Image War: Interview with Marie-José Mondzain

Abstract

In this interview, Marie-José Mondzain, prominent French philosopher, historian, and cultural critic, discusses some of the key concepts in critical visual studies central to her work. In her typical keen, learned fashion, Mondzain demonstrates the unbreakable relationships among image, desire, subjectivity, collective identity, and the broader sociocultural milieu, in which image making and unmaking work in situ to constitute our political realities and the conflicts therein. Never a mere visual object, an image, as Mondzain shows, is as dynamic an element in the display of power as all the acts of negotiations and struggles that make up what is called politics. In plain but lively language and peppered with ticking examples, Mondzain’s replies to the interviewer provide a helpful introduction to her work on culture, theory, criticism, and politics over more than forty years.