ABSTRACT

Reading a sign, opening a safe, learning a language deneutralizes the image. The image, initially private, becomes public as more and more individuals take for granted its repetitions and both pool and share their differences. Certainly the philosophy, like the scientific study of them, involves searching and seeking after the non-human originals which they are believed to image. The religions of mankind ever repeat the story and imitate the drama with their rites and rotes. Fascism has its symbolic concretion in the images of Mussolini and Franco, Nazism in those of Heil Hitler, Goering and Goebbels. The ancestors of all are the live Roman Emperors, worshipped like the gods; a survival is the divinely descended decent man, the Mikado of Japan. True, “history”, once it purports to be “scientific,” searches and seeks after the authentic original of the image. Its announced goal is to disclose whether the image is “only a myth” or a “true” likeness of the original.