Emmanuel Alloa

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.

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.

“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.

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.

For a long time, Gilbert Simondon’s work was known only as either a philosophy restricted to the problem of technology or as an inspirational source for Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. As Simondon’s thinking is now finally in the process of being recognized in its own right as one of the most original philosophies of the twentieth century, this also entails that some critical work needs to be done to disentangle it from an all too hasty identification with Deleuzian categories. While both Simondon and Deleuze have made crucial contributions towards a theory of differential individuation that significantly diverges from other authors associated with French poststructuralism insofar as they insist on the dynamic and vital dimension of difference, they also differ on crucial points. Whereas Simondon sees the process of becoming as transductive amplification, Deleuze theorizes it as intensifying involution, leading to two notably distinct concepts of difference.

In recent years, the claim of the unrepresentability of the Shoah has stirred vivid debates, especially following the strong positions taken by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann and author of Shoah (1986). This claim of unrepresentability, it can be shown, draws part of its attraction from the fact that it oscillates undecidedly between a claim of logical impossibility (“the Shoah can’t be represented”) and a normative demand (“the Shoah shouldn’t be represented”). This essay analyzes the argumentative structure of the advocates of the unrepresentability and shows why the often made connection to Kant is flawed. Although his Critique of the Power of Judgment affirms indeed that the prohibition of representation is the “perhaps most sublime passage in the Jewish Law”, turning the prohibition of representation into a supposedly Kantian claim does not hold grounds. The essay reconstructs the political framework of the debate, situates the Kantian passage in its precise philosophical context and then successively assesses the main arguments put forward by Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman in their critique of Lanzmann’s categorical imperative. While showing why the rhetoric of the “unrepresentable” bear troubling structural analogies to what they want to fight (i.e. the politics of erasure, which always also include the erasure of the traces of erasure), a certain notion of the “unrepresentable” is rescued nevertheless at the end of the essay. Representation, so it is argued by returning to a Kantian distinction, is not a matter of Kanon, but a matter of Organon, which then puts the debate about the Sublime (which took place between Lyotard and Rancière in the 90’s) into a new perspective.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If literary avant-garde journals and their communities have been, in the twentieth century, a space for creating, if not sustaining, major political utopias, it should help explain why this “literary communism,” as Jean-Luc Nancy called it, is not a weakened or substitutional form of politics. No myth without narration, no implementation without an instrumentation, no organic unity without a political organ voicing its claim, in short: no organicity without an organon. But can there be a (literary) community that does not aim at the achievement of its own assumed truth, a form of writing in common that does not serve to convey a meaning, but bears witness, in its very form, to the fragmentation of meaning? This essay examines three attempts of an affi rmative answer to this question by reappraising three interrelated experimental cases: Jena around 1800 and the Athenaeum journal of the Early Romantics; Walter Benjamin’s journal projects, from the Angelus Novus to the prison camp journal at the end of his life; Maurice Blanchot and the failed trans-European project of what was arguably the most ambitious intellectual journal enterprise of the century, the Revue internationale in the early 1960s.

Dass Bilder zwischen dem Regime der Dinge und dem Regime der Zeichen niemals einen angestammten Platz erhielten und nicht Gegenstand einer eigenen Wissenschaft wurden, ist keinem wiedergutzumachenden Vergessen geschuldet, sondern Ausdruck eines anfänglichen Skandalons, das historisch auch die Geburtsstunde der Philosophie einläutete. Bilder lassen sich nicht einmal als reine Erscheinungen absondern, weil in ihnen als Wasserzeichen stets durchscheint, was sie sichtbar werden ließ. An Husserls Grundlegung einer Phänomenologie des Bildes lässt sich das obstinate Unterfangen verfolgen, die Bilderscheinung von jeder medialen Kontamination freizuhalten. Emmanuel Alloas Archäologie der Medienvergessenheit legt jenes Doppelparadigma frei, das die westliche Tradition seit Anbeginn begleitet – Transparenz und Opazität – und sich vor jenen Begriff schiebt, den es zu übersetzen beanspruchte: In der aristotelischen Wahrnehmungstheorie bezeichnet das Diaphane die Fähigkeit eines Mediums, die Form von etwas anzunehmen, ohne es zu sein. Auf unerwartete Weise wird durch Aristoteles’ Lehre vom Diaphanen erhellt, worin die Macht von Bildern liegt.

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.Idealidade. História. Mediador. Escritura. Origem. Diferença.The intellectual history of the 20th century has been written along a scenario which sees in Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961 the partition line between an existential and phenomenological generation and the immediately subsequent event of structuralism. The publication of Merleau-Pontys lecture notes on Edmund Husserl’s Origin of geometry has shown how shaky the grounds of such a simplifying reading are. Indeed, while Derrida’s translation of and introduction to Husserl’s text from 1962 became a founding text for the structuralist generation, introducing a reflection about the historicity and the materiality of ideality, it was only in 1998, with the publication of Merleau-Ponty’s notes from the Collège de France lecture in 1959 on the same topic, that it became clear how close the early Derrida is to the late Merleau-Ponty. Just as Derrida, Merleau-Ponty had identified in Husserl’s tension between archaeology and teleology the basic problem of phenomenology, introducing the question of history and that of media of cultural transmission. Comparing both 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.Ideality. History. Medium. Writing. Origin. Difference.

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

Aunque fueron muchos los intentos en la modernidad de superar el dualismo cuerpo y mente, las teorías filosóficas del lenguaje en muchos casos lo reintrodujeron de manera sutil pero no menos eficaz. El artículo discute varios teoremas para pensar la materialidad del signo y muestra la preponderancia, desde Kierkegaard hasta el estructuralismo post-Saussuriano, de pensar la materialización como algo necesario, pero arbitrario en su modalidad. En esta concepción, el cuerpo del lenguaje no es solamente aquello que se puede sino aquello que se debe poder modificar: la corporalidad de la expresión es lo que debe poder ser absolutamente sustituible para conservar la unidad del sentido. Sin embargo, en muchos casos, el sentido emerge precisamente de la singularidad insustituible, de la configuración de los signos en la poesía o de la gestualidad inimitable del actor. El articulo argumenta en favor de introducir, en esta discusión, la distinción fenomenológica entre Kó'rper y Leib, que - como Husserl sugirió - también puede pueden pensarse según la diferencia entre lo representable y lo irrepresentable, entre lo que no tiene papel constituyente y que desde luego puede ser sustituido, y lo que permite ser representado por otro porque es insustituible. Although in the modern age there were plenty of attempts to overcome the mind-body dualism, its philosophical theories of languages reintroduced it in a subtle but not less effective way. In this article several theorems to think on the materiality of the sign are discussed, and the preponderance, from Kierkegaard to the post-Saussurean structuralism, of thinking the materialization as something necessary but arbitrary in its modality, is shown. The body of language under this understanding is not only that which can be modified, but that which must be modifiable: the corporeality of the utterance must be substitutable in order to preserve the unit of meaning. Nevertheless, in many cases, the meaning comes precisely from the unsubstitutable singularity, from the configuration of the signs in poetry or from the inimitable actor's gestures. The article argues for introducing in this discussion the phenomenological distinction between Kórper and Leib, which - as Husserl suggested - may also be thought from the difference between the representable and the irrepresentable, between what does not have a constituent role and hence can be substituted, and what allows to be represented by another because it is unsubstitutable

During World War II, both the US and Canadian governments issued a series of propaganda posters aimed at reducing spending and redirecting private households’ financial expenditures into the general war effort. Many of those posters, developed by some of the cleverest advertisers of the time, drew on Puritanism’s most deeply rooted principle: self-restraint. One propaganda poster succinctly exemplifies the underlying logic: as an elegant couple looks up at a gigantic elephant for sale, the caption sternly reminds them to be thrifty: “If you don’t need it … don’t buy it!”.If you don’t need it, don’t buy it. Propaganda Poster WWII. Ottawa...

Although in the modern age there were plenty of attempts to overcome the mind-body dualism, its philosophical theories of language reintroduced it in a subtle but not less effective way.In this article several theorems to think on the materiality of the sign are discussed, and, from Kierkegaard to the post-Saussurean structuralism, the prominent role of thinking the materialization as something necessary but arbitrary in its modality is shown. The body of language under this understanding is not only that which can be modified, but that which must be modifiable: the corporeality of the utterance must be substitutable in order to preserve the unit of meaning. Nevertheless, in many cases, the meaning comes precisely from the unsubstitutable singularity, from the configuration of the signs in poetry or from the inimitable actor’s gestures.The article argues for introducing in this discussion the phenomenological distinction between Körper and Leib , which – as Husserl suggested – may also be thought from the difference between what can be represented and what cannot be represented, between what does not have a constituent role and hence can be substituted, and what allows to be represented by another because it is irreplaceable.

Plusieurs générations de chercheurs internationaux interrogent l’esthétique de Merleau-Ponty suivant deux axes : d’une part, le dialogue constant et passionné avec des arts (peinture, littérature, cinéma) et ses protagonistes (Cézanne, Proust, Claude Simon) qui est à l’origine de l’esthétique de Merleau-Ponty, et dans d’autre part, l’impact de la pensée merleau-pontienne sur les arts, depuis le Minimal Art américain en passant par le Body Art et la danse contemporaine. Tandis que certaines contributions s’intéressent, en s’appuyant sur les inédits, au rapport jusqu’ici moins étudié que Merleau-Ponty entretenait avec la musique, mais aussi avec la photographie, d’autres contributions jaugent l’héritage merleau-pontien dans des arts sur lesquels il n’a pas lui-même écrit (la sculpture, la danse ou le théâtre). Ce volume propose donc une première synthèse générale du rapport de Merleau-Ponty aux arts, tout en en indiquant les lignes de fuite et les horizons qui en font aujourd’hui, cinquante ans après sa mort, toute l’actualité. Contributions d’Emmanuel Alloa, Ronald Bonan, Fabrice Bourlez, Mauro Carbone, Lambert Dousson, Eliane Escoubas, Barbara Formis, Paule Gioffredi, Adnen Jdey, Stefan Kristensen, Rosamaria Salvatore, Jenny Slatman, Bernhard Waldenfels, Benedetta Zaccarello.

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?

Seit über 30 Jahren gibt es in den deutschen wie französischen Kultur- und Geisteswissenschaften das Bestreben, den Begriff der »Lesbarkeit« von seiner engen Bindung an den geschriebenen Text zu emanzipieren. Die vorliegende Ausgabe von Trivium lässt einige der maßgeblichen Stimmen in dieser Debatte zu Wort kommen. Auf der gemeinsamen Schnittfläche von Mikrohistorie, Semiologie, Psychoanalyse, Kulturgeschichte, Physiognomie und Mantik zeichnet sich ein neues und zugleich altes Verständnis des Lesens ab. Wenn sich in der Moderne die Frage nach dem Lesen von Spuren – und damit im weiteren Sinne von Indizien, Symptomen, Vorzeichen etc. – neu stellt, so wird damit an eine archaische Praxis des Lesens neu angeknüpft, welche uns vor das unabschließbare Problem der Lesbarkeit der Welt stellt. -/- Lire. Voilà une chose que ne réfléchissent plus les sur-alphabétisés que nous sommes, habitués à ingérer les signes sans y prendre garde. Repenser la lecture et l’investir d’une fonction critique suppose de méditer la lettre en revenant à son antériorité : se souvenir que, de tout temps et avant tout livre, il y a eu des lecteurs. Des lecteurs – littéralement – avant la lettre. L’art de la lecture réunit le chasseur lisant les déjections des animaux dans les forêts, l’astronome babylonien scrutant les cartographies stellaires, le pêcheur hawaïen lisant les courants marins en plongeant dans l’eau sa main et l’amant déchiffrant aveuglément le corps de l’aimée. On apprend à lire non seulement des textes, mais encore des partitions de musique, des tableaux de peinture, des cartes à jouer, des notations chorégraphiques, des sillons dans la terre, des tourbillons dans l’eau, des gestes révélateurs ou bien des rêves.

As Hegel once said, in Byzantium, between homoousis and homoiousis, the difference of one letter could decide over the life and death of thousands. As the present essay would like to argue, Byzantine thinking was not only attentive to conceptual, but also to iconic differences. The iconoclastic controversy 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’. 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, re-examining Byzantine visual thinking in the light of today’s ‘iconic turn’ reveals its striking modernity.