From the Linguistic Turn to the Pictorial Turn — Hermeneutics Facing the ‘Third Copernican Revolution’

In this article, I will deal with the role of pictures within discussions on the crisis of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics. Firstly, I will argue that some of the aporias this debate runs up against can be overcome by a reconsideration of the traditional dualism of word and image. In this regard my reference point is Paul Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor. His model of the living metaphor overcomes the difficulties posed by the hermeneutics of the symbol and restores the image to an internal force within language: image seeks language to give itself form, and language seeks image to feed on new meanings. Secondly, I will reconstruct some aspects of the interdisciplinary debate around the so-called ‘pictorial turn’, in which, I will argue, very interesting features can be identified that Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor merely foreshadows. In this reactivation of the role of pictures, the debate concerning the outcomes of twentieth-century hermeneutics can probably make new claims on our attention. In Picture Theory, one of the seminal texts on the pictorial turn in contemporary philosophy, W.J.T. Mitchell proposes a definition of the relationship between text and image that has met with a certain success in the debate around Visual Culture. Mitchell aims to identify the picture as the subject that various disciplinary traditions – from philosophy to semiotics, from the arts to media studies – end up converging upon nowadays. He explains that if there is one thing that these disciplines tell us incontrovertibly, it is the impossibility of considering the visual as a ‘pure’ field of representation, that stands in extrinsic relation to the verbal: “The interaction of pictures and texts is constitutive of representation as such” (Mitchell, 1994, p. 5). * Email: [email protected]