Against the Image. Has There Ever Been an Iconoclastic Theory?

Iconoclasm constitutes a theoretical nexus of extraordinary significance within aesthetic and philosophical thought. It is not confined to a historical or religious episode, but rather emerges as a structural tension between visibility and transcendence, between the representative power of the image and the ontological interdiction of figuration. The theory of images interprets iconoclasm as an epistemic gesture that interrogates the very status of the image. The iconoclasm has compelled the arts to continually reinvent their own languages, seeking a balance between the dangers of idolatry and the preservation of the affective and devotional threshold inherent to images. Within this dynamic, artistic practices have developed both formal and conceptual strategies to safeguard the spiritual and affective potency of representation without succumbing to idolatry—from abstraction to symbolic reduction, from the fragment to the sign. The philosophical import of iconoclasm thus lies in its constitutive ambivalence: by destroying the image, it reveals its power; in attempting to negate it, it reaffirms its centrality as a device of thought, presence, and aesthetic experience—a fragile threshold between the visible and the invisible. Yet, although driven by an ancestral anthropological impulse and constantly fuelled by religious, ideological and political assumptions, iconoclastic intransigence has rarely resulted in a uniform, systematic attitude that is fully consistent from a theoretical and pragmatic point of view. From the outset, iconophobia has proved to be a set of unstable, even paradoxical ideas and practices, just as unstable as the theories of images that justify it and constitute its condition of possibility. From such a point of view, a more careful analytical reflection on this intricate theoretical complex, as it emerges in Byzantine visual culture, also sheds light on recent and apparently distant phenomena, as well as on the constitutively precarious and paradoxical nature of any iconoclastic “doctrine”.