Sigrid Weigel (Author) Sigrid Weigel is former director of Zentrum für Literatur-und Kulturforschung in Berlin and has taught at numerous universities in the United States and elsewhere around the world. She has published on literature, philosophy, cultural history, image theory, memory, secularization, genealogy, and the cultural history of sciences across numerous books in German and English, including Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy (Stanford, 2013).
Sigrid Weigel has provided a masterful overview of the infinite variety of image-practices, from the most primitive forms of mark-making, to effigies and monuments, to the dematerialized images of ghosts, angels, and memories, to screen culture and cultural icons. This authoritative volume will be essential to students of iconology, art history, and visual culture who will enjoy its wide range and original insights.---W. J. T. Mitchell, author of What Do Pictures Want?, What do a video of a burning American flag, an MRI of the brain, and Raphael's Madonna have in common? With stunning breath and erudition, Weigel concretizes what Derrida only suspected, completes what Benjamin was unable to finish, and clarifies what mystified Warburg--revealing the powerful forces hidden at the singular point of culture, which turn cyphers into images, from the banal to the most sacred.---Jimena Canales, author of Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science,