Summary A Crystalline Technique: Philosopher Gilles Deleuze saw Egyptian art not as primitive, but as a triumph of preserving eternal essences through a “crystalline” technique. Visual Mummification: The art’s flat, rigid style is a form of visual mummification, designed to rescue subjects from the decay of time. Haptic Vision: Egyptian art creates a “haptic” space, where the eye “touches” a flat surface, eliminating the distance between foreground and background. Resemblance Without Resembling: It achieves a truer resemblance by abandoning realism, capturing an eternal form rather than a fleeting, lifelike moment. Show more   Egyptian art does not always get its due credit. It often gets overshadowed by its Greek successor. The classical Western narrative and the history of ideas tend to favor Greek cultures as the wellspring of civilization. Late twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze offers a brand new way to think about Egyptian art; he invents a concept of the crystal. You might remember the images with flat two-dimensional surfaces. If you stare long enough at these cartoonish figures, you might feel an overwhelming sense of permanence. They refuse to budge even in our …