ABSTRACT
The question of the significance of the imagination for individual and collective perception is the focus of Part II, in which the chiastic structure of the look is investigated. Starting point is the question as to what it means to see a picture. When we see and try to put what we have seen into words we constitute ourselves as imagining subjects. Only as such can a subject perceive and speak. For a speaking subject the picture is the indispensable precondition of visibility itself (Mondzain). The theological and political thought of Byzantinism is an example of the fact that pictures and images precede seeing and that seeing is constituted by them. Insofar as the picture as the image of God that became an image in Christ is not only the object of seeing, but also plays a part in the invisibility of God, there is more to what is visible than what the eyes take in. Pictures and images evolve in the sphere between transcendence and the visibility of the world and therefore have an in-between character which contributes to the imagination. Thus, by their visibility pictures and images constitute the presence of an absence. To see a picture is therefore to gain access to its transparency in something that is visible. This dual nature of pictures is already discernible in the pictures of the early cave paintings and is constitutive for the relationship between human beings and the world and also of their relationships with themselves.
