Diaphenomenology: A Media Theory of Appearing

What is an image?Emmanuel Alloa's brilliant and powerful investigation of everything image-related sets off from the observation that the problem of the image leaves us at a loss.Even though most of us use and even produce images on a daily basis, we would be hardpressed to explain how they work.Alloa has a suggestion: "As supposedly transparent media, they are usually overlooked" (3).The problem of the image is as deep as it is old.At least since the fourth century BCE, Western philosophy has been pervaded by a profound ambivalence towards images, something that Alloa relates to Plato's distrust in the Sophists, "the most sublime of all image-makers" (10).As a defense against sophistry, and simultaneously against the alleged capacity of images to overpower the senses, Plato constructed "a metaphysical watershed of lasting consequence": a two-world ontological model of sensible things (aistheta) and intelligible things (noeta)-hence also the lingering distrust of the senses.Alloa's comprehensive book aims to rehabilitate images by overcoming philosophy's longstanding iconophobia.To this end, it seeks to properly diagnose this iconophobia and to seek out philosophical resources that can help develop an alternative analysis of images-one that no longer adheres to the two-world model.The development of such an analysis requires a broader conceptual investigation that also considers "philosophies that do not immediately present themselves as philosophies of the image" (9).