In this interdisciplinary anthology, essays study the relationship between the imagination and images both material and mental. Through case studies on a diverse array of topics including photography, film, sports, theater, and anthropology, contributors focus on the role of the creative imagination in seeing and producing images and the imaginary.

Bernd Huppauf is Professor Emeritus of New York University and former Director of Deutsches Haus.

Christoph Wulf is co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Historical Anthropology at the Free University Berlin.

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: The Indispensability of the Imagination

Bernd Huppauf and Christoph Wulf

Part I: Imagination, Fantasy and Creativity

Introduction to Part I

2 Imagination

Gert Mattenklott

3 Aesthetic Immanence

Georges Didi-Huberman

4 Imagination, Figurality and Creativity: Conditions of Cultural Innovation

Dieter Mersch

5 Intuition and Imagination: How to See Something that is Not There

Ludger Schwarte

Part II: A Look at Pictures - Pictures Look Back

Introduction to Part II

6 What is: Seeing an Image?

Marie José Mondzain

7 The Gaze in the Image: A Contribution to an Iconology of the Gaze

Hans Belting

8 Imagination or Response?: Some Remarks on the Understanding of Images and Pictures in Pre-modern China

Mathias Obert

9 The Nature of Face Recognition: A Perspective from the Cognitive Neurosciences David Poeppel and Clare Stroud

Part III: Body Images and Body Imaginations

Introduction to Part III

10 The Neapolitan Gesture

Gunter Gebauer

11 Images of Social Life

Christoph Wulf

12 Performative Spaces and Imagined Spaces: How Bodily Movement Sets the Imagination in Motion

Erika Fischer-Lichte

13 Media Images, Sports Rituals and the Imaginary

K. Ludwig Pfeiffer

14 Ferocious Images

Peter Sloterdijk

Part IV: Indeterminacy and Fuzziness of Images

Introduction to Part IV

15 Indeterminacy: On the Logic of the Image

Gottfried Boehm

16 Between Imitation and Simulation: Towards an Aesthetics of Fuzzy Images

Bernd Huppauf

17 A Small History (of) Still Passing

Rebecca Schneider

18 Scribbling, Scraping off, Painting over: Effacing Pictures in Literary Texts

Gabriele Brandstetter

19 Kierkegaard's Shadow Figures

Martin Puchner

Part V: Constructions of the Visual

Introduction to Part V

20 The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable: Word and Image in a Time of Terror

W.J.T. Mitchell

21 Face and Mass: Towards an Aesthetic of the Cross-Cut in Film

Gertrud Koch

22 Synaesthesia: Physiological Diagnosis, Practice of Perception, Art Program: A Semiotic Re-analysis

Roland Posner and Dagmar Schmauks

23 Recognisability and Visual Evidence in Medical Imaging versus Scientific Objectivity

Britta Schinzel

Notes on Contributors

Index