by Jon Lackman | 17 April 2007 | Books, Theory
In the March-April 2007 Acta Fabula, Marianna Marino reviews the essay collection Puissances de l’image: “As its title indicates, Puissances de l’image considers the multiple forms that iconic power can take. It prefers puissance to pouvoir, puissance being tied more closely to notions of virtuality and possibility. (It collects studies presented at the 2nd International Colloquium on the Esthetic and the Hermeneutic organized by the philosophy department at the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon in 2005.)
In the preface, editors Jean-Claude Gens and Pierre Rodrigo underscore the paradoxical side of this plural puissance. Images, despite their superabundance, are increasingly vulnerable to the indifference of gazes, which have been immunized by images’ ubiquity. Maria Bettetini defines this phenomenon as a modern form of iconoclasm, an iconoclasm lite that can do without actual physical destruction of images, because images neutralise themselves.
Images thus remain widows of the gaze, and their ‘omnipresence’ is condemned to be accompanied by an inevitable ‘evanescence.’ Consequently, it’s necessary to reconsider their status, without forgetting that they are also the means by which mankind experiences its ‘extremes’ (i.e. horror, wonder, the sacred, etc.), because images ‘always exceed what it’s possible for us to say.’
The text is organized around these three problems: La (dé)mesure: ontologies of the image; Extremes: the sacred, the profane, horror; The exuberance of images: art and life.”
