Iconic Intelligence (Or: In Praise of the Sublamental)

Abstract

In this essay, De Boever focuses on a section titled “Idols of Unrepresentability” in the closing pages of Stathis Gourgouris's book The Perils of the One. Scrutinizing the two counterintuitive theses about iconoclasm's political theology and the artwork's desacralizing power of presentation that Gourgouris proposes there, De Boever expands on Gourgouris's examples to take on, in a productive tension with his thought, what De Boever calls “art's own political theology” and its related politics of “aesthetic exceptionalism.” Proposing a theory of unexceptional art, De Boever ultimately ties such a theory to the unexceptional politics of democratic anarchy that Gourgouris has developed elsewhere. In conclusion, De Boever considers the music Gourgouris has released as “Count G” within this aesthetico-political frame.