Our world is increasingly saturated with images. Their number is growing so exponentially—on social networks and screens of all kinds—that the space in which we live is literally overflowing with images (we are approaching the limit which Walter Benjamin described as “a one hundred percent image space”). The question of storing or circulating them, their weight, the fluidity or viscosity of their exchanges, the fluctuations in their values—in short, the whole business of the image economy—is more relevant than ever. In order to analyze what is at stake in this new iconomy of our times, the lecture will offer a glimpse behind the scenes of visibility: on the one hand, into the road networks that route and reroute the circulation of images and gazes; on the other hand, into the history of shadows and their hidden transactions.

Peter Szendy is David Herlihy Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities. Among his recently published works in English: The Supermarket of the Visible: Toward a General Economy of Images (Fordham University Press, 2019); Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience (Fordham University Press, 2018); All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage (Fordham University Press, 2016); Phantom Limbs: On Musical Bodies (Fordham University Press, 2015); Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World (Fordham University Press, 2015); Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials: Cosmopolitical Philosofictions (Fordham University Press, 2013). At the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University, he leads the Economies of Aesthetics Initiative.