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Image, Story, Ghost Images

Summary/Abstract: Many anthropologists of the image accentuate that visual images are treated as if they were subjects brought to life. By introducing in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images the category of “wanting” W. J. T. Mitchell turns the “life“ of the image into a problem and indicates its, i.a. “ghostly” character. In the opinion of the author of this article Mitchell paid insufficient attention to the possibility of images wishing to deceive their recipients, towards whom they turn. By referring to the views of, i.a. J. Hillis Miller, Nicolas Abraham, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man Michera demonstrated that the interpretational “story” provoked by images is “apotropaic”, i.e. it comprises a “safe” solution, which, at the same time, conceals that, which would breach the subjective status of the recipient.The second part of the article is an analysis of two exemplary “metapictures”, which can be treated as an attempt at problematizing this problem: Albrecht Dürer’s drawing “Angels’ Mass” and Robert Walser’s “Micrograms”.

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