Abstract

The modern perspective is powerful. It represents the true program of modernity, but also the opposite gaze, the oblique gaze, the biased gaze, the diagonal gaze. A gaze that is attentive to the junctions, to the couplings between subject and object. A look, we can say with Humboldt, which thinks in terms of «landscape». A manner of seeing that is useful today to describe the current crisis of thought, the turmoil of the world. Humboldt’s brilliance (and the wisdom of landscape) is based on a word – and this is a rare case, if not unique, in the history of scientific knowledge – that serves to designate the thing and at the same time the image of the thing. That is to say: a word that expresses both the meaning and the signifier, and in such a way that one cannot be distinguished from the other. And isn’t the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of this distinction the most evident sign of our crisis, of the crisis of our capacity for knowledge?