This study examines the theology of the fourth-century bishop, Hilary of Poitiers, concentrating particularly on two commentaries written at different times in his life. The main focus of the study is on Hilary's anthropological theology.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

Throughout history the image of the non-Jew in Judaism has profoundly influenced the way in which Jews interact with non-Jews. It has also shaped the understanding that Jews have of their own identity, as it determines just what distinguishes them from the non-Jews around them. A crucial element in this is the concept of Noahide law, understood by the ancient rabbis and subsequent Jewish thinkers as incumbent upon all humankind, unlike the full 613 divine commandments of the Torah, which (...) are incumbent on Jews alone. The approach adopted in this now classic study is to consider the history of the idea of Noahide law, and to show how the concept is relevant to practical discussions of the halakhah pertaining to non-Jews and to relations between Jews and non-Jews. The seven chapters that make up the first part of the study examine each of the Noahide laws in turn, with a view to showing their halakhic development in the rabbinic sources, in the codes, and in the responsa literature. The discussion draws primarily on classical texts by traditional commentators as they attempt to deal with living issues from the rabbinic world as equally vital concerns in their own time. The second part deals with the theory of Noahide law, concluding with a consideration of why it is an appropriate starting point for Jewish philosophy today. (shrink)

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I develop a phenomenological account of racialized encounters with works of art and film, wherein the racialized viewer feels cast as perpetually past, coming “too late” to intervene in the meaning of her own representation. This points to the distinctive role that the colonial past plays in mediating and constructing our self-images. I draw on my experience of three exhibitions that take Muslims and/or Arabs as their subject matter and that ostensibly try to interrupt or subvert racialization while reproducing some (...) of its tropes. My examples are the Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015), the exposition Welten der Muslime at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (2011–2017), and a sculpture by Bob and Roberta Smith at the Leeds City Art Gallery, created in response to the imperial power painting, General Gordon’s Last Stand, that is housed there. My interest is in how artworks contribute to the experience of being racialized in ways that not only amplify the circulation of images but also constitute difficult temporal relations to images. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, I argue that such racialized images are temporally gluey, or stuck, so that we are weighted and bogged down by them. This essay received Honorable Mention from the American Society for Aesthetics Feminist Caucus Committee in the Feminist Research Essay prize in 2020. (shrink)

1. This book is a fascinating look at how early cinema and moving images inspired and were inspired by other more static forms of visual culture, such as painting, photography, and tableaux vivants. The contributors to this volume demonstrate how cinema responded to and was positioned within broader artistic and cultural frameworks. 2. This book is another strong contribution to the Proceedings of Domitor series, of which we are now the sole publishers. 3. It will benefit from our well established (...) reputation in early cinema studies. (shrink)

Certain anthropological narratives of South Africa's Eastern Cape province, such as Monica Hunter's 1936 Reaction to Conquest and Philip Mayer's 1963 Townsmen or Tribesmen, persist as potent referential 'bodies of knowledge'. By laying down the coordinates of Black rural and urban experience, such studies continue to animate concepts of tradition and modernity, effectively conjuring up notions of 'the border', both literally and metaphorically. Encountering Pauline Ingle's photographic collection amidst these circuits of knowledge and ways of seeing is to recognise that (...) it is both unusual and exceptional. It is a collection of over 4000 images that are not only located in a rural area but also covers a sustained time period, corresponding to the period of formal apartheid. The concept of the rural is amplified in the collection, positioning it as a site of development, as the 'not yet modern', in which subjects are figured both in class hierarchies and in relation to Daniel Morolong's urban photographs in and around East London in the 1950s. Employing the theory of social acts enables a re-contemplation of the subject, and a reading of the social that suggests a set of possibilities and futures beyond what currently constitutes the rural and the urban; and upturns the disciplinary optics that condition the predominating ethnographies and historiographies of the Eastern Cape. (shrink)

Boulding discusses the image as the key to understanding society and human behavior.

In the Islamic philosophical tradition, it seems that the image of woman has not been studied very much and the role of woman has hardly ever mentioned. First, we will briefly explain why we chose the concept of imagination. Afterward, from which sources the Islamic philosophical tradition has formed its concepts, and as a result, we would try to talk about where it established philosophy, whether it was theoretical or practical. Finally, we want to finish the subject by giving (...) examples from the fact of women in Islamic philosophical tradition. (shrink)

Now available in English for the first time, The Visibility of the Image explores the development of an influential aesthetic tradition through the work of six figures. Analysing their contribution to the progress of formal aesthetics, from its origins in Germany in the 1880s to semiotic interpretations in America a century later, the six chapters cover: Robert Zimmermann (1824-1898), the first to separate aesthetics and metaphysics and approach aesthetics along the lines of formal logic, providing a purely syntactic way (...) of using signs, regardless of objective content; Alois Riegl (1858-1905), who went on to further develop aesthetics on the model of formal logic, creating a theory of style in response to Zimmermann's call for an aesthetics oriented toward formal logic; Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), who represents a step toward an understanding of consciousness by using pictures as cognitive tools; Konrad Fiedler (1841-1895), the Saxon philosopher who considered the possibility that some kinds of images are made and viewed not for what they show, but for their visibility's sake alone; Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), responsible for taking up the connections between the problems of reducing the range of potential meanings and contexts of a given image down to just the picture surface; Charles William Morris (1901-1979), who set out to establish whether a picture with no objective reference, such as an abstract painting, still counts as a sign, and if so, in what sense. Bringing these thinkers together and interlinking their ideas, Lambert Wiesing presents an engaging history of formal aesthetics, while reconstructing the philosophical foundations for the appearance of new image forms in the 20th century, including the video-clip, abstract collage, digital simulation and virtual reality. Using this original approach, The Visibility of the Image introduces the rise of modern image theory and provides a valuable account of our engagement with pictures in the 21st century. (shrink)

The present ecological crisis imposes a rethinking of the relation between the human being and the rest of nature. Traditional theological articulations of this relation have proven problematic where they foster separatism and anthropocentrism, which give a false report on the relation and have a negative impact on thinking and acting in relation to nature. One place to begin rethinking is through an exploration of the affirmation that the human being is “made in the image of God,”imago dei. Some (...) ways of construing the theological meaning of this designation are more helpful than others. Science has recognized the extent to which the human being is not only dependent upon but even emergent from nature. We are made of the same “stuff” that makes up the rest of the universe. We are nature. The place of the human being is much more modest, recent, and precarious than usually acknowledged in theological reflection. New ways of interpreting our role within nature must evolve out of this new understanding. Philip Hefner has proposed that we think of the human being as created co-creator. His is a distinctive and promising contribution. This essay responds with both affirmations and friendly questions. (shrink)

Living inside the text : canon and creation -- A strange bridge: connecting the image and the idol -- The liturgy of creation in the cosmic temple -- The image of God on the temple walls -- Turning the imago Dei upside down: idolatry and the prophetic stance -- Inverting the inversion: idols and the perfect image in the New Testament -- The rise of suspicion: the religious criticism of religion -- Significance and security in a new (...) key. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to defend feminist film studies of the image of women in film approach, where that is understood as having no necessary commitment to psychoanalysis.

In the pages of the Latin chroniclers writing around 1200 the jongleur appears as a gray, furtive shadow. His existence was acknowledged by the broad term joculator, but his functions were too suspect to deserve further comment. The clerical chroniclers associated jongleurs with other lay activities, such as making love, admiring feminine beauty, holding festivities, and fighting in tournaments, about which the less said, the better. In contemporary vernacular literature, however, the jongleur's image springs into sharp focus and takes (...) on vivid colors. (shrink)

Despite their intuitive appeal and a long philosophical history, imagery-based accounts of the imagination have fallen into disfavor in contemporary discussions. The philosophical pressure to reject such accounts seems to derive from two distinct sources. First, the fact that mental images have proved difficult to accommodate within a scientific conception of mind has led to numerous attempts to explain away their existence, and this in turn has led to attempts to explain the phenomenon of imagining without reference to such ontologically (...) dubious entities as mental images. Second, even those philosophers who accept mental images in their ontology have worried about what seem to be fairly obvious examples of imaginings that occur without imagery. In this paper, I aim to relieve both these points of philosophical pressure and, in the process, develop a new imagery-based account of the imagination: the imagery model. (shrink)

The Image of Law is the first book to examine law through the work of Gilles Deleuze, activating his thought within problems of jurisprudence and developing a concept of judgment that acknowledges its inherently creative capacity.

This thesis aims to clarify the intrinsic characteristics of ‘image’ of everything for the image in the society of the fourth industrial revolution by the phenomenological dimention based on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and to clarify the value of image, the intrinsic characteristics of ‘painting-image’, ‘photo-image’ and ‘film-image’. It will reveal that ‘thing-image’, ‘artifact-image’, ‘digital image’, ‘robot-image’ become the images for society of humanities by these clarifications. The image of everything is (...) ‘appearance-image’ to reveal itself, ‘expression-image’ from the phenomenological, ontic point of view, and ‘image-being’ as ‘being as image and being image’ from the phenomenological, ontological point of view. The augmented reality-image is the image of fusion of virtual image+real image+body-subject image. Things-images in the world of Internet of Things(IoT) become things-images of digital communication. Painting-image, photo-image, film-image are text-images. The painting to paint a correspondence of perceptive phenomena and natural affairs themselves means the painting of the image to fuse the diverse images on horizon-image of natural affairs themselves by the multilateral, intentional vision. The sense of the intentional photo-image, the meaning of being of body-subject, and the facticity and singularity of object itself of photo shoot reveal the intrinsic characteristics of photo-image. The film-images in film manifest the intrinsic characteristics of the connective flesh between them mutually. Finally, it is necessary that the value of the intrinsic characteristics of image in the society of the fourth industrial revolution becomes the value for the righteous personality. (shrink)

Feminism is the most visible movement in film criticism today, and the most dominant trend in that movement is psychoanalytically informed. Psychoanalytic feminism came to this position in film studies at the very latest by the early to mid-1980s. Before the consolidation and ascendancy of this particular variety of feminism, earlier approaches to the study of women and film included the search for a suppressed canon of women filmmakers--a feminist version of the auteur theory--and the study of the image (...) of women in films, primarily the image of women in films by men. Neither of these approaches mandated a reliance on psychoanalysis, though, of course, one could pursue these research programs while also embracing psychoanalysis. My particular interest in this essay is to defend the study of the image of women in film, regarding that project as logically independent from the resort to psychoanalysis. In speaking of this approach to feminist film criticism, I have in mind writing on cinema from the early [nineteen-] seventies like Molly Haskell's From Reverence to rape which paralleled research in literary studies such as Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. Work of this sort called to our attention the ways the imagery of women in our culture recurrently portrayed them through a limited, constraining, and ultimately oppressive repertory of characterizations. (shrink)

EVER SINCE Plato declared imagining to be mere pseudo- or shadow-knowing—a form of eikasia, the lowest species of mental activity—Western philosophers have striven to put imagination in its place: a strictly subordinate place. With the exception of isolated figures such as Vico, Collingwood, and Bachelard, philosophers have denounced imagining for its digressiveness and excoriated it for its evasiveness, though sometimes surreptitiously admiring it for these very qualities. At the same time, and as part of the same deprecatory tactic, invidious comparisons (...) have been instituted between imagining and supposedly superior psychical activities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, the paradigm was pure thinking, over against which imagining appeared as deceitful and mendacious—as "the mistress of falsehood and error" in Pascal’s classic complaint. Even Kant, for all of his attention to imagination as a source of synthesis, considered the image to be "a mere set of particular qualities, determined by no assignable rule"—in contrast with the determinacy and rule-bound character of pure concepts. Kant, as much as Descartes or Pascal, Malebranche or Mersenne, Spinoza or Leibniz, would agree with Heidegger’s stern verdict that philosophical thinking is "charmless and image-poor.". (shrink)

Painting can only be thought in relation to the image. And yet, with (and within) painting what continues to endure is the image of painting. While this is staged explicitly in, for example, paintings of St. Luke by artists of the Northern Renaissance—e.g., Rogier van der Weyden, Jan Gossaert, and Simon Marmion—the same concerns are also at work within both the practices as well as the contemporaneous writings that define central aspects of the Italian Renaissance. The aim of (...) this paper is to begin an investigation into the process by which painting stages the activity of painting. This forms part of a project whose aim is an investigation of the way philosophy should respond to the essential historicity of art (where the latter is understood philosophically). (shrink)

I develop a phenomenological account of racialized encounters with works of art and film, wherein the racialized viewer feels cast as perpetually past, coming “too late” to intervene in the meaning of her own representation. This points to the distinctive role that the colonial past plays in mediating and constructing our self‐images. I draw on my experience of three exhibitions that take Muslims and/or Arabs as their subject matter and that ostensibly try to interrupt or subvert racialization while reproducing some (...) of its tropes. My examples are the Jean‐Joseph Benjamin‐Constant exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015), the exposition Welten der Muslime at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (2011–2017), and a sculpture by Bob and Roberta Smith at the Leeds City Art Gallery, created in response to the imperial power painting, General Gordon's Last Stand, that is housed there. My interest is in how artworks contribute to the experience of being racialized in ways that not only amplify the circulation of images but also constitute difficult temporal relations to images. Drawing on Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, I argue that such racialized images are temporally gluey, or stuck, so that we are weighted and bogged down by them. -/- This essay received Honorable Mention from the American Society for Aesthetics Feminist Caucus Committee as runner-up in the Feminist Research Essay prize in 2020. (shrink)

L'objet de cet article est de déterminer et d'analyser l'image de la Vierge Marie dans la piété russe. Dans cette culture marquée par l'Empire Byzantin et la religion chrétienne orthodoxe, la figure de la Vierge Marie n'a pas, comme dans l'occident catholique, été supplantée par des idéalisations comme Béatrix pour Dante ou l'amour courtois pour le Moyen-Age, de sorte que son image a continué de jouer un rôle prépondérant dans la piété populaire russe.

Following thinkers of the archive such as Derrida, Foucault and Groys, among others, one of the ethical functions of the archive is to enable differentiation: to do archival work is to unlock difference. Yet how is one to deem the archival content outside of those moments in which we deliberately engage with it? More specifically, how is one to think the spectatorial relation to images that, assigned to the sequestered space of the archive, remain most of the time without spectators? (...) In approaching the archival mode through the philosophical lens of sublation and its Hegelian precursor of Aufhebung that performs alteration through preservation-as-cancellation, this essay sets out to articulate a phenomenology of the archived photograph as an image of, or in, sublation. Exploring the fragile dynamics at stake between the archived and its non-archived outside, emphasis is laid on the critical contradictions inherent in the logics of archivization: seeking to preserve its documents, the archive cannot do so without also provoking further differentiation. (shrink)

Social theory draws energy not just from the concepts it articulates but also from the images it invokes. This article explores the image of the veil in social theory. Unlike the mask, which suggests a binary account of human conduct (what is covered can be uncovered), the veil summons a wide range of human experiences. Of special importance is the veil’s association with religion. In radical social thought, some writers ironize this association by “unveiling” religion as fraudulent (a move (...) indistinguishable from unmasking it.) Baron d’Holbach and Marx offer classic examples of this stratagem. But other writers, notably Du Bois and Fanon, take a more nuanced and more theoretically productive approach to both religion and the veil. Refusing to debunk religion, these authors treat the veil—symbol and material culture—as a resource to theorize about social conflict. Proceeding in three stages, I, first, contrast the meanings of mask and unmasking with more supple veil imagery; second, identify anti-religious unveiling that is tantamount to unmasking; and, third, examine social theories of the veil that clarify the stakes of social adversity and political struggle. Du Bois’s and Fanon’s contributions to veil imagery receive special attention. (shrink)

The paper explores the imagery and constructions of alterity in the contemporary world. The image of the other is at the same time the image of ourselves, mostly through the metaphor of the?stranger.? This?stranger? represents the unknown, so he/she occasionally provokes fear and resentment, if only for appearing physically different in the?mainstream? culture. This paper traces the genesis and development of certain modernist ideals. The apparent lack of comprehension for others is just a symptom of the much deeper (...) disorder - in the quest for rationality, the meaning of simple human communication seems to be forgotten. Just like in a hall of mirrors, the images that people encounter are basically the images of them?selves - only they have been distorted through nationalist or racist rhetoric. Using the examples from theory as well as from specific cultures, and following on the works of scholars like Kristeva, Linke and Balibar, the author demonstrates the logic behind the need to exclude others, as well as the fact that all of these attempts will eventually back?fire. For we cannot exclude others if we do not at the same time exclude ourselves. U tekstu se razmatraju predstave i konstrukcije drugosti u savremenom svetu. Slike drugih su u isto vreme i predstave nas s?mih, pre svega kroz metaforu?stranca?.?Stranac? ovde predstavlja nepoznato i, kao takav, ona/on moze izazvati strah i odbojnost, makar i samo zbog toga sto izgleda drugacije od pripadnika?osnovne? ili?domace? kulture. U tekstu se razmatra razvoj odredjenih modernistickih ideala. Ono sto izgleda kao nedostatak razumevanja za druge samo je simptom mnogo dubljeg poremecaja - u potrazi za racionalnoscu izgleda da je zaboravljeno znacenje jednostavne ljudske komunikacije. Bas kao u dvorani sa ogledalima, predstave na koje ljudi nailaze su slike njih samih - samo sto su izmenjene nacionalistickom ili rasistickom retorikom. Koristeci primere iz teorije, kao i iz razlicitih kultura i pozivajuci se na radove autora poput Kristeve, Linke i Balibara, autor ukazuje na logiku izopstavanja drugih, kao i na cinjenicu da mnogi ovakvi pokusaji izopstavanja prerastaju u sopstvenu suprotnost. Jer nemoguce je izbaciti druge a da u isto vreme ne izbacimo i sebe same. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Grounding is often glossed as metaphysical causation, yet no current theory of grounding looks remotely like a plausible treatment of causation. I propose to take the analogy between grounding and causation seriously, by providing an account of grounding in the image of causation, on the template of structural equation models for causation.

This essay explores the polemics that took place in France in 2001 on the occasion of an exhibition of photographs of Nazi concentration and extermination camps. The article analyzes hostile responses to this exhibition and to its catalogue, written by art historian Georges Didi-Huberman. Condemned for having transgressed an apparent prohibition of the representation of the Holocaust in France, Didi-Huberman responded with a book that tackles the questions of representation in relation to war and trauma. While recognizing the ethical and (...) intellectual merits of Didi-Huberman's response, the essay nonetheless suggests that the French debate, whether it promotes or demotes images of the Holocaust, seems to perpetuate an apocalyptic, allegorical, and sublime reading of Auschwitz. (shrink)

If anything marks the image, it is a deep ambivalence. Denounced as superficial, illusory, and groundless, images are at the same time attributed with exorbitant power and assigned a privileged relation to truth. In this collection of writings on images and visual art, the author explores this through an extraordinary range of references.

The primary aim of this article is to point up an essential attitude, an anxiety even, that has inflected – and perhaps inhibited - our engagement with film. Film theory has been marked by a ‘refusal to see, a looking away’ (Mulvey & Wollen 1976, 36), and my suggestion is that this has achieved its fullest expression in those strands of film theory heavily influenced by psychoanalysis. These, in turn, have remained within a gendered conceptual framework whereby the discursive or (...) the narrative is associated with the masculine, and the image or spectacle is aligned with the feminine. This is not to reject these applications out of hand but rather to revisit this area with its blind spots in mind and to consider aspects that are perhaps at once obvious but often overlooked. (shrink)

So much of the history of science has been written from the point of view of the scientist or the proto-scientist that it may be salutary for the modern reader occasionally to consider how science and its early practitioners were viewed from the outside. We must not be too surprised if a pioneering activity performed by controversial agents was misunderstood or misrepresented and if what emerges is, therefore, sometimes less of a portrait than a caricature. We are concerned here much (...) less with what natural philosophers actually did than what they were thought to have done, or what they were thought to stand for. The image is sometimes more influential than the reality. Considering that the period to be studied is one of major political and social unrest and that the principal spokesman, Edmund Burke (1729–1797), had made his reputation mainly in the arena of parliamentary politics, we can anticipate rather more polemic than dispassionate argument. In the formation of public opinion a colourful exaggeration or even an occasional sneer are often more effective than the objective exposition of a case. The spectacles through which Burke looked at his world sometimes magnified and often distorted, but they produced a view of knowledge and society shared by many of his contemporaries and of considerable subsequent influence. (shrink)

Suppose there comes a day when Homo sapiens has evolved into or been overtaken by techno sapiens. Will it then still make sense to speak of human beings as created in the image of God? What is the relevance of asking such a question today? I offer a sketch of the present state of development and discussion in artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial life (AL) and discuss some implications for the human condition. Taking into account both reality and fiction (...) in AI and AL, I hold that, regardless of the degree of realization, issues related to technological evolution inform the cultural agenda—at least the European–American one. I comment on antireductionist arguments and on arguments from philosophy and (history of) culture. I argue in favor of a consonance between neurotechnology and the Christian gospel in terms of realizing the marks of messianic life. However, issues of justice, reason versus nature, and perfection and finitude versus imperfection and immortality call for further illumination. Even though no principal opposition seems to exist between technological evolution and possible interpretations of the concept of the image of God (imago dei), a number of significant dissimilarities need to be addressed, such as the differences between technical improvement and forgiveness or transformation and between immortality and resurrection. The role of irregularity, disturbance, and error for creative processes in nature and culture is an exciting topic in science and technology as well as in theology. (shrink)

En sus Apologías y discursos de las conquistas occidentales, Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, apoyándose en Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, pretende justificar el dominio español americano. En sus planteamientos es posible constatar un cambio de la noción de bárbaro, que se puede interpretar como una ampliación del concepto de siervo por naturaleza, a partir de la caracterización del indio como alguien ya sometido pero que, de una u otra manera, trata de resistirse a un dominio impuesto y no querido. Así, las (...) ideas de Vargas Machuca al respecto se pueden entender como un aporte para la comprensión filosófica de la construcción de la imagen tanto del indio como del indiano por el tiempo del inicio de la Colonia. Resumen En sus Apologías y discursos de las conquistas occidentales , Bernardo de Vargas Machuca, apoyándose en Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, pretende justificar el dominio español americano. En sus planteamientos es posible constatar un cambio de la noción de bárbaro, que se puede interpretar como una ampliación del concepto de siervo por naturaleza, a partir de la caracterización del indio como alguien ya sometido pero que, de una u otra manera, trata de resistirse a un dominio impuesto y no querido. Así, las ideas de Vargas Machuca al respecto se pueden entender como un aporte para la comprensión filosófica de la construcción de la imagen tanto del indio como del indiano por el tiempo del inicio de la Colonia.In its Apologías y discursos de las conquistas occidentales , Bernardo de Vargas Machuca pretends to justify the Spanish dominion on America taking support on Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. In its account it is possible to note a change in the notion of a Barbarian, which can be interpreted as an extension of the concept of “slavery by nature”. From this point of view the Indian is conceived as someone who is submitted but who nevertheless tries to resist to an unwilled and imposed domination. Thus Vargas Machuca claims on this matter can be understood as a contribution to the philosophical understanding of the conception, during the Colonial time, of the Indian as well as of the indiano. (shrink)