of Non-Photography andAnti-Badiou and Quentin MeillasouxsThe Number and the Siren.

Translators Preface / Epigraph / Note to the Viewer-Reader / Acknowledgements / Introduction / Chapter 1: 19 June 1799The Goethe-Transformation / Chapter 2: Delacroix and the Massacre of Painting / Chapter 3. On the New Path of the Contemporary: The Manet Plane / Chapter 4. Grey Times on La Grande Jatte (The Extraterrestrial/Seurat/The Machine-Eye) / Chapter 5. Gauguin, or the Eye of the Earth / Chapter 6. Ten Variations on Cézannes Concentric Eye / List of Works Studied / Bibliography / Index of Names