On Giorgio Agamben’s Thought Of Image

Giorgio Agamben(1942-)is a famous contemporary Italian philosopher and thinker,and one of the top scholars in the world.Agamben has a deep foundation in philosophy,and his thoughts are deeply influenced by Heidegger,Benjamin and Foucault.He has a wide range of research fields and is proficient in political philosophy,religious theology,linguistics,literature and art.Agamben’s erudition and his original ideas make him more and more valued by scholars at home and abroad.Agamben’s thought of image is different from the path of other imageologists,but takes the image as an intermediary force and then explores the philosophical way of life energy.It is also a process of seeking salvation in the face of the world of the spectacle crisis caused by modern images.The main content of this paper will focus on the following three parts:The first part is the theoretical basis of Agamben’s thought of image,trying to accurately grasp the origin of him.Firstly,summarize the life of him and the formation process of academic thought and thought of image.Agamben inherited the reconstructed interpretation of Aby Warburg atlas on image and history,and paid attention to the human memory behind the image and its historical significance.The thoughts of Heidegger and Benjamin have a far-reaching impact on his thought.Heidegger’s “Weltbild” and the discussion of the original structure of art point to the return of human life,which provides a theoretical basis for him to explore the road of human salvation through images.Benjamin gave Agamben a new perspective from the disappearance of “aura” in the era of cultural industry to the thought of dialectical image,and began to think about the pseudo survival and deprived metaphysical essence of human beings from the perspective of image and film.The second part is the content of Agamben’s thought of image.Firstly,the concept of gesture is explained as a phenomenon caused by the loss of gesture,and the moving image can stimulate the potential of the image through the appearance of pure gesture,and then point to the existence of human true life.He regarded gesture as an intermediary of film,from gesture to further explore the generation of film and the ethics of film,and then to the criticism of the spectacle.Along the process from image to the spectacle,and finally return to image,he takes the repetition and suspension of montage as the revelation and resistance to the crisis of modernity,and takes the pure gesture and potential of image as the means of redemption.The third part is the final purpose of Agamben’s image thought,which reflects the reality of modern society through his thought.Combined with the analysis of the first three parts,we can see that his thought of image is closely related to his potential and biopolitics theory.Through the interpretation of image thought,it contains the redevelopment of potential to deal with the modernity crisis of “bare life ”and “exceptional state”.Image potential provides a way out of “Inaction”for the crisis of modernity.There is potential without use,and there is action without action.Agamben explained the possibility of his political messiah thought of image,which provided a way of redemption of Utopia.But in this sense,the realization of the so-called Messiah is actually just an idealistic utopian fantasy.Finally,this paper will criticize and reflect on the limitations of Agamben’s thought.