We live in a mediatized society, a society one could call a society of images. Working at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, Patrick Vauday challenges the dominant assumptions of this society and its disposition towards images. This challenge does not advocate repudiatingimages altogether, but rather entreats us to see them in a different light. This new way of thinking of images affords a glimpse into what images do and produce, rather than viewing them as copies or mere representations. Images are dynamic agents that are active in our world rather than simply empty reflections of it. Rethinking the concept of the image in this fashion opens up new ways of interpreting and engaging with works of art. This reconsideration of the role of images in society is the starting point for a new politics that considers the multiple and complex efficacies by which images act, circulate and are created.

"Vauday (philosophy, Université Paris 8, France) has two objectives for the present work: first, to highlight postwar French thought in aesthetics and, second, to examine its connection with contemporary theories of art related to the aesthetic status of images. Images are the primary focus—not images as mere representations or expressions but images as a shaping pragmatic, generating force. Vauday begins by tracing philosophy’s quarrels with the image and the bewitching charm of appearances, from Plato and Descartes to contemporary writers. He offers, by way of contrast, Aristotle, who considered the image as the rationalization of the sensible. This finds its modern extension in phenomenology, in which painting, cinema, and the other visible arts invest in the phenomenal world, enabling one to pass from an ontology of images (what is an image?) to the question of what images do—a pragmatic of images. The author explores concepts ranging from photographic prose, the impurity of cinema, and the image in the mirror of ontology to the politics of pictorial space, contemporary iconoclasm, and the counterimage…. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Graduate students, researchers, faculty." - CHOICE