Jae Emerling reviews The Share of Perspective

Emmanuel Alloa. The Share of Perspective. Trans. Nils F. Schott. New York: Routledge, 2025. 207 pp.

5 June 2026

Shortly before his death, Gilles Deleuze wrote a preface to the English edition of his 1968 book Difference and Repetition that addresses the difference between writing the history of philosophy and writing one’s own philosophy. In “one case, we study the arrows or the tools of a great thinker” and “in the other case, we trim our own arrows, or gather those which seem to us the finest in order to try to send them in other directions.”[1] I discern a similar, however subtle, change in the work of Emmanuel Alloa. His early texts, “Visual Studies in Byzantium?” (2013), “The Most Sublime of All Laws” (2015), and the brilliant Resistance of the Sensible World: An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty (2017) are texts in the history of philosophy and art. In Resistance of the Sensible World, we begin to see Alloa constructing his own philosophy, one that transmits these histories by reinventing them, by foregrounding richer complications and forgotten concepts as a means to expresses anew the aesthetic and epistemic necessity of understanding the visual as an ensemble of historical, epistemological, psychological, and ontological affects. More recently, in both Looking Through Images: A Phenomenology of Visual Media (2021) and The Share of Perspective (2025), Alloa presents us with a philosophical archaeology of optics, social psychology, art history, and political theory that constructs co-perception as an ethic of perspectivism, a position contrary to the sophistry of post-truth discourse. In The Share of Perspective, Alloa has gathered arrows launched into the future by other thinkers and artists, but he has also trimmed his own to let loose into the future of the humanities itself.

I first became aware of Alloa via a comment from Éric Alliez. Alliez’s invaluable De l’impossibilité de la phenomenologie (1995) argues that postwar French philosophy sought to escape phenomenology (especially a certain Edmund Husserl-Martin Heidegger line), a difficult yet possible task. At some point Éric mentioned to me that Alloa’s work is part of this philosophical project from within—refocusing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late, unfinished project to reorient phenomenology itself. Beyond phenomenology, Alloa’s The Share of Perspective also gives us a vast and inspired range of nearly Borgesian references—trompe l’oeil techniques, Robert Smithson, Andrea Palladio, Erwin Panofsky, Tintoretto, Filippo Brunelleschi, Hannah Arendt, Hubert Damisch, El Lissitzsky. But there is a fils conducteur: a critical theory of the image within a perceptual field constructed with and against post-Kantian aesthetics, German Bildwissenshaft, and the late-period work of Merleau-Ponty.

The Share of Perspective foregrounds the concept of a perspectiva communis (shared perspective, compare with John Peckham’s thirteenth-century treatise on optics). Alloa’s concept is premised not on abstract consensus but rather on the psychosomatic, cognitive, and ethical lessons of actual visual experience. It concerns how we see together. A seemingly simple act belied by a complex of affects that Merleau-Ponty called “co-perception.”[2] There is an ontological dimension to co-perception as an ensemble because every act of visuality is a seeing with and against, seeing together, within a specific perceptual field. Alloa moves beyond the subject-object dichotomy and into the folds of the perceptual field itself, which is never a neutral or empty spatium. Within it we acquire microperceptions that evade immediate understanding and significance but become cognitive and even ethical scotomas within our individual perspectives, each of which takes place within a temporality of visual experience (simultaneity and/as delay) as well as in the presence of the Other. Such a durational and intersubjective point of view can never be individual or solipsistic. It is, as Alloa argues, an act of co-perception. The inherent plurality of any point of view is what he terms a perspective “multiplicity,” a perspectiva communis (p. 171).

Alloa’s argument challenges presentism, relativism, and alternative facts—the doxa of our post-truth moment—because perspectivism does not erode the public sphere but rather “imposes the possibility of a re-vision” (p. 41). As such it is not simply an act of presenting multiple viewpoints on a given object; instead, it is an act of composition within a milieu that renders sensible and intelligible the very object to which we refer. In its inherent plurality, perspectivism is a movement between phenomenology and archaeology (in a Foucauldian sense) because perspective itself is an immanent physiological and a social-historical construct. Thus, Alloa dismisses any “metaperspective” from where “the confusion of viewpoints could be ordered in the sense of Leibniz’s prestablized harmony . . . or Gadamer’s fusion of horizons” (p. 180). What remains compelling and contradictory about one’s point of view is that it is “normalizing and unfinished at the same time”; it asserts a singularity in each instance predicated on other differing points of view that, as an ensemble, construct and express the real itself (p. 180).

This allows Alloa to trace “new theoretical paths out of the current deadlock between methodological relativism and the ‘new realisms’ [object-oriented-ontology and speculative realism] that seek to directly get at the ‘things themselves’” (p. xxvi). The “share” or partage of perspective at stake here also stages an intriguing encounter with Jacques Rancière, whose own Le partage du sensible (2000) is a starting point. There is a vital political difference between a distribution and an act of sharing. Moreover, Alloa’s concept of the “share” of perspective is neither accursed nor utopic. To share is to hope. Perspectivism is collective labor without leftist melancholy. It is in common: a commonality re-visioned and rebuilt as something other than unity. Alloa’s conclusion bears the title “In Praise of the Plural.” I would rather work toward this than accept a perpetual state of exception.

Alloa’s The Share of Perspective is a rare book. At once a throwback and a futurist text, it is such past-future thinking that appears to us a vital and visionary work. I will end with one of Alloa’s favorite lines from Paul Valéry, another hopeful voice from beyond our presentism as well as our narcissism: “the future is like everything else: it’s not what it used to be.”[3]

[1] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York, 1994), p. xv.

[2] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill., 1964), p. 170.

[3] Paul Valery, “Our Destiny and Literature,” in The Collected Works of Paul Valery, trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Matthews (New York, 1962), p. 171.