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.
