Philosophy Seminars - “Thinking with Paintings”
Merleau-Ponty and Cézanne’s Doubt
Time: 18.30 - 20.00
Speaker: Zeynep Direk
Moderator: Emre Şan
Merleau-Ponty gives special importance to the way Cézanne depicts nature. According to him, Cézanne feels a wholehearted commitment to the visual world. Rejecting traditional dualities such as feeling and intellect, nature and composition, subject and object, he returns to the primordial experience of the perceived world.
In Cézanne’s art, every brushstroke harbours doubt. Cézanne has schizothymia: when he perceives the world he perceives it from all perspectives, yet all the profiles seem frozen. He constantly doubts himself—does he paint those pictures because of such a disorder? Merleau-Ponty, however, examines this doubt not psychologically but on an ontological and phenomenological ground. Cézanne aims to capture the mysterious wholeness and reality in nature. By establishing a silent dialogue with nature, he experiences his own consciousness becoming at the same time the consciousness of the landscape. This experience gives me the feeling that the landscape thinks itself in me and that I am its consciousness.
While Merleau-Ponty returns to the intersection between the landscape and the perceiver at various junctures of his thought, he persistently refers to Cézanne. But perhaps the most striking emphasis falls on the experience of freedom. Cézanne does not associate freedom with the sovereignty of the subject or with the subject’s being the source of meaning and action. The experience of freedom crystallizes when nature finds expression in the artist and can be expressed visually. Cézanne’s creative freedom is not independent of his past, his way of life and his temperament; rather, freedom lies in the capacity to surpass these primary bonds of life without severing them.
Zeynep Direk received her PhD from the University of Memphis in 1998 and worked as a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at Galatasaray University until 2014. Since 2014 she has been a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Koç University. She is the editor of Derrida: Critical Assessments (Routledge, 2001) and A Companion to Derrida (Blackwell, 2014). She is the author of two books, Başkalık Deneyimi (The Experience of Otherness; Yapı Kredi, 2005) and Cinsel Farkın İnşası (The Construction of Sexual Difference; Metis, 2018). She has published numerous articles in Turkish, English and French in the fields of Feminism, Continental Philosophy, Political Philosophy and Ethics. She has prepared for publication edited volumes including Cinsiyetli Olmak (Yapı Kredi, 2004), Sonsuza Tanıklık (Metis, 2003), Dünyanın Teni (Metis, 2017), Jean-Paul Sartre: Tarihin Sorumluluğunu Almak (Metis, 2010), Irk Kavramını Kim İcât Etti? (Metis, 2001), Çağdaş Fransız Düşüncesi (Epos, 2004), Levinas Okumaları (Pinhan, 2011), Platon’un Eczanesi (Pinhan, 2011) and Cinsiyeti Yazmak (Yapı Kredi, 2016).
* The seminar will be held in Turkish. To attend this seminar, you can create your registration by using the "Register" button on the page and receive your free event invitation. Registrations will open 1 week before the event date (25.02.2027, at 18:30) and the "Register" button will become visible. Participation is limited to a quota of 70 people.
* Participants who have completed the event registration and received their invitation are kindly requested to be at the venue at least 15 minutes before the event. The doors will be closed at the event starting time.