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

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

describes. If an illusion is a way of relating to the image that spurns the visible, concrete world in which one encounters the image,

university. The museum had a definitive moment during the French Revolution, when the revolutionaries discovered an alternative to vandalizing the images and icons of the old regime: neutralizing them by placing them in the Louvre, which was transformed from a palace into a museum.

The view of images as sharing a substantive relationship with both the faithful and the prototype is not the dominant one in the Modern West.

Horst Bredekamp argues that it was through artists exaggerating the internal negations of images that Christianity was able to tolerate a tradition of image-making. In the teeth of a command not to make images, artisans justified Christian image-making by expressing that prohibition in the image itself.

The image is never safe from the threat of degradation, for identities like idol and image do not inhere in a thing; they name a relationship mediated by communities, institutions, histories, and desires. One person’s image is another person’s idol.

In its early days, pornography was a self-consciously political and philosophical genre.

The vertical search seeks to jettison the everyday, to escape the ordinary into some immaterial realm. The horizontal search devotes itself to the material as the only reality. In both, the visible and the invisible are sealed off and alienated from one another.

Mahmood suggests that it is, perhaps, not even readily intelligible to many Modern Westerners. To the extent that the image and the prototype are understood to be linked arbitrarily, the image simply conveys information or misinformation about the prototype.