This review of Emmanuel Alloa's Looking through Images considers the author's arguments with regard to their philosophical bearings and their significance for modern visual aesthetics. Particular attention is paid to the way that the traditions of Platonic and Aristotelian Realism are linked to modern phenomenological theory (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Marion). Alloa's elegant and lucid exploration of the image as a form of non-propositional cognition makes this monograph a landmark document in contemporary visual studies and aesthetic theory. Keywords Image theory • Phenomenology • Media theory • Plato • Aristotle • Husserl Considering the sharply divergent styles and concerns of Anglo-American and European philosophy, respectively, it is perhaps not surprising, though still regrettable, that it should have taken ten years for this remarkable book to be translated into English. Making at last its appearance a decade after its original publication in German (Das durchscheinende Bild: Konturen einer medialen Phänomenologie, 2011), Emmanuel Alloa's Looking Through Images: A Phenomenology of Visual Mediaably rendered into English by Nils F. Schott-should help establish its author on this side of the Atlantic as a leading thinker on the interconnected fields of phenomenology, visual studies, as well as image-, icon-, and media theory. English translations of a number of Alloa's essays had prepared the ground for this reception, as did his excellent introduction to the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Resistance to the Sensible World, 2017).

Discussing two recent monographs (STIJN BUSSELS, The Animated Image: Roman Theory on Naturalism, Vividness and Divine Power, and ANNE SHEPPARD, The Poetics of Phantasia: Imagination in Ancient Aesthetics), the review essay develops some salient points made by both authors, especially regarding the relation of images, material and mental alike, to the power and activity of imagination. It suggests that ancient authors tend to connect the much-discussed issue of the animated images to precisely this activity, which typically operates on the borderlines between the sensible world and its intellectual reflection. The latter need not acquire the shape of a theory: it can as well, perhaps better, translate back into the imaginative activity of the arts themselves. To show in more detail how this imaginative process works, the essay choses one text that speaks about painting, and another that treats sculpture. In the first case (which elaborates upon Bussels’ book), the focus is on Pliny’s Historia naturalis XXXV and its discourse on how the origins of art that will become painting consist in constructing an absent life, be it one imprinted in the ancestral portraits (imagines), or one evoked through a subtly traced silhouette. In the second case (which finds its point of departure in Sheppard’s book), the essay revisits Flavius Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana and its discourse on phantasia, with a special concern for Phidias’ statue of Zeus at Olympia. It concludes that, pace Sheppard and others, Philostratus’ dealing with imagination and the arts need not assume the Neoplatonic filiation. In its conclusions, the essay submits that both material images and verbally induced visualizations reveal themselves as images only if we recognize their power to animate our consciousness of not only the world, but ourselves as human beings.

English: In the mid-sixties, American artists such as Robert Smithson, Dan Graham and Bruce Nauman got interested in the issue of vision. Probably influenced by the increasing popularity of a scientific literature that often dealt with matters of optical perception as well as by the debates triggered of by the Op Art craze, which placed the physiology of the eye under great scrutiny, these artists used obsolete optical devices such as the stereoscope or brand new technologies such as closed-circuit television to produce works that no longer were mere visual objects to be looked at, but that became optical situations staging the very processes and structures of vision. Reversing the usual (power) relation of sight, these works set up what one might call an intransitive vision. Instead of opening onto a visual content, vision materializes, shows and exhibits itself. By overexposing vision, Smithson, Graham and Nauman do not exalt the visual. On the contrary, they highlight its faults and aim at deconstructing its physiological reflexes (such as binocular vision) and its cultural biases (like perspective). Exhibiting vision can therefore be a way to escape the all-might of the visual since ultimately, as Smithson put it, “to see one’s sight means visible blindness”. Here lies the paradox this talk plans to tackle: the display of vision would equate its failure. French: Cette communication analysera la manière dont, à partir du milieu des années 1960, les artistes américains Robert Smithson, Dan Graham et Bruce Nauman s’emparèrent de la question de la vision. Influencés par un contexte artistique qui, avec le succès de l’art optique, questionnait la physiologie de l’œil et le rôle du cerveau dans la perception visuelle, exposés à une littérature de vulgarisation scientifique qui faisait la part belle aux questions d’optique, et convoquant des dispositifs optiques désuets tel que le stéréoscope ou des technologies nouvelles comme la vidéo en circuit-fermé, Smithson, Nauman et Graham produisirent un ensemble d’œuvres qui n’étaient pas tant des objets visuels (soit, des objets à voir) que des situations optiques mettant-en-scène les structures et les processus de la vision elle-même. Opérant un renversement de la relation traditionnelle qui place le regard du côté du spectateur, ces œuvres fonctionnaient en établissant ce que l’on nommera une vision intransitive, soit une vision qui n’est plus ouverture et mise en forme d’un contenu visuel, mais qui se montre elle-même, se matérialise et s’exhibe. En surexposant ainsi la vision, Smithson, Graham et Nauman n’exaltent pas le visuel. Au contraire, ils en pointent les dysfonctionnements et en déconstruisent les réflexes physiologiques (celui de la vision binoculaire par exemples) et les impensés culturels (tels que le réflexe perspectif). Exposer la vision apparaît finalement comme le meilleur moyen d’échapper à la toute-puissance du visuel puisque, ainsi que l’écrit Robert Smithson au sujet des ses Enantiomorphic Chambers : « voir sa vue, équivaut à l’aveuglement rendu visible ». Tel est le paradoxe que l’on souhaite placer au cœur de notre réflexion : exhiber la vision, ce serait la mettre en échec.

Many American Renaissance transcendentalists imagine men as self-contained but permeable orbs, which are both organs of sight and individual planets in their own orbits. This conception is the result of an American pantheism that imaginatively merges and fragments human and divine bodies into parts, which are themselves, like Emerson's eye, also at times considered wholes. For the purposes of this essay, I define American pantheism as the deification of nature--the All of nature and in effect nature's eye--and the representation of natural law and its Romantic taxonomy of bodies as divine. For the pantheist, the classification of nature, its archetypal models of human and plant development, provides the model of divine order: all substances become part of a great chain of being with the eye at the top. I argue that a language of visual self-representation determines the nature of male identity in the American Renaissance. This specific language is conspicuous in the writings of mid-century American pantheists, and in Emerson's and Melville's ubiquitous use of the tropes of eyes and orbs to locate the self. In this chapter, I present a narrative of what happens to the eye, the orb, in the pantheist rhetoric of Emerson and Melville. Their version of the American self is manifested as a globular entity, and what happens to that self happens to the eye. The American's union with nature turns out to generate the fragmentation of the self as orb of seeing and being. Emerson's transformation to transparent eyeball in the essay "Nature," which was originally titled "Pan," is the central visual, linguistic, scientific, and representational motif of his transcendentalism. Through this merger--a quintessential form of pantheistic reverie, a giddy transcendence of the self--Emerson is able to become nature, its archetypal form, nature seeing itself through the instrument of man. As an eye whose I disappears and becomes nothing, Emerson merges with the universe, and so becomes diffusely All, and sees all. Emerson attempts such a merger of part with whole, variety with unity, throughout his works, a merger which he considers the essence of transcendentalism, the transcendence of the male self and body. In Emerson's wake, Melville undermines this optimism, one philosophically as well as etymologically based on Emerson's view of the eye; Melville and many of his characters initially experience Emerson's sublime orbit, but ultimately spin away from it fragmented and disillusioned. Melville then recapitulates but finally parodies Emerson's configuration of the orbed and orbiting self, reincorporating his thematics with bitter irony. Eyes are foremost the locus of human representation, so it is not surprising that altering the language of visuality changes not just one aspect of the self, but all the contingent parameters of that self. While the Melvillean characters I discuss initially experiment with pantheism, they undergo some version of the visual dismemberment Pierre experiences in its most dramatic form.

The current understanding of the expanded image is based on visual experiences provided by information turbulence in contemporary convergent media. We are therefore challenged to rethink everything we have come to understand about visuality, including the very physics of light and the physiology of the human eye. This essay will develop an alternative philosophy of visual perception based on hints given by Martin Heidegger and partially developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It involves devising a new language for seeing that looks into the light of the technological world as a way of apprehending the self-luminous. This results in the creation of an ontological sight capable of looking beyond the objectification of what is, revealing the way humans come into contact with other beings, both natural and technological. Exploring the ideas of Herbert Damish and Jacques Taminiaux, this essay will show that we can no longer cling to contemporary notions of sight that say we have, on the one...

Incomprehensible Certainty presents a sustained reflection on the nature of images and the phenomenology of visual experience. Taking the “image” (eikōn) as the essential medium of art and literature and as foundational for the intuitive ways in which we make contact with our “lifeworld,” Thomas Pfau draws in equal measure on Platonic metaphysics and modern phenomenology to advance a series of interlocking claims. First, Pfau shows that, beginning with Plato’s later dialogues, being and appearance came to be understood as ontologically distinct from (but no longer opposed to) one another. Second, in contrast to the idol that is typically gazed at and visually consumed as an object of desire, this study positions the image (eikōn) as a medium whose intrinsic abundance and excess reveal to us its metaphysical function, namely, as the visible analogue of an invisible, numinous reality. Finally, the interpretations unfolded in this book (from Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Damascene via Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, and Nicholas of Cusa to modern writers and artists such as Goethe, Ruskin, Turner, Hopkins, C zanne, and Rilke) affirm the essential complementarity of image and word, visual intuition and hermeneutic practice, in theology, philosophy, and literature. Like Pfau’s previous book, Minding the Modern, Incomprehensible Certainty is a major work. With over fifty illustrations, the book will interest students and scholars of philosophy, theology, literature, and art history.

This book is about the nature of images. It begins with a theory about how semiotics is more or less ruined by images, even though parts of it can be recovered in an historically specific fashion. The book compares familiar Western images with less familiar objects in order to question what we take as natural properties of images. One chapter is about neolithic marking; another is about the prehistoric Balkan Vinca culture, which produced writing-like artifacts; a third is on Persian and Chinese texts about images. This chapter surveys concepts of figure and ground in a number of different disciplines, including cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and Gestalt psychology, in order to broaden and problematize the largely phenomenological and modernist senses of figure and ground that continue to dominate critical writing. Originally published as On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, reissued 2011).