Painting, according to Jean-Luc Marion, is a central topic of concern for philosophy, particularly phenomenology. For the question of painting is, at its heart, a question of visibility--of appearance. As such, the painting is a privileged case of the phenomenon; the painting becomes an index for investigating the conditions of appearance--or what Marion describes as "phenomenality" in general. In "The Crossing of the Visible," Marion takes up just such a project. The natural outgrowth of his earlier reflections on icons, these four studies carefully consider the history of painting--from classical to contemporary--as a fund for phenomenological reflection on the conditions of (in)visibility. Ranging across artists from Raphael to Rothko, Caravaggio to Pollock, "The Crossing of the Visible" offers both a critique of contemporary accounts of the visual and a constructive alternative. According to Marion, the proper response to the "nihilism" of postmodernity is not iconoclasm, but rather a radically iconic account of the visual and the arts that opens them to the invisible.

让-吕克•马里翁（Jean-Luc Marion），法国当代著名学者，法兰西学院院士，巴黎第四大学索邦大学教授，芝加哥大学宗教学系、哲学系客座教授。作为德里达的学生，他的主要研究领域为近代哲学和现象学，出版过多部关于笛卡尔方法论、理性神学和形而上学的著作，对希腊和拉丁教父及中世纪哲学也多有研究，尤其以宗教领域的研究而广受关注。主要著作有《无存在的上帝》、《偶像与距离》等多部，曾获得法兰西学院哲学大奖（1992）和海德堡大学卡尔•雅斯贝尔斯奖（2008），2008年入选为法兰西学院院士。

译者张建华，武汉大学哲学硕士、哲学博士。2001年7月至今任教于华中科技大学哲学系。主要研究方向为马克思主义哲学、社会认识论和当代法国哲学。主要译作有《解构的共通体》《解释学、现象学与宗教哲学》《现象学导论》《论柏拉图的<政治家篇>》等。