2023/11/17 by Robert R. Clewis · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Visual Culture and Art Theory
paper · doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayac060
openalex publication_date 2023/11/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
In his erudite and detailed study, now made available in Nils Schott’s commendable translation a decade after the initial publication of the German version, Emmanuel Alloa offers a theory of images as presentative media. Images, Alloa holds, are ‘diaphanous things with a pictorial plane through which the medium still shines’ (p. 12). This contribution to philosophy, media studies, image theory, and visual studies consists of an Author’s Preface to the English edition, an introduction, and five chapters. Each chapter is divided into ten subsections—as if echoing the Pythagoreans who, evoking Aristotle’s ridicule, identified ten rather than nine heavens (p. 325, n. 101). Alloa’s brief conclusion is followed by an Afterword by Andrew Benjamin. Most of the chapters have well over 200 endnotes (at times becoming cumbersome to flip to and track down), reflecting the author’s extensive engagement with the literature in German, French, English, and Italian. In addition to a number of interesting figures, the book includes ten notable ‘illuminations’, in which Alloa provides pictures or illustrations accompanied by commentary. The insertion of these ten images/commentary, he states, is ‘intended to function as a form of paratext in the margins’, similar to medieval book illuminations (p. 12). From an aesthetic point of view, the ten ‘illuminations’ work well: they render the book more appealing and readable, breaking up the main text while, at the same time, clarifying it indirectly.