Publication Details

Abstract

The article focuses on the crisis of representation in contemporary political philosophy and semiotics. Its basis is the current dispute between Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman over the possibilities and conditions of the representation via the photographic image. Both strong and weak points of the dispute are shown and both solutions are compared with another approach: with the theory of interpretation of Umberto Eco. The latter is an enrichment of the conception of representation in adding to it the differentiation between discursive expectations and signs. The author’s suggestion is to resolve the crisis of representation by joining the three above mentioned conceptions: to show that joining Rancière’s political theory of perceiving the image as sharing the perceptible with Didi-Huberman’s philosophical theory of the surviving image, and with Eco’s semiotic conception of understanding an image taking into account its sign functions, is possible.