Mother-Death. On the Action of Images Emerging out of Iconic Mater-iality

Abstract

This essay explores a renewed way of thinking about/with images. Drawing on contemporary philosophy of the image and the material turn, I seek to problematize the action of images from within their own materiality. In a first movement, I trace the latent mater within iconic materiality by engaging in an etymological and historical archaeology of the concept of “matter.” This excavation aims to recover the density of iconic matter by undoing both humanist stereotypes and subjectivizing fictions, in order to articulate a rhetorical framework for the materiality of images—one whose axis is action. In a second movement, I examine the ancient anthropological bond between images and death—more precisely, the dead—as a paradigmatic threshold through which to interrogate the social sensorium that emerges in iconic experience, and that is reproduced in the “specter”, the “ghost”, or the “medium”, enacting, once again, a denial of the living matter of images and of their action. In this context, the conceptual assemblage Mother-Death is proposed as a philosophical artifact capable of rethinking the non-human material vitalism at the core of the iconic, and of enabling new, socially grounded ways of relating to images—visually and affectively.