After-images, I believe, hold the key to certain much-debated issues regarding meaning and verification. In particular, an analysis of the relevant features of our discourse shows that views often held to be untenable or unintelligible or avoidable regarding our discourse about pain and similar sensations are not so easily escaped in the context of after-images.

In concept, an image has both verticality and horizontal dimensions. Saturated images within this space have a horizon and can exceed that horizon. Within that horizon where the image dwells something chances itself upon the observer and the observed. Into that public space between self and other, students bring an instrumental approach to how they plan to deploy their new fund of knowledge, only to discover that the setting itself has become an event where surprise and upheaval disrupt their (...) illusion of self-continuity and the façade of familiarity. Phenomenologically, upheaval shows itself when givenness both precedes and participates in the giving of phenomena such as medical students’ “before and after” images of psychoanalysis. They discover and reconfigure their erstwhile absolute positions and values into reconfigurations of self and prior commitments. The turning point from their instrumental use of knowledge to reconfigurations of how they situate themselves in the world decisively comes when teaching and learning become an event in se that disturbs their sense of order.Following Husserl, phenomenological psychological observation has required us to go from the events of history to a sense of history. Would, however, that we could stay at the level of events much longer to see images explode and exceed their horizons from the illusion of order, and patterned repetition disrupted by surprise, upheaval and indeterminacy in the spirit of Alain Badiou! (shrink)

Publicly-enacted blood extractions (principally blood donation events and petitions or paintings in blood) in mass Indian political contexts (for instance, protest or political memorial events and election rallies) are a noteworthy present-day form of political enunciation in India, for such extractions – made to speak as and on behalf of political subject positions – are intensely communicative. Somewhat akin to the transformative fasts undertaken by Gandhi, such blood extractions seek to persuade from the moral high ground of political asceticism. This (...) essay seeks to shed light on how and why these extractions have become such a means, with a particular focus on blood-based portraiture. What makes such portraits – chiefly of politicians and ‘freedom fighter’ martyrs – interesting from a Strathernian point of view is their immanent persuasive relationality. The insights of Strathern can help us to explicate these objects’ dynamic relational features, while reciprocally, the portraits may help us to illuminate and clarify the very particular and interesting nature of the way Strathern treats (and creates) images. (shrink)

When historians, archivists, and museologists turn to Eastern European photos from family albums or collections—for example, photos from the decades preceding the Holocaust and the early years of the Second World War—they seek visual evidence or illustrations of the past. But photographs may refuse to fit expected narratives and interpretations, revealing both more and less than we expect. Focusing on photos of Jews taken on the main avenues of Cerna˘u?i, Romania, before the Second World War and during the city’s occupation (...) by Fascist Romanians and their Nazi-German allies, this essay shows how a close reading of these vernacular images, both for what they show and what they are unable to show, can challenge the “before, during, and after” timeline that, in Holocaust historiography, we have come to accept as a given. (shrink)

This paper seeks to articulate the significance of an intimate connection that exists between faces and images. It argues that the manner in which images face us – a picture's turning toward a viewer – is the primary condition of its meaningfulness. The article explicates the significance of an image's facing through a dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas's philosophical understanding of the human face. The analogy I draw between Levinas's notion of the face and the facing of images (...) runs against predominant readings of Levinas which emphasize the Levinasian ambivalence, not to say hostility, toward the visual, and the clear opposition he makes between the face's infinity and the finite and objectifying essence of images. My aim, however, is to show that there is an interesting sense in which Levinas's reflections on the human face offer, perhaps in spite of Levinas, a crucial prism for approaching pictures: I show that the Levinasian face can be understood in a manner that illuminates a dimension of alterity in pictures, one that remains uncontainable and, as such, questions the responsibility of the interpreter and opens up the ethical depth of the image. As a central case study, I turn to a series of provocative graffiti images, chimeric animal-human faces, which were created by Klone, a Tel Aviv-based street artist. (shrink)

ArgumentPost-Stalinist reforms resulted in dramatic changes in the ways of operation of Soviet science: one can say that they altered the very understanding of what science was, or should be, in the socialist society. A new vision came about as a result of political and rhetorical efforts of scientists, who pushed forward their various, often conflicting, agendas acting in accordance with specific rules of Soviet polity. The most visible part of the reform came with the 1961 administrative reorganization of the (...) USSR Academy of Sciences. The related series of changes, however, was much broader and comprehensive, modifying the relationships between science and ideology, politicians and academic researchers, and establishing the very division between fundamental and applied research, which had been strongly rejected during the preceding Stalinist period. (shrink)