Running throughout Carnes’s beautiful and powerful book is a flexible structure of thought or rough set of conceptual guidelines that I, as a Catholic theologian who has read my fair share of Erich Przywara, would tend to call “analogy,” at least as a shorthand, though I would by no means insist that others use this term. I find this flexible structure somewhat helpful regardless of how it is named. Carnes employs her own version of it to argue, in various concrete cases, that a visible image bears both a likeness and unlikeness to an invisible excess (see pp. 7, 22, 52, 95, 123, 168, and 182). For his part, Przywara would say that such an excess resides both “in” and “beyond” the image—or in his more abstract, ontological and theological terms: essence is present “in” and “beyond” existence, the infinite is present “in” and “beyond” the finite, the Creator is present “in” and “beyond” the creature. In a move which calls to mind John Betz’s impressive two-part article in Modern Theology, “Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being,” Carnes transposes such a conceptual apparatus into a largely aesthetic register (though, to be clear, her theory of images encompasses more than the aesthetic, in the narrow sense which pertains exclusively to the work of art). In short, she thinks the presence of the invisible “in” and “beyond” the visible.

According to Carnes, one stays within bounds so long as one holds the visible and the invisible together in the tension of their likeness and unlikeness. One goes out of bounds as soon as one attempts to eradicate either side of this polarity (that is, the visible or the invisible) or either mode of their relation (that is, their likeness or unlikeness). This set of conceptual parameters disqualifies any absolute iconoclasm that would disregard the value of the visible as well as any absolute iconophilia that would stifle desire for the invisible. It renounces any single-minded fixation on likeness, which would amount to idolatry, as well as any obsessive concern with unlikeness, which would leave one with an empty apophaticism. It demands an intrinsic, mutually conditioning relationship between iconoclasm and iconophilia, in which negation of the image is shown to be a necessary part of the experience of desiring that which the image represents. An ardent, non-arrested desire is really the key here. The image propels desire forward both through what it posits visually and through its self-negating act of pointing beyond itself.

Barthians who are wary of the analogy of being need not be overly trepidatious here, since Carnes’s argument is emphatically christocentric. As “the image of the invisible God” (181; see also Col 1:15), Christ grounds and perfectly exemplifies Carnes’s theory of the image and its self-negation. A biblically and doctrinally specified Christology guides the entire discussion. Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant theologians will all find much to appreciate in Carnes’s ecumenically sensitive project, which uses the anonymous trappings of (what I would call) analogy in such a thoroughly christological manner that few, if any, will judge it to be an extrinsic philosophical imposition.

At the same time, the basic principles of this analogical thought-form in Carnes’s work are communicable to a somewhat secularized and in any case largely non-Christian modern culture that must engage iconoclastic and iconophilic possibilities in its interactions with various religious and nonreligious images. Carnes’s book is both an exciting work of constructive Christian theology and a critical intervention in the interdisciplinary field of “visual studies” (xi) and warrants a careful reading by participants in both conversations. Without identifying excess with the Christian God, a secular or non-Christian reader may still recognize Carnes’s formal point, resonant with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bruno Latour, that images possess their own intrinsic iconoclasm (157, 163).

Reading through the text, I found myself not only agreeing with its central christocentric-and-analogical claims about the status of the image but also being energized by particular nuances and details that emerge within this framework.

I was especially struck by Carnes’s innovative appropriation of the distinction between hypostasis (individual person) and prosopon (individual self-expression or face) to formulate a theory of the “prosoponic likeness” of Christ in the poor and oppressed, whom she tends to call “the least of these” (see Matt 25:40). She argues: “As the risen Christ can be present to the icon through his hypostatic likeness to it, so Christ can be present to the least of these through his prosoponic likeness to them” (132). She continues:

Like hypostatic likeness, so, too, prosoponic likeness is Spirit-given. Even so, it is not identical to hypostatic likeness, which has the Spirit’s work in deification as its model. Prosoponic likeness does not require that the least of these have been incorporated into Christ’s very hypostasis, to be united with him in everlasting glory. The least of these may or may not have that kind of likeness as well, but they do not have it by virtue of their status as the least of these. Prosoponic likeness signifies, instead, that God has chosen to share the divine face with the least of these, whether or not they are members of the body of Christ. (139)

Carnes contends, in keeping with her Orthodox Christian tradition, that there is a kind of union with Christ’s hypostasis that is given by the Holy Spirit to faithful Christians who are being divinized through their participation in the church and that is similarly manifest in the epicletically blessed icons used for worship in Orthodox churches. What she adds—in order to clarify the meaning of biblical passages such as Matt 25 and in order to retrieve lost insights in certain Eastern patristic exegeses of such passages by commentators such as Chrysostom, Basil, and Nyssa (127, 133)—is a claim that there is another kind of union with Christ through his prosopon, or outward self-expression, which is given definitively to the suffering and downtrodden of this violent world regardless of their level of virtue or religious belonging. “The least of these” look like Christ in their misery and make him present in a real way through their bodies even if one cannot presuppose, on this basis alone, that they are united with him hypostatically through deifying faith and grace. Every human being is created in the image and likeness of God, but “the least of these” are distinctive insofar as they prosoponically image Christ in their suffering.

Who are “the least of these”? A few examples appear very clearly in Carnes’s text. Others hide in its margins. There is the pregnant woman and her unborn child, witnessed by Margaret Ebner, who were burned to death as punishment for stealing the consecrated host (108). There are the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean who seem, to Bartolomé de las Casas’s horrified eyes, to be “Jesus Christ, our God, scourged and afflicted and buffeted and crucified, not once but millions of times” (93). There is the black teenager Michael Brown shot dead on the streets, commemorated in Mark Dukes’s icon Our Lady of Ferguson (150). There are the victims of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, whose precious lives were senselessly destroyed over a work of satire (10). There are the Muslims who not only find their religion mocked but also their human rights violated by Western, Islamophobic societies (11).

There is also Maria Florencia Onori, the female model on Playboy Mexico’s controversial “Marian” cover (20). I would argue that hers is the face of Christ not despite the fact that the pornographic industry oppressively attempts to reduce her presence to that of a consumable object but precisely because of this fact. And there are also the survivors of John Howard Yoder’s (99) sexual abuse who go unmentioned. These last two examples are the ones I suggest are “hiding” in the text. They are present yet absent—or at least not emphasized to be prosoponically Christic in the ways that I think, according to Carnes’s logic, they could be.

An open question I have about Carnes’s theory of prosoponic likeness is whether we want to say more about the presence of Christ in “the least of these” which would take us beyond the conceptual restrictions of the prosopon, namely beyond the idea of Christ’s outward self-expression. In brief, my worry is that such a prosoponic emphasis may reinforce a sense of exteriority, non-subjectivity, or instrumentality-for-another which are traits already widely associated with such persons because of their historical circumstances. The risk is that “they” become outwardly Christ for “us,” while their intrinsic personhood—their hypostases (perhaps augmented for us moderns by notions of personal agency and selfhood)—remain not only obscure but also dissociated from the person of Christ.

To be clear, I do not want to engage in any presumptuous speculation about the state of the souls of the “least of these,” as if such a “state” could be safely generalized without threat of misapprehension, prejudice, or romanticization. I acknowledge the importance of some distinction between union with Christ through a life of intentional, divinizing participation and some other kind of union, important to affirm for biblical and ethical reasons, which does not presuppose so much at the interior level. Carnes helpfully marks such a distinction using the terms “hypostatic” and “prosoponic.” My question, however, is a theological one about what we think God is doing in the minds and hearts of those who are at a minimum prosoponically Christic. What mysterious sinews, what acts of divine grace, connect those bearing the face of Christ with his very person? Can his personhood and face be divided? What does appearing as a living image of Christ’s prosopon do, not just for the observers called to respond, but also for the living image herself, the abject one, the one treated as nonperson?

These are open and genuine questions occasioned for me by this wonderful book, questions to which I do not possess ready-made answers. Let me say, in closing, simply that I am grateful for this opportunity to think about the nature of the image and specifically about the many ways that Christ is both image and imaged in this suffering world. I am grateful for the illumination of certain conceptual parameters which guard against futile efforts to decide absolutely between iconoclasm and iconophilia and for the many historically subtle interpretations of specific images that Carnes develops within such parameters. The book gives me hope, not only for a more ecumenically holistic, intellectually compelling, and artistically enriched practice of Christian theology, which this text skillfully represents, but also for the often largely unimaginable promise of a new, convivial life transfigured by resurrection joy.

Even before I finished reading Natalie Carnes’s beautiful, richly layered book, I assigned it in a graduate seminar I am teaching this semester on “Aesthetics, Religion, and Modernity” as one of two constructive works by contemporary scholars. The other is Ashon Crawley’s Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. I can hardly wait to discuss the work with my graduate students, most of whom are systematic theologians (I am not). I hope it can serve (among other things) as a model for the kind of theology that does not just dabble in other disciplinary formations, but allows them to enrich and vivify the theological project. I can’t wait to see what kind of conversation we get started by reading Crawley’s work right after Carnes. The version of that conversation that is already unfolding in my own head forms part of my response in this forum.

I also finished reading Carnes’s book at the same time I was watching the new Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. I am raising two kids in a small New York City apartment, so I admit I’m a sucker for a yearly KonMarie purge and reorganization. But watching the show I was struck by how little Kondo cares how much stuff her clients keep and how much she wants to transform their relationship to objects themselves. Her clients in the show are palpably confused by this part of her project: they are vexed and embarrassed by their relationship to things but equally baffled by her suggestion that they cultivate a deeper spiritual and emotional connection to their stuff. They embody toward their huge piles of stuff the relationship W. J. T Mitchell describes about Modern Western confusion about images, as discussed by Carnes: they know they have been seduced, commanded, and ensnared by their stuff but they also intuitively know that their stuff isn’t supposed to have this kind of power over them (159).

I share these insights into the idiosyncratic nature of my own thinking as I approached this book, because they illuminate the questions I bring to the text. Those questions might be categorized as questions about how Carnes understands the relationship between Modern Western formation and Christian theology, how she thinks about the relationship between image and object, and encompassing both of these concerns, what might be added or shifted in Carnes’s analysis of iconophilia and iconoclasm (or iconoclasms of fidelity and temptation) by naming colonialism and slavery as the foundational events of modernity.

Very early on, Carnes names the three levels of argument about images at work in her book: that “iconoclasm is generally intrinsic to iconophilia, as negation is to revelation and presence. The second identifies a peculiarly modern thorniness to the entanglement of iconoclasm and iconophilia, generated by the institutions and cultural forms that shape image relationships in modernity. The third articulates the intertwining of iconoclasm and iconophilia represented by Christ the Image that is determinative for the Christian imagining tradition and echoed at some level in all images” (15). She states clearly that she will spend most of her time with this third level of argument (Christ the Image as determinative for Christian imagining) “for it is this third level that helps make sense of the other two.”

I am intrigued by the suggestion that getting our theological heads on straight with regards to christologically oriented image-experience will untangle the modern thorniness regarding presence/absence or iconophilia and iconoclasm. This could mean something like modern confusion about images is itself the result of bad theology or modernity (as a form of thought/practice) is itself really just a form of Christian heresy. I don’t get that sense from Carnes’s work, but I would welcome her thoughts on this.

Rather, I took this “making sense” to mean that Modern Western Christians are caught inside the same vexing formations that make Modern Westerns so confused about images in general. So Carnes’s theological proposals for reoriented or re-formed imaging will be salutary for those who are oriented toward Christ the Image. Indeed, it is her explicit ecclesial and ecumenical commitments that make clear she is speaking to Christians across theological formations, but speaking to them as “moderns” caught up in paradoxical image-relationships that are both the product of weird Christian confusions and weird modern confusions, which are sometimes part of the same histories and sometimes not.

At times I wanted more insight into how she saw these entanglements, but I am not sure it matters if we can sort out where Christian theology’s complicity in the projects of modernity begins and where it might one day end in order to engage her theological project. But the questions remain: who are these modern Christian subjects, what made them, and how might they be remade by more faithful devotion to Christ the Image (via Carnes’s iconoclasm of fidelity)?

And this is where I felt the absence of colonialism and slavery as definitive for modernity most acutely. It is not, of course, completely absent in Carnes’s work. It emerges in fleeting ways, suggesting its presence even when it is not named explicitly. If we turn back to her discussion of Mitchell in chapter 5, we can see the presence of the colonial mission field. We moderns, Mitchell argues in Carnes’s words, “deny our duplicity by projecting the commitment to the aliveness of images onto some Other, locating animism in childhood, or far-off cultures, or distant times, while claiming for ourselves a rationalism that knows these images not to be alive” (159).

I could not stop thinking of Webb Keane’s discussion of early twentieth-century Dutch Calvinist missionaries in Indonesia in Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter as a detailed anthropological history of this process “on the ground.” In those encounters, the central concern was getting relationships to materiality “right”—to correcting fetishistic attachments, to securing the proper free agency of the subject by circumscribing the agency of stuff. But as Keane insists, it is not a simple story of “Christians” meeting their “Others” and trying to police their attachments to stuff. Indonesian Christians joined this debate sometimes against the missionaries, sometimes on their side against other Javanese groups or a Muslim majority. On the one hand, we could read this as a kind of proof of Protestant entanglement with the duplicitous relationship to images/objects/materiality that Mitchell is diagnosing. Except that the Indonesian Christians Keane is studying are also modern, Christian subjects with different, competing relationships to things than the one Mitchell (and maybe Carnes?) is charting. Where do they fit in the story about Western (Christian) Moderns? (Here is where I can’t stop thinking about Marie Kondo again and the criticism that she is importing an “Eastern woo-woo” into a “rational West” despite Kondo’s own formation both in Shintoism and Christianity. Maybe I just want to watch Netflix with Carnes?)

The colonial field lurks in the background of chapter 1 as well, both in the invocation of Talal Asad’s work (and to a lesser degree in Wendy Brown’s read of modernity’s Protestant character) and in the discussion of museums and secret museums and their contemporary instantiations in fine art and pornography/advertising (respectively). I loved Carnes’s use of these histories to diagnosis with historical particularity the confused mess moderns have made of desire and how we have worked out our confused desires in our relationships to images and objects. But these are not (solely, primarily) histories of Western Europe figuring out its relationship to images and things. Rather, Western Europe worked out its relationship to images and things on the colonial frontier (understanding colonialism as fundamentally driven by slave capital for at least its first four hundred years). There is a robust scholarly literature tracing the intimate relationship between the formation of museums, colonial administration, and the emergence of anthropology that would deepen Carnes’s analysis. And this history applies not only to vast repositories of pillaged “things” (like the British museum), but also to the history of the fine art museum (as Simon Gikandi argues in Slavery and the Culture of Taste). Even more, focus on the history of slave advertisements, brothels that catered to (forced) sexual fantasies across bondage and race lines, and the fetishization of African sexuality would provide Carnes with a direct link between “fine art” and “high taste” (“museums”) and pornography/advertising (“secret museums”) (as you might find in Marcus Wood’s book Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography or in more wide-reaching ways in Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection).

We might push this line of inquiry even further and say that it is in grappling with slavery as the foundational event of modernity that the tension between image and object is felt most clearly and the tension Carnes is charting between iconoclasm and iconophilia reaches its breaking point. Here I am thinking of something like Fred Moten’s book In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition that takes as its fundamental problem how to think about the “inner life of a commodity” when we remember that there were just such commodities: objects who could be bought and sold who defied fetish-logic by also thinking and feeling. Would this reorienting (historically, theoretically, theologically) provide new purchase on how to think about the relationship between “image” and “object,” iconoclasm and iconophilia?

I should pause now to state explicitly that this line of discussion is not meant to be a “gotcha moment.” I am not trying to enact “a Baconian iconoclasm” (her term) and upbraid Carnes for not reading the right books or writing the right book. I offer these thoughts in the spirit of a “Wittgensteinian iconoclasm” (also Carnes’s term), a “yes and” to her analysis that wants to know what would be added, deepened, layered to her work if we turned our gaze to the presence of colonialism, slavery, and their aftermaths as central to the vexations Carnes has so rightly named. And by “central” I mean the story that both haunts and funds the other philosophical, theological, and theoretical discussions Carnes engages with such breadth and insight.

One obvious (to me) added layer to her analysis would be in her ecumenical aims. If she is clearing the ground for a way to think images in Christian theology beyond the tired old tales about who loves them (Catholics), who fears them (Protestants), and who has too narrow a view of them (Orthodox)—and if that is all this book did it would be a monumental service to the Christian world—what do we do with the many, diverse, rich, and deep Christian traditions that don’t easily fit into this tripartite division? What about those modern Indonesian Christians who embraced Dutch Calvinism and then turned it on its head? Or what about Mexican Apostolicos who defy easy stories about Catholic and Protestant love or suspicion of images (I am thinking of Lloyd Barba’s work)? Or looking forward to my own graduate seminar discussion, what about the groan, the shout, the faint of Blackpentecostalism as ways to think about Christ the Image and to enact an iconoclasm of fidelity that knows intimately the tension between the absence and presence of the spirit in the body that was once objectified (most literally) and vessel for the fleeting presence of the divine?

Perhaps more obliquely to these questions about what defines modernity and who answers to the call “modern subject” are questions about taste and judgment, so central to the problems of aesthetics and beauty and imagining and yet also mostly absent in Carnes’s work. Absent, that is, in terms of explicit discussion, but present on every page in the objects/images and texts Carnes chooses to engage. Again, my curiosity is not to police Carnes’s own aesthetic affections. Indeed, she works on every page to curate a wide-ranging, ecumenical (in all senses) collection of images/objects/experiences so that her theological claims cannot be foreclosed as applying only to “that kind of art” or another. But her tastes are present nonetheless in the images/objects that she presents for analysis.

I realize that she is primarily offering a “formal aesthetics” (not her term) in that she wants to discuss something true about images in general, irrespective of content—that intertwining of christological iconophilia and iconoclasm that is “echoed at some level in all images” in her third argumentative claim. But even leaving aside the return to my first question above—how does this echo work?—this kind of formal analysis leaves by the wayside so much of what aesthetic experience does in creating sociality through consensus and contestation. So much of the “work” of the image (object/experience) is in arguing with others about the responses it evokes. There are new lines of intimacy or antipathy drawn when one realizes your new office buddy really loves Maroon Five but cannot talk to you about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It may be that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, if subjected to careful reflection, would yield iconoclasms of fidelity or figure forth the twin-movements of absence/presence that Carnes discusses as inherent in all images. But that is certainly not what matters to me when I want to talk about “The First Penis I Saw” with a new friend who turns out not to share my aesthetic tastes.

For me, these contestations of taste—the long, good arguments that can be generated trying to explain your love of Cardi B or to get someone to consent to watch all three seasons of Deadwood or to ask someone to defend their love of Drake over Kendrick—return us, again, to the question of who the Modern (Christian) Subject is, how she is made, and how she might be remade by Christ the Image (and in what ways she needs to be re-made in the first place).

This book was one of those objects that generated the desire for good, long arguments. I would love to debate Cardi B with Carnes or watch Marie Kondo with her. But she has also given us more than enough fodder for genuine aesthetic contestation in this beautiful, layered, enriching book. I cannot wait to discuss it here and with my graduate students and with everyone else I will try to persuade to read it.

Natalie Carnes’s Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia is an attempt to engender a generative rather than oppositional account of the relationship between iconoclasm and iconophilia. Through close, christological examinations of the different senses of image-breaking and image-making that course through theological debates, questions of desire, and readings of various icons and images, Carnes hopes to show how a multiplicity of images can be produced by the play between presence and absence, image and its negation, that is at the heart of both iconoclasm and iconophilia. Aiming to break down what she reads as trenchant divisions in Christianity (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox) and between Secular Modern West and Religious, Carnes takes the absence or the negative that is a part of every image as a way of gently undoing the supposed ease with which iconoclasts and iconophiles have been identified. The iconoclast often breaks images because of their desire to affirm the true image. Conversely, the iconophile produces a wide array of images that suggest the inability of the image to capture that higher meaning which their literality gives shape to but never exhausts. What results is a book that weaves together the harmonious and discordant senses of iconoclasm and iconophilia. Rather than these different groups getting reduced to an identity as iconoclastic or iconophilic, Carnes complexifies the picture, providing a deeper rendering of images and their multiplicity by the stories she highlights, the shadows that she draws attention to, and the play of light and dark in what is meant to provide a mutually edifying education. Still, for a book that does so much complexifying, there is a significant amount of categorical distinctions between the true image and the false image, good desire and bad desire, order and disorder, temptation and fidelity, which quickly became tiring. It became tiring primarily because, over the course of the book, it becomes clear that the book never subjects itself and the image it renders to questions that would situate its conversation anywhere real. Just as a negative at the heart of the image enables its generativity, the negative—the unthought—at the heart of this book generates its claims of novelty, beauty, and reconciliation that remain, in my view, inadequate for attending to the existence of anyone who is not straight, white, and Christian. This is not, necessarily, for a lack of trying, though it may be for a lack of trying hard enough.

Power and the Production of Christian Theology

I am not of the mind that everything in theology ought to be reduced to a power analysis, but in its absence the presence of Christian theology’s mystifying, rather than mystical, imagination becomes unavoidable—unbearable even. The inadequacy of an approach that neglects to attend to questions of power is felt early in the book, when Carnes distinguishes art and pornography. This distinction works in order to reveal how artistic and pornographic images can either fail to allow desire to emerge in relationship to the image or literalize desire to the point that it becomes static, illusory. By rethinking the image and desire through Christ feeding from the Maria lactans, Carnes seeks to show how the image of Christ in the painting educates the viewer in the proper ordering of desire by “press[ing] a non-literal interpretation of desire” (47). It is on such a reading that Carnes critiques pornography as insufficiently critical and stuck in the literal, such that it produces an illusory and purely consumptive image. Here, in accepting the narrative of power that distinguishes the production of art from the production of pornography, the museum from the secret museum, Carnes depends on too easy narrations of the differences between the two. At the same time, this assumption of the distinction between art and pornography also assumes a moral primacy of the former and a perversity of the latter. If Carnes is trying to make a critique of the heteropatriarchal power structures that produce straight porn, it ought to be named as such. Otherwise, these kinds of statements ignore the radical critical, political, and yes gratifying and pleasurable work of feminist, queer, black, trans sex workers and porn creators. Otherwise, such analyses of pornography depend on the fear of sexual desire unmanaged by Christian authority that has led to various forms of sexual and gender oppression.

Yet Carnes never seems to feel the need to name who controls the production of dominant visions of pornography and how that dominance is not unrelated to white heteropatriarchal dominance over the means of production in general, including theological production in the Modern West. Carnes neglects to attribute disordered pornographic relationships to the white supremacist heteropatriarchal structures of power that produce them and so situate theological production as generative in the production of the museum and the secret museum. The book thus neglects to recognize how the divisions between art and pornography work to naturalize the production of one domain as disordered and both as in need of a higher order. This theological narration repeats the dividing and dominating impulses of the modern West (including Western Christianity) and calls Carnes’s analysis into question for its detachment from the actual situation of how art and pornography and art-porn are produced. This also misses the serious organizing that sex workers, queer and trans and poc porn producers and pornstars are doing to name what would actually provide them with well-ordered relationships, which is not the trinitarian economy, but things like decriminalization, universal healthcare, the undoing of antiblack and anti-fat protocols in porn casting, and a host of other concrete demands. Rather than dealing with the complex production of images in pornography as actually occurring, Carnes abstracts from their situatedness in order to narrate the proper ordering of desire and the image within Christianity. Yet this vision of Christian desire and subjectivity is decidedly straight in its orientation.

The primary problem with Image and Presence, it seems to me, is its reconciliatory investments which result in a tendency toward the common Christian theological procedure of making categorical distinctions in order to narrate them as reconciled in Christ.1 In this way, it preserves the image of Christian reconciliation as desirable by effacing the material violence that this vision of salvation in reconciliatory terms enacts. It is the lack of insight into the problems of power that emerge within a narrative of reconciliation that leads to an odd dismissal of Yoder’s sexual violence toward women as emerging from the “the anti-Christ imaging of Yoder’s own life” rather than the theological productivity of his vision of Christian theology as a project of radical reconciliation. Of course, such a recognition of this reconciliatory engine of Christian unity here would call into question the very mode of perception and terms of enunciation that Carnes is here invested in. But, the problem of perception is so crucial to the problems of enunciation here, where Yoder’s violence can only be read as a failure to image Christ rather than as a violence that was, in many ways, generated and justified by not only his theological investments, but institutional theological investments in a christological narrative of reconciliation which provided the theological armature for, not only Yoder’s, but a widespread scholarly and ecclesial dismissal of the victims and survivors of his actions. These kinds of oversights of power may be forgivable for some readers precisely because their cumulative affect is not evenly felt.

Racial Absence and the Generation of Christian Unity

Neglect of the uneven distribution of feeling, of suffering, and power extends throughout the book. Carnes seems to be attempting subtle commentary about racism, colonialism, and theology in multiple parts of the book, but these fleeting attempts function merely as images that communicate the feeling that the book is wrestling with the real difficulties of life when it actually wrestles with an absence of significant engagement. When I was studying for exams in Christian theology, I began to notice this mystifying power as it worked in much contemporary theology after James Cone. I began to notice when glimpses of blackness, slavery, and colonialism would emerge in white theological works. I began to notice how blackness and slavery, especially, were often evoked as a way of communicating without saying. Blackness works in these texts to image a totalizing sense of oppression, a total opacity, and a sense of total strangeness. This is a problem that I found in Image and Presence, too.

In Carnes’s reading of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, the silent Negro is a sign of the dimness with which we perceive grace in the world. The protagonist of Percy’s novel watches the Negro, while his white gaze communicates the Negro as lacking an existence or meaning for himself. This black reader of Image and Presence watched Carnes’s reading of this novel, waiting for a reflection on the problems of using blackness to image grace for the edification of the white gaze. But Carnes resonates with Percy’s image of blackness and its depiction of the dazzling dimness of grace in the world. Similarly, the black Christ on Carnes’s reading is a sign of Christ’s riven and riving presence. “Under the tree, a darker tree,” Carnes writes, referencing Christopher Wiman’s poem. But where someone like James Cone elaborates on the historical and political correlations and identifications he sees between the cross and the lynching tree to reveal how such violence is also repeated in the Christian theological production of inattention to blackness for its own sake, here we get no real analysis. Rather the theological works to abstract from the concrete violences and antiblackness in order to make meaning from blackness. Where, for Cone or Kelly Brown Douglas, the black Christ draws attention to not only the shape of black life but black theological production, here the black image appears, but never as a way of attending to blackness for itself. It is always on the way to some other point that blackness is called upon.2 There is no actual engagement with black thinkers, with black theology, let alone black studies. Instead blackness works to conjure the sense that the author needs to generate—the appearance of significance or a depth of feeling where actually there is none. The absence of blackness produces the presence of white theology.

A resonant absence carries through the text in its readings of indigenous people’s relationships to colonial Christianity. At one moment, the colonial situation registers as the violence that Christ breaks, in the next, Aztec peoples are abstracted from their violent situation within colonial Christianity to be read as providing hospitality to colonial Christianity. Reading Pope John Paul II’s words from the beatification of Juan Diego, the Aztec man to whom the Virgin of Guadalupe appears, Carnes’s analysis identifies with this beatification to reconcile the powerful and the lowly. Carnes goes on to note that, although he is not of significant stature on earth,

Juan Diego nevertheless ushers millions into the church with his gift of the acheiropoeietic image the Virgin gave to him. And Mary herself comes as one of the least of these, as an indigenous girl rather than a powerful queen. To receive this image, the authorities of the church (the bishop) had to yield to the authority of the least of these. (143)

Here, the indigenous are put to work as “doorkeepers” for the salvation of the church (which sounds like unpaid labor, to me), while Carnes narrates this as an inversion of power and authority. Yet, to claim this inversion requires an abstraction from the concrete situation in which power plays out. Indeed, the various means of managing and asserting control that the bishop holds includes the power to legitimate this apparition. In so doing, Juan Diego comes to figure for the Catholic Church, as the power of indigenous devotion is directed to fund the authority of the church. Missing power’s shaping influence in the production of these theological images results in missing the complexity that these images of colonial life hold when read from the underside. It is unclear what power and meaning the Virgin of Guadalupe holds when not read in terms of white reconciliation. For such an exaggerated sense of the difference between Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox, and the need for complexity in generating unity from the three, the sense that indigenous people or black people can just be assimilated into the Christian imagination without attending to these differences of power reads as deeply negligent.

These moments of inattention and negligence made my head spin as the whole book seems concerned with diagnosing such inattention and negligence in contemporary relationships to images as a problem. When I reached moments in Carnes’s argument where she elaborates on how christological senses of the image halt the objectifying and tokenizing operations of wrongly order relationships to images, I couldn’t help but screw up my eyes at the disjuncture between the theological claims of this book and its actual function in relying on tokenizing and objectifying images of black and indigenous people. The narrative arc of this book is certainly generative. It generates an image of Christ and a feeling of Christian unity that depends on covering over the antagonistic senses of theological meaning that black and indigenous people make for themselves. Those images and sensibilities that aren’t predicated on or governed by reconciliation with whiteness in Christian unity. In this way, Image and Presence’s imagination of Christian unity depends on the absence of a solidarity that would exert a shaping force on the structure of theological thought.

Conclusion

In narrating Las Casas’s shifting position against indigenous genocide and black enslavement, Carnes notes that he “decides that his people did not bring Christ. They crucify him anew” (93). Yet deciding whether they brought Christ or not is not up to him. Although they came in the name of Christ, bearing the cross and images of Christ, these actions are separable from the same theological productions that determine the orthodox images of Christ that shape Carnes’s reflections (after all, she’s not drawing on, say, gnostic theologies of Christ to reflect on the image). Like Las Casas, Carnes attempts an adjudication of the violence done in the name and image of Christ. A revised attempt at Yoder’s “vulnerable enemy love,” but this time made generative rather than rendered as iconoclasm of temptation, leads to this claim:

We do need to be vigilant for anti-Christ imaging. There are forms of imaging that point to worldly power rather than to Christ. There are images—more fittingly called idols—that attempt to obliterate the cross. Even cross images are not invulnerable to the temptation to idolatry. When they are identified with wealth, power, and war, cross images cease to point beyond themselves to Christ, for they deny their own logic of riving rivenness. . . . But this is difficult to discern. For, simply because one person (say, Constantine) has once identified a version of the cross with war, it is not the case that all crosses have become idols. . . . Images and idols always name relationships that are negotiated and renegotiated in particular places and times. Even Christ the ruler and judge can be an image of vulnerable enemy love. (109)

But isn’t Carnes’s mode of reading the violence of aligning the cross with wealth, power, and war here precisely the failure of the Christian image that enables Christian theology to announce itself as desirable anew regardless of its persistent violence? Never mind the fact that Constantine and what he represents, like imperial Christian formations in the New World, are not just one person but institutional and individual investments of images of Christ with power over black and indigenous flesh through the cross. This is this perverse generativity in the Christian imagination and its practices of inscription. Like the police investigating themselves after another murder of a black person and announcing the transformation of their department, Christianity’s supersessionist ability to perpetually read itself as new while embedded in the same habits of thought becomes the evasion of accountability, figuring solidarity with no concrete change.

But, what sense could these distinctions between Constantinian or colonial images of Christ and true images of Christ possibly make for those of who enter—are inscribed into the Christian imagination—through capture and genocide? For those who undergo what Hortense Spillers has accurately named the “transubstantiation” of the slave ship—the conversion of black flesh and its literality into the higher meaning of chattel? For those baptized into the image of the savage under the sign of the cross and into the image of the slave under the waters of the Atlantic Ocean? Marked and made over as a mirror by whips and chains and crucifixes and censers to secure and sacralize the sense of redemption that whiteness images, what could such a distinction between Christic and anti-Christic images possibly mean when given in the reconciliatory terms of white theology? For those who were claimed, had their names changed, were abducted from kith and kin, how can such a wound in the archive be riven simply because white theology wants to announce that it is? Wants to claim that it is taken up into the trinitarian economy and so even that absence can be redeemed? Yet it is lived as a wound still, today. That theologians continue to make an idol of these narratives of division and reconciliation in order to produce Christian unity speaks to the white theological investment in unthinking how such narrations and the images they produce are also signs of the real material investments and operations of theological power. There is still a white Christian desire to manage the terms in which theology is enunciated while attempting to assimilate and thus reconcile those figures who would indict these theological claims as reproducing violence. For taking seriously the demand of the irreconcilable figures would call the whole ruse of white theology into question. The fact that so many in theology continue to find these words, images, and figures of speech adequate to black suffering, indigenous suffering, suffering in general, says volumes.

If I have understood her correctly, the fundamental argument of Natalie Carnes’s Image and Presence is an effort to complicate the concepts of iconoclasm and iconophilia by pointing to the nature of images as themselves operating by a kind of internal negation. That is to say, because images signify by donating “more” than themselves and in so doing mediate a particular kind of “presence-in-absence,” images themselves bear a fundamental structure that Carnes designates as “iconoclastic” (4). Such a claim implies, then, that iconoclasm(s) and iconophilia(s) are not at all mutually exclusive but can, and indeed ought, to be understood in a mutually generative dialogue (184). Throughout the text, this persistent paradox of presence and absence in images is grounded theologically in a christological (and, more specifically, an incarnational) register (183), as she moves elegantly through the chiasm of arriving presence (“Born of the Virgin Mary”), abiding presence (“Came Down from Heaven and Was Made Human”), “riven and riving” presence (“Crucified, Died, and Was Buried”), abiding presence (“Rose Again on the Third Day”), and arriving presence (“Will Come Again in Glory”). Her concise conclusion returns more systematically to the theme of confounding binaries, appealing ultimately to the radical freedom and mercy of God to be present in a panoply and plurality of image forms.

By nuancing the relationship between presence and absence in images, whether religious or nonreligious, a secondary but no less important goal of the book is its own somewhat iconoclastic effort to dismantle caricatures of image-reception among different confessional groups, primarily Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christians, and, to a lesser extent, Jews and Muslims. (With respect to the last, I was especially compelled by her discussion of the Charlie Hebdo shooting on pp. 10–12 of the introduction). Carnes’s clear ecumenical motivation that seeks to avoid the too-easy binary of “us” and “them” is utterly commendable and absolutely refreshing in a cultural and popular climate that too often capitulates to and indulges such a narrative. Indeed, the book succeeds well in its balanced treatment of images and figures drawn from all quarters. It is impressively wide-ranging in its scope, including discussion on images both sacred and profane, with commentary on such varied topics as St. John of Damascus, apophaticism, religiously provocative Playboy covers, Christian Wiman’s poetry, Nestorius, desire in Sigmund Freud, Bruno Latour, Gregory of Nyssa, modern erotic fiction, the Isenheim Altarpiece, Marina Abramović’s MoMa performance “The Artist Is Present,” Wittgenstein, Francis Bacon (the English philosopher, not the modern painter), Flannery O’Connor, John Howard Yoder’s notion of “vulnerable enemy love,” Margery Kempe, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Eastern Orthodox iconography, pornography, Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf, Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology, Piss Christ, and toy animals from a religious education classroom, just to name a few. The book also represents a genuine recovery effort and welcome popularization of some of the perhaps lesser-known images in the Christian intellectual tradition like the Maria lactans.

As a Catholic and a Balthasarian, I—like everyone else—am bringing a whole complex of assumptions and categories to my interpretation of texts. Though I want studiously to avoid the reviewer’s trap of saying, “This is not the book I would have written!” I do wonder what Carnes might say about the benefits and limitations of some of the categories that Hans Urs von Balthasar is able to provide, all of which I read as fundamentally christological, and all of which share the same commitment to the paradoxical structure of presence-in-absence, similarity-in-dissimilarity, revelation-in-hiddenness, infinitude-in-finitude, etc., that Carnes draws out so well in her book. These foci include the ontological, the analogical, and the kenotic.

Balthasar lays out the contours of a religious epistemology perhaps most systematically in his Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory, volume 1, Truth of the World. In a section called, “The World of the Images,” he describes the curious case of images in terms that seem consonant with Carnes’s general account if it is not exactly synonymous in its deployment. Images “simulate something that they themselves are not: a world” (TL 1:133), and the possibility of signification rests upon the capacity of an image to point beyond itself to something that exceeds it but is somehow also not outside of it (c.f. TL 1:153–54). So, similarly to Carnes’s discussion, for Balthasar the significance of any given image rests almost entirely on the non-identity between the image itself and the invisible, hidden content which is expressed in it (TL 1:139), which can roughly be mapped onto the more well-known distinction he makes in Glory of the Lord I (following Aquinas and also Goethe to some extent) between “form” and “splendor.” This simultaneity, inseparability, and equal necessity of the double signification of visible and invisible, external and internal, hidden and revealed is crucial for Balthasarian aesthetics. Both elements are required and neither can be surpassed or abandoned, since truth and beauty emerge in their dynamic and organic interplay. According to Balthasar, the signification of an image’s meaning comes not from the appearance of the image itself, nor from the invisible absence “behind” the image that remains “unveiled,” but rather in “a floating middle between the appearance and the thing that appears” (TL 1:138). Images can convey depth but are not themselves identical with the depths of being they reveal. Indeed, this non-identical relationship is for Balthasar the condition of the possibility for images to be images. (For example, he writes that “it is precisely what the image is not—being’s power to give an image of itself—that enables the image to be an image in the first place” (TL 1:140)). It is thus quite clear that Balthasar understands images to have the capacity to bear an ontological depth, to be expressive of Being itself. And the failure to account for this ontological depth dimension is for Balthasar fatal for signification (“As soon as we cut off the living world of signification from the ontological root that sustains it, it withers and dies” [TL 1:144]).

Furthermore, what is especially interesting to me is the way that Balthasar actually locates the sense and meaning of images not exclusively in the domain of what the images themselves donate, but just as readily in the domain of the apprehending subject. The way Balthasar talks about images in this context is in certain respects tantalizingly similar to Carnes’s description of W. J. T. Mitchell’s picture theory in What Do Pictures Want? wherein we have the habit of simultaneously claiming that “images have no vitality and act[ing] as though they do” (159). That is, on the one hand, images are marked by an extreme kind of poverty. Alone, they make no sense and can reveal no sense, Balthasar says, “any more than the letters of a book can say themselves what the words they form together mean” (TL 1:133–34). On the other hand, Balthasar attributes something like the language of desire to images when he writes that they “crave” a “double interpretation” supplied not by themselves but rather by the subject, which lends them that which they cannot ever possess themselves: essence and existence. For Balthasar, the hyperbolic “manifestness” of images’ non-sense is precisely that which suggests that sense can be found, if not there, then somewhere. This sense gets supplied by the structure of the human mind which sees the world of images in terms of coherence, mystery, and depth. Images do confer a certain presence-in-absence, but the role of the apprehending subject is in part to “nourish” and bestow meaning and a sense of interiority upon the image.

Here, then, is occasion for me to pose a first set of question to Carnes: what value, if any, does she see in more systematically bringing in the category of the ontological to the discussion of images and the manner in which they both are and are not themselves? How might it inform her discussion of the idol (following Balthasar’s claim that to cut off the ontological root of significance transforms that which is living into that which is dead)? I am also curious about how Carnes might elaborate further upon the complex interactions of appearing images, the apprehending subject, and the ways in which the apprehending subject cooperates in the conferral of meaning, significance, and presence. How might Carnes account for the donation of an image’s interiority and depth not from the image itself but rather from the direction of the apprehending subject? What precisely is it that signifies? What precisely gives images power to signify?

The second set of questions concerns what Carnes might think of the value of the analogical as a category for thinking about how images operate (obviously crucial for Balthasar and Erich Przywara upon which he depends). Carnes articulates the coincidence of sameness and difference throughout her text, especially with respect to Christology, in order to launch a strong case for imaging that is grounded in the “ambivalences” of Christ in whom, she argues “the seemingly competing impulses of iconophilia, iconoclasm, and icon veneration are all affirmed, the differences separating the ecclesial families—on this one issue, at least, dissolved. Christ negates to reveal” (13, italics added; cf. 55, 82, 116, 183). The Son is God, but is not the Father, and so on. In the context of clarifying divine simplicity and the trinitarian relations, Lateran IV famously offered its classic definition of analogy as signifying simultaneously both similitude and difference: “Between the Creator and the creature so great a likeness cannot be noted without the necessity of noting a greater dissimilarity [major dissimilitudo] between them.”1 Balthasar will later identify the Incarnate Christ as the concrete analogia entis (c.f. Theo-Drama, 3:220–29), who is the very condition of the possibility for aesthetics and images to signify both themselves and beyond themselves. How, then, does the category of analogy, which performs the paradoxical task of signifying similarity but an ever-greater difference, fit into Carnes’s discussion of iconoclasm or negation at the heart of imaging that is “neither an eradication nor an erasure” but prevents images from becoming idols (7)? Are they roughly tantamount, or does she see any significant differences between the analogical and her own productive “iconoclasms of fidelity”?

Third, though I understand and admire the persuasive reasons Carnes provides for preferring the language of the iconoclastic to name this non-absolute negation in the operation of images, I do wonder whether it is salutary to prescind from the language of “kenosis” (8), especially given the strong christological pull of her text, wherein “the Son recedes—minimizes or negates himself—to reveal the Father. The Son’s negation does not erase himself, for in effacing himself to reveal the Father, the Son ultimately reveals himself” (13). For Balthasar, as we have already suggested, both images and essences are poor and make themselves poor; appearing phenomena give themselves away, presenting themselves as images not as assertions of power but rather as renunciations of any possibility of counterfeit versions of it. Essences deign to appear in and be conscripted in images. The image has “to reveal by stepping back, by making itself superfluous, by effacing itself, in order to direct attention, no longer to it, the appearance, but only to the essence itself’ (TL 1:147). These mutual dispossessions, in a way, mirror and participate in the kenotic modality and self-effacement of the eternal relations within the trinitarian God, in creation, and in the incarnation and passion of Christ. Kenosis in Balthasar’s accounting is, however, not a bare negation or lack or dispossession or destruction (what I might correlate with at least a commonsense reading of “iconoclasm”), but rather constitutive positively for both divine and human personhood. Balthasar’s radical kenoticism can, I think, open his aesthetic up to the possibility of revelatory disclosure in hiddenness, silence, interruption, distance, flesh, vulnerability, abjection, and poverty without collapsing into nihilism. Given the content of Carnes’s book, especially in the chapter on the crucifixion, death, and burial of Christ, could this version of the kenotic (which decisively manifests presence in the mode of absence) be included in a fuller cartography of negation?

Finally, I’ll end with a question that is more of a footnote and born from personal curiosity. I noted with great interest Carnes’s discussion of the “paradox of resurrection imaging” (123–25), which suggests around the resurrection a certain “imagelessness that invites iconoclasm” (123). Having read her treatment of Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece in the previous chapter, though, I wondered as I read what Carnes might have to say, if anything, about the striking resurrection image on the far-right panel that becomes visible when the Isenheim Altarpiece is opened in the second position? How might Carnes interpret this “hidden” image, or the fact that it remains covered or closed most of the time?