We often don’t have the “right” reactions to photographs of violence and oppression. This is certainly true for me. Sometimes you feel irritation—victimhood can be irritating. Sometimes you feel contempt or disgust. Photographs of suffering and violence do not always call up empathy and solidarity. Some such photographs—especially today, when we often lack the political context in which to understand these conflicts—actually call up anti-solidarity.....
So photographs are very good at conjuring up a conflicted stew of emotions. But rather than censor ourselves, we should allow ourselves to experience the photographs, and then analyze what those reactions mean. We need to look at these images with a more open mind and a more open heart, and allow ourselves a free reign. Then we need to do the analytic work, the historic work, the political work. Emotion is not an endpoint—I too am a Brechtian in some ways!—but it can be the starting-point to investigating what it means to be a victim, what it means to be defeated, what political oppression does. Photographs illuminate the terribly damaged family of man to which, I’m afraid, we all belong."

How can we explain the paradox of a political world full of images but increasingly deprived of imagination understood as the radical capacity to begin something new? By developing the concept of imaginal, understood as an intermediate space between imagination and the imaginary, I will explore the imaginal nature of politics as well as that of its contemporary transformations. Whereas imagination is a faculty that we possess and the imaginary is a domain that possesses us, the imaginal, understood as what is made of images, of (re)presentations that are presences in themselves, is not the sign of a lack, but rather of an abundance. Yet, the exponential quantitative increase in the number of images that mediate our political world, has now produced a new quality, a change in the intimate nature of politics itself, which is increasingly reduced to an empty spectacle. Together with the spectacularisation of politics, comes its increasing virtualization, as images, in the contemporary epoch, are no longer objects given once for all, but rather processes. Although the revolution of the new individual media can perhaps open new roads towards a  democratization of the image, a different scenario is disclosed by the current biopolitical turn: that of a global society of the spectacle where the cloned image is no longer what mediates our political life, but rather what risks doing politics in our stead.