Images have always stirred ambivalent reactions. Yet whether eliciting fascinated gazes or iconoclastic repulsion from their beholders, they have hardly ever been seen as true sources of knowledge. They were long viewed as mere appearances, placeholders for the things themselves or deceptive illusions. Today, the traditional critique of the spectacle has given way to an unconditional embrace of the visual. However, we still lack a persuasive theoretical account of how images work.
Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy, developing a novel genealogy of both visual studies and the concept of the medium. Alloa reconstructs the earliest Western media theory-Aristotle's concept of the diaphanous milieu of vision-and the significance of its subsequent erasure in the history of science. Ultimately, he argues for a historically informed phenomenology of images and visual media that explains why images are not simply referential depictions, windows onto the world. Instead, images constantly reactivate the power of appearing. As media of visualization, they allow things to appear that could not be visible except in and through these very material devices.
Images have always stirred ambivalent reactions. Yet whether eliciting fascinated gazes or iconoclastic repulsion from their beholders, they have hardly ever been seen as true sources of knowledge. They were long viewed as mere appearances, placeholders for the things themselves or deceptive illusions. Today, the traditional critique of the spectacle has given way to an unconditional embrace of the visual. However, we still lack a persuasive theoretical account of how images work.
Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy, developing a novel genealogy of both visual studies and the concept of the medium. Alloa reconstructs the earliest Western media theory-Aristotle's concept of the diaphanous milieu of vision-and the significance of its subsequent erasure in the history of science. Ultimately, he argues for a historically informed phenomenology of images and visual media that explains why images are not simply referential depictions, windows onto the world. Instead, images constantly reactivate the power of appearing. As media of visualization, they allow things to appear that could not be visible except in and through these very material devices.
Preface to the English Edition
Introduction
1. Between Thing and Sign: The Hubris of the Image
2. Aristotle’s Foundation of a Media Theory of Appearing
3. Forgetting Media: Traces of the Diaphanous from Themistius to
Berkeley
4. A Phenomenology of Images
5. Media Phenomenology
Conclusion: Seeing Through Images—for an Alternative Theory of
Media
Afterword: Seeing Not Riddling, by Andrew Benjamin
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Emmanuel Alloa is professor of philosophy at the University of
Fribourg, where he holds the Chair for Aesthetics and Philosophy of
Art. His books in English include Resistance of the Sensible World:
An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty (2017), as well as a number of
coedited volumes, including, most recently, Dynamis of the Image:
Moving Images in a Global World (2020). He currently serves as
president of the German Society of Aesthetics.
Nils F. Schott is a lecturer in the Euro-American Program of the
Collège universitaire de Sciences Po, Reims, and coeditor of, among
other books, Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World (Columbia,
2015).
Andrew Benjamin is distinguished professor of architectural theory
at the University of Technology, Sydney, and emeritus professor of
philosophy at Monash University Melbourne. His recent books include
Art’s Philosophical Work (2015), Towards a Relational Ontology:
Philosophy’s Other Possibility (2015), and Virtue in Being: Towards
an Ethics of the Unconditioned (2017).
In this innovative, rich, and powerful book, Emmanuel Alloa
brilliantly shows why images don’t represent the real, but let the
real come into being.
*Jean-Luc Nancy, University of Strasbourg*
Alloa’s tour de force provides an incredibly erudite and insightful
perspective on the phenomenology of images. A must-read for anyone
wishing to analyze the visual imperatives of the world, for which
we have lacked the appropriate tools.
*Chiara Bottici, author of Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond
Imagination and the Imaginary*
Emmanuel Alloa’s Looking Through Images is a real tour de force. A
masterful study of images, media, and visual experience, it
provides an ABC of philosophical struggles with these concepts,
from Aristotle to Berkeley to Descartes, Husserl, Sartre, and
beyond. What is an image? What is a medium? How do we know what we
see, and see what we know? This book is a feast of learning that
ranges across disciplines with admirable precision.
*W. J. T. Mitchell, author of What Do Pictures Want? Essays on
the Lives and Loves of Images*
A real gift to the field of visual studies
*James Elkins, The Art Institute of Chicago*
In a lucid reinterpretation of the European tradition, Emmanuel
Alloa shows that images are not the seduction or distraction of
philosophy but one of its most robust and enduring problems. Here
Geistesgeschichte shows itself the royal road to understanding
media
*John Durham Peters, Yale University*
An exceptionally ambitious book that attempts nothing less than
rethinking the fundamental questions of image theory… a must-read
for anyone with a stake in the theory of image, media and
imagination.
*Radical Philosophy*
Unfailingly acute and deeply informed… a remarkable book.
*Continental Philosophy Review*
an impressive, enriching, and immensely likeable work.
*Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology*
Alloa’s writings appear as a majestic scholastic body of work […]
Looking Through Images is the ideal introduction to his work and a
fundamental piece of literature in media theory.
*Visual Studies*
The book is valuable for dismantling the history and therein the
biases of categories we are most familiar with in thinking of
images.
*Estetika Journal*
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