The Power without Responsibility of the Gaze. The Letter and Spirit’s Eye in the Humanities, from the Italian Perspective to the Robot

Abstract

Abstract The paper identifies a continuity between the legal issue of the letter and spirit (or ratio) of the law and the invention of perspective as a symbolic form. The idea of perspective in Piero della Francesca’s Annunciation and the concept of “Italian perspective” in Arasse’s work are based on the aesthetic normativity of the painting in relation to the normative form of the norm, moving from the analysis of the invisible/visible nexus in legal theory. The notion of thirdness thus mediates between law as text and normativity as image, leading to the aesthetic enactment that conceives Italian playhouse as a form of theater, cinema, trial and university, as a symbolic form of knowledge and culture in the West. The simultaneously normative and aesthetic power of the gaze thus emerges as the removed from legal theory, until the problem of self-driving vehicles brings the issue back to the center of contemporary debate. The transition from frontal gaze to 360° vision suggests the theme of immersion as a new symbolic for the man–robot society.