Books & ideas

Unrepresentative images

Fabien Lacouture — 2026-02-03T14:22:25Z

In this collection of essays, Jean-Claude Schmitt continues his examination of medieval images. Considering the topic from a semantic, historical, and artistic perspective, he explores how the medieval West thought about images and, at times, through images.

Figuration and its Modalities

Grégory Delaplace — 2023-11-21T08:00:00Z

Images are nothing but figurations of our relationship to the world, that is, of our ways of worlding. P. Descola demonstrates this in a monumental study that does justice to the diversity of cultures, time periods, and artworks.

What Nero Says about Us

Laurie Lefebvre — 2017-11-16T08:00:00Z

“Parricide”, “tyrant”, “monster”: it would be an understatement to say that the last Julio-Claudian emperor is not highly regarded. Making use of some impressive documents, Donatien Grau analyses the image of the hated emperor from the first century AD to the present day. The story of Nero reads like a history of the West.

The Jew with the Gold Coin

Ewa Tartakowsky — 2017-04-24T07:00:00Z

In Poland, one can purchase a strange good luck charm to become rich: the picture of a Jew holding a gold coin. What is the significance of this popular re-appropriation of the figure of the Jew in the context of post-Holocaust Poland? And how conscious are anti-Semitic prejudices in this representation?

The Politics of Images

Cristelle Terroni — 2015-12-26T11:11:09Z

How do images respond to political events and how do they shape them ? What is the political power of images ? Should images of violence be shown in the media ? Through its winter selection, Books&Ideas offers to rediscover a group of four essays and reviews, all published in 2015, which have tackled these questions through the prism of history, philosophy, aesthetics and political sciences.

Should Images of Violence be Shown?

Emmanuel Taïeb — 2015-11-26T08:00:00Z

Scenes of lynching, beheadings, corpses… Although easily accessible on the Internet, images of violence are often occulted in the French media. Why are some images shown while others are kept out of circulation? Are some forms of violence unfit to be seen?

Images of the People

Déborah Cohen — 2015-07-05T22:00:00Z

Representations of “the people” tend to be highly policed: they smother its inherent diversity and particularity, and typically distort it. Such is the conclusion reached, each in his own way, by Georges Didi-Huberman and Jacques Rancière. This is also the reason why, they argue, one must pay attention to images which demonstrate the people's singularity and power.

A Visual History of Women's Emancipation

Anne Steiner — 2015-03-09T06:30:00Z

During the Belle Époque, the women who took on “men's work” – doctors, journalists, and lawyers, but also coach drivers and postal workers – met with incredulity, hilarity, and more generally hostility. Postcards began to spread as a medium during the rise of early feminism and offer a striking representation of these reactions.

The Meaning of Representation

Roger Chartier — 2014-08-25T07:00:00Z

To understand the concept of political representation, Roger Chartier, the historian of the book, proposes to relate it to the different meanings encompassed by the French term “représentation,” from its broadest sense—to show an absent object—to its legal and political sense—to hold someone's place.

Filming the End of the World

Florent Guénard — 2013-05-06T07:30:00Z

2012, Terminator, Blade Runner, Melancholia. There is no shortage of films portraying the end of the world; in fact, they are becoming ever more successful. But what is their real meaning? Are they pure entertainment, allowing us to play with the idea that everything could stop from one day to the next? Peter Szendy believes that we should be taking them very seriously, because they express the fundamental nature of cinema itself – and because they tell us, in their own way, what a world is.