ABSTRACT
In the radiant light of those countless screens whose images saturate our culture, one might read anew Martin Heidegger’s assertion that “the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.”1 The photographic, cinematic, televisual and computer-generated “worlds” of image that surround and absorb us might seem, at first glance, to confirm such an assertion rather straightforwardly-insofar as they might constitute so many mirrors of the self-assertive human subject whose immanence would ground and define them.2 A second look, however, might indicate the contrary: the boundless proliferation of image in today’s technological and electronic culture might be understood not to mirror any stable or self-identical subject back to itself but rather endlessly to unsettle and provoke the subject, who thus never quite finds itself in any image, a subject always lacking while always seeking, in image after image, “the total thing.”3 From this perspective, the imageworld today, a light world of spectacle and speed, might imply not simply the immanence and self-grounding of a self-certain subject, but rather a wounding of that subject and an opening toward something other. That “something other” would best be glimpsed, I believe, if today’s image-world were thought in terms of a “negative” cosmology, according to which it is not the human subject who founds or frames, comprehends or conquers the world as picture, or as mirror, but rather the infinitely various and ever-shifting image-world that precedes, exceeds, and unsettles the subject born into it. If the modern “worldpicture” opens with a self-positing of the autonomous human subject, it might close with the endless displacement or disappearance of that subject within the all-consuming light of image and immanence-and in that displacement or disappearance we might look for a shadow of transcendence.
