Description
Book SynopsisEmmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy.
Trade ReviewIn this innovative, rich, and powerful book, Emmanuel Alloa brilliantly shows why images don’t represent the real, but let the real come into being. -- Jean-Luc Nancy, University of Strasbourg
Alloa’s tour de force provides an incredibly erudite and insightful perspective on the phenomenology of images. A must-read for anyone wishing to analyze the visual imperatives of the world, for which we have lacked the appropriate tools. -- Chiara Bottici, author of
Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the ImaginaryEmmanuel Alloa’s
Looking Through Images is a real tour de force. A masterful study of images, media, and visual experience, it provides an ABC of philosophical struggles with these concepts, from Aristotle to Berkeley to Descartes, Husserl, Sartre, and beyond. What is an image? What is a medium? How do we know what we see, and see what we know? This book is a feast of learning that ranges across disciplines with admirable precision. -- W. J. T. Mitchell, author of
What Do Pictures Want? Essays on the Lives and Loves of ImagesA real gift to the field of visual studies -- James Elkins, The Art Institute of Chicago
In a lucid reinterpretation of the European tradition, Emmanuel Alloa shows that images are not the seduction or distraction of philosophy but one of its most robust and enduring problems. Here
Geistesgeschichte shows itself the royal road to understanding media -- John Durham Peters, Yale University
An exceptionally ambitious book that attempts nothing less than rethinking the fundamental questions of image theory… a must-read for anyone with a stake in the theory of image, media and imagination. * Radical Philosophy *
Unfailingly acute and deeply informed… a remarkable book. * Continental Philosophy Review *
an impressive, enriching, and immensely likeable work. * Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology *
Alloa’s writings appear as a majestic scholastic body of work […]
Looking Through Images is the ideal introduction to his work and a fundamental piece of literature in media theory. * Visual Studies *
The book is valuable for dismantling the history and therein the biases of categories we are most familiar with in thinking of images. * Estetika Journal *
Table of ContentsPreface to the English Edition
Introduction
1. Between Thing and Sign: The Hubris of the Image
2. Aristotle’s Foundation of a Media Theory of Appearing
3. Forgetting Media: Traces of the Diaphanous from Themistius to Berkeley
4. A Phenomenology of Images
5. Media Phenomenology
Conclusion: Seeing Through Images—for an Alternative Theory of Media
Afterword: Seeing Not Riddling, by Andrew Benjamin
Notes
Bibliography
Index
