Homer, Milton, Ossian. The aesthetic history of blindness goes straight to heart of visual modernity. This book examines this history in France and Germany around 1800 with reference to the philosophical and literary functionalizations of negation. In this, the blind individual figures as a counter-pole to visual enlightenment, an instantiation of the hierarchy of the senses, an idealistic metaphor for the process of negation, an embodiment of the sacralization of poetry, and finally as an exponent of a transitory form of seeing and of the optical unconscious, as represented by photograph negativity around 1900.