🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

It is not easy in our field… I was going to say, to maintain the line if possible, but to keep it as close as possible.

On the specific point where we are advancing, concerning the function of the eye insofar as it interests us, this may lead the one who seeks to enlighten you to distant explorations, to investigate, since its appearance in the living lineage, this function of the organ, and first of all, its presence.

Of all the organs we deal with—and I insist on this—it is the relationship of the subject, not so much with instinct, not so much, up until now, since we have not defined, ensured, or consolidated its psychoanalytic status under the name of drive, not so much with tendency, not so much with instinct, but rather the relationship of the subject with the organ that lies at the heart of our experience.

Now, of all the organs we deal with as significant organs—the breast, the feces, and others—it is striking to see that the eye goes back so far in the species that represent the emergence of life. You undoubtedly consume oysters innocently, without knowing that at its level, in the animal kingdom, the eye had already appeared. Such kinds of explorations teach us, quite literally, if not all, then much about colors. In the midst of this, however, it is about making a choice, bringing things back to what concerns us. Last time, I think I sufficiently emphasized what is called the small triangular schema, very simple, which I reproduced at the top of the board:

which is there only to remind you, in three terms, of what underpinned my remark: namely, that at a certain level of what is called optics—optics which seemed to be in use in this operational setup, whose usage I saw as both exemplary and oriented—what emerged as significant in this inverted form, this inverted usage given by perspective, came to dominate—at the forefront—a certain technique, that of painting, specifically between the centuries: the late 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, this anamorphosis, insofar as it shows us that things are not so simple, that it is not so much about a realistic reproduction of what is more or less properly called, in painting, the things of space, on which there is much to question.

What I wanted to highlight as essential, central to our approach through this small schema, is, in a way, this: it is worth noting that a certain optics allows what pertains to vision to escape.

As I pointed out to you, that optics is accessible even to the blind. I referred you to DIDEROT’s text, Letter on the Blind, where he tries, in the demonstration he provides, to observe how, of an entire function—which is that of vision—namely, precisely what it delivers to us about space,

The blind person:

• is capable of accounting for it,
• is capable of reconstructing it,
• is capable of imagining it,
• is capable of talking about it.

Without a doubt, on this possibility, DIDEROT constructs a sort of permanent equivocation with metaphysical undertones, and moreover, it is precisely this ambiguity that animates this text and gives it its biting, gripping character.

For us, let us emphasize this: it is that this geometrical dimension, where we saw the possibility of a certain mapping of the subject, the subject as called to a certain point, commanded, determined, necessary—it is indeed one of the dimensions through which we can glimpse how this subject that interests us is, in a way, caught, maneuvered, captured in the field of vision.

And what I showed you at the end of my presentation, namely HOLBEIN’s painting:

HOLBEIN’s painting with this singular floating object in the foreground, regarding which I immediately, in view of my goal, without dissimulating any more than I usually do what I would call “the cards under the table,” showed you that this object, which is, in sum, very much there—as we are going to revisit today what the thing finally means, by looking—that this object is there to take—and I would almost say “trap”—the observer, that is, us. And that, in sum, it is a manifest, undoubtedly exceptional, way, due to I don’t know what moment of reflection on the part of the painter, of showing us how, as subjects, we are—within the painting—literally called and here represented as captured.

For indeed, this relationship with this fascinating painting—of which I showed you the resonances, the kinships with those paintings called vanitas—this fascinating painting of being, between these two adorned and fixed figures, amidst all that reminds us, in the perspective of the time, of the vanity of arts and sciences, is there to captivate us. The secret of this painting is revealed at the moment when, moving slightly, little by little, away from it toward the left, in a factual return, we see the meaning of the floating object, of the serious, magical object, which reflects to us our own nothingness, in the figure of the skull.

The use of this geometrical dimension of vision to captivate the subject is an obvious relationship to desire, which nonetheless remains enigmatic. What is the desire that is captured, fixed, that has this encounter with this painting, which—as much as this painting is a constructed, crafted object—motivates the artist to implement something, and what exactly, into action?

This is the path along which we shall try to move further today. In this matter of vision, let us say of the visible, everything is a trap, and singularly so in the arrangement that you find present at every level, at every tier, which is so aptly designated by Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY in his book The Visible and the Invisible, by the title of one of its chapters: The Intertwining – the Chiasm.

There is not a single division, a single dual aspect presented by this function of vision, that does not present itself to us as a sort of labyrinth, due to the fact that, as we distinguish the various fields within it, we realize even further how much these fields intersect. At first, it seems that, after all, in this domain I have called the geometrical, it is—as I might say—the light that provides us with the thread.

And indeed, this thread, as you saw last time, acts to connect us to each point of the object, and to the point where it intersects the network in the form of a screen on which we will locate the image, functioning like a thread. Light, as we say, propagates in a straight line, and this is certain: it seems to be what gives us the thread. However, consider that this thread does not need light; it only needs to be a taut thread.

And for this reason, the blind person can follow all our demonstrations, provided we take some effort to show them—why not?—how to feel an object of a certain height, then follow the taut thread, and how somewhere, something, which we would also teach them to distinguish by touch, as something reparable and identifiable at their fingertips on a surface and responsive to it, provides a certain configuration, a certain boundary that reproduces precisely how we imagine, in pure optics, the mapping of images. It reproduces the diversely proportioned and fundamentally homologous relationships, the correspondences from one point to another in space, which ultimately, in the end, amounts to two points on the same thread.

This is something that does not belong specifically to what light delivers.

How can we attempt, try to grasp what thus seems to elude us in this optical structuring of space, which is always the subject of traditional arguments? When philosophers—ALAIN, the latest to demonstrate it in the most brilliant exercises, tracing back to KANT and PLATO—engage in these reflections on the so-called deception of perception, they simultaneously find mastery of the exercise by insisting on the fact that what we must grasp is that perception finds the object where it is, that this appearance of the cube, which we see as a parallelogram,

…it is precisely there, due to this rupture in space that underpins your very perception, which makes us perceive it as a cube. The entire game, the “sleight of hand” of classical dialectics around perception, revolves around this: it concerns geometrical vision, vision as it is situated in a space that, in its essence, is not what concerns the visual.

Moreover, this relationship, from appearance to being, which the philosopher so easily masters to grant themselves this field, lies elsewhere. It lies elsewhere, in the other property of light, which is to be the luminous point, that is, something other than these objects constituted within the reference of space. It is the point of irradiation, the flowing of light, the bursting source of reflections. Light undoubtedly propagates in a straight line, but it refracts, it diffuses, it floods, it fills—and let us not forget—this hollow that is our eye; it also overflows it. It necessitates, for us, around this hollow, an entire series of organs, apparatuses, defenses.

It is not simply at a distance that the iris reacts; it also reacts to light, and it must protect what happens at the bottom of the hollow, which could, under certain circumstances, be damaged. Similarly, our eyelid, too, when faced with an excessive amount of light, is called to contract, blinking at first, and even, in a more or less firm manner, tightening into a well-known grimace.

Furthermore, it is not only the eye that is photosensitive, as we know. The entire surface of the skin, in undoubtedly varying ways, which are not solely visual, can nonetheless be photosensitive, and this dimension cannot in any way be reduced within the functioning of vision, or the role of pigment.

There is an initial form, a sketch, of photosensitive organs, which are the pigment spots, and fundamentally, within the eye, the pigment operates fully. It functions in a way that the phenomenon, indeed, shows itself to be infinitely complex, acting within the cones, for instance, in the form of rhodopsin, as well as within the various layers of the retina. This pigment moves back and forth in functions that, for us, are not always immediately identifiable or clear, but it suggests the depth, complexity, and at the same time the unity of an entire series of mechanisms that are, strictly speaking, those of the relationship to light.

To guide you, to lead you along this path that is precisely what interests us—the relationship of the subject to what light truly is, which already appears to announce itself as ambiguous—you can see that these two triangular schemas are inverted:

At the same time, they must overlap, giving you the first example of what I mentioned earlier, which must essentially be this functioning of intertwining, of overlapping, of chiasm, which is the framework within which we must navigate throughout this domain.

To articulate, to make you feel what is at stake in the question posed—or more precisely, the initial structuring of the question in its relationship to light—concerning the subject and their place, their place as something other than this geometrical point defined by pure or geometrical optics, I will tell you a little apologue, a small story, and it is true. It dates back to when I was about twenty years old, and at that time, of course, as a young intellectual, my sole concern was to go elsewhere, to immerse myself in some direct, rural, hunting, or even marine practice. One day, on a small boat where I was with a few people from a family of fishermen in a small town, a small port… at that time, our Brittany was not yet at the stage of large-scale industry or trawlers. The fisherman fished in his nutshell of a boat, at his own risk and peril. These were risks and perils I loved to share, but it was not always about risks or perils; there were also days of good weather.

And one day, as we were waiting for the right moment to pull in the nets, a man named Petit-Jean—we’ll call him that—he and his whole family, as it happens, disappeared quite quickly due to tuberculosis, which at that time was truly the ambient disease in which this entire social stratum lived… showed me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small box, and to be specific: a sardine can.

It floated there in the sunlight, a testament to the canning industry we were, incidentally, tasked with supplying. It gleamed in the sunlight. And Petit-Jean said to me, “You see that box? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!”

This little episode—he found it very funny, I less so. I wondered why I found it less funny—this little episode is very instructive. This small apologue should detain us for a moment. First, if it makes sense that Petit-Jean told me the box doesn’t see me, it is because, in a certain sense, it nonetheless looks at me: at the level of the luminous point, this is where everything that looks at me resides, and this is not a metaphor.

The significance of this little story, as it arose from the invention of my interlocutor, the fact that he found it so funny and that I found it less so, lies in the fact that if I am being looked at, if I am told a story like this one, it is precisely the first example of what I mentioned earlier, which must essentially be this functioning of intertwining, of overlapping, of chiasm, which is the framework within which we must navigate throughout this domain.

There, it is still to the extent that I, at that moment—such as I have described myself, among these people who earned their living laboriously in their struggle with what was, for them, harsh nature—I made quite an incongruous figure in the picture. To put it bluntly, I stood out somewhat awkwardly in the scene, and it is essential to feel this—just by hearing myself addressed in this humorous, ironic story—that I didn’t find it as funny as they did.

Here, I take the structure at the level of the subject, but it reflects something that already exists in the natural relationship inscribed by the eye in relation to light. I am not simply this punctiform being, pinpointed at the geometrical point from which perspective is grasped: at the back of my eye, the painting is painted. I am here in an entire ambiguity: the painting, certainly, is in my eye, but I am in the painting.

What is light looks at me, and thanks to this light, something—at the back of my eye—is painted, which is not merely the constructed relationship, the object on which the philosopher dwells, which is an impression, which is this streaming of a surface [cf. Lituraterre, 12-05-1971], which is not pre-positioned, for me, in its distance.

Precisely, it introduces something omitted in the geometrical relationship, this point that is well-defined by the notion, the term, the manipulable concept—thanks to our devices, for it is a photographic apparatus in question—of “depth of field” with all its ambiguity, variability, and lack of mastery by me, and rather something that seizes me, solicits me at every moment, and makes the landscape something far more than mere perspective: what I have called the painting.

The reference of the painting, the one to be situated in the same place, meaning outside, is the point of the gaze. And what mediates between the two, what lies between them, is something of a different nature from what we identified the other day as this focusing mechanism, or this methodical framing, which constitutes geometrical optical space. It is something that plays an exactly opposite role, I mean, that operates not by being traversable but, on the contrary, by being opaque: it is the screen. What, at the level of the gaze, in the various points of what presents itself to me as the space of light, constitutes for me the gaze:

• It is always some play of light and opacity,
• It is always that shimmering, that glimmering that was earlier at the heart of my little story,
• It is always what, at every point, holds me back as a screen, making light appear as shimmering, as something that exceeds it.

To put it simply, the point of the gaze always participates in the ambiguity of the jewel. And I, if I am something in the painting, it is also on the other side, which is also the side of the screen, namely as what I earlier called: the stain.

The relationship of the subject with the domain of vision is not a relationship in the ordinary sense of the word “subject,” subjective. That is to say, it cannot be considered an idealistic relationship. This overview, which I call the subject—when I present it as giving consistency, as making the solidity of the tableau, its unity—is not merely a representative overview.

There are several ways to be mistaken here regarding this function of the subject in the domain of what develops as a spectacle. Certainly, the autonomy, “the function of synthesis,” as they say, of what happens behind, let us say, the retina, in what allows us to perceive, phenomenally, is illustrated by some remarkable examples provided in MERLEAU-PONTY’s book Phenomenology of Perception.

He skillfully extracts from an abundant literature—a study of the phenomenology of vision—very remarkable facts, among which he shows that merely masking part of a field with a screen, when that field is functioning as a source of composite colors (created, for example, by two wheels or screens rotating behind each other to compose a certain tone of light), completely changes the way the composition is perceived.

Here, indeed, we grasp the purely subjective function in the ordinary sense of the word, the note of a central mechanism that, for us, intervenes and gives to what was constructed in the experience—whose components we know—the distinction between the construction of the play of light and what is perceived by the subject.

Something else, as you can well sense, would be to notice—though it would still have a subjective aspect, albeit differently adjusted—the effects of reflection, of a certain field, of a certain color. For example, let us say yellow, reflected onto an adjacent field, which may be blue. The light reflected from the yellow field would cause some modification to the blue field.

But assuredly, everything that pertains to color is purely subjective. No objective correlation in the spectrum allows us to link the quality of color to wavelength or frequency at the level of luminous vibration. This is still subjective but situated differently from the first example evoked. Is that all? Is that what I mean when I speak of the subject’s relationship to what I call the tableau? Assuredly not!

The subject’s relationship to what is called the tableau gives us precisely something that, quite curiously, has been approached by certain philosophers, though situated somewhat to the side. Read Raymond RUYER’s book Neo-Finalism and observe how he is led to demand and construct, to situate perception—which he conceives as perception in a teleological perspective—by positioning the subject in absolute oversight.

Manifestly, there is no necessity, except in the most abstract sense, to think of the subject in absolute oversight when it is a matter, as in his example, of grasping what the perception of a chessboard is. This chessboard belongs, by essence, to this space, to this vision, to this geometrical optics that I have taken care to distinguish initially: we are dealing here with partes extra partes, in the space as it is precisely constituted, defined as such, which always presents such difficulty and resistance to the grasp of the object.

But in this direction, the matter is irreducible—we are in partes extra partes.

And yet, there is a phenomenal domain, infinitely more extensive when closely examined than the privileged points where it appears, which allows us to grasp, in its true nature, this subject in absolute oversight. It is not because we cannot ascribe being to it that it is not necessary—namely, this dimension where I situate myself in the tableau, and very precisely as a stain. This is brought to us in the natural domain by phenomena that are more or less properly called mimicry.

Here, I cannot delve into the proliferation of facts and problems suggested, imposed, or more or less elaborated in this dimension of mimicry. For that, refer to specialized works, which are not only fascinating and captivating but also extremely rich in material for reflection. What I want to emphasize is what perhaps has not been sufficiently highlighted so far regarding what is at stake.

Strictly speaking, in certain phenomena of mimicry, one might speak of adaptive or adapted coloration, as you prefer, and observe—as CUENOT indicated, sometimes with probable relevance—that coloration, insofar as it adapts to the background, would be, which is already very significant to grasp, merely a mechanism, a mode of defense against light.

In other words, a microorganism, whatever it may be—there are innumerable examples that could illustrate this—situated in an environment where green radiation dominates, such as in water surrounded by green vegetation, becomes green to the extent that, for it, light could—this is our hypothesis, and it is not implausible, and in some cases could be verified—become a harmful agent. It becomes green to reflect the light back, as everyone knows happens, reflecting it as green. Through its adaptive coloration, it shields itself from the effects of that light.

But in mimicry, something entirely different is at play. Here, I am compelled to take an example, chosen almost at random—do not think it is a privileged case or example.

A small crustacean called caprella, to which is added another descriptor, acanthifera, when it resides, when it nests among those kinds of organisms, on the borderline of being an animal, called bryozoans—what does it imitate? It imitates what, in the bryozoan, appears as a stain. In this quasi-plant-like creature, the bryozoan, during one of its phases, an intestinal loop appears as a stain; in another phase, there is something like a colored center that also functions.

It is this relationship between a form and a stained form that the crustacean adapts to: it becomes a stain; it becomes a tableau; it inscribes itself in the tableau. This is, strictly speaking, the original mechanism in mimicry. From there, the fundamental dimensions of what it means for the subject to inscribe itself in the tableau emerge—and they appear infinitely more justified than any initial vague divination or tentative guesswork could provide.

I have already alluded, two of my lectures ago, to what CAILLOIS says in his little book Medusa and Company, with an undeniable insight that sometimes belongs to the non-specialist, in that their distance perhaps allows them to grasp the contours of what the specialist has only been able to spell out.

He succeeds, I believe, in a much more accurate and effective way than those who wish to see in the realm of coloration only facts of adaptation—variously successful and always ambiguous, as I indicated to you earlier. The facts demonstrate that almost nothing in the order of adaptation—as it is ordinarily understood, namely adaptation tied to the needs of survival—justifies mimicry, which, in most cases, proves to be either inoperative or operates strictly in the opposite direction to what would be presumed as the adaptive result.

On the other hand, CAILLOIS highlights three terms that are effectively the major dimensions in which mimetic activity unfolds. He identifies and categorizes them under three headings, which appear, at least for now, to be essential for retaining our reflection:

• that of disguise, he says,
• that of camouflage,
• that of intimidation.

I repeat: disguise, camouflage, intimidation. It is in this domain, indeed, that we find the dimension through which the subject must insert itself into the tableau. It reveals something insofar as that something is distinct from what might be called “a self” that lies behind.

The effect of mimicry is camouflage, and in the properly technical sense, it is not about blending in with the background, but rather about a multicolored agreement, adapting to a multicolored background by becoming multicolored oneself—exactly as in the technique of camouflage in human warfare.

When it comes to disguise, it specifically involves the aim of a certain sexual finality, and nature shows us this reference to sexual aims through various effects that are essentially those of disguise, of masquerade. In this sense, a distinct plane is constituted, separate from the sexual aim itself, where it plays an essential role that should not be too quickly isolated or distinguished as mere deception. The function of the lure in this context is something else, something before which we must suspend our mental decisions until we have fully measured its implications.

Finally, the phenomenon of intimidation also always entails this overvaluation that the subject attempts to achieve in its appearance. But here too, one must not too quickly see this effect as involving, let us say it, an intersubjectivity. Each time imitation is at stake, let us refrain from too quickly thinking of the “other” who is supposedly being imitated. What the subject fundamentally imitates in imitation is a certain function it tends to project of itself.

This is where we must temporarily pause if we do not wish to proceed too hastily. For what demands our attention in this context, regarding the true function evoked here, is a perspective we must consider as persistent since facts and phenomena manifest themselves that cannot be situated or determined except in this plane of oversight.

Such is mimicry. What we must attempt is to look more closely—not simply with reference to the more or less unclear teleological end that is always more or less invoked by the function of instinct—but to examine it at the point where, for us, it becomes necessary to accommodate it, namely at the level of what the unconscious function teaches us as such, insofar as it represents, for us, the field that proposes itself to the conquest of the subject.

In this direction, we will advance, guided by an “observation,” so to speak, from the same CAILLOIS. For instance, he perceives, he indicates—surely he intuits something here—that in matters of mimicry, what is at stake would be nothing less than the analogue, at the animal level, of what, in humans, manifests itself as art, and specifically as painting.

I cannot say that this observation is particularly suggestive for the use we intend to make of it. The only objection one might raise is that, for René CAILLOIS [a slip: Roger Caillois], painting seems to be something so self-evident, so transparent, that it can be referenced as a clear equivalent. But what is this painting?

It is certainly not for nothing that we have emphasized the tableau as the function where the subject must locate itself as such. But when a human subject undertakes to create a tableau, to implement something centered on the gaze, what is it about?

I will advance the following thesis: in the tableau, the artist—so we are told—intends to be subject. Painting distinguishes itself from all other arts in that, in the work, it is as a subject, as a gaze, that the artist seeks to impose themselves on us. Others will respond to this by emphasizing, not without encountering some difficulties, the object-side of the product of art. In sum, both directions of inquiry manifest something equally effective and more or less appropriate, but they certainly do not exhaust the matter at hand.

I argue that, assuredly, in the tableau, something of the gaze always manifests itself. The painter knows this well, whose ethics, search, quest, and exercise, whether they adhere to or vary in selection, focus on a certain mode of gaze.

Assuredly, for those with a particularly sharp and perspicacious vision of what has been presented before you, it will become clear that in looking at tableaux—even those most devoid of what is conventionally called the gaze, constituted by a pair of eyes, even in those where all representation of the human figure is absent, such as a landscape by a Dutch or Flemish painter—one sufficiently attuned will eventually see, as if in filigree, something so specific to each painter that one will feel the presence of the gaze.

But this is merely an object of inquiry, and perhaps, after all, an illusion. The function of the tableau, in relation to the one to whom the painter literally shows their tableau, has a relationship to the gaze. This relationship is not, as might seem at first glance, to be a “trap for the gaze.” One might think that, like an actor, the painter seeks to say, “Look at me!” and desires to be seen. I do not believe so.

I believe that there is a relationship to the gaze of the viewer, but it is more complex: the painter, to the one who stands before the tableau, gives something that, in at least a large part of painting, could be summarized as: “You want to look? Well then, see this!”

They offer something to the eye, but they invite the viewer to lay down their gaze there, as one lays down arms. And this is the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting: something is offered, not so much to the gaze as to the eye, but it entails this abandonment, this laying down of the gaze. As such, it calls the subject to that level where they have deposited their own gaze.

Certainly, there is something problematic here, for a whole facet of painting—at the very least, one might say, regardless of the place one assigns to it—separates itself from the field I have just articulated and defined. A whole facet of painting is expressionist, meaning that it offers something—and this is what distinguishes it—that moves toward a certain satisfaction, in the sense that FREUD employs the term when referring to the satisfaction of a drive: a certain satisfaction in what is demanded by the gaze.

It is precisely this that allows us to distinguish the demands of expressionist painting from others. In other words, we must now pose the question of what the eye is as an organ. The function, they say, creates the organ. Pure absurdity! It doesn’t even explain it. Everything in the organism, as an organ, always presents itself as having a great multiplicity of functions.

And in the eye—simply to mark the ambiguity we have noted today—it is clear that diverse functions are combined: at the level of the discriminating function, the one that becomes maximally individualized and isolated at the level of the fovea, the chosen point of distinct vision, it is not the same as what takes place across the entire surface of the retina, unjustly distinguished by specialists as the “scopic function.” There, the same chiasm, the same intertwining we have highlighted, reappears since this field, supposedly designed to perceive effects of lesser illumination, is where the possibility of perceiving effects of light is at its maximum.

I mean, for instance, that if you wish to see a fifth- or sixth-magnitude star—the ARAGO phenomenon—you should not look at it directly: it is precisely by looking slightly to the side that it may appear to you.

These functions of the eye do not exhaust the character of the organ as it emerges within the living being, where it determines, as every organ does, duties. The flaw in our reference to instinct, so confused as it is, lies in the fact that we fail to realize that instinct is the way an organism must grapple with an organ, to manage it as best it can.

There are numerous examples in the animal kingdom where an excess, a burden, an overdevelopment of an organ causes the organism to succumb. The so-called function of instinct, in this relationship of the organism to the organ, seems much more to require definition in terms of a morality. It is an analogy, of course, but the organism must wrestle with what can be done with that organ, and we marvel at the so-called pre-adaptations of instinct in the sense that, from its organ, the organism can make something of use.

For us, in our reference to the unconscious, it is so clear that it concerns the relationship to the organ—not sexuality, not even the sex, if indeed we can assign a specific reference to this term, which we will—but something particular: the phallus, insofar as it is lacking from what could be grasped as real in the aim of sex.

It is because we deal with the core of the experience of the unconscious, with this organ determined in the subject by a lack—organized in the castration complex—that we must ask to what extent the eye is involved in a similar dialectic.

Well, at first glance, in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze, we see that there is no coincidence but fundamentally a lure: I ask for a gaze when, in love, I make this plea. What is fundamentally dissatisfying and always missed in this is:

“You never look at me where I see you.”

Conversely, what I look at is never what I want to see.

And in this play, which I mentioned earlier, between the painter and the viewer, it is a game, a trompe-l’œil game, whatever one may say, and here there is no demand or reference to what is improperly called the figurative. If you introduce some underlying essence into it, it is because it refers to reality.

When in the ancient apologue concerning ZEUXIS and PARRHASIOS, the merits of these painters are recounted:

• The first, having painted grapes that attracted birds—the emphasis is not on the perfection of the grapes but on the fact that even the eyes of the birds were deceived.
• And the proof lies in his rival, PARRHASIOS, triumphing over him by painting only a veil on the wall, so lifelike that ZEUXIS turned to him and said:

“Well then, now show us what you’ve done behind that.”

This demonstrates that the goal is to deceive the eye—not through appearance but by what is suggested beyond that appearance, which triumphs over the eye of the gaze.

On this function of the eye and the gaze, we will continue our exploration next time.