Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia (Encountering Traditions)

Second, accepting one’s separateness in the world requires “an acceptance of one’s father as a dependent sexual being whose incapacity to sustain desire [Hamlet] cannot revive, which may present itself to his son as having to abandon him.”

the image relationship coded as rational and free by the Modern West operates as though religious desire compromises critique.

to name and discern both iconoclasms of fidelity and iconoclasms of temptation.

Thus is her response an iconoclasm of temptation: she suppresses an image out of fear that it might not do what she hopes; she denies desire and its ambiguities.

nor the intentions of the maker.10 In this, he is representative of many contemporary picture theorists who want to exorcise what they see as Platonist or Kantian understandings of the image as pointing beyond itself to some distant meaning.11

It sounds like the action it denotes, and in this way slurp signifies in the same way images do: by its likeness to the signified.

the Modern West has bred new strains of iconoclasm. It did, after all, give rise to the museum, which arguably attenuates images’ political force. Pivotal in this history was the transformation of the Louvre Palace into a museum for housing political and religious artifacts of the old regime as objects of formal value.8 Just so, the museum both pro

iconoclast has become a sometimes laudatory term for someone who challenges entrenched beliefs or cultural institutions.

the image negates its own literal existence so it can mediate a divine presence with which it is not identical. Many iconoclasts want to claim that the image does not circumscribe the divine, that the divine cannot be located in the image. But the image—when it is not functioning as an idol—also makes this claim in the way it negates itself to pres