Art Theory

A notion of the common image, understood as a multisensory perception across species, and common ethics that transcend species-bound ways of living. »Although in recent reinterpretations of communism the emphasis has shifted to the notion of the common, very little work has been done on the possibility of extending communism to other-than-human modes of existence. In Common Image, Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie tackle this challenge with admirable thoroughness and theoretical breadth, while keeping an eye on the mediations – above all, images, which are not reducible to visuality – that render a larger than human communism possible.« (Michael Marder, author of Green Mass, 2021, Dump Philosophy, 2020, and Plant-Thinking, 2013)

»Through a multilingual, transtemporal process of ›looking back,
looking elsewhere,‹ Common Image collects from many cultures and historical moments the materials for creating a more just and more communal future. Its argument is deeply sensical: for the West to stop extracting and exploiting at the expense of untold others, past and present, widened perspectives built upon careful attending, respect for human and nonhuman agency, and a rediscovery of magic, myth and story will be required. A timely and important book.« (Jeffrey J Cohen, author of Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, 2015 and co-author of Earth (Object Lessons), 2017)

»The perspectival image, a powerful technology of humanist rationalism, which became invisible in its normalcy, is now disintegrating. The ›I‹ composed by the two authors together maps the possibility of an image that comes afterwards – the postimage – to reshape thinking away from the ancestry that has shaped thinking in the first place. Forceful and broad in scope, the book proposes the postimage through myths, magic, poetry, aesthesis, but also postcolonialism, community, ecology, multispecies, and many other dimensions. Can a postimage exist as a common relation? The book creates a concept and a figure – of a new, common image, as an ethical and aesthetic way of living.« (Olga Goriunova, author of »Fermentation« for More Posthuman Glossary, 2022 and (with Matthew Fuller) of Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility, 2019)