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book: Looking Through Images
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Looking Through Images

A Phenomenology of Visual Media
  • Translated by:
  • Afterword by:
  • Preface by:
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2021

About this book

Emmanuel 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.

Author / Editor information

Emmanuel Alloa is professor of philosophy at the University of Fribourg, where he holds the Chair for Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art. His books in English include Resistance of the Sensible World: An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty (2017), as well as a number of coedited volumes, including, most recently, Dynamis of the Image: Moving Images in a Global World (2020).

Nils F. Schott is a lecturer in the Euro-American Program of the Collège universitaire de Sciences Po, Reims, and coeditor of, among other books, Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World (Columbia, 2015).

Andrew Benjamin is distinguished professor of architectural theory at the University of Technology, Sydney, and emeritus professor of philosophy at Monash University Melbourne.cHis recent books include Towards a Relational Ontology: Philosophy’s Other Possibility (2015) and Art’s Philosophical Work (2015).

Reviews

John Durham Peters, Yale University:
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

James Elkins, The Art Institute of Chicago:
A real gift to the field of visual studies

W. J. T. Mitchell, author of What Do Pictures Want? Essays on the Lives and Loves of Images:
Emmanuel 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.

Chiara Bottici, author of Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary:
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.

Jean-Luc Nancy, University of Strasbourg:
In this innovative, rich, and powerful book, Emmanuel Alloa brilliantly shows why images don’t represent the real, but let the real come into being.

Topics

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    vii
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    Preface to the English Edition

    xiii
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    Introduction

    1
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    1. Between Thing and Sign: The Hubris of the Image

    13
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    2. Aristotle’s Foundation of a Media Theory of Appearing

    53
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    3. Forgetting Media: Traces of the Diaphanous from Themistius to Berkeley

    105
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    4. A Phenomenology of Images

    159
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    5. Media Phenomenology

    209
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    Conclusion: Seeing Through Images— for an Alternative Theory of Media

    293
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    Afterword: Seeing Not Riddling

    297
    Andrew Benjamin
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    Bibliography

    355
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    Index

    377
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
November 12, 2021
eBook ISBN:
9780231547574
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Other:
36 b&w illustrations
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This book is in the series
Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts
https://doi.org/10.7312/allo18792
eBook ISBN: 9780231547574
Audience(s) for this book
Professional and scholarly;
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