Rancière, Zizek, and the Image after Language

The Future of the Image (Verso, 2009) is actually Rancière's look back in a Zizekian fashion to show how our present aesthetic regime is based on the double image of "seeing two things at once" (79). These are the "showing" in image-focused works and the "reading" that is both in such works and prescribed by them for their proper understanding. Zizek, throughout his works, has shown us that reading backwards is the fate of understanding. We get what is through the process of seeing how it must have come to be. For a century and a half or so, we have allowed recognition of what the artist was doing to overrule the simple critique of representation. The trick now that these philosophers have shown us this aesthetic is to move beyond it, or rather to recognize how we have already moved beyond it. This is what I will try to blog about in this new framework: how we can see that where we are at is already mostly beyond those recent recognitions of Rancière's and Zizek's, always in a Zizekian fashion--of course!