Emmanuel Alloa

Emmanuel Alloa verfolgt die Hypothese, dass Bilder nicht aufgrund irgendeiner Bildblindheit marginalisiert wurden, sondern dass die Subordination des Ikonischen unter andere Sinnkategorien selbst bereits eine strategische Antwort auf die be@01AFunruhigende Kraft der Bilder darstellte. Wenn Bilder wahlweise als Zeichen oder als Dinge begriffen, als 'offene Fenster' verteidigt oder als reglose Objekte diskreditiert wurden, dann legen diese Theorien ein Doppelparadigma frei, das die westliche Tradition seit ihren Anfängen begleitet: Transparenz und Opazität. Das Buch zeichnet die Archäologie dieses Doppelparadigmas nach, das sich vor den Begriff schiebt, den es zu übersetzen beansprucht: das Diaphane. In Aristoteles' Wahrnehmungslehre verweist das Diaphane, als das durchsichtig-durchscheinende Medium der sinnlichen Welt, auf Medialität als elementare Fähigkeit, die Form von etwas annehmen zu können, ohne es zu sein.

Das 20. Jahrhundert war durch eine radikale Rückbesinnung auf die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen von Sprache gekennzeichnet. Der neuzeitliche Traum einer restlosen Benennung des Weltganzen wird fraglich, wenn ihr Medium – die propositionale Aussagelogik – unter Verdacht gerät. Der Band wirft die brisante Frage auf, ob der für das Jahrhundert prägende linguistic turn nicht so sehr in einer Hinwendung, als vielmehr in einer »Abwendung« vom Sagen besteht, die sich in der Entsagungsgeste von Melvilles Bartleby emblematisch verkörpert. Einzelanalysen zu literarischen Strategien bei Mallarmé, Wittgenstein, Celan, Foucault, Adorno, Derrida, Lévinas u.a.m. führen vor, wie Unterlassen nicht nur ein kritisches, sondern auch stets ein schöpferisches Moment in sich birgt.

Erwin Panofsky’s essay “Perspective as Symbolic Form” from 1924 is among the most widely commented essays in twentieth-century aesthetics and was discussed with regard to art theory, Renaissance painting, Western codes of depiction, history of optical devices, psychology of perception, or even ophthalmology. Strangely enough, however, almost nothing has been written about the philosophical claim implicit in the title, i.e. that perspective is a symbolic form among others. The article situates the essay within the intellectual constellation at Aby Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek in Hamburg, and analyzes the role of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms for the members of the Warburg circle. Does perspective meet the requirements for becoming a further “symbolic form,” beyond those outlined by Cassirer? The article argues that, ultimately, perspective cannot possibly be a symbolic form; not because it does not meet Cassirer’s philosophical requirements, but rather, because that would uproot Cassirer’s overall project. While revisiting Panofsky with Cassirer unearths the wide-raging philosophical implication of the essay, revisiting Cassirer with Panofsky means to highlight the fundamentally perspectival nature of all symbolic forms.

In the constitution of contemporary image theory, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy has undoubtedly become a major conceptual reference. Rather than trying to establish what Wittgenstein’s own image theory could possibly look like, this paper would like to critically assess some of the advantages as well as some of the quandaries that arise when using Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘seeing-as’ for addressing the plural realities of images. While putting into evidence the tensions that come into play when applying what was initially a theory of the gaze to a theory of the image, the paper shall subsequently discuss three modes of iconic vision: the propositional seeing-as, the projective seeing-in and the medial seeing-with.

The notion of ‘phenomenotechnique’ which Gaston Bachelard introduced in the 1930’s has enjoyed popularity among historians of science who used it in order to insist upon the technical and social mediateness of scientific facts. In the wake of the current triumphal return to epistemological ‘realism,’ the idea of phenomenotechnique has been dismissed as an alleged relic of ‘constructivism.’ The article advocates for a different reading of ‘phenomenotechnique,’ which, rather than insisting on the fabrication of the scientific fact, highlights the intrinsic connection of phenomenality and technicality. Phenomena are not simply given, they must be brought to visibility. While philosophies of technique have mostly stressed that technicity consists in overlooking the process (the ‘anesthesia’ of the medium), the paper argues for a conception of technicity that makes space for its productive, aestheticizing capacity. Finally, the article gestures towards parameters of what a ‘techno-aesthetics’ could look like.

In the early 1990s, W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm independently proclaimed that the humanities were witnessing a ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic turn’. Twenty years later, we may wonder whether this announcement was describing an event that had already taken place or whether it was rather calling forth for it to happen. The contemporary world is, more than ever, determined by visual artefacts. Still, our conceptual arsenal, forged during centuries of logocentrism, still falls behind the complexity of pictorial meaning. The essay has two parts. In the first, it tries to assess the exact meaning of the ‘pictorial’/’iconic turn’, and (re)places it into the context of Anglo-American visual studies and German Bildwissenschaften. It the second, it addresses the famous claim by the philologist Ernst Robert Curtius that ‘image sciences are easy’ by advocating for three ‘turns of the screw’ to make visual studies more difficult: a shift from iconology to symptomatology, a shift from extensive to intensive and a shift from the indicative to the subjunctive.

A simplistic image of twentieth century French philosophy sees Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961 as the line that divides two irreconcilable moments in its history: existentialism and phenomenology, on the one hand, and structuralism on the other. The structuralist generation claimed to recapture the dimension of objectivity and impersonality, which the previous generation was supposedly incapable of. As a matter of fact, in 1962, Derrida’s edition of Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry was taken to be a turning point that announced the structuralist revolution by introducing a reflection on the historicity and the materiality of impersonal idealities. And yet, the 1998 publication of Merleau-Ponty’s notes from his Collège de France lecture course on the same topic make manifest that he was already taking phenomenology in another direction. His 1959 reading of The Origin of Geometry shows how unexpectedly close the early Derrida is to the late Merleau-Ponty. By identifying the tension between archaeology and teleology as the basic problem of Husserlian phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida each disclose the fundamental importance of history and of writing. Comparing the two readings in their specific context not only brings about a more complex picture of the intellectual debates of the time, but also shows how, with Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of The Origin of Geometry, Derrida’s “différance” predates itself and receives another genealogy.

Depuis la renaissance des études aristotéliciennes avec Werner Jaeger, on a souvent observé la fréquence lexicographique des termes dénotant la médiété et la médiation dans le corpus aristotélicien. Cette récurrence a cependant généralement été traitée comme un effet homonymique, rien ne permettant de relier a priori la médiété éthique, le terme intermédiaire en logique ou encore le milieu perceptif. Et pourtant, le fait qu'Aristote s'interroge lui-même sur cette « plurivocité » du médium peut être lu comme une indication que, sous le couvert d'une apparente homonymie, il y a bien un problème de la médialité qui traverse la pensée du Stagirite. L'article se propose de recenser les figures majeures de cette médialité dans ses déclinaisons éthiques, logiques et aïsthétiques, afin de déterminer dans quelle mesure une relecture du corpus à l'aune de la médialité permet de dépasser l'alternative entre une lecture fonctionnaliste et une lecture naturaliste d'Aristote.

A história intelectual do século XX tem sido escrita ao longo de um cenário que vê, na morte de Merleau-Ponty em 1961, a linha de divisória entre uma geração existencial e fenomenológica e o evento do estruturalismo imediatamente subsequente. A publicação das notas de leitura de Merleau-Ponty sobre o texto A origem da geometria, de Edmund Husserl, tem mostrado quão frágeis são os alicerces desta leitura simplificadora. Na verdade, enquanto a tradução e introdução de Derrida ao texto de Husserl, de 1962, tornavam-se um texto fundamentador para a geração estruturalista, introduzindo uma reflexão sobre a historicidade e a materialidade da idealidade, foi apenas em 1998, com a publicação das notas da conferência de Merleau-Ponty no Collège de France, em 1959, sobre o mesmo tópico, que se tornou claro quão próximo está o primeiro Derrida do último Merleau-Ponty. Assim como Derrida, Merleau-Ponty identificou, na tensão husserliana entre arqueologia e teleologia, o problema básico da fenomenologia, introduzindo a questão da história e a do meio de transmissão cultural. Comparar tais leituras em seu contexto específico não apenas permite um retrato mais complexo dos debates intelectuais da época, mas também mostra como, com a interpretação de Merleau-Ponty sobre A origem da geometria, a "diferença" de Derrida antecede-se e admite outra genealogia.

As Hegel once said, in Byzantium, between homoousis and homoiousis, the difference of one letter could decide the life and death of thousands. As this article seeks to argue, Byzantine thinking was not only attentive to conceptual differences, but also to iconic ones. The iconoclastic controversy (726-842 AD) arose from two different interpretations of the nature of images: whereas iconoclastic philosophy is based on the assumption of a fundamental 'iconic identity', iconophile philosophy defends the idea of'iconic difference'. And while the reception in the Latin West of the controversies over the image as a mere problem of referentiality of the letter explains why its originality has remained underestimated for centuries, reexamining Byzantine visual thinking in the light of today's 'pictorial turn' reveals its striking modernity.

Die elf Beiträge dieses Bandes gehen aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln dem Problem der Verkörperung von Sinn nach: phänomenologische, psychoanalytische und sprachwissenschaftliche Ansätze bilden dabei den Schwerpunkt; sie werden aber durch Studien aus der Literaturtheorie, der politischen Theorie und der Filmwissenschaft ergänzt. Was heißt es – das ist die zentrale Frage –, den Körper als leibliches Medium aufzufassen, welches Sinn nicht nur verkörpert, sondern überhaupt erst entstehen lässt? Gibt es bereits eine Sprache des Leibes diesseits der Ebene ausdrücklicher Rede?

Das 20. Jahrhundert war durch eine radikale Rückbesinnung auf die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen von Sprache gekennzeichnet. Der neuzeitliche Traum einer restlosen Benennung des Weltganzen wird fraglich, wenn ihr Medium – die propositionale Aussagelogik – unter Verdacht gerät. Der Band wirft die brisante Frage auf, ob der für das Jahrhundert prägende linguistic turn nicht so sehr in einer Hinwendung, als vielmehr in einer »Abwendung« vom Sagen besteht, die sich in der Entsagungsgeste von Melvilles Bartleby emblematisch verkörpert. Einzelanalysen zu literarischen Strategien bei Mallarmé, Wittgenstein, Celan, Foucault, Adorno, Derrida, Lévinas u.a.m. führen vor, wie Unterlassen nicht nur ein kritisches, sondern auch stets ein schöpferisches Moment in sich birgt.

“What we have learned from Saussure” affirms Merleau-Ponty “is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs.” While it has often been stressed that Merleau-Ponty was arguably among the earliest philosophical readers of Saussure, the real impact of this reading on Merleau-Ponty’s thinking has rarely been assessed in detail. By focusing on the middle period – the years between the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception and the abandonment of the book project The Prose of the World – a special interest in language and its ideality becomes all the more evident. Now this period is crucial for understanding the turn of the later years: similarly to Saussure, who shifted the problem of meaning from a problem of referentiality to an issue of self-differentiation of the linguistic field, Merleau-Ponty shifts his account of perception from a relationship based on sensory subjects and perceived objects to an immanent differentiation of the sensible world. The genesis ofan articulated world can be conceptualized with the experience of children’s language acquisition and the phenomenon of “deflation.” At a certain point in her development, the child interrupts her incessant babbling and learns to shape pauses and silences, which are the precondition for meaningful sounds. Learning how to speak – as it were – would thus be learning how not to speak. The child may only enter a specific language by means of a phonematic restriction; to become a member of a language community is to lose the capacity to speak all languages.

In 20th century thinking, few concepts have provoked as many misunderstandings as Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘Flesh’. Such misunderstandings (of which the article sketches the outline of an archaeology) rest on the initial assumption that the Flesh has to be derived from the body. The article suggests that the dominant readings of the Flesh can be organized along what could respectively be called the scenario of propriety and the scenario of expansion, beyond which a third way comes into view which does not think Flesh as plenitude, but as an interstitial fabric. In this sense, the genesis of the last ontology of the Flesh is neither to be found in Husserl or in a simple anti-Sartrianism, but in a fecund and still underestimated reading of Saussure’s notion of the diacritics. The ontological turn of the last writings can thus only be understood on the grounds of the expressive turn from the intermediate period.

Der Band fragt nach der Kraft der Imagination, die im Reich der Episteme ein besonders schwer zu fassender, nicht immer gern gesehener Gast ist. Wie viel Fantasie braucht die Kunst, vor allem aber das wissenschaftliche Wissen? Wir bearbeiten dieses weite Feld, indem wir nach auslösenden Momenten, bildenden Prozessen und materiellen Substraten fragen. Danach, wie imaginiert wird, und womit: in der Wissenschaft, der Kunst, im Alltag. Bildern kommt die spezifische Rolle operativer Instrumente der Imagination zu, als Relais, als Ruhepunkte, an denen sich kreative Prozesse gleichsam selbstreflexiv manifestieren - aber auch als Impulsgeber, die Betrachtern ermöglichen, ihre Begrenztheit wahrzunehmen und zu überschreiten.

The category of « postmemory » has been invoked by Marianne Hirsch to refer to a traumatic past which is not directly remembered in first person, but is handed down to later generations and is recalled through the mediation of narratives and images which become “prostheses” for a lack of direct memory. But how is it that these prosthetic recollections do not simply substitute for what lacks but seem to shape the very events they are meant to reproduce? How come an event continues to haunt the memories of the present, even when no immediate remembrance of it is left? How to think of an “afterimage” of something that was never seen in the first place? It is only quite recently that the role of prosthetic images has been more widely acknowledged in the construction and creation of memories of collective trauma. The paper will focus on the role of photographic images played in remembrance of the Armenian genocide. It shall be shown how the few pictures that were taken by witnesses of the deportations had an afterlife of their own, being reframed and receiving specific interpretations. In particular, the paper will discuss the case of Armin T. Wegner, a German voluntary serving as Sanitary Officer in the Turkish army who, during his fieldwork in 1915/16 in Anatolia and on the Euphrates in Syria, documented the final stages of deportation, taking pictures of the camps at the desert’s fringes. His photos, which are among the most important visual testimonies of the extermination, only belatedly later made Wegner aware of what he had been witnessing, turning him into a witness après coup and to a defender of the Armenian cause.

Husserlian phenomenology sets off as a fundamental rejection of those psychologisms and anthropologisms that deduce the structures of appearance from some preexisting essence of man. However, despite a clear rejection of all anthropological foundations of phenomenology, the examples of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty show that the question of man continues to haunt the phenomenological project and constitutes something like a ‘blind spot’. Relating these unspoken tensions to another historical ‘scene’ (the debate between the Sophists and Aristotle), the article argues why phenomenology is to be seen as the endeavor of replying to the initial Protagorean provocation to thinking.