Visiocracy and Grammatology of Images: Making Images of the A-Visible

A Dialogue with:

Peter Goodrich (Cardozo School of Law, NYC)

Sigrid Weigel (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin; Permanent Visiting Prof., Princeton University)

Moderator: Niklaus Largier (University of California, Berkeley)

Peter Goodrich’s Legal Emblems and the Art of Law: Obiter Depicta as the Vision of Governance (2014) and Sigrid Weigel’s Grammatologie der Bilder (2015) both examine pictorial practices outside the standard domains of art history. Their research expands questions of image theory into the fields of law, governance, politics, science, and religion.

At this workshop, Goodrich and Weigel will discuss procedures that visualize phenomena and elude the visible: legal authority and justice for the former; emotions, thoughts, and the transcendental, for the latter. They will focus on the role played by images derived from rituals, cults, and religion in providing a site of presence for such ideas and phenomena, effectively enthroning them in the world.