Eric Alliez's 'L'oeil-cerveau' Challenges Phenomenology and Art History

Eric Alliez's book 'L'oeil-cerveau' (2007) argues for a hallucinatory perception in modern painting, drawing on Hippolyte Taine's concept that all perception is hallucination. Alliez contrasts Taine's psychophysiological approach from 'De l'intelligence' (1870) with his earlier philosophy of art. The work continues Alliez's critique of phenomenology begun in 'De l'impossibilité de la phénoménologie' (1995). It examines artists Delacroix, Manet, Seurat, Gauguin, and Cézanne, omitting Courbet, Monet, Degas, and Impressionism, which Alliez sees as a naturalistic phenomenology. He emphasizes a 'cerebralized' eye, linking painting to photography's spectral and neuronal qualities. The book includes no reproductions, aiming to subvert illustration's role in art philosophy. Alliez collaborated with Jean-Clet Martin and Jean-Claude Bonne (on 'Pensée-Matisse', 2005) and held seminars at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume. The text engages with Mallarmé's lost English essay 'The Impressionists and Edouard Manet' (1876) and opens with Goethe's 'Farbenlehre'.