Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Image Damage

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13534641003634499

1460-700X

Andrew Warstat,

Digital Media and Philosophy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I would like to thank my colleagues on parallax – Dave Ronalds, Francesco Ventrella and Ignaz Cassar – for their help and support in preparing Image Damage. I would also like to thank the executive editors of parallax for their guidance and suggestions. In particular, I would like to thank Barbara Engh for the clarity of her thinking, and the kindness of her words. 1 Keith Waldrop, Hegel's Family: Serious Variations (New York: Station Hill Press, 1989), p.5. 2 See Jacques Rancière's The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007); for Jean-Luc Nancy, see his The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); for Georges Didi-Huberman see Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). 3 As just one example of a recent manifestation of political and religious iconophobia, see Howard Caygill's discussion of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in his essay ‘The Destruction of Art’ in The Life and Death of Images (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), p.162-173. The analysis of the destruction of the Twin Towers in chapter one of Retort's Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (London: Verso, 2005) would also be another place to engage with recent debates on the politics of the image. 4 Maurice Blanchot, ‘Two Versions of the Imaginary’, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). 5 Gregg M. Horowitz's approach, as seen in a book such as his Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life (California: Stanford University Press, 2001), might be described as philosophical materialism (a materialism informed by Hegel, Marx and Adorno). By contrast, and following on from his writing on the parasite and the body's relation to parasitic guests, Phillipson's text gestures towards the organ-less body of the image-as-event in a way that deliberately invokes Deleuzian themes. In an effort to indicate a different form of becoming, Phillipson's text itself, through its poeticizing form, opens onto new types of relations (new compound words, new possibilities of configuring space), and new forms of immanence. See In Modernity's Wake: The Ameurunculus Letters (Routledge, 1989), or his text Ars Universitas: Jon Thompson's Ricinullus Fragments (John Hansard Gallery, 1985) with its discussion of parasitic agency. 6 In distinction to Hegel, the dialectic set in motion by Stezaker's ‘negation’ of the image generates a more infernal or mysterious series of associative relations. It is closer, in certain respects, to what Jacques Rancière calls, paraphrasing Jean Luc-Godard, the ability of the image to generate a ‘fraternity of metaphors’. See Rancière's ‘Politics of Aesthetics’ in Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Oxford: Polity Press, 2009), p.58. 7 For Michael Newman's other writing on Blanchot and the image, see ‘The Trace of Trauma: Blindness, Testimony and the Gaze in Blanchot and Derrida’ in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routldege, 1996). 8 As Timothy Clark suggests in ‘Blanchot and the End of Nature’, Blanchot's account of the image has often been ‘presented in negative and even slightly lugubrious terms’ (see p.26). For Clark's other writing on imagination and inspiration, see his The Theory of Inspiration (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997). 9 Alphonso Lingis' essay can be seen as a bridge between his more recent writing, such as Abuses (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1994) and Foreign Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1994), and his work as one of the key translators of Emmanuel Levinas' texts (including, significantly, Levinas' essay on the image, ‘Reality and its Shadow’, published in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)). 10 ‘A History of the Human Voice’ is distinct from the opening text ‘Baby or Doll?’ where the story's narrator/witness becomes fixated on trying to recount to his therapist his traumatic confusion between the life and death of a child. The traumatic confusion in ‘Baby or Doll?’ mimics, in certain respects, the abyssal relationship in Blanchot's corpse-as-image. 11 For further information about Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's work, and mp3 recordings of the decoded soot covered paper, see the web page: < http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/44267/title/Earliest_known_sound_recordings_revealed> [accessed 10 December 2009].