Visual Studies, 2023
Review
Looking Through Images. A Phenomenology of Visual
Media
by Emmanuel Alloa,
translated by Nils F. Schott, afterword by Andrew
Benjamin New York: Columbia University Press, 2021,
391 pages
ISBN: 9780231187930 (paperback) Price $33.60
Reviewed by Vlad Ionescu, PXL MAD/Faculty of
Architecture and Arts, Hasselt University, Hasselt,
Belgium, vlad.ionescu@uhasselt.be
This fundamental work on image theory is Nils
F. Schott’s compelling translation of the original German
edition published in 2011 by Diaphanes (Zürich/Berlin).
The book develops themes that the author first addressed
in various articles from 2009 onwards. Alloa published
an article on mediality in Aristotle in 2009 and he has
written extensively on Merleau-Ponty. In 2017, he was
the thinker in residence of the Royal Flemish Academy
of Belgium where he put together a volume on the theme
of transparency (Leuven University Press, 2022). These
bibliographical points need to be recalled because the
current book recaptures subjects that return in his recent
research: mediality, image-consciousness, transparency
and pictoriality.
Reading Looking Through Images makes one think of a
passage from Jean-François Lyotard’s Discourse, Figure
(1971): ‘One can say that the tree is green, but saying so
does not put the colour in the sentence. Yet color is
meaning’ (Lyotard 2011, 50). The passage captures the
essence of Alloa’s enterprise as he presents the reader
with a historical overview of an important distinction.
On the one hand, images can be conceived as ‘purveyors
of information’ (Alloa 2022, 2), entities that transfer
messages while hiding their discretizing medium. Digital
images conceal the material constitution of the iconicity
it generates. On the other hand, images can be conceived
as entities make manifest the repleteness (Nelson
Goodman) of their medium. Painting is such a medium
where each line, and each touch of the brush irrevocably
determines visual meaning. This regulative distinction
informs Alloa’s historical overview – from Aristotle to
Derrida and beyond – of the emergence of perception
and representation. This impressive overview reveals the
difference between the working of the mind that makes
distinctions and computes messages, and the moving
body that orients itself in a world which appears
differently with every step one takes. We move in a
world that unfolds in time and in between our bodies.
The iconic itself depends on this fundamental excess,
on the ambiguous complexity that pertains to the visual.
The task is urgent because there is ‘no general rule to go
about detaching the content presented in a given image
appearance safely from the support medium’ (Alloa
2022, 12). Hence, the need of a visual literacy in order to
understand how visual meaning emerges and how it
changes through history or simply through its medial
translation. Simply put, replete media (pregnant with
this sensitive Fülle) cannot be translated without
transforming the material density (from lines to paint,
from carving to ink) that characterises them, this
sensitive Fülle that Alloa finds in Goodman and that is
relatable to Merleau-Ponty ‘infinite fullness of the world’
(Alloa 2022, 206).
The book unfolds along a few fundamental ‘quilting
points’ that address the intertwinement between body
and world. Alloa reads Aristotle quite rigorously and in
relation to his classic and modern interpreters.
Aristotle’s concept of the diaphanous designates a
productive interspace that mediates perception and
where objects appear as colourful surface. Hence, this
distance is the potential of forms to appear while they are
in a continuous change (Alloa 2022, 85). This potential
proves that mediality is always already excessive,
overdetermining and irregular. Alloa discusses other
important figures, from Plotinus to Berkley, Alberti,
Descartes and Alberti. However, Husserl’s analysis of
image-consciousness is crucial for its modern impact on
image theory. In this context, Eugen Fink’s seminal work
Vergegenwärtigung und Bild (1930) has inspired both
Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. Alloa is right to return to
this seminal text because it emphasises the temporality of
images. Media confront the viewer – despite the past or
future of their content – with a perennial presentification
or appearance in the present (Alloa 2022, 196). Working
further on Husserl’s image-consciousness, Fink points
out the incongruity between the material image-carrier
(paper, canvass) and the visual appearance of an image.
The appearance is not only nothing but also not merely a
material carrier. For Fink (and Husserl), the focus can
shift between the two dimensions, between ‘what you
see’ and ‘from what’ the image emerges. However, the
fundamental incongruity between them proves that
images are irreducible entities. Alloa concludes that
image analysis becomes with Fink an operation through
2 Book Review
which phenomenology is introduced as a philosophy of
finitude.
Furthermore, the author shows that, like perception,
thinking too, is aspectual, ‘shadowed’ (Verschattet).
Furthermore, for Fink, phenomenology employs
‘conceptual models’ (Denkmodelle) that constitute what
is being thought. This internal architecture of ‘medial
lines of thought’ (mediale Denkbahnen) is never properly
addressed. They are a philosophical shadow, a kind of
absence that Derrida will make the trademark of his
philosophy. Finally, Alloa addresses the implications of
Fink’s work on Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. The
temporality of the image becomes a central theme
towards the end of the book. This section is also
important for art historiography as it explains an
interpretative model that is at the core of thinkers like
Benjamin, Warburg and Didi-Huberman. The
temporality of images is never fixed and they can
confront us with a complex act of positing. These are the
reasons why there is no single historical point that
reduces their meaning (Alloa 2022, 277). In other words,
every viewer looks at past images within new
constellations of images where each image can influence
the reading of others. No image ever includes all of its
viewers; hence no iconic act is ever complete.
Alloa shows how the distancing space and unfolding
time between the subject and the object of perception are
always already excessive, filled with a plethora of
appearances. This conception of the mediality as
emerging from an opulent and irreducible sensible world
is, of course, an act of faithfulness to the phenomenology
of Merleau-Ponty. It justifies painting as a model
through which perception is understood, not as the
legitimate geometric perspective but as lateral vision
within ‘immersive spaces’ (Alloa 2022, 291). Media
constitute thus an irreducible space that potentially
generates further appearances and constellations of
images, a ‘matrix of possibilities properly speaking, a
metaxy of appearances’. (Alloa 2022, 291) This passage is
significant because the visual that Lyotard distinguished
from the merely visible is rendered, in the aftermath of
Merleau-Ponty, as a matrix of possibilities. It is no
coincidence that – in What to Paint? (1987) – Lyotard
asserted that an anamnesis of the visible would require
for him an anamnesis of Discourse, Figure (Lyotard
2012). After all, Alloa does argue that lateral seeing
produces other figures, actualisations of a ‘figural matrix’
(Alloa 2022, 211), a genetic phenomenology finding its
counterpart, a generative phenomenology. His
conception of the sensible world as a matrix of
possibilities testifies to a profoundly Merleau-Pontian
conception of the perception. It also echoes Lyotard’s
notion of the figural-matrix, his conception of the
unconscious as a productive source of figure-forms and
figure-images. Hence, even though Alloa eludes the
psychoanalytical approach of Discourse, Figure, he does
perform its anamnesis. The latent potential of the
sensible world finds its homologation in a conception of
the unconscious as a generative matrix of heterogeneous
figures. Just like the unconscious is mediated by its
figures, the world is mediated by a plethora of lateral
views, variations and alterations of an ungraspable
origin. Maybe it is this fundamental disorderliness,
anarchic and engendering potential of the visual,
especially in its painterly formation, that have fascinated
many contemporary thinkers, from Merleau-Ponty to
Lyotard or from Deleuze to George Didi-Huberman.
Throughout the book, a phenomenology of appearance
is thus presented as the prerequisite of any image theory.
Andrew Benjamin’s Afterword critically frames this
position that associates the act of interpretation to the
phenomenological description of how and what is seen.
Whether we still need Heidegger’s speculative insights
on the riddle is debatable but Alloa’s plea for a
phenomenology of appearance is convincing especially
nowadays when media studies are often concerned with
the digital world, the ostensibly transparent media that
mesmerise the masses. Other than the replete media of
the fine arts, the digital is seducing in this tentative claim
to hide its medium, to appear immediately and
transparently. The advantage of starting from a
description of how we see is an insight in the working of
our attention in relation to what appears. Meaning is
thus founded on the way a medium is modulated, it is
(in)formed and unfolds in time. The working of
attention in the phenomenological tradition would have
disserved a separate chapter but maybe that is another
project for a different book. However, mediality is
elucidated throughout the book with a series of case
studies, interpretations of artworks and scientific
diagrams, from the mosaic of philosophers in Naples to
Vredeman de Vries’ perspective or a painting of Barnett
Newman.
Except the well-known cumbersome problem of
rendering German philosophical concepts, Schott’s
translation is generally clear and comprehensive. He
intelligibly renders ‘Bildlichkeit’ as ‘pictoriality’ (Alloa
2022, 174), the notion that designates the image-object,
the immaterial appearance of an object distinct from its
material carrier. However, the challenging
‘Vorstellungsbilder’ sounds slightly awkward as
‘imagination images’ (Alloa 2022, 178). To sum up,
Alloa’s work is the outcome of an intellectual profile that
has started to become rare even on the old continent. He
has an exhaustive historical knowledge that crosses both
the main philosophical languages (from Latin to Greek,

German to French and Dutch, English to Italian) and the
main philosophical paradigms. His writings appear as a
majestic scholastic body of work that presupposes
concrete philosophical knowledge. You have to read
your classics in order to follow him and that attitude is
crucial today in a climate where the academia falls prey
to fashionable themes. This is already a solid reason to
continue translating his works and to see in him a critical
mediator of intellectual traditions. Looking Through
Images is the ideal introduction to his work and a
fundamental piece of literature in media theory.
REFERENCES
Alloa, Emmanuel. 2022. This Obscure Thing Called
Transparency. Politics and Aesthetics of a Contemporary
Metaphor. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Book Review 3
Fink, Eugen. 1966. “Vergegenwärtigung und Bild. Beiträge zur
Phenomenologie der Unwirklichkeit.” In Studien zur
Phänomenologie 1930-1939, Phaenomenologica, Vol. 21,
1–78. Dordrecht: Springer.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 2011. Discourse, Figure, translated
by Anthony Hudek and Mary Lydon, Introduction by
John Mowitt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 2012. Que peindre? What to Paint?
Adami, Arakawa, Buren, edited by Herman Parret,
translated by Anthony Hudek, Vlad Ionescu, and Peter
W. Milne, epilogue by Gérald Sfrez. Leuven: Leuven
University Press.
© 2023 Vlad Ionescu
https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2023.2181211