The translucent image

That images never received an inherent place between the regime of things and the regime of signs, and did not become the subject of their own science, is not due to any irreparable forgetting, but rather an expression of an initial scandal that historically also heralded the birth of philosophy. Images cannot even be isolated as mere appearances, because what made them visible always shines through as a watermark. One can trace the obstinate endeavor in Husserl's foundation of a phenomenology of the image to keep the appearance of the image free from any medial contamination. Emmanuel Alloa's archaeology of media oblivion reveals that double paradigm that has accompanied the Western tradition since its inception - transparency and opacity - and which interposes itself before the concept it claimed to translate: In the.