Grammatology of Images

"What do a video of a burning American flag, an MRI of the brain, and Raphael's Madonna have in common? With stunning breath and erudition, Weigel concretizes what Derrida only suspected, completes what Benjamin was unable to finish, and clarifies what mystified Warburg--revealing the powerful forces hidden at the singular point of culture, which turn cyphers into images, from the banal to the most sacred."--Jimena Canales, author of Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science "Sigrid Weigel has provided a masterful overview of the infinite variety of image-practices, from the most primitive forms of mark-making, to effigies and monuments, to the dematerialized images of ghosts, angels, and memories, to screen culture and cultural icons. This authoritative volume will be essential to students of iconology, art history, and visual culture who will enjoy its wide range and original insights."--W. J. T. Mitchell, author of What Do Pictures Want? Grammatology of Images radically alters how we approach images. Instead of asking for the history, power, or essence of images, Sigrid Weigel addresses imaging as such. The book considers how something a-visible gets transformed into an image. Weigel scrutinizes the moment of mis-en-apparition, of making an appearance, and the process of concealment that accompanies any imaging. Weigel reinterprets Derrida's and Freud's concept of the trace as that which must be thought before something exists. In doing so, she illuminates the threshold between traces and iconic images, between something immaterial and its pictorial representation. Chapters alternate between general accounts of the line, the index, the effigy, and the cult-image, and case studies from the history of science, art, politics, and religion, involving faces as indicators of emotion, caricatures as effigies of defamation, and angels as embodiments of transcendental ideas. Weigel's approach to images illuminates fascinating, unexpected correspondences between premodern and contemporary image-practices, between the history of religion and the modern sciences, and between things that are and are not understood as art. Sigrid Weigel is former director of Zentrum für Literatur-und Kulturforschung in Berlin. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy.