The Image

People who fear the visceral or who fear "the image" need particularly to read Shaviro:

(Some quotes from The Cinematic Body)

“Images are condemned because they are bodies without souls, or forms without bodies. They are flat and insubstantial, devoid of interiority and substance, unable to express anything beyond themselves.”

“They are suspect, unreliable, and “ideological,” because they presume to subsist in this state of alienation, and even perpetuate it by giving rise to delusive “reality effects,” rituals of disavowal, and compensatory fantasies of plenitude and possession.”

“But is it really lack that makes images so dangerous and disturbing? What these theorists fear is not the emptiness of the image, but its weird fullness; not its impotence as much as its power. Images have an excessive capacity to seduce and mislead, to affect the spectator unwarrantedly.”

“The image is not a symptom of lack, but an uncanny, excessive residue of being that subsists when all should be lacking.”

“Images are banally self-evident and self-contained, but their superficiality and obviousness is also a strange blankness, a resistance to the closure of definition, or to any imposition of meaning.”