Do Pictures Really Want to Live?

Abstract This article seeks to understand what might be meant by the phrase ‘the pictorial turn’. It argues that to speak of the ‘pictorial turn’ is to do two things at once: to challenge the metaphysics that underpinned the ‘linguistic turn’ and to note the exhaustion of that metaphysics. The article examines the importance of what the author calls the critique of the critique of images, and places this within an age of the reassessment of the value of images, whether positive or negative, and the reaffirmation of their particular consistency. The term ‘pictorial turn’ would then no longer simply imply giving images their due against accusations of lack of consistency or of excessive consistency. This term would denote a real historical turning point, a mutation in the mode of the presence of images themselves; no longer the dues paid to images by the observer, but the vengeance exacted by the new powers of the image against all those who denied its powers. The article concludes by assessing the possibility of such a turn.