Grammatology of Images radically alters how we approach images. Instead of asking for the history, power, or essence of images, Sigrid Weigel addresses imaging as such. The book considers how something a-visible gets transformed into an image. Weigel scrutinizes the moment of mis-en-apparition, of making an appearance, and the process of concealment that accompanies any imaging.
Weigel reinterprets Derrida’s and Freud’s concept of the trace as that which must be thought before something exists. In doing so, she illuminates the threshold between traces and iconic images, between something immaterial and its pictorial representation. Chapters alternate between general accounts of the line, the index, the effigy, and the cult-image, and case studies from the history of science, art, politics, and religion, involving faces as indicators of emotion, caricatures as effigies of defamation, and angels as embodiments of transcendental ideas.
Weigel’s approach to images illuminates fascinating, unexpected correspondences between premodern and contemporary image-practices, between the history of religion and the modern sciences, and between things that are and are not understood as art.
Table of Content
Note to the English-Language Edition | vii
List of Figures | ix
Introduction : Toward a Grammatology of Images | 1
1 The Trace and the Current Revaluation of Lines | 15
2 Faces: Between Trace and Image, Encoding and Measurement | 43
3 Indexical Images: Trace, Resemblance, and Code | 84
4 Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and the Supplementary Economy of the Likeness (Ebenbild) | 101
5 Defamatory Images: Disfiguration in Physiognomy and Caricature’s Two Bodies | 118
6 Cult Images: Iconoclastic Controversy, the Desire for Images, and the Dialectic of Secularization | 170
7 Angels: Images of Making-Appearance between Religion, Art, and Science | 202
8 Perspectives of the Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture | 264
Notes | 275
Bibliography | 319
Index | 347
About the author
Sigrid Weigel is former director of Zentrum für Literatur-und Kulturforschung in Berlin and has taught at numerous universities in the United States and elsewhere around the world. She has published on literature, philosophy, cultural history, image theory, memory, secularization, genealogy, and the cultural history of sciences across numerous books in German and English, including Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy (Stanford, 2013).
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